In production means nothing. It could still not make it through to gold, because, lets face it, no game can live up to expectations of a 10 year wait. Trying to make a game fun is the hard bit.
Sid Meirs Civilisation was a great game, but to progress you had to kill a few indians, or worse infiltrate their camps and 'civilise' them. I don't remember seing a petition about that.
I've played more than my fair share of first person shoots where I'm pitched against a culture and told to destroy them all: Nazis, Covenant, Islamic Terrorists, all manner of Aliens.
As for the suggestion of a Civil War game where you hunt down and string up slaves, thats still bad taste at the moment (not sure why). But I can envisage a game where you're a turkish raider, pilaging the coastal towns of Britain for gold, religious relics and female slaves. How about a Roman citizen who hunts down the french and in order to stabailize the town has to crucify a couple of them, and then sell the females and children into the slave trade. Would the Turkish and Italians get all upset? Would the British or French? I doubt it.
Bad things happened in History. That's the interesting bit. The best way to teach history is to make it relevant and fun. If you can understand that the slave traders did what they did becuase it put food on their table and nobody thought it was wrong, then you are on your way to stopping slavery forever. If you can get people to understand why the pilgrims and cowboys were so violent against naitive americans, then hopefully you can understand how it stopped, why there is still bad blood, and why it should never happened again. Games that explore social dynamics are incomplete if they don't demonstrate the complete spectrum of human behavior.
Perhaps I should have been more verbose. My issue with IE isn't so much its memory leakage as much as the security holes. My real point was, that IE is too important as a platform for MS to get bored with it. Web technology is moving at a faster pace than it would appear Microsft can keep up with, and yet their browswer is still #1.
The only reason I'd suggest going with a OSS broswer is that it frees microsofts engineers to focus on something that the company as a whole is more interested in.
Is it just me or does Micorosft appear bored by IE7. Its not like its a finished product, they're are tens of standards that they don't conform too, its leaky and yet they're taking years between major revisions.
I know in the 90s it looked like who ever won the browser wars would take over the world, but 10 years on that seems to be the business logic of the underpant gnomes. Why don't they just give up, and distribute Firefox, SeaMonkey or some Gecko based wonder, instead of IE?
Re:Very normal with such high novice user rate
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Firefox Slides, IE Gains?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Because computes are a tool and ALL tools require a certain amount of training.
Now do they need to know when and how to implement a radix sort? No. In the same way as I don't need to know how to do and oil change, or tune the engine in my car. But I am expected to fill it up myself and check the tyre pressure, maybe even fill the screen wash. I'm also obligated to drive safely, and act with courtesy towards other road users and pedestrians.
It doesn't even need to be as complicated as a car for this analogy to work.
Take a sledgehammer. You don't need any formal training, or a license to operate it. You do have to be strong enough to lift it, and look halfway responsible when you buy it (more than a computer). In the right hands a sledgehammer is a wonderful tool that can be used in a variety of different ways. In the wrong hands it can be used to destroy your house and kill people. The difference between a computer and a sledgehammer is that when a sledgehammer is used by a moron, its the moron that gets blamed.
Its not even like there arn't equivalents to viruses and malware. Sledghammers are suseptable to variety of attacks: fungal wood rot, rust, termites. Still, if a moron gets hurt, or does damage with a damaged sledgehammer its the morons fault.
This is why nerds think that people who use computers should have at least a basic understand of how they work, before they use them. Computers are tools, and tools need training and care if they are to be used without damaging the operator and those around them.
Google can do Linux the biggest favour it can: branding.
Look at the big players in Linux:
RedHat
Novel/SuSE
Ubuntu
Gentoo
Say any of those names in a pub/bar and people will look at you like an alien has jumped out of your mouth.
Lets look at the identifiable brands in computing:
Microsoft: They're the problem
Apple: They've already gone BSD
Dell/Sony: Are hardware not software, and would inevitably make their Distro proprietary (see Apple)
Google: Its so crazy it could just work
Google are so huge, that googling is almost as accepted as a verb as hoovering or xeroxing. Just by mentioning that they might be releasing a competitor to Windows they will hit every business newspaper in the world.
To a certain extent it doesn't matter how good their distro is. If its based on Ubuntu its 95% there. If its pacakged with Google Earth, Picassa, gMail branded Evolution, a Blogger front end and Google Talk its up there with the big boys. If they can perform the ultimate trick and get Wine working as well as Rossetta does, then its an OS X beater.
Better than all of that, a home brand name supporting linux gives hardware and software developers something to target. If they can focus on one platform rather than all of them, and know that it will be hitting consumers not geeks, that can only be good for Linux.
Why is this good for Google?
Providing a distro that connects, by default, to their web services means that the penetration of their advertising is increase.
A web based company needs as many people on the web as possible. People who are polluted by viruses and malware arn't happy web consumers.
Share holders. If I was a major share holder of Google, I'd want to know why we weren't competing head on with Microsoft. Whilst Microsoft are the dominant OS, they control peoples initial perceptions of the web: Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, Hotmail and Outlook.
Do no harm. Its in their mission statement. Supporting Windows doesn't exactly fit into that category;)
It already has a H.264 decoder. All it needs now is a H.264 encoder, one of those swanky macbook cameras in the top and wi-fi card and we got ourselves the ultimate iChat client device.
I hate everything you've just said. It spits in the face of what we'd call progress, but I also hate that there is , if not poorly phrased, an element of truth in what you say.
Our current, national philosphy is that all children are equal, and that good education, housing and an X-Box are all that stands between them and a succesful future in the service nation. It's not working.
I'm surrounded by teachers, I've done my PGCE, and I've got to tell you, all children arn't equal. Not even close. Some children get 6 hours of school, and then love and attention at home, and all the resources they need to become the next Babbage or Einstein, but they come out of school with C in their GCSEs, they just don't have the ability. Other kids don't get even a fraction of that support, and yet they become world leaders. Nature, is often stronger than nurture.
Look at ANY classroom in the UK, and even by Year 1, there is a large enough gap between some children that it can be measured in years, and yet they progress regardless ability. By Year 9 there is normally at least one child in each class that could sit and pass their GCSEs, and yet they are often forced to wait another 2 years. In Shropshire, we have a couple of schools that are given in the region of £25,000 a year per child in order to take children with behavioural problems, at yet there are no, state run, centres of excellence. I often wonder if we are throwing money at the wrong end of the spectrum, or at least not distributing it enough.
That, and our economic situation means that you need a degree to get a job in retail management. You now need to get a Masters or a PhD in order to get your CV to stand out, which means that the nations brightist don't hit the job market until they are 25.
Your Darwinist stand point has a strong smell of truth about it too. I'm 26, been to university and earn twice the national average, even though I'm only three rungs up from mail boy on my corporations ladder. I can't afford to raise a family, or buy a house in my area, because my girlfriend is training to become a teacher. The only people I know, at my age, who have had children and own a house are those who survive off state subsidies and a factory job or equivalent.
