AJAX? Really? Didn't we go through this once already with the iPhone?
Nope. Apples and oranges.
WebOS has much more in common with MacOS's locally-executed, compiled Dashboard widgets than the remotely-hosted, AJAX-based "web apps" of the iPhone's days prior to its SDK.
Actually, I think Pixar has produced more fun-for-kids-yet-interesting-for-adults films than kids-only fare.
Offhand, I'd name Cars, A Bug's Life, probably Finding Nemo... Those three are about all I can think of in their production history that doesn't cater to adults as well as to kids. And I'm sure someone could argue each of those.
This could actually be very good for developers versus the iPhone.
The plan is, from my understanding, that the WebOS SDK should allow devs to build capable but high-level apps in a Javascript-style environment (though I'm pretty sure these things are still compiled). Thus a lower barrier to entry than even the iPhone, at the expense of more intensive system-level access.
If Pre homebrew software doesn't require firmware modification like the iPhone does (does the Pre even need to be jailbroken?), that goes a long way toward legitimizing it to a mainstream audience, giving potential Pre developers two possible avenues for development.
For closet pirates, it is. But not for everyone else.
For a console with an active homebrew community, like the Nintendo DS, there's a huge volume of stuff coming out all the time -- a lot of it not very good, but some of it excellent. I have a flash cartridge, and pretty much all I use it for is painting with the Colors! app. That cart is probably in there even more than Advance Wars.
I wish palm would release the sdk already so more apps would come out and so I could start customizing/contributing
This is what's going to make or break this platform. The promised accessibility and potential integration of WebOS development is too good to pass up, but it's only going places if Palm gets it out there in time and in one piece, documents it well, and we actually start seeing some good, original apps.
Also: Apple has a one-year head start and tens of thousands of apps, but 90% of them are absolutely useless, cluttering up the store. If Palm can build a better meritocracy for the App Catalog and promote quality (and maybe even offer an option to filter any app with "fart" in the name), they'll have a good thing going.
I went to a site that had managed to moderately flummox my iPod Touch (the MacUpdate promotion bundle) and the performance was significantly better. On Mobile Safari, the expanding boxes (which are supposed to operate on mouseover) either wouldn't expand when touching them or would only respond after a few seconds, the background was shifted off-center, and zooming seemed to do something strange to the text.
On the Pre, the site rendered the backgrounds properly, and the boxes expanded after a much shorter wait (1/2-1 second). I was impressed.
I think I can say it's a notch better than the iPhone's web browser. I'm not quite sure what it is, but there's something about the way it's antialiasing the fonts and the way it's wrapping lines of text that makes non-mobile-targeted sites easier on the eyes on the Pre than on the iPhone, despite the iPhone even having a slightly larger display.
This was the one thing I was pretty sure the Pre wouldn't do as well as the iPhone, go figure.
No, it won't. Think about it for a moment and you'll realize why.
iTunes knows which version or revision of iPod is connected because Apple has prepared iTunes to recognize each one -- first-party software recognizes first-party hardware. The icons are all stored inside the iTunes binary, and it's only relying on an identifier from a list of possible iPods it knows of (thus the software update after each iPod release).
Most likely, the Pre is presenting itself to iTunes as a 4th gen iPod, something that iTunes has to support and for which there is a lot of reverse-engineering work already out in in the hackersphere.
We joke about SkyNet. And we don't have to worry about such things because even the most sophisticated drones and killbots in service require humans to pull the trigger.
The moment you give a computer the responsibility of deciding when to pull the trigger, that's a pretty fundamental change.
And yet, is it fundamentally a bad thing? We give less-than-stable humans that responsibility all the time.
I suppose it's the military equivalent to the civilian tech quandary of one day letting autonomous vehicles on the roads. Perhaps once the tech has advanced to the point where it can demonstrate not merely parity with but vast superiority to the discernment exhibited by humans, it will be a shift we're ready to make.
Mac OS 10.5 added system-wide searchable menus, although they can be a little flaky with some third-party software.
When they do work, it's absolutely great: You just hit the help menu, type straight into the field that drops down, and it shows results underneath. You mouse over the result, and then it drops down that menu/submenu with an arrow pointing to the menu item, which you can go select as it keeps the menu out until you click somewhere else.
It's a fantastic bit of UI design, and more than makes up for the silly eye candy they added in the dock.
After some discussion with friends, I have laid out this possible scenario:
1. Take-Two, already owning the Duke IP, acquires 3D Realms' project assets for cheap at 3DR's bankruptcy hearing.
2. In conjunction with Rockstar top management, T2 assembles a ninth (remember, there are already eight others) Rockstar studio partially out of former 3DR staff (creatives, not management, and certainly not Broussard). It is named Rockstar Texas.
