Well yes, everyone's needs are different. I'm saying that for some businesses they could buy a lot of machines for around $300 (or cheaper possibly if they were getting A LOT of machines) and Apple just can't touch that. The only real difference between your machine and the dell machine is xp pro instead of home DVD R/W (do they use this in the course of their job?) 1 GB of vs 256 mb. 3 year warranty vs 1 year.
I'm hoping you could negotiate your discount and those items for less than an additional $396/machine.
Even full price, xp pro, 1 gb of ram and the DVD drive, only cost $175 per machine (give or take) Which leaves you over $200 to extend your warranty by an extra 2 years. Shouldn't be a problem to fit that in.Retail your 3 year warranty is only $109 more. So you're looking at a price of about 584 for a similar machine before you negotiate a bulk discount. If your buyer can't get that down another $50/unit or so, fire them.
I'd never develop for the PC only, but I'm hardly influential in the gaming market. I'm just saying that as it stands until Apple can attract developers to do that with regularity then that is a big segment of the market they won't have much luck with.
You certainly don't need to drop $350-$500/year for a new video card. I got an x800GT 2 years ago (I think it was around $350-$400 (CDN not USD) then it was called the x800SE back then.) and I probably wont' even consider replacing it till next year. It wasn't a top of the line when I bought it (mid-high range of the new cards). I haven't run in to a game I can't play yet at 1024x768 with all high settings and even a little AA. In 2 years all I've done is double the ram to 2GB, and that is only because there was a great sale on. If you want constant bleeding edge than yes, you need to spend that much every year. But you'd have to do the same on a Mac..if anything took advantage of it, there are far fewer games on the Mac that do.
Realistically, you would probably buy a system every 5 years, give or take depending on how you bought them. If you buy prebuilts like Dell, that's probably nota bad time frame as long as you buy an upgradable model and keep up with it. Buy it now, in a couple years double the ram, put a new video card in it, and let it live out its life and then buy a new one 2 or 3 years after that.
Building your own you could constantly swap things out and it would be harder to track how long something actually lasted you. The difference between a PS3 and a PC, is that after its gaming time has passed, the PC has far more uses. Its far more useful to donate to a school, or give to a family member who say needs a PC for school work/etc, use as a second computer for e-mail, work,etc.
I'm not saying Macs are bad or no one should touch them. I'm sure they have their place. As a mainstream box they're just not there yet. Being closed hardware has its advantages for some, for others not so much.
I assume you're referring to yourself with the new thread title? Trying to pass off Parallels as useful for gaming could only be seen as such. http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6546370.html in other words, its utterly useless currently for gaming.
by the time you goto the trouble of paying the extra cost and time of setting up bootcamp, any price difference is likely gone and it takes time, as is said around here, time is money.
as for an xbox360, great. Only what? another $500 or $600? plus you've now got a second machine. That makes total sense.
The sims sold millions of copies world wide. While its been ported to the Mac its lags behind by quite a bit. There are no simultaneous launches of PC and Mac expansions. The Mac fanbase is rather small. And casual gamers don't want to be inconvenienced. They're even less likely to go to the trouble of getting things to work, so they're going to pick the easiest solution. I'd also submit that a lot of games don't get ported eventually. I'm sure someone has stats somewhere on the actual amount of games that do get ported within a certain time frame. I guess Macs are great if you want to goto the trouble of setting up a dual boot (and paying more or the same, whatever little price difference that exists between the two systems would be eaten up by purchasing a windows license) and then locking yourself into a closed hardware system. Sounds awesome. Sign me up.
That depends on your business needs. For general office work, Dell has one for $279 with a monitor. Thats xp home, and they claim its $159 more for xp pro, but you and I both know the OEM price difference between home and pro isn't $159. Buy in bulk and you could get them to cut that down (I'm not sure what Dell's bulk point is, but I suspect around 10 machines you could begin to negotiate with a sales rep, you can probably start looking at volume licensing around 10 machines.
But again that depends heavily on what you're going to do. Even at 675 you're still less than the Mac someone quoted at $800, and if you're buying a lot of machines, that will really add up. I'm certainly not saying you can get a powerhouse of a machine for $300, but you can get something that would satisfy most companies needs for a "general office work" type of machine.
And someone could ask the same about how you got modded insightful.
Apple's software isn't more closed than Windows, but you have closed software in addition to closed hardware, he was talking about how the whole package was more closed. Thanks for coming out.
