On the other hand if you looked at ultima underworld which was one of the best games in the 90s to integrate physics, the game is a classic and everything afterwards in first person perspective after it was more or less a step back... The main issue nowadays is that physics in most action games is only integrate the way you can blow up things, it becomes more interesting as soon as they get out of this stage by utilizing it as puzzle part or simply by trying to make a virtual world within the game like the ultimas did! The problem is most games are not good to begin with and just to integrate physics to blow things up does not make them better!
Actually one thing I am really satisfied with is the battery, it really holds longer than the standard LI ION batteries, with my usage a standard LI ION battery probably already would have degraded into oblivion while the air chuggs along nicely on around 80-90% of its original capacity! So this is one thing I definitely can live with! A and replacing the battery on this machine is no rocket science either it is mostly removing 4 screws!
Needless to say that was the first and last piece of apple hardware I bought. Not that PC hardware, esp laptops are much better.
Actually my experience with Apple has been mostly positive the mac minis have been chugging along for years and the harddrive failure i had once was fixed by me (outside of warranty so who cares) but the macbook air is an entirely different issue and also the problems did not show up upfront. The heating issue reared its ugly head in summer the broken hinge problems I am at the beginning stage there so my hope is to get it fixed upfront!
Anyway the problem is you can get burned on the PC side as well, but it makes a difference to get burned for 800 Eur or for 3000Eur, and from Apple I at least would expect to support their most expensive machines more than they actually do
(which is almost non existent, being in the deny mode Apple obviously is on those problems they definitely know about them)
Needless to say, I will be reluctant to ever buy from Apple again, even the Mini will be phased out in the long run once real htpc alternatives arrive with similar specs (and no some cheap ass Atom based copies are not alternatives for now)!
My personal opinion is that Apple is the master of risk management. Which means they seem to have the chances of class action lawsuits in their recall statistics, if the chances are low due to low sales than the chances are high you will never ever get a problem on a 3000 $ machine repaired! It is not like they had not pulled those stunts several times in the past! And oh god how many times they have been dragged to court already. It is just a mere wonder nobody from the US has done it over the Macbook air!
By the same logic, you also will find very few accident reports in the US that say an accident was caused by a cell phone or a TV/Nav receiver or playing with the radio, but you will find many that say "inattentive driving" or "reckless driving".
Actually I have yet to see a person watching television while driving, this is common sense to keep your eyes on the road, but I have seen recless driving often enough!
They did: You just register some customer information with Apple here and a fedex delivers your hardware patch within a week or so... It's the Apple way.
Well there is another company doing cheaper repairs the same way: http://www.dell.com/ After all I d rather spend 500 USD on semi working garbage and having at least repair options than sitting on 3000$ semi working garbage and waiting for a recall which will never happen;-)
You bought a first gen product, had problems, and didn't return it for a refund?
What did you expect from a computer that doesn't even have a removable battery?
Jepp the main issue is that those problems do not show themselves in the first two weeks, the broken hinges appear after a year or more and the heating issues in summer. Guess what, apple never really fixed it, and until someone drags them with a class action lawsuit to court within the US they probably will never react!
Lets reverse this, try to dig out a report of an accident on european roads caused by DVB-T receivers in the cars? I have yet to read about this, although navigation units with digital TV receivers have been sold here for 2-3 years. I have seen them several times, they are very popular among local taxi drivers!
Is possible in my brothers brand new 2009 ( some asian car model). [Maybe If I remember I will find out and post it later.] It doesn't matter, I don't know the brand of the navigation system as well. What is important is that he can watch DVD's while driving. The only safety feature is that the parking brake has to be engagded, but only one click and he can watch DVD's while driving. That is nothing. He could drving across europe without problems with the hand brake engaged to the first ratchet.
Superb trying to drive for hours with the handbrake on means you will have a break failure in an instant, best way to kill yourself... Your brother should be candidate for the Darwin Awards!
