The new silver PS2: Looks great, but has problems playing some games. Didn't they just take the slim-line PS2 and change the case color? What happened?
I expect Sony rev'd the chipset (usually improved integration/production, hence cheaper to make a PS2). They did that a few times with the PSX, and a few games that didn't follow the 'rules' would fail to run on later PSX models.
I have to agree - I don't like XP's Luna look - I always switch back to Win2k ('Classic') style when I install.
Given that they seem to be dropping all the interesting features from Vista, and about the only thing to stay in is all the eye candy/GUI enhancements, I do have to wonder why whenever I look at Vista screenshots, they look so goddamn ugly.
The design is all over the place, and the transparency usage is just mad and confusing. I mean, Why do I want to be able to see through title bars? The stuff behind is blurred...what's the point? It just looks so messy - and judging by most of the screenshots I've seen, especially if you have a picture on the desktop background. Contrast this to OS X, where the transparency is subtle and hints at what is behind, as opposed to 'here's a bunch of visual noise for you to contend with'.
My initial reaction on seeing any Vista screenshot so far has been "Yuck!" That's not good, surely.
Also, that looks like the Media Center Edition stuff that is being integrated into Vista. I doubt that by default WMP takes over full screen (at least I hope not). Those screenshots seem to be of the ten foot interface of MCE-derived stuff.
It's called a reference rasterizer for a reason - it's not meant to actually be used in final products, it's just so you can see everything that DX supports. It's unusably slow.
Indeed - I did smile at the '50 times faster' claim.
Devs don't call it the 'Slideshow Renderer' or 'Postcard Renderer' for nothing:-)
It reminds me of a comment Erik made on Old Man Murray years ago:
"The game runs in software, but if that idea appealed to me, I imagine I'd be too busy churning my own butter to play Blair Witch anyway."
No, I never noticed that either, so I'm reading all this in a slight state of bemusement.
But then again, by the time he appeared, it had all got a bit cheesy (fart jokes, ffs), so it's fair to say I wasn't paying all that much attention by then. I liked the gas mask story, but parts of the reality/quiz tv story were pretty painful. All that "Where did you get that gun?" nonsense. It was like Carry On Up The Cybermen or something.
3) He implemented a fix to an old system that wasn't spec'd in the job, when his manager might have had another (possibly more important/lucrative) job waiting for him to do when he was done with the first job.
That publish.com site is yet another site that uses a pretty small font for body text - I can read it ok, but I bet my parents wouldn't like to.
That's another thing that slashdot gets right - body text (e.g. stories, comments) is, goodness me, displayed as body text, with the font/size etc that my browser is configured for.
Yes, I know you can do all kinds of preferences stuff to avoid this, use greasemonkey scripts, etc., but it comes down to web designers deciding that the body text font style on your computer is 'wrong', so they change it.
One thing I've noticed is that small body fonts on web sites nearly always come from designers who use Macs. I've never really worked out why. The fonts look small and annoying on their Macs, too, so it's not just some difference in font rendering or something. This isn't a dig at Mac users, btw. It's just something odd that I've noticed.
I would have been less annoyed with VHS if SVHS was slowly worked into consumer units.
It was, wasn't it? I know I bought a consumer SVHS deck years ago (at least 5 years ago), and it wasn't exactly expensive. It wasn't as cheap as a normal deck, but that was ok because it had a better build quality than your average deck too. Also, I guess because it's towards the high end, they didn't keep playing yo-yo with the features all the time ("We've decided you don't want tape remaining indicators...this year"), so that was also a good filtering mechanism for choosing a model.
In the UK, SVHS models have been around the 150ukp mark for a good number of years now. Mine was 220ukp when I bought it, but when I replaced it after a burglary a year later it was down to 150ukp.
"To be fair", the same could have been said about the original iPod if it had not supported mp3s, and only played AACs or something, and you had to transcode all your mp3s before you could use them.
But if it had, I sure wouldn't have bought one, and probably lots of other current iPod owners wouldn't have either.
It's the same in the UK, too. That's not just a "I use it and everyone I know uses it too" comment either - I was involved with the UK publicity for a movie, and when it came to promotions involving IM services, they told me MSN was easily #1 in the UK.
Anyway, I think a better analogy would be holding car manufacturers responsible if it was trivially easy for someone who knows what they're doing to break into your car and steal it.
Oh, wait, it is trivially easy to do that with most cars...hmm.
If you think retreads of "Mr. Do" and "Snake" are going to cut it in the Java space from now on, think again. You might like to look at Superscape's site for a taste of the kind of 3D games that are already out there.
Looks like poorly disguised retreads of Qix are fine, though?
Oh wait, it's got a hot girl in a bikini in it! Feel that innovation! Tssssssss!
I'm not sure if it's the same Canvas, but there was a vector drawing app called Canvas that was around when we wrote Xara. It was horribly slow and primitive in many ways though. I only ran it a few times, and most every time it prompted laughter when I did. We looked at a lot of other drawing programs at the time, for performance and usability comparisons. In terms of performance, Xara tended to wipe the floor with everything else, so that wasn't usually a problem. But we felt it was sensible to check the competition, and ensure we were better. Most programs had some nice ideas though. For instance, I think it was Freehand that inspired the pervasive drag and drop of colours in Xara. Then again, it would have been hard not to improve on the infamous Colour Tool in Artworks...:-)
As I say, I don't know if Deneba Canvas is the same program. It seems aimed at a similar task, so maybe it is. IIRC, the Canvas I tried was a Mac program that was ported to the PC. Er, possibly. It did look really ropey though. For some reason I remember a lot of the sample documents were of boats. Schematics of yachts, that sort of thing. Or maybe I'm hallucinating again.
