Now, not to troll or anything, but who is going to actually buy into this service?
I already have. It is unbelievably convenient. You buy songs through iTunes. They are automatically available in your music library. You find, you click (to buy), you listen. It's braindead easy. If I want to transfer the AAC file to my iPod, I plug it in, and it gets tranferred over. IMNSHO anyone who thinking that Gnutella is a better alternative almost certainly has never used it on a mac. It's terrible. There's no better way to describe it. Kazaa doesn't exist on the mac. etc. I am more than happy to pay a dollar for a song I really want, especially when apple has a fair amount of exclusive music: unreleased tracks, live performances, and so forth.
weirdly enough, my TiBook 550 with 512mb ram crawled on the 1000px movie. This is what I get for not rebooting for.... a month or so while running some nutty software....
Hmm, you better inform those millions of american kids who force their parents to: let them watch pokemon/take them to pokemon movies/buy pokemon cards/buy pokemon video games/etc.
You can also fill in the word Digimon in place of Pokemon.
In any case, point being is that 20 years ago video games were something little kids played. Now, all of those kids have grown up, purchased an XBox and a PS2, bought games like Metal Gear Solid 2 instead of Super Mario Bros, etc. The same will happen to anime.
Give it time. You push a meme onto the newest generation and give it a while to percolate into the mainstream...
Software marked as such described in the article is licensed. The license is the EULA on the installer. I have asked my boss about this in the past due to my concerns on receiving such software. Next, MS employees with a v- at the front of their email alias are contract employees. Nevertheless, they are employees. Referring to them as less than real employees is just demeaning. As someone who expects to have a v- as part of their email address in just a couple of months I don't appreciate being lumped into some group seen as morlocks to the rest of microsoft's eloi. MS employees routinely switch between being contract and full-time to better suit their needs. Don't be rude just because you don't understand how a system works.
My opinions are just that. They are not the opinions of my employer in any way shape or form. I am not an official spokesperson of my employer. caveat emptor.
If you're interested in this topic I highly recommend the book Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. It's the same basic concept as this article, but (at about 250 pages) far more in-depth. You can buy it on amazon.com for $34. An interesting sidenote here is that Microsoft believes very strongly in these principles, which is why they maximize the number of employees who get offices, have shower facilities throughout campus, allow people to work when and where they want to, etc.
a word of advice: watch out for version 3. The primary reason MS releases software that is seen as incomplete or buggy is in order to establish dominant mindshare within a new niche, or to start laying claim to an existing market. They may not get it at first (WinCE 1.0), but sooner or later they come around (PocketPC 2k2 and CE.Net).
Seriously though, MS products tend to take off around version 3.0. It happened with Windows, it happened with Pocket PC, it's too soon to tell with the Tablet PC, although it kinda looks like it.
I wouldn't call PS1/2 games mind blowingly complex.
Well, specifically here I was referring to the XBox. Re-reading my comment makes it pretty obvious that I wasn't be as clear I wanted to be with my words. Nevertheless....
To be absolutely specifically clear, I was thinking of Fable, the forthcoming Peter Molyneaux game, at the time. Furthermore, although I can't find a reference for it offhand, I distinctly recall words being spoken about Doom 3 coming out for XBox with graphics performance equivalent to the game on a high end PC. Once again, the unmoving target concept.
Finally, although the basic concept behind almost all games that come out is a re-hash, the specific twists upon the basic concept are what can make a game so unbelievably complex (from a developer's perspective, not so much from an end-user's perspective). Take Metal Gear Solid 2's melting ice cubes as a totally arbitrary example. The basic concept behind MGS2 really doesn't differ at all from Adventure. Same thing goes for any of the Final Fantasy games. FF1 is conceptually identical to FFX, but the logistical nature of 10 versus 1 is really quite something to behold.
And for the record, I am definitely the kind of person who recognizes the various and sundry (disad|ad)vantages of console and pc games.
I have a Powerbook G4 on which I only play Fallout 2 and Escape Velocity (I primarily use it for web and application development).
I have a Toshiba Tablet PC on which I play Sim City 4 (until the mac port comes out) and InkBall (yeah!). Normally, I use the Tablet PC for note-taking,.Net application and web development, and writing papers.
I have a Dreamcast that doesn't do anything right now.
I have an XBox on which I play Halo, Shenmue II, Splinter Cell, Rallisport Challenge, watch DVDs etc.
I have a PS2 on which I play GTA3, Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Tekken Tag.
I think that my console games are far more attractive, and far more usable (usually) than PC games. On the other hand, I'd rather lose my left hand (I'm right handed) than play Sim City 4 on my XBox (ugh). It just wouldn't translate very well. Meanwhile, I'd do the same never to have to try and play Final Fantasy 7 on my PC again (painful!).
I am more than happy to admit that consoles and PCs don't have particularly overlapping game genres. I think it's a good thing, personally, as we could, otherwise, spend countless hours arguing about whether its more enjoyable to play Game X on the PC versus a console. Who cares!?
meanwhile, people were still developing Playstation 1 games long past the time when it was _obvious_ that the Playstation 1 was the three year old PC equivalent of what their grandmother is using. Remember: consoles are special because they represent an unmoving target for game developers. Game developers optimize the hell out of console games, which they simply cannot do with PC games given the wide variety of available hardware (not to mention drivers, 3d lib support, operating systems, etc.) that the game could be running on. So, despite the fact that XBox is no longer (and has never been) a high-end PC, you will still see mind-blowingly complex games coming out for it because of this non-moving target fact. Same thing goes for the PS2, a 300MHz machine with some ridiculously small amount of RAM, and no hard drive.
