Might as well reply to you on this, as a lot of people said the same thing, and you're the highest rated.
I took a second look and golly-gee there is a VGA connector there. My bad, I honestly have never noticed it there. I'm not the original owner of this thing (though it's all here) so I never really pored over it that thoroughly.
First of all, it wasn't the "iCube". It was just the Cube, or more commonly, the G4 Cube.
Speaking as someone who is posting this from a G4 Cube, it wasn't and isn't that great a machine. All it has for a video connector in the back is an ADC connector, so unless you want to buy an adapter, you're stuck with expensive (but nice) Apple monitors, like the 15" Flat-screen CRT that originally came with the Cube, which is what I'm using here. Not that it's a crappy monitor, it's just a pain.
Also, it isn't as space-saving as you might believe. It was kept silent and cool by taking the power supply and moving it outside to a large, unwieldy power pack.
The speakers are crappy and there's a wierd USB-connector for them. No regular speaking connection, you've got to use the provided ones.
The "cool" touch-sensitive power button (using, I assume, the same technology as laptop trackpads) is, like those laptop trackpads, more trouble than it's worth. You have to be EXTREMELY careful when moving it around, because any light touch will send the machine into sleep mode immediately, even during the boot process. This is a serious pain when you're moving it around, as plugging it in to the power supply needs to be the last item on your list, and most people by habit do that first "to make sure it works". My cat puts it into sleep all the time, sniffing at the computer.
The access to USB ports, power ports, network ports, and the like is very shoddily done, all underneath the computer, with very little leeway, which means you generally need to put the machine on it's side to plug in a network cable, USB cable, firewire, whatever. Doing this, even for people like me who've been working with a Cube for awhile, means the first thing you do is put your hand in the most convenient place to flip it on it's side, or on it's back, which means you either slap the power button with your hand, or the table or some other object on your desk does it.
All in all, it's a cast iron pain, and one of Apple's biggest design blunders.
The 17" iMac, however, is a great thing. Hopefully, they won't become a collector's item, and I can get my hands on an inexpensive one.
Well, you should, because ultimately, Apple does control what does and doesn't run there.
Actually, no. They control what does or does not run under their operating system. I run Linux on an older iMac. People (for some reason I can't fathom) run Linux on newer machines that run OS X fine. Hell, Apple even helped support one of the older linux-for-macs distributions. In the end, what you use it for doesn't matter a whole lot to them, they just make the hardware. Yeah, they'll happily sell you other stuff if you want it, but they're not (yet) about stopping you from doing anything with it. (No, the iDVD thing isn't about hardware, the person in question was altering iDVD, an Apple piece of software)
It's not much different from running Gtk+ under XDarwin.
Actually, it's very different. I don't need to hog system resources running two window managers. I don't care if the applications don't follow the Apple spec for GUI design on a Mac. If that's what I wanted, what makes you think I'd even be bothering with GTK+ at all?
Well, perhaps you should.
Perhaps I shouldn't.
The fewer people buy and use Macs, the more trouble Apple is in.
I could get into the idiotic rumors of Apple's demise, but they've been gone over and over. The computer manufacturing industry is faltering all over. Apple isn't alone, no matter how you might wish it to be.
And if the open source community doesn't bother with supporting ports of open source software to the Mac anymore, you won't be getting much open source software anymore either.
This is the same "open source community" that ports things to the Amiga, BeOS, Irix, praises someone like Stallman for a "revolutionary operating system" that's more vaporware than half of the dead dotcoms? And there's supposed to be some way for you to stop people from porting things to a PPC architecture and Darwin when someone gets a bug up their ass about it later?
Excuse me, but I don't give a shit what Apple wants or doesn't want me to be able to run on their hardware. I'd like to run some GTK-based applications natively under Aqua without having to run a second window manager that happens to be resource intensive and buggy-as-hell along side it. Apparently a lot of other people want to as well.
