Apple appear to be taking advantage that many people are unaware how almost every phone (even cheap ones) can do Internet access as standard, so they are able to promote it as a new and wonderful thing No, Apple are taking advantage of the fact that every smartphone out there has interfaces and browsers that suck, while the iPhone's is somewhat decent. Same for about a dozen other features of the iPhone: other products claim to have them, but they are so painful to use that few people can stand them.
The interface is just about all that matters in a cell phone. I am sick and tired of cell phones with user interfaces that SUCK. The iPhone has a pioneering full-surface touchscreen display just like I envisioned. It rolls a great mp3 player in. It's thin enough to fit in a jeans pocket without anyone noticing, thinner than most phones. Those are all killer features. Smartphones? Barf. A rehash of Treo? Get out of here.
I have used numerous nVidia cards with many games and have never seen an nVidia driver crash on me, in Windows or Linux.
Maybe some of these crashes are caused by the flaky motherboards and memory that the drivers run on, or power supplies, and it's just that code in those drivers is what pushes the hardware to the max and makes it crash.
Games like tetris, civilization, sim city, lemmings, kings quest, red baron... had to use either innovative gameplay, storyline, or compelling simulation... Virtually nothing made by committee is as interesting... Tetris is ten times the work of art that Final Fantasy is... Competitive online content, which is seeing the most energy and creativity on both PCs AND consoles, is a turn-off to most people... MMORPGs are very interesting... Halo would play perfectly well with 500 polygon characters I'm sorry, I'd write a reply but I can't stop laughing.
To circumvent the security in order to get good performance for games means that hackers can circumvent the security for their purposes as well... if you have to jeopardize the security and integrity of your system to play games, is it worth it? That's a very interesting notion. Unfortunately for you, it's not in any way grounded in reality.
Computer security is managed by the operating system. There is no reason your entertainment has to get some higher form of access as compared to any other application on your system; if it needs that, it's improperly engineered. There are lots of safeguards that can be put in place to prevent your entertainment applications from ever having a glimpse of your personal data. Granted, few of them are implemented now, but if as you say more personal data becomes commonplace on computers, they will get there - it's not like they're hard to code, the framework is already there, and it doesn't affect performance at all. But even now, you don't have to "jeopardize the security and integrity of your system to play games" in any way.
And PC game developers are silly to make anything like that a requirement to even play their game at a decent level. Kinda like road bike makers are silly to make carbon fiber frames. After all, the market for shitty MTBs is much bigger, right? Or Lamborghini with their ridiculous cars. Or Canon with their L lenses. Or...
You're right, the market for games that can run on Intel GMA is massive and lucrative. But make no mistake, when we look back on game development in previous years, the imaginations and attentions of everyone are squarely on those studios and companies and people who pushed the envelope. Studios like id software and Valve and Epic and Crytek and Bioware and Black Isle and Ion Storm and Blizzard and Bethesda and who knows how many more didn't make their names selling games that could run on wimpy hardware when they were released... but in the long term, they are the only ones that matter. The same holds for hardware engineers who pushed the envelope of GPU and CPU design.
The fact that Vista does prefetching and other advanced memory management has no bearing on the fact that it's still a ridiculously, unacceptably bloated pig of an OS in terms of RAM, disk, and CPU resource use.
she does use some crazy word functionality for tracking edits Are you shitting me? This functionality is used pervasively.
I've tried most other Office-like programs out there and found them lacking. Office 2007 fixed quite a few of the problems you mention (many of which stem from the file format if I understand correctly). The lock-in is painful, but Word/Excel/Powerpoint 2007 are very far out in the lead of office software engineering.
Seriously, that design is stupendously atrocious. It looks like a blood-stained crib. There are a lot of ways to present modern server form factors in sexy ways; this is not one of them.
A solid state device can be protected against almost all of the severe vibrations encountered in a plane crash by proper padding. Other types of damage are taken care of by the armor around the box. There's nothing about SSDs that is less robust to damage than tape recorders or disk drives.
Amusingly enough, Southwest (the airline busted) remains one of the safest airlines in the world, with 0 crashes for 15 million commercial flights flown.
