It seems to me that all this technology just increases the effort necessary to produce a given quantity of satisfying gameplay.
Once you add physics into the mix, every object needs to be broken down into more parts, represented in more ways, its possible impact on the game logic dealt with. (No point putting in a maze puzzle if you can bash through walls.)
So now you need hyper-detailed models with hyper-detailed textures and somewhat-detailed physics representations to produce something that looks as good as a second-tier film from ten years ago.
And the state of the art is, say, Half Life 2, a game which provides gorgeous graphics but runs you around on rails -- because providing that level of detail in a more open-ended game is simply prohibitively expensive. Indeed, by all accounts, Half Life 2's game play is unusually restrictive, even by the standards of First Person Shooters.
The key to me is choosing a level of design detail that suits the game you plan to make and then hiring an art director who can make the game look fabulous at that level of detail -- rather than maxing out the level of detail for the hardware currently available, and then producing the best game you can given the budget constraints you're stuck with.
The way things are trending we'll have games where you only get to visit one room because it costs millions of dollars to texture the pillows, insects, cracks in the wall, navel fluff, etc.
Business Amiga was crippled by the inability of the Amiga to drive a high res display you would want to look at for more than five minutes. The most useful display mode for word-processing had 2:1 aspect ratio pixels, making it unsuitable for graphics. Some programs would adjust the proportions of images and text, others would simply display tall thin text and images.
Business Amiga was also crippled by the utter lack of useful business software (e.g. the most frequently recommended Word Processor, "Excellence", could barely manage a three page document before becoming unusable).
Our Mac 512k lost its power supply in 1989 and had to be fixed. During this period we were forced to word-process on our Amiga. It was an absolute nightmare (and we had legal or pirate copies of every single program out there -- the Amiga community was AWESOME at software piracy... something that also destroyed the Amiga as a business computer).
Business Amiga was crippled by a complete lack of human interface guidelines, leading to every application having a uniquely bizarre user interface.
Business Amiga was further crippled by the Amiga's lousy mouse (we generally had to replace our mouse once per year, at considerable cost -- eventually I took to rebuilding them with a soldering iron), horrible disk drives (aside from the noise, they were very slow), clunky UI (most users preferred CLI over Workbench, Amiga's "Finder" equivalent), and lousy support (I believe that AmigaOS 1.3 was, in essence, a Commodore blessed compilation of shareware/freeware third-party replacements for their own OS-level components, collectively titled ARP -- the Amiga Resource Project).
The Amiga was still a phenomenonally successful machine (at least outside the US) and a great games platform. I don't think PC games really started to catch up until after 1990.
But for business, the time the Amiga was even vaguely useful, Mac OS had Multifinder, fantastic displays, Word, Excel, WriteNow, Pagemaker, Lightspeed Pascal and C, etc. etc. So you could play it safe and buy a PC, or get a useful GUI-based computer. Amiga was neither.
I got a Creative Nomad Xtra for Christmas, and I have been very satisifed with it thus far. I needed to upgrade the firmware to get the most out of my player
And the best feature of Windows is the incredible range of anti-virus software!
Based on Apple's previous record of backwards compatibility (e.g. 10.3 installs on quite a lot of Macs that predate 10.0), I feel safe in saying yes.
More importantly, will all the functionality of Tiger, e.g. CoreGraphics, works on a Mac Mini -- I'm guessing that one factor in choosing the 9200 was that it should at least let CoreGraphics run, if not especially fast.
FYI: CoreGraphics is a graphics library that transparently allows GPU acceleration of common image filtering functions (e.g. using pixel shaders to do gaussian blur).
OK ignoring all the other legitimate criticisms of this idea (who wants a gun whose battery might run flat)...
How does the smart gun actually prevent unauthorized use? E.g. is there some metal thing somewhere that prevents the hammer from striking the detonator on the cartridge? Or preventing me from pulling the trigger? What if I file this off? This is something even a six year old would think of.
Are the bullets smart? Can I buy bullets for the smart gun and use them in a Saturday Night Special?
Fractal image compression was neat. I actually played with it back in 1992 when I was assessing technologies to use for an image database (and JPEG was still not a household word).
I ended up picking JPEG because of the performance issues (it was substantially quicker to compress, and significantly quicker to expand) and the proprietary fractal compression technology (licensing requirements were quite steep).
It's good technology, but I imagine at least some of the ideas made it into JPEG2000.
Unless you simply must run IRIX, these days you're doing 3D on PC hardware. Probably studly PC hardware.
If you're using 3D Studio Max (which may displace Maya as the Gold Standard the way things are going -- sure flame me and say it never will) then you have no choice but to use PC hardware.
Huge texture memory sizes and the ability to manipulate large polycount scenes in real time are far more important to such folk than gamers.
Actually I wrote BASIC games for the Apple ][ and the Sinclair ZX-80 (Timex computer here), and (IMHO) they were *far* better.
Re:iPod Video Display
on
CES Tidbits
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· Score: 2, Informative
"I've not seen a HD-based video player that has a clamshell design."
I have. It's called an iBook. I'm guessing that it's not much more expensive than an iPod + this piece of junk, has a far better screen, plays DVDs, and has interchangeable batteries.
"We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen... we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments."
The problem isn't that Microsoft was founded by programmers. The problem is that it was founded by bad programmers.
I think he means an "iTunes Music Store" customer not "iTunes" customer. iTunes doesn't do any of the things he is complaining about.
iTunes doesn't load your MP3s onto rival MP3 players, but that's not its job.
iTMS sells music in AAC format. If you don't want music in Apple's format, buy it somewhere else. Apple never sold music in any other format, so they haven't converted any formerly open market into a closed one.
Can you use an iPod with music not from iTMS? Yes.
Can you use iTMS music without an iPod? Yes (burn CDs, play it through iTunes).
Microsoft makes deals with hardware companies such that they are forced to bundle Windows with their hardware whether their customers want/need it or not (how many of us don't already have all the Windows licenses we're ever likely to need?). These deals are deals the hardware companies cannot refuse, because otherwise they will not be able to sell computers with Windows as cheaply as compliant companies (this is called leveraging a monopoly).
Can I buy a low-end Dell PC without paying for a Windows license? Basically, no.
Microsoft puts gotchas into their OSes to do things like break applications written using non-Microsoft compilers (remember the Borland compiler hack in 95 betas?)
Microsoft deliberately modifies their APIs to break third party software for strategic purposes (remember "DOS 2 ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"?; see "Hard Drive")
Does Windows Media Player intentionally break file associations to QuickTime files so that QuickTime appears not to work, when in fact it's simply WMP that doesn't work? Basically, yes.
Microsoft "embraces and extends" standards to make the Microsoft variant of a "standard" the defacto and break otherwise compliant code. (Which is why it's more important for your web page to render correctly in IE than to be actually correctly coded.)
Can I remove IE from my Windows install? Basically, no.
It seems clear that Stephenson lost his Macintosh "Faith" as a consequence of losing a major piece of work to a hard disk crash on his Powerbook. The fact that he could just as easily have had a hard disk failure on a Windows or Linux machine didn't register. Instead, his reaction to this was to abandon Apple and reinterpret his past allegiance to it.
None of the valid reasons for preferring a Mac are really touched on: superior usability, integration, user productivity, etc.
Everything else in the article is interesting, but basically, having started from a flawed perspective, pointless. People are willing to pay far more for a BMW than for a Ford, although the benefits of a BMW over a Ford are far fewer, and the downsides greater, than those of a Mac over a PC.
The annotator, meanwhile, has a curious knack for over-extending metaphors. (The monkey chauffeur business is a classic example.) The point of metaphors, in this case, is to simplify things; not to become as complex as the actual case.
Both Stephenson and the annotator are deluded if they think that Linux is a tank ready for anyone to drive away, or that BeOS was a batmobile. Even a self-configuring Linux like Knoppix is beyond a typical user (e.g. they won't handle dialup connections unless you know what you're doing, and you won't get any support), and BeOS didn't support printing properly, let alone have a decent application base (e.g. no decent word-processor or spreadsheet).
It would be fairer to describe BeOS as a hydrogen-powered batmobile that could only drive between LA and Phoenix, and Linux as a vegetalble-oil-fueled tank with controls that are subtley different from anything you're used to (probably including other tank controls). Great tank, but none of the gas stations sell vegetable oil.
It's a shame that Stallman seems to be mostly interested in bashing the Open Source movement.
1. Open Source is more like Microsoft than GNU:
"The open source movement promotes what they consider a technically superior development model that usually gives technically superior results. The values they cite are the same ones Microsoft appeals to: narrowly practical values."
2. Linus Torvalds is a corrupting influence:
"People know that Linus Torvalds wrote his program Linux to have fun. And people know that Linus Torvalds did not say that it's wrong to stop users for sharing and changing the software they use. If they think that our system was started by him and primarily owes existence to him, they will tend to follow his philosophy, and that weakens our community."
I had the "privilege" to play with a Xerox Star at a trade show. It cost $10,000 or so and, with its "useful" 3-button mouse it was completely unusable. Even the sales reps didn't seem to know how to drive it properly.
I did plenty of work on Macs using one-button mice. The Mac achieved everything Xerox did with three buttons -- and more (such as overlapping windows and drag-and-drop) -- simply and more elegantly with one-button. Until the scroll wheel and the context menu, most three-button mice simply achieved bizarre modes (e.g. you MUST use the middle mouse button to operate menus, even though in the same context the left button does nothing).
