I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, they continue to abuse their position. On the other hand, as others have pointed out, government interference doesn't tend to "go away" when the problem is gone in some of the cases.
How about we try something really different.
For the next two years, any Windows ad must include the tag line (emphasized somewhere, not hidden)
The operating system you should chose for your computer
It's not outright annoying to them (as requiring "it is possible to use something other than Windows on your computer" would be). It's not arguably false (as "The best operating system you could chose" would be). It sounds like something that would normally be in an ad.
But it will get people questioning... "What do you mean chose?" And spreading that fact is about the best thing we could do.
Off the wall (compared to normal sentences/penalties)? Yes.
Other choices? How about:
We realize you have a choice in operating systems, and we thank you for choosing Windows
I would support Ala Carte cable. It'd love it. That said, I figured I should provide a little perspective.
I was reading the previous issue of Forbes a day or to ago (not the current one the one before that) and they had a story about the guy behind High School Musical and how Disney has made their channel much more popular than it used to be (at the expense of quality and watchability, in my opinion).
The article mentioned that Disney is the 4th or 5th most expensive cable channel, and costs 89 cents per subscriber for a cable company to buy the rights to show. I'm not positive that's right, but it was in the 80s.
This would be fantastic. Look at the quality of programming that HBO and Showtime must produce to keep getting viewers. Now try to watch Spike TV for a few minutes. That's what competition does.
I agree completely, but that is what brings me to the question that I posed in my post:
When does it stop being privacy invasion of one person and become just looking at an aggregate group (and thus no longer a real privacy problem)? How many people or sewer connections or whatever?
I've got to say this is a very interesting idea. I've never heard anything like this.
That said, I'd like to ask a question of/.ers. Many here are obviously against anything they see as an encroachment of their privacy. I agree with them to varying degrees. But in this case, where would you draw the line and why? Is there really a privacy concern at testing from the waste water from a whole city or region? But what if you are testing at the main sewer pipe that serves 20k people? How about 10k? What about a neighborhood of 500?
As much as the "well they are breaking the law/what do you have to hide" appeals to me, I wouldn't support testing individual houses (or probably anything under a large chunk, say 10k).
Why 10k? It is quite anonymous, yet would be small enough that it might provide some good relative data as to where certain drugs are more of a problem (especially in bigger cities, like 1 million+).
Now once your waste water leaves your house and enters the pipes, it's no longer your property, right? Once garbage is placed out on the street (or in the garbage truck) it is no longer your property and the police can search it without a warrant right? This is the same thing isn't it? If not, when would waste water cease to be "yours"; considering that it is quickly mixed (permanently) with other waste water and unrecoverable.
Yes, but there will still be issues. They have to simulate all the Windows stuff, the way it works, etc. They have to simulate the windows input system for example, keeping their own queue of events (I'm guessing). Some things can be directly mapped, some cant. It's like WINE (which it is based on). Running a program will almost certainly be slower. It may be impreceptable, it may be minor, or (in the case of things like games) it may be major.
It's Apple's name for basically a partitioner, a boot loader, and a set of drivers.
I have a MacBook Pro and I use it for one thing and one thing only: Windows for Half-Life 2. It runs fantastic, but since Windows is on the bare metal, this is basically hat you'd expect.
If you don't want to go that route (which is really the only good way to do things right now for games) there is through these special game packages (they should work pretty well, but don't expect decent performance I'm betting).
Past that is Parallels (which is amazing) and it's new ability to run Direct3D stuff. That said, Half-Life 2 runs with all the details on very well on my MacBook Pro at full resolution (15" model). In Parallels it stutters unbearably at 640x480 with lower details. We are talking up to 5 (yes 5!) FPS. This is partly due to RAM (when I'm in Windows, it's got a full 2 gigs, when in OS X it has to share so it gets about a gig), partly due to optimization (they just released that not too long ago, they can tweak for better performance), partly due to the nature of Parallels (it will never be as fast as running native). For simpler things I'm sure it will run great. I bet you would have no problem with Half-Life, or Quake 3, or any other game from more than a few years ago. But for something as complex and detailed as HL2, it wasn't great.
Note that HL2 was the only thing I tested as that's all I was really interested in playing.
I like games. I have a Mac. But I also have consoles. If I wanted to play Madden, I could. It doesn't bother me that EA isn't doing this. Considering what many of their games are like (quality wise), this is probably a boon.
In all seriousness though, it doesn't matter too much. There are tons of web games. There are lots of console games (currently playing MGS: Portable Ops, FFXII, Picross DS, Chrono Trigger, and Metroid Prime 3 coming very very soon). I can boot into Windows for games that I find interesting enough (I'm playing through Half-Life 2 that way right now, then I've got episodes 1 and 2, and BioShock which I'm downloading as I type). There are also games that are available on the Mac (current in that category for me: Diner Dash - Flo on the Go).
Macs aren't great game machines. I'd like them to be. The graphics chip in the Mini is really anemic. The chips in the iMacs are... eh. The MacBooks share the Mini's chip. The MacBook Pros (like I have) have some pretty decent chips (HL2 runs great at full rez), but the MBP is expensive. The graphics cards in the Mac Pro are, from my understanding, just OK unless you pony up even more cash above and beyond the base Mac Pro price. If you just want games, you will get WAY better bang for your buck buying a PC (or a PC and a console).
