Second Opinion on PC-BSD
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Why FreeBSD
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· Score: 1
To add a word from a complete *BSD noob. I got PC-BSD 0.7, or whatever one was release May this year I think, maybe a 0.75. It comes with good detection, there are active forums on their site where they make it policy that they want things in as many languages as possible (no UK English at the installer, but they're a small voluntary project from what I see).
They're working especially hard on driver support too. For what it's worth, Solaris 10 has never detected a sound card on any system I put it on (mostly Creative SoundBlaster stuff, or generic cards). PC-BSD based on Freesbie detected it automatically. It runs KDE 3.4.0 out of the box - no X setup necessary.
It's a bit sluggish when compared to some optimized Linux distros, but the new KDE is a bit of a load to put on out-dated hardware. For new users, with hardware that's say, faster than 400 MHz with 128 MB RAM, they could live with the performance.
It's a single CD for installation, and it's quite verbose, with a nice graphical system taking you through partitioning.
It ships quite light compared to the big Linux distros like SuSE, or probably Debian, Fedora (I've never used them). But it's no stripped down Gentoo either.
No OpenOffice.org, don't recall a Firefox. The GIMP was there, but pretty much everything that wasn't essential, or expected for a base install of the GUI was left out - but was easily available for FreeBSD from their site.
Also, it includes a nice version of KAsteroids by default:)
Some problems I found were that the bootloader doesn't play well with existing systems. I put it on the second half of a HDD with SuSE 9.3 Pro and couldn't access SuSE any more. Had to nuke both of them (mostly because I was getting unsure of what I was doing and they were both 'fresh' without documents that needed to be salvaged).
I'd flag PC-BSD as a great intro to OSS UNIX (I'm an Apple fanboi, so the OSS is important there). Very easy to get a stable install off the ground. For perforamance it seemed steady for what I used it for, but riced up - pretty KDE, but could have been more optimized.
There is something unsettling about a system that hides the Konsole in a KMenu item, rather than putting the 'Quick Launch' icon on the KBar all the time (apologies for MS terminology, don't know the Linux equivalent of 'quick launch').
There's a possible solution to this in how the bullet time feature is implemented: you have your movement keys, and you have your bullet time movement keys.
That way, you enter bullet time by doing a bullet time move (step left, say) so the other person's computer knows what animation to show, and then just shows where on the map your player is.
Preventing the use of bullet time as a period to make up your mind would hopefully mean that the computer wouldn't have to make a choice in advance of the other player's movement being made.
Of course they could just blur the graphics badly and obscure everything I guess, if it's a matter of presentation.
See, I think you may be wrong here, but you seem from another reply you made to have a better grasp of this than I do.
If you and I play online in this game, let's call it NeoFrag, and you have a latency of 120 ms and I'm the server with a nice fat zero ping then I have.12 of a second that I'm effectively 'ahead' of you, and I can take advantage of that time difference to appear different to you. I simulate enough lag to meet you at your latency, you see me meeting you, and instead of being ahead of you, I'm now at the same ping as you, my responses (not the speed of my actions, but my reactions) are not as fast as they had previously been.
Then once I've stabilised with you at your ping, knowing I can drop back down to zero again, all of a sudden I gain.12 seconds in a single burst. This is the bullet time moment as I see it. I don't know what happens for the briefest of moments, but I have made 1.12 seconds worth of movement in 1 second, so instead of going 100 virtual yards, I've gone 112 virtual yards, and your rocket misses me.
All the while the poor guy at the end of a dodgy connection, or just very far away is at a greater disadvantage.
Okay, I can sort of see where they're coming from with how they would implement this, but instead of dealing with the finite amount of lag that exists within the game considered as an online 'system' or entity, why not buffer everything to simulate a lag?
Would it be theoretically possible to cache the time (bad way of explaining it, but think of it like 'giving access to time to carry out commands which is stored within a timenudge to gain an advantage').
So you start a deathmatch for example, then say you have a delay of 10 seconds where ostensibly you are waiting for a map to load in a fps game. Now, when the match starts, both players are inputting controls which move their characters around the map, but they could draw from those ten seconds to have ten seconds of bullet time within the match, sort of a slowdown advantage instead of a speed-up advantage.
The only problem of course is that you have to use the ten seconds from the start, but that puts a gap between the start of the game when entered into the buffer, and when you start entering key strokes to move your character. So you would actually have a latency of 10,000 for a second, then the game begins and no bullet time feature >:-|
So this way only works if you can borrow time from the end of the match, or from a point in the present onward, but that's a shaky way of drawing off of lag, rather than a steady feed of delay from a buffer. Meaning my way of implementing the bullet time is inherently flawed. (Damn you special relativity!! Why can't gaming take advantage of the curvature of timespace?)
