Yeah, but you have to remember that this is the Open Source Community. People who upload every buggy, unstable, alpha version of every piece of code they write to public CVS servers and then blog about it have a really hard time understanding that saner more intelligent people might prefer to actually stick to a schedule and only release the code when it's ready for use.
Poor performance compared to AMD chips won't hurt intel - they've been through this before, and always come out on top because they do two important things better than AMD. First, intel can fab more chips in less time, so they can keep the market flooded with their cool stuff. Second, intel has a much better marketing department than AMD, which has convinced millions of people out there that AMD chips are aberrations that will cause software instablities similar to those seen when attempting to make anything run well on Windows 95. Hell, this is part of intel's whole plan - slack off on R&D and just keep pouring stupid amounts of money into advertising.
AMD will never beat intel on by making quality products. The only hope AMD has of taking the crown of CPU sales is to open a bunch of cheap fabs in China and hire a good advertising firm.
Antonia Bayle hasn't been around for years - she's a new character in EQ II. I think the character you're referring to is Fironia Vie, who looks the way she does because she's a goddess, not a normal human woman.
The only reason Microsoft wants to have this discussion with open-source leaders is so that they can document it all and then fire off another anti-open-source campaign about all the unreasonable, anti-capitalist, anti-copyright demands that the open-source community expects from Microsoft.
Anyone who honestly believes that Microsoft's executives is having a change of heart and really wants to work with the open-source world is crazy.
"Whatever happened to RPGs that offered 80-100 hours of gameplay the first time thru?"
Given the continually rising cost of art development for video games, extremely long games have been tossed out the window because most studios can't keep them within a reasonable budget - the standouts being MMORPGs and Bethesda Softworks.
One thing to always keep in mind regarding college is that the college experience greater changes a person's likes, dislikes, and general outlook on life. For that reason, many people do not end up working in the field that matches their degree, for example, I've known many people with technical jobs that would label them as "engineers" who have political science degrees. That in mind, just do whatever you think you'll enjoy learning about the most, because there's a good chance that four years later, you'll want to do something different, so you might as well have a good time while you're there.
"But the graphical crap? Most people are going to disable it to try(!) to minimize the resources that windows sucks so that they might actually have cpu cycles for tasks instead of eye candy."
It's not likely that disabling eye-candy will have much of an effect on resources as most of processor itensive tricks will be dumped to the video card (Like Apple has been doing for the last year).
I suspect that most of the CPU cycles will really being going to things like MSN Antivrius, MSN Antispyware, constant automatic update checking by the OS and every additional piece of installed software, constantly monitoring and tracking use of system resources for crash reports, and of course, trying to balance out the crazed abuse of system resources that will be the latest versions of Adobe's new Flashcrobat viewer.
Right on the mark. They need to find the idiot designer who decided that putting the logo on the front was more important than putting the hot-swappable device ports on the front and fire his ass.
Won't it be a great day when the entire industry realizes that aside from power and network stuff, cables that stick out perpendicular to the back of the machine are just a pain in the ass?
"Adobe won't reverse-engineer the file, slightly reducing Photoshop's support for those files."
Adobe needs to just punish Nikon by stripping all support for Nikon raw images from Photoshop until Nikon caves. Nikon will have a hard time selling digital cameras to professional photographers if Photoshop just spits up all Nikon raw images as improperly formatted.
"If it really is that simple, then why haven't people been flocking in droves to OpenOffice?...Why isn't OpenOffice experiencing the same explosive success as Firefox?"
Because OpenOffice is a bloated, RAM hungry pig, loaded up with numerous unnecessary features that make it overly complex and unreliabe. It's the same reason that Mozilla never caught on, but as soon as someone came along and gutted out all the extra crap it started catching on like Wildfire.
I started using Staroffice in the 4.x days because it was faster, more reliable, and easier to use than MS-Office. Since then Microsoft has made Office leaner, more stable, and easier to use, while OpenOffice has been crammed full of so much excess garbage by an army of volunteers that it's not longer a good piece of software.
For OpenOffice to succeed like Firefox has, someone has to fork it and start cutting out all those stupid features that have been packed in because a programmer with spare time wanted it to be there.
"Wow. Cannot Microsoft even come up with their own mantras rather than copy others?"
Exactly what I was thinking... the whole "It just works" idea is why I went from Windows to Linux, and from Linux to Mac. But for Microsoft to expect people to have faith that their shitty software will ever "just work" is sort of ridiculous.
