Did they add it later? In many many cases yes actually. A lot of app compatibility was added in the year or so after the Win 2000 launch, long after 2000 Home had been cancelled.
Starcraft (released in 98) worked fine on 2000, last time I checked.
Blizzard was really the exception not the rule. After all many of -their- games even supported Macs.
In contrast, nothing at the time from Ubi was supported on 2k/NT. This included the first Tom Clancy titles (e.g. Rainbow Six) I managed to hammer it into 2k, but had all sorts of issues.
LucasArts titles from the era were hit and miss... Dark Forces II, in particular comes time mind as a game that really didn't like being installed on 2k.
Stuff like Quake 2 ran, but with a markedly lower frame rate due to the much less performance optimized opengl, and the fact that Win2k was a lot more resource hungry than 98, requiring twice the RAM etc. Of course, the price of RAM dropped, and the opengl drivers improved significantly over time.
Half Life didn't initially work on Windows 2000 but this was eventually fixed in a patch.
It's like if I were discontinuing a model of car because of several huge design problems, but after releasing the replacement model, suddenly started reselling the discontinued model again-- this time, with a spoiler that somehow made it harder to steer. It doesn't make a lot of sense unless it's a half-assed money-grab.
Windows 2000 was -supposed- to be launched as consumer OS. They even had a "Windows 2000 Home" edition planned in addition to "Professional" and "Server", but it was dropped from the plan fairly early on. The WinNT codebase simply wasn't consumer friendly enough - backwards compatibility with Win95/98 software, games, and piles of consumer hardware etc simply wasn't there.
So they backed off pushing consumers to Windows 2000 until 2002 with XP Home, and rushed out ME with a focus on multimedia features (that actually largely made it into XP) to have something new and shiny in the home market.
When i tried playing resident evil on the wii i found that the wiimote simply doesn't make a very good gun, you have to aim the a crosshair by moving the wiimote instead of just aiming.
Pretty much. The wii remote is not a light gun. The point the remote is actually pointing at is not likely the point at which the reticule is going to be at... so you can't sight down the 'barrel' of your wii remote.
However, if you use it as intended, as a way of manipulating the on screen reticule... tilting your aim down to move the reticule down, up to move it up, etc... using the position of the reticule to guide your movements to adjust its position it works VERY well. And frankly this is exactly the same way you use a mouse on a computer or target with a thumstick on a ps3/360.
In fact, in my opinion, it works FAR BETTER than a ps3/360 auto-centering thumbstick for aiming, and compared to the mouse its "equal but different".
The mouse is still more precise, and you can play longer without fatigue so its better from that point of view, but standing in front of a big screen TV pointing at it with the wii remote is more visceral and immersive so its better from that point of view....but the problem is that most genres need you to be able to control the direction and movement of the character, and if you want to achieve this you either lose the benefit of aiming with the wiimote, or end up with a complex control system which looses the benefit of the wiimote entirely.
It sounds like you played, Resident evil Umbrella Chronicles'. The rail-shooter. Try Resident Evil 4. or Metroid Prime 3 which use the thumbstick on the nunchuk to control movement to great effect, and then come back and let us know.
It works much better than you seem to think is possible. The Wii is amazing with a good FPS title.
I first got my DLP in 2004. It was $3000 for a 50". The bulb cost $400 at that time. I haven't had to replace mine yet, but picked up a replacement bulb in 2006 (yes, 2006) to have on hand when the bulb does finally die. I paid about $180 for it then. The bulb can be had even cheaper now, around $120. A new DLP TV of that size (although a 1080p one, an upgrade) would cost about $1000. That's still a tremendous amount more than the bulb, no matter when it was purchased.
You've done well; getting a set with bulbs that are falling in price. $120 down from $400 is pretty amazing; I've done ok... the replacement bulb for my 56" DLP is currently around $240 online. (And like you a new unit would be 1080p instead of my 720p but would cost a lot more than $240.) But as I said to another poster; I have a friend with a 44" LG, who recently replaced his bulb for $500. $500 against a 44" TV... hell... that's probably over half the cost of a new one.
btw, I seriously contemplated buying a replacement bulb to have on hand like you especially since a replacement is a special order and would probably take a few days or more to actually get, but the damned things only have a 90 day warranty... and from what I've heard they usually fail in the first 30 days if they are going to die early. (It actually came with dud bulb - that died within the first month I had it; and they promptly sent a service guy out to swap it for me -- in fact he's the one who told me that the bulbs either die right away or last their rated lifespan.) Anyhow, the last thing I wanted was to buy a dud, store it for a year or two, and then have it die 3-4 weeks after putting it in, long out of warranty.
Maybe I'm just over estimating the the liklihood of getting a dud because it came with one...I'm running 50/50 after all... once bitten twice shy and all that.
Man you sound terrified of change, i think you could put it ontop of the player for a whole two minutes. Or just get the disc as you send the kids away w/e.....
I don't fear change at all, but I dislike automation technology that inevitably just gets in my way.
I thought that he was making a Stargate SG1 joke. Black Turtleneck as Goa'uld.
--rant You know what I find unwatchable about Stargate. Its not the acting, or the cheese, or anything... its stupid words like: Goa'uld
That's NOT how people talk. It just isn't. We'd anglicize it. Goa'uld would become Goold. Or Gold. Or maybe Gowoold. or something along those lines. And the apostrophe would rapidly be dropped, and it would get pronounced in a convenient way.
Just look how the media handled al-Qa'ida for example. These days its usually spelt al Queda and is usually pronounced al-kayda. Its been completely anglicized. Nobody pronounces it remotely in proper arabic. Nobody even tries.
