Yeah, I don't either. I was definitely flaming a bit there. I was mostly annoyed by this constant issue brought up mostly out of ignorance. Gaming is better on PC, I won't deny it. However, any mac user who wants to game does, and constantly. All it takes is buying games online instead of at best buy (which I do for my PC anyway).
And the other replies are right; thousands is an exaggeration. Dozens easily, possibly hundreds. How many different games do people need to play?
Most PC users I know warez most of their games, playing them for a day or two before deleting. Then they have a few favorites that they keep coming back to to play over and over. Well, mac has most of those favorites. Personally I'd rather find another game like Myth that I can just love for a few months than play halfway through another five bad first person shooters and two ripoff RTS games. It's a simple fact that I, as a self-proclaimed hardcore gamer, have never run out of games to play on my Mac. There are games I wish I could get but can't, but then.. I wish I could play Halo 2 on my playsation 2, and that's never going to happen, either.
This is why I honestly think that a television miniseries is a much better format for an epic than a movie, or series of movies, can ever be. I could pull a million examples out of anime of a depth of character development and plot that you just can't get in three hours, but I've got a better one.
How many people remember Band of Brothers? It was an HBO miniseries about world war II that came out right after Saving Private Ryan, done by the same director and such. Comparing the two, Saving Private Ryan is much more famous, but I love BoB much more. Because the director now has ten hours to work with, you can develop more characteres in greater depth, and explore different aspects of the message of the war. You don't have a holocaust movie or a D-Day movie, you have a sense of the whole breadth of the war. I highly recomend it if you haven't seen it already.
Best of all, it's in hour-long segments that you don't have a wait a year between the release of. Much easier on the bladder, and significantly easier to maintain interest.
I wish that more epics would be released in the States that really used that format, instead or relegating television shows to completely self-contained stories with only slight continuity. It's amazing how much better a series gets when you can look at it as a whole and see the story arc. The only shows that really attempt that these days are soap operas.... it'd be nice if someone did something *good* with the format.
Hey,
I agree with your point, but just thought I'd let you know that there are better options than you think in older macs.
http://www.powermax.com/
For instance. There's a G4 on the front page right now that'd do any development short of the newest graphics for 700, running OS X out of the box. and I've seen much better deals.
If you're serious about picking up a mac cheaply, get a macaddict or a macworld and look through the adverts at the end of it. It's definitely possible to get a mac that will run OS X perfectly well for under $500. I agree that I could build my own development PC that's probably twice as fast for that cost, but... well, actually I did. I use it for gaming; work gets done on my powerbook.
There are more games available for mac than you can ever play in one lifetime.
Yes, you can't build an awesome gaming rig for a cheap, and there are some games that will never make it over. Likewise, you will never be able to play Halo on PS2.
However, thousands of games are ported/written for mac every year, and while the video cards in most macs aren't anything to brag about compared to PC, they'll still play every game that comes out for them.
No, not breakout, or even super-breakout. I'm talking Halo, Unreal Tournament 2k4, Battlefield 1942, Age of Empires II, Dungeon Siege, etc, etc, etc. No, you can't play Counterstrike, but there's a lot more to gaming than CS.
Gah. Yes, buying a mac to do nothing but play games is stupid. However, "I like to play games" is *not* a good reason to not get a mac if the rest of your computing experience is at least as important.
Re:Macintosh needs to go back to the future.
on
Apple Delays New iMac
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I know all of one person who is not a CSE who has opened their computer to upgrade it. I know one more who has paid the cost of a new computer to upgrade theirs (when it made no sense).
No one else's has ever been opened unless I was visiting and wanted a peek inside.
And remember; you can't upgrade PCI or video in an imac. Aside from that, they're about as expandable as one of the towers, and they come with anything a *normal* user (ie, someone who doesn't play FPS or need SATA RAID) would need built-in.
But see, that's the point. The idea isn't new; Appletalk did this more than ten years ago. It was great for home networks; you just turned it on and were connected, but the overhead was awful. So awful that if you tried to set it up on a corporate network, you had to divide your network into appletalk zones, and even doing that the network could get bogged down just with the configuration overhead.
