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Comment It just worked (Score 4, Insightful) 179

by chriss (#23338974) Attached to: iMac Turns 10

I think the emphasis should not be on the hardware, but on the package. True, it used USB (like the PowerMac G3 before it), but at that time this was just a faster replacement for the ADB bus that Apple had used as an universal bus before, and SCSI had been replaced by IDE as an internal connector before.

The major point of the iMac was the "just works" philosophy, as pointed out in some Apple ads that had a kid set up the iMac including internet access in a fraction of a time a HP engineer could do it with a PC. It was all about reducing the complexity that network access, multimedia and all the other nifty features had brought to computing during the last years. And that theme stuck with the iPod and the iPhone and is now widely regarded as the best way to bring technology to the masses.

So it was a revolutionary machine, just like the original Mac, and the hardware was the smallest part. I still have the original box, maxed to 128MB RAM and running MacOS 10.3. Just in case, because it "just works."
First Person Shooters (Games)

Submission + - Why Americans adopt suicide bombing tactics

Submitted by
chriss
chriss writes: "Clive Thompson describes in his commentary at Wired how he, confronted with certain death due to superior opponents, automatically switched his tactics to an approach now well established all over the world: suicide bombing. Fortunately he only did this in Halo 3.
Nonetheless his analysis of why he started blowing up himself (and his opponents) when there was no more chance of winning and the scary parallels to the conditions terrorist find themselves in are rather revealing. In the end one cannot win against others who can invest more time/money/technology. But if losing is inevitable, making the opponent pay the highest possible price becomes the natural objective.
Of course this is a vast oversimplification of the motivations for terrorism, but in contrast to just trying to analyze he actually 'felt' it. Playing games might be a better way to understand fighting seemingly inferior enemies, especially for those who still believe that better technology guarantees winning. The other side doesn't necessarily have to win, they just have to make sure you lose too."
Games

Videogames Fill Psychological Needs for Players 143

Posted by Zonk from the all-about-the-deepseated-pinata-wants dept.
codegen writes "The CBC (among others) is reporting that researchers at the University of Rochester and Immersyve Inc. have released a study indicating that people enjoy video games because they satisfy a psychological need. The study showed that the interrelations between players in MMOGs were particularly important. From the article: 'Gamers said they felt the best about their experience when the games they played produced positive outcomes in scenarios related to the real world ... The researchers evaluated players' motivations in virtual worlds by asking four groups of people to play different games, including a genre known as massively multiplayer online (MMO) games, which some industry watchers regard as the future of video games.'"
Software

Submission + - Germany backs out of EU Search Engine

Submitted by
An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian Limited is reporting that "senior officials in Germany's economics and technology ministry" have decided to dump Quaero, a search engine specifically made to counter ""Anglo-Saxon" cultural imperialism".

From the article: "Earlier this year Mr Chirac announced a series of ambitious technological projects designed to challenge the global dominance of the US. They included Quaero, a Franco-German search engine whose name is Latin for "I search", but which was swiftly dubbed "Ask Chirac". Today German officials confirmed they were abandoning the 400m (£270m) project."

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It's a naive, domestic operating system without any breeding, but I think you'll be amused by its presumption.

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