I interned over summer 2002 with the mac business unit (aka macbu, and that's pronounced mac-boo for the record) as a program manager. First off, I did work 60 hours a week minimum. And it was worth it. The real trick here is that ms does not require you to be stuck in an office from 9 to 5. I did most of my work @ a starbucks and a tullys near campus (in the town center for those who know). The amount of work you do, in many cases, is a direct result of the amount you want to do. I worked as much as I did out of choice. I still managed to have a social life on weekends, and I even met a wonderful girl as part of the deal (she's an english major and does not work for ms). The culture of individual groups can vary greatly. They are as unique as their employees. I would recommend an ms internship to anyone with the inclination. The work is hard but rewarding, and the perks are out of this world. Also, it bears mentioning that the bill bbq is only open to people who will be graduating in the next school year. 2002 was the first year with this policy. It was instituted due to the increasing number of interns. Finally, the intern newsgroup mentioned in other posts is never worth reading. It tends towards being as bad as browsing slashdot at -1.
(For those not familiar with the more obscure Mac OS acronyms, this would be the Hierarchical File System +).
What in the world are you talking about? HFS+ is the filesystem used by Mac OS 8.x, 9.x, and X. It has absolutely nothing in common with.Net's Global Assembly Cache... That's like saying that Mac OS Classic's Extension Manager is a lot like Fat32 or NTFS... Well, except that extension manager was phenomenally brain-dead, and the GAC actually works right...
The joys of being a Cocoa and.Net developer are many: you actually get mocked by everyone....
Do you honestly think that Microsoft would try such heavy-handed tactics as this? Come on. MSN and IE are in _totally separate_ product groups. MSN is not about to make themselves look bad in order make IE look better. Let me repeat this, as it's an important point: this doesn't make Opera look bad, it makes MSN look bad. Being one of the few people on here who has met the MSN general manager, and is responding here, I can tell you for a fact that this is not what they're trying to do. It was a screwup, plain and simple. Microsoft isn't infallible and evil, they're people too. Articles like this one do a great disservice to the ideals that slashdot is, in theory, attempting to pass on. This merely reinforces the view of many that slashdot is nothing but a collection of knee-jerk reactionaries. If Konqueror suddenly croaked on the Gnome website, no one would think that Gnome was trying to make the Konqueror project look bad. Same thing if mozilla.org stopped working correctly with IE.
a quote from the article: "Its innovative swiveling screen transforms the shape from PDA-style to laptop-style. "
yep. it's just about as innovative as the toshiba portege 3500 I'm writing this on right now. Too bad it doesn't have the MS Tablet PC API, or an electromagnetic-resistive screen. what a tragedy. It occurs to me that it must be lame when MS does it, but innovative if it runs linux. And no, I'm not a troll. People here just tend not to like anything that microsoft puts out, but will call it the greatest thing since sliced bread the second someone ports linux to the damned thing.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not going anywhere near.NET.
It may not be long before you have a choice. You may never install the.NET framework on your computer, but chances are that you will still make use of it on websites that you use before too long. It's incredibly nice for developing web services, which, if the pundits are to be believed are going to catch on in a big way. Besides web services, I'd much rather develop software using C# or VB.NET and the.NET framework than with the old-school windows APIs (note: my primary computer is currently an Apple TiBook. I develop with Obj-C/Cocoa primarily). This is, in a lot of ways, similar to the Win32 migration. People will hold out for a good long while, but eventually the world will get to the point where it's no longer possible to not switch. With Miguel DeIcaza advocating the use of Mono, you'll be able to do.NET development on linux even. The current systems may work, but it's always possible that the new stuff will work better. Or that you won't have a choice. Or a combination of the two.
Ok. As irritating as it is, I am going to have to do a point by point rebuttal here. Sorry in advance.
Point One half of Apple's current lineup of computers, the iMac and the iBook (2 computers that I bet make up the bulk of their sales) have NO expansion slots. No PCI slots on the iMac, and no PCMCIA slots on the laptops.
Rebuttal And this is bad why? The vast majority of people in the world out there DO NOT upgrade their computers. EVER. I worked at a computer repair firm for two years, and I would guess that not more than a quarter of PC users actually get new cards installed into their computers. This, contrary to what most people on slashdot feel, is not a limitation for the vast majority of users. Here, think of it like this. Most PC users, when they're adding new stuff to their computers, will get things that can be plugged into serial, parallel, and usb ports. Not PCI. Not AGP. Not (god forbid) ISA.
Point This is nothing more than a stupid, short-sighted attempt by Apple to make the computer not last as long. In essence, your choices become: 1: buy the much more expensive TiBook or G4 tower, or 2: buy the cheap one and it's obsolete, FAST.
