I wish I had MOD points right now. You're absolutely bang on. This is pretty much exactly what happened. It was DOS + IBM's initial popularity in the business realm (remember that the Mac always had trouble being seen as a business machine, however IBM PCs WERE the Business machine, esp after Lotus 123) that set the stage (we could say the "standard" as it was), and it was the clones finally that enabled that to proliferate. Compaq being the first BRAND name clone to gain identifiable value, but there were a tonne of clones around. And yes from there basically the future of Windows was pretty much set.
As a note to the parent of this thread, I think he's got it too, and I can't help but wonder if Steve Jobs might actually be wanting to KILL the Mac somehow. He's always said he'll keep with the Mac until they run it into the ground (ie: like a beater), and then move on. Looking at historically how he was involved in creating the Mac (and thought of himself as an artist), I wonder if his trip isn't so much the MAC, but rather creating things. Ala iPod (although of course it was a contracter that did the actual inventing. But perhaps you can consider yourself an artist for just having the ability to recognize good ideas and art).
Perhaps now he's just saying, lets go mass market and see what this thing can do. And if it dies, well that works out well for me because I can go onto the next big thing. You're going to tell me that Jobs is too much of a smart business man for this? I respond with: Apple is the ONLY company right now who has any chance of realizing the set-top box, downloadable media-movie-music center model to the masses, and he's building his company all around the media right now. Love Pixar. Don't be surprised if the Mac somehow becomes just a kind of "token" product to say they still make computers, but that the focus is entirely on Entertainment and Media.
Oh and one last thing. I like my women in video games SEXY. And that will factor into my decision in buy the game. And so will other guys. So I don't think that IS a problem at all.:)
1) Boobies = No women gamers A good point, but they don't seem to get to the root of the issue. It's not just the shabby treatment of women in games that turns them off. It's or the violence, or the language either. The fact is, your average "mature" title these days is dripping with pure unadulterated testosterone. Developers are too busy trying to grab their current target audience (males 17 to 25) to cultivate new audiences. The biggest games- the ones that sell millions of copies to non-traditional gamers- are almost all aimed at a wider audience. Halo 2 was big, there's no denying that- but it pales in comparison to The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon in raw staying power- they're practically cultural phenomena. The same can be said for Nintendogs in Japan, which helped the DS steamroll Sony's entire console family in May (haven't seen sales figures since then). That's the kind of stuff that will bring gaming to the masses, not a game designed to appeal to some 19 year-old trying to look cool sitting alone in his parents' basement.
No. I think you're basically wrong here. I think women just don't play video games period. I've made this point before.
Let me ask you a question. How often have you ever gone somewhere and met women, and found out that they loved video games. You just don't. I'm sure if you ask them why, and you think about their answer, you'll find that its not the big breasted women that are the problem. Many of my female friends *love* Angelina Jolie, and she seems to be one of those few women that have a kind of universal appeal across both sexes. Also the Tomb Raider example never really made any sense to me. I mean: So what you're telling me is a babe that kicks ass and goes adventuring and essentially does what Indiana Jones does, isn't appealing to women because her breats are too big? In other words if she was flat chested suddenly you'd see women flocking in droves to play the game? Is there some correct breast size that we should have that will make games appeal to women?
Na-huh. Of course not.
No the variables involved are much more complex, and have alot to do with how men and women react differently to media (why are soaps popular with women and not so much men? Why do we have movies we call "chick flicks", and the opposite for men?). Maybe women would really just rather spend that time with their friends being social. Maybe thats really where the video games for women should be...interactivity and socialization.
But who even cares about ogg-vorbis. I'm sure Apple just left it out because of the way the name sounds. "Ogg"? "Vorbis"?. It sounds like some kind of Swedish slime alge. I find alot of this ogg stuff to be alot like geeks going for NetBSD. Its probably quite true it has advantages, but who cares. MP3s will do just fine, and there are a ton of them. I mean even WMA's aren't that popular. Just go looking on the P2P's and see even how many WMA's there are compared to MP3. Years after release of the WMA format, its still 10-20 MP3s to one WMA. And as for sound quality, alot of people are encoding MP3s at higher than 128Kbps. So the file size is larger? Who cares, most people that do P2P have broadband.
Face it. The time that is required for ogg-vorbis to get anywhere, is about the time its replacement will arrive. Its not popular, and people that like it are alot like those people in the 80s that were really into Skoda's.
One final thing: I'll bet if you rebranded ogg-vorbis as MP4, or as MP3+, it would suddenly recieve alot more popularity.
"Take Item Under Discussion, Find Two or Three Reasons to Blast it, Call it Rediculous, Propose Alternative that Won't Happen, or Will Happen in Geeky Fantasy Land, ala Star Trek"
You're dead wrong on all points. THINK first.
Lets take any East Coast city, Montreal for the example I'm going to choose.
A huge percentage of the residential buildings are all around 100 years old, and are what you could call long box duplex or triplex. By long box what I mean is that they are built like long rows of boxes next to each other with a door and window in the front, and one in the back. The duplex my friend just bought is typical. It was built in 1908, and is around one and a half rooms wide, and five rooms deep. The first floor is horribly lit with only one small window in the front, and nothing for the middle two rooms.
Now imagine a city FULL of these, and imagine that many of the windows that were installed were super small in order to help insulate against temperatures reaching into the minuses. And now imagine that Montreal is alot like New York, or Toronto and cities in the area. And THEN consider that Europe is VERY similar in its cities as well. And then you start to see that a system like this is in fact IDEAL, and could be VERY popular. It just needs to be cheaper. And as for the skylight option, try doing that in a triplex on the first and second levels.
In fact my friend has been looking to see if its possible to build a system like this out of standard on the shelf parts for his place.
And as for the NEW buildings being done by the "Architects". Well at least here in Montreal, alot of the new construction looks exactly like the old construction. Because, you see if you take a duplex down in a row of them, and then put up a new one, guess what? You're surrounded by duplexes on each side and this limits you in what you can or cannot build, PLUS you want to have a building that blendes in with the theme of the street. So ALOT of the new buildings retain this problem (alieviating it somewhat in the front or back with larger, more efficient windows, but the middle rooms still stay dark).
