Or the like- I can't imagine that people such as Helms or some of the bums and genetic rejects I see on the bus could convievably be the result of a traditional pregnancy. Unless the mom took PCP like vitamins and drank like a fish.
IIRC, the Russians or Germans did some experiments along these lines in the early part of the 20th century. Not the artificial womb, so much as artificial maintenance of newborns- the control group was cared for in the ways you would expect; lotsa love and care and baby talk and all that other stuff.
The subject group had their base physical needs taken care of, and that was IT. The nurses did not interact with the newborns in any affectionate capacity. The results were pretty interesting- the subject group - you'll love this- died. All of them.
A device like this is an important step forward, but it's not going to produce viable results without additional stimulation. While you can theoretically grow an embryo in a tube like you would a chicken in an egg... ya gotta remember that chickens don't go to school or talk.
It's an important thing to note that while it's been proven through the above example that once the fetus is out in the world it needs care and *attention*- but we have ZERO *proof* that the stimulation you mention has any serious bearing on the infant, for the fact that we cannot- not even now, due to "regulations"- test this hypothesis!
Worldly stimuli is quite possibly entirely optional. As for my own curiosity, I would think that pheremones and nutritional intake have a serious bearing, as that shapes the physical development. Beyond that.... hey, my oldest memory would be from about the age of 18 months or so, and it's a pretty danged fuzzy one at that.
[giving up mod access for what some right-to-lifer with mod points is going to see as flamebate... but hey, opinion is opinion, and too many people seem to think that their opinions are FACT, so what the hell....]
It's not successful until the device can be proven to gestate a fetus to term, and that said fetus be functional and free of defencts (depending on the old truism of garbage in, garbage out with regards to the genetic materials). "Regulations" have allowed for nothing more than a proof of concept. Yee ha. Test it on a pig or something and see if it really works all the way.
Too many people are shooting straight from the hip with moral panic attacks about this- the results of which are essentially as close minded as "640k ought to be enough for anybody." The morally minded need to shut the fsck up and realize that they have no right to have ANY say in the procreation alternatives of other sentient individuals. I cannot assess wether or not this device is practical for reasons stated above- it's not a functional proof of concept until "regulations" (created or pushed through by the morally minded who seem to exist only to restrict the will of others) allow for a thorough test.
Is it a good idea? Of course; it's advancing science. Medical science and NASA would be about thirty years behind where we are now were it not for German scientific data garnered from the second world war.
The only life you have ANY say in is YOUR OWN. Now keep your mouth shut about why cloning and Gattica-style selective breeding is a bad idea.... because simply put, it doesn't presently exist, so we just don't KNOW, do we? It's not your life, it's not your choice, so fundamentally, it's *not your business* unless you're looking to reproduce and have run out of options.
He tells me what needs done, and gets the hell out of my way. And stays there. When I'm done with what I'm doing, or hit a milestone, I present, he looks it over, and I go back to the drawing board with changes in mind. Repeat until finished. We meet on the smoke bench or informally in either of our offices. He never gives me shit about being late, and gives me and my coworkers mad props when we get a job done right. If we need hardware or software, we get it- it's that simple.
The head of the department works on pretty much the same principal- hands off, out of the way, keeping the shit from hitting the people that get the content and systems work done.
So. To sum up:
1. If you have any say in hiring, hire competent individuals that you can communicate with [we get "tested" by being hired part time, then eventually, go on fulltime with benefits, etc. People get brought in on a "we need [___] NOW!" basis, and if they click with us, they stick around. If they don't click, they don't stick- it keeps the department a well-oiled machine that works smoothly.]- I can't emphasize communication ENOUGH. Email doesn't cut it- face to face.
2. Stay the hell out of the way of your employees- let them do their jobs without being baby-sat. This is especially necessary when you don't know the applications or processes they're working with [the old department head kept back-seat driving me in Macromedia Director, an application he's never used. He hasn't programmed since computers went 32-bit.]
3. Give 'em what they need to get the job done. And by "job done", I mean just that.
I'm one of the two staff members in the department that actually knows enough about hardware/software to maintain and work on the systems when they go boom- on top of everything else, we're the only division in the facility that does our own tech support.
But so much the better. I did a multimedia presentation for a class a couple years ago based on the Final Fantasy series. These are my thoughts:
1. Start with Final Fantasy. As in, the first one. Download an emulator and find the ROM. It's an 8-bit NES game, so it would appear dated by todays standards, but it has elements that none of the other games do- it's still one of my favorites. It's also turn based. The series has no chronology or "order" to it, unlike Dragon Warrior. Each FF is a complete story without ties to the others.
If you can't find it, then get your hands on FFVI - six is easily one of the best RPGs ever, and has possibly the best translation/story of them all. It's also the last "traditional" FF - after that, they *really* started to experiment with things.
2. In order:
A. Six.
B. Six.
C. First, then Six. Though if you value prettiness over actual gameplay mechanics, then Seven or Eight. A good friend of mine swears by Nine, but IMO it's like comparing War and Peace to PeeWee's Playhouse in terms of graphic design.
D. SIX. In a heartbeat. The only final fantasy to suck up more than 70 hours of my time.
E. Eight.
3. The HARDCORE are going to tell you that FF8 sucks wang. They are wrong. FF8 isn't really so much a Final Fantasy as it is its own animal- aside from parts of the battle system and the title, it bears no resemblance to any other final fantasy game. This is not a bad thing- people simply fear change and were likely expecting another Six with better graphics. Had they called it something other than "Final Fantasy VIII", it would have done gangbusters. Since Square DID call it a Final Fantasy, it has to measure up to 6- and doesn't. It's still really cool..... but it's *not* a final fantasy. It's in the same category as the movie, which isn't really a Final Fantasy either- both of them are really missing the "Fantasy" bit to some extent.
In terms of enjoyment, I'd rank 'em as follows:
1. FF 6 (still have the box and manual!)
2. FF (I own two copies, because you can only save one game on the cartridge)
3. FF 8
4. FF 5 - if you liked Tactics, this is where the Job System started.
5. FF 4 - the only FF with a cheat code.
6. FF 7 - I really cannot adequately explain the derision I have for 7. Mainly because, in my opinion, it took everything GOOD about the previous FF games and took a shit on it. There aren't enough challenging or difficult enemies, which makes your characters difficult to build. Cloud is an apathetic little bitch, which makes him impossible to really care about- which is even worse, as this is the first FF where you're stuck with him as lead for most of the game (technically, FF2 as well, but you could change your screen icon to whatever member of the party you preferred). The Materia system strips characters of the things that made the FF6 cast so unique- special abilities like Steal and magic casting became portable. Not only that, but with no way to skip a summon spell, I stopped using them in favor of regular magic. I like 8 in terms of story, but the summons in that game are five times WORSE - it was the first thing I asked about and the answer sold my playstation to the highest bidder.
7. FF 9 - being a person very much preferential to both 8 and Parasite Eve, I was inclined to view 9 as a venture into a childish, Barney / Telletubby aesthetic. Every FF previous to this one hooked me on graphics, story AND gameplay. I didn't realize just how important the graphical look and feel was until I played a sample of this and realized the cartoony crayola approach was making me sick.
8. FF 2 ( NES, played a Japanese ROM of it. No fun if you can't read Japanese)
9. FF 3 (Ditto 8)
I haven't played X and have no plans to do so- not only do I not have a PS2, I can't afford one and after VII destroyed my expectations for the series, I got out of video games and became a spectator for 8 and 9. I was a serious conniseur of video games throughout my teen years, and am firmly of the opinion that Square- and at large, the entire industry- simply doesn't have what it takes to make another game as >complete as FF6, and divested myself of my playstation on the strength of that conviction.
Take it from an ex-fan: Final Fantasy 6 is not only the best in the series, it's likely one of the best RPGS *EVER*.
Peer pressure is the worst possible reason to get into anything- you should only make the time investment in these games if you're into RPGs or think you might be... then look over plot synopsises of the titles in the series and start with the one that resonates with you the most. From my standing, The Majority spooged in their pants over FF7, which was an inferior waste of my time compared to FF6, adding fuel to the conclusion that the majority of people are retards and easily cave to advertising and trends. FF7 was so goddamned hyped that it didn't HAVE to be good to sell- just like Star Wars Episode One.
The earlier games were vague enough, flexible enough, and broad enough for any RPG enthusiast to have fun with them. FF6 came out and tightened this down a bit, but maintained a large cast of interesting and well developed characters. Then FF7 tried to continue the tradition... and character development went flat. The characters lost their "life", for lack of a better term, and became polygons. Square is becoming progressively more and more focused on character driven stories as opposed to concept-driven stories- FF6 being the transition point, in that it had enough of a variety to offer something to everyone.... something the proceeding games lost. I didn't like Cloud, Barret or Red 13- hence, it's next to impossible to actually LIKE FF7. My issues with 8 were entirely with the battle system. 9 was too childish in design to get my interest in the least.... and everything I've seen about X points to it being a story that really doesn't interest me. There was a point where RPGs were still games- these days, they're interactive movies and novels.
I like the games. If you do as well, then play the earlier parts of the series, as you're likely to enjoy them much, much more.
M$ got where it is through marketing and a couple of BAD decisions on the part of IBM.
Adobe got where it is by making QUALITY products that do what professional graphic artists NEED to do. Nothing compares to Photoshop in terms of functionality, flexibility, and stability. N O T H I N G.