This has nothing at all to do with "support for regular UNIX GUIs", it's about expanding support for the Aqua GUI. It's about making X11 less necessary, not making it more necessary.
I don't care what you do with your Mac, or your Linux machine. Neither does anyone else in here. If you want to waste the electricity and processor on a jukebox, well, you go for it.
It was Donkey Kong for the Intellivision. Yeah, I'm sure it was worse than the other versions, but hey, I didn't know any better. I played the hell out of that thing. Play control was fine enough for me.
As for Action 52, as the story hints at, there is a pretty funny and interesting story that goes along with the game. Here's a link to the Something Awful Rompit Review of Action 52, and go here for the Gamefaqs.com reviews page for Action 52. I've rarely laughed as hard as I did reading this stuff.
On a side-note, if you are at all into video games, browsing Gamefaqs for the reviews of really bad games can be a laugh riot sometimes. There are a few people who seem to make it their mission to completely eviscerate the worst offenders of the old cartridge console games. Some of the crappy PSX games get some hilarious reviews, too. For when you've got some surfing time, at least.
What's in it for them is avoiding goverment regulatory burdens such as have been threatened in the United States.
While the profit hit may, in the end, truly turn out to be imaginary (I don't honestly believe that any side in this numbers game has the real answer right now) the political clout that the entertainment industry holds is very, very real.
People don't "think" they need to work unpaid overtime just to hold a job. They DO need to, at least these days.
There are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people willing to do your job for half of what you make, because they're not making ANYTHING now. It just shows how brainless you are, telling people who can't feed their families or keep their homes heated should not take any less money than you believe they should for the good of the profession.
The "product" is already devalued. Wake up and smell the coffee. If you don't want to work for nothing, well, go into carpentry or some other profession that society actually values.
Of course I accept it. Just because I believe it's one of the biggest wastes of perfectly good bandwidth ever thought up doesn't mean I don't accept it.
Hailstorm, I thought, was.NET's raison d'etre. All these information technology services, implemented under a Windows framework, and a totally redesigned operating system, built to seamlessly integrate them.
So what the hell is it now? Passport,.NET server (basically Windows XP Server from everything I've heard), and a somewhat cross-platform (with Mono and all that) and network aware VisualBasic replacement in C#?
and remember - open source Linux means no spyware at all
You really are clueless, aren't you? I submit the recent trojan horses implanted in BitchX and tcpdump. It certainly is far easier to detect trojans in an open source project, but only a fool would believe that their open source nature makes them immune to trojan horses being implanted.
Please stop spreading idiocy that only makes the problem worse.
David Brin Has It Out For Heroes
on
David Brin On LOTR
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· Score: 2, Troll
I believe someone posted an article from Brin, like this, before Star Wars Episode 1 was released damning it for worshipping the ubermensch over the real people. IE, the only ones worth mentioning are the people who've got nothing mentionable about them. I've never read any of David Brin's books, but I don't imagine I'd be all that interesting. A bunch of forgettable cogs in the wheel of society each having hardly any impact on the world as events overtake everyone? Ah, how enthralling. And I need to pay $5.99 for the paperback version of this startling insight into the completely bloody obvious?
Tolkien stated many a time that his books were not meant to be taken as social commentary on the present (at least, his present). People who insist otherwise are probably the same kids of people who believe that "no means yes". Of course the times, and his experiences in the trenches of WWI influenced his writing, but influenced by != commentary upon.
Cubivore for GameCube. Mister Mosquito for PS2. Jet Grind Radio for Dreamcast.
Frankly, the Japanese are the only ones trying to do things really different from the American or European game studios. Most of the games either never get over here, or are relegated to the novelty or Nipponophile markets. I'm frankly amazed that Cubivore and Mister Mosquito made it over to this side of the Pacific. Anyone who's looking for something different, stay away from American game designers. We push the limits of the genres, but no one with any money here is willing to create any new ones. Just subdivide the ones we already have.
