Well, if we look at Diablo II, which kept me pretty busy for two years, or Warcraft III, which I played for months, or World of Warcraft, which I've been playing nonstop for the last year, then you have a point (sorry for the Blizzard-bias, they make awesome games). But then again, if you look at the same price point from other publishers, the games just keep getting shorter.
This isn't even talking about half-baked games like Deus Ex 2. Sure, they're a problem. They almost feel like getting jilted by a prostitute. But a quick glance through any online review will reveal whether it's trash or not. This is about id, which has failed to release games with the modifiability of its previous hits. I mean, I could care less about pure multiplayer Quake 2. What made it magic for me was Action Quake. Quake 1? Screw it, gimme TeamFortress. Now, I'm sure that there are mods for them, but I probably would've heard about them by now. It's sort of sad that the only successor to CounterStrike is CounterStrike: Source.
You talk as if Apple becoming marginalized happened by magic. That does IBM and Microsoft an injustice, because there are some very good reasons why the IBM clone became ubiquitous and the Mac became marginalized.
IBM opened its inferior platform so that others could make it better, and made a deal with MS to bundle DOS on every system. DOS became the de facto standard. This put MS in an outstanding position to market Windows, which won because it was cheap and had application support.
Meanwhile, under Sculley's leadership, Apple was making bazillions of different product lines like the Quadra, Centris and Performa, with negligable differences between them. Retail confusion ensues, and since most people bought their computers from big retailers, not small shops, most people end up with PCs.
Even before the PC Clones, they didn't have that big a market share. Certainly not the majority.
Anyway, I don't really think the same thing is going to happen again. IBM and co. won because of a series of smart decisions. The music player vendors only seem capable of stupid, shortsighted decisions. A lot of people already have big collections of music on iTunes. The non-Apple music vendors are fragmented, and they're all encumbered with some kind of mutually incompatible DRM. And it's all HIGHLY political. I mean, Sony pratically told the Japanese people they shouldn't buy iPods for the sake of their country. This doesn't seem to be working, not too surprisingly. Like the trenches in WWI, this is going to make sure that the market doesn't move too much.
The only thing that could potentially hurt iPod sales is the Cell Phone effect - it's hard to get somebody to buy a cell phone when they already have one. Not to mention most cell phones suck. Conversely, Apple seems to be able to churn out cool upgrades at a fairly regular rate. I mean, I just bought my girlfriend a black 5G iPod, and god damnit if I didn't want one myself, even though I have a 60GB one that's not 5 month's old
I think the reason those abilities fall away is because they're not constantly exposed to geometric objects. I recall in a psych class the teacher explaining a certain optical illusion. I forget the illusion, but the point was this: people in western countries see horizontal and vertical straight lines more clearly than diagonal ones. Our visual cortices are hard-wired - yep - to pick up the lines which we see reinforced in our lives. By contrast, the illusion does not work on non-civilized people.
Trust me, the publishing industry, especially the textbook publishing industry, is on the same level as the mob. I've heard that it's even run by the mob. All told, I'd rather owe the Godfather a favor than work for the textbook industry.
So, there's this book called The Riverside Chaucer, which, according to my Chaucer professor, is about the best compilation of Chaucer's works you can get for an undergraduate taking a normal 3 hour per week class. The thing is, it's published in two editions:
The British Edition is lightweight, small, and made of very thin, economical paper. It costs 20 pounds sterling, or about $36.
The American Edition is a coffee table book. It weighs more than 5 lbs, and is 10"x8"x2". Not fun. Oh yeah, and it costs $85.
So, my prof orders copies of the British edition for everybody in the class. Then she checked with the campus bookstore: not in stock. Nobody knows what's going on. Then, she practically goes down there with a broadsword and a hauberk 2 weeks later. Still no books. She demands an explaination. The manager calls the wholesaler, who then says that the publisher has blocked the shipment of the books, and the independent reseller in England can't do shit. English books are only available in England, and it would be breach of contract for them to sell them to Americans.
As a countermeasure, she suggested overnighting them from Amazon.co.uk, which worked just fine.
Ohhhh. I just didn't understand you properly. Maybe you'll get what I mean if you take another look:
Except here in Windowsland the spacebar doesn't consent to a popup, you need a enter key or a mouse click. Not to mention you can change this setting using power tools (or a simple RegEdit [onecomputerguy.com].
The way you worded it makes "this setting" sound like the setting in question is whether the enter key and a mouse click follows links and submits forms. When you're talking about ideas, 'this' is generally 'the thing I just talked about'. Now that I think about, mine is a pretty stupid conclusion, but thinking like that is how I survived upper division English classes:P
And hey, Mr. vi user, is there a good way to auto-indent code in vi? Seriously. I like the fact that you don't have to do ESC-control-shift-5 to do a regex search & replace, but I rely on smart indenting.
I don't really get web-based popups very much either, I was exaggerating for effect. Yeah, it wasn't very clever, but sometimes that's difficult to see when you're writing it.
It's actually more of a problem with things like chat clients, Windows Update, or even Windows Explorer. They are more than happy to take focus away from your current app, say, if a conversation starts, or if you need to shut down your computer, or to ask you if you'd like to overwrite a file if you're copying over a few MB or GB of files in the background.
What OS X does is this: if something needs to get your attention, its icon bounces on the dock until you click it. It's a really good feature and I wish Windows had it too, because I work for a Windows shop and even though most of my real work is done in cygwin, I can't eat the company dog food unless I'm on a Windows box.