I suppose that Adobe technically has a monopoly, but in this case, they have earned it through right of coding a product that is FAR and above superior to everything else. It's the Industry Standard for image manipulation and creation for a reason - it's GOOD. Nobody that uses Photoshop bitches about it (generally- a few people prefer 5 to 6, but it's semantics- nobody that likes 5 and hates 6 is going to jump ship to another app).
From a graphics standpoint, Macromedia makes the better HTML editor (dreamweaver) and image optimizer (fireworks) - but Fireworks sucks in many areas... and on the other side of the fence, Adobe Illustrator is a BITCH to print form at weird sizes, and Macromedia Freehand does color seperation for print (shirts, cloth, hats, etc.) in its sleep, whereas Illustrator doesn't even bother.
Read this completely before you mod it as flamebait.
Most of the web developers I know consider Flash to be a standards-breaking, improperly used piece of ass. But then, most of the web devs I know are rabid about making damned good and sure that the lowest common denominator can use their site. On a modem.
I'm a professional graphics designer. I live in photoshop. The GIMP - the closest thing that OSS has to a graphics app - is a huge steaming pile of poo compared to the ease of use, power, stability (on a Mac, no less!), and most importantly, USEABILITY of Photoshop (version 5, don't get me started on 6). The GIMP is "almost photoshop", everyone says. We (the graphics community) can NOT use "almost". What we NEED is "Better Than Photoshop".
I've seen a lot of GIMP art. I've seen a lot of Photoshop art. The capacity and useability of GIMP - particularly with regards to fonts, anti-aliasing, color control (emphasis), et. al., is severly lacking. I've seen some mindblowing graphics produced with photoshop.... I have yet to see anything comprable with the GIMP.
A *PROFESSIONAL* graphic design app is a good deal more difficult to execute than a window manager, an office suite, or an IRC client. OSS is almost worthy with Nautilus, barely palatable with word processing, stinks horribly at fonts, has produced a number of excellent IRC clients, and a stable as well as surprisingly portable codebase.
The functionality that graphics people demand isn't there because graphics people don't code and coders don't do graphics (some think they can in both cases, but the evidence supports my statement). Hence, a graphics person that depends on Photoshop has about a 99.9% chance of not knowing a single line of code, and hence, not knowing how to build what he wants to use for free. The issue with OSS is that the "by geeks, for geeks" mentality is simply incapable of producing an application of the quality and caliber of Photoshop- it takes a corporation like Adobe with the money and management to ram the coders and the artists together to get the results necessary to produce a useable application.
If Adobe and Macromedia's killer apps could be "easily replicated" by OSS, then why haven't they been? I don't know a SINGLE graphic designer that works in Linux. I know two that work in Windows. The rest use MacOS- and of the MacOS users, ONE uses OS X , and she runs her apps in Classic. NONE use or recommed the GIMP. Point of fact, it is a common conclusion within the Pittsburgh professional graphics community that the GIMP is very good at making very bad art. Likely due to the fact that "configue / make / make install" and "Orator 24 point/ Soft Light / desaturate/ color balance / variations (blue, two iterations)" involve two completely different sides of the brain.
Photoshop is worth the price tag. It is the ONLY graphics app out there that can do what professionals demand- easily, smoothly, and in a stable fashion (on a Mac- hasn't crashed on me once, minus poorly coded third party plugins). Compared to the price points of comprable video compositing and editing software, Photoshop is CHEAP.
When the GIMP (or comprable app) can use the photshop 5 keyboard shortcuts (and actually DO with equal effectiveness what those shortcuts key to), get color right, support a gazillion fonts, do alpha channels and selections on the flip of a click, read PSD files, launch in under ten seconds, dynamically allocate swap disks (something photoshop doesn't do), AND competently handle a 11x17 @ 600 DPI image with 45 pixel layers and 30 type layers... AND manage five gigs of swap disk without dumping core.... then I'll think about actually seriously using it to do some work.
The day that OSS can produce a useable graphics app - that can be installed in less than five clicks without resorting to a terminal - is the day I cease dual booting.
That day is nowhere near. We'll see another thousand or so IRC clients on sourceforge before we see a Better Than Windows WM, let alone a Better Than Photoshop graphics app.
Like FUEL EFFICIENCY? I'm not buying a car until one comes on the market that I can reasonably afford- and that gets at least 100 miles to the gallon, gets a clean bill of health from Consumer Reports, and needs the tires rotated more often than the oil changed (in other words, not for at least fifteen years, after we've run out of oil and finally have to build fuel efficient vehicles out of necessity).
On a lighter note, if they include a feature to pleasure the driver in ways that are probably illegal in most states and grounds for death in Singapore, well... maybe I'll test drive one.
Your statement describes the obvious, yet you seem to have missed the point: you'll notice that whenever you give your email address to ANY website that's even remotely disreputable (Yahoo, AOL, Pr0n sites, etc), your mailbox will be overloaded. It's not JUST M$ that's selling out your address. Places that you leave it at will sell it wholesale- this is why I publicize my hotmail account and don't leave my real account lying around anywhere.
I use that hotmail address EVERY time I need to submit my email in order to get whatever I'm looking for - as a consequence, I average between 20 and 30 unsolicited emails a day in that account. My real account remains clean- at least until ebay starts selling addresses to the highest bidder.
First, about the only people that would fall victim to this ridiculous proposal would be consumers. Companies, artists, writers and programmers aren't about to let ANYONE look around there systems just because they might have MP3s - and hey, what if you actually OWN the CD to begin with? Like I'm going to carry my Fear Factory CDs with me to work every day just so the staff can see proof that I have the "legal" "right" to listen to the Fear Factory MP3s on my system. My boss knows my system is loaded, knows where I got 'em, and knows that having music on hand makes me a hell of a lot more productive.
I'll give money to the artist for making a kick ass product- but the suits that are grubbing for this haven't a lick of musical talent in their bodies, haven't recorded a single damned song of their own, and flat out just do NOT deserve the proceeds or the right to poke at my system to begin with. Personally, I feel it's all a diversionary tactic to cover up the fact that the major labels have produced nothing of interest or value within the last five to ten years; how much money did you SAVE when you realized that out of ten albums you wanted to buy, less than three had more than two tracks worth listening to?
Folks, the DMCA, the RIAA, the entertainment industry in general infringe on our civil rights (or are quite obviously attempting to) a hell of a lot more than any terrorist activity or threat thereof. Money may talk, and they may have most of it, but the current state of the federal bill that they're trying to work around is a serious sticking point; as is the patently obvious fact that the RIAA seems to be more concerned with the mp3 FORMAT than any method to differentiate between songs that they distribute and music on independant labels.
[example; if something like this went down and they deleted a live recording of a friend's gig that I'd compressed to listen to later, that would technically be destruction of private property, wouldn't it?]
The way AIP did ProDev for CAM students was to slap it on top of Flat Portfolio. Which meant that in addition to resumes, biz cards, interview practice, and other things, we were also responsible for passing (there was no curve- it either exceeded [a+], met [a], or failed [f]) an 18 item checklist of graphics work- life drawing, color pieces, backgrounds, storyboards, multimedia CDROM, etc. If you failed ONE of these items, you failed the entire class.
THAT was where social engineering came in. The instructor considered my photoshop work to be the strongest in the class and actually used it as an example several times. But at that point in time, my flat work (drawings) sucked ass. If I hadn't greased the rails- if the instructor had been a complete and total hardass instead of an ally- I would have failed the class on the merit of my flat drawing skills.
Which makes you wonder why they slammed two marginally related classes together and had the entire grade structure hinge on one of them, but that's something I prefer not to think about.
I should know, I took the course when I was at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. It was folded into the flat portfolio class for some reason, and went over the *basics* of how to go about doing everything you want out of a course like that. I passed it through social engineering - I made friends with the instructor, cut her under-the-table deals in the print lab and scan lab, and pushed prints for any student she sent me. And I gave a lecture to my class on printing above 72 DPI (I was the ONLY computer animation student at the time that knew how to print at 300 dpi!). So I passed.
A class is basically an expensive cliff's notes for something you're going to need in real life. There's no better way to pick it up than hands-on experience, and no - repeat- NO- class can do that for you. Let me address these proposed course points of yours from my personal experience:
Resume Writing: the ProDev class sucked for this, being incredibly basic. How did I get a decent resume? Simple- when work was slowing down at my current job, my boss told me "make up your resume and let me see it." So I did. He shot down about half of it and suggested changes. I made them. Repeat until he was happy with it- THEN he told me to run it by the assistant chair of Education, who has a Masters in English. He had a few suggestions. By the time I passed the gauntlet, my Resume rocked the casbah.
Researching Companies and Potential Employers: I've never had to do this, actually- it's been calls out of the blue, or emails from friends saying "hey, this guy's looking for...." since day one. This is a good thing- I live in Pittsburgh, and none of the local companies look like anything I'd want to work for. I'm happy where I'm at.
Interviewing Skills: This is the essence of social engineering. If you don't convince the interviewer that you're a guy who not only does the job well, but can get along with him, you should be fine. If you click, you're almost guranteed in. If you're not laid back and congenial, and don't have some social skills, forget it. I have friends that are a hell of a lot better at various aspects of what I do, but they couldn't talk a rock into sitting still.