People hate this feature because its behavior is too unpredictable (breaking one of the fundamental UI guidelines), unintuitive (there is no apparent rule to how it orders the suggestions - a set of search preferences is not an apparent rule), cannot reasonably approximate the old behavior, and is often slow to boot. The intentions are great, but the feature has too many problems to be usable.
You're right that the suggestions can be deleted - nice find. Too bad you can't delete all suggestions from a particular site or pattern at once.
I agree with your sentiment about the URL bar. The loss of URL-only autocompletion is the most annoying "feature" I have ever seen in a new browser. What's worse is that this appears completely non-customizable. I can't revert to the old behavior, I can't tell it to stop learning, I can't rearrange or delete what it already learned, and I can't manage how it integrates with bookmarks/places. Most annoyingly, the results are unpredictable and the non-trivial amount of time that it needs to find contents for the dropdown box is frustrating. This is a complete trainwreck of a feature and I'll be looking for an extension to disable it... or writing one myself.
There is a number of wireless chipsets with fully functional open-source drivers other than Centrino. For most of those, the specs for writing your own driver are also fully available.
That is bullshit. The solutions to our social and political problems will be almost exclusively technological. To suggest that our society's economical structure - a mind-bogglingly wasteful festival of gratification, which also dictates the social and political challenges you talk about - can be improved or made sustainable with anything but technology is laughable.
A ballistic missile is predictable in the cruise portion of its flight. That's great, but its trajectory in the cruise portion is determined by its launch, which happened less than 20 minutes ago, and it releases chafe and decoys, so if you're tracking by infrared or radar, you have a problem. I know the latest Russian ICBMs (and MIRVs) can maneuver not just "a little", but enough to make targeting non-trivial - not sure if this happens during cruise and reentry or during reentry only, I think both.
The satellite does none of those things. Its trajectory is known days in advance, and it doesn't maneuver. The maneuvering and the chafe are there in the late reentry phase (due to asymmetric drag you mentioned and parts burning off of it), but it will have to be shot well in advance of that if they want the desired effect.
If I have to use binary drivers to run my hardware, that's bad. There are no two ways about it. This is a very unambiguous truth.
And yes, I'd rather have a car whose ECU I can reprogram using an open interface, and fly in a plane where I can read, and the operators can modify the source for the avionics software.
Stallman may be ridiculous in many ways, but to deny that open architectures are comparatively good is ludicrous.
What makes you think American students don't face the same challenges? American high schools and universities can end their spring semester anytime between the end of April and the end of July, and can start the fall semester anytime from middle of August to end of September. The summer semester is packed into just as tight a schedule as yours - session times vary a lot, but it's normal to pack a semester's worth of material into 6 (six) weeks - less than half a regular semester's time.
Slashdot Mirror
The interface is just about all that matters in a cell phone. I am sick and tired of cell phones with user interfaces that SUCK. The iPhone has a pioneering full-surface touchscreen display just like I envisioned. It rolls a great mp3 player in. It's thin enough to fit in a jeans pocket without anyone noticing, thinner than most phones. Those are all killer features. Smartphones? Barf. A rehash of Treo? Get out of here.
I'll definitely be getting a 2nd gen...
I have used numerous nVidia cards with many games and have never seen an nVidia driver crash on me, in Windows or Linux.
Maybe some of these crashes are caused by the flaky motherboards and memory that the drivers run on, or power supplies, and it's just that code in those drivers is what pushes the hardware to the max and makes it crash.
Computer security is managed by the operating system. There is no reason your entertainment has to get some higher form of access as compared to any other application on your system; if it needs that, it's improperly engineered. There are lots of safeguards that can be put in place to prevent your entertainment applications from ever having a glimpse of your personal data. Granted, few of them are implemented now, but if as you say more personal data becomes commonplace on computers, they will get there - it's not like they're hard to code, the framework is already there, and it doesn't affect performance at all. But even now, you don't have to "jeopardize the security and integrity of your system to play games" in any way.