But it would be smoother than simply using a stagger effect of time apropos lag - because as I make it out, you'd be using your opponent's lag to get your bullet time bonus power in the article's proposed implementation. So the lagger gets doubly penalised - meaning the game sucks.... unless I'm wrong again.
So, my question: can this be done, effectively, understandably, in a buffered way, that is fair to both players in a 1v1 deathmatch - which is probably the ideal situation for this feature rather than a free for all or other game mode?
My resize handle has been on the bottom right for the entire duration of my OS X experience (since January, 10.3.7 to 10.4.2).
Are you talking about the minimise and maximise buttons? There are keyboard shortcuts like [command-h] to hide and then [option-tab] to cycle through running applications to bring it back from oblivion.
I think this could be personal preference, but you might look into that other desktop because X11 would probably give you options for moving the buttons to other parts of the windows that would achieve what it seems you want.
Runs as an App under OS X to give you another desktop. I tried it once, didn't use it enough to work out how much of a performance hit it is - didn't like it too much. See this screenshot of my computer to show how you can emulate the look of Classic under OSX. Doesn't work for all programs though:-(
Yeah, I sort of stopped any amateur interest I had in getting to know escaped characters after I hit a brick wall trying to get a Perl page to contain an angle bracket:-) I believe it's possible, but have absolutely no idea how to do it. (I had wanted the page, a profile.pl for another site, to contain instructions on how to post inline images with a <img src="www.foobar.com/foobar.jpg">)
Angle brackets or less than signs have to be escaped in HTML. The code for open angle bracket is 'ampersand lt semicolon' and close angle bracket is 'ampersand gt semicolon'. This would be much better if I knew how to escape an ampersand, but oh well, or I could have just said "Shift-7" on most keyboard maps (I am unsure how common such maps are). So you can achieve the following line as an example:
<a href="http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozil la/releases/mozilla1.2.1/mozilla-macos9-1.2.1-full.bin">Text here on getting Mozilla for Mac OS 8.5 and up</a>
Command-H is your friend. Hey presto, all that's left is a small triangle near the Dock icon indicating the program is still running. Then Option-Tab to get back to it. It's far more a "To Desktop->Doesn't Exist!" than a Minimise or Genie MInimise function.
I'm always wary of getting into matters of opinion, but to defend mine:
I own a Mac, quite a nice one with a good setup and 256 MB graphics card in there. Try playing HL2 on the Mac, Virtual PC is not going to handle it. Quake 3? Runs on Mac and is identical to the PC version.
I own a copy of HL2 on my 2.26 GHz PC with teeny little 64 MB graphics card. It's not a very enjoyable way to play online. The fits and starts are fine one player, but online I'm dead before I can tell what is happening in a deathmatch, and Counter Strike plays okay, but, and this leads on to my next point, it's not my preferred game mode.
HL2 is not designed for 1v1 in the way Q3A is. Certain maps in Q3A (campgrounds 2 - pro-q3dm6, the longest yard - q3dm17 anarki tourney - pro-q3tourney4, in fact, all the tourney levels) are really great 1v1 levels where the speed you can move to advance/retreat, whether you can strafe jump, whether you've got proper weapon binds, and whether you can aim while running away (and rocket jump if you play Clan Arena) all these things decide the winner.
For quick thrills, I play the instaunlagged one-hit-kill rail-jumping mode on the longest yard, q3dm17. A game takes 2 minutes, normally with a 5 minute timelimit. First to 13, or 15 depending on the server. It's all reactions and unpredictable movement. There isn't anything I've found in HL2 that's like this. There are one-hit-kills, but that's not a good thing without the instant re-spawns and rail-jumping.
You say Q3 was the WORST EVAR, but you have to judge it on what it was: a game simply designed to be multiplayer and nothing else, unless you take in the modding community. Quake 4 is going to suck, they're going to do a Quake 2 on it and focus on the 1 player version I think. It won't be a patch on Doom 3, so unless Quake 5 is going to be your dream 64+ player map game in 2010, I guess my attachment to the franchise may end later this year, the Q3 players would probably leave to play Q4 on its release.
Your first point: "Q3Arena was a ripoff and its a shame such potential was utterly wasted on a crappy version of Unreal Tournament."
