When's the last time a code name was also used for the retail product? I can't remember that ever happening.
How about the Xbox? That name was in wide circulation way before any details surrounding the actual hardware were known, and eventually Microsoft just decided to use the codename.
No, they are important for playing all those new OpenGL 2-powered games on a decent operating system.
A "decent operating system"? What has that got to do with it? I just want to play games. And sad though this may be, that means using Windows. And usually they're DirectX-based. Currently, the games I play most are:
Halo
Counter-Strike Source
Day of Defeat Source
World of Warcraft
Guild Wars
I also tried the F.E.A.R. demo recently and think there's a very good chance I'll be playing that. What's the key similarity between all of the above? DirectX. Oh, and no Linux version. This is why I can't understand those concerned that lack of decent Linux drivers is a "serious concern". ATI doesn't give a toss when its primary market segment are people playing DX9 games on Windows. Other consumers won't care, either. And neither do I.
Then your course of action is clear: don't buy an ATI card. Clearly Linux users (of any description) aren't the demographic ATI is aiming for with a card like the X1800XT. It's a shame, certainly, but I personally wouldn't lose any sleep over the fact that a card built with Windows gamers in mind isn't particularly useful for Linux.
Agreed. I was going to make the same point, but you've done it for me. Essentially, RMS is confusing distribution and usage. Website visitors do not receive a distribution of the site, they use it. Forcing web application developers to distribute their works under the terms of the GPL is against the spirit of Free Software, which makes provision for people who wish to use free software but not redistribute it.
I share your concerns. I don't see much point in upgrading to Longhorn based on what has been promised and then subsequently taken out so that the OS can be finished "on time". As many others have pointed out, so far what we're looking at is a (n arguably) prettier skin but the same old crap underneath. There is still a gap in consistency (check out that same old monospaced font for the command prompt, or the icons in Computer Management).
It seems quite easy for the cynic to look at what they're getting and see that this product is more about raising the hardware-requirements bar so as to keep selling boxes rather than to genuinely innovate, or even, as was the case with Tiger, just iteratively improve what already exists. But then why are we surprised? This is precisely what Microsoft has been doing with their Office suite for years.
It strikes me that we're entering a very interesting time for desktop PC users. By the time Longhorn is out we should be seeing the first Intel-based Macs, and I'm sure that it won't be more than a couple of weeks before people work out a way to make a fully beige-box compatible hack to let them run a retail copy on their existing hardware. And I'm not sure Apple will do much to stop them.
I'm waiting to see just how many previously Windows-only developers start taking the Mac as a serious development target in between now and then. There has been a gradual shift in popular opinion away from Windows and towards Mac OS, thanks mostly to the lack of security / protection from spyware (by default) in the former. A combination of better support from third party developers and a poor reception to Longhorn could tip the balance away from Windows for the first time in 20 years.
I've been a "loyal" purchaser of ATI cards for the last 2 years. But when I wanted to upgrade last autumn, it took me nearly 3 months to get hold of a Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition, which was "launched" in May last year. I eventually got one in November. And I work for an IT reseller, so I think you can see just how bad the situation must have been in the channel.
The reviews of the 7800 all seem very good, suggesting that after a miss with the 5800, a nearly with the 6800 Nvidia have finally hit the mark. But what impresses me (and a lot of reviewers) most is that the card is in stores *right now*. Saying it'll hold the performance crown for the next 2 months, until the R520 is launched could well be off the mark; ATI have a less than stellar record with availability, so I can well imagine they're sweating over getting the cards to retail fast right now.
The question is, just how accurate is the speech recognition? I work for a company that sells many different text-to-speech and speech recognition packages, of which Scansoft's Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the most popular. It's a ~£400 product though (for Windows) and with good reason; after training (and assuming you have a PC up to spec and a decent microphone/headset) it has a very high accuracy rate for recognition; essential if you're dictating a 500,000 word essay and don't want to correct 10,000 incorrectly interpreted words.
The sort of speech recognition software bundled with operating systems in the past have traditionally been of a very substandard quality, and with limited scope for training to improve (the idea that you can use it immediately without *any* speech rec training worries me immensely, as people have sufficient variety in accents that regional differences could mean the product works or doesn't - maybe it works best if you're from South California?).
Still, like I say, I'd be very interested to see how good Tiger's support is. Apple has been making leaps and bounds with its accessibility support (which SR is essentially a component of, even if they're not marketing it as such) so an SR component of the OS with OS-level integration and commercial quality accuracy would make Tiger *the* killer accessible OS. If it isn't already, that is.
No, I looked at them side by side. It's obvious from doing this where you have added your own rules and where you've just kept the original stylings. My own issues are that whilst one individual may not have a problem with his work being used in this way, had I discovered somebody doing this with my own site I'd be mad as hell.
