Yep. The correct answer to the question (aside from the "install Windows on the Mac" answers above, which might be the best option) is "just buy whichever laptop has the screen size you want at the lowest price".
Odds are none of them will be any good with the next version of Windows anyway (driver issues, almost certainly) so no reason to worry about future OS requirements/capabilities, even. Cheapest damn thing on the (virtual) shelf will do just fine.
It's possible for a restriction on one type of liberty to help preserve another. It may even be necessary. Which is favored is a matter of preference and priorities, not some dictate from an absolute and ultimate (and fictional) ideal of "Liberty".
Jesus, this concept isn't complicated. Or new. I can't believe we're having such a large discussion about it.
Oh wait, it's Slashdot and this relates to the basics of political philosophy—yes I can.
Hell, the original's 14 (7, renewable for another 7) IIRC, at least in the US.
I'd call 25 the outside of what's remotely reasonable, and even that's completely unreasonable in the case of software unless a condition of such a long copyright term is the entrusting of the complete, compilable source code to some kind of repository to be released in to the PD along with the binary at the end of the 25 years. Otherwise I'd say anything over 15 is too much.
IMO not only should people be able to build on works released in their lifetime, they should be able to do it before they reach old age.
BattleTanx, actually. Not nitpicking, just want to make it a bit easier on anyone who wants to Google it.
We used to play the second one, Global Assault, quite a bit. Great friggin' game. Desperately needs a current-gen sequel. Not sure who owns the rights since the 3DO bankruptcy.
#&^$#@ you Republicans. Thieves, liars, and destroyers, all of you.
To be fair, most of them, including most of them in office (trust me, if you'd met many state-level elected Republicans you'd agree) are just idiots. Dangerous idiots, yes, guilty perhaps of causing large amounts of harm through the recklessness of their own incuriosity, but still... just idiots.
Black Ops has bots in splitscreen multiplayer, not just the AI in co-op. It also has everything unlocked for all players from the beginning in local play. It's also better balanced in general. That's why I said it was the only one of the last three with decent local multiplayer.
If your argument is true, then movies cannot be art either.
Which is fine, if that's the argument you actually want to make. If not I suggest you go back to the drawing board.
Games involve gameplay, anything else is just a movie. And I have not ever seen a game where everything, *together*, combined into something that reflected the human spirit.
You're not looking very hard, then. Many games express messages, themes, or emotions, if not directly through interaction with the player then more effectively due to that interaction.
I once had the opportunity to witness the sales of some software bundled with a freshman chemistry textbook. This chemistry visualization and modeling software was needed for class assignments. It was packaged and sold separately from the textbook so other students could use it too. The textbook included a coupon to get the software at a highly discounted price. About US$10 IIRC, US$30 if not bundled. The software contained no DRM the first quarter it was available. Sales of the software was a small fraction (5% ish - measured with redeemed coupons) of book sales. The publisher then added DRM for the next quarter, sales were close to (80% ish) the book sales, despite the fact that the DRM was easily defeated. The DRM was a well-known off-the-shelf solution with abundant removal tools. Subsequent quarters showed similar sales so the increase was not due to removal tools not being available on day 1. IIRC correctly such tools were available within a week - well in time for assignments that used the software.
Some observations:
1.There's a bit of selection bias. Students != the population at large. 2. I'm guessing most of the piracy was one student (or a few students) buying it and copying it for others; odds are there was never a torrent of it, and the with-DRM version never caught the attention of anyone with the knowledge/inclination to crack it. Well-known and long-cracked or not, the students still had to figure out what it was, find the tools, and learn how to use them--not worth $10, unless you sold pirated copies for $5 to your classmates or something. Big-name software gets cracked, period, and usually very quickly, often resulting in a better product than the with-DRM paid-for software. 3. Even if there was a cracked copy online, not everyone knows about torrents, let alone more obscure piracy channels. It's not like everyone in the class got together and talked about how to pirate their software before class. More students would figure out they could simply copy it than would track down online pirated copies or cracks. Most students probably spend minutes, at most, finding and buying (or trying to copy) stuff like this. A new video game? That they might think about buying one week, maybe talk to a friend about it a month later, that friend got a pirated copy from a guy down the hall who 'torrents THE ENTIRE INTERNET each week, and it spreads like that. For class-related software, there's a point at which they must have it and cannot wait.
In summary: interesting, but not broadly relevant IMO.
Actually, to expand on the selection bias thing, we're talking about textbook publishers; if I knew I could get away with it, I'd steal actual things from them. Like money. And I'd feel like I'd done the world a service. Of course the students gave them the finger when they could, even if they wouldn't normally (not saying that they wouldn't, just saying righteous vengeance may have been a factor)
Home theater PC hardware is perfectly capable of this too: HDTV + USB hub + gamepads. So why don't more PC games have an HTPC mode, apart from emulators of classic arcade games? Is the lack of HTPC games solely due to the lack of HTPCs and vice versa?
Certainly it's capable of it--I think the market's so small, though, that no-one cares to implement it. The only PC FPS games I can think of with splitscreen support are the Serious Sam games, and if that's not the flavor of FPS you like or if you're not willing to muck around in the game's console and config files (which IIRC was the only way to get it working) then you're left with nothing else. A few older games supported same-keyboard play, including some very good ones like Return Fire (also came out on the original Playstation) and Hunter, Hunted. Those could be made to work with controllers, but we're talking old games and, again, a small selection.
I'd call it a chicken-egg problem. That's a problem for all HTPC-specific software and hardware, actually, as general-purpose PCs under the TV have never really caught on in a big way. Everyone's got a gaming computer under their TV, but it's got a Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo logo on it. Everyone's got a video playing computer under their TV, but it's got a Tivo (or Microsoft, or Sony) logo on it. Hell, TVs these days are computers, but they're purpose-built ones. I'd be shocked if we don't see crap like Angry Birds running under Android on hardware built in to TVs, some time soon. General purpose PCs lost, special-purpose, limited hardware/software won, AFA the living room is concerned. I write that as someone whose sole desktop PC only outputs to a TV, and who's thinking about getting the wires, splitters, and hubs to make it connect to a TV in another room, too; I'm the exception, and very little software (certainly little commercial software) targets my market, so I'm always struggling to find solutions for little problems that are not well-solved for my situation. I'd love to have some non-emulated local multiplayer games for my PC, but I'm not expecting to ever see any released.
But there are a lot of other Slashdot users who claim in comments that the sort of local multiplayer seen in games like Bomberman series and Super Smash Bros. series is overrated, instead preferring that video game developers concentrate on local area network multiplayer. They like having an entire 720p to 1080p monitor for each player rather than one 360p quadrant of a 720p split screen (or, worse, the 240p in one quadrant of a Wii split screen) and being able to conceal their location from opponents who would screen-peek. They claim PC games tend to be so much cheaper than console games that mom can afford to buy two copies. Some who prefer Internet play tell stories of their adult friends either A. not being available for play dates or B. living so far away that the airfare to play a local multiplayer game with them would be cost prohibitive. What if anything do you say to those claims?
I don't have a problem with network support, and there's no reason the two can't co-exist. I'd guess most splitscreen is just two or more "client" threads connecting to a local game server, and I wouldn't be surprised if some non-splitscreen local-and-network multiplayer games are handled that way, too. In fact, I'd love better network support for consoles--it's a pain in the ass to get eight computers and eight monitors in one place for a LAN party, but many people have at least two televisions and a friend who owns one of the same consoles they do. Four-on-four team games using two TVs, or two-on-two with more screen real-estate devoted to each player (and, in either case, no worries about screen watching) would be great.
As for online play, I find it far less fun in general, even when I'm very good at the game, and especially much worse on the console (for some reason--I'm not exactly sure why) than on the PC.
IMO the highest purpose of consoles is local multiplayer. I've got other bits of equipment (handhelds, PC) that do everything else they do far, far better.
Yet it took three releases in the Call of Duty franchise to get a decent local split-screen game out of them (yes, I'm talking about Black Ops--bots[!!!], no bullshit equipment unlocking for local games, better maps for 4-player games, better maps in general, etc.) and I still haven't seen a better splitscreen shooter than Perfect Dark!. All these years later and the best splitscreen FPS is still on the N64 (and the 360, now--it's the one and only thing that kind of makes me wish I still had one)
We get a few good local games like Blur/Mario Kart, NSMBWii/Little Big Planet, but so many are focused on online play, and that doesn't appeal to me. The console is plugged in to the TV so I can play social games, and there aren't nearly enough of them.
Seriously, this part of the handbook explains how it works pretty well. The "working with rc-update" and "changing the runlevel behavior" sections are probably the most important for most users--or rather, for most of the subset of users that would care about this to begin with.
A $100 card will generally play everything currently selling at a very respectable resolution and very high to max detail. The only exceptions are usually very, very poorly ported console games that require 3x the system specs they ought to, and even those will usually look at least as good as they did on the console.
I'd call $130-150 mid-range these days, $85-130 low-end (but still gaming cards, and not at all bad).
I suspect this is largely because the current consoles are so far behind PC hardware right now--they are several years old--and so many games are multi-platform. Even those that aren't often use a multi-platform engine. I'd expect the cheap cards to fall behind again when the next console gen comes out, but in the mean time $100-150 will play everything just fine, and anything over $200 is a waste of money (except maybe for actual multi-screen gaming)
By far my favorite. I finally went back to it after a few years on Ubuntu (god has it gone from being sensible and complete yet sleek to a bloated mess in the last few releases) though I'm going the Sabayon route this time because I frankly don't care about compiling every single package, but I want access to Portage and Gentoo's config tools if I need them. The way init scripts are handled in Gentoo and Gentoo-derived systems is especially great--if I had to pick one part of Gentoo for every other distro to copy, it'd be that.
Holy shit is it ever nice to see an expert say Wikipedia's mathematics articles suck.
I've tried to use it to learn about math topics before, and the information I want always seems to be there, but damned if my eyes don't cross and my brain doesn't shut down to a state of "huhwut?" before I get through the first non-intro paragraph, even for topics for which I'm pretty damn sure I already understand most of the underlying concepts. Following linked terms to try to figure out WTF is going on usually just makes it worse. I wasn't sure whether the articles were very poorly written, or I was just way dumber than I thought. Good to know it might not have entirely be the latter.
Maybe I just don't get it, but the OSX GUI seems like a mess to me. I'd class it as slightly less user-unfriendly and obtuse than most non-Gnome-or-KDE Linux WMs/DEs, but also way less customizable. I can't imagine how a n00b wouldn't be totally lost, trying to use it.
Heh, I'd never read that. Interesting, since I'd wager 90%+ of all IT work is in no way more academic than mechanical arts or skilled trades.
Hell, most programming isn't a ton different from plumbing. Send water (user input) to one place, fetch other water from hot water heater (database) and send it to the sink (screen). Requires about as much creativity. In both cases talented or experienced workers will produce better results than others, and in both cases a big fuckup can result in a mound of shit where you don't want it, but neither is particularly cerebral.
Very, very few people are engineering new water heaters, designing new types of pipes, etc. Most of us are slapping a gui on a database, shuffling information from one spot or type of presentation to another, or configuring equipment that we didn't and couldn't design. Very few of us are much more than information plumbers--even if we could be more--though I know many in the industry probably wouldn't like to acknowledge that fact.
Some way to teach experienced IT workers the difference between what they know and what the school teaches regular undergrads, resulting in the same degree, would be awesome.
2 year degree, work a bit, one to two semesters picking up the difference, and you've got a "four year degree". That'd be awesome. Certainly would have saved me a hell of a lot of time in my second shot at higher education (but replace "2 year degree" with "4/5 of a non-IT degree, abandoned when it became clear it would be worthless and I had a good job offer")
Probably not feasible, I guess, but man would that be great. It'd help with the debt problem, too, since people wouldn't need two years worth of classes (and debt) for maybe a semester's worth of actual learning.
Holds no truth in the US, of course, for the reason you mention: our "leftist" party is so far to the right that it's off in loony land half the time, to say nothing of our (ultra-)"rightist" party.
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Yep. The correct answer to the question (aside from the "install Windows on the Mac" answers above, which might be the best option) is "just buy whichever laptop has the screen size you want at the lowest price".
Odds are none of them will be any good with the next version of Windows anyway (driver issues, almost certainly) so no reason to worry about future OS requirements/capabilities, even. Cheapest damn thing on the (virtual) shelf will do just fine.
It's possible for a restriction on one type of liberty to help preserve another. It may even be necessary. Which is favored is a matter of preference and priorities, not some dictate from an absolute and ultimate (and fictional) ideal of "Liberty".
Jesus, this concept isn't complicated. Or new. I can't believe we're having such a large discussion about it.
Oh wait, it's Slashdot and this relates to the basics of political philosophy—yes I can.
Hell, the original's 14 (7, renewable for another 7) IIRC, at least in the US.
I'd call 25 the outside of what's remotely reasonable, and even that's completely unreasonable in the case of software unless a condition of such a long copyright term is the entrusting of the complete, compilable source code to some kind of repository to be released in to the PD along with the binary at the end of the 25 years. Otherwise I'd say anything over 15 is too much.
IMO not only should people be able to build on works released in their lifetime, they should be able to do it before they reach old age.
BattleTanx, actually. Not nitpicking, just want to make it a bit easier on anyone who wants to Google it.
We used to play the second one, Global Assault, quite a bit. Great friggin' game. Desperately needs a current-gen sequel. Not sure who owns the rights since the 3DO bankruptcy.
Which was the first to have it? I'm having trouble remembering the first time I played a game that told you the direction of incoming fire.
To be fair, most of them, including most of them in office (trust me, if you'd met many state-level elected Republicans you'd agree) are just idiots. Dangerous idiots, yes, guilty perhaps of causing large amounts of harm through the recklessness of their own incuriosity, but still... just idiots.
Black Ops has bots in splitscreen multiplayer, not just the AI in co-op. It also has everything unlocked for all players from the beginning in local play. It's also better balanced in general. That's why I said it was the only one of the last three with decent local multiplayer.
If your argument is true, then movies cannot be art either.
Which is fine, if that's the argument you actually want to make. If not I suggest you go back to the drawing board.
You're not looking very hard, then. Many games express messages, themes, or emotions, if not directly through interaction with the player then more effectively due to that interaction.
Looks very similar to a board game called Tsuro
The Dock is the opposite of a selling point.
Wait, I take that back--it does look awesome on a demo machine, so I guess it helps sales after all.
Some observations:
1.There's a bit of selection bias. Students != the population at large.
2. I'm guessing most of the piracy was one student (or a few students) buying it and copying it for others; odds are there was never a torrent of it, and the with-DRM version never caught the attention of anyone with the knowledge/inclination to crack it. Well-known and long-cracked or not, the students still had to figure out what it was, find the tools, and learn how to use them--not worth $10, unless you sold pirated copies for $5 to your classmates or something. Big-name software gets cracked, period, and usually very quickly, often resulting in a better product than the with-DRM paid-for software.
3. Even if there was a cracked copy online, not everyone knows about torrents, let alone more obscure piracy channels. It's not like everyone in the class got together and talked about how to pirate their software before class. More students would figure out they could simply copy it than would track down online pirated copies or cracks. Most students probably spend minutes, at most, finding and buying (or trying to copy) stuff like this. A new video game? That they might think about buying one week, maybe talk to a friend about it a month later, that friend got a pirated copy from a guy down the hall who 'torrents THE ENTIRE INTERNET each week, and it spreads like that. For class-related software, there's a point at which they must have it and cannot wait.