I actually don't buy the idea that Apple is ditching the G4. The new 1.7GHz G4s look very nice and don't confuse anyone by having a higher clock rate than the pro G5 models. G5 laptops are still not viable, especially at lower price points. Even the G5 iMac has to do cooling tricks, while you can stick a 1.7GHz G4 in a Cube enclosure (albeit you need to add a fan).
Arguing that buying a headless Mac secondhand is cheaper and gets you more bang for the buck than buying a $500 pizzabox new is beside the point. A second hand Mac with an old ugly case hardly has the MUST GET value of a new gleaming white $599 box (I'm guessing that this is the pricepoint, not "under $500" -- see AppleInsider)
I doubt Apple's margins on $599 pizza boxes can possibly be lower than their margins on $999 iBooks, and I'm guessing that their margins on a pizza box would be better than those on eMacs. You're assuming the new machine is an eMac without a CRT -- it may be a headless iBook or a new, dramatically simpler and cheaper design (something Apple is very good at). I expect Apple can get a better margin on a $599 computer with no display, no PCI slots, etc. than Dell can on a $499 computer with a display and PCI slots.
Also consider Apple's usual release and pricing strategy -- the $599 item is their "bottom line" to get people to the website or into the store. There'll be a $799 version with more RAM, faster processor, and a deluxe $999 version with a built-in PVR, superdrive, etc. etc. (the best one won't be announced for a month or so, or won't be available immediately, or both, so a whole lot of early adopters will buy BOTH the $799 version and the $999 version).
Part of it is having "taste". E.g. Apple "copied" Xerox's and others' earlier work and produced the Mac UI -- which was better than anything that preceded it. With Apple's UI to borrow from, Microsoft repeatedly made kludgier, inferior imitations. Everyone copies someone, but taste determines what you've copy, and know when you've done a good job.
Another part of it is avoiding kludges. E.g. QuickTime was a revolutionary product, but it also had a fully extensible and general architecture which none of its clones can yet match. A single QuickTime movie can automatically select between multiple audio and video tracks to cope with different localization, bandwidth, and hardware requirements -- this is a 1.0 feature. Consider that MPEG came out initially without a robust mechanism for keeping audio and video in synch (just start playing both tracks at the same time, and hope).
Apple without Steve managed to produce the Newton (which could have been another stroke of lightning, but was released too early and with software too far in advance of its hardware) and managed the PowerPC transition flawlessly. Steve without Apple built Pixar and created NeXT (which for most of OS X's elegance deserves credit) and WebObjects.
Having just purchased a TiVo, I expect Apple to show TiVo a thing or two next... Sure, the UI is PRETTY...
The haggling over numbers is really almost beside the point.
Hollywood has a cultural impact that games have not yet approached (simply consider the number of games based on films, vs. the number of films based on games). How many games industry figures are household names? At a rough guess, zero.
Hollywood stars themselves are hugely influential. I don't think any women in shopping isles are reading Us magazine to find out about John Carmack's twins...
Hollywood's marketing machine covers far more than DVDs and rentals. A large proportion of the publishing market is driven by movies (many best-sellers are books that have just been adapted to film that otherwise sold quite modestly), similarly rock groups and fashion houses can be made or broken by films.
It seems to me that anyone who finds NPR a bastion of left-think has clearly never come across any actual left-think.
Since the writer nails his/her/its (Robotrunamuck) biases to the mast by accusing Clinton of having undermined press fairness, this seems like a pretty sound observation.
Speaking as a fan of Blitz3D (and yes, I've used AMOS and Blitz leaves it for dead), this is great news for hobby and semi-pro game developers.
Note that while Blitz3D has extensive Windows functionality, BlitzMax does not yet match this. It is the beginning of a more modern architecture for the Blitz product line.
The online documentation is a little bit ugly, but it's all html so (a) producing your own printed version shouldn't be too difficult, and (b) if you want to reformat it to your own taste, you can and it's easy.
1) There's a mirror in the way because it's built like an SLR instead of a digital camera.
Why do I care what's coming through the lens if that's not what I'll get on "film"? You guys are arguing like somehow there's a mystical value in looking through a periscope at your scene. The lens distorts reality as does the CCD. To minimize distortion -- use your eyeballs. To preview your photograph -- see the results at the far end of the process not midway. Why do I want to see partially distorted reality that (a) doesn't correspond to what I see and (b) doesn't correspond to the picture I'll get when I can see the actual more-or-less completely distorted reality?
Any shortcomings of LCDs are, in essence, mirrors of shortcomings of the entire digital photographic process which it's valuable to be able to preview in real time. (And having a brightness histogram available is pretty astonishing.)
2) '"preview" motion blur? ha, talk about turning a deficiency into a feature.'
Yup preview motion blur. I can see the actual motion blur from taking low shutter speed shots of the image (at least with high end Sonys). And it captures action just fine thanks, since it is taking photos using its current settings and sending them to the LCD at its refresh rate.
3) autofocus speed
Sure, the SLRs have fast autofocus, but there's no technical reason for that to be restricted to SLRs.
