Uhmmm, yeah. On a blank, brand new Vista install, no 3rd party apps the $!#%ing UAC thing drives me up the wall. You can't do ANYTHING without a UAC prompt. Change desktop background?
Wrong.
Open cmd prompt?
Wrong, unless you're trying to open an Admin console.
fix wacky resolution problem on desktop?
Again, wrong unless your "fix" requires updating drivers.
move mouse?
Now you're just being stupid. Either you don't have a Vista installation, you bought into the hype of "UAC Sucks" and just turned it off immediately before really experiencing it, or something is really wrong with your machine.
So have you followed Microsoft's advice to "run Visual Studio 2005 elevated"?
Honestly, because I use VS as a glorified text editor (builds are for command lines), there's really no need. Even if I did, though, I wouldn't see the UAC prompt all that often -- open Visual Studio once, keep it open for several days.
Perhaps Microsoft should set up an audit unit and start giving software a 'UAC-compatible' tick if a piece of software has minimised how much UAC approval is required if its turned on, allowing the publisher to put it on their box so that the customers can tell. Who knows, perhaps one day the UAC system might actually be viable.
In theory, that already exists. In order to use the "Certified for Windows Vista" logo on your software, you have to play nicely with UAC.
Hopefully this will cause applications to stay the hell out of the Windows directory, the registry and wherever else they seem to think would be a good place to sprinkle data randomly. I pine for the days of being able to uninstall a program fully from my system by deleting its folder. Or being able to simply copy a configuration file from one computer to the next and having all my settings preserved.
Just for the record, you don't have to stay out of the registry if you want to avoid admin privileges. You do need to stay out of the HKLM (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) hive, but HKCU (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) can and should be used for user-specific stuff without requiring extra admin privileges.
So does that mean it's not working, wasting my time, AND training me to ignore security warnings? Honestly I don't have a better solution except for the rhetorical question "why can't people who exploit users just/themselves......"
Which goes to exactly what Ian was saying -- If you're really seeing UAC that often, you're doing something wrong (or you're using software from developers who did something wrong). As developers get their act together and stop requiring admin privileges for trivial things (hint: using %userprofile% and HKCU rather than %programfiles% and HKLM will solve 90% of your admin-privilege requirements when developing), UAC prompts should appear less and less often, and then only when you really expect them (you're doing system configuration stuff) or when there's a real issue that you should deny. Unfortunately, that world is probably 3+ years away as developers get with the program and rev their software, and in the meantime UAC will just become one more annoying dialog you have to click through to do anything.
With that said, I saw the UAC dialog exactly once today, and that was only because I had to upgrade my video drivers. I'm a professional software developer. I spend my time with Visual Studio and SQL Server, and I rarely have to deal with UAC prompts.
True, it's very good -- but I'd pick Castlevania Bloodlines as the best title of the series.
The Genesis game that had no Belmont in it at all? Are you sure you're not thinking of Dracula X: Rondo of Blood instead? That being the Japan-only prequel to Symphony of the Night, and the last (and supposedly best) of the non-Metroidvania Castlevanias. It's also being re-released on PSP this summer, in case you never got a chance to play it.
BTW, if you really did mean Bloodlines, Portrait of Ruin (the latest DS game) is a continuation of that story line. The gameplay style is SOTN/Metroidvania rather than action/platformer, though.
Be disappointed now, it'll make it easier later. Console yourselves with the original Castlevainia which I hear can now be downloaded on the Wii.
Or Castlevania IV, which is also available on WiiVC. Or even better, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, available now on Xbox 360 XBLA. The earlier Castlevanias are fun, mindless action games, but I really much prefer the Metroidvania style of play.
On an unrelated note, am I the only one who had a problem with apparently the texture detail jumping during the cutscenes in Halo 2? As soon as someone or something appeared on-screen it'd have a relatively low-res texture applied to it for as long as a second or so, then bump up to the full quality. I've never figured out if it's a problem with my xbox or just a fact of life in the game.
That was by design, and Bungie has commented on it several times. Essentially, it's a compromise between load times and graphical quality. I don't know if you noticed, but after the intial load Halo 2 had absolutely no load screens at all, including for cutscenes. To pull that off, they had to compromise on loading the textures for cut scenes, which meant you could either have a completely seamless game but with 1-2 seconds of low-res textures at the beginning of each cut scene, or you could have cutscenes with their full textures from the very start but have to look at a loading screen for 1-2 seconds every time a cutscene kicked off.
