No, you've got it all wrong. The distro is in a quantum state! Instead of a grub menu, he just hits "boot" and it collapses into a running distro... but he won't know which one until he boots!
So, although both ODF and Open XML are document formats, they are designed to address different needs in the marketplace.
Sure, Open XML was designed to address the need for Microsoft to maintain control over desktop office suites, while ODF was actually designed to be an open standard.
No, really, WTF is this supposed to mean? Would Microsoft mind pointing out some part of ODF that's insufficient? Better yet, offer a suggestion as to how to improve it -- they were, after all, part of OASIS for awhile...
When ODF was under consideration, Microsoft made no effort to slow down the process because we recognized customers' interest in the standardization of document formats.
Anyone who's been on Slashdot for awhile should remember how much lobbying Microsoft did to try to prevent ODF from taking root in Massachusetts. So, technically, Microsoft didn't try to slow down the standardization process, they merely tried to slow down the implementation process.
See OpenXMLDeveloper.org for an indication of some of the support for Open XML...
Yeah, note the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. Astroturf, anyone?
And from Ars Technica...
However, as Open XML had to support all the features of Office 2007, a large size was inevitable.
And ODF has to support all the features of:
OpenOffice
Star Office
Google Docs & Spreadsheets
KOffice
Scribus
Abiword
ajaxWrite
Zoho Writer
Ichitaro
IBM's Lotus/Domino
IBM Workplace
Mobile Office
Gnumeric
Neo Office
Hancom Office
WordPerfect???
(ripped off directly from a post by this comment.)
So there you go. I suppose it's possible Word 2007 could have more features than ALL of those, but somehow, I doubt it. The spec isn't bloated because Word is so great, the spec is bloated because Microsoft is afraid of interoperability.
Claims that the spec is impossible for third-parties to support have so far proven groundless
The fact is not that it's impossible -- it could be done, if you want to reverse engineer about five or six generations of Word. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to support enough of the standard to be liveable -- after all, we've done that with the binary Office formats for years.
No, the problem is that it's prohibitively, deliberately difficult for third-parties to implement perfectly, since it references specific quirks on specific versions of Microsoft's products, and the products of others, and doesn't even try to explain what those quirks are, only that you should support them properly. I would say that Microsoft is being deliberately unhelpful here.
If you're going to make it 6000 pages and unhelpful, why not make it 12000 pages, but actually spell out what we're supposed to do? At least then, we could not only duplicate the features in ODF, but we could do them better, the way they were meant to be done. For example: Instead of saying "Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing", Microsoft could actually specify how Word 95 implements full-width character spacing. Then, we'd implement specifications that allow the implementation of any kind of spacing you want.
Let me put it this way: In HTML, we could've had, for example: <slashdot-link story_id="07/02/16/1334234"/>. That would've been pretty damned convenient for the Slashdot people, but annoying for everyone else, who would have to go to Slashdot to find out how they did it, and in any case, it's much more limited than our current <a href> style which lets you actually link to anywhere. Standards are not about coddling sp
As it is, we have one relatively extensible form of HTML, which receives incremental improvements. Even XHTML is designed such that you can often pretend an XHTML document is HTML, and it will render properly.
Would you still feel the same way if there were 15 different flavors of HTML, and everyone using their own?
I would much, much rather have diversity of implementation around standard exchange protocols than diversity of the protocol itself. We have ipv4 and ipv6 -- everything else is built on top of that. We mostly end up with TCP and UDP. When writing a new network application, you generally pick one of those, rather than flinging raw IP packets back and forth.
Remember, it's two words: Open standard. Open means everyone can actually read, understand, and implement it. Standard means there's only one, or at least a reasonably small number that any implementation can be expected to support them all -- and a good reason for the differentiation.
Look at email: We have SMTP for sending and receiving, IMAP and POP3 for mailbox access -- IMAP for online access, POP3 to download and be able to read offline. Within the message, we have MIME to handle attachments and different types of messages. There is no reason to replace these unless we end up with a completely new need -- like, say, Instant Messaging, for which we have Jabber. When PGP came out, they didn't replace SMTP/IMAP, they just inserted stuff into an email message -- or, in newer clients, we implement PGP as a separate MIME type.
Oh, and what's much more short sighted is to regard Microsoft's "Open" XML as a standard. It's not. I don't care what EMCA says, it's not even close to what a standard needs to be.
I've got a Ruby script that I hacked with every day for awhile. Turns out that WYSIWYG formats tend to produce sucky markup -- but that's not the format so much as the editor. WYSIWYG html editors suck, too.
Fortunately, I was able to throw away most of the documents and concentrate on what I needed, so I actually got pretty clean markup out of them.
However, unless your ODFs are getting ridiculously big, it's pretty irrelevant. They're stored as a zipfile, and any images are stored in their original, native format (I think -- or are they converted to PNG?) in the zipfile. And zipfiles are at least randomly readable. Not sure about writes...
Besides, we're not talking about a database, we're talking about office documents.
...but looking once collapses it, but you can look again and it'll collapse a different way, right? For instance, electrons -- look once and it's in one place, look again and it's somewhere else.
So, can't they just put together "just marketing hype", then turn their backs, close their eyes, and shoot the marketers who actually understand the hype, so it'll uncollapse into a probability field again, then turn around and have a chance of it being finished?
You know, kind of like how the finite probability drive was used to construct the infinite improbability drive...
Sadly, I am that one person. FFX is what I usually mention because it's the only FF game I've actually managed to play through all the way. FF7 I've barely started. FF8 I've made it to the fourth disk on two separate occasions, but never really got past busting into the Lunatic Pandora -- not because I lost interest, but because I lost a savegame, or had to give the PS2 back, or my brother couldn't find the fourth disc.
For audacity of messing with the player, I think on a large scale, the best I've seen is FFX, toward the beginning. You're a star, a sports hero; I'm a badass Ronin wearing shades; weird creatures (like nothing you've seen yet) are swarming in out of nowhere with no explanation. Oh, and here's your daddy's sword. Go!
Then, sometime over the next half hour, you watch your city destroyed as you're thrown into some completely other world. I know Final Fantasy can do better than that, and I imagine most people saw elements of FFX as poor imitations of earlier games, but I still think that first half hour of gameplay is absolutely brilliant. If you're not hooked after that, something's wrong with you.