If you'd spent any time in society working and doing anything else time based (such as watching the evening news), or various other things, you'd realize that DST was in fact useful, because those institutions you live your life around are forced to change as well. If I have to do SHIFT work, I have no choice to come in an hour earlier. Even if I don't clients will still come in an hour later, or worse leave at five, if I choose to leave at four. They're calling at five, I'm already on the way home. Doesn't look good to the boss or them.
Also I DO adjust my clock. Its twenty minutes ahead of time and it just works for me. It really is a case of different strokes for diffrent folkes, some people are just like that.
I'm not sure how insulting us (however vieldly), and then inventing imaginary potential problems (disrupted sleeping patterns, please!), is going to bring your (personal-centric) point across).
Personally, I wish they didn't waste their time reinventing the wheel. Other designers have already been there, and while there's a lot to say about the heavy legacy of various existing designs, they work and have billions of man/hours put into them.
I sometimes wonder if people like you are really so short sighted, or if in fact you're just having some kind of weird emotional reaction.
I'm sure there are other posters who will sit around and argue each and everyone of those points, and there certainly are many that could be made against them.
But the biggest one I have is: why would YOU care about what ANOTHER group of people are doing? Do you think these people would be somehow just redeployed for your favourite pet project -- "scrliminitrrtrt" -- some obscure unix command prompt that sees less and less use as unix finally matures in the interface area?
No of course not. They would be doing something else entirely. By your logic, UNIX itself should never have been developed, because instead there was MULTICS around. And MULTICS had years of development, and had all the "good" software. So why bother?
Everytime I see someone doing something new, even if its something that doesn't interest me in the least, I say "go for it". Because thats the only way humanity advances, and to be honest it helps stave off boredom while we're at it.
I'm not sure if your comment was to me or the other poster, but the kind of feminism you are talking about is generally regarded as "Liberal Feminism". There are many kinds, some of which are still active now, some of which more historically so.
I think the idea that feminism promotes equality, is a bit nieve, and doesn't go deeper into the issue. Its true that on the surface this is what it might look like its try to do -- especially if we consider what facets of it are seen through the media.
But ultimately what seems to have happened, is that, yes there has been a kind of equality, but only because women by and large caved into male societal structure, and joined it. This I think is very different than what alot of "feminists" were talking about mid-century and even into the 70s. At that time there was a not insignificant movement to bring "female" values into society, to help restructure society in a way, to rebalance it. What appeas to have happened is that women faced men on their own turf in the workplace, in the courts, and other areas of society, and then just stayed there.
I ask you this question: How would a perfectly balanced female-male society look today? One that combines male and female attitudes, interests and furthers the collective needs of each gender?
I also ask you this question: If your original objective was to create a society like this, but then you just gave up and became what you were originally fighting against, have you indeed achieved equality? If yes, what is the quality of that equality?
I see the same thing here with video games. Women are complaining that there are no "women" games. But then women have shown recently that they seem to be quite happy to just take male positions in the work force and continue without bringing whatever it would be that their gender would add to it. Why? Because they don't care? Because its too much work? The marketing manager is a woman, the key market researchs are women. Why are things not "different"? What would different even look like?
I'm not sure what the answer is.
I'm not sure anywhere in my original post I suggested anything about superiority. It was about the internal mechanisms by which my company decides to make video games, and how that might relate to women.
And lastly: I'd like to see what kind of games come from this sort of pow-wow. I know that women think that their games are NOT first person shooter X, or real time strategy Y. But what IS it in fact? I have yet to see an example of one, ONE, game in the industry that just isn't an example of mass market and (more specifically) gender neutral. I submit The Sims, Myst, and (strangely enough) GTA as an example.
Game developers have long tended to make games for themselves, and the problem is that they are an atypical audience.
Actually I work for a major video game company, and I know very well that video game companies DON'T make games for themselves. Video games are a business, and lately a very serious one at that. I was recently talking to the big guy here in charge of releasing games (the chief editor you might call him), and I asked him where new games and ideas come from, how did they decide on things. Well you know what? It comes from Marketing. Now this is not a surprise, because thats how its done everywhere else too (and yes I'm not saying its a GOOD thing).
Whenever this topic comes up, being a humanist, I say everyone is equal and you go do whatever you have to do. So men can go run around and push for their stuff, and women can do the same. But don't EXPECT me or anyone else to do it for you. I'm not a feminist, and when women ASK me why not, I basically tell them that because I'm a guy.
Now the reason I bring all this up, is because I haven't been convinced that there are a lot of women who WANT to play games. There certainly is a vocal minority. And I think that the video game companies know this too. There are ALOT of female produces on our games (out of say eight or nine producers at least four are women), and its not because we're lacking "femaleness" that "female" games aren't made.
But in staying with the paragraph before last, I say go for it. Go and make your lesbian hot tub racing -- er your bikini lounge---um...well whatever game you'd like to make, and we'll see.
But don't say that the video game companies sit in a vacuume and make games for themselves.
I would suggest you just relax. Aside from the obvious, "MAYBE I WANT TO BUILD MY OWN PROJECTOR", excuse, there are some very good reasons for an article like this. For example, I have several older laptops sitting around. One of them is a Compaq that is powerful enough to play MPEG video at SVGA, but the backlite is gone. And even if the backlite was gone, I still don't use it because its a few years old.
So in fact I've been thinking of some uses for this machine, and I can see that this would be perfect. Anyone else that has an older laptop and doesn't mind pulling it apart to make a project could make one cheaply. It would then become a dedicated video playback system. With Project. Great for parties!
People on slashdot do have parties don't they?:).o.
Just a comment on your grandfather's bird. African Greys ARE very smart. And yours may be just as smart, or smarter than Alex, however he's just not been trained. Its well known that the simple budgie, when trained becomes capable of many tricks, and actually uses previously learned words or behaviours to build on new ones -- just like children. I suspect that if you spend the time to train any African Grey from youth as they have with Alex, then you'd end up with a kind of "median" intelligence that went far and above what the average household grey would exhibit. To put it another way, Alex has learned by deliberate teaching -- most such as your grandfather's has learned mostly by chance. Considering that its learning environment is HUMAN and not AVIAN its probably done very well, considering how untuned it is to the bird.
btw: I have an African grey of just ten months, and she displays amazing potential. She knows where the seeds are hidden and will search them out (even though they're out of sight and in a bag), and knows how to play lots of different "games" to get our attention (like chewing on something important so we'll notice and make a big fuss -- she likes that one). Who knows, maybe I'll be able to get mine to count. My girlfriend would love that --
"So how many beers has he had?" "FIVE! FIVE BEERS!" "Shit Jedi," me screaming at the parrot (yes who's called Jedi, and no it was my Mom that named it),"I told you to say ZERO like Alex".o.
