I dunno... wouldn't it make more sense to have some kind of removable bolt system, where you simply take the bolt out of the gun, if you what to disarm or arm it? with the design of the bolts being unique in the same way as a house key or a dead lock.? I think what most ppl on/. find out "there" is the fact that they are going for such a bizzare electronic system which as the article quoted, "does not even exist yet". I also think the average./'er knows how easy it is to by-pass such systems, from modding consoles to cracking apps etc.
Some degree of enforced responsibility I see this as being another example of technology being used as a quick fix for somthing, that at the end of the day, is a social problem. That people will simply find away around it, And as a result it will be doomed to fail, as will DRM, CSS or if cars were all required to be limited to a certain speed limit.
It is time that the powers-that-be understand that the only way to fix a social problem is with a social solution.
For a start things like these were already tried with PC's, being closed server charged by the month, and proved to be failure, mainly due to competition with the open system (which MS has in standard PC games). The only ones of these left today are the MS gaming zone (have so much money they couldn't care less) and Battlenet (control the software so you don't have a choice and people are starting to work their way around that). What I surmise is that - in any system of online gaming you have to provide a means for people to run their own servers in order to create a culture, of clans lans what-have-you.
However, this ignorance of online culture is not the main reasion Live is going to fail. Live will fail because Microsoft have also chosen to ignore console culture. Ask any twelve year old what multiplay gaming on a console means to them and they will say having your mates around for a quick bash of tekken 4. People are not going to spend god awful amounts of money to get owned by poeple they have never met. People who play consoles are not the type of people who will go online to play video games, PERIOD (sega proved this with the dreamcast). At best you are looking at someone porting evercrack for the masses and Sony are already well ahead in that game. The fundamental mistake Microsoft have always made with the XBOX has been considering it to be just another computer. Someone need to tell them that they are as different as a skateboard is from a Automobile. Console people != PC People. PC culture (which they have chosen to ignore anyway) != Console Culture.
The final nail in the coffin of Live is the prior need of a broadband connection pretty much insuring you are marketing to people who have a computer already, why wont they simply play counterstrike.
XBOX LIVE is just a half arsed gimmick that aint going to safe the XBOX. What MS need to do is provide some innovation in games, not attempt to throw money at it or go around telling everyone that it represents a new paradigm shift for console services, but I guess, considering it cames from Microsoft, it was doomed from day one then. IMHO.
btw is it just me but aren't there too many XBOX stories on slashdot, I mean this horse looks to be pretty dead to me.
Its wierd, everyone who hated UT but loved Quake3 (mainly for the mods and the game balance) loves UT2K3 and everyone who loved UT fscking hates UT2K3 with a passion, I downloaded the demo, and IMHO, it does feel alot like a really good quake 3 mod, I mean the engines are so simliar now that it's scary.
I still think UT2K2 better then Battlefield 1942, I mean theres a over rated pile of crap which you put on if you what your 'putra to run at 2 FPS. As for game play think tribes with out rocket packs and a WW2 theme, weird how everyone seems to love it - based on the difficulty trying to find a server. go figure.
no matter how well you balance a game some jerk is going to find the secret to the game, then publish it on the internet so everyone knows it, then you are left with the choice, do you remove the flaw or leave it, what would have happened if ID had disabled rocket jumping in quake.
2. Bad story line development
I agree gamss could use better developed none derviative stories, but some games like UT Quake Counterstrike are closer to sports then games, ie does a football game need to have a story?
3. Lack of marketing.
Too much marketing IMHO, by a few people, a kind of payloya has developed, espcially with gamespot, btw if you have a good game people will beat a path to your door, ie Kohan, people love the idea of discovering something, seperating themselves from the rest of the plebs, see underdogs.org.
4. Program instability
This is a real problem, the only solution I can think of is to only buy games on a closed platform such as a PS2, just comes with the joys of a open platform IMHO.
