The city I live in - Corpus Christi, TX - is about to become the first metro area of our size (~250,000 people) with full WiFi coverage. There's a report on it here.
It would really suck if we had this infrastructure and weren't able to allow people to access it - the plan was to have full Internet access from most of the city.
The network is already up, with a nice page that explains what it is when you connect and open up IE.
It's difficult to judge any monitor at retail locations; as you mentioned, the signal quality is usually terrible, but it's more than just that.
The overhead lighting is usually way brighter than conditions where the monitors will actually be used, any they're almost never calibrated at all - just go to the TV section and see how many high end plasma and LCD TVs are running a 4:3 image stretched across a 16:9 field - wouldn't make most non-tech people all that interested.
It's great any time a device pulls a following like this and shows some unintended utility, but the PSP is hardly alone.
The DS also has a growing development community, and most likely, it'll be the more fruitful, at least in the short term. For one, we can already run our own code on the DS - and who knows when that'll be possible on the PSP?
I hope cool things do turn up on the PSP, but if you're interested in DS hacking, check out these:
It'd take about an hour to write a simple app that could download updated hosts files, switch between various ones, and provide a snazzy interface for it.
...I wonder If I should go ahead and write it, in anticipation of getting some site-licensed sales for small ISPs with no on-staff programmer. Just have the Logo and some of the text be configurable so it can be customized, and it should work fine...
While I'll completely agree that there are portions of Gnome that could be better, Eugenia's peice is way off.
Looking at the progress Gnome has made in the last few versions, its hard for me to even see where this is coming from. Yes, we're still missing a menu editor, and yes, that is a problem. Overall, though, each recent version of Gnome has been an improvement over the past, and the useability is only getting better.
If you look at the event that started this whole article, it was essentially Eugenia extrapolating "We'll do that if there's a developer who wants to" into "We don't care about what our users want". Hardly what I'd consider a logical step.
I read OS News daily because it provides a good roundup of news I like - much like Slashdot - but in the past few months, I've come to dread any article with Eugenia's name on it (much like many here dreaded Michael's name popping up). If things anywhere don't work like she expects them to, it's suddenly a huge overwhelming problem with Open Source in general - and usually, they aren't even problems at all - just spats where the developers of whatever she was using didn't agree with her suggestion/request.
I was a KDE user when I started using linux as my desktop three-four years ago, and it's still a good desktop. Nothing wrong with KDE, and I don't want to take this in that direction. But I switched to Gnome with 2.6 - it just felt better to me, and 2.8, 2.10 are continuing to improve. At least for this user, Gnome is doing exactly what I want it to.
You're right; the X-Box certainly doesn't seem to be capable of preventing load time, and they're are quite evident even in Halo 2.
The GameCube, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have much of a problem here. Check out Zelda, RE4, Metroid Prime 1 or 2, and you'll see that while loading still exists, it can be minimized quite well even without a hard drive.
You can do this, but the search bar doesn't expand to fill the space, so it's kinda pointless, and doesn't solve his problem.
That sentence was a run-on.
They did; the standards body is called the W3C, and of the current major browsers, IE is doing the worst job of actually sticking to the standards. Confusing the history of what happened 6-8 years ago and what's been happening since 2000 is not good; a lot has happened since 2000 (unless you're an IE user, at which point, it hasn't come too far).
If you're seeing a difference between IE and another browser, at least 90% of the time it'll be IE at fault - and you can usually test this by validating the code.
CSS Positioning is almost completely broken in IE - and it has been for 5 years. Likewise, they don't support a ton of CSS 2 - there's even a fair amount of CSS1 that doesn't work like it should.
PNG images don't support transparency or gamma properly in IE - if you didn't know that, you have no idea what PNG is capable of.
I could show you many test designs I've done that have amazing, new layouts - and I can't use them commercially because IE doesn't support CSS well enough to display them. They aren't even that difficult, code wise - just some absolute or fixed positioned DIVs and other elements, a few other things, and you can do some really cool things. And they'll all break on IE.
To me at least, your entire argument seems to come from a superficial understanding of how web standards should and do work. Most professional web designers that I know (I do mainly web applications) currently design using Firefox or Mozilla to test the code, and after they're happy with it, open up IE and tweak until it's acceptible there, too - things like the WebDeveloper extension really make Firefox suited for this.
...I don't think you realize how Nintendo handles this in their systems; the various processors - ARM7's and 9's, and the Z80 - they're all on the same die.
