In his defense, the G5 was heller-nice when it came out.
Unfortunately, from what I've heard it was power hungry and wasn't being advanced (ie, sped up) as quickly as they'd like. But the power thing was quite a factor, as Apple is really into laptops and they were stuc kon old G4's for a wihle now.
Huh. As if in the real world the enemy doesn't try to sneak up behind you, or send scouts and soldiers into areas you've just vacated. I think if you ask the guys in Iraq they'd all agree that an area once cleared should stay cleared. Would make things much easier.
Yeh but I doubt in realy life you'll clear out a supply closet, walk 5 meters, and turn around to see 10 more living guys appeared in the supply closet out of nowhere and are readdy to mess you up something fierce.
I'm sure the occasional room might have a trap door or something but I doubt that happens often.
The only thing is now they're worried that the Chinese gov got a PC supplier to fiddle with their product. Maybe not all, just 1 out of 100 or something.
Do I think China did this? No.
But it's pretty much the job of intelligence agencies to be paranoid.
They're probably in pre-production. With the various stages of production, some personel are need and other aren't. Example, you don't really need the group the story-writers towards the end when completion isn't too far off.
My guess: Episode 1: they're finishing off the coding, but a majority of each piece is complete. Enough to put them together and start refining.
Episode 2: they're laying out the storyboards, perhaps some concept art for new enemies and locales. Maybe their starting new artwork for the new enemies/locales as well, preparing the models and textures.
Personally I wasn't a big Doom 3 fan. Yes, my rig could more than handle it. And a couple of times towards the beginning I got the piss scared out of me. But after that it was pretty humdrum.
Let's see which shade of white do I want? This shouldn't be too ha.. OH MY GOD! WTF! There's like 200 shades of white!?!? Umm, umm,... this one's nice, but this one's nice too. So's that one, and that one, and...
A kidding aside, there are "options," and there are "too many options."
200 shades of white? Too many. Being able to run 3 OSes on a laptop? That's perfectly fine.
I'm all for eyecandy in my OS so long as it is in moderation. To me, that means 2 things: 1) It's not excessive. I don't need 10-second animations to show a window has popped up. 2) It's not too hardware intensive for the time it's released. Around 3 generations ago for video cards. 3) You can scale it back if needed.
For #1, it shouldn't slow things down or cause a distraction. Something cool, but subtle. OSX's dock bar is a nice example.
For #2, I mean you shouldn't need a current-gen system to render everything. If Vista came out today, I don't want to be required to have an nVidia 6800GT to view the desktop with the defaults on. If you required a Geforce 2 or 3, then fine; they've been out long enough that most should have something as good or better (plus you should be able to turn it down if you don't).
For #3, you should be able to run an OS in a lighter configuration. This is for people that either don't have recent hardware or just want a light experience for performance (or personal preference).
I'm an adult, but my whole childhoold was filled with gaming, through my teenage years. And I still play games.
Sure, if it was 1985 I'd be shocked to hear that more adult gamers were so numerous. But in this period, most young adults grew up playing Atari/Intellivision/Coleco, Nintento, SNES, etc. It's common sense that many of them would continue the habit.
Not really. As others posted before you, Adobe still doesn't have the Intel version (or should I say "Universal version" of the binaries). So OS X would be running it under Rosetta, which slows things down big time.
As far as I know, Highlander the Series was sort of a forked story. Sort of like how Smallville was seperate from the movies and the (then) comic continuity, Highlander was seperate from the movie.
To be honest, I liked both series.
I had decent experiences with Dell's support in 2000. My last PC that wasn't homebrewed was a Dell. It was an Inspiron 3700 laptop I purchased in 1998 or 1999.
It blue-screened in 98 and 2000 alot because of a driver, but upgrading to XP and its version of the driver fixed the problem.
In any case, I had 2 hardware problems during its warrantee.
1) The motherboard died. It would no longer charge or run off the battery even though the battry was half full. It was (supposedly) a faulty motherboard. It went back-and-forth in just a few days.
2) Bad CD Rom. They sent a replacement next-day-air along with a package to send the old one back.
While those 2 problems were a bit excessive, I was pleasantly surprised how quickly everything got rectified. They used overnight air for both problems (back and forth) and maybe took a day to replace the parts.
Meanwhile, my brother bought a Gateway from one of those Gateway country stores a few years later. When he needed a part replaced during the warantee it took even longer than the Dell. I found that amusing.
In any case, with the exception of my PowerBook, all of my other PCs have been homebrewed. So I have no idea what their support is like now.
