The MacBook is still a whole inch thick, but that's thinner that the 15" Aluminum. The one Apple channel sales person I spoke to today got an earful about the 12" and the need for a true sub-notebook (and battery life - add an hour to the battery and they can make it the old size.
And never mind the CPU performance when comparing to the G4 PowerBooks, the move to dual core and especially the faster frontside bus will do more to boost real-world performance than a per-clock performance boost.
Well... yes. Text-based benchmarking applications are exactly what Jobs was showing off on stage. Usefull benchmarks like Photoshop filters and Quake3 demos will appear as fast as applications become vailable in native mode.
For reference, I had enough hands-on time today to try my standard "kill the machine" benchmark on a 1.8GHz dual core iMac. I had a co-worker with me, his jaw dropped when I did this:
Go to/Applications. Switch to List view. Select All and hit cmd-right arrow. Select All again and hit cmd-O. As always, this totally artificial test completely staggered the poor machine. The Finder did manage to open 15-20 windows quite quickly. The Dock however did NOT appreciate having to display 70-odd applications (several being high-end PowerPC applications (Office and CS2)) all opening at once; it dropped to seconds-per-frame almost immediately.
I'll try some more realistic tests later in the week.
Apple does seem to be very good service when repairing manufacturing defects. They must be spending an awful lot on DHL to move stuff around. I had a 17" Studio Display go down at four years of age. A little research revealed that it was a known problem and under a warranty extension. I spent less than 5 minutes on the phone with Apple, got an empty box with a return label the next day, and a working monitor two days later - very fast turnaround at the repair center. That kind of logistics isn't cheap, especially when applied to a $400 monitor sold four years ago.
Your correct example would be Half-Life 2. WoW ships with Mac and Windows executables in the same box. Mac Half Life was cancelled late in development by Sierra, for which those involved will burn in Hell for all eternity.
The *very* first game I am running in emulation on an Intel PowerMac is going to be Half Life, just to finally play that on a Mac.
The second will probably be PinMAME since the Mac version has been in beta forever. Half Life 2 is a strong possibility of my flight-sim rig doesn't get upgraded by then (drive, not cpu kthx).
Yeah, I'll second the recommendation for going to the local game store. My current rig is a whitebox from a local store. I picked out CPU, motherboard, graphics and sound cards and called them and told 'em to put it all together, pick out case, power and fans - and install Windows and all the drivers for everything. I picked it up with an Admin and a user account created for me, took it home and dropped in my Earthlink CD. No hassle, and there's someone I could actually go and yell at if I even needed to.
The March Upcountry series is actually quite good. It reads like more of Ringo's work than Weber's, for what that's worth. The series works out to be a pretty good coming of age tale, and the paeans to the martial virtues are not overblown. I caught the first two books when they were in the free library and then bought the last two.
Ahh Starfire. The original pocket edition is one of the best games of its generation. It hasn't stood up well - although I prefer the 2d6 weapon rolls to the 1d10 just because I love the feel of the 2d6 bell curve- so I'm playing Full Thrust these days, predominantly online with FTJava - multiplayer, transport over email so not realtime, fog of war, and fighters coming this week in the 1.0 release. Starfire was cursed with mediocre expansions and overcomplex campaign games. Weber came along for the 2nd edition and rewrote the game to be more complex to handle the large battles he wanted (yes, that's what happened). And he wrote novels. They degenerated into one massive assault through a warp point after another. There's no ftl travel, you go through warp poitns and come out in another system. And they're easily defended with vast minefields and ginormous fortresses. Ungameably ugly in my opinion, you're forced into brute force up-the-middle attacks. This forces fleet sizes upwards to sustain the horrific casualty rates (90% attrition in fighter units in battle after battle, 90% percent people. Add in an even more extreme version of the technological one-upmanship in the Honor Harrington books and you get a really flashy strategic situation that's utterly boring to play.
On the other hand, the game for the Honor Harrington series is based on the excellent Attack Vector, which manages to put 3d Newtonian space combat on the tabletop. They're calling it the Saganami Island Tactical Simulator and yes, I do have a (small, non-financial) interest in the company. It's on my Christmas list for myself, just ordered it now (yes, I've been good).
1. the "move an application anywhere" refers to Carbon/Cocoa.app applications. Try and move something out of/usr/bin and you'll have the same issues Linux (or an *Nix) does.
2. It's technically an admin (user is member of sudoers) password, not a root password. Some few drivers must be installed from an admin account (Xerox/EFI, I'm looking in your direction).
3. Better than "no complaints" when you delete a user, the system will offer to create an image of the deleted homedirectory and place it in/Users/Deleted\ Users. Very nice.
