Re:Enormous congratulations to them all
on
The Phoenix Has Landed
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Would you have said the same thing to people inventing the sailing ship all those moons ago?
"Oh, other than the feeling of putting people on another country, what's the point?"
It's attitudes like this, that are so very narrow and shallow minded that cause people to become insular and think only of their own back yard in all affairs.
Other than the scientific achievements in doing this, there is the overall good it does to the human spirit to see ourselves as a race be able to conquer the distances, to think of a huge problem like this and surmount it with science.
If it encourages kids to do more in the way of science rather than religious persecution etc., I'm all for it.
Enormous congratulations to them all
on
The Phoenix Has Landed
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
To have a successful landing of this sort on Mars is brilliant, and continues to build hope that there might be a manned mission there in my lifetime, I can only hope.
Ever since I read the Mars Trilogy (red, green, blue) I have really hoped that it could come true in some way like those books show. (not all the bad obviously)... I would love to see it start, I really would.
Oh come on, anyone who tries these little classifications... come on, face it, we're all nerds, we're all geeks, I don't really know anyone who uses the term dork any more, so perhaps that speaks volumes as to your status?
You can be a geek or a nerd or anything you like AND still have social skills...
I prefer the term geek for myself, but hey, don't get too bogged down with terms for god's sake, we all pursue things of a cerebral nature, be they maths, be they D&D, you getting so uppity with possibly being called not a nerd because you don't like Star Wars... that just shows you're just as big of a dick as the jocks who look down on all nerds and geeks and dorks, you're just refining down your scorning of people into finer subgroups.
That doesn't make you any better than the jocks, and in fact probably just a hypocrite.
Learn to be comfortable in yourself and don't mind what bucket you get thrown in this week, it doesn't matter... if you're happy with who you are and with your friends and family who gives two rat's fused arses what people call you?
Have you tried Windows Media Player 11? Seriously... I was a devout Winamp user once it got its media library, but started finding it a bit slow and really it is a bit painful to use really. But Windows Media player was never an option.
Then I gave WMP11 a try and I really haven't looked back. It has everything you want (well, I can't vouch for the ipod support, but it might do, always worth a try).
It may not be to your liking, but give it a try, I was a convert, but then I've always hated both the look and feel of iTunes, and the horrible way it installs a gazillion services and things which I just really DON'T WANT on my system.
"I had been using Mambo for years and switched to Joomla when they split apart (made sense to follow the original developers)"
Erm, except the original developers were the company Miro (huh, now called Rice Studios... ) The split were a bunch of Contributors, not the creators of the original codebase at all.
Mambo was originally a closed source CMS that went open source.
There was a shitstorm based on some decisions made by Miro in regards to the direction of the foundation set up to guide the codebase and so the split happened.
At least, that's how I thought it all occurred.
Miro definitely started the project so you didn't follow the original developers, just the lion's share of the open source contributors.
Why should the film focus on the same thing that the game did? You've got a rich world to mine there... the building of Rapture, the fall of Rapture, the discovery of Rapture (the rapture of Rapture?).
Basically, the game succeeded on one front, who's to say the movie won't come at the material from another angle and succeed brilliantly also?
Stop thinking in the narrow 'the movie must just be the game all over again' mindset. The game introduced a world, how they use the world in a movie is open for vast interpretation.
"It had a great engine that sold really well to the major customers - other games developers."
Really... so, let's see how many games used it?
So, let's look on Wikipedia for that... hmm, about a dozen game, wow... that's even less than I though.
And what about their competitor, the Unreal engine? I can't actually find a list of games, but companies that have licensed it include: Atari, Activision, Capcom, Disney, Konami, Koei, 2K Games, Midway, THQ, Ubisoft, Sega, Sony, Electronic Arts, Square Enix.
A high percentage of the best FPS games to come out recently use it... hell, even my kid's favourite show, Lazy Town, uses the engine to render the backgrounds.
The engine under the hood of Doom is a serious failure compared to others in the market, it was unweildy, not very scalable (as much as others would like to say it is, Unreal based games run far better on lower spec machines than that round of id tech games) and harder to create content for.
It failed in most ways compared to its peers.
Sure it made them money, and whoopdedoo for them, but I'm afraid Epic and the Unreal Engine has a monstrous slice of the market now, and the games that come out using it look and run superbly.