So you do, and so he is. My apologies. Still, do you not think you could take what he's done and make it a little less... obviously the same? I mean, in some instances you've basically used exactly the same stylesheet. You could at least change the colour scheme, that's not hard to do...
It appears the design for the kernelthread.com site is a rip-off of an older version of CSS guru Eric A. Meyer's blog site. Compare the site's design to this version pulled out of The Wayback Machine. Time to let Pirated Sites know. And this from somebody who works at IBM? I'm sure somebody at SCO would find this amusing...
...but the deal to purchase Criterion went through (publically, at least) shortly after Burnout 3 was released, although EA's involvement in the project began some time before then. But as far as the developers are concerned; it was made by Criterion, not EA (although we can thank EA for their brand-centric placement of the EA Soundtrack ticker, and the focus group skaterawk soundtrack).
When humans get to Mars, keeping it Antarctic-pristine will be the last thing on their minds. A leaked document the Guardian has obtained from the year 2600 spells out the whole remarkable story.
Who is? Myself or Sven? I admit there are a lot of unknowns here (and I do agree that I should at least try it before being too critical), but where software I use 50% of my working time is concerned I tend to have a philosophy much like Robert De Niro's character in Ronin: "Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt."
Just so. But configurable or otherwise, the very idea that such things should be available seems baffling to me. Photoshop has many configurable floating palettes, but each is well designed and efficient with usage of screen space.
The question rises from your suggestion that "you don't have to use them", why bother putting them in the program at all? Surely some other way of accessing fonts with previews, recent documents with thumbnails and colour swatch palettes would be better than an ever-present window that would usually be used for frequently accessed tools?
I don't mean to belittle your work, of course; I have the utmost respect and admiration for those who commit hours of their time to such projects. I will still however be critical of these projects if I don't think they do the job better than commercial alternatives.
It's still hideously inefficient, if the first posted screenshot (http://cima.ng-london.org.uk/~john/desktop29.png) is anything to go by. Why would you want a list of all fonts displayed in a floating palette rather than a single selector? A more advanced font selection tool might be useful, but floating palettes should provide the most frequently required tools so as to save on screen usage. Multiple virtual desktops are all well and good but they don't let you look at all these palettes at the same time. The same gripe can go for the Document History and Palettes palette (!) - why would you need to see a thumbnail of every document you've recently worked on, all the time?
These are the main reasons why I won't ditch Photoshop yet. It might rival PS in terms of image quality and features, but the UI is (as with most Linux applications) designed in a haphazard and amateur fashion, whereas Photoshop's is developed by UI professionals.
Oh, I'm well aware of these factors and I agree wholeheartedly. As someone who played CS back in the beta 6.5 days and DoD up until the 1.0 launch (which I'm not too keen on) I appreciate that having a superb 3D engine Doom 3 could be the ultimate modding platform ever, but whilst the prospect of that is enticing, I still wouldn't wet myself in excitement over it the way some clearly have. I actually made similar comments over Halo PC's potential as a modding platform (assuming it has the XBox's bumpmapping) just yesterday on another forum; it's nice to think that we may see mods of a similar visual quality to these games in the future, but you've raised another interesting issue; despite the existence of technically more advanced FPS games suitable for modding, people have stuck with Half-Life for the more popular mods. Does this suggest the jump in complexity of modelling/lighting etc. is too much for mod makers? I guess we'll just have to wait until 12 months or so after Doom 3 launches...
The Doom 3 engine will be used to make more games than just Doom 3, after all.
...which is exactly what I suspected anyway, and suggests a lot of people are getting very excited over something mostly because of its potential rather than the thing in itself. The ATI screensavers are very impressive, but you didn't see me whooping and applauding them like the people watching the Doom 3 trailer. That's why I'm far more excited about Halo 2 than Doom 3; it will be a polished, encapsulated gaming experience from day one, rather than another cash cow for id to flog to other studios.
That's not to say Doom 3 won't be a good game, I just didn't see much there that made me eager to play it.
Doom123, Quake123, Mods1..N, this isn't about gameplay
Clearly! But if the excitement is over the graphics, why aren't the Doom/Quake fanboys all frothing at the mouth over the various Radeon 9700/9800 screensavers/demos ATI have made? These are without a doubt the most impressive realtime 3D sequences I've ever seen on a PC. Check out http://mirror.ati.com/developer/demos/r9700.html and have a look at (in particular) Animusic, Car and Rendering with Natural Light. The screensaver featuring ants marching around a Moebius Strip is currently running on my home desktop and even my usually apathetic mother commented on how convincing it was.
Slashdot Mirror
Well this is familiar. New ATI graphics card.... No decent Linux drivers... blah blah blah...
