I think, in the end, zealotry comes out as a wash. Yeah, there are people so fanboyish that they'll spout garbage and generally be annoying. But it's easy to balance that out with people who feel exactly the reverse, and will attack the same product/company/idea with incredible zeal and stupidity. Now with operating systems, you've got both extremes for just about every system out there, so in the long run, it all evens out.
It really only becomes interesting when a product/company fails, then the zealots can keep it alive, which is why there's still a fair amount of discussion of things like BeOS, or OS/2.
But for the most part, zealots contribute nothing other than noise, most of which is just lapped up by other zealots, and they're ignored by the majority of the world, who happens to buy the majority of computers.
There will always be software that costs money. If nothing else, you'll have to pay for games. That makes this whole idea much more appealing to Sony. They can add a lot of functionality to their console without spending all that much, because there's all sorts of free software. But at the same time, revenue from games will continue, because it's not really feasible to produce large scale games without charging for them. Especially with the constantly rising costs of game development. How are you supposed to make money with them otherwise? Service contracts?
Microsoft could add all sorts of functionality to the xbox if they were so inclined because they've got lots of software to build off of. Sony would have a really hard time catching up, but free software can give them a good foundation to build off of.
I think Nintendo will manage to stick around, because no matter what the kids want these days or will in the future, there's lots of non-kids with disposable income.
I'm over my blood and gore phase, but I still like games. I'm guessing I'll be playing games for the rest of my life, and I'm interested in new and fun things. If Nintendo keeps producing good stuff, I'll keep buying it. And I think a good number of people will too.
They may feel dumb, but they'll never admit it. The fanboys are already too emotionally invested, the battlelines have already been drawn, even before E3 for a lot of people. It's weird.
I've never had much love for sony, so when I saw how crappy the PS2 looked compared to what Sony was shoveling with their hype machine, I decided I wasn't interested. Fortunately for them, a while later GTA showed up, and I changed my mind.
I am, however, a Nintendo fanboy, and will likely be buying a revolution as my first next-gen console, despite the little information I have on it. Nintendo tends to refrain from over-promising though so I'm not too worried.
While I don't doubt that Jobs would love to be running more of the media show, if this is all powered by his ego, isn't Apple the place for him to be? They've got the best brand recognition going, a large fanatical fanbase, as they're constantly recognized as being technological/innovative leaders in a field dominated by companies many times their size. If I were Jobs, I'd feel pretty good waking up in the morning knowing my company was making an OS that a company approximately 8 times my size(market cap) was struggling to match.
Making movies is great, but they don't change the world. How much Apple has changed the world is subject to debate, but it seems to be more important than producing a few films each year or merchandising truckloads of cartoon characters.
I agree with you, but am just amazed at how many people have not noticed. I guess they consider themselves Republicans more than Conservatives. It's kind of like a sports fan, where the team means more than the players.
I've still got a softspot for the Baltimore Orioles, even though I moved away from Maryland six years ago, and their roster is entirely different than the players I remember. I can hardly name anyone on the team now. But they're still "my team".
My mom will vote Republican regardless of who they put up as a candidate, regardless of their record, regardless of what they'll probably do. She's not a stupid person, she's got street smarts and an intuitive understanding of people that I'll never have. Yet she falls into this "home team" with politics so easily. I guess that's the reasoning, it's just easier. Cheer for your side. Regardless of who wins or what happens, you can always blame the other team for all the country's ills.
I'm confused as to what sony's plans for UMD are. Do they expect it to be used for anything outside of the PSP? If so, then why? What does it offer over normal DVD's? And what about blu-ray and all that?
I'm surprised how many movies I've seen out on UMD, since the potential market is so small. Of course, the fact that Sony also has its hands in the movie making business probably plays into that.
Yeah, I was talking about the Pentium M, because getting the laptops moving should be the biggest priority for Apple. They're already shipping hot powermacs. Watercooling and all. There's plenty of space in the case for all sorts of cooling magics.
