Many of the other large bodies is space are more mountainous and uneven specifically because of the fact that they have much greater forces applied to them on a regular basis. Those forces are not evenly distributed across the planet, and cause mountains to rise from tectonic pressure and valleys to be carved from 100km/h sandstorms. The moon has no volcanic activity to create new mountains, and no atmosphere/rain to erode valleys, and as such the only real surface details are the overlapping craters left pitting the surface from billions of years of impact, and dust from atomized meteors.
You basically say:
Moon is relatively flat = Moon is artificial
yet you give no explanation for why the moon should be covered in massive mountains and deep canyons if it were natural.
For military personel it is treason, for anyone else it is not. Especially when the group releasing the documents are not American, they have no duty to keep the secrets of foreign nations. Heck, you are not required to keep the secrets of your own goverment either. When the pentagon papers were published by the New York Times, and Nixon had them taken to court, the supreme court found 6-3 in favor of the New York Times publishing the documents.
"Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell." —Justice Black
So in the closest case we have to Wikileaks, the supreme court ruled it was the newspapers RESPONSIBILITY to report the lies of our government to us. If you want to hide your head in the sand, obey big brother at all times, and never question your government, move to to China, they appreciate your kind there. America was founded on the idea of an open democracy by the people for the people, not some secretive government that disappears people who disagree with it for "treason". But the reason the governments are scared of Wikileaks is because a lot of people in government do things that if their people found out, would have them thrown out in seconds. Every time wikileaks releases more documents, the government starts banging the treason drum, saying it puts our troops at risk. As of yet not one single Wikileak can be blamed for causing the death of an American soldier. They said the same thing about the Afghan war document leak in august. The secretary of defense himself said "the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure." Those were military communications, and these are diplomatic cables, which are far less likely to endanger troops, and far more likely to embarrass two faced diplomats who are being caught saying one thing to the public and another in private.
The truth of the matter is 911 was an incredibly successful attack on the freedoms of Americans. No group had ever been as successful at changing American views and ideals since the founding fathers. Since then large portion of Americans can be herded wherever the government wants you by using words like "National Security" and "terrorism", people willingly give up freedoms that our grandfathers fought for and often paid for with their lives. That one attack did more to bring us closer to a 1984 style big brother controlled America, where any dissent is crushed and called treason, than any effort by any group. People willingly give up their freedoms and rights in exchange for protection from the terrorist bogeymen. Hell they don't even need to get actual protection, most people are perfectly happy with the bullshit security theatre their goverment puts in place (at great public cost) that will do nothing to stop another attack. America may once have been the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it is quickly turning into the land of the totalitarian democracy, the home of cowards who hide behind their governments skirts.
Compared to a digital system that requires power, working software,reception of signal from outside GPS satellites etc...
I want a compass that works 100% of the time, even if it takes minor adjustments every decade. If you think that making things electronic automatically makes them better and more reliable, well then you really haven't been working with technology long. Having to repaint the runways every 10 years is nothing compared to the amount of work that would be necessary to completely switch all planes in the world over to full electronic systems that have 100% guaranteed redundancy or failsafes in case of equipment failure. I don't know about you but my gps gets basic roads wrong all the time, and gets confused when hills/mountains block satellite reception in rural areas, I sure as hell would not trust it to guide me through landing a 747.
With the current plans for 2011, ~50% of NASAs budget is for military satellite launches, and so will have little to do with actual science or long term NASA programs. With what is left NASA has to redesign and replace their shuttle fleet (The last shuttle built, The Space Shuttle Endeavour, cost $1.7B just in construction, that doesn't include maintenance and operation costs). And while $18.69B might seem like a lot, it makes up less than 2% of the governments defense spending. And when they have to scrap and/or shelve their programs and re-focus on new goals every 4 years when the government agenda changes, a few billion really doesn't go far.
A lot of people complain about the amount of money spent on the space program because there are few immediately tangible improvements to American life. Everyone seems to forget that without NASA, we wouldn't have the advanced communications networks, offensive/defensive missile technology, weather satellites (or satellites of any kind). Hell even around the home smoke detectors, water purification systems, the padding in motorcycle/sport helmets and safety gear and even Black and Decker invented portable power tools for NASA. Not to mention that the pure sciences researched there have helped thousands of other fields, helping everything from digital image analysis of medical images such as MRI, to digital photography, to radio communications, electronics, computers, aircraft of all kinds,aerodynamics, remote control devices and thousands of other fields.
