You can get the full speed but you are not likely to get it from a single connection. I can saturate my Time Warner 5Mbps connection with stuff like bittorrent or multiple connections to a news server, but it is rare that a single say http download will hit over 300KBs. The great thing is that 5Mbps gives you the elbow room to have multiple computers downloading, playing online games and web surfing at the same time.
from liver failure due to alcoholism. He was 32 years old. Last year a coworker at my girlfriend's work was found dead in his apartment after he didn't come back from vacation. The cause was alcohol poisoning.
The crash problem may be specific to video card or needed updated drivers. Not my computer, so I didn't get a chance to try to fix it. A couple reviews I read noted that crashing to the desktop was a problem - probably specific to particular hardware I think.
I guess I'm just used to being able to bring up inventory and map information in windows on the main screen (ala World of Warcraft or Everquest 2). The font size on the interface screen also seems really big (as in for easy viewing on a tv) even though my res is set to 1280x1024.
"Oblivion's interface is way too console-oriented"
I agree, in fact that's one reason I'm still debating whether to buy it. While you mention some good fixes, the interface feels like it was built for Xbox first and not rebuilt for PC. Compared to the MMOs I've been playing recently it leaves a lot to be desired. My friend's copy also seems to crash to the desktop from time to time. Maybe I'll wait for the patching to start before I tackle the game.
Yeah I think that would help. Although of course it would piss off people that take a "mmo break". It seems like the reduced number of players on a server at one time being implemented so late in the game just pissed off and penalized long term players. I know it pissed me off. Sure there's less lag when you are on, but good luck getting on. They've been really weird when it comes to server transfers as well. You would think that migrating players to lower pop servers would be a no brainer, but these transfers are rare and only allowed between two specific servers. They've really done nothing to handle the imbalance between horde and alliance players either. You would think they could selectively allow migration for one faction if a server is totally unbalanced.
Depends on the server. The one I was playing on since April '05 suddenly got long queues after the 1.9 patch. I could expect to wait 30-60 minutes weekdays off hours. That's a large chunk of my play time. So I quit.
"Blizzards problem is that they won't hard cap servers."
They hard capped the server I was playing on (Doomhammer) a few months ago. Old players could still make new alts, but if you didn't have a toon already on Doomhammer you couldn't make a one. I don't know if they've opened it back up again as I quit playing. They seem to have reduced the total number of players allowed to login at any given time as well. At least after the last patch queues became a nightly reality versus no queues pre-patch.
I played on Doomhammer from April '05 through the beginning of this year. The server earned it's nickname "Downhammer". Queues had never been a big problem for me, but since December I had been seeing queues of 30-60 minutes in off hours. Which is great when you try to log on 15 minutes before a scheduled raid - have to wait 45 and find out your spot has been given away. Now Doomhammer is full of level 60s, and players with multiple level 60s. New character creation has been locked out for the server (unless you already have an existing toon on DH). I imagine I'm not the only one who has left. What happens when the expansion comes out and people reactivate their accounts? Most of the people I know rolled alts on a new server to play when not doing end game raids on Doomhammer. I tried that and a month after the server had been out - whammo - queues on the new server. I guess I just don't have enough free gaming time to spend it sitting staring at a queue.
"Somehow Blizzard hasn't quite caught on that 5.5 million subscribers might eventually go away, especially if they get frustrated enough with the downtime/lag. Sure, there's not much place for those gamers to go, but this may not be true in 1-3 years."
The final reason I quit was that since December the server queues were averaging 30-60 minutes on weekdays - non peak hours (late night Hawaii time). Given that I only have a couple of hours a night to play, having half of that wasted due to waiting in line sucked. Not to mention that since the login screen uses my 3D card I couldn't play anything else while waiting in the queue. Blizzard should take a hint from other MMOs and make the login 2D. That and there being nothing interesting to do at level 60 excepted scheduled raids (debatable how interesting that is anyway). As for there being nowhere to go, that really isn't true. Sure every MMO since WoW's release has been completely overshadowed but there are some great games out there. I played City of Villains for a few months and then moved on to Everquest 2 (sure flame all you want, but it has tons of great content and is much more friendly now than it was at launch). There are free trials available for a most of the other MMOs. Two things you won't find however, the truly massive player base of WoW and the associated server instability, queues and lag.
