Speaking as someone makes a living by understanding and interpreting precise meanings in words and images, I must inform you that you missed the boat with those commercials.
You could make a convincing argument that commercials were in some cases insulting to the users. Even though I don't agree with it in most cases, I'll admit that that's a defensible interpretation. However, I don't see how you could take those commercial as an insult to any computer user. Every ad starts like this:
Mac: "Hi. I'm a Mac." PC: "And I'm a PC."
They are not computer users, but anthropomorphizations of computers - basically, what those machines would look like if they turned into a human beings. PC is bookish, formal, and slightly high maintenance. Mac is an easygoing, modest person, but who nonetheless has the smugness around the edges that is often unavoidable in a true genius.
Basically, as the typical PC user in the audience, you're engaged in a conversation with two people - someone you barely know, and someone you both know pretty well. In this kind of situation most of the time you naturally focus on something you have in common (PC) and start to banter about their foibles and shortcomings. They're banking on the fact that most people have a love/hate relationship with their PCs - that while these people like them, they get viruses, they're needlessly complicated to put together, they have compatibility problems with some digital cameras, etc.
The remainder of the audience is people who hate PCs (who are either Mac users already, Unix users or luddites) and people who love. Among these are informed users who've used Macs and have good reasons to not use them. Then there are those who love them so blindly that they cannot see their problems, and among these are those who have spent so much money on a purchase they're unsatisfied with that they are defensive about it and get vicariously insulted whenever anyone points out that it has flaws. Example:
Man buys shoes for incredible amount of money. Man wears shoes for a while and discovers they're slightly too small, but it's too late to take them back. Rather than simply giving up, man sets out to prove that shoes are, in fact, perfect, and ends up blistering his feet horribly in the process. After this, any suggestion that the shoes are, in fact, too small, is met with bitter disagreement and vain argument that they're just the right size and will loosen up in a few weeks.
That describes my guild pretty well. I'd probably describe us as "half-casual." I joined primarily so that my girlfriend could also make the raid times (she works weeknights). We've got 20 people who are there 75% of the time, 20 who are there about 50% of the time, and about 80 who are there off and on.
Rant ensues: The good thing about this system (well, if you're in the top 20) is that DKP confers exaggerated benefits on the 20 people who are really holding the guild together. Basically, high attendance affords not only maximum points, but maximum opportunity to collect loot.
Example: I'm the highest attending warrior. I've spent 80% of my earned points on loot, not counting fringe benefits from being an MT which would probably bring me up to 110%. The average utilization in warriors 2-5 is 70%. 6-10? 50%. And if you look below that (which is basically people who showed up for one night and never returned), only 7 out of 30 have actually received any loot.
Unfair? Well, in the strict definition of fairness, I suppose it is. But the way I look at it, the top players ultimately benefit the more casual ones by trivializing the bosses, and will make loot more accessible by turning a 3-day dungeon into a 4-hour dungeon. By that point, the bottom 80 will be in candyland because the top 20 are already decked out. And since we're constantly recruiting, eventually we'll get a badass-enough group of people that we'll be able to tackle BWL.
As for sex, it doesn't really interfere that much - certainly not as much as the fact that she gets off at 9:00-9:30 every night, exhausted and grumpy. But she's going back to school in the fall, so hopefully things will improve:)
I'd mod a console if only for the ability to install a bigger drive and an alternate dashboard. The killer feature in my mind is without a doubt the ability to switch between different games without fumbling with the physical media. Kids destroy physical media at an astonishing rate, CDs get lost, they're hard to find, and they're a pain to organize.
Yes, I realize this facilitates piracy, and that this is something that many modded console owners do. I don't care. I have a good enough job that I could buy enough old console games to keep my busy for a good while. I'm not going to let weak copy protection and the letter of a EULA stand between me and something I see as a reasonable extension of console functionality, especially on a console which comes with a hard drive.
As for #3, which the author "cannot condone," I'm not eating into their profits by extending the functionality in this manner. I'd still be buying all of the whizbang accessories and games that they use to put themselves in the black. They don't provide a product (so far as I know) that allows the user to load a game which they own without the CD, so I'm not eating into their profits as long as I don't violate my own mores and pirate a game.
I'm not asking that they condone mod chips, I'm just asking them to explore the ability to do something that a console with an upgradable hard drive is just BEGGING to do. It's like they're shipping cars with 4 disc brakes and the rear brakes are disconnected, and connecting them is illegal. It's just stupid.
Seriously though, I think you're weighing content too heavily. Most "originality" is pretty much just rehashed ideas from long enough ago that most people have forgotten about the work that inspired them. The entire fantasy genre is pretty much a result of Tolkien, and he drew everything from Germanic, Norse, and Celtic/British folklore. And if you're going to call GW original, well:
Humans: Duh
Dwarves: Check
Elves: Check
Orcs: Check
Dark elves: Check
Chaos: Check (Christian demonology)
What they did was turn the inspiring battles of fantasy into something that could be played out on a table. And then Blizzard took this tabletop game and made it into something you could play on the computer and not, unless you really want to, devote every waking moment of your life to and hundreds upon hundreds of dollars.
