>> Will it run on the Mac? > > I sure hope not, that's the LAST thing we need is > a bunch of mac users ruining things.
Funny you should say that on a board mostly devoted to Linux...if the Mac port doesn't make it, the Linux port DEFINITELY won't make it.
The reason is that Verant's games are heavily dependant on DirectX.
I know, because I've been playing Verant's games since Tanarus was in open beta three years ago, and I've been asking them almost from the start to do a Mac port of Tanarus. Well, aside from the fact that they give Tanarus very little attention most of the time, they were very quick to cite Tanny's dependence on DirectX.
They threw out a lot of talk that they were considering a Mac port of Everquest. Well, ummm...where is it?
The fact is that Verant created Tanarus with the express purpose of trying to understand MMOG's; they said that Tanny was a stepping-stone to EQ, and a lot of Tanny's code is now part of EQ.
I'm going to venture a guess here, that Verant is going to use most of the EQ code base for the Star Wars game, it's going to be DirectX dependent, and ports to other platforms will be non-existent.
I hope I'm wrong, but Verant has simply not shown the motivation to do cross-platform stuff.
If the signal travels faster than light, wouldn't it get received before it was sent??
Only if lightspeed were instantaneous, i.e., took zero seconds to arrive from point A to point B (for instance, if point A were our Sun and point B was the Crab Nebulae). To be faster than zero, yes, would require time travel.
However, this is not the case, we know that light takes a certain amount of time to travel, so improving on that time does not necessarily mean going backwards in time.
Also, when you think about what is being proposed, the radio signals are not travelling faster than light, but they are arriving faster than light. The difference is that the worm hole is a shortcut from point A to B, but still has a measurable distance. If you shot a beam of light through the worm hole along with the radio signal, you would see that the radio signal has not actually increased its speed relative to the speed of light.
Napster and its ilk have legitimate uses. No, really, they do. If your solution to their overutilization of bandwidth is shutting them down completely, I can't blame anyone who tries to get around it. Hell, I've tried to get around it. A middle ground exists here, and I'm waiting for someone to stumble onto it.
The next step is probably not to shut down Napster and its ilk; the next step is probably to start charging students for the amount of bandwidth they use.
The true problem, after all, is that the university only has a limited budget set aside for bandwidth. Like any ISP, the university is overselling its service, on the hopes that the number of students who are light/casual users will balance out the number who are heavy users. Unfortunately, Napster is turning many light bandwidth users into heavy users.
The solution to the problem, then, is to keep the current charges for internet access in the student's bill, and to start penalizing the heavy users by charging a per MB fee over a basic monthly allotment.
You would see either one of two things happening: internet usage would drop dramatically, or the influx of cash would allow the university to keep upgrading its bandwidth.
There's another option which is probably less desirable, and that's to give a student an allotment of data transfer, and shut them down for the rest of the month after they reach it. I believe some schools are already doing something along these lines.
While Joy gives the example of sentient, self-replicating nanomachines of being a possible threat to mankind (which seems somewhat absurd at this present time), the real threat that he is getting at is the abuses of technology by people, and I believe he has a point.
I don't lay awake at night thinking about terrorists, no; but I am very concerned about the rapid advances in biotechnology. Imagine a day 20 or 30 years down the road where computer chips can be placed inside of disabled people; they can process motor functions, helping people with little or no muscle control live somewhat normal lives, or a chip implanted in the brain that helps autistic or mentally retarded people to think and act coherently.
Wonderful stuff....
Now look a little farther down the road. Perfectly healthy people are implanting these kinds of chips to improve athletic ability, to increase knowledge or to increase skill. Sporting leagues are the first to reject it, saying that any athelete found to have implants is barred from playing professionally. In the business world, however, the ethical lines are much more blurred; with the temptation of being able to land a better job for a lot more money, people are buying chip implants. Implants are seen as a shortcut to education, getting the equivalent of multiple doctorates in one operation. Initially, this is frowned upon, but eventually, many people are forced to do it because the marketplace has become extremely competitive; all of the best jobs are going to people who exhibit degrees of knowledge or skill that are on the level of genius.
