The hardware just isn't there. You throw on a game with texture and lighting on a mac mini with that Intel GMA 950 and I'll show you a mac mini that is doing t&l in software. It absolutely dies. Same demo/game, crap graphics chip.
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/: "Microsoft* DirectX* 9 Vertex Shader 3.0 and Transform and Lighting supported in software through highly optimized Processor Specific Geometry Pipeline (PSGP)"
Wow, through software. What's the other option, it just exits? Hardware > Software > Just quits
I'm sorry for the flame. Demos go from 30fps to 4fps. It's just really, really not even worth discussing T&L on these mac minis or Macbooks (the Macbook Pro has real vram and a "real" gpu).
Oblivion is recklessly aggressive with how much game asset it shoves in front of your face. You see a tree 5 miles away, you can run, run, run to said tree. There's no fluff art, art that you can't get to. Oblivion is certainly the exception and not the benchmark (imho).
I own a Gentoo server, a mac laptop and a desktop PC. I have worked with each for many years. I can describe in detail the advantages and disadvantages of each OS platform and hardware platform, even though I'm not an expert.
OSX is based on Unix and many smart developers use it. Windows games run on Windows, yes. That's why I have both. But (imho) OSX is better designed because Apple makes the hardware and they made people change their apps (pain). The pain has been done for redesign (Classic, Rosetta), Microsoft hasn't done that so they lose something.
Sounds great on paper. OSX is still running OpenGL 1.5 with a crapload of extensions. OSX still double-buffers full-screen windows by default (see 4fps gains in WoW window mode vs fullscreen). My massive and huge hope is that Apple is trying to clean up the final frontier, gaming.
WoW is cleanly coded. Doom3 is too. Both run great on Vista. Both are cross platform. Both come from amazing developers. But still, both run much slower on the same video card. And it's not OSX's eye candy, per se. It's OSX's intentional lag-behind driver versions. If Apple had pull with Nvidia and ATI then they could demand top-notch features and top-notch performance. But they can't. Macs are only good for designers and artists and they don't have market share (I hate this reputation).
OSX relies on OpenGL / CoreImage (afaik) for a major part of the UI. Whereas, XP, all that DirectX stuff is an after-thought. Hopefully Vista and 3D get in bed with each other and complexity overwhelms Microsoft. Then, maybe Apple can get some market share % and demand ATI write amazing drivers for them. Then maybe Apple could demand the current version of Forceware and OpenGL 2.0. And then maybe we'd see equal playing fields.
The OpenGL 2.0 bits aren't that important, 99% of the 1.5 extensions are there. But it's still a testament to the problem, imho.
Btw, I'm no expert. Please respond if have any thoughts on this so I can learn (and steal your brain).
Ok, so let's say instead of getting in trouble over a blog, he was leading an after school class.
Let's say that he didn't have permission to schedule time in the gym but he did it anyway. He taught a class in the gym named: "How To Stay in School 101" where he would talk to fellow students about how to avoid trouble and flunking out.
However since he didn't reserve the gym, he gets caught and suspended for unauthorized assembly. That's a good example of Irony of Fate?
I blame Alanis Morissette for all the confusion. Nothing in that song "Isn't it Ironic?" is ironic. It's all just unfortunate.
