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Re: High end for iPod
#120303 12/20/05 06:25 AM
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axiomite
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axiomite
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I've got FarCry for the Xbox, and it is quite good. Haven't had much time as of late to really get into it, but I have a few vacation days to use before the year is up (only working one day next week!).


***********
"Nothin' up my sleeve. . ." --Bullwinkle J. Moose
Re: High end for iPod
#120304 12/20/05 06:29 AM
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The plot is terrible. The most generic first person shooter I've ever seen, complete with African-American scientist, buxomy girl who is not what she seems, and giants with rocket launchers grafted to their arms. Seriously, I think we've all seen enough giants with rocket launchers grafted to their arms. Next!

However, the gameplay and graphics are amazingly good; especially the gameplay. It's so refreshing after Doom3 to be able to sneak up on enemies and kill them, instead of enemies sneaking up on you. And killing you. Messily.

On the other hand, Half Life 2 is still my favorite game of all time.


I am the Doctor, and THIS... is my SPOON!
Re: High end for iPod
#120305 12/20/05 06:35 AM
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Half Life 2 rocks. I still haven't finished it (near the end of the Nova Prospekt level), but it's definitely in my top 5 favorite games of all time. As amazing as the graphics are, the gameplay is even better.

Re: High end for iPod
#120306 12/20/05 06:38 AM
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axiomite
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Yeah, some plots really need to be worked on in games. At least the gameplay makes up for it. Half Life 2 is amazing (again, Xbox), but, unfortunately first person shooters make me queasy. I can only play for a little at a time.

One game I recently picked up that I was thrilled with was "Shadow of the Colossus." There are many faults to it, but it is a spectacle of a game and it is a must to have a subwoofer for.



***********
"Nothin' up my sleeve. . ." --Bullwinkle J. Moose
Re: High end for iPod
#120307 12/20/05 07:07 AM
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In reply to:

But really Apple pretty much created the bandwagon.


Exactly my point. Apple jumped on a bandwagon, repainted it tangerine (or in the case of the iPod, gloss white) and said they invented it... and everyone believes it. They created the hype. The hype that everyone needed "an iPod" (as a general term for portable players)

In reply to:

The market was stagnant until the 1G 'pods came on the scene. Heck one of the real problems is that none of the pretenders can do all of the 3 parts well: 1)Must-have design 2)Cool features and 3)MARKETING!


Apple got lucky in timing... that tech reached the point where it was a good time to toss away audio CD players, and MP3 on disc players in favour of audio on RAM players. As for the 3 parts? Must have design? It looks like my digital thermostat. Cool features? What ARE the cool features of an iPod? And marketing? Well, that's what makes dudes get a Dell, and everyone to pay a 200% premium to have their laptop look like a V-Tech kids learning centre.

In reply to:

And please don't tell me you buy into the "it's success makes it suck" crap.


No, its design makes it crap, it's success in spite of repeated design flaws says more about the Apple marketing strategy - the entire first run of Nanos had screens that scratched - with no protective coating on them. That should have made the iPod synonymous with Ford's Pinto. Apple was slow in even admitting a problem to users that were looking at frosted and cracked screens, that should have brought out the torch-light mobs. But no.

In reply to:

As far as computers go some people make the mistake of assuming I am a militant towards or against one platform of another. Nope. Like 'em all, as far as what they can do for me.


That's the difference, I'll be the first to point out problems with any platform and I've been through a lot - everything from CBM Basic V2 to BeOS to Solaris to Windows - they all sh*t the bed somewhere... but most don't get a second chance - BeOS was going to be awesome, but it died. The Mac supporters just seem to cheer for the retarded kid no matter how badly he does. You seem something similar in processor camps (Intel vs AMD) but it's just not the same as the all-encompassing Apple can do no wrong chant.

In reply to:

And believe you me there is no such thing as a perfect OS. Any of them. OS X could be. Stability of Unix, Mac GUI and ease of use. All it needs are the ba-jillions of periphs you can get on the PC plus all the high-end games and power apps. Maybe OS-X86 will be the one true OS that brings balance to the galaxy.


