Halo was released for Windows a year or two after Xbox. It was never released for Mac despite that being the original intent. I expect they were making MS a little nervous.
I'm sorry what?
The PPC-binary (and later universal binary) of Halo that is running on top of OS X on my box *right now* begs to differ. I actually run the PPC binary via rosetta as it performs better than the universal one for some reason, even with the added overhead of Rosetta my machine is powerful enough that it doesn't affect the gameplay.
I played Halo 2 on Vista under bootcamp, and oh how disappointed I was - it was such a shitty console port with some laughably unforgivable issues like the UI elements in the menu being so unresponsive to mouse clicks (or just not responding to clicks at all) and the actual clickable areas of these elements being almost random between different screens. Then the gameplay itself is just... weaker than the first game, all in the name of ease for the console.:/
Yes, it will import photos from an SD card or other memory stick attached via the adapter that attaches to the dock connector. I'm assuming it's acting as a USB host to be able to do this and mounting the filesystem on the card like a USB mass storage device. I also assume it's being a USB host for the keyboard dock/stand combo thing. It can clearly also go the other way, since that is how iTunes writes to it, although the filesystem is no exposed to the OS, just not for any technical reason.
Which got to $375 with shoddy build quality and poor quality parts compared to the demo units that were shown to the press, and featured an over the air update that bricked the device, and launched with promised features and apps missing with no timeline on the horizon for when these will be added...
Yeah, very comparable with the iPad's user experience and build quality. It's the closest anyone has come though.
Ah, good to know, I assumed it couldn't drive an HDMI display (I know it has a VGA adapter and have seen it in use), but I didn't actually double check.
For the Keychain, supposedly yes. On OS X itself the keychain can be locked independently of your user account. By default it is not - it shares the same password as your login, and unlocks when you log in. You can have it use a different password though and it stays locked until you allow access. Thus even if your machine is stolen and someone changes the password to your account they can't get into your keychain.
This is also what happens if you change the password using the OS X install disk (if you forget your user password) - it will allow you to change it, but the keychain password remains unchanged (even if it was the same as the user pw initially), preventing your passwords from being revealed.
All the system apps keep passwords in here, so your mail accounts, web page logins, wireless passwords etc are all protected.
I have no idea if this is the same on the iPhone. Presumably the keychain unlocks when the phone unlocks, I am unsure.
That's a different argument though (although one I agree with - I don't own one but would like one but I can't justify the cost right now).
The prices will come down as the manufacturing becomes cheaper for what it is. As it stands, no one can make a tablet with those specs for less (including Apple, less the profit margin associated with it) - it seems to be the cost of the hardware right now.
Right, so it's *not* the same featureset - that is the point! It's cheaper because it left out the more expensive components. The bulk of the "extra features that make it a wash" are software-related - the iPad can be a USB mass storage device if Apple adds the feature, and it has video out [not HDMI, but I expect that will be in v2), and the multimedia support is a question of shipping codecs. So, the Archos is is cheaper because it has less hardware - that's not "weasel words", that's just how it is.
The reason it has to be specified every time this debate comes up is because if you don;t say "comparable featureset" then the price comparisons are done with bottom-of-the-bin built-to-a-price crap in whatever it is is being compared (laptops, tablets, desktops etc).
I look forward to Android 3.0 and the alleged rash of tablets that are cheaper than the iPad - it will drive the price of iPads down (although the price is likely to come down anyway).
The Nintendo DS doesn't have a 10" multitouch screen.
The £100 tablets are not 10" either, and often have the cheaper resistive screens.
As yet, the iPad, which is "overpriced" has no viable competitor that can match its specifications. This is either because no one wants to make something to compete with it (unlikely) or that so far, no one can match Apple's price (just check out the Xoom, for example).
Your sample of a few being used to pay games is not definitive - games are a large part of its appeal to consumers, but it also makes a great casual browsing device.
Right, which is why there are so many competing tablets of equivalent featureset coming in under the iPad's price...
Oh wait, the other thing, opposite to what I just said.
Everyone crowed about supposed price of the iPad in the speculation and hype up to its launch, and when the actual price was announced, everyone quietly revised down their "zomg it's overpriced" by several hundred dollars. As yet we *still * haven't seen a competitor come in at significantly lower (or even a little lower) cost. If it's so overpriced, there will be a ton of tablets at a much lower price point - so far, I have yet to see that. They're all around the iPad's price or higher.
Your point about "finding a tool that fits" is dead on though - despite iPhone and Android, there will still be people who buy these new WebOS devices (assuming they are any good) purely because neither the iPhone nor the Android ecosystem provides what that customer is looking for.
If it behaves in the way you say (I no longer have my Mac, so I can't check), then it's so wildly inconsistent as to be impossible to say it does anything specific.
In what way is "x closes the window" inconsistent? You click the x, it goes away since you're done with it. If you open a new window of the same type, or the same document it's as if you are opening it from new, because that's what you are doing. X closes the document/window/palette because you are saying "I am finished with this window". If you wanted to save the state of the window (eg, how far you have scrolled, or whatever) then why close it? That's what minimise is for. The fact that sometimes it closes the window *and* closes the app (for example, for apps with only one window) is the erroneous behaviour. It is not common though.
The only inconsistent element on that UI piece is the green button - it always has a plus symbol on it, even when the state it will toggle to is smaller than the current window size (it toggles between two window states that you size yourself). Either the icon should be something else, or it should not be a plus when the action that results from clicking on it is actually going to shrink the window.
iMovie's import system is as transparent as you can really make a consumer NLE - you drag in the clip, it converts it, you edit it. All editors do this with a format that is not native to the timeline - FCP does it on the fly (if you have the horsepower), iMovie does it before you use it. You can work with any format you like, and for a consumer-focused home editing NLE it is frightfully good and remarkably extensible. So what you're really saying here is "ok, I was totally wrong about how iMovie doesn't support all these different formats, so now instead my argument is that it should all be totally behind the scenes and uninterrupted when you import non-native formats like a fully commercial NLE instead of having to wait while it converts the footage".
It does not edit raw H.264, or raw Xvid, or raw Divx etc, but then why would you unless you just want to shorten a clip, or throw some clips back to back with nothing more than cuts? Quicktime itself *can* do this incidentally, but if you're editing video you want to be able to use titles, transitions etc. Anything more than straight cuts and working with a temporal format like that is going to cause you issues. "The big guns" might be able to do it (Final Cut Pro will encode on the fly using RealRT if the format doesn't match the timeline settings, for example), but considering that iMovie is part of a sub-£100 software bundle I think it holds itself up pretty well. It can handle XDCAM HD footage - I put together a quick cut of a casting session on the weekend we shot it and were away from the main office (so no FCP). iMovie on a laptop did the job just fine.
I didn't say Quicktime was a format? Where are you getting that from. I'm fully aware it's a container, however the formats contained within the container are not able to be edited by iMovie more often than not.
From here:
Quicktime is absolute shit and the fact that OSX forces you to work in it is absolutely inexcusable, another braindead decision. Let people work in common formats.
Where it is clear that you don;t really understand what Quicktime is, and confuse it with the player software that is much-maligned on Windows. It is a totally different beast on OS X (being a very large and integral framework) that works with "common formats". There are Quicktime codecs for all the common formats and many uncommon ones.
iMovie does support the MKV container, because Quicktime does. It has some slight limitations in implementation (it has to scan through the whole clip when loaded rather than just immediately starting, so you have to wait if you want to scrub the clip immediately), but it does work. Quicktime also supports WMV files (with the exception of the short lived WMV9 codec -
When you hit the green button, the window doesn't follow the Microsoft Windows paradigm. Maximised windows have never been a part of OS X (or OS 9) - that's just people expecting them to do exactly what Windows does, but why should it?
You can set two sizes with the green button, and it will toggle between them. "Apple" doesn't decide how big you want that window - the user does. It will remember the size you chose.
OS X Lion is introducing full screen apps for the first time on OS X, where the entire UI changes (ie, Dock goes away, top menu bar goes away) so it the app that is full screen has full focus. I expect then the green button will do that (perhaps as a toggle - small, large, fullscreen).
I will say that OS X is better than Windows, hands down. That doesn't mean it can't also have flaws (hello, Finder, hello dotfile littering on non-Mac filesystems, hello eternal loop of drive-spin-up-spin-down if you insert an unreadable DVD, among other things). It's still way better than Windows though (although from what I have seen of Win 7, it is looking good - where was that when Vista was being pried out of Ballmer's ass with a chair leg?).
You pretty much just made the case for me. Clicking the red icon closes the window - no it doesn't, it minimizes the window, but then you go on to say "in some apps..."
No, it really doesn't. It CLOSES the window. If you open that window again, it is not in the same state. For example, a text document with the cursor halfway down the page. If you click the x the window closes. If you reopen the document it is as if the previous state never existed. Minimising specifically keeps the window open and in the same state as you left it so when you come to use it again, it is exactly the same. This is down with the yellow button. I said "some apps do close the whole app when you click the red button" but I specifically stated that this was *incorrect* behaviour that causes inconsistency. It is usually cross platform apps that "do it the windows way", although not exclusively - the worst offender for this from apple themselves is System Preferences, which fully closes if you close the main window with the x button.
How can that be? On the Mac, "It just works?" So it's impossible to have a bad install or something else.
No, that's just marketing. Everyone has it. It's not a carte blanche statement that things never go wrong - it's a computer with hardware and software; issues will crop up, which is why there is a large knowledgebase and Apple support network. If Apple users and Apple themselves genuinely thought it was "impossible to go wrong" then these things would not exist. In the majority of cases though, things do "just work" but not all the time - no different to any other software platform. You are being deliberately disingenuous if you are actually trying to argue this as a genuine point.
So it's a video editing app that can't edit the most common formats of video? Yeah, great app... again to the third party software.
You'll find that most video editing software wants the source material in specific formats - H.264 and Mpeg2 and Xvid and so on are temporally-based compressed formats, ie you have keyframes that can stand alone, but the majority of frames depend on data from earlier frames to save filesize. These do not edit well, so must be converted into non-temporal formats first. This is just basic video editing and is common to all NLE systems. Very few editors can actually work effectively with temporally compressed files. Final Cut Pro (well, actually Quicktime) added the ability to all OS X NLE software to edit HDV format by tweaking the way it handles start and end points of the clips for this very reason, so you don;t have to go through a lengthy import step to use it.
iMovie does this on import with any video that Quicktime will play, since it uses the Quicktime library to work - it comes with a large raft of common formats already, but you can extend it with other codecs as and when you need it. You can even import and export Theora if you like (it's a major part of the OS).
Quicktime is absolute shit and the fact that OSX forces you to work in it is absolutely inexcusable, another braindead decision. Let people work in common formats.
Now you're just trolling. Quicktime is not a "format" - it's a system library (what OS X calls a Framework) that handles video and graphics. Calling it a format is like calling The big blue E on a windows desktop "the internet". On OS X, which is the only place iMovie runs, it is a no-brainer to use the OS's built in, mature, highly extensible video framework to handle video. It is far more than just "Quicktime player" that most people see on Windows. It has been around for almost 20 years and is a key component of OS X.
The Quicktime *container* (.mov) can contain a great deal of actual *formats/codecs* by nature of the design of Quicktime itself, so you can "work with common formats" as much as you like, which is probably what you mean when you say "forced to use quicktime is a disgrace" without actually kn
Our diesel engines are considerably cleaner than the typical expectation, and the diesel fuel we buy is all extremely low in sulphur - far more than the US.
We get that "cleaner air" by burning less fuel per unit distance (mpg) compared to the equivalent Prius - that's what higher fuel economy means. Our diesel engines are no different to our petrol engines in that respect: with particulate filters, cats, and engine management systems.
In fact, european diesels put out less CO2 than the equivalent petrol engines (like the one in the Prius) - a fact noted in the way our cars are taxed. I pay less road tax for my large diesel minivan than my brother's smaller hatchback because despite his smaller engine (1.6l petrol vs 2.0l turbodiesel) his car gets lower mpg and higher g/CO2 per km.
So, we have our cake and eat it too. The market that that Prius carved out for itself in the US simply doesn't exist to the same extent here in Europe, since a long, long time before it came along we were buying diesels by the barrel because the innovation and drive to lower fuel costs went that way, rather than into hybrids.
