They're using the Atom branding because it is an Atom processor underneath. The Atoms and the Core/Xeon/Pentium/Celeron lines have completely different underlying microarchitectures. In particular, the Atom uarch ("Sodaville" in the current generation) has really poor floating-point and SIMD performance, so you can forget about scientific computing on this.
More to the point, the "Atom" brand implies "cheap, low-power device". The same thing "ARM" implies, and as this processor is mainly there to seize control of a niche ARM was trying to grab, it makes sense to use a similar brand name.
Normally, I prefer MPC. It's faster and lighter, or at least it feels like it. But VLC has a few features MPC doesn't:
* Streaming. The main thing I used VLC for was streaming to an AirPort without installing iTunes, because iTunes is evil. A recent update unfortunately broke this, but I haven't checked if they fixed recently. * Blu-Ray. There's probably some way to do this in MPC, but I can't figure it out.
Both of them are in my "immediate install" pack, along with other useful things like Notepad++ and 7zip. I wonder how hard it would be to get Microsoft to just bundle them in. It's not like Notepad makes them much money.
I actually read TFA, and they're saying it will withstand 23mm autocannon fire. I imagine they're exaggerating a bit, but I also imagine they at least tested it with the weapons they had on hand, like the 7.62mm LMG they mounted on it.
I wonder, what's the false positive rate on these "third-party" systems? It's easy to make a system that detects 100% of malware as malware - just deny everything.
A tank requires three things: heavy armor, a turret-mounted gun capable of anti-tank combat, and the use of tracks instead of wheels.
This arguably fails all three. It's a wheeled vehicle, and that 7.62mm gun may as well be paintballs to other tanks - it's a common caliber for the coax gun on modern tanks, for use when you don't want to waste your expensive ammo against mere infantry. The armor is definitely insufficient to handle modern tanks, but it would have been enough for 20's and '30s tanks (or perhaps WW2-era Italian or Japanese tanks), so you could probably squeeze it in.
That said, as long as the rebels use it intelligently, an armored car is a very useful tool. Keep it in the cities, where tanks have difficulty maneuvering, but use its mobility to outflank infantry. It will be interesting to see how long it lasts - it doesn't look like it could handle modern anti-tank missiles, but it *might* stand up to an RPG-7 or so.
There are two ways to do error-handling: try{}catch{}, or if{}else{}. That's "using exceptions" and "using return values", under Dobb's naming.
The difference in usage is simple: one handles errors immediately, thus cluttering the code with all the things that could go wrong, while the other separates error-handling out, pushing it to the end of a block (and away from the code that actually generates the error, which can complicate debugging).
I can really think of no other way to do it. You can handle the error where it happens, or handle the error at the end. I tend to look on anyone whining about how hard error-handling is with suspicion - their suggestions (if they even have any) are almost always "the language/compiler/interpreter/processor/operating system should handle errors for me", and there are enough obvious flaws in that logic that I need not point them out.
See, by the time of the Year of the Linux Desktop, Linux will be too mainstream. We'll have all switched to some more "trendy" or "underground" OS. Possibly one of the BSDs, or maybe OS/2 if it's "retro" enough, but possibly some yet-to-be-written OS. HURD, perhaps?
The problem with low-cost, low-benefit science is decreasing returns. After a while, you've basically learned all you can without sending a manned mission.
Just look at Mars. Sojourner brought back a lot of data. Spirit and Opportunity sent back even more, but were also more expensive. Curiosity is sending back yet more, but at yet higher costs (the wheels on Curiosity are about the size of the entire Sojourner rover). Pretty soon we'll reach the point where sending people will be *cheaper* than sending a rover with similar capabilities. Arguably, we've reached it now.
PS: As a member of the "younger" generation, I can assure you that we would like plenty more manned missions. We just don't like things that have been done before. If you rephrase the question as "permanent moon base, or robotic submarine on Europa", we'd pretty much all pick the base.
The "right" to be forgotten is a form of censorship and has nothing at all to do with privacy.
I think you are both right and wrong on this. It depends on how you implement this "right".