And like others have said, it doesn't look like apple's going to be using P4's outside of their preview development boxes. The dual-core stuff should make things run a little cooler.
This has been discussed in jsut about every post about Apple and Intel so far, but I'll repeat it here.
Intel has more to offer in terms of lower power chips, important for Apple because their powerbook line is really stagnating. Secondly, Intel is far less likely to have any sort of production rate problems, because they're just plain a much bigger company.
But don't think that Apple won't consider AMD an option somewhere down the line.
Well, although it is, in some ways obvious, there's also some potential pitfalls, which I think is what scares them. Basically, if they legitimize internet sales of movies, they're giving up a strangle hold on the market. They've gotten that stranglehold through the economic realities of physical distribution and sales.
Basically, there's the status quo, and that has evolved to make it really easy for the established players to just coast along making healthy money, while making it pretty difficult for newcomers to break into the business and take marketshare.
While the internet and digital distribution has the potential to expand the market even further, as well as lower distribution costs, it also levels the playing field in a lot of ways. And that's what they're afraid of. There's some risk there. They'd have to actually compete, with the quality of their online stores, and the quality of their content. Compared to now where they just dump whatever they want in the theaters/stores, and we buy it, cause that's all there is.
Would you be eager to give up an easy $100 mil per year in order to gamble for maybe $150 mil a year? I just made those numbers up, but i think that's basically their line of thought.
There's a couple orders of magnitude difference between writing crappy software that makes my word processor crash twice a day verses cutting foolish corners in the manufacture of a vehicle full of gasoline and easily capable of killing people.
You should talk to Nintendo. They enjoy making games that aren't striving for photo-realism. I just finished Paper Mario for the gamecube. That game combines 2d and 3d in some very silly and purposeful ways. It has the same cartoony, bright art design that all mario games have had, just refined and cleaned up as technology has allowed. It's also a very fun game, so there's that too.
A lot of Nintendo's games are like that, but they aren't the only ones taking a pragmatic approach to visuals. A good example is Blizzard with World of Warcraft. Although the world they've created for that game is complex and detailed, they obviously took a purposeful step away from realism, and instead decided on an art style that worked with the game.
Trying to achieve full out realism in a video game is tough, because you're never going to actually do it. At the end of the day you're just displaying stuff on a flat screen. Besides, if I wanted realism, I'd go outside. I want my video games to take place in a world/universe that I couldn't go to in real life. So why keep trying so hard to make everything look like reality?
It's also important to realize that realistic graphics are not the only way to create immersion. It's more important to have a consistent art design throughout a game. It's not neccessarily the "realism" of a game that helps me get involved in it. I completely bought into my character in Knights of the Old Republic, despite the fact that in real life I've never flown around on a space ship, I've never played with a light saber, and I usually don't see aliens walking around. None of those futuristic sci-fi things broke the immersion for me, because it all fit in within the universe of the game.
Striving really hard for realistic graphics can actually make things tougher for a game, because the more something becomes like real life, the more we notice the differences. It took Pixar five or six movies before they started focusing on humans as main characters, because inaccurately animated people would look very strange to viewers. The kids in Toy Story look pretty weird to me. And when Pixar did The Incredibles, they exaggerated a lot of features of the people, to make them seem a bit more cartoonish in form and movement, even while texturing them and lighting them to look more realistic.
The whole point of this article is not that graphics don't matter, its just that the graphics are becoming less of a distinguishing feature between any two games, since any game with a good amount of effort put into it should look good. One reason we've seen such a big change in the quality of graphics over the past couple decades is because we were starting from such a simple, crappy beginning. There was nowhere to go but up. And then the big jump from 2D to 3D created a whole bunch of other new growth.
There's just not that much further to go, as long as we're playing games on flat screens.
Yup, the graphics really only matter the first time through. Maybe not even the whole way through. I'll ooh and ahh at nice shadows and lights and stuff, but the novelty will wear off quickly. Hopefully there will be a few visual surprises throughout the game, but the higher complexity textures on all the concrete corridor walls ceases to amaze me pretty quickly.
