I experienced this when I lived in Australia and it sucked royally. Just regularly playing an online game could blow you over the bandwidth cap (of course in EverQuest you had to stay logged on to keep your merchants in the bazaar active), and there's no way to locally cache that.
If nothing else, this will be enormously unpleasant for teleworkers.
It seems to me that D&D's shortcomings are sufficiently ingrained that any serious attempt to fix them will be met with harsh resistance. It's nice to see someone actually attempt to fix D&D's clear shortcomings, but I suspect that this will fail badly.
Let's look at some of D&D's fundamental design problems:
1) Classes -- this is a really bad idea, it doesn't match reality or fiction. Even in official adaptations, no fictional character from source literature (e.g. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the Lord of the Rings, Conan) could be converted into a legal D&D character.
2) Alignments -- ugh.
3) Basic mechanics -- Armor does not make you harder to hit. What exactly is a saving throw?
Any attempt to fix these things (and there have been attempts in the past, e.g. Alternity) runs into these basic issues and runs into religious resistance.
There are plenty of better games than D&D which have solved most or all of these issue, have large "sweet spots", and are easier to learn and more fun to play. It would be nice if D&D were turned into one of them, but it's probably easier just to play a different game.
My take is that phone carriers aren't going to be around (in their current form) much longer, certainly not the four and a half years remaining on the Apple / AT&T contract. If the iPod Touch had a VoIP client and wireless networks were ubiquitous or it could use some kind of cellular modem, then this conversation would be completely irrelevant. How long will it be before the former is true in urban areas and/or the latter is true everywhere else?
"more people will begin to realize that F/OSS is not only usable, but valuable."
We never really left the days where Apple defined the home computing and desktop experience. It's just that, for a while, Windows was "nearly good enough" that people didn't realize that they were looking at an imitation of an Apple product. Nowhere does the original article's writer say "gee, the next version of Windows needs to be more like Linux", but he does mention Apple several times.
Volumetrics? Motion blur? (Proper motion blur, not "let's render 20x as many frames and composite them together")
"quite competitive with anything Max can produce as the gallery will contest" You can produce nice work with anything as long as you know its limitations. Michelangelo + charcoal > anyone I know with any software.
"A professional learns multiple GUIs and accepts that each has its pluses and minuses" I agree, and having learned Blender's GUI, I accept that is has a LOT of minuses.
Thanks so much for the youtube link. I had wanted to see the Elephants Dream since it was released but was unwilling to pay for the DVD or download it. What a horribly boring short film...
Oh well, supposedly Blender is completely redoing its godawful UI for 2.5 (I say as I put on my asbestos underwear)... and can then get to work adding functionality to the renderer to make it competitive with, say, 3D Studio Max R3.
I wonder if -- and indeed expect that -- the victory will prove Pyrrhic.
Gates famously said this would be the last format far. I think that it will prove to be the last plus one. Most people are going to be uninterested in buying video in a locked format; unless blu-rays allow you to play your videos on a generic DVD player, rip your video into your computer, play your video on your PSP, iPod, iPhone, or whatever, not enough people will want them to generate economies of scale.
I suspect that 1080 will turn out to be a mere stepping stone to arbitarily large screen resolutions. DVD, VHS, etc. all targeted an otherwise very stable market of equipment: NTSC televisions and stereo (or even mono) audio. The old CE companies have tried to create a new ecology (HD TV + Surround sound) but the real ecology is much more complex and diverse (PCs, laptops, cellphones, iPods, and stuff we haven't even dreamed of yet) and it's not going to stay even vaguely stable for long enough for a deeply flawed and mistargeted technology to gain traction.
If the hard disk was indeed the problem, Winer should have been able to figure that out himself in about five minutes, save himself the $160 and any other headaches. Is Apple going to resell the disk without scrubbing it? Hell no -- if they did that kind of thing they'd be liable for huge lawsuits for identity theft or whatever.
Sadly, Winer is doing what he does best and, apparently, was named for. Sorry, making fun of his name is unfair.
