Adblock/Adblock plus is your saviour. (or if you're super uber nerdy, a custom hosts file)
On the one hand I feel bad that I know that I'm not contributing to the continued survival of some of my favorite websites by providing them with adviews impressions (and certainly not with click-throughs), but on the other hand I work in the business of, among many other things, saving PCs that have become corrupted by malware that likely showed up in a drive-by ad-based browser attack. I feel no need to risk it.
On a somewhat related note, the sheer annoyance of today's ads have gone overboard. The days of a static tower jpg on the side of an article seem to be going the way of the dodo, where now everything is animated, full of sound, wants to jump out in front of the damn text I'm reading, or even replace the text itself (and often somehow take up an entire modern cpu core, wtf, I've got more processing power than nasa sent men to the moon with, and a "click-here-to-win-a-ps3!" ad is using all of it?!). When they have a custom "X" button on their ad that I have to click on to close the damn thing, I am ALWAYS wary, because I don't want to click on ANYTHING nonstandard. ever. That's just asking for trouble, even in today's modern sandboxed browsers.
It is sad to say, but I personally am more concerned with keeping my own system safe and secure than I am with "supporting" my favorite websites by letting their ads rape my eyes and ears at the very least, and quite possibly my system as well. They'll have to depend on other people for that, just hopefully not people I personally support.
Of course he isn't stumping up the cash by doubling his monthly ISP subscription.
He's stumping up the cash in tax-based subsidiaries provided by the government to telcos in order to build infrastructure. Just like you (assuming you're in the USA) and me.
A company I used to work for decided to use the initials "AOL" to refer internally their online product. seriously. I'm pretty sure they still do. I'm amazed that nobody ever pointed out to them that those initials were pretty much already spoken for, especially as an online product.
Names stick. Say what you will, once a name is taken, it is taken, and you can't appropriate it unless you are pretty much in a completely different business (e.g. Apple computers vs Apple records, and that didn't blow up for a good 30 years!).
Hell, if you want an example of name longevity, "whammy bars" on guitars are still called "tremolo bars" by most guitarists even though it is more specifically producing a vibrato effect, not a tremolo effect. Some early guitarists couldn't tell the difference, and the name stuck.
It's all pure optimism that "this time, it'll be like the old days", combined with respect for previous work. It's like people who keep going to see anything lucas, whedon, or tarrantino put out.
Crisis core was ok. I played it for several hours but the incomprehensible square plot "it'll all make sense by hour 30, we swear. just sit there and be confused at who these people are and why they're doing what they're doing for now" kinda drove me off. And this is from a guy who loved Grandia xtreme, which had one of the thinnest rpg backstories of all time (because the gameplay was worth it).
I will say that I haven't paid full price for any FF post-7, at least.
in retrospec, 8 doesn't look as dumb as some of the ones after it, but at the time it looked like such a huge departure that I didn't have any interest in it, and never bothered to pick it up. not when I had competition like Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II on the Dreamcast (It took me awhile to get a Playstation).
I have to agree. I keep trying to like new final fantasies because the old ones were some of the best games every made.
Every time, the game LOOKS phenomenal, and then I sit down to play and begin wondering "what the hell happened to this development house?"
The last good one was 7, and even it wasn't -nearly- as good as the hype produced of millions of kids whose first console was the ps1 seem to think it was. 8 looked so retarded I didn't even try it. I gave 9 a good 6 or 7 hours and it still wasn't drawing me in. to this day I can't remember anything about it except that one of my characters had a tail? I tried to play 10 like four times, and every single time I couldn't get past the fact that in the first 2 hours of the game you have about 30 seconds of button mashing actual playtime, and the rest is cinematic. 11 seemed like such a good idea and turned out to be worse than mmos that were out before it. "hey, yeah, I LOVE the idea of killing one mob, and then sitting for 5 minutes before I can kill another one. that's fun for a newbie! also, why can't i play on the same server as my friends without grinding gil for several days?" I didn't bother with 12. I am -still- trying to get into 13 but it seems to have suffered from the same disease as 10, and the fact that it keeps giving me new main characters every 20 minutes isn't doing much to endear itself to me. it's hard to get involved when you're presented with a new character, given vague hints about their personality and character motivation, and then they're gone (and back again!) in less time than a sitcom episode.