Ahh, see, people put Painkiller on a pedestal of 'bringing the fun back to FPS games', and I somewhat agree, I don't buy many games these days, but I got that as a bargain price, and enjoyed the hell out of it for a while.
But it kinda lost the thrill after a while, and I still haven't finished it.
But I COMPLETELY agree with what Doom 4 should be, just balls out over the top high tech fun... it would be AWESOME if they do that, but yeah, they say in the release "to bring the next installment of our flagship franchise to Earth"... does that mean they're setting it on earth? Cause, well, that might just be a terrible idea... "Let's make this game look and feel like pretty much every other shooter, that'd be GREAT!"
We can but hope it'll be brilliant, but id really hasn't done anything of real note for some time now.
The issue was that Doom 1 and 2 (2 was just 1 done better, but done so much closer to 1 that this was allowed) were such landmark games. Given so much time it was hoped and prayed for that Doom 3 would be another landmark game, really be a pinnacle of FPS fun.
But it wasn't.
It wasn't even the best of the lot out at the time.
It just made people think "Me, iD has kinda lost it a bit"
Bingo, that's what I was referring to, and what most reviewers and the public thought at the time.
It didn't do anything new or innovative (the original Doom WAS innovative in terms of pace and polish for a game at that time), it had huge requirements, and it was so incredibly dank, dark and dreary to look at.
No-one was particularly interested, it did nothing to make anyone sit up and take notice like the first one.
The Cnet one linked to above has a guy trying SO HARD to do a 'TV presenter's voice'... And noooow, liiiive from Hollywood coooomes some dick doing a TERRIBLE video review.
And is that the answer to everything is it? They can do anything that they feel like purely because they are not the dominant player... so all of Microsoft's underhanded playing early on when they weren't the dominant player is all excusable too is it?
It's ridiculous to try and use this insane rationale in regards to any company that's not Microsoft. At what point do you then start going 'well, actually I've decided they have enough market share now, NOW they should be ethical'
The issue with the Lenovo on planes is he's saying the screen is taller than the mac, so you can't open it out as much without it hitting the seat in front, but that's nothing to do with thickness.
Hang on a sec, you're being ridiculously pro Mac here and overlooking a lot of things:
Is thicker than MacBook Air. Winner: MacBook Air.
Really, who gives two craps about thickness... it's all marketing from Apple. Who has honestly gone "Gee wizz, this laptop is just too darn THICK for my needs!"? Pretty much no-one... where does it being super, super thin make for a big boon? Any bag you're going to carry said laptop in is going to be able to handle another centimeter or so... geeze.
Is heavier than MacBook Air. Winner: MacBook Air.
Weight does matter, indeed... but when it gets to a certain point, it doesn't any more, light enough is light enough, unless you have some sort of musculature atrophy that makes you unable to lift the heaviest version of the notebook at a whole... ooh, 3.5 pounds. Geeze... from his review: "is still very thin and light. It's under an inch thick and even at its heaviest is only 3.5 pounds." So, these points are just mindless waffle.
Has less battery life in both tests and normal use (so much for SSD.) Winner: MacBook Air.
This does indeed have baring on actual use, I give full points to this one.
Has way more ports. Winner: Lenovo X300.
This is very important, yet you just ignore the need for a large number of us to have different ports for different uses.
Has built-in DVD possibility. Winner: Lenovo X300.
YOU say "Whooptee doo." Big plus for me... my laptop MUST have a built in DVD drive as I use it as an entertainment station for the kids while we're away, and having a separate drive hanging off on a usb cable is a big NO NO. You also contradict yourself with for the Lenovo "You get to lug a DVD player", and yet for the Apple you say "you can bring along a USB powered DVD". Which is better, one that's in built, out of the way, doesn't need the external casing, or one hidden away in the body of the machine... if you NEED or WANT a DVD player (which a LOT of us still do), then it's a major failing to not have one in the unit. Yes, I can see certain people who'll have little need for one, but don't off handly say it's not a good thing.
Has SSD drive built-in. Winner: Lenovo X300.
YOU SAY "Smaller disk (with zero advantages on speed or battery)" which is ignoring the robustness of a solid state drive, nothing to do with speed/battery... missing the point entirely.
Has WiMax connectivity. Winner: Lenovo X300.
I like how you ignore this, which considering that the Apple lacks drives and needs to share others, would seem to be something it could do with, data transfer wise.
Has USB Wireless. Winner: Lenovo X300.
