The point is that you can't use a standard game (plus FPS meter) played by a human player to judge a graphics card's raw capabilities. To reduce subjectivity and error, you need a consistency in what is being rendered.
What you're saying makes sense when you write it down, but after having read the article the OP is talking about, as well as some of the related articles, I think it's fair to say that they are reliably doing just that. Decide on a specific run to do through a specific section, practice it until you can do it mechanically, then report on how well it played. They make a strong point of the fact that the FPS average and charts aren't even part of what informs their analysis, and I think that's fair.
To put it another way, they play what is effectively the exact same run through of a real game level on both cards. Will the frame rate be reported accurately? No, but the point is, that doesn't matter. What they report on was how the game played--how it felt--and that is fairly easy to qualify in a reasonably objective manner in my experience. If it's unpleasantly choppy with certain settings/hardware/whatever, that's what I really care about. Framerate tells me nothing useful, and I don't care how many triangles per second ATI/nVidia's cards can pump out on paper if the games are still unplayable.
Same goes for a default KDE or Gnome desktop. If you're going to insist that one of those would be a "learning experience" when switching from XP, then the same applies to Vista. There just aren't that many differences among ANY of the modern desktop environments to justify the big hoopla the/. crowd makes over how "hard they are to switch to for the poor little average user." And I'd say that default KDE is easily as close to an XP "experience" as Vista is.
With respect to your problems in Compiz, it sounds like you have vertical sync disabled in its settings. As a helpful tip, the following in the general settings should all be accessible on one page:
1. Disable "detect refresh rate"
2. Enable "vertical sync" (or v-sync, or something similar)
3. Crank the refresh rate slider up until moving windows around doesn't look choppy
Should get a nice smooth frame rate and no video tearing at all.
Already been done well ahead of your comment (search through and you should find it);) That being said, I approve of people who don't watch TV! Then again, I'm a "good ol' days" TV hater. When I was young I just remember the programming being so much better... and don't get me started on the news! Oy, removing the "equal airtime" requirement for politics, or whatever its technical name was, that was the nail in that coffin...
That's just short term. Give it six months for TV to ramp back up in its budget and production and they'll be churning out the same good ol' drivel in no time, writers and all.
Just a quick note, all the implementations of 'locate' I'm aware of require indexing, usually by running 'updatedb'. Lots of people don't like indexing and prefer to just remember where stuff is, and simply do a disk search when that fails. Dunno about how 'whereis' works.
It's easy to think of half a second as being "instant" until you've experienced the "Do you really want to delete this?" dialog popping up the moment your finger hits the key:)
I know for the brief time I had Vista, I got UAC prompts whenever I attempted to rearrange my start menu. Now, I'm assuming this was because I was changing items that were cascading in from the "All Users" start menu, but it really annoyed the hell out of me. I like to have an orderly start menu (I would keep everything under a few root "categories" such as Games/Office/etc..., exactly the same way I later discovered is basically the default for all Linux desktops). Definitely was the last straw for me and Windows, petty as that may sound.
Oddly, I've found sudo'ing around almost infinitely less obnoxious for whatever reason. Can't really explain it.
For me the problem is that the things that DID change did so, on the whole, for either no apparent reason at all (random UI changes that accomplish nothing), or for the worse (UAC GODDAMN YOU, as well as DRM and general inexplicable slowness every once in a while).
Because nobody would ever think to set up a KDE desktop for their users that's virtually identical to a Windows XP desktop (really quite easy to do)? Because OpenOffice is so very different from Office 2003? I'm going to assume you're just a troll, but on the off chance that's not the case, have you considered the difference between XP/Office 2003 and Vista/Office 2007 vs. XP/2003 and KDE/OpenOffice? I'll tell you right now, I can set up a KDE/OpenOffice desktop that's closer to what XP users are used to than anything you can accomplish on Vista. Hell, I could even pick up a skin and make it look nearly identical, although I would never really be so cruel.
The only real concern is whether you have hardware and proprietary third-party applications that require Windows to run and you absolutely can't replace with any Linux-compatible equivalent.
This can probably be chalked up to familiarity as much as anything. Just as in DX9, I'm sure DX10 has dozens of little "gotchyas" and other important considerations in order to make a well optimized renderer. Problem is, with the almost complete API overhaul between the two, I'm guessing that DX10's considerations are completely different (I've only ever done any real programming in DX9). The problem, of course, is that it's brand new and everybody is probably still trying to program for DX10 as if it were DX9, which is causing the performance hits. My two cents anyway.
