I think the Globe and Mail and the Nominal Pest would go far for spreading it in Canada. Perhaps the Guardian in the UK would be a good option as well.
I just set my threshold to 3 and rarely get more than a handful of comments anyway, and it weeds out most of the crap. Then I give bonuses to comments that are funny, insightful, or interesting, and negatives to troll comments, and I get what I want to read and very little I don't.
Of course, by that filter, I'd never see my own posts, but I never say anything worth reading anyway.
Well said. As much as I'd like to believe this is a Bush conspiracy, I'd be hard-pressed to believe that they'd think they could get away with 'losing' 58,000 ballots intentionally. 2,000, sure, but not 58,000.
I agree on your other point of needing an independant news service, but what would be the point? The news services that exist already should be independant and unbiased, so already you're dealing with an addition to a flawed system.
The problem is not with lack of media reporting, it's with people who don't care, and assume the media is giving them the 'straight dope', to use the parlance of our times. They watch the news, they see that Kerry is a putz, and that settles it. They don't see that Bush lies like a Best Buy salesman on Christmas Eve, they just see that Bush is sharing happy shiny thoughts and Kerry is a real downer, as they say.
What the US needs is a wake-up call, to tell them to pay attention and look for the real deal, and not to take Bush at monkey-face value but doubt what Kerry has to say; rather, they need to doubt what everyone says, and look for their own answers, instead of waiting for the TV to feed them what they assume they need to know.
It doesn't count if they used the joke in the article and you just repeat it here, that's just silly. What you're supposed to do in that case is make a joke about our dollar, or how we say 'eh' all the time, or maybe mention doughnuts somehow, though I don't know how you'd work that in.
Amen to this. I tried out the two-week trial they had a few months ago, and it was pretty interesting. Here's basically how it went (I'm not exaggerating, I did exactly what I said I did, no more, no less).
Day 1: Started off, didn't know what to do. Went through the tutorial, then logged off. (took about an hour and a half since I did the tutorial twice with two characters)
Day 2: Got a rifle, shot some stuff. Made a tent. Logged off after about two hours.
Day 3: Shot some more stuff, talked to a friend that had switched to SWG from FFXI. Shot some stuff, used my tent. Watched a Jedi kill a lot of people.
Friend invited me to go hunting, so he sent me some credits, and I flew off to the planet he was on. In the space of half an hour, I had gained 2 levels in most of my oft-used marksman skills, and I had more credits than I could hold (literally; I maxed out at 50k for the free trial).
Day 4: On the way back to tatooine, I bought a wardrobe worth of clothes, got a set of armour, a few different weapons, a speeder-bike, and pretty much everything else I wanted that I could use. Went back to tatooine, shot some stuff. Went to Jabba's Palace. Took forever to get there. Shot some stuff.
Day 6: Went back home from Jabba's Palace. Took forever. Shot some stuff.
Got a quest from Imperials to clean out sand people from an outpost. Got my ass kicked. Logged off and never logged back on.
A few things to note from my experience:
1) My first MMOG was Final Fantasy XI, which has had two years of development and polish. The controls are tight and responsive, the worlds lush and inviting, and everything seems real. SWG feels like playing a game, but more importantly, the game has a sluggish interface, responds slowly, and lacks anything to make it stand out. Worlds are generally flat and uninviting.
2) There is not much to SWG. I like the way it does things, with huge massive worlds that you can traverse without zoning, skill-based advancement instead of level-based, player cities, and so on, but when it all comes down to it, there's no compelling gameplay. I played it for a week, then realized I just don't care.
In SWG, I can run around and kill things, but there's no motivation for me to do so. In FFXI, I want to gain levels, so I can do the Missions and advance the storyline, and then go and explore the higher-level areas. In SWG, I have no interest in exploration because the terrain is pretty much consistantly boring (but the water is nice).
3) After I was done the 14-day trial, I had to go out and buy the boxed version, even though the only reason I'd want it is for the CD Key. There was no option provided to pay $10-20 less and just upgrade my trial key to a full-version key. And it's not like it was because I'd need the full version for content, I'd installed from a friend's full-version CDs.
