That being said, who the hell cares which one you prefer. I use windows (and linux on a spare box) because I game and have no use for a mac and think they are overpriced. However, if you choose to use one, go a head.
Coming from personal experience, I believe that most of the recent fanaticism for Apple/Mac/OSX stems from the screeching agonizing pain that was wrought from using Microsoft Windows for so many years, helping so many family members with countless rebuilds, various random things happening on the windows box that just "blew it up" and made you slave for hours and hours on end rebuilding it, patching a newly built windows machine and selecting 20 or 30 patches and then select a single patch that says "Oh, you have to install this patch alone, then reboot, then select the others.".. and in doing so, you have to do allowing for 10 to 15 different reboots to have a completely patched windows machine.... etc etc etc... I could go on and on and on and on... I've used windows since Windows 1.0 and had to help others with windows since around Windows 3.0, and it's never worked "right".. there have always been tricks to get windows to work, always been work arounds, etc...
I have an extensive knowledge of windows, I'm so happy with Mac OSX and Apple computers that I feel that if you were to truly give it a try, you too would save yourself thousands of hours a year fixing all your own computers and all your relative's computers whenever there's a problem.
If you want to get yourself a christmas present, tell your non-techie friends to buy a Mac next time they ask you what they should get. You'll save yourself a TON of time and headache, and they will appreciate it and be able to use a computer finally that does "mostly" what it says it'll do... and for the most part, they'll be more productive than they've ever been with a computer.
Weird.... why is it then that other projects like AbiWord, KOffice and the various other open source office utilities haven't taken over the market?
The main problem is OpenOffice isn't 100% compatible with MS Office documents. I have tried using Openoffice as a replacement to MS Word and Excel several times. Each time I end up getting burned because some executive pencil pusher thinks my layout sucked and looked bad. So in my attempt to use OpenOffice, I end up looking like a moron.
SO sure, I can use openoffice for my own documents, and then open it in Word or excel and format it completely when giving it to others, but comon. I don't have enough hours in the day to use something just to "stick it to microsoft", because honestly, the company I work for already has site licenses for Office and all other microsoft products. So in reality my attempt to use Open Office won't ever "stick it to microsoft".
I've been using linux for quite a while, and I like to play around alot with it, but it seems now like its just one short breath away from being an obvious alternative
Yah, I've been on the "linux is one breath behind" team for over 10 years. Trust me. Someday you too will see that the GPL is what holds linux back. Developers that actually want to graduate from school and not be working at a college the rest of their lives need income. Working on Linux is not profitable. Everything you do for linux has to be done for free. I don't understand how Linux will ever rise above software that actually can sustain income to pay their developers a hefty salary.
If there were a Linux fork with the BSD license, you would see progress that might even attract some serious commercial support from Adobe and such.
Linux is an amazing server. Since Linux and all the components uses the GPL I don't imagine anyone ever being able to invest any major amounts of efforts to refine the gui for consumers. Linux is very strong as a server. I really think people should just abandon efforts on trying to force Linux to be a widely used Workstation. It's a great workstation for developers and programmers. Not even close to ready for consumers.
Focus on the server side, consolidate efforts of all the developers to make it perform even better and be more secure and have more features and drivers as a server, not a workstation.
Strange... You'll buy a first gen HDTV that probably doesn't even have HDMI nor a built in HDTV receiver, but you won't buy a blu-ray player to match it. Seriously, buy a PS3, the upscale to 1080p is worth the money. Makes original DVD's look spectacular even if you don't buy blu-ray movies. But for the occasional blu-ray purchase, it'll look stellar.
I was buying bluray's for a while, but ever since the PS3 update enabling upconverting my old DVD's look amazing! You can modify the filters on the upconverting software to remove more noise and other things making it look clean. The default settings are spectacular, but it's interesting to play around with.
If you own an 1080i/p TV, get a PS3. The HDMI + upconverting makes it stellar. And if you want to get a few blurays for the big releases, it looks all that much cleaner.