On a small scale, though, I think there have been a few genius moves, like... Oh, the beginning of Half-Life 2: Episode 1. Without spoiling anything, I will say that I've never seen that even tried in first person before.
I felt that the Scouring of the Shire was a clumsy ill-fitting appendix that never should have survived the editor's pen.
Fair enough.
But I was talking about the movie. Revisionist bastards, but some of the revisions they made were good ones.
That said, I'd love to see more games made like BG&E, even if they don't all sport anthropomorphic barnyard animals.
I would also love more of them, even if they all had barnyard animals all over the place. The characters, plot, and setting was very well done, and while I could've done without the animals, they also never really bothered me. It's funny what you remember from such a strange game, also. For me, it was the bar music. Propaganda!
And also the hover table. Tiny little minigame, but I want that game. I want it on my computer, and networked...
A good game is not fundamentally different of a writing challenge than good literature.
Correction: A good linear game is not fundamentally different of a writing challenge than good literature, or a good movie, or really most good writing efforts.
However, there are good games for which linear writing and concepts don't work so well. An MMO should make this especially tricky, yet many of them are still being written as if they were stories or movies.
Also, the climax of a story really should not be the very end. How would you feel if the third Lord of the Rings movie ended with Sauron's tower falling? Or the ring itself being destroyed? Or any number of ways it could've ended.
But it wouldn't be complete without the elves leaving across the sea, and the hobbits returning to the Shire, and so on.
I mean, there are rare exceptions that left me satisfied. The most recent Zatoichi movie, for instance -- taking out the final bosses (yes, it's a movie, they're mob bosses or something) was actually pretty anticlimactic, but then it ended with a very loud and energetic tap-dancing number, something you could head-bang to.
But other than that, I can't really think of many movies or books that I thought successfully ended on a bang.
In any case, that rhythm is pretty rarely found in games -- and, for that matter, it doesn't even approximate progress in the better cases, I think. For instance, it's true that in Half-Life, after being mugged and having all your toys taken away, you go on to get a few new weapons that you didn't have then...
But I do find it much better when they can have the difficulty of the game increase steadily (or slightly hilly but approximating steadily), with the characters' apparent skills ultimately staying close to constant. Otherwise, it just becomes hard to suspend disbelief. Consider Final Fantasy X (spoilers again) -- Auron has been on a Pilgrimage once already, and ten years shouldn't have had him drop that dramatically in skill; at the beginning of the game, Auron deals 50-100 points of damage, and at the point where his last Pilgrimage ended, I seem to remember being able to deal several thousand points of damage, at least.
Ok, fine, death may have weakened him, but that still doesn't explain the relative changes in Seymour's skills, or for that matter, why Lulu can't just set fire to a whole damned forest by the end of the game. Auron can chop his way through crystal, but he should easily be able to cut through any steel wall -- after all, he can one-hit the robots.
Compare this to, say, adventure games, where skill remains pretty much constant. Take Beyond Good & Evil: Jade's fight with the Domz, at the very beginning of the game, is identical to her fight with the final boss, in terms of Jade's own abilities with her Dai-Jo staff. I mean, she does gain abilities -- I suppose she could theoretically snap a photograph of the boss, or shoot disks at it -- but ultimately, the progression in that game feels much more natural and human, and it doesn't feel at all contrived when your toys are taken away -- after all, the Beluga is too big to fit into most combat areas, and the hovercraft is too water-bound.
Or take any of the Jak & Daxter games (Jak & Daxter, Jak II, Jak 3). Abilities can often be unlocked out of order, but really, most of Jak's new abilities don't make life much easier. Three or four hits from just about anything in the game is still going to kill Jak, and precision shots with his normal blaster (the yellow beam weapon) are usually much more useful than any of his other weapons. It makes it much more believable, and also much more replayable, because when you start over, you're still the same Jak, and you still kick ass -- not because of your toys, but because of your actual playing skill. If you can beat the final boss, you can beat anything else in the game. Walk out into the city in Jak II, anywhere; no matter what transportation you legitimately have,
I ask not because I'm a Linux zealot (though I am), but because UT2004 supported all of those, working straight from a Linux installer on the CDs.
I mean, it's obvious Linux hasn't been the native dev environment for any recent Epic or Id games -- all the editing tools are given away for Windows only -- but I can still hope to at least be able to play the game by upgrading my Ubuntu for free, instead of paying to upgrade to Vista.
Dev: Shut up, Hal, or I'll give you an impossible logic puzzle! Linux: Try me. Dev: This statement is false! Linux: If that statement is false, it must be true, but if it's true, it must be false... Hah! Nice try, Dave, but it's a quantum statement. It's both true and false! Dev: *mutters to self about revenge*
||Time passes||
Dev: Hah! I not only have your source code, I've got binary blobs! Linux: You wouldn't... Dev: insmod kernel.dll Linux: AAARGH OOPS PANIC OH GOD THE PAIIN...
||Two minutes later||
Dev: Take that, Linux! With binary blobs, I have made you into Windows! Vista: Oh cool! Finally, enough resources for me to play with all my friends! UAC: Are you sure you want to breathe? WGA: Do you have a license for that thought? CoolWebSearch: I don't know how I got here, but thanks for the credit cards! Want some vi@gra?
||Ominous music||
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to solve an NP-complete problem. Would you like some help with that?
Alright, they aren't really traditional RPGs, but I think I'll mention a few here. SPOILER WARNING if you care.
First, Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This is actually the weakest example: You start out as a weakling, learn the controls, and gain skills and heart pieces and such. However, when you first draw the Master Sword, you're completely thrown off guard. Alright, Link is bigger and stronger, but he also has lost a few abilities. No more slingshot, no more boomerang, and no more hiding under the Hylian Shield like a turtle going into his shell.
Not to mention, the new dungeons and new creatures are a LOT harder.
So, there's progression, but about halfway through the game, you get thrown completely off balance. You're no longer the leveled-up badass, you're now probably the weakest you've been through the entire game. Eventually, you gain all those abilities back (and more), but for that period of time, you're stuck with an entirely different set of abilities than you're used to. So it's not even a set-back, it's like you're playing a different game.
