Before OS X, and even in the first version or so of OS X (when it used the Dock for switching instead of the bar of icons that pops up), built-in app switching with the keyboard in Mac OS was miserable indeed. You apparently found yourself the wrong solution, though. What you should've been using was LiteSwitch, which does pretty much everything the OS X keyboard switcher does now, except it did it several years ago, and it still runs on at least as far back as 7.5, from what I remember. Plus it's free now (the non-OS X version, that is), and they even released the source at some point. It's rather nifty.
I remember reading at some point a while ago that there would be some way to hook it up that way, but I haven't seen anything mentioned about it lately. IGN's FAQ has a quote from someone from Nintendo about it, but nothing definite.
You won't get your hopes up because you don't like the name? You know, you could get burned by something that actually matters, like the games or hardware sucking. Why don't you wait and see if the important stuff is any good before deciding things like that? I'm not a huge fan of the name, but it didn't ruin my day or anything. It's a name, and I can see what they might be going for. I'll wait and see what happens, and if the controller works and games are fun, I'll go buy one. I'm not about to change that or future purchases or expectations just because of a three-letter name. That would be ridiculous.
Speaking of Amplitude, the very best people I've seen (my roommate a few years ago was GoldenBoy, one of the testers at Harmonix at the time it was being developed) played Frequency and Amplitude not with the face buttons but with the shoulder buttons. I use the face buttons, and I'm ok, at least when I play more often, but people like him totally destroyed me with the shoulder buttons. I think I'm more comfortable with the face buttons from so many years playing the piano, but I watched him get more than one five-digit score in one sitting playing Amplitude without too much trouble one day, and I've never come close to 10,000 points even once. With the spacing of the face buttons, it's a little too cramped to move quickly enough sometimes, at least with how big my hands are, but that's just what I'm used to. Oh well.
It's definitely possible, but that wasn't the first thing that came to mind for me. It's really, really hard to say, based on all of a few sentences. I say this as an officially diagnosed aspie who knows some others, none of whom act particularly like that. Talking about random interests like that fits, but the part about talking like he's actually in the game...well, I'm not sure. Diagnosing someone over the Internet is hazy enough even when you can talk to them for an extended amount of time. Not like anyone will ever see this a week later anyway...
Do we have to get Merck of Phizer to want to market, and profit from it, to get the Federal government to allow it.
It seems that way sometimes, doesn't it? Speaking of medical marijuana, some pharmaceutical company sells a THC extract in a pill (Marinol, used to increase appetite in people with things like cancer, I think), which I think is Schedule III (controlled, but still available with a prescription), while marijuana itself is Schedule I (not legal or acknowledged to have any medical benefit). Go figure. I sometimes wonder how they came up with the scheduling and regulations and laws around all those sorts of things, because half the time it doesn't entirely make sense.
Actually, they DO sell meth already. It's called Desoxyn, and it's used for things like ADD, but generally only after things like Ritalin and Adderall have failed to help (enough). When taken as prescribed (and not abused in larger dosages or by people using it for other reasons), it can be very helpful for people who other things don't work for, just like Oxycontin.
Actually, some game a while back (I think it was Earthbound) had a relatively useless pray command that didn't help much during the game, but to win in the final battle, you needed to use it. I'm sure someone could find a way to assume that it involved praying to a "false god" and get worked up about it, but I haven't run into anyone like that so far. I wouldn't be surprised if they're out there, though.
This is true. I feel like I'd miss out if one of the next big things at some point is 3D displays, though, like how the move from 2D to 3D happened a few years ago. I kind of doubt it'll be any time soon (not in the upcoming generation, and not necessarily in the one after either), and I don't think they'll do anything like exclude people who the displays don't work for. I'm not worried about that, but it would be a shame to not be able to be a part of an advance like that. I'll live. As long as stuff is still fun to play in the future, I'll get over it.
Even though this rumor is probably not true, I worry about this same thing with anything that does end up using 3D glasses. Not only do I wear glasses, but I have weird corneas, and almost no type of 3D display works properly for me at all.
I could tolerate the Virtual Boy, but I haven't used it in a few years, and my vision has gotten a little worse since then. The last time I was in an IMAX theater, I completely couldn't make sense of the 3D previews while wearing the glasses. Not only did it not look 3D, it was very hard to even figure out what was going on. Luckily, the movie I was there to see wasn't 3D, so I was able to watch that fine.
I'm a bit worried about where 3D displays will head in the future, because they could end up leaving out part of their audience if people with vision problems can't see them properly. I realize there's not really much to be done about making music listenable for deaf people or videos seeable for blind people (at least until those problems can be physically corrected in some way with implants or something), but there are probably plenty more people (compared to the number of completely blind and/or dead people) who can see and hear well enough to use the current output devices just fine but for whom some of the fancy new ideas won't work. Hopefully we won't all get left out in the future.
