Is this just a clever dupe of the story on vaporware?
Also, did anyone else find the list of coming attractions to be a bit underwhelming?
Actually, it's likely that it all seems a bit underwhelming because most of it are actually *real* products which, most likely, *will* ship. Which means it's actually all kinda boring because it's just updates of stuff we've already seen, or stuff we knew was comming.
I've seen at least one other article today with such analysis; things that once were "this will happen some day" are now either happening ( handheld media players ), or not being talked about at the show ( networked everything, except maybe the one networked stove ).
There seems to be at least some supply of this tape around, though, some of it even still says "BASF" on it just one example. Google for "2 inch audio tape" for more.
So it appears there may be a reasonable supply of this stuff still around, and if they're "restructuring" maybe they'll make more before that supply runs out, but likely they were making _way_ more than demand called for, so... don't expect that $150 for 2500 feet price tag to drop when they do open their plant back up.
I don't know if "a lot" of those studios actually use this tape on a regular basis. "A lot" of those studios have had some really hard financial times over the past 10 years.
omg.. after reading that article I got the feeling that there are people even more geeky than computer geeks.
Being a computer geek who works with a HAM geek... yea, there are people who make computer geeks look, well, hardly geeky at all by comparison. HAM radio operators often fit in that group. What's really shocking is that anything is still actually manufactured in the U.S...
The HP logo is there... under the word "iPod", which is under the ( larger ) Apple logo on the back. So, they are in a sense both Apple and HP branded, oddly enough.
Perhaps they did some research into the marketability of an "HP blue" iPod and decided to call that off... after all, you can always buy the iPod Tattoo kit and print up your own blue umm... those are stickers, right? Yea, that's what I want to do, cover my iPod with stickers...
For those who are currently computer programmers/engineers, would you say you really enjoy your job, or does it get extremely old and tedious after awhile?
Well, if you get bored, you can always read slashdot...
Seriously, there are boring and/or bad jobs in just about any field, including CS ( to me, it's the "IT" side of things that sucks eggs ). Find a project or job category that you enjoy, and do that if you can. Of course, anything can get old- some people at some point in their lives just need to change careers. This has nothing to do with programming or any other specific job, it's a general thing. Even a fun gig, like game programming, can burn you out if it's too demanding or not rewarding in a key manner ( like, uh, pay ).
Me, I don't find that I have time to program ( much ) at home, but I do enjoy playing video games and editing home video movies in my free time, and I do manage to knock out the occasional little program, though it's difficult. I find I work 8 or 9 hours and I really just want to relax... but that'd probably be the case no matter what I did for those 8 or 9 hours of work.
If you RTFA, the most common response seems to be "that you exist" or "that people other than myself exist", or "that people other than myself have conciousness", something along those lines.
Not surprisingly, most folks comming up with this are psychologists, but some of the physicists hit on that one as well, which I found interesting.
Am I the only non-delusional, honest person reading slashdot? Answer the question, people!
Is your development project a sinking ship?
( actually, I don't have a hard deadline on my current project, so eventually, I do expect it to succeed, but I am a couple of months behind my goal, from posting on slashdot too often, so maybe I've already failed... )
Which reminds me, they left off number 6: team members reading slashdot instead of working...
Requirements Volatility was #5 on their list. Around where I work it's #1.
Another day of this client making some _unnecessary_ and nit-picky change and I'll start adding an extra week to my estimates of when it'll be done.
So wait a minute: Lack of customer involvement is #2 on their list of problems, but Requirements Volatility is last... but getting the customer more involved in your case means making the Requirements Volatility worse...
What their ranking really says to me is that successful projects include the customer who knows what they want and thus sets the requirements early. In my own experience, the customer usually has only a vauge idea what they want, and a really good idea of what they don't want. What you need to be able to do is put off the _truly_ unnecessary changes to a _scheduled_ version 2, either doing a planned multi-pass prototype/design phase, or locking down agreed-to requirements sets and designs ( including UI and other specifics ) as the very first step.
Beware, though- what you as a programmer might see as a nit-picky change might really be a workflow-enhancing feature that prevents the customer from hating your app... people would much rather their tools do what they want, rather than having to learn to use them.
