Bootcamp. Part of my frustration with the process was that the 8GB partition that I created initial was too small by about 250MB (grrrr) once the patches etc had been installed. 10GB to fit XP and Half-life is a workable minimum - but I kinda wish I'd gone for 15.
Other than that it went pretty smoothy, if not incredibly slowly.
I've had bad experiances with CrossOver Office in the past. If you can get it to work as well as BootCamp I'd be very interested as all the rebooting is a little tedious.
I've finally got a PC powerful enough to play modern PC games: a MacBook:) . First game I installed on it was Half-Life 2 as it was never, ever going to get ported to OS X and that has to be the most unpleastant installation and purchasing experiance I've ever had - but the game was great!
An hour or two into the game and I'm begining to wonder why I ever bought a console. 2 hours in and I'm begining to realize that its pretty much the same experiance as Halo 2, but with frame drops and installation problems.
My conclusion? I'm glad that PC gaming is open to me once more. The mouse might not be the greatest controller in every situation, but its certainly pretty neat at some things. I like being able to carry around a device thats capable of playing HL2 at silly high resolutions and since I've had it I've hardly used my DS, but I will still be first in line for a new Wii. It's apples and oranges.
It might feel like you can compare PC gaming and consoles directly, but they scratch different itches, in the same way as the PSP and DS are fundamentally differnet ways of approaching the same problem and cars are nothing like motorbikes.
I'm on the verge of a similar problem with iTunes.
I've got 2 macs. So thats two authorized computers gone. The hdd failed on my three year old PB, no biggy, I just replaced it and reauthorized it in iTunes. Then the logic board went. Was intermitent enough for me to think maybe, just maybe I ought to reinstall OS X, just in case (I used to be a windows user). That went fine, but like a dumbass I forgot to deauthorise before I reinstalled. 1 licence remains.
The logic board finally gave in, I could no longer get my PB to boot. I bought a shiney new MacBook, but now I have no spare iTunes authorized licences remaining.
If I have a power surge / my machine gets stolen. I won't be able to listen to the music that I bought - and I've only been using iTunes for 3 years, I expect to be a ble to listen to the music for the next 50. What am I going to do when my iMac fails in 3 years and I don't get the opertunity to de-authorise?
Do I use jHymn on my existing collection and hope thats OK with the RIAA/BPI?
Do I rip all my music to CD then painstakingly reimport them back to iTunes?
Will I be forced to create a new AppleID and then repurchase the music?
The situation worsens should I start to invest in Apple's Movie service. Part of the appeal of paying £10 for a DVD is that I know that should I feel like it, I have bought permission to watch that film, whenever I like for the rest of my life. With the DRMd version, I seem to be buying the right to watch the movie for a rest of my computers life. Essentially I'm one mac virus away from loosing £100s of pounds of investment - especially with my current AppleID.
But the really stupid thing... I still buy using iTMS because it is the easiest way to impulse buy music and receive instant gratification. It's the music equivalent of a chocolate bar. We all know the clever money is in fruit. Its better for you, slightly more expensive, and if you want to you can take the seeds and grow your own, but most people buy chocolate.
I didn't realise that was common in the US. It certainly isn't here in the UK. My Telewest box had a USB port, but I was never really sure why, and I don't think my current Sky box has anything. We can't even take advantage of Elgato modules as our cable and satalite suppliers refuse to provide CI cards. Even if they did come with Firewire out as standard, it still doesn't help me with a XBox 360 / Wii / PS3 or commodity HD DVD / Blu Ray player.
HDMI input would make iMac THE bedroom/kitchen pvr of choice: 24" quality screen with 200+ GB of storage and the ability to share recordings with other iMacs via WiFi, all for the price of a Bravia. Sweet.
What have NVidia or ATi got to do with it? USB / Firewire HDMI capture devices shouldn't be on the video card.
The technology is available, and its expensive (because its a niche technology), but its there.
Being able to plug my Sky box / 360 / Wii / PS3 into my Mac would save me a lot space and money - I guess if I want it that badly I could just go out and buy the device myself.
Surely the most glaring error is that, out of the box the only way of getting HD content into this Mac is via the ethernet cable. Guess this will make more sense on the 12th?
Why no HDMI/SCART/S-Video in? Surely a windowed HDMI input screen isn't beyond the Apple engineers, and Front Row would provide an excellent way of accessing it.
I was once blown across the room whilst I was fixing an old and dusty PSU. I accidently touch the case and one of the bigger caps at the same time whilst the thing was still plugged in.
Thats the sort of mistake you only make twice, maybe three times. Four and you're clearly an addict.
I only half believe that. While it is impossible to deny that our species is polluted with short-sighted agressors I believe that they are the minority. Most of the people I know are loving and caring who would go out of their way to avoid deceiving or hurting people for personal gain.