There is still a small market - they see a lot of use as taxi cabs, for example, where the car spends a lot of time idle or moving slowly and with a high proportion of urban driving, but in the car market as a whole, if you want fuel economy and low road tax you just pick the car you were going to buy anyway, and then get the diesel version.
Also, laughable that you claim to get cleaner air - even with all those Prius' on the road, the majority of the US car driving population is rolling around in large slushmatic cars with oversized engines - even your basic sedans have unnecessarily large and inefficient engines. The average petrol engine in europe is 1.6 litres displacement. The average diesel is 2.0 litres displacement. The US figures are.... worse. Add to that fact that manual transmission cars are more efficient than automatics and consider that the vast majority of cars on UK roads are manual (at least 75%, probably more) and the figure is diametrically opposed for the US market, I'm not seeing how you can sit on your high horse and claim that you get "cleaner air" because you guys went for the Prius 15 years after Europe realised that fuel economy and low emissions were a good idea and made diesel engines that blew everything else away.
We don not - the Prius is the Prius, but they are considerably less common here in the UK than in the states, since if you want to drive a fuel efficient car, you just buy a diesel (over 50% of cars on the UK roads are diesels) and thus you can choose what sort of car you want. Pretty much every diesel gets better fuel economy than the Prius.
I drive a 2003 diesel Xsara Picasso, for example, that gets 55mpg, and is a minivan. It was a no brainer compared to the Pruis:D
The comparisons for equally specced Apple vs Win/other PCs have been done to death. The prevailing situation is a 10 to 20% premium over equivalent PCs. 300% is just... laughably trollish.
1. Single clicking on a window performs actions in that window, without bringing focus forward. I knew this was the case but I just double checked it. For example, you can start and stop iTunes when it is not the foreground app with a single left click on the play button. You can close tabs in non-foreground Safari windows with a single click. I can clear the downloads list (not in foreground, or even in active app) with a single click. Not sure what you're on about here.
2. The application menu being fixed to the primary screen is an annoyance if you have more than one screen and something does need to be done about it. Agreed (I have used multi screen Macs extensively in the past also). On a single screen it works very well though, but it does totally fall down when you move to more than one.
3. Clicking the red close icon closes the window. In some apps it also closes the app (it should *not* do this, it should always leave the app running). Minimising to the dock is the yellow button. The red button means "close window". The way to quit an app is command+Q, or from the menu. The only reason you don;t like this is because the "windows way" is that X closes the application (although it also closes just certain windows in some software, like Word etc). This is just personal preference.
4. SMB seems to work ok for me, but I do not have that many Windows boxes around - only two of the people I live with have Windows boxes and they don't report any problems sharing my media collection (via XBMC, on SMB-mounted volume), but I'll take your word for it - I don't have enough data.
5. Safari is almost exactly like Chrome. I use both all the time (about 60:40 Safari:Chrome). Safari does have a memory leak that requires you restart it every week or so, but it's not bad. I like the speed of both browsers. Used to use FF3.6 but it was a bit chunky on OS X. The FF4 beta is dreadful.
6. There are very few UAC-like popups - these occur when privilege escalation is required, eg for installing certain apps (not all - eg just writing to the Applications folder [which is outside your home folder] does not require a password). There is *no way* there are as many warning prompts as there are in Vista. Vista prompts you with a UAC if you open the equivalent of System Preferences for goodness sake (which OS X does not do). Safari warns you by default if you download a file that can be executed or decompressed, but you can turn this off. The system will also prompt you if something wants access to your keychain (eg, Mail.app if it gets updated and then wants to use your mail server credentials, but it can be told to always remember). Having used both Vista and OS X extensively, I will stake my left testicle on the fact that there's *considerably fewer* UAC-like prompts in OS X, certainly not "lots and lots" of them.
7. iLife is one of the best software bundles out there right now. Mail.app is *not* part of iLife (you could have put that in at number 8 for a whole new list item, but it seems to me that given that you think it's part of iLife you haven't really used the software much)
Either way, addressing Mail. Can't set unread: Right click on message, select "Mark > as unread". I just did it to the slashdot email that told me about your reply in this thread. It does not have an option to leave a message unread if you only highlight it for a few seconds though, you are correct.
Regarding actual iLife, iDVD behaving like that is odd and probably either means a bad install or something else. It has worked fine when I have used it (not too often - I have DVD Studio Pro on my primary machine, I have only used iDVD on my sister's machine while visiting her). iMovie is a video editing app, so the formats it expects are ones designed to be source formats, like DV, HDV, AVC etc. It even edits XDCAM HD i
The brakes are *considerably* stronger than the transmission in their application of force to the wheels (ie, torque from the engine vs torque in the opposite direction from the brake disc). The only way he could have been in a situation where he could not stop is if his brakes were faulty, or if he gingerly pressed them and wore them out or hugely overheated them by keeping them partially depressed while speeding along. A sustained, hard press of the pedal *will* stop that car, even going at speed with the throttle jammed open and the transmission engaged.
As a professional driver, I am amazed that he *didn't* manage to stop the car despite the obvious method to do so - pressing the brake!
Whether the car has an issue or not, it was his own error that he died since he should have been able to stop the car despite a stuck throttle. If he could not do so, he was unfit to be driving in the first place, CHP officer or not.
What, so someone drilled a hole into the car, fitted a can of compressed air and fluid and pumped it into the transmission off-camera to make the car suddenly accelerate?
Bonus points if the person who rigged this demo, that the TV report fails to mention, is an expert witness for those suing because their cars "accelerated for no reason".;)
I live in a city, and you can pry my manual transmission from my cold, dead hands.
Then again, I live in the UK.
Auto boxes are for old people and people who can't drive - you can take your test in an auto, but you get a special, sub-driving licence that says "auto only", prohibiting you from driving manual transmission vehicles. You really don't want to let people know you have a licence that says that.
There's also no real reports of sudden acceleration in a manual because in the unlikely event of it happening, the driver just puts the clutch in, or pops it out of gear. Problem solved. Then takes it calmly to a dealer and says "hey, my throttle is odd, please check it out", rather than going to the media with a scare story.:)
Even with no assist from the engine, the brake pedal is physically connected to the brake pads via hydraulics. There is no way for software to prevent the brakes being applied if you put your foot on the pedal. If the engine is running, this will also supply vacuum assist too, since that is a purely mechanical system for force multiplying your effort on the pedal. There's no software to go wrong or stop you - if you stamp on that pedal, your brakes will engage unless the hydraulics are faulty.