The most important part of the security system for your computer lies between the computer and the chair, perhaps yours is in need of an upgrade if this is an issue
Well, I'll forgive that since I'm posting on a Mac topic and you have clearly misconstrued me as a fashionable young Apple fanboy. Seriously, I know why that stereotype exists. Half the time people my PowerBook they talk to me in that condescending kindergarten teacher manner until I open up Emacs and Terminal. Seriously, I posted a detailed report on the performance of World of Warcraft through Rosetta yesterday on the Blizzard Mac forums, along with some tests to confirm that the CPU was being saturated, and I swear if the first person didn't come across exactly like this:
Wow, you have a very nice com-pu-ter there! Did your mommy buy it for you? I think you did a great job. You get a gold star! Did you know that if you turn the sliders on the vid-e-o tab to the left, that it might go faster? Then, when you play your game, you might be able to kill the dragon!
Well, anyway, the point is this: if you assume somebody's a moron and talk in a condescending manner to them, in the end you generally only make an ass out of yourself.
And regarding the user as the most important part of the security model, I can tell you this much: if everybody I knew had a mac, I wouldn't spend nearly as much time fixing their computers.
For one, UI responsiveness and multitasking. I know that if I've got an application soaking up all of 1 processor, I'm not going to cause it to go belly-up by shoving it in the background and surfing the web while some single-threaded app happily churns away on that thread.
<Mac Snobbery>Oh, and that reminds me of the nicest feature of OS X: That pop-ups can't take the focus away from you. I hate hitting spacebar, thinking I'm typing into Notepad, and actually I've agreed to a window that flashed up on my screen for about a half a second and I'm wondering if I just bought viagra.</Mac Snobbery>
So perhaps it's a bit of exaggeration but in the end it isn't hurting anyone.
Right on both counts, and I think these are the reasons:
People who actually will buy a top-of-the-line system because a few extra FLOPS saves them hours and hours of time running photoshop filters are going to see the improvements because by and large, the applications that they use are designed to leverage multiple processors. If they're not, they need to bitch at their vendors, because that's ostensibly why Photoshop costs x-hundred dollars.
People like me, who just want to run World of Warcraft in the foreground and have safari open to look things up on Thottbot as necessary and surf the web during transit, are going to notice the UI responsiveness. Nothing's more annoying than when I can't click on Start for 10 seconds because I'm ripping a CD, or the Java VM is starting up for the first time at the behest of a web application running in the background.
Single-threaded performance is slightly overrated. No task I do, except compilation, gaming, and XSLT transformations, is going to benefit heavily from being twice as fast, even on a single thread. If you stuck a gigabyte of ram into my circa-2001 1GHz P3, set it up next to my office 3.2GHz P4 with HT disabled, and had me take the Pepsi Challenge, I would be hard-pressed to tell the difference in most of the applications I use without getting a stop watch or running Doom 3.
As soon as Fink (a system like Debian's apt for OS X) gets ported to the new architecture, I'll have all the free software I want. So, in essence, I get: good overpriced software (photoshop, etc) + pretty good complimentary software (iLife 06) + World of Warcraft (the other woman) + zero maintainence (no kernel recompiles OR spyware) + free software.
For me, that offsets the cost of the hardware premium. That's not even touching on the fact that your computer is an black box with a separate monitor, and mine has a 20" screen and is mistaken by most people for simply a very nice LCD. To each his own. You've got a super cheap computer that can do a lot of stuff; with free software, I've essentially got a swiss army knife in a really cute package.
But, like all Linux and OS X enthusiasts, I think at the end of the day we can both agree that either choice is better than Windows.
Yeah, it pretty much is all politics. From what I understand, IBM is treating Sony and MS with kid gloves because they know those companies are going to ship millions and millions of units. IDENTICAL units. Apple, on the other hand, is going to ship far fewer units, and they're going to ship faster models every 6 months. Contrast that with Intel. Intel's disappointed in Microsoft's ability to make a next-generation OS for it to showcase its new processors on. And the rumor mill says that Apple is getting big, fat discounts for all of its chips. For the money, IBM's never going to put out anything good enough to tempt Apple again.
On my last few characters, I've been limiting myself to a couple of full runs of SM. Yeah, it has lots of great items, but in the long run, your labors are better spent getting to 60 as fast as possible. It was more fun for my first character, because back then a level 60 was kind of a rare, godlike being. Not true anymore.
I don't care how uber you are: your group's success is directly proportional to your ability to communicate. If somebody needs to redo a debuff or a crowd control, there's nothing that beats shouting into a microphone at the top of your lungs and adding a few cuss words for emphasis.
If everybody grew up on IRC and can type 100 WPM, you're fine. Most people can't. My girlfriend types really well, but she doesn't always notice when somebody's talking to her on the chat window. That's why you have TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. Now, I'm just doing pick-up groups these days, mostly, but the difference between playing with teamspeak and without is night and day. I ran all of Scholomance, 5-man, with only 2 60's. I, the MT, was 58 and had sub-par gear. The difference was that we were using Teamspeak.
That, and the ninjas really, really piss me off. I hardly think all of the non-English speakers who've screwed me out of loot are gold farmers, but just because they screwed me out of an inability to understand, "EVERYBODY PASS, LET'S DISCUSS" as opposed to capitalist greed does not negate the screwing. And I have noticed a correlation: nobody who I could talk to has ever stolen an epic or blue item.
I won't play with anybody who can't speak English, any more than I would work with somebody I couldn't communicate with.
That's pretty much true. What Cancel really means is, "Oops, I pressed the red X by mistake and now I'm going to lose my document." I think a notepad-like application that automatically saves, organizes and names data would be pretty cool. I mean, usually I'm just borrowing some code for the web, or grabbing a cheat sheet because I forgot a particular MySQL statement's syntax. Having to save and name documents is a pain in the ass either way: I loose my data and I have to click the stupid button, or I save it, but god knows I'll never be able to find it because the name I chose at random doesn't make sense.
I was impressed when I went to shut down my iMac last night, and the dialog that came up was something like, "Do you really want to shut down? Your computer will automatically shut down if you do not respond in 1 minute 59 seconds." That accounts for the misclick and the case that I can't be bothered to look at the computer again. I don't know how many times I've tried to shut down my Dell, only to groggily trudge over to the computer, flick on the monitor, and find that it was asking me whether I wanted to save my notepad document, or worse yet, whether I REALLY, TRULY WANTED TO SHUT DOWN.
