what's the point of 1600x1200 on a 15 inch screen? Your only going to run it at 800x600 unless you want to be straining your eyes all the time.
No, you increase the size of everything to compensate for tiny pixels. In Windows, set Display Properties > Scheme to "Windows Classic (extra large)", then configure each app to use larger fonts, or use Ctrl + mouse-wheel to zoom in Mozilla and some M$ apps.
So you get super-crisp text that isn't tiny, and you actually take advantage of your graphics card's support for huge resolutions.
You're still left with stupid apps that won't zoom (e.g. pixel sizing in MSIE) and tiny GIF images.
Unfortunately so many people leave their monitors at the original default resolution that people who use huge resolution are treated like fringe cases and ignored by stupid app developers.
Your graphics card can do huge resolutions, use them and bitch to the app developers that force pixel layout!
Re:I am the market - an open letter to the RIAA
on
The Future of the CD
·
· Score: 1
I more or less agree except for the last word of:
Give me FTP access to a full catalog (all labels in one place)of high quality, verified, DRM-free and properly tagged MP3s.
I want the uncompressed file from the musician's hard drive, (it's probably even higher resolution than the 16-bit 44.1 kHz of the CD). Provide the option of downloading in a compressed format, but having the "original" work of art is a big added value for some of us.
Also I'd happily pay a buck for many great songs. That's less than the $1.99 that "singles" (children, these were 7-inch 45 RPM vinyl records with two songs on them) cost at their demise.
It's sad that the music business has moved so far from the single mentality. Most artists are lucky to come up with more than one fantastic song on a record, yet labels hope to con you into buying 13 more tracks of crap to go with one or two gems. True fans will add the album to their collection, but because there's no "single" product any more, the artist and label get nothing from the vast majority of "That's a nice song, I'd like to have it" listeners. E.g. I hear the Norah Jones album is lightweight, but I'll give her a dollar for "Don't know why". Cheap song downloads bring that market back (and would once again provide a real singles chart instead of the payola corruption that is the Billboard Hot 100), but the music business seems to be terrified of the prospect.
Obscure european bands from the 70s and 80s do not produce revenues for the colluding recording industry oligopoly.
That's only because the idiots don't offer "Download any track ever recorded for $1" service. Don't those morons understand how cheap electronic distribution is? Selling back catalog downloads lets them get a bit of money and lets the poor aging struggling artists get their cut (yeah, I know it's tiny).
However, I would like a place where I could download very high quality, RAW.wav or Ogg Vorbis or MP3 files for, say, $0.50-$1.00 each. Maybe $5.00 for a whole album. From a fast server. That are not in some sort of DRM vault.
So do I, I've been waiting for this since Mosaic 1.0. The other posters are wrong. EMusic is not quite this service.
EMusic filse are only MP3s. If I'm paying, give me the original 192kHz 24-bit files right off the mastering hard drive.
(Don't tell me MP3 quality is "good enough" unless you tell me the sound system you're using.)
I just searched EMusic for all the back catalog tracks from medium-famous artists for which I've been searching for years. Nothing.
It seems like a good service, but it's not yet the same as paying for any track ever recorded, which is what some ethical music fans want.
Remember the Qwest ads:
"every movie ever made in every language, anytime" ?
There are two ways the evil content owners can do this and still get paid, and drive the adoption of broadband.
1. Bite the bullet and offer everything they have at low prices, as dwheeler suggests. Sure the stuff will show up on P2P networks, but they can offer reasonable prices, easy searching, guaranteed quality,... Imagine if every song at Amazon had a download this at full quality for.90 cents checkbox next to it. Sure the warez crowd will ignore this for P2P, but your average consumer and a few ethical people would be delighted.
2. A tax on 'net access. This is controversial, but if there's a tax on blank media because sometimes it's used for copying intellectual property/copyrighted works, then there can be an equivalent tax on Internet access. The faster your access, the more you pay. Then the content owners can get out of the way, let people freely trade 1s and 0's, and at the end of the month the artists get a slice of the money.
Either approach will align the interests of content owners and broadband providers.
Right now as John Gilmore's great "What's wrong with Copy Protection" article (toad.com seems down right now) says,
the tail of movie/music revenue (a few tens of billions) is wagging the dog of communications revenue (hundreds of billions). The dog should quit whining about consumer lack of interest, eat its own tail and be better off.
unless the big music labels open up their entire catalogues as $1 per track uncrippled mp3's (not in my lifetime, I think).