Foreign countries pick up on this, and require that their soldiers and scientists receive implants. Several minor skirmishes around the world shows the US that they are being outmatched in soldier-to-soldier combat. Weapons technology in the third world is increasing at an alarming pace. Grudgingly, the US is forced to require that many or its key personnel have implants.
Eventually, someone gets the idea of starting sporting leagues soley for enhanced players. It's a controversial idea, but the controversy wears off pretty quickly when people see how exciting the sports are. Jujitsu matches with a half-dozen contestants all moving at blinding speed. Variations on basketball where the ball is slightly larger than a grapefruit (with an equally smaller goal), and many shots are still sunk from half-court.
Before the century closes, the gulf between those with implants and those without is so great that most of the people who refuse the enhancements on moral, ethical, or religious grounds are forced into the lower class and poverty. It's simply not possible any longer to live a normal life in the modern world without chip enhancements. They become servants, and that phenomenon known as the "middle class" slowly begins to dissolve.
That's what keeps ME awake at nights...boy, do I have an active imagination or what?;-)
Yeah, Nanosaur is a nice little game, but I agree. Half-Life is the kind of game you would blow $3000 on a computer system to play. Nanosaur is a nice little shooter for kids, but lacks any real depth to it.
This is also a bad analogy. Let's say Napster was a person. Napster is friends with Bob and Joe. Napster gets Bob and Joe together, and then Joe sells Bob some crack. Napster is witness to this, and fails to inform the authorities. Napster has violated the law.
Actually, I think a better analogy would be to compare Napster to the copy machine in the public library.
How many people are using it to make illegal copies? Almost everyone.
Does the library know about it? Absolutely.
What has the library done about it? Posted a little warning saying, "Hey stupid, don't copy anything!":-)
There are larger issues here that no one has yet touched on. Mainly, that Napster has validated and empowered an entire community of illegal MP3's; they've brought music bootlegging into the mainsteam. MP3's have been available for a while, but you had to search hard for them, going to seedy sites that were littered with porno ads and the like. Most people using Napster, however, will think, "This is so easy, it can't be criminal!"
Personally, I'm not an advocate of bootlegged music, but I can't help rooting for Napster. We all know that music CD's are grossly overpriced. I don't think that the RIAA would have to worry that much about the bootleg industry if they could keep their prices reasonable; but paying $18 for a CD is absurd, especially when they are cheaper to produce than vinyl LP's (which sold for under $10). CD prices continue to rise in spite of the fact that the music industry is bigger than ever. I believe that the music industry is top-heavy with overpaid execs who aspire to add another $10 mil to their compensation package.
Is Napster going to eat into CD sales? Absolutely--and I believe that the end result is going to be a lot of pruning in the industry. Hopefully, the end result is going to be a dramatic drop in CD prices before they lose totaly control over music distribution.
Someone said making napster illegal would be like making (among other things) the USENET illegal. The problem with this analogy is there isn't the same level of direct culpability with regards to the USENET as there is with Napster. The USENET is a far larger and amorphous entity than Napster is. Who would you find liable for file trading on the USENET?...The USENET isn't a product of a given company like napster is...
Actually, I think there might be some precedent here....
I have a friend who runs an ISP, and I think there have been some attempts to shut down ISP's whose newsgroup servers have downloaded illegal binaries. He would really like to filter out the porn stuff. However, he told me that if makes any attempt at filtering at all, he could be held liable for the binaries that didn't get filetered. He was actually better off (legally) not to filter anything at all.
o you are saying that a $5,000 workstation can play solitaire better than a deck of cards? That millenia-old chess falls short to a Playstation?
I don't know what's available on the Playstation, but I can show you a few chess programs for my PC that are MUCH harder to beat and will teach you MUCH more about the game than the average human player most people are likely to come across.
Better technology doesn't make a better game.
No more so than better instruments make better musicians...but a truely talented person with superior tools to work with will create spectacular stuff.
What would Netscape do to cause this person to "pop his pants"? You can't connect to a BBS with it. The internet won't be available to you and even if it was every link in your bookmarks file would give you a 404 error.
