and perhaps Sony unhappy enough to think twice next time..
just because you personally wont gain more then a "$10 off when buying God of War 3" coupon, doesnt mean Sony doesnt deserve some repercussions for this
Only an anonymous coward with no real vetting in the industry could make such a claim, considering the PS3 has roughly double the raw horsepower and superior graphics and pretty much superior everything else
only an anonymous coward with zero understanding of computer architecture would make such a claim. the Cell cpu might be teriffic for transcoding media, but it is absolute shit for general purpose computation. The GPU in there is nothing but an nvidia 7900GS, while the memory architecture is set up in such a way that it severely limits flexibility of allocation.
and im not sure why you say we are about to pay for external storage? dashboard upgrades have been free like... forever (this isnt apple we are talking about here..)
as for nickle/diming, sure, but i dont have to download DLC (in fact i just flat out ignore most DLC).
As for the backwards compatbility, how the hell do you actually claim this is a plus for sony? They started out with "yeah, all ps2 games work IN HARDWARE", to "we are removing the hardware, but dont worry, you can still play 90% in software" to "yeah, we are gonna go and kill the software emulator, you guys dont mind do you? yeah thanks.." How the fuck is seriously degrading your device over its lifetime better then just setting up something that works for a lot of games, and STICKING WITH IT? those emulated xbox games play perfectly, so i dont see what your problem is with emulation..
yeah i know, i just fed a troll, just couldnt resist..
Perhaps people will stop whining about their missing disk space
the fix for that is disk-makers defining KB as 1024 bytes, and not ripping us all off. Not to mention the fact that they suggest using the same definitions by giving us 160/320/640 "GB" drives. Meanwhile, 1 GB of RAM still means 1024 MB.
Computer memory evolved using base 2 conventions, the only reason disk makers diverted from that is making a few bucks.
Also, why dont we just start defining "byte" as 10 bits? because converting from bytes to bits is *so hard*
anyway, mark shuttleworth is ruining ubuntu for me, fuck him, ill go somewhere else
if any of those "China could bankrupt the US with all their dollars" stories has any truth to it, i dont think google would be any match for all the hacking power china can afford.
Doesnt mean that china deliberately struck google, but i seriously doubt they went all out
God i love the german language, i especially like your military ranks "oberstormbahnfuhrer" "feldwebel" and such, not to mention that angry industrial music (rammstein) sounds much better in german.
making fun of Dutchmen for eating sauerkraut and invading Poland.
Bah, in socialist Holland, Poland invades you!
seriously, we have tons of eastern europeans here misbehaving and such "They TUK UR JUUUUBSS"
(to slightly expand on the misbehaving, they dont know how to propperly drive, and they know that automated speeding tickets wont get through the entire international proces anyway, the polish police just throws them out. Also driving drunk apperently isnt a problem in poland.. I have nothing against polish people in general, but the ones coming here, ducking taxes and driving like morons with their poorly maintained 15 year old lowered BMWs are a bit of a pain sometime)
here in holland, most younger folk speak anywhere from barely acceptable to excellent english, my parents' generation is already worse, where only the higher educated people have sufficient command of the language to have a propper conversation, my grand parents? They know some english, but if you dropped them in England, they would have quite some trouble.. Then take into account that in Germany, practically every english show/movie is dubbed with german voices, and you can see that speaking German isnt all that obsolete.
Now off course, when all you do on vacation is sit in front of the tent and drink beer, english and 'zwei bier bitte' will suffice
Also, Some german comes in handy when listening to for instance Rammstein, Oomph, KMFDM, not to mention playing Wolfenstein (otherwise all those cries from opposing forces are lost on you..)
As for mandarin and spanish, good for you, i just dont see why you need to diss people for learning other stuff..
just after posting that comment i made the most minimal slax disk i could with a gui environment and a web browser, and launched it in virtualbox.
It is pretty basic, the XFCE desktop would be unusable to a joe-sixpack, but with some configuration that can easily be tackled.
