I don't see how there could even possibly be a correlation between playing games and being successful. This is especially true in certain fields, particularly high technology fields, where many of us keep up with the latest and greatest of technology, which often happens to include games.
I may agree that the hardest of the hardcore gamers (by that, I mean those who really don't do anything other than play games) will not fare as well as others, but I don't think you can honestly pinpoint gaming as the cause of this. There's always been people who will turn into total slackers and do nothing productive; this is just the latest version of it. Besides, I would have to wonder what your definition of gamers is. I have all the latest console systems, plus two reasonably competent computers, but I definitely wouldn't say that my gaming eats into my classtime (in fact, my coursework tends to remove all spare time from being able to be used for gaming). Most of my friends around the university seem to agree with that, even though we would spend hours together playing halo through the residence halls.
That reminds me, actually, of something somewhat unrelated to the parent post but that I think is interesting for the article. I work in one of the residence halls as a resident assistant working with freshmen students. One of my universities big goals is to promote a community among the students to make them get to know each other. The absolute best thing I did with my floor was to open my door to the gamers and get a few xboxes networked together playing halo. Guys who started out the year never opening their doors except to go to class suddenly were joining with the rest of the floor, and later the rest of the building, in playing games. I thought for a while that I was never going to see these guys doing anything else, but the next thing I knew, even the "geekiest" of the guys on my floor were out socializing with the rest of the building in non-gaming places. At least for college students, I personally think games like this are one of the best ways to bring everyone together because practically anyone can pick up a game controller these days and at least play, even if they aren't particularly good at it. I also find that most of the other people around don't really care if they're particularly good at it, so they encouraged everyone to join in. It may have hurt the gpa of one or two of them, but I really think the ones who did poorly would have done poorly anyway, considering their other activities (it's amazing how many college students think they can do well spending all night every night drinking and partying, but anyway).
Each increase of 3 dB is doubling in intensity, but the human ear doesn't hear intensity linearly, so it takes about 10 dB for an apparent doubling of loudness. That means the G5s are half as loud to a person's ear. This is part of the trouble with measuring volumes, especially when you consider the Fletcher-Munson (I think that's the right spelling...phonetically it's right anyway) curves for our hearing's frequency response, in which midrange sounds are heard as louder than extreme highs or extreme lows. So no more Physics 101 after all.....
If a fan fails, it's not necessarily going to kill the computer. Considering Apple says they used 9 fans to reduce noise, something tells me that the failure of a fan will not be a catastrophic failure in terms of the entire system. If the OS is controlling the speed of the fans, then the OS should be able to be written to either limit speeds or shut down the system upon the failure of a fan, so it shouldn't be a real issue. I really don't see why so many people are all hung up on the fact that it uses 9 fans..that's not too many more than my PC desktop uses if you count all of 'em.
I'm glad to see that someone else kept the old 8088 box lying around. Granted, I haven't fired it up in so long, I have no clue whether or not it workes, but it's still sitting there. An old Zenith Datasystems, with something like a 9 inch green monochrome monitor. Ahh, those were the days...
And I believe it -didn't- make it into Office X for the Mac, which even Microsoft made fun of on their website. They had a site up talking about how stupid the paperclip was and how it wouldn't be found in any future Office for Mac releases.
So, I for one like the brushed metal look. I know not everyone likes it, but I think it's kinda cool looking and still fits the general theme of OS X pretty well. Then again, I really don't have a problem with the mixture of brushed metal and pinstripe. I suppose I just don't notice it as much as some people do.
How many people are running nVidia on a non x86 or PowerPC architecture? Do they even make it for other architectures? I don't mean this to sound like a flame; I'm seriously curious because I didn't realize it was even an issue.
