[...] because they are part of products that will never come bundled (read free) with Vista due to legal intervention.
LoL. Funny to see the notion in such context.
First of all, exclusion of features due to legal intervention dwarfed by M$'s own partner chain. You know, M$ always boasts that it is provider of platform - with rest of industry to filling the blanks. Just open your "Programs" menu and count number of columns you already have there.
Second. Legal interventions occurred when M$ tried to screw up something. Like in case of WMP or J++/Java Foundation Library. Both now under legal control. Not because they are illegal - but because M$ tried to cripple competitive offers using them.
Third. Nothing prevents M$ releasing such features as free downloads. After all (Apple analogy of free Mac OS X with every computer sold) it's only Windows users who can take advantage of the software. And M$ already earned money by mean of Windows sale. Somehow, M$ doesn't look to be very altruistic, forcing people often to pay e.g. for Windows license twice.
Also, after using both Windows and Mac OS X for some years, I find offensive even the hint that "300 features" are somehow related to Vista. Simplest way is to compare: iTunes to WPM, Mail.App to Outlook Express, iPhoto to , iDVD to MovieMaker, iChatAV to MSN Messenger/NetMeeting, etc. When Apple improves something, they really improve something - based on customer feedback. I do not hold my breath to Vista updates: Windows never ever had an analogue of Mac OS X famous button "Send feedback to Apple". They can't improved Vista - because like hell they know what needs to be improved.
I'm pretty much given up on explaining that to M$ofties: people who have never ever stepped outside of M$ platform doomed to be biased. And doomed to believe that M$ is best of the best. LoL. Like the people can even compare: they have seen competition only as screen-shots on tabloids with comments from Dvorak. LoL.
Apple delayed 10.5 to make sure it will not flop as Vista did. And obviously to fix in 10.5 all problems reported in Vista(!).
Do not forget, Mac fanboys (like me) are long-term fans.
Delays were always OK.
Paying double for new quickly delivered feature - OK too.
Poorly implemented features - *NOT OK*.
[...] considering that less than 30% of the game playing market is under 18.
In part, statement was made to be slightly inflammatory.
I would correct you quote for your: "considering that more than 90% of the gamers got their first console under 18."
The bunch of never growing up people (actually I belong by myself too) doesn't really change it.
What is pretty sad image: guy at 35 playing games for 15+ years, going out rarely and living with parents. Bit stereotypical generalization - yet valid. I can hardly classify such people as adults. It's OK to group them with teenagers, because their habits and manners are of teenagers.
[...] there is proof that artist do not need the record labels to make money [...]
That's pretty big misunderstanding of "how it works" I'd say.
There is still somebody needed to make artist known to public.
Record labels score the contract with artists not because of, say, recording equipment - but mainly by providing access to high profile promotion channels. It's really all connected. Insiders often refer to the system as "mafia" and "cover-up" making sure that you can access particular media only by signing exclusive deals with particular studios. Otherwise whatever artist does - it will not be accepted.
I have a lot of trouble believing that a mediocre game library and a magical remote control are convincing non-gamers to spend several hundred dollars on games, who weren't previously swayed by the hugely broad libraries and discounted prices of the PS2 and Gameboy.
Well, there is a difference between "games" and "entertainment". Wii is entertainment - accessible to anybody. At $250 with included WiiSports it is already a good deal for most of not-cash-constrained casual demographic. Say, 5 visits to local bowling at $50 each - that already makes it a "great deal". Because Wii is like bowling in your own house. (Though most gaming teenagers do have problems understanding the "going out" thing. It's pure adult thing.)
It's not about "games" - you teenagers used to play for 8+ hours per day. It's about "entertainment" - something to break a daily routine.
to spend several hundred dollars on games
Wii sells right now solely as entertainment machine. Because there is only a handful of real "games" for it - what is absolutely irrelevant to casual demographics which is fine with WiiSports. As well as it was reported numerous times that Wii has quite low attachment rate. Casuals do not buy games - WiiSports for 80% of people is more than enough.
P.S. Disclaimer: Wii owner. Enjoying Zelda, WiiSports, Excite Truck and MySims. Probably will take a look a Metroid when it hits Europe next week.
Are there any "Flame of the " awards here on Slashdot?
P.S. I really feel that government has to force Windows appear on bills as separate item, so that people (1) will see that they pay extra and (2) will see how much they really are paying for Windows.
[...] it's that last 10% where the devils hide. So that last 10% never quite makes it into the FOSS solution [...]
I'd rather say it is particular to some FLOSS projects. But it is not systematic.
OOo is good example where you have huge corporate presence (most of the work is done by Sun full timers) and more or less complete disconnect from users and their needs.
But then you have something like e.g. Apache or Subversion or X.Org or KDE where users actually have a say - and project progress smoothly with only few not-show-stopper bumps here and there.
Many FLOSS are 100% ready and are in heavy use already. But OOo is simply not one of them. OOo got overhyped since it can *MIRACLE* read binary M$Office documents.
I personally have quite high expectation of KOffice which mostly works for me even right now. It is easy to start using KOffice, it is easy to start developing for KOffice. And KDE forums unlike OOo or GNOME forums are not overflowing with zealots - but rather pragmatical people - what definitely helps to find a solution for a problem one might have. If KDE 4.0/Qt4 would allow it to run on Windows, here you would have a real M$Office killer. For good.
2) Installed updates when I turned my computer on, not off - if I'm turning it off, then any second I'm going to be slinging the machine in my backpack, and jumping on my motorbike. Last I heard, Microsoft didn't possess the magical mystical powers required to ensure a hard drive works perfectly in these conditions.
This is a problem which bites now and then many notebook users in company where I work.