Better yet, $1 per track in any format I want. If I'm paying I want the original 44.1 16-bit 17MB.WAV file, or even higher 192kHz 32-bit quality off the studio hard drive. That's even more incentive for broadband. I've been waiting for such a service from the record labels since 1993. There's tons of money in their back catalogs if they just had the guts to offer it.
Solar Cells on the ROOF, not in the desert
on
The Future in Gear
·
· Score: 1
I love this sort of gee-whiz Popular Science stuff, but this typical comment
about solar
always irks me:
Imagine a barren, sunlit chunk of the Sahara the size of Sicily. Now imagine you've covered that area with solar cells. If you used your average off-the-shelf photovoltaic technology, which can convert 10 to 20 percent of the sun's energy into electrical output, you'd be able to supply the entire world's electrical needs.
If solar cells get cheap, you won't stick them in the middle of the desert, you'll stick them on the roof! Presumably if the sun is beating down enough to power the solar cells, it's frying your building, so you run the air conditioner harder to cool the place, consuming even more electricity, generating even more heat. So turn some of that energy into electricity instead of heat. It's not like there's anything useful on the roof.
I've heard the USA needs 75 square miles of PV cells for its energy needs.
Does anyone know how many square miles of roofs there are on top of Walmarts, Costcos, hospitals, prisons, and other huge flat structures in the USA in the Sun belt?
I don't have air conditioning and when it's really hot I dream of erecting an external screen or window blind covered in solar cells to kill two birds with one stone.
Coders could easily use dhtml and animated gifs to create effective animations on their page, however instead they use bloated swf files that need state of the art pc's just to run simple animations.
Don't blame the bloat on the file format. SWF files are neck-and-neck with large animated GIFs since they're vector-based and use outline fonts; and a simple drop-down menu in Flash is very compact code compared with roll-over GIFs in DHTML layers. I've built both. If you're Microsoft and you can cram your creative designer's chosen font into the OS, then DHTML *text* layers are extremely compact, but everyone else trying to use a corporate font should find SWFs smaller.
Macromedia's own global nav movie with three fonts and a text box is all of 12.2 kB
(the static GIF version may be smaller but has no rollovers).
BTW, most users never realize such "quiet" animations are Flash, it's the James Bond-movie-trailer-on-acid intros that you can only do in Flash that give it the Flashy reputation.
Hey, use whatever works for you;
Macromedia Dreamweaver is a fine tool for developing cross-browser DHTML animations,
as is vim.
a lot of Flash code is part of the FreeHand and Director code base too.... [Adobe lawsuit]
No. The Flash Player (the "plug-in") is (relatively) lean and mean, I doubt it shares any code with those authoring tools. The Flash authoring tool is a big application that runs on Mac and Win** with, in the new MX version, a common User Interface.
** How many Linux/UNIX users would pay how much $$$ for the authoring tool? I doubt there's any financial incentive to develop UNIX versions of the authoring tools.
$300B in broadband? = make content "free"!
on
Broadband Obstacles
·
· Score: 1
Robert Crandall estimated that if broadband use were universal, it could be worth as much as $300 billion a year to the U.S. economy.
Note how this is 10x bigger than records and movie business combined.
As people have pointed out, the tail of RIAA and MPAA is wagging the dog of access.
If broadband access included a 5% royalty that went to content providers (similar to the taxes on blank tapes and CD-R's), then content providers would make more money than they do now, the need for copy protection would go away, and the US economy would be better off.
The more consumers engage in content acquisition and trading, the more they'll want faster access, so the more royalties they'll pay.
(Sure you could screw the system by paying for a month of broadband, running a CD burner 24x7, then cancelling the service, but few would.)
Companies would still produce expensive record and video productions, but they'd have to wait for the audience figures to see how much of the 5% royalty they get back.
Is any elected representative proposing this?
It seems obvious to me.
M$oft marketed a PC phone a few years ago, what happened?
PC's ought to be the digital hub for DVD, HDTV, personal video recorder, and digital music. But the content companies are terrified of unencrypted signals traveling over Firewire.
PC's could serve as a digital hub for all the devices in a home that you want to interconnect. I want to hook my doorbell up to the PC so I have a log of who's ringing and know whether UPS and FedEx actually attempted delivery by 10:30am. No cable, and no standard. M$oft has had a wired house on their campus for two years now. What happened? (Is X10 signalling over power lines the answer?)
