The Xbench scores aren't a good indicator. From MacRumors... "While Xbench is a Universal Binary, it is not entirely multiprocessor aware. As a result, it does not generally test both cores of the Dual Core Intel processor."
It's not a new office suite, it's an application called Pages that will be bundled in with Keynote to make a new suite of applications called iWork (to complement iLife). There's no word of a spreadsheet application for example.
If the rumour is true (and Think Secret have been very accurate over the past couple of years) then bundling all this software along with the $500 Mac is a great move for them. 1.25Ghz G4 might not sound like much, but it's faster than the last generation iMac I have, and it's already fast enough for the majority of computer users (those who surf, do email, write some letters and take pictures from their digital cameras). Combined with all the software these users are likely to need, it's a great price.
I didn't say the software on the Pocket PC was developed by Apple. I said the software on the Pocket PC was licensed from the same people Apple originally licensed the software for the Newton from. When it was crap and didn't work.
That kind of rubbish handwriting recognition was only true on the early Newtons, when Apple licensed the technology from someone else. In the end, they dumped it and wrote their own, giving much better results in the later models.
Microsoft now license the original software for us on the Pocket PC.
I don't have anybody else in my house that's going to install spyware accidentally or otherwise.
I don't see much use in tabbed browsing on an OS that already has a taskbar. They're the only tabs I need.
Search bar, I have the Google toolbar. Popup blocking, equally, I have the Google toolbar, plus IE on XP SP2 has a popup blocker too. I don't use many bookmarks, have a seperate RSS reader I like and can never get the font sizes in Firefox to look like I want. Extensions, skins, and all that jazz, couldn't care less.
I use Camino/Firefox on my Mac's because Mac IE is terrible and I find Safari a bit flaky sometimes. Although it is improved on Tiger.
I've not been a victim of a single IE security hole (I keep up to date and I'm not a stupid user) and find that it does everything I want a browser to do. I see very little in Firefox that makes me want to switch. So I can see why MS aren't worried. I'm still waiting for that killer Firefox feature.
On my iMac however, it's Firefox or Camino all the way.
The TomTom Go has a five hour battery life and is easily usable on foot. It's about the size of a Blackberry and fits in the hand without any problems.
Simple, if you get it now then when 30th Sep (or whatever) comes, you'll just be able to pay for the unlock code and you'll be good to go. No waiting.
It's just a way for them to spread their downloads so that half a million people don't all try and download it at the same time when the game is released.
And they're not putting their full bandwidth behind the preload either, opting to give a smaller number of people a faster connection rather than a large number of people a slower connection.
This game is getting a bad rap because people are expecting no story, no plot and no variation just because that's what id have given them in the past.
With Doom 3, that's not the case.
The first thing that strikes you about the game is how cohesive everything is. The attention to detail is fantastic, from the UAC propoganda films, to the video discs, emails and audio logs, there's been a whole wealth of production value been heaped on incidentals, making the station feel more alive and really making you feel more like you're actually on Mars.
There are a number of different enemies, each with their unique abilities. The enemy AI is not non-existent, the zombie soliders hide behind walls and crates, ducking down to get a better shot. They chase you around corners before barrel rolling and ducking down to get you. They bunch themselves right up against pillars so you can't see them, they path-find through doors and other rooms to get you, I even saw one soldier try and climb through the railing that seperated him and me. Combined with the fact that things happen on all 4 sides since imps and spiders climb out of the ceiling and walls and scuttle down them with perfect animation and timing... means this is not a dumb or easy game.
Massive machinery, using grappling hooks to lift toxic barrels, using the relative safety of the roving sentry guns to aid your progress, listening to the radio chatter from your dying soldiers, following the scientist with the electric lamp as he leads you through the dark corridors (his shadow stretching up every wall with perfect accuracy), being scared by your own shadow, seeing enemies bend doors and rip them off their hinges before lunging at you, or crashing through glass windows... I could go on. There are plenty of scripted sequences, small and large indoor areas, you get out onto the surface of Mars, some enemies require you to just get in there and shoot, others require a bit more care. And slowly you descend into Hell, where the real fun begins.
Don't just dismiss Doom 3 as a simple blaster, it's an experience to be enjoyed and repeated. People's expectations are clouding their judgements, when id should be congratulated for doing exactly what they said they would do, create a scary, chilling re-imagining of the original Doom.
I forward all my email from my existing account (which I've been using for 5 years and gets a ton of spam) to my gmail account and spam always slips through. I've been using gmail since shortly after it was announced and I have seen it improve, but I'm still getting the same format spam slip through every day.
I pick up the same mail in Mac OS X Mail, and the combination of POPfile and the Mail spam filter gets it all.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Google has run out of docid's, hitting the 32-bit integer limit.
