Take this UI guide on the Sidebar. Excellent writing, and finally something which approaches what has made Apple keep the UI edge for all these years.
I agree wholeheartedly. The Sidebar guide is fantastic, and should give developers something to really think about. Finally, a guide as to when to clutter up the screen and when not to. 99% of system tray icons I've seen are completely useless (if Realplayer really needs help starting faster, maybe they should learn to code better instead of just pre-loading everything). This is a useful and intelligent developer resource, and people don't seem to understand that.
Public use cases seem like a good idea, until you realize that background noise and assholes shouting commands over your sholder could end up causing more problems than the system solved.
Not with today's audio processing capability. My cellphone only hears me when I'm talking on it, even when I'm standing in Starbucks on a Saturday evening with the espresso machine going - even I can't hear me then, but my phone filters out all the background noise no problem.
That being said, I agree that it will be a lot more useful if it can data-mine and/or learn words on-the-fly.
My question is, will it understand me when I pronounce 'schedule' the way it's supposed to be pronounced, instead of 'skedule'? Hell, even some people I meet can't manage that.
Unfortunately, RPMs generally do not follow the Debian packaging guidelines, and are frowned upon with the utmost of eyebrow usage. Native Debian packages are highly preferred.
Pogue has been around for a long long time and has written quite a lot of books over the years, aside from being a technology columnist for the NYT.
That being said, he's not writing the article for himself, he's writing it for other people - and those people should hear about the upgrade fee and find out if it's worth it or not.
Since when are Self destructing documents a "new feature?"
Yeah, come on Microsoft. QuarkXPress has had this feature for like ten years. And best of all, you don't even have to enable it, it happens automatically.
iTunes hasn't skipped at all, even when scanning two drives for MP3 files, or when I'm opening movies or (accidentaly) launching Winamp while Firebird is loading.
In fact, at the moment, it's using about 1.5% CPU use (average, it switches between 1% and 2% every update).
I think your system might have issues. Maybe the problem is accessing the hard drive? Maybe it's memory issues? VS.Net, Mozilla, and XP Pro are not exactly lightweight, and you're likely to have craploads of crud sucking up ram that you can't get back anyway.
That being said, I've never, EVER seen Winamp3 be responsive, smooth, or usable. Go figure.
I second Nagios. I set it up as a technology test I was doing a while back to monitor our internal network and some remote servers (arbitrary web servers on the internet) for a lark - got it telling uptime, system load, swap, memory usage, processors, network load and the like on our Linux and Win2K machines (including various network interfaces - when the wired interface on the laptop was disconnected, it paged me - useless for our situation, but good for multihomed machines).
It can monitor all kinds of machines, services, ports, networks, pings, traceroutes, anything. Beautiful setup, and highly recommended.
Most M-rated games aren't really rated M for anything that bad. So you shoot a guy, whoopie-doo. You see that on the news every day. 99% of the time, the M-rated games aren't anything to worry about.
When Grand Theft Auto: Vice City came out, however, the people at EB were asking everyone for ID - and if the parents WERE there, they would explain to the parent what the game is about - and most wouldn't buy it.
Some parents did, however. I overheard one woman who bought it for her eight-year-old son. Her reasoning? 'He's going to play it anyway, he may as well play it at home where I can watch him.'
The graders couldn't figure out why I only gave 3 digits of accuracy and the third was sometimes wrong.
Well, I suppose habits are hard to break, but I have to ask, why would you use one if it's inaccurate and sometimes wrong? I'd rather be right than oldschool.
2) SVG should not be used for the entire UI, that's overkill,
I disagree emphatically. Having the UI stored as vectors means that I can scale up everything - buttons, icons, widgets, everything - if I want, but Mr Only-has-640x480 doesn't have to suffer the obscenity of 40% of screen space going to widgets.
I recall some testing going on with the GNOME crew a while back where it showed that SVG rendering was actually faster than PNG rendering for some obscene reason (I'm too lazy to care, search back if you want).
