If you from Mac OS X to Windows, you have to buy a PC
Not really, no.
If you buy an iMac or MacBook today, or just about any Mac later this year, then you don't. Vista is expected to run just fine on the Intel-based Macs.
Compatibility with more games. Other than WoW, what popular MMORPG runs on Mac OS X?
Shadowbane Planeshift First Star Online A Tale in the Desert Clan Lord EverQuest (not 2)
Unless you're a real junkie for City of Heroes or EQ2, no need for Windows.
Compatibility with more peripherals sold at retail stores.
What? You mean like external hard drives (both USB2 and Firewire), USB input devices, video cameras, single-shot cameras, USB or network printers, HDCP-input HDTV's, DVI and/or VGA monitors (with monitor spanning), audio signal processors, etc.?
Yeah, not only will all of that stuff work on OS X, (and usually without need of a special driver), but often times they will work BETTER than on a PC. Try again.
Hardly. At the local Electrnics boutiques, BestBuys, Future Shops, and Circuit Cities these "demo screens" are mounted into mini 'arcade' stands between game racks and tend to be a whopping 15" sdtv, so any "hd-ness" will be invisible.
I was just in Best Buy this afternoon. The X-Box 360 demo box was hooked up to a 50" widescreen HDTV with surround sound.
The people who really care about HD have already purchased their XBox 360.
Obviously not true.
I care about HD, and I haven't already purchased one yet. I find it hard to believe I'm all that unique.
I *will* most likely purchase a next-gen console for my HD system within the next year, but I do not know if it will be a PS3 or an X-Box 360. The one thing I do know is: it won't be a "low-def" Nintendo.
The easiest way to transport water has been known for thousands of years: Gravity and/or pumps.
Water doesn't need wheels. Once you send it down whatever pipe, duct, canal, etc., that you lay out for it, it will keep going that way.
The challenge is making that water fit to drink.
Most of the world's water is salt water, which you can't drink as-is and expect it to hydrate you.
Most of the remaining water in the world is contaminated by something or another, and should be cleaned before it is consumed.
In the Third World, they can't always afford to completely clear their water of bacteria, parasites, and toxins... but you gotta drink something to stay alive. A better & cheaper way to clean water would be a major boost to world health.
Learn To Spell "Nikola." Don't Capitalize Every Word. Sentence Fragments. Should Be Avoided.
Also, While It's Good To Honor What Tesla Did, You Out Yourself As A Tin-Foil-Hat Sort Of Nut-Job When You Insist That Edison Was Not A Genius Inventor.
All the X-Box titles were $50 and under too, but most of the 360 games are $60. It's the direction the entire market is moving at the moment. It's a safe bet that new titles for the Revolution will retail around that price as well.
The console itself will be cheaper, but then it should be. No HD == no place in my living room. Maybe the rec room, though. $200 is reasonable for a second game system, if it has a lot of cool games available.
Then again, once I have a PS3 or 360, I'll probably eventually be putting my old X-Box down there (and getting about as good of graphics as the Revolution appears to be touting, with a bigger library of available games, at least at first.)
It seems like Nintendo fanboys can't help but slag the 360 and upcoming PS3 at every opportunity, and tout the upcoming magical box from Nintendo as the one that will win the hearts and minds of everybody.
What they conveniently overlook is Nintendo's lack of HD support is going to be awful for them.
Not a lot of people are using HD sets yet but most of the new ones being sold are HD systems.
Even if they don't have such a TV, families will walk into the store next Christmas season and see PS3, X-Box, and Nintendo screens side by side in demo areas, and next to the other two, the Nintendo will look like something from a 1980s arcade machine.
Meanwhile, the 360 will have a year's worth of new games to show off, the PS3 will have its usual stable of Sony exclusives, and the Revolution will have.... what? A "para para" game to take advantage of the new interface, and maybe a puppy simulator? Wow. That will still be dazzling people ten months from now, eh?
In spite of all that, it will still sell, because teenage boys are no longer the whole market. Some would be quick to point out that they never really were. Nintendo is pretty good at putting out games that appeal to a broader range of people than Microsoft or Sony.
Here's the real story:
There is no console "war."