I don't want to see people starving in the streets. I don't want children to be left behind just because their parents didn't understand birth control (or that alcholol doesn't work as a spermacide). I don't want to see children who have learning difficulites left behind, when all they really need is an extra year in reception. But that doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't have to contribute in order to get these benefits, I just don't know what contribute means anymore.
OpenGL drivers are freely available on evey major platform, just as C compilers are. Why limit yourself to a single market when you can target them all?
it does what the current generation of speech recognition claims to do. I have yet to find any dictation software that is even remotely accurate, and the voice command software has been pap, at least for me. There is something about my accent that really upsets speech recogntion software.
Nintendogs: I've stopped trying to train my dog, its never going to happen. Apple Speech: Only works if I use a terrible californian accent. Not worth the embarresment. Nokia: Even with just one voice command, my girlfriends name, if still can't match my voice.
If this can translate foreign languages in to American (sic) then it definately sounds like it could stand a chance at translating English into text and command.
Where do cell phone companies get their pricing tarifs from?
Orange were nice enough to offer me a try 3G for 3 months free when I took out my contract, so I've been a pretty heavy user over that period. Being able to freely check my emails, read slashdot and ssh into my various boxes has been a delight. On average I used 50-75MB a month, which I though was a reasonable, if not execesive amount, I mean my cable connection gets taken for 1GB a day.
They want around £1 a MB. As useful as that service was, it was not worth £75 a month. It was worth £5, but I would have paid £10. For a start, its not that fast. Its faster than dial-up, but the lag is very noticable. Its slow enough to make you think "I'll wait till I get home". Then there is coverage. I can connect at 25KBs at work but get a measly 3KBs at home. Then there is the power, it sucked the life out of my phone. Having bluetooth and the 3G modem going meant that I was charging my phone in twice a day on a new battery.
Now I welcome Dell embracing this technology into their hardware. A laptop without an internet connection is increasingly useless as our digital lives migrate to pastures new, online. The faster the better. I just wish cell companies understood their product better. With their current pricing plans they have deliberately made 3G a tool for rich business people who genuinely believe that their email is worth £75 a month. Its the same with hotspots in the UK. How often is an internet connection whilst you drink your coffee or eat your big mac worth £8?
Which is why take up is so poor. People know that they can setup a wireless network in their home for £30, plus £15 a month for ADSL. At what point did BT OpenZone and Vodaphone sit down and think that the same people who setup their own network for £30 would be willing to spend £8 an hour to use their service?
If a Mom and Pop cafe / coffee shop openned and gave away internet access with coffee I'd use it daily.
There is no denying that XP won the last round of the OS wars. This was mainly down to the fact the the same 90% that bought PCs thought that Macs were just for animation and graphics (groan) and that Linux is just for nerds. Most people just don't know that there are alternatives.
This time round Microsoft are faced by OS X which, thanks to iPod, is now routinely hailed as 'cool' and a Linux which is not only robust enough to be deployed in some businesses (Red Hat and SuSE) but also easy enough for your Nan to install and use (Ubuntu). The message about security is slowly sinking in. People are no longer asking me to defrag their harddisks, they're asking me to install anti-malware and firewalls, but when told about more secure OSs like BSD, Linux and OSX they are still dubious about getting Office to work and getting their old programs to run, unaware that there are free alternatives for most of their apps. I'd say that was a shrinking concern though. I'd also go out on a limb and say that Joe Public was, in general more tech savvi. The game is being played on a very different field.
Who wins boils down to hardware support. If NVidia start to update their drivers more frequently for Linux than for Windows, gamers will start to pay attention. If HP and Epson get tired of having to licence each minor revision of their printers maybe they'll start looking towards OSs with cheaper release cycles.
There is also software to think about. Why learn new APIs for Vista when you can use existing, cross platform APIs like Mono and Qt?
Perhaps even more scary is that Java is really starting to show its head on the desktop. Azurerus is a success, as is eclipse, but perhaps more shocking than either of them is Jake2. Java can already be deployed effectively on single CPU systems, but it really starts to shine when given a few more processors to play with. As a.Net and Java developer I would still say that Java is easier to write threaded software with, and the Java 5 language additions have really closed the gap on C#, but preventing it from shipping with Ubuntu has pushed it further from home users than ever.
I have no doubt that Vista will be the dominant OS over the next 5-6 years, but I don't expect it to have close 90% market share at the end of that period.
The article is right. Lots of small things do often add up to one big thing. But the real issue is lots of big things add up to one HUGE thing. The energy I waste in standby mode on my TV is really bought into to context when you look at how much energy people waste driving cars.
Here is a quick comparison. I'm insured on my Smart Car (0.6l petrol), and my girlfriends Rover 600 (2l petrol). If I use my car to get to work, my fuel bill is £50 a month. If I drive my girlfriends car its £90 a month. Can you imagine the national energy savings involved if everyone commuted in a small car? I can't see how they wouldn't eclipse the savings of turning lights and computers off. And thats nothing. When I cycle to work I not only save the fuel and maintenece on my car, I also save money at the gym!
But the most annoying thing about this is that there are some people who will read this article, take it too seriously and start switching my computer off when I get up to go and make a cup of tea, whilst tumble drying every item of clothes they own and driving toddlers around in SUVs. I'm not saying that I shouldn't take switching off the TV more seriously, but electronics on stand-by really isn't the problem. Would this really be an issue if the electricity was being generated using tidal, solar, geothermal or wind energies?
The real energy killer in modern homes is climate control. People insist on living at 27 degrees in Winter and 10 degress in Summer. In the UK, the energy peek is in the winter, not the summer (we don't really use air-conditioning), so the real saving can be made not by turning your TV off at the wall, but by investing in personal insulation: a jumper.
In the last round of the console wars I went with the XBox and the GC. I really enjoyed the XBox, but as an ex-PC gamer, felt that I was just regurgitating IDs back-catalogue, but with slightly better graphics. The GC provided me with the most fun. The games were cheaper, had greater variety, and for all the fun of Halo 2 Live, playing drink monkey ball proved that its was more important to be able to punch your opponent in the real world, than snipe them from behind a exquisitly rendered rock on Live.
I still don't understand what all the fuss was/is about the PS2. Lifes too short to watch progress bars, when your supposed to be having fun.
Being able to play Nintendo's entire back catalogue sounds too good to be true. Finally having a controller that reacts to its possition in space has been the aspiration of every gamer since the 80s - the only thing that could top that is having a game that gives you extra control when you stick your tounge out;)
I don't care that its not HD. Even if I buy one HD TV in the next year, that will be one in a house of 4 TVs. I've yet to see any real evidence that I need it. As my PC improved I was able to play Half-life at 640x480, then 800x600 and finally 1024x768. It was the graphics that got better, not the game. It may add a layer of realism to the game, but Doom 3 proved that once you stop looking at the eye-candy it's the underlying gameplay that makes the game worth the money.
