Even using libraries and other shortcuts is still no cakewalk for the game developer. Let's say you have all of the code to throw polygons on screen, set up your rendering pipeline, etc etc, all for free. To make a modern game you still need to run shaders - lighting, shadows, shading, etc etc, all run on GPU. Try looking up some parallax mapping examples for HLSL, I challenge you to understand it, and then still say that it's a lazy method to avoid programming. I consider myself a very capable coder. and HLSL/GLSL code is still often WAAAAAAY above me.
What you're not understanding is the market segmentation in games. Games like The Sims naturally do not require insane graphics. Different gamers demand different things out of their games - RTS gamers for example, generally do not expect flashy graphics. When it comes down to shooters, though, people DO demand graphics. Simply because The Sims has sold bajillions of copies doesn't mean that *all* developers (or even most) can start neglecting graphics in their games.
We are *nowhere* near the limit of what graphics can do for a game. The mistake you are making is looking at the casual gaming sector and assuming that its rules are applicable across the board, they are not. It's like saying "Look at Casablanca and how popular it is despite not having fancy special effects, clearly special effects have no place in movies!".
Quality of graphics is extremely important in parts of the games industry. Take a look at Final Fantasy, for example, a game known for its gameplay above its pretty graphics. It used to rely on pre-rendered FMVs to push the story forward, since its in-game graphics were so poor that it was impossible to achieve the level of cinematic immersion necessary to enthrall the player. This is no longer the case - the FF games now use in-game cinematics (for the most part).
Allow me to make another movie analogy. While some movies achieve success without big-budget special effects, some stories are impossible to tell without it. Try making Star Wars without special effects. Does this make Star Wars a story unworthy of being told? Of course not. Each game, like each movie, has its own technical requirements, and just because a low-budget movie with no special effects can make millions, doesn't make big-budget special effects-laden movies less worthy of being made.
I do get your point though:) Which games were these, just for curiosity's sake? I don't know many games that wil die with "illegal instruction" errors right out of the box, certainly not AAA-level titles anyway.
And what graphics card are you running? AMD/ATI, Nvidia, and Intel have fairly solid drivers on the Windows side, whereas some of the other manufacturers aren't so good with drivers.
Because you, the consumer, demand flashier and better graphics. Not to mention that the level of graphics we're talking about is *impossible* to implement on CPU - the GPU trounces your CPU's performance many times over for matrix math and other calculations.
Scalability is certainly a problem that game developers face - your game should look fairly decent even on a relatively old card, but PC gaming (especially of the 3D graphics variety) has always been an enthusiast thing. If you're not willing to buy a new $200 video card every year or so, you have no hope of keeping up.
I object to your description of game devs as "lazy". The usage of the GPU is a matter of necessity, and it's not easy either. Game developers are not taking the lazy way out by "not writing code" (they are), and relying in GPU functions - what does that mean anyway? Do you think there's a magical "awesome graphics" API on your graphics card that we can call to make things shiny? The kind of work we do on the card (shaders) is sometimes a LOT more complex than what we do on the CPU.
Oh, and DOOM works fine on integrated chipsets because... *drumroll* it doesn't use it! All your 3D work is done on-CPU, and I'm sorry to say that as fast as our CPUs have gotten, they are FAR from fast enough to power all of the pretty graphics you're used to seeing. We are, what, 100 times faster than the CPUs of the DOOM era? But our performance needs for games have progressed leaps and bounds beyond that.
I'm so tired of buying games for my 10 year old, then having to disappoint her when it won't install because it doesn support pixelshader 1.N, and 10^27 polygons per second etc
Read the requirements on the box! Every PC game I've ever bought has been *perfectly* clear about its video card requirements up front. After all, PC developers don't want pissed off consumers any more than you like getting disappointed when a game won't run. And seriously, if you're buying things like Lego Star Wars for your child, anything higher than a GeForce 6600 will run it buttery smooth, and that's a $50-100 card these days.
Honestly speaking, IMHO PC devs have been doing a good job with scalability. The only game recently that required a massive upgrade just to play was Crysis, everything else (Portal, TF2, C&C3, etc.) scales VERY well down to some downright low-end hardware.
