Was it better than System Shock? That's a 1994 game. Or Star Wars: Dark Forces, released 3 months later in March 1995?
Yes, but inferior to Duke Nukem 3D, so it really was a very tiny window of time in which Mac owners could claim an obvious FPS edge.
Once Quake got the 3D/FX patch, it was all over but the cryin'. From then on, Windows was the platform of the LAN party.
Which is fine. I still keep a Windows PC around for games. I wouldn't want to use it for anything important, but it's a nice game machine. (People who remember Mac/PC flame wars from the early 90's will find that comment funny, anyway.)
And yet we do not hear people complaining about Hummers wasting all our time at stop lights. This is because people buy Hummers to show they can.
No, this is because almost nobody drives those pieces of shit.
The H2 is not a real Hummer. It's a cheap-ass GM truck with a split-and-expanded frame, and the Hummer's fugly shell attached to it. The local dealership in my town has the practically piled up like cordwood, but even in Minnesota, where you would think the high stance would be popular for Winter roads, I've only seen two of them actually on the highway, and I bet at least one of them was a dealer moving it from one show to another.
Also, in e1m8, the most of the locations where you could see to target the best placed you very near walls.
What, did you play on a 9" black and white monitor or something?
Since the rocket launcher is an area-effect weapon, my effective target size just got a lot bigger.
Which is why the key to winning in that level is: stay away from walls and floors, and keep moving. People could fire rockets at me all they liked, they would only get me with a direct hit. They could wait for me to land and shoot rockets at my landing spot before I jump again, but odds are they would not live long enough to see me land.
FYI, There's a bug in Quake 1 (even in modern versions of the engine such as Darkplaces, Twilight and QuakeForge) that lets you change direction mid-jump. Hold down "+forward" and change yaw...you'll drift through the turn./g/bug/s//feature/
Somewhere around 132 (depending on the test) gets you into Mensa (which means "better than 98% of the world), and almost nobody scores over 165 or so.
There are however a significant number of people who score under 19.
So before we even look at the entire distribution, we can be pretty sure that it's not a normal one.
Of course, most people with IQ scores below 60 or so do not participate in society very much, and live as wards of somebody else, but the geniuses walk among the general population relatively unnoticed. So if you meet a "random" person in a store, they are already part of a sub-set of people who are mentally capable of going shopping, and the odds of them being "above average" improve slightly... unless the store you meet them in is a Bose electronics store, because only a complete idiot would shop there.
Married men live, on average, about ten years longer than men who remain single.
The individual who benefits the most from a stable marriage is the child of said couple. People can survive with one parent, but there is no greater force for giving somebody a shot at a happy and rewarding life than two loving parents who have committed themselves to living, raising children, and growing old together.
But if you don't plan on having kids then yeah... Marriage is just shacking up, but with paperwork.
Damn, I loved getting guys like you into the low-G level of Quake Deathmatch. I would go arcing across the room plunking away at Keyboard Joe while he took futile pot-shots at me with his rocket launcher... and Heaven help him if he dared to stand or run on the ground while trying to draw a bead on me. I'd switch up to rockets or grenades, and turn him into tasty chucks of meat.
You hardly ever see extreme low-gravity in deathmatch maps anymore. They were very unpopular with the 95% percent of gamers who couldn't stand the fact that they couldn't change directions at a sudden twitch the way you can on the ground. The 5% of us who embraced the madness had worlds of fun, though.
I was pretty good at Quake in general, but when given the chance to do the low-gravity floating strafe, I was death incarnate.
Good times, good times.
Hmm... I'm bragging about my Quake skills on Slashdot. I feel like I've gone back in time all of the sudden...
Now realize thay 1/2 the world is even dumber than that.
Hate to say it, but if you were one of the people who are smarter than the average, you would realize that median and average are not the same thing, and seldom the same number, and therefore the second line of your post is almost certainly incorrect.
For example, in a room of 11 people, suppose you have 8 with an IQ of 105, and 2 with an IQ of 80, and 1 with an IQ of 100.
The person with the 100 IQ is an average person for that room. Far less than half of the room is dumber than that.
Elsewhere in this forum, somebody was scoffing at the fact that most Americans consider themselves to be of "above average" intelligence, as if there's something absolutely hilarious about people having a high opinion of their own mind power... never stopping to consider that it is at least mathematically possible.