The problem I see with SVG is the buggy... well, everything. I installed Illustrator 10 and the Adobe SVG plugin. I made a circle with a gradient in Illustrator, exported as SVG, and the Adobe plugin couldn't read it at all. Nice. But the other CVG stuff that Adobe had on their website was awesome, and worked fine. Go figure.
To sum up (paraphrasing) the atmosphere about it at EB (the only gaming store in the city):
'The N-Gage is coming in early, but we won't sell it before the street date because we'd get sued. We won't sell it after the street date either though, because then we'd get lynched.'
'The marketing and games for the N-Gage are right here, just so you know.' 'Yeah, in case anyone wants to buy one.' *both laugh*
(Customer) 'What the heck is that thing?' 'That's the Nokia N-Gage. It's a game system, and a cell phone and- screw it, I don't care either.'
In short: No one knows, and no one cares. The local EB has a quota to fill: 24. Think about this. The only thing it has going for it is that you can play against other people. Except that even EB's district office only expects to sell one to every two thousand people. The store's expectations are different, however:
'Man, I can't believe we have to sell 24 N-Gages. We're not going to sell a single one.' 'That's not true, we'll sell one eventually.'
In other words, the (unnamed) employees know that it's not going to happen, and don't honestly care. I played with one (not the games, just the batteryless machine) at EB, and it was neat, and might make for a good 2D game system - but NOT a 3D system, and NOT a cellphone, and NOT a notebook, and NOT an MP3 player, and NOT for $450.
I find it hard to accuse EA of 'mass-marketization' when they practically own the video game market. They are, and have been for a long long time, the largest video game publisher in the world. They make all the big sports games, all the Maxis games, Westwood, Need for Speed - it really is amazing how big they are.
As for Need for Speed having to be 'The Fast and the Furious' - well, it makes sense, doesn't it? Why not? Nothing says they won't have Hot Pursuit III out later on, but why not do it? It's in the public eye, it's getting more popular, and you'd really have to be stupid not to do it.
Believe it or not, EA has a lot of interesting (And different) games. Simcity 4, Command and Conquer: Generals, Freedom Fighters, The Sims, Medal of Honor - all games that have something to them that other games of their type lack. Simcity is ludicrously detailed compared to its predecessors; Generals plays remarkably different from prior C&C games, but retains enough of its charm to avoid comparisons to other RTS games; The Sims is basically a genre in and of itself; Freedom Fighters is squad-based combat with a twist - recruiting (and actually being able to command your damn team); the intro to Medal of Honor makes you think 'Saving Private Ryan: The Game'.
Maybe you (as most other people, and myself) have just seen things blur together so much that you can't see the differences anymore - but trust me, they're there.
Living in a smaller (~50-60k people) university town, it's almost impossible to get a decent pen at a stationery store. As a result, I'm forced to rely on one kind of pen, and it has served me well. In almost all circumstances, this is the only pen I will use. In university, on one occasion when I discovered I'd forgotten them all at home, I bought a new one for $4 instead of borrowing one from a friend. I always keep them with me in case I need to use one, and the only time I ever don't use it is when I need to sign something that makes more than one copy (visa reciepts for example).
Because it's a gel pen, you can write very quickly and (once you get the hang of it) precisely, without the friction of pressing down on the paper. Last year I managed to take notes for a few minutes without being able to feel the paper under the pen. Less friction means less arm/wrist strain, which is good for anyone who types or writes a lot.
In short, always use gel or fountain pens. They're good, and worth the money. Compared to bic pens which, while good, usually start to choke and die after about 1/2 of the ink is gone, and are also easily stolen, the pens I have (and the fact that I use them exclusively) display an aspect of my character, and people know whose pens they are if they fall out of my pocket (happens sometimes). Handy.
If you ask me the Radio Series is the definative version. It's the original medium.
True, but the interesting thing I noticed about the radio and book versions is that, by and large, the book version is just a remixed version of the radio scripts - the same scenes are there, with the same or similar words, but the scenes are in a completely different order in the two versions.