If your client is making time-consuming changes late in the project... well, the very fact that they can do that, or that small changes are time-consuming, should raise a major red flag. You're doomed- either the change being made isn't really minor, or you've blown #1 and picked a development methodology which doesn't allow for smallish changes to be quick changes.
Uh, it's modded up because I'm talking about this year's software ? Because I'm not the only one who has seent he problems I've mentioned?
To be clear, my beef isn't that Word still *uses* Carbon calls, there are plenty of good reasons to do so, but rather that it uses Carbon calls that only made sense under OS 9, meaning the code wasn't cleaned or re-written from previous versions so much as ported and added too.
Does Word in Office 2004 fix long file name issues ?!? I didn't think it did for some reason...
Now I just have to teach her how to play Warcraft...
No, now is your chance to convince them to play games on consoles, so you don't have to get them their own computer ( allowing you to play Warcraft in peace ).
My son ( three years old ) gave me "SpongeBob SquarePants Battle for Bikini Bottom" for xmas. Fun game, and he's really good at it... for a three year old, at least. I think he forgot about noggin.com for a whole two days...
I first laid hands on a computer in 1982 or so, when I was in 6th grade. Knowing the guy who set up the computer lab at the high school located convieniently across the street, knowing he'd hack there at weird/late hours, and having permissive parents who knew I wasn't getting into trouble staying up late at the high school computer lab, all led to my leaning to program, and deciding I really needed to learn to type.
After doing "Hello World", I started with copying a "Camel" program from a magazine ( I belive the computer was a "Vector Graphics" ). I eventualy moved on to making a Pac-Man clone and an original space shooter on some fancy "Monroe 2000 color computer" thingie.
My son has it a lot easier. He toddled up to my iMac, I showed him a drawing program, got him started using the mouse to make brush strokes, and as soon as I realized he could use the mouse to click on files ( and use the keyboard to rename them to creative things like ",mk;oij;oi" ), I gave him his own locked-down account ( thank you OS X ) and Safari bookmarks to sesamestreet.org, noggin.com and nickjr.com. He still likes the paint program ( from the AppleWorks suite, it's MacPaint, remember that? ) and got into jigsaw puzzles, though the variety of flash games ( and painting apps ) on noggin.com and sesameworkshop.org probably define the computer for him.
I figure we'll wait for him to really read and write before I start him on Objective-C.;-) He's three years old now, and I figure it'll be at most another 4 to six months before he's ready to tackle learning to type, at the rate he's identifying new words... the poor kid is only starting preschool, he should enjoy being a kid and beating the SpongeBob SquarePants video game before learning to program, I figure...
Seriously, though, I'd start a young programmer out on one of Java, C, or Objective-C. I'd look for a tutorial on doing simple animations, kids like that kind of thing. Just seeing what it takes to draw a simple shape, and then doing an event loop to move it around a window - that goes a long way in understanding how most programs work.
As far as an introduction to computers in general, for my son's generation, that'll be something of an organic experience. Give them an account set up so they can't destroy anything critical, give them a few good starting points ( like a paint program and a few good websites ) and they'll ask questions when they think you can help.
Yes, my three year old will log in to his own account if he finds someone else has left themselves logged in.
While Office v.X is in general pretty impressive, it's also pretty Carbon... in OS X terms, it's code base is more OS 9 than OS X, still. Most users will never notice, but the legacy codebase shows through in places like some dialog boxes ( memory-related warnings? What?!? ) and possible confusion/limits with long file names.
I'd be more impressed if it were Cocoa from the ground up, or at least never let you see clear signs of the Carbonized underpinnings - there's no reason in OS X you'd ever see those "Memory low" warning dialogs which our users have occasionally seen in Word v.X.
Of course, AppleWorks is the demo app for the Carbon libs... in any event, more competition and options in the office suite space would probably be a good thing.
System Requirements
OS: Microsoft® Windows 98SE/Me/2000/XP
HUH?!?
Open source, open firmware, schematics... but Windows-only software support?
