You have to consider that games for a certain platform would target that platform. If Apple doesn't have GF 8800 GTX as baseline graphics, Mac games wouldn't be developed with that in mind. Good gameplay != High resolution graphics.
With your line of thinking, the XBox 360, PS3 and Wii aren't suitable for games either, since they don't have graphics that match the latest PC offerings. The Wii wouldn't even pass as a casual gaming platform, since it has such a massive lack of graphics power even in comparison to the XB360, PS3 and Apple offerings.
I'd rather think that the lack of Mac games are due to the really big ration between the number of Macs and PCs. Also, the demographics of Mac users tend to be towards the kind of people who don't spend much of their time gaming anyway. If a market got a relatively small user-base, and a good portion of them wouldn't want to buy your game either way, you'd probably go looking for another market. For instance, the PC or Console market.
I think it's obvious. They use the spin of the harddrive, since it's spinning most of the time anyway, to run a compressor that compresses the data (It's a well known fact that data has properties very similar to a gas) so that more of it can fit into the memory at once, giving instantly improved performance. For added performance, you can also have the data-bus go through a cooler.
It's interesting that Intel themselves calls it an "entirely new system innovation for Windows Vista PCs..." and says that it "Works on Windows Vista only." The reason why it only works in Vista is that, right now, there are no other OS which support it. Unless they have some funky hardware in there that actively monitors which OS is running and disables the Turbo Memory hardware if it doesn't recognize it as Vista, any OS should be able to support it. The specifications might be closed though. (Haven't checked) Maybe Intel won't allow anyone but Microsoft to read the specs, forcing all other to reverse-engineer it if they want to support it? =/
Regarding dual-boot, the Turbo Memory might not be designed in a way that let several OS use it concurrently. Haven't checked into this either. If it isn't, you'll simply have to choose to either only run one OS with Turbo Memory support on your computer or disable Turbo Memory on all but one of the systems you've got installed. It would be like in the bad old days, when hibernation was controlled by bios-firmware and written to a specific partition. If you hibernated one OS, you couldn't boot into another without first reloading the hibernated system and then doing a reboot. And if you did manage to boot into another OS and then hibernated that one, the first one would be overwritten.
Bars are impossible for me, it's smile-and-nod territory because I'm shut out of any conversation. I've applied the simple "solution" of sending a big FU! to bars and clubs where conversation is impossible due to loud music. This means that 99% of all places are out of the question, but since they're idiots, the don't deserve my patronage. What the hell is the purpose of a bar where you can't have a conversation anyway?
But, when all the media in your country routinely use the word democracy in a way that contradicts the rule you're stating there, well, it's your rule that's mistaken, not the people who use the word in violation of it. This is just Linguistics 101. That might be true for the meaning of the word itself. But "Democracy" is a simply the word that is used to describe the concept of democracy. If you let your media or government propaganda change the meaning of the word "Democracy", you'd have to come up with a new word for that concept, since the concept itself wouldn't have changed. Otherwise, it will be rather confusing when trying to compare what you call a democracy with what the rest of the world calls a democracy.
It would end up like the word "Football". A US-English speaking person and a International-English speaking person uses the same word for two different concepts. Since it doesn't have the same meaning in the US as in the rest of the world, they had to come up with the word "Soccer" to describe the international definition of "Football" and we had to come up with "American football" to describe their definition of "Football".
Windows Mobile is not a platform based on new ideas. On the other hand, new ideas are not always a good design. And even if it is a good design, changes from a "standard" conservative UI can have a negative impact when put in front of people who have been using the old UI-design for a long time. For a recent example, take a look at Office 2007. A good step forward for word-processing UI-design but getting a lot of negative comments because it's too different from all other word-processors, making it unintuitive and hard to navigate if you're used to those other word-processors.
If you're used to using other phones, the Iphone might not be your cup of tea.
You have a touch screen for God's sake, why in the world are you still dealing with the "binary choice" UI of old phones? Some things are simply stupid to put on a touch screen. Examples of stuff that I'd want to have hardware buttons for on this kind of device: Volume up/down Next/previous Play/stop Answer/hang up Touch screen input on/off!
Why? Because I want to be able to execute those functions while leaving the device itself in my pocket or when using another application running while listening to music. Imagine having to take it out just to be able to change the volume or song, or to answer a call with the handsfree. I also have a tendency to fiddle with my phone while having it in my hands. Flipping it over, etc. I don't want the touch screen to start register button presses just because I happen to be touching the screen.