Networking: What it ALL boils down to. No one ever got a job without knowing somebody- unless the case is 100% pure "we need somebody NOW." Case in point- my first supervisor at my job was a guy like that. I got in because he knew me. My next supervisor got in because he knew him (both of these guys left), and a future coworker is getting in by virtue of strong recommendations from myself and my last supervisor. That's three people getting jobs because they knew one guy that was in the right place at the right time.
I was barely competent when I got in- I was the only guy this person knew - and that everyone he asked knew- who could do the job. I picked up the details as I went along, and forget nascent capabilities into actual skills. Having friends in good places can only get you so far- your actual skills are going to carry you the rest of the way. So it's not enough to have a lot of friends OR be amazingly good at what you're doing- you gotta have BOTH, or you're going to be having a hell of a time of it.
That's my experience- which I'm slowly melding into a collection of essays with intent to stick on a website when I have enough of them.
If you have questions, replace AT with @ and ask away.
I'm a longtime, hardcore, dedicated Mac user. I've tried OS X, and while it makes an excellent *nix, it's a disgusting, horrible replacement for Classic MacOS- the interface transparency and performance - not to mention metadata- that I use regularly to make a living isn't there and doesn't look like it's going to be.
The shit thing about MoS X is that yeah, you can run your Classic Apps- but classic is "transparent", leaving you staring at Aqua. (yay.) I loved the opaque bluebox in the original incarnation of MOSX server (aka Rhapsody), and could well and truly care less for OS X as it stands right now. The dock and the damned Geni effect are no replacement for HD aliases in the Apple menu, tabbed folders, folder colors, file comments, blah blah blah.
Where Mac On Linux is beyond cool is that it's opaque, and you can run it in a window (as opposed to full screen). I saw it on a friend's system under Debian- at the time he was having sound problems with it- and it ran great. You get all of your Mac goodness with all of your Linux goodness, and you get them separated, without the massive, nasty overhead of Aqua.
I'd gladly use OS X for server applications (our Rhapsody box at work just hit 372 days of uptime, and would have been over 700 if we hadn't been ordered to shut every machine in the work area down one particular weekend). Love the stability, and the UI is the best I've ever seen on a unix system.... but it's still incredibly piss poor for the functionality that I need out of a production system.
Hmmm....
I wonder if you could run MOL on OS X? MOS apps at native speed as opposed to the insanely gross hit you take when running them in MOSX would be truly useful.
I personally don't think it would have been possible for Jesus to give a better review of God.
Reread the sentence, consider the originating website of the article (theforce.net) and you'll see what I mean exactly.
I read about five paragraphs of it, and very nearly puked. I viewed source, expecting to see a suspected <drool> review </drool> tag set in there somewhere. No luck.
This isn't a review- it's Lucasfilm Masturbigratification.
If time is money, then your PC is going to cost you a HELL of a lot more than a Mac.
Macintosh: no IRQ conflicts. No driver conflicts - in fact, all most drivers do is fine tune the hardware and add some features you probably won't use anyway. Sound, mobo ethernet, video, and your modem (if it's built in) are all supported by the OS. No upgrade nightmares, no endless search for drivers, and the best part- NO MESSING WITH A BIOS!
Seriously. To replace the HD on my roommate's PC box, I had to enter the sectors, heads, etc. into the BIOS so it would read it (auto detect was a joke), then format the blasted thing in DOS using an archaic utility.
To replace the HD on a mac: open the case, plug the new one in. Boot. If it wa a PC drive, format it. Install the OS [or pull an install over the network- all modern install CDs boot w/ network support]
And don't even get me STARTED on what a bitch it is to adjust monitor bit depth and resolution - let ALONE color coordination and gamma- on anything else. (particularly *nix)
Yes, the G3 and G4 towers use AGP video cards- but one thing I've noticed is that the AGP slots on Macs are in a different position than PC AGP slots. Same number of pins, but you need either some wackass piggyback rig or a completely different card. The hardware is effectively the same, but the implementation is incompatible.
I've been milking my Tsunami mobo [9500] for a damned good long time. The thing will take any PCI card with Mac drivers, has two SCSI busses built in, serial, adb, audio i/o [still need to snag an RCA and s-board from ebay], and with a few upgrades, it easily has all of the functionality of my iMac and then some.
The only downside is that the mobo has a 40 mhz bus, which sucks an amazing amount of ass for a lot of applications. If you're not using a Mac as a game platform, there's no reason at all to ditch the old hardware- hell, this thing can hold up to a gig of RAM (two, in theory- though I'm not about to spend the money on a 256 meg stick of EDO ram just to see if it'll work or not), I could theoretically slot a G4 processor into it... and my little beast of niftinees is the only hybrid system on my lan- SCSI with and IDE card for drives.
This might not be the best clue-in, but it does come from personal experience.
First, I've been a Mac user for the last four years, and own nothing but Apple hardware (unless you count the Sparc that's serving as a shelf for my video game systems). I am personally of the opinion that cost is really irrelvant here- Quality is what matters, and one of the major things I've found lacking in the PC world. Yeah- Apple gear isn't cheap. But if, for exampel, Dell were the ONLY PC maker, do you think prices would be as cut-rate? No.
Upgrading a Mac, if it's even possible, is usually an expensive undertaking- fortunately, depending on the model series, the parts you're replacing can easily hop over to the next machine down the food chain. I'll give a couple of examples here, from my personal collection.
The iMac- the only thing you can upgrade on these beasties is the RAM and the hard drive, though there are options available for the older models with mezzanine slots (SCSI cards, ADB/Serial cards, Firewire, etc.). Since the components in question are standard, upgrades are reasonably cheap. Anyone that fires off a bitch about the monitor had better try one first, and pull up the same graphics file on bothe the iMac and the PC. Trust me, the monitor does NOT need to be upped!
Powerbooks- again, RAM and hard drive are pretty much it. Likewise, standard options (in fact, my Pismo and bondi iMac use the same RAM:). Add-on expansion devices for pre-Tibooks are pricey (averaging 200-800 $) - CDRW, Floppy, Zip, expansion module hard drives, etc.
Where it really gets interesting is if you happen to have, like I do, a couple of x500 or x600 towers sitting around. My 9500 is the most expandable system apple ever produced- the only one ever put on the market with SIX PCI slots. You could count the 9600, but it's the same mobo in a different case.
RAM for any pre-G3 powermac is insanely expensive. As in, you are LUCKY if you can get 128 meg chips for less than 140$ apiece. Compare this to the 40$ I paid for 128 stick for my Pismo. If you want to actually USE one of these machines for anything, you want at least 48 megs of RAM (just for OS 9 and iTunes)- more to do anything serious. My 9500 has 320- a hoard of 16s, some 32s, and a 128.
You could buy a new PC for the price of a decent capacity SCSI HD. Since the 604s are SCSI-only, the best workaround is a Sonnet Tempo ATA/66 IDE Host adapter. 100$, though the older systems puke when you try to play MP3s. Do some price shopping and you can jam a 40 gig IDE drive into an older system and boot off of it for 200$- whereas a 36 gig SCSI drive would cost you at LEAST 250$ + In either case, don't swallow the bullshit about "Mac formatted!" - if a drive is Open Firmware Compliant (like IBM drives, for example), it doesn't matter WHAT was on it. In fact, the IDE drives I put in my 9500 still had data on them from their prior owners- and the MacOS read them.
USB cards are cheap, and do the job. Video cards are slightly more expensive for the Mac- most of what you're paying for is the flashed ROM and the extra I/O interface (both video cards in my 9500 support PC or Mac monitors). Add maybe 5% to the cost of an equivalent PC video card.
You're going to eat it on the processor upgrade, unfortunately. The big thing I've noticed about these is that they unilaterally decrease system stability. And cost you out the ass- typically running between 170 and 500 $ for a G3 upgrade in the 400-500 mhz range. The newer systems are cheaper to upgrade, but you won't see nearly as much of a boost.
My 9500 has an Xlr8 G3/300 board in it and hard hangs every time I try to mount a disk image, no matter the cache settings. Aside from that, it runs well in Photoshop, and more or less everything else. Mileage WILL vary with processor upgrades... I'll be using nex years tax refund to test out some Sonnet products.
Base system [including g3 board, 4 gig Barracuda, ATI video and 216 RAM] - free. I built a web site and was paid with the system.
128 megs of RAM - 60 $ on ebay (by sheer luck)
IDE card - 75$ on ebay
Video card - 40$ (cheapo model) on ebay
Two IDE drives - pull from work and loaner from roommate
10/100 ethernet card (mobo has 10 only) - 15$ (ebay again)
Pioneer SCSI CD drive [external] - 15$ from local goodwill computer store
Monitors: Already had 'em.
===
total cost: 205 $
cost for average user [stock 9500 would come w/ 32 ram, 604 120mhz, 1 gig HD, shitty or no video] : around 600-800$.
The big thing is that while you can walk into Wal * Mart and walk out with everything you need to upgrade your PC, you're shit out of luck on upgrading a Mac unless you use Ebay, buy direct, or happen to be lucky enough to live near an Apple Store. And if you're upgrading and older system, Ebay is almost your ONLY bet for reasonably priced hardware (discounting hard drives- I wouldn't buy them used under any conditions).
... is excellent if you don't run any applications or measure your uptime in nanoseconds. I've used six through ten.... the systems I've had the MOST problems with were 8.1 on an 8600 and 9.0.4 on an iMac. The most annoying- which doesn't count due to the fact that I'm payed by the hour to hassle with it- is a G3/Media 100 with 8.6.
