And you're a fucking idiot troll wanker. As I noted:
"The main difference is that in order to take advantage of it, you need a flash memory cart for the GBA or DS."
Any one will do. The SuperCard is nice because it uses compact flash. Are you stating that the other cards weren't made for piracy? How is playing a Nintendo ROM on a PSP NOT piracy??? Also do you think that the fact that the Super Card includes emulators built in and also includes the ability to play MP3s and movies as well means that maybe it can be used for something else besides pirated GBA ROMs? If I'm stupid, you my friend must have had a lobotomy.
Pretty nice you got modded insightful! I hate the "call for nerf". Frequently posted by people who have never played the class and don't understand how they work. Sometimes it's not just raw game mechanics but also choice of build and play style that creates powerful characters. I saw a lvl 40 Shaman smoke through an area of lvl 43 mobs that I was working on with a friend. I was pretty impressed as my 42 druid and my friends 43 warlock couldn't kill that quickly. But I don't know the class so I sure am not going to call for nerf. Play the class and offer constructive criticism if you think it's out of balance. Ask ye not to bring the nerf bat on your neighbor, lest the nerf bat come for you! (and yada yada druids suck yada yada warlocks suck)
Well. I actually switched from playing a Blaster when it became impossible to solo around level 35. I decided on an Illusion controller because they had been listed as good soloing class. True to form, thing's were rough in the beginning, but the combination of blind and spectral wounds helped. Once I achieved Phantom Army (and yes this was post nerf) soloing became easy. Also as Illusion/Kinetics I was pretty much useless as a healbot, although I was a pretty good buff bot. I think the key difference between Illusion and Fire controllers (I have a lower level fire, so I know the pain), is that Illusion gets Phantom Army much earlier than level 32 (level 18 if I remember correctly). While not a "true pet" in the same manner as fire imps or phantasms - Phantom Army dramatically changed the play style and soloability of Illusion controllers. I would love to see a comparable power given to other controllers at the same level range.
"Very little information is available on performance of native Mac OS X Intel applications, because few exist. However, those who have used the Developer Transition Kit report performance equal to or exceeding a G5 Mac."
I would absolutely EXPECT performance on Rosetta to be more like Virtual PC than like a true PowerPC. CPU emulation always involves a serious performance hit. If you watch the keynote, most of what Jobs does is the native applications. To demo Rosetta he mostly uses programs like Office, which should run ok even if hampered by emulation. He does load Photoshop (which takes a long time), but you don't really get any indication of the size of file he working on. When he runs the filters it applies the filter in a tiled manner, whereas given the filter used, on a modern system the whole image should refresh at once (emboss filter). So it seems to me this is running much slower than on a G5 or Photoshop running on Windows. This is admittedly a bit of conjecture on my part as you can't see the resolution of the image involved.
"Still, there were rumors that the keynote announcing the Intel deal, which included a demo on a PowerMac, was in fact powered by a quad-Pentium powered box. Were these the musings of a frantic fanbase or real facts? Impossible for me to say."
I really doubt this. Most of the demo things that Steve Jobs showed on the Pentium were things that wouldn't necessarily have benefitted much from multiple CPUs. The execution speed for the tasks he did certainly seems in line with what a Pentium 4 3.6GHz running Windows can do. My gut feeling is that the "quad Pentium" theory is just put out there by fanboys not wanting to give up there "Pentiums suck versus the G5" line.
OK, so the PSP currently has homebrew apps running on either the 1.0 bios or through a swap exploit on 1.5 bios - but not on the currently shipping bios. The emulation scene is in a very early state for those that can actually run the software. PSP Linux has hardly any progress. Now you probably don't know about emulation, homebrew, movie playback etc. on the Gameboy Advance or Gameboy. It does exist in a considerably more advanced state than on the PSP. The main difference is that in order to take advantage of it, you need a flash memory cart for the GBA or DS. A good example is the Super Card which allows you to plug a compact flash card into the DS. It also plays GB, NES, PCEngine and Sega GameGear games out of the box. It has both movie and music playback features as well and supports homebrew GBA apps. There are other cards available that will allow you to play DS bootleg or homebrew games as well.
