Well, I meant more the size and the functionality it offers - it's the best thing for the job that exists. I can only hope it'll get cooler and faster, and that the batteries will last a bit longer, in the next version, which rumour has it might use AMD processors.
Cant really say too much about the job, I'm afraid, it's an application that's at an early prototype stage, but read the posts I've made here and use your imagination (and you'll be miles off...).
Unfortunately the job I'm using it for depends on Microsoft's SALT browser extension thingy, and Opera supports IBM's rival X+V standard. Yes, the people that made this decision are fools, but I'm afraid it was decided before my time and I'm stuck with it.
That actually it does have another thing going for it. It's absolutely perfect for is watching the BBC's streaming World Cup webcasts from the office toilet...
Work bought it for me, for a very specific purpose. I suspect we're the only people that have a job that it's just perfect for.
It's slow, it's heavier than you'd like, it gets really hot in use, it's fiddly to interact with, and it's not worth anything like the money. I know you should expect nothing else from first-generation hardware, but it really is almost entirely pointless for nearly everybody (it's absolutely perfect for what I need it for, but that's an extremely niche market, believe me, and if Pocket Internet Explorer on a PDA was anything more than a toy, I wouldn't need it at all).
The hype was extremely misguided - it's just a very small tablet PC, it was never going to set the world on fire. But that's neither here nor there - hype or no hype, my main criticism of it is that it's not even very good at what it's meant to do, never mind all the things people imagined it would do before it came out.
That Charlie Whatshisname is a semi-literate one-eyed imbecile who has a cheek to call himself a journalist. Have a read through some of his past efforts and you'll get the picture. This one is so sloppy and amateurish that it actually annoyed me into writing to him and calling him an idiot, and I'm normally no Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.
Oh, this isn't meant as party political. A plague on both their houses, as far as I'm concerned. I'm just sitting here in backward old Europe marvelling at the boneheaded hypocrisy of it all. I mean, even the Koran's not that hard on gambling - it lumps it in with drinking as something which "does more harm than good" (I'm paraphrasing, I know I shouldn't, no offence intended).
For a nation that prides itself on providing a haven for the poor, the oppressed, and the persecuted, and its enlightened thinking on personal freedom, this is some seriously regressive behaviour.
Nope. You can get a 32" Samsung CRT HDTV for £450 in your local Comet. And I don't care what any salesman tries to tell you, no plasma or LCD screen is a match for a good glass tube. Neither technology's really up to the job, and they're just filling a gap until SED or OLED TVs come on the market. If I was buying a TV now, I'd get this Samsung and get a few years out of it while I waited for the next-generation displays to iron out the inevitable initial teething problems and become affordable.
Who needs Wikipedia when you've got this sort of expertise?
" animal of the week today is the polar bear which is pretty much the king of the animal kingdom because it is a cross of the best bits of a tiger, a shark and a Hulk Hogan. if you think that you can imagine how strong a polar bear is then think again because you are wrong. it is stronger than that and it is probably stronger than your next guess. we are talking about an animal that can leg press over 500kg and curl 200kg with ease. pretty much the only thing that it cant do is squat thrusts but they are gay anyway. polar bears have a furry bellend to protect it from the cold."
The reason why Windows Vista is a complete let-down is because all the clever stuff's being saved for Windows Live. MS see this WebOS caper as the way forward, and the main job of desktop Windows from now on will be to provide a platform to access the services they'll be offering via this medium (and, of course, to lock everybody down via DRM etc.) They've concentrated on the security and the DRM, rather than on the functionality, because those are the things that will really matter for what they want to do going forward.
Basically, certain big cheeses in Microsoft were really put out by the massive hash they were making of developing Vista, and at the same time could see that there was some pretty clever stuff going on at the MSN end of the company, which sees itself as a separate entity. Microsoft's most successful product of late has been MSN Messenger, which waded into a crowded market late and won users over partly by being included in the OS, in time-honoured fashion, but mostly by actually being good. MSN's all vibrant and innovative and forward-looking, while the rest of the company couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery. So the prevailing view on high seems to be to give a freer rein to the MSN lot and do stuff over the web instead.
Or at least, that's what a certain well-placed individual told me, anyway.
I'd be surprised by this, given that the equivalent idiom most likely to be used by your average Brit is "I couldn't give a flying fuck" or something to that effect.
No, I was just looking at the page to see how it rendered it. I didn't have a clue whether it displayed pages correctly, or carried on IE6's bad habits, or a bit of both. I mean, call me crazy, but when I go to open a file within an application, I expect that application to open it, rather than sending it to another app.