The way I originally heard it, the "right" was essentially "if I ask for something I uploaded to be taken down and deleted, it has to be taken down and deleted". If one quits Facebook and deletes their profile, it should actually be deleted. This I completely support, because while it's technically censorship, it is in the hand of the user and creator of the content, not in someone else's hands. And if someone happened to save that data and re-uploads it, that's governed by libel/slander laws.
If, however, the "right" is "I can demand anything even loosely connected to me be removed from any site", then it's basically the DMCA on an even worse level. I can't support that, because even though I can see good intentions behind it, the level of abuse it's going to cause is enormous. It would dwarf the level of abuse the DMCA gets.
I think, decades from now, we'll look back on the very concept of "targeted advertising" with mockery, like "Duck and Cover" drills in the 50s. Not because it's evil or privacy-invading, but because it doesn't work. (At least, in my estimation).
Seriously. You can *maybe* target your advertising to people working in a general profession, or in a geographical region, or maybe an age group. But every time I've seen ads targeting me because of something more specific, it's been a terrible failure.
The ads on Angry Birds were, at one point, *convinced* I was a gay black man with HIV. They were bombarding me with ads for "gay thug dating" or "HIV testing", despite the fact that the only thing they actually got right was "male" (and it's easy to get that one right when it's 50/50 on a blind guess).
Google keeps hitting me with sports ads. Football, I think, but I care so little about sports in general that I can't really tell. Which tells you how inclined I am to click those links. Or if I buy something, I start getting a lot of ads for competing products, *after* the fact.
Steam targets poorly with their "recommended games" bit. Usually, it's either stuff already on my wishlist (so I've already decided to buy it next time it's on sale), stuff that's blindingly obvious (oh, you just added Call of Duty 7 to your cart? Might I suggest Call of Duty 6, Call of Duty 8 or Call of Duty 5?), or stuff that I don't like (Train Simulator 2012). And they've got nearly as much data on me as Google. I will give them credit for using some of that data properly - they use their knowledge of what games I own to not try to sell me games I already own, or to try to upsell me on DLC for games I have.
Those are just three examples. But I could list hundreds more. I have yet to see an advertiser try to target me, and "hit" the target. They're amassing all this data on me, but they're no better at advertising to me than when they just classified me as "late teen/early twenties caucasian male working in some sort of computer field".
We need to collectively get over our obsession with targeted this or personalized that. It might give impressive results when it works, but I'd bet money that the hit rate is under 1% for the most precise groupings.
(While we're at it, I'll note that even if your targeting *was* perfect, it's useless if your actual ads are shit. And guess what? Most ads are shit)
I was going to suggest something similar to #1, but there is one flaw: hardware attacks. If they can plant an actual keylogger in the keyboard, even this won't help. Although you might be able to obfuscate a bit - use a Dvorak layout, perhaps?
Are they integrated into the CPU or chipset? Then it's integrated graphics. And while they may be the best integrated graphics on the market, and can certainly handle light gaming and media playback, they are far from the level a discrete processor is at.
Yes, the cores on a Fusion processor are essentially identical to those in the discrete card. But they are clocked lower, are heavily memory-constrained, and to put it bluntly, there's just not enough of them. The 7660D in the top-end A10 has 384 shader cores. That sounds like a lot. It isn't. First off, it's based on the old VLIW4 architecture of the Radeon HD 6000 series. The "common" card of that series was the 6770, which had 800 of those cores (with 50MHz higher clock speed, as well). To find comparable discrete cards, you have to go down to the budget section. The $79 6570 has 480 shader cores, while the $55 6450 had 160.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand Crytek's marketing position. They deliberately exclude the low end, in order to get better traction with the high end. They sell to the people who are more likely to spend $500 than $50 on a graphics card.
When the original came out, they bragged that there was not a computer on the planet that could run the game at absolute max settings. The whole reason "can it run Crysis?" is a meme is because the answer was almost universally "NO" for a few years after it came out.
Let me explain it to you with one of Slashdot's favorite tropes: the car analogy. Can you compete in a F1 race driving a '98 Toyota Camry? No. Can you compete driving a '13 Honda Civic? No. And it would be absolutely ridiculous for you to try. Similarly, trying to play Crysis on an integrated GPU is likely to end poorly.
That said, I would expect it to at least run. I have found that "minimum requirements" are often higher than they strictly need to be. The game will probably run, it might even be vaguely playable if you can increase the amount of memory and find a low-res texture mod.