That's cool, I can't wait to get my new mac and start playing..oh..uhm. I guess I better buy a console or something to go with it.
They have to do more than appeal to the masses. They need to appeal to game makers as well. Gaming is a big business and arguably what has pushed ahead a lot of computer innovation. People aren't ready to give up on computer gaming and until they are, Mac has nothing.
Let me know where I can get 10 new Macs for $300 each for my new business, I'll give you and address and you just start shipping.. cheque is in the mail, you'll get it when Ig et the macs.
Of course an entire machine is better than just an OS. The beauty of the PC is the ability to customize it exactly to your liking. Mac can never beat that.
I did end up purchasing it from an American company. The expansion was out for quite awhile before it got a north american publisher. As soon as it got a north american publisher, I found out ebgames was carrying it (this was last november). I spoke with their staff repeatedly to get them to find out why it wasn't being brought to Canada too. Finally last month when I gave up all hope of them ever getting it in here, I purchased it on ebay, but it was from a business that puts products on ebay, it was a new sealed game. I have gone to the lengths of importing games before. Space Rangers 2 I had to purchase from Interact in the US a long time ago. I imported a UK version in Sept 2005 (still got the confirmation email for my order) it was Mar 2006 before it was released in North America.
Sure I didn't rush out and find a company that would ship it from the US, mainly because it would have been cheaper to find it local. I was playing other games at the time. However I recently played Hammer and Sickle and decided I wanted to replay it. Rather than just reinstalling from my burned copy, I went out and sought it out. Thats the hallmark of a good game.
As always, there is that misconception that every download is a lost sale, or that by someone downloading something they've taken something from you. Downloading costs them nothing, the bandwidth is provided by those other people, the game is released by someone not on your payroll (possibly, unless there is a new marketting plan to create buzz about little known games by getting them out on the p2p networks). So whats being taken? A copy.
Allegedly they're taking your business, but the p2p users certainly aren't making a buck on it. There is a difference between someone using P2P and someone burning copies and selling them for profit.
There's never been any concrete evidence given to show that this is indeed harming the business. Why these articles are even given the time of day boggles my mind.
Here is a hint: 1) Make a game people want and they will enjoy. 2) Make it available.
I spent years trying to get Silent Storm. While the original was available in Canada, the expansion never was. So I downloaded it. Played it several times. Even years later, I went to ebgames multiple times to request it. Seems the company finally got an NA publisher (for the gold edition containing original and expansion), but ebgames never bothered to bring it to Canada. They sold it in the US only. I asked them several times to find out why, they never got back to me. Finally after almost a year, I had to buy it from some guy on ebay.
If there are good games out there that people want to support, they'll go to great lengths to do it.
Produce crap and they won't.
You offer no rebate policy on the shit your shovel out the door, and don't support your customers when there are problems with it.
Awesome business model. When it fails, blame the pirates.
If they made games no-one wanted, why are they being pirated?
Because its easy and free. If a game comes out that I'm not excited about, I'm not going to rush out and pay $50 for it. If its free, I'll download it to try it to see if my fear was for good reason (which it most often is). Demos are not as common as they once were, and many demos don't actually illustrate some of the issues with the final product. Games are being released in a broken state, with major performance issues. While not new, it does seem to happen with alarming frequency. Game reviewers are all too happy to gloss over this fact to kiss some companies ass to fill their ad space.
As its often pointed out, there is no correlation between downloads and lost sales.
Yup, but you could insert code that would say "You're using an unsupported browser, get one here!". No need to gimp it though, let them see the problems that exist under the other browser.
24 hours without power and the home phone goes dead until the telephone company gets a generator out to the local station.
Cell phones also have days of stand-by time. In power outage you probably don't need to be using your phone constantly and a laptop is available when you need it, for as long as you need it. The difference is during a power outage, I can go buy a paper, I don't restrict myself to a paper when I have other options.
Actually yes. Code your page the way you want and provide a link to the browser that displays it properly like Firefox. If enough websites do that, you'll see a shift.
USE her phone in a power failure cell phone's work when the power is out. Just as well as a regular phone, unless its out for a really long time. Then you probably have bigger issues.
Read the news while sitting on the crapper or in the subway Laptop, cell phone, pda, etc. Or there is that service that will print your morning news to your printer for you.
