I find it rather funny that what you say is testable, actualy hasnt sucessfully been.
You seem to have a problem with logical relationships. An observation which disagrees with theory (A) does not support theory (B) just because it disagrees with (A).
For a theory to be successfull, it must make predictions. Thats all there is to it. Show me the predictions.
If they chose to use OpenGL then you might have an arguement, but they didn't. They chose to use DirectX because it is a standardized interface to more features than OpenGL provides. OpenGL is practically in the dark ages these days, with no signs of ever comming out of its quagmire of bickering memberships.
Microsoft got it right with DirectX. Work with the vendors on a standardized interface for common features, then require those features to be implemented. DirectX is the windows standard for hardware acceleration of graphics. There were no backroom deals here, Intel just has a lot of shitty GPU's on the market that do not implement everything they need to be DX9 compliant.
Microsoft could have used a different API, but I ask (again) why should they have? (So that Intel can continue selling crap?)
...and by the "same level of access" you mean give the specs to someone not employed by ATI or under any obligations to ATI, who then might eventualy produce a driver if they are lucky.
They might also learn that rubber duckies that have been ripped to shreds under the increadible pressure of a freaking glacier simply dont float, but make a stylish home for deep-sea hermit crabs.
What the hell was wrong with Vista that it could not do translucency on Intel chip sets?
Its not like there are extensive nvidia and ati specific code paths...
Intel's chips simply dont do DX9/10 well and thats the fault of Intel, not Microsoft. Could Microsoft have decided to use something other than the well established DirectX? Sure.. but why should they have? That would have still required Intel to evolve their own solution, but would also have asked for more from nvidia and ati.
Its a no-brainer here. Intel's graphics chips dont do aero well because Intel's chips don't do DirectX well. Intel has long known that their chips suck for DX and have done nothing about it because they are unwilling to compete in that market.
Sorry pal,but I took economics too. Now allow me to quote your post "There is a price vs demand equilibria which maximizes revenue and there is no reason for these companies not to strive for maximum profits." But that isn't what we have now,is it?
This is where you fail. You let your emotions decide a fact that isnt in evidence and isnt even rational.
These companies are selling million+ of copies of each game. If you think that they are anywhere near the "absolute limit" of what they can charge, then explain the sales figures. You are way too far down the emotional biggot train to ever ratonalize with.
Did you not even read what I said before replying? The first part of your post says exactly what my entire post said but you are trying to come off as rebutting it. You need to learn what it means to charge what the market will bare. It does not mean charging as much as possible while maintaining a single customer. Got that?
You are angry at the game industry, and that anger has lead you into a big mess of illogic. You seem to think that the game industry will be happy with blaming pirate for their suboptimal pricing decisions that lead to lesser profits. You are wrong. Your logic is insane thinking based in anger. Pirating is just a factor that the business has to deal with, not the object of a holy war suitable for trashing the business.
You need to leave your anger at the door when discussing economics.
E.A. certainly isn't generally over-pricing its products. Their revenue figures speak for themselves.
I realize that some people think that the price of games is too high, however the price of games is pretty much exactly what the market will bare.
Even if piracy was an order of magnitude more rampant, the prices would still remain about the same. In markets like this the supply is not limited and the lower bounds on demand is 0. There is a price vs demand equilibria which maximizes revenue and there is no reason for these companies not to strive for maximum profits.
I don't see what the problem is with simply needing a legit key to play online.
The problem is in the act of deciding if a key is legit or not.
Pay-per-month games (ex: World Of Warcraft, Eve Online,..) don't have much of a problem here because even illegitimate keys must pay. Games which are not pay-per-month (ex: CounterStrike, Diablo,..) do have a serious problem with key validation.
I don't know what solution is acceptable here, however the latest DRM schemes seem to address a different issue entirely (that of removing First Sale rights from the consumer.)
...especialy when the bloggers comparison of OS performance is based on a video encoding benchmark. I'm suprised that I havent seen anyone call this bloger a clown yet. You shouldn't be allowed to publish benchmark results if you rode to school on the short bus, even if you happened to be the smartest kid on it.