When I was a kid, most games where created by "rock star" development houses like the Bitmap Brothers (they made classics like Speedball gods) etc, also, back then you did not really need to know alot about programing to make a good game, everything was done in 2d, and there was a much greater focus on gameplay. The whole thing was closer to the "demo" scean of that era, or the independant music scean. From that "golden age" you had loads of innovative titles come out, most of which you can find on underdogs.org (most of that sites content being PC to Amiga ports IMHO)
Now today, most development is done by comittee, with the only "rock star" development house left being ID. There is such a focus on technology, that most games tend to fall into spefic types, ie if you've played one FPS you've pretty much played them all. With gameplay becoming a after market add-on, a mod or some such. It is closer to the movie industry, or rather the crappy summer action "blockbaster" movies that play at shopping malls.
So I blame large companies for the current state of video games, such as EA, Sony, M$ what have you, before those guys came on the scean, video games where a form of art, now they are just a impluse buy you make to kill a rainly weekend. IMHO once you turn things into a business then no one does it for love, and you get things like hype and vapour wear.
If there is one thing Linux needs to do it is to stop being so tied to Windows, I know a lot of people use that OS and it makes sense to ease the user experience by making stuff as similar to it as possible but everyone needs to consider this, a person who lives is squalor only knows squalor. I mean seriously windows is shit,. The only decent versions of it are 98se and win2000, it is bloated, even today, has poor security out of box, in the case of 98 poor memory management, a badly laid out directory structure ("my documents" anyone) and the less said about the registry the better. It also comes loaded with worthless apps just put in because some guy at the Redmond marketing department decided that.NET was going to be the next big thing, A problem that's just getting worse. If you become obsessed with giving people what they are used to then there is no incentive to change, to make things better, ultimately to do it right in the Unix way.
Loads of examples of this mentality can be found, the most striking being the continuation of bad GUI habits from windows, true when there have been examples of good GUI's for years, like MacOS or BeOS.
However, this idea of running Office better then windows has got to be the ultimate, not only is it a slap in the face of all the free office projects out there but it is also redundant, if it talks off Microsoft are only going to work out some way of stopping later versions from running. Clearly effort would be better spent creating a file conversion tool for *.doc and *.xls type files, after all no one talks about running Photoshop under Wine because you can always edit your tiffs in the Gimp.
I am all for the promotion of wine to run old apps that are never going to be ported over, or another way to run games until Linux grows as a desktop platform, but using it to turn Linux into a better windows then windows is a destiny that will only lead to Linux becoming a modern version of OS2 (IBM tried this the same trick years ago). I Personally feel that Linux is a platform that deserves better then distributors like Suse/Redhat just turning into a cheap knock off windows 98.
The reason people are getting so worked up in this discussion is because it is a symptom of a greater illness.
This is just a another technology that provides nothing new, but is made in such a way that mainstream people "GET IT". I mean it's just such a hassle, you have a contact list, and right in the middle of doing something It's like, someone messages you about a new idea for an essay from school (hay dude I think we should do more bout this post 9/11 world). I'm not saying am trying to be elitest, but do any of kernal developers like Linus have ICQ numbers, these are people who do most of their work online and you would think know a bit about it. Add the spam to all of this and I all seems more trouble then what it is worth. Heres the way I see it,
Have a website, put your email address on that site, plus any number of boxes that you what, have a ftp site, but make sure you limited the number of people who can upload to it. If you must, create a irc group and shell account, just make sure that everyone knows the names of group, what time people what to have meetings etc. Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that between all the protocols that are already around is there any point to IM to begin with?. Like most of these (vastly overhyped) things they represent just a intergration of old tech, After all what the hell was Napster but an IRC client with a bunch of scripts added. People had been doing things like that for years,
Whats going to happen next? someone invents a app to leech crap of newsgroups creating another bubble of hype with a million troll's crapping on how information whats to be free, and suits going on about the new internet paradigm shift or what ever (READ using it to limited competition and screw developers just like the softwear industry made an art of). And some dweeb selling the thing to whatever corp of piles of $$$'s hang on...
ps... I'm not against IM, just the way AOL/MS act like its the second coming when its really not a big deal. I personally think that all the positioning just hold's things back that could be really useful like CVS.
