Myst, Spectre VR, OIDS, Vette, Falcon MC... There were lots of Mac-first games, but back in those days you needed a decked out monster of a Mac to play them. The crappy Mac Classics and Mac LCs in most schools generally didn't have enough horsepower to play much more than that 3D air hockey game.
It's late and I've been typing fast, so perhaps I wasn't very clear.
I too have flown both classes and on many airlines. When I've flown first class it has been on vacation with my girlfriend and we paid for the upgrades with our frequent flyer miles. I normally fly coach, and I normally shop for the best deal I can find. I'm one of those asses that often brings his own food. I usually read and listed to MP3s via my tiny little flash based player. I leave my laptop closed up. To me, an airliner is not much more than a glorified bus with wings. But I do think the customer service is severly lacking. I've found British Airways to be a *MUCH* more friendly, accomidating, and pleasently surprising airline.
If I had to rank my experiences with the airlines, I would put Southwest somewhere in the middle. They're run by some smart people and have made some very smart moves, but they're no JetBlue. I didn't mean to say that SW is a "dirty" airline. But their interior color scheme sure looks a lot cleaner than the wide open spances of white and gray you see on Northwest's planes. Their use of leather on all seats also makes it much easier to clean. It was a smart choice on their part.
My whole point is that while there is only so much you can do to improve the experience of flying in a little aluminum tube, I really think the airlines could do more to make it a pleasent experience.
I personally wish there was a way to blend the service of JetBlue with the comfort of the Avro RJ85 planes that Mesaba flys for Northwest's "AirLink" regional network. Unlike the 17-18" inch wide seats most Boeing, Airbus, and Embraer airliners use in coach, the Avro has 20" seats, plus a little more headroom. Impossible, I know, but I can dream.
Song and JetBlue are great. Unless you want to fly to Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Toronto, Montreal, Anchorage, Honolulu, Tokyo, London, Paris, or Berlin...
(And really, if SONG can offer Dish Network and games, why can't the rest of Delta Airlines??)
Song and JetBlue are great. Unless you want to fly to Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Toronto, Montreal, Anchorage, Honolulu, Tokyo, London, Paris, or Berlin...
Some airlines "get it" and have realized that their customers find value in free onboard services. JetBlue is a young "no-name" airline with a strong following because of their upbeat attitude and nice in-cabin entertainment offerings.
Other airlines have divisions that "get it", such as Delta's SONG airline. (I don't really agree with the way they pimp candy bars and sandwiches though).
But there are still so many airlines that have a really hard time grasping the concept that their customers have brains and like reasonable entertainment. I have a strong distaste for Southwest, they generally either treat me like crap or they try to be comedians. Continental, American, and United are far more professional, but they're deaf and blind. Why only offer in flight entertainment to overseas and only certain domestic flights? Why is your first class section so poorly managed. Those of us who pay for first (be it with money or upgrades with frequent flyer miles) expect a little better service and a larger variety of ammenties. Northwest is another airline I dislike. Why do they insist on hiring crabby old grandmas to be their flight attendents? I guess it fits their white and gray interior color scheme. But if you have white surfaces, KEEP THEM CLEAN, otherwise just use the dark beige and orange surfaces that Southwest uses to hide the dirt!!!
Rant Rant Rant. Airlines in the USA just don't get it. I really doubt they'll invest in Boeing's new entertainment systems. And even if they do, they'll just cripple it with strange usage restrictions and/or heavy fees. After all, these same airlines are starting to think they should charge us as much as $10 for a 3-day-old deli sandwich, no-name chips, and a piece of fruit. My local grocery store would sell me the same bundle of the same "quality" for $2.
> Ummm... don't we already have those nice LCD > screens on the back of seats (or folded to the side) on > most 747s already?
It depends on the airline. But generally, the longer the flight and the newer the plane, the more likely it is to have an entertainment system in each seat. Most 777's have them.
The 747-200 has been out for a long time and maybe have no entertainment at all. The newer 747-400 can usually be found with systems though. A lot of the DC-10's were upgraded with entertainment systems, and subsequently had them removed after some faulty wiring was blamed for a fire.