You don't realise how much a PSP is missing a touch screen until you use a DS. You don't realise how slow UMD is until you buy DS. You don't realise how time consuming transcoding video is until you buy a PSP.
The one area where the PSP kicks the DS is graphics. The graphics on the PSP are incredible for a handheld system, but they come with a heavy price: game loading time and battery life. Whats worse is that once its loaded your still left playing with an analogue stick and 6 buttons. Its a platform thats been done to death.
Cartridges make a lot of sense for a mobile platform. Low battery consumption and instant on are what gaming on the move is all about. Having two cartridge slots was a work of genius. Not only do you get a huge back catalogue, but you also get an explansion slot. How long will it be until you can buy a DS game that comes with a tilt cart, or a rumble pack? Thats simply not an option for the PSP.
As for games?
I haven't been as consumed with a gaming system since I got my first console, a NES. Mario 64 took a while for me get into, but now I'm hooked. Mario Kart is genuily the best in the series and Nintendogs is the most bizarly addictive game I've ever played, it really snook up on me. I'm looking forward to the port of Viewtiful Joe, Mario Soccer and the inevitable Pokemon game. I think, as a platform it shows a lot of promise.
However, I only know of one other person with a DS, everyone else owns PSPs... so what do I know?
I used.Mac for two years, and I didn't feel like I was getting value for money out of it.
I used iPhoto publishing for a couple of months. That was really neat, but when I was using it was ahead of its time... at least in the UK. Most people just didn't have a fast enough connection to make it worth their time looking at my photos.
The iDisk sounds like a great idea, but is just too slow. I have a 1Mb link, but I rarely got more than 30kBs down, less than a thrid of my pipe. If their going to sell to European customers, they really ought to get some servers over here.
Homepage? Give me a break. Most people can make a better web page with word.
Backup / Antivirus? The iDisk connection is too slow to make it useful for backing up anything but the essentials. I just couldn't figure out what those essentials should be. 750MB of storage sounds like a lot until you think that you've got 4GB of photos, 20GB of music and 2GB of powerpoint, word, pdf, excel, and code to keep safe. For a short period I thought it should be the things that I working on, ie my desktop, but that went sour fast when I was installing Linux on my old PIII and had gentoo, ubuntu and debian CDs sitting on my desktop (I just couldn't decide which I prefered). And then there is the time cost of getting that much data to your iDisk at 10KBs (I only have 128Kb up). Off site storage is a great service, if you have a symetrical connection, or a small amount of must keep data. Lets face it, that went out with the floppy disk, and has been trampled into the ground by the digital camera and the iPod.
The Mail was just a bog standard IMAP account, but I've replaced it with a gMail account. I do miss having IMAP, but personel email isn't worth £60 a year to me.
The other thing I finally found useful was synchronisation. I have a PowerBook and iMac. It was pretty neat to have my bookmarks synchronise before I got home etc. But again it wasn't worth £60 a year.
There is also the issue of billing. Why £60 a year in a single payment? If your a service, bill like a service! £5 a month is easier to swallow than £60 once a year. Or better yet £5 a quarter, probably closer to the real value.
I've slagged.Mac off a bit, and thats probably because I'm not the target market. But its a novelty, not an essential, and its not a premium service, they're just charging like its a premium service. Everything.Mac provides can be provide for free, you've just got hunt a little harder. As for its easier to use... well thats as maybe, especialy as their cheating. iPhoto could provide the same service by defaulting to.Mac, getting updates from software update (the new stationary), but letting you point it at any ftp server in an advance menu, but there is less money in that.
...where they can be exposed the horrors in real life. The is Art imitating Life. There might not be a game that represents a grieving father killing his family, but in some parts of the real world it doesn't even qualify as news.
Because when you shorten a word you carry the plural, otherwise you change the meaning. The parallels between Maths and English in this particular situation are almost ironic.
Microsoft: Turns out we own the world, give us all your money. Manufacturers: Hah, not so fast Softie, your not the only one who can make hashtables look like a novel invention. We've got our FileSystem : DukeNukemFS! Microsoft: So...? Manufacturers : Well we're going to use that in all our cameras, mp3 players and stuff... why arn't you scared? Microsoft: Because we're not going to support it. Manufacturers : What do you mean you're not going to support it? Microsoft: Well, we control 90% of the computer market. We decided what works and what doesn't. Your hardware is only as good as the support we LET you provide. Not only will we not support it, but expect the next "Software Update" to break any third party drives you think you can sneak by us. Continue with your folly, and support the other major OSs... oh there arn't any... my bad. Manufacturers: You are evil! Microsoft: Yup, now give me your money, turn round and take it like the little beotchs that you are.
Who knows, maybe Microsoft will repent and place FAT in the public domain, but this is money, lots of money, for old rope. Yes FAT is a lousy filesystem. Yes, hardware manufacturers could use a free FS, but Microsoft is under no obligation to make it work, stably, with their OS, and thats where the money is.
Look at the iPod. Out of the box it comes with a very nice HFS+ filesystem. If its simple to get Windows to work with another FS, why didn't Apple ship iTunes with a HFS+ compatibility layer? Instead you have to cripple your fancy new iPod with FAT32 if you want it to work with XP. Now, just because Apple didn't do it doesn't mean it impossible, but they do pride themselves on the "It just works" mentality. Getting an iPod to work with XP is trivial, but its a step past "it just works".
I'm under no obligation to use FAT on my USB sticks. They come with a FAT filing table, but the functionality of the device isn't compromised by my using a different file system. USB stick manufacturers could simply sell their wares unformatted like the old floppy days, or you could pay $0.50 more and get a formatted one. Let the consumer decide.
As for digital cameras... well that was their decision. Unless I, as a consumer, am going to get fined for buying a piece of hardware that was unlicenced I don't care. The patents on FAT were no secret. They were, as are all the other patents, kept in a public place, next to the patents for lenses, CCDs, batteries and jpeg compression. As with any other patent, if you want to use the tech you have to pay the licence... and then pass that cost onto the customer.
Having a single filesystem that is accessible to all is good for everyone, especially Windows users. If Microsoft make it difficult to use digital cameras with their operating systems then they're going to piss a lot of people off. Digital cameras are one of the few reasons people buy a new computer so making it difficult to use digital cameras on Windows systems is not in their interests but perhaps worse for Microsoft is that people will install software that lets them use EXT3, Reiser4, UFS or heavens forbid, HFS+. People could use harddisks from other operating systems, with no need to defrag, decent meta information and genuine multi-user support!
I work with OS X, Debian and NT4 on a daily basis. The only way I can predicitably transfer files between them is using FAT16/32, and the limiting factor is NTs lousy support for alien filesystems. Microsoft should place FAT in the public domain. Its not strong enough to warrent a licence, and should really have become extinct along side the floppy disk. Charging people a licence to use a technology that was chosen because of a weakness in your main project, your operating system, is as lame as lecturers teaching from their own book.