I'm just going to assume that's misleading/incorrect somehow, it probably works like any USB storage class device, but... how odd that they list only Windows OS support...
I suppose I should stop responding to the f-ing AC as well??
Besides, Mr. Bill Garcia there is currently rated +5 insightful, folks with mod points seem to be taking his point of view seriously. If he's trolling ( and I don't think he really is ), he's a lot better at it than you are... a significant number of folks ( who haven't been paying attention, mostly ) don't understand the anti-Real sentiment.
Me, I'll compare QuickTime for Windows and RealPlayer for OS X and decide based on that which company I'd rather support...
I know the popular opinion here is typically pro-Apple/iTMS/iPod but honestly I just don't see why we can be pro-reverse engineering on everything else and not this.
I don't think you're reading the general sentiment here correctly. We're pro-reverse engineering. Most folks are even OK with Real reverse-engineering Apple's FairPlay to get their own Real Rhapsody songs onto the iPod.
We aren't generally thrilled with Real's approach, though- we'd either like Real to basically sell non-DRM tunes ( which we understand they're not allowed to do ), or pull out all the stops to license Apple's tech from Apple so that it *is* supported. Sure it'd be hard for them, but they could do it- if they wanted to pay enough.
Mostly, folks here just think Real sucks for one reason or another, and that sort of dislike goes a long, long way.
If Real is going to support their ( and Apple's ) customers, they'd better get crackin' on the latest iPod firmware update. As far as Apple supporting Real's customers... another post covered that.
would take far less effort for the submitter to spell the fucking abbreviation out?
Except DS isn't an abbreviation, it's a product name. A lousy product name, but still... officially at least, it's not even an abbreviation.
It would have been good if the story had referenced at least "Nintendo", or said "Nintendo DS", but it did reference "Game Boy", and if you don't know what "Game Boy" is, uh, start filtering out stories with this topic. And turn in your geek card immediately.
For the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy story, though, I agree. H2G2 is just a stupid geek abbreviation that, frankly, doesn't even make sense.
Playing through Ridge Racers until the battery dies is probably not a good indication of how long the battery will last when you end up getting your PSP system and putting it to use for a variety of things.
Did they ask gamers? I'm pretty sure that playing a game like Ridge Racer during a multi-hour flight/ride/wait is the most likely usage scenario I can think of, at least for me... granted, over the course of a couple of hours I might decide to switch between Gran Turismo, Spiderman 2, and Dynasty Warriors, but... I'd like to be able to do so over the course of a couple of hours if need be. Having a second battery handy would be a pain.
Maybe I'll get an iBook instead. It's only 3 times the price, what the heck.;-)
The biggest problem I have with my Kodak digital camera (and even some of the nice Canon ones) is the large amount of redeye that is introduced into pictures
Red eye is all about the angle of reflection from the flash, which makes sense when you think about it- you're getting light reflected directly from the back of the eye, just change the angle of the light a little and that doesn't happen so much. The best method to reduce red-eye is to have a flash which is not so near the camera lens. Notice most of the higher-end SLR portrait cameras have a flash attachment that stands a couple of inches or so above the lens. So, you want an external flash of some kind. Which is somewhat at odds with the desire for a small camera, of course.
I have the same problem... but I'm pretty well resigned to using the red-eye reduction tool in iPhoto to deal with it. The positioning of the flash will play a small factor in my next camera purchase, which will be some time next year after prices drop and my bank account recovers from this christmas...
Instead of posting an ignorant-sounding question, you could always just click on the link and read the Fine article, with a much smaller amount of effort than is required to post a comment.
As an added bonus, fewer people would call you ignorant, and you might just become a little less ignorant in the process.
Not to go on about your ignorance far too much, but are you the kind of person who walks around the office asking for someone to define a word for you, rather than picking up a dictionary or typing "define:ignorant" into google? Damn that's annoying. Please stop.
Or, I guess your Windows equivalent, which is an shared volume automatically mounted by whatever method seems most reasonable.
Sorry, what's the interesting/difficult part of this question, other than you moved an engineering shop from Unix to Windows and are thus having issues?