Consider that professional analog photographers often take polaroids because that gives them a better idea of what they'll get on film than what they're getting by looking through the camera lens. And guess what, they're trying to produce good photographs, not see something pretty through their viewfinder.
SLR's viewfinders have the "virtues" of (a) not previewing depth of field (unless you clamp down the aperture, whereupon everything goes dim), (b) not previewing the actual framing correctly (it almost always crops the final picture, and (c) not previewing what will actually come out in the final photograph (in terms of whether the picture is even going to come out.) And the mirror mechanism introduces a delay in taking the photograph. (Indeed, one of the coolest features of the Olympus OM-2 was that it metered exposure using light reflected off the film AFTER the mirror had been raised, because lighting changes during this delay could occasionally ruin photographs.)
That said, obviously it would be nice to have both great optical and LCD viewfinders. It would be great if there were near zero latency between what's in the viewfinder and what appears on "film". It's just that if I had to pick one, I'd pick the LCD
As for the delay between clicking the shutter release and taking a picture -- there's no reason why a digital camera (unlike an analog) can't take pictures constantly, and simply preserve the image that it took as you pressed the shutter release. At least one company (Panasonic) has released cameras with this feature. Of course, if you physically have to move a mirror out of the way...
4) Lens aperture: "Well, its not quite that simple.... Since f is small, no matter how small n is, f/n is generally going to be a lot smaller than that for a 35mm SLR lens"
So how is it I can buy a 17-68mm F1.2 zoom lens for a 16mm movie camera? And for not too much money?
The reason SLRs are the size they are is that 35mm film represented the best tradeoff for film resolution to camera size. They're not some magic form factor for which lenses are golden.
To produce a lens of a given set of characteristics (focal length relative to image size, aperture, etc.) it is FAR CHEAPER at small sizes, which is why you can get an 8x zoom Zeiss or L-series lens on a small format Sony or Canon which including the camera costs less than the down-payment on an equivalent SLR lens or a fixed length Hasselblad lens.
Small film sizes lead to grainy pictures. The same is currently true of CCDs; but if we fix that problem, I for one have no desire to continue suffering the bulk, expense, and inconvenience of 35mm SLRs.
The article's discussion of current benefits and limitations of digital SLRs vs. non-SLRs is accurate in the situation it depicts but hopelessly inaccurate in explaining the reasons.
The reason you can't reduce depth of field with most non-SLR cameras is that they have cheaply designed lenses that won't open up to large apertures. It would actually be both technically easy and (compared to SLRs) cheap to provide fast lenses which offered low depth of field creative options on non-SLR digital cameras, but the market doesn't seem to want them. Indeed, the 35mm SLR market was already moving to zoom lenses incapable of large apertures (and with commensurately poor low light performance) before digital cameras became competitive.
Two features of digital SLRs are simply legacy.
1) Interchangeable lenses. There remains a significant demand for cameras that can use the lenses originally developed for 35mm photography. There's no reason why cheaper lenses can be developed for smaller format digital cameras. Sony has started offering this option with its DSC-V and DSC-W cameras. You get Carl Zeiss lenses for far less than comparable 35mm lenses, but the camera CCDs so far cannot compete with the larger CCDs in the Canon and Nikon SLRs.
2) No digital preview. This seems to me a horrible and unnecessary flaw in digital SLRs. With a good non-SLR camera I can preview motion blur in my photographs and manually adjust exposure settings for time exposures while seeing the results in real time.
At the moment, we seem to be able to produce nicer CCDs at slightly larger sizes. Thus you can get better pictures from a 6.3MP Digital Rebel than from an 8MP Sony DSC-V3. By the same token if Hasselblad were to produce an even larger format digitial camera it would quite possibly be better still (and cost $100,000). In the end, I suspect the market will create smaller format digital cameras that offer all the benefits anyone much cares about at prices substantially lower than the Digital Rebel et al.
Surely the ability of a large company to leverage internal software development (e.g. automation scripts, standard install images, etc.) would make the savings even greater -- OTOH with Microsoft it seems to make the costs even greater.
E.g. large companies often have to standardize on very specific hardware configurations -- such as laptops guaranteed to be assembled from identical components over the course of a specific time period -- so that a Windows system image will be able to run on all of them. The company pats a premium for these laptops. The advantage of various self-configuring, open source, end-user-configurable Debian distributions (e.g. Knoppix) for the IT departments of large companies would be enormous.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Raskin should get together with Ted Nelson and build a UI for Xanadu.
It seems to me that all this technology just increases the effort necessary to produce a given quantity of satisfying gameplay.
Once you add physics into the mix, every object needs to be broken down into more parts, represented in more ways, its possible impact on the game logic dealt with. (No point putting in a maze puzzle if you can bash through walls.)
So now you need hyper-detailed models with hyper-detailed textures and somewhat-detailed physics representations to produce something that looks as good as a second-tier film from ten years ago.
