I assume that by this you mean custom controllers. Which games were you talking about?
I'm talking about games with toy guns attached, dancepads, motorcycles or surfboards that move under you etc. I'm also talking about games that are networked for group play.
You've never been to a LAN party?
Of course I have. Not many people have, however. LAN parties require a group of people who can get together at the same time, a location, networking gear, portable machines, and many copies of the same software. A few people have these, but not a lot, and even for them it is often inconvenient to arrange and gather the equipment.
With a gaming cafe, the equipment and location are there. The software is there, loaded, and up to date. You don't need to have friends, or friends who have time, since when you go, there are people there to play with. as an added bonus, it is a way to meet people. All of these are reasons why gaming cafes are worthwhile and why in some other countries are commonly packed with people. If there was a gaming cafe near here and new games were available for play there months before they were for sale in stores I'm sure gamers would flock to it and many of them would also buy the games later to play at home. Thus, Gaming companies receive more revenue for the same amount of work.
Tell that to people in Europe, who had to wait nine months for their PSP
What is your point? I don't see how this pertains to the discussion.
Let see, we already have all this with Trillian and Adium. Why do I need IBM doing it?
The difference is one is a client and one is a server/service. Ideally, IM will become like e-mail using standard protocols. Anyone can check any server using any client. In the beginning this was not the case, until the major players agreed to start using standards. Now you can use mutt or outlook access e-mail from AOL or Comcast using SMTP and POP hosted on Sendmail or Communigate.
This is IBM saying that their service and servers and client will all start recognizing the SIP standard. This means you can get messages from users of IBM's service even if you are using Trillian with your AIM account. Further, if you are using IBM's service, you won't need to sign up for multiple accounts with AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, etc. to be able to chat with people using those services. With Google, IBM, AOL, Yahoo all starting to provide interoperability we are finally starting to get out of walled gardens and moving towards open, interoperable standards. This is very good news for anyone who uses IM and would like it to be more useful and have more possible people they can contact and it is good news for people running secure IM servers using IBM software. They will not be able to communicate with the outside world.
Note, all of this excepts MSN who don't believe in open standards of communication or something.
The future is AI-driven NPCs that can say and do something clever in response to events. It's not some voice-over "These are the Mountains of Dispair, which you must cross".
Maybe, maybe not. The thing you are missing is the dialogue and actions of the NPCs (whether AI or actor driven) have to be written. A good game for me includes a good story that provides motivation and a framework for action. The problem is, by focusing too much on just the gameplay, games end up hiring a third-rate hack that writes up NPC dialogue and plot, which results in really, really cheesy and uninteresting story. I'll give many games a try, but I always get bored with them unless there is a story or plot. Playing with other PCs online is great, when I feel like that. But, very few players are great conversationalists, nor can they direct the course of events, or initiate large amounts of action, outside of a very specific framework. For this sort of story, you need good writers. Otherwise, the experience becomes repetitive, like grinding in WoW, and I quickly lose interest.
User-mode drivers (which most drivers *should* be) are still fair game. It's only kernel-mode that's at issue, and they're only really necessary for stringent timing requirements and legacy hardware.
Except for drivers for "CD-ROM, disk drivers, ATA/ATAPI controllers, mouse and other pointing devices, SCSI and RAID controllers, and system devices." as the article says. I'd say that is a good portion of the drivers, wouldn't you?
Also there is very little value add to playing a game in a cafe, as the experience can be easily recreated inside joe sixpack's home with relatively cheap computer/console hardware.
The benefit is the same as the theater. You can have bigger screens, maybe even projectors. Interactive games will have a good sized group to play, and you can actually talk to those people before and after the game.
This is exactly why we saw the demise of the video arcade during the 90s.
Have you been to a video arcade lately? They are still around and are full of games you can't play easily at home. Most of them have hardware that is specialized for the game or have large systems linked together so a number of people can all play together interactively. This is exactly the type of benefit video game cafes can offer. But you're missing the one other important benefit of the theater over the home theater. You can see the movie now, not in six months when it comes out on DVD and all your friends have already seen it. Video games could do the same thing. Look at how many people are willing to pay to beta test now. Hardcore gamers will certainly pay to go play a game two months before it is available for the console or PC. Video gaming cafes are very popular in other countries already, by the way. All that needs to happen to gain this extra revenue is to offer the game there in advance of the regular release and at a premium price.
if you actually read the MSDN page on this subject you will find that non administrators will be prevented from installing unsigned drivers.
This is not true. From the article, "Even users with administrator privileges cannot load unsigned kernel-mode code on x64-based systems." On 32 bit systems, only admins can load unsigned drivers. on 64-bit, no one can.
