Can someone please answer this question for me? I swear to god, I've cruised game sites for days and googled it every way I know how, and there seems to be no answer on the Internet to this most basic of all questions:
Does Halo 3 have 4-player split-screen multiplayer?
I don't understand why this answer cannot be found anywhere. It took me days (as a non-hardcore FPS gamer) to understand that co-op/campaign and multiplayer were different (okay, I get it now, multiplayer is the opposite of co-op). I have found sites that mention how many players you can have via system-link or XBox live for co-op (4) or multiplayer (I think 16). I have even seen sites that tout "split-screen multiplayer" without saying whether this is 2-player split-screen, or 4-player. I have seen screenshots of 2-player split screen, but mostly everyone goes for the eye-candy of full screen screenshots.
So, does Halo 3 have this feature? It is truly the best thing in the world to play 4-player with your friends in one room, on one tv, while you trash talk. Sure, the screen is a bit small, but 4 games on one 46" 1080p TV is a hell of a lot better than when we were doing this on 25" TVs with only 480 lines of resolution.
I thank you greatly for your response. Yeah, I've got H3 on preorder, but I'll be buying a couple more controllers if it supports 4-player split screen. I'm sort of afraid I won't even be able to tell once I have my hands on the game, unless I have a 3rd controller turned on to test..
Actually, I think it's the exact opposite. 99% of the population would be better off using Apple products, because they simply work better than the alternatives. Your perceived "lack of functionality" (which I would dispute, but that's another story..) doesn't bother Joe consumer because he's not an uber-geek. The very real lack of Windows headaches alone, makes the Mac a better choice for almost everyone out there.
That would only leave the very confused Geek Squad-style geeks (you know the ones, who think they are computer geniuses because they work in the helpdesk) to muck in the registry.
There is no label. I think it is considered the sleep/wake button (per the manual), but that is deceiving. Nobody really "sleeps" their phone. All it does is turn the screen off/lock the phone, just like the feature on many other phones. I don't know how the hell they thought it was a power button. I tap it before i drop my phone in my pocket so I know nothing weird will happen (inadvertant calls, etc.. though it is probably impossible since the proximity sensor near the earpiece would disable the controls when its in my pocket..)
You still don't get it. I am happy for you that you seem to love bashing the iPhone and other overly complicated pieces of phone technology, but the "sleep mode" people speak of here is a red herring. The iPhone is like any other phone -- either on, or off. When I stop using my iphone, the display goes black to save battery. That's what people here are calling "standby." I don't know a single phone that doesn't power down its display to save battery.
These people were idiots, but hopefully AT&T makes things right-- that overcharge is just absurd.
The *only* difference is that the iPhone has no visible indicator of being on when the screen is black.
However, these people didn't even try to turn their phones off. They simply set them down and assumed that a darkened screen meant it was off.
Is this intentionally funny? You do realize how Microsoft screwed their PlaysForSure customers with the Zune, right? Why would you spend a single penny on their media technology, knowing they're likely to do the same thing again?
Simple. You're assuming Slashdotters are FOSSies, rather than just adamant about not using crappy products.
I don't like Microsoft because they make shit products and force them down our throats. I use them regularly, as I now have an XP laptop at my current job as a Unix SA. I am willing to pay for Microsoft products when I think they are worthwhile -- I have an XBox 360 Elite -- but usually they are not worth paying for. The XBox is the first Microsoft product I have bought.. well, ever.
For my own computer, I am happy to pay the extra few bucks for an Apple product that does exactly what it is designed to do, and does it extremely well. It's just not worth hassling with a Linux desktop machine anymore. OS X has the Windows advantages of being "mainstream" and playing all that fancy DVD and audio content with no fuss, no muss, but without the disadvantages of being utter crap. I definitely spent more money on my Mac Pro than I needed to spend on a computer, but mostly that was me buying an overkill machine, and very little of it was the Apple tax. Of course, if they had a mid-range headless system, maybe I would have bought that instead... But the low-end laptops are very competitive with PC offerings, and to some of us it is worth paying money for stuff that works.
By the way, I register all of the shareware I use and enjoy in OS X, something that is far more true of the Mac community than the Windows community. Why? Because we feel the products are worth paying for, rather than Windows users who feel that they use what they use out of necessity, not choice.
