You're only limitation is that you won't be able to pirate OS X. How's that going to hurt you?
You can put Linux on it.
You can put Windows on it.
You just can't pirate OS X and move the software to another machine.
Seems like you're getting upset over nothing much.
I like your use of the phrase "the most evil technology imaginable." Are you sure that's strongly worded enough? Maybe you could invoke baby-eating and Godwin's law.
So many Slashdotters just don't seem to get the gist of the article.
The point is not that the industry is bad, wrong or not successful.
The point is that it could do a lot better than it is. There's more room for growth in game genres that aren't traditional.
Two examples - Myst and The Sims. These easily outstrip sales of games like Doom and Half-Life. They appeal to a wider audience.
Another example - those animal hunting games. Now, I hate those games, but I see them as bringing non-gamers into the fold and there were some big-sellers in those games. Bass fishing? Bear hunting? Seem silly to me, but then to the majority of non-gamers, so do most current games.
Yes, keep going with the great games that are out there, but also reach out to the current non-gamers.
I like the features of the new iMacs, but my iBook needs to make the three year mark (it's at around 20 months now). By then I'll be looking at 2nd-gen x86 iBooks, iMacs and maybe 1st-gen x86 PowerMacs.
Until then, my iBook has to do. That's painful for some of my dev work (which really would need 8-16GB RAM to do it right before I optimise) but it's still good enough.
Just because you were a big part of Bungie doesn't mean you know better than some guy on the Internet!
Cripes!
Next you're going to dispute the reasons behind the Microsoft purchase, when we all *know* it was a sell-out specifically designed to irritate Bungie's loyal (and oftentimes rabid) Mac fan-base.
I really must play Marathon again. For some reason that game really captured my imagination back in... 94-95 I think. One of the all-time great games.
Someone from the Open Source crowd wants to write a driver for a piece of hardware? knock yourselves out. Everything you need from Apple is available freely. Of course, you also need data from the hardware manufacturer, who may not be so open.
The current system has worked well, so why change it? The US is a bunch of foreigners, so why give them control over something so important? We've seen what the US does to science, so why give them control over our measurement of time itself?
Hmm... a lot of the arguments used to support keeping 'control of the Internet' in US hands can be applied here to keep control over time measurement *out* of US hands.
The unit itself is $3099 at Streetwise.com.au ($100 off Apple's price)
They add on 2GB RAM for an extra $569, but if you can squeak by with only 1.5GB it's just $299.
The batteries are $199 there as well.
So my total is $3597 for a slightly lower-spec'd machine. That's not bad, considering you get a (finally!) good screen resolution, a DVD burner, Radeon9700
The lesson - never buy RAM from a manufacturer. Apple are bad, but so are others (Dell, HP, etc)
If you can wait, you may want to hold off for the x86 PowerBooks in the first half of next year. If you just want to dip your toe in, try a Mac Mini. You can re-sell it in six months and get a good chunk of your money back.
I sometimes plug a Microsoft Media Pro keyboard (I think that's the name) into my iBook and with the driver installed, it functions correctly for all media keys. It even launches applications and stuff.
If you use Dashboard but want to reclaim your RAM afterwards, kill the Dock process. Dashboard widgets seem to run as child processes from the Dock, and when the Dock restarts it doesn't restart the Dashboard widgets.
Or you can turn the whole thing off with that shareware app... been around for ages... the icon is a control panel with tools coming out of it... my memory's gone! Tool something or Finder something... I'll try to remember and post back later...
My online gaming experiences have been full of kids typing obscenities, people I just can't compete with annhilating me at every turn and being accused of cheating when other players have lag issues.
I prefer to play against the computer because I can turn the AI difficulty up or down as I choose, it rarely trash-talks me and like others have said, can be paused.
I play for fun. I don't care if I never get to be a great player. It's not about that for me, and I don't have the time to invest anyway. Halo is a good single-player game, but without bots, I can't touch it for multi-player fun. I lose that part of the game, which is a shame because I think it could have been great.
X-Box Live is the most successful of the console online services, from everything I've seen, but it's not something I'll ever pay money for.
I see authentication requests a lot in installers, and I always wonder about them. Sure, I can check what's asking for the authentication, but there's a niggling doubt that it wouldn't take much to write a malicious piece of code that pretends to be a shareware installer but instead wipes everything outside the/System folder.
So far I've had problems, but I'd echo the parent post's request for a way to review what the application did with the authentication.
I work on MS SQL Server 2000. I used to work on MS Access.
