Yes, you heard that. It's what people who had Windows 2000 said, and a heck of a lot of them stayed with Win2k. There really wasn't any compelling reason to move to XP.
Of course there is. Your new PC will come with Vista. Dell will quietly discontinue the XP license program after SP1 for vista, latest.
Just look at figure of new PCs sold monthly and 97% of that is the vista uptake, at least after the SP1 after which corporations start accepting it.
Stop injecting facts to/. discussion! If you can't see it in wiki, it does not exist!.. Seriously, parent needs cluebat.
Straight off I can think eastern european countries with representative goverment pre-WWII included at least Poland, Austria (well, "western european"), Czech republic (note the sneaky republic there), romania (pre coup),..
Some countries had republic but degenerated into paternal autocracy or just plain fascist such as Baltic countries, Romania and Germany.
Yeah. It'd be kind of odd to find something about bullet calibers in a treaty about the treatment of prisoners of war..
Hague convention (waaaay back in 1907!) does say you're not supposed to use hollowpoint munitions, thought. There's another treaty about very light exploding bullets, too.
However, if you can find something that says basic cigar-sized metal slug is verboten, please post a link..
The US military takes the same approach to the Geneva Conventions regarding the use of 50 cal bullets on humans. Technically, you can only use 50 cal guns for equipment, but the US military maintains that clothing, guns, ammunition, flashlights, and other things the enemy may be carrying constitute targetable equipment.
What's this? Some kind of astroturf designed to make geneva conventions seem irrelevant and out-of-touch?
Since torturing prisoners of war is no-no, we're supposed to believe the convention says it's not OK to shoot armed soldiers with big bullets? Yeah. Right. That would make them, what, more dead? With probably less trauma? (having big chunk of your body shot jellified probably kills you faster than nice light-weight bullet ripping tissue..)
Why not claim convention says artillery is forbidden because it's unfair?
Don't get me wrong - when I'm in the hospital, I certainly want advanced tech. And when my car crashes, or my home needs power, ditto. But some former citizens of Hiroshima an Nagasaki probably have somewhat mixed feelings on the issue.
Highly relevant for topic I'm sure, but..
You can find much bigger pile of dead people who don't have opinion on this created (and cremated) by Tokyo firebombing and associated terror bombing campaigns. An order of magnitude more people died in such.
I don't use a calculator much anymore, as MATLAB tends to be quicker for the things I need to do, but whatever HP lacks in computational power, it makes up for in efficient syntax.
And that's the problem for fancy calculator-business, really. HP48 (got 48G right here!) is great for some basic arimethic and also for straightforward 1st degree equations when you need to find a component parameter that will work for your circuit..
However, when it gets a bit more complicated, you either need access to some very expensive and dedicated package (field analysis..) or just the ubiquitous excel solver which is easier to manipulate and try scenarios with.
Yeah, I know, bit-heads can do all kinds of snazzy things with the programmability and libraries, but since graduating basic arimethic and 1st degree equations are what you need as an EE. Or, as an alternative, access to the aforementioned highly specialized and extremely expensive purpose-built tools. The kind of math that PSU design involves, for example, is something couple of professors while their time (and grants) with. Results are of course proudly displayed in IEEE journals and the like and everyone in the field has to wait for aforementioned-expensive-tools to be updated with the new models if applicable.
I'm sure we all remember how well things went for the U.S.S. Yorktown; an Aegis Class missile destroyer that ended up dead in the water after a crew member entered a zero into a database. Obviously, this was caused by the fact that the Yorktown's control software was of a really bad design. Critical systems should have never been so tightly linked that a failure in one area would cause a cascading failure across the ship. Still, it raised a lot of questions about the wisdom of using consumer software for life and death situations.
And you thought the scenario in BSG 2003 mini was unlikely? Invader infiltrating and corrupting integrated defence network over decades?
1938 Ford 2 door standard versus 2007 Ford Mustang GT
I think you would agree the latter is MARGINAL improvement when you get down to it.
More frills? Yeah. Faster? Well, yes, but useless. More powerful? Yes, see above. Safer? Hell, yes.
