if we've learned anything about time travel from hitchiker's guide to the galaxy, we've learned that you don't need to make high-risk trades...just put a couple of pennies in your favorite bank back in 1860 and then live off the interest in 2356 or whatever year.
That assumes there wasn't some other economic crisis between now and then. He never claims he intended to go back into the future to live off the wealth he was generating in our present. Perhaps because he couldn't. If we've learned anything from Quark on ST:DS9 it's that gold (the backing of our current economic system) is worthless in the 24th century.
"That's not a good analogy. The caps lock LED is an indicator of state."
Yes, that would be output. As a matter of fact, I vaguely remember reading a Slashdot article about the computer sending morse code to the caps lock indicator as an indication that something went wrong.
Though your example is quite accurate, the point of my comment was simply that there is no absolutist reasoning that can work in a situation like that. He had mentioned earlier in the thread that he felt touch screens were a matter of form factor, thus they're exempt. Convenient, eh?:)
Yeah, I agree with your comment (and disagree with his) about the coupling/de-coupling of input and output devices. But normal operation of a caps lock LED is not morse code;P
Look for a long warranty. I purchased a pair of Sony Multiscan 500PS monitors and they come with a three-year warranty. Had to use that warranty shortly before the three-year period ran up. They sent me back a Multiscan G500 replacement. (The monitor electron guns would sometimes go wrong.) Warranty applies to both CRT and LCD.
Also, you do sort of get what you pay for. The graphic series of monitors are higher quality than the "regular" or professional series monitors. But they cost more. You'll get better control over your setup with a graphic series monitor.
Monitors I've recently purchased/used: Radius PrecisionColor 20 (Sony Trinitron), Apple 21" Color (Sony Trinitron), Sony Multiscan G500/500PS (Sony Trinitron), ViewSonic E790 (budget 19"), MAG 771-FS (temporary replacement). Best ones have of course been the Sony Trinitrons. The ViewSonic E790 is decent, but the MAG 771-FS was basically a cheapo that I wouldn't use for any real period of time.
I believe the patent on the Trinitron technology is up? So you can get them from Sony and similar technology from other companies for cheaper now.
Don't necessarily go for the "fake" flat screen monitors. My brother had a flat screen ViewSonic that was only flat because the glass in front was concave on the inside. It didn't look right, but I don't think he cared too much.
If you're not going to do professional graphics, LCDs are better for multiple monitor setups so you don't get interference. Right now, my two monitors constantly shake. I've gotten used to it; maybe my eyeballs constantly shake as well. I'm hoping to get a dual 970 Mac later on with a Cinema Display, and put that in-between my two CRTs. That'll remove the interference and also balance out my speakers, keyboards, and entertainment playback.
"A monitor is an output device. A scanner (optical reader, whatever) is an input device. Why merge the two when they should be mutually exclusive? "
Does your keyboard have a caps-lock light?
That's not a good analogy. The caps lock LED is an indicator of state. It's not really an output, because it is not used to provide you with the result of a function. (LEDs on switches are an output, in my book.) Hitting the caps lock key is not a function itself, it's like one input to a two-input function, i.e. caps lock plus a character.
A better analogy would be tablet PCs or those drawing/input tablets sold by Wacom. Or even simpler, a PDA screen. I think the problem here with output = input is that you can only do one or the other. i.e. if you put a piece of paper on the screen, you can't see what's on the screen anymore. Saves space maybe, but I think most users would find this behavior kind of weird (not to say they wouldn't get used to it).
Like many dot-coms of yore, the game There seems to have a slight identity crisis. The title on their web site reads "Welcome to There.com!". So is the game named There.com? Or is it just the web site that is named There.com? (The company name is There Inc. and navigation refers to the game as just There.)
Anyway, if you search for There.com on Google, you do get just the single hit for their web site.
In the case of postal mail, the sender pays. If a company wants to waste their money sending stuff that's their business. In the case of Faxes and Email, the receiver pays. It means those sending the information don't pay but waste the money of people receiving the stuff. The economic difference is why an email box is full of spam, but your postal box may only get 3 to 4 items a week.
You could also argue that the receiver also pays for postal mail, and that the sender also pays for FAXes and email. When you receive mail through the U.S. post, you have to spend the time and resources to collect, process, and dispose of the mail. When a sender sends out a FAX, he or she is using their phone line and that costs them money. When a sender sends out an email, he or she is also consuming bandwidth that they have to pay for. In fact, you could argue that it costs you less time and resources to do the collect/process/dispose of an email than a FAX or postal mail. There is a difference is that a FAX effectively prevents you from using that resource for an extended period of time and with a considerably larger cost. Similar to a telemarketer call. But with postal mail and email that is not so much the case (due to a single piece of mail or email).
