..is that now John Romero can finally move on without losing his face. We all know by his actions that the guy is too stubborn to give up on his Grand Project, and generally everyone agrees that the job of finishing Daikatana can easily be compared to beating a dead horse -- beating a dead horse for years.
However, we all have also witnessed Romero's undeniable talent as a game designer. Let's just hope that the next project he embarks upon has a separate project leader with some organizational skills.
Sony has already looked into this situation, and even improved on your analysis: every codec that can succeed must have a name ending with a "3".
This could be seen in action when Sony introduced their new Memory Stick Walkman. The ultracompact music player features the latest version of Sony's ATRAC music codec.
The previus version was called ATRAC 4.5, and is present in most reasonably new MiniDisc recorders. Can you guess what the new version is called? Of course, it's ATRAC3!
And in the upside-down world of the New Economy, that's not a downgrade.
It's terrific to finally see an open, IP-free audio codec with (seemingly) great sound and compression efficiency.
One of the things most often complained about at Slashdot is the lack of Quicktime players for Linux, and more specifically, lack of a player capable of playing movies compressed with Quicktime 4's Sorenson codec. Many sites, especially those of the movie industry, have adopted Sorenson because it has genuine advantages over industry-standard MPEG video: Sorenson produces significantly better video quality at the bitrates preferred on the Internet today. While Sorenson and Microsoft's proprietary offerings are gaining ground, the use of free video standards like MPEG is becoming more and more scarce.
The only feasible way of reversing this trend is to come up with a superior video codec and distribute it freely. Until now, many people have argued that developing a good media codec involves such high-end mathematics that developing one under traditional Open Source development model is not possible.
Really, the birth of the Federation is hands down the most interesting thing in the whole Star Trek universe. It is something we can, and should, take into account when forming the society of the 21st century.
After all, Paramount will soon reveal how the good people of the Federation erased war, famine, illness, indecency and leisure clothing from the known universe. Isn't that something we should all look forward to?
While calling bluetooth a wireless networking technology is of course correct, it can also be misleading in a world with an exploding wireless lan market and a bunch of up-and-coming wireless communication technologies.
A better way to understand Bluetooth is to imagine it as IrDA without the line of sight requirements. Today, when I want to read my emails with my PowerBook on the go, I have to carefully balance my Nokia phone on my lap to get line of sight with the laptop. When both my phone and my laptop eventually support Bluetooth, the phone can stay in my pocket. The difference doesn't seem like much, but everyone who has used IrDA on the go must understand how cool Bluetooth is.
Well, if you consider a machine with completely open-source reference OS implementation (Darwin) to be closed-spec, I don't really see what would be open..
While transferring control over domain names from Network Solutions, Inc. to ICANN was certainly a step in the right direction, the real monopolistic threat to the Internet's naming system never really came from NSI.
It comes from Microsoft, which as an owner of the dominant web browsing software Internet Explorer has total control over directing the bulk of Internet users to web destinations.
Microsoft could, at any given moment, completely bypass the domain name system and start selling ActiveAddresses for IE(tm), completely independent of ICANN or NSI. Microsoft could even make this registry "open" in the sense that it would use Internet standards (such as DNS), encouraging third parties to implement the scheme in their products. The penetration level of Internet Explorer alone would make such addresses highly desirable on the marketplace.
Indeed Netscape is already hard at work on this, utilising this keyword approach with their Smart Browsing feature set. The only reason Netscape is unable to profit from this is their browser's diminishing market share. Microsoft doesn't have such a problem.
ICANN has the power to stop this from happening. It has to:
keep the domain name system as flexible as possible
work to diminish the dominance of the.com gTLD
demonstrate that keyword-style addresses like business.com are not major success factors in e-commerce
by these actions lower the value of a single.com property
This morning I woke up to the rancid smell of perishing perishables. Little inspection proved the hypothesis -- my refridgerator had decided it was best to store my food at room temperature. This was curious, but I *really* started to get irritated when my microwave didn't work either. At this point my primary suspect was an unpaid electricity bill, but the fully-functioning TV, Hi-Fi set and general lighting made that unlikely.