They seem to be broken anyway. Macromedia Dreamweaver's help system uses IE to display pages, and seems flaky at best once you've installed IE7. Frequently it just doesn't display the help you've asked for at all.
Just the other day I went to open an HTML page I'd made in IE7, to check that it rendered properly. After fumbling around for a few minutes wondering where they'd hidden the menu bar (yeah, clever one, Microsoft, give your most-used program a UI that flies in the face of 20 years of convention, and don't tell anybody you need to hit the ALT key to bring it up, that'll go down a treat with Joe User), I selected "open", browsed to the file......And IE7 opened the page in Firefox, my default browser!
Seriously, man, most people don't know what DRM is. Some of them might know their iPod with their work PC as well as their home one, and that annoys them. But they probably don't know it's an anti-piracy measure. It's something you can easily explain in layman's terms, and which they can immediately appreciate the harm of, because they've experienced it themselves. But try to explain to Joe iPod that Apple's trying to lock him in to buying only iPods forever, or that there's every likelihood that the record industry will start making DRM ever more restrictive once the public are sufficiently complacent about its presence, and he'll glaze over. And even if he does humour you, he'll still think you're a paranoid nutcase, no matter how right you are.
Simple truth is, in the world outside Slashdot and its environs, people don't understand the value of freedom until they lose it, and they don't particularly mind, nor even notice, it being taken off them piece by piece. You'll never make them understand. The powers that be are well aware of this, and currently seem to be pushing their luck as far as they think they can get away with, only to keep finding that nobody's bothered. So to suggest that people will "flock" to a DRM-less, open machine is hopelessly naive. People just don't think that hard. They buy iPods because a) Apple told them to, b) everybody else has one, c) they're shiny. And for most of them, it's Good Enough, and so they've no reason to think about how much better it could be if only they did their homework before purchasing.
You want to make an iPod killer? Make it smaller, make it prettier, make it at least as easy to use, don't worry about whizzy features, and make it 15% cheaper. Then market it down everybody's throats. It's pretty much exactly how Microsoft have always done it, and I wouldn't put it past them to relegate iPods to nostalgic reminiscence status in, say, five years.
I see much talk of how innovative and groundbreaking this game is. Well, I beg to differ. I remember a game very much along these lines on the Atari ST. It was called Eco, was written by a team called Denton Designs and released by the EA of their day, Ocean Software. Here's a write-up on it. I@m sure you'll see the parallels.
Now, remember, this was nineteen years ago. When those 16-bit machines came out, game design suddenly became hugely interesting and innovative, and to my mind we've been stagnating ever since.
Well, there were other reasons besides ease of installation, but Gentoo did SATA from the word go, which other Linux distributions generally didn't at the time, so I was sold.
Have you tried installing Windows XP on a computer with an SATA hard drive? Oh man. Pain. You actually have to kick the thing into life using drivers loaded off a FLOPPY DISK. Or at least, you did the last time I tried it. I bought all these shiny new components and had to borrow a floppy drive to get it running! In the end, I binned it and went Gentoo instead.
That would explain to me why these machines don't go SATA yet - most people are building their own systems with them, I'd imagine.
...Is terrible. Unacceptable to all but the cloth-eared. A few weeks ago I heard Beethoven's 9th symphony played off a CD produced from tracks downloaded off iTunes. Now, I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware producing CD tracks from compressed files results in no further degradation of quality. The CD was put in my hi-fi, which is a good set of separates, but nothing extraordinary. I was in a different room at the time, but even through two walls and a half-closed door, I was thinking that it sounded horrible. The high and low frequencies had been squeezed massively, which is a complete no-no with classical music, and the dynamic range was shot to bits too. I went and listened to it at close range, thinking that the detail must've been getting lost on the way through those walls, but no, it just wasn't there. And people pay money for this rubbish?
What worries me is that if the Apples of the world get their way, these shitty compressed files will be the only way we'll be able to buy music in the near future, and I'm afraid I'm not settling for it. Whatever happened to progress? What's the point of new sound formats which sound worse than the old ones? (Vinyl advocates, move along, nothing for you to see here...)
Notice I got the whole way through that post without even mentioning DRM? Even if they were selling this stuff DRM-free, I still wouldn't buy it, because it sounds awful, plain and simple.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I meant more the size and the functionality it offers - it's the best thing for the job that exists. I can only hope it'll get cooler and faster, and that the batteries will last a bit longer, in the next version, which rumour has it might use AMD processors.
Cant really say too much about the job, I'm afraid, it's an application that's at an early prototype stage, but read the posts I've made here and use your imagination (and you'll be miles off...).
