If this patent really is so broad that it affects all VoIP and there's no possible work-around, then this sounds to me like an antitrust suit waiting to happen.
Except you're just confusing the issue by using "virtual income" when what you really mean is just plain old "income" generated from virtual goods or services rendered. Virtual income is an income in-game that has not been converted to real-world currency.
Taxing virtual income is pure insanity; taxing real income generated from virtual goods or services rendered only makes sense.
Before MS, IBM ruled the computing world, with numerous other incompatible operating systems such as DEC/TOPS, DEC/VAX, Univac OS/1100, HP RTOS, etc thrown into the mix. And if IBM had been as good as MS at business tactics and were still in that position today, they would be facing exactly the same consequences MS is.
There's a reason people keep using "bad car" analogies. It's because computers these days are on a global scale as necessary and ubiquitous as cars are in the US. This was not the case in IBM's heyday, even in the commercial or industrial arena.
To use yet one more "bad car" analogy, it's as if [insert car manufacturer here] manufactured not only automobiles, but also the roads those autos worked on, and no other auto could function on their roads. Of course it just so happens that those roads are the ones needed to get to 95% of all the most popular destinations, and in particular the destinations involving tourism and vacation sites as well as the majority of business locations. Sure, you could use an auto and roads from a different manufacturer - you just won't be able to get to where you want to go.
Microsoft has done this to themselves. They have put themselves in a global monopolistic position that no other company has ever really even come close to. As such, there is no precedent on how to deal with such a company.
They made themselves a huge target, they should be expecting consequences a lot more severe than this.
Is there anything worse than sitting through some jerk reading their slides verbatim... Maybe a prof that falls asleep while reading through his slides verbatim?
Right. Without DST, we could all independently choose to move our schedules earlier acording to the clock. We can and do already. Just because 9-5 is considered the "norm" doesn't mean all businesses everywhere follow it.
And every buisiness could pick their own day to change their hours, etc. Except there's no need for businesses to change hours, whether there's DST or not. Indiana has only recently gone back to using DST after not having it for decades, and now only to keep time more similar with surrounding states. Most people and businesses don't like it one bit.
The net effect would be just like DST, except far more confusing and haphazard. Why would that be good? That's just your assumption. Alternatively, the net effect might well be that businesses would move their working hours an hour forward year-round, and done with. It's already daylight by 8:00AM in the winter anyway so the 9-5'ers wouldn't be affected much (if at all), and even with DST the industries that need daylight still need to change their working hours in the winter.
I'm not saying my assumptions are necessarily correct. But I'm saying it's worth trying, and certainly a lot more worth trying than shifting around the days DST begins and ends.
So you're saying that if we went to full-time non-DST, the "normal working day" would magically shift from 9-5 to 8-4? Magically? No. But I think it would happen a lot sooner than most people would expect. We really can't know for sure either way, as DST has been around longer than the "9-5 workday".
Given that my work schedule doesn't change when DST starts, and wouldn't change if DST or standard time were made year-round, yes, it does give me more post-work daylight. Only if your assumptions are correct. If my assumption is correct, DST in fact gives you LESS post-work daylight hours in the winter rather than more in the summer.
Regardless, DST in any form is little more than a useless annoyance that adds a lot of unnecessary work, as well as causing missed schedules and appointments.
The problem is, not only does DST not give you more daylight hours, it also doesn't give you more later daylight hours. It only changes what time is shown on the clock when daylight begins and ends. People just assume that the day would start and end at the same time by the clock, regardless of the daylight. In fact, it's probably a lot more accurate to assume that DST is the REASON your day goes as late as it does. If we didn't have DST, you would start work an hour earlier (according to the clock) and end work an hour earlier, and thus you would still have the same amount of daylight hours after work. The reason for this is that working hours in general are driven by the industries that can only work in daylight, such as farming, construction, etc.
Any "daylight saving" time is a waste of time and energy. It may have been a good idea back in Ben Franklin's day when people used candles and oil lamps, but now people leave the lights and electronics on whether it's day or night.
Personally, I'd MUCH prefer to just leave it on real time and forget this nonsense altogether. Can you imagine, never having to change your clock except when you move? But I guess that makes too much sense.
