As with all EU countries, we have to wait until April 2007 for a PS3, missing the lucrative Christmas season. I don't suppose Sony sees this as a problem - it could easily sell its entire output of consoles elsewhere - but it means a lot of people will be picking up a 360 or Wii instead.
That's lost customers, and the chances of them coming back to Sony are slim. Of the Sony fanboys I've spoken to, most are incredibly blunt about how badly Sony treats EU countries with hardware releases; a year wait for the PSP, and a 5 month wait for the PS3. I won't be buying a PS3 personally because I think it's stale, overpriced and I don't have room for another console - my Wii should be arriving tomorrow.
So this Christmas - here at least - I'd expect the 360 and the Nintendo DS to clear up. Lack of Wii's in huge numbers and a damn excellent games roster make the 360 incredibly attractive. The DS also has the advantage of a much better games range than the PSP, and as both machines are rumoured to talk to their next gen consoles, it will be interesting to see whether the PSP/DS battle translates into PS3/Wii sales. I suspect it will.
However you cut it, Sony have a huge uphill battle here in the UK. I suspect they'll sell quite a lot of PS3's in April, but their ability to innovate has waned and I think they'll pay the price for it.
Buy an iMac... shove Boot Camp on it... Games Machine!!
Seriously though, maybe they should concentrate on having people write games for their computers then. I mean granted, you have Civ IV and Doom, but 99% of Mac games arrive late and it's just embarrassing. I mean they have Myst as the splash graphic for Strategy Games on their store for Pete's sake! My local Game store here in the UK has just removed its Mac shelf (yup, one shelf) to make room for... more console magazines.
If Apple are really serious about making a console, it isn't going to happen anytime soon. Put plain and simple; Apple don't understand gaming. And if they did, it'd probably hurt their 'creative professional' image. Leave the consoles to people who do it best and plough your money, brains and time into making the Mac better.
Well, how about you take all that surface data and map it on to your satellite imagery and building data...
See where I'm going - textured buildings, proper virtual environments? Microsft's Live Local already has buildings, so you could - in theory - link the two and maybe play out a journey through a virtual city. That'd be pretty neat and one day it'll happen, it's just a case of who, when and how.
We've got satellite, we've got birds eye now from Live Local, and I reckon that the street level stuff is awesome - just the thing for driving directions. Imagine being able to send someone a bunch of shots showing where turnings are, landmarks etc. Neat stuff
While I can understand the privacy aspects concern some, I was under the impression that when you're in public, you can pretty much be photographed by anyone regardless. Ok, so this is Microsoft, but how many times do we show up in the background on people's holiday snaps and videos, on the news? When Google Earth appeared, how many people we zooming right in to see if they could make themselves out in their gardens?
So what's the deal with you appearing anonymously on a sidewalk in some road mapping software - it just means that you were in a certain place at an undetermined time? How do you see that being abused? Is it a general feeling towards all ground-scale mapping (Ordanence Survey in the UK have been doing this for years), or just anti-MS?
Either way, I have to say that I like the results and hopefully something like this will appear globally soon, avec or sans people...
Xbox: Anytime a company is willing to take billions in losses to get marketshare, the product should be able to place better than 2nd place to the PS2.
True, but to come from nowhere to be placed second to Sony (above Nintendo) is rather impressive. And as far as taking losses go, that's what multibillion dollar war chests are for - use the cash to leverage yourself into new markets. What did impress me is that they designed the Xbox platform in house, and didn't just go out and buy up - say - Nintendo, who in 1999/2000 were floundering slightly and ripe for purchase.
The other key thing to look at is how much value having a console adds to their other services. MS don't have a huge front-room presence like Sony, but the Xbox is the stepping stone between a PC and the front-room for them. For MS that's a priceless thing to have and gives them a massive advantage long-term in the home entertainment market as Sony are barely out of the gates with the PS3 and have yet to prove a coherent online presence. MS are on Xbox Live version 2 already...
