No company would choose to make a product slower than they could when the demand was high. That's from the school of totally fucking stupid business sense.
Apple are out to MAKE MONEY. They wouldn't do that by deliberately not making iPods as fast as they could, assuming people were buying them, and they are - iPods are flying off the shelves.
They charge more than other people, and guess what, they are STILL SELLING like hot cakes. I highly doubt they would slow down production.
If the iPod was a dud, people would know by know. There wouldn't be a groundswell of positive opinion fuelling the purchases of new iPods.
The fact that it's in high demand in no way contributes to the "awesomeness". It's awesome in the eyes of 50% of the mp3 player market (or whatever the iPod's share is - I know it's bigger than any other single player. It might be 30%, it might be 70%, I have just forgotten).
You and the grandparent poster only make up a small marketshare.
There's no "WTF!!" in leaving out a feature that only a very small number of people would benefit from.
You might not have noticed, but Apple can't make iPods fast enough - they're flying off the shelves. I don't think they're sitting back thinking "what could we do to make the iPod sell better?"
The Macrovision is usually disabled because it fucks up the picture not only on VCRs (who copies DVDs to tape, really?!) but also on high end CRT projectors that some home cinema enthusiasts use.
So, you can't watch your films on your $4,000+ projector because of the crippleware.
But the fact remains, they released a game with "multiplayer" features that had no bots!
Sure, I like playing against humans more, but sometimes you just fancy a skirmish, or you and your mates want to go up against a much larger force of AI.
I have an iBook - I can get 6 hours, easy (although I'm not sure with the Airport card powered up - I usually turn it off in flight, I mean, what am I going to connect to up there until now?)
An extra battery and I have enough for 10 or so hours easy, even adding for frivolous power waste, like increasing the screen brightness or listening to a CD rather than mp3.
Yes, hence my point that using solar energy would reduce that cost. It's still not 100% efficient converting sunlight into hydrogen via electricity (it's nowhere near 50% efficient) but sunlight is free.
All you have to pay for is the technology to make the conversion, and the cost of transporting it to wherever you need it.
It's a question of what we can harness. Enough energy falls on the surface of the Earth every day from the Sun to supply the World's energy needs for weeks, we just can't harness it effectively.
Large scale solar farms in desert and offshore areas would be a very useful source of power for the future, even if it isn't used as a primary, continuous source. An offshore solar farm could be used to electrolyse seawater to produce hydrogen for fuel cells, for example - it is currently expensive to do this because you get out less energy than you put in. Using solar energy though, that doesn't matter because the sun is free (unless the US Patent Office grants someone a patent on "a large ball of gas and dust undergoing nuclear fusion that the Earth orbits around".
SCO will no doubt claim that the Sun also contains System V code. Darl McBride is welcome to visit the sun in an Apollo capsule to inspect it for himself. How he's going to get to the Sun's kernel is beyond me. He'd better pack some sunblock.
My Dual G5's heat sinks are large, but pretty light.
They are rectangular boxes about 3"x3" square section, 5" long made of 1mm thick aluminium with lots of fins making an unobstructed tunnel for air flow.
With a fan in front and behind each of these heat sinks, my G5 stays cool and quiet.
The loudest fan in this box is the one up by the hard drives.
The PPC970s in this box draw 51 watts each. The ones in the G5 Xserve draw 24 watts each.
With careful design, the noise can be kept to a minimum. Sure, the heat sink could be made smaller on the G5, but then you'd possibly have to increase fan rpm to account for the loss in surface area available for heat exchange.
As for who do you know with dual CPUs? Aside from me and my other Mac friends, no one on the PC side. Apple and other Mac developers have spent more time working on dual CPU optimised apps through necessity - it was the best way to squeeze more performance out of the G4. I am pleased that they are carrying this trend into the G5 line, even though the PPC970 is a pretty decent performer on its own.
You have no choice - I thought the current version of Windows can refuse to run on MP architectures unless an MP-safe licence code is entered when setting up, and to get one of those you have to call MS.
I'm pretty sure I had DVD playback in 10.1.5 on my trusty 600Mhz iBook.
She shipped with 10.1.2 on the recovery/install discs and I'm certain I had full DVD playback from the moment I first started using her.
I have each new incarnation of OS X now - I bought a boxed version of Jaguar, and I now use the box for holding burned CDs of open source stuff and so on.
I have the "up to date" CDs for Panther since I qualified for them having bought a G5 within the upgrade window. I know I'm technically not supposed to have it installed on both the G5 and the iBook without the family licence, but I/did/ just drop 2,200 on a dual 2Ghz G5 so I figure Apple will cut me some slack because I wanted to give my 2 year old stalwart iBook a new lease of life,
In each incarnation 10.1 > 10.2 > 10.3 my iBook has become easier to use and much faster.
No, unless you want to put down the extra for the G5.
