Lack of hibernation in Mac OS, in my opinion, hurts. For those who don't know, "Hibernation" is the term Microsoft uses for a state in which all of the contents of memory are saved to the hard drive and the system completely shuts down. When the system is booted up, that cache is read from the hard drive (and is almost always much faster than a full-on boot). Considering all the things that could go wrong, it works excedingly well. It's sort of like a better sleep, hence the name.
As to why it's needed: battery life. I can hibernate my Dell, unplug it for a business trip and it's still got the same juice a day or two later when I turn it on. When I do the same with my Powerbook G4, the battery often dies while it's asleep.
I'm hoping it's one of the things they add for 10.5.
"The point is that the MacBook competes well with other currently available Intel laptops."
Well, no, it doesn't (at least not the machines you compared). You compared a faster, much more expensive machine versus lesser priced slower machines. If by competing you mean "speed", it's really an invalid comparison because one could just as easily take a 2.16 GHz PC and finds it runs the tests faster than the MacBook. If by competing you mean "price", there is no comparison. The prices are nowhere near equal.
You've got to remember who your target audience is. Your site is supposed to appeal to the tech savvy, the group that skips past http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ and goes straight to http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/whatsinside.html If the numbers aren't exactly equal, you have a problem. You've essentially lost the interest of your target audience and also invalidated your results at the same time.
Well, what I'm really against is the title of the Register article, which goes out of it's way to make it sound like the Mac was faster than the PCs, which it wasn't.
However, as you seem to be referring to the article it references with the questionable benchmarks (did you write it?), here are my primary beefs:
First off, the Mac platform, as a whole, never really had a problem competiting with the Windows platform on speed. Jobs went out of his way to show benchmark after benchmark comparing the G3/G4/G5 to PCs in various tests (including Photoshop) and it did fine or surpassed on real-world apps.
However, typically the machines he'd compare the Macs with were comparable. Here you have a $3000 laptop being compared with roughly $2000 models. The $3000 model has a faster hard drive, better video card, etc. If you outfit the PCs that were benchmarked in the same way (the PC benchmarks used primarily base configurations) so that it ended up around $3000, I'm sure you'd find they'd greatly surpass the Mac.
However, put that aside for a moment. You say that "it tells folks that they have a good chance of buying machines that will dual-boot the two OSes, getting market-competitive performance in both". I'm not really sure what you mean by "folks" in this context. If you mean the average computer buyer just trying to get some work done, I very much doubt they'd be able to get the system to dualboot given the work required.
But let's say they did. The only test where the machines were truly close was Photoshop. If they could get their system to dualboot, why on earth would the average consumer run Photoshop in Windows? Why wouldn't they run it in MacOS? A great deal of people who work with Photoshop use it on the Mac. The logistics of dualbooting a Mac to run Photoshop on the Windows makes no sense.
On the other side of the coin, I can tell (you as a geek) that Photoshop by and large doesn't appeal to me. The encoder tests are far better indicators of the overall speed of the machine, and on these the Macbook fell short (even with the better hardware). It'd also be nice to see (like I mentioned) some SPEC tests comparing the machines. If the scores are close to identical, it would appeal to me.
And personally, there's only one set of apps that'll really convince geeks that the new Intel Macs are worth it. Games. Sorry, but games are the truest way to stress every single component of machines and also draw geeky buyers (who then make recommendations to the larger community). I didn't see a single game test, and for good reason: without drivers positive results would be non-existant. I can guarantee you that a lot of people will permanently switch when/if they see Spore running at the same speed on a Pro Mac versus a Dell/Alienware later in the year.
Well, if you were expecting a first version product to skyrocket to the top of the console charts, it's unlikely. 2nd place (the eventual outcome of the original Xbox) was a pretty good showing, regardless how big Microsoft's piggybank is.
As for the article itself, the Xbox team didn't work on porting Media Center to Xbox 360 -- the Media Center team did. That's why when you go into Media Center on the 360 dashboard, it looks just like the PC version (I read an article that said the MCE team refused to compromise on the 360 media center UI, even though it looks really out of place). This article is 99.9% fluff, though, so I'm not surprised they made that mistake.
"And yet the Apple was 37% faster on the Photoshop test against 3 of the laptops. That is much better than the 8% advantage it has in processor speed."
An increase in processor speed isn't going to have a one-to-one correlation with an increase in a photoshop test. I can take out a video card with a 350 MHz clock and put in one with a 400 MHz clock and get a 50% speed boost in some apps. Photoshop is heavily dependent on the speed of the hard drives, so using the processor as a comparison without having matching hard drive speeds is kind of silly.
"The point is that the Macs could be faster than other laptops in real-world XP performance. This isn't an ideal test, but it is an interesting result."
I could take a boutique laptop with roughly the same processor, a RAID 0 hard drive array and a $500 mobile video card and the results could blow away any Macbook. I could then make the bold implication that laptop PCs are faster than Macs. My tests would have the same validity of the referenced article: absolutely none.