I hope the situation changes. People won't buy $2000 PC's unless they DO MORE than a $600 word processing/Internet PC.
Of course it's not as cute as the last model.
Sony is just implementing the enhanced hounds from William Gibson's classic Count Zero.
The first of Rudy's augmented dogs picked them up
fifteen minutes after they started out again....
A lean gray hound regarded them from a high clay bank at a turning in the road, its narrow head sheathed and blindered in a black hood studded with sensors. It panted, tongue lolling, and slowly swung its head from side to side.
Not so revolutionary now, but back in 1986, like everything else in the Neuromancer/Count Zero/Mona Lisa Overdrive series, it was mind-blowing.
Gibson bibliography
Many apps seem to use absolute pixels for at least their UI if not the rest of their dimensions.
Yes, pixel sizing on the web is already hell.
I use a Sony GDM-500R 21-inch monitor with a 1856x1392 desktop. I use Windows Classic (Large) appearance to make much of the UI larger, I increase the font in all my applications, and use Mozilla's Ctrl-mousewheel to zoom windows. Everything's groovy and productive.
Then some dumb Web designer specifies a 9-pixel font size that looks fine to him because he's too clueless to increase his desktop beyond 1024x768. He's even got 640x480 and 800x600 outlines on his desktop background, so he thinks he's being accessible because the page still looks good when he sizes the browser small.
But nine pixels is only 8/100 of an inch on my screen! It's damn well invisible.
I could specify my own CSS to override his pixel settings, but I resent feeling disabled just because I actually used my video card's hi-res mode.
The HTML to do propotional sizing while specifying font sizes is a little tricky, you have to do browser-dependent stylesheets. CNN and Macromedia do it, but it's apparently beyond the average Webmaster.
Bigger monitors are great, but until Web designers wise up, realize that increasing dpi without increasing monitor dimensions just leads to incompatibility and eyestrain. I guess that's why RAMDAC progress has stalled at 350MHz and 2048x1536. The sweet spot for a CRT is about 1600x1200 on a 19-inch GDM-F400 (my other monitor).
At least on a CRT you can drop back to a lower resolution. An LCD is going to look bad scaling 1024x768 up to fit its pixels. But I've not been able to see the Samsung SyncMaster 240T (1920 x 1200, 24 inches) or Viewsonic VP230mb (1600x1200, 23 inches) in person to compare. No computer store carries these things!
--
You can never have too many inches or too many pixels.
I heard was that X was created because Sun wouldn't license NeWS to any other workstation vendors!
Not so. I was there, though the memories are getting fuzzy. Sun was aggressively trying to license NeWS and promote it as an "open" standard (it implemented most of the Adobe Red book PostScript definition, hence Open). Sun had licensed the Network File System with huge success, with every other UNIX vendor adopting it, and Sun (somewhat naively in retrospect) thought the world would likewise adopt the next brilliant technical invention provided to them.
Remember at the time Windows 1.0 had tiled windows, and Macs were still monochrome. NeWS was a resolution-independent window system with arbitrarily-shaped canvases that you dynamically reprogrammed by defining new PostScript dictionary elements and then sending your own primitives over the wire!! It was far too advanced for people to grok. However the competition did not want yet another part of their technology coming from Sun, so the so-called Hamilton group (named after a street in Palo Alto) cast around for an alternative and settled on X which was developed primarily at MIT. Although a few companies did license NeWS (SCO and SGI demo'd it, a company implemented it for OS/2, etc.), every other workstation vendor declaring X a standard pretty much killed NeWS. (There were other factors, mentioned in the fine technical summary.)
NeWS might not have taken over the world anyway. James Gosling, Jerry Farrell, Owen Densmore, and others did amazing work turning stacks of PostScript dictionaries into an object-oriented UI class system (that later turned into the fine TNT toolkit), but PostScript is still an odd language in which to program a UI. I venture that the realization that language is crucial led Gosling on the path to Java.
Elsewhere, maggard says NeWS is released ~1985. I'm looking at the NeWS 1.0 release notes what I rote dated 10 July 1987. James Gosling joined Sun from the Andrew project and had been working on project SunDew for a while, and that became NeWS.
Cheers from Sun's Programming Environments documentation writer at the time. --
I want a nearly noiseless machine to use while listening to music at night (on a music system with a vanishingly low noise floor).
PC's seem to be getting noisier.
