Well, I seem to recall that either the PS2 or the Xbox (or was it an nVidia graphics card) was supposed to be able to deliver 'Toy Story' quality graphics, so it only makes sense that the unfulfilled promises this time around are updated to a more recent movie.
Although possibly it's just that they looked at Toy Story and thought "Wow, the animation is really good. We can't match that. I know, let's aim much lower. Aha, the Shrek series! I think can we do animation that 'good', no bother!":-)
I knew one day I would see someone using the words 'iTunes' and 'fast' in the same sentence without the words 'is not' in there somewhere - I just didn't think it would be so soon.
I can't help thinking that a fair number of consumer laws we have for purchase of goods/services in the real world might indicate that 'caveat emptor' is not considered a valid excuse for any and all defects by society in general.
This is the first (I think) big thing Google have done where you have to pay for it, so it's not surprising if people are not buying the "it says 'Beta' so it can be as crap as we like" excuse any more.
Re:Earlier British sitcom/drama about people in IT
on
'The IT Crowd' UK Sit-com
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· Score: 2, Informative
You're probably thinking of Attachments, which was more of a comedy drama.
The web/internet side of it all was usually painfully inaccurate or pantomimed (and timeless romantic dialogue like "Thanks for showing me how to rocket jump - I really owned that level" didn't help), but there were some genuinely good moments in there too. There was a memorable scene where they all arrive in dribs and drabs the morning after the office party, only to find that they've all got an email with a video attachment from the office cctv camera that shows two of the characters having sex the previous night. The sequence of shots around the office as people logged in, reacted to what they saw, then carefully looked around at the others to see if they'd seen it yet was a wonderful piece of acting and directing, and had me cringing and giggling at the same time (rather like The Office).
And I don't think James Lance was in it - possibly you're confusing him with David Walliams, who was, and did play a similar slimy character to the one in Absolute Power (although probably much less of a moral sewer).
If you want to make it really over the top, just make sure that most people who actually buy DVDs get little inserts inside the DVD packages themselves that accuse the customers of being thieving criminals.
mkdosfs is a program. You mean you used FAT, right?
So if it worked fine when you formatted it, it sounds like it was a problem with the configuration of the storage supplied by the manufacturer, and not the FAT file system itself?
You can pretend to do that already. My 2G iPod makes clicking noises when you move the cursor using the touchpad wheel, so you go to the song list, and, well, you can probably figure out the rest.
I predict the next mod will be to make an iPod make tricorder noises.
Could be worse. I used to work on flight simulators, and one day on the factory floor a seal went on one of the hydraulic jacks, and the fluid shot out in a jet...across to the next simulator along, where it punched a hole through four of five layers of custom wire-wrapped circuit boards.
To make it even more fun, although I wasn't there at the time (for which I am grateful) I am reliably informed that the hydraulic fluid smells like "cat's piss". Also it put back the damaged sim's schedule by six weeks. And I think they had late penalty fines of $10,000/day. You do the math. It was a bad day.
Raymond Chen may be many things, but not a bleedin' idiot.
To counter, I would ask, which bleedin' idiot read that article? You obviously missed:
Today, Calc's internal computations are done with infinite precision for basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) and 32 digits of precision for advanced operations (square root, transcendental operators).
I trust it is clear now.
And 512 is pretty crap
How true. I'm guessing the vast majority of people demand more than 512 bits of precision for transcendental operators from their desktop calculator. Stands to reason.
This article should come with instructions to breathe between each sentence, they're so long.
Most of the things that look like paragraphs are actually a single sentence. I agree with other comments about the quality of this guy's writing. Glass houses, and all that.
Any expectations that came from the game was hyped by the customers, not the developers.
*cough* *splutter* Troll, surely?
I mean there are a lot of Doom3/iD fanboys who thought it was the second coming, but it was all you could do to get Todd Hollenshead to stop proclaiming it as the first coming.
For instance, from Todd's blog on the release of Doom 3:
Thanks to everyone for their patience (yeah right! =) and for everyone at id, Activision and our
numerous partners for helping us create what I believe is absolutely the best game we have ever made.
You can talk about the limits of analog and horizontal resolution if you want
I sure can. If you can find anyone who knows anything about your average VHS deck, and thinks that they could output 352 lines, then I'll be impressed. 200-240 lines seems to have been the accepted truth for as long as I remember.
but then I'll have to bring up the fact DVD's MPEG-2 is 4:2:0 chroma subsampled...