??????? Unreal Tournament, in as much as I've played UT 2004 on Mac was more a matter of luck and random bullshit than it was about gameplay, skill, consistency. That game was pants in a very, very bad way. For multiplayer DM and extendability (1v1, Team Deathmatch, Clan Arena, InstaUnlag, FreezeTag, Excessive, Custom Maps, etc etc), Quake 3 wins IMHO. For multiplayer team modes, CS:S is better, prettier, smarter, and has a wider player base. But there are loads of things about it that get on my tits. You need to download those pointless.WAV files to hear the server's stupid sound effects when you already have all the damn sound you need to play the game! You need Steam to update to get online, fine if it does it's job for making it harder for bot players to get an unfair advantage, but it is annoying to wait an hour to play a game, especially when you only want to play for an hour at that exact moment in time.
Seriously, nobody better tell you about Doom 3, a game that was designed for optimal performance on near future technology that was not yet available to the consumer/gaming enthusiast when it was released.
The game [Half Life 2] is not poorly designed, quite the opposite IMHO. It's good, but not my ideal game. I still prefer Quake 3 for shit and giggles for example. But there's nothing to stop you reselling your copy to someone who can play it, so your money hasn't been completely wasted. Head to e-bay and see if you can recoup $20.
I will sympathise with the installation woes. If you don't play Half Life 2 often enough then waiting an hour to load the game because the updates are being downloaded is a royal PITA, but thems the breaks.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the lock-in to 'content providers' (read Steam activation on installation to play the offline 1 player mode, read the glitch that means I can't play the game without it first checking with a server that I am on an authorised pc or have a Steam account or whatever). I recognise software purchases are essentially a figment of a lot of consumers' imaginations, but extending the concept of licensing software instead of buying software to require a greenlight from Valve central for me to blow off some vapour from boiled water is pushing it a bit for my liking.
Re:Finally catching up with Apple...
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Longhorn Preview
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· Score: 1
I love the sweet serenade of iChat and Adium:
#tweet
#tweet
#gurgle
#tweet
#tweet
#gurgle
#You are out of AIM
#tweet
#tweet
#gurgle
#tweet
#tweet
#gurgle
#You are out of AIM
It's just like Bohemian Rhapsody when accidentally clicking a chat client logs me out of an already running client >:-|
I can understand where the parent poster is coming from. If you spend $1500 on a sexy display, the least you expect is functionality. And he got the least he could expect, truly base end performance.
Your comments didn't really help matters: anyone buying a Mac wouldn't expect its software to work on Athlon hardware, or the others you mentioned. But if you buy a monitor for Windows you can use it on Linux. You buy a monitor for Windows you get your doowhackey to convert the plug, it works on OS X. You buy a monitor for Linux, you don't expect it to drop from 3.2 million pixels to 786.000.
Under a quarter of the number of pixels the screen is capable of displaying, and performance contrary to the purpose of a Cinedisplay monitor: presentation quality appearance. Couple that with Apple's traditional ass ramming in regard to price, I don't think I'd take kindly to smart arse comments about Apple systems only working on Apple endorsed hardware either.
I have a Hewlitt-Packard Scanjet 3530c (USB connection). Nicely, the scanner came with a re-installation CD which includes OS X and Windows drivers (the device was hardware that came with a Dell computer).
You can download it, but I baulked when I realised it was 400+ MB. I could make the download, it'd take a few hours. I just don't see the reason for it to be so big.
I used the old drivers, transferred the scanner from PC to OS X. It worked.... then stopped. I reinstalled. It worked..... then stopped.
I feel your pain, I have no advice, but you are not alone on this one.
FWIW, she lost another empty CD-R trying to use an application named toast with the same result. Now, I've shown here what to do for her next try.
Shown her what to do? It was apparent within the main window of the Roxio Toast application. If you use Toast there is are radio buttons giving options: for Mac, for Mac/PC, iso9660.
I'll grant no one knows what iso9660 is if they haven't ever needed to, but this is not in any way an inchoate problem with OS X. By the way, it did "just work this morning", the PCs didn't read the disk because of the way she made the disk.
I really don't want to sound holier than thou. I'm an average computer user who has made mistakes in the past and only want to prevent others from the same thing.
For future reference, if she is putting files onto a CD, use a Data CD in Toast and make it iso9660. If she is burning an.iso file, use the Disk Utility in "Applications -> Utilities" and open the.iso file with that. If the.iso if properly made Disk Utility will burn it correctly - this includes bootable CDs for the x86 platform as I use my Mac (and its larger hard drive) for downloading Linux distros that I install on x86.
