A few hours after the source code leaks their big programming prodject is put on hault? Try this theory on for size, mabey the programers are working on the longhorn sourse code seeing as that by trend microsoft is to edit code, not rewrite it. Now they have to write code. Anyways I personally expect alot of things they were working on to come down over the next few weeks.
"Their big programming project"? Game developers working on Longhorn? Not likely. Microsoft has a bunch of big programming projects going on all the time, and there's little sharing between them. People working on Visual Studio are not going to be pulled off to work on SQL Server, and game developers are not going to be put on Longhorn (unless the developers in question are looking to change jobs within the company and go through the proper interview loops in the new groups and get accepted, of course).
Assuming the Mythica developers were internal to Microsoft and not part of an external company that Microsoft publishes for (Bizarre Creations, Gas Powered Games, etc), the team may be parceled up across different games in the MGS division, or they might be developing a different game. They're certainly not working on Longhorn.
Finally, cancelling projects in any company, not just Microsoft, doesn't happen overnight. Whether or not the NT source was leaked likely had no bearing on this decision at all, as it was surely made weeks ago.
You foil hat might be just a bit too tight, I think.
Please properly credit your source. That article is from The Onion, circa 1998. The site you reference says it got the article from www.cars.com, which may be true, but it doesn't say exactly where on cars.com so the link could be followed to eventually find the real author.
The xbox's buzzfactor, I think is as high as it can go. While observing Microsoft's moves, I've noted that they've done PC like stuff for the console. So basically they did things such as gamespatches that had never been done before by companies such as Nintendo. Think about that 20 years 1988-2004, no patching games, and then Microsoft comes along and starts patching games that have major bugs (granted, online games don't count, but think morrowind...etc.)
First off, your example is bad because Morrowind was released prior to XBox Live, had no capability to download patches, and didn't get any fixes applied to it until it was re-released in the GOTY version (it also wasn't Microsoft's game, and Bethesda is pretty much known for relatively buggy open-ended RPGs like Sea Dogs and the whole Elder Scrolls series). Second, games on the XBox are hardly the first console games to have major bugs or problems that could do with a patch. However, they are the first games on a console with the possibility of getting a patch. What's the problem with that? Nobody's perfect, and even with stringent testing for console games bugs do occassionally slip through. Would you rather throw away a good game that's ruined by one or two minor issues, or get a patch for it and keep going?
For what it's worth, your article only has one exception for the case of abbreviations with periods and lowercase letters where the non-apostrophed 's' would be confusing (I believe the use of apostrophes on upercase letters is incorrect and more confusing). That's a very small corner case, and just goes to show that there is an exception to every rule. That doesn't make the rule wrong, though.
Nope, not a recent development. My Tivo is one of the first series 2 models that came out. I've been using it with my comcast digital cable box for well over a year.
You're correct, that has worked for some time now. However, it's only been supported by TiVO since a software update in late spring/early summer of last year. Prior to that, the serial support may or may not have worked with your cable box, and TiVO made no claims that it did. Now they do claim to support certain models of Motorola boxes. Others may work as well, and a software update in the future may add official support, but you're on your own figuring out which work and which don't, and how much support each one has at the moment.
Here you go. If that link doesn't take you to the proper anchor in the page, it's about 3/4s of the way down, section 8.7, "Configuring lirc for use with an IR blaster".
Do what TiVO does with cable boxes -- get an IR blaster. Program the PVR with the codes to change channels on your Sky TV box, and let it change the channels on the STB for you. Any good PVR app will have support for this.
As a side note, TiVO has recently (within the past 6 months or so) started supporting certain cable boxes via the serial port, and they do support many satellite boxes via the serial port as well (just in case you had a TiVO before you got on DirecTV, and didn't want to get the DirecTiVO). However, the IR blaster approach is still required for a lot of cable boxes, and it works.
Good for you, but I think you missed the point. How cool would it be to download new tracks and racers for Mario Kart: Double Dash, or FZero GX? How about new quests for Zelda: Wind Waker? Downloadable content is a killer app for a console with a hard drive and network connection. Nintendo hasn't even figured out the killer app for their network adaptor, namely online Mario Kart (doable with Warp Pipe, but Mario Kart LAN multiplayer is rather broken, and Warp Pipe is not exactly a seamless, integrated solution like XBox Live:).
Pac-Man Vs. or Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles may killer apps for GC/GBA connections, but nothing else has really taken great advantage of the ability for the two to connect.
I'm thinking it might just be talking about the popup blockers for IE... anyone tested it?
The ads are nothing more than popups that make the popup window "full screen" (ie, they set the size and position of the window to 0,0 and x,y to fill up your screen, and not actually setting the browser to its full screen togglable state, which pisses me off because all future browser windows will now be of that size), and load a flash applet. My own pop-up blocker for IE, NoPopIE has no problems catching those popups, and with proper security settings IE will prompt you to run Flash. All this is going to do for me is prompt me to finally get around to blocking popups from resizing the browser window.