That reminds me: One thing that should definitely be covered is the 3-way "Save file" dialog that comes up when exiting a program/shutting down, and similar dialogs, that offer "Yes", "No", and "Cancel".
OS X and Gimp generally say, "Save", "Do not save", and "Cancel". Bust out that one the next time you hear somebody talking about Linux usability. Even that isn't perfect. If I had my druthers I'd go with something like, "Save/Don't Save/Back" (with a second warning that comes up if you hit Don't Save), because anybody who's used a back button a browser is going to understand the last one.
I've been writing functional specs for the last six months, and I can assure you, the easiest way to confuse your user is with Yes/No/Cancel. I've even confused myself a few times. I almost set up a dialog that had Abort/Retry/Ignore/Fail as an easter egg.
When Apple retail stores hit the scene, did anyone note that the UI on the electronic signature box matched that of Aqua? Did anyone notice that your receipt font matches the fonts on the box / os x / sales literature etc?
Yeah, and I also noticed that the signiture box sucked donkey balls. It might just be the Apple Store in Emeryville, CA, but I found them almost impossible to sign.
. . . so I can let you know later tonight:). I don't really have any interest in dual-booting per se, but I feel like it's my obligation as a geek.
Got delivered at about 9:00. I only had a half an hour or so to play with it before I drove to work. I'm currently trying to convert my mother, so I set it up at her place so she could play with it today. Thoughts: Just as snappy as the G5's. Much better than my laptop. My only complaint is the mighty mouse - apparently it uses inductance to determine where your finger is, and normally I have my fingers constantly resting on either side. I only played with Safari, Photo Booth, and the MS Word trial, and I opened up system information to make sure it was the right iMac, of course.
And now that I think about it, I guess Word was running on Rosetta. Holy shit! I didn't even notice.
Well, let's look at this like a bean counter would. In a world where Adobe has an absolute monopoly on drawing programs, if the cost of developing the Mac version of CS2 exceeded the revenue generated by those users buying CS2, they would not make a Mac version. Those Mac users would have no choice but to get ugly little Dells, or buy a copy of Windows Vista for a premium.
However, it's a lot more complicated than that. They don't have a monopoly, and if they suddenly dropped support for OS X, then Corel would be the first company to jump in and have a free beta of their entire suite running natively on Intel. The number of users who would switch platforms to keep running Adobe and the number who would switch apps to keep running OS X is unknown. So, potentially, by not shelling out a few extra bucks to get an Intel version up and running, they have not only lost revenue in this quarter, but for the foreseeable future because they won't be able to sell iterations to these people.
Oh, and I had a fun moment with my girlfriend regarding the Macintosh UX the other day. We were playing around with iTunes on her Wintel, and she asked, "How do I rip this CD?" "Drag and drop." "What?" "Click here, to grab the CD, and drop it in your library, up here." *click, click* "Wow." Mac UX > Win UX. That's why most Mac users won't want to dual boot or use VirtualPC.
I just had a profound thought: Steve Jobs released the Intel Macs so early, and with 32-bit processors, to force developers to port now. If he'd waited, then Vista would have ran on them. If they'd put 64-bit chips in them, Windows 64-bit edition would have ran (they both support EFI).
Currently, the room I share with my girlfriend has my old Dell (big, ugly black box), which said girlfriend now uses, the stereo speaker system that came with said dell (less big but still quite big, ugly black box), and a giganimous HP printer/scanner/fax/toaster oven that she got as a job perq because her boss was moving to the East Coast.
My office has two 19" monitors and two desktops. The faster one is a big ugly black Dell, and the slower one is an even bigger, uglier, somehow BLACKER Gateway. I actually wouldn't have the monitors there, except if the left one isn't there, I'm constantly one of my coworkers directly in the face. Regardless of the fact that he's a nice chap, I don't want to look at his mug all day, it's unnerving.
Each of these settings has, at one time or another, my Powerbook in them.
Now, I bought a new 20" Intel iMac (yeah I know the MacBooks are Jenna Jameson-sexy, but this is cheaper, slightly faster, and has a large screen, and I'm an artist sometimes), but let's pretend I bought one of those PowerMacs and a 23" Cinema Display. Not only would I have an AWESOMELY HUGE, ugly aluminum box, I would have a gigantic monitor, a DVI KVM switch, yet another ugly black Dell (or, if I built it myself, a big ugly box with no branding), and enough cords to hide more than a few corpses in.
So, yeah, having a little white thing with two cords coming out the back is kind of a boon to me.
The X1600 actually outperforms the GeForce 6800. The GT leaves it in the dust though.
My two and a half year-old 2.6Hz P4 with 1GB of ram and a Radeon 9800/128MB runs it just fine with all the bells and whistles. And I'm not sure they even had 6800's back then.
I think the premium is worth not having to worry about WMF vulnerabilities. Let's see how your r0x0rz your b0x is after it's been pwn3d by a 17 year-old Romanian hacker. Who cares if thread creation takes an eon on OS X: it'll take you 5 minutes to open FireFox because of all the spam emails flying out of your laptop at lightning speed! All for $500 less!
I mean, how much is your time worth to you? If you're a moderate income professional you're talking (conservatively) $20-25 an hour. I charge about $40 to help people with computers. Let's assume you're contracting tech support to yourself at $40 an hour:
Reinstalling Windows and getting all of your programs up again: 4 hours x 40 = $160
Adware/virus maintainence: 1 hour = $40
Let's assume that you reinstall windows once every year, and that you do one hour of adware maintainence every second month. Granted, you don't have to do a complete system wipe every year, but it's probably a good idea. I guarantee your system will be snappier after you do. Let's also assume that you use this box for about 3 years. One hour every other month of cleaning off bad guys is about what I do for my windows systems, and you can just about double it if you let any non-computer savvy person who thinks they're hot shit because they maxed out their buddy list near your computer.
