There is a certain tendancy for a cool new piece of software to come out, only to be suddenly followed by some open source projects who decide that there ought to be a free version.
A good example is VMWare - it was an innovative, useful new product, but very soon after it was released the FreeMWare (or whatever it is called now) project started up. Now don't get me wrong - I applaud the FreeMWare folks, but you can see how it doesn't bode well for the VMWare guys who did it first. They may be able to compete on features, but they sure can't compete on price. Without VMWare, FreeMWare probably wouldn't have been started, or at least, it would have appeared much later without as much publicity and developer support.
I was talking about the Intellectual Property protection side of things. As far as I'm aware, neither vorbis or ogg have any copyright protection in them.
If you write an open source program for Windows, it can reach many more people than it can if you write it for Linux, especially if it's desktop software.
It's not that Linux users are second-class citizens - it's just that the authors have decided to write it for the most popular desktop OS, thereby spreading the wealth to the largest number of people.
Of course Microsoft is putting stuff in their operating systems to make them more attractive to content providers. Stop complaining about it - if some Linux people had gotten together and actually made a Linux alternative, they might have had a chance of setting a standard. However, it's probably a bit late now.
One of the reasons the Mac has such a well-loved interface (how many PC interface zealots do you know?) is that it's consistent from app to app. Basically, you buy a new Mac app, you launch it, and you figure it out on the first try.
Jebus! Is this still 1986? Uh, I think you'll find that that's pretty much the same on PCs. And to a certain extent, all GUI-based OSes.
In fact, there are some ways in which Windows is *more* consistent than the Mac, the prime example being the file browser windows. If you want to save or load something, the load windows you get are exatly the same as the file explorer windows you get in the rest of Windows. You can view them how you like (large icons, small icons, details, etc...) and do all the the things that you can do in a normal explorer window (rename things, delete things, create things, change the properties of things, etc.) I find it exceptionally useful. Mac file openers are primitive in comparison (although I admit, I've not used OS X yet...)
Oh, and yes, I suppose I'm a PC interface zealot. Most of us no longer have a tiny monchrome screen. We can afford menubars on a per-window basis now.
From your comment, I can only assume you live in North America. If you live in Europe there are lots of good reasons to want to play Region 1 DVDs.
There are about 10 times as many Region 1 DVDs as Region 2 - which means that often the only way to see a less well known film on DVD is to get a Region 1 copy.
Also, (and this is especially true on older films) the Region 2 DVDs have less extras on them.
Price is also an issue. DVDs in the UK seem to cost about 1.5 times as much as they do in the US. Regional coding allows the film distributors to artifically inflate the price, because they know that people won't be able to play cheap imports.
However, I think many DVD players in this country are now sold multi-region - I recently bought one from Richer Sounds, and almost all the ones they sell are multi-region.
Even with his 'Indrema Developer Network' I can't see enough people jumping on board to create games in time for enough people to buy his system.
Modern games often take at a team of 15 people 2 years to produce. I can't the average open source project populated by people doing stuff in their spare time cutting the mustard, somehow. This isn't sendmail, where you can release an early version and keep adding incremental improvements for years. You need to get it done fairly quickly, and you need to get it all done and dusted before you start burning it onto a CD.
Anyway, if it does get released - I'll buy one. Then I'll install Windows on it, just so I have a chance of running some games on it;)
Re:The GIMP would be very popular if only...
on
Grokking The Gimp
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· Score: 1
Perhaps it's come along in leaps and bounds in the last six months, but the last time I tried it it did seem unresponsive, especially when I compared it to the Linux version running on the same machine, which I tried out when I had Linux running on there as well.
The big problem with it not having native widgets really shows up when you try and us an 'open' or 'save' dialog - Many people who are not regular users of windows do not realise that the open and save dialogs work in exactly the same way as explorer - you can do all the same things - i.e. create new directories, change file permissions, rename files etc... - To suddenly be lumped with a rather clunky standard Motif-style file chooser is a big step backwards, and I imagine would be quite a huge turn-off for those who have not used X applications before.
The GIMP would be very popular if only...
on
Grokking The Gimp
·
· Score: 2
...There was a decent Win32 port.
I know that there is a Windows port, but unfortunately it doesn't use native Windows widgets, and as a result it's rather slow and clunky.
As a result, there's a huge chunk of people who would probably rather use it than a demo version of Pain Shop Pro, but it's just not worth it on Windows.
Ah well, I suppose I should look into doing a native widgets port of GTK...
Yeah, I think the reasoning behind that is the stipulation in the Python license shall be governed and interpreted by the law in the state of California.
I hope to God it isn't.