Great: discovering how to make fire, Newton figuring out laws of gravity..
Greater/greatest: USA and USSR putting men in space
Actually, I tend to give a lot of the credit for the space race to the two individuals who figured out fire and gravity. Nobody would have gotten far off the ground without them.
And no, you can't be certain that, were there no Einstein, somebody else would have come up with Relativity. It may seem like an obvious conclusion now, in hindsight, because he showed it to us, but billions of people had what appeared to be the same potential to reach it themselves and didn't. We will never no for sure, as we have not "control" specimen of an Einstein-free world to compare ours with.
If the tone of your origian post wasn't expressing irritation at Google gittin' all fancy-like with them there thirty-cent words, perhaps you would not have been subjected to such a humiliating barrage of people pointing out your ignorance.
For that matter, if (as you now claim) you genuinely were curious about the distiction between "zeitgeist" and "summary," you could have looked it up at dictionary.com or m-w.com yourself, and spared yourself from a brief (but festive) flame-war.
Zeitgeist might not be a popular word in whatever circles you happen to run in, but it is a word that English speakers use a lot, and corporate marketing types (who would be among the most interested in this sort of information) have been using a Hell of a lot, especially in the last decade or so. (One could even say it has entered the national zeitgeist... but that would just be piling on at this point.)
In fact, it would be tough to find an entire issue of Wired magazine which doesn't use the word "zeitgeist" somewhere between the covers.
If you really wanted to insist on a more common word, however, then "fads" might have almost done the trick. Almost.
but the page is written in english. only germanic language speakers would have an extra chance of knowing the meaning of the word "zeitgeist."
Psst...
English is a Germanic language.
if someone was reading it in japan with rudimentary english skills, he/she would stand a much better chance of understanding the word "summary" is than "zeitgeist."
So, you are saying that our standard for all written communication must now be, "dumbed down to the point that a foreign tourist who barely knows how to ask where the bathroom is and can't even hear the difference between R and L sounds (let alone pronounce them) can follow the conversation."
How about instead of pulling all of us down to your 5th-grade reading level, you get an education and learn how to talk with the grown-ups? Until then, if you could stop whining, that would be great.
Neither is "garage," (it's French, kids!) but unless you are Moe the bartender from The Simpsons, you probably don't insist on calling it a "car hole."
Zeitgeist is a word which is borrowed by English speakers often enough that Webster's dictionary lists it.
Just because your vocabulary is limited to words which were lovingly shaped from authentic virgin phonemes by Celtic craftmen long before those Norman bastards invaded and started importing all kinds of new words, doesn't mean the rest of us need to be so limited in our tools of communication.
As surprised as I was to discover that Miss Spears had not become completely irrelevant in 2004, it was far from the biggest shock.
"Charmed" is the fourth-most Googled show on television!? Really? Charmed? There's actually people out there who care about that show?
It was the only non-animated series to even make the list.
I would chalk it up to the "babe factor", but none of the stars of that crap show turned up on the top-ten list of female celebrity image searches (while a few of the ones on that list have or had TV shows.) Besides, there are certainly plenty of women on television as attractive as Alyssa Milano, aren't there?
Yeah, I also stopped reading when I hit "#96: Test Match Cricket."
I have no desire to take a nostalgic journey through the childhood of people I've never meet.
Besides, a fluff piece like this which is split into ten sections in order to pump up hit counts on their banner ads is officially "t3h suck." Let's all make it our New Years resolution to never link to such articles from now on, m'kay?
You know, in any other country Kevin Garnet would be a bum or clerk or something.
No, he would be a soccer star, and worshipped as a god. The guy is seven feet tall, strong as a bull, graceful as a cat, and moves like an olympic sprinter. He's a perfect genetic specimen of human physcal perfection who continues to display a work ethic which few atheletes even pretend they have.
The fact that people pay guys $305 million to bounce a ball is idiotic.
Good thing he makes $20 Million a year, not $305.
What would be idiotic is if he was only paid a six-figure salary when his performance generates billions of dollars for both the Timberwolves and the NBA in general.
When I buy a ticket to an Wolves game, I'm not paying to see Glen Taylor own a basketball team, I'm paying to see Kevin Garnett play basketball, so it's only right that he keeps most of the money from my ticket.
If it were limited to that, there would be no problem, but paying one player more affects the entire league.