I spent most of the morning trashing my food and wondering what was going on.
Moral of the story: the fuse box is a great starting point in any Y2K -related practical jokes you are planning.
Quite recently, my FreeBSD-based development box was rebooted. Violently. The machine had been up for about 320 days, when somebody accidentally removed its power cord in a co-location facility. I had a ssh session to the box at the moment, and pretty damn near shit in my pants when the machine stopped answering. I got to sigh in relief in a few minutes, after the machine booted and got all its services running.
Which gets us to the subject of the day. The reason I was so worried was that after 320 days of tinkering, new IP numbers, new system software, new services, old services scrapped, etc, I had no idea if the server would come up on a reboot or not.
Frequent, comfortably scheduled reboots tell you whether your machine will come up after an unexpected interruption or not.
That's pretty much the only direct problem with long uptimes. However, glorifying long uptimes has other, well known drawbacks. The most important of them is, of course, putting up important kernel security updates in pursuit of long uptime.
That's patently false. You can't pay for a non-existing domain name with the NSI's online payment system. And had it been a new registration, he would be paying $70, not $35.
Apple (and Mac OS clone manufacturers) have toyed with multiprocessor Macs in the past. Apple itself sold dual processor systems while some cloners went as far as to bring quad processor systems to market. The machines were mighty impressive, but unless BeOS was your bag, the only thing they were good for was accelerating Photoshop filters. And let's face it, most of us don't spend that much time waiting for Photoshop filters to finish.
Fast forward to 1999 and nothing has changed, except that Apple is now being led by a guy who actually understands that multiprocessor boxes are useless with classic Mac OS. That's why Apple isn't shipping any. The next major Apple OS release, Mac OS X, will feature decent SMP support, but could still be a year away. Shipping SMP hardware before that is ethically questionable at best, doomed to backfire at worst.
I was pretty amazed a while back when I learned that the new Gameboy Color not only supports old Gameboy games, but displays them in full color!
What I haven't found out is if Nintendo had the foresight to include color information in the original cartridges or if they have the colors for the most popular b&w games in the system ROM.
Nevertheless, the Gameboy is clearly a good demonstration of a successful migration from black&white to color. And by the way, their reflective color LCD doesn't use that much juice either.
No wonder Microsoft wanted to see Netscape dead. Microsoft has everything to lose if the world will collectively embrace a new, standards compliant browsing platform. Mozilla will provide just that, and like M12 is starting to show, offer an additional bonus: it's quickly becoming the absolutely best browser out there.
Sooner than you think, the Mozilla 1.0 release will be in the hands of anyone that's interested, in complete source form. This WILL spawn zillions of of new, Mozilla-based browser version. They will have minuscule market shares at first, but that's when the big players will enter: Computer manufacturers will start making browsers to bundle with their machines, application developers will start integrating browser features into existing apps, big corporations will create custom browsers for internal use.
Each of these new browsing platforms will make little difference on its own, but grouped together, they will create a single, compatible, cross-platform application environment that is based on accepted industry standards. Mozilla will be the catalyst of life in this expanding pool of diverse browsers, and together the pool will quickly challenge Internet Explorer's position as the dominant browser.
There will be no reason to ponder if Compaq, Dell or Apple will include the Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Internet Explorer with their machines. They can and will roll their own, emphasizing their brand's unique selling proposition through innovative, custom features and look-n-feel.
How will that be possible? Luckily, it's a certainity that Microsoft will be barred from forcing their distribution channel (OEMs) to distribute Internet Explorer with other Microsoft products. This will level the playing field and launch wide-scale Mozilla-based browser development.
The emerging new browsers will share an API that is the W3C standards suite, and in this Microsoft-vs-the-world situation Microsoft will witness their embrace-extend-extinguish strategy becoming a public relations nightmare. Eventually Microsoft has to follow suit and develop a standards compliant browser. When this is realized at Redmond, it may very well be that the company will even switch to use the Mozilla layout engine as a goodwill stunt.
