Despite that most sales of Sins of a Solar Empire thus far have been through TotalGaming.net (direct digital download), Sins topped the charts last month at retail for PC games.
Here are the stats courtesy of NPD:
February 2008
1. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
2. Sins Of A Solar Empire
3. World Of Warcraft: Battle Chest
4. The Sims 2 Free Time Expansion Pack
5. World Of Warcraft: Burning Crusade Expansion Pack
6. World Of Warcraft
7. The Orange Box
8. The Sims 2 Deluxe
9. The Sims: Castaway Stories
10. Crysis
Sins of a Solar Empire was released in February. No CD/DVD copy protection included. One other note, NPD doesn't include sales at Walmart where a significant percentage of the sales of Sins of a Solar Empire occurred. Unofficial tallies we've received internally put Sins at #1.
Thank you so much for your support!
We hope over the coming weeks and months we are able to keep the game fun and interesting for you as we continue to provide free updates based on your feedback! Free updates is our version of "copy protection".
That's his point: we consider these markets "niche", because of the number of people who play them. But when viewed in terms of the number of people who buy the game, they're not niche markets.
So, in other words: fighting piracy with intrusive DRM is an expensive and risky undertaking: you reduce the value of your product in the hope that you'll succeed in staving off the pirates a couple days at retail, and you often fail at that.
So, factoring piracy in, what does your market look like? That's what you build games to.
Another sideswipe: much of the DRM out there is designed to prevent zero-day (or even pre-release) cracks hitting P2P. A lot of people seem to like to download their games. So why are some companies still releasing games to retail only?
Anyone have a copy of the Licensing Agreement? How much do you want to bet that the Customer agrees not to hold Sequoia liable for any shortcomings in the product's performance, such as failing to tabulate votes correctly, or being vulnerable to manipulation?
Their policies have nothing to do with "their product". At stake is what is being sold here. They claim to be selling an iPhone. If so, that if I buy it, it is mine.
I don't give a damn about the iPhone. I'm perfectly happy with what I've got. I do care about companies trying to impose their definition of "property" on society for the sole purpose of making money. You can say "don't like their policies, don't buy their product", but such small-minded capitalist platitudes aren't going to save us, when the major producers define "buy" as "use the things we make on our terms, while renouncing all benefits of ownership."
Oh look! The Market hath Spoken! We are its slaves!
Astrology has a scientific pedigree. Ptolemy's Almagest does not make the modern distinction between Astronomy and Astrology.
The core intuition works this way: "We can see that the sphere of the Sun has a distinct effect on our daily lives. When it's overhead, it's warm and light, when it's on the other side of the Earth, it's cold and dark. When it is in a certain part of the sky, it's winter, and another part, it's summer. The moon has a more tenuous effect on the the Earth, but one we can sense: the tides, for example, seem connected to the phase of the moon, and perhaps people too. Therefore, the spheres of the other five planets should likewise have a thin affect."
The core intuition is, of course, wrong, but there's a ton of scientific literature built on the subject. Most modern astrologers, however, ignore the thousands of years of careful reflection and study, and prefer to pull crap out of their asses.
Columbus is the worst case of this underdog narrative. Many people (evidently Dr. Sagan was one of them) believe A. that he set out to prove that the world was spherical, and B. that the dogmatic 'scientists' of the time believed the world to be flat.
This is pure fiction developed to sustain the myth that scientific and moral progress are intertwined.
dude, as a professional historian, I find it pretty cool. In a period where we tend to sentimentalize the early years of videogames, it also highlights a key part of the game industry: many, many games were written by people who had no particular interest in video games. It was a coding job. It's hard to imagine now, when there's enough demand that writing videogames involves taking a pay cut, but people were involved in it with no inspiration whatsoever, producing shovelware. In my short period in the industry as a (paid) tester, years after this incident, I remember explaining just what constituted traveling and offsides to a lead programmer whose basketball game was already in final testing. We remember the smart folks, and the good games, but there was a lot of junk out there. We all played the games of the believers, but most of the games were made by hacks, and only a small number played them.
The official reason for the embargo is the seizure of US assets 50 years ago. If we send 'em 'American Media', I'm betting we'll see the RIAA making ex parte filings against the John Does on every refugee boat that makes shore, alleging that flirtatious speech while packing a USB key in the pants constitutes 'making available' which itself is equivalent to mass duplication. You thought the revolution was bad for busiess - you won't believe the kind of damages these guys willl assert.
