But that doesn't mean he shouldn't be aware of how to use GIMP. It would be like a programmer who could only program if he was using Visual Studio Team Fortress Edition (or whatever it's called). I wouldn't hire a programmer who couldn't get the job done with notepad and a command line compiler. Sure the tools are available, but if you want to whip something up in an unfamiliar computing environment, you often don't have all the "professional" level tools available, so you should be able to do a pretty good job with lesser tools. Even though it's 2007 and we have laser guided mitre saws, I would still expect that a carpenter could build stuff using a mitre box and a hand saw.
The point wasn't that he couldn't figure out which one is better. The point is that buying a computer shouldn't be a research project. It's not worth your time to spend 20 hours researching specs and performance and and trying to determine if what you're seeing is factually correct or some marketing trash that's only correct under certain conditions.
What are you doing? Opening up a 150 MB XML file in that one tab? Seriously. I know Firefox has some memory problems, but that is not anything like I have ever seen. Most of the actual "leaks" i've seen involve flash and web pages that continually add stuff to the DOM with javascript and leaving them open overnight. I haven't seen many other huge memory problems. I've had Firefox open for days and have browsed to hundreds of pages and I'm still only using 132 MB.
No, what you might want to compare is on equal amounts but less quality of sugar, but all sugar is pretty much the same, so lets look at something like coffee. So you can go to Store A and get 1 KG of coffee for $5. At another store that only sells gourmet coffee, you have to pay $15 for 1KG of coffee. You're getting the same amount of coffee for a much cheaper price. However, how do you really define "amount" in buying a computer. Certainly not by weight. However, A computer is a computer, and they can all do the same thing, although some of them slower. Slower would be equivalent in the coffee world to, it's still coffee, but it doesn't taste as good as the expensive stuff.
Thanks for the tip. I (the poster) didn't even realize you could align by start date. I'm in the process of trying to compare the Wii to the PS2, but it keeps timing out when I pick PS2.
Just because I enjoy Super Monkey Ball, Mario, Zelda, Mario Party and other, does that mean I can't be a hardcore gamer? I can spend a lot of hours playing those games. Microsoft puts out a certain image to appeal to 14-25 year old males, and that's the crowd they get. However, just because you don't fit that demographic doesn't mean you can't be a hardcore gamer. Hardcore gamer is defined by how much time or money you will spend on a system, and not by which specific games you play.
Even with their 1 year release headstart, Nintendo is quickly approaching them in systems sold. It's become apparent that you can only sell so many systems to hardcore gamers, and that it's hard to sell expensive systems, even to hardcore gamers. Targetting children and families cannot be done by releasing a single game, or by releasing some peripherals which have motion sensing. It must be something that is the core of your system. Looking at the XBox 360 controller is daunting for people who aren't hardcore gamers, as is the size and look of the entire console. They're going to have a hard time turning things around for their current system. However, if they want to make a start, how about releasing a web browser. It's not like they don't already have one.
Isn't coming back just falling back to earth? How can you not have enough power to fall? Ok maybe I'm trying to be a little bit funny, but it seems like if they have enough energy to bring it up, then there should be not problem bringing it back down.
I really don't see what MS is so afraid of. MS Office is a great tool. Even if it used ODF, I think a lot of people and businesses would stick with it over OpenOffice, or any of the other alternatives. However, MS Office is too expensive for people that just want to use a word processor at home, and do some simple formatting with maybe a couple tables. They wouldn't be losing much money from these people since most of them just pirate word, use the $30 version that came with their PC, or use some alternative like OpenOffice.
Nobody is saying that MS or any other commercial company cannot produce software to read the open formats. The only thing that public standards allows is for people to use free software (or any commercial package) if they choose to. Nobody is forcing anybody to use any specific software. If the government put out everything in MS.Doc, then the only way to properly and reliably read the documents would be with MS Word. However, if they release the documents in ODF, then you could read them in OpenOffice, KOffice, MS Office, WordPerfect, and any other word processor that you might want to use. Sure some word processors don't support it yet, but it's a free and open spec to support, so if there's a market for it, and the choices are support the format or lose customers, then they choice is pretty clear.
Even if you are home theater buff who spent $2000 on an amplifier/reciever (not a lot, but more than most) and another $3000 on speakers, and $4000 on a TV, then $600 for a game console still sounds like a lot of money. Do you know why? Because the game console will be obsolete in 4 years, and they'll stop selling games. Meanwhile that amp,speakers and TV combo should probably last 10-15 years, if not longer. Not only that, seeing the low sales of the PS3 from the start makes people thing that it will end up being the next dream cast or neo geo, which means that they will have completely wasted $600. And even with the blue-ray player, who says that's going to be existent if 3-4 years.