My 2-year old PIII 500MHz on which I'm typing is about three times noisier than my 5-year old Pentium 133MHz. Both the fans and IBM SCSI drive are both much noisier than their older counterparts. Even laptops these days are really noisy.
Midrange notebook components can't generate a lot of heat, so putting them in a a slightly larger PC case than a notebook should make a fan unnecessary. And I bet drive makers would make quieter drives if anyone asked.
The HP e-PC sounds like it might be quiet, but the HP Web site doesn't indicate if it has a fan or not.
And I've never seen noise measurements in a computer review.
We need a visionary PC manufacturer and customers for it.
Apple has the right idea with the cube,
I wish a PC maker would follow them.
--
Agreed, but it's also a clicking device. What's the desired action when you point and click?
There are two that cover 95% of usage: make a selection, and act on the current area. Since the action may be ambiguous, a context menu pop-up appears at the mouse position.
Hence multiple mouse buttons.
Seems pretty obvious to me, and way better than Apple's misguided <Ctrl>+click for the context menu.
(Often programs adds a third: extend the current selection.)
Many mouse software packages let you add additional actions, my favorite is: paste at the current location. --
The Flash Player is a browser plug-in or ActiveX control, not a program. Add/Remove Programs doesn't apply to those. I suspect the browser makers have more control over how easy it is to remove plug-ins and ActiveX controls than the plug-in. I guess the Flash player could be made into a program with an installer (like Adobe Acrobat?), but then the download would be larger and there's more to go wrong.
I wasn't aware that Macromedia didn't have installation instructions in the past.
I'm sorry for my tone.
But right now it's not that hard. --
It's far easier to control software that can contact the mothership through the OS it requires than it is to control hardware that can run any OS.
Agreed. That's why I predict...
The next Microsoft O.S.'s will not just do driver code signing, but will refuse to load drivers that have not been signed by an "approved" developer.
Doing this both reduces the average user's ability to load drivers that don't implement copy protection-schemes, and
it's the only way I can see Microsoft defeating "debugging" audio and video drivers that intercept the unencrypted data streams on the way to the speakers and display and write them as standard.WAV and.AVI file.
Microsoft will in part be forced to do this by the big media companies, who will not allow computers to play next-generation media formats (HD-DVD, audio+video over FireWire, SDMI, etc.) without better assurance that they can't be hacked.
Either Intel and M$oft give up on the idea of the PC being a platform for personal video recorder, audio library, home entertainment portal, etc.
or they knuckle under and put in whatever hardwre and O.S. restrictions the bit media companies dictate.
(As an aside, Intel and Microsoft have failed so badly to move the PC out of the home office and into the home entertainment center rôle that they may well abandon the effort to specialized, and even more closed, devices such as Xbox, WebTV, etc.)
This will just be a further reason to use alternatives such as Linux, but additional strengthening of laws like the DMCA will turn those who even mention hacks around the limitations into international criminals, let alone those who develop them.
The whole battle over DVD and DeCSS is just a warm-up:-(
Check back in a 6 months and see how much of this comes true. --
Not to mention I have yet to see a Flash page with a static image - they're always animating with a rotating logo or some other action.
Flash is more (less) than noisy multimedia,
and more (less) than 007-movie-intro-on-drugs animations.
Macromedia's own site uses Flash for the navigation at the top of most pages on their site, and that doesn't do any animation except on rollover.
As well as being the only viable cross-platform cross-browser vector solution right now,
if you want to use your own font and you don't want the overhead of lots of GIF's, Flash is the only cross-platform cross-browser font solution. AFAIK the 3.x browser approaches for embedded fonts in Web pages never standardized. Microsoft can ram a new font like Verdana or Trebuchet into the operating system, but other sites have to use Flash.
(I acknowledge the argument that sites can bloody well communicate whatever they have to say in serif, sans serif, and fixed, but designers would disagree.)
For another subtle, silent, non-animating use of Flash, check out webmonkey's front page. --
If I hit one of these Flash sites I
get a popup telling me I need a plugin
Macromedia's own site detects that you don't have Flash (using a mixture of Apache server-side and client-side detection),
and serves you a GIF version of the content.
They also provide a link on their help page that sets a cookie to override, in the unlikely case that the detection doesn't work.
If it doesn't work for you, let Macromedia know the details (contact link on their help page) --
Most of the comments on here make no sense. Or course commercial search engines won't use this technology unless forced to. Of course there will be myriad ways around this technology, crackers are ingenious.
It's just a tool that (among other uses) helps copyright holders figure out "Who might be ripping me off?". Why is this so upsetting?
