The big selling point, to me, is the pen digitizer. Slate PCs and even convertible tablet PCs are relatively uncommon. Pricing is really not bad next to similar machines like the Samsung Series 7 Slate, or even relative to things like a Cintiq for entry level pen-on-screen stuff. It also seems like it'll have a much nicer screen than what's in most existing products to boot.
If it was just a capacitive touchscreen with an included stylus like you can get for iPads/etc, then that'd be different. As a dual digitizer device, it actually seems like it'll be a rather attractive product for certain markets.
Actually, thing is, it's not that similar to FFXI. They reused the races, but past that, they seemed to intentionally do things differently than XI.
In the meantime, FFXI has undergone quite a number of changes over the years, much of which has served to make it a more appealing game. The current Abyssea content, in and of itself, is a vast departure from FFXI as originally released - albeit at the expense of the rest of the game, which is being largely ignored now as a result.
Either way, XIV would likely be a far better product if SE had actually taken their years of hard lessons learned with XI and applied them to XIV. If they -had- taken current XI and retooled it a little, put new graphics on it, then there'd be a lot more content, and a lot more tweaks already in place. They didn't.
What I took from that is not that it's a Mac vs. PC thing, but a typical office user vs. creative user thing.
Figure, their PCs are probably your normal office drone setups. AD logon, Office, probably not much more. People log on, check their Exchange accounts, write emails and word docs, edit Excel spreadsheets, and that covers their computing needs. Connect to the one network printer down the hall...
"Creatives" as they call them are probably the media department type folks. They'll have Mac Office, but they'll also have a suite of Adobe stuff, maybe a few other tools too. Digital cameras, scanners, maybe a wide format printer, etc. A bit more in the way of peripherals, programs, and in turn file formats to deal with.
My experience has been more that the more stuff that can go wrong, the more calls you'll wind up getting.
Well, do remember that "Disney" is a brand in itself, but also a parent company.
Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, Caravan, Miramax, among the film companies.
What he describes is the old Photoshop LE software, which was basically just older versions of Photoshop not eligible to be upgraded.
Elements is a bit different from Photoshop, but does just as good a job on the things it does have. However tools are rearranged, fewer options mean a cleaner interface, etc. In fact, Photoshop CS2 borrows interface designs from Elements, not the other way around.
It's a good compromise I think, good enough to keep me happy as a second-computer graphics tool, but lacking enough that I still want Photoshop for serious work. It's way better than the load of crap called Adobe Photodeluxe it replaced.
While I'd rather have an expandable tower for the long run, the current "expansion" of the G5 is laughable. The only thing that you can add a good amount of is RAM.
With that in mind, I'd certainly like to see a smaller form for the G5. Why do I want a behemoth of a machine that I can't load up with upgrades?
The other problem with the vertical design was the optical drives if I recall.
At the time of the 20th Anniversary Mac, the CD-ROM speed was hampered by it (down to what, 4X?). While I'm sure we can do a little better now, it might pose a problem if you were, say, trying to write a DVD or some such task.
Well, there are proof-of-concept viruses and malware...plus at least that one example in the wild on the pirated Office 2004 people got.
But certainly, assuming nothing else goes wrong with it (as happens a fair amount, especially on older hardware)...yeah, should be a lot more solid than a Windows box in a similar situation.
Actually, 10.2->10.3 at least on par with 2k->XP (if not greater). If you want to be technical, 10.2->10.3 and 5.0->5.1.
Each upgrade has been a version update of the underlying UNIX layer for OSX, if you want to ignore all the other stuff that got changed. It's not a minor update here and there. But on top of that you had file system changes (Journaling), fast user swapping, etc. Some of those features are comparable between the two upgrades.
2k->XP doesn't functionally change the basic OS like OS9->OSX does. More similar would be something like Win95->WinXP. XP offers newly rearranged control panels (10.3 does too..minorly), appearance tweaks (fugly though some are...makes it seem like more of a change than it is) and bundles some thing like remote login that were already there in server versions, etc. 2k is already a multithreaded OS with protected memory, built for multiple users with security persmissions etc, etc. OS9 was not.
OSX was around in server form before the desktop variant came out, and also in beta form available to developers. I'd think it safe to say Adobe would have had access to it enough for at least 4 years to do an adequate translation.
Apple was prodding devs towards at least writing Carbon apps for longer than that, if I remember right. The dual-compatability mode was the subject of ads featuring the very first G3s (blue-box and yellow box modes anyone?), which were released in '97.
That's only true if you cancelled the free Playonline subscription as well. If you simply cancel the FFXI content ID, then after 3 months your character may be deleted, but you can still use the same serial number to play the game (and start a new character).
At least, that's the information as gathered on FFXI boards and from the manual.
It might be dependant on the takes that they used. I remember seeing mention of differences in audio tracks between laser disc versions of the original versions.
Not that I don't think it's annoying too, and in some ways moreso than the added stuff. It's one thing to have interjected scenes that I can recognize as not having been there. It's another to remove what was.
By that I was referring to the original Japanese language track for SAC. The original poster didn't seem to be specifying that, though in retrospect he didn't mention hearing a dub either.