It never ceases to amaze me how women get threatened by a good looking competitor. Geek girls for sure the same. It doesn't even matter if they are good looking themselves. I would say this "Shame" is more about their geek girls insecurities than anything else...
Thats absolutely rediculous. The workers in other countries are typically not going to be any more productive than anyone in first world nations. Human nature as it is, they may put in more hours (because they have no choice -- if you have a job at IBM and you're bosses are telling you that to keep your job at IBM Mexico you need to work long hours, otherwise you get the boot, and there's no other company out there, it doesn't become an issue of voluntary overtime), but ultimately you would never expect one group of human beings to be more productive than others. Not without modifying human beings themselves.
What are you really suggesting? My feeling is you really didn't think about it. Tell me, how are YOU personally going to be more productive than an equivilant worker in Mexico? I'd wager you have no idea. And even then, how would you measure it? Lines of code? Number of bugs found? We've been through all that, and we know its bullshit.
But this is besides the point. If we look at the "big picture" we see mostly a short sighted decision, which only makes sense because all the other companies are doing it. All the other companies are doing it, so of course why shouldn't IBM do it?
Of course the long term view is very dismal. If all companies are laying off workers in first world nations, who is going to be there with the spending power to buy things? You're killing off your consumer base. And then we can imagine that in ten years the Mexicans or who ever they are will increase their standard of living, and the jobs will have to be moved from there to..well..who knows...Africa or some other place. And there will come a time when EVERYONE will have the same average standard of living and then there won't be any places that are cheaper to hire people.
But the real issue is this. Unions came about because people finally realized that 80% of business is what you negotiate. I have no bleeding hard for IBM. If 10,000 of their workers decide to strike for x or y reason, I'm all for it. Its all just business, and if big business like IBM is going to leverage their "power" on the market to get favourable conditions, then for sure there's no reason why employees shouldnt either? Oh wait, it's going to ruin the business? Well, too bad. I won't miss IBM. Someone else will take their place, and a newcomer to replace their business might be very happy to take former IBM employees with favourable packages. But IBM won't fold. If they're forced to keep these employees, via union or whatever, then they will find other ways to save money. You want to force the executives to take a pay cut? This is the way to do it. Because they'll only do so when they're up against the wall.
"What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record... my actions," Mann said. "Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions."
Does this make sense to anyone?
Taking pictures of cameras taking pictures of you is not keeping a record of your own actions.
Well in fact it makes alot of sense. Not only is it the fact that you HAVE the SAME video to play with, so technically you could conduct your own analysis (hey...in the shadows back there...it WAS a smoking gun..this is a police cover up! ) of the raw unedited feed, but also you YOURSELF are sending a very clear message to the "watchers". We are watching what you're doing. The game is played the same way. It may stop here, it may not. But now at least you can share a little of the kind of paranoia you try and instill in us.
See, techical uses aside, its a powerful role reversal, with all the ramifications that this implies. We just need to go to Zimbardo (http://www.prisonexp.org/) to know that a huge perecentage of the surviellance and security field is based on psycholgical plays of power. Simply confronting a security guard for example, or a cop directly will have little effect, because you are directly playing into the power game. They're ready for that. In fact they're probably hoping for that. But to step *aside* from the power trap. To do something like this, is not what they're expecting. Its outside of what a traditional conflict entails. And presumably is a great equalizer. And suddenly the watchers, are being watched. If only for the psychological value, its great.
Unless you live in one of many parts of Canada, in which case the electricity you get is from water (aka BC Hydro, Ontario Hydro, Quebec Hydro, etc)..o.
People who talk about space programmes (at least at Slashdot) seem to fall into two sets of camps.
1) Send rockets into space with a space capsule (reusable or not, we really don't care).
2) Use a reusable space plane.
Now the people in the first camp will argue about efficiency, and cost, and reliability. They've got a million reasons, much like those that advocate only sending robotic space probes into space, and forget manned space flight.
Because I don't agree with them, and also to bring a smile to my face, I like to believe they like this idea because rockets resemble a big penis (something they may be lacking themselves), and that the "capsule" at the end is like the ejaculation of sperm into space. But again this is just my personal opinion.
What the people in the first camp DO lack is efficiency of the imagination. Thats for sure. They see a short term solution which forestalls a long term one.
The people in the second group, are more visionairy, and understand that in order to make space really accessible and interesting to humanity, you need something thats more like a space plane. Something that does not need to be manufactured for each flight and transported to a certain location (rocket). Something that can be turned around maintenance wise within 24-48 hours, and is preferably SSTO. Its no coincidence that Scaled Composites space ship that won the X-Prize was a space plane. And its no coincidence that Richard Branson signed up with Scaled Composits right away to start Virgin Galactic -- a service to take people up into outer space for around $250,000 a flight. It matches all of these qualifications, and more than just some metallic cylendar sitting on a launch pad, it captures the imagination.
Also with a rocket you lack the pushing of technology forward. Building something that does SSTO and goes from Tokyo to New York in an hour, will require serious advances. And these advances could have (and probably would have) a huge impact in other areas. With a rocket, you just use refined 50s and 60s technology. In fact, if you consider that most rocket designs are still based on the V2, this would in fact be 40s technology. Sure reliable and cheap. Save it for Arianne Space. But for NASA, who's initial setup was to push the envelope as it were in space and space related technologies, its a bit disappointing to take a BACKWARDS step.
Anyways here's a neat little page that talks about past and future launch vehciles. Notice that there aren't alot of rockets.:)
In a related article from canoe.ca , the judge was qoute as saying,"I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service,"
Doesn't this analogy actually make more sense, than alot of the analogies to "theft" that the record industry has thrown out?
On the other hand, it may not be that valid, because to actually photocopy an entire book would be prohibatively expensive. Where as with P2P whether you download an entire album or just one song its the same cost. Free.
