I agree with everything but the Jedi bit. Mostly because I work in a faccility that sees a throughput of anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand patrons on a daily basis.
The simple fact is that no matter how smart they are individually, people en masse make a herd of cows look like MENSA material. Take the lowest IQ (since s/he's the one that's going to REQUIRE babysitting and handholding) and divide by the total number of the mob and you've got its sum intelligents.
A herd of cows is smart enough to use the exits, rather than stand around slack-jawed, blocking them.:P
The fact that the scene was a large-scale, fairly boring lightsabers vs. stormtroopers battle was quite the letdown. Makes the Jedi look like little more than a mob of cosplayers swamping a Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory server.
With tactical behaviour like that, they deserved what they got. You'd think these guys would be hauling bigger weapons, have artillery support in reserve and actually know how to work as a team in a large-scale engagement.
Or, since it's a Lucas movie, find the enemy's single itty bitty eak point and jam the spaceship equivalent of a Yugo into it. Problem solved.
Let him outline and storyboard - it's obvious the man has is capable of generating the occasional zinger, but if the most recent SW movies have proved anything, it's that depth isn't something he's capable of. Else the "itty bitty little thing blows up the HUGE MEGA STUPIDBAD THING" would have been used as the climax of ONE movie in the series, instead of THREE (possibly four, haven't seen ep3 yet and can honestly say I have lower expectations for it than I did for the third Matrix film, which was fucking DRAGONBALL Z with sunglasses).
Gone are the days where eye candy was enough to make a great hit.
Bull. Look at how much the "cleaned up" rereleases of IV-VI grossed. Look at what Ep2 grossed and how many people were all OMFG YODA LIGHT SABER FIGHT!!!!!!!!! The mere idea was fanservice. Pure eye candy. Straight up conceptual bullshit.
Oh, and that fanservice piece of CRAP grossed $649,476,740 worldwide.
Yeah, that doesn't beat Titanic but I'll be damned if the movie had anything I'd consider "redeeming" from a non eye-candy perspective. And Lucas is still rolling in dough.
Lucas is at his best when he's producing other, more talented individuals interpretations of his creative work. Witness Jedi and ESB. Willow (co-writer) was also fairly enjoyable.
The area he's always been strong in, imo, is his ear for sound- Freiheit and THX-1138 come to mind. Not to mention the original Star Wars.
... why hasn't Lucas cashed in on the current cultural hardon for fantasy with a cleaned up re-release of WILLOW?
Seriously. Take the pre-composite footage of the confrontation with Bavmorda (sp?), replace with current effects technology, re-release. Instant club hit.
That, or Lucas can do what he did with Star Wars (the best of which he didn't direct) - write and direct a shitty prequel that totally taints the setting?
Oh, wait. He screwed that one over with a sequel. In book form, anyway.
Apple first stuck that into MacOS in 8.5, and it was dandy. It's Been There awhile, and reached its current incarantation with 10.3. While Windows is the obvious precursor, Apple has polished the feature and improved the hell out of it. For example, a quick one-two of the buttons will flip between the current app and the previously focused app, whereas holding the buttons down will bring up the full menu and allow you to tab through - while that menu is up, you can also mouse to the desired app.
Apple has "borrowed" a number of FEEJURS from MS, but they've improved them in the process- alt-tabe is an example.... while simultaneously ignoring a few things they SHOULD be adding - for example, when I'm in a directory, why the hell do I care how much free space I have on disk? Why can't I know the size of the directory without resorting to Get Info or a du -h on the command line? Why isn't the ability to list directories-then-files or files-then-directories at least an option (the 10.3 Finder is notoriously defficient compared to previous incarnations but STILL).
Anyway.
Apple takes a few decent ideas Microsoft either First To Markets or rips from elsewhere (OS/2, etc), polishes them, improves them, and integrates them. Microsoft takes all the pretty stuff from Apple, implements it in a fashion that proves they don't understand what makes it good in the first place, does a shit job of making it functional, and sticks everyone with it... in gui terms, a bit like the retarded younger cousin who loudly emulates the behaviour of his grown-up relatives.
Oh, and the Dock isn't a "nod" to the taskbar. It's a reimplimentation of the NeXT dock.- the taskbar itself is a Win32ized implimentation of similar docks / widget bins from CDE, OS/2, NeXT, etc. And NeXT beat Win32 to market by how many years? Apple didn't so much fail to develop a better solution as a refuse to - to my understanding, the persistance of the Dock is very much a Steve/NeXT thing... and you know what bastards people can be when they Know They're Right (regardless of rather they actually are or not). Apple users are stuck with the damned thing- most of the users I know use Quicksilver ( http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ ) to achieve similar functionality with (GASP!) customizeability and none of the retardedness.