That would sux dude, I can imagine all the spammers having mass invites, onjoins (whatever)irc style, If your going to add somthing don't add something that so open for abuse, for the sake of adding somthing, what next, automatic running of VBscript in email.
I'm not sure that AOL would be classed as a IM monopoly since, you can use any client you like, (there are loads of ICQ clones) and there are also loads of alternative IM services such as whatever is installed on windows these days, and Jabber (which I haven't used in a while, due to having no mates:-().
btw, I think ICQ came out of nullware(?) the same lot that made winamp years ago. An execellent development house even if they did sell out (but I guess thats what people dream of nowadays).
I'll would mod you up as funny but I don't have any points left and I think everyone is sick of pop culture refereces esp... lord of the rings (I can see the point your trying to make but).
If you click on a CD in OSX the trash icon turns into a eject icon, also if you insert a blank CD into the drive, copy some files to it and then click on the CD icon, the trash turns into a Burn symbol. Still a funny post but.
That's a possible option since Sony already license firewire off apple. Although they seem to call it I-link for some reason. However companies tend to shy away from licensing patents since, firstly, the margin on electronics are so low that $10 a unit really does make a difference, and secondly, The Not-Invented-Here Syndrome, Viao's are a prestige brand made to demonstrate how cool Sony are (from a fashion standpoint, not the chip or the OS). What is it going to say about them if the keyboard was invented by IBM, it would be like Gucci licensing their designs from Nike.
Probably not... most emulators work by interpreting the instructions from one chip to another, for example x86 to PPC (PPC to x86 has proven difficult) or Motorola to x86, the performance hit that you get as a result is normally liveable since most emulators pretend to be hardware which is either years out of date, for example a SNES, or where speed isn't really a issue, i.e. Office. In the case of the PSX or PS2 the arch of the machines is so alien (the emotion engine) that to emulate this way your going to have to take a performance hit which would make the game unplayable, you have to remember that with the Xbox your talking about a computer which is only clocked at 700Mhz.
Another way of emulating is to completely ignoring the arch of the chip and just trying to emulate the system call made by the software (for example OpenGL), this is the main option that had been taken when emulating the PSX or N64 and why in games like Final Fantasy you can change the resolution of the graphics (the polygons not the background), Now with the Xbox this is not currently a option since the X server, can not use OpenGL since the drivers for the chip are currently property to NVIDIA hence new drivers for this chip (which is closed spec) would need to be written before you even think about emulating.
I think that the real problem with Mandrake 9 is that people have simply gotten use to the whole thing. After all apart from being a recompile what does it really add? You have to remember that when mandrake first came out the rate of development was phenomenal, within months Linux had gone from a reasonably good server OS without much of a UI to a OS that was one a par with windows. The great thing about Mandrake-soft is that they have been able to keep up this rate of progress showing what Linux could be, given half a chance.
Nowadays the Desktop environments on Linux have more-or-less matured, no one seems to be implementing new ideas at the same rate that they once where and Mandrake itself has become stagnate, A RPM based distro built for Kde just doesn't seem to be as big a deal that it once was and if people what Unix with a really good UI then they can now use OSX. People now seem to get excited by things like Gentoo, after you've finshed compiling it.
Of course it is a bit early to say someone slipping after releasing just one distro, and a.0 at that, That Mandrake that held themselves up to such a high standard in the past makes this current distro disappointing to a lot of people (myself included) but if people remember Redhat 7.0 didn't even have a working compiler as I recall.
I don't really trust apple (puts on flame suit), what are they but just another Microsoft with a smaller market share?, btw Jobs the guy who runs it is also the Ceo of Pixar who have a very strong relationship with Disney. I don't mean to start a flamefest but the truth is if palladium went though I think apple would jump on board, sadly. Never trust the suits.