The gaming market is now big enough to handle three major players. Probably more. All three consoles are probably going to end up making lots and lots of money. The only people who care about a "winner" between the three consoles are drooling fanboys of one platform or another.
It's more reliable than Old Faithful. You simply can't mention The Wizard of Menlo Park, in any context, with out a couple of slashbots crawling out of the woodwork to point out how enlightened they are because they know who the fuck Westinghouse's in-shop inventor was, and the fact that he was the champion of AC and thought of a lot of really cool sci-fi-esque ideas for changing the world that never took.
Look, I compared Kamen to Edison because he built a business around an invention lab of his very own which is cranking out remarkable inventions, some of which are "merely" huge improvements on existing concepts. Edison was father of the "mass-produced" invention lab, and Kamen, with his 200-person staff, is his successor.
Tesla, peripherally, is another inventor who came up with a lot of neat ideas, some of which the company he worked for was able to bring to market as something useful.
In other words, no, I didn't fucking mean Nikola Tesla.
Uh, apart from one very visible and notorious market failure (the Segway), Kamen's career is a long string of remarkable triumphs, particularly in the area of med-tech devices. He's become extremely wealthy off the success of his inventions.
If the Segway and maybe the fancy wheelchair is all you know about him, go read the Wiki on him and come back later, k?
The mention of Best Buy was a mistake in that post, but it brings up another point: Once Apple has the Blockbuster name and distribution channel, these kiosks could be put just about anywhere, including various large electronic stores like Best Buy, the Apple Stores, video arcades, bars, or just as stand-alone units like ATMs.
I mean, if the billing is monthly and automatic, and the computer that feeds the iPod is just a kiosk, why would you need any employees standing there to monitor the transactions at all?
Cringley's not thinking it all the way through, IMHO.
Why bother with timing out files when you can "throttle" movie access according to capacity?
In other words, suppose I've got a spiffy new 120 GB iPod. I go to Blockbuster and get an "iPod video" account, signing up for a $15/month account. Their little kiosk creates a special encrypted folder on my iPod, which is big enough to hold up to three full-length movies.
I grab the three movies I want, go home and watch them, and when I come back in a few days for more movies, I need to delete the three I "rented" before in order to make room in my special Blockbuster Video folder for the new stuff.
Set up the encryption so that it's non-trivial to make digital rips from that directory (and relatively trivial for software updates to keep it that way), and that's about all it would take to come up with a service which is not only more convenient than NetFlix, but actually superior in one very important way:
Rental DVDs tend to get scratched all to hell over time.
I've only been on NetFlix a short time, and I've already had to send back several disks as "unplayable" and wait a couple days for a new copy. Filling up an iPod from a local kiosk would save me that hassle, and for me that would be more than worth the hassle of driving to Best Buy.
I mean, to use NetFlix I gotta leave the house to mail out the disks which I've watched, and like with a lot of people, there's a Blockbuster store almost as close to my house as my nearest mailbox. I don't see it as all that different.
He's constantly having to strip down his plans because they are too expensive.
As I recall, his original upright, stair-walking, cool-ass wheelchair went for about $20,000.
Were I unable to walk, I would cheerfully take out a loan if I had to, even for double that amount, in exchange for daily use of that particular miracle of engineering. Owning one would be more important to me than owning a car.
No matter how stupid, useless and over-hyped the Segway was, Dean Kamen is still a fucking genius and the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in our generation.
His insulin pump was so brilliant, it looks obvious in hindsight (as the best inventions often do.)
Even the Segway, which is a silly gadget, makes a sort of sense. He was hoping to make a consumer product which (had it caught on with people) would apply economies of scale to his gyroscopic concepts, which would eventually make his stair-walking wheelchairs cheaper.
If he wants to turn his mad skillz to the problem of getting clean water to people, I gotta take off my hat.
Obviously you come from a world where life-saving "brain transplants" happen. Thank you for coming back in time to tell us about it.
As for other organs, the whole point of a helmet is that some motorcycle accidents which don't "squish" the rest of you can still kill you by crushing your skull.
Wear a helmet, limp away with a few scrapes, bruises, and maybe a broken bone or two. Don't wear a helmet, and little Timmy gets that new knee cartilage he's been waiting for so he can play soccer again.
and they want their hand-wringing over economic depression back.