Conclusions:
1. You just don't think Mac OS X is all that great, which is fine, but not universal truth because it's your belief.
2. You can help some of the people some of the time, but I agree, there is no way for a developer or designer to come up with one all-inclusive idiot proof graphical system for every user regardless of experience. I'll admit to being an Apple fanboi/apologist - it's not the same, but some of the difference is that they strive to make the environment consistent. This presents itself in the one button mouse (as one example). Hey presto, programmers and designers have to put all the options in the menu bar (iTunes has a notable glitch - you could only reset play counts by [ctrl-click]ing a track). Furthermore, the menu bar is always (with some exceptions, Valknut, OpenOffice, some others) at the top of the screen, the reason? You just have to shove the mouse. So long as it goes up, you reach the menu bar - meaning that there is 178 degrees of direction you can push in for an infinite distance, but you are going to hit the big welcoming target. These and other little consistencies are only there to make things easier for users to make the transition both to Mac as a daily use platform, and to make the transition from one Mac application or suite to another application or suite on the same computer.
Your gripe is with Dashboard, but the whole look and feel of Mac is consistent, and IMHO better, than Windows. The enforcement of standard practice apropos the one button mouse standard, the consistency and comprehensiveness of the menu bar options that result from that, means I far prefer the OS X way of doing things. Aqua is better eye candy than the Windows scheme, whether the Fisher Price theme on XP, or the theme parodied by the 'Redmond' option on Linux.
If Dashboard sucks your resources, and the browser does everything you want, here's some advice: turn Dashboard off then. There is a plugin that does this, and hey presto, resources no longer assigned to it.
Also, if you were to dig a bit deeper than the standard widgets you'd find a growing number of functions that *could* be found by a browser, but it would not be similar to the live update feature of Dashboard widgets. I have widgets that tell me free physical and other memory resources, tell me the current state of my hard drives, free space and total capacity of partitions and so on. Another one gives you a quick, basic, always open terminal window, handy if you rarely use the Terminal and want to keep Dock icons to a minimum just to save the small bother of digging it out of utilities.
There are fun widgets that will let you draw single colour pictures, and it will then run a very basic animation sequence on them so they move a bit (very PWOR, but Dashboard widgets are still sort of new so that's allowed). You can track an order by FedEx or UPS or Amazon (can't remember which) at every stage it reaches on its journey to you, or the recipient if you are the seller.
You can have an iTunes lyric widget which will check the mp3 you are playing in iTunes and retrieve the lyrics from online if it matches the title and artist of the file. Pointless? Maybe. Fun, sure. Done by a browser? Not without input from you, a quick google search to find the artist/band's complete lyrics, find the song. This one finds it for the song you're playing, then updates for the next song. Which is the essential difference between Dashboard information and browser retrieved information: the web is still quite a static place. RSS feeds are changing that, and content is becoming more dynamic. But Dashboard's widgets were conceived with the purpose of being dynamic - I can get traffic reports from Paris, or many US locations, live; weather reports; headlines from the BBC; Slashdot summaries and Mac Update links on one screen with the option of going to the sites with one click and they all launch my browser.
Screw branding, there is functionality inherent in Dashboard, and if you don't think so send me an e-mail and I will give you details on how to turn the thing off (I'm not on my Mac right now, so I can't check the name of the tool, it's a System Preferences plug-in).
Your argument/question is invalid. The BBC cannot be funded by subscription, only by the service charge that is the license fee and British Government funding in case of budgetary emergency.
Also, it's contrary to the purpose of the BBC as it serves its audience to diminish what is an existing method for ex-patriate British citizens to access its content.
The BBC is a public service, and it is so true to its model of Public Service Broadcasting that it is for many ingrained into an essential part of what makes British people British, like tea, 'no sex please...', Carry On films, snaggletooth and rain. Take away access to any part of the BBC because someone is a non-license fee payer you do something that is anathema to what is a core purpose of the BBC.
As you're probably aware, there are tight regulations regarding the model for public service broadcasting under which the BBC as a corporation is forced/constrained to operate. Were you not to have known this, you might also find it notable that the only advertising content on the BBC's television broadcasts are for programs that are shown on the BBC's stations or charitable advertising such as Children in Need fundraisers (this may be the case for radio too, I'm in Ireland where I can receive the TV signals, but not the radio stations, so I don't know).
In this case, your point, that the Corporation ought to make and market a line of products tied to shows, would probably be allowable, so there could be advertisements placed on the sites that way, but I think its hands are also tied as regards making profits, i.e. like some (all?) governments the BBC is not allowed to make a profit, but what it reclaims by license fees and other revenue, it must be reinvested and not kept as a future resource. I'm not sure on this second point, so anyone can feel free to correct me on this if it's misleading.