Actually, even if it's limited to that, you have a problem. Look at baseball, where the Yankees get their first choice of player at every position, and then all other teams divide up the remaining players between them.
Small-market MLB teams have only two ways to win:
1. Develop a squad of AAA-leage players over six or seven losing seasons, hoping that your managers can hone them into a good enough club to take one or two cracks at a title before the whole staff leaves for free agency. This is a cycle the Minnesota Twins have gone through three times now, and can actually be kind of entertaining to witness, if you don't mind watching a few really horrid seasons immediately after each championship team's peak.
2. Blow your entire 10-year budget on a staff of hired guns on short-term contracts, and then wallow in mediocraty until the total loss of fan interest forces you to do it again. This has produced mighty, yet short-lived teams for Anneheim, Florida and Arizona, but it's hard to feel any real attachment to these squads of mercenaries. "Yankees vs. Whoever signed Randy Johnson This Year" gets a little old after a while.
Football has strong revenue sharing and basketball has a salary cap, which means that cities like Green Bay, Wisconsin and San Antonio, Texas can participate as real contenders and even build brief "dynasty" teams, rather than just show up as patsies for New York City to smack around.
I humbly submit that the LOTR trilogy single-handedly justifies the exitance of motion pictures in the last ten years. Throw in parts 1 & 2 of both Spiderman and Kill Bill, and you've got a darn good decade for movies on your hands there.... and those are just the films with geek cred.
Look past the Jerry Bruckhiemer chucks of spew, and you will find that new directors like Spike Jonze, Daren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, along with veterans at the top of their game like the Cohen brothers, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, and Mel Gibson, have all made it a pretty good era for film.
I do agree about the lack of originality in game content. It's not like I'm insisting on a whole new from-the-ground-up gameplay experience here (although it would be nice to see once in a while.) Just do something more interesting than re-skinning the games I've already played.
I read an article recently about the VHS/Betamax wars in the early 80's. Now everyone knows that the Betamax was a better machine, the quality was better, the tapes didn't degrade as quickly BUT the argument he gave for VHS can be perfectly attributed to the PC/Mac argument.
I agree. VHS won because it was the format pr0n was distributed on. PC's won because it was the format that had Doom deathmatches first. Very similar history.
I can scour hundreds of websites all selling parts cheaper than the last that will make my computer that little bit better. I can buy motherboards, CPU's, PSU's, Gfx cards, memory, etc. I can mix and match according to my budget. I know you can buy seperate memory and HDD's for the Mac but the choice is certainly not as extensive as it is for the PC
As somebody who uses both PC's and Macs, I've found that motherboard replacements on PC's almost never have a cost/benifit advantage over selling the old system and buying a new one. In the three years it takes for a PC to become obsolete, CUP Slot, memory format, graphics card slots, and power requirements all change formats, so replacing the motherboard demands the replacement of all those other components, and suddenly you are sinking $600 into a PC when you can buy one with bigger and faster media storage for $650.
Here, the high resale value of the Mac suddenly shines through. I could still get $300 for the G3 Tower I bought four years ago, while I could not get $50 for the PC I built a year later.
And let's be honest about CPU upgrades here. There are major CPU makers for PC's, Intel and AMD. Their CPU designs use completely different slots, so if you have an Intel PC, you are just as locked in to Intel as a Mac user is locked into PowerPC, unless you are willing to do a complete motherboard swap (which gets back to the point I made above.) If you have an AMD, you are locked into AMD.
Your only serious choices for graphics cards are nVidia and ATI, both of which make Mac cards.
Memory is a commodity part; Macs use DDR, the same stuff high-end PC's use.
Most of the stuff that people used to use PCI slots for now tends to be built in to the motherboard on both Macs and PC's (sound, modem, Ethernet, etc.), but the Mac towers still have three of the exact same PCI slots which PC's use.
What I'm getting at here is that it's kind of a myth that PC's are sooooo much more upgradable than Macs.
Unless you are a gamer or somebody who desperately needs to stay bleeding-edge on CPU speed, you probably will not replace the CPU on your PC more than once (if that) in the lifetime of the motherboard, and will probably replace the whole damned thing when the motherboard no longer meets your needs.
I can walk into my local PC World (PC Warehouse style store in the UK) and pick up anything off the shelf, take it home and install it. The only Apple shop i know is in London. I know that virtually all cameras, digital video cameras, mp3 players, etc. will work with my machine without even having to check the box for compatibility.
