Comment How far we've come (Score 1) 157
10 years ago I worked on a major title for the Dreamcast, "Ecco the Dolphin: Defender of the Future" and our budget of somewhere around 2.5M was considered excessive.
One of the most touching things I ever had on Xbox Live was when I received a message I from a friend who always seemed to be on, but not in the previous 2 weeks. The message was from his mother thanking me, and everyone on his friends list for being his friend and telling us he had passed away. She continued to tell us he had Downs Syndrome, and at 21 years of age had passed away from complications of it. She told us that we, his virtual friends were the only friends he really seemed to have, because we didn't know about, or judge him because of his condition.
Would this system have deprived him of the one joy he had in his life because he couldn't run the hundred meter dash, or didn't match up with some other physical standard?
A few years ago I was working in television as a video editor. I bought Final Cut to do some side projects on, to make my demo DVD as professional as possible while looking for another job, and because I was used to working with pro tools.
Now I'm a software developer, I make maybe 2 or 3 fun videos a year, friends weddings, highlights of hockey, and it isn't worth it to upgrade the software. There still is that pull of "I spent over $1k on that software I should make sure I can still use it, but at the same time when I look at how much more I'll need to spend on a hardware in order to still run it, I need to figure out where to cut the losses.
I thought I had justified it if I could make the entire house Mac centric, but to upgrade the netbook to the cheapest MacBook, and to buy a Mac Pro vs build a home system just doesn't justify it.
Yeah my main desktop at work is an Ubuntu machine, which runs VirtualBox whenever I need to do something which requires windows (not often). I also have an old iMac at work, but it doesn't do much but serve as an iTunes player, and doing the occasional SVN merge. I've always appreciated the OSX ui, and a few years ago bought Final Cut Pro to do some video editing as a hobby. I'd like to keep using it, but I'm caught in the Mac Hole. iMac isn't the ideal platform for it. Mac Pro is to expensive for something I'll be doing as a "hobby" I want to get my wife off of Windows, and the transition from Windows -> OSX would be just as easy/hard as the transition from Windows -> Ubuntu. Yes they aren't equal yet, but for what she'll use it for there will be close enough.
It's funny as someone with an aging MacBook Pro, I was contemplating passing it down to my wife, claiming her netbook, installing osx86 on it, and then picking up a new Mac desktop, either an iMac or a Mac Pro, and just standardizing on OSX throughout the house.
Now I wonder if I'm better off just installing Ubuntu on the MBP and the Netbook and spend a lot less money on the desktop and build myself one with Ubuntu as well.
I'm not totally stating that this has caused Apple a hardware sale, (at least not yet) but it has made me re-think my strategy.
As a big hockey fan I picked up NHL 10, to play with friends on their online league, the EASHL. In past years the game just featured "real" equipment that the players in the league wore, and you could chose any of that for your character.
This year they featured customized "cool" equipment with boost slots. So a piece of equipment could be unlocked with 3 boost slots, and then up to 3 boosts could also be unlocked and added to it. So suddenly if you decided you wanted your character to look like he rides the short bus, you could actually increase your character up to 60 points, which is a major increase, considering leveling up your character fully only gets you about a 75 point increase.
EA set most of these "unlockables" to some really impossible tasks. Play 4 seasons, manually playing at least 40 games each season and score X number of goals each season. If somebody has a month, they could probably achieve this, but because these would be used in a competitive league, people wanted them now and EA allowed people to purchase them. $3 per equipment, $2 per boost. Maxing out the boost equipment on your guy comes to roughly $40, yet if you don't you're at a disadvantage from those who either have too much time and can unlock, or too much money and can just buy it all.
I bought one or two pieces to try and keep up, and would probably have bought more but my 360 RROD'd and its given me time to think. I doubt I'll buy a $60 game in the future where the part of the game I'm most likely to play will cost me a full $100, then I'll be fully expected to do it again next year.
A while back I had a problem with the power brick for my Macbook Pro. It was running awful hot, and some of the plastic on the cable near the magnetic adapter was starting to melt. Applecare kept trying to tell me that the problem was my fault for unplugging the adapter by pulling on the cable instead of actually grabbing the magsafe plug, and that despite me having paid for applecare, they would not fix it.
A couple days later while playing a game in bootcamp, I went to unplug it, and was so hot that the power cord's coating actually melted to my hand. I called up AppleCare went through the situation again. I even explained that it had melted, I seemed to get nowhere. Where I had touched the cord it had now darkened considerably, probably from me being able to see the bare cable beneath it. I was trying to describe this to the tech and said something along the lines of, "Well there's melting damage, and the area is blackened a bit as if there was a small fire there"
Suddenly the whole tone of the conversation changed, and I was immediately transfered to a supervisor. I went through about 10 minutes answering a series of questions off a script. "Did the Fire cause any property damage?" "Was there any bodily injury caused by the fire?" "Have you suffered any loss of income due to this problem?" etc etc etc.
I answered no to everything, but simply mentioning "Fire" got me a new power brick, when no other method did. It is something Apple is clearly concerned about.
I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato
