If you really want to plug an expensive CPU, GPU, memory, hard disk into a knock-off board, and run then run power said motherboard just to save maybe $50 then be my guest.
Personally I would be more concerned about frying my hardware, electrocuting myself or possibly burning the whole house down. It doesn't matter either if the mobo is actually genuine in the stolen sense. Who knows if the thing passed QC or not. For all anyone knows, it came out of the reject pile and has something seriously wrong with it.
It's not quite up there with knowingly using counterfeit drugs to save money, but its certainly a risk that I consider to be far in excess of any money saved.
I can understand why they did it, but the reality is that some legacy apps will NEVER EVER be updated. UAC should at least allow an admin to exempt an app, or "train" the system to not bug for certain kinds of errors.
The alternative is people will just turn off UAC altogether. I'm sorry but I would hit those stupid warnings 20 or 30 times a day. In the absence of a way to train the system, I prefer to disable it altogether.
Those PS3 tech demos are cool but could more accurately be called ray casting. They bounce a primary and maybe a secondary ray off some fairly simple scenes. I expect if you looked close up there would be jaggies all over the shop, and things like reflection & shadows would be brutal. Proper ray tracing requires sub pixel sampling with jitter and recursion to look even remotely acceptable.
I don't think anyone denies that ray tracing is lovely etc., but its a question of whether it is remotely feasible to do it on the current generation of CPUs or GPUs. If it takes a cluster of Cell processors (basically super fast number shovels) to render a simple scene you can bet we are some way off from it being viable yet.
Maybe in the mean time it is more suitable for lighting / reflection effects and is used in conjunction with traditional techniques.
Unless you change the core mechanics and introduce a random story generation algorithm, Permadeath would be the single most mind-numbingly annoying thing you could introduce into a modern game.
I think the clue to make it work is your "unless". Of course it would be boring in WOW, because WOW is a static game world where change is restricted to day & night, some quests and other extremely minor variations. Its no wonder it would be boring because the world never changes. If anything perma death would highlight how utterly dull the WOW gameworld actually is - there are no consequences of slaughtering all the creatures in the forest because they respawn, there are no lasting consequences of anything that a player or race can do.
I think it would be a dumb idea for WOW to introduce it because it would show how flawed the game is. I don't think the idea in general is bad but it requires a world that is either dynamic or random - the two do not necessarily mean the same thing.
I don't think its a small window. It will be several years before any sort of digital download service gets widespread adoption, and even then it will be for rentals not ownership. Downloads are still too complicated for most people and are blighted by DRM and poor quality. You'd have to be mad to buy movies to own with any service currently in existence. After all, who wants a movie which is locked to a handful of Sony / Microsoft / Apple products? Or requires you install some proprietary playback software?
I do think many providers will be offering Video On Demand / Digital Downloads soon enough. However it's clear that these will be more of a threat to movie rentals than ownership of physical media.
The uptake of HD television sets virtually guarantee that Blu Ray will succeed. Aside from price, there is no downside to purchasing a Blu Ray player - they're backwards compatible and most of them will play your DVDs better than ever before. And once someone has a BD player they will be inclined to favour HD content.
The biggest sticking point is price. I think $400 is a bit steep for a standalone (although the PS3 is great value), but I expect we'll see sub $300 and possibly even a sub $200 player by year end. The major manufacturers are all producing new models in the next couple of months so they're going to mark down their old models accordingly. On top of that economies of scale and fiercer competition will ensure cheaper prices.
I don't see Blu Ray capturing 50% of movie sales for several years unless we're specifically talking about new chart releases. It may well capture 50% of hardware sales though, especially if we see some significant discounts in time for Christmas.
Using a proxy or Tor doesn't make you anonymous since your browser is still issued with cookies by every website, and indeed any iframes embedded in the website (e.g. adverts). So in addition to using a proxy, you would have to use a clean profile which automatically flushed cookies at the end of the session. And of course if you sign onto MSN, Yahoo, Google or any other "portal" that you have effectively thrown your privacy out of the window. For example, sign onto Gmail and all of the searches you did anonymously on your clean session will be folded straight into your profile.
There is something even worse than cookies - Flash player. Most people know about cookies. What they don't know is that Flash has its own version called shared objects. Every domain can have up to 100k (by default) of persistent storage on your machine. If you enabled Flash in your anonymous browser, any shared objects that had been created in the anonymous session would be carried over when you opened your browser again in your normal session. The privacy controls in Flash player are also terrible and clunky and its highly unlikely most people have ever seen them. In Windows the raw objects are under %APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\. Most people would be shocked by the crap in there. I doubt the likes of DoubleClick even bother with cookies any more - after all who even knows about they are being tracked by Flash shared objects?