Your information is shockingly out of date. "Virtually all cameras, digital video cameras, mp3 players, etc." will work with a Mac. Furthermore, they will work immedately, while most PC users need to futz around with extra driver software.
Apple helped invent the IEEE-1394 format which most digital media devices now use. Furthermore, every new Mac ships with USB and Bluetooth.
Mac users seem to delight in pointing out all the viruses, trojans, etc for the pc but for them i have 3 words: Nortons Internet Security. Any pc user knows before the computer goes anyway near the internet he needs a firewall and antivirus. Of course no internet protection software is perfect but as long as the user is completely brain-dead he's relatively safe.
When I built my last PC and installed XP, hackers "pwned" it before the security patches from Microsoft could even finish downloading. I re
We do not, however, have vending machines for buying underwear. Japan remains the world leader in the "everything you can possibly imagine sold by vending machines" category.
The point of Starbucks (or, in Minnesota, Caribou and Dunn Bros.) was never the coffee. You can get coffee anywhere. Every office has coffee, and there are plenty of coffee vending machines.
The point of coffee shops is leaving the office for ten or twenty minutes.
Most Americans are non-smokers, so making a "coffee run" is one of the few excuses the typical American worker has for getting out of the building for a little while. It's a six-dollar mini-vacation.
So I don't think the executives at Starbucks are losing sleep over cold coffee that you re-heat with hand warmers built into the can.
I could see it being popular with hunters, though. Having hot coffee in the deer stand without needing a big thermos could have some appeal.
Slashdot Mirror
It's also not good for the public image of skydiving when sombody dies like this.
Recreational skydiving probably should not have a good public image.
If you skydive on any kind of regular basis, and you are not a paratrooper training for combat, then you are obviously an idiotic adreneline junkie.
Was it better than System Shock? That's a 1994 game. Or Star Wars: Dark Forces, released 3 months later in March 1995?
Yes, but inferior to Duke Nukem 3D, so it really was a very tiny window of time in which Mac owners could claim an obvious FPS edge.
Once Quake got the 3D/FX patch, it was all over but the cryin'. From then on, Windows was the platform of the LAN party.
Which is fine. I still keep a Windows PC around for games. I wouldn't want to use it for anything important, but it's a nice game machine. (People who remember Mac/PC flame wars from the early 90's will find that comment funny, anyway.)
And yet we do not hear people complaining about Hummers wasting all our time at stop lights. This is because people buy Hummers to show they can.
No, this is because almost nobody drives those pieces of shit.
The H2 is not a real Hummer. It's a cheap-ass GM truck with a split-and-expanded frame, and the Hummer's fugly shell attached to it. The local dealership in my town has the practically piled up like cordwood, but even in Minnesota, where you would think the high stance would be popular for Winter roads, I've only seen two of them actually on the highway, and I bet at least one of them was a dealer moving it from one show to another.
Also, in e1m8, the most of the locations where you could see to target the best placed you very near walls.
/g/bug/s//feature/
What, did you play on a 9" black and white monitor or something?
Since the rocket launcher is an area-effect weapon, my effective target size just got a lot bigger.
Which is why the key to winning in that level is: stay away from walls and floors, and keep moving. People could fire rockets at me all they liked, they would only get me with a direct hit. They could wait for me to land and shoot rockets at my landing spot before I jump again, but odds are they would not live long enough to see me land.
FYI, There's a bug in Quake 1 (even in modern versions of the engine such as Darkplaces, Twilight and QuakeForge) that lets you change direction mid-jump. Hold down "+forward" and change yaw...you'll drift through the turn.
Somewhere around 132 (depending on the test) gets you into Mensa (which means "better than 98% of the world), and almost nobody scores over 165 or so.
There are however a significant number of people who score under 19.
So before we even look at the entire distribution, we can be pretty sure that it's not a normal one.
Of course, most people with IQ scores below 60 or so do not participate in society very much, and live as wards of somebody else, but the geniuses walk among the general population relatively unnoticed. So if you meet a "random" person in a store, they are already part of a sub-set of people who are mentally capable of going shopping, and the odds of them being "above average" improve slightly... unless the store you meet them in is a Bose electronics store, because only a complete idiot would shop there.
Find a woman who doesn't drive you nuts. Then you won't have to bitch.
And when you find her, ask if she has a sister, because pretty much all the women I've meet are completely psycho.