In some cases, one way makes sense more than another - for example, when the travellers are sent to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe - they're sent by Eddie from the Heart of Gold on the Frogstar via a 'massive explosion' that rocks the bridge - which isn't explained at all. In the radio play, they're flung by an exploding console in the bowels of Magrathea thanks to them being shot at a good deal and the console overloading.
The Book, which I hold dear to my heart, makes little to no sense here, but the radio version... well, ok, they both make little to no sense. Actually, nothing about the books makes sense. Oh well.
Interesting way to put the spin on it. I have another idea.
Vancouver Bars Network Together to Protect Customers
If I go to a bar and bump into the wrong person, I'm going to get my ass kicked (if I'm lucky), or, like another poster mentioned, I'm going to get beaten within an inch of my life. This is a big reason I don't go to bars. The worst part is, if it happens, I'm probably on my own. In a city the size of Vancouver, it's not too easy to find someone based on what four people almost saw.
With this system in place, the bars know where I go, but they also know who was there, with photos, so if I get laid out, I can say 'yeah, that's the guy' and they have records of him swiping in/out of the bar, so they know he was there.
I don't meet a lot of belligerant people, but when I do, coincidentally, most of them are drunk. If I'm given reassurances that there will be penalties for people who harm me, I'll feel a lot safer going out and having a good time. And that translates into me spending more money. That being said, having to empty one's pockets, as another poster mentioned is a real pain in the ass.
Yes, but your entry into the bar is conditional on your providing this information. If you claim to be someone else (which is illegal) and they bust you, you've got some bad shit coming to you. And guess what? Next time you go to the bar, the machine will notice your 'fake' ID again, and they'll know it's you.
Look, it's very simple. If you don't intend to play by their rules (don't be rowdy, swipe your card, get your picture taken) then don't go to those clubs. If you want to enter their clubs, you have to do it by their rules, or else it's just not right. It's like pirating Windows 2000 because 'all software should be free'. Maybe it should be, but it's not, and if you want to use it, you should pay for it, because that's the deal being presented, take it or leave it.
If you plan on picking one of these up, plan on looking for some wireless controllers with it - the controller ports are (delightfully) in the back. This is a Good Thing. The device looks better (you don't have cables hanging off the front of your DVD player, do you?), and it encourages people to go for a more elegant solution. If only Sony had doen the first-party wireless thing. Oh well.
Actually, a lot of Sony and other brand-name electronics are coming in silver or white nowadays in addition to (or instead of) black. Quite nice too, helps keep the room from getting depressing when you're Mr. Audiophile.
I think you're completely missing the point. This isn't meant to be an 'everything to everyone' gadget, this is for home users who want another 'set-top-box' for their entertainment centre. Something to put on top of their reciever that looks nice.
It won't have a VGA port because this isn't for computer ubergeeks, it's designed specifically (and only) for the living room, and for the average non-geek/b>. In other words, if you want a VGA port, they're targeting not-you.
This sure beats the one they were tossing around at Nintendo before: 'Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?'
Seriously, from being in the game industry, I had given up on the Gamecube as dead (even though I bought one last month, and love it), and figured Nintendo had as well. I thought ok, they'll put in a token effort, and keep their heads above water, and then wo wus all with a fresh release of a brand new console earlier than anyone else. Awesome.
Then the Gamecube came down to $99 ($139 in Canada). That's cheaper than the GBA SP for crying out loud. Hell, why NOT buy one?
And that's exactly what people did. We've been selling quite a few of them lately, and at that price, no one needs to be told twice. Not to mention the new releases that are coming out (I checked through EB's new release list and found over a thousand dollars of just games that I can't wait to play - Starcraft: Ghost, Freedom Fighters, Rogue Ops, NFS:Underground, Beyond Good and Evil, and dozens more).
They also dropped the price of the GBA SP in Canada to match the GC, and brought some of their hottest titles into the Player's Choice lineup at $39.99 (including Animal Crossing, which was at $70 before).
In short, they blew me, a loyal fan, out of the water. I'll be glad to see those GCs flying off the shelf, but I can't help but wonder what else it is they have in the wings. Hopefully, it'll be something awesome, but we'll see.