FFXI: +photo realism +if you played any FF series, you know the spells +lots of jobs +end game content (I guess if you have the time) +feeling of being a hardcore MMO player, no easy mode +lots of expansions (I quit after 2nd one) +cross platform +not a lot of lag (usually) +searching for groups is kinda fun but you have to group. play another game while waiting to play FFXI... what. -$1 for a mule (a character to store stuff), $1 for any additional character a month -registry hacks to change the resolution? -consolitis. it's severely suffering from the port-feel -people on ps2 type slow -wait around for a group (hours), you can't solo -you can't jump, you collide with everything -no hints on quests -you can't make money, farmers everywhere. -experience loss (hours of work) when you die -playonline.com is terrible, sony's thing -about a million players maybe? -if you can't get a "raise" (which is life or resurrection) then you have to walk forever -bad for people with jobs
WoW: +getting to end is actually possible with a day job +runs fast, is a real PC game +runs on a Mac +patching is fast to download because of bittorrent but patching is not perfect +lots of players +no level loss, not ever. you just lose money because you have to repair your equipment (durability loss) when you die. not a huge deal. +economy is really solid, easy to make money +resting bonuses while you are not playing, so you can play only on the weekends, you get double experience while "rested" +guilds are better than linkshells although Ctrl+L was a cool shortcut in FFXI, I dunno if you could map a key in WoW like that +WoW is easier (so much easier) on my relationship with my chica. +weather effects are awesome +you can jump (and take falling damage), this is nice rather than being glued to the ground. ++huge number of mods and addon tools written by community. this is a major plus. stuff like, recast fishing pole or "show me the top healer in my group". too many great mods to list. -end game needs some work but I never hit 75 in FFXI. you had to be in JP to have that kind of headstart on the Americans when I quit FFXI. Huge, huge timesink -some say it looks cartoony. I agree but think it looks great with FSAA and all that turned up (with beasty PC) -you will get hated by the FFXI community for selling out or playing "easy mode" -lag was an issue at one point, server queues were insane. -patching is annoying but I respect their choice for bittorrent. FFXI probably installs from scratch faster because of patching. -WoW's official forums are a good way to lose your mind if you are trying to have a productive conversation. -farmers are around but being rich isn't respected in-game.
Play what you want. My opinions aren't gospel. FFXI was my first MMO, WoW was my second. I've played Guild Wars only slightly. I care about design and game development. I respect WoW more because of many things that I think they've done right. But I wonder if MMOs will make it if games like WoW die off. Certainly, there are other things to do with your time.
Also I wonder if the hype is dying off with WoW, how long until the expansion comes out? Why release an expansion at all? Would people keep playing without the expansion until 2008? Personally, I would suspend my account if any more delays happens. Carrot on a stick of sorts, don't like being the horse.
Jedi Academy was great. It was effortless to beat it (to me) because it was fun. The "ubering" was fantastic. It was relaxing and fed my huge desire for power-tripping.
"Devolve into WoW forums mode". Eloquent, exactly what's going on in this thread. I hope the outsiders move onto another story, I fear and wonder at how all this jargon looks to them.
Casuals will get there. I refused to give up my life, I'll wait for nerfs, stay behind the curve. It has to remain fun.
I loved the comparisons of other MMOs, good write-ups. WoW official forums is a database of pain and evil administrated by Satan. You would not find such good write-ups there. Thanks to all for commented, enjoyed the reading so far.
I think the issue is, cmd.exe is still 16-bit right? I mean, why the crap doesn't the title bar look the same? Why can't I resize horizontally like in OSX and Gnome/KDE?
It's not a serious priority to MS. They want you to use the MMC for everything. And yet, the MMC can't do handy constructs like "for" or "while". CMD.exe is just this huge exception to the rule in Windows and I have no idea why.
I wonder if there would be some feedback required for your brain to believe it. You move your hand and your hand starts to move and so you believe in your hand movement. It would be interesting to see how this would play out in a game, you would need to provide some sort of calibration or training system I would assume in the early adoption stages.
For example, you calibrate your PDA touch screen for maximum accuracy. "Think left. Ok, now think left but only slightly", meanwhile a little dot on your game TV is moving around. That would be strange.
Even a bigger question to me is could the Jedi thing actually work? If you looked at a vase in a 3d space, could you actually concentrate enough to start to move it? Could you continue to move it while it moved? If it moved suddenly outside of your expectation, would you be quick enough to anticipate it and continue controlling it? I imagine this would take a lot of in-depth parsing of many things going on in the brain just to get a test going like this.
I was not impressed by this article. "Concentrate to make the car go faster?" It's Need for Speed with a mood ring, that doesn't compute.
That's an interesting perspective on redrival.com. I read the whole thing (long) and agreed with many of your experiences. I guess you and I are alike in our lack of time for phat lootz and "what should I do?" at 60.
Your timeline and writeup of going to a guild, going to a PuG and then quitting is disturbing because I feel like I am just before the quitting point. I run things over and over and that's the deal. You can help people all day but not get helped yourself. It's a sad statement.
