And, as I've said in several other comments, the point that is being missed by about half the/. readership is the definition of "desktop" (or "personal computer"). Apple hasn't generally tried to market to the same segment that previous 64-bit offerings were marketed to. I think basically they are defining "personal computers" as "computers marketed to the same segment of the population we have historically targeted." In which case, their statement is correct.
On the speed thing, I'm with you 100%. Everyone says they're the fastest, and, by a certain measure, everyone is...
Apple markets the G5 as a desktop, to the general public (not admins, not geeks, ordinary people). The previous 64-bit systems have been marketed as workstations or servers. Regardless of your semantic quibblings about what exactly constitutes a desktop vs. a workstation, this is what they were sold as, to the general public. Sure, I could buy a whopping expensive server or workstation from whoever I wanted, put it on my desk, and call it a desktop. And it wouldn't be any less true. But that's not the point. It's not my terminology we're dealing with here, or yours.
Apple doesn't care what you call the G5, or what anyone else does. They call it a desktop. Perhaps they made this decision so they could market it as the "first 64-bit desktop" (which I consider synonymous with Personal Computer, as they were using the term). It was clear the message Apple was trying to send. Whether it was a purely marketing-based decision or not, when arguing with Apple's words, you at least have to accept their terminology. You may not agree that that's what a Personal Computer is, but I, and many others, think it's a reasonable definition, so to talk about Apple's statement, you simply have to accept it. Otherwise the argument doesn't even make sense.
Apologies. I've just had one too many people say stuff like that to me and mean it, I guess. And it is kind of annoying not having a real Apple store within the general area...but think how people in, say, Montana must feel.;-)
All right, I get it; the Mac benchmarks were done by Macworld. But the point still stands that the comparisons were done by a primarily Windows-oriented magazine, and several people have called the methods into question (eg, almost none of the apps even *used* the second processor, and the PC TestWorld suite, or whatever, doesn't run on the Mac, etc). From what I can see, this cannot be called an unbiased comparison, any more than any paid for or done by Apple, Dell, M$, or Sun can.
How nice. I, personally, like my area very much (Upstate NY, just south of the Adirondacks). However, the nearest Apple store, until just recently, was in Syracuse, nearly an hour's drive away (and that was in the back corner of a CompUSA, or something). Now there's a Best Buy about 20 minutes away. The closest "real" Apple store is in Crossgates mall...in Albany, 2 hours away.
If you have multiple Apple stores near you, good for you. You probably either live in Souther California or somewhere between Boston and DC. But most of the country doesn't have Apple stores all over like that. But that doesn't mean we should move.
My general attitude towards all benchmarks is skepticism, no matter who performs them or what sort of test suite they're running. I think that both real-world tests and (independently designed) artificial test suites can give us important information about computers' performance. I think that artificial tests are for people who like to compare raw speed, while real-world tests are for people who just care if it's fast enough to do what they want.
PC World is, and always has been (to the best of my knowledge; I don't read it) about what the general public calls PCs: that is, Wintel computers. They tend to have an anti-Mac slant, from everything I've seen. Hardly an unbiased source.
And the point is that Apple markets the G5 as a desktop, and that's what they were comparing it to, other computers marketed as desktops. You can't just arbitrarily change the domain of discourse because you don't feel that the distinction matters. Apple said something specific, and you're trying to put other words into their mouth.
The POINT is that Apple never marketed the G5 as the fastest workstation. All Apple marketed the G5 as was the a) first 64-bit desktop (and if your definition of desktop differs from "a pre-built box from a well-known company that an ordinary human might buy", that's your problem, not Apple's), and b) the fastest desktop around at the time.
Saying, "Ooh! Ooh! New computers have come out! There are benchmarks against computers Apple wasn't talking about! The G5's not the fastest! Apple LIED!" is just plain dumb. Of course faster computers will come out! Apple isn't dumb enough to think or claim that their first-generation G5s will always be the fastest, and anyone who thinks they were claiming that is dumb.
