You have to account for the fact that Intel has a lot more than just their processor business. They also make chipsets for a wide variety of things. They make ethernet controllers, flash chips, supporting chipsets for their CPUs, modem and voice processing chipsets, various microcontrollers, and various embedded processors. If you consider an Intel-based PC will most likely also carry an Intel chipset, and may contain an Intel NIC or modem, and if it's a server, may have an IOP based CPU for it's RAID. They even produce complete motherboards, some of which are rebranded by OEMs, others are sold directly under Intel's name.
I've *never* heard of Google screwing another business.
Google's been doing their best to screw the search engine placement folks. It can't be helped -- their interests aren't exactly aligned, and if the placement folks succeed, Google's product is damaged.
I agree that when cinematics absolutely need to done, they should be short, probably everyone agrees.
Depends on the game. I don't mind long cinematic sequences, as long as they're productive. A cinematic that tells me something I already know or should've inferred by now just gets on my nerves (if I haven't figured out that the dead are rising from their graves after trudging through a cemetary full of undead to get here...). A scene that progresses the story, and tells me something I don't yet know helps the immersion of the game itself.
Misuse of cinematics includes:
showing off eyecandy for the sake of eyecandy
recapping what you just finished doing (often by telling another character your story)
filling space to make the game "longer"
telling me what to do in the next stage of the game when it's going to be explained to me as I play anyway
One of Microsoft's prime arguments for why they were not a monopoly during their anti-trust trial was because they "haven't raised prices on Windows". These editions are merely Microsoft's way of "not raising prices" by creating "new" products with inflated prices. Strictly speaking, it's completely true. The price of Windows has not increased, but that doesn't mean that people are not paying more to purchase Windows today.
Microsoft's customers have felt the sting from their pocketbooks. They know how much it hurt when Microsoft forced them to upgrade to Windows 2000 over Windows 9x when Microsoft chose to cripple Windows Me. You'll note that few new features are making it into the baseline home and pro versions of the OS, so if you want the new features, you need to shell out more money for the SBS or Enterprise editions.
On the other hand, Microsoft may need to look closely at their processor licensing in the new Windows. Dual-core chips are becoming more and more common, and it's not unreasonable that they'll start showing up in home user machines in the not-too-distant future. XP Home doesn't not appear to support multiprocessor, so hopefully this trend does not carry over into the Vista home products (although I will not be surprised if it does).
Ever installed Windows on a laptop? Unless you have the vendor's customized installation CD, it's a real pain. Customized drivers, vendor specific proprietary extensions and drivers, and non-standard configurations all around. Sometimes it's a wonder Linux ever manages to boot at all on them.
Given the fact there's typically a three month lead to magazine printing, it's hardly surprising that they were reviewing unfinished games. That also means, for better or worse, they have to make some assumption about the bugs they may or may not run into being fixed before release. How stupid would they look complaining about a bug that didn't exist on the shipping version?
...no "normal" keyboard can compare with the Model M.
Especially when used as a LART. Normal keyboards have a tendancy to break before the job is done. The Model M's increased weight and strength also means it takes less time and effort to complete the job.
(IANAL, but I took took a class and believe I know everything about this)
And yet your opinion is just as useless as the parent. Even lawyers don't all agree on the enforcability of software EULAs, and as far as I know (and I'm not a lawyer either), judgements have gone both ways when presented to courts. A lawyer will tell you to add the EULA even if it isn't valid because even if it isn't, you've lost nothing (aside from the money you've paid the lawyer to write it). If it is held as valid, you've gained rights you otherwise wouldn't have.
Some day a case based on this will reach up to the supreme court, or some foolish politician will get a bill passed, and this dispute will be solved for good. Until then, both answers are right.
Besides the fact your post is quite cold-hearted, New Orleans is hardly alone. Perhaps you know of a little city called Grand Forks that was severely damaged by the Red River flood of 1997. Or perhaps the cities sitting along the Mississippi river that got flooded by the flood of 1993 should've been left to rot? How about the earthquakes that always seem to rip LA apart?