Given that everyone here obviously believes gameplay is more important than cutscenes, I think Bungie made the right choice -- sacrifice some small amount of cutscene quality in order to have a completely seamless, load-free game.
I'm guessing its the graphics card. On a AMD X2 4200, 7800 GT, and 2 GB of RAM, my games have worked fine, with the exception of GalCiv 2 (this was back in January). The developers for that game stated that the problem was with nVidia's drivers in particular, not with Vista. Newer drivers may have rectified the situation, but I haven't tested yet.
I can confirm that (the nVidia driver problem, not whether or not it's been fixed). GalCiv2 and GC2:DA run flawlessly on my laptop's ATI x300 GPU under Vista. Since GC2 is the only PC game I play anymore, Vista has been perfect for me.
I thought it was really cool that if I played the same couple of maps or levels in Halo over and over it only had to load them once because Bungie was able to stream the files to the hard drive.
I feel like MS pussied out on the 360's design by removing the hard drive because they took that away from developers.
Unless developers want to make you "install" your game on a console (like Final Fantasy XI), the lack of a hard drive should be transparent. If it's there, cache your data. If it's not, don't. You still have to be able to stream your data from optical media, so having the hard drive just allows you to cut down on some loading times.
This is a well-known pattern, and has already been used in many Xbox 360 games. If Rockstar can't figure it out (especially with all of the excellent developer support Microsoft provides), they have more problems than just a lack of a hard drive.
Now we're finally seeing a successful multi-platform developer complain about the 360's limitations. I don't think this looks very good for the 360 or for Microsoft.
Bethesda Software, the makers of Oblivion, complained about the exact same things Rockstar is complaining about now, but almost two years ago. Somehow they figured it out, fitting all of their content onto a single DVD and utilizing the hard drive for a stream cache when available. I'm sure Rockstar can figure it out as well.
P.S.: I'm sure the PS3 has development issues too--mainly the long load times as a result of the Blu-Ray disc and still figuring out the Cell architecture. But Rockstar is used to taking crap from Sony, so they're not complaining about it.
Actually, they are complaining about it. RTFA and you'll see that the guy complained that both consoles have difficulties. The submitter's apparent anti-MS bias caused him to leave that part out, because "Xbox 360 sucks (implies PS3 is good)" is more attention grabbing than "Xbox 360 and PS3 both suck".
Um... "as opposed to about an hour with Aero active.":) I didn't get the higher-capacity battery because I won't use it on battery too often. But I've noticed a significant difference in battery life with Aero off. I guess I should have included the "YMMV" but I figured that would be implied.
What video chipset does your laptop have? I'm guessing a discrete chip with its own memory will be both more efficient at running Areo and more power efficient than an integrated chip that steals system memory and CPU resources in order to process shaders (like Intel's chipsets that support Aero). A driver update might help somewhat, but drivers can't changed a shared/integrated architecture into a discrete GPU.
It's not just Aero it's the way it hits the disk so much - it has processes in there that for example after writing to a directory it decides to scan the disk and cache the whole directory. Fine in theory but when you've got the disk thrashing for 5+ minutes at a stretch that eats battery on a laptop.
If indexing is your problem, you misconfigured your power settings. By default, a laptop should do little or no indexing while running on battery power ("Power Saver" mode). Assuming you didn't go monkeying around with your power settings, setting them to "High Performance" on battery power, you're probably seeing something else like Defender scanning for spyware or your antivirus scanning for viruses. Personally, I'd turn off real-time protection and just do periodic scans while running on wall power, but that's a question of "security" vs. battery life (I'd choose battery life).
I got a Compaq Presario laptop with Vista Home Premium about two months ago. It's not a killer laptop, just an Athlon Turion 64 at 2 GHz with 1 GB RAM, but it's sufficient for why I wanted a laptop. Just listening to MP3s through Media Player would shoot the CPU level up to a consistent 35-50% CPU utilization with Aero active. The battery obviously didn't last too long. I finally got so fed up with it that I shut off Aero, dropped the system back to a 2000/XP theme, and installed WinAmp. Listening to the same MP3s that way had the CPU going at around 5-10%. Even when I'm just using it for audio editing or photo editing, now I can use it for a few hours as opposed to about an hour with Aero active.