And does anyone else see the possible conflict of interest with PC World running these benchmarks? Now, note that I'm an Apple fan. However, I won't completely believe any benchmarks that are done by anyone with an interest in seeing either side win. And it would probably be best if both computers were running something neutral, like a Linux or a BSD. Does anyone really believe these benchmarks are any more fair and unbiased than Apple's own???
although I couldn't see any support for tabs in safari so had to install firebird
Did you even bother to look in the preferences? Right under the Safari menu (or hit Cmd-,). The item in the center, labeled "Tabs"--click that. Then click "Enable Tabbed Browsing." There, now, wasn't that easy?
Safari has had tabs since well before the 1.0 release. You could at least make some effort before giving up on it.
Apologies, Mr. Annoying Person. The other solutions suggested were free. Also, I thought I had heard before of Anonymizer as being free. So why not just take your elitist attitude and stuff it? Stuff your gratuitous insults and profanity, too, while you're at it.
Oh, and by the way, you rail against "typical Slashdot whiners," but I notice that you're on Slashdot, too. Funny thing, that....
It looks like they might once have allowed you to use their service for free, but I just tried viewing a few sites with it, and it looks like most dynamic content (eg, Slashdot, any forum or blog-type page) requires that you Upgrade to their Premium Service with New Privacy Features!!!!!
I worked as an intern at the Air Force Research Lab in Rome, NY, and the people I was working under were talking about it. I don't remember details, but I got the impression that it wouldn't be approved till sometime next year. By which point it, too will be outdated (though, of course, nowhere near as hopelessly so as NS4.7!).
So, yeah, it was DoD related. Not that it's likely to be the kind of info you can really call "research"...;-)
Not really. I had to write webpages that would work in both NS4 and IE5.5 last summer (the most recent browser approved by the gov't is NS4.7, and I was working for a gov't contractor). In most cases, I had to have separate CSS files depending on which browser was accessing the page. In some cases, I even had to redirect to a different HTML file. And getting all those tables to work right in NS4 in the first place...I quite agree, augh!!
Fortunately, they're testing Mozilla 1.0 for use, and should have finished approving it by sometime next year.
Well, I haven't checked out Apple RAM for a while, but while loading up my fiancee's Dell laptop, I discovered that I could get an extra 512MB DIMM bundled & preinstalled for around $330...or I could buy the same DIMM from Crucial for $130. Guess which I did?
By the way, if the prices aren't quite that outrageous, I don't mind paying a little extra to get stuff straight from Apple--or, for that matter, from most locally-owned stores, and other places I think are worth it. So long as the money's going to a "good cause," whether that cause is actually a charity or is just a business I want to see prosper, I don't mind paying a little extra.
It seems that we shall have to agree to disagree on most of this, since you have a pessimistic view of how Halo would have been received had Bungie not been bought by Microsoft. However, there is still one issue I feel the need to clarify.
Frankly, if you're going to boycott Microsoft over Halo, then you need to boycott Sony over Final Fantasy
[etc]
I think you misunderstood me. I am not boycotting over exclusivity; I have no problem with exclusivity as such. I actually very much enjoy the Final Fantasy series, which was the other reason I bought my PS2, and I am happy to know that it will remain on the PS2 for the foreseeable future (ie, FFXII).
No, my problem is with Microsoft's business practices, their general evilness. You are entitled to your own opinion of them; however, I would encourage you to consider boycotting, too, since they have engaged in many activities that would be considered anticompetitive even after being found to be an illegal monopoly. (Please don't start an argument about this; this is the way I read the facts, and you won't change my mind, and if you believe otherwise, I know I won't change your belief either)
But, as I said, it appears that we have differing premises on this argument, so further debate is likely fruitless.
I find that questionable. The PS2 has limitations that would have watered down that game significantly. But, if they were to do a decent job, I could see you being quite happy with it.
Ah. So not only is the PS2 somehow significantly inferior to the XBox (I don't know the relative specs, but I'm quite sure it wouldn't make that big a difference), but for some reason, less people would have bought it if they didn't have to buy a new console to play it...yeah. I'm sure that's what would have happened.
I hope you realize that Sony is guilty of this stuff, a lot more so than Microsoft. Square? Rare? Etc.