BIPPITY POBBITY BAM! your wish is granted. PS2 System Data Software is free download from PSN which allow PS2 games to be played on PS3
Actually to my knowledge it is not it is just the PS1.... at least the european version does not have PS2 compatibility and here this is the first time I ever heard the US versions have it. There used to be compatible PS3s in the beginning though;-)
I assume the attach rate on the PS3 is not very high, you have about 30% customers who buy the PS3 as Blue Ray player only because face it it still is the inofficial reference player and one of the best there is! The rest is gamers but the games are way too expensive compared to other systems! The PS3 is the classical example where game companies outpriced themselves due to their greed! Probably comes hand in hand with the console being the only one which has not been pried open!
Forget about it, Sony of Europe wont allow this, this is the disadvantage of the EU price fights within european countries are not really possible anymore. Imagine what would happen if you suddenly would get the PS3 for half the price in Poland than in Germany... Poland would be overrun by germans buying PS3s!
Actually it is Nintendo of Europe who says how much an item has to cost! Same goes for Sony Europe etc... and the 1:1 Dollar Euro price hiking is quite common, this gives companies an additional 10-20% revenue (if you count out the VAT which is quite high in Europe)
Oh well Activision wanted to have every game being a multi million dollar franchise which should sell a butload of copies every year, I guess they failed their way!
I think you missed a few years of game business. Currently, PC gaming is pretty much dead except for specific genres like RTS and MMORPGs, and nearly all new games are made for the consoles.
Well most of the stuff is ported since the PC still is about 1/3rd of the revenue market, the funny thing is thanks to the consoles the hardware upgrade cycle has slowed down so much that pc gaming nowadays is cheaper than the average console if you count in the games as well which on the average are 30% cheaper!
Actually I could justify the price if there was a PS2 backwards compatibility but the way I see it I probably if I ever buy a console the next two years will end up with a ps2 there is a handful of excellent games I really want to play, while the PS3 lineup so far only has two of them if at all!
No one will care that is the main problem... The web designers and web programmers are on the wrong side of things. Otherwise if they had their ways IE6 would already have been banned into oblivion! One of the reasons why the movie tag wont be a major incentive to upgrade any browser!
No plugins, thats pretty much it!
Why would a typical user care? Especially as Flash quite often comes preinstalled, so he doesn't even know it's a plugin...
JavaFX can fight it by being bundled with JRE (or installed when JRE is auto-updated).
Except that the end user still has to install Java. If they're going to do that, then it's not so much of a leap for them to install an alternate browser or some sort of addin for IE that enables decent HTML5 rendering (maybe by swapping out the rendering engine?) I'd only expect that to happen if IE really sucks at HTML5, and the technology just hasn't gained the momentum for us to be judging Microsoft on it yet. Apart from Youtube's experiments, I don't know of anyone that's considering HTML5.
HTML5 comes free with the browser of your choice, the only one out of the game for now is Microsoft, which means as soon as you have gotten rid of the pestilence IE in reality is you are free to use it.
Your "as soon as" clause effectively translates to "not in the next 5 years for sure", and that's a very optimistic assessment.
This depends on the surrounding, smaller companies very likely already now. Corporate environments, if we are lucky we have gotten rid of IE6 in less than 20 years, Mobile phones, pretty much now, Extranet sites, IE has to be supported but likely IE6 can be dropped within a years timeframe depending on the region you target (USA probably within 2 years, Europe definitely within a year!)
Lets leave the standards aside, RIA development on browsers has a bigger problem when it comes to HTML. And HTML5 does not take care of it. Lets have a look, usually a RIA application is a self contained application with a load of widgets which in itself are self contained and only via dedicated contracts influencable, the widgets themselves communicate over messages (events)
Now what do we have in the WEB a huge singleton called the DOM tree, normally not bad in itself, but it has no subtree isolation constructs so we cannot really get any isolation, the control language javascript, does not provide that feature either. The only thing really more or less there is the event system, but even that does not work unified over all browsers!
This is one of the many reasons why it is so hard to develop complex RIA applications even on modern browsers, the runtime makes mistakes which other systems like Smalltalk already had eliminated in the mid 70s! But that is more or less the entire problem of the entire web development!
