I don't see what's to prefer about OS X if you're already familiar or prepared to use XP for playing games.
Hmm, lets see, I can buy the Windows version, plus a copy of Windows, plus go through a complex install process, and shut down the 15 applications I always have running and reboot to play a game, or I can buy the mac version and just run it. Yeah, I certainly see no reason to go with the latter.
...but it blows for gaming if for no other reason than the dearth of titles compared to Windows.
Whooosh! That was the sound of the previous poster's point whizzing over your head. Will the market demand more games on OS X? Your reasoning, no because there aren't enough games on OS X.
Doubly so because a lot of older titles will be PPC and must be emulated.
Which will make no difference within a year when said emulation is faster on current hardware than it was native on old hardware.
But more importantly, anyone intent on playing games would never buy the current Intel Macs.
I see, so that is why no one ports games to OS X now. No one would who is interested in games would buy a mac....Except there is a market, and it is quite profitable. Believe it or not, most game sales are to casual gamers, who own a handful of titles, not to "extreme gamers" who live for games. They just want to pick out something fun, and being native for OS X is a big plus if they have a mac. The more people have macs, the bigger this market gets and the more games it will get. Thus, if bootcamp increases the adoption of Macs, more games will come to the platform, but since such a tiny market is willing to go to the expense and time of using it just for games, it probably won't affect the game market otherwise.
Both the MacBook and the Mac Mini (the only Intel based systems thus far) have low-end / mobile GPUs and the CPUs are hardly cutting edge.
And what percentage of regular PC users that buy games have "cutting edge" graphics cards? My guess is somewhere around.5%. Sorry, but as much as you'd like to think otherwise, hardcore gamers are not a big market segment.
People want Apple's[sic] because of the trend and the way the hardware looks.
Really? How surprising. I think the dozens of coders and security experts using them here would disagree with you. For me, I don't care what the machine looks like, just how it works. The laptop hardware is nice and supports multiple monitors in a non-mirrored configuration. It is reasonably fast and reliable. More importantly though, the OS runs both standard UNIX/Linux applications, mainstream ports from Windows, OS X only apps, and now (with some messing around and inconvenience) Windows and all its apps. It also provides functionality above and beyond any other workstation I've used. If I can run pipes and cat and I can run photoshop and InDesign, and I can run the same spellchecker, grammar checker, and scripts and translation on all text in all applications, and it can reboot for the occasional Windows app... hell it can come in pink and have pictures of guys sucking each other off on it. I can always paint it or cover it in stickers.
Re:Symphathy for Apple
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Apple vs Bloggers
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Yes, but the lawsuit involves a more subtle issue: who is responsible, the insider violated an NDA and leaked the info, or the person who reports on the leaked info?
In most places, the law says they are both guilty.
That's why they are framing it as a journalistic freedom issue. Definitely a gray area...
This is only a "gray area" to those who haven't done any research. Different types of speech have different levels of protection. Political expression has the highest level of protection. Commercial has the lowest. These people are making money doing this and hurting another company. But that is not why this is illegal. It is illegal because of the following hypothetical:
Bob works for big company A. Tom is an investor. Tom pays Bob (the poor working grunt) $1000 to give him insider information. Tom publishes said information causing company A's stock to plummet. Bob is convicted and goes to jail. Fifty people are laid off. Investors in company A lose their shirts. Tom makes a bajillion dollars by having invested in Company B and shorting company A's stock. Tom is guilty of no crime and starts looking for another desperate person, we'll call her Jane.
Do you understand why they decided to make it against the law to knowingly publish trade secrets, especially when you are profiting from it?
But widescreen monitors just aren't the majority of monitors being bought.
You're right and at the same time, not quite right. You see this article is for/by people running Macs and most Macs have widescreen displays. Aside from ibooks, I'm not even sure Apple sells any non-widescreen systems. So current Mac users (the most likely users of bootcamp) Are used to everything, including games dealing with widescreen. I've never run a game under OS X that did not handle widescreen, that I recall. It seems like gaming companies should get with the program, it's not like widescreen is rare anymore either.
I find it sickening that modern games do not support what should be standard screen resolutions.
It will probably upset Mac gamers even more than most. Since such a large percentage of Macs are widescreen, I don't think I've ever seen a Mac game that did not support them. Also, many Mac users love to bitch about the Windows platform, in general:)
So his 'character' has a better peripheral vision because he has a widescreen monitor?
Imagine a gamer with a great video card and monitor. With the better resolution and size he can make out objects that are further away. Shouldn't all games be restricted to 640x480 and at a certain size on the screen, otherwise some characters can see further and in better detail than others. Some people might have two monitors allowing them to reference a map, IM with other players, or view cheats at the same time as the game. Games need to detect and turn off multiple monitors. Also, some gamers use joysticks and trackball setups that allow them to click buttons faster. Games should only support standard keyboards and mice; lest some characters have better reaction times than others.
You could argue this for all sorts of hardware, but it does not really matter. People who spend more on the best hardware and connection will gain some slight advantage. That's life. In any case failing to deal with widescreen monitors and distorting the picture is pathetic. I thought all games checked for this and at worst put some black bars on the right and left, like the ones at the top and bottom for widescreen movies on a standard TV.
Yeah, they look cooler, but why would anyone expect that they would bench/perform differently from a generic white box with the same specs?