I've shelved quite a few games due to control problems or difficulty frustrations, but I've never put down a game that was fun to play because the story was sub-par.
I have a different perspective. I enjoy FPS games, for the most part. I enjoy both the multiplayer and single player modes. Of all the FPS games out there, I think I've played all the way through two of them in my entire life. The reason for that is that game play inevitably becomes repetitive. Run and shoot and shoot and run. Gee, after about 48 hours I'm done. The two FPS games I can remember playing all the way through are the old Marathon 2 and newer Wolfenstein. Marathon 2, if you've never played it, had the single best, most developed and engaging story ever in an FPS. It was possible to beat the game without reading some of the mission information, but I don't know anyone who did that. The plot was just too interesting and the characters too fun. Whether an egotistical AI was blackmailing you into a suicide mission, or an insane AI was spewing poetry at you, it was fascinating.
Another important thing I think should be kept in mind is that game players have different tastes. Maybe you don't like plots. Maybe most current gamers don't like plots. But, maybe, just maybe, a significant portion of the population, many of whole can't stand current game offerings, really do like plots. I'll play all sorts of games, but I don't devote significant time to any game that does not have a lot of variety and story to hold my interest. Consequently, I won't pay much money for games without a good story.
Games cost a lot of money compared to a Movie, and partly this is because they do not effectively pursue multiple tiers of revenue. At $60 a lot of people simply will never buy your game. At $10 a lot of people will never pay to see a single showing of a movie. For movies, they first release in theaters at an exorbitant price for a single showing. Next it goes to second run theaters that charge less, but still a fair bit for a single showing. Then they on release on DVD, often getting people who paid the first time to buy another version, this time at a more reasonable price. DVD prices generally drop over time to help incentivise those who would not buy at the original price, but will buy a bargain. Then they play the movie on TV for "free" generating ad revenue. Movie studios collect money all along the way and thus each stage can actually be cheaper.
Here's my new model for gaming revenue. First, make new games only playable at gaming "arcades" like gaming cafes and the like. These venues may have to be invented by the game company to start, but once the profit model is shown they will become more common. Next, release the game on DVD or CD and slowly lower the sale price over time. Finally, release free, ad supported versions of the game and make money from ad revenue.
Is this practical? Who knows. The thing is, games are often very poorly offered at only one price point and, like movies are not something everyone wants to keep. It is that or I'll just keep buying four year old games from the bargain bin.
European companies seem to value the flexibility of open source solutions, while American companies value the savings.
In other news, most European corporate executives plan to be working for the same company in twenty years, when the largest benefits of OSS make a difference.
American business is about making money now and getting out with the cash before it all falls apart. Thus, American executives don't care about long-term savings and strategic benefits.
What makes all these stories about Steve Jobs worthy of being on the front page of a webpage for geeks/nerds?
Yeah articles about a guy who runs one of the biggest and most innovative computer companies and one of the most well regarded computer graphics production houses has nothing to do with nerds. Computers and what happens with computer graphics and their affect upon the computer industry is more of a jock thing. I'm sure they're covering it on ESPN right now.
Actually, it doesn't reflect well on intel architecture. I'm sure everyone by now knows that AMD processors run faster and are not as hot.
I don't know that at all. Prove you're not just an AMD fanboy by showing me one reputable comparison showing an AMD chip that meets or beats the Intel Core Duo on performance, heat, and power used. All of my reading has indicated that the new Intels are significantly ahead of current AMD chips for performance/watt at acceptable powers for laptops.
Apple switched to Intel to get performance at a reasonable power usage. G4 had good power usage but poor performance. G5 had good performance and crappy power consumption. I suspect they chose Intel because it gave them the best of both worlds and looking at chip specs the battery will last about an hour longer using the Duo instead of an Athalon 4000 Mobile and has slightly better performance to boot.
...seems that good ol' Apple is charging $1300 for a machine that costs around $900...
If you bothered to read the actual report, it says the physical components and assembly cost are about $900. That means it does not include engineering, software, packaging, shipping, business overhead, marketing, or retail costs. To imply that the "cost" of the machine is equivalent to the retail markup merely demonstrates your ignorance of how a product goes from manufacturing to retail. As an aside, that price is a guess based upon what prices they think Apple might be getting from component suppliers, including a guess that Apple is getting a 10% extra discount from Intel. This sort of guess is vaguely useful for estimating what parts of a computer are costing and thus guiding investment, but not for much else. Take a look at similar guestimates for other companies, like Dell or Gateway. You'll notice the discrepancy is much, much higher than what the margins on the machine are.
People dont even use the V-chip, and those same people will lobby our government with hopes of ridding the planet of porn.
