then explain the 3 to 6 month port times of games that where written for Wintel only by companies for the Mac, since most Mac games are not ported by the firm that created them (obviously some are built with the plans for them to be ported in the first place, Blizzard which has put out plenty of cross-platform games even subscibes to the multi-platform disk idea, which gives them major points in my mind)
examples of this would be the huge number of games MacPlay ports over, many in 6 months or less with the longest being 9.
Obviously if its a good game, its going to get ported, so why not put the code in ahead of time so it doesnt cost you more later.
yeah I understand your thought, but even if it is miniscule, it seems like there are many more reports than last time, and worse, far too many reports on different aspects of the OS.
It's understandable if one or two things dont work, but it seems like there are a LOT of the new aplications that are giving trouble on a lot of different machines (what works with a new G4 has problems with a old G4, some things work better on a G3 iBook than a Tibook, no one problem which is a bit odd)
I'm going to refrain from saying anything about that but while you guys cant see I will be secretly snickering in the corner.
See my big problem is that porting games is not hard, especially when a huge chunk of the games out there are still coded on the Mac, its mot very hard to re-compile the data to run on other systems, especially when unlike on the PC a huge chunk of your problems with configurations and such are gone since a lot a Apples stuff is standardized with a much more limited amount of 3rd party cards and such to worry about causeing bugs.
Active X used to big a big problem, since there was for some time no program to convert Active X controls to Mac, but that has also changed.
While I love the 3 month wait time from PC release to Mac release, since it both gives me a wait period to see if A) the game is good, and B) get rid of the huge amount of bugs Games always have since they are pushed through, the truth is that its not so hard anymore to compile for both platforms.
nonono dont get me wrong, I mean its cool and all, but still WHY?? it's freaking excel!!!! Im tired of people using Excel (specially in my workplace) for databases instead of Filemaker when we have a site license for it. The last thing I want to see is them PLAYING in Excel!! lol.
Is it me, but compaired to Jag. that Panther is just a bit more buggier than it should have been? Palm doesnt install (though 10.2.8 broke that so I cant call it a Panther problem) Lineage wont play, a crapload of other utilities and programs wont work. And in some cases it breaks your computer, or FW drive.
Really I know this is usually the case with first version software, but with the OS X it seemed that more polished versions of the OS where comming out? Why the rush at Apple? if there where problems its not like we have to worry about compitition from Microsoft with their long in the tooth, err I mean Longhorn OS. They should have just held it and worked things out.
with just about every work enviroment with a conection to the internet these days (including a few that shouldnt have such connection) and with Java all over the place...
WHY???????????
Personally I am not upset at the xBox getting screwed. while Microsoft might have made a nice system, its licensing practices blow, and unlike PC companies who dont mind bending over and getting Bill's little Bill, the game manufacturers, knowing that they have two other perfectly viable systems out there have no problem saying, screw you.
It's kinda nice to see people feel what its like to be a mac user too:-).
brought Ultima Online to the masses??? gee my mac was never able to run it??
Eh I will go back to Lineage, at least NC soft lets us Mac users play that.
I must say it is quiet annoying that in this day and age of code being easily compiled for multiple platforms, still very few MMORPGs out there for mac users, with online Lineage, Everquest, and Shadowbane, along with a few much smaller ones.
The one that pisses me off the most at not getting is Uhr.
is there a OSX GPS setup out there, I would love to do this to my problematic iBook 500mhz (screen problem so you have to use the RGB hookup) that I thought about integrating into my car as a iTunes player/DVD player/ GPS navigator.
wh we are just speaking to the trolls, we can be happy in knowing we have a knowlage of the computer industry the 13 year olds lack (sorry to any 13 year olds who are nice and considerate of posters on/.)
The best thing about it is its not like it would be any harder to code games for the mac, There are programs that work at letting a PC progrma compiled for Active X call for the right things in OS X as well as there is decent amount of "PC" games that where actually coded and developed on the mac, just compiled to PC.
Really its cause they know its pointless to release a game for Mac unless it is a GOOD game, The smaller user base (and the fact that there is a decent amount of mac users out there who dont buy a mac for games but buy it to do work, so dont have the time/need to play games on it) means that if its a suck ass game, its going to be ported over for naught. Its cheeper for them to just wait, see the reponse and then if there is a demand port it.