Of course, in the current state of play at 64bit CPU isn't going to be all that beneficial to you unless you have very specific needs, but for the 90% of people who don't need it, my previous post still applies.
Macs are pretty competitively priced for the hardware and software that you get.
Sure, they can't compete with Dell for the "3Ghz PC with 17" TFT for $400! Theres nothing wrong with it, honest! We didn't use the cheapest, crappiest parts we could find to offset the cost of the CPU and LCD panel, really!"
You'll be hard pressed to find a better value laptop than an iBook (or even a Powerbook, excluding the 17" which is a bit overkill).
The dekstops vary more, but an eMac is as close as you'll get to budget - and it's pretty good value for money.
Mac is awesome for Q3A and TA
on
The FragBook
·
· Score: 1
We're a pro video shop using Final Cut Pro so we have a fair few G4 and G5 Macs around - the evenings tend to be taken up with stress busting LAN games.
Usually Team Arena, sometimes standard Q3A. Sure, there are more modern games out there, but it's hard to beat Quake 3 for its gameplay and feel and it runs perfectly well on a modest G4 system all the way up to our DP 2gig G5. Hell, it even runs on my 600Mhz iBook in a pinch, although the graphics system is what lets it down there - only 8Mb VRAM).
Just witness the Yahoo deviousness - you uncheck the "send me lots of spam" boxes when you agree to sign up. Then they change the TOS (every month or so it seems) and those boxes magically check themselves again and you have to opt out all over again.
I have always named my computers. Names are always female and I often pick them out of the air when I'm setting up the machine for the first time.
G3 iBook 600Mhz (primary machine): Helen (after my first love) Dual 2Ghz G5: Alison (random name choice) 12" Powerbook: Laura 500Mhz Athlon box: Holly (after the senile computer in Red Dwarf) 166Mhz FreeBSD box: Kate iPod: Caroline
I also name my cars. My first Renault Clio was Kate, my second is Charlotte.
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The iBook and the 12" PB both lack 1000BT and FW800.
Only the 15" and 17" PB have those.
No company would choose to make a product slower than they could when the demand was high. That's from the school of totally fucking stupid business sense.
Apple are out to MAKE MONEY. They wouldn't do that by deliberately not making iPods as fast as they could, assuming people were buying them, and they are - iPods are flying off the shelves.
They charge more than other people, and guess what, they are STILL SELLING like hot cakes. I highly doubt they would slow down production.
If the iPod was a dud, people would know by know. There wouldn't be a groundswell of positive opinion fuelling the purchases of new iPods.
The fact that it's in high demand in no way contributes to the "awesomeness". It's awesome in the eyes of 50% of the mp3 player market (or whatever the iPod's share is - I know it's bigger than any other single player. It might be 30%, it might be 70%, I have just forgotten).
You and the grandparent poster only make up a small marketshare.
There's no "WTF!!" in leaving out a feature that only a very small number of people would benefit from.
You might not have noticed, but Apple can't make iPods fast enough - they're flying off the shelves. I don't think they're sitting back thinking "what could we do to make the iPod sell better?"
Well, not yet anyway.
The Macrovision is usually disabled because it fucks up the picture not only on VCRs (who copies DVDs to tape, really?!) but also on high end CRT projectors that some home cinema enthusiasts use.
So, you can't watch your films on your $4,000+ projector because of the crippleware.
Citroen may be crap, but don't you be dissin' my Renault.
Both Clios I've had have been reliable, sturdy and economical.
The iTunes DRM is keyed to your logic board, not the hard drive in your machine.
But the fact remains, they released a game with "multiplayer" features that had no bots!
Sure, I like playing against humans more, but sometimes you just fancy a skirmish, or you and your mates want to go up against a much larger force of AI.
I can't believe you pay for the privelege of calling 911.
Although I guess it weeds out those people who couldn't afford to be treated by the US healthcare system.
Is that an African or European swallow?
Of course, there's also the availability of the PPC970 to consider - can IBM make them fast enough?
Probably yes.
If your G5 sounds like a jet engine there's something wrong with it.
I have an iBook - I can get 6 hours, easy (although I'm not sure with the Airport card powered up - I usually turn it off in flight, I mean, what am I going to connect to up there until now?)
An extra battery and I have enough for 10 or so hours easy, even adding for frivolous power waste, like increasing the screen brightness or listening to a CD rather than mp3.
Yes, hence my point that using solar energy would reduce that cost. It's still not 100% efficient converting sunlight into hydrogen via electricity (it's nowhere near 50% efficient) but sunlight is free.
All you have to pay for is the technology to make the conversion, and the cost of transporting it to wherever you need it.
It's a question of what we can harness. Enough energy falls on the surface of the Earth every day from the Sun to supply the World's energy needs for weeks, we just can't harness it effectively.