Starcraft II is hardly the most graphically-challenging game. Neither is R6: Vegas. And the WEI scores are essentially useless.
The A10 uses a Radeon 7660D which, in "real"-card terms, fits somewhere between 7570 and a 7470. However, the integrated Radeons are known to be extremely memory-bandwidth-bound, enough that they're frequently used in RAM benchmarks. So in practice you're looking at a graphics processor that's already weak, and further crippling it by bottlenecking its memory access.
Look at the benchmarks. 48 FPS in Crysis: Warhead - at 1366x768. 41 FPS in Metro: 2033, on low, at the same low resolution. 68 FPS in Dirt 3. 58 FPS in Battlefield 3, at low quality. For any game that has a reputation for being GPU-heavy, integrated graphics will not suffice.
Yes, the Fusions are pretty awesome chips. I almost got one myself. They're excellent for mobile or light gaming usage. I'm not surprised you sell a lot of them. But (at the risk of sounding like a True Scotsman) they're not the kind of thing a real PC gamer uses. And Crysis 3 is definitely trying to target the "real PC gamer".
We're spotting exoplanets faster than we can name them. We just landed a fucking nuclear-powered, laser-wielding science tank on Mars. Two years ago we dive-bombed the moon so we could search the debris cloud for signs of water. New Horizons is planned to leave the solar system as well once it's done with Pluto. We've got probes around Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Vesta, and whole damn fleets around the Moon and Mars, with another probe en route to Jupiter. We've got a company planning to mine the freaking asteroid belt. The ISS is constantly manned - I get Twitter pics *every* *day* from fucking *space*.
The hell we aren't dreaming big. The only reason Voyager is the only probe so far out is because it takes forty years to get there.
Note: Whenever I referred to "good" products in my original post, I was referring to "good" as in "opposite of evil", not "of high quality". I thought that was obvious given how I structured my comparisons, but I guess not.
You also seem to fail to understand how corporations work. I can flip your statement around and have it be just as true: if I give Sony money for one thing, they can use it to develop products to help people and perhaps redeem themselves.
You apparently insist on a complete, 100% change before you will do any business with them. That is not going to happen. Corporations, like people, cannot change overnight. That works both ways - Canonical could not immediately turn into a draconian lock-in vendor, no matter what the people "in charge" try to do. Likewise, Sony can't immediately turn into the company we want them to be. They could hand the reins over to you completely and you still couldn't do it in less than a year.
I for one do not make my purchasing decisions based on any single factor. One of those factors is indeed how "evil" a company has been, but if the product *itself* is not intrinsically evil, I would have no problems with it. This is one of those cases - it isn't even really a Sony product, just a product Sony is manufacturing on behalf of another company. And I would venture to say that the Raspberry Pi counts as an intrinsically non-evil product.
What do you think the best way to change that behavior is? A) Refuse to buy any of their products, even the non-evil or outright good ones, or B) Reward them for building good products by buying them, while punishing them by boycotting their evil products
Path A causes them to just stop counting you as a potential customer. So they no longer care at all what you do. In a way, you're like a rabid PS3 fanboy who buys every one of their products - your purchasing decision is a known factor. Path B gives them the full stick/carrot combination. They get rewarded for doing good, and punished for acts of evil. I may not know much psychology, but I think that one is more likely to work.
Could be that the spyware is really, really well-designed. Some sort of boot sector thing, perhaps?
If the spyware was designed to be difficult to remove, and nobody was looking for it, it wouldn't be surprising that it survived something that removes most software.
The response from the Humble Bundle co-founder John Graham is this: They're experimenting. They're trying to see if they can make the HIB system work for bigger games. But this is in no way a guaranteed change in how it will work in the future - they fully plan to continue the DRM-free, cross-platform indie game bundles, possibly even another one this year.
My own addendum: If the experiment is a success, they'll likely be able to push harder in the future to force their partners to remove the DRM and/or port to Mac/Linux. But since this was the first one, they had to compromise a bit. And even then they could only get a publisher that's nearly dead and is desperate for PR and sales. Given how much backlash that's brought them from some sectors*, they almost definitely won't do the next one just like this. At least, not under the Humble Bundle name.
