So are you saying a Windows notebook comes with better hardware my MacBook Pro does? Like a magnetic power connector? (Which unplugs safely instead of dragging the PC with it if the power cord is pulled.) A built-in webcam? (I guess most do these days.) A brilliant widescreen 1440x960 LCD (15" version that I have)? The ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 is not too shabby either. And let's not forget the built-in motion sensor that quickly parks the drive safely in case of an accident. Are you saying a non-Apple laptop with all those specs is cheaper?
Apple hardware is good. Don't pretend otherwise.
Oh, and does this cheaper Windows laptop have a mousepad that lets you use two fingers as a scroll wheel (or whatever you program the multiple inputs for)?
Almost all the programs crash on invalid input... because the programmers are FOOLS who haven't learned the rules of user input: you cannot trust the input implicitly, you cannot expect users to have read the design document and act according to the use cases, you cannot expect the users to be as rational as computers, and you cannot expect users to be well-behaved.
If one of my web-based administrative applications decided to throw a 500 Internal Server Error in the user's face if they wrote a to-date that was before the from-date (instead of redisplaying the form with an understandable error message), I would be out of a job. I guess people working on open-source software don't have an employer for the project that can fire them, but why do Microsoft employees get off the hook for sloppy coding? Maybe they don't and Microsoft needs to get a steady stream of fresh developers who have no chance to fix the mess...
If I copy a huge binary dump into the clipboard and try to paste it into Word, Word should check the clipboard contents type and size before proceeding. Anything else is plain lazy.
Remember the "begin" crash bug in Outlook Express? Where the programmer just assumed that a line starting with the perfectly normal English word was the beginning og encoded data? Same degree of sloppyness.
This is total garbage. Swapping disks isn't that difficult and happens infrequently if done correctly.
If it was total garbage, then there would be more multi-disk console games than the scant examples that actually exist, no? Disk swapping IS a chore when you are sitting comfortably in your couch, five feet away from the console, instead of right next to the drive bay like PC users do. As another poster pointed out, in order to make disk swaps rare you need to complete one disk worth of game before proceeding to the next, usually not going back to the first. This makes the media dictate game structure.
Having 50 gigs available removes this concern.
What kind of luddite are you when you want to stick to yesterday's technology like that? Then you might just as well buy a PS2. Swapping sucks, I have known this since back when I had to install Microsoft Office on multiple PCs - from a stack of 28 diskettes...
Also: Sony makes consoles for an 8-10 year lifespan, not the short lifespans of Microsoft's consoles. Already, Microsoft has run into problems with their "last-gen" tech choices and has announced the Elite version of the 360 for later this year, which will have a much larger hard drive than the 20 GB og today's Premium, and also a HDMI port for digital video.
Sega Dreamcast (I don't want to get into whether or not CD killed it)
Lack of DVD playback (the PS2 sold a lot in Japan first and foremost as a cheaper DVD player) and lack of backward compatibility (preceding Sega consoles - except the Mega CD - were cartridge-based) killed the Dreamcast.
PS2 as cheap DVD player when DVDs were starting to come into the marketplace == PS3 as cheap Blu-ray player when Blu-ray is starting to come into the marketplace. "But, Blu-ray has HD-DVD as competition, DVD did not have competition!" Yes it did, in three forms: Analog Laserdiscs (expensive, cumbersome, large), Div-X (Circuit City's failed rental format) and Video-CD (largely popular in Asia). DVD won because most companies backed it, just like most (movie) companies now seem to back Blu-ray.
You should tell that to the makers of Blue dragon for the XBox 360 - it ships on three DVDs.
Blue Dragon ships on three DVDs, making it bigger than any Xbox 360 title to date. According to Sakaguchi, the game required compression technology to fit onto the three disks. In uncompressed form, the game's data takes up over 30 Gigs of space!
There is a reason there is only a small minority of console games that ship on multiple disks. Disk swapping is not fun.
Well yes you can do what you want with the software. But if you do, Blizzard have no obligations to provide the SECONDARY product, which is the services provided by the servers (login, patching, gameworld and chat). And WoW like all purely online games is worthless without access to those services.
Here at/. there seems to be a general support for paying people for their skills. Now, if Circuit City did that, it follows that the top-paid store workers would also be the most knowledgeable about the products sold - or at least the employees with the longest experience in the field and the greatest loyalty reflected by their staying in the company and having gotten raises to bring them where they are now. So imagine this conversation:
- Say, there is Frank? He always had the best contacts in the field and knew the latest release dates straight from the source... - Oh, he was laid off for earning too much money. He went to work for EB two blocks away. - EB two blocks away, you say? *leaves and never returns*
Maybe Circuit City are satisfied with the following exchange? - Excuse me, will this game work on my PC? I have a... - Shut up and buy something!