However, after playing on the Public Test Realm and having an uber priest with everything done for me already, I don't see where the payoff is. The color, value, shape, attributes of a reward are completely arbitrary if I don't feel like I earned it. You get out what you put in.
I think my only saving philosophy is.. this will be my last MMO. Yes. A promise. Blizzard has done the best job with the genre. I will play it until the expansion, they will promise something else and I'll play until I get sick of it and then I won't play another MMO ever.
So if I quit WoW, I'm quitting the MMO genre. Because I don't think it can get any better unless society changes (like robots do all the dirty work and we sit idle all day). The MMO work/reward system overlaps way too much with career/money, thereby creating a group of closet players.
Trying to get back on topic... certainly, my girl has no idea why I try to get a Glowing Brightwood Staff or why I can play for hours and hours. Personally, I think it's a lot of fun, but not so much recently.
I think if anything, WoW has taught me that there is more to life than having the nicest stuff, in RL and in-game. I like logging on, helping someone and logging off. At least it's a measurable amount of brownie points not ever found in the RL.
This is an incredibly interesting point (seriously). I never thought about the OSX administrator prompt (where you type in your password like sudo) as a negative.
But, I wouldn't consider it a major flaw. For one, how are you planning on popping a program up at will on my desktop? If you have a trojan, why aren't you logging my keyboard input? If you are a webpage or applet, I see an application border... maybe there are other ways.
You could use my home dir (which the user has write access to). Suppose I downloaded an app into my home directory and it emulated the OSX sudo prompt/administrator prompt. Let's call it ~/BadJuju.app and I think it's a nifty text editor.
But it wouldn't ever fire off. Let's say I install an OSX security update which needs to write to / somewhere. The update downloads, it tries to write to some file or folder outside of the user's directory and the system prompt is displayed. The fake administrator prompt ~/BadJuju.app is not executed,/Library/realapp.app or whatever the Admin prompt is launched as usual.
So what you'd need is to replace the system files with fake ones to trick me. And that's called a rootkit. sudo works the same way in *nix. You could prompt with a fake sudo and collect root passwords all day long.
But your point is still scary to me... if your installer prompted for the admin password, you might catch a few more people. Big software packages in OSX usually require admin privileges. But at that point, you might as well just fire your payload, trojan or bad juju since you have admin access (assuming I'm an admin) and my password.
Vista is probably going to work like this. So unless you have a really nice, usable and usable (I said usable twice) way to replace this, it's not a major UI flaw. It's actually one of the best things IMHO because I see how 'intrusive' a program is in a day-to-day way.
The texture loading and unloading can be hard on the disk even with lots of RAM. Regardless, my powerbook's two fans both start revving while playing WoW on it. It's not something I do often since I have a gaming PC.
I have a 17" 1.33ghz older model powerbook with 1gb RAM. All detail settings down, resolution doesn't affect much.
I too would love to see WoW on it as my own type of comparison.
It's almost the exact same hardware on a different web page. I stare at my 17" PB all day and this looks just like it (except the camera and the new ports). I can't even tell that it's thinner... I want to see it in person.
I also don't understand people's reaction to the front page. That's the standard 10.4 wallpaper in the background, how does it look like a Dell? The price isn't surprising although I had been hoping for lower to shut up all the people who look at the == unconfigured Dell price ==. Someone please do a high-end comparison listing out software, features and capability (Mspaint vs iPhoto. Even TextEdit vs Wordpad.exe or Notepad.exe). Movie editor bundled with XP?
Branding. Little to do with the quality of the product but more of a way to compete in the market place. It's a nice thought to think that naming your child will instantly lead him/her to success but in reality you probably just avoid naming them something that rhymes with Big Dummy: Stan Grummy, Jan Rummy.
98 ME didn't mean anything until I assigned meaning to it. Windows 95A means a lot to people (crashy). Or RedHat 6.0 with the local cron root exploit.
Maybe that's what they mean by "what's in a name"?
Baboons can use hammers and chains for weapons. Gorillas can sign simple phrases and mean it. Man clearly came from monkeys and you'd likely cut off your feet than cut off your hands.