Out of which only really the "safety" aspect has increased dramatically. Then again, at absolute numbers the vehicular fatality rate has never been THAT high.
Only the electronics gear has developed dramatically in last 50 years. Materials and construction not so much at all. Sure our nuclear reactors are safer and more efficient than 1st generation reactors were. Engines are a bit more efficient and mass-production has really come to it's own with robotics, but it's more of a case of having a "tool" repeat procedures A - ZZZ in near perfect record and pace.
Ditto for your airplane example.. Modern passenger jet goes about 900km/h vs commercial airliner from 30s which could do about 350km/h (DC-3)? So what. Incremental improvement at best there. You could argue of course that the jet engine itself is revolutionary improvement over propeller, but that was invented in 40s.
For space ships there was some pretty amazing development between late fities and sixties but sinc e then, big fat ho-hum. Ion engine is the only really remarkable new development I can think of off the bat that isn't data processing-oriented.
In other words, wake me up when we get some decent new materials (nanotubes or whatever) in mass production.. For constructing space ships (or anything else), they'd need to be dramatically stronger and/or lighter than equivalent materials used for last fifty yars!..
I'd say that for interstellar probes (let's be realistic here) first major development will be coupling of ion engines and probably compact fission pile. We don't even use arguably more modern fission reactors since they're not maintenance-free.
Having 0.02g sustained acceleration may not sound much, but if you can keep that up for 5 years, you build up pretty respectable delta-v. Much more so I daresay than the v'ger.
In any case for arkships it's pretty likely they'd be bypassed by later incremental improvements in shipbuilding as soon as basic requirements for really long distance operation is got down to pat.
But I'd also assert that a well-designed TPM setup is WAY beyond the resources of DVD John, the AACS crackers, and maybe even the distributed.net efforts.
Just one good example here.. Xbox 360. It's been out for a while and the DRM is still essentially there. Except that games can be COPIED. But forget about playing that "backup" of brand new R1 game in your R2 console, pardner. Region codes are NOT hacked. Neither is requirement for signed code.
So what the modchips essentially do is hack the dvd drive to give "we're good here" response to appropriate media query, but you need 1:1 copy of the original media to pull that off or the signature won't match.
No media center for X360, thought. XNA program does not let you do it even after you fork out $99/year for the privilege because XNA progs cannot use network (and access your huge collection of dvd rips and mp3s)
All right. Can someone please explain why is it neccesary to have a COMPUTER for a function that's equivalent of picking 1 option out of option matrix of 0-255 (or whatever)?
You could have laughably simple programmable logic to do that, which could be exhaustively audited for backdoors and whatnot. Using something like CE is equivalent of using a flamethrower inside your home to kill a bee..
I design electronics for living so please use all the big words you like..
And for the summary.. This is a deathblow? Because they identified some problems? It's no longer possible to take faults into account and make a new version? Boohoo?
With that said, the Navy has had decades of experience in dealing with guns that make your whole battleship slew sideways when fired. There are ways to absorb and/or re-direct the recoil.
It supports saving/loading backwards compatible formats too...
Let me guess; the damn thing complains each and every time you save in Word 97 format and there's no way to turn off the nag popup?
My personal favourite was actually Word 97. It had an option to always save in Word95 format, then it'd pop up a window asking if you'd like to save in Word95 format..
What's with the massive anti-HD sentiment regarding porn? What happened when you guys see a woman in real life? Do you go "EWWWWWWW! She's so hi-def! I can see her pores!" Christ, if detail really turns you off that much why not just confine yourself to viewing hentai?
This is slashdot, after all.. Hentai is about as close to real women majority here has gotten so far.
And, hey, I read somewhere that 2/3 (or was it 1/2) of american men won't munch kitty. So this "help, HD, help"-sentiment doesn't surprise me at all. Here comes the real shocker: Some people do it with lights off!
I do hope you do understand that's a dangerous fallacy.
Finnish BASIC EDUCATION is lauded. As in public school. As in until kids are about 16 and they're supposed to get a bit specialized. After that point it's all shot to hell.