I had one of those HP Lovecraft moments a few months ago- I began to seriously question my sanity when I realized that the only Mac at work that hadn't been rebooted in over a month was..... my workstation. The one that was used every day, all day- a G4/733 with OS 9.1. The only time it's blown up in the last month was when I attempted to connect a bad firewire drive to it.
For UNIX, that's a fart in a hurricaine. For Windows, it's next to impossible (my boss runs Win2k and reboots at least twice before lunch, the sysadmin for the building cycles his every week or two).... and for the Macintosh OS, I'd thought it propability zero.
Wish I could get that level of uptime on my damned 9500 [G3/333, 196 RAM, Lucent USB, no-name Ethernet, Adaptec SCSI, Infinity and ATI video cards, Sonnet IDE card w/ an IBM and Fujitsu drive.... every piece of gear in the beast is made by a different manufacturer. Wouldn't stay up for more than ten minutes until I put OS X on it.:P ]
"Who gives a shit about branding? This is Slashdot, man. If you can run Unix apps on it with just a few tweaks then it is Unix. If it runs Apache, it is Unix. "
You couldn't be more wrong if you were paid to be. I think this sums it up:
Well, I *was* in the process of moderating this story, but it merits a post.
The vast majority of online comics (Sluggy, Goats, PVP, Avalon, Absurd Notions, Triangle and Robert) follow a relatively straight-forward three or four panel format (though Sluggy has proven that this isn't an absolute, merely a quick and occasionally preferred method to tell the story), exactly like newspaper comic strips.
Here's the difference: Online, you can say "fuck", deal with important topics (relative to the thrust of the comic) and are completely and totally free of editors and syndicate hacks breathing down your neck. Online comics can experiment with layout and story telling, and many of these feature long-running plots and serious character development. Not only that, but you can easily browse through the previous strips to get yourself up to speed (set aside a full weekend if you want to catch up on sluggy). Compare to newspaper strips, where you're lucky if you can find yesterday's paper in the trashcan.
I've laughed my ass off at Goats- tactical use of Weebles, Johnny Cash and Oompa Loompas prove that Jon has a uniquely twisted mind deserving of comic fans attention. The closest I've come to laughing at a newspaper strip is Dilbert, simply because none of it is fiction- though it may be to the author. Office people really *are* that stupid.
Dilbert is the exception to the rule, and it also suffers from the flaws that plague newspaper comics- shite artwork, no plot or storylines beyond something that may last, say, a week (tops), and generally not even worth reading.
When was the last time you sprained an abdominal muscle laughing at Peanuts, Dilbert, or any of the hundreds of pustulant, vomitous masses of diarrhea that propagate the newspaper?
There's no screening process for online comic artists- all they need is art supplies, a scanner (if that), and a web connection. There's no lowest common denominator- you make the daily comics page out of your bookmarks file and go to town.
And of course, online comics are akin to newspaper comics in that 90% of them are shit (go ahead and mod me down, but I firmly place Superiosity and User Friendly in the majority here) - but there are *so many* of them that you're bound to find something good. Unlike the newspaper, where that 10% of "good" fits in at the bottom of the 90% of crappy online comics.
First, as a Mac user, you can kiss the sub-1k$ range goodbye, unless you're willing to snag something older and a hell of a lot heavier.
I want the following features in a laptop- from most important to optional:
1. Weight. If it weighs as my Powerbook 180, forget it. Four, five pounds- tops.
2. Battery life. Lithium Ion batteries whup the llammas ass- four hours of "office" use, two hours of Quake III / Photoshop / Internet use, maybe an hour on the DVD player.
3. Modem AND Ethernet. All or nothing- I dump downloads onto a server on my home LAN and a crossover cable is far more useable than IRDA or lugging a zip drive.
4. Battery CAPACITY. My Pismo powerbook can ditch the DVD/CD drive module in favor of a second battery, if and when I need it. This has saved my ass many, many times! (forget the TiBook- and don't get me started on slot-loading drives in portables)
5. A responsive, reliable keyboard. Something that I can pick apart and clean if I need to. (the Pismo is a nightmare from this respect, but Apple seems to be sticking with the "wishbone suspension" on their portable keyboards....)
6. Any sort of Video Out. (fortunately, the pismo runs S-video and VGA out.:D )
7. Audio out.
8. Millions of colors @ 1024x768. Bigger is better, but this usually means that the *case* gets bulkier, and who needs that?
9. Accessability. Upgrading laptops is a nightmare, and not recommended for amateurs.
Fortunately, one can run MacOS X or Classic MacOS on a Pismo, and I have a friend who's running DebianPPC on his Lombard (one model lower). Linux PPC installs, as does MKLinux.
My opinion? You want a Pismo or a Lombard powerbook. The only *real* differences between the two are that the Lombard has SCSI and the Pismo comes with Firewire and is slightly faster.
A quick features list:
14.5" LCD @ 1024x768, millions
VGA out, supports some wicked high resolutions as a second monitor
S-Video out, treated same as VGA.
2 USB ports
2 Firewire ports
Audio out
Audio in
Ethernet (10/100)
Modem (56k)
Expansion module comes with CD or CD/DVD drive, they make burner modules. And the expansion module can swallow a second battery.
I know. I'm on my second in seven years. They're about forty to sixty bucks and worth every penny. My old grey model was waterproof, and my current black model came that way, but the Pittsburgh acid rain seems to have eaten it off. There is one big pocket, a smaller pocket, and a *much* smaller pocket with an inside pouch that has pencil holders and a little zippered thingy, as well as a zippered flap on the outside of *that* pocket.
Here's my cargo manifest (off the top of my head):
Big pocket: Script, card stock, pencil case, notebook, garbage bag (everything goes in there and it stays in the big pocket when it pours buckets), after market Duo laptop case that holds my headphones, laptop power supply, and external HD. Enough space left over for a forty ounce of water and two CD wallets, when I need them. (when I do, the thing fits better- go figure).
Second pocket: Sweater. Inside the sweater, Powerbook wrapped in plastic. Fits perfectly.
Little pocket: Eraser, pencil sharpener, dagger, keys, swiss army knife, wallet, day planner,asprin, ephedrine, sunglasses or spectacles (depending), goth makeup, work ID.
Last pocket: Bus schedules.
On the pack, as ornamentation: a Carcass pin and a Batman pin.
If the bomb drops, I'm ready. Beat THAT with a stick.
Kennywood, outside of Pittsburgh, has few arcade stands. Not nearly as intense and amazing as Hershey was way back in '92, but - get this- they have a ORIGINAL WORKING SPACIE INVADERS. The case is old, the paint and instructions worn completely off by over twenty years of gaming. If that doesn't tickle your fancy, they have Dig Dug and a few others- still just a quarter.
Hell, I commute three hundred miles twice annually to access the only working Centipede machine I've ever found. One quarter on that will last you longer than half a dozen will on Tekken....
1. Right. A wall-mount is useless when you're sitting in your bed with a keyboard in your lap unless the screen is at least 36". 56", if you, y'know, code or do something with text. How many people spend the majority of their day with their face less than five feet from a wall, anyway? If you think the cinema display is pricey, well, try forking over the cost of a 56" plasma screen.
2. I can't contest that, because I haven't done the reading. My boss uses an Athlon gigahertz with 768 megs of RAM. I have a G4 733 with 256 of RAM. He boots faster. I beat him to a bloody, oozing, wimpering PULP in photoshop and video rendering. Oh, and stability. I rebooted my G4 sometime last week, and he went down about seven times today.:)
3. My Pismo batteries last four hours, and I can hold two. My friend's Dell laptop (PIII 600 or close) goes maybe two and a half. The power PC chip runs a hell of a lot cooler than the x86 could ever hope to- Apple already has the lead here, and removing the backlight is going to please one person- you. You obviously haven't used a gameboy under conditions other than optimal, have you?
4. I laugh. You think that 15" iMac monitor is too small? A single 15" touchscreen goes for about 1,200$ these days, if you want it to pull 1024x768. Compare to 100$ for a keyboard and mouse, and 200$ for a half-decent, mid-sized monitor. Touchscreens are practically worthless for anything other than kiosks- ever try to right click? Click and drag? Set up file permissions or networking? And name me one person that can talk intelligibly faster than he can type legibly.... (no, not SPELL correctly, just get the point across).
This is ridiculous- flamebate trying to struggle into the ill-fitting suit of a well-founded argument.
With MOSX, you can boot back and forth between 9.1 and X cleanly and easily- with the added advantage of both systems existing on one hard drive partition. With older version of MacOS, you can run as many versions of MOS as you have hard drive partitions- you can throw on linux if you'd like, and older versions of MOS, MOS X server, etceteras.
For example, it is entirely possible to run OS 9.1, MOSX, MOS X server (AKA Rhapsody), MOS 8.5 and, say, MKLinux on one machine.
From personal experience, you'd probably want at least three hard drives for this, though- Server gets moody without a drive to itself, and MKLinux requires a pre-existing MOS to boot-strap itself from.
In any case, it's an Apple computer- as a graphics nerd, Mac OS X lets me run Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, Perl, and Apache on the same system without dual booting. I dig that. (and sorry, Gimp doesn't cut it. You're deluding yourself.)
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Or the like- I can't imagine that people such as Helms or some of the bums and genetic rejects I see on the bus could convievably be the result of a traditional pregnancy. Unless the mom took PCP like vitamins and drank like a fish.