IIS: Even though it is bundled with Windows Server, it still is second place to Apache.
Yup, second place to something that's free. That's not surprising really is it. Of the 'paid for' web servers, it's succeeded, and it's earning MS cash when people choose to use it.
IE: Ahem, didn't they get sued by leveraging their monopoly on this one?
Yes, but no matter which way you look at it, for the last 4 or 5 years, there wasn't a decent alternative until Firefox was released. Opera wasn't too bad, but in that 4 year gap it's hard to say whether people used IE because it came free with the PC, or because they actually preferred it. Netscape was a bag of crap and Apple hadn't yet rolled Safari out (I think I was using IE on a Mac back then - *shudder*).
So, will Zune fail? Who knows - it's out there as a market feeler at the moment, and you can bet that with MS behind it, it isn't going to go away overnight.
Seriously, in 1997 Apple was on the brink of extermination. It had a stale product line, and abortive OS update (Copland) begun in 1994 which was eventually canned, it's replacement to appear a massive 7 years later as OS X. And you think MS's handling of Vista was bad...
Them boom! Jobs is back, the iMac appears, OS X appears, the iPod appears, switches to Intel, Apple reinvents itself again - successfully. You could argue that Jobs is pretty much the heart and soul of Apple.
Microsoft don't have anyone like that. You could argue that Bill Gates is, but most of the projects he's personally championed have been niche markets. Sure, they've had their successful market areas; Windows Mobile, Xbox, Windows Mediacenter, Auto PCs, but you kind of wish they'd look again at what people want.
Apple get it; get a person iTunes, an iPod and a Mac and they're sorted for most of their entertainment needs. Want it around the house? Get an Airtunes adaptor.
Sony don't get it; PSP speaks to PS3, and um... ATRAC? Minidisc? Er... Memory Stick slots? Their idea of a digital home doesn't incorporate other vendors and isn't feature-complete. On its own, Sony stuff doesn't make you go 'wow'.
Microsoft desperately need to get it and the thing they have going in their favour is - ironically - interoperability. Apple and Sony are stuck in lock-in land - our kit, our standards, our profit. If Microsoft took their head out of the sand for a moment and realised this, bit their lip and went with something a bit more open-minded, then they could really make a difference. However, like Sony and Apple, I think they'll be putting their bottom line/market share first, and what consumers want second. It's nice that we're seeing a change though and that they're having a shot at trying new stuff with the Xbox 360 (definitely a great console, no matter how you cut it) and Zune (average first try), but they need to try a bit harder...
..by Psygnosis on the Amiga. Absolutely bloody hilarious. Four players in a Dungeon Master/Eye of the Beholder style environment. Most maps were supposed to be cooperative, but it all went to hell when the first 'accidental' friendly fire occurred.
You always sat on the character selection screen hoping like hell that you were the first person to select the combat droid with the chain gun...
Apart from that, Skidmarks was great, Stunt Car Racer was good and I had a soft spot for Spy Vs Spy. When I got my PC, Duke Nukem 3D was a laugh if you went to the trouble of hauling your Pentium 75s round to a mates for a game (after spending an afternoon making network cables). More recently, I'd say the Half Life Team Fortress mod, and I sort of liked Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.
At the moment, I'm engrossed in Company of Heroes, which can be an absolute sod to play against other humans, but totally rocks in both multi- and simgle-player modes.
...that having a heavy disk in the drive would make it more stable, easier to keep and a constant speed and generally a lot better for wear and tear on bearings and heads.
I also seem to remember that glass and ceramic platters don't expand as much as metals do during thermal change which happens a lot as drives are turned on and shuts down, so I'd wager that his idea of using tin foil, aluminium or any other metal is flawed. Seriously.
Lots of them here. All Windows Mobile devices come with a media player, Samsung makes one with a 4GB drive and generally they're pretty good - been around for about 5 years and are certainly more than a rumour. AFAIK, Microsoft doesn't loose cash on these, it just supplies the reference hardware and OS.