Huh?? Last I checked, Sony didn't own Square; as a matter of fact, they just merged with Enix, another very successful RPG-maker, to form Square-Enix. This way, Square doesn't even need Sony to publish their titles in North America the way they used to. And it was Microsoft, not Sony, that bought Rare.
So who has Sony bought lately? I haven't been paying much attention, but I think I would have noticed if they'd bought anyone big.
Encumbered? Give me a break! That game would not have sold well on the PC.
See above. Why, given both major commercial OSes and the most popular console of the current generation, do you think that Halo would have sold fewer titles than on the XBox, which, again, most people had to buy just to play Halo??? And there's also the fact that various people, including me, wouldn't buy the XBox because we're boycotting M$ (and please don't start arguing about that; I am boycotting, and others are too, and it's a totally separate issue. In fact, I'm still not sure I'll buy Halo, even when it comes out for the Mac). I doubt as many people are boycotting Sony, or Bungie.
Halo is the must have game for XBOX. It would have been another ho-hum-did-it-before title on the PC that would have been lucky to sell half a million units.
Halo is only the "must-have" title for XBox because the XBox really didn't do well, and has very few games of its caliber. And, once again, you are discounting the PS2 sales entirely. (I agree that if it were Mac-exclusive, it wouldn't have had nearly the audience it would need to sell better, as much as I like the Mac).
It seems to me that you somehow need to justify Halo's XBox exclusivity. I realize that "exclusivity is a fact of life," but Halo wasn't originally going to be exclusive to anything, and I, for the reasons I have stated, believe that it would have done better if the original plan had been followed.
At least in this case, it was moved to a console where the quality was consistent, and Bungie reaped the rewards of millions of copies sold. At best they might have gotten a million or two on PC.
I guess you don't remember what the original plan was for Halo, (and recall it was demoed at the Macworld Expo, alongside Steve Jobs, I forget which year!). Halo was to be released, if I recall correctly, simultaneously for Mac, PC, and PS2. Or if not simultaneously, then first for Mac, then for PC and PS2 very soon after. And don't try to tell me you think that people wouldn't have bought it for PS2. I would have; it was one of the reasons I bought one.
Whoops! Guess I got gypped....
So it would have had the consistency of consoles, the flexibility of PCs (both Wintel and Mac), and the early, unencumbered release it deserved. Until M$ bought Bungie and decided that they wanted to push the XBox.
Bungie started development on the Mac. Minotaur, Pathways into Darkness, the Marathon series, those came out exclusively for the Mac. Yes, M2 was released for Windows 95, but it was clearly an afterthought. Bungie was a Mac games company, and one of the best, before the Evil Empire decided they wanted them on their side...
"Paracutin...1943, a Mexican farmer sees smoke coming out of the middle of his cornfield. A week later there's a volcano a thousand feet high. There's no history of anything until it happens. Then there is. "
Umm... my understanding is all TV broadcasters being all channels.
That is half correct: broadcasters, not cable--certainly not all channels. Here, where I live, it's about 3 1/2 channels. Until there's significant pressure on the cable industry to change (that is, most people have HD sets), they're not going to spend the large amounts of $$$ to upgrade their own equipment.
My understanding right now is that the only cable networks that are changing over are the sports channels. This will certainly drive some adoption, but I suspect that it will be slow. Eventually, all channels will at least have an HD option; however, that probably won't be for some time.
And maybe by then the prevailing winds of public opinion will be somewhat more against things like HD-DVDs stopping people from doing legal stuff with them.
Dan Aris
This would be funnier if it were, you know, TRUE
on
Beatles Bite Apple
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's true that "ringo" means Apple. However, not only can you not directly write "Starr" in Japanese (the closest you can come is "sutaa" or "sutaru"), nothing like it means "sauce," so far as I know. Generally, when a Japanese person wants to say "sauce," they say "soosu", (and that's a long "o", not an "u" sound). They pronounce it pretty much like we do. It's a loan word.
I will admit that it's possible that there's a Japanese word I don't know that means "sauce" and sounds like "Starr," but if so, I don't think it's a common one.