A proper raytrace implementation will automatically account for things like the shadow penumbra (soft shadows), indirect lighting (light bounces, aka radiosity), and ambient occlusion. We're definitely not talking about the raytracers of yesteryear, which were very functionally limited.
I suppose the argument isn't even really about raytracing vs. not. It's about whether it's worthwhile to brute force the problem (thereby keeping the solution elegant and simple) with sheer CPU power, or to try and fake your way to good visuals via ever more convoluted "fake" solutions.
As a coder I'm obviously in the first camp - the sheer amount of hacks to get your "unified" lighting system together is ridiculous, and gets even more complex every day. Ideally we'd just calculate everything for real, in real-time, and the bonus is that it's scalable to computing power. Want better lighting? Crank up the sample count in your raytrace solution... if you have the power:P
I am an amateur game developer, so I probably can't speak for large devs, but I can speak for the community. The biggest problem facing game devs (and graphics people in general) is lighting. Doom 3 created an elegant, unified lighting model (i.e. the environment and characters are lit with the same algorithm, making them consistent), but it had severe limitations. Gone were the days where lights could be soft, and bounce around, and generally look nice, and replacing it was a very harsh lighting system that did not account for radiosity (due to limitations in hardware performance).
We've spent the last few years since Doom 3 trying to fake ways to get nice, soft lighting in our games, but in the end every single method is still just that - a hack. As we see more and more advanced lighting schemes come about to try and do soft lighting in real time, you will notice the systems get more and more convoluted and complex.
The only "elegant" solution to this problem is raytracing. Instead of faking radiosity through texture caches, secondary renders, and a whole slew of messy, fake solutions, we need to be able to execute raytracing in real-time. As soon as we can do it, the complexity of our lighting code will collapse to something incredibly elegant, simple, and universal (i.e. it will work across ALL situations).
Was this before or after the passing of Sarbanes-Oxley? You can't very well do that anymore, due to the fact that (apparently) the Enron guys were exploiting this as an accounting loophole.
At least Rogers has 24-hour customer support. You may have to wait for 3 hours to talk to a live human being, but at least you can do that. When I was with Bell Sympatico they ONLY WORKED from 9 to 5... Any time I had a problem I had to take time off work just to deal with it!
"Less than half" the escape velocity of Earth is STILL a considerable speed! Clearly I haven't done the math, but say you can cut your fuel requirements in half - you still have to haul all that fuel there, land softly enough that nothing is broken (or explodes), and THEN you have to have a way of dusting off safely. That's a lot of caveats.
The PEY (16 month co-op) program is counter-productive for both employees and employers. At UW (and other schools like UOttawa), 4 month cycling terms allow students to gain academic experience AND apply it to their work at the same time, as well as the fact that I can have *six* different work experiences under my belt before I hit the market. This is very beneficial for students, who now have a FAR more extensive network to call upon when they graduate, and a lot more street smart about the job market to boot.
It's also easier to sell for companies who are not currently doing internships and co-ops. Getting a company to commit to a 4 month work placement is a heck of a lot easier than a 16-month term. It also encourages companies to take more risks with their candidates - the commitment, even if the student is lousy, is much less. This allows a lot of otherwise unseen talent to be discovered.
Good students get good jobs, others get mediocre jobs and many can't get a placement at all. At Waterloo everyone gets a lousy job, but they fool themselves into thinking their getting better value than everyone else.
Have you *been* to Waterloo? Good students get GREAT jobs here, others get mediocre ones, and the rest get lousy jobs. Almost nobody is left unemployed (especially at the upper year level). We *do* get better value than everyone else, considering the numerous hoops we DON'T have to jump through to get our internships, the prestige we carry with private industry, and the sheer number of companies recruiting here that simply do not recruit at UofT and other schools.
FYI today was ranking day at Waterloo (the day where the system will finalize which job you get). I'm going to be getting a "lousy" job at Amazon, and I know many people who are getting equally "lousy" jobs at Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
Get off that high horse. There's a reason major schools in Canada are following Waterloo's 4-month model instead of the failed PEY 16-month model.
Note: I'm one of the selected students for this VeloCity thing, so I may be biased. To answer some of your questions...
The problem I have with this Velocity thing is: who pays and who benefits?