Or brings about Revelations... the draw of *nix is its adaptability. The hardcore nerds love to recompile kernals to make them 0.01% smaller and 0.02% faster and then brag about it in IRC channels. Anyone with a day job or even a good quality hobby isn't really all that interested in that. So the kernal's hidden away under the mask of OSX, leaving only the well-documented *nix drawback of "not playing well with peripherals", which, granted, is a small problem with Apple, since they control most of what add-ons go into their machines, you don't pick from a who's-who of nobodys when it comes to network card, sound cards and the like. No "happy green mainboard for sokket 7 proscesser" motherboards floating over on rafts from the east.

For a good example of why I'm not sold on OSX - I launched a brand new sports facility with a "world-class" closed circuit feed last year. Apple put together the non-linear edit suite to certain specs. Out of the box, the system would not L&C (log and capture) footage over 5 minutes in length without a complete OS crash... ie: pull the plug out of the wall. Took them 2.5 months for their techs to fix the problem. Spectacular, guys.

Bren R.

Re: High end for iPod
#120308 12/20/05 07:16 AM
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In reply to:

I love how you talk about glutting the market and 300 Mac users in the same post. 5% of the total market ain't half bad for one company...

(...)

They get critiqued for being so small, and so big! And you do both in one post! Incredible!


The glut I refer to is in the personal players market... the 300 Mac users is in the computer market.

Remember - they've got a few irons in the pot... hardware, OS, software, standalone electronics, music reseller. They can be big in one area, and small in another. And good in one area and bad in another.

Take HP for instance - great graphing calculators, incredible desktop printing solutions, mediocre scanners, and pretty much everything else they brand/sell is complete crap. I've got a point-and-shoot digital cam of theirs for quick product shots for emailing - has a driver that completely craps out the Windows volume tracker - makes fixed discs disappear. Bra-vo. You screw up your DRIVER that badly? Tsk! And HP laptops - one of my guys had one... accidentally hit the key-combination to park the drive heads... they're still parked... in a landfill here somewhere.

Bren R.

Re: High end for iPod
#120309 12/20/05 04:22 PM
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Come on Bren, join the revolution and admit it. The iPod is cooler than tits on glass.

Re: High end for iPod
#120310 12/20/05 05:47 PM
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I don't have much use for portable players. When I do need a few tunes when out working in the yard or on a plane, I usually put my Sony discman in my pocket - plays the same MP3 discs I've prepared for my car deck (I'm up to about 40% of my CD collection on 15 or so discs at 256Kbps), has an insane amount of read-ahead (only spins up a second time on songs over about 3 minutes) and does the trick for me.

Other than that, either I'm at work, at home, in the car (all places I've got either good or great audio systems) or on my bike, in which case I like being able to hear road noise.

Bren R.

Re: High end for iPod
#120311 12/20/05 05:48 PM
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I never heard the Apple folks say they invented the market or discovered nuclear fission or the cure for polio. That's just perception. They come out with a cooler product that what's out there, people (including the press, who of course have been plied with free merch) love it and away we go. Meanwhile there is a fringe group of people, mostly geeks, sitting in their batcaves grumbling about the superiority of whatever it is that they use. Yawn.

As far as "lucky," well I'm not so sure it was luck. You don't think they had the 'pod in the works for a while? You don't think they did studies and such to decide when to launch? I can't believe they spent huge amounts of time and money designing the 1G iPod then crossed their fingers and wished hard. Sure no one expected the nuclear explosion that happened but they have to had sensed a market upturn coming. You seem to completely forget the Napster Factor. The 'pod was launched at the height of The Golden Age OF Napster (RIP) and touted as the perfect device for the age of digital music. Genius. And it was certainly cooler than the clunky devices Creative and Rio had out at the time, plus the HDD storage far outstripped the 256MB flash players that were standard at the time. Luck? Nope.


As far as "it's design makes it crap." Well, nope. Nano screen scratches a design flaw? Only partly. They had a bad run of screens and the Nano design called for a thinner layer of coating than previous 'pods. Didn't work out. Oh well. Read the ARS Technica article where they dropped, kicked, ran over, hit with a hammer, and basically tortured a Nano and it wouldn't stop playing music? There's a design flaw I like: Will not stop working even if run over by a car. My Rio Carbon was my all-time fave until a true design flaw killed it: The volume wheel was poorly reinforced and would break and could not be fixed. THAT is bad engineering my friend.

