But in using the word "consuming" you pointed your finger right at the flaw of his arguments: all he talked about was the act of _consuming_ a video game (playing it), which is certainly not an act of art. Just as little as staring at pieces of high art in an exposition is an act of art. He seems to give a little mention to the interactivity of games, but that's also not an argument against video games as art, since big parts of the last decades were dominated by the idea of "interactive art". Maybe he didn't like that either.
> In my mind, the premium is really for the higher bit rate (256 kbps instead of 128 kbps)
My theory is that the premium is because CDs are more expensive to manufacture than vinyl. It just looks so damn similar to what happened to music pricing about two decades ago:(
That's what happens to me with Linux: always something left that you can make work do even better. The upside is that "it" (well, recent Kubuntus or openSuSEs) comes with a considerable "default usefullness" that is there right from the first boot.
With windows it is exactly the opposite for me: completely unuseable until after about a week of beating it in shape, but once that is done i will completely stop thinking about configuration issues until a piece of hardware fails.
Folding on an idle PC that is used for CPU-easy things like typing/. comments and the like is one thing, the PC would be running anyways. But i don't (yet, likely to change with the increasing media-center role game consoles are supposed to take) see why a PS3 should be running at times when it is not running at full CPU demand (e.g. gaming). There should only be full throttle gaming or power off. Or can it still fold in the background while emulating PS2 games?
An exception is the scenario where somebody would be heating electrically anyways, then it's always a good idea to pipe the energy through some circuits before enjoying the inevitable temperature increase. If you shake up that enthalpy, shake it up in the most funky way you can. But then it's still much better to avoid electrical heating at all...
Honestly, i did not expect the VC project to outlive so many other clonez, keep that good luck going! Kudos btw for leaving that gloryfied macro assembler (c++) behind, looks like quite some pioneering work that you do.
i was thinking of this prior art too. or is that patent by the same guys? a quick glance over the patent pdf linked behind the article shows no date before 2005.
i don't agree with the backside thing though (never had that problem), but then i'm one of those people who are spending much more time with their mobile in a pda role than with their mobile in the traditional phone role. ever thought about using a headset?
"Follow-on models are guaranteed to be amazing with features such as iChatAV"
Seems like they don't even have regular text iChat, just that SMS cash-cow thing. Don't pretend that there could be any technical reasons for this.
Add-on software from Apple and certified partners is likely to happen, but don't expect anything that does not include some extra profit margin increase for the interested powers, that's Apple (i wonder if they will charge for firmware updates, OS X minor versions, anyone?), the network providers (i would be surprised if the projected price would not include some serious deduction beyond the usual 24-months-contract premium, so they have even more influence than with Nokia et al) and maybe The iTMS-Buddies.
I agree with you that there are a lot more good reasons for closedness in a phone device than in a general purpose computer (the number of evil reasons stays roughly the same with the different device classes), but don't claim that closedness would be the only way. Just look at the phones running Palm OS (ok, this one is dying, but not because of anything Apple did), Symbian or the inevitable Windows CE (or however they prefer to call their embedded product these days).
The Apple phone is certainly an impressive device and the software could have an advantage here and there, but the way in which fanpeople deny the possibility of shortcomings and the prior existence of other touchscreen smartphones (that basically differ in having a few more tactile keys and lacking pointless 3d-GUI FX in the media player) is just another great example of the reality distortion field at work.
1): haven't noticed much difference with USB between 2k and xp (i run it on the notebook), are you talking about the preventive flushing of USB stick? anyways, if you bring that up as #1 then i'm sure you will have your reasons, i'm not using USB that much.
2): hiding try icons always seemed to be a two sided sword to me: for nontechnical people this is the last chance they have to realize that they have too much junk in their system, technical people should be able to keep them down by other means. But i guess people might have more trouble with that than i have, since i never run windows less than 1600 pixels wide, plenty of room and i even have a narrower taskbar on w2k, this shrinks the icons even more.
3): interesting, never heard of anyone tolerating the new menu;)
4): i tried a), seems to work. I have not fully tested b) and c), but i do not remember having to reboot for network settings after the switch from 98 to w2k. My guess is that the line between 9x and w2k has somewhat blurred in your memories, could happen to the best of us. windows update has gone through quite some iterations with the service packs, i think it's the same app as on XP. I would not rule out the possibility that w2k maybe needs to reboot for some updates that XP can swallow without a reboot, but that's just speculation.
Do you have any idea how expensive those shows would become once NASA gets involved?