So Apple don't even have a contender in the budget market, thanks for clearing that up. May I buy whatever machine suits me now.
Unless you want to look at an iBook. $999 USD for a 12", $1,299 USD for a 14". Both perform quite decently. Probably perform better than a Dell Celeron, but I don't know (or care) as I don't go "budget" for my equipment. My work requires I have something more substantial.
But feel free to get whatever machine you want. My post was only that people laughing at how expensive Apple's notebooks are price are pretty clueless.
Actually the hardware isn't that pricey at all. Build me a PC with all the features of the iMac and I guarantee you will be at roughly the same price point. The only difference is, one will be a well engineered Mac and the other will be a big loud ugly box with a big ugly display. Choose what you prefer.
That's what I can't get some people to understand. Particularly with laptops.
I know people that brag about the $500 USD laptop they picked up on clearance/sale in BestBuy after some rebates. They say "tell me how Apple can justify such high prices!?!? Look how cheap this thing was."
Meanwhile, their cheap plastic laptop is already crashing from poor hardware and the case is cracking.
Hmm, why indeed.
Apple's do have a premium, I won't argue with that. You can get a similarly specced out Dell for less than an Apple but it's not a HUGE difference. But again, that's only if you're doing a true comparison. That Intel Celeron notebook is not a comparison with a Duo.
My freshmen year, they bought a Pentium 90 for each classroom (top-of-the-line for the time, or VERY close to it). By the time I graduated, only 3 teachers used them (not 3 of my teachers, 3 teachers total).
My freshmen year, they wired the entire building for ethernet. By the time I graduated, only the computer rooms were wired, and only locally through their own switches) (ie, not to the building's ethernet).
My favorite was a couple of times they'd upgrade the security in the computer rooms (where only programming was used). And, you guessed it, we couldn't compile any of our programs because of it. Each time was for a while.
The list goes on. But I have to admit, putting in wireless in your situtation is stupid.
what anybody says, last-ditch or whatever, the Dreamcast is still comparable with almost anything on the market today, purely from a technological (read: graphics quality) standpoint.
Don't get me wrong. The Dreamcast look beautiful. I still play some games on it today: Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, Sonic, etc. And I maintain it still looks better than the PS2.
However, it's falls slightly behind XBox and GameCube as far as graphics go. It's not way behind, but still not up to their looks/performance.
And the 360? Sorry to break it to you, but no. I will never buy a 360 but even I have to admit the 360 has superior graphics.
I don't sign my cards either. 4 times out of 5 the cashier won't bother checking, or will check and not care.
However, whenever I go to BestBuy they ask for my drivers license and compare my face to the photo. I guess the managers at the 2 stores near me are strict about that sort of thing.
When I worked as a cashier I didn't care if it was signed or not. I never bother checking unless my boss was hovering around the front.
I have "alt-itits" As in I keep making new characters... constantly. Each time I'd get to like lvl 14 I'd create another one.
My 2 oldest characters though i liked the most and played them into the mid 20's before buying influence. Most of it was for changing their look and such and to give me an ample supply for when I (soon) got the special effects.
I played them until their mid-30's (all-the-while creating alts) until I finally decided to kick the habit.
there is no gold farming, just rewards for missions or helping NPCs. Or by selling enhancements
there are no "drops" in the normal sense. gold/influence and enhancements are automatically distributed to people in the group by the server, so you can't really steal.
The main methods of hoarding gold/influence in CoH is by herding large amount of mobs, or going on Task Forces (usually 4-6 hour quests that can't be "paused").
If you have an upper level character, the gold/influence pours in like rain in the Amazon, unfortunately enhancements cost a lot too. So if you can get a character up there you can gain a lot of influence quickly and sell it. The lower and mid level characters have a hard time getting it, so them buying it isn't unheard of.
The last method is costume contests, where upper level characters/supergroups have a costume contest and give the top x contestants some of their ungodly amounts of money. It sounds lame, but if you have some time to kill and have a good costume it's worth a shot (and 10 minutes of your life).
I bought "gold" for City of Heroes twice, both times spending like 20 or 30 USD. This was while I was in my fullblown addiction phase. I've since kicked the habit entirely.
Anyway, my reasons were mostly to correct pas mistakes. I would normally play characters I'd created since the game came out a while ago, and eventually wanted to fix a bunch of my newbie mistakes. Ie, designing a costume that didnt suck nd re-outfitting him with the correct enhancements.