You can have it installed on 5 different consoles, and re-install on those 5 consoles as many times as you like. You can also de-activate your account on one of those consoles to get the use back to use on another console.
First you say that background radiation is 3 times higher at coal plants than nuclear and then you say that nuclear has a harder time containing the radioactivity. Personally i would rather see nuclear where there is a slim chance of leakage than coal where it is guaranteed to be pumped into the atmosphere. That combined with the fact that half life is related to radioactivity, so that the materials that are radioactive for 100,000 are much less dangerous than the materials that are radioactive for 100 years, which kind of takes some of the wind out of the sails of the people who scare-monger with worse case storage scenarios. Its still dangerous but with proper precautions is safer than the dangers most other sources of power based on burning fossils, with easier storage of the waste product (rather than literally going up in smoke, dumping the radiation on a wide area). The short half life materials are quickly spent in the reactor, leaving less radioactive material on earth overall, although concentrating the radioactivity into a few pockets of spent refined material.
Are you using the ATI drivers, or the windows update drivers? Windows update drivers don't always offer all the performance of your card. Get the latest drivers for your chip from either ati or your laptop manufacturer and try it out.
Thats just your mind filtering all other distractions and focusing on as much detail of the current situation as possible, and is a trick caused by your memory. For more info: http://www.livescience.com/health/071211-time-slow.html
Agreed, everyone should stop now and actualy read the book (I know, I know this is slashdot, RTFA is a 4 letter swear, but its almost all pictures and only uses small words!). It has very little to do with 9/11 other than the cover (which may have been a bad choice, seeing as how anyone old enough to remember it is too old to be using colouring books) the rest of the book being about fires and floods. At most they should redo the cover to something less controversial and more generaly applicable (flood, fire, earthquake, tornado).
It's not that the video didn't fit,BD-live is a feature that allows downloading of video that was not available when the disk was made, like special features that weren't finished, or more likely new previews for films that are coming out now and not when the disk was made.
The disk gives you the option to download or not, and my PS3 allows me to disable the BD-live downloads entirely, so it's not exactly a problem with Sony, its the implementation of some of the Blueray players out there that have too long of a timeout before they give up on servers that don't answer.
Actualy, so does the PS3 as several people in this thread have pointed out. It's not Sony's fault if some of the blueray device makers don't add the feature. But keep bashing Sony, it might make you feel better about not owning a PS3.
If they are already up to 1% within one week of release, what will that be up to in 6 months? How about if i want to play it again in 2 years, will i still be able to get ahold of someone at EA to get it to activate?
Electronic data is the only place where people allow this kind of crap (imagine if every time you wanted to start your car you had to present your ownership and submit to an ID scan to show it's yours, or every time you want to unzip your fly you have to swipe it with your receipt, ridiculous yes but there are equally ludicrous laws concerning software) but it's spreading wider as more and more media, communications and security are made electronic. Hell, if the DMCA were applied to something like cars, if you locked your keys in the car you would be screwed and have hope the dealer will help you, using a coat hanger to get the door open to get into your property would constitute a crime as a circumvention of the security procedures/anti-theft features of the vehicle.
DRM might make the company managers happy about protecting their investment, but it only harms legitimate users. Pirates will get whatever they want whenever they want and DRM will barely even slow them down. I used to pirate software as a kid until my income rose to the point where I could comfortably afford to spend 60$ on a game that I may or may not enjoy. Yet I still played every single game I wanted to try, without having to worry about putting the CD in the drive every time I wanted to play (often with better performance as a result) due to cracked copies, and I can think of only 2 games (out of literally hundreds that I pirated) that I could not play within the first few days of release, and I was often able to get the full version BEFORE the official release. DRM does nothing because it takes 1 person in this day and age to find a way around it and put the crack on the net, and there are plenty of assembly guru's who consider it a challenge and do it for kicks. Hell, I cracked a few games myself for my own use when I was learning assembly in College.