I'm sure saturation is the main reason for TV ads ineffectiveness. I stopped watching TV about a year ago, due to not having enough money to get cable TV service on top of internet service where I moved to a year ago. I've had my dad and other people offer to pay for the service, but by now I just don't want it or need it. I watch alot of movies, and get my news off NPR. The whole world of commercial TV seems so strange to me, now, and the commercials are so jarring, I don't bother to watch it unless I'm at someone else's house. I never used to notice them before, but I so do now. I can't stand commercial radio for the same reasons.
Internet ads I've learned to deal with, I imagine. I know they're there (and sometimes laugh at the wierdnesses...Microsoft advertising on Slashdot, etc) I don't pay enough attention to them to go to extreme measures to avoid them. I use pop-up blocking browsers, 'cause popups can be extremely rude/dangerous, but I don't bother beyond that. Actually, I can count on two hands the number of websites I visit daily that might have ads.
I'm sure you're dead wrong. If slashdot started having "clearly labelled" advertising articles (or slashvertisements as an April Fools post once called them), the page I read that policy change on would be the last page from here that any browser I control downloads from slashdot.
Yeah, slashdot has a heavy editorial bias towards certain products, but that's nerd-land people. In case you hadn't realized it yet, nerds tend to fixate on things and want to tell everyone how it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, even if the other people really might not be all that interested. That I don't have a problem with. Infomercials, cross my line, and my line is the only one that matters in this particular case, since I'm the one choosing what to browse..
I know exactly how expensive the transition to OS X is. I am currently in the process of shepherding all of our Mac clients (the vast majority of the clients I work with) onto OS X.
Frankly, no one is telling people to get rid of their old stuff and replace them with brand spanking new G4s RIGHT NOW. If you've been going well with old 9600s and 8100s for this long, and they're still functioning, who cares? It's not like you can get replacement parts anywhere but eBay or Preowned Electronics nowadays. They'll continue to run the old OSes until they just stop working.
However, a changeover is eventually going to be coming, and me and my father have done yeoman's work in getting our clients moved over to OS X. Lotta hand-holding. Lotta panicked phone calls that they can't do X or Y. These people haven't the first clue what a file permission is. We were able to convince these people that it was going to hort whether they did it now or later. At least if they did it now, they'd have time to get used to it. Hell, these people still use Quark, even though they're all running X, as Classic mode works just fine. I feel sorry for people who refuse to make the switch. They're going to be in the most pain, make the switch to Windows they'll be so damn angry, and it won't be any better.
When you buy something from eBay, you've got nil guarantee that it works. When we recently bought an AppleTalk card for an ImageWriter for that one of our customers NEEDED, we went to Shreve, because if it didn't work, we could at least get our money back. Never mind the blind trust factor inherent in buying anything from eBay. Don't get me wrong, I buy stuff on eBay all the time, but nothing particularly important. The cost of an escrow service generally makes it not worth the hassle.
You obviously haven't been a Mac user too long, or have been living in a cave.
Shreve Systems was selling refurbished Macs for almost as long as I've used them. I still have an old Quadra 610 pizza box that was my first computer (like, only mine, not the family computer). My dad bought almost every pre-G# Mac he ever owned or specced from Shreve. For the Mac user without the deep pockets or with a frugal streak back in the day, they were the only place to look for equipment. Even these days, you never know when you're going to need to replace parts on someone's old PowerMac or need an AppleTalk card for an ImageWriter, and Shreve were the guys to talk to. Now that source has dried up.
The problem with EQ (and AO, DAoC, whatever) is that you need on average around an hour just to get going in the game. You need to get to some place where you can kill something, find a group, wait for friends, etc etc...
Well, you don't NEED to. I currently play both DAoC and Anarchy Online, the former regularly, the latter irregularly. Yes, there are some things you need to have large groups for and preparation is required, but those are by no means the only things there are to do in the games. EQ's ultra rare mob spawn/drop system isn't like what all other games have. I regularly pop on DAoC or AO when I have a few minutes to kill before doing soemthing/going somewhere. I'm a habitual multitasker, so even if I play during work hours (basically self-employed tech-for-hire) I'm usually researching some problem or working on something at the same time.