There is simply no way a word like Goa'uld would not have been normalized shortly after its introduction given how commonly they say it. No group of english speakers would would sit around stumbling over this awkward clumsy word construct indefinitely, they'd invariably smooth it out. Its what we do.
Too many fantasy authors don't get this either.
At least Tolkien who invented entire languages to go with his book had reduced all the commonly used names to easily pronounced normalized word constructs. Merry, Pippin, Bilbo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Boromir... not Mer'y Pi'ppi'in, Beao'lbo,... I think that's why Tolkien's fantasy languages are easier to tolerate... as a professor in the field he actually GOT how people USED words and languages... he understood that Frodo and co wouldn't go around talking to Olórin, one of the Maiar of Valinor... he was Gandalf the Wizard. And Aragorn of the Dúnedain... Strider one of those Ranger folk.
--rant off
Back to on topic-ish... The idea of a black turtleneck as the real power at apple actually immediately reminded me of "Meet the Robinsons" and Doris the black bowler hat.
I don't know about that. The rear projection set I have has a $200 bulb in it, which is now 4 years old. My screen is 60". There really aren't any 60" screen HDTV's out there for anything close to $200.
I'd say you are more the exception than the rule. For starters most people bought 42" sets, not 60".
And the 42" sets usually have the same $200 bulb the 60" sets use, and they CAN get new 42" sets for $600-800.
Additionally, $200 is pretty good for a replacement bulb. My own 56" Samsung is ~$240 (its a factor I actually considered when buying it.) But I have a friend with a 44" LG that had to pay over $500 for a new bulb (yes he shopped around online for the best price).
I've seen other sets with bulbs up to $600 and more; supply and demand it seems, if the particular lamp style was only used in one model and/or the models it was in didn't sell well, then replacement lamps are a beast to find, and expensive when you finally do.
Front projection TVs also seem to be generally more expensive than rears, its seems everyone I know with one paid $450+ for a new bulb.
But yeah, there are lots of TVs out there with bulbs in the 150-250 range, and when looking at big HDTVs its probably worth picking up a new bulb. With smaller sets like 42" and 44" though, even $200 is over 1/4 the price of a whole new TV.
I know I've been out of college for a little while now, but do people actually blow through TVs that fast these days? At the risk of sounding old, that just seems wasteful.
A classic CRT tv lasted people 10-20 years. The more recent TVs however are pretty much disposable. The early generation plasmas lose half their brightness within 5 years, and pretty much have to be replaced. Newer plasmas apparently are much better.
And the various front and rear projection technologies (DLP, LCD) all have rather expensive bulbs that need to be replaced within 3-5 years. And the money for a new bulb for your old TV is a big chunk of the price of a new TV... and the new TV will be 1080p instead of 1080i/720p have more hdmi inputs, less latency, run at a 120Hz, etc etc etc... so buying a new TV might seem like a better deal. Sort of like buying a new cellphone or ipod is usually deemed better value than buying new batteries for your 3 year old one.
It's possible over HDMI at least to have the DVR know if the TV is is on or not.
Even if there is a hdmi switch box between them?
. I know some newer TV+Blu-Ray player combinations can even have the Blu-Ray player turn the TV on, and turn the input to the correct one, all automatically when you insert a disc.
That's cool as long as it can also be turned off. I routinely throw movies in while my kids are playing games, or watching a show, in anticpation of watching it shortly thereafter. They'd be pretty pissed if the moment the disc slid in the TV switched inputs on them.
Fair enough. I agree I went in a different direction as I thought it was the more important point. However, to address the argument directly:
Outlook XP can't store passwords in Vista, even in 'compatibility mode'. You have to re-enter all your email passwords every time you re-open the program. I suppose it still 'runs', but this is beyond aggravating especially if you have multiple accounts/complex passwords.
Install compatibility mode on Vista, and they ARE fully compatible.
Until you need to add a few licenses, because you hired some new staff. And now you need to either source some office 2000 licenses or mix in some office 2007 and cause all kinds of headaches like:
1) user envy... he has Office 2007 and I don't -- Stupid as it is, this is a very real problem. 2) intra-office document exchange problems -- its bad enough when you have to exchange documents with customers running different versions... but to have to deal with that hassle internally is far more aggravating.
With OOo you can simply install 2.4 everywhere for as long as you like, or move to 3.0 everywhere whenever you want... etc. Big corporations have some of this flexibility with their (expensive!) Volume licensing maintenance packages... but smaller and medium sized businesses more often than not don't.
What corporations are getting Blackberries w/out unlimited data plans?
Many blackberry "unlimited" data plans only include unlimited data destined-to and originating-from the blackberry itself. Data incurred when using it as a tethered modem is usually excluded from the unlimited bb data plan.
The rationale is that you can really only consume so much bandwidth with the BB itself. After all, its primary an email device with some modest multimedia capabilities. So they can give you "unlimited data" and the limitations on the device itself effectively keep practically everyone within the bounds they'd like. After all, its not like you are going to use it to seed torrents or stream hi-def video...
Think of it this way. Take a hollow, empty laptop shell. Put your non-removeable laptop battery in place, and hot glue it to the case. Now take a knife or a dremel, and cut around the outline of the battery. Voila, your non removeable battery is now a removeable battery. Now instead of cutting the hole manually, you design the case with the hole already there, and you design the battery so that it matches the case, and can be held in place by a screw or two. A couple of contact pads on the battery, and leaf spring contacts inside the laptop battery cavity, and you're all set. Such mods would take, maybe one or two percent of the battery volume.