Don't judge a book (game, movie, etc) by it's cover. Sure, most games make it pretty well known on the cover what the content is, but there's a lot of really basic looking covers out there, and you really don't know what it is about until you play it. Besides, this is just like movie ratings, which we've had in place now for years without much of a problem. (I know, most filmmakers refuse to make NC-17 movies for fear that they will not be sold, but the fact that they can try to make them says to me that the ratings aren't causing that much of a problem)
The ESRB is perfectly beneficial for people who want to think for themselves, especially people like parents. There's nothing in the ESRB ratings that prevent games from being made; it's just a way to restrict access to those who really shouldn't be playing them in the first place and to let parents know what their kids are doing. Movies have been doing this for years, yet I've seen plenty of movies that push the limits of taste in their pursuit for freedom of expression
It's not like the ESRB is limiting the games that can be published; they're just trying to tell parents and retailers what the content of the game is to prevent kids from playing who shouldn't be exposed to the games. Besides that, if a parent, who should know their children well enough to be able to tell whether they're mature enough to play, can decide to buy the game for the kids, but the ratings in theory should prevent the kids from buying the games without their parents knowing about it. This -is- a good thing, because it allows a method for the industry to show that they are not all about warping kids and making them shoot everyone in sight with a shotgun.
If these ratings were used properly, it could end the tireless screams of video games making kids violent. All they really have to do is to restrict access to kids and educate parents on the fact that the ratings are out there, and bingo, most of the problem is solved. Granted, this is assuming that the parents realize that the ratings are on there and do something about it, which is probably pretty rare, but still.
At least Apple's -making- money right now. That's better than a lot of companies can say these days. I'm sure they could be making more, but the fact that they aren't losing money says a fair amount...
I would be thrilled to see an across the board middle-click copy and paste function in OS X. Perhaps with Panther including X11 out of the box Apple will think of that. Wishful thinking?
I've managed to get X11 apps to copy and paste decently between normal OS X apps and other X11 apps, but I'm afraid that I can't get it working with my Matlab plots. Anybody know how to do it? I admit that I haven't tried for very long (I was in the middle of a project and didn't really have time to play with it forever), but it would be really handy for me! I'll give it another shot using your suggestions above, but I'm not sure it will works with the plots easily because I can't figure out how to highlight them...
Re:This is not my beautiful (first?) post!
on
Safari 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Oh yeah, nice Talking Heads reference! (I assume you meant to make a talking heads reference with that title, anyway...)
"How did I get here?"
Re:This is not my beautiful (first?) post!
on
Safari 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Yeah, the trouble with so many mac stories coming out so quickly during the keynote is that the discussions between all of them ended up sounding much the same. Oh well, I'd rather that than have the keynote turn out to be a flop.
As for Safari, I've been impressed with it as a whole. I can't say it's a huge difference for me over Camino, but it's really nice to have a choice of several native Aqua web browsers to choose from. I actually kinda like the metal look to the new Apple programs, although it would be nice if they'd all settle on one appearance...
The mere fact that X11 on OSX is still using a separate clipboard is enough to keep me from wanting to use it. I find it really annoying when I have to struggle to copy and paste between my word processor and the rest of the apps in my system. There is one thing I will say in it's defense, however. It makes it really handy for me as an engineering student because currently Matlab only runs on X11, so I can use it to integrate my plots and such into my reports. Otherwise, I'll stick with commercial office suites until oo.o goes aqua.
Interesting. I respond saying that you couldn't get a quad opteron for $2000 with the features available on a mac. A true statement, I do believe. And I get a response referring to me as a mac zealot. Interesting.
Buddy, I'm as big an AMD fan as you seem to be. I'd love to see that quad opteron for $2000 work out. Nothing in my post said that Apple would be able to get a quad G5 out for that price. I just find it really irritating that every time a mac article is posted on/. everyone feels the need to point out these wonderful things that they could allegedly get for the same price. Did my post say anything about macs being inexpensive? Does -anyone- say macs are inexpensive? Certainly not when we're talking about the powermacs. Furthermore, what I'm talking about has nothing to do with a quad G5. Maybe you should reread the post. You tell me to start looking at reality, but that's pretty much exactly what I said to you.
I'll spare you the patronizing, "I'm smarter than you" type closing.
Software can always be ported to meet the demand. I would be pretty scared right now if I were sun, honestly. If people realize that an apple could be used for the same sorts of purposes as those extremely expensive sun boxes, they may just be tempted to switch. Does that mean it's guaranteed to happen? definitely not, but the mere fact that it's getting more feasable should be enough to at least freak out sun.
Yeah, ok, you show me a $2000 quad opteron with that kind of memory right now. You'd be pushing a thousand just for the processors on that sucker, never mind the motherboard, ram, and all the other expensive goodies that are on the mac...