I also use the games as a way to keep in touch with my SO who's in grad school on the other side of the country. No, it's not "face time" but it keeps us doing stuff together, and it helps alot with the long distance relationship. Better than just speaking through IM, and cheaper than the phone bill.
The hardcore spend tons of time on it, but the hardcore are just that. To those people it has ceased to be a game and has become a sport, and any sport requires an insane amount of practice to be the best at.
Yes, I play games, an awful lot. In the vernacular, I would be called a gaming addict. I've called myself that, and have no problem with it, so feel free. Whether it is a "real" addiction could be argued to death. I don't get the shivers when I'm not playing a game, but I certainly think about it often enough. It fills my time. I reject out of hand all accusations that I merely am rationalizing anything. I frankly don't see it as by default irrational in the first place, so there's no need to spin it to make it appear so.
Here's the real end of the story. People are responsible for the consequences of their own actions. Of the myriad positions made on this point, the ones that have been modded up appear to fall into one of two catagories.
1) These "gaming addicts" are worthless and spineless, without the self control the gods gave moths.
2) The games made me do it! I couldn't stop myself! They're dangerous! Keep away!
There is (at the very least) a third way to look at the whole "addiction" scenario. Maybe, just maybe, people have respsonsibly taken a look at the world around them, their lives, and sundry other things, and have chosen to spend a large portion of their time playing video games. Who gave any of you the right to pass judgement on another person's social situation? Hmm? I'm waiting. The world is a hellhole these days. Our government seems intent on passive-agressively stripping us of our rights, moving us inexorably toward the gods know what kind of war. People with a grudge against me because of a government I can't stand and have excercised my franchise against are out there looking to kill anyone who might happen to be around, and scare the fuck out of the rest of them. If you disagree with anyone, they want you marginalized or dead. I wouldn't wish this world on anyone. How can you be surprised that people would feel the need to form their own communities to try and insulate themselves. Why do you give a damn whether that community is online or person-to-person?
No one gets out of this alive, eh? So take a look at the log in your own eye before you worry about those around you. You techno-fetishistic, mysoginist, life-less circuit-heads. (Hit a little close to home? Good. No? Consider yourself suitably insulted, in whatever way fits.)
Aside from getting the best hardware you can afford, if you want the best performance out of your gaming machine, don't do anything else with that computer than play games. Don't even install any other software (save Mozilla for downloading patches, etc) but the base operating system. Anything else you install can have hidden stuff that will reduce your performance. All this extra tweaking crap is closing the barn door after the horses have already ran.
Anyone reading this been using a Mac long enough to remember "Bash Big Blue", which was just clicking on a jumping around IBM logo. I remember playing that on my family's Mac Plus back with the original Daleks game, Airborne, and Orbiter.
I don't imagine AOLTW's bandwidth costs are in the totally defrayed by the advertising found on their sites. They likely have been losing magazine subscriptions to Time, etc, for awhile, since almost anyone who doesn't want to pay for it and has an internet connection can read it for free.
Even if 10,000 pay, say $10 monthly for an subscription to the online versions of one of their magazines, and maybe another 10,000 get an AOL account for access to all of them, that's more money than they ae getting from those properties now. Not to mention the likely increase in magazine subscriptions from people who were only reading it online because it was free and might've paid anyways.
People don't seem to realize that people who make and do things for-pay are WILLING to go out of business if no one wants their stuff. If you went to a Suncoast Video and just stood in front of the screen watching whatever movie they had running, before too long they'd tell you to buy something or get the hell out before they have security kick you out. They don't care what you think should be free or not, and acting like they should only makes you look like an idiot.
Slashdot Mirror
Might as well reply to you on this, as a lot of people said the same thing, and you're the highest rated.