Good point... no clue where he got the idea 10.1 had lesser requirements than 10.0.
I might add that when 10.0 came out, Apple was selling quite a few machines that could barely run it, and iMacs came out before OS X, so quoting iMac specs is also beside the point.
This is probably the single most informative thing I've read about why I would care about Vista, but you're right -- the frustrations make Vista just not worth it. I'd like to see some of these things brought over to the Mac.
He said 10.0 not 10.1. Even so, I think folks are entitled to be a little hazy on machine specs from yesteryear. OS X 10.0 "ran" quite well on 64MB of RAM. (And 333 MHz is actually a pretty liberal estimate. I had 10.2 work quite nicely on an aging G3 Powerbook.)
I'm not up on the HTML5 spec, but it seems to me that video should be handled the way images are handled:
Or even:
The only fundamental media types are (a) images (don't change over time, have spatial dimension); (b) sound (changes over time, has no spatial dimension although a controller may be desired); (c) video (changes over time, has spatial dimension). If you assume images may want controls (zoom, pan, scan, etc.) then they're all just one media type. Make everyone's lives simpler.
with exactly which video works and doesn't work being an implementation issue. In such a case, mentioning X as the kind of format that should be supported would be OK; but I don't see any reason to mention ogg over mov, wmv, or flv -- the patents argument is essentially irrelevant since I have no doubt there are patent trolls waiting to ambush everyone who implements ogg support as soon as it becomes economically significant. (Remember gif?)
I loved the original movie, but always thought it should end when the elevator doors close (which the first "Director's Cut" did) and should lose the voice overs. With those two changes, I'd be happy.
That said, when I watch the first "Director's Cut" I hear the voiceovers in my head... so there's no point. I can't tell whether the movie would hang together well without the voice overs because I can't get them out of my head. And I don't think the voice overs make the movie easy to understand the first time through because I can remember not understanding it the first time I saw it. It seems to me the one thing they could have done with the voiceovers and didn't was patch the continuity error caused by cutting the original opening scene (where Deckard "retires" the mysterious fifth replicant).
I disagree about that "the transition from book to movie was made clumsily". The only thing I really object to, although I understand it, is the cinematic differentiation of replicants from humans displayed by Leon removing an egg from boiling water. If you can stick a replicant's hand in boiling water without hurting them, then the VK test is kind of pointless. Frankly, I'd cut that scene.
From TFA: In the scene where Batty confronts Tyrell, the line, "I want more life, fucker" has been replaced with "I want more life, father".
Bad change, IMO. In a movie with zero profanity, that line really hit hard.
Also from TFA: Equally, if Deckard really is a Nexus 7 created to work as an exterminator, why is he lacking the strength of the inferior Nexus 6 models he is chasing? He seems to spend a large part of the film being bashed to a pulp.
True, if you assume "Nexus 7" vs. incredibly illegal experimental Nexus 5... or whatever... which would make perfect sense.
As I understand it, ogg is only "free from patent issues" because it's not worth suing anyone over it. If it becomes economically significant, it's just as vulnerable to patent litigation (c.f. the GIF format) as anything else.
And... is ogg a codec or a container? There's a MAJOR difference. If it's just a codec, then it's essentially transient.
The best system technically is also the first to be widely used -- QuickTime. It was built from the ground up as a container format (i.e. a metastructure for sequencing collections of media) AND an extensible family of codecs, it even includes a virtual machine for arbitrary interactivity, and the container format (in the form of MPEG-4) is a published standard which anyone can choose to implement or not. Any system which does not have all this flexibility is bound to run into a brick wall at some point and have to make profound architectural changes.
I wonder if this is where all that "dark matter" is.
The problem is that the strongest evidence for dark matter/energy is in the velocities of stars orbiting the center of galaxies (Andromeda in particular, since it's the one we have the best view of). Their velocity should drop off markedly as the distance from the center, but doesn't, implying that the mass of the galaxy isn't concentrated in the core, but distributed much more broadly.