I like the idea of free software, but I'm not devoting my life to the cause. If it works best, I'll use it. If not, I'll pay to use whatever works best. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it is almost never their product.
My 2.66Ghz quad-core Mac Pro only has 1GB RAM. It's not really intentional, I just didn't want to pay $300 for another gig of FB-DIMMs when I bought it last August; figured I'd skip the Apple Tax and buy it third-party.
Then I found out third-party companies were selling it for the same absurd price.
So I told myself I'd wait a few months for the price to drop, since it would inevitably fall like a rock when more companies started shipping the Core 2 Extreme with chipsets requiring FB-DIMMs. Then it was announced that the FB-DIMM wasn't going to be on Intel's future roadmap.. d'oh!
Prices haven't dropped like a rock, but slowly declined instead.. now I can get 4GB for around $300.
But the thing is, the system doesn't really need it. I admit that it's already total overkill for what I use it for, but I was rewarding myself for using my 600Mhz iBook G3 for 5 years, including all thru college, and that maxed out at 640MB. With Tiger, and a bunch of widgets running, yeah, I can feel when it starts swapping -- usually at about the 15th Safari window or so. However, the system is so damn fast -- and I'm running RAID 0 on my main volume -- that the swapping is really just a minor annoyance. I keep finding better things to spend money on than more memory for my already blazing fast computer.
So, to make a long story short, 1GB is plenty for a "desktop" Mac. Most users would be much better served by 2GB, but most users would ALSO be much better served by Apple bundling as little possible so that the buyer can choose whether they want to install the RAM themselves, or have Apple do it.
How on earth can anyone sanction Trillian? Sure Windows UI is not the greatest thing in the world, but damn, it's as if the authors of Trillian tried their best to make it conform to no UI standard on the planet. The behavior of alt-tab with respect to chat windows and the buddy list is asinine, options are impossible to find, it's just.. downright TERRIBLE.
I use Adium on the Mac and really couldn't be happier. I wish there was something similar to use on my Windows laptop.
I love your Monty Python "taunt you a second time" signature. Unfortunately you are the one who missed the boat this time.
Michael Dell has, at least once, said that Apple should liquidate all of their assets and give the proceeds back to the shareholder. That is why his comment is funny. Or was, before it had to be explained.
Also you used "your" in place of "you're."
Neither are major miscues, but for some reason your signature (while taken in good humor) prompted me to reply when I would not have otherwise.
... the first person who accuses Dell of copying Apple's sales model of they go retail?
I'm a big Apple fan, but I still expect some retard to make some comment like that.
I wouldn't place Apple and IBM (Lenovo) in the same camps in terms of design -- plenty of people find the Thinkpads to be pretty ugly, and it is true that their design has not changed much in a long time, where Apple's are considered to be very attractive.
Where they both shine is in build quality. You can pick up any Apple notebook or Thinkpad (save perhaps the huge 17" ones) by the corner, and carry it like that. Try that with a Dell, the thing bends like a wet noodle (except it creaks more).
Personally, I find the Thinkpad to be attractive *and* well-built. Not quite as solid as my old 12" iBook, but the Thinkpad X60 I have is a 15", so that's the main reason. IBM could stand to fix some of the obnoxious little issues (waking from standby, screen occasionally deciding to switch to external-only for no reason, poor performance when undocking, the annoying IBM popups telling me how to undock, or eject a device, or whatever), but the hardware is a real winner. Some of the hardware/software behavior may be Microsoft faults, or faults of the general PC architecture in general, so I won't go too hard on them.
So what you're saying is that you're the only person for whom OS X has gotten slower with successive releases?
I went from 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 on a 600mhz iBook maxxed out at 640mb of ram, and every release WAS faster than the last.
I finally upgraded to a Mac Pro when I got out of school, so I now have Tiger. I'm not sure if a 600mhz G3 fits in the minimum requirements, but the only thing about Tiger I can see requiring more resources than my iBook had would be RAM for dashboard.
Note my iBook didn't even support CoreImage with its weak old 4mb video card, so Apple was doing more than just offloading gui elements to the GPU for me to see those speed increases.