Now there is always an exception (cough lucasarts cough) but for the most part it holds true, and honestly given a choice between a relitivaly bug free and very cool game, and a bug ridden first release that I just wasted my money on, which more often than not is what a good chunk of the games I see in the PC gamers mags are after they review them... I go for the first choice.
I was begining to think we might be getting these less frequently
ANYWAY, I really am shocked that this has been going on unchecked as much as it has. Im sure enough people have said something to warrent a investigation of SCO's activities, yet still no word on them being investigated for Stock fraud just as their is no word on what real code was actually stolen, (to which we now get its up to them to prove it... huh??? self incrimination????? YEAH THATS GOING TO HAPPEN EVEN IF THEY DID STEAL CODE WHICH I NOW FEEL WE KNOW THEY PROBABLY DIDNT.)
Anyway what I find quite annoying is that the press has been treating it as if SCO has a case, not one person has actually talked to anyone in the tech field who knows they are lying. Its always some "tech analist" who couldnt analize his or her way out of a paper bag. Would us sending these slashdot stories to the major cable news outlets make a difference????
Re:Who do GNU/Darwin think they are?
on
Darwin 7.0 Released
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· Score: 3, Insightful
And to be totally truthfull
a) Apple is a hardware company NOT a software one. They have been getting more and more into the software biz these days, but they have always been a hardware company that makes the OS for their systems, much like higher end server companies make tailor or even make OS's for their boxes.
b) There where Power PC clones, Infact my first mac wass a powerbase 180 made by PowerComputing which was one of the best ones out there, but at the time it killed Apples sales and put them even more in the red than before., plus while the quality off some was great, mush better than Apples (best feature of mine, ability to use serial AND PS/2 mice and keyboards and Apple and PC VGA conectivity without using an adapter), some where horror shows on line with most second rate PC manufacturers and really brought down the macintosh's quality.
Job's not being stupid and needing to fix all the red left from before, killed the clones that sucked and bought out the ones that where great so he could have those people on staff for him (which is why Apple has all the tech support documents for Power Computing still on their servers in support). It was that along with killing the projects sucking away money without showing anything for it (newton, which I still love and still use my eMate, and the old Apple server department, the ones that used IBM Unix in them) and the releace of the G3/iMac that saved the company and allowed him to do the big change, which was recoding the old NeXt OS, what we now know as OSX.
Disreagrd the fuckhead troll posters, what it literally means is
I Am Not A Lawer
when discussing things that have legality issues in them
course 90% of slashdot users probably didnt know that either which is why you got the stupid comments back.
No question, there's a lot the Russians didn't tell us during the space race. In a chapter of his 1988 book Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost entitled "Dead Cosmonauts," space engineer and historian James Oberg relates several episodes:
On March 23, 1961, three weeks before Gagarin's flight, cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko died horribly after a fire in an oxygen-rich pressure chamber used for training, which started when he carelessly tossed a cotton pad on a hot plate. Bondarenko's death was not acknowledged until 1986.
One cosmonaut was airbrushed out of a widely circulated 1961 photo of the original Soviet space team, not because he'd died in the line of duty but because he'd been cashiered. Again, not until 1986 was the truth revealed: the missing man was Grigoriy Nelyubov, who along with two other men had been bounced from the cosmonaut corps in late 1961 after fighting with some soldiers in a rail station. Embittered and alcoholic, he was killed in 1966 when he stepped in front of a train.
Several other cosmonauts in training were also painted out of photos in books and other materials circulating in the Soviet Union. Most had been dropped from the roster for medical, disciplinary, or academic reasons--the Soviets apparently wanted no suggestion that any cosmonaut was less than perfect.
