I think you're missing the point. As you yourself so eloquently explain, running Windows as non-admin is a pita (requiring sudo equivalents and changed configurations); furthermore, you still can't install most apps without having an admin password.
That is very different to how it works on Macs (or on some Linux flavours).
Yeah, not being able to install Office as a non-admin is a real usability issue.. About as much of a usability issue as not being able to install Parallels as a non-admin.
One needs admin access. The other doesn't. Except that on Windows, pretty much all apps do.
And here's something else: I use a non-admin account on my Mac. When installing Parallels, the installer lets me enter an admin login and password, which it uses to write the kext. Guess what, it would prompt me for the password even if I was running as admin, so when installing apps, there's really no difference between admin and non-admin accounts - except that non-admins who don't have an admin password can't install apps that change the system; and most Mac apps don't. In fact, most Mac apps are installed by simply dragging and dropping them wherever you want them to be.
I'm guessing in the next breath you'll be saying "Windows makes it too easy to install things; that's how spyware spreads".
Except a lot of Microsoft's own software doesn't play well with non-admin accounts, and everyone else has followed suit. This is very much Microsoft's fault.
Why in the world can Office not be installed by non-Admins? Every sane operating systems allows users to install crap, as long as they install it somewhere where they have the required access rights. Installing an app is not "making a system change."
On the Mac, non-admin users can install apps all day long, as long as they don't actually change the system (say, by installing a kernel extension).
I'm guessing "State" was a dropdown menu. Whether you can tab to it or not is a user-configurable setting. It's off by default, the idea being that you type everything you can with the keyboard, and then use the mouse to set the remaining values.
Personally, I hate the fact that Windows includes so much stuff in its tab order. I don't really want to tab through all buttons and links and whatnot.
I bought my first PowerBook 7 years ago. It's still being used regularly by a friend of mine. In the meantime, I bought 3 additional Apple laptops, and all of them are in active use (although one doesn't have sound anymore, and some batteries obviously had to be replaced).
I would tend to say that Apple's build quality isn't as good anymore as 7 years ago, but it's still in the very top of all laptop manufacturers.
Yeah, that FN-Stuff took me a while to figure out when I first tried to hook a Windows laptop to a projector. On the Mac, it just recognizes that you've added another Screen and uses the Projector as your secondary screen. Keynote and Powerpoint then automatically use the second screen to show your presentation, and the first (internal) screen for your notes, a timer, and a list of upcoming screens.
Most of us manage to run Windows on the net confidently.
All I can say is that most of my Windows-running friends caught at least one virus during the last four years.
I don't want to deal with this. I don't even want to think about it. That's why my Windows runs inside Parallels. I store my Windows-created files on the Mac side of things. Whenever I have an issue (some app suddenly doesn't want to start anymore, Windows starts to get slow, Explorer refuses to quit whenever I turn off Windows), I just throw away the image and make a new copy of the clean image. Takes about 10 minutes, and everything is back up running.
Frankly, I wouldn't want to use Windows on an actual Windows PC.
While the Wii attach rate can't compete with the 360, it's not bad at all, and higher than the PS3's. I don't know the current numbers, but half a year ago, the PS3 attach rate was at 3.4 and the Wii at 3.6. I think the 360's is somewhat above 6 by now (but doubled in the last four months, and was thus around the Wii's at the same time of its lifespan), which is not surprising since it's been out much longer, so people had more time to buy games.
The point is, the Wii's attach rate is not worse than usual.
In fact,I think most analysts expected the PS3 to be bloated and expensive and fail because so many gamers lack the disposable income for a 1080p PS3 type system. Everybody knew the PS3 was a waste of money. Even Sony had to make apologias for it.
That's strange. I must accidentally have landed in bizzarro universe during my last wormhole experiment.
Before the E3 where gamers got to actually play with the Wii, everyone was counting Nintendo out. And even afterwards, people tended to think that Sony would win. Analysts, especially.
I think Microsoft understands what's going on, but they can't do anything about it. Everything about their console - from the name to the logo to the looks of the first Xbox to the games selection - just screams "male teenager."
They can't get into the casual market despite the fact that many of their online games are extremely casual. They've painted themselves into a corner, and now they can't really do anything about it.
The 360 is the hardcore console, and until Microsoft changes its strategy drastically (including changing the console's name - maybe for the next gen, if they remain in the console business), it will remain that.
