Not to mention that what people generally see as "normal" varies widly between place and country of origin, education and religion -- if any. There is no magical norm that is world-wide unless you go to REALLY basic stuff, such as eating, sleeping and breathing. There's hardly a consensus on what's "normal" even among people from one, single nation, yet alone multiple countries. Even such a regular concept as marriage can differ a lot, like e.g. in some places marriage can be polygamous instead of monogamous, in some places it gives actual physical ownership of the partner to the other one, how one celebrates a marriage can vary from brooding alone to feasting and partying wildly and so on.
Besides, why is it even seen as a positive thing to be considered "normal" at all? Being "normal" more-or-less means you conform to expectations from people around you and their moral and ethic codes, thereby becoming just another one of the crowd. Wouldn't it be a more positive thing not to necessarily conform, to make up your own decisions and arguments and make up your own view on the world around you? Atleast I personally am totally proud to be "abnormal"; I'll promise to never conform.
The problem with most hybrid disks is the fact that they don't know about filesystems, they don't know about current working conditions of the rest of the system and they don't know of user and application preferences: they're working with a very limited set of data available to them and thus they can only base their operation on guesses of what is going to be needed next. The OCZ RevoDrive is the exception here in that it's actually two drives that are both accessible separately to the OS and/or applications if one doesn't install their caching software.
OS- and filesystem-agnostic system is always going to be somewhat limited so it would be beneficial if the rest of these hybrid systems also allowed the OS direct access to the flash so that the OS can optimize its behaviour accordingly. Like e.g. the user is reading several multi-gigabyte files, say, disc images for example; a OS- and filesystem-agnostic hybrid will start caching those files since it doesn't know how large those files are or how often they're needed, whereas if OS handled the caching it could determine that those files are accessed very rarely, usually in large sequences, and thus it would be better to skip caching them and instead save the cache for any related smaller files that are accessed more often. If you're familiar with the Windows ReadyBoost it actually works similarly: it skips caching large files as usually mechanical drives are more than fast enough for large sequential reads, but it instead caches a helluva lot of all kinds of small files since flash is absolutely terrific at random accesses and reading in even hundreds of small files from a slow flash is still faster than reading them in from the fastest mechanical one (I have a class10 16GB SD-card in my laptop as ReadyBoost drive and I've certainly noticed huge improvement in application startup times)
So yeah, sure, do create hybrids, they're a good idea in general. Just allow the OS to flip a bit and gain direct access to the flash part, too, for those OSes that are aware of such.
... no costs of producing a digital object there is also no losses to be spread over.
Open up a text editor. Type the source code for Windows 7, compile it, debug it, and post the binary for the entire world to use for free.
Get back to us when your done, and you have the experience to determine how expensive of an effort that was.
Good job trying to completely misrepresent what I said. Let's do it this way: find that ebook you bought in Explorer (or whichever filemanager you happen to use) and copy it. Then make another copy. And another. Now, how much did that cost you? Or the person who wrote it? Zero? Oh, shoot, that's right: duplicating a digital object costs nothing.
When NancyBoy the pirate enters the picture, and receives the benefit of ABCD without paying for it, he just stole $1, collectively, from the 10 people who paid to receive benefit. If NancyBoy the pirate had paid, the cost to the 11 benefit receivers would be $10/11 or approx $0.91. NancyBoy the pirate has stolen money, and permanently deprived 10 people of property.
Again, economics doesn't work like that. If 10 people buy the software the company has just earned $10. If 10 people buy it, and one pirates it, the company has STILL earned $10. The amount of money earned doesn't change according to the amount of people using the software as money isn't some fluctuating variable. Besides, the company can't even know how many people are using the software anyways unless the pirates themselves report to the company, so again that's yet another reason for why it cannot work like that.
The physical object argument does not matter, and here is why. A car started out as dirt in the ground. Someone had to mine the dirt, extract the iron, make steel, form it into a car, etc. When you buy a car, you are paying for the labor and time of people who molded dirt into a car. The same is true of software, movies, and music. You are paying for the labor and time of people who organized information and molded it into a product.
