Spoken like someone who never used an Amiga. Do you realize that the Amiga's Zorro bus had a feature called autoconfig which made it pretty damn plug and play? The ONLY case of needing a soldering iron, was if you wanted to upgrade chip RAM in an old model Amiga 500. I did this. Most geeks did this. Most ordinary users didn't need to. Oh wait, I need to explain chip RAM. You know how you have video RAM? Well just think of chip RAM as memory for your video and your audio. That's it. Hard to understand eh? If you are going to slam the use of torx screws in the Amiga 500 - you might want to consider that things sure as hell were worse on the Mac. At least I could buy a torx screwdriver at the local store. Mac users had to get a Mac Cracker. The Amiga 2000, 3000 and 4000 series where standard to open up and work on. No funky tools. The 500, 600 and 1200 were designed to generally be closed box units and not meant to be opened by end users. And if you did want to mess with them, well you could just pony up the chump change for the torx screwdriver. I would also note that the Amiga 500 sold for considerably less than $2000. More like $750 when I bought mine in '87. I can't believe you got modded +5 informative.
"Columns of 4-pt Flyshit font listing hardware add-ons which required an advanced EE degree to install."
Um OK. I don't know what the hell you were reading. My own upgrades? Lets see SCSI hard disks, removable media (Syquest), upgrade to a 68030 CPU, video upgrade etc. All plug and play. There was absolutely no difference between plugging in a card on an Amiga versus a Mac. You opened the case, you plugged it in. Now where is my EE degree? Lastly, in the case of video - the Amiga was a tool just like any other. And in a specialized industry the technical equipment has plenty of weirdo terms and issues you need to deal with. It sure was no different moving to an Avid system in the mid 90s.
"So I brought it up again, pulled the network cable from it, setup the firewall and happily patched the box."
I always make sure to be behind a firewall before bringing a Windows computer online. I use a hardware firewall in addtion to setting up a software one. Install Windows. Install latest service pack off CD. Instal anti-virus. Setup firewall. Plus into local router with firewall. Connect to net. Patch.
I'd recommend checking out Rise of Nations unless you are absolutely against RTS games. I enjoy Civilization but just don't have time for it. RON gives me some of the same feelings of city and empire building in a game that lasts about an hour on average.
The only way the two controllers are similar is in the inclusion of the number pad. I'm just saying it would have been more interesting showing some of the weirdo concepts that were used before the advent of the dpad (intellivision's disc, Bally's paddle/joystick).
This article is worthless without mention of the Intellivision controller. Especially as they slam the old Atari one some much. Where the Atari's was simple, the Intellivision's was a complicated affair with a weird disk and a keybad that you could attach overlays too. Check out In Defense of the Intellivision Hand Controller for an interesting look at this oddball of a controller. Also worthy of retro note is the bizarro Bally Astrocade gun grip controller which could function as both joystick and paddle.
Oh and also, I guess to really clarify. Encoding is something that I used to setup before I went to sleep. The reason I don't any more is because the performance impact is so minor that I no longer need to do it while I'm asleep. I can encode whenever. It's not really a case of going out of my way to encode while I'm gaming, it's just the computer is fast enough to handle it. I think Half Life 2 and Doom 3 are probably the only games I have where there would be much of an impact on performance. And in those cases if the thread priority is low, it would pretty much just take longer to encode the file. It won't really slow down the game much.
Actually it isn't a case of something I do all the time, it's something that I do from time to time. Mostly when the woman of the house hands me one of our kid's DVDs and says "can you make this into a DIVX file?" DVDs get destroyed by kids, so we tend to back them up to DIVX for playback.
Michelle Forbes
on
P2P and TV
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"Miranda Zero, played by actress Michelle Forbes. (Forbes is fast building a tech-geek pedigree: She's also the voice of Dr. Judith Mossman in the video game Half Life 2)."
I guess having appeared as Ensign Ro in multiple Star Trek the Next Generation episodes isn't worth mention as far her geek-pedigree goes?