More importantly, she knows to diversify her information sources. You rely on one data path. That data path goes down, for any reason, and you're officially screwed. The internet is a large amount of information sources. If the data path goes down, get wireless, use dial-up or a cell phone to hook in. If all paths to the internet go down, we've got bigger issues.
all know the benefits of this data diversification. which includes being able to get your information from the internet. More importantly its the more difficult of them. Any yahoo can contact the phone company and goto the corner store and buy a $5 radio and 50 cent paper. Many of them would commit crimes against humanity trying to operate a computer and do the same thing.
Which may be, but it would have really made the webcast much more interesting. It was basically "here are a bunch of squiggles, you're the first in the world to see them".
and to be honest I was a bit underwhelmed. I missed the first few minutes, so maybe there was something more interesting going on there. I was hoping at the end when they revealed the page they'd been working on, they might actually translate some of what was on the page, for those of us who don't speak ancient greek.
you only make the assumption that I haven't. I've wiped the laptop several times since acquiring it and the reinstall didn't involve an included driver full windows CD.
I would also point out that while certain things do work out of the box with linux, others don't. Like 3D acceleration on intel integrated cards. You have to go through manually building and installing DRI.
He is right. I can see this attitude prevalent in several areas. As I mentioned above, even when a game is finally ported to Linux, there are still rumblings and mumblings about how "it'd be better if it was open source". There is also a lack of exciting software for Linux, mainly gaming software. While Linux has a wide range of productivity choices, its gaming library is old and tired. Sure there is the occasional gem, and lots of little interesting open source games being made, but in reality the amount pales in comparison to Windows. This is a major sticking point for a lot of people. Wine is all right, but not reliable. Linux needs these companies to make these products available for the OS so it can grow and bring in fresh blood. In order to do that, these companies need to feel welcome on their own terms.
Not that different. I see companies getting flack for porting games because they're closed source. Linux gets so few of the big games compared to Windows, yet when they are ported there are still people who will bitch about it being closed source.
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Well yes, everyone's needs are different. I'm saying that for some businesses they could buy a lot of machines for around $300 (or cheaper possibly if they were getting A LOT of machines) and Apple just can't touch that. The only real difference between your machine and the dell machine is
xp pro instead of home
DVD R/W (do they use this in the course of their job?)
1 GB of vs 256 mb.
3 year warranty vs 1 year.
I'm hoping you could negotiate your discount and those items for less than an additional $396/machine.
Even full price, xp pro, 1 gb of ram and the DVD drive, only cost $175 per machine (give or take) Which leaves you over $200 to extend your warranty by an extra 2 years. Shouldn't be a problem to fit that in.Retail your 3 year warranty is only $109 more. So you're looking at a price of about 584 for a similar machine before you negotiate a bulk discount. If your buyer can't get that down another $50/unit or so, fire them.
I'd never develop for the PC only, but I'm hardly influential in the gaming market. I'm just saying that as it stands until Apple can attract developers to do that with regularity then that is a big segment of the market they won't have much luck with.
You certainly don't need to drop $350-$500/year for a new video card. I got an x800GT 2 years ago (I think it was around $350-$400 (CDN not USD) then it was called the x800SE back then.) and I probably wont' even consider replacing it till next year. It wasn't a top of the line when I bought it (mid-high range of the new cards). I haven't run in to a game I can't play yet at 1024x768 with all high settings and even a little AA. In 2 years all I've done is double the ram to 2GB, and that is only because there was a great sale on. If you want constant bleeding edge than yes, you need to spend that much every year. But you'd have to do the same on a Mac..if anything took advantage of it, there are far fewer games on the Mac that do.
Realistically, you would probably buy a system every 5 years, give or take depending on how you bought them. If you buy prebuilts like Dell, that's probably nota bad time frame as long as you buy an upgradable model and keep up with it. Buy it now, in a couple years double the ram, put a new video card in it, and let it live out its life and then buy a new one 2 or 3 years after that.
Building your own you could constantly swap things out and it would be harder to track how long something actually lasted you. The difference between a PS3 and a PC, is that after its gaming time has passed, the PC has far more uses. Its far more useful to donate to a school, or give to a family member who say needs a PC for school work/etc, use as a second computer for e-mail, work,etc.
I'm not saying Macs are bad or no one should touch them. I'm sure they have their place. As a mainstream box they're just not there yet. Being closed hardware has its advantages for some, for others not so much.