You are misunderstanding their intentions. Most people lobbying for anti-porn laws are not really concerned that their kids will see porn. They know they have ways of restricting their children. They are afraid that consenting adults will see porn, which they think is immoral and for some reason their business. "Please think of the children" has always been PR.
That way if your child searches breast... and finds a sweet pair of titties... its your own dam fault and not googles.
It is already your fault. If you let your children go to the library unsupervised and they find a nude in an art book, it is not the library's responsibility. If kids look on the internet and find porn, who let them do that? To understand the motives just read up on puritanism.
Personally, the Acrobat reader is *very* slow and annoying to use
This is true, especially when paired with the equally bloated IE. That is one of the reasons a lot of pros don't use either anymore and use a faster alternative.
the built-in search capability of Firefox or Internet Explorer works just as well, if not better, to search HTML.
This is just not so. First, browsers generally search one page only. Second, they generally find each instance of a search item in sequential order, one at a time. With a PDF many viewers (including Acrobat I think) let you see a list of all the instances that match your search at once, rather than slowly moving through each one and rejecting it.
I didn't say that PDF files aren't printable, but that most users won't see any benefit to PDF over just HTML.
Being easily printable is one of those advantages. You can take a PDF to Kinkos and ask for a bound copy and not have problems. Doing the same with HTML is non trivial. Especially given that HTML is generally a whole directory of files, while PDF is a single file you can e-mail to someone.
You may believe HTML works for all purposes, but it does not work well. It is simply not ideal for a help system or for print, and loses the advantages of formats designed for those purposes. I'm not trying to dissuade you from your current practices, but I think you are making a common error in thinking that because you prefer HTML to read documentation, everyone does. This is not the case. Different people prefer different formats and actually use the more advanced features of those formats. Many people would not consider a software offering that does not offer documentation in the standard formats to be unprofessional, and that reflects poorly on your offering. Again, good luck.
An important note here is that I am self-employed, and thus, a 1-man team.
That does make a big difference. The normal ratio for a GUI development I've experienced is about one tech writer for 15 coders. You could hire someone to do contract work, but it may not be worth your time. Of course your program is very small with distribution only over the internet and only in one language. Should you ever grow to the point where you are selling boxed copies, you'll need print manuals. Also, more professional online help would be useful, like help pages that are searchable and without any grammatical or spelling mistakes.
CHM/PDF/MAN help systems don't really provide most common users any real benefit over HTML, and can at times just make searching the document more difficult.
I don't know where you got this idea. PDF files are printable, something many users prefer (although personally I don't). They also provide better searching capabilities. Try searching an HTML page and then try searching a PDF. The PDF is much faster and nicer. Man pages are very necessary for anything that runs primarily via a CLI and help systems of various sorts are ideal for users who want to look at help but are lacking an internet connection at the time (think mobiles) or who would like to use included help without opening a full browser. Now I'm not trying to argue that all of these apply to you, but they certainly apply to many, many projects.
Most people run their mouths on slashdot but the GP poster actually provided solid numbers.
I'm not sure posting power usage numbers for three Intel chips counts as providing sufficient data to show that they use less power than comparable AMD chips. In the really real world the specs don't mean much anyway. It is all about performance and power. Right now everyone pretty much agrees the Intel Core Duo is in the lead. I've seen the matter debated in the past between various AMDs and Pentium M's, but most reviews I've read seemed to favor the Intels when it came to power for a given amount of battery used. I'm not going to bother trying to find reviews over the last few years, but I'd be happy to look at any you find that seem to contradict this.
There has been talk about applying extra fees for "higher quality network" for a long time. In the beginning it sounded like a great idea: data that needs to be transported in realtime (phone calls, stock ticker) would be charged more then data where in time or even in order delivery would be unimportant (ftp transfers etc.)
You're right that this model has not been working out well, although a lot of providers still seem to be pushing it. Where I have seen success is in providing other add-on services. A premium charge for "clean pipes" meaning a connection with the ISP filtering out DoS attacks has been in high demand. I have heard of at least one provider that is nearing the limit of how large they can scale such a system, after trying to meet the demand of their existing customers. I foresee this type of value added charge being a lot more attractive to customers.
If you were searching the Internet for a technical writer, what kinds of search terms would you use? What sites would you check? Where and how would you start looking?
I've hired or been involved in hiring a number of technical writers. The first step to finding one, as with most other employees, is to ask within the company for referrals. The majority of coders and writers hired are someone recommended. Failing that, I generally post an ad and look through some of the common job sites or ask contacts at the STC and local universities. Search terms I might include would depend upon the job. If it is another writer to supplement a team I might look for experience with the tools they are expected to use or the particular skills that are needed. I might search for 'Framemaker' or ''internationalization' or 'XML' along with generic terms like 'technical writer.' I might look for experience with similar subject matter, like telecommunications or C++.