It's an "interesting result" only in that people are referencing it. The reality is they took fairly different hardware and came up with an invalid conclusion.
Maybe because it's not the first line but the title of the article, and nowhere in the "article" does it mention this magical "60%" number, nor does it provide any real reasons for how that number came about.
I mean, there's contradictions in the very second paragraph:
"One of the key components of the consumer version of Vista is the Media Centre code. This will be an optional package in the same way that Microsoft currently sell a Professional and Home version of XP. With Vista there will not be a seperate Media Centre SKU."
So wait, Media Center is going to be included or not? (To answer that question, google "Vista" and look at the million different versions. You will definitely be able to get one without Media Center.
We have papers in my area you may have heard of: "NY Post", "NY Newsday" and "Daily News". They can largely be considered tabloids. I saw a typical headline on one yesterday "Mr. Someperson to Rot in Jail". When you read the article, you realized that person was getting a life sentence but they eventually could get parole. The headline was downright misleading, but it drew readers so that's why they used it. Slashdot (and this Smarthome site) is doing the same thing. Show me where you got the 60% number or don't publish it.
One should also note that the machines they compared didn't even have the same hardware. The Mac is a dual-core 2.16 GHz machine while the PCs were 2.0 GHz. Not to mention discrepancies with hard drive speeds, video cards (including the non-existant XP drivers on the Mac), etc. It's just not a good comparison by any stretch of the imagination.
A more valid comparison would be SPEC tests between the MacBook and other machines. What you'd likely see is, given the same hardware, they perform exactly the same -- which is the point.
As someone pointed out, most geeks would be interested in a box that runs both XP and Mac OS equally well. Apple is in a big transition year: with Vista delayed and the switch to Intel, they finally have means to court a massive number of geeks to their platform. Some random people claiming the MacBook is somehow "faster" than PCs with different hardware damages this. Geeks will look at the specs and know it's not a valid comparison. Mac fans just need to sit tight and let the benchmarks speak for themselves.
I thought the quest to find Manrik's wife in Wow was pretty interesting. A lot of the quests involve killing X of a creature or FedExing an item, but this one involved finding an Orc's wife that was lost in the plains of the Barrens during a battle. It seemed like a pretty simple Fedex quest, until you realize that Manrik's wife is actually a corpse in a non-descript hut. You come back to Manrik and report the news and he solemnly says he understands, with no further conversation. It ends up having a lot of emotion in very little words.
(Of course, now that more 14-year olds have gotten into the game it's lost its flavor. Shouts of "Where's Mankik's wife?" echo across the Barrens every 5 minutes. When I finished the quest the first week the game was out, it was still new and fresh and held some weight).
What I think they did cool with Warcraft is make the story optional. You can play the entire game and not really care about the history of the world, or you could read the books scattered about the continents and become an expert on the history. It's optional. Same thing with the Elder Scrolls series. When you give players an option like that, the game appeals to a much broader audience.
"Except the new season of Family Guy is unwatchable trash. I liked the earlier seasons, but now we just get 22 minutes of "hey, remember that old TV show? here's a skit spoofing it for no reason!" every week."
You know, as a fan of Family Guy, I'm getting more than a little tired of hearing this shit. People seem to forget that the show has ALWAYS been like this. It's the basis of the show: paper-thin plot, lots and lots of little in-jokes that attack social morays, pop culture, etc. If you don't like it you're certainly free not to watch it, but to attack it for maintaining the same atmosphere it had before it was cancelled is ludicrous. People LIKED the way it was -- hence the DVD sales, high ratings on Cartoon Network reruns, etc.
Personally, I like the short, concentrated bits of funny. I'm nearly in tears every time I see Peter's "breakfast machine", which is from a new episode (http://www.gorillamask.net/famguybreakfast.shtml) .
I think you're missing the point. There is a large segment of the population that like to watch TV whether they have a Tivo or not. Sometimes you have to (coverage of a news event) and sometimes you just want to bounce around the dial when nothing saved on the PVR interests you. There really isn't a better way to bounce around the dial than the number buttons (see my other post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179826&cid=148 96185). You can try to come up with a better way if you like, but other have already tried and failed.
I happen to think that things CAN get better while getting more "complicated". Example: most modern cars stick volume and channel controls on the radio itself and on the steering wheel. Most people agree that, even with the additional buttons, it's a better design because you no longer have to take your hands off the wheel. An Apple design purist would argue that any additional buttons is folly. The market has demonstrated, however, that they like the "complicated" design better and more and more cars have them.
As for masking the channel number with a name, I know most PVRs do that. In fact, I can't think of any PVRs that don't do that. Again, though, that doesn't solve the issue of bouncing around channels, and as long as they're live events, people will need to do that.