Perhaps that's a reason for dwindling number of PC games in the stores: Selling PC games actually requires technical knowledge.
Maybe the execs should try to look at how much revenue they bring in personally. If you can keep 500 in-store employees by firing one suit, why wouldn't you? (The answer is of course because the suit is one of the same group that would do the firing.)
3G hasn't met with much success outside of Asia yet - I can understand Apple not adding it to the American phone in June, but it's too ealry to tell what they will do with the European release later. For me, GPS and WiFi is more important anyway.
I would have just assumed that if I was going to make a warranty claim, I would have to do so while running the supported environment.
Why would you want to read things into a warranty that aren't there? Why would you, a customer, make assumptions that benefits the other party and disadvantages you? If some helpdesk droid says they don't support Linux, but it's not actually WRITTEN in the warranty, it's just hot air. Prior to Vista you could install non-certified drivers into Windows - would that also void the warranty? After all, you would be running Windows...
I think the only reason Alpha didn't last long was because DEC dropped the ball.
As I remember it, when DEC went belly-up the software assets went to Compaq and the hardware assets eventually to Intel, which buried the Alpha - strong competitor to their processor lines.
Nonsense: If e.g. a welder's manager is a better welder, why isn't he working as a welder? People are managers either because they are good at being managers or because their trade skills in their field are WORSE than others.
No, we're nearly ten years late. Remember? "On August 29th 1997, three billion people died. The survivors who crept out of the ruins called it Judgment Day."
You know, you would have a point if there ever WAS a Final Cut Pro for Windows that Apple could threaten to pull. But hey look there isn't. Meanwhile, Office for Mac started at the same time as the Windows version - earlier if you look at the Mac-debuting Excel spreadsheet.
Thanks for pointing out the lack of a movie editing application for Windows that can match Final Cut Pro, though. Microsoft's Movie Maker doesn't even reach iMovie levels.
Well, since the first commandment reads "Thou shalt hold no games before World of Warcraft", and World of Warcraft runs on MacOS X, the Mac is served in that regard.
And video games run on games consoles. You know, the ones where you don't have to fiddle with driver updates or PixelShader versions. PCs are good for life-consuming MMOs, anti-social strategy games and headache-inducing FPSes.
(All of which, coincidentally, are genres present on Macintosh.)
Case in point: The new MMO from Sony, Vanguard. I downloaded the beta client, and on trying to install it it informed me my card was not up to scratch for that reason only. Other games also list what cards they support, like Dreamfall.
Of course there are worse examples, like Battelfield 2 EXPLICITLY not supporting one family of cards: nVidia's Geforce 4 series. Got the older GeForce 3 or newer cards like the 6800? No problems. Got 4? Won't work.
But why did you use a metric coin system? After all, even the English didn't abandon the 1£ = 20s = 240p system until they got the metric bug in 1971. And that's even ignoring older coinages throughout history including the 21s Guinea (or the £1.05 coin), 80p coins etc. After all, you are so good at using fractions in other measures (stock values, physical measures like 7/8"), why not also for money?
No, a PC does not qualify. "PC" means a hundred different platforms, depending on your graphics card mostly. I have a PC, but because its ATI 9250 card only can do PixelShader version 1.4 I cannot play "PC" games that require version 2.0. And to get a really good card I would need to replace my AGP-equipped motherboard with one sporting PCI-express. Why would I need to do that if the PC was a unified gaming platform?
Both of these had the problem that there was a bunch of implementers who fought over a limited market, thus generating little profit for any of them. Especially the expensive ($700 in 1994 = at least $900 in today's money) 3DO was a dodgy proposition.
Having USPs (unique seeling points) lets the consumer choose based on other factors than just price. MSX vendors used this to add their variants on the platform, e.g. Sony's was more geared toward music etc. This is why people like me choose the PS3 instead of the 360 for instance: It has aspects that make it more interesting even though it is more expensive. The 3DO machines were almost the same if memory serves.
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So are you saying a Windows notebook comes with better hardware my MacBook Pro does? Like a magnetic power connector? (Which unplugs safely instead of dragging the PC with it if the power cord is pulled.) A built-in webcam? (I guess most do these days.) A brilliant widescreen 1440x960 LCD (15" version that I have)? The ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 is not too shabby either. And let's not forget the built-in motion sensor that quickly parks the drive safely in case of an accident. Are you saying a non-Apple laptop with all those specs is cheaper?