Nice to know that HP's got the garage inventor thing still going on. Excellent progress. Especially considering the competition: ASIMO? Who wants a personal robot and not a blimp delivery service?
Based on all the discussion in response to this one comment, I'd say it's pretty clear that tabs do cause quite a bit of confusion and problems as to what the correct behavior should be (from a "what does the user expect" point of view). Shouldn't people take this to mean something?
If it's a fun game, that's no problem, but how many games out there do you REALLY want to play for 80 hours a week for a month or two solid? I can't think of very many. You'd get sick of it in a real hurry.
Here's one: EverQuest. Whether or not you're sick of it, you're still playing!
I think this decision has some broader implications which the people commenting have so far missed. This means there might be some legal requirement by other companies to keep information which may prove necessary for purposes not yet known.
For example, could it be argued that ISPs must keep complete logs of user traffic in the event of legal action taken against a user? Or that companies must retain versions of software builds for X years to prove they didn't "steal" intellectual property in building their system?
Granted, that is a big difference from keeping documents which were used in the process of conducting business (e.g. patents, SEC filings, shareholder meetings). Is this the first ruling of its kind? (I'm guessing no.) Any legal experts have any insight into where else this sort of ruling can be applied in a broader sense?
The fact that your child is good at computers, to me, stems not only from the fact that you taught her early...but that she has inherited the intelligence required to program from you, your wife, or both....
The nurture side of the fence would argue that since the majority of brain interconnections are developed at an extremely young age (he started this with his daughter at 18 months) that exposing her and involving himself so deeply with computers at such a young age and for so long would have a much larger impact than her genes. Brain interconnections do not form as quickly once you grow up. This is why everyone tells you to start reading to your kids the second they leave the hospital (or somewhere close to that;P).
BTW-The brain interconnections thing is something that's been proven, and not just mumbo jumbo from the nurture side of the fence. So if you build the interconnections for things like mathematical reasoning, spatial processing, hand-eye coordination, deduction, etc. which are all things related to programming and using the GUI, then that's where your "intelligence" is coming from.
These were the Hawthorne Studies... they specifically tried to determine the effect of lighting levels on worker productivity. Increasing the amount of light appeared to improve output. But decreasing the amount of light did the same thing. I don't think anyone knows for sure why the workers responded to the change in light instead of the absolute value of the lighting level. Prehaps they felt management was taking care of them. Prehaps they were more auspicious about being observed by the guys conducting the study.
This study is talked about a lot in business classes and stuff, but when someone went back and talked to the people who actually participated in this study, it turned out that the people conducting the studies did some questionable things to "massage" their data. Nothing so bad as to say this conclusion is wrong, but enough to say their study is flawed.
If I recall correctly, one example of this "massaging" was that when they did studies on individual workers in a room off the assembly line, the filtered out the ones who were grumpy or something like that, and therefore had lower performance.
Someone should double-check on this for me. I'm probably getting some part of this wrong.
No, Put Away was made for back when Macs didn't ship with Hard Drives. ejecting left a ghost image of the disk on the desktop, then you could insert another disk and drag your files over, the mac would then prompt you to insert the other disk to make the copy. Put away ejected the disk and removed the icon from the desktop.
Omp. You're right. I forgot about that because they changed it so ejecting didn't leave a ghost image anymore. (Unless you ejected it special, I think.)
Originally, the ability to eject disks by trashing them was a "hack" only intended for use internally. The UI designers did decide that it didn't make any sense and that being able to trash a mounted disk to eject it was wrong. So this feature was removed. The resulting annoyance of people who had gotten used to trashing disks to unmount them resulted in this feature getting put back in.
You could very easily get by using floppies without ever knowing that you could eject by trashing, however. As others have mentioned, "Eject Disk" (Command-E) was under the Special menu. "Put Away" (Command-Y) also worked, although the idea there is that something should be put back to where it came from. Usually you used "Put Away" for files.
Personally, I don't intend to purchase music in a digital format if I can't get a lossless or super-high quality format. I would prefer to purchase songs in AIFF rather than MP3 or Ogg. 320Kbps MP3s might be okay. (Yes, I know AIFF is still technically lossy.)