I'm quite impressed with where slax is going, being able to hand-pick your modules on the website, and downloading a custom iso right away, not to mention squeezing a graphical OS with web browser into 108 mb.
if you want a usefull recovery disk, check out the UBCD, no gui, but tons of low-level tools for screwing around with partition tabels and such, saved my ass more then once
A shame too because I loved AC and the C&C series.
dont worry, they screwed up the gameplay too, no more basebuilding, apperently a single building produces all units, and you are supplied with all needed building at the start.. so you arent missing much.
As i commented in an other thread (i think about the ubisoft shitstorm days after release), EA lost me, and my girlfriend as a customer, even before i read about how they butchered the entire C&C core gameplay, with this ridiculous DRM. Part of the fun of CnC for me always has been toying around with different tanks, taking over an entire map and then steamrolling the computer adversary, and i will not be restricted in doing that only where i have internet (case in point, hotelrooms when travelling, on holiday)
the data plan is required if you want that netbook for $49, its price is heavily subsidized by verizon
if you want the netbook without the data plan, it costs $300 or so, hence the gp was pointing out that the $49 price-tag isnt actually $49
i agree with the AC a bit higher, a simple arm netbook with 800*480 would suffice, i also managed to get a slax bootable iso(slax core + X.org + xfce + firefox) with webbrowser in 109 mb, so 128mb flashdrive should be sufficient. put in 256mb of ram, and you are done.
i'd say slax would be a nice idea. it fits within 200mb, if the user has more then 256mb memory it can load itself entirely into ram, making itself extremely responsive.
slax now also offers a custom build option right there on the website, my own trial (slax core + X.org + KDE + firefox) comes out at 129 mb. If you replace KDe with xfce it comes to 108 mb. Booting off a usb stick and loading 108 mb into ram should be lightning quick, and offers a pretty much all you need for e-banking
supplying bootable SD cards with no switch (locked in read-only mode) should solve that. I wouldnt be surprised if there are already manufacturers which make read-only sd cards..
hell, you could even make ROM-based SD cards if you dont trust the switch mechanism
hibernate your normal OS, it will restart to your previous state
seriously though, while this is a generally good idea, once you put all that stuff on a cd, you lose any and all ability to patch the software. Meaning that if the bank puts out a CD with firefox version X, and two months later a serious vulnerability is found, all those users will be forcedly be using an unsafe version, without means to patch (unless at every update the bank mails a fresh CD, at which point users will be confused as to which cd to use). Sure the browser goes right to the bank website, so getting the browser infected would be a small challenge.. but still.
I would think it still is orders of magnitude better then using their normal windows/IE installs, but this way somewhere in 2020 people will be still using FF 3.5 and *buntu 9.10 for their banking..
what nerd doesnt want a service monkey? hell, it sounds like a pretty cool idea to me..
seriously though, i didnt know people had actual service monkeys, what do those monkeys do? What physical handicap do they make up for? Over here i've heard off (and seen) helper dogs, but never monkeys..
the common chinese person might perceive western media as propaganda, and given how much we criticize most of the stuff they do, who can blame them? In all fairness, whenever i watch CNN, i as a european already activate my americanism-filter, and discard a lot of stuff as 'silly americans'. Thats not to say i dont want access to CNN, but i take everything with a grain of salt, simply because i realise the difference in culture and agenda.
For millenia china was its own massive kingdom, the only worry was to keep the barbarians out, and they lived like that for ages. Then in the last few centuries the rest of the world caught up and shot past china in terms of civilisation, and suddenly they have to play with others..
