Really? That's the first I've heard of Apple supporting USB 3.0. Last I heard, they decided to go the Thunderbolt route, despite the almost entire lack of Thunderbolt peripherals. (Even the AC who listed Thunderbolt-compatible peripherals only came up with RAID enclosures - not something you'd generally carry around with a laptop - and, hilariously enough, a Thunderbolt hub to connect even more of those RAID enclosures.)
You mean besides the whole OS, all Apple software (like Safari and Final Cut X)
First off, no one is going to use a laptop for serious video work. Even if they did, the 768GB max configurable storage space for the MBPR (which will add another $500 to the price, so it's now a $3500 laptop) ensures that no one would do serious video work with the MBPR at all. Hell, the limited storage space means no photographer can use the MBPR either, which makes the only other useful use of the retinal display I can think of entirely useless as well.
Secondly, just because Safari supports retinal, doesn't mean websites do. Without website support, all you get is high-res text - except every browser out there already does subpixel rendering, so you won't notice that, either.
So that leaves you with what, the file system view in high-res? Woo-hoo?
and a number of third party apps (since mostly you just need a few new assets and a recompile to support it).
But no specifics, I see. The majority of apps don't, because 1) why bother recompiling something that works? and 2) why bother offering support for something that a tiny fraction of your user base can even use? Especially when it will cost you $3000 to test to make sure there are no bugs in retinal mode, and your app will work just fine if left alone?
Oh, and related to an earlier post, now that the MBPR is in stores and you can actually try them out, I checked: you can't change the display resolution. There are no resolution controls in the display preferences. They're just entirely missing. So you can't even use that "amazing" resolution to display anything other than effectively 1440x900.
It's also worth mentioning that the new MacBook Pro Retina is really just a 15" MacBook Air. Like the Air, it's missing ethernet and a DVD drive. Like the Air, it has a thin form factor and is non-upgradeable. I think the only ports they added over the Air is a second Thunderbolt port (that you can use with literally nothing) and an HDMI port.
I'm not sure why Apple decided to go with the "Pro" brand, but the MacBook Pro Retina isn't "Pro" so much as it is a larger Air with a different display.
All the complaints that can be aimed at the Air (it's a slow, useless laptop that's only selling point is being pointlessly thin) can be aimed at the MBPR. Oh, and with the higher DPI screen that nothing bothers to support. (Because who the fuck is going to spend $3000 and redraw all their assets for some tiny fraction of users?) So there's that, too.
IMHO one of the MAIN reasons why people will fail with Agile is that they ignore the requirement to have the customer/stake-holders right there in the process.
That reminds me of an "Agile" project I was on. The top-level project leader declared we were going to do Agile.
He then refused to answer requests for clarification on design requirements and refused to allow any of the developers to talk to the actual users, insisting that all user communication go through him. (While refusing to actually pass on questions to users or, really, answer any question we asked.)
So we had a continuous integration system updating the demo system with every commit - a demo that no one ever used. But, hey, if anyone ever checked in a commit that failed to compile, we knew that at least.
In the end, the system didn't quite do whatever it was it was supposed to do. Imagine that.
Incidentally (and not surprisingly) you have the same issue with the retinal iPad displays.
The next time you see a display at your favorite big box store (or wherever you have iPads on display), walk up to it, go to the Home screen and flick the icons back and worth, and watch the image tear like crazy.
Assuming it has web access, try opening a webpage and do the same thing - the tearing is probably more noticeable in Mobile Safari.
If you wondered how on earth they managed to get a graphics processor capable of dealing with a 2048x1536 display into a tablet, the answer is simple: they didn't.
Here, I'll summarize it for you: "I'm a giant Final Fantasy Fanboy and will buy everything that Square Enix makes! Well, glorious Square Enix Nippon, not that western crap like Deus Ex Human Revolution or Quantum Conundrum."
Here's my review: Are you a giant Final Fantasy music fan? Like, enormous? Could you listen to nothing but Final Fantasy music for days on end? Congratulations, this game is for you! If you're only a minor Final Fantasy fan and enjoy the music, this game is probably worth $10-$20. Everyone else, don't even bother looking at it. The game is literally nothing but Final Fantasy fan-wank.