I never said "Intel CPUs don't run hot". Intel CPUs however don't melt when they overheat. I'm sure AMD has resolved this problem by now, but it was a serious problem. Take a look at this video for exactly what was occuring. And this CPU meltdown happened to a few of my friends due to incorrect heatsink mounting. It should be noted that the heatsink mounting mechanism on the Pentium 4 is way easier to secure and isn't likely to come loose as can happen with the clips on AMDs. Then you go on a rant about Intel the company. I'm talking strictly about one thing - stability. Long life of components. I have a Pentium 200 that is what 10 years old? Works fine. I've never had an Intel CPU fail. I've chucked out several AMDs CPUs. The best thing for the market is to have competition and you are starting to see the results of AMD's strong performance in Intel's next generation chipsets. The Core processor is a better laptop chip than AMD's Turion. The next gen Intel desktop chips will also make it an interesting fight. The sooner the Pentium 4 is left behind, the better for Intel. But all of this is academic and completely beside my point which is simply that speed is not the only factor in making a decision between what hardware to use in your PC. There are other reasons not to buy a Dell gaming computer (proprietary parts, cost versus a custom rig).
Yep, I've heard nightmares from home users about Dell support, but corporate support has always been fine to work with. If I do have a problem I can always bitch to my sales rep and that kicks things in gear.
We run Dell PCs at work. You're right to a certain extent, I would never own one at home and any time someone wants to buy one I tell them they need to get the extended warranty. Now from a business case, we buy computers assuming a definate 3 year lifecycle with anything after that a bonus. We buy 3 year warranties on all our Dells. Something breaks and Dell shows up the next day to repair it, or overnights a component and we do the install. We used to have PCs built with better parts from a local company. The problem is that with a Dell you can pay less than $100/year for service including parts and labor. One component failure on the custom PCs would easily cost more than $100 between part cost and IT labor. Now do Dells break more than other computers? Honestly, we have maybe 5 failures a year on a total of about 100+ computers, some over 5 years old. The number one component failure is hard drives (standard non Dell off the shelf parts). I've seen a couple motherboards blow over the past five years and a couple PSUs. Dells are cheap, they work decently for normal business office tasks and their service (at least corporate under warranty service) is great but no way would I buy one for home.
"It does beg the question of why their monitors blow out so easily but they were Johnny-on-the-spot about replacing them."
This is really key. For Windows boxes we pretty much exclusively use Dell at the office. It's definately not because they are the best out there, but their support (at least business level) is excellent as is their sales division. Dell makes it easy for me to purchase what I need and easy for me to get equipment repaired quickly. Now if you are the type that likes to do self repair or upgrade your computer (i.e. swap out motherboard/CPU) - I wouldn't recommend Dell. They use proprietary power supplies and case designs making otherwise simple upgrades a bitch. If you do go with Dell at home, make sure to get an extended warranty. It's well worth it. Otherwise you may be forced to purchase a Dell specific part at Dell's pricing. Not pretty. I once had a fan fail on a Dell box that was out of warranty. Ordinarily I would just buy a standard fan from the store and install it. In this case the fan motherboard connector was proprietary. So although we could install a normal fan, the bios would keep bitching about a fan fail and refuse to boot unless you pressed a key to make it boot. I tried to source the part from Dell directly and since it was out of warranty I got bounced around between different Dell support people and could never locate the proper person to purchase the fan from. In the end I lied and used the service tag # of a computer that was still under warranty and got the part shipped out for free.
Yeah I was gonna say for a wee bit more than price as the Dell XPS and Alienware rigs you could get a server that had, you know, stuff in it that might be useful to a... server? Like RAID 1 or 5, hot swappable drives, redundant power supplies, dual procs etc.
But yeah my servers might be good at running a Quake server, they sure can't run the client for shit.