Let's not forget that these games are NOT native. They are using TransGaming's Cider platform. While I am very interested in this technologically (has anyone ever used this kind of translation layer for so many big games) and how it performs, etc... these are not native games. They won't run that well compared to how they should. They are probably bad ports (after all, the last few EA games I played on Windows didn't seem to run without occasional issues).
Now as other have mentioned, 3 or 4 games are now available for purchase off of Apple's store. That said, there are still others that are not. Some were delayed for quite a bit, and one that came out just a week or so ago didn't get a simultaneous release. We'll see how they do in the future but given how well the Mac is set up for games right now and the size of its market I'm not that surprised.
I've got a Series 3 (fanstastic device). I've read those stories. I offered to install the cards myself. I'm smart enough to stick two cards in two slots and call the numbers on them in. Heck, TiVo included a nice guide on how to install them... for the installers. That's how frequently cable cards were used last year when the Series 3 came out.
I had some decent luck. When I called Comcast after getting my S3 the person who answered the phone actually knew what a cable card was (which was an improvement of some of the stories I've heard). I set up an appointment and a week or so later when it arrived I got my cards. They did function to a certain degree (the channel mapping worked, for example).
That said, I couldn't watch certain channels (Discovery HD being the one that really got me). They twice sent out technicians to check signal level and other things. I had to confirm everything with them, and they discussed replacing the cards and everything. That's what the third guy came out to do.
He figured it out in 30 seconds on a hunch.
I didn't have HDTV. I could watch local HD channels thanks to the must-carry rules, but they hadn't enabled HDTV on my account, so the channels (which had great strength) were black (because they weren't authorized).
This despite how I upgraded my package. "I just got an HDTV and would like HDTV service." "So this will give me all you HDTV channels that aren't premium like HBO?", "And I'll get Discovery HD, right?"
I love HDTV. I especially love how Comcast really can't screw up the picture quality like they can with all my analog channels. But they managed to mess up putting two identicle PCMCIA cards into two identical slots and clicking the appropriate box on their sales screen for the package I specifically asked for.
I got off REAL easy compared to some others. This may be due to lack of complete and utter incompetence on my local Comcast's part. This may be due to me waiting a month or two after the S3 came out to buy it (so others already went through things). This may have just been the best luck I've ever had with Comcast.
I've setup at least a half-dozen DirecTV receivers over the years. Easy a pie. There is no technical reason I couldn't do the cable card install myself. The only reason I can think of would be they wanted the service charge. Worst case scenario, it didn't work and they had to send a guy out anyway. I'd have taken that risk.
Worse than the hassles of getting the cards installed are the prices for the things. I'm being charged a few dollars a month for each card, despite the fact both are in the same device (and there are two only because Comcast isn't using multi-stream cards, I'm guessing so they can charge more). Some people don't get charged at all (at least for the first TV). Some people get charged $10 or more per month per card. From what I remember reading it isn't consistent in operators. It seems to be up to the local Comcast, Time Warner, or whatever office how they want to handle it.
Considering those problems, the worries about copying (which is why the SATA port on the S3 hasn't been active and TiVo2Go and Multi-Room Viewing don't work, stupid Cable Labs) I'm not surprised they aren't rushing to let Windows Media Center boxes work, let alone Media Center boxes built by individuals and not companies like Alienware.
I'm completely aware of their name. I also think that M$ is juvenile, same with Worst Buy. But if you had had the experiences I and my neighbors have had with Comcast, you'd use the same name. In fact, Comcrud is not what I would like to call them, but I don't like to cuss, even typing on the 'net. You can see a decent overview of why I despise them in this comment I wrote in this discussion. I have had decent experiences with some MS software (2K and XP weren't bad, they have made some good games, etc) and Best Buy (they generally have a game I'm after in stock, and I know enough to avoid their warranty scams and such). I haven't had any good experiences with Comcast.
I forgot to mention their Cable Card ineptitude in my post I linked to above. That was almost impressive.
I've posted this before, but I'll post it again. Now I'll ignore other issues about them (like G4 and ruining TechTV). We had a little cable company (that may or may not have been a co-op, I'm not sure). They were cheap, they had good service. The quality was perfectly fair. The cable modem speed was wicked fast (partially because there were fewer people then).
Then Comcast bought them
Our service has gone down. Our cable bill has gone up at least $20 total per month. The internet speed is MUCH slower (it's become more popular, but they capped the things almost immediately). We have far more cable drop-outs than we used to.
My local channels look about the same or better though an antenna (metro area is up to 20mi plus away) than through the cable. The other analog channels (like Sci-Fi, etc) look OK. Digital looks great, but that's digital.
I used to have DirecTV who I loved. The picture quality was MUCH better. But I switched back to Comcast to save money, because I was going HDTV with a TiVo Series 3 (I'm mad about DTV dropping TiVo, and Comcast can't screw up HDTV much), and I can put up with other channels like SciFi.
Now they haven't added much at all to my lineup in the last year or so. They added... Golf HD and a few in-demand channels which I can't use and don't care about. No Anime network. No other HDTV channels like HDNet. They've done basically nothing.
I've been to the college town about 5 miles from my house. Their cable TV rates are criminal compared to mine. Their cable modems are way faster. They have competition (between the dorms, DSL, etc). I have none. About 10 miles away in the large suburb of the local metro, there are areas with competition between two cable companies or cable and DSL and again things are way better.
Comcast hasn't done a single good thing for us, not to mention their ineptitude.