And the state of the art is, say, Half Life 2, a game which provides gorgeous graphics but runs you around on rails -- because providing that level of detail in a more open-ended game is simply prohibitively expensive. Indeed, by all accounts, Half Life 2's game play is unusually restrictive, even by the standards of First Person Shooters.
The key to me is choosing a level of design detail that suits the game you plan to make and then hiring an art director who can make the game look fabulous at that level of detail -- rather than maxing out the level of detail for the hardware currently available, and then producing the best game you can given the budget constraints you're stuck with.
The way things are trending we'll have games where you only get to visit one room because it costs millions of dollars to texture the pillows, insects, cracks in the wall, navel fluff, etc.
You might like to read "To Live Forever" by Jack Vance.
The thesis can be summed up in one line -- to live is to kill. You're taking up space someone else could be using.
Business Amiga was crippled by the inability of the Amiga to drive a high res display you would want to look at for more than five minutes. The most useful display mode for word-processing had 2:1 aspect ratio pixels, making it unsuitable for graphics. Some programs would adjust the proportions of images and text, others would simply display tall thin text and images.
Business Amiga was also crippled by the utter lack of useful business software (e.g. the most frequently recommended Word Processor, "Excellence", could barely manage a three page document before becoming unusable).
Our Mac 512k lost its power supply in 1989 and had to be fixed. During this period we were forced to word-process on our Amiga. It was an absolute nightmare (and we had legal or pirate copies of every single program out there -- the Amiga community was AWESOME at software piracy... something that also destroyed the Amiga as a business computer).
Business Amiga was crippled by a complete lack of human interface guidelines, leading to every application having a uniquely bizarre user interface.
Business Amiga was further crippled by the Amiga's lousy mouse (we generally had to replace our mouse once per year, at considerable cost -- eventually I took to rebuilding them with a soldering iron), horrible disk drives (aside from the noise, they were very slow), clunky UI (most users preferred CLI over Workbench, Amiga's "Finder" equivalent), and lousy support (I believe that AmigaOS 1.3 was, in essence, a Commodore blessed compilation of shareware/freeware third-party replacements for their own OS-level components, collectively titled ARP -- the Amiga Resource Project).
The Amiga was still a phenomenonally successful machine (at least outside the US) and a great games platform. I don't think PC games really started to catch up until after 1990.
But for business, the time the Amiga was even vaguely useful, Mac OS had Multifinder, fantastic displays, Word, Excel, WriteNow, Pagemaker, Lightspeed Pascal and C, etc. etc. So you could play it safe and buy a PC, or get a useful GUI-based computer. Amiga was neither.
I got a Creative Nomad Xtra for Christmas, and I have been very satisifed with it thus far. I needed to upgrade the firmware to get the most out of my player
And the best feature of Windows is the incredible range of anti-virus software!
Based on Apple's previous record of backwards compatibility (e.g. 10.3 installs on quite a lot of Macs that predate 10.0), I feel safe in saying yes.
More importantly, will all the functionality of Tiger, e.g. CoreGraphics, works on a Mac Mini -- I'm guessing that one factor in choosing the 9200 was that it should at least let CoreGraphics run, if not especially fast.
FYI: CoreGraphics is a graphics library that transparently allows GPU acceleration of common image filtering functions (e.g. using pixel shaders to do gaussian blur).
OK ignoring all the other legitimate criticisms of this idea (who wants a gun whose battery might run flat)...
How does the smart gun actually prevent unauthorized use? E.g. is there some metal thing somewhere that prevents the hammer from striking the detonator on the cartridge? Or preventing me from pulling the trigger? What if I file this off? This is something even a six year old would think of.
Are the bullets smart? Can I buy bullets for the smart gun and use them in a Saturday Night Special?
Fractal image compression was neat. I actually played with it back in 1992 when I was assessing technologies to use for an image database (and JPEG was still not a household word).
I ended up picking JPEG because of the performance issues (it was substantially quicker to compress, and significantly quicker to expand) and the proprietary fractal compression technology (licensing requirements were quite steep).
It's good technology, but I imagine at least some of the ideas made it into JPEG2000.
Unless you simply must run IRIX, these days you're doing 3D on PC hardware. Probably studly PC hardware.
If you're using 3D Studio Max (which may displace Maya as the Gold Standard the way things are going -- sure flame me and say it never will) then you have no choice but to use PC hardware.
Huge texture memory sizes and the ability to manipulate large polycount scenes in real time are far more important to such folk than gamers.
Actually I wrote BASIC games for the Apple ][ and the Sinclair ZX-80 (Timex computer here), and (IMHO) they were *far* better.
"I've not seen a HD-based video player that has a clamshell design."
I have. It's called an iBook. I'm guessing that it's not much more expensive than an iPod + this piece of junk, has a far better screen, plays DVDs, and has interchangeable batteries.