Apple hardware is good. Don't pretend otherwise.
Oh, and does this cheaper Windows laptop have a mousepad that lets you use two fingers as a scroll wheel (or whatever you program the multiple inputs for)?
Almost all the programs crash on invalid input ... because the programmers are FOOLS who haven't learned the rules of user input: you cannot trust the input implicitly, you cannot expect users to have read the design document and act according to the use cases, you cannot expect the users to be as rational as computers, and you cannot expect users to be well-behaved.
If one of my web-based administrative applications decided to throw a 500 Internal Server Error in the user's face if they wrote a to-date that was before the from-date (instead of redisplaying the form with an understandable error message), I would be out of a job. I guess people working on open-source software don't have an employer for the project that can fire them, but why do Microsoft employees get off the hook for sloppy coding? Maybe they don't and Microsoft needs to get a steady stream of fresh developers who have no chance to fix the mess...
If I copy a huge binary dump into the clipboard and try to paste it into Word, Word should check the clipboard contents type and size before proceeding. Anything else is plain lazy.
Remember the "begin" crash bug in Outlook Express? Where the programmer just assumed that a line starting with the perfectly normal English word was the beginning og encoded data? Same degree of sloppyness.
This is total garbage. Swapping disks isn't that difficult and happens infrequently if done correctly.
If it was total garbage, then there would be more multi-disk console games than the scant examples that actually exist, no? Disk swapping IS a chore when you are sitting comfortably in your couch, five feet away from the console, instead of right next to the drive bay like PC users do. As another poster pointed out, in order to make disk swaps rare you need to complete one disk worth of game before proceeding to the next, usually not going back to the first. This makes the media dictate game structure.
Having 50 gigs available removes this concern.
What kind of luddite are you when you want to stick to yesterday's technology like that? Then you might just as well buy a PS2. Swapping sucks, I have known this since back when I had to install Microsoft Office on multiple PCs - from a stack of 28 diskettes...
Also: Sony makes consoles for an 8-10 year lifespan, not the short lifespans of Microsoft's consoles. Already, Microsoft has run into problems with their "last-gen" tech choices and has announced the Elite version of the 360 for later this year, which will have a much larger hard drive than the 20 GB og today's Premium, and also a HDMI port for digital video.
Sega Dreamcast (I don't want to get into whether or not CD killed it)
Lack of DVD playback (the PS2 sold a lot in Japan first and foremost as a cheaper DVD player) and lack of backward compatibility (preceding Sega consoles - except the Mega CD - were cartridge-based) killed the Dreamcast.
PS2 as cheap DVD player when DVDs were starting to come into the marketplace == PS3 as cheap Blu-ray player when Blu-ray is starting to come into the marketplace. "But, Blu-ray has HD-DVD as competition, DVD did not have competition!" Yes it did, in three forms: Analog Laserdiscs (expensive, cumbersome, large), Div-X (Circuit City's failed rental format) and Video-CD (largely popular in Asia). DVD won because most companies backed it, just like most (movie) companies now seem to back Blu-ray.
There is a reason there is only a small minority of console games that ship on multiple disks. Disk swapping is not fun.
Don't forget that SCO (that is Caldera) got the unix rights from Novell.
Yes, but doesn't that make Novell the old SCO? *frowns*
Well yes you can do what you want with the software. But if you do, Blizzard have no obligations to provide the SECONDARY product, which is the services provided by the servers (login, patching, gameworld and chat). And WoW like all purely online games is worthless without access to those services.
Well, obviously not in this case.
Here at /. there seems to be a general support for paying people for their skills. Now, if Circuit City did that, it follows that the top-paid store workers would also be the most knowledgeable about the products sold - or at least the employees with the longest experience in the field and the greatest loyalty reflected by their staying in the company and having gotten raises to bring them where they are now. So imagine this conversation:
- Say, there is Frank? He always had the best contacts in the field and knew the latest release dates straight from the source...
- Oh, he was laid off for earning too much money. He went to work for EB two blocks away.
- EB two blocks away, you say? *leaves and never returns*
Maybe Circuit City are satisfied with the following exchange?
- Excuse me, will this game work on my PC? I have a...
- Shut up and buy something!
Perhaps that's a reason for dwindling number of PC games in the stores: Selling PC games actually requires technical knowledge.