Two (2) OS reinstalls: $320
18 hours maintainence: $720
A grand total of $1040 wasted for being penny wise and pound foolish. There's TCO for ya, baby.
Granted, this is theoretical money. However, since I do most of my computer work in the evenings, I'd much rather not stay up until 2:00am when I could be sleeping with my fiancée. And I'm not even going to try to consider Linux here. I've really had a lot of fun troubleshooting Linux systems, and I think I've never learned so much about how computers actually work as when I was tooling around with Slackware and Gentoo, but I'm glad I get to work with them on the job now, instead of doing kernel recompiles at til the crack of dawn trying to get the i8x0 integrated sound card to work.
Really, it was designed for consoles first, with the PC version as kind of a lackluster afterthought. As a result, the inventory system is fundamentally horrible and resembles Resident Evil 1. The story is OK, but I think it suffers from the Matrix Re-suckage phenomenon: you already know about aliens, the illuminati, and the Helios AI. The whole game does not show nearly the polish and love that the first one did.
Everything will slowly work itself out. Well you know what, it won't.
Nobody can predict the future. Not peak oil doomers, not/.ers with futurist tendencies. Not even Thomas Malthus. Somebody at the patent office said 100 years ago that almost everything that could be invented already had. I'm not saying any of these people are dumb - quite the opposite, in fact - I'm saying that it's not something the human mind is really good at grasping. Some native culture in Austrailia, I believe, view progression in time like walking backwards. You can see perfectly where you've been, but you have no idea where you're going.
Granted, I respect that you don't want to take the time to post excerpts from the Oduvai Gorge paper to support your statements. That stuff is pretty easy to access via google.
What people generally do instead is use statistical extrapolations and add in personal bias. We all know, or should know, the fact that statistical extrapolations are really shitty ways to go about predicting things. If you don't believe it, I have a few proven systems for making money on everything from the Stock Market to craps that I want to sell you.
As for bias, I don't think it's an accident that the most outspoken Peak Oil Doomer I know is a college student under a significant amount of debt who's so freakin' outdoorsy that he can start a fire in a rainstorm without a drop of accelerant. If the world ended, most people I know would think of him as some kind of a demi-god, and he'd suddenly become sexier than any investment banker ever was. He has the least to lose from the collapse of the current system. Depending on how you view debt, it could be considered a net gain for some who are particularly well-equipped for survival.
Conversely, it's no accident that I, a young man with a fiancée and a great job, think that everything's going to be OK in the end, and there's little you can do to convince me otherwise. However, since I don't own a house and don't have the same level of disposable income as other people, it naturally follows that I view those who are better off than me with disdain and a bit of envy, and think that they should decrease their ecological footprint significantly. When I'm older, independent of who turns out to be right, I'll probably be more conservative because I have more invested in the current system and bleak prospects of starting over, whether that my investment happens to be a family farm or a space colony.
One of my favorite quotes for people blindly believing in the market like you is:
"... they believe that when the price is high enough, God will put more oil into the ground".
No, that's not at all what he's talking about. You're not reacting to his article, you're setting up a straw man of his argument so you can pull out a witty quote that brands all optimists (or really, all those who don't believe in an imminent apocalypse) as crazy religious nuts. I mean, really, doomers have far more in common with Pre-Millenialists than anybody else. And if everybody thought that way, then there really would be no hope for the future.
Cue indignant rant from an attorney/.er who's convinced it's only the corrupt, fallen state of the capitalists in this country which allows lawyers to act against their true nature of liberalism and prevents them from the pursuit of the public good.
Well, while I am no expert on British legal history, I will tell you that Jonathan Swift certainly believed in the statement,
Win or lose, lawyers are the only ones who really win in court.
In Gulliver's Travels book 4, Gulliver sees a Yahoo find a pretty stone. Another Yahoo comes along and tries to take it away from him. Struggle ensues, and it appears to be a stalemate - but then a third Yahoo comes along and runs away with the pretty stone. Gulliver compares it to a legal struggle he had while in Britain and concludes that the third must be a Yahoo lawyer.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that all lawyers are good or all lawyers are slime. But nobody in their right mind would contradict me when I say that a lot of the people who go to law school do so because they really like money.
Given the abject failure of Keynesian economics and the fact that it's being disproven and repudiated at record speeds, it appears that Adam Smith still holds the record for having written the most comprehensive text on the fundamentals of supply and demand.
Alright, jackass, I'll admit that I'm not an economics major. But I didn't undo my belt and start waving my cock around about which school of economics I prescribe to.
Let me tell you this: Comments like yours usually come from investment banker jackasses who are too busy getting pedicures and blowjobs from Southeast-Asian sex workers to actually see how Point of Sale actually operates. I'm not saying that neoclassical supply/demand economics are bad, I'm saying that there's more to it than that, and that's something that only somebody who's sold shit to other people would ever understand that.
I'll give it to you in brief, since you clearly were born with a silver spoon in your mouth and have never worked an honest day in your life: smiling works. I smile at the people at my favorite coffee shop and chat them up. They smile at me and ask me about my fianceé. They get a monopoly on my business and I get my drinks made perfectly. It worked exactly the same when I was the guy hocking lattes two years ago. When I sold fabric (my first job out of college), I displayed conversance and interest in the activities of SCA people, strippers, and goths, as well as a shocking level of memory retention about our inventory. That made sure that if those people were going to buy some fabric, they bought it from our store, and they bought it from me, which made me very, very hard to fire.