Graphics are good enough that visually, I can get immersed in the game and pretend I'm there. It could be improved upon probably with VR glasses or soemthing that provides me with some peripheral vision maybe, but other than that, it's not the imagery that's keeping me from losing myself in games anymore.
The physics and the AI are the next technical challenge in making games more believable. Of course the game design plays just an important role in this, but that's something that will continue to vary from game to game, no matter how good the technology gets.
I agree entirely. As long as they remain a computer vendor, instead of just an OS vendor, they're not totally in direct competition with MS, so MS will let them live, if only to avoid creating more monopoly/government troubles.
Although it could get interesting a few years down the line. Apple could make their own office software, I have no doubt they could make a quality office suite. And MS has been talking up the openness of their new XML document formats. It still remains to be seen how honest that talk is, we shall see.
We're getting way off topic now, but let me just say that if this X86 switch goes smoothly, and depending on how a few other things play out, Apple could find itself with some really interesting opportunities in the future.
First off, there's a difference between being right about something that you heard leaks about. Dvorak never came up with unique arguments for an Apple to Intel switch. All he gave were the same list of pros and cons that the Apple community has been arguing about for years. Congrats to him on hearing the rumors and the leaks before a lot of other people, but that doesn't make him a great visionary or insightful interpreter of the industry. His track record isn't very impressive in my opinion.
Second, Apple's switch to Intel really doesn't change all that much unless you're a current Apple developer. Apple's hardware is not going to get significantly cheaper, their OS is not going to run on non-apple machines. There's still going to be just as much proprietary-ness in both their hardware and software as ever. They've been making general strides towards open source with OSX, but I don't think that's going to function any differently now that they're on x86.
A mac will still be a mac, and a PC will still be a PC, they'll just happen to have the same processor inside. Like they have the same hard drives and ram and lots of other stuff now. If Apple was opening up OSX to any old dell or emachines box, then maybe there'd be significant migration from Linux. If Apple was entirely open sourcing the whole of OSX, then maybe there'd be significant migration. But not because they're changing processors in their otherwise the same computers.
Maybe they haven't gotten around to it yet. It's only been a few days since CNet made their report, and most of those days were the weekend. Maybe they already found out who leaked it and are taking the necessary precautions. Maybe it was an intentional leak to get more publicity for the event.
Don't accuse Apple of being hypocritical about this just yet.
Yeah, but the reason Doom 3 didn't go well was because they didn't have the great designers working on it. iD has some very talented programmers, hopefully well paid, but giving them more money wouldn't have made Doom 3 any better. Giving a big check to a really talented art director and letting him really make something cool with the engine would've.
The being said, I think it's accurate to look at Doom 3 more as a technology demo, intended to sell the engine to other developers. The creative team working on the game may have tried their best to make something fun and be really creative, but I don't think it was the overarching goal of the company.
Which is fine, if the company wants to sell technology, good for them. But maybe they shouldn't market themselves so much as a games developer then.
Yeah, reading some of the stuff Steve Jobs said about DRM when the music store was ramping up, he understands pretty well both the technical problems in getting working DRM (ie, someone's going to break it), as well as the social problems (ie, it can piss off your customers). It seems that the content providers are the ones so dead set on limiting everything, and Apple just negotiated the best compromise they could come up with at the time.
The point is, I don't think Steve Jobs would be too eager to go through something as difficult and risky as a processor architecture change just to gain the abilities that he doesn't seem to hold in very high regard. I guess the other side of this coin is, maybe he really really wants to distribute movies, and the studios won't compromise an inch. But if that's their attitude, I don't think the legal downloading of movies online has much of a future.
Still, if that were the case, I'd think Apple could roll out their own hardware DRM stuff in a similar timeframe as they could switch to x86, and avoid a bunch of the problems they'd have with a switch.