How long is "didn't last too long"? I have a ~2.5 year old Dell Inspiron 9300, 1.6GHz P4m, 2GB RAM (I upgraded for Vista), 7200RPM hard drive (upgraded for a small boost in speed), and an ATI x300 GPU with 128MB of onboard RAM (not shared with system memory). I use Aero Glass on that laptop all the time, and I still get 3.5-4 hours of battery life if I'm conservative with the LCD backlight. That's with the bigger 9 cell battery rather than a standard 6 cell, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that my battery usage in Vista is on par with my battery usage in XP before upgrading. In fact as far as I can tell the only hit I've taken to battery life is the natural degradation of the battery over time with use.
Suppose the 'mysteriously' winding up in the secondary index goes like "Ah, this guy is getting far too good results without us making any money out of it, let's put him in the secondary index, it might motivate him to buy sponsored links."
So you're suggesting that Google is watching all of the billions of searches that happen on its service every day, just looking for sites that are getting a little too good (organically) without paying? Don't ascribe to (Google's) maliciousness that which can be explained by (the article's subjects') stupidity. In this case, it's much more likely that the idiots in the article were
We then went to a local Staples, and ended up buying an HP laptop with the
same processor, memory and disk capacity as the Dell, with Windows XP, for
about 35% less than what the twit in the Dell kiosk quoted us, which appeared
to be basically the same price I'd obtained the evening before over the net
from the DellDirect web site.
Dell has some awesome deals, but they're not very well published. The trick is finding the right coupon code and configuring the machine to have only what you want. You can usually do $100-200 cheaper than the lowest price Dell lists on their site, without having to send out for mail-in rebates or the like.
If you think that it's incoherent for X windows to be in a different module than the kernel, there's something that you don't get.
"Built-in" does not have to mean built into the kernel. In the case of Linux, "built-in" might mean "available by default in every distribution without having to do anything special". Maybe that's KDE, maybe it's GNOME, maybe it's something else, but it has to always be there (alternatively, you have to really work at making it not be there, in which case you're probably not the target audience).
However, it is true that a unified API that eases porting between different GUI kits would be nice.
I don't think a unified API solves the problem, so long as projects are allowed to implement however much or little of it as they want. What is needed is a single, de-facto GUI widget kit that is ubiquitous across all distributions of Linux. Or at least provide a single easy way for an application to force the installation of that toolkit if it's not there already (and no, debs, rpms, pkgs, and whatever else don't satisfy that criteria because there's too many of them -- one installation method, one dependency resolution method, one toolkit. Not 10 different installation methods, each with their own dependency resolution models, for 20 different toolkits).
On an unrelated note, I wasn't aware the.NET SDK was free. Interesting, but I can't see the justification in using F# over Ocaml. Of course, if you're using.NET you might as well get an MSDN kit and visual studio, so I can see where they're going with it.
.NET SDK 2.0. Also, as I mentioned, Visual Studio Express products are available for free for many different uses (app development, web development, database development, game development, etc). If you're developing software professionally, you probably would want to spring for a full Visual Studio product, but for individuals and small projects the Express SKUs work great. XNA's Game Studio Express is built on top of Visual C# Express, for example, and allows you to build games for Windows and/or Xbox 360.
As for why you would use F# instead of OCAML, IronPython instead of Python, Ruby.NET instead of Ruby, etc, is for interoperability. Because the languages are implemented to compile down to IL (.NET's Intermediate Language), they can be used with any other.NET language. For most people it's just a novelty, but it's still cool in a geeky way. BTW, this is no different than building compilers to target languages to the Java VM, like Jython. Why would you use Jython rather than Python? Because it can more easily interact with Java components and other languages compiled to the Java VM. Not a big deal if you're only doing Python work, but invaluable if parts of your product are written in Java and it makes sense to build other portions with Python.
This means that no matter if the product 'sells' to 1000 people or a million, they will keep doing it.
Really? How many dead apps exist on sourceforge? Freshmeat?
