Here in the great white North, we have a paper ballot. A simple "X" inside a circle. Human verifiable, countable, no switches, electrons, software, etc. Weeks or months after the election I can see the recounts.
Oh, so you're one of them, are you? I always use a checkmark, which indicates positivity!;)
It might be bullshit for most people, but I know multiple persons that will buy (including myself) after trying the game if we like it.
Ditto. I've "illegally" downloaded Supreme Commander and Prince of Persia.
Of course, I bought both a few days later. I also downloaded a widescreen crack for PoP, because the developers were too incompetent to add widescreen support.
Ironically, the widescreen crack was the one that got a C&D letter sent to my email address - which I ignored.
they also looked at the related iPhone DeviceIDs to see how many of the pirates went on to purchase the game. None of them did.
I'm going to hazard a guess and say the pirates found a way around that. None is a statistical anomaly.;)
Would you pay $5/mo, $50/yr for Hulu 480p access, and $12/mo, $120/yr for Hulu 720p ad-free access?
Just curious - because Cable is damn expensive here, and $12/mo for all the best shows in awesome quality, ad-free, seems like a bargain. Unfortunately, I'm Canadian, so the option isn't available.
BSD: (last I checked) TB: 1,000,000,000,000 TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
HDD Manufacturers: (Since before it became a problem) TB: 1,000,000,000,000 TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
Windows: TB: 1,099,511,627,776 TiB: WTF LOL
And of course, there are specific scenarios like RAM and cache where the incorrect suffixes are used to this day. When you have "3 MB" of L2 cache, you know it's 3072KiB, which is 3,145,728 bytes. It should be labelled "3 MiB", but it isn't.
First off, there's no legitimate reason iTunes has to use QuickTime for MP3/AAC decoding. There are plenty of other options. If Apple insists on eating their own dogfood, there's no excuse for installing more than is necessary. Installing iTunes doesn't mean I want their stupid, crippled movie player or plugins.
Right on! I feel exactly the same way. Unfortunately, Microsoft does the same thing. If you remove WMP, most Microsoft games released in the past few years will fail to play video/cinematics, and sometimes audio.:P
Parallelism isn't basic stuff. Breaking tasks up into smaller chunks is basic stuff. If you happen to have a workload like Apache where you're doing one thing 1 million times, then it's easy peasy. However, if you have a primarily sequential task - like games - then it's particularly difficult. It's easy to split the IO off into different threads, and run that plus some minor tasks like audio off another core - but how do you balance the workload so that two or more cores stay busy as much as possible? Designing new algorithms to split tasks across cores? This isn't simplistic stuff that just pops into your head - it requires a lot of thought to get it right.
For a game like Crysis, you have enough physics and advanced graphics that there's significant gains from finding the right way. For many older games, multi-threading/multi-core support was done so poorly that close-to-single-threaded would run faster. (I say close to, because IO should always be split off, along with any task that can lock down the CPU)
Really, for games at least, it comes down to doing it right or not at all. A more optimized single-threaded game loop can be far easier to implement, and offer speed gains if you do multi-threading the wrong way. (which is common)
So, if that indicates a problem with piracy, *AND* they're unhappy with the sales, then normally I'd say the game was garbage. But... it got amazing reviews and it's really quite a bit of fun. Make of that what you will, but my baseless opinion seems to have slightly more base than yours.
Good games get pirated first, bought second.
It's a repeating trend. The most pirated games that are actually good - Demigod/WoG - sell well, and the most pirated games that are bad - Spore - do not sell well.
That's because pirates are vocal evangelists. It costs them nothing to recommend games to friends - and sooner or later, someone is going to feel it's worth buying.
You know... I can't verify my vote got sent in unchanged on paper. I guess the idea is, there's enough people involved that the bad apples get weeded out?
But I'm not sure their survey percentages are accurate. I never got a link in the email, and never got to vote. I heard about the sale quite late, so I suspect there's several days of buyers that haven't been included.
And it doesn't address the main issue that FPTP voting can get someone into office with under 25% of the popular vote.:P The whole system is flawed and needs to be redone - but finding the right way of doing it is the challenge.
Voting machines should definitely be open-source, and should not be depending on databases like MySQL... on the server end, they need a DB with hardened source code and a limited feature set. I mean, all it has to do is tie a single number to an account/SIN and locked it in, so just about every DB out there is overkill and just opens up the possibility of exploits.
The problem is, Office tends to be 'compatible enough', certainly to the point where most people don't think twice about which version a.doc is created in when they open it.
In which direction?
I recall there being issues opening old docs in Word 2007. If I were a bigger microsoft troll, I might have even saved the links. I suggest searching out the last OpenOffice post on slashdot, and perusing the comments.:P
You can take your superior benchmarks and shove it. On older hardware, the difference in responsiveness with BFS is absolutely astounding.
Those tests are multi-processor multi-core runs, which is not what BFS was designed for. I would ask you to bench it on a single single-core, dual-core, tri-core, and quad-core CPU before making such statements.