While this isn't widespread yet, how cool to not have to plug in new devices? Very nice.
Has GPS location-finding. Winner: Lenovo X300.
YOU say "Whooptee doo." Yeah, just discount something many, many people would find handy.
Has higher screen resolution. Winner: Lenovo X300.
You say "Whooptee doo." Again... um... higher resolution is a BIG plus for many people, yet you just discount it... well done.
Has a screen that stands up higher, leaving less viewing angle while travelling on plane. Winner: MacBook Air.
Yeah, valid point here, no two ways about that.
Has slower processor. Winner: MacBook Air.
Except "In my tests, the X300 performed very well, even though it has a relatively slow processor, slower than the MacBook's." So, a bit of a moot point it would seem.
Doesn't use Mac OS X Leopard. Winner: MacBook Air.
This SO doesn't apply to most people... SOME want OSX, OTHERS want Vista/XP, you can't put this as a carte blanch statement.
It comes down to what you want a laptop for... and looking at what YOU deem to be important and applying that to EVERYONE is such an immature attitude.
That's all well and good that it works for you, but I have a number of issues with the WAY it doesn't work for me:
a) It shows EVERYTHING FINE in the preview... doesn't even hint that there may be a problem. b) It burns and wastes a DVD BEFORE I find out it's decided to change the aspect ratio on me c) When it actually fails it does so with NO useful error message, not even in the Event log. Oh, sure there's a message but it says NOTHING as to the cause.
If it's going to have a problem, it should show me BEFOREHAND and let me know how to remedy it, NOT pretend everything is going to be fine and then stuff up.
I'm not the only one with these issues either, there are a number of forums with a number of people with the same issues. I've reported the failing one at least, to Microsoft via the Beta feedback system... but I doubt they'll fix it.
If you have a piece of software with a preview, you'd better have the preview show what's going to actually happen, lest it be useless.
Firstly, while you can buy iLife separately, it comes bundled with EVERY Mac, so it's in effect part of the OS. Yes you can uninstall it, which is great, but it's not much different to Microsoft bundling DVD Maker & Movie Maker with Windows.
Secondly, yeah, if you buy a Dell or the like you're going to end up with a bunch of different tools etc. pre installed. But I build my own PCs, so I'm always interested in what I get bundled with the OS. I feel an OS SHOULD come with at least the option of installing a DVD Maker, Media Player etc. because these are pretty much day-to-day uses for a PC these days.
So, sure Microsoft could make their own iLife like suite that can be purchased separately, but to be the same as Apple they must bundle it with every copy of the OS sold (or every Home Premium etc. version, leave it out of the Basic version so you can option to not pay for it if you don't want it).
Don't fear, they're not putting any 3rd party vendors out of business with DVD Maker just yet, it just doesn't work.
I've been running the SP1 Release Candidate for a while now and it has improved networking greatly (resuming from Sleep the network is available again immediately unlike pre SP1 where there was quite a lag), and on that front the network discovery and usage of my LAN is better than XP. (Machines are found more reliably and it all just works much more smoothly).
My biggest gripe with Vista has been the DVD Maker. I look upon OSX users with envy because of their iLife. I don't have HUGE needs for my digital media, but I would like to be able to throw one or more videos onto a DVD with a nice menu. I used to be able to do this without effort with Nero, but the version I have was an OEM that doesn't work with Vista.
So, I turned to what Vista has, and was thrilled to see DVD Maker, a simple program that seemed to do pretty much what I wanted and made really, really pretty menus with no hassle.
EXCEPT IT DOESN'T WORK.
I haven't had one successful DVD made using this dang thing.
I have tried burning DVDs with video taken straight from digital free to air tv (so already in DVD resolution and MPEG2 encoded), I've tried Divx files, I've tried everything. While you're creating the DVD in DVD Maker it shows EVERYTHING perfectly. If it burned the disc the way it SHOWED it in the program it'd all be fine... except what does it do?
One of two things: * Fail with cryptic error at 99% of burn process (except it actually hasn't even touched the blank DVD) OR * Burn the disc successfully, but turn all widescreen material into squished 4:3 content... leaving only beautiful 16:9 menus working correctly.
It's utterly infuriating and is the only thing that has made me want a Mac really... just iLife... if I could have that on Windows I'd be happy.
If a family wants to have more than the number of kids required to replace themselves, how do you stop that without introducing draconian laws such as in China? (with all the issues that's introduced).