Final Fantasy 6 was a masterpiece, which is still the yardstick by which jrpgs are compared against, 2d or 3d. Final Fantasy 4 would have held that spot if not for 6. Final Fantasy 1 was and still is one of if not my favorite games of all time. I've bought it like 5 different times for 4 different systems.
What happened? Square's descent into "I don't remember how I did the excellence of my youth so I'm going to replace it with the pretty pretty 3d models!" makes even George Lucas look good.
I don't have any facebook apps installed. not a one.
I don't answer any surveys or take any polls.
I painstakingly go through every privacy setting and set to "friends only".
I post as little truly personal information as possible. No phone number, no address, no high school, college, or place of current employment, none of it.
and I'm still pretty sure that facebook has still somehow probably derived all of my info down to my underwear color, porn preferences, and whether I ate lucky charms for dinner last night, and sold that to advertisers.
yes, you said that nobody else can currently fill some roles that the USPS currently serves. Do you contend that if they were allowed to collapse, no current company would step up to fulfill that role, nor would a new company form to satisfy a need?
I'm pretty sure that the history of business says otherwise. if it is profitable to do something (and legal, and even sometimes not), somebody is going to step in and make the money.
Anything you don't care about, can probably be sent electronically just as easily.
Anything you DO care about should never ever be sent by USPS.
I've had nothing but bad experiences with sending stuff via USPS. nothing. Tracking numbers that still read "waiting for pickup" at the origin point days after they've been delivered (i.e. tracking is useless). packages that mysteriously disappear for months at time with nothing but a shrug from the postal service. packages that take days to show up even though they're coming from about 50 miles away. mail that shows up shredded in a plastic bag with a note saying "oops, our bad, enjoy the 8% of this letter you actually received!"
Every single time I try to give them the benefit of the doubt and say "maybe the previous couple experiences have all been flukes, let me give them one more try", they do their best to disappoint me and prove my previous experiences were not flukes.
May they crash and burn like any other business. propping up a business just because we're used to it being there is WRONG. if there is business that USPS handles that UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc don't... well when USPS shuts down those services can and will step in to fill a need, and I trust each one of those WAY more than USPS.
And hey, maybe if the 0.079 cent taxpayer subsidized mailings are no longer available to large mailing houses through the USPS, perhaps I'll be able to stop digging out the hard copy spam that constitutes roughly 50% of the mail that shows up in my mailbox.
That is exactly what I was talking about when I said "unless you specifically set up a circumstance to prove otherwise".
I said that more cores beyond does not make a game faster. it doesn't (generally). if you purposely load up your system with more tasks in order to make the game slower, so that it requires more cores to offload the additional tasks to in order to bring the game speed back up to normal, that's a contrived test.
I understand the point you're making about average day-to-day real world use benefiting from more than 2 cores, and that is correct, but if you are -serious- about game performance, trying to wrangle out every last frame per second, then you will never do anything like this. For that sort of person, a quad-core running at 3.5ghz is going to give them better performance than a 6-core running at 3ghz. Most of the time, they'd see the best performance of all running a dual core at 4ghz compared to the previous two options (assuming same basic architecture of course).
Me, I just have a second system next to the primary one to play movies and music on. Just run the audio digital out from system A to the digital in on system B, and you're good to go. Hell, I've got a 3rd system that doesn't actually do anything, I leave it off 95% of the time.
Intel had good entry level CPUs 10 years ago a lot less than the $400 you're quoting. During the second wave of the pentium II (when they went back to sockets), the pentium III 700 was a very solid CPU that was fairly inexpensive. I bought two of them for like $170 each.