I don't know about you, but I use my broadband connection for much more than just XBox Live. While you may enjoy playing online games via a dialup connection, you simply cannot have a rich gameplay experience doing so (witness the number of PS2 online titles that are broadband-only, including the most popular SOCOM series). I would have broadband even if I didn't have an XBox or XBox Live, and so it is not a contributing cost to XBox Live.
XBox Live and other broadband-only online gaming ventures may push broadband acceptance, which is a good thing, and I back it 100%, but even if someone purchased a broadband connection initially for XBox Live, I believe that said person will find more uses for that connection.
Re:Debian based ApeXtreme to take on Xbox Live!
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However, there is a growing community backlash over what is largely perceived to be an overpriced and underfeatured service. Who wants to pay $19.99/month just to download some extra spell updates to Harry Potter III or to patch bugs in Duke Nukem Forever?
I wish I learned how to do math where you did, so I could also divide $50 (cost of XBox Live subscription per year) by 12 (number of months in a year) and get $20.
Re:It will all come down to one system
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Their console sucks in my opinion (especially in respects of the controller)
Care to explain why you think the XBox sucks? Is it just because it's from Microsoft? Also, if you're still complaining about the controller, you either have girly hands, or you haven't touched an XBox since November 2001. The Duke (original controller) is quite comfortable for anyone with average sized hands, though the best playing position is not the one you'll find at in-store kiosks with fixed controller positions. If that's your only experience, find a friend with an XBox and a Duke and try it again. The S controller is much better for people with smaller hands, and is still a great controller.
As far as I'm concerned, the XBox controller is the best out there right now. The fully analog triggers are perfect for racing games, and the shape and contours fit my hand like a glove. The PS2 controller is a bit too small and angular, and leads to cramping after an hour or two of gaming, and the Gamecube controller is just plain weird. It's great for games that don't need more than one button, but it's terrible for anything else (and it leads to stupid design decisions, like Metroid Prime's horrible control scheme).
Re:It will all come down to one system
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With days of software being unportable due to heavy use of assembly language being a thing of the far past, and games being more modular, people are going to do what they do in the business world and bet on the winner.
In regards to PC games, you're somewhat correct, as usage of assembly is pretty much limited to discrete pieces that need extreme performance. These pieces are easier to re-write than the entire application. However, console games are a different beast. As consoles age and developers become more familiar with the hardware (and at the same time are required to squeeze more and more out of the hardware, because a third or fourth generation title is expected to be more impressive than a first generation title), developers develop their own libraries for the console using low-level languages. This is especially common on Sony platforms, because 1) the PS1 was alive for so long, the initial development libraries were completely inadequate near its end of life, and 2) Sony totally dropped the ball with the PS2, not even providing a higher-level set of libraries*. Now, a lot of these are portable across platforms with a recompile, because the developers will write the backends for multiple consoles while the library's interface remains the same. These games are not portable simply by putting the disc in a different console, however.
So, how does the PS2 achieve backwards compatibility with PS1 games? Sleight of hand. The PS2 includes a PSOne-on-a-chip (the development of which made it possible to release the cheap, compact PSOne redesign of the PS1). It shares memory and hardware devices with the PS2 hardware, but when you pop in a PS1 game the Emotion Engine and so forth are not working at all. It's all being done via the PSOne-on-a-chip.
* Sony saw that 5 years after the PS1 launch no developers were using the Sony-provided tools (well, outside of hobbyist-level startup shops that didn't have the time or money to develop their own libraries or buy a good set from established parties like EA). If no developers are going to use the tools, why should they spend time and money on developing those tools for the PS2? Of course, they didn't look back and see that the PS1 would not have been as popular in its early life if it had not been easy to write for initially. This forced companies to spend millions of dollars and months of work to gear up for PS2 development, and is why there were very few good early launch titles for PS2. The PS2 was almost totally carried by its PS1 compatibility in the first 6-12 months of its life.
Although Windows media actually isn't a bad piece of tech anymore, it's inherently evil in many ways, and that's enough for me to stop using it.
Hrm. WMP is inherently evil because it's made by Microsoft, but Real's software is not even though it includes spyware, sneaky opt-out options, takes over your system, and just generally sucks horribly? I guess I see your logic...
They're also trying to reduce the blatant advertising they have on their site and in their client; the more of this the better, this was everyone's #1 complaint about Real anyway.
Funny, I thought the major complaints were hidden opt-out options, media association takeover, spyware, tracking and selling user information, etc. I guess you could lump that all under "advertising".