As far as I can tell, PlayNC is just a master account to manage your games. I haven't tried Lineage 2 to confirm this, but for my City of Heroes subscription there is a line item for CoH with the billing cost and the activate/deactivate button. Guild Wars and an NCsoft beta game are listed as seperate line items.
I'm not sure I agree with you on this. From the developer community responses I read, most seem to think the change to a single processor family for both Windows and Macs will make application porting easier. My point with the little guys is those that are sitting on aging Metroworks Codewarrior code bases are going to have to do a lot more reworking of their code.
Provided you are already coding to Apple's Xcode spec. Almost 25% of the Mac developer base still uses Metroworks Codewarrior and is going to have a lot harder a time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a political component to the use of the bomb? As in by that point in the war irregardless of whether the US invaded Japan or not, it was becoming obvious that the USSR and the US were going to be the emerging super powers. The demostration of the use of the bomb (and in particular using it twice, quickly) was a show of the extent of the US's military power.
Jobs is a great marketeer and businessman. He will do what he feels is best to grow Apple. He will do it on his terms. I'm not completely sure I understand the "cult of Jobs". Watching the keynote was amazing. Being able to present to a room full of Apple developers who have just cleared the transition hurdle to OSX, and dropping the "new transition to Intel" bomb on them and receiving thunderous applause. It was awesome. Having the Intel CEO come out and get thunderous applause was awesome. Having all these PowerPC thumping crowds turn around and embrace the new Intel direction like a flip of the switch - awesome. For cross platform developers this is probably ultimately a move that will save them money (and get a few Mac specific devs fired) as it will ease porting. The little Mac only devs will probably be hardest hit. Especially the old timers who are still using Codewarrior and have been coding Mac since it's launch. It represents an additional cost outlay for them, to reach the same market they are already targetting. Wheee!
"The fact that they are able to provide these products while having only "the same level of problems as Dell" (something I dispute, but note that in any case Apple's customer support is much better) is why they're seen as the equivalent of a BMW and not an Alfa Romeo."
Hmmm, well do a google search on "apple class action lawsuits" and see how many results you get involving hardware problems. With Dell you just get sleazy business dealing lawsuits. As for the support - your milleage may vary. As a small business customer using the mid level Dell service I get someone showing up at my office within 4 hours of the call. I get nice onsite hardware installation if I need it (as in laptops) or can just have the part dropped off if we want to do the install ourselves. I hear their consumer level support sucks however. Now Apple wants me to bring my computer into their store for diagnosis because they don't trust our own evaluations. They don't do onsite as far as I can tell (we buy Apple Care on all our Macs). Turnaround is MUCH slower for repairs. For a standard business computer I sure don't need a BMW, I need something fairly reliable that has good support and sells at a low cost.
The point is exactly what the EU is finding out - the public doesn't give a flying fuck about where or how media player is setup in Windows or IE or any of it. They want to be able to click on a file and have it be displayed. Just as much as a Mac user wants to do the same. They don't care or understand about DLLs or integration or any of that. My point is that no end user of either Apple or Microsoft's operating system wants to have functionality removed. The fact of the matter is that maybe if Real had a product that offered something over Windows Media Player people would use it. Lots of people I know use other media players (such as Core Media Player, Media player classic) instead of Windows Media Player. From the programmers perspective no one is FORCING you to call IE or WMP to parse an HTML page or to playback a video. You can roll your own code for this - and many companies do. But you can hardly blame a company for calling IE to display HTML within their app, it saves a lot of development time. As far as I'm concerned the ability to parse data types should be an OS level component. I don't think Windows does it properly at all, I would rather see something like the Amiga's plug in data types. Add the plugin for a particular type and any appropriate application can take advantage of it. Don't like the way the default OS data type plug in works, swap it out. You raise a good point about the iPod. Are you going to argue that Apple doesn't lock other vendors out? Let's see I seem to recall a bit of a spat between our friends at Real and Apple over playback of music from Real's music store on the iPod. You want to talk integration - good fucking luck playing back any other purchaseable online music on your iPod. If there is a hack to do it Apple will update iTunes and lock out the other vendor again. If I bought an iPod, I pretty much have to use iTunes and the iTunes music store if I want commercial downloadable music. So it's OK for Apple to lock out people like Real from their product but it's not ok for MS to lockout Real from theirs (which incidentally it doesn't do, as you can install Real on Windows, but you can't play Real on your iPod)? It's all fine to call MS the evil empire, but understand that other companies use cut throat business tactics as well. You sir can have your goat back.