Times are tight for many people, including gamers, and we are more discriminating with our money
Unemployment is waaaay below 5% nation-wide, and interest and inflation rates are still low. Average income is up. Average disposable income is up.
BTW: The only economic bad news you can point at right now (apart from dirt-poor people from New Orleans getting dirt-poorer after the hurricane wiped out their shanties), is that gas and oil prices are high. That hardly counts, because high gas prices are fantastic news, if you are a progressive/liberal thinker. 1) It makes the current conservative (and already unpopular) president even less popular. 2) It makes alternative fuels more economically viable. Win-win, really.
Swerving back on topic, people have more money to piddle away on NetFlix accounts, cable/satelite TV, IMAX theater attendance, broadband Internet, porn, and yes, even games, than they ever had in American history.
The.com paper millionaires of the Clinton boom may be gone, but all the sweet upper-middle-class corporate jobs are back with a vengeance. If you are not making an assload of money right now, you are either completely incompetent, or else you desperately need to update your resume and change jobs.
Smokers tend to die young and fast. Non-smokers tend to live long lives, and eventually die of things which gradually wear them down while they lie in hospital beds for months and even years.
Smokers SAVE health systems money. Death by lung cancer or heart attack is way cheaper than slowly failing kidneys.
Why don't we just build a 500 mile high pyramid of some description?
Indeed! Then we shall be like gods! Effettivamente! Allora saremo come i dii! In der Tat! Dann sind wir wie Götter! En effet! Alors nous serons comme des dieux!
Slashdot Mirror
This is a "tomato" type situation.
Only in the sense that some say "to-MAY-to", some say "to-MAH-to"... but you (and you alone) think it's "to-MAR-to."
I wasn't quite sure on the spelling so i spelt it how it is pronounced. (dee-bar-kol or dee-bar-kel)
o.O
I'm not even sure where to begin...
Product of the public schools, are you?
If you from Mac OS X to Windows, you have to buy a PC
Not really, no.
If you buy an iMac or MacBook today, or just about any Mac later this year, then you don't. Vista is expected to run just fine on the Intel-based Macs.
Compatibility with more games. Other than WoW, what popular MMORPG runs on Mac OS X?
Shadowbane
Planeshift
First Star Online
A Tale in the Desert
Clan Lord
EverQuest (not 2)
Unless you're a real junkie for City of Heroes or EQ2, no need for Windows.
Compatibility with more peripherals sold at retail stores.
What? You mean like external hard drives (both USB2 and Firewire), USB input devices, video cameras, single-shot cameras, USB or network printers, HDCP-input HDTV's, DVI and/or VGA monitors (with monitor spanning), audio signal processors, etc.?
Yeah, not only will all of that stuff work on OS X, (and usually without need of a special driver), but often times they will work BETTER than on a PC. Try again.
Hardly. At the local Electrnics boutiques, BestBuys, Future Shops, and Circuit Cities these "demo screens" are mounted into mini 'arcade' stands between game racks and tend to be a whopping 15" sdtv, so any "hd-ness" will be invisible.
I was just in Best Buy this afternoon. The X-Box 360 demo box was hooked up to a 50" widescreen HDTV with surround sound.
Would you like anything to go with that crow?
The people who really care about HD have already purchased their XBox 360.
Obviously not true.
I care about HD, and I haven't already purchased one yet. I find it hard to believe I'm all that unique.
I *will* most likely purchase a next-gen console for my HD system within the next year, but I do not know if it will be a PS3 or an X-Box 360. The one thing I do know is: it won't be a "low-def" Nintendo.
The easiest way to transport water has been known for thousands of years: Gravity and/or pumps.
Water doesn't need wheels. Once you send it down whatever pipe, duct, canal, etc., that you lay out for it, it will keep going that way.
The challenge is making that water fit to drink.
Most of the world's water is salt water, which you can't drink as-is and expect it to hydrate you.
Most of the remaining water in the world is contaminated by something or another, and should be cleaned before it is consumed.
In the Third World, they can't always afford to completely clear their water of bacteria, parasites, and toxins... but you gotta drink something to stay alive. A better & cheaper way to clean water would be a major boost to world health.