That would still limit the shape of your battery in a number of ways. What if the battery was a giant thin pancake.
Take a look at the battery in the macbook air... for example.
Your access slot would run the length of an entire side of the PC. This would significantly impact the structural integrity of the laptop. It would also be a really flimsy battery, and even if you had a separate 'jewel case' to put it in; it would be particularly vulnerable going from one to the other and not something users should be encouraged to do, and a certain percentage of users wouldn't use it at all... and unlike CD's this thing is pretty volatile. It would take maybe a week for a class action lawsuit because some twits burned their houses down.
Thinking a bit more about this there is a feature that makes newspapers and magazines so bathroom freindly that will be hard to recreate on a reader.
Indeed!
Namley, parallel accessibility. When I sit on my thrown I don't go there to read a specific article. I browse the magazine for something that look intriguing. It's hard to manage that sort of page flipping and scanning on a reader. But it's essential to the use mode.
Er..uh...yeah... I thought you were going to point out that, in a pinch you can use the magazines/newspapers as a backup supply of TP, something that will be hard to recreate on a reader... for obvious reasons.
But your point is good too, I guess. Still, I can pull up a major news portal... or/. on a PC and then aimlessly pick ariticles of interest... surely this sort of functionality could be added to an ebook.
A) you only save it on one side (the laptop case does not generally extend below the battery case - the bottom of the battery case is part of the laptop case.
1) On some laptops yes, on others no. I have several laptops where that isn't true; including from Apple. And of course, Apple's marketing department is going to go with the relative comparison that makes the numbers as impressive as possible.
2) The numbers were hypothetical to make the point (and I said so up front), not actual.
My tablet PC, which has the thinnest laptop battery I've ever seen (and runs for 5 hours on it) has a battery at least half an inch thick, including case. Take out the case and it's still going to be 10mm or so.
Take a look at the battery in the macbook air. The new MBP probably has a very similiar design.
Scroll down to the 5th or 6th picture, where they look at the battery. The actual cells might well be ~3mm thick; especially if you factor in that the "battery" there still includes some minimal plastic packaging and cushioning.
Yes, because the people on 8+ hour flights who need to use their laptop the entire time, and don't use airlines with power in the seats should be Apple's top priority.
Look, if you actually need a laptop with removable batteries, there are plenty on the market... I'm not saying non removable batteries is a good thing, but I'm not sure its something to get worked up about.
How does the fact that it is not removeable affect its shape by 40%?
Here's a hypothetical cross section: Traditional Laptop: Laptop Case - Battery Case - Battery Cells - Battery Case - Laptop Case 1mm + 1m + 3mm + 1mm + 1mm
MBP: Latop Case - Battery Cells - Laptop Case 1mm + 3mm + 1mm
Overall thickness reduced by 2mm. The "Battery" part is reduced from 5mm to 3mm, saving 40%, by not having to give the battery a redundant plastic shell.
The only way I could see that happening is if the battery was the size of a watch battery. After all, all you need to do to make a battery removeable is install some contacts (which would have to exist in some form or another anyways) and a latch mechanism (which could be just a simple screw).
Not really a valid example. Comparing the can requirements of a 1 volt battery that delivers milliamps to a 10-14Volt 1-3amp battery. The much larger and more powerful battery needs more insulation and rigidity etc to prevent it from shorting out, catching fire, exploding, etc. In the MBP this is taken care of by the laptop case. In a removable battery, the battery has to have its own suitable enclosure.
Remember "40%" may seem like a lot, but we're talking about a laptop that's only a dozen mm thick. Removing a couple mm thickness from a single part is a BIG deal.
WoW does a very good job at teaching most of its game, but if you look closely, it doesn't guide players through a few things; for example talent builds and rotations. And this is where it's very easy to see and divide crap players with people that have spent time on forums learning about their class. People on countless sites (like elitist jerks for example) had volumes of arguments, spreadsheets, graphs, etc devoted to these things. Although any high level character can easily get by in almost every aspect of the game, to maximize the potential of a class is something else entirely.
And this is where the game and most MMOs fail for me. There is no point in maximizing your potential, because you can easily get by in almost every aspect of the game without it.
I want to see my efforts in optimizing my character be the difference between surviving and dying, not finishing it easily and finishing it even more easily.
As a raid leader or for PvP, there were a number of times where I'd be much more inclined to take people who I knew understood the mechanics over someone whose gear was better.
This shouldn't even be a question. Knowing and understanding the mechanics should be paramount... not hey, there are a couple places in the game where this would be a slight advantage.
That's not to say it couldn't be more complex. But that's not the point. Back in BC days, when you met a level 70 hunter talking about theoretically being able to lay up to 5 traps within a certain number of seconds when specced a certain survival spec and managing cooldowns properly, versus some guy's wife that takes over his hunter for a bit during a raid while he deals with an emergency at work, the difference is profound.
Profound, and yet simultaneously almost irrelevant. A band of semi-conscious players of average intelligence who played the game and their class a few hundred hours are nearly always "good enough"; there is rarely really a need for someone 'that good'.
The only time I ever encountered real challenge was when doing content that was beyond my level, and the game actively punishes you for it. You actually accumulate XP slower for the effort. The only other time was when someone fucked up and you are trying to recover... but its not that hard to avoid fucking up, and since dying has practically no penalty, people aren't particularly motivated to avoid it.