Sure *ix has many superior elements but are you gonna set granny in Hoboken up with NetBSD? Didn't think so. I mean quit beating around the bush and name the perfect OS. Does it exist? Nope. I mean as far as servers go you have a point but as an all-around all-purpose OS FOR THE MASSES any *ix or Linux (remember GNU's Not Unix!) doesn't stand up. Granny needs 100% point-and-click usability and plug-n-play compatibility. Certainly no "read the man pages" and "edit the config file" stuff. That's fine for us but not for Granny.

So anyway I'm going to go monitor our Linux servers from my Powerbook and later I'll play Doom3 on my Wintel machine at home. Ahh, so glad I can enjoy the best of all worlds without reservation.





"That's some catch, that Catch-22." "It's the best there is." M22ti VP150 EP350 QS8 M3Ti
Re: High end for iPod
#120312 12/20/05 07:00 PM
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In reply to:

Meanwhile there is a fringe group of people, mostly geeks, sitting in their batcaves grumbling about the superiority of whatever it is that they use. Yawn.


Insulting and dismissive in the same sentence.

In reply to:

And it was certainly cooler than the clunky devices Creative and Rio had out at the time, plus the HDD storage far outstripped the 256MB flash players that were standard at the time. Luck? Nope.


One man's clunky is another man's streamlined. Is flat "cool"? According to Apple, Motorola (Moto Razr phones) and vinyl LPs it is, I'd personally rather carry a cassette than an LP, but that's just me.

In reply to:

As far as "it's design makes it crap." Well, nope. Nano screen scratches a design flaw? Only partly. They had a bad run of screens and the Nano design called for a thinner layer of coating than previous 'pods. Didn't work out. Oh well.


Nope, and oh well? People bought these products for hundreds of dollars, they were severely damaged within days and Apple refused to admit a problem, and you're confident in your opinion that this wasn't an issue.

In reply to:

Read the ARS Technica article where they dropped, kicked, ran over, hit with a hammer, and basically tortured a Nano and it wouldn't stop playing music? There's a design flaw I like: Will not stop working even if run over by a car.


Now that sounded a wee bit fishy to me... you're talking about this, correct? The article where dropping a Nano out of a car window did not appreciable damage the unit, save for scratches. Honestly, it doesn't weigh much, so the physics of it are it's got a pretty good drag coefficient, coupled with not much mass behind it that means it's not hitting the ground hard. I don't believe this is the kind of force that would be most likely to damage the iPod. Kind of like saying a feather is indestructable because you can drop it out of a plane and it'll survive unscathed.

Dropping it from a park bench destroyed the screen. They (and you) consider this a pass, I'd consider it a fail. The music still plays - but the functionality is gone. I've dropped a "G-shock" watch ($0.50 plastic watch I grabbed out of stock when I worked shipping and receiving) off an 8th story balcony, and it's continued to work, with only a chip in the LCD screen, so I'd already consider the screen becoming non-functional as a fail. There are no mentions of hitting it with a hammer or kicking it. Running it over with a car is kind of smoke and mirrors... as long as there are standoffs between the front and back of the case, a car's weight would be evenly distributed over these and shouldn't damage the internals. I've had my foot run over by a 1/2 ton truck and if the tiny bones in my foot weren't snapped like twigs (my calcium consumption is probably 3% of RDA), I wouldn't expect electronics to suffer much either.

As for all the OS talk - I'm not suggesting any OS doesn't stink. But I'm also not willing to put any on a pedestal. I haven't gone on on how XP roolz - all else droolz, or how they'll get my OS/2 Warp when they pry it from my cold dead hands or anything. Computers are a tool for me. I want my tool to work. I don't need it to be tangerine, or glowing, or stylin' I just want it to work.

My personal experience has been some frustration with Windows 3.x (mostly networking issues until 3.11WFWG), a good deal of frustration with 95, none to speak of with Win98/SE or NT3.5/4.0, I skipped over 2000 and ME (which both stunk on ice) and I've been remarkably impressed with WinXP (though that impression requires that you patch the OS security defects on an hourly basis, but since none of them have actually burned me, it's been a non-issue for me)... in the Mac camp, I've never myself been the primary user of a Mac system - they've been and are in my workplace, and from a purely managerial standpoint, OS9.x has created very few headaches and slipped timelines on my projects, OSX came out of the box like a screaming baby. If someone's still shiny-faced about this wonderful tech, maybe it's still got some cool factor for them... I've become pretty grizzled with the personal computer since 1983, I just want it to work, if it doesn't, I either lose money or face.

Bren R.

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