You're absolutely right that the older ones run hotter. The original 867 MHz 12" PowerBooks were incredibly hot, but the more recent ones have been much better about heat.
If I'm just sitting on the couch with my iBook (800 MHz G4) checking my mail or chatting on IRC, it's cool to the touch, and the fan doesn't even turn on. Doing anything that uses the CPU, hard drive, or video card heavily makes it heat up in a hurry, though, especially things that use two or all three of those things at once, like games, audio/video processing, compiling, etc. This one actually seems to get a bit hotter than my old G3 iBook did, unlike the PowerBooks (12" ones, at least), which have gotten cooler.
Star Wars II in digital projection, at least in my opinion, looked pretty miserable. It might have been better-looking farther back from the screen than I was (the only seats left I could find when I got there were in the first ten rows or so), but from where I was sitting, I could make out the individual pixels on the screen.
Some things did look sharper than on film, but the overall effect was fairly annoying to look at. Not only do games have some catching up to do before they reach movie quality, the movies themselves still have plenty of room for improvement.
What this really makes me think of is LiveJournal and other blogs. Lots of people seem to like sticking in their mood and whatever music they're listening to at the top of every blog entry. Now imagine them making their "Current Song:" line in every entry an iTMS link to the song. Any money they make off it is theirs to keep on a free blog site, since they don't have to pay for hosting, and people can earn money just by keeping a journal of the inane details of their everyday life, as long as someone actually reads it. People could even make money off each other, buying songs through each other's referrals and getting the money kicked back to their friend.
Before that, Marathon (one of Bungie's first FPS games) had both bullet spray and weapon recoil in its pretty-impressive-for-the-time (1994, I think, around the time Doom II came out, a couple years before the first Quake game) physics model. I never played Pathways into Darkness, another FPS by Bungie from a year or so before Marathon came out, enough to know if it could do either of those, but even if it didn't, it wouldn't surprise me if someone else had already done it by then, or at least thought of it, although that's almost getting back in time as far as Wolf3D...
Getting even more offtopic, I can think of a "sample" from Hello Nasty that I did immediately recognize, but most people probably wouldn't. I think it was in Intergalactic that they used part of someone or other's recording/interpretation of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor. I think the only reason I noticed was that I've been playing classical piano on and off for the past 20 years or so, and right when the song came out, I was learning to play that piece.
In this case, they actually borrowed something that's been out of copyright for a long time. I don't know exactly when the original piece is from, but I've heard a player-piano roll of it recorded by Rachmaninoff himself in the early 1900s, so it was definitely a while ago. Considering it's probably around 100 years old, and the composer himself has been decomposing for a little over 60 years, that's one piece of musical borrowing I don't see them getting sued for any time soon.
I think the thing with Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil is that most people either like one or the other, and they usually hate the one that they don't like. I can't think of anyone I know who likes both, but I know people who like ED and people who like RE.
I personally really, really can't stand the controls for RE, and even though the characters have a completely ridiculous number of polygons in their models, they felt really stiff to me in their animation and how they moved around. Of course, there are other people who think ED's graphics weren't detailed enough or didn't like the style, or who didn't like the targetting system, or thought the sanity effects were silly instead of scary, or a bunch of other stuff.
I guess the moral of the story is that it's a really huge pain in the ass to make a game that makes everyone happy, as I've learned working on a game with friends as a hobby. You come up with something that you think is the greatest thing ever, and half the people agree with you, and the other half think you're nuts for even suggesting it...
Someone has to say this, and it might as well be me. In the comments on every story like this, there's always at least one person, usually several, who claim that the GameCube's major failing is the lack of support for networking. I must disagree entirely.
Unless something's changed a whole lot in the past couple months, the online aspect of the other two current consoles is very visible, but the number of people who actually are participating is incredibly small in comparison to how much we hear about them. Xbox Live and some of the online stuff for the PS2 is well done, and a lot of people who have used them are impressed by them. However, the people who have even used a console-based online gaming service are a tiny fraction of the number of console gamers who never have.
In the PC gaming world, especially with things like MMORPGs, RTS games, FPS games, etc., multiplayer network support is almost vitally important. I don't think everyone realizes that the console world isn't like that...yet. I think it will probably become more important in the future, and any console in the next generation without good support for it will probably suffer somewhat, but at this point in time, the vast majority of console gamers are completely unaffected by whether a game or console has network support or not.