3. Rockstar Texas goes on a strict 18-month development cycle to actually finish DNF. Former 3DR employees who do not adapt to the vastly new way of working are ruthlessly downsized.
4. Sometime in 2011, DNF is actually released. With the mystique gone along with 3D Realms, it's not quite the same, but it turns out to be a solid FPS with some great immersion and an enjoyably snarky sense of humor.
Should such a transfer ever be possible, how could you be so certain that you're the one experiencing the neural processes of the copy of you?
The continuity you experience could die and no one would ever know; the copy would have no reason to believe it was not the sole experiencer of its own continuity.
If the Linux world would learn from that, and push a few of the top companies to port their app to Linux, then we would see massive surge in it.
There is a proper time to push WINE compatibility with Ubuntu -- after a few major industry players, as you describe, put out an Ubuntu version of their software.
The key is to get a user's most important apps running natively, so that there's an incentive to switch. Then you add the compatibility layer for their other miscellaneous apps to take away the disincentive to switch.
Any publisher-proprietary reader over $99, probably even $49, will die. And the balance sheets showing scores of unsold, low-margin/high-cost devices won't be a pretty sight, either.
I don't think the Commander in Chief or anyone in his cabinet will touch these once over the next four years.
This is almost certainly handled by the Office of the White House Press Secretary, and I would imagine there are several staffers who will do the actual writing before passing it by the Secretary himself for approval.
The Press Secretary is probably the only cabinet member who will even have this on his mind.
For that matter, why is it running a general-purpose OS like Windows? Anything upon which life-critical systems run should be a hardened, embedded system focused on the equipment's features and nothing else.
Am I the only one who shudders at the idea of Bonzi Buddy on a cardiac monitoring system?
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was ostensibly passed to protect consumers from the problems inherent in a market free of competition.
Google seems to be in the position to have a monopoly in the book indexing market. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and others hold an oligopolistic position on a panoply financial instruments. In both cases, competition would be/would have been beneficial for the consumer, but only in the former do we see any motion to investigate.
2,500 out of ~300,000,000 Americans died in a tall building in the year 2001.
That year, you had a.000083% chance of dying in a tall building.
If we go by 10 year averages, of course, that goes down to a far lower percentage.
As tragic as the losses on that day were, as significant as all those people were to their friends and family, from an actuarial point of view the event was statistically insignificant.
Your chance of dying in a tall building rounds to zero. Your chance of being eaten by a shark in a tall building also rounds to zero.
You're probably right. While credibility may not be a huge obstacle to appearing on the likes of Fox News, his disbarment, continued absurdist hijinks, and now this have probably dipped him below the mark where he's likely to be picked up by "news programs" as a "school shooting expert" or other disturbing titles in the future.
He still has an audience, no doubt, but by this point it's probably nearing the contemporary size of the Uri Geller faithful.
It hasn't been worth it yet for me to pick up an old-and-still-not-cheap copy of XP for my Mac given that all I ever use my aging PC for is Team Fortress 2 (sorry CodeWeavers; CrossOver is still too unstable).
But for, say, $29.95 (with such a ridiculous limitation as 3 simultaneous apps, any more than that would be a pretty poor value) I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Actually, this brings to mind another possibile market: virtualization. If you're virtualizing Windows, chances are there's only one app you needed to run there anyway -- and this would make virtualization cheap enough for a lot more people to do it.
I still don't understand the strange implied correlation between rating and maturity, as if content ratings are somehow a measure of a game's (or movie's, or that matter) sophistication.
As a ceiling, yes: It makes sense that more mature content should have that space in which to work, so that if the creators feel it needs violence or sexuality, they're free to add it, but this assumption that if it's not M-rated it's not appropriate for adults just seems an oddly limited view of the medium.
Design is a lot like software development in this respect.
If something is poorly designed, and you aren't a designer, you may not notice it at first, just as if something is poorly coded and you're not a developer, you may not immediately sense just how unoptimized the software is.
But as you use it more, the deficiencies manifest themselves in your own frustration. Poor design makes things hard to follow and taxing to use, just as poor software development makes things sluggish and unstable. The work of a skilled designer will always be more enjoyable to use over time, just as the work of a skilled developer shows through in a solid and stable product.
I may be a font snob, but I'm also a stability snob, a performance snob, a usability snob, and a number of other snobberies.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope. Apples and oranges.