Being a writer, I always struggled with this issue. I tried the palm with a keyboard, and while theoretically a nice solution, ergonomically it's not. The screen is too small, it's awkcward, and there is a serious lack of word processing software available for the palm platform. The builtin note pad application has a 4K limitation on entry.
Lets face it, when you write you want to be able to enjoy it. This means the screen is pleasant to look at, the keyboard feels nice to type on, and editing and organizing your work on it is easy.
The HP Jornada 820 has all of these, it's VERY compact, and has a plus a 10 hour + battery life. This last point I kid you not on. It's largely a Win CE device with keyboard and 640x 480 colour screen, and so has no hard drive. I easily charge the thing once a week, and take it with me where ever I go. It runs like a lite version of Windows 95, which wile not glamerous, is pretty functional. Plus it has PCMCIA, CF Card, USB, and VGA out, built in v.90 modem. I actually can (and occasionally do) hook up to the internet with it.
Seriously check this out if you can. After I got it, through a friend, it completely changed my writing. Now, instead of having to chose between bringing a note pad to write in, or bring a dangerously expensive laptop that would only run for an hour or two on battery (ikn this case an early viao), I just pop it in my bag and bring it out whenever I need it. And since it's instant on, I can just turn it on, make a quick note and turn it off...
"These are friends of mine. Should I interview them and get transcripts for you?"
No. I'm saying I don't care about your friends. Or my friends for that matter. I'm looking for some kind of statistically valid survey of Mac users. Anecdotal stories are fun over beer, but nothing you have said has made your point.
"Well, then obviously you and I are talking to different people then."
No we're talking about Mac users here. As a class of people, they're the same.
"You sound like an easily offended man"
No, although you seem very defensive when someone asks you for some 3rd party information (also known as "facts"). I would like to see some of what you're saying backed up with something other than you typing at a keyboard. Can you at least show me some facts? One?
"of those 7 OSX users I know, four are G3 Ibook users that have since added YellowDog Linux, because they think OSX is too slow on the G3."
Which is exactly what I said in my post. Did you read it? That G3s are too slow to run OSX. We know that. Why would you run Linux on them though? I mean, why? If you have a Mac, you bought it for it's Maciness. Such as applications and so on. What would Linux give you other than a huge headache, and inferior office suits writen in mind numblingly slow Java?
"Oh, by the way, as far as me hating Macs, you're full of shit. I like OSX, it's way better than OS classic, as it inherited much of NeXT, which I always lusted after. And anytime I get a complaint about the constant assault of viruses and trojans, and people ask my advice, know what I tell them? Simple. Buy a Mac"
That's nice. And what I was saying in my original post is that users tend to be more informed than you were suggesting (ie: Joe is going to drop 1-2K and so will AT LEAST look for a bit and get some idea of what he's getting into), and will invariably decide which computer to buy based on it's own merits.
BTW: I never just nievely tell people to "Buy Macs". I always find out what they're looking for, and try and match the platform to the personality and what they're trying to do. Some people have no choice and need to use Windows, for work for example. Others would really benefit of the Mac. It's never a one size fits all.
"There are a lot of longtime Apple customers, but as much as we nix people like OSX for its BSD base, OSX alientated a LOT of longtime Mac users that wanted nothing to do with Unix or command lines. A prime complaint was that the Mac interface was changed too radically, and that it looks nothing like the beloved old 9X-and-lower line. I've also heard some of these people complain that OSX is too slow, especially on G3 hardware. Personally, I know more Linux people that love OSX than longtime Mac people that love it. "
Sources? Citations? Studies? Even links to articles?
I have met NO Mac user to date that didn't think that OS X was an improvement on 9. Yes, it's slow on G3s, AND on some G4s too. No doubt about that. But if we make an analogy between XP being OS X and OS 9 being windows 2000, it's exactly the same. I can run 2000 comfortably on machines from five years ago, but NOT XP.
So what's your point? I think you just don't like Macs. Which is fine, but don't hide it behind unsupportable arguments and invented or anectodal evidence from your three friends.
"Well, Joe Schmo customer doesn't agree. He's out at BestBuy or CompUSA looking for a new computer, and all he sees is that Macs 1- cost a lot more, and 2- can't run the games and software that PCs can. Plus, if Joe Schmo's expierience is anything like mine, when he tries out these newer Macs at the store, he's not going to be real impressed with the quality and feel of the Apple hardware (sorry, I think the keyboards and mice have a cheap feel to them now. They generally seem more shoddy than past Macs to me). He's going to be saying "So why should I pay 900 bucks for an Emac that's slow (with it's stock 128 or 256 mb of ram) when I can get this HP for 600, or this Emachines for 400?".
1: And so this only applies to it's pre G5 line. Yes we know that Apple was dealing with limitations from Motorala not being able to produce G4s in the higher MHZ. Now IBM has solved this problem for them with the new PPC chip, which Apple markets as the "G5". And so?
2: And it only applies to people who are not informed, or are informed and don't want an Apple machine. Those that get informed, understand what they're getting into and have made a good choice. A good choice for them. Apple or X86, or whatever else they decide. There are lots of great reasons to buy an Apple, and to also pay a "premium". For sure, when ANYONE has to go into a situation to buy something and they know "nothing" about it, price is the only obvious criteria you can decide on, and people decide on it. But also to assume that people just plunk down $1000-$2000 without doing research, is maybe a little nieve. Again, maybe really you just don't like Apple.:)
3: And finally on the games issue, it only applies to people that absolutely have to play PC games. NEWSFLASH FOR YOU: The PC Gaming market is on a decline. It's being taken over by console.
Finally as for their "exclusive-club" route. I don't see how paying two to three hundred dollars more on a $2500 system to be exclusive or cluby. If I want the product, I will pay for it. Your use of the term, seems to suggest that, yes in fact you don't like apple, and really your whole post could have been summed up by that statement.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had MOD points right now. You're absolutely bang on. This is pretty much exactly what happened. It was DOS + IBM's initial popularity in the business realm (remember that the Mac always had trouble being seen as a business machine, however IBM PCs WERE the Business machine, esp after Lotus 123) that set the stage (we could say the "standard" as it was), and it was the clones finally that enabled that to proliferate. Compaq being the first BRAND name clone to gain identifiable value, but there were a tonne of clones around. And yes from there basically the future of Windows was pretty much set.