I've always wondered how "humans" existed for all these years without a toothbrush. You would think they would have cavities and tons of pains. I would guess that a major factor that contributed to the ancient human was that they didn't have sugar treats that would stick to their teeth. Proteins and things can stick to your teeth and cause quite a problem, but not as bad as a bag of skittles and coke can do in a day or two without cleaning the crap off your teeth.
I would think shows like american idol are destroying the music industry. They are putting out so many new artists each year of mediocre talent. All the ones that are runner ups have albums, and the winners get albums, etc. And even the winners are questionably deserving. Sure there's been Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood... but to get those two talented people we've seen well over 80+ american idol's being pushed in the market place. This distracts from other musical artists.
"If I like Apple enough to take a second mortgage on my house to get one, you better believe I would learn to like it." Freaking hilarious... I would imagine that if you would stack up every CHEAP computer and repair / upgrade part that you've purchased over the last 5 years you could have bought 2 or 3 macs. It's called UP FRONT investment instead of paying on the backend. Not to mention the time you've wasted screwing around with putting in motherboards, replacing cases, kernel recompiles, fullfilling dependencies for Linux RPM installations, compiling apps, etc.
I use Mac OSX because I need working applications in all areas ranging from hobbies to advanced video/audio, need a real unix environment (do lots of perl, c, shell scripting), don't want to waste my time fussing reinstalling my operating system all the time nor doing hazardous updates and lastly need solid hardware that doesn't need repairs nor upgrades all the time.
Once you get a mac you get out of the mentality of always needing to upgrade. It's probably because you can't upgrade your mac so you don't think about it, but the other reason is you don't feel the desire to. The machine generally does everything you want it to do and does it just fine from the day you buy it till FOREVER. Resale value of a mac is incredible because a mac no matter how old, is still a mac!
OSX has an uncanny way of upgrading my old hardware at each new release of OSX. I find my OLD hardware runs FASTER with each OSX upgrade. So my old hardware always seems to find a way of being useful and being passed around the family.
Terminal.app is a abomination of a UNIX Terminal. It....well....it SUCKS! Yeah it's nice that it's there, but call me crazy....when I type Ctrl-D it should CLOSE the terminal window! Not show process is complete and THEN make you close the terminal. That's just one gripe. It's a horrible terminal. Oh come on.... I actually like the ^D + CMD+W to close the window. I like the CMD+ARROWKEYS to navigate between windows in terminal. I do think their default TERM setting is annoying, but that's easily correctable and of course I have to set the colors to black & green and set the window size bigger.
I like that when you resize the windows bigger the text will automatically resize correctly to the new width without a bunch of broken up lines.
I dunno, I've been exclusively using unix systems the last 10 years of my life. I don't really feel that any other *Term's really do much of a better job. Terminal.app can be a tad 'slow' if your command is spewing 10's of thousands of lines at a time, but that's not something I try to let happen often.
Something you probably don't realize is that every major TV show you've ever seen and TV commercials are STILL currently shot on Film at 24fps and then converted to regular broadcast formats and edited.
Umm, except for all of the stuff shot on video??? The only stuff shot on video is the cheezy local car dealership commercials and local crap. Anything national is shot on film still.
Anyone mention the GPL yet? I honestly believe that if Linux had a BSD license it would be successful.
Why can't there be a BSD fork of Linux? The GPL insures that people's innovations stay "open" and "free", but also means that someone who wants to try to put real effort and time into the project it means they can't ever make money from working on it.
People have the wrong perspective of money. Someone might want to innovate "linux" and potentially sell their innovations for a few bucks. The purpose isn't always to become rich, but think of it as an opportunity to not have to work every waking minute of their life. To have to work a full time job to pay the bills and then work at night 'innovating' is a disaster. Not a healthy way to live. But just think if you could work full time on innovating a product that you believe in and want to make better (think linux) and then sell it for a few bucks to pay the bills, that would be optimal.