Consequences: Microsoft will lose some of the applications barrier to entry they've so feverishly protected all these years. Faced with this reality, they will even claim that the barried never existed. The Open Source camp will rejoice, but only to see Microsoft products grow their market share by sheer inertia.
Marko
Disclaimer: my crystal ball was being polished, so I had to pull this out of my ass. Sorry.
A couple of things. It's sad to see digital movie projection being pushed at a laughable 1280x1024 resolution -- surely that is doomed to fail. A more accurate conclusion for Ebert would be that "I have seen the future of cinema, and it is not Texas Instruments."
First of all, considering that most of new motion pictures are delivered with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, the effective resolution would be 1280x545 (assuming square pixels). I've heard of other up-and-coming digital projection systems, and they have at least three times more pixels.
Second, contrary to popular belief, most frames, if not yet all, of a modern cinematic experience have been stored digitally at some point on their path from the camera to the silver screen. The motion pictures are printed to the celluloid film from this digital master data.
Needless to say, elimination of this last conversion phase is the holy grail of digital movie projection and IT WILL ARRIVE when the projectors get closer to the native resolution of the master data.
Everything that can be digital will be. I'm betting my ass on it.
You just reminded me why I put up with the "first posts" and semiliterate anonymous cowards and comments about as non-informative as the one I'm writing right now.
Well written, well thought out, thoroughly investigated comments like yours are what make Slashdot stand out from the usual news sites.
Apple really didn't have a choice regarding the timing of the G4 announcement. As you may remember, as early as a month before the announcement at Seybold, the media considered the G4 introduction to be a done deal. They even had the real machine specs and pricing at hand. This was first and foremost a problem caused by Apple leaks, something which Jobs has worked hard to eliminate.
Apple obviously knew that the initial G4 chip supplies from Motorola would be extremely limited, as is the case with most new processors. Regardless of these Motorola delays, Apple worked hard to finalize the design of the G4 machines in time, in order to keep the schedule of their R&D functions. The fact that the hardware designs were ready was misinterpreted by the media to mean that an announcement was immiment.
Come Seybold, Apple faced a difficult choice: Ignore this pressure to announce and fail to materialize the G4 everyone and their dog was expecting (most probably leading to a VERY bad reaction at NASDAQ), or introduce the new machines while being fully aware that there wouldn't be enough of them made anytime soon.
Apple chose the latter path, betting that the G4 introduction and a later notice of anticipated delivery problems (and lousy Q4 results) would hurt the company less than just introducing the G4 later. This is pretty understandable to me, because the sales of the G3 naturally slowed down under the G4 anticipation. I think the basic choices Apple made after the leaks have been sound, but the implementation of them, public relations wise, have proved that Apple still has serious internal communications issues to work out.
Just a quick update on the Finnish economy -- GDP's up to $120B, the balance of trade is positive (thanks to Nokia), and the amount of outstanding public debt has stopped increasing.
That has little to do with your question, though. It seems to me that this thing is getting financed as a purely commercial venture, by the players on the local telecommunications market. Consider it a pilot lab with 1 million people. As far as the technical merits of the project go, though, I'm not holding my breath to see anything insanely great.
Well, Apple's stock just broke its all-time high (which was from 1991). I'd venture to say that their death is not imminent.
As for the G4 upgrades, Apple is trying to stop them because of the same reasons they killed the Mac clones: they want the third-party vendors to provide the low-end solutions, not the cutting edge stuff where the best profit margins are.
This policy is obviously questionable, but you have to remember that Apple is not just yet-another-computer-maker, they are a systems company. There isn't any free competition in the RS/6000 or HP/UX markets either.
The problem with these numbers is that they don't tell us the size of the machine, but the size of the bounding box the machine fits in.