Previous to that, the celeron 366 was even cheaper and could be OC'd into a fairly strong cpu.
previous to that the celeron 300a was possibly the most famous overclocker of all time, it sold for like $125 and would consistently OC to be faster than intel's top of the line mainsteam processor.
Even the lowly celeron 266 (no l2 cache) was a fairly good gaming processor.
While AMD (and to a lesser extent Cyrix) had some early success with cloned 386 processors in the low-end/replacement cpu market, really the price war you enjoy today started with the K6, not the Athlon64. The K6, especially in K6-2 garb, was the first alternate cpu to really start eating into intel's market dominance in the mainstream arena. Its follow up, the original Athlon, took a HUGE bite into not just marketshare, but mindshare, as it was the first time Intel was outperformed in the mainstream arena in not just clock speed but work-per-clock as well.
If that were Apple's plan they would just come out and say it. They make no bones about doing it on their iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads so why what do they gain from lying and saying they AREN'T doing it to OS X? Oh, right, that doesn't make for a great bit of Apple trolling.
If he was trolling, which I don't think he was, doesn't that mean you just fed the troll?
Sure support SMP, but that doesn't mean that it makes much of a difference. They can spin off a minor task or three to additional cores, but that doesn't mean they can max out usage on additional cores in order to raise the performance bar for the entire application. You're going to get max usage on core 0, maybe token-to-decent usage (say 50% or so on a good day) out of core 1, and token usage at best (less than 5%) on cores 2 and 3 (and 4 and 5).
video card speed aside, for gaming it is -still- all about the clock speed (and work done per cycle) when determining your performance threshold. Or to put it another way, take any modern game. Unless you specifically set up a circumstance to prove otherwise, you're going to find that you get nearly identical framerates on a 2-core, 4-core, and 6-core processor of the same architecture at the same clock speed, because those extra cores aren't really doing a whole hell of a lot, at least not as far as the game is concerned.
I've had prime95 catch errors on overclocks that passed -everything- else.
Know what, in every one of those instances, it was right. If I kept running at the speed that passed prime but failed everything else, I'd eventually run into random errors, sudden unrepeatable crashes, or other mysterious problems.
I've never had any issues with any overclock that passed 24 hours of prime, including distributed computing projects where they'll yell at you if you're returning bad data (i.e. aren't passing the redundancy tests).
unless you still use software which runs it's main loop in a single thread, with only relatively minor tasks spun off to other threads. Like say, just about any game on the market.
Or, we could bring back what we used to have before the globalists took over circa 1970 and the standard of living here stopped growing: tariffs.
How do you plan on explaining to consumers that the majority of their goods will now cost significantly more, perhaps several times as much? Ok, better question, how will a politician explain that, and still get re-elected?
Actually, come to think of it, technically I think it may rule out liquid AND solid rocket boosters, since they're basically just a controlled and directed explosion. Gonna have to get a waiver for that.
They want YOUR input on how you can best be molested!
Also, no more backscatter x-rays, they'll just line your chair with carbon paper and conveniently leave off that radiation shielding on the outer hull!
Pretty much from day 1 I found Windows 7 to be superior to XP. Sure I may want a small handful of things like the old XP network config interface back, but 7 is far and away the better UI, which isn't even counting that the underlying OS is way better as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Adblock/Adblock plus is your saviour. (or if you're super uber nerdy, a custom hosts file)
On the one hand I feel bad that I know that I'm not contributing to the continued survival of some of my favorite websites by providing them with adviews impressions (and certainly not with click-throughs), but on the other hand I work in the business of, among many other things, saving PCs that have become corrupted by malware that likely showed up in a drive-by ad-based browser attack. I feel no need to risk it.
