You're right. And just wait another two years. I'm betting that Nintendo is a one trick pony, and once the hype dies down, that these things will start collecting dust and game sales will tank. If they're smart, they're already working on a sequel... the "Wii Wii" PS3 will just be hitting it's stride, with the bugs worked out, and tons of games hitting the market that are starting to take advantage of the computing power. The 360 will still be popular, but it'll start looking and feeling "old" in comparison to the more powerful PS3.
Your analysis should sit in psychology literature under "wishful thinking". I've never heard so many things wrong about the game industry before. And I've no particular affection for either company or console.
At least don't contradict yourself. "It's very fast" is no longer a deal maker or breaker for consoles. You could call Wii a one trick pony, then PS3 ends up as zero trick pony.
I remember when the big 3 was announcing their forthcoming console. The Xbox 360 press event made it to slashdot's front page. So did the PS3, while the Wii was tucked away in the game section.
Your memory is apparently doing you a very poor service.
Speculations about Nintendo's controller where all over the news (before they have shown the controller). When they announced the controller with photos, doubly so.
We had fanboys making fake "Nintendo Revolution" videos about what the console might look like.
Then later, when Nintendo announced how they *called* their console, it was all over the news for weeks again.
Im sick and tired of having to view 11 pages of adds to read an article that could easily fit on one. Easily 6 adds per page.
You go there to read the article? Damn, I go there to enjoy the ads, and that little article paragraph in the middle? It's pissing me off. It's right in the middle, getting in my way, demanding attention, as if I have nothing better to do than read articles all day.
Can't there be site with just the ads and no pesky articles?
I'm sick of all this "our console is better than the other's" crap, I want to see the best games on the right console at the right time. For all three competitors. Their products should speak for themselves.
They're learning from Sony. I'm surprised they didn't say XBOX360 can make baby dolls cry blood yet. PS3 can.
Amazing what you can do with $4billion to burn. The most amazing thing is that Sony still probably would have beaten them if they didn't get caught up in their own hubris and focus on things like blu-ray.
You know: if, if, if...
If Sony didn't focus on things like blu-ray, hd-dvd would've taken edge, and they'd lose a far more lucrative revenue source than gaming.
If Microsoft didn't burn so much money on sales at loss, maybe they'd still gain edge since XBOX260 was the first 3G console on the market, and with solid online service.
Last but not least, if Nintendo didn't screw Son with the CD players, PlayStation wouldn't exist in the first place.
But if or not if, the situation is like it is, and I pretty much believe there won't be PS4 ever. Sony plans to keep PS3 for something like 10-15 years, and with poor growth, exclusives and features like this, XBOX480 (or whatever) and WiiPeeDoo 2 will basically finish them completely.
Microsoft have confidence in the sector for a reason.
Well, if only 75% are renewing, doesn't that mean 25% aren't??
And the forrester report said 26%. I bet that's inside the margin for error of the survey.
The truth is, whoever paid for the long-term service already was screwed and there's no way back. Now Microsoft will capitalize on the technology it produced for Vista (some released with Vista, some with Server 2008, and some will remain in beta for some time yet) and churn out updates faster.
My point being, those 75% aren't necessarily happy with the deal, but have considered continuing contract in respect to the situation right now onward.
Every company that tries such periodic contracts have failed in one way or another. And I'm talking big companies here, such as Macromedia (now part of Adobe).
Big complex products like CS3 and Windows, Office, will at some point no longer be possible to produce on schedule, so periodic payments will have to form in some shape or another, but this is definitely not the form.
The new CPU scheduler should improve the desktop Linux experience, and will be part of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel.
Could someone outline concrete problem the Linux desktop scheduling had right now that are visible resolved by CFS.
I'm not a heavy user of Linux desktop (just servers on the shell), but it was always my experience that Linux handles simultaneous multimedia tasks (for example) better on the same hardware than Windows.