What sort of graphics card do you need to play Tux Racer anyway?
When's the last time a code name was also used for the retail product? I can't remember that ever happening.
How about the Xbox? That name was in wide circulation way before any details surrounding the actual hardware were known, and eventually Microsoft just decided to use the codename.
No, they are important for playing all those new OpenGL 2-powered games on a decent operating system.
A "decent operating system"? What has that got to do with it? I just want to play games. And sad though this may be, that means using Windows. And usually they're DirectX-based. Currently, the games I play most are:
I also tried the F.E.A.R. demo recently and think there's a very good chance I'll be playing that. What's the key similarity between all of the above? DirectX. Oh, and no Linux version. This is why I can't understand those concerned that lack of decent Linux drivers is a "serious concern". ATI doesn't give a toss when its primary market segment are people playing DX9 games on Windows. Other consumers won't care, either. And neither do I.
Then your course of action is clear: don't buy an ATI card. Clearly Linux users (of any description) aren't the demographic ATI is aiming for with a card like the X1800XT. It's a shame, certainly, but I personally wouldn't lose any sleep over the fact that a card built with Windows gamers in mind isn't particularly useful for Linux.
... when buying a top-end graphics card for playing all those new DirectX 9-powered games, aren't they?
Agreed. I was going to make the same point, but you've done it for me. Essentially, RMS is confusing distribution and usage. Website visitors do not receive a distribution of the site, they use it. Forcing web application developers to distribute their works under the terms of the GPL is against the spirit of Free Software, which makes provision for people who wish to use free software but not redistribute it.
I share your concerns. I don't see much point in upgrading to Longhorn based on what has been promised and then subsequently taken out so that the OS can be finished "on time". As many others have pointed out, so far what we're looking at is a (n arguably) prettier skin but the same old crap underneath. There is still a gap in consistency (check out that same old monospaced font for the command prompt, or the icons in Computer Management).
It seems quite easy for the cynic to look at what they're getting and see that this product is more about raising the hardware-requirements bar so as to keep selling boxes rather than to genuinely innovate, or even, as was the case with Tiger, just iteratively improve what already exists. But then why are we surprised? This is precisely what Microsoft has been doing with their Office suite for years.
It strikes me that we're entering a very interesting time for desktop PC users. By the time Longhorn is out we should be seeing the first Intel-based Macs, and I'm sure that it won't be more than a couple of weeks before people work out a way to make a fully beige-box compatible hack to let them run a retail copy on their existing hardware. And I'm not sure Apple will do much to stop them.
I'm waiting to see just how many previously Windows-only developers start taking the Mac as a serious development target in between now and then. There has been a gradual shift in popular opinion away from Windows and towards Mac OS, thanks mostly to the lack of security / protection from spyware (by default) in the former. A combination of better support from third party developers and a poor reception to Longhorn could tip the balance away from Windows for the first time in 20 years.
I've been a "loyal" purchaser of ATI cards for the last 2 years. But when I wanted to upgrade last autumn, it took me nearly 3 months to get hold of a Radeon X800XT Platinum Edition, which was "launched" in May last year. I eventually got one in November. And I work for an IT reseller, so I think you can see just how bad the situation must have been in the channel.
The reviews of the 7800 all seem very good, suggesting that after a miss with the 5800, a nearly with the 6800 Nvidia have finally hit the mark. But what impresses me (and a lot of reviewers) most is that the card is in stores *right now*. Saying it'll hold the performance crown for the next 2 months, until the R520 is launched could well be off the mark; ATI have a less than stellar record with availability, so I can well imagine they're sweating over getting the cards to retail fast right now.
In a panic, they tried to pull the plug...
The question is, just how accurate is the speech recognition? I work for a company that sells many different text-to-speech and speech recognition packages, of which Scansoft's Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the most popular. It's a ~£400 product though (for Windows) and with good reason; after training (and assuming you have a PC up to spec and a decent microphone/headset) it has a very high accuracy rate for recognition; essential if you're dictating a 500,000 word essay and don't want to correct 10,000 incorrectly interpreted words.
The sort of speech recognition software bundled with operating systems in the past have traditionally been of a very substandard quality, and with limited scope for training to improve (the idea that you can use it immediately without *any* speech rec training worries me immensely, as people have sufficient variety in accents that regional differences could mean the product works or doesn't - maybe it works best if you're from South California?).
Still, like I say, I'd be very interested to see how good Tiger's support is. Apple has been making leaps and bounds with its accessibility support (which SR is essentially a component of, even if they're not marketing it as such) so an SR component of the OS with OS-level integration and commercial quality accuracy would make Tiger *the* killer accessible OS. If it isn't already, that is.
