Creative Labs actually shipped the 3DO Blaster in the mid 90s. They succeeded in making what was probably the biggest, most expensive ISA card available at the time. It was basically all the fiscal disadvantages of the 3DO price point combined with all the technical disadvantages of turning your computer into a Frankenstein game console. What a great idea!
There's some great stuff out, especially if you go online... MechAssault, Ghost Recon, all the Sega Sports games are solid, Rallisport, Project Gotham. Give you local used game retailer another shot.
I'm guess it's because releasing 30 games for $40 could really hurt their bottom line, since one of the main thing that drives new game sales is that you've played through your existing games already. If you've got hundreds of hours of gameplay for $40, what's the incentive for you to buy more games?
I'm not saying I agree, but I imagine that's what's preventing Nintendo from putting every Super Mario game onto a single disc. You might never have to buy a game again.
Does anyone else find these MS offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?
Please. If Steve Jobs had introduced an iMac that allowed you to pop off the screen and carry it around the house with you wirelessly, the Mac faithful would have drowned in a sea of their own drool.
Worm Light is a nice add-on, but I was never able to deal with the glare. You'd always get this really hot spot of light near the top of the screen. If you play with the angles enough, you could get it so that it didn't interfere, but it always seemed a little half baked. Directable lamps are definitely the only way to go.
GameGear was a great unit, but it took SIX AA batteries. Count 'em. SIX.
Nintendo's always placed a premium on battery life, so this isn't that surprising. I would have thought they would have done a sidelighting, like an iPaq, but this is an interesting development for them.
Parents across the country are, I'm sure, breathing a sigh of relief about the rechargable battery pack (while Duracell's stock takes a dive)...
Studio MX includes HomeSite+ (which has all the functionality of ColdFusion Studio and Homesite 5) as a toss-in, though they're definitely trying to get people to use Dreamweaver as a code editor.
Don't worry, though... it's still in the package. I think they know that there are a lot of us that don't use wysiwyg editors for code editing.
Ah, right you are. Anyway, $800 is still hundreds of dollars more than an equivalent PC (after all, the CRT iMac's hardware is getting pretty vintage).
My mistake, but my point still remains. The music isn't free -- you *do* pay for it.
That's why Apple doesn't offer a machine -- even an old CRT iMac -- for less than $900. You don't think that music is really *free*, do you? Trust me, you're paying for it, whether you want to or not.
I understand your point, but I think you're just splitting hairs with me. Most home users buy XP home because the few things that XP pro lets you do. For them, XP is cheaper. For people who need the "pro" features of XP, it costs a little more. Either way, they're all within throwing distance of each other. I'm not sure it's fair to call XP Home an "anomaly" since it's the biggest selling version of Windows by far.
Even with your comparison of software prices, you're ignoring the fact that Apple builds the cost of its software into its hardware. When you're buying a boxed copy of OS X server, you're adding it to a machine that already has the (ahem) Apple tax built-in.
As for used Macs, I still don't quite understand your point. Any Mac that has ever been sold has been sold with a copy of MacOS [something]. Just because you buy it used with no OS doesn't mean that Apple didn't sell it with one. Since the OS is tied to the hardware, yes, upgrading from OS 8.6 or 9.1 to X is an "upgrade."
Agreed that it's a totally semantic argument.
Put another way, the least expensive new Windows machine is about $300. The least expensive new Mac is about $900. Either Apple's hardware is 3x the cost of the PC hardware, or you're paying extra for built-in costs (like bundled iApps or the operating system). Shouldn't people be making the same complaints about Mac hardware/software not declining in price in concert with PC hardware/software?
2: The price the market will bear is dictated by Microsoft defining the market, I speculate. If not for Microsoft setting the price for XP and 2k at $150 for upgrades and $250 for full versions (or whatever the price really is), then Apple and RedHat would not price the way they do.
To use an example, Sony prices at $400 for a TV. JVC wants to sell a TV, but because it doesn't have the name Sony does, it has to price lower in order to make any sort of sale, for similar features.
That's my point, though. RedHat and Apple (presumably the JVCs of this analogy) *don't* sell their products for appreciably less than Microsoft. $149 for RedHat Pro and $129 for OS X is right in line with $99 for XP home and $199 for XP pro.
There are Macs that don't come with OS X 10.2, 10.1, 10.0, or OS 9.
