Re:Because its not part of the game play
on
Torture in Games
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· Score: 1
On PVP servers, waiting for quest text isn't always an option. Go ahead and try to hang out at Hemet Nesingwary 's(Jr. now?) camp and read a book of quest text with all the 40-level-higher-than-you gankers hanging around.
Also, I tried for a long time to avoid coordinate addons and "quest helper" type sites and addons. I did (tried) the shaman water quest in the barrens back in the day without addons. They don't actually tell you enough to do a lot of quests. Unless you consider running around the entire Barrens willy-nilly trying to find some random guy "to the east" to be fun.
There's definitely a lot of room for improvement in games, even without extensive + expensive voice acting.
1) XP supports more software 2) XP supports more hardware 3) XP is faster 4) XP is less buggy 5) Vista adds nothing of value
I used Vista for 3 months and found #1 and #4 to be huge. A lot of software wouldn't run on Vista, which amazes me for how long it's been out.
I started *after* Service Pack 1 came out, and ran into far more bugs in my daily work than ever before. Graphical glitches that required a reboot, frozen explorer windows and error messages that required a reboot, I think even rebooting required a reboot?
So yeah, I went into it fully expecting people to be full of crap about vista's problems. After actually using it, I'm a believer.
Ugh, thank god. As a programmer I could never bring myself to put punctuation inside quotations, even though I was taught that was "correct".
scientific and technical publications, even in the U.S., almost universally use logical quotation (punctuation outside unless part of the source material), due to its precision.
And the reason why in the late 1900s I was taught the wrong way to punctuate?
Buy computer with Vista. Put in Windows XP CD, reboot. Install XP, Reboot twice more. Go to windows update, get updates to windows update. Reboot. (it doesnt prompt you, but you'll fubar windows update if you dont and have to hack the registered dlls) Install Service pack 3. Reboot. Install updates to service pack 3. Reboot. etc.
Windows is a bad example. If you want to talk about an OS that's easy to run out and full-featured out of the box, try a Mac. Windows isn't there yet, and likely will never be. (using your definition anyway).
That's interesting, hadn't heard of those. Since all the people with the problem seemed to have made itunes purchases recently, I'd be willing to bet this is from the same Flash keylogging that's rampant in eg. WOW forums. Just as easy to take an iTunes user+pass as a Warcraft user+pass. Also noticing that everyone seemed to have charges in the same range (200-500$).
While I know it's cool to hate and all, this is almost guaranteed to be a case of people getting their accounts logged There's not a lot Apple can do about that.
People know not to open executable files (.exe) and even for more obtuse executables (.scr,.cmd) most systems and mail clients are smart enough to warn that it's executable content.
For data files like.jpg or.wri, neither the user or the system probably consider the file dangerous. So these type of exploits should be considered more dangerous than the completely-idiotic "e-mail people virus executables".
Especially considering many of these viruses propagate through address books (ie: trusted contacts)
But yes, at least it's not a completely automatic remote exploit.
I loved being around for the beta design process of this expansion. I spent hours in the forums and on mmo-champion.com every day discussing class balance and the like. It's a blast trying to design for such a complicated and complex game with such a huge audience. When BC came out there didn't seem to be quite as much openness in the design process, and I ended up quitting from BC's launch until a couple months ago.
Now that LK is out? The actual gameplay is still very tedious. It takes hours to go up levels and move on to new and interesting places. Double or triple that if you add in auctioning, professions, etc. I'm slowly leveling some of my toons, but every time I have to spend 20 minutes running from point A to point B a bit of me dies inside.
There's just too many timesinks in the game. Presumably intended to keep people paying rather than to keep them having fun while it lasts and then letting them move on.
And I argue that C actually teaches people more about object-oriented that most other languages, because it teaches them in no uncertain terms why you should use objects. It's harder to realize why you don't just make fields public until you've seen global variables in a C program
IMO you can learn most of OOP just by doing C in an object oriented fashion. For all the breathless talk of OOP, most Java and C++/C# programs end up coming down to Structs and Namespaced Functions. If inheritance, polymorphism, or interfaces are used it's typically in the underlying libraries, not within the new code.
And Java programmers in particular love using Singletons, which are effectively a global struct with functions namespaced to it.
So you can learn bad programming in any language, and likewise you can learn good programming, even OOP, from any language. Just saying "oh, teach him Java" doesn't mean he'll actually have the remotest clue about object oriented design when he's done.