All of this is probably not too helpful to you, but given that you did not really describe your goals, it is the best I can offer. Good luck.
ow could I possibly explain all of this to a technical writer to have documentation written, without just writing the documentation myself?,/i>
This is a perfectly valid question. The answer is, sadly, that many technical writers serve in the capacity of editors. Especially in larger teams a tech writer is likely to find themselves gathering written documents from many individuals, and consolidating that content into a single, cohesive, work with consistent style and grammar. A good technical writer often also functions as a first line of customer advocacy. If they can't figure something out, the interface is probably not intuitive and should be reworked. On smaller projects a writer can save you a lot of time by simply doing a first pass at writing a manual for a piece of software and explaining all of the things that are obvious to a savvy user, but maybe not to the average user. This could easily be 75% of the work, leaving you to fill in the blank 25% that they don't grok.
Other advantages to hiring a professional is that they should be familiar with layout tools for making print versions of documents, and methods of taking a single source file and outputting various types of documentation including print, PDF, help systems, man pages, and HTML. At least one good tech writer is pretty much a necessity if you want to output professional looking products.
I hope this perspective, from someone who has done a fair bit of coding and writing, is helpful to you.
Why didn't Apple just go with AMD? Their newer chips are much more power efficient and faster than Intel's...
Because Apple disagrees with you on that. I do too, for that matter. Take a look at the new Intel Core Duo and compare it to an Athalon 4000 mobile, or whatever you think is best. The Intel wins on performance and more importantly on power. They are squeezing an extra 30-90 minutes of battery life out of going with an Intel chip and they need it considering going to x86 has cost them nearly half their battery life as it is.
Don't worry. In Q4 AMD will come out with their 65nm mobiles and depending upon how they stack up and what deals each company offers Apple, I'm sure they will pick the best one. It is a shame AMD is running behind on the 65nm fab though. It would be nicer to go to all 64 bit in one fell swoop, rather than as separate moves.
Re:Phone number replacement needed
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The e-mail address isn't a bad idea, but I honestly don't want to share that with some people. A new number isn't memorable. Names are too generic and duplicated (there are 3 Adam Dada's that I've found in the past 3 years).
Google is offering VOIP service with their google talk service. Unsurprisingly it uses the same scheme as the rest of DNS. You can talk to bob@gtalk.com or set up your own domain and people can send you talk requests to bob@mydomain.co.uk or whatever. Set up as many as you like. They are easier to remember than numbers and it does not matter since you can just save them to your phone and computer. This is pretty much a non-issue.
The performance for a given power crown has been handed back and forth for a while between Intel and AMD. While it is true Intel has had Pentium M's for quite a while, they have not been comparable to competing AMDs for performance for most of their existence, barring a few anomalies. This is my unbiased opinion. I am neither an AMD not Intel "fanboy" as so many on Slashdot seem to be. I haven't yet purchased a non-PPC laptop in this millennium. Looking at arstechnica or a similar sites comparisons over the last few years seems to show that most review sites agree with my assessment. To summarize, your assessment is completely correct, if you don't care about performance as part of the equation.
In the mid 1990s, Apple showed the famous picture of a Pentium grilling a hot dog and claimed Intel's chips were power hungry and ran hot compared to the nice cool sleek PowerPC. That was one of the supporting reasons that Apple ostensibly switched, according to all the engineering presentations at WWDC. So when did this change?
Just within the last 12 months has Intel started releasing chips that focus on lower heat and power. The Pentium M chips were a step towards lower power, but the Intel Core Duo that ships in the imac is the first chip that is really ahead of AMD for mobile systems.
One of my mates showed me an episode or two of this. He was enthusing about it, saying how amzing it was. I thought it was pretty shit. Maybe it's because I generally don't like Sci-Fi but the show really was bad. The dialog was, for want of a better word, shallow and tacky.
It's interesting that you mention the dialogue. Everyone has different tastes, of course, but I found the dialogue to be some of the best I have ever heard in a television show. It is the only example of characters misunderstanding one another's speech that I can recall that was well done and not dumbed down, ever. Usually everyone hears what everyone else says perfectly on TV, unlike in real life. Occasionally, they mistake something but to avoid losing the audience they always belabor the point so much that is is just stupid, e.g. "Oh you said pop, oh I thought you said pot and that is why I brought the pot. I must not have heard you right."
In any case, I enjoyed the series immensely and a lot of people seem to agree with me. It has been the number one selling TV show on DVD for quite a while now.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume that by this you mean custom controllers. Which games were you talking about?