I'd love a free copy of OffRoad Fury 3- I can't believe people would complain about free games! So you lost your saves? Hey, I understand, I'm still recovering from my three-year-old erasing my Simpson Road Rage save ( he was pretty upset, too ). I'd be heartbroken if my memory card was wiped clean, to think of the time spent getting my GTA3 game completed is scary, but... if someone walked up to me and offered me $25 to wipe it clean? I might just do it. I would at least consider it.
I could finish those games faster this time around... and if the game was fun to play the first time, it should be even more fun to play now that I know what I'm doing...
Bottom line for me is, if my save games were _really_ important to me, I'd have a gameshark or other save system with those all-important saves in a backup set somewhere. They may not be giving away copies of Viewtiful Joe, which of course is what they _should_ do, but hey, it's a nice gesture, I doubt they really had to do anything... though I do wonder how much you could get out of some dumb jury for "pain and suffering" caused by losing your PS2 game saves!
Slashdot Mirror
But check out this image from the after party... there's a whole little group of them, what's up with *that*?!?
Also, did anyone else find the list of coming attractions to be a bit underwhelming?
Actually, it's likely that it all seems a bit underwhelming because most of it are actually *real* products which, most likely, *will* ship. Which means it's actually all kinda boring because it's just updates of stuff we've already seen, or stuff we knew was comming.
I've seen at least one other article today with such analysis; things that once were "this will happen some day" are now either happening ( handheld media players ), or not being talked about at the show ( networked everything, except maybe the one networked stove ).
That's what the sucker gets for buying a Celeron and running XP on it.
Oh, and who saw PowerPC CPUs catching up in clock speed ? Probably some engineers at Apple, Motorola and IBM, I'm guessing...
So it appears there may be a reasonable supply of this stuff still around, and if they're "restructuring" maybe they'll make more before that supply runs out, but likely they were making _way_ more than demand called for, so... don't expect that $150 for 2500 feet price tag to drop when they do open their plant back up.
I don't know if "a lot" of those studios actually use this tape on a regular basis. "A lot" of those studios have had some really hard financial times over the past 10 years.
Being a computer geek who works with a HAM geek... yea, there are people who make computer geeks look, well, hardly geeky at all by comparison. HAM radio operators often fit in that group. What's really shocking is that anything is still actually manufactured in the U.S...
Perhaps they did some research into the marketability of an "HP blue" iPod and decided to call that off... after all, you can always buy the iPod Tattoo kit and print up your own blue umm... those are stickers, right? Yea, that's what I want to do, cover my iPod with stickers...
Well, if you get bored, you can always read slashdot...
Seriously, there are boring and/or bad jobs in just about any field, including CS ( to me, it's the "IT" side of things that sucks eggs ). Find a project or job category that you enjoy, and do that if you can. Of course, anything can get old- some people at some point in their lives just need to change careers. This has nothing to do with programming or any other specific job, it's a general thing. Even a fun gig, like game programming, can burn you out if it's too demanding or not rewarding in a key manner ( like, uh, pay ).
Me, I don't find that I have time to program ( much ) at home, but I do enjoy playing video games and editing home video movies in my free time, and I do manage to knock out the occasional little program, though it's difficult. I find I work 8 or 9 hours and I really just want to relax... but that'd probably be the case no matter what I did for those 8 or 9 hours of work.
If you RTFA, the most common response seems to be "that you exist" or "that people other than myself exist", or "that people other than myself have conciousness", something along those lines.
Not surprisingly, most folks comming up with this are psychologists, but some of the physicists hit on that one as well, which I found interesting.
Is your development project a sinking ship?
( actually, I don't have a hard deadline on my current project, so eventually, I do expect it to succeed, but I am a couple of months behind my goal, from posting on slashdot too often, so maybe I've already failed... )
Which reminds me, they left off number 6: team members reading slashdot instead of working...
Another day of this client making some _unnecessary_ and nit-picky change and I'll start adding an extra week to my estimates of when it'll be done.
So wait a minute: Lack of customer involvement is #2 on their list of problems, but Requirements Volatility is last... but getting the customer more involved in your case means making the Requirements Volatility worse...