It is our society, they way we form groups and heirarchies that has decided that minority of agressors show 'leadership' and 'strength' and that these qualities allow them to demand a greater percentage of the wealth and a greater freedom in mates.
Was our human instincts that formed this society? I would say that it was the instincts of the agressors who enforced their rule through fear rather than the majority, as most people are happy to bundle through life without a 'leader'.
This is damning of our society. A central, organised resource where people are free to contribute should be the pinacle of the internet - but it isn't - its a place where politicians, corporations and zealots spread their lies under a banner of truth.
But I guess this is art imitating life. Wikipedia was a democracy - and this proves that not all people are equal and that power is a much greater force for bad than knowledge and freedom is for good.
I agree. Games are supposed to be fun, its kinda in the their job description. Take Half-Life, arguably the greatest game of its era. It truely was an immersive game that was ahead of the competition. But getting the bugger to work was a PITA. From what I can remember it took my 4x CD ROM drive 10 minutes to install it, which was quickly followed by the grim message that I need to download a new version of directX, which then told me I had to download the latest glide drivers for my Voodoo 2.
After all that, it worked - at around 15-20 fps at 640x480.
At the time I concidered this progress compared to getting Tie Fighter to load from a CD-ROM AND getting the mouse driver to load at the same time (I got much kudos from my peers for this miricle of config.sys engineering).
But that was the price you payed for wanting cutting edge graphics and realism. Consoles of the day were fun. SMB3, Star Fox we great games, but compared to PC Games they were for amatures and kids. The PS1 changed that for me, the XBOX more so.
I just put the CD in the machine and it worked! Better than that the games were as good as the current crop of PC games. And it was cheaper! The console was only £150!! And the games were the same price... and there were more of them!
From what I can see PC gaming is still 1 part playing a game to 1 part being told your system is too slow (and you really need to buy another one). Online play has made this worse, because when you get beat there is always the thought that if only you had an extra 10 fps or a lower latency server you could have got the bastard. Unless, you find the fun in fixing the box (which, until it turned into silly money, I have to admit I did) there is little fun in playing PC Games compared to a console.
The other part that has really turned me off is that the only reason its telling you that your computer is too slow is that its struggling to render the 50 billion polygons on a tree just off the horizon... ie its got nothing to do with gameplay and everything to do with the 'realism'.
I'm just about to buy a new laptop. I need it to be light, small, pretty and performant. I'm buying a Mac Book.
Do I care that it can play DVDs out of the box. Yes. But do I care weather it comes with 5.1 Digital Surround? No, because its a laptop, and the best sound I'm, going to get out of it is from my ear buds, on a plane. However, I know from experiance that I rarely use my laptop to play DVDs because of battery life. If its plugged into a wall, I'm either at work (and shouldn't be watching a DVD), or I'm at home, where I have a much better system that doesn't tie up valuable memory and video resources: a TV.
Do I care about music? Increasingly less. If I'm listening to music I tend to be listening on my iPod, which is synced with my iMac (which has Harmon Kardon speakers:) ). I'd miss music playback on my iMac, but if they took the speakers out of my laptop I probably wouldn't notice.
Do I care about games? No. I like to think, that if I suddenly had a change of heart and thought that £39 for last years games was worth it, I might be tempted at the odd Mac game. But my gaming needs are met significantly more completely by my DS (and probably a Wii in the comming months).
What I do care is that I can plug it into a second monitor/projector and it allows me to have a database, tomcat/webbrick/jboss, eclipse, textmate, firefox/safari/opera and mail open at once without any noticable slow down. I want wireless internet, killer battery life the ability to sync across my iMac/phone/iPod/mac book with almost no interaction from myself.
Good iChat performance is a bonus, but really, I want that in my iPod/iPhone as soon as humanly possible - 3g video mobiles are rubbish, and Apple could be onto a real winner if they can combine the iSight, iPod and Airport... I'd buy one if the price was right.
And I don't think I'm on my own. Most people, when they buy a computer, want a computer, not a media centre. You just kind of expect it to do media stuff out of the box, but its not a reason to buy in itself. A decent office suite, or development environment or creativity suite might be - something that isn't outperformed by commodity white goods that cost half the price.
The fascinating thing about this is that it will just change the weapons. Better armour means just one thing, better weapons. So you can't stab a guard with a shiv, they'll find another, probably more gruesom way of penetrating the thin blue line.
Never the less, liquid armour sounds cool, can I have it in my motorbike kit? Lighter, more flexible armour that resists penetration can only make landing in a hedge that little bit safer. Of course, better armour means more dangerous riding...