Oh yeah, and I sold my almost 5-year-old $1000 laptop for over $300. Icing on the cake.
Because you're a troll, I won't bother trying to post a full comparison.
Just be aware that adding a second 2.66ghz Quad-core chip (not even the 3.0ghz that Apple is selling) to your Precision 690 adds $1600 to the price. So a base 2.66ghz 8-core workstation from Dell is $5000. I'm sure you can get the slower Dell closer to the Apple price if you dump the RAM below 1GB, ditch the OS, and so on.
Maybe people are buying the BluRay version because the DVD version of Casino Royale is hideously broken.
Watching the movie on my Mac Pro with a moderately priced receiver and speakers, the audio level drops were so distracting it was hard to watch the movie. The first one I noticed was during Audioslave's intro song during the animation. It continued to happen throughout the movie. In action scenes, music would be loud, and just before a punch, the audio level would drop to 1/2 or less, and then slowly build back up.
I tried it on my cheap Sony TV and DVD player and didn't notice the problem, but it could be because the speakers are so bad.
Then I tried the movie in VLC on the Mac, and had the same problem.
Next I ran it on my work Thinkpad with Intervideo's WinDVD, and noticed the problem too. If you can hear an audio problem on laptop speakers, it MUST be bad!
It is possible that this is a result of crippling the DVD to prevent ripping -- MacTheRipper could not rip it for me to backup, something about not being able to view the filesystem tree. You can browse the DVD fine on the desktop, although the AUDIO_TS folder is empty for some reason.
However, I have heard others complain of the same thing, so I think I just didn't notice it on my 20" TV because the speakers are too crappy. On a real home A/V system I bet it would be just as distracting.
Sorry, Sony, this one's coming back.. I won't buy broken DVDs. I watch all of my movies on my computer.
Here's how you know that most hybrids are bought for ego, rather than environmental, reasons.
Compare Prius sales to Civic hybrid sales.
There's a reason you see far more Priuses (Prii?) on that road than Civic hybrids, and that is because the Prius looks like a rolling freakshow, and the Civic hybrid looks like a normal car. For all intents and purposes, both cars do the same thing in a similar sized body with similar fuel economy results at a similar price point.
Prius drivers just REALLY REALLY want you to know that they're saving the environment.
Hybrid drivers who turn up their noses at diesels are also similarly guilty of being fashionistas.
For the record, I've driven a current-gen Prius, and it's a neat little car.
I just enjoy driving too much to drive any economy car, let alone a hybrid. But if I were to get a commuter car of some sort, I'd look long and hard at the Jetta TDI Wagon.
Why do I care who started YouTube or who owns it? Is it written somewhere in the emo-hipster code that I can only root for the little guy? I'll root for whomever I want to, whether it is the little guy, or a massively rich corporation. Similarly, if I think you're an asshole, I don't take into account your annual income.
Not too familiar with the Live Mail service mentioned here, but if it truly is Windows-only that would be really confusing. I suspect easily 15-20% of my university students used Macs. It makes sense, if you realize that Apple has relatively higher marketshare in laptops, and most students use laptops.
Of the 10 or so people I'm close friends with that bought new computers while in school (graduated 06), every single one of them bought Macs. About 50% were former Mac users, and 50% switched from Dell or HP type systems. Nobody was buying Windows.
Not sure if this is just my friends, or my (West-coast) school, or if these students are representative of what will be happening on a wider scale in the future...
Christ, if there's one thing I hate about being a geek, it's being lumped in with people who make up dramatic crap like eyes bleeding and ears panicking from flourescent lights. It's as if you're trying as hard as you can to invent shit to bitch about to make yourself stand out.
What is it that makes a noticeable percentage of us complete and utter idiots? Like Dwight from The Office (US).
1. Attempt to negotiate with Cisco 2. Lackeys say "Steve, you can't call it the iPhone at MacWorld tomorrow, we don't have an agreement in place yet with Cisco!" 3. His Steveness: "Then you're not fucking trying hard enough, I'm gonna call it what I fucking want to call it, you figure it out!" 4. ??? 5. Profit!
Are you kidding me? I notice the performance difference all the time.
