To be honest I find little difference between Vista and OSX. I develop on both platforms actually. Both have elevation prompts, both have automatic updates turned on by default. Both require reboots for a good majority of updates. Both have had updates that have caused issues with 3rd party apps (Quicktime update breaking PPC emulation on Intel Macs is a good example - I actually can't remember an update recent memory that has caused any issues on Windows).
If OSX works for you better - great - arguing which one is better I think is getting harder and harder.
Me thinks you need to call technical support instead of writing articles on Slashdot and your blog. Reason? I use Vista and I have an uninstall button for all the programs I have installed - and I've installed all the latest patches.
There's something to this - Apple store employee told my friend that the iphone would work with his cell network (Edge Wireless - AT&T doesn't exist in his area...). Anyhow it doesn't work with his sim card. Reading more on the net it seems that Apple built in some software that checks for a special AT&T sim card. (yeah the iphone went back)
Forget the sealed batteries, non upgradable memory - to me perma-locking the phone into AT&T is the biggest crime about the iphone and I think should be grounds for an anti-trust suite. Maybe open phones are in?
If Microsoft had done this with a killer phone everyone had to have (yes - I know they don't have one...) everyone on Slashdot would be crying bloody murder.
Oddly enough my addiction to WoW has saved me all kinds of money - I actually have a running positive balance in my bank account where there was none before. I know its sad, but since I never go anywhere I'm not spending money on expensive toys, movies etc.
As far as the hardware race goes. WoW actually runs on just about anything pretty well. I've got a really brutal PC, but only because I used to be hooked on CSS and DoD. The game happens to run on my crappy laptop with integrated intel gfx.
Yet all they have is a character it's YOU who's making the assumption about how they acquired it. If someone has a maid then should they fire her because YOU assume they clean their ultra-clean house themselves?
When a lvl 70 holy paladin doesn't know that you need two people to summon from a meeting stone, and doesn't know that if they are holy they need to be healing the party - yeah they bought their character.
Thats the kind of player you have to be for me to make that assumption (and yes thats a real world example).
What is exactly wrong with him paying someone else to do this for him? To gain gold for him? To level a character for him?
One problem with this - and you run into this all the time in WoW is that people who pay for their accounts often don't have the experience to actually play the game in any meaningful way. You know the type - we invited you to do x in our instance run, but they didn't know they could do x - or they do it so poorly that you might have been better off without em.
Or lvl 70's that don't know how to get to places...
I mean are maids immoral to have now as well? House cleaners that come in once a weak? Gas station attendants? Car mechanics? Computer repairman? Lawyers? Accountans? Cooks? All of them are paid to do a task which someone else could do but for various reasons chooses to "outsource".
Bad comparison really - if I buy a lvl 70 character in WoW I'm making a false statement that "I did this", I know this character better than anyone and I can use this character to the best of my abilities - when its not true.
You don't hire a maid to clean your house, and then claim you know everything about cleaning your house? Or do you have a mechanic fix your car and claim to your friends that your an expert in cars?
If you hire a lawyer and he/she wins your case you're not going to claim your a legal expert are you?
Because you are doing all those things when you buy a character.
I know the grind sucks, and the game companies could obviously do stuff to make this better - but its there for a reason. To help teach you the mechanics of the game, and to help teach you how your character works. People who buy their accounts - unless they've been through the ranks several times usually really suck at the game itself.
I disagree that a trained monkey can do end game raid content in WoW. Last I heard there's only a handful of hardcore raiding guilds who have even stepped foot in The Eye in Tempest Keep - and so far none have defeated the final boss.
The guild I'm in (and this isn't too uncommon) hasn't even got to the end of Karazhan.
EQ was a timesink - nothing more nothing less. If anything WoW a good chunk of that and look where it left EQ... I honestly think most former EQ players (and I run into them all the time on WoW) left because they realized sleeping in shifts for a video game is stupid.
I actually haven't noticed any DRM technologies inhibiting my ability to play all my ripped movies and mp3 files on Vista - if anything the experience is improved over XP - I can even watch TV or DVD's while playing games. I suspect what your talking about is DRM included Microsoft Video/Audio technology and DRM included to play HD content - that actually only applies to content you purchase from 3rd parties who use that technology.
Guess what - your Macbook running OSX has just as much DRM in the same areas in fact.
Reason Linux has none of that is because its not being supported by Microsoft or Apple.
I'm a developer and I happen to have a Mac at work, but I really honestly couldn't tell you how much more productive or less productive I am because all the projects people want me to work on are on Windows. I rarely get to use it, but when I do it seems getting around the machine is much more tedious (browsing folders to launch apps, the goofy task bar etc).
How is UAC any different than the elevation prompts on OSX? The only difference is that OSX asks you for your password, UAC (while it can be configured in the same manner) assumes you want to skip typing in your password.