I'm just not sure that spending a lot of resources on that would do anything, you're trying to stop a pretty basic right there.
It is a case though of... what can we do about it?
I have virtually no time to devote to any cause to get the word out, I spend all my time working and doing general home stuff for myself, wife and three boys...
Must think of some non time intensive ways of making this a far bigger priority for the government...
We're not great at it though... we have so much sunlight that we're a perfect location to use it more. Our government does give rebates for installing solar power, but not enough for it to be affordable for most of us. (I'd install it immediately if I could afford it).
We're also a great place for wind power and while there are a number of wind generator farms, companies have been pulling out due to lack of government investment in putting up more.
It's a sad and sorry state of affairs that things are not moving anywhere nearly as fast as they should be.
But it always comes down to cost... and it keeps being pushed that you must have single, huge power stations... why?
a) The cost should be born by the government by stripping some of the horrendously bloated military budget to do so. Why is there such a huge resistance to putting some REAL money into this from the government? b) Again, what's with the need to have a single, large power plant rather than distributed energy gatherers on people's homes? c) I never said that electric cars... I don't believe they're the answer at all until the electric grid is running off 'free' natural power sources. But how about we mandate that all new cars MUST meet some really tough targets that only hybrids or similarly frugal engines can meet... if its law then suddenly the car companies will somehow just come out with amazing tech they've never shown us. d) I think that kittens probably would be an inefficient fuel... now those little handbag dogs, they might work a bit better.
We have solar, we have wind, we have the tech for them all. We have the ability already to put solar panels on the roof of your home and push power back onto the grid, lessening the load and getting energy credits ALREADY.
It's all there... all that needs to happen is the initial investment to put them out there.
Imagine HOW MUCH less we'd be dependent on the existing power stations if we did this? Governments just need to invest in it... and alternate power for cars...
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Would you have said the same thing to people inventing the sailing ship all those moons ago?
"Oh, other than the feeling of putting people on another country, what's the point?"
It's attitudes like this, that are so very narrow and shallow minded that cause people to become insular and think only of their own back yard in all affairs.
Other than the scientific achievements in doing this, there is the overall good it does to the human spirit to see ourselves as a race be able to conquer the distances, to think of a huge problem like this and surmount it with science.
If it encourages kids to do more in the way of science rather than religious persecution etc., I'm all for it.
To have a successful landing of this sort on Mars is brilliant, and continues to build hope that there might be a manned mission there in my lifetime, I can only hope.
Ever since I read the Mars Trilogy (red, green, blue) I have really hoped that it could come true in some way like those books show. (not all the bad obviously)... I would love to see it start, I really would.
Oh come on, anyone who tries these little classifications... come on, face it, we're all nerds, we're all geeks, I don't really know anyone who uses the term dork any more, so perhaps that speaks volumes as to your status?
You can be a geek or a nerd or anything you like AND still have social skills...
I prefer the term geek for myself, but hey, don't get too bogged down with terms for god's sake, we all pursue things of a cerebral nature, be they maths, be they D&D, you getting so uppity with possibly being called not a nerd because you don't like Star Wars... that just shows you're just as big of a dick as the jocks who look down on all nerds and geeks and dorks, you're just refining down your scorning of people into finer subgroups.
That doesn't make you any better than the jocks, and in fact probably just a hypocrite.
Learn to be comfortable in yourself and don't mind what bucket you get thrown in this week, it doesn't matter... if you're happy with who you are and with your friends and family who gives two rat's fused arses what people call you?
Have you tried Windows Media Player 11? Seriously... I was a devout Winamp user once it got its media library, but started finding it a bit slow and really it is a bit painful to use really. But Windows Media player was never an option.
Then I gave WMP11 a try and I really haven't looked back. It has everything you want (well, I can't vouch for the ipod support, but it might do, always worth a try).
It may not be to your liking, but give it a try, I was a convert, but then I've always hated both the look and feel of iTunes, and the horrible way it installs a gazillion services and things which I just really DON'T WANT on my system.
"I had been using Mambo for years and switched to Joomla when they split apart (made sense to follow the original developers)"
Erm, except the original developers were the company Miro (huh, now called Rice Studios... ) The split were a bunch of Contributors, not the creators of the original codebase at all.
Mambo was originally a closed source CMS that went open source.
There was a shitstorm based on some decisions made by Miro in regards to the direction of the foundation set up to guide the codebase and so the split happened.