What their ranking really says to me is that successful projects include the customer who knows what they want and thus sets the requirements early. In my own experience, the customer usually has only a vauge idea what they want, and a really good idea of what they don't want. What you need to be able to do is put off the _truly_ unnecessary changes to a _scheduled_ version 2, either doing a planned multi-pass prototype/design phase, or locking down agreed-to requirements sets and designs ( including UI and other specifics ) as the very first step.
Beware, though- what you as a programmer might see as a nit-picky change might really be a workflow-enhancing feature that prevents the customer from hating your app... people would much rather their tools do what they want, rather than having to learn to use them.
If your client is making time-consuming changes late in the project... well, the very fact that they can do that, or that small changes are time-consuming, should raise a major red flag. You're doomed- either the change being made isn't really minor, or you've blown #1 and picked a development methodology which doesn't allow for smallish changes to be quick changes.
To be clear, my beef isn't that Word still *uses* Carbon calls, there are plenty of good reasons to do so, but rather that it uses Carbon calls that only made sense under OS 9, meaning the code wasn't cleaned or re-written from previous versions so much as ported and added too.
Does Word in Office 2004 fix long file name issues ?!? I didn't think it did for some reason...
No, now is your chance to convince them to play games on consoles, so you don't have to get them their own computer ( allowing you to play Warcraft in peace ).
My son ( three years old ) gave me "SpongeBob SquarePants Battle for Bikini Bottom" for xmas. Fun game, and he's really good at it... for a three year old, at least. I think he forgot about noggin.com for a whole two days...
After doing "Hello World", I started with copying a "Camel" program from a magazine ( I belive the computer was a "Vector Graphics" ). I eventualy moved on to making a Pac-Man clone and an original space shooter on some fancy "Monroe 2000 color computer" thingie.
My son has it a lot easier. He toddled up to my iMac, I showed him a drawing program, got him started using the mouse to make brush strokes, and as soon as I realized he could use the mouse to click on files ( and use the keyboard to rename them to creative things like ",mk;oij;oi" ), I gave him his own locked-down account ( thank you OS X ) and Safari bookmarks to sesamestreet.org, noggin.com and nickjr.com. He still likes the paint program ( from the AppleWorks suite, it's MacPaint, remember that? ) and got into jigsaw puzzles, though the variety of flash games ( and painting apps ) on noggin.com and sesameworkshop.org probably define the computer for him.
I figure we'll wait for him to really read and write before I start him on Objective-C. ;-) He's three years old now, and I figure it'll be at most another 4 to six months before he's ready to tackle learning to type, at the rate he's identifying new words... the poor kid is only starting preschool, he should enjoy being a kid and beating the SpongeBob SquarePants video game before learning to program, I figure...
Seriously, though, I'd start a young programmer out on one of Java, C, or Objective-C. I'd look for a tutorial on doing simple animations, kids like that kind of thing. Just seeing what it takes to draw a simple shape, and then doing an event loop to move it around a window - that goes a long way in understanding how most programs work.
As far as an introduction to computers in general, for my son's generation, that'll be something of an organic experience. Give them an account set up so they can't destroy anything critical, give them a few good starting points ( like a paint program and a few good websites ) and they'll ask questions when they think you can help.
Yes, my three year old will log in to his own account if he finds someone else has left themselves logged in.
I'd be more impressed if it were Cocoa from the ground up, or at least never let you see clear signs of the Carbonized underpinnings - there's no reason in OS X you'd ever see those "Memory low" warning dialogs which our users have occasionally seen in Word v.X .
Of course, AppleWorks is the demo app for the Carbon libs... in any event, more competition and options in the office suite space would probably be a good thing.
HUH?!?
Open source, open firmware, schematics... but Windows-only software support?
I'm just going to assume that's misleading/incorrect somehow, it probably works like any USB storage class device, but... how odd that they list only Windows OS support...
Stop replying to the fucking troll.
I suppose I should stop responding to the f-ing AC as well??
Besides, Mr. Bill Garcia there is currently rated +5 insightful, folks with mod points seem to be taking his point of view seriously. If he's trolling ( and I don't think he really is ), he's a lot better at it than you are... a significant number of folks ( who haven't been paying attention, mostly ) don't understand the anti-Real sentiment.