The thing that makes zeroconf (Rendezvous) so awesome is that it does it with a negligible increase in traffic over the existing network protocols (TCP/IP).
We had an old V8 dump truck at work that got horrid gas mileage; about 3 miles to the gallon if we were lucky. It had a small tank, too, so you'd have to fill up about two-three times a day.
One day I went the entire day without needing a fill-up. It turns out that V8 gets great gas mileage when it's only running on 4 cylinders.:) The "mechanic" who worked on it didn't quite install the spark plugs properly.
It's definitely enjoyable to use, and I don't feel like I got ripped off. Just because someone can make something cheaper does mean that the iPod's a bad value, just possibly not the best.
Of course they should be prosecuted. However, 3 years of prison for $20 worth of crime is ridiculous and just an extra stupid burden on our justice system.
I second the recommendation of the Lego Mindstorms controller. It's about the best simple controller you can find around for a stupid robot like this.
I will tell you, though; this project will be way more trouble than it's actually *worth*. My freshman year at OSU, we spent a quarter making smaller robots to do a similar task. Just getting something like that to drive straight under computer guidance is a bit of a challenge, although there are methods to doing so that you'll know if you've studied feedback signals. The most important thing to remember is that you can get very complex behaviors out of stupid code. Use distance and bump sensors and have the robot feel its way around the yard without actually knowing where it is. That's the only way it'll find it way short of a massive system and crazy AI/cameras on the whole thing. It's the only way NASA is able to make the martian rovers do anything.
You'll need sensors for basic navigation and distance checking. You'll need very sensitive bump sensors around the entire thing, in addition to any sort of IR setup you want to try.
You can get basic robot that will eventually do the entire lawn and not mow over anything hard with some pretty simple bump-sensor programming. Getting something that will mow a nice line is only somewhat more difficult, assuming you have driving straight and turning accurately figured out. Then, since you're just mowing your own lawn, you can program exact numbers and have it navigate the path as a series of steps.
The biggest issue will be safety, of people and flowers, as some things that would be dangerous to run over probably won't trigger a bump or even IR sensor. If you just wanted something to mow a lawn with a fence around it and maybe a few posts or something, I'd say I could probably build it for you. It's dealing with more variables that makes this a difficult problem.
As for motor recommendations, drill motors and old window lift motors are very good for these sorts of projects. Drill motors are about as strong as you'll find in their size (and generally, if you pull them off a drill, come with a very nice drill gearbox already), and window-lift motors are worm-driven, so they have a lot of slow torque with no back-driving. They're also fairly cheap.
The only technical examples I can think of for reference for this are battle bots and the FIRST engineering robot competition. Check out The Chief Delphi FIRST Team's website for good information about building robots of about this size.
Good luck. From my personal experience, I'd say it's a very large task to be considered just "interesting" for one guy, but it would be kind of cool to see.
Regardless, it's a significant added cost that gives a would make people like it better, but not directly move more sales.
I would do it, since I think that making a better product that does more things for people will result in better sales overall and have the indirect consequences you describe. I don't think that's necessarily been Microsoft's policy, though, especially when the extra feature comes at such significant difficulty.
In short, it's a hard feature to add for no direct benefit. It has a possible long-term indirect benefit of making people like their console more, but they didn't feel that that justified the direct cost and difficulty. So, they made up a study to make themselves seem right.
What we're all forgetting is that, while we all love buying old PS1 games to play on our Playstation, Sony doesn't make any money off a used copy of Final Fantasy VII.
They also don't make any money off the console, especially not at launch. It's common knowledge that consoles are sold at very low margins, sometimes none at all, for the manufacturer. They are priced to capture the market, which is then exploited by the $50 video games one buys for the console.
So Microsoft gains no direct, and almost no indirect advantage by including costly and difficult backwards compatibility in the XBox2. While it would add customer goodwill and possibly increase the value of their product, it doesn't translate into hard profits, and so when they make up a study to justify their marketing decisions, of course it isn't important.