Nope thats not the only problem with ActivX. The biggest problem is that it only works on one browser. Java Applets and Flash, as annoying as they are, at least make some attempt to run on competing platforms - but personally, I would advocate their use.
ActivX does many cool things, and sometimes its good to be given the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot, but when the base technology, (D)HTML / Javascript, is designed to be cross-platform and sandboxed for a reason circumventing that in a platform-specific-destroy-your-computer kind of way, by default (you should at least have to turn the damn thing on) its like to piss off web dev zealots.
I agree with everything you say, but I think you've missed an important point. Most computer users don't factor in their time into the TCO, as it is NEVER their time. Most computer owners know a geek/nerd who is more than willing to help them out defragging their harddisk, finding free tools, installing stolen copies of MS Office for little more than a 4 pack / pocket money / kudos - its not like they have a social life to get in the way.
The chances are that most computer users don't know an equivalent mac geek. This is for a couple of reasons: they arn't usually required as macs are easy to maintain ; Macs have lousy market share. This is pretty scary for a novice computer buyer especially when faced with slightly steeper learning curve (people hate change) and price tag.
I buy mac, but that is because the maintenace buck normally stops with me. Most people I know buy PC... because the mainainence buck stops with me, and they're cheaper and easier to use (at least you don't have to learn anything new).
Thats why I buy Mac. The Mac Mini is damn near silent, tiny and looks as at home under the LCD TV in the living room as it does sitting in the office.
My iMac G5 is noisier, but, at the time it represented the best bang-per-dB. Its not silent, but I had to get rid of my external firewire drive because it was noisier than the iMac.
But if you put concepts of the lounge based Mac Mini and the iMac together, the obvious conclusion a 25"+ Mac, that also has HDMI input, but has USB ports for camera and iPod connectivity, a 160GB HDD for PVR, music/movie storage etc, and camera for iChat, etc... The biggest coup would be if Apple could convince retailers to sell it in the TV aisle, and for a price point within 25% of the Bravia range. If I'm going to shell out $2000 for a TV, $2500 for TV that will also operate as a home server, iChat, PVR etc seems like a bargain.
Yup, and that console is the DS. Instant on, mouse, wireless download/internet play... oh and you can take it with you for those long, boring teleconferances.
There is a certain amount of genius in this. For years I've wondered what the best way to combine HTML/Javascript and OO language is, and now it seems obvious: create a tool kit that structures and generates the HTML for you, just as a window toolkit handles it for you. Genius.
I've never been a big fan of % languages. Mixing HTML and anything always looks, bad and fails misrably at seperating code from presentation. Seperating code from presentation on a dynamic page is impossible, but sticking the code in the mark-up language is the wrong compromise, but was the better of two evils (see JSP/Servlets).
Actually having Java classes that represent HTML objects and using them to create dynamic webpages makes so much sense, I'm suprised no one, especially Sun, have tried it earlier.
I don't think thats the right counter argument. Its not that Hotels will start using PDAs or Phones, its that they will be using a hotel management appliance rather than a windows PC.
Think 15" OLED touch screen with a WiFi link to a "hotel datacentre appliance" which in turn is connected to a "hotel chain service" etc. No configuration, no maintenance, low power, and you don't have to worry about the receptionist playing solitaire all day, or the summer intern installing unlicenced software.
Most people don't need a PC they need web/email/office appliances. Most businesses don't need a PC, they need SAGE / Office / POS appliances. But one thing is clear, even though a typewriter is easier to use than a digital typewriter, and digital type writer is easier to use than a PC, the benefits each technology bought with it were large enough to justify the learning curve, even for a job as basic as typing. The real question is why do you need to buy a desktop PC that is capable of simulating flight and realtime video compression when all you want to do is knock up the local parish newsletter?
At the moment I'd say it was economics. A letter sized LCD touch screen, with a comfortable keyboard and a simple OS that does noting but boot Abi Office and simple web browser for email and research would still cost about the same as a low end Dell - and even if it was easier to use, portable, and virus free a system it would be a hard sell to get people to pay the same for a system that does conciderably less. But once that costs approach the mindless levels of $100 will people really care? My company already spends huge ammounts of money locking down our PCs so that the vast majority of users can do little more than access word... why not buy a an appliance instead?
Ah, it feel like only last year when we were berating Apple for shipping units with only 256MB RAM.
512MB is plenty of RAM for iLife and the core apps. I've only got 512 in my G4 powerbook. I use it for iLife etc, but I also do A LOT of tomcat development with eclipse and postgres, and Rails work. I'm not going to lie, and say that 512 is enough, for those applications, but it does work, and it is usable, but for iLife and co. it is more than adequate.
Why should the baseline consumer be forced to buy RAM that only the power users amoung us really need?