Hey, I'd settle for just having them release patches for zero-day vulnerabilities on the first patch Tuesday following the discovery of the vulnerability. But they can't even manage that.
However one thing they could do is release patches as an Optional Software update as soon as they're ready, and then move them to High Priority update status on patch Tuesday.
There's still going to be plenty of room for add-on graphics cards for a long long time. See, the thing with games is it's not so much about increasing the frame rate. It's about keeping the frame rate steady while increasing features. Today's technology has barely begun to tap the creative potential of game developers.
Once we've got technology that allows us to make games in a huge world (think bigger than the biggest MMO to date) where you can literally do anything, limited only by the bounds of physics coded into the game engine (think things like blowing up trees with a cannon where the pieces don't fall in some scripted manner, but instead scatter realistically in a pattern determined only by the physics model), and at the same time have all this rendered on a 52" screen or larger with a good resolution (like perhaps 5120x4096) with a view distance that's as good as a human in the real world with 20/20 vision, and textures and models so good they're all but indistinguishable from real objects, all while maintaining frame-rates of at least 150FPS, and you can pack all that into one small chip, then perhaps we'll no longer have use for add-on graphics cards. I sure don't see that happening any time soon.
Several years ago, I bougth a 19" CRT, it did 1600x1200 at 70hz. Today, more than half a decade later we've got flat-panel screens, but their performance is actually no better than the CRT was way-back-when. Infact most 19" LCDs do only 1280x1024, which is the same my 17" CRT did more than a DECADE ago. Uh huh. Not only is this irrelevant, it's also completely wrong.
For one thing, while your 19" CRT did 1600x1200 at 70hz, most people didn't use that kind of resolution because it made things way too small. Most people would need a magnifying glass to see that on a 19" CRT. Today, *only* half a decade later we've got LCDs monitors that go all the way up to 30" with a 2560x1600 resolution - which is actually usable, unlike the "maximum" resolutions on the old CRTs. And that in a package that weighs less than your 19" CRT did, and takes up less of your desk space to boot. And they're much more pleasant to use too, being far easier on the eyes, and having an auto-adjust feature to fit your screen properly instead of you having to wrestle with it for 10 minutes just to get the edges of your picture fairly straight. (And that's not even mentioning the PITA those CRTS are to lug around.)
But all that aside, as long as you're doing an apples to apples comparison, and using a CRT running at the same resolution as an LCD it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how much graphics power you need to run it. The initial and still primary advantage of an LCD is not that you get "more performance", but that you get the same amount of "performance" in a package that's a fraction the size of an old CRT. Of course by now since CRTs are all but obsolete while LCDs have had continued development, you also get a lot more "performance". Which still has little to do with graphics cards, except for the fact that you need more graphics power to run a current 3D game at 2560x1600 than you do at 1280x1024. Monitors are not the driving force behind new graphics cards. Graphics features in games are.
But go ahead, keep using your 19" CRT if you think it's as good as modern LCDs. Meanwhile I'll be happily using my dual 19" LCDs (running at a very nice 1280x1024 that's actually readable without a magnifying glass) on a flimsy little computer desk that fits nicely in the corner of my den.
I didn't say add-on cards were necessary for most people. But add-on graphics cards and chipsets for power-users are NVidia's primary (only?) markets. I don't know of any chipsets besides NVidia's own that use NVidia integrated graphics. And NVidia's chipsets (yes even the ones with integrated graphics) are targeted primarily at the same power-users that use add-on graphics. I have never seen a mass-manufactured basic consumer PC come with an NVidia chipset.
So, if and when these modular CPUs come with integrated graphics, they're targeted at a different market than NVidia's market.
Granted, I haven't spent a lot of time researching my assertions here so if you know of some reliable website that proves my assumptions here wrong, by all means please post a link.
Partly, the bitching is about that they keep changing the specs. This is a game-console. Game-consoles biggest (only?) advantage over gaming-PC's is that they're non-moving targets for developers. Yes, that's the primary advantage for developers, but most consumers don't know or care about that. For consumers, the advantage of a gaming console instead of a PC is that you just buy your gear, plug all your shit together, and (as long as you got it all hooked up right) you just pop in your game and play. No need to worry about drivers, no need to worry about having a fast enough CPU/video card/RAM, etc. That and the capability to set up a console and have 4 people playing on the same machine.