The brakes are also much more effective at stopping you than the transmission is at making you go forwards - easily demonstrated on even a slight incline - it requires almost no effort (with the engine running) and little effort (with the engine off) to stop a car rolling down the incline, yet moving the car up via the engine is much more work (for the engine, obviously). Even at full throttle, in gear, the brakes on a family car can overpower the engine, and then either the engine will stall or the clutch will slip (or your automatic transmission will shred).
Unless the guy's brake lines were defective, and he had no hydraulic pressure at all, "no brakes" just isn't an excuse for a car being unstoppable due to a stuck accelerator. Accident investigators would have carefully checked for this. There is a slight possibility that all of his brake lines failed at once (or failed at the master cylinder) but it is unlikely, especially combined with a *second* unlikely event - uncontrolled acceleration.
But you didn't "pay for it" - you got it at a discount, with Tmobile eating the cost. If you bought the phone outright from the start, then yes. And after the contract ends, then yes. Obviously you pay more overall with the contract since you get service (phone service) included in that, and interest on the initial discount since you could just walk off with the phone and never pay the contract.
So, you paid for *part* of it, it's *partly* your phone.
You already brought up the car analogy, but if you buy a car on hire-purchase, it does not belong to you fully until you have paid it off, and you are limited in the things you can do to it that will affect its resale value (like modifying it). If you bought it outright, you can do what the hell you like to it.
All those are excellent enhancements, but number 5 is already part of the iPhone's base features.
If you restore your phone (or even get a totally new one) you can restore it to exactly the way it was - SMS messages, contact data and other info, are all restored from backup when you sync your phone.
Those "few hours" are the extra you get from not having to carry around a spare battery - your original battery is considerably bigger. If you need to be in a situation where you need more power than the battery can give you, you have something that extends it. In a situation where you have a removable battery and you need longer life, you need to carry a spare - there's no real difference one way or the other. The main benefit of the built in battery is that you don't need to accommodate all the various bits to make it accessible - a door, a battery bay, a connector, and the physical conformation of the internal parts of the rest of the device to make it externally accessible. With a built in, you remove all of that and just fill any empty space you have in the device with the battery, wherever it will fit - the battery doesn't even have to be a uniform shape. The downside is that it is harder to repair or replace, and if the battery runs down and you are away from a power source you are stuck. Consider though - how many people using tablets and cellphones routinely carry around a spare battery with them, even if the model they have contains a removable one?
There are tradeoffs to both methods, but the security of data (in terms of ability to access or potential for data loss between backups) is not one of them. You are just looking for ways to make built-in batteries look bad beyond all the usual talking points.
"3x more for the privilege". Right 1995 called and wants its utterly inaccurate "fact" back.
If you think OS X is merely for "Mom and Pop" and "non tech savvy" then you really haven't looked very hard. It is very good at catering for those user groups. It is also exceptional at catering to the "tech savvy" too. It's aaaaaaaaal Unix under there, with all the power and flexibility that brings - with a GUI that is as easy to use as you could ever need. Sure, Finder is a bit clunky (especially in column view), but you can always put your own third party file manager on there (just like Linux), or just use the shell (just like Linux), or run an X session or twelve (just like Linux), all the while running Photoshop or AutoCAD or iPhoto or some other large commercial software alongside it (just like linu.... oh wait).
The combination of what's under the hood and the GUI on top make OS X one of the best all round OSes out there right now. Add to that the fact that Apple went and switched to x86, making virtualisation (just like on Linux) really simple and powerful, and you can do an awful lot with it. It's just as powerful as almost any flavour of Linux, and has a few things that it doesn't have, and clearly a few things that Linux has going for it that are a compromise on OS X - have to take the pros and cons here.
In terms of base function it's still better than Windows 7 (but Win 7 is way better than Vista), and there's still nothing to touch iLife for the price.
I would be interested to hear some of these "braindead modalities". I have already mentioned the weird sorting in column view in Finder (someone really needs to just rewrite it). What else? I really am interested in specific examples. I am going to be generous and assume you're not just trolling with some made up BS that you can't back up. I note you used modalities plural, so we're after more than one here.
You must have missed the part where Apple's market share has been steadily growing, year on year (not just for iOS, but for OS X too - there is no way that this is simply "old faithful" users.
Almost 1 in 5 new computers sold in the US is a Mac (this is not including any iOS devices, purely OS X). Two years ago it was 15%. Two years before that it was 8%ish.
The iPhone and iPad have done more for adoption of OS X than any switch commercials ever did.
Also, why would Apple halve the price of the whole line of products, even theoretically - they are making money hand over fist, in the face of all their haters saying "Apple is dying.... no, this year.... wait, this year...... ok, with this product they will definitely start dying....." since the release of the original multicoloured iMac. They're in business to make money, and they are making *a lot* of it, and seem to have judged their market pretty well. Look at it this way - where are the comparably priced tablet competitors to the iPad? What about the iPhone? All of the comparable stuff is similarly priced, if it exists at all (the iPad really is off in its own league right now, at least until Android 3.0).
I also note you think "industry pundits" will think the iPad2 is "keeping up" (with what exactly - there is nothing better than the iPad *1* right now, 8 months after it came out) - but the crucial thing being that Apple is not selling iPads to "industry pundits" - they are selling them to the general public who are liking what they see. Witness the slew of comments about how terrible the iPad is from a large portion of slashdot.... yet it sells faster than they can make it. It does exactly what a huge proportion of people want it to do, and it does it well.
While "industry pundits" are benchmarking tablets for FPS and other nonsense, Apple are off in the corner selling an awesome user experience to their customers. The iPad 2 will be no different in this respect - they will refine it a little, and then the "industry pundits" can say what they like. Slashsdot will call it evil and closed (even if it shipped with Linux on it and full source code, it would be "oh, they are just profiting on the backs of others! evil!" - you cannot win).
Meanwhile the general public will be all over it like a tramp on hot chips.
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Halo was released for Windows a year or two after Xbox. It was never released for Mac despite that being the original intent. I expect they were making MS a little nervous.