We've been lied to horribly for the last 3-4 years. Clock for clock intels are as powerful as PowerPC. So when I bought my 1.8GHz iMac G5 it was already slower than equivalent PCs. Now thats all very well and good, except that Apple were screaming that it was faster, better, stronger. That you would be mad to even think about buying Intel, and I sucked it up. Its not even like they didn't know the truth. They've been developing Mac OS X on intel for the last 5 years, so they new they were onto a looser with PowerPC and they still over sold.
Now I'm very happy with my Mac, but the smug sense of superiority that I bought with the Mac has been wiped out. I miss being inside the RDF.
As a/. reader and com sci graduate the advantages of a single, lightweight low power solution versus the tomes that I used to have to chug around are obvious... although when I needed it most, university, I could have afforded it least. Even now, I find myself turning to electronic texts for referance over paper equivalents, but I have never read a novel from either a PDA or a VDU.
From a referance point of view an electronic reader is a long time comming. With any luck it will mean the publishers can stop charging £30 for a 200 page book thats bought by maybe 200 people a year. For short run publications this could be the philosophers stone. But for novels and fun reading I'm not so sure.
There are simply too many conflicts. Although the cost of publishing will be massively reduced so will the returns. We know from DVDs and CDs that people have very little respect for DRM as it feels artificial and more than any other medium I share books. I share them at work, work shares them with me (we have a library... more on that) and I share them with friends and family. This happens on an almost daily basis, and with the exception of reference books, once read, I rarely have any use for the books except to share them with others.
And what about libraries?
Libraries are a great good for any society providing education for all ages, free at the point of service, but they are intrinsically linked to the fact that you have to give the book back. Thats what seperates them from shops. With a digital library you would never have to give the book back, and if you did it would only be because of incredibly strict DRM. So what happens?
In my view the only way it could ever work was if nations openned up their national libraries to their citizens. Each citizen is provided with 'library card' and that allows them unlimited access to all the books via a website. The nation then keeps track of books and a nominal fee is handed out to publishers and authors at set points in the year... I dunno a $1 a book. Libraries would still be funded by the government, and paid for by direct taxation, and publishers would still be encourage not to publish crap because if no one reads it then they don't get paid, but librarians and high street books stores would be out of a job and libraries up and down the country would close and be turned into pubs. There would be no file sharing because everyone could access the books for free.
I dunno, there's something a little too utopian about this for it to ever happen. What will actually happen is that public libraries will close and not be replaced, because publishers will see it as a loss in revenue. A draconian DRM will be announced that means that you can't even cut and paste between your book and Word, this will be cracked with minutes and file sharing will kill short run publishing and severely damage small publishers who can't take the hit of a succesful book getting copied around the interent, leaving us with nothing but middle of the road, religious pap that people don't copy because its so awful and then think that they'll go to hell if they do.
Or worse, authors, desperate to spread their books will release them for free on the internet, but you'll only be able to read them if you also watch flashing adverts. Nightmare.
There is something about using the new architecture on low end macs first that makes me really nervous.
If dual core yonah is more powerful than the existing G4 laptop line, which I'm sure it is, why isn't it being rolled out in the performance centric PowerBooks and iMacs?
I suspect the answer to that is application support, ie, Office and Final Cut are both running via Rossetta. But that just makes me even more nervous as that seems to imply that although good, Rosetta just isn't good enough for pro users.
What a strange sales pitch that is!
Sales Rep: How will you be using your computer? Mac Guy: I'm a pro photographer who spends 80% of my time on the move, and in my spare time I edit music videos for a couple of local bands. Sales Rep: Cool! We've got just the job for you. Its a PowerBook! Mac Guy: Well thats good, I need all the power I can get! Sales Rep: Actually sir, the PowerBook is actually 2/3 of the power of the cheaper iBook. Mac Guy: I'll take that then! If its cheaper and faster whats not to like? Sales Rep: Well actually sir, for your purposes the PowerBook will be faster 50% of the time... that is of course until they release the next version of the Pro apps in 6 months time, then your new PowerBook will be crushed like bug by the cheaper iBook.
What would you buy? The sensible answer is not to buy a PowerBook for another 6 months until the pro apps have caught up unless your current PowerBook explodes (stupid korean batteries).
You can have a similar conversation with a noob.
Noob: I want a mac. I bought an iPod and it was neat, and the iBooks look cool. Sales Rep: Excellent choice sir, would you like anything else with that? Noob: Well, I know macs arn't that hot at games, but I think I'd like a copy of Sims 2 to tide me over until I can afford a XBox 360. Sales Rep: I'd have to recommend against that. You see the new macs are in a state of transition, and high powered games like The Sims 2 will run really badly on you new iBook. Noob: Thats irritating, I guess it will just have to be a copy of Office. Its a good things Macs support office, otherwise I'd never be able to get any work done. Sales Rep: Again, not such a great choice. Although this mac will run Office, it be like trying to run through treacle. You probably won't notice any performance increase on your 2003 mac. We'd recommend that you use Pages... its really cool?
Which leaves the questions, who would buy a Mac right now and why?
The role of the home desktop is changing. It used to be the powerhouse. The computer you used when you really wanted to get some work done... but that came at a price: working in an office. Laptops work for me, because when faced with a block the best way of solving it is a change of scenery. Sitting in the same place for hours on end for "fun" is less appealing now I have to do it at work as well.
My G5 is easily twice as powerful as my G4 Powerbook, but I use my laptop 80% of the time. So why have a the G5? It's a home server. I have over 40GB of music, 10GB of photos, 100GB of home movies and PVR, and its incredibly useful to have a single point of access for the whole household, and because its a desktop its always in the same place, always on and permanently connected to the internet meaning that not only does it server the house, it serves us whilst we're on the move as well.
Even if my laptop could match the desktop for storage, I wouldn't want it to be bogged down with running the services, and all the laptops in the house having independant media store is just plain bad management. Also, tasks like media recompression, code compilation and games are still done best on a machine with more RAM than sense and a processor thats designed for performance not low power consumption: you use a push bike to get to work and for fun, you use a car to do the shopping. Sometimes you need the heavy lifting.
In fact I now have a couple of home servers, but thats because I'm a nerd: I have a PIII running debian to provide the low power services like a front end for Azuereus, a few small web apps and LAN facing NFS server. Which is why I can't wait for a 20GB NAND drive that improves the battery life of my laptops. I just don't need that much storage on teh move providing I've got a decent wireless network connection.
As for, when was the last time I topped out a hardisk... yesterday. I hve 300GB of storage available to me and I use all of it. You can never have too much storage, you just don't need all of it, all of the time, providing you can access it from anywhere in the world network latency and speed is more of a barrier than local storage.