Warhammer online is equally bad. If you are supposed to be able to do it, then its easy. There is simply nothing that is 'hard' that you are supposed to be able to do. If you encounter something 'hard' it means you probably aren't high enough level, or didn't bring enough players. I have yet to encounter anything in either WoW or WAR that was "hard" and yet was also designed to be done at my level with the number of people I had with me.
Everquest had that sort of difficulty. You'd walk into an area designed to be done in a small group at level 25 and thered be a level 40 critter in the area you simply had to avoid. And every now and then a 'named' would spawn that was tougher and hit harder than the usual stuff you were fighting -- but you could still kill him if you played well. He may have been tougher but he was still -designed- to be killed by a small group at level 25.
Its not that playing well in WoW doesn't make a difference, its that its doesn't make the difference between winning or losing an encounter. If the encounter was designed to be done at your level, as long as you don't completely fuck up, you'll defeat it without all that much trouble.
To be fair the raid game is more challenging. But a) you have to suffer through the rest of the game to get their b) you have to play often and regularly enough to be part of a raid
There is really no option for "good players with lives"; I can't be in raid guild. I don't have time for it. I want to be able to log in when I can with 2 to 4 friends and do something challenging. I simply don't have the flexibility to be online when 12 or 20 guild-mates are scheduled to do something.
If you're on a decent screen the experience should be amazing.
You pretty much sunk your argument when your experience comes down to whether or not you have a 'decent screen'.
If the game needs a decent screen to be an amazing experience, then its not a terribly good game, although it might have some amazing shiny graphics to distract you from this fact for a while.
I text a message status to Twitter "... is going to be in Toledo this weekend, anyone free?" instead of calling EVERYONE I might know in Toledo and then saying "well hold on, I haven't called Y or Z yet."
1) Does everyone you know that's not in Toledo not vastly outnumber the number of people in Toledo?
2) My email has this feature where I can cc or even bcc messages to as many people as I want, it also supports setting up groups of recipients for groups I might want to send messages to often. Doesn't yours? I don't object to your using twitter, but replicating features of 20 year old email is hardly something to be excited about.
No need to tell your friends they'd be free to call you instead huh?
Correct, there is no need. My friends don't need me to tell them they can call me. They just call me.
I can easily text message Twitter that I'm heading over to a different town for work and wouldn't mind getting together for coffee with friends and leave it open for people to give me a call.
Cool, then they can send a text message to twitter that they they like coffee in different towns, and leave it open for people to call them.
Then you can text message twitter just to reinforce just how open to the idea of someone calling you you are.
And they can text message twitter with the same.
And then...
Gee, no wonder it ended up being a never ending chat room.
See... the way I do it is... If I want to have coffee with you, I'll just call or email you. If I don't, then I don't. I don't need to play this ridiculous game of passive aggressive "I want to have coffee with you, but you have to ask me." that you seem to enjoy.
Oh I see so no support at all > Support except maybe not 100% as good as the original?
Not exactly.
Having the vendors do their job and provide drivers > flaky virtualized support by microsoft
Why should microsoft create an expensive and inherently flaky solution to a problem much easier solved by the hardware vendors. And if we demand it of Microsoft, why not apple? There is nothing stopping apple from releasing a wrapper/virtualization layer that would work with Windows xp drivers. (This is, after all, essentially how a chunk of wifi drivers work with linux with ndis-wrapper.) Yet I don't hear any bitching that Apple should have done this.)
Meanwhile as a customer there are several brands I now prefer over customers because they've taken the trouble to release 64 bit and OSX drivers.
Or I could go blame BOTH Microsoft and Apple for not providing emulation/virtualization solutions for XP drivers...but really its not their job.
Do you suppose that there might be just a touch of "We can jack up profits by making everybody buy our latest card, because Microsoft will absorb the blame for the missing drivers by just standing close, leaving our reputation blemish-free." in that decision not to produce drivers for existing hardware?
More than just a touch, I think that is one of the main reasons 3rd parties didn't bother. They rarely will even fix a bug in a driver for a product that's been superseded by a new version, nevermind go back and write/recompile them for a new architecture or OS. There's just no money in doing that... and a whole lot of money in selling new models.
I know little about the technical details of all this, but couldn't this be alleviated by Microsoft writing an emulation/virtualisation layer to run the 32-bit drivers on a 64-bit OS?
I suppose anything is possible.
I'm not sure it would be worth it for microsoft though.
It wouldn't be easy, it wouldn't work for all devices, and it would incur a performance hit (which is the last thing MS needs: "my camera transfers slower in windows 7 64-bit, Win7 sucks!"
The fact that this is because the camera vendor was lazy and didn't bother with a 64-bit driver, so Win7 has to run their 32-bit driver through a virtualization layer isn't going to placate end users. Whereas if there is no Win7 64-bit driver on the camera vendors website, it appears to be the fault of the camera vendor for not supporting Win7... which is really where the fault lies.
Its the same problem linux has really, except that instead of 3rd party proprietary drivers we mostly got nothing at all. The Linux community stepped up and released their own drivers for the most part.
There is actually nothing preventing the windows community from doing the same, and a lot of the hard work has already been done.
If they had actually encouraged open source on their platform to begin with, then they wouldn't be in this mess now:)
There has never really been any reason that 3rd party vendors couldn't open source their drivers, or that the community couldn't write their own.
At least until Vista and driver-signing requirements... but even that is a minor obstacle, it wouldn't be too difficult to organize a driver signing organization for windows drivers. Hell, I bet if the windows community stepped up with open source drivers for all the unsupported hardware for vista MS itself would cough up the cash to do the signing. It would be in their own interest after all.
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Did they add it later?
In many many cases yes actually. A lot of app compatibility was added in the year or so after the Win 2000 launch, long after 2000 Home had been cancelled.
Starcraft (released in 98) worked fine on 2000, last time I checked.
Blizzard was really the exception not the rule. After all many of -their- games even supported Macs.
In contrast, nothing at the time from Ubi was supported on 2k/NT. This included the first Tom Clancy titles (e.g. Rainbow Six) I managed to hammer it into 2k, but had all sorts of issues.
LucasArts titles from the era were hit and miss... Dark Forces II, in particular comes time mind as a game that really didn't like being installed on 2k.
Stuff like Quake 2 ran, but with a markedly lower frame rate due to the much less performance optimized opengl, and the fact that Win2k was a lot more resource hungry than 98, requiring twice the RAM etc. Of course, the price of RAM dropped, and the opengl drivers improved significantly over time.
Half Life didn't initially work on Windows 2000 but this was eventually fixed in a patch.
It's like if I were discontinuing a model of car because of several huge design problems, but after releasing the replacement model, suddenly started reselling the discontinued model again-- this time, with a spoiler that somehow made it harder to steer. It doesn't make a lot of sense unless it's a half-assed money-grab.
Windows 2000 was -supposed- to be launched as consumer OS. They even had a "Windows 2000 Home" edition planned in addition to "Professional" and "Server", but it was dropped from the plan fairly early on. The WinNT codebase simply wasn't consumer friendly enough - backwards compatibility with Win95/98 software, games, and piles of consumer hardware etc simply wasn't there.
So they backed off pushing consumers to Windows 2000 until 2002 with XP Home, and rushed out ME with a focus on multimedia features (that actually largely made it into XP) to have something new and shiny in the home market.
When i tried playing resident evil on the wii i found that the wiimote simply doesn't make a very good gun, you have to aim the a crosshair by moving the wiimote instead of just aiming.
Pretty much. The wii remote is not a light gun. The point the remote is actually pointing at is not likely the point at which the reticule is going to be at... so you can't sight down the 'barrel' of your wii remote.
However, if you use it as intended, as a way of manipulating the on screen reticule... tilting your aim down to move the reticule down, up to move it up, etc... using the position of the reticule to guide your movements to adjust its position it works VERY well. And frankly this is exactly the same way you use a mouse on a computer or target with a thumstick on a ps3/360.
In fact, in my opinion, it works FAR BETTER than a ps3/360 auto-centering thumbstick for aiming, and compared to the mouse its "equal but different".
The mouse is still more precise, and you can play longer without fatigue so its better from that point of view, but standing in front of a big screen TV pointing at it with the wii remote is more visceral and immersive so its better from that point of view. ...but the problem is that most genres need you to be able to control the direction and movement of the character, and if you want to achieve this you either lose the benefit of aiming with the wiimote, or end up with a complex control system which looses the benefit of the wiimote entirely.
It sounds like you played, Resident evil Umbrella Chronicles'. The rail-shooter.
Try Resident Evil 4. or Metroid Prime 3 which use the thumbstick on the nunchuk to control movement to great effect, and then come back and let us know.
It works much better than you seem to think is possible. The Wii is amazing with a good FPS title.
I first got my DLP in 2004. It was $3000 for a 50". The bulb cost $400 at that time. I haven't had to replace mine yet, but picked up a replacement bulb in 2006 (yes, 2006) to have on hand when the bulb does finally die. I paid about $180 for it then. The bulb can be had even cheaper now, around $120. A new DLP TV of that size (although a 1080p one, an upgrade) would cost about $1000. That's still a tremendous amount more than the bulb, no matter when it was purchased.
You've done well; getting a set with bulbs that are falling in price. $120 down from $400 is pretty amazing; I've done ok... the replacement bulb for my 56" DLP is currently around $240 online. (And like you a new unit would be 1080p instead of my 720p but would cost a lot more than $240.) But as I said to another poster; I have a friend with a 44" LG, who recently replaced his bulb for $500. $500 against a 44" TV... hell... that's probably over half the cost of a new one.
btw, I seriously contemplated buying a replacement bulb to have on hand like you especially since a replacement is a special order and would probably take a few days or more to actually get, but the damned things only have a 90 day warranty... and from what I've heard they usually fail in the first 30 days if they are going to die early. (It actually came with dud bulb - that died within the first month I had it; and they promptly sent a service guy out to swap it for me -- in fact he's the one who told me that the bulbs either die right away or last their rated lifespan.) Anyhow, the last thing I wanted was to buy a dud, store it for a year or two, and then have it die 3-4 weeks after putting it in, long out of warranty.
Maybe I'm just over estimating the the liklihood of getting a dud because it came with one...I'm running 50/50 after all... once bitten twice shy and all that.
Man you sound terrified of change, i think you could put it ontop of the player for a whole two minutes. Or just get the disc as you send the kids away w/e.....
I don't fear change at all, but I dislike automation technology that inevitably just gets in my way.
I thought that he was making a Stargate SG1 joke. Black Turtleneck as Goa'uld.
--rant
You know what I find unwatchable about Stargate. Its not the acting, or the cheese, or anything... its stupid words like: Goa'uld
That's NOT how people talk. It just isn't. We'd anglicize it. Goa'uld would become Goold. Or Gold. Or maybe Gowoold. or something along those lines. And the apostrophe would rapidly be dropped, and it would get pronounced in a convenient way.
Just look how the media handled al-Qa'ida for example. These days its usually spelt al Queda and is usually pronounced al-kayda. Its been completely anglicized. Nobody pronounces it remotely in proper arabic. Nobody even tries.