And I seriously doubt that MS (or Sony) would be stupid enough to make a newer version of a console so different from the first version that games could not feasibly be made compatible with all versions of the console.
GW doesn't gives users free content like WoW does. And while a WoW player will pay more than a GW player, if you want to be competitive, you have to keep buying the expansions the GW crew is rolling out. Not entirely true. GW gave us free content in the form of Sorrow's Furnace, which compares quite favorably with the free new content WoW got in the form of instances. And to be competitive in WoW, you also have to buy the expansion pack they just rolled out. Blizzard just hasn't been as quick as ArenaNet in rolling out new expansions.
And FWIW, I've played over 1600 hours of GW and more than 2000 hours of WoW.
Think of PvE in GW as a sort of tutorial. Only it's not, except in the broadest sense. PvE functions as a tutorial only in that it helps you get to know your skills, but even in that it might not help much with PvP. Some skills that are very valuable for PvP are nearly useless for PvE, and the bread-and-butter skills of PvE that work really well for almost anything generally aren't worth squat in PvP. Even with the "improvements" to the AI, they still require two very different approaches. Also in PvE you can generally be prepared for what you're about to face. You can take skill sets designed specifically to deal with what you're going to be facing. You only need to go to an area once (or look it up online) to get this information. In PvP, you're always rolling the dice when you choose your skills. No matter what team build you take (whether solid all-around or specialized) you may be facing a team with a skill set specifically designed to tear yours apart.
I guess that all depends on what you consider "linear". After having put in more than 1600 hours in Guild Wars I would definitely have to call it quite linear. To be able to do "what you want, when you want, where you want" you have to play through all the content up to that point. And once you've done that, there's really not much reason to go back through it and do "what you want, when you want, where you want", because you've already been there done that. If anything, there's less reason to revisit places in GW than there is in most RPGs. Gear and money are not an issue, as the game is constructed in such a way that you'll have the money and gear you need when you need it. (In fact, gear itself is so unimportant in this game that a highly-skilled player with no gear can do better than a moderately skilled player with the best gear.)
Where Guild Wars is linear all the way through to the "end" of the game, most MMORPGs are only linear up until you reach the level cap. And even in leveling, some of them such as WoW are a lot less linear than Guild Wars. For instance in WoW, both factions have four different starting areas that take you all the way to at least level 15, and even after that there's usually at least two choices for places you could go to level up, all the way to 60. In WoW you could easily level four or more characters all the way to 60 and never do the same content twice.
I could not agree more. That's one of the things I don't like about GW. Also, the "everyone on the same server" setup does far more harm than good. It completely destroys any real sense of community. In a real MMO where you have to choose your server and there's only a few thousand people per faction on each server (as in WoW) you eventually get to know players by name that you've never even done anything with. Random encounters with other players become a lot more meaningful, as there's a good chance you'll find yourself playing with them again in the future provided you stick around. Not so with Guild Wars. You might have a great evening with a great team, and unless you actually make a point of doing so you probably will never see or play with any of those players again, even if you play regularly for months and years.
Sadly, it sounds like they're still planning to keep this model for the sequel.
Really? I think you are overestimating the needs of the average user. I didn't do anything with my last machine that taxed the GPU, which was the mobile variant of the Radeon 9700. My new machine has a faster GPU, but I would probably have had no problems with an embedded Intel chipset. Huh? I believe you're disagreeing with something I never said nor implied.
If Intel and AMD start integrating good GPU cores on the same die as the CPU where will that leave NVidia?
It could be left in the dust. It might not affect NVidia at all. At worst, it will replace their on-board graphics chipsets. These are a replacement for integrated graphics that are part of the chipset. It's going to be quite some time (if ever) until GPUs integrated in a CPU will be powerful enough to replace add-on graphics cards.
Slashdot Mirror
And then people wonder why I refuse to buy anything from MS.
If this patent really is so broad that it affects all VoIP and there's no possible work-around, then this sounds to me like an antitrust suit waiting to happen.
That's truly appalling. Maybe we should lock him up for 12 days and see how he feels about not having his rights stepped on?
Except you're just confusing the issue by using "virtual income" when what you really mean is just plain old "income" generated from virtual goods or services rendered. Virtual income is an income in-game that has not been converted to real-world currency.