Why don't I use other tools? I don't have access to them. People are forced into using what their companies provide, and from my position I can't drive that sort of change.
For what I need, Access was good. Now some of my databases are groaning at around 1-2GB, but they work smoothly and well because I manage them carefully.
SQL Server provides a much better set of tools than Access, and it's better supported by our IT department. It's the best tool I have available.
For many users, Access is good enough. For many other users, SQL Server is good enough. While I could fight battles with a national IT department (of a multinational company) to get a different DBMS in, it's just not worth the effort, it'd take too much time from my actual work and there's small likelihood that I'll succeed. There's a saying I like a lot - "Better done than perfect."
The units will sell out on release day, and probably there's been an artificial restriction on stock to ensure that.
But a few days later they'll be back. No-one could seriously believe that Microsoft will miss the holiday buyers, can they?
There will be no shortage, but there will be a few days wait for most buyers.
I'm going to sit this out for the first year, and then maybe buy one, if I like the look of Halo-3. I only bought the X-box for Halo-2, but then I upgraded to a PowerMac G4/450 back in 1999 because I thought Halo for the Mac was just around the corner. There were demos! At Macworld! Yes... I'm a long-suffering Bungie fan...
This is a huge issue for the industry, and it's good to see some notable people bringing attention to it.
We know that games don't cause crime (people cause crime!) and that they can't affect people's mental state more than a movie or book. (As an aside - anyone ever compare the effect of _Catcher In The Rye_ to Doom?)
But what *we* know isn't important - it's the wider public's perception of the gaming industry that really matters here. We see the great variety of fun games because we're close to the industry. The wider public see only the games that make the news, and for so long now the sort of games that make the news are associated with school shootings, suicides and on-screen sex (Hot Coffee - I'm looking at you!)
Does it matter if the general public get the wrong idea? Absolutely! They vote, they vastly outnumber gamers and they can be mobilised by people like Jack Thompson to force games to be banned from sale or to force the government to step in and regulate the industry.
Governments around the world show great desire to be seen to be tough on crime, and many are now pandering to religion in a cynical effort to woo voters. Think for a moment what an industry regulated by them would be. Imagine (for those of you in the US) if Jack Thompson was on the regulatory board.
That's what is at stake.
The perception of video games is awful. The rise in realism, combined with the media's need for a quick image or soundbite means that it's simple to grab a scene that makes just about any game look like a blood-fest. Well, maybe not Pikmin or Golf.
The way to turn this around is both simple and hard.
The simple part is to stop portraying characters as easy stereotypes - muscle-bound heroic men or stick-thin women with cavernous cleavage. The visual element is incredibly important and it's often used to make quick judgements about a game. The average age of gamers is rising, so the industry isn't targeting 13-year-old boys any more - it's men and women nearing their 30s. Get realistic and make games that look good *and* appeal to both men and women. This is just a matter of 3D models - trivial stuff.
The hard part is to promote the more positive aspects of gameplay. It's not all about killing - there's fantasy, escapism, exploration, strategy, problem-solving and so on. There are so many good things in gaming, and it is critical to make the general public see them rather than the continual violence that they're told games are all about.
Great! Let's think of some of the other success stories from competition with Microsoft! Netscape. OS/2 Warp. Just about every other word processor and spreadsheet app. Apple.
Some great success stories there. Everyone who goes up against MS seems to come off second best, and in this industry that often means the end. Apple have clung on, but the marketshare is undeniably lower now than back when Win95 was introduced. I think the reason they still exist is the hardware.
So, competing as a software-only company against MS is not the best strategy.
I'll echo the call for a business case. Selling to a bunch of geeks on Slashdot may make for popularity around here, but that's a tiny portion compared to the entire market. I'm not convinced that software sales of OS X would boom - most people use what came with their computer. Apple would have to change the way people think about their existing PCs, and that's a big ask.
As for the iPod killer coming along - it keeps coming along only to disappear again. The iPod is only part of the picture though - the whole picture includes iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. Who else has the whole solution? Maybe Sony, but they're just a bunch of rootkit-installing bastards.
The only iPod killers that have been successful have been from Apple themselves.
You may be an Apple fan, but that doesn't mean other Apple user's would agree with anything you say.
Every single transistor in the computer you typed your post on is a working example of Quantum Physics in action.
Every one of them. That's hundreds of millions of examples right in front of you.
Look around at the world. Quantum physics is *everywhere* and we make a lot of use of it. It's demonstrated in just about everything technological, it's verifiable using equipment (not cheap equipment, but you *can* do it) and it's well-documented and understood.