It works, and you can watch video with it, and with OS2008 it isn't half bad. But Flash is either on or off, and some abuses of flash can really slow down your web experience (e.g., try loading page full of flash video ads).
So, yes, you can get Flash on a mobile device (the n800 has an Arm9 @400 MHz, while the iPhone's processor runs at 620), but not a 100% reliable effort-free flash. Also, considering the iPhone's screen resolution, Flash would really suck on it.
Not $2000 Swiss Army Knives. A good chef's knife is worth it. At some point, though, those Swiss Army Knives become too big and unwieldy to be of any use.
Right, I've owned my share of desktop replacements, and I had very good reasons for buying them. But seriously, for the price of that $3000 laptop, you could have one hell of a mothership desktop, a NAS and a Eee, n810 or whatever you need for mobile/kitchen computing.
Expensive laptops will always have their niche; it's just getting smaller. The paradigm used to be: "cost, size or performance: pick one". Now it's pick two.
It's the Challenger story all over again. As I understand it from those emails, is clear: Vista was developed for the graphical experience to be not just essential, but the major selling point. Microsoft established this early on (as in Summer 2004). Another key plank was that Vista was going to be a major rewrite of how things are done, requiring entirely new hardware. So Microsoft developed a program to aid consumers in navigating this sea change in hardware.
At the last minute (~1 year before the official release), Intel comes up and says: "look, old chap, we've got this cheap chipset that we need to move units on to make our quarterlies", and the guy whose job it is to deal with Intel happens to outrank everyone else, and not be in the loop concerning the nitty-gritty details of what he's selling. So he changes the specifications of what constitutes "Vista-capable" to satisfy Intel. As a knock-on, every manufacturer out there gets to slap "Vista-capable" on similarly lame (aka "runs XP, sorta") hardware.
Yeah, that's a lawsuit that will be settled pretty quickly. I feel sorry for the folks who had to deal with this crap. It ain't what they asked for.
I have the same problem on Friday evenings, especially in typing Yike! Don't beer me! Not Beer Please!. My Bartender, Ike, never seems to get it right.
I mean a N800 runs Linux out of the box and has most of the bits and pieces already available for the remote control uses he describes. And, being not only a Linux geek, but a Linux geek motivated enough to hobble together his own house, he should recognize that the Touch's strength is in doing the small number of factory-approved tasks, but doing them really well, while the N800 excels in doing whatever you want, provided you can figure out how to do it. I'm just saying, it's a better fit.
But when you look at home automation like that, do you ask yourself "how much time a day does he spend installing and maitaining his automatics?"
Established scholars in a mediocre position avail themselves of work done by excessively trusting graduate students to further their careers and/or their journal that is struggling for submissions and subscriptions. Of the people I know who've been victims of "plagiarism", this is usually the profile.
They're giving away the tools for DRM, automatic updates, encrypted delivery (unlock at release date), voice comms, community access and server browsing. They are not giving away access to their network.
So, they're giving away the parts of their toolkit that would make all those 3d-party games not suck with Steam.
And I prefer the N800 over the iPod touch
on
Hacking Asus EEE
·
· Score: 1
no need to wait for no steenkin' SDK!
Seriously, don't underestimate the Eee. The N800 is great for when you're not using a computer, and the Touch works when you want to impress teh b4bes with your disposable income and disposable toys.
Seriously, TFA seems concerned with a presentist understanding of "The greatest machine of all time", as in "Which consoles make the greatest advancement." Who cares about advancement? It's about the games, dude.
Go to questionable startup rate your prof^H^H^H^Hlawyer and pull up their list of IP and Patent lawyers. Send "registered" emails from separate accounts for each name on the list. Then, if he should ever determine the identity, chances are it's on the list, and whoever sent the email will have a good claim on the money. That is provided, of course, said mouthpiece doesn't accuse the snitch of participating in a conspiracy to do exactly that. So the flipside is that if we spam the address with false positives, either the real stoolie will have little hope of making any money off of it, or we get in on the action.
I'm just speaking hypothetically, of course. I'm pretty sure someone else holds a patent on this sort of spam, and the lawyer involved has set an elaborate trap for an infringement suit.
777 Autothrottle works by moving the throttle levers. What Autothrottle wants, it gets through a servo connected to the flight control in question. So, no, Autothrottle wasn't getting none neither.