IIRC, the Russians or Germans did some experiments along these lines in the early part of the 20th century. Not the artificial womb, so much as artificial maintenance of newborns- the control group was cared for in the ways you would expect; lotsa love and care and baby talk and all that other stuff.
The subject group had their base physical needs taken care of, and that was IT. The nurses did not interact with the newborns in any affectionate capacity. The results were pretty interesting- the subject group - you'll love this- died. All of them.
A device like this is an important step forward, but it's not going to produce viable results without additional stimulation. While you can theoretically grow an embryo in a tube like you would a chicken in an egg... ya gotta remember that chickens don't go to school or talk.
It's an important thing to note that while it's been proven through the above example that once the fetus is out in the world it needs care and *attention*- but we have ZERO *proof* that the stimulation you mention has any serious bearing on the infant, for the fact that we cannot- not even now, due to "regulations"- test this hypothesis!
Worldly stimuli is quite possibly entirely optional. As for my own curiosity, I would think that pheremones and nutritional intake have a serious bearing, as that shapes the physical development. Beyond that.... hey, my oldest memory would be from about the age of 18 months or so, and it's a pretty danged fuzzy one at that.
[giving up mod access for what some right-to-lifer with mod points is going to see as flamebate... but hey, opinion is opinion, and too many people seem to think that their opinions are FACT, so what the hell....]
It's not successful until the device can be proven to gestate a fetus to term, and that said fetus be functional and free of defencts (depending on the old truism of garbage in, garbage out with regards to the genetic materials). "Regulations" have allowed for nothing more than a proof of concept. Yee ha. Test it on a pig or something and see if it really works all the way.
Too many people are shooting straight from the hip with moral panic attacks about this- the results of which are essentially as close minded as "640k ought to be enough for anybody." The morally minded need to shut the fsck up and realize that they have no right to have ANY say in the procreation alternatives of other sentient individuals. I cannot assess wether or not this device is practical for reasons stated above- it's not a functional proof of concept until "regulations" (created or pushed through by the morally minded who seem to exist only to restrict the will of others) allow for a thorough test.
Is it a good idea? Of course; it's advancing science. Medical science and NASA would be about thirty years behind where we are now were it not for German scientific data garnered from the second world war.
The only life you have ANY say in is YOUR OWN. Now keep your mouth shut about why cloning and Gattica-style selective breeding is a bad idea.... because simply put, it doesn't presently exist, so we just don't KNOW, do we? It's not your life, it's not your choice, so fundamentally, it's *not your business* unless you're looking to reproduce and have run out of options.
My boss rocks the world.
He tells me what needs done, and gets the hell out of my way. And stays there. When I'm done with what I'm doing, or hit a milestone, I present, he looks it over, and I go back to the drawing board with changes in mind. Repeat until finished. We meet on the smoke bench or informally in either of our offices. He never gives me shit about being late, and gives me and my coworkers mad props when we get a job done right. If we need hardware or software, we get it- it's that simple.
The head of the department works on pretty much the same principal- hands off, out of the way, keeping the shit from hitting the people that get the content and systems work done.
So. To sum up:
1. If you have any say in hiring, hire competent individuals that you can communicate with [we get "tested" by being hired part time, then eventually, go on fulltime with benefits, etc. People get brought in on a "we need [___] NOW!" basis, and if they click with us, they stick around. If they don't click, they don't stick- it keeps the department a well-oiled machine that works smoothly.]- I can't emphasize communication ENOUGH. Email doesn't cut it- face to face.
2. Stay the hell out of the way of your employees- let them do their jobs without being baby-sat. This is especially necessary when you don't know the applications or processes they're working with [the old department head kept back-seat driving me in Macromedia Director, an application he's never used. He hasn't programmed since computers went 32-bit.]
3. Give 'em what they need to get the job done. And by "job done", I mean just that.
I'm one of the two staff members in the department that actually knows enough about hardware/software to maintain and work on the systems when they go boom- on top of everything else, we're the only division in the facility that does our own tech support.
But so much the better. I did a multimedia presentation for a class a couple years ago based on the Final Fantasy series. These are my thoughts:
1. Start with Final Fantasy. As in, the first one. Download an emulator and find the ROM. It's an 8-bit NES game, so it would appear dated by todays standards, but it has elements that none of the other games do- it's still one of my favorites. It's also turn based. The series has no chronology or "order" to it, unlike Dragon Warrior. Each FF is a complete story without ties to the others.
If you can't find it, then get your hands on FFVI - six is easily one of the best RPGs ever, and has possibly the best translation/story of them all. It's also the last "traditional" FF - after that, they *really* started to experiment with things.
2. In order:
A. Six.
B. Six.
C. First, then Six. Though if you value prettiness over actual gameplay mechanics, then Seven or Eight. A good friend of mine swears by Nine, but IMO it's like comparing War and Peace to PeeWee's Playhouse in terms of graphic design.
D. SIX. In a heartbeat. The only final fantasy to suck up more than 70 hours of my time.
E. Eight.
3. The HARDCORE are going to tell you that FF8 sucks wang. They are wrong. FF8 isn't really so much a Final Fantasy as it is its own animal- aside from parts of the battle system and the title, it bears no resemblance to any other final fantasy game. This is not a bad thing- people simply fear change and were likely expecting another Six with better graphics. Had they called it something other than "Final Fantasy VIII", it would have done gangbusters. Since Square DID call it a Final Fantasy, it has to measure up to 6- and doesn't. It's still really cool..... but it's *not* a final fantasy. It's in the same category as the movie, which isn't really a Final Fantasy either- both of them are really missing the "Fantasy" bit to some extent.
In terms of enjoyment, I'd rank 'em as follows:
1. FF 6 (still have the box and manual!)
2. FF (I own two copies, because you can only save one game on the cartridge)
3. FF 8
4. FF 5 - if you liked Tactics, this is where the Job System started.
5. FF 4 - the only FF with a cheat code.
6. FF 7 - I really cannot adequately explain the derision I have for 7. Mainly because, in my opinion, it took everything GOOD about the previous FF games and took a shit on it. There aren't enough challenging or difficult enemies, which makes your characters difficult to build. Cloud is an apathetic little bitch, which makes him impossible to really care about- which is even worse, as this is the first FF where you're stuck with him as lead for most of the game (technically, FF2 as well, but you could change your screen icon to whatever member of the party you preferred). The Materia system strips characters of the things that made the FF6 cast so unique- special abilities like Steal and magic casting became portable. Not only that, but with no way to skip a summon spell, I stopped using them in favor of regular magic. I like 8 in terms of story, but the summons in that game are five times WORSE - it was the first thing I asked about and the answer sold my playstation to the highest bidder.
7. FF 9 - being a person very much preferential to both 8 and Parasite Eve, I was inclined to view 9 as a venture into a childish, Barney / Telletubby aesthetic. Every FF previous to this one hooked me on graphics, story AND gameplay. I didn't realize just how important the graphical look and feel was until I played a sample of this and realized the cartoony crayola approach was making me sick.
8. FF 2 ( NES, played a Japanese ROM of it. No fun if you can't read Japanese)
9. FF 3 (Ditto 8)
I haven't played X and have no plans to do so- not only do I not have a PS2, I can't afford one and after VII destroyed my expectations for the series, I got out of video games and became a spectator for 8 and 9. I was a serious conniseur of video games throughout my teen years, and am firmly of the opinion that Square- and at large, the entire industry- simply doesn't have what it takes to make another game as >complete as FF6, and divested myself of my playstation on the strength of that conviction.
Take it from an ex-fan: Final Fantasy 6 is not only the best in the series, it's likely one of the best RPGS *EVER*.
Peer pressure is the worst possible reason to get into anything- you should only make the time investment in these games if you're into RPGs or think you might be... then look over plot synopsises of the titles in the series and start with the one that resonates with you the most. From my standing, The Majority spooged in their pants over FF7, which was an inferior waste of my time compared to FF6, adding fuel to the conclusion that the majority of people are retards and easily cave to advertising and trends. FF7 was so goddamned hyped that it didn't HAVE to be good to sell- just like Star Wars Episode One.
The earlier games were vague enough, flexible enough, and broad enough for any RPG enthusiast to have fun with them. FF6 came out and tightened this down a bit, but maintained a large cast of interesting and well developed characters. Then FF7 tried to continue the tradition... and character development went flat. The characters lost their "life", for lack of a better term, and became polygons. Square is becoming progressively more and more focused on character driven stories as opposed to concept-driven stories- FF6 being the transition point, in that it had enough of a variety to offer something to everyone.... something the proceeding games lost. I didn't like Cloud, Barret or Red 13- hence, it's next to impossible to actually LIKE FF7. My issues with 8 were entirely with the battle system. 9 was too childish in design to get my interest in the least.... and everything I've seen about X points to it being a story that really doesn't interest me. There was a point where RPGs were still games- these days, they're interactive movies and novels.
I like the games. If you do as well, then play the earlier parts of the series, as you're likely to enjoy them much, much more.
M$ got where it is through marketing and a couple of BAD decisions on the part of IBM.
Adobe got where it is by making QUALITY products that do what professional graphic artists NEED to do. Nothing compares to Photoshop in terms of functionality, flexibility, and stability. N O T H I N G.
