this in support of the company that produced the GBA
Er... yeah, do you have any issue with the GBA?
a system that launched with Super Mario 64 DS
You're aware that other games have been released since Super Mario 64 right?
why doesn't the DS do anything else for me? With 35 million other folks out there owning one, it seems like there should be more here than whatever video game is inserted+pictochat.
You may be aware that the Nintendo DS is a game console, its first and foremost goal is to allow you to play games, not watch movies of listen to MP3s (even though first and third-party addons do actually allow you to)
The fact that it was built, marketed and thought of as a portable game console focused on allowing the user to play games, the very fact you criticize, is in fact probably one of the DS' sources of success. A minor one compared to the SW library, but one nonetheless.
Not to mention the complete and utter failure of the PSP's "entertainment center" strategy (have you checked the UMD movies sales as of late? Do you see many people using the PSP as their MP3 player? They're in the shitter and I don't, respectively)
If there were it would have to be sold seperately
As a matter of fact, there are, and they are already.
But I will give the PSP credit in the vein of my criticism against the DS: the PSP has upgradeable firmware and nothing that shows the lack of vision that pictochat displays.
Haven't seen the PSP's upgradeable firmware feature used for any upgrade yet, unless you consider "homebrew" crackdown an upgrade.
Maybe it's the lack of vision that makes the DS so popular
Lack of vision? So the Touch Generation and the Nintendogs/Animal Crossing/Brain Age games show lack of vision to you? As opposed to the "let's just port PS2 games to the PSP it'll work well enough" and "Hey I've got that awesome idea of creating a handheld console with 3 hours of autonomy"?
Damn, if the DS shows a lack of vision, what does the PSP show? Utter blindness?
if the DS had some new wonderful useful function we could all bask
It has a touch screen, it has awesome games, the DS Lite has corrected the Tank's mistakes (screens and all), I can bask in actually being able to play good games on a game console.
They haven't been able to really ramp up their DS Lite production either, even though it's been out of stock since its release (Mars 2, 2006) in Japan and is becoming *very* hard to find in europe since November or so...
This is similar to the way Microsoft only releases some updates for previous OS versions (IE7), while others force you to upgrade (DX10).
You could also have mentioned that Microsoft decided to use a lot of stuff as forced-upgrade wedges. Case in point: Age of Empires III. It doesn't install on Windows 2000 (unless you hack in the installer, which I couldn't be bothered with) while every other modern non-microsoft game (including Oblivion, NWN2 and Supreme Commander) do install and run flawlessly. But no, AOEIII requires Windows XP...
Apple took a different approach though, and rather than giving some updates away for free and neglecting to give out other updates for old OSes, they chose to provide many of the updates, but they're charging for them. It will still encourage people to upgrade--who wants to waste $29?--but it doesn't force them to upgrade.
Well they do give some updates for free, mainly the updates they feel necessary for you (and them). For example, Safari 1.1, released with OSX 10.3 (Panther) saw a final update to Safari 1.3 when Tiger and (Tiger-exclusive) Safari 2.0 were released. Safari 1.3 contained most of Safari 2.0's improvements (rendering, speed,...), and it was free.
Likewise, when Leopard is released along with Safari 3.0 we'll more than likely see a free Safari 2.1 (current: 2.0.4) including most of Safari 3.0's improvements.
Question is: will they also release a Safari 1.4? I highly doubt they will, I don't think Webkit (the dev version of Safari) runs on Panther, and the 1.x Safari branch has been decaying for nearly two years now.
No one cares about you, you're a minority, most Apple users will buy the new versions of OSX because they offer compelling enough features while being mostly risk-free updates (they're quick to do, they work, and they usually don't break anything)
Most Mac people will, but what about the recent switchers, especially those that took the plunge because of the intel macs? I imagine most of them will see a $129 OS upgrade as kind of expensive.
Time Machine and Spaces will take care of having most of the switchers buy Leopard. I should know for I am a recent switcher.
For the others, well there's Bootcamp for Tiger at $29, that's what it's here for.
They're not that far from annual, and $129/box is still far above $50/year:
Of the OSX line, only 10.1 was a free update, and then only because 10.0 was barely useable.
So the for-pay versions are
10.0 Cheetah - March 24, 2001
10.2 Jaguar, August 24, 2002 -- 17 months later
10.3 Panther, October 24, 2003 -- 14 months later
10.4 Tiger, April 29, 2005 -- 18 months later
10.5 Leopard should be released this quarter, around 24 months after Tiger
Ok so the "worst" release, for Apple, is the 2 years Tiger - Leopard gap which means that they "only" get $129/2 = $64.5... or nearly 30% more than your scheme.
And on average, one pay-for version of OSX has been released every 18 month yielding roughly $86/year/user for Apple, yielding a good 72% more than your stupid scheme.
$50/year would be more regular indeed, but more revenue? Not a chance.
Apple doesn't care, full Bootcamp will be part of Leopard (for "free"), this is just a boon to the few users who don't want to get Leopard but want a non-beta bootcamp in the end.