* I say "some sectors" because the gaming world is actually pretty excited about this one. They don't really care about the lack of Mac/Linux support or the DRM. It's rather clear that this bundle was aimed at them, not at anti-DRM crusaders or Mac/Linux fans.
If the beer is not run for long enough, the beer sitting in the pipe will become warm. To get to the fresh, cold beer, you would have to run the tap for a few seconds to flush out the warm beer that had been sitting. This is, however, a tragic waste of beer that could otherwise have been rechilled and drunk. Thus, he weeps for the lost beer.
As a member of the "Steam-worshipping younger generation", I feel I should explain my position. A lot of what you say is right. But there are a few points you get wrong.
I don't love Steam because it's DRM. I love it despite the DRM it contains.
You see, I still view DRM as an evil. However, it is not an intolerable one, nor is it a philosophical one. It is, perhaps, a necessary one. As a thought experiment, suppose there is some perfect DRM system - it always stops the software from being used by non-paying customers, and always allows paying ones to use it, regardless of internet connectivity, system profile, phase of the moon, etc. Don't ask how it works - it's magic or something. But it always lets the right people use it, and always stops the wrong ones. I, and most of "my generation", would not object to it. The developer does have a reasonable expectation that they will profit from their work, which DRM can help to protect.
DRM does two things - it reduces the number of non-paying users, and it drives away otherwise-paying customers due to the inconvenience of it. The "perfect DRM" I posited reaches the limits of those numbers - non-paying users are reduced to zero, and the only people it drives away are those with a deep philosophical opposition to DRM (who are, I think, a relative minority). Actual DRM systems perform worse than the ideal, of course. Some, in fact, drive away more paying customers than non-paying, and ultimately cause a profit loss, not gain.
Steam is one of the better ones. You can view it as a compromise between two positions. On the one hand, you have the publishers, who want maximum control over their product, as a corollary to their desire for maximum profit. On the other hand, you have the customers, who want maximum convenience. Steam provides significantly less restriction than many publishers would like - it does not encrypt things, it allows offline play, and it is easily broken. Many publishers supplement it with additional DRM, like SecuROM or GFWL (which are, in fact, noted on the store page), because they don't think it goes far enough. On the other side, Steam DRM is significantly more convenient than any other system I have seen. And Steam also offers significantly more features than a standard DRM system, enough that I would argue that the DRM is just one component of the system.
Steam is fundamentally a content distribution system - the goal is to put software in the hands of as many paying customers as possible. The DRM is secondary to that - it's enough to discourage casual piracy, but anyone who really wants to not pay for their games can bypass it. Rather easily, even - there are fake version of the Steam authentication servers that simply authorizes you for every game, so if you can get the files, you can run the game. If Steam is ever shut down for any reason (and Valve doesn't follow through on their promise to release a DRM-removal tool themselves), I fully plan to use such a server.
For me, Steam is about at the limit of how "inconvenient" DRM can be before I stop using it. In fact, when combined with some other DRM, I refuse to use it. I try to avoid stuff that uses GFWL unless it's a really good game, and I've been avoiding EA (and Bioware in particular) due to their DRM constantly fucking up.
I don't use any other similar services, simply because all but one of them contain more DRM than I will tolerate. The only other one I would consider is GOG, but I simply haven't had a reason to buy anything from them yet.
"Your" generation seems to have refused to compromise, on both sides of the DRM fight. "My" generation is willing to compromise, generally as long as it is an actual compromise, where both sides give up some things in order to get others.
PS: I also think you're being a bit factually inaccurate when you said that old games didn't have DRM. They most certainly did. I remember not being able to install Warcraft II off a copied disc - it has to be installed from an original, although a copy will w
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They're using the Atom branding because it is an Atom processor underneath. The Atoms and the Core/Xeon/Pentium/Celeron lines have completely different underlying microarchitectures. In particular, the Atom uarch ("Sodaville" in the current generation) has really poor floating-point and SIMD performance, so you can forget about scientific computing on this.
More to the point, the "Atom" brand implies "cheap, low-power device". The same thing "ARM" implies, and as this processor is mainly there to seize control of a niche ARM was trying to grab, it makes sense to use a similar brand name.