The problem isn't the locks on the doors--it's the fact that the staff locks us in as soon as we get there, and won't let us out till checkout time.
The real problem is that there are 2 kinds of people: First there are the lusers who need an ISP to firewall for them, 'cause not only do they not know what it is and that they need it, they certainly wouldn't pay extra for it, even $1-2/month. Then there are the geeks like us, who want ports open so we can do stuff, and can usually configure our own firewalls.
The trouble, of course, will come with the lusers who want to play games that require open ports. However, if they can't figure out which ports they need opened, they don't deserve to have them opened, and if they can, and tell the ISP, which can then check that against the information for the game, the ISP should open those ports and only those ports for them.
But that will never happen, because of the many ISPs (this isn't meant as a dig at you, div_2n) who have lusers staffing them, or just care about the money, and not about protecting their customers or actually letting them access the Internet.
I learned to touchtype (not perfectly, but pretty darn well) by playing the Rogue-like game Angband, based (extremely loosely) on the works of Tolkien. It's a lot of fun, and you use every key on the keyboard that has a symbol on it for some action or other (most have at least 2 actions, some have 3: normal keypress, Shift, and Ctrl)
It's a somewhat unorthodox, but highly addictive, method of learning to touchtype. My current favourite variant is T.O.M.E., Tales of Middle-Earth, formerly PernAngband (until Anne McCaffrey got mad:-P)
But if you write an emulator (or have one that already exists), you only need to do that once. On the other hand, each piece of software needs to be ported separately. And sometimes it's really hard to get the necessary abstraction to work properly. I can attest to this, since I'm currently trying to write a program on the Mac that I want to make portable to Windows (probably not port it myself, but maybe if I'm real bored...).
As to your second paragraph, I'm afraid I don't understand what the heck you're trying to say. Do you mean "They can make it look like Mac, so they can emulate it, and it will look like Windows"? If so, then duh, of course they can, since they have an emulator now. But that seems like a pretty pointless statement, so I'm not really sure what you're driving at....
And while your description of Mac users is one point of view, another is simply that Mac users tend to appreciate good UI design. One of the reasons MS has been ripping of the Mac's UI design from the get-go.
Slashdot Mirror
And, as I've said in several other comments, the point that is being missed by about half the /. readership is the definition of "desktop" (or "personal computer"). Apple hasn't generally tried to market to the same segment that previous 64-bit offerings were marketed to. I think basically they are defining "personal computers" as "computers marketed to the same segment of the population we have historically targeted." In which case, their statement is correct.
On the speed thing, I'm with you 100%. Everyone says they're the fastest, and, by a certain measure, everyone is...
Dan Aris
*sigh* I seem to be attracting trolls today...
Apple markets the G5 as a desktop, to the general public (not admins, not geeks, ordinary people). The previous 64-bit systems have been marketed as workstations or servers. Regardless of your semantic quibblings about what exactly constitutes a desktop vs. a workstation, this is what they were sold as, to the general public. Sure, I could buy a whopping expensive server or workstation from whoever I wanted, put it on my desk, and call it a desktop. And it wouldn't be any less true. But that's not the point. It's not my terminology we're dealing with here, or yours.
Apple doesn't care what you call the G5, or what anyone else does. They call it a desktop. Perhaps they made this decision so they could market it as the "first 64-bit desktop" (which I consider synonymous with Personal Computer, as they were using the term). It was clear the message Apple was trying to send. Whether it was a purely marketing-based decision or not, when arguing with Apple's words, you at least have to accept their terminology. You may not agree that that's what a Personal Computer is, but I, and many others, think it's a reasonable definition, so to talk about Apple's statement, you simply have to accept it. Otherwise the argument doesn't even make sense.
Dan Aris
Apologies. I've just had one too many people say stuff like that to me and mean it, I guess. And it is kind of annoying not having a real Apple store within the general area...but think how people in, say, Montana must feel. ;-)
Dan Aris
All right, I get it; the Mac benchmarks were done by Macworld. But the point still stands that the comparisons were done by a primarily Windows-oriented magazine, and several people have called the methods into question (eg, almost none of the apps even *used* the second processor, and the PC TestWorld suite, or whatever, doesn't run on the Mac, etc). From what I can see, this cannot be called an unbiased comparison, any more than any paid for or done by Apple, Dell, M$, or Sun can.