Artificial primarily means that it comes from artifice (ingenuity) or art. It doesn't (directly) mean it's fake, it just means it's a consciously created work of humankind rather than nature. I think that in modern times with so many knock-offs of natural goods, such as artificial sweetener, the secondary definition has gained the upper hand.
When you read enough literature from the 16th and 17th centuries you get more familiar with the original, literal meanings of words such as this one. A favorite subject was to compare art to nature, and they'd freely use the word "artificial" to mean that which comes from human arts. This is not to say that the secondary definition is wrong: for example, when in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene a troll creates an artificial woman to replace the girl who left him out of snow, "virgin" wax and some gold wire (and of course wackiness ensues) it is repeatedly underscored that this "False Florimell" is a cheap immitation.
Anyway, you can chose any definition you like. I sort of prefer artificial intelligence to synthetic intelligence or whatever, just because how you regard the word artificial says a lot about you and what you think of human creativity. And I don't like euphamism treadmills, which is effectively what we're talking about here.
Last time I was in an EB Games, I couldn't find any PC Games. If they haven't stopped selling them altogether, they're certainly giving them zero shelf space.
You've got a good point there entertainment center real estate. I hope you don't end up like Jim trying to get more than one console hooked up, though.
If I were making about half what I do now, a PS3 would be about 35% of my monthly income after the tax markup on the console.
Anyway, I think the reason why the situation that Sony is painting itself into might be a problem in terms of overall industry growth is the legacy issue. The PS2 was the most successful console of the previous generation, and a lot of people have dozens, even hundreds of PS2 titles. This is a very significant monetary investment. The PS3, like its predecessor, is designed to be fully backwards-compatible. But the sticky point is that the PS3 has one of the highest inflation-adjusted pricetags in console history.
You might say, "Well, they're not buying a PS3 to play Final Fantasy X-2, they're buying it for the next-gen titles. True. But people don't think that way. They think, "I have a huge investment, and I don't want to just dump that in the garbage," even if they never play any of those titles again. When you try to get people to switch to Apples, for example, they say, "Well, I won't be able to run Mavis Beacon 1.0 on this Mac thing, so I don't want it." When they buy a new PC, they have you load their dirty old DOS6 and Windows 3.1 apps up on it and promptly forget about them. And if the world turned on its head and PCs suddenly became ten times as expensive as Macs, those people would be just as likely to buy no computers at all for a while. Then the industry stagnates because there's a smaller target audience for Mavis Beacon 15, which requires a 256MB dedicated 3d card and DirectX9.
I'm not making an excuse not to download WGA-protected software, because my job requires it. I'm saying their UX is shitty.
Anyway, let's go over to my test machine where I'm downloading DirectX. I click "Continue". I click, "OK" on the warning that lets me know that the Information Bar has popped up. I click the bar, click "Install ActiveX control", then I click "Install" again. Obviously they've upgraded it, because there used to be a lot more clickthroughs involved, and I used to have to reload the page with the download a few times.
It's even worse on Firefox. But I guess I should be glad they even support it.
You shouldn't be making excuses for Microsoft because it's a first-time install.
I would be more scared their tools were bundled exclusively with OneCare. In either case, the next release version of any of those tools will probably include several megabytes of Microsoft Bloat®. Can't wait for Clippy to tell me how to use Process Explorer.
Personally, my only problem with WGA is that it's a weird user experience. I need to click through about twenty times - even on IE - to have my system transmit "Yes, he's using a real version of Windows." It shouldn't be that complicated.
It's true. You can draw just fine under Rosetta, I do it all the time using my Wacom tablet.
The only thing that's pretty slow is moving layers around, applying filters, and blending effects. But that stuff doesn't need to be as real-time as actually drawing.
And as far as creative pros go, if in a given workweek I code some Java, some Lua, some XML, use Emacs and Eclipse, build a few web pages, draw some graphics, make a Flash toon, record some sound, and crank out a dozen pages of documentation, I must be creative, and since I get paid a salary for it, I must be a professional. And there must be others like me out there. If you're gonna come back and say, "No, Brian, you are the only Mac user - nay, the only person - on Earth who can write, draw, play guitar, and code - you are completely unique," it might just be time for me to ask for a raise:)
I was just reading about that, actually. Enabling only 7 of the cores is a great idea from a business perspective - costs are already going to be high enough with the BD-ROM. As well, the marginal benefit of 8 over 7 just isn't that great.
What I was trying to get at with "gimmick" wasn't really numerological at all, it was just an attack on what I see as a sexy, overengineered solution over pratical computing. I don't doubt that multithreaded applications are the wave of the future and that an engineer who is capable of thinking in an arbitrary number of directions at once is going to have a huge leg up in the next twenty years. However, when AMD and Intel are making baby-steps into the field of multiprocessing by only having 4 cores per chip by next year, and IBM's been making a huge amount of fanfare for freakin' ever about their 8-core chip, I start to have doubts about whether the Cell is going to look the same under my TV as it does on paper. I call it a healthy level of caution - some people think I'm a curmudgeon, though.
