Yeah, my bad. I didn't realize that the middle tier machine has a super drive too. I just did a comparison and found that if you max the RAM and hard disk options on the white middle tier machine and on the black machine, the price difference is $150. The black and white iPods don't have a price difference, why would they charge a premium for something like that on the MacBook. Couple that with the shared video ram on a machine that is starved for RAM on the base configuration and I have to say that I find this to be a dubious product.
Intel GMA 950 graphics processor with 64MB of DDR2 SDRAM shared with main memory
Yeah, I just read that myself. Sharing 64MB of video RAM on a system that comes with a base config of only 512MB (skimpy to begin with) is pretty cheap. It's funny how Steve compares Apple to BMW (I think that was the luxery car copmany he mentioned) and they make some really nice looking, stylish products but do cheapo things like shorting the machine on RAM. If they're going to make a high end premium product, I wish that they'd just commit and do it right. Seriously, if push comes to shove, most people would see a greater benefit from sperate video RAM over a firewire port...
I don't think that it's possible that they would have the same finish on them. The Nano is black underneath a clear plastic coating. The clear layer is the part that scratches. It doesn't make sense that they'd polish up a laptop to a high shine like that and the pictures of the machine don't look like they've got that New Nano Sheen to them. I think the jury is still out on that one...
BTW, who the hell use the word "stunning" to describe the color black in any context? I read that on their site and just rolled my eyes...
I thought the same thing, but it also has a super drive. I think that a couple hundred more GHz, 20GB of storage and the super drive could justify the larger price tag.
This is seriously ridiculous. How many times are they going to release these movies? How many definitive editions can we have? The demand for the "original versions" of these films has been there since the VIDEO TAPES of the updated editions were released. This isn't a suprise to Lucas. No more new movies = = slow dying revenue streams. This constantly taking advantage of his fans has to stop.
1. We know there's a problem. 2. We know what the proglem is. 3. Here's what we're doing to fix it. 4. Here's when we expect it to be fixed. 5. Update as old information is obsolete.
Many of these are much easier said than done.
1) Identifying the problem is the first step. Determining that a slow login is on the customer's end or their end is a task in and of itself.
2) Again, this takes time and is closely associated with #1 above. knowing that you have a problem and pinpoint the cause are 2 different things.
3) Not really the customer's business and very closely tied to #2. A lot of the time, determining the problem on a network gets you 90% of the way to correcting it.
4) Same as #3. Determining the problem is the most time consuming part much of the time. If you don't know what the issue is, you don't know how to fix it yet. If you don't know what it's going to take to fix it, logically it's not possible to give an ETA that's worth anything. It's also not really in their interest to say "We'll have the login problem fixed by 8PM" because that just encourages people to pound the servers at 8PM creating a whole new set of issues. Having the infrastructure to support 6M customers is different than having the infra structure to support ^m customers that all want to login in at the same time:)
5) Yeah, this would be helpful provided that you're not just pushing back ETAs replacing the last inaccurate one with a new inaccurate one. This just gets people frustrated.
The controlling factor for their server performance should not be the total number of subscribers, but the number of subscribers per realm, and Blizzard has complete control over that number, because they can mark a realm as "full" and disallow logins/signups. IOW, as you know, those 6,000,000 people are not all playing in the same game at the same time.
It should be possible to make the realms completely independent, so that this just becomes a matter of horizontal scaling, and having hardware/systems monkeys roll out new realms via some standard operating procedure.
Because it's just that easy, telling the monkeys to release another server.
From what I've read, Blizz has been rolling out patches to keep new content coming while they've been migrating realms to new higher end hardware while they've been opening new realms to ease congestion issues on more crowded servers. They look like they're taking their issues seriously but an operation of that scale just doesn't expand at the snap of the fingers. They have to plan plan plan to add capacity. All added capacity comes with increased costs and if they're too short sighted, they're doing it all again in a few months. BAsed on some of the dev posts that I've read, it seems like some of us are going through a little pain now so they can work to prvent that pain again in the near future.
They underbuilt their infrastructure to begin with, which is where they really went wrong. They are supposedly trying to remedy that, but by the time you have re-architected the system it has grown to the point where you have to do it again.