To my generation (yeah, i'm an ipodless guy who can't remember a time before the space shuttle) software has been the "new frontier", while cold war time aerospace technology has been rather stagnant for all of our lives (when will there be the first B52 pilot who already had his granddad fly the same kind of plane? or did that already happen?).
> As for space travel, I think people are enjoying a much > higher standard of living now.
Forget that, it's so obvious: when the "space generation" grew up, the most exciting thing they experienced as a child were sputnik, gagarin (and their american counterparts) or later the apollo project. At the time the "ipod generation" grew up the most exciting thing for children was Tetris on the gameboy.
You can certainly learn old and new things, even after you grow up (like working with a computer), but it will only become a passion if it can be connected to exciting topics from your childhood.
> What's the difference between reading a book, which is > in decline, and reading the masses of material online
The difference is that the book world is highly prefiltered (even pulp publishing houses try to stick to a certain line of pulp) which makes it much easier to consume quality. And you don't even have to develop an own opinion about the books you read, you could as well outsource that task to a professional, all you need to do is read the reviews in a newspaper.
Of course this was put in very partisan wording, which only partially matches with my own view (i know, in turn the internet is 95% shallow omglolz, hidden advertizing or badly researched new), but it helps conveing the point.
On a side note, what i described in the first paragraph is basically the same thing as that difference inside the book world between sticking to old and tried classics on the one hand and diving head-first into reading current releases on the other, where you can easily (even with all that filtering) end up with a bookshelf full of mediocricity you won't remember a year from now. Good stuff gets written at any time, but it's extremely difficult identify that without the implicit filtering of a decade or two passing.
I was thinking the same thing when i read this story. All that talk about competition winning over customers if MS does not come up with new OS versions fast enough.
Thanks to the Vista delays XP has been a very stable platform (yeah, i hear the jokes, in terms of support continuity). Even the copy of windows 2000 that i am writing this on is still getting sufficient updates and i bought it before Mac OS X 10.0 came out. Somehow i have a gut feeling that this would not be the case if an early Longhorn release would have turned w2k into a second row legacy OS years ago.
From the customers point of view the slower update cycle is more a feature than a bug, even if it is certainly unintended from the manufacturer side. Note that this was probably different back in the days of windows 95, when desktop operating systems flaws were obvious enough to make technical and nontechnical people excitedly wait for the opportunity to spend money on an upgrade. Since w2k these things seem to have changed: did _anybody_ change from 2k to XP before a hardware upgrade came with a bundled licence? (corporate installations are a different topic alltogether)
just compare the best time you can achieve in minesweeper within one hour (or any other sufficiently long fixed timespan)
admittedly, you should not be allowed to test your "home mouse": experience shows that it takes me about half a year until my minesweeper subbrain gets completely accustomed to a new mouse.
yes i love conspiracy theories for entertainment as much as anybody else, but that stuff is only really fun until you meet someone (like for example, someone from your family) who actually buys into this stuff. once that conspiracy theory mindset has settled people tend to buy into all kinds of CT crap, ranging from the harmless over the insanely expensive to the dangerous (like for example, nazi ideology, which is also mostly a big construction of conspiracy theory over conspiracy theory). von Daeniken can be kind of like a gateway drug.
it's not about the glory of ancient rome and greece, it's about catholicism and the vatican's miserable self trying to pose as the true successor of the ancient rome. all those "early modern historians" were either catholics or protestants who still agreed on catholicism being the next best thing to protestantism (as opposed to christian strains based on the byzantinian way)amd thus could not accept that east rome thing due to religious/confessional reasons.
> WoW runs very well on linux under wine, so you can give up on everything but PC gaming too.
Heh, at first glance i was about to write something about the fact that there are people who still like games besides WoW and the few other triple-A titles that have the user base to get good wine support, only then i realized what a brilliant joke your post was.
wait, if you buy a mac with 10.3 and later buy a boxed 10.4 and install it on that machine, wouldn't that make it two licenses per machine?
yes, this is meant as a joke. but the original comparison by one grandparent poster is still valid, with a mac any serious hardware upgrade comes bundled with a fresh license of the OS. apple already has tight coupling between hardware and OS license and charges for small updates. XP grew into a 5 years OS for the early adopters, so they did not charge for incrementals. at the same time their hardware coupling was comparatively loose (OEM is coupled in theory, but incremental hardware upgrades that can be bought without an OS license make even that a grey area).
so in theory the MS model is more friendy, even with increased hardware coupling, but there's another important difference: the apple model is very "natural", there are no artificial limitations except for the initial "no MacOSX on non-apple hardware", which is easy to accept for the apple crowd. the MS way allows more, but it is, by any definition, a deliberate smack in the face of the paying customer, which can easily result in a lose/lose situation.