Ok, smart guy...ever hear of "Offline Browsing"?:-)
How many applications these days are really processor bound? Sure this'll speed up your SETI rate, but is that a good reason to buy a $500 processor? I just went from a 300 Mhz to a 466 Mhz chip. You'd think that would be a noticeable difference in the everyday user experience. Nope. Feels just about the same -- even on Win 2K. Now what would a 1 Ghz do for me?
The same argument could have been made 15 years ago...who needs an 8 mhz Macintosh when my 1 mhz Apple ][+ can do word processing, spreadsheets, play games, send email, etc., and fit everything on a floppy.
However, if you could take a PC system running Win98, Office 2000, Netscape, and Quake III Arena back to 1984, that Apple ][+ guy would poop in his pants.
There's still a tremendous amount of growth left in computing. Not everyone needs to be on the bleeding edge, but everyone will benefit eventually.
I wouldn't say EVERYTHING Marvel has done in live-action has been bad. The Spider-man series in the 70's was pretty good (I was a kid at the time, so I may be remembering it as better than it was).
The Captain America TV series wasn't TOO bad, though the changes they made for TV were questionable.
The Hulk TV series, while borrowing heavily from The Fugitive and being too overly dramatic for a story about a hero adored for his brute strength, did have its moments. It was great towards the end when they were actually incorporating OTHER characters from the Marvel universe.
And though I really don't like him, the Doctor Strange TV movie was very faithful to the comic book, I thought.
Blade was supposed to be pretty good, though I didn't see it.
And Marvel actually did good with the Fantastic Four movie...they canned it before it went into release, knowing that they could do much better.
I haven't read X-Men in years, but I was really upset that Colossus and Nightcrawler didn't make the cut in either the cartoon or the movie. Colossus added moral balance to the team (particularly to Wolverine, being the only one who could restrain him, both as a friend and by brute force), and Nightcrawler was just plain cool--not to mention that he added much-needed comic relief to a team that was so doggone serious all the time.
I could never stand Kitty Pride, though...pure saccharine. Same goes for the teenage girl in the cartoon (can't remember her name). Come to think of it, Star Trek did the same thing with Wesley Crusher. I suppose it's an attempt to lighten up the cast, but I always thought it stupid.
Storm's character was always pretty bland to me, though I liked what I saw of Halle Berry in the trailer.
The original Mac didn't even have a hard drive, which really sucked.
The original Mac didn't need a hard drive. In '84, HD's were only just beginning to make their appearance in the desktop market. The Mac OS was small enough back then that it could fit on a floppy with enough room for MacWrite and a few files. By the time HD's and SyQuest carts began to take on importance in the late 80's, the Mac Plus (1996) had introduced the external SCSI port.
Around the time the Mac was in deep trouble (no hard drive, one floppy, really slow, lousy sales, no laser printer) Jobs killed off the Lisa division. This may have been done to make his Mac project look good.
I don't think so...first of all, Jobs was kicked off the Lisa project, and out of spite tried to destroy the Lisa through the success of the Mac. But he didn't have the authority to kill the Lisa project, especially after being kicked off the team.
Second, the Mac has always had an external second floppy drive available (well...at least for most of the first decade, when that sort of thing was important).
Third, the postscript laser printer was introduced by Apple in either late '84 or '85. There may have been other high-end laser printers on the market, but AFAIK, the original Apple LaserWriter was the first consumer/small business laser.
Fourth, the "really slow" wasn't the problem. It wasn't until the 90's that the megahertz race took off with a vengeance. If anything, one of the problems might have been a misconception of being slow, because PC's were still mostly running DOS and the Mac had the overhead of a sophisticated GUI to deal with (not that greasy ANSI kid stuff).
The lousy sales, I believe, were primarily related to the cost of the systems...while it was widely acknowledged that the Mac was a better computer for the then-computer illiterate market, consumers and businesses were not willing to shell out an extra grand for a Mac to save themselves the headaches of dealing with DOS. The price of a Lisa system, though, was even worse at $10k. It was the coolest thing I saw (at the time), but priced way out of the range of the average business. The Mac did, indeed destroy the Lisa because it provided most of the functionality for less than a third of the price. But, the Mac was still much more expensive than the PC, which was its doom.
But this is not the first time that Apple has promised a pre-emptive, multitasking OS. Remember Copeland? Rememember Pink? At one time Apple promised that OS 9 would be multitasking too. Same promise for 0S 8, Guess what....