I think the issues you're having with the Wii can easily be attributed to a surprising lack of knowledge and/or experience. For example, you wrote:
Take the tennis game for example. Yes, you swing the Wiimote rather than pressing a button, but that's all you are doing in effect. It doesn't measure the angle you swing at or anything, it is just timing.
This is blatantly wrong. You can use your remote to slice the ball to the left or the right, and you can even do stopballs. It takes a bit of practise, but all of the Wii Sports titles (well, maybe except Baseball) are a lot deeper than you think.
In fact, the boxing game - the most reviled Wii Sports game - is easily the deepest boxing game I've ever played. There's so much you can do with blocking, different strikes, aiming for parts of the opponent's body, and moving. No other boxing game allows this kind of exact control.
I can't understand why the Wii is flying off shelves so fast... there really aren't many good reasons to have one at this time...
Have you even tried games like Mario Party 8 (which, strangely, got bad reviews, but is the most fun I've had in years), Super Paper Mario, the Wii version of Resi 4, Madden, Trauma Center, Mario Strikers, The Godfather (best version of the game), Rayman, Elebits, Excite Truck or Super Monkey Ball?
There are a lot of great games on the Wii that could not be done on any other console.
You mean "there's Warhawk." The other ones aren't out yet, and we don't know how they'll turn out.
Apropos, I downloaded Warhawk yesterday. It's a lot of fun. Not worth 40 bucks to most people, given how little stuff there's in it (very few maps, only two teams, very few different weapons and cars and no single-player mode), but it is a great game nonetheless - and sometimes it's even really pretty, especially when flying through the clouds. Huge pity they didn't put more content in it. And it does have four-player split screen, which is a huge plus in my book. I wish Motorstorm had that, too.
All in a ll a good distraction, but definitely not a system seller.
However, a lot of those people aren't in a position to lay out $500 for a video game system or HDTV either, so they're not exactly the market segment in question, are they?
I think people who buy 350 bucks iPods probably can afford 500 bucks consoles.
Audio quality quite simply isn't a console system seller.
We're talking about serious gamers choosing between a 360 and a PS3.
While I own a PS3 and no 360, I would probably tell "serious gamers" (aren't games supposed to be fun, as in non-serious?) to buy a 360, simply for the games selection. The PS3 unfortunately doesn't offer too much of interest to gamers, as of now.
Well, the worrying thing is that if you compare sales aligned to launch dates, the PS3 is actually losing ground to the 360... Of course, the PS3 doesn't have any good games and the 360 has tons of them, so some good games might yet change that.
And of course, the Wii is pulling ahead like nobody' business. It has already overtaken the 360 in worldwide sales and will probably own more of the market than the 360 and PS3 combined within a few months.
I actually almost finished Battletoads. I have no idea how I did it, but I got to the boulder level, and almost to the end of it (or maybe I actually finished it, I can't quite remember). Despite the fact that you have to play the whole damn game right from the start every time you're game over.
I must have been insane.
When I play the game now, I don't even finish the second level.
Just give them a few hundred thou, a few picks from the refurb page, and have at it. Look at the wonderful job they've done with nothing. Gawd, they are a couple of geniuses.
What good would throwing money at an open source project do? They would be able to clone Microsoft Office faster? Yay. Thanks, but I'll take iWork over an Office Clone.
I actually prefer a simple, well-designed works suite over a perfect Office clone.
The funny thing is, during the last gen, the Cube was the only console worth owning to me. One of the best Zelda games of all time, a fantastic stop into 3D for Metroid, Super Monkey Ball as a launch title, great Mario Party games, a really, really fun version of Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros: Melee, Resident Evil 4, Viewtiful Joe...
The Cube did not get a lot of games, but almost all of the games I actually wanted to own were on the Cube.
This gen is different. Each console has exclusive games that I want to play. Bio Shock and many great arcade games on the 360, stuff like Echochrome and Little Big Planet on the PS3, and the usual suspects on the Wii. I had no issues owning only the Cube during the last gen and never felt like I was missing a lot of stuff that was of interest to me (I did miss a few gems Dragon Quest, Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts and a bunch of other games, but they weren't a lot of games, and I've now bought them for my PS3). It looks like this gen, I'll have to own all three consoles.
Yeah. I have no idea about how it works in the UK either, but whenever I've been in contact with (central European) public health care, quality and timeliness has been perfect. I find it funny that Americans often take health care as an example of the superiority of their system. It's not.