Maybe the execs should try to look at how much revenue they bring in personally. If you can keep 500 in-store employees by firing one suit, why wouldn't you? (The answer is of course because the suit is one of the same group that would do the firing.)
3G hasn't met with much success outside of Asia yet - I can understand Apple not adding it to the American phone in June, but it's too ealry to tell what they will do with the European release later. For me, GPS and WiFi is more important anyway.
But it would still be to Europe and not to America as the 100,000 figure refered.
I would have just assumed that if I was going to make a warranty claim, I would have to do so while running the supported environment.
Why would you want to read things into a warranty that aren't there? Why would you, a customer, make assumptions that benefits the other party and disadvantages you? If some helpdesk droid says they don't support Linux, but it's not actually WRITTEN in the warranty, it's just hot air. Prior to Vista you could install non-certified drivers into Windows - would that also void the warranty? After all, you would be running Windows...
I think the only reason Alpha didn't last long was because DEC dropped the ball.
As I remember it, when DEC went belly-up the software assets went to Compaq and the hardware assets eventually to Intel, which buried the Alpha - strong competitor to their processor lines.
Nonsense: If e.g. a welder's manager is a better welder, why isn't he working as a welder? People are managers either because they are good at being managers or because their trade skills in their field are WORSE than others.
Shouldn't that be "Cyberdyne"-ic overlords? "Cyberdynic"? What? OK, I'll shut up now.
So, we've got only 15 years left?!
No, we're nearly ten years late. Remember? "On August 29th 1997, three billion people died. The survivors who crept out of the ruins called it Judgment Day."
... but don't use "death to Bush" otherwise the Secret Service will come knocking on your door...
.us TLD is rarely used by mundanes.)
(Of course this is less useful because the
You know, you would have a point if there ever WAS a Final Cut Pro for Windows that Apple could threaten to pull. But hey look there isn't. Meanwhile, Office for Mac started at the same time as the Windows version - earlier if you look at the Mac-debuting Excel spreadsheet.
Thanks for pointing out the lack of a movie editing application for Windows that can match Final Cut Pro, though. Microsoft's Movie Maker doesn't even reach iMovie levels.
Well, since the first commandment reads "Thou shalt hold no games before World of Warcraft", and World of Warcraft runs on MacOS X, the Mac is served in that regard.
And video games run on games consoles. You know, the ones where you don't have to fiddle with driver updates or PixelShader versions. PCs are good for life-consuming MMOs, anti-social strategy games and headache-inducing FPSes.
(All of which, coincidentally, are genres present on Macintosh.)
But that's the point of NeoOffice: It's OpenOffice ported to native APIs. No more ugly non-anti-aliased fonts of the X11 version.
Not that big a problem. Packets getting scrambled by solar radiation, though...
Case in point: The new MMO from Sony, Vanguard. I downloaded the beta client, and on trying to install it it informed me my card was not up to scratch for that reason only. Other games also list what cards they support, like Dreamfall.
Of course there are worse examples, like Battelfield 2 EXPLICITLY not supporting one family of cards: nVidia's Geforce 4 series. Got the older GeForce 3 or newer cards like the 6800? No problems. Got 4? Won't work.
But why did you use a metric coin system? After all, even the English didn't abandon the 1£ = 20s = 240p system until they got the metric bug in 1971. And that's even ignoring older coinages throughout history including the 21s Guinea (or the £1.05 coin), 80p coins etc. After all, you are so good at using fractions in other measures (stock values, physical measures like 7/8"), why not also for money?
http://www.tclayton.demon.co.uk/coins.html#index
No, a PC does not qualify. "PC" means a hundred different platforms, depending on your graphics card mostly. I have a PC, but because its ATI 9250 card only can do PixelShader version 1.4 I cannot play "PC" games that require version 2.0. And to get a really good card I would need to replace my AGP-equipped motherboard with one sporting PCI-express. Why would I need to do that if the PC was a unified gaming platform?
Both of these had the problem that there was a bunch of implementers who fought over a limited market, thus generating little profit for any of them. Especially the expensive ($700 in 1994 = at least $900 in today's money) 3DO was a dodgy proposition.
Having USPs (unique seeling points) lets the consumer choose based on other factors than just price. MSX vendors used this to add their variants on the platform, e.g. Sony's was more geared toward music etc. This is why people like me choose the PS3 instead of the 360 for instance: It has aspects that make it more interesting even though it is more expensive. The 3DO machines were almost the same if memory serves.