Everyone says that piracy is so bad on PC because it's so much easier on PC than on console, but that's not necessarily true. I know several people who can mod consoles, and once it's modded you can run any copied game, you can just rent and rip to the HDD with PS2 etc..., whereas with PC you have to find a working copy online and also find a crack that isn't infected with viruses (might be easy for those of us in the know but I have fixed a LOT of computers for people who tried without knowing what they were doing, although bittorrent sites have made it a little easier) Hell, I can mod a PSP in less than 5 minutes with no hardware changes, then all you need is a decent sized memory stick.
If the game companies want to seriously end piracy, several things need to be done to minimized the root reasons for piracy.
1. For the love of god, release finished products. Releasing a bug riddled beta and calling it v1.0, then releasing patches before the first day its out is really, really bad publicity. While patches to balance multiplayer gameplay and to fix weird unforeseeable glitches (game crashes on level 2 if your running an NVidia card with an Amd CPU during a full moon on a Wednesday during a leap year). There will always be bugs on PC due to the sheer number of different configurations out there (and many are badly maintained), but many bugs would have been fixed if the companies had a proper QA procedure. Releasing buggy software is bad, but the fact that most places have a "No PC software returns policy" is even worse. Which brings up #2
2. Allow returns/resale - If I get a game for console that doesn't work or I don't like, I can bring it to the local game shop for a refund or to sell/trade it in for credit on another. With PC I'm stuck with my $50+ coaster. A LOT of people I know won't buy PC
True, but that's also due to the fact that it uses a completely different control system and lower hardware performance (Since it's basically an overclocked last-gen system).
Many games are being written for the Wii only specifically because of the wiimote. The hardware performance is lower than the 360/PS3 in all areas, thus requiring PS3/360 games to be completely rewritten for that console, making it just as easy to write a new game specifically for the Wii as it is having to redo the entire engine, graphics, models, controls etc... of a game written for the more powerful systems, only to wind up with a crippled version of the game with motion sensor controls tacked on. While it doesn't make it impossible to have a great port of a game designed for the larger systems, you will still see many games released for PS3, 360 & PC (even though people have said PCs are dying as a gaming system every console launch since the original NES came out) that won't be making an appearance on the Wii for that very reason, so it may have many exclusives but it will also be exclusively excluded from some next gen game releases.
According to wikipedia, the PS3 has 100 exclusives currently announced and/or out, while the Xbox 360 has 132, which isn't that big of a lead considering the 360 was out for a year ahead of the PS3.
These days saying that the PS3 has no exclusives is about as accurate as saying the Xbox only has FPS games.
All in all though this generation of consoles will have very few true exclusives on either system, so it boils down to whether you want the cheaper Xbox and to pay for the more consistent Internet gaming service, or pay extra for the PS3 to get a blueray player, wireless Internet, Bluetooth headset/keyboard/mouse support, faster load times, but with Internet gaming depending on the developer's implementation.
True, the only system's I've installed with raid have been some of the more recent systems, people setting up media centers (becoming much more popular as various PVRs and DVD recorders support playback from WMP 11 over either USB or network and with the rise of cheap mass storage) and some of the new Sony laptops, and all have been with Vista SP1 which apparently fixed the issue.
iTunes for windows is not exactly known for being a well written piece of software. As has been pointed out earlier in the thread, Apple's iTunes installs their own kernel-level USB drivers instead of using the built in Vista/XP ones and also installs drivers/filters on the DVD/CD drives of the PC which has been known to cause some manufactures drives to stop reading/writing various types of disks or to disappear from the drive listing entirely. Fixing the filter problem disables the burning features of iTunes and causes iTunes to pop up an error message
I have never had a blue screen of death in Vista ever. Period.
That's funny, when I tried to install Vista Ultimate x64 it bluescreened. It couldn't even load the installer. Turns out you can't boot from the DVD when you have 4GB of RAM in your machine. (Isn't the whole reason to go x64 for addressing more ram??)
Once I removed a stick, installed it, installed SP1, and put the stick back did I get any stability.
I haven't tried updating iTunes yet, maybe I won't bother. I'll get nightmares about trying to install Vista again...
It's not a problem with the 4GB, we install several copies of ultimate daily with various makes of computers, with anywhere from 4-8gb of ram, with no problems whatsoever. Pretty much every blue-screen I have seen since vista came out has been the result of a hardware fault or occasionally bad drivers (I'm looking at you Nvidia) it is extremely rare that we get a system that blue-screens with any kind of frequency without solvable cause . And to give you an idea we go through ~20-30 Vista PCs a day at my shop, both repairs and software installs/bloatware cleanups on new units.