When I contact my ISP, I see
--- Storing pirated software on our system is illegal and also against our acceptable use policy.
--- Copyrighted audio files (i.e. MP3's) fall under the above policy; if you store them in a public directory your access will be removed.
Sounds as if my ISP and Eric Clapton are in agreement, Cantametrix just gives them another tool to help enforce this. The many posts that are essentially "Nyaaah, nyaah, can't catch me" just make their authors sound like amoral badly-raised children. At least put "Disclaimer: I think copyrights should have no legal basis" at the start of them. --
All five of the major record companies have started aggressive ramps of online distribution
No. A few songs in some semi-proprietary limited format hooked up to some untried payment scheme does not count as an aggessive ramp-up. I should be able to go to a record company site and buy say 5 tracks for $10 on my credit card in any format I want (probably Windows.WAV uncompressed) from their *entire* back catalog -- every song, every out-take, every B-side, everything. I would gladly pay for this, I've been trying to do so long before Napster or MP3 existed, and AFAIK no record company has implemented it. Right now I have a much better chance of getting the same 5 songs easily, freely, and illegally off Napster. The record companies still need to get a clue. --
Gaming always has, and probably always will be somewhat about being the first person to get the "next cool thing."
That's pretty limiting.
I'm having a blast right now playing Driver for the Playstation. 2 years off the cutting edge.
My friend's 7- and 10-year old daughters were completely unimpressed with their new Nintendo 64 and latest "Star Wars" games. I managed to find a shop with a dusty old "Super Mario 64" cartridge in the back for sale, and the depth and quality of Shigeru Miyamoto's world gobsmacked them ("blew them away"). 4 years off the cutting edge.
We have a BurgerTime arcade machine at work, it's extremely tense and challenging to complete more than three levels, the play design is brilliant. 18 years off the cutting edge.
If you don't play videogames obsessively, gaming should much more be about the classic games of all time than the latest hype. But hey, to each his or her own.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you increase the size of everything to compensate for tiny pixels. In Windows, set Display Properties > Scheme to "Windows Classic (extra large)", then configure each app to use larger fonts, or use Ctrl + mouse-wheel to zoom in Mozilla and some M$ apps.
So you get super-crisp text that isn't tiny, and you actually take advantage of your graphics card's support for huge resolutions.
You're still left with stupid apps that won't zoom (e.g. pixel sizing in MSIE) and tiny GIF images.
Unfortunately so many people leave their monitors at the original default resolution that people who use huge resolution are treated like fringe cases and ignored by stupid app developers.
Your graphics card can do huge resolutions, use them and bitch to the app developers that force pixel layout!
I want the uncompressed file from the musician's hard drive, (it's probably even higher resolution than the 16-bit 44.1 kHz of the CD). Provide the option of downloading in a compressed format, but having the "original" work of art is a big added value for some of us.
Also I'd happily pay a buck for many great songs. That's less than the $1.99 that "singles" (children, these were 7-inch 45 RPM vinyl records with two songs on them) cost at their demise.
It's sad that the music business has moved so far from the single mentality. Most artists are lucky to come up with more than one fantastic song on a record, yet labels hope to con you into buying 13 more tracks of crap to go with one or two gems. True fans will add the album to their collection, but because there's no "single" product any more, the artist and label get nothing from the vast majority of "That's a nice song, I'd like to have it" listeners. E.g. I hear the Norah Jones album is lightweight, but I'll give her a dollar for "Don't know why". Cheap song downloads bring that market back (and would once again provide a real singles chart instead of the payola corruption that is the Billboard Hot 100), but the music business seems to be terrified of the prospect.
That's only because the idiots don't offer "Download any track ever recorded for $1" service. Don't those morons understand how cheap electronic distribution is? Selling back catalog downloads lets them get a bit of money and lets the poor aging struggling artists get their cut (yeah, I know it's tiny).
So do I, I've been waiting for this since Mosaic 1.0. The other posters are wrong. EMusic is not quite this service.
It seems like a good service, but it's not yet the same as paying for any track ever recorded, which is what some ethical music fans want.
Remember the Qwest ads: "every movie ever made in every language, anytime" ?
There are two ways the evil content owners can do this and still get paid, and drive the adoption of broadband.