Nothing has more bugs than stuff written in the 'web languages'. The current slashdot home page has 91 SGML parser errors and 1 warning, 225 HTMLTidy warnings, and 40 errors via the W3C markup validation service.
And the slashdot homepage works just fine in firefox, safari, and internet explorer, on mac, windows, and linux. Are those really "bugs" you're talking about?
I'm not sure I'm following here. Are you trying to suggest C++ would be a better tool for web development than, say, PHP?
Or are you saying that a C++ client-server GUI app would be a better tool for implementing your typical web application than (for instance) PHP+Apache+MySQL feeding HTML to web browsers?
I may not have made the resulting conclusion clear - "fixing" the death of individuals will result in death of the human species. Change will come, and we will not be able to adapt.
Immortals will function as a cancer, bringing the demise of the larger metaphorical organism they are part of. Themselves included.
2) Forget the metaphorical nonsense - every human cell is descended from another human cell. The human species is all descended from other humans - there aren't new magic cells coming down out of heaven with "$time=0". So if human cells can create cells with $time=0 (procreation) why can't it do the same thing internally to (indefinitely?) extend life?
With evolution in mind, I would argue that death is as necessary a part of evolution as birth. Death of organisms is a "feature" that lets the species as a whole progress.
It's likely we can engineer out this feature (we pretend its a bug) but then we'll find ourselves susceptible to the problems that this feature is there to solve - we will no longer evolve biologically. And considering the stubborness that comes with age, it's unlikely we'll evolve intellectually or culturally any better than we will biologically when there is no birth or death of individuals.
Even gamers will try to shame gamers by claiming "no life!" and such. A guy in WOW Trade chat the other day was mocking the people who picked up the expansion on launch day and leveled up with their friends. I asked what he did that was so superior, and he said he went drinking with some friends at a football game.
Is sitting around in-person with friends objectively better than playing with them online? Does adding voice chat make the game more competitive with "reality"? How about avatars? Is IRC worse than a voice-chatting video game?
It's gonna take a while (possibly replacement by the next generation) to get "I'm playing WOW with my guildies" to be heard as the same level of commitment as "I'm playing poker with my buddies"
Yep, Blizz devs have stated that very, very few players have seen most of the endgame dungeons. For instance the decision to bring back Naxx in LK was in part recycling content, but it's content that really no one had seen in the first place. Even Kara was "too hard" for more than a small percentage of players to get into.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with these "pro gamers" - everyone has some hobby that someone else thinks is weird. But from Blizzard's perspective it's not a good use of their money to make content that no one can enjoy.
Although it does seem like a good idea to make dungeons start out hard and then get easier - whether that's done through nerfing the content, making better gear more accessible, buffing players in general (as with the 3.02 patch), or some other method. This would keep hardcore players busy on difficult content, but still filter it down to the massive player base eventually.
Better yet, this lets them use/abuse the hardcore players as a beta for rooting out bugs and tuning the encounters before putting out to the majority of players.
So everyone would win, really. I'm not sure why this kind of curve hasn't been (intentionally) put in place yet.
FYI, it appears that Blizz is making raids MUCH easier in LK. I think they'd really like to see people PUGging raids.
* Aggro isn't nearly the issue it once was.
* Buffs are shared across multiple classes, so you don't have to micromanage which classes you bring - just bring whoever you can get.
* Hybrids have become even more cross-spec - every class can do solid damage now, even if specced for healing or tanking
* While it's not quite in the game yet, they'll be introducing off-specs soon, so you that pally or druid can switch to their resto off-spec or tank off-spec if a tank or healer has to leave
* Combined with the previous, gear is more universal than ever, so that druid doesnt have to carry a second set of gear to switch between magic dps and healing when he uses his off spec (but to tank or melee would require a separate set of gear)
I think all these things combined are going to make raiding a LOT more accessible AND enjoyable in LK. I was in a guild once, and they really guilted you into playing, and would treat you like shit if you left during a raid. If I could hop into a raid for half an hour then PUG a replacement when I have to go cook dinner, I'd be raiding a lot more.
Oh, "it just is"? Thanks, that's a real useful theory there. Instead of saying observable things "just is", we'll make up an additional layer of imagined nonsense between the observable and the "???".