This review has obviously been written by a Final Fantasy fanboy.
Well, yeah. There's no reason to even consider Theatrhythm unless you're a Final Fantasy fan - of the complete series at that, not just a single game. If you're not, or only like a few of the games, there's no reason to even consider it. Hell, if you're a Final Fantasy fan but not a fan of Final Fantasy music, this game is not for you, either.
Seriously - this is a game that's for Final Fantasy music fans to the point of excluding everyone else. There's no reason to play it unless you like the entire series and want to listen to music from the entire series. There's a reason rhythm games aren't popular any more - they get pretty boring after a while, especially if you're not playing music you actually like. (And on that note, even as someone who in general likes Final Fantasy music, there's a good number of tracks you are required to play that I can't stand. Like the entirety of Final Fantasy XI.)
I'd also have to question the eight hour play time in the review. I S-ranked all the songs on Basic and defeated Chaos in the game, and I've yet to hit eight hours play time. Once you do that, you can replay the songs on harder difficulty levels to potentially unlock more characters and "collector cards." Yay?
I mean, I'm one of the few people who probably is in Square Enix's target market, and I'm already bored with the game. I can't imagine recommending this game to other people at $40, even if they were a huge Final Fantasy music fan.
Yeah, but this would have been a DS game, not a DSiware (or whatever it's called) downloadable game. And those can't really do DLC, because they have to run on the older DSes. (I suppose they could if they stuck a bunch of flash in the cart, but that would probably drive the game price up.)
But other than that, the animation and graphics are simple enough that the DS could definitely handle them. And given that Square Enix has managed to do full CGI cutscenes on the DS, there's no reason the videos used in Theatrhythm couldn't have been done on the DS. They might not have looked as nice, but it would hit a wider audience.
Why add 3D perspective and a "whacky stylus" to a game that does not need it?
This is another game where you can challenge yourself to see how long you can keep the 3D turned on until your eyes bug out and you're forced to turn it off. Since you need to pay attention to the music prompts, the 3D effect actually makes it more difficult, because the background elements are at a different depth by the exact same focus. It looks really weird and I had to turn it off fairly quickly.
As for what this game does that it can't do on the DS? My guess: DLC. That's it. Everything else can be done on the DS. That's right, the reason they're targeting the 3DS and not the DS is so that they can charge you extra money to buy the rest of the game.
You can still play regular DS games on a 3DS right?
Kind of? The problem is that the 3DS screen is a higher resolution, but not 2x as big. So you have two choices: play the games in "blur-o-vision" with the DS screen bilinearly resized to fit, or play the games in "squint-o-vision" where they take up a small portion of the screen. Since I still have my DSi, I just use that for DS gaming rather than try using the 3DS's backwards compatibility.
Wait, this game was $40? I preordered it a while ago, and after playing it I'd say it's well worth $20 if you're a huge Final Fantasy fan. If you're not, then just don't bother. The music isn't good enough if you don't get a nostalgia kick, and the gameplay is honestly pretty boring.
If you are, wait for it to hit the bargain bin. Even better, wait for Theatrhythm Deluxe Edition in a year or so where they include the entire game rather than parceling it out via DLC. (Oh yes, they're doing that.)
And iOS 6 builds the Facebook apps into iOS, so you won't be able to remove it OR deny it access to your contact information, because it will literally be part of Contacts.app!
The guy was using some function in what appears to me as the wrong way (failed to validate inputs) and was relying on some edge-case behaviour. Now this edge-case behaviour has changed and made the mistake in his code more apparent.
One of the things I hate about PHP was the number of times that calling a function with bad data "just works" even though it really shouldn't. (Primarily because it effectively dumps the checking onto you.) That looks like a perfect example - if you try and format a thing that isn't a number, it "works" and returns 0. Huh? That's not right. That should be an error.
And now, it is! It notices the error, and returns NULL instead of pretending that a string is a number. Great!
Someone elsewhere in this thread was complaining about mysql_escape_string and mysql_real_escape_string, and how they should have just fixed mysql_escape_string. It sounds like the person filing the bug report would have rather they created a real_number_format function rather than fix a bug in the existing number_format function.
I don't know, for some reason, that sounds to me like the start of the graphics buffering equivalent of the "blades per razor" war.