Dark matter, in other words, is mass that isn't colocated with things we expect to be there.
(Another way of "looking" at this is that black holes aren't dark matter, because we can "see" them. Dark matter refers to stuff we simply can't observe. Black holes radiate.)
The hack only affected MacBooks with specific third-party wireless hardware attached -- something almost no-one would be affected by, since MacBooks come with wireless that wasn't vulnerable.
So it was especially bad that Apple got all the bad press.
It bugs me that notepad and ms paint are so terrible. Given that they're ubiquitous and useful, a paint program with selection tools that work nicely would be nice. And notepad can't edit large files. The first thing I do with a new Windows install is download a decent text editor (notepad++ say). Paint.NET isn't bad for free software, but it's bloated.
Microsoft only goes cross-platform when they are trying to screw a competitor with superior market position. If they aren't, they go as proprietary as they can.
In this case they're attacking a stupendously well-entrenched player, so they go cross-platform.
Here's my prediction: Silverlight 2.0 claims to be "Flash-compatible" (implementing 95% of Flash 6, say) and when you install it, helpfully remaps Application/Shockwave-Flash to Silverlight so that any recent Flash files appear borked. They've been doing this to QuickTime for ten years now...
WoW is, for all intents and purposes, a DnD-based game. Levels, classes, alignments... a pure D&D setting would be the same concepts arranged in a slightly different pattern.
Even something as unoriginal-but-different as Traveller would be nice.
Slashdot Mirror
I experienced this when I lived in Australia and it sucked royally. Just regularly playing an online game could blow you over the bandwidth cap (of course in EverQuest you had to stay logged on to keep your merchants in the bazaar active), and there's no way to locally cache that.
If nothing else, this will be enormously unpleasant for teleworkers.
5GB/month is roughly 14kbps.
It seems to me that D&D's shortcomings are sufficiently ingrained that any serious attempt to fix them will be met with harsh resistance. It's nice to see someone actually attempt to fix D&D's clear shortcomings, but I suspect that this will fail badly.
Let's look at some of D&D's fundamental design problems:
1) Classes -- this is a really bad idea, it doesn't match reality or fiction. Even in official adaptations, no fictional character from source literature (e.g. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the Lord of the Rings, Conan) could be converted into a legal D&D character.
2) Alignments -- ugh.
3) Basic mechanics -- Armor does not make you harder to hit. What exactly is a saving throw?
Any attempt to fix these things (and there have been attempts in the past, e.g. Alternity) runs into these basic issues and runs into religious resistance.
There are plenty of better games than D&D which have solved most or all of these issue, have large "sweet spots", and are easier to learn and more fun to play. It would be nice if D&D were turned into one of them, but it's probably easier just to play a different game.
My take is that phone carriers aren't going to be around (in their current form) much longer, certainly not the four and a half years remaining on the Apple / AT&T contract. If the iPod Touch had a VoIP client and wireless networks were ubiquitous or it could use some kind of cellular modem, then this conversation would be completely irrelevant. How long will it be before the former is true in urban areas and/or the latter is true everywhere else?
"more people will begin to realize that F/OSS is not only usable, but valuable."
We never really left the days where Apple defined the home computing and desktop experience. It's just that, for a while, Windows was "nearly good enough" that people didn't realize that they were looking at an imitation of an Apple product. Nowhere does the original article's writer say "gee, the next version of Windows needs to be more like Linux", but he does mention Apple several times.
Nah, they've documented more of them than anyone else.
E.g. the "are you sure you want to do that" dialogs aren't a flaw.
As expected -- modded to flamebait :-)
The Blender community is amazingly hostile to constructive criticism, so sending occasional barbs its way is pretty entertaining.
"Blenders renderer is state of the art"
Volumetrics?
Motion blur? (Proper motion blur, not "let's render 20x as many frames and composite them together")
"quite competitive with anything Max can produce as the gallery will contest"
You can produce nice work with anything as long as you know its limitations. Michelangelo + charcoal > anyone I know with any software.