The best evidence is doing a search which returns results which say "Supplemental Result" next to them. That'll be coming from a second document store I'd guess.
I'm sure I've seen Google do this. I've occasionally seen that links I click on in Google search results get forwarded through another Google URL which is no doubt tracking what I'm clicking on.
Like a lot of Google features they're testing though, it's very much random and it's been a month since I've seen it.
That doesn't solve the problem. You'd always get somebody who said they'd been left out. Opera would complain that only IE and Mozilla were in there for example.
You'd also get the Linux effect. Install most distributions these days and the menus are littered with duplicate programs. Two FTP programs, two browsers, three MP3 players. It's a nightmare for the consumer. They just want one, not a whole bunch. Most consumers (and I'm saying "most" here, not necessarily the people reading this) want the OS provider to make that choice for them. They don't know the differences between browsers, they just want something to show webpages. Tabs, type ahead find etc etc don't make much difference to them.
The basic fact is that for the majority of users, IE and Windows Media Player work just fine. I never have any issues with either, and I've happily used IE since version 4, when I switched over from Netscape. Why? It was a better browser. Not because it was included with the OS. YMMV, but for me, Netscape sucked from the moment I started using IE4.
If these products were really terrible, I, and everybody else out there would be actively looking for a replacement. But right now, nothing is offering me a better alternative. Quicktime doesn't support as many formats and has a bad UI, Real likes sticking programs in my registry that launch on startup (a big evil NO to that) and Windows Media Player lets me give it a standard looking UI (I hate skins) and does the job I want it to do. Same with IE. It browses web pages. It does it quickly. It doesn't crash. Mozilla isn't giving me any reason to switch, so I don't. Tabs are unnecessary on Windows (it's just like another taskbar after all) and there's no single other feature that is a compelling reason to give up IE. Unlike on the Mac, where I was happy to start using Camino instead of IE (before Safari came out...).
Re:Apple + PPC970 = True!
on
Jaguar is Over
·
· Score: 1
Previous models were $1499, $1999, $2699 and $3799.
Considering these new ones are MUCH faster than pretty much anything out there (including the $4000 Dell machine they tested it against) these seem like pretty fair prices to me.
G5 is a marketing name. Apple gave the processors that name, not Motorola or IBM (who make G3's). To Moto, it's a 7450, 7455 and other odd numbers. G5 makes sense to consumers, because they see it as one more than G4. Call it a 970 and you'll have to call it a 970-B, 980 etc over the next year as IBM update the chip.
These were also taken from Apple's online store and they do match their usual font, colour etc.
Firewire 400 is so you can plug your 400 devices into that and your 800 ones into the other one. Otherwise an 800 firewire hub has all it's devices slowed down to 400 as soon as you put a 400 device into it. This is exactly the same as the current models.
Should be interesting to see how the Mac platform manages to incorporate intensive 3D graphics...
Probably about the same way as it did a couple of years ago when the first public test of Quake III Arena was released for it (a week before the PC version).
That isn't right. A lot of the albums are $9.99 each (even when they have more than 10 songs), and that's a pretty hard price to beat. Amazon averages out a few bucks more + tax + shipping.
But yes, the record companies, not having their distribution costs do stand to make a pretty penny.
I've seen the cast on many UK TV shows, heard them each on different radio shows and they always do the voices. Dan C was on Danny Baker's radio show many years ago and went through the collection, and Harry Shearer was on something a couple of years ago doing the same. There was also some show where they had pretty much them all on there.
Watching Dan doing Homer's voice is really weird, since you can hear Homer's voice, but you're not actually watching somebody bright yellow say the words.:)
Well it's an alpha, it's unoptimised, it's a leak... do you want me to go on?
And of course there's the fact that it looks better than every single other game either out on the marketplace or coming out in the next 12 months on any platform (that screenshots have been released of anyway). Comparing it to Warcraft 3 seems a bit dumb as well, since the two are very different games with very different engines.
I'm surprised that Slashdot are posting links to places with information about this, reporting it is one thing, pointing people to places they can probably get it is another.
Saying that though, I did get it yesterday. 30fps easy when walking around, drops to 1 or 2 when in any kind of firefight. But even though it's unoptimised, uncomplete and even contains a bug that stopped id from showing it at full quality during E3 - it's fabulous. I look forward to plonking down my £35 as soon as it's available next year for real.
Slashdot Mirror
The Xbench scores aren't a good indicator. From MacRumors... "While Xbench is a Universal Binary, it is not entirely multiprocessor aware. As a result, it does not generally test both cores of the Dual Core Intel processor."
That's why it scored so low in the CPU tests.