From personal experience, 3.1 ripped all the worst elements of the mac and all the worst elements of CDE. It was as much a rip of UNIX desktops as it was MacOS - and like modern x11 de wannabes, it did a piss-poor job of being either.
I think in part because its more obvious latter influences (OS/2, MacOS 8) hadn't shipped yet.
I'm with you on that. It can't be THAT hard for the OS to scan a keyboard, notice extra non-Standard (all the normal QUERTY bits that are SUPPOSED to be there) keys and offer them up for remapping.
I have a Sun Ray USB board I'd LOVE to use with OS X - while it recognizes all of the keys that it should properly, there's the slight matter of the extra rows off to the left, the blank key, and other bits - there are keys on that board that the OS doesn't SEE that, if it was all HEY BUTTONS WHADDAYAWANNADOWITHEM, I'd be able to map to system shortucts (copy/cut/paste) or app launches (Stop for a terminal, Again for VLC, Props for Firefox, Undo for apple-z, etc, etc.)
Conversely, I'm sure Solaris users wouldn't mind their native layouts actually working under OS X.
I needed more workspace, so I went multihead. Some apps lend themselves well to virts - web browsing, email, a pile of xterms... but when you're running something like photoshop and you need more "room to maneuver". adding extra heads is the way to go.
I seem to be the only OS X user that neither uses no likes Expose much. Part of it's the fact that a few apps I use bind to F11-13, though my BIG gripe is that F14-F16 ARE NOT MAPPING OPTIONS. Why can't I put the shortcuts for Expose onto the three keys that I NEVER use for ANYTHING?:-(
That aside, I've noticed that virts are something the "I used to use freenix but the desktop sucks so I switched" crowd complains about, as well as sloppy focus and the fact that portables have one button trackpads (something of an annoyance if you're using X11 applications). As a whole, the freenix imports seem to be so used to doing things Their Way that the mere notion of a UNIX not having $feature makes them positively apoplectic.:-|
Not only was it annoying, this is 8.5-9.2.2 we're talking about. Just TRY doing ANYTHING else while that sucker was running - suddenly your G3 is running about as fast as a 386... and if you didn't treat it like the open powder keg in a spark factory that it suddenly was, well... BLAM!.
Worst thing about FBC in 8.5+ is that it was horridly, horridly slow. The current FBC in 10.3 is about as slow.
Or, more appropriately, why does India have nukes?
It ain't Pakistan, it's China.
Macrodobe has a disgusting amount of leverage that neither Adobe nor Macromedia alone have - lop Quark out of the equation and Macrodobe OWNS desktop publishing on two platforms. Artschool/Vo-Tech "web design" ? They'll own that. Graphics creation and production? Yeah, Apple makes your swankass Final Cut Pro but you're still doing the graphics for your overlays in Macrodobe Photoshop MX 2006.
You really think Apple or Microsoft can afford to piss off The De Facto Graphics Standard?
No.
Hell, Apple suffered for YEARS under Adobe's continuing threats to drop Mac support for $fillintheblank because whatever Apple was intending to do to the OS (full memory protection planned for 9.3, for example- which had been planned and Working for awhile but was never implemented for this reason) would "force them to rewrite their applications" and there wasn't enough money in the mac market to make that worthwhile (bullshit).
If it wasn't for Photoshop and Illustrator, Apple would have probably told them to shove it years ago. Hell, the steaming pile of shit that is Premiere is one of the primary reasons that iMovie and the light version of FCP exist at all - video editing on the mac prior to these apps was like mp3 playback on the mac prior to iTunes - it either Sucked Horribly or you paid out the ass for something Awesome (usually hardware linked) to do it. No middle ground.
I'm ranting, I'm ranting... but Macromedia's OS X apps are actually semi-decent (Flash support blows a dead moose, but it always has), and Adobe's leave a lot to be desired. "Why is Photoshop 5.5 running IN CLASSIC FASTER than Photoshop CS for just about everything?!" kind of a lot to be desired.
As a Creative Professional, I'm disgusted to see one of the three companies I buy software from (Macromedia, Adobe, Apple) get swallowed up by the asshole of the three.