"Anyone idiotic enough to be cought buying an Intel gaming rig is stupid enough"
Pure speed isn't the only reason to choose a brand. I've had numerous problems with AMD chips over the years, and while things may have improved the fact is that between chips melting down and buggy motherboard bioses AMD has had a bumpy road at times. While I've had problems with non-Intel chipset mobos (such as Via's), the stablest x86 computers I've used have had Intel processors with Intel chipset motherboards. The same goes for Nvidia versus ATI. I've had so many driver problems with ATI and such a good record of stability with Nvidia that it doesn't really matter to me if the ATI is the ultimate-ist , fastest. And no I don't own a Dell or any other name brand "gaming rig", I have a custom box of course.
"it's right in line with any of the big manufacturers"
I've done some comparisons recently as one of the companys I oversee is a publishing firm. We are migrating the Editorial department to Macs to allow them to work directly with the actual fonts being used on press. Now if you are to compare a Mac Mini with a standard low end business Dell Optiplex (like a 170L), the cost is pretty comparable (withing $100 difference). The Dell however is running a faster processor than the low end Mini. Moving up to an iMac system costs about $600 more than the Dell PC. A large portion of this cost is the purchase of MS Office. Where the Dell OEM version is significantly discounted, the Mac version costs $400. I think the iMac's are worth it overall, but we do pay a bit of a premium versus Dell for them. Now if you like to play games and want some flexibility in upgrading your video or internal drives, the only option on a Mac is a Power Mac. And that's where the cost really is substantially more. I priced out a comparable Power Mac versus a PC and was looking at $1500 versus over $2500 for Apple. A "gaming" Mac definately costs more than a "gaming" PC.
"The Macintosh interface was quite a bit different from the Xerox Star's, and innovation certainly includes making a formerly unaffordable product more affordable."
Refinement sure but the metaphor was not theirs. The lawsuits have been flung back and forth over this issue through the years, from Apple vs. Microsoft, to Apple vs. GEM to Xerox vs. Apple. I certainly never thought of Apple computers as inexpensive. The Apple II was priced out of range for my family, so we had a C64 at home. I used Apples at school and couldn't understand why they cost so much more. When I started doing design work in the late 80s I couldn't afford a Mac at home. I worked on Macs at the office and used an Amiga at home. I used to boot Mac OS on my Amiga to do design work because I couldn't afford several thousand dollars for a Mac (don't even mention doing design on a lunch box Mac screen). Apple innovates sure, but Apple co-opts technology as well. Look at the guts of OS X for example. Or the PC components in the latest Macs.
"In my recollection, if you had to force quit an application on the Macintosh, it would usually hang on just long enough for you to save your files. (Note that I said usually, not always)."
When was the last time you used a Mac OS earlier than 10? I still deal with OS 9 machines on a daily basis and I can tell you that this is not true. It got a little better with OS 8 versus System 7 and earlier but nine times out of ten having to force quit meant you were likely to lose something. You might get the finder back and you might be able to save your data OR you might have the computer lock up during the save or shutdown potentially corrupting your data. I learned this pretty early in my career when I was forced on deadline to re-layout a magazine due to corruption caused by attempting to save out of QuarkXpress when Photoshop decided to take a dump. Save frequently and use "save as" periodically was the rule of thumb. In Mac OS prior to OS X, the lack of guidelines for creating extensions caused all kind of problems with extension conflicts where one extension would stomp over the memory of another locking the system up. This problem often appeared as intermittent crashes and was difficult to debug. Enough of a problem that a product was sold called "Conflict Catcher" to attempt to prevent it. In Mac OS 8 they also added in extension set management to help ease troubleshooting these problems rather than the traditional, take an extension out of the system folder, reboot, see if the problem still occurs type of troubleshooting. In regards to the Amiga, keep in mind that when the Amiga launched in 1985 it had preemptive multitasking. The Mac at that time had only "Desktop Accessories" (like the calculator and the Apple sliding puzzle) which could be run concurrently with a single application. It wasn't until System 5 that multifinder was released (1987 I believe) and not until System 7 that true cooperative multitasking was integrated into the OS. The Mac wouldn't get preemptive multitasking until the release of OS X. You mention the Guru Meditation, but you don't remember the "Software error - task held Finish all disk activity Select CANCEL to reset/debug" request. This message sometimes allowed you to save your data before the system shit the bed. Much like the force quit on Mac. It didn't always work particularly if the application you wanted to save data from was the one that crashed (same as on any other OS). With the release of AmigaDOS 2.0 there was some additional handling of errant applications (recoverable errors). Well behaved applications wouldn't necessarily take the system down, similar to how Mac OS and Windows 3.1 worked. As I mentioned before Windows was barely used before 3.0 and that version wasn't released until the '90s. Windows also could take advantage of protected mode in the 386 series of computers which helped prevent stability problems when running multiple programs. If you are going to compare operating systems I think it only makes sense
That the classic 1984 ad showed a woman wearing colored clothes running into a hall of gray zombified people smashing the video of the gray evil dictator. And this was used to sell a product that was monochrome. The original Apple rainbow logo highlighted the fact that Apple IIs were one of the first low cost computers to do color video displays (thanks to Woz). After Jobs moved on to NeXt with their high res monochrome screens, I often have wondered if Steve Jobs is color blind.