Linux would still be effected due to having to run on DRM Pc's or not as the case may be.
Yeah, It wont fly, but people will simply stay with their old pre-DRM hardwear and softwear, meaning Microsoft will have just as much of a monopoly as they do now. Then someone will crack it promoting a mod industry for PC's like their is with DVD players today.
In short... its a complete waste of time and money, based on nothing more then Microsoft trying to get in bed with the MPAA and the RIAA, and demonstrates how much of a pain in the arse a mono-culture is and why the situation should be changed as quickly as possible.
Yeah I agree, when people look back on all this is histroy they will say that the great mistake of the Mozilla project was instead of giving people what they whated, a small fast standard compliant browser, they instead went of some adventure in trying to recreate Emacs for a new generation.
However, I think this was more a problem with Netscape and Mozilla where left picking up the pieces, and to tell you the truth I'm kinda over it, such things could have been done better but we still have pheoix today + a million gecko based browsers.
Re:Interaction, not Merging
on
Phoenix 0.3 Is Out
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Microsoft has been doing things with their internet tools: chat, email, and browser are all separate, lightweight apps (outlook express, msn messenger and IE) that don't need each other but work well together
err no, Microsoft just pile everything into the OS and load the apps up when windows boots (for example IE) they get away with this because they have a monopoly on a closed API. If you don't what to run IE then you are very hard pressed to remove it. I think even Office uses libaries which are installed as part of the OS. If you did a direct shot out between moz and IE and Microsoft product would look decidly bloated. Since this is slashdot someone will point this out.
The question is "Is this such a bad thing?" KDE seems to do much the same thing on linux, but in a open manner, modular code does seem to work very well, although the linux kernel still seems very monolythic in nature compared to somthing like mach
.
However I think what people "mean" when they say "small tools doing simple things very well" in the unix philosophy is something along the lines of grep | sort | more > results &&. For example imagine if instead of one hugh program you had a menu and just loaded menu items into that menu while displaying output windows, with programs just being scripts to tie all those things up, and I think from that stand point Mozilla with XUL seems closer to that ideal.
The Problem seems to be that no one has decided on a framework, and people went mad on OOP's type paradigms causing all the softwear bloat problems we have today,
Yeah I have to agree, it seems a great pity that even with OSX being out for more then 2 years OSS developers still seem content with just knocking everything off windows, when a much better approach would be to steal off someone who, at least has some taste in making a UI, This is important because Microsoft have been responsible for some terrible crimes against humanity in terms of UI design and it seems like it is going to take years of bitching on mail lists to correct things which shouldn't have been carried over in the first place.
[disclaimer: I'm aware that you can setup kde just how you like (thats why I use it), what I'm talking about here are just things which annoy the hell out of me when ever I use someone else's 'puter or set it on a default install]
Crime 1, name prefix's , see my documents, my music, my anything, kde changes this to k anything, although it seems more a case of someone just trying to keep their/src tree organised, but is something that just seem's to be taken too far, see previous posts.
Crime 2 the kicker, why does it have to be a direct port of the start menu, (which sucks when you think about it) for example, when you push the k the first icons presented are logoff and shutdown, this is terrible design, someone could trigger a shutdown dialog by sloppy clicking on the K, hell even windows XP corrected this, (why they don't remove these and place them with the applets I have no idea, that seemed the most corret solution to me, and this is how I hack it to work like). Another example, menu lists for applications, couldn't someone work out a faster and more streamlined method, then, k > internet > mozilla > mozilla, (perhaps a pop-up window or something) everyone knows that to have a human interface you have to have as few clinks to activate a application as possible, ie one. but it seems just because windows uses it everything has to be constructed this way,.
Crime 3, icons on the left and window widgets on the right, it seems that it would make more sense to align icons to the right and window widgets on the left since people read from left to right, making less likly that open windows would cover up important icons. (although this is more of a religous issue.)