RebuttalAnd this is different from those microtower Dells, Compaq iPaqs, etc, in what way exactly? Furthermore, with laptops, what the hell is the point of a PC card slot on a laptop that has video out, firewire, usb, 10/100 ethernet, AirPort (802.11b), and a 56k modem built-in? I actually just bought a TiBook 3-4 days ago (it's still on its way), and I don't have any notion of what I'll actually use the PC card slot on it for. I've been using an indigo iBook for the last 14 months, and I am currently replacing it only because I am starting to find the screen size limiting (it's a pain to use Project Builder and Interface Builder in 800x600 pixels).
Point Apple has end-of-lifed the video cards used in the first generation iMac - users of those computers are never going to get accelerated video drivers in OS X. If those were cheapo PCs with slots, you could at least throw a nicer video card in there and solve the problem.
Rebuttal Ok. OS X is big. It's a dog on anything less than a 366 MHz G3 with at least 128MB RAM. The original iMac (the bondi blue variety) has a 233MHz G3 processor, and came with 32 mb RAM. The average person is NOT going to run OS X on that thing. They'd be absolutely nuts to do it. Apple knows this. That's a big reason why they will not bother writing accelerated video card drivers for the bondi iMac. No one would use them (or at least they shouldn't). If these people really want to run OS X, they should sell their Bondi iMac off for $350 or $400, or whatever they go for, and pick up the $799 iMac.
PointAnd don't bother posting that it doesn't matter that there aren't any expansion slots because "everything comes built in". Tell that to first generation iBook or iMac owners who like to use the iPod - "sorry, FireWire only". Those computers are less than two years old, and already becoming obsolete.
Rebuttal Ha. Yeah right. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't afford to pick up a new computer every two or three years (the iMac will be 4 next August, and the iBook came out ~one year after the iMac) there is no way in hell you could afford an iPod. The iPod is a toy for those with too much money. Don't get me wrong on this, I'd love to have one, but there's no way in hell I can afford one until I'm out of college (I bought the TiBook because it'll serve a definite purpose. besides, I bought an AVC Soul Player a year ago). These people aren't going to go out and spend $400 on the iPod unless they could afford a new computer anyway. Besides, it doesn't matter, since everything comes built-in anyways, right?;-)
Point Would you like to have USB 2.0? I will, and I can add it to my 3 year old Dell notebook via a card and it will work fine. The Apple iBook you buy TODAY can't be expanded with a single new tech. beyond what it ships with. Now which comp. is aging faster, the Apple, or the Dell? Even crummy $700 PCs and $1100 laptops have PCI/PCMCIA.
Rebuttal Yet people continue buying iBooks, with their 400 Mbit firewire ports that have devices available for the port today. What idiots! Can you even buy a USB 2.0 card yet? By the way, take a look at your P.S. statement. Hell, I'll quote it here. P.S. I don't want to hear about how you can add all sorts of nifty expansion option via FireWire. I don't want 5 boxes hanging off my computer. But wait, you still want 5 USB 2.0 devices hanging off your computer? I'm confused. It must be because I'm one of those gullible anti-windows mac users (I'm typing this on my self-built coppermine-core system running XP pro right now.).
Point PCI and PCMCIA slots let you add all sorts of stuff to your computer, in effect, "future-proofing" it by allowing you to expand rather than buy a new computer. A computer without expansion options hardly qualifies as "a computer that ages slower than PCs."
Point I just did a search on Micro Warehouse for pc card, and as you can see, basically everything listed is a wireless ethernet card, an ethernet card, a modem, or a usb controller. I HAVE ALL OF THOSE THINGS BUILT INTO MY IBOOK. Jeez. About the only thing I would find useful to buy for a pc card slot would be one of those pc card hard drives (that ibm makes). Even then, I'd rather just burn a cd with the built-in burner. More people have cd-rom drives than pc card slots. Furthermore, let's take a look at the cards I have in my PC right now. 1. An ATI Xpert 2000 (AGP 4x). 2. An SB Live (PCI). 3. A Linksys 10/100BaseT Ethernet card (PCI). 4. A firewire card. There is really nothing else that I am planning on ever adding to this computer. Sure, there are a lot of people out there who need second monitors, but none of them would buy an iMac anyways. They wouldn't be served well by a 15" monitor. The iMac is a consumer machine. The iBook (supposedly) is too (although most business types would probably be fine having one). The Power Mac G4 is a professional machine. Same thing goes for the Powerbook G4. You don't hear people complaining that their Dell Dimension 2100's won't let them install a burner inside the case. If you did, you'd probably ridicule them for not buying a higher-end machine.
You know what, I will go on using my Apple laptop, my Intel/Microsoft desktop, and the god-awful Sun Blade 100 I get stuck using at school, and you can go on using whatever you want to. We'll just call it even.
A quick note regarding OS 10.1:
(FWIW/FYI I'm using an iBook 366/Firewire)
Project Builder 10.0.1 breaks upon upgrading, you just need to reinstall it to get it working again
I have an SB live and it worked right off the bat for my distro (Mandrake).