Wolf's Rain was great overall I thought. I haven't seen the last 4 episodes (it's 30, not 26). Four episodes of recap was terrible though.
The story really did kinda burn out near the end though.
But then, so did WHR.
Probably the first Full Metal Panic would be good to run rather than Fumoffu.
You mean like music fans?
Anime fans will always be able to nab fansubs well in advance of American TV or DVD release. If not that, they'll likely stick with subs not dubs for most things.
The Tachikomas are like that in the original, which is similar in turn to the original manga.
There's even a series of shorts that were made with just the Tachikomas sitting around postulating about various things.
Gosh, you'll have to inform the Japanese that stuff like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Outlaw Star isn't stuff they should like (all anime, which, btw, Firefly has been compared to).
Obviously you've never used an early 90's CD-ROM, such as the kind that used caddys. I think the only things that do anymore are DVD-RAMs (sorta).
You point out a CASE, a CADDY would be something that the disc stays in when in use.
I'd say that Nintendo has always used excuses like that to justify an ironclad grip on producing the games that run in its consoles.
The hard drive model as executed in the XBox tends to be faster, and the Gamecube could certainly have been outfitted with a little more RAM for buffering if load time was really the concern (granted the super-compressed textures are condusive to fast loading...and lower data capacity).
Agreed that Gamecube doesn't use small discs for potential portability, since they have no real protection from damage. It'd be trivial to release a caddy of some kind if they ever did.
Somehow I doubt they would though (as nice as it would be) since Nintendo loves reselling you the same games for your portable system years later.
I know the G5 is not good for emulation...but...aren't all XBox games written in DirectX? Wouldn't it be more possible to write a translator for whatever version of DirectX they wind up with on the IBM CPU for the old instructions? Not quite an emulator, more like what UltraHLE did in that it could understand the commands and run them rather than pretend to be the old hardware. That ran pretty well on a 350Mhz PII for me and the N64 hardware was near 100Mhz.
Maybe I'm not too great at the whole coding thing (okay, I *know* I'm not great at it)...but it seems like they wouldn't have to do a full emulation deal a la Virtual PC to run the old games.
Or they could just build the old CPU in too, like the PS2 did (it's the IO controller AFAIK).
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The big selling point, to me, is the pen digitizer. Slate PCs and even convertible tablet PCs are relatively uncommon. Pricing is really not bad next to similar machines like the Samsung Series 7 Slate, or even relative to things like a Cintiq for entry level pen-on-screen stuff. It also seems like it'll have a much nicer screen than what's in most existing products to boot. If it was just a capacitive touchscreen with an included stylus like you can get for iPads/etc, then that'd be different. As a dual digitizer device, it actually seems like it'll be a rather attractive product for certain markets.
Actually, thing is, it's not that similar to FFXI. They reused the races, but past that, they seemed to intentionally do things differently than XI. In the meantime, FFXI has undergone quite a number of changes over the years, much of which has served to make it a more appealing game. The current Abyssea content, in and of itself, is a vast departure from FFXI as originally released - albeit at the expense of the rest of the game, which is being largely ignored now as a result. Either way, XIV would likely be a far better product if SE had actually taken their years of hard lessons learned with XI and applied them to XIV. If they -had- taken current XI and retooled it a little, put new graphics on it, then there'd be a lot more content, and a lot more tweaks already in place. They didn't.
That's pretty much how FFXI has been since it was released. I wouldn't hold out hope for SE changing its MMO development strategy anytime soon.
What I took from that is not that it's a Mac vs. PC thing, but a typical office user vs. creative user thing. Figure, their PCs are probably your normal office drone setups. AD logon, Office, probably not much more. People log on, check their Exchange accounts, write emails and word docs, edit Excel spreadsheets, and that covers their computing needs. Connect to the one network printer down the hall... "Creatives" as they call them are probably the media department type folks. They'll have Mac Office, but they'll also have a suite of Adobe stuff, maybe a few other tools too. Digital cameras, scanners, maybe a wide format printer, etc. A bit more in the way of peripherals, programs, and in turn file formats to deal with. My experience has been more that the more stuff that can go wrong, the more calls you'll wind up getting.
Well, do remember that "Disney" is a brand in itself, but also a parent company. Touchstone, Hollywood Pictures, Caravan, Miramax, among the film companies.
Has he even used Photoshop Elements?
What he describes is the old Photoshop LE software, which was basically just older versions of Photoshop not eligible to be upgraded.
Elements is a bit different from Photoshop, but does just as good a job on the things it does have. However tools are rearranged, fewer options mean a cleaner interface, etc. In fact, Photoshop CS2 borrows interface designs from Elements, not the other way around.
It's a good compromise I think, good enough to keep me happy as a second-computer graphics tool, but lacking enough that I still want Photoshop for serious work.
It's way better than the load of crap called Adobe Photodeluxe it replaced.
While I'd rather have an expandable tower for the long run, the current "expansion" of the G5 is laughable. The only thing that you can add a good amount of is RAM. With that in mind, I'd certainly like to see a smaller form for the G5. Why do I want a behemoth of a machine that I can't load up with upgrades?
