Users are looking for the ease of using OSX, but for work or play purposes they simply cannot afford to lose the entrenched Windows apps that they have right now. A web developer, for example, absolutely needs to run IE6 and IE7 to ensure that their work is compatible with the vast majority of the world's users, whilst preferring OSX for its simplicity and cleanliness. In that case a MacBook Pro with Windows virtualized with Parallels is quite the ideal solution.
It's funny how MS apologists constantly use the "but Windows run on Mac!" point to assert Windows' superiority. If people truly wanted to run just Windows, they wouldn't buy a Mac, they'd buy your average PC box. It's quite obvious to anyone that Boot Camp other run-Win-on-Mac solutions are there to take the shackles off people who are otherwise locked to PC right now.
As soon as the repeatable nature of the flaw was determined, a recall was issued.
Correction: As soon as finance and legal determined that the:
1 - The cost of settling out of court with the projected number of people harmed by this defect.
2 - Lost business due to bad publicity caused by this defect.
would exceed the cost of recall, a recall was issued.
I really don't get why the Slashdot groupthink is so against ad profit. The way I see it, if the article is chopped into so many fine pieces that it becomes a burden or a chore having to leaf through all those pages, then it's excessive. But if it's chopped comfortably into substantial pages that take a significant amount of time to read through and process, then they're free to make some ad impressions on me.
I am, after all, consuming their content. There's a difference between seeking profit and all-out greed, this article I do not believe belongs to the latter.
The article was on 2 pages. Were we reading the same article? I don't consider that amount of content to be too little for 2 freaking pages.
Inflammatory? Nowhere in the article did the authors insinuate that games should not bother to have a plot, their assertion was that a good plot would still make for a boring game if the gameplay elements are not there - and I reckon the vast majority of gamers will agree with that.
And where in the world did the article claim that MMOGs were bad? Not to mention one of the authors lists "Guild Wars" amongst his favorite games - hardly an anti-MMORPG fanatic.
- CPU overhead -- we just don't have the horsepower to generate "good" procedural textures in real-time. Basically why would I trade IO (loading) time (of premade textures) with CPU time (generating)??? As CPUs get this faster, then this balance will definitely shift to procedural textures.
I beg to differ. With the introduction of new storage media like Bluray and HD-DVD, there is nothing stopping us from generating procedural textures offline, storing them, and calling them back later. While games like.kkrieger generated textures on the fly to get themselves down into the KB-level distribution range, retail (or even downloadable games) generally do not experience these restrictions. Much like how lightmaps in old shooters were generated over days (literally!) for each map, then stored, we can do the same with procedurally generated content.
I suppose what I'm saying is, when I say procedural content I'm not necessarily thinking about the direction that Spore took, though that is certainly exciting. I'm rather thinking about increasing the machine's independence in creating content - the machine as artist, if you will. For example, would it not be nice if the artist modeling a European town had a tool that was aware of basic architectural elements of such a town? A tool that can add a gabled roof automatically at the check of a checkbox, instead of making the artist do it himself? I do not mean to make the machine generate content on its own, but rather take some control away from the artist, and make the artist the visionary instead of the labourer.
Let me know when you have an engine that runs on PC, PS2 and Wii. Not everyone is doing next gen PS3 and XBox360 games only! I'm not even going to mention the 'mobile' market.
True, there are not. But there are *many* engines out there that WILL run on PC, PS2, and Wii, just probably not at the same time. As a game developer though, it is rare for a game to target so many consoles at once, especially given their massive technological differences.
I would like to also add that games like Dead Rising are good examples of the type of rethinking we need to do in modern game development. Here we have a mall, modeled in excruciating and beautiful detail, filled to the brim with zombies. Yet, content-wise, it didn't have nearly as much content as, say, Half-Life 2. Why?
That hallway you blew past in 0.75 seconds in Half-Life 2 took someone hours upon hours to create. That same amount of time went towards creating the nice store in Dead Rising that you could visit over and over again. Twists on missions, objectives, and other gameplay-related alterations made it so that each visit was different, without introducing the slightest bit of new content!
Does this mean that on-rails shooters are on their way out? Perhaps, I don't know. But what I do know is that games that are successfully able to recycle their content (sandbox games have an easier time with this) are a lot more profitable than shooters right now. The content they stuff into their games can be enjoyed over and over. With games like SimCity, that one building that is modeled can go for *months* of player enjoyment, in a myriad of different ways. That hallway in HL2? Once. And once only.