I'm sorry what?
The PPC-binary (and later universal binary) of Halo that is running on top of OS X on my box *right now* begs to differ. I actually run the PPC binary via rosetta as it performs better than the universal one for some reason, even with the added overhead of Rosetta my machine is powerful enough that it doesn't affect the gameplay.
I played Halo 2 on Vista under bootcamp, and oh how disappointed I was - it was such a shitty console port with some laughably unforgivable issues like the UI elements in the menu being so unresponsive to mouse clicks (or just not responding to clicks at all) and the actual clickable areas of these elements being almost random between different screens. Then the gameplay itself is just... weaker than the first game, all in the name of ease for the console. :/
Halo 1 was pretty good though, even on the Mac.
Yes, it will import photos from an SD card or other memory stick attached via the adapter that attaches to the dock connector. I'm assuming it's acting as a USB host to be able to do this and mounting the filesystem on the card like a USB mass storage device. I also assume it's being a USB host for the keyboard dock/stand combo thing. It can clearly also go the other way, since that is how iTunes writes to it, although the filesystem is no exposed to the OS, just not for any technical reason.
Which got to $375 with shoddy build quality and poor quality parts compared to the demo units that were shown to the press, and featured an over the air update that bricked the device, and launched with promised features and apps missing with no timeline on the horizon for when these will be added...
Yeah, very comparable with the iPad's user experience and build quality. It's the closest anyone has come though.
Ah, good to know, I assumed it couldn't drive an HDMI display (I know it has a VGA adapter and have seen it in use), but I didn't actually double check.
For the Keychain, supposedly yes. On OS X itself the keychain can be locked independently of your user account. By default it is not - it shares the same password as your login, and unlocks when you log in. You can have it use a different password though and it stays locked until you allow access. Thus even if your machine is stolen and someone changes the password to your account they can't get into your keychain.
This is also what happens if you change the password using the OS X install disk (if you forget your user password) - it will allow you to change it, but the keychain password remains unchanged (even if it was the same as the user pw initially), preventing your passwords from being revealed.
All the system apps keep passwords in here, so your mail accounts, web page logins, wireless passwords etc are all protected.
I have no idea if this is the same on the iPhone. Presumably the keychain unlocks when the phone unlocks, I am unsure.
That's a different argument though (although one I agree with - I don't own one but would like one but I can't justify the cost right now).
The prices will come down as the manufacturing becomes cheaper for what it is. As it stands, no one can make a tablet with those specs for less (including Apple, less the profit margin associated with it) - it seems to be the cost of the hardware right now.
Right, so it's *not* the same featureset - that is the point! It's cheaper because it left out the more expensive components. The bulk of the "extra features that make it a wash" are software-related - the iPad can be a USB mass storage device if Apple adds the feature, and it has video out [not HDMI, but I expect that will be in v2), and the multimedia support is a question of shipping codecs. So, the Archos is is cheaper because it has less hardware - that's not "weasel words", that's just how it is.
The reason it has to be specified every time this debate comes up is because if you don;t say "comparable featureset" then the price comparisons are done with bottom-of-the-bin built-to-a-price crap in whatever it is is being compared (laptops, tablets, desktops etc).
I look forward to Android 3.0 and the alleged rash of tablets that are cheaper than the iPad - it will drive the price of iPads down (although the price is likely to come down anyway).
The Nintendo DS doesn't have a 10" multitouch screen.
The £100 tablets are not 10" either, and often have the cheaper resistive screens.
As yet, the iPad, which is "overpriced" has no viable competitor that can match its specifications. This is either because no one wants to make something to compete with it (unlikely) or that so far, no one can match Apple's price (just check out the Xoom, for example).
Your sample of a few being used to pay games is not definitive - games are a large part of its appeal to consumers, but it also makes a great casual browsing device.
"iPad ridiculously overpriced"
Right, which is why there are so many competing tablets of equivalent featureset coming in under the iPad's price...
Oh wait, the other thing, opposite to what I just said.
Everyone crowed about supposed price of the iPad in the speculation and hype up to its launch, and when the actual price was announced, everyone quietly revised down their "zomg it's overpriced" by several hundred dollars. As yet we *still * haven't seen a competitor come in at significantly lower (or even a little lower) cost. If it's so overpriced, there will be a ton of tablets at a much lower price point - so far, I have yet to see that. They're all around the iPad's price or higher.
Your point about "finding a tool that fits" is dead on though - despite iPhone and Android, there will still be people who buy these new WebOS devices (assuming they are any good) purely because neither the iPhone nor the Android ecosystem provides what that customer is looking for.
If it behaves in the way you say (I no longer have my Mac, so I can't check), then it's so wildly inconsistent as to be impossible to say it does anything specific.
In what way is "x closes the window" inconsistent? You click the x, it goes away since you're done with it. If you open a new window of the same type, or the same document it's as if you are opening it from new, because that's what you are doing. X closes the document/window/palette because you are saying "I am finished with this window". If you wanted to save the state of the window (eg, how far you have scrolled, or whatever) then why close it? That's what minimise is for.
The fact that sometimes it closes the window *and* closes the app (for example, for apps with only one window) is the erroneous behaviour. It is not common though.
The only inconsistent element on that UI piece is the green button - it always has a plus symbol on it, even when the state it will toggle to is smaller than the current window size (it toggles between two window states that you size yourself). Either the icon should be something else, or it should not be a plus when the action that results from clicking on it is actually going to shrink the window.
iMovie's import system is as transparent as you can really make a consumer NLE - you drag in the clip, it converts it, you edit it. All editors do this with a format that is not native to the timeline - FCP does it on the fly (if you have the horsepower), iMovie does it before you use it. You can work with any format you like, and for a consumer-focused home editing NLE it is frightfully good and remarkably extensible. So what you're really saying here is "ok, I was totally wrong about how iMovie doesn't support all these different formats, so now instead my argument is that it should all be totally behind the scenes and uninterrupted when you import non-native formats like a fully commercial NLE instead of having to wait while it converts the footage".