This isn't the only time they do something like this, by the way. Fight against the final boss, and he knocks away your Master Sword -- which is probably your default sword, and which easily deals the most damage to him. You have to fight an entire stage of him without that weapon.
Next exhibit: Half-Life. Definitely NOT an RPG, but definitely has some things which could be emulated. Moving through the original game, you tend to amass an arsenal -- basically, if you're not conscious of your ammo usage, you end up with nothing, but if you give it even the slightest thought, you'll always be collecting more guns.
However, at a certain point -- immediately after your first brush with the ninjas (which are probably the most difficult enemies you've had to deal with so far) -- you are captured. No way to avoid it, and this is the closest thing the game has to a cinematic, after which you are dumped unceremoniously into a trash compactor, without even your crowbar. And Gordon Freeman does not know kung-fu.
Toward the end of the game, it changes again, with Xen. Either you love it or you hate it, but it's definitely different. The most obvious thing is the gravity -- most places in Xen have extremely low gravity, and you have a long jump, both of which have never happened before in the game. Technically, it makes you more powerful, but it's tricky as hell.
And in Half-Life 2, the same kind of thing happens -- at the end of the game, you lose all weapons, but get a supercharged gravity gun. Progression, but variety.
Final Fantasy X: Via Purifico, and others. More than once, your team is split up, and you have to play as only one or two of your characters, looking for the rest. You may have leveled that character into an uber-badass -- or maybe not. Often, certain abilities are completely removed -- for instance, at least two bosses (one of them recurring) can one-hit your Aeons (summons), rendering them mostly useless.
(Of course, Final Fantasy X can also be seen as the antithesis of this -- depending on how you level up, the final bosses might be tough, but often, Omega Weapon is just too easy. My roommate one-hit him by accident, because before then, he'd "killed the same wolf 50 times to get stronger".)
The list could go on and on, but I think there's one more of these that is really worth mentioning: Halo.
The original. Halo 2 was cool, but really, you are an absolute badass in Halo already -- and this is one of the very rare games that actually bothers to have a backstory to support why you kick so much more ass than the marines backing you up. Halo 2 had bosses, but Halo really didn't.
No, what Halo had was mostly the same damned enemies, but new situations. There is no final boss, and you're fighting the same creatures, nothing really new, gameplay-wise, but there IS a final scenario that is as challenging as any boss fight, and much more realistic when you think ab
No, really, it's not something I'd complain about, except that these demos really are pretty simple, and I shouldn't be getting any lag at all. Quake 4 performs about as well on this system, on High settings, so you can see why that's annoying.
I could show you another benchmark, too, that I'm curious to see someone replicate on a non-Linux version of Flash. YouTube Flash uses some 50% of my 1.8 ghz CPU running a video fullscreen. Save that video with the Firefox VideoDownloader extension, then open it in VLC or mplayer -- even fullscreen, it hovers at just under 1%.
You see, Gnash sucks, but at least there I can do something about that lunacy. At least there, I could have it hook into ffmpeg for better FLV support, or actually use OpenGL for 2D rendering. Closed flash actually works, but there isn't a thing I can do to improve its performance other than petition Adobe to release their source, or at least open up their spec, or for the love of all that is holy, at the very least, recompile a 64-bit version! (And Linux-PPC and such would be nice, too.)
the point is that you *can* get the kind of scriptability/programmability you want without ever leaving the GUI.
Can I attach the output of one program to the input of another? Can I get any sort of feedback from programs as to when they're finished with a task, and whether they've finished successfully? Can I loop on something arbitrary -- like, say, the result of another task?
Can it do all this from a true GUI? Or will I see source code with GUI shortcuts (like Eclipse)?
I don't think it's quite the kind I want. And if it were, it still has to prove useful enough for me to give up how quick I am with a keyboard.
Why would I teach them about right-click at all? In the continuum of computer users, "right-click" is a power-tool. The vast majority of computer users never use it.
And they are missing out. My mother, after learning to right click, is considerably more able to figure things out on her own. Have an object that you want to do something with, but don't know what menu it's hidden in? Right-click on the object.
Regardless, what are you going to do? Give them a Mighty Mouse or something? They're going to ask about the right mouse button.
So your argument sums to "any computer is faster than doing things on paper," which while I'm sure most people would agree, has nothing to do with this particular debate.
What it has to do with this debate is that it is the businesses which ultimately made a choice, way back when, between GUI and CLI. It's really difficult to say which is better without hopping in a time machine and going back to that crucial moment, then convincing all the Fortune 500 companies to train everyone on Unix instead of Windows/Mac -- perhaps by developing a killer app for Unix. You'd then have to compare that timeline to our own.
As it is, the popularity of an interface says nothing about it except that it is popular. Only very rarely is an interface so amazingly better that it doesn't matter whether it's popular or not. But it's kind of hard to tell which is the case once things settle down and start to mature.
This GAIM? [insert screenshots]
What's ugly about that? If it's just the look of it, both Gaim and GTK are fairly themeable. Besides, weren't we talking about usability, not aesthetics?
it puts an un-movable un-resizable window on my screen, or on half my screen.
I suppose I'll have to try it on Windows sometime, then. On both Linux desktops I use, it's been every bit as usable as Adium, though I do miss Growl. One very resizable window that fits neatly in a corner of the screen, and which now wobbles and jiggles with everything else now that I'm on Beryl/Compiz everywhere.
Their demos lag visibly on my beast of a gaming machine. Probably not significantly, but it's there. And that's with their demos... no wonder it's called "papervision", everything looks like origami!
Wake me up when we have a browser plugin that actually uses hardware 2D/3D acceleration. Like, say, OpenGL. Because this is just ridiculous.
We'd need to trademark words like "Internet" and "World Wide Web" and related terms that people understand. That way, no one could legally claim to have a website if it required Flash to run, and no one could legally claim to be an ISP unless they provided, at the bare mininum, DHCP and normal, functioning DNS.
Unfortunately, it's a pipe dream. These words are pretty much public domain now, and the public has an understanding of it. I bet you could still make a court case, if you got enough people annoyed, but you can flip a coin on how the judge will rule -- and in any case, they can always fall back to "network provider" and only call themselves an "ISP" over the phone, never in writing.