No two ways about it, BBC is throwing something valuable away.
Speaking as someone who admires the Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) model first applied in the UK, and whose national broadcaster Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE) closely copied (we get ads though because of a small population base - the stations would be unsustainable from license fee collection alone), there is a major item of value returned from the system of completely preventing, or setting quotas for, advertising content. Whether that is in the form of the media outlet functioning as a forum without overarching interest excercised by big businesses, or in the expansion of the broadcaster into newer areas (new media etc.) to accommodate the audience, or just in news being gathered and presented by generally unbiased reporters (give or take that whole Andrew Gilligan/Hutton Inquiry/Dr David Kelly matter which isn't worth flaming about at this stage).
AFAIK, I have all the files I need already on my Mac's desktop. So I'll port them to Nero under Windows by iPod at some time in future. I had laboured under the presumption that Disk Utility would just do it, as I had success with.iso files with it in the past. Damn presumptions.
No I don't intend to run it on Mac, and I should add SuSE 9.1 is stable (and slow as a dog) under VPC.
If you're a Tiger and Transmit user, Safari doesn't go anywhere near ftp anymore. Smartly it just stays on its previous page and loads up Transmit to do the ftp instead. Handy, if like me your taken by the SuSE 9.3 DVD, but fear a browser crapping out after 3 Gb:-) (Transmit resumes downloads)
Thanks for the advice, I may yet persist with it give or take a few hardware issues - the hard drive I want to install it onto is normally not resident in a computer, but put in infrequently. When that hard drive is returned to its proper owner it will then be in a PC permanently, so it's not a priority right now, just a mild frustration. Although I'm sure OpenBSD could do a windows and baulk at running on different hardware to what it was installed under:/
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They're working especially hard on driver support too. For what it's worth, Solaris 10 has never detected a sound card on any system I put it on (mostly Creative SoundBlaster stuff, or generic cards). PC-BSD based on Freesbie detected it automatically. It runs KDE 3.4.0 out of the box - no X setup necessary.
It's a bit sluggish when compared to some optimized Linux distros, but the new KDE is a bit of a load to put on out-dated hardware. For new users, with hardware that's say, faster than 400 MHz with 128 MB RAM, they could live with the performance.
It's a single CD for installation, and it's quite verbose, with a nice graphical system taking you through partitioning.
It ships quite light compared to the big Linux distros like SuSE, or probably Debian, Fedora (I've never used them). But it's no stripped down Gentoo either.
No OpenOffice.org, don't recall a Firefox. The GIMP was there, but pretty much everything that wasn't essential, or expected for a base install of the GUI was left out - but was easily available for FreeBSD from their site.
Also, it includes a nice version of KAsteroids by default :)
Some problems I found were that the bootloader doesn't play well with existing systems. I put it on the second half of a HDD with SuSE 9.3 Pro and couldn't access SuSE any more. Had to nuke both of them (mostly because I was getting unsure of what I was doing and they were both 'fresh' without documents that needed to be salvaged).
I'd flag PC-BSD as a great intro to OSS UNIX (I'm an Apple fanboi, so the OSS is important there). Very easy to get a stable install off the ground. For perforamance it seemed steady for what I used it for, but riced up - pretty KDE, but could have been more optimized.
There is something unsettling about a system that hides the Konsole in a KMenu item, rather than putting the 'Quick Launch' icon on the KBar all the time (apologies for MS terminology, don't know the Linux equivalent of 'quick launch').
Opera users call that "user mode".
That way, you enter bullet time by doing a bullet time move (step left, say) so the other person's computer knows what animation to show, and then just shows where on the map your player is.
Preventing the use of bullet time as a period to make up your mind would hopefully mean that the computer wouldn't have to make a choice in advance of the other player's movement being made.
Of course they could just blur the graphics badly and obscure everything I guess, if it's a matter of presentation.
If you and I play online in this game, let's call it NeoFrag, and you have a latency of 120 ms and I'm the server with a nice fat zero ping then I have .12 of a second that I'm effectively 'ahead' of you, and I can take advantage of that time difference to appear different to you. I simulate enough lag to meet you at your latency, you see me meeting you, and instead of being ahead of you, I'm now at the same ping as you, my responses (not the speed of my actions, but my reactions) are not as fast as they had previously been.
Then once I've stabilised with you at your ping, knowing I can drop back down to zero again, all of a sudden I gain .12 seconds in a single burst. This is the bullet time moment as I see it. I don't know what happens for the briefest of moments, but I have made 1.12 seconds worth of movement in 1 second, so instead of going 100 virtual yards, I've gone 112 virtual yards, and your rocket misses me.