They already did it with iChat AV (OSX 10.3 included iChat AV, you had to pay $29 to get it on 10.2) and with the 802.11n update (will be available with the 802.11n Airport, should be included in Leopard, $29 if you stick to Tiger without getting the 802.11n Airport Extreme)
Two things I did find lacking were a virtual desktop manager (now using VirtueDesktop; it has some stability issues and b/c it's a hack, doesn't work as well as virtual desktops in X, but it's usable)
Yeah VirtueDesktop is probably the current best, and Apple's take on virtual desktops is coming with Leopard (which should be released within 3 months or so).
and after a week I still think a Start menu would be a good thing to have.
Well first of all if you really want a "start" menu, just drag your Applications folder to your dock and right click / ctrl-click on it, it'll behave as some kind of Start menu.
But i'd advise against doing that, and for installing QuickSilver (here's a tutorial to get you started), it's basically a Spotlight on Steroids, just CMD-SPC, type the first letters of whatever you want to launch (Camino, Fugu, Parallels, Mail, iTunes, CyberDuck, works with everything including bookmarks and regular files if you check the plugins), type enter, you're done. Plus it's adaptative: the more you call a software, the earlier QS will find it (for example I only need "C" for camino, "S" for safari, "P" for Parallels, "O" for Opera, "M" for Mail, "F" for Firefox and "Fu" for Fugu, "Cy" for CyberDuck, etc...)
QS works so well and is so fast that I don't actually put shortcuts in the dock: just calling apps from QS is faster.
VAT rates are indeed high in europe (15% to more than 20%, varies with the country), but -- usually in europe -- the higher the taxes the higher the welfare and aid systems.
Paying high VAT rates sucks, but being able not to go bankrupt and take on 50 years of loans to heal your cancer rocks.
Yeah but his point was that comparing prices between the USA and Europe you had to remove the VAT, because VAT is much higher in european countries than in the USA indeed (16 to almost more than 20%)
The difference being that US coffee usually isn't fit for human or animal consumption while british coffee mostly qualifies (while being far under southern europe coffees. You'd better just get tea in GB)
US leftists are aiming to revoke the 1st Amendment
Someone should probably tell them that they're late to the party and that KG has already slaughtered it, along with the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th.
They can still try to revoke the third though, looks like it's still there.
Nope, this has no relation with the FN, the FN is a right-wing ultra-nationalist party, they hate everything non-white non-catholic non-french because it's neither white nor catholic nor french, the precise behavior of the US doesn't impact them much (except in giving them more ways to "reach" people).
If anything, they probably wish they wield GWB's power to wage random wars on any random country he happens to hate.
And the real reason them furriners like the metric system is because of their girly man little barbie doll cars! They can go ZOMG, I was going 100 KPH!
Speed limits in europe are actually often higher than 100km/h (motorways are limited to 130km/h -- 80mph -- in france, and some have unlimited upper speed in Germany, which means you can see big mercedes zooming past you at above 200km/h -- 125mph)
Slashdot Mirror
Er... yeah, do you have any issue with the GBA?
You're aware that other games have been released since Super Mario 64 right?
You may be aware that the Nintendo DS is a game console, its first and foremost goal is to allow you to play games, not watch movies of listen to MP3s (even though first and third-party addons do actually allow you to)
The fact that it was built, marketed and thought of as a portable game console focused on allowing the user to play games, the very fact you criticize, is in fact probably one of the DS' sources of success. A minor one compared to the SW library, but one nonetheless.
Not to mention the complete and utter failure of the PSP's "entertainment center" strategy (have you checked the UMD movies sales as of late? Do you see many people using the PSP as their MP3 player? They're in the shitter and I don't, respectively)
As a matter of fact, there are, and they are already.
Haven't seen the PSP's upgradeable firmware feature used for any upgrade yet, unless you consider "homebrew" crackdown an upgrade.
Lack of vision? So the Touch Generation and the Nintendogs/Animal Crossing/Brain Age games show lack of vision to you? As opposed to the "let's just port PS2 games to the PSP it'll work well enough" and "Hey I've got that awesome idea of creating a handheld console with 3 hours of autonomy"?
Damn, if the DS shows a lack of vision, what does the PSP show? Utter blindness?
It has a touch screen, it has awesome games, the DS Lite has corrected the Tank's mistakes (screens and all), I can bask in actually being able to play good games on a game console.
They haven't been able to really ramp up their DS Lite production either, even though it's been out of stock since its release (Mars 2, 2006) in Japan and is becoming *very* hard to find in europe since November or so...
They've actually been doing that ever since the start of Eternal Easter
European VATs range from around 15% to above 20% (22% or so, I think)
Spotlight sucks.
Current QuickSilver versions only work on Tiger though (since beta 37)
You could also have mentioned that Microsoft decided to use a lot of stuff as forced-upgrade wedges. Case in point: Age of Empires III. It doesn't install on Windows 2000 (unless you hack in the installer, which I couldn't be bothered with) while every other modern non-microsoft game (including Oblivion, NWN2 and Supreme Commander) do install and run flawlessly. But no, AOEIII requires Windows XP...
