And it can also be used to explain to young women entering high school why they shouldn't be taking advanced math courses.
I scored slightly below average in all of my motor-skills tests. No one ever told me to stay out of varsity sports, I just had to work a little harder.
Whether this study is BS or not doesn't change the fact that the first step to dealing with a deficiency is to identify it.
I love how many Marathon references there are in Ambrosia games. You can tell what they play when they aren't developing:)
FYI, they've ported EV: Nova to PC now, and have made plugins to play the original two in EV:Nova. So whether you get the chicks or not, you can play EV on your PC.
I can't find the numbers anywhere, but I think the Marathon series sold somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 units. Not that great compared to most blockbuster games out there (Halo 2 did that in what, the first hour of release) but at least a few people got to play it:)
I used to use Camino exclusively, right before development pretty much stalled on it.
I've been considering trying it again now that I've heard it's being actively worked on, except I really don't have any complaints with safari that aren't present in camino and firefox as well. Well, ok, I'm not a huge fan of brushed metal, but the buttons are still where I expect them to be, so.. *shrug*
I want iCab on OS X to not suck. either that or for someone to write a plugin adding all their extra page options to firefox.
I won't argue with you about the need to install third-party product... but how is this a negative again?
I assume that I'm buying a computer to run third-party software. I don't expect apple to come up with the best solution for every software I need.
The thing that really makes the mac (and that people tend to overlook) is the consistancy of the good aqua UI between mac apps. This is enforced both by the Cocoa tools that make making a UI that conforms to these standards quite easy (Interface builder throws up guides when interface objects are the recommended distance from each other, for crying out loud) and the hordes of mac users who will REFUSE TO USE A PRODUCT if it doesn't comply.
Its why Omniweb was the mac OS X browser before safari came out, because it was the most maclike. I love firefox, but I used to hate using it on the mac because, to preserve cross-platform uniformity, it didn't *feel* like a mac app.
It's the consistencies in the third party apps (like "Install/Uninstall" instead of "Yes, no, cancel" in their dialog boxes) that are why I use a mac, and did long before apple started coming out with their iStuff.
My desktop has a nice keyboard that I'm quite accustomed to using. As a general rule I can type almost as fast as I can talk, and generally faster than I can think of what to say. Definitely faster than any speech recognition software I've used.
However, my iPod and palm *don't* have nice keyboards. If I could tell my palm to take a note, write down someone's phone number and email, or just start dictating my thoughts, and have it end up in my contacts ready to be synced... well, that'd be pretty nice.
Last I checked, areas that actually *are* that desperately poor (certain areas of Appalachia, for instance) don't really have that much in the way of building codes, from what I've seen. At least, if they do, they sure as hell aren't enforced.
If you live in the US and are healthy enough to build your own house, why are you so poor that you can't afford basic prefab construction. if you have the skills to build something yourself that's better than cheap prefab, why aren't you working in construction and making enough money to make yourself something better.
The jobs are there here. I've lived "below the poverty line" by our government's standards, and we still managed to afford a house, you just can't live in an area where the property values are sky-high.
If you can build your own house, go build houses for a contractor, or stack boxes for fedex, or work for a farmer, or a million other jobs that pay well enough to survive on and afford a small place that I could get just by walking up to them.
Those jobs don't exist in some areas? Move. That's the only way it's going to change. Being able to build your own cob house isn't going to put food into it.
It's a very effective solution for parts of the world where these jobs don't exist, and economies are such that a farmer can bring in his whole crop and still barely be able to eat (although if you can farm, you can subsist, as my grandparent's stories from the great depression tell me), but in the US that just doesn't cut it.
It's putting a bandaid on a bullet wound - if you have the ability to make yourself a crap house, you shouldn't need to.
Generally it isn't the actual building codes that say you can't build a shack in your backyard (or well, sometimes they do, but how often does an inspector just wander around to your house?) but your neighbors.
Can be built cheaply, yes. Can be built well cheaply? Maybe.
The damn shame of things is that it's almost impossible to nicely made small house, sell it, and make a profit at it.
I've worked on a residential construction crew for two years, and it's the honest truth that it only take an extra half a week to frame a $200k house over what it takes for a $100k house, and 100k isn't even cheap yet. Maybe a week more than it'd take for a "cheap" $35k or $25k house. And you're still buying the same lumber, because anything cheaper than OSB sheathing won't last, and you don't put better than that on a house less than $1million.