Again, a car is made of physical materials. If the materials could simply be whipped out from thin air then your argument would be better, but as reality stands the materials are indeed a physical object and are needed to produce other physical objects. I would LOVE to see how you duplicate a car without it affecting the original one.
Of course I agree that the developers deserve to get paid for the work they've done, but that is a perfectly reasonable argument that doesn't depend on false pretenses and is perfectly fine on its own. But your other arguments are just bullsh*t, you are trying to associate material costs to something that doesn't have them, and you're similarly trying to assign theft to something that in no way or form affects the original or its owner.
The time required to produce the product is a constant indeed. But the expense is amortized by the number of people who will benefit from using the software. Copying and using software without paying for it, is similar to shoplifting, in the sense that, by you not paying for the right to use the product you stole, increases the price that people who do pay for the right to use an item. When you steal a candy bar from Walmart, the loss is spread to the customers who pay for their purchases.
It doesn't work like that, you're just grasping for strawman arguments here. A candy bar is a physical object, it cannot just be copied. There is always a loss of material that is spent on manufacturing it, whereas there is no material loss at all when you copy a digital object. So of course the cost of the materials used to manufacture something is either absorbed by the budget assigned to it, or spread to the rest of objects being sold. But as there is no loss of materials and thus no costs of producing a digital object there is also no losses to be spread over.
This is just an excuse on your part. You are receiving the benefit of someone elses labor, without paying for it. It's the same situation if you screw the painter. You receive the benefit of his labor without paying him for it.
No, it's not an excuse. If you literally hire someone to use their time on you, then you are indeed depriving them of their time. But if that person uses their time with or without you involved then you cannot deprive them of their time since they're depriving it all by themselves.
If a company hired you to work for them, and the company received the benefit of your labor, then refused to pay you for it, you would be outraged. But when you want to receive the benefits of other peoples labor without paying for it, you justify it by saying "It's okay because its really easy for me to copy it and receive benefit without payment."
See above.
By your logic, its okay for me to steal your car because I have a screwdriver and I know how to disable alarms and hotwire it. It only took 30 seconds. It was so easy for me to steal it that you don't deserve a car.
No, you're depriving me of a physical object that I don't have accessible to me afterwards. If you however e.g. copy an ebook I have written I will still have the ebook in my possession, too.
You are permanently depriving them of the time it took to produce the software
The time they spent to produce the software is a constant, it doesn't change according to the amount of people using the software.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done. You have deprived the painter of his time. When you pirate software, you are depriving the person or people who spent time developing that software of their time.
Not really. A software product is already done, the time on it has been spent already whether or not you're using it. But the painter's time isn't used until you hire him to use it. As such your argument doesn't quite fly right. Comparing virtual things to physical things often doesn't work too well.
You're missing the point, either deliberately or not by a mistake. First of all, with or without pirated content you're still going to pay for food, gas, rent and utilities, so you cannot count that money. Nor can you count the money you wouldn't use on media anyways. Secondly, they mean the money you'd use on media you're likely to spend on media anyways, with or without pirated content available. There are of course always individuals who differ from the general norm, but it does hold true for the general populace.
It's still getting something for nothing, and maybe you spend the same amount in entertainment, but its distributed totally differently. If you spend $100 on some blockbuster concert and then pirate 10 albums from smaller bands, the only one winning is the big act. Rationalize it any way you want, but its stealing either way.
And who's to say that the $100 would go to the smaller bands if there was no pirated content available? It's just as likely that the person pirates songs from smaller bands to sample them out and then goes and buys $100 worth of goodies from the ones that feel worth it. You can try and rationalize it any way you wish, but it simply isn't as clear-cut as people try to make it out to be.
Besides it's not theft. Hell, it's not even deprivation of income as you cannot just assume that the person would buy the content if it wasn't available for free. If anything it's often free advertising.