The curvier the machine, the more the numbers lie. Cell phone manufacturers are beginning to take note of this by announcing the *volume* of the product along with the other specs.
Slashdot Mirror
..is that now John Romero can finally move on without losing his face. We all know by his actions that the guy is too stubborn to give up on his Grand Project, and generally everyone agrees that the job of finishing Daikatana can easily be compared to beating a dead horse -- beating a dead horse for years.
However, we all have also witnessed Romero's undeniable talent as a game designer. Let's just hope that the next project he embarks upon has a separate project leader with some organizational skills.
Sony has already looked into this situation, and even improved on your analysis: every codec that can succeed must have a name ending with a "3".
This could be seen in action when Sony introduced their new Memory Stick Walkman. The ultracompact music player features the latest version of Sony's ATRAC music codec.
The previus version was called ATRAC 4.5, and is present in most reasonably new MiniDisc recorders. Can you guess what the new version is called? Of course, it's ATRAC3!
And in the upside-down world of the New Economy, that's not a downgrade.
It's terrific to finally see an open, IP-free audio codec with (seemingly) great sound and compression efficiency.
One of the things most often complained about at Slashdot is the lack of Quicktime players for Linux, and more specifically, lack of a player capable of playing movies compressed with Quicktime 4's Sorenson codec. Many sites, especially those of the movie industry, have adopted Sorenson because it has genuine advantages over industry-standard MPEG video: Sorenson produces significantly better video quality at the bitrates preferred on the Internet today. While Sorenson and Microsoft's proprietary offerings are gaining ground, the use of free video standards like MPEG is becoming more and more scarce.
The only feasible way of reversing this trend is to come up with a superior video codec and distribute it freely. Until now, many people have argued that developing a good media codec involves such high-end mathematics that developing one under traditional Open Source development model is not possible.
It is high time that someone proved them wrong.
Really, the birth of the Federation is hands down the most interesting thing in the whole Star Trek universe. It is something we can, and should, take into account when forming the society of the 21st century.
After all, Paramount will soon reveal how the good people of the Federation erased war, famine, illness, indecency and leisure clothing from the known universe. Isn't that something we should all look forward to?
Pretty funny, but unfortunately not true. The new iMacs have hundreds of small air vents sprinkled around the top handle.
While calling bluetooth a wireless networking technology is of course correct, it can also be misleading in a world with an exploding wireless lan market and a bunch of up-and-coming wireless communication technologies.
A better way to understand Bluetooth is to imagine it as IrDA without the line of sight requirements. Today, when I want to read my emails with my PowerBook on the go, I have to carefully balance my Nokia phone on my lap to get line of sight with the laptop. When both my phone and my laptop eventually support Bluetooth, the phone can stay in my pocket. The difference doesn't seem like much, but everyone who has used IrDA on the go must understand how cool Bluetooth is.
Well, if you consider a machine with completely open-source reference OS implementation (Darwin) to be closed-spec, I don't really see what would be open..
Basically, what you're saying is that a person can't win a weekly lottery in her lifetime either.
Think about it.
It comes from Microsoft, which as an owner of the dominant web browsing software Internet Explorer has total control over directing the bulk of Internet users to web destinations.
Microsoft could, at any given moment, completely bypass the domain name system and start selling ActiveAddresses for IE(tm), completely independent of ICANN or NSI. Microsoft could even make this registry "open" in the sense that it would use Internet standards (such as DNS), encouraging third parties to implement the scheme in their products. The penetration level of Internet Explorer alone would make such addresses highly desirable on the marketplace.
Indeed Netscape is already hard at work on this, utilising this keyword approach with their Smart Browsing feature set. The only reason Netscape is unable to profit from this is their browser's diminishing market share. Microsoft doesn't have such a problem.
ICANN has the power to stop this from happening. It has to:
- keep the domain name system as flexible as possible
- work to diminish the dominance of the
.com gTLD
- demonstrate that keyword-style addresses like business.com are not major success factors in e-commerce
- by these actions lower the value of a single
.com property
and of courseWell, we have to remember that NeXT *IS* Apple nowadays. It's not like they're stealing this stuff from NeXT, it's theirs!