I took my two weeks' paid vacation and went to Israel to relax and socialize for a while. A friend was having a birthday, so I timed it to surprise her, and we hung out for a while. Great fun, explored Jerusalem, was having a blast.
One day, I get an email from my now-roommate Mike, saying I should probably talk to Gerhard before I got back. I emailed back to ask why, and he pasted an IRC conversation.
The long and the short of it was that my boss had apparantly found a PHP programmer to replace me, because he didn't like that I 'didn't do anything' while I was there. Nevermind that he hired a PHP programmer (me) to do a perl programmer's job without telling me that I'd have to do perl, I didn't do perl and so was let go (fair enough).
Because I didn't have a job to go back to, I just decided not to show up for my departing flight, stayed an extra week, lied like an SOB and faked some documents to get my return ticket moved up a week, and went back to Montreal. When I did, I found that all my papers and belongings at my desk had been thrown out (!!) and I had to fish my own hardware out of my old work computer while the boss was gone. Salvaged my MP3 collection at least.
I don't really harbour them any ill will, except for not telling me I was fired even after I got back (and for Gerhard not to bother emailing me himself) - not to mention not having any notice whatsoever. Fact is, I wasn't the sort of person the company was looking for and vice-versa, and I was going to leave the company anyway (tell me honestly, would you work for a company whose owner is a good friend of Alan Ralsky?), but still, it would have been nice to have official notice.
Yes, though enhancements show up much more slowly in Windows.
More accurately, enhancements show up in Windows with every release of MS Office, but programmers don't take the time to learn to use them (and rightly so, who has the time?).
Windows itself has improved the base widget set, though most Windows apps still look like they were designed for Windows 95 and very few of these new widgets are used there.
That's because Microsoft feels the same way about widget sets as they do about every other technology - namely, they can't settle.
Office 97 had a lot of neat things you could do - the toolbars, scroll bars, it was all different from normal. IE4 as well had rebar-style toolbars, and everyone thought that was neato. By the time other people figured out how to use these features (since MS didn't exactly publish these new interfaces right away), MS was designing NEW features - the Office 2K toolbars and 'hide extra junk' menus.
Most authors just want to make software, they don't want to dick around finding out how to use the latest and greatest new standard MS has set with their latest and greatest software.
If, on the other hand, MS had added enhancements to the REGULAR widgets (toolbars, menus, etc) and provided backwards compatibility (which they're never too keen on, it seems), then their OS wouldn't today look like the mishmash it is.
Coffee nothing, knowing Intel's track record, you could probably cook a chicken on this thing, and have heat left over to stir-fry some veggies to go with it.
No, it doesn't. There is an X backend to SDL, but it can also do the fun stuff on its own, as well, and runs on many platforms. From the FAQ:
Q: How do I choose a specific video driver? A: You can set the environment variable "SDL_VIDEODRIVER" to the name of the driver you want to use. The drivers available depend on the platform and SDL compile-time options. Here is a partial list for some platforms:
Linux:
x11 - (default) Use the X11 windowing system
dga - Use XFree86 DGA 2.0 for fullscreen hardware acceleration
fbcon - Use the framebuffer console
directfb - Use the DirectFB API
svgalib - Use the SVGAlib API
ggi - Use the General Graphics Interface API
aalib - Use the Ascii Art library
Win32:
directx - (default) Use the DirectDraw API
windib - Use the standard Win32 GDI
And from the website:
Simple DirectMedia Layer supports Linux, Windows, BeOS, MacOS Classic, MacOS X, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, Solaris, IRIX, and QNX. There is also code, but no official support, for Windows CE, AmigaOS, Dreamcast, Atari, NetBSD, AIX, OSF/Tru64, and SymbianOS.
Thus, not only can his example be made to work under X (theoretically), but it will also work on pretty much every other OS you'd want to use it on, and some you wouldn't. Also, in addition to being runnable anywhere, it can also run directly on the Linux framebuffer, which means that all that needs doing is hardware acceleration for the framebuffer, and then Y, as well as many other SDL apps (perhaps with slight modification), will run quite well without having to have X loaded. That, to me, sounds like a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Take this UI guide on the Sidebar. Excellent writing, and finally something which approaches what has made Apple keep the UI edge for all these years.