Umm...so, what's your point? That not every Apple technology has made it out of R&D? Here's a news flash for ya...EVERY major company goes through this.
What you so quickly brushed aside is the fact that Apple essentially had a brain transplant in 1997.
OS X Server is already shipping. OS X has been demonstrated, and an updated timeline given.
Besides, how would it benefit Apple for Steve Jobs to say that the final beta of OS X would ship in a few months when they were really looking at another two years?
You can ALREADY run Linix on a G4 Mac. The fact that Apple has has an OS based on MACH that runs on a G4 means absolutely nothing.
Nothing? It's a quantum leap ahead of the current Mac OS, which happens to be the second largest installed desktop OS. It's even a significant leap ahead of Windows 98, the market leader.
That's the EASY part. Where they will fail is making a *nix clone run programs currently designed for earlier Mac OS's.
How would this benefit Apple? They make most of their profits on hardware, not software.
And what would it matter to the *nix community to have Mac compatibility if Apple ended up dying in the process?
Within 2 years, Linix will have more market share on the desktop than Apple does. At that point, do you really want to be still carrying Apple's baggage around?
What planet are you living on?
Here on Earth, KDE and Gnome are years away from catching up with Windows and Mac OS in the ease of use category. You can't even switch your monitor resolution in KDE without dropping into the CLI!
For the average user, who does word processing, web surfing, email, and maybe a few games, ease of use is significantly more important than being able to debug the code of your OS.
Unfortunatly someone else would have to do the port, as Sierra has decided not to port HL to any other OS (hence the incident with Mac Half-Life, that thing was almost finished by the way).
Actually, it was Valve that made that decision. Logicware was nearly done with the port, and Sierra was ready to ship...but the patches to make the multiplayer game current with the PC version weren't ready, and Valve didn't want the Mac players to always be lagging behind the PC players.
SOMEHOW that translated into "Kill the Mac version." WTG, Valve.
I think it'll probably be a cold day in Nihilanth before Valve ships a cross-platform game.
Ummm...I don't think they will put the corrosive layer on the outside. 911: "Yeah, whaddaya want?" DVD watcher: "Ah...I was watching The Little Mermaid, and now the disc seems to be grafted to my skin." 911: "Right. You want an ambulance or something?" DVD watcher: "No, get me Johnny Cochran. I'm goin to DisneyWorld!"
The return of Steve Jobs heralded the killing off of the clones and the breaking of ties between Apple and Be.
Blame the snake oil salesman at the helm of Apple.
There were never any "ties" between Apple and Be. Gasse, a former Apple exec, tried to duplicate Apple's business model by selling closed systems (OS & hardware); the processor he chose for the BeBox was the PPC.
When significant BeBox sales failed to materialize, he looked at dumping the hardware and selling the OS only, much as NeXT had done. Since BeOS was already running on the PPC, and Apple had just opened their hardware specs to clone vendors, it just made sense for Be to cut a deal with PowerComputing to preinstall the BeOS on their systems. But, because Be was going after Apple's core design market and because Gasse was something of a platform elitist (he scoffed at the notion of porting MacOS to Intel during his days at Apple), there were no plans to port BeOS to x86. Besides, the "closed set" of Mac OS systems were a lot easier to support than the open-ended set of the PC world.
The only thing that ever came close to Be having a deal with Apple was when Gil Amelio was shopping around for a modern OS as the foundation of the Mac. BeOS was a strong contender but, as I recall, the negotiations started at around $100 mil, and quickly escalated to $400 mil (Gasse thought he had Apple at his mercy). Apple's board balked, and decided to purchase the more mature, tried, and tested NeXT, instead.
When Jobs took over Apple, there were rumors that the clone licensing was coming to an end; Mac OS 8 was not being licensed for some reason. At that time, Gasse realized that he had all of his eggs in a very tenuous basket, and decided that he had no choice but to jump ship for Intel.
M2 for Windows was probably the worst game Bungie ever released. I remember it being jerky on a 90 mhz Pentium, but running great on my 75 mhz PPC Mac. Also, the networking didn't include AppleTalk (IPX, I think), and the Mac version wasn't updated with IPX support, so no cross-platform gaming. Also, I seem to recall that Mac mods weren't supported, so goodbye 3rd party stuff.