There is simply no way a word like Goa'uld would not have been normalized shortly after its introduction given how commonly they say it. No group of english speakers would would sit around stumbling over this awkward clumsy word construct indefinitely, they'd invariably smooth it out. Its what we do.
Too many fantasy authors don't get this either.
At least Tolkien who invented entire languages to go with his book had reduced all the commonly used names to easily pronounced normalized word constructs. Merry, Pippin, Bilbo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Boromir... not Mer'y Pi'ppi'in, Beao'lbo, ... I think that's why Tolkien's fantasy languages are easier to tolerate... as a professor in the field he actually GOT how people USED words and languages... he understood that Frodo and co wouldn't go around talking to Olórin, one of the Maiar of Valinor... he was Gandalf the Wizard. And Aragorn of the Dúnedain... Strider one of those Ranger folk.
--rant off
Back to on topic-ish ... The idea of a black turtleneck as the real power at apple actually immediately reminded me of "Meet the Robinsons" and Doris the black bowler hat.
I don't know about that. The rear projection set I have has a $200 bulb in it, which is now 4 years old. My screen is 60". There really aren't any 60" screen HDTV's out there for anything close to $200.
I'd say you are more the exception than the rule. For starters most people bought 42" sets, not 60".
And the 42" sets usually have the same $200 bulb the 60" sets use, and they CAN get new 42" sets for $600-800.
Additionally, $200 is pretty good for a replacement bulb. My own 56" Samsung is ~$240 (its a factor I actually considered when buying it.) But I have a friend with a 44" LG that had to pay over $500 for a new bulb (yes he shopped around online for the best price).
I've seen other sets with bulbs up to $600 and more; supply and demand it seems, if the particular lamp style was only used in one model and/or the models it was in didn't sell well, then replacement lamps are a beast to find, and expensive when you finally do.
Front projection TVs also seem to be generally more expensive than rears, its seems everyone I know with one paid $450+ for a new bulb.
But yeah, there are lots of TVs out there with bulbs in the 150-250 range, and when looking at big HDTVs its probably worth picking up a new bulb. With smaller sets like 42" and 44" though, even $200 is over 1/4 the price of a whole new TV.
I know I've been out of college for a little while now, but do people actually blow through TVs that fast these days? At the risk of sounding old, that just seems wasteful.
A classic CRT tv lasted people 10-20 years.
The more recent TVs however are pretty much disposable. The early generation plasmas lose half their brightness within 5 years, and pretty much have to be replaced. Newer plasmas apparently are much better.
And the various front and rear projection technologies (DLP, LCD) all have rather expensive bulbs that need to be replaced within 3-5 years. And the money for a new bulb for your old TV is a big chunk of the price of a new TV ... and the new TV will be 1080p instead of 1080i/720p have more hdmi inputs, less latency, run at a 120Hz, etc etc etc... so buying a new TV might seem like a better deal. Sort of like buying a new cellphone or ipod is usually deemed better value than buying new batteries for your 3 year old one.
It's possible over HDMI at least to have the DVR know if the TV is is on or not.
Even if there is a hdmi switch box between them?
. I know some newer TV+Blu-Ray player combinations can even have the Blu-Ray player turn the TV on, and turn the input to the correct one, all automatically when you insert a disc.
That's cool as long as it can also be turned off. I routinely throw movies in while my kids are playing games, or watching a show, in anticpation of watching it shortly thereafter. They'd be pretty pissed if the moment the disc slid in the TV switched inputs on them.
Just pointing out your statement was wrong.
Fair enough. I agree I went in a different direction as I thought it was the more important point. However, to address the argument directly:
Outlook XP can't store passwords in Vista, even in 'compatibility mode'. You have to re-enter all your email passwords every time you re-open the program. I suppose it still 'runs', but this is beyond aggravating especially if you have multiple accounts/complex passwords.
Install compatibility mode on Vista, and they ARE fully compatible.
Until you need to add a few licenses, because you hired some new staff. And now you need to either source some office 2000 licenses or mix in some office 2007 and cause all kinds of headaches like:
1) user envy... he has Office 2007 and I don't -- Stupid as it is, this is a very real problem.
2) intra-office document exchange problems -- its bad enough when you have to exchange documents with customers running different versions... but to have to deal with that hassle internally is far more aggravating.
With OOo you can simply install 2.4 everywhere for as long as you like, or move to 3.0 everywhere whenever you want... etc. Big corporations have some of this flexibility with their (expensive!) Volume licensing maintenance packages... but smaller and medium sized businesses more often than not don't.
What corporations are getting Blackberries w/out unlimited data plans?
Many blackberry "unlimited" data plans only include unlimited data destined-to and originating-from the blackberry itself. Data incurred when using it as a tethered modem is usually excluded from the unlimited bb data plan.
The rationale is that you can really only consume so much bandwidth with the BB itself. After all, its primary an email device with some modest multimedia capabilities. So they can give you "unlimited data" and the limitations on the device itself effectively keep practically everyone within the bounds they'd like. After all, its not like you are going to use it to seed torrents or stream hi-def video...
Think of it this way. Take a hollow, empty laptop shell. Put your non-removeable laptop battery in place, and hot glue it to the case. Now take a knife or a dremel, and cut around the outline of the battery. Voila, your non removeable battery is now a removeable battery. Now instead of cutting the hole manually, you design the case with the hole already there, and you design the battery so that it matches the case, and can be held in place by a screw or two. A couple of contact pads on the battery, and leaf spring contacts inside the laptop battery cavity, and you're all set. Such mods would take, maybe one or two percent of the battery volume.