The problem is finding a game for XBox 360 or PS3 that everyone would like to have. Wii Sports fits the definition as something that everyone wants to play. Plus Wii sports was a cheap-to-produce tech demo that isn't worth much on it's own. If MS an Sony start to include free games, then they'll probably have to have a couple different options to please everyone, And it will lower their profits because nobody will be buying that first game at $60.
The competition needs to do something to beat Nintendo. If you look at the charts, you'll see that Nintendo has sold more consoles in 6 months than Xbox360 sold in it's first year as the lone player. Also, it looks like they will surpass Xbox360 within 6 more months. And the PS3 looks like a no show. Looks to me like the tables have completely turned this generation.
Also, it's not really that good, I mean, not something I'd pay $60 for separately from the system. If they debundled it, it would probably be best to sell it at $20-$30. It's a fun game, but you can tell it's just a tech-demo and that they didn't put a ton of work into it. With baseball, you don't even get to control the fielders or running the bases, and with golf, you only have 4 clubs, and 9 holes to play.
What's the news here? It's not saying that there is any indication that there will be any price cuts other than, "there was price cuts with the last generation, so there will be with this one". Personally, I think the PS3 has the most to lose. It's not selling well, and it's already being sold less than cost, so I don't think a price cut would Sony that much. However, if the XBox 360 and the Wii take a price cut, then the PS3 will be left as the really expensive one that nobody wants to buy.
But the NetMD players aren't all that bad, if you don't have to use the SonicStage software to load the music on. I've seen workarounds that involve burning your mp3s to a virtual CD drive and then using the CD transfer software to load the music, because it's easier than using sonicstage. I have one, although I don't use it anymore, because I got an iPod. However, the battery life was great, and the sound quality was good. You could also bring as much music with you as you wanted, provided you bought extra disks. I can't do that with my ipod shuffle. Also, you could just have a couple prerecorded disks lying around with various styles of music so that you wouldn't have to transfer music so often. Oh, and the disks were very durable. Really quite a great product that ruined by DRM.
Personally, I can't see why people would want to spend $500 on a cell phone/music player. All the cell phones i've had, especially the flashy expensive ones have died in 2 years. Also, they are usually tied to the phone company. I'd rather spend $300 on a music player that isn't tied to some phone company and get the free phone when I sign up for the service. I know, I only get a free phone if I sign a contract, but I don't plan on switching phone companies every 3 months, and it's not like they give you a better monthly rate if you buy the phone.
What's the point of DRM in downloading free TV episodes from the TV network. There's no need to pirate it, if someone else wants it, they can just go download it themselves. If someone wants a high quality copy to pass around to all their friends, they can copy the DVD or record the Unencrypted over-the-air HD broadcast of the same show. All the major ways of getting our media CD, DVD, Cable TV have either no DRM, or DRM so weak it might as well not be there. So how does DRM actually play into the equation of you being able to get more stuff.
This can be further seen by the fact that the only DRM schemes that haven't been hacked yet are the ones that nobody cares about. Take NetMD for instance. There's no program out there to break the encryption and load songs onto a NetMD player. But I think that's more due to the fact that nobody cares to break it more than to the fact that they are using unbreakable encryption.
I'm on Emusic so it's DRM Free, but I thought all music download networks (iTunes, PureTracks) let you redownload stuff for free if you've already paid for it. I'm pretty sure the virtual console for the Wii is the same. The only problem is that if the service goes out of business, or makes certain songs unavailable, then you are unable to download them again. However, you can always back up the files to a CD/DVD/Whatever, but playing them on some unapproved player tends to be the hard part.
So then why don't we have a national "Dangers of going out of your house month"? There's lots of dangerous things that can happen to you in many places. That doesn't mean we need a whole month dedicated to them. I mean, we only have 1 day for earth day, where we're suppose to think about how we are supposed to help the environment, but an entire month dedicated to the dangers of the internet. Sounds kind of odd to me.
I find that the system gets a little memory hungry when you load KDElibs while running gnome. I'm not willing to sacrifice that much memory just for an IM client.
Personally I'm a KDE user myself, so for IM I use Kopete. I find it much better than GAIM. For that though, you'll have to use Kunbuntu, or some other distro that supports KDE. I vote for Mandriva.