So iOS 6.0 will all of a sudden add quad-buffered graphics for extra-extra smoothness, which means that Google will have to answer with "fuck it, Android Killer chocolate cake uses five buffers!"
But seriously, does triple-buffering really offer much over traditional double-buffering? I guess it might help if the process doing the animation gets swapped out, so there's an additional frame to fall back on?
So I guess you didn't really think through that "non user serviceable" part very well.
Well, let's see, the hard drive in the new MacBook Pro is:
1. In a case that's screwed shut with patented, proprietary screws. 2. Once you get that off, is glued in place. 3. Once you unglue it, is soldered to the motherboard. 4. And, finally, assuming you know how to unsolder something, is a proprietary, custom, undocumented drive anyway.
Yeah, that's definitely a completely user serviceable part. Assuming you have a proprietary screwdriver, electronic-safe solvent, and a soldering iron.
Face it, you're never going to see aftermarket parts for the new MacBook Pro. Enjoy paying twice what it's worth.
I mean, you do still recommend buying the latest MacBook Pro, but not any other SSD-based laptops, right? Oh, but you're not going to answer that, are you.
Funny you would post in this thread - given that the article points out that SSD prices have fallen to about $1/GB.
How much does it cost to add 256GB of storage to the new, non-user-serviceable MacBook Pro with non-standard SSD drives? Or to the existing MacBook Air models? (For those who don't know, SuperKendall is an Apple fanboy.)
The answer is $500, or $1.95/GB.
Which means that the only SSD in the article more expensive than a proprietary, non-user upgradeable Apple SSD is an old 40GB Intel one.
And people say Apple laptops aren't vastly overpriced.
Apple introduce a feature and immediately figure out a way to tell the world how that feature is useful
This is something Apple really does deserve a lot of credit for. When the iPhone launched, their commercials were essentially little 30 second tutorials on how to use the fucking thing. Same with the iPhone 4S - their commercials show people using Siri, creating a little tutorial on the commands you can use with Siri and what they do. Their ads are literally little user stories and tutorials on how to use the device and how it enhances your life.
So if you hand someone an iPhone, chances are, they'll know how to use it. Not because the interface is intuitive, but because they've seen a 30 second tutorial on it 50 thousand times.
As opposed to other companies' ads, which basically boast features like "higher megapixels than iPhone" and "you can take pictures while taking a video!" (That's a desired feature? I've never wanted to do that.) And while it's still a user story, the user in the ad I'm thinking of is skydiving, whereas Apple has Zooey Whatshername in her pajamas wandering around her house using her iPhone. One's a bit easier to relate to for most people.
Considering that the NVidia drivers consistently hard-freeze the machine and force either a remote "ssh sudo reboot" (if you're lucky) or a complete reset - I'm not sure I really want their "consistent experience."
Seriously, it's been my experience that more often than not the Linux NVidia drivers crash after running for a day or so, leaving you with a completely non-responsive desktop. I had to revert to Nouveau, which gives me a functional machine with no pretty graphics.
This has been my experience with the Linux NVidia driver for years across multiple machines and cards, for probably the past decade or so.
So, no, I'm not sure they're worried about Linux speed exceeding Windows speed. I'd say they're more worried about people making Linux drivers that actually fucking work when they've proven themselves completely incapable of doing so.
In my current laptop, my original battery started to bulge after two years. I walked into an Apple store, patiently waiting 30 minutes to see someone at the genius bar, and received my complimentary replacement battery.
Where the hell did you do that? They told me to fuck off, because I hadn't bought the Apple Care extended warranty. Or did you but the extended warranty?
How long did you use them? Because the battery will die, eventually. Apple claims you've got, at best, three to four years before the battery is basically useless. If you only kept the 20 MacBooks running for like two years each, then congrats, you got managed to get lucky and dodging the "battery starts to bulge" problem that's been plaguing Apple.
And if the selling point to a MacBook is that it'll last longer than a cheaper Windows laptop, the battery being unreplaceable is definitely an issue. (If the selling point is instead "shiny high-DPI display," on the other hand...)
Uh, yes it does. My old MacBook had the battery die after two years. I had to replace it ($150 mail order from Apple) and the laptop still works fine otherwise, despite being nearly four years old by now. (Oh, and I upgraded the hard drive. Something else you can't do any more.)