Let's see...
No headers and footers.
No multiple columns.
No table support.
WriteNow had all this and more and weighed in at under 500kB. And it was ported to the NeXT machine so where the heck is it?
From the last paragraph:
... we were amazed that such a thoroughly bad game could be co-authored by Microsoft's co-founder, and that he would actually want to take credit for it in the comments."
"Microsoft was founded by programmers and is still run by programmers, and the bias of programmers is that software can do anything"
From Donkey:
"We thought the concept of the game was as bad the crude graphics that it used. Since the game was written in BASIC, you could list it out and see how it was written. We were surprised to see that the comments at the top of the game proudly proclaimed the authors: Bill Gates and Neil Konzen
The problem isn't that Microsoft was founded by programmers. The problem is that it was founded by bad programmers.
I think he means an "iTunes Music Store" customer not "iTunes" customer. iTunes doesn't do any of the things he is complaining about.
iTunes doesn't load your MP3s onto rival MP3 players, but that's not its job.
iTMS sells music in AAC format. If you don't want music in Apple's format, buy it somewhere else. Apple never sold music in any other format, so they haven't converted any formerly open market into a closed one.
Can you use an iPod with music not from iTMS? Yes.
Can you use iTMS music without an iPod? Yes (burn CDs, play it through iTunes).
Microsoft makes deals with hardware companies such that they are forced to bundle Windows with their hardware whether their customers want/need it or not (how many of us don't already have all the Windows licenses we're ever likely to need?). These deals are deals the hardware companies cannot refuse, because otherwise they will not be able to sell computers with Windows as cheaply as compliant companies (this is called leveraging a monopoly).
Can I buy a low-end Dell PC without paying for a Windows license? Basically, no.
Microsoft puts gotchas into their OSes to do things like break applications written using non-Microsoft compilers (remember the Borland compiler hack in 95 betas?)
Microsoft deliberately modifies their APIs to break third party software for strategic purposes (remember "DOS 2 ain't done 'til Lotus won't run"?; see "Hard Drive")
Does Windows Media Player intentionally break file associations to QuickTime files so that QuickTime appears not to work, when in fact it's simply WMP that doesn't work? Basically, yes.
Microsoft "embraces and extends" standards to make the Microsoft variant of a "standard" the defacto and break otherwise compliant code. (Which is why it's more important for your web page to render correctly in IE than to be actually correctly coded.)
Can I remove IE from my Windows install? Basically, no.
It seems clear that Stephenson lost his Macintosh "Faith" as a consequence of losing a major piece of work to a hard disk crash on his Powerbook. The fact that he could just as easily have had a hard disk failure on a Windows or Linux machine didn't register. Instead, his reaction to this was to abandon Apple and reinterpret his past allegiance to it.
None of the valid reasons for preferring a Mac are really touched on: superior usability, integration, user productivity, etc.
Everything else in the article is interesting, but basically, having started from a flawed perspective, pointless. People are willing to pay far more for a BMW than for a Ford, although the benefits of a BMW over a Ford are far fewer, and the downsides greater, than those of a Mac over a PC.
The annotator, meanwhile, has a curious knack for over-extending metaphors. (The monkey chauffeur business is a classic example.) The point of metaphors, in this case, is to simplify things; not to become as complex as the actual case.
Both Stephenson and the annotator are deluded if they think that Linux is a tank ready for anyone to drive away, or that BeOS was a batmobile. Even a self-configuring Linux like Knoppix is beyond a typical user (e.g. they won't handle dialup connections unless you know what you're doing, and you won't get any support), and BeOS didn't support printing properly, let alone have a decent application base (e.g. no decent word-processor or spreadsheet).
It would be fairer to describe BeOS as a hydrogen-powered batmobile that could only drive between LA and Phoenix, and Linux as a vegetalble-oil-fueled tank with controls that are subtley different from anything you're used to (probably including other tank controls). Great tank, but none of the gas stations sell vegetable oil.
It's a shame that Stallman seems to be mostly interested in bashing the Open Source movement.
1. Open Source is more like Microsoft than GNU:
"The open source movement promotes what they consider a technically superior development model that usually gives technically superior results. The values they cite are the same ones Microsoft appeals to: narrowly practical values."
2. Linus Torvalds is a corrupting influence:
"People know that Linus Torvalds wrote his program Linux to have fun. And people know that Linus Torvalds did not say that it's wrong to stop users for sharing and changing the software they use. If they think that our system was started by him and primarily owes existence to him, they will tend to follow his philosophy, and that weakens our community."
I had the "privilege" to play with a Xerox Star at a trade show. It cost $10,000 or so and, with its "useful" 3-button mouse it was completely unusable. Even the sales reps didn't seem to know how to drive it properly.