To me this looks like a preview of what the Cell will be capable of, although this looks slightly less flexible. All this represents is a multicore SIMD floating point unit, much like a graphics card, but with a more rounded instruction set, except that its all the way out on the PCI bus rather than being in core.
Unlike the GPU which is quite happy sitting out on its own, doing what its told, to my mind a physics engine should be more interactive.
Graphics processor:
Transform polygons in to pixels as fast as possible. Physics processor:
Apply forces to particles as fast as possible
And then tell the game engine if anything interesting happened.
From what I can tell the second step is being avoided at the moment, so all we are seeing is fancy explosions and effects. That could change with The Cell as the whole chip is designed to ease incredibly fast communication between units, remember this is a industry where they worry about cache misses, never mind bus IO latency.
So in answer to your speculation, I think your right, the next generation of GPUs will have on board physics, but I think the future is getting as many SIMD units on die as humanly possible... at least for games.
I agree, Apple should lay off the bullsh1t. Windows XP works. Yes, it has some fundamentally stupid problems that we are all more than aware of, but hardware support, stability and ease of use arn't problems for Windows any more.
No hunting for drivers? I lost days trying to get a Minolta Color printer to work. I still can't get a cheap webcam I've got to work, and the motor on my iFeel mouse doesn't work (although thats a feature). All of them worked on XP after following the same routine you use for all XP devices: insert CD, follow instructions, plug in device.
Next years OS today? There are a lot of feature in OS X that I like, but the fact remains that it runs on the dog slow Mach kernel (not all progress is good) and silly little things like Finder hanging if you loose a connection to a network resource, a problem that was solved many years ago in other OSs. Is it better than XP? Depends what you're doing (my answer is 'yes' YMMV)
114,000 Viruses on XP! There is nothing about OS X that makes it inherantly immune from viruses. Yes, it has a firewall, yes, it requires user intervention to install Applications, no it doesn't let you run macros directly from email application, and no, the web browswer isn't bolted onto the kernel but its still built on C and vulnerable to buffer overruns, and all macs tend to be used by the greatest threat to user data: end users. Its all about pay load and kudos to script kiddies and black hats. 3% market share just doesn't do it for them - who knows 5% might.
Awesome out of the box? Yeah, I was chuffed to bits when I had to handover £20 to watch movies in full screen mode... but I guess thats been fixed now with Front Row. Questions that I've seen people ask when they get a Mac are:
How do I cut and paste (because people use the toolbar icons and right click in windows (not keyboard short cuts, or the menu)).
Where are my applications? A valid question. Clicking on Macintosh HD, followed by Applications or pressing Cmd-Shift-A are less intuitive for noobs than hitting the start button. I normally stick a link to the Applitions folder in the Dock for noobs.
How do I make things full screen? Trying to explain to somebody that Apple HIG state that zooming is better than full screen tends to fall on deaf ears.
Thats not awesome out the box, thats frickin scary.
Let he who has no sin cast the first stone. I love my Mac, and I regularly recommend them to anyone who will listen, but I am not afraid to admit that they are less than perfect, and for the most part it makes no difference which system you use if all you do is email and web. Negative advertising like this leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
But that brings in the biggest problem with Java, when to use it. I completely agree with you that Java, for small apps, is a nightmare. Compare getting a single JSP running under Tomcat 5.0 to getting an rhtml page running in Ruby on Rails, or a PHP page with mod_php.
The problem is worse with medium scale apps because Java offers something most frameworks don't: choice. Do you use Spring, Hibernate, JSF/EJB3, JSP/EJB2, Struts or a mixture of all of the above (shudder). Thats one man month gone already and you haven't even written a prototype. This makes finding your team hard too, as even if you are Sun Certified, each framework is a language in itself with its own quirks and thats before you get inhouse arguments over which patterns you are going to use and where. Thats before we even start to talk about writing the same code three times (interface(s), bean, XML)
I think Java has lost the small to medium enterprise battle, but then it never really wanted to win those battles. XDoclet and hibernate take some of the hardwork out of Java programming, but the battle isn't with the frameworks so much as the language itself. Compared to C/C++ Java might look light, but compared to Ruby/Python/PHP its nightmare of repitition and bordom. Arguments about speed of execution are as relevent with Java/Ruby(et al) as they were with Java/C and C/Assembler. Thats not to say that Java isn't faster than modern scripting languages (although just as in Java vs. C that is debateable), its just that the time to support and build a scripting language is so much less that the additional hardware is cheap in comparision.
If you find yourself writting a Java webapp for a project whose volumetrics don't mean that you need to be running on at least 3 Sun Servers (or equivalent), then you're almost certainly using the wrong tool, and even if you are the chances are that Ruby on Rails is still probably worth a look.