No, not really 2880x1800. Make no mistake, this is not a 2880x1800 display, at least in the sense that most people would think. It's effectively a 1440x900 display, where each pixel is actually four.
By which I mean that if you currently can fit 40 lines of code in a single editor window on your existing 1440x900 display, on this new 2880x1800 "retina" display, you will be able to fit those same 40 lines of code, just with extra clarity.
Now don't get me wrong, the increase in pixel density is a good thing, but calling it a "2880x1800" is incredibly misleading (albeit technically accurate). You won't fit any more actual data, the same data you can currently fit will just have a higher resolution.
This instance isn't quite as bad, because it's only the people of Rhode Island who were screwed. Maybe next time they'll elect a better governor.
They already did - the current governor was against the 38 Studios deal from the get-go. It's one of the reasons he's going to let the studio just die instead of pursue the fallacy of sunk costs.
Unfortunately he's still stuck with the fallout from the idiots who did give $75 million to a company trying to enter a saturated market with no actual shipping products. (The deal predated Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.)
That's only the national ones. If you use a local one, and make it animate, they use Flash. For example, the Boston area radar loop.
Which is actually a step up - they used to be a Java applet. The Flash version is a massive improvement. Of course, there's no reason why they couldn't be done using HTML4 (no need anything HTML5 adds), but they're not.
Except the mice Apple makes all have one physical button (and play dumb-ass horrid "touch sensitive" tricks for the right button, which barely works) and they're all really shitty mice. Which makes them one-button shitmice.
The Mac at work I have I use a Logitech mouse with. It's pretty nice, minus the lack of auto-scroll support.
Trackpads aren't mice, but I will give Apple credit for making the most useable trackpad I've ever used. Well, not Apple, but the company that they bought that actually created them and used to sell them for Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
They added USB 3.0. Perhaps you've heard of it?
Really? That's the first I've heard of Apple supporting USB 3.0. Last I heard, they decided to go the Thunderbolt route, despite the almost entire lack of Thunderbolt peripherals. (Even the AC who listed Thunderbolt-compatible peripherals only came up with RAID enclosures - not something you'd generally carry around with a laptop - and, hilariously enough, a Thunderbolt hub to connect even more of those RAID enclosures.)
You mean besides the whole OS, all Apple software (like Safari and Final Cut X)
First off, no one is going to use a laptop for serious video work. Even if they did, the 768GB max configurable storage space for the MBPR (which will add another $500 to the price, so it's now a $3500 laptop) ensures that no one would do serious video work with the MBPR at all. Hell, the limited storage space means no photographer can use the MBPR either, which makes the only other useful use of the retinal display I can think of entirely useless as well.
Secondly, just because Safari supports retinal, doesn't mean websites do. Without website support, all you get is high-res text - except every browser out there already does subpixel rendering, so you won't notice that, either.
So that leaves you with what, the file system view in high-res? Woo-hoo?
and a number of third party apps (since mostly you just need a few new assets and a recompile to support it).
But no specifics, I see. The majority of apps don't, because 1) why bother recompiling something that works? and 2) why bother offering support for something that a tiny fraction of your user base can even use? Especially when it will cost you $3000 to test to make sure there are no bugs in retinal mode, and your app will work just fine if left alone?
Oh, and related to an earlier post, now that the MBPR is in stores and you can actually try them out, I checked: you can't change the display resolution. There are no resolution controls in the display preferences. They're just entirely missing. So you can't even use that "amazing" resolution to display anything other than effectively 1440x900.
It's also worth mentioning that the new MacBook Pro Retina is really just a 15" MacBook Air. Like the Air, it's missing ethernet and a DVD drive. Like the Air, it has a thin form factor and is non-upgradeable. I think the only ports they added over the Air is a second Thunderbolt port (that you can use with literally nothing) and an HDMI port.
I'm not sure why Apple decided to go with the "Pro" brand, but the MacBook Pro Retina isn't "Pro" so much as it is a larger Air with a different display.