In theory I suppose Google and their ilk could even link your normal and anonymous session by using a flash object. They could do it in a Google ad, or embed an invisible.swf on the page. The.swf could check the shared object against your cookies, repairing and updating them as they did so. It wouldn't be hard to do either.
Being anonymous definitely means you disable all plugins, clear all cookies, and use a proxy. Otherwise they can circumvent your privacy if they wanted. Whether Google or anybody else would bother to go to these lengths is another matter but they could if they wanted.
Can't you get your own ISBN and then it doesn't matter who you get to print your books? It could be POD, your local publisher, or something else entirely.
I do not see how OOXML becoming a standard is a good thing for ODF. Microsoft is pushing for OOXML because they don't want to support ODF.
If OOXML became an ISO standard the chances of ODF support in MS Office is zero. I'm sure Microsoft will act all conciliatory once they get their standard but they will never offer more than token support for ODF. If they produce anything at all I expect it will be some broken tools that conveniently convert ODF to OOXML but botch OOXML to ODF conversion.
How anyone can think that OOXML standardization is a good thing just boggles the mind. It will either kill ODF or marginalize it so much that it doesn't matter any more.
If Microsoft wanted to licence Blu Ray they'd go to the BDA, not to Sony. They'd then be free to implement the standard through any OEM they felt like which could even be Toshiba. After all, Toshiba and Samsung jointly own TSST that makes Blu Ray OEM drives.
Sure if MS doesn't include a Blu Ray drive, it would mean Sony was deprived of some royalties. But at the same time it would negate the one major advantage the PS3 has over the 360 so they'd lose sales. So I think Sony would be quite happy if MS skipped Blu Ray altogether. It would be just another reason for many people to buy a PS3.
Windows does show some variance in designs, especially in WMP (a terrible confusing design IMO) but there are user interface guidelines and virtually every app pays more attention to them than either iTunes or Safari. That includes picking up the system font, system themes, frame layout / resizing and menus, menu positions, use of native widgets (or at least using uxtheme.dll and proper handling to resemble them), scrollbar metrics, tabbing behaviour, modal dialog behaviour, repaint behaviour, on so on. It's not just a visual issue but one of accessibility too. iTunes and Safari just invented their own thing and its totally inconsistent with the rest of the system.
There is no excuse for this except arrogance and marketing pressure. Apple chose to do it because they chose to do it. From a technical standpoint they could have made their apps look and behave natively and they'd be better for it too. For a company which has been so insistent that 3rd party apps follow the MacOS guidelines this is both hypocritical and arrogant.
BTW Microsoft can be said to do it too to some extent. Reinventing their Office app every iteration is plain silly. However even they take great pains to follow system metrics, theme settings, accessibility and so forth. And if you look at MS Office on the Mac, they have taken great pains to make the app work the Mac way. The same cannot be said of Apple apps on Windows.
Every group has zealots. Trying to explain to some Linux users why usability might be a Good Thing, and RTFM a Bad Thing will provoke the same huffy indignance as when you suggest to some Mac user that their UI or hardware has flaws or things which (the horror!) work better the Windows way. Such people don't get it, or take criticism as a personal affront. I've seen responses to some of my remarks which would hardly differ if I said I was going to take a shit on their grandmother's grave.
The truth always lies away from the extremes and frankly its a little sad that such people exist. Every OS has its good points and its bad points, and there is no point blindly and slavishly defending a platform against its flaws. If anything the true fans should be leveling valid criticism at their platform of choice in order to make it better.
Apple are hypocrites. They release interface guidelines for MacOS which say how apps should look and feel. When MS ran afoul of these guidelines, users screamed blue murder and they soon learned.
Now look at Apple software on Windows. It doesn't give a damn about the Windows interface guidelines and pushes a nasty Aqua-like theme through Safari, Quicktime and iTunes. As far as I can tell, it ignores the system settings. A native Windows app should look like a native Windows app, not some refugee from OS X. Worse, the faux Aqua widgets cause sluggish performance and visual glitches. Scrolling a long list of tracks in iTunes is painful and often the app doesn't start properly in Vista and renders everything in black. The apps aren't even consistent with each other - the positioning and rendering menus is completely different in iTunes from Safari.
It's too bad they aren't taken to task for this. It's as arrogant as when MS did it. Except MS learned and Apple seemed to be getting away with it.