The polycarb that the CD's are made out of starts to deform at high speed. Even if it were perfectly balanced to begin with, if you spun it faster than 52x for a little while, it wouldn't be any more.
Eventually the stress from the deformation becomes too much and they explode.
I remember a study where they put a teflon wire on the outside of the cd. The polycarb warped around the wire at high speed.
So, in short, it'll take a bit more re-engineering than that to get higher rpm's out of CD's.
I downloaded all the files for these tests, and to be honest, on my admittably very average set of computer speakers, I could hear no discernible difference between ANY of the codecs and the source.
I find this very strange, since I *know* that I have heard significant differences between 128kbps and source with downloaded mp3's. This begs the question; how much of mp3's general crappiness is due not to the codec itself, but to the incompetence of the person making the original encoding?
Or maybe I'm just going deaf. It still bothers me, though, that I honestly heard no difference in the samples, and I've worked as a sound technician before!
Out of curiousity, why use the iTunes encoder for the 128 kb files when you have a higher quality professional codec available. I was under the impression that iTunes, while perfectly fine for the average consumer, wasn't exactly the best encoder for high quality distributable work.
This isn't really a crack, as you have to have the legal rights to those files to be able to crack them in the first place.
A useful crack would be to strip the DRM off of someone else's files that you had downloaded. This only allows you to go through a lot of effort in order to distribute the files you obtained legally in the first place. It's not really useful enough to say that iTune's DRM has been "cracked."
I've got an easier crack; burn the tracks to cd and play those in another computer. Or if you want to get fancy, capture the stream from CoreAudio with something like Audio Hijack. These only lose you quality if you feel like reencoding them in something else lossy.
They're just pretty darn nice earbuds. Not amazing, but hey, I just spent $300 on a music device that comes with good earbuds. I don't see any reason to spend another $100 on a set that *might* be better.
The whole mugging incident is because they're distinctive, as the ipod's the only music system that comes with white earpuds.
I didn't say that other firewalls were perfect, nor did I even mention RealSecure or Proventia. I have no knowledge of them, I admit. Although, I'm not sure I'd want to trust the quality of anything coming out of Rea. I had a friend who interned there and thereafter refused to buy anything they made.
I do know that a few years ago Black ICE provided no protection against trojans and imperfect protection against outside attacks. I also know that an update released that supposedly "fixed" the trojan vulnerability did, in fact, change nothing about the way that Black ICE handled trojan programs. This was, of course, after they had been notifified of their programs vulnerability. I don't know if they have fixed these yet or not; I was just unsurprised that they had an unpatched vulnerability which was exploitable.
The major targetted firewall of this worm, Black ICE Defender, has been shown on multiple occasions to do a very poor job of actually protecting a system from attack, either by an outside worm or an internet trojan. So, while the users may have been concerned about their security, they were not, apparently, concerned enough to research before buying their security products.
Read Gibson's report of the DDOS on his website, and you'll have a completely different view of the possible reach of a 17-year-old in our current times of insecure computing.
http://www.grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm
In short, anyone with basic scripting knowledge and some time can create a reasonably-sized network (of a few hundred system, at least) of remote-controlled "bots" or zombies, generally home users on cable modems. Quickly-propagating worms are more easily come by. It doesn't take much to add a "delete IMPORTANTFILE.SYS" to one of those.
It takes even less effort to then combine the two.
While this action may appear to require large-scale planning and intent, it can accomplished fairly easily by one kid with issues and a bit of time to work on it. Not to say that it *isn't* an easy way for cyber-terrorists to strike (if a kid can do it well, a trained terrorist could probably add something more interesting), but it is definitely within the reach of an oddball kid.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I don't either. I was definitely flaming a bit there. I was mostly annoyed by this constant issue brought up mostly out of ignorance. Gaming is better on PC, I won't deny it. However, any mac user who wants to game does, and constantly. All it takes is buying games online instead of at best buy (which I do for my PC anyway).
And the other replies are right; thousands is an exaggeration. Dozens easily, possibly hundreds. How many different games do people need to play?