Now I'm not one of those people who recon apple are the be all and end all of UI design, and kde should look just like OSX with the dock etc, for example a trash can on a IBM seems to make about as much sense as a scum in Rugby league, (although for some reasion it makes sense on a macintosh, and one of the first things do in windows or linux is hide the dame thing but please take the things that have been done right and impliment them.
btw, please don't posts follow ups along the lines of they just do what people are use to, a person living in squalor doesn't know any different
1) You have the option of getting a smaller controller, but I prefer the original one.
Yeah and the market for selling add on to consoles is so hugh, thats like saying if ford can't make a decent steering wheel, then it is up to the owner to fix it instead of buying a volvo, face it consoles are defined by their controller, it is the one thing that you have to get right when designing a console, and the fact M$ screwed up demonstrates how out of touch with the market they are.
2) As an XBox Live beta tester, I can say that it's the greatest thing to happen to consoles since Mario.
Still have to sell it to the masses and it ain't going to work, consoles aint computers, most people will lose you after then you log on and wait around for someone to play, besides this types of things where tryed on the PC like mplayer years ago and where are they today? hell where the hell is M$ gaming Zone?, everyone just uses gamespy.
Slashdot Mirror
However, this ignorance of online culture is not the main reasion Live is going to fail. Live will fail because Microsoft have also chosen to ignore console culture. Ask any twelve year old what multiplay gaming on a console means to them and they will say having your mates around for a quick bash of tekken 4. People are not going to spend god awful amounts of money to get owned by poeple they have never met. People who play consoles are not the type of people who will go online to play video games, PERIOD (sega proved this with the dreamcast). At best you are looking at someone porting evercrack for the masses and Sony are already well ahead in that game. The fundamental mistake Microsoft have always made with the XBOX has been considering it to be just another computer. Someone need to tell them that they are as different as a skateboard is from a Automobile. Console people != PC People. PC culture (which they have chosen to ignore anyway) != Console Culture.
The final nail in the coffin of Live is the prior need of a broadband connection pretty much insuring you are marketing to people who have a computer already, why wont they simply play counterstrike.
XBOX LIVE is just a half arsed gimmick that aint going to safe the XBOX. What MS need to do is provide some innovation in games, not attempt to throw money at it or go around telling everyone that it represents a new paradigm shift for console services, but I guess, considering it cames from Microsoft, it was doomed from day one then. IMHO.
btw is it just me but aren't there too many XBOX stories on slashdot, I mean this horse looks to be pretty dead to me.
I still think UT2K2 better then Battlefield 1942, I mean theres a over rated pile of crap which you put on if you what your 'putra to run at 2 FPS. As for game play think tribes with out rocket packs and a WW2 theme, weird how everyone seems to love it - based on the difficulty trying to find a server. go figure.
1. Bad or unbalanced game play
no matter how well you balance a game some jerk is going to find the secret to the game, then publish it on the internet so everyone knows it, then you are left with the choice, do you remove the flaw or leave it, what would have happened if ID had disabled rocket jumping in quake.
2. Bad story line development
I agree gamss could use better developed none derviative stories, but some games like UT Quake Counterstrike are closer to sports then games, ie does a football game need to have a story?
3. Lack of marketing.
Too much marketing IMHO, by a few people, a kind of payloya has developed, espcially with gamespot, btw if you have a good game people will beat a path to your door, ie Kohan, people love the idea of discovering something, seperating themselves from the rest of the plebs, see underdogs.org.
4. Program instability
This is a real problem, the only solution I can think of is to only buy games on a closed platform such as a PS2, just comes with the joys of a open platform IMHO.
Now today, most development is done by comittee, with the only "rock star" development house left being ID. There is such a focus on technology, that most games tend to fall into spefic types, ie if you've played one FPS you've pretty much played them all. With gameplay becoming a after market add-on, a mod or some such. It is closer to the movie industry, or rather the crappy summer action "blockbaster" movies that play at shopping malls.
