Where the merry hell are you buying your games from? Amazon show the vast majority of PC games are $50 if you're not playing the "I must have the collector's edition in a box with a widget, a thingy and some tat" game to make your idea look better, and console ones are usually $60.
Also, you didn't add on the price of a second Wii remote and nunchuck adaptor, because that would push the price of a Wii up even higher.
Suggesting I didn't buy an enterprise Oracle license because I installed MySQL isn't just a Broken Window Fallacy. For the tiny purpose I needed it for, it's more like suggesting that because nobody has written my Peugeot off, Ferrari are out of pocket the price of a 612 Scaglietti.
And by you lot telling people it's a load of crap for free, you're costing them a fortune in missed sales. Shut up, or at least charge over $1000 for the information!
How can you call the first Matrix film "Unique", when one of the many sources it stole so liberally from was indeed the GitS movie?
Obviously it added its own elements to the blend, but somewhat like that terrible Judge Dredd movie suffered due to Robocop, I can't see a way to remake Ghost In The Shell without being accused of ripping off The Matrix by people who don't know any better.
Running 1080p over 50 feet isn't easy, no. Which is why Blue Jeans themselves have only got certification on a 45ft run.
But that doesn't mean Monster are justified in asking £89 for 3 feet of HDMI. The vast majority of Monster sales are on runs of less than 10 feet, where just about any cable on the market would work fine.
The letter's point is that offshore tax shelters are indeed legal. If the offshore company is correctly run as a seperate entity perfoming proper arms-length transactions with the parent.
However. He then shows that they've cocked up once, by forgetting to send the patent infringement claim from the Bermuda company that actually owns those patents. Do they really feel the rest of their ducks are correctly aligned, should the IRS come knocking?
You're right it's still illegal to use the upgrade without owning a legitimate XP disc.
However, I suspect the real reason that they left it in is that it's also legal to use the 'trick' to perform a clean install of Vista, when you have an XP disc sitting around, but don't want to fill your drive with cruft before you start.
My Terratec card was wonderful, until my son accidentally blew a fuse by shoving a wire in the mic input while it was on, having panicked about knocking it out.
Part of me wants to agree with you that it's a reasonable request. After all, it was certainly a lot more polite than the response Engadget gave.
But the difficult part is deciding what to do about it. Change the colour of the logo, presumably. Would you recommend using Vodaphone Red, O2 Blue or Orange, um, Orange? Well, no. I'm sure there are plenty of other carriers outside the UK that use the rest of the spectrum as well.
If Engadget used the exact same shade, I'd have more time for them, but as the article clearly shows, they're different purples.
XBox Live already has internet movie distribution up and running (and at HD (well, sorta; 720p) at that). The article is quite rightly suggesting that rather than just being a flat movie file, they could use it to give you all the menus and extras that people are used to on shiny discs.
Is that the wonderful story which ends with the dogs only wanting to sleep under Allied tanks, because the German ones smelled different (due to having different engines)?
Sometimes the problem is that people don't like the authorized software because Firefox is nicer than IE7, and sometimes they like silly IM clients, but most of the time, the software that they actually need to do their job isn't "authorized".
Just as an example, clients (particularly European ones, it seems) often send us documents in.RAR format. I can either install unauthorized software to open them, or go back and ask them to repackage it in a.ZIP.
You can guess which option most people in the office go for, and which is considered the more productive.
Thanks for the reply. I agree that we can only place so much stead by the words of politicians, and there is interpretation on the wording. It's caused a big ruckus in the UK news reports, but I think if there were any particular meaning to be taken it's more that an awareness of how carefully Israel's strategy needs to tread; Gaza isn't Lebanon, where civilians can run away when the fighting starts.
If I'm giving the impression that I see an equality between the two sides, I've typed poorly, however. Hamas's tactics are disgusing. What I'm trying to get at is that Israel, as a well-resourced democracy who have the firepower to keep military barracks standing without their neighbour flattening them every five minutes can afford to obey the Geneva convention in this way. They've pushed Palestine into a position where desperation is leading Hamas to terrible things, and then acting suprised that they won't just die quietly.
Those warnings don't seem to work very well some of the time, is what I was referring to.
As I've just said to the other responder, I think Hamas's actions are disgusting, but they're quite clearly the acts of a desperate populace facing what the Israeli Defence Minister himself has used the big H-word to describe. Labelling them "Terrorists" seems a fairly pointless piece of antagonism that merely continues to push kids toward the idea that something is actually being achieved by these sensless acts of suicidal violence toward non-military targets.