But put my paranoia aside. Let us assume the Cell ultimately really is an objectively outstanding processor (it very well may be). I think there's no question that writing multithreaded games is harder than writing single-threaded games and that developers aren't used to doing it as a rule yet. Despite how outstanding the Cell is, Sony is dictating the rules of the game to its developers, who'd rather have fast single-thread performance because it's easier and it's what they already do. They'd also like it because it's similar to PCs and it'd make the consoles similar to each other. Widen your market, fatten your profits. Sell them the same game twice. It works.
It's just like Cocoa vs. Carbon on Macs: Objective-C and Cocoa pretty much is a better solution than C++ and Carbon if you're just talking Mac development. But one, it forces developers to learn a different language with foreign syntax and no namespaces, and two, Cocoa isn't an option if you're porting in, and you'll have to rewrite your entire program if you ever decide to port from Cocoa. Apple also merrily does things that break people's programs and cause the old bugs they were exploiting to get by to stop working, forcing you to rewrite your code correctly and adapt to a newer, better hardware platform once every ten years or so. This is why most developers like Microsoft better, because they let you hang around and run your crufty, old-as-the-hills legacy code for ever and ever. Simcity exploited a bug to run in DOS, and Windows 95 detected when Simcity was running and allowed that bug to be exploited so that Simcity could run on Windows 95 with no alterations. That's the strategy that makes you the darling of developers, and even though they've been in the console space longer than MS, Sony has something to learn from them.
I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand that. Please restate your response in the form of the source code to a non-trivial 3d game that takes full advantage of 7 processors, or the words, "I am Tim Sweeney." Thank you.
Your rival Nintendo has given up trying to compete technologically with you in their next console and is turning to gimmicks like the Wii's pointing device.
Brazil and Britain are both up there. In Britain I don't think it's that the women are hotter, but that they're less inhibited. Every British person i've met, male or female, claims that American women play those crazy games defined in "The Rules" - i.e., the ultimate women's guide to never having or enjoying sex - a hundred times more than British women, who are more receptive to open advances.
British women are more likely to be cute because they're less likely to be obese, but I find smoking pretty disgusting. Can't have your cake and eat it too, I suppose. But I think I'd prefer living in a place where people acknowledge that everybody wants to copulate, including women, and that this is not a bad thing. Of course, there are countries that are worse than America. I know a woman from Peru who was educated at a Catholic school.
They seem to have a generalized poverty of data. Their charts seem absurd to the point of being straw men. I mean, come on - I don't think there's anything seriously wrong enough with Linux that WAMP would have a score of 12 transactions/sec, competing with Windows, whereas LAMP would have a performance of 2. My experience with Windows vs. Linux has always been that they are similar in terms of speed from pure processing tasks to 3d games. Sometimes Windows does a little better, sometimes Linux is better. But they're usually in the same ballpark. The numbers are just too neat. It's like they put up a chart saying that Republicans, Germans, Koreans and Canadians have sex once a month, whereas Democrats, Brazilians, and the British have sex five million times per second.
Moreover, the whole rest of the article is morass of poetic circumlocution. My gut feeling as somebody who works with words a lot is that they're trying to obfuscate something with a giant wall of banal text. I don't know exactly what that is, because I don't feel like reading all of it, but if I had to guess I'd say that the real thing to take away from this article is that anybody can set up.NET and a Windows box, but that it requires a little bit of patience and research to make Linux work properly - research that these people were not willing to do.
There'd be a lot less economic waste if people didn't buy major appliances and vehicles every five years or so. I mean, a stove built in the 1920's-1940's like an O'Kieff & Merritt will still work, and work better than many modern stoves. At some point in the recent past corporations figured out that making stuff built to last two hundred years was unprofitable, and started charging the same amount of money for disposable, unrepairable consumer goods. Think a Hybrid is a good deal, and that you're helping the environment? Think again. A ton of pollution was created in the production of that automobile, and that should be weighed against when your last car was made.
The solution to this is to either change the consumer mindset so that people realize that a gas stove that's 80 years old really is better than one you buy today that's built to break down in 5-10 years, or to enforce it via government regulation. It's poppycock to assume that a corporation will Do the Right Thing (unless it's built into their charter or something) - it's hard enough to get them to not break the law. And of course, it's horseshit to think that government officials will do anything unless it helps them get reelected, so our only hope really is grassroots movements. We've just got to get the radical leftist environmentalists to stop trying to get people to wear fake fur, eat only vegetables, and live in polyamorous permaculture commune villages in the middle of nowhere, and focus on things that can bridge the gap to middle America.
Basically, what they're doing is shooting themselves in the foot with good ol' fashioned Sony internal collusion coupled with braindead premises. They are falsely assuming that the success of the PS3 is not in question, and tying its success to Blu-Ray's on that premise.
The PS2's success, in my mind, was a factor of its large library of games, backwards compatibility, earlier launch date and relative cheapness compared to the XBox. The PS3 is more expensive, is delayed indefinitely, and does not exclusively hold the title to backwards compatibility. Given the fact that they put a freakin' 8-way CPU in there, they might have significant difficulty courting developers. I'm not a graphics guy, but you'd need a lot of Japanese hookers to convince me to write for that beast.