Thumbs are where its at. Whale music is certainly an interesting point. I'd like to know more about how it relates to intelligence and capability and not just why it's slow, low and pretty to us humans. Slow is pretty to us because it's relaxing because we're stressed?
"Zoom and enhance." [zoom] [clear as daylight] "Zoom and enhance again."
I hate zoom and enhance. I hate it. It's crap. Total crap. I hated this episode, I hated the assumptions it made. I hated the fact that Buick ads and The Who markets CSI to parents of so called 'gamer-crimminals'. I hate how bias the show is, how bias I am as a gamer and how bias everyone is about everything. Flame on.
They had a gamer die. They found a bunch of cans all around his 'console' he was dead with the controller in his hand. The cans looked like AMP and Red Bull. Then whats his name... David Caruso says "HE PLAYED THE GAME TO DEATH". I left the room. I seriously went to the bathroom. I thought I was going to puke, but didn't. It just felt like I should. I trimmed my beard instead. *sigh*
I enjoyed reading the other threads about studies from The Guardian about how TV has affected the virgin land of 'XYZ'. I enjoy reading all the debate back and forth, it is on a serious note, good debating. On a not so serious note, I'm going to kill CSI:Miami once it materializes into the physical world.
Yeah, most of VA geographically is rural. However more people live in urban areas than in rural areas: 2004 (latest estimates) Rural: 1,090,994 Urban: 6,368,833 from http://www.ers.usda.gov/statefacts/VA.HTM
And Giant is sticking close to the income. Looking at their website, seems like they stick north. NoVA, MD, DE (never seen one down 'south'). Of course, their food is overpriced lots of times.
Not knocking south VA, you can buy a killer house for cheap down there. *crying*
Peapod service by Giant Foods (at least near DC). You go onto a website, pick out foods you want and they deliver it in an icebox that is well insulated on your doorstep. Hopefully no one steals your icebox and you get home in time. They pickup the previous icebox on the next delivery. It's just like the way netflix works. I'm sure there are lots of places that are offering this service in densely populated areas (which is where these ideas would work best).
Netflix doesn't pick your movies, you do and they go into a queue. Peapod doesn't pick your food, you do and they arrive in weekly shipments (I think). I've talked to people who use the service (not a user myself) and they are happy with it, despite the added cost (+$7) and the obvious problem of having ice cream sit out in the summer time. The coolers apparently work fairly well, probably much better than non-cooled sushi delivery in June.:)
I'd be curious to hear more 1st-person experiences with something like this.
A book out of electronic pages would probably be a waste. On a single display, dual display -- maybe a book that flips out to only two pages, I can paginate electronically like a PDF reader. One page can represent and display multiple pages (though not at the same time without scaling or zooming).
I think there would also be interface problems/challenges with having multiple pages. You'd have to track which pages are hidden or folded down and which ones are active or shown. For example, if I'm on Page1 and I want to search the book, where does my search box pop up to? All pages? The first page?
Turning electronic pages physically would be a novelty I think. Books of paper have pages and page flipping because there is no other option. You can't store information in the same space because ink would overwrite other ink. On this e-paper though, I think you could design a better interface and improve on the book rather than try to emulate it. Emulation is a waste IMHO, like having an electronic keyboard with real strings in the back that don't do anything (well maybe not a great analogy).
I'm looking at this deal from Nintendo's point of view. Everyone is always complaining that Nintendo is a cartoonesque kids platform (which I might agree with if I wasn't a fan-boy). If being a kids console is Nintendo's biggest market penetration problem, they need to get away from the Happy Meals to be taken more seriously and reach an older audience.
By taken more seriously, I mean by an older audience and more mature themes (maybe not their intention). Related to this recent/. article. Staying in the light-hearted kid's land of casual gore-free gameplay must be their stra-tem-egy.
Or maybe it's not related at all:
I can play Super Monkey Ball with my g/f.
I cannot play Halo with my g/f.
I cannot take my g/f to McD's.