One of the last updates had BSoDed bunch of older Toshiba notebooks during mandated by IT automated install. (Notebooks are normally left in office with lid closed and that seems somehow screwed the update.) And the system isn't even faced to net directly - we have pretty draconian firewall. But you still can download and install any spyware/malway you want. Bunch of people with notebooks lined up to IT department - 3-4 hours of lost time is pretty hefty damage.
3) Fucked off when I press the "I don't want to reboot now" button, instead of pestering me every 30 seconds like a bloody 4 year old.
My friend some time ago found simple workaround for that: stop windows update service.
I personally hate most in Windows Update the way it does interface with user. Worst part is the stealthy design that even do not expect you to look at what M$ does with your computer. Compare that with Mac OS X or Linux where you are showed with what and why will be updated - you are still one click away from update, but generally you can plan your work around the updates. With Windows Update you always have to do extra clicking to even see what it is going to do. Provided the silly notification mechanism and unreliable network interface this becomes major PITA. I'm sure that happened to everybody when you said WU to download in background - and it took it 2 weeks to fetch 500K update. With Linux or Mac OS X it is interactive: if there is network problem you see that immediately. And it really tells you that there were no problem or as usually there were no problems and everything went OK. But with WU - it just tells you shit.
Linux and Mac OS X do not require you to trust them. But generally they proofed themselves to be trustworthy - without any demands. With M$ its backwards: they demand trust while generally being unworthy. But they know it - and try to hide the fact that they do something with your working system.
Until OOo would get itself decent user-friendly scripting language, one can forget about professional users adopting it.
And as long as professional users would keep away from OOo, there would be nobody to recommend OOo to normal business users.
Yeah, I know, OOo does 90% of tasks already. But getting something from last 10% - even for professional user - can be experience in frustration. In M$Office you can at least write macro...
WRT to manuscripts I can't keep comments, styles, formating etc straight.
I used to use hidden frames for comments in my documents. Reflowing/repagination in OOo works better than in M$Office, so I found the functionality (though bit awkward and not straightforward) yet performing better than M$Office counterpart.
As for styles and formating, I'm not sure what you refer to. OOo, unlike M$Office, can be configured to use only predefined styles from document.
WRT to investing the OO spreadsheet is way to limited, and to extend the spreadsheet with custom functionality is absolutely painful! OOBasic bites, and their component architecture is anything but simple. OO extensions are a joke when compared to Microsoft Office.
This is in fact major blocker in OOo for mass adoption. As soon as you try to automate/extend anything in the OOo and face the OOBasic thing, it all breaks down miserably.
In M$Office you can record couple of macros and then easily modify/combine them: VBA is dumb, but for primitive automation is fits OK. Automating - easily.
In OOo recording macros just exposes you to all the ugliness of its undocumented component model. Extending macro - or combining two macros - essentially impossible. That renders OOo unautomateable nor extendable as end user concerned. (Correction: bad wording. Component model of OOo is of course documented. It's components themselves which are undocumented. Best documentation I found to date was happily reporting that "and here we have a plugable components - go search documentation elsewhere" - and that was in about 5 places in OOo documentation. "Frustrating" at best.)
Until OOo would get itself decent user-friendly scripting language, one can forget about professional users adopting it.
What prevents you from asking people to resend you the document in readable form?
It might take 15-20 minutes - but many "dumb" users are pretty happy to learn how to save document in any other format e.g. PDF.
If you would tell them the PDFs (or even HTMLs) can be read under Linux and Mac OS (or any other OS) and that it is document format suitable for data preservation, they would be really eager to learn.
If it's really as good as they say, there's a good chance I'll switch over.
First, this is/. - not GNOME forums - you do not have to drop your whole DE just to run a KDE application.
Second, it is not "as good as they say." It is just competitors are so much worse.
Beyond simple text editing OO.o is barely usable. OOWriter is OK for tech documentation which would be later converted into PDF. Making nice looking document - impossible. HTML import/export are completely unusable. AbiWord is absolutely strange beast - I wasn't being able to create a single 2+ page document without hitting some snag. Import/export better be described as defunct - anything more complicated than plain text (e.g. tables) just not supported.
In KOffice 1.5 I had created bunch of documents w/o problems - mostly text documents and one spread sheet. Though trying to import (least edit) them in OO.o was pretty unsuccessful: lost formating or worse completely screwed up formating shows up. (I had a ridiculous situation when OO.o was showing text in font size of about 7pt, while style claimed that it was in fact (as it should be) 13pt). Problem with font name unportability had also beaten me very often.
From my experience, you have more chances of OO.o -> KOffice import than KOffice -> OO.o. So I personally rate KOffice higher just on that ground. It still misses some features, but for smallish documents it is already in near perfect shape.
[ Funnily, for large documents, OO.o remains better: it is more stable right now than KOffce or M$Office. I had crashed OO.o only on few occasions. KOffice 1.5 crashed on me pretty often - especially on import/export. (I reported some bugs and last I heard they were fixed in 1.6). M$Office on large documents not only crashes, but has extra feature: it hangs on large documents open from network. [ AbiWord crashed on me constantly in past. ] ]
P.S. Though vector graphics application in KOffice is as useless as one from OO.o. None of them support any kind of standard notation. Drawing even simple decent UML or network chart is experience not for weak-hearted. Updating/maintaining it - mission impossible and it is quicker to redo whole drawing anew.
Look up costs associated to deploy a country-wide mobile network. Probably that would help you to understand why gov'ts do sometime protect carriers from market. Communication is crucial in our society - gov't makes sure that it has some level of quality. Consequently it has to pay up sometimes to cellcos as well has to invest into mobile networks by itself.
On topic, I'm happy for French since they would most likely avoid all the silly hype related to iPhone. Yes, it is great phone. Probably the best. I would gladly own one. But. IT'S STILL JUST DAMM MOBILE PHONE!!!! MOVE ON. GET OVER IT!!!!!!!!