Maybe I should try Mandrake sometime. This kind of confirms what I was saying. I've tried a shitload of different distros (RH 5.something, RH 6.0, RH 6.2, SuSE 6.4, Turbolinux 6.04, Slackware 7) and it gets irritating not having it work. I am certainly not dumping on any of you who do enjoy doing this stuff, it's just not my thing, but I don't want to have to patch and recompile the kernel. I don't care enough to learn it.
I don't see what the big deal is. Despite the fact that Linux has the whole free beer/speech going for it there are a lot of people who will never want to use it in its current state due to general inaccessibility. For example, I was able to install Mac OS X in 20 minutes on a new iBook with _zero_ hassle. Everything in my system worked out of the box. No configuration. No nothing. I have _never_ been able to get my sound card to work under any version of linux (I have an SB Live). That includes SuSE, which I thought included support by default for the EMU10K1 DSP. I have had no end of trouble getting things to work under linux. I am sure I could get everything to work if I spent enough time on it, but I DON'T WANT TO. I just want the damn thing to work. I've been using Macintoshes for years.
I used to think that I was a MacOS bigot, but I've since changed my tune on that. A couple years back I switched from the MacOS to Windows (initially 95). I hated it. But eventually 98 came out. I began to appreciate it more and more. I've found WinME to be nothing but a dream to use as far as the UI goes. Except for the crashing. Every time I suffer a fatal exception error I feel a distinct urge to fly to redmond and beat the crap out of MSFT's QA engineers. In any case, about 3 months ago I purchased an iBook because I sorely needed a laptop, and I couldn't bear the thought of purchasing another Wintel machine. OS X public beta had come out shortly before and had been getting many rave reviews. I received the machine shortly thereafter in the mail with MacOS 9.04 preinstalled and hated it. Thankfully I got OS X in the mail the next day. I installed it as I related previously. I have never suffered a crash on the machine. It runs Apache, Jakarta-Tomcat, all of my XML tools, the Java Dev. Kit, Office 2001, and Unreal flawlessly. I have discovered that I am not a Mac bigot, but in fact a user interface bigot. I feel that KDE and Gnome (mind you that I am referring to KDE 1.x and Gnome without Eazel) are somewhat lacking in the tasty eye-candy that make a computer friendly to me. Microsoft seems to have finally figured out how to make a computer (relatively) easy to use. Apple has, once again, perfected it. OS X is a beautiful OS. It has a perfect mixture of power user features and beginner hand-holding.
If Linux suffers as a result of OS X's release it will be in its best interest in the end. Linux, as cool as it is (don't get me wrong, I still use it) has many rough edges. These need to be corrected before it will ever appeal to a mass audience. Then again, who is to say that this has ever been the goal of the OSS movement? We all come out better in the end with the release of high-quality software, no matter who has created it. I certainly do not claim to an expert in the field I have been discussing, only someone who has used many different operating systems (MacOS, OS X, Linux flavors, BSD, Win9x, NT 4, Win2k, and the BeOS).
Please do me a favor and not moderate me down if you feel that what I have written only contradicts with your philosophy. Thanks.
How difficult is it exactly to ensure the support of hardware abstraction layers, such as the Windows NT HAL or DirectX, under Plex86? Is this a non-issue, i.e. the HALs can still talk to the underlying hardware, or is this a seriously difficult issue, mandating the writing of vitualized video cards, sound cards, BIOSes, etc.?
My mother makes $25K (Canadian) a year. To get that money she AVERAGES a 55 hour work week spent staring at a computer screen as her eyes slowly deteriorate.
For you to suggest, even for one second, that you "work harder" than my mother, is one of the most offensive and repugnant things I've ever heard.
You don't make > $100K because you're smarter or because you work harder. You make it because you are luckier and more self absorbed.
And no, you shouldn't be rewarded for that.
Right on. This also dovetails with the typical right-wing belief that people on welfare in the united states are on it because they are lazy, stupid, or ignorant. Furthermore, they believe that those who do fall upon hard times are SOL if they do not have the savings to live off of during such time periods. I find beliefs such as that so repugnant, mostly because I've never heard anyone spout that type of drivel at me unless they or their parents made at least $80-90k per year. As long as I'm ranting about economic inequality, I'll mention one more thing. I work with a guy who is, just like me, a college student. He doesn't believe that the government should assist people in paying for college. He's one of those people whose parents make said 80-90 k per year, whereas my mother is a public school teacher, and my father is a deadbeat. I asked my coworker if he, as one who did not take loans out from the government, received money from his wealthy parents for school. He replied, "I have been given a sizeable amount of money for school." I, in contrast, work my ass off to save enough money to continue going to school, receive nothing in money from my parents, and have to take out loans from the government. "Big government" is the only reason I am able to afford school. To say that I am, by default, unworthy of going to college, or should not allowed to receive a higher education if I cannot, at this time, afford it is probably the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard in my life.
GORE 2000!
Even then, it can still be a really big mistake to send email from work. Of course, if you're emailing illegal/proprietary company information to someone while you're at work maybe you deserve to get caught...
That is why, even though modern breeder reactors are far safer and more efficient than the nuke plants that have been running since the '50s, less than a dozen new nuclear plants have opened in the US in the past 20 years. Naturally, these would be the same scary breeders that generate plutonium. Yeah, that's fantastic. Let's generate _MORE_ plutonium.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, not to troll or anything, but who is going to actually buy into this service?