Apple's remote design is a decent one, but I don't think it would ever work for TV watching. They also need to make the thing bigger. The small design works fine if you have it magnetically stuck against the side of your iMac, but in a living room it's going to become even more likely to get lost in the cushions.
May seem obvious, but...
on
Futurama Returns
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I think this is an excellent example of how powerful the masses have become in affecting entertainment, and to a greater degree corporations in general.
Medieval times: jester makes everyone laugh but the king. King has jester beheaded.
Modern times: show makes everyone laugh but company has show cancelled. Show does astromical DVD figures and comes back.
It's a testament to the power of the masses' will. The almighty buck is powerful, but the almighty buck plus thousands of people writing Fox to call them idiots is even more powerful.
"That's like putting 87 octane gas in a formula 1 car!;-)"
As always, follow the example of this poster. Make absolutely certain that your valid/intelligent comments are watered down by useless fanboyism. When in doubt, play to Slashdot crowd!
"And one COULD argue that someone is "lower-class" based on something as superficial as a console choice. But the person making that argument would be idiot and/or a troll."
Sure thing "MentosPimp". Your opinions are just as valid as mine. *rolls eyes*
You're telling me the dongle is an option. I'm telling you it's not. Logistically, it makes no sense to have a service which'll essentially be downloading ROMS run through anything less than broadband. Since the dongle can be connected to anything, it's a problem.
I don't know if you've tried playing Mario Kart with the dongle connected to anything less than broadband, but it's painful. Even with broadband there are a lot of fits and starts. Now take that experience and amplify it now that you're downloading 8 MB ROMS. See the issue?
The original poster felt Sony and Microsoft are marketing computer gear as AV equipment this generation. I'm saying all 3 are. Having a dongle to do Wi-Fi doesn't fix the problem that most people who buy the Revolution won't have a lot of cash, won't have broadband, and will likely wonder why the emulation service is so slow. That's always a problem when you sell to the lower-class, and Nintendo isn't addressing it well.
"A house without HDTV is "lower class"? give me a break."
One could easily argue that anyone who purchases the cheapest of the 3 systems with games from 20 years ago is lower-class. I mean, a person with a decent amount of money would buy the better systems (or perhaps all 3). They could get the same results out of an emulator. *shrug* But Nintendo has always kind of bowed to the lowest common denominator -- that's why they're in the position they're in now.
Except they haven't totally verified that the USB dongle will work with Revolution. For that matter, suppose the user has 56K? This is bad enough trying to play Mario Kart on DS -- imagine downloading N64 games on it.
A lot of people lambast the 360 (and it's predecessor) for requiring broadband. I have a feeling Nintendo is going to require the same thing, and not everyone has broadband yet. Especially considering they're marketing a low-priced system to people without HDTVs (lower-class families), it's odd that you're pretty much going to need broadband to get a reasonable gaming experience out of the box.
"The 360 CPU generates twice as much heat as the Broadband Engine."
Actually, I read whitepapers that said, while a single core of the engine is quite low in heat (comparitively, anyway, to modern-day processors), all of them running at once can generate twice as much heat as a standard dual-core x86. Granted, you're talking about a triple-core PowerPC in the Xbox 360, but the temperatures the guys at Xbox-Scene have measured are no where near what I saw in IBM's whitepaper.
So, I guess you could say Cell uses a low-heat engine -- if you're running at 1/2 or maybe 1/4 processing. Maybe that's Sony's plan!:)
"This is the same mistake Microsoft made. They, like you, assume that the 360 is a computer, and people will treat it as such. But the reality is that a game console is not supposed to be a computer. It's a piece of AV hardware, and it ought to work like it, since that's how people are going to treat it. Think of it like a VCR, it needs to be able to go in the cabinet under the TV and still work."
If that's the case, all three companies are going to be in serious trouble this generation. You've got Microsoft, who's already released a console that can get hot if you put it in an enclosed area. You've got Sony, who's not shown a single prototype with ventilation holes (rumor has it Cell gets very hot). And you have Nintendo, which should be fine in the heat department but pretty much will require internet connectivity for the main feature of the system, emulated games (not everyone has the luxury of an internet connection in their living room).
Truth is, none of these systems are really designed as AV equipment. They're being treated as computer equipment by the manufacturers because they ARE computer equipment. All 3 are going to go far beyond the original concept of what a "gaming console" is: playing media, downloading files, etc. They're essentially regular computers in a living room setting. This is a shift, and it's something the companies will just have to teach families how to properly handle (it starts with lots of warnings in the intruction manual).
Just want to echo that sentiment. Since I got mine in December, I haven't had a single issue with it. I use it regularly to play games and DVDs. No scratching, no overheating, and to be honest it's not that loud (certainly not louder than my gaming rig PC).
The system needs more games (most consoles do in their first few months), the UI needs some work, but outside that it's a pretty solid machine.