Worst of all is that, while Bungie's reputation in the Mac community was similiar to the reputation Id enjoyed with PC gamers, Bungie had no name recognition in the already crowded PC game market.
With all those problems, M2 ended up being just another W3D/DOOM clone that was quickly dismissed.
I think that both are good games, but it's very obvious that DOOM spawned Marathon (i.e. Bungie wouldn't have written Marathon had they not seen DOOM).
Actually, Wolfenstein 3D was the inspiration for Pathways Into Darkness, which I believe was Bungie's 1st FPS (either that or something called Minotaur).
While DOOM may have had some influence on Marathon, it wouldn't have been much, since DOOM was only a baby step over W3D; but Marathon was a huge leap over PID.
No, Mac users rave about Marathon because a) it had a very engaging plot, b) the graphics were vastly better than Doom (even better than Quake I, IMO), c) and it offered full up/down aiming long before Quake came out. Throw in a few other small touches like dual pistols, realistic rocket launcher, etc., and Marathon was definitely big jump over Doom, in the way that Half-Life was a big jump over Quake II.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Will it run on the Mac?
>
> I sure hope not, that's the LAST thing we need is
> a bunch of mac users ruining things.
Funny you should say that on a board mostly devoted to Linux...if the Mac port doesn't make it, the Linux port DEFINITELY won't make it.
The reason is that Verant's games are heavily dependant on DirectX.
I know, because I've been playing Verant's games since Tanarus was in open beta three years ago, and I've been asking them almost from the start to do a Mac port of Tanarus. Well, aside from the fact that they give Tanarus very little attention most of the time, they were very quick to cite Tanny's dependence on DirectX.
They threw out a lot of talk that they were considering a Mac port of Everquest. Well, ummm...where is it?
The fact is that Verant created Tanarus with the express purpose of trying to understand MMOG's; they said that Tanny was a stepping-stone to EQ, and a lot of Tanny's code is now part of EQ.
I'm going to venture a guess here, that Verant is going to use most of the EQ code base for the Star Wars game, it's going to be DirectX dependent, and ports to other platforms will be non-existent.
I hope I'm wrong, but Verant has simply not shown the motivation to do cross-platform stuff.
Only if lightspeed were instantaneous, i.e., took zero seconds to arrive from point A to point B (for instance, if point A were our Sun and point B was the Crab Nebulae). To be faster than zero, yes, would require time travel.
However, this is not the case, we know that light takes a certain amount of time to travel, so improving on that time does not necessarily mean going backwards in time.
Also, when you think about what is being proposed, the radio signals are not travelling faster than light, but they are arriving faster than light. The difference is that the worm hole is a shortcut from point A to B, but still has a measurable distance. If you shot a beam of light through the worm hole along with the radio signal, you would see that the radio signal has not actually increased its speed relative to the speed of light.
The next step is probably not to shut down Napster and its ilk; the next step is probably to start charging students for the amount of bandwidth they use.
The true problem, after all, is that the university only has a limited budget set aside for bandwidth. Like any ISP, the university is overselling its service, on the hopes that the number of students who are light/casual users will balance out the number who are heavy users. Unfortunately, Napster is turning many light bandwidth users into heavy users.
The solution to the problem, then, is to keep the current charges for internet access in the student's bill, and to start penalizing the heavy users by charging a per MB fee over a basic monthly allotment.
You would see either one of two things happening: internet usage would drop dramatically, or the influx of cash would allow the university to keep upgrading its bandwidth.
There's another option which is probably less desirable, and that's to give a student an allotment of data transfer, and shut them down for the rest of the month after they reach it. I believe some schools are already doing something along these lines.
While Joy gives the example of sentient, self-replicating nanomachines of being a possible threat to mankind (which seems somewhat absurd at this present time), the real threat that he is getting at is the abuses of technology by people, and I believe he has a point.