So basically, the success of Blu-ray is entirely dependent on the number of brothels Sony owns.
What a thoughtful and insightful post. Clearly IBM does not have production and yield problems, because they are courting three major game console manufacturers with their wonderful, efficient chips.
Oh wait. Of these three, only two of them are actually available. Hrm.
Oh yeah, and I seem to recall something about a shortage of XBox360s. Something about a chip company not making as many chips as they promised. Must've been the wifi card or something.
WAIT, I DO recall a time when a company - think it was IBM - didn't produce enough G5 chips and people were backordering their Power Macs for months! Perhaps there is something to this after all.
What's that? Your XBox360 consumes so much power that the PSU caught fire and burned a hole in your carpet? Guess there is a performance-per-watt issue after all. You know, that really does matter to a lot of people. There are data centers, especially in downtown locations, that can't grow their business any more because the power company won't sell them any more wattage. And if you remove the excess thermal paste, MBPs aren't all that hot.
Ages ago I was totally wrapped up in the old fortran game Empire (eventually released as a PC game), until I'd played it enough to know what to expect. Nothing quite like the first time you're marching your little a into the black unknown only to find the enemy well entrenched, then to gear up your production for an assault. Eventually it was too slow and tedius.
When I started playing Doom 3, I thought, "They've finally done it. id has returned to their former glory." However, as I progressed through the game, though the visuals remained impressive and the baddies remained gross, I could predict with absolute certainty when an imp was going to jump out from behind me. I'd look at a doorway, see a few places where a hidden door could open up, back up through the doorway, and give the imp a mouthfull of buckshot. This started to become agonizing beyond belief and I cheated my way through the last four levels or so.
The other sin that Doom 3 committed was the same one that has been used in survival horror games since Resident Evil: You are in a place where there should be more ammo than you could possibly imagine (America, a military research facility), and there are exactly 9 bullets. Clive Barker's The Undying used this cheap tactic, and I blazed through most of the game with only a haste spell and the Scythe just to spite the developers. Whenever a first person shooter makes you want to not bother and just use a melee weapon, it's just because their monsters are so pathetic they would be trivial if you had sufficient ammunition to kill them all. But that's another topic entirely.
I didn't RTFA, but supreme court rulings can often have very far-reaching implications. For example, the case "Marbury vs Madison" established the tradition of judicial review. In some other legislative systems, all laws are automatically in harmony with the constitution. However, due to that one case and a really ballsy Chief Justice, courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular can essentially say that a law is bogus and strike it from the law. Then there's Brown vs Board of Education, which (after much fighting, ignoring, pain, suffering, and tribulation) paved the way for equal access to education and public services regardless of ethnicity.
If I had to guess, whatever the outcome, a hard battle is still ahead for those opposed to stupid patents - but depending on how it's worded, this could be a turning point.
I was probably one of the first people in the public to own a new Intel iMac (ordered it like a half an hour after it was up on the website, and it was delivered way ahead of schedule), and I've had no problems other than some improper permissions.
Conversely, my PowerBook - which was the second-to-last generation, mind you - has had a few problems here and there. I don't give it much of a beating, but I know that the keys start to act funny when it heats up too much.
My reasoning with electing to be an iMac beta tester^W^Wearly adopter was as follows: The motherboard is essentially a stock intel laptop model. The chasis is identical to the previous iMac revision, meaning that all of those components have a lot of room to breathe and stay pretty cool. The likelihood of the internals doing weird stuff as a function of heat is low, and the screen probably won't break. This is what I regard as an acceptable risk. If you shoved all of those components into a 1" thick aluminum case and integrate an unstable potential energy storage device such as a lithium-ion battery, and then start taking it everywhere with you where it can get hit, kicked around, tenderized, baked, fried and frozen, then things get more complicated. I will admit that the new cord design was ALMOST enough to get me to replace my laptop, however, there were just too many things that could go wrong. Every laptop owner knows this - or should know it.
The only real rough ride I've had has been getting my hands on Intel-native builds. But I use a lot of OSS, and most of it compiled with minimal tweaking. In the case of Emacs, it compiled perfectly with no tweaking whatsoever. Also, in some cases I was able to start a correspondence with developers and get pre-release universal builds of applications.
It sort of depends on your perspective. If I was a programmer with an extant, well-involved userbase, and I didn't have a lot of time or resources for documentation, I'd probably just throw up a wiki and edit it when people had questions. This would work especially well if I weren't highly concerned with the quality and consistency of the docs.
With that last part I'm not saying that unprofessional material is a necessary consequence of a wiki, just that if I had to hand something off to my boss or a printer I'd probably want something without stub articles and with everything well-edited. I suspect, with so many hands involved, that editing it to the point where it was printable would quickly become a full-time job. Also, printed media is better with a beginning, middle, end, a table of contents and an index. I'm not sure how you'd turn the hypertext wiki into something linear like a manual.
I'm saying this as somebody who works with a few different wikis on a daily basis. The ones I use are great. But I'm also saying it as a technical writer, and if I were going to put my name on something and tell my boss with a smile, "This is what you're paying me for," I'd probably hand him a docbook xml file, not a link to an internal company wiki.