For me it is certain tropes which ruin a series for me: * gender roles from the 19th century * women who only exist as decoration or object of relationships * women who are wearing clothes which are just ridiculous. I seriously would put most actors in a burkah for their performances, not out of Islamic fundamentalism but because enough is enough. (This gets a pass if the men are wearing as little as well)
Heh. Those kinds of things tend to put me off, too. I am not a feminist -- atleast I personally don't view myself as one -- but it really does tick me in a bad way when people even in this day and age try to push centuries-old misconceptions and roles on us just because we happen to be the ones with breasts, trying to box us in with restrictions about how we should be, behave and what we should like and dislike. In that same vein I find it annoying that even women who are supposed to be some total badass killing machines, going out to kill dragons or take out half a robotic army all by herself, are wearing chainmail bikinis that barely cover nipples and genitals: how the f*ck is that supposed to protect them when the male characters doing exact same stuff are wearing full plate-mails? Either have them both jumping around in loincloths, or have them both in plate/full body armory/whatnot.
* "listen to your heart, not your head"
That is indeed annoying. Sure, listening to your own emotions is important, but you should still use your head, too. A "great teacher" - character should know better than teaching his/her students to only to listen the one and ignore the other.
* excessive violence
I have yet to see too much violence, only too little..:D
This may not directly relate to the article itself, but how about trying to be a little bit constructive here instead of only offering criticism? What kinds of TV-shows or series do you view as being worth watching, worth your time? Are there some that you'd feel others might also enjoy and thus you'd like to recommend them?
I personally do not have any specific genre that I enjoy as I can watch mostly anything, it's the flow of the story and the believability of the characters and their actions that matters the most. Then again, as I watch movies most of the time and not TV-series I don't really have all that much experience on that field. I still do offer two recommendations that I personally feel that are definitely worth watching, and if you can afford it, they're sure worth owning, too:
* Breaking Bad: A high-school chemistry teacher in his 50s hears he has a lung cancer, realizes he has been an under-performer his whole life and wishes to be able to leave his family with means to get by even if he isn't no longer supporting them financially, and derails completely and decides to take part in meth-cooking business. * Walking Dead: As if the name isn't already descriptive enough or anything, but, well, a small-town sheriff gets shot, is taken to hospital, is unconcious for some time only to wake up to a seemingly empty hospital and the rest of the town either empty or trying to eat him. From there, it's only downhill!
I own two TVs. I use one for DVDs, Netflix Instant, and OTA NFL games. The other is collecting dust in my bedroom, I really should have it recycled.
So while I own them, I don't watch much TV--at least not until it shows up on Instant. Because of that, and because of everyone else being totally obsessed with TV, it is very hard not to point out that I have no fucking clue what they're talking about when they tell me about "New Show 131". If you just nod your head and pretend they catch on quickly and ask "WTF?"
You're an idiot either way for not watching the "idiot box.":(
There's two TVs in this household too, but both are only used as display devices for PlayStation 3, PC and my tablet. None of them are used for watching actual TV - shows or such. Why? Because most of what is there is just plain crap and more annoying than entertaining. Watching TV is a terribly passive experience so if I'm going to sit down and just stare at the screen then I atleast expect it to be worth my time. Alas, if there even is a good TV show going it's always pushed to really late hours, it's shown only once a week, and there's only ever at most one, single good show running at any given time. Never more than one.
Seriously though, A lot of people don't quite settle for the onboard GPU, especially if you like to game with a very high resolution, or multiple monitors.
I sure as hell wouldn't be able to settle for an onboard GPU, they're simply too slow. I already cringe whenever I'm away from home for longer periods and have to kill some time by trying to play on my laptop, and these days I'm starting to feel my overclocked Geforce 460 on my desktop is starting to get slow and needs a replacement soon.
I was actually just thinking today to myself that it should be a feature built-in to the OS: you tell the OS which stuff it should optimize for speed, you could assign one or several devices to use for that, and then the OS would figure out the best way to do that. Like for example the OS would include a tool that lists all installed application and games, then things like "browser cache", "my personal documents", "Custom files", and would also allow you to tick on/off OS itself from the list, and so on. There are and always will be shortcomings when a device tries to cache stuff when it doesn't know user's own preferences or how the operating system itself manages files and its own caches, so why leave it to hardware? Why not instead have the OS optimize the thing?
I do realize that SSDs are becoming the norm soon and old mechanical drives are on their way out and eventually they'll be reserved a niche space somewhere. But then the next big, fast thing will come and people will wish to again use it as a cache for SSDs, and so on, and that's why I also think the whole caching system should be built-in to the OS itself because it has access to all the needed data to optimize the thing.