So I blame large companies for the current state of video games, such as EA, Sony, M$ what have you, before those guys came on the scean, video games where a form of art, now they are just a impluse buy you make to kill a rainly weekend. IMHO once you turn things into a business then no one does it for love, and you get things like hype and vapour wear.
Loads of examples of this mentality can be found, the most striking being the continuation of bad GUI habits from windows, true when there have been examples of good GUI's for years, like MacOS or BeOS.
However, this idea of running Office better then windows has got to be the ultimate, not only is it a slap in the face of all the free office projects out there but it is also redundant, if it talks off Microsoft are only going to work out some way of stopping later versions from running. Clearly effort would be better spent creating a file conversion tool for *.doc and *.xls type files, after all no one talks about running Photoshop under Wine because you can always edit your tiffs in the Gimp.
I am all for the promotion of wine to run old apps that are never going to be ported over, or another way to run games until Linux grows as a desktop platform, but using it to turn Linux into a better windows then windows is a destiny that will only lead to Linux becoming a modern version of OS2 (IBM tried this the same trick years ago). I Personally feel that Linux is a platform that deserves better then distributors like Suse/Redhat just turning into a cheap knock off windows 98.
The reason people are getting so worked up in this discussion is because it is a symptom of a greater illness.
Sorry me bad...
Have a website, put your email address on that site, plus any number of boxes that you what, have a ftp site, but make sure you limited the number of people who can upload to it. If you must, create a irc group and shell account, just make sure that everyone knows the names of group, what time people what to have meetings etc. Anyway the point I'm trying to make is that between all the protocols that are already around is there any point to IM to begin with?. Like most of these (vastly overhyped) things they represent just a intergration of old tech, After all what the hell was Napster but an IRC client with a bunch of scripts added. People had been doing things like that for years,
Whats going to happen next? someone invents a app to leech crap of newsgroups creating another bubble of hype with a million troll's crapping on how information whats to be free, and suits going on about the new internet paradigm shift or what ever (READ using it to limited competition and screw developers just like the softwear industry made an art of). And some dweeb selling the thing to whatever corp of piles of $$$'s hang on...
ps... I'm not against IM, just the way AOL/MS act like its the second coming when its really not a big deal. I personally think that all the positioning just hold's things back that could be really useful like CVS.
ok lame...
btw, I think ICQ came out of nullware(?) the same lot that made winamp years ago. An execellent development house even if they did sell out (but I guess thats what people dream of nowadays).
Another way of emulating is to completely ignoring the arch of the chip and just trying to emulate the system call made by the software (for example OpenGL), this is the main option that had been taken when emulating the PSX or N64 and why in games like Final Fantasy you can change the resolution of the graphics (the polygons not the background), Now with the Xbox this is not currently a option since the X server, can not use OpenGL since the drivers for the chip are currently property to NVIDIA hence new drivers for this chip (which is closed spec) would need to be written before you even think about emulating.
Nowadays the Desktop environments on Linux have more-or-less matured, no one seems to be implementing new ideas at the same rate that they once where and Mandrake itself has become stagnate, A RPM based distro built for Kde just doesn't seem to be as big a deal that it once was and if people what Unix with a really good UI then they can now use OSX. People now seem to get excited by things like Gentoo, after you've finshed compiling it.
Of course it is a bit early to say someone slipping after releasing just one distro, and a .0 at that, That Mandrake that held themselves up to such a high standard in the past makes this current distro disappointing to a lot of people (myself included) but if people remember Redhat 7.0 didn't even have a working compiler as I recall.
Yes it was a think pad, I think that the problem is that IBM would have patented the design. Pity really.
Linux would still be effected due to having to run on DRM Pc's or not as the case may be.
Yeah, It wont fly, but people will simply stay with their old pre-DRM hardwear and softwear, meaning Microsoft will have just as much of a monopoly as they do now. Then someone will crack it promoting a mod industry for PC's like their is with DVD players today.