Point A - That response was not irrelevant. Use some logic. Here is the question I posed later in my post (learn to read the entire post before posting):
Just because you ask a question later, that does not mean that your comment was relevant. Your question isnt relevant either. If your comment was relevant, you would have said why in this post. You didn't. Instead, you dance around with some twisted connect the dots game.
Point B - Bullshit. Give me the stats on that. Most of the programmers I know say that C (and it's close derivatives) is the most used programming language. Perhaps VB is the most used Beginners language.
Most programmers are in-house developers in the corporate world. Most in-house development is in VBA. Your anectodal evidence carries about as much weight as your language biggotry.
Even JavaScript blows C away these days.
Point C - Perhaps trolling is the wrong word, as I don't think you are doing it for kicks.Active X isn't the future of the IT worlds nor is it the basis for everything out there anyway. Besides this, there are ways to work out Active-X problems with Linux, it just isn't natively supported and really shouldn't be.
You completely miss the point. The future is moot. There is only the NOW.
A corporate environment has prior development NOW that needs to be supported. You seem to trivialize the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of existing development in the world as something easily migrated and refactored. I got news for you. It isn't.
This isnt new product development. This is old development thats done and over with. What can ubuntu do for a single corporate giant with thousands of active-x controls which provides core functionality to its business?
(if you argue that they shouldnt use active-x, you've already failed.. they do use it.. now address the migration problem)
Point D - None of the businesses that I've known that have IT professionals with a decent amount of intellect have castrated themselves when switching to Linux. If you can't figure it out, perhaps the reason why is found in this paragraph.
So all trivially small businesses then?
..or perhaps some new definition of the word 'switch'.. something like using linux for some things, but plenty of windows boxes running the legacy?
I can only know about you what you say on here, and it certainly sounded to me like you felt biodiversity was unimportant.
Yet I didnt say that it was...
I ask you, what is the practical difference between Extinct and Almost Extinct aside from the emotional horror that a species might be "lost forever?" Is it really reasonable to do anything more than zoo captivity in order to satisfy those emotions?
The slippery slope goes both ways. The calls for biodiversity is the same as the "for the children" justification used in other walks of life. Its meant to invoke an emotional response for lack of a persuasive reasoned arguement.
You're full of shit and have no clue what you're talking about.
He's almost right tho. Acid tests a browsers ability to render illegal HTML. While the ability to render illegal HTML might be considered good, the ability to render existing proprietary extensions and quirks is far more important to end users.
I have no idea why the W3C doesn't wise up and implement a reference renderer. Seriously. Until they do, there will always be quirks and those quirks are the real web development problem. ACID doesnt do jack shit for web developers.
You are the one lacking the critical thinking skills. However, your slipery slope skills are fully charged. If you knew how I felt about biodiversity then you would not say what you did, so don't pretend that you do.
There is a difference between watching a thousand species out of tens of millions go extinct and watching 1 out of 2 go extinct.
Your slipery slope arguement only applies to conditions near the later, not the former. We are at the former, where a critical thinker would actualy be.
I think that you are wrong about the AI community looking down on games as "lowly applications."
I think that many posters here are confusing Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning. The later is a subset of the former, but is often difficult to apply to games. Accepting adaptation is typically equivient to abandoning Game Theory.
Certainly there are entire fields of A.I. that are entirely unrelated, but there are many fields of A.I. whos core development is exclusively related to games.
Most games do not implement any heavy A.I. techniques because it is too difficult to provide skill gradients: Easy, Normal, Hard, Godlike. These skill gradients are pretty simple to implement as an escalation of "cheating," but not so simple as a tweak to AlphaBeta and pretty much futile with Machine Learning.
Do you know how many measurements they're averaging those with?
I do know how many are used for the surface record. Its well documented and the data is available online. What isn't well documented is the placement of those thermometers. The scientists harping on climate change simply don't give a shit, which is obvious since they dont even bother visiting these sites to see what problems may exist.