I dunno, that's a lot of words, but the GPL is annoying for anyone trying to actually pay bills and do something with their lives other than stay a student and contribute to a code base that is completely rogue.
I've been asking myself the whole time why they have to create a new standard an use 24fps. Why don't they use 72fps or 48 fps, at least the former should work with many displays (or at least should if their interfaces weren't so braindead). 24fps is the "film look", when things have higher frame rates they are 'too smooth' and don't feel like a movie any more. They feel like a soap opera. Obviously every major movie you've ever seen has been shot on film at 24 fps (sure there are some recent exceptions where they're shot digitally but still 24fps). Something you probably don't realize is that every major TV show you've ever seen and TV commercials are STILL currently shot on Film at 24fps and then converted to regular broadcast formats and edited.
24fps is the look our minds associate as 'professional' and in my experience things shot on film look more legit because of the lenses that are used on the film cameras. Digital cameras are able to capture light almost as well as film does, but the area that is still way off is in the area of lenses. There is just no way a $3k digital camera compares to a $25k film camera and $50k+ of lenses. But the main difference is the lens.
How much bandwidth do they have in rural nigeria? How about Power? So what's a laptop going to do for this 'child'? Be something they could use to prop their legs up on and use for delivering children? That'd be at least useful.
If they used the same money to build more weather resistant dictionaries, encyclopedias or instructional books, and shipped those all over, that might actually be something I'd stand behind. Give them real knowledge, real power, not just a reason to spend money to boost our own economies.
Why do children need laptops anyway? People think that technology is power. Knowledge is power. People think that technology is knowledge. So you hand these kids a laptop and expect them to then become knowledge able. Personally I think that education has gone down hill ever since technology has been allowed in the classrooms.
When doing research in a library (with physical books) you'll probably stumble across 15 different topics and learn several things rather than just immediately finding that paragraph you need to quote about the topic you're researching.
Sure, technology brings precision and ease. But the person driving doesn't learn anything. They just learn what questions to ask and where to find information. I suppose the argument could be made that if you know where to find it, then you know everything. I personally would feel like a moron if I couldn't answer any questions if my internet died.
My parents owned a video store during the beta vs vhs war days.
The reason betamax failed was for two reasons:
1. The tapes had shorter run times than VHS. A long movie would be on two beta tapes. This happened with some VHS movies, but not as often. Consumers were only able to record 60 minutes on a beta tape. For recording Tv shows or movies that ran on TV wasn't good enough for consumers. VHS had 2 hour tapes out the gate.
2. The hardware failure rate was much higher on the betamax machines. For whatever reason, the beta machines had mechanical failures a LOT. Much like the XBox 360 is receiving 33% error rates.
If you recall, video stores originally would 'rent out' the video tape machine along with the movies. Surprisingly, not everyone owned a video tape machine during this war. This war was largely waged through video rental shops. When people would ask about beta vs vhs my dad would say, "Well, beta looks better but has less recording length and our beta machines are always being shipped out to be fixed. VHS doesn't look as good, has longer recording lengths and the stability for your investment seems to be there."
So if you put the Blu-Ray vs HDDVD war in comparison to Betamax vs VHS then it looks like BluRay is going to win.
1. Blu-ray has larger storage capacity and recordable capacity over HDDVD 2. XBox 360's wildly publicised failure rates and return rates and now lack of solid warranty is going to hurt XBox 360. People on the fence are going to goto PS3, just like they went to VHS when they heard their friend's "Beta machine" was in the shop.
XBox vs PS3.... Here's an idea, buy them all! I know several people who have all owned all three... Game Cube, PS2 and Xbox. Early on people always buy one new console, but eventually serious gamers will buy all the consoles. If you owned all three, exclusive titles for each console is better hands down. Sure, if you own one console then most likely you'd only get access to 50% of the games (factoring in the fact that not all games will be exclusive titles). But your overall gaming experience would be "more enjoyable" with only access to 50% of the games with more exclusive titles.