It would be interesting to see someone start a research project around this idea on some open-source OS, but it remains to be seen if anyone is willing to do that. I personally don't have the skills needed.
I know many people who would see a huge benefit from these hybrid drives, but then again they're all non-techies: they just use the computer the way they've learned, they know nothing about the internals and so on. A hybrid drive would atleast get them on the desktop a lot faster than they do right now, and that alone is quite useful. The thing is that I don't really feel like 8 gigabytes is enough. Windows alone can easily eat up more than half of that, and with many applications weighing in the hundreds of megabytes you don't really get all that much stuff in there. Up it to 16 gigabytes and it'll help even novitiate gamers.
For me though, hybrid drives are definitely not suitable. I rather control what exactly goes in there so I can optimize those things that I feel need optimization and leave the rest to standard non-SSDs. Like e.g. I'd definitely want most of Windows on SSD, plus Firefox+cache, a few IM applications, programming tools, and whatever game I happen to be playing the most at the time; I'd leave most of Steam to non-SSD, I'd just copypaste the currently most interesting game to SSD for fast startup and loading-times. And for example even though I access my music files regularly, they're so small that it takes barely a second to read a whole song to memory even from non-SSDs, so it'd be waste of fast storage to cache those files on there. A hybrid drive would most definitely be caching stuff that doesn't need caching.
Alas, SSDs are terribly expensive for an unemployed person. Before the floods I could get a 1TB non-SSD for 49€ whereas a 64GB SSD costs 120€. While 64GB would be enough for my needs it still hurts way too much to pay such sums for so little.
I used to play lots of pirated games, and I mean LOTS of them, but.. a few years back I got introduced to Steam. I don't remember anymore what exactly drove me to try it, but I did. And suddenly I noticed using less and less pirated games to the point that I haven't had a single pirated game on any of my computers for a few years now. Steam just happens to be so extraordinarily convenient, not to mention two things they provide me with that pirated games don't: always up-to-date installations, and I don't have to bother with backups of my own or trying to keep the original discs safe. And again, the constant sales thing is also great; if I can just stay patient and wait for the game I like to come on this or that seasonal sale I'll be able to safe quite a bit, but I also can just rush out and buy it the moment it's available if I just can't stay patient.
My roomie has a very similar story in fact, we're both old "pirates"; we never produced any pirated copies ourselves nor did we spread them around, but we did use them ourselves a lot. And when we learned of Steam we both started using pirated games less and less until we eventually stopped altogether. In other words, whatever Steam is doing, it seems to be working.
Now, as for the "competing" services, like e.g. the one you're required to sign to when you buy BF3... well, we both view them as an inconvenience, not a convenience. They do not offer anything that Steam already doesn't, plus they're handicapped in several ways, like only offering games from one, single publisher. I understand that they want a piece of the Steam-cake, but the way they're going about it is simply not working all that well.
Well, I know that was meant as a joke, but...there is no backlight so the light has to come from somewhere. And if the eyelid is closed then there is no light-source.
I have no doubt in my mind that for some kids, video games are the thin line between "coping on a day to day basis" and "suicidal tendencies".
I'm not going to go to details, but suffice to say that I have had a somewhat rough life and atleast from personal experience I have to agree with you: I likely wouldn't have made it to this day without something to occupy myself with, and games happen to be extremely good for such.
So, you're saying that the ability to quickly assess a situation and make strategic decisions isn't useful? Or the ability to mentally track multiple things simultaneously and still being able to function yourself, too? Because I can definitely see use for such skills on multiple areas. Games, especially RTS games, are plenty good for developing skills one needs later in life. You're just too short-sighted to realize that.
What was your opinion on the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X back in the day? Did you bitch slap Motorola for wasting your time? Not the Next Big Thing after all?
No need to try to attack me here, I wasn't bashing AMD and in fact I didn't even show any opinion of mine at all. I merely pointed out what the article was about and what they were trying to say.