"I had an Amiga. It loved to crash, and when one application died it would bring down the entire machine."
You might want to note that no personal computers of the time period had memory protection. The CPUs of the time didn't have MMUs and if they did they weren't used (as in the case of the 68030 and up series of chips on Macs and Amigas). When one application died on a Mac it would take down the entire machine. In fact this was the case on Macs until the release of OS X. In certain cases you might have been able to recover enough to shutdown the Mac safely, but in general if you were using "force quit" you were likely to have the whole computer crash. Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, a bit later than the Amiga in 1985. I don't know if I would say it was all that much stabler than an Amiga. It really depending on what programs you were running. Well behaved Windows apps weren't too bad, but running DOS stuff under Windows was real hit or miss.
"The Mac, with the first graphical interface in an affordable PC, was surely just as innovative as the Amiga, if not more so." I guess they were both innovative in that they stole the desktop metaphor from other developers. Mice, folders/drawers, trash cans etc. None of that was invented at Apple or Amiga. I don't really think I'd call the Mac affordable. I went with an Amiga in 1987 because I couldn't afford a color Macintosh (the first color Mac II's were 3-5 times the cost of an Amiga). I liked to use my computer for artwork and not having color was too big a limitation. Color Macs were not common home computers in '87.
Woah. These exist? One of the things I actually enjoy about using Windows is the lack of platform advocacy from the users. God forbid you mention some aspect of OS X as sucking, you get an instant fight.
Disclaimer: I use and support Windows, Free BSD, Mac OS 9 and X and various flavors of Linux at my job. I feel fully qualified to point out how each of them suck in their own ways. It's all been downhill since the Amiga died.;)
1. Need to run software applications for your work that are not available on Mac OS X. There are a ton of business applications for various industries that are Windows only. You may not want to run them but you may not have a choice at your job.
2. Games. You may not have time for them, but others (such as myself) do. Sure Mac OS X has some games but they don't tend to be released right away for Mac and some genres are not well represented (i.e. MMOs where World of Warcraft is about your only choice). And no the "get a console" argument doesn't work for people who play strategy games, MMORPGs or prefer using a mouse for FPS games.
There is a third sort of weak reason: 3. Cross platform development without needing another system.
"One thing I always felt was missing from AA was the remnants of modern real world culture, which if you take a look around any urban center, is oversaturated with ads, billboards, posters, etc. It's a fact of the landscape. For example, why wouldn't you find an old rusted out Coke can in this world?"
"We get total artistic control over which ads go into the game so nothing would ever go into the game that does anything but add to the fact that this is a post apocalyptic earth. Each ad is custom made by Massive to add to our worlds existing look and feel. All the ads would be from old earth companies no longer around, not modern ads as if the companies existed on earth during the time period of Auto Assault."
They have a valid point. Real world brands shown destroyed and decrepit in a post-apocalyptic environment could add a sense of realism to the game. The real question is implementation. If they get one ad buyer and all you see if Nike ads, it really won't matter how well they are integrated into the environment.
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You can get the full speed but you are not likely to get it from a single connection. I can saturate my Time Warner 5Mbps connection with stuff like bittorrent or multiple connections to a news server, but it is rare that a single say http download will hit over 300KBs.
The great thing is that 5Mbps gives you the elbow room to have multiple computers downloading, playing online games and web surfing at the same time.