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But that doesn't mean he shouldn't be aware of how to use GIMP. It would be like a programmer who could only program if he was using Visual Studio Team Fortress Edition (or whatever it's called). I wouldn't hire a programmer who couldn't get the job done with notepad and a command line compiler. Sure the tools are available, but if you want to whip something up in an unfamiliar computing environment, you often don't have all the "professional" level tools available, so you should be able to do a pretty good job with lesser tools. Even though it's 2007 and we have laser guided mitre saws, I would still expect that a carpenter could build stuff using a mitre box and a hand saw.
The point wasn't that he couldn't figure out which one is better. The point is that buying a computer shouldn't be a research project. It's not worth your time to spend 20 hours researching specs and performance and and trying to determine if what you're seeing is factually correct or some marketing trash that's only correct under certain conditions.
What are you doing? Opening up a 150 MB XML file in that one tab? Seriously. I know Firefox has some memory problems, but that is not anything like I have ever seen. Most of the actual "leaks" i've seen involve flash and web pages that continually add stuff to the DOM with javascript and leaving them open overnight. I haven't seen many other huge memory problems. I've had Firefox open for days and have browsed to hundreds of pages and I'm still only using 132 MB.
How does a CS degree tell you if an Intel Core Duo is better than an Athlon FX?
No, what you might want to compare is on equal amounts but less quality of sugar, but all sugar is pretty much the same, so lets look at something like coffee. So you can go to Store A and get 1 KG of coffee for $5. At another store that only sells gourmet coffee, you have to pay $15 for 1KG of coffee. You're getting the same amount of coffee for a much cheaper price. However, how do you really define "amount" in buying a computer. Certainly not by weight. However, A computer is a computer, and they can all do the same thing, although some of them slower. Slower would be equivalent in the coffee world to, it's still coffee, but it doesn't taste as good as the expensive stuff.
Thanks for the tip. I (the poster) didn't even realize you could align by start date. I'm in the process of trying to compare the Wii to the PS2, but it keeps timing out when I pick PS2.
Just because I enjoy Super Monkey Ball, Mario, Zelda, Mario Party and other, does that mean I can't be a hardcore gamer? I can spend a lot of hours playing those games. Microsoft puts out a certain image to appeal to 14-25 year old males, and that's the crowd they get. However, just because you don't fit that demographic doesn't mean you can't be a hardcore gamer. Hardcore gamer is defined by how much time or money you will spend on a system, and not by which specific games you play.
Even with their 1 year release headstart, Nintendo is quickly approaching them in systems sold. It's become apparent that you can only sell so many systems to hardcore gamers, and that it's hard to sell expensive systems, even to hardcore gamers. Targetting children and families cannot be done by releasing a single game, or by releasing some peripherals which have motion sensing. It must be something that is the core of your system. Looking at the XBox 360 controller is daunting for people who aren't hardcore gamers, as is the size and look of the entire console. They're going to have a hard time turning things around for their current system. However, if they want to make a start, how about releasing a web browser. It's not like they don't already have one.
It adds to the idea of "original sin" since if being naked is a sin, and we are born naked, then we all have sin.
Isn't coming back just falling back to earth? How can you not have enough power to fall? Ok maybe I'm trying to be a little bit funny, but it seems like if they have enough energy to bring it up, then there should be not problem bringing it back down.
I really don't see what MS is so afraid of. MS Office is a great tool. Even if it used ODF, I think a lot of people and businesses would stick with it over OpenOffice, or any of the other alternatives. However, MS Office is too expensive for people that just want to use a word processor at home, and do some simple formatting with maybe a couple tables. They wouldn't be losing much money from these people since most of them just pirate word, use the $30 version that came with their PC, or use some alternative like OpenOffice.
Nobody is saying that MS or any other commercial company cannot produce software to read the open formats. The only thing that public standards allows is for people to use free software (or any commercial package) if they choose to. Nobody is forcing anybody to use any specific software. If the government put out everything in MS .Doc, then the only way to properly and reliably read the documents would be with MS Word. However, if they release the documents in ODF, then you could read them in OpenOffice, KOffice, MS Office, WordPerfect, and any other word processor that you might want to use. Sure some word processors don't support it yet, but it's a free and open spec to support, so if there's a market for it, and the choices are support the format or lose customers, then they choice is pretty clear.
Even if you are home theater buff who spent $2000 on an amplifier/reciever (not a lot, but more than most) and another $3000 on speakers, and $4000 on a TV, then $600 for a game console still sounds like a lot of money. Do you know why? Because the game console will be obsolete in 4 years, and they'll stop selling games. Meanwhile that amp,speakers and TV combo should probably last 10-15 years, if not longer. Not only that, seeing the low sales of the PS3 from the start makes people thing that it will end up being the next dream cast or neo geo, which means that they will have completely wasted $600. And even with the blue-ray player, who says that's going to be existent if 3-4 years.