I assume you're referring to yourself with the new thread title? Trying to pass off Parallels as useful for gaming could only be seen as such. http://reviews.cnet.com/4531-10921_7-6546370.html in other words, its utterly useless currently for gaming.
by the time you goto the trouble of paying the extra cost and time of setting up bootcamp, any price difference is likely gone and it takes time, as is said around here, time is money.
as for an xbox360, great. Only what? another $500 or $600? plus you've now got a second machine. That makes total sense.
The sims sold millions of copies world wide. While its been ported to the Mac its lags behind by quite a bit. There are no simultaneous launches of PC and Mac expansions. The Mac fanbase is rather small. And casual gamers don't want to be inconvenienced. They're even less likely to go to the trouble of getting things to work, so they're going to pick the easiest solution. I'd also submit that a lot of games don't get ported eventually. I'm sure someone has stats somewhere on the actual amount of games that do get ported within a certain time frame. I guess Macs are great if you want to goto the trouble of setting up a dual boot (and paying more or the same, whatever little price difference that exists between the two systems would be eaten up by purchasing a windows license) and then locking yourself into a closed hardware system. Sounds awesome. Sign me up.
That depends on your business needs. For general office work, Dell has one for $279 with a monitor. Thats xp home, and they claim its $159 more for xp pro, but you and I both know the OEM price difference between home and pro isn't $159. Buy in bulk and you could get them to cut that down (I'm not sure what Dell's bulk point is, but I suspect around 10 machines you could begin to negotiate with a sales rep, you can probably start looking at volume licensing around 10 machines.
But again that depends heavily on what you're going to do. Even at 675 you're still less than the Mac someone quoted at $800, and if you're buying a lot of machines, that will really add up.
I'm certainly not saying you can get a powerhouse of a machine for $300, but you can get something that would satisfy most companies needs for a "general office work" type of machine.
And someone could ask the same about how you got modded insightful.
Apple's software isn't more closed than Windows, but you have closed software in addition to closed hardware, he was talking about how the whole package was more closed. Thanks for coming out.
I believe that is Microsoft's fault.
it doesn't matter who's fault it is, the end user doesn't care. If it doesn't work as they expect it to, they won't buy it.
That's cool, I can't wait to get my new mac and start playing..oh..uhm. I guess I better buy a console or something to go with it.
They have to do more than appeal to the masses. They need to appeal to game makers as well. Gaming is a big business and arguably what has pushed ahead a lot of computer innovation. People aren't ready to give up on computer gaming and until they are, Mac has nothing.
Let me know where I can get 10 new Macs for $300 each for my new business, I'll give you and address and you just start shipping.. cheque is in the mail, you'll get it when Ig et the macs.
Of course an entire machine is better than just an OS. The beauty of the PC is the ability to customize it exactly to your liking. Mac can never beat that.
$1200 isn't low-end. We're talking $300 machines that businesses buy in bulk. Apple can't compete with that.
I did end up purchasing it from an American company. The expansion was out for quite awhile before it got a north american publisher. As soon as it got a north american publisher, I found out ebgames was carrying it (this was last november). I spoke with their staff repeatedly to get them to find out why it wasn't being brought to Canada too. Finally last month when I gave up all hope of them ever getting it in here, I purchased it on ebay, but it was from a business that puts products on ebay, it was a new sealed game. I have gone to the lengths of importing games before. Space Rangers 2 I had to purchase from Interact in the US a long time ago. I imported a UK version in Sept 2005 (still got the confirmation email for my order) it was Mar 2006 before it was released in North America.
Sure I didn't rush out and find a company that would ship it from the US, mainly because it would have been cheaper to find it local. I was playing other games at the time. However I recently played Hammer and Sickle and decided I wanted to replay it. Rather than just reinstalling from my burned copy, I went out and sought it out. Thats the hallmark of a good game.
As always, there is that misconception that every download is a lost sale, or that by someone downloading something they've taken something from you. Downloading costs them nothing, the bandwidth is provided by those other people, the game is released by someone not on your payroll (possibly, unless there is a new marketting plan to create buzz about little known games by getting them out on the p2p networks). So whats being taken? A copy.
Allegedly they're taking your business, but the p2p users certainly aren't making a buck on it. There is a difference between someone using P2P and someone burning copies and selling them for profit.