"Or if you tried you'd probably end up with a lot bigger problem than you'd have with a WoW addiction ;-)"
Or you turn into Ron Jeremy and have a successful career.
from liver failure due to alcoholism. He was 32 years old.
Last year a coworker at my girlfriend's work was found dead in his apartment after he didn't come back from vacation. The cause was alcohol poisoning.
The crash problem may be specific to video card or needed updated drivers. Not my computer, so I didn't get a chance to try to fix it. A couple reviews I read noted that crashing to the desktop was a problem - probably specific to particular hardware I think.
I guess I'm just used to being able to bring up inventory and map information in windows on the main screen (ala World of Warcraft or Everquest 2). The font size on the interface screen also seems really big (as in for easy viewing on a tv) even though my res is set to 1280x1024.
"Oblivion's interface is way too console-oriented"
I agree, in fact that's one reason I'm still debating whether to buy it. While you mention some good fixes, the interface feels like it was built for Xbox first and not rebuilt for PC. Compared to the MMOs I've been playing recently it leaves a lot to be desired.
My friend's copy also seems to crash to the desktop from time to time. Maybe I'll wait for the patching to start before I tackle the game.
Although a different genre, I'd vote for Star Wars Battlefront as the ultimate online Star Wars despite the fact that it's not very good.
Yeah I think that would help. Although of course it would piss off people that take a "mmo break".
It seems like the reduced number of players on a server at one time being implemented so late in the game just pissed off and penalized long term players. I know it pissed me off. Sure there's less lag when you are on, but good luck getting on.
They've been really weird when it comes to server transfers as well. You would think that migrating players to lower pop servers would be a no brainer, but these transfers are rare and only allowed between two specific servers. They've really done nothing to handle the imbalance between horde and alliance players either. You would think they could selectively allow migration for one faction if a server is totally unbalanced.
Depends on the server. The one I was playing on since April '05 suddenly got long queues after the 1.9 patch. I could expect to wait 30-60 minutes weekdays off hours.
That's a large chunk of my play time. So I quit.
"Blizzards problem is that they won't hard cap servers."
They hard capped the server I was playing on (Doomhammer) a few months ago. Old players could still make new alts, but if you didn't have a toon already on Doomhammer you couldn't make a one. I don't know if they've opened it back up again as I quit playing.
They seem to have reduced the total number of players allowed to login at any given time as well. At least after the last patch queues became a nightly reality versus no queues pre-patch.
"I played on Doomhammer btw."
I played on Doomhammer from April '05 through the beginning of this year. The server earned it's nickname "Downhammer". Queues had never been a big problem for me, but since December I had been seeing queues of 30-60 minutes in off hours. Which is great when you try to log on 15 minutes before a scheduled raid - have to wait 45 and find out your spot has been given away.
Now Doomhammer is full of level 60s, and players with multiple level 60s. New character creation has been locked out for the server (unless you already have an existing toon on DH). I imagine I'm not the only one who has left. What happens when the expansion comes out and people reactivate their accounts?
Most of the people I know rolled alts on a new server to play when not doing end game raids on Doomhammer. I tried that and a month after the server had been out - whammo - queues on the new server. I guess I just don't have enough free gaming time to spend it sitting staring at a queue.
"Somehow Blizzard hasn't quite caught on that 5.5 million subscribers might eventually go away, especially if they get frustrated enough with the downtime/lag. Sure, there's not much place for those gamers to go, but this may not be true in 1-3 years."
The final reason I quit was that since December the server queues were averaging 30-60 minutes on weekdays - non peak hours (late night Hawaii time). Given that I only have a couple of hours a night to play, having half of that wasted due to waiting in line sucked. Not to mention that since the login screen uses my 3D card I couldn't play anything else while waiting in the queue. Blizzard should take a hint from other MMOs and make the login 2D.
That and there being nothing interesting to do at level 60 excepted scheduled raids (debatable how interesting that is anyway).
As for there being nowhere to go, that really isn't true. Sure every MMO since WoW's release has been completely overshadowed but there are some great games out there. I played City of Villains for a few months and then moved on to Everquest 2 (sure flame all you want, but it has tons of great content and is much more friendly now than it was at launch). There are free trials available for a most of the other MMOs. Two things you won't find however, the truly massive player base of WoW and the associated server instability, queues and lag.