For example, most of the outlets in our house get a pretty bad analog signal... with noticeable interference. Their solution was to try a booster. Didn't work. No other checking, no nothing. Just "too bad". Now I'm talking two rooms, right next to each other, one looks pretty good the other has noticeable problems. I don't know if it is the way our house was wired (I wouldn't put it past those guys, they were not bright), but Comcast really didn't try to fix it. They just installed a booster (which I could have done), overcharged us for it and the call, and threw their hands up.
That's what I pay you $60-$70 a month for. Don't complain to me. In the time I have had my cable internet service (since the first day it was available where I live)... Comcrud has raised rates, capped downloads, slowed speeds, raised rates, had dropouts, raised rates, etc. I really don't care that you are "overwhelmed". Maybe you shouldn't have sold 10k people 5 Mb connections when you only have a total of 500 Mbps of bandwidth. Maybe you shouldn't have lied.
Last week we got a letter in the mail that said that our streets would soon be torn up as AT&T would be replacing our terrible old copper with fiber to the home (our copper is bad, no DSL). We should be able to sign-up for their TV and internet service within about a year (so they say, I'd guess 1.5-2).
Of course, Comcrud has also dropped the quality of our cable TV, added next to no new channels, raised rates, and more. I would guess we'll switch off that too to U-Verse.
Comcrud is already in deep trouble in this area now that they will have actual competition. That alone will cause them big problems. But soon people won't be able to sign-up for their "ultra high speed" internet service so they can download music (which you have to pay for), download movies wicked fast (but you can't, and you probably have to pay for it), and surf at lightning speeds (if they aren't having a random outage)?
Why don't they do like many businesses, and stop selling services they can't provide.
Then again, I'm sure just about other/.er has the same sympathy I do for the lying US broadband industry.
Fair enough. That's odd though, I wonder why I didn't see that when I did my search. That was said in jest, as you say the tone from text can be tough to tell.
Did MS care to explain what kind of undocumented,hidden quantum computing (!) routines in Vista needed for DX 10 running?
I can explain that one. I read a post a while back where someone who was in the know explained it (it was on one of the Microsoft blogs, I think). DX 10 contained virtualized graphics memory (that may not be the right term). Like system memory, each program would get it's own addresses and you could page in and out graphics data. This is a big feature. It also required kernel and GDI changes. This is why DX 10 could only run on Vista.
Someone (I think it was NVidia), couldn't get it done in time.
So it ended up optional in the spec (or moved out completely, I don't remember). The people who did do it (ATI, I think) got an unfair shake. Now without that feature, there is no technical reason DX 10 can't be run on XP without a few small innocuous changes. But they don't have time at this point (or a business reason).
DX 10 being only on Vista was based on a very valid techical reason... that they gave up on and removed.
I specifically referenced the book "The Population Bomb". I am aware people are starving. It's a sad fact. The that book proposed we would see a situation where even people in the richest 1st world countries (like the US and European nations) would be starving in the streets. This would be due to the increase in the world's population. Basically the world was supposed to turn into the world of the movie Soylent Green.
But it never happened.
Science got us higher yield crops. We got crops that could grow in less arable land than before. We got better farming methods. If farming was still suck in the '50s or '60s and we had today's population, the book's prediction may have happened. But that didn't happen.
Instead, people in the US (and soon other rich nations) pay billions per year for books and seminars and such on how to starve themselves just the right amount to lose weight.
Of course, your snarky comment was wasteful as well. In my large post about what I disliked about what I see as the misdirection in the current global-warming debate and you took one sentence and tried to make me look insensitive based on that. Maybe that's because you disagree with my views and don't want to post a valid response (possibly because you can't articulate your point and back it up). Maybe you are just trying to troll. Maybe you are posting from a 3rd world country and have been doing food aid all day and are frustrated with the problem so that was the part of my post that stood out to you.
That's very interesting. I used the search on Safari and didn't find the word "idiot" anywhere on this page until I came to your post. It certainly wasn't in mine.
Your comment is the kind that generally keeps me out of these kind of discussions. I pointed out that I have somewhat valid questions about the idea that humans are causing global warming. I pointed out that the media doesn't tend to question these kind of things well enough and is prone to hyping thing out of proportion. I pointed out that all that annoyed me (and yes, my comment did get rant-like, sorry about that).
I'm not calling anyone an idiot over this. All I said was I dislike the people who take media reports at face value as gospel. You on the other hand...
I believe I said in my post that I'm not against "fixing" global warming. If I didn't say it in that post I know I've said it in others. Cutting emissions is a good goal. There is tons more smog where I live now than 10 years ago. I'm just not a fan of everything being related to the global warming boogyman. Smog makes asthma worse, but no one is talking about that now, because that same pollution might cause global temperatures to go up, maybe. We can PROVE the asthma thing (and others), but since global warming is the in thing, all environmental debates must be framed with it as a reference.
I meant my post more as a comparison about how many people seem to use global warming almost as a religion right now, as other disasters (possibly real or just imagined) have been used in the past. I think the globe probably is warming up.
The real irony here is you called me an idiot for calling other people who I disagree with idiots. But I didn't do that, and you seem to agree with me.
As I said in my post, I don't disbelieve that the globe is warming, I just question that the evidence of causality is as strong as it is usually presented. I mentioned all those disasters to come to point out the trend of the media likes to latch on to something (even with tenuous evidence in many of those cases) and just promote it as fact to death (which is my biggest problem with global warming, how the media is presenting everything).
