It's a blog post, so it's not like it's going to happen, but I don't see how forking the kernel would do anything than just lead to distribution craziness. Arguably that's Linux's biggest hurdle for new people -- deciding which distribution to get. And if people are checking out linux for workload purposes, forcing them to decide whether to get a server distro or a home distro and making that distinction at the kernel level? Buh?
Generally, if it's good enough for enterprise, it's good enough for home use. And things that are useful for desktop Linux are often utilized at the enterprise level anyway. So yeah, it's just a blog post; I'm not sure anyone will take it seriously.
iTunes on a mac isn't the "bloated," error-prone kludge it is on Windows. I'm not sure why that is, especially since it's supposed to be some sort of trojan horse for the Mac lifestyle or some other marketing thing, but iTunes on OS X is nice 'n speedy.
It also comes pre-installed on all Macs, so there's that going for it.
I'd imagine that developers would quite like the reduced cost of a more established, yet slower, system architecture, and would be perfectly happy not having to introduced network code into their games.
The problem is that the games that work well with those type of elements (flashy FPS games just to name one large genre) exist almost entirely due to those two elements.
But they're hardly dealbreakers. It's not like BioShock has online play.
If I wanted to read Dvorak's meaningless drivel, I would just read his "blog" independently. He's never said anything even remotely interesting, let alone something that involved actual thought.
He doesn't -- he says he could pay $40. But as he's not a subscriber, he probably has not looked at the available plans and actually checked the prices, because what he's talking about doesn't make any sense. No cable company charges $40 for the "local channel + public access" stuff. They provide it as an almost public service, for people who get poor antenna reception.
Most providers offer the "basic analog" package, which includes about 90 channels for $40. He's probably just confused his interpretation of "basic" with the cable company's.
I think that's why they opened a US call center and promise short wait times. They know most people don't need to use it. Makes it cheaper when you don't have to open a bazillion of them because your product/service is crappy.
Same with digital cables! I love telling people that cables can't matter for a digital connection, as they give me a blank look after dropping $80 on Monster HDMI cables.
Yes, because it makes the difference between watching a movie and saying "by golly, thems some purty pictures" and "oh, that's directly influenced by this classic play, that's neat."
Of course, there's a lot of models of iPod that can't play games, and Apple has never pushed the iPod as a linux device. It barely pushes the games aspect, really.
It is in pretty stark contract to Sony, who has constantly pushed the PS3 as a "trojan horse" for Blu-Ray.
Agreed. The PS2s first year was poor, but it followed it up with a damn good 2nd year. And, more importantly, it essentially has zero competition during that first year. So it didn't matter that there weren't that many games, or that they were crappy -- it could actually get away with just wowing people with fancy graphics.
By the time the other consoles had gotten past their "launch window," the PS2 was coming into its heyday.
Nope, iTunes is successful because it's NOT a store. It's a music catalog program that, as a feature, includes a music store and video support.
Netflix does have the same technology, though, and the same crappy DRM. It's only playable on Windows, in Internet Explorer, using Windows Media Player, and only on a primary monitor. It won't play out of SVideo ports even. That also means that there's a sizeable chunk of people who won't use it.
Still, I don't think it'll really help BB. It doesn't help Netflix because the selection is poor and the DRM annoyingness. Most BB users (who mostly use the service thanks to the physical store advantages, which they're dropping) probably won't even notice it.
Yeah, you can select an index of colors -- last time I checked, you can even select the bits used in the PNG. The problem is that photoshop is too specific about it. It'll save GIFs indexed to the "best fit" colors automatically. It should be able to do the same for PNGs, but it doesn't, forcing users to do it manually. And most won't bother, when GIF is right there.
It's only because Photoshop will whack down the color palette for GIFs when you use Save for Web. A PNG with the same color index will inherently be smaller than a GIF.
BUT! It took me some experimenting to see that this was the case. Photoshop has a tendency to increase the color palette when you open an indexed gif and try to save it as a PNG. Use the same palette, or use Save for Web, though, and the PNG will be smaller than an otherwise equivalent GIF.
Most earlier cameras did, but it took a very, very long time to save to the format. As such, very few users ever tried the feature after using it once, and those that did use it realized that a new, 3 or 5mp camera would take inherently better pictures, even saving to jpg.
I can't imagine how long it would take to save a 5mp picture to tiff, let alone what it would do to battery life. These little point/click cameras are not known for their speedy chips.
Exactly. People like games that are on time. What they hate about games that are pushed back is that arbitrary deadline in the first place. If your game is probably NOT going to be ready in a year's time, DON'T say it is!
But yeah, the only thing worse than a moving deadline are patches and bugs. And last 1/3 of a game that's just tacked on and unfinished.
That's why they're making money, I believe -- they're not really advertising the thing. People who are generally anti-iPod, for whatever reason, know about the Zune. And some of them buy one, because it's got a nice screen and isn't an iPod.
I think MS knows that it can't really overcome the iPod at this point, but if it doesn't advertise them (or advertises very selectively), people will buy them and they'll not have to spend huge gobs of money trying to beat Apple's advertising.