In fact, if you think about it, Real is probably the most crossplatform thing out there. Windows Media is obviously focused on Windows, and lesser so on Mac. Quicktime is obviously focused on Mac, and a slightly lesser degree on Windows. Both of those have zero Linux support. Real's got RP8 on Linux and all those helix builds too. Though mplayer can do all three (w00t), it isn't an official product from any of them, so I wouldn't count that as adding crossplatform capability.
I hear that MPEG formats work on all platforms. Sure, it's not a streaming format, but I'd rather wait 15 minutes or so to download the video before watching it than suffer through Real's crap.
Granted, Real's got a big frigging hole to dig out of, one that they only dug themselves. But at least they're trying, and if they keep this up, they might do a pretty damn good job too. Let's at least keep an open mind while they try.
You're quite right. Real dug themselves deep. While they could dig themselves out in time, it's going to take a lot more than this. They're still deep in that hole, and just because they've (supposedly) changed a few of their ways doesn't mean they're better yet. I can keep an open mind, but there's no way in hell I'll be installing Real software any time soon. Let's see where they're at in 3-5 years from now, and I might reconsider.
Regarding the opt-out issues, Real's biggest problem was not so much that most of the items were opt-out, but that they hid the real opt-out items in a scrollable form where the visible options on the top were already unchecked. Unless you paid attention and made sure you scrolled through all the options, you may think you were opting out because everything you could see was unchecked, but there were 9 or 10 more nasty items checked below that.
The takeover issue is another big problem, which neither WMP nor Winamp have. Overall, Real has honestly earned their terrible reputation, and I for one will never trust them. Goodbye, Real.
Your mind sees approximately 22-30 frames per second. This is why a 1080i is indistiguishable, frame rate wise, from 720p. Very very very very few people can see the difference.
Bullshit. Modern science has not found the upper limit that the eye can distinguish. I found a nice link simply by searching Google, so you can do the research yourself about what information is out there.
Given various different tricks (motion blur, mostly), your eyes only really need 18fps to determine motion, but even at higher frame rates you'll still be able to detect flicker and jerkiness. Next time you watch Return of the King, look for any long horizontal pans (caveat: I haven't seen the movie yet, so I don't know if there are any good examples in the movie). If the pan is fast enough, you're going to see flicker and jerkiness. This is also why you need a much higher frame rate for video games, because proper motion blur is computationally expensive and current hardware still can't handle it and everything else while maintaining a smooth rate (the other issue in trying for the highest possible frame rate is that games measure averages, so a 30fps average means that the rate will drop below 30fps. A locked 30fps, like many consoles games do, guarantees the game will not drop below 30fps at the cost of visual quality). Look out of the corner of your eye at your computer screen. If you're using a CRT, you're going to be able to see flicker even if you're running a higher refresh rate (some people can't detect it past 85Hz or so, but most people can). Work in an office with all flourescent lighting, and see how long it takes you to get a headache. You may not physically see the flicker, but your eyes do and the headache is caused by strain because of it.
Between 480i and 480p, I can certainly tell a difference in refresh rate. Turn off progressive scan output on your DVD player, watch a scene, and turn it back on, or play with the progressive settings in the DVD player setup. If you can't tell a difference, you're a rare person, not the average. Just because you can't see the difference doesn't mean that other people can't either.
Well I don't know about you, but I rekin' we better close up our code quick before the likes of Microsoft or SCO get a hold of it, and we lose our competitive advantage.
What you fail to realize is that nVidia is selling product which is enhanced by the drivers and the IP contained therein. Driver enhancements are how nVidia keeps their older card lines still attractive in the mid- and low-level markets. An original GeForce256 is still quite capable today thanks to enhancements in drivers, and many of those enhancements support even the ancient TNT and TNT2 chipsets. Because of this, you can still buy TNT2 chipsets on the market and actually get a useful card.
On the other hand, Linux is not in the business of selling product. There are companies making money off of Linux, but none are thriving solely from selling Linux itself, and thus there is no benefit in keeping the source closed. You're right that people could very well take code and insert it into Windows or Windows drivers and applications, and I'm sure it's been done before, but the main difference here is that there's something people (nVidia competitors) want in nVidia's driver code, and it's in nVidia's best interests to make sure that they can't get it without cost.
When you're in a market as competitive as the GPU industry, you hang on to every scrap that could possibly give you an edge on your competitors and cause people to buy your product over others. nVidia has this with their driver technology, on which strength alone many nVidia cards have been sold (even when ATI makes technically superior cards, nVidia's driver prowess often wins the day). The same can't be said for drivers in the Linux kernel for 10 year old SCSI cards, for example.