Frankly, there aren't many places that are immune to natural disasters. I may not have to worry about hurricans, earthquakes or tsunamis where I live (Winnipeg, Manitoba), but I do have to worry about the occasional tornado, ice storms, flooding of the Red River, and blizzards. Life on this planet just isn't safe.
Re:I concur. Troll, indeed.
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I wonder if I could write a similar book about people who overdose on Evangelical Christianity and require ever-stronger doses of legislative activism and repression of women to get their rocks off.
Of course not. Or rather you could probably write it, but you'd never get it published. There's little danger to the published from someone writing a book that rails against pornography, but write a book that trashes christianity and watch the sparks fly.
Well, the fact remains that while SCSI was difficult to configure, ATA was dead simple. Even on servers, you commonly find ATAPI CD-ROM drives as opposed to the SCSI versions because they're cheaper, easier to install, and pose fewer problems. To make matters worse, even in the ATAPI side, the drives are usually two or three generations behind the current standard (we have SATA2 stuff coming out now, and optical drives are starting to support ATA-100). On a server, this left you with needing another pricy SCSI channel. Even SCSI is tending towards the way of SATA with the Serial Attached SCSI set to replace traditional LVD SCSI connections. There's even talk of being able to use SATA drives with SAS expanders by tunnelling the SATA packets through the SAS bus.
All but the lowest-end (and the 1U rack mountable) servers from both HP and IBM come with PCIe (don't know anything about Dell servers because the company I work for can't resell them). PCI-X has potential for higher speeds, but cross-talk is becoming a problem for that bus. PCIe will be doubling in speed with the PCIe 2.0 spec which should come out fairly soon, and future speed increases should become possible as technology improves. With ethernet controllers now pushing the 10Gbps mark, and serial attached SCSI hitting 6Gbps mark. PCIe server hardware is rare right now, but that will change. PCIe desktop hardware (aside from PCIe 16x video cards) is still pretty rare, too.
The world is moving back to serial. From USB to SATA/SAS to PCIe, these are all serial technologies replacing traditional parallel ones. If everything goes well, the result could be that desktops and servers become more converged on standards than they are now. Being able to use a large array of SATA drives attached to a SAS controller when you're more concerned about storage density than speed, and getting a single bus interface on both server and desktop so economies of scale kick in to lower prices are goals of each of these groups.
If you think they're always coming up with the wrong answer, maybe you don't fully understand the question.
Re: IDE/SATA vs SCSI: SCSI is far more complex than ATA/SATA and compatibility concerns. If you want to make an ATA controller, you must implement the entire spec. If you want to make a SCSI controller, large portions of the spec are optional. These additional features mean SCSI can give greater performance than ATA drives, but it also means that while ATA has become simpler and simpler to set-up, SCSI has become more and more complex. Things like CS and asynchronous speeds (each device runs at it's maximum supported speed) on the ATA bus serve to make ATA easier to deal with, while the termination, SCSI IDs and synchronous speeds (each device runs at the slowest common speed on the bus) of SCSI require more planning.
Re: PCIe versus PCI-X: This change is inevitable. PCI-X was a hack (much like VLB) to get more bandwidth out of existing PCI hardware. Plug a PCI device into a PCI-X bus, and oops, all your devices are now limited to 33MHz. PCIe is a good technology, and replacing PCI with PCIe is a good thing, just like replacing all those ISA cards with PCI was a good idea. PCIe may not have an performance wins over the highest-end PCI-X right now, but it's a lot cheaper to manufacture (you don't need a separate PCI bus controller for each 16x/32x PCIe card as you would with a 133MHz 64-bit PCI-X card), and provides framework for expansion in the future.
Re: x86 architecture: Can't argue with you there. The x86 instruction set really stinks. At least we don't really have to deal with "Real Mode" anymore. On the bright side, I rarely need to worry about IRQ related conflicts.