It's not Big Brother as all these cameras are not linked to a central system. A company for instance, might have three or four monitoring its perimeter, while a cashpoint may have another one monitoring its use. Petrol stations may have a few outside for security - basically, they're scattered everywhere.
Now, the areas that do have linked cameras tend to be city centres. I don't really have a problem with this as the amount of effort required to pick me out after a day out shopping (if I had or hadn't done anything wrong) would be immense. After 7/7 last year, it took a lot of people looking at a lot of tapes a lot of time to track the involved individual's movements, and even now there is still uncertainty about where one of the guys went for 30-odd minutes. And remember that this process involved going to private companies to ask for their video tapes - it's a huge job tracking someone on disparate video systems, so the effort has got to be worth it when it's done.
So I have no problems with a loss of privacy - as far as I'm concerned once I step into a public area, anyone can film me for all I care - privacy's not just about video cameras, it's about people's eyeballs. If I was having an affair or something and was out and about with said woman, chances are more people would see me in person than cameras or camera operators, and if I decided it might be fun to steal something from a shop, same again. In the UK, CCTV is very much used as a tool to discourage people from doing wrong, and the more cameras on more separate systems the better - it makes retreiving the tapes for abusive purposes harder...
"They think nothing of drinking a four-pack of Redbull and lying about happy-slapping strangers to their £200-an-hour psychotherapist. They cannot adjust to the ever accelerating pace of modern life, where the branded totems of their demographic (Nike, Sony, Apple) are worn like tribal markings. The corporate endorsement of their t-shirts can be the critical bridge to social acceptance in the eyes of their peers."
Huh? What's all this "cannot adjust to the ever accelerating pace of modern life"? Surely some applied logic here would tend to suggest that older people - i.e. adults - should be less able to cope with the ever accelerating change of life than kids? Shouldn't we all be freaking out and taking Prozac? Yup, some of us might be, but that's what's interesting about the world, we're all different I know some kids that get by just fine, and others that go off the rails, but there's nothing to suggest that they're not coping with the pace of modern life - in any case, what would they compare it to?
They're not as contradictory as it first appears really.
Web standards pretty much determine the markup output server-side and how that markup is rendered in the browser. ASP.NET 2.0 is a server-side technology that outputs XHTML compliant code that will work in any browser - no ASP.NET stuff ever gets near the browser.
In that respect, ASP.NET is as web standards compliant as any other server-side technology - PHP, JSP, anything - it's virtually irrelevant to what gets output and arrives at the browser.
However, you're right in that Expression looks and feels half-baked. Visual Studio.NET is just fine for putting together 'professional' ASP.NET stuff, so why you'd want to release a product that overlaps is beyond me, especially when pages adhering to web standards can be put together in notepad if you know what you're doing (which from experience a lot of web designers don't).
Specifically the old Txxx and Dimension XPS series from 1999 or so - although not as spectacularly I must admit...
The drive was placed vertically in the front of the machine with the PCB facing the air vent. Consequently, dust and debris from the floor got sucked in, and eventually something shorted out the drive electronics. We didn't get 3" high flames, but we got a nice big blue/white flash and the magic smoke came out.
We solved the problem by raising the towers off the floor and placing plastic shields of the drive PCBs. I haven't seen the problems on more recent machines, but if you're in an environment making CAT5 cables or other stuff where you're likely to get small conductive lengths of material, it's worth bearing in mind.
...the fact that from a hardware perspective, a Mac and a PC are now pretty much the same, except in design, OS, name and - most importantly for Apple - price. I mean what makes a Mac a Mac? The OS, plain and simple.
This seems to have forced Apple into a slightly more childish "Our Intel-powered box is better than yours" where they really have nothing else to focus on apart from the small physical design elements such as the magnetic power cord and built in camera, and a different OS. As I mentioned in a previous post a while back, by moving to Intel, Apple have less and less differentiating them from Windows PCs and it's going to make it harder and harder for them to command unique selling points from a hardware perspective.