All the while the poor guy at the end of a dodgy connection, or just very far away is at a greater disadvantage.
Would it be theoretically possible to cache the time (bad way of explaining it, but think of it like 'giving access to time to carry out commands which is stored within a timenudge to gain an advantage').
So you start a deathmatch for example, then say you have a delay of 10 seconds where ostensibly you are waiting for a map to load in a fps game. Now, when the match starts, both players are inputting controls which move their characters around the map, but they could draw from those ten seconds to have ten seconds of bullet time within the match, sort of a slowdown advantage instead of a speed-up advantage.
The only problem of course is that you have to use the ten seconds from the start, but that puts a gap between the start of the game when entered into the buffer, and when you start entering key strokes to move your character. So you would actually have a latency of 10,000 for a second, then the game begins and no bullet time feature >:-|
So this way only works if you can borrow time from the end of the match, or from a point in the present onward, but that's a shaky way of drawing off of lag, rather than a steady feed of delay from a buffer. Meaning my way of implementing the bullet time is inherently flawed. (Damn you special relativity!! Why can't gaming take advantage of the curvature of timespace?)
But it would be smoother than simply using a stagger effect of time apropos lag - because as I make it out, you'd be using your opponent's lag to get your bullet time bonus power in the article's proposed implementation. So the lagger gets doubly penalised - meaning the game sucks.... unless I'm wrong again.
So, my question: can this be done, effectively, understandably, in a buffered way, that is fair to both players in a 1v1 deathmatch - which is probably the ideal situation for this feature rather than a free for all or other game mode?
Are you talking about the minimise and maximise buttons? There are keyboard shortcuts like [command-h] to hide and then [option-tab] to cycle through running applications to bring it back from oblivion.
I think this could be personal preference, but you might look into that other desktop because X11 would probably give you options for moving the buttons to other parts of the windows that would achieve what it seems you want.
OroborOSX I think it's called. Link.
Runs as an App under OS X to give you another desktop. I tried it once, didn't use it enough to work out how much of a performance hit it is - didn't like it too much. See this screenshot of my computer to show how you can emulate the look of Classic under OSX. Doesn't work for all programs though :-(
Thanks, that was one of the funniest things I've seen today.
*BSDeeead indeed.
The same thing we do every night Pinky. That damned Stage 1 Gentoo installation we've always promised ourselves.
Testing & & hopefully success.
//will do that google soon, promise
<a href="http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozil la/releases/mozilla1.2.1/mozilla-macos9-1.2.1-full .bin">Text here on getting Mozilla for Mac OS 8.5 and up</a>
I own a Mac, quite a nice one with a good setup and 256 MB graphics card in there. Try playing HL2 on the Mac, Virtual PC is not going to handle it. Quake 3? Runs on Mac and is identical to the PC version.
I own a copy of HL2 on my 2.26 GHz PC with teeny little 64 MB graphics card. It's not a very enjoyable way to play online. The fits and starts are fine one player, but online I'm dead before I can tell what is happening in a deathmatch, and Counter Strike plays okay, but, and this leads on to my next point, it's not my preferred game mode.
HL2 is not designed for 1v1 in the way Q3A is. Certain maps in Q3A (campgrounds 2 - pro-q3dm6, the longest yard - q3dm17 anarki tourney - pro-q3tourney4, in fact, all the tourney levels) are really great 1v1 levels where the speed you can move to advance/retreat, whether you can strafe jump, whether you've got proper weapon binds, and whether you can aim while running away (and rocket jump if you play Clan Arena) all these things decide the winner.
For quick thrills, I play the instaunlagged one-hit-kill rail-jumping mode on the longest yard, q3dm17. A game takes 2 minutes, normally with a 5 minute timelimit. First to 13, or 15 depending on the server. It's all reactions and unpredictable movement. There isn't anything I've found in HL2 that's like this. There are one-hit-kills, but that's not a good thing without the instant re-spawns and rail-jumping.
You say Q3 was the WORST EVAR, but you have to judge it on what it was: a game simply designed to be multiplayer and nothing else, unless you take in the modding community. Quake 4 is going to suck, they're going to do a Quake 2 on it and focus on the 1 player version I think. It won't be a patch on Doom 3, so unless Quake 5 is going to be your dream 64+ player map game in 2010, I guess my attachment to the franchise may end later this year, the Q3 players would probably leave to play Q4 on its release.
Your first point: "Q3Arena was a ripoff and its a shame such potential was utterly wasted on a crappy version of Unreal Tournament."