Just because a technology is technologically inferior, doesn't make it an inferior technology. ATA has a number of strong points that may not appeal to the computer elite, but are still quite valuable. PCIe's biggest challenge is fighting the intertia of the past decade of PCI.
Ahh, they're all relatively insane. At the lowest level of each circuit there are a number of judges who never bother to consider the consequences of their decisions. Instead of prefering to avoid setting precident as most judges do, they hand out awards to whomever had the most compelling agument, regardless of the law. Hopefully this error in judgement will be corrected in the nearly inevitable appeal.
Well, at least some people here remember the stupidity that was Circuit City's "Digital Video Express" DIVX nonsense. Last time they were selling an inferior product with onerous restrictions on it. This time they seem to want to sell a slightly superior product (provided you have a HD display, which most people do not) with onerous restrictions.
Maybe if these movie companies pull their head out of their ass, they'll realize that people won't want to hook an internet or telephone connection to their appliances without a damn good reason. Unfortunately, all the reasons I might hook an internet connection up to a player like this come down to watching unlicensed or pirated media.
I guess it's true: Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
In Microsoft's strange twisted world, this is almost true. I doubt the OpenDocument format has any support for compound OLE objects that make up pictures, charts, audio and video embedded into typical Microsoft Word documents. In this case, converting from MSWord to OpenDocument means that you lose the in-place editing of any embedded Excel charts or graphs, or any other editable COM/OLE object you might've inserted into your document.
I suspect the Microsoft spokesperson is well aware of the distinction between what he said and reality, though. What he said has the potential for perhaps someone to re-evaluate the decision. If he had properly represented the deficiency of the format, he would've been ignored because the people making the decision should've already realized they were giving up on the deep Microsoft integration features.
That will never happen. This is just a variation of the "rock and roll is the devil's music" story. Read up on the crackpot theories screamed about on the news at the time about music, and you'll find an awful lot of similarities to the modern crackpot theories about games.
I have no idea how to deal with these clearly irrational people. It's generally impossible to reason with them, and even if you do manage to get through to one of them, there's always another crackpot willing to take up the torch in front of the news cameras.
I would argue that it's not even one of the greatest games ever. It's just a very good game that many people played during their youth, and as such, it's been elevated to the untouchable status it has today. People overlook it's flaws and fondly look back at it and reminisce about the "good ole days". Show the game to people who've grown up with current games, and they'll happily complain about the sluggish controls, and the inconsistent level difficulty.
The same is true about Star Wars. It's not the greatest movie ever (or even the greatest sci fi movie ever), but rather merely a good one with amazing special effects for the time that people grew up enjoying. Everyone ignores the cliched story line, and the poor acting. Some people even get defensive if you bring these things up because you're not attacking the movie, you're attacking them and their childhood memory of the movie.
There are a lot of good games out there, but so long as people compare them to the false "perfection" of the games they played in their youth, they will remain blind to them.
And why don't I hear anything about Linux "shills" here on Slashdot?
You have. Only they're typically called Linux zealots. Both terms are horribly overused. Someone praises Microsoft or criticises Linux, no matter how lightly, and they're called a Microsoft shill. If they do the opposite, they get called a zealot. I've read articles where the author has been called both on the same story. It was rather amusing.
You may be reading too much into that. It's one of those things that could be used to suggest that bias exists, but does not prove it. Also, given the conduct of the RIAA lawyer at the start of the case, I don't believe that the judge's conduct is out of order. Think of that statement as just another assertion by the judge that she is in control of this courtroom, and it's run by her rules, whether the RIAA lawyer likes it or not.
Uh huh. What a cynical attitude! A certain amount of evidence has been discovered that suggests at least a certain amount of interbreeding happened between neanderthal humans and modern ones. It's possible that as modern humans migrated into the areas inhabited by neanderthals, they were simply overwealmed.