Dead Rising was able to tell a remarkably good story given that it was a sandbox game. Complex storytelling had previously been locked to RPGs and shooters, both extremely content-intensive genres. I congratulate Capcom for pulling it off, and I hope more developers learn and experiment with storytelling in genres other than the traditional ones.
Agreed. I would have suggested a solution had I been aware of one.
That said, it's not about doing the things I'm suggesting and turning an obscene profit - this is about restoring profitability, not about making game development so cheap that everyone is rolling in the dough - that won't ever happen.
IMHO we need technological development in tools. We are still using the same 3D modeling tools, the same texturing tools, and the same map-building tools that we've been using since the release of Half-Life 1 8 years ago. The difference is that what we're doing now is many times more complicated than before.
In 1999 a wall was 2 polygons, and a 256x256 flat texture.
Now, we demand things like geometrically modeled light switches on these walls, power outlets, and other little things that add to immersion. We also need normal/parallax maps on all of this, not to mention specular maps too. We've added so much on top of what we used to do, without once stopping to really, completely rethink the way we interact with our tools.
When I first saw an artist use ZBrush, I was blown away. Here we have something that is smart, it is awesomely predictive, and it reduces the workload of the artist dramatically when it comes to modeling high-detail meshes. We're talking a couple orders of magnitude less time to do the same thing. And all it took was a brand new interface and way to interact with the type of models we're used to seeing.
Let's see the same sort of rethinking for our animation, for our texturing, and for our mapping.
This necessitates a change in the way games are made. One of the fundamental problems is that we're building games in bigger, shinier forms, without streamlining our method of production. As our graphical capabilities increase, we will be tempted to include more and more content into our games. That 900-polygon character that took an artist 1 week to create now takes 2 artists 3 weeks, what with technologies like parallax mapping.
I have believed, and still believe, that procedural content is the answer. There is a limit to how much manpower a development team can consume whilst remaining profitable, and IMHO we're already at that line. We need to start letting the machines figure out our content. This does not necessarily mean complete and full generation of assets by algorithms, but rather that our tools need to be streamlined as such. Software like ZBrush have drastically reduced (for the skilled user anyway) the amount of time required to build high-poly models. We need more tools like this for textures, for all other aspects of game development. We need to let go of the manual shift stick and build more powerful tools that will take more off our coders' and artists' hands.
This also means the segmentation between game developer and technology developer. For years we've seen some companies stick stubbornly to building their own engines, a costly affair. It should be clear to developers by now that, if you are in any way serious about graphical horsepower, you need to license an engine. Building your own engine from scratch is no longer feasible if you want to get your game done on-time and on-budget. The industry will, in time, become the playing field of dedicated technology developers who license their engines to developers, much like Valve and Epic are doing now.
The gaming industry is holding onto archaic ideals. It is like the car factory that insists hand-built is better, and refuses to mechanize any aspect of their production. It is now suffering the consequences, and like it or not they will have to change.
This is very true. While I find that Wal Mart's selection is poor, and stock levels even worse, places like Best Buy and Future Shop (its Canadian brother) treat me quite kindly. Where the local EB's have the whole "did you preorder? no? then sod off" mentality for games on launch day, there's no such issue with the big box stores.
I walked into a Future Shop and got Crackdown (for $10 cheaper than EB, no mail-in or anything required, just a markdown) on launch day. Try that at EB and get the evil "did you preorder?" look.
That's something I've been wondering, since last-gen I was still very much a PC gamer and didn't pay much attention to consoles. Did people always call the current-gen consoles next-gen? It seems confusing to me... you can justify calling it next-gen before it comes out, or even for a few months after they do... but this is getting a bit ridiculous.
Five years from now when the PS4 and Xbox420 comes out, there will be a huge big confusion, necessitating a number of "next-gen is now last-gen!" public service announcements...
In order to make this work he should never have identified himself, never been in contact with law enforcement. He should only have left a package at their doorstep, never allowing any contact that could make him an agent of law enforcement.
If my coworker came up every morning, deliberately knocked my coffee all over my work, and got verbally violent with me in the office, *he* is the one that's going to have a problem. Not me. As adults we police ourselves remarkably well, this is not true in school.
The "stresses and coldness of the working world" is peanuts (and hell, I've been in some pretty crappy workplaces) compared to the type of bullying some kids endure.
Mod parent up. Confrontation only works when you're in a predominantly middle-class suburban setting. In settings where gangs are common, doing something like the GP is incredibly dangerous. Sock one in the face? Welcome to the ICU, if you're lucky.
