I was a Day One donor, and I haven't received my laptop yet, though I *have* received two emails telling me that their delivery software is telling them they can't ship to my address. I used my work address, which is a confirmed PayPal address to which I've had literally dozens of online purchases shipped over the last three and a half years, so that makes no sense. If they say they had problems with PayPal data, I guess that sort of explains it. I wrote them after the first "we can't deliver it" email, authorizing them to send it to my home address, and never received a reply. Thet opened a 24/7 customer service phone number on Jan 22, and when I called them on the 23rd they promised me I can expect to receive my XO laptop at the work address within the next 10 days. My fingers are crossed...
Maybe someone here can explain this to me, because I just can't wrap my mind around it: Why is an ESRB "Adults Only" rating considered the kiss of death while the "M" is no big deal? Games aren't like movies--"nobody under 17 unless accompanied by an adult" a la the MPAA R rating is not a viable option. Seems to me the ratings are functionally identical, with the only difference being that 17-year-olds can buy "M" games...and 17-year-olds are probably.000000000000000000000000001% of the gaming market . It's insane to me that they would suddenly become such a battleground.
The real problem here is the ridiculous fact that the people at the top of our culture--people in their 50s and 60s who didn't grow up with videogames--are simply incapable of understanding that gaming is an adult hobby. I'd like to think that in 10 or 20 years, when the current crop of senators and editorial writers are dead or retired and Gen Xers will have taken their place, that this insanity will finally be behind us...but by then, the boomers will probably have legislatively emasculated ine industry to a degree where the changing of the demographic guard won't make any difference at all.
People for whom English is a recently-aquired second or third language often display poor written grammar yet still spell very well. This guy's grammar and sentence structure are excellent despite the atrocious spelling, which leads me to believe that he grew up with the language.
Thanks for the info on WordService, of which I was entirely ignorant. I'll give it a whirl with Pages. I made my post from the POV of a fairly recent Windows-->OS X switcher who hasn't used Macs much since the System 9 days. While I'm obviously fairly computer-savvy (otherwise, I wouldn't be reading/.), I'm not a technical writer, but rather a pop culture journalist, and most of the people in my field are probably only going to use mass-market ultra-user friendly word processors (for compatability's sake, if nothing else), and while the other progams' ability to save as Word files makes them viable alteratives, it really all comes down to the features set. I'll definitely give WordService a try. If I can get the functionality I need from Pages, I'd be happy to make it my primary word processor.
I'd love tgo switch to NeoOffice or Pages or another decednt alternative to Word on the OS X platform, but they all ignore a feature of vital importance to professional writers like myself: A halfway decent word count function. In Pages, you can do a word count on the whole document, but not on a highlighted selection. And in NeoOffice, you have to go through an enormous song-and-dance with the Tools-->Statistics dialog (before manually selecting a tab!) to get the word count (a method that also precludes getting the word count of a highlighted selection). There's tons of room for a word count box in the status bar at the bottom of document panes in NeoOffice, but is it there? Nope. In Word, I can see how much I've written by looking at the status bar or by by executing a quick keyboard commmand, and I can run it on selections as easily as the whole document. Everyone who's trying to make Word-beaters for OS X just don't get it. I don't like using MS bloatware, especially on the Mac, but for now Word is the only real option for anyone who earns his or her living as a writer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall reading in the New York Times and elsewhere that the official Vatican announcement of John Paul II's death was made by email. Maybe they licked that electronic-holy-seal problem when no-one was looking.
I'm reminded of the (apycryphyal?) story I heard about why they continute to drive on the left in India. Apparently they wanted to switch to driving on the right when they became an independent country, as part of ditching the colonial legacy--only to realize that the tens of millions of bulls and horses used to haul wagons were so stubborn as to make it impossible to retrain them to use the other side of the road. Sometimes, the most mundane of practical considerations can carry the day.
The *original* BSG was set in the present day and posited that Earth was a long-lost outpost of a galactic civilization. The new BSG is set several hundred years in the future--the humans are descended from colonists from Earth who lost contact with their homeworld, which, over the course of several generations, began to be treated as a myth. Their culture is rooted in technology from Earth which got rolled back from a more advanced level by the first war with the Cylons. All of the present-day stuff we've seen--whiteboards, ties, etc.--are things that it's pretty easy to see people still using as part of their daily lives hundreds of years from now.