Um... no, not really. I just clicked through all of the G4 towers, Powerbook G4s, iBooks, iMacs and iServes on the Apple site and every one of them came with a MacOS operating system. Apple's never sold systems without a bundled OS.
1. The manufacture of software is much more than just pressing a CD. Programmers aren't cheap and, thanks to ongoing support and development, keeping a piece of software up-to-date remains expensive.
On the hardware side, once you've designed, say, a USB 2.0 chipset, you can license it and build millions of them at, incrementally, a very low cost, and the design might not change substantially for years. They're two separate businesses, and it's not really rational to say that, since hardware is getting cheaper, software should be too.
2. Sorry, but that just doesn't make sense. Maybe OS X and RedHat are priced that way because that's the price the market will bear for an OS. MS doesn't *make* anyone sell competing products for the same amount (or more).
My point about OS X was that there are no full *licenses*. What I'm getting at is that OS X only runs on Macs. If you've bought a Mac, you've bought a copy of OS 8/9/X. Therefore, the only thing you can install is an upgrade -- the only use for a so-called "full" version would be on a machine on which you don't already have a copy of OS 8/9/X which is, thanks to the Mac's closed architecture, not possible.
3. Not sure what you're getting at here. All I'm saying is that the cost of an OEM product is often substantially less than the cost of a retail product.
1. The costs involved in manufacturing hardware are very different from the costs in manufacturing software. Considering how much more complexity and how many more features operating systems have than they did in the past (browsers, media players, TCP/IP stacks, etc. all used to be separate purchases), current prices aren't especially high.
2. As long as OS X is selling, as an upgrade (there are, after all, no "full versions" of OS X because you have to have purchased it with hardware) at $129 and RedHat Professional is selling at $149, $99-$199 upgrades for Windows (which most end users don't actually near that much because they get OEM) will continue to be the norm.
3. Dell, Gateway, etc. don't pay nearly $100 for OEM copies of Windows. More like $40.
I totally understand your point; it's just that you're saying two different things.
To say that it's illegal to play DVDs on Linux is untrue -- you just have to go through the same process every other company does and pay the DVD decoder license.
To your second point, yes, the product couldn't be freely distributed, but that a different issue! If it's important to you, why wouldn't you pay a company a couple bucks to develop it (and the DVD decoder license)? I don't see how it's that different from any of the good closed-source Linux packages that people see fit to pay for (admittedly there are few, but if this is something you really want, why not just pay for it?).
This is not a case of Linux being picked on; it's a case of Linux having to play by the rules of the rest of the world. If Linux users were willing to pay for it, they'd get it.
To play DVDs on Linux, you need to break the law, in America and soon elsewhere as well.
That's not true. To play DVDs on Linux FOR FREE, you need to break the law. There'd be nothing illegal against someone creating a closed-source DVD player that actually went through the trouble of licensing the DVD decoder, like every other software entity has to do.
If it was important enough to enough people who would drop $20 on it, you'd see a commercial Linux DVD player overnight.
You're missing my point. iTunes cared not what was on the device and ERASED EVERYTHING ON IT WITHOUT WARNING. Regardless of what I was doing, my opinion is that good software shouldn't wipe clean a device attached to it.
People make mistakes and it's the job of a good programmer to plan for them, I think? I mean, the same thing happened to a friend of mine, so it's not like I'm uniquely foolish here. I didn't do anything unusual with the device -- I just added music from a different computer.
Actually, I had used the iPod in my PC at home via EphPod, which didn't require me to "lock" it to the computer. So when I brought it back to work, it said, "Hey, I know this iPod!" and proceeded to wipe it clean because it thought the iPod "belonged" to it.
Maybe I'm an unusual case, but it seems like the software should be a little smarter than that. At any rate, it's Apple's default sync behavior that screwed me. You could say it was "my fault," but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has made the "mistake" of thinking I could use my iPod on a Mac and a PC without having it erased without warning.
Thanks, but that was the way it came out of the box. I didn't set anything. I've since changed that behavior and all's well, but that's a really stupid and destructive default behavior. How about a dialogue box: "I'm about to delete 6 GB from this iPod and replace it with the dozen or so songs in this library. Are you sure that's what you want?"
Yeah, Apple's DRM stance is so consumer-friendly that I deleted all the music on my iPod by -- get this -- plugging it into another Mac! No warning, no dialogue, no music.