I agree wholeheartedly. The Sidebar guide is fantastic, and should give developers something to really think about. Finally, a guide as to when to clutter up the screen and when not to. 99% of system tray icons I've seen are completely useless (if Realplayer really needs help starting faster, maybe they should learn to code better instead of just pre-loading everything). This is a useful and intelligent developer resource, and people don't seem to understand that.
--Dan
Public use cases seem like a good idea, until you realize that background noise and assholes shouting commands over your sholder could end up causing more problems than the system solved.
Not with today's audio processing capability. My cellphone only hears me when I'm talking on it, even when I'm standing in Starbucks on a Saturday evening with the espresso machine going - even I can't hear me then, but my phone filters out all the background noise no problem.
That being said, I agree that it will be a lot more useful if it can data-mine and/or learn words on-the-fly.
My question is, will it understand me when I pronounce 'schedule' the way it's supposed to be pronounced, instead of 'skedule'? Hell, even some people I meet can't manage that.
--Dan
Unfortunately, RPMs generally do not follow the Debian packaging guidelines, and are frowned upon with the utmost of eyebrow usage. Native Debian packages are highly preferred.
Still, Alien is definitely useful in a pinch.
--Dan
Write one or two books ...or a hundred and forty...
Pogue has been around for a long long time and has written quite a lot of books over the years, aside from being a technology columnist for the NYT.
That being said, he's not writing the article for himself, he's writing it for other people - and those people should hear about the upgrade fee and find out if it's worth it or not.
--Dan
Since when are Self destructing documents a "new feature?"
Yeah, come on Microsoft. QuarkXPress has had this feature for like ten years. And best of all, you don't even have to enable it, it happens automatically.
Sheesh, talk about behind the times.
--Dan
Nope.
iTunes hasn't skipped at all, even when scanning two drives for MP3 files, or when I'm opening movies or (accidentaly) launching Winamp while Firebird is loading.
In fact, at the moment, it's using about 1.5% CPU use (average, it switches between 1% and 2% every update).
I think your system might have issues. Maybe the problem is accessing the hard drive? Maybe it's memory issues? VS.Net, Mozilla, and XP Pro are not exactly lightweight, and you're likely to have craploads of crud sucking up ram that you can't get back anyway.
That being said, I've never, EVER seen Winamp3 be responsive, smooth, or usable. Go figure.
--Dan
The local EB sold one! First in their district! Go 872!
It was returned a few days later, the radio didn't work. First one sold was defective. No problem, exchanged for another one, and he left happy.
Still, way to go Nokia.
--Dan
I second Nagios. I set it up as a technology test I was doing a while back to monitor our internal network and some remote servers (arbitrary web servers on the internet) for a lark - got it telling uptime, system load, swap, memory usage, processors, network load and the like on our Linux and Win2K machines (including various network interfaces - when the wired interface on the laptop was disconnected, it paged me - useless for our situation, but good for multihomed machines).
It can monitor all kinds of machines, services, ports, networks, pings, traceroutes, anything. Beautiful setup, and highly recommended.
--Dan
Most M-rated games aren't really rated M for anything that bad. So you shoot a guy, whoopie-doo. You see that on the news every day. 99% of the time, the M-rated games aren't anything to worry about.
When Grand Theft Auto: Vice City came out, however, the people at EB were asking everyone for ID - and if the parents WERE there, they would explain to the parent what the game is about - and most wouldn't buy it.
Some parents did, however. I overheard one woman who bought it for her eight-year-old son. Her reasoning? 'He's going to play it anyway, he may as well play it at home where I can watch him.'
--Dan
The graders couldn't figure out why I only gave 3 digits of accuracy and the third was sometimes wrong.
Well, I suppose habits are hard to break, but I have to ask, why would you use one if it's inaccurate and sometimes wrong? I'd rather be right than oldschool.