Web "integration" was there out of the box and was the Big Deal with Sherlock. It was such a Big Deal that it was integrated as a tab into the System-level "Find" command to augment it. Sherlock didn't search your hard drive, it searched the internets.
Oh, and it had banner ads.
This was nicely unobtrusive until OS 9, at which point Apple made Sherlock the Find command and replaced the simple, clean interface with the bloated "brushed metal" that we see to this day. Same functionality as previous incarnations with a more OMG TEH INTERNETS!!!! emphasis.
Oh, and it had banner ads. AND it was big and ugly. So I hauled in my "sherlock" from 8.6 and used that with my powerbook until I switched over to OS X.
And I didn't do that until they peeled Sherlock back into a separate app (that I've never launched on this machine) and left a useable Find in its place. Which we didn't have at all in between 8.6 and 10.2.
rsyncx and psync don't ship with the default install. I'm very, very big on Out Of The Box functionality - I don't like the idea of having to convince OS X-running friends to download such-and-such, tell them how to install it, walk them through using it, etc, etc.
Besides, this stuff still should have been there To Begin With.:)
Yes and no. You join up and you get a handful (I think the number depends on how much you pay / the membership "level", iirc) of "keys" that you can assign to any other ADC member.
Getting an actual ADC membership is easy - you just sign up. Getting the cool stuff is what costs the money.
... get four Mac using friends, squeeze a hundred bucks each out of them, pool your money together and get an ADC account. I did this with some friends of mine and we consider it money well spent.
500$/year gets you Server and Client builds, update builds, and advance info/data of just about everything. The downside is that you can't talk about it until it's on store shelves or in Software Update.... but the upside is that it's cheaper as a group effort than buying a single copy of the OS yourself. There's also the 1337 factor of knowing the new toy inside-and-out months or weeks before everyone else starts OMFGing about it.
I dunno why they don't make a bigger deal out of this, honestly. It's probably the one feature in 10.4 that SHOULD have been in 10.0 - the fact that the command line doesn't "see" all the things that make Mac files Mac files (file type and creator codes being the big thing) has been an endless source of frustration for me.
Finally, I should be able to cron backups of my home directory- something I've been able to do with every other *nix during the five years I've been using OS X.
The big question is "how do these types of folders work on the command line" ? Can I make a "burnable folder" of my dotfiles and ~/Library and make weekly tarballs of that burn folder with a cron job that scp's them to a linux server on the other coast? Can I create these "burnable folders" on the command line?
And if not, why not? Seems like it would be fantastically useful from an administrative standpoint, for things like automated backups, etc.
Stuff like that cracks me up. I've been running OS X since Public Beta and have NEVER had a use for Address Book (beyond the extent that certain system tools 'n shizzle mandate) or (after a real, non-shitty Find hit the Finder) Sherlock. Hell, Sherlock's never even been LAUNCHED on this machine.
Meta-data awareness of certain common CLI apps such as rsync, cp and tar is HUGE, worth the upgrade all by itself, and gets a one-line mention somewhere near the bottom. Ditto for Core Data. And those are, imo, new features. As opposed to improvements on things they've been trying to get right since 10.0.
Jebus. I'm paying four times that for a hair less (150/40).:(
Of course, the Telecom Monopoly (Verizon) owns the pipe and is forced by gubment laws to share it with all comers, so my actual ISP fees are hiked by that, "service charges", TAXES TAXES TAXES, etc...
I've wanted something like this (or at least the Power Glove) since I first used 3dStudio MAX in 1997. Using keyboard and mouse to manipulate 3d space? I kept wanting to reach into the monitor and spin the mesh around. Very frustrating.
Seriously, the computer interface in Minority Report is probably the coolest damned thing I've ever seen in a movie, ever. First time CG has made my jaw drop since The Last Starfighter, and it did it by presenting a "proof of concept" of a system that will SERIOUSLY improve the way computers can be used.
VHS became the standard because you could record a full movie onto it. You could only record an hour on Beta. (yes, there are full movies on Beta but how long was it before the "six hour" VHS record mode was available?)
Guess what people wanted?
Same reason cel phones have all but completely replaced pagers overnight.
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I agree with everything but the Jedi bit. Mostly because I work in a faccility that sees a throughput of anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand patrons on a daily basis.
:P
The simple fact is that no matter how smart they are individually, people en masse make a herd of cows look like MENSA material. Take the lowest IQ (since s/he's the one that's going to REQUIRE babysitting and handholding) and divide by the total number of the mob and you've got its sum intelligents.