The problem is finding a game for XBox 360 or PS3 that everyone would like to have. Wii Sports fits the definition as something that everyone wants to play. Plus Wii sports was a cheap-to-produce tech demo that isn't worth much on it's own. If MS an Sony start to include free games, then they'll probably have to have a couple different options to please everyone, And it will lower their profits because nobody will be buying that first game at $60.
The competition needs to do something to beat Nintendo. If you look at the charts, you'll see that Nintendo has sold more consoles in 6 months than Xbox360 sold in it's first year as the lone player. Also, it looks like they will surpass Xbox360 within 6 more months. And the PS3 looks like a no show. Looks to me like the tables have completely turned this generation.
Also, it's not really that good, I mean, not something I'd pay $60 for separately from the system. If they debundled it, it would probably be best to sell it at $20-$30. It's a fun game, but you can tell it's just a tech-demo and that they didn't put a ton of work into it. With baseball, you don't even get to control the fielders or running the bases, and with golf, you only have 4 clubs, and 9 holes to play.
What's the news here? It's not saying that there is any indication that there will be any price cuts other than, "there was price cuts with the last generation, so there will be with this one". Personally, I think the PS3 has the most to lose. It's not selling well, and it's already being sold less than cost, so I don't think a price cut would Sony that much. However, if the XBox 360 and the Wii take a price cut, then the PS3 will be left as the really expensive one that nobody wants to buy.
But the NetMD players aren't all that bad, if you don't have to use the SonicStage software to load the music on. I've seen workarounds that involve burning your mp3s to a virtual CD drive and then using the CD transfer software to load the music, because it's easier than using sonicstage. I have one, although I don't use it anymore, because I got an iPod. However, the battery life was great, and the sound quality was good. You could also bring as much music with you as you wanted, provided you bought extra disks. I can't do that with my ipod shuffle. Also, you could just have a couple prerecorded disks lying around with various styles of music so that you wouldn't have to transfer music so often. Oh, and the disks were very durable. Really quite a great product that ruined by DRM.
Personally, I can't see why people would want to spend $500 on a cell phone/music player. All the cell phones i've had, especially the flashy expensive ones have died in 2 years. Also, they are usually tied to the phone company. I'd rather spend $300 on a music player that isn't tied to some phone company and get the free phone when I sign up for the service. I know, I only get a free phone if I sign a contract, but I don't plan on switching phone companies every 3 months, and it's not like they give you a better monthly rate if you buy the phone.
What's the point of DRM in downloading free TV episodes from the TV network. There's no need to pirate it, if someone else wants it, they can just go download it themselves. If someone wants a high quality copy to pass around to all their friends, they can copy the DVD or record the Unencrypted over-the-air HD broadcast of the same show. All the major ways of getting our media CD, DVD, Cable TV have either no DRM, or DRM so weak it might as well not be there. So how does DRM actually play into the equation of you being able to get more stuff.
This can be further seen by the fact that the only DRM schemes that haven't been hacked yet are the ones that nobody cares about. Take NetMD for instance. There's no program out there to break the encryption and load songs onto a NetMD player. But I think that's more due to the fact that nobody cares to break it more than to the fact that they are using unbreakable encryption.
I'm on Emusic so it's DRM Free, but I thought all music download networks (iTunes, PureTracks) let you redownload stuff for free if you've already paid for it. I'm pretty sure the virtual console for the Wii is the same. The only problem is that if the service goes out of business, or makes certain songs unavailable, then you are unable to download them again. However, you can always back up the files to a CD/DVD/Whatever, but playing them on some unapproved player tends to be the hard part.
So then why don't we have a national "Dangers of going out of your house month"? There's lots of dangerous things that can happen to you in many places. That doesn't mean we need a whole month dedicated to them. I mean, we only have 1 day for earth day, where we're suppose to think about how we are supposed to help the environment, but an entire month dedicated to the dangers of the internet. Sounds kind of odd to me.
I find that the system gets a little memory hungry when you load KDElibs while running gnome. I'm not willing to sacrifice that much memory just for an IM client.
Personally I'm a KDE user myself, so for IM I use Kopete. I find it much better than GAIM. For that though, you'll have to use Kunbuntu, or some other distro that supports KDE. I vote for Mandriva.