So somewhere between both throttle levers, and the independent systems they run through and the thrust coming out of the engine something failed. The common elements that I can think of: A. The shared space in the cockpit of the throttle levers, B. symmetrically designed systems, C. identical fuel condition D. the air the engines flew through, and of course, E. the flight crew moving the levers. As of now, E. has been ruled out (since the Autothrottle had the same problem), barring something really weird (like spilling a coffee cup of 1M H2SO4 on the flight controls). A-D are all equally improbable at the moment.
Yes, non-Macintoshes have them, I suppose. But what about what happens when you put a regular bad CD into the drive? On a Mac, you can always eject the disk by going to the Disk Manager (whatever that thing is called). Unless, of course, the CD is bad, then the disk manager won't necessarily load. No problem, just hold down one of those funky keys while selecting "restart." That will work, provided the disk isn't bad.
Well, you can always boot the machine into console and issue a direct "eject disk" command.
But then, of course, you'd say it was the user's fault for not knowing the disk was bad before inserting it.
This will be fun: Non-standard DVD player and an unusual DVD. Does the DVD adhere to appropriate standards, in which case, we can all gloat that the stylish and disposable Mac du jour falls victim to its own preciousness, or is this a matter of shared liability?
Since it didn't waste any time with depth and went straight for quality. It's all economy, no fat. In terms of writing, it was perfect: it's so slight that many folks can discount it as "just a game," but for those who look, it's at one time an implementation of "games as learning" theory and the playtest-intensive approach of Valve and a criticism of it. How much of the game is simply an exercise, and how much of it is being measured by some remote server and being scored as a victory? Portal has some of the most endearing writing because it takes the stereotypes of "test gone wrong" (which built Half Life, among others) and the "lying computer", and twists them ultimately into "test gone right" ("This was a triumph") and "truthful computer" ("The difference between us is that I can feel pain" - prima facie so wrong, but on further reflection, so right).
But it also poses the greatest threat to the WGA. Just look at how it was developed. Yes, they had professional writers in the various cabals, and those guys are venerated for their work. Yet their development structure gave everyone input.
Create an environment where extremely creative people who specialize in different disciplines inspire each other to great heights, and the result is greater than any could achieve in their own domain, were turf boundaries established. To do so, however, requires an egalitarian environment antithetical to the traditional management/labor divide. Enslaved masses, forward!
Aye. It's exceedingly old now. It wasn't four years ago when I tried to sort it. Basically, the first-generation iBook didn't have AirPort built in. After that, they moved to all-AirPort all the time. Thanks to a custom port, you can only use the Apple cards. Thanks to 10.1, you can't use any third-party WiFi cards. So, four years ago, I had to sort this situation: here's a machine that labors under 10.1, and there are three options: A. spend $150-200 on Ebay for an Airport (802.11b) card that Apple no longer manufactured, B. Spend $150 on an OS upgrade that would degrade OS responsiveness without adding anythign system-critical, and another $100 on a USB Wireless card, or C. Do nothing, and wait for them to repeat their mistake and buy yet another Mac.
I took option C., and Mr. Jobs and the Mac horde otta be grateful for it.
I do enjoy these little posts, because it shows that there are always Macintosh fans who refuse to believe that Apple could ever do anything bad to their customers; every time I bring up an Apple failing (well, except for the Eudora abandonware issue that hit everyone last week), someone has to post that the problem doesn't exist. Guys, it's an OS. If, in the past, you'd only gone the Amiga route instead of the Macintosh one, you'd understand that brilliant UI design and amazing engineering are fine things, but the suits run strategy. All that fine work ain't gonna save you from marketing decisions, and a platform that insists on tight hardware control is going to have exactly these problems.
Then maybe you'd figure out why Firewire was a fiasco at a dollar a pop instead of a triumph.
My Parents have 4 Macintoshes in their house. Two they use, and two that ended up obsolete simply because Apple made them that way ahead of their time (okay, okay, that iBook could have been brought up to speed for only a $150 software update and a $150 (on Ebay only) legacy 802.11b card, 'cos Apple wouldn't think of making 802.11g for old tech).
Most people DON'T need all that. But most people DO need SOME of that. And if you add it all together, most people AREN'T going to get WHAT THEY NEED.