As much as I dislike MS Office, that's really what you should be using for high-school students - assuming that these are computers the students will be using - for the following reasons.
1. MS Office is a great job skill to have. Being competent with Word and Excel can mean the difference between a white collar job and working at Wal-Mart. This is very important in a time when more and more students are working their way through college due to high tuition costs. 2. Most of the colleges in the US use MS Office, and college professers who do accept digital submissions of work usually only accept it in MS Word format. 3. Because most of the world is standardized on MS Office, it's a safe bet that incoming teachers will know how to use MS Office and not have a clue about Open Office, which means that all the money you saved on licensing will be going to training and support for OpenOffice. 4. OpenOffice support for Microsoft formats is still imperfect and likely to stay that way as Microsoft continues to change said formats. This means that you'll still have to keep a few copies of MS Office around for any time a student or teacher needs to open an existing office document or create an office document for some reason. And that means there will always be a line to use the MS Office machines instead of working on the ones with OpenOffice.
Using OpenOffice in a high school would be a real disservice to the students, because you'll be teaching them a skill that is mostly useless in today's job market as well as in academia when they could be learning a valuable skill. Please be sure that if you are pushing for OpenOffice in the schools that you are doing it for a really good reason and not just for the sake of the open-source movement.
You sir, are entirely correct. I abandoned Linux and went to OS X about two years ago for the very reasons you mentioned. Trying to stay sane in the crazy fragmented Linux desktop universe just wasn't worth the effort anymore, and I don't think that I've ever looked back and thought "Gee, I sure do miss trying to get new Linux apps compiled and working in a simple desktop environment."
Linux has no real future as a mass-market desktop until some sane standards are accepted and put into place by the majority of distros and programmers, and I have no reason to expect that to ever happen.
"Strangely enough, less space on disc available to the gamemaker means they can't just cram a bunch of FMV sequences into a crapass game then ship it off."
Or they can just use multiple discs. Capcom has done it, and would probably happen a lot more often if Nintendo's former CEO hadn't pissed off most of the big Japanese game developers.
"I don't understand why everybody thinks that this shows that Nintendo is "behind" or "not prepared" to show Revolution to the public. I think the decision makes perfect sense from a marketing standpoint."
How old are you, fifteen? You need to take a look back at Nintendo's history of greatly overpromising products and releasing them very, very late. The N64 came out several YEARS late and didn't come close to delivering the visuals Nintendo and SGI had spent years trying to get it to.
The reason so many people think Nintendo is behind is that we've seen them do this before, and know where it's going. Nintendo is going to dick around for way too long, keep developers in the dark, and finally release a not-too-impressive console without support for important features and only have a tiny list of third-part developers on board.
That people who don't want to view Flash can just load the sites up in a browser that doesn't have Flash installed, and read PDF files outside of a web browser?
If this scares you, you're just plain paranoid and need serious therapy.
When I was a little kid I used to read all the time about these neat flying cars that were only a few years away, once the designers worked out a few kinks and the government figured out the regulatory side. As I've grown up I've continued to see these stories coming along, always promising that these guys have a new flying car that will be ready for consumers at some time right around the bend...
It ain't happening, folks. Now and then these guys might pick up an award or snowball another big team of journalists into reporting on their work, but safe, reliable, affordable flying cars that get reasonable fuel economy aren't going to happen any time soon. And when they do, they'll be tied up in regulatory and insurance messes for years, continuing to prevent wide adoption. At the rate this stuff is moving, by the these designs are ready for the market and the market is ready, the fossil fuels needed to run them will cost so much that people won't want them, and we'll get to wait another twenty years for hydrogen-powered models to arrive.
That's not a solution, because for many game companies, the publisher is fronting the development money. There aren't many companies out there like Valve, id, and Blizzard that can afford to produce a big game on their own, and there aren't a lot of venture capitalists and banks clamoring to loan money to independent game developers.
The real cost in games right now is artists. Detailed models with detailed animation and textures that look good at high resolutions take a lot of time and money. Add in a similarly detailed world, and things start to get really pricey.
"...most DVD players don't even have RF outputs. Yeah, most people use component outputs, but RF is still widely used, and most VCRs and PVRs support it. Profit margins on DVD players must be really low for them to leave off a feature that's still pretty standard."
RF out is left off of DVD players because adding that kind of distortion to digitally compressed video tends to leave one looking at a pretty nasty picture.