If I was a real RIA guy I would not be worried either too much, the basic mistakes cannot be fixed anymore and unless someting like XUL (basically a fixed up component model which never became standard) becomes cross platform it just will not be viable to program that stuff for intranet due to cost reasons!
Microsoft might be part of the w3 organization, but none of their browsers support any of the HTML5 specs, i dont call that being involved, instead they have specifically decided not to support these standards, and try to slow down, and break apart the web.
Happened many times, they were members of the Corba consortium and derived DCOM from the technologies there, early they were members of the OpenGL consortium it ended with DirectX 3 being a plain COM based copy of OpenGL, their membership in the W3C consortium has been going on for longer than a decade.
But to Microsofts defense they behave more nicely. The last stunt they pulled was to rip off SVG and label it under their own name (XAML) incompatible of course, while not supporting the official SVG standard, but that has been several years ago!
It could be done with PHP because replacing server software doesn't affects clients; in particular, it does not require them to install new plugins and/or change their browser.
Client-side, it's a very different kettle of fish. Silverlight can fight Flash by being bundled with the OS (or installed wia WU); JavaFX can fight it by being bundled with JRE (or installed when JRE is auto-updated). I don't see any similar opportunity for HTML5.
HTML5 comes free with the browser of your choice, the only one out of the game for now is Microsoft, which means as soon as you have gotten rid of the pestilence IE in reality is you are free to use it. I think the fastest uptake will happen on the mobile platform, as soon as people see what is possible on mobile phones the demand for the same stuff on the desktop will happen, but then IE either has to catch up or to die!
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand if you looked at ultima underworld which was one of the best games in the 90s to integrate physics, the game is a classic and everything afterwards in first person perspective after it was more or less a step back...
The main issue nowadays is that physics in most action games is only integrate the way you can blow up things, it becomes more interesting as soon as they get out of this stage by utilizing it as puzzle part or simply by trying to make a virtual world within the game like the ultimas did!
The problem is most games are not good to begin with and just to integrate physics to blow things up does not make them better!
Actually one thing I am really satisfied with is the battery, it really holds longer than the standard LI ION batteries, with my usage a standard LI ION battery probably already would have degraded into oblivion while the air chuggs along nicely on around 80-90% of its original capacity!
So this is one thing I definitely can live with!
A and replacing the battery on this machine is no rocket science either it is mostly removing 4 screws!
Needless to say that was the first and last piece of apple hardware I bought. Not that PC hardware, esp laptops are much better.
Actually my experience with Apple has been mostly positive the mac minis have been chugging along for years and the harddrive failure i had once was fixed by me (outside of warranty so who cares)
but the macbook air is an entirely different issue and also the problems did not show up upfront. The heating issue reared its ugly head in summer the broken hinge problems I am at the beginning stage there so my hope is to get it fixed upfront!
Anyway the problem is you can get burned on the PC side as well, but it makes a difference to get burned for 800 Eur or for 3000Eur, and from Apple I at least would expect to support their most expensive machines more than they actually do
(which is almost non existent, being in the deny mode Apple obviously is on those problems they definitely know about them)
Needless to say, I will be reluctant to ever buy from Apple again, even the Mini will be phased out in the long run once real htpc alternatives arrive with similar specs (and no some cheap ass Atom based copies are not alternatives for now)!
My personal opinion is that Apple is the master of risk management. Which means they seem to have the chances of class action lawsuits in their recall statistics, if the chances are low due to low sales than the chances are high you will never ever get a problem on a 3000 $ machine repaired!
It is not like they had not pulled those stunts several times in the past! And oh god how many times they have been dragged to court already. It is just a mere wonder nobody from the US has done it over the Macbook air!
By the same logic, you also will find very few accident reports in the US that say an accident was caused by a cell phone or a TV/Nav receiver or playing with the radio, but you will find many that say "inattentive driving" or "reckless driving".