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In production means nothing. It could still not make it through to gold, because, lets face it, no game can live up to expectations of a 10 year wait. Trying to make a game fun is the hard bit.
Sid Meirs Civilisation was a great game, but to progress you had to kill a few indians, or worse infiltrate their camps and 'civilise' them. I don't remember seing a petition about that.
I've played more than my fair share of first person shoots where I'm pitched against a culture and told to destroy them all: Nazis, Covenant, Islamic Terrorists, all manner of Aliens.
As for the suggestion of a Civil War game where you hunt down and string up slaves, thats still bad taste at the moment (not sure why). But I can envisage a game where you're a turkish raider, pilaging the coastal towns of Britain for gold, religious relics and female slaves. How about a Roman citizen who hunts down the french and in order to stabailize the town has to crucify a couple of them, and then sell the females and children into the slave trade. Would the Turkish and Italians get all upset? Would the British or French? I doubt it.
Bad things happened in History. That's the interesting bit. The best way to teach history is to make it relevant and fun. If you can understand that the slave traders did what they did becuase it put food on their table and nobody thought it was wrong, then you are on your way to stopping slavery forever. If you can get people to understand why the pilgrims and cowboys were so violent against naitive americans, then hopefully you can understand how it stopped, why there is still bad blood, and why it should never happened again. Games that explore social dynamics are incomplete if they don't demonstrate the complete spectrum of human behavior.
Perhaps I should have been more verbose. My issue with IE isn't so much its memory leakage as much as the security holes. My real point was, that IE is too important as a platform for MS to get bored with it. Web technology is moving at a faster pace than it would appear Microsft can keep up with, and yet their browswer is still #1. The only reason I'd suggest going with a OSS broswer is that it frees microsofts engineers to focus on something that the company as a whole is more interested in.
Is it just me or does Micorosft appear bored by IE7. Its not like its a finished product, they're are tens of standards that they don't conform too, its leaky and yet they're taking years between major revisions.
I know in the 90s it looked like who ever won the browser wars would take over the world, but 10 years on that seems to be the business logic of the underpant gnomes. Why don't they just give up, and distribute Firefox, SeaMonkey or some Gecko based wonder, instead of IE?
Because computes are a tool and ALL tools require a certain amount of training.
Now do they need to know when and how to implement a radix sort? No. In the same way as I don't need to know how to do and oil change, or tune the engine in my car. But I am expected to fill it up myself and check the tyre pressure, maybe even fill the screen wash. I'm also obligated to drive safely, and act with courtesy towards other road users and pedestrians.
It doesn't even need to be as complicated as a car for this analogy to work.
Take a sledgehammer. You don't need any formal training, or a license to operate it. You do have to be strong enough to lift it, and look halfway responsible when you buy it (more than a computer). In the right hands a sledgehammer is a wonderful tool that can be used in a variety of different ways. In the wrong hands it can be used to destroy your house and kill people. The difference between a computer and a sledgehammer is that when a sledgehammer is used by a moron, its the moron that gets blamed.
Its not even like there arn't equivalents to viruses and malware. Sledghammers are suseptable to variety of attacks: fungal wood rot, rust, termites. Still, if a moron gets hurt, or does damage with a damaged sledgehammer its the morons fault.
This is why nerds think that people who use computers should have at least a basic understand of how they work, before they use them. Computers are tools, and tools need training and care if they are to be used without damaging the operator and those around them.
Look at the big players in Linux:
Say any of those names in a pub/bar and people will look at you like an alien has jumped out of your mouth.
Lets look at the identifiable brands in computing:
Google are so huge, that googling is almost as accepted as a verb as hoovering or xeroxing. Just by mentioning that they might be releasing a competitor to Windows they will hit every business newspaper in the world.
To a certain extent it doesn't matter how good their distro is. If its based on Ubuntu its 95% there. If its pacakged with Google Earth, Picassa, gMail branded Evolution, a Blogger front end and Google Talk its up there with the big boys. If they can perform the ultimate trick and get Wine working as well as Rossetta does, then its an OS X beater.
Better than all of that, a home brand name supporting linux gives hardware and software developers something to target. If they can focus on one platform rather than all of them, and know that it will be hitting consumers not geeks, that can only be good for Linux.
Why is this good for Google?
Providing a distro that connects, by default, to their web services means that the penetration of their advertising is increase.
A web based company needs as many people on the web as possible. People who are polluted by viruses and malware arn't happy web consumers.
Share holders. If I was a major share holder of Google, I'd want to know why we weren't competing head on with Microsoft. Whilst Microsoft are the dominant OS, they control peoples initial perceptions of the web: Internet Explorer, MSN Messenger, Hotmail and Outlook.
Do no harm. Its in their mission statement. Supporting Windows doesn't exactly fit into that category
I'm serious. The future is the iPod.
It already has a H.264 decoder. All it needs now is a H.264 encoder, one of those swanky macbook cameras in the top and wi-fi card and we got ourselves the ultimate iChat client device.
All the more reason to use MPEG-2. Fudge 'em
I hate everything you've just said. It spits in the face of what we'd call progress, but I also hate that there is , if not poorly phrased, an element of truth in what you say.
Our current, national philosphy is that all children are equal, and that good education, housing and an X-Box are all that stands between them and a succesful future in the service nation. It's not working.
I'm surrounded by teachers, I've done my PGCE, and I've got to tell you, all children arn't equal. Not even close. Some children get 6 hours of school, and then love and attention at home, and all the resources they need to become the next Babbage or Einstein, but they come out of school with C in their GCSEs, they just don't have the ability. Other kids don't get even a fraction of that support, and yet they become world leaders. Nature, is often stronger than nurture.
Look at ANY classroom in the UK, and even by Year 1, there is a large enough gap between some children that it can be measured in years, and yet they progress regardless ability. By Year 9 there is normally at least one child in each class that could sit and pass their GCSEs, and yet they are often forced to wait another 2 years. In Shropshire, we have a couple of schools that are given in the region of £25,000 a year per child in order to take children with behavioural problems, at yet there are no, state run, centres of excellence. I often wonder if we are throwing money at the wrong end of the spectrum, or at least not distributing it enough.
That, and our economic situation means that you need a degree to get a job in retail management. You now need to get a Masters or a PhD in order to get your CV to stand out, which means that the nations brightist don't hit the job market until they are 25.
Your Darwinist stand point has a strong smell of truth about it too. I'm 26, been to university and earn twice the national average, even though I'm only three rungs up from mail boy on my corporations ladder. I can't afford to raise a family, or buy a house in my area, because my girlfriend is training to become a teacher. The only people I know, at my age, who have had children and own a house are those who survive off state subsidies and a factory job or equivalent.