First, let me apologize for something. I really should get out of the habit of replying to a post without reading the grandparent, and explicitly stating where I don't agree. For one thing, I am NOT claiming that a CLI is in any way a replacement for a GUI. In fact, if you read carefully, you'll note that I say ALL forms of UI have their place.
Now, on to the content...
So now you're arguing that the free market economy doesn't work.
Basically yes, basically because people are idiots.
More specifically, Mac OS has evolved, and in particular, I'm convinced it would've died without OS X or something similar, just as I'm convinced Linux could've easily stomped Windows if Microsoft had stayed with the Windows 98 code.
So, this has nothing to do with whether the original Mac OS continues to meet everyone's needs, or whether it was particularly impressive. It does have something to do with how you define a need, and whether most people objectively evaluate their own needs. Some people think they need OS X when Win3.1 would really meet their needs. Some people are on Win95 or such and manage to mentally block out their problems (BSODs and such) as something that should be expected of all computers, and thus don't see why they REALLY need to at least get a new XP box, if not a Mac.
I think the primary factors driving OS adoption are not needs or even really wants, but everyone's own personal delusion about their needs, and vendor lock-in creating artificial needs. (For instance: If Java had worked, and 90% of new apps were completely cross-platform, there would be far less "need" for Windows.)
yes, there's a learning curve to learning Excel. It's still months shorter than the learning curve involved in learning the Unix CLI interface, and I stand by my point.
Let's keep in mind, also, that this learning is an ongoing thing. To some extent, understanding "man" and "google" is most of what you need to make the CLI explorable, and a decent GUI is inherently explorable. But once you know how to explore, it will still be awhile before you're proficient.
So, bearing that in mind, I think they end up being closer than you think. GUIs still have a shorter learning curve, but I don't think it's so much shorter as to invalidate the results.
It's trivial to run a CLI in a GUI. It's not trivial to run CLI commands in a GUI
I have an answer for you:
Double-click Terminal.app....
[rambling about how my GUI must suck to not have a terminal]...
You obviously missed the distinction. I used OS X daily until my Powerbook broke. I currently use Linux, with all kinds of flavors of terminals. But these are running a whole CLI in a GUI. For all intents and purposes, everything inside that little window is just as if I was back on vt1.
That may seem pedantic as hell, but there's a point: You can, in fact, run a GUI in a CLI. On Linux, the main GUI we all know and love is X.Org, which runs in a virtual terminal -- you can verify this by hitting CTRL+ALT+F1, and CTRL+ALT+F2 and so on. Traditionally, somewhere around CTRL+ALT+F7 will take you back to the GUI.
Or, you can treat it as a bit of a hybrid. For me, that means I make heavy use of the "run" command (bound to a key) in favor of menus, as most programs I want to run are easily-typed English words that I can type much faster than I can find in a menu. This includes my terminal window, which runs fully in the GUI (to the point of being translucent and wobbly), and GUI programs I may launch from the terminal -- meaning I get to specify commandline options, do pipe redirections, all that good stuff, and the GUI program comes up, but will report status and error messages back to the terminal.
As for really running CLI commands in a GUI, or getting CLI-like functionality in a GUI, you may be right about Automator (haven't tried it), but I'm sure Auto
It's not necessarily that I don't think Jobs is sincere.
It's that I don't see ANY action. We can talk about cigars and what they might be all day, but it would help if Jobs actually, say, pulled out a lighter.
I mean, come on -- ONE track on iTunes without DRM would at least show they're trying.
I see Flac as the source code to these other codecs. If there was a choice of formats to choose from, then everyone who didn't want to transcode could just buy mp3s. However, if there were flacs for everything, device manufacturers could support whatever codec they want -- ac3, aac, vorbis, wma, mp3, shn even -- and provide simple tools for transcoding to that format.
Basically, I'm thinking, I buy the flac and I own it -- and they let me download that file as long as I still have the username/pass to go with it (and am not obviously uploading it to others). That way, if the worst happens and I have my entire collection in mp3, and I buy a device that only takes vorbis, I can re-download my entire collection in flac, transcoding to vorbis on the fly (so I don't need terabytes of space), and lose no quality.
Hey, I would back them the hell up if I believed for a second that they were sincere about it. As it is, this would be like me backing Microsoft up on their lip service to "security". Security is a good thing, but it's obvious that Microsoft doesn't really care about it.
World of Warcraft has a Windows version and a Mac version, but no Linux version. And this is a company which runs Linux on the backend, and actively cooperates with Cedega.
We already see a bit of this with OS X -- the Airport Extreme uses proprietary drivers from Broadcom.
If there was true diversity of OSes -- even the competition between Linux distros and kernel patches would be a start -- then we could expect hardware to use those higher-level, published standards. However, as it is, it seems infinitely more likely that we'll see what we see now with peripherals -- they rely on proprietary Windows and Mac drivers, and Linux still has to go reverse-engineer them.
The rest of your argument is fallacious as well. Apple does not force consumers to buy a new Mac to run a new version of OS X.
No, they force us to buy a new Mac when the old one breaks.
My Powerbook was dropped shortly after I got it; this was around September 2005. A couple weeks ago, the display stopped working. However, my $240 AppleCare license was completely useless, as it was determined that there was "accidental damage". Yeah, right -- the case was dented due to that fall, but Apple refuses to do any sort of partial repair, it's an all or nothing thing. And, since the screen is what failed, I would have to pay $1200 -- not including my useless AppleCare warranty -- to repair it.
$1200 will buy me a PC laptop -- any one of several flavors of PC laptop -- that would be roughly 2-4 times as powerful, in just about every metric, as this old Powerbook.
Dell's computers that do compete with Apple's computers feature wise are often more expensive than the Mac offering.
Understand: TV out on a laptop is kind of cool, but I don't need it. I also don't need DVI output, the magnetic locking power cable, a dual-core processor (in a laptop!), FireWire, a webcam, or a microphone input.
Some of these things would be nice to have, but none of them are required.
And yes, Apple has a vested interest in forcing me to buy their hardware, overpriced or not. Don't you think Dell would force me to buy their top-of-the-line stuff if they thought they could get away with it? Don't you suspect that maybe this is why manufacturers are jumping all over Vista -- it ups the hardware requirements and thus their profit margins?