"What about that interlocking ring of spaceships being an interlocking ring of solar panels? Then that blocked energy can get diverted to earth in a more desirable form..."
Yeah right like this wouldn't be abused to power oh say... orbital mind control lasers?
Except that in Pac-Man you eat the dots which disappear and only the magic dots do anything. So you need to roll around and get stuff in Karamari, but the stuff adds to your bundle and your control alters depending on the shape of the bundle. I'm not going to say Katamari is super complete-o innovate-o-tastic. But I will say the innovation is in the controls. Most importantly how the controls are impacted by your movement through the levels and the crap you pick up. It doesn't really feel like any other game I've played. I liked the style of the game too. Very nice and charming, if simple, presentation.
"The obvious question is how many gamers actually encode MPEG-2 while playing games on a day to day basis? It's an easy answer: none."
Wrong. I do it. Yep. I do. Or encode to divx. I find that with hyperthreading this is quite doable on a modern system without much impact. If you are running the background process in low priority I don't notice slowdown. Sure the encode will take a little longer, but my experience has been that it still gets finished pretty quickly. Maybe I'm nuts, but what else am I going to do while waiting for an encode to complete?
(obvious answers include: go outside! get a life! spend time with other human beings! etc.)
I have several consoles. They are good for some types of gaming. Not so for others. So why own a Windows machine for gaming? These are my personal answers:
There are very few strategy (RTS and turn based) for consoles. The console controller is terrible for these types of games and the TV resolution is terrible at displaying the complexity needed. Examples:
Rise of Nations Civilization 3 Age of Mythology And tons more on the way (AOE 3, Civ 4, Heroes of Might and Magic 5 etc.)
Games that have lots of user modifiable content. Easy to do on a PC, hard to do on a console.
Examples: Unreal Tournament Battlefield 1942 Half Life Quake Thief
Top of the line graphics still are only on PC. Maybe this will change, but the next generation consoles will stay at the same level for years - where the PC will keep getting better:
Examples: Half-Life 2 Doom 3
Online multiplayer gaming. This is the big one. While consoles have made strides (in particularly with Xbox Live) on the PC tons of games have free online playability.
Examples: Just about any FPS or RTS Guild Wars Diablo
Massively Multiplayer Online gaming. I love MMOs. I still can't see how one would work without a keyboard. I mean voice chat is great for a small group, but how do you handle large groups of people in a capitol city?
Examples: World of Warcraft City of Heroes Everquest 2
One other great thing is tons of freeware, and shareware games. Another is the large amount of emulators (yes I know you can do this on a modded Xbox as well).
"Note, this is on a couple year old laptop running OS X. The games I usually play are some older ones, like UT2003, Warcraft 3, Neverwinter nights, and a handful of less cpu/gpu intensive but fun games."
These are old games. You shouldn't have any problem doing the same thing on a comparable Windows box from a couple of years ago. I sure could on my old 2.4GHz box just fine. The biggest issue is RAM. If you have a gig of RAM this is mostly a non-issue. Leaving apps open isn't going to cause a problem. Even without enough memory, Windows will dump your apps into virtual memory and free up the RAM for use with the active application as necessary. I run World of Warcraft full speed with all the whiz bango effects on. I alt-tab out to use my web browser. I run background tasks such as newsgroup binary downloads (huge memory hog btw, when you have millions of posts in a group) without any in game slowdown. If you are talking about Windows 98 or something you have a point I guess, but I haven't had an issue with 2000 or XP. So maybe it doesn't work well with your system, but I sure don't know why. Maybe you don't know how to properly take care of a Windows system or something. Just because YOUR Windows computer doesn't work well, doesn't mean that everyone else is having the same trouble. I think this is evidenced by the number of posts citing that their Windows systems can handle it just fine.