Married men live, on average, about ten years longer than men who remain single.
The individual who benefits the most from a stable marriage is the child of said couple. People can survive with one parent, but there is no greater force for giving somebody a shot at a happy and rewarding life than two loving parents who have committed themselves to living, raising children, and growing old together.
But if you don't plan on having kids then yeah... Marriage is just shacking up, but with paperwork.
Damn, I loved getting guys like you into the low-G level of Quake Deathmatch. I would go arcing across the room plunking away at Keyboard Joe while he took futile pot-shots at me with his rocket launcher... and Heaven help him if he dared to stand or run on the ground while trying to draw a bead on me. I'd switch up to rockets or grenades, and turn him into tasty chucks of meat.
You hardly ever see extreme low-gravity in deathmatch maps anymore. They were very unpopular with the 95% percent of gamers who couldn't stand the fact that they couldn't change directions at a sudden twitch the way you can on the ground. The 5% of us who embraced the madness had worlds of fun, though.
I was pretty good at Quake in general, but when given the chance to do the low-gravity floating strafe, I was death incarnate.
Good times, good times.
Hmm... I'm bragging about my Quake skills on Slashdot. I feel like I've gone back in time all of the sudden...
think of how dumb the average person is...
Now realize thay 1/2 the world is even dumber than that.
Hate to say it, but if you were one of the people who are smarter than the average, you would realize that median and average are not the same thing, and seldom the same number, and therefore the second line of your post is almost certainly incorrect.
For example, in a room of 11 people, suppose you have 8 with an IQ of 105, and 2 with an IQ of 80, and 1 with an IQ of 100.
The person with the 100 IQ is an average person for that room. Far less than half of the room is dumber than that.
Elsewhere in this forum, somebody was scoffing at the fact that most Americans consider themselves to be of "above average" intelligence, as if there's something absolutely hilarious about people having a high opinion of their own mind power... never stopping to consider that it is at least mathematically possible.
Oh... and you spelled "that" wrong.
Great: discovering how to make fire, Newton figuring out laws of gravity..
Greater/greatest: USA and USSR putting men in space
Actually, I tend to give a lot of the credit for the space race to the two individuals who figured out fire and gravity. Nobody would have gotten far off the ground without them.
And no, you can't be certain that, were there no Einstein, somebody else would have come up with Relativity. It may seem like an obvious conclusion now, in hindsight, because he showed it to us, but billions of people had what appeared to be the same potential to reach it themselves and didn't. We will never no for sure, as we have not "control" specimen of an Einstein-free world to compare ours with.
More information, fewer words - one of the benefits of an expanded vocabulary. Just ask Homer. ;)
Really? Because I always thought that the Illiad was considered rather verbose.
Oh... Maybe you were talking about a different Homer.
D'oh!
If the tone of your origian post wasn't expressing irritation at Google gittin' all fancy-like with them there thirty-cent words, perhaps you would not have been subjected to such a humiliating barrage of people pointing out your ignorance.
For that matter, if (as you now claim) you genuinely were curious about the distiction between "zeitgeist" and "summary," you could have looked it up at dictionary.com or m-w.com yourself, and spared yourself from a brief (but festive) flame-war.
Zeitgeist might not be a popular word in whatever circles you happen to run in, but it is a word that English speakers use a lot, and corporate marketing types (who would be among the most interested in this sort of information) have been using a Hell of a lot, especially in the last decade or so. (One could even say it has entered the national zeitgeist... but that would just be piling on at this point.)
In fact, it would be tough to find an entire issue of Wired magazine which doesn't use the word "zeitgeist" somewhere between the covers.
If you really wanted to insist on a more common word, however, then "fads" might have almost done the trick. Almost.
I always love it when somebody pulls out "cromulent" during a vocab flame war. I offer you my sinsere contrafibularities.
but the page is written in english. only germanic language speakers would have an extra chance of knowing the meaning of the word "zeitgeist."
Psst...
English is a Germanic language.
if someone was reading it in japan with rudimentary english skills, he/she would stand a much better chance of understanding the word "summary" is than "zeitgeist."
So, you are saying that our standard for all written communication must now be, "dumbed down to the point that a foreign tourist who barely knows how to ask where the bathroom is and can't even hear the difference between R and L sounds (let alone pronounce them) can follow the conversation."