I'm talking about games with toy guns attached, dancepads, motorcycles or surfboards that move under you etc. I'm also talking about games that are networked for group play.
You've never been to a LAN party?
Of course I have. Not many people have, however. LAN parties require a group of people who can get together at the same time, a location, networking gear, portable machines, and many copies of the same software. A few people have these, but not a lot, and even for them it is often inconvenient to arrange and gather the equipment.
With a gaming cafe, the equipment and location are there. The software is there, loaded, and up to date. You don't need to have friends, or friends who have time, since when you go, there are people there to play with. as an added bonus, it is a way to meet people. All of these are reasons why gaming cafes are worthwhile and why in some other countries are commonly packed with people. If there was a gaming cafe near here and new games were available for play there months before they were for sale in stores I'm sure gamers would flock to it and many of them would also buy the games later to play at home. Thus, Gaming companies receive more revenue for the same amount of work.
Tell that to people in Europe, who had to wait nine months for their PSP
What is your point? I don't see how this pertains to the discussion.
Let see, we already have all this with Trillian and Adium. Why do I need IBM doing it?
The difference is one is a client and one is a server/service. Ideally, IM will become like e-mail using standard protocols. Anyone can check any server using any client. In the beginning this was not the case, until the major players agreed to start using standards. Now you can use mutt or outlook access e-mail from AOL or Comcast using SMTP and POP hosted on Sendmail or Communigate.
This is IBM saying that their service and servers and client will all start recognizing the SIP standard. This means you can get messages from users of IBM's service even if you are using Trillian with your AIM account. Further, if you are using IBM's service, you won't need to sign up for multiple accounts with AOL, ICQ, Yahoo, etc. to be able to chat with people using those services. With Google, IBM, AOL, Yahoo all starting to provide interoperability we are finally starting to get out of walled gardens and moving towards open, interoperable standards. This is very good news for anyone who uses IM and would like it to be more useful and have more possible people they can contact and it is good news for people running secure IM servers using IBM software. They will not be able to communicate with the outside world.
Note, all of this excepts MSN who don't believe in open standards of communication or something.
The future is AI-driven NPCs that can say and do something clever in response to events. It's not some voice-over "These are the Mountains of Dispair, which you must cross".
Maybe, maybe not. The thing you are missing is the dialogue and actions of the NPCs (whether AI or actor driven) have to be written. A good game for me includes a good story that provides motivation and a framework for action. The problem is, by focusing too much on just the gameplay, games end up hiring a third-rate hack that writes up NPC dialogue and plot, which results in really, really cheesy and uninteresting story. I'll give many games a try, but I always get bored with them unless there is a story or plot. Playing with other PCs online is great, when I feel like that. But, very few players are great conversationalists, nor can they direct the course of events, or initiate large amounts of action, outside of a very specific framework. For this sort of story, you need good writers. Otherwise, the experience becomes repetitive, like grinding in WoW, and I quickly lose interest.
So your idea is to copy a broken model.
The movie industry is making money, is it not? What makes you think their model is "broken?"
User-mode drivers (which most drivers *should* be) are still fair game. It's only kernel-mode that's at issue, and they're only really necessary for stringent timing requirements and legacy hardware.
Except for drivers for "CD-ROM, disk drivers, ATA/ATAPI controllers, mouse and other pointing devices, SCSI and RAID controllers, and system devices." as the article says. I'd say that is a good portion of the drivers, wouldn't you?
The movie experience is a shared experience...
You've never been to a LAN party?
Also there is very little value add to playing a game in a cafe, as the experience can be easily recreated inside joe sixpack's home with relatively cheap computer/console hardware.
The benefit is the same as the theater. You can have bigger screens, maybe even projectors. Interactive games will have a good sized group to play, and you can actually talk to those people before and after the game.
This is exactly why we saw the demise of the video arcade during the 90s.
Have you been to a video arcade lately? They are still around and are full of games you can't play easily at home. Most of them have hardware that is specialized for the game or have large systems linked together so a number of people can all play together interactively. This is exactly the type of benefit video game cafes can offer. But you're missing the one other important benefit of the theater over the home theater. You can see the movie now, not in six months when it comes out on DVD and all your friends have already seen it. Video games could do the same thing. Look at how many people are willing to pay to beta test now. Hardcore gamers will certainly pay to go play a game two months before it is available for the console or PC. Video gaming cafes are very popular in other countries already, by the way. All that needs to happen to gain this extra revenue is to offer the game there in advance of the regular release and at a premium price.
if you actually read the MSDN page on this subject you will find that non administrators will be prevented from installing unsigned drivers.