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I think you're missing the point. As you yourself so eloquently explain, running Windows as non-admin is a pita (requiring sudo equivalents and changed configurations); furthermore, you still can't install most apps without having an admin password.
That is very different to how it works on Macs (or on some Linux flavours).
Parallels: Installs kernel extension. Pretty low-level application. Office: It's a fucking office suite!
One needs admin access. The other doesn't. Except that on Windows, pretty much all apps do.
And here's something else: I use a non-admin account on my Mac. When installing Parallels, the installer lets me enter an admin login and password, which it uses to write the kext. Guess what, it would prompt me for the password even if I was running as admin, so when installing apps, there's really no difference between admin and non-admin accounts - except that non-admins who don't have an admin password can't install apps that change the system; and most Mac apps don't. In fact, most Mac apps are installed by simply dragging and dropping them wherever you want them to be.
I'm guessing in the next breath you'll be saying "Windows makes it too easy to install things; that's how spyware spreads".No. Better luck with your guesses next time.
Except a lot of Microsoft's own software doesn't play well with non-admin accounts, and everyone else has followed suit. This is very much Microsoft's fault.
Why in the world can Office not be installed by non-Admins? Every sane operating systems allows users to install crap, as long as they install it somewhere where they have the required access rights. Installing an app is not "making a system change."
On the Mac, non-admin users can install apps all day long, as long as they don't actually change the system (say, by installing a kernel extension).
Very strange, I've never had to do that, even with the DVI-VGA adapter. I wouldn't even know how or where to "turn it on".
Yeah, a non-admin account on Windows. Real usable. That's a good one.
iPod 30 gigabytes: $249.00
ZEN Vision 30 gigabytes: $249.99
Dunnoe, prices seem comparable in general. Here are the shops:
http://us.creative.com/
http://store.apple.com/
I'm guessing "State" was a dropdown menu. Whether you can tab to it or not is a user-configurable setting. It's off by default, the idea being that you type everything you can with the keyboard, and then use the mouse to set the remaining values.
Personally, I hate the fact that Windows includes so much stuff in its tab order. I don't really want to tab through all buttons and links and whatnot.
I bought my first PowerBook 7 years ago. It's still being used regularly by a friend of mine. In the meantime, I bought 3 additional Apple laptops, and all of them are in active use (although one doesn't have sound anymore, and some batteries obviously had to be replaced).
I would tend to say that Apple's build quality isn't as good anymore as 7 years ago, but it's still in the very top of all laptop manufacturers.
Yeah, that FN-Stuff took me a while to figure out when I first tried to hook a Windows laptop to a projector. On the Mac, it just recognizes that you've added another Screen and uses the Projector as your secondary screen. Keynote and Powerpoint then automatically use the second screen to show your presentation, and the first (internal) screen for your notes, a timer, and a list of upcoming screens.
All I can say is that most of my Windows-running friends caught at least one virus during the last four years.
I don't want to deal with this. I don't even want to think about it. That's why my Windows runs inside Parallels. I store my Windows-created files on the Mac side of things. Whenever I have an issue (some app suddenly doesn't want to start anymore, Windows starts to get slow, Explorer refuses to quit whenever I turn off Windows), I just throw away the image and make a new copy of the clean image. Takes about 10 minutes, and everything is back up running.
Frankly, I wouldn't want to use Windows on an actual Windows PC.
While the Wii attach rate can't compete with the 360, it's not bad at all, and higher than the PS3's. I don't know the current numbers, but half a year ago, the PS3 attach rate was at 3.4 and the Wii at 3.6. I think the 360's is somewhat above 6 by now (but doubled in the last four months, and was thus around the Wii's at the same time of its lifespan), which is not surprising since it's been out much longer, so people had more time to buy games.
The point is, the Wii's attach rate is not worse than usual.
That's strange. I must accidentally have landed in bizzarro universe during my last wormhole experiment.
Before the E3 where gamers got to actually play with the Wii, everyone was counting Nintendo out. And even afterwards, people tended to think that Sony would win. Analysts, especially.
I think Microsoft understands what's going on, but they can't do anything about it. Everything about their console - from the name to the logo to the looks of the first Xbox to the games selection - just screams "male teenager."
They can't get into the casual market despite the fact that many of their online games are extremely casual. They've painted themselves into a corner, and now they can't really do anything about it.