While I contribute this more to architectural problem on the Windows side (such as.. it's quite easy an app to stall Explorer.exe or vice versa, no amount of scheduling helps there), I'm curious to see if there's tangible difference someone could describe with CFS running desktop software in Linux.
Perhaps this is a term difference, but hasn't all versions of Windows from 95 up been running in protected mode? Otherwise how do they get access to larger linear memory mapping versus segmented chunks like the DOS days.
It's not related to the memory protected mode really, now that I think of it, not very good choice of words on MS part, as it (obviously) could cause confusion.
Michael, please don't bother wasting your time arguing with the Photoshop fanatics. These guys are not interested in helping improve the state of free software, they are simply here to browbeat anyone who would consider using it instead of their beloved adobe products.
Did you miss the part where I said Krita is a lot better development than GIMP? How do you explain this.
"Photoshop fanatics"... jesus, you guys are desperate.
If you want better window management, use a better window manager. Putting the window management features into GIMP would actually cripple the program for many of us. Photoshop's MDI is a great way to work around the limitations of the window manager in MS Windows. But it's still a kludge. A better window manager is a far better solution, and there are plenty of good solutions already available.
I'm not the one who's craving to use GIMP never mind the price. It's the GIMP community trying to push GIMP forward as a replacement of Photoshop onto designers.
A good app conforms to the platforms it targets. The rest is just excuses. What am I supposed to do, switch to Linux to make GIMP a little better? Yea, sure.
Yeah, isn't being blind to the problem a real bitch? Just like people like you who go, "Well, these stupid suckers are gullible enough to program this application for ten years and release all of their work for free! That makes them my-y-y BITCH!"
The problem here isn't that graphics designers are actively seeking to make fun of GIMP. It's that GIMP's developers and fans keep trying to push GIMP down our throat. It gets really old real fast, and we're forced to tell you straight in the face that GIMP sucks compared to the majority of commercial products out there. It sucks even compared to other open source editors (such as Krita).
Designer: "Shoot, that CS3 upgrade price is steep. But I'll pay it of course..."
GIMP fan: "Dude, you gotta switch to GIMP! It's F*R*E*E and [insert drivel about conspiracies, "evil", information wants to be free etc]"
Designer: "I've given GIMP several shots, it's really very far from a mature product, I'll pass on it."
GIMP fan: "Dude, it's F*R*E*E, no upgrade price, isn't this what you're complaining about".
Designer: "I complain since there's no cheaper alternative, GIMP isn't an alternative."
Well, I wish you luck Prof. Terry, but I see from a mile away this is not going anywhere. For what I know, software is written by humans for humans, and the best way to find out what humans are after is to just do a good old usability study with
a) asking people directly what are they frustrated with
b) monitoring people directly (as: in person, or on video) how they use the program and what they struggle with
This is what commercial software companies do since they don't have years of free time to fiddle with collecting artificial data to "guess" upon. And it works.
In your other post you said how you can use the logs to identify Photoshop users since they accidentally use CTRL+D for the wrong action. Here's a perfect example of overcomplicating things. You could've just asked the people participating: are you a Photoshop user. That eliminates any uncertainty and complexity associated with monitoring logs and "guessing" what the users' background is.
Another example from your post up there:
We also have some emperical data to support the notion that the multiple windows design choice is not the best. Our data indicate that the percentage of the monitor covered by the document window is typically about 50% for most users (again, see http://www.ingimp.org/stats/monitors [ingimp.org] ). Most Photoshop users seem to maximize their document windows; with GIMP, this seems to happen much less frequently, probably because doing so obscures GIMP's other windows.
As a graphics designer who tried to use this program, I could've told you all of the above immediately, and in a much simpler fashion. I know because *I use* the program. I don't guess how other people use it.
You'd ask me "what do you think about multiple windows" and I'd tell you "they suck, merge them into a single window with panels". No need for "empirical data supporting notions", or "statistics for percentage of screen covered by document window".