That would still limit the shape of your battery in a number of ways. What if the battery was a giant thin pancake.
Take a look at the battery in the macbook air... for example.
Your access slot would run the length of an entire side of the PC. This would significantly impact the structural integrity of the laptop. It would also be a really flimsy battery, and even if you had a separate 'jewel case' to put it in; it would be particularly vulnerable going from one to the other and not something users should be encouraged to do, and a certain percentage of users wouldn't use it at all... and unlike CD's this thing is pretty volatile. It would take maybe a week for a class action lawsuit because some twits burned their houses down.
Thinking a bit more about this there is a feature that makes newspapers and magazines so bathroom freindly that will be hard to recreate on a reader.
Indeed!
Namley, parallel accessibility. When I sit on my thrown I don't go there to read a specific article. I browse the magazine for something that look intriguing. It's hard to manage that sort of page flipping and scanning on a reader. But it's essential to the use mode.
Er..uh...yeah... I thought you were going to point out that, in a pinch you can use the magazines/newspapers as a backup supply of TP, something that will be hard to recreate on a reader... for obvious reasons.
But your point is good too, I guess. Still, I can pull up a major news portal... or /. on a PC and then aimlessly pick ariticles of interest... surely this sort of functionality could be added to an ebook.
A) you only save it on one side (the laptop case does not generally extend below the battery case - the bottom of the battery case is part of the laptop case.
1) On some laptops yes, on others no. I have several laptops where that isn't true; including from Apple. And of course, Apple's marketing department is going to go with the relative comparison that makes the numbers as impressive as possible.
2) The numbers were hypothetical to make the point (and I said so up front), not actual.
My tablet PC, which has the thinnest laptop battery I've ever seen (and runs for 5 hours on it) has a battery at least half an inch thick, including case. Take out the case and it's still going to be 10mm or so.
Take a look at the battery in the macbook air. The new MBP probably has a very similiar design.
http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20080215/147525/
Scroll down to the 5th or 6th picture, where they look at the battery. The actual cells might well be ~3mm thick; especially if you factor in that the "battery" there still includes some minimal plastic packaging and cushioning.
Yes, because the people on 8+ hour flights who need to use their laptop the entire time, and don't use airlines with power in the seats should be Apple's top priority.
Look, if you actually need a laptop with removable batteries, there are plenty on the market... I'm not saying non removable batteries is a good thing, but I'm not sure its something to get worked up about.
How does the fact that it is not removeable affect its shape by 40%?
Here's a hypothetical cross section:
Traditional Laptop:
Laptop Case - Battery Case - Battery Cells - Battery Case - Laptop Case
1mm + 1m + 3mm + 1mm + 1mm
MBP:
Latop Case - Battery Cells - Laptop Case
1mm + 3mm + 1mm
Overall thickness reduced by 2mm. The "Battery" part is reduced from 5mm to 3mm, saving 40%, by not having to give the battery a redundant plastic shell.
The only way I could see that happening is if the battery was the size of a watch battery. After all, all you need to do to make a battery removeable is install some contacts (which would have to exist in some form or another anyways) and a latch mechanism (which could be just a simple screw).
Not really a valid example. Comparing the can requirements of a 1 volt battery that delivers milliamps to a 10-14Volt 1-3amp battery. The much larger and more powerful battery needs more insulation and rigidity etc to prevent it from shorting out, catching fire, exploding, etc. In the MBP this is taken care of by the laptop case. In a removable battery, the battery has to have its own suitable enclosure.
Remember "40%" may seem like a lot, but we're talking about a laptop that's only a dozen mm thick. Removing a couple mm thickness from a single part is a BIG deal.
WoW does a very good job at teaching most of its game, but if you look closely, it doesn't guide players through a few things; for example talent builds and rotations. And this is where it's very easy to see and divide crap players with people that have spent time on forums learning about their class. People on countless sites (like elitist jerks for example) had volumes of arguments, spreadsheets, graphs, etc devoted to these things. Although any high level character can easily get by in almost every aspect of the game, to maximize the potential of a class is something else entirely.
And this is where the game and most MMOs fail for me. There is no point in maximizing your potential, because you can easily get by in almost every aspect of the game without it.
I want to see my efforts in optimizing my character be the difference between surviving and dying, not finishing it easily and finishing it even more easily.
As a raid leader or for PvP, there were a number of times where I'd be much more inclined to take people who I knew understood the mechanics over someone whose gear was better.
This shouldn't even be a question. Knowing and understanding the mechanics should be paramount... not hey, there are a couple places in the game where this would be a slight advantage.
That's not to say it couldn't be more complex. But that's not the point. Back in BC days, when you met a level 70 hunter talking about theoretically being able to lay up to 5 traps within a certain number of seconds when specced a certain survival spec and managing cooldowns properly, versus some guy's wife that takes over his hunter for a bit during a raid while he deals with an emergency at work, the difference is profound.
Profound, and yet simultaneously almost irrelevant. A band of semi-conscious players of average intelligence who played the game and their class a few hundred hours are nearly always "good enough"; there is rarely really a need for someone 'that good'.
The only time I ever encountered real challenge was when doing content that was beyond my level, and the game actively punishes you for it. You actually accumulate XP slower for the effort. The only other time was when someone fucked up and you are trying to recover... but its not that hard to avoid fucking up, and since dying has practically no penalty, people aren't particularly motivated to avoid it.