In short... its a complete waste of time and money, based on nothing more then Microsoft trying to get in bed with the MPAA and the RIAA, and demonstrates how much of a pain in the arse a mono-culture is and why the situation should be changed as quickly as possible.
However, I think this was more a problem with Netscape and Mozilla where left picking up the pieces, and to tell you the truth I'm kinda over it, such things could have been done better but we still have pheoix today + a million gecko based browsers.
err no, Microsoft just pile everything into the OS and load the apps up when windows boots (for example IE) they get away with this because they have a monopoly on a closed API. If you don't what to run IE then you are very hard pressed to remove it. I think even Office uses libaries which are installed as part of the OS. If you did a direct shot out between moz and IE and Microsoft product would look decidly bloated. Since this is slashdot someone will point this out.
The question is "Is this such a bad thing?" KDE seems to do much the same thing on linux, but in a open manner, modular code does seem to work very well, although the linux kernel still seems very monolythic in nature compared to somthing like mach
. However I think what people "mean" when they say "small tools doing simple things very well" in the unix philosophy is something along the lines of grep | sort | more > results &&. For example imagine if instead of one hugh program you had a menu and just loaded menu items into that menu while displaying output windows, with programs just being scripts to tie all those things up, and I think from that stand point Mozilla with XUL seems closer to that ideal.
The Problem seems to be that no one has decided on a framework, and people went mad on OOP's type paradigms causing all the softwear bloat problems we have today,
[disclaimer: I'm aware that you can setup kde just how you like (thats why I use it), what I'm talking about here are just things which annoy the hell out of me when ever I use someone else's 'puter or set it on a default install]
Crime 1, name prefix's , see my documents, my music, my anything, kde changes this to k anything, although it seems more a case of someone just trying to keep their /src tree organised, but is something that just seem's to be taken too far, see previous posts.
Crime 2 the kicker, why does it have to be a direct port of the start menu, (which sucks when you think about it) for example, when you push the k the first icons presented are logoff and shutdown, this is terrible design, someone could trigger a shutdown dialog by sloppy clicking on the K, hell even windows XP corrected this, (why they don't remove these and place them with the applets I have no idea, that seemed the most corret solution to me, and this is how I hack it to work like). Another example, menu lists for applications, couldn't someone work out a faster and more streamlined method, then, k > internet > mozilla > mozilla, (perhaps a pop-up window or something) everyone knows that to have a human interface you have to have as few clinks to activate a application as possible, ie one. but it seems just because windows uses it everything has to be constructed this way,.
Crime 3, icons on the left and window widgets on the right, it seems that it would make more sense to align icons to the right and window widgets on the left since people read from left to right, making less likly that open windows would cover up important icons. (although this is more of a religous issue.)
Now I'm not one of those people who recon apple are the be all and end all of UI design, and kde should look just like OSX with the dock etc, for example a trash can on a IBM seems to make about as much sense as a scum in Rugby league, (although for some reasion it makes sense on a macintosh, and one of the first things do in windows or linux is hide the dame thing but please take the things that have been done right and impliment them.
btw, please don't posts follow ups along the lines of they just do what people are use to, a person living in squalor doesn't know any different
Yeah and the market for selling add on to consoles is so hugh, thats like saying if ford can't make a decent steering wheel, then it is up to the owner to fix it instead of buying a volvo, face it consoles are defined by their controller, it is the one thing that you have to get right when designing a console, and the fact M$ screwed up demonstrates how out of touch with the market they are.
2) As an XBox Live beta tester, I can say that it's the greatest thing to happen to consoles since Mario.
Still have to sell it to the masses and it ain't going to work, consoles aint computers, most people will lose you after then you log on and wait around for someone to play, besides this types of things where tryed on the PC like mplayer years ago and where are they today? hell where the hell is M$ gaming Zone?, everyone just uses gamespy.