I think this afternoon was the first time I've seen/. servers take a beating as badly as they did. All things considered, I think Apple's servers did pretty well. Even right after the announcement, I was able to get at least the text part of the Apple store page. That says a lot, considering how huge the announcement was...
Bear in mind that these are Powermacs, which are considered the high end professional league of the apple lineup. They still have iMacs and eMacs to cover the lower end. Considering all that has gone into these machines, it makes sense to me.
I've been listening to this "Indy Pop Rocks" station on iTunes radio lately for some good stuff. Discovered a band that's been spending by far the most time on my turntable lately (yes, a turntable, and not for DJ use!). I'm also fortunate enough to go to a university with a very strong college radio station that isn't afraid of playing new and offbeat stuff, so I get to hear good new music from a couple places.
My latest thing, actually, is to buy mostly vinyl from independent labels. I figure this way I'm killing two birds with one stone: helping keep a "dead" (but superior sounding) format alive, and helping keep the indies in business.
There's still plenty of good new music being made these days; it's just that most of it never seems to wind up being popular and getting played over and over on the radio. Sure, it's not nearly as easy to find this music, but it really does exist out there.
Another thing that gets to me about people wanting less eye candy is that I notice that after using a system that's as pretty as OS X to use is that other systems seem somehow inferior to it. It's not just with Aqua that I get this, either. I know that under the hood, Windows XP and Windows 2000 are very similar, but yet after using XP for a few months now, Win2k feels somehow worse, even if only for the differences in the amount of eye candy provided. The way I see it, we have plenty of processor power available these days to make a pretty, yet functional UI with lots of frilly animations and such, so why not use it? If I'm ever needing to do a job that requires every last ounce of power my system can eek out, most of these frilly extras can be turned off anyway, so it shouldn't really matter.
I, for one, am a huge fan of the graphical frilliness of OS X. That's the main reason I switched to a Mac when I wanted to buy a laptop. And I'm not even an art person (electrical engineering, instead).
I find it rather sad just how true that statement is. I have this sneaking suspicion that the OS X of today is the future of many operating systems, not just Windows. Oh well, I suppose that's a good thing, since at least it will hopefully drive development forward.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see how there could even possibly be a correlation between playing games and being successful. This is especially true in certain fields, particularly high technology fields, where many of us keep up with the latest and greatest of technology, which often happens to include games.
I may agree that the hardest of the hardcore gamers (by that, I mean those who really don't do anything other than play games) will not fare as well as others, but I don't think you can honestly pinpoint gaming as the cause of this. There's always been people who will turn into total slackers and do nothing productive; this is just the latest version of it. Besides, I would have to wonder what your definition of gamers is. I have all the latest console systems, plus two reasonably competent computers, but I definitely wouldn't say that my gaming eats into my classtime (in fact, my coursework tends to remove all spare time from being able to be used for gaming). Most of my friends around the university seem to agree with that, even though we would spend hours together playing halo through the residence halls.
That reminds me, actually, of something somewhat unrelated to the parent post but that I think is interesting for the article. I work in one of the residence halls as a resident assistant working with freshmen students. One of my universities big goals is to promote a community among the students to make them get to know each other. The absolute best thing I did with my floor was to open my door to the gamers and get a few xboxes networked together playing halo. Guys who started out the year never opening their doors except to go to class suddenly were joining with the rest of the floor, and later the rest of the building, in playing games. I thought for a while that I was never going to see these guys doing anything else, but the next thing I knew, even the "geekiest" of the guys on my floor were out socializing with the rest of the building in non-gaming places. At least for college students, I personally think games like this are one of the best ways to bring everyone together because practically anyone can pick up a game controller these days and at least play, even if they aren't particularly good at it. I also find that most of the other people around don't really care if they're particularly good at it, so they encouraged everyone to join in. It may have hurt the gpa of one or two of them, but I really think the ones who did poorly would have done poorly anyway, considering their other activities (it's amazing how many college students think they can do well spending all night every night drinking and partying, but anyway).
Each increase of 3 dB is doubling in intensity, but the human ear doesn't hear intensity linearly, so it takes about 10 dB for an apparent doubling of loudness. That means the G5s are half as loud to a person's ear. This is part of the trouble with measuring volumes, especially when you consider the Fletcher-Munson (I think that's the right spelling...phonetically it's right anyway) curves for our hearing's frequency response, in which midrange sounds are heard as louder than extreme highs or extreme lows. So no more Physics 101 after all.....