I took a second look and golly-gee there is a VGA connector there. My bad, I honestly have never noticed it there. I'm not the original owner of this thing (though it's all here) so I never really pored over it that thoroughly.
First of all, it wasn't the "iCube". It was just the Cube, or more commonly, the G4 Cube.
Speaking as someone who is posting this from a G4 Cube, it wasn't and isn't that great a machine. All it has for a video connector in the back is an ADC connector, so unless you want to buy an adapter, you're stuck with expensive (but nice) Apple monitors, like the 15" Flat-screen CRT that originally came with the Cube, which is what I'm using here. Not that it's a crappy monitor, it's just a pain.
Also, it isn't as space-saving as you might believe. It was kept silent and cool by taking the power supply and moving it outside to a large, unwieldy power pack.
The speakers are crappy and there's a wierd USB-connector for them. No regular speaking connection, you've got to use the provided ones.
The "cool" touch-sensitive power button (using, I assume, the same technology as laptop trackpads) is, like those laptop trackpads, more trouble than it's worth. You have to be EXTREMELY careful when moving it around, because any light touch will send the machine into sleep mode immediately, even during the boot process. This is a serious pain when you're moving it around, as plugging it in to the power supply needs to be the last item on your list, and most people by habit do that first "to make sure it works". My cat puts it into sleep all the time, sniffing at the computer.
The access to USB ports, power ports, network ports, and the like is very shoddily done, all underneath the computer, with very little leeway, which means you generally need to put the machine on it's side to plug in a network cable, USB cable, firewire, whatever. Doing this, even for people like me who've been working with a Cube for awhile, means the first thing you do is put your hand in the most convenient place to flip it on it's side, or on it's back, which means you either slap the power button with your hand, or the table or some other object on your desk does it.
All in all, it's a cast iron pain, and one of Apple's biggest design blunders.
The 17" iMac, however, is a great thing. Hopefully, they won't become a collector's item, and I can get my hands on an inexpensive one.
Well, you should, because ultimately, Apple does control what does and doesn't run there.
Actually, no. They control what does or does not run under their operating system. I run Linux on an older iMac. People (for some reason I can't fathom) run Linux on newer machines that run OS X fine. Hell, Apple even helped support one of the older linux-for-macs distributions. In the end, what you use it for doesn't matter a whole lot to them, they just make the hardware. Yeah, they'll happily sell you other stuff if you want it, but they're not (yet) about stopping you from doing anything with it. (No, the iDVD thing isn't about hardware, the person in question was altering iDVD, an Apple piece of software)
It's not much different from running Gtk+ under XDarwin.
Actually, it's very different. I don't need to hog system resources running two window managers. I don't care if the applications don't follow the Apple spec for GUI design on a Mac. If that's what I wanted, what makes you think I'd even be bothering with GTK+ at all?
Well, perhaps you should.
Perhaps I shouldn't.
The fewer people buy and use Macs, the more trouble Apple is in.
I could get into the idiotic rumors of Apple's demise, but they've been gone over and over. The computer manufacturing industry is faltering all over. Apple isn't alone, no matter how you might wish it to be.
And if the open source community doesn't bother with supporting ports of open source software to the Mac anymore, you won't be getting much open source software anymore either.
This is the same "open source community" that ports things to the Amiga, BeOS, Irix, praises someone like Stallman for a "revolutionary operating system" that's more vaporware than half of the dead dotcoms? And there's supposed to be some way for you to stop people from porting things to a PPC architecture and Darwin when someone gets a bug up their ass about it later?
I would consider myself unconcerned... =)
Excuse me, but I don't give a shit what Apple wants or doesn't want me to be able to run on their hardware. I'd like to run some GTK-based applications natively under Aqua without having to run a second window manager that happens to be resource intensive and buggy-as-hell along side it. Apparently a lot of other people want to as well.
This has nothing at all to do with "support for regular UNIX GUIs", it's about expanding support for the Aqua GUI. It's about making X11 less necessary, not making it more necessary.