??????? Unreal Tournament, in as much as I've played UT 2004 on Mac was more a matter of luck and random bullshit than it was about gameplay, skill, consistency. That game was pants in a very, very bad way. For multiplayer DM and extendability (1v1, Team Deathmatch, Clan Arena, InstaUnlag, FreezeTag, Excessive, Custom Maps, etc etc), Quake 3 wins IMHO. For multiplayer team modes, CS:S is better, prettier, smarter, and has a wider player base. But there are loads of things about it that get on my tits. You need to download those pointless .WAV files to hear the server's stupid sound effects when you already have all the damn sound you need to play the game! You need Steam to update to get online, fine if it does it's job for making it harder for bot players to get an unfair advantage, but it is annoying to wait an hour to play a game, especially when you only want to play for an hour at that exact moment in time.
Cheers.
Yours,
64nDh1
The game [Half Life 2] is not poorly designed, quite the opposite IMHO. It's good, but not my ideal game. I still prefer Quake 3 for shit and giggles for example. But there's nothing to stop you reselling your copy to someone who can play it, so your money hasn't been completely wasted. Head to e-bay and see if you can recoup $20.
I will sympathise with the installation woes. If you don't play Half Life 2 often enough then waiting an hour to load the game because the updates are being downloaded is a royal PITA, but thems the breaks.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the lock-in to 'content providers' (read Steam activation on installation to play the offline 1 player mode, read the glitch that means I can't play the game without it first checking with a server that I am on an authorised pc or have a Steam account or whatever). I recognise software purchases are essentially a figment of a lot of consumers' imaginations, but extending the concept of licensing software instead of buying software to require a greenlight from Valve central for me to blow off some vapour from boiled water is pushing it a bit for my liking.
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#You are out of AIM
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It's just like Bohemian Rhapsody when accidentally clicking a chat client logs me out of an already running client >:-|
Your comments didn't really help matters: anyone buying a Mac wouldn't expect its software to work on Athlon hardware, or the others you mentioned. But if you buy a monitor for Windows you can use it on Linux. You buy a monitor for Windows you get your doowhackey to convert the plug, it works on OS X. You buy a monitor for Linux, you don't expect it to drop from 3.2 million pixels to 786.000.
Under a quarter of the number of pixels the screen is capable of displaying, and performance contrary to the purpose of a Cinedisplay monitor: presentation quality appearance. Couple that with Apple's traditional ass ramming in regard to price, I don't think I'd take kindly to smart arse comments about Apple systems only working on Apple endorsed hardware either.
You can download it, but I baulked when I realised it was 400+ MB. I could make the download, it'd take a few hours. I just don't see the reason for it to be so big.
I used the old drivers, transferred the scanner from PC to OS X. It worked.... then stopped. I reinstalled. It worked..... then stopped.
I feel your pain, I have no advice, but you are not alone on this one.
Shown her what to do? It was apparent within the main window of the Roxio Toast application. If you use Toast there is are radio buttons giving options: for Mac, for Mac/PC, iso9660.
I'll grant no one knows what iso9660 is if they haven't ever needed to, but this is not in any way an inchoate problem with OS X. By the way, it did "just work this morning", the PCs didn't read the disk because of the way she made the disk.
I really don't want to sound holier than thou. I'm an average computer user who has made mistakes in the past and only want to prevent others from the same thing.
For future reference, if she is putting files onto a CD, use a Data CD in Toast and make it iso9660. If she is burning an .iso file, use the Disk Utility in "Applications -> Utilities" and open the .iso file with that. If the .iso if properly made Disk Utility will burn it correctly - this includes bootable CDs for the x86 platform as I use my Mac (and its larger hard drive) for downloading Linux distros that I install on x86.
Conclusions:
1. You just don't think Mac OS X is all that great, which is fine, but not universal truth because it's your belief.
2. You can help some of the people some of the time, but I agree, there is no way for a developer or designer to come up with one all-inclusive idiot proof graphical system for every user regardless of experience. I'll admit to being an Apple fanboi/apologist - it's not the same, but some of the difference is that they strive to make the environment consistent. This presents itself in the one button mouse (as one example). Hey presto, programmers and designers have to put all the options in the menu bar (iTunes has a notable glitch - you could only reset play counts by [ctrl-click]ing a track). Furthermore, the menu bar is always (with some exceptions, Valknut, OpenOffice, some others) at the top of the screen, the reason? You just have to shove the mouse. So long as it goes up, you reach the menu bar - meaning that there is 178 degrees of direction you can push in for an infinite distance, but you are going to hit the big welcoming target. These and other little consistencies are only there to make things easier for users to make the transition both to Mac as a daily use platform, and to make the transition from one Mac application or suite to another application or suite on the same computer.