So either way I'm playing Monkey Ball with my g/f and having a real meal. *shrug*
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The hardware just isn't there. You throw on a game with texture and lighting on a mac mini with that Intel GMA 950 and I'll show you a mac mini that is doing t&l in software. It absolutely dies. Same demo/game, crap graphics chip.
http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/:
"Microsoft* DirectX* 9 Vertex Shader 3.0 and Transform and Lighting supported in software through highly optimized Processor Specific Geometry Pipeline (PSGP)"
Wow, through software. What's the other option, it just exits? Hardware > Software > Just quits
I'm sorry for the flame. Demos go from 30fps to 4fps. It's just really, really not even worth discussing T&L on these mac minis or Macbooks (the Macbook Pro has real vram and a "real" gpu).
Oblivion is recklessly aggressive with how much game asset it shoves in front of your face. You see a tree 5 miles away, you can run, run, run to said tree. There's no fluff art, art that you can't get to. Oblivion is certainly the exception and not the benchmark (imho).
I own a Gentoo server, a mac laptop and a desktop PC. I have worked with each for many years. I can describe in detail the advantages and disadvantages of each OS platform and hardware platform, even though I'm not an expert.
OSX is based on Unix and many smart developers use it. Windows games run on Windows, yes. That's why I have both. But (imho) OSX is better designed because Apple makes the hardware and they made people change their apps (pain). The pain has been done for redesign (Classic, Rosetta), Microsoft hasn't done that so they lose something.
Sounds great on paper. OSX is still running OpenGL 1.5 with a crapload of extensions. OSX still double-buffers full-screen windows by default (see 4fps gains in WoW window mode vs fullscreen). My massive and huge hope is that Apple is trying to clean up the final frontier, gaming.
WoW is cleanly coded. Doom3 is too. Both run great on Vista. Both are cross platform. Both come from amazing developers. But still, both run much slower on the same video card. And it's not OSX's eye candy, per se. It's OSX's intentional lag-behind driver versions. If Apple had pull with Nvidia and ATI then they could demand top-notch features and top-notch performance. But they can't. Macs are only good for designers and artists and they don't have market share (I hate this reputation).
OSX relies on OpenGL / CoreImage (afaik) for a major part of the UI. Whereas, XP, all that DirectX stuff is an after-thought. Hopefully Vista and 3D get in bed with each other and complexity overwhelms Microsoft. Then, maybe Apple can get some market share % and demand ATI write amazing drivers for them. Then maybe Apple could demand the current version of Forceware and OpenGL 2.0. And then maybe we'd see equal playing fields.
The OpenGL 2.0 bits aren't that important, 99% of the 1.5 extensions are there. But it's still a testament to the problem, imho.
Btw, I'm no expert. Please respond if have any thoughts on this so I can learn (and steal your brain).
Ok, so let's say instead of getting in trouble over a blog, he was leading an after school class.
Let's say that he didn't have permission to schedule time in the gym but he did it anyway. He taught a class in the gym named: "How To Stay in School 101" where he would talk to fellow students about how to avoid trouble and flunking out.
However since he didn't reserve the gym, he gets caught and suspended for unauthorized assembly. That's a good example of Irony of Fate?
I blame Alanis Morissette for all the confusion. Nothing in that song "Isn't it Ironic?" is ironic. It's all just unfortunate.
What do you mean physically lagging? Do you mean regular computer or digital lag/skipping or was it like a reel-to-reel thing that was skipping?
FFXI: ... what.
+photo realism
+if you played any FF series, you know the spells
+lots of jobs
+end game content (I guess if you have the time)
+feeling of being a hardcore MMO player, no easy mode
+lots of expansions (I quit after 2nd one)
+cross platform
+not a lot of lag (usually)
+searching for groups is kinda fun but you have to group. play another game while waiting to play FFXI
-$1 for a mule (a character to store stuff), $1 for any additional character a month
-registry hacks to change the resolution?
-consolitis. it's severely suffering from the port-feel
-people on ps2 type slow
-wait around for a group (hours), you can't solo
-you can't jump, you collide with everything
-no hints on quests
-you can't make money, farmers everywhere.
-experience loss (hours of work) when you die
-playonline.com is terrible, sony's thing
-about a million players maybe?