I don't care what you do with your Mac, or your Linux machine. Neither does anyone else in here. If you want to waste the electricity and processor on a jukebox, well, you go for it.
It was Donkey Kong for the Intellivision. Yeah, I'm sure it was worse than the other versions, but hey, I didn't know any better. I played the hell out of that thing. Play control was fine enough for me.
As for Action 52, as the story hints at, there is a pretty funny and interesting story that goes along with the game. Here's a link to the Something Awful Rompit Review of Action 52, and go here
for the Gamefaqs.com reviews page for Action 52. I've rarely laughed as hard as I did reading this stuff.
On a side-note, if you are at all into video games, browsing Gamefaqs for the reviews of really bad games can be a laugh riot sometimes. There are a few people who seem to make it their mission to completely eviscerate the worst offenders of the old cartridge console games. Some of the crappy PSX games get some hilarious reviews, too. For when you've got some surfing time, at least.
What's in it for them is avoiding goverment regulatory burdens such as have been threatened in the United States.
While the profit hit may, in the end, truly turn out to be imaginary (I don't honestly believe that any side in this numbers game has the real answer right now) the political clout that the entertainment industry holds is very, very real.
Welcome to the real world, twerp.
People don't "think" they need to work unpaid overtime just to hold a job. They DO need to, at least these days.
There are tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people willing to do your job for half of what you make, because they're not making ANYTHING now. It just shows how brainless you are, telling people who can't feed their families or keep their homes heated should not take any less money than you believe they should for the good of the profession.
The "product" is already devalued. Wake up and smell the coffee. If you don't want to work for nothing, well, go into carpentry or some other profession that society actually values.
Of course I accept it. Just because I believe it's one of the biggest wastes of perfectly good bandwidth ever thought up doesn't mean I don't accept it.
Way to cut-and-paste this from MacSlash to here, in an extremely offtopic section here, even.
Hailstorm, I thought, was .NET's raison d'etre. All these information technology services, implemented under a Windows framework, and a totally redesigned operating system, built to seamlessly integrate them.
.NET server (basically Windows XP Server from everything I've heard), and a somewhat cross-platform (with Mono and all that) and network aware VisualBasic replacement in C#?
So what the hell is it now? Passport,
Touche. Preview, preview, preview.
and remember - open source Linux means no spyware at all
You really are clueless, aren't you? I submit the recent trojan horses implanted in BitchX and tcpdump. It certainly is far easier to detect trojans in an open source project, but only a fool would believe that their open source nature makes them immune to trojan horses being implanted.
Please stop spreading idiocy that only makes the problem worse.
I believe someone posted an article from Brin, like this, before Star Wars Episode 1 was released damning it for worshipping the ubermensch over the real people. IE, the only ones worth mentioning are the people who've got nothing mentionable about them. I've never read any of David Brin's books, but I don't imagine I'd be all that interesting. A bunch of forgettable cogs in the wheel of society each having hardly any impact on the world as events overtake everyone? Ah, how enthralling. And I need to pay $5.99 for the paperback version of this startling insight into the completely bloody obvious?
Tolkien stated many a time that his books were not meant to be taken as social commentary on the present (at least, his present). People who insist otherwise are probably the same kids of people who believe that "no means yes". Of course the times, and his experiences in the trenches of WWI influenced his writing, but influenced by != commentary upon.
Cubivore for GameCube. Mister Mosquito for PS2. Jet Grind Radio for Dreamcast.
Frankly, the Japanese are the only ones trying to do things really different from the American or European game studios. Most of the games either never get over here, or are relegated to the novelty or Nipponophile markets. I'm frankly amazed that Cubivore and Mister Mosquito made it over to this side of the Pacific. Anyone who's looking for something different, stay away from American game designers. We push the limits of the genres, but no one with any money here is willing to create any new ones. Just subdivide the ones we already have.