Now, you can debate whether the Mac approach is better than Microsoft's (=We give you ALL you need, but each bit of it only works 80% of the time. Most people will need to use FIVE such elements, so it will only work, (Pet 2.0 fans, help me out here) 32.768% of the time), but the fact is, fashionable obsolescence is part of Apple's game plan. And we can always needle you for it.
Slashdot Mirror
That's his point: we consider these markets "niche", because of the number of people who play them. But when viewed in terms of the number of people who buy the game, they're not niche markets.
So, in other words: fighting piracy with intrusive DRM is an expensive and risky undertaking: you reduce the value of your product in the hope that you'll succeed in staving off the pirates a couple days at retail, and you often fail at that.
So, factoring piracy in, what does your market look like? That's what you build games to.
Another sideswipe: much of the DRM out there is designed to prevent zero-day (or even pre-release) cracks hitting P2P. A lot of people seem to like to download their games. So why are some companies still releasing games to retail only?
Anyone have a copy of the Licensing Agreement? How much do you want to bet that the Customer agrees not to hold Sequoia liable for any shortcomings in the product's performance, such as failing to tabulate votes correctly, or being vulnerable to manipulation?
Their policies have nothing to do with "their product". At stake is what is being sold here. They claim to be selling an iPhone. If so, that if I buy it, it is mine.
I don't give a damn about the iPhone. I'm perfectly happy with what I've got. I do care about companies trying to impose their definition of "property" on society for the sole purpose of making money. You can say "don't like their policies, don't buy their product", but such small-minded capitalist platitudes aren't going to save us, when the major producers define "buy" as "use the things we make on our terms, while renouncing all benefits of ownership."
Oh look! The Market hath Spoken! We are its slaves!
I think it's maybe 'pretending not to be big fat planets'.
er, effect. Okay, fine. Busted.
Astrology has a scientific pedigree. Ptolemy's Almagest does not make the modern distinction between Astronomy and Astrology.
The core intuition works this way: "We can see that the sphere of the Sun has a distinct effect on our daily lives. When it's overhead, it's warm and light, when it's on the other side of the Earth, it's cold and dark. When it is in a certain part of the sky, it's winter, and another part, it's summer. The moon has a more tenuous effect on the the Earth, but one we can sense: the tides, for example, seem connected to the phase of the moon, and perhaps people too. Therefore, the spheres of the other five planets should likewise have a thin affect."
The core intuition is, of course, wrong, but there's a ton of scientific literature built on the subject. Most modern astrologers, however, ignore the thousands of years of careful reflection and study, and prefer to pull crap out of their asses.
when, in fact, they only laughed at Bozo.
Columbus is the worst case of this underdog narrative. Many people (evidently Dr. Sagan was one of them) believe A. that he set out to prove that the world was spherical, and B. that the dogmatic 'scientists' of the time believed the world to be flat.
This is pure fiction developed to sustain the myth that scientific and moral progress are intertwined.
dude, as a professional historian, I find it pretty cool. In a period where we tend to sentimentalize the early years of videogames, it also highlights a key part of the game industry: many, many games were written by people who had no particular interest in video games. It was a coding job. It's hard to imagine now, when there's enough demand that writing videogames involves taking a pay cut, but people were involved in it with no inspiration whatsoever, producing shovelware. In my short period in the industry as a (paid) tester, years after this incident, I remember explaining just what constituted traveling and offsides to a lead programmer whose basketball game was already in final testing. We remember the smart folks, and the good games, but there was a lot of junk out there. We all played the games of the believers, but most of the games were made by hacks, and only a small number played them.
So, yeah, thanks for sharing.
The official reason for the embargo is the seizure of US assets 50 years ago. If we send 'em 'American Media', I'm betting we'll see the RIAA making ex parte filings against the John Does on every refugee boat that makes shore, alleging that flirtatious speech while packing a USB key in the pants constitutes 'making available' which itself is equivalent to mass duplication. You thought the revolution was bad for busiess - you won't believe the kind of damages these guys willl assert.
...which has Flash 9 fully implemented.
It works, and you can watch video with it, and with OS2008 it isn't half bad. But Flash is either on or off, and some abuses of flash can really slow down your web experience (e.g., try loading page full of flash video ads).
So, yes, you can get Flash on a mobile device (the n800 has an Arm9 @400 MHz, while the iPhone's processor runs at 620), but not a 100% reliable effort-free flash. Also, considering the iPhone's screen resolution, Flash would really suck on it.