On a somewhat related note, the sheer annoyance of today's ads have gone overboard. The days of a static tower jpg on the side of an article seem to be going the way of the dodo, where now everything is animated, full of sound, wants to jump out in front of the damn text I'm reading, or even replace the text itself (and often somehow take up an entire modern cpu core, wtf, I've got more processing power than nasa sent men to the moon with, and a "click-here-to-win-a-ps3!" ad is using all of it?!). When they have a custom "X" button on their ad that I have to click on to close the damn thing, I am ALWAYS wary, because I don't want to click on ANYTHING nonstandard. ever. That's just asking for trouble, even in today's modern sandboxed browsers.
It is sad to say, but I personally am more concerned with keeping my own system safe and secure than I am with "supporting" my favorite websites by letting their ads rape my eyes and ears at the very least, and quite possibly my system as well. They'll have to depend on other people for that, just hopefully not people I personally support.
Of course he isn't stumping up the cash by doubling his monthly ISP subscription.
He's stumping up the cash in tax-based subsidiaries provided by the government to telcos in order to build infrastructure. Just like you (assuming you're in the USA) and me.
A company I used to work for decided to use the initials "AOL" to refer internally their online product. seriously. I'm pretty sure they still do. I'm amazed that nobody ever pointed out to them that those initials were pretty much already spoken for, especially as an online product.
Names stick. Say what you will, once a name is taken, it is taken, and you can't appropriate it unless you are pretty much in a completely different business (e.g. Apple computers vs Apple records, and that didn't blow up for a good 30 years!).
Hell, if you want an example of name longevity, "whammy bars" on guitars are still called "tremolo bars" by most guitarists even though it is more specifically producing a vibrato effect, not a tremolo effect. Some early guitarists couldn't tell the difference, and the name stuck.
Ask Fred Goldman how much of the money OJ owes him has actually been paid.
that's why the decision doesn't matter financially.
business folds in the face of a laughable settlement it'll never be able to play.
founders go on to found other, perhaps similar businesses. perhaps very similar. lemonwire, orangewire, or kiwiwire coming your way soon!
it's all about the RIAA getting the message out that they are serious and will dropkick you right in the wallet.
It's all pure optimism that "this time, it'll be like the old days", combined with respect for previous work. It's like people who keep going to see anything lucas, whedon, or tarrantino put out.
Crisis core was ok. I played it for several hours but the incomprehensible square plot "it'll all make sense by hour 30, we swear. just sit there and be confused at who these people are and why they're doing what they're doing for now" kinda drove me off. And this is from a guy who loved Grandia xtreme, which had one of the thinnest rpg backstories of all time (because the gameplay was worth it).
I will say that I haven't paid full price for any FF post-7, at least.
in retrospec, 8 doesn't look as dumb as some of the ones after it, but at the time it looked like such a huge departure that I didn't have any interest in it, and never bothered to pick it up. not when I had competition like Skies of Arcadia and Grandia II on the Dreamcast (It took me awhile to get a Playstation).
I have to agree. I keep trying to like new final fantasies because the old ones were some of the best games every made.
Every time, the game LOOKS phenomenal, and then I sit down to play and begin wondering "what the hell happened to this development house?"
The last good one was 7, and even it wasn't -nearly- as good as the hype produced of millions of kids whose first console was the ps1 seem to think it was. 8 looked so retarded I didn't even try it. I gave 9 a good 6 or 7 hours and it still wasn't drawing me in. to this day I can't remember anything about it except that one of my characters had a tail? I tried to play 10 like four times, and every single time I couldn't get past the fact that in the first 2 hours of the game you have about 30 seconds of button mashing actual playtime, and the rest is cinematic. 11 seemed like such a good idea and turned out to be worse than mmos that were out before it. "hey, yeah, I LOVE the idea of killing one mob, and then sitting for 5 minutes before I can kill another one. that's fun for a newbie! also, why can't i play on the same server as my friends without grinding gil for several days?" I didn't bother with 12. I am -still- trying to get into 13 but it seems to have suffered from the same disease as 10, and the fact that it keeps giving me new main characters every 20 minutes isn't doing much to endear itself to me. it's hard to get involved when you're presented with a new character, given vague hints about their personality and character motivation, and then they're gone (and back again!) in less time than a sitcom episode.