The 360 is the hardcore console, and until Microsoft changes its strategy drastically (including changing the console's name - maybe for the next gen, if they remain in the console business), it will remain that.
I think the issues you're having with the Wii can easily be attributed to a surprising lack of knowledge and/or experience. For example, you wrote:
This is blatantly wrong. You can use your remote to slice the ball to the left or the right, and you can even do stopballs. It takes a bit of practise, but all of the Wii Sports titles (well, maybe except Baseball) are a lot deeper than you think.
In fact, the boxing game - the most reviled Wii Sports game - is easily the deepest boxing game I've ever played. There's so much you can do with blocking, different strikes, aiming for parts of the opponent's body, and moving. No other boxing game allows this kind of exact control.
Have you even tried games like Mario Party 8 (which, strangely, got bad reviews, but is the most fun I've had in years), Super Paper Mario, the Wii version of Resi 4, Madden, Trauma Center, Mario Strikers, The Godfather (best version of the game), Rayman, Elebits, Excite Truck or Super Monkey Ball?
There are a lot of great games on the Wii that could not be done on any other console.
You mean "there's Warhawk." The other ones aren't out yet, and we don't know how they'll turn out.
Apropos, I downloaded Warhawk yesterday. It's a lot of fun. Not worth 40 bucks to most people, given how little stuff there's in it (very few maps, only two teams, very few different weapons and cars and no single-player mode), but it is a great game nonetheless - and sometimes it's even really pretty, especially when flying through the clouds. Huge pity they didn't put more content in it. And it does have four-player split screen, which is a huge plus in my book. I wish Motorstorm had that, too.
All in a ll a good distraction, but definitely not a system seller.
I think people who buy 350 bucks iPods probably can afford 500 bucks consoles.
Audio quality quite simply isn't a console system seller.
While I own a PS3 and no 360, I would probably tell "serious gamers" (aren't games supposed to be fun, as in non-serious?) to buy a 360, simply for the games selection. The PS3 unfortunately doesn't offer too much of interest to gamers, as of now.
I thought we were talking about gamers?
Well, now that you've preemptively disqualified yourself by confessing to be an "audiophile", I don't have to :-)
Well, the worrying thing is that if you compare sales aligned to launch dates, the PS3 is actually losing ground to the 360... Of course, the PS3 doesn't have any good games and the 360 has tons of them, so some good games might yet change that.
And of course, the Wii is pulling ahead like nobody' business. It has already overtaken the 360 in worldwide sales and will probably own more of the market than the 360 and PS3 combined within a few months.
What you probably do not realize is that people owning the older PS3s can choose between hardware and software PS2 compatibility.
I actually almost finished Battletoads. I have no idea how I did it, but I got to the boulder level, and almost to the end of it (or maybe I actually finished it, I can't quite remember). Despite the fact that you have to play the whole damn game right from the start every time you're game over.
I must have been insane.
When I play the game now, I don't even finish the second level.
What good would throwing money at an open source project do? They would be able to clone Microsoft Office faster? Yay. Thanks, but I'll take iWork over an Office Clone.
I actually prefer a simple, well-designed works suite over a perfect Office clone.
The funny thing is, during the last gen, the Cube was the only console worth owning to me. One of the best Zelda games of all time, a fantastic stop into 3D for Metroid, Super Monkey Ball as a launch title, great Mario Party games, a really, really fun version of Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros: Melee, Resident Evil 4, Viewtiful Joe...
The Cube did not get a lot of games, but almost all of the games I actually wanted to own were on the Cube.
This gen is different. Each console has exclusive games that I want to play. Bio Shock and many great arcade games on the 360, stuff like Echochrome and Little Big Planet on the PS3, and the usual suspects on the Wii. I had no issues owning only the Cube during the last gen and never felt like I was missing a lot of stuff that was of interest to me (I did miss a few gems Dragon Quest, Okami, Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts and a bunch of other games, but they weren't a lot of games, and I've now bought them for my PS3). It looks like this gen, I'll have to own all three consoles.
Yeah. I have no idea about how it works in the UK either, but whenever I've been in contact with (central European) public health care, quality and timeliness has been perfect. I find it funny that Americans often take health care as an example of the superiority of their system. It's not.
In my country, the PS3 costs 747 US$. VAT is 7,6%. 600 US$ + 7.6% = 645 US$.