And you know what? That's fine, too. Heck, a friend of mine runs a parasailing school. Needless to say, he has to take a lot of shit to the top of a mountain. Thus, he has a big-honkin' SUV. More power to him. I know people who use have SUVs because they have a boat and they need to tow it. As I've said before, I want those people to have SUVs. I've been stuck behind people with passenger cars trying to tow a trailer uphill. It isn't fun. So for those people, I'll stand up and applaud when they buy an SUV.
According to statistics I've seen, that's about 2% of SUV owners.
Part of the issue that I have with most SUV owners is that they basically have what I call "Macho Minivans." They don't go off-roading. They don't go camping--or if they do, it's to campsites barely off the highway and they do it for a week in the summer. They like the SUV because they can carry lots of groceries and the kids' stuff. Yet there are other vehicles which could be used instead--namely the minivan--but Dad doesn't want to drive them because they are not considered "manly" vehicles. If you see a guy driving a minivan, he obviously has a job, a wife, some kids, etc. etc. It may not be true in certain cases, but that's how society "sees" you.
As for things that you carry, some of it might also depend on how often you need to do this. Now I'll admit, I live in a metropolitan area, but I grew up in the country and I understand it's different. But, for example, I recently needed to carry a lot of stuff. Y'know what I did? I went to Enterprise, conveniently located down the block, and rented an SUV for the day. Moved the stuff from Point-A to Point-B and then returned the vehicle. Cost me about $60. A couple of years ago, my Dad bought a cord of wood for his shop's woodstove. They actually delivered it right to the woodshed. Cost him an extra $100 or so.
Now, don't get me wrong. If you're going out every weekend for an SUV load of alfalfa, pellets, or pine shavings, it might be cost-effective to own one. If you do this once-a-year or so, it might be cheaper to just rent an SUV from the local Enterprise or see if they'll deliver it to you.
I'll apologize in advance: I'm playing pop-psychologist.
Why does one like the taste of alcohol?
Personally, I think we make a connection between the taste, the effect on ourselves, memories, etc. I used to drink a lot of a particular brand of beer. Too much. Enough that I decided I needed a "lifestyle change" and quit drinking altogether for awhile, just to regain some command of my life. Anyway, nowadays I rarely drink to excess (the last time was about 4 years ago) but I find that I absolutely despise the taste of that brand of beer. I won't drink it. Other beers, no problem--just not that brand. As I told someone once, "It tastes like personal failure."
I was thinking about other addictive things, such as coffee and cigarettes. I don't drink coffee--don't like the taste. But I do smoke and I like the taste of a cigarette. People look at me like a loon when I tell them that. But, again, I equate the taste with the stimulant effects of the nicotine. I bring up the same thing with coffee--they don't like the taste of coffee but they equate the taste with the positive effect and "learn" to like the taste. "It's an acquired taste" is the keyword.
Remember that alcohol is a depressant. While you point out that one drink is not enough to get a buzz, it still has an effect. There's probably also some ritual involved which is comforting. I picture you sitting down in the big comfy chair with your glass of scotch and talking to friends/significant others about pleasant topics. The scotch is a message that it's time to relax and put away the stresses of life.
"It wasn't 'we're provding you with pirated software to do your job because we're cheap' it was 'find your own pirated software to do your job because we're too cheap to buy any AND too lazy to even do the pirating'"
Which means that managers can disavow all knowledge of it. It's not Best Buy's fault--I guess we just hired some evil employees. Go sue those employees...
"Instead of criticizing, please, take a moment to say thank you next time."
Thank you for that link.
It seems that every time I travel, when I get to my destination, I have a little note in my luggage from the TSA saying, "We searched your bag." I've been trying to think of something to do next time I travel.
"What about large scale 'Enterprise level' CRM applications? The same for accounting servers? Hospital applications?"
Sigh.
On the Hospital side, check out Antidote Solutions. For multi-user accounting, there's Absolute Accounting. CRM, well, if it's "Enterprise Level", I'd imagine that it's web-based.