I never said "Intel CPUs don't run hot". Intel CPUs however don't melt when they overheat. I'm sure AMD has resolved this problem by now, but it was a serious problem. Take a look at this video for exactly what was occuring. And this CPU meltdown happened to a few of my friends due to incorrect heatsink mounting. It should be noted that the heatsink mounting mechanism on the Pentium 4 is way easier to secure and isn't likely to come loose as can happen with the clips on AMDs.
Then you go on a rant about Intel the company. I'm talking strictly about one thing - stability. Long life of components. I have a Pentium 200 that is what 10 years old? Works fine. I've never had an Intel CPU fail. I've chucked out several AMDs CPUs.
The best thing for the market is to have competition and you are starting to see the results of AMD's strong performance in Intel's next generation chipsets. The Core processor is a better laptop chip than AMD's Turion. The next gen Intel desktop chips will also make it an interesting fight. The sooner the Pentium 4 is left behind, the better for Intel.
But all of this is academic and completely beside my point which is simply that speed is not the only factor in making a decision between what hardware to use in your PC.
There are other reasons not to buy a Dell gaming computer (proprietary parts, cost versus a custom rig).
Yep, I've heard nightmares from home users about Dell support, but corporate support has always been fine to work with.
If I do have a problem I can always bitch to my sales rep and that kicks things in gear.
We run Dell PCs at work. You're right to a certain extent, I would never own one at home and any time someone wants to buy one I tell them they need to get the extended warranty.
Now from a business case, we buy computers assuming a definate 3 year lifecycle with anything after that a bonus. We buy 3 year warranties on all our Dells. Something breaks and Dell shows up the next day to repair it, or overnights a component and we do the install.
We used to have PCs built with better parts from a local company. The problem is that with a Dell you can pay less than $100/year for service including parts and labor. One component failure on the custom PCs would easily cost more than $100 between part cost and IT labor.
Now do Dells break more than other computers? Honestly, we have maybe 5 failures a year on a total of about 100+ computers, some over 5 years old. The number one component failure is hard drives (standard non Dell off the shelf parts). I've seen a couple motherboards blow over the past five years and a couple PSUs.
Dells are cheap, they work decently for normal business office tasks and their service (at least corporate under warranty service) is great but no way would I buy one for home.
"It does beg the question of why their monitors blow out so easily but they were Johnny-on-the-spot about replacing them."
This is really key. For Windows boxes we pretty much exclusively use Dell at the office. It's definately not because they are the best out there, but their support (at least business level) is excellent as is their sales division. Dell makes it easy for me to purchase what I need and easy for me to get equipment repaired quickly.
Now if you are the type that likes to do self repair or upgrade your computer (i.e. swap out motherboard/CPU) - I wouldn't recommend Dell. They use proprietary power supplies and case designs making otherwise simple upgrades a bitch. If you do go with Dell at home, make sure to get an extended warranty. It's well worth it. Otherwise you may be forced to purchase a Dell specific part at Dell's pricing. Not pretty. I once had a fan fail on a Dell box that was out of warranty. Ordinarily I would just buy a standard fan from the store and install it. In this case the fan motherboard connector was proprietary. So although we could install a normal fan, the bios would keep bitching about a fan fail and refuse to boot unless you pressed a key to make it boot. I tried to source the part from Dell directly and since it was out of warranty I got bounced around between different Dell support people and could never locate the proper person to purchase the fan from. In the end I lied and used the service tag # of a computer that was still under warranty and got the part shipped out for free.
Yeah I was gonna say for a wee bit more than price as the Dell XPS and Alienware rigs you could get a server that had, you know, stuff in it that might be useful to a... server? Like RAID 1 or 5, hot swappable drives, redundant power supplies, dual procs etc.
But yeah my servers might be good at running a Quake server, they sure can't run the client for shit.
"Anyone idiotic enough to be cought buying an Intel gaming rig is stupid enough"
Pure speed isn't the only reason to choose a brand. I've had numerous problems with AMD chips over the years, and while things may have improved the fact is that between chips melting down and buggy motherboard bioses AMD has had a bumpy road at times.