Taxing virtual income is pure insanity; taxing real income generated from virtual goods or services rendered only makes sense.
There's a reason people keep using "bad car" analogies. It's because computers these days are on a global scale as necessary and ubiquitous as cars are in the US. This was not the case in IBM's heyday, even in the commercial or industrial arena.
To use yet one more "bad car" analogy, it's as if [insert car manufacturer here] manufactured not only automobiles, but also the roads those autos worked on, and no other auto could function on their roads. Of course it just so happens that those roads are the ones needed to get to 95% of all the most popular destinations, and in particular the destinations involving tourism and vacation sites as well as the majority of business locations. Sure, you could use an auto and roads from a different manufacturer - you just won't be able to get to where you want to go.
Microsoft has done this to themselves. They have put themselves in a global monopolistic position that no other company has ever really even come close to. As such, there is no precedent on how to deal with such a company.
They made themselves a huge target, they should be expecting consequences a lot more severe than this.
I'm not saying my assumptions are necessarily correct. But I'm saying it's worth trying, and certainly a lot more worth trying than shifting around the days DST begins and ends.
Regardless, DST in any form is little more than a useless annoyance that adds a lot of unnecessary work, as well as causing missed schedules and appointments.
The problem is, not only does DST not give you more daylight hours, it also doesn't give you more later daylight hours. It only changes what time is shown on the clock when daylight begins and ends. People just assume that the day would start and end at the same time by the clock, regardless of the daylight. In fact, it's probably a lot more accurate to assume that DST is the REASON your day goes as late as it does. If we didn't have DST, you would start work an hour earlier (according to the clock) and end work an hour earlier, and thus you would still have the same amount of daylight hours after work. The reason for this is that working hours in general are driven by the industries that can only work in daylight, such as farming, construction, etc.
Yeah, I've thought of that before. I'd like that even better. But I'll just settle for sticking with the same time year-round.
Any "daylight saving" time is a waste of time and energy. It may have been a good idea back in Ben Franklin's day when people used candles and oil lamps, but now people leave the lights and electronics on whether it's day or night.
Personally, I'd MUCH prefer to just leave it on real time and forget this nonsense altogether. Can you imagine, never having to change your clock except when you move? But I guess that makes too much sense.
Hey, I'd settle for just having them release patches for zero-day vulnerabilities on the first patch Tuesday following the discovery of the vulnerability. But they can't even manage that.
However one thing they could do is release patches as an Optional Software update as soon as they're ready, and then move them to High Priority update status on patch Tuesday.
OMG this game is a hoax guys!! I installed it and my taxes still aren't done! LIES!! I DEMAND A REFUND! And it didn't even have any ponies. :(
...92% of people under age 40 are too busy to bother with filling out inane surveys about crappy little online PC games.
Once we've got technology that allows us to make games in a huge world (think bigger than the biggest MMO to date) where you can literally do anything, limited only by the bounds of physics coded into the game engine (think things like blowing up trees with a cannon where the pieces don't fall in some scripted manner, but instead scatter realistically in a pattern determined only by the physics model), and at the same time have all this rendered on a 52" screen or larger with a good resolution (like perhaps 5120x4096) with a view distance that's as good as a human in the real world with 20/20 vision, and textures and models so good they're all but indistinguishable from real objects, all while maintaining frame-rates of at least 150FPS, and you can pack all that into one small chip, then perhaps we'll no longer have use for add-on graphics cards. I sure don't see that happening any time soon. Several years ago, I bougth a 19" CRT, it did 1600x1200 at 70hz. Today, more than half a decade later we've got flat-panel screens, but their performance is actually no better than the CRT was way-back-when. Infact most 19" LCDs do only 1280x1024, which is the same my 17" CRT did more than a DECADE ago. Uh huh. Not only is this irrelevant, it's also completely wrong.
For one thing, while your 19" CRT did 1600x1200 at 70hz, most people didn't use that kind of resolution because it made things way too small. Most people would need a magnifying glass to see that on a 19" CRT. Today, *only* half a decade later we've got LCDs monitors that go all the way up to 30" with a 2560x1600 resolution - which is actually usable, unlike the "maximum" resolutions on the old CRTs. And that in a package that weighs less than your 19" CRT did, and takes up less of your desk space to boot. And they're much more pleasant to use too, being far easier on the eyes, and having an auto-adjust feature to fit your screen properly instead of you having to wrestle with it for 10 minutes just to get the edges of your picture fairly straight. (And that's not even mentioning the PITA those CRTS are to lug around.)