Actually I have yet to see a person watching television while driving, this is common sense to keep your eyes on the road, but I have seen recless driving often enough!
They did: You just register some customer information with Apple here and a fedex delivers your hardware patch within a week or so... It's the Apple way.
Well there is another company doing cheaper repairs the same way: http://www.dell.com/ ;-)
After all I d rather spend 500 USD on semi working garbage and having at least repair options than sitting on 3000$ semi working garbage and waiting for a recall which will never happen
You bought a first gen product, had problems, and didn't return it for a refund?
What did you expect from a computer that doesn't even have a removable battery?
Jepp the main issue is that those problems do not show themselves in the first two weeks, the broken hinges appear after a year or more and the heating issues in summer. Guess what, apple never really fixed it, and until someone drags them with a class action lawsuit to court within the US they probably will never react!
Lets reverse this, try to dig out a report of an accident on european roads caused by DVB-T receivers in the cars? I have yet to read about this, although navigation units with digital TV receivers have been sold here for 2-3 years. I have seen them several times, they are very popular among local taxi drivers!
It would be even nicer if they fixed the 3000 USD first gen macbook airs which are plagued by broken hinge problems and overheating:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1696844&tstart=15
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1387729&tstart=15
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1931283&tstart=30
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1893302&tstart=15
Is possible in my brothers brand new 2009 ( some asian car model). [Maybe If I remember I will find out and post it later.] It doesn't matter, I don't know the brand of the navigation system as well. What is important is that he can watch DVD's while driving. The only safety feature is that the parking brake has to be engagded, but only one click and he can watch DVD's while driving. That is nothing. He could drving across europe without problems with the hand brake engaged to the first ratchet.
Superb trying to drive for hours with the handbrake on means you will have a break failure in an instant, best way to kill yourself...
Your brother should be candidate for the Darwin Awards!
We have had those units in Europe for ages, and there was not a single problem. I am not sure if this is not an American problem alone...
BIPPITY POBBITY BAM! your wish is granted. PS2 System Data Software is free download from PSN which allow PS2 games to be played on PS3
Actually to my knowledge it is not it is just the PS1.... ;-)
at least the european version does not have PS2 compatibility and here this is the first time I ever heard the US versions have it.
There used to be compatible PS3s in the beginning though
I assume the attach rate on the PS3 is not very high, you have about 30% customers who buy the PS3 as Blue Ray player only because face it it still is the inofficial reference player and one of the best there is!
The rest is gamers but the games are way too expensive compared to other systems!
The PS3 is the classical example where game companies outpriced themselves due to their greed!
Probably comes hand in hand with the console being the only one which has not been pried open!
Forget about it, Sony of Europe wont allow this, this is the disadvantage of the EU price fights within european countries are not really possible anymore. Imagine what would happen if you suddenly would get the PS3 for half the price in Poland than in Germany...
Poland would be overrun by germans buying PS3s!
Actually it is Nintendo of Europe who says how much an item has to cost!
Same goes for Sony Europe etc... and the 1:1 Dollar Euro price hiking is quite common, this gives companies an additional 10-20% revenue (if you count out the VAT which is quite high in Europe)
Oh well Activision wanted to have every game being a multi million dollar franchise which should sell a butload of copies every year, I guess they failed their way!
I think you missed a few years of game business. Currently, PC gaming is pretty much dead except for specific genres like RTS and MMORPGs, and nearly all new games are made for the consoles.
Well most of the stuff is ported since the PC still is about 1/3rd of the revenue market, the funny thing is thanks to the consoles the hardware upgrade cycle has slowed down so much that pc gaming nowadays is cheaper than the average console if you count in the games as well which on the average are 30% cheaper!
Actually I could justify the price if there was a PS2 backwards compatibility but the way I see it I probably if I ever buy a console the next two years will end up with a ps2 there is a handful of excellent games I really want to play, while the PS3 lineup so far only has two of them if at all!
This law will be sacked by the courts in no time, it is clearly unconstitutional. The german constitution prohibits censorship!