I don't want to see people starving in the streets. I don't want children to be left behind just because their parents didn't understand birth control (or that alcholol doesn't work as a spermacide). I don't want to see children who have learning difficulites left behind, when all they really need is an extra year in reception. But that doesn't mean that I think people shouldn't have to contribute in order to get these benefits, I just don't know what contribute means anymore.
Why do independant gamers do this to themselves?
Why not code in OpenGL?
OpenGL drivers are freely available on evey major platform, just as C compilers are. Why limit yourself to a single market when you can target them all?
it does what the current generation of speech recognition claims to do. I have yet to find any dictation software that is even remotely accurate, and the voice command software has been pap, at least for me. There is something about my accent that really upsets speech recogntion software.
Nintendogs: I've stopped trying to train my dog, its never going to happen.
Apple Speech: Only works if I use a terrible californian accent. Not worth the embarresment.
Nokia: Even with just one voice command, my girlfriends name, if still can't match my voice.
If this can translate foreign languages in to American (sic) then it definately sounds like it could stand a chance at translating English into text and command.
Where do cell phone companies get their pricing tarifs from?
Orange were nice enough to offer me a try 3G for 3 months free when I took out my contract, so I've been a pretty heavy user over that period. Being able to freely check my emails, read slashdot and ssh into my various boxes has been a delight. On average I used 50-75MB a month, which I though was a reasonable, if not execesive amount, I mean my cable connection gets taken for 1GB a day.
They want around £1 a MB. As useful as that service was, it was not worth £75 a month. It was worth £5, but I would have paid £10. For a start, its not that fast. Its faster than dial-up, but the lag is very noticable. Its slow enough to make you think "I'll wait till I get home". Then there is coverage. I can connect at 25KBs at work but get a measly 3KBs at home. Then there is the power, it sucked the life out of my phone. Having bluetooth and the 3G modem going meant that I was charging my phone in twice a day on a new battery.
Now I welcome Dell embracing this technology into their hardware. A laptop without an internet connection is increasingly useless as our digital lives migrate to pastures new, online. The faster the better. I just wish cell companies understood their product better. With their current pricing plans they have deliberately made 3G a tool for rich business people who genuinely believe that their email is worth £75 a month. Its the same with hotspots in the UK. How often is an internet connection whilst you drink your coffee or eat your big mac worth £8?
Which is why take up is so poor. People know that they can setup a wireless network in their home for £30, plus £15 a month for ADSL. At what point did BT OpenZone and Vodaphone sit down and think that the same people who setup their own network for £30 would be willing to spend £8 an hour to use their service?
If a Mom and Pop cafe / coffee shop openned and gave away internet access with coffee I'd use it daily.
There is no denying that XP won the last round of the OS wars. This was mainly down to the fact the the same 90% that bought PCs thought that Macs were just for animation and graphics (groan) and that Linux is just for nerds. Most people just don't know that there are alternatives.
.Net and Java developer I would still say that Java is easier to write threaded software with, and the Java 5 language additions have really closed the gap on C#, but preventing it from shipping with Ubuntu has pushed it further from home users than ever.
This time round Microsoft are faced by OS X which, thanks to iPod, is now routinely hailed as 'cool' and a Linux which is not only robust enough to be deployed in some businesses (Red Hat and SuSE) but also easy enough for your Nan to install and use (Ubuntu). The message about security is slowly sinking in. People are no longer asking me to defrag their harddisks, they're asking me to install anti-malware and firewalls, but when told about more secure OSs like BSD, Linux and OSX they are still dubious about getting Office to work and getting their old programs to run, unaware that there are free alternatives for most of their apps. I'd say that was a shrinking concern though. I'd also go out on a limb and say that Joe Public was, in general more tech savvi. The game is being played on a very different field.
Who wins boils down to hardware support. If NVidia start to update their drivers more frequently for Linux than for Windows, gamers will start to pay attention. If HP and Epson get tired of having to licence each minor revision of their printers maybe they'll start looking towards OSs with cheaper release cycles.
There is also software to think about. Why learn new APIs for Vista when you can use existing, cross platform APIs like Mono and Qt?
Perhaps even more scary is that Java is really starting to show its head on the desktop. Azurerus is a success, as is eclipse, but perhaps more shocking than either of them is Jake2. Java can already be deployed effectively on single CPU systems, but it really starts to shine when given a few more processors to play with. As a
I have no doubt that Vista will be the dominant OS over the next 5-6 years, but I don't expect it to have close 90% market share at the end of that period.
The article is right. Lots of small things do often add up to one big thing. But the real issue is lots of big things add up to one HUGE thing. The energy I waste in standby mode on my TV is really bought into to context when you look at how much energy people waste driving cars.
Here is a quick comparison. I'm insured on my Smart Car (0.6l petrol), and my girlfriends Rover 600 (2l petrol). If I use my car to get to work, my fuel bill is £50 a month. If I drive my girlfriends car its £90 a month. Can you imagine the national energy savings involved if everyone commuted in a small car? I can't see how they wouldn't eclipse the savings of turning lights and computers off. And thats nothing. When I cycle to work I not only save the fuel and maintenece on my car, I also save money at the gym!
But the most annoying thing about this is that there are some people who will read this article, take it too seriously and start switching my computer off when I get up to go and make a cup of tea, whilst tumble drying every item of clothes they own and driving toddlers around in SUVs. I'm not saying that I shouldn't take switching off the TV more seriously, but electronics on stand-by really isn't the problem. Would this really be an issue if the electricity was being generated using tidal, solar, geothermal or wind energies?
The real energy killer in modern homes is climate control. People insist on living at 27 degrees in Winter and 10 degress in Summer. In the UK, the energy peek is in the winter, not the summer (we don't really use air-conditioning), so the real saving can be made not by turning your TV off at the wall, but by investing in personal insulation: a jumper.
In the last round of the console wars I went with the XBox and the GC. I really enjoyed the XBox, but as an ex-PC gamer, felt that I was just regurgitating IDs back-catalogue, but with slightly better graphics. The GC provided me with the most fun. The games were cheaper, had greater variety, and for all the fun of Halo 2 Live, playing drink monkey ball proved that its was more important to be able to punch your opponent in the real world, than snipe them from behind a exquisitly rendered rock on Live.
;)
I still don't understand what all the fuss was/is about the PS2. Lifes too short to watch progress bars, when your supposed to be having fun.
Being able to play Nintendo's entire back catalogue sounds too good to be true. Finally having a controller that reacts to its possition in space has been the aspiration of every gamer since the 80s - the only thing that could top that is having a game that gives you extra control when you stick your tounge out
I don't care that its not HD. Even if I buy one HD TV in the next year, that will be one in a house of 4 TVs. I've yet to see any real evidence that I need it. As my PC improved I was able to play Half-life at 640x480, then 800x600 and finally 1024x768. It was the graphics that got better, not the game. It may add a layer of realism to the game, but Doom 3 proved that once you stop looking at the eye-candy it's the underlying gameplay that makes the game worth the money.