I spent 4 years on a 600mhz G3 iBook, and just upgraded to a Quad Mac Pro 2.66. I've also regularly used a P4 2.4 and a Celeron 1.7 laptop at work.
To start with, actually, I ran a 6-proc 200mhz PPro at an old job I had, and while the thing was never lightning fast, it ran like a train.. NOTHING slowed it down, ever.
I was continually surprised at how slow the P4 2.4 running XP felt, given my slow iBook at home... so part of it may be the OS.
And it's obvious to say that when I stepped up to the Mac Pro, it blew everything out of the water. But I can't believe you're saying multiple cores is only good for running multiple apps. That's simplistic and wrong. To begin with, we're ALL running multiple apps all the time -- MP3 player, web browser, email, and so on. Sure, none of these processes are taking a ton of CPU time, but the ability for the OS to assign them to different cores means your computing experience is much smoother and more consistant.
Hell, Acquisition X (P2P client) often has something like 50 java threads running, so even though I'm running "one program" its not like I'm not seeing a benefit from 4 cores.
Also, I am in the process of ripping my entire DVD collection to hard disk, and it's pretty sweet the way Handbrake can crunch a full DVD down to 1500kbps at full size/framerate in 40 minutes. I'm not using my machine as a server or as a professional, but that doesn't mean we don't all have needs for a high level of performance now and then.
The average person might not benefit a whole lot from more than 2 or 4 cores right now, but come on. The computing experience is SO much better, and it's not about running more than one intensive user application at once, it's about everything your OS runs, the multithreading of the application, and so on.
Now I just need FB-DIMMs to drop in price so I can get more RAM...
Slashdot Mirror
This is like a sick joke. Even the reply to my desperate plea for help is just more confusion. I guess I'll find out tomorrow AM :)
Can someone please answer this question for me? I swear to god, I've cruised game sites for days and googled it every way I know how, and there seems to be no answer on the Internet to this most basic of all questions:
Does Halo 3 have 4-player split-screen multiplayer?
I don't understand why this answer cannot be found anywhere. It took me days (as a non-hardcore FPS gamer) to understand that co-op/campaign and multiplayer were different (okay, I get it now, multiplayer is the opposite of co-op). I have found sites that mention how many players you can have via system-link or XBox live for co-op (4) or multiplayer (I think 16). I have even seen sites that tout "split-screen multiplayer" without saying whether this is 2-player split-screen, or 4-player. I have seen screenshots of 2-player split screen, but mostly everyone goes for the eye-candy of full screen screenshots.
So, does Halo 3 have this feature? It is truly the best thing in the world to play 4-player with your friends in one room, on one tv, while you trash talk. Sure, the screen is a bit small, but 4 games on one 46" 1080p TV is a hell of a lot better than when we were doing this on 25" TVs with only 480 lines of resolution.
I thank you greatly for your response. Yeah, I've got H3 on preorder, but I'll be buying a couple more controllers if it supports 4-player split screen. I'm sort of afraid I won't even be able to tell once I have my hands on the game, unless I have a 3rd controller turned on to test..
Actually, I think it's the exact opposite. 99% of the population would be better off using Apple products, because they simply work better than the alternatives. Your perceived "lack of functionality" (which I would dispute, but that's another story..) doesn't bother Joe consumer because he's not an uber-geek. The very real lack of Windows headaches alone, makes the Mac a better choice for almost everyone out there.
That would only leave the very confused Geek Squad-style geeks (you know the ones, who think they are computer geniuses because they work in the helpdesk) to muck in the registry.
There is no label. I think it is considered the sleep/wake button (per the manual), but that is deceiving. Nobody really "sleeps" their phone. All it does is turn the screen off/lock the phone, just like the feature on many other phones. I don't know how the hell they thought it was a power button. I tap it before i drop my phone in my pocket so I know nothing weird will happen (inadvertant calls, etc.. though it is probably impossible since the proximity sensor near the earpiece would disable the controls when its in my pocket..)
You still don't get it. I am happy for you that you seem to love bashing the iPhone and other overly complicated pieces of phone technology, but the "sleep mode" people speak of here is a red herring. The iPhone is like any other phone -- either on, or off. When I stop using my iphone, the display goes black to save battery. That's what people here are calling "standby." I don't know a single phone that doesn't power down its display to save battery.