I already have. It is unbelievably convenient. You buy songs through iTunes. They are automatically available in your music library. You find, you click (to buy), you listen. It's braindead easy. If I want to transfer the AAC file to my iPod, I plug it in, and it gets tranferred over. IMNSHO anyone who thinking that Gnutella is a better alternative almost certainly has never used it on a mac. It's terrible. There's no better way to describe it. Kazaa doesn't exist on the mac. etc. I am more than happy to pay a dollar for a song I really want, especially when apple has a fair amount of exclusive music: unreleased tracks, live performances, and so forth.
weirdly enough, my TiBook 550 with 512mb ram crawled on the 1000px movie. This is what I get for not rebooting for .... a month or so while running some nutty software....
Which kind of raises the question, why not a meganova, or a giganova?
jeez, silly names...
glory fades, but wes anderson never will....
(sorry, lame joke)
Seriously, I think that being "jsut a long episode" is the absolute best thing a movie based on a (good) series can do.
Counterexample: Star Trek 9 and Star Trek 10.
I have seen these both once, and will never, ever see them again. ugh.
anime will NEVER become mainstream.
Hmm, you better inform those millions of american kids who force their parents to: let them watch pokemon/take them to pokemon movies/buy pokemon cards/buy pokemon video games/etc.
You can also fill in the word Digimon in place of Pokemon.
In any case, point being is that 20 years ago video games were something little kids played. Now, all of those kids have grown up, purchased an XBox and a PS2, bought games like Metal Gear Solid 2 instead of Super Mario Bros, etc. The same will happen to anime.
Give it time. You push a meme onto the newest generation and give it a while to percolate into the mainstream...
Software marked as such described in the article is licensed. The license is the EULA on the installer. I have asked my boss about this in the past due to my concerns on receiving such software. Next, MS employees with a v- at the front of their email alias are contract employees. Nevertheless, they are employees. Referring to them as less than real employees is just demeaning. As someone who expects to have a v- as part of their email address in just a couple of months I don't appreciate being lumped into some group seen as morlocks to the rest of microsoft's eloi. MS employees routinely switch between being contract and full-time to better suit their needs. Don't be rude just because you don't understand how a system works.
My opinions are just that. They are not the opinions of my employer in any way shape or form. I am not an official spokesperson of my employer. caveat emptor.
If you're interested in this topic I highly recommend the book Peopleware by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. It's the same basic concept as this article, but (at about 250 pages) far more in-depth. You can buy it on amazon.com for $34. An interesting sidenote here is that Microsoft believes very strongly in these principles, which is why they maximize the number of employees who get offices, have shower facilities throughout campus, allow people to work when and where they want to, etc.
a word of advice: watch out for version 3. The primary reason MS releases software that is seen as incomplete or buggy is in order to establish dominant mindshare within a new niche, or to start laying claim to an existing market. They may not get it at first (WinCE 1.0), but sooner or later they come around (PocketPC 2k2 and CE.Net).
Seriously though, MS products tend to take off around version 3.0. It happened with Windows, it happened with Pocket PC, it's too soon to tell with the Tablet PC, although it kinda looks like it.
I wouldn't call PS1/2 games mind blowingly complex.
.Net application and web development, and writing papers.
Well, specifically here I was referring to the XBox. Re-reading my comment makes it pretty obvious that I wasn't be as clear I wanted to be with my words. Nevertheless....
To be absolutely specifically clear, I was thinking of Fable, the forthcoming Peter Molyneaux game, at the time. Furthermore, although I can't find a reference for it offhand, I distinctly recall words being spoken about Doom 3 coming out for XBox with graphics performance equivalent to the game on a high end PC. Once again, the unmoving target concept.
Finally, although the basic concept behind almost all games that come out is a re-hash, the specific twists upon the basic concept are what can make a game so unbelievably complex (from a developer's perspective, not so much from an end-user's perspective). Take Metal Gear Solid 2's melting ice cubes as a totally arbitrary example. The basic concept behind MGS2 really doesn't differ at all from Adventure. Same thing goes for any of the Final Fantasy games. FF1 is conceptually identical to FFX, but the logistical nature of 10 versus 1 is really quite something to behold.
And for the record, I am definitely the kind of person who recognizes the various and sundry (disad|ad)vantages of console and pc games.
I have a Powerbook G4 on which I only play Fallout 2 and Escape Velocity (I primarily use it for web and application development).
I have a Toshiba Tablet PC on which I play Sim City 4 (until the mac port comes out) and InkBall (yeah!). Normally, I use the Tablet PC for note-taking,
I have a Dreamcast that doesn't do anything right now.
I have an XBox on which I play Halo, Shenmue II, Splinter Cell, Rallisport Challenge, watch DVDs etc.
I have a PS2 on which I play GTA3, Final Fantasy X, Metal Gear Solid 2, and Tekken Tag.
I think that my console games are far more attractive, and far more usable (usually) than PC games. On the other hand, I'd rather lose my left hand (I'm right handed) than play Sim City 4 on my XBox (ugh). It just wouldn't translate very well. Meanwhile, I'd do the same never to have to try and play Final Fantasy 7 on my PC again (painful!).