according to some 3rd hand experience with the XP "substantial hardware change detection" an upgrade won't count, but a downgrade will. the reasoning behind this is clear, "nobody would ever downgrade, less ram means the HDD has been moved to another system", but that completely ignores the possibility of a hardware defect.
but from that point of view again it is clear what microsoft is trying to achieve: if the hardware breaks, the software licence will break too, much like OEM licences were supposed to do since years. not surprising, because since windows 2000 the microsoft OS seemed to be "good enough" for everyone to not upgrade, unlike with the 9x, where everybody tried to run away from the horror of his current version to the next one, no matter how small the differences were. compared with OEM licences, which are already replaced with "new" OEM licences by the Joe Average on every hardware replacement, and corporate licences, where these new rules are very unlikely to apply, the retail market is such a small part of what microsoft is selling, why are they trying to finally drive those customers away?
So SGI is making cloudy suggestions that there might be more IP to blackmail over.
Someone seems to be really desperate to get bought by one of the remaining big players (most likely they are hoping for intel). So the whole company is really only worth the legal matches to light the other guy's factory.
candy is delicious, it tastes good. flashiness is bad taste.
therefore, the traditional OS X design is great eye candy, while the new "brushed metal" style is flashiness. (yes, this is a personal opinion)
but i agree with you about the general view of not looks-related polish, even if my favourite example of polish might be a different one than yours: mine is ms office, even in O'97 (my version of choice, yes, i'm poor and back then i made more money with VBA stuff than i paid for my copy) theres some polish applied to even the most obscure nieche feature. In OOo (which i mostly use today, because of the outdated nature of my O'97) only the most visible 10% of the app really have the polish feeling to them. of course these 10% are 100% of what 90% of all users will ever see, but that's exactly my point about MSO: even the stuff that only 1% of all users will ever see has at least a little polish applied to it, that's what amazes me so much about this product.
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It's not that important who is consuming.
But in using the word "consuming" you pointed your finger right at the flaw of his arguments: all he talked about was the act of _consuming_ a video game (playing it), which is certainly not an act of art. Just as little as staring at pieces of high art in an exposition is an act of art. He seems to give a little mention to the interactivity of games, but that's also not an argument against video games as art, since big parts of the last decades were dominated by the idea of "interactive art". Maybe he didn't like that either.
> In my mind, the premium is really for the higher bit rate (256 kbps instead of 128 kbps)
:(
My theory is that the premium is because CDs are more expensive to manufacture than vinyl. It just looks so damn similar to what happened to music pricing about two decades ago
> and substantially cheaper than including WMA decoders, I would imagine.
And you imagine so why, exactly?
That's what happens to me with Linux: always something left that you can make work do even better. The upside is that "it" (well, recent Kubuntus or openSuSEs) comes with a considerable "default usefullness" that is there right from the first boot.
With windows it is exactly the opposite for me: completely unuseable until after about a week of beating it in shape, but once that is done i will completely stop thinking about configuration issues until a piece of hardware fails.
Folding on an idle PC that is used for CPU-easy things like typing /. comments and the like is one thing, the PC would be running anyways. But i don't (yet, likely to change with the increasing media-center role game consoles are supposed to take) see why a PS3 should be running at times when it is not running at full CPU demand (e.g. gaming). There should only be full throttle gaming or power off. Or can it still fold in the background while emulating PS2 games?
An exception is the scenario where somebody would be heating electrically anyways, then it's always a good idea to pipe the energy through some circuits before enjoying the inevitable temperature increase. If you shake up that enthalpy, shake it up in the most funky way you can. But then it's still much better to avoid electrical heating at all...
nonexclusive distribution should be the norm for all IP. The world would a better place by a very noticable margin.
Hey Frequnknown, looks interesting!
Honestly, i did not expect the VC project to outlive so many other clonez, keep that good luck going! Kudos btw for leaving that gloryfied macro assembler (c++) behind, looks like quite some pioneering work that you do.
i was thinking of this prior art too. or is that patent by the same guys? a quick glance over the patent pdf linked behind the article shows no date before 2005.
i don't agree with the backside thing though (never had that problem), but then i'm one of those people who are spending much more time with their mobile in a pda role than with their mobile in the traditional phone role. ever thought about using a headset?
"Follow-on models are guaranteed to be amazing with features such as iChatAV"
Seems like they don't even have regular text iChat, just that SMS cash-cow thing. Don't pretend that there could be any technical reasons for this.