These people were idiots, but hopefully AT&T makes things right-- that overcharge is just absurd.
The *only* difference is that the iPhone has no visible indicator of being on when the screen is black.
However, these people didn't even try to turn their phones off. They simply set them down and assumed that a darkened screen meant it was off.
Is this intentionally funny? You do realize how Microsoft screwed their PlaysForSure customers with the Zune, right? Why would you spend a single penny on their media technology, knowing they're likely to do the same thing again?
Can't wait to see NBC's online sales dry up.
CDs with swear lyrics are a specialty market?
No, oddly sanitized versions of 'reality' without obscenity are a specialty market.
Thankfully those who get all hot and bothered by an arbitrarily-judged "offensive" word are a dying breed.
Never shopped there in my life, never will.
Simple. You're assuming Slashdotters are FOSSies, rather than just adamant about not using crappy products.
.. well, ever.
I don't like Microsoft because they make shit products and force them down our throats. I use them regularly, as I now have an XP laptop at my current job as a Unix SA. I am willing to pay for Microsoft products when I think they are worthwhile -- I have an XBox 360 Elite -- but usually they are not worth paying for. The XBox is the first Microsoft product I have bought
For my own computer, I am happy to pay the extra few bucks for an Apple product that does exactly what it is designed to do, and does it extremely well. It's just not worth hassling with a Linux desktop machine anymore. OS X has the Windows advantages of being "mainstream" and playing all that fancy DVD and audio content with no fuss, no muss, but without the disadvantages of being utter crap. I definitely spent more money on my Mac Pro than I needed to spend on a computer, but mostly that was me buying an overkill machine, and very little of it was the Apple tax. Of course, if they had a mid-range headless system, maybe I would have bought that instead... But the low-end laptops are very competitive with PC offerings, and to some of us it is worth paying money for stuff that works.
By the way, I register all of the shareware I use and enjoy in OS X, something that is far more true of the Mac community than the Windows community. Why? Because we feel the products are worth paying for, rather than Windows users who feel that they use what they use out of necessity, not choice.
I like the idea of free software, but I'm not devoting my life to the cause. If it works best, I'll use it. If not, I'll pay to use whatever works best. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it is almost never their product.
My 2.66Ghz quad-core Mac Pro only has 1GB RAM. It's not really intentional, I just didn't want to pay $300 for another gig of FB-DIMMs when I bought it last August; figured I'd skip the Apple Tax and buy it third-party.
Then I found out third-party companies were selling it for the same absurd price.
So I told myself I'd wait a few months for the price to drop, since it would inevitably fall like a rock when more companies started shipping the Core 2 Extreme with chipsets requiring FB-DIMMs. Then it was announced that the FB-DIMM wasn't going to be on Intel's future roadmap.. d'oh!
Prices haven't dropped like a rock, but slowly declined instead.. now I can get 4GB for around $300.
But the thing is, the system doesn't really need it. I admit that it's already total overkill for what I use it for, but I was rewarding myself for using my 600Mhz iBook G3 for 5 years, including all thru college, and that maxed out at 640MB. With Tiger, and a bunch of widgets running, yeah, I can feel when it starts swapping -- usually at about the 15th Safari window or so. However, the system is so damn fast -- and I'm running RAID 0 on my main volume -- that the swapping is really just a minor annoyance. I keep finding better things to spend money on than more memory for my already blazing fast computer.
So, to make a long story short, 1GB is plenty for a "desktop" Mac. Most users would be much better served by 2GB, but most users would ALSO be much better served by Apple bundling as little possible so that the buyer can choose whether they want to install the RAM themselves, or have Apple do it.
this truly is the best trackball ever... i loved mine.
Games in the $60 range aren't targeted at kids?
I begged an 8-bit Nintendo out of my parents for Christmas in about '89 if memory serves.
I remember saving up for Super Mario 3. List price was $65. I think I got it for $59.
$59 in the Super Mario 3 release year of 1990 was $92.52 in 2006 dollars (most recent data). The MSRP of $65 was $101.93 in 2006.