Basically they were telling me to go out and buy a boxed version just to open it up and read the CD key off the case, instead of just selling me one online (or letting me just pay the monthly fee from that point on).
SWG is like a reference implentation for different skills and ways of making a game. It has excellent features, but no content, while FFXI has a lot of content and the features are great-but-not-excellent, but implemented well.
SWG might be great if you don't like any of the other MMOGs, you have lots of friends who play it, and you like SW a lot, but if not, it's a waste of time after the first week.
Hear hear. I spend more in two days' of eating out than I do in a month of playing FFXI. When I got FFXI, I went from debts going UP every month (by $100-250 depending on my activities) to debts going DOWN every month (up to $500/month) - because I had something to do at home, so I didn't have to go out to fill my time, saving me hundreds of dollars a month.
IBM's POWER-series chips are designed to trade away ultra-high-speed clock rates in favor of low failure rates.
In other words, IBM's customers will pay $2m for a computer that has one processor out of 64 fail once or twice in its operational lifetime thus and has no downtime, instead of $800,000 for a cluster with ten times the processing capacity and an average of two minutes of downtime a year.
These may not be actual numbers (it's a pretty extreme example), but that's the philosophy. Pay more for reliability.
The original poster pointed out the same service I was going to, but a few things are worth mentioning.
Certapay isn't just a method of paying vendors - it's often referred to by banks as an 'e-mail money transfer', and this is what it is. I can put through a transfer from my online banking and send it to my roommate, and the system sends him an e-mail. When he recieves it, he can confirm and accept payment, and the money is automatically put into his bank account. Thus, I can send money from my account to his between banks instantly, at almost no charge (I get billed a $1.50 charge when I send). No reliance on credit cards, external companies, no worries about getting your accounts frozen for doing a lot of transactions (I have friends that have had this done by PayPal). Very nice, very handy.
I think Apple seems to "get it" a lot more than other companies do.
I don't even think it's that Apple 'gets it' more than other companies, though that certainly is the case. I think it's more a matter of Apple's attitude towards the rest of the world.
Most companies do software development (and, for that matter, most people go about their lives) in a fairly straightforward manner. Add new features every release, needed or not, change things in whatever way their biggest clients want (or think they want), and try to make everybody happy (or in Microsoft's case, equally frustrated). Try not to step on anyone's toes.
Apple has a different philosophy. They decide how it's going to be, and that's the end of it. Period. You want a Mac? You get OS X. You want to run OS X? You need our hardware. You want digital music? You use iTunes and the iPod. You want to sell your music on iTunes? This is what it costs.
Apple does not give in. Marketshare or not, they have enough capital that they can pretty much dictate how it's going to be, and if you don't like it, go buy someone else's computer and use someone else's software. If you don't want what they're offering, then it's no skin off their teeth.
Apple 'gets it', make no mistake, but a lot of other people 'get it' too. I'm sure Microsoft 'gets it' in some respects, they just don't care. The difference is that Apple has the calzones to dictate terms to literally everyone they deal with - so if they decide that it's better for the consumer to be able to do X with Y, then that is how it will be, and if people don't like it, I'm sure someone somewhere in Cupertino is paid well to sit in a beautiful office and shed a tear for each of them in turn.
Microsoft, on the other hand, tries to be all things to all people, and screw the whole world equally. It lies to the SMPTE, it lies to developers, it lies to the public, and it lies to pretty much everyone else, in order to make everyone happy until the contract is signed, knowing full well that it may piss everyone off, but what can you do once the ink is dry?
To summarize: Apple does the right thing up front. Microsoft does the wrong thing behind your back.
This is exactly what I was going to suggest myself. A natural gas generator won't provide continuous power in the event of an outage, but of the models I've looked at, most of the auto-start models take about a minute to power up and start producing electricity in the event of a power outage (intentional, so that it doesn't kick on for momentary interruptions) - having a UPS on anything that needs power continuously (computers are the only thing I can think of) will keep everything running.
This is one of the options I am keeping in mind for when I settle down and build a home to stay in, but it depends on where I am at the time. This would be more of a problem in New Brunswick than BC.