1. Bite the bullet and offer everything they have at low prices, as dwheeler suggests. Sure the stuff will show up on P2P networks, but they can offer reasonable prices, easy searching, guaranteed quality, ... Imagine if every song at Amazon had a download this at full quality for .90 cents checkbox next to it. Sure the warez crowd will ignore this for P2P, but your average consumer and a few ethical people would be delighted.
2. A tax on 'net access. This is controversial, but if there's a tax on blank media because sometimes it's used for copying intellectual property/copyrighted works, then there can be an equivalent tax on Internet access. The faster your access, the more you pay. Then the content owners can get out of the way, let people freely trade 1s and 0's, and at the end of the month the artists get a slice of the money.
Either approach will align the interests of content owners and broadband providers.
Right now as John Gilmore's great "What's wrong with Copy Protection" article (toad.com seems down right now) says, the tail of movie/music revenue (a few tens of billions) is wagging the dog of communications revenue (hundreds of billions). The dog should quit whining about consumer lack of interest, eat its own tail and be better off.
Better yet, $1 per track in any format I want. If I'm paying I want the original 44.1 16-bit 17MB .WAV file, or even higher 192kHz 32-bit quality off the studio hard drive. That's even more incentive for broadband. I've been waiting for such a service from the record labels since 1993. There's tons of money in their back catalogs if they just had the guts to offer it.
I love this sort of gee-whiz Popular Science stuff, but this typical comment about solar always irks me:
If solar cells get cheap, you won't stick them in the middle of the desert, you'll stick them on the roof! Presumably if the sun is beating down enough to power the solar cells, it's frying your building, so you run the air conditioner harder to cool the place, consuming even more electricity, generating even more heat. So turn some of that energy into electricity instead of heat. It's not like there's anything useful on the roof.
I've heard the USA needs 75 square miles of PV cells for its energy needs. Does anyone know how many square miles of roofs there are on top of Walmarts, Costcos, hospitals, prisons, and other huge flat structures in the USA in the Sun belt?
I don't have air conditioning and when it's really hot I dream of erecting an external screen or window blind covered in solar cells to kill two birds with one stone.
Don't blame the bloat on the file format. SWF files are neck-and-neck with large animated GIFs since they're vector-based and use outline fonts; and a simple drop-down menu in Flash is very compact code compared with roll-over GIFs in DHTML layers. I've built both. If you're Microsoft and you can cram your creative designer's chosen font into the OS, then DHTML *text* layers are extremely compact, but everyone else trying to use a corporate font should find SWFs smaller.
Macromedia's own global nav movie with three fonts and a text box is all of 12.2 kB (the static GIF version may be smaller but has no rollovers). BTW, most users never realize such "quiet" animations are Flash, it's the James Bond-movie-trailer-on-acid intros that you can only do in Flash that give it the Flashy reputation.
Hey, use whatever works for you; Macromedia Dreamweaver is a fine tool for developing cross-browser DHTML animations, as is vim.
No. The Flash Player (the "plug-in") is (relatively) lean and mean, I doubt it shares any code with those authoring tools. The Flash authoring tool is a big application that runs on Mac and Win** with, in the new MX version, a common User Interface.
** How many Linux/UNIX users would pay how much $$$ for the authoring tool? I doubt there's any financial incentive to develop UNIX versions of the authoring tools.
Note how this is 10x bigger than records and movie business combined. As people have pointed out, the tail of RIAA and MPAA is wagging the dog of access.
If broadband access included a 5% royalty that went to content providers (similar to the taxes on blank tapes and CD-R's), then content providers would make more money than they do now, the need for copy protection would go away, and the US economy would be better off.
The more consumers engage in content acquisition and trading, the more they'll want faster access, so the more royalties they'll pay. (Sure you could screw the system by paying for a month of broadband, running a CD burner 24x7, then cancelling the service, but few would.)
Companies would still produce expensive record and video productions, but they'd have to wait for the audience figures to see how much of the 5% royalty they get back.
Is any elected representative proposing this? It seems obvious to me.
I think you mean "no holds barred", as in free-form wrestling. "No holes barred" sounds like a tag line from a porno movie.
Wintel has failed to push any convergence.
M$oft marketed a PC phone a few years ago, what happened?
PC's ought to be the digital hub for DVD, HDTV, personal video recorder, and digital music. But the content companies are terrified of unencrypted signals traveling over Firewire.
PC's could serve as a digital hub for all the devices in a home that you want to interconnect. I want to hook my doorbell up to the PC so I have a log of who's ringing and know whether UPS and FedEx actually attempted delivery by 10:30am. No cable, and no standard. M$oft has had a wired house on their campus for two years now. What happened? (Is X10 signalling over power lines the answer?)