The debate about whether Apple or typical PC laptop has raged for a decade. The debate about OS X versus Windows for speed has not slacked either. Now, we can actually benchmark them. They seem to be benchmarking about the same as the top of the line PCs. This is good news for Apple customers, since it means they are functional using both systems, especially for games, which is the main reason someone would dual-boot. More interesting to many of us, we can benchmark the same software under both OSs and sets of hardware to gain insight into the hardware and software bottlenecks in Apple machines and in the OSs.
Nice article but I dont know why any one would want to game on a laptop.
LAN party. You know, a dozen guys and gals go to someone's house. We usually have about three desktops and about nine laptops for a typical night. Who wants to lug a desktop and a monitor over to a friend's house? Just buy a USB keyboard (maybe a gaming keyboard), plug into your laptop and go.
Most specifically you can't open an Open Office document in Microsoft Office, which, no matter how much you dislike it, is the defacto industry standard. If you send someone a word document, they will have something which can open it, and if they do any document editing at all, they'll be able to work with it and change it.
First, I disagree with your characterization of the state of the industry/computing world. If someone sends a Word file somewhere the other person might be able to open it. Many will have Word, at least in the US. In other countries that is much less likely. Even if they do have Word, they may or may not be able to open the document, depending upon the version. Often it works, sometimes it doesn't. There is no guarantee that in 10 years the same file will be able to be opened using any software available. Right now, very old Word files are sometimes nearly impossible to open with any program.
This is a problem. Open Standards are a solution. There are many very good reasons for companies, governments, and other large organizations that plan to be around for more than a decade to switch to open standards. Archiving is one of them. There are simultaneously some good reasons to switch to a free office suite (namely $200 a seat). Change is always difficult and it is made more-so by MS specifically working to make it hard. That in itself is another reason to change. When you are someone's customer and they are specifically trying to make things hard for you, it is obvious they don't value you and you are likely to get abominable service from them. Between the cost and the functionality I think a lot of people are looking to change, and if they aren't at least investigating, they are ripe for being slaughtered by more nimble competitors. I get OpenOffice files from co-workers and even from some partners. They aren't as common as.doc files yet, but the tide is turning. I can tell a partner or large customer in Argentina to download OpenOffice if they want to edit our files, and they can use it for.doc files too. I can't tell them to buy copies of Word and expect it to happen in a timely manner. Schools can use a version of OpenOffice and be confident that students can read the same files at home. They can't be so confident with Word and they can't tell everyone to buy a copy of some particular version.
Between schools, foreign companies, and government agencies adopting the open office standard, no one will be able to afford not being able to read it, and since it is free OpenOffice will start to be bundled with home systems. There will be plug-ins for Word and eventually MS will try to embrace and extend the format. That will be the real challenge, but I don't doubt that it is coming.
Who really cares about getting EU addresses anyway? I guess asking that makes me sound like an isolated bumpkin American, but honestly the same goes for.us and pretty much any other TLD that isn't.com. Do companies really stand to make megamillions selling non-.com addresses? I just don't see it.
Halfway through the initial registration, the.eu domain became the third largest, behind.com and.uk. They have probably passed.uk by now. It is not shaping up to be one of those ignored TLDs. So, yes a lot of people care about it and yes big money is involved.
Look at the music CD. I believe it was Philips that collected the benefits for that for a long time. Not sure if they still do.
The patent has expired, but they have a trademark on the term "CD." They still refuse to let nonstandard discs use that moniker, like DRM'd pseudo-CDs.
There is a difference between closed standards that you let nobody else use (like *.doc), closed standards that you control, but let others use (like *.pdf) or open ones that are made by a commity (like *.html)
I disagree with your characterization. The "openness" of a standard is not reliant upon who wrote it. It relates only to the functionality. Can it be used by anyone without and strings attached? Also, PDF is an open standard. Anyone can and does implement that standard and Adobe cannot stop them. They released it as an open specification. A better example of a "half-open" standard might be Java. It is a standard and is implemented by many, but the standard is under the control of a single company who has patents on the technology.
So what you are saying is that you installed a poorly designed application which places its game data somewhere where it shouldn't (i.e. the user's own My Docs) so therefore Windows is awful and we should all use Linux? Hmmm, don't think much of your logic.
I think the parent poster makes a very good point. Developers aim at the defaults. By default Windows installs only an administrator account. Further, programs MS themselves develop behave this same way. It is obvious MS expects everyone to be running as admin and don't care to change that. If they did they would include setting up an admin and non-admin account at install and design all the dev tools they give away and sell to create properly functioning programs, by default. Or, they could build a nice, easy version of su and give users less permission by default. Game designers would then be encouraged to use better design practices, since they don't want to annoy their users.
I'd say MS, is the one holding all the cards, is really the only one who can fix this and thus should be the one to bear the lion's share of the blame.
And another one is that an armed rebellion simply isn't viable anymore these days.
I disagree. The US has a great deal of ability to lay waste to large areas. They can't do that within the US and not just growing a larger resistance. As you may have noted from Iraq, people get upset when you drop bombs on them and murder their relatives and friends.
Small arms and improvised munitions in the US are very effective and plentiful. People with experience using them are common. In a real rebellion a significant number of the military, ex-military, and police would probably side with the rebellion. At any given time a significant number of US troops are tied up overseas. Many foreign nations would be happy to clandestinely support a war within the US.
So basically, I just don't buy it. Armed rebellion is very possible, should the population be motivated. (Not that I see that happening. The population lacks education and will. So long as they have beer and TV, they are sheep.)