Getting back to why the GameCube was less successful than it could've been, I suspect a least a couple things had something to do with it. Launching an entire year after the PS2 definitely did not help. While the PS2 had few, if any, compelling games in its first year, the same could be said of the GameCube, and by the time the GC started getting more games worth playing, the PS2 had already been out for a couple years, had much more support, and was in many more homes.
On a related note, the GC was pretty lacking in third-party support until more recently, too. Even now, I look at which games I've been playing lately on my GC and which games I'm looking forward to, and the vast majority are straight from Nintendo. Now, if I had to pick one and only one company whose games I could play, it would be Nintendo, so I'm not too bothered by that, but it would be nice to have more stuff out there to choose from.
Regardless, as long as Nintendo gets to the party on time with the next console, instead of being unfashionably late, I think they're on the right track. I buy consoles to play games, not to watch movies on or to use a PVR or a CD player or anything else like that. I play games because I want to have fun. As far as I'm concerned, they make some of the best games that are the most fun, and anything they do to make it easier to make good games and to create more ways for games to be fun is ok with me.
A friend of mine has some form of Shuttle case he uses for his MythTV setup, and, naturally, it came with a piercing, blindingly bright, blue LED to let everyone within half a mile know whether it's on or not. Occasionally, I end up sleeping on the futon ten feet away from it if I'm over there late at night and not heading home until the next day, and I honestly can't sleep in the same room unless I cover the light up with something.
I'm the kind of person whose eyes are sensitive enough to light that I use a single 40W bulb to light my room at home and read by, and in the past, I've used only a 25W bulb at times. This trend for bright, flashy indicator lights on everything these days (including the pulsating white one on my iBook to let me know it's asleep...I have to stick it underneath the bed or put a book in front of it to sleep while it's sleeping) is literally kind of painful sometimes.
As an added bonus, I have Keratoconus, a fairly uncommon cornea problem, so all these excessively bright little lights on everything are wonderfully smeared all over the place in my vision, which makes them even more annoying and drives me absolutely nuts.
I love little blinking lights all over the place on my hardware as much as the next guy, but lately, they've been getting pretty ridiculously obtrusive. There are only so many little lights that are actually necessary, and they don't need to be all that bright to be noticeable or useful.
Speaking of technology and schools, you can't forget Draper in a list like that. They're right across the street from the MIT campus, and if memory serves me right, they were originally part of MIT a few decades ago, before splitting off and becoming a separate entity. A ridiculous number of people working there come straight from MIT, too, and they do a lot of government and military funded projects, too.
As an example, when I had a summer job there (working on a DARPA-funded project for the military, naturally), I was one of only two people on my project who didn't have a degree from MIT.
The sheer number of opportunities at places like Draper and the others mentioned by this comment's parent, along with all the biotech stuff going on here, are a good incentive to keep a lot of the techies from the area's schools around after they graduate.
I just went through the process of getting my iBook replaced quite recently (the new one should be getting here tomorrow, actually).
In the past year (I've had it for 15 months, but the problems didn't start until a year ago), it had been in for repairs five times, and not long ago, it started having issues again. Nearly everything in it had already been replaced once already, if not more times than that.
The previous couple times I'd called in, they'd hinted that they'd do something about it if it had any more problems. For a while it was doing fine, I suspect because I got a new logic boards after they'd resolved the problems they had been prone to. The new logic board was fine, but other stuff started to go.
In my case, I didn't even have to ask them about getting it replaced this time. I think it had enough frequent flier miles from travelling back and forth across the country from Boston back to Apple that I must've earned a new one. Although it had been fine for a few months after getting the original problems resolved (after a few tries and a few logic boards), they agreed it was ridiculous that it had had so many problems, and they voluntarily replaced it for me without me having to suggest it. I had a few problems with FedEx taking forever to ship the old one back to Apple so it could be processed and the new one sent to me, but everyone at Apple has been extremely helpful about it.
Without exceptions, everyone I've talked to on the phone has been friendly and professional, and they've generally gone out of their way to get stuff taken care of as well as they could and as quickly as they could. The past couple days, as I've been calling in to check up on the status of the whole process, I've amazingly been on hold for a grand total of under five minutes before getting a real person, and that's over three different calls combined. Except for this most recent time, I've been shocked by how quickly my computer has been returned to me. I call one afternoon, the shipping material arrives the morning, Apple receives and repairs it the next day, and the morning after that, I have a computer again.
Of course, I would prefer that nothing had gone wrong with my computer in the first place, but this is the first Apple product I've had this kind of trouble with (I was using my Quadra 950, from 1992, as a router until a month ago, when I replaced it with something that could handle 802.11b, and I have stuff older than which still works fine). If anything of mine breaks again that I have to talk to any tech support people about it, I hope it's a product of Apple's again.