Apple absolutely did review all the options and choose the one they thought was best. That doesn't, however, mean that they were right:)
The window-maximize thing is a pain in the ass for sure. I don't notice it too much since I never maximize windows anymore, but it irks me anew every time I try to maximize something.
Yes. I doubt that the CPU or GPU are of differing quality. Except, of course, that the Mac has a much faster CPU than the eMachine, which is also where some of that cost comes in.
But what about the RAM? Motherboard? PSU? Hard drive?
I built my own PCs for a long time, but finally got fed up with low quality, buggy components. I don't have spare RAM, mobos, and PSUs lying around to troubleshoot crappy hardware to figure out which piece is bad or incompatible with some other random cheap crappy piece. I still buy PC desktops, but my last several computers have been barebones kits from Dell and Shuttle. When I buy RAM it's always from a reputable company, as I've had as many unusable sticks of Kingston and the like as have actually worked.
And what about the other details - like ports, keyboard+mouse, size, battery life, warranty/support, and perhaps most important - operating system?
These all factor into the quality of any given system.
Sure, price is also important. As I said, I buy $400 Dell desktops and add in Crucial RAM and a Newegg video card.
None of the Mac desktops come remotely close to meeting my needs in terms of price and functionality. I would love it if they sold barebones Mini-tower desktops, but that's just not a market they're catering to. That doesn't imply that their Mac Mini or other desktops are bad products. And to suggest that they're the "same thing" as an $200-$400 eMachines or Dell is a complete farce.
I much prefer using SSH or an SSH tunnel personally, I only use remote desktop as a "last resort".
Also, I fully expect a full-desktop GUI to be slow and somewhat bandwidth heavy and unresponsive. Remote Desktop is like this, but I don't hold that against it.
The problem with Remote Desktop is that (at least in Vista) the Windows key regularly gets 'stuck' down on the remote machine. This is apparently a known and ignored yet huge bug. The only way I can un-stick the key is using the Accessories->On-Screen Keyboard. And because I use virtual desktops (windows+up/down/left/right) I had to do this almost every time I went to the screen with Remote Desktop on it.
It also dropped the connection frequently, but I'm 99% sure that was the spotty internet connection at that job, not a windows problem.
My mom once explained this to me as "people don't want to give you cash that you'll use to pay your cable bill or buy groceries".
I don't entirely agree, but I would say that people feel more comfortable giving "gift cards" than giving cash. For one reason or another. Does seem silly since both are worth the same except the gift card has a LOT of additional restrictions (including a time limit).
I'm actually the opposite. I always heard comments like yours (maybe you're astroturf from MS marketing?) and thought it made sense. Other than the DRM quirks, I figured Vista would be at least as good as XP, with no real problems outside the removal of backwards compatibility.
My first experience with Vista was when my grandfather-in-law bought a new computer and couldn't run any of his small business' software. He had to downgrade to XP.
Then I got a new job where the boss required us to use Vista. My coworker (started same day I did) was totally against it and only grudgingly gave in. Personally I was excited to give Vista a try and shoot a hole through all the BS whines/complaints.
I found out that Vista sucks. REALLY sucks. It had crashed and bugs I had never even heard of. Because I was working, I only even used a small portion of Vista's software. Yet very basic things like FTP, Windows Explorer, and Remote Desktop had huge and glaring flaws that made working a painful experience. The UI in general is abysmal. The very first day I was installing software I ran into UAC popping up prompts behind other windows, for instance. "Hmm, why is this installer frozen?"
I'm sorry, but Vista really is *that* bad.
I'm now working at another software development company. My brand new Dell laptop they gave me has a Windows Vista sticker on it. It's running Windows XP. Same goes for my wife's new computer from Dell, except I had to install XP myself because it costs $100 extra (on a $400 laptop!) to get XP instead of Vista.
Can you give some examples of OS X being "slow" and unable to be turned off? Windows aggravates me to no end, but I can't think of any graphics "gimmicks" in OS X then get in the way (or at least that I still have enabled)
And yes Macs cost more and are of higher quality than bargain bin PCs. This has nothing to do with the article or the quality of the OS. If you had a real point you just killed it by trolling.
Slashdot Mirror
On PVP servers, waiting for quest text isn't always an option. Go ahead and try to hang out at Hemet Nesingwary 's(Jr. now?) camp and read a book of quest text with all the 40-level-higher-than-you gankers hanging around.