So let me get this straight... this guy hosts an NTP server and is pissed because... its being used as an NTP server?
If I set up an NTP server, say for my university, and left it open for others, I also might think it a bit unorthodox if a multinational corporation hardcoded all there gear (which was deployed internationally) to query it. This is for several reasons. First, it generates unneeded bandwidth and violates convention by not using a local NTP server. Second, it means thousands of people are relying on one person for their gear to work properly, a person the company did not even bother to consult. What if he decides to change the time by five hours, just for fun? It is bloody irresponsible of the manufacturer to give him that option. And what happens if the server is deprecated or the hostname and IP changed in a reworking of the network? Tons of wasted traffic as they ping his IP space.
Well, if I were a game company, I sure wouldn't waste money doing a Mac port just because Mac users are lazy.
If that is the kind of logic you applied to making business decisions, like which markets you should be addressing, you wouldn't be a game company for long. There is an old saying, "the customer is always right." They aren't, but it does recognize the truth that in order to make money you have to give someone something they want. If you don't give customers something they want (a game they can and are willing to spend the effort to install) they won't give you money. If you don't give it to them at a reasonable price ($200 for a second OS to play a game?) they won't give you money. If they don't give you money, they do give it to someone who does give them what they want. Does it cost Blizzard a lot of money to build for OS X as well as Windows? Nope. They build using OpenGL and other portable, open tools. Does it cost ID a lot? Nope, same deal. Does it cost Sierra? Yup, they went with DirectX and tied themselves to just one system. Sierra lost out on a significant market because it costs them too much to port to other platforms. Maybe it was the right business choice for them at the time, but I bet they didn't to it because "those mac users are lazy."
I love a lot of science, accept that evolution is probably right, decry abortions, gay marriage, perhaps birth control too. Yet I don't feel like forcing it on you people through laws will help things, since a new law that no one wants to obey doesn't actually change anything (think Prohabition)... it's not that I don't think these things are making society, in general, worse. Yet I still edge towards having some sort of control... where do I fit in?
You're one of the christians with a very different understanding of the teachings than I have. You mention practical reasons for enacting or not enacting laws to force others to conform with your beliefs about what is right and wrong (abortion, gay marriage, birth control). I don't know how you could read the bible and the other religious works of early christians and not understand that one of the basic themes Jesus was promoting was minding your own business. It is a very clear theme that it is not anyone's place to judge or control the actions of others and each of us should do what we feel is right without interfering with what others think is right. Passing laws to force people with guns and clubs and gas to do what you feel is right is very, very anti-christian. Of course most people these days practice a christianity so different that the original teachings as to be almost unrecognizable. That is one of the things that has allowed it to survive and become popular. Every generation the beliefs are different. It is wrong to kill. It is okay to kill non-christians. You'll suffer eternal torment unless you kill those people right now. Slowly torturing other christians to death is a good thing. Killing must be approved by the church. Killing is commendable much of the time, so long as it is spreading the word. killing is always wrong. Killing is okay so long as you are forgiven. I hope you're seeing my point.
The most common sects of christianity should more properly be called Augustians, since they take more everyday beliefs from the opinions of the homosexual, pedophile, animal lover Saint Augustine than they do the works of Jesus. Up until his "contributions" women were allowed to be bishops and sex was not some horrible evil.
So where do you stand? I'd say you are a moderate at an average level of mis-education about the teachings of the man you profess to follow. You are, perhaps, more educated than those christians who insist on a literal interpretation of the bible, but you probably don't understand the history of it and you seem more than willing to ascribe to the dogma of some christian sect rather than follow the teachings of Jesus and eschew having a priest or church between you and him.
Personally, I'm not really a christian. I respect his work and I think he had a lot of very good ideas. Maybe that is why I can objectively look at the religion and see how far it has changed from the original writings. That, and the fact that I bothered to actually research it, rather than proclaiming it the most important thing in life and then avoiding finding out anything about it. I find religions in general to be interesting and I've read most of the major religious works from the mainstream religions. Modern christianity, sadly, has gone from a lot of good ideas to a bunch of rules and traditions, many of which directly oppose those original ideas. The followers have gone from people whose eyes were opened to a better way of life, to a huge number of people mindlessly going along and trying to force others to be more like them. It is very sad.
I'm just underwhelmed by the whole dual boot story here. It's only a story because because Apple decided not to allow OSX to run on other platforms.
Yeah, imagine not wanting to go out of business, what can they be thinking? Until the justice department gets off its ass and stops MS's differential pricing, bundling, and standard corruption it would be suicide for Apple to enter the white-box OS race. It has already killed three arguably superior OSs. One look at the history of BeOS and I'd refuse to try to enter that market as well.
By the way, of the OS's in front of you, which only run on one vendor's hardware?
Actually, two. OS X, and the highly modified version of NetBSD that only runs on one platform, the one we sell here.
All your arguments sound like sour grapes. They won't sell just what I want so I'll just pout and try to make fun of them. Meanwhile they are one of the few companies advancing the state of the art. As a workstation it can't be beat and I don't care if the purchase is tied to certain hardware, so long as that hardware is good quality, which not many people seem to disagree with.
"The religious right" is a very nebulous term. The official stance of the Catholic church, the Anglican Church, and most other major protestant churches is that evolution does happen and that the bible cannot be interpreted literally. The fact that a significant number of people who belong to these organized religions disagrees with their church or is presented as so doing is very interesting. My personal opinion is that there are a significant number of people in the US who reject evolution on religious grounds and subscribe instead to a pseudo-christian belief system made up of "common wisdom" beliefs that they associate with christianity. I like to call these people "Jesus was an American dammit!" believers. There are of course a few organized religions that formally promote ID, mostly televangelists and cultists like the Moonies. I suspect they do so as more of a control mechanism than anything else.