MS won't sell something that isn't making money
That's why they killed Xbox, right? Oh, wait...
Think of it like this... you have 50 car dealerships in a small town. They all get their cars for free from the factory. Everything they sell is for a profit, but because there are so many of them, they barely make any profit. The only ones that shut down, are those who get tired of not making any profit. Some owners are content to keep their dealership open without making a profit, because they get to say they own a dealership, or they have a select few customers who always come in to buy cars, thus making them think that what they are doing is worthwhile.
Worst. Car analogy. Ever.
Keeping a dealership open when it's selling no cars still costs money even the cars are free to the dealer. Similarly, open source projects that don't make money are done in spare time because the author(s) still have to work to eat. Yes, some authors will keep doing it for love of the problem well past the point where they've scratched their own itch. More will get the app just to point of scratching that itch and then mothball it (see open source apps that haven't been updated in years). Most will never get to the point of scratching their own itch and will die in a planning, pre-alpha, or alpha stage, never to be useful by anyone including the original author.
The open source projects that survive are the ones that can either drum up enough interest to build a large developer community such that the author doesn't have to spread himself so thin, or the ones that are able to scrape up some cash in order to pay a developer or two to work on them. Linux is not solely developed by Linus anymore. Perl is not solely developed by Larry Wall. And so on.
There's plenty of choice on Windows. The only difference is that these choices involve paying money for things whose worth you can't evaluate until you've used them for longer than a month.
If you're going to claim that you have to pay for everything on Windows, you probably ought to choose better examples.
IDEs - visual studio, eclipse, netbeans, dev-c++, codewarrior, just to name a few I've used
Visual Studio (Express versions), Eclipse, NetBeans, Dev-C++ -- all free
The various.NET languages
Again, free. You don't need anything but a text editor and the.NET SDK (free) to build.NET applications. Also, other languages like F# (variant of ML) and IronPython (uh... Python on.NET) are free as well. In fact, IronPython is even open source.
Databases
SQL Server Express, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, all free. Sure, SQL Server (non-Express), Oracle, and db2 are not free, but Oracle and db2 are not free on Linux either.
Webservers, IIS, apache, or something else?
IIS is "free" (comes with the OS you paid for), and Apache is obviously free as well.
If you're just moaning about how Microsoft has a large vertically integrated set of tools, well, there's Java. Nobody does this, because its stupid and they have the choice not to.
They have the choice not to moan about Microsoft's vertically integrated toolset? Or they have the choice not to use Java?
For independent or small developers, an integrated set of tools isn't really all that important (though nice). For a medium to large business, it's critical if you want to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time without reinventing the wheel over and over again. That toolset doesn't have to be Microsoft, but they do provide a compelling set of developer utilities (Visual Studio is easily one of the best IDEs available for any price, for example). That's what the article was getting at -- when it comes to developers, Microsoft Gets It(tm) (queue Ballmer's infamous "Developers developers developers" video here).
On another note, Blu-ray actually is technologically superior, and it would be nice, for once, to see capitalism actually work in that something that really is better would succeed in the market (here I'm thinking Macintosh, Beta, etc.).
Blu-Ray might be technically better (larger size, better DRM options), but that doesn't really matter to end-users. What matters is titles available (which Blu-Ray seems to be winning at right now) and audio/video quality (both HD-DVD and BR can do up to 1080p, though BR does allow for uncompressed audio tracks thanks to its larger size). If Blu-Ray does win, it'll be because it has a better selection of titles.
As for your examples of "better" tech, they weren't "better" where it counted -- for example, Macs have historically been more expensive than PCs, and Beta lost because it didn't record as long as VHS. Beta did catch on in the recording industry where resolution was more important than length.
First off, the OP's link didn't work for me. This one did, though.
Considering that the Xbox360 and (windows) PC ports both likely use DirectX, I imagine the port back and forth was cake. Not only that but the PS3 is a much more difficult system to get working so yeah, if they barge headlong into ports without actually working to make the graphics look good then sure, it'll suck. I imagine most of those 6 months was spent porting away from DirectX, y'know, Microsoft's lock-in for graphics/input/sound APIs. Microsoft makes it easy to write for the platform, but a bitch to port away from.