Fair enough, but then I'll have to bring up the fact that the luminance channel is the high res one, and that's what matters when it comes to resolving detail. There's a reason the chroma info is encoded at a lower resolution.
No, actually were back to MP3 vs CD territory.
I was actually referring to the fact that although SACD is technically better, the average person really can't tell the difference, hence SACD's failure to become popular. And as for MP3 vs CD, again, most people are perfectly happy with MP3, and would probably be surprised if you told them it sounds worse than CDs. But thanks for making my point for me:-)
You can think what you want, but it's just opinion.
Thanks for that. I'll make sure I put a cover sheet on my TPS report too.
Having the same physical dimentions, using the same video codecs, etc., it's exceedingly obvious that dual-format players will appear in a short ammount of time, so it really isn't a VHS vs. Betamax format war. -snip- DVD-R vs. DVD+R didn't exactly stop people from buying burners.
Exactly. So you know that, and I know that, so why the hell can't the tech/entertainment industry figure it out? They just had an object lesson (with DVD+R and DVD-R) that these days two competing formats will just result in dual-standard players, so what is with the BluRay vs HD-DVD thing?
Don't answer that. I think we all know the answer.
Seriously, the upgrade from VHS to DVDs was only about a 2X improvement
More like 3X, really.
and people were constantly saying how much better DVDs looked.
But also people didn't have to buy a new TV to see the difference. They bought a DVD player - it looked better on their normal NTSC/PAL TV.
If they buy an HD-DVD or BluRay player, it's not really going to look any better unless they buy a new HD TV. And they're still pretty expensive. (Mind you, the player manufacturers seem to be solving this problem by making the players prohibitively expensive anyway.)
For me, a big difference with DVDs was the sound, too. Perhaps more so than the improved video. VHS sound is crap (inc. 'VHS HiFi') - I have pre-recorded VHS movies where I can barely make out the dialogue, and it's not like I've played those tapes to death. I'm talking about the first play through. DVD sound is great - and I have to ask, how much better can the sound actually get with HD-DVD? We're back into CD vs SACD territory there.
I think high definition DVDs will take over eventually, but not at the speed the industry thinks, especially while they're still dicking around with competing formats. Until one HD format is settled on, I think most people will steer clear (esp. when the people who actually bought 'HD Ready' TVs find out it won't work due to no HDMI connector, etc).
I very much suspect that WINE does implement the parsing/decoding of WMF files, and that is where the problem is. The WMF format allows the file to specify an error handler, which is the cause of the problem.
Don't get hung up on gdi32.dll or shimgvw.dll or whatever - it's the API itself that WINE implements, not specific DLLs and entry points (although it might provide shim for those for some apps) and that's where the problem is.
Ah, that would explain it, because I remember being told about it in an induction course when I started work at Rediffusion Simulation (years ago now).
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Although possibly it's just that they looked at Toy Story and thought "Wow, the animation is really good. We can't match that. I know, let's aim much lower. Aha, the Shrek series! I think can we do animation that 'good', no bother!" :-)
I knew one day I would see someone using the words 'iTunes' and 'fast' in the same sentence without the words 'is not' in there somewhere - I just didn't think it would be so soon.
This is the first (I think) big thing Google have done where you have to pay for it, so it's not surprising if people are not buying the "it says 'Beta' so it can be as crap as we like" excuse any more.
The web/internet side of it all was usually painfully inaccurate or pantomimed (and timeless romantic dialogue like "Thanks for showing me how to rocket jump - I really owned that level" didn't help), but there were some genuinely good moments in there too. There was a memorable scene where they all arrive in dribs and drabs the morning after the office party, only to find that they've all got an email with a video attachment from the office cctv camera that shows two of the characters having sex the previous night. The sequence of shots around the office as people logged in, reacted to what they saw, then carefully looked around at the others to see if they'd seen it yet was a wonderful piece of acting and directing, and had me cringing and giggling at the same time (rather like The Office).
And I don't think James Lance was in it - possibly you're confusing him with David Walliams, who was, and did play a similar slimy character to the one in Absolute Power (although probably much less of a moral sewer).
Except for the part where they installed invasive system software even if you clicked the "No, I don't want that" button.
Or was that an 'honest mistake'?
Exactly, so you'd expect a functional installer/uninstaller to be a given.