I'm sure there's a whole class of people who would much rather spend, say, $300 on a new Dell with OS X on it than spend $300 on a used Mac, considering the new Dell will probably be at least 3-5x as powerful (not even joking) as the old Mac. This might even be competitive considering the price of OS X.
I can understand writing it off as unsupported, kind of like how Microsoft doesn't officially support running XP in a virtual machine. However, both Microsoft and Apple are actively taking measures to limit the use of their OS in certain situations. It takes more time, money, and effort for Apple to do DRM on OS X than it would for them to simply have your warranty voided if you tried running it on non-Apple hardware -- so obviously, Jobs must like DRM, at least in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you've got it all wrong. The distro is in a quantum state! Instead of a grub menu, he just hits "boot" and it collapses into a running distro... but he won't know which one until he boots!
That is sarcasm, right?
If so, where can I find resources on this? I want to be convinced, one way or the other, about Java as a game development platform.
You are right, but that is not a typo. Cringely really did say "hardware", not "software".
Sure, Open XML was designed to address the need for Microsoft to maintain control over desktop office suites, while ODF was actually designed to be an open standard.
No, really, WTF is this supposed to mean? Would Microsoft mind pointing out some part of ODF that's insufficient? Better yet, offer a suggestion as to how to improve it -- they were, after all, part of OASIS for awhile...
Anyone who's been on Slashdot for awhile should remember how much lobbying Microsoft did to try to prevent ODF from taking root in Massachusetts. So, technically, Microsoft didn't try to slow down the standardization process, they merely tried to slow down the implementation process.
Yeah, note the copyright notice at the bottom of the page. Astroturf, anyone?
And from Ars Technica...
And ODF has to support all the features of:
(ripped off directly from a post by this comment.)
So there you go. I suppose it's possible Word 2007 could have more features than ALL of those, but somehow, I doubt it. The spec isn't bloated because Word is so great, the spec is bloated because Microsoft is afraid of interoperability.
The fact is not that it's impossible -- it could be done, if you want to reverse engineer about five or six generations of Word. It would be difficult, but not impossible, to support enough of the standard to be liveable -- after all, we've done that with the binary Office formats for years.
No, the problem is that it's prohibitively, deliberately difficult for third-parties to implement perfectly, since it references specific quirks on specific versions of Microsoft's products, and the products of others, and doesn't even try to explain what those quirks are, only that you should support them properly. I would say that Microsoft is being deliberately unhelpful here.
If you're going to make it 6000 pages and unhelpful, why not make it 12000 pages, but actually spell out what we're supposed to do? At least then, we could not only duplicate the features in ODF, but we could do them better, the way they were meant to be done. For example: Instead of saying "Emulate Word 95 Full-Width Character Spacing", Microsoft could actually specify how Word 95 implements full-width character spacing. Then, we'd implement specifications that allow the implementation of any kind of spacing you want.
Let me put it this way: In HTML, we could've had, for example: <slashdot-link story_id="07/02/16/1334234" />. That would've been pretty damned convenient for the Slashdot people, but annoying for everyone else, who would have to go to Slashdot to find out how they did it, and in any case, it's much more limited than our current <a href> style which lets you actually link to anywhere. Standards are not about coddling sp
As it is, we have one relatively extensible form of HTML, which receives incremental improvements. Even XHTML is designed such that you can often pretend an XHTML document is HTML, and it will render properly.
Would you still feel the same way if there were 15 different flavors of HTML, and everyone using their own?
I would much, much rather have diversity of implementation around standard exchange protocols than diversity of the protocol itself. We have ipv4 and ipv6 -- everything else is built on top of that. We mostly end up with TCP and UDP. When writing a new network application, you generally pick one of those, rather than flinging raw IP packets back and forth.
Remember, it's two words: Open standard. Open means everyone can actually read, understand, and implement it. Standard means there's only one, or at least a reasonably small number that any implementation can be expected to support them all -- and a good reason for the differentiation.
Look at email: We have SMTP for sending and receiving, IMAP and POP3 for mailbox access -- IMAP for online access, POP3 to download and be able to read offline. Within the message, we have MIME to handle attachments and different types of messages. There is no reason to replace these unless we end up with a completely new need -- like, say, Instant Messaging, for which we have Jabber. When PGP came out, they didn't replace SMTP/IMAP, they just inserted stuff into an email message -- or, in newer clients, we implement PGP as a separate MIME type.
Oh, and what's much more short sighted is to regard Microsoft's "Open" XML as a standard. It's not. I don't care what EMCA says, it's not even close to what a standard needs to be.
Did I spell that right? Because that whole site seems to be password-protected now! WTF??
I've got a Ruby script that I hacked with every day for awhile. Turns out that WYSIWYG formats tend to produce sucky markup -- but that's not the format so much as the editor. WYSIWYG html editors suck, too.
Fortunately, I was able to throw away most of the documents and concentrate on what I needed, so I actually got pretty clean markup out of them.
However, unless your ODFs are getting ridiculously big, it's pretty irrelevant. They're stored as a zipfile, and any images are stored in their original, native format (I think -- or are they converted to PNG?) in the zipfile. And zipfiles are at least randomly readable. Not sure about writes...
Besides, we're not talking about a database, we're talking about office documents.
...but looking once collapses it, but you can look again and it'll collapse a different way, right? For instance, electrons -- look once and it's in one place, look again and it's somewhere else.
So, can't they just put together "just marketing hype", then turn their backs, close their eyes, and shoot the marketers who actually understand the hype, so it'll uncollapse into a probability field again, then turn around and have a chance of it being finished?
You know, kind of like how the finite probability drive was used to construct the infinite improbability drive...
Sadly, I am that one person. FFX is what I usually mention because it's the only FF game I've actually managed to play through all the way. FF7 I've barely started. FF8 I've made it to the fourth disk on two separate occasions, but never really got past busting into the Lunatic Pandora -- not because I lost interest, but because I lost a savegame, or had to give the PS2 back, or my brother couldn't find the fourth disc.