The residence component is paid by the residents, barring a small (
Beneficiaries is everyone. In the worst case scenario nothing of real value comes from this, and nothing happens, money down the drain. In the best case scenario we're talking about massive new employment opportunities in the region, and potentially tens of thousands of high-tech jobs (the type the gov't likes) created in the region. The KW region is trying to justify a lot of infrastructure upgrades right now, and having the employment numbers to back it up won't hurt.
I hate to get all Ayn Rand about this, but... smart people don't work in a vacuum. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't make those billions by themselves - they bootstrapped a company that now employs tens of thousands of people worldwide. Supporting initiatives like this isn't being elitist, it's forward-looking, and ultimately benefits everyone.
I hate the idea of university admins having the power to pick winners.
The group of students were picked by VeloCity's organizers, which, FYI, were also students.
As a UW student who's looked at many other Canadian co-op programs... I urge you to look more deeply into UW's co-op. I hate to be a braggart, but I do not exaggerate when I say that UW's co-op is leaps and bounds beyond ANYTHING any other Canadian university has, despite their best efforts. The level of support, organization, and opportunities you get with UW co-op far exceeds any other school.
With many other schools I feel as if the co-op is another thing to strike off their list "yep, we've got that too", whereas at UW you really feel that the school strives to make it part of its identity, and the results speak for themselves. We place a ridiculous number of students in jobs every term, incredible satisfaction and success rates from both employers and employees, and heck, companies come interview students on *our* campus...
Hi, I'm one of the students selected for this "dormcubator" thing, and I've had the chance to talk to many of the other students, as well as the organizers themselves. The focus of this initiative definitely wasn't to look for brainiacs with high grades - my marks suck. More focus was put on having an existing portfolio and history of pursuing extracurricular projects - building your own roomba on the side, for example. These are guys who have not only the smarts, but also proven their ability to work.
I'm an occasional traveler - maybe 10 times a year. Still a lot more frequent than the general public I think, and I know my way around flying. I agree with you wholeheartedly, and would like to add that this isn't just a problem in the cabin, but also at check-in.
Yes, you know the ones. The big family of 6 clearly taking the plane for the first time in their lives, who saunter up to the check-in counter, no ID in hand, no documents in hand, and then spend the next 10 minutes digging through luggage for the documents they should've known they'd need in the first place.
Seriously people. Have your luggage in order, make sure it's not overweight AT HOME, have you boarding pass printed, and your drivers license/passport/what have you in-hand. I do, and I'm in and out of that check-in procedure in 30 seconds FLAT.
I too am puzzled by it. I hate flying - the cramped feeling of being stuck into a flying tin can, the dry air, the (generally) horrible neighbors I usually get stuck with... Even the non-first-class waiting area is INFINITELY nicer than the innards of the airplane. Heck, people ought to pay to board LAST!
I've developed a habit. Book an early morning flight, pull an all-nighter the night before, and I'll be knocked right the heck out for most of the insufferable experience, be well-rested when I reach my destination, and still have plenty of daylight left to do something productive.
Yes, No, No to all, Yes to all. Which ever option I needed they always neglected to put in the menu.
Actually IMHO those are precisely the options you *NEVER* need in a menu. "Yes" to what? "No" to what? IMHO Yes/No dialogs should be banned from existence. Users do not bother to read the bulk of the dialog boxes that are presented to them - sometimes for good reason, some of those things read like essays. Look at other OSes - close down an app without saving, you get a dialog with "Save", "Don't Save", and "Cancel". Even without reading the dialog you know exactly what each button does.
Whereas in Windows you're simply putting users in danger of hitting a button when they don't really know what it does. Dialog options should ALWAYS be "verbed".
Really? By your logic Sony is a monopolist also. Hell, by your logic the Dole fruit company is also a monopolist. I can't get a Bravia TV from anyone other than sony! And surely the only place to get a Dole Pineapple is *gasp* Dole!
You can't get MS Windows from anyone but MS, but you can get alternative OSes from everyone else. That's not a monopoly. Not until MS is actively preventing you from purchasing competing OSes.
Except in this case Apple provided a Technical Note that detailed the exact steps you'd need to follow to implement this feature. The only thing that was undocumented was an *alternate* but *functionally identical* way to do it (i.e. doing it from code as opposed to from program config).
