I used to use sequencer software on my old Amiga 500 + green monochrome monitor up until about 5 years ago, and never really saw the need to switch until I got into Reason in a big way on PC. That app alone is worth the switch I think
Yes, it is worth the switch - to an Apple machine, since it's available for both OS 9 and X.;-)
"More Hardware Options, for Less Dough...
My laptop came with 512 MB of RAM, a 15" screen, a DVD player, and Windows XP Home Edition preinstalled, for $450 less than a comparable iBook."
Apart from the lying^H^H^H^Hcreative use of "comparable" here, she forgot to add: "Yuh, and it has, like, a whole two minutes of battery life!"
Anti-aliasing cannot be turned off--decreasing the readability of the text (Okay, it can be turned off, but have you done that and looked at your desktop? There is not an uglier site to see than a drop shadow around non-antialiased text.)
Some people prefer antialiased text; others do not. Apple gives you the option to have it either way. Now, what was your point again?
Beyond the problems with the GUI, there are also a number of issues with all the apps that now run under OS X.
Bullshit. With MS Office, yes. As an MS guy on the newsgroup said, Mac Office X was rushed out the door unfinished. But with "all apps"?? Do you actually use any OS X apps?
Re:Spacewar first ran on the PDP-1
on
High Score
·
· Score: 1
I didn't know about Computer Space. I hope
Nintndo knew about it when they disputed
Bushnell's patent. Nintendo claimed that
Spacewar constituted "prior art" and had me
testify about the presence of the game at
Sanders. They only told me what I needed to
know, so I have no idea how that dispute
was resolved. I believe the holder of the
Pong patent wanted a license fee from every
video game sold, which would be quite a piece
of change.
That's interesting. As far as I know, Bushnell never denied that Computer Space (Nutting Associates, 1971, and the first ever commercial videogame) was a clone of Spacewar, which according to numerous sources he played in the early 1960s at the University of Utah. I wasn't aware that once he released Pong through his own company, Atari, he seriously wanted royalties on all subsequent videogames. Good thing he didn't get 'em.;-)
Steven Poole
Re:Spacewar first ran on the PDP-1
on
High Score
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The review refers to the PDP 11, but the original version of Spacewar ran on the PDP-1, which was a $120,000 computer. Spacewar may have influenced Pong, though there is no proof. I brought Spacewar from Stanford to Sanders Associates in 1969, where it was played on Sanders' PDP-1 at about the time that Pong was invented. Unfortunately, there was no log kept of PDP-1 users, so there is no proof that the inventor of Pong played Spacewar.
Um, actually there is, since Pong inventor Nolan Bushnell's first production arcade game was Computer Space, which was more or less exactly Spacewar in a cabinet.
Re:Sinclair ?
on
High Score
·
· Score: 2, Informative
There's a reason that people don't remember the Sinclair when talking about the history of video/computer games, and that reason is that the Sinclair was and is utterly unimportant in this regard.
Uh, did you ever hear of a little company called Rare which developed various all-time classics for SNES and N64, including Goldeneye? Which has just been bought for half a billion by Microsoft?
It began as a company making games for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Let's face it, Cubase is a toy. And I'm a guy who started out with Cubase, and then switched to Logic. If you need Pro Tools compatibility between studios, you can use Logic as a front end for the Pro Tools recording, which is just as well because the Pro Tools front end sucks. More integration with MacOSX can only improve what is already a great product.
Oh, and to the guy who complained about soundcards - guess what? You can buy all kinds of pro soundcards for Macs, too.
What the fsck happened to reading a paperback book while you're waiting for the train?
Practise what you preach
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 1
I like giving information away.
Oh, really? So why does it say this on your website?
Can I put my page on your site?
It's a personal homepage. I buy and maintain my own webspace. The pages at Furinkan.net are for personal use only.
Way to restrict the flow of information there, dude.
Re:Leveraging what business, exactly?
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 1
Information is not equal to property. I like giving information away. It's a fun hobby. I write almost every day. Rather than selling my writing, I write about things that I could never sell and give that writing to whomever comes to my website. Are you calling my readers criminals?
Er, why do you think "intellectual property" is called property? Because it is property. Let me tell you why. You're getting confused about different uses of that handy word "information".
Meaning #1: The "information" that the sun is ~8 light-minutes away from the Earth, for example, is, indeed, not property - it's just a truth that's out there.
Meaning#2: If I write a book that contains original content, or I record an album, you might still loosely call it information, but it is something created by me, and therefore it is mine to dispose of as I see fit. Just the same as if you built a log cabin in the woods. You would want to feel entitled to live there, and to defend it against anyone who wanted to steal it from you.