So, who are Nvidia trying to protect their intellectual property from ? Who would gain the most from seeing it ? Individual end users, or their determined rivals like ATi, who have much more at stake, and possibly more to gain from discovering Nvidia's IP ? Assuming it is ATi or other competitors, which is what most people suggest when faced with this argument, then the "locks" that Nvidia have put in place are useless, as they will not stop a determined adversary, such as ATi, who may be willing to invest multiple $100K or $1M decoding Nvidia's drivers, using AGP bus analysers etc. The reward for ATi might be high, so the risk and / or effort involved in decoding the drivers may be worth it.
I can only believe that reverse engineering nVidia's work is a very expensive and risky proposition for ATI, and the time and expense would be better spent developing their own developers' skills. If on the other hand nVidia opened the source of their code, it would be trivially inexpensive for ATI to co-opt that code into their own drivers. As well, opening the code would require more dilligence and expense on nVidia's part making sure that if any competitors did use the code (even inadevertently, which is where you really have to be careful), those said competitors follow the open license properly. Providing the source code under a "look but don't touch" license would be useless, and still lead to the same problem as licensing under an OSS license, but with even more effort required by nVidia because anybody using the code would be doing so covertly.
In short, there doesn't seem to be any benefit for nVidia to open up the source code of their drivers (OSS mantras of "more eyes" aside), and there are what seem to me good reasons for them not to do so.
Actually, thinking about it, if they really need to protect their intellectual property within closed source drivers, those drivers should be encrypted, preventling disasspembly and decrypted on the fly. Hmm. That's not going to work, cause if you really wanted to find out their secrets, you'd just use a AGP bus analyser or some other similar device.
You're right, with a certain amount of effort whatever they're hiding in the closed source drivers can still be found and copied. However, the idea is to make it as unappealing as possible to try to steal the information. As it is now, someone at ATI would have to consciously make an effort to get that information. If nVidia opened the source, then any ATI developer could browse it, and inadvertently (or advertently, even) insert nVidia code into ATI drivers.
By your argument, I shouldn't bother with locks on my doors, because if someone really wanted to get in they could easily pick to lock or break a window. However, we lock our doors because it makes us a less inviting target, and thieves will move on to easier pickings. It won't stop them if they're determined to get in, but few of us have to worry about such targetted attacks.
Even more contrary to this argument, companies like Nvidia and ATI want their extensions to be added to the OpenGL specs, which results in both an industry wide endorsement of their techniques, as well as licensing revenue from their competitors.
The GPU-specific portions of the extensions are irrelevent to the OpenGL standards, so why open the source? And I'm sure if ATI wanted to license nVidia's driver techniques, nVidia would be more than happy to do so and give ATI the source. That doesn't mean you or I would see it, though.
Screw wanting to see how they work, most people just want the source so that they can get it to work, period. Since they're binary only it means that they're usually tied to a specific kernel version and sometimes a specific distro. If you deviate from the path of the most popular distros you soon get into uncharted water.
Not true at all. The closed portion of the nVidia drivers is only the X driver. The kernel module is and has always been open source, and you can compile it for whatever version of the kernel you wish (assuming the kernel module interface hasn't changed drastically, of course).
As far as the original poster wanting to see how nVidia does all the cool stuff they do in software, that's exactly why the driver is closed. If you can see it, ATI, S3, etc can see it as well, and then nVidia could have some series problems...
it's a bit disappointing that you persist in excluding it from your list of "real" RDBMS systems even after being confronted with the *fact* that mysql is being used in some very large, important, and time sensitive environments.
I can take a Geo Metro to the racetrack, but that won't make it a racecar. Just because MySQL is being used for large, important, and time sensitive environments doesn't mean that it was the best choice for those environments, just that whoever designed them chose to use MySQL.
seem to prefer a fat database that will protect you from yourself and do all the work for you while you write a little code to connect it all. I guess at the very least it gives you someone to point fingers at when the problems come.
No, I prefer a relational database engine that actually does what a relational database engine is supposed to do. There are now decades of research and development into RDBMS systems, and I'm not naive or proud enough to think that I can do it better than people who have made database engine design their life's work. Now, you could say that also includes MySQL developers, but I have to disagree. If MySQL didn't call itself a RDBMS, I'd be right there with you. But they do, and it's not, for the simple reason that an RDBMS manages and enforces relationships. That happens on the database, where it's most efficent to do so, not in my middle-tier code.
I prefer a light-weight high performance database that will give me precise and deliberate control over the data that I am working with. I don't need the database protecting itself from me.
It sounds like you don't need a relational database, but basically an indexed filesystem. That's fine, MySQL works great for that. What you call "protecting itself from me" is what I call "maintaining data integrity regardless of what may happen".
since you seem to have strayed way off topic and turned this into retorting rather than discussing...i am done with this thread.
Yep, it's all my fault, the Microsoft-loving weenie that won't listen to why a half-implemented RDBMS is better for mission critical applications than a full featured, properly designed RDBMS. Who cares that it's half-implemented? I can implement what it doesn't in my middle-tier code!