You say you want "TANGIBLE evidence" ? It's right there, literally in front of you. You just need to understand your world better.
Intelligent Design offers nothing to help us understand the Universe better. It draws a line in the sand and says "This side is ineffable. You cannot know anything more about it." That's the exact antithesis of Science, which is about saying "Why does this occur and how can we predict it?"
What does ID give you? How can we make use of that 'knowledge'? How can we use it to predict future events? Why should we stop questioning the Universe, and isn't that a fundamental abrogation of the intelligence that (ID believers say) we were given?
It's not science, any more than saying "Quantum Physics is wrong! My tests (which I won't give you the details of) prove it beyond all doubt!"
Although, we're now in a time when weird religious crap like Intelligent Design is popping up pretending to be science, so why not say the speed of light is wrong?
After all, the kids should be taught every theory out there, or at least the popular ones. If enough nutjobs get behind this one, then maybe it should be given equal time in science classes.
That'd make great Physics at Uni. "Well, there's this other theory, which says that Einstein is flat out wrong. It doesn't go on to say what a better answer is, but since we insist on equal time we're going to spend the first semester sitting quietly here."
The speed of light is 3! Transistors can't really work! It's all powered by tiny goblins! Someone redesigns the world every so often in ways impossible to understand or know! I think cats can read my mind!
It's the new science. Harder to use for understanding the Universe, but more fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Is the HTML rendering engine for Windows completely documented and open?
Apple's WebKit is not only both, but they open sourced it as well.
Seems like a different situation to me.
Independant artists selling on iTunes via CDbaby get about 65 cents of the 99 cent sale.
That's pretty good.
Artists under the RIAA umbrella get about 5-10c I think.
You're only limitation is that you won't be able to pirate OS X. How's that going to hurt you?
You can put Linux on it.
You can put Windows on it.
You just can't pirate OS X and move the software to another machine.
Seems like you're getting upset over nothing much.
I like your use of the phrase "the most evil technology imaginable." Are you sure that's strongly worded enough? Maybe you could invoke baby-eating and Godwin's law.
So many Slashdotters just don't seem to get the gist of the article.
The point is not that the industry is bad, wrong or not successful.
The point is that it could do a lot better than it is. There's more room for growth in game genres that aren't traditional.
Two examples - Myst and The Sims. These easily outstrip sales of games like Doom and Half-Life. They appeal to a wider audience.
Another example - those animal hunting games. Now, I hate those games, but I see them as bringing non-gamers into the fold and there were some big-sellers in those games. Bass fishing? Bear hunting? Seem silly to me, but then to the majority of non-gamers, so do most current games.
Yes, keep going with the great games that are out there, but also reach out to the current non-gamers.
I like the features of the new iMacs, but my iBook needs to make the three year mark (it's at around 20 months now). By then I'll be looking at 2nd-gen x86 iBooks, iMacs and maybe 1st-gen x86 PowerMacs.
Until then, my iBook has to do. That's painful for some of my dev work (which really would need 8-16GB RAM to do it right before I optimise) but it's still good enough.
Rubbish.
Even my iBook gets a brisk jogging pace up. It's not sprinting, but it's not doing so poorly either.
BG&E is a few years old now, but still well worth playing. If you see it in a bargain bin, buy it and try it out.
Just because you were a big part of Bungie doesn't mean you know better than some guy on the Internet!
Cripes!
Next you're going to dispute the reasons behind the Microsoft purchase, when we all *know* it was a sell-out specifically designed to irritate Bungie's loyal (and oftentimes rabid) Mac fan-base.
I really must play Marathon again. For some reason that game really captured my imagination back in... 94-95 I think. One of the all-time great games.
What did you order?
The Apple Store shows that the 12" PowerBook is US$1499, so you've probably ordered a bunch of extras to bump the cost up.
You didn't order RAM from Apple, did you? Only very silly people do that (this applies to pretty much any hardware manufacturer).
To a casual observer, it looks like you just bumped up the price to create an unfair comparison.
They already do this.
http://developer.apple.com/devicedrivers/
Someone from the Open Source crowd wants to write a driver for a piece of hardware? knock yourselves out. Everything you need from Apple is available freely. Of course, you also need data from the hardware manufacturer, who may not be so open.
The current system has worked well, so why change it?
The US is a bunch of foreigners, so why give them control over something so important?
We've seen what the US does to science, so why give them control over our measurement of time itself?
Hmm... a lot of the arguments used to support keeping 'control of the Internet' in US hands can be applied here to keep control over time measurement *out* of US hands.