But I hope in a few years you collect enough empirical evidence to catch up with the rest of us, and finally someone does something about it, before GIMP is completely forgotten by the community.
You know, how do you recognize a project is someone's pet project? It's an overcomplicated solution for a problem with a trivial solution.
Want to find out what makes the GIMP ui suck? Ask the damn users! They won't exactly shy away from telling you.
I'm a Photoshop user and I have GIMP installed here to use the occasional esoteric plugin functionality. Let me tell you few things you can immediately get busy fixing:
1. for some reason GIMP developers decided every single thing needs its own window and its own menu bar. It's weird as f*ck: put the entire layout in a single window with integrated panel layout (similar to how Eclipse does it, for example).
2. each plugin is its own modeless exe dialog that takes arbitrary amount to start after it was called (at which time you can modify the processed image.. sometimes, and sometimes GIMP crashes because of it): create a proper lean plugin API and modal plugin dialog.
3. the menus and options are all over the place: there seems to be no strategy at all about what goes where
4. GIMP has really bad startup time, and performance, compared to commercial graphics editors (such as Photoshop)
5. There's no way at all to organize your layers in a more complex setup: there are no layer groups, layer folder, or anything like that. It's just a big sack of flat layers, that you can select one at a time, and link them together. This is Photoshop 4 level functionality, and most graphics editors are waaaay past that by now.
6. There are no proper drawing tools in Gimp at all. For a graphics package that claims to be targeted at geeks making icons and web devs making web designs, this is ridiculous. We're forced to fake our ways with selection tools and scripts, which covers only a fraction of what we need.
7. A personal issue I have with Gimp: no proper grid. I use the grid in Photoshop all the time, set on unobtrusive "pixel" mode, and usually at 8, 16, 32 pixels with subdivisors. In Gimp, no subdivisors, no pixel mode, and for some reason the *mere fast of displaying* the grid, makes everything slow down to a crawl.
This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there. 'It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,' said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings
Don't you guys see what's going on here. A creative way to throw "Google" in the mix, to get your press release a better publicity.
Englighten me, how is Google affected by NetRatings ranking anyway? I thought their revenue comes from ad clicks and aggregate data they sell to various companies.
Scott Ross seems overly concerned though: don't worry Scott, they don't care, nor do we.
Think of how disappointing it feels when you're searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant
If you want recent materials and not articles created years ago, you hit the "News" link in Google.
"Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics: Download times rule the Web, and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps, Web pages can be no more than 3 KB..."
Because, as we are all painfully aware of, if the online in-depth article is split into 60 pages, each page containing a riot of banners surrounding a lonely paragraph in the middle... well we just skip to "conclusions".
The HIV virus is a very interesting virus. Of all the common viruses, it is one of most deadly and the hardest to cure. It kills millions of people every year.
You're forgetting the heart attack virus. Or was this a bacteria..?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right. And just wait another two years. I'm betting that Nintendo is a one trick pony, and once the hype dies down, that these things will start collecting dust and game sales will tank. If they're smart, they're already working on a sequel... the "Wii Wii" PS3 will just be hitting it's stride, with the bugs worked out, and tons of games hitting the market that are starting to take advantage of the computing power. The 360 will still be popular, but it'll start looking and feeling "old" in comparison to the more powerful PS3.
Your analysis should sit in psychology literature under "wishful thinking". I've never heard so many things wrong about the game industry before. And I've no particular affection for either company or console.
At least don't contradict yourself. "It's very fast" is no longer a deal maker or breaker for consoles. You could call Wii a one trick pony, then PS3 ends up as zero trick pony.
I remember when the big 3 was announcing their forthcoming console. The Xbox 360 press event made it to slashdot's front page. So did the PS3, while the Wii was tucked away in the game section.
Your memory is apparently doing you a very poor service.
Speculations about Nintendo's controller where all over the news (before they have shown the controller). When they announced the controller with photos, doubly so.
We had fanboys making fake "Nintendo Revolution" videos about what the console might look like.