Final Fantasy 6 was a masterpiece, which is still the yardstick by which jrpgs are compared against, 2d or 3d. Final Fantasy 4 would have held that spot if not for 6. Final Fantasy 1 was and still is one of if not my favorite games of all time. I've bought it like 5 different times for 4 different systems.
What happened? Square's descent into "I don't remember how I did the excellence of my youth so I'm going to replace it with the pretty pretty 3d models!" makes even George Lucas look good.
I don't have any facebook apps installed. not a one.
I don't answer any surveys or take any polls.
I painstakingly go through every privacy setting and set to "friends only".
I post as little truly personal information as possible. No phone number, no address, no high school, college, or place of current employment, none of it.
and I'm still pretty sure that facebook has still somehow probably derived all of my info down to my underwear color, porn preferences, and whether I ate lucky charms for dinner last night, and sold that to advertisers.
yes, you said that nobody else can currently fill some roles that the USPS currently serves. Do you contend that if they were allowed to collapse, no current company would step up to fulfill that role, nor would a new company form to satisfy a need?
I'm pretty sure that the history of business says otherwise. if it is profitable to do something (and legal, and even sometimes not), somebody is going to step in and make the money.
Anything you don't care about, can probably be sent electronically just as easily.
Anything you DO care about should never ever be sent by USPS.
I've had nothing but bad experiences with sending stuff via USPS. nothing. Tracking numbers that still read "waiting for pickup" at the origin point days after they've been delivered (i.e. tracking is useless). packages that mysteriously disappear for months at time with nothing but a shrug from the postal service. packages that take days to show up even though they're coming from about 50 miles away. mail that shows up shredded in a plastic bag with a note saying "oops, our bad, enjoy the 8% of this letter you actually received!"
Every single time I try to give them the benefit of the doubt and say "maybe the previous couple experiences have all been flukes, let me give them one more try", they do their best to disappoint me and prove my previous experiences were not flukes.
May they crash and burn like any other business. propping up a business just because we're used to it being there is WRONG. if there is business that USPS handles that UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc don't... well when USPS shuts down those services can and will step in to fill a need, and I trust each one of those WAY more than USPS.
And hey, maybe if the 0.079 cent taxpayer subsidized mailings are no longer available to large mailing houses through the USPS, perhaps I'll be able to stop digging out the hard copy spam that constitutes roughly 50% of the mail that shows up in my mailbox.
That is exactly what I was talking about when I said "unless you specifically set up a circumstance to prove otherwise".
I said that more cores beyond does not make a game faster. it doesn't (generally). if you purposely load up your system with more tasks in order to make the game slower, so that it requires more cores to offload the additional tasks to in order to bring the game speed back up to normal, that's a contrived test.
I understand the point you're making about average day-to-day real world use benefiting from more than 2 cores, and that is correct, but if you are -serious- about game performance, trying to wrangle out every last frame per second, then you will never do anything like this. For that sort of person, a quad-core running at 3.5ghz is going to give them better performance than a 6-core running at 3ghz. Most of the time, they'd see the best performance of all running a dual core at 4ghz compared to the previous two options (assuming same basic architecture of course).
Me, I just have a second system next to the primary one to play movies and music on. Just run the audio digital out from system A to the digital in on system B, and you're good to go. Hell, I've got a 3rd system that doesn't actually do anything, I leave it off 95% of the time.
Sad thing is, to a lot of Americans, that will probably be the best way to explain it.
Intel had good entry level CPUs 10 years ago a lot less than the $400 you're quoting. During the second wave of the pentium II (when they went back to sockets), the pentium III 700 was a very solid CPU that was fairly inexpensive. I bought two of them for like $170 each.