--Dan
2) SVG should not be used for the entire UI, that's overkill,
I disagree emphatically. Having the UI stored as vectors means that I can scale up everything - buttons, icons, widgets, everything - if I want, but Mr Only-has-640x480 doesn't have to suffer the obscenity of 40% of screen space going to widgets.
I recall some testing going on with the GNOME crew a while back where it showed that SVG rendering was actually faster than PNG rendering for some obscene reason (I'm too lazy to care, search back if you want).
The problem I see with SVG is the buggy... well, everything. I installed Illustrator 10 and the Adobe SVG plugin. I made a circle with a gradient in Illustrator, exported as SVG, and the Adobe plugin couldn't read it at all. Nice. But the other CVG stuff that Adobe had on their website was awesome, and worked fine. Go figure.
--Dan
To sum up (paraphrasing) the atmosphere about it at EB (the only gaming store in the city):
'The N-Gage is coming in early, but we won't sell it before the street date because we'd get sued. We won't sell it after the street date either though, because then we'd get lynched.'
'The marketing and games for the N-Gage are right here, just so you know.'
'Yeah, in case anyone wants to buy one.'
*both laugh*
(Customer) 'What the heck is that thing?'
'That's the Nokia N-Gage. It's a game system, and a cell phone and- screw it, I don't care either.'
In short: No one knows, and no one cares. The local EB has a quota to fill: 24. Think about this. The only thing it has going for it is that you can play against other people. Except that even EB's district office only expects to sell one to every two thousand people. The store's expectations are different, however:
'Man, I can't believe we have to sell 24 N-Gages. We're not going to sell a single one.'
'That's not true, we'll sell one eventually.'
In other words, the (unnamed) employees know that it's not going to happen, and don't honestly care. I played with one (not the games, just the batteryless machine) at EB, and it was neat, and might make for a good 2D game system - but NOT a 3D system, and NOT a cellphone, and NOT a notebook, and NOT an MP3 player, and NOT for $450.
--Dan
I find it hard to accuse EA of 'mass-marketization' when they practically own the video game market. They are, and have been for a long long time, the largest video game publisher in the world. They make all the big sports games, all the Maxis games, Westwood, Need for Speed - it really is amazing how big they are.
As for Need for Speed having to be 'The Fast and the Furious' - well, it makes sense, doesn't it? Why not? Nothing says they won't have Hot Pursuit III out later on, but why not do it? It's in the public eye, it's getting more popular, and you'd really have to be stupid not to do it.
Believe it or not, EA has a lot of interesting (And different) games. Simcity 4, Command and Conquer: Generals, Freedom Fighters, The Sims, Medal of Honor - all games that have something to them that other games of their type lack. Simcity is ludicrously detailed compared to its predecessors; Generals plays remarkably different from prior C&C games, but retains enough of its charm to avoid comparisons to other RTS games; The Sims is basically a genre in and of itself; Freedom Fighters is squad-based combat with a twist - recruiting (and actually being able to command your damn team); the intro to Medal of Honor makes you think 'Saving Private Ryan: The Game'.
Maybe you (as most other people, and myself) have just seen things blur together so much that you can't see the differences anymore - but trust me, they're there.
--Dan
Living in a smaller (~50-60k people) university town, it's almost impossible to get a decent pen at a stationery store. As a result, I'm forced to rely on one kind of pen, and it has served me well. In almost all circumstances, this is the only pen I will use. In university, on one occasion when I discovered I'd forgotten them all at home, I bought a new one for $4 instead of borrowing one from a friend. I always keep them with me in case I need to use one, and the only time I ever don't use it is when I need to sign something that makes more than one copy (visa reciepts for example).
Because it's a gel pen, you can write very quickly and (once you get the hang of it) precisely, without the friction of pressing down on the paper. Last year I managed to take notes for a few minutes without being able to feel the paper under the pen. Less friction means less arm/wrist strain, which is good for anyone who types or writes a lot.