Also, I tried for a long time to avoid coordinate addons and "quest helper" type sites and addons. I did (tried) the shaman water quest in the barrens back in the day without addons. They don't actually tell you enough to do a lot of quests. Unless you consider running around the entire Barrens willy-nilly trying to find some random guy "to the east" to be fun.
There's definitely a lot of room for improvement in games, even without extensive + expensive voice acting.
In case that's a genuine question:
1) XP supports more software
2) XP supports more hardware
3) XP is faster
4) XP is less buggy
5) Vista adds nothing of value
I used Vista for 3 months and found #1 and #4 to be huge. A lot of software wouldn't run on Vista, which amazes me for how long it's been out.
I started *after* Service Pack 1 came out, and ran into far more bugs in my daily work than ever before. Graphical glitches that required a reboot, frozen explorer windows and error messages that required a reboot, I think even rebooting required a reboot?
So yeah, I went into it fully expecting people to be full of crap about vista's problems. After actually using it, I'm a believer.
Ugh, thank god. As a programmer I could never bring myself to put punctuation inside quotations, even though I was taught that was "correct".
scientific and technical publications, even in the U.S., almost universally use logical quotation (punctuation outside unless part of the source material), due to its precision.
And the reason why in the late 1900s I was taught the wrong way to punctuate?
The American rule is derived from typesetting
Just wanted to point out the best defense is not knowledge, it's your router acting as a firewall. Without that (or enabling DMZ) you'd be screwed. ;)
Correction. A windows install is more like:
Buy computer with Vista.
Put in Windows XP CD, reboot.
Install XP, Reboot twice more.
Go to windows update, get updates to windows update. Reboot. (it doesnt prompt you, but you'll fubar windows update if you dont and have to hack the registered dlls)
Install Service pack 3. Reboot.
Install updates to service pack 3. Reboot.
etc.
Windows is a bad example. If you want to talk about an OS that's easy to run out and full-featured out of the box, try a Mac. Windows isn't there yet, and likely will never be. (using your definition anyway).
That's interesting, hadn't heard of those. Since all the people with the problem seemed to have made itunes purchases recently, I'd be willing to bet this is from the same Flash keylogging that's rampant in eg. WOW forums. Just as easy to take an iTunes user+pass as a Warcraft user+pass. Also noticing that everyone seemed to have charges in the same range (200-500$).
While I know it's cool to hate and all, this is almost guaranteed to be a case of people getting their accounts logged There's not a lot Apple can do about that.
People know not to open executable files (.exe) and even for more obtuse executables (.scr, .cmd) most systems and mail clients are smart enough to warn that it's executable content.
For data files like .jpg or .wri, neither the user or the system probably consider the file dangerous. So these type of exploits should be considered more dangerous than the completely-idiotic "e-mail people virus executables".
Especially considering many of these viruses propagate through address books (ie: trusted contacts)
But yes, at least it's not a completely automatic remote exploit.
I loved being around for the beta design process of this expansion. I spent hours in the forums and on mmo-champion.com every day discussing class balance and the like. It's a blast trying to design for such a complicated and complex game with such a huge audience. When BC came out there didn't seem to be quite as much openness in the design process, and I ended up quitting from BC's launch until a couple months ago.
Now that LK is out? The actual gameplay is still very tedious. It takes hours to go up levels and move on to new and interesting places. Double or triple that if you add in auctioning, professions, etc. I'm slowly leveling some of my toons, but every time I have to spend 20 minutes running from point A to point B a bit of me dies inside.
There's just too many timesinks in the game. Presumably intended to keep people paying rather than to keep them having fun while it lasts and then letting them move on.
And I argue that C actually teaches people more about object-oriented that most other languages, because it teaches them in no uncertain terms why you should use objects. It's harder to realize why you don't just make fields public until you've seen global variables in a C program
IMO you can learn most of OOP just by doing C in an object oriented fashion. For all the breathless talk of OOP, most Java and C++/C# programs end up coming down to Structs and Namespaced Functions. If inheritance, polymorphism, or interfaces are used it's typically in the underlying libraries, not within the new code.
And Java programmers in particular love using Singletons, which are effectively a global struct with functions namespaced to it.
So you can learn bad programming in any language, and likewise you can learn good programming, even OOP, from any language. Just saying "oh, teach him Java" doesn't mean he'll actually have the remotest clue about object oriented design when he's done.