Add-on software from Apple and certified partners is likely to happen, but don't expect anything that does not include some extra profit margin increase for the interested powers, that's Apple (i wonder if they will charge for firmware updates, OS X minor versions, anyone?), the network providers (i would be surprised if the projected price would not include some serious deduction beyond the usual 24-months-contract premium, so they have even more influence than with Nokia et al) and maybe The iTMS-Buddies.
I agree with you that there are a lot more good reasons for closedness in a phone device than in a general purpose computer (the number of evil reasons stays roughly the same with the different device classes), but don't claim that closedness would be the only way. Just look at the phones running Palm OS (ok, this one is dying, but not because of anything Apple did), Symbian or the inevitable Windows CE (or however they prefer to call their embedded product these days).
The Apple phone is certainly an impressive device and the software could have an advantage here and there, but the way in which fanpeople deny the possibility of shortcomings and the prior existence of other touchscreen smartphones (that basically differ in having a few more tactile keys and lacking pointless 3d-GUI FX in the media player) is just another great example of the reality distortion field at work.
1): haven't noticed much difference with USB between 2k and xp (i run it on the notebook), are you talking about the preventive flushing of USB stick? anyways, if you bring that up as #1 then i'm sure you will have your reasons, i'm not using USB that much.
;)
2): hiding try icons always seemed to be a two sided sword to me: for nontechnical people this is the last chance they have to realize that they have too much junk in their system, technical people should be able to keep them down by other means. But i guess people might have more trouble with that than i have, since i never run windows less than 1600 pixels wide, plenty of room and i even have a narrower taskbar on w2k, this shrinks the icons even more.
3): interesting, never heard of anyone tolerating the new menu
4): i tried a), seems to work. I have not fully tested b) and c), but i do not remember having to reboot for network settings after the switch from 98 to w2k. My guess is that the line between 9x and w2k has somewhat blurred in your memories, could happen to the best of us. windows update has gone through quite some iterations with the service packs, i think it's the same app as on XP. I would not rule out the possibility that w2k maybe needs to reboot for some updates that XP can swallow without a reboot, but that's just speculation.
Do you have any idea how expensive those shows would become once NASA gets involved?
To my generation (yeah, i'm an ipodless guy who can't remember a time before the space shuttle) software has been the "new frontier", while cold war time aerospace technology has been rather stagnant for all of our lives (when will there be the first B52 pilot who already had his granddad fly the same kind of plane? or did that already happen?).
> To most people, even the Mars rovers and the
> Voyager probes were just curiosities.
Catering for this mindset would inevitably turn NASA into an entertainment company. I don't think that you want that.
> As for space travel, I think people are enjoying a much
> higher standard of living now.
Forget that, it's so obvious: when the "space generation" grew up, the most exciting thing they experienced as a child were sputnik, gagarin (and their american counterparts) or later the apollo project. At the time the "ipod generation" grew up the most exciting thing for children was Tetris on the gameboy.
You can certainly learn old and new things, even after you grow up (like working with a computer), but it will only become a passion if it can be connected to exciting topics from your childhood.
> What's the difference between reading a book, which is
> in decline, and reading the masses of material online
The difference is that the book world is highly prefiltered (even pulp publishing houses try to stick to a certain line of pulp) which makes it much easier to consume quality. And you don't even have to develop an own opinion about the books you read, you could as well outsource that task to a professional, all you need to do is read the reviews in a newspaper.
Of course this was put in very partisan wording, which only partially matches with my own view (i know, in turn the internet is 95% shallow omglolz, hidden advertizing or badly researched new), but it helps conveing the point.
On a side note, what i described in the first paragraph is basically the same thing as that difference inside the book world between sticking to old and tried classics on the one hand and diving head-first into reading current releases on the other, where you can easily (even with all that filtering) end up with a bookshelf full of mediocricity you won't remember a year from now. Good stuff gets written at any time, but it's extremely difficult identify that without the implicit filtering of a decade or two passing.
I was thinking the same thing when i read this story. All that talk about competition winning over customers if MS does not come up with new OS versions fast enough.
Thanks to the Vista delays XP has been a very stable platform (yeah, i hear the jokes, in terms of support continuity). Even the copy of windows 2000 that i am writing this on is still getting sufficient updates and i bought it before Mac OS X 10.0 came out. Somehow i have a gut feeling that this would not be the case if an early Longhorn release would have turned w2k into a second row legacy OS years ago.