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention that what people generally see as "normal" varies widly between place and country of origin, education and religion -- if any. There is no magical norm that is world-wide unless you go to REALLY basic stuff, such as eating, sleeping and breathing. There's hardly a consensus on what's "normal" even among people from one, single nation, yet alone multiple countries. Even such a regular concept as marriage can differ a lot, like e.g. in some places marriage can be polygamous instead of monogamous, in some places it gives actual physical ownership of the partner to the other one, how one celebrates a marriage can vary from brooding alone to feasting and partying wildly and so on.
Besides, why is it even seen as a positive thing to be considered "normal" at all? Being "normal" more-or-less means you conform to expectations from people around you and their moral and ethic codes, thereby becoming just another one of the crowd. Wouldn't it be a more positive thing not to necessarily conform, to make up your own decisions and arguments and make up your own view on the world around you? Atleast I personally am totally proud to be "abnormal"; I'll promise to never conform.
The problem with most hybrid disks is the fact that they don't know about filesystems, they don't know about current working conditions of the rest of the system and they don't know of user and application preferences: they're working with a very limited set of data available to them and thus they can only base their operation on guesses of what is going to be needed next. The OCZ RevoDrive is the exception here in that it's actually two drives that are both accessible separately to the OS and/or applications if one doesn't install their caching software.
OS- and filesystem-agnostic system is always going to be somewhat limited so it would be beneficial if the rest of these hybrid systems also allowed the OS direct access to the flash so that the OS can optimize its behaviour accordingly. Like e.g. the user is reading several multi-gigabyte files, say, disc images for example; a OS- and filesystem-agnostic hybrid will start caching those files since it doesn't know how large those files are or how often they're needed, whereas if OS handled the caching it could determine that those files are accessed very rarely, usually in large sequences, and thus it would be better to skip caching them and instead save the cache for any related smaller files that are accessed more often. If you're familiar with the Windows ReadyBoost it actually works similarly: it skips caching large files as usually mechanical drives are more than fast enough for large sequential reads, but it instead caches a helluva lot of all kinds of small files since flash is absolutely terrific at random accesses and reading in even hundreds of small files from a slow flash is still faster than reading them in from the fastest mechanical one (I have a class10 16GB SD-card in my laptop as ReadyBoost drive and I've certainly noticed huge improvement in application startup times)
So yeah, sure, do create hybrids, they're a good idea in general. Just allow the OS to flip a bit and gain direct access to the flash part, too, for those OSes that are aware of such.
That's what she said.
... no costs of producing a digital object there is also no losses to be spread over.
Open up a text editor. Type the source code for Windows 7, compile it, debug it, and post the binary for the entire world to use for free.
Get back to us when your done, and you have the experience to determine how expensive of an effort that was.
Good job trying to completely misrepresent what I said. Let's do it this way: find that ebook you bought in Explorer (or whichever filemanager you happen to use) and copy it. Then make another copy. And another. Now, how much did that cost you? Or the person who wrote it? Zero? Oh, shoot, that's right: duplicating a digital object costs nothing.
Sorry I didn't respond earlier, I dozed off.
When NancyBoy the pirate enters the picture, and receives the benefit of ABCD without paying for it, he just stole $1, collectively, from the 10 people who paid to receive benefit. If NancyBoy the pirate had paid, the cost to the 11 benefit receivers would be $10/11 or approx $0.91. NancyBoy the pirate has stolen money, and permanently deprived 10 people of property.
Again, economics doesn't work like that. If 10 people buy the software the company has just earned $10. If 10 people buy it, and one pirates it, the company has STILL earned $10. The amount of money earned doesn't change according to the amount of people using the software as money isn't some fluctuating variable. Besides, the company can't even know how many people are using the software anyways unless the pirates themselves report to the company, so again that's yet another reason for why it cannot work like that.
The physical object argument does not matter, and here is why. A car started out as dirt in the ground. Someone had to mine the dirt, extract the iron, make steel, form it into a car, etc. When you buy a car, you are paying for the labor and time of people who molded dirt into a car. The same is true of software, movies, and music. You are paying for the labor and time of people who organized information and molded it into a product.
Again, a car is made of physical materials. If the materials could simply be whipped out from thin air then your argument would be better, but as reality stands the materials are indeed a physical object and are needed to produce other physical objects. I would LOVE to see how you duplicate a car without it affecting the original one.