I don't have any problems alt-tabbing out of World of Warcraft to the Windows desktop. I frequently run apps in the background, especially so I can alt-tab out to check thottbot.com for a particularly tricky quest. I also run things like a newsreader doing binary downloands while I play or stream a dvd off my computer to another comp in the house. It has pretty much no impact on the game performance. True, not all games support alt-tabbing to the desktop nicely, but many do. Also I find having a lot of RAM helps to make this a quick operation. If the OS needs to swap everything back off virtual memory when you alt-tab the performance will be slow. It also depends on the speed of your processor. I have a 3.2GHz Pent 4 which admittedly is way more than enough for World of Warcraft.
So I guess you must really hate Mac OS X huh? Let's see:
web browser -> Safari movie playback -> Quicktime email -> mail
And where exactly do you draw the line? Should they take "defrag" out of Windows because it competes with Disk Keeper? How about Scandisk? It competes with Norton Utilities and other products. What about the file system compression and encrpyption included in Windows? Remote Desktop competes Timbuktu Remote and many other applications. Windows Movie Maker sure should be ripped out, even though it only exists so that MS could show feature parity with OS X. Windows XP has built is support for zip files, further destroiyng PK Zip's market share. Now we've got MS Anti-Spyware coming out - I guess they will ruin Adaware and other pay spyware removal programs. It even detects viruses so it's sure to erode Symantec and Mcaffee's business. Backup should be ripped out along with Paint and Wordpad. Calculator is probably pretty evil too.
Ok so here's a genuine question: you can uninstall Quicktime and not have any impact on any Mac functionality? Will Final Cut Pro work fine without it? What about other apps? If so, that's a big change from applications on OS 9 and earlier which often required Quicktime.
I really don't care if you can uninstall WMP or not. Frankly you can install another media player and use it just fine. You can tell the system to associate your video files with the alternate video player (typically a part of the install setup, if the new app doesn't just associate itself to everything on planet earth anyway). WMP won't bother you about it. I know a number of people who use players like Core Media Player instead of WMP. The choice however is one based on functionality. Just as much as it is with someone purchasing Diskeeper to defrag, or Winzip to unzip files. The person makes the choice to install it because they feel it is a better option for them. They have the freedom to do this. As you say an OS should just be an OS, fine. But every OS these days, be it XP, OS X or a desktop Linux distro includes lots of supporting software. I certainly don't want to pay for Windows and then be expected to pay for 45 different other programs just to get basic functionality.
So all Windows users should suffer with an operating system that can't by default playback common media files? Windows users should be forced into buying an alternative media player? I'm sure you think Windows shouldn't have a web browser either. Honestly as far as I'm concerned I think playback of data files should be a component of any modern OS. As for Real, if they hadn't lost my faith by forcing completely crappy products down my throat I might care. I personally have decided against viewing any Real files that aren't supported by Real alternative. I don't trust Real and their crappy products have caused me much grief in the past. Why don't you look at how FireFox has achieved success and at how Opera has as well? In both cases you have a better product which people are going out of their way to download and use.
Um. Except for the fact that the number one online music store is Apple's. Using Apple's DRM. Oh, and Apple's DRM only works on Apple's iPod. So how is MS DRM more of a monopoly?
"Then again, Nintendo may choose the simpler route of merely incorporating a filtering or anti-aliasing method to improve the quality of the existing graphics. Certain N64 and SNES titles could benefit greatly from a method such as this."
This seems more likely to me. Most modern emulators have various options for filtering and antialiasing the graphics display. While purists may scoff at the softening and smoothing effect of the filters - it definately makes the games look let chunky.
Oops, must have misread you. You have a good point, moving to x86 should hopefully offer at least a boost to programs such as Virtual PC on the Mac. For games, it will be interesting to see if something like Cedega can benefit the Mac as well. I imagines porting to the Mac would be a bit easier once it's on x86, but I believe games that use DirectX would be more of a problem. OpenGL games would probably be quite easy to port.
"The PC world had finally caught up and started making products that could support the Macintosh experience"
Ohmigod that's so funny. I just have this vision of a theme park "Macintosh Experience" ala the "Star Trek Experience".