Nothing has more bugs than stuff written in the 'web languages'. The current slashdot home page has 91 SGML parser errors and 1 warning, 225 HTMLTidy warnings, and 40 errors via the W3C markup validation service.
And the slashdot homepage works just fine in firefox, safari, and internet explorer, on mac, windows, and linux. Are those really "bugs" you're talking about?
I'm not sure I'm following here. Are you trying to suggest C++ would be a better tool for web development than, say, PHP?
Or are you saying that a C++ client-server GUI app would be a better tool for implementing your typical web application than (for instance) PHP+Apache+MySQL feeding HTML to web browsers?
I may not have made the resulting conclusion clear - "fixing" the death of individuals will result in death of the human species. Change will come, and we will not be able to adapt.
Immortals will function as a cancer, bringing the demise of the larger metaphorical organism they are part of. Themselves included.
2) Forget the metaphorical nonsense - every human cell is descended from another human cell. The human species is all descended from other humans - there aren't new magic cells coming down out of heaven with "$time=0". So if human cells can create cells with $time=0 (procreation) why can't it do the same thing internally to (indefinitely?) extend life?
With evolution in mind, I would argue that death is as necessary a part of evolution as birth. Death of organisms is a "feature" that lets the species as a whole progress.
It's likely we can engineer out this feature (we pretend its a bug) but then we'll find ourselves susceptible to the problems that this feature is there to solve - we will no longer evolve biologically. And considering the stubborness that comes with age, it's unlikely we'll evolve intellectually or culturally any better than we will biologically when there is no birth or death of individuals.
Nice rant :) Totally agree.
Even gamers will try to shame gamers by claiming "no life!" and such. A guy in WOW Trade chat the other day was mocking the people who picked up the expansion on launch day and leveled up with their friends. I asked what he did that was so superior, and he said he went drinking with some friends at a football game.
Is sitting around in-person with friends objectively better than playing with them online? Does adding voice chat make the game more competitive with "reality"? How about avatars? Is IRC worse than a voice-chatting video game?
It's gonna take a while (possibly replacement by the next generation) to get "I'm playing WOW with my guildies" to be heard as the same level of commitment as "I'm playing poker with my buddies"
Yep, Blizz devs have stated that very, very few players have seen most of the endgame dungeons. For instance the decision to bring back Naxx in LK was in part recycling content, but it's content that really no one had seen in the first place. Even Kara was "too hard" for more than a small percentage of players to get into.
That's not to say there's anything wrong with these "pro gamers" - everyone has some hobby that someone else thinks is weird. But from Blizzard's perspective it's not a good use of their money to make content that no one can enjoy.
Although it does seem like a good idea to make dungeons start out hard and then get easier - whether that's done through nerfing the content, making better gear more accessible, buffing players in general (as with the 3.02 patch), or some other method. This would keep hardcore players busy on difficult content, but still filter it down to the massive player base eventually.
Better yet, this lets them use/abuse the hardcore players as a beta for rooting out bugs and tuning the encounters before putting out to the majority of players.
So everyone would win, really. I'm not sure why this kind of curve hasn't been (intentionally) put in place yet.
FYI, it appears that Blizz is making raids MUCH easier in LK. I think they'd really like to see people PUGging raids.
* Aggro isn't nearly the issue it once was.
* Buffs are shared across multiple classes, so you don't have to micromanage which classes you bring - just bring whoever you can get.
* Hybrids have become even more cross-spec - every class can do solid damage now, even if specced for healing or tanking
* While it's not quite in the game yet, they'll be introducing off-specs soon, so you that pally or druid can switch to their resto off-spec or tank off-spec if a tank or healer has to leave
* Combined with the previous, gear is more universal than ever, so that druid doesnt have to carry a second set of gear to switch between magic dps and healing when he uses his off spec (but to tank or melee would require a separate set of gear)
I think all these things combined are going to make raiding a LOT more accessible AND enjoyable in LK. I was in a guild once, and they really guilted you into playing, and would treat you like shit if you left during a raid. If I could hop into a raid for half an hour then PUG a replacement when I have to go cook dinner, I'd be raiding a lot more.
My friends think I'm crazy, but I'm the same way. Spent an hour this morning buying low and selling high.
3.02 was great, jacked up the prices of herbs through the roof with inscription :)
I also got a few hundred G off being able to transmute primal might without a cooldown, before others caught on.
Where did religion/god come from?