I gotta say, the PS3 as a blu-ray player is excellent. I've talked with several retailers, they want this war to end quickly. They're sick of stocking both formats. They say the blu-ray products move a ton more than the HDDVD stuff. They're fairly confident in a bluray victory.
When I had learned that Microsoft was entering into the video game industry I had several predictions, and they've all happened and we as the consumers are the ones who suffer.
Microsoft has enough cash to drown out any compitition. I felt that they'll come out the gate (no pun intended) with easily hackable hardware and piracy will run rampad. They will show attempts to squash piracy so their 3rd party developers won't be "as pissed' when they realize their software is out in the wild without anyone buying it. Microsoft doesn't really care about piracy, they more care about domiance. Once a market is dominated then they no longer have to focus on anything in particular to keep the customer happy.
Back in the day there were lots of exclusive games for specific consoles. Now between Nintendo, XBox and Playstation, nobody wants to choose a side and miss out on potential market sales. So now they make their games so it's most friendly with all platforms. Exclusive titles is really what the consumers should want. When a game goes exclusive they tailor the game to the console it's being written for with all the extra bells and whisles. When they're developing for all consoles, there is lots of console specific programming that gets lost, so in the end, the consumer suffers.
Sure, sony is evil.... So is microsoft. Bluray rules, the next gen PS3 games coming out are amazing! The PS3 is very smooth and looks better than all the other consoles (in my opinion)...
That sux about the bluetooth modem thing. Probably that way because AT&T feared their network would melt with the surge of iPhone net users... I would hope that over time once the network usage stabalizes that this restriction is lifted.
The night before the launch I noticed several reports of people saying AT&T seemed to have opened up their network quite a bit. I have been searching for any confirmed network speeds on the phone.
Also, would like to know if anyone has been able to make the thing work as a bluetooth modem for internet on a laptop.
I just thought of an example. I've been a huge fan of google and google maps for quite some time. I absolutely hate microsoft. Somebody showed me the cool 'birds eye view' on http://maps.live.com/ (firefox or IE required, safari doesn't work)... it blew me away. I now use this to look around quite a bit. Google tried to combat with the 360 view thing. Honestly, that 360 view thing is completely worthless. Doesn't pull off the 'birds eye view' even close.
I remember when google first came out. Yahoo, msn, altavista, hotbot and several other sites were stronger brands than google. Google's search page was clean and wasn't cluttered with tons of stuff. It returned lots of results and it had the least amount of spam compared to the others. Nobody knew what google was but once I found it I started telling people about it.
I would say the factors for internet site success are: results, interface & word of mouth.
The tricky part about the internet is that if any of those three things change or is bested by another competitor, the flow of traffic will change.
Internet customers are not loyal to brands. They go with the flow. If all of a sudden google became obsessively cluttered or slow response or cluttered with spam, then we'd be ready for something else. And which ever service seemed to step up to the plate then the flow would change to the new place. But since we're all comfortable with 'google' right now, if there's a competitor that is offering a similar service, we have no reason to move the flow of traffic. But if google started being annoying, there are NO loyalties.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone find this location in Google Earth yet? Maybe it would be easy to track by pulling it over the course of a year?
Coming from personal experience, I believe that most of the recent fanaticism for Apple/Mac/OSX stems from the screeching agonizing pain that was wrought from using Microsoft Windows for so many years, helping so many family members with countless rebuilds, various random things happening on the windows box that just "blew it up" and made you slave for hours and hours on end rebuilding it, patching a newly built windows machine and selecting 20 or 30 patches and then select a single patch that says "Oh, you have to install this patch alone, then reboot, then select the others."
I have an extensive knowledge of windows, I'm so happy with Mac OSX and Apple computers that I feel that if you were to truly give it a try, you too would save yourself thousands of hours a year fixing all your own computers and all your relative's computers whenever there's a problem.
If you want to get yourself a christmas present, tell your non-techie friends to buy a Mac next time they ask you what they should get. You'll save yourself a TON of time and headache, and they will appreciate it and be able to use a computer finally that does "mostly" what it says it'll do... and for the most part, they'll be more productive than they've ever been with a computer.
