Sunday Mornin' 8:52
Slept badly.There is too much going on.
Hey it's Easter! Kettle is on. Coffee on it's way.
Well partly I blame Apple. For my tiredness I mean.
I got a new new machine week before last. My new machine was an iMac G5. My new new machine was what is now called an iMac which is Apple's branding solution for the core duo machines.
NOW is anyone of the same opinion as me? All the early Peter Gabriel albums were eclectic, interesting and thoroughly enjoyable. AND the all had the same name. Then when he started giving the albums titles they all sounded the same. I think generally I will stick with the former.
So perhaps Apple are working on the same principle... Actually after the mess they got into in the middle of the 80's when they had so many different models with little or no differentiation and complete confusion - including amongst themselves - they did have a set of machines that had the CX and CI nomenclature which generally described the higher and lower spec - but at the height of this madness they actually released a machine where these badges were reversed thereby leaving Mac users unable to deduce what was actually going on.
I can foresee actually that Apple may actually stumble into a similar trap - the differentiation issue - even with his Steveness in charge. I can't as yet see what is going to differentiate MacBooks from MacBookPro machines for example. Mind you having had to purchase some products from Dell recently they obviously suffer from the same feature creep differentiation issues Apple had in the 80's. Quite why anyone would buy from them without their credit facilities I would have no idea.
Anyroad, Apple released BootCamp and so we hurtled up to COMPUSA and bought the iMac - two reasons -
One is that the software I am working with is only useable on a PC - this despite the specific promise from a large photocopying company that it would work cross platform - it is a web-based ordering system and it is so tied into IE that it is unreal. Well MS have since pulled the plug on that program on the Mac - their argument was that Apple had released Safari and therefore they would take their ball away - actually I think that there is more going on.
Having just read Revolution in the Valley by Andy Hertzfeld and the fantastic tales of duplicity MS have pulled on Apple over the years - I would suggest there was more to this - perhaps MS trying to wrestle back the Internet from all those open source people. This software is a fine example of this trend. My favourite story - well most frustrating really coz I saw this from the other side - had to do with Basic programming on the Mac. When the Mac was released I was kind of interested in programming it - but couldn't get all the dev tools and wanted to just try stuff so a Mac Basic would have been really cool - Apple were working on it but never heard anything about it - then MS released a pile of crap programming language for the Mac - what was all THAT about? ... Well it turns out that Donn Denman put considerable effort along with Randy Wiggington on getting BASIC working on the Mac BUT the license for Applesoft Basic which MS supplied for the Apple II machines was due to expire in September 1985. So as a condition of the renewal of the licence is that Apple sold their BASIC to Microsoft for one dollar which they then buried. oh and to add insult to injury this was also the fantastic John Sculley deal that effectively gave MS perpetual use of the Macintosh User Interface. Go figure.
The second reason is that I wanted to play games. For a start I could finally do an A B comparison of WOW on a PC and a Mac and see which was best. But I could also get a couple of the games people were raving about currently and see what all the fuss was about.
So I purchased Oblivion which Ratty was playing on his 360 just before I left the UK and 1/2 Life 2 - because the "the graphics were amazing"
Oblivion is very good and plays well. Plot line is intricate and involved and I still don't know what is happening. Just starting the Vampire quests... should be interesting.
1/2 life 2 is pretty good - atmospherically very dark and quite paranoid inducing. But graphics were OK - this is not an issue with the Mac - just perhaps I hadn't realised what State of the Art meant. OK Outside areas are very nice and the close up faces are also very nice - but the details on the rubbish floating about in the game I feel are a bit cartoonish. Also doing head shots on the attacking troupers seems a little harsh - can't we all just be friends?
Actually with all these games I play them as tourists - I am very interested in the following things:
How these artificial landscapes are evolving and how people are perceiving them.
How does an experience in a game world differ from an experience in the real world and in terms of memory how the brain sorts the information.
Talking of which... I've been having strange dreams again.
posted by John Molloy @ 8:54 AM
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