They only have to install it all once. They still have to reboot twice every time they want to play a game and stop everything else they are doing. Mac users aren't used to rebooting more than once a month or so. And really, once is too much for most. Most people never install an OS or know that they can. If a game seller actually recommends that customers go spend hundreds of dollars on another OS in addition to the price tag of the game and then perform or get someone else to perform a complex install process they will be laughed at. Sure some people might do it, but not nearly enough. It just is not going to happen as a marketable solution.
In short, just because you have the right idea doesn't mean you automatically get funding for a flawed study.
Maybe. Maybe, they rejected his study because of potential flaws in the methodology and the reply they sent him accidentally read as though they rejected it because they view ID and evolution as competing scientific theories of similar credibility. Or maybe they are now backpedalling from the public backlash of their seemingly anti-scientific views.
Either way, it is a shit-storm now and they made it.
If I've gotten this straight. He is asking for a grant to prove that ID is bad and he doesn't, in the grant application, give sufficient evidence that the other theory is right.
You're fundamentally mistaking the nature of science. Science is a methodology. ID is not a scientific theory and is not able to be falsified. This is analogous to a researcher proposing a scientific study on how likely mutations of bird flu will affect the US population and being denied because he did not prove organisms mutate instead of being altered by Vishnu using magic. Evolution is supported by such a vast body of research that it is accepted by basically every biologist everywhere. It is as well supported as any scientific theory I can think of.
Logically then the researcher who turns in an application that does show that evolution is right will get the money. I have no problem with this.
Yes, also remember if you're submitting a grant for work on ballistics, provide some proof for gravity. After all, it is just a theory. Also, for anything space related, make sure you provide some proof that the world is round and that stars are not the eyes of hungry ghosts that will eat us if we go too high.
...it seems to me the grant is justified, so long as the board is also willing to provide a grant to a theologist that is trying to prove creationism or intelligent design.
Did you read the summary? This person is looking for a grant to study the sociology of how promotion of a particular religious belief can lead politicians and other people to publicly reject the entire body of scientific work on a particular subject. He is not trying to "prove evolution" he is trying to find out what makes people ignore scientific research. He's proposing a scientific study of why people reject scientific studies and he was rejected because the scientific research that was his subject is being ignored by the decision makers.
Intelligent design proponents can try to get grants as well, provided they actually propose a valid scientific study, not try to find arguments in favor of something. This person proposed a scientific experiment. If someone wants to propose one to validate or falsify ID I'm all for funding them, but that is not the same thing as, "trying to prove creationism or intelligent design" and is not material to this person's research.
Now they won't have to deal with the hassle of porting their games and software to OS X. Why bother?
It's easy, just go to the store and buy a copy of Windows for $200, then download this program from Apple and repartition and install Windows. Boot Windows and install the game. After that each time you want to play a game you just have to reboot while holding down a key and then switch to Windows and then click on the Start menu, then programs then run the game. Simple huh?
Yeah, that will fly.
90% or more of users never, ever install an operating system, ever. You expect them to pay for one, and install it in a dual-boot setup and reboot every time they want to play a game. And you expect this of the majority of Mac users? Can you say, "fat chance?"
Sure, some Mac users will dual boot to play games using a pirated, already owned, or new copy of Windows. Some will play native Windows games using virtualization, or something like WINE. Some companies will use something like WINE to do quick ports. Most users, however, won't settle for that and they are still a big enough market that they are profitable for gaming companies. If some companies count on people dual-booting, others will eat them alive. You think it is a complete coincidence that WoW is on top right now and they just happen to build the Mac version right alongside the Windows one? Nope. They utilize good coding practices and it makes it easy to reach the whole market. Their products are better as a result and for social games (like MMORPGs) it only takes one well-liked person with a mac to keep a whole group using a particular game.
I've bought alieanwares because they do actually sell good solid harware, take a look at the packages they sell, they're very upfront about what specifically you're getting.
That was true a few years ago. These days independent reviews (like consumer reports) show their prices to be very high compared to the same hardware from other vendors and it is coupled with some of the lowest rated support in the industry. Further, I've read in some cases they literally buy white boxes in bulk, swap the cases, mark them up, and resell them (having decreased reliability by all the handling and with inferior airflow cases).
Alienware is a brand these days, not a type of computer. Now that they are owned by Dell, I expect that will become even more true.
And personally I'd rather not build my own machine as I'd rather not spend the time to do so. Yes I can get something faster and cheaper if I do it myself, but thats why I'm paying more, so I can have somone else do it.
So just buy the same hardware from another vendor, pre-assembled. You'll get a cheaper, more reliable machine.
But I also like a bit of flash and realize I'm paying extra for it.
That is fine so long as you know what you are doing. Just remember, computers are not like clothes. There are easy ways to measure the relative quality of computers and once that knowledge becomes widespread many people will think it is ridiculous that you paid a 20% markup and are willing to suffer with crappy support, to have the equivalent of a Nike swoosh on your case.
Here, at work, almost everyone has a laptop covered in stickers. I've seen some really nice paint-jobs on tower cases, too. For the markup Alienware charges you could hire one of the many starving artists out there to give you a really cool, one of a kind looking machine. Think about it for your next purchase.