Weird.... why is it then that other projects like AbiWord, KOffice and the various other open source office utilities haven't taken over the market?
The main problem is OpenOffice isn't 100% compatible with MS Office documents. I have tried using Openoffice as a replacement to MS Word and Excel several times. Each time I end up getting burned because some executive pencil pusher thinks my layout sucked and looked bad. So in my attempt to use OpenOffice, I end up looking like a moron.
SO sure, I can use openoffice for my own documents, and then open it in Word or excel and format it completely when giving it to others, but comon. I don't have enough hours in the day to use something just to "stick it to microsoft", because honestly, the company I work for already has site licenses for Office and all other microsoft products. So in reality my attempt to use Open Office won't ever "stick it to microsoft".
Yah, I've been on the "linux is one breath behind" team for over 10 years. Trust me. Someday you too will see that the GPL is what holds linux back. Developers that actually want to graduate from school and not be working at a college the rest of their lives need income. Working on Linux is not profitable. Everything you do for linux has to be done for free. I don't understand how Linux will ever rise above software that actually can sustain income to pay their developers a hefty salary.
If there were a Linux fork with the BSD license, you would see progress that might even attract some serious commercial support from Adobe and such.
Linux is an amazing server. Since Linux and all the components uses the GPL I don't imagine anyone ever being able to invest any major amounts of efforts to refine the gui for consumers. Linux is very strong as a server. I really think people should just abandon efforts on trying to force Linux to be a widely used Workstation. It's a great workstation for developers and programmers. Not even close to ready for consumers.
Focus on the server side, consolidate efforts of all the developers to make it perform even better and be more secure and have more features and drivers as a server, not a workstation.
Strange... You'll buy a first gen HDTV that probably doesn't even have HDMI nor a built in HDTV receiver, but you won't buy a blu-ray player to match it. Seriously, buy a PS3, the upscale to 1080p is worth the money. Makes original DVD's look spectacular even if you don't buy blu-ray movies. But for the occasional blu-ray purchase, it'll look stellar.
They're now doing 4K conversions..
I was buying bluray's for a while, but ever since the PS3 update enabling upconverting my old DVD's look amazing! You can modify the filters on the upconverting software to remove more noise and other things making it look clean. The default settings are spectacular, but it's interesting to play around with.
If you own an 1080i/p TV, get a PS3. The HDMI + upconverting makes it stellar. And if you want to get a few blurays for the big releases, it looks all that much cleaner.
I've always wondered how "humans" existed for all these years without a toothbrush. You would think they would have cavities and tons of pains. I would guess that a major factor that contributed to the ancient human was that they didn't have sugar treats that would stick to their teeth. Proteins and things can stick to your teeth and cause quite a problem, but not as bad as a bag of skittles and coke can do in a day or two without cleaning the crap off your teeth.
I would think shows like american idol are destroying the music industry. They are putting out so many new artists each year of mediocre talent. All the ones that are runner ups have albums, and the winners get albums, etc. And even the winners are questionably deserving. Sure there's been Kelly Clarkson and Carrie Underwood... but to get those two talented people we've seen well over 80+ american idol's being pushed in the market place. This distracts from other musical artists.
I use Mac OSX because I need working applications in all areas ranging from hobbies to advanced video/audio, need a real unix environment (do lots of perl, c, shell scripting), don't want to waste my time fussing reinstalling my operating system all the time nor doing hazardous updates and lastly need solid hardware that doesn't need repairs nor upgrades all the time.
Once you get a mac you get out of the mentality of always needing to upgrade. It's probably because you can't upgrade your mac so you don't think about it, but the other reason is you don't feel the desire to. The machine generally does everything you want it to do and does it just fine from the day you buy it till FOREVER. Resale value of a mac is incredible because a mac no matter how old, is still a mac!