Most PC users I know warez most of their games, playing them for a day or two before deleting. Then they have a few favorites that they keep coming back to to play over and over. Well, mac has most of those favorites. Personally I'd rather find another game like Myth that I can just love for a few months than play halfway through another five bad first person shooters and two ripoff RTS games. It's a simple fact that I, as a self-proclaimed hardcore gamer, have never run out of games to play on my Mac. There are games I wish I could get but can't, but then.. I wish I could play Halo 2 on my playsation 2, and that's never going to happen, either.
That's what my college roommates said. Then they refused to play games with me because they were tired of losing to the guy on the mac.
There are serious mac gamers. I was one through all of high school.
macgamersledge.com
This is why I honestly think that a television miniseries is a much better format for an epic than a movie, or series of movies, can ever be. I could pull a million examples out of anime of a depth of character development and plot that you just can't get in three hours, but I've got a better one.
How many people remember Band of Brothers? It was an HBO miniseries about world war II that came out right after Saving Private Ryan, done by the same director and such. Comparing the two, Saving Private Ryan is much more famous, but I love BoB much more. Because the director now has ten hours to work with, you can develop more characteres in greater depth, and explore different aspects of the message of the war. You don't have a holocaust movie or a D-Day movie, you have a sense of the whole breadth of the war. I highly recomend it if you haven't seen it already.
Best of all, it's in hour-long segments that you don't have a wait a year between the release of. Much easier on the bladder, and significantly easier to maintain interest.
I wish that more epics would be released in the States that really used that format, instead or relegating television shows to completely self-contained stories with only slight continuity. It's amazing how much better a series gets when you can look at it as a whole and see the story arc. The only shows that really attempt that these days are soap operas.... it'd be nice if someone did something *good* with the format.
Hey, I agree with your point, but just thought I'd let you know that there are better options than you think in older macs. http://www.powermax.com/ For instance. There's a G4 on the front page right now that'd do any development short of the newest graphics for 700, running OS X out of the box. and I've seen much better deals. If you're serious about picking up a mac cheaply, get a macaddict or a macworld and look through the adverts at the end of it. It's definitely possible to get a mac that will run OS X perfectly well for under $500. I agree that I could build my own development PC that's probably twice as fast for that cost, but... well, actually I did. I use it for gaming; work gets done on my powerbook.
For the last time:
There are more games available for mac than you can ever play in one lifetime.
Yes, you can't build an awesome gaming rig for a cheap, and there are some games that will never make it over. Likewise, you will never be able to play Halo on PS2.
However, thousands of games are ported/written for mac every year, and while the video cards in most macs aren't anything to brag about compared to PC, they'll still play every game that comes out for them.
No, not breakout, or even super-breakout. I'm talking Halo, Unreal Tournament 2k4, Battlefield 1942, Age of Empires II, Dungeon Siege, etc, etc, etc. No, you can't play Counterstrike, but there's a lot more to gaming than CS.
Gah. Yes, buying a mac to do nothing but play games is stupid. However, "I like to play games" is *not* a good reason to not get a mac if the rest of your computing experience is at least as important.
I know all of one person who is not a CSE who has opened their computer to upgrade it. I know one more who has paid the cost of a new computer to upgrade theirs (when it made no sense).
No one else's has ever been opened unless I was visiting and wanted a peek inside.
And remember; you can't upgrade PCI or video in an imac. Aside from that, they're about as expandable as one of the towers, and they come with anything a *normal* user (ie, someone who doesn't play FPS or need SATA RAID) would need built-in.
But see, that's the point. The idea isn't new; Appletalk did this more than ten years ago. It was great for home networks; you just turned it on and were connected, but the overhead was awful. So awful that if you tried to set it up on a corporate network, you had to divide your network into appletalk zones, and even doing that the network could get bogged down just with the configuration overhead.
The thing that makes zeroconf (Rendezvous) so awesome is that it does it with a negligible increase in traffic over the existing network protocols (TCP/IP).
As an example.
:) The "mechanic" who worked on it didn't quite install the spark plugs properly.
We had an old V8 dump truck at work that got horrid gas mileage; about 3 miles to the gallon if we were lucky. It had a small tank, too, so you'd have to fill up about two-three times a day.