If you open up a GBA, you won't see a separate Z80, and likewise for a DS and the ARM7/9.
Essentially, there would be no size impact (and no real complexity impact). Additionally, Z80's are practically trivial to make - they've been around for 20 years.
Nintendo's decision to break compatability was just that - a decision to do so. The DS's main processor is more than capable of emulating a Gameboy - hell the GBA can emulate a GB mono quite well (check out Goomba) without booting into GBC mode.
What the hell good is windows going to do me when I'm sitting 1000 miles away logged in with ssh?
Well, for starters, it's hiding your real location and identity from discovery while you do whatever you're doing, along with two or three other Windows boxes along the way.
Or maybe its acting as a server for those big files you're hosting - or being searched for passwords and credit card info.
There are plenty of reasons people would want to hack a Windows box - and many of them are far more likely to be profitable than "high security servers" - indeed, they might even help in your attempt on those servers.
I'm not advocating any of the above; just pointing out that there are plenty of reasons someone would want to get into an MS box.
It's not fully backwards compatible; it's can only run GBA games.
I know, it may not seem like a big deal, but running at the very least Gameboy Color games would be a nice thing for the next real Gameboy to do.
Also, Nintendo was pretty clear on this strategy way before the DS was released. I don't know if it was stupid or not, but they have at least been consistent.
Plenty came out first - dual analog for FPS has been around since just a little after the PS1 got Dual Shock.
Even before that, you had games like Turok on the N64, which used the analog stick for look, and the four arrow buttons for movement - a very similar result, really. Heck, even the N64 version of Quake was pretty playable - the joystick substituted for mouselook, and the arrow buttons became WASD. Circle-strafing and all worked fine - or at least as well as Halo.
As far as graphics go - well, I just don't agree. There are some snazzy environment mapping effects in Halo 1, sure, but overall, the polycount is very low and some of the effects - like the fog - just don't look very good.
Halo 2 just came out, and it just feels very unpolished graphically - I've seen LOD models jump to higher-quality versions during the middle of cutscenes, when they should have been high-quality the whole time, and there are a variety of other quirks.
RE4 for the Gamecube was released about the same time, looks better, and doesn't have any of these problems (or the load time), even without the benefit of a hard drive to cache to.
Slashdot Mirror
Whew. That's good to know. Thanks for noting that. The bill is still a terrible thing, though.
Actually, as long as you've got a concealed carry license, you still can in most places.
...yes, but in this case, they're about to make full, public Internet access available. In fact, it already is in some places.
It would really suck if we had this infrastructure and weren't able to allow people to access it - the plan was to have full Internet access from most of the city.
The network is already up, with a nice page that explains what it is when you connect and open up IE.
It's difficult to judge any monitor at retail locations; as you mentioned, the signal quality is usually terrible, but it's more than just that.
The overhead lighting is usually way brighter than conditions where the monitors will actually be used, any they're almost never calibrated at all - just go to the TV section and see how many high end plasma and LCD TVs are running a 4:3 image stretched across a 16:9 field - wouldn't make most non-tech people all that interested.
The DS also has a growing development community, and most likely, it'll be the more fruitful, at least in the short term. For one, we can already run our own code on the DS - and who knows when that'll be possible on the PSP?
I hope cool things do turn up on the PSP, but if you're interested in DS hacking, check out these:
Funny, it's working just fine on Firefox in Gentoo...not sure how I could possibly even have Active X barring some weird WINE stuff.
So did I...I wasn't sure enough to mention it here, but that was my understanding, too.
Just out of curiosity, is this the tepples from GBADev?
No, I'm not joking.
Whoa. Until I saw the modded-down post, I was really confused.
Looking at the progress Gnome has made in the last few versions, its hard for me to even see where this is coming from. Yes, we're still missing a menu editor, and yes, that is a problem. Overall, though, each recent version of Gnome has been an improvement over the past, and the useability is only getting better.
If you look at the event that started this whole article, it was essentially Eugenia extrapolating "We'll do that if there's a developer who wants to" into "We don't care about what our users want". Hardly what I'd consider a logical step.
I read OS News daily because it provides a good roundup of news I like - much like Slashdot - but in the past few months, I've come to dread any article with Eugenia's name on it (much like many here dreaded Michael's name popping up). If things anywhere don't work like she expects them to, it's suddenly a huge overwhelming problem with Open Source in general - and usually, they aren't even problems at all - just spats where the developers of whatever she was using didn't agree with her suggestion/request.