In any case, I'm against the open-sourcing of Xara, as it means people will be able to see the
mucky code I wrote for the EPS filters:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I expect Sony rev'd the chipset (usually improved integration/production, hence cheaper to make a PS2). They did that a few times with the PSX, and a few games that didn't follow the 'rules' would fail to run on later PSX models.
(I was upset for probably about 20 seconds, then I thought "Meh. I got it for functionality, not as a status symbol.")
Given that they seem to be dropping all the interesting features from Vista, and about the only thing to stay in is all the eye candy/GUI enhancements, I do have to wonder why whenever I look at Vista screenshots, they look so goddamn ugly.
The design is all over the place, and the transparency usage is just mad and confusing. I mean, Why do I want to be able to see through title bars? The stuff behind is blurred...what's the point? It just looks so messy - and judging by most of the screenshots I've seen, especially if you have a picture on the desktop background. Contrast this to OS X, where the transparency is subtle and hints at what is behind, as opposed to 'here's a bunch of visual noise for you to contend with'.
My initial reaction on seeing any Vista screenshot so far has been "Yuck!" That's not good, surely.
Also, that looks like the Media Center Edition stuff that is being integrated into Vista. I doubt that by default WMP takes over full screen (at least I hope not). Those screenshots seem to be of the ten foot interface of MCE-derived stuff.
1FPS? What sort of slideshows do you go to?
Indeed - I did smile at the '50 times faster' claim.
Devs don't call it the 'Slideshow Renderer' or 'Postcard Renderer' for nothing :-)
It reminds me of a comment Erik made on Old Man Murray years ago:
Don't feel bad.
When you can snatch the pebble from my hand, grasshopper, then you will truly have achieved enlightenment.
In the meantime, junior, pipe down and get me some freaking coffee.
No, I never noticed that either, so I'm reading all this in a slight state of bemusement.
But then again, by the time he appeared, it had all got a bit cheesy (fart jokes, ffs), so it's fair to say I wasn't paying all that much attention by then. I liked the gas mask story, but parts of the reality/quiz tv story were pretty painful. All that "Where did you get that gun?" nonsense. It was like Carry On Up The Cybermen or something.
3) He implemented a fix to an old system that wasn't spec'd in the job, when his manager might have had another (possibly more important/lucrative) job waiting for him to do when he was done with the first job.
I have another one: tiny fonts.
That publish.com site is yet another site that uses a pretty small font for body text - I can read it ok, but I bet my parents wouldn't like to.
That's another thing that slashdot gets right - body text (e.g. stories, comments) is, goodness me, displayed as body text, with the font/size etc that my browser is configured for.
Yes, I know you can do all kinds of preferences stuff to avoid this, use greasemonkey scripts, etc., but it comes down to web designers deciding that the body text font style on your computer is 'wrong', so they change it.
One thing I've noticed is that small body fonts on web sites nearly always come from designers who use Macs. I've never really worked out why. The fonts look small and annoying on their Macs, too, so it's not just some difference in font rendering or something. This isn't a dig at Mac users, btw. It's just something odd that I've noticed.
Hey, the first low UID thread that no-one will reply to! :-)
You're posting to slashdot. That means you're already a double-zero.
Max: My teacher tells me beauty is on the inside.
Fletcher: That's just something ugly people say.
-- "Liar Liar"
It was, wasn't it? I know I bought a consumer SVHS deck years ago (at least 5 years ago), and it wasn't exactly expensive. It wasn't as cheap as a normal deck, but that was ok because it had a better build quality than your average deck too. Also, I guess because it's towards the high end, they didn't keep playing yo-yo with the features all the time ("We've decided you don't want tape remaining indicators...this year"), so that was also a good filtering mechanism for choosing a model.
In the UK, SVHS models have been around the 150ukp mark for a good number of years now. Mine was 220ukp when I bought it, but when I replaced it after a burglary a year later it was down to 150ukp.
That would be da bomb!
But if it had, I sure wouldn't have bought one, and probably lots of other current iPod owners wouldn't have either.
...because everyone knows time is free?
Well, I guess that proves pornography isn't educational.
It's the same in the UK, too. That's not just a "I use it and everyone I know uses it too" comment either - I was involved with the UK publicity for a movie, and when it came to promotions involving IM services, they told me MSN was easily #1 in the UK.
(Bloody kids! Get off my lawn! etc)
Anyway, I think a better analogy would be holding car manufacturers responsible if it was trivially easy for someone who knows what they're doing to break into your car and steal it.
Oh, wait, it is trivially easy to do that with most cars...hmm.
Looks like poorly disguised retreads of Qix are fine, though?
Oh wait, it's got a hot girl in a bikini in it! Feel that innovation! Tssssssss!
As I say, I don't know if Deneba Canvas is the same program. It seems aimed at a similar task, so maybe it is. IIRC, the Canvas I tried was a Mac program that was ported to the PC. Er, possibly. It did look really ropey though. For some reason I remember a lot of the sample documents were of boats. Schematics of yachts, that sort of thing. Or maybe I'm hallucinating again.
In any case, I'm against the open-sourcing of Xara, as it means people will be able to see the mucky code I wrote for the EPS filters :-)
It's modded down because it's an oft-posted troll.
IP doesn't use DNS. DNS is what you use to get an IP address so that you can create an IP packet. So we don't need a replacement for IP.