HA I remeber the turbo button, know what was great with some of those old games like Tie Fighter, putting it on a faster machine than it was designed for and seeing what happened, I remeber vividly my Uncle putting it on his brand new Pentium and having the speech in the game come out sounding like a Ewok on crack when the Imperial trooper asked for you name
Well the ISS is more than just 3 years old, its only been in space for 3 years but parts of it where designed and built as far back as the later Regan early Bush years (that Sr. not Dubua) I know cause the guy who designed the superstructure for the solar arrays (and inccidentally enough the building to construct that superstructure since it was test fitted on earth and thus needed a huge building to support it) graduated from our tech department in 1989 and almost imediately started working on the Hubble and then manage the 3 or 4th team to design the final ISS design based on some of the stuff they had built and tested for Alpha (the superstructor is actually newer than the moduals)
Anyway, the other thing you have to remeber is that in relation to the Russians with whom safety was a concern but not as much so as we cared about, the Mir was a deathtrap in our minds. I remeber after the remote probe incident all of the NASA officials talking about had it been us we would have crash burned the thing years ago. So in relation to the Mir ours might be in great shape, but after Columbia they dont want to take any chances.
no I know there is a way to rip to Ogg in iTunes, it was posted here over the summer (least last time I saw it on slashdot)
but yes the iPod non-support is a bit of a annoyance, It would be nice if someone hacked the firmware to allow it to support it (and maybe DRM.wav files ) but until that time its only really usefull on your computer and the one or two players that actually play them.
maybe since that has been a complaint by a few people who didnt backup their harddrive (I for one learned the hard way its always safer to have a backup)
What you can do with iTunes is download some, then pause and download the rest, I have actually done this and it works fine.
course you cant play it on a different computer unless you authorize it so you will never be able to play it on more than 3 computers (yes even streaming unfortunatly doesnt let you play them, that I also tried streaming my iBook to a iMac at work.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously if its a good game, its going to get ported, so why not put the code in ahead of time so it doesnt cost you more later.
And guess what, PlayOnline has been around much longer than the XBox
It's understandable if one or two things dont work, but it seems like there are a LOT of the new aplications that are giving trouble on a lot of different machines (what works with a new G4 has problems with a old G4, some things work better on a G3 iBook than a Tibook, no one problem which is a bit odd)
See my big problem is that porting games is not hard, especially when a huge chunk of the games out there are still coded on the Mac, its mot very hard to re-compile the data to run on other systems, especially when unlike on the PC a huge chunk of your problems with configurations and such are gone since a lot a Apples stuff is standardized with a much more limited amount of 3rd party cards and such to worry about causeing bugs.
Active X used to big a big problem, since there was for some time no program to convert Active X controls to Mac, but that has also changed.
While I love the 3 month wait time from PC release to Mac release, since it both gives me a wait period to see if A) the game is good, and B) get rid of the huge amount of bugs Games always have since they are pushed through, the truth is that its not so hard anymore to compile for both platforms.
nonono dont get me wrong, I mean its cool and all, but still WHY?? it's freaking excel!!!! Im tired of people using Excel (specially in my workplace) for databases instead of Filemaker when we have a site license for it. The last thing I want to see is them PLAYING in Excel!! lol.
Really I know this is usually the case with first version software, but with the OS X it seemed that more polished versions of the OS where comming out? Why the rush at Apple? if there where problems its not like we have to worry about compitition from Microsoft with their long in the tooth, err I mean Longhorn OS. They should have just held it and worked things out.
with just about every work enviroment with a conection to the internet these days (including a few that shouldnt have such connection) and with Java all over the place... WHY???????????
what would have been correct would have been bringing the game to the large segment of windows users, not saying the masses
Maybe I'm glad we lost Tech TV here for the freaking YES network... Though watching the Yankees is just as bad.
It's kinda nice to see people feel what its like to be a mac user too :-).
Eh I will go back to Lineage, at least NC soft lets us Mac users play that.
I must say it is quiet annoying that in this day and age of code being easily compiled for multiple platforms, still very few MMORPGs out there for mac users, with online Lineage, Everquest, and Shadowbane, along with a few much smaller ones.
The one that pisses me off the most at not getting is Uhr.
is there a OSX GPS setup out there, I would love to do this to my problematic iBook 500mhz (screen problem so you have to use the RGB hookup) that I thought about integrating into my car as a iTunes player/DVD player/ GPS navigator.
wh we are just speaking to the trolls, we can be happy in knowing we have a knowlage of the computer industry the 13 year olds lack (sorry to any 13 year olds who are nice and considerate of posters on /.)
Really its cause they know its pointless to release a game for Mac unless it is a GOOD game, The smaller user base (and the fact that there is a decent amount of mac users out there who dont buy a mac for games but buy it to do work, so dont have the time/need to play games on it) means that if its a suck ass game, its going to be ported over for naught. Its cheeper for them to just wait, see the reponse and then if there is a demand port it.