Then later, when Nintendo announced how they *called* their console, it was all over the news for weeks again.
After all, we were used to sci-fi of the Star Trek standard where the quality of the writing overcame the poor effects.
...you're serious :(
Hahahahahaha! Great one.
Wait... are ya? Uhmm... Yea,
Niether would Nintendo. That whole thing broke down because Sony wanted their name plastered all over it instead of Nintendo's.
I didn't know that side of the story, got links?
Im sick and tired of having to view 11 pages of adds to read an article that could easily fit on one. Easily 6 adds per page.
You go there to read the article? Damn, I go there to enjoy the ads, and that little article paragraph in the middle? It's pissing me off. It's right in the middle, getting in my way, demanding attention, as if I have nothing better to do than read articles all day.
Can't there be site with just the ads and no pesky articles?
And then I found this. Best. Site. Ever.
I'm sick of all this "our console is better than the other's" crap, I want to see the best games on the right console at the right time. For all three competitors. Their products should speak for themselves.
They're learning from Sony. I'm surprised they didn't say XBOX360 can make baby dolls cry blood yet. PS3 can.
Amazing what you can do with $4billion to burn. The most amazing thing is that Sony still probably would have beaten them if they didn't get caught up in their own hubris and focus on things like blu-ray.
You know: if, if, if...
If Sony didn't focus on things like blu-ray, hd-dvd would've taken edge, and they'd lose a far more lucrative revenue source than gaming.
If Microsoft didn't burn so much money on sales at loss, maybe they'd still gain edge since XBOX260 was the first 3G console on the market, and with solid online service.
Last but not least, if Nintendo didn't screw Son with the CD players, PlayStation wouldn't exist in the first place.
But if or not if, the situation is like it is, and I pretty much believe there won't be PS4 ever. Sony plans to keep PS3 for something like 10-15 years, and with poor growth, exclusives and features like this, XBOX480 (or whatever) and WiiPeeDoo 2 will basically finish them completely.
Microsoft have confidence in the sector for a reason.
Forrester: ~25% of your partners won't renew their contracts!
Microsoft: Blatant lies! ~75% of our partners will renew it!
Well, if only 75% are renewing, doesn't that mean 25% aren't??
And the forrester report said 26%. I bet that's inside the margin for error of the survey.
The truth is, whoever paid for the long-term service already was screwed and there's no way back. Now Microsoft will capitalize on the technology it produced for Vista (some released with Vista, some with Server 2008, and some will remain in beta for some time yet) and churn out updates faster.
My point being, those 75% aren't necessarily happy with the deal, but have considered continuing contract in respect to the situation right now onward.
Every company that tries such periodic contracts have failed in one way or another. And I'm talking big companies here, such as Macromedia (now part of Adobe).
Big complex products like CS3 and Windows, Office, will at some point no longer be possible to produce on schedule, so periodic payments will have to form in some shape or another, but this is definitely not the form.
The new CPU scheduler should improve the desktop Linux experience, and will be part of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel.
Could someone outline concrete problem the Linux desktop scheduling had right now that are visible resolved by CFS.
I'm not a heavy user of Linux desktop (just servers on the shell), but it was always my experience that Linux handles simultaneous multimedia tasks (for example) better on the same hardware than Windows.
While I contribute this more to architectural problem on the Windows side (such as.. it's quite easy an app to stall Explorer.exe or vice versa, no amount of scheduling helps there), I'm curious to see if there's tangible difference someone could describe with CFS running desktop software in Linux.
Perhaps this is a term difference, but hasn't all versions of Windows from 95 up been running in protected mode? Otherwise how do they get access to larger linear memory mapping versus segmented chunks like the DOS days.
It's not related to the memory protected mode really, now that I think of it, not very good choice of words on MS part, as it (obviously) could cause confusion.
It's a "low permissions" mode.
But they never say what System it affects. Granted for IE it's pretty simple
Is it. Most exploits that would work on XP wouldn't work on Vista in protected mode.
