Anybody remember Falcon 3? While all the other sims pretty much had scripted missions (many still do), Falcon tried to run the whole war in the background. And when you ran into other planes, they acted pretty convincingly. They were hard to beat as well, I remember the Mirage F1s especially as being pretty tough in a dogfight. Pilots of different planes acted differently according to their planes strength/weaknesses. They used 6 months to patch the game sufficiently that it didn't crash all the time, kind of understandable with the complexity.
This is a far stretch. Apple have a good part of the "creative" market, some home users and some educational users, but going from there to saying they are going to wipe out MS is a long shot. The last few years, I think Apple even has lost market share in the pro music market because application support on Windows is much better now than it was (used to be that Cubase on Windows was a couple of versions behind the Mac version).
If anything, history has been that technology moves from the corporate sector to the home sector, and not the other way around (C64 and Amiga ruled the home, but never moved to corporate. IBM PC was a pure corporate machine, ended up dominating the home).
Problem is vendor lock-in. If I'm sick and tired of Microsoft sheniagans, the last thing I want to do is to go to Apple, which is even worse (nobody else makes hardware, software doesn't run on anything else). If I make the big jump, it makes a lot of sense to go to Linux instead.
And regarding the "don't bash it if you haven't tried it", I have stepped up and tried OS X in Apple stores a few times, and I am not blown away. I have an iPod, and I am not so impressed by the user interface and I don't like iTunes. Biggest problem is the "one button" philosophy, I'd much rather have context menus rather than clicking the damn button four times to get to the ratings screen, whoever thought that was simpler?!?
The Mac is still the dongle (how many people are running OS X on non-Apple HW? Very, very few in the big scheme of things) SW is a vehicle for selling Macs. When Apple bought Emagic, the Windows version disappeared faster than you could say "takeover".
No, music DRM serves Apple's purposes for the time being. If the unwashed masses figure it out and start a massive protest (fat chance), then maybe Apple will change their policies. Not before.
One: Ferraries don't come with an EULA. Two: Don't try to tell me that if an easy way of cloning physical objects existed, the world wouldn't look totally different.
Not on its own. The beauty of the metric system is when you consider all the units together, they are defined so that an absolute minimum of conversion factors are needed. 1 liter equals 1 dm3, 1 liter of water weighs 1 kg etc. A fantastic boon for engineers.
If you follow this argument, then the parsec (parallax of one second of arc) should be the astronomical unit of choice. It used to be among professional astronomers. However, the lightyear is a much easier unit to visualize and explain to a layperson, so therefore it has become the norm.
BTW, the minute of arc itself is based on the 60 system and therefore is kind of wierd compared to the decimal system. Remember that there are 3 different commonly used systems to measure angles (degrees, grads and radians). If you ask me, the most logical one is the radian, but it does require that you are familiar with Pi, and the numbers that come out are not exactly easy to work with.
Really what I am trying to say is that the minute of arc is arbitary too.
I'm sure that if they improved AC efficiency by 10%, or increased the temperature by a couple of degrees, it would mean a much larger power saving than changing the lights in a hot country like Australia... Don't sweat the small stuff, I say. How about banning SUVs?
Ha ha! This is the most abt comparison I have seen so far - Macrovision and similar companies "add value" in the same way that the Mafia "adds value"! Extortion is the right word here.
In most cases corporations get all the benefits of being a "person", but none of the negatives (there are some corporations who have done such heinous things, they should have been sent to jail for 800 years). This is of course to protect the owners. If owners were responsible for what their corporation did, they'd be a bit more careful...
I think Clippy is right next to Jar-Jar Binks on the hate-o-meter. I still don't get why MS thought it was a good idea to turn this on by default. I think the combination of a really dumb AI (Clippy never managed to figure out what I wanted to do) and the annoyance of having him pop up all the time (just as bad as pop-up ads on websites) had a tendency to drive people up the wall. The only other "feature" in Word I have come close to hating as much was the when they changed the default for pictures so that they became "floating" rather than being treated like a character. Man, have I seen people go crazy trying to have pictures stay in the right spot when Word repaginated...
If they really want to help novice users, why not use the start-up screen the first time you start office to ask what kind of user you are? Power users are the most likely to change computers or reinstall software frequently, and having to change the setting from the clueless default settings gets on your nerves after a while...