Both are indeed great.
Normally, I prefer MPC. It's faster and lighter, or at least it feels like it. But VLC has a few features MPC doesn't:
* Streaming. The main thing I used VLC for was streaming to an AirPort without installing iTunes, because iTunes is evil. A recent update unfortunately broke this, but I haven't checked if they fixed recently.
* Blu-Ray. There's probably some way to do this in MPC, but I can't figure it out.
Both of them are in my "immediate install" pack, along with other useful things like Notepad++ and 7zip. I wonder how hard it would be to get Microsoft to just bundle them in. It's not like Notepad makes them much money.
I actually read TFA, and they're saying it will withstand 23mm autocannon fire. I imagine they're exaggerating a bit, but I also imagine they at least tested it with the weapons they had on hand, like the 7.62mm LMG they mounted on it.
I wonder, what's the false positive rate on these "third-party" systems? It's easy to make a system that detects 100% of malware as malware - just deny everything.
That is not a tank. That's an armored car.
A tank requires three things: heavy armor, a turret-mounted gun capable of anti-tank combat, and the use of tracks instead of wheels.
This arguably fails all three. It's a wheeled vehicle, and that 7.62mm gun may as well be paintballs to other tanks - it's a common caliber for the coax gun on modern tanks, for use when you don't want to waste your expensive ammo against mere infantry. The armor is definitely insufficient to handle modern tanks, but it would have been enough for 20's and '30s tanks (or perhaps WW2-era Italian or Japanese tanks), so you could probably squeeze it in.
That said, as long as the rebels use it intelligently, an armored car is a very useful tool. Keep it in the cities, where tanks have difficulty maneuvering, but use its mobility to outflank infantry. It will be interesting to see how long it lasts - it doesn't look like it could handle modern anti-tank missiles, but it *might* stand up to an RPG-7 or so.
There are two ways to do error-handling: try{}catch{}, or if{}else{}. That's "using exceptions" and "using return values", under Dobb's naming.
The difference in usage is simple: one handles errors immediately, thus cluttering the code with all the things that could go wrong, while the other separates error-handling out, pushing it to the end of a block (and away from the code that actually generates the error, which can complicate debugging).
I can really think of no other way to do it. You can handle the error where it happens, or handle the error at the end. I tend to look on anyone whining about how hard error-handling is with suspicion - their suggestions (if they even have any) are almost always "the language/compiler/interpreter/processor/operating system should handle errors for me", and there are enough obvious flaws in that logic that I need not point them out.
See, by the time of the Year of the Linux Desktop, Linux will be too mainstream. We'll have all switched to some more "trendy" or "underground" OS. Possibly one of the BSDs, or maybe OS/2 if it's "retro" enough, but possibly some yet-to-be-written OS. HURD, perhaps?
The problem with low-cost, low-benefit science is decreasing returns. After a while, you've basically learned all you can without sending a manned mission.
Just look at Mars. Sojourner brought back a lot of data. Spirit and Opportunity sent back even more, but were also more expensive. Curiosity is sending back yet more, but at yet higher costs (the wheels on Curiosity are about the size of the entire Sojourner rover). Pretty soon we'll reach the point where sending people will be *cheaper* than sending a rover with similar capabilities. Arguably, we've reached it now.
PS: As a member of the "younger" generation, I can assure you that we would like plenty more manned missions. We just don't like things that have been done before. If you rephrase the question as "permanent moon base, or robotic submarine on Europa", we'd pretty much all pick the base.
The "right" to be forgotten is a form of censorship and has nothing at all to do with privacy.
I think you are both right and wrong on this. It depends on how you implement this "right".
The way I originally heard it, the "right" was essentially "if I ask for something I uploaded to be taken down and deleted, it has to be taken down and deleted". If one quits Facebook and deletes their profile, it should actually be deleted. This I completely support, because while it's technically censorship, it is in the hand of the user and creator of the content, not in someone else's hands. And if someone happened to save that data and re-uploads it, that's governed by libel/slander laws.
If, however, the "right" is "I can demand anything even loosely connected to me be removed from any site", then it's basically the DMCA on an even worse level. I can't support that, because even though I can see good intentions behind it, the level of abuse it's going to cause is enormous. It would dwarf the level of abuse the DMCA gets.