Like the command line vs. the GUI, even though it's archaic it happens to be the most efficient way to get from channel 5 to channel 505.
I mean, what are the alternatives? You could have an iPod-like circle. Perfect for when you know what you're looking for, not so hot when you're bouncing around. What about a display of what's on the channels (little videos all mapped out)? Again, cumbersome, particularly when you're talking hundreds of channels.
Things change, and those that stand the test of time tend to be pretty good. Did you know one of the first remotes used the number keys to dial in volume as well? Turned out that was unnecessary, so they dropped it. The channel keys, however, have stood the test of time for a reason.
Then Tivo sucks, then? I haven't seen a single PVR that didn't have channel buttons. It's the most efficient way to get from one channel to another one hundreds up the dial. People do watch Live TV sometimes, you know.
[i]Plugging the DVI cable right into the HDMI input on my projector was easy enough.
On my projector, I lose about 12 vertical pixels at 720p. (Fewer in 1080i, but 720 is the native resolution for my projector.)
Tweaked my view to lose them mostly from the bottom rather than the top... Put the dock on the side of the screen... Got on with my life.
Watching shows, I lose less of the screen image than people with ordinary HDTV sets do. Watching movies I usually lose nothing, since the aspect ratio is usually even wider than 16:9. Done.[/i]
You got lucky. Overscan varies from display to display, and 12 pixels is nothing. 90 pixels (on all 4 sides) is a problem, and that's what I got with my Mac. I didn't get that with my PC.
But that's more the TV's fault than the Mac's. The real issue is that in it's effort to keep things "simple" (one checkbox for overscan), they completely removed any customized resolutions. Why is it that I can set the resolution exactly on a Windows box (and on a Linux box, for that matter, in MythTV) but not in Mac? Why do I have to go with the (incorrectly) detected resolutions? I thought DisplayX and ResX would fix this, but they didn't.
[i]The Mac has this very obscure application called "DVD Player" which plays VIDEO_TS folders just fine, and also has the zoom feature you are so depressed about missing. Best of all, I am able to use my universal remote to browse through my entire DVD library on my firewire drives, select the one I want, and watch it in full-screen 16:9 mode. This is all just from the basic OS with a cheap Keyspan IR sensor, mind you. No need for fancy apps.[/i]
Thank you for not reading all of the very paragraph you quoted. I *did* notice that DVD Player did video zoom, and it worked well. However, 2 issues: first, eschewing any kind of UI consistency, they don't allow zooming in Front Row. Second, and more importantly, running the DVD player app defeats the very purpose of what I'm trying to achieve with the setup. I want to use the 10 foot interface, not the 2 foot one. On the Windows and Myth boxes, I can choose the ripped movie I want to watch and hit play on the remote. Done -- and in full screen I might add. Your suggestion is to either open the DVD app from the desktop (yuck) or have it on Autoplay, which is even less palatable. If I left it on Autoplay, I'd have to contend with that damn "Start at beginning or play from where you last stopped" dialog, which unfortunately is completely inaccessible from the Mac remote. If I turn off that feature (which is actually somewhat useful) I lose functionality that's in Front Row. Lose-lose all around.
[i]My EyeTV remote hasn't come out of the kitchen drawer since the week that I bought it. Nor do I use the Keyspan remote for my Mac.
I do everything with the programmable remote that came with my Amp. Have you never heard of universal remotes?[/i]
Yes, I own the $200 Sony one. (The "brick" -- the one that controls a ridiculous number of devices with 32-step macros). It's fine for getting the boxes on but cumbersome if you just want to flip around menus on a DVD.
[i]You're nuts. I would NEVER part with my Mac in favor of a Windows-based media center.[/i]
Then you never used one. Seriously. I've found every single person I talk to that downplays MCE has never actually used it. It's without a doubt the best UI Microsoft has ever come up with (which is a complement, considering every other UI they've done blows monkey turds) and I've had people react surprised when I have it bring up a 300-movie library in front of them, get director/cast info, etc. with 2 button presses. They can't believe Microsoft made it, because it doesn't act like they did. Not to mention, MCE plays just about every file format I can throw at it, and it does the most basic things (security updates right from within the 10-foot interface) that even Apple was blind enough to leave out.
Look, we're not talking about a dinky little sub-par projector in the
I wrote about my similar experience here: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179826&c id=14893286 In short, I don't think the Mac Mini is ready for any kind of real HTPC duties. I like the size and quiet of the box, but there's just too many limitations that have already been addressed, better, by Windows Media Center and MythTV. Apple needs to revise the product, and in particular Front Row, big time if they intend to compete in the living room.
Slashdot Mirror
Lack of hibernation in Mac OS, in my opinion, hurts. For those who don't know, "Hibernation" is the term Microsoft uses for a state in which all of the contents of memory are saved to the hard drive and the system completely shuts down. When the system is booted up, that cache is read from the hard drive (and is almost always much faster than a full-on boot). Considering all the things that could go wrong, it works excedingly well. It's sort of like a better sleep, hence the name.