The unit itself is $3099 at Streetwise.com.au ($100 off Apple's price)
They add on 2GB RAM for an extra $569, but if you can squeak by with only 1.5GB it's just $299.
The batteries are $199 there as well.
So my total is $3597 for a slightly lower-spec'd machine. That's not bad, considering you get a (finally!) good screen resolution, a DVD burner, Radeon9700
The lesson - never buy RAM from a manufacturer. Apple are bad, but so are others (Dell, HP, etc)
If you can wait, you may want to hold off for the x86 PowerBooks in the first half of next year. If you just want to dip your toe in, try a Mac Mini. You can re-sell it in six months and get a good chunk of your money back.
As for the keyboard - look to your drivers.
I sometimes plug a Microsoft Media Pro keyboard (I think that's the name) into my iBook and with the driver installed, it functions correctly for all media keys. It even launches applications and stuff.
If you use Dashboard but want to reclaim your RAM afterwards, kill the Dock process. Dashboard widgets seem to run as child processes from the Dock, and when the Dock restarts it doesn't restart the Dashboard widgets.
Or you can turn the whole thing off with that shareware app... been around for ages... the icon is a control panel with tools coming out of it... my memory's gone! Tool something or Finder something... I'll try to remember and post back later...
My online gaming experiences have been full of kids typing obscenities, people I just can't compete with annhilating me at every turn and being accused of cheating when other players have lag issues.
I prefer to play against the computer because I can turn the AI difficulty up or down as I choose, it rarely trash-talks me and like others have said, can be paused.
I play for fun. I don't care if I never get to be a great player. It's not about that for me, and I don't have the time to invest anyway. Halo is a good single-player game, but without bots, I can't touch it for multi-player fun. I lose that part of the game, which is a shame because I think it could have been great.
X-Box Live is the most successful of the console online services, from everything I've seen, but it's not something I'll ever pay money for.
Wow. Google must be broken and Apple.com must be down.
Is there a reason you can't find stuff out for yourself?
That's an extremely good point.
/System folder.
I see authentication requests a lot in installers, and I always wonder about them. Sure, I can check what's asking for the authentication, but there's a niggling doubt that it wouldn't take much to write a malicious piece of code that pretends to be a shareware installer but instead wipes everything outside the
So far I've had problems, but I'd echo the parent post's request for a way to review what the application did with the authentication.
I work on MS SQL Server 2000. I used to work on MS Access.
Why don't I use other tools? I don't have access to them. People are forced into using what their companies provide, and from my position I can't drive that sort of change.
For what I need, Access was good. Now some of my databases are groaning at around 1-2GB, but they work smoothly and well because I manage them carefully.
SQL Server provides a much better set of tools than Access, and it's better supported by our IT department. It's the best tool I have available.
For many users, Access is good enough. For many other users, SQL Server is good enough. While I could fight battles with a national IT department (of a multinational company) to get a different DBMS in, it's just not worth the effort, it'd take too much time from my actual work and there's small likelihood that I'll succeed. There's a saying I like a lot - "Better done than perfect."
The units will sell out on release day, and probably there's been an artificial restriction on stock to ensure that.
But a few days later they'll be back. No-one could seriously believe that Microsoft will miss the holiday buyers, can they?
There will be no shortage, but there will be a few days wait for most buyers.
I'm going to sit this out for the first year, and then maybe buy one, if I like the look of Halo-3. I only bought the X-box for Halo-2, but then I upgraded to a PowerMac G4/450 back in 1999 because I thought Halo for the Mac was just around the corner. There were demos! At Macworld! Yes... I'm a long-suffering Bungie fan...
What?
Absolutely not! It's not hard to get changes started.
It's only hard to change the public perception.
But hey - if you prefer the idea of external regulation, go for it.
I'd rather keep control inside the industry and see it produce whatever games it likes, so long as the general perception is good.
This is a huge issue for the industry, and it's good to see some notable people bringing attention to it.
We know that games don't cause crime (people cause crime!) and that they can't affect people's mental state more than a movie or book. (As an aside - anyone ever compare the effect of _Catcher In The Rye_ to Doom?)
But what *we* know isn't important - it's the wider public's perception of the gaming industry that really matters here. We see the great variety of fun games because we're close to the industry. The wider public see only the games that make the news, and for so long now the sort of games that make the news are associated with school shootings, suicides and on-screen sex (Hot Coffee - I'm looking at you!)