With the exception of Elite, most BBC games were pretty crap too. It probably had something to do with the trade offs between resolution and colours. Most arcade games had to drop into mode 2 but the poor horizontal resolution made them look squashed like the sprites had been sat on.
The Spectrum wasn't exactly great for graphics but it was good enough, and more importantly it was much cheaper than the BBC and had more games. Acorn's own efforts to produce a home computer weren't exactly great either. The Acorn Electron was to the BBC Model B what the Commodore 16 was to the C64 - a total disaster.
Aside from its graphics the BBC micro was impressive in hindsight. I recall our school actually had a file server and a network for its BBC micros. This is something hard to even imagine for an 8-bit micro.
Tom Clancy doesn't appear to have anything to do with most of the shit that bears his name. I read virtually all of his original books and was a great fan. But now I simply don't trust any book with his name on it. Normally they're ghost written or his input appears to be minimal such as writing the forward. It's deceitful and intellectually bankrupt.
His name used to be synonymous with decent geopolitical thrillers. These days it is synonymous with name whoring and cash-ins.
I use Vista and I haven't had any major issues with it. There have been some minor incompatibility issues with some apps that I have resolved, and some annoyances like UAC which I have disabled but in general Vista has performed extremely well. The Vista desktop is *much* better than XP's. Performance overall is slightly better than XP though games seem to have lower performance. I have no issue with the quality of Vista compared to any other OS I've used which all have their fair share of bugs and crashes.
I have had no trouble ripping or burning anything I like on Vista. If there is DRM, it hasn't made the slightest difference to me.
I do think Microsoft is far too tardy with its service packs. Putting everything out in one monolithic update a lot more risky than incremental improvements. Windows Update shouldn't be just for "hotfixes". There should be smaller releases that focus on specific areas.
I also find it hard to believe that the standard battery on an iPod is going to suddenly going to turn into an explosive device if they take it into space. That sounds like more of a bureaucratic oversight than anything else.
They've caught fire here on Earth. I expect the effect of such a fire in space would range anywhere from serious to catastrophic.
Guitar Hero is a ripoff of the GuitarFreaks arcade game which according to Wikipedia first appeared in February 1999. So quite possibly the game concept predates the patent.
The joke being that almost all the Blu-ray players on the market right now are obsolete.
Yeah, and USB 2.0 is obsolete because USB 3.0 is out. Right?
BD-Live is an optional feature for blu ray players. Your 1.0 or 1.1 player does not become obsolete because it can't hit the internet. Indeed, 1.0 or 1.1 players will continue to play new Blu Ray content for as long as it is produced. I'm not saying it's a bad idea to wait if you're on the fence, but the features of 2.0 themselves really don't justify the wait. A better reason to wait if you need one is for better deals and better players. Many CEs are in the process of releasing new models soon.
You only have to look at what HD DVD did with web connectivity to see what an utter waste of time it was. I remember a big splash headline that that 30% of users of Transformers HD DVD used the "live" features and 30% again revisited them again. In other words not even 10% of early adopters bothered to use the feature more than once. And early adopters are the group most likely to even bother hooking up a player.
BD-Live might allow a disk to launch a studio's generic portal / store, or an online high score table, or some twitter like blog, or some scene sharing features. But these are hardly earth shattering features. I only see BD-Live being worth the bother is if a studio uses it to give users a "movie of the week" freebie or some other substantial reward for visiting.
Mandatory managed copy might make network access worth it too but that is going to require player support and no one seems to be talking much about how it will eventually work.
Off the top of my head you can buy players from Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Denon, Marantz and Pioneer. Since I have no idea where you live or where you buy your electronics from I can't comment whether you can find them in bricks & mortar stores or not. I expect most dedicated AV stores would stock several models. I expect stores like Best Buy etc. do too or will before long.
With the format war over and uncertainty removed, retailers are starting to sell these things close to their MSRP again. I shouldn't worry though. More and more models are appearing from more and more manufacturers including no-names so the prices are going to head south.
Monopoly? Last I heard, virtually every major CE manufacturer with the exception of Toshiba was competing for the blu ray money in your pocket. Even Toshiba has a 50% stake in a company producing blu ray drives so I'm sure they come out of their period of mourning soon enough.
Prices will drop through competition and economies of scale.
That's great but every publisher needs to do it. There needs to be a very well specified single standard that all publishers use and tools exist for. Something as ubiquitous as MP3. Once that happens, ebook sales will shoot up.
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Personally I would be more concerned about frying my hardware, electrocuting myself or possibly burning the whole house down. It doesn't matter either if the mobo is actually genuine in the stolen sense. Who knows if the thing passed QC or not. For all anyone knows, it came out of the reject pile and has something seriously wrong with it.