I wonder how the americans would react if a russian/chinese news channel would try to 'liberate' them from fox news/cnn
(by the way, if you ever see some of those italians sneeking around with a ferrari, send them to me... i am planning to set up an italian car orphanage, if you will)
amen, i started my linux experience by ordering a 5.04 ubuntu CD (i HATE the damn codenames with a passion, i refuse to use them, especially when the version numbers are tied to their release date, making it frikkin obvious!!). I had some trouble with that (try installing an ati driver in 2005, when that is your first ever encounter with linux). But by 6.06, i used it full-on on my laptop
come to think of it, it all has gone down hill a bit since then, the 7 releases were ok, 8.x started introducing issues, and 9.x just fricking sucks sometimes. I'd say ubuntu should have continued along the line of the 6.x and 7x releases..
i wouldnt consider myself a true linux power user, but ubuntu has been annoying me the past few years, to the point where i am increasingly considering jumping ship to fedora or suse (perhaps debian deserves my attention too). Ubuntu promisses ease of use/installation, yet every machine i install it on has some weird problem which requires hours of me fiddling around, or they just plain and simple fuck up the entire sound-stack to the point where it takes considerable effort to get normal stereo sound out of my computer (takes me back to messing with config.sys under dos to get my soundblaster 16 to work)
My file server will stay ubuntu for the time being, since all that thing requires is samba, and i hardly ever interface with the machine directly, but my desktop/laptop will probably be converted once i find a good distro to switch to
hmm, i see, i suppose it would be possible to build a machine in 2005 with no sata, if you went for the cheapest available parts. Stupid practice though.. even when building to a tight budget, i will trade 100 mhz cpu speed for getting at least a half decent mobo. speed doesnt mean anything if the caps blow up in a year..
Slashdot Mirror
Any of you who have run Gentoo on yours and seen how fast it can handle non-graphics-related tasks like compiling know it's not a "slow" unit.
finally, an excuse to run Gentoo!
just to paraphrase:
First they came for my backwards compatibility, and i didnt speak up, because i dont have ps2 games
Then they came for my other OS option, and i didnt speak up because i dont run linux...
what will Sony come for next?
and perhaps Sony unhappy enough to think twice next time..
just because you personally wont gain more then a "$10 off when buying God of War 3" coupon, doesnt mean Sony doesnt deserve some repercussions for this
my guess is that next year they will launch some kind of 3d vision goggles
*cue obscure simpsons reference*
Only an anonymous coward with no real vetting in the industry could make such a claim, considering the PS3 has roughly double the raw horsepower and superior graphics and pretty much superior everything else
only an anonymous coward with zero understanding of computer architecture would make such a claim. the Cell cpu might be teriffic for transcoding media, but it is absolute shit for general purpose computation. The GPU in there is nothing but an nvidia 7900GS, while the memory architecture is set up in such a way that it severely limits flexibility of allocation.
and im not sure why you say we are about to pay for external storage? dashboard upgrades have been free like... forever (this isnt apple we are talking about here..)
as for nickle/diming, sure, but i dont have to download DLC (in fact i just flat out ignore most DLC).
As for the backwards compatbility, how the hell do you actually claim this is a plus for sony? They started out with "yeah, all ps2 games work IN HARDWARE", to "we are removing the hardware, but dont worry, you can still play 90% in software" to "yeah, we are gonna go and kill the software emulator, you guys dont mind do you? yeah thanks.." How the fuck is seriously degrading your device over its lifetime better then just setting up something that works for a lot of games, and STICKING WITH IT? those emulated xbox games play perfectly, so i dont see what your problem is with emulation..
yeah i know, i just fed a troll, just couldnt resist..
Perhaps people will stop whining about their missing disk space
the fix for that is disk-makers defining KB as 1024 bytes, and not ripping us all off. Not to mention the fact that they suggest using the same definitions by giving us 160/320/640 "GB" drives. Meanwhile, 1 GB of RAM still means 1024 MB.
Computer memory evolved using base 2 conventions, the only reason disk makers diverted from that is making a few bucks.
Also, why dont we just start defining "byte" as 10 bits? because converting from bytes to bits is *so hard*
anyway, mark shuttleworth is ruining ubuntu for me, fuck him, ill go somewhere else
if any of those "China could bankrupt the US with all their dollars" stories has any truth to it, i dont think google would be any match for all the hacking power china can afford.