Warhammer online is equally bad. If you are supposed to be able to do it, then its easy. There is simply nothing that is 'hard' that you are supposed to be able to do. If you encounter something 'hard' it means you probably aren't high enough level, or didn't bring enough players. I have yet to encounter anything in either WoW or WAR that was "hard" and yet was also designed to be done at my level with the number of people I had with me.
Everquest had that sort of difficulty. You'd walk into an area designed to be done in a small group at level 25 and thered be a level 40 critter in the area you simply had to avoid. And every now and then a 'named' would spawn that was tougher and hit harder than the usual stuff you were fighting -- but you could still kill him if you played well. He may have been tougher but he was still -designed- to be killed by a small group at level 25.
Its not that playing well in WoW doesn't make a difference, its that its doesn't make the difference between winning or losing an encounter. If the encounter was designed to be done at your level, as long as you don't completely fuck up, you'll defeat it without all that much trouble.
To be fair the raid game is more challenging. But
a) you have to suffer through the rest of the game to get their
b) you have to play often and regularly enough to be part of a raid
There is really no option for "good players with lives"; I can't be in raid guild. I don't have time for it. I want to be able to log in when I can with 2 to 4 friends and do something challenging. I simply don't have the flexibility to be online when 12 or 20 guild-mates are scheduled to do something.
If you're on a decent screen the experience should be amazing.
You pretty much sunk your argument when your experience comes down to whether or not you have a 'decent screen'.
If the game needs a decent screen to be an amazing experience, then its not a terribly good game, although it might have some amazing shiny graphics to distract you from this fact for a while.
I text a message status to Twitter " ... is going to be in Toledo this weekend, anyone free?" instead of calling EVERYONE I might know in Toledo and then saying "well hold on, I haven't called Y or Z yet."
1) Does everyone you know that's not in Toledo not vastly outnumber the number of people in Toledo?
2) My email has this feature where I can cc or even bcc messages to as many people as I want, it also supports setting up groups of recipients for groups I might want to send messages to often. Doesn't yours? I don't object to your using twitter, but replicating features of 20 year old email is hardly something to be excited about.
No need to tell your friends they'd be free to call you instead huh?
Correct, there is no need. My friends don't need me to tell them they can call me. They just call me.
I can easily text message Twitter that I'm heading over to a different town for work and wouldn't mind getting together for coffee with friends and leave it open for people to give me a call.
Cool, then they can send a text message to twitter that they they like coffee in different towns, and leave it open for people to call them.
Then you can text message twitter just to reinforce just how open to the idea of someone calling you you are.
And they can text message twitter with the same.
And then...
Gee, no wonder it ended up being a never ending chat room.
See... the way I do it is... If I want to have coffee with you, I'll just call or email you. If I don't, then I don't. I don't need to play this ridiculous game of passive aggressive "I want to have coffee with you, but you have to ask me." that you seem to enjoy.
Oh I see so no support at all > Support except maybe not 100% as good as the original?
Not exactly.
Having the vendors do their job and provide drivers > flaky virtualized support by microsoft
Why should microsoft create an expensive and inherently flaky solution to a problem much easier solved by the hardware vendors. And if we demand it of Microsoft, why not apple? There is nothing stopping apple from releasing a wrapper/virtualization layer that would work with Windows xp drivers. (This is, after all, essentially how a chunk of wifi drivers work with linux with ndis-wrapper.) Yet I don't hear any bitching that Apple should have done this.)
Meanwhile as a customer there are several brands I now prefer over customers because they've taken the trouble to release 64 bit and OSX drivers.
Or I could go blame BOTH Microsoft and Apple for not providing emulation/virtualization solutions for XP drivers...but really its not their job.
Do you suppose that there might be just a touch of "We can jack up profits by making everybody buy our latest card, because Microsoft will absorb the blame for the missing drivers by just standing close, leaving our reputation blemish-free." in that decision not to produce drivers for existing hardware?
More than just a touch, I think that is one of the main reasons 3rd parties didn't bother. They rarely will even fix a bug in a driver for a product that's been superseded by a new version, nevermind go back and write/recompile them for a new architecture or OS. There's just no money in doing that... and a whole lot of money in selling new models.
I know little about the technical details of all this, but couldn't this be alleviated by Microsoft writing an emulation/virtualisation layer to run the 32-bit drivers on a 64-bit OS?
I suppose anything is possible.
I'm not sure it would be worth it for microsoft though.
It wouldn't be easy, it wouldn't work for all devices, and it would incur a performance hit (which is the last thing MS needs: "my camera transfers slower in windows 7 64-bit, Win7 sucks!"
The fact that this is because the camera vendor was lazy and didn't bother with a 64-bit driver, so Win7 has to run their 32-bit driver through a virtualization layer isn't going to placate end users. Whereas if there is no Win7 64-bit driver on the camera vendors website, it appears to be the fault of the camera vendor for not supporting Win7... which is really where the fault lies.
That's their problem.
Its the same problem linux has really, except that instead of 3rd party proprietary drivers we mostly got nothing at all. The Linux community stepped up and released their own drivers for the most part.
There is actually nothing preventing the windows community from doing the same, and a lot of the hard work has already been done.
If they had actually encouraged open source on their platform to begin with, then they wouldn't be in this mess now :)
There has never really been any reason that 3rd party vendors couldn't open source their drivers, or that the community couldn't write their own.
At least until Vista and driver-signing requirements... but even that is a minor obstacle, it wouldn't be too difficult to organize a driver signing organization for windows drivers. Hell, I bet if the windows community stepped up with open source drivers for all the unsupported hardware for vista MS itself would cough up the cash to do the signing. It would be in their own interest after all.