How about instead of pulling all of us down to your 5th-grade reading level, you get an education and learn how to talk with the grown-ups? Until then, if you could stop whining, that would be great.
because zeitgeist is not a native english word?
Neither is "garage," (it's French, kids!) but unless you are Moe the bartender from The Simpsons, you probably don't insist on calling it a "car hole."
Zeitgeist is a word which is borrowed by English speakers often enough that Webster's dictionary lists it.
Just because your vocabulary is limited to words which were lovingly shaped from authentic virgin phonemes by Celtic craftmen long before those Norman bastards invaded and started importing all kinds of new words, doesn't mean the rest of us need to be so limited in our tools of communication.
As surprised as I was to discover that Miss Spears had not become completely irrelevant in 2004, it was far from the biggest shock.
"Charmed" is the fourth-most Googled show on television!? Really? Charmed? There's actually people out there who care about that show?
It was the only non-animated series to even make the list.
I would chalk it up to the "babe factor", but none of the stars of that crap show turned up on the top-ten list of female celebrity image searches (while a few of the ones on that list have or had TV shows.) Besides, there are certainly plenty of women on television as attractive as Alyssa Milano, aren't there?
I'm baffled.
Yeah, I also stopped reading when I hit "#96: Test Match Cricket."
I have no desire to take a nostalgic journey through the childhood of people I've never meet.
Besides, a fluff piece like this which is split into ten sections in order to pump up hit counts on their banner ads is officially "t3h suck." Let's all make it our New Years resolution to never link to such articles from now on, m'kay?
Unfortunately, their main page doesn't tell much about what SkyOS actually is.
Unfortunately, noone can be told what SkyOS is. You have to see it for yourself.
Looks like I got my one Matrix quote for the year in, just under the wire! w00t!
You know, in any other country Kevin Garnet would be a bum or clerk or something.
No, he would be a soccer star, and worshipped as a god. The guy is seven feet tall, strong as a bull, graceful as a cat, and moves like an olympic sprinter. He's a perfect genetic specimen of human physcal perfection who continues to display a work ethic which few atheletes even pretend they have.
The fact that people pay guys $305 million to bounce a ball is idiotic.
Good thing he makes $20 Million a year, not $305.
What would be idiotic is if he was only paid a six-figure salary when his performance generates billions of dollars for both the Timberwolves and the NBA in general.
When I buy a ticket to an Wolves game, I'm not paying to see Glen Taylor own a basketball team, I'm paying to see Kevin Garnett play basketball, so it's only right that he keeps most of the money from my ticket.
If it were limited to that, there would be no problem, but paying one player more affects the entire league.
Actually, even if it's limited to that, you have a problem. Look at baseball, where the Yankees get their first choice of player at every position, and then all other teams divide up the remaining players between them.
Small-market MLB teams have only two ways to win:
1. Develop a squad of AAA-leage players over six or seven losing seasons, hoping that your managers can hone them into a good enough club to take one or two cracks at a title before the whole staff leaves for free agency. This is a cycle the Minnesota Twins have gone through three times now, and can actually be kind of entertaining to witness, if you don't mind watching a few really horrid seasons immediately after each championship team's peak.
2. Blow your entire 10-year budget on a staff of hired guns on short-term contracts, and then wallow in mediocraty until the total loss of fan interest forces you to do it again. This has produced mighty, yet short-lived teams for Anneheim, Florida and Arizona, but it's hard to feel any real attachment to these squads of mercenaries. "Yankees vs. Whoever signed Randy Johnson This Year" gets a little old after a while.
Football has strong revenue sharing and basketball has a salary cap, which means that cities like Green Bay, Wisconsin and San Antonio, Texas can participate as real contenders and even build brief "dynasty" teams, rather than just show up as patsies for New York City to smack around.
I humbly submit that the LOTR trilogy single-handedly justifies the exitance of motion pictures in the last ten years. Throw in parts 1 & 2 of both Spiderman and Kill Bill, and you've got a darn good decade for movies on your hands there. ... and those are just the films with geek cred.
Look past the Jerry Bruckhiemer chucks of spew, and you will find that new directors like Spike Jonze, Daren Aronofsky, Christopher Nolan, David Fincher, along with veterans at the top of their game like the Cohen brothers, Clint Eastwood, Steven Spielberg, and Mel Gibson, have all made it a pretty good era for film.