I don't approve of piracy in and of itself - people put a lot of time and hard work into this software, and the long hours they put in are no picnic, make no mistake. If their work has produced a result that is enjoyable, I think people should pay for it. A friend of mine has Neverwinter Nights and the two expansions, but I spent $50 on the Platinum instead of $0.50 on a blank DVD, because it's worth it.
That all being said, I am glad in a way that games are getting pirated, though it's not having the effect I'd like. My roommate downloaded Doom 3 before it was released, as (according to suprnova) did several hundred thousand other people. As a direct result, we wasted at least 20 minutes playing the game (waste is right) before we decided that it was hopeless - the graphics were phenominal - not realistic, but phenominal anyway. The physics was well-done as well, and the environment felt real.
The game, however, was terrible.
If I had bought the game for anything more than $5, I would have kicked myself, and even if I had paid $5, I could have gotten a pork roast for that and had a good dinner instead. It was a complete waste of time, and as much as we tried to justify playing it, eventually we got sick and gave up.
Doom 3 lost a lot of sales to piracy, not because people weren't forced to buy it, but because people realized they didn't WANT to buy it. If I download GTA:SA and I like it, I'll get it. If I don't, I'll delete it (well, I'll burn it off then lose the DVD, which is the same thing).
Thanks to the proliferation of broadband and bittorrent, piracy has become the way we test our content first. ISOs are the new game demos, Telesyncs are the new trailers, and media, for a good portion of those so-inclined in North America, purchases have moved into the honor system - every 'ware is shareware now, and people are starting to realize that it's easier to download and try it out than to haggle with the clerk at EB when they find out the much-hyped 'game of the century' is both uninspired and pointless.
So yes, I'm glad this is released - not necessarily before the game is out, but I don't honestly think that matters, except for the 'first-day sales' figures, and those are largely unaffected anyway.
That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. I mean, think about it, keys that find themselves behind the couch, or a car that finds itself in a crowded parking lot. I'm kind of excited actually.
In one IRC channel I was in one time, we sat around trying to spell our names in Gaelic. I think the best I managed was Dkghaeryghiagnneh (Darien). Others had names that lent themselves better to obscene exaggerations, but unfortunately, I could only do so much.
But to say that Linux or some other non-Windows OS is going to be magically immune to the cheap-ass, no-QA hardware that you frequently encounter in the x86 world is completely off base.
I hate to keep posting without citing, but when I was in high school, I put Debian on one of the machines in our lab (I'd never used Linux on a good machine before). Turns out that in Linux (but for some reason, not in Windows - probably driver workarounds), there was a conflict with the Intel network controller and the Intel motherboard. The two didn't play nice together, and as a result, the interface had to be reset the instant more than one program tried to access the network. I could do a multi-source apt-get, but as soon as I opened Lynx it choked and had to reset it.
So talk all you want about low-quality el-cheapo hardware, but even the big boys with the big bucks screw up sometimes.
In short, anyone who has already switched to a *NIX desktop (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, whatever) is unlikely to be tempted by an x86 OSX.
Studies show that a lot of the people that switch to OSX aren't switching from Windows, they're switching from UNIX (can't find the link). As another example, Jordan Hubbard, longtime FreeBSD developer (and project co-founder) went to work for Apple on OS X.
The reason is that OS X provides the UNIX-like interface we know and love (command lines, X servers, and the like) as well as a functional, stable, friendly, and yet still powerful, graphical interface. Without having to hunt for themes, it is pretty. Without having to compile libraries, it works. Without having to install WINE, you can use professional applications, such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, and Final Cut Pro, while at the same time running XChat, Gterm, and... well, I can't think of any 'killer apps' for Linux, but I'm sure someone else can fill that in.
In short, there are a lot of reasons to use OS X instead of Linux (all else, like hardware support, being equal) for a desktop machine, but not a lot (that I can think of) to use Linux instead of OS X.
First, to agree with your statement, the majority of people who use computers use them for business (spreadsheets, e-mail, web browsing) or for 'home use' (encarta, websites, e-mail, word documents). These users don't need a 3.06 GHz P4 with 512 megs of ram, a 160 gig HD, and a GeForce FX Ti 8.09e52. Still, they pay for them.