IMHO the answer to bullying is not "toughen up, hit 'em back", nor is it a bunch of inane laws that cannot ever be enforced. It all comes down to the school's ability to discipline their students, and the parents' willingness to discipline their children.
No amount of school-enforced punishment will be effective if the child goes home and is congratulated by the parent(s) for bullying yet another high school loser. I know of many parents who would do just such a thing, without realizing the kind of little monsters they are creating.
People bully in order to use the misery of others as a way to elevate themselves in the eyes of their peers. Nobody bullies alone, the mob mentality is a critical component of that behavior. Until the majority of people have no tolerance for bullying, and will stand up not only for themselves but others as well when bullied, this kind of thing will continue.
And it is unfortunate. For someone caught in bullying (like I once was) there is simply no way out. If you're in a safe enough environment you can sock 'em in the face and be done with it, but if they're part of the Chinese mafia there's really nothing you can do. Schools have their hands tied to giving out punishments that don't even amount to slaps on the wrist, and most often if a child has gotten to that point his/her parents are probably douchebags who can't be bothered to discipline their own children. In this case there is absolutely nothing a bullied child can do.
People often look at the bullied kids that snap, and point out the ills of our society (rap music, comic books, video games, whatever the problem du jour is). I for one sympathize with many of them. It is difficult for people who have never been bullied to comprehend the level of powerlessness that it instills in you. I've gone through a lot of crap since high school, and everything pales in comparison to the sheer powerless terror that you walk into school with every morning. In our modern atmosphere of classifying everything bad as "terrorism", it's a damned shame that bullying is not, 'cos IMHO it's probably the closest thing to terrorism that happens regularly in America.
Disclaimer: I do not condone nor endorse the actions of the ones that snap. I am merely saying that I can see why they did, and where they were coming from. When you are in a constant state of terror and fear, and live in a society that tolerates and seemingly encourages it, with absolutely no system or people to turn to, certain crazy things start looking not-as-crazy.
Furthermore, with Java becoming free as in free will, I don't see how free software benefits by having VB,.Net or any other Microsoft born encumbrance.
Maybe I'm the only one who's seen this, but the Java VM on any platform I've seen is dead slow. The GUI is unresponsive and sluggish, and the damned thing leaks like a sieve - not to mention is a memory monster for any app larger than a small utility..NET (2.0 at least) has been fast and relatively small in-memory. The only crappy thing about it is the size of the runtime.
Because people still uise 2000. I still use 98. It is when you are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to run new operating systems in order to run _A_PROGRAM_ that the world has turned upside down. In real life, you produce a product that fits into the way people are doing things.
I work for a software developer that does both Mac and PC software. Our next release cuts off Panther support, and I don't think we've supported Win2K since the last version. Our installer does check for it, and will deny install if your OS doesn't meet your specs.
Why? Because there is a cost related to proper quality assurance on any platform. We cannot in good conscience release software that has not been fully and thoroughly tested, and to be honest, we'd rather not have the support calls when users run into these inevitable bugs. In a perfect world if you follow the API docs everything will be hunky dory, reality is much less ideal. Testing on more platforms means more machines and more QA testers, the latter of which cost a LOT of money.
This is not to mention the fact that as we develop and add features in subsequent releases, we start utilizing API calls and OS features that only certain versions support. I myself was just implementing something with Carbon API calls in OSX that are only available in OS 10.3 and later. Can we hack a way around it? Sure, but it'll be messy, and it'll break interoperability with other parts of the OS.
So the sad reality is, OS support does need to be cut off at a certain point, both because we start using features that aren't available in older OSes, and because the cost of support and QA becomes unfeasible. Note that as a software company we are not suicidal - we don't lock you into XP or OSX Tiger because we feel like it or because some vendor paid us off. We only lock you in after we are convinced that the *vast* majority (and we're talking VAST) are running on that platform. We are not stupid, we're not going to cut off support for an OS if a significant number of people are still using it. Honestly, I find your claims of developer kickbacks to be ludicrous, laughable, and at least a little insulting. Take off your tinfoil hat, there's no big conspiracy between MS and your common app developers (and our app is VERY large in the industry) to make you upgrade!
As for the installer issue. Here's the deal. It costs us time and money when a user calls our support line. Believe it or not, if you present the "Warning: There is no support if you proceed!" dialog box, people will still call, and they will still demand support. When they do not get it they will get their panties in a bunch and tell all their friends about your horrible customer service (said friends are also likely to believe them). Hell, if someone calls up the support line and says "when I open window X and then window Y, the program crashes!", we immediately assume the user has discovered a bug, it may in fact never come out during the support call that the user is running Win98. This wastes our time and money.