I think that this is really pretty close to the actual problem. Less than underbuilding their infrastructure, I think that they under appreciated the demand for their game and have been playing catch up on the infrastructure ever since. Blizzard has never run an MMO before and they had the dumb luck to produce the most successful one on the market their first time out of the gate. What we're seeing here is their learning curve and the natural lag of infrastructure installation driven by demand. When you've got 6M customers on a system that complex, putting in a server isn't just a matter of plugging in a box. It's hardware purchase planning, testing, network infrastructure to support the new server, possibly hiring the people to maintain it, allocating time for the existing employees to roll it out. I'm aware that they've been having problems lately but, frankly, this is nothing compared to what we went through after Christmas.
How does the iMac's Radeon X1600 video card measure up? The lack of games available on the Mac was the last hurdle for me to make the switch to Apple. Can I get a good 3D graphics experience out of an iMac running the Radeon X1600? How does it stack up to some of the higher end Nvidia graphic solutions?
Agreed. Let's face it. If you wear a binary watch, you probably look like a guy who would wear a binary watch and that means you're probably not getting a lot of the desirable kin do female attention when you're at the bar...:)
Maybe you did, but, seriously, did Apple's market share increase appreciably at the time of that campaign? If it did, did it remain at that level? The Switcher campaign was clever. People enjoyed the ads and went back to whichever OS they were using before they giggled at the stoner girl on the boob tube.
I swear I've read about similar situations in other countries and regions that have tried messing importing a foreign predator and ended up with a bigger mess than before. Didn't they release a bunch of mosquitoes that were genetically engineered to be sterile to help curb the mosquito population in southern Florida and end up with flocks of "love bugs"? These schemes seem like a good idea on paper but messing with the eco system never seems to work out the way anyone intends, and not for the better...
Geez, I guess it's a crime to enjoy a service that provides a great convenience, savings if you are a heavy renter, and access to a MUCH larger selection of films than a local video store could ever offer (unless it were operating out of a space the size of an Ikea).
Personally, I'm a big fan of Netflix just for the quality and quantity of their selection alone. If you only rent new releases two or three times a month, yeah, you probably wouldn't get a lot out of Netflix. Blockbuster and the average mom and pop video store around me only cary new releases and popular catalog titles like "When Harry Met Sally" and stuff like that and I can completely understand why. Movies take up a lot of space on shelves and their stores can only be so big. I wouldn't devote space to a lot of movies that rented twice a year either if I had rent to pay and was only able to service a relatively small area.
With Netflix, I get movies delivered to my door at a reasonable price. I never have to worry about watching them TONIGHT because they're due back tomorrow before 5. And, occassionally I don't feel like watching the latest Jerry Bruckheimer big budget fiasco. I like documentaries every once in a while, and classic films like "Hell's Angels" and "Logan's Run":) If I get a bad disc from NEtflix, I send it back and they send me another. If that happens at Blockbuster and it's a catalog title, most of the time, you're SOL.
There are a lot of advantages to Netflix. I get plenty of exercise and human interaction in ways that don't involve my local video store
Why didn't they just tell people that they weren't focusing on it earlier instead of stringing us along and letting it become a big joke? They've squandered a lot of good will and hype over the last gazillion years we've been waiting...
Hopefully it won't be Daikatana, the gold standard of disappointing gaming vaporware:)
I agree but, believe it or not, there are people on the WoW boards that state that they play at least that much a day and claim to be casual players. Usually they say this to provide evidence that "casual" players have no excuse as to why they can't get "epic" gear. It goes like thisP "I'm casual, I only play four hours a day and *I've* got epic gear so there's no reason why other casuals can't too. Most casual just want epic gear handed to them."
I think that people can realy loose sight of the shore sometimes.
"The Dead's backtrack on their standards shows how corrupting law can be. How a band that has made millions over decades could turn is beyond me. The law is culpable -- the temptation to forcibly control what isn't in your possession is that strong."
The Dead always supported audience tapes and have said repeatedly that the soundboard tapes that got out were never really officially sanctioned. They're not really back tracking on this compromise. They've always let the agreement stand as a gentlmen's agreement with their fans. Some bands, like Phish, have had this same policy, been very vocal to make sure that it was understood, and been careful about not letting unsanctioned soundboards get out. If the Dead are guilty of anything it's that they didn't really care what happened when the money was flowing in steadily from touring.
Chris
Who labeled this post "insightful"? The Dead have always been a disorganized when it comes to making business decisions and they've only been more so in the post Garcia era. Communication SNAFUs are the norm from those guys. Also, if you think that the sound board streams are the "highest quality" recordings that the Dead have, you have likely not heard many of their tapes. Sound board tapes are mixed to meet the demands of the acoustics of the venue so, while they might be clear of audience sounds, they usually don't sound that good because the levels of the individual voices and instruments are all over the place. A well recorded audience tape is crisp, clean, has wonderful atmosphere, and records the music with a mix that was intended to be presented to the audience. Those sound boards don't start sounding really good until the mix is retouched and mastered. Regardless, most fans will, if given the choice, take a remastered CD of a Dead show over a soundboard tape that happens to have a naturally good mix because they're looking for the best sounding representation of the show that they can find.