Choice is great if you are a rogue cowboy developer. Lot's of stuff all over the place, bits and pieces thrown together. I remember a project we had here, it'd been outsourced to some third party. It came back with just about every piece of free open source software you can imagine. The data entry screens were Java running on Apache, the reporting screens were Python, the admin screens were running Perl scripts. The data entry stuff used Oracle, the reporting used postgres. The whole thing was tied together with some other bits of glue and tape. Thank God the morons who wrote it were horrible architects and the thing couldn't scale, otherwise this piece of unmaintable crap might have ended up in production. This wasn't SAP was it?
Flash supports mpeg 4 too. One thing people don't realize is that player on youtube is a full blown program streaming an flv file - which with Flash 9 can be encoded with HD quality codecs (like on2), all the way down to the stuff you see on youtube and google video.
One reason I think a lot of other standards haven't taken off is because there are little if no platforms to stream the video seamlessly. Flash is ubiquitous, and it is a platform you can build your custom video player around.
Basically your saying that a wrong is a left right? So if you turned left at least 3 times at 90 deg intervals you would have a right. The US has at least done that many wrongs.
Xbox live? Sure. No cheating there (yet) and that's good.
About a year ago I was watching a friend play counter-strike on the Xbox - it was a pain in the arse to play, but it had a global rating system. Right at the top with the most kills and 100% accuracy was a player called "xboxhacker" - and I'm not making this up.
Same here - I pretty much have bittorrent running 24/7 on my Comcast connection. I suspect they don't cut off people who have alternatives - in the Seattle area there are plenty.
I don't think this is true actually - in a lot of ways Vista is quicker. For instance when I turned on my Vista machine today it was ready to go in literally seconds.
Low priority I/O makes it so a lot of tasks like backup, indexing and optimizing the disk can be done in the background with little to no impact to foreground apps.
As far as application performance, you can dumb down vista's ui, but even with Aero on I really honestly don't notice any performance difference between Vista and XP.
Its not like Microsoft is the only one to blame for this. My Mac for instance - default install eats 16+ gigs of disk space - way more than Vista. I recall my first Mac - ran off floppy disks.
When I first started running Linux I ran kernel 1.2.8 on a 386 with 4 megs of ram. It took a couple hours to compile the kernel (had a P90 that could compile it in what seemed like seconds).
Beside - who cares. I've got 2 gigs of ram in every computer I have - even my latop.
My own impression of Vista was that it was more responsive that XP - especially under heavy load.
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To be honest I find little difference between Vista and OSX. I develop on both platforms actually. Both have elevation prompts, both have automatic updates turned on by default. Both require reboots for a good majority of updates. Both have had updates that have caused issues with 3rd party apps (Quicktime update breaking PPC emulation on Intel Macs is a good example - I actually can't remember an update recent memory that has caused any issues on Windows).
If OSX works for you better - great - arguing which one is better I think is getting harder and harder.
Me thinks you need to call technical support instead of writing articles on Slashdot and your blog. Reason? I use Vista and I have an uninstall button for all the programs I have installed - and I've installed all the latest patches.
Its actually true - he is on Edge Wireless. The Apple guy figured - since Edge is part of AT&T now it would work - not quite so.
There's something to this - Apple store employee told my friend that the iphone would work with his cell network (Edge Wireless - AT&T doesn't exist in his area...). Anyhow it doesn't work with his sim card. Reading more on the net it seems that Apple built in some software that checks for a special AT&T sim card. (yeah the iphone went back)
Forget the sealed batteries, non upgradable memory - to me perma-locking the phone into AT&T is the biggest crime about the iphone and I think should be grounds for an anti-trust suite. Maybe open phones are in?
If Microsoft had done this with a killer phone everyone had to have (yes - I know they don't have one...) everyone on Slashdot would be crying bloody murder.
Oddly enough my addiction to WoW has saved me all kinds of money - I actually have a running positive balance in my bank account where there was none before. I know its sad, but since I never go anywhere I'm not spending money on expensive toys, movies etc.
As far as the hardware race goes. WoW actually runs on just about anything pretty well. I've got a really brutal PC, but only because I used to be hooked on CSS and DoD. The game happens to run on my crappy laptop with integrated intel gfx.
Yet all they have is a character it's YOU who's making the assumption about how they acquired it. If someone has a maid then should they fire her because YOU assume they clean their ultra-clean house themselves?
When a lvl 70 holy paladin doesn't know that you need two people to summon from a meeting stone, and doesn't know that if they are holy they need to be healing the party - yeah they bought their character.
Thats the kind of player you have to be for me to make that assumption (and yes thats a real world example).
What is exactly wrong with him paying someone else to do this for him? To gain gold for him? To level a character for him?
One problem with this - and you run into this all the time in WoW is that people who pay for their accounts often don't have the experience to actually play the game in any meaningful way. You know the type - we invited you to do x in our instance run, but they didn't know they could do x - or they do it so poorly that you might have been better off without em.
Or lvl 70's that don't know how to get to places...
I mean are maids immoral to have now as well? House cleaners that come in once a weak? Gas station attendants? Car mechanics? Computer repairman? Lawyers? Accountans? Cooks? All of them are paid to do a task which someone else could do but for various reasons chooses to "outsource".