But instead of picking favorites and letting enterprise run with it by developing only for certain environments, etc., and effectively putting another desktop in a small minority, we can standardize on basic things: general interface concepts, configuration and installation methods, navigating the hard disk and using the clipboard, etc. We can KEEP KDE and GNOME and all the major browsers and all the major mail clients and all the major Xs and Os going -- as long as they play well with eachother and don't confuse the hell out of users.
Two issues here. First, enterprises don't like to develop for an infinite number of platforms. The test matrix is impossible. That's why you see stuff like Oracle supporting Redhat and SuSE (?), but not Slackware or Debian. If you can get Oracle running on the latter, great, but you're not supported. Second, the key phrase you said is "don't confuse the hell out of users". That's exactly the problem right now. A secretary doesn't care if she's using GNOME or KDE, but she's going to be confused if you tell her, "Now pick your desktop environment, and then you can get to work". The IT guys will standardize on one environment, one office suite, etc. Why not have a distro that does all of that work for the IT guys out of the box?
The problem of enterprise standardizing on one distro happened years ago, when many businesses started supporting Redhat rather than Linux in general, and guess what? Linux is still around and kicking, and Redhat isn't the only option.
Linux doesn't need a flagship desktop environment.
Making a specification that says quit is "CTRL+Q" is. Making a specification that says "this is how you handle a clipboard" is. Making a specification that says "this is how to handle drag-n-drop" is. Making a specification that says "program installations should be supported through RPM,.deb,.ebuild, etc." files is.
Specifications don't mean anything if they're not enforced. I can make a specification that says I get to have root on your system, but unless everybody gives me root, it doesn't mean anything. Given the distributed nature of open source development, and that anybody can start their own project to reinvent the wheel any time they want, just writing a specification isn't enough. You have to write the specification, get people to support it (or do it yourself), and then choose to only distribute those applications that support the specifications in your distribution. Choosing KDE over GNOME is implicitly saying that the specification is to use KDE's guidelines and development practices rather than GNOME's. That doesn't mean that KDE does have a coherent style guide, but if they don't now they really should.
I'm sure they're going to go a step further than just choosing KDE over GNOME, and only ship one office suite, one gui text editor, one calculator, etc. If you want a different desktop environment, office suite, text editor, etc, then go ahead and install something else. However, you're no longer the target demographic for UserLinux. Use a more appropriate distribution like Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, SuSE, etc.
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"Their big programming project"? Game developers working on Longhorn? Not likely. Microsoft has a bunch of big programming projects going on all the time, and there's little sharing between them. People working on Visual Studio are not going to be pulled off to work on SQL Server, and game developers are not going to be put on Longhorn (unless the developers in question are looking to change jobs within the company and go through the proper interview loops in the new groups and get accepted, of course).
Assuming the Mythica developers were internal to Microsoft and not part of an external company that Microsoft publishes for (Bizarre Creations, Gas Powered Games, etc), the team may be parceled up across different games in the MGS division, or they might be developing a different game. They're certainly not working on Longhorn.
Finally, cancelling projects in any company, not just Microsoft, doesn't happen overnight. Whether or not the NT source was leaked likely had no bearing on this decision at all, as it was surely made weeks ago.
You foil hat might be just a bit too tight, I think.
Please properly credit your source. That article is from The Onion, circa 1998. The site you reference says it got the article from www.cars.com, which may be true, but it doesn't say exactly where on cars.com so the link could be followed to eventually find the real author.
First off, your example is bad because Morrowind was released prior to XBox Live, had no capability to download patches, and didn't get any fixes applied to it until it was re-released in the GOTY version (it also wasn't Microsoft's game, and Bethesda is pretty much known for relatively buggy open-ended RPGs like Sea Dogs and the whole Elder Scrolls series). Second, games on the XBox are hardly the first console games to have major bugs or problems that could do with a patch. However, they are the first games on a console with the possibility of getting a patch. What's the problem with that? Nobody's perfect, and even with stringent testing for console games bugs do occassionally slip through. Would you rather throw away a good game that's ruined by one or two minor issues, or get a patch for it and keep going?
Bob the Angry Flower disagrees.
For what it's worth, your article only has one exception for the case of abbreviations with periods and lowercase letters where the non-apostrophed 's' would be confusing (I believe the use of apostrophes on upercase letters is incorrect and more confusing). That's a very small corner case, and just goes to show that there is an exception to every rule. That doesn't make the rule wrong, though.
You're correct, that has worked for some time now. However, it's only been supported by TiVO since a software update in late spring/early summer of last year. Prior to that, the serial support may or may not have worked with your cable box, and TiVO made no claims that it did. Now they do claim to support certain models of Motorola boxes. Others may work as well, and a software update in the future may add official support, but you're on your own figuring out which work and which don't, and how much support each one has at the moment.