This is a reasonable compromise that has worked with other taper friendly bands (Phish leaps to mind) in the past. It's tough for the Dead to put the genie back in the bottle but I think their relationship with the fans is pretty remarkable. You'll see voluntary compliance with this request except in a few rare cases. The quality of the Dead's audience tapes are very good because they went out of their way to try and play halls with good acoustics and they set aside a space behind the sound board (the sound quality sweet spot) for tapers to setup their equipment. People that don't want to spend the money on a given show can get a nice sounding audience recording OR they can buy the tweaked / remastered version from the Dead, who usually sell their concert CDs for a very low price.
Well, if he were alive, this wouldn't have happened, not because he was massively in favor of "tapers rights" but because the band would still be on tour and the $$$ would still be flowing in. They probably never would have considered it because, under those circumstances, everyone was getting what they wanted: music to enjoy and a very good paycheck for the band. The Dead have never really fought hard to protect their intellectual properties as long as they were making a good living. In the post Jerry, less lucrative solo touring world, $$$ is trickling not flowing. I'm not calling them greedy. I can completely understand and sympathize with the desire to profit from their hard work for all those years. I think the "trade the audience tapes, hands off the sound board tapes" is a very good compromise. Phish have / had that policy for YEARS and it worked well for them, but they established it a long time ago. Honestly, the audience tapes sound better to my ears anyway. Tapes straight from the sound board sound wonky because the mix is setup for the hall they played not for consumption under head phones or on the home stereo.
I think that Singer's participation in the new Superman is a triple tragedy.
1) It's Superman. The boy scout in red and blue tights just won't fly (pun intended) in light of modern attitudes towards right and wrong. Batman works because (among other things) he works against his limitations and steps over the line in the name of doing what's right and watching that satisfies the audience's collective feeling that an individual can't effect a real change on society. Superman effectively has no limitations which massively reduced dramatic tension in the film.
2) Singer has an excellent track record so far and I hate to see him sully it with a big budget flop. I think that the new Superman will be a huge flop for the reasons I listed in 1) but also because no one seems all that interested in Superman AND the average age of the cast looks to be about 19. We already have that. It's called Smallville. (as an aside, towns with names like "Smallville" make it hard to see Superman as anything other than campy and outdated).
3) By abandoning X-men, Singer has opened the door for Brett Ratner to crap all over a very good franchise that Singer did an excellent job sheparding along. Brett Ratner is the poor man's Michael Bay, but without the style.
Singer's decision to do Superman is only going to leave us with 1 hero movie we don't want to see and another that will be a massively disappointing ending to what started out as a great trilogy.
Slashdot Mirror
If Apple produced it, it wouldn't be "beige", it would be "the Color of the Universe..."
:)
http://www.pha.jhu.edu/~kgb/cosspec/
Yeah, my bad. I didn't realize that the middle tier machine has a super drive too. I just did a comparison and found that if you max the RAM and hard disk options on the white middle tier machine and on the black machine, the price difference is $150. The black and white iPods don't have a price difference, why would they charge a premium for something like that on the MacBook. Couple that with the shared video ram on a machine that is starved for RAM on the base configuration and I have to say that I find this to be a dubious product.
Yeah, I just read that myself. Sharing 64MB of video RAM on a system that comes with a base config of only 512MB (skimpy to begin with) is pretty cheap. It's funny how Steve compares Apple to BMW (I think that was the luxery car copmany he mentioned) and they make some really nice looking, stylish products but do cheapo things like shorting the machine on RAM. If they're going to make a high end premium product, I wish that they'd just commit and do it right. Seriously, if push comes to shove, most people would see a greater benefit from sperate video RAM over a firewire port...
When the screen measures 13.3" wide, can you really call it a "wide screen"? It's more like Short Screen or Relatively Wide Screen
I don't think that it's possible that they would have the same finish on them. The Nano is black underneath a clear plastic coating. The clear layer is the part that scratches. It doesn't make sense that they'd polish up a laptop to a high shine like that and the pictures of the machine don't look like they've got that New Nano Sheen to them. I think the jury is still out on that one...