It still takes basically one day for a good roofing crew to shingle it. They won't be there all day, but they spend most of their time setting up for it anyway.
Digging the foundation is still at least 2/3rd of the cost. As is the blockwork.
Similar logic applies for heating, plumbing, electricity, drywall, etc. No matter how simple you make the trim, you've still got to install it on the whole house. You're also going to need a water heater, a furnace, and a sewer and water hookup. The simple fact of the matter is that to do things *right* in building a house, there are a large number of "constants" in the cost equation that make building smaller houses have dramatically limitted returns.
So you get to the end of the project. You've spent maybe two months on it, maybe three because they didn't get your last door in until a week late and they were out of the bathtub you picked, and oh, the plumbers couldn't work for a week because plumbers are always busy. And now you have to put the thing on the market and try to sell it at enough of a profit that you, the contractor, have something to show for all of this after you pay off all the subs and/or employees who did this work.
But you can only really mark it up a few percentage points, or it'll be *way* overpriced. So you maybe made yourself $1-2k dollars on this two-month project so that some low-income family can have a house that will last.
Or you can spend that same two months building some $500k monstrosity on a golf course and earning over $20k on it. Guess which option anyone with the brains to build a house properly (and believe me, it does take brains, sweat, and strong knowledge and attention to detail) is going to take?
It's the same as low-end computers - you *can* get cheap and good, but only if you build it yourself. Otherwise you get to pick between expensive but quality (assuming you choose the right vendor and don't just get hustled) and cheap shite. Only in the housing case, you've just mortgaged your soul to buy the cheapness.
That still misses the point that mp3 player interfaces are so horrible in general that iTunes for PC, as much of a memory hog as it is, blows them completely out of the water.
I've never bought a single song from the iTunes store, but I've been using the player since it came out. Sound Jam was really nice to use, and iTunes is a reasonable facsimile of it, in some ways even a bit easier.
Anyone who thinks winamp's interface is nice needs to be shot. Sure, it has some nice functions, but crappy, unreadable skinnability is *not* what I look for in an mp3 player. I want something that, you know, makes it easy to find/listen to my mp3's.
I read about it on their website, and a friend of mine was all set to buy one, but we couldn't find a vendor at the time. None of the normal aopen carriers seemed to have it, and google just turned up preview links.
I am so sick of this "console players have different standards" bullshit. I play FPS on pc, have been doing so since wolfenstein, and I *still* think Halo PC did some really great little innovations to play.
It's as simple as two things; the recharging shield and grenades. Those two articles give halo a completely different rhythm than any other fps I've played, and it's a rhythm that *works.*
Some of the levels suck. personally, I've found that nearly every fps kind of bogs down toward the middle (Unreal, every id games levels have blown through the entire game, even half-life kind of sucked once you got stuck in the alien areas). Halo was far from perfect, but I think that there's a huge desire to bring it down just because it's *so* huge on the console. The reason it wasn't a big deal on PC was because by the time it was released, it was YEARS out of date. We had Far Cry by then, which did some wonderful things (and had it's own crappy moments; aka, almost everyone after the major plot twist) which beat it in graphics and was at least as good in AI. And we had Battlefield, with the massive outdoor battles that halo was originally supposed to be.
I'm not saying OMG BEST GASME EVEH about Halo, but you have to appreciate the things any game does right. Doom 3, for all that its levels bored me after an hour, had some really cool uses of lighting (I've never before set ambushes around a lone light bulb, waiting desperately for the creeping things to step into where I could see them). QuakeIII is the best pure distillation of twitch gaming I've played, even though UT beat it for general fun, coolness, and prettiness. I've never really thought Half-life's story was more than adequate, but the atmosphere of its earlier levels kept me on edge for hours, and I'll never forget the first time I've had to use cover against an AI.
Halo was the first game that made me feel as though every Elite I faced was a worthy enemy, that bringing it down was an accomplishment not because it was a big nasty monster but because it was a crafty, powerful equal. Its shield system is also the first that made sense to me (sitting back from battle for a couple seconds to recharge works a lot better than searching for randomly scattered health packs), and it places a big emphasis on concentrated firepower rather than slowly scratching an enemy into oblivion. And the grenades... I still in every game I play keep hitting my second mouse button just hoping I could throw a grenade at something.