Look at when the transition to AGP, PCI, USB etc. happened. It was a decision created by the need to reduce cost. A completely valid one, but really it was because Apple was hurting and needed to reduce overhead by standardizing parts. This continued with Jobs decision to reduce the Mac lineup from way to many choices to just a few clearly delineated options. The also reduced cost and reduced the need for a large inventory of different models. The move to Intel is also driven by cost reduction as well as being able to get proper supply on chips it needs. For Intel it's great press as they become THE processor for home computers. I wouldn't look for much innovation on the Apple hardware side. It is possible that Intel will launch processors on the Mac platform to demo new chipset features - but that's hard to say. Apple gets the publicity, but Intel's PC making clients have the volume. With the hardware completely commoditized, you can bet that the innovation will remain where it has for years now - in the software.
Except that - if the camper kills and doesn't move, those who he killed will respawn and remember where he is and come and tag his ass. It's not a gameplay problem. Sure it's cheap but it's also not necessarily a great tactic that lets you run up uber kills. Moving and killing rather than waiting to kill will always earn you more kills if you are a reasonably skilled player. Camping has been around as long as the genre. It's not a Halo phenomenon. Camping has been a tactic since Doom. In Quake 2 the known common camping spots became second nature to good players. You new without thinking that you were coming by a common camp spot and you changed your approach to adjust. Usually the result would be a quickly fragged camper. Stop whining and get even.
Killing the pet doesn't do nearly as much good in PVP as killing the player. Focusing on killing the pet is a good way to get yourself killed. At least that's what I've learned through many duels against my friend's Warlock. That doesn't make pets useless however. I've had a Succubus drop me from a finishing move while I wasn't paying attention.
Slashdot Mirror
Spoken like someone who never used an Amiga.
Do you realize that the Amiga's Zorro bus had a feature called autoconfig which made it pretty damn plug and play?
The ONLY case of needing a soldering iron, was if you wanted to upgrade chip RAM in an old model Amiga 500. I did this. Most geeks did this. Most ordinary users didn't need to.
Oh wait, I need to explain chip RAM. You know how you have video RAM? Well just think of chip RAM as memory for your video and your audio. That's it. Hard to understand eh?
If you are going to slam the use of torx screws in the Amiga 500 - you might want to consider that things sure as hell were worse on the Mac. At least I could buy a torx screwdriver at the local store. Mac users had to get a Mac Cracker.
The Amiga 2000, 3000 and 4000 series where standard to open up and work on. No funky tools. The 500, 600 and 1200 were designed to generally be closed box units and not meant to be opened by end users. And if you did want to mess with them, well you could just pony up the chump change for the torx screwdriver. I would also note that the Amiga 500 sold for considerably less than $2000. More like $750 when I bought mine in '87.
I can't believe you got modded +5 informative.
"Columns of 4-pt Flyshit font listing hardware add-ons which required an advanced EE degree to install."
Um OK. I don't know what the hell you were reading. My own upgrades? Lets see SCSI hard disks, removable media (Syquest), upgrade to a 68030 CPU, video upgrade etc. All plug and play.
There was absolutely no difference between plugging in a card on an Amiga versus a Mac. You opened the case, you plugged it in. Now where is my EE degree?
Lastly, in the case of video - the Amiga was a tool just like any other. And in a specialized industry the technical equipment has plenty of weirdo terms and issues you need to deal with. It sure was no different moving to an Avid system in the mid 90s.
"So I brought it up again, pulled the network cable from it, setup the firewall and happily patched the box."
I always make sure to be behind a firewall before bringing a Windows computer online. I use a hardware firewall in addtion to setting up a software one.
Install Windows.
Install latest service pack off CD.
Instal anti-virus.
Setup firewall.
Plus into local router with firewall.
Connect to net.
Patch.
I'd recommend checking out Rise of Nations unless you are absolutely against RTS games.
I enjoy Civilization but just don't have time for it. RON gives me some of the same feelings of city and empire building in a game that lasts about an hour on average.
The only way the two controllers are similar is in the inclusion of the number pad.