WebOS has much more in common with MacOS's locally-executed, compiled Dashboard widgets than the remotely-hosted, AJAX-based "web apps" of the iPhone's days prior to its SDK.
Actually, I think Pixar has produced more fun-for-kids-yet-interesting-for-adults films than kids-only fare.
Offhand, I'd name Cars, A Bug's Life, probably Finding Nemo... Those three are about all I can think of in their production history that doesn't cater to adults as well as to kids. And I'm sure someone could argue each of those.
This could actually be very good for developers versus the iPhone.
The plan is, from my understanding, that the WebOS SDK should allow devs to build capable but high-level apps in a Javascript-style environment (though I'm pretty sure these things are still compiled). Thus a lower barrier to entry than even the iPhone, at the expense of more intensive system-level access.
If Pre homebrew software doesn't require firmware modification like the iPhone does (does the Pre even need to be jailbroken?), that goes a long way toward legitimizing it to a mainstream audience, giving potential Pre developers two possible avenues for development.
For closet pirates, it is. But not for everyone else.
For a console with an active homebrew community, like the Nintendo DS, there's a huge volume of stuff coming out all the time -- a lot of it not very good, but some of it excellent. I have a flash cartridge, and pretty much all I use it for is painting with the Colors! app. That cart is probably in there even more than Advance Wars.
This is what's going to make or break this platform. The promised accessibility and potential integration of WebOS development is too good to pass up, but it's only going places if Palm gets it out there in time and in one piece, documents it well, and we actually start seeing some good, original apps.
Also: Apple has a one-year head start and tens of thousands of apps, but 90% of them are absolutely useless, cluttering up the store. If Palm can build a better meritocracy for the App Catalog and promote quality (and maybe even offer an option to filter any app with "fart" in the name), they'll have a good thing going.
I went to a site that had managed to moderately flummox my iPod Touch (the MacUpdate promotion bundle) and the performance was significantly better. On Mobile Safari, the expanding boxes (which are supposed to operate on mouseover) either wouldn't expand when touching them or would only respond after a few seconds, the background was shifted off-center, and zooming seemed to do something strange to the text.
On the Pre, the site rendered the backgrounds properly, and the boxes expanded after a much shorter wait (1/2-1 second). I was impressed.
I think I can say it's a notch better than the iPhone's web browser. I'm not quite sure what it is, but there's something about the way it's antialiasing the fonts and the way it's wrapping lines of text that makes non-mobile-targeted sites easier on the eyes on the Pre than on the iPhone, despite the iPhone even having a slightly larger display.
This was the one thing I was pretty sure the Pre wouldn't do as well as the iPhone, go figure.
I'm working on an inverse Godwin-esque law where the first person to make a car analogy WINS. Automatically.
No, it won't. Think about it for a moment and you'll realize why.
iTunes knows which version or revision of iPod is connected because Apple has prepared iTunes to recognize each one -- first-party software recognizes first-party hardware. The icons are all stored inside the iTunes binary, and it's only relying on an identifier from a list of possible iPods it knows of (thus the software update after each iPod release).
Most likely, the Pre is presenting itself to iTunes as a 4th gen iPod, something that iTunes has to support and for which there is a lot of reverse-engineering work already out in in the hackersphere.
We joke about SkyNet. And we don't have to worry about such things because even the most sophisticated drones and killbots in service require humans to pull the trigger.
The moment you give a computer the responsibility of deciding when to pull the trigger, that's a pretty fundamental change.
And yet, is it fundamentally a bad thing? We give less-than-stable humans that responsibility all the time.
I suppose it's the military equivalent to the civilian tech quandary of one day letting autonomous vehicles on the roads. Perhaps once the tech has advanced to the point where it can demonstrate not merely parity with but vast superiority to the discernment exhibited by humans, it will be a shift we're ready to make.
Mac OS 10.5 added system-wide searchable menus, although they can be a little flaky with some third-party software.
When they do work, it's absolutely great: You just hit the help menu, type straight into the field that drops down, and it shows results underneath. You mouse over the result, and then it drops down that menu/submenu with an arrow pointing to the menu item, which you can go select as it keeps the menu out until you click somewhere else.
It's a fantastic bit of UI design, and more than makes up for the silly eye candy they added in the dock.
After some discussion with friends, I have laid out this possible scenario:
1. Take-Two, already owning the Duke IP, acquires 3D Realms' project assets for cheap at 3DR's bankruptcy hearing.
2. In conjunction with Rockstar top management, T2 assembles a ninth (remember, there are already eight others) Rockstar studio partially out of former 3DR staff (creatives, not management, and certainly not Broussard). It is named Rockstar Texas.