As a note to the parent of this thread, I think he's got it too, and I can't help but wonder if Steve Jobs might actually be wanting to KILL the Mac somehow. He's always said he'll keep with the Mac until they run it into the ground (ie: like a beater), and then move on. Looking at historically how he was involved in creating the Mac (and thought of himself as an artist), I wonder if his trip isn't so much the MAC, but rather creating things. Ala iPod (although of course it was a contracter that did the actual inventing. But perhaps you can consider yourself an artist for just having the ability to recognize good ideas and art).
Perhaps now he's just saying, lets go mass market and see what this thing can do. And if it dies, well that works out well for me because I can go onto the next big thing. You're going to tell me that Jobs is too much of a smart business man for this? I respond with: Apple is the ONLY company right now who has any chance of realizing the set-top box, downloadable media-movie-music center model to the masses, and he's building his company all around the media right now. Love Pixar. Don't be surprised if the Mac somehow becomes just a kind of "token" product to say they still make computers, but that the focus is entirely on Entertainment and Media.
Oh and one last thing. I like my women in video games SEXY. And that will factor into my decision in buy the game. And so will other guys. So I don't think that IS a problem at all. :)
1) Boobies = No women gamers
A good point, but they don't seem to get to the root of the issue. It's not just the shabby treatment of women in games that turns them off. It's or the violence, or the language either. The fact is, your average "mature" title these days is dripping with pure unadulterated testosterone. Developers are too busy trying to grab their current target audience (males 17 to 25) to cultivate new audiences.
The biggest games- the ones that sell millions of copies to non-traditional gamers- are almost all aimed at a wider audience. Halo 2 was big, there's no denying that- but it pales in comparison to The Sims or Rollercoaster Tycoon in raw staying power- they're practically cultural phenomena. The same can be said for Nintendogs in Japan, which helped the DS steamroll Sony's entire console family in May (haven't seen sales figures since then). That's the kind of stuff that will bring gaming to the masses, not a game designed to appeal to some 19 year-old trying to look cool sitting alone in his parents' basement.
No. I think you're basically wrong here. I think women just don't play video games period. I've made this point before.
http://oblivionboy.blogspot.com/2005/07/do-women-
Let me ask you a question. How often have you ever gone somewhere and met women, and found out that they loved video games. You just don't. I'm sure if you ask them why, and you think about their answer, you'll find that its not the big breasted women that are the problem. Many of my female friends *love* Angelina Jolie, and she seems to be one of those few women that have a kind of universal appeal across both sexes. Also the Tomb Raider example never really made any sense to me. I mean: So what you're telling me is a babe that kicks ass and goes adventuring and essentially does what Indiana Jones does, isn't appealing to women because her breats are too big? In other words if she was flat chested suddenly you'd see women flocking in droves to play the game? Is there some correct breast size that we should have that will make games appeal to women?
Na-huh. Of course not.
No the variables involved are much more complex, and have alot to do with how men and women react differently to media (why are soaps popular with women and not so much men? Why do we have movies we call "chick flicks", and the opposite for men?). Maybe women would really just rather spend that time with their friends being social. Maybe thats really where the video games for women should be...interactivity and socialization.
But who even cares about ogg-vorbis. I'm sure Apple just left it out because of the way the name sounds. "Ogg"? "Vorbis"?. It sounds like some kind of Swedish slime alge. I find alot of this ogg stuff to be alot like geeks going for NetBSD. Its probably quite true it has advantages, but who cares. MP3s will do just fine, and there are a ton of them. I mean even WMA's aren't that popular. Just go looking on the P2P's and see even how many WMA's there are compared to MP3. Years after release of the WMA format, its still 10-20 MP3s to one WMA. And as for sound quality, alot of people are encoding MP3s at higher than 128Kbps. So the file size is larger? Who cares, most people that do P2P have broadband.
Face it. The time that is required for ogg-vorbis to get anywhere, is about the time its replacement will arrive. Its not popular, and people that like it are alot like those people in the 80s that were really into Skoda's.
One final thing: I'll bet if you rebranded ogg-vorbis as MP4, or as MP3+, it would suddenly recieve alot more popularity.
You're just trolling for points obviously.
Its Karma Whoring #17 on the list:
"Take Item Under Discussion, Find Two or Three Reasons to Blast it, Call it Rediculous, Propose Alternative that Won't Happen, or Will Happen in Geeky Fantasy Land, ala Star Trek"
You're dead wrong on all points. THINK first.
Lets take any East Coast city, Montreal for the example I'm going to choose.
A huge percentage of the residential buildings are all around 100 years old, and are what you could call long box duplex or triplex. By long box what I mean is that they are built like long rows of boxes next to each other with a door and window in the front, and one in the back. The duplex my friend just bought is typical. It was built in 1908, and is around one and a half rooms wide, and five rooms deep. The first floor is horribly lit with only one small window in the front, and nothing for the middle two rooms.
Now imagine a city FULL of these, and imagine that many of the windows that were installed were super small in order to help insulate against temperatures reaching into the minuses. And now imagine that Montreal is alot like New York, or Toronto and cities in the area. And THEN consider that Europe is VERY similar in its cities as well. And then you start to see that a system like this is in fact IDEAL, and could be VERY popular. It just needs to be cheaper. And as for the skylight option, try doing that in a triplex on the first and second levels.
In fact my friend has been looking to see if its possible to build a system like this out of standard on the shelf parts for his place.
And as for the NEW buildings being done by the "Architects". Well at least here in Montreal, alot of the new construction looks exactly like the old construction. Because, you see if you take a duplex down in a row of them, and then put up a new one, guess what? You're surrounded by duplexes on each side and this limits you in what you can or cannot build, PLUS you want to have a building that blendes in with the theme of the street. So ALOT of the new buildings retain this problem (alieviating it somewhat in the front or back with larger, more efficient windows, but the middle rooms still stay dark).
So really, do some thinking next time.
You're just bitter, obviously. :)
If you'd spent any time in society working and doing anything else time based (such as watching the evening news), or various other things, you'd realize that DST was in fact useful, because those institutions you live your life around are forced to change as well. If I have to do SHIFT work, I have no choice to come in an hour earlier. Even if I don't clients will still come in an hour later, or worse leave at five, if I choose to leave at four. They're calling at five, I'm already on the way home. Doesn't look good to the boss or them.