You don't realise how much a PSP is missing a touch screen until you use a DS.
You don't realise how slow UMD is until you buy DS.
You don't realise how time consuming transcoding video is until you buy a PSP.
The one area where the PSP kicks the DS is graphics. The graphics on the PSP are incredible for a handheld system, but they come with a heavy price: game loading time and battery life. Whats worse is that once its loaded your still left playing with an analogue stick and 6 buttons. Its a platform thats been done to death.
Cartridges make a lot of sense for a mobile platform. Low battery consumption and instant on are what gaming on the move is all about. Having two cartridge slots was a work of genius. Not only do you get a huge back catalogue, but you also get an explansion slot. How long will it be until you can buy a DS game that comes with a tilt cart, or a rumble pack? Thats simply not an option for the PSP.
As for games?
I haven't been as consumed with a gaming system since I got my first console, a NES. Mario 64 took a while for me get into, but now I'm hooked. Mario Kart is genuily the best in the series and Nintendogs is the most bizarly addictive game I've ever played, it really snook up on me. I'm looking forward to the port of Viewtiful Joe, Mario Soccer and the inevitable Pokemon game. I think, as a platform it shows a lot of promise.
However, I only know of one other person with a DS, everyone else owns PSPs... so what do I know?
I used .Mac for two years, and I didn't feel like I was getting value for money out of it.
.Mac off a bit, and thats probably because I'm not the target market. But its a novelty, not an essential, and its not a premium service, they're just charging like its a premium service. Everything .Mac provides can be provide for free, you've just got hunt a little harder. As for its easier to use... well thats as maybe, especialy as their cheating. iPhoto could provide the same service by defaulting to .Mac, getting updates from software update (the new stationary), but letting you point it at any ftp server in an advance menu, but there is less money in that.
I used iPhoto publishing for a couple of months. That was really neat, but when I was using it was ahead of its time... at least in the UK. Most people just didn't have a fast enough connection to make it worth their time looking at my photos.
The iDisk sounds like a great idea, but is just too slow. I have a 1Mb link, but I rarely got more than 30kBs down, less than a thrid of my pipe. If their going to sell to European customers, they really ought to get some servers over here.
Homepage? Give me a break. Most people can make a better web page with word.
Backup / Antivirus? The iDisk connection is too slow to make it useful for backing up anything but the essentials. I just couldn't figure out what those essentials should be. 750MB of storage sounds like a lot until you think that you've got 4GB of photos, 20GB of music and 2GB of powerpoint, word, pdf, excel, and code to keep safe. For a short period I thought it should be the things that I working on, ie my desktop, but that went sour fast when I was installing Linux on my old PIII and had gentoo, ubuntu and debian CDs sitting on my desktop (I just couldn't decide which I prefered). And then there is the time cost of getting that much data to your iDisk at 10KBs (I only have 128Kb up). Off site storage is a great service, if you have a symetrical connection, or a small amount of must keep data. Lets face it, that went out with the floppy disk, and has been trampled into the ground by the digital camera and the iPod.
The Mail was just a bog standard IMAP account, but I've replaced it with a gMail account. I do miss having IMAP, but personel email isn't worth £60 a year to me.
The other thing I finally found useful was synchronisation. I have a PowerBook and iMac. It was pretty neat to have my bookmarks synchronise before I got home etc. But again it wasn't worth £60 a year.
There is also the issue of billing. Why £60 a year in a single payment? If your a service, bill like a service! £5 a month is easier to swallow than £60 once a year. Or better yet £5 a quarter, probably closer to the real value.
I've slagged
...where they can be exposed the horrors in real life. The is Art imitating Life. There might not be a game that represents a grieving father killing his family, but in some parts of the real world it doesn't even qualify as news.
Because when you shorten a word you carry the plural, otherwise you change the meaning. The parallels between Maths and English in this particular situation are almost ironic.
yeah, that will work...
Microsoft: Turns out we own the world, give us all your money.
Manufacturers: Hah, not so fast Softie, your not the only one who can make hashtables look like a novel invention. We've got our FileSystem : DukeNukemFS!
Microsoft: So...?
Manufacturers : Well we're going to use that in all our cameras, mp3 players and stuff... why arn't you scared?
Microsoft: Because we're not going to support it.
Manufacturers : What do you mean you're not going to support it?
Microsoft: Well, we control 90% of the computer market. We decided what works and what doesn't. Your hardware is only as good as the support we LET you provide. Not only will we not support it, but expect the next "Software Update" to break any third party drives you think you can sneak by us. Continue with your folly, and support the other major OSs... oh there arn't any... my bad.
Manufacturers: You are evil!
Microsoft: Yup, now give me your money, turn round and take it like the little beotchs that you are.
Who knows, maybe Microsoft will repent and place FAT in the public domain, but this is money, lots of money, for old rope. Yes FAT is a lousy filesystem. Yes, hardware manufacturers could use a free FS, but Microsoft is under no obligation to make it work, stably, with their OS, and thats where the money is.
Look at the iPod. Out of the box it comes with a very nice HFS+ filesystem. If its simple to get Windows to work with another FS, why didn't Apple ship iTunes with a HFS+ compatibility layer? Instead you have to cripple your fancy new iPod with FAT32 if you want it to work with XP. Now, just because Apple didn't do it doesn't mean it impossible, but they do pride themselves on the "It just works" mentality. Getting an iPod to work with XP is trivial, but its a step past "it just works".
I'm under no obligation to use FAT on my USB sticks. They come with a FAT filing table, but the functionality of the device isn't compromised by my using a different file system. USB stick manufacturers could simply sell their wares unformatted like the old floppy days, or you could pay $0.50 more and get a formatted one. Let the consumer decide.
As for digital cameras... well that was their decision. Unless I, as a consumer, am going to get fined for buying a piece of hardware that was unlicenced I don't care. The patents on FAT were no secret. They were, as are all the other patents, kept in a public place, next to the patents for lenses, CCDs, batteries and jpeg compression. As with any other patent, if you want to use the tech you have to pay the licence... and then pass that cost onto the customer.
Having a single filesystem that is accessible to all is good for everyone, especially Windows users. If Microsoft make it difficult to use digital cameras with their operating systems then they're going to piss a lot of people off. Digital cameras are one of the few reasons people buy a new computer so making it difficult to use digital cameras on Windows systems is not in their interests but perhaps worse for Microsoft is that people will install software that lets them use EXT3, Reiser4, UFS or heavens forbid, HFS+. People could use harddisks from other operating systems, with no need to defrag, decent meta information and genuine multi-user support!
I work with OS X, Debian and NT4 on a daily basis. The only way I can predicitably transfer files between them is using FAT16/32, and the limiting factor is NTs lousy support for alien filesystems. Microsoft should place FAT in the public domain. Its not strong enough to warrent a licence, and should really have become extinct along side the floppy disk. Charging people a licence to use a technology that was chosen because of a weakness in your main project, your operating system, is as lame as lecturers teaching from their own book.