Looking back at it, I can't believe how stupid it was. It wasn't a lot of money and did make things a little easier/nicer for a while. But it was stupid.
As for cheating... there's not a whole lot to get in CoH. I mean, if someone from WoW used bought gold to buy a rare mount or something I could sort of see it as cheating. But in CoH, where you're limited to costumes and enhancements, there's not much benefit.
Kind of weird that Apple has officially said that it has objections to you runing software you bought from them on anything you like, huh?
Not really.
They're more or less saying "Don't worry, we're not going to be dicks and try to stop you from putting Windows on these machines. However we won't support the configuration so we won't help out by releasing a hack for it. But if you can get it going, then good for you."
Frankly, it's smart. If they did support windows out of the box and installing it was easy, then they might get into some trouble by not letting OS X go onto our machines. Somone like MS could then start a big stink, perhaps legal, forcing them to release OS X on all x86 hardware which is something they don't want.
PS I'm not a Mac fanboy. I split my computer time at home between a Powerbook and a homebuilt AMD 64 X2 machine. I just don't think they were being dicks and saying "We have decided to LET you install Windows on the machine, but only for now... mua hahahahaha..."
I wonder if the reaction would still be the same if it was AMD that was chosen by Skype for the 10-way call feature.
I'm sure Intel would respond in similalr fassion. But the geek-public public wouldn't mind as much, heck some would probably be cheering them on. If a school bully picks fights with kids on a daily basis by kicking them in the nuts, how would you feel if kid #147 kicks hit in the nuts first?
Intel has been throwing its weight around for years now to ensure its dominance. The Dell debacle comes to mind. This is just another example.
Personally I'm dissapointed with Skype more than I'm annoyed at Intel. Though if this was AMD then I'd have mixed feelings on the issue: dissapointed yet chuckling.
The networks don't want that. But the alternative (when their prime money-making fare is episodic, either fiction or reality) is that I lose interest in the story arc altogether and never bother to turn the program on again. So take your pick, suits. Either tolerate my catching up or say goodbye to my eyeballs.
Actually, the networks probably want you to buy the show individually if you want it. Comcast OnDemand already has CBS's pay-per-episode service. They also have the Premium Channels (HBO,Max,etc) with their shows and movies, but since you pay for the channel you (currently) get their shows for free.
Also, don't forget iTunes.
Face it, they want you to pay if you miss the show.
I thought the point of that episode was they were taking corpses and selling the body parts and tissue to research firms, not to hospitals. Like a biotech looking at arthritis could use a semi-fresh hand+fingers, or some similar thing.
From my understanding, tissue can't be reimplanted after a few hours past death no matter how well preserved/iced. And some of those parts were around for weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
In his defense, the G5 was heller-nice when it came out.
Unfortunately, from what I've heard it was power hungry and wasn't being advanced (ie, sped up) as quickly as they'd like. But the power thing was quite a factor, as Apple is really into laptops and they were stuc kon old G4's for a wihle now.
Yeh but I doubt in realy life you'll clear out a supply closet, walk 5 meters, and turn around to see 10 more living guys appeared in the supply closet out of nowhere and are readdy to mess you up something fierce.
I'm sure the occasional room might have a trap door or something but I doubt that happens often.
They spy on us, and we spy on them. Nothing new.
The only thing is now they're worried that the Chinese gov got a PC supplier to fiddle with their product. Maybe not all, just 1 out of 100 or something.
Do I think China did this? No.
But it's pretty much the job of intelligence agencies to be paranoid.
They're probably in pre-production. With the various stages of production, some personel are need and other aren't. Example, you don't really need the group the story-writers towards the end when completion isn't too far off.
My guess:
Episode 1: they're finishing off the coding, but a majority of each piece is complete. Enough to put them together and start refining.
Episode 2: they're laying out the storyboards, perhaps some concept art for new enemies and locales. Maybe their starting new artwork for the new enemies/locales as well, preparing the models and textures.
Personally I wasn't a big Doom 3 fan. Yes, my rig could more than handle it. And a couple of times towards the beginning I got the piss scared out of me. But after that it was pretty humdrum.
Apparently you've never had to shop for paint.
... this one's nice, but this one's nice too. So's that one, and that one, and ...
Let's see which shade of white do I want? This shouldn't be too ha.. OH MY GOD! WTF! There's like 200 shades of white!?!? Umm, umm,
A kidding aside, there are "options," and there are "too many options."
200 shades of white? Too many.
Being able to run 3 OSes on a laptop? That's perfectly fine.