All the complaints that can be aimed at the Air (it's a slow, useless laptop that's only selling point is being pointlessly thin) can be aimed at the MBPR. Oh, and with the higher DPI screen that nothing bothers to support. (Because who the fuck is going to spend $3000 and redraw all their assets for some tiny fraction of users?) So there's that, too.
IMHO one of the MAIN reasons why people will fail with Agile is that they ignore the requirement to have the customer/stake-holders right there in the process.
That reminds me of an "Agile" project I was on. The top-level project leader declared we were going to do Agile.
He then refused to answer requests for clarification on design requirements and refused to allow any of the developers to talk to the actual users, insisting that all user communication go through him. (While refusing to actually pass on questions to users or, really, answer any question we asked.)
So we had a continuous integration system updating the demo system with every commit - a demo that no one ever used. But, hey, if anyone ever checked in a commit that failed to compile, we knew that at least.
In the end, the system didn't quite do whatever it was it was supposed to do. Imagine that.
Incidentally (and not surprisingly) you have the same issue with the retinal iPad displays.
The next time you see a display at your favorite big box store (or wherever you have iPads on display), walk up to it, go to the Home screen and flick the icons back and worth, and watch the image tear like crazy.
Assuming it has web access, try opening a webpage and do the same thing - the tearing is probably more noticeable in Mobile Safari.
If you wondered how on earth they managed to get a graphics processor capable of dealing with a 2048x1536 display into a tablet, the answer is simple: they didn't.
Here, I'll summarize it for you: "I'm a giant Final Fantasy Fanboy and will buy everything that Square Enix makes! Well, glorious Square Enix Nippon, not that western crap like Deus Ex Human Revolution or Quantum Conundrum."
Here's my review: Are you a giant Final Fantasy music fan? Like, enormous? Could you listen to nothing but Final Fantasy music for days on end? Congratulations, this game is for you! If you're only a minor Final Fantasy fan and enjoy the music, this game is probably worth $10-$20. Everyone else, don't even bother looking at it. The game is literally nothing but Final Fantasy fan-wank.
But then you'd miss out on all the great extra features like ... um ... virtual collector cards with rare foil versions?
This review has obviously been written by a Final Fantasy fanboy.
Well, yeah. There's no reason to even consider Theatrhythm unless you're a Final Fantasy fan - of the complete series at that, not just a single game. If you're not, or only like a few of the games, there's no reason to even consider it. Hell, if you're a Final Fantasy fan but not a fan of Final Fantasy music, this game is not for you, either.
Seriously - this is a game that's for Final Fantasy music fans to the point of excluding everyone else. There's no reason to play it unless you like the entire series and want to listen to music from the entire series. There's a reason rhythm games aren't popular any more - they get pretty boring after a while, especially if you're not playing music you actually like. (And on that note, even as someone who in general likes Final Fantasy music, there's a good number of tracks you are required to play that I can't stand. Like the entirety of Final Fantasy XI.)
I'd also have to question the eight hour play time in the review. I S-ranked all the songs on Basic and defeated Chaos in the game, and I've yet to hit eight hours play time. Once you do that, you can replay the songs on harder difficulty levels to potentially unlock more characters and "collector cards." Yay?
I mean, I'm one of the few people who probably is in Square Enix's target market, and I'm already bored with the game. I can't imagine recommending this game to other people at $40, even if they were a huge Final Fantasy music fan.
Yeah, but this would have been a DS game, not a DSiware (or whatever it's called) downloadable game. And those can't really do DLC, because they have to run on the older DSes. (I suppose they could if they stuck a bunch of flash in the cart, but that would probably drive the game price up.)
But other than that, the animation and graphics are simple enough that the DS could definitely handle them. And given that Square Enix has managed to do full CGI cutscenes on the DS, there's no reason the videos used in Theatrhythm couldn't have been done on the DS. They might not have looked as nice, but it would hit a wider audience.
Why add 3D perspective and a "whacky stylus" to a game that does not need it?
This is another game where you can challenge yourself to see how long you can keep the 3D turned on until your eyes bug out and you're forced to turn it off. Since you need to pay attention to the music prompts, the 3D effect actually makes it more difficult, because the background elements are at a different depth by the exact same focus. It looks really weird and I had to turn it off fairly quickly.