Our universities are notably absent on the top 100 crowd worldwide. Also there's ridiculous amounts of red tape and general BS you have to go through if you decide you're in the wrong career or, heaven forbit, you want to further your education a little bit.
As a reference, my 4yr B.Sc degree with 7+ years of work experience would get credited GRAND TOTAL OF 1 BLOODY YEAR of credits if I wanted M.Sc degree in my field of profession.
Thanks, but I wait until the guy with grease shows up, OK?
I can't imagine the rubber-stamper at immigration control not letting me through because he can't read my RFID tag... I'm sure a good percentage of non-zapped passports would fail to scan for one reason or another. If enough people did it, then they justn wouldn't be able to rely on them, period.
I see you haven't traveled to US from abroads lately. Fail with your passport chip scan and you are in classified holding pen sans trial for indefinite period before you have chance to say "huh?".
The cost of Windows is hidden in the cost of the machine, so people don't even get presented with a price tag for $300. They don't realize that $300 of the purchase price for the machine was for Windows, and in any case, most people probably wouldn't consider that an unreasonable amount of money to pay for it.
If you don't like going by the way of 1st gen anti-sleep pills, there's one alternative for guys who work in rotating shifts or just plain are not morning people -
Melatonin. That's the stuff your brain actually syntesizes by itself to control the day-night cycle. It's not a sleeping drug per se so it's probably not going to help on insomnia, stress etc. But what it does help on is shifting your sleeping cycle around.
I go without a pause from going to bed around 1am and waking up at 8am during working days to staying up until 2-4am and sleeping until 11 or so during weekends. Reverse obviously does not happen that easily. Naturally I can shift my sleeping cycle backwards by about 30mins/day at most. In other direction it easily jumps by 1-2 hours.
With melatonin I can fall asleep "early" at sunday nights so I'm not crippled by 4 hours of sleep due to being unable to fall asleep until 4am.. Works just fine after I take long nap after work, which would also "naturally" keep me up until 3-4am..
The downside is that when the melatonin is processed during the night, you may wake up during the night or too early in the morning.. But all in all I get a lot more sleep than I do "naturally". There are no real side-effects as far as I can tell (beyond weirdness involved with kicking your sleeping cycle around)
There's good stuff on strategy games if you know where to look. Galciv2 is a fine example. Paradox has made many nifty timewasters. Then there's Nival and their Silent storm games (more like tactics but you get the idea, that sort of game doesn't exist on consoles althought there would be no technical reason why it couldn't)
Also on not-happening-on-consoles is stuff like Silent Hunter III, Steel Beasts Pro, Dangerous waters, Defcon..
And on more mainstream front, Rome and Medieval II, faces of war, company of heroes, Dawn of war and of course, Civ IV..
With the average huge replayability of some of these titles there's simply more good stuff coming out than anyone can play and keep a day job.
Some of these titles are done on a proverbial shoestring budget and with services such as Steam indie developers can get their games to consumers (like me!) without doing the retail dance. Big bucks are in the retail to be sure, but if you have 3-4 guys in eastern europe as dev team, they can make pretty decent living on 10-20k online sales.
Consoles PWN the mainstream gaming for sure, but just like there's always going to be market for small-profile indie films..
Games companies now want to release on consoles only (where piracy is much lower and the lifespan of games can be controlled much better) and the power of video cards on PCs has far exceeded where games are at
Oh pshaw. Please don't trot out that tired, tired old straw man argument of "but there's less piracy on consoles".. There's MORE piracy on consoles. A LOT more. If only because, well, lot more gaming going on with consoles.
A case in point, it's been possible for long time to play pirated games on XO but try playing region 1 game on region 2 console.. ha-ha.
And for PC graphics cards excessive power.. Uhh, yeah, so that's where ATI + Nvidia do the R&D which will be seen on next gen consoles in about 2-3 years. And your problem was again..?
Real GPU power goes to ever increasing schmancy effects such as HDR, resolution has nothing or very little to do with it. FWIW, XO chipset gives pretty good run for money for most PC graphics cards you can buy today.
And for what it's worth, some game genres do not exist for consoles and old farts like me like our strategy games just fine, thanks for asking.