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I don't see what's to prefer about OS X if you're already familiar or prepared to use XP for playing games.
Hmm, lets see, I can buy the Windows version, plus a copy of Windows, plus go through a complex install process, and shut down the 15 applications I always have running and reboot to play a game, or I can buy the mac version and just run it. Yeah, I certainly see no reason to go with the latter.
Whooosh! That was the sound of the previous poster's point whizzing over your head. Will the market demand more games on OS X? Your reasoning, no because there aren't enough games on OS X.
Doubly so because a lot of older titles will be PPC and must be emulated.
Which will make no difference within a year when said emulation is faster on current hardware than it was native on old hardware.
But more importantly, anyone intent on playing games would never buy the current Intel Macs.
I see, so that is why no one ports games to OS X now. No one would who is interested in games would buy a mac. ...Except there is a market, and it is quite profitable. Believe it or not, most game sales are to casual gamers, who own a handful of titles, not to "extreme gamers" who live for games. They just want to pick out something fun, and being native for OS X is a big plus if they have a mac. The more people have macs, the bigger this market gets and the more games it will get. Thus, if bootcamp increases the adoption of Macs, more games will come to the platform, but since such a tiny market is willing to go to the expense and time of using it just for games, it probably won't affect the game market otherwise.
Both the MacBook and the Mac Mini (the only Intel based systems thus far) have low-end / mobile GPUs and the CPUs are hardly cutting edge.
And what percentage of regular PC users that buy games have "cutting edge" graphics cards? My guess is somewhere around .5%. Sorry, but as much as you'd like to think otherwise, hardcore gamers are not a big market segment.
People want Apple's[sic] because of the trend and the way the hardware looks.
Really? How surprising. I think the dozens of coders and security experts using them here would disagree with you. For me, I don't care what the machine looks like, just how it works. The laptop hardware is nice and supports multiple monitors in a non-mirrored configuration. It is reasonably fast and reliable. More importantly though, the OS runs both standard UNIX/Linux applications, mainstream ports from Windows, OS X only apps, and now (with some messing around and inconvenience) Windows and all its apps. It also provides functionality above and beyond any other workstation I've used. If I can run pipes and cat and I can run photoshop and InDesign, and I can run the same spellchecker, grammar checker, and scripts and translation on all text in all applications, and it can reboot for the occasional Windows app... hell it can come in pink and have pictures of guys sucking each other off on it. I can always paint it or cover it in stickers.
Yes, but the lawsuit involves a more subtle issue: who is responsible, the insider violated an NDA and leaked the info, or the person who reports on the leaked info?
In most places, the law says they are both guilty.
That's why they are framing it as a journalistic freedom issue. Definitely a gray area...
This is only a "gray area" to those who haven't done any research. Different types of speech have different levels of protection. Political expression has the highest level of protection. Commercial has the lowest. These people are making money doing this and hurting another company. But that is not why this is illegal. It is illegal because of the following hypothetical:
Bob works for big company A. Tom is an investor. Tom pays Bob (the poor working grunt) $1000 to give him insider information. Tom publishes said information causing company A's stock to plummet. Bob is convicted and goes to jail. Fifty people are laid off. Investors in company A lose their shirts. Tom makes a bajillion dollars by having invested in Company B and shorting company A's stock. Tom is guilty of no crime and starts looking for another desperate person, we'll call her Jane.
Do you understand why they decided to make it against the law to knowingly publish trade secrets, especially when you are profiting from it?
But widescreen monitors just aren't the majority of monitors being bought.
You're right and at the same time, not quite right. You see this article is for/by people running Macs and most Macs have widescreen displays. Aside from ibooks, I'm not even sure Apple sells any non-widescreen systems. So current Mac users (the most likely users of bootcamp) Are used to everything, including games dealing with widescreen. I've never run a game under OS X that did not handle widescreen, that I recall. It seems like gaming companies should get with the program, it's not like widescreen is rare anymore either.
I find it sickening that modern games do not support what should be standard screen resolutions.
It will probably upset Mac gamers even more than most. Since such a large percentage of Macs are widescreen, I don't think I've ever seen a Mac game that did not support them. Also, many Mac users love to bitch about the Windows platform, in general :)
So his 'character' has a better peripheral vision because he has a widescreen monitor?
Imagine a gamer with a great video card and monitor. With the better resolution and size he can make out objects that are further away. Shouldn't all games be restricted to 640x480 and at a certain size on the screen, otherwise some characters can see further and in better detail than others. Some people might have two monitors allowing them to reference a map, IM with other players, or view cheats at the same time as the game. Games need to detect and turn off multiple monitors. Also, some gamers use joysticks and trackball setups that allow them to click buttons faster. Games should only support standard keyboards and mice; lest some characters have better reaction times than others.
You could argue this for all sorts of hardware, but it does not really matter. People who spend more on the best hardware and connection will gain some slight advantage. That's life. In any case failing to deal with widescreen monitors and distorting the picture is pathetic. I thought all games checked for this and at worst put some black bars on the right and left, like the ones at the top and bottom for widescreen movies on a standard TV.
Yeah, they look cooler, but why would anyone expect that they would bench/perform differently from a generic white box with the same specs?