As an American, I agree. It's really fascinating too. The "American Dream" is all about working hard and making your own way, and creating opportunity and executing until you earn your fortune. There's no greater symbol of what America is supposed to be about than the "self made man".
But at the same time, so many americans are quick to complain about how they're being victimized, there are so many people eager to try get rich quick schemes, and there are so many people who don't want to take any responsibility.
I think this partially has to do with the fact that many of us have had life too easy. Having easy access to all the necessities of life, while at the same time having a good amount of freedom, and lots of easy entertainment...well, it's made a lot of our citizens into pansies.
But there's another cause, applicable to other people. And that's basically the fact that the American dream is a whole lot harder to accomplish now. It's not impossible, if you work hard, you can still do well. It just requires even more effort, and maybe at least a little bit of luck. But with our economy and industries as big as they are, with all the legal and red tape nonsense it takes to get anything done, plus the ridiculous costs of things like education and health care, getting started from nothing is quite a task. And it may be impossible for some people. And so they feel cheated.
Not every American is getting a fair shot at the american dream. Those who are given more than enough to succeed are often time over-babied sissies. It's a weird mix.
Second life is all about allowing providing a world in which people can easily create things. More specifically, three-dimensional things that can be experienced in a way somewhat similar to how we see the real world.
I'm guessing you haven't actually played it, because it's not moving around in a pre-determined environment, it's moving around in a pretty random environment, one shaped and changed by a whole bunch of different and uncoordinated people.
Games are like books/written words. There are people who are skilled and talented at making good stuff, and then the rest of the population who mostly makes crap. There are people in second life making incredible things with the tools that the game could provide. And I'll bet the majority of those people aren't partiularly talented writers, just because most people aren't. What's wrong with them having fun creating in a format that works for them?
I agree with you. I think Miyamoto picked a bad example with GTA. Going through all of the missions could certainly take a while, but it's a game where you don't have to do that. I probably only played through five or six missions, even though I put hours a day into that game for weeks. I never "finished" the game proper, but i still had a whole lot of fun with it after I gave up on the mission structure. I stopped playing with it because I got bored, not because I got frustrated and gave up. nothing wrong with that.
Most of them were actually sold to people who like to have an easy way to listen to music, but good job making up your own stereotype.
Apple making it easier to recycle ipods is not going to save the rainforests, and noone expects it to, but that doesn't make it a bad idea, or a worthless one.
Your cynicism does not make you look smarter than the any ipod owner, sorry.
Because supersecretive apple would never have allowed it to be publicly displayed if that were the case.
And besides, don't you think Apple could afford to hire a couple engineers to try and do that themselves, rather than just take Intel's word for it?
There's differences between PPC and x86 when you look at them really closely, but in terms of just shoving them into a box, most of those differences go away. You've got to worry about different heat outputs and power requirements, but none of that stuff is really secret.
I guess if Intel's mini box was running on some new prototype low power proc that Apple couldn't get access to it would make more sense, but then again, I doubt somethign like that would have any sort of good cost benefits, making it pretty useless for a mac mini.
Not just drawing pictures, but looking at pictures maybe? Don't forget that the human brain is very strongly geared towards the visual. The internet pre -the explosion of the web was a cool place, but the web is what let the internet explode, by allowing images and text to coexist easily. ASCII diagrams are quite often not the best way to convey information.
The command line certainly has its place. There are things in which it is faster and less restrictive, as you've said; but there are plenty of counter-examples for the GUI. I'm sure you could implement a spreadsheet of some sort in a CLI, but I'd hate to have to navigate through and edit random cells just with a keyboard. Or editing a document any more complicated than just simple text. GUI's are pretty much necessary if you're looking for WYSIWYG editing of almost any sort.
Your quote is interesting, and I see the point. But I would argue that the GUI is as much a language as the CLI. Neither of them are particularly equivalent to normal human speech, and they both need to be learned.