There's never been any concrete evidence given to show that this is indeed harming the business. Why these articles are even given the time of day boggles my mind.
Here is a hint:
1) Make a game people want and they will enjoy.
2) Make it available.
I spent years trying to get Silent Storm. While the original was available in Canada, the expansion never was. So I downloaded it. Played it several times. Even years later, I went to ebgames multiple times to request it. Seems the company finally got an NA publisher (for the gold edition containing original and expansion), but ebgames never bothered to bring it to Canada. They sold it in the US only. I asked them several times to find out why, they never got back to me. Finally after almost a year, I had to buy it from some guy on ebay.
If there are good games out there that people want to support, they'll go to great lengths to do it.
Produce crap and they won't.
You offer no rebate policy on the shit your shovel out the door, and don't support your customers when there are problems with it.
Awesome business model. When it fails, blame the pirates.
If they made games no-one wanted, why are they being pirated?
Because its easy and free. If a game comes out that I'm not excited about, I'm not going to rush out and pay $50 for it. If its free, I'll download it to try it to see if my fear was for good reason (which it most often is). Demos are not as common as they once were, and many demos don't actually illustrate some of the issues with the final product. Games are being released in a broken state, with major performance issues. While not new, it does seem to happen with alarming frequency. Game reviewers are all too happy to gloss over this fact to kiss some companies ass to fill their ad space.
As its often pointed out, there is no correlation between downloads and lost sales.
Yup, but you could insert code that would say "You're using an unsupported browser, get one here!".
No need to gimp it though, let them see the problems that exist under the other browser.
24 hours without power and the home phone goes dead until the telephone company gets a generator out to the local station.
Cell phones also have days of stand-by time. In power outage you probably don't need to be using your phone constantly and a laptop is available when you need it, for as long as you need it. The difference is during a power outage, I can go buy a paper, I don't restrict myself to a paper when I have other options.
Actually yes. Code your page the way you want and provide a link to the browser that displays it properly like Firefox. If enough websites do that, you'll see a shift.
look up a phone number in a power failure
411.
USE her phone in a power failure
cell phone's work when the power is out. Just as well as a regular phone, unless its out for a really long time. Then you probably have bigger issues.
Read the news while sitting on the crapper or in the subway
Laptop, cell phone, pda, etc. Or there is that service that will print your morning news to your printer for you.
More importantly, she knows to diversify her information sources. You rely on one data path. That data path goes down, for any reason, and you're officially screwed.
The internet is a large amount of information sources. If the data path goes down, get wireless, use dial-up or a cell phone to hook in. If all paths to the internet go down, we've got bigger issues.
all know the benefits of this data diversification.
which includes being able to get your information from the internet. More importantly its the more difficult of them. Any yahoo can contact the phone company and goto the corner store and buy a $5 radio and 50 cent paper. Many of them would commit crimes against humanity trying to operate a computer and do the same thing.
Which may be, but it would have really made the webcast much more interesting. It was basically "here are a bunch of squiggles, you're the first in the world to see them".
awesome.
Plenty of people over 25 can hear that noise. Its an urban myth that they can't.
and to be honest I was a bit underwhelmed. I missed the first few minutes, so maybe there was something more interesting going on there. I was hoping at the end when they revealed the page they'd been working on, they might actually translate some of what was on the page, for those of us who don't speak ancient greek.
you only make the assumption that I haven't. I've wiped the laptop several times since acquiring it and the reinstall didn't involve an included driver full windows CD.
I would also point out that while certain things do work out of the box with linux, others don't. Like 3D acceleration on intel integrated cards. You have to go through manually building and installing DRI.
He is right. I can see this attitude prevalent in several areas. As I mentioned above, even when a game is finally ported to Linux, there are still rumblings and mumblings about how "it'd be better if it was open source". There is also a lack of exciting software for Linux, mainly gaming software. While Linux has a wide range of productivity choices, its gaming library is old and tired. Sure there is the occasional gem, and lots of little interesting open source games being made, but in reality the amount pales in comparison to Windows. This is a major sticking point for a lot of people. Wine is all right, but not reliable. Linux needs these companies to make these products available for the OS so it can grow and bring in fresh blood. In order to do that, these companies need to feel welcome on their own terms.
Not that different. I see companies getting flack for porting games because they're closed source. Linux gets so few of the big games compared to Windows, yet when they are ported there are still people who will bitch about it being closed source.