Well they do give some updates for free, mainly the updates they feel necessary for you (and them). For example, Safari 1.1, released with OSX 10.3 (Panther) saw a final update to Safari 1.3 when Tiger and (Tiger-exclusive) Safari 2.0 were released. Safari 1.3 contained most of Safari 2.0's improvements (rendering, speed, ...), and it was free.
Likewise, when Leopard is released along with Safari 3.0 we'll more than likely see a free Safari 2.1 (current: 2.0.4) including most of Safari 3.0's improvements.
Question is: will they also release a Safari 1.4? I highly doubt they will, I don't think Webkit (the dev version of Safari) runs on Panther, and the 1.x Safari branch has been decaying for nearly two years now.
I doubt anyone cares though.
No one cares about you, you're a minority, most Apple users will buy the new versions of OSX because they offer compelling enough features while being mostly risk-free updates (they're quick to do, they work, and they usually don't break anything)
Time Machine and Spaces will take care of having most of the switchers buy Leopard. I should know for I am a recent switcher.
For the others, well there's Bootcamp for Tiger at $29, that's what it's here for.
Uh yeah sorry I fucked up on the pricing of the 802.11n upgrade. Sorry about that
They're not that far from annual, and $129/box is still far above $50/year:
Of the OSX line, only 10.1 was a free update, and then only because 10.0 was barely useable.
So the for-pay versions are
Ok so the "worst" release, for Apple, is the 2 years Tiger - Leopard gap which means that they "only" get $129/2 = $64.5... or nearly 30% more than your scheme.
And on average, one pay-for version of OSX has been released every 18 month yielding roughly $86/year/user for Apple, yielding a good 72% more than your stupid scheme.
$50/year would be more regular indeed, but more revenue? Not a chance.
Apple doesn't care, full Bootcamp will be part of Leopard (for "free"), this is just a boon to the few users who don't want to get Leopard but want a non-beta bootcamp in the end.
They already did it with iChat AV (OSX 10.3 included iChat AV, you had to pay $29 to get it on 10.2) and with the 802.11n update (will be available with the 802.11n Airport, should be included in Leopard, $29 if you stick to Tiger without getting the 802.11n Airport Extreme)
Most people will buy Leopard anyway.
$50/year for updates when you have to (and will) shell out $130 for your update box?
Dude, Apple's in for they money, why would they offer you a service that would yield them $80 less per year per Mac user?
Mod parent insightful (also the 802.11n upgrade should be "free" if you buy Leopard).
Yeah VirtueDesktop is probably the current best, and Apple's take on virtual desktops is coming with Leopard (which should be released within 3 months or so).
Well first of all if you really want a "start" menu, just drag your Applications folder to your dock and right click / ctrl-click on it, it'll behave as some kind of Start menu.
But i'd advise against doing that, and for installing QuickSilver (here's a tutorial to get you started), it's basically a Spotlight on Steroids, just CMD-SPC, type the first letters of whatever you want to launch (Camino, Fugu, Parallels, Mail, iTunes, CyberDuck, works with everything including bookmarks and regular files if you check the plugins), type enter, you're done. Plus it's adaptative: the more you call a software, the earlier QS will find it (for example I only need "C" for camino, "S" for safari, "P" for Parallels, "O" for Opera, "M" for Mail, "F" for Firefox and "Fu" for Fugu, "Cy" for CyberDuck, etc...)
QS works so well and is so fast that I don't actually put shortcuts in the dock: just calling apps from QS is faster.
Well blue cheeses are actually mostly white you know
Sadly not, we got our fair share of "collaborators" during WWII, and some people do long for that period...
VAT rates are indeed high in europe (15% to more than 20%, varies with the country), but -- usually in europe -- the higher the taxes the higher the welfare and aid systems.
Paying high VAT rates sucks, but being able not to go bankrupt and take on 50 years of loans to heal your cancer rocks.
Yeah but his point was that comparing prices between the USA and Europe you had to remove the VAT, because VAT is much higher in european countries than in the USA indeed (16 to almost more than 20%)
The difference being that US coffee usually isn't fit for human or animal consumption while british coffee mostly qualifies (while being far under southern europe coffees. You'd better just get tea in GB)
Someone should probably tell them that they're late to the party and that KG has already slaughtered it, along with the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th.
They can still try to revoke the third though, looks like it's still there.
They should probably hurry.
Nitpick, I know, but The Party's name is "Norsefire" not Nordic Fire.
Nope, this has no relation with the FN, the FN is a right-wing ultra-nationalist party, they hate everything non-white non-catholic non-french because it's neither white nor catholic nor french, the precise behavior of the US doesn't impact them much (except in giving them more ways to "reach" people).
If anything, they probably wish they wield GWB's power to wage random wars on any random country he happens to hate.
Yeah, because that part of islam isn't anything like what christianity used to be, and the spanish inquisition didn't exist...
We probably aren't living in the same france, dude.
Speed limits in europe are actually often higher than 100km/h (motorways are limited to 130km/h -- 80mph -- in france, and some have unlimited upper speed in Germany, which means you can see big mercedes zooming past you at above 200km/h -- 125mph)