Re:Food. What you are used to eating
on
Kimchi in Space
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· Score: 1
YMMV I guess. I'm a Chinese-Canadian, been in Canada for 13 years now, and I still hanker for some good Chinese food. I consider myself pretty Canadianized - most of my cooking repertoire consists of Western foods, but if I go over a week without some solid Chinese food I start hankering for it.
I suppose I'm somewhat unique... An Asian guy who doesn't know how to cook Asian food, and ends up eating out at Chinese places a lot.
$3 per gallon? Are you kidding? These are stealth bombers we're talking about, they don't run off regular gasoline you know... Last I checked aircraft fuel (especially of the military variety) ain't cheap!
How is it that it caught on for the web (credit card payments over SSL), but still barely for personal communications
Because someone is losing something tangible (i.e. money) when fake credit card payments go through. The users didn't demand it, credit card companies did, to prevent skyrocketing fraud losses. Users themselves have never truly demanded encryption - how many online shoppers do you know that are savvy enough to look for proper SSL encryption before typing in their credit card number?
You're right, I didn't mean to imply that Apple was the first to put USB ports on their machines, but rather that they're the first to really say "want PS/2 peripherals? TOO FRIGGIN BAD!" - much like they were the first with the floppy in that regard. Steve Jobs made a big deal out of how USB was the future, and it's kind of sad now to see all these peripherals getting no love. USB still has a huge role in everyday computing, and while 6 ports may be a bit extreme, at LEAST 3 or 4!
My MacBook Pro is my main workhorse machine - and I have no desktop to complement it. It's always got the following hooked up to it:
- Keyboard ('cos the integrated one really sucks for anything beyond basic text entry)
- Mouse ('cos when I'm really chugging away at my work I need to be speedy)
- External HDD ('cos the internal drive really isn't big enough, even at 160GB)
- iPhone sync cable ('cos... well that's obvious)
The keyboard and mouse collectively take up only one USB port on my machine, thanks to the geniuses who put a USB hub in the Apple Keyboard, but as you can see I constantly need a USB hub. On the go it's not so bad, since it's usually just the iPhone sync cable, and a memory stick - but even then I'd still need more than a single port.
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Even using libraries and other shortcuts is still no cakewalk for the game developer. Let's say you have all of the code to throw polygons on screen, set up your rendering pipeline, etc etc, all for free. To make a modern game you still need to run shaders - lighting, shadows, shading, etc etc, all run on GPU. Try looking up some parallax mapping examples for HLSL, I challenge you to understand it, and then still say that it's a lazy method to avoid programming. I consider myself a very capable coder. and HLSL/GLSL code is still often WAAAAAAY above me.
What you're not understanding is the market segmentation in games. Games like The Sims naturally do not require insane graphics. Different gamers demand different things out of their games - RTS gamers for example, generally do not expect flashy graphics. When it comes down to shooters, though, people DO demand graphics. Simply because The Sims has sold bajillions of copies doesn't mean that *all* developers (or even most) can start neglecting graphics in their games.
We are *nowhere* near the limit of what graphics can do for a game. The mistake you are making is looking at the casual gaming sector and assuming that its rules are applicable across the board, they are not. It's like saying "Look at Casablanca and how popular it is despite not having fancy special effects, clearly special effects have no place in movies!".
Quality of graphics is extremely important in parts of the games industry. Take a look at Final Fantasy, for example, a game known for its gameplay above its pretty graphics. It used to rely on pre-rendered FMVs to push the story forward, since its in-game graphics were so poor that it was impossible to achieve the level of cinematic immersion necessary to enthrall the player. This is no longer the case - the FF games now use in-game cinematics (for the most part).
Allow me to make another movie analogy. While some movies achieve success without big-budget special effects, some stories are impossible to tell without it. Try making Star Wars without special effects. Does this make Star Wars a story unworthy of being told? Of course not. Each game, like each movie, has its own technical requirements, and just because a low-budget movie with no special effects can make millions, doesn't make big-budget special effects-laden movies less worthy of being made.
I do get your point though :) Which games were these, just for curiosity's sake? I don't know many games that wil die with "illegal instruction" errors right out of the box, certainly not AAA-level titles anyway.