Unfortunately the job I'm using it for depends on Microsoft's SALT browser extension thingy, and Opera supports IBM's rival X+V standard. Yes, the people that made this decision are fools, but I'm afraid it was decided before my time and I'm stuck with it.
That actually it does have another thing going for it. It's absolutely perfect for is watching the BBC's streaming World Cup webcasts from the office toilet...
Work bought it for me, for a very specific purpose. I suspect we're the only people that have a job that it's just perfect for.
It's slow, it's heavier than you'd like, it gets really hot in use, it's fiddly to interact with, and it's not worth anything like the money. I know you should expect nothing else from first-generation hardware, but it really is almost entirely pointless for nearly everybody (it's absolutely perfect for what I need it for, but that's an extremely niche market, believe me, and if Pocket Internet Explorer on a PDA was anything more than a toy, I wouldn't need it at all).
The hype was extremely misguided - it's just a very small tablet PC, it was never going to set the world on fire. But that's neither here nor there - hype or no hype, my main criticism of it is that it's not even very good at what it's meant to do, never mind all the things people imagined it would do before it came out.
And it's as boring as hell, appallingly badly acted, and there's far more non-interactive content than bits where you have to join in.
Hence the comparison.
And it's not trolling, darlings, it's sarcasm. Laugh along.
Not only does it have a more interesting plot and better gameplay than the Metal Gear Solid games, now it looks shinier, too!
That Charlie Whatshisname is a semi-literate one-eyed imbecile who has a cheek to call himself a journalist. Have a read through some of his past efforts and you'll get the picture. This one is so sloppy and amateurish that it actually annoyed me into writing to him and calling him an idiot, and I'm normally no Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells.
He's an utter clown.
Oh, this isn't meant as party political. A plague on both their houses, as far as I'm concerned. I'm just sitting here in backward old Europe marvelling at the boneheaded hypocrisy of it all. I mean, even the Koran's not that hard on gambling - it lumps it in with drinking as something which "does more harm than good" (I'm paraphrasing, I know I shouldn't, no offence intended).
For a nation that prides itself on providing a haven for the poor, the oppressed, and the persecuted, and its enlightened thinking on personal freedom, this is some seriously regressive behaviour.
So much more liberal and right-thinking than those evil Islamic theocracies of the Middle East.
Keep on shining the torch of liberty into the darkest corners of the earth, now, won't you?
Jumping Jehosaphat, OBVIOUSLY.
Before you stare, I know it's not an animal. I don't care.
Nope. You can get a 32" Samsung CRT HDTV for £450 in your local Comet. And I don't care what any salesman tries to tell you, no plasma or LCD screen is a match for a good glass tube. Neither technology's really up to the job, and they're just filling a gap until SED or OLED TVs come on the market. If I was buying a TV now, I'd get this Samsung and get a few years out of it while I waited for the next-generation displays to iron out the inevitable initial teething problems and become affordable.
Who needs Wikipedia when you've got this sort of expertise?
" animal of the week today is the polar bear which is pretty much the king of the animal kingdom because it is a cross of the best bits of a tiger, a shark and a Hulk Hogan. if you think that you can imagine how strong a polar bear is then think again because you are wrong. it is stronger than that and it is probably stronger than your next guess. we are talking about an animal that can leg press over 500kg and curl 200kg with ease. pretty much the only thing that it cant do is squat thrusts but they are gay anyway. polar bears have a furry bellend to protect it from the cold."
Animal Of The Week
Oh, there's a Greasemonkey script for that. In fact there's several.
Given that no browser was able to render the Acid2 text correctly when it came out, how did they ever test that it worked as intended?
But I will again.
The reason why Windows Vista is a complete let-down is because all the clever stuff's being saved for Windows Live. MS see this WebOS caper as the way forward, and the main job of desktop Windows from now on will be to provide a platform to access the services they'll be offering via this medium (and, of course, to lock everybody down via DRM etc.) They've concentrated on the security and the DRM, rather than on the functionality, because those are the things that will really matter for what they want to do going forward.
Basically, certain big cheeses in Microsoft were really put out by the massive hash they were making of developing Vista, and at the same time could see that there was some pretty clever stuff going on at the MSN end of the company, which sees itself as a separate entity. Microsoft's most successful product of late has been MSN Messenger, which waded into a crowded market late and won users over partly by being included in the OS, in time-honoured fashion, but mostly by actually being good. MSN's all vibrant and innovative and forward-looking, while the rest of the company couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery. So the prevailing view on high seems to be to give a freer rein to the MSN lot and do stuff over the web instead.
Or at least, that's what a certain well-placed individual told me, anyway.
Mmm. And then when you stop subscribing to Napster, your entire music collection disappears, just like that.
Great.