I've had to encode my CDs using 256Kbps VBR normal stereo without removing low frequencies (see iTunes encoding options if those aren't available in your encoder) to ensure unnoticeable quality in all songs. And even then I can sometimes hear a difference in the richness or "sharpness" of the sound. See trumpets and travelling octaves on strings--those are often a place where MP3 was messing up.
But for everything else, if they charged $.25 per song, they couldn't upload them fast enough for me. As long as they're a dollar, I'll think long and hard about downloading anything.
Well, isn't that part of the point? You're not supposed to buy music just for the sake of buying music. You're supposed to buy it because it's better than everything else, and you feel that song is worth $1, while other songs are not. Other people will have different opinions as to what is worth $1.
So, now there's a study which would seem to encourage the move back towards higher fidelity audio recordings, namely SACD and DVD-Audio. (I don't think we're going back to vinyl.) I suspected as much, but it's good that someone has executed a scientific study on the matter, although more studies are certainly needed.
We recently discussed this paper here at UNC-CH because one of our graduate students went to IMW. Something that came up was that they didn't actually get any real data for this experiment. So although the paper's content is sound, it should still be verified before it is taken as a feasible approach.
Okay, so a bunch of people have pointed out that Nemesis was released with competition from Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Clearly, when you feel like a movie (in the theatre), you pick the one you think is best of those currently playing.
Yet, whenever there's a post about DVD region coding and international movie releases, people mod up the "release it everywhere at the same time" comments. You can't have it both ways.
e.g. I'm looking forward to seeing Hero from Hong Kong or China (wherever it was made) that was just released over there. But it's up for Cannes or something and so they are not releasing it in the U.S. until Winter 2003 since they can certainly get better results by tacking on the "Best Foreign Film" award in the trailers and commercials.
I can appreciate this, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. On the other hand, I'm planning to purchase a region-free, whatever region-whatever DVD player so I can play imports.
I read through the article, and it seems pretty clear that NARAS has decided to embrace P2P, file-sharing, and subscription models without DRM as the primary form of music distribution. One of the arguments he made was that it turned out to actually profit many artists, and among those he cited was Janis Ian.
So I found it very interesting that the link off the article to Janis Ian's Internet Debacle quotes NARAS as follows:
The NARAS people were a bit more pushy. They told me downloads were "destroying sales", "ruining the music industry", and "costing you money".
Looks like NARAS has done a 180. But if they previously didn't believe in what this article is arguing for, why do they believe it now? Is it really just because they think they have to adapt to the new model? Or are there other motives which we don't know about? After all, I bet a huge load of/.ers are going to think "Yay, NARAS! Boo, RIAA!" after reading this. Are we looking at a power struggle?
First, "teleportation" only teleports "DATA", quantum information, like the spin of an electron. You won't see any beam me up scotty, despite how much people wants to and how wrong reporters are in artciles =)
If I recall my Star Trek history correctly, this is in fact how the original teleporters did work. And, as you say, it didn't exactly teleport living creatures very well. You were essentially reconstructing a copy. But they "fixed" this later on, so that teleportation in ST:TOS and later worked the right way, and you weren't reconstructing a copy but instead the original. Something to do with pattern buffers and iso-linear chips.
So, history (or future) does indeed seem to indicate that this is the first step in the right direction.
For that matter, what kind of Chinese-only games are there?
How about Romance of the Three Kingdoms? I don't know how closely the game follows the history/book, but I remember playing it. Plus, there are hundreds and hundreds of Chinese RPGs which you just won't see in the U.S. Think a truckload of Final Fantasy quality games. Softstar is a big publisher of these types of games. You can find a few of them if you go to a Chinese imports store. I played through PAL myself (even though I can't read Chinese) with the help of my cousins.
Honestly, it's a lot easier to make <nation>-only games for just about every other nation, since their histories and cultures are so much richer. In the U.S., you can go Native American (which does have a lot), American Revolution, Civil War, Wild West, and recent wars. There isn't much more than that. China has several thousand years of history and culture.
The metal interface is used for whatever applications Apple has decided belong in the "digital lifestyle" category. I suppose they decided to include Safari and iChat in this. Whether or not these applications deserve to be placed in there is a judgement call. I'm leaning towards no, but you have to admit that the metal interface is leaner and meaner than the regular Aqua interface.