As to why it's needed: battery life. I can hibernate my Dell, unplug it for a business trip and it's still got the same juice a day or two later when I turn it on. When I do the same with my Powerbook G4, the battery often dies while it's asleep.
I'm hoping it's one of the things they add for 10.5.
"The point is that the MacBook competes well with other currently available Intel laptops."
Well, no, it doesn't (at least not the machines you compared). You compared a faster, much more expensive machine versus lesser priced slower machines. If by competing you mean "speed", it's really an invalid comparison because one could just as easily take a 2.16 GHz PC and finds it runs the tests faster than the MacBook. If by competing you mean "price", there is no comparison. The prices are nowhere near equal.
You've got to remember who your target audience is. Your site is supposed to appeal to the tech savvy, the group that skips past http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/ and goes straight to http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/whatsinside.html If the numbers aren't exactly equal, you have a problem. You've essentially lost the interest of your target audience and also invalidated your results at the same time.
Well, what I'm really against is the title of the Register article, which goes out of it's way to make it sound like the Mac was faster than the PCs, which it wasn't.
However, as you seem to be referring to the article it references with the questionable benchmarks (did you write it?), here are my primary beefs:
First off, the Mac platform, as a whole, never really had a problem competiting with the Windows platform on speed. Jobs went out of his way to show benchmark after benchmark comparing the G3/G4/G5 to PCs in various tests (including Photoshop) and it did fine or surpassed on real-world apps.
However, typically the machines he'd compare the Macs with were comparable. Here you have a $3000 laptop being compared with roughly $2000 models. The $3000 model has a faster hard drive, better video card, etc. If you outfit the PCs that were benchmarked in the same way (the PC benchmarks used primarily base configurations) so that it ended up around $3000, I'm sure you'd find they'd greatly surpass the Mac.
However, put that aside for a moment. You say that "it tells folks that they have a good chance of buying machines that will dual-boot the two OSes, getting market-competitive performance in both". I'm not really sure what you mean by "folks" in this context. If you mean the average computer buyer just trying to get some work done, I very much doubt they'd be able to get the system to dualboot given the work required.
But let's say they did. The only test where the machines were truly close was Photoshop. If they could get their system to dualboot, why on earth would the average consumer run Photoshop in Windows? Why wouldn't they run it in MacOS? A great deal of people who work with Photoshop use it on the Mac. The logistics of dualbooting a Mac to run Photoshop on the Windows makes no sense.
On the other side of the coin, I can tell (you as a geek) that Photoshop by and large doesn't appeal to me. The encoder tests are far better indicators of the overall speed of the machine, and on these the Macbook fell short (even with the better hardware). It'd also be nice to see (like I mentioned) some SPEC tests comparing the machines. If the scores are close to identical, it would appeal to me.
And personally, there's only one set of apps that'll really convince geeks that the new Intel Macs are worth it. Games. Sorry, but games are the truest way to stress every single component of machines and also draw geeky buyers (who then make recommendations to the larger community). I didn't see a single game test, and for good reason: without drivers positive results would be non-existant. I can guarantee you that a lot of people will permanently switch when/if they see Spore running at the same speed on a Pro Mac versus a Dell/Alienware later in the year.
Well, if you were expecting a first version product to skyrocket to the top of the console charts, it's unlikely. 2nd place (the eventual outcome of the original Xbox) was a pretty good showing, regardless how big Microsoft's piggybank is.
As for the article itself, the Xbox team didn't work on porting Media Center to Xbox 360 -- the Media Center team did. That's why when you go into Media Center on the 360 dashboard, it looks just like the PC version (I read an article that said the MCE team refused to compromise on the 360 media center UI, even though it looks really out of place). This article is 99.9% fluff, though, so I'm not surprised they made that mistake.
"And yet the Apple was 37% faster on the Photoshop test against 3 of the laptops. That is much better than the 8% advantage it has in processor speed."
An increase in processor speed isn't going to have a one-to-one correlation with an increase in a photoshop test. I can take out a video card with a 350 MHz clock and put in one with a 400 MHz clock and get a 50% speed boost in some apps. Photoshop is heavily dependent on the speed of the hard drives, so using the processor as a comparison without having matching hard drive speeds is kind of silly.
"The point is that the Macs could be faster than other laptops in real-world XP performance. This isn't an ideal test, but it is an interesting result."
I could take a boutique laptop with roughly the same processor, a RAID 0 hard drive array and a $500 mobile video card and the results could blow away any Macbook. I could then make the bold implication that laptop PCs are faster than Macs. My tests would have the same validity of the referenced article: absolutely none.
It's an "interesting result" only in that people are referencing it. The reality is they took fairly different hardware and came up with an invalid conclusion.