..What choice consumers have? You buy a new PC, you will get vista. You want to play a (PC) game in 2008, you need vista.
So since there's no real alternative as you can't (legally) even transfer the OEM copy of XP you got with your old PC into the new PC, you're stuck with Vista, no matter how it is.
At least this shows that anyone who considers burning trees as a good source of energy (Hint! Renevable!) cannot handle advanced physics concepts like light pressure.
Guess there's no limit to imagination when it comes to thinking of alternatives to building more nuke plants to replace coal/oil.
High blood pressure is a side effect of being a libertarian in Sweden.
Well, at least you get your health care and medications paid for. Here in the US, we get the high blood pressure from our insane politicians and have to pay for everything by ourselves. Any way you look at it, you lose.
Bein in another happy northern socialist country (Finland) I can say that "getting your health care paid for" is a fantasy.
It got so bad in Finland that they passed a law that the public health care *has to* provide basic surgeries/treatments and let you see a specialist doctor in certain set amount of time. Otherwise the counties have to pay fines.. Ultimately those fines come from taxpayers pocket of course. So county z pays fine to goverment for not providing the legally mandated health care for taxpayer X in time Y by using taxpayer X's money.
Previously how it worked was that they said "Oh, need your hemorroids operated? Well shucks, there's a 2.5 year waiting list! Hope you're not too uncomfortable in the meantime.. Oh and by the way, I happen to work on my days off in this nice private clinic".. Used to be 3-6 months to see an eye doctor if you had eye inflammation or something.
Of course the county was always been required to provide the health care, only new thing is that it's enumerated in law what's minimum acceptable service level and fines for patients who do not receive treatment in the given timeframe.
To make things even more amusing, county pays the health care from a portion of the income taxes collected from taxpayers, whereas state decides how the health care is organized and they get most of the income tax money plus VAT. (22% on food btw)
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, you heard that. It's what people who had Windows 2000 said, and a heck of a lot of them stayed with Win2k. There really wasn't any compelling reason to move to XP.
Of course there is. Your new PC will come with Vista. Dell will quietly discontinue the XP license program after SP1 for vista, latest.
Just look at figure of new PCs sold monthly and 97% of that is the vista uptake, at least after the SP1 after which corporations start accepting it.
Stop injecting facts to /. discussion! If you can't see it in wiki, it does not exist! .. Seriously, parent needs cluebat.
..
Straight off I can think eastern european countries with representative goverment pre-WWII included at least Poland, Austria (well, "western european"), Czech republic (note the sneaky republic there), romania (pre coup),
Some countries had republic but degenerated into paternal autocracy or just plain fascist such as Baltic countries, Romania and Germany.
Yeah. It'd be kind of odd to find something about bullet calibers in a treaty about the treatment of prisoners of war..
Hague convention (waaaay back in 1907!) does say you're not supposed to use hollowpoint munitions, thought. There's another treaty about very light exploding bullets, too.
However, if you can find something that says basic cigar-sized metal slug is verboten, please post a link..
The US military takes the same approach to the Geneva Conventions regarding the use of 50 cal bullets on humans. Technically, you can only use 50 cal guns for equipment, but the US military maintains that clothing, guns, ammunition, flashlights, and other things the enemy may be carrying constitute targetable equipment.
What's this? Some kind of astroturf designed to make geneva conventions seem irrelevant and out-of-touch?
Since torturing prisoners of war is no-no, we're supposed to believe the convention says it's not OK to shoot armed soldiers with big bullets? Yeah. Right. That would make them, what, more dead? With probably less trauma? (having big chunk of your body shot jellified probably kills you faster than nice light-weight bullet ripping tissue..)
Why not claim convention says artillery is forbidden because it's unfair?
Don't get me wrong - when I'm in the hospital, I certainly want advanced tech. And when my car crashes, or my home needs power, ditto. But some former citizens of Hiroshima an Nagasaki probably have somewhat mixed feelings on the issue.
Highly relevant for topic I'm sure, but..