Of course I agree that the developers deserve to get paid for the work they've done, but that is a perfectly reasonable argument that doesn't depend on false pretenses and is perfectly fine on its own. But your other arguments are just bullsh*t, you are trying to associate material costs to something that doesn't have them, and you're similarly trying to assign theft to something that in no way or form affects the original or its owner.
The time required to produce the product is a constant indeed. But the expense is amortized by the number of people who will benefit from using the software. Copying and using software without paying for it, is similar to shoplifting, in the sense that, by you not paying for the right to use the product you stole, increases the price that people who do pay for the right to use an item. When you steal a candy bar from Walmart, the loss is spread to the customers who pay for their purchases.
It doesn't work like that, you're just grasping for strawman arguments here. A candy bar is a physical object, it cannot just be copied. There is always a loss of material that is spent on manufacturing it, whereas there is no material loss at all when you copy a digital object. So of course the cost of the materials used to manufacture something is either absorbed by the budget assigned to it, or spread to the rest of objects being sold. But as there is no loss of materials and thus no costs of producing a digital object there is also no losses to be spread over.
This is just an excuse on your part. You are receiving the benefit of someone elses labor, without paying for it. It's the same situation if you screw the painter. You receive the benefit of his labor without paying him for it.
No, it's not an excuse. If you literally hire someone to use their time on you, then you are indeed depriving them of their time. But if that person uses their time with or without you involved then you cannot deprive them of their time since they're depriving it all by themselves.
If a company hired you to work for them, and the company received the benefit of your labor, then refused to pay you for it, you would be outraged. But when you want to receive the benefits of other peoples labor without paying for it, you justify it by saying "It's okay because its really easy for me to copy it and receive benefit without payment."
See above.
By your logic, its okay for me to steal your car because I have a screwdriver and I know how to disable alarms and hotwire it. It only took 30 seconds. It was so easy for me to steal it that you don't deserve a car.
No, you're depriving me of a physical object that I don't have accessible to me afterwards. If you however e.g. copy an ebook I have written I will still have the ebook in my possession, too.
You are permanently depriving them of the time it took to produce the software
The time they spent to produce the software is a constant, it doesn't change according to the amount of people using the software.
Your argument is similar to hiring someone to paint your house, then refusing to pay them after the job is done. You have deprived the painter of his time. When you pirate software, you are depriving the person or people who spent time developing that software of their time.
Not really. A software product is already done, the time on it has been spent already whether or not you're using it. But the painter's time isn't used until you hire him to use it. As such your argument doesn't quite fly right. Comparing virtual things to physical things often doesn't work too well.
You're missing the point, either deliberately or not by a mistake. First of all, with or without pirated content you're still going to pay for food, gas, rent and utilities, so you cannot count that money. Nor can you count the money you wouldn't use on media anyways. Secondly, they mean the money you'd use on media you're likely to spend on media anyways, with or without pirated content available. There are of course always individuals who differ from the general norm, but it does hold true for the general populace.
It's still getting something for nothing, and maybe you spend the same amount in entertainment, but its distributed totally differently. If you spend $100 on some blockbuster concert and then pirate 10 albums from smaller bands, the only one winning is the big act. Rationalize it any way you want, but its stealing either way.
And who's to say that the $100 would go to the smaller bands if there was no pirated content available? It's just as likely that the person pirates songs from smaller bands to sample them out and then goes and buys $100 worth of goodies from the ones that feel worth it. You can try and rationalize it any way you wish, but it simply isn't as clear-cut as people try to make it out to be.
Besides it's not theft. Hell, it's not even deprivation of income as you cannot just assume that the person would buy the content if it wasn't available for free. If anything it's often free advertising.
For me it is certain tropes which ruin a series for me:
* gender roles from the 19th century
* women who only exist as decoration or object of relationships
* women who are wearing clothes which are just ridiculous. I seriously would put most actors in a burkah for their performances, not out of Islamic fundamentalism but because enough is enough. (This gets a pass if the men are wearing as little as well)
Heh. Those kinds of things tend to put me off, too. I am not a feminist -- atleast I personally don't view myself as one -- but it really does tick me in a bad way when people even in this day and age try to push centuries-old misconceptions and roles on us just because we happen to be the ones with breasts, trying to box us in with restrictions about how we should be, behave and what we should like and dislike. In that same vein I find it annoying that even women who are supposed to be some total badass killing machines, going out to kill dragons or take out half a robotic army all by herself, are wearing chainmail bikinis that barely cover nipples and genitals: how the f*ck is that supposed to protect them when the male characters doing exact same stuff are wearing full plate-mails? Either have them both jumping around in loincloths, or have them both in plate/full body armory/whatnot.