As the final act in a long guerrilla marketing campaign consisting of multiple "leaks" of songs to torrent aggregators and P2P networks, press releases about the fight to not leak the album, and "leaking" the entire album, Warner Records tried to get some attention by posting a song from the album in Apple's Garage Band format.
Music fans expect this to be followed by lots of interviews where Reznor will try to convince people that he isn't just a stale leftover of the 1990's alt-rock scene, where he made a huge splash by offering tame knockoffs of songs by lesser known industrial rock groups like Ministry after he failed to take off as a mainstream techno act.
Fat goth teenage girls across America are expected to rejoice, everyone else will just continue not caring.
In my experience short lifespans are typical for optical drives, although if you spend a lot of money and get high-end Pioneer or Plextor drives they last a long time, and the Pioneer drives are good at reading the most scratched discs that other players will just spit out.
On a related note, stop using DVD cleaner discs - all they do is scratch the lens unless your DVD drive is located somewhere that it collects massive amounts of dust. Electronics stores have been pushing those stupid things on consumers for years because the markup runs anywhere from nine-hundred to several-thousand percent depending on whether you just buy the disc or buy it as part of some silly cleaning kit comeplete with a soap and isopropyl alcohol solution.
My hypothesis is that this is directly due to the majority of early World of Warcraft adopters hitting level 60, getting bored, and moving on to other games. I certainly have.
So true. Right now I'm in art school, looking down a few different career paths later, one of which is the booming field of digital art in the movie and game industries. I've realized that if I do go that way, I'll be shooting for the game industry, because I'm not about to go into a career that makes me beholden to the crazy assholes in the Director's Guild, Screen Actor's Guild, etc. unless I'm lucky enough to end up working for Lucas or Rodriguez, both of whom had to leave the director's guild and start non-union shops because the Hollywood unions limit the creativity of their members.
Have you ever seen how massive the G5 CPU/heatsink combo is and felt the amount of heat it puts out? They put anything AMD and intel make to shame when it comes to ridiculous head output. Those fans are the closest thing to silent you're going to find that can effectively cool those things.
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Yeah, but you have to remember that this is the Open Source Community. People who upload every buggy, unstable, alpha version of every piece of code they write to public CVS servers and then blog about it have a really hard time understanding that saner more intelligent people might prefer to actually stick to a schedule and only release the code when it's ready for use.
Poor performance compared to AMD chips won't hurt intel - they've been through this before, and always come out on top because they do two important things better than AMD. First, intel can fab more chips in less time, so they can keep the market flooded with their cool stuff. Second, intel has a much better marketing department than AMD, which has convinced millions of people out there that AMD chips are aberrations that will cause software instablities similar to those seen when attempting to make anything run well on Windows 95. Hell, this is part of intel's whole plan - slack off on R&D and just keep pouring stupid amounts of money into advertising.
AMD will never beat intel on by making quality products. The only hope AMD has of taking the crown of CPU sales is to open a bunch of cheap fabs in China and hire a good advertising firm.
Antonia Bayle hasn't been around for years - she's a new character in EQ II. I think the character you're referring to is Fironia Vie, who looks the way she does because she's a goddess, not a normal human woman.
The only reason Microsoft wants to have this discussion with open-source leaders is so that they can document it all and then fire off another anti-open-source campaign about all the unreasonable, anti-capitalist, anti-copyright demands that the open-source community expects from Microsoft.
Anyone who honestly believes that Microsoft's executives is having a change of heart and really wants to work with the open-source world is crazy.
"Whatever happened to RPGs that offered 80-100 hours of gameplay the first time thru?"
Given the continually rising cost of art development for video games, extremely long games have been tossed out the window because most studios can't keep them within a reasonable budget - the standouts being MMORPGs and Bethesda Softworks.
One thing to always keep in mind regarding college is that the college experience greater changes a person's likes, dislikes, and general outlook on life. For that reason, many people do not end up working in the field that matches their degree, for example, I've known many people with technical jobs that would label them as "engineers" who have political science degrees. That in mind, just do whatever you think you'll enjoy learning about the most, because there's a good chance that four years later, you'll want to do something different, so you might as well have a good time while you're there.
"But the graphical crap? Most people are going to disable it to try(!) to minimize the resources that windows sucks so that they might actually have cpu cycles for tasks instead of eye candy."