Also you get to find out that Mace Windu really is in fact one bad muthafucka of a Jedi inspite of almost universally sucking in the movies. It also reveals that Kit Fisto is the Jedi version of Aquaman and that Squidheads and Mon Calamari are mortal enemies. I think Black Manta might be a Sith lord too. I wasn't too clear on that.
I know a few people who have the same problem with the text scroll - get as far as:
"War! The Republic is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Dooku"
And then I burst out laughing as soon as I read the name "Dooku". Some words are just intrinsicly amusing. About the only thing funnier is when you preface it with "ruthless Sith Lord, Count".
Well they were a little longer than that. The whole series can be run "movie style" without interruptions. Total run time is an hour and nine minutes for the first series. The second series episodes are longer and offer more dialogue rather than just lots of shooting and explosions.
Video, audio, text, rich text, markup etc. All these things are data types. It makes sense to have a consistent way to implement these data types on the OS level. If a developer can call the OS api for video playback or to read a text stream for that matter, or to display html, it means they get a tremendous time savings in development. I expect my OS to be able to handle common data types out of the box. On the Amiga, data types were handled as plug-ins. If you needed the capability to open a jpeg you added the data type. With the data type added to the system applications could automagically access the data. For example, now your picture viewer could view jpegs since the OS provided the decoding layer. This was an extremely nice way to providing access to data types without requiring that you use any bundled applications.
I agree. And of course this should be done with Apple as well. I think Apple needs to remove Safari, Quicktime, and mail at the very least. As well as stop bundling iLife with new computers. Apple is destroying the market for Mac developers by including so much software with it's machines. iTunes, Garageband, iMovie, Appleworks should never be included with a computer at no extra cost. I can hardly believe developers still make Mac software. I mean why would you buy a game for a Mac when Apple just gives away Nanosaur with your new computer? An OS should be an OS. That's it. Nothing else. Certainly not web browsers, word processors or media players. This bundling has to stop before all development innovation is eradicated.
"Some people simply won't like WoW because the particular style to it isn't to their liking"
I for one would like a slider on the character creation thing so I could adjust the size of my elves freaking huge ears. My friend named his elf Dawnkey as a reflection on the state of elf ears in WoW.
Really? Well someone should let the guys at Xport know they are wasting their time. Sure you can play on the PC, but the PC doesn't have consistent controller support across emulators and many emulators feature interfaces that aren't easy to use when displayed on a TV screen. Xbox emulation is much more useful for classic multiplayer sitting in the living room console playing.
"There is not great way to do emulation-on-the-go right now"
Gee, besides the GP32, you have solid emulation on the Palm and PocketPC devices. The Tapwave Zodiac has a great form factor for classic gaming. Another great option for mobile emulation is to get a Super Card for the Gameboy Advance, SP or DS. It uses standard compact flash cards and plays GB, NES, PC Engine and Game Gear/Sega Master System games. The PSP has the potential to become the greatest mobile emulation platform but we are still a long way from that point it seems.
Yeah the older ones (like my 400mhz Xscale) had a bit of a hard time with speed on the GBA games. The big problem I have with SNES is the buttons - I haven't seen a PPC with a good layout for any with more buttons than a Genesis.
The one user who hated it was the one user. The fact that he questions all based on one user is another issue. The fact is that if you like one OS or another is a subjective position. And yes, most Mac fanboys can't see that their love of the OS is subjective, as noted by the responses of "you just don't get it" when anyone comments that they prefer Linux or Windows or whatever. I've hated the cult of Mac as long as I've used one, the smug attitude that any one who uses a computer other than a Mac is an idiot drives me nuts.
Slashdot Mirror
According to the leaked patch notes:
"Will of the Forsaken (Undead Racial) - duration of the lasting immunity effect decreased to 5 seconds."
And you're a fucking idiot troll wanker. As I noted:
"The main difference is that in order to take advantage of it, you need a flash memory cart for the GBA or DS."