So, no, it's not the holy grail of games, but I'm definitely looking forward to playing it, along with Half-life 2 and GTA san andreas.
Yeah, interface is all about preference. Personally, I agree with you, but I've been using macs as my preferred platform for years.
I don't think it's mostly about the graphical interface, though. It's more the command line stuff, and the programs you're used to having. Sure, a lot of them are available for OS X, but not all, and often not in quite as nice of a form, or the configuration files being where you're used to them, and working how you want. I'd say it's the same reason people prefer Linux's various interfaces over windows. I honestly don't think Gnome or KDE is even as polished as windows, but they aren't the entirety of the interface. That way you interact with the machine on the command line and configuration files are part of it, too.
That said, clustering and fitting the machine into your existing server network are two other reasons. I'd bet that you can get a version of linux that'll make that G5 run certain tasks faster than OS X does. In that case, interface doesn't really matter, as long as you can set it up to begin with. OS X isn't as specifically at scientific applications as some versions of PPC linux.
1) It's an old mac that barely runs OS X. If you stick a fresh copy of Gentoo on it, especially with a minimalistic window manager, you can get much better responsiveness than on X. I believe it's pretty much the only way to get smooth DivX video on a G3 400 mhz and lower (and even then, you have to play a bit). This also comes into play in a server situation, when you don't need all the niceness of OS X, just some speed and stability.
2) It's what you're familiar with. Sure, OS X is BSD-based and has a nice interface, but it does handle some of the configuration differently from whatever version of linux you might be used to. There's also the concern that not all *nix apps build for OS X, or build easily even if they do. Portage, I know, is one tool that one of my Linux-on-mac using friends refuses to do without. There's also the issues that some people prefer a very minimalistic window manager, which you can *do* on top of OS X, through X11, but you lose most of the speed advantages of doing so.
So, in short, there are some very specific reasons that a very linux-ie person might like to run that on their new ibook or G5 instead of OSX.
Lets you set the trackpad to one button and the button to another. Also supports scrolling areas and hot corners on the pad. I haven't had any problems with it.
Seriously. Computer gamers (especially FPS and RTS gamers, like the high school me) look down on D&D players the same way that "normal" people look down on us, and D&D nerds look down on LARPers.
My "real life" friends in high school were much to "cool" to play video games or D&D, so I never knew anyone who played the game. I met my girlfriend in college, and since she's introduced me to all her friends from high school with whom she used to play, and with whom we now play.
I realize my fortune; I'm dating a very cute girl who is a CSE major and like gaming. And the ink's barely dry on my deal with the devil.
There's a Sony outlet store in a mall out in the middle of nowhere in Ohio. I don't know if this counts as the same thing, but it's Sony branded and sells only sony products.
Its prices suck, and it only carries the major products (ie, I couldn't get the cable I needed for my sony video camera there), but it was technically a Sony retail store.
For some things (like games) this makes a lot of sense. Most of your interface is proprietary anyway to match the theme of the game, and isn't the focus of the application.
However, for generelized productivity applications, the whole reason I use a mac is for the consistency between applications. If you write a program that doesn't use the OS-specific calls for the interface, I'm not going to use it unless there's absolutely nothing competing with it. It's just too annoying.
However, using open libraries for everything but the interface is definitely a positive, especially since the interface should only be a couple day's worth of playing around with Interface builder or equivalent for each platform.
They'll buy them because the rio karm and dell jukebox because they want an "Ipod."
The whole "genericized trademark" issue is getting really annoying, especially because it actually matters a little bit here (ie, tech support doesn't become more difficult when people are using tissues instead of kleenex).
You jest, but I just had to go from a SPARC (risc) programming course to an EE course on the Motorola 68HC11 (cisc). I SO miss the consistent naming of the risc instructions, and I'm having to completely rethink all of my logic as a result of only really having two registers to play with.
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I've been using one of those for a while.
Rounding down makes the G4 tibook 666.6666 sound SO much cooler.
I already have one of those.
Round down makes the G4 666.66666 tibook sound sooooooo much cooler.
I scored slightly below average in all of my motor-skills tests. No one ever told me to stay out of varsity sports, I just had to work a little harder.