Unfortunately for me, this only reinforces the question:
why Apple, won't you let me run your OS on other Intel hardware?
My own answer to this would be that it's because they're a gnat's pube away from becoming a software company, and they're holding on to their bespoke hardware business for dear life. Once OSX is opened up to other Intel boxes (as I think it should be), what are the compelling reasons for buying an Apple?
(incidentally, is it just me or does anyone else find the Mac guy condescending, arrogant and bloody annoying?)
...if they dug up my back garden, they'd find 5 years worth of unsolicited ISP CDs they used to send me - oh, let's call them spam for the sake of argument - and bloody annoying they were too!
Even more stunning is the screen on the Sony UX180. That's running a 4.5" diagonal display (about 4" x 2.25") at a resolution of 1024 x 600, which is absolutely phenomenal.
Add to that it's Xbrite and touchscreen capabilities and I reckon it's pretty much about as good as you can get at the moment - sort of coming in at around 260 dpi. When you run Cleartype on it in Windows, the anti-aliasing is virtually invisible, it just looks like paper.
Regarding the power consumption - AFAIK, the UX180 screen is LED backlight driven which saves a large amount of juice and gives a more even effect, hence the UX180's decent battery life when compared to the larger screen (and lower res) UMPCs - one of which is ironically made by Samsung.
Ummm... I may be getting the wrong end of the stick here, but just how exactly does that stop people selling the console for extortionate amounts on eBay? They have to buy the console for the full price before eBaying it, so that 150 UKP deposit only goes so far as to ensure they get one to sell on...
It certainly won't discourage entrepreneurs who want to make a bit of cash, and (maybe I'm cynical) looks more like Sony trying to make people commit to a purchase. I'd certainly feel uneasy ponying up a quarter of the console's price before launch.
...it's heading the way of the movie industry and the music industry then? Lack of imagination, repatitive themes, form over function, soaring production costs and focus on brand rather than content... sounds familiar?
If you look at it that way, then it's not surprising. Although that said, the recent bedroom musician/indie film producer model means that we'll hopefully see a more gung-ho type of do-it-yourself game writing in the future.
Turbulence is derived from the Latin turbinis which means vortex. The same name also gave way to turbine - a phrase first used by Claude Burdin to describe the aforementioned device in 1828.
Van Gogh lived from 1853 until 1890, so man-made turbines existed during his lifetime, as well as the more natural effects he will have seen that others have mentioned.
Ergo, the entire point of the article is moot, he painted what he saw and understood, that - believe it or not - is what artists do. Why people have to waste their time trying to comprehend why Van Gogh painted turbulence is beyond me...
Every time Apple have released a version of OSX - through from 10.1 to the current 10.4, we have had no end of problems with all the little "under the bonnet" changes they keep making; IP stacks, security updates, SMB compatibility. That plus the £80-a-pop update price each year just makes supporting Macs on a corporate network annoying.
Don't get me wrong, I await 10.5 for my home Mac with a great deal of enthusiasm, I just wish they'd realise that businesses need version stability, rather than version surprises when selecting and using an OS.
A caldera is formed when a company ejects a large volume of magma, fire and crap, creating a huge void within itself. Consequently, it collapses under its own weight.
Hmmm... I wouldn't say that working for MS automatically makes you a fan of everything they do, and CRM is vastly removed from the Xbox and FASA teams - they are a huge company. Although maybe I should be more cynical...
However, I reckon that whether he works for MS or not is irrelevant given that Xbox 360 owners will be able to download demos of the game from Live to see if they personally like it before they buy it. Plus at least he's up front enough to blog as an MS employee, rather than it being some convoluted viral marketing campaign. And let's be honest, we've all got a right to voice comments about stuff - even if it's made by companies we work for.
Incidentally,
the demo download is one of the best things about Xbox Live, because I can get a demo of pretty much any game instantly. So a tiny slither of kudos to MS for doing this, rather than me having to reply on magazine reviews and glossy box pics.
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As with all EU countries, we have to wait until April 2007 for a PS3, missing the lucrative Christmas season. I don't suppose Sony sees this as a problem - it could easily sell its entire output of consoles elsewhere - but it means a lot of people will be picking up a 360 or Wii instead.
That's lost customers, and the chances of them coming back to Sony are slim. Of the Sony fanboys I've spoken to, most are incredibly blunt about how badly Sony treats EU countries with hardware releases; a year wait for the PSP, and a 5 month wait for the PS3. I won't be buying a PS3 personally because I think it's stale, overpriced and I don't have room for another console - my Wii should be arriving tomorrow.
So this Christmas - here at least - I'd expect the 360 and the Nintendo DS to clear up. Lack of Wii's in huge numbers and a damn excellent games roster make the 360 incredibly attractive. The DS also has the advantage of a much better games range than the PSP, and as both machines are rumoured to talk to their next gen consoles, it will be interesting to see whether the PSP/DS battle translates into PS3/Wii sales. I suspect it will.
However you cut it, Sony have a huge uphill battle here in the UK. I suspect they'll sell quite a lot of PS3's in April, but their ability to innovate has waned and I think they'll pay the price for it.
Buy an iMac... shove Boot Camp on it... Games Machine!!
Seriously though, maybe they should concentrate on having people write games for their computers then. I mean granted, you have Civ IV and Doom, but 99% of Mac games arrive late and it's just embarrassing. I mean they have Myst as the splash graphic for Strategy Games on their store for Pete's sake! My local Game store here in the UK has just removed its Mac shelf (yup, one shelf) to make room for... more console magazines.
If Apple are really serious about making a console, it isn't going to happen anytime soon. Put plain and simple; Apple don't understand gaming. And if they did, it'd probably hurt their 'creative professional' image. Leave the consoles to people who do it best and plough your money, brains and time into making the Mac better.
Well, how about you take all that surface data and map it on to your satellite imagery and building data...
See where I'm going - textured buildings, proper virtual environments? Microsft's Live Local already has buildings, so you could - in theory - link the two and maybe play out a journey through a virtual city. That'd be pretty neat and one day it'll happen, it's just a case of who, when and how.
I think that's rather cool to be honest.
We've got satellite, we've got birds eye now from Live Local, and I reckon that the street level stuff is awesome - just the thing for driving directions. Imagine being able to send someone a bunch of shots showing where turnings are, landmarks etc. Neat stuff
While I can understand the privacy aspects concern some, I was under the impression that when you're in public, you can pretty much be photographed by anyone regardless. Ok, so this is Microsoft, but how many times do we show up in the background on people's holiday snaps and videos, on the news? When Google Earth appeared, how many people we zooming right in to see if they could make themselves out in their gardens?
So what's the deal with you appearing anonymously on a sidewalk in some road mapping software - it just means that you were in a certain place at an undetermined time? How do you see that being abused? Is it a general feeling towards all ground-scale mapping (Ordanence Survey in the UK have been doing this for years), or just anti-MS?
Either way, I have to say that I like the results and hopefully something like this will appear globally soon, avec or sans people...
The other key thing to look at is how much value having a console adds to their other services. MS don't have a huge front-room presence like Sony, but the Xbox is the stepping stone between a PC and the front-room for them. For MS that's a priceless thing to have and gives them a massive advantage long-term in the home entertainment market as Sony are barely out of the gates with the PS3 and have yet to prove a coherent online presence. MS are on Xbox Live version 2 already...
Yup, second place to something that's free. That's not surprising really is it. Of the 'paid for' web servers, it's succeeded, and it's earning MS cash when people choose to use it.