Happened to a friend of mine too... 6 GB of music wiped out. That's not what I call user-friendly.
It's actually at the root of the Start Menu and has been added to the left-hand nav of the Add/Remove Programs dialogue. I looked at it and it seemed fairly free of threats. You can say, "Use Microsoft programs," "Use current programs" or "Custom."
And also, I hate the X-box. Because of the reason microsoft got into the market: only to cash in, not to make quality games. Because of the lack of good games for it. Because of the controllers.
Ah... the bias comes out. I hate to burst your bubble, but I'm sure Sony's doing it for the money, too... you honestly think they make game consoles because the shareholders like "quality games"? What next, they make audio receivers because the engineers want to listen to loud, clear music?
Wake up, dude: Sony is a big ol' megacorp, just like Microsoft (except over a much broader range of products). Fine, if you prefer one platform over another, but let's not go nuts on the rationale.
And speaking of the PS2: Sony, on the other hand, doesn't care if people pirate games for their systems. Why? They make money on the hardware. To play pirated playstation games, you first have to have a playstation. Any rumor that Sony lost money on the playstation or ps2 hardware is bull. They make the thing, and they make money on it.
... is horse pocky. If you think that Sony cares any less than Microsoft about the huge profits they make on a successful piece of game software, you're fooling yourself. The small amount they make on an individual console pales in comparison to what they make on the 6-8 games the average user buys in a year.
In other words, if I buy a computer from Dell that comes with Windows XP, and I format the hard drive and install Linux, then take the Windows XP CD (which Dell wouldn't send me anyway) and install it on another computer, I've violting the EULA.
Which, in my mind, is total bitchcake. And part of the reason I use a Mac.
Not to split hairs with you here, but I'd be really surprised if Apple's EULA allows you to move your copy of the MacOS from machine to machine. There are lots of reasons to use a Mac, but I'm not sure that Apple's operating system policies (try buying a Mac without the MacOS) are one of them.
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Creative Labs actually shipped the 3DO Blaster in the mid 90s. They succeeded in making what was probably the biggest, most expensive ISA card available at the time. It was basically all the fiscal disadvantages of the 3DO price point combined with all the technical disadvantages of turning your computer into a Frankenstein game console. What a great idea!
Three words for you: Grand Theft Auto.
MS is just playing the game the way it's played by its competitors. You may not like it, and it may suck, but there you go.
There's some great stuff out, especially if you go online... MechAssault, Ghost Recon, all the Sega Sports games are solid, Rallisport, Project Gotham. Give you local used game retailer another shot.
I'm guess it's because releasing 30 games for $40 could really hurt their bottom line, since one of the main thing that drives new game sales is that you've played through your existing games already. If you've got hundreds of hours of gameplay for $40, what's the incentive for you to buy more games?
I'm not saying I agree, but I imagine that's what's preventing Nintendo from putting every Super Mario game onto a single disc. You might never have to buy a game again.
Does anyone else find these MS offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?
Please. If Steve Jobs had introduced an iMac that allowed you to pop off the screen and carry it around the house with you wirelessly, the Mac faithful would have drowned in a sea of their own drool.
Worm Light is a nice add-on, but I was never able to deal with the glare. You'd always get this really hot spot of light near the top of the screen. If you play with the angles enough, you could get it so that it didn't interfere, but it always seemed a little half baked. Directable lamps are definitely the only way to go.
GameGear was a great unit, but it took SIX AA batteries. Count 'em. SIX.
Nintendo's always placed a premium on battery life, so this isn't that surprising. I would have thought they would have done a sidelighting, like an iPaq, but this is an interesting development for them.
Parents across the country are, I'm sure, breathing a sigh of relief about the rechargable battery pack (while Duracell's stock takes a dive)...
Right... you have to call MS and say, "I got a new computer." They then issue you a new code.
They're trying to stop wholesale copying of their software, not stopping you from installing it on a machine you have a legal right to install it to.
Raise your hand if you've made an illegal copy of Windows at some point in the last decade. That's why they're concerned.
Studio MX includes HomeSite+ (which has all the functionality of ColdFusion Studio and Homesite 5) as a toss-in, though they're definitely trying to get people to use Dreamweaver as a code editor.