And as for "primitive", neanderthals had brains that were 10% larger than modern human brains and had poorer speech capabilities. They were the first to adapt to sub-arctic conditions, and were adept stone tool makers. Physically, they were shorter, and very possibly stronger.
Don't believe everything you see from Hollywood. Movies are not required to accurate, merely entertaining. Reality may be far more boring than fiction.
The Linux kernel does not explicitly allow binary modules. This is a commonly repeated myth. Please see Linus's posting on LKML for the truth behind this.
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You have to account for the fact that Intel has a lot more than just their processor business. They also make chipsets for a wide variety of things. They make ethernet controllers, flash chips, supporting chipsets for their CPUs, modem and voice processing chipsets, various microcontrollers, and various embedded processors. If you consider an Intel-based PC will most likely also carry an Intel chipset, and may contain an Intel NIC or modem, and if it's a server, may have an IOP based CPU for it's RAID. They even produce complete motherboards, some of which are rebranded by OEMs, others are sold directly under Intel's name.
One note: "As necessary" means until the child gives up, not until the child becomes annoying (which usually far precedes the giving up stage).
Misuse of cinematics includes:
Microsoft's customers have felt the sting from their pocketbooks. They know how much it hurt when Microsoft forced them to upgrade to Windows 2000 over Windows 9x when Microsoft chose to cripple Windows Me. You'll note that few new features are making it into the baseline home and pro versions of the OS, so if you want the new features, you need to shell out more money for the SBS or Enterprise editions.
On the other hand, Microsoft may need to look closely at their processor licensing in the new Windows. Dual-core chips are becoming more and more common, and it's not unreasonable that they'll start showing up in home user machines in the not-too-distant future. XP Home doesn't not appear to support multiprocessor, so hopefully this trend does not carry over into the Vista home products (although I will not be surprised if it does).
Ever installed Windows on a laptop? Unless you have the vendor's customized installation CD, it's a real pain. Customized drivers, vendor specific proprietary extensions and drivers, and non-standard configurations all around. Sometimes it's a wonder Linux ever manages to boot at all on them.
Given the fact there's typically a three month lead to magazine printing, it's hardly surprising that they were reviewing unfinished games. That also means, for better or worse, they have to make some assumption about the bugs they may or may not run into being fixed before release. How stupid would they look complaining about a bug that didn't exist on the shipping version?
Some day a case based on this will reach up to the supreme court, or some foolish politician will get a bill passed, and this dispute will be solved for good. Until then, both answers are right.
Frankly, there aren't many places that are immune to natural disasters. I may not have to worry about hurricans, earthquakes or tsunamis where I live (Winnipeg, Manitoba), but I do have to worry about the occasional tornado, ice storms, flooding of the Red River, and blizzards. Life on this planet just isn't safe.
All but the lowest-end (and the 1U rack mountable) servers from both HP and IBM come with PCIe (don't know anything about Dell servers because the company I work for can't resell them). PCI-X has potential for higher speeds, but cross-talk is becoming a problem for that bus. PCIe will be doubling in speed with the PCIe 2.0 spec which should come out fairly soon, and future speed increases should become possible as technology improves. With ethernet controllers now pushing the 10Gbps mark, and serial attached SCSI hitting 6Gbps mark. PCIe server hardware is rare right now, but that will change. PCIe desktop hardware (aside from PCIe 16x video cards) is still pretty rare, too.
The world is moving back to serial. From USB to SATA/SAS to PCIe, these are all serial technologies replacing traditional parallel ones. If everything goes well, the result could be that desktops and servers become more converged on standards than they are now. Being able to use a large array of SATA drives attached to a SAS controller when you're more concerned about storage density than speed, and getting a single bus interface on both server and desktop so economies of scale kick in to lower prices are goals of each of these groups.
It's worse than that. See vigor and be afraid.