What if the clause didn't come from higher-ups - but instead of from service personnel??
I had two friends who had worked for a small cheap foreign ISP in service. Since this is service and this is small ISP, they were all-around specialists who had to deal with literally everything, except picking the phone when customers had dialed. They are specialists after all - hot line isn't their job. But rest - is.
So. They were always complaining about customers. No, not every one of them. Not who even call to file a problem/complain. About "whiners" who call and start yelling that "nothing works", "you shitty cheap company", "I wish I buy Internet from better company", "Nothing works" again and so on in the loop. Girls working on hot-lines could do nothing better - since "nothing works" - to hand the call over to specialists who in the end had to deal with the whiners.
There were six(?) such customers. They were complaining all the time: there were no week without them ringing in and start whining. Guess that number of actual connection problem from such calls were pretty damm near zero. If not zero at all.
What I'm trying to get to. Many many peoples working in ISP would be glad to have such clients cut off. And having such clause in contract might be very helpful just for that. ^_^
But something tells me that AT&T clause has a different origins, different purposes...
"rich enough" == "can read proprietary M$Outlook's rich text messages and winmail.dats"
... to deliver applications,...
"deliver applications", not sure but in context sounds like "automatically download malware"
... that's available from multiple manufacturers,...
"multiple manufacturers" == not a product but technology. Notice that no word of "based on international/etc standards" in there.
So in other words... M$'s thousands of APIs please in studio!! Host of the show... is The De-eL-eL Hell!!!
[ btw, "manufacturers" of what? software? hardware? ]
... offering a decent range of handsets
"Decent range" != "Range of decent" you moron!!! iPhone alone for many qualified as "range of decent phones." While to me the dozens of old styled and bulky Nokias do not provide a single phone I like. But, you know, range is very very "decent".
... with corporate features.
"corporate features" == "workarounds for numerous M$Exchange and M$Outlook bugz"
Linux just falls down on all of those."
That reads like: "I never tried it and will not because it doesn't run under M$Outlook Disk Operating System".
My friend has one of the Linux Motos and I'm absolutely startled how little of Linux (nothing really!!!) is there on the phone. No bash, no terminal == not a Linux to me. And hey, it syncs with Outlook.
What advantage lies in that? If the audience is no longer very small, it no longer matters to have them very loyal either -- just ask Microsoft.
Well, this is simple management truth.
Try to organize and communicate with five people. Record results.
Now try to organize and communicate with five hundred people. Record results.
It is much much easier to come up with product which would appeal to five people than with product which would appeal to five hundred. Finding compromise is clearly what drives size of market share.
For good example, try to work under Mac OS X for one month and try to work under Vista for one month. Record your problems. Oversimplifying, for every problem under Mac OS X in 75% of cases you would be told to use particular OS feature. Rest - install 3rd party tool. In Vista (as well as all other Windows) you would have clear 50/50: 50% of problem would be plainly unsolvable and for other 50% you need to install 3rd party tool. The point I'm trying to make, Mac OS X is close to be feature complete - but not every feature is made the way you want it. Windows on other hand made so universally (it's "platform" not "product" - from my other comment), that it plainly misses some simple features - because M$ cannot decide something for its enormous install base. How Apple decides? It just doesn't care - as long as there are those few guys who like it and who would buy it.
Conclusion. Apple enjoys small market share - because it allows it to be blatantly ignorant to the rest of market share.
Silly people. Jobs was talking about this numerous times.
Apple never targeted broad audience. True, it can sell to very broad audience, but still Apple prefer to have few but loyal customers.
What also crossed my mind, is difference between Windows/Vista and Mac OS X. How does MacOS becomes platform of choice? Because you have to choose MacOS (as well as Apple hardware) by yourself. This establishes kind of barrier. But people who would cross the barrier are people who made their choice. The barrier works both ways: it takes some money investment to cross it (acquire hardware/software) and it takes some paining experience to come back to Wintel (which lacks all the polish, integrity and utility of Apple offering). But still, you are to make the choice by yourself.
And now ask yourself, who of us had chosen Windows?? Right, nobody. It's the thing which came preinstalled.
And Doom 3 had boss fights, thank you very much [...]
Two of them to be precise. On in middle to get a BFG and another in the end.
Compared to usual crap of boss fights in console games - can you believe it - monsters can be killed by actually shooting at them. No - w/o jumping around waiting moment to attack, w/o hitting some obscure combos to attack, w/o hitting even more weirder combos to temporarily disarm or make vulnerable the boss. I didn't even need to reload once to kill bosses in Doom3. How many times you usually die before you kill boss in normal console game? Ten times? Twenty? Fifty?? Otherwise it is said to be "too easy", I'm told.
By, worth repeating, SHOOTING AT MOSTER. Show me single console game with such boss monsters. Show me single console game with such straightforward game play. End of story.
P.S. I intentionally omit Quake4 references, since there were nothing decent in the game - except for its excellent multi-player, perfected with three previous iterations of Quake games. And Q4 isn't shooter anymore. It's more like Half-Life 2 - more of action or arcade then shooting. Running around or watching cinematics or flying in some tar or driving something took more of game time that actual shooting.
MP3:C was just an example. HArdcore games are not necessarily hard to play. They just appeal to smaller group of people. Like Metroid3: it appeals primarily to people who played Metrod1, Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, Metroid 2, Metroid 2: Echos. IOW, to enjoy game you have to belong to the elite club of people who played previous iterations of game before. (It is also not necessarily fact relating to MP3:C - they are some brighter examples like Wii's RE4).
To me it is telling. What ever crap load of sh*t games there are on PCs, there are gems which have no analogues on consoles: Quake1/2/3, Doom3, Civ4, Alpha Centauri, NWN1, etc.
All console "gems" I (was recommended and) have tried turned out to be some uberleet games you really need to sit N years before TV playing previous versions to even being able to understand the idea of game - least to appreciate the game.