You like giving your writing away because no one would want to pay for it? Fine. Doesn't disprove my case.
the great majority of smaller performers make their money by a) selling merchandise such as t-shirts and b) selling concert tickets
And because some artists can manage to do that, you think that therefore all artists ought to give away their work for free?
How many novelists make their living selling T-shirts?
How many classical composers make their living selling T-shirts?
How many painters make their living selling T-shirts?
Arguably the special case of rock/pop musicians living off merchandise is only possible in the first place because of the large publicity and IP infrastructure already in place. But remember anyway that they are a special case. You haven't even started to explain how your "idea" will work for other artists.
IP laws do not work in this day and age. They have to be scrapped
Uh, they work fine for me and other creators of intellectual property. If you mean they "have to be scrapped" simply because stealing is easy, that's an awfully poor argument. And you haven't offered any other one.
Leveraging what business, exactly?
on
Fair IP Laws?
·
· Score: 1
There are just too many advantages to having no restriction on the flow of information.
Advantages to whom? Oh right, to people who want the fruits of other people's labour for free. So, being the kind of guy who demands the fruits of other people's labour for free, I guess you always walk out of restaurants without paying the bill too, huh? Information actually flows pretty easily already when I buy a book from amazon, and the author gets to pay the rent into the bargain.
As the poster put it 'leveraging other business' should be the only way people who make information, be it text, code, music, etc... make money.
I'm sorry, but this is just f***ing nuts. Almost all musicians or writers worth their salt do nothing but make music or write. That's why they're so good, and that's why you want to listen to and read their stuff. So what other "business" do they have to leverage? Selling T-shirts? This might be funny if it weren't so stupid.
The FIDE champ, Ponomariov, lost badly to Kasparov at Linares.
Meh. He lost 0.5-1.5 over a course of two games. That tells you nothing. Maybe if we see them play a 16-game match... After making a horrible blunder on about move 7, Ponomariov actually defended brilliantly for most of the second game.
[Kramnik] is the anti-Kasparov with a playing style designed to specifically give Kasparov fits.
Yeah, well that's another problem. Kramnik has been scared to play anyone else since he beat Kasparov. That world no 2 ranking is beginning to look a little underjustified;-)
It's "free", only in the sense that there's no added cost above and beyond that which you're paying for that "unmetered connection".
Yep. In other words, because I already have the unmetered connection, it's free. Just like commercial television is free for me to watch even though I, like, have to buy a TV set.
For you, there may be no added cost for the bandwidth required to transfer "foo" from wherever it is to you
Yep. So, for me, it's free. What part of that didn't you understand again?
No, the point is that I already pay for the unmetered connection so that I can do my work. Therefore the extra cost of reading content for fun is precisely $0.
Why go through all that if you can just go to Gamespot *right now* and find what you're looking for.
Because Gamespot sucks, and call me a genius but hey: it doesn't take me three days to find something better.
1. Free on-line content is only free if your time is worth nothing.
Uh, hello? That's like saying free beer isn't really free because it costs you time to drink it.
If I have an unmetered connection, and I find something online that I want to read, and I don't have to pay for it, then it is free. If I did have to pay for it, it wouldn't be free. Do you see?
As far as the "OMG EXCLUSIVE ++HOT!!" articles go... well, the cover article is *never* a review. It's always a preview
I beg to differ. It is often a review.
So, if there's anything going on that's unjust then rest assured it's happening at the editorial level and NOT with the individual writers themselves.
That is largely the case, but it doesn't make it any less dishonest. And there are a few "individual writers" around my neck of the woods whose actions are rather suspicious when seen close-up. Oh, and I write about games myself, btw.
The subject of gaming publications getting funny money for knocking review scores up just isn't true. It's pure speculatory myth.
You are clearly very lucky, having only ever been involved with honest people in the industry. It is a fact, at least in the UK, that magazines grant high review scores to games in return for "exclusive" coverage.
The real question is who cares what happens to Gamespot? They give any old crap an 8 or above. Look hard and you can find some good reviews online: at joystick101, gamecritics, or eurogamer. And they're all free.
As in the game, despite her access to some stunningly sophisticated firepower, Croft prefers the 9mm pistols strapped prominently to her hips, wielding them against robots, commandos, even supernatural creatures of yore.
Hmmm. Actually, it's in the game that her ammo never runs out. In the film, she has to reload magazines. And she never has access to any other firepower, because she can't unlock her gun cupboard.
As someone who enjoys great popcorn action movies, I have to say: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider sucks big time. Why?