BTW, who the hell use the word "stunning" to describe the color black in any context? I read that on their site and just rolled my eyes...
I thought the same thing, but it also has a super drive. I think that a couple hundred more GHz, 20GB of storage and the super drive could justify the larger price tag.
This is seriously ridiculous. How many times are they going to release these movies? How many definitive editions can we have? The demand for the "original versions" of these films has been there since the VIDEO TAPES of the updated editions were released. This isn't a suprise to Lucas. No more new movies = = slow dying revenue streams. This constantly taking advantage of his fans has to stop.
Many of these are much easier said than done.
1) Identifying the problem is the first step. Determining that a slow login is on the customer's end or their end is a task in and of itself.
2) Again, this takes time and is closely associated with #1 above. knowing that you have a problem and pinpoint the cause are 2 different things.
3) Not really the customer's business and very closely tied to #2. A lot of the time, determining the problem on a network gets you 90% of the way to correcting it.
4) Same as #3. Determining the problem is the most time consuming part much of the time. If you don't know what the issue is, you don't know how to fix it yet. If you don't know what it's going to take to fix it, logically it's not possible to give an ETA that's worth anything. It's also not really in their interest to say "We'll have the login problem fixed by 8PM" because that just encourages people to pound the servers at 8PM creating a whole new set of issues. Having the infrastructure to support 6M customers is different than having the infra structure to support ^m customers that all want to login in at the same time
5) Yeah, this would be helpful provided that you're not just pushing back ETAs replacing the last inaccurate one with a new inaccurate one. This just gets people frustrated.
Sounds like MS is engineering their own Mac viruses now :)
How does the iMac's Radeon X1600 video card measure up? The lack of games available on the Mac was the last hurdle for me to make the switch to Apple. Can I get a good 3D graphics experience out of an iMac running the Radeon X1600? How does it stack up to some of the higher end Nvidia graphic solutions?
Agreed. Let's face it. If you wear a binary watch, you probably look like a guy who would wear a binary watch and that means you're probably not getting a lot of the desirable kin do female attention when you're at the bar... :)
chris
Maybe you did, but, seriously, did Apple's market share increase appreciably at the time of that campaign? If it did, did it remain at that level? The Switcher campaign was clever. People enjoyed the ads and went back to whichever OS they were using before they giggled at the stoner girl on the boob tube.
Chris
I swear I've read about similar situations in other countries and regions that have tried messing importing a foreign predator and ended up with a bigger mess than before. Didn't they release a bunch of mosquitoes that were genetically engineered to be sterile to help curb the mosquito population in southern Florida and end up with flocks of "love bugs"? These schemes seem like a good idea on paper but messing with the eco system never seems to work out the way anyone intends, and not for the better...
Chris
Geez, I guess it's a crime to enjoy a service that provides a great convenience, savings if you are a heavy renter, and access to a MUCH larger selection of films than a local video store could ever offer (unless it were operating out of a space the size of an Ikea).
:) If I get a bad disc from NEtflix, I send it back and they send me another. If that happens at Blockbuster and it's a catalog title, most of the time, you're SOL.
Personally, I'm a big fan of Netflix just for the quality and quantity of their selection alone. If you only rent new releases two or three times a month, yeah, you probably wouldn't get a lot out of Netflix. Blockbuster and the average mom and pop video store around me only cary new releases and popular catalog titles like "When Harry Met Sally" and stuff like that and I can completely understand why. Movies take up a lot of space on shelves and their stores can only be so big. I wouldn't devote space to a lot of movies that rented twice a year either if I had rent to pay and was only able to service a relatively small area.
With Netflix, I get movies delivered to my door at a reasonable price. I never have to worry about watching them TONIGHT because they're due back tomorrow before 5. And, occassionally I don't feel like watching the latest Jerry Bruckheimer big budget fiasco. I like documentaries every once in a while, and classic films like "Hell's Angels" and "Logan's Run"
There are a lot of advantages to Netflix. I get plenty of exercise and human interaction in ways that don't involve my local video store
Chris
Why didn't they just tell people that they weren't focusing on it earlier instead of stringing us along and letting it become a big joke? They've squandered a lot of good will and hype over the last gazillion years we've been waiting...
:)
Hopefully it won't be Daikatana, the gold standard of disappointing gaming vaporware
Chris
I agree but, believe it or not, there are people on the WoW boards that state that they play at least that much a day and claim to be casual players. Usually they say this to provide evidence that "casual" players have no excuse as to why they can't get "epic" gear. It goes like thisP "I'm casual, I only play four hours a day and *I've* got epic gear so there's no reason why other casuals can't too. Most casual just want epic gear handed to them."