SeatGuru.com has the per-airline and per-model details you're looking for.
Oh great, now everyone's going to pull out their laptops while en route!
When I fly in economy/coach class, I invariably spend at least one leg of my flight sitting beside somone who insists on using his 15+ inch notebook computer! Now, even if the seat in front of him is in it's fully upright position, there still isn't quite enough room to open the lid to a comfortable 110-degree angle. And because of the compact nature of coach class, the front (trackpad) edge of the notebook is only a few inches away from his chest... so there's not enough room for his arms, forcing him to jut out his elbows a good 8 inches in each direction so he can comfortably use the keyboard and trackpad.
PLEASE PEOPLE! Use your PDA in economy class. If you must use a notebook, get a 12" or smaller model. It's not just uncomfortable for you, it's uncomfortable for anyone sitting beside you.
Most of the large airlines in the USA have a really difficult time dealing with onboard services and prices. Several of the biggies started charging for their poor quality meals. Pretty much every USA airline has a very poor excuse for first class (especially when compared to foreign airlines). Customer service is more than just a few listed items on some cutesy poster by the ticket counter.
So I'm wondering how these same airlines are going to implement and charge for this new service. Just because Boeing is offering it, doesn't mean that every airline is going to automatically buy and install these systems and not charge the passengers!
If American Airlines can't figure out how to serve a *large* dish of ice cream in first class, then I don't see how they're going to find the value in onboard streaming data and video.
That's the thing.. In some rural areas (portions of Central Texas, anyone?), there is NO PHONE INFRASTRUCTURE at all. No splice box, no poles, no wires, no nothing. The "obscene price" quoted was likely the cost, in wire-feet, to connect her house to something on the PSTN, since there was currently no wire to her house. I should have been more clear -- they shouldn't charge her ANYTHING for brining the infrastructure to her property line. She may be required to pay for the cable run from the nearest (newly-installed) splice box and she may have to sign an agreement to keep POTS service for at least a year or two. But there's no reason why she should have to pay for the poles and boxes. Granted the longest runs I've seen and heard about to existing homes without telco service were 10 miles. But still... that's a pretty darn long trenching run.
My mother lives way out in the country, and the local telco quoted her an obscene price to run a landline to the house. Unfortunately, she lives too far from the highway to get decent cellphone coverage. She ended up having to pay it. She was screwed. At most, she should only have to pay for the run from her house to the nearest splice box, which should be installed within a few hundred feet of the house. It's too bad she already paid, she should have taken the case to the state or county public service commision. There is a lot of rural phone and power grant money available to pay for runs like that. She shouldn't have had to pay.
In the USA, there are Rural Telecommunication (and electrification) Acts. I'm not sure about new construction, but I know that in rural Texas if you have an old isolated homestead in need of telephone service, you can call up the nearest telco and they'll string out lines no matter what it costs. It all gets paid for by federal grants.
The only catch is the telco territory boundries. Sometimes two telcos will bicker over who gets to (or who has to) string the lines. A vist to your state's public services commissioner will get things moving though.
As many other posts have pointed out, GTK is widely used and very flexible GUI toolkit. It has great C and Perl bindings and has been used in a few of my applications.
But, it's SLOW. If you're used to Xaw3D or even Motif, you'll find GTK to be slow. Applications built against GTK 1.2 aren't too bad on semi-modern hardware. A Pentium 3 500 MHz or a 300 MHz UltraSPARC II can run such applications with ease. It'll be a tad sluggish on a Pentium 233 MMX or a 170 MHz UltraSPARC I.
I'm looking forward to trying version 2.6, but I can tell you from experience that version 2.4 is *far* slower than 1.2, even when AA fonts and all of the other fancy eyecandy features are disabled. Blame it on Pango? Blame it on the latest glib? I don't know for certain where the problem is, but it's slow.
For now I write most of my GUI apps with Perl/Tk (hackish, I know) or with Motif/OpenMotif (ugly code but fast). I've even used Xaw3D on a recent project (retro in a strange way).
But GTK? Version 2.4 is too damn slow and folks are moving away from version 1.2 in droves.
I would like to know if 2.6 has finally brought 2.x up to the performance of 1.2 (or maybe even better?).