Conversely, I won't go to Good Vibrations because the service is utterly indifferent. If you think Apple Store employees are bad, you're in for a surprise. If we were to believe you, all they would have to do is lower the price of their sex toys enough and I'd come flocking to them. Nope. Now I go to Madame S, which charges more, but has lots of cheerful, helpful staff. Likewise, I left the fabric store and started selling lattes for a pay cut and worse hours because the staff was political and dour.
Lines like this usually come from egomaniacs who expect their employers to spend inordinate amounts of time telling them just how valued they are. Really, get a fucking life already. You work for PAY, as in, I agree to give you X amount of dollars for Y amount of work. If you need your ego stroked, calling a phone sex hotline.
Hey, I am an egomaniac, but you, Mr. Pot, are calling me, Mr. Kettle, black. But that's not the point. You go out of your way to launch a personal attack full of hollow rhetoric. However, in the midst of so much slime and vitriol, I am able pick out a kernel of wisdom in that people who need their egos massaged are difficult to work with. I wholeheartedly agree with this, but trust me, it doesn't apply to me. My fat christmas bonus was all the praise I needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, if we look at Diablo II, which kept me pretty busy for two years, or Warcraft III, which I played for months, or World of Warcraft, which I've been playing nonstop for the last year, then you have a point (sorry for the Blizzard-bias, they make awesome games). But then again, if you look at the same price point from other publishers, the games just keep getting shorter.
This isn't even talking about half-baked games like Deus Ex 2. Sure, they're a problem. They almost feel like getting jilted by a prostitute. But a quick glance through any online review will reveal whether it's trash or not. This is about id, which has failed to release games with the modifiability of its previous hits. I mean, I could care less about pure multiplayer Quake 2. What made it magic for me was Action Quake. Quake 1? Screw it, gimme TeamFortress. Now, I'm sure that there are mods for them, but I probably would've heard about them by now. It's sort of sad that the only successor to CounterStrike is CounterStrike: Source.
You talk as if Apple becoming marginalized happened by magic. That does IBM and Microsoft an injustice, because there are some very good reasons why the IBM clone became ubiquitous and the Mac became marginalized.
IBM opened its inferior platform so that others could make it better, and made a deal with MS to bundle DOS on every system. DOS became the de facto standard. This put MS in an outstanding position to market Windows, which won because it was cheap and had application support.
Meanwhile, under Sculley's leadership, Apple was making bazillions of different product lines like the Quadra, Centris and Performa, with negligable differences between them. Retail confusion ensues, and since most people bought their computers from big retailers, not small shops, most people end up with PCs.
Even before the PC Clones, they didn't have that big a market share. Certainly not the majority.
Anyway, I don't really think the same thing is going to happen again. IBM and co. won because of a series of smart decisions. The music player vendors only seem capable of stupid, shortsighted decisions. A lot of people already have big collections of music on iTunes. The non-Apple music vendors are fragmented, and they're all encumbered with some kind of mutually incompatible DRM. And it's all HIGHLY political. I mean, Sony pratically told the Japanese people they shouldn't buy iPods for the sake of their country. This doesn't seem to be working, not too surprisingly. Like the trenches in WWI, this is going to make sure that the market doesn't move too much.
The only thing that could potentially hurt iPod sales is the Cell Phone effect - it's hard to get somebody to buy a cell phone when they already have one. Not to mention most cell phones suck. Conversely, Apple seems to be able to churn out cool upgrades at a fairly regular rate. I mean, I just bought my girlfriend a black 5G iPod, and god damnit if I didn't want one myself, even though I have a 60GB one that's not 5 month's old
I think the reason those abilities fall away is because they're not constantly exposed to geometric objects. I recall in a psych class the teacher explaining a certain optical illusion. I forget the illusion, but the point was this: people in western countries see horizontal and vertical straight lines more clearly than diagonal ones. Our visual cortices are hard-wired - yep - to pick up the lines which we see reinforced in our lives. By contrast, the illusion does not work on non-civilized people.
Trust me, the publishing industry, especially the textbook publishing industry, is on the same level as the mob. I've heard that it's even run by the mob. All told, I'd rather owe the Godfather a favor than work for the textbook industry.
So, there's this book called The Riverside Chaucer, which, according to my Chaucer professor, is about the best compilation of Chaucer's works you can get for an undergraduate taking a normal 3 hour per week class. The thing is, it's published in two editions:
So, my prof orders copies of the British edition for everybody in the class. Then she checked with the campus bookstore: not in stock. Nobody knows what's going on. Then, she practically goes down there with a broadsword and a hauberk 2 weeks later. Still no books. She demands an explaination. The manager calls the wholesaler, who then says that the publisher has blocked the shipment of the books, and the independent reseller in England can't do shit. English books are only available in England, and it would be breach of contract for them to sell them to Americans.
As a countermeasure, she suggested overnighting them from Amazon.co.uk, which worked just fine.
Ohhhh. I just didn't understand you properly. Maybe you'll get what I mean if you take another look:
The way you worded it makes "this setting" sound like the setting in question is whether the enter key and a mouse click follows links and submits forms. When you're talking about ideas, 'this' is generally 'the thing I just talked about'. Now that I think about, mine is a pretty stupid conclusion, but thinking like that is how I survived upper division English classes:P
And hey, Mr. vi user, is there a good way to auto-indent code in vi? Seriously. I like the fact that you don't have to do ESC-control-shift-5 to do a regex search & replace, but I rely on smart indenting.
I don't really get web-based popups very much either, I was exaggerating for effect. Yeah, it wasn't very clever, but sometimes that's difficult to see when you're writing it.
It's actually more of a problem with things like chat clients, Windows Update, or even Windows Explorer. They are more than happy to take focus away from your current app, say, if a conversation starts, or if you need to shut down your computer, or to ask you if you'd like to overwrite a file if you're copying over a few MB or GB of files in the background.