3. Rockstar Texas goes on a strict 18-month development cycle to actually finish DNF. Former 3DR employees who do not adapt to the vastly new way of working are ruthlessly downsized.
4. Sometime in 2011, DNF is actually released. With the mystique gone along with 3D Realms, it's not quite the same, but it turns out to be a solid FPS with some great immersion and an enjoyably snarky sense of humor.
Oh, and...
5. Profit
Should such a transfer ever be possible, how could you be so certain that you're the one experiencing the neural processes of the copy of you?
The continuity you experience could die and no one would ever know; the copy would have no reason to believe it was not the sole experiencer of its own continuity.
There is a proper time to push WINE compatibility with Ubuntu -- after a few major industry players, as you describe, put out an Ubuntu version of their software.
The key is to get a user's most important apps running natively, so that there's an incentive to switch. Then you add the compatibility layer for their other miscellaneous apps to take away the disincentive to switch.
Better yet, a $300 reader for the NYT, a $250 reader for the local paper, a $450 reader for Condé Nast publications, a $200 reader put out by a consortium of alternative weeklies...
Any publisher-proprietary reader over $99, probably even $49, will die. And the balance sheets showing scores of unsold, low-margin/high-cost devices won't be a pretty sight, either.
Only in Hollywood.
I don't think the Commander in Chief or anyone in his cabinet will touch these once over the next four years.
This is almost certainly handled by the Office of the White House Press Secretary, and I would imagine there are several staffers who will do the actual writing before passing it by the Secretary himself for approval.
The Press Secretary is probably the only cabinet member who will even have this on his mind.
If I de-friend the White House on Facebook, will I get put on a watch list?
Certainly not a truck, or anything you just dump something on.
For that matter, why is it running a general-purpose OS like Windows? Anything upon which life-critical systems run should be a hardened, embedded system focused on the equipment's features and nothing else.
Am I the only one who shudders at the idea of Bonzi Buddy on a cardiac monitoring system?
Actually, they are not distant issues.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act was ostensibly passed to protect consumers from the problems inherent in a market free of competition.
Google seems to be in the position to have a monopoly in the book indexing market. Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and others hold an oligopolistic position on a panoply financial instruments. In both cases, competition would be/would have been beneficial for the consumer, but only in the former do we see any motion to investigate.
2,500 out of ~300,000,000 Americans died in a tall building in the year 2001.
That year, you had a .000083% chance of dying in a tall building.
If we go by 10 year averages, of course, that goes down to a far lower percentage.
As tragic as the losses on that day were, as significant as all those people were to their friends and family, from an actuarial point of view the event was statistically insignificant.
Your chance of dying in a tall building rounds to zero. Your chance of being eaten by a shark in a tall building also rounds to zero.
You're probably right. While credibility may not be a huge obstacle to appearing on the likes of Fox News, his disbarment, continued absurdist hijinks, and now this have probably dipped him below the mark where he's likely to be picked up by "news programs" as a "school shooting expert" or other disturbing titles in the future.
He still has an audience, no doubt, but by this point it's probably nearing the contemporary size of the Uri Geller faithful.
It hasn't been worth it yet for me to pick up an old-and-still-not-cheap copy of XP for my Mac given that all I ever use my aging PC for is Team Fortress 2 (sorry CodeWeavers; CrossOver is still too unstable).
But for, say, $29.95 (with such a ridiculous limitation as 3 simultaneous apps, any more than that would be a pretty poor value) I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Actually, this brings to mind another possibile market: virtualization. If you're virtualizing Windows, chances are there's only one app you needed to run there anyway -- and this would make virtualization cheap enough for a lot more people to do it.
I still don't understand the strange implied correlation between rating and maturity, as if content ratings are somehow a measure of a game's (or movie's, or that matter) sophistication.
As a ceiling, yes: It makes sense that more mature content should have that space in which to work, so that if the creators feel it needs violence or sexuality, they're free to add it, but this assumption that if it's not M-rated it's not appropriate for adults just seems an oddly limited view of the medium.
Design is a lot like software development in this respect.
If something is poorly designed, and you aren't a designer, you may not notice it at first, just as if something is poorly coded and you're not a developer, you may not immediately sense just how unoptimized the software is.
But as you use it more, the deficiencies manifest themselves in your own frustration. Poor design makes things hard to follow and taxing to use, just as poor software development makes things sluggish and unstable. The work of a skilled designer will always be more enjoyable to use over time, just as the work of a skilled developer shows through in a solid and stable product.
I may be a font snob, but I'm also a stability snob, a performance snob, a usability snob, and a number of other snobberies.