2x faster? 4x faster?
We've been lied to horribly for the last 3-4 years. Clock for clock intels are as powerful as PowerPC. So when I bought my 1.8GHz iMac G5 it was already slower than equivalent PCs. Now thats all very well and good, except that Apple were screaming that it was faster, better, stronger. That you would be mad to even think about buying Intel, and I sucked it up. Its not even like they didn't know the truth. They've been developing Mac OS X on intel for the last 5 years, so they new they were onto a looser with PowerPC and they still over sold.
Now I'm very happy with my Mac, but the smug sense of superiority that I bought with the Mac has been wiped out. I miss being inside the RDF.
As a /. reader and com sci graduate the advantages of a single, lightweight low power solution versus the tomes that I used to have to chug around are obvious... although when I needed it most, university, I could have afforded it least. Even now, I find myself turning to electronic texts for referance over paper equivalents, but I have never read a novel from either a PDA or a VDU.
From a referance point of view an electronic reader is a long time comming. With any luck it will mean the publishers can stop charging £30 for a 200 page book thats bought by maybe 200 people a year. For short run publications this could be the philosophers stone. But for novels and fun reading I'm not so sure.
There are simply too many conflicts. Although the cost of publishing will be massively reduced so will the returns. We know from DVDs and CDs that people have very little respect for DRM as it feels artificial and more than any other medium I share books. I share them at work, work shares them with me (we have a library... more on that) and I share them with friends and family. This happens on an almost daily basis, and with the exception of reference books, once read, I rarely have any use for the books except to share them with others.
And what about libraries?
Libraries are a great good for any society providing education for all ages, free at the point of service, but they are intrinsically linked to the fact that you have to give the book back. Thats what seperates them from shops. With a digital library you would never have to give the book back, and if you did it would only be because of incredibly strict DRM. So what happens?
In my view the only way it could ever work was if nations openned up their national libraries to their citizens. Each citizen is provided with 'library card' and that allows them unlimited access to all the books via a website. The nation then keeps track of books and a nominal fee is handed out to publishers and authors at set points in the year... I dunno a $1 a book. Libraries would still be funded by the government, and paid for by direct taxation, and publishers would still be encourage not to publish crap because if no one reads it then they don't get paid, but librarians and high street books stores would be out of a job and libraries up and down the country would close and be turned into pubs. There would be no file sharing because everyone could access the books for free.
I dunno, there's something a little too utopian about this for it to ever happen. What will actually happen is that public libraries will close and not be replaced, because publishers will see it as a loss in revenue. A draconian DRM will be announced that means that you can't even cut and paste between your book and Word, this will be cracked with minutes and file sharing will kill short run publishing and severely damage small publishers who can't take the hit of a succesful book getting copied around the interent, leaving us with nothing but middle of the road, religious pap that people don't copy because its so awful and then think that they'll go to hell if they do.
Or worse, authors, desperate to spread their books will release them for free on the internet, but you'll only be able to read them if you also watch flashing adverts. Nightmare.
There is something about using the new architecture on low end macs first that makes me really nervous.
If dual core yonah is more powerful than the existing G4 laptop line, which I'm sure it is, why isn't it being rolled out in the performance centric PowerBooks and iMacs?
I suspect the answer to that is application support, ie, Office and Final Cut are both running via Rossetta. But that just makes me even more nervous as that seems to imply that although good, Rosetta just isn't good enough for pro users.
What a strange sales pitch that is!
Sales Rep: How will you be using your computer?
Mac Guy: I'm a pro photographer who spends 80% of my time on the move, and in my spare time I edit music videos for a couple of local bands.
Sales Rep: Cool! We've got just the job for you. Its a PowerBook!
Mac Guy: Well thats good, I need all the power I can get!
Sales Rep: Actually sir, the PowerBook is actually 2/3 of the power of the cheaper iBook.
Mac Guy: I'll take that then! If its cheaper and faster whats not to like?
Sales Rep: Well actually sir, for your purposes the PowerBook will be faster 50% of the time... that is of course until they release the next version of the Pro apps in 6 months time, then your new PowerBook will be crushed like bug by the cheaper iBook.
What would you buy? The sensible answer is not to buy a PowerBook for another 6 months until the pro apps have caught up unless your current PowerBook explodes (stupid korean batteries).
You can have a similar conversation with a noob.
Noob: I want a mac. I bought an iPod and it was neat, and the iBooks look cool.
Sales Rep: Excellent choice sir, would you like anything else with that?
Noob: Well, I know macs arn't that hot at games, but I think I'd like a copy of Sims 2 to tide me over until I can afford a XBox 360.
Sales Rep: I'd have to recommend against that. You see the new macs are in a state of transition, and high powered games like The Sims 2 will run really badly on you new iBook.
Noob: Thats irritating, I guess it will just have to be a copy of Office. Its a good things Macs support office, otherwise I'd never be able to get any work done.
Sales Rep: Again, not such a great choice. Although this mac will run Office, it be like trying to run through treacle. You probably won't notice any performance increase on your 2003 mac. We'd recommend that you use Pages... its really cool?
Which leaves the questions, who would buy a Mac right now and why?
I think this is really interesting.
The role of the home desktop is changing. It used to be the powerhouse. The computer you used when you really wanted to get some work done... but that came at a price: working in an office. Laptops work for me, because when faced with a block the best way of solving it is a change of scenery. Sitting in the same place for hours on end for "fun" is less appealing now I have to do it at work as well.
My G5 is easily twice as powerful as my G4 Powerbook, but I use my laptop 80% of the time. So why have a the G5? It's a home server. I have over 40GB of music, 10GB of photos, 100GB of home movies and PVR, and its incredibly useful to have a single point of access for the whole household, and because its a desktop its always in the same place, always on and permanently connected to the internet meaning that not only does it server the house, it serves us whilst we're on the move as well.
Even if my laptop could match the desktop for storage, I wouldn't want it to be bogged down with running the services, and all the laptops in the house having independant media store is just plain bad management. Also, tasks like media recompression, code compilation and games are still done best on a machine with more RAM than sense and a processor thats designed for performance not low power consumption: you use a push bike to get to work and for fun, you use a car to do the shopping. Sometimes you need the heavy lifting.
In fact I now have a couple of home servers, but thats because I'm a nerd: I have a PIII running debian to provide the low power services like a front end for Azuereus, a few small web apps and LAN facing NFS server. Which is why I can't wait for a 20GB NAND drive that improves the battery life of my laptops. I just don't need that much storage on teh move providing I've got a decent wireless network connection.
As for, when was the last time I topped out a hardisk... yesterday. I hve 300GB of storage available to me and I use all of it. You can never have too much storage, you just don't need all of it, all of the time, providing you can access it from anywhere in the world network latency and speed is more of a barrier than local storage.