Why there is no simple enjoyable games on consoles???
Take Xbox360 and shooters. Nothing comes even close to simplicity and enjoyment of Doom3. First PC has mouse - and targeting with classical controller is just plain pain. Second, somehow Doom3 got away without boss fights and locked items. Try to imaging a console game where you are not presented with screen covered with question mark boxes and only one-two items are available? Hard, isn't it. Impossible I'd tell. I yet to see console game not sprouting this "unlockable content" crap. I'd say Civilization is good example of PC games having SO MUCH CONTENT!!! which is NOT locked from you. You play the game. (Not game plays you) and you play the game ANY WAY YOU WANT IT. Try to find a single similar similator on consoles. All console Tycoons I have seen are literally bloated with locked content you have to guess how to unlock. Stupid I'd say. As somebody who pays with his own earned money, I often feel offended by the messages like "Bonus item was unlocked!!!". Bonus?? BONUS?????? Sh*t, as I would have paid for game which has only stick and stone available to play with only.
And the crap is copy-pasted from game to game. It already requires special mind set to swallow all the load you are trying to stuff you with.
One thing you are kid and you have only what your parents have bought you. You have to like - because you have nothing else to like. I'm working. I have money. I can buy 10 PS3s easily. Or 4-5 decent gaming rigs. Or 25 Wiis. Doesn't matter. I have money and I have choice. But the problem with console games that they give you NO choice. Straight prearranged line you hardly can deviate from.
Console gaming degraded into self closed leet society: it all started with "console for people", but now feedback grew and it is very often "people for console".
Well, I'm hoping for best. Because now I'm kind of in the boat - I have bought myself a Wii ^_^
And if you want to develop for their platforms - you have to sign them. And you see content of NDA only after you sign it... Not like you have a choice. (*) Business as usual.
(*) That's actually, many manufacturers had run to AMD as soon as it had decent chips (Opterons) in productions. Few like Intel's methods of handling partners.
Think about it. Now you can use only one register set as input/output to string operations. Let's call it default. But why to limit ops only to one set of registers?
Main problem of IA-32/64 optimization was always lack of registers. And this is also what contributes to sparse use of advanced CPU commands - that they often require special set of registers. And at the point where particular op might be useful, other optimization could have been already made and required registers are already used up. Or worse: only one of the required registers is already used. The whole optimization is wasted due to single register overlap.
I like string ops on PowerPC. They are not that cool as on Intel, they are fewer, but they are more useful. Let say, in 4 years I have programmed assembler on Intel, I used string ops on fewer occasions that I used string ops while I coded stuff on PowerPC in half of year. On PowerPC, string ops are limited to loading/storing content of up to 8 registers (== 32 byte read/write). And that's very convenient.
Probably somebody had to start a gaming site dedicated to casual gaming and casual reviews.
For example me, after gaming on PC for more that 15+ year, see most console games as total suckers. And mostly they are - thankfully to terrible game utility (e.g. no save/load functionality), overloaded controls and too much backward franchises (accompanied by flameboys).
But recently, in large thanks to Nintendo and its Wii, there were surge of pretty good playable and enjoyable games even on consoles. I normally tend to ignore console games and write off console gamers as people who grew to live in denial. But I hope that can change.
Some casual reviews already started showing up - as for example Variety's MP3:C review. (Flamed by fanboys here). Thanks to the review written in plain human words I would save my 50 for something better than MP3:C when it hits Europe. On on side. On another side, the review had bunch of hints for hardcore folks who have time the game requires to learn to play it.
Split - hardcore vs. casual - is inevitable. It is just better to be prepared. I would side with casual folks, since what they say makes much much more sense. And there is no the elitism aura around them too.
What I'm trying to get to here is that probably if you would grab a random guy from street and give him PS3 + Lair to play for some time - he might like it. Not necessarily he would want to invest $600+ into something like that. Yet. To hardcore folks easy game play (or what I call "enjoyable") is of course no-go.
Well, as Wii fan, I would omit the question about controls. Needless to add that IMNSHO classical controller - main that makes console the suckers - sucks big time.
P.S. Notice how skillfully I have managed in the post avoid saying that console games sucks... Uhm. Stop.... (rereading post)... Uhm. Never mind.
I doubt anything interesting would come out of it. But... let them try.
My personal wish-list was always made of improved string operations:
- support more operations (or rather allow any operation - add, sub, mul to stringified),
- support source and destination increments to allow string operations to work on structures,
- handle all the alignment idiotism internally: when possible source and destination pointers should be aligned internally to get most out of string operations on plain arrays,
- remove implicit registers, allow registers to be supplied by programmer (though i'm not sure how that valid on IA-64 - on i386 it was always pain to restructure whole program to make special registers available in some place).
Also, I would appreciate a string instruction to perform quick search in array. For example such operation could perform a single step of dichotomy search on array pointed by EDI of ECX size. The op should update EDI and ECX to be usable with REP prefix. If the op would also support increment - to allow to search in array of structures sorted by field, there would be no end to my happiness.
String operations became kind of bastards now, since they are so stupid that nobody uses them. What's more, 200 op implementation of memcpy() is faster compared to plain REP MOVSB/W/D, what is really really stupid. Why we need the string operation altogether then???
So I wasn't alone who thought that Thunderbird - as well as its half-***** development - did sucked big time? I used it for 4(?) years. Piles of bugs which were never getting fixed with new improved GUI which took all development time to annoy with new even more weirder (or (re)moved) keyboard shortcuts, usual mail folder manipulation flops/crashes and inability to display certain messages at all.
Problem kind of went away since now I'm using more or less exclusively Web based e-mail systems. OMG, they are SO MUCH BETTER! than Tb. And often are SO MUCH FASTER!!.