Glad you liked it. I was wondering if I'd get marked troll. I avoid many discussions here (mostly those in politics, but also most global warming debates) for that reason. Most people on those issues (and many others) don't want to debate, they just want to call the other sides idiots. Despite all the group-think, the moderation system shines pretty well at elevating well written but anti-groupthink posts (which I've seen in articles FAR more controversial than this).
Even though the discussion comes from such a small section of the users here, the discourse usually always seems to contain well informed experts and often incredibly insightful points that I would have never thought of (or heard in mainstream coverage).
Of course, in my comment I didn't question if the globe actually was warming. I even said I basically agree with it. I questioned the science behind why it was warming, saying that I didn't think it was as conclusive as other think.
I agree with him completely. There is no questioning of global warming. It's now a fact. The sun revolves around the earth. To suggest otherwise means you're an idiot.
Let's ignore that CO2 is not the largest part of our atmosphere, and something else (say methane) may be responsible. Let's ignore the fact we're coming off an ice age. Let's the history of "science facts" that the media has trumpeted in the last 40 years or so (remember when we would all die in a massive world-wide starvation as foretold in "The Population Bomb"?, the new ice age they said would come in the by the 80s? The mass extinction caused by DDT?) Let's ignore the fact that Mars is getting hotter too and that it seems to be the Sun's fault. How about that acid rain that would become a blight on the planet making it impossible to go outside while it was raining in the US? And where are those empty south american countries that lost so many trees the planet can't produce enough oxygen to supply all the people in the world.
Is the globe getting warmer? Seems like it. Is it the fault of humans? I wonder. Is it the fault of CO2? I wonder. I don't care if you want to reduce pollution and emissions and such. When I moved to my current location 9 years ago or so, the sky was clear. We now have plenty of smog. Asthma is going up in the US. There are plenty of reasons to do these kind of things. But no one talks about that any more. If we want to cut car exhaust, it's to stop the planet from warming, not so the air isn't brown. If we want to reduce power plant emissions it is to reduce the warming of the globe, not because the plant has been putting a fine layer of soot on everything downwind.
Global warming is the latest media boogeyman. I'm just sick of hearing about it. I'm sick of how it's the US's fault. China pollutes more than us now. Go bug them. Go help them stop burning so many coal blocks for heat. Go help them make cleaner cars affordable. Go help India. Go help Europe (which is getting close to our levels). Fight the BIG sources (that will only grow bigger). When a dam is leaking, you plug the BIG leak that will soon be letting out 20,000 gallons a minute, not 5 little holes that let a few gallons through per day.
I'm sick of this global warming stuff, and how I've basically never seen it questioned in the mass media (except by other people who question it and immediately get called morons for questioning).
Global warming, as it is discussed in the US, seems more like a religion than anything else to me at this point.
Can you give me a good reason why the number from a government scientist who's report was used to "prove" global warming and then later complained he was censored for his actions being disproved shouldn't be reported just as big as the original story?
Remember kids. Call the president a child molester, that's page one. Print the retraction (if at all), that's page 37b in tiny type 6 months later between an ad for Hardee's and Mission Impossible 12.
I've been saying this all along. With many stories here on/. people say "But no one will care about the Wii because it can't do HD" and this kind of thing was my answer to that (although I'm surprised the numbers for HD game playing are THAT LOW). I submitted this myself yesterday (although this write-up looks better and sources Ars). I have a Wii plugged into my HDTV and love it. I don't have a 360 yet (thinking of getting one) and the PS3 doesn't have any games I care about yet (except for MGS4, but that won't be out for a while).
This shouldn't be surprising. The TV ads for the 360 and PS3 don't mention HD, and Joe Bob buys an HDTV and watches over-the-air analog stations and thinks that's HD.
Mostly, I'd say this is a failure of marketing. That said, it's a good shot against the "no one wants non-HD stuff" argument.
Why, when there is an article about something visual, especially a revolutionary new visualization system, do they never show pictures.
I hate that.
If you are reporting on a neat visual thingy,... SHOW ME THE THINGY. Even a picture of the machine would be a plus, even if it looks exactly like an MRI or some other machine. I don't care if the picture may mean nothing to me. Put a little caption trying to explain it. It doesn't matter, show me SOMETHING.
I'm aware. But we can adjust it (if you are between 5'5" and 6', your BMI should be X. If you are 6' to 6'5", it should be Y). We can put in an exception for if you can prove you are health. We can just set the "fat point" really high initially. We can use another scale or alter the way BMI is calculated.
I see a 1 GHz T1 doing quite well compared to a 2.4 GHz Opteron and a 3 GHz Xeon. Things have improved on the Intel front, but the T2 should do quite well for the workloads it is designed for. Not only does it have more threads (and I think a better memory controller), but now it has one FPU per core instead of 1 per chip. That means 8x as many FPUs. That was the real weak point and now it has been addressed.
I can't wait to see benchmarks of this chip. It is far more interesting than "the same chip for 3 years ago, now 0.3 GHz faster" or "now with one more micro-op fuser and a 2% better branch decoder."
There are people like that. You don't think they could provide an exception if you can prove you are in good health?
Propose a better measure than BMI, if you want (I'll agree it's not ideal).