In other words, we cannot trust the user to totally grok what it means to not be supported.
Many people would point to this case as an example that "hardcore gaming is dying". This cannot be further from the truth.
Look at Hollywood. You've got your forgettable romantic comedies and action flicks that, in two years time, nobody will even remember. Then you have the *good* films that seem to live forever. They may or may not be big-budget or have explosions galore, but in 30 years people will still be watching them, and they will keep showing up on "100 best movies..." lists.
Gaming is much the same way. There will always be a market for good high-budget games like Gears of War, that is in no danger of disappearing. What we will see more of is crappy, forgettable, licensed games. But that's just the way it is.
I recall also that the old school Apple LCD displays had a special connector that rolled in a USB connection also, thus allowing USB ports on-board the monitor without an extra cable.
The same method used to acquire this key can be used to acquire future keys. All it takes is one determined hacker willing to rifle through his memory addresses for the key.
I do not see a terribly effective fix for this - your key has to exist somewhere, and even in a CPU register it is still in memory more often than not.
I would personally like to hear some explanation of it. The hardware in a Moto phone is no slouch compared to its competitors, so why is it that I get a very very annoying delay every time I hit a button? It seriously hinders the usability of their phones, and this problem has existed for YEARS without a fix. Every time I use my friend's Sony-Ericsson phone I am continually amazed at how responsive it is.
Kind of, sort of, not really. I think Apple is more interested in keeping these students on board after they graduate by making them prefer Macs as home machines. Apple has been spending a LOT of time and money marketing and developing OSX and the iLife suite as the ultimate home computer suite.
Macs lack a lot of the infrastructure and 3rd-party tools necessary for large scale IT integration. I remember a company I worked for once had a system set up by IBM where broken laptops can have their data imaged across to a new one in a matter of hours. Macs lack this ability, and there are currently very few, if not none, 3rd-party tools that do this sort of thing. There's more to corporate IT computing than just "hey let's all use Macs!"
That said, I do work for a company right now that uses Macs (we just got a bunch of quad-core Mac Pros in, man they're sweet), but that's mostly because we develop software for Macs. I really ought to look at how the IT team copes with the lack of tools.
I go to college, and I've been there for a few years. During my freshman year the *vast* majority of laptops were PCs, Dells and Toshibas mostly. If I walk through a crowded library during exam time, I'd probably see 1-2 Macs out of every 100 laptops. They were rare, and you kind of looked at someone weird if they walked around with those little 12" iBooks (or for the hardcore Apple freak, the PowerBook).
Fast forward to 2 months ago, exam time yet again. I walked through the library and noticed just how many macs there are. At my college we're now looking at 15-20 Macs for every 100 laptops. Clunky Toshibas and Dells are on the way out - slim and light Sonys are in. Apple's all all the rage, with little white MacBooks floating *everywhere*. Practically everyone shopping for a laptop is seriously considering the MacBook, and even "hardcore" users like those in engineering and CS are making the switch (I am one of them).
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Apples are taking over the college market like a firestorm, it's just that obvious. Most people have a hard time grokking this, since Apple has made almost zero in-roads to enterprise and corporate computing, but do not let that be a sign that Apple is dying, it's quite healthy in the markets that it cares about.
Agreed on all counts, and to expand on your point:
The integrated LCD is wasteful, yes, since it involves throwing out a perfectly good display whenever you change computers. That said, it is also a core aspect of the Macintosh experience. The whole point of the iMac is to take away your tower, your LCD, and the bajillion wires and peripherals that come with it. Monitor cable? None. Monitor power? None. Speaker cables (usually a huge tangle of wiring)? None. You've got a keyboard that goes to your iMac, a very short wire that doesn't loop back or tangle. You've got a Mighty Mouse that plugs into your keyboard, without a whole spool of long wire that has to go all the way over to your tower like on a PC. All in all your desk is uncluttered, there aren't wires all over the place, and when you need to move your computer it's as simple as unplug-and-move.
Wasteful? Yeah, but it is just one more thing that makes a Mac more like an appliance than a cool technical gadget that does everything, and that is exactly the type of thinking Apple shoots for.
Slashdot Mirror
Users are looking for the ease of using OSX, but for work or play purposes they simply cannot afford to lose the entrenched Windows apps that they have right now. A web developer, for example, absolutely needs to run IE6 and IE7 to ensure that their work is compatible with the vast majority of the world's users, whilst preferring OSX for its simplicity and cleanliness. In that case a MacBook Pro with Windows virtualized with Parallels is quite the ideal solution.