Really, people. Rather than asking silly questions, check out Apple's Macintosh Product Guide. There are over 23,000 products. They can't all be drawing programs...
Again, this is what I was complaining about. "Oh, I learned the name of this software package and it's not on the Mac. Thus, there's no software for the Mac."
Well, I was going to start off this post the various other products that you could use instead of those product names. But I realized that I don't know enough about any of those products.
What might have been more Informative (moderators, note) is to do a little research and see what Macintosh products might replace these. As a person who, I assume, does industrial work, this might have been quite valuable.
You see, it's easy to throw out application titles and say, "See? You can't CAD on a Mac because there's no AutoCAD!" But what about VectorWorks, VersaCAD, or the products from Ashlar-Vellum? A trip to Apple's database gives me those three.
Of course, you have to look for them. I remember being told that Macs couldn't do accounting because there was no QuickBooks. There was plenty of other accounting software available for the Mac. But the only accounting software that this person knew was QuickBooks and if that didn't run a Mac, well, you couldn't do accounting.
Check out some of the Mac solutions. You might be surprised.
Well, it depends. For example, years ago I had a rental car from Hertz with a GPS. I was surprised to discover that the GPS did not have the road that my parents live on.
I figure I can probably find "Main Street" in a small town. I don't need a GPS to tell me that. However, I could probably use some help finding "Baker Hill Road."
That said, one of the odd tricks about roads is that if nobody lives on a road, generally the town doesn't maintain it and stops becoming a road. You can find all sorts of "used-to-be" roads in rural New England. They're usually fun to drive along because you never know where you'll end up.
If it went that far, Microsoft would have to recall the boxes. They would ship them back to Redmond, remove the infringing code, and return them to consumers, or ship new ones to consumers, or give you your money back.
I rashly assume the offending code is used to play DVD movies. Thus, you might get an Xbox 360 which would not play movies out of the deal. Or your money back.
Of course, if you didn't return your Xbox 360, there is little that Microsoft or Lucent could do about it. It's not like they'd send the police to your house to find out what happened to it.
You had pixelated gore?! LUXURY! When I was a kid, if you wanted gore, you had to go out and beat up someone!
Never underestimate the aerobic exercise involved in running for your life from the local bully. You kids today are too damn fat and lazy to get up off your rear-ends, go out, and cause your own violence!
I agree, but I have to admit that both announcements coming the same day made me think the same thing. Especially when you consider the "leaving to pursue other interests" usually is companyspeak for some internal battle that they lost.
Well, back at WWDC, we got some entertaining statistics. At the time, last July, the breakdown went something like this:
49% of Mac OS X users used 10.3. 25% of Mac OS X users used 10.2. 16% of Mac OS X users used 10.4. 10% of Mac OS X users used 10.2.
So, if you will, if you develop for 10.2 as your minimum, you'll catch 90% of the users. So, with limited dev and testing time, is it worth it to try to pick up the last 10%? Also, will those people who won't shell out $129 for 10.2, 10.3, or 10.4 shell out money for your application?
I was thinking, though, that you're in the middle of your Lord of the Rings style quest to get to Elfendale or wherever when, suddenly, an Imperial Storm Trooper and a Halo Master Chief show up in their 4x4 Evolution 2 SUVs and offer to give you a lift. Of course, during the trip, these Carmageddon guys show up...
Of course, I have weird taste in comics, too, so that probably explains these thoughts...
"I'm sure it would have made a HUGE difference and totally changed the meaning of the article. Except the opposite."
Actually, I agree with the parent.
You're right. The idea of showing the "advancement" in games is still there, no matter what. But, let's be honest, most of us already knew this. What would have made the article more fun would have been to have shown us the equivalent situations, wherever possible.
I'm mostly a casual gamer (I'm a Mac user, I don't have much choice). So since I'm ignorant of most of the games shown, it would have been interesting on a different level.
Heck, take "Double Dribble vs. NBA Live '06." In the "Double Dribble" frame, I see somebody making a basket. I don't see anybody around him. What's the context? Same with the "NBA Live '06" frame--just a picture of some guy from the Miami Heat. Is he blocking me? Am I blocking him? Is this a "replay" shot? Is the first one a "replay" shot? I have no idea.