How big of a temperature shift you'd expect from a misplaced thermometer?
Not as much as if there were hundreds of misplaced thermometers just in the USHCN. Didn't expect a big problem with the quality of the surface record, did you? The problems the scientists say do not exist are now well documented with photographic evidence. This is a classic case of garbage in garbage out. Maybe its warming significantly, maybe it isn't. We don't know because the data we have just plain sucks.
The biggest pusher of the "climate change" scare is the IPCC, a political organization trying to heavily regulate industry on a global scale. If it looks like an attempt at a power grab, it probably is.
Why? Feel free to justify your opinion with evidence.
Aside from the fact that losing an entire species forever is an extremely sad thing to happen there are practical implications.
Why is it sad, and why do you think that being emotionally involved in this issue is a good thing?
Also, you don't know what statistically significant means so don't use that term.
I know that we discover more species each *month* than we have ever observed go extinct, so I think I got a pretty good handle on what statistically insignificant means here. I think you are not looking at the big picture, probably because of that emotional monkey on your back.
You should qualify that one. Here is a species for you: Homo sapiens. Gotcha. (Wink)
I donate sperm, so no, you didnt get me... and i did qualify it.. I said i'll help *you* save it.
Didn't expect that, did ya?
How about this one: wheat. Gotcha again.
My Atkins diet says otherwise.
You really are clever, but not enough.
Here is a question for you: What is the bare minimum number of species you might be comfortable with?
Half of the existing ones. Feel free to derive that number.. oh wait.. you can't.. because there are so many species already that you cannot even count them.
Diversity? Thats crap. There are so many species on this planet that we can't even count them. The loss of even hundreds of thousands of species is statistically insignificant.
Heres an idea.. give me a reason why a specific species is worth protecting, and then if you convince me, I'll even fucking help you to save it.
Slashdot Mirror
I find it rather funny that what you say is testable, actualy hasnt sucessfully been.
You seem to have a problem with logical relationships. An observation which disagrees with theory (A) does not support theory (B) just because it disagrees with (A).
For a theory to be successfull, it must make predictions. Thats all there is to it. Show me the predictions.
I guess you should actualy RTFA... then you wouldn't look like a moron.
See you in contract court while your IP gets spread across the globe.
"Wasn't me"
If they chose to use OpenGL then you might have an arguement, but they didn't. They chose to use DirectX because it is a standardized interface to more features than OpenGL provides. OpenGL is practically in the dark ages these days, with no signs of ever comming out of its quagmire of bickering memberships.
Microsoft got it right with DirectX. Work with the vendors on a standardized interface for common features, then require those features to be implemented. DirectX is the windows standard for hardware acceleration of graphics. There were no backroom deals here, Intel just has a lot of shitty GPU's on the market that do not implement everything they need to be DX9 compliant.
Microsoft could have used a different API, but I ask (again) why should they have? (So that Intel can continue selling crap?)
...and by the "same level of access" you mean give the specs to someone not employed by ATI or under any obligations to ATI, who then might eventualy produce a driver if they are lucky.
They might also learn that rubber duckies that have been ripped to shreds under the increadible pressure of a freaking glacier simply dont float, but make a stylish home for deep-sea hermit crabs.
I am well practiced in one particular DIY gesture. If anyone needs someone to do research with, I can flip a few for you.
Its relevant because it is the API being used to do those effects.
Those Intel chipset sucks under that API and thats Intel's fault. Period.
What the hell was wrong with Vista that it could not do translucency on Intel chip sets?
Its not like there are extensive nvidia and ati specific code paths...
Intel's chips simply dont do DX9/10 well and thats the fault of Intel, not Microsoft. Could Microsoft have decided to use something other than the well established DirectX? Sure.. but why should they have? That would have still required Intel to evolve their own solution, but would also have asked for more from nvidia and ati.