It's funny how MS apologists constantly use the "but Windows run on Mac!" point to assert Windows' superiority. If people truly wanted to run just Windows, they wouldn't buy a Mac, they'd buy your average PC box. It's quite obvious to anyone that Boot Camp other run-Win-on-Mac solutions are there to take the shackles off people who are otherwise locked to PC right now.
The call is collect! It's a trap!
As soon as the repeatable nature of the flaw was determined, a recall was issued.
Correction: As soon as finance and legal determined that the:
1 - The cost of settling out of court with the projected number of people harmed by this defect.
2 - Lost business due to bad publicity caused by this defect.
would exceed the cost of recall, a recall was issued.
I really don't get why the Slashdot groupthink is so against ad profit. The way I see it, if the article is chopped into so many fine pieces that it becomes a burden or a chore having to leaf through all those pages, then it's excessive. But if it's chopped comfortably into substantial pages that take a significant amount of time to read through and process, then they're free to make some ad impressions on me.
I am, after all, consuming their content. There's a difference between seeking profit and all-out greed, this article I do not believe belongs to the latter.
The article was on 2 pages. Were we reading the same article? I don't consider that amount of content to be too little for 2 freaking pages.
Inflammatory? Nowhere in the article did the authors insinuate that games should not bother to have a plot, their assertion was that a good plot would still make for a boring game if the gameplay elements are not there - and I reckon the vast majority of gamers will agree with that.
And where in the world did the article claim that MMOGs were bad? Not to mention one of the authors lists "Guild Wars" amongst his favorite games - hardly an anti-MMORPG fanatic.
- CPU overhead -- we just don't have the horsepower to generate "good" procedural textures in real-time. Basically why would I trade IO (loading) time (of premade textures) with CPU time (generating)??? As CPUs get this faster, then this balance will definitely shift to procedural textures.
I beg to differ. With the introduction of new storage media like Bluray and HD-DVD, there is nothing stopping us from generating procedural textures offline, storing them, and calling them back later. While games like .kkrieger generated textures on the fly to get themselves down into the KB-level distribution range, retail (or even downloadable games) generally do not experience these restrictions. Much like how lightmaps in old shooters were generated over days (literally!) for each map, then stored, we can do the same with procedurally generated content.
I suppose what I'm saying is, when I say procedural content I'm not necessarily thinking about the direction that Spore took, though that is certainly exciting. I'm rather thinking about increasing the machine's independence in creating content - the machine as artist, if you will. For example, would it not be nice if the artist modeling a European town had a tool that was aware of basic architectural elements of such a town? A tool that can add a gabled roof automatically at the check of a checkbox, instead of making the artist do it himself? I do not mean to make the machine generate content on its own, but rather take some control away from the artist, and make the artist the visionary instead of the labourer.
Let me know when you have an engine that runs on PC, PS2 and Wii. Not everyone is doing next gen PS3 and XBox360 games only! I'm not even going to mention the 'mobile' market.
True, there are not. But there are *many* engines out there that WILL run on PC, PS2, and Wii, just probably not at the same time. As a game developer though, it is rare for a game to target so many consoles at once, especially given their massive technological differences.
I would like to also add that games like Dead Rising are good examples of the type of rethinking we need to do in modern game development. Here we have a mall, modeled in excruciating and beautiful detail, filled to the brim with zombies. Yet, content-wise, it didn't have nearly as much content as, say, Half-Life 2. Why?
That hallway you blew past in 0.75 seconds in Half-Life 2 took someone hours upon hours to create. That same amount of time went towards creating the nice store in Dead Rising that you could visit over and over again. Twists on missions, objectives, and other gameplay-related alterations made it so that each visit was different, without introducing the slightest bit of new content!
Does this mean that on-rails shooters are on their way out? Perhaps, I don't know. But what I do know is that games that are successfully able to recycle their content (sandbox games have an easier time with this) are a lot more profitable than shooters right now. The content they stuff into their games can be enjoyed over and over. With games like SimCity, that one building that is modeled can go for *months* of player enjoyment, in a myriad of different ways. That hallway in HL2? Once. And once only.
Dead Rising was able to tell a remarkably good story given that it was a sandbox game. Complex storytelling had previously been locked to RPGs and shooters, both extremely content-intensive genres. I congratulate Capcom for pulling it off, and I hope more developers learn and experiment with storytelling in genres other than the traditional ones.