For audacity of messing with the player, I think on a large scale, the best I've seen is FFX, toward the beginning. You're a star, a sports hero; I'm a badass Ronin wearing shades; weird creatures (like nothing you've seen yet) are swarming in out of nowhere with no explanation. Oh, and here's your daddy's sword. Go!
Then, sometime over the next half hour, you watch your city destroyed as you're thrown into some completely other world. I know Final Fantasy can do better than that, and I imagine most people saw elements of FFX as poor imitations of earlier games, but I still think that first half hour of gameplay is absolutely brilliant. If you're not hooked after that, something's wrong with you.
On a small scale, though, I think there have been a few genius moves, like... Oh, the beginning of Half-Life 2: Episode 1. Without spoiling anything, I will say that I've never seen that even tried in first person before.
Fair enough.
But I was talking about the movie. Revisionist bastards, but some of the revisions they made were good ones.
I would also love more of them, even if they all had barnyard animals all over the place. The characters, plot, and setting was very well done, and while I could've done without the animals, they also never really bothered me. It's funny what you remember from such a strange game, also. For me, it was the bar music. Propaganda!
And also the hover table. Tiny little minigame, but I want that game. I want it on my computer, and networked...
Correction: A good linear game is not fundamentally different of a writing challenge than good literature, or a good movie, or really most good writing efforts.
However, there are good games for which linear writing and concepts don't work so well. An MMO should make this especially tricky, yet many of them are still being written as if they were stories or movies.
Also, the climax of a story really should not be the very end. How would you feel if the third Lord of the Rings movie ended with Sauron's tower falling? Or the ring itself being destroyed? Or any number of ways it could've ended.
But it wouldn't be complete without the elves leaving across the sea, and the hobbits returning to the Shire, and so on.
I mean, there are rare exceptions that left me satisfied. The most recent Zatoichi movie, for instance -- taking out the final bosses (yes, it's a movie, they're mob bosses or something) was actually pretty anticlimactic, but then it ended with a very loud and energetic tap-dancing number, something you could head-bang to.
But other than that, I can't really think of many movies or books that I thought successfully ended on a bang.
In any case, that rhythm is pretty rarely found in games -- and, for that matter, it doesn't even approximate progress in the better cases, I think. For instance, it's true that in Half-Life, after being mugged and having all your toys taken away, you go on to get a few new weapons that you didn't have then...
But I do find it much better when they can have the difficulty of the game increase steadily (or slightly hilly but approximating steadily), with the characters' apparent skills ultimately staying close to constant. Otherwise, it just becomes hard to suspend disbelief. Consider Final Fantasy X (spoilers again) -- Auron has been on a Pilgrimage once already, and ten years shouldn't have had him drop that dramatically in skill; at the beginning of the game, Auron deals 50-100 points of damage, and at the point where his last Pilgrimage ended, I seem to remember being able to deal several thousand points of damage, at least.
Ok, fine, death may have weakened him, but that still doesn't explain the relative changes in Seymour's skills, or for that matter, why Lulu can't just set fire to a whole damned forest by the end of the game. Auron can chop his way through crystal, but he should easily be able to cut through any steel wall -- after all, he can one-hit the robots.
Compare this to, say, adventure games, where skill remains pretty much constant. Take Beyond Good & Evil: Jade's fight with the Domz, at the very beginning of the game, is identical to her fight with the final boss, in terms of Jade's own abilities with her Dai-Jo staff. I mean, she does gain abilities -- I suppose she could theoretically snap a photograph of the boss, or shoot disks at it -- but ultimately, the progression in that game feels much more natural and human, and it doesn't feel at all contrived when your toys are taken away -- after all, the Beluga is too big to fit into most combat areas, and the hovercraft is too water-bound.
Or take any of the Jak & Daxter games (Jak & Daxter, Jak II, Jak 3). Abilities can often be unlocked out of order, but really, most of Jak's new abilities don't make life much easier. Three or four hits from just about anything in the game is still going to kill Jak, and precision shots with his normal blaster (the yellow beam weapon) are usually much more useful than any of his other weapons. It makes it much more believable, and also much more replayable, because when you start over, you're still the same Jak, and you still kick ass -- not because of your toys, but because of your actual playing skill. If you can beat the final boss, you can beat anything else in the game. Walk out into the city in Jak II, anywhere; no matter what transportation you legitimately have,
I ask not because I'm a Linux zealot (though I am), but because UT2004 supported all of those, working straight from a Linux installer on the CDs.
I mean, it's obvious Linux hasn't been the native dev environment for any recent Epic or Id games -- all the editing tools are given away for Windows only -- but I can still hope to at least be able to play the game by upgrading my Ubuntu for free, instead of paying to upgrade to Vista.
Dev: Shut up, Hal, or I'll give you an impossible logic puzzle!
Linux: Try me.
Dev: This statement is false!
Linux: If that statement is false, it must be true, but if it's true, it must be false... Hah! Nice try, Dave, but it's a quantum statement. It's both true and false!
Dev: *mutters to self about revenge*
||Time passes||
Dev: Hah! I not only have your source code, I've got binary blobs!
Linux: You wouldn't...
Dev: insmod kernel.dll
Linux: AAARGH OOPS PANIC OH GOD THE PAIIN...
||Two minutes later||
Dev: Take that, Linux! With binary blobs, I have made you into Windows!
Vista: Oh cool! Finally, enough resources for me to play with all my friends!
UAC: Are you sure you want to breathe?
WGA: Do you have a license for that thought?
CoolWebSearch: I don't know how I got here, but thanks for the credit cards! Want some vi@gra?
||Ominous music||
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to solve an NP-complete problem. Would you like some help with that?
Alright, they aren't really traditional RPGs, but I think I'll mention a few here. SPOILER WARNING if you care.
First, Zelda: Ocarina of Time. This is actually the weakest example: You start out as a weakling, learn the controls, and gain skills and heart pieces and such. However, when you first draw the Master Sword, you're completely thrown off guard. Alright, Link is bigger and stronger, but he also has lost a few abilities. No more slingshot, no more boomerang, and no more hiding under the Hylian Shield like a turtle going into his shell.
Not to mention, the new dungeons and new creatures are a LOT harder.