Like my own military, I hold Israel to higher standards, partly because they wish to claim a moral superiority, but also because they have the resources to perform to them.
I equate them when people are still in the houses, as has been repeatedly documented.
I don't seek to justify the disgusting actions of Hamas, merely state that I find Israel's response unacceptable, counter-productive and results in many infant deaths as well. It's the nature of asymmetric warfare that the guys who can't afford to drive a tank have to use other methods to deliver the weapon. Standing around calling them Terrorists doesn't further the debate very well.
Yes, Hamas shoots rockets from "civilian areas". You can quite easily spot the non-civilian areas on account of them being very flat piles of rubble. Also, it's rather tough to Godwin yourself on the subject when Israel's own Defence Minister claims he is orchestrating a Holocaust, big-H.
"Were all your DVD players obsolete when component video came out? What about when Surround Sound came out? "
That's odd. My DVD player from 1998, the year before your 'old' one, had those features.
However, I'll also note that it was rendered obsolete by an early firmware that couldn't handle the deranged acrobatics that the likes of Van Ling put players through.
Yes, $700 CAD when thrown through an exchange rate calculator works out at £325. But then you add on Magic UK Ripoff Taxes, and you'll find that a 1525 of that spec. is £428.99 on the Dell site. More expensive than anything in that lineup, and certainly a lot more than the £220 Eee.
Personally, I'm glad that Vista is 32-bit. Because I'm running it on a 32-bit CPU. I'm running it on a 32-bit CPU, because every time I think about upgrading my PC to something more modern, I realise that the only reason I want something faster is to play games. And playing games is something that can be achieved at much better value for money by buying a new console; the most recent upgrade being getting a 360 instead of a box that could handle Oblivion. Of course, you could probably argue I shouldn't have installed Vista, but hey - it was free under my MSDN, and I needed to reinstall Windows anyway because I wanted Media Center to stream stuff to my 360, so that's just me being foolish.
Returning to Crysis, maybe it should have been more expensive. Maybe some of those features that cause the £3000 Triple-SLI insaneomachine I saw reviewed last week to run under 20fps with everything turned on were a waste of dev time. Certainly, not doing a 360 or PS3 port was a huge mistake - like it or not, that's where the money is, because I'm not the only person who thinks like I described above.
The PC has a market still, but it's a small, tech-savvy market. Mind you, I've not even seen these motherboards without PCI-E slots on in my latest attempt to spec up an upgrade, so that's probably partly why I didn't see the problem.
I agree with everything you say, and if I were building a new PC that I ever intended to run games on I know well enough to avoid the onboard graphics. But game playing is such a vanishingly small segment of Intel's target market for their integrated solutions that doesn't matter to them. They DO have hardware acceleration for video, and they do take work off the CPU for Windows. Business doesn't need any more.
I remember Quake (not Doom) 3 being controversial by demanding a proper graphics card instead of using the CPU. But for it still to be controversial now seems odd.
Sweeney is right to say that the gap between onboard and high-end dedicated 3D is so huge that scaling their engine is a challenge. But he can make the box explicit that it won't run on onboard, or put the work in. Complaining that it's possible to make a PC that doesn't meet his specs is pointless, because PCs are general-purpose computing devices that have plenty of jobs more important than that.
Generally, though, all of this just reminds me why I bought an XBox 360 instead of a new graphics card when my box couldn't handle Oblivion.
But, as ever with Epic staff, he seems to labour under the frankly ludicrous idea that the solution is to stop home and business users who don't need an 8800 from buying anything slower.
If he's not able to label his game box clearly enough as needing a £300 graphics card, that's his problem, not Intel's. They make chipsets that are perfectly good enough to accelerate Aero Glass, and there are plenty of consumers that only need that.
$50 upscaling is, in my experience, so poor that you're better off letting the panel's internal scaling do the job instead - I set my cheap HDMI player to output 480p because it looks better.
Toshiba's scaling in these HD-DVD players is massively superior, and definitely worth the small premium even without any HD-DVD discs to hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Where the merry hell are you buying your games from? Amazon show the vast majority of PC games are $50 if you're not playing the "I must have the collector's edition in a box with a widget, a thingy and some tat" game to make your idea look better, and console ones are usually $60.
Also, you didn't add on the price of a second Wii remote and nunchuck adaptor, because that would push the price of a Wii up even higher.