Some novice users are getting into movie editing and photo editing. These people, they say, DO need that kind of power. They buy a PC and a digital camcorder and make DVDs of their family instead of home movies. Well yes, they can do that. That being said, doing so is easier on a Mac, and if it takes another 5 or 10 minutes to finalize the movie and finish encoding it, then fine, they can check the turkey in the oven, play with the kids, or set the table.
The only people that need the kind of power that PCs provide are the people building clusters (and the big clusters don't use P4s anyway), gamers (and the l33t c0unt3r5tryk3 d00ds can stay on PC until hell freezes over for all I care), and people that use software that wastes CPU cycles
(In Windows on my Cyrix 133, Winamp took 58% CPU to play an MP3 (40% if I buffered the song into memory), but in Linux on the same machine, XMMS took 3% CPU use streaming from disk).
If the cost of entry wasn't as high as it was, if there were business apps like Simply Accounting on the Mac, and if people weren't so full of anger and distrust regarding OS X because they've been taught to be by elitists for years, then I can't help but think that Windows machines could become a niche market. Honestly, there's not much a Windows machine could do that a Mac couldn't, and as consoles approach (and surpass) the power and abilities of PCs anyway, games might be even less of an issue.
I dream of the day when Macs are a serious contender for market share and Microsoft really does have to innovate or die. Then, and only then, will we see what Microsoft is truly capable of, when they have to fight to maintain their position. That is a dream I long to see realized.
Well, it's already pirated like wildfire (among the tech cognoscenti), but only by people with $2000-3000 machines.
The poster seems to presume Apple wouldn't make any money (or as much money) at it if it were ported because people would pirate it (or perhaps I am misinterpreting). Keep in mind that OS X is surprisingly cheap compared to Windows, weighing in at only $129 USD for the latest incarnation of Panther in a pretty box, compared to $199 for Home or $299 for Pro (which is closer to the feature set that OS X has - dual processor support etc).
I'd gladly pay $129 for OS X, but I'd never pay even that much, let alone $300, for Windows XP.
Your laptop most likely has a cover underneath that you can remove by unscrewing a standard screw, and the hard disk is most likely inside it (that's the case with my Compaq Presario). However, it might happen that you have to use some special hexagonal key to reach the hard disk, as is the case on my wife's Sony laptop.
Or in the case of my Dell laptop (and others I've seen), there is probably a tray that can slide out. On my Inspiron 5150, there are two screws under the Cardbus slot, and removing those allows one to remove the hard drive (the faceplate covering the cardbus is also attached to the hard drive mounting frame).
My friend's Dell Inspiron (forget what model) has two screws on a faceplate dedicated to the HD.
On Dell laptops, it is trivial to do anything. Go onto their website and you can get manuals to tell you how to strip them down to the chassis and build them back up again. Easy, if you're careful.
Just make sure to remember which screws go where. I massacred a UPS by getting two almost (but not quite) identical screws backwards. Not that it worked in the first place anyway.
In a press release today, Nintendo announced that pretty much every game anyone would want will be available at launch. When asked what this would mean for future launches, a spokesperson told reporters, 'Instead of trickling out good releases once or twice a year, we're just going to release them all at once.'
In other news, the PSP is still delayed, due to unreasonable ambition and poor planning, including low battery life and a poor selection of launch titles. Sony spokespersons remain optimistic despite the facts.
Reports are now coming in that Nintendo of America has been sighted travelling in the direction of the bank; witnesses in several areas reported laughing, however it is not clear whether Nintendo was laughing all the way, or merely a good portion of the way, to said bank.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the Globe and Mail and the Nominal Pest would go far for spreading it in Canada. Perhaps the Guardian in the UK would be a good option as well.
--Dan
I just set my threshold to 3 and rarely get more than a handful of comments anyway, and it weeds out most of the crap. Then I give bonuses to comments that are funny, insightful, or interesting, and negatives to troll comments, and I get what I want to read and very little I don't.
Of course, by that filter, I'd never see my own posts, but I never say anything worth reading anyway.
--Dan
Well said. As much as I'd like to believe this is a Bush conspiracy, I'd be hard-pressed to believe that they'd think they could get away with 'losing' 58,000 ballots intentionally. 2,000, sure, but not 58,000.