I probably sound like a complete fanboy whoring myself out for Apple, the Great and All-Powerful, but I've really been that impressed with the people working there, even if I've been kind of frustrated by the whole thing (thanks, Josh, Glenn, Greg, and everyone else I've dealt with there).
(As an added bonus, the model I had (the iBook with an 800MHz G3 from a year and a half ago) was out of stock, so they're replacing it with the current model iBook G4. So, for putting up with everything that went wrong with the old one, I get a new toy. Huzzah!)
As someone who hasn't used ecstasy or other drugs but who has done a fair amount of reading (mostly due to general curiosity and far, far too much free time) and who has some familiarity with it through friends, I figured I'd chime in.
The mention of the interaction between SSRIs and ecstasy reminded me of a node on Everything2 I ran into recently about serotonin syndrome. It seems like a pretty miserable condition to end up in whether you have the more severe symptoms (coma, death) or not.
I ran into that info while wandering aimlessly though E2 after looking to see what people had to say about different SSRIs my doctor has had me try recently, and as annoying and frustrating as the side effects I've ended up with have been, that would, to put it mildly, just downright suck.
So, kids, think about that before using MDMA while on something like Prozac or Zoloft or anything similar. The more you know, I guess.
Also, specifically to The Tyro, it's always nice seeing people taking the time to respond to people's comments about their posts, especially with even more information to support their position and to try to keep people informed about subjects they(you) know about.
Looks like no one's mentioned the "Zeroth Law" yet, which I think was added towards the end of the Foundation series (I want to say in Foundation and Earth, for some reason, but it's been most of a decade since I last read the books, so I really have no idea any more, now that all the books are blurred together in my memory...).
0: A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
...or some such similar wording. And, naturally, the other three laws were modified so that the "Zeroth Law" took precedence over them. I guarantee this won't come up at all in the movie, but as long as we're on the subject of Asimov, might as well mention it, right?
Guinness might be overrated, but I still like it. What I've really been into lately in terms of stouts is this, ever since my friend brought some back from New York. I took them up on their claim that it's "a stunning accompaniment to a chocolate dessert," and it turns out that the bitter aftertaste of it really does match surprisingly well with bittersweet dark chocolate.
...not that anyone will ever see this, since I didn't notice this story until right after it fell off the front page, but that's ok.
It seems like a lot of comments are complaining that the people with problems with their iBooks are just bitching and moaning and want someone to listen to them whine about it. Several others have pointed out that Apple's support is (usually) very good and will fix anything under warranty, pretty much with no questions asked. However, I think some of these people are missing something important.
I have no complaints about Apple's support at all. Quite the opposite, actually; the people I've dealt with on the phone have been extremely helpful, and when I've had to send my iBook in to be repaired, it's been returned to me so quickly that they must've fixed it and put it back in the mail immediately after it reached them. They've even replaced part of the case that was scratched while they were fixing other unrelated things.
The problem isn't with how wonderful their support department is or how they're willing to fix anything at no cost (as long as it's under warranty). The problem, for me at least, is that in the year I've had my iBook, I've been unable to use it for a significant amount of the time while it's being repaired. This past fall, during the most recent period it was in for repairs, I counted all the things that had gone wrong with it and determined that it's had a major hardware failure that made it completely unusable every 55 days since I bought it. I hardly ever travel with it, and I'm very gentle with it. It doesn't take any kind of abuse at all, unlike some people's laptops, but it still manages to be completely useless far too much of the time.
I brought my iBook with me on vacation last spring to work on some programming projects to pass the time while traveling, and it died the day after I left. By now, almost a year later, I can't trust that my computer, which I paid over $1000 for, will work long enough that I can start and finish a project on it before it up and dies on me, and although Apple has taken good care of me and fixed it repeatedly, they obviously haven't solved the problem, since it keeps happening over and over and over. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people with similar stories to mine. This is the problem.
I'm not asking for Apple to do anything special for me or to give me any kind of special treatment. I just want the computer I paid for to work for more than a few weeks at a time. If something goes wrong once in a while and I have to have it fixed, I can understand that, but if replacing the same part (the logic board) a couple times doesn't solve the problem, I don't want them to keep pretending that trying again a third, fourth, or eleventh time is going to make a difference if there's something fundamentally wrong with the design or manufacturing process.
All I want is a solution to whatever it is that's wrong with this generation of iBooks (which I am otherwise completely happy with, when mine works) so I can use it normally without being panicking and worrying that it's broken again whenever I see some kind of rendering or display artifact on the screen. I'm sure the poor support people at Apple would be happy to be done dealing with me calling in on a regular basis so they can take a break.