Man, I really love the tagging feature. When I saw this article it was tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" followed by "hugeexplosion." Gave me a good chuckle.
These people are putting their personal information up on a site, the purpose of which is to share your personal information on. Now, granted there are varying degrees of access you can grant people, but I wouldn't assume too much privacy in doing so. I think the real problem here is people just assume they can go handing out whatever willy nilly and it'll just "all work out."
My take? If you don't want your information shared with abandon, don't put it on a site that has made its while business on sharing personal information with abandon. I've really never understood this silly social networking on the web fad (but then I'm just an old fogie on the inside).
I think he means actual encryption of the textual content. As in, sending a PGP encoded block rather than plain text. You've probably seen the like:
-----BEGIN PGP MESSAGE-----
Followed by the identification of the program used to encrypt and then a lot of gibberish. It can (at least supposedly) only be decrypted by a person in possession of the private key matching the public key with which it was encrypted. Presumably Eli Lilly doesn't go around giving their private keys to news reporters:)
A bit late on the reply, but here goes. Nobel prizes aren't awarded for just being a stand-up guy or any nonsense like that. They're awarded for what are perceived as very real accomplishments. In Arafat's case (he was, you might note, one of three recipients of that Nobel award), it was for specific peace negotiations that, although ultimately unsuccessful, were arguably tremendously worthwhile endeavors. In Al Gore's case, the prize was awarded for furthering global knowledge about global warming.
Also, your claim that "real scientists have been scrambling to distance themselves from" his film is total bullshit as far as I'm aware. Maybe some are, but as far as I'm aware the vast majority of climate scientists back him. Nice attempts at ad hominem attacks in your post though...
To play Devil's advocate for the fun of it, one might construe his argument thus: the belief in God is unsound; the Pope's ethical position regarding biotech, or for that matter anything, is predicated on his belief in God; therefore, the Pope's ethical position regarding biotech, or for that matter anything, may be discarded as unsound.
This is not to say that their ethical positions are untrue, just that the reasoning that leads to those positions is unsound. In other words, the truth of such positions must be decided by arguments based on sound premises, which the Pope's are not. And make no mistake, there are great many people who consider the belief in God to be an unsound premise for any argument external to that belief. From this position one would be logically entitled to discard people who insist on such arguments as "irrational."
Not really what you're asking for, but somewhere up above in the chain of comments somebody posted screenshots of XP before and after having been reduced by the XP version of this utility. I don't want to go find it again, but it about halved the memory footprint of a fresh install. I can only imagine that Vista has more to trim off than XP.
The problem is that, fundamentally, Microsoft WANTS a bloated OS. Things like Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, MSN Installer, and all that crap most of us here don't give two shits about and is removed by this tool, they desperately want everybody to use. Just part the monopoly.
As far as I'm concerned, whatever comes on the OS CD and is installed by default with the OS, is part of the OS. I mean, I could split hairs and limit it to the kernel, or the kernel+drivers, or whatever, but really, the OS is whatever the manufacturer intends for the consumer to end up with as a base install. That means that yes, I consider Ubuntu OS to include a ton of useless crap like Tomboy, whereas something like Arch is a much more bare bones modular OS. As a functional definition, it works well for me.
Well, that's something of a moot point considering Microsoft has nothing to do with OpenGL support. SGI puts out up to date development libraries, and driver support is done by the video card companies, just as it is for DirectX. Just because Microsoft hasn't been willing to support OpenGL past version 1.1--last I checked--doesn't mean you can't use it fine just the same.
Wow, what useless rhetoric. Let's assume for a minute that the entire biotech sector suddenly became completely unprofitable without patents (which I think is nonsense, but that's another argument). Do you really believe that the only thing standing between humanity and some nasty pandemic is big daddy biotech? Do you really think they even spend any significant part of their research budgets against speculative research into potential threats? Not unless there's some seriously obvious profit to make it a winning economic proposition over developing some "great" new "quality of life" medication (Find yourself getting occasionally depressed? Take these seven pills twice daily!).
The academic world, as it has been throughout most of human history, is more than capable of picking up any slack dropped by the corporate world when it comes to solving problems that really matter. And, assuming the biotech industry suddenly dropped off the map, I don't doubt for one second that the academic world would suddenly find all the funding they need to get the job done. To be quite honest, I for one would rather see a publicly funded academic research model, the results of which would go straight into the public domain for all to benefit from. And, if the corporate biotech world suddenly dropped off the map (which wouldn't happen either way), I can guarantee you increased medical research funding would suddenly become a very popular political platform.