This is not true. From the article, "Even users with administrator privileges cannot load unsigned kernel-mode code on x64-based systems." On 32 bit systems, only admins can load unsigned drivers. on 64-bit, no one can.
I've shelved quite a few games due to control problems or difficulty frustrations, but I've never put down a game that was fun to play because the story was sub-par.
I have a different perspective. I enjoy FPS games, for the most part. I enjoy both the multiplayer and single player modes. Of all the FPS games out there, I think I've played all the way through two of them in my entire life. The reason for that is that game play inevitably becomes repetitive. Run and shoot and shoot and run. Gee, after about 48 hours I'm done. The two FPS games I can remember playing all the way through are the old Marathon 2 and newer Wolfenstein. Marathon 2, if you've never played it, had the single best, most developed and engaging story ever in an FPS. It was possible to beat the game without reading some of the mission information, but I don't know anyone who did that. The plot was just too interesting and the characters too fun. Whether an egotistical AI was blackmailing you into a suicide mission, or an insane AI was spewing poetry at you, it was fascinating.
Another important thing I think should be kept in mind is that game players have different tastes. Maybe you don't like plots. Maybe most current gamers don't like plots. But, maybe, just maybe, a significant portion of the population, many of whole can't stand current game offerings, really do like plots. I'll play all sorts of games, but I don't devote significant time to any game that does not have a lot of variety and story to hold my interest. Consequently, I won't pay much money for games without a good story.
Games cost a lot of money compared to a Movie, and partly this is because they do not effectively pursue multiple tiers of revenue. At $60 a lot of people simply will never buy your game. At $10 a lot of people will never pay to see a single showing of a movie. For movies, they first release in theaters at an exorbitant price for a single showing. Next it goes to second run theaters that charge less, but still a fair bit for a single showing. Then they on release on DVD, often getting people who paid the first time to buy another version, this time at a more reasonable price. DVD prices generally drop over time to help incentivise those who would not buy at the original price, but will buy a bargain. Then they play the movie on TV for "free" generating ad revenue. Movie studios collect money all along the way and thus each stage can actually be cheaper.
Here's my new model for gaming revenue. First, make new games only playable at gaming "arcades" like gaming cafes and the like. These venues may have to be invented by the game company to start, but once the profit model is shown they will become more common. Next, release the game on DVD or CD and slowly lower the sale price over time. Finally, release free, ad supported versions of the game and make money from ad revenue.
Is this practical? Who knows. The thing is, games are often very poorly offered at only one price point and, like movies are not something everyone wants to keep. It is that or I'll just keep buying four year old games from the bargain bin.
European companies seem to value the flexibility of open source solutions, while American companies value the savings.
In other news, most European corporate executives plan to be working for the same company in twenty years, when the largest benefits of OSS make a difference.
American business is about making money now and getting out with the cash before it all falls apart. Thus, American executives don't care about long-term savings and strategic benefits.
What makes all these stories about Steve Jobs worthy of being on the front page of a webpage for geeks/nerds?
Yeah articles about a guy who runs one of the biggest and most innovative computer companies and one of the most well regarded computer graphics production houses has nothing to do with nerds. Computers and what happens with computer graphics and their affect upon the computer industry is more of a jock thing. I'm sure they're covering it on ESPN right now.
Actually, it doesn't reflect well on intel architecture. I'm sure everyone by now knows that AMD processors run faster and are not as hot.
I don't know that at all. Prove you're not just an AMD fanboy by showing me one reputable comparison showing an AMD chip that meets or beats the Intel Core Duo on performance, heat, and power used. All of my reading has indicated that the new Intels are significantly ahead of current AMD chips for performance/watt at acceptable powers for laptops.
Apple switched to Intel to get performance at a reasonable power usage. G4 had good power usage but poor performance. G5 had good performance and crappy power consumption. I suspect they chose Intel because it gave them the best of both worlds and looking at chip specs the battery will last about an hour longer using the Duo instead of an Athalon 4000 Mobile and has slightly better performance to boot.
If you bothered to read the actual report, it says the physical components and assembly cost are about $900. That means it does not include engineering, software, packaging, shipping, business overhead, marketing, or retail costs. To imply that the "cost" of the machine is equivalent to the retail markup merely demonstrates your ignorance of how a product goes from manufacturing to retail. As an aside, that price is a guess based upon what prices they think Apple might be getting from component suppliers, including a guess that Apple is getting a 10% extra discount from Intel. This sort of guess is vaguely useful for estimating what parts of a computer are costing and thus guiding investment, but not for much else. Take a look at similar guestimates for other companies, like Dell or Gateway. You'll notice the discrepancy is much, much higher than what the margins on the machine are.
People dont even use the V-chip, and those same people will lobby our government with hopes of ridding the planet of porn.