It's not likely that disabling eye-candy will have much of an effect on resources as most of processor itensive tricks will be dumped to the video card (Like Apple has been doing for the last year).
I suspect that most of the CPU cycles will really being going to things like MSN Antivrius, MSN Antispyware, constant automatic update checking by the OS and every additional piece of installed software, constantly monitoring and tracking use of system resources for crash reports, and of course, trying to balance out the crazed abuse of system resources that will be the latest versions of Adobe's new Flashcrobat viewer.
Adobe makes computer software and Nikon makes cameras, which means they don't compete, so there's nothing anti-competitive going on.
Right on the mark. They need to find the idiot designer who decided that putting the logo on the front was more important than putting the hot-swappable device ports on the front and fire his ass.
Won't it be a great day when the entire industry realizes that aside from power and network stuff, cables that stick out perpendicular to the back of the machine are just a pain in the ass?
"Adobe won't reverse-engineer the file, slightly reducing Photoshop's support for those files."
Adobe needs to just punish Nikon by stripping all support for Nikon raw images from Photoshop until Nikon caves. Nikon will have a hard time selling digital cameras to professional photographers if Photoshop just spits up all Nikon raw images as improperly formatted.
"If it really is that simple, then why haven't people been flocking in droves to OpenOffice?...Why isn't OpenOffice experiencing the same explosive success as Firefox?"
Because OpenOffice is a bloated, RAM hungry pig, loaded up with numerous unnecessary features that make it overly complex and unreliabe. It's the same reason that Mozilla never caught on, but as soon as someone came along and gutted out all the extra crap it started catching on like Wildfire.
I started using Staroffice in the 4.x days because it was faster, more reliable, and easier to use than MS-Office. Since then Microsoft has made Office leaner, more stable, and easier to use, while OpenOffice has been crammed full of so much excess garbage by an army of volunteers that it's not longer a good piece of software.
For OpenOffice to succeed like Firefox has, someone has to fork it and start cutting out all those stupid features that have been packed in because a programmer with spare time wanted it to be there.
"Wow. Cannot Microsoft even come up with their own mantras rather than copy others?"
Exactly what I was thinking... the whole "It just works" idea is why I went from Windows to Linux, and from Linux to Mac. But for Microsoft to expect people to have faith that their shitty software will ever "just work" is sort of ridiculous.
As much as I dislike MS Office, that's really what you should be using for high-school students - assuming that these are computers the students will be using - for the following reasons.
1. MS Office is a great job skill to have. Being competent with Word and Excel can mean the difference between a white collar job and working at Wal-Mart. This is very important in a time when more and more students are working their way through college due to high tuition costs.
2. Most of the colleges in the US use MS Office, and college professers who do accept digital submissions of work usually only accept it in MS Word format.
3. Because most of the world is standardized on MS Office, it's a safe bet that incoming teachers will know how to use MS Office and not have a clue about Open Office, which means that all the money you saved on licensing will be going to training and support for OpenOffice.
4. OpenOffice support for Microsoft formats is still imperfect and likely to stay that way as Microsoft continues to change said formats. This means that you'll still have to keep a few copies of MS Office around for any time a student or teacher needs to open an existing office document or create an office document for some reason. And that means there will always be a line to use the MS Office machines instead of working on the ones with OpenOffice.
Using OpenOffice in a high school would be a real disservice to the students, because you'll be teaching them a skill that is mostly useless in today's job market as well as in academia when they could be learning a valuable skill. Please be sure that if you are pushing for OpenOffice in the schools that you are doing it for a really good reason and not just for the sake of the open-source movement.
You sir, are entirely correct. I abandoned Linux and went to OS X about two years ago for the very reasons you mentioned. Trying to stay sane in the crazy fragmented Linux desktop universe just wasn't worth the effort anymore, and I don't think that I've ever looked back and thought "Gee, I sure do miss trying to get new Linux apps compiled and working in a simple desktop environment."
Linux has no real future as a mass-market desktop until some sane standards are accepted and put into place by the majority of distros and programmers, and I have no reason to expect that to ever happen.
"Strangely enough, less space on disc available to the gamemaker means they can't just cram a bunch of FMV sequences into a crapass game then ship it off."
Or they can just use multiple discs. Capcom has done it, and would probably happen a lot more often if Nintendo's former CEO hadn't pissed off most of the big Japanese game developers.