It does not edit raw H.264, or raw Xvid, or raw Divx etc, but then why would you unless you just want to shorten a clip, or throw some clips back to back with nothing more than cuts? Quicktime itself *can* do this incidentally, but if you're editing video you want to be able to use titles, transitions etc. Anything more than straight cuts and working with a temporal format like that is going to cause you issues. "The big guns" might be able to do it (Final Cut Pro will encode on the fly using RealRT if the format doesn't match the timeline settings, for example), but considering that iMovie is part of a sub-£100 software bundle I think it holds itself up pretty well. It can handle XDCAM HD footage - I put together a quick cut of a casting session on the weekend we shot it and were away from the main office (so no FCP). iMovie on a laptop did the job just fine.
I didn't say Quicktime was a format? Where are you getting that from. I'm fully aware it's a container, however the formats contained within the container are not able to be edited by iMovie more often than not.
From here:
Quicktime is absolute shit and the fact that OSX forces you to work in it is absolutely inexcusable, another braindead decision. Let people work in common formats.
Where it is clear that you don;t really understand what Quicktime is, and confuse it with the player software that is much-maligned on Windows. It is a totally different beast on OS X (being a very large and integral framework) that works with "common formats". There are Quicktime codecs for all the common formats and many uncommon ones.
iMovie does support the MKV container, because Quicktime does. It has some slight limitations in implementation (it has to scan through the whole clip when loaded rather than just immediately starting, so you have to wait if you want to scrub the clip immediately), but it does work. Quicktime also supports WMV files (with the exception of the short lived WMV9 codec -
When you hit the green button, the window doesn't follow the Microsoft Windows paradigm. Maximised windows have never been a part of OS X (or OS 9) - that's just people expecting them to do exactly what Windows does, but why should it?
You can set two sizes with the green button, and it will toggle between them. "Apple" doesn't decide how big you want that window - the user does. It will remember the size you chose.
OS X Lion is introducing full screen apps for the first time on OS X, where the entire UI changes (ie, Dock goes away, top menu bar goes away) so it the app that is full screen has full focus. I expect then the green button will do that (perhaps as a toggle - small, large, fullscreen).
I will say that OS X is better than Windows, hands down. That doesn't mean it can't also have flaws (hello, Finder, hello dotfile littering on non-Mac filesystems, hello eternal loop of drive-spin-up-spin-down if you insert an unreadable DVD, among other things). It's still way better than Windows though (although from what I have seen of Win 7, it is looking good - where was that when Vista was being pried out of Ballmer's ass with a chair leg?).
You pretty much just made the case for me. Clicking the red icon closes the window - no it doesn't, it minimizes the window, but then you go on to say "in some apps..."
No, it really doesn't. It CLOSES the window. If you open that window again, it is not in the same state. For example, a text document with the cursor halfway down the page. If you click the x the window closes. If you reopen the document it is as if the previous state never existed. Minimising specifically keeps the window open and in the same state as you left it so when you come to use it again, it is exactly the same. This is down with the yellow button.
I said "some apps do close the whole app when you click the red button" but I specifically stated that this was *incorrect* behaviour that causes inconsistency. It is usually cross platform apps that "do it the windows way", although not exclusively - the worst offender for this from apple themselves is System Preferences, which fully closes if you close the main window with the x button.
How can that be? On the Mac, "It just works?" So it's impossible to have a bad install or something else.
No, that's just marketing. Everyone has it. It's not a carte blanche statement that things never go wrong - it's a computer with hardware and software; issues will crop up, which is why there is a large knowledgebase and Apple support network. If Apple users and Apple themselves genuinely thought it was "impossible to go wrong" then these things would not exist. In the majority of cases though, things do "just work" but not all the time - no different to any other software platform. You are being deliberately disingenuous if you are actually trying to argue this as a genuine point.
So it's a video editing app that can't edit the most common formats of video? Yeah, great app... again to the third party software.
You'll find that most video editing software wants the source material in specific formats - H.264 and Mpeg2 and Xvid and so on are temporally-based compressed formats, ie you have keyframes that can stand alone, but the majority of frames depend on data from earlier frames to save filesize. These do not edit well, so must be converted into non-temporal formats first. This is just basic video editing and is common to all NLE systems. Very few editors can actually work effectively with temporally compressed files. Final Cut Pro (well, actually Quicktime) added the ability to all OS X NLE software to edit HDV format by tweaking the way it handles start and end points of the clips for this very reason, so you don;t have to go through a lengthy import step to use it.
iMovie does this on import with any video that Quicktime will play, since it uses the Quicktime library to work - it comes with a large raft of common formats already, but you can extend it with other codecs as and when you need it. You can even import and export Theora if you like (it's a major part of the OS).
Quicktime is absolute shit and the fact that OSX forces you to work in it is absolutely inexcusable, another braindead decision. Let people work in common formats.
Now you're just trolling. Quicktime is not a "format" - it's a system library (what OS X calls a Framework) that handles video and graphics. Calling it a format is like calling The big blue E on a windows desktop "the internet". On OS X, which is the only place iMovie runs, it is a no-brainer to use the OS's built in, mature, highly extensible video framework to handle video. It is far more than just "Quicktime player" that most people see on Windows. It has been around for almost 20 years and is a key component of OS X.
The Quicktime *container* (.mov) can contain a great deal of actual *formats/codecs* by nature of the design of Quicktime itself, so you can "work with common formats" as much as you like, which is probably what you mean when you say "forced to use quicktime is a disgrace" without actually kn
Our diesel engines are considerably cleaner than the typical expectation, and the diesel fuel we buy is all extremely low in sulphur - far more than the US.
We get that "cleaner air" by burning less fuel per unit distance (mpg) compared to the equivalent Prius - that's what higher fuel economy means. Our diesel engines are no different to our petrol engines in that respect: with particulate filters, cats, and engine management systems.
In fact, european diesels put out less CO2 than the equivalent petrol engines (like the one in the Prius) - a fact noted in the way our cars are taxed. I pay less road tax for my large diesel minivan than my brother's smaller hatchback because despite his smaller engine (1.6l petrol vs 2.0l turbodiesel) his car gets lower mpg and higher g/CO2 per km.
So, we have our cake and eat it too. The market that that Prius carved out for itself in the US simply doesn't exist to the same extent here in Europe, since a long, long time before it came along we were buying diesels by the barrel because the innovation and drive to lower fuel costs went that way, rather than into hybrids.