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I think, in the end, zealotry comes out as a wash. Yeah, there are people so fanboyish that they'll spout garbage and generally be annoying. But it's easy to balance that out with people who feel exactly the reverse, and will attack the same product/company/idea with incredible zeal and stupidity. Now with operating systems, you've got both extremes for just about every system out there, so in the long run, it all evens out.
It really only becomes interesting when a product/company fails, then the zealots can keep it alive, which is why there's still a fair amount of discussion of things like BeOS, or OS/2.
But for the most part, zealots contribute nothing other than noise, most of which is just lapped up by other zealots, and they're ignored by the majority of the world, who happens to buy the majority of computers.
There will always be software that costs money. If nothing else, you'll have to pay for games. That makes this whole idea much more appealing to Sony. They can add a lot of functionality to their console without spending all that much, because there's all sorts of free software. But at the same time, revenue from games will continue, because it's not really feasible to produce large scale games without charging for them. Especially with the constantly rising costs of game development. How are you supposed to make money with them otherwise? Service contracts?
Microsoft could add all sorts of functionality to the xbox if they were so inclined because they've got lots of software to build off of. Sony would have a really hard time catching up, but free software can give them a good foundation to build off of.
I think Nintendo will manage to stick around, because no matter what the kids want these days or will in the future, there's lots of non-kids with disposable income.
I'm over my blood and gore phase, but I still like games. I'm guessing I'll be playing games for the rest of my life, and I'm interested in new and fun things. If Nintendo keeps producing good stuff, I'll keep buying it. And I think a good number of people will too.
They may feel dumb, but they'll never admit it. The fanboys are already too emotionally invested, the battlelines have already been drawn, even before E3 for a lot of people. It's weird.
I've never had much love for sony, so when I saw how crappy the PS2 looked compared to what Sony was shoveling with their hype machine, I decided I wasn't interested. Fortunately for them, a while later GTA showed up, and I changed my mind.
I am, however, a Nintendo fanboy, and will likely be buying a revolution as my first next-gen console, despite the little information I have on it. Nintendo tends to refrain from over-promising though so I'm not too worried.
While I don't doubt that Jobs would love to be running more of the media show, if this is all powered by his ego, isn't Apple the place for him to be? They've got the best brand recognition going, a large fanatical fanbase, as they're constantly recognized as being technological/innovative leaders in a field dominated by companies many times their size. If I were Jobs, I'd feel pretty good waking up in the morning knowing my company was making an OS that a company approximately 8 times my size(market cap) was struggling to match.
Making movies is great, but they don't change the world. How much Apple has changed the world is subject to debate, but it seems to be more important than producing a few films each year or merchandising truckloads of cartoon characters.
I agree with you, but am just amazed at how many people have not noticed. I guess they consider themselves Republicans more than Conservatives. It's kind of like a sports fan, where the team means more than the players.
I've still got a softspot for the Baltimore Orioles, even though I moved away from Maryland six years ago, and their roster is entirely different than the players I remember. I can hardly name anyone on the team now. But they're still "my team".
My mom will vote Republican regardless of who they put up as a candidate, regardless of their record, regardless of what they'll probably do. She's not a stupid person, she's got street smarts and an intuitive understanding of people that I'll never have. Yet she falls into this "home team" with politics so easily. I guess that's the reasoning, it's just easier. Cheer for your side. Regardless of who wins or what happens, you can always blame the other team for all the country's ills.
I'm confused as to what sony's plans for UMD are. Do they expect it to be used for anything outside of the PSP? If so, then why? What does it offer over normal DVD's? And what about blu-ray and all that?
I'm surprised how many movies I've seen out on UMD, since the potential market is so small. Of course, the fact that Sony also has its hands in the movie making business probably plays into that.
Yeah, I was talking about the Pentium M, because getting the laptops moving should be the biggest priority for Apple. They're already shipping hot powermacs. Watercooling and all. There's plenty of space in the case for all sorts of cooling magics.