* "listen to your heart, not your head"
That is indeed annoying. Sure, listening to your own emotions is important, but you should still use your head, too. A "great teacher" - character should know better than teaching his/her students to only to listen the one and ignore the other.
* excessive violence
I have yet to see too much violence, only too little.. :D
This may not directly relate to the article itself, but how about trying to be a little bit constructive here instead of only offering criticism? What kinds of TV-shows or series do you view as being worth watching, worth your time? Are there some that you'd feel others might also enjoy and thus you'd like to recommend them?
I personally do not have any specific genre that I enjoy as I can watch mostly anything, it's the flow of the story and the believability of the characters and their actions that matters the most. Then again, as I watch movies most of the time and not TV-series I don't really have all that much experience on that field. I still do offer two recommendations that I personally feel that are definitely worth watching, and if you can afford it, they're sure worth owning, too:
* Breaking Bad: A high-school chemistry teacher in his 50s hears he has a lung cancer, realizes he has been an under-performer his whole life and wishes to be able to leave his family with means to get by even if he isn't no longer supporting them financially, and derails completely and decides to take part in meth-cooking business.
* Walking Dead: As if the name isn't already descriptive enough or anything, but, well, a small-town sheriff gets shot, is taken to hospital, is unconcious for some time only to wake up to a seemingly empty hospital and the rest of the town either empty or trying to eat him. From there, it's only downhill!
I own two TVs. I use one for DVDs, Netflix Instant, and OTA NFL games. The other is collecting dust in my bedroom, I really should have it recycled.
So while I own them, I don't watch much TV--at least not until it shows up on Instant. Because of that, and because of everyone else being totally obsessed with TV, it is very hard not to point out that I have no fucking clue what they're talking about when they tell me about "New Show 131". If you just nod your head and pretend they catch on quickly and ask "WTF?"
You're an idiot either way for not watching the "idiot box." :(
There's two TVs in this household too, but both are only used as display devices for PlayStation 3, PC and my tablet. None of them are used for watching actual TV - shows or such. Why? Because most of what is there is just plain crap and more annoying than entertaining. Watching TV is a terribly passive experience so if I'm going to sit down and just stare at the screen then I atleast expect it to be worth my time. Alas, if there even is a good TV show going it's always pushed to really late hours, it's shown only once a week, and there's only ever at most one, single good show running at any given time. Never more than one.
*whoosh*
Good thing you have nothing to hide!
Oh, you bet MAFIAA will be credited somewhere as a 'sponsor' on these things..
Seriously though, A lot of people don't quite settle for the onboard GPU, especially if you like to game with a very high resolution, or multiple monitors.
I sure as hell wouldn't be able to settle for an onboard GPU, they're simply too slow. I already cringe whenever I'm away from home for longer periods and have to kill some time by trying to play on my laptop, and these days I'm starting to feel my overclocked Geforce 460 on my desktop is starting to get slow and needs a replacement soon.
I was actually just thinking today to myself that it should be a feature built-in to the OS: you tell the OS which stuff it should optimize for speed, you could assign one or several devices to use for that, and then the OS would figure out the best way to do that. Like for example the OS would include a tool that lists all installed application and games, then things like "browser cache", "my personal documents", "Custom files", and would also allow you to tick on/off OS itself from the list, and so on. There are and always will be shortcomings when a device tries to cache stuff when it doesn't know user's own preferences or how the operating system itself manages files and its own caches, so why leave it to hardware? Why not instead have the OS optimize the thing?
I do realize that SSDs are becoming the norm soon and old mechanical drives are on their way out and eventually they'll be reserved a niche space somewhere. But then the next big, fast thing will come and people will wish to again use it as a cache for SSDs, and so on, and that's why I also think the whole caching system should be built-in to the OS itself because it has access to all the needed data to optimize the thing.
