I mentioned this upthread earlier, but I'll reply here as well. The G5 iMac with 256MB RAM performs remarkably well, very smooth transitioning between applications, navigating in the Finder etc. This is not how a 256MB Mac used to run, even under 10.3. We didn't try iMovie, but that can't possibly run well in 256MB, kind of proving the OP's point, but the bare-bones config is a lot more useful than it used to be. If enough of the speedup is in video and component updates rather than CPU, a headless G4 should be usable at 256MB.
Pricewatch.com is listing PC3200 256MB at $24 and 512MB at $45. Assuming wholesale prices follow a similar ratio[1], Apple is adding $10-$15 to their margin per unit by including the smaller chip. Note that 1GB chips are at $104 and 2GB at $279. We'll start seeing Macs ship with a single 512MB standard soon, but there's too much margin to be had on the bigger RAM upgrades to change yet. Probably this year, but not necessarily.
One other point to consider is that the laptops need the memory more, to save disk access and because swap space on laptop drives is horribly slow. But look at the prices [1] PC2700 memory is roughly $25 for 128MB, $35-$53 for 256MB and up around $80 minimum for a 512MB chip. As long as those ratios hold, PowerBooks will ship with 256MB standard. Don't look for that to change anytime soon, and don't expect a stable notebook with cheap RAM in it. Those $35 256s may not even be recognized by a PowerBook, let alone run without errors in one. Get Kingston, be happy.
[1] If anyone knows a good site for checking actual wholesale prices rather than nitwits who like putting that on their page so Google returns them for searches on 'wholesale' I'd be grateful to see it.
I've had an iMac G5 open for a RAM upgrade. Once you get the back case off, you're looking right at the whole motherboard. Every component is accessible, including the video card (64MB GeForce FX 5200 Ultra) in the only expansion slot, an 8x AGP. Expansion is through USB/Firewire since there are no open PCI slots, but that still leaves plenty of expansion options.
One of these with a late-model G4 in it for $499 would be a pretty good deal, I could use two. It may not be in the 'impulse buy' price range for a lot of people, but it should fall nicely into the 'grandma wants a computer' bracket.
Incidentally, the G5 we had showed up before it's extra RAM so it was in use for a couple of days with only 256MB. And it ran as slick as owl snot in 10.3.7. I ran it through its basic multimedia and MS Office paces and didn't see any spinning beachballs. Something at the (hardware) component level has really clicked into place, this is completely usable at the factory-standard RAM configs.
I'd say the point to this thread is that the UI defaults in Windows are simply wrong. And turn off "Personalized Menus" while you're at it, that's an abomination.
On the other hand, there are now nice new trade paperback editions of the Earthsea cycle available. Some of her other works are in this reprint series as well. If TV is anything like Hollywood, she'll see more for the sale of the new editions than in residuals on the miniseries.
Nahh, that's easy to structure. Setup and character development, 15-20 minutes. Action sequence: 10 minutes. Regrouping and character interaction: 15-20 minutes. Massive Action sequence: 45 minutes. Finale and coda: 10 minutes. Hey presto, 95-105 minutes worth of movie. Plenty of time for other characters, teamwork, etc. and lots of time for fragging demons on a run through hell.
There's one real-world reason for that: they may not have the budget for two servers. Best practices say you have an identical piece of hardware for each of your mission-critical servers so you can just restore backups and boot it up. This can be very, very, very expensive. If two days of downtime is cheaper (think weekend) then you take the downtime.
Ah yes, the 'limited, lethal' theory of crowd control. Snipers take out everyone with an armband, clipboard, megaphone or cellphone simultaneously. The 'troublemakers' get taken out theoretically leaving the rest of the crowd scared but leaderless.
Of course, most governments who'll do that will go right for the next level and just fire volleys into the crowd.
Speedhackers on the other hand require no license and there is no bag limit. Go Blizzard ! And since the kind of obsessive nutjobs who'll cheat also signed up early, the first server cluster may see slightly lower populations as a result.
2. Two effects from this: a) Lycos updates their client to ignore their own IP range and b) the spamvertised site is now advertising for an anti-spam campaign. Sounds good to me.
One more note on the Home zones that's important. There are NPCs guarding all of the population centers that will attack enemies flagged for PvP. And in the newbie areas, these NPC are very high level. The guards around the Night Elf starting areas are level 62 for example; and yes, the PC cap is at 60. The higher-level the PCs are, the lower level the guards in the area will be. At the border between a Home and a Contested territory there might just be some level 40s.