Like I said, here's where having the same context would have made the article more enjoyable.
I went to the web site and they had video that showed the output of the two video cards side-by-side. It reminded me of an old bit about advertising color televisions on television.
If you have a black & white television (remember those?), you can't see the colors.
If you have a color television but not the brand being advertised, you can't see how much better the colors will look.
If you have the brand of color television being advertised, you don't need the advertising.
"Why waste time re-implementing something that already works fine?"
From a coding perspective? Agreed. If it ain't broke, etc., etc. Politically, though, there is quite a bit to be gained.
I am not a Windows Developer and I'm pretty ignorant about.Net. But, as a Mac developer, I know Apple gets a lot of credit for "eating their own dog food." When Apple announced Carbon, many Mac developers had this whole "Carbon is going away, it will never be as fully supported as Cocoa, Apple is going to screw us, etc." attitude. This is one reason the Finder is a Carbon application. Apple would have a hard time getting rid of the Carbon APIs and rewriting the Finder in Cocoa at this point.
Another good reason to do this is to show what.Net can do. Again, I'm ignorant of it, so I don't know what it can do. But, to use Apple as the example, Apple's applications like iPhoto, iWeb, etc. are written with Cocoa. That certainly makes me feel more confident that problems with Cocoa will be found and fixed, that Apple will continue to support and improve it, etc. It's a better way to sell developers on using it than having some VP of Development stand up at a conference and say, "Hey you guys, you should really use Cocoa. It's cool."
Third, and this is a variation of "eating your own dog food," but if Microsoft is making all these claims about how great.Net is, why aren't they using it? If it supports rapid application development, then it shouldn't be that monumental a task to rewrite Notepad, MSPaint, RegEdit, etc. with it. And if it is a monumental task to do this, maybe Microsoft needs to figure out why this is so and solve the problem. If rewriting a simple application in.Net is so difficult, why should I use.Net to write my applications?
So, I went to the link with my Mac running 10.3.9 and Safari 1.3.2 just for laughs, knowing it wouldn't work. Sure enough, it redirects me to a page telling me that I need Windows XP and WMP 10 to "experience all that this great new service has to offer."
To be expected.
But then I notice the title of the window, "AOL Television: In2TV: Upgrade." And in bold letters on, the page says "How to Upgrade" followed by a link to Microsoft's page on Windows XP.
So, I need to "upgrade" my Mac to a Windows machine to view this content? Guess who wrote this page?
"[...] the time when the corporations comprising the media cartels will be driven to paralysis by issues like DRM, and this is only the beginning."
I'd also point out that history is repeating itself.
One of the things that hurt Sony in developing a digital music player was the issue of DRM. "Oh, we can't sell a digital music player because people will have to rip their CDs and then they could share them with their friends over the Internet. The last thing we want to do is legitimize people ripping music from CDs. So until we can come up with a way to force the consumer to have to rebuy all their music to play it on a digital player, we'll just ignore the whole thing." Apple went and developed the iPod and shipped it about a year-and-a-half before developing a music store to sell DRMed music. Now Sony is left sucking wind releasing Walkman NW-2367s and Walkman Beans and trying to figure out why nobody cares about Sony's products.
By the time Sony gets their heads out of their hindquarters, gets everything all synched up between all their divisions so that they get "maximum synergy," and releases the PlayStation 3, consumers will have all moved on to Xbox Home Entertainment Systems or Revolutions or something else. Once again, Sony will be left holding the bag and saying, "Pay attention to me! I'm relevant!"
Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.
Slashdot Mirror
And you know what? That's fine, too. Heck, a friend of mine runs a parasailing school. Needless to say, he has to take a lot of shit to the top of a mountain. Thus, he has a big-honkin' SUV. More power to him. I know people who use have SUVs because they have a boat and they need to tow it. As I've said before, I want those people to have SUVs. I've been stuck behind people with passenger cars trying to tow a trailer uphill. It isn't fun. So for those people, I'll stand up and applaud when they buy an SUV.