You are misunderstanding their intentions. Most people lobbying for anti-porn laws are not really concerned that their kids will see porn. They know they have ways of restricting their children. They are afraid that consenting adults will see porn, which they think is immoral and for some reason their business. "Please think of the children" has always been PR.
That way if your child searches breast... and finds a sweet pair of titties... its your own dam fault and not googles.
It is already your fault. If you let your children go to the library unsupervised and they find a nude in an art book, it is not the library's responsibility. If kids look on the internet and find porn, who let them do that? To understand the motives just read up on puritanism.
Personally, the Acrobat reader is *very* slow and annoying to use
This is true, especially when paired with the equally bloated IE. That is one of the reasons a lot of pros don't use either anymore and use a faster alternative.
the built-in search capability of Firefox or Internet Explorer works just as well, if not better, to search HTML.
This is just not so. First, browsers generally search one page only. Second, they generally find each instance of a search item in sequential order, one at a time. With a PDF many viewers (including Acrobat I think) let you see a list of all the instances that match your search at once, rather than slowly moving through each one and rejecting it.
I didn't say that PDF files aren't printable, but that most users won't see any benefit to PDF over just HTML.
Being easily printable is one of those advantages. You can take a PDF to Kinkos and ask for a bound copy and not have problems. Doing the same with HTML is non trivial. Especially given that HTML is generally a whole directory of files, while PDF is a single file you can e-mail to someone.
You may believe HTML works for all purposes, but it does not work well. It is simply not ideal for a help system or for print, and loses the advantages of formats designed for those purposes. I'm not trying to dissuade you from your current practices, but I think you are making a common error in thinking that because you prefer HTML to read documentation, everyone does. This is not the case. Different people prefer different formats and actually use the more advanced features of those formats. Many people would not consider a software offering that does not offer documentation in the standard formats to be unprofessional, and that reflects poorly on your offering. Again, good luck.
An important note here is that I am self-employed, and thus, a 1-man team.
That does make a big difference. The normal ratio for a GUI development I've experienced is about one tech writer for 15 coders. You could hire someone to do contract work, but it may not be worth your time. Of course your program is very small with distribution only over the internet and only in one language. Should you ever grow to the point where you are selling boxed copies, you'll need print manuals. Also, more professional online help would be useful, like help pages that are searchable and without any grammatical or spelling mistakes.
CHM/PDF/MAN help systems don't really provide most common users any real benefit over HTML, and can at times just make searching the document more difficult.
I don't know where you got this idea. PDF files are printable, something many users prefer (although personally I don't). They also provide better searching capabilities. Try searching an HTML page and then try searching a PDF. The PDF is much faster and nicer. Man pages are very necessary for anything that runs primarily via a CLI and help systems of various sorts are ideal for users who want to look at help but are lacking an internet connection at the time (think mobiles) or who would like to use included help without opening a full browser. Now I'm not trying to argue that all of these apply to you, but they certainly apply to many, many projects.
In any case, good luck with your project.
Most people run their mouths on slashdot but the GP poster actually provided solid numbers.
I'm not sure posting power usage numbers for three Intel chips counts as providing sufficient data to show that they use less power than comparable AMD chips. In the really real world the specs don't mean much anyway. It is all about performance and power. Right now everyone pretty much agrees the Intel Core Duo is in the lead. I've seen the matter debated in the past between various AMDs and Pentium M's, but most reviews I've read seemed to favor the Intels when it came to power for a given amount of battery used. I'm not going to bother trying to find reviews over the last few years, but I'd be happy to look at any you find that seem to contradict this.
There has been talk about applying extra fees for "higher quality network" for a long time. In the beginning it sounded like a great idea: data that needs to be transported in realtime (phone calls, stock ticker) would be charged more then data where in time or even in order delivery would be unimportant (ftp transfers etc.)
You're right that this model has not been working out well, although a lot of providers still seem to be pushing it. Where I have seen success is in providing other add-on services. A premium charge for "clean pipes" meaning a connection with the ISP filtering out DoS attacks has been in high demand. I have heard of at least one provider that is nearing the limit of how large they can scale such a system, after trying to meet the demand of their existing customers. I foresee this type of value added charge being a lot more attractive to customers.
If you were searching the Internet for a technical writer, what kinds of search terms would you use? What sites would you check? Where and how would you start looking?
I've hired or been involved in hiring a number of technical writers. The first step to finding one, as with most other employees, is to ask within the company for referrals. The majority of coders and writers hired are someone recommended. Failing that, I generally post an ad and look through some of the common job sites or ask contacts at the STC and local universities. Search terms I might include would depend upon the job. If it is another writer to supplement a team I might look for experience with the tools they are expected to use or the particular skills that are needed. I might search for 'Framemaker' or ''internationalization' or 'XML' along with generic terms like 'technical writer.' I might look for experience with similar subject matter, like telecommunications or C++.