On Solaris I still build most applications with GTK+ 1.2.x because I've found 2.4.x to be significantly slower, even without AA fonts, and all of the pretty eyecandy. Doing the same thing as 1.2, it seems that 2.4 is just plain slower.
If you're a student, the $950 iBook 12" is a really good deal. You get a compact little notebook, 1.2 GHz G4, CDRW/DVD-ROM combo drive, about 4 - 6 hours of battery life (5 hours real-world), and plenty of I/O options. The GPU is only a Radeon 9200, but it's still vastly better than having onboard "integrated" graphics that eat CPU and RAM bandwidth. Plus the Radeon 9200 is actually slightly faster than the crap FX5200 in the 12" PowerBook that costs more! The iBook is small, but thick enough to survive backpack life at 1.3 inches.
PowerBook hardware is very sturdy and very classy, but you'll pay out the nose for what's essentially only 0.3 GHz faster and Radeon 9700 GPU.
Anyway, getting back to OS X... I think it's a great OS and I love my iBook, but I still use and enjoy WinXP as well. They are different worlds, but the variety is nice. OS X has a great X11 environment if you so desire and the bundled developer tools and sample code are very handy. There are plenty of Mac sites and even a few that sell games too. Apple's online store is actually a good place to browse some of the more popular commerical apps, I think they try to maintain stock of 100 of the top selling Mac apps. They don't tend to sell the less popular, but still cool fringe apps, so you'll have to hit up some other resellers (like MacWarehouse or MacMall or Amazon) for those. http://www.versiontracker.com http://www.macsurfer.com Both very handy sites.
"slomo 2" is a cheat to make the game run twice as fast. Sort of like fast-forwarding a DVD. (Ever tried to play Quake with timedemo on? It's kinda like that).
I think you're experiencing a combinaton of the placebo effect and/or dumb luck. To me. 10.3 feels exactly the same as 10.3.5 and so fouth. But your 128 MB of RAM may have something to do with it. Maybe 10.3.7 consumes slightly less RAM, just enough for it to make a difference on your machine.
I personally wouldn't run Mac OS X without 384 MB. That's where it really shines.
But I will tell you that I have indeed experienced major performance boosts from OS X Public Beta -> 10.0 -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -) 10.3. From the "reviews" of leaked developer builds of 10.4, it sounds like there are even more performance boosts to be had in Tiger. But I do think there'll come a point in a year or two, maybe even as soon as 10.5, where G3 users willl start to see performance turn the other direction.
The new drivers in 10.3.7 aren't enough to improve WoW performance, the other key component is an update from Blizzard to re-enable certain hardware rendering features. Then we can finally get the performance boosts that were promised.
>Enter 87.68. Subtract 6.1, then subtract 23.43, then subtract 3.16, then subtract 4.99, then subtract 50. >On my G4 Cube, Calculator gives me a result of 7.1054273576e-15. The correct answer is zero.
That's a classic floating point hardware demonstration. That's the way FP works and is why you should never use a float as the index in a loop! But anyway, Calculator and/or Mac OS X itself should have rounded that tinnnny number to zero.
The current version of Mac WoW has some major graphics features disabled and/or using slower rendering paths. (Such as multi-pass rendering rather than OpenGL shader language). As I understand it, this was done to work around some bugs found in Mac OS 10.3's OpenGL implementation. Many of these bugs have been fixed in 10.3.7, but you will need to wait for a WoW from Blizzard before you'll see major performance increases. Just 10.3.7 alone probably won't make the game any faster, it might even make it slightly slower.
Slashdot Mirror
Myst, Spectre VR, OIDS, Vette, Falcon MC...
There were lots of Mac-first games, but back in those days you needed a decked out monster of a Mac to play them. The crappy Mac Classics and Mac LCs in most schools generally didn't have enough horsepower to play much more than that 3D air hockey game.
You don't happen to have one of these do you?
Whoa! Is that from the new MechWarrior game?
Which version of the C3 does this notebook use?
Notebooks based the C3 come in two flavors: Ezra and Nehemiah. The Nehemiah at 1 GHz is almost twice as fast as the Ezra at 1 GHz.