Finally!
First, Gypsy2012 writes with a highly critical security flaw involving both Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer
Earlier when Microsoft's IE team flew over to Mozilla HQ to ask them about their RSS icon, I knew it that's the beginning of a wonderful partnership.
A: "Jesus, now they're making ISP-s hold data for 6 months in case NSA or whoever .. wants it.."
B: "Come ooon! Why would you mind them reading your mails and sniffing your traffic. If you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to hide"
A: "You know what... pull your underpants down and walk out in public"
B: "What? WTF is wrong with you"
A: "Come on, pull 'em down, why not? You've got nothing to hide.. or do you..."
Michael, please don't bother wasting your time arguing with the Photoshop fanatics. These guys are not interested in helping improve the state of free software, they are simply here to browbeat anyone who would consider using it instead of their beloved adobe products.
Did you miss the part where I said Krita is a lot better development than GIMP? How do you explain this.
"Photoshop fanatics"... jesus, you guys are desperate.
If you want better window management, use a better window manager. Putting the window management features into GIMP would actually cripple the program for many of us. Photoshop's MDI is a great way to work around the limitations of the window manager in MS Windows. But it's still a kludge. A better window manager is a far better solution, and there are plenty of good solutions already available.
I'm not the one who's craving to use GIMP never mind the price. It's the GIMP community trying to push GIMP forward as a replacement of Photoshop onto designers.
A good app conforms to the platforms it targets. The rest is just excuses. What am I supposed to do, switch to Linux to make GIMP a little better? Yea, sure.
Yeah, isn't being blind to the problem a real bitch? Just like people like you who go, "Well, these stupid suckers are gullible enough to program this application for ten years and release all of their work for free! That makes them my-y-y BITCH!"
...
The problem here isn't that graphics designers are actively seeking to make fun of GIMP. It's that GIMP's developers and fans keep trying to push GIMP down our throat. It gets really old real fast, and we're forced to tell you straight in the face that GIMP sucks compared to the majority of commercial products out there. It sucks even compared to other open source editors (such as Krita).
Designer: "Shoot, that CS3 upgrade price is steep. But I'll pay it of course..."
GIMP fan: "Dude, you gotta switch to GIMP! It's F*R*E*E and [insert drivel about conspiracies, "evil", information wants to be free etc]"
Designer: "I've given GIMP several shots, it's really very far from a mature product, I'll pass on it."
GIMP fan: "Dude, it's F*R*E*E, no upgrade price, isn't this what you're complaining about".
Designer: "I complain since there's no cheaper alternative, GIMP isn't an alternative."
GIMP fan snaps and goes into an endless cycle:
GIMP fan: "No, dude, it's F*R*E*E, use it!"
GIMP fan: "No, dude, it's F*R*E*E, use it!"
GIMP fan: "No, dude, it's F*R*E*E, use it!"
Well, I wish you luck Prof. Terry, but I see from a mile away this is not going anywhere. For what I know, software is written by humans for humans, and the best way to find out what humans are after is to just do a good old usability study with
a) asking people directly what are they frustrated with
b) monitoring people directly (as: in person, or on video) how they use the program and what they struggle with
This is what commercial software companies do since they don't have years of free time to fiddle with collecting artificial data to "guess" upon. And it works.
In your other post you said how you can use the logs to identify Photoshop users since they accidentally use CTRL+D for the wrong action. Here's a perfect example of overcomplicating things. You could've just asked the people participating: are you a Photoshop user. That eliminates any uncertainty and complexity associated with monitoring logs and "guessing" what the users' background is.
Another example from your post up there:
We also have some emperical data to support the notion that the multiple windows design choice is not the best. Our data indicate that the percentage of the monitor covered by the document window is typically about 50% for most users (again, see http://www.ingimp.org/stats/monitors [ingimp.org] ). Most Photoshop users seem to maximize their document windows; with GIMP, this seems to happen much less frequently, probably because doing so obscures GIMP's other windows.