According to statistics I've seen, that's about 2% of SUV owners.
Part of the issue that I have with most SUV owners is that they basically have what I call "Macho Minivans." They don't go off-roading. They don't go camping--or if they do, it's to campsites barely off the highway and they do it for a week in the summer. They like the SUV because they can carry lots of groceries and the kids' stuff. Yet there are other vehicles which could be used instead--namely the minivan--but Dad doesn't want to drive them because they are not considered "manly" vehicles. If you see a guy driving a minivan, he obviously has a job, a wife, some kids, etc. etc. It may not be true in certain cases, but that's how society "sees" you.
As for things that you carry, some of it might also depend on how often you need to do this. Now I'll admit, I live in a metropolitan area, but I grew up in the country and I understand it's different. But, for example, I recently needed to carry a lot of stuff. Y'know what I did? I went to Enterprise, conveniently located down the block, and rented an SUV for the day. Moved the stuff from Point-A to Point-B and then returned the vehicle. Cost me about $60. A couple of years ago, my Dad bought a cord of wood for his shop's woodstove. They actually delivered it right to the woodshed. Cost him an extra $100 or so.
Now, don't get me wrong. If you're going out every weekend for an SUV load of alfalfa, pellets, or pine shavings, it might be cost-effective to own one. If you do this once-a-year or so, it might be cheaper to just rent an SUV from the local Enterprise or see if they'll deliver it to you.
I'll apologize in advance: I'm playing pop-psychologist.
Why does one like the taste of alcohol?
Personally, I think we make a connection between the taste, the effect on ourselves, memories, etc. I used to drink a lot of a particular brand of beer. Too much. Enough that I decided I needed a "lifestyle change" and quit drinking altogether for awhile, just to regain some command of my life. Anyway, nowadays I rarely drink to excess (the last time was about 4 years ago) but I find that I absolutely despise the taste of that brand of beer. I won't drink it. Other beers, no problem--just not that brand. As I told someone once, "It tastes like personal failure."
I was thinking about other addictive things, such as coffee and cigarettes. I don't drink coffee--don't like the taste. But I do smoke and I like the taste of a cigarette. People look at me like a loon when I tell them that. But, again, I equate the taste with the stimulant effects of the nicotine. I bring up the same thing with coffee--they don't like the taste of coffee but they equate the taste with the positive effect and "learn" to like the taste. "It's an acquired taste" is the keyword.
Remember that alcohol is a depressant. While you point out that one drink is not enough to get a buzz, it still has an effect. There's probably also some ritual involved which is comforting. I picture you sitting down in the big comfy chair with your glass of scotch and talking to friends/significant others about pleasant topics. The scotch is a message that it's time to relax and put away the stresses of life.
No offense intended. I think we all do this.
"It wasn't 'we're provding you with pirated software to do your job because we're cheap' it was 'find your own pirated software to do your job because we're too cheap to buy any AND too lazy to even do the pirating'"
Which means that managers can disavow all knowledge of it. It's not Best Buy's fault--I guess we just hired some evil employees. Go sue those employees...
"Instead of criticizing, please, take a moment to say thank you next time."
Thank you for that link.
It seems that every time I travel, when I get to my destination, I have a little note in my luggage from the TSA saying, "We searched your bag." I've been trying to think of something to do next time I travel.
This will be perfect. Thank you very much.
"What about large scale 'Enterprise level' CRM applications? The same for accounting servers? Hospital applications?"
Sigh.
On the Hospital side, check out Antidote Solutions. For multi-user accounting, there's Absolute Accounting. CRM, well, if it's "Enterprise Level", I'd imagine that it's web-based.
Really, people. Rather than asking silly questions, check out Apple's Macintosh Product Guide. There are over 23,000 products. They can't all be drawing programs...
"AutoCAD (and all other Autodesk products save Maya[maybe not for long...]): not available on a Mac."
Except for:
DWF And, from the same article, Express Viewer.
"In fact, ANY CAM software: not available on a Mac."
True. Except for stuff like Cenon.