OSX has an uncanny way of upgrading my old hardware at each new release of OSX. I find my OLD hardware runs FASTER with each OSX upgrade. So my old hardware always seems to find a way of being useful and being passed around the family.
I like that when you resize the windows bigger the text will automatically resize correctly to the new width without a bunch of broken up lines.
I dunno, I've been exclusively using unix systems the last 10 years of my life. I don't really feel that any other *Term's really do much of a better job. Terminal.app can be a tad 'slow' if your command is spewing 10's of thousands of lines at a time, but that's not something I try to let happen often.
Umm, except for all of the stuff shot on video??? The only stuff shot on video is the cheezy local car dealership commercials and local crap. Anything national is shot on film still.
Anyone mention the GPL yet? I honestly believe that if Linux had a BSD license it would be successful.
Why can't there be a BSD fork of Linux? The GPL insures that people's innovations stay "open" and "free", but also means that someone who wants to try to put real effort and time into the project it means they can't ever make money from working on it.
People have the wrong perspective of money. Someone might want to innovate "linux" and potentially sell their innovations for a few bucks. The purpose isn't always to become rich, but think of it as an opportunity to not have to work every waking minute of their life. To have to work a full time job to pay the bills and then work at night 'innovating' is a disaster. Not a healthy way to live. But just think if you could work full time on innovating a product that you believe in and want to make better (think linux) and then sell it for a few bucks to pay the bills, that would be optimal.
I dunno, that's a lot of words, but the GPL is annoying for anyone trying to actually pay bills and do something with their lives other than stay a student and contribute to a code base that is completely rogue.
24fps is the look our minds associate as 'professional' and in my experience things shot on film look more legit because of the lenses that are used on the film cameras. Digital cameras are able to capture light almost as well as film does, but the area that is still way off is in the area of lenses. There is just no way a $3k digital camera compares to a $25k film camera and $50k+ of lenses. But the main difference is the lens.
How much bandwidth do they have in rural nigeria? How about Power? So what's a laptop going to do for this 'child'? Be something they could use to prop their legs up on and use for delivering children? That'd be at least useful.
If they used the same money to build more weather resistant dictionaries, encyclopedias or instructional books, and shipped those all over, that might actually be something I'd stand behind. Give them real knowledge, real power, not just a reason to spend money to boost our own economies.
Why do children need laptops anyway? People think that technology is power. Knowledge is power. People think that technology is knowledge. So you hand these kids a laptop and expect them to then become knowledge able. Personally I think that education has gone down hill ever since technology has been allowed in the classrooms.
When doing research in a library (with physical books) you'll probably stumble across 15 different topics and learn several things rather than just immediately finding that paragraph you need to quote about the topic you're researching.
Sure, technology brings precision and ease. But the person driving doesn't learn anything. They just learn what questions to ask and where to find information. I suppose the argument could be made that if you know where to find it, then you know everything. I personally would feel like a moron if I couldn't answer any questions if my internet died.
My parents owned a video store during the beta vs vhs war days.
The reason betamax failed was for two reasons:
1. The tapes had shorter run times than VHS. A long movie would be on two beta tapes. This happened with some VHS movies, but not as often. Consumers were only able to record 60 minutes on a beta tape. For recording Tv shows or movies that ran on TV wasn't good enough for consumers. VHS had 2 hour tapes out the gate.
2. The hardware failure rate was much higher on the betamax machines. For whatever reason, the beta machines had mechanical failures a LOT. Much like the XBox 360 is receiving 33% error rates.
If you recall, video stores originally would 'rent out' the video tape machine along with the movies. Surprisingly, not everyone owned a video tape machine during this war. This war was largely waged through video rental shops. When people would ask about beta vs vhs my dad would say, "Well, beta looks better but has less recording length and our beta machines are always being shipped out to be fixed. VHS doesn't look as good, has longer recording lengths and the stability for your investment seems to be there."
So if you put the Blu-Ray vs HDDVD war in comparison to Betamax vs VHS then it looks like BluRay is going to win.