As for what this game does that it can't do on the DS? My guess: DLC. That's it. Everything else can be done on the DS. That's right, the reason they're targeting the 3DS and not the DS is so that they can charge you extra money to buy the rest of the game.
You can still play regular DS games on a 3DS right?
Kind of? The problem is that the 3DS screen is a higher resolution, but not 2x as big. So you have two choices: play the games in "blur-o-vision" with the DS screen bilinearly resized to fit, or play the games in "squint-o-vision" where they take up a small portion of the screen. Since I still have my DSi, I just use that for DS gaming rather than try using the 3DS's backwards compatibility.
Wait, this game was $40? I preordered it a while ago, and after playing it I'd say it's well worth $20 if you're a huge Final Fantasy fan. If you're not, then just don't bother. The music isn't good enough if you don't get a nostalgia kick, and the gameplay is honestly pretty boring.
If you are, wait for it to hit the bargain bin. Even better, wait for Theatrhythm Deluxe Edition in a year or so where they include the entire game rather than parceling it out via DLC. (Oh yes, they're doing that.)
And iOS 6 builds the Facebook apps into iOS, so you won't be able to remove it OR deny it access to your contact information, because it will literally be part of Contacts.app!
Wait, shit.
The guy was using some function in what appears to me as the wrong way (failed to validate inputs) and was relying on some edge-case behaviour. Now this edge-case behaviour has changed and made the mistake in his code more apparent.
One of the things I hate about PHP was the number of times that calling a function with bad data "just works" even though it really shouldn't. (Primarily because it effectively dumps the checking onto you.) That looks like a perfect example - if you try and format a thing that isn't a number, it "works" and returns 0. Huh? That's not right. That should be an error.
And now, it is! It notices the error, and returns NULL instead of pretending that a string is a number. Great!
Someone elsewhere in this thread was complaining about mysql_escape_string and mysql_real_escape_string, and how they should have just fixed mysql_escape_string. It sounds like the person filing the bug report would have rather they created a real_number_format function rather than fix a bug in the existing number_format function.
I don't know, for some reason, that sounds to me like the start of the graphics buffering equivalent of the "blades per razor" war.
So iOS 6.0 will all of a sudden add quad-buffered graphics for extra-extra smoothness, which means that Google will have to answer with "fuck it, Android Killer chocolate cake uses five buffers!"
But seriously, does triple-buffering really offer much over traditional double-buffering? I guess it might help if the process doing the animation gets swapped out, so there's an additional frame to fall back on?
So I guess you didn't really think through that "non user serviceable" part very well.
Well, let's see, the hard drive in the new MacBook Pro is:
1. In a case that's screwed shut with patented, proprietary screws.
2. Once you get that off, is glued in place.
3. Once you unglue it, is soldered to the motherboard.
4. And, finally, assuming you know how to unsolder something, is a proprietary, custom, undocumented drive anyway.
Yeah, that's definitely a completely user serviceable part. Assuming you have a proprietary screwdriver, electronic-safe solvent, and a soldering iron.
Face it, you're never going to see aftermarket parts for the new MacBook Pro. Enjoy paying twice what it's worth.
I mean, you do still recommend buying the latest MacBook Pro, but not any other SSD-based laptops, right? Oh, but you're not going to answer that, are you.
Funny you would post in this thread - given that the article points out that SSD prices have fallen to about $1/GB.
How much does it cost to add 256GB of storage to the new, non-user-serviceable MacBook Pro with non-standard SSD drives? Or to the existing MacBook Air models? (For those who don't know, SuperKendall is an Apple fanboy.)
The answer is $500, or $1.95/GB.
Which means that the only SSD in the article more expensive than a proprietary, non-user upgradeable Apple SSD is an old 40GB Intel one.
And people say Apple laptops aren't vastly overpriced.
Apple introduce a feature and immediately figure out a way to tell the world how that feature is useful
This is something Apple really does deserve a lot of credit for. When the iPhone launched, their commercials were essentially little 30 second tutorials on how to use the fucking thing. Same with the iPhone 4S - their commercials show people using Siri, creating a little tutorial on the commands you can use with Siri and what they do. Their ads are literally little user stories and tutorials on how to use the device and how it enhances your life.
So if you hand someone an iPhone, chances are, they'll know how to use it. Not because the interface is intuitive, but because they've seen a 30 second tutorial on it 50 thousand times.