Food is used to boost your healing rate if you're willing to sit down for a bit. Some foods can make you "well fed" which also boosts, iirc, Stamina. I use it, other people use it. It's handy, but don't waste more than one inventory slot on food and you can probably keep yourself supplied from drops (this isn't GTA:SA). Unless you have a pet, then you need to keep them well-fed so they stay happy, build Loyalty and stay in the 125% of normal damage state. Food costs can make some pets very expensive, but if you really want a raptor...
Weapons and armor take durability damage in combat, and everything you have takes 25% if you use a Spirit Healer instead of doing a corpse run. I make a point of getting everything repaired whenever I'm in town, that way forgetting once won't get me killed. So no, not significantly. Think of it as a small tax on combat. I do not know if PCs can repair their own or other's equipment. There are probably spells/items/monsters that do durability damage.
Tip on crafting for those who don't care for it: pick up Herbalism and Alchemy anyway, that combo produces healing and buff potions for next to free. You can always sell herbs you aren't going to use for a little walking-around money.
Umm, if you actually click something Firefox is *supposed* to allow the popup. Same for Safari which I'm using right now. This also appears to be the case for the gamecopyworld.com situation - the popup shows up when you click a link.
Well, I think Fox has already turned your treatment for The Jungle Book into at least one TV series...
As for Cinderella, you might be interested in the Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. An absolutely smashing retelling of Cinderella from the viewpoint of the stepsisters. No product placement in this one.
By the same author, and something I'm very surprised hasn't been mentioned so far, is Wicked, which isn't darker per se, but it is an outstanding novel, being in the main the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Somewhere, somewhen a green girlchild was born, and things can only go downhill from there. The treatment of the political situation in Oz during the Wizard's reign is quite interesting, if only for being considered at all.
This has already been adapted for Broadway, one wishes the movie rights get acted on quickly to pre-empt this inevitable train-wreck of a project.
My experience in the betas of WoW are that finding an ad hoc group for one tough boss or instanced dungeon is very easy. Now, finding GOOD players, like for Ragefire Chasm (go Horde !), isn't so easy. But if you can't find a group in short order either it's 4am in the server's local timezone or you've been a jerk on the channels.
This may be Microsoft's biggest HCI flaw ever. The second one is whatever caused our lead Filemaker developer to accidentally and irretrievably delete an entire project in Access 97 a mere two hours into a product evaluation.. But number one is a threefer: making interface elements moving targets, hiding a large portion of the menu items from view, and adding an extra click to access the hidden items.
The unspoken prime directive of interface design is No Moving Targets. It makes the UI harder to learn, slower to use and more frustrating. This implementation of menus does a grave disservice to novice suers (sorry, too many SCO articles). The best way to learn what a program does is to explore the menus. Making that an unecessarily time consuming and frustrating task discourages novices from learning [1]. People learn an interface both visually and kinetically. Kinesthetic memory plays a big role in how we learn software [2], moving targets retards this process. And by making everyone's menus different you create a support nightmare.
The main role of a menu is to group common functions spatially without taking up much of the screen (this is one reason why Apple has stuck with a single menu bar for 20 years). The introduction of hierarchical menus was a controversial move in interface design, since it hid some of the commands. The Views menu in a word processor is a good example. They're a necessary evil since menus can't be too long either. But when Windows hides the rarely used functions they remove those functions from the user's ken altogether, defeating the purpose of menus.
The rarely used fucntions can be the most important. Adding an extra click to get at the more powerful functions hinders the intermediate users. There is always the option to customize the menus or keyboard shortcuts, but requiring the suer to do that to easily perform any but the most basic functions is a sign of poor design.
Their concept was probably a Marketing idea: make the menus learn how the user works and adapt themselves accordingly. It looks great on a presentation but you wouldn't want to use it.
[1] Yes, you can point to this and say that Windows causes stupid users.
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I mentioned this upthread earlier, but I'll reply here as well. The G5 iMac with 256MB RAM performs remarkably well, very smooth transitioning between applications, navigating in the Finder etc. This is not how a 256MB Mac used to run, even under 10.3. We didn't try iMovie, but that can't possibly run well in 256MB, kind of proving the OP's point, but the bare-bones config is a lot more useful than it used to be. If enough of the speedup is in video and component updates rather than CPU, a headless G4 should be usable at 256MB.