Not $2000 Swiss Army Knives.
A good chef's knife is worth it. At some point, though, those Swiss Army Knives become too big and unwieldy to be of any use.
Right, I've owned my share of desktop replacements, and I had very good reasons for buying them. But seriously, for the price of that $3000 laptop, you could have one hell of a mothership desktop, a NAS and a Eee, n810 or whatever you need for mobile/kitchen computing.
Expensive laptops will always have their niche; it's just getting smaller. The paradigm used to be: "cost, size or performance: pick one". Now it's pick two.
It's the Challenger story all over again. As I understand it from those emails, is clear: Vista was developed for the graphical experience to be not just essential, but the major selling point. Microsoft established this early on (as in Summer 2004). Another key plank was that Vista was going to be a major rewrite of how things are done, requiring entirely new hardware. So Microsoft developed a program to aid consumers in navigating this sea change in hardware.
At the last minute (~1 year before the official release), Intel comes up and says: "look, old chap, we've got this cheap chipset that we need to move units on to make our quarterlies", and the guy whose job it is to deal with Intel happens to outrank everyone else, and not be in the loop concerning the nitty-gritty details of what he's selling. So he changes the specifications of what constitutes "Vista-capable" to satisfy Intel. As a knock-on, every manufacturer out there gets to slap "Vista-capable" on similarly lame (aka "runs XP, sorta") hardware.
Yeah, that's a lawsuit that will be settled pretty quickly. I feel sorry for the folks who had to deal with this crap. It ain't what they asked for.
Oh yeah, Vista sucks.
I have the same problem on Friday evenings, especially in typing Yike! Don't beer me! Not Beer Please!. My Bartender, Ike, never seems to get it right.
I mean a N800 runs Linux out of the box and has most of the bits and pieces already available for the remote control uses he describes. And, being not only a Linux geek, but a Linux geek motivated enough to hobble together his own house, he should recognize that the Touch's strength is in doing the small number of factory-approved tasks, but doing them really well, while the N800 excels in doing whatever you want, provided you can figure out how to do it. I'm just saying, it's a better fit.
But when you look at home automation like that, do you ask yourself "how much time a day does he spend installing and maitaining his automatics?"
disfunctionem erectilem, I believe, is the correct ending to your spam.
Established scholars in a mediocre position avail themselves of work done by excessively trusting graduate students to further their careers and/or their journal that is struggling for submissions and subscriptions. Of the people I know who've been victims of "plagiarism", this is usually the profile.
They're giving away the tools for DRM, automatic updates, encrypted delivery (unlock at release date), voice comms, community access and server browsing. They are not giving away access to their network.
So, they're giving away the parts of their toolkit that would make all those 3d-party games not suck with Steam.
no need to wait for no steenkin' SDK!
Seriously, don't underestimate the Eee. The N800 is great for when you're not using a computer, and the Touch works when you want to impress teh b4bes with your disposable income and disposable toys.
and yes to Vectrex!
Seriously, TFA seems concerned with a presentist understanding of "The greatest machine of all time", as in "Which consoles make the greatest advancement." Who cares about advancement? It's about the games, dude.
Go to questionable startup rate your prof^H^H^H^Hlawyer and pull up their list of IP and Patent lawyers. Send "registered" emails from separate accounts for each name on the list. Then, if he should ever determine the identity, chances are it's on the list, and whoever sent the email will have a good claim on the money. That is provided, of course, said mouthpiece doesn't accuse the snitch of participating in a conspiracy to do exactly that. So the flipside is that if we spam the address with false positives, either the real stoolie will have little hope of making any money off of it, or we get in on the action.
I'm just speaking hypothetically, of course. I'm pretty sure someone else holds a patent on this sort of spam, and the lawyer involved has set an elaborate trap for an infringement suit.
Well, maybe this harddrive just fell behind the satellite's photocopier. You never know.
777 Autothrottle works by moving the throttle levers. What Autothrottle wants, it gets through a servo connected to the flight control in question. So, no, Autothrottle wasn't getting none neither.