And like others have said, it doesn't look like apple's going to be using P4's outside of their preview development boxes. The dual-core stuff should make things run a little cooler.
This has been discussed in jsut about every post about Apple and Intel so far, but I'll repeat it here.
Intel has more to offer in terms of lower power chips, important for Apple because their powerbook line is really stagnating. Secondly, Intel is far less likely to have any sort of production rate problems, because they're just plain a much bigger company.
But don't think that Apple won't consider AMD an option somewhere down the line.
Well, although it is, in some ways obvious, there's also some potential pitfalls, which I think is what scares them. Basically, if they legitimize internet sales of movies, they're giving up a strangle hold on the market. They've gotten that stranglehold through the economic realities of physical distribution and sales.
Basically, there's the status quo, and that has evolved to make it really easy for the established players to just coast along making healthy money, while making it pretty difficult for newcomers to break into the business and take marketshare.
While the internet and digital distribution has the potential to expand the market even further, as well as lower distribution costs, it also levels the playing field in a lot of ways. And that's what they're afraid of. There's some risk there. They'd have to actually compete, with the quality of their online stores, and the quality of their content. Compared to now where they just dump whatever they want in the theaters/stores, and we buy it, cause that's all there is.
Would you be eager to give up an easy $100 mil per year in order to gamble for maybe $150 mil a year? I just made those numbers up, but i think that's basically their line of thought.
Not that it isn't lame and sucky for consumers.
There's a couple orders of magnitude difference between writing crappy software that makes my word processor crash twice a day verses cutting foolish corners in the manufacture of a vehicle full of gasoline and easily capable of killing people.
You should talk to Nintendo. They enjoy making games that aren't striving for photo-realism. I just finished Paper Mario for the gamecube. That game combines 2d and 3d in some very silly and purposeful ways. It has the same cartoony, bright art design that all mario games have had, just refined and cleaned up as technology has allowed. It's also a very fun game, so there's that too.
A lot of Nintendo's games are like that, but they aren't the only ones taking a pragmatic approach to visuals. A good example is Blizzard with World of Warcraft. Although the world they've created for that game is complex and detailed, they obviously took a purposeful step away from realism, and instead decided on an art style that worked with the game.
Trying to achieve full out realism in a video game is tough, because you're never going to actually do it. At the end of the day you're just displaying stuff on a flat screen. Besides, if I wanted realism, I'd go outside. I want my video games to take place in a world/universe that I couldn't go to in real life. So why keep trying so hard to make everything look like reality?
It's also important to realize that realistic graphics are not the only way to create immersion. It's more important to have a consistent art design throughout a game. It's not neccessarily the "realism" of a game that helps me get involved in it. I completely bought into my character in Knights of the Old Republic, despite the fact that in real life I've never flown around on a space ship, I've never played with a light saber, and I usually don't see aliens walking around. None of those futuristic sci-fi things broke the immersion for me, because it all fit in within the universe of the game.
Striving really hard for realistic graphics can actually make things tougher for a game, because the more something becomes like real life, the more we notice the differences. It took Pixar five or six movies before they started focusing on humans as main characters, because inaccurately animated people would look very strange to viewers. The kids in Toy Story look pretty weird to me. And when Pixar did The Incredibles, they exaggerated a lot of features of the people, to make them seem a bit more cartoonish in form and movement, even while texturing them and lighting them to look more realistic.
The whole point of this article is not that graphics don't matter, its just that the graphics are becoming less of a distinguishing feature between any two games, since any game with a good amount of effort put into it should look good. One reason we've seen such a big change in the quality of graphics over the past couple decades is because we were starting from such a simple, crappy beginning. There was nowhere to go but up. And then the big jump from 2D to 3D created a whole bunch of other new growth.
There's just not that much further to go, as long as we're playing games on flat screens.