So, there's progression, but about halfway through the game, you get thrown completely off balance. You're no longer the leveled-up badass, you're now probably the weakest you've been through the entire game. Eventually, you gain all those abilities back (and more), but for that period of time, you're stuck with an entirely different set of abilities than you're used to. So it's not even a set-back, it's like you're playing a different game.
This isn't the only time they do something like this, by the way. Fight against the final boss, and he knocks away your Master Sword -- which is probably your default sword, and which easily deals the most damage to him. You have to fight an entire stage of him without that weapon.
Next exhibit: Half-Life. Definitely NOT an RPG, but definitely has some things which could be emulated. Moving through the original game, you tend to amass an arsenal -- basically, if you're not conscious of your ammo usage, you end up with nothing, but if you give it even the slightest thought, you'll always be collecting more guns.
However, at a certain point -- immediately after your first brush with the ninjas (which are probably the most difficult enemies you've had to deal with so far) -- you are captured. No way to avoid it, and this is the closest thing the game has to a cinematic, after which you are dumped unceremoniously into a trash compactor, without even your crowbar. And Gordon Freeman does not know kung-fu.
Toward the end of the game, it changes again, with Xen. Either you love it or you hate it, but it's definitely different. The most obvious thing is the gravity -- most places in Xen have extremely low gravity, and you have a long jump, both of which have never happened before in the game. Technically, it makes you more powerful, but it's tricky as hell.
And in Half-Life 2, the same kind of thing happens -- at the end of the game, you lose all weapons, but get a supercharged gravity gun. Progression, but variety.
Final Fantasy X: Via Purifico, and others. More than once, your team is split up, and you have to play as only one or two of your characters, looking for the rest. You may have leveled that character into an uber-badass -- or maybe not. Often, certain abilities are completely removed -- for instance, at least two bosses (one of them recurring) can one-hit your Aeons (summons), rendering them mostly useless.
(Of course, Final Fantasy X can also be seen as the antithesis of this -- depending on how you level up, the final bosses might be tough, but often, Omega Weapon is just too easy. My roommate one-hit him by accident, because before then, he'd "killed the same wolf 50 times to get stronger".)
The list could go on and on, but I think there's one more of these that is really worth mentioning: Halo.
The original. Halo 2 was cool, but really, you are an absolute badass in Halo already -- and this is one of the very rare games that actually bothers to have a backstory to support why you kick so much more ass than the marines backing you up. Halo 2 had bosses, but Halo really didn't.
No, what Halo had was mostly the same damned enemies, but new situations. There is no final boss, and you're fighting the same creatures, nothing really new, gameplay-wise, but there IS a final scenario that is as challenging as any boss fight, and much more realistic when you think ab
Well, it is, I suppose -- for Flash.
No, really, it's not something I'd complain about, except that these demos really are pretty simple, and I shouldn't be getting any lag at all. Quake 4 performs about as well on this system, on High settings, so you can see why that's annoying.
I could show you another benchmark, too, that I'm curious to see someone replicate on a non-Linux version of Flash. YouTube Flash uses some 50% of my 1.8 ghz CPU running a video fullscreen. Save that video with the Firefox VideoDownloader extension, then open it in VLC or mplayer -- even fullscreen, it hovers at just under 1%.
You see, Gnash sucks, but at least there I can do something about that lunacy. At least there, I could have it hook into ffmpeg for better FLV support, or actually use OpenGL for 2D rendering. Closed flash actually works, but there isn't a thing I can do to improve its performance other than petition Adobe to release their source, or at least open up their spec, or for the love of all that is holy, at the very least, recompile a 64-bit version! (And Linux-PPC and such would be nice, too.)
Can I attach the output of one program to the input of another? Can I get any sort of feedback from programs as to when they're finished with a task, and whether they've finished successfully? Can I loop on something arbitrary -- like, say, the result of another task?
Can it do all this from a true GUI? Or will I see source code with GUI shortcuts (like Eclipse)?
I don't think it's quite the kind I want. And if it were, it still has to prove useful enough for me to give up how quick I am with a keyboard.
And they are missing out. My mother, after learning to right click, is considerably more able to figure things out on her own. Have an object that you want to do something with, but don't know what menu it's hidden in? Right-click on the object.
Regardless, what are you going to do? Give them a Mighty Mouse or something? They're going to ask about the right mouse button.
What it has to do with this debate is that it is the businesses which ultimately made a choice, way back when, between GUI and CLI. It's really difficult to say which is better without hopping in a time machine and going back to that crucial moment, then convincing all the Fortune 500 companies to train everyone on Unix instead of Windows/Mac -- perhaps by developing a killer app for Unix. You'd then have to compare that timeline to our own.
As it is, the popularity of an interface says nothing about it except that it is popular. Only very rarely is an interface so amazingly better that it doesn't matter whether it's popular or not. But it's kind of hard to tell which is the case once things settle down and start to mature.
What's ugly about that? If it's just the look of it, both Gaim and GTK are fairly themeable. Besides, weren't we talking about usability, not aesthetics?
I suppose I'll have to try it on Windows sometime, then. On both Linux desktops I use, it's been every bit as usable as Adium, though I do miss Growl. One very resizable window that fits neatly in a corner of the screen, and which now wobbles and jiggles with everything else now that I'm on Beryl/Compiz everywhere.
Just no.
Their demos lag visibly on my beast of a gaming machine. Probably not significantly, but it's there. And that's with their demos... no wonder it's called "papervision", everything looks like origami!
Wake me up when we have a browser plugin that actually uses hardware 2D/3D acceleration. Like, say, OpenGL. Because this is just ridiculous.
Trouble is, no one knows what DNS is.
We'd need to trademark words like "Internet" and "World Wide Web" and related terms that people understand. That way, no one could legally claim to have a website if it required Flash to run, and no one could legally claim to be an ISP unless they provided, at the bare mininum, DHCP and normal, functioning DNS.
Unfortunately, it's a pipe dream. These words are pretty much public domain now, and the public has an understanding of it. I bet you could still make a court case, if you got enough people annoyed, but you can flip a coin on how the judge will rule -- and in any case, they can always fall back to "network provider" and only call themselves an "ISP" over the phone, never in writing.