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I was a Day One donor, and I haven't received my laptop yet, though I *have* received two emails telling me that their delivery software is telling them they can't ship to my address. I used my work address, which is a confirmed PayPal address to which I've had literally dozens of online purchases shipped over the last three and a half years, so that makes no sense. If they say they had problems with PayPal data, I guess that sort of explains it. I wrote them after the first "we can't deliver it" email, authorizing them to send it to my home address, and never received a reply. Thet opened a 24/7 customer service phone number on Jan 22, and when I called them on the 23rd they promised me I can expect to receive my XO laptop at the work address within the next 10 days. My fingers are crossed...
Maybe someone here can explain this to me, because I just can't wrap my mind around it: Why is an ESRB "Adults Only" rating considered the kiss of death while the "M" is no big deal? Games aren't like movies--"nobody under 17 unless accompanied by an adult" a la the MPAA R rating is not a viable option. Seems to me the ratings are functionally identical, with the only difference being that 17-year-olds can buy "M" games...and 17-year-olds are probably .000000000000000000000000001% of the gaming market . It's insane to me that they would suddenly become such a battleground.
The real problem here is the ridiculous fact that the people at the top of our culture--people in their 50s and 60s who didn't grow up with videogames--are simply incapable of understanding that gaming is an adult hobby. I'd like to think that in 10 or 20 years, when the current crop of senators and editorial writers are dead or retired and Gen Xers will have taken their place, that this insanity will finally be behind us...but by then, the boomers will probably have legislatively emasculated ine industry to a degree where the changing of the demographic guard won't make any difference at all.
People for whom English is a recently-aquired second or third language often display poor written grammar yet still spell very well. This guy's grammar and sentence structure are excellent despite the atrocious spelling, which leads me to believe that he grew up with the language.
Thanks for the info on WordService, of which I was entirely ignorant. I'll give it a whirl with Pages. I made my post from the POV of a fairly recent Windows-->OS X switcher who hasn't used Macs much since the System 9 days. While I'm obviously fairly computer-savvy (otherwise, I wouldn't be reading /.), I'm not a technical writer, but rather a pop culture journalist, and most of the people in my field are probably only going to use mass-market ultra-user friendly word processors (for compatability's sake, if nothing else), and while the other progams' ability to save as Word files makes them viable alteratives, it really all comes down to the features set. I'll definitely give WordService a try. If I can get the functionality I need from Pages, I'd be happy to make it my primary word processor.
I'd love tgo switch to NeoOffice or Pages or another decednt alternative to Word on the OS X platform, but they all ignore a feature of vital importance to professional writers like myself: A halfway decent word count function. In Pages, you can do a word count on the whole document, but not on a highlighted selection. And in NeoOffice, you have to go through an enormous song-and-dance with the Tools-->Statistics dialog (before manually selecting a tab!) to get the word count (a method that also precludes getting the word count of a highlighted selection). There's tons of room for a word count box in the status bar at the bottom of document panes in NeoOffice, but is it there? Nope. In Word, I can see how much I've written by looking at the status bar or by by executing a quick keyboard commmand, and I can run it on selections as easily as the whole document. Everyone who's trying to make Word-beaters for OS X just don't get it. I don't like using MS bloatware, especially on the Mac, but for now Word is the only real option for anyone who earns his or her living as a writer.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I recall reading in the New York Times and elsewhere that the official Vatican announcement of John Paul II's death was made by email. Maybe they licked that electronic-holy-seal problem when no-one was looking.
I'm reminded of the (apycryphyal?) story I heard about why they continute to drive on the left in India. Apparently they wanted to switch to driving on the right when they became an independent country, as part of ditching the colonial legacy--only to realize that the tens of millions of bulls and horses used to haul wagons were so stubborn as to make it impossible to retrain them to use the other side of the road. Sometimes, the most mundane of practical considerations can carry the day.
The *original* BSG was set in the present day and posited that Earth was a long-lost outpost of a galactic civilization. The new BSG is set several hundred years in the future--the humans are descended from colonists from Earth who lost contact with their homeworld, which, over the course of several generations, began to be treated as a myth. Their culture is rooted in technology from Earth which got rolled back from a more advanced level by the first war with the Cylons. All of the present-day stuff we've seen--whiteboards, ties, etc.--are things that it's pretty easy to see people still using as part of their daily lives hundreds of years from now.