I agree on your other point of needing an independant news service, but what would be the point? The news services that exist already should be independant and unbiased, so already you're dealing with an addition to a flawed system.
The problem is not with lack of media reporting, it's with people who don't care, and assume the media is giving them the 'straight dope', to use the parlance of our times. They watch the news, they see that Kerry is a putz, and that settles it. They don't see that Bush lies like a Best Buy salesman on Christmas Eve, they just see that Bush is sharing happy shiny thoughts and Kerry is a real downer, as they say.
What the US needs is a wake-up call, to tell them to pay attention and look for the real deal, and not to take Bush at monkey-face value but doubt what Kerry has to say; rather, they need to doubt what everyone says, and look for their own answers, instead of waiting for the TV to feed them what they assume they need to know.
--Dan
It doesn't count if they used the joke in the article and you just repeat it here, that's just silly. What you're supposed to do in that case is make a joke about our dollar, or how we say 'eh' all the time, or maybe mention doughnuts somehow, though I don't know how you'd work that in.
--Dan
Amen to this. I tried out the two-week trial they had a few months ago, and it was pretty interesting. Here's basically how it went (I'm not exaggerating, I did exactly what I said I did, no more, no less).
Day 1: Started off, didn't know what to do. Went through the tutorial, then logged off. (took about an hour and a half since I did the tutorial twice with two characters)
Day 2: Got a rifle, shot some stuff. Made a tent. Logged off after about two hours.
Day 3: Shot some more stuff, talked to a friend that had switched to SWG from FFXI. Shot some stuff, used my tent. Watched a Jedi kill a lot of people.
Friend invited me to go hunting, so he sent me some credits, and I flew off to the planet he was on. In the space of half an hour, I had gained 2 levels in most of my oft-used marksman skills, and I had more credits than I could hold (literally; I maxed out at 50k for the free trial).
Day 4: On the way back to tatooine, I bought a wardrobe worth of clothes, got a set of armour, a few different weapons, a speeder-bike, and pretty much everything else I wanted that I could use. Went back to tatooine, shot some stuff. Went to Jabba's Palace. Took forever to get there. Shot some stuff.
Day 6: Went back home from Jabba's Palace. Took forever. Shot some stuff.
Got a quest from Imperials to clean out sand people from an outpost. Got my ass kicked. Logged off and never logged back on.
A few things to note from my experience:
1) My first MMOG was Final Fantasy XI, which has had two years of development and polish. The controls are tight and responsive, the worlds lush and inviting, and everything seems real. SWG feels like playing a game, but more importantly, the game has a sluggish interface, responds slowly, and lacks anything to make it stand out. Worlds are generally flat and uninviting.
2) There is not much to SWG. I like the way it does things, with huge massive worlds that you can traverse without zoning, skill-based advancement instead of level-based, player cities, and so on, but when it all comes down to it, there's no compelling gameplay. I played it for a week, then realized I just don't care.
In SWG, I can run around and kill things, but there's no motivation for me to do so. In FFXI, I want to gain levels, so I can do the Missions and advance the storyline, and then go and explore the higher-level areas. In SWG, I have no interest in exploration because the terrain is pretty much consistantly boring (but the water is nice).
3) After I was done the 14-day trial, I had to go out and buy the boxed version, even though the only reason I'd want it is for the CD Key. There was no option provided to pay $10-20 less and just upgrade my trial key to a full-version key. And it's not like it was because I'd need the full version for content, I'd installed from a friend's full-version CDs.
Basically they were telling me to go out and buy a boxed version just to open it up and read the CD key off the case, instead of just selling me one online (or letting me just pay the monthly fee from that point on).
SWG is like a reference implentation for different skills and ways of making a game. It has excellent features, but no content, while FFXI has a lot of content and the features are great-but-not-excellent, but implemented well.
SWG might be great if you don't like any of the other MMOGs, you have lots of friends who play it, and you like SW a lot, but if not, it's a waste of time after the first week.