Maybe because it's not the first line but the title of the article, and nowhere in the "article" does it mention this magical "60%" number, nor does it provide any real reasons for how that number came about.
I mean, there's contradictions in the very second paragraph:
"One of the key components of the consumer version of Vista is the Media Centre code. This will be an optional package in the same way that Microsoft currently sell a Professional and Home version of XP. With Vista there will not be a seperate Media Centre SKU."
So wait, Media Center is going to be included or not? (To answer that question, google "Vista" and look at the million different versions. You will definitely be able to get one without Media Center.
We have papers in my area you may have heard of: "NY Post", "NY Newsday" and "Daily News". They can largely be considered tabloids. I saw a typical headline on one yesterday "Mr. Someperson to Rot in Jail". When you read the article, you realized that person was getting a life sentence but they eventually could get parole. The headline was downright misleading, but it drew readers so that's why they used it. Slashdot (and this Smarthome site) is doing the same thing. Show me where you got the 60% number or don't publish it.
One should also note that the machines they compared didn't even have the same hardware. The Mac is a dual-core 2.16 GHz machine while the PCs were 2.0 GHz. Not to mention discrepancies with hard drive speeds, video cards (including the non-existant XP drivers on the Mac), etc. It's just not a good comparison by any stretch of the imagination.
A more valid comparison would be SPEC tests between the MacBook and other machines. What you'd likely see is, given the same hardware, they perform exactly the same -- which is the point.
As someone pointed out, most geeks would be interested in a box that runs both XP and Mac OS equally well. Apple is in a big transition year: with Vista delayed and the switch to Intel, they finally have means to court a massive number of geeks to their platform. Some random people claiming the MacBook is somehow "faster" than PCs with different hardware damages this. Geeks will look at the specs and know it's not a valid comparison. Mac fans just need to sit tight and let the benchmarks speak for themselves.
One misspelling and people immediately have it in for you...
Mr. Flyingsquid? You do realize squids cannot truely fly? Do you? DO YOU!?! Ha, I now moral superiority over a random internet poster. I am pleased.
I thought the quest to find Manrik's wife in Wow was pretty interesting. A lot of the quests involve killing X of a creature or FedExing an item, but this one involved finding an Orc's wife that was lost in the plains of the Barrens during a battle. It seemed like a pretty simple Fedex quest, until you realize that Manrik's wife is actually a corpse in a non-descript hut. You come back to Manrik and report the news and he solemnly says he understands, with no further conversation. It ends up having a lot of emotion in very little words.
(Of course, now that more 14-year olds have gotten into the game it's lost its flavor. Shouts of "Where's Mankik's wife?" echo across the Barrens every 5 minutes. When I finished the quest the first week the game was out, it was still new and fresh and held some weight).
What I think they did cool with Warcraft is make the story optional. You can play the entire game and not really care about the history of the world, or you could read the books scattered about the continents and become an expert on the history. It's optional. Same thing with the Elder Scrolls series. When you give players an option like that, the game appeals to a much broader audience.
"Except the new season of Family Guy is unwatchable trash. I liked the earlier seasons, but now we just get 22 minutes of "hey, remember that old TV show? here's a skit spoofing it for no reason!" every week."
) .
You know, as a fan of Family Guy, I'm getting more than a little tired of hearing this shit. People seem to forget that the show has ALWAYS been like this. It's the basis of the show: paper-thin plot, lots and lots of little in-jokes that attack social morays, pop culture, etc. If you don't like it you're certainly free not to watch it, but to attack it for maintaining the same atmosphere it had before it was cancelled is ludicrous. People LIKED the way it was -- hence the DVD sales, high ratings on Cartoon Network reruns, etc.
Personally, I like the short, concentrated bits of funny. I'm nearly in tears every time I see Peter's "breakfast machine", which is from a new episode (http://www.gorillamask.net/famguybreakfast.shtml
I think you're missing the point. There is a large segment of the population that like to watch TV whether they have a Tivo or not. Sometimes you have to (coverage of a news event) and sometimes you just want to bounce around the dial when nothing saved on the PVR interests you. There really isn't a better way to bounce around the dial than the number buttons (see my other post: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179826&cid=148 96185). You can try to come up with a better way if you like, but other have already tried and failed.
I happen to think that things CAN get better while getting more "complicated". Example: most modern cars stick volume and channel controls on the radio itself and on the steering wheel. Most people agree that, even with the additional buttons, it's a better design because you no longer have to take your hands off the wheel. An Apple design purist would argue that any additional buttons is folly. The market has demonstrated, however, that they like the "complicated" design better and more and more cars have them.
As for masking the channel number with a name, I know most PVRs do that. In fact, I can't think of any PVRs that don't do that. Again, though, that doesn't solve the issue of bouncing around channels, and as long as they're live events, people will need to do that.
Apple's remote design is a decent one, but I don't think it would ever work for TV watching. They also need to make the thing bigger. The small design works fine if you have it magnetically stuck against the side of your iMac, but in a living room it's going to become even more likely to get lost in the cushions.