In summary: interesting, but not broadly relevant IMO.
Actually, to expand on the selection bias thing, we're talking about textbook publishers; if I knew I could get away with it, I'd steal actual things from them. Like money. And I'd feel like I'd done the world a service. Of course the students gave them the finger when they could, even if they wouldn't normally (not saying that they wouldn't, just saying righteous vengeance may have been a factor)
Certainly it's capable of it--I think the market's so small, though, that no-one cares to implement it. The only PC FPS games I can think of with splitscreen support are the Serious Sam games, and if that's not the flavor of FPS you like or if you're not willing to muck around in the game's console and config files (which IIRC was the only way to get it working) then you're left with nothing else. A few older games supported same-keyboard play, including some very good ones like Return Fire (also came out on the original Playstation) and Hunter, Hunted. Those could be made to work with controllers, but we're talking old games and, again, a small selection.
I'd call it a chicken-egg problem. That's a problem for all HTPC-specific software and hardware, actually, as general-purpose PCs under the TV have never really caught on in a big way. Everyone's got a gaming computer under their TV, but it's got a Microsoft or Sony or Nintendo logo on it. Everyone's got a video playing computer under their TV, but it's got a Tivo (or Microsoft, or Sony) logo on it. Hell, TVs these days are computers, but they're purpose-built ones. I'd be shocked if we don't see crap like Angry Birds running under Android on hardware built in to TVs, some time soon. General purpose PCs lost, special-purpose, limited hardware/software won, AFA the living room is concerned. I write that as someone whose sole desktop PC only outputs to a TV, and who's thinking about getting the wires, splitters, and hubs to make it connect to a TV in another room, too; I'm the exception, and very little software (certainly little commercial software) targets my market, so I'm always struggling to find solutions for little problems that are not well-solved for my situation. I'd love to have some non-emulated local multiplayer games for my PC, but I'm not expecting to ever see any released.
I don't have a problem with network support, and there's no reason the two can't co-exist. I'd guess most splitscreen is just two or more "client" threads connecting to a local game server, and I wouldn't be surprised if some non-splitscreen local-and-network multiplayer games are handled that way, too. In fact, I'd love better network support for consoles--it's a pain in the ass to get eight computers and eight monitors in one place for a LAN party, but many people have at least two televisions and a friend who owns one of the same consoles they do. Four-on-four team games using two TVs, or two-on-two with more screen real-estate devoted to each player (and, in either case, no worries about screen watching) would be great.
As for online play, I find it far less fun in general, even when I'm very good at the game, and especially much worse on the console (for some reason--I'm not exactly sure why) than on the PC.
Agreed.
IMO the highest purpose of consoles is local multiplayer. I've got other bits of equipment (handhelds, PC) that do everything else they do far, far better.
Yet it took three releases in the Call of Duty franchise to get a decent local split-screen game out of them (yes, I'm talking about Black Ops--bots[!!!], no bullshit equipment unlocking for local games, better maps for 4-player games, better maps in general, etc.) and I still haven't seen a better splitscreen shooter than Perfect Dark!. All these years later and the best splitscreen FPS is still on the N64 (and the 360, now--it's the one and only thing that kind of makes me wish I still had one)
We get a few good local games like Blur/Mario Kart, NSMBWii/Little Big Planet, but so many are focused on online play, and that doesn't appeal to me. The console is plugged in to the TV so I can play social games, and there aren't nearly enough of them.
Well, you could look at the documentation :)
Seriously, this part of the handbook explains how it works pretty well. The "working with rc-update" and "changing the runlevel behavior" sections are probably the most important for most users--or rather, for most of the subset of users that would care about this to begin with.
A $100 card will generally play everything currently selling at a very respectable resolution and very high to max detail. The only exceptions are usually very, very poorly ported console games that require 3x the system specs they ought to, and even those will usually look at least as good as they did on the console.