Still doesn't meet the requirements...
http://blog.blogbear.com/blog/single/842
It's not a new office suite, it's an application called Pages that will be bundled in with Keynote to make a new suite of applications called iWork (to complement iLife). There's no word of a spreadsheet application for example.
If the rumour is true (and Think Secret have been very accurate over the past couple of years) then bundling all this software along with the $500 Mac is a great move for them. 1.25Ghz G4 might not sound like much, but it's faster than the last generation iMac I have, and it's already fast enough for the majority of computer users (those who surf, do email, write some letters and take pictures from their digital cameras). Combined with all the software these users are likely to need, it's a great price.
I didn't say the software on the Pocket PC was developed by Apple. I said the software on the Pocket PC was licensed from the same people Apple originally licensed the software for the Newton from. When it was crap and didn't work.
That kind of rubbish handwriting recognition was only true on the early Newtons, when Apple licensed the technology from someone else. In the end, they dumped it and wrote their own, giving much better results in the later models.
Microsoft now license the original software for us on the Pocket PC.
I don't have anybody else in my house that's going to install spyware accidentally or otherwise.
I don't see much use in tabbed browsing on an OS that already has a taskbar. They're the only tabs I need.
Search bar, I have the Google toolbar. Popup blocking, equally, I have the Google toolbar, plus IE on XP SP2 has a popup blocker too. I don't use many bookmarks, have a seperate RSS reader I like and can never get the font sizes in Firefox to look like I want. Extensions, skins, and all that jazz, couldn't care less.
I use Camino/Firefox on my Mac's because Mac IE is terrible and I find Safari a bit flaky sometimes. Although it is improved on Tiger.
I've not been a victim of a single IE security hole (I keep up to date and I'm not a stupid user) and find that it does everything I want a browser to do. I see very little in Firefox that makes me want to switch. So I can see why MS aren't worried. I'm still waiting for that killer Firefox feature.
On my iMac however, it's Firefox or Camino all the way.
The TomTom Go has a five hour battery life and is easily usable on foot. It's about the size of a Blackberry and fits in the hand without any problems.
Simple, if you get it now then when 30th Sep (or whatever) comes, you'll just be able to pay for the unlock code and you'll be good to go. No waiting.
It's just a way for them to spread their downloads so that half a million people don't all try and download it at the same time when the game is released.
And they're not putting their full bandwidth behind the preload either, opting to give a smaller number of people a faster connection rather than a large number of people a slower connection.
This game is getting a bad rap because people are expecting no story, no plot and no variation just because that's what id have given them in the past.
With Doom 3, that's not the case.
The first thing that strikes you about the game is how cohesive everything is. The attention to detail is fantastic, from the UAC propoganda films, to the video discs, emails and audio logs, there's been a whole wealth of production value been heaped on incidentals, making the station feel more alive and really making you feel more like you're actually on Mars.
There are a number of different enemies, each with their unique abilities. The enemy AI is not non-existent, the zombie soliders hide behind walls and crates, ducking down to get a better shot. They chase you around corners before barrel rolling and ducking down to get you. They bunch themselves right up against pillars so you can't see them, they path-find through doors and other rooms to get you, I even saw one soldier try and climb through the railing that seperated him and me. Combined with the fact that things happen on all 4 sides since imps and spiders climb out of the ceiling and walls and scuttle down them with perfect animation and timing... means this is not a dumb or easy game.
Massive machinery, using grappling hooks to lift toxic barrels, using the relative safety of the roving sentry guns to aid your progress, listening to the radio chatter from your dying soldiers, following the scientist with the electric lamp as he leads you through the dark corridors (his shadow stretching up every wall with perfect accuracy), being scared by your own shadow, seeing enemies bend doors and rip them off their hinges before lunging at you, or crashing through glass windows... I could go on. There are plenty of scripted sequences, small and large indoor areas, you get out onto the surface of Mars, some enemies require you to just get in there and shoot, others require a bit more care. And slowly you descend into Hell, where the real fun begins.
Don't just dismiss Doom 3 as a simple blaster, it's an experience to be enjoyed and repeated. People's expectations are clouding their judgements, when id should be congratulated for doing exactly what they said they would do, create a scary, chilling re-imagining of the original Doom.
In a word, it's terrible.
I forward all my email from my existing account (which I've been using for 5 years and gets a ton of spam) to my gmail account and spam always slips through. I've been using gmail since shortly after it was announced and I have seen it improve, but I'm still getting the same format spam slip through every day.
I pick up the same mail in Mac OS X Mail, and the combination of POPfile and the Mail spam filter gets it all.
There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Google has run out of docid's, hitting the 32-bit integer limit.
The best evidence is doing a search which returns results which say "Supplemental Result" next to them. That'll be coming from a second document store I'd guess.