I suppose that Adobe technically has a monopoly, but in this case, they have earned it through right of coding a product that is FAR and above superior to everything else. It's the Industry Standard for image manipulation and creation for a reason - it's GOOD. Nobody that uses Photoshop bitches about it (generally- a few people prefer 5 to 6, but it's semantics- nobody that likes 5 and hates 6 is going to jump ship to another app).
From a graphics standpoint, Macromedia makes the better HTML editor (dreamweaver) and image optimizer (fireworks) - but Fireworks sucks in many areas... and on the other side of the fence, Adobe Illustrator is a BITCH to print form at weird sizes, and Macromedia Freehand does color seperation for print (shirts, cloth, hats, etc.) in its sleep, whereas Illustrator doesn't even bother.
Read this completely before you mod it as flamebait.
Most of the web developers I know consider Flash to be a standards-breaking, improperly used piece of ass. But then, most of the web devs I know are rabid about making damned good and sure that the lowest common denominator can use their site. On a modem.
I'm a professional graphics designer. I live in photoshop. The GIMP - the closest thing that OSS has to a graphics app - is a huge steaming pile of poo compared to the ease of use, power, stability (on a Mac, no less!), and most importantly, USEABILITY of Photoshop (version 5, don't get me started on 6). The GIMP is "almost photoshop", everyone says. We (the graphics community) can NOT use "almost". What we NEED is "Better Than Photoshop".
I've seen a lot of GIMP art. I've seen a lot of Photoshop art. The capacity and useability of GIMP - particularly with regards to fonts, anti-aliasing, color control (emphasis), et. al., is severly lacking. I've seen some mindblowing graphics produced with photoshop.... I have yet to see anything comprable with the GIMP.
A *PROFESSIONAL* graphic design app is a good deal more difficult to execute than a window manager, an office suite, or an IRC client. OSS is almost worthy with Nautilus, barely palatable with word processing, stinks horribly at fonts, has produced a number of excellent IRC clients, and a stable as well as surprisingly portable codebase.
The functionality that graphics people demand isn't there because graphics people don't code and coders don't do graphics (some think they can in both cases, but the evidence supports my statement). Hence, a graphics person that depends on Photoshop has about a 99.9% chance of not knowing a single line of code, and hence, not knowing how to build what he wants to use for free. The issue with OSS is that the "by geeks, for geeks" mentality is simply incapable of producing an application of the quality and caliber of Photoshop- it takes a corporation like Adobe with the money and management to ram the coders and the artists together to get the results necessary to produce a useable application.
If Adobe and Macromedia's killer apps could be "easily replicated" by OSS, then why haven't they been? I don't know a SINGLE graphic designer that works in Linux. I know two that work in Windows. The rest use MacOS- and of the MacOS users, ONE uses OS X , and she runs her apps in Classic. NONE use or recommed the GIMP. Point of fact, it is a common conclusion within the Pittsburgh professional graphics community that the GIMP is very good at making very bad art. Likely due to the fact that "configue / make / make install" and "Orator 24 point/ Soft Light / desaturate/ color balance / variations (blue, two iterations)" involve two completely different sides of the brain.
Photoshop is worth the price tag. It is the ONLY graphics app out there that can do what professionals demand- easily, smoothly, and in a stable fashion (on a Mac- hasn't crashed on me once, minus poorly coded third party plugins). Compared to the price points of comprable video compositing and editing software, Photoshop is CHEAP.
When the GIMP (or comprable app) can use the photshop 5 keyboard shortcuts (and actually DO with equal effectiveness what those shortcuts key to), get color right, support a gazillion fonts, do alpha channels and selections on the flip of a click, read PSD files, launch in under ten seconds, dynamically allocate swap disks (something photoshop doesn't do), AND competently handle a 11x17 @ 600 DPI image with 45 pixel layers and 30 type layers... AND manage five gigs of swap disk without dumping core.... then I'll think about actually seriously using it to do some work.
The day that OSS can produce a useable graphics app - that can be installed in less than five clicks without resorting to a terminal - is the day I cease dual booting.
That day is nowhere near. We'll see another thousand or so IRC clients on sourceforge before we see a Better Than Windows WM, let alone a Better Than Photoshop graphics app.
Like FUEL EFFICIENCY? I'm not buying a car until one comes on the market that I can reasonably afford- and that gets at least 100 miles to the gallon, gets a clean bill of health from Consumer Reports, and needs the tires rotated more often than the oil changed (in other words, not for at least fifteen years, after we've run out of oil and finally have to build fuel efficient vehicles out of necessity).
On a lighter note, if they include a feature to pleasure the driver in ways that are probably illegal in most states and grounds for death in Singapore, well... maybe I'll test drive one.
Your statement describes the obvious, yet you seem to have missed the point: you'll notice that whenever you give your email address to ANY website that's even remotely disreputable (Yahoo, AOL, Pr0n sites, etc), your mailbox will be overloaded. It's not JUST M$ that's selling out your address. Places that you leave it at will sell it wholesale- this is why I publicize my hotmail account and don't leave my real account lying around anywhere.
I use that hotmail address EVERY time I need to submit my email in order to get whatever I'm looking for - as a consequence, I average between 20 and 30 unsolicited emails a day in that account. My real account remains clean- at least until ebay starts selling addresses to the highest bidder.
First, about the only people that would fall victim to this ridiculous proposal would be consumers. Companies, artists, writers and programmers aren't about to let ANYONE look around there systems just because they might have MP3s - and hey, what if you actually OWN the CD to begin with? Like I'm going to carry my Fear Factory CDs with me to work every day just so the staff can see proof that I have the "legal" "right" to listen to the Fear Factory MP3s on my system. My boss knows my system is loaded, knows where I got 'em, and knows that having music on hand makes me a hell of a lot more productive.
I'll give money to the artist for making a kick ass product- but the suits that are grubbing for this haven't a lick of musical talent in their bodies, haven't recorded a single damned song of their own, and flat out just do NOT deserve the proceeds or the right to poke at my system to begin with. Personally, I feel it's all a diversionary tactic to cover up the fact that the major labels have produced nothing of interest or value within the last five to ten years; how much money did you SAVE when you realized that out of ten albums you wanted to buy, less than three had more than two tracks worth listening to?
Folks, the DMCA, the RIAA, the entertainment industry in general infringe on our civil rights (or are quite obviously attempting to) a hell of a lot more than any terrorist activity or threat thereof. Money may talk, and they may have most of it, but the current state of the federal bill that they're trying to work around is a serious sticking point; as is the patently obvious fact that the RIAA seems to be more concerned with the mp3 FORMAT than any method to differentiate between songs that they distribute and music on independant labels.
[example; if something like this went down and they deleted a live recording of a friend's gig that I'd compressed to listen to later, that would technically be destruction of private property, wouldn't it?]
The way AIP did ProDev for CAM students was to slap it on top of Flat Portfolio. Which meant that in addition to resumes, biz cards, interview practice, and other things, we were also responsible for passing (there was no curve- it either exceeded [a+], met [a], or failed [f]) an 18 item checklist of graphics work- life drawing, color pieces, backgrounds, storyboards, multimedia CDROM, etc. If you failed ONE of these items, you failed the entire class.
THAT was where social engineering came in. The instructor considered my photoshop work to be the strongest in the class and actually used it as an example several times. But at that point in time, my flat work (drawings) sucked ass. If I hadn't greased the rails- if the instructor had been a complete and total hardass instead of an ally- I would have failed the class on the merit of my flat drawing skills.
Which makes you wonder why they slammed two marginally related classes together and had the entire grade structure hinge on one of them, but that's something I prefer not to think about.
I should know, I took the course when I was at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh. It was folded into the flat portfolio class for some reason, and went over the *basics* of how to go about doing everything you want out of a course like that. I passed it through social engineering - I made friends with the instructor, cut her under-the-table deals in the print lab and scan lab, and pushed prints for any student she sent me. And I gave a lecture to my class on printing above 72 DPI (I was the ONLY computer animation student at the time that knew how to print at 300 dpi!). So I passed.
A class is basically an expensive cliff's notes for something you're going to need in real life. There's no better way to pick it up than hands-on experience, and no - repeat- NO- class can do that for you. Let me address these proposed course points of yours from my personal experience:
Resume Writing: the ProDev class sucked for this, being incredibly basic. How did I get a decent resume? Simple- when work was slowing down at my current job, my boss told me "make up your resume and let me see it." So I did. He shot down about half of it and suggested changes. I made them. Repeat until he was happy with it- THEN he told me to run it by the assistant chair of Education, who has a Masters in English. He had a few suggestions. By the time I passed the gauntlet, my Resume rocked the casbah.
Researching Companies and Potential Employers: I've never had to do this, actually- it's been calls out of the blue, or emails from friends saying "hey, this guy's looking for...." since day one. This is a good thing- I live in Pittsburgh, and none of the local companies look like anything I'd want to work for. I'm happy where I'm at.
Interviewing Skills: This is the essence of social engineering. If you don't convince the interviewer that you're a guy who not only does the job well, but can get along with him, you should be fine. If you click, you're almost guranteed in. If you're not laid back and congenial, and don't have some social skills, forget it. I have friends that are a hell of a lot better at various aspects of what I do, but they couldn't talk a rock into sitting still.
Networking: What it ALL boils down to. No one ever got a job without knowing somebody- unless the case is 100% pure "we need somebody NOW." Case in point- my first supervisor at my job was a guy like that. I got in because he knew me. My next supervisor got in because he knew him (both of these guys left), and a future coworker is getting in by virtue of strong recommendations from myself and my last supervisor. That's three people getting jobs because they knew one guy that was in the right place at the right time.