What OS X does is this: if something needs to get your attention, its icon bounces on the dock until you click it. It's a really good feature and I wish Windows had it too, because I work for a Windows shop and even though most of my real work is done in cygwin, I can't eat the company dog food unless I'm on a Windows box.
Well, I'll forgive that since I'm posting on a Mac topic and you have clearly misconstrued me as a fashionable young Apple fanboy. Seriously, I know why that stereotype exists. Half the time people my PowerBook they talk to me in that condescending kindergarten teacher manner until I open up Emacs and Terminal. Seriously, I posted a detailed report on the performance of World of Warcraft through Rosetta yesterday on the Blizzard Mac forums, along with some tests to confirm that the CPU was being saturated, and I swear if the first person didn't come across exactly like this:
Well, anyway, the point is this: if you assume somebody's a moron and talk in a condescending manner to them, in the end you generally only make an ass out of yourself.
And regarding the user as the most important part of the security model, I can tell you this much: if everybody I knew had a mac, I wouldn't spend nearly as much time fixing their computers.
For one, UI responsiveness and multitasking. I know that if I've got an application soaking up all of 1 processor, I'm not going to cause it to go belly-up by shoving it in the background and surfing the web while some single-threaded app happily churns away on that thread.
<Mac Snobbery>Oh, and that reminds me of the nicest feature of OS X: That pop-ups can't take the focus away from you. I hate hitting spacebar, thinking I'm typing into Notepad, and actually I've agreed to a window that flashed up on my screen for about a half a second and I'm wondering if I just bought viagra.</Mac Snobbery>
Right on both counts, and I think these are the reasons:
People who actually will buy a top-of-the-line system because a few extra FLOPS saves them hours and hours of time running photoshop filters are going to see the improvements because by and large, the applications that they use are designed to leverage multiple processors. If they're not, they need to bitch at their vendors, because that's ostensibly why Photoshop costs x-hundred dollars.
People like me, who just want to run World of Warcraft in the foreground and have safari open to look things up on Thottbot as necessary and surf the web during transit, are going to notice the UI responsiveness. Nothing's more annoying than when I can't click on Start for 10 seconds because I'm ripping a CD, or the Java VM is starting up for the first time at the behest of a web application running in the background.
Single-threaded performance is slightly overrated. No task I do, except compilation, gaming, and XSLT transformations, is going to benefit heavily from being twice as fast, even on a single thread. If you stuck a gigabyte of ram into my circa-2001 1GHz P3, set it up next to my office 3.2GHz P4 with HT disabled, and had me take the Pepsi Challenge, I would be hard-pressed to tell the difference in most of the applications I use without getting a stop watch or running Doom 3.
As soon as Fink (a system like Debian's apt for OS X) gets ported to the new architecture, I'll have all the free software I want. So, in essence, I get: good overpriced software (photoshop, etc) + pretty good complimentary software (iLife 06) + World of Warcraft (the other woman) + zero maintainence (no kernel recompiles OR spyware) + free software.
For me, that offsets the cost of the hardware premium. That's not even touching on the fact that your computer is an black box with a separate monitor, and mine has a 20" screen and is mistaken by most people for simply a very nice LCD. To each his own. You've got a super cheap computer that can do a lot of stuff; with free software, I've essentially got a swiss army knife in a really cute package.
But, like all Linux and OS X enthusiasts, I think at the end of the day we can both agree that either choice is better than Windows.
Yeah, it pretty much is all politics. From what I understand, IBM is treating Sony and MS with kid gloves because they know those companies are going to ship millions and millions of units. IDENTICAL units. Apple, on the other hand, is going to ship far fewer units, and they're going to ship faster models every 6 months. Contrast that with Intel. Intel's disappointed in Microsoft's ability to make a next-generation OS for it to showcase its new processors on. And the rumor mill says that Apple is getting big, fat discounts for all of its chips. For the money, IBM's never going to put out anything good enough to tempt Apple again.
On my last few characters, I've been limiting myself to a couple of full runs of SM. Yeah, it has lots of great items, but in the long run, your labors are better spent getting to 60 as fast as possible. It was more fun for my first character, because back then a level 60 was kind of a rare, godlike being. Not true anymore.
I don't care how uber you are: your group's success is directly proportional to your ability to communicate. If somebody needs to redo a debuff or a crowd control, there's nothing that beats shouting into a microphone at the top of your lungs and adding a few cuss words for emphasis.
If everybody grew up on IRC and can type 100 WPM, you're fine. Most people can't. My girlfriend types really well, but she doesn't always notice when somebody's talking to her on the chat window. That's why you have TeamSpeak and Ventrilo. Now, I'm just doing pick-up groups these days, mostly, but the difference between playing with teamspeak and without is night and day. I ran all of Scholomance, 5-man, with only 2 60's. I, the MT, was 58 and had sub-par gear. The difference was that we were using Teamspeak.
That, and the ninjas really, really piss me off. I hardly think all of the non-English speakers who've screwed me out of loot are gold farmers, but just because they screwed me out of an inability to understand, "EVERYBODY PASS, LET'S DISCUSS" as opposed to capitalist greed does not negate the screwing. And I have noticed a correlation: nobody who I could talk to has ever stolen an epic or blue item.
I won't play with anybody who can't speak English, any more than I would work with somebody I couldn't communicate with.
That's pretty much true. What Cancel really means is, "Oops, I pressed the red X by mistake and now I'm going to lose my document." I think a notepad-like application that automatically saves, organizes and names data would be pretty cool. I mean, usually I'm just borrowing some code for the web, or grabbing a cheat sheet because I forgot a particular MySQL statement's syntax. Having to save and name documents is a pain in the ass either way: I loose my data and I have to click the stupid button, or I save it, but god knows I'll never be able to find it because the name I chose at random doesn't make sense.