A lot of people like to bash vista, and while it's not perfect (damn UAC is poorly implemented) it is better for security in general than the OSes that Microsoft came out with for home users before it. We get many, many times more viruses on systems running older versions of windows than with vista (more than could be attributed to the fact that there are more XP installs out there than Vista).
The biggest problem we see with vista is program compatibility, since vista by default wont allow programs to molest your computer any way they damn well please, but that is fixable in 95% of cases by running the program as administrator. I find it odd that many of the same people who recommend running nothing as root unless absolutely necessary on their Linux box balk at this and complain about Microsoft basically enforcing good programing practices from third party developers. (Jebus, never thought i would have Microsoft & good programing practices in the same sentence). As programs start being written to put their files where Microsoft has been telling them to put them for YEARS this will go away. (Documents in %homepath%\documents folder, program settings in %appdata% instead of hard coding a location that could change with the next windows release etc... Hell there is still software being sold that won't work properly if installed anywhere other than c:\program files\ and that's on XP as well as Vista. Too bad for you if you want it on your second HDD)
70% of the complaints i get are a question of customer education, about the increased security and the new locations and look for everything ("Where is the start button? All i have is this little windows logo button thingy.") 20% are software compatibility (which are fixed most of the time with the aforementioned "run as administrator") The other 10% are usually justifiable complaints about the occasional Vista weirdness and/or performance (usually after upgrading to vista on an old machine or on a system with low ram, or with the default bloatware that came with their PC (HP/COMPAQ are STUFFED with crap)) Vista is slightly slower than XP, but then again XP is slower than W2K, which is slower than 98, which runs slower than 3.11.
Moors law states that transistor counts in integrated circuits will double every 18 months. He made no promises when it came to speed, although the two usualy go hand in hand. It has been a reasonably accurate prediction so far (although its closer to 2x every 24 months in reality) and is still holding up well even though people have been predicting that it will come to an end for the past several years. For instance 2 years ago the AMD Athlon X2 3800+ was a good high end processor, it had 233 million transistors, where the newish AMD Athlon X4 9850 has 450 million transistors.
The good times will eventualy come to an end, we are at the point where the size of the transistor cannot be reduced much further, where the lines are so close electrons can simply jump over to the net track, and where quantum effects are starting to throw some chaos into the equasions. But who knows, scientists are looking for ways to compensate for the quantum effects or to even incorporate them into the functioning of the chip, or to construct multi-layered 3d circuitry, and god know what else someone may think of, so Moores law may continue for some time yet.
As it says under the second picture, it used to be covered by a layer of smooth granite. The Egyptians were fond of recycling the materials of old monuments of Pharoes who have fallen out of favor to build new monuments. Most of the pyramids originaly had a layer of smooth white granite, that would reflect the sun's light and shine. Those granite bricks as well as any bricks they could manage to remove were harshly ripped out to build future monuments. Under the surface, the bricks have very little space between them and you would be hard pressed to find a space to squeeze in a piece of paper, they are amazingly well shaped.
All modern cards are capable of processing compressed textures without having to decompress them. They actualy result in both less memory usage and FASTER processing, at a slight cost of image quality (minor compression artefacts at the higher compression levels)
A 32bit OS can only address 4GB of RAM. If you have 1GB of video memory, that eats up 1GB of the 4GB limit, so yes, 2 1GB cards would halve the total amount of ram available to the system. That is with any cards, weather it's one card or 2 in Crossfire or SLI.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of the other large bodies is space are more mountainous and uneven specifically because of the fact that they have much greater forces applied to them on a regular basis. Those forces are not evenly distributed across the planet, and cause mountains to rise from tectonic pressure and valleys to be carved from 100km/h sandstorms. The moon has no volcanic activity to create new mountains, and no atmosphere/rain to erode valleys, and as such the only real surface details are the overlapping craters left pitting the surface from billions of years of impact, and dust from atomized meteors.
You basically say:
Moon is relatively flat = Moon is artificial
yet you give no explanation for why the moon should be covered in massive mountains and deep canyons if it were natural.