But charge 'em more. I've lost tons of weight, I'm not going to subsidize your laziness and not wanting to be "uncomfortable" by having to do things like watch what you eat or home much you move.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, they continue to abuse their position. On the other hand, as others have pointed out, government interference doesn't tend to "go away" when the problem is gone in some of the cases.
How about we try something really different.
For the next two years, any Windows ad must include the tag line (emphasized somewhere, not hidden)
The operating system you should chose for your computerIt's not outright annoying to them (as requiring "it is possible to use something other than Windows on your computer" would be). It's not arguably false (as "The best operating system you could chose" would be). It sounds like something that would normally be in an ad.
But it will get people questioning... "What do you mean chose?" And spreading that fact is about the best thing we could do.
Off the wall (compared to normal sentences/penalties)? Yes.
Other choices? How about:
We realize you have a choice in operating systems, and we thank you for choosing WindowsSorry to reply to myself, but that's 89 centers per subscriber per month. Forgot that last part.
I would support Ala Carte cable. It'd love it. That said, I figured I should provide a little perspective.
I was reading the previous issue of Forbes a day or to ago (not the current one the one before that) and they had a story about the guy behind High School Musical and how Disney has made their channel much more popular than it used to be (at the expense of quality and watchability, in my opinion).
The article mentioned that Disney is the 4th or 5th most expensive cable channel, and costs 89 cents per subscriber for a cable company to buy the rights to show. I'm not positive that's right, but it was in the 80s.
This would be fantastic. Look at the quality of programming that HBO and Showtime must produce to keep getting viewers. Now try to watch Spike TV for a few minutes. That's what competition does.
I agree completely, but that is what brings me to the question that I posed in my post:
When does it stop being privacy invasion of one person and become just looking at an aggregate group (and thus no longer a real privacy problem)? How many people or sewer connections or whatever?
I've got to say this is a very interesting idea. I've never heard anything like this.
That said, I'd like to ask a question of /.ers. Many here are obviously against anything they see as an encroachment of their privacy. I agree with them to varying degrees. But in this case, where would you draw the line and why? Is there really a privacy concern at testing from the waste water from a whole city or region? But what if you are testing at the main sewer pipe that serves 20k people? How about 10k? What about a neighborhood of 500?
As much as the "well they are breaking the law/what do you have to hide" appeals to me, I wouldn't support testing individual houses (or probably anything under a large chunk, say 10k).
Why 10k? It is quite anonymous, yet would be small enough that it might provide some good relative data as to where certain drugs are more of a problem (especially in bigger cities, like 1 million+).
Now once your waste water leaves your house and enters the pipes, it's no longer your property, right? Once garbage is placed out on the street (or in the garbage truck) it is no longer your property and the police can search it without a warrant right? This is the same thing isn't it? If not, when would waste water cease to be "yours"; considering that it is quickly mixed (permanently) with other waste water and unrecoverable.
Just wondering how you guys would draw the line.
Yes, but there will still be issues. They have to simulate all the Windows stuff, the way it works, etc. They have to simulate the windows input system for example, keeping their own queue of events (I'm guessing). Some things can be directly mapped, some cant. It's like WINE (which it is based on). Running a program will almost certainly be slower. It may be impreceptable, it may be minor, or (in the case of things like games) it may be major.
Boot Camp is Windows.
It's Apple's name for basically a partitioner, a boot loader, and a set of drivers.
I have a MacBook Pro and I use it for one thing and one thing only: Windows for Half-Life 2. It runs fantastic, but since Windows is on the bare metal, this is basically hat you'd expect.
If you don't want to go that route (which is really the only good way to do things right now for games) there is through these special game packages (they should work pretty well, but don't expect decent performance I'm betting).
Past that is Parallels (which is amazing) and it's new ability to run Direct3D stuff. That said, Half-Life 2 runs with all the details on very well on my MacBook Pro at full resolution (15" model). In Parallels it stutters unbearably at 640x480 with lower details. We are talking up to 5 (yes 5!) FPS. This is partly due to RAM (when I'm in Windows, it's got a full 2 gigs, when in OS X it has to share so it gets about a gig), partly due to optimization (they just released that not too long ago, they can tweak for better performance), partly due to the nature of Parallels (it will never be as fast as running native). For simpler things I'm sure it will run great. I bet you would have no problem with Half-Life, or Quake 3, or any other game from more than a few years ago. But for something as complex and detailed as HL2, it wasn't great.
Note that HL2 was the only thing I tested as that's all I was really interested in playing.
Hope that answers your question.
I give this news a solid 'meh".
I like games. I have a Mac. But I also have consoles. If I wanted to play Madden, I could. It doesn't bother me that EA isn't doing this. Considering what many of their games are like (quality wise), this is probably a boon.
In all seriousness though, it doesn't matter too much. There are tons of web games. There are lots of console games (currently playing MGS: Portable Ops, FFXII, Picross DS, Chrono Trigger, and Metroid Prime 3 coming very very soon). I can boot into Windows for games that I find interesting enough (I'm playing through Half-Life 2 that way right now, then I've got episodes 1 and 2, and BioShock which I'm downloading as I type). There are also games that are available on the Mac (current in that category for me: Diner Dash - Flo on the Go).
Macs aren't great game machines. I'd like them to be. The graphics chip in the Mini is really anemic. The chips in the iMacs are... eh. The MacBooks share the Mini's chip. The MacBook Pros (like I have) have some pretty decent chips (HL2 runs great at full rez), but the MBP is expensive. The graphics cards in the Mac Pro are, from my understanding, just OK unless you pony up even more cash above and beyond the base Mac Pro price. If you just want games, you will get WAY better bang for your buck buying a PC (or a PC and a console).