I did plenty of work on Macs using one-button mice. The Mac achieved everything Xerox did with three buttons -- and more (such as overlapping windows and drag-and-drop) -- simply and more elegantly with one-button. Until the scroll wheel and the context menu, most three-button mice simply achieved bizarre modes (e.g. you MUST use the middle mouse button to operate menus, even though in the same context the left button does nothing).
I actually don't buy the idea that Apple is ditching the G4. The new 1.7GHz G4s look very nice and don't confuse anyone by having a higher clock rate than the pro G5 models. G5 laptops are still not viable, especially at lower price points. Even the G5 iMac has to do cooling tricks, while you can stick a 1.7GHz G4 in a Cube enclosure (albeit you need to add a fan).
Arguing that buying a headless Mac secondhand is cheaper and gets you more bang for the buck than buying a $500 pizzabox new is beside the point. A second hand Mac with an old ugly case hardly has the MUST GET value of a new gleaming white $599 box (I'm guessing that this is the pricepoint, not "under $500" -- see AppleInsider)
I doubt Apple's margins on $599 pizza boxes can possibly be lower than their margins on $999 iBooks, and I'm guessing that their margins on a pizza box would be better than those on eMacs. You're assuming the new machine is an eMac without a CRT -- it may be a headless iBook or a new, dramatically simpler and cheaper design (something Apple is very good at). I expect Apple can get a better margin on a $599 computer with no display, no PCI slots, etc. than Dell can on a $499 computer with a display and PCI slots.
Also consider Apple's usual release and pricing strategy -- the $599 item is their "bottom line" to get people to the website or into the store. There'll be a $799 version with more RAM, faster processor, and a deluxe $999 version with a built-in PVR, superdrive, etc. etc. (the best one won't be announced for a month or so, or won't be available immediately, or both, so a whole lot of early adopters will buy BOTH the $799 version and the $999 version).
Apple does this EVERY time it releases a product.
I agree on all counts.
Part of it is having "taste". E.g. Apple "copied" Xerox's and others' earlier work and produced the Mac UI -- which was better than anything that preceded it. With Apple's UI to borrow from, Microsoft repeatedly made kludgier, inferior imitations. Everyone copies someone, but taste determines what you've copy, and know when you've done a good job.
Another part of it is avoiding kludges. E.g. QuickTime was a revolutionary product, but it also had a fully extensible and general architecture which none of its clones can yet match. A single QuickTime movie can automatically select between multiple audio and video tracks to cope with different localization, bandwidth, and hardware requirements -- this is a 1.0 feature. Consider that MPEG came out initially without a robust mechanism for keeping audio and video in synch (just start playing both tracks at the same time, and hope).
Apple without Steve managed to produce the Newton (which could have been another stroke of lightning, but was released too early and with software too far in advance of its hardware) and managed the PowerPC transition flawlessly. Steve without Apple built Pixar and created NeXT (which for most of OS X's elegance deserves credit) and WebObjects.
Having just purchased a TiVo, I expect Apple to show TiVo a thing or two next... Sure, the UI is PRETTY...
The haggling over numbers is really almost beside the point.
Hollywood has a cultural impact that games have not yet approached (simply consider the number of games based on films, vs. the number of films based on games). How many games industry figures are household names? At a rough guess, zero.
Hollywood stars themselves are hugely influential. I don't think any women in shopping isles are reading Us magazine to find out about John Carmack's twins...
Hollywood's marketing machine covers far more than DVDs and rentals. A large proportion of the publishing market is driven by movies (many best-sellers are books that have just been adapted to film that otherwise sold quite modestly), similarly rock groups and fashion houses can be made or broken by films.
It seems to me that anyone who finds NPR a bastion of left-think has clearly never come across any actual left-think.
Since the writer nails his/her/its (Robotrunamuck) biases to the mast by accusing Clinton of having undermined press fairness, this seems like a pretty sound observation.
Speaking as a fan of Blitz3D (and yes, I've used AMOS and Blitz leaves it for dead), this is great news for hobby and semi-pro game developers.
Note that while Blitz3D has extensive Windows functionality, BlitzMax does not yet match this. It is the beginning of a more modern architecture for the Blitz product line.
The online documentation is a little bit ugly, but it's all html so (a) producing your own printed version shouldn't be too difficult, and (b) if you want to reformat it to your own taste, you can and it's easy.
1) There's a mirror in the way because it's built like an SLR instead of a digital camera.
... Since f is small, no matter how small n is, f/n is generally going to be a lot smaller than that for a 35mm SLR lens"
Why do I care what's coming through the lens if that's not what I'll get on "film"? You guys are arguing like somehow there's a mystical value in looking through a periscope at your scene. The lens distorts reality as does the CCD. To minimize distortion -- use your eyeballs. To preview your photograph -- see the results at the far end of the process not midway. Why do I want to see partially distorted reality that (a) doesn't correspond to what I see and (b) doesn't correspond to the picture I'll get when I can see the actual more-or-less completely distorted reality?