1. Incoherent action sequences. For some reason, it is now fashionable to construct action sequences after the fact, in the editing room, rather than letting the camera shoot properly choreographed action in the first place. This was the worst aspect of Gladiator, eg, where the fast-cutting close-ups precluded any understanding of the spatial logic of those fights. It's even worse in this movie. We don't understand - and therefore don't care - how Lara moves about and wins fights.
2. Not enough violence. I know they wanted to make this a kiddies' film, but over the course of the entire movie, Lara only kills one person. It's like a (bad) episode of The A-Team.
3. Not enough sex. Angelina Jolie only wears hotpants in the first scene. Shame. The one interesting part of her characterisation, meanwhile, is a sort of pseudo-sexual moan she makes whenever a situation is about to turn violent. This could have been an interesting way to go - make Lara a real psychopath - but it's never really exploited.
4. A stupid, stupid script. I don't just mean stupid like in all blockbusters - I mean much more stupid than something like Con Air. Just boring, incoherent and dull.
5. Bad special effects. So a six-armed giant Buddha comes to life, huh? Yeah, we saw that in Sinbad. And the CGI here pales in comparison to Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion monsters. It really does.
6. Crap monsters. Monkey statues coming to life? Never mind, they're really easy to kill. Hit 'em with a sword, shoot them, punch them - hell, even breathe on 'em, they'll fall over. Boring.
7. Er, did I mention it sucks really badly and in every possible way? Angelina Jolie is great, and she has some nice outfits, but she can't save the film single-handed. It really is terrible.
Never mind about my horizontally aligned Neo Geo Pocket Color. It's not even the first h-a Nintendo handheld. What about all the Game & Watch titles? They were horizontally aligned in the early 1980s. Ah, Snoopy Tennis...
>"The missile hit the target it was told to, but >the target was actually a friendly, therefore it's >a failure of the missile" seems a strange >conclusion.
Yes it is, but it's not mine. I'm talking missiles veering totally off target and hitting, say, a hospital at random because the navigation system crashed. Of course this doesn't happen "all the time", but it seems to me you can never totally eradicate errors like this. Of course, you can't eradicate human error either.
The original point in the book is that if human operators are now making decisions based on mediated pixel displays rather than meat-based eyeballing, that's just another thing added to the process that might go wrong. The information has to go through more tubes, therefore there's a stronger chance of it getting frazzled.
BTW I don't blame Word for my spelling mistakes (cos I don't make any;-) but I do blame it for tricking me into typing double spaces because it can't display them at a fixed width when I have text zoom on.
Thanks for the comments. I'd just like to point out that it is a *deliberate* strategy to illustrate my arguments using as few and as widely recognisable games as possible, for the simple reason that a reader who is not herself expert in the field doesn't need to be confused by a million different obscure game titles if something she already knows, like Tomb Raider, will do just as well in the explanatory context. Steven Poole.
Actually, what I say in the book is "pixels *can* lie" (emphasis added), which I mean as shorthand for "technology (and the people using it) can fuck up".
You say military tech is "designed to be as near to failure-proof as possible". Sure. But if you're trying to argue that it *never fails*, then that's clearly nonsense. Missiles misfire and hit the wrong target all the time.
Steven Poole
Re:Story Telling Capability of Video Games
on
Trigger Happy
·
· Score: 1
As a matter of fact, I have played FF. I got locked into a luxury hotel to play FFVIII all weekend for a newspaper article. It was so shatteringly banal and boring that I nearly poked my own eyes out with a broken miniature of whisky.
Thank you for your interest.
Steven Poole,
Author, Trigger Happy
Foster, a Vassar prof who solved a centuries old mystery involving a Shakespearean sonnet
Katz uncritically repeats what I imagine is Foster's own, or his publishers' claim. In fact, Foster has tried to prove using linguistic methods that a flaky 1612 poem entitled "A Funeral Elegy" (it's not a sonnet) is by William Shakespeare. Many Shakespeare scholars violently disagree. Foster has certainly not "solved a centuries old mystery" to many people's satisfaction.
Slashdot Mirror
http://unspeak.net/cult/
Yes, it is worth the switch - to an Apple machine, since it's available for both OS 9 and X. ;-)
Apart from the lying^H^H^H^Hcreative use of "comparable" here, she forgot to add: "Yuh, and it has, like, a whole two minutes of battery life!"
Some people prefer antialiased text; others do not. Apple gives you the option to have it either way. Now, what was your point again?
Beyond the problems with the GUI, there are also a number of issues with all the apps that now run under OS X.