Learn To Spell "Nikola." Don't Capitalize Every Word. Sentence Fragments. Should Be Avoided.
Also, While It's Good To Honor What Tesla Did, You Out Yourself As A Tin-Foil-Hat Sort Of Nut-Job When You Insist That Edison Was Not A Genius Inventor.
You know the old saying about riding a Moped, don't you??
Actually, no. What is it?
Buckle up and get ready for it.
All the X-Box titles were $50 and under too, but most of the 360 games are $60. It's the direction the entire market is moving at the moment. It's a safe bet that new titles for the Revolution will retail around that price as well.
The console itself will be cheaper, but then it should be. No HD == no place in my living room. Maybe the rec room, though. $200 is reasonable for a second game system, if it has a lot of cool games available.
Then again, once I have a PS3 or 360, I'll probably eventually be putting my old X-Box down there (and getting about as good of graphics as the Revolution appears to be touting, with a bigger library of available games, at least at first.)
It seems like Nintendo fanboys can't help but slag the 360 and upcoming PS3 at every opportunity, and tout the upcoming magical box from Nintendo as the one that will win the hearts and minds of everybody.
What they conveniently overlook is Nintendo's lack of HD support is going to be awful for them.
Not a lot of people are using HD sets yet but most of the new ones being sold are HD systems.
Even if they don't have such a TV, families will walk into the store next Christmas season and see PS3, X-Box, and Nintendo screens side by side in demo areas, and next to the other two, the Nintendo will look like something from a 1980s arcade machine.
Meanwhile, the 360 will have a year's worth of new games to show off, the PS3 will have its usual stable of Sony exclusives, and the Revolution will have.... what? A "para para" game to take advantage of the new interface, and maybe a puppy simulator? Wow. That will still be dazzling people ten months from now, eh?
In spite of all that, it will still sell, because teenage boys are no longer the whole market. Some would be quick to point out that they never really were. Nintendo is pretty good at putting out games that appeal to a broader range of people than Microsoft or Sony.
Here's the real story:
There is no console "war."
The gaming market is now big enough to handle three major players. Probably more. All three consoles are probably going to end up making lots and lots of money. The only people who care about a "winner" between the three consoles are drooling fanboys of one platform or another.
Perhaps you mean Tesla
*Sigh*
It's more reliable than Old Faithful. You simply can't mention The Wizard of Menlo Park, in any context, with out a couple of slashbots crawling out of the woodwork to point out how enlightened they are because they know who the fuck Westinghouse's in-shop inventor was, and the fact that he was the champion of AC and thought of a lot of really cool sci-fi-esque ideas for changing the world that never took.
Look, I compared Kamen to Edison because he built a business around an invention lab of his very own which is cranking out remarkable inventions, some of which are "merely" huge improvements on existing concepts. Edison was father of the "mass-produced" invention lab, and Kamen, with his 200-person staff, is his successor.
Tesla, peripherally, is another inventor who came up with a lot of neat ideas, some of which the company he worked for was able to bring to market as something useful.
In other words, no, I didn't fucking mean Nikola Tesla.
Uh, apart from one very visible and notorious market failure (the Segway), Kamen's career is a long string of remarkable triumphs, particularly in the area of med-tech devices. He's become extremely wealthy off the success of his inventions.
If the Segway and maybe the fancy wheelchair is all you know about him, go read the Wiki on him and come back later, k?
The mention of Best Buy was a mistake in that post, but it brings up another point: Once Apple has the Blockbuster name and distribution channel, these kiosks could be put just about anywhere, including various large electronic stores like Best Buy, the Apple Stores, video arcades, bars, or just as stand-alone units like ATMs.
I mean, if the billing is monthly and automatic, and the computer that feeds the iPod is just a kiosk, why would you need any employees standing there to monitor the transactions at all?
Cringley's not thinking it all the way through, IMHO.
Why bother with timing out files when you can "throttle" movie access according to capacity?
In other words, suppose I've got a spiffy new 120 GB iPod. I go to Blockbuster and get an "iPod video" account, signing up for a $15/month account. Their little kiosk creates a special encrypted folder on my iPod, which is big enough to hold up to three full-length movies.