It's not quite up there with knowingly using counterfeit drugs to save money, but its certainly a risk that I consider to be far in excess of any money saved.
The alternative is people will just turn off UAC altogether. I'm sorry but I would hit those stupid warnings 20 or 30 times a day. In the absence of a way to train the system, I prefer to disable it altogether.
I don't think anyone denies that ray tracing is lovely etc., but its a question of whether it is remotely feasible to do it on the current generation of CPUs or GPUs. If it takes a cluster of Cell processors (basically super fast number shovels) to render a simple scene you can bet we are some way off from it being viable yet.
Maybe in the mean time it is more suitable for lighting / reflection effects and is used in conjunction with traditional techniques.
I think the clue to make it work is your "unless". Of course it would be boring in WOW, because WOW is a static game world where change is restricted to day & night, some quests and other extremely minor variations. Its no wonder it would be boring because the world never changes. If anything perma death would highlight how utterly dull the WOW gameworld actually is - there are no consequences of slaughtering all the creatures in the forest because they respawn, there are no lasting consequences of anything that a player or race can do.
I think it would be a dumb idea for WOW to introduce it because it would show how flawed the game is. I don't think the idea in general is bad but it requires a world that is either dynamic or random - the two do not necessarily mean the same thing.
I do think many providers will be offering Video On Demand / Digital Downloads soon enough. However it's clear that these will be more of a threat to movie rentals than ownership of physical media.
The biggest sticking point is price. I think $400 is a bit steep for a standalone (although the PS3 is great value), but I expect we'll see sub $300 and possibly even a sub $200 player by year end. The major manufacturers are all producing new models in the next couple of months so they're going to mark down their old models accordingly. On top of that economies of scale and fiercer competition will ensure cheaper prices.
I don't see Blu Ray capturing 50% of movie sales for several years unless we're specifically talking about new chart releases. It may well capture 50% of hardware sales though, especially if we see some significant discounts in time for Christmas.
There is something even worse than cookies - Flash player. Most people know about cookies. What they don't know is that Flash has its own version called shared objects. Every domain can have up to 100k (by default) of persistent storage on your machine. If you enabled Flash in your anonymous browser, any shared objects that had been created in the anonymous session would be carried over when you opened your browser again in your normal session. The privacy controls in Flash player are also terrible and clunky and its highly unlikely most people have ever seen them. In Windows the raw objects are under %APPDATA%\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\. Most people would be shocked by the crap in there. I doubt the likes of DoubleClick even bother with cookies any more - after all who even knows about they are being tracked by Flash shared objects?
In theory I suppose Google and their ilk could even link your normal and anonymous session by using a flash object. They could do it in a Google ad, or embed an invisible .swf on the page. The .swf could check the shared object against your cookies, repairing and updating them as they did so. It wouldn't be hard to do either.
Being anonymous definitely means you disable all plugins, clear all cookies, and use a proxy. Otherwise they can circumvent your privacy if they wanted. Whether Google or anybody else would bother to go to these lengths is another matter but they could if they wanted.
Can't you get your own ISBN and then it doesn't matter who you get to print your books? It could be POD, your local publisher, or something else entirely.
It's not much of a stopgap if you many millions of lines of code written against it. Which I expect Adobe have.
The game title might sound odd but its based off a book of the same name.
If OOXML became an ISO standard the chances of ODF support in MS Office is zero. I'm sure Microsoft will act all conciliatory once they get their standard but they will never offer more than token support for ODF. If they produce anything at all I expect it will be some broken tools that conveniently convert ODF to OOXML but botch OOXML to ODF conversion.
How anyone can think that OOXML standardization is a good thing just boggles the mind. It will either kill ODF or marginalize it so much that it doesn't matter any more.
Sure if MS doesn't include a Blu Ray drive, it would mean Sony was deprived of some royalties. But at the same time it would negate the one major advantage the PS3 has over the 360 so they'd lose sales. So I think Sony would be quite happy if MS skipped Blu Ray altogether. It would be just another reason for many people to buy a PS3.
There is no excuse for this except arrogance and marketing pressure. Apple chose to do it because they chose to do it. From a technical standpoint they could have made their apps look and behave natively and they'd be better for it too. For a company which has been so insistent that 3rd party apps follow the MacOS guidelines this is both hypocritical and arrogant.
BTW Microsoft can be said to do it too to some extent. Reinventing their Office app every iteration is plain silly. However even they take great pains to follow system metrics, theme settings, accessibility and so forth. And if you look at MS Office on the Mac, they have taken great pains to make the app work the Mac way. The same cannot be said of Apple apps on Windows.