You can find much bigger pile of dead people who don't have opinion on this created (and cremated) by Tokyo firebombing and associated terror bombing campaigns. An order of magnitude more people died in such.
I don't use a calculator much anymore, as MATLAB tends to be quicker for the things I need to do, but whatever HP lacks in computational power, it makes up for in efficient syntax.
And that's the problem for fancy calculator-business, really. HP48 (got 48G right here!) is great for some basic arimethic and also for straightforward 1st degree equations when you need to find a component parameter that will work for your circuit..
However, when it gets a bit more complicated, you either need access to some very expensive and dedicated package (field analysis..) or just the ubiquitous excel solver which is easier to manipulate and try scenarios with.
Yeah, I know, bit-heads can do all kinds of snazzy things with the programmability and libraries, but since graduating basic arimethic and 1st degree equations are what you need as an EE. Or, as an alternative, access to the aforementioned highly specialized and extremely expensive purpose-built tools. The kind of math that PSU design involves, for example, is something couple of professors while their time (and grants) with. Results are of course proudly displayed in IEEE journals and the like and everyone in the field has to wait for aforementioned-expensive-tools to be updated with the new models if applicable.
Except if you want to print on A4 paper or somesuch.
I'm sure we all remember how well things went for the U.S.S. Yorktown; an Aegis Class missile destroyer that ended up dead in the water after a crew member entered a zero into a database. Obviously, this was caused by the fact that the Yorktown's control software was of a really bad design. Critical systems should have never been so tightly linked that a failure in one area would cause a cascading failure across the ship. Still, it raised a lot of questions about the wisdom of using consumer software for life and death situations.
And you thought the scenario in BSG 2003 mini was unlikely? Invader infiltrating and corrupting integrated defence network over decades?
Hmm.
1938 Ford 2 door standard
.. For constructing space ships (or anything else), they'd need to be dramatically stronger and/or lighter than equivalent materials used for last fifty yars! ..
versus
2007 Ford Mustang GT
I think you would agree the latter is MARGINAL improvement when you get down to it.
More frills? Yeah.
Faster? Well, yes, but useless.
More powerful? Yes, see above.
Safer? Hell, yes.
Out of which only really the "safety" aspect has increased dramatically. Then again, at absolute numbers the vehicular fatality rate has never been THAT high.
Only the electronics gear has developed dramatically in last 50 years. Materials and construction not so much at all. Sure our nuclear reactors are safer and more efficient than 1st generation reactors were. Engines are a bit more efficient and mass-production has really come to it's own with robotics, but it's more of a case of having a "tool" repeat procedures A - ZZZ in near perfect record and pace.
Ditto for your airplane example.. Modern passenger jet goes about 900km/h vs commercial airliner from 30s which could do about 350km/h (DC-3)? So what. Incremental improvement at best there. You could argue of course that the jet engine itself is revolutionary improvement over propeller, but that was invented in 40s.
For space ships there was some pretty amazing development between late fities and sixties but sinc e then, big fat ho-hum. Ion engine is the only really remarkable new development I can think of off the bat that isn't data processing-oriented.
In other words, wake me up when we get some decent new materials (nanotubes or whatever) in mass production
I'd say that for interstellar probes (let's be realistic here) first major development will be coupling of ion engines and probably compact fission pile. We don't even use arguably more modern fission reactors since they're not maintenance-free.
Having 0.02g sustained acceleration may not sound much, but if you can keep that up for 5 years, you build up pretty respectable delta-v. Much more so I daresay than the v'ger.
In any case for arkships it's pretty likely they'd be bypassed by later incremental improvements in shipbuilding as soon as basic requirements for really long distance operation is got down to pat.
But I'd also assert that a well-designed TPM setup is WAY beyond the resources of DVD John, the AACS crackers, and maybe even the distributed.net efforts.
Just one good example here.. Xbox 360. It's been out for a while and the DRM is still essentially there. Except that games can be COPIED. But forget about playing that "backup" of brand new R1 game in your R2 console, pardner. Region codes are NOT hacked.
Neither is requirement for signed code.
So what the modchips essentially do is hack the dvd drive to give "we're good here" response to appropriate media query, but you need 1:1 copy of the original media to pull that off or the signature won't match.