Pricewatch.com is listing PC3200 256MB at $24 and 512MB at $45. Assuming wholesale prices follow a similar ratio[1], Apple is adding $10-$15 to their margin per unit by including the smaller chip. Note that 1GB chips are at $104 and 2GB at $279. We'll start seeing Macs ship with a single 512MB standard soon, but there's too much margin to be had on the bigger RAM upgrades to change yet. Probably this year, but not necessarily.
One other point to consider is that the laptops need the memory more, to save disk access and because swap space on laptop drives is horribly slow. But look at the prices [1] PC2700 memory is roughly $25 for 128MB, $35-$53 for 256MB and up around $80 minimum for a 512MB chip. As long as those ratios hold, PowerBooks will ship with 256MB standard. Don't look for that to change anytime soon, and don't expect a stable notebook with cheap RAM in it. Those $35 256s may not even be recognized by a PowerBook, let alone run without errors in one. Get Kingston, be happy.
[1] If anyone knows a good site for checking actual wholesale prices rather than nitwits who like putting that on their page so Google returns them for searches on 'wholesale' I'd be grateful to see it.
I've had an iMac G5 open for a RAM upgrade. Once you get the back case off, you're looking right at the whole motherboard. Every component is accessible, including the video card (64MB GeForce FX 5200 Ultra) in the only expansion slot, an 8x AGP. Expansion is through USB/Firewire since there are no open PCI slots, but that still leaves plenty of expansion options.
One of these with a late-model G4 in it for $499 would be a pretty good deal, I could use two. It may not be in the 'impulse buy' price range for a lot of people, but it should fall nicely into the 'grandma wants a computer' bracket.
Incidentally, the G5 we had showed up before it's extra RAM so it was in use for a couple of days with only 256MB. And it ran as slick as owl snot in 10.3.7. I ran it through its basic multimedia and MS Office paces and didn't see any spinning beachballs. Something at the (hardware) component level has really clicked into place, this is completely usable at the factory-standard RAM configs.
Nice work, I haven't seen that troll for ages.
I'd say the point to this thread is that the UI defaults in Windows are simply wrong. And turn off "Personalized Menus" while you're at it, that's an abomination.
I'm gonna have to start reading a.s.r again, should be some gripping reading coming up.
Apple is actually wrong in the release notes. You unmount the volume, disconnect the drive and THEN AND ONLY THEN do you turn the damn thing off.
I hope everyone reads that and does the Right Thing anyway.
Heck, I've got room on my Friends list. Quality people, the both of 'em.
On the other hand, there are now nice new trade paperback editions of the Earthsea cycle available. Some of her other works are in this reprint series as well. If TV is anything like Hollywood, she'll see more for the sale of the new editions than in residuals on the miniseries.
Nahh, that's easy to structure. Setup and character development, 15-20 minutes. Action sequence: 10 minutes. Regrouping and character interaction: 15-20 minutes. Massive Action sequence: 45 minutes. Finale and coda: 10 minutes. Hey presto, 95-105 minutes worth of movie. Plenty of time for other characters, teamwork, etc. and lots of time for fragging demons on a run through hell.
The English language is the unintended progeny of the attempts of French speaking soldiers to pick up German speaking barmaids.
There's one real-world reason for that: they may not have the budget for two servers. Best practices say you have an identical piece of hardware for each of your mission-critical servers so you can just restore backups and boot it up. This can be very, very, very expensive. If two days of downtime is cheaper (think weekend) then you take the downtime.
"You threw a telepath out a third-story window on Io !"
"Into a pool sir !"
"I'll assume you knew that was there before you threw him out that window."
Ah yes, the 'limited, lethal' theory of crowd control. Snipers take out everyone with an armband, clipboard, megaphone or cellphone simultaneously. The 'troublemakers' get taken out theoretically leaving the rest of the crowd scared but leaderless.
Of course, most governments who'll do that will go right for the next level and just fire volleys into the crowd.
Speedhackers on the other hand require no license and there is no bag limit. Go Blizzard ! And since the kind of obsessive nutjobs who'll cheat also signed up early, the first server cluster may see slightly lower populations as a result.
2. Two effects from this: a) Lycos updates their client to ignore their own IP range and b) the spamvertised site is now advertising for an anti-spam campaign. Sounds good to me.
yeah, yer a n00b. There are people around the starting areas *with* guns.
Yes, you can buy the skill to use a gun. But you won't get the auto-fire skill as only hunters get that.