Slashdot Mirror
if we've learned anything about time travel from hitchiker's guide to the galaxy, we've learned that you don't need to make high-risk trades...just put a couple of pennies in your favorite bank back in 1860 and then live off the interest in 2356 or whatever year.
That assumes there wasn't some other economic crisis between now and then. He never claims he intended to go back into the future to live off the wealth he was generating in our present. Perhaps because he couldn't. If we've learned anything from Quark on ST:DS9 it's that gold (the backing of our current economic system) is worthless in the 24th century.
"That's not a good analogy. The caps lock LED is an indicator of state."
:)
;P
Yes, that would be output. As a matter of fact, I vaguely remember reading a Slashdot article about the computer sending morse code to the caps lock indicator as an indication that something went wrong.
Though your example is quite accurate, the point of my comment was simply that there is no absolutist reasoning that can work in a situation like that. He had mentioned earlier in the thread that he felt touch screens were a matter of form factor, thus they're exempt. Convenient, eh?
Yeah, I agree with your comment (and disagree with his) about the coupling/de-coupling of input and output devices. But normal operation of a caps lock LED is not morse code
Look for a long warranty. I purchased a pair of Sony Multiscan 500PS monitors and they come with a three-year warranty. Had to use that warranty shortly before the three-year period ran up. They sent me back a Multiscan G500 replacement. (The monitor electron guns would sometimes go wrong.) Warranty applies to both CRT and LCD.
Also, you do sort of get what you pay for. The graphic series of monitors are higher quality than the "regular" or professional series monitors. But they cost more. You'll get better control over your setup with a graphic series monitor.
Monitors I've recently purchased/used: Radius PrecisionColor 20 (Sony Trinitron), Apple 21" Color (Sony Trinitron), Sony Multiscan G500/500PS (Sony Trinitron), ViewSonic E790 (budget 19"), MAG 771-FS (temporary replacement). Best ones have of course been the Sony Trinitrons. The ViewSonic E790 is decent, but the MAG 771-FS was basically a cheapo that I wouldn't use for any real period of time.
I believe the patent on the Trinitron technology is up? So you can get them from Sony and similar technology from other companies for cheaper now.
Don't necessarily go for the "fake" flat screen monitors. My brother had a flat screen ViewSonic that was only flat because the glass in front was concave on the inside. It didn't look right, but I don't think he cared too much.
If you're not going to do professional graphics, LCDs are better for multiple monitor setups so you don't get interference. Right now, my two monitors constantly shake. I've gotten used to it; maybe my eyeballs constantly shake as well. I'm hoping to get a dual 970 Mac later on with a Cinema Display, and put that in-between my two CRTs. That'll remove the interference and also balance out my speakers, keyboards, and entertainment playback.
"A monitor is an output device. A scanner (optical reader, whatever) is an input device. Why merge the two when they should be mutually exclusive? "
Does your keyboard have a caps-lock light?
That's not a good analogy. The caps lock LED is an indicator of state. It's not really an output, because it is not used to provide you with the result of a function. (LEDs on switches are an output, in my book.) Hitting the caps lock key is not a function itself, it's like one input to a two-input function, i.e. caps lock plus a character.
A better analogy would be tablet PCs or those drawing/input tablets sold by Wacom. Or even simpler, a PDA screen. I think the problem here with output = input is that you can only do one or the other. i.e. if you put a piece of paper on the screen, you can't see what's on the screen anymore. Saves space maybe, but I think most users would find this behavior kind of weird (not to say they wouldn't get used to it).
Like many dot-coms of yore, the game There seems to have a slight identity crisis. The title on their web site reads "Welcome to There.com!". So is the game named There.com? Or is it just the web site that is named There.com? (The company name is There Inc. and navigation refers to the game as just There.)
Anyway, if you search for There.com on Google, you do get just the single hit for their web site.
In the case of postal mail, the sender pays. If a company wants to waste their money sending stuff that's their business. In the case of Faxes and Email, the receiver pays. It means those sending the information don't pay but waste the money of people receiving the stuff. The economic difference is why an email box is full of spam, but your postal box may only get 3 to 4 items a week.
You could also argue that the receiver also pays for postal mail, and that the sender also pays for FAXes and email. When you receive mail through the U.S. post, you have to spend the time and resources to collect, process, and dispose of the mail. When a sender sends out a FAX, he or she is using their phone line and that costs them money. When a sender sends out an email, he or she is also consuming bandwidth that they have to pay for. In fact, you could argue that it costs you less time and resources to do the collect/process/dispose of an email than a FAX or postal mail. There is a difference is that a FAX effectively prevents you from using that resource for an extended period of time and with a considerably larger cost. Similar to a telemarketer call. But with postal mail and email that is not so much the case (due to a single piece of mail or email).