If a fan fails, it's not necessarily going to kill the computer. Considering Apple says they used 9 fans to reduce noise, something tells me that the failure of a fan will not be a catastrophic failure in terms of the entire system. If the OS is controlling the speed of the fans, then the OS should be able to be written to either limit speeds or shut down the system upon the failure of a fan, so it shouldn't be a real issue. I really don't see why so many people are all hung up on the fact that it uses 9 fans..that's not too many more than my PC desktop uses if you count all of 'em.
I'm glad to see that someone else kept the old 8088 box lying around. Granted, I haven't fired it up in so long, I have no clue whether or not it workes, but it's still sitting there. An old Zenith Datasystems, with something like a 9 inch green monochrome monitor. Ahh, those were the days...
Yeah, I served my time on a green monitor. It was fine for dos, but for a kid who wanted to play some games, it was a real pain..
And I believe it -didn't- make it into Office X for the Mac, which even Microsoft made fun of on their website. They had a site up talking about how stupid the paperclip was and how it wouldn't be found in any future Office for Mac releases.
So, I for one like the brushed metal look. I know not everyone likes it, but I think it's kinda cool looking and still fits the general theme of OS X pretty well. Then again, I really don't have a problem with the mixture of brushed metal and pinstripe. I suppose I just don't notice it as much as some people do.
How many people are running nVidia on a non x86 or PowerPC architecture? Do they even make it for other architectures? I don't mean this to sound like a flame; I'm seriously curious because I didn't realize it was even an issue.
Don't judge a book (game, movie, etc) by it's cover. Sure, most games make it pretty well known on the cover what the content is, but there's a lot of really basic looking covers out there, and you really don't know what it is about until you play it. Besides, this is just like movie ratings, which we've had in place now for years without much of a problem. (I know, most filmmakers refuse to make NC-17 movies for fear that they will not be sold, but the fact that they can try to make them says to me that the ratings aren't causing that much of a problem)
The ESRB is perfectly beneficial for people who want to think for themselves, especially people like parents. There's nothing in the ESRB ratings that prevent games from being made; it's just a way to restrict access to those who really shouldn't be playing them in the first place and to let parents know what their kids are doing. Movies have been doing this for years, yet I've seen plenty of movies that push the limits of taste in their pursuit for freedom of expression
It's not like the ESRB is limiting the games that can be published; they're just trying to tell parents and retailers what the content of the game is to prevent kids from playing who shouldn't be exposed to the games. Besides that, if a parent, who should know their children well enough to be able to tell whether they're mature enough to play, can decide to buy the game for the kids, but the ratings in theory should prevent the kids from buying the games without their parents knowing about it. This -is- a good thing, because it allows a method for the industry to show that they are not all about warping kids and making them shoot everyone in sight with a shotgun.
If these ratings were used properly, it could end the tireless screams of video games making kids violent. All they really have to do is to restrict access to kids and educate parents on the fact that the ratings are out there, and bingo, most of the problem is solved. Granted, this is assuming that the parents realize that the ratings are on there and do something about it, which is probably pretty rare, but still.
At least Apple's -making- money right now. That's better than a lot of companies can say these days. I'm sure they could be making more, but the fact that they aren't losing money says a fair amount...
I would be thrilled to see an across the board middle-click copy and paste function in OS X. Perhaps with Panther including X11 out of the box Apple will think of that. Wishful thinking?
I've managed to get X11 apps to copy and paste decently between normal OS X apps and other X11 apps, but I'm afraid that I can't get it working with my Matlab plots. Anybody know how to do it? I admit that I haven't tried for very long (I was in the middle of a project and didn't really have time to play with it forever), but it would be really handy for me! I'll give it another shot using your suggestions above, but I'm not sure it will works with the plots easily because I can't figure out how to highlight them...
Oh yeah, nice Talking Heads reference! (I assume you meant to make a talking heads reference with that title, anyway...)
"How did I get here?"
Yeah, the trouble with so many mac stories coming out so quickly during the keynote is that the discussions between all of them ended up sounding much the same. Oh well, I'd rather that than have the keynote turn out to be a flop.