I'm all for eyecandy in my OS so long as it is in moderation. To me, that means 2 things:
1) It's not excessive. I don't need 10-second animations to show a window has popped up.
2) It's not too hardware intensive for the time it's released. Around 3 generations ago for video cards.
3) You can scale it back if needed.
For #1, it shouldn't slow things down or cause a distraction. Something cool, but subtle. OSX's dock bar is a nice example.
For #2, I mean you shouldn't need a current-gen system to render everything. If Vista came out today, I don't want to be required to have an nVidia 6800GT to view the desktop with the defaults on. If you required a Geforce 2 or 3, then fine; they've been out long enough that most should have something as good or better (plus you should be able to turn it down if you don't).
For #3, you should be able to run an OS in a lighter configuration. This is for people that either don't have recent hardware or just want a light experience for performance (or personal preference).
I mean, come on. This is a no brainer.
I'm an adult, but my whole childhoold was filled with gaming, through my teenage years. And I still play games.
Sure, if it was 1985 I'd be shocked to hear that more adult gamers were so numerous. But in this period, most young adults grew up playing Atari/Intellivision/Coleco, Nintento, SNES, etc. It's common sense that many of them would continue the habit.
Not really. As others posted before you, Adobe still doesn't have the Intel version (or should I say "Universal version" of the binaries). So OS X would be running it under Rosetta, which slows things down big time.
As far as I know, Highlander the Series was sort of a forked story. Sort of like how Smallville was seperate from the movies and the (then) comic continuity, Highlander was seperate from the movie. To be honest, I liked both series.
I had decent experiences with Dell's support in 2000. My last PC that wasn't homebrewed was a Dell. It was an Inspiron 3700 laptop I purchased in 1998 or 1999.
It blue-screened in 98 and 2000 alot because of a driver, but upgrading to XP and its version of the driver fixed the problem.
In any case, I had 2 hardware problems during its warrantee. 1) The motherboard died. It would no longer charge or run off the battery even though the battry was half full. It was (supposedly) a faulty motherboard. It went back-and-forth in just a few days. 2) Bad CD Rom. They sent a replacement next-day-air along with a package to send the old one back.
While those 2 problems were a bit excessive, I was pleasantly surprised how quickly everything got rectified. They used overnight air for both problems (back and forth) and maybe took a day to replace the parts.
Meanwhile, my brother bought a Gateway from one of those Gateway country stores a few years later. When he needed a part replaced during the warantee it took even longer than the Dell. I found that amusing.
In any case, with the exception of my PowerBook, all of my other PCs have been homebrewed. So I have no idea what their support is like now.
Unless you want to look at an iBook. $999 USD for a 12", $1,299 USD for a 14". Both perform quite decently. Probably perform better than a Dell Celeron, but I don't know (or care) as I don't go "budget" for my equipment. My work requires I have something more substantial.
But feel free to get whatever machine you want. My post was only that people laughing at how expensive Apple's notebooks are price are pretty clueless.
That's what I can't get some people to understand. Particularly with laptops.
I know people that brag about the $500 USD laptop they picked up on clearance/sale in BestBuy after some rebates. They say "tell me how Apple can justify such high prices!?!? Look how cheap this thing was."
Meanwhile, their cheap plastic laptop is already crashing from poor hardware and the case is cracking.
Hmm, why indeed.
Apple's do have a premium, I won't argue with that. You can get a similarly specced out Dell for less than an Apple but it's not a HUGE difference. But again, that's only if you're doing a true comparison. That Intel Celeron notebook is not a comparison with a Duo.
HA! My old highschool beats your highschool.
My freshmen year, they bought a Pentium 90 for each classroom (top-of-the-line for the time, or VERY close to it). By the time I graduated, only 3 teachers used them (not 3 of my teachers, 3 teachers total).
My freshmen year, they wired the entire building for ethernet. By the time I graduated, only the computer rooms were wired, and only locally through their own switches) (ie, not to the building's ethernet).
My favorite was a couple of times they'd upgrade the security in the computer rooms (where only programming was used). And, you guessed it, we couldn't compile any of our programs because of it. Each time was for a while.
The list goes on. But I have to admit, putting in wireless in your situtation is stupid.
Don't get me wrong. The Dreamcast look beautiful. I still play some games on it today: Crazy Taxi, Soul Calibur, Sonic, etc. And I maintain it still looks better than the PS2.
However, it's falls slightly behind XBox and GameCube as far as graphics go. It's not way behind, but still not up to their looks/performance.