For military personel it is treason, for anyone else it is not. Especially when the group releasing the documents are not American, they have no duty to keep the secrets of foreign nations. Heck, you are not required to keep the secrets of your own goverment either. When the pentagon papers were published by the New York Times, and Nixon had them taken to court, the supreme court found 6-3 in favor of the New York Times publishing the documents.
"Only a free and unrestrained press can effectively expose deception in government. And paramount among the responsibilities of a free press is the duty to prevent any part of the government from deceiving the people and sending them off to distant lands to die of foreign fevers and foreign shot and shell."
—Justice Black
So in the closest case we have to Wikileaks, the supreme court ruled it was the newspapers RESPONSIBILITY to report the lies of our government to us. If you want to hide your head in the sand, obey big brother at all times, and never question your government, move to to China, they appreciate your kind there. America was founded on the idea of an open democracy by the people for the people, not some secretive government that disappears people who disagree with it for "treason". But the reason the governments are scared of Wikileaks is because a lot of people in government do things that if their people found out, would have them thrown out in seconds. Every time wikileaks releases more documents, the government starts banging the treason drum, saying it puts our troops at risk. As of yet not one single Wikileak can be blamed for causing the death of an American soldier. They said the same thing about the Afghan war document leak in august. The secretary of defense himself said "the review to date has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised by this disclosure." Those were military communications, and these are diplomatic cables, which are far less likely to endanger troops, and far more likely to embarrass two faced diplomats who are being caught saying one thing to the public and another in private.
The truth of the matter is 911 was an incredibly successful attack on the freedoms of Americans. No group had ever been as successful at changing American views and ideals since the founding fathers. Since then large portion of Americans can be herded wherever the government wants you by using words like "National Security" and "terrorism", people willingly give up freedoms that our grandfathers fought for and often paid for with their lives. That one attack did more to bring us closer to a 1984 style big brother controlled America, where any dissent is crushed and called treason, than any effort by any group. People willingly give up their freedoms and rights in exchange for protection from the terrorist bogeymen. Hell they don't even need to get actual protection, most people are perfectly happy with the bullshit security theatre their goverment puts in place (at great public cost) that will do nothing to stop another attack. America may once have been the land of the free and the home of the brave, but it is quickly turning into the land of the totalitarian democracy, the home of cowards who hide behind their governments skirts.
Compared to a digital system that requires power, working software,reception of signal from outside GPS satellites etc...
I want a compass that works 100% of the time, even if it takes minor adjustments every decade. If you think that making things electronic automatically makes them better and more reliable, well then you really haven't been working with technology long. Having to repaint the runways every 10 years is nothing compared to the amount of work that would be necessary to completely switch all planes in the world over to full electronic systems that have 100% guaranteed redundancy or failsafes in case of equipment failure. I don't know about you but my gps gets basic roads wrong all the time, and gets confused when hills/mountains block satellite reception in rural areas, I sure as hell would not trust it to guide me through landing a 747.
With the current plans for 2011, ~50% of NASAs budget is for military satellite launches, and so will have little to do with actual science or long term NASA programs. With what is left NASA has to redesign and replace their shuttle fleet (The last shuttle built, The Space Shuttle Endeavour, cost $1.7B just in construction, that doesn't include maintenance and operation costs). And while $18.69B might seem like a lot, it makes up less than 2% of the governments defense spending. And when they have to scrap and/or shelve their programs and re-focus on new goals every 4 years when the government agenda changes, a few billion really doesn't go far.
A lot of people complain about the amount of money spent on the space program because there are few immediately tangible improvements to American life. Everyone seems to forget that without NASA, we wouldn't have the advanced communications networks, offensive/defensive missile technology, weather satellites (or satellites of any kind). Hell even around the home smoke detectors, water purification systems, the padding in motorcycle/sport helmets and safety gear and even Black and Decker invented portable power tools for NASA. Not to mention that the pure sciences researched there have helped thousands of other fields, helping everything from digital image analysis of medical images such as MRI, to digital photography, to radio communications, electronics, computers, aircraft of all kinds,aerodynamics, remote control devices and thousands of other fields.
You can have it installed on 5 different consoles, and re-install on those 5 consoles as many times as you like. You can also de-activate your account on one of those consoles to get the use back to use on another console.