So somewhere between both throttle levers, and the independent systems they run through and the thrust coming out of the engine something failed. The common elements that I can think of: A. The shared space in the cockpit of the throttle levers, B. symmetrically designed systems, C. identical fuel condition D. the air the engines flew through, and of course, E. the flight crew moving the levers. As of now, E. has been ruled out (since the Autothrottle had the same problem), barring something really weird (like spilling a coffee cup of 1M H2SO4 on the flight controls). A-D are all equally improbable at the moment.
Yes, non-Macintoshes have them, I suppose. But what about what happens when you put a regular bad CD into the drive? On a Mac, you can always eject the disk by going to the Disk Manager (whatever that thing is called). Unless, of course, the CD is bad, then the disk manager won't necessarily load. No problem, just hold down one of those funky keys while selecting "restart." That will work, provided the disk isn't bad.
Well, you can always boot the machine into console and issue a direct "eject disk" command.
But then, of course, you'd say it was the user's fault for not knowing the disk was bad before inserting it.
This will be fun: Non-standard DVD player and an unusual DVD. Does the DVD adhere to appropriate standards, in which case, we can all gloat that the stylish and disposable Mac du jour falls victim to its own preciousness, or is this a matter of shared liability?
Since it didn't waste any time with depth and went straight for quality. It's all economy, no fat. In terms of writing, it was perfect: it's so slight that many folks can discount it as "just a game," but for those who look, it's at one time an implementation of "games as learning" theory and the playtest-intensive approach of Valve and a criticism of it. How much of the game is simply an exercise, and how much of it is being measured by some remote server and being scored as a victory? Portal has some of the most endearing writing because it takes the stereotypes of "test gone wrong" (which built Half Life, among others) and the "lying computer", and twists them ultimately into "test gone right" ("This was a triumph") and "truthful computer" ("The difference between us is that I can feel pain" - prima facie so wrong, but on further reflection, so right).
But it also poses the greatest threat to the WGA. Just look at how it was developed. Yes, they had professional writers in the various cabals, and those guys are venerated for their work. Yet their development structure gave everyone input.
Create an environment where extremely creative people who specialize in different disciplines inspire each other to great heights, and the result is greater than any could achieve in their own domain, were turf boundaries established. To do so, however, requires an egalitarian environment antithetical to the traditional management/labor divide. Enslaved masses, forward!
Aye. It's exceedingly old now. It wasn't four years ago when I tried to sort it. Basically, the first-generation iBook didn't have AirPort built in. After that, they moved to all-AirPort all the time. Thanks to a custom port, you can only use the Apple cards. Thanks to 10.1, you can't use any third-party WiFi cards. So, four years ago, I had to sort this situation: here's a machine that labors under 10.1, and there are three options: A. spend $150-200 on Ebay for an Airport (802.11b) card that Apple no longer manufactured, B. Spend $150 on an OS upgrade that would degrade OS responsiveness without adding anythign system-critical, and another $100 on a USB Wireless card, or C. Do nothing, and wait for them to repeat their mistake and buy yet another Mac.
I took option C., and Mr. Jobs and the Mac horde otta be grateful for it.
I do enjoy these little posts, because it shows that there are always Macintosh fans who refuse to believe that Apple could ever do anything bad to their customers; every time I bring up an Apple failing (well, except for the Eudora abandonware issue that hit everyone last week), someone has to post that the problem doesn't exist. Guys, it's an OS. If, in the past, you'd only gone the Amiga route instead of the Macintosh one, you'd understand that brilliant UI design and amazing engineering are fine things, but the suits run strategy. All that fine work ain't gonna save you from marketing decisions, and a platform that insists on tight hardware control is going to have exactly these problems.
Then maybe you'd figure out why Firewire was a fiasco at a dollar a pop instead of a triumph.
My Parents have 4 Macintoshes in their house. Two they use, and two that ended up obsolete simply because Apple made them that way ahead of their time (okay, okay, that iBook could have been brought up to speed for only a $150 software update and a $150 (on Ebay only) legacy 802.11b card, 'cos Apple wouldn't think of making 802.11g for old tech).
Most people DON'T need all that. But most people DO need SOME of that. And if you add it all together, most people AREN'T going to get WHAT THEY NEED.
Now, you can debate whether the Mac approach is better than Microsoft's (=We give you ALL you need, but each bit of it only works 80% of the time. Most people will need to use FIVE such elements, so it will only work, (Pet 2.0 fans, help me out here) 32.768% of the time), but the fact is, fashionable obsolescence is part of Apple's game plan. And we can always needle you for it.