You're right, the market for games that can run on Intel GMA is massive and lucrative. But make no mistake, when we look back on game development in previous years, the imaginations and attentions of everyone are squarely on those studios and companies and people who pushed the envelope. Studios like id software and Valve and Epic and Crytek and Bioware and Black Isle and Ion Storm and Blizzard and Bethesda and who knows how many more didn't make their names selling games that could run on wimpy hardware when they were released... but in the long term, they are the only ones that matter. The same holds for hardware engineers who pushed the envelope of GPU and CPU design.
The fact that Vista does prefetching and other advanced memory management has no bearing on the fact that it's still a ridiculously, unacceptably bloated pig of an OS in terms of RAM, disk, and CPU resource use.
Read the fucking article.
RTFA.
I've tried most other Office-like programs out there and found them lacking. Office 2007 fixed quite a few of the problems you mention (many of which stem from the file format if I understand correctly). The lock-in is painful, but Word/Excel/Powerpoint 2007 are very far out in the lead of office software engineering.
Try FlashBlock. It's on my list of indispensable plugins.
Reminds me of the Badonkadonk land cruiser.
Seriously, that design is stupendously atrocious. It looks like a blood-stained crib. There are a lot of ways to present modern server form factors in sexy ways; this is not one of them.
A solid state device can be protected against almost all of the severe vibrations encountered in a plane crash by proper padding. Other types of damage are taken care of by the armor around the box. There's nothing about SSDs that is less robust to damage than tape recorders or disk drives.
Amusingly enough, Southwest (the airline busted) remains one of the safest airlines in the world, with 0 crashes for 15 million commercial flights flown.
People hate this feature because its behavior is too unpredictable (breaking one of the fundamental UI guidelines), unintuitive (there is no apparent rule to how it orders the suggestions - a set of search preferences is not an apparent rule), cannot reasonably approximate the old behavior, and is often slow to boot. The intentions are great, but the feature has too many problems to be usable.
You're right that the suggestions can be deleted - nice find. Too bad you can't delete all suggestions from a particular site or pattern at once.
I agree with your sentiment about the URL bar. The loss of URL-only autocompletion is the most annoying "feature" I have ever seen in a new browser. What's worse is that this appears completely non-customizable. I can't revert to the old behavior, I can't tell it to stop learning, I can't rearrange or delete what it already learned, and I can't manage how it integrates with bookmarks/places. Most annoyingly, the results are unpredictable and the non-trivial amount of time that it needs to find contents for the dropdown box is frustrating. This is a complete trainwreck of a feature and I'll be looking for an extension to disable it... or writing one myself.
There is a number of wireless chipsets with fully functional open-source drivers other than Centrino. For most of those, the specs for writing your own driver are also fully available.
That is bullshit. The solutions to our social and political problems will be almost exclusively technological. To suggest that our society's economical structure - a mind-bogglingly wasteful festival of gratification, which also dictates the social and political challenges you talk about - can be improved or made sustainable with anything but technology is laughable.
A ballistic missile is predictable in the cruise portion of its flight. That's great, but its trajectory in the cruise portion is determined by its launch, which happened less than 20 minutes ago, and it releases chafe and decoys, so if you're tracking by infrared or radar, you have a problem. I know the latest Russian ICBMs (and MIRVs) can maneuver not just "a little", but enough to make targeting non-trivial - not sure if this happens during cruise and reentry or during reentry only, I think both.
The satellite does none of those things. Its trajectory is known days in advance, and it doesn't maneuver. The maneuvering and the chafe are there in the late reentry phase (due to asymmetric drag you mentioned and parts burning off of it), but it will have to be shot well in advance of that if they want the desired effect.
If I have to use binary drivers to run my hardware, that's bad. There are no two ways about it. This is a very unambiguous truth.
And yes, I'd rather have a car whose ECU I can reprogram using an open interface, and fly in a plane where I can read, and the operators can modify the source for the avionics software.
Stallman may be ridiculous in many ways, but to deny that open architectures are comparatively good is ludicrous.
What makes you think American students don't face the same challenges? American high schools and universities can end their spring semester anytime between the end of April and the end of July, and can start the fall semester anytime from middle of August to end of September. The summer semester is packed into just as tight a schedule as yours - session times vary a lot, but it's normal to pack a semester's worth of material into 6 (six) weeks - less than half a regular semester's time.