I was barely competent when I got in- I was the only guy this person knew - and that everyone he asked knew- who could do the job. I picked up the details as I went along, and forget nascent capabilities into actual skills. Having friends in good places can only get you so far- your actual skills are going to carry you the rest of the way. So it's not enough to have a lot of friends OR be amazingly good at what you're doing- you gotta have BOTH, or you're going to be having a hell of a time of it.
That's my experience- which I'm slowly melding into a collection of essays with intent to stick on a website when I have enough of them.
If you have questions, replace AT with @ and ask away.
I'm a longtime, hardcore, dedicated Mac user. I've tried OS X, and while it makes an excellent *nix, it's a disgusting, horrible replacement for Classic MacOS- the interface transparency and performance - not to mention metadata- that I use regularly to make a living isn't there and doesn't look like it's going to be.
The shit thing about MoS X is that yeah, you can run your Classic Apps- but classic is "transparent", leaving you staring at Aqua. (yay.) I loved the opaque bluebox in the original incarnation of MOSX server (aka Rhapsody), and could well and truly care less for OS X as it stands right now. The dock and the damned Geni effect are no replacement for HD aliases in the Apple menu, tabbed folders, folder colors, file comments, blah blah blah.
Where Mac On Linux is beyond cool is that it's opaque, and you can run it in a window (as opposed to full screen). I saw it on a friend's system under Debian- at the time he was having sound problems with it- and it ran great. You get all of your Mac goodness with all of your Linux goodness, and you get them separated, without the massive, nasty overhead of Aqua.
I'd gladly use OS X for server applications (our Rhapsody box at work just hit 372 days of uptime, and would have been over 700 if we hadn't been ordered to shut every machine in the work area down one particular weekend). Love the stability, and the UI is the best I've ever seen on a unix system.... but it's still incredibly piss poor for the functionality that I need out of a production system.
Hmmm....
I wonder if you could run MOL on OS X? MOS apps at native speed as opposed to the insanely gross hit you take when running them in MOSX would be truly useful.
I personally don't think it would have been possible for Jesus to give a better review of God.
Reread the sentence, consider the originating website of the article (theforce.net) and you'll see what I mean exactly.
I read about five paragraphs of it, and very nearly puked. I viewed source, expecting to see a suspected <drool> review </drool> tag set in there somewhere. No luck.
This isn't a review- it's Lucasfilm Masturbigratification.
Let's look at it this way:
If time is money, then your PC is going to cost you a HELL of a lot more than a Mac.
Macintosh: no IRQ conflicts. No driver conflicts - in fact, all most drivers do is fine tune the hardware and add some features you probably won't use anyway. Sound, mobo ethernet, video, and your modem (if it's built in) are all supported by the OS. No upgrade nightmares, no endless search for drivers, and the best part- NO MESSING WITH A BIOS!
Seriously. To replace the HD on my roommate's PC box, I had to enter the sectors, heads, etc. into the BIOS so it would read it (auto detect was a joke), then format the blasted thing in DOS using an archaic utility.
To replace the HD on a mac: open the case, plug the new one in. Boot. If it wa a PC drive, format it. Install the OS [or pull an install over the network- all modern install CDs boot w/ network support]
And don't even get me STARTED on what a bitch it is to adjust monitor bit depth and resolution - let ALONE color coordination and gamma- on anything else. (particularly *nix)
Yes, the G3 and G4 towers use AGP video cards- but one thing I've noticed is that the AGP slots on Macs are in a different position than PC AGP slots. Same number of pins, but you need either some wackass piggyback rig or a completely different card. The hardware is effectively the same, but the implementation is incompatible.
I've been milking my Tsunami mobo [9500] for a damned good long time. The thing will take any PCI card with Mac drivers, has two SCSI busses built in, serial, adb, audio i/o [still need to snag an RCA and s-board from ebay], and with a few upgrades, it easily has all of the functionality of my iMac and then some.
The only downside is that the mobo has a 40 mhz bus, which sucks an amazing amount of ass for a lot of applications. If you're not using a Mac as a game platform, there's no reason at all to ditch the old hardware- hell, this thing can hold up to a gig of RAM (two, in theory- though I'm not about to spend the money on a 256 meg stick of EDO ram just to see if it'll work or not), I could theoretically slot a G4 processor into it... and my little beast of niftinees is the only hybrid system on my lan- SCSI with and IDE card for drives.
This might not be the best clue-in, but it does come from personal experience.
:). Add-on expansion devices for pre-Tibooks are pricey (averaging 200-800 $) - CDRW, Floppy, Zip, expansion module hard drives, etc.
First, I've been a Mac user for the last four years, and own nothing but Apple hardware (unless you count the Sparc that's serving as a shelf for my video game systems). I am personally of the opinion that cost is really irrelvant here- Quality is what matters, and one of the major things I've found lacking in the PC world. Yeah- Apple gear isn't cheap. But if, for exampel, Dell were the ONLY PC maker, do you think prices would be as cut-rate? No.
Upgrading a Mac, if it's even possible, is usually an expensive undertaking- fortunately, depending on the model series, the parts you're replacing can easily hop over to the next machine down the food chain. I'll give a couple of examples here, from my personal collection.
The iMac- the only thing you can upgrade on these beasties is the RAM and the hard drive, though there are options available for the older models with mezzanine slots (SCSI cards, ADB/Serial cards, Firewire, etc.). Since the components in question are standard, upgrades are reasonably cheap. Anyone that fires off a bitch about the monitor had better try one first, and pull up the same graphics file on bothe the iMac and the PC. Trust me, the monitor does NOT need to be upped!
Powerbooks- again, RAM and hard drive are pretty much it. Likewise, standard options (in fact, my Pismo and bondi iMac use the same RAM
Where it really gets interesting is if you happen to have, like I do, a couple of x500 or x600 towers sitting around. My 9500 is the most expandable system apple ever produced- the only one ever put on the market with SIX PCI slots. You could count the 9600, but it's the same mobo in a different case.
RAM for any pre-G3 powermac is insanely expensive. As in, you are LUCKY if you can get 128 meg chips for less than 140$ apiece. Compare this to the 40$ I paid for 128 stick for my Pismo. If you want to actually USE one of these machines for anything, you want at least 48 megs of RAM (just for OS 9 and iTunes)- more to do anything serious. My 9500 has 320- a hoard of 16s, some 32s, and a 128.
You could buy a new PC for the price of a decent capacity SCSI HD. Since the 604s are SCSI-only, the best workaround is a Sonnet Tempo ATA/66 IDE Host adapter. 100$, though the older systems puke when you try to play MP3s. Do some price shopping and you can jam a 40 gig IDE drive into an older system and boot off of it for 200$- whereas a 36 gig SCSI drive would cost you at LEAST 250$ + In either case, don't swallow the bullshit about "Mac formatted!" - if a drive is Open Firmware Compliant (like IBM drives, for example), it doesn't matter WHAT was on it. In fact, the IDE drives I put in my 9500 still had data on them from their prior owners- and the MacOS read them.
USB cards are cheap, and do the job. Video cards are slightly more expensive for the Mac- most of what you're paying for is the flashed ROM and the extra I/O interface (both video cards in my 9500 support PC or Mac monitors). Add maybe 5% to the cost of an equivalent PC video card.
You're going to eat it on the processor upgrade, unfortunately. The big thing I've noticed about these is that they unilaterally decrease system stability. And cost you out the ass- typically running between 170 and 500 $ for a G3 upgrade in the 400-500 mhz range. The newer systems are cheaper to upgrade, but you won't see nearly as much of a boost.
My 9500 has an Xlr8 G3/300 board in it and hard hangs every time I try to mount a disk image, no matter the cache settings. Aside from that, it runs well in Photoshop, and more or less everything else. Mileage WILL vary with processor upgrades... I'll be using nex years tax refund to test out some Sonnet products.
Base system [including g3 board, 4 gig Barracuda, ATI video and 216 RAM] - free. I built a web site and was paid with the system.
128 megs of RAM - 60 $ on ebay (by sheer luck)
IDE card - 75$ on ebay
Video card - 40$ (cheapo model) on ebay
Two IDE drives - pull from work and loaner from roommate
10/100 ethernet card (mobo has 10 only) - 15$ (ebay again)
Pioneer SCSI CD drive [external] - 15$ from local goodwill computer store
Monitors: Already had 'em.
===
total cost: 205 $
cost for average user [stock 9500 would come w/ 32 ram, 604 120mhz, 1 gig HD, shitty or no video] : around 600-800$.
The big thing is that while you can walk into Wal * Mart and walk out with everything you need to upgrade your PC, you're shit out of luck on upgrading a Mac unless you use Ebay, buy direct, or happen to be lucky enough to live near an Apple Store. And if you're upgrading and older system, Ebay is almost your ONLY bet for reasonably priced hardware (discounting hard drives- I wouldn't buy them used under any conditions).
... is excellent if you don't run any applications or measure your uptime in nanoseconds. I've used six through ten.... the systems I've had the MOST problems with were 8.1 on an 8600 and 9.0.4 on an iMac. The most annoying- which doesn't count due to the fact that I'm payed by the hour to hassle with it- is a G3/Media 100 with 8.6.