Bullshit. With MS Office, yes. As an MS guy on the newsgroup said, Mac Office X was rushed out the door unfinished. But with "all apps"?? Do you actually use any OS X apps?
That's interesting. As far as I know, Bushnell never denied that Computer Space (Nutting Associates, 1971, and the first ever commercial videogame) was a clone of Spacewar, which according to numerous sources he played in the early 1960s at the University of Utah. I wasn't aware that once he released Pong through his own company, Atari, he seriously wanted royalties on all subsequent videogames. Good thing he didn't get 'em. ;-)
Steven Poole
Um, actually there is, since Pong inventor Nolan Bushnell's first production arcade game was Computer Space, which was more or less exactly Spacewar in a cabinet.
Uh, did you ever hear of a little company called Rare which developed various all-time classics for SNES and N64, including Goldeneye? Which has just been bought for half a billion by Microsoft?
It began as a company making games for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Lesson over.
Oh, and to the guy who complained about soundcards - guess what? You can buy all kinds of pro soundcards for Macs, too.
What the fsck happened to reading a paperback book while you're waiting for the train?
Oh, really? So why does it say this on your website?
Can I put my page on your site?
It's a personal homepage. I buy and maintain my own webspace. The pages at Furinkan.net are for personal use only.
Way to restrict the flow of information there, dude.
Er, why do you think "intellectual property" is called property? Because it is property. Let me tell you why. You're getting confused about different uses of that handy word "information".
Meaning #1: The "information" that the sun is ~8 light-minutes away from the Earth, for example, is, indeed, not property - it's just a truth that's out there.
Meaning#2: If I write a book that contains original content, or I record an album, you might still loosely call it information, but it is something created by me, and therefore it is mine to dispose of as I see fit. Just the same as if you built a log cabin in the woods. You would want to feel entitled to live there, and to defend it against anyone who wanted to steal it from you.
You like giving your writing away because no one would want to pay for it? Fine. Doesn't disprove my case.
the great majority of smaller performers make their money by a) selling merchandise such as t-shirts and b) selling concert tickets
And because some artists can manage to do that, you think that therefore all artists ought to give away their work for free?
How many novelists make their living selling T-shirts?
How many classical composers make their living selling T-shirts?
How many painters make their living selling T-shirts?
Arguably the special case of rock/pop musicians living off merchandise is only possible in the first place because of the large publicity and IP infrastructure already in place. But remember anyway that they are a special case. You haven't even started to explain how your "idea" will work for other artists.
IP laws do not work in this day and age. They have to be scrapped
Uh, they work fine for me and other creators of intellectual property. If you mean they "have to be scrapped" simply because stealing is easy, that's an awfully poor argument. And you haven't offered any other one.
Advantages to whom? Oh right, to people who want the fruits of other people's labour for free. So, being the kind of guy who demands the fruits of other people's labour for free, I guess you always walk out of restaurants without paying the bill too, huh? Information actually flows pretty easily already when I buy a book from amazon, and the author gets to pay the rent into the bargain.
As the poster put it 'leveraging other business' should be the only way people who make information, be it text, code, music, etc... make money.
I'm sorry, but this is just f***ing nuts. Almost all musicians or writers worth their salt do nothing but make music or write. That's why they're so good, and that's why you want to listen to and read their stuff. So what other "business" do they have to leverage? Selling T-shirts? This might be funny if it weren't so stupid.
Meh. He lost 0.5-1.5 over a course of two games. That tells you nothing. Maybe if we see them play a 16-game match... After making a horrible blunder on about move 7, Ponomariov actually defended brilliantly for most of the second game.
[Kramnik] is the anti-Kasparov with a playing style designed to specifically give Kasparov fits.
Yeah, well that's another problem. Kramnik has been scared to play anyone else since he beat Kasparov. That world no 2 ranking is beginning to look a little underjustified ;-)
Yep. In other words, because I already have the unmetered connection, it's free. Just like commercial television is free for me to watch even though I, like, have to buy a TV set.
For you, there may be no added cost for the bandwidth required to transfer "foo" from wherever it is to you
Yep. So, for me, it's free. What part of that didn't you understand again?
Why go through all that if you can just go to Gamespot *right now* and find what you're looking for.
Because Gamespot sucks, and call me a genius but hey: it doesn't take me three days to find something better.
Uh, hello? That's like saying free beer isn't really free because it costs you time to drink it.
If I have an unmetered connection, and I find something online that I want to read, and I don't have to pay for it, then it is free. If I did have to pay for it, it wouldn't be free. Do you see?
I beg to differ. It is often a review.