In short, always use gel or fountain pens. They're good, and worth the money. Compared to bic pens which, while good, usually start to choke and die after about 1/2 of the ink is gone, and are also easily stolen, the pens I have (and the fact that I use them exclusively) display an aspect of my character, and people know whose pens they are if they fall out of my pocket (happens sometimes). Handy.
--Dan
If you ask me the Radio Series is the definative version. It's the original medium.
True, but the interesting thing I noticed about the radio and book versions is that, by and large, the book version is just a remixed version of the radio scripts - the same scenes are there, with the same or similar words, but the scenes are in a completely different order in the two versions.
In some cases, one way makes sense more than another - for example, when the travellers are sent to the Restaurant at the End of the Universe - they're sent by Eddie from the Heart of Gold on the Frogstar via a 'massive explosion' that rocks the bridge - which isn't explained at all. In the radio play, they're flung by an exploding console in the bowels of Magrathea thanks to them being shot at a good deal and the console overloading.
The Book, which I hold dear to my heart, makes little to no sense here, but the radio version... well, ok, they both make little to no sense. Actually, nothing about the books makes sense. Oh well.
--Dan
Vancouver Bars Network Together to Track Patrons
Interesting way to put the spin on it. I have another idea.
Vancouver Bars Network Together to Protect Customers
If I go to a bar and bump into the wrong person, I'm going to get my ass kicked (if I'm lucky), or, like another poster mentioned, I'm going to get beaten within an inch of my life. This is a big reason I don't go to bars. The worst part is, if it happens, I'm probably on my own. In a city the size of Vancouver, it's not too easy to find someone based on what four people almost saw.
With this system in place, the bars know where I go, but they also know who was there, with photos, so if I get laid out, I can say 'yeah, that's the guy' and they have records of him swiping in/out of the bar, so they know he was there.
I don't meet a lot of belligerant people, but when I do, coincidentally, most of them are drunk. If I'm given reassurances that there will be penalties for people who harm me, I'll feel a lot safer going out and having a good time. And that translates into me spending more money. That being said, having to empty one's pockets, as another poster mentioned is a real pain in the ass.
--Dan
Yes, but your entry into the bar is conditional on your providing this information. If you claim to be someone else (which is illegal) and they bust you, you've got some bad shit coming to you. And guess what? Next time you go to the bar, the machine will notice your 'fake' ID again, and they'll know it's you.
Look, it's very simple. If you don't intend to play by their rules (don't be rowdy, swipe your card, get your picture taken) then don't go to those clubs. If you want to enter their clubs, you have to do it by their rules, or else it's just not right. It's like pirating Windows 2000 because 'all software should be free'. Maybe it should be, but it's not, and if you want to use it, you should pay for it, because that's the deal being presented, take it or leave it.
--Dan
If you plan on picking one of these up, plan on looking for some wireless controllers with it - the controller ports are (delightfully) in the back. This is a Good Thing. The device looks better (you don't have cables hanging off the front of your DVD player, do you?), and it encourages people to go for a more elegant solution. If only Sony had doen the first-party wireless thing. Oh well.
--Dan
Actually, a lot of Sony and other brand-name electronics are coming in silver or white nowadays in addition to (or instead of) black. Quite nice too, helps keep the room from getting depressing when you're Mr. Audiophile.
--Dan
I think you're completely missing the point. This isn't meant to be an 'everything to everyone' gadget, this is for home users who want another 'set-top-box' for their entertainment centre. Something to put on top of their reciever that looks nice.
It won't have a VGA port because this isn't for computer ubergeeks, it's designed specifically (and only) for the living room, and for the average non-geek/b>. In other words, if you want a VGA port, they're targeting not-you.
--Dan
This sure beats the one they were tossing around at Nintendo before: 'Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?'
Seriously, from being in the game industry, I had given up on the Gamecube as dead (even though I bought one last month, and love it), and figured Nintendo had as well. I thought ok, they'll put in a token effort, and keep their heads above water, and then wo wus all with a fresh release of a brand new console earlier than anyone else. Awesome.
Then the Gamecube came down to $99 ($139 in Canada). That's cheaper than the GBA SP for crying out loud. Hell, why NOT buy one?