Bad comparison really - if I buy a lvl 70 character in WoW I'm making a false statement that "I did this", I know this character better than anyone and I can use this character to the best of my abilities - when its not true.
You don't hire a maid to clean your house, and then claim you know everything about cleaning your house? Or do you have a mechanic fix your car and claim to your friends that your an expert in cars?
If you hire a lawyer and he/she wins your case you're not going to claim your a legal expert are you?
Because you are doing all those things when you buy a character.
I know the grind sucks, and the game companies could obviously do stuff to make this better - but its there for a reason. To help teach you the mechanics of the game, and to help teach you how your character works. People who buy their accounts - unless they've been through the ranks several times usually really suck at the game itself.
I wouldn't be too suprised though... if Google's desktop search hooked into the same Indexing Service your suggesting people turn off :).
Yeah,
Um... re-read your quote - I'm pretty sure they are simply talking about the year/date selected.
I disagree that a trained monkey can do end game raid content in WoW. Last I heard there's only a handful of hardcore raiding guilds who have even stepped foot in The Eye in Tempest Keep - and so far none have defeated the final boss.
The guild I'm in (and this isn't too uncommon) hasn't even got to the end of Karazhan.
EQ was a timesink - nothing more nothing less. If anything WoW a good chunk of that and look where it left EQ... I honestly think most former EQ players (and I run into them all the time on WoW) left because they realized sleeping in shifts for a video game is stupid.
I actually haven't noticed any DRM technologies inhibiting my ability to play all my ripped movies and mp3 files on Vista - if anything the experience is improved over XP - I can even watch TV or DVD's while playing games. I suspect what your talking about is DRM included Microsoft Video/Audio technology and DRM included to play HD content - that actually only applies to content you purchase from 3rd parties who use that technology.
Guess what - your Macbook running OSX has just as much DRM in the same areas in fact.
Reason Linux has none of that is because its not being supported by Microsoft or Apple.
I'm a developer and I happen to have a Mac at work, but I really honestly couldn't tell you how much more productive or less productive I am because all the projects people want me to work on are on Windows. I rarely get to use it, but when I do it seems getting around the machine is much more tedious (browsing folders to launch apps, the goofy task bar etc).
How is UAC any different than the elevation prompts on OSX? The only difference is that OSX asks you for your password, UAC (while it can be configured in the same manner) assumes you want to skip typing in your password.
Ironically Continue/Cancel isn't all that much different than what the mac does. You can even change it so that it prompts for a password instead.
Flash supports mpeg 4 too. One thing people don't realize is that player on youtube is a full blown program streaming an flv file - which with Flash 9 can be encoded with HD quality codecs (like on2), all the way down to the stuff you see on youtube and google video.
One reason I think a lot of other standards haven't taken off is because there are little if no platforms to stream the video seamlessly. Flash is ubiquitous, and it is a platform you can build your custom video player around.
heh - I actually have one of those - always though of selling it on ebay to see what apple fanboy would want for it.
So show me a legal way to virtualize OSX on Windows/Linux?
Actually the lawyer who represented the supposedly raped woman is likely to be disbarred... > http://www.pr-inside.com/year-long-controversy-bas ed-on-faulty-accusation-r91234.htm
So two wrongs make a right?
Basically your saying that a wrong is a left right? So if you turned left at least 3 times at 90 deg intervals you would have a right. The US has at least done that many wrongs.
I run wow as a non unprivileged user - all you need actually is read/write access to the game folder.
Xbox live? Sure. No cheating there (yet) and that's good.
About a year ago I was watching a friend play counter-strike on the Xbox - it was a pain in the arse to play, but it had a global rating system. Right at the top with the most kills and 100% accuracy was a player called "xboxhacker" - and I'm not making this up.
Same here - I pretty much have bittorrent running 24/7 on my Comcast connection. I suspect they don't cut off people who have alternatives - in the Seattle area there are plenty.
But you yourself agree that it is a good thing - in other words - something vista did do right, even if apple etc has bee there before.
I don't think this is true actually - in a lot of ways Vista is quicker. For instance when I turned on my Vista machine today it was ready to go in literally seconds.
Low priority I/O makes it so a lot of tasks like backup, indexing and optimizing the disk can be done in the background with little to no impact to foreground apps.
As far as application performance, you can dumb down vista's ui, but even with Aero on I really honestly don't notice any performance difference between Vista and XP.
Its not like Microsoft is the only one to blame for this. My Mac for instance - default install eats 16+ gigs of disk space - way more than Vista. I recall my first Mac - ran off floppy disks.
When I first started running Linux I ran kernel 1.2.8 on a 386 with 4 megs of ram. It took a couple hours to compile the kernel (had a P90 that could compile it in what seemed like seconds).
Beside - who cares. I've got 2 gigs of ram in every computer I have - even my latop.
My own impression of Vista was that it was more responsive that XP - especially under heavy load.