A herd of cows is smart enough to use the exits, rather than stand around slack-jawed, blocking them.
The fact that the scene was a large-scale, fairly boring lightsabers vs. stormtroopers battle was quite the letdown. Makes the Jedi look like little more than a mob of cosplayers swamping a Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory server.
With tactical behaviour like that, they deserved what they got. You'd think these guys would be hauling bigger weapons, have artillery support in reserve and actually know how to work as a team in a large-scale engagement.
Or, since it's a Lucas movie, find the enemy's single itty bitty eak point and jam the spaceship equivalent of a Yugo into it. Problem solved.
Should it?
My understanding of JS is that it's a few orders of magnitude more evil than CSS; while CSS has the buzzword compliance going on.
SQUEAKY WHEEL GETS THE KICK, as it were.
Heh.
:|
Hey man, I dig Willow. Quite a bit. I enjoy watching it. It's got its funny moments and unlike LotR it isn't an ordeal to slog through.
However, Lucas could easily clean up the last few minutes and rerelease, capitalizing on the current fantasy craze.
Of course, he'd probably want to go further than that.
Let him outline and storyboard - it's obvious the man has is capable of generating the occasional zinger, but if the most recent SW movies have proved anything, it's that depth isn't something he's capable of. Else the "itty bitty little thing blows up the HUGE MEGA STUPIDBAD THING" would have been used as the climax of ONE movie in the series, instead of THREE (possibly four, haven't seen ep3 yet and can honestly say I have lower expectations for it than I did for the third Matrix film, which was fucking DRAGONBALL Z with sunglasses).
Bull. Look at how much the "cleaned up" rereleases of IV-VI grossed. Look at what Ep2 grossed and how many people were all OMFG YODA LIGHT SABER FIGHT!!!!!!!!! The mere idea was fanservice. Pure eye candy. Straight up conceptual bullshit.
Oh, and that fanservice piece of CRAP grossed $649,476,740 worldwide.
Yeah, that doesn't beat Titanic but I'll be damned if the movie had anything I'd consider "redeeming" from a non eye-candy perspective. And Lucas is still rolling in dough.
Lucas is at his best when he's producing other, more talented individuals interpretations of his creative work. Witness Jedi and ESB. Willow (co-writer) was also fairly enjoyable.
The area he's always been strong in, imo, is his ear for sound- Freiheit and THX-1138 come to mind. Not to mention the original Star Wars.
... why hasn't Lucas cashed in on the current cultural hardon for fantasy with a cleaned up re-release of WILLOW?
Seriously. Take the pre-composite footage of the confrontation with Bavmorda (sp?), replace with current effects technology, re-release. Instant club hit.
That, or Lucas can do what he did with Star Wars (the best of which he didn't direct) - write and direct a shitty prequel that totally taints the setting?
Oh, wait. He screwed that one over with a sequel. In book form, anyway.
For when you absolutely, positively have to be able to multitask!
Apple first stuck that into MacOS in 8.5, and it was dandy. It's Been There awhile, and reached its current incarantation with 10.3. While Windows is the obvious precursor, Apple has polished the feature and improved the hell out of it. For example, a quick one-two of the buttons will flip between the current app and the previously focused app, whereas holding the buttons down will bring up the full menu and allow you to tab through - while that menu is up, you can also mouse to the desired app.
Apple has "borrowed" a number of FEEJURS from MS, but they've improved them in the process- alt-tabe is an example.... while simultaneously ignoring a few things they SHOULD be adding - for example, when I'm in a directory, why the hell do I care how much free space I have on disk? Why can't I know the size of the directory without resorting to Get Info or a du -h on the command line? Why isn't the ability to list directories-then-files or files-then-directories at least an option (the 10.3 Finder is notoriously defficient compared to previous incarnations but STILL).
Anyway.
Apple takes a few decent ideas Microsoft either First To Markets or rips from elsewhere (OS/2, etc), polishes them, improves them, and integrates them. Microsoft takes all the pretty stuff from Apple, implements it in a fashion that proves they don't understand what makes it good in the first place, does a shit job of making it functional, and sticks everyone with it... in gui terms, a bit like the retarded younger cousin who loudly emulates the behaviour of his grown-up relatives.