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Bootcamp. Part of my frustration with the process was that the 8GB partition that I created initial was too small by about 250MB (grrrr) once the patches etc had been installed. 10GB to fit XP and Half-life is a workable minimum - but I kinda wish I'd gone for 15.
Other than that it went pretty smoothy, if not incredibly slowly.
I've had bad experiances with CrossOver Office in the past. If you can get it to work as well as BootCamp I'd be very interested as all the rebooting is a little tedious.
I've finally got a PC powerful enough to play modern PC games: a MacBook :) . First game I installed on it was Half-Life 2 as it was never, ever going to get ported to OS X and that has to be the most unpleastant installation and purchasing experiance I've ever had - but the game was great!
An hour or two into the game and I'm begining to wonder why I ever bought a console. 2 hours in and I'm begining to realize that its pretty much the same experiance as Halo 2, but with frame drops and installation problems.
My conclusion? I'm glad that PC gaming is open to me once more. The mouse might not be the greatest controller in every situation, but its certainly pretty neat at some things. I like being able to carry around a device thats capable of playing HL2 at silly high resolutions and since I've had it I've hardly used my DS, but I will still be first in line for a new Wii. It's apples and oranges.
It might feel like you can compare PC gaming and consoles directly, but they scratch different itches, in the same way as the PSP and DS are fundamentally differnet ways of approaching the same problem and cars are nothing like motorbikes.
That will teach me to doubt Apple. Much appreciated. One reset a year sounds fair.
;)
Best get to my Shrine of Jobs, say a few "Hail Steve"'s and make a quick sacrifice - do you think the blood of 1 or 2 MSCEs will suffice?
I've got 2 macs. So thats two authorized computers gone. The hdd failed on my three year old PB, no biggy, I just replaced it and reauthorized it in iTunes. Then the logic board went. Was intermitent enough for me to think maybe, just maybe I ought to reinstall OS X, just in case (I used to be a windows user). That went fine, but like a dumbass I forgot to deauthorise before I reinstalled. 1 licence remains.
The logic board finally gave in, I could no longer get my PB to boot. I bought a shiney new MacBook, but now I have no spare iTunes authorized licences remaining.
If I have a power surge / my machine gets stolen. I won't be able to listen to the music that I bought - and I've only been using iTunes for 3 years, I expect to be a ble to listen to the music for the next 50. What am I going to do when my iMac fails in 3 years and I don't get the opertunity to de-authorise?
The situation worsens should I start to invest in Apple's Movie service. Part of the appeal of paying £10 for a DVD is that I know that should I feel like it, I have bought permission to watch that film, whenever I like for the rest of my life. With the DRMd version, I seem to be buying the right to watch the movie for a rest of my computers life. Essentially I'm one mac virus away from loosing £100s of pounds of investment - especially with my current AppleID.
But the really stupid thing... I still buy using iTMS because it is the easiest way to impulse buy music and receive instant gratification. It's the music equivalent of a chocolate bar. We all know the clever money is in fruit. Its better for you, slightly more expensive, and if you want to you can take the seeds and grow your own, but most people buy chocolate.
I didn't realise that was common in the US. It certainly isn't here in the UK. My Telewest box had a USB port, but I was never really sure why, and I don't think my current Sky box has anything. We can't even take advantage of Elgato modules as our cable and satalite suppliers refuse to provide CI cards. Even if they did come with Firewire out as standard, it still doesn't help me with a XBox 360 / Wii / PS3 or commodity HD DVD / Blu Ray player.
HDMI input would make iMac THE bedroom/kitchen pvr of choice: 24" quality screen with 200+ GB of storage and the ability to share recordings with other iMacs via WiFi, all for the price of a Bravia. Sweet.
What have NVidia or ATi got to do with it? USB / Firewire HDMI capture devices shouldn't be on the video card.
The technology is available, and its expensive (because its a niche technology), but its there.
Being able to plug my Sky box / 360 / Wii / PS3 into my Mac would save me a lot space and money - I guess if I want it that badly I could just go out and buy the device myself.
Surely the most glaring error is that, out of the box the only way of getting HD content into this Mac is via the ethernet cable. Guess this will make more sense on the 12th?
Why no HDMI/SCART/S-Video in? Surely a windowed HDMI input screen isn't beyond the Apple engineers, and Front Row would provide an excellent way of accessing it.
I was once blown across the room whilst I was fixing an old and dusty PSU. I accidently touch the case and one of the bigger caps at the same time whilst the thing was still plugged in.
Thats the sort of mistake you only make twice, maybe three times. Four and you're clearly an addict.
I only half believe that. While it is impossible to deny that our species is polluted with short-sighted agressors I believe that they are the minority. Most of the people I know are loving and caring who would go out of their way to avoid deceiving or hurting people for personal gain.