Large scale solar farms in desert and offshore areas would be a very useful source of power for the future, even if it isn't used as a primary, continuous source. An offshore solar farm could be used to electrolyse seawater to produce hydrogen for fuel cells, for example - it is currently expensive to do this because you get out less energy than you put in. Using solar energy though, that doesn't matter because the sun is free (unless the US Patent Office grants someone a patent on "a large ball of gas and dust undergoing nuclear fusion that the Earth orbits around".
SCO will no doubt claim that the Sun also contains System V code. Darl McBride is welcome to visit the sun in an Apollo capsule to inspect it for himself. How he's going to get to the Sun's kernel is beyond me. He'd better pack some sunblock.
My Dual G5's heat sinks are large, but pretty light.
They are rectangular boxes about 3"x3" square section, 5" long made of 1mm thick aluminium with lots of fins making an unobstructed tunnel for air flow.
With a fan in front and behind each of these heat sinks, my G5 stays cool and quiet.
The loudest fan in this box is the one up by the hard drives.
The PPC970s in this box draw 51 watts each. The ones in the G5 Xserve draw 24 watts each.
With careful design, the noise can be kept to a minimum. Sure, the heat sink could be made smaller on the G5, but then you'd possibly have to increase fan rpm to account for the loss in surface area available for heat exchange.
As for who do you know with dual CPUs? Aside from me and my other Mac friends, no one on the PC side. Apple and other Mac developers have spent more time working on dual CPU optimised apps through necessity - it was the best way to squeeze more performance out of the G4. I am pleased that they are carrying this trend into the G5 line, even though the PPC970 is a pretty decent performer on its own.
You have no choice - I thought the current version of Windows can refuse to run on MP architectures unless an MP-safe licence code is entered when setting up, and to get one of those you have to call MS.
Fair enough - I fell into the trap that most people do of using "PC" as a symonym for "Windows".
When I took Windows 95 off my olf P166 box and put FreeBSD on there, the speed went up hugely.
I'm pretty sure I had DVD playback in 10.1.5 on my trusty 600Mhz iBook.
/did/ just drop 2,200 on a dual 2Ghz G5 so I figure Apple will cut me some slack because I wanted to give my 2 year old stalwart iBook a new lease of life,
She shipped with 10.1.2 on the recovery/install discs and I'm certain I had full DVD playback from the moment I first started using her.
I have each new incarnation of OS X now - I bought a boxed version of Jaguar, and I now use the box for holding burned CDs of open source stuff and so on.
I have the "up to date" CDs for Panther since I qualified for them having bought a G5 within the upgrade window. I know I'm technically not supposed to have it installed on both the G5 and the iBook without the family licence, but I
In each incarnation 10.1 > 10.2 > 10.3 my iBook has become easier to use and much faster.
I can't say I've ever seen that trend in PCs.
No, unless you want to put down the extra for the G5.
Of course, in the current state of play at 64bit CPU isn't going to be all that beneficial to you unless you have very specific needs, but for the 90% of people who don't need it, my previous post still applies.
Not this old sock again.
Macs are pretty competitively priced for the hardware and software that you get.
Sure, they can't compete with Dell for the "3Ghz PC with 17" TFT for $400! Theres nothing wrong with it, honest! We didn't use the cheapest, crappiest parts we could find to offset the cost of the CPU and LCD panel, really!"
You'll be hard pressed to find a better value laptop than an iBook (or even a Powerbook, excluding the 17" which is a bit overkill).
The dekstops vary more, but an eMac is as close as you'll get to budget - and it's pretty good value for money.
We're a pro video shop using Final Cut Pro so we have a fair few G4 and G5 Macs around - the evenings tend to be taken up with stress busting LAN games.
Usually Team Arena, sometimes standard Q3A. Sure, there are more modern games out there, but it's hard to beat Quake 3 for its gameplay and feel and it runs perfectly well on a modest G4 system all the way up to our DP 2gig G5. Hell, it even runs on my 600Mhz iBook in a pinch, although the graphics system is what lets it down there - only 8Mb VRAM).
No, not quite.
Crashes are more rare than both of those.
22:59 up 87 days, 22:57
Dang software updates affecting my uptime.
Yes, for digital TV/Cable/Satellite.
It is also used for DVD videos, but at a higher bitrate than is possible/normal for TV.
Do you trust those boxes to stay unchecked?
Just witness the Yahoo deviousness - you uncheck the "send me lots of spam" boxes when you agree to sign up. Then they change the TOS (every month or so it seems) and those boxes magically check themselves again and you have to opt out all over again.
Indeed I do.
I have always named my computers. Names are always female and I often pick them out of the air when I'm setting up the machine for the first time.
G3 iBook 600Mhz (primary machine): Helen (after my first love)
Dual 2Ghz G5: Alison (random name choice)
12" Powerbook: Laura
500Mhz Athlon box: Holly (after the senile computer in Red Dwarf)
166Mhz FreeBSD box: Kate
iPod: Caroline
I also name my cars. My first Renault Clio was Kate, my second is Charlotte.