Wait. Unrifled artillery is civilian-legal?
So I could get a T-72 tank with a smoothbore 125mm gun, and it would be legal to keep armed?
Man, if only those things were street-legal...
I think, decades from now, we'll look back on the very concept of "targeted advertising" with mockery, like "Duck and Cover" drills in the 50s. Not because it's evil or privacy-invading, but because it doesn't work. (At least, in my estimation).
Seriously. You can *maybe* target your advertising to people working in a general profession, or in a geographical region, or maybe an age group. But every time I've seen ads targeting me because of something more specific, it's been a terrible failure.
The ads on Angry Birds were, at one point, *convinced* I was a gay black man with HIV. They were bombarding me with ads for "gay thug dating" or "HIV testing", despite the fact that the only thing they actually got right was "male" (and it's easy to get that one right when it's 50/50 on a blind guess).
Google keeps hitting me with sports ads. Football, I think, but I care so little about sports in general that I can't really tell. Which tells you how inclined I am to click those links. Or if I buy something, I start getting a lot of ads for competing products, *after* the fact.
Steam targets poorly with their "recommended games" bit. Usually, it's either stuff already on my wishlist (so I've already decided to buy it next time it's on sale), stuff that's blindingly obvious (oh, you just added Call of Duty 7 to your cart? Might I suggest Call of Duty 6, Call of Duty 8 or Call of Duty 5?), or stuff that I don't like (Train Simulator 2012). And they've got nearly as much data on me as Google. I will give them credit for using some of that data properly - they use their knowledge of what games I own to not try to sell me games I already own, or to try to upsell me on DLC for games I have.
Those are just three examples. But I could list hundreds more. I have yet to see an advertiser try to target me, and "hit" the target. They're amassing all this data on me, but they're no better at advertising to me than when they just classified me as "late teen/early twenties caucasian male working in some sort of computer field".
We need to collectively get over our obsession with targeted this or personalized that. It might give impressive results when it works, but I'd bet money that the hit rate is under 1% for the most precise groupings.
(While we're at it, I'll note that even if your targeting *was* perfect, it's useless if your actual ads are shit. And guess what? Most ads are shit)
I was going to suggest something similar to #1, but there is one flaw: hardware attacks. If they can plant an actual keylogger in the keyboard, even this won't help. Although you might be able to obfuscate a bit - use a Dvorak layout, perhaps?
Are they integrated into the CPU or chipset? Then it's integrated graphics. And while they may be the best integrated graphics on the market, and can certainly handle light gaming and media playback, they are far from the level a discrete processor is at.
Yes, the cores on a Fusion processor are essentially identical to those in the discrete card. But they are clocked lower, are heavily memory-constrained, and to put it bluntly, there's just not enough of them. The 7660D in the top-end A10 has 384 shader cores. That sounds like a lot. It isn't. First off, it's based on the old VLIW4 architecture of the Radeon HD 6000 series. The "common" card of that series was the 6770, which had 800 of those cores (with 50MHz higher clock speed, as well). To find comparable discrete cards, you have to go down to the budget section. The $79 6570 has 480 shader cores, while the $55 6450 had 160.
You seem to fundamentally misunderstand Crytek's marketing position. They deliberately exclude the low end, in order to get better traction with the high end. They sell to the people who are more likely to spend $500 than $50 on a graphics card.
When the original came out, they bragged that there was not a computer on the planet that could run the game at absolute max settings. The whole reason "can it run Crysis?" is a meme is because the answer was almost universally "NO" for a few years after it came out.
Let me explain it to you with one of Slashdot's favorite tropes: the car analogy. Can you compete in a F1 race driving a '98 Toyota Camry? No. Can you compete driving a '13 Honda Civic? No. And it would be absolutely ridiculous for you to try. Similarly, trying to play Crysis on an integrated GPU is likely to end poorly.
That said, I would expect it to at least run. I have found that "minimum requirements" are often higher than they strictly need to be. The game will probably run, it might even be vaguely playable if you can increase the amount of memory and find a low-res texture mod.
Integrated graphics. Seriously?
Starcraft II is hardly the most graphically-challenging game. Neither is R6: Vegas. And the WEI scores are essentially useless.