Let's not forget that these games are NOT native. They are using TransGaming's Cider platform. While I am very interested in this technologically (has anyone ever used this kind of translation layer for so many big games) and how it performs, etc... these are not native games. They won't run that well compared to how they should. They are probably bad ports (after all, the last few EA games I played on Windows didn't seem to run without occasional issues).
Now as other have mentioned, 3 or 4 games are now available for purchase off of Apple's store. That said, there are still others that are not. Some were delayed for quite a bit, and one that came out just a week or so ago didn't get a simultaneous release. We'll see how they do in the future but given how well the Mac is set up for games right now and the size of its market I'm not that surprised.
I've got a Series 3 ( fanstastic device). I've read those stories. I offered to install the cards myself. I'm smart enough to stick two cards in two slots and call the numbers on them in. Heck, TiVo included a nice guide on how to install them... for the installers. That's how frequently cable cards were used last year when the Series 3 came out.
I had some decent luck. When I called Comcast after getting my S3 the person who answered the phone actually knew what a cable card was (which was an improvement of some of the stories I've heard). I set up an appointment and a week or so later when it arrived I got my cards. They did function to a certain degree (the channel mapping worked, for example).
That said, I couldn't watch certain channels (Discovery HD being the one that really got me). They twice sent out technicians to check signal level and other things. I had to confirm everything with them, and they discussed replacing the cards and everything. That's what the third guy came out to do.
He figured it out in 30 seconds on a hunch.
I didn't have HDTV. I could watch local HD channels thanks to the must-carry rules, but they hadn't enabled HDTV on my account, so the channels (which had great strength) were black (because they weren't authorized).
This despite how I upgraded my package. "I just got an HDTV and would like HDTV service." "So this will give me all you HDTV channels that aren't premium like HBO?", "And I'll get Discovery HD, right?"
I love HDTV. I especially love how Comcast really can't screw up the picture quality like they can with all my analog channels. But they managed to mess up putting two identicle PCMCIA cards into two identical slots and clicking the appropriate box on their sales screen for the package I specifically asked for.
I got off REAL easy compared to some others. This may be due to lack of complete and utter incompetence on my local Comcast's part. This may be due to me waiting a month or two after the S3 came out to buy it (so others already went through things). This may have just been the best luck I've ever had with Comcast.
I've setup at least a half-dozen DirecTV receivers over the years. Easy a pie. There is no technical reason I couldn't do the cable card install myself. The only reason I can think of would be they wanted the service charge. Worst case scenario, it didn't work and they had to send a guy out anyway. I'd have taken that risk.
Worse than the hassles of getting the cards installed are the prices for the things. I'm being charged a few dollars a month for each card, despite the fact both are in the same device (and there are two only because Comcast isn't using multi-stream cards, I'm guessing so they can charge more). Some people don't get charged at all (at least for the first TV). Some people get charged $10 or more per month per card. From what I remember reading it isn't consistent in operators. It seems to be up to the local Comcast, Time Warner, or whatever office how they want to handle it.
Considering those problems, the worries about copying (which is why the SATA port on the S3 hasn't been active and TiVo2Go and Multi-Room Viewing don't work, stupid Cable Labs) I'm not surprised they aren't rushing to let Windows Media Center boxes work, let alone Media Center boxes built by individuals and not companies like Alienware.
I'm completely aware of their name. I also think that M$ is juvenile, same with Worst Buy. But if you had had the experiences I and my neighbors have had with Comcast, you'd use the same name. In fact, Comcrud is not what I would like to call them, but I don't like to cuss, even typing on the 'net. You can see a decent overview of why I despise them in this comment I wrote in this discussion. I have had decent experiences with some MS software (2K and XP weren't bad, they have made some good games, etc) and Best Buy (they generally have a game I'm after in stock, and I know enough to avoid their warranty scams and such). I haven't had any good experiences with Comcast.
I forgot to mention their Cable Card ineptitude in my post I linked to above. That was almost impressive.
Then Comcast bought them
Our service has gone down. Our cable bill has gone up at least $20 total per month. The internet speed is MUCH slower (it's become more popular, but they capped the things almost immediately). We have far more cable drop-outs than we used to.
My local channels look about the same or better though an antenna (metro area is up to 20mi plus away) than through the cable. The other analog channels (like Sci-Fi, etc) look OK. Digital looks great, but that's digital.
I used to have DirecTV who I loved. The picture quality was MUCH better. But I switched back to Comcast to save money, because I was going HDTV with a TiVo Series 3 (I'm mad about DTV dropping TiVo, and Comcast can't screw up HDTV much), and I can put up with other channels like SciFi.
Now they haven't added much at all to my lineup in the last year or so. They added... Golf HD and a few in-demand channels which I can't use and don't care about. No Anime network. No other HDTV channels like HDNet. They've done basically nothing.
I've been to the college town about 5 miles from my house. Their cable TV rates are criminal compared to mine. Their cable modems are way faster. They have competition (between the dorms, DSL, etc). I have none. About 10 miles away in the large suburb of the local metro, there are areas with competition between two cable companies or cable and DSL and again things are way better.
Comcast hasn't done a single good thing for us, not to mention their ineptitude.