This morning I woke up to the rancid smell of perishing perishables. Little inspection proved the hypothesis -- my refridgerator had decided it was best to store my food at room temperature. This was curious, but I *really* started to get irritated when my microwave didn't work either. At this point my primary suspect was an unpaid electricity bill, but the fully-functioning TV, Hi-Fi set and general lighting made that unlikely.
I spent most of the morning trashing my food and wondering what was going on.
Moral of the story: the fuse box is a great starting point in any Y2K -related practical jokes you are planning.
Quite recently, my FreeBSD-based development box was rebooted. Violently. The machine had been up for about 320 days, when somebody accidentally removed its power cord in a co-location facility. I had a ssh session to the box at the moment, and pretty damn near shit in my pants when the machine stopped answering. I got to sigh in relief in a few minutes, after the machine booted and got all its services running.
Which gets us to the subject of the day. The reason I was so worried was that after 320 days of tinkering, new IP numbers, new system software, new services, old services scrapped, etc, I had no idea if the server would come up on a reboot or not.
Frequent, comfortably scheduled reboots tell you whether your machine will come up after an unexpected interruption or not.
That's pretty much the only direct problem with long uptimes. However, glorifying long uptimes has other, well known drawbacks. The most important of them is, of course, putting up important kernel security updates in pursuit of long uptime.
That's patently false. You can't pay for a non-existing domain name with the NSI's online payment system. And had it been a new registration, he would be paying $70, not $35.
Apple (and Mac OS clone manufacturers) have toyed with multiprocessor Macs in the past. Apple itself sold dual processor systems while some cloners went as far as to bring quad processor systems to market. The machines were mighty impressive, but unless BeOS was your bag, the only thing they were good for was accelerating Photoshop filters. And let's face it, most of us don't spend that much time waiting for Photoshop filters to finish.
Fast forward to 1999 and nothing has changed, except that Apple is now being led by a guy who actually understands that multiprocessor boxes are useless with classic Mac OS. That's why Apple isn't shipping any. The next major Apple OS release, Mac OS X, will feature decent SMP support, but could still be a year away. Shipping SMP hardware before that is ethically questionable at best, doomed to backfire at worst.
I was pretty amazed a while back when I learned that the new Gameboy Color not only supports old Gameboy games, but displays them in full color!
What I haven't found out is if Nintendo had the foresight to include color information in the original cartridges or if they have the colors for the most popular b&w games in the system ROM.
Nevertheless, the Gameboy is clearly a good demonstration of a successful migration from black&white to color. And by the way, their reflective color LCD doesn't use that much juice either.
No wonder Microsoft wanted to see Netscape dead. Microsoft has everything to lose if the world will collectively embrace a new, standards compliant browsing platform. Mozilla will provide just that, and like M12 is starting to show, offer an additional bonus: it's quickly becoming the absolutely best browser out there.
Sooner than you think, the Mozilla 1.0 release will be in the hands of anyone that's interested, in complete source form. This WILL spawn zillions of of new, Mozilla-based browser version. They will have minuscule market shares at first, but that's when the big players will enter: Computer manufacturers will start making browsers to bundle with their machines, application developers will start integrating browser features into existing apps, big corporations will create custom browsers for internal use.
Each of these new browsing platforms will make little difference on its own, but grouped together, they will create a single, compatible, cross-platform application environment that is based on accepted industry standards. Mozilla will be the catalyst of life in this expanding pool of diverse browsers, and together the pool will quickly challenge Internet Explorer's position as the dominant browser.
There will be no reason to ponder if Compaq, Dell or Apple will include the Netscape Communicator or Microsoft Internet Explorer with their machines. They can and will roll their own, emphasizing their brand's unique selling proposition through innovative, custom features and look-n-feel.