I grab the three movies I want, go home and watch them, and when I come back in a few days for more movies, I need to delete the three I "rented" before in order to make room in my special Blockbuster Video folder for the new stuff.
Set up the encryption so that it's non-trivial to make digital rips from that directory (and relatively trivial for software updates to keep it that way), and that's about all it would take to come up with a service which is not only more convenient than NetFlix, but actually superior in one very important way:
Rental DVDs tend to get scratched all to hell over time.
I've only been on NetFlix a short time, and I've already had to send back several disks as "unplayable" and wait a couple days for a new copy. Filling up an iPod from a local kiosk would save me that hassle, and for me that would be more than worth the hassle of driving to Best Buy.
I mean, to use NetFlix I gotta leave the house to mail out the disks which I've watched, and like with a lot of people, there's a Blockbuster store almost as close to my house as my nearest mailbox. I don't see it as all that different.
He's constantly having to strip down his plans because they are too expensive.
As I recall, his original upright, stair-walking, cool-ass wheelchair went for about $20,000.
Were I unable to walk, I would cheerfully take out a loan if I had to, even for double that amount, in exchange for daily use of that particular miracle of engineering. Owning one would be more important to me than owning a car.
No matter how stupid, useless and over-hyped the Segway was, Dean Kamen is still a fucking genius and the closest thing we have to a Thomas Edison in our generation.
His insulin pump was so brilliant, it looks obvious in hindsight (as the best inventions often do.)
Even the Segway, which is a silly gadget, makes a sort of sense. He was hoping to make a consumer product which (had it caught on with people) would apply economies of scale to his gyroscopic concepts, which would eventually make his stair-walking wheelchairs cheaper.
If he wants to turn his mad skillz to the problem of getting clean water to people, I gotta take off my hat.
Obviously you come from a world where life-saving "brain transplants" happen. Thank you for coming back in time to tell us about it.
As for other organs, the whole point of a helmet is that some motorcycle accidents which don't "squish" the rest of you can still kill you by crushing your skull.
Wear a helmet, limp away with a few scrapes, bruises, and maybe a broken bone or two. Don't wear a helmet, and little Timmy gets that new knee cartilage he's been waiting for so he can play soccer again.
No Video out :(
Unless there is some adapter I'm not aware of.
Why would I want to "adapt" the DVI output of my Mac???
My TV (and any decent modern HDTV system or projector) accepts it with a simple DVI-HDCP cable.
and they want their hand-wringing over economic depression back.
.com paper millionaires of the Clinton boom may be gone, but all the sweet upper-middle-class corporate jobs are back with a vengeance. If you are not making an assload of money right now, you are either completely incompetent, or else you desperately need to update your resume and change jobs.
Times are tight for many people, including gamers, and we are more discriminating with our money
Unemployment is waaaay below 5% nation-wide, and interest and inflation rates are still low. Average income is up. Average disposable income is up.
BTW: The only economic bad news you can point at right now (apart from dirt-poor people from New Orleans getting dirt-poorer after the hurricane wiped out their shanties), is that gas and oil prices are high. That hardly counts, because high gas prices are fantastic news, if you are a progressive/liberal thinker. 1) It makes the current conservative (and already unpopular) president even less popular. 2) It makes alternative fuels more economically viable. Win-win, really.
Swerving back on topic, people have more money to piddle away on NetFlix accounts, cable/satelite TV, IMAX theater attendance, broadband Internet, porn, and yes, even games, than they ever had in American history.
The
Biggest myth ever.
Smokers tend to die young and fast. Non-smokers tend to live long lives, and eventually die of things which gradually wear them down while they lie in hospital beds for months and even years.
Smokers SAVE health systems money. Death by lung cancer or heart attack is way cheaper than slowly failing kidneys.
Got any about Hammurabi?
Are you kidding? I've got a stele full of them!
Actually, the common term for motorcyclists who don't wear helmets is "organ donors."
Why don't we just build a 500 mile high pyramid of some description?
Indeed! Then we shall be like gods!
Effettivamente! Allora saremo come i dii!
In der Tat! Dann sind wir wie Götter!
En effet! Alors nous serons comme des dieux!
Indeed. It would be like claiming that you ran from Chicago to New York City in "under 12 miles"
...which Chuck Norris did once, by the way.