I'd call $130-150 mid-range these days, $85-130 low-end (but still gaming cards, and not at all bad).
I suspect this is largely because the current consoles are so far behind PC hardware right now--they are several years old--and so many games are multi-platform. Even those that aren't often use a multi-platform engine. I'd expect the cheap cards to fall behind again when the next console gen comes out, but in the mean time $100-150 will play everything just fine, and anything over $200 is a waste of money (except maybe for actual multi-screen gaming)
By far my favorite. I finally went back to it after a few years on Ubuntu (god has it gone from being sensible and complete yet sleek to a bloated mess in the last few releases) though I'm going the Sabayon route this time because I frankly don't care about compiling every single package, but I want access to Portage and Gentoo's config tools if I need them. The way init scripts are handled in Gentoo and Gentoo-derived systems is especially great--if I had to pick one part of Gentoo for every other distro to copy, it'd be that.
Bingo.
Movies 1-3: supernatural mumbo-jumbo
Movie 4: naturalistic if far-fetched explanation (aliens)
It's not that it's less believable from the first three, it's that the others had set up the assumption that Indiana Jones = the supernatural
Holy shit is it ever nice to see an expert say Wikipedia's mathematics articles suck.
I've tried to use it to learn about math topics before, and the information I want always seems to be there, but damned if my eyes don't cross and my brain doesn't shut down to a state of "huhwut?" before I get through the first non-intro paragraph, even for topics for which I'm pretty damn sure I already understand most of the underlying concepts. Following linked terms to try to figure out WTF is going on usually just makes it worse. I wasn't sure whether the articles were very poorly written, or I was just way dumber than I thought. Good to know it might not have entirely be the latter.
Stagnant and crappy.
Maybe I just don't get it, but the OSX GUI seems like a mess to me. I'd class it as slightly less user-unfriendly and obtuse than most non-Gnome-or-KDE Linux WMs/DEs, but also way less customizable. I can't imagine how a n00b wouldn't be totally lost, trying to use it.
Heh, I'd never read that. Interesting, since I'd wager 90%+ of all IT work is in no way more academic than mechanical arts or skilled trades.
Hell, most programming isn't a ton different from plumbing. Send water (user input) to one place, fetch other water from hot water heater (database) and send it to the sink (screen). Requires about as much creativity. In both cases talented or experienced workers will produce better results than others, and in both cases a big fuckup can result in a mound of shit where you don't want it, but neither is particularly cerebral.
Very, very few people are engineering new water heaters, designing new types of pipes, etc. Most of us are slapping a gui on a database, shuffling information from one spot or type of presentation to another, or configuring equipment that we didn't and couldn't design. Very few of us are much more than information plumbers--even if we could be more--though I know many in the industry probably wouldn't like to acknowledge that fact.
Some way to teach experienced IT workers the difference between what they know and what the school teaches regular undergrads, resulting in the same degree, would be awesome.
2 year degree, work a bit, one to two semesters picking up the difference, and you've got a "four year degree". That'd be awesome. Certainly would have saved me a hell of a lot of time in my second shot at higher education (but replace "2 year degree" with "4/5 of a non-IT degree, abandoned when it became clear it would be worthless and I had a good job offer")
Probably not feasible, I guess, but man would that be great. It'd help with the debt problem, too, since people wouldn't need two years worth of classes (and debt) for maybe a semester's worth of actual learning.
Very true. There are occasional gems on the radio, but off of it there's so much good stuff coming out that it's hard to keep up.
I'm pretty sure the only reason you can comment in CSS is to say thing's like: /* The following section is to make IE unfuck itself. */
Colorado, the Dakotas, and Kansas have the weird service-stopping-at-their-borders thing going on in the wireless.
Holds no truth in the US, of course, for the reason you mention: our "leftist" party is so far to the right that it's off in loony land half the time, to say nothing of our (ultra-)"rightist" party.