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Speaking as someone makes a living by understanding and interpreting precise meanings in words and images, I must inform you that you missed the boat with those commercials.
You could make a convincing argument that commercials were in some cases insulting to the users. Even though I don't agree with it in most cases, I'll admit that that's a defensible interpretation. However, I don't see how you could take those commercial as an insult to any computer user. Every ad starts like this:
Mac: "Hi. I'm a Mac." PC: "And I'm a PC."
They are not computer users, but anthropomorphizations of computers - basically, what those machines would look like if they turned into a human beings. PC is bookish, formal, and slightly high maintenance. Mac is an easygoing, modest person, but who nonetheless has the smugness around the edges that is often unavoidable in a true genius.
Basically, as the typical PC user in the audience, you're engaged in a conversation with two people - someone you barely know, and someone you both know pretty well. In this kind of situation most of the time you naturally focus on something you have in common (PC) and start to banter about their foibles and shortcomings. They're banking on the fact that most people have a love/hate relationship with their PCs - that while these people like them, they get viruses, they're needlessly complicated to put together, they have compatibility problems with some digital cameras, etc.
The remainder of the audience is people who hate PCs (who are either Mac users already, Unix users or luddites) and people who love. Among these are informed users who've used Macs and have good reasons to not use them. Then there are those who love them so blindly that they cannot see their problems, and among these are those who have spent so much money on a purchase they're unsatisfied with that they are defensive about it and get vicariously insulted whenever anyone points out that it has flaws. Example:
Man buys shoes for incredible amount of money. Man wears shoes for a while and discovers they're slightly too small, but it's too late to take them back. Rather than simply giving up, man sets out to prove that shoes are, in fact, perfect, and ends up blistering his feet horribly in the process. After this, any suggestion that the shoes are, in fact, too small, is met with bitter disagreement and vain argument that they're just the right size and will loosen up in a few weeks.
I would wager that you fall into that category.
That describes my guild pretty well. I'd probably describe us as "half-casual." I joined primarily so that my girlfriend could also make the raid times (she works weeknights). We've got 20 people who are there 75% of the time, 20 who are there about 50% of the time, and about 80 who are there off and on.
Rant ensues: The good thing about this system (well, if you're in the top 20) is that DKP confers exaggerated benefits on the 20 people who are really holding the guild together. Basically, high attendance affords not only maximum points, but maximum opportunity to collect loot.
Example: I'm the highest attending warrior. I've spent 80% of my earned points on loot, not counting fringe benefits from being an MT which would probably bring me up to 110%. The average utilization in warriors 2-5 is 70%. 6-10? 50%. And if you look below that (which is basically people who showed up for one night and never returned), only 7 out of 30 have actually received any loot.
Unfair? Well, in the strict definition of fairness, I suppose it is. But the way I look at it, the top players ultimately benefit the more casual ones by trivializing the bosses, and will make loot more accessible by turning a 3-day dungeon into a 4-hour dungeon. By that point, the bottom 80 will be in candyland because the top 20 are already decked out. And since we're constantly recruiting, eventually we'll get a badass-enough group of people that we'll be able to tackle BWL.
As for sex, it doesn't really interfere that much - certainly not as much as the fact that she gets off at 9:00-9:30 every night, exhausted and grumpy. But she's going back to school in the fall, so hopefully things will improve:)
I'd mod a console if only for the ability to install a bigger drive and an alternate dashboard. The killer feature in my mind is without a doubt the ability to switch between different games without fumbling with the physical media. Kids destroy physical media at an astonishing rate, CDs get lost, they're hard to find, and they're a pain to organize.
Yes, I realize this facilitates piracy, and that this is something that many modded console owners do. I don't care. I have a good enough job that I could buy enough old console games to keep my busy for a good while. I'm not going to let weak copy protection and the letter of a EULA stand between me and something I see as a reasonable extension of console functionality, especially on a console which comes with a hard drive.
As for #3, which the author "cannot condone," I'm not eating into their profits by extending the functionality in this manner. I'd still be buying all of the whizbang accessories and games that they use to put themselves in the black. They don't provide a product (so far as I know) that allows the user to load a game which they own without the CD, so I'm not eating into their profits as long as I don't violate my own mores and pirate a game.
I'm not asking that they condone mod chips, I'm just asking them to explore the ability to do something that a console with an upgradable hard drive is just BEGGING to do. It's like they're shipping cars with 4 disc brakes and the rear brakes are disconnected, and connecting them is illegal. It's just stupid.
Not original? Sir, in what other game can I play a big, hairy cow with a hypnotising dance routine?
Seriously though, I think you're weighing content too heavily. Most "originality" is pretty much just rehashed ideas from long enough ago that most people have forgotten about the work that inspired them. The entire fantasy genre is pretty much a result of Tolkien, and he drew everything from Germanic, Norse, and Celtic/British folklore. And if you're going to call GW original, well:
What they did was turn the inspiring battles of fantasy into something that could be played out on a table. And then Blizzard took this tabletop game and made it into something you could play on the computer and not, unless you really want to, devote every waking moment of your life to and hundreds upon hundreds of dollars.