For example, most of the outlets in our house get a pretty bad analog signal... with noticeable interference. Their solution was to try a booster. Didn't work. No other checking, no nothing. Just "too bad". Now I'm talking two rooms, right next to each other, one looks pretty good the other has noticeable problems. I don't know if it is the way our house was wired (I wouldn't put it past those guys, they were not bright), but Comcast really didn't try to fix it. They just installed a booster (which I could have done), overcharged us for it and the call, and threw their hands up.
That's what I pay you $60-$70 a month for. Don't complain to me. In the time I have had my cable internet service (since the first day it was available where I live)... Comcrud has raised rates, capped downloads, slowed speeds, raised rates, had dropouts, raised rates, etc. I really don't care that you are "overwhelmed". Maybe you shouldn't have sold 10k people 5 Mb connections when you only have a total of 500 Mbps of bandwidth. Maybe you shouldn't have lied.
Last week we got a letter in the mail that said that our streets would soon be torn up as AT&T would be replacing our terrible old copper with fiber to the home (our copper is bad, no DSL). We should be able to sign-up for their TV and internet service within about a year (so they say, I'd guess 1.5-2).
Of course, Comcrud has also dropped the quality of our cable TV, added next to no new channels, raised rates, and more. I would guess we'll switch off that too to U-Verse.
Comcrud is already in deep trouble in this area now that they will have actual competition. That alone will cause them big problems. But soon people won't be able to sign-up for their "ultra high speed" internet service so they can download music (which you have to pay for), download movies wicked fast (but you can't, and you probably have to pay for it), and surf at lightning speeds (if they aren't having a random outage)?
Why don't they do like many businesses, and stop selling services they can't provide.
Then again, I'm sure just about other /.er has the same sympathy I do for the lying US broadband industry.
Fair enough. That's odd though, I wonder why I didn't see that when I did my search. That was said in jest, as you say the tone from text can be tough to tell.
I can explain that one. I read a post a while back where someone who was in the know explained it (it was on one of the Microsoft blogs, I think). DX 10 contained virtualized graphics memory (that may not be the right term). Like system memory, each program would get it's own addresses and you could page in and out graphics data. This is a big feature. It also required kernel and GDI changes. This is why DX 10 could only run on Vista.
Someone (I think it was NVidia), couldn't get it done in time.
So it ended up optional in the spec (or moved out completely, I don't remember). The people who did do it (ATI, I think) got an unfair shake. Now without that feature, there is no technical reason DX 10 can't be run on XP without a few small innocuous changes. But they don't have time at this point (or a business reason).
DX 10 being only on Vista was based on a very valid techical reason... that they gave up on and removed.
I specifically referenced the book "The Population Bomb". I am aware people are starving. It's a sad fact. The that book proposed we would see a situation where even people in the richest 1st world countries (like the US and European nations) would be starving in the streets. This would be due to the increase in the world's population. Basically the world was supposed to turn into the world of the movie Soylent Green.
But it never happened.
Science got us higher yield crops. We got crops that could grow in less arable land than before. We got better farming methods. If farming was still suck in the '50s or '60s and we had today's population, the book's prediction may have happened. But that didn't happen.
Instead, people in the US (and soon other rich nations) pay billions per year for books and seminars and such on how to starve themselves just the right amount to lose weight.
Of course, your snarky comment was wasteful as well. In my large post about what I disliked about what I see as the misdirection in the current global-warming debate and you took one sentence and tried to make me look insensitive based on that. Maybe that's because you disagree with my views and don't want to post a valid response (possibly because you can't articulate your point and back it up). Maybe you are just trying to troll. Maybe you are posting from a 3rd world country and have been doing food aid all day and are frustrated with the problem so that was the part of my post that stood out to you.
That's very interesting. I used the search on Safari and didn't find the word "idiot" anywhere on this page until I came to your post. It certainly wasn't in mine.
Your comment is the kind that generally keeps me out of these kind of discussions. I pointed out that I have somewhat valid questions about the idea that humans are causing global warming. I pointed out that the media doesn't tend to question these kind of things well enough and is prone to hyping thing out of proportion. I pointed out that all that annoyed me (and yes, my comment did get rant-like, sorry about that).
I'm not calling anyone an idiot over this. All I said was I dislike the people who take media reports at face value as gospel. You on the other hand...
I believe I said in my post that I'm not against "fixing" global warming. If I didn't say it in that post I know I've said it in others. Cutting emissions is a good goal. There is tons more smog where I live now than 10 years ago. I'm just not a fan of everything being related to the global warming boogyman. Smog makes asthma worse, but no one is talking about that now, because that same pollution might cause global temperatures to go up, maybe. We can PROVE the asthma thing (and others), but since global warming is the in thing, all environmental debates must be framed with it as a reference.
I meant my post more as a comparison about how many people seem to use global warming almost as a religion right now, as other disasters (possibly real or just imagined) have been used in the past. I think the globe probably is warming up.
The real irony here is you called me an idiot for calling other people who I disagree with idiots. But I didn't do that, and you seem to agree with me.
As I said in my post, I don't disbelieve that the globe is warming, I just question that the evidence of causality is as strong as it is usually presented. I mentioned all those disasters to come to point out the trend of the media likes to latch on to something (even with tenuous evidence in many of those cases) and just promote it as fact to death (which is my biggest problem with global warming, how the media is presenting everything).