Agreed. I would have suggested a solution had I been aware of one.
That said, it's not about doing the things I'm suggesting and turning an obscene profit - this is about restoring profitability, not about making game development so cheap that everyone is rolling in the dough - that won't ever happen.
IMHO we need technological development in tools. We are still using the same 3D modeling tools, the same texturing tools, and the same map-building tools that we've been using since the release of Half-Life 1 8 years ago. The difference is that what we're doing now is many times more complicated than before.
In 1999 a wall was 2 polygons, and a 256x256 flat texture.
Now, we demand things like geometrically modeled light switches on these walls, power outlets, and other little things that add to immersion. We also need normal/parallax maps on all of this, not to mention specular maps too. We've added so much on top of what we used to do, without once stopping to really, completely rethink the way we interact with our tools.
When I first saw an artist use ZBrush, I was blown away. Here we have something that is smart, it is awesomely predictive, and it reduces the workload of the artist dramatically when it comes to modeling high-detail meshes. We're talking a couple orders of magnitude less time to do the same thing. And all it took was a brand new interface and way to interact with the type of models we're used to seeing.
Let's see the same sort of rethinking for our animation, for our texturing, and for our mapping.
This necessitates a change in the way games are made. One of the fundamental problems is that we're building games in bigger, shinier forms, without streamlining our method of production. As our graphical capabilities increase, we will be tempted to include more and more content into our games. That 900-polygon character that took an artist 1 week to create now takes 2 artists 3 weeks, what with technologies like parallax mapping.
I have believed, and still believe, that procedural content is the answer. There is a limit to how much manpower a development team can consume whilst remaining profitable, and IMHO we're already at that line. We need to start letting the machines figure out our content. This does not necessarily mean complete and full generation of assets by algorithms, but rather that our tools need to be streamlined as such. Software like ZBrush have drastically reduced (for the skilled user anyway) the amount of time required to build high-poly models. We need more tools like this for textures, for all other aspects of game development. We need to let go of the manual shift stick and build more powerful tools that will take more off our coders' and artists' hands.
This also means the segmentation between game developer and technology developer. For years we've seen some companies stick stubbornly to building their own engines, a costly affair. It should be clear to developers by now that, if you are in any way serious about graphical horsepower, you need to license an engine. Building your own engine from scratch is no longer feasible if you want to get your game done on-time and on-budget. The industry will, in time, become the playing field of dedicated technology developers who license their engines to developers, much like Valve and Epic are doing now.
The gaming industry is holding onto archaic ideals. It is like the car factory that insists hand-built is better, and refuses to mechanize any aspect of their production. It is now suffering the consequences, and like it or not they will have to change.
This is very true. While I find that Wal Mart's selection is poor, and stock levels even worse, places like Best Buy and Future Shop (its Canadian brother) treat me quite kindly. Where the local EB's have the whole "did you preorder? no? then sod off" mentality for games on launch day, there's no such issue with the big box stores.
I walked into a Future Shop and got Crackdown (for $10 cheaper than EB, no mail-in or anything required, just a markdown) on launch day. Try that at EB and get the evil "did you preorder?" look.
That's something I've been wondering, since last-gen I was still very much a PC gamer and didn't pay much attention to consoles. Did people always call the current-gen consoles next-gen? It seems confusing to me... you can justify calling it next-gen before it comes out, or even for a few months after they do... but this is getting a bit ridiculous.
Five years from now when the PS4 and Xbox420 comes out, there will be a huge big confusion, necessitating a number of "next-gen is now last-gen!" public service announcements...
In order to make this work he should never have identified himself, never been in contact with law enforcement. He should only have left a package at their doorstep, never allowing any contact that could make him an agent of law enforcement.
Ahhh, but where's the fame and glory in THAT?
If my coworker came up every morning, deliberately knocked my coffee all over my work, and got verbally violent with me in the office, *he* is the one that's going to have a problem. Not me. As adults we police ourselves remarkably well, this is not true in school.
The "stresses and coldness of the working world" is peanuts (and hell, I've been in some pretty crappy workplaces) compared to the type of bullying some kids endure.
Mod parent up. Confrontation only works when you're in a predominantly middle-class suburban setting. In settings where gangs are common, doing something like the GP is incredibly dangerous. Sock one in the face? Welcome to the ICU, if you're lucky.
IMHO the answer to bullying is not "toughen up, hit 'em back", nor is it a bunch of inane laws that cannot ever be enforced. It all comes down to the school's ability to discipline their students, and the parents' willingness to discipline their children.