One more note on the Home zones that's important. There are NPCs guarding all of the population centers that will attack enemies flagged for PvP. And in the newbie areas, these NPC are very high level. The guards around the Night Elf starting areas are level 62 for example; and yes, the PC cap is at 60. The higher-level the PCs are, the lower level the guards in the area will be. At the border between a Home and a Contested territory there might just be some level 40s.
Food is used to boost your healing rate if you're willing to sit down for a bit. Some foods can make you "well fed" which also boosts, iirc, Stamina. I use it, other people use it. It's handy, but don't waste more than one inventory slot on food and you can probably keep yourself supplied from drops (this isn't GTA:SA). Unless you have a pet, then you need to keep them well-fed so they stay happy, build Loyalty and stay in the 125% of normal damage state. Food costs can make some pets very expensive, but if you really want a raptor...
Weapons and armor take durability damage in combat, and everything you have takes 25% if you use a Spirit Healer instead of doing a corpse run. I make a point of getting everything repaired whenever I'm in town, that way forgetting once won't get me killed. So no, not significantly. Think of it as a small tax on combat. I do not know if PCs can repair their own or other's equipment. There are probably spells/items/monsters that do durability damage.
Tip on crafting for those who don't care for it: pick up Herbalism and Alchemy anyway, that combo produces healing and buff potions for next to free. You can always sell herbs you aren't going to use for a little walking-around money.
Umm, if you actually click something Firefox is *supposed* to allow the popup. Same for Safari which I'm using right now. This also appears to be the case for the gamecopyworld.com situation - the popup shows up when you click a link.
Well, I think Fox has already turned your treatment for The Jungle Book into at least one TV series...
As for Cinderella, you might be interested in the Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. An absolutely smashing retelling of Cinderella from the viewpoint of the stepsisters. No product placement in this one.
By the same author, and something I'm very surprised hasn't been mentioned so far, is Wicked, which isn't darker per se, but it is an outstanding novel, being in the main the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Somewhere, somewhen a green girlchild was born, and things can only go downhill from there. The treatment of the political situation in Oz during the Wizard's reign is quite interesting, if only for being considered at all.
This has already been adapted for Broadway, one wishes the movie rights get acted on quickly to pre-empt this inevitable train-wreck of a project.
10% ?
A statistic I'll cheerfully believe.
I can, and here's a hint:
It ain't Duke Nukem Forever
I think so, but I don't think they made that many copies of E.T.
Never seen someone agree with a post before ?
My experience in the betas of WoW are that finding an ad hoc group for one tough boss or instanced dungeon is very easy. Now, finding GOOD players, like for Ragefire Chasm (go Horde !), isn't so easy. But if you can't find a group in short order either it's 4am in the server's local timezone or you've been a jerk on the channels.
This may be Microsoft's biggest HCI flaw ever. The second one is whatever caused our lead Filemaker developer to accidentally and irretrievably delete an entire project in Access 97 a mere two hours into a product evaluation.. But number one is a threefer: making interface elements moving targets, hiding a large portion of the menu items from view, and adding an extra click to access the hidden items.
The unspoken prime directive of interface design is No Moving Targets. It makes the UI harder to learn, slower to use and more frustrating. This implementation of menus does a grave disservice to novice suers (sorry, too many SCO articles). The best way to learn what a program does is to explore the menus. Making that an unecessarily time consuming and frustrating task discourages novices from learning [1]. People learn an interface both visually and kinetically. Kinesthetic memory plays a big role in how we learn software [2], moving targets retards this process. And by making everyone's menus different you create a support nightmare.
The main role of a menu is to group common functions spatially without taking up much of the screen (this is one reason why Apple has stuck with a single menu bar for 20 years). The introduction of hierarchical menus was a controversial move in interface design, since it hid some of the commands. The Views menu in a word processor is a good example. They're a necessary evil since menus can't be too long either. But when Windows hides the rarely used functions they remove those functions from the user's ken altogether, defeating the purpose of menus.
The rarely used fucntions can be the most important. Adding an extra click to get at the more powerful functions hinders the intermediate users. There is always the option to customize the menus or keyboard shortcuts, but requiring the suer to do that to easily perform any but the most basic functions is a sign of poor design.
Their concept was probably a Marketing idea: make the menus learn how the user works and adapt themselves accordingly. It looks great on a presentation but you wouldn't want to use it.
[1] Yes, you can point to this and say that Windows causes stupid users.
[2] cf. both Tognazzini and Nielsen