I was impressed when I went to shut down my iMac last night, and the dialog that came up was something like, "Do you really want to shut down? Your computer will automatically shut down if you do not respond in 1 minute 59 seconds." That accounts for the misclick and the case that I can't be bothered to look at the computer again. I don't know how many times I've tried to shut down my Dell, only to groggily trudge over to the computer, flick on the monitor, and find that it was asking me whether I wanted to save my notepad document, or worse yet, whether I REALLY, TRULY WANTED TO SHUT DOWN.
OS X and Gimp generally say, "Save", "Do not save", and "Cancel". Bust out that one the next time you hear somebody talking about Linux usability. Even that isn't perfect. If I had my druthers I'd go with something like, "Save/Don't Save/Back" (with a second warning that comes up if you hit Don't Save), because anybody who's used a back button a browser is going to understand the last one.
I've been writing functional specs for the last six months, and I can assure you, the easiest way to confuse your user is with Yes/No/Cancel. I've even confused myself a few times. I almost set up a dialog that had Abort/Retry/Ignore/Fail as an easter egg.
Yeah, I'm looking at the .app right now. It says: Application (PowerPC)
Yeah, and I also noticed that the signiture box sucked donkey balls. It might just be the Apple Store in Emeryville, CA, but I found them almost impossible to sign.
. . . so I can let you know later tonight:). I don't really have any interest in dual-booting per se, but I feel like it's my obligation as a geek.
Got delivered at about 9:00. I only had a half an hour or so to play with it before I drove to work. I'm currently trying to convert my mother, so I set it up at her place so she could play with it today. Thoughts: Just as snappy as the G5's. Much better than my laptop. My only complaint is the mighty mouse - apparently it uses inductance to determine where your finger is, and normally I have my fingers constantly resting on either side. I only played with Safari, Photo Booth, and the MS Word trial, and I opened up system information to make sure it was the right iMac, of course.
And now that I think about it, I guess Word was running on Rosetta. Holy shit! I didn't even notice.
You'd probably be interested in this article.
Well, let's look at this like a bean counter would. In a world where Adobe has an absolute monopoly on drawing programs, if the cost of developing the Mac version of CS2 exceeded the revenue generated by those users buying CS2, they would not make a Mac version. Those Mac users would have no choice but to get ugly little Dells, or buy a copy of Windows Vista for a premium.
However, it's a lot more complicated than that. They don't have a monopoly, and if they suddenly dropped support for OS X, then Corel would be the first company to jump in and have a free beta of their entire suite running natively on Intel. The number of users who would switch platforms to keep running Adobe and the number who would switch apps to keep running OS X is unknown. So, potentially, by not shelling out a few extra bucks to get an Intel version up and running, they have not only lost revenue in this quarter, but for the foreseeable future because they won't be able to sell iterations to these people.
Oh, and I had a fun moment with my girlfriend regarding the Macintosh UX the other day. We were playing around with iTunes on her Wintel, and she asked, "How do I rip this CD?" "Drag and drop." "What?" "Click here, to grab the CD, and drop it in your library, up here." *click, click* "Wow." Mac UX > Win UX. That's why most Mac users won't want to dual boot or use VirtualPC.
I just had a profound thought: Steve Jobs released the Intel Macs so early, and with 32-bit processors, to force developers to port now . If he'd waited, then Vista would have ran on them. If they'd put 64-bit chips in them, Windows 64-bit edition would have ran (they both support EFI).
Currently, the room I share with my girlfriend has my old Dell (big, ugly black box), which said girlfriend now uses, the stereo speaker system that came with said dell (less big but still quite big, ugly black box), and a giganimous HP printer/scanner/fax/toaster oven that she got as a job perq because her boss was moving to the East Coast.
My office has two 19" monitors and two desktops. The faster one is a big ugly black Dell, and the slower one is an even bigger, uglier, somehow BLACKER Gateway. I actually wouldn't have the monitors there, except if the left one isn't there, I'm constantly one of my coworkers directly in the face. Regardless of the fact that he's a nice chap, I don't want to look at his mug all day, it's unnerving.
Each of these settings has, at one time or another, my Powerbook in them.
Now, I bought a new 20" Intel iMac (yeah I know the MacBooks are Jenna Jameson-sexy, but this is cheaper, slightly faster, and has a large screen, and I'm an artist sometimes), but let's pretend I bought one of those PowerMacs and a 23" Cinema Display. Not only would I have an AWESOMELY HUGE, ugly aluminum box, I would have a gigantic monitor, a DVI KVM switch, yet another ugly black Dell (or, if I built it myself, a big ugly box with no branding), and enough cords to hide more than a few corpses in.
So, yeah, having a little white thing with two cords coming out the back is kind of a boon to me.
Yes, I really do think that. Why? Am I just grabbing numbers out of thin air? Nope.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/rad eon-x1600_7.html
The X1600 actually outperforms the GeForce 6800. The GT leaves it in the dust though.
My two and a half year-old 2.6Hz P4 with 1GB of ram and a Radeon 9800/128MB runs it just fine with all the bells and whistles. And I'm not sure they even had 6800's back then.
I think the premium is worth not having to worry about WMF vulnerabilities. Let's see how your r0x0rz your b0x is after it's been pwn3d by a 17 year-old Romanian hacker. Who cares if thread creation takes an eon on OS X: it'll take you 5 minutes to open FireFox because of all the spam emails flying out of your laptop at lightning speed! All for $500 less!
I mean, how much is your time worth to you? If you're a moderate income professional you're talking (conservatively) $20-25 an hour. I charge about $40 to help people with computers. Let's assume you're contracting tech support to yourself at $40 an hour:
Let's assume that you reinstall windows once every year, and that you do one hour of adware maintainence every second month. Granted, you don't have to do a complete system wipe every year, but it's probably a good idea. I guarantee your system will be snappier after you do. Let's also assume that you use this box for about 3 years. One hour every other month of cleaning off bad guys is about what I do for my windows systems, and you can just about double it if you let any non-computer savvy person who thinks they're hot shit because they maxed out their buddy list near your computer.