Here you go. If that link doesn't take you to the proper anchor in the page, it's about 3/4s of the way down, section 8.7, "Configuring lirc for use with an IR blaster".
Do what TiVO does with cable boxes -- get an IR blaster. Program the PVR with the codes to change channels on your Sky TV box, and let it change the channels on the STB for you. Any good PVR app will have support for this.
As a side note, TiVO has recently (within the past 6 months or so) started supporting certain cable boxes via the serial port, and they do support many satellite boxes via the serial port as well (just in case you had a TiVO before you got on DirecTV, and didn't want to get the DirecTiVO). However, the IR blaster approach is still required for a lot of cable boxes, and it works.
Good for you, but I think you missed the point. How cool would it be to download new tracks and racers for Mario Kart: Double Dash, or FZero GX? How about new quests for Zelda: Wind Waker? Downloadable content is a killer app for a console with a hard drive and network connection. Nintendo hasn't even figured out the killer app for their network adaptor, namely online Mario Kart (doable with Warp Pipe, but Mario Kart LAN multiplayer is rather broken, and Warp Pipe is not exactly a seamless, integrated solution like XBox Live :).
Pac-Man Vs. or Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles may killer apps for GC/GBA connections, but nothing else has really taken great advantage of the ability for the two to connect.
Two words: Downloadable content. Sure, you could probably do the same thing with memory cards, but that can get very expensive very quickly.
The ads are nothing more than popups that make the popup window "full screen" (ie, they set the size and position of the window to 0,0 and x,y to fill up your screen, and not actually setting the browser to its full screen togglable state, which pisses me off because all future browser windows will now be of that size), and load a flash applet. My own pop-up blocker for IE, NoPopIE has no problems catching those popups, and with proper security settings IE will prompt you to run Flash. All this is going to do for me is prompt me to finally get around to blocking popups from resizing the browser window.
You can find samples here to test against.
My IE only plays Flash if I tell it to. It also blocks popups. Why doesn't yours?
I don't know about you, but I use my broadband connection for much more than just XBox Live. While you may enjoy playing online games via a dialup connection, you simply cannot have a rich gameplay experience doing so (witness the number of PS2 online titles that are broadband-only, including the most popular SOCOM series). I would have broadband even if I didn't have an XBox or XBox Live, and so it is not a contributing cost to XBox Live.
XBox Live and other broadband-only online gaming ventures may push broadband acceptance, which is a good thing, and I back it 100%, but even if someone purchased a broadband connection initially for XBox Live, I believe that said person will find more uses for that connection.
I wish I learned how to do math where you did, so I could also divide $50 (cost of XBox Live subscription per year) by 12 (number of months in a year) and get $20.
Care to explain why you think the XBox sucks? Is it just because it's from Microsoft? Also, if you're still complaining about the controller, you either have girly hands, or you haven't touched an XBox since November 2001. The Duke (original controller) is quite comfortable for anyone with average sized hands, though the best playing position is not the one you'll find at in-store kiosks with fixed controller positions. If that's your only experience, find a friend with an XBox and a Duke and try it again. The S controller is much better for people with smaller hands, and is still a great controller.
As far as I'm concerned, the XBox controller is the best out there right now. The fully analog triggers are perfect for racing games, and the shape and contours fit my hand like a glove. The PS2 controller is a bit too small and angular, and leads to cramping after an hour or two of gaming, and the Gamecube controller is just plain weird. It's great for games that don't need more than one button, but it's terrible for anything else (and it leads to stupid design decisions, like Metroid Prime's horrible control scheme).
In regards to PC games, you're somewhat correct, as usage of assembly is pretty much limited to discrete pieces that need extreme performance. These pieces are easier to re-write than the entire application. However, console games are a different beast. As consoles age and developers become more familiar with the hardware (and at the same time are required to squeeze more and more out of the hardware, because a third or fourth generation title is expected to be more impressive than a first generation title), developers develop their own libraries for the console using low-level languages. This is especially common on Sony platforms, because 1) the PS1 was alive for so long, the initial development libraries were completely inadequate near its end of life, and 2) Sony totally dropped the ball with the PS2, not even providing a higher-level set of libraries*. Now, a lot of these are portable across platforms with a recompile, because the developers will write the backends for multiple consoles while the library's interface remains the same. These games are not portable simply by putting the disc in a different console, however.
So, how does the PS2 achieve backwards compatibility with PS1 games? Sleight of hand. The PS2 includes a PSOne-on-a-chip (the development of which made it possible to release the cheap, compact PSOne redesign of the PS1). It shares memory and hardware devices with the PS2 hardware, but when you pop in a PS1 game the Emotion Engine and so forth are not working at all. It's all being done via the PSOne-on-a-chip.