I'm just saying it would have been more interesting showing some of the weirdo concepts that were used before the advent of the dpad (intellivision's disc, Bally's paddle/joystick).
This article is worthless without mention of the Intellivision controller. Especially as they slam the old Atari one some much. Where the Atari's was simple, the Intellivision's was a complicated affair with a weird disk and a keybad that you could attach overlays too. Check out In Defense of the Intellivision Hand Controller for an interesting look at this oddball of a controller.
Also worthy of retro note is the bizarro Bally Astrocade gun grip controller which could function as both joystick and paddle.
Oh and also, I guess to really clarify. Encoding is something that I used to setup before I went to sleep. The reason I don't any more is because the performance impact is so minor that I no longer need to do it while I'm asleep. I can encode whenever.
It's not really a case of going out of my way to encode while I'm gaming, it's just the computer is fast enough to handle it.
I think Half Life 2 and Doom 3 are probably the only games I have where there would be much of an impact on performance. And in those cases if the thread priority is low, it would pretty much just take longer to encode the file. It won't really slow down the game much.
Obvious answer: Amateur pornography?
Actually it isn't a case of something I do all the time, it's something that I do from time to time.
Mostly when the woman of the house hands me one of our kid's DVDs and says "can you make this into a DIVX file?"
DVDs get destroyed by kids, so we tend to back them up to DIVX for playback.
"Miranda Zero, played by actress Michelle Forbes. (Forbes is fast building a tech-geek pedigree: She's also the voice of Dr. Judith Mossman in the video game Half Life 2)."
I guess having appeared as Ensign Ro in multiple Star Trek the Next Generation episodes isn't worth mention as far her geek-pedigree goes?
"What about that interlocking ring of spaceships being an interlocking ring of solar panels? Then that blocked energy can get diverted to earth in a more desirable form..."
Yeah right like this wouldn't be abused to power oh say... orbital mind control lasers?
Except that in Pac-Man you eat the dots which disappear and only the magic dots do anything.
So you need to roll around and get stuff in Karamari, but the stuff adds to your bundle and your control alters depending on the shape of the bundle.
I'm not going to say Katamari is super complete-o innovate-o-tastic. But I will say the innovation is in the controls. Most importantly how the controls are impacted by your movement through the levels and the crap you pick up. It doesn't really feel like any other game I've played.
I liked the style of the game too. Very nice and charming, if simple, presentation.
From the article:
"The obvious question is how many gamers actually encode MPEG-2 while playing games on a day to day basis? It's an easy answer: none."
Wrong. I do it. Yep. I do. Or encode to divx.
I find that with hyperthreading this is quite doable on a modern system without much impact. If you are running the background process in low priority I don't notice slowdown.
Sure the encode will take a little longer, but my experience has been that it still gets finished pretty quickly.
Maybe I'm nuts, but what else am I going to do while waiting for an encode to complete?
(obvious answers include:
go outside!
get a life!
spend time with other human beings!
etc.)
I have several consoles. They are good for some types of gaming. Not so for others.
So why own a Windows machine for gaming? These are my personal answers:
There are very few strategy (RTS and turn based) for consoles. The console controller is terrible for these types of games and the TV resolution is terrible at displaying the complexity needed.
Examples:
Rise of Nations
Civilization 3
Age of Mythology
And tons more on the way (AOE 3, Civ 4, Heroes of Might and Magic 5 etc.)
Games that have lots of user modifiable content. Easy to do on a PC, hard to do on a console.
Examples:
Unreal Tournament
Battlefield 1942
Half Life
Quake
Thief
Top of the line graphics still are only on PC. Maybe this will change, but the next generation consoles will stay at the same level for years - where the PC will keep getting better:
Examples:
Half-Life 2
Doom 3
Online multiplayer gaming. This is the big one. While consoles have made strides (in particularly with Xbox Live) on the PC tons of games have free online playability.
Examples:
Just about any FPS or RTS
Guild Wars
Diablo
Massively Multiplayer Online gaming. I love MMOs.