Dan Aris
How nice. I, personally, like my area very much (Upstate NY, just south of the Adirondacks). However, the nearest Apple store, until just recently, was in Syracuse, nearly an hour's drive away (and that was in the back corner of a CompUSA, or something). Now there's a Best Buy about 20 minutes away. The closest "real" Apple store is in Crossgates mall...in Albany, 2 hours away.
If you have multiple Apple stores near you, good for you. You probably either live in Souther California or somewhere between Boston and DC. But most of the country doesn't have Apple stores all over like that. But that doesn't mean we should move.
Dan Aris
My general attitude towards all benchmarks is skepticism, no matter who performs them or what sort of test suite they're running. I think that both real-world tests and (independently designed) artificial test suites can give us important information about computers' performance. I think that artificial tests are for people who like to compare raw speed, while real-world tests are for people who just care if it's fast enough to do what they want.
Dan Aris
PC World is, and always has been (to the best of my knowledge; I don't read it) about what the general public calls PCs: that is, Wintel computers. They tend to have an anti-Mac slant, from everything I've seen. Hardly an unbiased source.
And the point is that Apple markets the G5 as a desktop, and that's what they were comparing it to, other computers marketed as desktops. You can't just arbitrarily change the domain of discourse because you don't feel that the distinction matters. Apple said something specific, and you're trying to put other words into their mouth.
Dan Aris
The POINT is that Apple never marketed the G5 as the fastest workstation. All Apple marketed the G5 as was the a) first 64-bit desktop (and if your definition of desktop differs from "a pre-built box from a well-known company that an ordinary human might buy", that's your problem, not Apple's), and b) the fastest desktop around at the time.
Saying, "Ooh! Ooh! New computers have come out! There are benchmarks against computers Apple wasn't talking about! The G5's not the fastest! Apple LIED!" is just plain dumb. Of course faster computers will come out! Apple isn't dumb enough to think or claim that their first-generation G5s will always be the fastest, and anyone who thinks they were claiming that is dumb.
And does anyone else see the possible conflict of interest with PC World running these benchmarks? Now, note that I'm an Apple fan. However, I won't completely believe any benchmarks that are done by anyone with an interest in seeing either side win. And it would probably be best if both computers were running something neutral, like a Linux or a BSD. Does anyone really believe these benchmarks are any more fair and unbiased than Apple's own???
Dan Aris
although I couldn't see any support for tabs in safari so had to install firebird
Did you even bother to look in the preferences? Right under the Safari menu (or hit Cmd-,). The item in the center, labeled "Tabs"--click that. Then click "Enable Tabbed Browsing." There, now, wasn't that easy?
Safari has had tabs since well before the 1.0 release. You could at least make some effort before giving up on it.
Dan Aris
Apologies, Mr. Annoying Person. The other solutions suggested were free. Also, I thought I had heard before of Anonymizer as being free. So why not just take your elitist attitude and stuff it? Stuff your gratuitous insults and profanity, too, while you're at it.
Oh, and by the way, you rail against "typical Slashdot whiners," but I notice that you're on Slashdot, too. Funny thing, that....
Dan Aris
It looks like they might once have allowed you to use their service for free, but I just tried viewing a few sites with it, and it looks like most dynamic content (eg, Slashdot, any forum or blog-type page) requires that you Upgrade to their Premium Service with New Privacy Features!!!!!
Yeah. Sure.
Dan Aris
I worked as an intern at the Air Force Research Lab in Rome, NY, and the people I was working under were talking about it. I don't remember details, but I got the impression that it wouldn't be approved till sometime next year. By which point it, too will be outdated (though, of course, nowhere near as hopelessly so as NS4.7!).
;-)
So, yeah, it was DoD related. Not that it's likely to be the kind of info you can really call "research"...