One of the great things about Python was that you can embed it in your own code, without having to open the whole of your code. That's very useful.
It'd be okay if it was released under the it's normal (BSD-style) license and the GPL, though...
I would suggest that you start with Python - there are several reasons for this:
You can run python as an interactive interpreter, which is very useful when you're learning. It means that you can test out a line before committing it to code, just to see if it works. You can also query the data your program uses from it.
Python is quite an elegantly structured language, and it gives quite a nice introduction to Object Orientation.
Python code is very easy to read. I find that when I'm learning a language, I spend a lot of time looking at other people's code - you should find that fairly easy in Python.
I think what it comes down to is this: Your first language should be as easy to use as possible, and as easy to get results with as possible. It's more important that someone gets encouraged and continues programming, rather than giving up than it is to ensure that they've learned good programming habits. That's why BASIC was such a good language to learn with. (I learnt on BBC Basic) Of course the nice thing about Python is that I doubt it would encourage many bad habits;)
And anyway, you can un-learn bad habits.
Once you are happy using Python, have a go at C/C++ - it is the de facto standard in computing languages, and you'll get to learn all about the wonderful world of memory management...
XBox is *not* simply a PC in a little box. One of the biggest differences is the unified memory. There's a whole world of tricks you can do if you can muck about with textures on the fly, something which normally involves a big hit on PCs.
The other point to remember is that PC game creators cannot tailor their games to a single platform in the way you can with a console. This *does* make a huge difference. I write games for a PC, and I'm still trying to ensure that it'll run on a P233 with a ATI Rage Pro, as well as the 800Mhz machine with a GeForce 2. Sure, you can try and make it as scalable as you can, but you'll never be able to go for the same quality as you can on a fixed platform.
As for your labelling as DX8 as 'silly' - where have you been? DirectX has been getting steadily better for ages.
Cheap GPS units in the UK
on
Geocaching
·
· Score: 1
... anybody know where you can get them? I noticed the claim on the original page: "almost everyone on earth can buy [a GPS receiver] for for under $100"... Now, all the GPS units I've seen have been at least £200, but I'd buy one if it was £65...
Even though you seem to have some reasonably impressive technical specs for your machine, a console is nothing without a good lineup of games. How do you expect to be able to get enough developer support whne you've got competition from the likes of Nintendo, Sony, Sega and Microsoft? Microsoft alone will apparently be spending half a billion dollars on marketing XBox, and all the other companies have a record of making games consoles, and are well known by the public.
For a game devloper to be able to make their money back, they need to sell a large number of units of their game, which isn't going to happen unless you've got a large user base. I just can't see how you're going to out-market the giants...
... is surely the most exciting thing shown in these screenshots. From the name, it sound like a VNC-style system, although I suppose it's possible it's speeded up with some windows GUI commands. I'd be suprised if it's quite as flexible as X, but I don't think that's such a bad thing, given the poor performance of X.
As for the large folder icons, I imagine that they are the icons used in the 'thumbnails' view that explorer gives you - they're not just big folders for the sake of being big - it's just a shame that the screenshot doesn't show you a folder that has any files in it.
I work for a games company who sell their games exclusively online for about a third of the price of retail boxed games. You can download the whole game online, (we keep it down to less than 15Mb on the whole) and play the demo parts of it, and you can buy a license to unlock the rest of the game.
Now, when we first started the key that you bought would have a special ID number that we had generated from your system configuration, and the game would not run unless your configuration matched that key. If you changed your system you could log into our website and it would generate a new one for you - and by default you could do this 5 or 10 times or so before you'd have to write to us to get a new version. The motivation for this was to prevent people from simply handing around their keys to other people.
Obviusly, a Hard Drive ID systems is quite similar (and actually would have made our job easier...;)
However, we found that many of our customers found this process very confusing, and it caused a lot of problems, so we dropped it. The system now uses keys that will work on any computer, but it has the name of the person who bought in encoded into it, which is displayed on the main menu of the game. Obviously this system does mean that it is easier for people to rip us off by passing the keys around, but it is also much better for our customers. Having a few more illegal copies is better than losing customers through a difficult process.
I think with this Hard Drive ID system, you'll see a similar thing happen - not many companies will use it because they'll get so much hassle through their support lines.
cheers,
Tim
Re:How can we help the British protestors?
on
Kuro5hin Update
·
· Score: 1
Perhaps you'd like to leave us to our own devices? The UK is a *very* different country to the US - just because petrol prices are cheap over there doesn't mean they should be over here. We can do just fine working this out by ourselves without being interfered with by those who know nothing about our situation.