As for Safari, I've been impressed with it as a whole. I can't say it's a huge difference for me over Camino, but it's really nice to have a choice of several native Aqua web browsers to choose from. I actually kinda like the metal look to the new Apple programs, although it would be nice if they'd all settle on one appearance...
The mere fact that X11 on OSX is still using a separate clipboard is enough to keep me from wanting to use it. I find it really annoying when I have to struggle to copy and paste between my word processor and the rest of the apps in my system. There is one thing I will say in it's defense, however. It makes it really handy for me as an engineering student because currently Matlab only runs on X11, so I can use it to integrate my plots and such into my reports. Otherwise, I'll stick with commercial office suites until oo.o goes aqua.
Interesting. I respond saying that you couldn't get a quad opteron for $2000 with the features available on a mac. A true statement, I do believe. And I get a response referring to me as a mac zealot. Interesting.
/. everyone feels the need to point out these wonderful things that they could allegedly get for the same price. Did my post say anything about macs being inexpensive? Does -anyone- say macs are inexpensive? Certainly not when we're talking about the powermacs. Furthermore, what I'm talking about has nothing to do with a quad G5. Maybe you should reread the post. You tell me to start looking at reality, but that's pretty much exactly what I said to you.
Buddy, I'm as big an AMD fan as you seem to be. I'd love to see that quad opteron for $2000 work out. Nothing in my post said that Apple would be able to get a quad G5 out for that price. I just find it really irritating that every time a mac article is posted on
I'll spare you the patronizing, "I'm smarter than you" type closing.
Software can always be ported to meet the demand. I would be pretty scared right now if I were sun, honestly. If people realize that an apple could be used for the same sorts of purposes as those extremely expensive sun boxes, they may just be tempted to switch. Does that mean it's guaranteed to happen? definitely not, but the mere fact that it's getting more feasable should be enough to at least freak out sun.
Yeah, ok, you show me a $2000 quad opteron with that kind of memory right now. You'd be pushing a thousand just for the processors on that sucker, never mind the motherboard, ram, and all the other expensive goodies that are on the mac...
I think this afternoon was the first time I've seen /. servers take a beating as badly as they did. All things considered, I think Apple's servers did pretty well. Even right after the announcement, I was able to get at least the text part of the Apple store page. That says a lot, considering how huge the announcement was...
Bear in mind that these are Powermacs, which are considered the high end professional league of the apple lineup. They still have iMacs and eMacs to cover the lower end. Considering all that has gone into these machines, it makes sense to me.
I've been listening to this "Indy Pop Rocks" station on iTunes radio lately for some good stuff. Discovered a band that's been spending by far the most time on my turntable lately (yes, a turntable, and not for DJ use!). I'm also fortunate enough to go to a university with a very strong college radio station that isn't afraid of playing new and offbeat stuff, so I get to hear good new music from a couple places.
My latest thing, actually, is to buy mostly vinyl from independent labels. I figure this way I'm killing two birds with one stone: helping keep a "dead" (but superior sounding) format alive, and helping keep the indies in business.
There's still plenty of good new music being made these days; it's just that most of it never seems to wind up being popular and getting played over and over on the radio. Sure, it's not nearly as easy to find this music, but it really does exist out there.
Another thing that gets to me about people wanting less eye candy is that I notice that after using a system that's as pretty as OS X to use is that other systems seem somehow inferior to it. It's not just with Aqua that I get this, either. I know that under the hood, Windows XP and Windows 2000 are very similar, but yet after using XP for a few months now, Win2k feels somehow worse, even if only for the differences in the amount of eye candy provided. The way I see it, we have plenty of processor power available these days to make a pretty, yet functional UI with lots of frilly animations and such, so why not use it? If I'm ever needing to do a job that requires every last ounce of power my system can eek out, most of these frilly extras can be turned off anyway, so it shouldn't really matter.
I, for one, am a huge fan of the graphical frilliness of OS X. That's the main reason I switched to a Mac when I wanted to buy a laptop. And I'm not even an art person (electrical engineering, instead).
I find it rather sad just how true that statement is. I have this sneaking suspicion that the OS X of today is the future of many operating systems, not just Windows. Oh well, I suppose that's a good thing, since at least it will hopefully drive development forward.