If Apple has chosen to have no hardware buttons on their phone, they've made a great sacrifice of usability for what can only be called a design gimmick.
Wait, wait, do you mean "public funds" or do you mean "$10 dollars a pop"? You'd have the government pay $10 million each for a cure and sell it for $10 each? Yeah, that's a nice sustainable model. Let's give everyone all the health care they want, and while we're at it, $10 Ferraris all around! What if the production cost is, say, $10 a pop, but if a private company owned the patent they could charge $10000 a pop since they have no competitor?
So if I'm not satisfied with what Apple chooses for me, I shouldn't be allowed to develop something that does? If you're not interested in non Apple-applications, you wouldn't download it anyway, right? Freedom of choice is good, even if it lets you make choices others wouldn't.
OS X doesn't come with applications that do more than a very small subset of the functions I want. When I use OS X, most applications are 3:rd party. So, no, I do not think I'd trust Apple to preload the Iphone with the applications I would want it to have.
Does it have bluetooth? (Haven't been keeping up to date with what will be in the shipping version) If it does, you can get a BT-GPS-receiver. And if it has standard J2ME-support, you could use this until someone made a Iphone-native gps-app.
Why would applications on an Apple-phone accessing the internet via tcp-ip sockets be more harmful than all the existing phones that enable just that? On my sony-ericsson W810 I've installed things like a webbrowser, a Google-earth-like app, a ssh/telnet-client, a gps-map software, a ICQ/MSN/etc-IM app, all of which access the internet via tcp-ip, none of which has ever brought down the mobile network.
I can see how they'd be nervous about letting 3:rd party software talk directly to the mobile network, but tcp-ip access for 3:rd party software is already common stuff in mainstream, middle-end mobiles via J2ME MIDP 2.0.
The biggest problem with mobile-phones today is that everything is proprietary. Damn it! Use a standard headphone-port, a standard usb-port and give me some decent documentation and I'd be a great device. But noooo. Want to connect headphones? Then use our worthless adapter. Want to connect to the computer? Then use our worthless proprietary cable. Want to change the media-player application? You can't *argh* Want to build a [insert purpose]-device to interface with our phone? Then go back-engineer the interface, cause we won't tell you how it works!
Current mobile-tech companies suck, along with their hardware. I do hope Apple will use standard ports, have an open software architecture and open control-protocols, but looking at their history, it seems unlikely that they'll manage to not suck like the rest.
Besides, when running, my feet sweat, so water will end up inside the shoe even if it isn't wet outside. I thought the thing with Gore-Tex was that "it helps keep the wearer protected from the wind and rain, while nonetheless allowing sweat to evaporate and escape." [According to Wikipedia]
I know in my case, I won't buy any console until I see which one has a library of RPGs. I could care less about shooters, sports or racing games. "Me too"(tm)
Seriously, I haven't seen one good title on either XB360 or PS3 yet. Actually, for the entire 2006/2007, this goes for all other consoles too. One problem might be that, after playing World of Warcraft for half a year, I can no longer stand any game that has a "Do task x, get object y. Kill z, get p experience. Get n*p experience, gain 1 level" style of gaming. This includes almost all mediocre RPGs or MMRPGs, and also most of the ones I used to like but no longer can stand playing. =(
So Microsoft claim that their products are the actual CD's or DVD's that contain their software, not the software itself, which definitely is produced in the US? =/
Well, it does comply nicely with their "You got to have the exactly correct version of the physical media to install"-license keys.
In a movie-theater, you'd probably not go for a 1280 dots/inch resolution. That's only needed if you're going to watch the screen at a 1 inch distance.
Perhaps IBMs are not as well built as they once were? You got to keep in mind that the R-series are cheap budget machines while the T-series are expensive professional ones.
(I hear Apple makes very well-engineered laptops as well. I wish I had one so I could comment:-) I owned a IBM T20 and a Apple Powerbook Ti-G4 at the same time. The IBM hardware kicked Apple-hardware ass in *all* aspects. Quality, Looks, Ergonomics, Performance, you name it.
t doesn't solve the menu bar problem though. Whilst annoying at times, I've recently seen a widescreen windows notebook with adobe reader within a browser. My word! There was hardly any space for the text left due to the sheer number of toolbars present. But having the "Menu bar, Window bar, Browser navigation, Adobe reader navigation" order of Mac would take up as much space as the "Window bar, Menu bar, Browser navigation, Adobe reader navigation" order of Windows.