The debate about whether Apple or typical PC laptop has raged for a decade. The debate about OS X versus Windows for speed has not slacked either. Now, we can actually benchmark them. They seem to be benchmarking about the same as the top of the line PCs. This is good news for Apple customers, since it means they are functional using both systems, especially for games, which is the main reason someone would dual-boot. More interesting to many of us, we can benchmark the same software under both OSs and sets of hardware to gain insight into the hardware and software bottlenecks in Apple machines and in the OSs.
Nice article but I dont know why any one would want to game on a laptop.
LAN party. You know, a dozen guys and gals go to someone's house. We usually have about three desktops and about nine laptops for a typical night. Who wants to lug a desktop and a monitor over to a friend's house? Just buy a USB keyboard (maybe a gaming keyboard), plug into your laptop and go.
Most specifically you can't open an Open Office document in Microsoft Office, which, no matter how much you dislike it, is the defacto industry standard. If you send someone a word document, they will have something which can open it, and if they do any document editing at all, they'll be able to work with it and change it.
First, I disagree with your characterization of the state of the industry/computing world. If someone sends a Word file somewhere the other person might be able to open it. Many will have Word, at least in the US. In other countries that is much less likely. Even if they do have Word, they may or may not be able to open the document, depending upon the version. Often it works, sometimes it doesn't. There is no guarantee that in 10 years the same file will be able to be opened using any software available. Right now, very old Word files are sometimes nearly impossible to open with any program.
This is a problem. Open Standards are a solution. There are many very good reasons for companies, governments, and other large organizations that plan to be around for more than a decade to switch to open standards. Archiving is one of them. There are simultaneously some good reasons to switch to a free office suite (namely $200 a seat). Change is always difficult and it is made more-so by MS specifically working to make it hard. That in itself is another reason to change. When you are someone's customer and they are specifically trying to make things hard for you, it is obvious they don't value you and you are likely to get abominable service from them. Between the cost and the functionality I think a lot of people are looking to change, and if they aren't at least investigating, they are ripe for being slaughtered by more nimble competitors. I get OpenOffice files from co-workers and even from some partners. They aren't as common as .doc files yet, but the tide is turning. I can tell a partner or large customer in Argentina to download OpenOffice if they want to edit our files, and they can use it for .doc files too. I can't tell them to buy copies of Word and expect it to happen in a timely manner. Schools can use a version of OpenOffice and be confident that students can read the same files at home. They can't be so confident with Word and they can't tell everyone to buy a copy of some particular version.
Between schools, foreign companies, and government agencies adopting the open office standard, no one will be able to afford not being able to read it, and since it is free OpenOffice will start to be bundled with home systems. There will be plug-ins for Word and eventually MS will try to embrace and extend the format. That will be the real challenge, but I don't doubt that it is coming.
Who really cares about getting EU addresses anyway? I guess asking that makes me sound like an isolated bumpkin American, but honestly the same goes for .us and pretty much any other TLD that isn't .com. Do companies really stand to make megamillions selling non-.com addresses? I just don't see it.
Halfway through the initial registration, the .eu domain became the third largest, behind .com and .uk. They have probably passed .uk by now. It is not shaping up to be one of those ignored TLDs. So, yes a lot of people care about it and yes big money is involved.
Look at the music CD. I believe it was Philips that collected the benefits for that for a long time. Not sure if they still do.
The patent has expired, but they have a trademark on the term "CD." They still refuse to let nonstandard discs use that moniker, like DRM'd pseudo-CDs.
There is a difference between closed standards that you let nobody else use (like *.doc), closed standards that you control, but let others use (like *.pdf) or open ones that are made by a commity (like *.html)
I disagree with your characterization. The "openness" of a standard is not reliant upon who wrote it. It relates only to the functionality. Can it be used by anyone without and strings attached? Also, PDF is an open standard. Anyone can and does implement that standard and Adobe cannot stop them. They released it as an open specification. A better example of a "half-open" standard might be Java. It is a standard and is implemented by many, but the standard is under the control of a single company who has patents on the technology.
So what you are saying is that you installed a poorly designed application which places its game data somewhere where it shouldn't (i.e. the user's own My Docs) so therefore Windows is awful and we should all use Linux? Hmmm, don't think much of your logic.
I think the parent poster makes a very good point. Developers aim at the defaults. By default Windows installs only an administrator account. Further, programs MS themselves develop behave this same way. It is obvious MS expects everyone to be running as admin and don't care to change that. If they did they would include setting up an admin and non-admin account at install and design all the dev tools they give away and sell to create properly functioning programs, by default. Or, they could build a nice, easy version of su and give users less permission by default. Game designers would then be encouraged to use better design practices, since they don't want to annoy their users.
I'd say MS, is the one holding all the cards, is really the only one who can fix this and thus should be the one to bear the lion's share of the blame.
And another one is that an armed rebellion simply isn't viable anymore these days.
I disagree. The US has a great deal of ability to lay waste to large areas. They can't do that within the US and not just growing a larger resistance. As you may have noted from Iraq, people get upset when you drop bombs on them and murder their relatives and friends.
Small arms and improvised munitions in the US are very effective and plentiful. People with experience using them are common. In a real rebellion a significant number of the military, ex-military, and police would probably side with the rebellion. At any given time a significant number of US troops are tied up overseas. Many foreign nations would be happy to clandestinely support a war within the US.
So basically, I just don't buy it. Armed rebellion is very possible, should the population be motivated. (Not that I see that happening. The population lacks education and will. So long as they have beer and TV, they are sheep.)
So let me get this straight... this guy hosts an NTP server and is pissed because... its being used as an NTP server?