But all that aside, as long as you're doing an apples to apples comparison, and using a CRT running at the same resolution as an LCD it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how much graphics power you need to run it. The initial and still primary advantage of an LCD is not that you get "more performance", but that you get the same amount of "performance" in a package that's a fraction the size of an old CRT. Of course by now since CRTs are all but obsolete while LCDs have had continued development, you also get a lot more "performance". Which still has little to do with graphics cards, except for the fact that you need more graphics power to run a current 3D game at 2560x1600 than you do at 1280x1024. Monitors are not the driving force behind new graphics cards. Graphics features in games are.
But go ahead, keep using your 19" CRT if you think it's as good as modern LCDs. Meanwhile I'll be happily using my dual 19" LCDs (running at a very nice 1280x1024 that's actually readable without a magnifying glass) on a flimsy little computer desk that fits nicely in the corner of my den.
I didn't say add-on cards were necessary for most people. But add-on graphics cards and chipsets for power-users are NVidia's primary (only?) markets. I don't know of any chipsets besides NVidia's own that use NVidia integrated graphics. And NVidia's chipsets (yes even the ones with integrated graphics) are targeted primarily at the same power-users that use add-on graphics. I have never seen a mass-manufactured basic consumer PC come with an NVidia chipset.
So, if and when these modular CPUs come with integrated graphics, they're targeted at a different market than NVidia's market.
Granted, I haven't spent a lot of time researching my assertions here so if you know of some reliable website that proves my assumptions here wrong, by all means please post a link.
This is a game-console. Game-consoles biggest (only?) advantage over gaming-PC's is that they're non-moving targets for developers. Yes, that's the primary advantage for developers, but most consumers don't know or care about that. For consumers, the advantage of a gaming console instead of a PC is that you just buy your gear, plug all your shit together, and (as long as you got it all hooked up right) you just pop in your game and play. No need to worry about drivers, no need to worry about having a fast enough CPU/video card/RAM, etc. That and the capability to set up a console and have 4 people playing on the same machine.
And I seriously doubt that MS (or Sony) would be stupid enough to make a newer version of a console so different from the first version that games could not feasibly be made compatible with all versions of the console.
And FWIW, I've played over 1600 hours of GW and more than 2000 hours of WoW.
I guess that all depends on what you consider "linear". After having put in more than 1600 hours in Guild Wars I would definitely have to call it quite linear. To be able to do "what you want, when you want, where you want" you have to play through all the content up to that point. And once you've done that, there's really not much reason to go back through it and do "what you want, when you want, where you want", because you've already been there done that. If anything, there's less reason to revisit places in GW than there is in most RPGs. Gear and money are not an issue, as the game is constructed in such a way that you'll have the money and gear you need when you need it. (In fact, gear itself is so unimportant in this game that a highly-skilled player with no gear can do better than a moderately skilled player with the best gear.)
Where Guild Wars is linear all the way through to the "end" of the game, most MMORPGs are only linear up until you reach the level cap. And even in leveling, some of them such as WoW are a lot less linear than Guild Wars. For instance in WoW, both factions have four different starting areas that take you all the way to at least level 15, and even after that there's usually at least two choices for places you could go to level up, all the way to 60. In WoW you could easily level four or more characters all the way to 60 and never do the same content twice.
I could not agree more. That's one of the things I don't like about GW. Also, the "everyone on the same server" setup does far more harm than good. It completely destroys any real sense of community. In a real MMO where you have to choose your server and there's only a few thousand people per faction on each server (as in WoW) you eventually get to know players by name that you've never even done anything with. Random encounters with other players become a lot more meaningful, as there's a good chance you'll find yourself playing with them again in the future provided you stick around. Not so with Guild Wars. You might have a great evening with a great team, and unless you actually make a point of doing so you probably will never see or play with any of those players again, even if you play regularly for months and years.
Sadly, it sounds like they're still planning to keep this model for the sequel.
Erm, sorry, "Junk Mail folder" should read "Bulk folder".