While I've had problems with non-Intel chipset mobos (such as Via's), the stablest x86 computers I've used have had Intel processors with Intel chipset motherboards.
The same goes for Nvidia versus ATI. I've had so many driver problems with ATI and such a good record of stability with Nvidia that it doesn't really matter to me if the ATI is the ultimate-ist , fastest.
And no I don't own a Dell or any other name brand "gaming rig", I have a custom box of course.
"it's right in line with any of the big manufacturers"
I've done some comparisons recently as one of the companys I oversee is a publishing firm. We are migrating the Editorial department to Macs to allow them to work directly with the actual fonts being used on press. Now if you are to compare a Mac Mini with a standard low end business Dell Optiplex (like a 170L), the cost is pretty comparable (withing $100 difference). The Dell however is running a faster processor than the low end Mini. Moving up to an iMac system costs about $600 more than the Dell PC. A large portion of this cost is the purchase of MS Office. Where the Dell OEM version is significantly discounted, the Mac version costs $400.
I think the iMac's are worth it overall, but we do pay a bit of a premium versus Dell for them.
Now if you like to play games and want some flexibility in upgrading your video or internal drives, the only option on a Mac is a Power Mac. And that's where the cost really is substantially more. I priced out a comparable Power Mac versus a PC and was looking at $1500 versus over $2500 for Apple. A "gaming" Mac definately costs more than a "gaming" PC.
"The Macintosh interface was quite a bit different from the Xerox Star's, and innovation certainly includes making a formerly unaffordable product more affordable."
Refinement sure but the metaphor was not theirs. The lawsuits have been flung back and forth over this issue through the years, from Apple vs. Microsoft, to Apple vs. GEM to Xerox vs. Apple.
I certainly never thought of Apple computers as inexpensive. The Apple II was priced out of range for my family, so we had a C64 at home. I used Apples at school and couldn't understand why they cost so much more. When I started doing design work in the late 80s I couldn't afford a Mac at home. I worked on Macs at the office and used an Amiga at home. I used to boot Mac OS on my Amiga to do design work because I couldn't afford several thousand dollars for a Mac (don't even mention doing design on a lunch box Mac screen).
Apple innovates sure, but Apple co-opts technology as well. Look at the guts of OS X for example. Or the PC components in the latest Macs.
"In my recollection, if you had to force quit an application on the Macintosh, it would usually hang on just long enough for you to save your files. (Note that I said usually, not always)."
When was the last time you used a Mac OS earlier than 10? I still deal with OS 9 machines on a daily basis and I can tell you that this is not true. It got a little better with OS 8 versus System 7 and earlier but nine times out of ten having to force quit meant you were likely to lose something. You might get the finder back and you might be able to save your data OR you might have the computer lock up during the save or shutdown potentially corrupting your data. I learned this pretty early in my career when I was forced on deadline to re-layout a magazine due to corruption caused by attempting to save out of QuarkXpress when Photoshop decided to take a dump. Save frequently and use "save as" periodically was the rule of thumb.
In Mac OS prior to OS X, the lack of guidelines for creating extensions caused all kind of problems with extension conflicts where one extension would stomp over the memory of another locking the system up. This problem often appeared as intermittent crashes and was difficult to debug. Enough of a problem that a product was sold called "Conflict Catcher" to attempt to prevent it. In Mac OS 8 they also added in extension set management to help ease troubleshooting these problems rather than the traditional, take an extension out of the system folder, reboot, see if the problem still occurs type of troubleshooting.
In regards to the Amiga, keep in mind that when the Amiga launched in 1985 it had preemptive multitasking. The Mac at that time had only "Desktop Accessories" (like the calculator and the Apple sliding puzzle) which could be run concurrently with a single application. It wasn't until System 5 that multifinder was released (1987 I believe) and not until System 7 that true cooperative multitasking was integrated into the OS. The Mac wouldn't get preemptive multitasking until the release of OS X.
You mention the Guru Meditation, but you don't remember the "Software error - task held Finish all disk activity Select CANCEL to reset/debug" request. This message sometimes allowed you to save your data before the system shit the bed. Much like the force quit on Mac. It didn't always work particularly if the application you wanted to save data from was the one that crashed (same as on any other OS).