"40% more IPC" isn't really any more informative than "40% more frequency". This depends. If they say "A has 40% more performance @ 2GHz than B @ 2Ghz", comparing their relative performance is just a matter of math. A at 2GHz will have the same performance as B at 2.8GHz. Saying "A will have 40% higher Hz than B" and not mentioning the performance per Hz (á la the 90's) makes it impossible to make any performance estimates.
It also says a little about the performance-gains one can expect over time. A certain chip-die will not increase it's performance/Hz ratio during it's lifespan, but it will increase in Hz.
If product A(amd) and B(intel) both gain the same percentage of clock frequency rise during a certain time-frame, and neither introduces a new die in that time, the one with the steepest performance/Hz-curve will gain the most performance. The same one will also gain the most from overclocking.
If you don't use Aero and instead switch to Windows Classic Appearance, Vista works great on a wide variety of machines. Unless you have one of those cards that have no vista-driver. If I want to run Vista on my laptop, I have to run the generic vga-driver, and that is slow enough that the system becomes practically unusable.
Other than that, Vista runs just fine on my 4 year old laptop.
Wouldn't that be the Playstation 4, Xbox 720 and Nintendo Whoop? (or whatever the next generation consoles will be called) PS3, XB360 and Wii are now current generation consoles, with PS2, XB and GC being last generation.
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That's why one should only buy mobile-devices that support SyncML.
You have to consider that games for a certain platform would target that platform.
If Apple doesn't have GF 8800 GTX as baseline graphics, Mac games wouldn't be developed with that in mind.
Good gameplay != High resolution graphics.
With your line of thinking, the XBox 360, PS3 and Wii aren't suitable for games either, since they don't have graphics that match the latest PC offerings.
The Wii wouldn't even pass as a casual gaming platform, since it has such a massive lack of graphics power even in comparison to the XB360, PS3 and Apple offerings.
I'd rather think that the lack of Mac games are due to the really big ration between the number of Macs and PCs.
Also, the demographics of Mac users tend to be towards the kind of people who don't spend much of their time gaming anyway.
If a market got a relatively small user-base, and a good portion of them wouldn't want to buy your game either way, you'd probably go looking for another market. For instance, the PC or Console market.
I think it's obvious.
They use the spin of the harddrive, since it's spinning most of the time anyway, to run a compressor that compresses the data (It's a well known fact that data has properties very similar to a gas) so that more of it can fit into the memory at once, giving instantly improved performance.
For added performance, you can also have the data-bus go through a cooler.
Unless they have some funky hardware in there that actively monitors which OS is running and disables the Turbo Memory hardware if it doesn't recognize it as Vista, any OS should be able to support it.
The specifications might be closed though. (Haven't checked) Maybe Intel won't allow anyone but Microsoft to read the specs, forcing all other to reverse-engineer it if they want to support it? =/
Regarding dual-boot, the Turbo Memory might not be designed in a way that let several OS use it concurrently. Haven't checked into this either.
If it isn't, you'll simply have to choose to either only run one OS with Turbo Memory support on your computer or disable Turbo Memory on all but one of the systems you've got installed.
It would be like in the bad old days, when hibernation was controlled by bios-firmware and written to a specific partition.
If you hibernated one OS, you couldn't boot into another without first reloading the hibernated system and then doing a reboot.
And if you did manage to boot into another OS and then hibernated that one, the first one would be overwritten.
This means that 99% of all places are out of the question, but since they're idiots, the don't deserve my patronage.
What the hell is the purpose of a bar where you can't have a conversation anyway?
Maybe a terrorist has hidden a lithium-ion battery in the phone.
They're explosive you know. ^_^
Otherwise, it will be rather confusing when trying to compare what you call a democracy with what the rest of the world calls a democracy.
It would end up like the word "Football".
A US-English speaking person and a International-English speaking person uses the same word for two different concepts.
Since it doesn't have the same meaning in the US as in the rest of the world, they had to come up with the word "Soccer" to describe the international definition of "Football" and we had to come up with "American football" to describe their definition of "Football".
And even if it is a good design, changes from a "standard" conservative UI can have a negative impact when put in front of people who have been using the old UI-design for a long time.
For a recent example, take a look at Office 2007.
A good step forward for word-processing UI-design but getting a lot of negative comments because it's too different from all other word-processors, making it unintuitive and hard to navigate if you're used to those other word-processors.
If you're used to using other phones, the Iphone might not be your cup of tea.
Examples of stuff that I'd want to have hardware buttons for on this kind of device:
Volume up/down
Next/previous
Play/stop
Answer/hang up
Touch screen input on/off!
Why?
Because I want to be able to execute those functions while leaving the device itself in my pocket or when using another application running while listening to music.