Previous to that, the celeron 366 was even cheaper and could be OC'd into a fairly strong cpu.
previous to that the celeron 300a was possibly the most famous overclocker of all time, it sold for like $125 and would consistently OC to be faster than intel's top of the line mainsteam processor.
Even the lowly celeron 266 (no l2 cache) was a fairly good gaming processor.
While AMD (and to a lesser extent Cyrix) had some early success with cloned 386 processors in the low-end/replacement cpu market, really the price war you enjoy today started with the K6, not the Athlon64. The K6, especially in K6-2 garb, was the first alternate cpu to really start eating into intel's market dominance in the mainstream arena. Its follow up, the original Athlon, took a HUGE bite into not just marketshare, but mindshare, as it was the first time Intel was outperformed in the mainstream arena in not just clock speed but work-per-clock as well.
Honor the K6. we owe our current market to it.
If that were Apple's plan they would just come out and say it. They make no bones about doing it on their iPhones, iPod Touches, iPads so why what do they gain from lying and saying they AREN'T doing it to OS X? Oh, right, that doesn't make for a great bit of Apple trolling.
If he was trolling, which I don't think he was, doesn't that mean you just fed the troll?
Sure support SMP, but that doesn't mean that it makes much of a difference. They can spin off a minor task or three to additional cores, but that doesn't mean they can max out usage on additional cores in order to raise the performance bar for the entire application. You're going to get max usage on core 0, maybe token-to-decent usage (say 50% or so on a good day) out of core 1, and token usage at best (less than 5%) on cores 2 and 3 (and 4 and 5).
video card speed aside, for gaming it is -still- all about the clock speed (and work done per cycle) when determining your performance threshold. Or to put it another way, take any modern game. Unless you specifically set up a circumstance to prove otherwise, you're going to find that you get nearly identical framerates on a 2-core, 4-core, and 6-core processor of the same architecture at the same clock speed, because those extra cores aren't really doing a whole hell of a lot, at least not as far as the game is concerned.
I've had prime95 catch errors on overclocks that passed -everything- else.
Know what, in every one of those instances, it was right. If I kept running at the speed that passed prime but failed everything else, I'd eventually run into random errors, sudden unrepeatable crashes, or other mysterious problems.
I've never had any issues with any overclock that passed 24 hours of prime, including distributed computing projects where they'll yell at you if you're returning bad data (i.e. aren't passing the redundancy tests).
unless you still use software which runs it's main loop in a single thread, with only relatively minor tasks spun off to other threads. Like say, just about any game on the market.
isn't that what prime95 is for?
Or, we could bring back what we used to have before the globalists took over circa 1970 and the standard of living here stopped growing: tariffs.
How do you plan on explaining to consumers that the majority of their goods will now cost significantly more, perhaps several times as much? Ok, better question, how will a politician explain that, and still get re-elected?
No exploding
Doesn't this rule out nuclear pulse propulsion?
Actually, come to think of it, technically I think it may rule out liquid AND solid rocket boosters, since they're basically just a controlled and directed explosion. Gonna have to get a waiver for that.
I got used to the grouped buttons on 7. I hated them on XP. I hated them on Vista. I got used to them on 7. Can't explain why.
On XP, I will sometimes have a double-sized taskbar and still not be able to read button names. Yeah, I keep too much stuff open.
Nobody is confused. everybody just wants to pretend we can compete with that. We can't.
Either we have to lower standards for our workers, or they have to raise theirs.
Either solution is probably going to involve and armed revolution somewhere along the line, one way or another.
They want YOUR input on how you can best be molested!
Also, no more backscatter x-rays, they'll just line your chair with carbon paper and conveniently leave off that radiation shielding on the outer hull!
We did?
Pretty much from day 1 I found Windows 7 to be superior to XP. Sure I may want a small handful of things like the old XP network config interface back, but 7 is far and away the better UI, which isn't even counting that the underlying OS is way better as well.