Does it matter if the general public get the wrong idea? Absolutely! They vote, they vastly outnumber gamers and they can be mobilised by people like Jack Thompson to force games to be banned from sale or to force the government to step in and regulate the industry.
Governments around the world show great desire to be seen to be tough on crime, and many are now pandering to religion in a cynical effort to woo voters. Think for a moment what an industry regulated by them would be. Imagine (for those of you in the US) if Jack Thompson was on the regulatory board.
That's what is at stake.
The perception of video games is awful. The rise in realism, combined with the media's need for a quick image or soundbite means that it's simple to grab a scene that makes just about any game look like a blood-fest. Well, maybe not Pikmin or Golf.
The way to turn this around is both simple and hard.
The simple part is to stop portraying characters as easy stereotypes - muscle-bound heroic men or stick-thin women with cavernous cleavage. The visual element is incredibly important and it's often used to make quick judgements about a game. The average age of gamers is rising, so the industry isn't targeting 13-year-old boys any more - it's men and women nearing their 30s. Get realistic and make games that look good *and* appeal to both men and women. This is just a matter of 3D models - trivial stuff.
The hard part is to promote the more positive aspects of gameplay. It's not all about killing - there's fantasy, escapism, exploration, strategy, problem-solving and so on. There are so many good things in gaming, and it is critical to make the general public see them rather than the continual violence that they're told games are all about.
Perception is reality.
If they use Halo 3 as a point against the Dreamcast, they should use Sonic Knights as a point against the XB360.
It seems like a foolish point to make, given the age of the DC and the fact that there are no commercial developers today.
Apple should *compete* with Microsoft?
Great! Let's think of some of the other success stories from competition with Microsoft!
Netscape. OS/2 Warp. Just about every other word processor and spreadsheet app. Apple.
Some great success stories there. Everyone who goes up against MS seems to come off second best, and in this industry that often means the end. Apple have clung on, but the marketshare is undeniably lower now than back when Win95 was introduced. I think the reason they still exist is the hardware.
So, competing as a software-only company against MS is not the best strategy.
I'll echo the call for a business case. Selling to a bunch of geeks on Slashdot may make for popularity around here, but that's a tiny portion compared to the entire market. I'm not convinced that software sales of OS X would boom - most people use what came with their computer. Apple would have to change the way people think about their existing PCs, and that's a big ask.
As for the iPod killer coming along - it keeps coming along only to disappear again. The iPod is only part of the picture though - the whole picture includes iTunes and the iTunes Music Store. Who else has the whole solution? Maybe Sony, but they're just a bunch of rootkit-installing bastards.
The only iPod killers that have been successful have been from Apple themselves.
You may be an Apple fan, but that doesn't mean other Apple user's would agree with anything you say.
Every single transistor in the computer you typed your post on is a working example of Quantum Physics in action.
Every one of them. That's hundreds of millions of examples right in front of you.
Look around at the world. Quantum physics is *everywhere* and we make a lot of use of it. It's demonstrated in just about everything technological, it's verifiable using equipment (not cheap equipment, but you *can* do it) and it's well-documented and understood.
You say you want "TANGIBLE evidence" ? It's right there, literally in front of you. You just need to understand your world better.
Intelligent Design offers nothing to help us understand the Universe better. It draws a line in the sand and says "This side is ineffable. You cannot know anything more about it." That's the exact antithesis of Science, which is about saying "Why does this occur and how can we predict it?"
What does ID give you? How can we make use of that 'knowledge'? How can we use it to predict future events? Why should we stop questioning the Universe, and isn't that a fundamental abrogation of the intelligence that (ID believers say) we were given?
It's not science, any more than saying "Quantum Physics is wrong! My tests (which I won't give you the details of) prove it beyond all doubt!"
Although, we're now in a time when weird religious crap like Intelligent Design is popping up pretending to be science, so why not say the speed of light is wrong?
After all, the kids should be taught every theory out there, or at least the popular ones. If enough nutjobs get behind this one, then maybe it should be given equal time in science classes.
That'd make great Physics at Uni. "Well, there's this other theory, which says that Einstein is flat out wrong. It doesn't go on to say what a better answer is, but since we insist on equal time we're going to spend the first semester sitting quietly here."
The speed of light is 3!
Transistors can't really work! It's all powered by tiny goblins!
Someone redesigns the world every so often in ways impossible to understand or know!
I think cats can read my mind!
It's the new science. Harder to use for understanding the Universe, but more fun.
Thanks. For some reason my mind went blank while typing earlier.
Maybe it's the effect of slaving over a hot database all day...