Whether this study is BS or not doesn't change the fact that the first step to dealing with a deficiency is to identify it.
I'm sure they *could* fit it into a laptop, but could they fit into the aluminum powerbook?
No one would buy a G5 laptop if it had the form factor and battery life of an alienware.
I love how many Marathon references there are in Ambrosia games. You can tell what they play when they aren't developing :)
FYI, they've ported EV: Nova to PC now, and have made plugins to play the original two in EV:Nova. So whether you get the chicks or not, you can play EV on your PC.
I can't find the numbers anywhere, but I think the Marathon series sold somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 units. Not that great compared to most blockbuster games out there (Halo 2 did that in what, the first hour of release) but at least a few people got to play it :)
I used to use Camino exclusively, right before development pretty much stalled on it.
I've been considering trying it again now that I've heard it's being actively worked on, except I really don't have any complaints with safari that aren't present in camino and firefox as well. Well, ok, I'm not a huge fan of brushed metal, but the buttons are still where I expect them to be, so.. *shrug*
I want iCab on OS X to not suck. either that or for someone to write a plugin adding all their extra page options to firefox.
I won't argue with you about the need to install third-party product... but how is this a negative again?
I assume that I'm buying a computer to run third-party software. I don't expect apple to come up with the best solution for every software I need.
The thing that really makes the mac (and that people tend to overlook) is the consistancy of the good aqua UI between mac apps. This is enforced both by the Cocoa tools that make making a UI that conforms to these standards quite easy (Interface builder throws up guides when interface objects are the recommended distance from each other, for crying out loud) and the hordes of mac users who will REFUSE TO USE A PRODUCT if it doesn't comply.
Its why Omniweb was the mac OS X browser before safari came out, because it was the most maclike. I love firefox, but I used to hate using it on the mac because, to preserve cross-platform uniformity, it didn't *feel* like a mac app.
It's the consistencies in the third party apps (like "Install/Uninstall" instead of "Yes, no, cancel" in their dialog boxes) that are why I use a mac, and did long before apple started coming out with their iStuff.
Is more toward the portable than my desktop.
My desktop has a nice keyboard that I'm quite accustomed to using. As a general rule I can type almost as fast as I can talk, and generally faster than I can think of what to say. Definitely faster than any speech recognition software I've used.
However, my iPod and palm *don't* have nice keyboards. If I could tell my palm to take a note, write down someone's phone number and email, or just start dictating my thoughts, and have it end up in my contacts ready to be synced... well, that'd be pretty nice.
Until then, it's just a novelty to me.
Last I checked, areas that actually *are* that desperately poor (certain areas of Appalachia, for instance) don't really have that much in the way of building codes, from what I've seen. At least, if they do, they sure as hell aren't enforced.
Apologies -
This reply should have been to the parent.
If you live in the US and are healthy enough to build your own house, why are you so poor that you can't afford basic prefab construction. if you have the skills to build something yourself that's better than cheap prefab, why aren't you working in construction and making enough money to make yourself something better.
The jobs are there here. I've lived "below the poverty line" by our government's standards, and we still managed to afford a house, you just can't live in an area where the property values are sky-high.
If you can build your own house, go build houses for a contractor, or stack boxes for fedex, or work for a farmer, or a million other jobs that pay well enough to survive on and afford a small place that I could get just by walking up to them.
Those jobs don't exist in some areas? Move. That's the only way it's going to change. Being able to build your own cob house isn't going to put food into it.
It's a very effective solution for parts of the world where these jobs don't exist, and economies are such that a farmer can bring in his whole crop and still barely be able to eat (although if you can farm, you can subsist, as my grandparent's stories from the great depression tell me), but in the US that just doesn't cut it.
It's putting a bandaid on a bullet wound - if you have the ability to make yourself a crap house, you shouldn't need to.
Agreed.
Generally it isn't the actual building codes that say you can't build a shack in your backyard (or well, sometimes they do, but how often does an inspector just wander around to your house?) but your neighbors.
Can be built cheaply, yes. Can be built well cheaply? Maybe.
The damn shame of things is that it's almost impossible to nicely made small house, sell it, and make a profit at it.