BTW, the Office UI revamp seems to be another horrible step, why alienate your whole current user base? I mean, Excel has had the same user interface for almost 20 years, it has to be pretty good?!?
I've used Netvibes for almost half a year now - really great for keeping up to date with various RSS feeds and bookmarks (due to the del.icio.us support) no matter what machine you're on. The key to having this work is a very clean layout - I've tried both the Yahoo and Google solutions but liked Netvibes much better.
Now, using more energy-efficient lighting is a good idea, especially in a place like CA where the heating effect of "ordinary" light bulbs are not what you want 99% of the time. However, CA could save much more power by having people adjust the temperature of all the air-conditioning units used in the state.
What always drives me up the wall when I go to CA is that there seems to be a race as to who can have their air-conditioning unit set to the lowest temperature. How about adjusting them up a couple degrees, folks? I always get a cold when I go to California due to the HUGE difference between inside and outside temperature.
The part I don't get is that MSFT launches twenty different flavors of Vista, but not a "PowerUser" edition or an "Expert" edition. This version would have all those annoying "help" features turned off by default and would be configured out of the box to run with as little overhead as possible. What about helping your fellow nerds a little, Microsoft developers?
The situation I described would be analogous with being able to load iTunes-purchased music onto any MP3-player, and being able to load PlaysForSure-purchased music onto an iPod. Also called "free customer choice". Apple is actually hindering both variants, since they do not license "FairPlay" (tisk) to anyone else, and refuse to license "PlaysForSure", which actually they could if they wanted to.
Disclosure: I actually own an iPod, but I do not buy or use DRM-protected music, as I refuse to support this anti-consumer measure. I would recommend everybody who wants to buy music online to sign up with eMusic, which currently is the only major legal site peddling DRM-free music.
They are open. I can go to the shop and buy any stinking phone I want, and it will work with any network. There are some deals on phones that are subsidized, and require a 1-year contract. However, I can buy the same physical phone without a contract for a higher price. Consumers do have the choice.
Britain has always leaned towards being a police state - that 1984 was written by an Englishman is no coincidence. Ditto with "V for Vendetta". The big surprise is that the US is going the same route - the country that prided itself on being free has turned 180 degrees in 5 years.
So far, Cypress and Sony have officially said that they are being investigated. Makes sense that the other big players in the SRAM market will be investigated as well. If I remember correctly, four companies were implicated in the DRAM price fixing debacle. Makes sense that they check this out now, since there was price fixing in the DRAM market, and that this has happened before in the SRAM market as well.
Anybody know if there has been price fixing in the NAND flash market as well?
It's gotten to the point that I think I would be willing to pay a little extra to avoid the camera - they should be able to make a smaller/slimmer device without it.
There's a high-intensity white LED on my Sony Ericsson K700i. It's intended to be lighting for the built-in camera, but is much more useful as a flashlight (actually, the LED is more useful than the camera). Shame there's no dedicated button, it takes two button presses to turn it on.
Nokia &co are already looking into this, they have done some design studies of cellphones with a screen covering the whole front (candybar type). In my opinion this makes a lot of sense, really the thing holding many handheld devices back is the screen. This is a concern especially on the cellphone front, as they they suffer from the small screen when you consider that Nokia's vision is to make the cellphone into a computer.
That said, I don't think a touchscreen enhances today's iPod. For a movie iPod it would be a good move however. If a movie iPod is to be successful, it has to have at least as good a screen as the PSP, which is kind of the yardstick right now.
Wow! I've been playing with the idea of buying a second 19" screen more for my home setup because I play around Cubase and Cubase really eats screen area, but quad-screen is more than I've thought of... How do the top screens work? I think I would get a sore neck from looking up.
Sorry - I got more and more angry thinking about this while I wrote, and my temper got the better of me.