Its a no-brainer here. Intel's graphics chips dont do aero well because Intel's chips don't do DirectX well. Intel has long known that their chips suck for DX and have done nothing about it because they are unwilling to compete in that market.
Sorry pal,but I took economics too. Now allow me to quote your post "There is a price vs demand equilibria which maximizes revenue and there is no reason for these companies not to strive for maximum profits." But that isn't what we have now,is it?
This is where you fail. You let your emotions decide a fact that isnt in evidence and isnt even rational.
These companies are selling million+ of copies of each game. If you think that they are anywhere near the "absolute limit" of what they can charge, then explain the sales figures. You are way too far down the emotional biggot train to ever ratonalize with.
Have a nice delusional life.
Did you not even read what I said before replying? The first part of your post says exactly what my entire post said but you are trying to come off as rebutting it. You need to learn what it means to charge what the market will bare. It does not mean charging as much as possible while maintaining a single customer. Got that?
You are angry at the game industry, and that anger has lead you into a big mess of illogic. You seem to think that the game industry will be happy with blaming pirate for their suboptimal pricing decisions that lead to lesser profits. You are wrong. Your logic is insane thinking based in anger. Pirating is just a factor that the business has to deal with, not the object of a holy war suitable for trashing the business.
You need to leave your anger at the door when discussing economics.
E.A. certainly isn't generally over-pricing its products. Their revenue figures speak for themselves.
I realize that some people think that the price of games is too high, however the price of games is pretty much exactly what the market will bare.
Even if piracy was an order of magnitude more rampant, the prices would still remain about the same. In markets like this the supply is not limited and the lower bounds on demand is 0. There is a price vs demand equilibria which maximizes revenue and there is no reason for these companies not to strive for maximum profits.
I don't see what the problem is with simply needing a legit key to play online.
The problem is in the act of deciding if a key is legit or not.
..) don't have much of a problem here because even illegitimate keys must pay. Games which are not pay-per-month (ex: CounterStrike, Diablo, ..) do have a serious problem with key validation.
Pay-per-month games (ex: World Of Warcraft, Eve Online,
I don't know what solution is acceptable here, however the latest DRM schemes seem to address a different issue entirely (that of removing First Sale rights from the consumer.)
..the fact that their tests ran significantly faster on XP means that there is something significantly wrong with their tests.
...especialy when the bloggers comparison of OS performance is based on a video encoding benchmark. I'm suprised that I havent seen anyone call this bloger a clown yet. You shouldn't be allowed to publish benchmark results if you rode to school on the short bus, even if you happened to be the smartest kid on it.
Point A - That response was not irrelevant. Use some logic. Here is the question I posed later in my post (learn to read the entire post before posting):
Just because you ask a question later, that does not mean that your comment was relevant. Your question isnt relevant either. If your comment was relevant, you would have said why in this post. You didn't. Instead, you dance around with some twisted connect the dots game.
Point B - Bullshit. Give me the stats on that. Most of the programmers I know say that C (and it's close derivatives) is the most used programming language. Perhaps VB is the most used Beginners language.
Most programmers are in-house developers in the corporate world. Most in-house development is in VBA. Your anectodal evidence carries about as much weight as your language biggotry.
Even JavaScript blows C away these days.
Point C - Perhaps trolling is the wrong word, as I don't think you are doing it for kicks.Active X isn't the future of the IT worlds nor is it the basis for everything out there anyway. Besides this, there are ways to work out Active-X problems with Linux, it just isn't natively supported and really shouldn't be.
You completely miss the point. The future is moot. There is only the NOW.
A corporate environment has prior development NOW that needs to be supported. You seem to trivialize the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of existing development in the world as something easily migrated and refactored. I got news for you. It isn't.
This isnt new product development. This is old development thats done and over with. What can ubuntu do for a single corporate giant with thousands of active-x controls which provides core functionality to its business?
(if you argue that they shouldnt use active-x, you've already failed.. they do use it.. now address the migration problem)
Point D - None of the businesses that I've known that have IT professionals with a decent amount of intellect have castrated themselves when switching to Linux. If you can't figure it out, perhaps the reason why is found in this paragraph.