Imagine having to take it out just to be able to change the volume or song, or to answer a call with the handsfree.
I also have a tendency to fiddle with my phone while having it in my hands. Flipping it over, etc. I don't want the touch screen to start register button presses just because I happen to be touching the screen.
If Apple has chosen to have no hardware buttons on their phone, they've made a great sacrifice of usability for what can only be called a design gimmick.
So if I'm not satisfied with what Apple chooses for me, I shouldn't be allowed to develop something that does?
If you're not interested in non Apple-applications, you wouldn't download it anyway, right?
Freedom of choice is good, even if it lets you make choices others wouldn't.
OS X doesn't come with applications that do more than a very small subset of the functions I want.
When I use OS X, most applications are 3:rd party.
So, no, I do not think I'd trust Apple to preload the Iphone with the applications I would want it to have.
Does it have bluetooth? (Haven't been keeping up to date with what will be in the shipping version)
If it does, you can get a BT-GPS-receiver.
And if it has standard J2ME-support, you could use this until someone made a Iphone-native gps-app.
Why would applications on an Apple-phone accessing the internet via tcp-ip sockets be more harmful than all the existing phones that enable just that?
On my sony-ericsson W810 I've installed things like a webbrowser, a Google-earth-like app, a ssh/telnet-client, a gps-map software, a ICQ/MSN/etc-IM app, all of which access the internet via tcp-ip, none of which has ever brought down the mobile network.
I can see how they'd be nervous about letting 3:rd party software talk directly to the mobile network, but tcp-ip access for 3:rd party software is already common stuff in mainstream, middle-end mobiles via J2ME MIDP 2.0.
The biggest problem with mobile-phones today is that everything is proprietary.
Damn it! Use a standard headphone-port, a standard usb-port and give me some decent documentation and I'd be a great device.
But noooo.
Want to connect headphones? Then use our worthless adapter.
Want to connect to the computer? Then use our worthless proprietary cable.
Want to change the media-player application? You can't *argh*
Want to build a [insert purpose]-device to interface with our phone? Then go back-engineer the interface, cause we won't tell you how it works!
Current mobile-tech companies suck, along with their hardware.
I do hope Apple will use standard ports, have an open software architecture and open control-protocols, but looking at their history, it seems unlikely that they'll manage to not suck like the rest.
Seriously, I haven't seen one good title on either XB360 or PS3 yet.
Actually, for the entire 2006/2007, this goes for all other consoles too.
One problem might be that, after playing World of Warcraft for half a year, I can no longer stand any game that has a "Do task x, get object y. Kill z, get p experience. Get n*p experience, gain 1 level" style of gaming.
This includes almost all mediocre RPGs or MMRPGs, and also most of the ones I used to like but no longer can stand playing. =(
Somebody needs to reinvent the RPG.
What you need is simply more parties in the goverment.
A two-party system isn't really much better than a one-party system when it comes to choice.
So Microsoft claim that their products are the actual CD's or DVD's that contain their software, not the software itself, which definitely is produced in the US? =/
Well, it does comply nicely with their "You got to have the exactly correct version of the physical media to install"-license keys.
In a movie-theater, you'd probably not go for a 1280 dots/inch resolution. That's only needed if you're going to watch the screen at a 1 inch distance.
The IBM hardware kicked Apple-hardware ass in *all* aspects. Quality, Looks, Ergonomics, Performance, you name it.
If they say "A has 40% more performance @ 2GHz than B @ 2Ghz", comparing their relative performance is just a matter of math.
A at 2GHz will have the same performance as B at 2.8GHz.
Saying "A will have 40% higher Hz than B" and not mentioning the performance per Hz (á la the 90's) makes it impossible to make any performance estimates.
It also says a little about the performance-gains one can expect over time.
A certain chip-die will not increase it's performance/Hz ratio during it's lifespan, but it will increase in Hz.
If product A(amd) and B(intel) both gain the same percentage of clock frequency rise during a certain time-frame,
and neither introduces a new die in that time, the one with the steepest performance/Hz-curve will gain the most performance.
The same one will also gain the most from overclocking.
If I want to run Vista on my laptop, I have to run the generic vga-driver, and that is slow enough that the system becomes practically unusable.
Other than that, Vista runs just fine on my 4 year old laptop.
Wouldn't that be the Playstation 4, Xbox 720 and Nintendo Whoop? (or whatever the next generation consoles will be called)
PS3, XB360 and Wii are now current generation consoles, with PS2, XB and GC being last generation.