-if you can't get a "raise" (which is life or resurrection) then you have to walk forever
-bad for people with jobs
WoW:
+getting to end is actually possible with a day job
+runs fast, is a real PC game
+runs on a Mac
+patching is fast to download because of bittorrent but patching is not perfect
+lots of players
+no level loss, not ever. you just lose money because you have to repair your equipment (durability loss) when you die. not a huge deal.
+economy is really solid, easy to make money
+resting bonuses while you are not playing, so you can play only on the weekends, you get double experience while "rested"
+guilds are better than linkshells although Ctrl+L was a cool shortcut in FFXI, I dunno if you could map a key in WoW like that
+WoW is easier (so much easier) on my relationship with my chica.
+weather effects are awesome
+you can jump (and take falling damage), this is nice rather than being glued to the ground.
++huge number of mods and addon tools written by community. this is a major plus. stuff like, recast fishing pole or "show me the top healer in my group". too many great mods to list.
-end game needs some work but I never hit 75 in FFXI. you had to be in JP to have that kind of headstart on the Americans when I quit FFXI. Huge, huge timesink
-some say it looks cartoony. I agree but think it looks great with FSAA and all that turned up (with beasty PC)
-you will get hated by the FFXI community for selling out or playing "easy mode"
-lag was an issue at one point, server queues were insane.
-patching is annoying but I respect their choice for bittorrent. FFXI probably installs from scratch faster because of patching.
-WoW's official forums are a good way to lose your mind if you are trying to have a productive conversation.
-farmers are around but being rich isn't respected in-game.
Play what you want. My opinions aren't gospel. FFXI was my first MMO, WoW was my second. I've played Guild Wars only slightly. I care about design and game development. I respect WoW more because of many things that I think they've done right. But I wonder if MMOs will make it if games like WoW die off. Certainly, there are other things to do with your time.
Also I wonder if the hype is dying off with WoW, how long until the expansion comes out? Why release an expansion at all? Would people keep playing without the expansion until 2008? Personally, I would suspend my account if any more delays happens. Carrot on a stick of sorts, don't like being the horse.
*alone* a damn fine missed opportunity for a good pun. Too bad, "along" instead of "alone".
Jedi Academy was great. It was effortless to beat it (to me) because it was fun. The "ubering" was fantastic. It was relaxing and fed my huge desire for power-tripping.
"Devolve into WoW forums mode". Eloquent, exactly what's going on in this thread. I hope the outsiders move onto another story, I fear and wonder at how all this jargon looks to them.
Casuals will get there. I refused to give up my life, I'll wait for nerfs, stay behind the curve. It has to remain fun.
I loved the comparisons of other MMOs, good write-ups. WoW official forums is a database of pain and evil administrated by Satan. You would not find such good write-ups there. Thanks to all for commented, enjoyed the reading so far.
I think the issue is, cmd.exe is still 16-bit right? I mean, why the crap doesn't the title bar look the same? Why can't I resize horizontally like in OSX and Gnome/KDE?
It's not a serious priority to MS. They want you to use the MMC for everything. And yet, the MMC can't do handy constructs like "for" or "while". CMD.exe is just this huge exception to the rule in Windows and I have no idea why.
I wonder if there would be some feedback required for your brain to believe it. You move your hand and your hand starts to move and so you believe in your hand movement. It would be interesting to see how this would play out in a game, you would need to provide some sort of calibration or training system I would assume in the early adoption stages.
For example, you calibrate your PDA touch screen for maximum accuracy. "Think left. Ok, now think left but only slightly", meanwhile a little dot on your game TV is moving around. That would be strange.
Even a bigger question to me is could the Jedi thing actually work? If you looked at a vase in a 3d space, could you actually concentrate enough to start to move it? Could you continue to move it while it moved? If it moved suddenly outside of your expectation, would you be quick enough to anticipate it and continue controlling it? I imagine this would take a lot of in-depth parsing of many things going on in the brain just to get a test going like this.
I was not impressed by this article. "Concentrate to make the car go faster?" It's Need for Speed with a mood ring, that doesn't compute.
That's an interesting perspective on redrival.com. I read the whole thing (long) and agreed with many of your experiences. I guess you and I are alike in our lack of time for phat lootz and "what should I do?" at 60.