Oh, and the Dock isn't a "nod" to the taskbar. It's a reimplimentation of the NeXT dock.- the taskbar itself is a Win32ized implimentation of similar docks / widget bins from CDE, OS/2, NeXT, etc. And NeXT beat Win32 to market by how many years? Apple didn't so much fail to develop a better solution as a refuse to - to my understanding, the persistance of the Dock is very much a Steve/NeXT thing... and you know what bastards people can be when they Know They're Right (regardless of rather they actually are or not). Apple users are stuck with the damned thing- most of the users I know use Quicksilver ( http://quicksilver.blacktree.com/ ) to achieve similar functionality with (GASP!) customizeability and none of the retardedness.
From personal experience, 3.1 ripped all the worst elements of the mac and all the worst elements of CDE. It was as much a rip of UNIX desktops as it was MacOS - and like modern x11 de wannabes, it did a piss-poor job of being either.
I think in part because its more obvious latter influences (OS/2, MacOS 8) hadn't shipped yet.
I'm with you on that. It can't be THAT hard for the OS to scan a keyboard, notice extra non-Standard (all the normal QUERTY bits that are SUPPOSED to be there) keys and offer them up for remapping.
I have a Sun Ray USB board I'd LOVE to use with OS X - while it recognizes all of the keys that it should properly, there's the slight matter of the extra rows off to the left, the blank key, and other bits - there are keys on that board that the OS doesn't SEE that, if it was all HEY BUTTONS WHADDAYAWANNADOWITHEM, I'd be able to map to system shortucts (copy/cut/paste) or app launches (Stop for a terminal, Again for VLC, Props for Firefox, Undo for apple-z, etc, etc.)
Conversely, I'm sure Solaris users wouldn't mind their native layouts actually working under OS X.
I needed more workspace, so I went multihead. Some apps lend themselves well to virts - web browsing, email, a pile of xterms... but when you're running something like photoshop and you need more "room to maneuver". adding extra heads is the way to go.
:-(
:-|
I seem to be the only OS X user that neither uses no likes Expose much. Part of it's the fact that a few apps I use bind to F11-13, though my BIG gripe is that F14-F16 ARE NOT MAPPING OPTIONS. Why can't I put the shortcuts for Expose onto the three keys that I NEVER use for ANYTHING?
That aside, I've noticed that virts are something the "I used to use freenix but the desktop sucks so I switched" crowd complains about, as well as sloppy focus and the fact that portables have one button trackpads (something of an annoyance if you're using X11 applications). As a whole, the freenix imports seem to be so used to doing things Their Way that the mere notion of a UNIX not having $feature makes them positively apoplectic.
First thing I'd turn off on a fresh install.
Not only was it annoying, this is 8.5-9.2.2 we're talking about. Just TRY doing ANYTHING else while that sucker was running - suddenly your G3 is running about as fast as a 386... and if you didn't treat it like the open powder keg in a spark factory that it suddenly was, well... BLAM!.
Worst thing about FBC in 8.5+ is that it was horridly, horridly slow. The current FBC in 10.3 is about as slow.
Or, more appropriately, why does India have nukes?
It ain't Pakistan, it's China.
Macrodobe has a disgusting amount of leverage that neither Adobe nor Macromedia alone have - lop Quark out of the equation and Macrodobe OWNS desktop publishing on two platforms. Artschool/Vo-Tech "web design" ? They'll own that. Graphics creation and production? Yeah, Apple makes your swankass Final Cut Pro but you're still doing the graphics for your overlays in Macrodobe Photoshop MX 2006.
You really think Apple or Microsoft can afford to piss off The De Facto Graphics Standard?
No.
Hell, Apple suffered for YEARS under Adobe's continuing threats to drop Mac support for $fillintheblank because whatever Apple was intending to do to the OS (full memory protection planned for 9.3, for example- which had been planned and Working for awhile but was never implemented for this reason) would "force them to rewrite their applications" and there wasn't enough money in the mac market to make that worthwhile (bullshit).
If it wasn't for Photoshop and Illustrator, Apple would have probably told them to shove it years ago. Hell, the steaming pile of shit that is Premiere is one of the primary reasons that iMovie and the light version of FCP exist at all - video editing on the mac prior to these apps was like mp3 playback on the mac prior to iTunes - it either Sucked Horribly or you paid out the ass for something Awesome (usually hardware linked) to do it. No middle ground.
I'm ranting, I'm ranting... but Macromedia's OS X apps are actually semi-decent (Flash support blows a dead moose, but it always has), and Adobe's leave a lot to be desired. "Why is Photoshop 5.5 running IN CLASSIC FASTER than Photoshop CS for just about everything?!" kind of a lot to be desired.
As a Creative Professional, I'm disgusted to see one of the three companies I buy software from (Macromedia, Adobe, Apple) get swallowed up by the asshole of the three.