I'm not arguing that the biotech industry does no good. It certainly does. I think it's naive and dishonest how so many people claim that they're the only ones who can get the important jobs done, and we'd be up shit's creek without them. They're not, and we wouldn't.
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To put it another way, they play what is effectively the exact same run through of a real game level on both cards. Will the frame rate be reported accurately? No, but the point is, that doesn't matter. What they report on was how the game played--how it felt--and that is fairly easy to qualify in a reasonably objective manner in my experience. If it's unpleasantly choppy with certain settings/hardware/whatever, that's what I really care about. Framerate tells me nothing useful, and I don't care how many triangles per second ATI/nVidia's cards can pump out on paper if the games are still unplayable.
Same goes for a default KDE or Gnome desktop. If you're going to insist that one of those would be a "learning experience" when switching from XP, then the same applies to Vista. There just aren't that many differences among ANY of the modern desktop environments to justify the big hoopla the /. crowd makes over how "hard they are to switch to for the poor little average user." And I'd say that default KDE is easily as close to an XP "experience" as Vista is.
With respect to your problems in Compiz, it sounds like you have vertical sync disabled in its settings. As a helpful tip, the following in the general settings should all be accessible on one page:
1. Disable "detect refresh rate"
2. Enable "vertical sync" (or v-sync, or something similar)
3. Crank the refresh rate slider up until moving windows around doesn't look choppy
Should get a nice smooth frame rate and no video tearing at all.
Well, if we're talking corporate as in servers, Linux has broken into that world in a big way.
Already been done well ahead of your comment (search through and you should find it) ;) That being said, I approve of people who don't watch TV! Then again, I'm a "good ol' days" TV hater. When I was young I just remember the programming being so much better... and don't get me started on the news! Oy, removing the "equal airtime" requirement for politics, or whatever its technical name was, that was the nail in that coffin...
There, was that enough for you?
That's just short term. Give it six months for TV to ramp back up in its budget and production and they'll be churning out the same good ol' drivel in no time, writers and all.
Just a quick note, all the implementations of 'locate' I'm aware of require indexing, usually by running 'updatedb'. Lots of people don't like indexing and prefer to just remember where stuff is, and simply do a disk search when that fails. Dunno about how 'whereis' works.
It's easy to think of half a second as being "instant" until you've experienced the "Do you really want to delete this?" dialog popping up the moment your finger hits the key :)
I know for the brief time I had Vista, I got UAC prompts whenever I attempted to rearrange my start menu. Now, I'm assuming this was because I was changing items that were cascading in from the "All Users" start menu, but it really annoyed the hell out of me. I like to have an orderly start menu (I would keep everything under a few root "categories" such as Games/Office/etc..., exactly the same way I later discovered is basically the default for all Linux desktops). Definitely was the last straw for me and Windows, petty as that may sound.
Oddly, I've found sudo'ing around almost infinitely less obnoxious for whatever reason. Can't really explain it.
For me the problem is that the things that DID change did so, on the whole, for either no apparent reason at all (random UI changes that accomplish nothing), or for the worse (UAC GODDAMN YOU, as well as DRM and general inexplicable slowness every once in a while).
Because nobody would ever think to set up a KDE desktop for their users that's virtually identical to a Windows XP desktop (really quite easy to do)? Because OpenOffice is so very different from Office 2003? I'm going to assume you're just a troll, but on the off chance that's not the case, have you considered the difference between XP/Office 2003 and Vista/Office 2007 vs. XP/2003 and KDE/OpenOffice? I'll tell you right now, I can set up a KDE/OpenOffice desktop that's closer to what XP users are used to than anything you can accomplish on Vista. Hell, I could even pick up a skin and make it look nearly identical, although I would never really be so cruel.
The only real concern is whether you have hardware and proprietary third-party applications that require Windows to run and you absolutely can't replace with any Linux-compatible equivalent.
This can probably be chalked up to familiarity as much as anything. Just as in DX9, I'm sure DX10 has dozens of little "gotchyas" and other important considerations in order to make a well optimized renderer. Problem is, with the almost complete API overhaul between the two, I'm guessing that DX10's considerations are completely different (I've only ever done any real programming in DX9). The problem, of course, is that it's brand new and everybody is probably still trying to program for DX10 as if it were DX9, which is causing the performance hits. My two cents anyway.
Man, I really love the tagging feature. When I saw this article it was tagged "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" followed by "hugeexplosion." Gave me a good chuckle.