Oh yes. This is GOLDEN advice. I cannot overemphasize how much this will *improve* your worklife. You gte to deal with the user community when stuff isn't broken. They get to ask you the low-priority "while you're here" questions that usually improve their computing experience (or skill level !). And, as the OP pointed out, it's GOOD for them to see you when thing are running; don't be a harbinger of doom.
Of course, this is really only possible when you're doing 2nd- or 3rd-level support. Helldesk types are tied to the phones, and the BOFHs are busy in the back room. But if you can, it's an excellent way to build rapport with the users. And, on a slow day, it's a good way to log a lot of tickets into the system and make your numbers look good. You can also pick up pet projects that provide interesting work than just rebooting something.
As muchas I hate to link to Amazon, The Rediscovery of Man is a fantastic collection, containing all the mandatory stories. Which, really, would be all of them.
It's actually possible for a publisher to make money by giving stuff away. Take a look at a publisher who is giving stuff away and seeing an increase in sales. The basic gimmick is to give away the first couple of books in a series away online. This solves the problem of selling sequels to people who haven't read the first books and in royalty figures listed on the site it also boosts sales in the author's other series. They've gone so far as to put upwards of 20 books on a disk bound into some recent novels. The latest Honor Harrington novel is something like the 14th in the series, and comes with all of the earlier books.
The free ebooks come in a variety of formats; nicely framed html, text, and a couple of popular (and free) ebook readers for mobile devices. But they've found that enough people prefer to read actual books and buy them that they come out ahead on the deal.
Incidentally, Baen publishes mainly military science fiction.
Mr. Stewart is an exception to the rule, as he is as accomplished a voice actor as he is in person. He's getting at least as much work in TV commercial voiceovers as the rest of the cast combined (opinion, no research done). Heck, Patrick Stewart would probably have done the voice work for the game even if he hadn't done the movie.
Heh, imagine the poor SOB in 50 years who has to play Dr. X in the remake. The comparisons he'll get.....
Yes. It'll warn her, but the wrong button on that dialog *will* wipe the iPod. Annoying, yes. The thing to do is to sneak the MP3s onto the new computer and put 'em on the 'pod from there. Sounds like its a little late in this case.
Pick a harder counterexample. Microsoft is using its profits from Office and Windows to extend its domination to other segments. It's funding MSN not so much to make a profit as to try and keep Google from owning that space. They occasionally get their wrist slapped for this, you can't legally use monopoly leverage in one market to hurt your competition in another (cf. Netscape).
Actually, you don't even have to ask them not to give any of the money from a PSP purchase to the music division. Each division's sales and expenses are tracked wholly seperately. They only add up together when the most high-level analyses are done, like the Earnings Per Share (EPS). And the analysts can see exactly where any shortfalls from expectations came from. Other than pretty much that, in any large corporation each department will be budgeted and tracked seperately.
Oh that's a very nice point about the jumping-off-the-bridge thing. You're quite right. Anybody who doesn't get that drilled into them in early childhood is dangerously mis-socialised. And that, from most people's experience, is obviously the parent's responsibility.
Let's face it, parents raising children in the 70s and 80s didn't do a very good job.
Also, I think the most likely explanation is indeed that both the crime wave and the TV watching were both caused by the same cultural shift. Either that, or TV and crime waves cause Bhutan.
Ok, that's one anecdote about seeing a 360 crash playing CoD2. I'm going to need to hear a lot more reports (or see one do it myself) before I actually believe this. Besides, I'm not wasting my last mod point on a +1: Funny for the parent.
Agreed. KH is no more a kids game than any of the FF series. It's a good storyline, with a good Active Time system and neat bosses to kill. Note that not only is interacting with the Disney classics and FF characters cool, but the original KH material is cool too (the end stages are very well designed).
Yeah, Treo's are nice. A couple of people in the office have those with 1 GB cards. Those are gonna fill up with email real fast. I've always liked Palm devices, and these function as a phone very well. iTunes on these would be very nice. And I can't wait until someone puts a hard drive into one - be a worry about battery life though.
Heh, it's a very nice monitor, but Google says a Sony 32" flatscreen is $400-$550 and Apple's 30" is $2500. But, if you need a large monitor anyway then just put the thing on a wall-mounted arm. Just swing it so you can see the monitor from the TV and use a Bluetooth remote.
Oh, and my employer is employed by Apple in a marketing or advertising capacity.
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The MacBook is still a whole inch thick, but that's thinner that the 15" Aluminum. The one Apple channel sales person I spoke to today got an earful about the 12" and the need for a true sub-notebook (and battery life - add an hour to the battery and they can make it the old size.
And never mind the CPU performance when comparing to the G4 PowerBooks, the move to dual core and especially the faster frontside bus will do more to boost real-world performance than a per-clock performance boost.