Interestingly enough, computers can only win at games that are purely strategical with no element of luck. So yes, a program will one day be unbeatable at chess simply due to the fact that there is no random element in the game. It's just a matter of figuring out the right algorithm, or series of algorithms.
The neat thing about this checkers "simulation" is that it charts out end games, so it's likely a relatively lean program. Rather than having the program evaluate each position and all following positions after each move, it simply compares and moves as "best possible" each time. For checkers it's easy since all pieces prior to king are equivalent. It's more complex for Chess -- is a bishop better than a rook or a knight? But really, it's just a bigger program.
Now, you take a game like Poker or Blackjack and you end up with a random element. A program could count cards or bet strategically, but it could theoretically lose with a run of "bad luck." Which is why mathematicians don't really care about figuring out card-based games, of course.
And then you get games like Settlers of Catan that a computer could never perform well at, because the other players will simply refuse to trade with it:D
Yeah, it's the "pay" part that most people have to figure out. At least, people who don't keep $560 just sitting around, completely unusable for any other purpose.
Yeah, it's funny how many people forget that in most "Top 10" or "Best Games" lists, the best games are often sequels. Either it's #2, because it fixes all the problems of #1 and expands on the game, or some later version that comes out from obscurity and small releases to make a big splash.
The problem isn't sequels; it's cookie cutter updates that just milk a franchise. I'm sure fans of The Ocarina of Time don't bemoan the fact that it's a sequel, or that SMB3 is the 4th game in the Mario Bros franchise.
Then there's System Shock 2, Fallout 2, Descent 3, Quake 2, etc. Are these games bad because they're sequels?
Yeah the problem had to do with CEO business culture, not tech culture. You know, the "make as much money as possible at any cost" idea, regardless of how poor of a long-term strategy it is. I don't think "able to play foosball during lunch or after long coding sessions, and wear shorts to work in the summertime" contributed much to the bubble bursting.
I will agree that middle-men usually serve a very useful purpose. Even ignoring crap, I'd rather have a musician I enjoy or a writer I prefer to spend their time doing what they're good at, rather than accounting or taxes or marketing. I'd rather have an agent push for publishing houses to print the book while the author is finishing it up, rather than delaying it that much more, not to mention their notion that it's "for art's sake" and their general inability to realize a good contract.
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It's a blog post, so it's not like it's going to happen, but I don't see how forking the kernel would do anything than just lead to distribution craziness. Arguably that's Linux's biggest hurdle for new people -- deciding which distribution to get. And if people are checking out linux for workload purposes, forcing them to decide whether to get a server distro or a home distro and making that distinction at the kernel level? Buh?
Generally, if it's good enough for enterprise, it's good enough for home use. And things that are useful for desktop Linux are often utilized at the enterprise level anyway. So yeah, it's just a blog post; I'm not sure anyone will take it seriously.
iTunes on a mac isn't the "bloated," error-prone kludge it is on Windows. I'm not sure why that is, especially since it's supposed to be some sort of trojan horse for the Mac lifestyle or some other marketing thing, but iTunes on OS X is nice 'n speedy.
It also comes pre-installed on all Macs, so there's that going for it.
I'd imagine that developers would quite like the reduced cost of a more established, yet slower, system architecture, and would be perfectly happy not having to introduced network code into their games.
The problem is that the games that work well with those type of elements (flashy FPS games just to name one large genre) exist almost entirely due to those two elements.
But they're hardly dealbreakers. It's not like BioShock has online play.
If I wanted to read Dvorak's meaningless drivel, I would just read his "blog" independently. He's never said anything even remotely interesting, let alone something that involved actual thought.
He doesn't -- he says he could pay $40. But as he's not a subscriber, he probably has not looked at the available plans and actually checked the prices, because what he's talking about doesn't make any sense. No cable company charges $40 for the "local channel + public access" stuff. They provide it as an almost public service, for people who get poor antenna reception.
Most providers offer the "basic analog" package, which includes about 90 channels for $40. He's probably just confused his interpretation of "basic" with the cable company's.
I think that's why they opened a US call center and promise short wait times. They know most people don't need to use it. Makes it cheaper when you don't have to open a bazillion of them because your product/service is crappy.
Same with digital cables! I love telling people that cables can't matter for a digital connection, as they give me a blank look after dropping $80 on Monster HDMI cables.
Yes, because it makes the difference between watching a movie and saying "by golly, thems some purty pictures" and "oh, that's directly influenced by this classic play, that's neat."
You've got a point on the Monet, though.
I believe it's "apparent" because there's no clear definition of what "winning" is, in relation to the Console War.
Of course, there's a lot of models of iPod that can't play games, and Apple has never pushed the iPod as a linux device. It barely pushes the games aspect, really.
It is in pretty stark contract to Sony, who has constantly pushed the PS3 as a "trojan horse" for Blu-Ray.