I still can't see how one would work without a keyboard. I mean voice chat is great for a small group, but how do you handle large groups of people in a capitol city?
Examples:
World of Warcraft
City of Heroes
Everquest 2
One other great thing is tons of freeware, and shareware games. Another is the large amount of emulators (yes I know you can do this on a modded Xbox as well).
As you quoted previously:
"Note, this is on a couple year old laptop running OS X. The games I usually play are some older ones, like UT2003, Warcraft 3, Neverwinter nights, and a handful of less cpu/gpu intensive but fun games."
These are old games. You shouldn't have any problem doing the same thing on a comparable Windows box from a couple of years ago. I sure could on my old 2.4GHz box just fine.
The biggest issue is RAM. If you have a gig of RAM this is mostly a non-issue. Leaving apps open isn't going to cause a problem. Even without enough memory, Windows will dump your apps into virtual memory and free up the RAM for use with the active application as necessary.
I run World of Warcraft full speed with all the whiz bango effects on. I alt-tab out to use my web browser. I run background tasks such as newsgroup binary downloads (huge memory hog btw, when you have millions of posts in a group) without any in game slowdown.
If you are talking about Windows 98 or something you have a point I guess, but I haven't had an issue with 2000 or XP.
So maybe it doesn't work well with your system, but I sure don't know why. Maybe you don't know how to properly take care of a Windows system or something.
Just because YOUR Windows computer doesn't work well, doesn't mean that everyone else is having the same trouble. I think this is evidenced by the number of posts citing that their Windows systems can handle it just fine.
I don't have any problems alt-tabbing out of World of Warcraft to the Windows desktop. I frequently run apps in the background, especially so I can alt-tab out to check thottbot.com for a particularly tricky quest. I also run things like a newsreader doing binary downloands while I play or stream a dvd off my computer to another comp in the house. It has pretty much no impact on the game performance.
True, not all games support alt-tabbing to the desktop nicely, but many do. Also I find having a lot of RAM helps to make this a quick operation. If the OS needs to swap everything back off virtual memory when you alt-tab the performance will be slow.
It also depends on the speed of your processor. I have a 3.2GHz Pent 4 which admittedly is way more than enough for World of Warcraft.
So I guess you must really hate Mac OS X huh?
Let's see:
web browser -> Safari
movie playback -> Quicktime
email -> mail
And where exactly do you draw the line? Should they take "defrag" out of Windows because it competes with Disk Keeper?
How about Scandisk? It competes with Norton Utilities and other products.
What about the file system compression and encrpyption included in Windows?
Remote Desktop competes Timbuktu Remote and many other applications.
Windows Movie Maker sure should be ripped out, even though it only exists so that MS could show feature parity with OS X.
Windows XP has built is support for zip files, further destroiyng PK Zip's market share.
Now we've got MS Anti-Spyware coming out - I guess they will ruin Adaware and other pay spyware removal programs. It even detects viruses so it's sure to erode Symantec and Mcaffee's business.
Backup should be ripped out along with Paint and Wordpad.
Calculator is probably pretty evil too.
Ok so here's a genuine question: you can uninstall Quicktime and not have any impact on any Mac functionality? Will Final Cut Pro work fine without it? What about other apps?
If so, that's a big change from applications on OS 9 and earlier which often required Quicktime.
I really don't care if you can uninstall WMP or not. Frankly you can install another media player and use it just fine. You can tell the system to associate your video files with the alternate video player (typically a part of the install setup, if the new app doesn't just associate itself to everything on planet earth anyway). WMP won't bother you about it.
I know a number of people who use players like Core Media Player instead of WMP. The choice however is one based on functionality. Just as much as it is with someone purchasing Diskeeper to defrag, or Winzip to unzip files. The person makes the choice to install it because they feel it is a better option for them. They have the freedom to do this.
As you say an OS should just be an OS, fine. But every OS these days, be it XP, OS X or a desktop Linux distro includes lots of supporting software.
I certainly don't want to pay for Windows and then be expected to pay for 45 different other programs just to get basic functionality.