There is still a small market - they see a lot of use as taxi cabs, for example, where the car spends a lot of time idle or moving slowly and with a high proportion of urban driving, but in the car market as a whole, if you want fuel economy and low road tax you just pick the car you were going to buy anyway, and then get the diesel version.
Also, laughable that you claim to get cleaner air - even with all those Prius' on the road, the majority of the US car driving population is rolling around in large slushmatic cars with oversized engines - even your basic sedans have unnecessarily large and inefficient engines. The average petrol engine in europe is 1.6 litres displacement. The average diesel is 2.0 litres displacement. The US figures are.... worse. Add to that fact that manual transmission cars are more efficient than automatics and consider that the vast majority of cars on UK roads are manual (at least 75%, probably more) and the figure is diametrically opposed for the US market, I'm not seeing how you can sit on your high horse and claim that you get "cleaner air" because you guys went for the Prius 15 years after Europe realised that fuel economy and low emissions were a good idea and made diesel engines that blew everything else away.
We don not - the Prius is the Prius, but they are considerably less common here in the UK than in the states, since if you want to drive a fuel efficient car, you just buy a diesel (over 50% of cars on the UK roads are diesels) and thus you can choose what sort of car you want. Pretty much every diesel gets better fuel economy than the Prius.
I drive a 2003 diesel Xsara Picasso, for example, that gets 55mpg, and is a minivan. It was a no brainer compared to the Pruis :D
The comparisons for equally specced Apple vs Win/other PCs have been done to death. The prevailing situation is a 10 to 20% premium over equivalent PCs. 300% is just... laughably trollish.
1. Single clicking on a window performs actions in that window, without bringing focus forward. I knew this was the case but I just double checked it. For example, you can start and stop iTunes when it is not the foreground app with a single left click on the play button. You can close tabs in non-foreground Safari windows with a single click. I can clear the downloads list (not in foreground, or even in active app) with a single click. Not sure what you're on about here.
2. The application menu being fixed to the primary screen is an annoyance if you have more than one screen and something does need to be done about it. Agreed (I have used multi screen Macs extensively in the past also). On a single screen it works very well though, but it does totally fall down when you move to more than one.
3. Clicking the red close icon closes the window. In some apps it also closes the app (it should *not* do this, it should always leave the app running). Minimising to the dock is the yellow button. The red button means "close window". The way to quit an app is command+Q, or from the menu. The only reason you don;t like this is because the "windows way" is that X closes the application (although it also closes just certain windows in some software, like Word etc). This is just personal preference.
4. SMB seems to work ok for me, but I do not have that many Windows boxes around - only two of the people I live with have Windows boxes and they don't report any problems sharing my media collection (via XBMC, on SMB-mounted volume), but I'll take your word for it - I don't have enough data.
5. Safari is almost exactly like Chrome. I use both all the time (about 60:40 Safari:Chrome). Safari does have a memory leak that requires you restart it every week or so, but it's not bad. I like the speed of both browsers. Used to use FF3.6 but it was a bit chunky on OS X. The FF4 beta is dreadful.
6. There are very few UAC-like popups - these occur when privilege escalation is required, eg for installing certain apps (not all - eg just writing to the Applications folder [which is outside your home folder] does not require a password). There is *no way* there are as many warning prompts as there are in Vista. Vista prompts you with a UAC if you open the equivalent of System Preferences for goodness sake (which OS X does not do). Safari warns you by default if you download a file that can be executed or decompressed, but you can turn this off. The system will also prompt you if something wants access to your keychain (eg, Mail.app if it gets updated and then wants to use your mail server credentials, but it can be told to always remember). Having used both Vista and OS X extensively, I will stake my left testicle on the fact that there's *considerably fewer* UAC-like prompts in OS X, certainly not "lots and lots" of them.
7. iLife is one of the best software bundles out there right now. Mail.app is *not* part of iLife (you could have put that in at number 8 for a whole new list item, but it seems to me that given that you think it's part of iLife you haven't really used the software much)
Either way, addressing Mail. Can't set unread: Right click on message, select "Mark > as unread". I just did it to the slashdot email that told me about your reply in this thread. It does not have an option to leave a message unread if you only highlight it for a few seconds though, you are correct.
Regarding actual iLife, iDVD behaving like that is odd and probably either means a bad install or something else. It has worked fine when I have used it (not too often - I have DVD Studio Pro on my primary machine, I have only used iDVD on my sister's machine while visiting her).
iMovie is a video editing app, so the formats it expects are ones designed to be source formats, like DV, HDV, AVC etc. It even edits XDCAM HD i
He was an idiot.
Press the footbrake. Hard.
Car stops.
Problem solved.
The brakes are *considerably* stronger than the transmission in their application of force to the wheels (ie, torque from the engine vs torque in the opposite direction from the brake disc). The only way he could have been in a situation where he could not stop is if his brakes were faulty, or if he gingerly pressed them and wore them out or hugely overheated them by keeping them partially depressed while speeding along. A sustained, hard press of the pedal *will* stop that car, even going at speed with the throttle jammed open and the transmission engaged.
As a professional driver, I am amazed that he *didn't* manage to stop the car despite the obvious method to do so - pressing the brake!
Whether the car has an issue or not, it was his own error that he died since he should have been able to stop the car despite a stuck throttle. If he could not do so, he was unfit to be driving in the first place, CHP officer or not.
What, so someone drilled a hole into the car, fitted a can of compressed air and fluid and pumped it into the transmission off-camera to make the car suddenly accelerate?
Bonus points if the person who rigged this demo, that the TV report fails to mention, is an expert witness for those suing because their cars "accelerated for no reason". ;)
I live in a city, and you can pry my manual transmission from my cold, dead hands.
Then again, I live in the UK.
Auto boxes are for old people and people who can't drive - you can take your test in an auto, but you get a special, sub-driving licence that says "auto only", prohibiting you from driving manual transmission vehicles. You really don't want to let people know you have a licence that says that.
There's also no real reports of sudden acceleration in a manual because in the unlikely event of it happening, the driver just puts the clutch in, or pops it out of gear. Problem solved. Then takes it calmly to a dealer and says "hey, my throttle is odd, please check it out", rather than going to the media with a scare story. :)
Even with no assist from the engine, the brake pedal is physically connected to the brake pads via hydraulics. There is no way for software to prevent the brakes being applied if you put your foot on the pedal. If the engine is running, this will also supply vacuum assist too, since that is a purely mechanical system for force multiplying your effort on the pedal. There's no software to go wrong or stop you - if you stamp on that pedal, your brakes will engage unless the hydraulics are faulty.