Now there is always an exception (cough lucasarts cough) but for the most part it holds true, and honestly given a choice between a relitivaly bug free and very cool game, and a bug ridden first release that I just wasted my money on, which more often than not is what a good chunk of the games I see in the PC gamers mags are after they review them... I go for the first choice.
ANYWAY, I really am shocked that this has been going on unchecked as much as it has. Im sure enough people have said something to warrent a investigation of SCO's activities, yet still no word on them being investigated for Stock fraud just as their is no word on what real code was actually stolen, (to which we now get its up to them to prove it... huh??? self incrimination????? YEAH THATS GOING TO HAPPEN EVEN IF THEY DID STEAL CODE WHICH I NOW FEEL WE KNOW THEY PROBABLY DIDNT.)
Anyway what I find quite annoying is that the press has been treating it as if SCO has a case, not one person has actually talked to anyone in the tech field who knows they are lying. Its always some "tech analist" who couldnt analize his or her way out of a paper bag. Would us sending these slashdot stories to the major cable news outlets make a difference????
Job's not being stupid and needing to fix all the red left from before, killed the clones that sucked and bought out the ones that where great so he could have those people on staff for him (which is why Apple has all the tech support documents for Power Computing still on their servers in support). It was that along with killing the projects sucking away money without showing anything for it (newton, which I still love and still use my eMate, and the old Apple server department, the ones that used IBM Unix in them) and the releace of the G3/iMac that saved the company and allowed him to do the big change, which was recoding the old NeXt OS, what we now know as OSX.
not a west coast thing, every bar and pool hall in NJ and NY has it too, unless they are too hip to have games to begin with.
Ha your right, i never said i was a good speller though :-D
I Am Not A Lawer
when discussing things that have legality issues in them course 90% of slashdot users probably didnt know that either which is why you got the stupid comments back.
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/i/IANAL.html
http://www.fas.org/spp/guide/russia/piloted/oberg8 810.htm
got to thank straight dope for this one
No question, there's a lot the Russians didn't tell us during the space race. In a chapter of his 1988 book Uncovering Soviet Disasters: Exploring the Limits of Glasnost entitled "Dead Cosmonauts," space engineer and historian James Oberg relates several episodes:
On March 23, 1961, three weeks before Gagarin's flight, cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko died horribly after a fire in an oxygen-rich pressure chamber used for training, which started when he carelessly tossed a cotton pad on a hot plate. Bondarenko's death was not acknowledged until 1986.
One cosmonaut was airbrushed out of a widely circulated 1961 photo of the original Soviet space team, not because he'd died in the line of duty but because he'd been cashiered. Again, not until 1986 was the truth revealed: the missing man was Grigoriy Nelyubov, who along with two other men had been bounced from the cosmonaut corps in late 1961 after fighting with some soldiers in a rail station. Embittered and alcoholic, he was killed in 1966 when he stepped in front of a train.
Several other cosmonauts in training were also painted out of photos in books and other materials circulating in the Soviet Union. Most had been dropped from the roster for medical, disciplinary, or academic reasons--the Soviets apparently wanted no suggestion that any cosmonaut was less than perfect.
HA I remeber the turbo button, know what was great with some of those old games like Tie Fighter, putting it on a faster machine than it was designed for and seeing what happened, I remeber vividly my Uncle putting it on his brand new Pentium and having the speech in the game come out sounding like a Ewok on crack when the Imperial trooper asked for you name
Anyway, the other thing you have to remeber is that in relation to the Russians with whom safety was a concern but not as much so as we cared about, the Mir was a deathtrap in our minds. I remeber after the remote probe incident all of the NASA officials talking about had it been us we would have crash burned the thing years ago. So in relation to the Mir ours might be in great shape, but after Columbia they dont want to take any chances.
but yes the iPod non-support is a bit of a annoyance, It would be nice if someone hacked the firmware to allow it to support it (and maybe DRM .wav files ) but until that time its only really usefull on your computer and the one or two players that actually play them.
What you can do with iTunes is download some, then pause and download the rest, I have actually done this and it works fine.
course you cant play it on a different computer unless you authorize it so you will never be able to play it on more than 3 computers (yes even streaming unfortunatly doesnt let you play them, that I also tried streaming my iBook to a iMac at work.