It would be interesting to see someone start a research project around this idea on some open-source OS, but it remains to be seen if anyone is willing to do that. I personally don't have the skills needed.
I know many people who would see a huge benefit from these hybrid drives, but then again they're all non-techies: they just use the computer the way they've learned, they know nothing about the internals and so on. A hybrid drive would atleast get them on the desktop a lot faster than they do right now, and that alone is quite useful. The thing is that I don't really feel like 8 gigabytes is enough. Windows alone can easily eat up more than half of that, and with many applications weighing in the hundreds of megabytes you don't really get all that much stuff in there. Up it to 16 gigabytes and it'll help even novitiate gamers.
For me though, hybrid drives are definitely not suitable. I rather control what exactly goes in there so I can optimize those things that I feel need optimization and leave the rest to standard non-SSDs. Like e.g. I'd definitely want most of Windows on SSD, plus Firefox+cache, a few IM applications, programming tools, and whatever game I happen to be playing the most at the time; I'd leave most of Steam to non-SSD, I'd just copypaste the currently most interesting game to SSD for fast startup and loading-times. And for example even though I access my music files regularly, they're so small that it takes barely a second to read a whole song to memory even from non-SSDs, so it'd be waste of fast storage to cache those files on there. A hybrid drive would most definitely be caching stuff that doesn't need caching.
Alas, SSDs are terribly expensive for an unemployed person. Before the floods I could get a 1TB non-SSD for 49€ whereas a 64GB SSD costs 120€. While 64GB would be enough for my needs it still hurts way too much to pay such sums for so little.
I used to play lots of pirated games, and I mean LOTS of them, but.. a few years back I got introduced to Steam. I don't remember anymore what exactly drove me to try it, but I did. And suddenly I noticed using less and less pirated games to the point that I haven't had a single pirated game on any of my computers for a few years now. Steam just happens to be so extraordinarily convenient, not to mention two things they provide me with that pirated games don't: always up-to-date installations, and I don't have to bother with backups of my own or trying to keep the original discs safe. And again, the constant sales thing is also great; if I can just stay patient and wait for the game I like to come on this or that seasonal sale I'll be able to safe quite a bit, but I also can just rush out and buy it the moment it's available if I just can't stay patient.
My roomie has a very similar story in fact, we're both old "pirates"; we never produced any pirated copies ourselves nor did we spread them around, but we did use them ourselves a lot. And when we learned of Steam we both started using pirated games less and less until we eventually stopped altogether. In other words, whatever Steam is doing, it seems to be working.
Now, as for the "competing" services, like e.g. the one you're required to sign to when you buy BF3... well, we both view them as an inconvenience, not a convenience. They do not offer anything that Steam already doesn't, plus they're handicapped in several ways, like only offering games from one, single publisher. I understand that they want a piece of the Steam-cake, but the way they're going about it is simply not working all that well.
For most people who don't fit in that category, 1TB is not enough.
Tell me about it! I've got all-in-all about 3.5TB here right now and I'm constantly running out of space!
Well, I know that was meant as a joke, but...there is no backlight so the light has to come from somewhere. And if the eyelid is closed then there is no light-source.
Unfortunately it cannot hide people being douchebags.
I have no doubt in my mind that for some kids, video games are the thin line between "coping on a day to day basis" and "suicidal tendencies".
I'm not going to go to details, but suffice to say that I have had a somewhat rough life and atleast from personal experience I have to agree with you: I likely wouldn't have made it to this day without something to occupy myself with, and games happen to be extremely good for such.
So, you're saying that the ability to quickly assess a situation and make strategic decisions isn't useful? Or the ability to mentally track multiple things simultaneously and still being able to function yourself, too? Because I can definitely see use for such skills on multiple areas. Games, especially RTS games, are plenty good for developing skills one needs later in life. You're just too short-sighted to realize that.
What was your opinion on the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X back in the day? Did you bitch slap Motorola for wasting your time? Not the Next Big Thing after all?
No need to try to attack me here, I wasn't bashing AMD and in fact I didn't even show any opinion of mine at all. I merely pointed out what the article was about and what they were trying to say.