Yes, DirectX surely makes it easier to port between PC and 360 than it does PC and PS3. That said, many other companies have figured it out (look at Epic's Unreal Engine, for example). Monolith wants to be an engine company just like Id and Epic, so surely they should be able to figure it out as well. Besides, porting between architectures has nothing to do with texture quality, which if you read the review was a major gripe (textures look "muddy" on the PS3 port). Why would that happen, especially given the extra real-estate available on a Blu-Ray disk that would allow textures to be stored uncompressed?
As for difficulty of working with the PS3, that's also somewhat true of the 360. Multi-threading is hard, and optimizing for a non-look-ahead architecture is harder. Of course, 360 developers only have to deal with 6 hardware threads with full functionality, rather than 1 with full functionality and 7 threads that are little more than glorified vector units, so I could see how developing for the PS3 would be harder. Well, that and Microsoft provides awesome developer support and Sony doesn't.
A lack of online for PS3 version smacks of laziness on behalf of the publishers, since they can just slop the online component off on microsoft for the xbox360 verison. They'd actually have to provide a service for their customers, but don't want to.
But wait! The PC version has online multiplayer already that doesn't rely on Xbox Live or its peer-to-peer architecture. In fact, I would suspect it's harder to switch from PC-style client/server network play to Live's peer-to-peer method than it would be to port the PC code over to the PS3. Lazy developers? Sure. Lazy because it's "hard"? Maybe so, but I suspect the "hardness" has nothing to do with the fact that the developer would have to provide an infrastructure that's already available on PC. Then again, maybe they spent so much time just getting the game to work on the PS3 that there was nothing left to sort out multiplayer as well.
Games make a console. This screams shitty ports and half-ass releases rather than "omg the ps3 sucks." The PS3 isn't going anywhere, and I certainly hope no one wishes Microsoft total victory. Wouldn't be the first time they forced their way into a market, only to effectively destroy it (What's that? Six years between browser releases what? Still incompatible?)
Sony, welcome to the market Microsoft entered 6 years ago. The Xbox game selection was rife with shitty PS2 ports, and was clearly a second-class citizen in the market. Looks like this time around the PS3 is going to fill that niche. Yes, most companies don't "win" twice in a row in the console market (so far, only Sony's done that with the PS1 and PS2), so Sony may very well come back out on top with the PS4. Then again, with all of their eggs in the Blu-Ray basket (see this very story about Wal-Mart potentially backing HD-DVD, thus guaranteeing a loss for Blu-Ray; alternatively, take a look at Sony's past history with proprietary formats and their inability to win), their continued demolishing of customer trust (yeah, I'm sure you went out and got a second job like Kutaragi suggested in order to buy a PS3), their DRM issues (*cough*rootkit*cou
Where in the article did it say anything about Katamari shipping on XBLA rather than as a retail game? Given the importance of the funky J-pop music to the Katamari titles, it would seem disastrous to me to ship it in a state where it can only be as large as 250MB.
The article did speculate that online multiplayer would be an additional future download, but that doesn't have anything to do with XBLA. The speculation is written in a confusing way as to imply that users would have to pay for that download, but they may have only meant that Xbox 360 users have to pay a monthly fee for a Gold subscription in order to play multiplayer online (and that the additional download would be free). Personally, I don't care either way. What I do care about is that I can get my Katamari fix without having to drop $600 on a PS3.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong.
Wrong, unless you're trying to open an Admin console.
Again, wrong unless your "fix" requires updating drivers.
Now you're just being stupid. Either you don't have a Vista installation, you bought into the hype of "UAC Sucks" and just turned it off immediately before really experiencing it, or something is really wrong with your machine.
Honestly, because I use VS as a glorified text editor (builds are for command lines), there's really no need. Even if I did, though, I wouldn't see the UAC prompt all that often -- open Visual Studio once, keep it open for several days.
In theory, that already exists. In order to use the "Certified for Windows Vista" logo on your software, you have to play nicely with UAC.
Just for the record, you don't have to stay out of the registry if you want to avoid admin privileges. You do need to stay out of the HKLM (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE) hive, but HKCU (HKEY_CURRENT_USER) can and should be used for user-specific stuff without requiring extra admin privileges.