I think that people can realy loose sight of the shore sometimes.
CB
Don't forget about that Edi Brickell video on the Win95 CD.
Good time, bad times, gimme some of that...
Chris
"The Dead's backtrack on their standards shows how corrupting law can be. How a band that has made millions over decades could turn is beyond me. The law is culpable -- the temptation to forcibly control what isn't in your possession is that strong." The Dead always supported audience tapes and have said repeatedly that the soundboard tapes that got out were never really officially sanctioned. They're not really back tracking on this compromise. They've always let the agreement stand as a gentlmen's agreement with their fans. Some bands, like Phish, have had this same policy, been very vocal to make sure that it was understood, and been careful about not letting unsanctioned soundboards get out. If the Dead are guilty of anything it's that they didn't really care what happened when the money was flowing in steadily from touring. Chris
Who labeled this post "insightful"? The Dead have always been a disorganized when it comes to making business decisions and they've only been more so in the post Garcia era. Communication SNAFUs are the norm from those guys. Also, if you think that the sound board streams are the "highest quality" recordings that the Dead have, you have likely not heard many of their tapes. Sound board tapes are mixed to meet the demands of the acoustics of the venue so, while they might be clear of audience sounds, they usually don't sound that good because the levels of the individual voices and instruments are all over the place. A well recorded audience tape is crisp, clean, has wonderful atmosphere, and records the music with a mix that was intended to be presented to the audience. Those sound boards don't start sounding really good until the mix is retouched and mastered. Regardless, most fans will, if given the choice, take a remastered CD of a Dead show over a soundboard tape that happens to have a naturally good mix because they're looking for the best sounding representation of the show that they can find.
Chris
This is a reasonable compromise that has worked with other taper friendly bands (Phish leaps to mind) in the past. It's tough for the Dead to put the genie back in the bottle but I think their relationship with the fans is pretty remarkable. You'll see voluntary compliance with this request except in a few rare cases. The quality of the Dead's audience tapes are very good because they went out of their way to try and play halls with good acoustics and they set aside a space behind the sound board (the sound quality sweet spot) for tapers to setup their equipment. People that don't want to spend the money on a given show can get a nice sounding audience recording OR they can buy the tweaked / remastered version from the Dead, who usually sell their concert CDs for a very low price.
Chris
Well, if he were alive, this wouldn't have happened, not because he was massively in favor of "tapers rights" but because the band would still be on tour and the $$$ would still be flowing in. They probably never would have considered it because, under those circumstances, everyone was getting what they wanted: music to enjoy and a very good paycheck for the band. The Dead have never really fought hard to protect their intellectual properties as long as they were making a good living. In the post Jerry, less lucrative solo touring world, $$$ is trickling not flowing. I'm not calling them greedy. I can completely understand and sympathize with the desire to profit from their hard work for all those years. I think the "trade the audience tapes, hands off the sound board tapes" is a very good compromise. Phish have / had that policy for YEARS and it worked well for them, but they established it a long time ago. Honestly, the audience tapes sound better to my ears anyway. Tapes straight from the sound board sound wonky because the mix is setup for the hall they played not for consumption under head phones or on the home stereo.
Chris
I think that Singer's participation in the new Superman is a triple tragedy.
1) It's Superman. The boy scout in red and blue tights just won't fly (pun intended) in light of modern attitudes towards right and wrong. Batman works because (among other things) he works against his limitations and steps over the line in the name of doing what's right and watching that satisfies the audience's collective feeling that an individual can't effect a real change on society. Superman effectively has no limitations which massively reduced dramatic tension in the film.
2) Singer has an excellent track record so far and I hate to see him sully it with a big budget flop. I think that the new Superman will be a huge flop for the reasons I listed in 1) but also because no one seems all that interested in Superman AND the average age of the cast looks to be about 19. We already have that. It's called Smallville. (as an aside, towns with names like "Smallville" make it hard to see Superman as anything other than campy and outdated).
3) By abandoning X-men, Singer has opened the door for Brett Ratner to crap all over a very good franchise that Singer did an excellent job sheparding along. Brett Ratner is the poor man's Michael Bay, but without the style.
Singer's decision to do Superman is only going to leave us with 1 hero movie we don't want to see and another that will be a massively disappointing ending to what started out as a great trilogy.
Chris
Superman is an OCD hero? lol...
Chris