1. Blu-ray has larger storage capacity and recordable capacity over HDDVD
2. XBox 360's wildly publicised failure rates and return rates and now lack of solid warranty is going to hurt XBox 360. People on the fence are going to goto PS3, just like they went to VHS when they heard their friend's "Beta machine" was in the shop.
XBox vs PS3 .... Here's an idea, buy them all! I know several people who have all owned all three ... Game Cube, PS2 and Xbox. Early on people always buy one new console, but eventually serious gamers will buy all the consoles. If you owned all three, exclusive titles for each console is better hands down. Sure, if you own one console then most likely you'd only get access to 50% of the games (factoring in the fact that not all games will be exclusive titles). But your overall gaming experience would be "more enjoyable" with only access to 50% of the games with more exclusive titles.
I gotta say, the PS3 as a blu-ray player is excellent. I've talked with several retailers, they want this war to end quickly. They're sick of stocking both formats. They say the blu-ray products move a ton more than the HDDVD stuff. They're fairly confident in a bluray victory.
.... So is microsoft. Bluray rules, the next gen PS3 games coming out are amazing! The PS3 is very smooth and looks better than all the other consoles (in my opinion)...
When I had learned that Microsoft was entering into the video game industry I had several predictions, and they've all happened and we as the consumers are the ones who suffer.
Microsoft has enough cash to drown out any compitition. I felt that they'll come out the gate (no pun intended) with easily hackable hardware and piracy will run rampad. They will show attempts to squash piracy so their 3rd party developers won't be "as pissed' when they realize their software is out in the wild without anyone buying it. Microsoft doesn't really care about piracy, they more care about domiance. Once a market is dominated then they no longer have to focus on anything in particular to keep the customer happy.
Back in the day there were lots of exclusive games for specific consoles. Now between Nintendo, XBox and Playstation, nobody wants to choose a side and miss out on potential market sales. So now they make their games so it's most friendly with all platforms. Exclusive titles is really what the consumers should want. When a game goes exclusive they tailor the game to the console it's being written for with all the extra bells and whisles. When they're developing for all consoles, there is lots of console specific programming that gets lost, so in the end, the consumer suffers.
Sure, sony is evil
That sux about the bluetooth modem thing. Probably that way because AT&T feared their network would melt with the surge of iPhone net users... I would hope that over time once the network usage stabalizes that this restriction is lifted.
The night before the launch I noticed several reports of people saying AT&T seemed to have opened up their network quite a bit. I have been searching for any confirmed network speeds on the phone.
Also, would like to know if anyone has been able to make the thing work as a bluetooth modem for internet on a laptop.
I just thought of an example. I've been a huge fan of google and google maps for quite some time. I absolutely hate microsoft. Somebody showed me the cool 'birds eye view' on http://maps.live.com/ (firefox or IE required, safari doesn't work) ... it blew me away. I now use this to look around quite a bit. Google tried to combat with the 360 view thing. Honestly, that 360 view thing is completely worthless. Doesn't pull off the 'birds eye view' even close.
I remember when google first came out. Yahoo, msn, altavista, hotbot and several other sites were stronger brands than google. Google's search page was clean and wasn't cluttered with tons of stuff. It returned lots of results and it had the least amount of spam compared to the others. Nobody knew what google was but once I found it I started telling people about it.
I would say the factors for internet site success are: results, interface & word of mouth.
The tricky part about the internet is that if any of those three things change or is bested by another competitor, the flow of traffic will change.
Internet customers are not loyal to brands. They go with the flow. If all of a sudden google became obsessively cluttered or slow response or cluttered with spam, then we'd be ready for something else. And which ever service seemed to step up to the plate then the flow would change to the new place. But since we're all comfortable with 'google' right now, if there's a competitor that is offering a similar service, we have no reason to move the flow of traffic. But if google started being annoying, there are NO loyalties.
Ok, well, "TheGimp" and various other freestuff is also available on the Mac. So both parties can be happy on the mac.