One day I went the entire day without needing a fill-up. It turns out that V8 gets great gas mileage when it's only running on 4 cylinders.
So go buy one and stop bitching.
It's definitely enjoyable to use, and I don't feel like I got ripped off. Just because someone can make something cheaper does mean that the iPod's a bad value, just possibly not the best.
Guess it depends on your TA's.
The ones in my last class were fat, evil bastards who stayed up late at night thinking of ways to break our project. But it held. By God, it held.
Still, their nastiness made me create some of the best-written code I'd ever done.
Of course they should be prosecuted. However, 3 years of prison for $20 worth of crime is ridiculous and just an extra stupid burden on our justice system.
I second the recommendation of the Lego Mindstorms controller. It's about the best simple controller you can find around for a stupid robot like this.
I will tell you, though; this project will be way more trouble than it's actually *worth*. My freshman year at OSU, we spent a quarter making smaller robots to do a similar task. Just getting something like that to drive straight under computer guidance is a bit of a challenge, although there are methods to doing so that you'll know if you've studied feedback signals. The most important thing to remember is that you can get very complex behaviors out of stupid code. Use distance and bump sensors and have the robot feel its way around the yard without actually knowing where it is. That's the only way it'll find it way short of a massive system and crazy AI/cameras on the whole thing. It's the only way NASA is able to make the martian rovers do anything.
You'll need sensors for basic navigation and distance checking. You'll need very sensitive bump sensors around the entire thing, in addition to any sort of IR setup you want to try.
You can get basic robot that will eventually do the entire lawn and not mow over anything hard with some pretty simple bump-sensor programming. Getting something that will mow a nice line is only somewhat more difficult, assuming you have driving straight and turning accurately figured out. Then, since you're just mowing your own lawn, you can program exact numbers and have it navigate the path as a series of steps.
The biggest issue will be safety, of people and flowers, as some things that would be dangerous to run over probably won't trigger a bump or even IR sensor. If you just wanted something to mow a lawn with a fence around it and maybe a few posts or something, I'd say I could probably build it for you. It's dealing with more variables that makes this a difficult problem.
As for motor recommendations, drill motors and old window lift motors are very good for these sorts of projects. Drill motors are about as strong as you'll find in their size (and generally, if you pull them off a drill, come with a very nice drill gearbox already), and window-lift motors are worm-driven, so they have a lot of slow torque with no back-driving. They're also fairly cheap.
The only technical examples I can think of for reference for this are battle bots and the FIRST engineering robot competition. Check out The Chief Delphi FIRST Team's website for good information about building robots of about this size.
Good luck. From my personal experience, I'd say it's a very large task to be considered just "interesting" for one guy, but it would be kind of cool to see.
Regardless, it's a significant added cost that gives a would make people like it better, but not directly move more sales.
I would do it, since I think that making a better product that does more things for people will result in better sales overall and have the indirect consequences you describe. I don't think that's necessarily been Microsoft's policy, though, especially when the extra feature comes at such significant difficulty.
In short, it's a hard feature to add for no direct benefit. It has a possible long-term indirect benefit of making people like their console more, but they didn't feel that that justified the direct cost and difficulty. So, they made up a study to make themselves seem right.
What we're all forgetting is that, while we all love buying old PS1 games to play on our Playstation, Sony doesn't make any money off a used copy of Final Fantasy VII.
They also don't make any money off the console, especially not at launch. It's common knowledge that consoles are sold at very low margins, sometimes none at all, for the manufacturer. They are priced to capture the market, which is then exploited by the $50 video games one buys for the console.
So Microsoft gains no direct, and almost no indirect advantage by including costly and difficult backwards compatibility in the XBox2. While it would add customer goodwill and possibly increase the value of their product, it doesn't translate into hard profits, and so when they make up a study to justify their marketing decisions, of course it isn't important.
No, obviously now it's:
1) fetch packages
2) compile
3) ???
4) !PROFIT
The polycarb that the CD's are made out of starts to deform at high speed. Even if it were perfectly balanced to begin with, if you spun it faster than 52x for a little while, it wouldn't be any more.