As a graphics designer who tried to use this program, I could've told you all of the above immediately, and in a much simpler fashion. I know because *I use* the program. I don't guess how other people use it.
You'd ask me "what do you think about multiple windows" and I'd tell you "they suck, merge them into a single window with panels". No need for "empirical data supporting notions", or "statistics for percentage of screen covered by document window".
But I hope in a few years you collect enough empirical evidence to catch up with the rest of us, and finally someone does something about it, before GIMP is completely forgotten by the community.
You know, how do you recognize a project is someone's pet project? It's an overcomplicated solution for a problem with a trivial solution.
Want to find out what makes the GIMP ui suck? Ask the damn users! They won't exactly shy away from telling you.
I'm a Photoshop user and I have GIMP installed here to use the occasional esoteric plugin functionality. Let me tell you few things you can immediately get busy fixing:
1. for some reason GIMP developers decided every single thing needs its own window and its own menu bar. It's weird as f*ck: put the entire layout in a single window with integrated panel layout (similar to how Eclipse does it, for example).
2. each plugin is its own modeless exe dialog that takes arbitrary amount to start after it was called (at which time you can modify the processed image.. sometimes, and sometimes GIMP crashes because of it): create a proper lean plugin API and modal plugin dialog.
3. the menus and options are all over the place: there seems to be no strategy at all about what goes where
4. GIMP has really bad startup time, and performance, compared to commercial graphics editors (such as Photoshop)
5. There's no way at all to organize your layers in a more complex setup: there are no layer groups, layer folder, or anything like that. It's just a big sack of flat layers, that you can select one at a time, and link them together. This is Photoshop 4 level functionality, and most graphics editors are waaaay past that by now.
6. There are no proper drawing tools in Gimp at all. For a graphics package that claims to be targeted at geeks making icons and web devs making web designs, this is ridiculous. We're forced to fake our ways with selection tools and scripts, which covers only a fraction of what we need.
7. A personal issue I have with Gimp: no proper grid. I use the grid in Photoshop all the time, set on unobtrusive "pixel" mode, and usually at 8, 16, 32 pixels with subdivisors. In Gimp, no subdivisors, no pixel mode, and for some reason the *mere fast of displaying* the grid, makes everything slow down to a crawl.
This is likely to affect Google's ranking because while users visit the site often, they don't usually spend much time there. 'It is not that page views are irrelevant now, but they are a less accurate gauge of total site traffic and engagement,' said Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings
Don't you guys see what's going on here. A creative way to throw "Google" in the mix, to get your press release a better publicity.
Englighten me, how is Google affected by NetRatings ranking anyway? I thought their revenue comes from ad clicks and aggregate data they sell to various companies.
Scott Ross seems overly concerned though: don't worry Scott, they don't care, nor do we.
You averaged 2.2 posts over the past 11 articles: You are your own .sig!
:(
How do you think I came up with it in the first place?
Ironically, the cheaper grades of olive oil probably have more of this oil.
Why "ironically". Do you intend to use food olive oil to prevent HIV next time?
Think of how disappointing it feels when you're searching for something and get directed to short postings in the middle of a debate that occurred years before, and is thus irrelevant
..."
If you want recent materials and not articles created years ago, you hit the "News" link in Google.
Talking about outdated content, this page was linked straight from Jacob's index page. I'll quote:
"Why This Site Has Almost No Graphics:
Download times rule the Web, and since most users have access speeds on the order of 28.8 kbps, Web pages can be no more than 3 KB
Because, as we are all painfully aware of, if the online in-depth article is split into 60 pages, each page containing a riot of banners surrounding a lonely paragraph in the middle... well we just skip to "conclusions".
The HIV virus is a very interesting virus. Of all the common viruses, it is one of most deadly and the hardest to cure. It kills millions of people every year.
You're forgetting the heart attack virus. Or was this a bacteria..?