So, if there's anything going on that's unjust then rest assured it's happening at the editorial level and NOT with the individual writers themselves.
That is largely the case, but it doesn't make it any less dishonest. And there are a few "individual writers" around my neck of the woods whose actions are rather suspicious when seen close-up. Oh, and I write about games myself, btw.
You are clearly very lucky, having only ever been involved with honest people in the industry. It is a fact, at least in the UK, that magazines grant high review scores to games in return for "exclusive" coverage.
The real question is who cares what happens to Gamespot? They give any old crap an 8 or above. Look hard and you can find some good reviews online: at joystick101, gamecritics, or eurogamer. And they're all free.
Hmmm. Actually, it's in the game that her ammo never runs out. In the film, she has to reload magazines. And she never has access to any other firepower, because she can't unlock her gun cupboard.
As someone who enjoys great popcorn action movies, I have to say: Lara Croft: Tomb Raider sucks big time. Why?
1. Incoherent action sequences. For some reason, it is now fashionable to construct action sequences after the fact, in the editing room, rather than letting the camera shoot properly choreographed action in the first place. This was the worst aspect of Gladiator, eg, where the fast-cutting close-ups precluded any understanding of the spatial logic of those fights. It's even worse in this movie. We don't understand - and therefore don't care - how Lara moves about and wins fights.
2. Not enough violence. I know they wanted to make this a kiddies' film, but over the course of the entire movie, Lara only kills one person. It's like a (bad) episode of The A-Team.
3. Not enough sex. Angelina Jolie only wears hotpants in the first scene. Shame. The one interesting part of her characterisation, meanwhile, is a sort of pseudo-sexual moan she makes whenever a situation is about to turn violent. This could have been an interesting way to go - make Lara a real psychopath - but it's never really exploited.
4. A stupid, stupid script. I don't just mean stupid like in all blockbusters - I mean much more stupid than something like Con Air. Just boring, incoherent and dull.
5. Bad special effects. So a six-armed giant Buddha comes to life, huh? Yeah, we saw that in Sinbad. And the CGI here pales in comparison to Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion monsters. It really does.
6. Crap monsters. Monkey statues coming to life? Never mind, they're really easy to kill. Hit 'em with a sword, shoot them, punch them - hell, even breathe on 'em, they'll fall over. Boring.
7. Er, did I mention it sucks really badly and in every possible way? Angelina Jolie is great, and she has some nice outfits, but she can't save the film single-handed. It really is terrible.
>"The missile hit the target it was told to, but >the target was actually a friendly, therefore it's >a failure of the missile" seems a strange >conclusion.
;-) but I do blame it for tricking me into typing double spaces because it can't display them at a fixed width when I have text zoom on.
Yes it is, but it's not mine. I'm talking missiles veering totally off target and hitting, say, a hospital at random because the navigation system crashed. Of course this doesn't happen "all the time", but it seems to me you can never totally eradicate errors like this. Of course, you can't eradicate human error either.
The original point in the book is that if human operators are now making decisions based on mediated pixel displays rather than meat-based eyeballing, that's just another thing added to the process that might go wrong. The information has to go through more tubes, therefore there's a stronger chance of it getting frazzled.
BTW I don't blame Word for my spelling mistakes (cos I don't make any
Steven
Thanks for the comments. I'd just like to point out that it is a *deliberate* strategy to illustrate my arguments using as few and as widely recognisable games as possible, for the simple reason that a reader who is not herself expert in the field doesn't need to be confused by a million different obscure game titles if something she already knows, like Tomb Raider, will do just as well in the explanatory context. Steven Poole.
Actually, what I say in the book is "pixels *can* lie" (emphasis added), which I mean as shorthand for "technology (and the people using it) can fuck up".
You say military tech is "designed to be as near to failure-proof as possible". Sure. But if you're trying to argue that it *never fails*, then that's clearly nonsense. Missiles misfire and hit the wrong target all the time.
Steven Poole
As a matter of fact, I have played FF. I got locked into a luxury hotel to play FFVIII all weekend for a newspaper article. It was so shatteringly banal and boring that I nearly poked my own eyes out with a broken miniature of whisky. Thank you for your interest. Steven Poole, Author, Trigger Happy
Katz uncritically repeats what I imagine is Foster's own, or his publishers' claim. In fact, Foster has tried to prove using linguistic methods that a flaky 1612 poem entitled "A Funeral Elegy" (it's not a sonnet) is by William Shakespeare. Many Shakespeare scholars violently disagree. Foster has certainly not "solved a centuries old mystery" to many people's satisfaction.
This is not a sig