:P ]
I had one of those HP Lovecraft moments a few months ago- I began to seriously question my sanity when I realized that the only Mac at work that hadn't been rebooted in over a month was..... my workstation. The one that was used every day, all day- a G4/733 with OS 9.1. The only time it's blown up in the last month was when I attempted to connect a bad firewire drive to it.
For UNIX, that's a fart in a hurricaine. For Windows, it's next to impossible (my boss runs Win2k and reboots at least twice before lunch, the sysadmin for the building cycles his every week or two).... and for the Macintosh OS, I'd thought it propability zero.
Wish I could get that level of uptime on my damned 9500 [G3/333, 196 RAM, Lucent USB, no-name Ethernet, Adaptec SCSI, Infinity and ATI video cards, Sonnet IDE card w/ an IBM and Fujitsu drive.... every piece of gear in the beast is made by a different manufacturer. Wouldn't stay up for more than ten minutes until I put OS X on it.
You said:
3 2/
"Who gives a shit about branding? This is Slashdot, man. If you can run Unix apps on it with just a few tweaks then it is Unix. If it runs Apache, it is Unix. "
You couldn't be more wrong if you were paid to be. I think this sums it up:
http://httpd.apache.org/dist/httpd/binaries/win
So, in effect, you're wrongfully stating that Windows is a UNIX. Which is akin to calling a McDonalds hamburger a Porterhouse Steak.
Well, I *was* in the process of moderating this story, but it merits a post.
The vast majority of online comics (Sluggy, Goats, PVP, Avalon, Absurd Notions, Triangle and Robert) follow a relatively straight-forward three or four panel format (though Sluggy has proven that this isn't an absolute, merely a quick and occasionally preferred method to tell the story), exactly like newspaper comic strips.
Here's the difference: Online, you can say "fuck", deal with important topics (relative to the thrust of the comic) and are completely and totally free of editors and syndicate hacks breathing down your neck. Online comics can experiment with layout and story telling, and many of these feature long-running plots and serious character development. Not only that, but you can easily browse through the previous strips to get yourself up to speed (set aside a full weekend if you want to catch up on sluggy). Compare to newspaper strips, where you're lucky if you can find yesterday's paper in the trashcan.
I've laughed my ass off at Goats- tactical use of Weebles, Johnny Cash and Oompa Loompas prove that Jon has a uniquely twisted mind deserving of comic fans attention. The closest I've come to laughing at a newspaper strip is Dilbert, simply because none of it is fiction- though it may be to the author. Office people really *are* that stupid.
Dilbert is the exception to the rule, and it also suffers from the flaws that plague newspaper comics- shite artwork, no plot or storylines beyond something that may last, say, a week (tops), and generally not even worth reading.
When was the last time you sprained an abdominal muscle laughing at Peanuts, Dilbert, or any of the hundreds of pustulant, vomitous masses of diarrhea that propagate the newspaper?
There's no screening process for online comic artists- all they need is art supplies, a scanner (if that), and a web connection. There's no lowest common denominator- you make the daily comics page out of your bookmarks file and go to town.
And of course, online comics are akin to newspaper comics in that 90% of them are shit (go ahead and mod me down, but I firmly place Superiosity and User Friendly in the majority here) - but there are *so many* of them that you're bound to find something good. Unlike the newspaper, where that 10% of "good" fits in at the bottom of the 90% of crappy online comics.
First, as a Mac user, you can kiss the sub-1k$ range goodbye, unless you're willing to snag something older and a hell of a lot heavier.
:D )
I want the following features in a laptop- from most important to optional:
1. Weight. If it weighs as my Powerbook 180, forget it. Four, five pounds- tops.
2. Battery life. Lithium Ion batteries whup the llammas ass- four hours of "office" use, two hours of Quake III / Photoshop / Internet use, maybe an hour on the DVD player.
3. Modem AND Ethernet. All or nothing- I dump downloads onto a server on my home LAN and a crossover cable is far more useable than IRDA or lugging a zip drive.
4. Battery CAPACITY. My Pismo powerbook can ditch the DVD/CD drive module in favor of a second battery, if and when I need it. This has saved my ass many, many times! (forget the TiBook- and don't get me started on slot-loading drives in portables)
5. A responsive, reliable keyboard. Something that I can pick apart and clean if I need to. (the Pismo is a nightmare from this respect, but Apple seems to be sticking with the "wishbone suspension" on their portable keyboards....)
6. Any sort of Video Out. (fortunately, the pismo runs S-video and VGA out.
7. Audio out.
8. Millions of colors @ 1024x768. Bigger is better, but this usually means that the *case* gets bulkier, and who needs that?
9. Accessability. Upgrading laptops is a nightmare, and not recommended for amateurs.
Fortunately, one can run MacOS X or Classic MacOS on a Pismo, and I have a friend who's running DebianPPC on his Lombard (one model lower). Linux PPC installs, as does MKLinux.
My opinion? You want a Pismo or a Lombard powerbook. The only *real* differences between the two are that the Lombard has SCSI and the Pismo comes with Firewire and is slightly faster.
A quick features list:
14.5" LCD @ 1024x768, millions
VGA out, supports some wicked high resolutions as a second monitor
S-Video out, treated same as VGA.
2 USB ports
2 Firewire ports
Audio out
Audio in
Ethernet (10/100)
Modem (56k)
Expansion module comes with CD or CD/DVD drive, they make burner modules. And the expansion module can swallow a second battery.
I know. I'm on my second in seven years. They're about forty to sixty bucks and worth every penny. My old grey model was waterproof, and my current black model came that way, but the Pittsburgh acid rain seems to have eaten it off. There is one big pocket, a smaller pocket, and a *much* smaller pocket with an inside pouch that has pencil holders and a little zippered thingy, as well as a zippered flap on the outside of *that* pocket.
,asprin, ephedrine, sunglasses or spectacles (depending), goth makeup, work ID.
Here's my cargo manifest (off the top of my head):
Big pocket: Script, card stock, pencil case, notebook, garbage bag (everything goes in there and it stays in the big pocket when it pours buckets), after market Duo laptop case that holds my headphones, laptop power supply, and external HD. Enough space left over for a forty ounce of water and two CD wallets, when I need them. (when I do, the thing fits better- go figure).
Second pocket: Sweater. Inside the sweater, Powerbook wrapped in plastic. Fits perfectly.
Little pocket: Eraser, pencil sharpener, dagger, keys, swiss army knife, wallet, day planner
Last pocket: Bus schedules.
On the pack, as ornamentation: a Carcass pin and a Batman pin.
If the bomb drops, I'm ready. Beat THAT with a stick.
Kennywood, outside of Pittsburgh, has few arcade stands. Not nearly as intense and amazing as Hershey was way back in '92, but - get this- they have a ORIGINAL WORKING SPACIE INVADERS. The case is old, the paint and instructions worn completely off by over twenty years of gaming. If that doesn't tickle your fancy, they have Dig Dug and a few others- still just a quarter.
Hell, I commute three hundred miles twice annually to access the only working Centipede machine I've ever found. One quarter on that will last you longer than half a dozen will on Tekken....
To whit:
:)
1. Right. A wall-mount is useless when you're sitting in your bed with a keyboard in your lap unless the screen is at least 36". 56", if you, y'know, code or do something with text. How many people spend the majority of their day with their face less than five feet from a wall, anyway? If you think the cinema display is pricey, well, try forking over the cost of a 56" plasma screen.
2. I can't contest that, because I haven't done the reading. My boss uses an Athlon gigahertz with 768 megs of RAM. I have a G4 733 with 256 of RAM. He boots faster. I beat him to a bloody, oozing, wimpering PULP in photoshop and video rendering. Oh, and stability. I rebooted my G4 sometime last week, and he went down about seven times today.
3. My Pismo batteries last four hours, and I can hold two. My friend's Dell laptop (PIII 600 or close) goes maybe two and a half. The power PC chip runs a hell of a lot cooler than the x86 could ever hope to- Apple already has the lead here, and removing the backlight is going to please one person- you. You obviously haven't used a gameboy under conditions other than optimal, have you?
4. I laugh. You think that 15" iMac monitor is too small? A single 15" touchscreen goes for about 1,200$ these days, if you want it to pull 1024x768. Compare to 100$ for a keyboard and mouse, and 200$ for a half-decent, mid-sized monitor. Touchscreens are practically worthless for anything other than kiosks- ever try to right click? Click and drag? Set up file permissions or networking? And name me one person that can talk intelligibly faster than he can type legibly.... (no, not SPELL correctly, just get the point across).
This is ridiculous- flamebate trying to struggle into the ill-fitting suit of a well-founded argument.
With MOSX, you can boot back and forth between 9.1 and X cleanly and easily- with the added advantage of both systems existing on one hard drive partition. With older version of MacOS, you can run as many versions of MOS as you have hard drive partitions- you can throw on linux if you'd like, and older versions of MOS, MOS X server, etceteras.
For example, it is entirely possible to run OS 9.1, MOSX, MOS X server (AKA Rhapsody), MOS 8.5 and, say, MKLinux on one machine.
From personal experience, you'd probably want at least three hard drives for this, though- Server gets moody without a drive to itself, and MKLinux requires a pre-existing MOS to boot-strap itself from.
In any case, it's an Apple computer- as a graphics nerd, Mac OS X lets me run Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Photoshop, Perl, and Apache on the same system without dual booting. I dig that. (and sorry, Gimp doesn't cut it. You're deluding yourself.)