And what graphics card are you running? AMD/ATI, Nvidia, and Intel have fairly solid drivers on the Windows side, whereas some of the other manufacturers aren't so good with drivers.
Because you, the consumer, demand flashier and better graphics. Not to mention that the level of graphics we're talking about is *impossible* to implement on CPU - the GPU trounces your CPU's performance many times over for matrix math and other calculations.
Scalability is certainly a problem that game developers face - your game should look fairly decent even on a relatively old card, but PC gaming (especially of the 3D graphics variety) has always been an enthusiast thing. If you're not willing to buy a new $200 video card every year or so, you have no hope of keeping up.
I object to your description of game devs as "lazy". The usage of the GPU is a matter of necessity, and it's not easy either. Game developers are not taking the lazy way out by "not writing code" (they are), and relying in GPU functions - what does that mean anyway? Do you think there's a magical "awesome graphics" API on your graphics card that we can call to make things shiny? The kind of work we do on the card (shaders) is sometimes a LOT more complex than what we do on the CPU.
Oh, and DOOM works fine on integrated chipsets because... *drumroll* it doesn't use it! All your 3D work is done on-CPU, and I'm sorry to say that as fast as our CPUs have gotten, they are FAR from fast enough to power all of the pretty graphics you're used to seeing. We are, what, 100 times faster than the CPUs of the DOOM era? But our performance needs for games have progressed leaps and bounds beyond that.
I'm so tired of buying games for my 10 year old, then having to disappoint her when it won't install because it doesn support pixelshader 1.N, and 10^27 polygons per second etcRead the requirements on the box! Every PC game I've ever bought has been *perfectly* clear about its video card requirements up front. After all, PC developers don't want pissed off consumers any more than you like getting disappointed when a game won't run. And seriously, if you're buying things like Lego Star Wars for your child, anything higher than a GeForce 6600 will run it buttery smooth, and that's a $50-100 card these days.
Honestly speaking, IMHO PC devs have been doing a good job with scalability. The only game recently that required a massive upgrade just to play was Crysis, everything else (Portal, TF2, C&C3, etc.) scales VERY well down to some downright low-end hardware.
A proper raytrace implementation will automatically account for things like the shadow penumbra (soft shadows), indirect lighting (light bounces, aka radiosity), and ambient occlusion. We're definitely not talking about the raytracers of yesteryear, which were very functionally limited.
I suppose the argument isn't even really about raytracing vs. not. It's about whether it's worthwhile to brute force the problem (thereby keeping the solution elegant and simple) with sheer CPU power, or to try and fake your way to good visuals via ever more convoluted "fake" solutions.
As a coder I'm obviously in the first camp - the sheer amount of hacks to get your "unified" lighting system together is ridiculous, and gets even more complex every day. Ideally we'd just calculate everything for real, in real-time, and the bonus is that it's scalable to computing power. Want better lighting? Crank up the sample count in your raytrace solution... if you have the power :P
I am an amateur game developer, so I probably can't speak for large devs, but I can speak for the community. The biggest problem facing game devs (and graphics people in general) is lighting. Doom 3 created an elegant, unified lighting model (i.e. the environment and characters are lit with the same algorithm, making them consistent), but it had severe limitations. Gone were the days where lights could be soft, and bounce around, and generally look nice, and replacing it was a very harsh lighting system that did not account for radiosity (due to limitations in hardware performance).
We've spent the last few years since Doom 3 trying to fake ways to get nice, soft lighting in our games, but in the end every single method is still just that - a hack. As we see more and more advanced lighting schemes come about to try and do soft lighting in real time, you will notice the systems get more and more convoluted and complex.
The only "elegant" solution to this problem is raytracing. Instead of faking radiosity through texture caches, secondary renders, and a whole slew of messy, fake solutions, we need to be able to execute raytracing in real-time. As soon as we can do it, the complexity of our lighting code will collapse to something incredibly elegant, simple, and universal (i.e. it will work across ALL situations).
Was this before or after the passing of Sarbanes-Oxley? You can't very well do that anymore, due to the fact that (apparently) the Enron guys were exploiting this as an accounting loophole.
At least Rogers has 24-hour customer support. You may have to wait for 3 hours to talk to a live human being, but at least you can do that. When I was with Bell Sympatico they ONLY WORKED from 9 to 5... Any time I had a problem I had to take time off work just to deal with it!