In my own tests on a shitty VIA C7 with a horribly slow(10MB/sec) Quantum EIDE(I think) drive, BFS dropped the times to launch programs almost in half. I'd place a bet that CFQ is doing some stupid shit optimized for high performance servers.
And at least a few real-world tests heavily favour BFS. But I personally despise meaningless numerical benchmarks. I much prefer watching desktop responsiveness soar on old hardware.
Most phones have such crappy lenses that it doesn't matter if you have a 5mp CMOS sensor. You're still getting pictures no better than 2.0mp upscaled a lot. The difference is the upscaling isn't done digitally(by the processor) - it's done by the sensor, so they can advertise the full amount of megapixels. In the end, that difference adds up to a whole lot of nothing. Resize down to 1600*1200 (roughly 2mp) and your 5mp phone probably won't compare to pictures taken by an old 2.0mp camera. It's all because of the lenses.
I'm not an audiophile like you, but I do recognize differences in quality.
From recording FRAPS vids of games, I noted that 48kbit AAC HE (encoded with 3GPP AAC+ codec in MediaCoder) sounds quite close to the source material. MP3 needed twice the bitrate, and ogg +6kbits. This was for game music.
For encoding voices, it was totally different. MP3 was much closer, and ogg was in the lead. (but why not use one of those other voice-related codecs, instead?)
For songs (voices + music), AAC at 48kbit had too many artifacts to be enjoyable. It really sounded quite awful. Ogg sounded much better than it when I pushed the bitrate a bit higher. (which isn't possible for 3GPP AAC+)
My conclusion? A complete tangent, but I'm noticing more differences as I upgrade my speakers and soundcard. I'll have to revise this next upgrade.:P
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or perform keylogging outside WINE or snoop on private files.
The beauty of infecting Microsoft Office is, a user with MS Office probably uses MS Office for everything.
Here in the great white North, we have a paper ballot. A simple "X" inside a circle. Human verifiable, countable, no switches, electrons, software, etc. Weeks or months after the election I can see the recounts.
Oh, so you're one of them, are you? I always use a checkmark, which indicates positivity! ;)
It might be bullshit for most people, but I know multiple persons that will buy (including myself) after trying the game if we like it.
Ditto. I've "illegally" downloaded Supreme Commander and Prince of Persia.
Of course, I bought both a few days later. I also downloaded a widescreen crack for PoP, because the developers were too incompetent to add widescreen support.
Ironically, the widescreen crack was the one that got a C&D letter sent to my email address - which I ignored.
they also looked at the related iPhone DeviceIDs to see how many of the pirates went on to purchase the game. None of them did.
I'm going to hazard a guess and say the pirates found a way around that. None is a statistical anomaly. ;)
Correct. My Windows 2000 computer as rock solid stable.
My XP computer wasn't, but I finally had to turf the motherboard. New board is perfectly stable so far.
Ubuntu computer wasn't. But that was a linux kernel problem, which got fixed.
My Uncle's Mac wasn't. But his HDD died, so the store gave him a new Mac.
I've seen a lot of crash-prone Vista laptops - but almost all of them have Fujitsu HDDs that end up needing to be replaced.
Would you pay $5/mo, $50/yr for Hulu 480p access, and $12/mo, $120/yr for Hulu 720p ad-free access?
Just curious - because Cable is damn expensive here, and $12/mo for all the best shows in awesome quality, ad-free, seems like a bargain. Unfortunately, I'm Canadian, so the option isn't available.
Slashdot is diverse enough that we insult every OS.
Web 2.0 forms don't make such mistakes! :P
But it's also in the consumer's best interests. :P
Rare, but that makes it okay for most people - unless they abuse their patent.
You should clarify usage scenarios with your amounts.
Metric:
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
OSX:
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
Ubuntu/Linux:
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
BSD: (last I checked)
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
HDD Manufacturers: (Since before it became a problem)
TB: 1,000,000,000,000
TiB: 1,099,511,627,776
Windows:
TB: 1,099,511,627,776
TiB: WTF LOL
And of course, there are specific scenarios like RAM and cache where the incorrect suffixes are used to this day. When you have "3 MB" of L2 cache, you know it's 3072KiB, which is 3,145,728 bytes. It should be labelled "3 MiB", but it isn't.
Doesn't make a difference.
The games embed the WMP directshow plugins somehow. Updating codecs has the same effect as updating VLC - none.
First off, there's no legitimate reason iTunes has to use QuickTime for MP3/AAC decoding. There are plenty of other options. If Apple insists on eating their own dogfood, there's no excuse for installing more than is necessary. Installing iTunes doesn't mean I want their stupid, crippled movie player or plugins.
Right on! I feel exactly the same way. Unfortunately, Microsoft does the same thing. If you remove WMP, most Microsoft games released in the past few years will fail to play video/cinematics, and sometimes audio. :P
Ditto for Ubuntu. :(
Next time, it's a clean install for me!
You're sort of right and sort of wrong.