Yes, but no matter which way you look at it, for the last 4 or 5 years, there wasn't a decent alternative until Firefox was released. Opera wasn't too bad, but in that 4 year gap it's hard to say whether people used IE because it came free with the PC, or because they actually preferred it. Netscape was a bag of crap and Apple hadn't yet rolled Safari out (I think I was using IE on a Mac back then - *shudder*).
So, will Zune fail? Who knows - it's out there as a market feeler at the moment, and you can bet that with MS behind it, it isn't going to go away overnight.
Apple.
Seriously, in 1997 Apple was on the brink of extermination. It had a stale product line, and abortive OS update (Copland) begun in 1994 which was eventually canned, it's replacement to appear a massive 7 years later as OS X. And you think MS's handling of Vista was bad...
Them boom! Jobs is back, the iMac appears, OS X appears, the iPod appears, switches to Intel, Apple reinvents itself again - successfully. You could argue that Jobs is pretty much the heart and soul of Apple.
Microsoft don't have anyone like that. You could argue that Bill Gates is, but most of the projects he's personally championed have been niche markets. Sure, they've had their successful market areas; Windows Mobile, Xbox, Windows Mediacenter, Auto PCs, but you kind of wish they'd look again at what people want.
Apple get it; get a person iTunes, an iPod and a Mac and they're sorted for most of their entertainment needs. Want it around the house? Get an Airtunes adaptor.
Sony don't get it; PSP speaks to PS3, and um... ATRAC? Minidisc? Er... Memory Stick slots? Their idea of a digital home doesn't incorporate other vendors and isn't feature-complete. On its own, Sony stuff doesn't make you go 'wow'.
Microsoft desperately need to get it and the thing they have going in their favour is - ironically - interoperability. Apple and Sony are stuck in lock-in land - our kit, our standards, our profit. If Microsoft took their head out of the sand for a moment and realised this, bit their lip and went with something a bit more open-minded, then they could really make a difference. However, like Sony and Apple, I think they'll be putting their bottom line/market share first, and what consumers want second. It's nice that we're seeing a change though and that they're having a shot at trying new stuff with the Xbox 360 (definitely a great console, no matter how you cut it) and Zune (average first try), but they need to try a bit harder...
..by Psygnosis on the Amiga. Absolutely bloody hilarious. Four players in a Dungeon Master/Eye of the Beholder style environment. Most maps were supposed to be cooperative, but it all went to hell when the first 'accidental' friendly fire occurred.
You always sat on the character selection screen hoping like hell that you were the first person to select the combat droid with the chain gun...
Apart from that, Skidmarks was great, Stunt Car Racer was good and I had a soft spot for Spy Vs Spy. When I got my PC, Duke Nukem 3D was a laugh if you went to the trouble of hauling your Pentium 75s round to a mates for a game (after spending an afternoon making network cables). More recently, I'd say the Half Life Team Fortress mod, and I sort of liked Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory.
At the moment, I'm engrossed in Company of Heroes, which can be an absolute sod to play against other humans, but totally rocks in both multi- and simgle-player modes.
...that having a heavy disk in the drive would make it more stable, easier to keep and a constant speed and generally a lot better for wear and tear on bearings and heads.
I also seem to remember that glass and ceramic platters don't expand as much as metals do during thermal change which happens a lot as drives are turned on and shuts down, so I'd wager that his idea of using tin foil, aluminium or any other metal is flawed. Seriously.
Lots of them here. All Windows Mobile devices come with a media player, Samsung makes one with a 4GB drive and generally they're pretty good - been around for about 5 years and are certainly more than a rumour. AFAIK, Microsoft doesn't loose cash on these, it just supplies the reference hardware and OS.
It's not Big Brother as all these cameras are not linked to a central system. A company for instance, might have three or four monitoring its perimeter, while a cashpoint may have another one monitoring its use. Petrol stations may have a few outside for security - basically, they're scattered everywhere.