I do agree about the lack of originality in game content. It's not like I'm insisting on a whole new from-the-ground-up gameplay experience here (although it would be nice to see once in a while.) Just do something more interesting than re-skinning the games I've already played.
I read an article recently about the VHS/Betamax wars in the early 80's. Now everyone knows that the Betamax was a better machine, the quality was better, the tapes didn't degrade as quickly BUT the argument he gave for VHS can be perfectly attributed to the PC/Mac argument.
I agree. VHS won because it was the format pr0n was distributed on. PC's won because it was the format that had Doom deathmatches first. Very similar history.
I can scour hundreds of websites all selling parts cheaper than the last that will make my computer that little bit better. I can buy motherboards, CPU's, PSU's, Gfx cards, memory, etc. I can mix and match according to my budget. I know you can buy seperate memory and HDD's for the Mac but the choice is certainly not as extensive as it is for the PC
As somebody who uses both PC's and Macs, I've found that motherboard replacements on PC's almost never have a cost/benifit advantage over selling the old system and buying a new one. In the three years it takes for a PC to become obsolete, CUP Slot, memory format, graphics card slots, and power requirements all change formats, so replacing the motherboard demands the replacement of all those other components, and suddenly you are sinking $600 into a PC when you can buy one with bigger and faster media storage for $650.
Here, the high resale value of the Mac suddenly shines through. I could still get $300 for the G3 Tower I bought four years ago, while I could not get $50 for the PC I built a year later.
And let's be honest about CPU upgrades here. There are major CPU makers for PC's, Intel and AMD. Their CPU designs use completely different slots, so if you have an Intel PC, you are just as locked in to Intel as a Mac user is locked into PowerPC, unless you are willing to do a complete motherboard swap (which gets back to the point I made above.) If you have an AMD, you are locked into AMD.
Your only serious choices for graphics cards are nVidia and ATI, both of which make Mac cards.
Memory is a commodity part; Macs use DDR, the same stuff high-end PC's use.
Most of the stuff that people used to use PCI slots for now tends to be built in to the motherboard on both Macs and PC's (sound, modem, Ethernet, etc.), but the Mac towers still have three of the exact same PCI slots which PC's use.
What I'm getting at here is that it's kind of a myth that PC's are sooooo much more upgradable than Macs.
Unless you are a gamer or somebody who desperately needs to stay bleeding-edge on CPU speed, you probably will not replace the CPU on your PC more than once (if that) in the lifetime of the motherboard, and will probably replace the whole damned thing when the motherboard no longer meets your needs.
I can walk into my local PC World (PC Warehouse style store in the UK) and pick up anything off the shelf, take it home and install it. The only Apple shop i know is in London. I know that virtually all cameras, digital video cameras, mp3 players, etc. will work with my machine without even having to check the box for compatibility.
Your information is shockingly out of date. "Virtually all cameras, digital video cameras, mp3 players, etc." will work with a Mac. Furthermore, they will work immedately, while most PC users need to futz around with extra driver software.
Apple helped invent the IEEE-1394 format which most digital media devices now use. Furthermore, every new Mac ships with USB and Bluetooth.
Mac users seem to delight in pointing out all the viruses, trojans, etc for the pc but for them i have 3 words: Nortons Internet Security. Any pc user knows before the computer goes anyway near the internet he needs a firewall and antivirus. Of course no internet protection software is perfect but as long as the user is completely brain-dead he's relatively safe.
When I built my last PC and installed XP, hackers "pwned" it before the security patches from Microsoft could even finish downloading. I re
We have those in the US, too.
We do not, however, have vending machines for buying underwear. Japan remains the world leader in the "everything you can possibly imagine sold by vending machines" category.
No. Budweiser says "beer" on the can, so clearly anything goes here.
The point of Starbucks (or, in Minnesota, Caribou and Dunn Bros.) was never the coffee. You can get coffee anywhere. Every office has coffee, and there are plenty of coffee vending machines.
The point of coffee shops is leaving the office for ten or twenty minutes.
Most Americans are non-smokers, so making a "coffee run" is one of the few excuses the typical American worker has for getting out of the building for a little while. It's a six-dollar mini-vacation.
So I don't think the executives at Starbucks are losing sleep over cold coffee that you re-heat with hand warmers built into the can.
I could see it being popular with hunters, though. Having hot coffee in the deer stand without needing a big thermos could have some appeal.