Don't worry, though... it's still in the package. I think they know that there are a lot of us that don't use wysiwyg editors for code editing.
Ah, right you are. Anyway, $800 is still hundreds of dollars more than an equivalent PC (after all, the CRT iMac's hardware is getting pretty vintage).
My mistake, but my point still remains. The music isn't free -- you *do* pay for it.
That's why Apple doesn't offer a machine -- even an old CRT iMac -- for less than $900. You don't think that music is really *free*, do you? Trust me, you're paying for it, whether you want to or not.
I understand your point, but I think you're just splitting hairs with me. Most home users buy XP home because the few things that XP pro lets you do. For them, XP is cheaper. For people who need the "pro" features of XP, it costs a little more. Either way, they're all within throwing distance of each other. I'm not sure it's fair to call XP Home an "anomaly" since it's the biggest selling version of Windows by far.
Even with your comparison of software prices, you're ignoring the fact that Apple builds the cost of its software into its hardware. When you're buying a boxed copy of OS X server, you're adding it to a machine that already has the (ahem) Apple tax built-in.
As for used Macs, I still don't quite understand your point. Any Mac that has ever been sold has been sold with a copy of MacOS [something]. Just because you buy it used with no OS doesn't mean that Apple didn't sell it with one. Since the OS is tied to the hardware, yes, upgrading from OS 8.6 or 9.1 to X is an "upgrade."
Agreed that it's a totally semantic argument.
Put another way, the least expensive new Windows machine is about $300. The least expensive new Mac is about $900. Either Apple's hardware is 3x the cost of the PC hardware, or you're paying extra for built-in costs (like bundled iApps or the operating system). Shouldn't people be making the same complaints about Mac hardware/software not declining in price in concert with PC hardware/software?
2: The price the market will bear is dictated by Microsoft defining the market, I speculate. If not for Microsoft setting the price for XP and 2k at $150 for upgrades and $250 for full versions (or whatever the price really is), then Apple and RedHat would not price the way they do.
To use an example, Sony prices at $400 for a TV. JVC wants to sell a TV, but because it doesn't have the name Sony does, it has to price lower in order to make any sort of sale, for similar features.
That's my point, though. RedHat and Apple (presumably the JVCs of this analogy) *don't* sell their products for appreciably less than Microsoft. $149 for RedHat Pro and $129 for OS X is right in line with $99 for XP home and $199 for XP pro.
There are Macs that don't come with OS X 10.2, 10.1, 10.0, or OS 9.
Um... no, not really. I just clicked through all of the G4 towers, Powerbook G4s, iBooks, iMacs and iServes on the Apple site and every one of them came with a MacOS operating system. Apple's never sold systems without a bundled OS.
1. The manufacture of software is much more than just pressing a CD. Programmers aren't cheap and, thanks to ongoing support and development, keeping a piece of software up-to-date remains expensive.
On the hardware side, once you've designed, say, a USB 2.0 chipset, you can license it and build millions of them at, incrementally, a very low cost, and the design might not change substantially for years. They're two separate businesses, and it's not really rational to say that, since hardware is getting cheaper, software should be too.
2. Sorry, but that just doesn't make sense. Maybe OS X and RedHat are priced that way because that's the price the market will bear for an OS. MS doesn't *make* anyone sell competing products for the same amount (or more).
My point about OS X was that there are no full *licenses*. What I'm getting at is that OS X only runs on Macs. If you've bought a Mac, you've bought a copy of OS 8/9/X. Therefore, the only thing you can install is an upgrade -- the only use for a so-called "full" version would be on a machine on which you don't already have a copy of OS 8/9/X which is, thanks to the Mac's closed architecture, not possible.
3. Not sure what you're getting at here. All I'm saying is that the cost of an OEM product is often substantially less than the cost of a retail product.
1. The costs involved in manufacturing hardware are very different from the costs in manufacturing software. Considering how much more complexity and how many more features operating systems have than they did in the past (browsers, media players, TCP/IP stacks, etc. all used to be separate purchases), current prices aren't especially high.
2. As long as OS X is selling, as an upgrade (there are, after all, no "full versions" of OS X because you have to have purchased it with hardware) at $129 and RedHat Professional is selling at $149, $99-$199 upgrades for Windows (which most end users don't actually near that much because they get OEM) will continue to be the norm.