First you say that background radiation is 3 times higher at coal plants than nuclear and then you say that nuclear has a harder time containing the radioactivity. Personally i would rather see nuclear where there is a slim chance of leakage than coal where it is guaranteed to be pumped into the atmosphere. That combined with the fact that half life is related to radioactivity, so that the materials that are radioactive for 100,000 are much less dangerous than the materials that are radioactive for 100 years, which kind of takes some of the wind out of the sails of the people who scare-monger with worse case storage scenarios. Its still dangerous but with proper precautions is safer than the dangers most other sources of power based on burning fossils, with easier storage of the waste product (rather than literally going up in smoke, dumping the radiation on a wide area). The short half life materials are quickly spent in the reactor, leaving less radioactive material on earth overall, although concentrating the radioactivity into a few pockets of spent refined material.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/03/28/29-of-windows-vista-crashes-caused-by-nvidia-drivers/
Yeah, and being one of the main reasons for vista instability is a great feather in Nvidia's cap.
Are you using the ATI drivers, or the windows update drivers? Windows update drivers don't always offer all the performance of your card. Get the latest drivers for your chip from either ati or your laptop manufacturer and try it out.
One fish, two fishes? No.
One money, two moneys? No.
One information, two informations? No.
Mathematics is an uncoutable noun. It does not change depending on number counted.
You do not say "I solved it using Mathematic" when you use only one field of Mathematics.
You do not say "Math(s) WERE my worst subject", you say WAS.
Saying you need an s on Maths because there is an s on Mathematics is like saying you should spell the short form of Biology with a y as in "Bioy"
Thats just your mind filtering all other distractions and focusing on as much detail of the current situation as possible, and is a trick caused by your memory. For more info: http://www.livescience.com/health/071211-time-slow.html
having effectively zero size, your girlfriend must wish you were throwing a hotdog through the halway :P
Agreed, everyone should stop now and actualy read the book (I know, I know this is slashdot, RTFA is a 4 letter swear, but its almost all pictures and only uses small words!). It has very little to do with 9/11 other than the cover (which may have been a bad choice, seeing as how anyone old enough to remember it is too old to be using colouring books) the rest of the book being about fires and floods. At most they should redo the cover to something less controversial and more generaly applicable (flood, fire, earthquake, tornado).
It's not that the video didn't fit ,BD-live is a feature that allows downloading of video that was not available when the disk was made, like special features that weren't finished, or more likely new previews for films that are coming out now and not when the disk was made.
The disk gives you the option to download or not, and my PS3 allows me to disable the BD-live downloads entirely, so it's not exactly a problem with Sony, its the implementation of some of the Blueray players out there that have too long of a timeout before they give up on servers that don't answer.
Actualy, so does the PS3 as several people in this thread have pointed out. It's not Sony's fault if some of the blueray device makers don't add the feature. But keep bashing Sony, it might make you feel better about not owning a PS3.
If they are already up to 1% within one week of release, what will that be up to in 6 months? How about if i want to play it again in 2 years, will i still be able to get ahold of someone at EA to get it to activate?
Electronic data is the only place where people allow this kind of crap (imagine if every time you wanted to start your car you had to present your ownership and submit to an ID scan to show it's yours, or every time you want to unzip your fly you have to swipe it with your receipt, ridiculous yes but there are equally ludicrous laws concerning software) but it's spreading wider as more and more media, communications and security are made electronic. Hell, if the DMCA were applied to something like cars, if you locked your keys in the car you would be screwed and have hope the dealer will help you, using a coat hanger to get the door open to get into your property would constitute a crime as a circumvention of the security procedures/anti-theft features of the vehicle.
DRM might make the company managers happy about protecting their investment, but it only harms legitimate users. Pirates will get whatever they want whenever they want and DRM will barely even slow them down. I used to pirate software as a kid until my income rose to the point where I could comfortably afford to spend 60$ on a game that I may or may not enjoy. Yet I still played every single game I wanted to try, without having to worry about putting the CD in the drive every time I wanted to play (often with better performance as a result) due to cracked copies, and I can think of only 2 games (out of literally hundreds that I pirated) that I could not play within the first few days of release, and I was often able to get the full version BEFORE the official release. DRM does nothing because it takes 1 person in this day and age to find a way around it and put the crack on the net, and there are plenty of assembly guru's who consider it a challenge and do it for kicks. Hell, I cracked a few games myself for my own use when I was learning assembly in College.