Slashdot Mirror
.com, .net, and .org are all international domains.
.us domain, it's just that few use it.
The US has a
Oh good! I'm glad they're doing well - I'd always felt a bit sorry for those guys.
cheers,
Tim
There is a certain tendancy for a cool new piece of software to come out, only to be suddenly followed by some open source projects who decide that there ought to be a free version.
A good example is VMWare - it was an innovative, useful new product, but very soon after it was released the FreeMWare (or whatever it is called now) project started up. Now don't get me wrong - I applaud the FreeMWare folks, but you can see how it doesn't bode well for the VMWare guys who did it first. They may be able to compete on features, but they sure can't compete on price. Without VMWare, FreeMWare probably wouldn't have been started, or at least, it would have appeared much later without as much publicity and developer support.
cheers,
Tim
I was talking about the Intellectual Property protection side of things. As far as I'm aware, neither vorbis or ogg have any copyright protection in them.
If you write an open source program for Windows, it can reach many more people than it can if you write it for Linux, especially if it's desktop software.
It's not that Linux users are second-class citizens - it's just that the authors have decided to write it for the most popular desktop OS, thereby spreading the wealth to the largest number of people.
Of course Microsoft is putting stuff in their operating systems to make them more attractive to content providers. Stop complaining about it - if some Linux people had gotten together and actually made a Linux alternative, they might have had a chance of setting a standard. However, it's probably a bit late now.
One of the reasons the Mac has such a well-loved interface (how many PC interface zealots do you know?) is that it's consistent from app to app. Basically, you buy a new Mac app, you launch it, and you figure it out on the first try.
Jebus! Is this still 1986? Uh, I think you'll find that that's pretty much the same on PCs. And to a certain extent, all GUI-based OSes.
In fact, there are some ways in which Windows is *more* consistent than the Mac, the prime example being the file browser windows. If you want to save or load something, the load windows you get are exatly the same as the file explorer windows you get in the rest of Windows. You can view them how you like (large icons, small icons, details, etc...) and do all the the things that you can do in a normal explorer window (rename things, delete things, create things, change the properties of things, etc.) I find it exceptionally useful. Mac file openers are primitive in comparison (although I admit, I've not used OS X yet...)
Oh, and yes, I suppose I'm a PC interface zealot. Most of us no longer have a tiny monchrome screen. We can afford menubars on a per-window basis now.
cheers,
Tim
From your comment, I can only assume you live in North America. If you live in Europe there are lots of good reasons to want to play Region 1 DVDs.
There are about 10 times as many Region 1 DVDs as Region 2 - which means that often the only way to see a less well known film on DVD is to get a Region 1 copy.
Also, (and this is especially true on older films) the Region 2 DVDs have less extras on them.
Price is also an issue. DVDs in the UK seem to cost about 1.5 times as much as they do in the US. Regional coding allows the film distributors to artifically inflate the price, because they know that people won't be able to play cheap imports.
However, I think many DVD players in this country are now sold multi-region - I recently bought one from Richer Sounds, and almost all the ones they sell are multi-region.
cheers,
Tim
Even with his 'Indrema Developer Network' I can't see enough people jumping on board to create games in time for enough people to buy his system.
;)
Modern games often take at a team of 15 people 2 years to produce. I can't the average open source project populated by people doing stuff in their spare time cutting the mustard, somehow. This isn't sendmail, where you can release an early version and keep adding incremental improvements for years. You need to get it done fairly quickly, and you need to get it all done and dusted before you start burning it onto a CD.
Anyway, if it does get released - I'll buy one. Then I'll install Windows on it, just so I have a chance of running some games on it
Touché!
Perhaps it's come along in leaps and bounds in the last six months, but the last time I tried it it did seem unresponsive, especially when I compared it to the Linux version running on the same machine, which I tried out when I had Linux running on there as well.
The big problem with it not having native widgets really shows up when you try and us an 'open' or 'save' dialog - Many people who are not regular users of windows do not realise that the open and save dialogs work in exactly the same way as explorer - you can do all the same things - i.e. create new directories, change file permissions, rename files etc... - To suddenly be lumped with a rather clunky standard Motif-style file chooser is a big step backwards, and I imagine would be quite a huge turn-off for those who have not used X applications before.
...There was a decent Win32 port.
I know that there is a Windows port, but unfortunately it doesn't use native Windows widgets, and as a result it's rather slow and clunky.
As a result, there's a huge chunk of people who would probably rather use it than a demo version of Pain Shop Pro, but it's just not worth it on Windows.
Ah well, I suppose I should look into doing a native widgets port of GTK...
They don't have any choice.