It is our society, they way we form groups and heirarchies that has decided that minority of agressors show 'leadership' and 'strength' and that these qualities allow them to demand a greater percentage of the wealth and a greater freedom in mates.
Was our human instincts that formed this society? I would say that it was the instincts of the agressors who enforced their rule through fear rather than the majority, as most people are happy to bundle through life without a 'leader'.
This is damning of our society. A central, organised resource where people are free to contribute should be the pinacle of the internet - but it isn't - its a place where politicians, corporations and zealots spread their lies under a banner of truth.
But I guess this is art imitating life. Wikipedia was a democracy - and this proves that not all people are equal and that power is a much greater force for bad than knowledge and freedom is for good.
I agree. Games are supposed to be fun, its kinda in the their job description. Take Half-Life, arguably the greatest game of its era. It truely was an immersive game that was ahead of the competition. But getting the bugger to work was a PITA. From what I can remember it took my 4x CD ROM drive 10 minutes to install it, which was quickly followed by the grim message that I need to download a new version of directX, which then told me I had to download the latest glide drivers for my Voodoo 2.
After all that, it worked - at around 15-20 fps at 640x480.
At the time I concidered this progress compared to getting Tie Fighter to load from a CD-ROM AND getting the mouse driver to load at the same time (I got much kudos from my peers for this miricle of config.sys engineering).
But that was the price you payed for wanting cutting edge graphics and realism. Consoles of the day were fun. SMB3, Star Fox we great games, but compared to PC Games they were for amatures and kids. The PS1 changed that for me, the XBOX more so.
I just put the CD in the machine and it worked! Better than that the games were as good as the current crop of PC games. And it was cheaper! The console was only £150!! And the games were the same price... and there were more of them!
From what I can see PC gaming is still 1 part playing a game to 1 part being told your system is too slow (and you really need to buy another one). Online play has made this worse, because when you get beat there is always the thought that if only you had an extra 10 fps or a lower latency server you could have got the bastard. Unless, you find the fun in fixing the box (which, until it turned into silly money, I have to admit I did) there is little fun in playing PC Games compared to a console.
The other part that has really turned me off is that the only reason its telling you that your computer is too slow is that its struggling to render the 50 billion polygons on a tree just off the horizon... ie its got nothing to do with gameplay and everything to do with the 'realism'.
I'm just about to buy a new laptop. I need it to be light, small, pretty and performant. I'm buying a Mac Book.
:) ). I'd miss music playback on my iMac, but if they took the speakers out of my laptop I probably wouldn't notice.
Do I care that it can play DVDs out of the box. Yes. But do I care weather it comes with 5.1 Digital Surround? No, because its a laptop, and the best sound I'm, going to get out of it is from my ear buds, on a plane. However, I know from experiance that I rarely use my laptop to play DVDs because of battery life. If its plugged into a wall, I'm either at work (and shouldn't be watching a DVD), or I'm at home, where I have a much better system that doesn't tie up valuable memory and video resources: a TV.
Do I care about music? Increasingly less. If I'm listening to music I tend to be listening on my iPod, which is synced with my iMac (which has Harmon Kardon speakers
Do I care about games? No. I like to think, that if I suddenly had a change of heart and thought that £39 for last years games was worth it, I might be tempted at the odd Mac game. But my gaming needs are met significantly more completely by my DS (and probably a Wii in the comming months).
What I do care is that I can plug it into a second monitor/projector and it allows me to have a database, tomcat/webbrick/jboss, eclipse, textmate, firefox/safari/opera and mail open at once without any noticable slow down. I want wireless internet, killer battery life the ability to sync across my iMac/phone/iPod/mac book with almost no interaction from myself.
Good iChat performance is a bonus, but really, I want that in my iPod/iPhone as soon as humanly possible - 3g video mobiles are rubbish, and Apple could be onto a real winner if they can combine the iSight, iPod and Airport... I'd buy one if the price was right.
And I don't think I'm on my own. Most people, when they buy a computer, want a computer, not a media centre. You just kind of expect it to do media stuff out of the box, but its not a reason to buy in itself. A decent office suite, or development environment or creativity suite might be - something that isn't outperformed by commodity white goods that cost half the price.
Trust me. Foreigners don't need RFID to spot an American from 100 meters :)
The fascinating thing about this is that it will just change the weapons. Better armour means just one thing, better weapons. So you can't stab a guard with a shiv, they'll find another, probably more gruesom way of penetrating the thin blue line.
Never the less, liquid armour sounds cool, can I have it in my motorbike kit? Lighter, more flexible armour that resists penetration can only make landing in a hedge that little bit safer. Of course, better armour means more dangerous riding...
Nope thats not the only problem with ActivX. The biggest problem is that it only works on one browser. Java Applets and Flash, as annoying as they are, at least make some attempt to run on competing platforms - but personally, I would advocate their use.