First, let me apologize for something. I really should get out of the habit of replying to a post without reading the grandparent, and explicitly stating where I don't agree. For one thing, I am NOT claiming that a CLI is in any way a replacement for a GUI. In fact, if you read carefully, you'll note that I say ALL forms of UI have their place.
Now, on to the content...
Basically yes, basically because people are idiots.
More specifically, Mac OS has evolved, and in particular, I'm convinced it would've died without OS X or something similar, just as I'm convinced Linux could've easily stomped Windows if Microsoft had stayed with the Windows 98 code.
So, this has nothing to do with whether the original Mac OS continues to meet everyone's needs, or whether it was particularly impressive. It does have something to do with how you define a need, and whether most people objectively evaluate their own needs. Some people think they need OS X when Win3.1 would really meet their needs. Some people are on Win95 or such and manage to mentally block out their problems (BSODs and such) as something that should be expected of all computers, and thus don't see why they REALLY need to at least get a new XP box, if not a Mac.
I think the primary factors driving OS adoption are not needs or even really wants, but everyone's own personal delusion about their needs, and vendor lock-in creating artificial needs. (For instance: If Java had worked, and 90% of new apps were completely cross-platform, there would be far less "need" for Windows.)
Let's keep in mind, also, that this learning is an ongoing thing. To some extent, understanding "man" and "google" is most of what you need to make the CLI explorable, and a decent GUI is inherently explorable. But once you know how to explore, it will still be awhile before you're proficient.
So, bearing that in mind, I think they end up being closer than you think. GUIs still have a shorter learning curve, but I don't think it's so much shorter as to invalidate the results.
You obviously missed the distinction. I used OS X daily until my Powerbook broke. I currently use Linux, with all kinds of flavors of terminals. But these are running a whole CLI in a GUI. For all intents and purposes, everything inside that little window is just as if I was back on vt1.
That may seem pedantic as hell, but there's a point: You can, in fact, run a GUI in a CLI. On Linux, the main GUI we all know and love is X.Org, which runs in a virtual terminal -- you can verify this by hitting CTRL+ALT+F1, and CTRL+ALT+F2 and so on. Traditionally, somewhere around CTRL+ALT+F7 will take you back to the GUI.
Or, you can treat it as a bit of a hybrid. For me, that means I make heavy use of the "run" command (bound to a key) in favor of menus, as most programs I want to run are easily-typed English words that I can type much faster than I can find in a menu. This includes my terminal window, which runs fully in the GUI (to the point of being translucent and wobbly), and GUI programs I may launch from the terminal -- meaning I get to specify commandline options, do pipe redirections, all that good stuff, and the GUI program comes up, but will report status and error messages back to the terminal.
As for really running CLI commands in a GUI, or getting CLI-like functionality in a GUI, you may be right about Automator (haven't tried it), but I'm sure Auto
It's not necessarily that I don't think Jobs is sincere.
It's that I don't see ANY action. We can talk about cigars and what they might be all day, but it would help if Jobs actually, say, pulled out a lighter.
I mean, come on -- ONE track on iTunes without DRM would at least show they're trying.
I see Flac as the source code to these other codecs. If there was a choice of formats to choose from, then everyone who didn't want to transcode could just buy mp3s. However, if there were flacs for everything, device manufacturers could support whatever codec they want -- ac3, aac, vorbis, wma, mp3, shn even -- and provide simple tools for transcoding to that format.
Basically, I'm thinking, I buy the flac and I own it -- and they let me download that file as long as I still have the username/pass to go with it (and am not obviously uploading it to others). That way, if the worst happens and I have my entire collection in mp3, and I buy a device that only takes vorbis, I can re-download my entire collection in flac, transcoding to vorbis on the fly (so I don't need terabytes of space), and lose no quality.
Hey, I would back them the hell up if I believed for a second that they were sincere about it. As it is, this would be like me backing Microsoft up on their lip service to "security". Security is a good thing, but it's obvious that Microsoft doesn't really care about it.
World of Warcraft has a Windows version and a Mac version, but no Linux version. And this is a company which runs Linux on the backend, and actively cooperates with Cedega.
We already see a bit of this with OS X -- the Airport Extreme uses proprietary drivers from Broadcom.
If there was true diversity of OSes -- even the competition between Linux distros and kernel patches would be a start -- then we could expect hardware to use those higher-level, published standards. However, as it is, it seems infinitely more likely that we'll see what we see now with peripherals -- they rely on proprietary Windows and Mac drivers, and Linux still has to go reverse-engineer them.
No, they force us to buy a new Mac when the old one breaks.
My Powerbook was dropped shortly after I got it; this was around September 2005. A couple weeks ago, the display stopped working. However, my $240 AppleCare license was completely useless, as it was determined that there was "accidental damage". Yeah, right -- the case was dented due to that fall, but Apple refuses to do any sort of partial repair, it's an all or nothing thing. And, since the screen is what failed, I would have to pay $1200 -- not including my useless AppleCare warranty -- to repair it.
$1200 will buy me a PC laptop -- any one of several flavors of PC laptop -- that would be roughly 2-4 times as powerful, in just about every metric, as this old Powerbook.
Understand: TV out on a laptop is kind of cool, but I don't need it. I also don't need DVI output, the magnetic locking power cable, a dual-core processor (in a laptop!), FireWire, a webcam, or a microphone input.
Some of these things would be nice to have, but none of them are required.
And yes, Apple has a vested interest in forcing me to buy their hardware, overpriced or not. Don't you think Dell would force me to buy their top-of-the-line stuff if they thought they could get away with it? Don't you suspect that maybe this is why manufacturers are jumping all over Vista -- it ups the hardware requirements and thus their profit margins?
I'm sure there's a whole class of people who would much rather spend, say, $300 on a new Dell with OS X on it than spend $300 on a used Mac, considering the new Dell will probably be at least 3-5x as powerful (not even joking) as the old Mac. This might even be competitive considering the price of OS X.
I can understand writing it off as unsupported, kind of like how Microsoft doesn't officially support running XP in a virtual machine. However, both Microsoft and Apple are actively taking measures to limit the use of their OS in certain situations. It takes more time, money, and effort for Apple to do DRM on OS X than it would for them to simply have your warranty voided if you tried running it on non-Apple hardware -- so obviously, Jobs must like DRM, at least in this case.