Dan Aris
Not really. I had to write webpages that would work in both NS4 and IE5.5 last summer (the most recent browser approved by the gov't is NS4.7, and I was working for a gov't contractor). In most cases, I had to have separate CSS files depending on which browser was accessing the page. In some cases, I even had to redirect to a different HTML file. And getting all those tables to work right in NS4 in the first place...I quite agree, augh!!
Fortunately, they're testing Mozilla 1.0 for use, and should have finished approving it by sometime next year.
Dan Aris
With no debugger installed it sends you to a window with a > prompt, at which I never managed to do anything.
Actually, if you type "G FINDER" at that prompt, it will attempt to force-quit whatever application is currently running.
Dan Aris
Well, I haven't checked out Apple RAM for a while, but while loading up my fiancee's Dell laptop, I discovered that I could get an extra 512MB DIMM bundled & preinstalled for around $330...or I could buy the same DIMM from Crucial for $130. Guess which I did?
By the way, if the prices aren't quite that outrageous, I don't mind paying a little extra to get stuff straight from Apple--or, for that matter, from most locally-owned stores, and other places I think are worth it. So long as the money's going to a "good cause," whether that cause is actually a charity or is just a business I want to see prosper, I don't mind paying a little extra.
Dan Aris
It seems that we shall have to agree to disagree on most of this, since you have a pessimistic view of how Halo would have been received had Bungie not been bought by Microsoft. However, there is still one issue I feel the need to clarify.
I think you misunderstood me. I am not boycotting over exclusivity; I have no problem with exclusivity as such. I actually very much enjoy the Final Fantasy series, which was the other reason I bought my PS2, and I am happy to know that it will remain on the PS2 for the foreseeable future (ie, FFXII).
No, my problem is with Microsoft's business practices, their general evilness. You are entitled to your own opinion of them; however, I would encourage you to consider boycotting, too, since they have engaged in many activities that would be considered anticompetitive even after being found to be an illegal monopoly. (Please don't start an argument about this; this is the way I read the facts, and you won't change my mind, and if you believe otherwise, I know I won't change your belief either)
But, as I said, it appears that we have differing premises on this argument, so further debate is likely fruitless.
Dan Aris
Ah. So not only is the PS2 somehow significantly inferior to the XBox (I don't know the relative specs, but I'm quite sure it wouldn't make that big a difference), but for some reason, less people would have bought it if they didn't have to buy a new console to play it...yeah. I'm sure that's what would have happened.
Huh?? Last I checked, Sony didn't own Square; as a matter of fact, they just merged with Enix, another very successful RPG-maker, to form Square-Enix. This way, Square doesn't even need Sony to publish their titles in North America the way they used to. And it was Microsoft, not Sony, that bought Rare.
So who has Sony bought lately? I haven't been paying much attention, but I think I would have noticed if they'd bought anyone big.
See above. Why, given both major commercial OSes and the most popular console of the current generation, do you think that Halo would have sold fewer titles than on the XBox, which, again, most people had to buy just to play Halo??? And there's also the fact that various people, including me, wouldn't buy the XBox because we're boycotting M$ (and please don't start arguing about that; I am boycotting, and others are too, and it's a totally separate issue. In fact, I'm still not sure I'll buy Halo, even when it comes out for the Mac). I doubt as many people are boycotting Sony, or Bungie.
Halo is only the "must-have" title for XBox because the XBox really didn't do well, and has very few games of its caliber. And, once again, you are discounting the PS2 sales entirely. (I agree that if it were Mac-exclusive, it wouldn't have had nearly the audience it would need to sell better, as much as I like the Mac).
It seems to me that you somehow need to justify Halo's XBox exclusivity. I realize that "exclusivity is a fact of life," but Halo wasn't originally going to be exclusive to anything, and I, for the reasons I have stated, believe that it would have done better if the original plan had been followed.
Dan Aris
I guess you don't remember what the original plan was for Halo, (and recall it was demoed at the Macworld Expo, alongside Steve Jobs, I forget which year!). Halo was to be released, if I recall correctly, simultaneously for Mac, PC, and PS2. Or if not simultaneously, then first for Mac, then for PC and PS2 very soon after. And don't try to tell me you think that people wouldn't have bought it for PS2. I would have; it was one of the reasons I bought one.