Re: IDE/SATA vs SCSI: SCSI is far more complex than ATA/SATA and compatibility concerns. If you want to make an ATA controller, you must implement the entire spec. If you want to make a SCSI controller, large portions of the spec are optional. These additional features mean SCSI can give greater performance than ATA drives, but it also means that while ATA has become simpler and simpler to set-up, SCSI has become more and more complex. Things like CS and asynchronous speeds (each device runs at it's maximum supported speed) on the ATA bus serve to make ATA easier to deal with, while the termination, SCSI IDs and synchronous speeds (each device runs at the slowest common speed on the bus) of SCSI require more planning.
Re: PCIe versus PCI-X: This change is inevitable. PCI-X was a hack (much like VLB) to get more bandwidth out of existing PCI hardware. Plug a PCI device into a PCI-X bus, and oops, all your devices are now limited to 33MHz. PCIe is a good technology, and replacing PCI with PCIe is a good thing, just like replacing all those ISA cards with PCI was a good idea. PCIe may not have an performance wins over the highest-end PCI-X right now, but it's a lot cheaper to manufacture (you don't need a separate PCI bus controller for each 16x/32x PCIe card as you would with a 133MHz 64-bit PCI-X card), and provides framework for expansion in the future.
Re: x86 architecture: Can't argue with you there. The x86 instruction set really stinks. At least we don't really have to deal with "Real Mode" anymore. On the bright side, I rarely need to worry about IRQ related conflicts.
Just because a technology is technologically inferior, doesn't make it an inferior technology. ATA has a number of strong points that may not appeal to the computer elite, but are still quite valuable. PCIe's biggest challenge is fighting the intertia of the past decade of PCI.
Ahh, they're all relatively insane. At the lowest level of each circuit there are a number of judges who never bother to consider the consequences of their decisions. Instead of prefering to avoid setting precident as most judges do, they hand out awards to whomever had the most compelling agument, regardless of the law. Hopefully this error in judgement will be corrected in the nearly inevitable appeal.
Maybe if these movie companies pull their head out of their ass, they'll realize that people won't want to hook an internet or telephone connection to their appliances without a damn good reason. Unfortunately, all the reasons I might hook an internet connection up to a player like this come down to watching unlicensed or pirated media.
I guess it's true: Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
I suspect the Microsoft spokesperson is well aware of the distinction between what he said and reality, though. What he said has the potential for perhaps someone to re-evaluate the decision. If he had properly represented the deficiency of the format, he would've been ignored because the people making the decision should've already realized they were giving up on the deep Microsoft integration features.
I have no idea how to deal with these clearly irrational people. It's generally impossible to reason with them, and even if you do manage to get through to one of them, there's always another crackpot willing to take up the torch in front of the news cameras.
The same is true about Star Wars. It's not the greatest movie ever (or even the greatest sci fi movie ever), but rather merely a good one with amazing special effects for the time that people grew up enjoying. Everyone ignores the cliched story line, and the poor acting. Some people even get defensive if you bring these things up because you're not attacking the movie, you're attacking them and their childhood memory of the movie.
There are a lot of good games out there, but so long as people compare them to the false "perfection" of the games they played in their youth, they will remain blind to them.
You may be reading too much into that. It's one of those things that could be used to suggest that bias exists, but does not prove it. Also, given the conduct of the RIAA lawyer at the start of the case, I don't believe that the judge's conduct is out of order. Think of that statement as just another assertion by the judge that she is in control of this courtroom, and it's run by her rules, whether the RIAA lawyer likes it or not.
And as for "primitive", neanderthals had brains that were 10% larger than modern human brains and had poorer speech capabilities. They were the first to adapt to sub-arctic conditions, and were adept stone tool makers. Physically, they were shorter, and very possibly stronger.
Don't believe everything you see from Hollywood. Movies are not required to accurate, merely entertaining. Reality may be far more boring than fiction.
And make sure you don't use it underwater or you might gib yourself and anything in the water around you.
They're running in Canada, too. Can never figure out if I should laugh or cringe.
The Linux kernel does not explicitly allow binary modules. This is a commonly repeated myth. Please see Linus's posting on LKML for the truth behind this.