* Sony saw that 5 years after the PS1 launch no developers were using the Sony-provided tools (well, outside of hobbyist-level startup shops that didn't have the time or money to develop their own libraries or buy a good set from established parties like EA). If no developers are going to use the tools, why should they spend time and money on developing those tools for the PS2? Of course, they didn't look back and see that the PS1 would not have been as popular in its early life if it had not been easy to write for initially. This forced companies to spend millions of dollars and months of work to gear up for PS2 development, and is why there were very few good early launch titles for PS2. The PS2 was almost totally carried by its PS1 compatibility in the first 6-12 months of its life.
Hrm. WMP is inherently evil because it's made by Microsoft, but Real's software is not even though it includes spyware, sneaky opt-out options, takes over your system, and just generally sucks horribly? I guess I see your logic ...
Funny, I thought the major complaints were hidden opt-out options, media association takeover, spyware, tracking and selling user information, etc. I guess you could lump that all under "advertising".
I hear that MPEG formats work on all platforms. Sure, it's not a streaming format, but I'd rather wait 15 minutes or so to download the video before watching it than suffer through Real's crap.
You're quite right. Real dug themselves deep. While they could dig themselves out in time, it's going to take a lot more than this. They're still deep in that hole, and just because they've (supposedly) changed a few of their ways doesn't mean they're better yet. I can keep an open mind, but there's no way in hell I'll be installing Real software any time soon. Let's see where they're at in 3-5 years from now, and I might reconsider.
Regarding the opt-out issues, Real's biggest problem was not so much that most of the items were opt-out, but that they hid the real opt-out items in a scrollable form where the visible options on the top were already unchecked. Unless you paid attention and made sure you scrolled through all the options, you may think you were opting out because everything you could see was unchecked, but there were 9 or 10 more nasty items checked below that.
The takeover issue is another big problem, which neither WMP nor Winamp have. Overall, Real has honestly earned their terrible reputation, and I for one will never trust them. Goodbye, Real.
Bullshit. Modern science has not found the upper limit that the eye can distinguish. I found a nice link simply by searching Google, so you can do the research yourself about what information is out there.
Given various different tricks (motion blur, mostly), your eyes only really need 18fps to determine motion, but even at higher frame rates you'll still be able to detect flicker and jerkiness. Next time you watch Return of the King, look for any long horizontal pans (caveat: I haven't seen the movie yet, so I don't know if there are any good examples in the movie). If the pan is fast enough, you're going to see flicker and jerkiness. This is also why you need a much higher frame rate for video games, because proper motion blur is computationally expensive and current hardware still can't handle it and everything else while maintaining a smooth rate (the other issue in trying for the highest possible frame rate is that games measure averages, so a 30fps average means that the rate will drop below 30fps. A locked 30fps, like many consoles games do, guarantees the game will not drop below 30fps at the cost of visual quality). Look out of the corner of your eye at your computer screen. If you're using a CRT, you're going to be able to see flicker even if you're running a higher refresh rate (some people can't detect it past 85Hz or so, but most people can). Work in an office with all flourescent lighting, and see how long it takes you to get a headache. You may not physically see the flicker, but your eyes do and the headache is caused by strain because of it.
Between 480i and 480p, I can certainly tell a difference in refresh rate. Turn off progressive scan output on your DVD player, watch a scene, and turn it back on, or play with the progressive settings in the DVD player setup. If you can't tell a difference, you're a rare person, not the average. Just because you can't see the difference doesn't mean that other people can't either.
What you fail to realize is that nVidia is selling product which is enhanced by the drivers and the IP contained therein. Driver enhancements are how nVidia keeps their older card lines still attractive in the mid- and low-level markets. An original GeForce256 is still quite capable today thanks to enhancements in drivers, and many of those enhancements support even the ancient TNT and TNT2 chipsets. Because of this, you can still buy TNT2 chipsets on the market and actually get a useful card.
On the other hand, Linux is not in the business of selling product. There are companies making money off of Linux, but none are thriving solely from selling Linux itself, and thus there is no benefit in keeping the source closed. You're right that people could very well take code and insert it into Windows or Windows drivers and applications, and I'm sure it's been done before, but the main difference here is that there's something people (nVidia competitors) want in nVidia's driver code, and it's in nVidia's best interests to make sure that they can't get it without cost.
When you're in a market as competitive as the GPU industry, you hang on to every scrap that could possibly give you an edge on your competitors and cause people to buy your product over others. nVidia has this with their driver technology, on which strength alone many nVidia cards have been sold (even when ATI makes technically superior cards, nVidia's driver prowess often wins the day). The same can't be said for drivers in the Linux kernel for 10 year old SCSI cards, for example.