Whoops! Guess I got gypped....
So it would have had the consistency of consoles, the flexibility of PCs (both Wintel and Mac), and the early, unencumbered release it deserved. Until M$ bought Bungie and decided that they wanted to push the XBox.
Dan Aris
Bungie started development on the Mac. Minotaur, Pathways into Darkness, the Marathon series, those came out exclusively for the Mac. Yes, M2 was released for Windows 95, but it was clearly an afterthought. Bungie was a Mac games company, and one of the best, before the Evil Empire decided they wanted them on their side...
Dan Aris
"Paracutin...1943, a Mexican farmer sees smoke coming out of the middle of his cornfield. A week later there's a volcano a thousand feet high. There's no history of anything until it happens. Then there is. "
--Volcano
Have a nice day.
Dan Aris
That is half correct: broadcasters, not cable--certainly not all channels. Here, where I live, it's about 3 1/2 channels. Until there's significant pressure on the cable industry to change (that is, most people have HD sets), they're not going to spend the large amounts of $$$ to upgrade their own equipment.
My understanding right now is that the only cable networks that are changing over are the sports channels. This will certainly drive some adoption, but I suspect that it will be slow. Eventually, all channels will at least have an HD option; however, that probably won't be for some time.
And maybe by then the prevailing winds of public opinion will be somewhat more against things like HD-DVDs stopping people from doing legal stuff with them.
Dan Aris
It's true that "ringo" means Apple. However, not only can you not directly write "Starr" in Japanese (the closest you can come is "sutaa" or "sutaru"), nothing like it means "sauce," so far as I know. Generally, when a Japanese person wants to say "sauce," they say "soosu", (and that's a long "o", not an "u" sound). They pronounce it pretty much like we do. It's a loan word.
I will admit that it's possible that there's a Japanese word I don't know that means "sauce" and sounds like "Starr," but if so, I don't think it's a common one.
Dan Aris
The problem isn't the locks on the doors--it's the fact that the staff locks us in as soon as we get there, and won't let us out till checkout time.
The real problem is that there are 2 kinds of people: First there are the lusers who need an ISP to firewall for them, 'cause not only do they not know what it is and that they need it, they certainly wouldn't pay extra for it, even $1-2/month. Then there are the geeks like us, who want ports open so we can do stuff, and can usually configure our own firewalls.
The trouble, of course, will come with the lusers who want to play games that require open ports. However, if they can't figure out which ports they need opened, they don't deserve to have them opened, and if they can, and tell the ISP, which can then check that against the information for the game, the ISP should open those ports and only those ports for them.
But that will never happen, because of the many ISPs (this isn't meant as a dig at you, div_2n) who have lusers staffing them, or just care about the money, and not about protecting their customers or actually letting them access the Internet.
Dan Aris
I learned to touchtype (not perfectly, but pretty darn well) by playing the Rogue-like game Angband, based (extremely loosely) on the works of Tolkien. It's a lot of fun, and you use every key on the keyboard that has a symbol on it for some action or other (most have at least 2 actions, some have 3: normal keypress, Shift, and Ctrl)
:-P)
It's a somewhat unorthodox, but highly addictive, method of learning to touchtype. My current favourite variant is T.O.M.E., Tales of Middle-Earth, formerly PernAngband (until Anne McCaffrey got mad
Dan Aris
But if you write an emulator (or have one that already exists), you only need to do that once. On the other hand, each piece of software needs to be ported separately. And sometimes it's really hard to get the necessary abstraction to work properly. I can attest to this, since I'm currently trying to write a program on the Mac that I want to make portable to Windows (probably not port it myself, but maybe if I'm real bored...).
As to your second paragraph, I'm afraid I don't understand what the heck you're trying to say. Do you mean "They can make it look like Mac, so they can emulate it, and it will look like Windows"? If so, then duh, of course they can, since they have an emulator now. But that seems like a pretty pointless statement, so I'm not really sure what you're driving at....
And while your description of Mac users is one point of view, another is simply that Mac users tend to appreciate good UI design. One of the reasons MS has been ripping of the Mac's UI design from the get-go.
Dan Aris