So all trivially small businesses then?
..or perhaps some new definition of the word 'switch'.. something like using linux for some things, but plenty of windows boxes running the legacy?
I can only know about you what you say on here, and it certainly sounded to me like you felt biodiversity was unimportant.
Yet I didnt say that it was...
I ask you, what is the practical difference between Extinct and Almost Extinct aside from the emotional horror that a species might be "lost forever?" Is it really reasonable to do anything more than zoo captivity in order to satisfy those emotions?
The slippery slope goes both ways. The calls for biodiversity is the same as the "for the children" justification used in other walks of life. Its meant to invoke an emotional response for lack of a persuasive reasoned arguement.
You're full of shit and have no clue what you're talking about.
He's almost right tho. Acid tests a browsers ability to render illegal HTML. While the ability to render illegal HTML might be considered good, the ability to render existing proprietary extensions and quirks is far more important to end users.
I have no idea why the W3C doesn't wise up and implement a reference renderer. Seriously. Until they do, there will always be quirks and those quirks are the real web development problem. ACID doesnt do jack shit for web developers.
You are the one lacking the critical thinking skills. However, your slipery slope skills are fully charged. If you knew how I felt about biodiversity then you would not say what you did, so don't pretend that you do.
There is a difference between watching a thousand species out of tens of millions go extinct and watching 1 out of 2 go extinct.
Your slipery slope arguement only applies to conditions near the later, not the former. We are at the former, where a critical thinker would actualy be.
I think that you are wrong about the AI community looking down on games as "lowly applications."
I think that many posters here are confusing Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning. The later is a subset of the former, but is often difficult to apply to games. Accepting adaptation is typically equivient to abandoning Game Theory.
Certainly there are entire fields of A.I. that are entirely unrelated, but there are many fields of A.I. whos core development is exclusively related to games.
Most games do not implement any heavy A.I. techniques because it is too difficult to provide skill gradients: Easy, Normal, Hard, Godlike. These skill gradients are pretty simple to implement as an escalation of "cheating," but not so simple as a tweak to AlphaBeta and pretty much futile with Machine Learning.
Did you not realize that both the Gros Michel and the Cavendish are the SAME species?
I do know how many are used for the surface record. Its well documented and the data is available online. What isn't well documented is the placement of those thermometers. The scientists harping on climate change simply don't give a shit, which is obvious since they dont even bother visiting these sites to see what problems may exist.
Not as much as if there were hundreds of misplaced thermometers just in the USHCN. Didn't expect a big problem with the quality of the surface record, did you? The problems the scientists say do not exist are now well documented with photographic evidence. This is a classic case of garbage in garbage out. Maybe its warming significantly, maybe it isn't. We don't know because the data we have just plain sucks.
I suggest you begin your research at http://www.surfacestations.org/
The biggest pusher of the "climate change" scare is the IPCC, a political organization trying to heavily regulate industry on a global scale. If it looks like an attempt at a power grab, it probably is.
Why? Feel free to justify your opinion with evidence.
Why is it sad, and why do you think that being emotionally involved in this issue is a good thing?
I know that we discover more species each *month* than we have ever observed go extinct, so I think I got a pretty good handle on what statistically insignificant means here. I think you are not looking at the big picture, probably because of that emotional monkey on your back.
I donate sperm, so no, you didnt get me... and i did qualify it.. I said i'll help *you* save it.
Didn't expect that, did ya?
My Atkins diet says otherwise.
You really are clever, but not enough.
Half of the existing ones. Feel free to derive that number.. oh wait.. you can't.. because there are so many species already that you cannot even count them.
No, the real question is....
...why the fuck should we care?
Diversity? Thats crap. There are so many species on this planet that we can't even count them. The loss of even hundreds of thousands of species is statistically insignificant.
Heres an idea.. give me a reason why a specific species is worth protecting, and then if you convince me, I'll even fucking help you to save it.