I am more than happy to admit that consoles and PCs don't have particularly overlapping game genres. I think it's a good thing, personally, as we could, otherwise, spend countless hours arguing about whether its more enjoyable to play Game X on the PC versus a console. Who cares!?
Anyway, I think I've rambled long enough here.
meanwhile, people were still developing Playstation 1 games long past the time when it was _obvious_ that the Playstation 1 was the three year old PC equivalent of what their grandmother is using. Remember: consoles are special because they represent an unmoving target for game developers. Game developers optimize the hell out of console games, which they simply cannot do with PC games given the wide variety of available hardware (not to mention drivers, 3d lib support, operating systems, etc.) that the game could be running on. So, despite the fact that XBox is no longer (and has never been) a high-end PC, you will still see mind-blowingly complex games coming out for it because of this non-moving target fact. Same thing goes for the PS2, a 300MHz machine with some ridiculously small amount of RAM, and no hard drive.
I interned over summer 2002 with the mac business unit (aka macbu, and that's pronounced mac-boo for the record) as a program manager. First off, I did work 60 hours a week minimum. And it was worth it. The real trick here is that ms does not require you to be stuck in an office from 9 to 5. I did most of my work @ a starbucks and a tullys near campus (in the town center for those who know). The amount of work you do, in many cases, is a direct result of the amount you want to do. I worked as much as I did out of choice. I still managed to have a social life on weekends, and I even met a wonderful girl as part of the deal (she's an english major and does not work for ms). The culture of individual groups can vary greatly. They are as unique as their employees. I would recommend an ms internship to anyone with the inclination. The work is hard but rewarding, and the perks are out of this world. Also, it bears mentioning that the bill bbq is only open to people who will be graduating in the next school year. 2002 was the first year with this policy. It was instituted due to the increasing number of interns. Finally, the intern newsgroup mentioned in other posts is never worth reading. It tends towards being as bad as browsing slashdot at -1.
>Sounds like HFS+.
.Net's Global Assembly Cache... That's like saying that Mac OS Classic's Extension Manager is a lot like Fat32 or NTFS... Well, except that extension manager was phenomenally brain-dead, and the GAC actually works right...
.Net developer are many: you actually get mocked by everyone....
(For those not familiar with the more obscure Mac OS acronyms, this would be the Hierarchical File System +).
What in the world are you talking about? HFS+ is the filesystem used by Mac OS 8.x, 9.x, and X. It has absolutely nothing in common with
The joys of being a Cocoa and
Do you honestly think that Microsoft would try such heavy-handed tactics as this? Come on. MSN and IE are in _totally separate_ product groups. MSN is not about to make themselves look bad in order make IE look better. Let me repeat this, as it's an important point: this doesn't make Opera look bad, it makes MSN look bad. Being one of the few people on here who has met the MSN general manager, and is responding here, I can tell you for a fact that this is not what they're trying to do. It was a screwup, plain and simple. Microsoft isn't infallible and evil, they're people too. Articles like this one do a great disservice to the ideals that slashdot is, in theory, attempting to pass on. This merely reinforces the view of many that slashdot is nothing but a collection of knee-jerk reactionaries. If Konqueror suddenly croaked on the Gnome website, no one would think that Gnome was trying to make the Konqueror project look bad. Same thing if mozilla.org stopped working correctly with IE.
a quote from the article: "Its innovative swiveling screen transforms the shape from PDA-style to laptop-style. "
yep. it's just about as innovative as the toshiba portege 3500 I'm writing this on right now. Too bad it doesn't have the MS Tablet PC API, or an electromagnetic-resistive screen. what a tragedy. It occurs to me that it must be lame when MS does it, but innovative if it runs linux. And no, I'm not a troll. People here just tend not to like anything that microsoft puts out, but will call it the greatest thing since sliced bread the second someone ports linux to the damned thing.
The universal remote (actually known as the Personal Universal Controller, or PUC) is part of the Pebbles Project at CMU. It's website is here.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm not going anywhere near .NET.
It may not be long before you have a choice. You may never install the .NET framework on your computer, but chances are that you will still make use of it on websites that you use before too long. It's incredibly nice for developing web services, which, if the pundits are to be believed are going to catch on in a big way. Besides web services, I'd much rather develop software using C# or VB.NET and the .NET framework than with the old-school windows APIs (note: my primary computer is currently an Apple TiBook. I develop with Obj-C/Cocoa primarily). This is, in a lot of ways, similar to the Win32 migration. People will hold out for a good long while, but eventually the world will get to the point where it's no longer possible to not switch. With Miguel DeIcaza advocating the use of Mono, you'll be able to do .NET development on linux even. The current systems may work, but it's always possible that the new stuff will work better. Or that you won't have a choice. Or a combination of the two.
Ok. As irritating as it is, I am going to have to do a point by point rebuttal here. Sorry in advance.
Point One half of Apple's current lineup of computers, the iMac and the iBook (2 computers that I bet make up the bulk of their sales) have NO expansion slots. No PCI slots on the iMac, and no PCMCIA slots on the laptops.