Which goes to exactly what Ian was saying -- If you're really seeing UAC that often, you're doing something wrong (or you're using software from developers who did something wrong). As developers get their act together and stop requiring admin privileges for trivial things (hint: using %userprofile% and HKCU rather than %programfiles% and HKLM will solve 90% of your admin-privilege requirements when developing), UAC prompts should appear less and less often, and then only when you really expect them (you're doing system configuration stuff) or when there's a real issue that you should deny. Unfortunately, that world is probably 3+ years away as developers get with the program and rev their software, and in the meantime UAC will just become one more annoying dialog you have to click through to do anything.
With that said, I saw the UAC dialog exactly once today, and that was only because I had to upgrade my video drivers. I'm a professional software developer. I spend my time with Visual Studio and SQL Server, and I rarely have to deal with UAC prompts.
The Genesis game that had no Belmont in it at all? Are you sure you're not thinking of Dracula X: Rondo of Blood instead? That being the Japan-only prequel to Symphony of the Night, and the last (and supposedly best) of the non-Metroidvania Castlevanias. It's also being re-released on PSP this summer, in case you never got a chance to play it.
BTW, if you really did mean Bloodlines, Portrait of Ruin (the latest DS game) is a continuation of that story line. The gameplay style is SOTN/Metroidvania rather than action/platformer, though.
Or Castlevania IV, which is also available on WiiVC. Or even better, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, available now on Xbox 360 XBLA. The earlier Castlevanias are fun, mindless action games, but I really much prefer the Metroidvania style of play.
That was by design, and Bungie has commented on it several times. Essentially, it's a compromise between load times and graphical quality. I don't know if you noticed, but after the intial load Halo 2 had absolutely no load screens at all, including for cutscenes. To pull that off, they had to compromise on loading the textures for cut scenes, which meant you could either have a completely seamless game but with 1-2 seconds of low-res textures at the beginning of each cut scene, or you could have cutscenes with their full textures from the very start but have to look at a loading screen for 1-2 seconds every time a cutscene kicked off.
Given that everyone here obviously believes gameplay is more important than cutscenes, I think Bungie made the right choice -- sacrifice some small amount of cutscene quality in order to have a completely seamless, load-free game.
I can confirm that (the nVidia driver problem, not whether or not it's been fixed). GalCiv2 and GC2:DA run flawlessly on my laptop's ATI x300 GPU under Vista. Since GC2 is the only PC game I play anymore, Vista has been perfect for me.
Unless developers want to make you "install" your game on a console (like Final Fantasy XI), the lack of a hard drive should be transparent. If it's there, cache your data. If it's not, don't. You still have to be able to stream your data from optical media, so having the hard drive just allows you to cut down on some loading times.
This is a well-known pattern, and has already been used in many Xbox 360 games. If Rockstar can't figure it out (especially with all of the excellent developer support Microsoft provides), they have more problems than just a lack of a hard drive.
Bethesda Software, the makers of Oblivion, complained about the exact same things Rockstar is complaining about now, but almost two years ago. Somehow they figured it out, fitting all of their content onto a single DVD and utilizing the hard drive for a stream cache when available. I'm sure Rockstar can figure it out as well.
Actually, they are complaining about it. RTFA and you'll see that the guy complained that both consoles have difficulties. The submitter's apparent anti-MS bias caused him to leave that part out, because "Xbox 360 sucks (implies PS3 is good)" is more attention grabbing than "Xbox 360 and PS3 both suck".
What video chipset does your laptop have? I'm guessing a discrete chip with its own memory will be both more efficient at running Areo and more power efficient than an integrated chip that steals system memory and CPU resources in order to process shaders (like Intel's chipsets that support Aero). A driver update might help somewhat, but drivers can't changed a shared/integrated architecture into a discrete GPU.
If indexing is your problem, you misconfigured your power settings. By default, a laptop should do little or no indexing while running on battery power ("Power Saver" mode). Assuming you didn't go monkeying around with your power settings, setting them to "High Performance" on battery power, you're probably seeing something else like Defender scanning for spyware or your antivirus scanning for viruses. Personally, I'd turn off real-time protection and just do periodic scans while running on wall power, but that's a question of "security" vs. battery life (I'd choose battery life).