"Less than half" the escape velocity of Earth is STILL a considerable speed! Clearly I haven't done the math, but say you can cut your fuel requirements in half - you still have to haul all that fuel there, land softly enough that nothing is broken (or explodes), and THEN you have to have a way of dusting off safely. That's a lot of caveats.
The PEY (16 month co-op) program is counter-productive for both employees and employers. At UW (and other schools like UOttawa), 4 month cycling terms allow students to gain academic experience AND apply it to their work at the same time, as well as the fact that I can have *six* different work experiences under my belt before I hit the market. This is very beneficial for students, who now have a FAR more extensive network to call upon when they graduate, and a lot more street smart about the job market to boot.
It's also easier to sell for companies who are not currently doing internships and co-ops. Getting a company to commit to a 4 month work placement is a heck of a lot easier than a 16-month term. It also encourages companies to take more risks with their candidates - the commitment, even if the student is lousy, is much less. This allows a lot of otherwise unseen talent to be discovered.
Good students get good jobs, others get mediocre jobs and many can't get a placement at all. At Waterloo everyone gets a lousy job, but they fool themselves into thinking their getting better value than everyone else.Have you *been* to Waterloo? Good students get GREAT jobs here, others get mediocre ones, and the rest get lousy jobs. Almost nobody is left unemployed (especially at the upper year level). We *do* get better value than everyone else, considering the numerous hoops we DON'T have to jump through to get our internships, the prestige we carry with private industry, and the sheer number of companies recruiting here that simply do not recruit at UofT and other schools.
FYI today was ranking day at Waterloo (the day where the system will finalize which job you get). I'm going to be getting a "lousy" job at Amazon, and I know many people who are getting equally "lousy" jobs at Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, and Google.
Get off that high horse. There's a reason major schools in Canada are following Waterloo's 4-month model instead of the failed PEY 16-month model.
You don't need one. I use an old bathroom scale to weigh my luggage, works like a charm.
Note: I'm one of the selected students for this VeloCity thing, so I may be biased. To answer some of your questions...
The problem I have with this Velocity thing is: who pays and who benefits?The residence component is paid by the residents, barring a small (
Beneficiaries is everyone. In the worst case scenario nothing of real value comes from this, and nothing happens, money down the drain. In the best case scenario we're talking about massive new employment opportunities in the region, and potentially tens of thousands of high-tech jobs (the type the gov't likes) created in the region. The KW region is trying to justify a lot of infrastructure upgrades right now, and having the employment numbers to back it up won't hurt.
I hate to get all Ayn Rand about this, but... smart people don't work in a vacuum. Larry Page and Sergey Brin didn't make those billions by themselves - they bootstrapped a company that now employs tens of thousands of people worldwide. Supporting initiatives like this isn't being elitist, it's forward-looking, and ultimately benefits everyone.
I hate the idea of university admins having the power to pick winners.The group of students were picked by VeloCity's organizers, which, FYI, were also students.
Honestly, the name sucks... I thought it was some sort of municipal bike initiative (velos? anyone?) when I first heard about it...
As a UW student who's looked at many other Canadian co-op programs... I urge you to look more deeply into UW's co-op. I hate to be a braggart, but I do not exaggerate when I say that UW's co-op is leaps and bounds beyond ANYTHING any other Canadian university has, despite their best efforts. The level of support, organization, and opportunities you get with UW co-op far exceeds any other school.
With many other schools I feel as if the co-op is another thing to strike off their list "yep, we've got that too", whereas at UW you really feel that the school strives to make it part of its identity, and the results speak for themselves. We place a ridiculous number of students in jobs every term, incredible satisfaction and success rates from both employers and employees, and heck, companies come interview students on *our* campus...
Hi, I'm one of the students selected for this "dormcubator" thing, and I've had the chance to talk to many of the other students, as well as the organizers themselves. The focus of this initiative definitely wasn't to look for brainiacs with high grades - my marks suck. More focus was put on having an existing portfolio and history of pursuing extracurricular projects - building your own roomba on the side, for example. These are guys who have not only the smarts, but also proven their ability to work.
I'm an occasional traveler - maybe 10 times a year. Still a lot more frequent than the general public I think, and I know my way around flying. I agree with you wholeheartedly, and would like to add that this isn't just a problem in the cabin, but also at check-in.