I think this is an excellent example of how powerful the masses have become in affecting entertainment, and to a greater degree corporations in general.
Medieval times: jester makes everyone laugh but the king. King has jester beheaded.
Modern times: show makes everyone laugh but company has show cancelled. Show does astromical DVD figures and comes back.
It's a testament to the power of the masses' will. The almighty buck is powerful, but the almighty buck plus thousands of people writing Fox to call them idiots is even more powerful.
P.s. Don't stop calling Fox idiots.
"That's like putting 87 octane gas in a formula 1 car! ;-)"
As always, follow the example of this poster. Make absolutely certain that your valid/intelligent comments are watered down by useless fanboyism. When in doubt, play to Slashdot crowd!
"And one COULD argue that someone is "lower-class" based on something as superficial as a console choice. But the person making that argument would be idiot and/or a troll."
Sure thing "MentosPimp". Your opinions are just as valid as mine. *rolls eyes*
You're telling me the dongle is an option. I'm telling you it's not. Logistically, it makes no sense to have a service which'll essentially be downloading ROMS run through anything less than broadband. Since the dongle can be connected to anything, it's a problem.
I don't know if you've tried playing Mario Kart with the dongle connected to anything less than broadband, but it's painful. Even with broadband there are a lot of fits and starts. Now take that experience and amplify it now that you're downloading 8 MB ROMS. See the issue?
The original poster felt Sony and Microsoft are marketing computer gear as AV equipment this generation. I'm saying all 3 are. Having a dongle to do Wi-Fi doesn't fix the problem that most people who buy the Revolution won't have a lot of cash, won't have broadband, and will likely wonder why the emulation service is so slow. That's always a problem when you sell to the lower-class, and Nintendo isn't addressing it well.
"A house without HDTV is "lower class"? give me a break."
One could easily argue that anyone who purchases the cheapest of the 3 systems with games from 20 years ago is lower-class. I mean, a person with a decent amount of money would buy the better systems (or perhaps all 3). They could get the same results out of an emulator. *shrug* But Nintendo has always kind of bowed to the lowest common denominator -- that's why they're in the position they're in now.
Except they haven't totally verified that the USB dongle will work with Revolution. For that matter, suppose the user has 56K? This is bad enough trying to play Mario Kart on DS -- imagine downloading N64 games on it.
A lot of people lambast the 360 (and it's predecessor) for requiring broadband. I have a feeling Nintendo is going to require the same thing, and not everyone has broadband yet. Especially considering they're marketing a low-priced system to people without HDTVs (lower-class families), it's odd that you're pretty much going to need broadband to get a reasonable gaming experience out of the box.
"The 360 CPU generates twice as much heat as the Broadband Engine."
:)
Actually, I read whitepapers that said, while a single core of the engine is quite low in heat (comparitively, anyway, to modern-day processors), all of them running at once can generate twice as much heat as a standard dual-core x86. Granted, you're talking about a triple-core PowerPC in the Xbox 360, but the temperatures the guys at Xbox-Scene have measured are no where near what I saw in IBM's whitepaper.
So, I guess you could say Cell uses a low-heat engine -- if you're running at 1/2 or maybe 1/4 processing. Maybe that's Sony's plan!
"This is the same mistake Microsoft made. They, like you, assume that the 360 is a computer, and people will treat it as such. But the reality is that a game console is not supposed to be a computer. It's a piece of AV hardware, and it ought to work like it, since that's how people are going to treat it. Think of it like a VCR, it needs to be able to go in the cabinet under the TV and still work."
If that's the case, all three companies are going to be in serious trouble this generation. You've got Microsoft, who's already released a console that can get hot if you put it in an enclosed area. You've got Sony, who's not shown a single prototype with ventilation holes (rumor has it Cell gets very hot). And you have Nintendo, which should be fine in the heat department but pretty much will require internet connectivity for the main feature of the system, emulated games (not everyone has the luxury of an internet connection in their living room).
Truth is, none of these systems are really designed as AV equipment. They're being treated as computer equipment by the manufacturers because they ARE computer equipment. All 3 are going to go far beyond the original concept of what a "gaming console" is: playing media, downloading files, etc. They're essentially regular computers in a living room setting. This is a shift, and it's something the companies will just have to teach families how to properly handle (it starts with lots of warnings in the intruction manual).
Just want to echo that sentiment. Since I got mine in December, I haven't had a single issue with it. I use it regularly to play games and DVDs. No scratching, no overheating, and to be honest it's not that loud (certainly not louder than my gaming rig PC).
The system needs more games (most consoles do in their first few months), the UI needs some work, but outside that it's a pretty solid machine.
Like the command line vs. the GUI, even though it's archaic it happens to be the most efficient way to get from channel 5 to channel 505.