And the 360? Sorry to break it to you, but no. I will never buy a 360 but even I have to admit the 360 has superior graphics.
It's a shame it died. I still love that system.
I installed an XP SP2 CD perfectly fine on my A8N3-SLI motherboard. And yes, the hard drive was a SATA hard drive.
I don't sign my cards either. 4 times out of 5 the cashier won't bother checking, or will check and not care.
However, whenever I go to BestBuy they ask for my drivers license and compare my face to the photo. I guess the managers at the 2 stores near me are strict about that sort of thing.
When I worked as a cashier I didn't care if it was signed or not. I never bother checking unless my boss was hovering around the front.
I have "alt-itits" As in I keep making new characters... constantly. Each time I'd get to like lvl 14 I'd create another one.
My 2 oldest characters though i liked the most and played them into the mid 20's before buying influence. Most of it was for changing their look and such and to give me an ample supply for when I (soon) got the special effects.
I played them until their mid-30's (all-the-while creating alts) until I finally decided to kick the habit.
In CoH:
-
there is no gold farming, just rewards for missions or helping NPCs. Or by selling enhancements
-
there are no "drops" in the normal sense. gold/influence and enhancements are automatically distributed to people in the group by the server, so you can't really steal.
The main methods of hoarding gold/influence in CoH is by herding large amount of mobs, or going on Task Forces (usually 4-6 hour quests that can't be "paused").If you have an upper level character, the gold/influence pours in like rain in the Amazon, unfortunately enhancements cost a lot too. So if you can get a character up there you can gain a lot of influence quickly and sell it. The lower and mid level characters have a hard time getting it, so them buying it isn't unheard of.
The last method is costume contests, where upper level characters/supergroups have a costume contest and give the top x contestants some of their ungodly amounts of money. It sounds lame, but if you have some time to kill and have a good costume it's worth a shot (and 10 minutes of your life).
I have to agree.
I bought "gold" for City of Heroes twice, both times spending like 20 or 30 USD. This was while I was in my fullblown addiction phase. I've since kicked the habit entirely.
Anyway, my reasons were mostly to correct pas mistakes. I would normally play characters I'd created since the game came out a while ago, and eventually wanted to fix a bunch of my newbie mistakes. Ie, designing a costume that didnt suck nd re-outfitting him with the correct enhancements.
Looking back at it, I can't believe how stupid it was. It wasn't a lot of money and did make things a little easier/nicer for a while. But it was stupid.
As for cheating... there's not a whole lot to get in CoH. I mean, if someone from WoW used bought gold to buy a rare mount or something I could sort of see it as cheating. But in CoH, where you're limited to costumes and enhancements, there's not much benefit.
Not really.
They're more or less saying "Don't worry, we're not going to be dicks and try to stop you from putting Windows on these machines. However we won't support the configuration so we won't help out by releasing a hack for it. But if you can get it going, then good for you."
Frankly, it's smart. If they did support windows out of the box and installing it was easy, then they might get into some trouble by not letting OS X go onto our machines. Somone like MS could then start a big stink, perhaps legal, forcing them to release OS X on all x86 hardware which is something they don't want.
PS
I'm not a Mac fanboy. I split my computer time at home between a Powerbook and a homebuilt AMD 64 X2 machine. I just don't think they were being dicks and saying "We have decided to LET you install Windows on the machine, but only for now... mua hahahahaha..."
I'm sure Intel would respond in similalr fassion. But the geek-public public wouldn't mind as much, heck some would probably be cheering them on. If a school bully picks fights with kids on a daily basis by kicking them in the nuts, how would you feel if kid #147 kicks hit in the nuts first?
Intel has been throwing its weight around for years now to ensure its dominance. The Dell debacle comes to mind. This is just another example.
Personally I'm dissapointed with Skype more than I'm annoyed at Intel. Though if this was AMD then I'd have mixed feelings on the issue: dissapointed yet chuckling.
Actually, the networks probably want you to buy the show individually if you want it. Comcast OnDemand already has CBS's pay-per-episode service. They also have the Premium Channels (HBO,Max,etc) with their shows and movies, but since you pay for the channel you (currently) get their shows for free.
Also, don't forget iTunes.
Face it, they want you to pay if you miss the show.
I thought the point of that episode was they were taking corpses and selling the body parts and tissue to research firms, not to hospitals. Like a biotech looking at arthritis could use a semi-fresh hand+fingers, or some similar thing.
From my understanding, tissue can't be reimplanted after a few hours past death no matter how well preserved/iced. And some of those parts were around for weeks.