Now, the areas that do have linked cameras tend to be city centres. I don't really have a problem with this as the amount of effort required to pick me out after a day out shopping (if I had or hadn't done anything wrong) would be immense. After 7/7 last year, it took a lot of people looking at a lot of tapes a lot of time to track the involved individual's movements, and even now there is still uncertainty about where one of the guys went for 30-odd minutes. And remember that this process involved going to private companies to ask for their video tapes - it's a huge job tracking someone on disparate video systems, so the effort has got to be worth it when it's done.
So I have no problems with a loss of privacy - as far as I'm concerned once I step into a public area, anyone can film me for all I care - privacy's not just about video cameras, it's about people's eyeballs. If I was having an affair or something and was out and about with said woman, chances are more people would see me in person than cameras or camera operators, and if I decided it might be fun to steal something from a shop, same again. In the UK, CCTV is very much used as a tool to discourage people from doing wrong, and the more cameras on more separate systems the better - it makes retreiving the tapes for abusive purposes harder...
"They think nothing of drinking a four-pack of Redbull and lying about happy-slapping strangers to their £200-an-hour psychotherapist. They cannot adjust to the ever accelerating pace of modern life, where the branded totems of their demographic (Nike, Sony, Apple) are worn like tribal markings. The corporate endorsement of their t-shirts can be the critical bridge to social acceptance in the eyes of their peers."
Huh? What's all this "cannot adjust to the ever accelerating pace of modern life"? Surely some applied logic here would tend to suggest that older people - i.e. adults - should be less able to cope with the ever accelerating change of life than kids? Shouldn't we all be freaking out and taking Prozac? Yup, some of us might be, but that's what's interesting about the world, we're all different I know some kids that get by just fine, and others that go off the rails, but there's nothing to suggest that they're not coping with the pace of modern life - in any case, what would they compare it to?
They're not as contradictory as it first appears really.
Web standards pretty much determine the markup output server-side and how that markup is rendered in the browser. ASP.NET 2.0 is a server-side technology that outputs XHTML compliant code that will work in any browser - no ASP.NET stuff ever gets near the browser.
In that respect, ASP.NET is as web standards compliant as any other server-side technology - PHP, JSP, anything - it's virtually irrelevant to what gets output and arrives at the browser.
However, you're right in that Expression looks and feels half-baked. Visual Studio.NET is just fine for putting together 'professional' ASP.NET stuff, so why you'd want to release a product that overlaps is beyond me, especially when pages adhering to web standards can be put together in notepad if you know what you're doing (which from experience a lot of web designers don't).
Specifically the old Txxx and Dimension XPS series from 1999 or so - although not as spectacularly I must admit...
The drive was placed vertically in the front of the machine with the PCB facing the air vent. Consequently, dust and debris from the floor got sucked in, and eventually something shorted out the drive electronics. We didn't get 3" high flames, but we got a nice big blue/white flash and the magic smoke came out.
We solved the problem by raising the towers off the floor and placing plastic shields of the drive PCBs. I haven't seen the problems on more recent machines, but if you're in an environment making CAT5 cables or other stuff where you're likely to get small conductive lengths of material, it's worth bearing in mind.
...the fact that from a hardware perspective, a Mac and a PC are now pretty much the same, except in design, OS, name and - most importantly for Apple - price. I mean what makes a Mac a Mac? The OS, plain and simple.
This seems to have forced Apple into a slightly more childish "Our Intel-powered box is better than yours" where they really have nothing else to focus on apart from the small physical design elements such as the magnetic power cord and built in camera, and a different OS. As I mentioned in a previous post a while back, by moving to Intel, Apple have less and less differentiating them from Windows PCs and it's going to make it harder and harder for them to command unique selling points from a hardware perspective.
Unfortunately for me, this only reinforces the question:
why Apple, won't you let me run your OS on other Intel hardware?