The tip-off would be the chipset, if it was known. The Nehemiah is almost always used with the CLE266 chipset with a 266 MHz FSB.
It's late and I've been typing fast, so perhaps I wasn't very clear.
I too have flown both classes and on many airlines. When I've flown first class it has been on vacation with my girlfriend and we paid for the upgrades with our frequent flyer miles. I normally fly coach, and I normally shop for the best deal I can find. I'm one of those asses that often brings his own food. I usually read and listed to MP3s via my tiny little flash based player. I leave my laptop closed up. To me, an airliner is not much more than a glorified bus with wings. But I do think the customer service is severly lacking. I've found British Airways to be a *MUCH* more friendly, accomidating, and pleasently surprising airline.
If I had to rank my experiences with the airlines, I would put Southwest somewhere in the middle. They're run by some smart people and have made some very smart moves, but they're no JetBlue. I didn't mean to say that SW is a "dirty" airline. But their interior color scheme sure looks a lot cleaner than the wide open spances of white and gray you see on Northwest's planes. Their use of leather on all seats also makes it much easier to clean. It was a smart choice on their part.
My whole point is that while there is only so much you can do to improve the experience of flying in a little aluminum tube, I really think the airlines could do more to make it a pleasent experience.
I personally wish there was a way to blend the service of JetBlue with the comfort of the Avro RJ85 planes that Mesaba flys for Northwest's "AirLink" regional network. Unlike the 17-18" inch wide seats most Boeing, Airbus, and Embraer airliners use in coach, the Avro has 20" seats, plus a little more headroom. Impossible, I know, but I can dream.
How long before someone live-blogs their flight to wherever? And how pathetic would that be?
It almost happened:
http://db.tidbits.com/getbits.acgi?tbart=07831
The last time I had a layover in the Denver airport I was tempted to use my digital camera and the free wifi access to blog.
Song and JetBlue are great. Unless you want to fly to Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Toronto, Montreal, Anchorage, Honolulu, Tokyo, London, Paris, or Berlin...
(And really, if SONG can offer Dish Network and games, why can't the rest of Delta Airlines??)
Song and JetBlue are great. Unless you want to fly to Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Minneapolis, Toronto, Montreal, Anchorage, Honolulu, Tokyo, London, Paris, or Berlin...
**ANYTHING** has to be more interesting than the CNN Airport Network station you see in airport terminals.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Some airlines "get it" and have realized that their customers find value in free onboard services. JetBlue is a young "no-name" airline with a strong following because of their upbeat attitude and nice in-cabin entertainment offerings.
Other airlines have divisions that "get it", such as Delta's SONG airline. (I don't really agree with the way they pimp candy bars and sandwiches though).
But there are still so many airlines that have a really hard time grasping the concept that their customers have brains and like reasonable entertainment. I have a strong distaste for Southwest, they generally either treat me like crap or they try to be comedians. Continental, American, and United are far more professional, but they're deaf and blind. Why only offer in flight entertainment to overseas and only certain domestic flights? Why is your first class section so poorly managed. Those of us who pay for first (be it with money or upgrades with frequent flyer miles) expect a little better service and a larger variety of ammenties. Northwest is another airline I dislike. Why do they insist on hiring crabby old grandmas to be their flight attendents? I guess it fits their white and gray interior color scheme. But if you have white surfaces, KEEP THEM CLEAN, otherwise just use the dark beige and orange surfaces that Southwest uses to hide the dirt!!!
Rant Rant Rant. Airlines in the USA just don't get it. I really doubt they'll invest in Boeing's new entertainment systems. And even if they do, they'll just cripple it with strange usage restrictions and/or heavy fees. After all, these same airlines are starting to think they should charge us as much as $10 for a 3-day-old deli sandwich, no-name chips, and a piece of fruit. My local grocery store would sell me the same bundle of the same "quality" for $2.
> Ummm... don't we already have those nice LCD
> screens on the back of seats (or folded to the side) on
> most 747s already?
It depends on the airline. But generally, the longer the flight and the newer the plane, the more likely it is to have an entertainment system in each seat. Most 777's have them.