Source: http://www.westegg.com/inflation/infl.cgi
How on earth can anyone sanction Trillian? Sure Windows UI is not the greatest thing in the world, but damn, it's as if the authors of Trillian tried their best to make it conform to no UI standard on the planet. The behavior of alt-tab with respect to chat windows and the buddy list is asinine, options are impossible to find, it's just.. downright TERRIBLE.
I use Adium on the Mac and really couldn't be happier. I wish there was something similar to use on my Windows laptop.
I love your Monty Python "taunt you a second time" signature. Unfortunately you are the one who missed the boat this time.
Michael Dell has, at least once, said that Apple should liquidate all of their assets and give the proceeds back to the shareholder. That is why his comment is funny. Or was, before it had to be explained.
Also you used "your" in place of "you're."
Neither are major miscues, but for some reason your signature (while taken in good humor) prompted me to reply when I would not have otherwise.
... the first person who accuses Dell of copying Apple's sales model of they go retail?
I'm a big Apple fan, but I still expect some retard to make some comment like that.
I wouldn't place Apple and IBM (Lenovo) in the same camps in terms of design -- plenty of people find the Thinkpads to be pretty ugly, and it is true that their design has not changed much in a long time, where Apple's are considered to be very attractive.
Where they both shine is in build quality. You can pick up any Apple notebook or Thinkpad (save perhaps the huge 17" ones) by the corner, and carry it like that. Try that with a Dell, the thing bends like a wet noodle (except it creaks more).
Personally, I find the Thinkpad to be attractive *and* well-built. Not quite as solid as my old 12" iBook, but the Thinkpad X60 I have is a 15", so that's the main reason. IBM could stand to fix some of the obnoxious little issues (waking from standby, screen occasionally deciding to switch to external-only for no reason, poor performance when undocking, the annoying IBM popups telling me how to undock, or eject a device, or whatever), but the hardware is a real winner. Some of the hardware/software behavior may be Microsoft faults, or faults of the general PC architecture in general, so I won't go too hard on them.
So what you're saying is that you're the only person for whom OS X has gotten slower with successive releases?
I went from 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 on a 600mhz iBook maxxed out at 640mb of ram, and every release WAS faster than the last.
I finally upgraded to a Mac Pro when I got out of school, so I now have Tiger. I'm not sure if a 600mhz G3 fits in the minimum requirements, but the only thing about Tiger I can see requiring more resources than my iBook had would be RAM for dashboard.
Note my iBook didn't even support CoreImage with its weak old 4mb video card, so Apple was doing more than just offloading gui elements to the GPU for me to see those speed increases.
Oh yeah, and I sold my almost 5-year-old $1000 laptop for over $300. Icing on the cake.
It's the payback for making us put up with this Windows shit at work all the time. Going home to a Mac is a breath of fresh air.
Because you're a troll, I won't bother trying to post a full comparison.
Just be aware that adding a second 2.66ghz Quad-core chip (not even the 3.0ghz that Apple is selling) to your Precision 690 adds $1600 to the price. So a base 2.66ghz 8-core workstation from Dell is $5000. I'm sure you can get the slower Dell closer to the Apple price if you dump the RAM below 1GB, ditch the OS, and so on.
Maybe people are buying the BluRay version because the DVD version of Casino Royale is hideously broken.
Watching the movie on my Mac Pro with a moderately priced receiver and speakers, the audio level drops were so distracting it was hard to watch the movie. The first one I noticed was during Audioslave's intro song during the animation. It continued to happen throughout the movie. In action scenes, music would be loud, and just before a punch, the audio level would drop to 1/2 or less, and then slowly build back up.
I tried it on my cheap Sony TV and DVD player and didn't notice the problem, but it could be because the speakers are so bad.
Then I tried the movie in VLC on the Mac, and had the same problem.
Next I ran it on my work Thinkpad with Intervideo's WinDVD, and noticed the problem too. If you can hear an audio problem on laptop speakers, it MUST be bad!
It is possible that this is a result of crippling the DVD to prevent ripping -- MacTheRipper could not rip it for me to backup, something about not being able to view the filesystem tree. You can browse the DVD fine on the desktop, although the AUDIO_TS folder is empty for some reason.
However, I have heard others complain of the same thing, so I think I just didn't notice it on my 20" TV because the speakers are too crappy. On a real home A/V system I bet it would be just as distracting.