Also I DO adjust my clock. Its twenty minutes ahead of time and it just works for me. It really is a case of different strokes for diffrent folkes, some people are just like that.
I'm not sure how insulting us (however vieldly), and then inventing imaginary potential problems (disrupted sleeping patterns, please!), is going to bring your (personal-centric) point across).
Personally, I wish they didn't waste their time reinventing the wheel. Other designers have already been there, and while there's a lot to say about the heavy legacy of various existing designs, they work and have billions of man/hours put into them.
I sometimes wonder if people like you are really so short sighted, or if in fact you're just having some kind of weird emotional reaction.
I'm sure there are other posters who will sit around and argue each and everyone of those points, and there certainly are many that could be made against them.
But the biggest one I have is: why would YOU care about what ANOTHER group of people are doing? Do you think these people would be somehow just redeployed for your favourite pet project -- "scrliminitrrtrt" -- some obscure unix command prompt that sees less and less use as unix finally matures in the interface area?
No of course not. They would be doing something else entirely. By your logic, UNIX itself should never have been developed, because instead there was MULTICS around. And MULTICS had years of development, and had all the "good" software. So why bother?
Everytime I see someone doing something new, even if its something that doesn't interest me in the least, I say "go for it". Because thats the only way humanity advances, and to be honest it helps stave off boredom while we're at it.
I'm not sure if your comment was to me or the other poster, but the kind of feminism you are talking about is generally regarded as "Liberal Feminism". There are many kinds, some of which are still active now, some of which more historically so.
I think the idea that feminism promotes equality, is a bit nieve, and doesn't go deeper into the issue. Its true that on the surface this is what it might look like its try to do -- especially if we consider what facets of it are seen through the media.
But ultimately what seems to have happened, is that, yes there has been a kind of equality, but only because women by and large caved into male societal structure, and joined it. This I think is very different than what alot of "feminists" were talking about mid-century and even into the 70s. At that time there was a not insignificant movement to bring "female" values into society, to help restructure society in a way, to rebalance it. What appeas to have happened is that women faced men on their own turf in the workplace, in the courts, and other areas of society, and then just stayed there.
I ask you this question: How would a perfectly balanced female-male society look today? One that combines male and female attitudes, interests and furthers the collective needs of each gender?
I also ask you this question: If your original objective was to create a society like this, but then you just gave up and became what you were originally fighting against, have you indeed achieved equality? If yes, what is the quality of that equality?
I see the same thing here with video games. Women are complaining that there are no "women" games. But then women have shown recently that they seem to be quite happy to just take male positions in the work force and continue without bringing whatever it would be that their gender would add to it. Why? Because they don't care? Because its too much work? The marketing manager is a woman, the key market researchs are women. Why are things not "different"? What would different even look like?
I'm not sure what the answer is.
I'm not sure anywhere in my original post I suggested anything about superiority. It was about the internal mechanisms by which my company decides to make video games, and how that might relate to women.
And lastly: I'd like to see what kind of games come from this sort of pow-wow. I know that women think that their games are NOT first person shooter X, or real time strategy Y. But what IS it in fact? I have yet to see an example of one, ONE, game in the industry that just isn't an example of mass market and (more specifically) gender neutral. I submit The Sims, Myst, and (strangely enough) GTA as an example.
Game developers have long tended to make games for themselves, and the problem is that they are an atypical audience.
Actually I work for a major video game company, and I know very well that video game companies DON'T make games for themselves. Video games are a business, and lately a very serious one at that. I was recently talking to the big guy here in charge of releasing games (the chief editor you might call him), and I asked him where new games and ideas come from, how did they decide on things. Well you know what? It comes from Marketing. Now this is not a surprise, because thats how its done everywhere else too (and yes I'm not saying its a GOOD thing).
Whenever this topic comes up, being a humanist, I say everyone is equal and you go do whatever you have to do. So men can go run around and push for their stuff, and women can do the same. But don't EXPECT me or anyone else to do it for you. I'm not a feminist, and when women ASK me why not, I basically tell them that because I'm a guy.
Now the reason I bring all this up, is because I haven't been convinced that there are a lot of women who WANT to play games. There certainly is a vocal minority. And I think that the video game companies know this too. There are ALOT of female produces on our games (out of say eight or nine producers at least four are women), and its not because we're lacking "femaleness" that "female" games aren't made.
But in staying with the paragraph before last, I say go for it. Go and make your lesbian hot tub racing -- er your bikini lounge---um...well whatever game you'd like to make, and we'll see.
But don't say that the video game companies sit in a vacuume and make games for themselves.
I would suggest you just relax. Aside from the obvious, "MAYBE I WANT TO BUILD MY OWN PROJECTOR", excuse, there are some very good reasons for an article like this. For example, I have several older laptops sitting around. One of them is a Compaq that is powerful enough to play MPEG video at SVGA, but the backlite is gone. And even if the backlite was gone, I still don't use it because its a few years old.
:) .o.
So in fact I've been thinking of some uses for this machine, and I can see that this would be perfect. Anyone else that has an older laptop and doesn't mind pulling it apart to make a project could make one cheaply. It would then become a dedicated video playback system. With Project. Great for parties!
People on slashdot do have parties don't they?
Just a comment on your grandfather's bird. African Greys ARE very smart. And yours may be just as smart, or smarter than Alex, however he's just not been trained. Its well known that the simple budgie, when trained becomes capable of many tricks, and actually uses previously learned words or behaviours to build on new ones -- just like children. I suspect that if you spend the time to train any African Grey from youth as they have with Alex, then you'd end up with a kind of "median" intelligence that went far and above what the average household grey would exhibit. To put it another way, Alex has learned by deliberate teaching -- most such as your grandfather's has learned mostly by chance. Considering that its learning environment is HUMAN and not AVIAN its probably done very well, considering how untuned it is to the bird.
.o.
btw: I have an African grey of just ten months, and she displays amazing potential. She knows where the seeds are hidden and will search them out (even though they're out of sight and in a bag), and knows how to play lots of different "games" to get our attention (like chewing on something important so we'll notice and make a big fuss -- she likes that one). Who knows, maybe I'll be able to get mine to count. My girlfriend would love that --
"So how many beers has he had?"