I'm sure saturation is the main reason for TV ads ineffectiveness. I stopped watching TV about a year ago, due to not having enough money to get cable TV service on top of internet service where I moved to a year ago. I've had my dad and other people offer to pay for the service, but by now I just don't want it or need it. I watch alot of movies, and get my news off NPR. The whole world of commercial TV seems so strange to me, now, and the commercials are so jarring, I don't bother to watch it unless I'm at someone else's house. I never used to notice them before, but I so do now. I can't stand commercial radio for the same reasons.
Internet ads I've learned to deal with, I imagine. I know they're there (and sometimes laugh at the wierdnesses...Microsoft advertising on Slashdot, etc) I don't pay enough attention to them to go to extreme measures to avoid them. I use pop-up blocking browsers, 'cause popups can be extremely rude/dangerous, but I don't bother beyond that. Actually, I can count on two hands the number of websites I visit daily that might have ads.
I'm sure you're dead wrong. If slashdot started having "clearly labelled" advertising articles (or slashvertisements as an April Fools post once called them), the page I read that policy change on would be the last page from here that any browser I control downloads from slashdot.
Yeah, slashdot has a heavy editorial bias towards certain products, but that's nerd-land people. In case you hadn't realized it yet, nerds tend to fixate on things and want to tell everyone how it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, even if the other people really might not be all that interested. That I don't have a problem with. Infomercials, cross my line, and my line is the only one that matters in this particular case, since I'm the one choosing what to browse..
I know exactly how expensive the transition to OS X is. I am currently in the process of shepherding all of our Mac clients (the vast majority of the clients I work with) onto OS X.
Frankly, no one is telling people to get rid of their old stuff and replace them with brand spanking new G4s RIGHT NOW. If you've been going well with old 9600s and 8100s for this long, and they're still functioning, who cares? It's not like you can get replacement parts anywhere but eBay or Preowned Electronics nowadays. They'll continue to run the old OSes until they just stop working.
However, a changeover is eventually going to be coming, and me and my father have done yeoman's work in getting our clients moved over to OS X. Lotta hand-holding. Lotta panicked phone calls that they can't do X or Y. These people haven't the first clue what a file permission is. We were able to convince these people that it was going to hort whether they did it now or later. At least if they did it now, they'd have time to get used to it. Hell, these people still use Quark, even though they're all running X, as Classic mode works just fine. I feel sorry for people who refuse to make the switch. They're going to be in the most pain, make the switch to Windows they'll be so damn angry, and it won't be any better.
When you buy something from eBay, you've got nil guarantee that it works. When we recently bought an AppleTalk card for an ImageWriter for that one of our customers NEEDED, we went to Shreve, because if it didn't work, we could at least get our money back. Never mind the blind trust factor inherent in buying anything from eBay. Don't get me wrong, I buy stuff on eBay all the time, but nothing particularly important. The cost of an escrow service generally makes it not worth the hassle.
You obviously haven't been a Mac user too long, or have been living in a cave.
Shreve Systems was selling refurbished Macs for almost as long as I've used them. I still have an old Quadra 610 pizza box that was my first computer (like, only mine, not the family computer). My dad bought almost every pre-G# Mac he ever owned or specced from Shreve. For the Mac user without the deep pockets or with a frugal streak back in the day, they were the only place to look for equipment. Even these days, you never know when you're going to need to replace parts on someone's old PowerMac or need an AppleTalk card for an ImageWriter, and Shreve were the guys to talk to. Now that source has dried up.
The problem with EQ (and AO, DAoC, whatever) is that you need on average around an hour just to get going in the game. You need to get to some place where you can kill something, find a group, wait for friends, etc etc...
Well, you don't NEED to. I currently play both DAoC and Anarchy Online, the former regularly, the latter irregularly. Yes, there are some things you need to have large groups for and preparation is required, but those are by no means the only things there are to do in the games. EQ's ultra rare mob spawn/drop system isn't like what all other games have. I regularly pop on DAoC or AO when I have a few minutes to kill before doing soemthing/going somewhere. I'm a habitual multitasker, so even if I play during work hours (basically self-employed tech-for-hire) I'm usually researching some problem or working on something at the same time.