And now, I see no reasons for Eudora resurrection other than some people being annoyed with how development of Tb is done and managed. Mozilla people clearly stated that Tb is to "go after Outlook Express" users. IOW, it's not for serious e-mail users. It's not something what Netscape Messenger was. And will never be. It's something you can't rely on. Nor should you in future. It's "Outlook Express" (c)ed by Mozilla with all relevant bugs copy-pasted.
Or could be any other reason in open source to introduce fork?
P.S. Thanks for news. I would give a Eudora shot. After of course it would grow a bit and stabilize a lot.;)
Slashdot Mirror
[ "All new is well forgotten old." Russian proverb. ]
New????? Under what kind of rock the people are living???
For ages, service model was how artists lived - by making performance and getting paid for it.
Most of classical music, paintings, sculptures were made now on whip - but after a offer from people with money.
My favorite composer J.S. Bach lived by creating music for different religious events commissioned by church.
That's how it worked since dawn of ages.
LoL. Funny to see the notion in such context.
First of all, exclusion of features due to legal intervention dwarfed by M$'s own partner chain. You know, M$ always boasts that it is provider of platform - with rest of industry to filling the blanks. Just open your "Programs" menu and count number of columns you already have there.
Second. Legal interventions occurred when M$ tried to screw up something. Like in case of WMP or J++/Java Foundation Library. Both now under legal control. Not because they are illegal - but because M$ tried to cripple competitive offers using them.
Third. Nothing prevents M$ releasing such features as free downloads. After all (Apple analogy of free Mac OS X with every computer sold) it's only Windows users who can take advantage of the software. And M$ already earned money by mean of Windows sale. Somehow, M$ doesn't look to be very altruistic, forcing people often to pay e.g. for Windows license twice.
Also, after using both Windows and Mac OS X for some years, I find offensive even the hint that "300 features" are somehow related to Vista. Simplest way is to compare: iTunes to WPM, Mail.App to Outlook Express, iPhoto to , iDVD to MovieMaker, iChatAV to MSN Messenger/NetMeeting, etc. When Apple improves something, they really improve something - based on customer feedback. I do not hold my breath to Vista updates: Windows never ever had an analogue of Mac OS X famous button "Send feedback to Apple". They can't improved Vista - because like hell they know what needs to be improved.
I'm pretty much given up on explaining that to M$ofties: people who have never ever stepped outside of M$ platform doomed to be biased. And doomed to believe that M$ is best of the best. LoL. Like the people can even compare: they have seen competition only as screen-shots on tabloids with comments from Dvorak. LoL.
Missed opportunity? WTF???
Apple delayed 10.5 to make sure it will not flop as Vista did. And obviously to fix in 10.5 all problems reported in Vista(!).
Do not forget, Mac fanboys (like me) are long-term fans.
Delays were always OK.
Paying double for new quickly delivered feature - OK too.
Poorly implemented features - *NOT OK*.
In part, statement was made to be slightly inflammatory.
I would correct you quote for your: "considering that more than 90% of the gamers got their first console under 18."
The bunch of never growing up people (actually I belong by myself too) doesn't really change it.
What is pretty sad image: guy at 35 playing games for 15+ years, going out rarely and living with parents. Bit stereotypical generalization - yet valid. I can hardly classify such people as adults. It's OK to group them with teenagers, because their habits and manners are of teenagers.
That's pretty big misunderstanding of "how it works" I'd say.
There is still somebody needed to make artist known to public.
Record labels score the contract with artists not because of, say, recording equipment - but mainly by providing access to high profile promotion channels. It's really all connected. Insiders often refer to the system as "mafia" and "cover-up" making sure that you can access particular media only by signing exclusive deals with particular studios. Otherwise whatever artist does - it will not be accepted.
Well, there is a difference between "games" and "entertainment". Wii is entertainment - accessible to anybody. At $250 with included WiiSports it is already a good deal for most of not-cash-constrained casual demographic. Say, 5 visits to local bowling at $50 each - that already makes it a "great deal". Because Wii is like bowling in your own house. (Though most gaming teenagers do have problems understanding the "going out" thing. It's pure adult thing.)
It's not about "games" - you teenagers used to play for 8+ hours per day. It's about "entertainment" - something to break a daily routine.
Wii sells right now solely as entertainment machine. Because there is only a handful of real "games" for it - what is absolutely irrelevant to casual demographics which is fine with WiiSports. As well as it was reported numerous times that Wii has quite low attachment rate. Casuals do not buy games - WiiSports for 80% of people is more than enough.
P.S. Disclaimer: Wii owner. Enjoying Zelda, WiiSports, Excite Truck and MySims. Probably will take a look a Metroid when it hits Europe next week.
LoL
Are there any "Flame of the " awards here on Slashdot?
P.S. I really feel that government has to force Windows appear on bills as separate item, so that people (1) will see that they pay extra and (2) will see how much they really are paying for Windows.
I'd rather say it is particular to some FLOSS projects. But it is not systematic.
OOo is good example where you have huge corporate presence (most of the work is done by Sun full timers) and more or less complete disconnect from users and their needs.
But then you have something like e.g. Apache or Subversion or X.Org or KDE where users actually have a say - and project progress smoothly with only few not-show-stopper bumps here and there.
Many FLOSS are 100% ready and are in heavy use already. But OOo is simply not one of them. OOo got overhyped since it can *MIRACLE* read binary M$Office documents.
I personally have quite high expectation of KOffice which mostly works for me even right now. It is easy to start using KOffice, it is easy to start developing for KOffice. And KDE forums unlike OOo or GNOME forums are not overflowing with zealots - but rather pragmatical people - what definitely helps to find a solution for a problem one might have. If KDE 4.0/Qt4 would allow it to run on Windows, here you would have a real M$Office killer. For good.