--Dan
Hear hear. I spend more in two days' of eating out than I do in a month of playing FFXI. When I got FFXI, I went from debts going UP every month (by $100-250 depending on my activities) to debts going DOWN every month (up to $500/month) - because I had something to do at home, so I didn't have to go out to fill my time, saving me hundreds of dollars a month.
--Dan
IBM's POWER-series chips are designed to trade away ultra-high-speed clock rates in favor of low failure rates.
In other words, IBM's customers will pay $2m for a computer that has one processor out of 64 fail once or twice in its operational lifetime thus and has no downtime, instead of $800,000 for a cluster with ten times the processing capacity and an average of two minutes of downtime a year.
These may not be actual numbers (it's a pretty extreme example), but that's the philosophy. Pay more for reliability.
--Dan
Older gamers don't need sex in advertisements because they can have real sex any time.
I don't understand. Please explain and cite references, HOWTOs preferably.
Thanks.
I heard they're going to take advantage of the amazing dynamic lighting system in the game by adding lights. I can't wait!
--Dan
6 x 9 = 42 is my personal favourite.
The original poster pointed out the same service I was going to, but a few things are worth mentioning.
Certapay isn't just a method of paying vendors - it's often referred to by banks as an 'e-mail money transfer', and this is what it is. I can put through a transfer from my online banking and send it to my roommate, and the system sends him an e-mail. When he recieves it, he can confirm and accept payment, and the money is automatically put into his bank account. Thus, I can send money from my account to his between banks instantly, at almost no charge (I get billed a $1.50 charge when I send). No reliance on credit cards, external companies, no worries about getting your accounts frozen for doing a lot of transactions (I have friends that have had this done by PayPal). Very nice, very handy.
--Dan
I think Apple seems to "get it" a lot more than other companies do.
I don't even think it's that Apple 'gets it' more than other companies, though that certainly is the case. I think it's more a matter of Apple's attitude towards the rest of the world.
Most companies do software development (and, for that matter, most people go about their lives) in a fairly straightforward manner. Add new features every release, needed or not, change things in whatever way their biggest clients want (or think they want), and try to make everybody happy (or in Microsoft's case, equally frustrated). Try not to step on anyone's toes.
Apple has a different philosophy. They decide how it's going to be, and that's the end of it. Period. You want a Mac? You get OS X. You want to run OS X? You need our hardware. You want digital music? You use iTunes and the iPod. You want to sell your music on iTunes? This is what it costs.
Apple does not give in. Marketshare or not, they have enough capital that they can pretty much dictate how it's going to be, and if you don't like it, go buy someone else's computer and use someone else's software. If you don't want what they're offering, then it's no skin off their teeth.
Apple 'gets it', make no mistake, but a lot of other people 'get it' too. I'm sure Microsoft 'gets it' in some respects, they just don't care. The difference is that Apple has the calzones to dictate terms to literally everyone they deal with - so if they decide that it's better for the consumer to be able to do X with Y, then that is how it will be, and if people don't like it, I'm sure someone somewhere in Cupertino is paid well to sit in a beautiful office and shed a tear for each of them in turn.
Microsoft, on the other hand, tries to be all things to all people, and screw the whole world equally. It lies to the SMPTE, it lies to developers, it lies to the public, and it lies to pretty much everyone else, in order to make everyone happy until the contract is signed, knowing full well that it may piss everyone off, but what can you do once the ink is dry?
To summarize: Apple does the right thing up front. Microsoft does the wrong thing behind your back.
--Dan
This is exactly what I was going to suggest myself. A natural gas generator won't provide continuous power in the event of an outage, but of the models I've looked at, most of the auto-start models take about a minute to power up and start producing electricity in the event of a power outage (intentional, so that it doesn't kick on for momentary interruptions) - having a UPS on anything that needs power continuously (computers are the only thing I can think of) will keep everything running.
This is one of the options I am keeping in mind for when I settle down and build a home to stay in, but it depends on where I am at the time. This would be more of a problem in New Brunswick than BC.
--Dan
I don't approve of piracy in and of itself - people put a lot of time and hard work into this software, and the long hours they put in are no picnic, make no mistake. If their work has produced a result that is enjoyable, I think people should pay for it. A friend of mine has Neverwinter Nights and the two expansions, but I spent $50 on the Platinum instead of $0.50 on a blank DVD, because it's worth it.