;-)
I don't lay awake at night thinking about terrorists, no; but I am very concerned about the rapid advances in biotechnology. Imagine a day 20 or 30 years down the road where computer chips can be placed inside of disabled people; they can process motor functions, helping people with little or no muscle control live somewhat normal lives, or a chip implanted in the brain that helps autistic or mentally retarded people to think and act coherently.
Wonderful stuff....
Now look a little farther down the road. Perfectly healthy people are implanting these kinds of chips to improve athletic ability, to increase knowledge or to increase skill. Sporting leagues are the first to reject it, saying that any athelete found to have implants is barred from playing professionally. In the business world, however, the ethical lines are much more blurred; with the temptation of being able to land a better job for a lot more money, people are buying chip implants. Implants are seen as a shortcut to education, getting the equivalent of multiple doctorates in one operation. Initially, this is frowned upon, but eventually, many people are forced to do it because the marketplace has become extremely competitive; all of the best jobs are going to people who exhibit degrees of knowledge or skill that are on the level of genius.
Foreign countries pick up on this, and require that their soldiers and scientists receive implants. Several minor skirmishes around the world shows the US that they are being outmatched in soldier-to-soldier combat. Weapons technology in the third world is increasing at an alarming pace. Grudgingly, the US is forced to require that many or its key personnel have implants.
Eventually, someone gets the idea of starting sporting leagues soley for enhanced players. It's a controversial idea, but the controversy wears off pretty quickly when people see how exciting the sports are. Jujitsu matches with a half-dozen contestants all moving at blinding speed. Variations on basketball where the ball is slightly larger than a grapefruit (with an equally smaller goal), and many shots are still sunk from half-court.
Before the century closes, the gulf between those with implants and those without is so great that most of the people who refuse the enhancements on moral, ethical, or religious grounds are forced into the lower class and poverty. It's simply not possible any longer to live a normal life in the modern world without chip enhancements. They become servants, and that phenomenon known as the "middle class" slowly begins to dissolve.
That's what keeps ME awake at nights...boy, do I have an active imagination or what?
Yeah, Nanosaur is a nice little game, but I agree. Half-Life is the kind of game you would blow $3000 on a computer system to play. Nanosaur is a nice little shooter for kids, but lacks any real depth to it.
Actually, I think a better analogy would be to compare Napster to the copy machine in the public library.
How many people are using it to make illegal copies? Almost everyone.
Does the library know about it? Absolutely.
What has the library done about it? Posted a little warning saying, "Hey stupid, don't copy anything!" :-)
Personally, I'm not an advocate of bootlegged music, but I can't help rooting for Napster. We all know that music CD's are grossly overpriced. I don't think that the RIAA would have to worry that much about the bootleg industry if they could keep their prices reasonable; but paying $18 for a CD is absurd, especially when they are cheaper to produce than vinyl LP's (which sold for under $10). CD prices continue to rise in spite of the fact that the music industry is bigger than ever. I believe that the music industry is top-heavy with overpaid execs who aspire to add another $10 mil to their compensation package.
Is Napster going to eat into CD sales? Absolutely--and I believe that the end result is going to be a lot of pruning in the industry. Hopefully, the end result is going to be a dramatic drop in CD prices before they lose totaly control over music distribution.
Right now, they don't; but in the future, they could put banner ads in the client or sell a "Plus" version of the client like RealPlayer does.
Actually, I think there might be some precedent here....
I have a friend who runs an ISP, and I think there have been some attempts to shut down ISP's whose newsgroup servers have downloaded illegal binaries. He would really like to filter out the porn stuff. However, he told me that if makes any attempt at filtering at all, he could be held liable for the binaries that didn't get filetered. He was actually better off (legally) not to filter anything at all.
I don't know what's available on the Playstation, but I can show you a few chess programs for my PC that are MUCH harder to beat and will teach you MUCH more about the game than the average human player most people are likely to come across.
Better technology doesn't make a better game.
No more so than better instruments make better musicians...but a truely talented person with superior tools to work with will create spectacular stuff.
Ok, smart guy...ever hear of "Offline Browsing"? :-)
The same argument could have been made 15 years ago...who needs an 8 mhz Macintosh when my 1 mhz Apple ][+ can do word processing, spreadsheets, play games, send email, etc., and fit everything on a floppy.