I was a KDE user when I started using linux as my desktop three-four years ago, and it's still a good desktop. Nothing wrong with KDE, and I don't want to take this in that direction. But I switched to Gnome with 2.6 - it just felt better to me, and 2.8, 2.10 are continuing to improve. At least for this user, Gnome is doing exactly what I want it to.
Of course he can't; all of the next-gen Gameboy stuff is rumor.
You're right; the X-Box certainly doesn't seem to be capable of preventing load time, and they're are quite evident even in Halo 2. The GameCube, on the other hand, doesn't seem to have much of a problem here. Check out Zelda, RE4, Metroid Prime 1 or 2, and you'll see that while loading still exists, it can be minimized quite well even without a hard drive.
You can do this, but the search bar doesn't expand to fill the space, so it's kinda pointless, and doesn't solve his problem. That sentence was a run-on.
They did; the standards body is called the W3C, and of the current major browsers, IE is doing the worst job of actually sticking to the standards. Confusing the history of what happened 6-8 years ago and what's been happening since 2000 is not good; a lot has happened since 2000 (unless you're an IE user, at which point, it hasn't come too far).
If you're seeing a difference between IE and another browser, at least 90% of the time it'll be IE at fault - and you can usually test this by validating the code.
CSS Positioning is almost completely broken in IE - and it has been for 5 years. Likewise, they don't support a ton of CSS 2 - there's even a fair amount of CSS1 that doesn't work like it should.
PNG images don't support transparency or gamma properly in IE - if you didn't know that, you have no idea what PNG is capable of.
I could show you many test designs I've done that have amazing, new layouts - and I can't use them commercially because IE doesn't support CSS well enough to display them. They aren't even that difficult, code wise - just some absolute or fixed positioned DIVs and other elements, a few other things, and you can do some really cool things. And they'll all break on IE.
To me at least, your entire argument seems to come from a superficial understanding of how web standards should and do work. Most professional web designers that I know (I do mainly web applications) currently design using Firefox or Mozilla to test the code, and after they're happy with it, open up IE and tweak until it's acceptible there, too - things like the WebDeveloper extension really make Firefox suited for this.
Every designer I know curses IE's failings.
Right click on a page. Select "View like Internet Explorer" from the menu. I agree, it should also be under view.
If you open up a GBA, you won't see a separate Z80, and likewise for a DS and the ARM7/9.
Essentially, there would be no size impact (and no real complexity impact). Additionally, Z80's are practically trivial to make - they've been around for 20 years.
Nintendo's decision to break compatability was just that - a decision to do so. The DS's main processor is more than capable of emulating a Gameboy - hell the GBA can emulate a GB mono quite well (check out Goomba) without booting into GBC mode.
Well, for starters, it's hiding your real location and identity from discovery while you do whatever you're doing, along with two or three other Windows boxes along the way.
Or maybe its acting as a server for those big files you're hosting - or being searched for passwords and credit card info.
There are plenty of reasons people would want to hack a Windows box - and many of them are far more likely to be profitable than "high security servers" - indeed, they might even help in your attempt on those servers.
I'm not advocating any of the above; just pointing out that there are plenty of reasons someone would want to get into an MS box.
I know, it may not seem like a big deal, but running at the very least Gameboy Color games would be a nice thing for the next real Gameboy to do.
Also, Nintendo was pretty clear on this strategy way before the DS was released. I don't know if it was stupid or not, but they have at least been consistent.
Or read half of what counts as the press in Britain.
XBox controller ports are really just USB ports with some extra lines to power the rumble.
Even before that, you had games like Turok on the N64, which used the analog stick for look, and the four arrow buttons for movement - a very similar result, really. Heck, even the N64 version of Quake was pretty playable - the joystick substituted for mouselook, and the arrow buttons became WASD. Circle-strafing and all worked fine - or at least as well as Halo.
As far as graphics go - well, I just don't agree. There are some snazzy environment mapping effects in Halo 1, sure, but overall, the polycount is very low and some of the effects - like the fog - just don't look very good.
Halo 2 just came out, and it just feels very unpolished graphically - I've seen LOD models jump to higher-quality versions during the middle of cutscenes, when they should have been high-quality the whole time, and there are a variety of other quirks.
RE4 for the Gamecube was released about the same time, looks better, and doesn't have any of these problems (or the load time), even without the benefit of a hard drive to cache to.
Oh, that's just Zaphod. He's just this guy, you know?