I've worked on a residential construction crew for two years, and it's the honest truth that it only take an extra half a week to frame a $200k house over what it takes for a $100k house, and 100k isn't even cheap yet. Maybe a week more than it'd take for a "cheap" $35k or $25k house. And you're still buying the same lumber, because anything cheaper than OSB sheathing won't last, and you don't put better than that on a house less than $1million.
It still takes basically one day for a good roofing crew to shingle it. They won't be there all day, but they spend most of their time setting up for it anyway.
Digging the foundation is still at least 2/3rd of the cost. As is the blockwork.
Similar logic applies for heating, plumbing, electricity, drywall, etc. No matter how simple you make the trim, you've still got to install it on the whole house. You're also going to need a water heater, a furnace, and a sewer and water hookup. The simple fact of the matter is that to do things *right* in building a house, there are a large number of "constants" in the cost equation that make building smaller houses have dramatically limitted returns.
So you get to the end of the project. You've spent maybe two months on it, maybe three because they didn't get your last door in until a week late and they were out of the bathtub you picked, and oh, the plumbers couldn't work for a week because plumbers are always busy. And now you have to put the thing on the market and try to sell it at enough of a profit that you, the contractor, have something to show for all of this after you pay off all the subs and/or employees who did this work.
But you can only really mark it up a few percentage points, or it'll be *way* overpriced. So you maybe made yourself $1-2k dollars on this two-month project so that some low-income family can have a house that will last.
Or you can spend that same two months building some $500k monstrosity on a golf course and earning over $20k on it. Guess which option anyone with the brains to build a house properly (and believe me, it does take brains, sweat, and strong knowledge and attention to detail) is going to take?
It's the same as low-end computers - you *can* get cheap and good, but only if you build it yourself. Otherwise you get to pick between expensive but quality (assuming you choose the right vendor and don't just get hustled) and cheap shite. Only in the housing case, you've just mortgaged your soul to buy the cheapness.
That still misses the point that mp3 player interfaces are so horrible in general that iTunes for PC, as much of a memory hog as it is, blows them completely out of the water.
I've never bought a single song from the iTunes store, but I've been using the player since it came out. Sound Jam was really nice to use, and iTunes is a reasonable facsimile of it, in some ways even a bit easier.
Anyone who thinks winamp's interface is nice needs to be shot. Sure, it has some nice functions, but crappy, unreadable skinnability is *not* what I look for in an mp3 player. I want something that, you know, makes it easy to find/listen to my mp3's.
I wonder how many they actually bought to market.
I read about it on their website, and a friend of mine was all set to buy one, but we couldn't find a vendor at the time. None of the normal aopen carriers seemed to have it, and google just turned up preview links.
I am so sick of this "console players have different standards" bullshit. I play FPS on pc, have been doing so since wolfenstein, and I *still* think Halo PC did some really great little innovations to play.
It's as simple as two things; the recharging shield and grenades. Those two articles give halo a completely different rhythm than any other fps I've played, and it's a rhythm that *works.*
Some of the levels suck. personally, I've found that nearly every fps kind of bogs down toward the middle (Unreal, every id games levels have blown through the entire game, even half-life kind of sucked once you got stuck in the alien areas). Halo was far from perfect, but I think that there's a huge desire to bring it down just because it's *so* huge on the console. The reason it wasn't a big deal on PC was because by the time it was released, it was YEARS out of date. We had Far Cry by then, which did some wonderful things (and had it's own crappy moments; aka, almost everyone after the major plot twist) which beat it in graphics and was at least as good in AI. And we had Battlefield, with the massive outdoor battles that halo was originally supposed to be.
I'm not saying OMG BEST GASME EVEH about Halo, but you have to appreciate the things any game does right. Doom 3, for all that its levels bored me after an hour, had some really cool uses of lighting (I've never before set ambushes around a lone light bulb, waiting desperately for the creeping things to step into where I could see them). QuakeIII is the best pure distillation of twitch gaming I've played, even though UT beat it for general fun, coolness, and prettiness. I've never really thought Half-life's story was more than adequate, but the atmosphere of its earlier levels kept me on edge for hours, and I'll never forget the first time I've had to use cover against an AI.