How will that be possible? Luckily, it's a certainity that Microsoft will be barred from forcing their distribution channel (OEMs) to distribute Internet Explorer with other Microsoft products. This will level the playing field and launch wide-scale Mozilla-based browser development.
The emerging new browsers will share an API that is the W3C standards suite, and in this Microsoft-vs-the-world situation Microsoft will witness their embrace-extend-extinguish strategy becoming a public relations nightmare. Eventually Microsoft has to follow suit and develop a standards compliant browser. When this is realized at Redmond, it may very well be that the company will even switch to use the Mozilla layout engine as a goodwill stunt.
Consequences: Microsoft will lose some of the applications barrier to entry they've so feverishly protected all these years. Faced with this reality, they will even claim that the barried never existed. The Open Source camp will rejoice, but only to see Microsoft products grow their market share by sheer inertia.
Marko
Disclaimer: my crystal ball was being polished, so I had to pull this out of my ass. Sorry.
A couple of things. It's sad to see digital movie projection being pushed at a laughable 1280x1024 resolution -- surely that is doomed to fail. A more accurate conclusion for Ebert would be that "I have seen the future of cinema, and it is not Texas Instruments."
First of all, considering that most of new motion pictures are delivered with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, the effective resolution would be 1280x545 (assuming square pixels). I've heard of other up-and-coming digital projection systems, and they have at least three times more pixels.
Second, contrary to popular belief, most frames, if not yet all, of a modern cinematic experience have been stored digitally at some point on their path from the camera to the silver screen. The motion pictures are printed to the celluloid film from this digital master data.
Needless to say, elimination of this last conversion phase is the holy grail of digital movie projection and IT WILL ARRIVE when the projectors get closer to the native resolution of the master data.
Everything that can be digital will be. I'm betting my ass on it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
You just reminded me why I put up with the "first posts" and semiliterate anonymous cowards and comments about as non-informative as the one I'm writing right now.
Well written, well thought out, thoroughly investigated comments like yours are what make Slashdot stand out from the usual news sites.
http://skepdic.com/crystalskull.html
Apple obviously knew that the initial G4 chip supplies from Motorola would be extremely limited, as is the case with most new processors. Regardless of these Motorola delays, Apple worked hard to finalize the design of the G4 machines in time, in order to keep the schedule of their R&D functions. The fact that the hardware designs were ready was misinterpreted by the media to mean that an announcement was immiment.
Come Seybold, Apple faced a difficult choice: Ignore this pressure to announce and fail to materialize the G4 everyone and their dog was expecting (most probably leading to a VERY bad reaction at NASDAQ), or introduce the new machines while being fully aware that there wouldn't be enough of them made anytime soon.
Apple chose the latter path, betting that the G4 introduction and a later notice of anticipated delivery problems (and lousy Q4 results) would hurt the company less than just introducing the G4 later. This is pretty understandable to me, because the sales of the G3 naturally slowed down under the G4 anticipation. I think the basic choices Apple made after the leaks have been sound, but the implementation of them, public relations wise, have proved that Apple still has serious internal communications issues to work out.
That has little to do with your question, though. It seems to me that this thing is getting financed as a purely commercial venture, by the players on the local telecommunications market. Consider it a pilot lab with 1 million people. As far as the technical merits of the project go, though, I'm not holding my breath to see anything insanely great.
Marko, Helsinki
What are the crackers going to do? Steal your high scores?
As for the G4 upgrades, Apple is trying to stop them because of the same reasons they killed the Mac clones: they want the third-party vendors to provide the low-end solutions, not the cutting edge stuff where the best profit margins are.
This policy is obviously questionable, but you have to remember that Apple is not just yet-another-computer-maker, they are a systems company. There isn't any free competition in the RS/6000 or HP/UX markets either.
The problem with these numbers is that they don't tell us the size of the machine, but the size of the bounding box the machine fits in.
The curvier the machine, the more the numbers lie.
Cell phone manufacturers are beginning to take note of this by announcing the *volume* of the product along with the other specs.
Marko