Again, this is what I was complaining about. "Oh, I learned the name of this software package and it's not on the Mac. Thus, there's no software for the Mac."
Well, I was going to start off this post the various other products that you could use instead of those product names. But I realized that I don't know enough about any of those products.
What might have been more Informative (moderators, note) is to do a little research and see what Macintosh products might replace these. As a person who, I assume, does industrial work, this might have been quite valuable.
You see, it's easy to throw out application titles and say, "See? You can't CAD on a Mac because there's no AutoCAD!" But what about VectorWorks, VersaCAD, or the products from Ashlar-Vellum? A trip to Apple's database gives me those three.
Of course, you have to look for them. I remember being told that Macs couldn't do accounting because there was no QuickBooks. There was plenty of other accounting software available for the Mac. But the only accounting software that this person knew was QuickBooks and if that didn't run a Mac, well, you couldn't do accounting.
Check out some of the Mac solutions. You might be surprised.
Well, it depends. For example, years ago I had a rental car from Hertz with a GPS. I was surprised to discover that the GPS did not have the road that my parents live on.
I figure I can probably find "Main Street" in a small town. I don't need a GPS to tell me that. However, I could probably use some help finding "Baker Hill Road."
That said, one of the odd tricks about roads is that if nobody lives on a road, generally the town doesn't maintain it and stops becoming a road. You can find all sorts of "used-to-be" roads in rural New England. They're usually fun to drive along because you never know where you'll end up.
"Would owning an XBOX 360 then be illegal?"
No.
If it went that far, Microsoft would have to recall the boxes. They would ship them back to Redmond, remove the infringing code, and return them to consumers, or ship new ones to consumers, or give you your money back.
I rashly assume the offending code is used to play DVD movies. Thus, you might get an Xbox 360 which would not play movies out of the deal. Or your money back.
Of course, if you didn't return your Xbox 360, there is little that Microsoft or Lucent could do about it. It's not like they'd send the police to your house to find out what happened to it.
Sentient?! Pfft. My car didn't know the difference between a door and a jar...
You had pixelated gore?! LUXURY! When I was a kid, if you wanted gore, you had to go out and beat up someone!
Never underestimate the aerobic exercise involved in running for your life from the local bully. You kids today are too damn fat and lazy to get up off your rear-ends, go out, and cause your own violence!
Oops. Wrong Matt Groening show.
Never mind.
President Poseidon?
I agree, but I have to admit that both announcements coming the same day made me think the same thing. Especially when you consider the "leaving to pursue other interests" usually is companyspeak for some internal battle that they lost.
Well, back at WWDC, we got some entertaining statistics. At the time, last July, the breakdown went something like this:
49% of Mac OS X users used 10.3.
25% of Mac OS X users used 10.2.
16% of Mac OS X users used 10.4.
10% of Mac OS X users used 10.2.
So, if you will, if you develop for 10.2 as your minimum, you'll catch 90% of the users. So, with limited dev and testing time, is it worth it to try to pick up the last 10%? Also, will those people who won't shell out $129 for 10.2, 10.3, or 10.4 shell out money for your application?
Actually, I had a similar thought.
I was thinking, though, that you're in the middle of your Lord of the Rings style quest to get to Elfendale or wherever when, suddenly, an Imperial Storm Trooper and a Halo Master Chief show up in their 4x4 Evolution 2 SUVs and offer to give you a lift. Of course, during the trip, these Carmageddon guys show up...
Of course, I have weird taste in comics, too, so that probably explains these thoughts...
"I'm sure it would have made a HUGE difference and totally changed the meaning of the article. Except the opposite."
Actually, I agree with the parent.
You're right. The idea of showing the "advancement" in games is still there, no matter what. But, let's be honest, most of us already knew this. What would have made the article more fun would have been to have shown us the equivalent situations, wherever possible.
I'm mostly a casual gamer (I'm a Mac user, I don't have much choice). So since I'm ignorant of most of the games shown, it would have been interesting on a different level.