Eventually the stress from the deformation becomes too much and they explode.
I remember a study where they put a teflon wire on the outside of the cd. The polycarb warped around the wire at high speed.
So, in short, it'll take a bit more re-engineering than that to get higher rpm's out of CD's.
I downloaded all the files for these tests, and to be honest, on my admittably very average set of computer speakers, I could hear no discernible difference between ANY of the codecs and the source.
I find this very strange, since I *know* that I have heard significant differences between 128kbps and source with downloaded mp3's. This begs the question; how much of mp3's general crappiness is due not to the codec itself, but to the incompetence of the person making the original encoding?
Or maybe I'm just going deaf. It still bothers me, though, that I honestly heard no difference in the samples, and I've worked as a sound technician before!
Out of curiousity, why use the iTunes encoder for the 128 kb files when you have a higher quality professional codec available. I was under the impression that iTunes, while perfectly fine for the average consumer, wasn't exactly the best encoder for high quality distributable work.
Apple sells the albums for the price that the artist decides to sell them at.
They strongly recommend that all normal albums cost $10, but if the artist wants to sell it for $15, that's what it's going to sell at.
Of course.
Even if they were open source, they still make (mostly) inferior products. They also, through use their monopoly illegally to remove competition.
If Red Hat and Gentoo were the same position, doing the same things, I'd probably hate them, too.
This isn't really a crack, as you have to have the legal rights to those files to be able to crack them in the first place.
A useful crack would be to strip the DRM off of someone else's files that you had downloaded. This only allows you to go through a lot of effort in order to distribute the files you obtained legally in the first place. It's not really useful enough to say that iTune's DRM has been "cracked."
I've got an easier crack; burn the tracks to cd and play those in another computer. Or if you want to get fancy, capture the stream from CoreAudio with something like Audio Hijack. These only lose you quality if you feel like reencoding them in something else lossy.
Umm, no.
They're just pretty darn nice earbuds. Not amazing, but hey, I just spent $300 on a music device that comes with good earbuds. I don't see any reason to spend another $100 on a set that *might* be better.
The whole mugging incident is because they're distinctive, as the ipod's the only music system that comes with white earpuds.
Don't read too much into this.
I didn't say that other firewalls were perfect, nor did I even mention RealSecure or Proventia. I have no knowledge of them, I admit. Although, I'm not sure I'd want to trust the quality of anything coming out of Rea. I had a friend who interned there and thereafter refused to buy anything they made.
I do know that a few years ago Black ICE provided no protection against trojans and imperfect protection against outside attacks. I also know that an update released that supposedly "fixed" the trojan vulnerability did, in fact, change nothing about the way that Black ICE handled trojan programs. This was, of course, after they had been notifified of their programs vulnerability. I don't know if they have fixed these yet or not; I was just unsurprised that they had an unpatched vulnerability which was exploitable.
The major targetted firewall of this worm, Black ICE Defender, has been shown on multiple occasions to do a very poor job of actually protecting a system from attack, either by an outside worm or an internet trojan. So, while the users may have been concerned about their security, they were not, apparently, concerned enough to research before buying their security products.
http://www.grc.com/lt/scoreboard.htm
Read Gibson's report of the DDOS on his website, and you'll have a completely different view of the possible reach of a 17-year-old in our current times of insecure computing.
http://www.grc.com/dos/grcdos.htm
In short, anyone with basic scripting knowledge and some time can create a reasonably-sized network (of a few hundred system, at least) of remote-controlled "bots" or zombies, generally home users on cable modems. Quickly-propagating worms are more easily come by. It doesn't take much to add a "delete IMPORTANTFILE.SYS" to one of those.
It takes even less effort to then combine the two.
While this action may appear to require large-scale planning and intent, it can accomplished fairly easily by one kid with issues and a bit of time to work on it. Not to say that it *isn't* an easy way for cyber-terrorists to strike (if a kid can do it well, a trained terrorist could probably add something more interesting), but it is definitely within the reach of an oddball kid.