These people are putting their personal information up on a site, the purpose of which is to share your personal information on. Now, granted there are varying degrees of access you can grant people, but I wouldn't assume too much privacy in doing so. I think the real problem here is people just assume they can go handing out whatever willy nilly and it'll just "all work out."
My take? If you don't want your information shared with abandon, don't put it on a site that has made its while business on sharing personal information with abandon. I've really never understood this silly social networking on the web fad (but then I'm just an old fogie on the inside).
A bit late on the reply, but here goes. Nobel prizes aren't awarded for just being a stand-up guy or any nonsense like that. They're awarded for what are perceived as very real accomplishments. In Arafat's case (he was, you might note, one of three recipients of that Nobel award), it was for specific peace negotiations that, although ultimately unsuccessful, were arguably tremendously worthwhile endeavors. In Al Gore's case, the prize was awarded for furthering global knowledge about global warming.
Also, your claim that "real scientists have been scrambling to distance themselves from" his film is total bullshit as far as I'm aware. Maybe some are, but as far as I'm aware the vast majority of climate scientists back him. Nice attempts at ad hominem attacks in your post though...
To play Devil's advocate for the fun of it, one might construe his argument thus: the belief in God is unsound; the Pope's ethical position regarding biotech, or for that matter anything, is predicated on his belief in God; therefore, the Pope's ethical position regarding biotech, or for that matter anything, may be discarded as unsound.
This is not to say that their ethical positions are untrue, just that the reasoning that leads to those positions is unsound. In other words, the truth of such positions must be decided by arguments based on sound premises, which the Pope's are not. And make no mistake, there are great many people who consider the belief in God to be an unsound premise for any argument external to that belief. From this position one would be logically entitled to discard people who insist on such arguments as "irrational."
Apparently not the ones who decided to award him a Nobel prize. Or are they just handing those out to any ol' crazy these days...
That's a good lesson. Also, "lock the cockpit door," might help.
Not really what you're asking for, but somewhere up above in the chain of comments somebody posted screenshots of XP before and after having been reduced by the XP version of this utility. I don't want to go find it again, but it about halved the memory footprint of a fresh install. I can only imagine that Vista has more to trim off than XP.
The problem is that, fundamentally, Microsoft WANTS a bloated OS. Things like Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, MSN Installer, and all that crap most of us here don't give two shits about and is removed by this tool, they desperately want everybody to use. Just part the monopoly.
As far as I'm concerned, whatever comes on the OS CD and is installed by default with the OS, is part of the OS. I mean, I could split hairs and limit it to the kernel, or the kernel+drivers, or whatever, but really, the OS is whatever the manufacturer intends for the consumer to end up with as a base install. That means that yes, I consider Ubuntu OS to include a ton of useless crap like Tomboy, whereas something like Arch is a much more bare bones modular OS. As a functional definition, it works well for me.
Well, that's something of a moot point considering Microsoft has nothing to do with OpenGL support. SGI puts out up to date development libraries, and driver support is done by the video card companies, just as it is for DirectX. Just because Microsoft hasn't been willing to support OpenGL past version 1.1--last I checked--doesn't mean you can't use it fine just the same.
First they came for the Geiger counters, but I did not speak out for I was not a tinfoil-hat-wearing loony...
Wow, what useless rhetoric. Let's assume for a minute that the entire biotech sector suddenly became completely unprofitable without patents (which I think is nonsense, but that's another argument). Do you really believe that the only thing standing between humanity and some nasty pandemic is big daddy biotech? Do you really think they even spend any significant part of their research budgets against speculative research into potential threats? Not unless there's some seriously obvious profit to make it a winning economic proposition over developing some "great" new "quality of life" medication (Find yourself getting occasionally depressed? Take these seven pills twice daily!).
The academic world, as it has been throughout most of human history, is more than capable of picking up any slack dropped by the corporate world when it comes to solving problems that really matter. And, assuming the biotech industry suddenly dropped off the map, I don't doubt for one second that the academic world would suddenly find all the funding they need to get the job done. To be quite honest, I for one would rather see a publicly funded academic research model, the results of which would go straight into the public domain for all to benefit from. And, if the corporate biotech world suddenly dropped off the map (which wouldn't happen either way), I can guarantee you increased medical research funding would suddenly become a very popular political platform.
I'm not arguing that the biotech industry does no good. It certainly does. I think it's naive and dishonest how so many people claim that they're the only ones who can get the important jobs done, and we'd be up shit's creek without them. They're not, and we wouldn't.