No one will care that is the main problem...
The web designers and web programmers are on the wrong side of things. Otherwise if they had their ways IE6 would already have been banned into oblivion!
One of the reasons why the movie tag wont be a major incentive to upgrade any browser!
No plugins, thats pretty much it!
Why would a typical user care? Especially as Flash quite often comes preinstalled, so he doesn't even know it's a plugin...
JavaFX can fight it by being bundled with JRE (or installed when JRE is auto-updated).
Except that the end user still has to install Java. If they're going to do that, then it's not so much of a leap for them to install an alternate browser or some sort of addin for IE that enables decent HTML5 rendering (maybe by swapping out the rendering engine?) I'd only expect that to happen if IE really sucks at HTML5, and the technology just hasn't gained the momentum for us to be judging Microsoft on it yet. Apart from Youtube's experiments, I don't know of anyone that's considering HTML5.
Iphone and android based phones...
What, exactly, would be enhanced about experience of people working with HTML5 version as compared to Flash/Silveright/JavaFX?
No plugins, thats pretty much it!
HTML5 comes free with the browser of your choice, the only one out of the game for now is Microsoft, which means as soon as you have gotten rid of the pestilence IE in reality is you are free to use it.
Your "as soon as" clause effectively translates to "not in the next 5 years for sure", and that's a very optimistic assessment.
This depends on the surrounding, smaller companies very likely already now. Corporate environments, if we are lucky we have gotten rid of IE6 in less than 20 years, Mobile phones, pretty much now, Extranet sites, IE has to be supported but likely IE6 can be dropped within a years timeframe depending on the region you target (USA probably within 2 years, Europe definitely within a year!)
Lets leave the standards aside, RIA development on browsers has a bigger problem when it comes to HTML. And HTML5 does not take care of it.
Lets have a look, usually a RIA application is a self contained application with a load of widgets which in itself are self contained and only via dedicated contracts influencable, the widgets themselves communicate over messages (events)
Now what do we have in the WEB a huge singleton called the DOM tree, normally not bad in itself, but it has no subtree isolation constructs so we cannot really get any isolation, the control language javascript, does not provide that feature either.
The only thing really more or less there is the event system, but even that does not work unified over all browsers!
This is one of the many reasons why it is so hard to develop complex RIA applications even on modern browsers, the runtime makes mistakes which other systems like Smalltalk already had eliminated in the mid 70s! But that is more or less the entire problem of the entire web development!
If I was a real RIA guy I would not be worried either too much, the basic mistakes cannot be fixed anymore and unless someting like XUL (basically a fixed up component model which never became standard) becomes cross platform it just will not be viable to program that stuff for intranet due to cost reasons!
Microsoft might be part of the w3 organization, but none of their browsers support any of the HTML5 specs, i dont call that being involved, instead they have specifically decided not to support these standards, and try to slow down, and break apart the web.
Happened many times, they were members of the Corba consortium and derived DCOM from the technologies there, early they were members of the OpenGL consortium it ended with DirectX 3 being a plain COM based copy of OpenGL, their membership in the W3C consortium has been going on for longer than a decade.
But to Microsofts defense they behave more nicely. The last stunt they pulled was to rip off SVG and label it under their own name (XAML) incompatible of course, while not supporting the official SVG standard, but that has been several years ago!
It could be done with PHP because replacing server software doesn't affects clients; in particular, it does not require them to install new plugins and/or change their browser.
Client-side, it's a very different kettle of fish. Silverlight can fight Flash by being bundled with the OS (or installed wia WU); JavaFX can fight it by being bundled with JRE (or installed when JRE is auto-updated). I don't see any similar opportunity for HTML5.
HTML5 comes free with the browser of your choice, the only one out of the game for now is Microsoft, which means as soon as you have gotten rid of the pestilence IE in reality is you are free to use it.
I think the fastest uptake will happen on the mobile platform, as soon as people see what is possible on mobile phones the demand for the same stuff on the desktop will happen, but then IE either has to catch up or to die!