Any shortcomings of LCDs are, in essence, mirrors of shortcomings of the entire digital photographic process which it's valuable to be able to preview in real time. (And having a brightness histogram available is pretty astonishing.)
2) '"preview" motion blur? ha, talk about turning a deficiency into a feature.'
Yup preview motion blur. I can see the actual motion blur from taking low shutter speed shots of the image (at least with high end Sonys). And it captures action just fine thanks, since it is taking photos using its current settings and sending them to the LCD at its refresh rate.
3) autofocus speed
Sure, the SLRs have fast autofocus, but there's no technical reason for that to be restricted to SLRs.
Consider that professional analog photographers often take polaroids because that gives them a better idea of what they'll get on film than what they're getting by looking through the camera lens. And guess what, they're trying to produce good photographs, not see something pretty through their viewfinder.
SLR's viewfinders have the "virtues" of (a) not previewing depth of field (unless you clamp down the aperture, whereupon everything goes dim), (b) not previewing the actual framing correctly (it almost always crops the final picture, and (c) not previewing what will actually come out in the final photograph (in terms of whether the picture is even going to come out.) And the mirror mechanism introduces a delay in taking the photograph. (Indeed, one of the coolest features of the Olympus OM-2 was that it metered exposure using light reflected off the film AFTER the mirror had been raised, because lighting changes during this delay could occasionally ruin photographs.)
That said, obviously it would be nice to have both great optical and LCD viewfinders. It would be great if there were near zero latency between what's in the viewfinder and what appears on "film". It's just that if I had to pick one, I'd pick the LCD
As for the delay between clicking the shutter release and taking a picture -- there's no reason why a digital camera (unlike an analog) can't take pictures constantly, and simply preserve the image that it took as you pressed the shutter release. At least one company (Panasonic) has released cameras with this feature. Of course, if you physically have to move a mirror out of the way...
4) Lens aperture: "Well, its not quite that simple.
So how is it I can buy a 17-68mm F1.2 zoom lens for a 16mm movie camera? And for not too much money?
The reason SLRs are the size they are is that 35mm film represented the best tradeoff for film resolution to camera size. They're not some magic form factor for which lenses are golden.
To produce a lens of a given set of characteristics (focal length relative to image size, aperture, etc.) it is FAR CHEAPER at small sizes, which is why you can get an 8x zoom Zeiss or L-series lens on a small format Sony or Canon which including the camera costs less than the down-payment on an equivalent SLR lens or a fixed length Hasselblad lens.
Small film sizes lead to grainy pictures. The same is currently true of CCDs; but if we fix that problem, I for one have no desire to continue suffering the bulk, expense, and inconvenience of 35mm SLRs.
The article's discussion of current benefits and limitations of digital SLRs vs. non-SLRs is accurate in the situation it depicts but hopelessly inaccurate in explaining the reasons.
The reason you can't reduce depth of field with most non-SLR cameras is that they have cheaply designed lenses that won't open up to large apertures. It would actually be both technically easy and (compared to SLRs) cheap to provide fast lenses which offered low depth of field creative options on non-SLR digital cameras, but the market doesn't seem to want them. Indeed, the 35mm SLR market was already moving to zoom lenses incapable of large apertures (and with commensurately poor low light performance) before digital cameras became competitive.
Two features of digital SLRs are simply legacy.
1) Interchangeable lenses. There remains a significant demand for cameras that can use the lenses originally developed for 35mm photography. There's no reason why cheaper lenses can be developed for smaller format digital cameras. Sony has started offering this option with its DSC-V and DSC-W cameras. You get Carl Zeiss lenses for far less than comparable 35mm lenses, but the camera CCDs so far cannot compete with the larger CCDs in the Canon and Nikon SLRs.
2) No digital preview. This seems to me a horrible and unnecessary flaw in digital SLRs. With a good non-SLR camera I can preview motion blur in my photographs and manually adjust exposure settings for time exposures while seeing the results in real time.
At the moment, we seem to be able to produce nicer CCDs at slightly larger sizes. Thus you can get better pictures from a 6.3MP Digital Rebel than from an 8MP Sony DSC-V3. By the same token if Hasselblad were to produce an even larger format digitial camera it would quite possibly be better still (and cost $100,000). In the end, I suspect the market will create smaller format digital cameras that offer all the benefits anyone much cares about at prices substantially lower than the Digital Rebel et al.
Surely the ability of a large company to leverage internal software development (e.g. automation scripts, standard install images, etc.) would make the savings even greater -- OTOH with Microsoft it seems to make the costs even greater.
E.g. large companies often have to standardize on very specific hardware configurations -- such as laptops guaranteed to be assembled from identical components over the course of a specific time period -- so that a Windows system image will be able to run on all of them. The company pats a premium for these laptops. The advantage of various self-configuring, open source, end-user-configurable Debian distributions (e.g. Knoppix) for the IT departments of large companies would be enormous.