Suggesting I didn't buy an enterprise Oracle license because I installed MySQL isn't just a Broken Window Fallacy. For the tiny purpose I needed it for, it's more like suggesting that because nobody has written my Peugeot off, Ferrari are out of pocket the price of a 612 Scaglietti.
And by you lot telling people it's a load of crap for free, you're costing them a fortune in missed sales. Shut up, or at least charge over $1000 for the information!
How can you call the first Matrix film "Unique", when one of the many sources it stole so liberally from was indeed the GitS movie?
Obviously it added its own elements to the blend, but somewhat like that terrible Judge Dredd movie suffered due to Robocop, I can't see a way to remake Ghost In The Shell without being accused of ripping off The Matrix by people who don't know any better.
Running 1080p over 50 feet isn't easy, no. Which is why Blue Jeans themselves have only got certification on a 45ft run.
But that doesn't mean Monster are justified in asking £89 for 3 feet of HDMI. The vast majority of Monster sales are on runs of less than 10 feet, where just about any cable on the market would work fine.
The letter's point is that offshore tax shelters are indeed legal. If the offshore company is correctly run as a seperate entity perfoming proper arms-length transactions with the parent.
However. He then shows that they've cocked up once, by forgetting to send the patent infringement claim from the Bermuda company that actually owns those patents. Do they really feel the rest of their ducks are correctly aligned, should the IRS come knocking?
You're right it's still illegal to use the upgrade without owning a legitimate XP disc.
However, I suspect the real reason that they left it in is that it's also legal to use the 'trick' to perform a clean install of Vista, when you have an XP disc sitting around, but don't want to fill your drive with cruft before you start.
My Terratec card was wonderful, until my son accidentally blew a fuse by shoving a wire in the mic input while it was on, having panicked about knocking it out.
Right, so purple is out. Lets use Orange instead. Oh.
How about red? Nope, that's Vodaphone's colour.
O2 is blue, so that's also out.
Anyone already got a trademark on aquamarine, is that ok?
Part of me wants to agree with you that it's a reasonable request. After all, it was certainly a lot more polite than the response Engadget gave.
But the difficult part is deciding what to do about it. Change the colour of the logo, presumably. Would you recommend using Vodaphone Red, O2 Blue or Orange, um, Orange? Well, no. I'm sure there are plenty of other carriers outside the UK that use the rest of the spectrum as well.
If Engadget used the exact same shade, I'd have more time for them, but as the article clearly shows, they're different purples.
XBox Live already has internet movie distribution up and running (and at HD (well, sorta; 720p) at that). The article is quite rightly suggesting that rather than just being a flat movie file, they could use it to give you all the menus and extras that people are used to on shiny discs.
Is that the wonderful story which ends with the dogs only wanting to sleep under Allied tanks, because the German ones smelled different (due to having different engines)?
Sometimes the problem is that people don't like the authorized software because Firefox is nicer than IE7, and sometimes they like silly IM clients, but most of the time, the software that they actually need to do their job isn't "authorized".
.RAR format. I can either install unauthorized software to open them, or go back and ask them to repackage it in a .ZIP.
Just as an example, clients (particularly European ones, it seems) often send us documents in
You can guess which option most people in the office go for, and which is considered the more productive.
Thanks for the reply. I agree that we can only place so much stead by the words of politicians, and there is interpretation on the wording. It's caused a big ruckus in the UK news reports, but I think if there were any particular meaning to be taken it's more that an awareness of how carefully Israel's strategy needs to tread; Gaza isn't Lebanon, where civilians can run away when the fighting starts.
Re: Bulldozing, I specifically remember the case of Rachel Corrie, but there have been others my Google-fu is rubbish for.
Re: Matan Vilnai using the word Shoah the other week - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/7270650.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/feb/29/israelandthepalestinians1
If I'm giving the impression that I see an equality between the two sides, I've typed poorly, however. Hamas's tactics are disgusing. What I'm trying to get at is that Israel, as a well-resourced democracy who have the firepower to keep military barracks standing without their neighbour flattening them every five minutes can afford to obey the Geneva convention in this way. They've pushed Palestine into a position where desperation is leading Hamas to terrible things, and then acting suprised that they won't just die quietly.
Those warnings don't seem to work very well some of the time, is what I was referring to.
As I've just said to the other responder, I think Hamas's actions are disgusting, but they're quite clearly the acts of a desperate populace facing what the Israeli Defence Minister himself has used the big H-word to describe. Labelling them "Terrorists" seems a fairly pointless piece of antagonism that merely continues to push kids toward the idea that something is actually being achieved by these sensless acts of suicidal violence toward non-military targets.