Sorry, Sony, this one's coming back.. I won't buy broken DVDs. I watch all of my movies on my computer.
What a shame, too, as it was an excellent movie.
Here's how you know that most hybrids are bought for ego, rather than environmental, reasons.
Compare Prius sales to Civic hybrid sales.
There's a reason you see far more Priuses (Prii?) on that road than Civic hybrids, and that is because the Prius looks like a rolling freakshow, and the Civic hybrid looks like a normal car. For all intents and purposes, both cars do the same thing in a similar sized body with similar fuel economy results at a similar price point.
Prius drivers just REALLY REALLY want you to know that they're saving the environment.
Hybrid drivers who turn up their noses at diesels are also similarly guilty of being fashionistas.
For the record, I've driven a current-gen Prius, and it's a neat little car.
I just enjoy driving too much to drive any economy car, let alone a hybrid. But if I were to get a commuter car of some sort, I'd look long and hard at the Jetta TDI Wagon.
Why do I care who started YouTube or who owns it? Is it written somewhere in the emo-hipster code that I can only root for the little guy? I'll root for whomever I want to, whether it is the little guy, or a massively rich corporation. Similarly, if I think you're an asshole, I don't take into account your annual income.
Not too familiar with the Live Mail service mentioned here, but if it truly is Windows-only that would be really confusing. I suspect easily 15-20% of my university students used Macs. It makes sense, if you realize that Apple has relatively higher marketshare in laptops, and most students use laptops.
Of the 10 or so people I'm close friends with that bought new computers while in school (graduated 06), every single one of them bought Macs. About 50% were former Mac users, and 50% switched from Dell or HP type systems. Nobody was buying Windows.
Not sure if this is just my friends, or my (West-coast) school, or if these students are representative of what will be happening on a wider scale in the future...
Christ, if there's one thing I hate about being a geek, it's being lumped in with people who make up dramatic crap like eyes bleeding and ears panicking from flourescent lights. It's as if you're trying as hard as you can to invent shit to bitch about to make yourself stand out.
What is it that makes a noticeable percentage of us complete and utter idiots? Like Dwight from The Office (US).
I think it was something like this:
1. Attempt to negotiate with Cisco
2. Lackeys say "Steve, you can't call it the iPhone at MacWorld tomorrow, we don't have an agreement in place yet with Cisco!"
3. His Steveness: "Then you're not fucking trying hard enough, I'm gonna call it what I fucking want to call it, you figure it out!"
4. ???
5. Profit!
Are you kidding me? I notice the performance difference all the time.
I spent 4 years on a 600mhz G3 iBook, and just upgraded to a Quad Mac Pro 2.66. I've also regularly used a P4 2.4 and a Celeron 1.7 laptop at work.
To start with, actually, I ran a 6-proc 200mhz PPro at an old job I had, and while the thing was never lightning fast, it ran like a train.. NOTHING slowed it down, ever.
I was continually surprised at how slow the P4 2.4 running XP felt, given my slow iBook at home... so part of it may be the OS.
And it's obvious to say that when I stepped up to the Mac Pro, it blew everything out of the water. But I can't believe you're saying multiple cores is only good for running multiple apps. That's simplistic and wrong. To begin with, we're ALL running multiple apps all the time -- MP3 player, web browser, email, and so on. Sure, none of these processes are taking a ton of CPU time, but the ability for the OS to assign them to different cores means your computing experience is much smoother and more consistant.
Hell, Acquisition X (P2P client) often has something like 50 java threads running, so even though I'm running "one program" its not like I'm not seeing a benefit from 4 cores.
Also, I am in the process of ripping my entire DVD collection to hard disk, and it's pretty sweet the way Handbrake can crunch a full DVD down to 1500kbps at full size/framerate in 40 minutes. I'm not using my machine as a server or as a professional, but that doesn't mean we don't all have needs for a high level of performance now and then.
The average person might not benefit a whole lot from more than 2 or 4 cores right now, but come on. The computing experience is SO much better, and it's not about running more than one intensive user application at once, it's about everything your OS runs, the multithreading of the application, and so on.
Now I just need FB-DIMMs to drop in price so I can get more RAM...