All of this is probably not too helpful to you, but given that you did not really describe your goals, it is the best I can offer. Good luck.
ow could I possibly explain all of this to a technical writer to have documentation written, without just writing the documentation myself?,/i>
This is a perfectly valid question. The answer is, sadly, that many technical writers serve in the capacity of editors. Especially in larger teams a tech writer is likely to find themselves gathering written documents from many individuals, and consolidating that content into a single, cohesive, work with consistent style and grammar. A good technical writer often also functions as a first line of customer advocacy. If they can't figure something out, the interface is probably not intuitive and should be reworked. On smaller projects a writer can save you a lot of time by simply doing a first pass at writing a manual for a piece of software and explaining all of the things that are obvious to a savvy user, but maybe not to the average user. This could easily be 75% of the work, leaving you to fill in the blank 25% that they don't grok.
Other advantages to hiring a professional is that they should be familiar with layout tools for making print versions of documents, and methods of taking a single source file and outputting various types of documentation including print, PDF, help systems, man pages, and HTML. At least one good tech writer is pretty much a necessity if you want to output professional looking products.
I hope this perspective, from someone who has done a fair bit of coding and writing, is helpful to you.
Why didn't Apple just go with AMD? Their newer chips are much more power efficient and faster than Intel's...
Because Apple disagrees with you on that. I do too, for that matter. Take a look at the new Intel Core Duo and compare it to an Athalon 4000 mobile, or whatever you think is best. The Intel wins on performance and more importantly on power. They are squeezing an extra 30-90 minutes of battery life out of going with an Intel chip and they need it considering going to x86 has cost them nearly half their battery life as it is.
Don't worry. In Q4 AMD will come out with their 65nm mobiles and depending upon how they stack up and what deals each company offers Apple, I'm sure they will pick the best one. It is a shame AMD is running behind on the 65nm fab though. It would be nicer to go to all 64 bit in one fell swoop, rather than as separate moves.
The e-mail address isn't a bad idea, but I honestly don't want to share that with some people. A new number isn't memorable. Names are too generic and duplicated (there are 3 Adam Dada's that I've found in the past 3 years).
Google is offering VOIP service with their google talk service. Unsurprisingly it uses the same scheme as the rest of DNS. You can talk to bob@gtalk.com or set up your own domain and people can send you talk requests to bob@mydomain.co.uk or whatever. Set up as many as you like. They are easier to remember than numbers and it does not matter since you can just save them to your phone and computer. This is pretty much a non-issue.
The performance for a given power crown has been handed back and forth for a while between Intel and AMD. While it is true Intel has had Pentium M's for quite a while, they have not been comparable to competing AMDs for performance for most of their existence, barring a few anomalies. This is my unbiased opinion. I am neither an AMD not Intel "fanboy" as so many on Slashdot seem to be. I haven't yet purchased a non-PPC laptop in this millennium. Looking at arstechnica or a similar sites comparisons over the last few years seems to show that most review sites agree with my assessment. To summarize, your assessment is completely correct, if you don't care about performance as part of the equation.
In the mid 1990s, Apple showed the famous picture of a Pentium grilling a hot dog and claimed Intel's chips were power hungry and ran hot compared to the nice cool sleek PowerPC. That was one of the supporting reasons that Apple ostensibly switched, according to all the engineering presentations at WWDC. So when did this change?
Just within the last 12 months has Intel started releasing chips that focus on lower heat and power. The Pentium M chips were a step towards lower power, but the Intel Core Duo that ships in the imac is the first chip that is really ahead of AMD for mobile systems.
One of my mates showed me an episode or two of this. He was enthusing about it, saying how amzing it was. I thought it was pretty shit. Maybe it's because I generally don't like Sci-Fi but the show really was bad. The dialog was, for want of a better word, shallow and tacky.
It's interesting that you mention the dialogue. Everyone has different tastes, of course, but I found the dialogue to be some of the best I have ever heard in a television show. It is the only example of characters misunderstanding one another's speech that I can recall that was well done and not dumbed down, ever. Usually everyone hears what everyone else says perfectly on TV, unlike in real life. Occasionally, they mistake something but to avoid losing the audience they always belabor the point so much that is is just stupid, e.g. "Oh you said pop, oh I thought you said pot and that is why I brought the pot. I must not have heard you right."
In any case, I enjoyed the series immensely and a lot of people seem to agree with me. It has been the number one selling TV show on DVD for quite a while now.