"FIVE! FIVE BEERS!"
"Shit Jedi," me screaming at the parrot (yes who's called Jedi, and no it was my Mom that named it),"I told you to say ZERO like Alex"
...she's 48!
It never ceases to amaze me how women get threatened by a good looking competitor. Geek girls for sure the same. It doesn't even matter if they are good looking themselves. I would say this "Shame" is more about their geek girls insecurities than anything else...
Thats absolutely rediculous. The workers in other countries are typically not going to be any more productive than anyone in first world nations. Human nature as it is, they may put in more hours (because they have no choice -- if you have a job at IBM and you're bosses are telling you that to keep your job at IBM Mexico you need to work long hours, otherwise you get the boot, and there's no other company out there, it doesn't become an issue of voluntary overtime), but ultimately you would never expect one group of human beings to be more productive than others. Not without modifying human beings themselves.
What are you really suggesting? My feeling is you really didn't think about it. Tell me, how are YOU personally going to be more productive than an equivilant worker in Mexico? I'd wager you have no idea. And even then, how would you measure it? Lines of code? Number of bugs found? We've been through all that, and we know its bullshit.
But this is besides the point. If we look at the "big picture" we see mostly a short sighted decision, which only makes sense because all the other companies are doing it. All the other companies are doing it, so of course why shouldn't IBM do it?
Of course the long term view is very dismal. If all companies are laying off workers in first world nations, who is going to be there with the spending power to buy things? You're killing off your consumer base. And then we can imagine that in ten years the Mexicans or who ever they are will increase their standard of living, and the jobs will have to be moved from there to..well..who knows...Africa or some other place. And there will come a time when EVERYONE will have the same average standard of living and then there won't be any places that are cheaper to hire people.
But the real issue is this. Unions came about because people finally realized that 80% of business is what you negotiate. I have no bleeding hard for IBM. If 10,000 of their workers decide to strike for x or y reason, I'm all for it. Its all just business, and if big business like IBM is going to leverage their "power" on the market to get favourable conditions, then for sure there's no reason why employees shouldnt either? Oh wait, it's going to ruin the business? Well, too bad. I won't miss IBM. Someone else will take their place, and a newcomer to replace their business might be very happy to take former IBM employees with favourable packages. But IBM won't fold. If they're forced to keep these employees, via union or whatever, then they will find other ways to save money. You want to force the executives to take a pay cut? This is the way to do it. Because they'll only do so when they're up against the wall.
It's really hard to see the point of PC gaming anymore. What's it got that consoles dont?
A mouse?
"What I argue is that if I'm going to be held accountable for my actions that I should be allowed to record ... my actions," Mann said. "Especially if somebody else is keeping a record of my actions."
Does this make sense to anyone?
Taking pictures of cameras taking pictures of you is not keeping a record of your own actions.
Well in fact it makes alot of sense. Not only is it the fact that you HAVE the SAME video to play with, so technically you could conduct your own analysis (hey...in the shadows back there...it WAS a smoking gun..this is a police cover up! ) of the raw unedited feed, but also you YOURSELF are sending a very clear message to the "watchers". We are watching what you're doing. The game is played the same way. It may stop here, it may not. But now at least you can share a little of the kind of paranoia you try and instill in us.
See, techical uses aside, its a powerful role reversal, with all the ramifications that this implies. We just need to go to Zimbardo (http://www.prisonexp.org/) to know that a huge perecentage of the surviellance and security field is based on psycholgical plays of power. Simply confronting a security guard for example, or a cop directly will have little effect, because you are directly playing into the power game. They're ready for that. In fact they're probably hoping for that. But to step *aside* from the power trap. To do something like this, is not what they're expecting. Its outside of what a traditional conflict entails. And presumably is a great equalizer. And suddenly the watchers, are being watched. If only for the psychological value, its great.
Unless you live in one of many parts of Canada, in which case the electricity you get is from water (aka BC Hydro, Ontario Hydro, Quebec Hydro, etc). .o.
What? You need more sheep??
Why is why we like you guy staying in the west island. :) .o.
People who talk about space programmes (at least at Slashdot) seem to fall into two sets of camps.
:)
1) Send rockets into space with a space capsule (reusable or not, we really don't care).
2) Use a reusable space plane.
Now the people in the first camp will argue about efficiency, and cost, and reliability. They've got a million reasons, much like those that advocate only sending robotic space probes into space, and forget manned space flight.
Because I don't agree with them, and also to bring a smile to my face, I like to believe they like this idea because rockets resemble a big penis (something they may be lacking themselves), and that the "capsule" at the end is like the ejaculation of sperm into space. But again this is just my personal opinion.
What the people in the first camp DO lack is efficiency of the imagination. Thats for sure. They see a short term solution which forestalls a long term one.
The people in the second group, are more visionairy, and understand that in order to make space really accessible and interesting to humanity, you need something thats more like a space plane. Something that does not need to be manufactured for each flight and transported to a certain location (rocket). Something that can be turned around maintenance wise within 24-48 hours, and is preferably SSTO. Its no coincidence that Scaled Composites space ship that won the X-Prize was a space plane. And its no coincidence that Richard Branson signed up with Scaled Composits right away to start Virgin Galactic -- a service to take people up into outer space for around $250,000 a flight. It matches all of these qualifications, and more than just some metallic cylendar sitting on a launch pad, it captures the imagination.
Also with a rocket you lack the pushing of technology forward. Building something that does SSTO and goes from Tokyo to New York in an hour, will require serious advances. And these advances could have (and probably would have) a huge impact in other areas. With a rocket, you just use refined 50s and 60s technology. In fact, if you consider that most rocket designs are still based on the V2, this would in fact be 40s technology. Sure reliable and cheap. Save it for Arianne Space. But for NASA, who's initial setup was to push the envelope as it were in space and space related technologies, its a bit disappointing to take a BACKWARDS step.
Anyways here's a neat little page that talks about past and future launch vehciles. Notice that there aren't alot of rockets.
In a related article from canoe.ca , the judge was qoute as saying,"I cannot see a real difference between a library that places a photocopy machine in a room full of copyrighted material and a computer user that places a personal copy on a shared directory linked to a P2P service,"
Doesn't this analogy actually make more sense, than alot of the analogies to "theft" that the record industry has thrown out?