Slashdot Mirror
Before OS X, and even in the first version or so of OS X (when it used the Dock for switching instead of the bar of icons that pops up), built-in app switching with the keyboard in Mac OS was miserable indeed. You apparently found yourself the wrong solution, though. What you should've been using was LiteSwitch, which does pretty much everything the OS X keyboard switcher does now, except it did it several years ago, and it still runs on at least as far back as 7.5, from what I remember. Plus it's free now (the non-OS X version, that is), and they even released the source at some point. It's rather nifty.
compulsively
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I remember reading at some point a while ago that there would be some way to hook it up that way, but I haven't seen anything mentioned about it lately. IGN's FAQ has a quote from someone from Nintendo about it, but nothing definite.
You won't get your hopes up because you don't like the name? You know, you could get burned by something that actually matters, like the games or hardware sucking. Why don't you wait and see if the important stuff is any good before deciding things like that? I'm not a huge fan of the name, but it didn't ruin my day or anything. It's a name, and I can see what they might be going for. I'll wait and see what happens, and if the controller works and games are fun, I'll go buy one. I'm not about to change that or future purchases or expectations just because of a three-letter name. That would be ridiculous.
Speaking of Amplitude, the very best people I've seen (my roommate a few years ago was GoldenBoy, one of the testers at Harmonix at the time it was being developed) played Frequency and Amplitude not with the face buttons but with the shoulder buttons. I use the face buttons, and I'm ok, at least when I play more often, but people like him totally destroyed me with the shoulder buttons. I think I'm more comfortable with the face buttons from so many years playing the piano, but I watched him get more than one five-digit score in one sitting playing Amplitude without too much trouble one day, and I've never come close to 10,000 points even once. With the spacing of the face buttons, it's a little too cramped to move quickly enough sometimes, at least with how big my hands are, but that's just what I'm used to. Oh well.
It's definitely possible, but that wasn't the first thing that came to mind for me. It's really, really hard to say, based on all of a few sentences. I say this as an officially diagnosed aspie who knows some others, none of whom act particularly like that. Talking about random interests like that fits, but the part about talking like he's actually in the game...well, I'm not sure. Diagnosing someone over the Internet is hazy enough even when you can talk to them for an extended amount of time. Not like anyone will ever see this a week later anyway...
Do we have to get Merck of Phizer to want to market, and profit from it, to get the Federal government to allow it.
It seems that way sometimes, doesn't it? Speaking of medical marijuana, some pharmaceutical company sells a THC extract in a pill (Marinol, used to increase appetite in people with things like cancer, I think), which I think is Schedule III (controlled, but still available with a prescription), while marijuana itself is Schedule I (not legal or acknowledged to have any medical benefit). Go figure. I sometimes wonder how they came up with the scheduling and regulations and laws around all those sorts of things, because half the time it doesn't entirely make sense.
Actually, they DO sell meth already. It's called Desoxyn, and it's used for things like ADD, but generally only after things like Ritalin and Adderall have failed to help (enough). When taken as prescribed (and not abused in larger dosages or by people using it for other reasons), it can be very helpful for people who other things don't work for, just like Oxycontin.
Actually, some game a while back (I think it was Earthbound) had a relatively useless pray command that didn't help much during the game, but to win in the final battle, you needed to use it. I'm sure someone could find a way to assume that it involved praying to a "false god" and get worked up about it, but I haven't run into anyone like that so far. I wouldn't be surprised if they're out there, though.
This is true. I feel like I'd miss out if one of the next big things at some point is 3D displays, though, like how the move from 2D to 3D happened a few years ago. I kind of doubt it'll be any time soon (not in the upcoming generation, and not necessarily in the one after either), and I don't think they'll do anything like exclude people who the displays don't work for. I'm not worried about that, but it would be a shame to not be able to be a part of an advance like that. I'll live. As long as stuff is still fun to play in the future, I'll get over it.
Even though this rumor is probably not true, I worry about this same thing with anything that does end up using 3D glasses. Not only do I wear glasses, but I have weird corneas, and almost no type of 3D display works properly for me at all.
I could tolerate the Virtual Boy, but I haven't used it in a few years, and my vision has gotten a little worse since then. The last time I was in an IMAX theater, I completely couldn't make sense of the 3D previews while wearing the glasses. Not only did it not look 3D, it was very hard to even figure out what was going on. Luckily, the movie I was there to see wasn't 3D, so I was able to watch that fine.
I'm a bit worried about where 3D displays will head in the future, because they could end up leaving out part of their audience if people with vision problems can't see them properly. I realize there's not really much to be done about making music listenable for deaf people or videos seeable for blind people (at least until those problems can be physically corrected in some way with implants or something), but there are probably plenty more people (compared to the number of completely blind and/or dead people) who can see and hear well enough to use the current output devices just fine but for whom some of the fancy new ideas won't work. Hopefully we won't all get left out in the future.