Like my own military, I hold Israel to higher standards, partly because they wish to claim a moral superiority, but also because they have the resources to perform to them.
I equate them when people are still in the houses, as has been repeatedly documented.
I don't seek to justify the disgusting actions of Hamas, merely state that I find Israel's response unacceptable, counter-productive and results in many infant deaths as well. It's the nature of asymmetric warfare that the guys who can't afford to drive a tank have to use other methods to deliver the weapon. Standing around calling them Terrorists doesn't further the debate very well.
Yes, Hamas shoots rockets from "civilian areas". You can quite easily spot the non-civilian areas on account of them being very flat piles of rubble. Also, it's rather tough to Godwin yourself on the subject when Israel's own Defence Minister claims he is orchestrating a Holocaust, big-H.
"Were all your DVD players obsolete when component video came out? What about when Surround Sound came out? "
That's odd. My DVD player from 1998, the year before your 'old' one, had those features.
However, I'll also note that it was rendered obsolete by an early firmware that couldn't handle the deranged acrobatics that the likes of Van Ling put players through.
Long Live Laserdisc.
1) I'm not entirely sure I understand how either side's rockets are concealing their identity as combatants when they come sailing over the horizon.
2) All Israeli citizens are required to serve time in the military. Hamas seem rather low on funds for nice uniforms.
3) Hamas blow up people sitting in cafés near military barracks. Israel bulldozes the houses around where the bomber lived.
Neither side looks particularly good in all this.
Yes, $700 CAD when thrown through an exchange rate calculator works out at £325. But then you add on Magic UK Ripoff Taxes, and you'll find that a 1525 of that spec. is £428.99 on the Dell site. More expensive than anything in that lineup, and certainly a lot more than the £220 Eee.
V. True - I'm still playing my Dreamcast occasionally, but I think by any useful definition that format is dead.
Personally, I'm glad that Vista is 32-bit. Because I'm running it on a 32-bit CPU. I'm running it on a 32-bit CPU, because every time I think about upgrading my PC to something more modern, I realise that the only reason I want something faster is to play games. And playing games is something that can be achieved at much better value for money by buying a new console; the most recent upgrade being getting a 360 instead of a box that could handle Oblivion. Of course, you could probably argue I shouldn't have installed Vista, but hey - it was free under my MSDN, and I needed to reinstall Windows anyway because I wanted Media Center to stream stuff to my 360, so that's just me being foolish.
Returning to Crysis, maybe it should have been more expensive. Maybe some of those features that cause the £3000 Triple-SLI insaneomachine I saw reviewed last week to run under 20fps with everything turned on were a waste of dev time. Certainly, not doing a 360 or PS3 port was a huge mistake - like it or not, that's where the money is, because I'm not the only person who thinks like I described above.
The PC has a market still, but it's a small, tech-savvy market. Mind you, I've not even seen these motherboards without PCI-E slots on in my latest attempt to spec up an upgrade, so that's probably partly why I didn't see the problem.
I agree with everything you say, and if I were building a new PC that I ever intended to run games on I know well enough to avoid the onboard graphics. But game playing is such a vanishingly small segment of Intel's target market for their integrated solutions that doesn't matter to them. They DO have hardware acceleration for video, and they do take work off the CPU for Windows. Business doesn't need any more.
I remember Quake (not Doom) 3 being controversial by demanding a proper graphics card instead of using the CPU. But for it still to be controversial now seems odd.
Sweeney is right to say that the gap between onboard and high-end dedicated 3D is so huge that scaling their engine is a challenge. But he can make the box explicit that it won't run on onboard, or put the work in. Complaining that it's possible to make a PC that doesn't meet his specs is pointless, because PCs are general-purpose computing devices that have plenty of jobs more important than that.
Generally, though, all of this just reminds me why I bought an XBox 360 instead of a new graphics card when my box couldn't handle Oblivion.
But, as ever with Epic staff, he seems to labour under the frankly ludicrous idea that the solution is to stop home and business users who don't need an 8800 from buying anything slower.
If he's not able to label his game box clearly enough as needing a £300 graphics card, that's his problem, not Intel's. They make chipsets that are perfectly good enough to accelerate Aero Glass, and there are plenty of consumers that only need that.
$50 upscaling is, in my experience, so poor that you're better off letting the panel's internal scaling do the job instead - I set my cheap HDMI player to output 480p because it looks better.
Toshiba's scaling in these HD-DVD players is massively superior, and definitely worth the small premium even without any HD-DVD discs to hand.