I mean, what are the alternatives? You could have an iPod-like circle. Perfect for when you know what you're looking for, not so hot when you're bouncing around. What about a display of what's on the channels (little videos all mapped out)? Again, cumbersome, particularly when you're talking hundreds of channels.
Things change, and those that stand the test of time tend to be pretty good. Did you know one of the first remotes used the number keys to dial in volume as well? Turned out that was unnecessary, so they dropped it. The channel keys, however, have stood the test of time for a reason.
Then Tivo sucks, then? I haven't seen a single PVR that didn't have channel buttons. It's the most efficient way to get from one channel to another one hundreds up the dial. People do watch Live TV sometimes, you know.
[i]Plugging the DVI cable right into the HDMI input on my projector was easy enough.
On my projector, I lose about 12 vertical pixels at 720p. (Fewer in 1080i, but 720 is the native resolution for my projector.)
Tweaked my view to lose them mostly from the bottom rather than the top... Put the dock on the side of the screen... Got on with my life.
Watching shows, I lose less of the screen image than people with ordinary HDTV sets do. Watching movies I usually lose nothing, since the aspect ratio is usually even wider than 16:9. Done.[/i]
You got lucky. Overscan varies from display to display, and 12 pixels is nothing. 90 pixels (on all 4 sides) is a problem, and that's what I got with my Mac. I didn't get that with my PC.
But that's more the TV's fault than the Mac's. The real issue is that in it's effort to keep things "simple" (one checkbox for overscan), they completely removed any customized resolutions. Why is it that I can set the resolution exactly on a Windows box (and on a Linux box, for that matter, in MythTV) but not in Mac? Why do I have to go with the (incorrectly) detected resolutions? I thought DisplayX and ResX would fix this, but they didn't.
[i]The Mac has this very obscure application called "DVD Player" which plays VIDEO_TS folders just fine, and also has the zoom feature you are so depressed about missing. Best of all, I am able to use my universal remote to browse through my entire DVD library on my firewire drives, select the one I want, and watch it in full-screen 16:9 mode. This is all just from the basic OS with a cheap Keyspan IR sensor, mind you. No need for fancy apps.[/i]
Thank you for not reading all of the very paragraph you quoted. I *did* notice that DVD Player did video zoom, and it worked well. However, 2 issues: first, eschewing any kind of UI consistency, they don't allow zooming in Front Row. Second, and more importantly, running the DVD player app defeats the very purpose of what I'm trying to achieve with the setup. I want to use the 10 foot interface, not the 2 foot one. On the Windows and Myth boxes, I can choose the ripped movie I want to watch and hit play on the remote. Done -- and in full screen I might add. Your suggestion is to either open the DVD app from the desktop (yuck) or have it on Autoplay, which is even less palatable. If I left it on Autoplay, I'd have to contend with that damn "Start at beginning or play from where you last stopped" dialog, which unfortunately is completely inaccessible from the Mac remote. If I turn off that feature (which is actually somewhat useful) I lose functionality that's in Front Row. Lose-lose all around.
[i]My EyeTV remote hasn't come out of the kitchen drawer since the week that I bought it. Nor do I use the Keyspan remote for my Mac.
I do everything with the programmable remote that came with my Amp. Have you never heard of universal remotes?[/i]
Yes, I own the $200 Sony one. (The "brick" -- the one that controls a ridiculous number of devices with 32-step macros). It's fine for getting the boxes on but cumbersome if you just want to flip around menus on a DVD.
[i]You're nuts. I would NEVER part with my Mac in favor of a Windows-based media center.[/i]
Then you never used one. Seriously. I've found every single person I talk to that downplays MCE has never actually used it. It's without a doubt the best UI Microsoft has ever come up with (which is a complement, considering every other UI they've done blows monkey turds) and I've had people react surprised when I have it bring up a 300-movie library in front of them, get director/cast info, etc. with 2 button presses. They can't believe Microsoft made it, because it doesn't act like they did. Not to mention, MCE plays just about every file format I can throw at it, and it does the most basic things (security updates right from within the 10-foot interface) that even Apple was blind enough to leave out.
Look, we're not talking about a dinky little sub-par projector in the
I wrote about my similar experience here: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=179826&c id=14893286 In short, I don't think the Mac Mini is ready for any kind of real HTPC duties. I like the size and quiet of the box, but there's just too many limitations that have already been addressed, better, by Windows Media Center and MythTV. Apple needs to revise the product, and in particular Front Row, big time if they intend to compete in the living room.
"Why didn't you just download the 3rd-party divx codec for Quicktime?"
Because it doesn't always work. I spent 3 hours this week pulling out my hair in frustration trying to get videos to play from dapcentral.org.
"For that matter, why didn't you just use VLC? That app plays pretty much everything."
Yes, and it's unusable from 10 feet away. People are buying the minis (like me) to try to make them into home theater PCs. They're not.