No media center for X360, thought. XNA program does not let you do it even after you fork out $99/year for the privilege because XNA progs cannot use network (and access your huge collection of dvd rips and mp3s)
All right. Can someone please explain why is it neccesary to have a COMPUTER for a function that's equivalent of picking 1 option out of option matrix of 0-255 (or whatever)?
You could have laughably simple programmable logic to do that, which could be exhaustively audited for backdoors and whatnot. Using something like CE is equivalent of using a flamethrower inside your home to kill a bee..
I design electronics for living so please use all the big words you like..
And for the summary.. This is a deathblow? Because they identified some problems? It's no longer possible to take faults into account and make a new version? Boohoo?
With that said, the Navy has had decades of experience in dealing with guns that make your whole battleship slew sideways when fired. There are ways to absorb and/or re-direct the recoil.
You mispelled centuries.
It supports saving/loading backwards compatible formats too...
Let me guess; the damn thing complains each and every time you save in Word 97 format and there's no way to turn off the nag popup?
My personal favourite was actually Word 97. It had an option to always save in Word95 format, then it'd pop up a window asking if you'd like to save in Word95 format..
What's with the massive anti-HD sentiment regarding porn? What happened when you guys see a woman in real life? Do you go "EWWWWWWW! She's so hi-def! I can see her pores!" Christ, if detail really turns you off that much why not just confine yourself to viewing hentai?
This is slashdot, after all.. Hentai is about as close to real women majority here has gotten so far.
And, hey, I read somewhere that 2/3 (or was it 1/2) of american men won't munch kitty. So this "help, HD, help"-sentiment doesn't surprise me at all. Here comes the real shocker: Some people do it with lights off!
How's that for twisted?
I do hope you do understand that's a dangerous fallacy.
Finnish BASIC EDUCATION is lauded. As in public school. As in until kids are about 16 and they're supposed to get a bit specialized. After that point it's all shot to hell.
Our universities are notably absent on the top 100 crowd worldwide. Also there's ridiculous amounts of red tape and general BS you have to go through if you decide you're in the wrong career or, heaven forbit, you want to further your education a little bit.
As a reference, my 4yr B.Sc degree with 7+ years of work experience would get credited GRAND TOTAL OF 1 BLOODY YEAR of credits if I wanted M.Sc degree in my field of profession.
Thanks, but I wait until the guy with grease shows up, OK?
UYFB and RTFA.
I see you must be new here.
I can't imagine the rubber-stamper at immigration control not letting me through because he can't read my RFID tag... I'm sure a good percentage of non-zapped passports would fail to scan for one reason or another. If enough people did it, then they justn wouldn't be able to rely on them, period.
I see you haven't traveled to US from abroads lately. Fail with your passport chip scan and you are in classified holding pen sans trial for indefinite period before you have chance to say "huh?".
The cost of Windows is hidden in the cost of the machine, so people don't even get presented with a price tag for $300. They don't realize that $300 of the purchase price for the machine was for Windows, and in any case, most people probably wouldn't consider that an unreasonable amount of money to pay for it.
Ha-ha.
Bulk OEM licence is, what, more like $39.95?
If you don't like going by the way of 1st gen anti-sleep pills, there's one alternative for guys who work in rotating shifts or just plain are not morning people -
Melatonin. That's the stuff your brain actually syntesizes by itself to control the day-night cycle. It's not a sleeping drug per se so it's probably not going to help on insomnia, stress etc. But what it does help on is shifting your sleeping cycle around.
I go without a pause from going to bed around 1am and waking up at 8am during working days to staying up until 2-4am and sleeping until 11 or so during weekends. Reverse obviously does not happen that easily. Naturally I can shift my sleeping cycle backwards by about 30mins/day at most. In other direction it easily jumps by 1-2 hours.
With melatonin I can fall asleep "early" at sunday nights so I'm not crippled by 4 hours of sleep due to being unable to fall asleep until 4am.. Works just fine after I take long nap after work, which would also "naturally" keep me up until 3-4am..