Rebuttal And this is bad why? The vast majority of people in the world out there DO NOT upgrade their computers. EVER. I worked at a computer repair firm for two years, and I would guess that not more than a quarter of PC users actually get new cards installed into their computers. This, contrary to what most people on slashdot feel, is not a limitation for the vast majority of users. Here, think of it like this. Most PC users, when they're adding new stuff to their computers, will get things that can be plugged into serial, parallel, and usb ports. Not PCI. Not AGP. Not (god forbid) ISA.
Point This is nothing more than a stupid, short-sighted attempt by Apple to make the computer not last as long. In essence, your choices become: 1: buy the much more expensive TiBook or G4 tower, or 2: buy the cheap one and it's obsolete, FAST.
RebuttalAnd this is different from those microtower Dells, Compaq iPaqs, etc, in what way exactly? Furthermore, with laptops, what the hell is the point of a PC card slot on a laptop that has video out, firewire, usb, 10/100 ethernet, AirPort (802.11b), and a 56k modem built-in? I actually just bought a TiBook 3-4 days ago (it's still on its way), and I don't have any notion of what I'll actually use the PC card slot on it for. I've been using an indigo iBook for the last 14 months, and I am currently replacing it only because I am starting to find the screen size limiting (it's a pain to use Project Builder and Interface Builder in 800x600 pixels).
Point Apple has end-of-lifed the video cards used in the first generation iMac - users of those computers are never going to get accelerated video drivers in OS X. If those were cheapo PCs with slots, you could at least throw a nicer video card in there and solve the problem.
Rebuttal Ok. OS X is big. It's a dog on anything less than a 366 MHz G3 with at least 128MB RAM. The original iMac (the bondi blue variety) has a 233MHz G3 processor, and came with 32 mb RAM. The average person is NOT going to run OS X on that thing. They'd be absolutely nuts to do it. Apple knows this. That's a big reason why they will not bother writing accelerated video card drivers for the bondi iMac. No one would use them (or at least they shouldn't). If these people really want to run OS X, they should sell their Bondi iMac off for $350 or $400, or whatever they go for, and pick up the $799 iMac.
PointAnd don't bother posting that it doesn't matter that there aren't any expansion slots because "everything comes built in". Tell that to first generation iBook or iMac owners who like to use the iPod - "sorry, FireWire only". Those computers are less than two years old, and already becoming obsolete.
Rebuttal Ha. Yeah right. I hate to break it to you, but if you can't afford to pick up a new computer every two or three years (the iMac will be 4 next August, and the iBook came out ~one year after the iMac) there is no way in hell you could afford an iPod. The iPod is a toy for those with too much money. Don't get me wrong on this, I'd love to have one, but there's no way in hell I can afford one until I'm out of college (I bought the TiBook because it'll serve a definite purpose. besides, I bought an AVC Soul Player a year ago). These people aren't going to go out and spend $400 on the iPod unless they could afford a new computer anyway. Besides, it doesn't matter, since everything comes built-in anyways, right? ;-)
Point Would you like to have USB 2.0? I will, and I can add it to my 3 year old Dell notebook via a card and it will work fine. The Apple iBook you buy TODAY can't be expanded with a single new tech. beyond what it ships with. Now which comp. is aging faster, the Apple, or the Dell? Even crummy $700 PCs and $1100 laptops have PCI/PCMCIA.
Rebuttal Yet people continue buying iBooks, with their 400 Mbit firewire ports that have devices available for the port today. What idiots! Can you even buy a USB 2.0 card yet? By the way, take a look at your P.S. statement. Hell, I'll quote it here. P.S. I don't want to hear about how you can add all sorts of nifty expansion option via FireWire. I don't want 5 boxes hanging off my computer. But wait, you still want 5 USB 2.0 devices hanging off your computer? I'm confused. It must be because I'm one of those gullible anti-windows mac users (I'm typing this on my self-built coppermine-core system running XP pro right now.).
Point PCI and PCMCIA slots let you add all sorts of stuff to your computer, in effect, "future-proofing" it by allowing you to expand rather than buy a new computer. A computer without expansion options hardly qualifies as "a computer that ages slower than PCs."
Point I just did a search on Micro Warehouse for pc card, and as you can see, basically everything listed is a wireless ethernet card, an ethernet card, a modem, or a usb controller. I HAVE ALL OF THOSE THINGS BUILT INTO MY IBOOK. Jeez. About the only thing I would find useful to buy for a pc card slot would be one of those pc card hard drives (that ibm makes). Even then, I'd rather just burn a cd with the built-in burner. More people have cd-rom drives than pc card slots. Furthermore, let's take a look at the cards I have in my PC right now. 1. An ATI Xpert 2000 (AGP 4x). 2. An SB Live (PCI). 3. A Linksys 10/100BaseT Ethernet card (PCI). 4. A firewire card. There is really nothing else that I am planning on ever adding to this computer. Sure, there are a lot of people out there who need second monitors, but none of them would buy an iMac anyways. They wouldn't be served well by a 15" monitor. The iMac is a consumer machine. The iBook (supposedly) is too (although most business types would probably be fine having one). The Power Mac G4 is a professional machine. Same thing goes for the Powerbook G4. You don't hear people complaining that their Dell Dimension 2100's won't let them install a burner inside the case. If you did, you'd probably ridicule them for not buying a higher-end machine.