Yeah, because I know I demand my keytop displays to be locked to a 60fps update, otherwise it breaks the illusion.
If you want to make it really over the top, just make sure that most people who actually buy DVDs get little inserts inside the DVD packages themselves that accuse the customers of being thieving criminals.
They could do a similar thing at cinemas.
Oh wait. They already do that stuff. Never mind.
So if it worked fine when you formatted it, it sounds like it was a problem with the configuration of the storage supplied by the manufacturer, and not the FAT file system itself?
Unless I missed something.
I predict the next mod will be to make an iPod make tricorder noises.
What filesystem did you use when you reformatted it?
Another one is to go to sleep.
Well, to be fair to MS, Windows 98 wasn't due to be released for another 8 years at that point, so they still had some testing left to do.
To make it even more fun, although I wasn't there at the time (for which I am grateful) I am reliably informed that the hydraulic fluid smells like "cat's piss". Also it put back the damaged sim's schedule by six weeks. And I think they had late penalty fines of $10,000/day. You do the math. It was a bad day.
So, like I say, it could be worse :)
Raymond Chen may be many things, but not a bleedin' idiot.
To counter, I would ask, which bleedin' idiot read that article? You obviously missed:
I trust it is clear now.
How true. I'm guessing the vast majority of people demand more than 512 bits of precision for transcendental operators from their desktop calculator. Stands to reason.
This article should come with instructions to breathe between each sentence, they're so long.
Most of the things that look like paragraphs are actually a single sentence. I agree with other comments about the quality of this guy's writing. Glass houses, and all that.
*cough* *splutter* Troll, surely?
I mean there are a lot of Doom3/iD fanboys who thought it was the second coming, but it was all you could do to get Todd Hollenshead to stop proclaiming it as the first coming.
For instance, from Todd's blog on the release of Doom 3:
(my emphasis)
You're so right. Luckily I'm a fucking red hot coder and have put together a Half-Life 2 demo for you here:
http://www.ati.com/halflife2/index.html
Don't mention it.
I sure can. If you can find anyone who knows anything about your average VHS deck, and thinks that they could output 352 lines, then I'll be impressed. 200-240 lines seems to have been the accepted truth for as long as I remember.
Fair enough, but then I'll have to bring up the fact that the luminance channel is the high res one, and that's what matters when it comes to resolving detail. There's a reason the chroma info is encoded at a lower resolution.
I was actually referring to the fact that although SACD is technically better, the average person really can't tell the difference, hence SACD's failure to become popular. And as for MP3 vs CD, again, most people are perfectly happy with MP3, and would probably be surprised if you told them it sounds worse than CDs. But thanks for making my point for me :-)
Thanks for that. I'll make sure I put a cover sheet on my TPS report too.
Exactly. So you know that, and I know that, so why the hell can't the tech/entertainment industry figure it out? They just had an object lesson (with DVD+R and DVD-R) that these days two competing formats will just result in dual-standard players, so what is with the BluRay vs HD-DVD thing?
Don't answer that. I think we all know the answer.
...to see how American cartoons are made!
More like 3X, really.
But also people didn't have to buy a new TV to see the difference. They bought a DVD player - it looked better on their normal NTSC/PAL TV.
If they buy an HD-DVD or BluRay player, it's not really going to look any better unless they buy a new HD TV. And they're still pretty expensive. (Mind you, the player manufacturers seem to be solving this problem by making the players prohibitively expensive anyway.)
For me, a big difference with DVDs was the sound, too. Perhaps more so than the improved video. VHS sound is crap (inc. 'VHS HiFi') - I have pre-recorded VHS movies where I can barely make out the dialogue, and it's not like I've played those tapes to death. I'm talking about the first play through. DVD sound is great - and I have to ask, how much better can the sound actually get with HD-DVD? We're back into CD vs SACD territory there.
I think high definition DVDs will take over eventually, but not at the speed the industry thinks, especially while they're still dicking around with competing formats. Until one HD format is settled on, I think most people will steer clear (esp. when the people who actually bought 'HD Ready' TVs find out it won't work due to no HDMI connector, etc).
Don't get hung up on gdi32.dll or shimgvw.dll or whatever - it's the API itself that WINE implements, not specific DLLs and entry points (although it might provide shim for those for some apps) and that's where the problem is.
Is this another Windows 95 = Macintosh 84 joke?
Not so much.
Thanks :)