No amount of school-enforced punishment will be effective if the child goes home and is congratulated by the parent(s) for bullying yet another high school loser. I know of many parents who would do just such a thing, without realizing the kind of little monsters they are creating.
People bully in order to use the misery of others as a way to elevate themselves in the eyes of their peers. Nobody bullies alone, the mob mentality is a critical component of that behavior. Until the majority of people have no tolerance for bullying, and will stand up not only for themselves but others as well when bullied, this kind of thing will continue.
And it is unfortunate. For someone caught in bullying (like I once was) there is simply no way out. If you're in a safe enough environment you can sock 'em in the face and be done with it, but if they're part of the Chinese mafia there's really nothing you can do. Schools have their hands tied to giving out punishments that don't even amount to slaps on the wrist, and most often if a child has gotten to that point his/her parents are probably douchebags who can't be bothered to discipline their own children. In this case there is absolutely nothing a bullied child can do.
People often look at the bullied kids that snap, and point out the ills of our society (rap music, comic books, video games, whatever the problem du jour is). I for one sympathize with many of them. It is difficult for people who have never been bullied to comprehend the level of powerlessness that it instills in you. I've gone through a lot of crap since high school, and everything pales in comparison to the sheer powerless terror that you walk into school with every morning. In our modern atmosphere of classifying everything bad as "terrorism", it's a damned shame that bullying is not, 'cos IMHO it's probably the closest thing to terrorism that happens regularly in America.
Disclaimer: I do not condone nor endorse the actions of the ones that snap. I am merely saying that I can see why they did, and where they were coming from. When you are in a constant state of terror and fear, and live in a society that tolerates and seemingly encourages it, with absolutely no system or people to turn to, certain crazy things start looking not-as-crazy.
Furthermore, with Java becoming free as in free will, I don't see how free software benefits by having VB, .Net or any other Microsoft born encumbrance.
Maybe I'm the only one who's seen this, but the Java VM on any platform I've seen is dead slow. The GUI is unresponsive and sluggish, and the damned thing leaks like a sieve - not to mention is a memory monster for any app larger than a small utility. .NET (2.0 at least) has been fast and relatively small in-memory. The only crappy thing about it is the size of the runtime.
Because people still uise 2000. I still use 98. It is when you are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to run new operating systems in order to run _A_PROGRAM_ that the world has turned upside down. In real life, you produce a product that fits into the way people are doing things.
I work for a software developer that does both Mac and PC software. Our next release cuts off Panther support, and I don't think we've supported Win2K since the last version. Our installer does check for it, and will deny install if your OS doesn't meet your specs.
Why? Because there is a cost related to proper quality assurance on any platform. We cannot in good conscience release software that has not been fully and thoroughly tested, and to be honest, we'd rather not have the support calls when users run into these inevitable bugs. In a perfect world if you follow the API docs everything will be hunky dory, reality is much less ideal. Testing on more platforms means more machines and more QA testers, the latter of which cost a LOT of money.
This is not to mention the fact that as we develop and add features in subsequent releases, we start utilizing API calls and OS features that only certain versions support. I myself was just implementing something with Carbon API calls in OSX that are only available in OS 10.3 and later. Can we hack a way around it? Sure, but it'll be messy, and it'll break interoperability with other parts of the OS.
So the sad reality is, OS support does need to be cut off at a certain point, both because we start using features that aren't available in older OSes, and because the cost of support and QA becomes unfeasible. Note that as a software company we are not suicidal - we don't lock you into XP or OSX Tiger because we feel like it or because some vendor paid us off. We only lock you in after we are convinced that the *vast* majority (and we're talking VAST) are running on that platform. We are not stupid, we're not going to cut off support for an OS if a significant number of people are still using it. Honestly, I find your claims of developer kickbacks to be ludicrous, laughable, and at least a little insulting. Take off your tinfoil hat, there's no big conspiracy between MS and your common app developers (and our app is VERY large in the industry) to make you upgrade!
As for the installer issue. Here's the deal. It costs us time and money when a user calls our support line. Believe it or not, if you present the "Warning: There is no support if you proceed!" dialog box, people will still call, and they will still demand support. When they do not get it they will get their panties in a bunch and tell all their friends about your horrible customer service (said friends are also likely to believe them). Hell, if someone calls up the support line and says "when I open window X and then window Y, the program crashes!", we immediately assume the user has discovered a bug, it may in fact never come out during the support call that the user is running Win98. This wastes our time and money.