If I set up an NTP server, say for my university, and left it open for others, I also might think it a bit unorthodox if a multinational corporation hardcoded all there gear (which was deployed internationally) to query it. This is for several reasons. First, it generates unneeded bandwidth and violates convention by not using a local NTP server. Second, it means thousands of people are relying on one person for their gear to work properly, a person the company did not even bother to consult. What if he decides to change the time by five hours, just for fun? It is bloody irresponsible of the manufacturer to give him that option. And what happens if the server is deprecated or the hostname and IP changed in a reworking of the network? Tons of wasted traffic as they ping his IP space.
Well, if I were a game company, I sure wouldn't waste money doing a Mac port just because Mac users are lazy.
If that is the kind of logic you applied to making business decisions, like which markets you should be addressing, you wouldn't be a game company for long. There is an old saying, "the customer is always right." They aren't, but it does recognize the truth that in order to make money you have to give someone something they want. If you don't give customers something they want (a game they can and are willing to spend the effort to install) they won't give you money. If you don't give it to them at a reasonable price ($200 for a second OS to play a game?) they won't give you money. If they don't give you money, they do give it to someone who does give them what they want. Does it cost Blizzard a lot of money to build for OS X as well as Windows? Nope. They build using OpenGL and other portable, open tools. Does it cost ID a lot? Nope, same deal. Does it cost Sierra? Yup, they went with DirectX and tied themselves to just one system. Sierra lost out on a significant market because it costs them too much to port to other platforms. Maybe it was the right business choice for them at the time, but I bet they didn't to it because "those mac users are lazy."
I love a lot of science, accept that evolution is probably right, decry abortions, gay marriage, perhaps birth control too. Yet I don't feel like forcing it on you people through laws will help things, since a new law that no one wants to obey doesn't actually change anything (think Prohabition)... it's not that I don't think these things are making society, in general, worse. Yet I still edge towards having some sort of control... where do I fit in?
You're one of the christians with a very different understanding of the teachings than I have. You mention practical reasons for enacting or not enacting laws to force others to conform with your beliefs about what is right and wrong (abortion, gay marriage, birth control). I don't know how you could read the bible and the other religious works of early christians and not understand that one of the basic themes Jesus was promoting was minding your own business. It is a very clear theme that it is not anyone's place to judge or control the actions of others and each of us should do what we feel is right without interfering with what others think is right. Passing laws to force people with guns and clubs and gas to do what you feel is right is very, very anti-christian. Of course most people these days practice a christianity so different that the original teachings as to be almost unrecognizable. That is one of the things that has allowed it to survive and become popular. Every generation the beliefs are different. It is wrong to kill. It is okay to kill non-christians. You'll suffer eternal torment unless you kill those people right now. Slowly torturing other christians to death is a good thing. Killing must be approved by the church. Killing is commendable much of the time, so long as it is spreading the word. killing is always wrong. Killing is okay so long as you are forgiven. I hope you're seeing my point.
The most common sects of christianity should more properly be called Augustians, since they take more everyday beliefs from the opinions of the homosexual, pedophile, animal lover Saint Augustine than they do the works of Jesus. Up until his "contributions" women were allowed to be bishops and sex was not some horrible evil.
So where do you stand? I'd say you are a moderate at an average level of mis-education about the teachings of the man you profess to follow. You are, perhaps, more educated than those christians who insist on a literal interpretation of the bible, but you probably don't understand the history of it and you seem more than willing to ascribe to the dogma of some christian sect rather than follow the teachings of Jesus and eschew having a priest or church between you and him.
Personally, I'm not really a christian. I respect his work and I think he had a lot of very good ideas. Maybe that is why I can objectively look at the religion and see how far it has changed from the original writings. That, and the fact that I bothered to actually research it, rather than proclaiming it the most important thing in life and then avoiding finding out anything about it. I find religions in general to be interesting and I've read most of the major religious works from the mainstream religions. Modern christianity, sadly, has gone from a lot of good ideas to a bunch of rules and traditions, many of which directly oppose those original ideas. The followers have gone from people whose eyes were opened to a better way of life, to a huge number of people mindlessly going along and trying to force others to be more like them. It is very sad.
I'm just underwhelmed by the whole dual boot story here. It's only a story because because Apple decided not to allow OSX to run on other platforms.
Yeah, imagine not wanting to go out of business, what can they be thinking? Until the justice department gets off its ass and stops MS's differential pricing, bundling, and standard corruption it would be suicide for Apple to enter the white-box OS race. It has already killed three arguably superior OSs. One look at the history of BeOS and I'd refuse to try to enter that market as well.
By the way, of the OS's in front of you, which only run on one vendor's hardware?
Actually, two. OS X, and the highly modified version of NetBSD that only runs on one platform, the one we sell here.
All your arguments sound like sour grapes. They won't sell just what I want so I'll just pout and try to make fun of them. Meanwhile they are one of the few companies advancing the state of the art. As a workstation it can't be beat and I don't care if the purchase is tied to certain hardware, so long as that hardware is good quality, which not many people seem to disagree with.
"The religious right" is a very nebulous term. The official stance of the Catholic church, the Anglican Church, and most other major protestant churches is that evolution does happen and that the bible cannot be interpreted literally. The fact that a significant number of people who belong to these organized religions disagrees with their church or is presented as so doing is very interesting. My personal opinion is that there are a significant number of people in the US who reject evolution on religious grounds and subscribe instead to a pseudo-christian belief system made up of "common wisdom" beliefs that they associate with christianity. I like to call these people "Jesus was an American dammit!" believers. There are of course a few organized religions that formally promote ID, mostly televangelists and cultists like the Moonies. I suspect they do so as more of a control mechanism than anything else.