You're absolutely right that the older ones run hotter. The original 867 MHz 12" PowerBooks were incredibly hot, but the more recent ones have been much better about heat.
If I'm just sitting on the couch with my iBook (800 MHz G4) checking my mail or chatting on IRC, it's cool to the touch, and the fan doesn't even turn on. Doing anything that uses the CPU, hard drive, or video card heavily makes it heat up in a hurry, though, especially things that use two or all three of those things at once, like games, audio/video processing, compiling, etc. This one actually seems to get a bit hotter than my old G3 iBook did, unlike the PowerBooks (12" ones, at least), which have gotten cooler.
Star Wars II in digital projection, at least in my opinion, looked pretty miserable. It might have been better-looking farther back from the screen than I was (the only seats left I could find when I got there were in the first ten rows or so), but from where I was sitting, I could make out the individual pixels on the screen.
Some things did look sharper than on film, but the overall effect was fairly annoying to look at. Not only do games have some catching up to do before they reach movie quality, the movies themselves still have plenty of room for improvement.
What this really makes me think of is LiveJournal and other blogs. Lots of people seem to like sticking in their mood and whatever music they're listening to at the top of every blog entry. Now imagine them making their "Current Song:" line in every entry an iTMS link to the song. Any money they make off it is theirs to keep on a free blog site, since they don't have to pay for hosting, and people can earn money just by keeping a journal of the inane details of their everyday life, as long as someone actually reads it. People could even make money off each other, buying songs through each other's referrals and getting the money kicked back to their friend.
Before that, Marathon (one of Bungie's first FPS games) had both bullet spray and weapon recoil in its pretty-impressive-for-the-time (1994, I think, around the time Doom II came out, a couple years before the first Quake game) physics model. I never played Pathways into Darkness, another FPS by Bungie from a year or so before Marathon came out, enough to know if it could do either of those, but even if it didn't, it wouldn't surprise me if someone else had already done it by then, or at least thought of it, although that's almost getting back in time as far as Wolf3D...
Getting even more offtopic, I can think of a "sample" from Hello Nasty that I did immediately recognize, but most people probably wouldn't. I think it was in Intergalactic that they used part of someone or other's recording/interpretation of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C# Minor. I think the only reason I noticed was that I've been playing classical piano on and off for the past 20 years or so, and right when the song came out, I was learning to play that piece.
In this case, they actually borrowed something that's been out of copyright for a long time. I don't know exactly when the original piece is from, but I've heard a player-piano roll of it recorded by Rachmaninoff himself in the early 1900s, so it was definitely a while ago. Considering it's probably around 100 years old, and the composer himself has been decomposing for a little over 60 years, that's one piece of musical borrowing I don't see them getting sued for any time soon.
I think the thing with Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil is that most people either like one or the other, and they usually hate the one that they don't like. I can't think of anyone I know who likes both, but I know people who like ED and people who like RE.
I personally really, really can't stand the controls for RE, and even though the characters have a completely ridiculous number of polygons in their models, they felt really stiff to me in their animation and how they moved around. Of course, there are other people who think ED's graphics weren't detailed enough or didn't like the style, or who didn't like the targetting system, or thought the sanity effects were silly instead of scary, or a bunch of other stuff.
I guess the moral of the story is that it's a really huge pain in the ass to make a game that makes everyone happy, as I've learned working on a game with friends as a hobby. You come up with something that you think is the greatest thing ever, and half the people agree with you, and the other half think you're nuts for even suggesting it...
Someone has to say this, and it might as well be me. In the comments on every story like this, there's always at least one person, usually several, who claim that the GameCube's major failing is the lack of support for networking. I must disagree entirely.
Unless something's changed a whole lot in the past couple months, the online aspect of the other two current consoles is very visible, but the number of people who actually are participating is incredibly small in comparison to how much we hear about them. Xbox Live and some of the online stuff for the PS2 is well done, and a lot of people who have used them are impressed by them. However, the people who have even used a console-based online gaming service are a tiny fraction of the number of console gamers who never have.
In the PC gaming world, especially with things like MMORPGs, RTS games, FPS games, etc., multiplayer network support is almost vitally important. I don't think everyone realizes that the console world isn't like that...yet. I think it will probably become more important in the future, and any console in the next generation without good support for it will probably suffer somewhat, but at this point in time, the vast majority of console gamers are completely unaffected by whether a game or console has network support or not.