Oh, "it just is"? Thanks, that's a real useful theory there. Instead of saying observable things "just is", we'll make up an additional layer of imagined nonsense between the observable and the "???".
Apple absolutely did review all the options and choose the one they thought was best. That doesn't, however, mean that they were right :)
The window-maximize thing is a pain in the ass for sure. I don't notice it too much since I never maximize windows anymore, but it irks me anew every time I try to maximize something.
Thanks for providing some examples!
"We're a Windows shop" /shrug
Yes. I doubt that the CPU or GPU are of differing quality. Except, of course, that the Mac has a much faster CPU than the eMachine, which is also where some of that cost comes in.
But what about the RAM? Motherboard? PSU? Hard drive?
I built my own PCs for a long time, but finally got fed up with low quality, buggy components. I don't have spare RAM, mobos, and PSUs lying around to troubleshoot crappy hardware to figure out which piece is bad or incompatible with some other random cheap crappy piece. I still buy PC desktops, but my last several computers have been barebones kits from Dell and Shuttle. When I buy RAM it's always from a reputable company, as I've had as many unusable sticks of Kingston and the like as have actually worked.
And what about the other details - like ports, keyboard+mouse, size, battery life, warranty/support, and perhaps most important - operating system?
These all factor into the quality of any given system.
Sure, price is also important. As I said, I buy $400 Dell desktops and add in Crucial RAM and a Newegg video card.
None of the Mac desktops come remotely close to meeting my needs in terms of price and functionality. I would love it if they sold barebones Mini-tower desktops, but that's just not a market they're catering to. That doesn't imply that their Mac Mini or other desktops are bad products. And to suggest that they're the "same thing" as an $200-$400 eMachines or Dell is a complete farce.
I much prefer using SSH or an SSH tunnel personally, I only use remote desktop as a "last resort".
Also, I fully expect a full-desktop GUI to be slow and somewhat bandwidth heavy and unresponsive. Remote Desktop is like this, but I don't hold that against it.
The problem with Remote Desktop is that (at least in Vista) the Windows key regularly gets 'stuck' down on the remote machine. This is apparently a known and ignored yet huge bug. The only way I can un-stick the key is using the Accessories->On-Screen Keyboard. And because I use virtual desktops (windows+up/down/left/right) I had to do this almost every time I went to the screen with Remote Desktop on it.
It also dropped the connection frequently, but I'm 99% sure that was the spotty internet connection at that job, not a windows problem.
My mom once explained this to me as "people don't want to give you cash that you'll use to pay your cable bill or buy groceries".
I don't entirely agree, but I would say that people feel more comfortable giving "gift cards" than giving cash. For one reason or another. Does seem silly since both are worth the same except the gift card has a LOT of additional restrictions (including a time limit).
I'm actually the opposite. I always heard comments like yours (maybe you're astroturf from MS marketing?) and thought it made sense. Other than the DRM quirks, I figured Vista would be at least as good as XP, with no real problems outside the removal of backwards compatibility.
My first experience with Vista was when my grandfather-in-law bought a new computer and couldn't run any of his small business' software. He had to downgrade to XP.
Then I got a new job where the boss required us to use Vista. My coworker (started same day I did) was totally against it and only grudgingly gave in. Personally I was excited to give Vista a try and shoot a hole through all the BS whines/complaints.
I found out that Vista sucks. REALLY sucks. It had crashed and bugs I had never even heard of. Because I was working, I only even used a small portion of Vista's software. Yet very basic things like FTP, Windows Explorer, and Remote Desktop had huge and glaring flaws that made working a painful experience. The UI in general is abysmal. The very first day I was installing software I ran into UAC popping up prompts behind other windows, for instance. "Hmm, why is this installer frozen?"
I'm sorry, but Vista really is *that* bad.
I'm now working at another software development company. My brand new Dell laptop they gave me has a Windows Vista sticker on it. It's running Windows XP. Same goes for my wife's new computer from Dell, except I had to install XP myself because it costs $100 extra (on a $400 laptop!) to get XP instead of Vista.
Can you give some examples of OS X being "slow" and unable to be turned off? Windows aggravates me to no end, but I can't think of any graphics "gimmicks" in OS X then get in the way (or at least that I still have enabled)
And yes Macs cost more and are of higher quality than bargain bin PCs. This has nothing to do with the article or the quality of the OS. If you had a real point you just killed it by trolling.