As opposed to other companies' ads, which basically boast features like "higher megapixels than iPhone" and "you can take pictures while taking a video!" (That's a desired feature? I've never wanted to do that.) And while it's still a user story, the user in the ad I'm thinking of is skydiving, whereas Apple has Zooey Whatshername in her pajamas wandering around her house using her iPhone. One's a bit easier to relate to for most people.
Considering that the NVidia drivers consistently hard-freeze the machine and force either a remote "ssh sudo reboot" (if you're lucky) or a complete reset - I'm not sure I really want their "consistent experience."
Seriously, it's been my experience that more often than not the Linux NVidia drivers crash after running for a day or so, leaving you with a completely non-responsive desktop. I had to revert to Nouveau, which gives me a functional machine with no pretty graphics.
This has been my experience with the Linux NVidia driver for years across multiple machines and cards, for probably the past decade or so.
So, no, I'm not sure they're worried about Linux speed exceeding Windows speed. I'd say they're more worried about people making Linux drivers that actually fucking work when they've proven themselves completely incapable of doing so.
In my current laptop, my original battery started to bulge after two years. I walked into an Apple store, patiently waiting 30 minutes to see someone at the genius bar, and received my complimentary replacement battery.
Where the hell did you do that? They told me to fuck off, because I hadn't bought the Apple Care extended warranty. Or did you but the extended warranty?
How long did you use them? Because the battery will die, eventually. Apple claims you've got, at best, three to four years before the battery is basically useless. If you only kept the 20 MacBooks running for like two years each, then congrats, you got managed to get lucky and dodging the "battery starts to bulge" problem that's been plaguing Apple.
And if the selling point to a MacBook is that it'll last longer than a cheaper Windows laptop, the battery being unreplaceable is definitely an issue. (If the selling point is instead "shiny high-DPI display," on the other hand...)
Uh, yes it does. My old MacBook had the battery die after two years. I had to replace it ($150 mail order from Apple) and the laptop still works fine otherwise, despite being nearly four years old by now. (Oh, and I upgraded the hard drive. Something else you can't do any more.)
Having a non-replaceable battery, especially given that it's Apple, is absolutely a deal-killer.
No, not really 2880x1800. Make no mistake, this is not a 2880x1800 display, at least in the sense that most people would think. It's effectively a 1440x900 display, where each pixel is actually four.
By which I mean that if you currently can fit 40 lines of code in a single editor window on your existing 1440x900 display, on this new 2880x1800 "retina" display, you will be able to fit those same 40 lines of code, just with extra clarity.
Now don't get me wrong, the increase in pixel density is a good thing, but calling it a "2880x1800" is incredibly misleading (albeit technically accurate). You won't fit any more actual data, the same data you can currently fit will just have a higher resolution.
This instance isn't quite as bad, because it's only the people of Rhode Island who were screwed. Maybe next time they'll elect a better governor.
They already did - the current governor was against the 38 Studios deal from the get-go. It's one of the reasons he's going to let the studio just die instead of pursue the fallacy of sunk costs.
Unfortunately he's still stuck with the fallout from the idiots who did give $75 million to a company trying to enter a saturated market with no actual shipping products. (The deal predated Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning.)
From the looks of things, they're nothing but animated GIFs.
That's only the national ones. If you use a local one, and make it animate, they use Flash. For example, the Boston area radar loop.
Which is actually a step up - they used to be a Java applet. The Flash version is a massive improvement. Of course, there's no reason why they couldn't be done using HTML4 (no need anything HTML5 adds), but they're not.
Start a petition for that?
I honestly really like that idea.
Who wants to start a White House petition calling for Obama to resign? I'd love to see that, just for the comedy value.
Except the mice Apple makes all have one physical button (and play dumb-ass horrid "touch sensitive" tricks for the right button, which barely works) and they're all really shitty mice. Which makes them one-button shitmice.
The Mac at work I have I use a Logitech mouse with. It's pretty nice, minus the lack of auto-scroll support.
Trackpads aren't mice, but I will give Apple credit for making the most useable trackpad I've ever used. Well, not Apple, but the company that they bought that actually created them and used to sell them for Windows.