"I don't understand why everybody thinks that this shows that Nintendo is "behind" or "not prepared" to show Revolution to the public. I think the decision makes perfect sense from a marketing standpoint."
How old are you, fifteen? You need to take a look back at Nintendo's history of greatly overpromising products and releasing them very, very late. The N64 came out several YEARS late and didn't come close to delivering the visuals Nintendo and SGI had spent years trying to get it to.
The reason so many people think Nintendo is behind is that we've seen them do this before, and know where it's going. Nintendo is going to dick around for way too long, keep developers in the dark, and finally release a not-too-impressive console without support for important features and only have a tiny list of third-part developers on board.
That people who don't want to view Flash can just load the sites up in a browser that doesn't have Flash installed, and read PDF files outside of a web browser?
If this scares you, you're just plain paranoid and need serious therapy.
When I was a little kid I used to read all the time about these neat flying cars that were only a few years away, once the designers worked out a few kinks and the government figured out the regulatory side. As I've grown up I've continued to see these stories coming along, always promising that these guys have a new flying car that will be ready for consumers at some time right around the bend...
It ain't happening, folks. Now and then these guys might pick up an award or snowball another big team of journalists into reporting on their work, but safe, reliable, affordable flying cars that get reasonable fuel economy aren't going to happen any time soon. And when they do, they'll be tied up in regulatory and insurance messes for years, continuing to prevent wide adoption. At the rate this stuff is moving, by the these designs are ready for the market and the market is ready, the fossil fuels needed to run them will cost so much that people won't want them, and we'll get to wait another twenty years for hydrogen-powered models to arrive.
That's not a solution, because for many game companies, the publisher is fronting the development money. There aren't many companies out there like Valve, id, and Blizzard that can afford to produce a big game on their own, and there aren't a lot of venture capitalists and banks clamoring to loan money to independent game developers.
The real cost in games right now is artists. Detailed models with detailed animation and textures that look good at high resolutions take a lot of time and money. Add in a similarly detailed world, and things start to get really pricey.
"...most DVD players don't even have RF outputs. Yeah, most people use component outputs, but RF is still widely used, and most VCRs and PVRs support it. Profit margins on DVD players must be really low for them to leave off a feature that's still pretty standard."
RF out is left off of DVD players because adding that kind of distortion to digitally compressed video tends to leave one looking at a pretty nasty picture.
As the final act in a long guerrilla marketing campaign consisting of multiple "leaks" of songs to torrent aggregators and P2P networks, press releases about the fight to not leak the album, and "leaking" the entire album, Warner Records tried to get some attention by posting a song from the album in Apple's Garage Band format.
Music fans expect this to be followed by lots of interviews where Reznor will try to convince people that he isn't just a stale leftover of the 1990's alt-rock scene, where he made a huge splash by offering tame knockoffs of songs by lesser known industrial rock groups like Ministry after he failed to take off as a mainstream techno act.
Fat goth teenage girls across America are expected to rejoice, everyone else will just continue not caring.
In my experience short lifespans are typical for optical drives, although if you spend a lot of money and get high-end Pioneer or Plextor drives they last a long time, and the Pioneer drives are good at reading the most scratched discs that other players will just spit out.
On a related note, stop using DVD cleaner discs - all they do is scratch the lens unless your DVD drive is located somewhere that it collects massive amounts of dust. Electronics stores have been pushing those stupid things on consumers for years because the markup runs anywhere from nine-hundred to several-thousand percent depending on whether you just buy the disc or buy it as part of some silly cleaning kit comeplete with a soap and isopropyl alcohol solution.
My hypothesis is that this is directly due to the majority of early World of Warcraft adopters hitting level 60, getting bored, and moving on to other games. I certainly have.
"Unions are there to protect the unions."
So true. Right now I'm in art school, looking down a few different career paths later, one of which is the booming field of digital art in the movie and game industries. I've realized that if I do go that way, I'll be shooting for the game industry, because I'm not about to go into a career that makes me beholden to the crazy assholes in the Director's Guild, Screen Actor's Guild, etc. unless I'm lucky enough to end up working for Lucas or Rodriguez, both of whom had to leave the director's guild and start non-union shops because the Hollywood unions limit the creativity of their members.
Have you ever seen how massive the G5 CPU/heatsink combo is and felt the amount of heat it puts out? They put anything AMD and intel make to shame when it comes to ridiculous head output. Those fans are the closest thing to silent you're going to find that can effectively cool those things.