Granted, this is theoretical money. However, since I do most of my computer work in the evenings, I'd much rather not stay up until 2:00am when I could be sleeping with my fiancée. And I'm not even going to try to consider Linux here. I've really had a lot of fun troubleshooting Linux systems, and I think I've never learned so much about how computers actually work as when I was tooling around with Slackware and Gentoo, but I'm glad I get to work with them on the job now, instead of doing kernel recompiles at til the crack of dawn trying to get the i8x0 integrated sound card to work.
Really, it was designed for consoles first, with the PC version as kind of a lackluster afterthought. As a result, the inventory system is fundamentally horrible and resembles Resident Evil 1. The story is OK, but I think it suffers from the Matrix Re-suckage phenomenon: you already know about aliens, the illuminati, and the Helios AI. The whole game does not show nearly the polish and love that the first one did.
Get Half-Life 2. You won't be disappointed.
Nobody can predict the future. Not peak oil doomers, not /.ers with futurist tendencies. Not even Thomas Malthus. Somebody at the patent office said 100 years ago that almost everything that could be invented already had. I'm not saying any of these people are dumb - quite the opposite, in fact - I'm saying that it's not something the human mind is really good at grasping. Some native culture in Austrailia, I believe, view progression in time like walking backwards. You can see perfectly where you've been, but you have no idea where you're going.
Granted, I respect that you don't want to take the time to post excerpts from the Oduvai Gorge paper to support your statements. That stuff is pretty easy to access via google.
What people generally do instead is use statistical extrapolations and add in personal bias. We all know, or should know, the fact that statistical extrapolations are really shitty ways to go about predicting things. If you don't believe it, I have a few proven systems for making money on everything from the Stock Market to craps that I want to sell you.
As for bias, I don't think it's an accident that the most outspoken Peak Oil Doomer I know is a college student under a significant amount of debt who's so freakin' outdoorsy that he can start a fire in a rainstorm without a drop of accelerant. If the world ended, most people I know would think of him as some kind of a demi-god, and he'd suddenly become sexier than any investment banker ever was. He has the least to lose from the collapse of the current system. Depending on how you view debt, it could be considered a net gain for some who are particularly well-equipped for survival.
Conversely, it's no accident that I, a young man with a fiancée and a great job, think that everything's going to be OK in the end, and there's little you can do to convince me otherwise. However, since I don't own a house and don't have the same level of disposable income as other people, it naturally follows that I view those who are better off than me with disdain and a bit of envy, and think that they should decrease their ecological footprint significantly. When I'm older, independent of who turns out to be right, I'll probably be more conservative because I have more invested in the current system and bleak prospects of starting over, whether that my investment happens to be a family farm or a space colony.
No, that's not at all what he's talking about. You're not reacting to his article, you're setting up a straw man of his argument so you can pull out a witty quote that brands all optimists (or really, all those who don't believe in an imminent apocalypse) as crazy religious nuts. I mean, really, doomers have far more in common with Pre-Millenialists than anybody else. And if everybody thought that way, then there really would be no hope for the future.
Cue indignant rant from an attorney /.er who's convinced it's only the corrupt, fallen state of the capitalists in this country which allows lawyers to act against their true nature of liberalism and prevents them from the pursuit of the public good.
Well, while I am no expert on British legal history, I will tell you that Jonathan Swift certainly believed in the statement,
In Gulliver's Travels book 4, Gulliver sees a Yahoo find a pretty stone. Another Yahoo comes along and tries to take it away from him. Struggle ensues, and it appears to be a stalemate - but then a third Yahoo comes along and runs away with the pretty stone. Gulliver compares it to a legal struggle he had while in Britain and concludes that the third must be a Yahoo lawyer.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that all lawyers are good or all lawyers are slime. But nobody in their right mind would contradict me when I say that a lot of the people who go to law school do so because they really like money.
Alright, jackass, I'll admit that I'm not an economics major. But I didn't undo my belt and start waving my cock around about which school of economics I prescribe to.
Let me tell you this: Comments like yours usually come from investment banker jackasses who are too busy getting pedicures and blowjobs from Southeast-Asian sex workers to actually see how Point of Sale actually operates. I'm not saying that neoclassical supply/demand economics are bad, I'm saying that there's more to it than that, and that's something that only somebody who's sold shit to other people would ever understand that.
I'll give it to you in brief, since you clearly were born with a silver spoon in your mouth and have never worked an honest day in your life: smiling works. I smile at the people at my favorite coffee shop and chat them up. They smile at me and ask me about my fianceé. They get a monopoly on my business and I get my drinks made perfectly. It worked exactly the same when I was the guy hocking lattes two years ago. When I sold fabric (my first job out of college), I displayed conversance and interest in the activities of SCA people, strippers, and goths, as well as a shocking level of memory retention about our inventory. That made sure that if those people were going to buy some fabric, they bought it from our store, and they bought it from me, which made me very, very hard to fire.
Conversely, I won't go to Good Vibrations because the service is utterly indifferent. If you think Apple Store employees are bad, you're in for a surprise. If we were to believe you, all they would have to do is lower the price of their sex toys enough and I'd come flocking to them. Nope. Now I go to Madame S, which charges more, but has lots of cheerful, helpful staff. Likewise, I left the fabric store and started selling lattes for a pay cut and worse hours because the staff was political and dour.
Hey, I am an egomaniac, but you, Mr. Pot, are calling me, Mr. Kettle, black. But that's not the point. You go out of your way to launch a personal attack full of hollow rhetoric. However, in the midst of so much slime and vitriol, I am able pick out a kernel of wisdom in that people who need their egos massaged are difficult to work with. I wholeheartedly agree with this, but trust me, it doesn't apply to me. My fat christmas bonus was all the praise I needed.
I don't shit in, or around it either.