You know what, I will go on using my Apple laptop, my Intel/Microsoft desktop, and the god-awful Sun Blade 100 I get stuck using at school, and you can go on using whatever you want to. We'll just call it even.
A quick note regarding OS 10.1:
(FWIW/FYI I'm using an iBook 366/Firewire)
Project Builder 10.0.1 breaks upon upgrading, you just need to reinstall it to get it working again
I have an SB live and it worked right off the bat for my distro (Mandrake).
Maybe I should try Mandrake sometime. This kind of confirms what I was saying. I've tried a shitload of different distros (RH 5.something, RH 6.0, RH 6.2, SuSE 6.4, Turbolinux 6.04, Slackware 7) and it gets irritating not having it work. I am certainly not dumping on any of you who do enjoy doing this stuff, it's just not my thing, but I don't want to have to patch and recompile the kernel. I don't care enough to learn it.
I used to think that I was a MacOS bigot, but I've since changed my tune on that. A couple years back I switched from the MacOS to Windows (initially 95). I hated it. But eventually 98 came out. I began to appreciate it more and more. I've found WinME to be nothing but a dream to use as far as the UI goes. Except for the crashing. Every time I suffer a fatal exception error I feel a distinct urge to fly to redmond and beat the crap out of MSFT's QA engineers. In any case, about 3 months ago I purchased an iBook because I sorely needed a laptop, and I couldn't bear the thought of purchasing another Wintel machine. OS X public beta had come out shortly before and had been getting many rave reviews. I received the machine shortly thereafter in the mail with MacOS 9.04 preinstalled and hated it. Thankfully I got OS X in the mail the next day. I installed it as I related previously. I have never suffered a crash on the machine. It runs Apache, Jakarta-Tomcat, all of my XML tools, the Java Dev. Kit, Office 2001, and Unreal flawlessly. I have discovered that I am not a Mac bigot, but in fact a user interface bigot. I feel that KDE and Gnome (mind you that I am referring to KDE 1.x and Gnome without Eazel) are somewhat lacking in the tasty eye-candy that make a computer friendly to me. Microsoft seems to have finally figured out how to make a computer (relatively) easy to use. Apple has, once again, perfected it. OS X is a beautiful OS. It has a perfect mixture of power user features and beginner hand-holding.
If Linux suffers as a result of OS X's release it will be in its best interest in the end. Linux, as cool as it is (don't get me wrong, I still use it) has many rough edges. These need to be corrected before it will ever appeal to a mass audience. Then again, who is to say that this has ever been the goal of the OSS movement? We all come out better in the end with the release of high-quality software, no matter who has created it. I certainly do not claim to an expert in the field I have been discussing, only someone who has used many different operating systems (MacOS, OS X, Linux flavors, BSD, Win9x, NT 4, Win2k, and the BeOS).
Please do me a favor and not moderate me down if you feel that what I have written only contradicts with your philosophy. Thanks.
How difficult is it exactly to ensure the support of hardware abstraction layers, such as the Windows NT HAL or DirectX, under Plex86? Is this a non-issue, i.e. the HALs can still talk to the underlying hardware, or is this a seriously difficult issue, mandating the writing of vitualized video cards, sound cards, BIOSes, etc.?
My mother makes $25K (Canadian) a year. To get that money she AVERAGES a 55 hour work week spent staring at a computer screen as her eyes slowly deteriorate. For you to suggest, even for one second, that you "work harder" than my mother, is one of the most offensive and repugnant things I've ever heard. You don't make > $100K because you're smarter or because you work harder. You make it because you are luckier and more self absorbed. And no, you shouldn't be rewarded for that. Right on. This also dovetails with the typical right-wing belief that people on welfare in the united states are on it because they are lazy, stupid, or ignorant. Furthermore, they believe that those who do fall upon hard times are SOL if they do not have the savings to live off of during such time periods. I find beliefs such as that so repugnant, mostly because I've never heard anyone spout that type of drivel at me unless they or their parents made at least $80-90k per year. As long as I'm ranting about economic inequality, I'll mention one more thing. I work with a guy who is, just like me, a college student. He doesn't believe that the government should assist people in paying for college. He's one of those people whose parents make said 80-90 k per year, whereas my mother is a public school teacher, and my father is a deadbeat. I asked my coworker if he, as one who did not take loans out from the government, received money from his wealthy parents for school. He replied, "I have been given a sizeable amount of money for school." I, in contrast, work my ass off to save enough money to continue going to school, receive nothing in money from my parents, and have to take out loans from the government. "Big government" is the only reason I am able to afford school. To say that I am, by default, unworthy of going to college, or should not allowed to receive a higher education if I cannot, at this time, afford it is probably the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard in my life. GORE 2000!
Even then, it can still be a really big mistake to send email from work. Of course, if you're emailing illegal/proprietary company information to someone while you're at work maybe you deserve to get caught...
That is why, even though modern breeder reactors are far safer and more efficient than the nuke plants that have been running since the '50s, less than a dozen new nuclear plants have opened in the US in the past 20 years.
Naturally, these would be the same scary breeders that generate plutonium. Yeah, that's fantastic. Let's generate _MORE_ plutonium.