ActivX does many cool things, and sometimes its good to be given the freedom to shoot yourself in the foot, but when the base technology, (D)HTML / Javascript, is designed to be cross-platform and sandboxed for a reason circumventing that in a platform-specific-destroy-your-computer kind of way, by default (you should at least have to turn the damn thing on) its like to piss off web dev zealots.
I agree with everything you say, but I think you've missed an important point. Most computer users don't factor in their time into the TCO, as it is NEVER their time. Most computer owners know a geek/nerd who is more than willing to help them out defragging their harddisk, finding free tools, installing stolen copies of MS Office for little more than a 4 pack / pocket money / kudos - its not like they have a social life to get in the way.
The chances are that most computer users don't know an equivalent mac geek. This is for a couple of reasons: they arn't usually required as macs are easy to maintain ; Macs have lousy market share. This is pretty scary for a novice computer buyer especially when faced with slightly steeper learning curve (people hate change) and price tag.
I buy mac, but that is because the maintenace buck normally stops with me. Most people I know buy PC... because the mainainence buck stops with me, and they're cheaper and easier to use (at least you don't have to learn anything new).
Thats why I buy Mac. The Mac Mini is damn near silent, tiny and looks as at home under the LCD TV in the living room as it does sitting in the office.
My iMac G5 is noisier, but, at the time it represented the best bang-per-dB. Its not silent, but I had to get rid of my external firewire drive because it was noisier than the iMac.
But if you put concepts of the lounge based Mac Mini and the iMac together, the obvious conclusion a 25"+ Mac, that also has HDMI input, but has USB ports for camera and iPod connectivity, a 160GB HDD for PVR, music/movie storage etc, and camera for iChat, etc... The biggest coup would be if Apple could convince retailers to sell it in the TV aisle, and for a price point within 25% of the Bravia range. If I'm going to shell out $2000 for a TV, $2500 for TV that will also operate as a home server, iChat, PVR etc seems like a bargain.
Yup, and that console is the DS. Instant on, mouse, wireless download/internet play... oh and you can take it with you for those long, boring teleconferances.
There is a certain amount of genius in this. For years I've wondered what the best way to combine HTML/Javascript and OO language is, and now it seems obvious: create a tool kit that structures and generates the HTML for you, just as a window toolkit handles it for you. Genius.
I've never been a big fan of % languages. Mixing HTML and anything always looks, bad and fails misrably at seperating code from presentation. Seperating code from presentation on a dynamic page is impossible, but sticking the code in the mark-up language is the wrong compromise, but was the better of two evils (see JSP/Servlets).
Actually having Java classes that represent HTML objects and using them to create dynamic webpages makes so much sense, I'm suprised no one, especially Sun, have tried it earlier.
I don't think thats the right counter argument. Its not that Hotels will start using PDAs or Phones, its that they will be using a hotel management appliance rather than a windows PC.
Think 15" OLED touch screen with a WiFi link to a "hotel datacentre appliance" which in turn is connected to a "hotel chain service" etc. No configuration, no maintenance, low power, and you don't have to worry about the receptionist playing solitaire all day, or the summer intern installing unlicenced software.
Most people don't need a PC they need web/email/office appliances. Most businesses don't need a PC, they need SAGE / Office / POS appliances. But one thing is clear, even though a typewriter is easier to use than a digital typewriter, and digital type writer is easier to use than a PC, the benefits each technology bought with it were large enough to justify the learning curve, even for a job as basic as typing. The real question is why do you need to buy a desktop PC that is capable of simulating flight and realtime video compression when all you want to do is knock up the local parish newsletter?
At the moment I'd say it was economics. A letter sized LCD touch screen, with a comfortable keyboard and a simple OS that does noting but boot Abi Office and simple web browser for email and research would still cost about the same as a low end Dell - and even if it was easier to use, portable, and virus free a system it would be a hard sell to get people to pay the same for a system that does conciderably less. But once that costs approach the mindless levels of $100 will people really care? My company already spends huge ammounts of money locking down our PCs so that the vast majority of users can do little more than access word... why not buy a an appliance instead?
Ah, it feel like only last year when we were berating Apple for shipping units with only 256MB RAM.
512MB is plenty of RAM for iLife and the core apps. I've only got 512 in my G4 powerbook. I use it for iLife etc, but I also do A LOT of tomcat development with eclipse and postgres, and Rails work. I'm not going to lie, and say that 512 is enough, for those applications, but it does work, and it is usable, but for iLife and co. it is more than adequate.
Why should the baseline consumer be forced to buy RAM that only the power users amoung us really need?