I can only believe that reverse engineering nVidia's work is a very expensive and risky proposition for ATI, and the time and expense would be better spent developing their own developers' skills. If on the other hand nVidia opened the source of their code, it would be trivially inexpensive for ATI to co-opt that code into their own drivers. As well, opening the code would require more dilligence and expense on nVidia's part making sure that if any competitors did use the code (even inadevertently, which is where you really have to be careful), those said competitors follow the open license properly. Providing the source code under a "look but don't touch" license would be useless, and still lead to the same problem as licensing under an OSS license, but with even more effort required by nVidia because anybody using the code would be doing so covertly.
In short, there doesn't seem to be any benefit for nVidia to open up the source code of their drivers (OSS mantras of "more eyes" aside), and there are what seem to me good reasons for them not to do so.
You're right, with a certain amount of effort whatever they're hiding in the closed source drivers can still be found and copied. However, the idea is to make it as unappealing as possible to try to steal the information. As it is now, someone at ATI would have to consciously make an effort to get that information. If nVidia opened the source, then any ATI developer could browse it, and inadvertently (or advertently, even) insert nVidia code into ATI drivers.
By your argument, I shouldn't bother with locks on my doors, because if someone really wanted to get in they could easily pick to lock or break a window. However, we lock our doors because it makes us a less inviting target, and thieves will move on to easier pickings. It won't stop them if they're determined to get in, but few of us have to worry about such targetted attacks.
The GPU-specific portions of the extensions are irrelevent to the OpenGL standards, so why open the source? And I'm sure if ATI wanted to license nVidia's driver techniques, nVidia would be more than happy to do so and give ATI the source. That doesn't mean you or I would see it, though.
Not true at all. The closed portion of the nVidia drivers is only the X driver. The kernel module is and has always been open source, and you can compile it for whatever version of the kernel you wish (assuming the kernel module interface hasn't changed drastically, of course).
As far as the original poster wanting to see how nVidia does all the cool stuff they do in software, that's exactly why the driver is closed. If you can see it, ATI, S3, etc can see it as well, and then nVidia could have some series problems ...
I can take a Geo Metro to the racetrack, but that won't make it a racecar. Just because MySQL is being used for large, important, and time sensitive environments doesn't mean that it was the best choice for those environments, just that whoever designed them chose to use MySQL.
No, I prefer a relational database engine that actually does what a relational database engine is supposed to do. There are now decades of research and development into RDBMS systems, and I'm not naive or proud enough to think that I can do it better than people who have made database engine design their life's work. Now, you could say that also includes MySQL developers, but I have to disagree. If MySQL didn't call itself a RDBMS, I'd be right there with you. But they do, and it's not, for the simple reason that an RDBMS manages and enforces relationships. That happens on the database, where it's most efficent to do so, not in my middle-tier code.
It sounds like you don't need a relational database, but basically an indexed filesystem. That's fine, MySQL works great for that. What you call "protecting itself from me" is what I call "maintaining data integrity regardless of what may happen".
Yep, it's all my fault, the Microsoft-loving weenie that won't listen to why a half-implemented RDBMS is better for mission critical applications than a full featured, properly designed RDBMS. Who cares that it's half-implemented? I can implement what it doesn't in my middle-tier code!
Two issues here. First, enterprises don't like to develop for an infinite number of platforms. The test matrix is impossible. That's why you see stuff like Oracle supporting Redhat and SuSE (?), but not Slackware or Debian. If you can get Oracle running on the latter, great, but you're not supported. Second, the key phrase you said is "don't confuse the hell out of users". That's exactly the problem right now. A secretary doesn't care if she's using GNOME or KDE, but she's going to be confused if you tell her, "Now pick your desktop environment, and then you can get to work". The IT guys will standardize on one environment, one office suite, etc. Why not have a distro that does all of that work for the IT guys out of the box?
The problem of enterprise standardizing on one distro happened years ago, when many businesses started supporting Redhat rather than Linux in general, and guess what? Linux is still around and kicking, and Redhat isn't the only option.
I completely disagree.
Specifications don't mean anything if they're not enforced. I can make a specification that says I get to have root on your system, but unless everybody gives me root, it doesn't mean anything. Given the distributed nature of open source development, and that anybody can start their own project to reinvent the wheel any time they want, just writing a specification isn't enough. You have to write the specification, get people to support it (or do it yourself), and then choose to only distribute those applications that support the specifications in your distribution. Choosing KDE over GNOME is implicitly saying that the specification is to use KDE's guidelines and development practices rather than GNOME's. That doesn't mean that KDE does have a coherent style guide, but if they don't now they really should.
I'm sure they're going to go a step further than just choosing KDE over GNOME, and only ship one office suite, one gui text editor, one calculator, etc. If you want a different desktop environment, office suite, text editor, etc, then go ahead and install something else. However, you're no longer the target demographic for UserLinux. Use a more appropriate distribution like Debian, Gentoo, Mandrake, SuSE, etc.