This is a problem which bites now and then many notebook users in company where I work.
One of the last updates had BSoDed bunch of older Toshiba notebooks during mandated by IT automated install. (Notebooks are normally left in office with lid closed and that seems somehow screwed the update.) And the system isn't even faced to net directly - we have pretty draconian firewall. But you still can download and install any spyware/malway you want. Bunch of people with notebooks lined up to IT department - 3-4 hours of lost time is pretty hefty damage.
My friend some time ago found simple workaround for that: stop windows update service.
I personally hate most in Windows Update the way it does interface with user. Worst part is the stealthy design that even do not expect you to look at what M$ does with your computer. Compare that with Mac OS X or Linux where you are showed with what and why will be updated - you are still one click away from update, but generally you can plan your work around the updates. With Windows Update you always have to do extra clicking to even see what it is going to do. Provided the silly notification mechanism and unreliable network interface this becomes major PITA. I'm sure that happened to everybody when you said WU to download in background - and it took it 2 weeks to fetch 500K update. With Linux or Mac OS X it is interactive: if there is network problem you see that immediately. And it really tells you that there were no problem or as usually there were no problems and everything went OK. But with WU - it just tells you shit.
Linux and Mac OS X do not require you to trust them. But generally they proofed themselves to be trustworthy - without any demands. With M$ its backwards: they demand trust while generally being unworthy. But they know it - and try to hide the fact that they do something with your working system.
And as long as professional users would keep away from OOo, there would be nobody to recommend OOo to normal business users.
Yeah, I know, OOo does 90% of tasks already. But getting something from last 10% - even for professional user - can be experience in frustration. In M$Office you can at least write macro...
I used to use hidden frames for comments in my documents. Reflowing/repagination in OOo works better than in M$Office, so I found the functionality (though bit awkward and not straightforward) yet performing better than M$Office counterpart.
As for styles and formating, I'm not sure what you refer to. OOo, unlike M$Office, can be configured to use only predefined styles from document.
This is in fact major blocker in OOo for mass adoption. As soon as you try to automate/extend anything in the OOo and face the OOBasic thing, it all breaks down miserably.
In M$Office you can record couple of macros and then easily modify/combine them: VBA is dumb, but for primitive automation is fits OK. Automating - easily.
In OOo recording macros just exposes you to all the ugliness of its undocumented component model. Extending macro - or combining two macros - essentially impossible. That renders OOo unautomateable nor extendable as end user concerned. (Correction: bad wording. Component model of OOo is of course documented. It's components themselves which are undocumented. Best documentation I found to date was happily reporting that "and here we have a plugable components - go search documentation elsewhere" - and that was in about 5 places in OOo documentation. "Frustrating" at best.)
Until OOo would get itself decent user-friendly scripting language, one can forget about professional users adopting it.
What prevents you from asking people to resend you the document in readable form?
It might take 15-20 minutes - but many "dumb" users are pretty happy to learn how to save document in any other format e.g. PDF.
If you would tell them the PDFs (or even HTMLs) can be read under Linux and Mac OS (or any other OS) and that it is document format suitable for data preservation, they would be really eager to learn.
First, this is /. - not GNOME forums - you do not have to drop your whole DE just to run a KDE application.
Second, it is not "as good as they say." It is just competitors are so much worse.
Beyond simple text editing OO.o is barely usable. OOWriter is OK for tech documentation which would be later converted into PDF. Making nice looking document - impossible. HTML import/export are completely unusable. AbiWord is absolutely strange beast - I wasn't being able to create a single 2+ page document without hitting some snag. Import/export better be described as defunct - anything more complicated than plain text (e.g. tables) just not supported.
In KOffice 1.5 I had created bunch of documents w/o problems - mostly text documents and one spread sheet. Though trying to import (least edit) them in OO.o was pretty unsuccessful: lost formating or worse completely screwed up formating shows up. (I had a ridiculous situation when OO.o was showing text in font size of about 7pt, while style claimed that it was in fact (as it should be) 13pt). Problem with font name unportability had also beaten me very often.
From my experience, you have more chances of OO.o -> KOffice import than KOffice -> OO.o. So I personally rate KOffice higher just on that ground. It still misses some features, but for smallish documents it is already in near perfect shape.
[ Funnily, for large documents, OO.o remains better: it is more stable right now than KOffce or M$Office. I had crashed OO.o only on few occasions. KOffice 1.5 crashed on me pretty often - especially on import/export. (I reported some bugs and last I heard they were fixed in 1.6). M$Office on large documents not only crashes, but has extra feature: it hangs on large documents open from network. [ AbiWord crashed on me constantly in past. ] ]
P.S. Though vector graphics application in KOffice is as useless as one from OO.o. None of them support any kind of standard notation. Drawing even simple decent UML or network chart is experience not for weak-hearted. Updating/maintaining it - mission impossible and it is quicker to redo whole drawing anew.
Look up costs associated to deploy a country-wide mobile network. Probably that would help you to understand why gov'ts do sometime protect carriers from market. Communication is crucial in our society - gov't makes sure that it has some level of quality. Consequently it has to pay up sometimes to cellcos as well has to invest into mobile networks by itself.
On topic, I'm happy for French since they would most likely avoid all the silly hype related to iPhone. Yes, it is great phone. Probably the best. I would gladly own one. But. IT'S STILL JUST DAMM MOBILE PHONE!!!! MOVE ON. GET OVER IT!!!!!!!!
What if the clause didn't come from higher-ups - but instead of from service personnel??
I had two friends who had worked for a small cheap foreign ISP in service. Since this is service and this is small ISP, they were all-around specialists who had to deal with literally everything, except picking the phone when customers had dialed. They are specialists after all - hot line isn't their job. But rest - is.