Everyone says that piracy is so bad on PC because it's so much easier on PC than on console, but that's not necessarily true. I know several people who can mod consoles, and once it's modded you can run any copied game, you can just rent and rip to the HDD with PS2 etc..., whereas with PC you have to find a working copy online and also find a crack that isn't infected with viruses (might be easy for those of us in the know but I have fixed a LOT of computers for people who tried without knowing what they were doing, although bittorrent sites have made it a little easier) Hell, I can mod a PSP in less than 5 minutes with no hardware changes, then all you need is a decent sized memory stick.
If the game companies want to seriously end piracy, several things need to be done to minimized the root reasons for piracy.
1. For the love of god, release finished products. Releasing a bug riddled beta and calling it v1.0, then releasing patches before the first day its out is really, really bad publicity. While patches to balance multiplayer gameplay and to fix weird unforeseeable glitches (game crashes on level 2 if your running an NVidia card with an Amd CPU during a full moon on a Wednesday during a leap year). There will always be bugs on PC due to the sheer number of different configurations out there (and many are badly maintained), but many bugs would have been fixed if the companies had a proper QA procedure. Releasing buggy software is bad, but the fact that most places have a "No PC software returns policy" is even worse. Which brings up #2
2. Allow returns/resale - If I get a game for console that doesn't work or I don't like, I can bring it to the local game shop for a refund or to sell/trade it in for credit on another. With PC I'm stuck with my $50+ coaster. A LOT of people I know won't buy PC
True, but that's also due to the fact that it uses a completely different control system and lower hardware performance (Since it's basically an overclocked last-gen system).
Many games are being written for the Wii only specifically because of the wiimote. The hardware performance is lower than the 360/PS3 in all areas, thus requiring PS3/360 games to be completely rewritten for that console, making it just as easy to write a new game specifically for the Wii as it is having to redo the entire engine, graphics, models, controls etc... of a game written for the more powerful systems, only to wind up with a crippled version of the game with motion sensor controls tacked on. While it doesn't make it impossible to have a great port of a game designed for the larger systems, you will still see many games released for PS3, 360 & PC (even though people have said PCs are dying as a gaming system every console launch since the original NES came out) that won't be making an appearance on the Wii for that very reason, so it may have many exclusives but it will also be exclusively excluded from some next gen game releases.
According to wikipedia, the PS3 has 100 exclusives currently announced and/or out, while the Xbox 360 has 132, which isn't that big of a lead considering the 360 was out for a year ahead of the PS3.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:PlayStation_3-only_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Xbox_360-only_games
These days saying that the PS3 has no exclusives is about as accurate as saying the Xbox only has FPS games.
All in all though this generation of consoles will have very few true exclusives on either system, so it boils down to whether you want the cheaper Xbox and to pay for the more consistent Internet gaming service, or pay extra for the PS3 to get a blueray player, wireless Internet, Bluetooth headset/keyboard/mouse support, faster load times, but with Internet gaming depending on the developer's implementation.
True, the only system's I've installed with raid have been some of the more recent systems, people setting up media centers (becoming much more popular as various PVRs and DVD recorders support playback from WMP 11 over either USB or network and with the rise of cheap mass storage) and some of the new Sony laptops, and all have been with Vista SP1 which apparently fixed the issue.
iTunes for windows is not exactly known for being a well written piece of software. As has been pointed out earlier in the thread, Apple's iTunes installs their own kernel-level USB drivers instead of using the built in Vista/XP ones and also installs drivers/filters on the DVD/CD drives of the PC which has been known to cause some manufactures drives to stop reading/writing various types of disks or to disappear from the drive listing entirely. Fixing the filter problem disables the burning features of iTunes and causes iTunes to pop up an error message
http://wizardcreations.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/itunes-makes-my-cddvd-drive-disappear/
Any OS, including linux, with badly written drivers can crash.
This isn't the first time iPods have caused damage to windows systems.
http://www.apple.com/support/windowsvirus/
That's funny, when I tried to install Vista Ultimate x64 it bluescreened. It couldn't even load the installer. Turns out you can't boot from the DVD when you have 4GB of RAM in your machine. (Isn't the whole reason to go x64 for addressing more ram??)