The truth always lies away from the extremes and frankly its a little sad that such people exist. Every OS has its good points and its bad points, and there is no point blindly and slavishly defending a platform against its flaws. If anything the true fans should be leveling valid criticism at their platform of choice in order to make it better.
Now look at Apple software on Windows. It doesn't give a damn about the Windows interface guidelines and pushes a nasty Aqua-like theme through Safari, Quicktime and iTunes. As far as I can tell, it ignores the system settings. A native Windows app should look like a native Windows app, not some refugee from OS X. Worse, the faux Aqua widgets cause sluggish performance and visual glitches. Scrolling a long list of tracks in iTunes is painful and often the app doesn't start properly in Vista and renders everything in black. The apps aren't even consistent with each other - the positioning and rendering menus is completely different in iTunes from Safari.
It's too bad they aren't taken to task for this. It's as arrogant as when MS did it. Except MS learned and Apple seemed to be getting away with it.
With the exception of Elite, most BBC games were pretty crap too. It probably had something to do with the trade offs between resolution and colours. Most arcade games had to drop into mode 2 but the poor horizontal resolution made them look squashed like the sprites had been sat on. The Spectrum wasn't exactly great for graphics but it was good enough, and more importantly it was much cheaper than the BBC and had more games. Acorn's own efforts to produce a home computer weren't exactly great either. The Acorn Electron was to the BBC Model B what the Commodore 16 was to the C64 - a total disaster. Aside from its graphics the BBC micro was impressive in hindsight. I recall our school actually had a file server and a network for its BBC micros. This is something hard to even imagine for an 8-bit micro.
His name used to be synonymous with decent geopolitical thrillers. These days it is synonymous with name whoring and cash-ins.
I have had no trouble ripping or burning anything I like on Vista. If there is DRM, it hasn't made the slightest difference to me.
I do think Microsoft is far too tardy with its service packs. Putting everything out in one monolithic update a lot more risky than incremental improvements. Windows Update shouldn't be just for "hotfixes". There should be smaller releases that focus on specific areas.
They've caught fire here on Earth. I expect the effect of such a fire in space would range anywhere from serious to catastrophic.
Guitar Hero is a ripoff of the GuitarFreaks arcade game which according to Wikipedia first appeared in February 1999. So quite possibly the game concept predates the patent.
Yeah, and USB 2.0 is obsolete because USB 3.0 is out. Right?
BD-Live is an optional feature for blu ray players. Your 1.0 or 1.1 player does not become obsolete because it can't hit the internet. Indeed, 1.0 or 1.1 players will continue to play new Blu Ray content for as long as it is produced. I'm not saying it's a bad idea to wait if you're on the fence, but the features of 2.0 themselves really don't justify the wait. A better reason to wait if you need one is for better deals and better players. Many CEs are in the process of releasing new models soon.
You only have to look at what HD DVD did with web connectivity to see what an utter waste of time it was. I remember a big splash headline that that 30% of users of Transformers HD DVD used the "live" features and 30% again revisited them again. In other words not even 10% of early adopters bothered to use the feature more than once. And early adopters are the group most likely to even bother hooking up a player.
BD-Live might allow a disk to launch a studio's generic portal / store, or an online high score table, or some twitter like blog, or some scene sharing features. But these are hardly earth shattering features. I only see BD-Live being worth the bother is if a studio uses it to give users a "movie of the week" freebie or some other substantial reward for visiting.
Mandatory managed copy might make network access worth it too but that is going to require player support and no one seems to be talking much about how it will eventually work.
Off the top of my head you can buy players from Sony, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Denon, Marantz and Pioneer. Since I have no idea where you live or where you buy your electronics from I can't comment whether you can find them in bricks & mortar stores or not. I expect most dedicated AV stores would stock several models. I expect stores like Best Buy etc. do too or will before long.
With the format war over and uncertainty removed, retailers are starting to sell these things close to their MSRP again. I shouldn't worry though. More and more models are appearing from more and more manufacturers including no-names so the prices are going to head south.
Monopoly? Last I heard, virtually every major CE manufacturer with the exception of Toshiba was competing for the blu ray money in your pocket. Even Toshiba has a 50% stake in a company producing blu ray drives so I'm sure they come out of their period of mourning soon enough.
Prices will drop through competition and economies of scale.
That's great but every publisher needs to do it. There needs to be a very well specified single standard that all publishers use and tools exist for. Something as ubiquitous as MP3. Once that happens, ebook sales will shoot up.