Me, I'll compare QuickTime for Windows and RealPlayer for OS X and decide based on that which company I'd rather support...
I don't think you're reading the general sentiment here correctly. We're pro-reverse engineering. Most folks are even OK with Real reverse-engineering Apple's FairPlay to get their own Real Rhapsody songs onto the iPod.
We aren't generally thrilled with Real's approach, though- we'd either like Real to basically sell non-DRM tunes ( which we understand they're not allowed to do ), or pull out all the stops to license Apple's tech from Apple so that it *is* supported. Sure it'd be hard for them, but they could do it- if they wanted to pay enough.
Mostly, folks here just think Real sucks for one reason or another, and that sort of dislike goes a long, long way.
If Real is going to support their ( and Apple's ) customers, they'd better get crackin' on the latest iPod firmware update. As far as Apple supporting Real's customers... another post covered that.
Except DS isn't an abbreviation, it's a product name. A lousy product name, but still... officially at least, it's not even an abbreviation.
It would have been good if the story had referenced at least "Nintendo", or said "Nintendo DS", but it did reference "Game Boy", and if you don't know what "Game Boy" is, uh, start filtering out stories with this topic. And turn in your geek card immediately.
For the Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy story, though, I agree. H2G2 is just a stupid geek abbreviation that, frankly, doesn't even make sense.
Digital toy, as opposed to computer? The difference being??
Well, it's pretty clear IBM ain't buying Apple anyhow... though it's an amusing rumor.
Did they ask gamers? I'm pretty sure that playing a game like Ridge Racer during a multi-hour flight/ride/wait is the most likely usage scenario I can think of, at least for me... granted, over the course of a couple of hours I might decide to switch between Gran Turismo, Spiderman 2, and Dynasty Warriors, but... I'd like to be able to do so over the course of a couple of hours if need be. Having a second battery handy would be a pain.
Maybe I'll get an iBook instead. It's only 3 times the price, what the heck. ;-)
Red eye is all about the angle of reflection from the flash, which makes sense when you think about it- you're getting light reflected directly from the back of the eye, just change the angle of the light a little and that doesn't happen so much. The best method to reduce red-eye is to have a flash which is not so near the camera lens. Notice most of the higher-end SLR portrait cameras have a flash attachment that stands a couple of inches or so above the lens. So, you want an external flash of some kind. Which is somewhat at odds with the desire for a small camera, of course.
I have the same problem... but I'm pretty well resigned to using the red-eye reduction tool in iPhoto to deal with it. The positioning of the flash will play a small factor in my next camera purchase, which will be some time next year after prices drop and my bank account recovers from this christmas...
As an added bonus, fewer people would call you ignorant, and you might just become a little less ignorant in the process.
Not to go on about your ignorance far too much, but are you the kind of person who walks around the office asking for someone to define a word for you, rather than picking up a dictionary or typing "define:ignorant" into google? Damn that's annoying. Please stop.
Sorry, what's the interesting/difficult part of this question, other than you moved an engineering shop from Unix to Windows and are thus having issues?
I just had to ask...
I'd love a free copy of OffRoad Fury 3- I can't believe people would complain about free games! So you lost your saves? Hey, I understand, I'm still recovering from my three-year-old erasing my Simpson Road Rage save ( he was pretty upset, too ). I'd be heartbroken if my memory card was wiped clean, to think of the time spent getting my GTA3 game completed is scary, but... if someone walked up to me and offered me $25 to wipe it clean? I might just do it. I would at least consider it.
I could finish those games faster this time around... and if the game was fun to play the first time, it should be even more fun to play now that I know what I'm doing...
Bottom line for me is, if my save games were _really_ important to me, I'd have a gameshark or other save system with those all-important saves in a backup set somewhere. They may not be giving away copies of Viewtiful Joe, which of course is what they _should_ do, but hey, it's a nice gesture, I doubt they really had to do anything... though I do wonder how much you could get out of some dumb jury for "pain and suffering" caused by losing your PS2 game saves!