How long is "didn't last too long"? I have a ~2.5 year old Dell Inspiron 9300, 1.6GHz P4m, 2GB RAM (I upgraded for Vista), 7200RPM hard drive (upgraded for a small boost in speed), and an ATI x300 GPU with 128MB of onboard RAM (not shared with system memory). I use Aero Glass on that laptop all the time, and I still get 3.5-4 hours of battery life if I'm conservative with the LCD backlight. That's with the bigger 9 cell battery rather than a standard 6 cell, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that my battery usage in Vista is on par with my battery usage in XP before upgrading. In fact as far as I can tell the only hit I've taken to battery life is the natural degradation of the battery over time with use.
So you're suggesting that Google is watching all of the billions of searches that happen on its service every day, just looking for sites that are getting a little too good (organically) without paying? Don't ascribe to (Google's) maliciousness that which can be explained by (the article's subjects') stupidity. In this case, it's much more likely that the idiots in the article were
Dell has some awesome deals, but they're not very well published. The trick is finding the right coupon code and configuring the machine to have only what you want. You can usually do $100-200 cheaper than the lowest price Dell lists on their site, without having to send out for mail-in rebates or the like.
Please tell me you did that on purpose ...
(Did what? Using "their" instead of "they're", of course.)
"Built-in" does not have to mean built into the kernel. In the case of Linux, "built-in" might mean "available by default in every distribution without having to do anything special". Maybe that's KDE, maybe it's GNOME, maybe it's something else, but it has to always be there (alternatively, you have to really work at making it not be there, in which case you're probably not the target audience).
I don't think a unified API solves the problem, so long as projects are allowed to implement however much or little of it as they want. What is needed is a single, de-facto GUI widget kit that is ubiquitous across all distributions of Linux. Or at least provide a single easy way for an application to force the installation of that toolkit if it's not there already (and no, debs, rpms, pkgs, and whatever else don't satisfy that criteria because there's too many of them -- one installation method, one dependency resolution method, one toolkit. Not 10 different installation methods, each with their own dependency resolution models, for 20 different toolkits).
As for why you would use F# instead of OCAML, IronPython instead of Python, Ruby.NET instead of Ruby, etc, is for interoperability. Because the languages are implemented to compile down to IL (.NET's Intermediate Language), they can be used with any other .NET language. For most people it's just a novelty, but it's still cool in a geeky way. BTW, this is no different than building compilers to target languages to the Java VM, like Jython. Why would you use Jython rather than Python? Because it can more easily interact with Java components and other languages compiled to the Java VM. Not a big deal if you're only doing Python work, but invaluable if parts of your product are written in Java and it makes sense to build other portions with Python.
Really? How many dead apps exist on sourceforge? Freshmeat?
That's why they killed Xbox, right? Oh, wait ...
Worst. Car analogy. Ever.
Keeping a dealership open when it's selling no cars still costs money even the cars are free to the dealer. Similarly, open source projects that don't make money are done in spare time because the author(s) still have to work to eat. Yes, some authors will keep doing it for love of the problem well past the point where they've scratched their own itch. More will get the app just to point of scratching that itch and then mothball it (see open source apps that haven't been updated in years). Most will never get to the point of scratching their own itch and will die in a planning, pre-alpha, or alpha stage, never to be useful by anyone including the original author.
The open source projects that survive are the ones that can either drum up enough interest to build a large developer community such that the author doesn't have to spread himself so thin, or the ones that are able to scrape up some cash in order to pay a developer or two to work on them. Linux is not solely developed by Linus anymore. Perl is not solely developed by Larry Wall. And so on.
If you're going to claim that you have to pay for everything on Windows, you probably ought to choose better examples.
Visual Studio (Express versions), Eclipse, NetBeans, Dev-C++ -- all free
Again, free. You don't need anything but a text editor and the .NET SDK (free) to build .NET applications. Also, other languages like F# (variant of ML) and IronPython (uh ... Python on .NET) are free as well. In fact, IronPython is even open source.
SQL Server Express, PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite, all free. Sure, SQL Server (non-Express), Oracle, and db2 are not free, but Oracle and db2 are not free on Linux either.
IIS is "free" (comes with the OS you paid for), and Apache is obviously free as well.