3. Dell, Gateway, etc. don't pay nearly $100 for OEM copies of Windows. More like $40.
I totally understand your point; it's just that you're saying two different things.
To say that it's illegal to play DVDs on Linux is untrue -- you just have to go through the same process every other company does and pay the DVD decoder license.
To your second point, yes, the product couldn't be freely distributed, but that a different issue! If it's important to you, why wouldn't you pay a company a couple bucks to develop it (and the DVD decoder license)? I don't see how it's that different from any of the good closed-source Linux packages that people see fit to pay for (admittedly there are few, but if this is something you really want, why not just pay for it?).
This is not a case of Linux being picked on; it's a case of Linux having to play by the rules of the rest of the world. If Linux users were willing to pay for it, they'd get it.
To play DVDs on Linux, you need to break the law, in America and soon elsewhere as well.
That's not true. To play DVDs on Linux FOR FREE, you need to break the law. There'd be nothing illegal against someone creating a closed-source DVD player that actually went through the trouble of licensing the DVD decoder, like every other software entity has to do.
If it was important enough to enough people who would drop $20 on it, you'd see a commercial Linux DVD player overnight.
You're missing my point. iTunes cared not what was on the device and ERASED EVERYTHING ON IT WITHOUT WARNING. Regardless of what I was doing, my opinion is that good software shouldn't wipe clean a device attached to it.
People make mistakes and it's the job of a good programmer to plan for them, I think? I mean, the same thing happened to a friend of mine, so it's not like I'm uniquely foolish here. I didn't do anything unusual with the device -- I just added music from a different computer.
Actually, I had used the iPod in my PC at home via EphPod, which didn't require me to "lock" it to the computer. So when I brought it back to work, it said, "Hey, I know this iPod!" and proceeded to wipe it clean because it thought the iPod "belonged" to it.
Maybe I'm an unusual case, but it seems like the software should be a little smarter than that. At any rate, it's Apple's default sync behavior that screwed me. You could say it was "my fault," but I'm sure I'm not the only one who has made the "mistake" of thinking I could use my iPod on a Mac and a PC without having it erased without warning.
Thanks, but that was the way it came out of the box. I didn't set anything. I've since changed that behavior and all's well, but that's a really stupid and destructive default behavior. How about a dialogue box: "I'm about to delete 6 GB from this iPod and replace it with the dozen or so songs in this library. Are you sure that's what you want?"
THAT's consumer-friendly DRM.
Yeah, Apple's DRM stance is so consumer-friendly that I deleted all the music on my iPod by -- get this -- plugging it into another Mac! No warning, no dialogue, no music.
Happened to a friend of mine too... 6 GB of music wiped out. That's not what I call user-friendly.
It's actually at the root of the Start Menu and has been added to the left-hand nav of the Add/Remove Programs dialogue. I looked at it and it seemed fairly free of threats. You can say, "Use Microsoft programs," "Use current programs" or "Custom."
And also, I hate the X-box. Because of the reason microsoft got into the market: only to cash in, not to make quality games. Because of the lack of good games for it. Because of the controllers.
Ah... the bias comes out. I hate to burst your bubble, but I'm sure Sony's doing it for the money, too... you honestly think they make game consoles because the shareholders like "quality games"? What next, they make audio receivers because the engineers want to listen to loud, clear music?
Wake up, dude: Sony is a big ol' megacorp, just like Microsoft (except over a much broader range of products). Fine, if you prefer one platform over another, but let's not go nuts on the rationale.
And speaking of the PS2: Sony, on the other hand, doesn't care if people pirate games for their systems. Why? They make money on the hardware. To play pirated playstation games, you first have to have a playstation. Any rumor that Sony lost money on the playstation or ps2 hardware is bull. They make the thing, and they make money on it.
... is horse pocky. If you think that Sony cares any less than Microsoft about the huge profits they make on a successful piece of game software, you're fooling yourself. The small amount they make on an individual console pales in comparison to what they make on the 6-8 games the average user buys in a year.
Which, in my mind, is total bitchcake. And part of the reason I use a Mac.
Not to split hairs with you here, but I'd be really surprised if Apple's EULA allows you to move your copy of the MacOS from machine to machine. There are lots of reasons to use a Mac, but I'm not sure that Apple's operating system policies (try buying a Mac without the MacOS) are one of them.