The downside is that when the melatonin is processed during the night, you may wake up during the night or too early in the morning.. But all in all I get a lot more sleep than I do "naturally". There are no real side-effects as far as I can tell (beyond weirdness involved with kicking your sleeping cycle around)
There's good stuff on strategy games if you know where to look. Galciv2 is a fine example. Paradox has made many nifty timewasters. Then there's Nival and their Silent storm games (more like tactics but you get the idea, that sort of game doesn't exist on consoles althought there would be no technical reason why it couldn't)
..
Also on not-happening-on-consoles is stuff like Silent Hunter III, Steel Beasts Pro, Dangerous waters, Defcon
And on more mainstream front, Rome and Medieval II, faces of war, company of heroes, Dawn of war and of course, Civ IV..
With the average huge replayability of some of these titles there's simply more good stuff coming out than anyone can play and keep a day job.
Some of these titles are done on a proverbial shoestring budget and with services such as Steam indie developers can get their games to consumers (like me!) without doing the retail dance. Big bucks are in the retail to be sure, but if you have 3-4 guys in eastern europe as dev team, they can make pretty decent living on 10-20k online sales.
Consoles PWN the mainstream gaming for sure, but just like there's always going to be market for small-profile indie films..
Games companies now want to release on consoles only (where piracy is much lower and the lifespan of games can be controlled much better) and the power of video cards on PCs has far exceeded where games are at
.. There's MORE piracy on consoles. A LOT more. If only because, well, lot more gaming going on with consoles.
.. ha-ha.
Oh pshaw. Please don't trot out that tired, tired old straw man argument of "but there's less piracy on consoles"
A case in point, it's been possible for long time to play pirated games on XO but try playing region 1 game on region 2 console
And for PC graphics cards excessive power.. Uhh, yeah, so that's where ATI + Nvidia do the R&D which will be seen on next gen consoles in about 2-3 years. And your problem was again..?
Real GPU power goes to ever increasing schmancy effects such as HDR, resolution has nothing or very little to do with it. FWIW, XO chipset gives pretty good run for money for most PC graphics cards you can buy today.
And for what it's worth, some game genres do not exist for consoles and old farts like me like our strategy games just fine, thanks for asking.
..What choice consumers have? You buy a new PC, you will get vista. You want to play a (PC) game in 2008, you need vista.
So since there's no real alternative as you can't (legally) even transfer the OEM copy of XP you got with your old PC into the new PC, you're stuck with Vista, no matter how it is.
At least this shows that anyone who considers burning trees as a good source of energy (Hint! Renevable!) cannot handle advanced physics concepts like light pressure.
Guess there's no limit to imagination when it comes to thinking of alternatives to building more nuke plants to replace coal/oil.
De facto compatibility then?
High blood pressure is a side effect of being a libertarian in Sweden.
.. Used to be 3-6 months to see an eye doctor if you had eye inflammation or something.
Well, at least you get your health care and medications paid for. Here in the US, we get the high blood pressure from our insane politicians and have to pay for everything by ourselves. Any way you look at it, you lose.
Bein in another happy northern socialist country (Finland) I can say that "getting your health care paid for" is a fantasy.
It got so bad in Finland that they passed a law that the public health care *has to* provide basic surgeries/treatments and let you see a specialist doctor in certain set amount of time. Otherwise the counties have to pay fines.. Ultimately those fines come from taxpayers pocket of course. So county z pays fine to goverment for not providing the legally mandated health care for taxpayer X in time Y by using taxpayer X's money.
Previously how it worked was that they said "Oh, need your hemorroids operated? Well shucks, there's a 2.5 year waiting list! Hope you're not too uncomfortable in the meantime.. Oh and by the way, I happen to work on my days off in this nice private clinic"
Of course the county was always been required to provide the health care, only new thing is that it's enumerated in law what's minimum acceptable service level and fines for patients who do not receive treatment in the given timeframe.
To make things even more amusing, county pays the health care from a portion of the income taxes collected from taxpayers, whereas state decides how the health care is organized and they get most of the income tax money plus VAT. (22% on food btw)
Just life in the welfare state.