Web "integration" was there out of the box and was the Big Deal with Sherlock. It was such a Big Deal that it was integrated as a tab into the System-level "Find" command to augment it. Sherlock didn't search your hard drive, it searched the internets.
Oh, and it had banner ads.
This was nicely unobtrusive until OS 9, at which point Apple made Sherlock the Find command and replaced the simple, clean interface with the bloated "brushed metal" that we see to this day. Same functionality as previous incarnations with a more OMG TEH INTERNETS!!!! emphasis.
Oh, and it had banner ads. AND it was big and ugly. So I hauled in my "sherlock" from 8.6 and used that with my powerbook until I switched over to OS X.
And I didn't do that until they peeled Sherlock back into a separate app (that I've never launched on this machine) and left a useable Find in its place. Which we didn't have at all in between 8.6 and 10.2.
My address book a list of phone numbers written on the back of my notebook.
:-)
Nice to know the software is there, on the off chance I'll ever actually need it for anything.
rsyncx and psync don't ship with the default install. I'm very, very big on Out Of The Box functionality - I don't like the idea of having to convince OS X-running friends to download such-and-such, tell them how to install it, walk them through using it, etc, etc.
:)
Besides, this stuff still should have been there To Begin With.
Yes and no. You join up and you get a handful (I think the number depends on how much you pay / the membership "level", iirc) of "keys" that you can assign to any other ADC member.
Getting an actual ADC membership is easy - you just sign up. Getting the cool stuff is what costs the money.
... get four Mac using friends, squeeze a hundred bucks each out of them, pool your money together and get an ADC account. I did this with some friends of mine and we consider it money well spent.
500$/year gets you Server and Client builds, update builds, and advance info/data of just about everything. The downside is that you can't talk about it until it's on store shelves or in Software Update.... but the upside is that it's cheaper as a group effort than buying a single copy of the OS yourself. There's also the 1337 factor of knowing the new toy inside-and-out months or weeks before everyone else starts OMFGing about it.
I dunno why they don't make a bigger deal out of this, honestly. It's probably the one feature in 10.4 that SHOULD have been in 10.0 - the fact that the command line doesn't "see" all the things that make Mac files Mac files (file type and creator codes being the big thing) has been an endless source of frustration for me.
Finally, I should be able to cron backups of my home directory- something I've been able to do with every other *nix during the five years I've been using OS X.
The big question is "how do these types of folders work on the command line" ? Can I make a "burnable folder" of my dotfiles and ~/Library and make weekly tarballs of that burn folder with a cron job that scp's them to a linux server on the other coast? Can I create these "burnable folders" on the command line?
And if not, why not? Seems like it would be fantastically useful from an administrative standpoint, for things like automated backups, etc.
Stuff like that cracks me up. I've been running OS X since Public Beta and have NEVER had a use for Address Book (beyond the extent that certain system tools 'n shizzle mandate) or (after a real, non-shitty Find hit the Finder) Sherlock. Hell, Sherlock's never even been LAUNCHED on this machine.
Meta-data awareness of certain common CLI apps such as rsync, cp and tar is HUGE, worth the upgrade all by itself, and gets a one-line mention somewhere near the bottom. Ditto for Core Data. And those are, imo, new features. As opposed to improvements on things they've been trying to get right since 10.0.
Jebus. I'm paying four times that for a hair less (150/40). :(
:|
Of course, the Telecom Monopoly (Verizon) owns the pipe and is forced by gubment laws to share it with all comers, so my actual ISP fees are hiked by that, "service charges", TAXES TAXES TAXES, etc...
Oh, and Verizon is pretty gross.
... when do we get the civilian version?
I've wanted something like this (or at least the Power Glove) since I first used 3dStudio MAX in 1997. Using keyboard and mouse to manipulate 3d space? I kept wanting to reach into the monitor and spin the mesh around. Very frustrating.
Seriously, the computer interface in Minority Report is probably the coolest damned thing I've ever seen in a movie, ever. First time CG has made my jaw drop since The Last Starfighter, and it did it by presenting a "proof of concept" of a system that will SERIOUSLY improve the way computers can be used.
It wasn't cost, simplicity or marketing.
VHS became the standard because you could record a full movie onto it. You could only record an hour on Beta. (yes, there are full movies on Beta but how long was it before the "six hour" VHS record mode was available?)
Guess what people wanted?
Same reason cel phones have all but completely replaced pagers overnight.