Artificial primarily means that it comes from artifice (ingenuity) or art. It doesn't (directly) mean it's fake, it just means it's a consciously created work of humankind rather than nature. I think that in modern times with so many knock-offs of natural goods, such as artificial sweetener, the secondary definition has gained the upper hand.
Check out wictionary (It's the hive-mind wikipedia, it must be right!)
When you read enough literature from the 16th and 17th centuries you get more familiar with the original, literal meanings of words such as this one. A favorite subject was to compare art to nature, and they'd freely use the word "artificial" to mean that which comes from human arts. This is not to say that the secondary definition is wrong: for example, when in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene a troll creates an artificial woman to replace the girl who left him out of snow, "virgin" wax and some gold wire (and of course wackiness ensues) it is repeatedly underscored that this "False Florimell" is a cheap immitation.
Anyway, you can chose any definition you like. I sort of prefer artificial intelligence to synthetic intelligence or whatever, just because how you regard the word artificial says a lot about you and what you think of human creativity. And I don't like euphamism treadmills, which is effectively what we're talking about here.
Last time I was in an EB Games, I couldn't find any PC Games. If they haven't stopped selling them altogether, they're certainly giving them zero shelf space.
You've got a good point there entertainment center real estate. I hope you don't end up like Jim trying to get more than one console hooked up, though.
If I were making about half what I do now, a PS3 would be about 35% of my monthly income after the tax markup on the console.
Anyway, I think the reason why the situation that Sony is painting itself into might be a problem in terms of overall industry growth is the legacy issue. The PS2 was the most successful console of the previous generation, and a lot of people have dozens, even hundreds of PS2 titles. This is a very significant monetary investment. The PS3, like its predecessor, is designed to be fully backwards-compatible. But the sticky point is that the PS3 has one of the highest inflation-adjusted pricetags in console history.
You might say, "Well, they're not buying a PS3 to play Final Fantasy X-2, they're buying it for the next-gen titles. True. But people don't think that way. They think, "I have a huge investment, and I don't want to just dump that in the garbage," even if they never play any of those titles again. When you try to get people to switch to Apples, for example, they say, "Well, I won't be able to run Mavis Beacon 1.0 on this Mac thing, so I don't want it." When they buy a new PC, they have you load their dirty old DOS6 and Windows 3.1 apps up on it and promptly forget about them. And if the world turned on its head and PCs suddenly became ten times as expensive as Macs, those people would be just as likely to buy no computers at all for a while. Then the industry stagnates because there's a smaller target audience for Mavis Beacon 15, which requires a 256MB dedicated 3d card and DirectX9.
lrn2css, n00b
I'm not making an excuse not to download WGA-protected software, because my job requires it. I'm saying their UX is shitty.
Anyway, let's go over to my test machine where I'm downloading DirectX. I click "Continue". I click, "OK" on the warning that lets me know that the Information Bar has popped up. I click the bar, click "Install ActiveX control", then I click "Install" again. Obviously they've upgraded it, because there used to be a lot more clickthroughs involved, and I used to have to reload the page with the download a few times.
It's even worse on Firefox. But I guess I should be glad they even support it.
You shouldn't be making excuses for Microsoft because it's a first-time install.
I would be more scared their tools were bundled exclusively with OneCare. In either case, the next release version of any of those tools will probably include several megabytes of Microsoft Bloat®. Can't wait for Clippy to tell me how to use Process Explorer.
Personally, my only problem with WGA is that it's a weird user experience. I need to click through about twenty times - even on IE - to have my system transmit "Yes, he's using a real version of Windows." It shouldn't be that complicated.
It's true. You can draw just fine under Rosetta, I do it all the time using my Wacom tablet.
The only thing that's pretty slow is moving layers around, applying filters, and blending effects. But that stuff doesn't need to be as real-time as actually drawing.
And as far as creative pros go, if in a given workweek I code some Java, some Lua, some XML, use Emacs and Eclipse, build a few web pages, draw some graphics, make a Flash toon, record some sound, and crank out a dozen pages of documentation, I must be creative, and since I get paid a salary for it, I must be a professional. And there must be others like me out there. If you're gonna come back and say, "No, Brian, you are the only Mac user - nay, the only person - on Earth who can write, draw, play guitar, and code - you are completely unique," it might just be time for me to ask for a raise :)
I was just reading about that, actually. Enabling only 7 of the cores is a great idea from a business perspective - costs are already going to be high enough with the BD-ROM. As well, the marginal benefit of 8 over 7 just isn't that great.
What I was trying to get at with "gimmick" wasn't really numerological at all, it was just an attack on what I see as a sexy, overengineered solution over pratical computing. I don't doubt that multithreaded applications are the wave of the future and that an engineer who is capable of thinking in an arbitrary number of directions at once is going to have a huge leg up in the next twenty years. However, when AMD and Intel are making baby-steps into the field of multiprocessing by only having 4 cores per chip by next year, and IBM's been making a huge amount of fanfare for freakin' ever about their 8-core chip, I start to have doubts about whether the Cell is going to look the same under my TV as it does on paper. I call it a healthy level of caution - some people think I'm a curmudgeon, though.