Any one will do. The SuperCard is nice because it uses compact flash.
Are you stating that the other cards weren't made for piracy? How is playing a Nintendo ROM on a PSP NOT piracy???
Also do you think that the fact that the Super Card includes emulators built in and also includes the ability to play MP3s and movies as well means that maybe it can be used for something else besides pirated GBA ROMs?
If I'm stupid, you my friend must have had a lobotomy.
Pretty nice you got modded insightful!
I hate the "call for nerf". Frequently posted by people who have never played the class and don't understand how they work. Sometimes it's not just raw game mechanics but also choice of build and play style that creates powerful characters.
I saw a lvl 40 Shaman smoke through an area of lvl 43 mobs that I was working on with a friend. I was pretty impressed as my 42 druid and my friends 43 warlock couldn't kill that quickly.
But I don't know the class so I sure am not going to call for nerf. Play the class and offer constructive criticism if you think it's out of balance.
Ask ye not to bring the nerf bat on your neighbor, lest the nerf bat come for you!
(and yada yada druids suck yada yada warlocks suck)
"Contrast this with a controller from CoH"
Well. I actually switched from playing a Blaster when it became impossible to solo around level 35. I decided on an Illusion controller because they had been listed as good soloing class. True to form, thing's were rough in the beginning, but the combination of blind and spectral wounds helped. Once I achieved Phantom Army (and yes this was post nerf) soloing became easy. Also as Illusion/Kinetics I was pretty much useless as a healbot, although I was a pretty good buff bot.
I think the key difference between Illusion and Fire controllers (I have a lower level fire, so I know the pain), is that Illusion gets Phantom Army much earlier than level 32 (level 18 if I remember correctly). While not a "true pet" in the same manner as fire imps or phantasms - Phantom Army dramatically changed the play style and soloability of Illusion controllers. I would love to see a comparable power given to other controllers at the same level range.
From the article you quoted:
"Very little information is available on performance of native Mac OS X Intel applications, because few exist. However, those who have used the Developer Transition Kit report performance equal to or exceeding a G5 Mac."
I would absolutely EXPECT performance on Rosetta to be more like Virtual PC than like a true PowerPC. CPU emulation always involves a serious performance hit.
If you watch the keynote, most of what Jobs does is the native applications. To demo Rosetta he mostly uses programs like Office, which should run ok even if hampered by emulation. He does load Photoshop (which takes a long time), but you don't really get any indication of the size of file he working on. When he runs the filters it applies the filter in a tiled manner, whereas given the filter used, on a modern system the whole image should refresh at once (emboss filter). So it seems to me this is running much slower than on a G5 or Photoshop running on Windows. This is admittedly a bit of conjecture on my part as you can't see the resolution of the image involved.
"Still, there were rumors that the keynote announcing the Intel deal, which included a demo on a PowerMac, was in fact powered by a quad-Pentium powered box. Were these the musings of a frantic fanbase or real facts? Impossible for me to say."
I really doubt this. Most of the demo things that Steve Jobs showed on the Pentium were things that wouldn't necessarily have benefitted much from multiple CPUs. The execution speed for the tasks he did certainly seems in line with what a Pentium 4 3.6GHz running Windows can do. My gut feeling is that the "quad Pentium" theory is just put out there by fanboys not wanting to give up there "Pentiums suck versus the G5" line.
OK, so the PSP currently has homebrew apps running on either the 1.0 bios or through a swap exploit on 1.5 bios - but not on the currently shipping bios. The emulation scene is in a very early state for those that can actually run the software. PSP Linux has hardly any progress.
Now you probably don't know about emulation, homebrew, movie playback etc. on the Gameboy Advance or Gameboy. It does exist in a considerably more advanced state than on the PSP. The main difference is that in order to take advantage of it, you need a flash memory cart for the GBA or DS. A good example is the Super Card which allows you to plug a compact flash card into the DS. It also plays GB, NES, PCEngine and Sega GameGear games out of the box. It has both movie and music playback features as well and supports homebrew GBA apps. There are other cards available that will allow you to play DS bootleg or homebrew games as well.
As far as I can tell, PlayNC is just a master account to manage your games. I haven't tried Lineage 2 to confirm this, but for my City of Heroes subscription there is a line item for CoH with the billing cost and the activate/deactivate button.