The other problem with the vertical design was the optical drives if I recall. At the time of the 20th Anniversary Mac, the CD-ROM speed was hampered by it (down to what, 4X?). While I'm sure we can do a little better now, it might pose a problem if you were, say, trying to write a DVD or some such task.
Well, there are proof-of-concept viruses and malware...plus at least that one example in the wild on the pirated Office 2004 people got. But certainly, assuming nothing else goes wrong with it (as happens a fair amount, especially on older hardware)...yeah, should be a lot more solid than a Windows box in a similar situation.
Actually, 10.2->10.3 at least on par with 2k->XP (if not greater). If you want to be technical, 10.2->10.3 and 5.0->5.1.
Each upgrade has been a version update of the underlying UNIX layer for OSX, if you want to ignore all the other stuff that got changed. It's not a minor update here and there. But on top of that you had file system changes (Journaling), fast user swapping, etc. Some of those features are comparable between the two upgrades.
2k->XP doesn't functionally change the basic OS like OS9->OSX does. More similar would be something like Win95->WinXP. XP offers newly rearranged control panels (10.3 does too..minorly), appearance tweaks (fugly though some are...makes it seem like more of a change than it is) and bundles some thing like remote login that were already there in server versions, etc. 2k is already a multithreaded OS with protected memory, built for multiple users with security persmissions etc, etc. OS9 was not.
OSX was around in server form before the desktop variant came out, and also in beta form available to developers. I'd think it safe to say Adobe would have had access to it enough for at least 4 years to do an adequate translation. Apple was prodding devs towards at least writing Carbon apps for longer than that, if I remember right. The dual-compatability mode was the subject of ads featuring the very first G3s (blue-box and yellow box modes anyone?), which were released in '97.
That's only true if you cancelled the free Playonline subscription as well. If you simply cancel the FFXI content ID, then after 3 months your character may be deleted, but you can still use the same serial number to play the game (and start a new character). At least, that's the information as gathered on FFXI boards and from the manual.
It might be dependant on the takes that they used. I remember seeing mention of differences in audio tracks between laser disc versions of the original versions. Not that I don't think it's annoying too, and in some ways moreso than the added stuff. It's one thing to have interjected scenes that I can recognize as not having been there. It's another to remove what was.
You don't, you get it with the remaining $114.5 million of her presumed current salary, which is what the original poster was pointing out.
By that I was referring to the original Japanese language track for SAC. The original poster didn't seem to be specifying that, though in retrospect he didn't mention hearing a dub either.
Wolf's Rain was great overall I thought. I haven't seen the last 4 episodes (it's 30, not 26). Four episodes of recap was terrible though. The story really did kinda burn out near the end though. But then, so did WHR. Probably the first Full Metal Panic would be good to run rather than Fumoffu.
You mean like music fans? Anime fans will always be able to nab fansubs well in advance of American TV or DVD release. If not that, they'll likely stick with subs not dubs for most things.
The Tachikomas are like that in the original, which is similar in turn to the original manga. There's even a series of shorts that were made with just the Tachikomas sitting around postulating about various things.
Gosh, you'll have to inform the Japanese that stuff like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, and Outlaw Star isn't stuff they should like (all anime, which, btw, Firefly has been compared to).
Obviously you've never used an early 90's CD-ROM, such as the kind that used caddys. I think the only things that do anymore are DVD-RAMs (sorta). You point out a CASE, a CADDY would be something that the disc stays in when in use.
Obviously they were all waiting for Apple to do it so they could copy them ;)
I'd say that Nintendo has always used excuses like that to justify an ironclad grip on producing the games that run in its consoles. The hard drive model as executed in the XBox tends to be faster, and the Gamecube could certainly have been outfitted with a little more RAM for buffering if load time was really the concern (granted the super-compressed textures are condusive to fast loading...and lower data capacity). Agreed that Gamecube doesn't use small discs for potential portability, since they have no real protection from damage. It'd be trivial to release a caddy of some kind if they ever did. Somehow I doubt they would though (as nice as it would be) since Nintendo loves reselling you the same games for your portable system years later.
That'd be Man-Machine Interface (not Complex). The TV anime is Stand Alone Complex, which is much more like the manga than the movie IMHO.
I haven't read past #4 or 5 I think of GiTS2:MMI so I can't really pass judgement on it...but it didn't seem quite as readable as the first one.
I know the G5 is not good for emulation...but...aren't all XBox games written in DirectX? Wouldn't it be more possible to write a translator for whatever version of DirectX they wind up with on the IBM CPU for the old instructions? Not quite an emulator, more like what UltraHLE did in that it could understand the commands and run them rather than pretend to be the old hardware. That ran pretty well on a 350Mhz PII for me and the N64 hardware was near 100Mhz. Maybe I'm not too great at the whole coding thing (okay, I *know* I'm not great at it)...but it seems like they wouldn't have to do a full emulation deal a la Virtual PC to run the old games. Or they could just build the old CPU in too, like the PS2 did (it's the IO controller AFAIK).
Dubs are certainly preferable for me when the show depends on timing and delivery to really work...for instance in comedy.