Getting back to why the GameCube was less successful than it could've been, I suspect a least a couple things had something to do with it. Launching an entire year after the PS2 definitely did not help. While the PS2 had few, if any, compelling games in its first year, the same could be said of the GameCube, and by the time the GC started getting more games worth playing, the PS2 had already been out for a couple years, had much more support, and was in many more homes.
On a related note, the GC was pretty lacking in third-party support until more recently, too. Even now, I look at which games I've been playing lately on my GC and which games I'm looking forward to, and the vast majority are straight from Nintendo. Now, if I had to pick one and only one company whose games I could play, it would be Nintendo, so I'm not too bothered by that, but it would be nice to have more stuff out there to choose from.
Regardless, as long as Nintendo gets to the party on time with the next console, instead of being unfashionably late, I think they're on the right track. I buy consoles to play games, not to watch movies on or to use a PVR or a CD player or anything else like that. I play games because I want to have fun. As far as I'm concerned, they make some of the best games that are the most fun, and anything they do to make it easier to make good games and to create more ways for games to be fun is ok with me.
A friend of mine has some form of Shuttle case he uses for his MythTV setup, and, naturally, it came with a piercing, blindingly bright, blue LED to let everyone within half a mile know whether it's on or not. Occasionally, I end up sleeping on the futon ten feet away from it if I'm over there late at night and not heading home until the next day, and I honestly can't sleep in the same room unless I cover the light up with something.
I'm the kind of person whose eyes are sensitive enough to light that I use a single 40W bulb to light my room at home and read by, and in the past, I've used only a 25W bulb at times. This trend for bright, flashy indicator lights on everything these days (including the pulsating white one on my iBook to let me know it's asleep...I have to stick it underneath the bed or put a book in front of it to sleep while it's sleeping) is literally kind of painful sometimes.
As an added bonus, I have Keratoconus, a fairly uncommon cornea problem, so all these excessively bright little lights on everything are wonderfully smeared all over the place in my vision, which makes them even more annoying and drives me absolutely nuts.
I love little blinking lights all over the place on my hardware as much as the next guy, but lately, they've been getting pretty ridiculously obtrusive. There are only so many little lights that are actually necessary, and they don't need to be all that bright to be noticeable or useful.
Speaking of technology and schools, you can't forget Draper in a list like that. They're right across the street from the MIT campus, and if memory serves me right, they were originally part of MIT a few decades ago, before splitting off and becoming a separate entity. A ridiculous number of people working there come straight from MIT, too, and they do a lot of government and military funded projects, too.
As an example, when I had a summer job there (working on a DARPA-funded project for the military, naturally), I was one of only two people on my project who didn't have a degree from MIT.
The sheer number of opportunities at places like Draper and the others mentioned by this comment's parent, along with all the biotech stuff going on here, are a good incentive to keep a lot of the techies from the area's schools around after they graduate.
I just went through the process of getting my iBook replaced quite recently (the new one should be getting here tomorrow, actually).
In the past year (I've had it for 15 months, but the problems didn't start until a year ago), it had been in for repairs five times, and not long ago, it started having issues again. Nearly everything in it had already been replaced once already, if not more times than that.
The previous couple times I'd called in, they'd hinted that they'd do something about it if it had any more problems. For a while it was doing fine, I suspect because I got a new logic boards after they'd resolved the problems they had been prone to. The new logic board was fine, but other stuff started to go.
In my case, I didn't even have to ask them about getting it replaced this time. I think it had enough frequent flier miles from travelling back and forth across the country from Boston back to Apple that I must've earned a new one. Although it had been fine for a few months after getting the original problems resolved (after a few tries and a few logic boards), they agreed it was ridiculous that it had had so many problems, and they voluntarily replaced it for me without me having to suggest it. I had a few problems with FedEx taking forever to ship the old one back to Apple so it could be processed and the new one sent to me, but everyone at Apple has been extremely helpful about it.
Without exceptions, everyone I've talked to on the phone has been friendly and professional, and they've generally gone out of their way to get stuff taken care of as well as they could and as quickly as they could. The past couple days, as I've been calling in to check up on the status of the whole process, I've amazingly been on hold for a grand total of under five minutes before getting a real person, and that's over three different calls combined. Except for this most recent time, I've been shocked by how quickly my computer has been returned to me. I call one afternoon, the shipping material arrives the morning, Apple receives and repairs it the next day, and the morning after that, I have a computer again.
Of course, I would prefer that nothing had gone wrong with my computer in the first place, but this is the first Apple product I've had this kind of trouble with (I was using my Quadra 950, from 1992, as a router until a month ago, when I replaced it with something that could handle 802.11b, and I have stuff older than which still works fine). If anything of mine breaks again that I have to talk to any tech support people about it, I hope it's a product of Apple's again.