They have the choice not to moan about Microsoft's vertically integrated toolset? Or they have the choice not to use Java?
For independent or small developers, an integrated set of tools isn't really all that important (though nice). For a medium to large business, it's critical if you want to get anything done in a reasonable amount of time without reinventing the wheel over and over again. That toolset doesn't have to be Microsoft, but they do provide a compelling set of developer utilities (Visual Studio is easily one of the best IDEs available for any price, for example). That's what the article was getting at -- when it comes to developers, Microsoft Gets It(tm) (queue Ballmer's infamous "Developers developers developers" video here).
What if you compare the Porsche to a Porsche bike? You know, to go along with your Porsche clothes, shoes, pipes, toaster, etc.
Blu-Ray might be technically better (larger size, better DRM options), but that doesn't really matter to end-users. What matters is titles available (which Blu-Ray seems to be winning at right now) and audio/video quality (both HD-DVD and BR can do up to 1080p, though BR does allow for uncompressed audio tracks thanks to its larger size). If Blu-Ray does win, it'll be because it has a better selection of titles.
As for your examples of "better" tech, they weren't "better" where it counted -- for example, Macs have historically been more expensive than PCs, and Beta lost because it didn't record as long as VHS. Beta did catch on in the recording industry where resolution was more important than length.
First off, the OP's link didn't work for me. This one did, though.
Yes, DirectX surely makes it easier to port between PC and 360 than it does PC and PS3. That said, many other companies have figured it out (look at Epic's Unreal Engine, for example). Monolith wants to be an engine company just like Id and Epic, so surely they should be able to figure it out as well. Besides, porting between architectures has nothing to do with texture quality, which if you read the review was a major gripe (textures look "muddy" on the PS3 port). Why would that happen, especially given the extra real-estate available on a Blu-Ray disk that would allow textures to be stored uncompressed?
As for difficulty of working with the PS3, that's also somewhat true of the 360. Multi-threading is hard, and optimizing for a non-look-ahead architecture is harder. Of course, 360 developers only have to deal with 6 hardware threads with full functionality, rather than 1 with full functionality and 7 threads that are little more than glorified vector units, so I could see how developing for the PS3 would be harder. Well, that and Microsoft provides awesome developer support and Sony doesn't.
But wait! The PC version has online multiplayer already that doesn't rely on Xbox Live or its peer-to-peer architecture. In fact, I would suspect it's harder to switch from PC-style client/server network play to Live's peer-to-peer method than it would be to port the PC code over to the PS3. Lazy developers? Sure. Lazy because it's "hard"? Maybe so, but I suspect the "hardness" has nothing to do with the fact that the developer would have to provide an infrastructure that's already available on PC. Then again, maybe they spent so much time just getting the game to work on the PS3 that there was nothing left to sort out multiplayer as well.
Sony, welcome to the market Microsoft entered 6 years ago. The Xbox game selection was rife with shitty PS2 ports, and was clearly a second-class citizen in the market. Looks like this time around the PS3 is going to fill that niche. Yes, most companies don't "win" twice in a row in the console market (so far, only Sony's done that with the PS1 and PS2), so Sony may very well come back out on top with the PS4. Then again, with all of their eggs in the Blu-Ray basket (see this very story about Wal-Mart potentially backing HD-DVD, thus guaranteeing a loss for Blu-Ray; alternatively, take a look at Sony's past history with proprietary formats and their inability to win), their continued demolishing of customer trust (yeah, I'm sure you went out and got a second job like Kutaragi suggested in order to buy a PS3), their DRM issues (*cough*rootkit*cou
Where in the article did it say anything about Katamari shipping on XBLA rather than as a retail game? Given the importance of the funky J-pop music to the Katamari titles, it would seem disastrous to me to ship it in a state where it can only be as large as 250MB.
The article did speculate that online multiplayer would be an additional future download, but that doesn't have anything to do with XBLA. The speculation is written in a confusing way as to imply that users would have to pay for that download, but they may have only meant that Xbox 360 users have to pay a monthly fee for a Gold subscription in order to play multiplayer online (and that the additional download would be free). Personally, I don't care either way. What I do care about is that I can get my Katamari fix without having to drop $600 on a PS3.
Both of which were forks of Redhat, leaving us with two distros where initially there was one.