Once I removed a stick, installed it, installed SP1, and put the stick back did I get any stability.
I haven't tried updating iTunes yet, maybe I won't bother. I'll get nightmares about trying to install Vista again...
It's not a problem with the 4GB, we install several copies of ultimate daily with various makes of computers, with anywhere from 4-8gb of ram, with no problems whatsoever. Pretty much every blue-screen I have seen since vista came out has been the result of a hardware fault or occasionally bad drivers (I'm looking at you Nvidia) it is extremely rare that we get a system that blue-screens with any kind of frequency without solvable cause . And to give you an idea we go through ~20-30 Vista PCs a day at my shop, both repairs and software installs/bloatware cleanups on new units.
A lot of people like to bash vista, and while it's not perfect (damn UAC is poorly implemented) it is better for security in general than the OSes that Microsoft came out with for home users before it. We get many, many times more viruses on systems running older versions of windows than with vista (more than could be attributed to the fact that there are more XP installs out there than Vista).
The biggest problem we see with vista is program compatibility, since vista by default wont allow programs to molest your computer any way they damn well please, but that is fixable in 95% of cases by running the program as administrator. I find it odd that many of the same people who recommend running nothing as root unless absolutely necessary on their Linux box balk at this and complain about Microsoft basically enforcing good programing practices from third party developers. (Jebus, never thought i would have Microsoft & good programing practices in the same sentence). As programs start being written to put their files where Microsoft has been telling them to put them for YEARS this will go away. (Documents in %homepath%\documents folder, program settings in %appdata% instead of hard coding a location that could change with the next windows release etc... Hell there is still software being sold that won't work properly if installed anywhere other than c:\program files\ and that's on XP as well as Vista. Too bad for you if you want it on your second HDD)
70% of the complaints i get are a question of customer education, about the increased security and the new locations and look for everything ("Where is the start button? All i have is this little windows logo button thingy.") 20% are software compatibility (which are fixed most of the time with the aforementioned "run as administrator") The other 10% are usually justifiable complaints about the occasional Vista weirdness and/or performance (usually after upgrading to vista on an old machine or on a system with low ram, or with the default bloatware that came with their PC (HP/COMPAQ are STUFFED with crap)) Vista is slightly slower than XP, but then again XP is slower than W2K, which is slower than 98, which runs slower than 3.11.
Moors law states that transistor counts in integrated circuits will double every 18 months. He made no promises when it came to speed, although the two usualy go hand in hand. It has been a reasonably accurate prediction so far (although its closer to 2x every 24 months in reality) and is still holding up well even though people have been predicting that it will come to an end for the past several years. For instance 2 years ago the AMD Athlon X2 3800+ was a good high end processor, it had 233 million transistors, where the newish AMD Athlon X4 9850 has 450 million transistors.
The good times will eventualy come to an end, we are at the point where the size of the transistor cannot be reduced much further, where the lines are so close electrons can simply jump over to the net track, and where quantum effects are starting to throw some chaos into the equasions. But who knows, scientists are looking for ways to compensate for the quantum effects or to even incorporate them into the functioning of the chip, or to construct multi-layered 3d circuitry, and god know what else someone may think of, so Moores law may continue for some time yet.
As it says under the second picture, it used to be covered by a layer of smooth granite. The Egyptians were fond of recycling the materials of old monuments of Pharoes who have fallen out of favor to build new monuments. Most of the pyramids originaly had a layer of smooth white granite, that would reflect the sun's light and shine. Those granite bricks as well as any bricks they could manage to remove were harshly ripped out to build future monuments. Under the surface, the bricks have very little space between them and you would be hard pressed to find a space to squeeze in a piece of paper, they are amazingly well shaped.
All modern cards are capable of processing compressed textures without having to decompress them. They actualy result in both less memory usage and FASTER processing, at a slight cost of image quality (minor compression artefacts at the higher compression levels)
A 32bit OS can only address 4GB of RAM. If you have 1GB of video memory, that eats up 1GB of the 4GB limit, so yes, 2 1GB cards would halve the total amount of ram available to the system. That is with any cards, weather it's one card or 2 in Crossfire or SLI.
A good article on it is here: http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm
What the hell was that? Either english is your second language or you REALY need to lay off the crack pipe.