In other words, we cannot trust the user to totally grok what it means to not be supported.
Oh great, now when I turn on my PS3 it will print on screen "Hello, my name is Joe, how can I help you today?"
Damned outsourced chips, taking valuable processing away from hard-working American (Japanese?) chips!
I kid, I kid!
Many people would point to this case as an example that "hardcore gaming is dying". This cannot be further from the truth.
Look at Hollywood. You've got your forgettable romantic comedies and action flicks that, in two years time, nobody will even remember. Then you have the *good* films that seem to live forever. They may or may not be big-budget or have explosions galore, but in 30 years people will still be watching them, and they will keep showing up on "100 best movies..." lists.
Gaming is much the same way. There will always be a market for good high-budget games like Gears of War, that is in no danger of disappearing. What we will see more of is crappy, forgettable, licensed games. But that's just the way it is.
I recall also that the old school Apple LCD displays had a special connector that rolled in a USB connection also, thus allowing USB ports on-board the monitor without an extra cable.
The same method used to acquire this key can be used to acquire future keys. All it takes is one determined hacker willing to rifle through his memory addresses for the key.
I do not see a terribly effective fix for this - your key has to exist somewhere, and even in a CPU register it is still in memory more often than not.
I would personally like to hear some explanation of it. The hardware in a Moto phone is no slouch compared to its competitors, so why is it that I get a very very annoying delay every time I hit a button? It seriously hinders the usability of their phones, and this problem has existed for YEARS without a fix. Every time I use my friend's Sony-Ericsson phone I am continually amazed at how responsive it is.
C'mon Motorola, what gives?
Kind of, sort of, not really. I think Apple is more interested in keeping these students on board after they graduate by making them prefer Macs as home machines. Apple has been spending a LOT of time and money marketing and developing OSX and the iLife suite as the ultimate home computer suite.
Macs lack a lot of the infrastructure and 3rd-party tools necessary for large scale IT integration. I remember a company I worked for once had a system set up by IBM where broken laptops can have their data imaged across to a new one in a matter of hours. Macs lack this ability, and there are currently very few, if not none, 3rd-party tools that do this sort of thing. There's more to corporate IT computing than just "hey let's all use Macs!"
That said, I do work for a company right now that uses Macs (we just got a bunch of quad-core Mac Pros in, man they're sweet), but that's mostly because we develop software for Macs. I really ought to look at how the IT team copes with the lack of tools.
My karma's going to go to hell for this, but here's an interesting thought.
This "return" concept is entirely impossible without DRM.
I'll do it better then:
I go to college, and I've been there for a few years. During my freshman year the *vast* majority of laptops were PCs, Dells and Toshibas mostly. If I walk through a crowded library during exam time, I'd probably see 1-2 Macs out of every 100 laptops. They were rare, and you kind of looked at someone weird if they walked around with those little 12" iBooks (or for the hardcore Apple freak, the PowerBook).
Fast forward to 2 months ago, exam time yet again. I walked through the library and noticed just how many macs there are. At my college we're now looking at 15-20 Macs for every 100 laptops. Clunky Toshibas and Dells are on the way out - slim and light Sonys are in. Apple's all all the rage, with little white MacBooks floating *everywhere*. Practically everyone shopping for a laptop is seriously considering the MacBook, and even "hardcore" users like those in engineering and CS are making the switch (I am one of them).
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Apples are taking over the college market like a firestorm, it's just that obvious. Most people have a hard time grokking this, since Apple has made almost zero in-roads to enterprise and corporate computing, but do not let that be a sign that Apple is dying, it's quite healthy in the markets that it cares about.
Agreed on all counts, and to expand on your point:
The integrated LCD is wasteful, yes, since it involves throwing out a perfectly good display whenever you change computers. That said, it is also a core aspect of the Macintosh experience. The whole point of the iMac is to take away your tower, your LCD, and the bajillion wires and peripherals that come with it. Monitor cable? None. Monitor power? None. Speaker cables (usually a huge tangle of wiring)? None. You've got a keyboard that goes to your iMac, a very short wire that doesn't loop back or tangle. You've got a Mighty Mouse that plugs into your keyboard, without a whole spool of long wire that has to go all the way over to your tower like on a PC. All in all your desk is uncluttered, there aren't wires all over the place, and when you need to move your computer it's as simple as unplug-and-move.
Wasteful? Yeah, but it is just one more thing that makes a Mac more like an appliance than a cool technical gadget that does everything, and that is exactly the type of thinking Apple shoots for.