But put my paranoia aside. Let us assume the Cell ultimately really is an objectively outstanding processor (it very well may be). I think there's no question that writing multithreaded games is harder than writing single-threaded games and that developers aren't used to doing it as a rule yet. Despite how outstanding the Cell is, Sony is dictating the rules of the game to its developers, who'd rather have fast single-thread performance because it's easier and it's what they already do. They'd also like it because it's similar to PCs and it'd make the consoles similar to each other. Widen your market, fatten your profits. Sell them the same game twice. It works.
It's just like Cocoa vs. Carbon on Macs: Objective-C and Cocoa pretty much is a better solution than C++ and Carbon if you're just talking Mac development. But one, it forces developers to learn a different language with foreign syntax and no namespaces, and two, Cocoa isn't an option if you're porting in, and you'll have to rewrite your entire program if you ever decide to port from Cocoa. Apple also merrily does things that break people's programs and cause the old bugs they were exploiting to get by to stop working, forcing you to rewrite your code correctly and adapt to a newer, better hardware platform once every ten years or so. This is why most developers like Microsoft better, because they let you hang around and run your crufty, old-as-the-hills legacy code for ever and ever. Simcity exploited a bug to run in DOS, and Windows 95 detected when Simcity was running and allowed that bug to be exploited so that Simcity could run on Windows 95 with no alterations. That's the strategy that makes you the darling of developers, and even though they've been in the console space longer than MS, Sony has something to learn from them.
I'm sorry, I didn't quite understand that. Please restate your response in the form of the source code to a non-trivial 3d game that takes full advantage of 7 processors, or the words, "I am Tim Sweeney." Thank you.
What, and a seven-way processor isn't a gimmick?
Brazil and Britain are both up there. In Britain I don't think it's that the women are hotter, but that they're less inhibited. Every British person i've met, male or female, claims that American women play those crazy games defined in "The Rules" - i.e., the ultimate women's guide to never having or enjoying sex - a hundred times more than British women, who are more receptive to open advances.
British women are more likely to be cute because they're less likely to be obese, but I find smoking pretty disgusting. Can't have your cake and eat it too, I suppose. But I think I'd prefer living in a place where people acknowledge that everybody wants to copulate, including women, and that this is not a bad thing. Of course, there are countries that are worse than America. I know a woman from Peru who was educated at a Catholic school.
They seem to have a generalized poverty of data. Their charts seem absurd to the point of being straw men. I mean, come on - I don't think there's anything seriously wrong enough with Linux that WAMP would have a score of 12 transactions/sec, competing with Windows, whereas LAMP would have a performance of 2. My experience with Windows vs. Linux has always been that they are similar in terms of speed from pure processing tasks to 3d games. Sometimes Windows does a little better, sometimes Linux is better. But they're usually in the same ballpark. The numbers are just too neat. It's like they put up a chart saying that Republicans, Germans, Koreans and Canadians have sex once a month, whereas Democrats, Brazilians, and the British have sex five million times per second.
Moreover, the whole rest of the article is morass of poetic circumlocution. My gut feeling as somebody who works with words a lot is that they're trying to obfuscate something with a giant wall of banal text. I don't know exactly what that is, because I don't feel like reading all of it, but if I had to guess I'd say that the real thing to take away from this article is that anybody can set up .NET and a Windows box, but that it requires a little bit of patience and research to make Linux work properly - research that these people were not willing to do.
There'd be a lot less economic waste if people didn't buy major appliances and vehicles every five years or so. I mean, a stove built in the 1920's-1940's like an O'Kieff & Merritt will still work, and work better than many modern stoves. At some point in the recent past corporations figured out that making stuff built to last two hundred years was unprofitable, and started charging the same amount of money for disposable, unrepairable consumer goods. Think a Hybrid is a good deal, and that you're helping the environment? Think again. A ton of pollution was created in the production of that automobile, and that should be weighed against when your last car was made.
The solution to this is to either change the consumer mindset so that people realize that a gas stove that's 80 years old really is better than one you buy today that's built to break down in 5-10 years, or to enforce it via government regulation. It's poppycock to assume that a corporation will Do the Right Thing (unless it's built into their charter or something) - it's hard enough to get them to not break the law. And of course, it's horseshit to think that government officials will do anything unless it helps them get reelected, so our only hope really is grassroots movements. We've just got to get the radical leftist environmentalists to stop trying to get people to wear fake fur, eat only vegetables, and live in polyamorous permaculture commune villages in the middle of nowhere, and focus on things that can bridge the gap to middle America.
Basically, what they're doing is shooting themselves in the foot with good ol' fashioned Sony internal collusion coupled with braindead premises. They are falsely assuming that the success of the PS3 is not in question, and tying its success to Blu-Ray's on that premise.
The PS2's success, in my mind, was a factor of its large library of games, backwards compatibility, earlier launch date and relative cheapness compared to the XBox. The PS3 is more expensive, is delayed indefinitely, and does not exclusively hold the title to backwards compatibility. Given the fact that they put a freakin' 8-way CPU in there, they might have significant difficulty courting developers. I'm not a graphics guy, but you'd need a lot of Japanese hookers to convince me to write for that beast.