However, if you could take a PC system running Win98, Office 2000, Netscape, and Quake III Arena back to 1984, that Apple ][+ guy would poop in his pants.
There's still a tremendous amount of growth left in computing. Not everyone needs to be on the bleeding edge, but everyone will benefit eventually.
I wouldn't say EVERYTHING Marvel has done in live-action has been bad. The Spider-man series in the 70's was pretty good (I was a kid at the time, so I may be remembering it as better than it was).
The Captain America TV series wasn't TOO bad, though the changes they made for TV were questionable.
The Hulk TV series, while borrowing heavily from The Fugitive and being too overly dramatic for a story about a hero adored for his brute strength, did have its moments. It was great towards the end when they were actually incorporating OTHER characters from the Marvel universe.
And though I really don't like him, the Doctor Strange TV movie was very faithful to the comic book, I thought.
Blade was supposed to be pretty good, though I didn't see it.
And Marvel actually did good with the Fantastic Four movie...they canned it before it went into release, knowing that they could do much better.
I haven't read X-Men in years, but I was really upset that Colossus and Nightcrawler didn't make the cut in either the cartoon or the movie. Colossus added moral balance to the team (particularly to Wolverine, being the only one who could restrain him, both as a friend and by brute force), and Nightcrawler was just plain cool--not to mention that he added much-needed comic relief to a team that was so doggone serious all the time.
I could never stand Kitty Pride, though...pure saccharine. Same goes for the teenage girl in the cartoon (can't remember her name). Come to think of it, Star Trek did the same thing with Wesley Crusher. I suppose it's an attempt to lighten up the cast, but I always thought it stupid.
Storm's character was always pretty bland to me, though I liked what I saw of Halle Berry in the trailer.
The original Mac didn't need a hard drive. In '84, HD's were only just beginning to make their appearance in the desktop market. The Mac OS was small enough back then that it could fit on a floppy with enough room for MacWrite and a few files. By the time HD's and SyQuest carts began to take on importance in the late 80's, the Mac Plus (1996) had introduced the external SCSI port.
Around the time the Mac was in deep trouble (no hard drive, one floppy, really slow, lousy sales, no laser printer) Jobs killed off the Lisa division. This may have been done to make his Mac project look good.
I don't think so...first of all, Jobs was kicked off the Lisa project, and out of spite tried to destroy the Lisa through the success of the Mac. But he didn't have the authority to kill the Lisa project, especially after being kicked off the team.
Second, the Mac has always had an external second floppy drive available (well...at least for most of the first decade, when that sort of thing was important).
Third, the postscript laser printer was introduced by Apple in either late '84 or '85. There may have been other high-end laser printers on the market, but AFAIK, the original Apple LaserWriter was the first consumer/small business laser.
Fourth, the "really slow" wasn't the problem. It wasn't until the 90's that the megahertz race took off with a vengeance. If anything, one of the problems might have been a misconception of being slow, because PC's were still mostly running DOS and the Mac had the overhead of a sophisticated GUI to deal with (not that greasy ANSI kid stuff).
The lousy sales, I believe, were primarily related to the cost of the systems...while it was widely acknowledged that the Mac was a better computer for the then-computer illiterate market, consumers and businesses were not willing to shell out an extra grand for a Mac to save themselves the headaches of dealing with DOS. The price of a Lisa system, though, was even worse at $10k. It was the coolest thing I saw (at the time), but priced way out of the range of the average business. The Mac did, indeed destroy the Lisa because it provided most of the functionality for less than a third of the price. But, the Mac was still much more expensive than the PC, which was its doom.
Don't blame Sierra, they were ready to ship the game.
Valve pulled the plug at the last minute....
Umm...so, what's your point? That not every Apple technology has made it out of R&D? Here's a news flash for ya...EVERY major company goes through this.
What you so quickly brushed aside is the fact that Apple essentially had a brain transplant in 1997.
OS X Server is already shipping. OS X has been demonstrated, and an updated timeline given.
Besides, how would it benefit Apple for Steve Jobs to say that the final beta of OS X would ship in a few months when they were really looking at another two years?
You can ALREADY run Linix on a G4 Mac. The fact that Apple has has an OS based on MACH that runs on a G4 means absolutely nothing.