So. They were always complaining about customers. No, not every one of them. Not who even call to file a problem/complain. About "whiners" who call and start yelling that "nothing works", "you shitty cheap company", "I wish I buy Internet from better company", "Nothing works" again and so on in the loop. Girls working on hot-lines could do nothing better - since "nothing works" - to hand the call over to specialists who in the end had to deal with the whiners.
There were six(?) such customers. They were complaining all the time: there were no week without them ringing in and start whining. Guess that number of actual connection problem from such calls were pretty damm near zero. If not zero at all.
What I'm trying to get to. Many many peoples working in ISP would be glad to have such clients cut off. And having such clause in contract might be very helpful just for that. ^_^
But something tells me that AT&T clause has a different origins, different purposes...
Let me translate that for you.
"rich enough" == "can read proprietary M$Outlook's rich text messages and winmail.dats"
"deliver applications", not sure but in context sounds like "automatically download malware""multiple manufacturers" == not a product but technology. Notice that no word of "based on international/etc standards" in there.
So in other words ... M$'s thousands of APIs please in studio!! Host of the show ... is The De-eL-eL Hell!!!
[ btw, "manufacturers" of what? software? hardware? ]
"Decent range" != "Range of decent" you moron!!! iPhone alone for many qualified as "range of decent phones." While to me the dozens of old styled and bulky Nokias do not provide a single phone I like. But, you know, range is very very "decent".
"corporate features" == "workarounds for numerous M$Exchange and M$Outlook bugz"
That reads like: "I never tried it and will not because it doesn't run under M$Outlook Disk Operating System".
My friend has one of the Linux Motos and I'm absolutely startled how little of Linux (nothing really!!!) is there on the phone. No bash, no terminal == not a Linux to me. And hey, it syncs with Outlook.
Well, this is simple management truth.
Try to organize and communicate with five people. Record results.
Now try to organize and communicate with five hundred people. Record results.
It is much much easier to come up with product which would appeal to five people than with product which would appeal to five hundred. Finding compromise is clearly what drives size of market share.
For good example, try to work under Mac OS X for one month and try to work under Vista for one month. Record your problems. Oversimplifying, for every problem under Mac OS X in 75% of cases you would be told to use particular OS feature. Rest - install 3rd party tool. In Vista (as well as all other Windows) you would have clear 50/50: 50% of problem would be plainly unsolvable and for other 50% you need to install 3rd party tool. The point I'm trying to make, Mac OS X is close to be feature complete - but not every feature is made the way you want it. Windows on other hand made so universally (it's "platform" not "product" - from my other comment), that it plainly misses some simple features - because M$ cannot decide something for its enormous install base. How Apple decides? It just doesn't care - as long as there are those few guys who like it and who would buy it.
Conclusion. Apple enjoys small market share - because it allows it to be blatantly ignorant to the rest of market share.
Silly people. Jobs was talking about this numerous times.
Apple never targeted broad audience. True, it can sell to very broad audience, but still Apple prefer to have few but loyal customers.
What also crossed my mind, is difference between Windows/Vista and Mac OS X. How does MacOS becomes platform of choice? Because you have to choose MacOS (as well as Apple hardware) by yourself. This establishes kind of barrier. But people who would cross the barrier are people who made their choice. The barrier works both ways: it takes some money investment to cross it (acquire hardware/software) and it takes some paining experience to come back to Wintel (which lacks all the polish, integrity and utility of Apple offering). But still, you are to make the choice by yourself.
And now ask yourself, who of us had chosen Windows?? Right, nobody. It's the thing which came preinstalled.
Two of them to be precise. On in middle to get a BFG and another in the end.
Compared to usual crap of boss fights in console games - can you believe it - monsters can be killed by actually shooting at them. No - w/o jumping around waiting moment to attack, w/o hitting some obscure combos to attack, w/o hitting even more weirder combos to temporarily disarm or make vulnerable the boss. I didn't even need to reload once to kill bosses in Doom3. How many times you usually die before you kill boss in normal console game? Ten times? Twenty? Fifty?? Otherwise it is said to be "too easy", I'm told.
By, worth repeating, SHOOTING AT MOSTER. Show me single console game with such boss monsters. Show me single console game with such straightforward game play. End of story.
P.S. I intentionally omit Quake4 references, since there were nothing decent in the game - except for its excellent multi-player, perfected with three previous iterations of Quake games. And Q4 isn't shooter anymore. It's more like Half-Life 2 - more of action or arcade then shooting. Running around or watching cinematics or flying in some tar or driving something took more of game time that actual shooting.
MP3:C was just an example. HArdcore games are not necessarily hard to play. They just appeal to smaller group of people. Like Metroid3: it appeals primarily to people who played Metrod1, Super Metroid, Metroid Fusion, Metroid 2, Metroid 2: Echos. IOW, to enjoy game you have to belong to the elite club of people who played previous iterations of game before. (It is also not necessarily fact relating to MP3:C - they are some brighter examples like Wii's RE4).
To me it is telling. What ever crap load of sh*t games there are on PCs, there are gems which have no analogues on consoles: Quake1/2/3, Doom3, Civ4, Alpha Centauri, NWN1, etc.
All console "gems" I (was recommended and) have tried turned out to be some uberleet games you really need to sit N years before TV playing previous versions to even being able to understand the idea of game - least to appreciate the game.
Why there is no simple enjoyable games on consoles???
Take Xbox360 and shooters. Nothing comes even close to simplicity and enjoyment of Doom3. First PC has mouse - and targeting with classical controller is just plain pain. Second, somehow Doom3 got away without boss fights and locked items. Try to imaging a console game where you are not presented with screen covered with question mark boxes and only one-two items are available? Hard, isn't it. Impossible I'd tell. I yet to see console game not sprouting this "unlockable content" crap. I'd say Civilization is good example of PC games having SO MUCH CONTENT!!! which is NOT locked from you. You play the game. (Not game plays you) and you play the game ANY WAY YOU WANT IT. Try to find a single similar similator on consoles. All console Tycoons I have seen are literally bloated with locked content you have to guess how to unlock. Stupid I'd say. As somebody who pays with his own earned money, I often feel offended by the messages like "Bonus item was unlocked!!!". Bonus?? BONUS?????? Sh*t, as I would have paid for game which has only stick and stone available to play with only.