The A10 uses a Radeon 7660D which, in "real"-card terms, fits somewhere between 7570 and a 7470. However, the integrated Radeons are known to be extremely memory-bandwidth-bound, enough that they're frequently used in RAM benchmarks. So in practice you're looking at a graphics processor that's already weak, and further crippling it by bottlenecking its memory access.
Look at the benchmarks. 48 FPS in Crysis: Warhead - at 1366x768. 41 FPS in Metro: 2033, on low, at the same low resolution. 68 FPS in Dirt 3. 58 FPS in Battlefield 3, at low quality. For any game that has a reputation for being GPU-heavy, integrated graphics will not suffice.
Yes, the Fusions are pretty awesome chips. I almost got one myself. They're excellent for mobile or light gaming usage. I'm not surprised you sell a lot of them. But (at the risk of sounding like a True Scotsman) they're not the kind of thing a real PC gamer uses. And Crysis 3 is definitely trying to target the "real PC gamer".
We're spotting exoplanets faster than we can name them. We just landed a fucking nuclear-powered, laser-wielding science tank on Mars. Two years ago we dive-bombed the moon so we could search the debris cloud for signs of water. New Horizons is planned to leave the solar system as well once it's done with Pluto. We've got probes around Mercury, Venus, Saturn, Vesta, and whole damn fleets around the Moon and Mars, with another probe en route to Jupiter. We've got a company planning to mine the freaking asteroid belt. The ISS is constantly manned - I get Twitter pics *every* *day* from fucking *space*.
The hell we aren't dreaming big. The only reason Voyager is the only probe so far out is because it takes forty years to get there.
Note: Whenever I referred to "good" products in my original post, I was referring to "good" as in "opposite of evil", not "of high quality". I thought that was obvious given how I structured my comparisons, but I guess not.
You also seem to fail to understand how corporations work. I can flip your statement around and have it be just as true: if I give Sony money for one thing, they can use it to develop products to help people and perhaps redeem themselves.
You apparently insist on a complete, 100% change before you will do any business with them. That is not going to happen. Corporations, like people, cannot change overnight. That works both ways - Canonical could not immediately turn into a draconian lock-in vendor, no matter what the people "in charge" try to do. Likewise, Sony can't immediately turn into the company we want them to be. They could hand the reins over to you completely and you still couldn't do it in less than a year.
I for one do not make my purchasing decisions based on any single factor. One of those factors is indeed how "evil" a company has been, but if the product *itself* is not intrinsically evil, I would have no problems with it. This is one of those cases - it isn't even really a Sony product, just a product Sony is manufacturing on behalf of another company. And I would venture to say that the Raspberry Pi counts as an intrinsically non-evil product.
Yes, Sony was evil. Still is, for a large part.
What do you think the best way to change that behavior is?
A) Refuse to buy any of their products, even the non-evil or outright good ones, or
B) Reward them for building good products by buying them, while punishing them by boycotting their evil products
Path A causes them to just stop counting you as a potential customer. So they no longer care at all what you do. In a way, you're like a rabid PS3 fanboy who buys every one of their products - your purchasing decision is a known factor.
Path B gives them the full stick/carrot combination. They get rewarded for doing good, and punished for acts of evil. I may not know much psychology, but I think that one is more likely to work.
Twice the power for twice the price doesn't make it a better deal. If the Pi has all the power you need, why spend $25 more for a "better" one?
Also, the GPIO pins. That's not a particularly Android-y feature.
That quote was in the context of the entire mission, not this particular data point. He was saying that the Curiosity mission data, overall, is groundbreaking.
Naturally, NPR quoted him out of context, and then everyone else ran with it.
Because many of us have at least been accused of having it. Or are "self-diagnosed" as having it. Or were even diagnosed by an actual psychiatrist.
Could be that the spyware is really, really well-designed. Some sort of boot sector thing, perhaps?
If the spyware was designed to be difficult to remove, and nobody was looking for it, it wouldn't be surprising that it survived something that removes most software.
The response from the Humble Bundle co-founder John Graham is this:
They're experimenting. They're trying to see if they can make the HIB system work for bigger games. But this is in no way a guaranteed change in how it will work in the future - they fully plan to continue the DRM-free, cross-platform indie game bundles, possibly even another one this year.