"A professional learns multiple GUIs and accepts that each has its pluses and minuses"
I agree, and having learned Blender's GUI, I accept that is has a LOT of minuses.
Thanks so much for the youtube link. I had wanted to see the Elephants Dream since it was released but was unwilling to pay for the DVD or download it. What a horribly boring short film...
... and can then get to work adding functionality to the renderer to make it competitive with, say, 3D Studio Max R3.
Oh well, supposedly Blender is completely redoing its godawful UI for 2.5 (I say as I put on my asbestos underwear)
And if you want to swap batteries, you might notice that the MacBook offers this functionality and is actually cheaper.
I wonder if -- and indeed expect that -- the victory will prove Pyrrhic.
Gates famously said this would be the last format far. I think that it will prove to be the last plus one. Most people are going to be uninterested in buying video in a locked format; unless blu-rays allow you to play your videos on a generic DVD player, rip your video into your computer, play your video on your PSP, iPod, iPhone, or whatever, not enough people will want them to generate economies of scale.
I suspect that 1080 will turn out to be a mere stepping stone to arbitarily large screen resolutions. DVD, VHS, etc. all targeted an otherwise very stable market of equipment: NTSC televisions and stereo (or even mono) audio. The old CE companies have tried to create a new ecology (HD TV + Surround sound) but the real ecology is much more complex and diverse (PCs, laptops, cellphones, iPods, and stuff we haven't even dreamed of yet) and it's not going to stay even vaguely stable for long enough for a deeply flawed and mistargeted technology to gain traction.
If the hard disk was indeed the problem, Winer should have been able to figure that out himself in about five minutes, save himself the $160 and any other headaches. Is Apple going to resell the disk without scrubbing it? Hell no -- if they did that kind of thing they'd be liable for huge lawsuits for identity theft or whatever.
Sadly, Winer is doing what he does best and, apparently, was named for. Sorry, making fun of his name is unfair.
Good point ... no clue where he got the idea 10.1 had lesser requirements than 10.0.
I might add that when 10.0 came out, Apple was selling quite a few machines that could barely run it, and iMacs came out before OS X, so quoting iMac specs is also beside the point.
This is probably the single most informative thing I've read about why I would care about Vista, but you're right -- the frustrations make Vista just not worth it. I'd like to see some of these things brought over to the Mac.
Why has the parent been modded down?
I think you're being a bit harsh.
He said 10.0 not 10.1. Even so, I think folks are entitled to be a little hazy on machine specs from yesteryear. OS X 10.0 "ran" quite well on 64MB of RAM. (And 333 MHz is actually a pretty liberal estimate. I had 10.2 work quite nicely on an aging G3 Powerbook.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_v10.0
Oops -- my pre tags got cut out:
/>
/>
The missing bits are:
<video src="..."
Or even:
<media src="..."
I'm not up on the HTML5 spec, but it seems to me that video should be handled the way images are handled:
Or even:
The only fundamental media types are (a) images (don't change over time, have spatial dimension); (b) sound (changes over time, has no spatial dimension although a controller may be desired); (c) video (changes over time, has spatial dimension). If you assume images may want controls (zoom, pan, scan, etc.) then they're all just one media type. Make everyone's lives simpler.
with exactly which video works and doesn't work being an implementation issue. In such a case, mentioning X as the kind of format that should be supported would be OK; but I don't see any reason to mention ogg over mov, wmv, or flv -- the patents argument is essentially irrelevant since I have no doubt there are patent trolls waiting to ambush everyone who implements ogg support as soon as it becomes economically significant. (Remember gif?)
I loved the original movie, but always thought it should end when the elevator doors close (which the first "Director's Cut" did) and should lose the voice overs. With those two changes, I'd be happy.