The 747-200 has been out for a long time and maybe have no entertainment at all. The newer 747-400 can usually be found with systems though. A lot of the DC-10's were upgraded with entertainment systems, and subsequently had them removed after some faulty wiring was blamed for a fire.
SeatGuru.com has the per-airline and per-model details you're looking for.
Oh great, now everyone's going to pull out their laptops while en route!
When I fly in economy/coach class, I invariably spend at least one leg of my flight sitting beside somone who insists on using his 15+ inch notebook computer! Now, even if the seat in front of him is in it's fully upright position, there still isn't quite enough room to open the lid to a comfortable 110-degree angle. And because of the compact nature of coach class, the front (trackpad) edge of the notebook is only a few inches away from his chest... so there's not enough room for his arms, forcing him to jut out his elbows a good 8 inches in each direction so he can comfortably use the keyboard and trackpad.
PLEASE PEOPLE! Use your PDA in economy class. If you must use a notebook, get a 12" or smaller model. It's not just uncomfortable for you, it's uncomfortable for anyone sitting beside you.
Most of the large airlines in the USA have a really difficult time dealing with onboard services and prices. Several of the biggies started charging for their poor quality meals. Pretty much every USA airline has a very poor excuse for first class (especially when compared to foreign airlines). Customer service is more than just a few listed items on some cutesy poster by the ticket counter.
So I'm wondering how these same airlines are going to implement and charge for this new service. Just because Boeing is offering it, doesn't mean that every airline is going to automatically buy and install these systems and not charge the passengers!
If American Airlines can't figure out how to serve a *large* dish of ice cream in first class, then I don't see how they're going to find the value in onboard streaming data and video.
That's the thing .. In some rural areas (portions of Central Texas, anyone?), there is NO PHONE INFRASTRUCTURE at all. No splice box, no poles, no wires, no nothing. The "obscene price" quoted was likely the cost, in wire-feet, to connect her house to something on the PSTN, since there was currently no wire to her house.
I should have been more clear -- they shouldn't charge her ANYTHING for brining the infrastructure to her property line. She may be required to pay for the cable run from the nearest (newly-installed) splice box and she may have to sign an agreement to keep POTS service for at least a year or two. But there's no reason why she should have to pay for the poles and boxes. Granted the longest runs I've seen and heard about to existing homes without telco service were 10 miles. But still... that's a pretty darn long trenching run.
My mother lives way out in the country, and the local telco quoted her an obscene price to run a landline to the house. Unfortunately, she lives too far from the highway to get decent cellphone coverage. She ended up having to pay it.
She was screwed. At most, she should only have to pay for the run from her house to the nearest splice box, which should be installed within a few hundred feet of the house. It's too bad she already paid, she should have taken the case to the state or county public service commision. There is a lot of rural phone and power grant money available to pay for runs like that. She shouldn't have had to pay.
The latency would be horrible. You'd have to end every sentence with "over". May as well just use a CB Radio.
In the USA, there are Rural Telecommunication (and electrification) Acts. I'm not sure about new construction, but I know that in rural Texas if you have an old isolated homestead in need of telephone service, you can call up the nearest telco and they'll string out lines no matter what it costs. It all gets paid for by federal grants.
The only catch is the telco territory boundries. Sometimes two telcos will bicker over who gets to (or who has to) string the lines. A vist to your state's public services commissioner will get things moving though.
As many other posts have pointed out, GTK is widely used and very flexible GUI toolkit. It has great C and Perl bindings and has been used in a few of my applications.
But, it's SLOW. If you're used to Xaw3D or even Motif, you'll find GTK to be slow. Applications built against GTK 1.2 aren't too bad on semi-modern hardware. A Pentium 3 500 MHz or a 300 MHz UltraSPARC II can run such applications with ease. It'll be a tad sluggish on a Pentium 233 MMX or a 170 MHz UltraSPARC I.
I'm looking forward to trying version 2.6, but I can tell you from experience that version 2.4 is *far* slower than 1.2, even when AA fonts and all of the other fancy eyecandy features are disabled. Blame it on Pango? Blame it on the latest glib? I don't know for certain where the problem is, but it's slow.