Many people who don't travel a lot think that business travel must be fun or even glamourous. I think that for most frequent travellers, it's a drag. When I first started out, I was single and I travelled to places I hadn't been to before, and that was fun. But after a while, you really get tired of airplanes, airports and hotels. And when you have a family, being away from them for one or two weeks (US or Asian trip, a business trip in US is just a couple days so this isn't a problem) isn't fun either. After 911, the norm is to fly coach. Many executives fly coach, it depends on company policy. For us lower down the hirarchy, the only time we get to fly business is if we get an upgrade or if we are so late ordering tickets that we have to buy business tickets (happened to me once - had to fly to the US on one day's notice). Add jetlag, and heavy-handed security and plane travel can get really frustrating (there's more and more big-shot people flying private jets these days because they will not put up with the indignities of flying commercial, even on first class). Not that I envy them, some people in my company travel 200 days of the year, this is way more than I would put up with regardless of how I travelled.
I do mostly plain-vanilla stuff on my laptop; email, MS Office, Acrobat documents (can be slow, but I start it and leave it), research on the web, so I really do not have very extensive computing needs. I have a 3G (UMTS/GPRS) PC-express card that helps a lot as emergency backup in case the hotels don't have WLAN (some European hotels still don't have broadband access). Much time is used answering emails, it's very good getting rid of them before I go home. When making connections it's very nice to only carry a small laptop bag with my 12" laptop, accessories, iPod, a book and my PSP in it. I tried a 15" and found it heavy. The thought of carrying even a 17" makes me cringe.
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Anybody remember Falcon 3? While all the other sims pretty much had scripted missions (many still do), Falcon tried to run the whole war in the background. And when you ran into other planes, they acted pretty convincingly. They were hard to beat as well, I remember the Mirage F1s especially as being pretty tough in a dogfight. Pilots of different planes acted differently according to their planes strength/weaknesses. They used 6 months to patch the game sufficiently that it didn't crash all the time, kind of understandable with the complexity.
I don't see why Adobe should be motivated to do so.
There is no reason for the camera manufacturers to do so.
Apple obviously won't.
OSS software won't.
So what's left? MS's own software? There's TONS of people using MS photo software, right? Ha-ha!
This is like trying to displace PDF by including support for MS's own format in Notepad.
If anything, history has been that technology moves from the corporate sector to the home sector, and not the other way around (C64 and Amiga ruled the home, but never moved to corporate. IBM PC was a pure corporate machine, ended up dominating the home).
Problem is vendor lock-in. If I'm sick and tired of Microsoft sheniagans, the last thing I want to do is to go to Apple, which is even worse (nobody else makes hardware, software doesn't run on anything else). If I make the big jump, it makes a lot of sense to go to Linux instead.
And regarding the "don't bash it if you haven't tried it", I have stepped up and tried OS X in Apple stores a few times, and I am not blown away. I have an iPod, and I am not so impressed by the user interface and I don't like iTunes. Biggest problem is the "one button" philosophy, I'd much rather have context menus rather than clicking the damn button four times to get to the ratings screen, whoever thought that was simpler?!?
No, music DRM serves Apple's purposes for the time being. If the unwashed masses figure it out and start a massive protest (fat chance), then maybe Apple will change their policies. Not before.
One: Ferraries don't come with an EULA. Two: Don't try to tell me that if an easy way of cloning physical objects existed, the world wouldn't look totally different.
Not on its own. The beauty of the metric system is when you consider all the units together, they are defined so that an absolute minimum of conversion factors are needed. 1 liter equals 1 dm3, 1 liter of water weighs 1 kg etc. A fantastic boon for engineers.
BTW, the minute of arc itself is based on the 60 system and therefore is kind of wierd compared to the decimal system. Remember that there are 3 different commonly used systems to measure angles (degrees, grads and radians). If you ask me, the most logical one is the radian, but it does require that you are familiar with Pi, and the numbers that come out are not exactly easy to work with.
Really what I am trying to say is that the minute of arc is arbitary too.
I'm sure that if they improved AC efficiency by 10%, or increased the temperature by a couple of degrees, it would mean a much larger power saving than changing the lights in a hot country like Australia... Don't sweat the small stuff, I say. How about banning SUVs?
Bill G., Steve B.
Ha ha! This is the most abt comparison I have seen so far - Macrovision and similar companies "add value" in the same way that the Mafia "adds value"! Extortion is the right word here.
I'm waiting for the first post rambling about freedom of speech...
In most cases corporations get all the benefits of being a "person", but none of the negatives (there are some corporations who have done such heinous things, they should have been sent to jail for 800 years). This is of course to protect the owners. If owners were responsible for what their corporation did, they'd be a bit more careful...