No, I looked at them side by side. It's obvious from doing this where you have added your own rules and where you've just kept the original stylings. My own issues are that whilst one individual may not have a problem with his work being used in this way, had I discovered somebody doing this with my own site I'd be mad as hell.
So you do, and so he is. My apologies. Still, do you not think you could take what he's done and make it a little less... obviously the same? I mean, in some instances you've basically used exactly the same stylesheet. You could at least change the colour scheme, that's not hard to do...
It appears the design for the kernelthread.com site is a rip-off of an older version of CSS guru Eric A. Meyer's blog site. Compare the site's design to this version pulled out of The Wayback Machine. Time to let Pirated Sites know. And this from somebody who works at IBM? I'm sure somebody at SCO would find this amusing...
...but the deal to purchase Criterion went through (publically, at least) shortly after Burnout 3 was released, although EA's involvement in the project began some time before then. But as far as the developers are concerned; it was made by Criterion, not EA (although we can thank EA for their brand-centric placement of the EA Soundtrack ticker, and the focus group skaterawk soundtrack).
When humans get to Mars, keeping it Antarctic-pristine will be the last thing on their minds. A leaked document the Guardian has obtained from the year 2600 spells out the whole remarkable story.
Now that's just taking the p*ss...
OS/2 Warp, of course!
Who is? Myself or Sven? I admit there are a lot of unknowns here (and I do agree that I should at least try it before being too critical), but where software I use 50% of my working time is concerned I tend to have a philosophy much like Robert De Niro's character in Ronin: "Whenever there is any doubt, there is no doubt."
Just so. But configurable or otherwise, the very idea that such things should be available seems baffling to me. Photoshop has many configurable floating palettes, but each is well designed and efficient with usage of screen space.
The question rises from your suggestion that "you don't have to use them", why bother putting them in the program at all? Surely some other way of accessing fonts with previews, recent documents with thumbnails and colour swatch palettes would be better than an ever-present window that would usually be used for frequently accessed tools?
I don't mean to belittle your work, of course; I have the utmost respect and admiration for those who commit hours of their time to such projects. I will still however be critical of these projects if I don't think they do the job better than commercial alternatives.
It's still hideously inefficient, if the first posted screenshot (http://cima.ng-london.org.uk/~john/desktop29.png) is anything to go by. Why would you want a list of all fonts displayed in a floating palette rather than a single selector? A more advanced font selection tool might be useful, but floating palettes should provide the most frequently required tools so as to save on screen usage. Multiple virtual desktops are all well and good but they don't let you look at all these palettes at the same time. The same gripe can go for the Document History and Palettes palette (!) - why would you need to see a thumbnail of every document you've recently worked on, all the time?
These are the main reasons why I won't ditch Photoshop yet. It might rival PS in terms of image quality and features, but the UI is (as with most Linux applications) designed in a haphazard and amateur fashion, whereas Photoshop's is developed by UI professionals.
Oh, I'm well aware of these factors and I agree wholeheartedly. As someone who played CS back in the beta 6.5 days and DoD up until the 1.0 launch (which I'm not too keen on) I appreciate that having a superb 3D engine Doom 3 could be the ultimate modding platform ever, but whilst the prospect of that is enticing, I still wouldn't wet myself in excitement over it the way some clearly have. I actually made similar comments over Halo PC's potential as a modding platform (assuming it has the XBox's bumpmapping) just yesterday on another forum; it's nice to think that we may see mods of a similar visual quality to these games in the future, but you've raised another interesting issue; despite the existence of technically more advanced FPS games suitable for modding, people have stuck with Half-Life for the more popular mods. Does this suggest the jump in complexity of modelling/lighting etc. is too much for mod makers? I guess we'll just have to wait until 12 months or so after Doom 3 launches...
...which is exactly what I suspected anyway, and suggests a lot of people are getting very excited over something mostly because of its potential rather than the thing in itself. The ATI screensavers are very impressive, but you didn't see me whooping and applauding them like the people watching the Doom 3 trailer. That's why I'm far more excited about Halo 2 than Doom 3; it will be a polished, encapsulated gaming experience from day one, rather than another cash cow for id to flog to other studios.
That's not to say Doom 3 won't be a good game, I just didn't see much there that made me eager to play it.
Clearly! But if the excitement is over the graphics, why aren't the Doom/Quake fanboys all frothing at the mouth over the various Radeon 9700/9800 screensavers/demos ATI have made? These are without a doubt the most impressive realtime 3D sequences I've ever seen on a PC. Check out http://mirror.ati.com/developer/demos/r9700.html and have a look at (in particular) Animusic, Car and Rendering with Natural Light. The screensaver featuring ants marching around a Moebius Strip is currently running on my home desktop and even my usually apathetic mother commented on how convincing it was.
Maybe it's just the lack of guns?