I hope the situation changes. People won't buy $2000 PC's unless they DO MORE than a $600 word processing/Internet PC.
Gibson bibliography
Yes, pixel sizing on the web is already hell.
I use a Sony GDM-500R 21-inch monitor with a 1856x1392 desktop. I use Windows Classic (Large) appearance to make much of the UI larger, I increase the font in all my applications, and use Mozilla's Ctrl-mousewheel to zoom windows. Everything's groovy and productive.
Then some dumb Web designer specifies a 9-pixel font size that looks fine to him because he's too clueless to increase his desktop beyond 1024x768. He's even got 640x480 and 800x600 outlines on his desktop background, so he thinks he's being accessible because the page still looks good when he sizes the browser small.
But nine pixels is only 8/100 of an inch on my screen! It's damn well invisible. I could specify my own CSS to override his pixel settings, but I resent feeling disabled just because I actually used my video card's hi-res mode. The HTML to do propotional sizing while specifying font sizes is a little tricky, you have to do browser-dependent stylesheets. CNN and Macromedia do it, but it's apparently beyond the average Webmaster.
Bigger monitors are great, but until Web designers wise up, realize that increasing dpi without increasing monitor dimensions just leads to incompatibility and eyestrain. I guess that's why RAMDAC progress has stalled at 350MHz and 2048x1536. The sweet spot for a CRT is about 1600x1200 on a 19-inch GDM-F400 (my other monitor).
At least on a CRT you can drop back to a lower resolution. An LCD is going to look bad scaling 1024x768 up to fit its pixels. But I've not been able to see the Samsung SyncMaster 240T (1920 x 1200, 24 inches) or Viewsonic VP230mb (1600x1200, 23 inches) in person to compare. No computer store carries these things!
--You can never have too many inches or too many pixels.
Not so. I was there, though the memories are getting fuzzy. Sun was aggressively trying to license NeWS and promote it as an "open" standard (it implemented most of the Adobe Red book PostScript definition, hence Open). Sun had licensed the Network File System with huge success, with every other UNIX vendor adopting it, and Sun (somewhat naively in retrospect) thought the world would likewise adopt the next brilliant technical invention provided to them.
Remember at the time Windows 1.0 had tiled windows, and Macs were still monochrome. NeWS was a resolution-independent window system with arbitrarily-shaped canvases that you dynamically reprogrammed by defining new PostScript dictionary elements and then sending your own primitives over the wire!! It was far too advanced for people to grok. However the competition did not want yet another part of their technology coming from Sun, so the so-called Hamilton group (named after a street in Palo Alto) cast around for an alternative and settled on X which was developed primarily at MIT. Although a few companies did license NeWS (SCO and SGI demo'd it, a company implemented it for OS/2, etc.), every other workstation vendor declaring X a standard pretty much killed NeWS. (There were other factors, mentioned in the fine technical summary.)
NeWS might not have taken over the world anyway. James Gosling, Jerry Farrell, Owen Densmore, and others did amazing work turning stacks of PostScript dictionaries into an object-oriented UI class system (that later turned into the fine TNT toolkit), but PostScript is still an odd language in which to program a UI. I venture that the realization that language is crucial led Gosling on the path to Java.
Elsewhere, maggard says NeWS is released ~1985. I'm looking at the NeWS 1.0 release notes what I rote dated 10 July 1987. James Gosling joined Sun from the Andrew project and had been working on project SunDew for a while, and that became NeWS.
Cheers from Sun's Programming Environments documentation writer at the time.
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PC's seem to be getting noisier. My 2-year old PIII 500MHz on which I'm typing is about three times noisier than my 5-year old Pentium 133MHz. Both the fans and IBM SCSI drive are both much noisier than their older counterparts. Even laptops these days are really noisy.
Midrange notebook components can't generate a lot of heat, so putting them in a a slightly larger PC case than a notebook should make a fan unnecessary. And I bet drive makers would make quieter drives if anyone asked.
The HP e-PC sounds like it might be quiet, but the HP Web site doesn't indicate if it has a fan or not. And I've never seen noise measurements in a computer review.
We need a visionary PC manufacturer and customers for it. Apple has the right idea with the cube, I wish a PC maker would follow them.
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(Often programs adds a third: extend the current selection.) Many mouse software packages let you add additional actions, my favorite is: paste at the current location.