Yes they do!
they have more choice than someone in the same position who is too unnatractive to get into porn!
Yeah, I think the reasoning behind that is the stipulation in the Python license shall be governed and interpreted by the law in the state of California.
It may be resisting tyranny, but I still don't see at what point you shoot.
I hope to God it isn't.
One of the great things about Python was that you can embed it in your own code, without having to open the whole of your code. That's very useful.
It'd be okay if it was released under the it's normal (BSD-style) license and the GPL, though...
I think what it comes down to is this: Your first language should be as easy to use as possible, and as easy to get results with as possible. It's more important that someone gets encouraged and continues programming, rather than giving up than it is to ensure that they've learned good programming habits. That's why BASIC was such a good language to learn with. (I learnt on BBC Basic) Of course the nice thing about Python is that I doubt it would encourage many bad habits
And anyway, you can un-learn bad habits.
Once you are happy using Python, have a go at C/C++ - it is the de facto standard in computing languages, and you'll get to learn all about the wonderful world of memory management...
cheers,
Tim
>Hold on to your guns, people, because when people like flatpack here get into office, you're going to need them.
Huh?
So what are you going to do? Shoot anyone who makes a law you don't agree with?
XBox is *not* simply a PC in a little box. One of the biggest differences is the unified memory. There's a whole world of tricks you can do if you can muck about with textures on the fly, something which normally involves a big hit on PCs.
The other point to remember is that PC game creators cannot tailor their games to a single platform in the way you can with a console. This *does* make a huge difference. I write games for a PC, and I'm still trying to ensure that it'll run on a P233 with a ATI Rage Pro, as well as the 800Mhz machine with a GeForce 2. Sure, you can try and make it as scalable as you can, but you'll never be able to go for the same quality as you can on a fixed platform.
As for your labelling as DX8 as 'silly' - where have you been? DirectX has been getting steadily better for ages.
... anybody know where you can get them? I noticed the claim on the original page: "almost everyone on earth can buy [a GPS receiver] for for under $100"... Now, all the GPS units I've seen have been at least £200, but I'd buy one if it was £65...
Even though you seem to have some reasonably impressive technical specs for your machine, a console is nothing without a good lineup of games. How do you expect to be able to get enough developer support whne you've got competition from the likes of Nintendo, Sony, Sega and Microsoft? Microsoft alone will apparently be spending half a billion dollars on marketing XBox, and all the other companies have a record of making games consoles, and are well known by the public.
For a game devloper to be able to make their money back, they need to sell a large number of units of their game, which isn't going to happen unless you've got a large user base. I just can't see how you're going to out-market the giants...
cheers,
Tim
If this ever comes out, I'm gonna buy one and put Windows on it - not bad - a reasonable gaming computer for only $299...
... is surely the most exciting thing shown in these screenshots. From the name, it sound like a VNC-style system, although I suppose it's possible it's speeded up with some windows GUI commands. I'd be suprised if it's quite as flexible as X, but I don't think that's such a bad thing, given the poor performance of X.
As for the large folder icons, I imagine that they are the icons used in the 'thumbnails' view that explorer gives you - they're not just big folders for the sake of being big - it's just a shame that the screenshot doesn't show you a folder that has any files in it.
I work for a games company who sell their games exclusively online for about a third of the price of retail boxed games. You can download the whole game online, (we keep it down to less than 15Mb on the whole) and play the demo parts of it, and you can buy a license to unlock the rest of the game.
;)
Now, when we first started the key that you bought would have a special ID number that we had generated from your system configuration, and the game would not run unless your configuration matched that key. If you changed your system you could log into our website and it would generate a new one for you - and by default you could do this 5 or 10 times or so before you'd have to write to us to get a new version. The motivation for this was to prevent people from simply handing around their keys to other people.
Obviusly, a Hard Drive ID systems is quite similar (and actually would have made our job easier...
However, we found that many of our customers found this process very confusing, and it caused a lot of problems, so we dropped it. The system now uses keys that will work on any computer, but it has the name of the person who bought in encoded into it, which is displayed on the main menu of the game. Obviously this system does mean that it is easier for people to rip us off by passing the keys around, but it is also much better for our customers. Having a few more illegal copies is better than losing customers through a difficult process.
I think with this Hard Drive ID system, you'll see a similar thing happen - not many companies will use it because they'll get so much hassle through their support lines.
cheers,
Tim
Perhaps you'd like to leave us to our own devices? The UK is a *very* different country to the US - just because petrol prices are cheap over there doesn't mean they should be over here. We can do just fine working this out by ourselves without being interfered with by those who know nothing about our situation.
cheers,
Tim