My own answer to this would be that it's because they're a gnat's pube away from becoming a software company, and they're holding on to their bespoke hardware business for dear life. Once OSX is opened up to other Intel boxes (as I think it should be), what are the compelling reasons for buying an Apple?
(incidentally, is it just me or does anyone else find the Mac guy condescending, arrogant and bloody annoying?)
...if they dug up my back garden, they'd find 5 years worth of unsolicited ISP CDs they used to send me - oh, let's call them spam for the sake of argument - and bloody annoying they were too!
Even more stunning is the screen on the Sony UX180. That's running a 4.5" diagonal display (about 4" x 2.25") at a resolution of 1024 x 600, which is absolutely phenomenal.
Add to that it's Xbrite and touchscreen capabilities and I reckon it's pretty much about as good as you can get at the moment - sort of coming in at around 260 dpi. When you run Cleartype on it in Windows, the anti-aliasing is virtually invisible, it just looks like paper.
Regarding the power consumption - AFAIK, the UX180 screen is LED backlight driven which saves a large amount of juice and gives a more even effect, hence the UX180's decent battery life when compared to the larger screen (and lower res) UMPCs - one of which is ironically made by Samsung.
Ummm... I may be getting the wrong end of the stick here, but just how exactly does that stop people selling the console for extortionate amounts on eBay? They have to buy the console for the full price before eBaying it, so that 150 UKP deposit only goes so far as to ensure they get one to sell on...
It certainly won't discourage entrepreneurs who want to make a bit of cash, and (maybe I'm cynical) looks more like Sony trying to make people commit to a purchase. I'd certainly feel uneasy ponying up a quarter of the console's price before launch.
...it's heading the way of the movie industry and the music industry then? Lack of imagination, repatitive themes, form over function, soaring production costs and focus on brand rather than content... sounds familiar?
If you look at it that way, then it's not surprising. Although that said, the recent bedroom musician/indie film producer model means that we'll hopefully see a more gung-ho type of do-it-yourself game writing in the future.
Turbulence is derived from the Latin turbinis which means vortex. The same name also gave way to turbine - a phrase first used by Claude Burdin to describe the aforementioned device in 1828.
Van Gogh lived from 1853 until 1890, so man-made turbines existed during his lifetime, as well as the more natural effects he will have seen that others have mentioned.
Ergo, the entire point of the article is moot, he painted what he saw and understood, that - believe it or not - is what artists do. Why people have to waste their time trying to comprehend why Van Gogh painted turbulence is beyond me...
Every time Apple have released a version of OSX - through from 10.1 to the current 10.4, we have had no end of problems with all the little "under the bonnet" changes they keep making; IP stacks, security updates, SMB compatibility. That plus the £80-a-pop update price each year just makes supporting Macs on a corporate network annoying.
Don't get me wrong, I await 10.5 for my home Mac with a great deal of enthusiasm, I just wish they'd realise that businesses need version stability, rather than version surprises when selecting and using an OS.
'Touching' The Void
Is it like Peter Crouch? Cos if it is... I don't care if it's M$!!!
Well, one description is here
A caldera is formed when a company ejects a large volume of magma, fire and crap, creating a huge void within itself. Consequently, it collapses under its own weight.
Oh, did I say company? I meant volcano.
Hmmm... I wouldn't say that working for MS automatically makes you a fan of everything they do, and CRM is vastly removed from the Xbox and FASA teams - they are a huge company. Although maybe I should be more cynical...
However, I reckon that whether he works for MS or not is irrelevant given that Xbox 360 owners will be able to download demos of the game from Live to see if they personally like it before they buy it. Plus at least he's up front enough to blog as an MS employee, rather than it being some convoluted viral marketing campaign. And let's be honest, we've all got a right to voice comments about stuff - even if it's made by companies we work for.
Incidentally, the demo download is one of the best things about Xbox Live, because I can get a demo of pretty much any game instantly. So a tiny slither of kudos to MS for doing this, rather than me having to reply on magazine reviews and glossy box pics.