Heck, take "Double Dribble vs. NBA Live '06." In the "Double Dribble" frame, I see somebody making a basket. I don't see anybody around him. What's the context? Same with the "NBA Live '06" frame--just a picture of some guy from the Miami Heat. Is he blocking me? Am I blocking him? Is this a "replay" shot? Is the first one a "replay" shot? I have no idea.
Like I said, here's where having the same context would have made the article more enjoyable.
"Or Grand Moff Tarkan and the construction of the Death Star."
Perhaps they could have an episode which shows the difficulties Tarkan had hiring Independent Contractors to build it...
(Yes, I know--they're talking about Return of the Jedi...)
Hey! I downloaded it off Bittorrent! What more do you want?
(The preceding is a joke)
"We all know that means you sport about 3 and a half hard inches."
Yes, but some women like it that wide.
"Vista does not provide any new applications though."
.Net to me...
What about Windows Mail, Windows Calendar, and Windows Photo Gallery?
These seem like prime candidates to show off
"Why waste time re-implementing something that already works fine?"
.Net. But, as a Mac developer, I know Apple gets a lot of credit for "eating their own dog food." When Apple announced Carbon, many Mac developers had this whole "Carbon is going away, it will never be as fully supported as Cocoa, Apple is going to screw us, etc." attitude. This is one reason the Finder is a Carbon application. Apple would have a hard time getting rid of the Carbon APIs and rewriting the Finder in Cocoa at this point.
.Net can do. Again, I'm ignorant of it, so I don't know what it can do. But, to use Apple as the example, Apple's applications like iPhoto, iWeb, etc. are written with Cocoa. That certainly makes me feel more confident that problems with Cocoa will be found and fixed, that Apple will continue to support and improve it, etc. It's a better way to sell developers on using it than having some VP of Development stand up at a conference and say, "Hey you guys, you should really use Cocoa. It's cool."
.Net is, why aren't they using it? If it supports rapid application development, then it shouldn't be that monumental a task to rewrite Notepad, MSPaint, RegEdit, etc. with it. And if it is a monumental task to do this, maybe Microsoft needs to figure out why this is so and solve the problem. If rewriting a simple application in .Net is so difficult, why should I use .Net to write my applications?
From a coding perspective? Agreed. If it ain't broke, etc., etc. Politically, though, there is quite a bit to be gained.
I am not a Windows Developer and I'm pretty ignorant about
Another good reason to do this is to show what
Third, and this is a variation of "eating your own dog food," but if Microsoft is making all these claims about how great
So, I went to the link with my Mac running 10.3.9 and Safari 1.3.2 just for laughs, knowing it wouldn't work. Sure enough, it redirects me to a page telling me that I need Windows XP and WMP 10 to "experience all that this great new service has to offer."
To be expected.
But then I notice the title of the window, "AOL Television: In2TV: Upgrade." And in bold letters on, the page says "How to Upgrade" followed by a link to Microsoft's page on Windows XP.
So, I need to "upgrade" my Mac to a Windows machine to view this content? Guess who wrote this page?
"[...] the time when the corporations comprising the media cartels will be driven to paralysis by issues like DRM, and this is only the beginning."
I'd also point out that history is repeating itself.
One of the things that hurt Sony in developing a digital music player was the issue of DRM. "Oh, we can't sell a digital music player because people will have to rip their CDs and then they could share them with their friends over the Internet. The last thing we want to do is legitimize people ripping music from CDs. So until we can come up with a way to force the consumer to have to rebuy all their music to play it on a digital player, we'll just ignore the whole thing." Apple went and developed the iPod and shipped it about a year-and-a-half before developing a music store to sell DRMed music. Now Sony is left sucking wind releasing Walkman NW-2367s and Walkman Beans and trying to figure out why nobody cares about Sony's products.
By the time Sony gets their heads out of their hindquarters, gets everything all synched up between all their divisions so that they get "maximum synergy," and releases the PlayStation 3, consumers will have all moved on to Xbox Home Entertainment Systems or Revolutions or something else. Once again, Sony will be left holding the bag and saying, "Pay attention to me! I'm relevant!"
Those who do not learn from the past are doomed to repeat it.