Halo was the first game that made me feel as though every Elite I faced was a worthy enemy, that bringing it down was an accomplishment not because it was a big nasty monster but because it was a crafty, powerful equal. Its shield system is also the first that made sense to me (sitting back from battle for a couple seconds to recharge works a lot better than searching for randomly scattered health packs), and it places a big emphasis on concentrated firepower rather than slowly scratching an enemy into oblivion. And the grenades... I still in every game I play keep hitting my second mouse button just hoping I could throw a grenade at something.
So, no, it's not the holy grail of games, but I'm definitely looking forward to playing it, along with Half-life 2 and GTA san andreas.
Yeah, interface is all about preference. Personally, I agree with you, but I've been using macs as my preferred platform for years.
I don't think it's mostly about the graphical interface, though. It's more the command line stuff, and the programs you're used to having. Sure, a lot of them are available for OS X, but not all, and often not in quite as nice of a form, or the configuration files being where you're used to them, and working how you want. I'd say it's the same reason people prefer Linux's various interfaces over windows. I honestly don't think Gnome or KDE is even as polished as windows, but they aren't the entirety of the interface. That way you interact with the machine on the command line and configuration files are part of it, too.
That said, clustering and fitting the machine into your existing server network are two other reasons. I'd bet that you can get a version of linux that'll make that G5 run certain tasks faster than OS X does. In that case, interface doesn't really matter, as long as you can set it up to begin with. OS X isn't as specifically at scientific applications as some versions of PPC linux.
There are a few reasons.
1) It's an old mac that barely runs OS X. If you stick a fresh copy of Gentoo on it, especially with a minimalistic window manager, you can get much better responsiveness than on X. I believe it's pretty much the only way to get smooth DivX video on a G3 400 mhz and lower (and even then, you have to play a bit). This also comes into play in a server situation, when you don't need all the niceness of OS X, just some speed and stability.
2) It's what you're familiar with. Sure, OS X is BSD-based and has a nice interface, but it does handle some of the configuration differently from whatever version of linux you might be used to. There's also the concern that not all *nix apps build for OS X, or build easily even if they do. Portage, I know, is one tool that one of my Linux-on-mac using friends refuses to do without. There's also the issues that some people prefer a very minimalistic window manager, which you can *do* on top of OS X, through X11, but you lose most of the speed advantages of doing so.
So, in short, there are some very specific reasons that a very linux-ie person might like to run that on their new ibook or G5 instead of OSX.
Stop bitching and google.
http://www.ragingmenace.com/software/sidetrack/
Lets you set the trackpad to one button and the button to another. Also supports scrolling areas and hot corners on the pad. I haven't had any problems with it.
Haha.
Seriously. Computer gamers (especially FPS and RTS gamers, like the high school me) look down on D&D players the same way that "normal" people look down on us, and D&D nerds look down on LARPers.
My "real life" friends in high school were much to "cool" to play video games or D&D, so I never knew anyone who played the game. I met my girlfriend in college, and since she's introduced me to all her friends from high school with whom she used to play, and with whom we now play.
I realize my fortune; I'm dating a very cute girl who is a CSE major and like gaming. And the ink's barely dry on my deal with the devil.
There's a Sony outlet store in a mall out in the middle of nowhere in Ohio. I don't know if this counts as the same thing, but it's Sony branded and sells only sony products.
Its prices suck, and it only carries the major products (ie, I couldn't get the cable I needed for my sony video camera there), but it was technically a Sony retail store.
Yeah, this doesn't seem like new to me at all.
For some things (like games) this makes a lot of sense. Most of your interface is proprietary anyway to match the theme of the game, and isn't the focus of the application.
However, for generelized productivity applications, the whole reason I use a mac is for the consistency between applications. If you write a program that doesn't use the OS-specific calls for the interface, I'm not going to use it unless there's absolutely nothing competing with it. It's just too annoying.
However, using open libraries for everything but the interface is definitely a positive, especially since the interface should only be a couple day's worth of playing around with Interface builder or equivalent for each platform.
They'll buy them because the rio karm and dell jukebox because they want an "Ipod."
The whole "genericized trademark" issue is getting really annoying, especially because it actually matters a little bit here (ie, tech support doesn't become more difficult when people are using tissues instead of kleenex).
You jest, but I just had to go from a SPARC (risc) programming course to an EE course on the Motorola 68HC11 (cisc). I SO miss the consistent naming of the risc instructions, and I'm having to completely rethink all of my logic as a result of only really having two registers to play with.