And the crap is copy-pasted from game to game. It already requires special mind set to swallow all the load you are trying to stuff you with.
One thing you are kid and you have only what your parents have bought you. You have to like - because you have nothing else to like. I'm working. I have money. I can buy 10 PS3s easily. Or 4-5 decent gaming rigs. Or 25 Wiis. Doesn't matter. I have money and I have choice. But the problem with console games that they give you NO choice. Straight prearranged line you hardly can deviate from.
Console gaming degraded into self closed leet society: it all started with "console for people", but now feedback grew and it is very often "people for console".
Well, I'm hoping for best. Because now I'm kind of in the boat - I have bought myself a Wii ^_^
Dunno about M$, but Intel does it all the time.
And if you want to develop for their platforms - you have to sign them. And you see content of NDA only after you sign it... Not like you have a choice. (*) Business as usual.
(*) That's actually, many manufacturers had run to AMD as soon as it had decent chips (Opterons) in productions. Few like Intel's methods of handling partners.
I'm not saying to remove default.
Think about it. Now you can use only one register set as input/output to string operations. Let's call it default. But why to limit ops only to one set of registers?
Main problem of IA-32/64 optimization was always lack of registers. And this is also what contributes to sparse use of advanced CPU commands - that they often require special set of registers. And at the point where particular op might be useful, other optimization could have been already made and required registers are already used up. Or worse: only one of the required registers is already used. The whole optimization is wasted due to single register overlap.
I like string ops on PowerPC. They are not that cool as on Intel, they are fewer, but they are more useful. Let say, in 4 years I have programmed assembler on Intel, I used string ops on fewer occasions that I used string ops while I coded stuff on PowerPC in half of year. On PowerPC, string ops are limited to loading/storing content of up to 8 registers (== 32 byte read/write). And that's very convenient.
Probably somebody had to start a gaming site dedicated to casual gaming and casual reviews.
For example me, after gaming on PC for more that 15+ year, see most console games as total suckers. And mostly they are - thankfully to terrible game utility (e.g. no save/load functionality), overloaded controls and too much backward franchises (accompanied by flameboys).
But recently, in large thanks to Nintendo and its Wii, there were surge of pretty good playable and enjoyable games even on consoles. I normally tend to ignore console games and write off console gamers as people who grew to live in denial. But I hope that can change.
Some casual reviews already started showing up - as for example Variety's MP3:C review. (Flamed by fanboys here). Thanks to the review written in plain human words I would save my 50 for something better than MP3:C when it hits Europe. On on side. On another side, the review had bunch of hints for hardcore folks who have time the game requires to learn to play it.
Split - hardcore vs. casual - is inevitable. It is just better to be prepared. I would side with casual folks, since what they say makes much much more sense. And there is no the elitism aura around them too.
What I'm trying to get to here is that probably if you would grab a random guy from street and give him PS3 + Lair to play for some time - he might like it. Not necessarily he would want to invest $600+ into something like that. Yet. To hardcore folks easy game play (or what I call "enjoyable") is of course no-go.
Well, as Wii fan, I would omit the question about controls. Needless to add that IMNSHO classical controller - main that makes console the suckers - sucks big time.
P.S. Notice how skillfully I have managed in the post avoid saying that console games sucks... Uhm. Stop. ... (rereading post)... Uhm. Never mind.
I doubt anything interesting would come out of it. But ... let them try.
My personal wish-list was always made of improved string operations:
- support more operations (or rather allow any operation - add, sub, mul to stringified),
- support source and destination increments to allow string operations to work on structures,
- handle all the alignment idiotism internally: when possible source and destination pointers should be aligned internally to get most out of string operations on plain arrays,
- remove implicit registers, allow registers to be supplied by programmer (though i'm not sure how that valid on IA-64 - on i386 it was always pain to restructure whole program to make special registers available in some place).
Also, I would appreciate a string instruction to perform quick search in array. For example such operation could perform a single step of dichotomy search on array pointed by EDI of ECX size. The op should update EDI and ECX to be usable with REP prefix. If the op would also support increment - to allow to search in array of structures sorted by field, there would be no end to my happiness.
String operations became kind of bastards now, since they are so stupid that nobody uses them. What's more, 200 op implementation of memcpy() is faster compared to plain REP MOVSB/W/D, what is really really stupid. Why we need the string operation altogether then???
So I wasn't alone who thought that Thunderbird - as well as its half-***** development - did sucked big time? I used it for 4(?) years. Piles of bugs which were never getting fixed with new improved GUI which took all development time to annoy with new even more weirder (or (re)moved) keyboard shortcuts, usual mail folder manipulation flops/crashes and inability to display certain messages at all.
Problem kind of went away since now I'm using more or less exclusively Web based e-mail systems. OMG, they are SO MUCH BETTER! than Tb. And often are SO MUCH FASTER!! .
And now, I see no reasons for Eudora resurrection other than some people being annoyed with how development of Tb is done and managed. Mozilla people clearly stated that Tb is to "go after Outlook Express" users. IOW, it's not for serious e-mail users. It's not something what Netscape Messenger was. And will never be. It's something you can't rely on. Nor should you in future. It's "Outlook Express" (c)ed by Mozilla with all relevant bugs copy-pasted.
Or could be any other reason in open source to introduce fork?
P.S. Thanks for news. I would give a Eudora shot. After of course it would grow a bit and stabilize a lot. ;)