Yup, the graphics really only matter the first time through. Maybe not even the whole way through. I'll ooh and ahh at nice shadows and lights and stuff, but the novelty will wear off quickly. Hopefully there will be a few visual surprises throughout the game, but the higher complexity textures on all the concrete corridor walls ceases to amaze me pretty quickly.
Graphics are good enough that visually, I can get immersed in the game and pretend I'm there. It could be improved upon probably with VR glasses or soemthing that provides me with some peripheral vision maybe, but other than that, it's not the imagery that's keeping me from losing myself in games anymore.
The physics and the AI are the next technical challenge in making games more believable. Of course the game design plays just an important role in this, but that's something that will continue to vary from game to game, no matter how good the technology gets.
I agree entirely. As long as they remain a computer vendor, instead of just an OS vendor, they're not totally in direct competition with MS, so MS will let them live, if only to avoid creating more monopoly/government troubles.
Although it could get interesting a few years down the line. Apple could make their own office software, I have no doubt they could make a quality office suite. And MS has been talking up the openness of their new XML document formats. It still remains to be seen how honest that talk is, we shall see.
We're getting way off topic now, but let me just say that if this X86 switch goes smoothly, and depending on how a few other things play out, Apple could find itself with some really interesting opportunities in the future.
First off, there's a difference between being right about something that you heard leaks about. Dvorak never came up with unique arguments for an Apple to Intel switch. All he gave were the same list of pros and cons that the Apple community has been arguing about for years. Congrats to him on hearing the rumors and the leaks before a lot of other people, but that doesn't make him a great visionary or insightful interpreter of the industry. His track record isn't very impressive in my opinion.
Second, Apple's switch to Intel really doesn't change all that much unless you're a current Apple developer. Apple's hardware is not going to get significantly cheaper, their OS is not going to run on non-apple machines. There's still going to be just as much proprietary-ness in both their hardware and software as ever. They've been making general strides towards open source with OSX, but I don't think that's going to function any differently now that they're on x86.
A mac will still be a mac, and a PC will still be a PC, they'll just happen to have the same processor inside. Like they have the same hard drives and ram and lots of other stuff now. If Apple was opening up OSX to any old dell or emachines box, then maybe there'd be significant migration from Linux. If Apple was entirely open sourcing the whole of OSX, then maybe there'd be significant migration. But not because they're changing processors in their otherwise the same computers.
Maybe they haven't gotten around to it yet. It's only been a few days since CNet made their report, and most of those days were the weekend. Maybe they already found out who leaked it and are taking the necessary precautions. Maybe it was an intentional leak to get more publicity for the event.
Don't accuse Apple of being hypocritical about this just yet.
Yeah, but the reason Doom 3 didn't go well was because they didn't have the great designers working on it. iD has some very talented programmers, hopefully well paid, but giving them more money wouldn't have made Doom 3 any better. Giving a big check to a really talented art director and letting him really make something cool with the engine would've.
The being said, I think it's accurate to look at Doom 3 more as a technology demo, intended to sell the engine to other developers. The creative team working on the game may have tried their best to make something fun and be really creative, but I don't think it was the overarching goal of the company.
Which is fine, if the company wants to sell technology, good for them. But maybe they shouldn't market themselves so much as a games developer then.
Yeah, reading some of the stuff Steve Jobs said about DRM when the music store was ramping up, he understands pretty well both the technical problems in getting working DRM (ie, someone's going to break it), as well as the social problems (ie, it can piss off your customers). It seems that the content providers are the ones so dead set on limiting everything, and Apple just negotiated the best compromise they could come up with at the time.
The point is, I don't think Steve Jobs would be too eager to go through something as difficult and risky as a processor architecture change just to gain the abilities that he doesn't seem to hold in very high regard. I guess the other side of this coin is, maybe he really really wants to distribute movies, and the studios won't compromise an inch. But if that's their attitude, I don't think the legal downloading of movies online has much of a future.
Still, if that were the case, I'd think Apple could roll out their own hardware DRM stuff in a similar timeframe as they could switch to x86, and avoid a bunch of the problems they'd have with a switch.