So basically, the success of Blu-ray is entirely dependent on the number of brothels Sony owns.
You're Cringley, aren't you? BTW, you forgot to link to your nasty little troll site. Remember, it's:
Just FYI.
What a thoughtful and insightful post. Clearly IBM does not have production and yield problems, because they are courting three major game console manufacturers with their wonderful, efficient chips.
Oh wait. Of these three, only two of them are actually available. Hrm.
Oh yeah, and I seem to recall something about a shortage of XBox360s. Something about a chip company not making as many chips as they promised. Must've been the wifi card or something.
WAIT, I DO recall a time when a company - think it was IBM - didn't produce enough G5 chips and people were backordering their Power Macs for months! Perhaps there is something to this after all.
What's that? Your XBox360 consumes so much power that the PSU caught fire and burned a hole in your carpet? Guess there is a performance-per-watt issue after all. You know, that really does matter to a lot of people. There are data centers, especially in downtown locations, that can't grow their business any more because the power company won't sell them any more wattage. And if you remove the excess thermal paste, MBPs aren't all that hot.
So yeah. Troll somewhere else.
When I started playing Doom 3, I thought, "They've finally done it. id has returned to their former glory." However, as I progressed through the game, though the visuals remained impressive and the baddies remained gross, I could predict with absolute certainty when an imp was going to jump out from behind me. I'd look at a doorway, see a few places where a hidden door could open up, back up through the doorway, and give the imp a mouthfull of buckshot. This started to become agonizing beyond belief and I cheated my way through the last four levels or so.
The other sin that Doom 3 committed was the same one that has been used in survival horror games since Resident Evil: You are in a place where there should be more ammo than you could possibly imagine (America, a military research facility), and there are exactly 9 bullets. Clive Barker's The Undying used this cheap tactic, and I blazed through most of the game with only a haste spell and the Scythe just to spite the developers. Whenever a first person shooter makes you want to not bother and just use a melee weapon, it's just because their monsters are so pathetic they would be trivial if you had sufficient ammunition to kill them all. But that's another topic entirely.
I didn't RTFA, but supreme court rulings can often have very far-reaching implications. For example, the case "Marbury vs Madison" established the tradition of judicial review. In some other legislative systems, all laws are automatically in harmony with the constitution. However, due to that one case and a really ballsy Chief Justice, courts in general and the Supreme Court in particular can essentially say that a law is bogus and strike it from the law. Then there's Brown vs Board of Education, which (after much fighting, ignoring, pain, suffering, and tribulation) paved the way for equal access to education and public services regardless of ethnicity.
If I had to guess, whatever the outcome, a hard battle is still ahead for those opposed to stupid patents - but depending on how it's worded, this could be a turning point.
I was probably one of the first people in the public to own a new Intel iMac (ordered it like a half an hour after it was up on the website, and it was delivered way ahead of schedule), and I've had no problems other than some improper permissions.
Conversely, my PowerBook - which was the second-to-last generation, mind you - has had a few problems here and there. I don't give it much of a beating, but I know that the keys start to act funny when it heats up too much.
My reasoning with electing to be an iMac beta tester^W^Wearly adopter was as follows: The motherboard is essentially a stock intel laptop model. The chasis is identical to the previous iMac revision, meaning that all of those components have a lot of room to breathe and stay pretty cool. The likelihood of the internals doing weird stuff as a function of heat is low, and the screen probably won't break. This is what I regard as an acceptable risk. If you shoved all of those components into a 1" thick aluminum case and integrate an unstable potential energy storage device such as a lithium-ion battery, and then start taking it everywhere with you where it can get hit, kicked around, tenderized, baked, fried and frozen, then things get more complicated. I will admit that the new cord design was ALMOST enough to get me to replace my laptop, however, there were just too many things that could go wrong. Every laptop owner knows this - or should know it.
The only real rough ride I've had has been getting my hands on Intel-native builds. But I use a lot of OSS, and most of it compiled with minimal tweaking. In the case of Emacs, it compiled perfectly with no tweaking whatsoever. Also, in some cases I was able to start a correspondence with developers and get pre-release universal builds of applications.
It sort of depends on your perspective. If I was a programmer with an extant, well-involved userbase, and I didn't have a lot of time or resources for documentation, I'd probably just throw up a wiki and edit it when people had questions. This would work especially well if I weren't highly concerned with the quality and consistency of the docs.
With that last part I'm not saying that unprofessional material is a necessary consequence of a wiki, just that if I had to hand something off to my boss or a printer I'd probably want something without stub articles and with everything well-edited. I suspect, with so many hands involved, that editing it to the point where it was printable would quickly become a full-time job. Also, printed media is better with a beginning, middle, end, a table of contents and an index. I'm not sure how you'd turn the hypertext wiki into something linear like a manual.
I'm saying this as somebody who works with a few different wikis on a daily basis. The ones I use are great. But I'm also saying it as a technical writer, and if I were going to put my name on something and tell my boss with a smile, "This is what you're paying me for," I'd probably hand him a docbook xml file, not a link to an internal company wiki.