Agreed. The PS2s first year was poor, but it followed it up with a damn good 2nd year. And, more importantly, it essentially has zero competition during that first year. So it didn't matter that there weren't that many games, or that they were crappy -- it could actually get away with just wowing people with fancy graphics.
By the time the other consoles had gotten past their "launch window," the PS2 was coming into its heyday.
Nope, iTunes is successful because it's NOT a store. It's a music catalog program that, as a feature, includes a music store and video support.
Netflix does have the same technology, though, and the same crappy DRM. It's only playable on Windows, in Internet Explorer, using Windows Media Player, and only on a primary monitor. It won't play out of SVideo ports even. That also means that there's a sizeable chunk of people who won't use it.
Still, I don't think it'll really help BB. It doesn't help Netflix because the selection is poor and the DRM annoyingness. Most BB users (who mostly use the service thanks to the physical store advantages, which they're dropping) probably won't even notice it.
I believe the "at least" means that the smallest one is still larger than the Milky Way. Meaning that all are greater than 1.
Yeah, you can select an index of colors -- last time I checked, you can even select the bits used in the PNG. The problem is that photoshop is too specific about it. It'll save GIFs indexed to the "best fit" colors automatically. It should be able to do the same for PNGs, but it doesn't, forcing users to do it manually. And most won't bother, when GIF is right there.
It's only because Photoshop will whack down the color palette for GIFs when you use Save for Web. A PNG with the same color index will inherently be smaller than a GIF.
BUT! It took me some experimenting to see that this was the case. Photoshop has a tendency to increase the color palette when you open an indexed gif and try to save it as a PNG. Use the same palette, or use Save for Web, though, and the PNG will be smaller than an otherwise equivalent GIF.
Most earlier cameras did, but it took a very, very long time to save to the format. As such, very few users ever tried the feature after using it once, and those that did use it realized that a new, 3 or 5mp camera would take inherently better pictures, even saving to jpg. I can't imagine how long it would take to save a 5mp picture to tiff, let alone what it would do to battery life. These little point/click cameras are not known for their speedy chips.
Exactly. People like games that are on time. What they hate about games that are pushed back is that arbitrary deadline in the first place. If your game is probably NOT going to be ready in a year's time, DON'T say it is!
But yeah, the only thing worse than a moving deadline are patches and bugs. And last 1/3 of a game that's just tacked on and unfinished.
That's why they're making money, I believe -- they're not really advertising the thing. People who are generally anti-iPod, for whatever reason, know about the Zune. And some of them buy one, because it's got a nice screen and isn't an iPod.
I think MS knows that it can't really overcome the iPod at this point, but if it doesn't advertise them (or advertises very selectively), people will buy them and they'll not have to spend huge gobs of money trying to beat Apple's advertising.
Interestingly enough, computers can only win at games that are purely strategical with no element of luck. So yes, a program will one day be unbeatable at chess simply due to the fact that there is no random element in the game. It's just a matter of figuring out the right algorithm, or series of algorithms. The neat thing about this checkers "simulation" is that it charts out end games, so it's likely a relatively lean program. Rather than having the program evaluate each position and all following positions after each move, it simply compares and moves as "best possible" each time. For checkers it's easy since all pieces prior to king are equivalent. It's more complex for Chess -- is a bishop better than a rook or a knight? But really, it's just a bigger program. Now, you take a game like Poker or Blackjack and you end up with a random element. A program could count cards or bet strategically, but it could theoretically lose with a run of "bad luck." Which is why mathematicians don't really care about figuring out card-based games, of course. And then you get games like Settlers of Catan that a computer could never perform well at, because the other players will simply refuse to trade with it :D
That means she has poor security and lets anything in.
Yeah, it's the "pay" part that most people have to figure out. At least, people who don't keep $560 just sitting around, completely unusable for any other purpose.
Yeah, it's funny how many people forget that in most "Top 10" or "Best Games" lists, the best games are often sequels. Either it's #2, because it fixes all the problems of #1 and expands on the game, or some later version that comes out from obscurity and small releases to make a big splash.
The problem isn't sequels; it's cookie cutter updates that just milk a franchise. I'm sure fans of The Ocarina of Time don't bemoan the fact that it's a sequel, or that SMB3 is the 4th game in the Mario Bros franchise.
Then there's System Shock 2, Fallout 2, Descent 3, Quake 2, etc. Are these games bad because they're sequels?
Yeah the problem had to do with CEO business culture, not tech culture. You know, the "make as much money as possible at any cost" idea, regardless of how poor of a long-term strategy it is. I don't think "able to play foosball during lunch or after long coding sessions, and wear shorts to work in the summertime" contributed much to the bubble bursting.
The US certainly doesn't give a damn. At least some regulatory board is investigating, even if it turns out to be a red herring.
I will agree that middle-men usually serve a very useful purpose. Even ignoring crap, I'd rather have a musician I enjoy or a writer I prefer to spend their time doing what they're good at, rather than accounting or taxes or marketing. I'd rather have an agent push for publishing houses to print the book while the author is finishing it up, rather than delaying it that much more, not to mention their notion that it's "for art's sake" and their general inability to realize a good contract.