At least, that's how I thought it all occurred.
Miro definitely started the project so you didn't follow the original developers, just the lion's share of the open source contributors.
I asked 'Where do babies come from' and it just gave me back a bunch of articles with that string somewhere in their text.
Pathetic, and you'd hope it's got a long way to go really because at the moment it does NOTHING of merit that I can see.
Why should the film focus on the same thing that the game did? You've got a rich world to mine there... the building of Rapture, the fall of Rapture, the discovery of Rapture (the rapture of Rapture?).
Basically, the game succeeded on one front, who's to say the movie won't come at the material from another angle and succeed brilliantly also?
Stop thinking in the narrow 'the movie must just be the game all over again' mindset. The game introduced a world, how they use the world in a movie is open for vast interpretation.
I enjoyed all three movies, and I've watched all the making of stuff on the discs. HE DEFINITELY DIRECTED ALL THREE MOVIES
Where do people get this shit that they spout as fact?
"It had a great engine that sold really well to the major customers - other games developers."
Really... so, let's see how many games used it?
So, let's look on Wikipedia for that... hmm, about a dozen game, wow... that's even less than I though.
And what about their competitor, the Unreal engine? I can't actually find a list of games, but companies that have licensed it include: Atari, Activision, Capcom, Disney, Konami, Koei, 2K Games, Midway, THQ, Ubisoft, Sega, Sony, Electronic Arts, Square Enix.
A high percentage of the best FPS games to come out recently use it... hell, even my kid's favourite show, Lazy Town, uses the engine to render the backgrounds.
The engine under the hood of Doom is a serious failure compared to others in the market, it was unweildy, not very scalable (as much as others would like to say it is, Unreal based games run far better on lower spec machines than that round of id tech games) and harder to create content for.
It failed in most ways compared to its peers.
Sure it made them money, and whoopdedoo for them, but I'm afraid Epic and the Unreal Engine has a monstrous slice of the market now, and the games that come out using it look and run superbly.
Ahh, see, people put Painkiller on a pedestal of 'bringing the fun back to FPS games', and I somewhat agree, I don't buy many games these days, but I got that as a bargain price, and enjoyed the hell out of it for a while.
But it kinda lost the thrill after a while, and I still haven't finished it.
But I COMPLETELY agree with what Doom 4 should be, just balls out over the top high tech fun... it would be AWESOME if they do that, but yeah, they say in the release "to bring the next installment of our flagship franchise to Earth"... does that mean they're setting it on earth? Cause, well, that might just be a terrible idea... "Let's make this game look and feel like pretty much every other shooter, that'd be GREAT!"
We can but hope it'll be brilliant, but id really hasn't done anything of real note for some time now.
The issue was that Doom 1 and 2 (2 was just 1 done better, but done so much closer to 1 that this was allowed) were such landmark games. Given so much time it was hoped and prayed for that Doom 3 would be another landmark game, really be a pinnacle of FPS fun.
But it wasn't.
It wasn't even the best of the lot out at the time.
It just made people think "Me, iD has kinda lost it a bit"
And that made a lot of us sad.
Bingo, that's what I was referring to, and what most reviewers and the public thought at the time.
It didn't do anything new or innovative (the original Doom WAS innovative in terms of pace and polish for a game at that time), it had huge requirements, and it was so incredibly dank, dark and dreary to look at.
No-one was particularly interested, it did nothing to make anyone sit up and take notice like the first one.
The Cnet one linked to above has a guy trying SO HARD to do a 'TV presenter's voice'... And noooow, liiiive from Hollywood coooomes some dick doing a TERRIBLE video review.
Urgh, stick to text.
And is that the answer to everything is it? They can do anything that they feel like purely because they are not the dominant player... so all of Microsoft's underhanded playing early on when they weren't the dominant player is all excusable too is it?
It's ridiculous to try and use this insane rationale in regards to any company that's not Microsoft. At what point do you then start going 'well, actually I've decided they have enough market share now, NOW they should be ethical'
Bar and truly humbug
Errr. nope.
The issue with the Lenovo on planes is he's saying the screen is taller than the mac, so you can't open it out as much without it hitting the seat in front, but that's nothing to do with thickness.
It's not an issue.
Hang on a sec, you're being ridiculously pro Mac here and overlooking a lot of things:
Is thicker than MacBook Air. Winner: MacBook Air.