I probably sound like a complete fanboy whoring myself out for Apple, the Great and All-Powerful, but I've really been that impressed with the people working there, even if I've been kind of frustrated by the whole thing (thanks, Josh, Glenn, Greg, and everyone else I've dealt with there).
(As an added bonus, the model I had (the iBook with an 800MHz G3 from a year and a half ago) was out of stock, so they're replacing it with the current model iBook G4. So, for putting up with everything that went wrong with the old one, I get a new toy. Huzzah!)
As someone who hasn't used ecstasy or other drugs but who has done a fair amount of reading (mostly due to general curiosity and far, far too much free time) and who has some familiarity with it through friends, I figured I'd chime in.
The mention of the interaction between SSRIs and ecstasy reminded me of a node on Everything2 I ran into recently about serotonin syndrome. It seems like a pretty miserable condition to end up in whether you have the more severe symptoms (coma, death) or not.
I ran into that info while wandering aimlessly though E2 after looking to see what people had to say about different SSRIs my doctor has had me try recently, and as annoying and frustrating as the side effects I've ended up with have been, that would, to put it mildly, just downright suck.
So, kids, think about that before using MDMA while on something like Prozac or Zoloft or anything similar. The more you know, I guess.
Also, specifically to The Tyro, it's always nice seeing people taking the time to respond to people's comments about their posts, especially with even more information to support their position and to try to keep people informed about subjects they(you) know about.
Looks like no one's mentioned the "Zeroth Law" yet, which I think was added towards the end of the Foundation series (I want to say in Foundation and Earth, for some reason, but it's been most of a decade since I last read the books, so I really have no idea any more, now that all the books are blurred together in my memory...).
...or some such similar wording. And, naturally, the other three laws were modified so that the "Zeroth Law" took precedence over them. I guarantee this won't come up at all in the movie, but as long as we're on the subject of Asimov, might as well mention it, right?
0: A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
Guinness might be overrated, but I still like it. What I've really been into lately in terms of stouts is this, ever since my friend brought some back from New York. I took them up on their claim that it's "a stunning accompaniment to a chocolate dessert," and it turns out that the bitter aftertaste of it really does match surprisingly well with bittersweet dark chocolate.
...not that anyone will ever see this, since I didn't notice this story until right after it fell off the front page, but that's ok.
It seems like a lot of comments are complaining that the people with problems with their iBooks are just bitching and moaning and want someone to listen to them whine about it. Several others have pointed out that Apple's support is (usually) very good and will fix anything under warranty, pretty much with no questions asked. However, I think some of these people are missing something important.
I have no complaints about Apple's support at all. Quite the opposite, actually; the people I've dealt with on the phone have been extremely helpful, and when I've had to send my iBook in to be repaired, it's been returned to me so quickly that they must've fixed it and put it back in the mail immediately after it reached them. They've even replaced part of the case that was scratched while they were fixing other unrelated things.
The problem isn't with how wonderful their support department is or how they're willing to fix anything at no cost (as long as it's under warranty). The problem, for me at least, is that in the year I've had my iBook, I've been unable to use it for a significant amount of the time while it's being repaired. This past fall, during the most recent period it was in for repairs, I counted all the things that had gone wrong with it and determined that it's had a major hardware failure that made it completely unusable every 55 days since I bought it. I hardly ever travel with it, and I'm very gentle with it. It doesn't take any kind of abuse at all, unlike some people's laptops, but it still manages to be completely useless far too much of the time.
I brought my iBook with me on vacation last spring to work on some programming projects to pass the time while traveling, and it died the day after I left. By now, almost a year later, I can't trust that my computer, which I paid over $1000 for, will work long enough that I can start and finish a project on it before it up and dies on me, and although Apple has taken good care of me and fixed it repeatedly, they obviously haven't solved the problem, since it keeps happening over and over and over. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of people with similar stories to mine. This is the problem.
I'm not asking for Apple to do anything special for me or to give me any kind of special treatment. I just want the computer I paid for to work for more than a few weeks at a time. If something goes wrong once in a while and I have to have it fixed, I can understand that, but if replacing the same part (the logic board) a couple times doesn't solve the problem, I don't want them to keep pretending that trying again a third, fourth, or eleventh time is going to make a difference if there's something fundamentally wrong with the design or manufacturing process.
All I want is a solution to whatever it is that's wrong with this generation of iBooks (which I am otherwise completely happy with, when mine works) so I can use it normally without being panicking and worrying that it's broken again whenever I see some kind of rendering or display artifact on the screen. I'm sure the poor support people at Apple would be happy to be done dealing with me calling in on a regular basis so they can take a break.