Well... yes. Text-based benchmarking applications are exactly what Jobs was showing off on stage. Usefull benchmarks like Photoshop filters and Quake3 demos will appear as fast as applications become vailable in native mode.
/Applications. Switch to List view. Select All and hit cmd-right arrow. Select All again and hit cmd-O. As always, this totally artificial test completely staggered the poor machine. The Finder did manage to open 15-20 windows quite quickly. The Dock however did NOT appreciate having to display 70-odd applications (several being high-end PowerPC applications (Office and CS2)) all opening at once; it dropped to seconds-per-frame almost immediately.
For reference, I had enough hands-on time today to try my standard "kill the machine" benchmark on a 1.8GHz dual core iMac. I had a co-worker with me, his jaw dropped when I did this:
Go to
I'll try some more realistic tests later in the week.
Apple does seem to be very good service when repairing manufacturing defects. They must be spending an awful lot on DHL to move stuff around. I had a 17" Studio Display go down at four years of age. A little research revealed that it was a known problem and under a warranty extension. I spent less than 5 minutes on the phone with Apple, got an empty box with a return label the next day, and a working monitor two days later - very fast turnaround at the repair center. That kind of logistics isn't cheap, especially when applied to a $400 monitor sold four years ago.
Your correct example would be Half-Life 2. WoW ships with Mac and Windows executables in the same box. Mac Half Life was cancelled late in development by Sierra, for which those involved will burn in Hell for all eternity.
The *very* first game I am running in emulation on an Intel PowerMac is going to be Half Life, just to finally play that on a Mac.
The second will probably be PinMAME since the Mac version has been in beta forever. Half Life 2 is a strong possibility of my flight-sim rig doesn't get upgraded by then (drive, not cpu kthx).
Yeah, I'll second the recommendation for going to the local game store. My current rig is a whitebox from a local store. I picked out CPU, motherboard, graphics and sound cards and called them and told 'em to put it all together, pick out case, power and fans - and install Windows and all the drivers for everything. I picked it up with an Admin and a user account created for me, took it home and dropped in my Earthlink CD. No hassle, and there's someone I could actually go and yell at if I even needed to.
Tty thinking of that post as "the most understated Matrix reference ever".
What Ferengi rule of aquistion covers "the dead do not buy" or "don't limit your market without good reason"?
I never memorized the Rules of Acquisition, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say "all of them".
Lucky for Blizzard, a lot of people like pinball.
The March Upcountry series is actually quite good. It reads like more of Ringo's work than Weber's, for what that's worth. The series works out to be a pretty good coming of age tale, and the paeans to the martial virtues are not overblown. I caught the first two books when they were in the free library and then bought the last two.
Ahh Starfire. The original pocket edition is one of the best games of its generation. It hasn't stood up well - although I prefer the 2d6 weapon rolls to the 1d10 just because I love the feel of the 2d6 bell curve- so I'm playing Full Thrust these days, predominantly online with FTJava - multiplayer, transport over email so not realtime, fog of war, and fighters coming this week in the 1.0 release. Starfire was cursed with mediocre expansions and overcomplex campaign games. Weber came along for the 2nd edition and rewrote the game to be more complex to handle the large battles he wanted (yes, that's what happened). And he wrote novels. They degenerated into one massive assault through a warp point after another. There's no ftl travel, you go through warp poitns and come out in another system. And they're easily defended with vast minefields and ginormous fortresses. Ungameably ugly in my opinion, you're forced into brute force up-the-middle attacks. This forces fleet sizes upwards to sustain the horrific casualty rates (90% attrition in fighter units in battle after battle, 90% percent people. Add in an even more extreme version of the technological one-upmanship in the Honor Harrington books and you get a really flashy strategic situation that's utterly boring to play.
On the other hand, the game for the Honor Harrington series is based on the excellent Attack Vector, which manages to put 3d Newtonian space combat on the tabletop. They're calling it the Saganami Island Tactical Simulator and yes, I do have a (small, non-financial) interest in the company. It's on my Christmas list for myself, just ordered it now (yes, I've been good).
1. the "move an application anywhere" refers to Carbon/Cocoa .app applications. Try and move something out of /usr/bin and you'll have the same issues Linux (or an *Nix) does.
/Users/Deleted\ Users. Very nice.
2. It's technically an admin (user is member of sudoers) password, not a root password. Some few drivers must be installed from an admin account (Xerox/EFI, I'm looking in your direction).
3. Better than "no complaints" when you delete a user, the system will offer to create an image of the deleted homedirectory and place it in
Quibbles aside, try OS X.
Oh yes. This is GOLDEN advice. I cannot overemphasize how much this will *improve* your worklife. You gte to deal with the user community when stuff isn't broken. They get to ask you the low-priority "while you're here" questions that usually improve their computing experience (or skill level !). And, as the OP pointed out, it's GOOD for them to see you when thing are running; don't be a harbinger of doom.