That all being said, I am glad in a way that games are getting pirated, though it's not having the effect I'd like. My roommate downloaded Doom 3 before it was released, as (according to suprnova) did several hundred thousand other people. As a direct result, we wasted at least 20 minutes playing the game (waste is right) before we decided that it was hopeless - the graphics were phenominal - not realistic, but phenominal anyway. The physics was well-done as well, and the environment felt real.
The game, however, was terrible.
If I had bought the game for anything more than $5, I would have kicked myself, and even if I had paid $5, I could have gotten a pork roast for that and had a good dinner instead. It was a complete waste of time, and as much as we tried to justify playing it, eventually we got sick and gave up.
Doom 3 lost a lot of sales to piracy, not because people weren't forced to buy it, but because people realized they didn't WANT to buy it. If I download GTA:SA and I like it, I'll get it. If I don't, I'll delete it (well, I'll burn it off then lose the DVD, which is the same thing).
Thanks to the proliferation of broadband and bittorrent, piracy has become the way we test our content first. ISOs are the new game demos, Telesyncs are the new trailers, and media, for a good portion of those so-inclined in North America, purchases have moved into the honor system - every 'ware is shareware now, and people are starting to realize that it's easier to download and try it out than to haggle with the clerk at EB when they find out the much-hyped 'game of the century' is both uninspired and pointless.
So yes, I'm glad this is released - not necessarily before the game is out, but I don't honestly think that matters, except for the 'first-day sales' figures, and those are largely unaffected anyway.
--Dan
That wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. I mean, think about it, keys that find themselves behind the couch, or a car that finds itself in a crowded parking lot. I'm kind of excited actually.
--Dan
I also feel bad for the person at the front (facing back)- they can't see where they're going.
I guess that means that seat is for management...
--Dan
The car industry blamed it on bad drivers (this fits marketing as noone thinks of themselves as a bad driver).
That's kind of funny when you consider that most XP crashes are because of bad drivers too (or misbehaving malware).
--Dan
Oil won't escape from containment and (supposedly) cause catastrophic global warming...
That's why we have to do all the work on its behalf. The world's not going to pollute itself! We all have to pitch in and do our part!
Insert obligatory cynical anti-GWB big oil reference here.
--Dan
In one IRC channel I was in one time, we sat around trying to spell our names in Gaelic. I think the best I managed was Dkghaeryghiagnneh (Darien). Others had names that lent themselves better to obscene exaggerations, but unfortunately, I could only do so much.
Ghkaelicchke is a fun language though.
--Dan
But to say that Linux or some other non-Windows OS is going to be magically immune to the cheap-ass, no-QA hardware that you frequently encounter in the x86 world is completely off base.
I hate to keep posting without citing, but when I was in high school, I put Debian on one of the machines in our lab (I'd never used Linux on a good machine before). Turns out that in Linux (but for some reason, not in Windows - probably driver workarounds), there was a conflict with the Intel network controller and the Intel motherboard. The two didn't play nice together, and as a result, the interface had to be reset the instant more than one program tried to access the network. I could do a multi-source apt-get, but as soon as I opened Lynx it choked and had to reset it.
So talk all you want about low-quality el-cheapo hardware, but even the big boys with the big bucks screw up sometimes.
--Dan
In short, anyone who has already switched to a *NIX desktop (GNOME, KDE, Xfce, whatever) is unlikely to be tempted by an x86 OSX.
Studies show that a lot of the people that switch to OSX aren't switching from Windows, they're switching from UNIX (can't find the link). As another example, Jordan Hubbard, longtime FreeBSD developer (and project co-founder) went to work for Apple on OS X.
The reason is that OS X provides the UNIX-like interface we know and love (command lines, X servers, and the like) as well as a functional, stable, friendly, and yet still powerful, graphical interface. Without having to hunt for themes, it is pretty. Without having to compile libraries, it works. Without having to install WINE, you can use professional applications, such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, and Final Cut Pro, while at the same time running XChat, Gterm, and... well, I can't think of any 'killer apps' for Linux, but I'm sure someone else can fill that in.