Nice to know that HP's got the garage inventor thing still going on. Excellent progress. Especially considering the competition: ASIMO? Who wants a personal robot and not a blimp delivery service?
- This is supposed to be a poke at U.S. R&D.
Based on all the discussion in response to this one comment, I'd say it's pretty clear that tabs do cause quite a bit of confusion and problems as to what the correct behavior should be (from a "what does the user expect" point of view). Shouldn't people take this to mean something?
If it's a fun game, that's no problem, but how many games out there do you REALLY want to play for 80 hours a week for a month or two solid? I can't think of very many. You'd get sick of it in a real hurry.
Here's one: EverQuest. Whether or not you're sick of it, you're still playing!
I think this decision has some broader implications which the people commenting have so far missed. This means there might be some legal requirement by other companies to keep information which may prove necessary for purposes not yet known.
For example, could it be argued that ISPs must keep complete logs of user traffic in the event of legal action taken against a user? Or that companies must retain versions of software builds for X years to prove they didn't "steal" intellectual property in building their system?
Granted, that is a big difference from keeping documents which were used in the process of conducting business (e.g. patents, SEC filings, shareholder meetings). Is this the first ruling of its kind? (I'm guessing no.) Any legal experts have any insight into where else this sort of ruling can be applied in a broader sense?
The fact that your child is good at computers, to me, stems not only from the fact that you taught her early...but that she has inherited the intelligence required to program from you, your wife, or both....
;P).
The nurture side of the fence would argue that since the majority of brain interconnections are developed at an extremely young age (he started this with his daughter at 18 months) that exposing her and involving himself so deeply with computers at such a young age and for so long would have a much larger impact than her genes. Brain interconnections do not form as quickly once you grow up. This is why everyone tells you to start reading to your kids the second they leave the hospital (or somewhere close to that
BTW-The brain interconnections thing is something that's been proven, and not just mumbo jumbo from the nurture side of the fence. So if you build the interconnections for things like mathematical reasoning, spatial processing, hand-eye coordination, deduction, etc. which are all things related to programming and using the GUI, then that's where your "intelligence" is coming from.
These were the Hawthorne Studies... they specifically tried to determine the effect of lighting levels on worker productivity. Increasing the amount of light appeared to improve output. But decreasing the amount of light did the same thing. I don't think anyone knows for sure why the workers responded to the change in light instead of the absolute value of the lighting level. Prehaps they felt management was taking care of them. Prehaps they were more auspicious about being observed by the guys conducting the study.
This study is talked about a lot in business classes and stuff, but when someone went back and talked to the people who actually participated in this study, it turned out that the people conducting the studies did some questionable things to "massage" their data. Nothing so bad as to say this conclusion is wrong, but enough to say their study is flawed.
If I recall correctly, one example of this "massaging" was that when they did studies on individual workers in a room off the assembly line, the filtered out the ones who were grumpy or something like that, and therefore had lower performance.
Someone should double-check on this for me. I'm probably getting some part of this wrong.
No, Put Away was made for back when Macs didn't ship with Hard Drives. ejecting left a ghost image of the disk on the desktop, then you could insert another disk and drag your files over, the mac would then prompt you to insert the other disk to make the copy. Put away ejected the disk and removed the icon from the desktop.
Omp. You're right. I forgot about that because they changed it so ejecting didn't leave a ghost image anymore. (Unless you ejected it special, I think.)
Originally, the ability to eject disks by trashing them was a "hack" only intended for use internally. The UI designers did decide that it didn't make any sense and that being able to trash a mounted disk to eject it was wrong. So this feature was removed. The resulting annoyance of people who had gotten used to trashing disks to unmount them resulted in this feature getting put back in.
You could very easily get by using floppies without ever knowing that you could eject by trashing, however. As others have mentioned, "Eject Disk" (Command-E) was under the Special menu. "Put Away" (Command-Y) also worked, although the idea there is that something should be put back to where it came from. Usually you used "Put Away" for files.
Personally, I don't intend to purchase music in a digital format if I can't get a lossless or super-high quality format. I would prefer to purchase songs in AIFF rather than MP3 or Ogg. 320Kbps MP3s might be okay. (Yes, I know AIFF is still technically lossy.)