The volume and rate at which its supporters, a group which remains fairly static, are speaking are rising.
..and the rate at which they are being appointed to government posts.
Yeah, but they only have to do it ONCE
They only have to install it all once. They still have to reboot twice every time they want to play a game and stop everything else they are doing. Mac users aren't used to rebooting more than once a month or so. And really, once is too much for most. Most people never install an OS or know that they can. If a game seller actually recommends that customers go spend hundreds of dollars on another OS in addition to the price tag of the game and then perform or get someone else to perform a complex install process they will be laughed at. Sure some people might do it, but not nearly enough. It just is not going to happen as a marketable solution.
In short, just because you have the right idea doesn't mean you automatically get funding for a flawed study.
Maybe. Maybe, they rejected his study because of potential flaws in the methodology and the reply they sent him accidentally read as though they rejected it because they view ID and evolution as competing scientific theories of similar credibility. Or maybe they are now backpedalling from the public backlash of their seemingly anti-scientific views.
Either way, it is a shit-storm now and they made it.
If I've gotten this straight. He is asking for a grant to prove that ID is bad and he doesn't, in the grant application, give sufficient evidence that the other theory is right.
You're fundamentally mistaking the nature of science. Science is a methodology. ID is not a scientific theory and is not able to be falsified. This is analogous to a researcher proposing a scientific study on how likely mutations of bird flu will affect the US population and being denied because he did not prove organisms mutate instead of being altered by Vishnu using magic. Evolution is supported by such a vast body of research that it is accepted by basically every biologist everywhere. It is as well supported as any scientific theory I can think of.
Logically then the researcher who turns in an application that does show that evolution is right will get the money. I have no problem with this.
Yes, also remember if you're submitting a grant for work on ballistics, provide some proof for gravity. After all, it is just a theory. Also, for anything space related, make sure you provide some proof that the world is round and that stars are not the eyes of hungry ghosts that will eat us if we go too high.
Did you read the summary? This person is looking for a grant to study the sociology of how promotion of a particular religious belief can lead politicians and other people to publicly reject the entire body of scientific work on a particular subject. He is not trying to "prove evolution" he is trying to find out what makes people ignore scientific research. He's proposing a scientific study of why people reject scientific studies and he was rejected because the scientific research that was his subject is being ignored by the decision makers.
Intelligent design proponents can try to get grants as well, provided they actually propose a valid scientific study, not try to find arguments in favor of something. This person proposed a scientific experiment. If someone wants to propose one to validate or falsify ID I'm all for funding them, but that is not the same thing as, "trying to prove creationism or intelligent design" and is not material to this person's research.
Now they won't have to deal with the hassle of porting their games and software to OS X. Why bother?
It's easy, just go to the store and buy a copy of Windows for $200, then download this program from Apple and repartition and install Windows. Boot Windows and install the game. After that each time you want to play a game you just have to reboot while holding down a key and then switch to Windows and then click on the Start menu, then programs then run the game. Simple huh?
Yeah, that will fly.
90% or more of users never, ever install an operating system, ever. You expect them to pay for one, and install it in a dual-boot setup and reboot every time they want to play a game. And you expect this of the majority of Mac users? Can you say, "fat chance?"
Sure, some Mac users will dual boot to play games using a pirated, already owned, or new copy of Windows. Some will play native Windows games using virtualization, or something like WINE. Some companies will use something like WINE to do quick ports. Most users, however, won't settle for that and they are still a big enough market that they are profitable for gaming companies. If some companies count on people dual-booting, others will eat them alive. You think it is a complete coincidence that WoW is on top right now and they just happen to build the Mac version right alongside the Windows one? Nope. They utilize good coding practices and it makes it easy to reach the whole market. Their products are better as a result and for social games (like MMORPGs) it only takes one well-liked person with a mac to keep a whole group using a particular game.
I've bought alieanwares because they do actually sell good solid harware, take a look at the packages they sell, they're very upfront about what specifically you're getting.
That was true a few years ago. These days independent reviews (like consumer reports) show their prices to be very high compared to the same hardware from other vendors and it is coupled with some of the lowest rated support in the industry. Further, I've read in some cases they literally buy white boxes in bulk, swap the cases, mark them up, and resell them (having decreased reliability by all the handling and with inferior airflow cases).
Alienware is a brand these days, not a type of computer. Now that they are owned by Dell, I expect that will become even more true.
And personally I'd rather not build my own machine as I'd rather not spend the time to do so. Yes I can get something faster and cheaper if I do it myself, but thats why I'm paying more, so I can have somone else do it.
So just buy the same hardware from another vendor, pre-assembled. You'll get a cheaper, more reliable machine.
But I also like a bit of flash and realize I'm paying extra for it.
That is fine so long as you know what you are doing. Just remember, computers are not like clothes. There are easy ways to measure the relative quality of computers and once that knowledge becomes widespread many people will think it is ridiculous that you paid a 20% markup and are willing to suffer with crappy support, to have the equivalent of a Nike swoosh on your case.
Here, at work, almost everyone has a laptop covered in stickers. I've seen some really nice paint-jobs on tower cases, too. For the markup Alienware charges you could hire one of the many starving artists out there to give you a really cool, one of a kind looking machine. Think about it for your next purchase.