I also use the games as a way to keep in touch with my SO who's in grad school on the other side of the country. No, it's not "face time" but it keeps us doing stuff together, and it helps alot with the long distance relationship. Better than just speaking through IM, and cheaper than the phone bill.
The hardcore spend tons of time on it, but the hardcore are just that. To those people it has ceased to be a game and has become a sport, and any sport requires an insane amount of practice to be the best at.
Yes, I play games, an awful lot. In the vernacular, I would be called a gaming addict. I've called myself that, and have no problem with it, so feel free. Whether it is a "real" addiction could be argued to death. I don't get the shivers when I'm not playing a game, but I certainly think about it often enough. It fills my time. I reject out of hand all accusations that I merely am rationalizing anything. I frankly don't see it as by default irrational in the first place, so there's no need to spin it to make it appear so.
Here's the real end of the story. People are responsible for the consequences of their own actions. Of the myriad positions made on this point, the ones that have been modded up appear to fall into one of two catagories.
1) These "gaming addicts" are worthless and spineless, without the self control the gods gave moths.
2) The games made me do it! I couldn't stop myself! They're dangerous! Keep away!
There is (at the very least) a third way to look at the whole "addiction" scenario. Maybe, just maybe, people have respsonsibly taken a look at the world around them, their lives, and sundry other things, and have chosen to spend a large portion of their time playing video games. Who gave any of you the right to pass judgement on another person's social situation? Hmm? I'm waiting. The world is a hellhole these days. Our government seems intent on passive-agressively stripping us of our rights, moving us inexorably toward the gods know what kind of war. People with a grudge against me because of a government I can't stand and have excercised my franchise against are out there looking to kill anyone who might happen to be around, and scare the fuck out of the rest of them. If you disagree with anyone, they want you marginalized or dead. I wouldn't wish this world on anyone. How can you be surprised that people would feel the need to form their own communities to try and insulate themselves. Why do you give a damn whether that community is online or person-to-person?
No one gets out of this alive, eh? So take a look at the log in your own eye before you worry about those around you. You techno-fetishistic, mysoginist, life-less circuit-heads. (Hit a little close to home? Good. No? Consider yourself suitably insulted, in whatever way fits.)
MS Licensces say that you can't review the software you are licensed to use without Microsoft's approval.
How's that any better?
Aside from getting the best hardware you can afford, if you want the best performance out of your gaming machine, don't do anything else with that computer than play games. Don't even install any other software (save Mozilla for downloading patches, etc) but the base operating system. Anything else you install can have hidden stuff that will reduce your performance. All this extra tweaking crap is closing the barn door after the horses have already ran.
Anyone reading this been using a Mac long enough to remember "Bash Big Blue", which was just clicking on a jumping around IBM logo. I remember playing that on my family's Mac Plus back with the original Daleks game, Airborne, and Orbiter.
I don't imagine AOLTW's bandwidth costs are in the totally defrayed by the advertising found on their sites. They likely have been losing magazine subscriptions to Time, etc, for awhile, since almost anyone who doesn't want to pay for it and has an internet connection can read it for free.
Even if 10,000 pay, say $10 monthly for an subscription to the online versions of one of their magazines, and maybe another 10,000 get an AOL account for access to all of them, that's more money than they ae getting from those properties now. Not to mention the likely increase in magazine subscriptions from people who were only reading it online because it was free and might've paid anyways.
People don't seem to realize that people who make and do things for-pay are WILLING to go out of business if no one wants their stuff. If you went to a Suncoast Video and just stood in front of the screen watching whatever movie they had running, before too long they'd tell you to buy something or get the hell out before they have security kick you out. They don't care what you think should be free or not, and acting like they should only makes you look like an idiot.