Really, who gives two craps about thickness... it's all marketing from Apple. Who has honestly gone "Gee wizz, this laptop is just too darn THICK for my needs!"? Pretty much no-one... where does it being super, super thin make for a big boon? Any bag you're going to carry said laptop in is going to be able to handle another centimeter or so... geeze.
Is heavier than MacBook Air. Winner: MacBook Air.
Weight does matter, indeed... but when it gets to a certain point, it doesn't any more, light enough is light enough, unless you have some sort of musculature atrophy that makes you unable to lift the heaviest version of the notebook at a whole... ooh, 3.5 pounds. Geeze... from his review: "is still very thin and light. It's under an inch thick and even at its heaviest is only 3.5 pounds." So, these points are just mindless waffle.
Has less battery life in both tests and normal use (so much for SSD.) Winner: MacBook Air.
This does indeed have baring on actual use, I give full points to this one.
Has way more ports. Winner: Lenovo X300.
This is very important, yet you just ignore the need for a large number of us to have different ports for different uses.
Has built-in DVD possibility. Winner: Lenovo X300.
YOU say "Whooptee doo." Big plus for me... my laptop MUST have a built in DVD drive as I use it as an entertainment station for the kids while we're away, and having a separate drive hanging off on a usb cable is a big NO NO. You also contradict yourself with for the Lenovo "You get to lug a DVD player", and yet for the Apple you say "you can bring along a USB powered DVD". Which is better, one that's in built, out of the way, doesn't need the external casing, or one hidden away in the body of the machine... if you NEED or WANT a DVD player (which a LOT of us still do), then it's a major failing to not have one in the unit. Yes, I can see certain people who'll have little need for one, but don't off handly say it's not a good thing.
Has SSD drive built-in. Winner: Lenovo X300.
YOU SAY "Smaller disk (with zero advantages on speed or battery)" which is ignoring the robustness of a solid state drive, nothing to do with speed/battery... missing the point entirely.
Has WiMax connectivity. Winner: Lenovo X300.
I like how you ignore this, which considering that the Apple lacks drives and needs to share others, would seem to be something it could do with, data transfer wise.
Has USB Wireless. Winner: Lenovo X300.
While this isn't widespread yet, how cool to not have to plug in new devices? Very nice.
Has GPS location-finding. Winner: Lenovo X300.
YOU say "Whooptee doo." Yeah, just discount something many, many people would find handy.
Has higher screen resolution. Winner: Lenovo X300.
You say "Whooptee doo." Again... um... higher resolution is a BIG plus for many people, yet you just discount it... well done.
Has a screen that stands up higher, leaving less viewing angle while travelling on plane. Winner: MacBook Air.
Yeah, valid point here, no two ways about that.
Has slower processor. Winner: MacBook Air.
Except "In my tests, the X300 performed very well, even though it has a relatively slow processor, slower than the MacBook's." So, a bit of a moot point it would seem.
Doesn't use Mac OS X Leopard. Winner: MacBook Air.
This SO doesn't apply to most people... SOME want OSX, OTHERS want Vista/XP, you can't put this as a carte blanch statement.
It comes down to what you want a laptop for... and looking at what YOU deem to be important and applying that to EVERYONE is such an immature attitude.
Ahh, but I've done that already via... erm... some nice little program I found, can't remember the name of it, converted it to a standard MPEG file.
It's infuriating that throughout the process the program thinks it's all going ok until the very end. Very frustrating.
That's all well and good that it works for you, but I have a number of issues with the WAY it doesn't work for me:
a) It shows EVERYTHING FINE in the preview... doesn't even hint that there may be a problem.
b) It burns and wastes a DVD BEFORE I find out it's decided to change the aspect ratio on me
c) When it actually fails it does so with NO useful error message, not even in the Event log. Oh, sure there's a message but it says NOTHING as to the cause.
If it's going to have a problem, it should show me BEFOREHAND and let me know how to remedy it, NOT pretend everything is going to be fine and then stuff up.
I'm not the only one with these issues either, there are a number of forums with a number of people with the same issues. I've reported the failing one at least, to Microsoft via the Beta feedback system... but I doubt they'll fix it.
If you have a piece of software with a preview, you'd better have the preview show what's going to actually happen, lest it be useless.
I'm not sure I agree with you.
Firstly, while you can buy iLife separately, it comes bundled with EVERY Mac, so it's in effect part of the OS. Yes you can uninstall it, which is great, but it's not much different to Microsoft bundling DVD Maker & Movie Maker with Windows.