.. this will be my last MMO. Yes. A promise. Blizzard has done the best job with the genre. I will play it until the expansion, they will promise something else and I'll play until I get sick of it and then I won't play another MMO ever.
... certainly, my girl has no idea why I try to get a Glowing Brightwood Staff or why I can play for hours and hours. Personally, I think it's a lot of fun, but not so much recently.
Your timeline and writeup of going to a guild, going to a PuG and then quitting is disturbing because I feel like I am just before the quitting point. I run things over and over and that's the deal. You can help people all day but not get helped yourself. It's a sad statement.
However, after playing on the Public Test Realm and having an uber priest with everything done for me already, I don't see where the payoff is. The color, value, shape, attributes of a reward are completely arbitrary if I don't feel like I earned it. You get out what you put in.
I think my only saving philosophy is
So if I quit WoW, I'm quitting the MMO genre. Because I don't think it can get any better unless society changes (like robots do all the dirty work and we sit idle all day). The MMO work/reward system overlaps way too much with career/money, thereby creating a group of closet players.
Trying to get back on topic
I think if anything, WoW has taught me that there is more to life than having the nicest stuff, in RL and in-game. I like logging on, helping someone and logging off. At least it's a measurable amount of brownie points not ever found in the RL.
Fine, I agree. Xbox doesn't have much out yet, even for $400. I can't even find it anywhere. Oh well, plenty of other stuff to do.
This is an incredibly interesting point (seriously). I never thought about the OSX administrator prompt (where you type in your password like sudo) as a negative.
... maybe there are other ways.
/Library/realapp.app or whatever the Admin prompt is launched as usual.
... if your installer prompted for the admin password, you might catch a few more people. Big software packages in OSX usually require admin privileges. But at that point, you might as well just fire your payload, trojan or bad juju since you have admin access (assuming I'm an admin) and my password.
But, I wouldn't consider it a major flaw. For one, how are you planning on popping a program up at will on my desktop? If you have a trojan, why aren't you logging my keyboard input? If you are a webpage or applet, I see an application border
You could use my home dir (which the user has write access to). Suppose I downloaded an app into my home directory and it emulated the OSX sudo prompt/administrator prompt. Let's call it ~/BadJuju.app and I think it's a nifty text editor.
But it wouldn't ever fire off. Let's say I install an OSX security update which needs to write to / somewhere. The update downloads, it tries to write to some file or folder outside of the user's directory and the system prompt is displayed. The fake administrator prompt ~/BadJuju.app is not executed,
So what you'd need is to replace the system files with fake ones to trick me. And that's called a rootkit. sudo works the same way in *nix. You could prompt with a fake sudo and collect root passwords all day long.
But your point is still scary to me
Vista is probably going to work like this. So unless you have a really nice, usable and usable (I said usable twice) way to replace this, it's not a major UI flaw. It's actually one of the best things IMHO because I see how 'intrusive' a program is in a day-to-day way.
But, good point squiggleslash.
Yes! Thank you!
The texture loading and unloading can be hard on the disk even with lots of RAM. Regardless, my powerbook's two fans both start revving while playing WoW on it. It's not something I do often since I have a gaming PC.
I have a 17" 1.33ghz older model powerbook with 1gb RAM. All detail settings down, resolution doesn't affect much.
I too would love to see WoW on it as my own type of comparison.
It's almost the exact same hardware on a different web page. I stare at my 17" PB all day and this looks just like it (except the camera and the new ports). I can't even tell that it's thinner ... I want to see it in person.
I also don't understand people's reaction to the front page. That's the standard 10.4 wallpaper in the background, how does it look like a Dell? The price isn't surprising although I had been hoping for lower to shut up all the people who look at the == unconfigured Dell price ==. Someone please do a high-end comparison listing out software, features and capability (Mspaint vs iPhoto. Even TextEdit vs Wordpad.exe or Notepad.exe). Movie editor bundled with XP?
I am a fanboy. Go Steve.
Branding. Little to do with the quality of the product but more of a way to compete in the market place. It's a nice thought to think that naming your child will instantly lead him/her to success but in reality you probably just avoid naming them something that rhymes with Big Dummy: Stan Grummy, Jan Rummy.