On the other hand, it may not be that valid, because to actually photocopy an entire book would be prohibatively expensive. Where as with P2P whether you download an entire album or just one song its the same cost. Free.
In English the word is "unionize". :)
But I agree. The US style job system is hardly a model for employee happiness.
Being a writer, I always struggled with this issue. I tried the palm with a keyboard, and while theoretically a nice solution, ergonomically it's not. The screen is too small, it's awkcward, and there is a serious lack of word processing software available for the palm platform. The builtin note pad application has a 4K limitation on entry.
Lets face it, when you write you want to be able to enjoy it. This means the screen is pleasant to look at, the keyboard feels nice to type on, and editing and organizing your work on it is easy.
The HP Jornada 820 has all of these, it's VERY compact, and has a plus a 10 hour + battery life. This last point I kid you not on. It's largely a Win CE device with keyboard and 640x 480 colour screen, and so has no hard drive. I easily charge the thing once a week, and take it with me where ever I go. It runs like a lite version of Windows 95, which wile not glamerous, is pretty functional. Plus it has PCMCIA, CF Card, USB, and VGA out, built in v.90 modem. I actually can (and occasionally do) hook up to the internet with it.
Seriously check this out if you can. After I got it, through a friend, it completely changed my writing. Now, instead of having to chose between bringing a note pad to write in, or bring a dangerously expensive laptop that would only run for an hour or two on battery (ikn this case an early viao), I just pop it in my bag and bring it out whenever I need it. And since it's instant on, I can just turn it on, make a quick note and turn it off...
*sigh*
:)
"These are friends of mine. Should I interview them and get transcripts for you?"
No. I'm saying I don't care about your friends. Or my friends for that matter. I'm looking for some kind of statistically valid survey of Mac users. Anecdotal stories are fun over beer, but nothing you have said has made your point.
"Well, then obviously you and I are talking to different people then."
No we're talking about Mac users here. As a class of people, they're the same.
"You sound like an easily offended man"
No, although you seem very defensive when someone asks you for some 3rd party information (also known as "facts"). I would like to see some of what you're saying backed up with something other than you typing at a keyboard. Can you at least show me some facts? One?
"so just to rub salt in the wound some more, "
*Yawn* Oh please. Keep rubbing. I'll try and keep myself awake.
"of those 7 OSX users I know, four are G3 Ibook users that have since added YellowDog Linux, because they think OSX is too slow on the G3."
Which is exactly what I said in my post. Did you read it? That G3s are too slow to run OSX. We know that. Why would you run Linux on them though? I mean, why? If you have a Mac, you bought it for it's Maciness. Such as applications and so on. What would Linux give you other than a huge headache, and inferior office suits writen in mind numblingly slow Java?
"Oh, by the way, as far as me hating Macs, you're full of shit. I like OSX, it's way better than OS classic, as it inherited much of NeXT, which I always lusted after. And anytime I get a complaint about the constant assault of viruses and trojans, and people ask my advice, know what I tell them? Simple. Buy a Mac"
That's nice. And what I was saying in my original post is that users tend to be more informed than you were suggesting (ie: Joe is going to drop 1-2K and so will AT LEAST look for a bit and get some idea of what he's getting into), and will invariably decide which computer to buy based on it's own merits.
BTW: I never just nievely tell people to "Buy Macs". I always find out what they're looking for, and try and match the platform to the personality and what they're trying to do. Some people have no choice and need to use Windows, for work for example. Others would really benefit of the Mac. It's never a one size fits all.
"There are a lot of longtime Apple customers, but as much as we nix people like OSX for its BSD base, OSX alientated a LOT of longtime Mac users that wanted nothing to do with Unix or command lines. A prime complaint was that the Mac interface was changed too radically, and that it looks nothing like the beloved old 9X-and-lower line. I've also heard some of these people complain that OSX is too slow, especially on G3 hardware. Personally, I know more Linux people that love OSX than longtime Mac people that love it.
:)
"
Sources? Citations? Studies? Even links to articles?
I have met NO Mac user to date that didn't think that OS X was an improvement on 9. Yes, it's slow on G3s, AND on some G4s too. No doubt about that. But if we make an analogy between XP being OS X and OS 9 being windows 2000, it's exactly the same. I can run 2000 comfortably on machines from five years ago, but NOT XP.
So what's your point? I think you just don't like Macs. Which is fine, but don't hide it behind unsupportable arguments and invented or anectodal evidence from your three friends.
"Well, Joe Schmo customer doesn't agree. He's out at BestBuy or CompUSA looking for a new computer, and all he sees is that Macs 1- cost a lot more, and 2- can't run the games and software that PCs can. Plus, if Joe Schmo's expierience is anything like mine, when he tries out these newer Macs at the store, he's not going to be real impressed with the quality and feel of the Apple hardware (sorry, I think the keyboards and mice have a cheap feel to them now. They generally seem more shoddy than past Macs to me). He's going to be saying "So why should I pay 900 bucks for an Emac that's slow (with it's stock 128 or 256 mb of ram) when I can get this HP for 600, or this Emachines for 400?".
1: And so this only applies to it's pre G5 line. Yes we know that Apple was dealing with limitations from Motorala not being able to produce G4s in the higher MHZ. Now IBM has solved this problem for them with the new PPC chip, which Apple markets as the "G5". And so?
2: And it only applies to people who are not informed, or are informed and don't want an Apple machine. Those that get informed, understand what they're getting into and have made a good choice. A good choice for them. Apple or X86, or whatever else they decide. There are lots of great reasons to buy an Apple, and to also pay a "premium". For sure, when ANYONE has to go into a situation to buy something and they know "nothing" about it, price is the only obvious criteria you can decide on, and people decide on it. But also to assume that people just plunk down $1000-$2000 without doing research, is maybe a little nieve. Again, maybe really you just don't like Apple.
3: And finally on the games issue, it only applies to people that absolutely have to play PC games. NEWSFLASH FOR YOU: The PC Gaming market is on a decline. It's being taken over by console.
Finally as for their "exclusive-club" route. I don't see how paying two to three hundred dollars more on a $2500 system to be exclusive or cluby. If I want the product, I will pay for it. Your use of the term, seems to suggest that, yes in fact you don't like apple, and really your whole post could have been summed up by that statement.