My own addendum:
If the experiment is a success, they'll likely be able to push harder in the future to force their partners to remove the DRM and/or port to Mac/Linux. But since this was the first one, they had to compromise a bit. And even then they could only get a publisher that's nearly dead and is desperate for PR and sales. Given how much backlash that's brought them from some sectors*, they almost definitely won't do the next one just like this. At least, not under the Humble Bundle name.
* I say "some sectors" because the gaming world is actually pretty excited about this one. They don't really care about the lack of Mac/Linux support or the DRM. It's rather clear that this bundle was aimed at them, not at anti-DRM crusaders or Mac/Linux fans.
To explain the joke:
If the beer is not run for long enough, the beer sitting in the pipe will become warm. To get to the fresh, cold beer, you would have to run the tap for a few seconds to flush out the warm beer that had been sitting. This is, however, a tragic waste of beer that could otherwise have been rechilled and drunk. Thus, he weeps for the lost beer.
As a member of the "Steam-worshipping younger generation", I feel I should explain my position. A lot of what you say is right. But there are a few points you get wrong.
I don't love Steam because it's DRM. I love it despite the DRM it contains.
You see, I still view DRM as an evil. However, it is not an intolerable one, nor is it a philosophical one. It is, perhaps, a necessary one. As a thought experiment, suppose there is some perfect DRM system - it always stops the software from being used by non-paying customers, and always allows paying ones to use it, regardless of internet connectivity, system profile, phase of the moon, etc. Don't ask how it works - it's magic or something. But it always lets the right people use it, and always stops the wrong ones. I, and most of "my generation", would not object to it. The developer does have a reasonable expectation that they will profit from their work, which DRM can help to protect.
DRM does two things - it reduces the number of non-paying users, and it drives away otherwise-paying customers due to the inconvenience of it. The "perfect DRM" I posited reaches the limits of those numbers - non-paying users are reduced to zero, and the only people it drives away are those with a deep philosophical opposition to DRM (who are, I think, a relative minority). Actual DRM systems perform worse than the ideal, of course. Some, in fact, drive away more paying customers than non-paying, and ultimately cause a profit loss, not gain.
Steam is one of the better ones. You can view it as a compromise between two positions. On the one hand, you have the publishers, who want maximum control over their product, as a corollary to their desire for maximum profit. On the other hand, you have the customers, who want maximum convenience. Steam provides significantly less restriction than many publishers would like - it does not encrypt things, it allows offline play, and it is easily broken. Many publishers supplement it with additional DRM, like SecuROM or GFWL (which are, in fact, noted on the store page), because they don't think it goes far enough. On the other side, Steam DRM is significantly more convenient than any other system I have seen. And Steam also offers significantly more features than a standard DRM system, enough that I would argue that the DRM is just one component of the system.
Steam is fundamentally a content distribution system - the goal is to put software in the hands of as many paying customers as possible. The DRM is secondary to that - it's enough to discourage casual piracy, but anyone who really wants to not pay for their games can bypass it. Rather easily, even - there are fake version of the Steam authentication servers that simply authorizes you for every game, so if you can get the files, you can run the game. If Steam is ever shut down for any reason (and Valve doesn't follow through on their promise to release a DRM-removal tool themselves), I fully plan to use such a server.
For me, Steam is about at the limit of how "inconvenient" DRM can be before I stop using it. In fact, when combined with some other DRM, I refuse to use it. I try to avoid stuff that uses GFWL unless it's a really good game, and I've been avoiding EA (and Bioware in particular) due to their DRM constantly fucking up.
I don't use any other similar services, simply because all but one of them contain more DRM than I will tolerate. The only other one I would consider is GOG, but I simply haven't had a reason to buy anything from them yet.
"Your" generation seems to have refused to compromise, on both sides of the DRM fight. "My" generation is willing to compromise, generally as long as it is an actual compromise, where both sides give up some things in order to get others.
PS: I also think you're being a bit factually inaccurate when you said that old games didn't have DRM. They most certainly did. I remember not being able to install Warcraft II off a copied disc - it has to be installed from an original, although a copy will w
But your Wal-Marts *still* don't have a firearms section.