As an American, I agree. It's really fascinating too. The "American Dream" is all about working hard and making your own way, and creating opportunity and executing until you earn your fortune. There's no greater symbol of what America is supposed to be about than the "self made man".
But at the same time, so many americans are quick to complain about how they're being victimized, there are so many people eager to try get rich quick schemes, and there are so many people who don't want to take any responsibility.
I think this partially has to do with the fact that many of us have had life too easy. Having easy access to all the necessities of life, while at the same time having a good amount of freedom, and lots of easy entertainment...well, it's made a lot of our citizens into pansies.
But there's another cause, applicable to other people. And that's basically the fact that the American dream is a whole lot harder to accomplish now. It's not impossible, if you work hard, you can still do well. It just requires even more effort, and maybe at least a little bit of luck. But with our economy and industries as big as they are, with all the legal and red tape nonsense it takes to get anything done, plus the ridiculous costs of things like education and health care, getting started from nothing is quite a task. And it may be impossible for some people. And so they feel cheated.
Not every American is getting a fair shot at the american dream. Those who are given more than enough to succeed are often time over-babied sissies. It's a weird mix.
Second life is all about allowing providing a world in which people can easily create things. More specifically, three-dimensional things that can be experienced in a way somewhat similar to how we see the real world.
I'm guessing you haven't actually played it, because it's not moving around in a pre-determined environment, it's moving around in a pretty random environment, one shaped and changed by a whole bunch of different and uncoordinated people.
Games are like books/written words. There are people who are skilled and talented at making good stuff, and then the rest of the population who mostly makes crap. There are people in second life making incredible things with the tools that the game could provide. And I'll bet the majority of those people aren't partiularly talented writers, just because most people aren't. What's wrong with them having fun creating in a format that works for them?
I agree with you. I think Miyamoto picked a bad example with GTA. Going through all of the missions could certainly take a while, but it's a game where you don't have to do that. I probably only played through five or six missions, even though I put hours a day into that game for weeks. I never "finished" the game proper, but i still had a whole lot of fun with it after I gave up on the mission structure. I stopped playing with it because I got bored, not because I got frustrated and gave up. nothing wrong with that.
Most of them were actually sold to people who like to have an easy way to listen to music, but good job making up your own stereotype.
Apple making it easier to recycle ipods is not going to save the rainforests, and noone expects it to, but that doesn't make it a bad idea, or a worthless one.
Your cynicism does not make you look smarter than the any ipod owner, sorry.
Because supersecretive apple would never have allowed it to be publicly displayed if that were the case.
And besides, don't you think Apple could afford to hire a couple engineers to try and do that themselves, rather than just take Intel's word for it?
There's differences between PPC and x86 when you look at them really closely, but in terms of just shoving them into a box, most of those differences go away. You've got to worry about different heat outputs and power requirements, but none of that stuff is really secret.
I guess if Intel's mini box was running on some new prototype low power proc that Apple couldn't get access to it would make more sense, but then again, I doubt somethign like that would have any sort of good cost benefits, making it pretty useless for a mac mini.
Not just drawing pictures, but looking at pictures maybe? Don't forget that the human brain is very strongly geared towards the visual. The internet pre -the explosion of the web was a cool place, but the web is what let the internet explode, by allowing images and text to coexist easily. ASCII diagrams are quite often not the best way to convey information.
The command line certainly has its place. There are things in which it is faster and less restrictive, as you've said; but there are plenty of counter-examples for the GUI. I'm sure you could implement a spreadsheet of some sort in a CLI, but I'd hate to have to navigate through and edit random cells just with a keyboard. Or editing a document any more complicated than just simple text. GUI's are pretty much necessary if you're looking for WYSIWYG editing of almost any sort.
Your quote is interesting, and I see the point. But I would argue that the GUI is as much a language as the CLI. Neither of them are particularly equivalent to normal human speech, and they both need to be learned.