Guild Wars and an NCsoft beta game are listed as seperate line items.
I'm not sure I agree with you on this. From the developer community responses I read, most seem to think the change to a single processor family for both Windows and Macs will make application porting easier. My point with the little guys is those that are sitting on aging Metroworks Codewarrior code bases are going to have to do a lot more reworking of their code.
Provided you are already coding to Apple's Xcode spec. Almost 25% of the Mac developer base still uses Metroworks Codewarrior and is going to have a lot harder a time.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there a political component to the use of the bomb? As in by that point in the war irregardless of whether the US invaded Japan or not, it was becoming obvious that the USSR and the US were going to be the emerging super powers. The demostration of the use of the bomb (and in particular using it twice, quickly) was a show of the extent of the US's military power.
Jobs is a great marketeer and businessman. He will do what he feels is best to grow Apple. He will do it on his terms.
I'm not completely sure I understand the "cult of Jobs". Watching the keynote was amazing. Being able to present to a room full of Apple developers who have just cleared the transition hurdle to OSX, and dropping the "new transition to Intel" bomb on them and receiving thunderous applause. It was awesome. Having the Intel CEO come out and get thunderous applause was awesome. Having all these PowerPC thumping crowds turn around and embrace the new Intel direction like a flip of the switch - awesome.
For cross platform developers this is probably ultimately a move that will save them money (and get a few Mac specific devs fired) as it will ease porting. The little Mac only devs will probably be hardest hit. Especially the old timers who are still using Codewarrior and have been coding Mac since it's launch. It represents an additional cost outlay for them, to reach the same market they are already targetting. Wheee!
"Also, who knows, due the Rosetta stuff, they probably may be able to switch from one arch to another in the future freely!!"
:)
Um... not likely!
"The fact that they are able to provide these products while having only "the same level of problems as Dell" (something I dispute, but note that in any case Apple's customer support is much better) is why they're seen as the equivalent of a BMW and not an Alfa Romeo."
Hmmm, well do a google search on "apple class action lawsuits" and see how many results you get involving hardware problems. With Dell you just get sleazy business dealing lawsuits.
As for the support - your milleage may vary. As a small business customer using the mid level Dell service I get someone showing up at my office within 4 hours of the call. I get nice onsite hardware installation if I need it (as in laptops) or can just have the part dropped off if we want to do the install ourselves. I hear their consumer level support sucks however.
Now Apple wants me to bring my computer into their store for diagnosis because they don't trust our own evaluations. They don't do onsite as far as I can tell (we buy Apple Care on all our Macs). Turnaround is MUCH slower for repairs.
For a standard business computer I sure don't need a BMW, I need something fairly reliable that has good support and sells at a low cost.
The point is exactly what the EU is finding out - the public doesn't give a flying fuck about where or how media player is setup in Windows or IE or any of it. They want to be able to click on a file and have it be displayed. Just as much as a Mac user wants to do the same.
They don't care or understand about DLLs or integration or any of that.
My point is that no end user of either Apple or Microsoft's operating system wants to have functionality removed.
The fact of the matter is that maybe if Real had a product that offered something over Windows Media Player people would use it. Lots of people I know use other media players (such as Core Media Player, Media player classic) instead of Windows Media Player.
From the programmers perspective no one is FORCING you to call IE or WMP to parse an HTML page or to playback a video. You can roll your own code for this - and many companies do. But you can hardly blame a company for calling IE to display HTML within their app, it saves a lot of development time.
As far as I'm concerned the ability to parse data types should be an OS level component. I don't think Windows does it properly at all, I would rather see something like the Amiga's plug in data types. Add the plugin for a particular type and any appropriate application can take advantage of it. Don't like the way the default OS data type plug in works, swap it out.
You raise a good point about the iPod. Are you going to argue that Apple doesn't lock other vendors out? Let's see I seem to recall a bit of a spat between our friends at Real and Apple over playback of music from Real's music store on the iPod. You want to talk integration - good fucking luck playing back any other purchaseable online music on your iPod. If there is a hack to do it Apple will update iTunes and lock out the other vendor again. If I bought an iPod, I pretty much have to use iTunes and the iTunes music store if I want commercial downloadable music. So it's OK for Apple to lock out people like Real from their product but it's not ok for MS to lockout Real from theirs (which incidentally it doesn't do, as you can install Real on Windows, but you can't play Real on your iPod)?