I put in Dublin and got New England (I think). I put in Dublin, Ireland... guess what I got?
If Dashboard sucks your resources, and the browser does everything you want, here's some advice: turn Dashboard off then. There is a plugin that does this, and hey presto, resources no longer assigned to it.
Also, if you were to dig a bit deeper than the standard widgets you'd find a growing number of functions that *could* be found by a browser, but it would not be similar to the live update feature of Dashboard widgets. I have widgets that tell me free physical and other memory resources, tell me the current state of my hard drives, free space and total capacity of partitions and so on. Another one gives you a quick, basic, always open terminal window, handy if you rarely use the Terminal and want to keep Dock icons to a minimum just to save the small bother of digging it out of utilities.
There are fun widgets that will let you draw single colour pictures, and it will then run a very basic animation sequence on them so they move a bit (very PWOR, but Dashboard widgets are still sort of new so that's allowed). You can track an order by FedEx or UPS or Amazon (can't remember which) at every stage it reaches on its journey to you, or the recipient if you are the seller.
You can have an iTunes lyric widget which will check the mp3 you are playing in iTunes and retrieve the lyrics from online if it matches the title and artist of the file. Pointless? Maybe. Fun, sure. Done by a browser? Not without input from you, a quick google search to find the artist/band's complete lyrics, find the song. This one finds it for the song you're playing, then updates for the next song. Which is the essential difference between Dashboard information and browser retrieved information: the web is still quite a static place. RSS feeds are changing that, and content is becoming more dynamic. But Dashboard's widgets were conceived with the purpose of being dynamic - I can get traffic reports from Paris, or many US locations, live; weather reports; headlines from the BBC; Slashdot summaries and Mac Update links on one screen with the option of going to the sites with one click and they all launch my browser.
Screw branding, there is functionality inherent in Dashboard, and if you don't think so send me an e-mail and I will give you details on how to turn the thing off (I'm not on my Mac right now, so I can't check the name of the tool, it's a System Preferences plug-in).
Also, it's contrary to the purpose of the BBC as it serves its audience to diminish what is an existing method for ex-patriate British citizens to access its content.
The BBC is a public service, and it is so true to its model of Public Service Broadcasting that it is for many ingrained into an essential part of what makes British people British, like tea, 'no sex please...', Carry On films, snaggletooth and rain. Take away access to any part of the BBC because someone is a non-license fee payer you do something that is anathema to what is a core purpose of the BBC.
In this case, your point, that the Corporation ought to make and market a line of products tied to shows, would probably be allowable, so there could be advertisements placed on the sites that way, but I think its hands are also tied as regards making profits, i.e. like some (all?) governments the BBC is not allowed to make a profit, but what it reclaims by license fees and other revenue, it must be reinvested and not kept as a future resource. I'm not sure on this second point, so anyone can feel free to correct me on this if it's misleading.
No two ways about it, BBC is throwing something valuable away.
Speaking as someone who admires the Public Service Broadcasting (PSB) model first applied in the UK, and whose national broadcaster Radio Telefis Eireann (RTE) closely copied (we get ads though because of a small population base - the stations would be unsustainable from license fee collection alone), there is a major item of value returned from the system of completely preventing, or setting quotas for, advertising content. Whether that is in the form of the media outlet functioning as a forum without overarching interest excercised by big businesses, or in the expansion of the broadcaster into newer areas (new media etc.) to accommodate the audience, or just in news being gathered and presented by generally unbiased reporters (give or take that whole Andrew Gilligan/Hutton Inquiry/Dr David Kelly matter which isn't worth flaming about at this stage).
No I don't intend to run it on Mac, and I should add SuSE 9.1 is stable (and slow as a dog) under VPC.
If you're a Tiger and Transmit user, Safari doesn't go anywhere near ftp anymore. Smartly it just stays on its previous page and loads up Transmit to do the ftp instead. Handy, if like me your taken by the SuSE 9.3 DVD, but fear a browser crapping out after 3 Gb :-) (Transmit resumes downloads)
Thanks for the advice, I may yet persist with it give or take a few hardware issues - the hard drive I want to install it onto is normally not resident in a computer, but put in infrequently. When that hard drive is returned to its proper owner it will then be in a PC permanently, so it's not a priority right now, just a mild frustration. Although I'm sure OpenBSD could do a windows and baulk at running on different hardware to what it was installed under :/