I'm sure I've seen Google do this. I've occasionally seen that links I click on in Google search results get forwarded through another Google URL which is no doubt tracking what I'm clicking on.
Like a lot of Google features they're testing though, it's very much random and it's been a month since I've seen it.
That doesn't solve the problem. You'd always get somebody who said they'd been left out. Opera would complain that only IE and Mozilla were in there for example.
You'd also get the Linux effect. Install most distributions these days and the menus are littered with duplicate programs. Two FTP programs, two browsers, three MP3 players. It's a nightmare for the consumer. They just want one, not a whole bunch. Most consumers (and I'm saying "most" here, not necessarily the people reading this) want the OS provider to make that choice for them. They don't know the differences between browsers, they just want something to show webpages. Tabs, type ahead find etc etc don't make much difference to them.
The basic fact is that for the majority of users, IE and Windows Media Player work just fine. I never have any issues with either, and I've happily used IE since version 4, when I switched over from Netscape. Why? It was a better browser. Not because it was included with the OS. YMMV, but for me, Netscape sucked from the moment I started using IE4.
If these products were really terrible, I, and everybody else out there would be actively looking for a replacement. But right now, nothing is offering me a better alternative. Quicktime doesn't support as many formats and has a bad UI, Real likes sticking programs in my registry that launch on startup (a big evil NO to that) and Windows Media Player lets me give it a standard looking UI (I hate skins) and does the job I want it to do. Same with IE. It browses web pages. It does it quickly. It doesn't crash. Mozilla isn't giving me any reason to switch, so I don't. Tabs are unnecessary on Windows (it's just like another taskbar after all) and there's no single other feature that is a compelling reason to give up IE. Unlike on the Mac, where I was happy to start using Camino instead of IE (before Safari came out...).
Previous models were $1499, $1999, $2699 and $3799.
Considering these new ones are MUCH faster than pretty much anything out there (including the $4000 Dell machine they tested it against) these seem like pretty fair prices to me.
You clearly have no idea.
G5 is a marketing name. Apple gave the processors that name, not Motorola or IBM (who make G3's). To Moto, it's a 7450, 7455 and other odd numbers. G5 makes sense to consumers, because they see it as one more than G4. Call it a 970 and you'll have to call it a 970-B, 980 etc over the next year as IBM update the chip.
These were also taken from Apple's online store and they do match their usual font, colour etc.
Firewire 400 is so you can plug your 400 devices into that and your 800 ones into the other one. Otherwise an 800 firewire hub has all it's devices slowed down to 400 as soon as you put a 400 device into it. This is exactly the same as the current models.
You'll see them on Monday.
Should be interesting to see how the Mac platform manages to incorporate intensive 3D graphics...
Probably about the same way as it did a couple of years ago when the first public test of Quake III Arena was released for it (a week before the PC version).
Agree with everything you've said apart from looprumors - reliable and macwhispers - reliable.
Neither has shown themselves to be on top of the ball yet, just lots of wild stabs in the dark from every direction, especially loop.
That isn't right. A lot of the albums are $9.99 each (even when they have more than 10 songs), and that's a pretty hard price to beat. Amazon averages out a few bucks more + tax + shipping.
But yes, the record companies, not having their distribution costs do stand to make a pretty penny.
That was all sorted out years ago. Cost Apple $35 million in the end.
How do you think they managed to release iTunes and the iPod, both music related products.
"IDE doesn't cut it"
Tell that to Google.
I've seen the cast on many UK TV shows, heard them each on different radio shows and they always do the voices. Dan C was on Danny Baker's radio show many years ago and went through the collection, and Harry Shearer was on something a couple of years ago doing the same. There was also some show where they had pretty much them all on there.
:)
Watching Dan doing Homer's voice is really weird, since you can hear Homer's voice, but you're not actually watching somebody bright yellow say the words.
"Why is this so ridiculously hardware intensive?"
Well it's an alpha, it's unoptimised, it's a leak... do you want me to go on?
And of course there's the fact that it looks better than every single other game either out on the marketplace or coming out in the next 12 months on any platform (that screenshots have been released of anyway). Comparing it to Warcraft 3 seems a bit dumb as well, since the two are very different games with very different engines.
I'm surprised that Slashdot are posting links to places with information about this, reporting it is one thing, pointing people to places they can probably get it is another.
Saying that though, I did get it yesterday. 30fps easy when walking around, drops to 1 or 2 when in any kind of firefight. But even though it's unoptimised, uncomplete and even contains a bug that stopped id from showing it at full quality during E3 - it's fabulous. I look forward to plonking down my £35 as soon as it's available next year for real.
Inflatable space station?
:)
Are we sure this is real?