From the customers point of view the slower update cycle is more a feature than a bug, even if it is certainly unintended from the manufacturer side. Note that this was probably different back in the days of windows 95, when desktop operating systems flaws were obvious enough to make technical and nontechnical people excitedly wait for the opportunity to spend money on an upgrade. Since w2k these things seem to have changed: did _anybody_ change from 2k to XP before a hardware upgrade came with a bundled licence? (corporate installations are a different topic alltogether)
mice are easy to benchmark:
just compare the best time you can achieve in minesweeper within one hour (or any other sufficiently long fixed timespan)
admittedly, you should not be allowed to test your "home mouse": experience shows that it takes me about half a year until my minesweeper subbrain gets completely accustomed to a new mouse.
yes i love conspiracy theories for entertainment as much as anybody else, but that stuff is only really fun until you meet someone (like for example, someone from your family) who actually buys into this stuff. once that conspiracy theory mindset has settled people tend to buy into all kinds of CT crap, ranging from the harmless over the insanely expensive to the dangerous (like for example, nazi ideology, which is also mostly a big construction of conspiracy theory over conspiracy theory). von Daeniken can be kind of like a gateway drug.
it's not about the glory of ancient rome and greece, it's about catholicism and the vatican's miserable self trying to pose as the true successor of the ancient rome. all those "early modern historians" were either catholics or protestants who still agreed on catholicism being the next best thing to protestantism (as opposed to christian strains based on the byzantinian way)amd thus could not accept that east rome thing due to religious/confessional reasons.
> WoW runs very well on linux under wine, so you can give up on everything but PC gaming too.
Heh, at first glance i was about to write something about the fact that there are people who still like games besides WoW and the few other triple-A titles that have the user base to get good wine support, only then i realized what a brilliant joke your post was.
thank you!
"you are only allowed one license per machine"
wait, if you buy a mac with 10.3 and later buy a boxed 10.4 and install it on that machine, wouldn't that make it two licenses per machine?
yes, this is meant as a joke. but the original comparison by one grandparent poster is still valid, with a mac any serious hardware upgrade comes bundled with a fresh license of the OS. apple already has tight coupling between hardware and OS license and charges for small updates. XP grew into a 5 years OS for the early adopters, so they did not charge for incrementals. at the same time their hardware coupling was comparatively loose (OEM is coupled in theory, but incremental hardware upgrades that can be bought without an OS license make even that a grey area).
so in theory the MS model is more friendy, even with increased hardware coupling, but there's another important difference: the apple model is very "natural", there are no artificial limitations except for the initial "no MacOSX on non-apple hardware", which is easy to accept for the apple crowd. the MS way allows more, but it is, by any definition, a deliberate smack in the face of the paying customer, which can easily result in a lose/lose situation.
according to some 3rd hand experience with the XP "substantial hardware change detection" an upgrade won't count, but a downgrade will. the reasoning behind this is clear, "nobody would ever downgrade, less ram means the HDD has been moved to another system", but that completely ignores the possibility of a hardware defect.
but from that point of view again it is clear what microsoft is trying to achieve: if the hardware breaks, the software licence will break too, much like OEM licences were supposed to do since years. not surprising, because since windows 2000 the microsoft OS seemed to be "good enough" for everyone to not upgrade, unlike with the 9x, where everybody tried to run away from the horror of his current version to the next one, no matter how small the differences were. compared with OEM licences, which are already replaced with "new" OEM licences by the Joe Average on every hardware replacement, and corporate licences, where these new rules are very unlikely to apply, the retail market is such a small part of what microsoft is selling, why are they trying to finally drive those customers away?
So SGI is making cloudy suggestions that there might be more IP to blackmail over.
Someone seems to be really desperate to get bought by one of the remaining big players (most likely they are hoping for intel). So the whole company is really only worth the legal matches to light the other guy's factory.
rock musicians?
someone bad might find out how much swap you are useing.
something along that line. even if your paranoid, it does not mean there can't be someone more paranoid behind you.
one real advantage could be that it might be easier to implement in hardware, the cryptochip would not have to know anything about partitions etc.
candy is delicious, it tastes good. flashiness is bad taste.
therefore, the traditional OS X design is great eye candy, while the new "brushed metal" style is flashiness. (yes, this is a personal opinion)
but i agree with you about the general view of not looks-related polish, even if my favourite example of polish might be a different one than yours: mine is ms office, even in O'97 (my version of choice, yes, i'm poor and back then i made more money with VBA stuff than i paid for my copy) theres some polish applied to even the most obscure nieche feature. In OOo (which i mostly use today, because of the outdated nature of my O'97) only the most visible 10% of the app really have the polish feeling to them. of course these 10% are 100% of what 90% of all users will ever see, but that's exactly my point about MSO: even the stuff that only 1% of all users will ever see has at least a little polish applied to it, that's what amazes me so much about this product.