In short, there are a lot of reasons to use OS X instead of Linux (all else, like hardware support, being equal) for a desktop machine, but not a lot (that I can think of) to use Linux instead of OS X.
--Dan
Well said poster, well said.
First, to agree with your statement, the majority of people who use computers use them for business (spreadsheets, e-mail, web browsing) or for 'home use' (encarta, websites, e-mail, word documents). These users don't need a 3.06 GHz P4 with 512 megs of ram, a 160 gig HD, and a GeForce FX Ti 8.09e52. Still, they pay for them.
Some novice users are getting into movie editing and photo editing. These people, they say, DO need that kind of power. They buy a PC and a digital camcorder and make DVDs of their family instead of home movies. Well yes, they can do that. That being said, doing so is easier on a Mac, and if it takes another 5 or 10 minutes to finalize the movie and finish encoding it, then fine, they can check the turkey in the oven, play with the kids, or set the table.
The only people that need the kind of power that PCs provide are the people building clusters (and the big clusters don't use P4s anyway), gamers (and the l33t c0unt3r5tryk3 d00ds can stay on PC until hell freezes over for all I care), and people that use software that wastes CPU cycles
(In Windows on my Cyrix 133, Winamp took 58% CPU to play an MP3 (40% if I buffered the song into memory), but in Linux on the same machine, XMMS took 3% CPU use streaming from disk).
If the cost of entry wasn't as high as it was, if there were business apps like Simply Accounting on the Mac, and if people weren't so full of anger and distrust regarding OS X because they've been taught to be by elitists for years, then I can't help but think that Windows machines could become a niche market. Honestly, there's not much a Windows machine could do that a Mac couldn't, and as consoles approach (and surpass) the power and abilities of PCs anyway, games might be even less of an issue.
I dream of the day when Macs are a serious contender for market share and Microsoft really does have to innovate or die. Then, and only then, will we see what Microsoft is truly capable of, when they have to fight to maintain their position. That is a dream I long to see realized.
--Dan
Well, it's already pirated like wildfire (among the tech cognoscenti), but only by people with $2000-3000 machines.
The poster seems to presume Apple wouldn't make any money (or as much money) at it if it were ported because people would pirate it (or perhaps I am misinterpreting). Keep in mind that OS X is surprisingly cheap compared to Windows, weighing in at only $129 USD for the latest incarnation of Panther in a pretty box, compared to $199 for Home or $299 for Pro (which is closer to the feature set that OS X has - dual processor support etc).
I'd gladly pay $129 for OS X, but I'd never pay even that much, let alone $300, for Windows XP.
--Dan
Your laptop most likely has a cover underneath that you can remove by unscrewing a standard screw, and the hard disk is most likely inside it (that's the case with my Compaq Presario). However, it might happen that you have to use some special hexagonal key to reach the hard disk, as is the case on my wife's Sony laptop.
Or in the case of my Dell laptop (and others I've seen), there is probably a tray that can slide out. On my Inspiron 5150, there are two screws under the Cardbus slot, and removing those allows one to remove the hard drive (the faceplate covering the cardbus is also attached to the hard drive mounting frame).
My friend's Dell Inspiron (forget what model) has two screws on a faceplate dedicated to the HD.
On Dell laptops, it is trivial to do anything. Go onto their website and you can get manuals to tell you how to strip them down to the chassis and build them back up again. Easy, if you're careful.
Just make sure to remember which screws go where. I massacred a UPS by getting two almost (but not quite) identical screws backwards. Not that it worked in the first place anyway.
--Dan
In a press release today, Nintendo announced that pretty much every game anyone would want will be available at launch. When asked what this would mean for future launches, a spokesperson told reporters, 'Instead of trickling out good releases once or twice a year, we're just going to release them all at once.'
In other news, the PSP is still delayed, due to unreasonable ambition and poor planning, including low battery life and a poor selection of launch titles. Sony spokespersons remain optimistic despite the facts.
Reports are now coming in that Nintendo of America has been sighted travelling in the direction of the bank; witnesses in several areas reported laughing, however it is not clear whether Nintendo was laughing all the way, or merely a good portion of the way, to said bank.
--Dan