To me this looks like a preview of what the Cell will be capable of, although this looks slightly less flexible. All this represents is a multicore SIMD floating point unit, much like a graphics card, but with a more rounded instruction set, except that its all the way out on the PCI bus rather than being in core.
Unlike the GPU which is quite happy sitting out on its own, doing what its told, to my mind a physics engine should be more interactive.
Graphics processor:
Transform polygons in to pixels as fast as possible.
Physics processor:
Apply forces to particles as fast as possible
And then tell the game engine if anything interesting happened.
From what I can tell the second step is being avoided at the moment, so all we are seeing is fancy explosions and effects. That could change with The Cell as the whole chip is designed to ease incredibly fast communication between units, remember this is a industry where they worry about cache misses, never mind bus IO latency.
So in answer to your speculation, I think your right, the next generation of GPUs will have on board physics, but I think the future is getting as many SIMD units on die as humanly possible... at least for games.
Funny, thats similar to the Windows user demographic... and in fact most population of this fine island (especially the ones that work in IT).
I agree, Apple should lay off the bullsh1t. Windows XP works. Yes, it has some fundamentally stupid problems that we are all more than aware of, but hardware support, stability and ease of use arn't problems for Windows any more.
No hunting for drivers? I lost days trying to get a Minolta Color printer to work. I still can't get a cheap webcam I've got to work, and the motor on my iFeel mouse doesn't work (although thats a feature). All of them worked on XP after following the same routine you use for all XP devices: insert CD, follow instructions, plug in device.
Next years OS today? There are a lot of feature in OS X that I like, but the fact remains that it runs on the dog slow Mach kernel (not all progress is good) and silly little things like Finder hanging if you loose a connection to a network resource, a problem that was solved many years ago in other OSs. Is it better than XP? Depends what you're doing (my answer is 'yes' YMMV)
114,000 Viruses on XP! There is nothing about OS X that makes it inherantly immune from viruses. Yes, it has a firewall, yes, it requires user intervention to install Applications, no it doesn't let you run macros directly from email application, and no, the web browswer isn't bolted onto the kernel but its still built on C and vulnerable to buffer overruns, and all macs tend to be used by the greatest threat to user data: end users. Its all about pay load and kudos to script kiddies and black hats. 3% market share just doesn't do it for them - who knows 5% might.
Awesome out of the box? Yeah, I was chuffed to bits when I had to handover £20 to watch movies in full screen mode... but I guess thats been fixed now with Front Row. Questions that I've seen people ask when they get a Mac are:
How do I cut and paste (because people use the toolbar icons and right click in windows (not keyboard short cuts, or the menu)).
Where are my applications? A valid question. Clicking on Macintosh HD, followed by Applications or pressing Cmd-Shift-A are less intuitive for noobs than hitting the start button. I normally stick a link to the Applitions folder in the Dock for noobs.
How do I make things full screen? Trying to explain to somebody that Apple HIG state that zooming is better than full screen tends to fall on deaf ears.
Thats not awesome out the box, thats frickin scary.
Let he who has no sin cast the first stone. I love my Mac, and I regularly recommend them to anyone who will listen, but I am not afraid to admit that they are less than perfect, and for the most part it makes no difference which system you use if all you do is email and web. Negative advertising like this leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
But that brings in the biggest problem with Java, when to use it. I completely agree with you that Java, for small apps, is a nightmare. Compare getting a single JSP running under Tomcat 5.0 to getting an rhtml page running in Ruby on Rails, or a PHP page with mod_php.
The problem is worse with medium scale apps because Java offers something most frameworks don't: choice. Do you use Spring, Hibernate, JSF/EJB3, JSP/EJB2, Struts or a mixture of all of the above (shudder). Thats one man month gone already and you haven't even written a prototype. This makes finding your team hard too, as even if you are Sun Certified, each framework is a language in itself with its own quirks and thats before you get inhouse arguments over which patterns you are going to use and where. Thats before we even start to talk about writing the same code three times (interface(s), bean, XML)
I think Java has lost the small to medium enterprise battle, but then it never really wanted to win those battles. XDoclet and hibernate take some of the hardwork out of Java programming, but the battle isn't with the frameworks so much as the language itself. Compared to C/C++ Java might look light, but compared to Ruby/Python/PHP its nightmare of repitition and bordom. Arguments about speed of execution are as relevent with Java/Ruby(et al) as they were with Java/C and C/Assembler. Thats not to say that Java isn't faster than modern scripting languages (although just as in Java vs. C that is debateable), its just that the time to support and build a scripting language is so much less that the additional hardware is cheap in comparision.
If you find yourself writting a Java webapp for a project whose volumetrics don't mean that you need to be running on at least 3 Sun Servers (or equivalent), then you're almost certainly using the wrong tool, and even if you are the chances are that Ruby on Rails is still probably worth a look.