Secondly, yeah, if you buy a Dell or the like you're going to end up with a bunch of different tools etc. pre installed. But I build my own PCs, so I'm always interested in what I get bundled with the OS. I feel an OS SHOULD come with at least the option of installing a DVD Maker, Media Player etc. because these are pretty much day-to-day uses for a PC these days.
So, sure Microsoft could make their own iLife like suite that can be purchased separately, but to be the same as Apple they must bundle it with every copy of the OS sold (or every Home Premium etc. version, leave it out of the Basic version so you can option to not pay for it if you don't want it).
Don't fear, they're not putting any 3rd party vendors out of business with DVD Maker just yet, it just doesn't work.
I've been running the SP1 Release Candidate for a while now and it has improved networking greatly (resuming from Sleep the network is available again immediately unlike pre SP1 where there was quite a lag), and on that front the network discovery and usage of my LAN is better than XP. (Machines are found more reliably and it all just works much more smoothly).
My biggest gripe with Vista has been the DVD Maker. I look upon OSX users with envy because of their iLife. I don't have HUGE needs for my digital media, but I would like to be able to throw one or more videos onto a DVD with a nice menu. I used to be able to do this without effort with Nero, but the version I have was an OEM that doesn't work with Vista.
So, I turned to what Vista has, and was thrilled to see DVD Maker, a simple program that seemed to do pretty much what I wanted and made really, really pretty menus with no hassle.
EXCEPT IT DOESN'T WORK.
I haven't had one successful DVD made using this dang thing.
I have tried burning DVDs with video taken straight from digital free to air tv (so already in DVD resolution and MPEG2 encoded), I've tried Divx files, I've tried everything. While you're creating the DVD in DVD Maker it shows EVERYTHING perfectly. If it burned the disc the way it SHOWED it in the program it'd all be fine... except what does it do?
One of two things:
* Fail with cryptic error at 99% of burn process (except it actually hasn't even touched the blank DVD)
OR
* Burn the disc successfully, but turn all widescreen material into squished 4:3 content... leaving only beautiful 16:9 menus working correctly.
It's utterly infuriating and is the only thing that has made me want a Mac really... just iLife... if I could have that on Windows I'd be happy.
How do you do it?
I mean, how do you stop women having kids?
If a family wants to have more than the number of kids required to replace themselves, how do you stop that without introducing draconian laws such as in China? (with all the issues that's introduced).
I'm just not sure that spending a lot of resources on that would do anything, you're trying to stop a pretty basic right there.
I'm glad at least one person sees it as I do.
It is a case though of... what can we do about it?
I have virtually no time to devote to any cause to get the word out, I spend all my time working and doing general home stuff for myself, wife and three boys...
Must think of some non time intensive ways of making this a far bigger priority for the government...
We're not great at it though... we have so much sunlight that we're a perfect location to use it more. Our government does give rebates for installing solar power, but not enough for it to be affordable for most of us. (I'd install it immediately if I could afford it).
We're also a great place for wind power and while there are a number of wind generator farms, companies have been pulling out due to lack of government investment in putting up more.
It's a sad and sorry state of affairs that things are not moving anywhere nearly as fast as they should be.
But it always comes down to cost... and it keeps being pushed that you must have single, huge power stations... why?
a) The cost should be born by the government by stripping some of the horrendously bloated military budget to do so. Why is there such a huge resistance to putting some REAL money into this from the government?
b) Again, what's with the need to have a single, large power plant rather than distributed energy gatherers on people's homes?
c) I never said that electric cars... I don't believe they're the answer at all until the electric grid is running off 'free' natural power sources. But how about we mandate that all new cars MUST meet some really tough targets that only hybrids or similarly frugal engines can meet... if its law then suddenly the car companies will somehow just come out with amazing tech they've never shown us.
d) I think that kittens probably would be an inefficient fuel... now those little handbag dogs, they might work a bit better.
But what I stated wasn't new technologies at all.
We have solar, we have wind, we have the tech for them all. We have the ability already to put solar panels on the roof of your home and push power back onto the grid, lessening the load and getting energy credits ALREADY.
It's all there... all that needs to happen is the initial investment to put them out there.
Imagine HOW MUCH less we'd be dependent on the existing power stations if we did this? Governments just need to invest in it... and alternate power for cars...