Yes, you know the ones. The big family of 6 clearly taking the plane for the first time in their lives, who saunter up to the check-in counter, no ID in hand, no documents in hand, and then spend the next 10 minutes digging through luggage for the documents they should've known they'd need in the first place.
Seriously people. Have your luggage in order, make sure it's not overweight AT HOME, have you boarding pass printed, and your drivers license/passport/what have you in-hand. I do, and I'm in and out of that check-in procedure in 30 seconds FLAT.
I too am puzzled by it. I hate flying - the cramped feeling of being stuck into a flying tin can, the dry air, the (generally) horrible neighbors I usually get stuck with... Even the non-first-class waiting area is INFINITELY nicer than the innards of the airplane. Heck, people ought to pay to board LAST!
I've developed a habit. Book an early morning flight, pull an all-nighter the night before, and I'll be knocked right the heck out for most of the insufferable experience, be well-rested when I reach my destination, and still have plenty of daylight left to do something productive.
Actually IMHO those are precisely the options you *NEVER* need in a menu. "Yes" to what? "No" to what? IMHO Yes/No dialogs should be banned from existence. Users do not bother to read the bulk of the dialog boxes that are presented to them - sometimes for good reason, some of those things read like essays. Look at other OSes - close down an app without saving, you get a dialog with "Save", "Don't Save", and "Cancel". Even without reading the dialog you know exactly what each button does.
Whereas in Windows you're simply putting users in danger of hitting a button when they don't really know what it does. Dialog options should ALWAYS be "verbed".
Really? By your logic Sony is a monopolist also. Hell, by your logic the Dole fruit company is also a monopolist. I can't get a Bravia TV from anyone other than sony! And surely the only place to get a Dole Pineapple is *gasp* Dole!
You can't get MS Windows from anyone but MS, but you can get alternative OSes from everyone else. That's not a monopoly. Not until MS is actively preventing you from purchasing competing OSes.
Except in this case Apple provided a Technical Note that detailed the exact steps you'd need to follow to implement this feature. The only thing that was undocumented was an *alternate* but *functionally identical* way to do it (i.e. doing it from code as opposed to from program config).
YMMV I guess. I'm a Chinese-Canadian, been in Canada for 13 years now, and I still hanker for some good Chinese food. I consider myself pretty Canadianized - most of my cooking repertoire consists of Western foods, but if I go over a week without some solid Chinese food I start hankering for it.
I suppose I'm somewhat unique... An Asian guy who doesn't know how to cook Asian food, and ends up eating out at Chinese places a lot.
$3 per gallon? Are you kidding? These are stealth bombers we're talking about, they don't run off regular gasoline you know... Last I checked aircraft fuel (especially of the military variety) ain't cheap!
Because someone is losing something tangible (i.e. money) when fake credit card payments go through. The users didn't demand it, credit card companies did, to prevent skyrocketing fraud losses. Users themselves have never truly demanded encryption - how many online shoppers do you know that are savvy enough to look for proper SSL encryption before typing in their credit card number?
You're right, I didn't mean to imply that Apple was the first to put USB ports on their machines, but rather that they're the first to really say "want PS/2 peripherals? TOO FRIGGIN BAD!" - much like they were the first with the floppy in that regard. Steve Jobs made a big deal out of how USB was the future, and it's kind of sad now to see all these peripherals getting no love. USB still has a huge role in everyday computing, and while 6 ports may be a bit extreme, at LEAST 3 or 4!
My MacBook Pro is my main workhorse machine - and I have no desktop to complement it. It's always got the following hooked up to it:
- Keyboard ('cos the integrated one really sucks for anything beyond basic text entry)
- Mouse ('cos when I'm really chugging away at my work I need to be speedy)
- External HDD ('cos the internal drive really isn't big enough, even at 160GB)
- iPhone sync cable ('cos... well that's obvious)
The keyboard and mouse collectively take up only one USB port on my machine, thanks to the geniuses who put a USB hub in the Apple Keyboard, but as you can see I constantly need a USB hub. On the go it's not so bad, since it's usually just the iPhone sync cable, and a memory stick - but even then I'd still need more than a single port.