... so there's no point. I can't tell whether the movie would hang together well without the voice overs because I can't get them out of my head. And I don't think the voice overs make the movie easy to understand the first time through because I can remember not understanding it the first time I saw it. It seems to me the one thing they could have done with the voiceovers and didn't was patch the continuity error caused by cutting the original opening scene (where Deckard "retires" the mysterious fifth replicant).
... or whatever ... which would make perfect sense.
That said, when I watch the first "Director's Cut" I hear the voiceovers in my head
I disagree about that "the transition from book to movie was made clumsily". The only thing I really object to, although I understand it, is the cinematic differentiation of replicants from humans displayed by Leon removing an egg from boiling water. If you can stick a replicant's hand in boiling water without hurting them, then the VK test is kind of pointless. Frankly, I'd cut that scene.
From TFA: In the scene where Batty confronts Tyrell, the line, "I want more life, fucker" has been replaced with "I want more life, father".
Bad change, IMO. In a movie with zero profanity, that line really hit hard.
Also from TFA: Equally, if Deckard really is a Nexus 7 created to work as an exterminator, why is he lacking the strength of the inferior Nexus 6 models he is chasing? He seems to spend a large part of the film being bashed to a pulp.
True, if you assume "Nexus 7" vs. incredibly illegal experimental Nexus 5
As I understand it, ogg is only "free from patent issues" because it's not worth suing anyone over it. If it becomes economically significant, it's just as vulnerable to patent litigation (c.f. the GIF format) as anything else.
... is ogg a codec or a container? There's a MAJOR difference. If it's just a codec, then it's essentially transient.
And
The best system technically is also the first to be widely used -- QuickTime. It was built from the ground up as a container format (i.e. a metastructure for sequencing collections of media) AND an extensible family of codecs, it even includes a virtual machine for arbitrary interactivity, and the container format (in the form of MPEG-4) is a published standard which anyone can choose to implement or not. Any system which does not have all this flexibility is bound to run into a brick wall at some point and have to make profound architectural changes.
Address space randomization makes a lot of legitimate techniques harder.
Name one.
OS X lets you cache a vector without any hackery. This will still work.
unnecessary security dialogs.
Nope -- they're just adding more info to the existing dialog you get when launching a downloaded app for the first time.
I wonder if this is where all that "dark matter" is.
The problem is that the strongest evidence for dark matter/energy is in the velocities of stars orbiting the center of galaxies (Andromeda in particular, since it's the one we have the best view of). Their velocity should drop off markedly as the distance from the center, but doesn't, implying that the mass of the galaxy isn't concentrated in the core, but distributed much more broadly.
Dark matter, in other words, is mass that isn't colocated with things we expect to be there.
(Another way of "looking" at this is that black holes aren't dark matter, because we can "see" them. Dark matter refers to stuff we simply can't observe. Black holes radiate.)
And dark energy is even weirder.
The hack only affected MacBooks with specific third-party wireless hardware attached -- something almost no-one would be affected by, since MacBooks come with wireless that wasn't vulnerable.
So it was especially bad that Apple got all the bad press.
It bugs me that notepad and ms paint are so terrible. Given that they're ubiquitous and useful, a paint program with selection tools that work nicely would be nice. And notepad can't edit large files. The first thing I do with a new Windows install is download a decent text editor (notepad++ say). Paint.NET isn't bad for free software, but it's bloated.
Microsoft only goes cross-platform when they are trying to screw a competitor with superior market position. If they aren't, they go as proprietary as they can.
In this case they're attacking a stupendously well-entrenched player, so they go cross-platform.
Here's my prediction: Silverlight 2.0 claims to be "Flash-compatible" (implementing 95% of Flash 6, say) and when you install it, helpfully remaps Application/Shockwave-Flash to Silverlight so that any recent Flash files appear borked. They've been doing this to QuickTime for ten years now...
A non D&D-ripped-off MMO would be even nicer.
... a pure D&D setting would be the same concepts arranged in a slightly different pattern.
WoW is, for all intents and purposes, a DnD-based game. Levels, classes, alignments
Even something as unoriginal-but-different as Traveller would be nice.