With the release of AmigaDOS 2.0 there was some additional handling of errant applications (recoverable errors). Well behaved applications wouldn't necessarily take the system down, similar to how Mac OS and Windows 3.1 worked. As I mentioned before Windows was barely used before 3.0 and that version wasn't released until the '90s. Windows also could take advantage of protected mode in the 386 series of computers which helped prevent stability problems when running multiple programs.
If you are going to compare operating systems I think it only makes sense
That the classic 1984 ad showed a woman wearing colored clothes running into a hall of gray zombified people smashing the video of the gray evil dictator.
And this was used to sell a product that was monochrome.
The original Apple rainbow logo highlighted the fact that Apple IIs were one of the first low cost computers to do color video displays (thanks to Woz).
After Jobs moved on to NeXt with their high res monochrome screens, I often have wondered if Steve Jobs is color blind.
"I had an Amiga. It loved to crash, and when one application died it would bring down the entire machine."
You might want to note that no personal computers of the time period had memory protection. The CPUs of the time didn't have MMUs and if they did they weren't used (as in the case of the 68030 and up series of chips on Macs and Amigas). When one application died on a Mac it would take down the entire machine. In fact this was the case on Macs until the release of OS X. In certain cases you might have been able to recover enough to shutdown the Mac safely, but in general if you were using "force quit" you were likely to have the whole computer crash.
Windows 3.1 was released in 1992, a bit later than the Amiga in 1985. I don't know if I would say it was all that much stabler than an Amiga. It really depending on what programs you were running. Well behaved Windows apps weren't too bad, but running DOS stuff under Windows was real hit or miss.
"The Mac, with the first graphical interface in an affordable PC, was surely just as innovative as the Amiga, if not more so."
I guess they were both innovative in that they stole the desktop metaphor from other developers. Mice, folders/drawers, trash cans etc. None of that was invented at Apple or Amiga.
I don't really think I'd call the Mac affordable. I went with an Amiga in 1987 because I couldn't afford a color Macintosh (the first color Mac II's were 3-5 times the cost of an Amiga). I liked to use my computer for artwork and not having color was too big a limitation. Color Macs were not common home computers in '87.
"PC zealots"
;)
Woah. These exist? One of the things I actually enjoy about using Windows is the lack of platform advocacy from the users. God forbid you mention some aspect of OS X as sucking, you get an instant fight.
Disclaimer: I use and support Windows, Free BSD, Mac OS 9 and X and various flavors of Linux at my job. I feel fully qualified to point out how each of them suck in their own ways.
It's all been downhill since the Amiga died.
Two big reasons:
1. Need to run software applications for your work that are not available on Mac OS X. There are a ton of business applications for various industries that are Windows only. You may not want to run them but you may not have a choice at your job.
2. Games. You may not have time for them, but others (such as myself) do. Sure Mac OS X has some games but they don't tend to be released right away for Mac and some genres are not well represented (i.e. MMOs where World of Warcraft is about your only choice). And no the "get a console" argument doesn't work for people who play strategy games, MMORPGs or prefer using a mouse for FPS games.
There is a third sort of weak reason:
3. Cross platform development without needing another system.
Check out the response from the development company (NetDevil) on how the ads will be integrated into the game.
Of particular interest:
"One thing I always felt was missing from AA was the remnants of modern real world culture, which if you take a look around any urban center, is oversaturated with ads, billboards, posters, etc. It's a fact of the landscape. For example, why wouldn't you find an old rusted out Coke can in this world?"
"We get total artistic control over which ads go into the game so nothing would ever go into the game that does anything but add to the fact that this is a post apocalyptic earth. Each ad is custom made by Massive to add to our worlds existing look and feel. All the ads would be from old earth companies no longer around, not modern ads as if the companies existed on earth during the time period of Auto Assault."
They have a valid point. Real world brands shown destroyed and decrepit in a post-apocalyptic environment could add a sense
of realism to the game. The real question is implementation. If they get one ad buyer and all you see if Nike ads, it really won't matter how well they are integrated into the environment.
I was quoting the Slashdot summary article. If you mean the comments missed the point, agreed quite a few did.