Doesnt mean that china deliberately struck google, but i seriously doubt they went all out
FUK UUU DOH-PHIN!!!
God i loved that episode
God i love the german language, i especially like your military ranks "oberstormbahnfuhrer" "feldwebel" and such, not to mention that angry industrial music (rammstein) sounds much better in german.
making fun of Dutchmen for eating sauerkraut and invading Poland.
Bah, in socialist Holland, Poland invades you!
seriously, we have tons of eastern europeans here misbehaving and such "They TUK UR JUUUUBSS"
(to slightly expand on the misbehaving, they dont know how to propperly drive, and they know that automated speeding tickets wont get through the entire international proces anyway, the polish police just throws them out. Also driving drunk apperently isnt a problem in poland.. I have nothing against polish people in general, but the ones coming here, ducking taxes and driving like morons with their poorly maintained 15 year old lowered BMWs are a bit of a pain sometime)
here in holland, most younger folk speak anywhere from barely acceptable to excellent english, my parents' generation is already worse, where only the higher educated people have sufficient command of the language to have a propper conversation, my grand parents? They know some english, but if you dropped them in England, they would have quite some trouble.. Then take into account that in Germany, practically every english show/movie is dubbed with german voices, and you can see that speaking German isnt all that obsolete.
Now off course, when all you do on vacation is sit in front of the tent and drink beer, english and 'zwei bier bitte' will suffice
Also, Some german comes in handy when listening to for instance Rammstein, Oomph, KMFDM, not to mention playing Wolfenstein (otherwise all those cries from opposing forces are lost on you..)
As for mandarin and spanish, good for you, i just dont see why you need to diss people for learning other stuff..
just after posting that comment i made the most minimal slax disk i could with a gui environment and a web browser, and launched it in virtualbox.
It is pretty basic, the XFCE desktop would be unusable to a joe-sixpack, but with some configuration that can easily be tackled.
I'm quite impressed with where slax is going, being able to hand-pick your modules on the website, and downloading a custom iso right away, not to mention squeezing a graphical OS with web browser into 108 mb.
if you want a usefull recovery disk, check out the UBCD, no gui, but tons of low-level tools for screwing around with partition tabels and such, saved my ass more then once
A shame too because I loved AC and the C&C series.
dont worry, they screwed up the gameplay too, no more basebuilding, apperently a single building produces all units, and you are supplied with all needed building at the start.. so you arent missing much.
As i commented in an other thread (i think about the ubisoft shitstorm days after release), EA lost me, and my girlfriend as a customer, even before i read about how they butchered the entire C&C core gameplay, with this ridiculous DRM. Part of the fun of CnC for me always has been toying around with different tanks, taking over an entire map and then steamrolling the computer adversary, and i will not be restricted in doing that only where i have internet (case in point, hotelrooms when travelling, on holiday)
the data plan is required if you want that netbook for $49, its price is heavily subsidized by verizon
if you want the netbook without the data plan, it costs $300 or so, hence the gp was pointing out that the $49 price-tag isnt actually $49
i agree with the AC a bit higher, a simple arm netbook with 800*480 would suffice, i also managed to get a slax bootable iso(slax core + X.org + xfce + firefox) with webbrowser in 109 mb, so 128mb flashdrive should be sufficient. put in 256mb of ram, and you are done.
i'd say slax would be a nice idea. it fits within 200mb, if the user has more then 256mb memory it can load itself entirely into ram, making itself extremely responsive.
slax now also offers a custom build option right there on the website, my own trial (slax core + X.org + KDE + firefox) comes out at 129 mb. If you replace KDe with xfce it comes to 108 mb. Booting off a usb stick and loading 108 mb into ram should be lightning quick, and offers a pretty much all you need for e-banking
supplying bootable SD cards with no switch (locked in read-only mode) should solve that. I wouldnt be surprised if there are already manufacturers which make read-only sd cards..