Nothing? It's a quantum leap ahead of the current Mac OS, which happens to be the second largest installed desktop OS. It's even a significant leap ahead of Windows 98, the market leader.
That's the EASY part. Where they will fail is making a *nix clone run programs currently designed for earlier Mac OS's.
How would this benefit Apple? They make most of their profits on hardware, not software.
And what would it matter to the *nix community to have Mac compatibility if Apple ended up dying in the process?
Within 2 years, Linix will have more market share on the desktop than Apple does. At that point, do you really want to be still carrying Apple's baggage around?
What planet are you living on?
Here on Earth, KDE and Gnome are years away from catching up with Windows and Mac OS in the ease of use category. You can't even switch your monitor resolution in KDE without dropping into the CLI!
For the average user, who does word processing, web surfing, email, and maybe a few games, ease of use is significantly more important than being able to debug the code of your OS.
Actually, it was Valve that made that decision. Logicware was nearly done with the port, and Sierra was ready to ship...but the patches to make the multiplayer game current with the PC version weren't ready, and Valve didn't want the Mac players to always be lagging behind the PC players.
SOMEHOW that translated into "Kill the Mac version." WTG, Valve.
I think it'll probably be a cold day in Nihilanth before Valve ships a cross-platform game.
Check the Preferences, it already has that feature. On my Mac, I have it show the screen saver for 5 mins before going to a blank screen.
Ummm...I don't think they will put the corrosive layer on the outside. 911: "Yeah, whaddaya want?" DVD watcher: "Ah...I was watching The Little Mermaid, and now the disc seems to be grafted to my skin." 911: "Right. You want an ambulance or something?" DVD watcher: "No, get me Johnny Cochran. I'm goin to DisneyWorld!"
Blame the snake oil salesman at the helm of Apple.
There were never any "ties" between Apple and Be. Gasse, a former Apple exec, tried to duplicate Apple's business model by selling closed systems (OS & hardware); the processor he chose for the BeBox was the PPC.
When significant BeBox sales failed to materialize, he looked at dumping the hardware and selling the OS only, much as NeXT had done. Since BeOS was already running on the PPC, and Apple had just opened their hardware specs to clone vendors, it just made sense for Be to cut a deal with PowerComputing to preinstall the BeOS on their systems. But, because Be was going after Apple's core design market and because Gasse was something of a platform elitist (he scoffed at the notion of porting MacOS to Intel during his days at Apple), there were no plans to port BeOS to x86. Besides, the "closed set" of Mac OS systems were a lot easier to support than the open-ended set of the PC world.
The only thing that ever came close to Be having a deal with Apple was when Gil Amelio was shopping around for a modern OS as the foundation of the Mac. BeOS was a strong contender but, as I recall, the negotiations started at around $100 mil, and quickly escalated to $400 mil (Gasse thought he had Apple at his mercy). Apple's board balked, and decided to purchase the more mature, tried, and tested NeXT, instead.
When Jobs took over Apple, there were rumors that the clone licensing was coming to an end; Mac OS 8 was not being licensed for some reason. At that time, Gasse realized that he had all of his eggs in a very tenuous basket, and decided that he had no choice but to jump ship for Intel.
Worst of all is that, while Bungie's reputation in the Mac community was similiar to the reputation Id enjoyed with PC gamers, Bungie had no name recognition in the already crowded PC game market.
With all those problems, M2 ended up being just another W3D/DOOM clone that was quickly dismissed.
Actually, Wolfenstein 3D was the inspiration for Pathways Into Darkness, which I believe was Bungie's 1st FPS (either that or something called Minotaur).
While DOOM may have had some influence on Marathon, it wouldn't have been much, since DOOM was only a baby step over W3D; but Marathon was a huge leap over PID.
No, Mac users rave about Marathon because a) it had a very engaging plot, b) the graphics were vastly better than Doom (even better than Quake I, IMO), c) and it offered full up/down aiming long before Quake came out. Throw in a few other small touches like dual pistols, realistic rocket launcher, etc., and Marathon was definitely big jump over Doom, in the way that Half-Life was a big jump over Quake II.
Well, I suppose if they ever invent their own UI, we'll find out... :D