It's all fine to call MS the evil empire, but understand that other companies use cut throat business tactics as well.
You sir can have your goat back.
Also you get to find out that Mace Windu really is in fact one bad muthafucka of a Jedi inspite of almost universally sucking in the movies.
It also reveals that Kit Fisto is the Jedi version of Aquaman and that Squidheads and Mon Calamari are mortal enemies. I think Black Manta might be a Sith lord too. I wasn't too clear on that.
I know a few people who have the same problem with the text scroll - get as far as:
"War! The Republic is crumbling under attacks by the ruthless Sith Lord, Count Dooku"
And then I burst out laughing as soon as I read the name "Dooku". Some words are just intrinsicly amusing. About the only thing funnier is when you preface it with "ruthless Sith Lord, Count".
Well they were a little longer than that. The whole series can be run "movie style" without interruptions. Total run time is an hour and nine minutes for the first series. The second series episodes are longer and offer more dialogue rather than just lots of shooting and explosions.
Video, audio, text, rich text, markup etc. All these things are data types. It makes sense to have a consistent way to implement these data types on the OS level. If a developer can call the OS api for video playback or to read a text stream for that matter, or to display html, it means they get a tremendous time savings in development. I expect my OS to be able to handle common data types out of the box.
On the Amiga, data types were handled as plug-ins. If you needed the capability to open a jpeg you added the data type. With the data type added to the system applications could automagically access the data. For example, now your picture viewer could view jpegs since the OS provided the decoding layer. This was an extremely nice way to providing access to data types without requiring that you use any bundled applications.
I agree. And of course this should be done with Apple as well. I think Apple needs to remove Safari, Quicktime, and mail at the very least. As well as stop bundling iLife with new computers. Apple is destroying the market for Mac developers by including so much software with it's machines. iTunes, Garageband, iMovie, Appleworks should never be included with a computer at no extra cost.
I can hardly believe developers still make Mac software. I mean why would you buy a game for a Mac when Apple just gives away Nanosaur with your new computer?
An OS should be an OS. That's it. Nothing else. Certainly not web browsers, word processors or media players. This bundling has to stop before all development innovation is eradicated.
"Some people simply won't like WoW because the particular style to it isn't to their liking"
I for one would like a slider on the character creation thing so I could adjust the size of my elves freaking huge ears.
My friend named his elf Dawnkey as a reflection on the state of elf ears in WoW.
"People weren't big on emulators for XBox"
Really? Well someone should let the guys at Xport know they are wasting their time. Sure you can play on the PC, but the PC doesn't have consistent controller support across emulators and many emulators feature interfaces that aren't easy to use when displayed on a TV screen. Xbox emulation is much more useful for classic multiplayer sitting in the living room console playing.
"There is not great way to do emulation-on-the-go right now"
Gee, besides the GP32, you have solid emulation on the Palm and PocketPC devices. The Tapwave Zodiac has a great form factor for classic gaming.
Another great option for mobile emulation is to get a Super Card for the Gameboy Advance, SP or DS. It uses standard compact flash cards and plays GB, NES, PC Engine and Game Gear/Sega Master System games.
The PSP has the potential to become the greatest mobile emulation platform but we are still a long way from that point it seems.
Yeah the older ones (like my 400mhz Xscale) had a bit of a hard time with speed on the GBA games. The big problem I have with SNES is the buttons - I haven't seen a PPC with a good layout for any with more buttons than a Genesis.
The one user who hated it was the one user. The fact that he questions all based on one user is another issue. The fact is that if you like one OS or another is a subjective position. And yes, most Mac fanboys can't see that their love of the OS is subjective, as noted by the responses of "you just don't get it" when anyone comments that they prefer Linux or Windows or whatever.
I've hated the cult of Mac as long as I've used one, the smug attitude that any one who uses a computer other than a Mac is an idiot drives me nuts.
I think the point was that what one user likes in an OS another may hate. It's a subjective experience.