Of course, this is really only possible when you're doing 2nd- or 3rd-level support. Helldesk types are tied to the phones, and the BOFHs are busy in the back room. But if you can, it's an excellent way to build rapport with the users. And, on a slow day, it's a good way to log a lot of tickets into the system and make your numbers look good. You can also pick up pet projects that provide interesting work than just rebooting something.
As muchas I hate to link to Amazon, The Rediscovery of Man is a fantastic collection, containing all the mandatory stories. Which, really, would be all of them.
It's actually possible for a publisher to make money by giving stuff away. Take a look at a publisher who is giving stuff away and seeing an increase in sales. The basic gimmick is to give away the first couple of books in a series away online. This solves the problem of selling sequels to people who haven't read the first books and in royalty figures listed on the site it also boosts sales in the author's other series. They've gone so far as to put upwards of 20 books on a disk bound into some recent novels. The latest Honor Harrington novel is something like the 14th in the series, and comes with all of the earlier books.
The free ebooks come in a variety of formats; nicely framed html, text, and a couple of popular (and free) ebook readers for mobile devices. But they've found that enough people prefer to read actual books and buy them that they come out ahead on the deal.
Incidentally, Baen publishes mainly military science fiction.
Mr. Stewart is an exception to the rule, as he is as accomplished a voice actor as he is in person. He's getting at least as much work in TV commercial voiceovers as the rest of the cast combined (opinion, no research done). Heck, Patrick Stewart would probably have done the voice work for the game even if he hadn't done the movie.
Heh, imagine the poor SOB in 50 years who has to play Dr. X in the remake. The comparisons he'll get.....
Yes. It'll warn her, but the wrong button on that dialog *will* wipe the iPod. Annoying, yes. The thing to do is to sneak the MP3s onto the new computer and put 'em on the 'pod from there. Sounds like its a little late in this case.
Pick a harder counterexample. Microsoft is using its profits from Office and Windows to extend its domination to other segments. It's funding MSN not so much to make a profit as to try and keep Google from owning that space. They occasionally get their wrist slapped for this, you can't legally use monopoly leverage in one market to hurt your competition in another (cf. Netscape).
Actually, you don't even have to ask them not to give any of the money from a PSP purchase to the music division. Each division's sales and expenses are tracked wholly seperately. They only add up together when the most high-level analyses are done, like the Earnings Per Share (EPS). And the analysts can see exactly where any shortfalls from expectations came from. Other than pretty much that, in any large corporation each department will be budgeted and tracked seperately.
Oh that's a very nice point about the jumping-off-the-bridge thing. You're quite right. Anybody who doesn't get that drilled into them in early childhood is dangerously mis-socialised. And that, from most people's experience, is obviously the parent's responsibility.
Let's face it, parents raising children in the 70s and 80s didn't do a very good job.
Also, I think the most likely explanation is indeed that both the crime wave and the TV watching were both caused by the same cultural shift. Either that, or TV and crime waves cause Bhutan.
Ok, that's one anecdote about seeing a 360 crash playing CoD2. I'm going to need to hear a lot more reports (or see one do it myself) before I actually believe this. Besides, I'm not wasting my last mod point on a +1: Funny for the parent.
Agreed. KH is no more a kids game than any of the FF series. It's a good storyline, with a good Active Time system and neat bosses to kill. Note that not only is interacting with the Disney classics and FF characters cool, but the original KH material is cool too (the end stages are very well designed).
While you're there, check out the new video they did. Very nice space scenes and combat shots, all in-engine and a great electronica soundtrack.
The only reason I dropped out is because I wanted to play lone wolf and the gameplay turned into corp v corp so a solo player had no chance.
Yeah, Treo's are nice. A couple of people in the office have those with 1 GB cards. Those are gonna fill up with email real fast. I've always liked Palm devices, and these function as a phone very well. iTunes on these would be very nice. And I can't wait until someone puts a hard drive into one - be a worry about battery life though.
Oh, it'll be patched. Everything is. Take 2 can't afford to piss that many people off. They would like to sell another game or two someday.
But it sounds like I may need the "wait for a couple patches, then demo a warez copy" (did pay for Civ III done that way) technique for this one.
Down to 70% bad on 31 votes :-)
Heh, it's a very nice monitor, but Google says a Sony 32" flatscreen is $400-$550 and Apple's 30" is $2500. But, if you need a large monitor anyway then just put the thing on a wall-mounted arm. Just swing it so you can see the monitor from the TV and use a Bluetooth remote.
Oh, and my employer is employed by Apple in a marketing or advertising capacity.