For now I write most of my GUI apps with Perl/Tk (hackish, I know) or with Motif/OpenMotif (ugly code but fast). I've even used Xaw3D on a recent project (retro in a strange way).
But GTK? Version 2.4 is too damn slow and folks are moving away from version 1.2 in droves.
I would like to know if 2.6 has finally brought 2.x up to the performance of 1.2 (or maybe even better?).
On Solaris I still build most applications with GTK+ 1.2.x because I've found 2.4.x to be significantly slower, even without AA fonts, and all of the pretty eyecandy. Doing the same thing as 1.2, it seems that 2.4 is just plain slower.
If you're a student, the $950 iBook 12" is a really good deal. You get a compact little notebook, 1.2 GHz G4, CDRW/DVD-ROM combo drive, about 4 - 6 hours of battery life (5 hours real-world), and plenty of I/O options. The GPU is only a Radeon 9200, but it's still vastly better than having onboard "integrated" graphics that eat CPU and RAM bandwidth. Plus the Radeon 9200 is actually slightly faster than the crap FX5200 in the 12" PowerBook that costs more! The iBook is small, but thick enough to survive backpack life at 1.3 inches.
PowerBook hardware is very sturdy and very classy, but you'll pay out the nose for what's essentially only 0.3 GHz faster and Radeon 9700 GPU.
Anyway, getting back to OS X... I think it's a great OS and I love my iBook, but I still use and enjoy WinXP as well. They are different worlds, but the variety is nice. OS X has a great X11 environment if you so desire and the bundled developer tools and sample code are very handy. There are plenty of Mac sites and even a few that sell games too. Apple's online store is actually a good place to browse some of the more popular commerical apps, I think they try to maintain stock of 100 of the top selling Mac apps. They don't tend to sell the less popular, but still cool fringe apps, so you'll have to hit up some other resellers (like MacWarehouse or MacMall or Amazon) for those.
http://www.versiontracker.com
http://www.macsurfer.com
Both very handy sites.
"slomo 2" is a cheat to make the game run twice as fast. Sort of like fast-forwarding a DVD. (Ever tried to play Quake with timedemo on? It's kinda like that).
I think you're experiencing a combinaton of the placebo effect and/or dumb luck. To me. 10.3 feels exactly the same as 10.3.5 and so fouth. But your 128 MB of RAM may have something to do with it. Maybe 10.3.7 consumes slightly less RAM, just enough for it to make a difference on your machine.
I personally wouldn't run Mac OS X without 384 MB. That's where it really shines.
But I will tell you that I have indeed experienced major performance boosts from OS X Public Beta -> 10.0 -> 10.1 -> 10.2 -) 10.3. From the "reviews" of leaked developer builds of 10.4, it sounds like there are even more performance boosts to be had in Tiger. But I do think there'll come a point in a year or two, maybe even as soon as 10.5, where G3 users willl start to see performance turn the other direction.
> Holy shit, 26.4 MB for the delta update from 10.3.6 to 10.3.7? What crack are they smoking?
Sounds about right for the major OpenGL changes in both the ATI and NVIDIA drivers.
The new drivers in 10.3.7 aren't enough to improve WoW performance, the other key component is an update from Blizzard to re-enable certain hardware rendering features. Then we can finally get the performance boosts that were promised.
>Enter 87.68. Subtract 6.1, then subtract 23.43, then subtract 3.16, then subtract 4.99, then subtract 50.
>On my G4 Cube, Calculator gives me a result of 7.1054273576e-15. The correct answer is zero.
That's a classic floating point hardware demonstration. That's the way FP works and is why you should never use a float as the index in a loop! But anyway, Calculator and/or Mac OS X itself should have rounded that tinnnny number to zero.
The current version of Mac WoW has some major graphics features disabled and/or using slower rendering paths. (Such as multi-pass rendering rather than OpenGL shader language). As I understand it, this was done to work around some bugs found in Mac OS 10.3's OpenGL implementation. Many of these bugs have been fixed in 10.3.7, but you will need to wait for a WoW from Blizzard before you'll see major performance increases. Just 10.3.7 alone probably won't make the game any faster, it might even make it slightly slower.