Glad you liked it. I was wondering if I'd get marked troll. I avoid many discussions here (mostly those in politics, but also most global warming debates) for that reason. Most people on those issues (and many others) don't want to debate, they just want to call the other sides idiots. Despite all the group-think, the moderation system shines pretty well at elevating well written but anti-groupthink posts (which I've seen in articles FAR more controversial than this).
Even though the discussion comes from such a small section of the users here, the discourse usually always seems to contain well informed experts and often incredibly insightful points that I would have never thought of (or heard in mainstream coverage).
Thanks for reading my comment.
Of course, in my comment I didn't question if the globe actually was warming. I even said I basically agree with it. I questioned the science behind why it was warming, saying that I didn't think it was as conclusive as other think.
Nice try though.
I agree with him completely. There is no questioning of global warming. It's now a fact. The sun revolves around the earth. To suggest otherwise means you're an idiot.
Let's ignore that CO2 is not the largest part of our atmosphere, and something else (say methane) may be responsible. Let's ignore the fact we're coming off an ice age. Let's the history of "science facts" that the media has trumpeted in the last 40 years or so (remember when we would all die in a massive world-wide starvation as foretold in "The Population Bomb"?, the new ice age they said would come in the by the 80s? The mass extinction caused by DDT?) Let's ignore the fact that Mars is getting hotter too and that it seems to be the Sun's fault. How about that acid rain that would become a blight on the planet making it impossible to go outside while it was raining in the US? And where are those empty south american countries that lost so many trees the planet can't produce enough oxygen to supply all the people in the world.
Is the globe getting warmer? Seems like it. Is it the fault of humans? I wonder. Is it the fault of CO2? I wonder. I don't care if you want to reduce pollution and emissions and such. When I moved to my current location 9 years ago or so, the sky was clear. We now have plenty of smog. Asthma is going up in the US. There are plenty of reasons to do these kind of things. But no one talks about that any more. If we want to cut car exhaust, it's to stop the planet from warming, not so the air isn't brown. If we want to reduce power plant emissions it is to reduce the warming of the globe, not because the plant has been putting a fine layer of soot on everything downwind.
Global warming is the latest media boogeyman. I'm just sick of hearing about it. I'm sick of how it's the US's fault. China pollutes more than us now. Go bug them. Go help them stop burning so many coal blocks for heat. Go help them make cleaner cars affordable. Go help India. Go help Europe (which is getting close to our levels). Fight the BIG sources (that will only grow bigger). When a dam is leaking, you plug the BIG leak that will soon be letting out 20,000 gallons a minute, not 5 little holes that let a few gallons through per day.
I'm sick of this global warming stuff, and how I've basically never seen it questioned in the mass media (except by other people who question it and immediately get called morons for questioning).
Global warming, as it is discussed in the US, seems more like a religion than anything else to me at this point.
Can you give me a good reason why the number from a government scientist who's report was used to "prove" global warming and then later complained he was censored for his actions being disproved shouldn't be reported just as big as the original story?
Remember kids. Call the president a child molester, that's page one. Print the retraction (if at all), that's page 37b in tiny type 6 months later between an ad for Hardee's and Mission Impossible 12.
I've been saying this all along. With many stories here on /. people say "But no one will care about the Wii because it can't do HD" and this kind of thing was my answer to that (although I'm surprised the numbers for HD game playing are THAT LOW). I submitted this myself yesterday (although this write-up looks better and sources Ars). I have a Wii plugged into my HDTV and love it. I don't have a 360 yet (thinking of getting one) and the PS3 doesn't have any games I care about yet (except for MGS4, but that won't be out for a while).
This shouldn't be surprising. The TV ads for the 360 and PS3 don't mention HD, and Joe Bob buys an HDTV and watches over-the-air analog stations and thinks that's HD.
Mostly, I'd say this is a failure of marketing. That said, it's a good shot against the "no one wants non-HD stuff" argument.
Why, when there is an article about something visual, especially a revolutionary new visualization system, do they never show pictures.
I hate that.
If you are reporting on a neat visual thingy,... SHOW ME THE THINGY. Even a picture of the machine would be a plus, even if it looks exactly like an MRI or some other machine. I don't care if the picture may mean nothing to me. Put a little caption trying to explain it. It doesn't matter, show me SOMETHING.
Does anyone have a picture?
This should be criminal.
(the annoyed MBCook)
I'm aware. But we can adjust it (if you are between 5'5" and 6', your BMI should be X. If you are 6' to 6'5", it should be Y). We can put in an exception for if you can prove you are health. We can just set the "fat point" really high initially. We can use another scale or alter the way BMI is calculated.
I see a 1 GHz T1 doing quite well compared to a 2.4 GHz Opteron and a 3 GHz Xeon. Things have improved on the Intel front, but the T2 should do quite well for the workloads it is designed for. Not only does it have more threads (and I think a better memory controller), but now it has one FPU per core instead of 1 per chip. That means 8x as many FPUs. That was the real weak point and now it has been addressed.
I can't wait to see benchmarks of this chip. It is far more interesting than "the same chip for 3 years ago, now 0.3 GHz faster" or "now with one more micro-op fuser and a 2% better branch decoder."
There are people like that. You don't think they could provide an exception if you can prove you are in good health?
Propose a better measure than BMI, if you want (I'll agree it's not ideal).
But charge 'em more. I've lost tons of weight, I'm not going to subsidize your laziness and not wanting to be "uncomfortable" by having to do things like watch what you eat or home much you move.