98 ME didn't mean anything until I assigned meaning to it. Windows 95A means a lot to people (crashy). Or RedHat 6.0 with the local cron root exploit.
Maybe that's what they mean by "what's in a name"?
Baboons can use hammers and chains for weapons. Gorillas can sign simple phrases and mean it. Man clearly came from monkeys and you'd likely cut off your feet than cut off your hands.
Thumbs are where its at. Whale music is certainly an interesting point. I'd like to know more about how it relates to intelligence and capability and not just why it's slow, low and pretty to us humans. Slow is pretty to us because it's relaxing because we're stressed?
"Zoom and enhance."
[zoom]
[clear as daylight]
"Zoom and enhance again."
I hate zoom and enhance. I hate it. It's crap. Total crap. I hated this episode, I hated the assumptions it made. I hated the fact that Buick ads and The Who markets CSI to parents of so called 'gamer-crimminals'. I hate how bias the show is, how bias I am as a gamer and how bias everyone is about everything. Flame on.
They had a gamer die. They found a bunch of cans all around his 'console' he was dead with the controller in his hand. The cans looked like AMP and Red Bull. Then whats his name... David Caruso says "HE PLAYED THE GAME TO DEATH". I left the room. I seriously went to the bathroom. I thought I was going to puke, but didn't. It just felt like I should. I trimmed my beard instead. *sigh*
I enjoyed reading the other threads about studies from The Guardian about how TV has affected the virgin land of 'XYZ'. I enjoy reading all the debate back and forth, it is on a serious note, good debating. On a not so serious note, I'm going to kill CSI:Miami once it materializes into the physical world.
Yeah, most of VA geographically is rural. However more people live in urban areas than in rural areas:
a rchives/income_wealth/005647.html
2004 (latest estimates) Rural: 1,090,994 Urban: 6,368,833
from http://www.ers.usda.gov/statefacts/VA.HTM
The median household income was $88,133 in Fairfax County, Va, the highest in the country in 2004.
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/
And Giant is sticking close to the income. Looking at their website, seems like they stick north. NoVA, MD, DE (never seen one down 'south'). Of course, their food is overpriced lots of times.
Not knocking south VA, you can buy a killer house for cheap down there. *crying*
http://www.giantfood.com/peapod/
:)
Peapod service by Giant Foods (at least near DC). You go onto a website, pick out foods you want and they deliver it in an icebox that is well insulated on your doorstep. Hopefully no one steals your icebox and you get home in time. They pickup the previous icebox on the next delivery. It's just like the way netflix works. I'm sure there are lots of places that are offering this service in densely populated areas (which is where these ideas would work best).
Netflix doesn't pick your movies, you do and they go into a queue. Peapod doesn't pick your food, you do and they arrive in weekly shipments (I think). I've talked to people who use the service (not a user myself) and they are happy with it, despite the added cost (+$7) and the obvious problem of having ice cream sit out in the summer time. The coolers apparently work fairly well, probably much better than non-cooled sushi delivery in June.
I'd be curious to hear more 1st-person experiences with something like this.
A book out of electronic pages would probably be a waste. On a single display, dual display -- maybe a book that flips out to only two pages, I can paginate electronically like a PDF reader. One page can represent and display multiple pages (though not at the same time without scaling or zooming).
I think there would also be interface problems/challenges with having multiple pages. You'd have to track which pages are hidden or folded down and which ones are active or shown. For example, if I'm on Page1 and I want to search the book, where does my search box pop up to? All pages? The first page?
Turning electronic pages physically would be a novelty I think. Books of paper have pages and page flipping because there is no other option. You can't store information in the same space because ink would overwrite other ink. On this e-paper though, I think you could design a better interface and improve on the book rather than try to emulate it. Emulation is a waste IMHO, like having an electronic keyboard with real strings in the back that don't do anything (well maybe not a great analogy).
By taken more seriously, I mean by an older audience and more mature themes (maybe not their intention). Related to this recent
Or maybe it's not related at all:
So either way I'm playing Monkey Ball with my g/f and having a real meal. *shrug*