I've had to encode my CDs using 256Kbps VBR normal stereo without removing low frequencies (see iTunes encoding options if those aren't available in your encoder) to ensure unnoticeable quality in all songs. And even then I can sometimes hear a difference in the richness or "sharpness" of the sound. See trumpets and travelling octaves on strings--those are often a place where MP3 was messing up.
But for everything else, if they charged $.25 per song, they couldn't upload them fast enough for me. As long as they're a dollar, I'll think long and hard about downloading anything.
Well, isn't that part of the point? You're not supposed to buy music just for the sake of buying music. You're supposed to buy it because it's better than everything else, and you feel that song is worth $1, while other songs are not. Other people will have different opinions as to what is worth $1.
So, now there's a study which would seem to encourage the move back towards higher fidelity audio recordings, namely SACD and DVD-Audio. (I don't think we're going back to vinyl.) I suspected as much, but it's good that someone has executed a scientific study on the matter, although more studies are certainly needed.
We recently discussed this paper here at UNC-CH because one of our graduate students went to IMW. Something that came up was that they didn't actually get any real data for this experiment. So although the paper's content is sound, it should still be verified before it is taken as a feasible approach.
Okay, so a bunch of people have pointed out that Nemesis was released with competition from Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Clearly, when you feel like a movie (in the theatre), you pick the one you think is best of those currently playing.
Yet, whenever there's a post about DVD region coding and international movie releases, people mod up the "release it everywhere at the same time" comments. You can't have it both ways.
e.g. I'm looking forward to seeing Hero from Hong Kong or China (wherever it was made) that was just released over there. But it's up for Cannes or something and so they are not releasing it in the U.S. until Winter 2003 since they can certainly get better results by tacking on the "Best Foreign Film" award in the trailers and commercials.
I can appreciate this, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. On the other hand, I'm planning to purchase a region-free, whatever region-whatever DVD player so I can play imports.
I read through the article, and it seems pretty clear that NARAS has decided to embrace P2P, file-sharing, and subscription models without DRM as the primary form of music distribution. One of the arguments he made was that it turned out to actually profit many artists, and among those he cited was Janis Ian.
/.ers are going to think "Yay, NARAS! Boo, RIAA!" after reading this. Are we looking at a power struggle?
So I found it very interesting that the link off the article to Janis Ian's Internet Debacle quotes NARAS as follows:
The NARAS people were a bit more pushy. They told me downloads were "destroying sales", "ruining the music industry", and "costing you money".
Looks like NARAS has done a 180. But if they previously didn't believe in what this article is arguing for, why do they believe it now? Is it really just because they think they have to adapt to the new model? Or are there other motives which we don't know about? After all, I bet a huge load of
QuickTime Trailers
Since no link was provided in the post, here they are: Global Frequency and Warren Ellis with a deep link to his GF page.
First, "teleportation" only teleports "DATA", quantum information, like the spin of an electron. You won't see any beam me up scotty, despite how much people wants to and how wrong reporters are in artciles =)
If I recall my Star Trek history correctly, this is in fact how the original teleporters did work. And, as you say, it didn't exactly teleport living creatures very well. You were essentially reconstructing a copy. But they "fixed" this later on, so that teleportation in ST:TOS and later worked the right way, and you weren't reconstructing a copy but instead the original. Something to do with pattern buffers and iso-linear chips.
So, history (or future) does indeed seem to indicate that this is the first step in the right direction.
For that matter, what kind of Chinese-only games are there?
How about Romance of the Three Kingdoms? I don't know how closely the game follows the history/book, but I remember playing it. Plus, there are hundreds and hundreds of Chinese RPGs which you just won't see in the U.S. Think a truckload of Final Fantasy quality games. Softstar is a big publisher of these types of games. You can find a few of them if you go to a Chinese imports store. I played through PAL myself (even though I can't read Chinese) with the help of my cousins.
Honestly, it's a lot easier to make <nation>-only games for just about every other nation, since their histories and cultures are so much richer. In the U.S., you can go Native American (which does have a lot), American Revolution, Civil War, Wild West, and recent wars. There isn't much more than that. China has several thousand years of history and culture.
The metal interface is used for whatever applications Apple has decided belong in the "digital lifestyle" category. I suppose they decided to include Safari and iChat in this. Whether or not these applications deserve to be placed in there is a judgement call. I'm leaning towards no, but you have to admit that the metal interface is leaner and meaner than the regular Aqua interface.