hell, you could even make ROM-based SD cards if you dont trust the switch mechanism
hibernate your normal OS, it will restart to your previous state
seriously though, while this is a generally good idea, once you put all that stuff on a cd, you lose any and all ability to patch the software. Meaning that if the bank puts out a CD with firefox version X, and two months later a serious vulnerability is found, all those users will be forcedly be using an unsafe version, without means to patch (unless at every update the bank mails a fresh CD, at which point users will be confused as to which cd to use). Sure the browser goes right to the bank website, so getting the browser infected would be a small challenge.. but still.
I would think it still is orders of magnitude better then using their normal windows/IE installs, but this way somewhere in 2020 people will be still using FF 3.5 and *buntu 9.10 for their banking..
what nerd doesnt want a service monkey? hell, it sounds like a pretty cool idea to me..
seriously though, i didnt know people had actual service monkeys, what do those monkeys do? What physical handicap do they make up for? Over here i've heard off (and seen) helper dogs, but never monkeys..
but yeah, this doesnt really belong on /.
finally a valid excuse for blasting whoopy goldberg of the planet!
off topic, i wonder how the disc-tray stuff on the xbox would work in zero-G, makes game swapping an interesting experience i'd say
the common chinese person might perceive western media as propaganda, and given how much we criticize most of the stuff they do, who can blame them? In all fairness, whenever i watch CNN, i as a european already activate my americanism-filter, and discard a lot of stuff as 'silly americans'. Thats not to say i dont want access to CNN, but i take everything with a grain of salt, simply because i realise the difference in culture and agenda.
For millenia china was its own massive kingdom, the only worry was to keep the barbarians out, and they lived like that for ages. Then in the last few centuries the rest of the world caught up and shot past china in terms of civilisation, and suddenly they have to play with others..
I wonder how the americans would react if a russian/chinese news channel would try to 'liberate' them from fox news/cnn
(by the way, if you ever see some of those italians sneeking around with a ferrari, send them to me... i am planning to set up an italian car orphanage, if you will)
amen, i started my linux experience by ordering a 5.04 ubuntu CD (i HATE the damn codenames with a passion, i refuse to use them, especially when the version numbers are tied to their release date, making it frikkin obvious!!). I had some trouble with that (try installing an ati driver in 2005, when that is your first ever encounter with linux). But by 6.06, i used it full-on on my laptop
come to think of it, it all has gone down hill a bit since then, the 7 releases were ok, 8.x started introducing issues, and 9.x just fricking sucks sometimes. I'd say ubuntu should have continued along the line of the 6.x and 7x releases..
devils advocate here, just set up sshd on the box before you give it to grandma and ssh in to fix these kind of things..
honestly though, if there isnt a quick checkbox type fix to this, it is gonna hurt ubuntu
unfortunatly they havent yet reverse-engineerd the elusive RDF generator..
a mass exodus of power users to another distro
i wouldnt consider myself a true linux power user, but ubuntu has been annoying me the past few years, to the point where i am increasingly considering jumping ship to fedora or suse (perhaps debian deserves my attention too). Ubuntu promisses ease of use/installation, yet every machine i install it on has some weird problem which requires hours of me fiddling around, or they just plain and simple fuck up the entire sound-stack to the point where it takes considerable effort to get normal stereo sound out of my computer (takes me back to messing with config.sys under dos to get my soundblaster 16 to work)
My file server will stay ubuntu for the time being, since all that thing requires is samba, and i hardly ever interface with the machine directly, but my desktop/laptop will probably be converted once i find a good distro to switch to
hmm, i see, i suppose it would be possible to build a machine in 2005 with no sata, if you went for the cheapest available parts. Stupid practice though.. even when building to a tight budget, i will trade 100 mhz cpu speed for getting at least a half decent mobo. speed doesnt mean anything if the caps blow up in a year..