If they really want to help novice users, why not use the start-up screen the first time you start office to ask what kind of user you are? Power users are the most likely to change computers or reinstall software frequently, and having to change the setting from the clueless default settings gets on your nerves after a while...
BTW, the Office UI revamp seems to be another horrible step, why alienate your whole current user base? I mean, Excel has had the same user interface for almost 20 years, it has to be pretty good?!?
I've used Netvibes for almost half a year now - really great for keeping up to date with various RSS feeds and bookmarks (due to the del.icio.us support) no matter what machine you're on. The key to having this work is a very clean layout - I've tried both the Yahoo and Google solutions but liked Netvibes much better.
What always drives me up the wall when I go to CA is that there seems to be a race as to who can have their air-conditioning unit set to the lowest temperature. How about adjusting them up a couple degrees, folks? I always get a cold when I go to California due to the HUGE difference between inside and outside temperature.
The part I don't get is that MSFT launches twenty different flavors of Vista, but not a "PowerUser" edition or an "Expert" edition. This version would have all those annoying "help" features turned off by default and would be configured out of the box to run with as little overhead as possible. What about helping your fellow nerds a little, Microsoft developers?
Disclosure: I actually own an iPod, but I do not buy or use DRM-protected music, as I refuse to support this anti-consumer measure. I would recommend everybody who wants to buy music online to sign up with eMusic, which currently is the only major legal site peddling DRM-free music.
They are open. I can go to the shop and buy any stinking phone I want, and it will work with any network. There are some deals on phones that are subsidized, and require a 1-year contract. However, I can buy the same physical phone without a contract for a higher price. Consumers do have the choice.
Britain has always leaned towards being a police state - that 1984 was written by an Englishman is no coincidence. Ditto with "V for Vendetta". The big surprise is that the US is going the same route - the country that prided itself on being free has turned 180 degrees in 5 years.
Anybody know if there has been price fixing in the NAND flash market as well?
It's gotten to the point that I think I would be willing to pay a little extra to avoid the camera - they should be able to make a smaller/slimmer device without it.
There's a high-intensity white LED on my Sony Ericsson K700i. It's intended to be lighting for the built-in camera, but is much more useful as a flashlight (actually, the LED is more useful than the camera). Shame there's no dedicated button, it takes two button presses to turn it on.
That said, I don't think a touchscreen enhances today's iPod. For a movie iPod it would be a good move however. If a movie iPod is to be successful, it has to have at least as good a screen as the PSP, which is kind of the yardstick right now.
Wow! I've been playing with the idea of buying a second 19" screen more for my home setup because I play around Cubase and Cubase really eats screen area, but quad-screen is more than I've thought of... How do the top screens work? I think I would get a sore neck from looking up.
Many people who don't travel a lot think that business travel must be fun or even glamourous. I think that for most frequent travellers, it's a drag. When I first started out, I was single and I travelled to places I hadn't been to before, and that was fun. But after a while, you really get tired of airplanes, airports and hotels. And when you have a family, being away from them for one or two weeks (US or Asian trip, a business trip in US is just a couple days so this isn't a problem) isn't fun either. After 911, the norm is to fly coach. Many executives fly coach, it depends on company policy. For us lower down the hirarchy, the only time we get to fly business is if we get an upgrade or if we are so late ordering tickets that we have to buy business tickets (happened to me once - had to fly to the US on one day's notice). Add jetlag, and heavy-handed security and plane travel can get really frustrating (there's more and more big-shot people flying private jets these days because they will not put up with the indignities of flying commercial, even on first class). Not that I envy them, some people in my company travel 200 days of the year, this is way more than I would put up with regardless of how I travelled.
I do mostly plain-vanilla stuff on my laptop; email, MS Office, Acrobat documents (can be slow, but I start it and leave it), research on the web, so I really do not have very extensive computing needs. I have a 3G (UMTS/GPRS) PC-express card that helps a lot as emergency backup in case the hotels don't have WLAN (some European hotels still don't have broadband access). Much time is used answering emails, it's very good getting rid of them before I go home. When making connections it's very nice to only carry a small laptop bag with my 12" laptop, accessories, iPod, a book and my PSP in it. I tried a 15" and found it heavy. The thought of carrying even a 17" makes me cringe.