The Pacman Joke
"If Pacman had affected us as kids we'd be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to repetitive music."
So all Windows users should suffer with an operating system that can't by default playback common media files?
Windows users should be forced into buying an alternative media player? I'm sure you think Windows shouldn't have a web browser either.
Honestly as far as I'm concerned I think playback of data files should be a component of any modern OS. As for Real, if they hadn't lost my faith by forcing completely crappy products down my throat I might care. I personally have decided against viewing any Real files that aren't supported by Real alternative. I don't trust Real and their crappy products have caused me much grief in the past.
Why don't you look at how FireFox has achieved success and at how Opera has as well? In both cases you have a better product which people are going out of their way to download and use.
Um. Except for the fact that the number one online music store is Apple's. Using Apple's DRM. Oh, and Apple's DRM only works on Apple's iPod.
So how is MS DRM more of a monopoly?
"What next, is he going to push her down on the blacktop to prove his affection for her?"
If the woman in question was Ayn Rand, that's exactly what she'd enjoy.
"Then again, Nintendo may choose the simpler route of merely incorporating a filtering or anti-aliasing method to improve the quality of the existing graphics. Certain N64 and SNES titles could benefit greatly from a method such as this."
This seems more likely to me. Most modern emulators have various options for filtering and antialiasing the graphics display. While purists may scoff at the softening and smoothing effect of the filters - it definately makes the games look let chunky.
Oops, must have misread you.
You have a good point, moving to x86 should hopefully offer at least a boost to programs such as Virtual PC on the Mac.
For games, it will be interesting to see if something like Cedega can benefit the Mac as well. I imagines porting to the Mac would be a bit easier once it's on x86, but I believe games that use DirectX would be more of a problem. OpenGL games would probably be quite easy to port.
"The PC world had finally caught up and started making products that could support the Macintosh experience"
Ohmigod that's so funny. I just have this vision of a theme park "Macintosh Experience" ala the "Star Trek Experience".
Look at when the transition to AGP, PCI, USB etc. happened. It was a decision created by the need to reduce cost. A completely valid one, but really it was because Apple was hurting and needed to reduce overhead by standardizing parts. This continued with Jobs decision to reduce the Mac lineup from way to many choices to just a few clearly delineated options. The also reduced cost and reduced the need for a large inventory of different models.
The move to Intel is also driven by cost reduction as well as being able to get proper supply on chips it needs. For Intel it's great press as they become THE processor for home computers.
I wouldn't look for much innovation on the Apple hardware side. It is possible that Intel will launch processors on the Mac platform to demo new chipset features - but that's hard to say. Apple gets the publicity, but Intel's PC making clients have the volume.
With the hardware completely commoditized, you can bet that the innovation will remain where it has for years now - in the software.
"The same isn't true for Windows."
Sure not as many, but let's see...
Apache - check
MySQL - check
PostgreSQL - check
Gimp - check
Open Office - check
Firefox - check
Mozilla - check
Perl - check
PHP - check
And tons of others. It's somewhat of a misconception that there is no open source software for the Windows platform.
Except that - if the camper kills and doesn't move, those who he killed will respawn and remember where he is and come and tag his ass.
It's not a gameplay problem. Sure it's cheap but it's also not necessarily a great tactic that lets you run up uber kills. Moving and killing rather than waiting to kill will always earn you more kills if you are a reasonably skilled player.
Camping has been around as long as the genre. It's not a Halo phenomenon. Camping has been a tactic since Doom. In Quake 2 the known common camping spots became second nature to good players. You new without thinking that you were coming by a common camp spot and you changed your approach to adjust. Usually the result would be a quickly fragged camper.
Stop whining and get even.
Killing the pet doesn't do nearly as much good in PVP as killing the player. Focusing on killing the pet is a good way to get yourself killed. At least that's what I've learned through many duels against my friend's Warlock.
That doesn't make pets useless however. I've had a Succubus drop me from a finishing move while I wasn't paying attention.