Parallelism isn't basic stuff. Breaking tasks up into smaller chunks is basic stuff. If you happen to have a workload like Apache where you're doing one thing 1 million times, then it's easy peasy. However, if you have a primarily sequential task - like games - then it's particularly difficult. It's easy to split the IO off into different threads, and run that plus some minor tasks like audio off another core - but how do you balance the workload so that two or more cores stay busy as much as possible? Designing new algorithms to split tasks across cores? This isn't simplistic stuff that just pops into your head - it requires a lot of thought to get it right.
For a game like Crysis, you have enough physics and advanced graphics that there's significant gains from finding the right way. For many older games, multi-threading/multi-core support was done so poorly that close-to-single-threaded would run faster. (I say close to, because IO should always be split off, along with any task that can lock down the CPU)
Really, for games at least, it comes down to doing it right or not at all. A more optimized single-threaded game loop can be far easier to implement, and offer speed gains if you do multi-threading the wrong way. (which is common)
Multiple tens of thousands for one week, i.e. millions of dollars per year, is a "miserable salary"?
Doesn't quite work that way. Normally, I doubt they pull it more than $2k a week - if not less.
They don't have an office or pay rent, fwiw.
Everyone pays rent, or other expenses. But yes, they have no office or office rent.
So, if that indicates a problem with piracy, *AND* they're unhappy with the sales, then normally I'd say the game was garbage. But ... it got amazing reviews and it's really quite a bit of fun. Make of that what you will, but my baseless opinion seems to have slightly more base than yours.
Good games get pirated first, bought second.
It's a repeating trend. The most pirated games that are actually good - Demigod/WoG - sell well, and the most pirated games that are bad - Spore - do not sell well.
That's because pirates are vocal evangelists. It costs them nothing to recommend games to friends - and sooner or later, someone is going to feel it's worth buying.
This is where you need a trustworthy third party.
You know... I can't verify my vote got sent in unchanged on paper. I guess the idea is, there's enough people involved that the bad apples get weeded out?
I paid $2 so I could get it outside of steam.
But I'm not sure their survey percentages are accurate. I never got a link in the email, and never got to vote. I heard about the sale quite late, so I suspect there's several days of buyers that haven't been included.
Right. Excel 2003 - because 2007 doesn't open it properly either. :P
Wonder when Microsoft's fix will be released? ;)
I never said anything about the kernel developers - I merely attacked the benchmarks being used.
That's something I do for every OS. Most benchmarks aren't relevant.
That's more confusing than BC-STV.
And it doesn't address the main issue that FPTP voting can get someone into office with under 25% of the popular vote. :P The whole system is flawed and needs to be redone - but finding the right way of doing it is the challenge.
Voting machines should definitely be open-source, and should not be depending on databases like MySQL... on the server end, they need a DB with hardened source code and a limited feature set. I mean, all it has to do is tie a single number to an account/SIN and locked it in, so just about every DB out there is overkill and just opens up the possibility of exploits.
The problem is, Office tends to be 'compatible enough', certainly to the point where most people don't think twice about which version a .doc is created in when they open it.
In which direction?
I recall there being issues opening old docs in Word 2007. If I were a bigger microsoft troll, I might have even saved the links. I suggest searching out the last OpenOffice post on slashdot, and perusing the comments. :P
You can take your superior benchmarks and shove it. On older hardware, the difference in responsiveness with BFS is absolutely astounding.
Those tests are multi-processor multi-core runs, which is not what BFS was designed for. I would ask you to bench it on a single single-core, dual-core, tri-core, and quad-core CPU before making such statements.
In my own tests on a shitty VIA C7 with a horribly slow(10MB/sec) Quantum EIDE(I think) drive, BFS dropped the times to launch programs almost in half. I'd place a bet that CFQ is doing some stupid shit optimized for high performance servers.
And at least a few real-world tests heavily favour BFS. But I personally despise meaningless numerical benchmarks. I much prefer watching desktop responsiveness soar on old hardware.
The desktop scheduler may also be tweaked to try and make sure interactive tasks respond quickly
BFS! ;)
Most phones have such crappy lenses that it doesn't matter if you have a 5mp CMOS sensor. You're still getting pictures no better than 2.0mp upscaled a lot. The difference is the upscaling isn't done digitally(by the processor) - it's done by the sensor, so they can advertise the full amount of megapixels. In the end, that difference adds up to a whole lot of nothing. Resize down to 1600*1200 (roughly 2mp) and your 5mp phone probably won't compare to pictures taken by an old 2.0mp camera. It's all because of the lenses.
I'm not an audiophile like you, but I do recognize differences in quality.
From recording FRAPS vids of games, I noted that 48kbit AAC HE (encoded with 3GPP AAC+ codec in MediaCoder) sounds quite close to the source material. MP3 needed twice the bitrate, and ogg +6kbits. This was for game music.
For encoding voices, it was totally different. MP3 was much closer, and ogg was in the lead. (but why not use one of those other voice-related codecs, instead?)
For songs (voices + music), AAC at 48kbit had too many artifacts to be enjoyable. It really sounded quite awful. Ogg sounded much better than it when I pushed the bitrate a bit higher. (which isn't possible for 3GPP AAC+)
My conclusion? A complete tangent, but I'm noticing more differences as I upgrade my speakers and soundcard. I'll have to revise this next upgrade. :P