The brakes are also much more effective at stopping you than the transmission is at making you go forwards - easily demonstrated on even a slight incline - it requires almost no effort (with the engine running) and little effort (with the engine off) to stop a car rolling down the incline, yet moving the car up via the engine is much more work (for the engine, obviously). Even at full throttle, in gear, the brakes on a family car can overpower the engine, and then either the engine will stall or the clutch will slip (or your automatic transmission will shred).
Unless the guy's brake lines were defective, and he had no hydraulic pressure at all, "no brakes" just isn't an excuse for a car being unstoppable due to a stuck accelerator. Accident investigators would have carefully checked for this. There is a slight possibility that all of his brake lines failed at once (or failed at the master cylinder) but it is unlikely, especially combined with a *second* unlikely event - uncontrolled acceleration.
But you didn't "pay for it" - you got it at a discount, with Tmobile eating the cost. If you bought the phone outright from the start, then yes. And after the contract ends, then yes. Obviously you pay more overall with the contract since you get service (phone service) included in that, and interest on the initial discount since you could just walk off with the phone and never pay the contract.
So, you paid for *part* of it, it's *partly* your phone.
You already brought up the car analogy, but if you buy a car on hire-purchase, it does not belong to you fully until you have paid it off, and you are limited in the things you can do to it that will affect its resale value (like modifying it). If you bought it outright, you can do what the hell you like to it.
All those are excellent enhancements, but number 5 is already part of the iPhone's base features.
If you restore your phone (or even get a totally new one) you can restore it to exactly the way it was - SMS messages, contact data and other info, are all restored from backup when you sync your phone.
Those "few hours" are the extra you get from not having to carry around a spare battery - your original battery is considerably bigger. If you need to be in a situation where you need more power than the battery can give you, you have something that extends it. In a situation where you have a removable battery and you need longer life, you need to carry a spare - there's no real difference one way or the other. The main benefit of the built in battery is that you don't need to accommodate all the various bits to make it accessible - a door, a battery bay, a connector, and the physical conformation of the internal parts of the rest of the device to make it externally accessible. With a built in, you remove all of that and just fill any empty space you have in the device with the battery, wherever it will fit - the battery doesn't even have to be a uniform shape. The downside is that it is harder to repair or replace, and if the battery runs down and you are away from a power source you are stuck. Consider though - how many people using tablets and cellphones routinely carry around a spare battery with them, even if the model they have contains a removable one?
There are tradeoffs to both methods, but the security of data (in terms of ability to access or potential for data loss between backups) is not one of them. You are just looking for ways to make built-in batteries look bad beyond all the usual talking points.
"3x more for the privilege". Right 1995 called and wants its utterly inaccurate "fact" back.
If you think OS X is merely for "Mom and Pop" and "non tech savvy" then you really haven't looked very hard. It is very good at catering for those user groups. It is also exceptional at catering to the "tech savvy" too. It's aaaaaaaaal Unix under there, with all the power and flexibility that brings - with a GUI that is as easy to use as you could ever need. Sure, Finder is a bit clunky (especially in column view), but you can always put your own third party file manager on there (just like Linux), or just use the shell (just like Linux), or run an X session or twelve (just like Linux), all the while running Photoshop or AutoCAD or iPhoto or some other large commercial software alongside it (just like linu.... oh wait).
The combination of what's under the hood and the GUI on top make OS X one of the best all round OSes out there right now. Add to that the fact that Apple went and switched to x86, making virtualisation (just like on Linux) really simple and powerful, and you can do an awful lot with it. It's just as powerful as almost any flavour of Linux, and has a few things that it doesn't have, and clearly a few things that Linux has going for it that are a compromise on OS X - have to take the pros and cons here.
In terms of base function it's still better than Windows 7 (but Win 7 is way better than Vista), and there's still nothing to touch iLife for the price.
I would be interested to hear some of these "braindead modalities". I have already mentioned the weird sorting in column view in Finder (someone really needs to just rewrite it). What else? I really am interested in specific examples. I am going to be generous and assume you're not just trolling with some made up BS that you can't back up. I note you used modalities plural, so we're after more than one here.
You must have missed the part where Apple's market share has been steadily growing, year on year (not just for iOS, but for OS X too - there is no way that this is simply "old faithful" users.
Almost 1 in 5 new computers sold in the US is a Mac (this is not including any iOS devices, purely OS X). Two years ago it was 15%. Two years before that it was 8%ish.
The iPhone and iPad have done more for adoption of OS X than any switch commercials ever did.
Also, why would Apple halve the price of the whole line of products, even theoretically - they are making money hand over fist, in the face of all their haters saying "Apple is dying.... no, this year.... wait, this year...... ok, with this product they will definitely start dying....." since the release of the original multicoloured iMac. They're in business to make money, and they are making *a lot* of it, and seem to have judged their market pretty well. Look at it this way - where are the comparably priced tablet competitors to the iPad? What about the iPhone? All of the comparable stuff is similarly priced, if it exists at all (the iPad really is off in its own league right now, at least until Android 3.0).
I also note you think "industry pundits" will think the iPad2 is "keeping up" (with what exactly - there is nothing better than the iPad *1* right now, 8 months after it came out) - but the crucial thing being that Apple is not selling iPads to "industry pundits" - they are selling them to the general public who are liking what they see. Witness the slew of comments about how terrible the iPad is from a large portion of slashdot.... yet it sells faster than they can make it. It does exactly what a huge proportion of people want it to do, and it does it well.
While "industry pundits" are benchmarking tablets for FPS and other nonsense, Apple are off in the corner selling an awesome user experience to their customers. The iPad 2 will be no different in this respect - they will refine it a little, and then the "industry pundits" can say what they like. Slashsdot will call it evil and closed (even if it shipped with Linux on it and full source code, it would be "oh, they are just profiting on the backs of others! evil!" - you cannot win).
Meanwhile the general public will be all over it like a tramp on hot chips.
"How limited the Apple OS's are"
I see you've never used OS X then.