And that's exactly what people did. We've been selling quite a few of them lately, and at that price, no one needs to be told twice. Not to mention the new releases that are coming out (I checked through EB's new release list and found over a thousand dollars of just games that I can't wait to play - Starcraft: Ghost, Freedom Fighters, Rogue Ops, NFS:Underground, Beyond Good and Evil, and dozens more).
They also dropped the price of the GBA SP in Canada to match the GC, and brought some of their hottest titles into the Player's Choice lineup at $39.99 (including Animal Crossing, which was at $70 before).
In short, they blew me, a loyal fan, out of the water. I'll be glad to see those GCs flying off the shelf, but I can't help but wonder what else it is they have in the wings. Hopefully, it'll be something awesome, but we'll see.
--Dan
I took my two weeks' paid vacation and went to Israel to relax and socialize for a while. A friend was having a birthday, so I timed it to surprise her, and we hung out for a while. Great fun, explored Jerusalem, was having a blast.
One day, I get an email from my now-roommate Mike, saying I should probably talk to Gerhard before I got back. I emailed back to ask why, and he pasted an IRC conversation.
The long and the short of it was that my boss had apparantly found a PHP programmer to replace me, because he didn't like that I 'didn't do anything' while I was there. Nevermind that he hired a PHP programmer (me) to do a perl programmer's job without telling me that I'd have to do perl, I didn't do perl and so was let go (fair enough).
Because I didn't have a job to go back to, I just decided not to show up for my departing flight, stayed an extra week, lied like an SOB and faked some documents to get my return ticket moved up a week, and went back to Montreal. When I did, I found that all my papers and belongings at my desk had been thrown out (!!) and I had to fish my own hardware out of my old work computer while the boss was gone. Salvaged my MP3 collection at least.
I don't really harbour them any ill will, except for not telling me I was fired even after I got back (and for Gerhard not to bother emailing me himself) - not to mention not having any notice whatsoever. Fact is, I wasn't the sort of person the company was looking for and vice-versa, and I was going to leave the company anyway (tell me honestly, would you work for a company whose owner is a good friend of Alan Ralsky?), but still, it would have been nice to have official notice.
--Dan
Yes, though enhancements show up much more slowly in Windows.
More accurately, enhancements show up in Windows with every release of MS Office, but programmers don't take the time to learn to use them (and rightly so, who has the time?).
Windows itself has improved the base widget set, though most Windows apps still look like they were designed for Windows 95 and very few of these new widgets are used there.
That's because Microsoft feels the same way about widget sets as they do about every other technology - namely, they can't settle.
Office 97 had a lot of neat things you could do - the toolbars, scroll bars, it was all different from normal. IE4 as well had rebar-style toolbars, and everyone thought that was neato. By the time other people figured out how to use these features (since MS didn't exactly publish these new interfaces right away), MS was designing NEW features - the Office 2K toolbars and 'hide extra junk' menus.
Most authors just want to make software, they don't want to dick around finding out how to use the latest and greatest new standard MS has set with their latest and greatest software.
If, on the other hand, MS had added enhancements to the REGULAR widgets (toolbars, menus, etc) and provided backwards compatibility (which they're never too keen on, it seems), then their OS wouldn't today look like the mishmash it is.
Coffee nothing, knowing Intel's track record, you could probably cook a chicken on this thing, and have heat left over to stir-fry some veggies to go with it.
--Dan
Now, doesn't libSDL again depend on X? ;-)
No, it doesn't. There is an X backend to SDL, but it can also do the fun stuff on its own, as well, and runs on many platforms. From the FAQ:
And from the website:
Thus, not only can his example be made to work under X (theoretically), but it will also work on pretty much every other OS you'd want to use it on, and some you wouldn't. Also, in addition to being runnable anywhere, it can also run directly on the Linux framebuffer, which means that all that needs doing is hardware acceleration for the framebuffer, and then Y, as well as many other SDL apps (perhaps with slight modification), will run quite well without having to have X loaded. That, to me, sounds like a good thing.
--Dan