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I wasn't aware that Macromedia didn't have installation instructions in the past. I'm sorry for my tone. But right now it's not that hard.
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Agreed. That's why I predict...
The next Microsoft O.S.'s will not just do driver code signing, but will refuse to load drivers that have not been signed by an "approved" developer.
Doing this both reduces the average user's ability to load drivers that don't implement copy protection-schemes, and it's the only way I can see Microsoft defeating "debugging" audio and video drivers that intercept the unencrypted data streams on the way to the speakers and display and write them as standard .WAV and .AVI file.
Microsoft will in part be forced to do this by the big media companies, who will not allow computers to play next-generation media formats (HD-DVD, audio+video over FireWire, SDMI, etc.) without better assurance that they can't be hacked. Either Intel and M$oft give up on the idea of the PC being a platform for personal video recorder, audio library, home entertainment portal, etc. or they knuckle under and put in whatever hardwre and O.S. restrictions the bit media companies dictate. (As an aside, Intel and Microsoft have failed so badly to move the PC out of the home office and into the home entertainment center rôle that they may well abandon the effort to specialized, and even more closed, devices such as Xbox, WebTV, etc.)
This will just be a further reason to use alternatives such as Linux, but additional strengthening of laws like the DMCA will turn those who even mention hacks around the limitations into international criminals, let alone those who develop them.
The whole battle over DVD and DeCSS is just a warm-up :-(
Check back in a 6 months and see how much of this comes true.
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Flash is more (less) than noisy multimedia, and more (less) than 007-movie-intro-on-drugs animations. Macromedia's own site uses Flash for the navigation at the top of most pages on their site, and that doesn't do any animation except on rollover.
As well as being the only viable cross-platform cross-browser vector solution right now, if you want to use your own font and you don't want the overhead of lots of GIF's, Flash is the only cross-platform cross-browser font solution. AFAIK the 3.x browser approaches for embedded fonts in Web pages never standardized. Microsoft can ram a new font like Verdana or Trebuchet into the operating system, but other sites have to use Flash.
(I acknowledge the argument that sites can bloody well communicate whatever they have to say in serif, sans serif, and fixed, but designers would disagree.)
For another subtle, silent, non-animating use of Flash, check out webmonkey's front page.
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People, you're not even trying.t er nates/ lists an uninstaller for the Macromedia Shockwave Player.
http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/al
The support for the Flash player links to http://www.shockwave.com/help/faq_swplayer.html which provides instructions to remove the Flash player.
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If it doesn't work for you, let Macromedia know the details (contact link on their help page)
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It's just a tool that (among other uses) helps copyright holders figure out "Who might be ripping me off?". Why is this so upsetting?
When I contact my ISP, I see
--- Storing pirated software on our system is illegal and also against our acceptable use policy.
--- Copyrighted audio files (i.e. MP3's) fall under the above policy; if you store them in a public directory your access will be removed.
Sounds as if my ISP and Eric Clapton are in agreement, Cantametrix just gives them another tool to help enforce this. The many posts that are essentially "Nyaaah, nyaah, can't catch me" just make their authors sound like amoral badly-raised children. At least put "Disclaimer: I think copyrights should have no legal basis" at the start of them.
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No. A few songs in some semi-proprietary limited format hooked up to some untried payment scheme does not count as an aggessive ramp-up. I should be able to go to a record company site and buy say 5 tracks for $10 on my credit card in any format I want (probably Windows .WAV uncompressed) from their *entire* back catalog -- every song, every out-take, every B-side, everything. I would gladly pay for this, I've been trying to do so long before Napster or MP3 existed, and AFAIK no record company has implemented it. Right now I have a much better chance of getting the same 5 songs easily, freely, and illegally off Napster. The record companies still need to get a clue.
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- I'm having a blast right now playing Driver for the Playstation. 2 years off the cutting edge.
- My friend's 7- and 10-year old daughters were completely unimpressed with their new Nintendo 64 and latest "Star Wars" games. I managed to find a shop with a dusty old "Super Mario 64" cartridge in the back for sale, and the depth and quality of Shigeru Miyamoto's world gobsmacked them ("blew them away"). 4 years off the cutting edge.
- We have a BurgerTime arcade machine at work, it's extremely tense and challenging to complete more than three levels, the play design is brilliant. 18 years off the cutting edge.
If you don't play videogames obsessively, gaming should much more be about the classic games of all time than the latest hype. But hey, to each his or her own.