I'd be surprised by this, given that the equivalent idiom most likely to be used by your average Brit is "I couldn't give a flying fuck" or something to that effect.
No, I was just looking at the page to see how it rendered it. I didn't have a clue whether it displayed pages correctly, or carried on IE6's bad habits, or a bit of both. I mean, call me crazy, but when I go to open a file within an application, I expect that application to open it, rather than sending it to another app.
They seem to be broken anyway. Macromedia Dreamweaver's help system uses IE to display pages, and seems flaky at best once you've installed IE7. Frequently it just doesn't display the help you've asked for at all.
Just the other day I went to open an HTML page I'd made in IE7, to check that it rendered properly. After fumbling around for a few minutes wondering where they'd hidden the menu bar (yeah, clever one, Microsoft, give your most-used program a UI that flies in the face of 20 years of convention, and don't tell anybody you need to hit the ALT key to bring it up, that'll go down a treat with Joe User), I selected "open", browsed to the file... ...And IE7 opened the page in Firefox, my default browser!
Clever, eh?
Seriously, man, most people don't know what DRM is. Some of them might know their iPod with their work PC as well as their home one, and that annoys them. But they probably don't know it's an anti-piracy measure. It's something you can easily explain in layman's terms, and which they can immediately appreciate the harm of, because they've experienced it themselves. But try to explain to Joe iPod that Apple's trying to lock him in to buying only iPods forever, or that there's every likelihood that the record industry will start making DRM ever more restrictive once the public are sufficiently complacent about its presence, and he'll glaze over. And even if he does humour you, he'll still think you're a paranoid nutcase, no matter how right you are.
Simple truth is, in the world outside Slashdot and its environs, people don't understand the value of freedom until they lose it, and they don't particularly mind, nor even notice, it being taken off them piece by piece. You'll never make them understand. The powers that be are well aware of this, and currently seem to be pushing their luck as far as they think they can get away with, only to keep finding that nobody's bothered. So to suggest that people will "flock" to a DRM-less, open machine is hopelessly naive. People just don't think that hard. They buy iPods because a) Apple told them to, b) everybody else has one, c) they're shiny. And for most of them, it's Good Enough, and so they've no reason to think about how much better it could be if only they did their homework before purchasing.
You want to make an iPod killer? Make it smaller, make it prettier, make it at least as easy to use, don't worry about whizzy features, and make it 15% cheaper. Then market it down everybody's throats. It's pretty much exactly how Microsoft have always done it, and I wouldn't put it past them to relegate iPods to nostalgic reminiscence status in, say, five years.
I see much talk of how innovative and groundbreaking this game is. Well, I beg to differ. I remember a game very much along these lines on the Atari ST. It was called Eco, was written by a team called Denton Designs and released by the EA of their day, Ocean Software. Here's a write-up on it. I@m sure you'll see the parallels.
Now, remember, this was nineteen years ago. When those 16-bit machines came out, game design suddenly became hugely interesting and innovative, and to my mind we've been stagnating ever since.
Well, there were other reasons besides ease of installation, but Gentoo did SATA from the word go, which other Linux distributions generally didn't at the time, so I was sold.
Have you tried installing Windows XP on a computer with an SATA hard drive? Oh man. Pain. You actually have to kick the thing into life using drivers loaded off a FLOPPY DISK. Or at least, you did the last time I tried it. I bought all these shiny new components and had to borrow a floppy drive to get it running! In the end, I binned it and went Gentoo instead.
That would explain to me why these machines don't go SATA yet - most people are building their own systems with them, I'd imagine.
...Is terrible. Unacceptable to all but the cloth-eared. A few weeks ago I heard Beethoven's 9th symphony played off a CD produced from tracks downloaded off iTunes. Now, I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I'm aware producing CD tracks from compressed files results in no further degradation of quality. The CD was put in my hi-fi, which is a good set of separates, but nothing extraordinary. I was in a different room at the time, but even through two walls and a half-closed door, I was thinking that it sounded horrible. The high and low frequencies had been squeezed massively, which is a complete no-no with classical music, and the dynamic range was shot to bits too. I went and listened to it at close range, thinking that the detail must've been getting lost on the way through those walls, but no, it just wasn't there. And people pay money for this rubbish?
What worries me is that if the Apples of the world get their way, these shitty compressed files will be the only way we'll be able to buy music in the near future, and I'm afraid I'm not settling for it. Whatever happened to progress? What's the point of new sound formats which sound worse than the old ones? (Vinyl advocates, move along, nothing for you to see here...)
Notice I got the whole way through that post without even mentioning DRM? Even if they were selling this stuff DRM-free, I still wouldn't buy it, because it sounds awful, plain and simple.