After reading the site a bit and reading about how he mapped a lot of Direct3D calls to the Xbox operating system to Direct3D calls for the Windows operating system, I'm wondering if it's possible to get FSAA and/or Anisotropic filtering going on. Not to inflame anyone, but Xbox graphics downright suck. A little AA would do it some good.
For those of you who don't know, most strip clubs use what's called "funny money". Let's say you come in with $100. You exchange that $100 at the door for what is essentially play money. You spend that play money inside the club. That way, there's one controlled spot at which cash flows. This is to reduce theft.
As a guy who, from time to time, has accidentally found himself in a house of sin while on his way to volunteer at the senior center or to attend Bible study, I can say that I have never heard of nor seen this "funny money."
In fact, the only thing funny is how it makes me feel to be in there. And the fact that it's only three hundred bucks for two strippers in a closed, private shower with you. Wahoo!
For one, try reading the news item again, as the submitter clearly quotes the article with mention of it. The article really does have it in there too.
I mean, geez, not reading the article is typical of a slashbot but not even reading the submitted blurb and then commenting on the story?
Also, try these on for size:
The Register pointing out that Steve Jobs said so himself during an Apple financial analyst conference.
A Reuters article states rather matter-of-factly that Apple's store doesn't make money.
Apple has sold about 30 million songs through the iTunes music store. All told, if they had licensed their FairPlay technology and let someone else open a store and sell those 30 million songs, they would have raked in a cool $300,000 dollars at a penny per song.
Apple is already losing money through the store, and while outsourcing it would have staved off costs, they'd still be very much in the red. Imagine if they now started operating their money-losing store in competition with another money-losing store. Gee, lots of winners there, aren't there?
What it comes down to is they need every penny they can from their own store, and competing with someone else for a crowd they now have a monopoly on won't work -- even if it does sell more iPods, it's going to chip away at their image of being a simple, single source. One application, one portable player, one store, one sign-on, etc. etc.
Consoles don't drive innovation, PCs do. You don't see ATI working hard month after month after month to stay ahead of Nvidia in the console market, do you? They work in the PC market to make better video cards for PCs. Those video cards in turn spur the development industry to make games that take advantage of those faster and faster cards.
Compare, for example, the rate of development for PC hardware versus the hardware development between the Famicom and Super Famicom. We're talking twenty years without a major change. The Xbox has a 733 MHz Celeron for crying out loud -- do you think that during the creation of the Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 the developers were thinking "This is going to lookg great on the Xbox!"? No, they probably weren't.
PC gaming pushes the technology. Console gaming is a slow, controlled process that lets the manufacturers rake in the money with low priced games and lets developers rake in the money with lower requirements for development. Consoles are old technology that produces poor quality. People don't see what the Xbox can do and say "Damn, I wish my PC could do that!" They look at their PC games running at 1600x1200 with FSAA at 75 fps and say "Damn, why the hell would I play this on a console at the rough equivalent of 640x480 with lower quality textures and three year old technology?
What truth did I subvert? I stated the facts as they were represented in the article, then I clearly established my opinion by preceding it with the powerful word believe.
So I challenge you to answer your own question: which indeed?
The quote in the blurb is taken totally out of context. It's presented as a way to convince the reader that Microsoft intends to do the following:
1.) Create a search engine that will be popular enough to rival Google.
2.) Create a method of forcing users to view unending advertisements each time they search, click, blink, etc.
3.) Profit unendingly.
What Ballmer was referring to was the amount of money Microsoft spends on advertising. He was using hyperbole to explain that many companies only spend 1% of their budget on advertising, and they should bring that up to 4-5%. He then said that when he gives money to his advertising people, he wants them to spend a metric shitload of it on online advertising, thus when people browse the web, even if they're not visiting Microsoft sites, they see Microsoft advertising.
He's not talking about abusing their own search engine to display ads but rather about spending their own money on advertising in the hopes it will net them more money.
That's not to say that I don't believe Microsoft deliberately manipulates their current search results and will continue to do so in the future in whatever incarnation their search engine may take, and it's not to say that I don't think Microsoft is a horrible company that breaks the law as much and as far as they can and that they need to be broken up in order to stop them from abusing the market any further, and finally it's not to say that they're not contributing to the downfall of capitalism and democracy and society as it is known for much of the Western world, but Jesus, if you're going to play ball, play fair. Only companies like Microsoft play unfair, and that's fucking wrong, and you can't say out one side of your mouth "Microsoft isn't playing fair!" and say out the other "Steve Ballmer rapes horses, with the dead bodies of children!"
Don't try to subvert truth like some neocon on a power trip.
If you want to reduce power consumption, you start with the big things--refrigerators, driers, air conditioners, stoves. You don't start with a 10 W hard drive.
If you had bothered to read what I said, you would have noticed that I specifically pointed out that people aren't willing to do "big" things, like give up their refrigerators, washing machines and air conditioners.
It's like I said, it's easier to get a dollar from a hundred people than a hundred dollars from one person. It's easier to get ten watts out of a hundred people than a thousand watts out of one person.
You're starting to sound a bit like a trained monkey: "less than ten watts," "8 cents per kWh," "7 dollars per year." Utility companies aren't in it to do the public good, they are in it to make money. They don't care about any wasteful effects of electricity being used, they only care about making sure they're putting out the maximum load they can to make as much money as they can. While it seems like a tiny bit of money to you and to me, it can be a metric shitload of money to them when you get millions of people doing it.
Don't people get it yet? It's about cumulative effects. It's harder to get someone to give you a hundred dollars than it is to get a hundred people to give you a dollar. Even the homeless can figure that out. Whether it's snowballing costs from electricity or snowballing energy waste by a hundred-thousand people blowing through 8.76 million kWh in a year, it's a cumulative effect that's 1) taking more money from the poor to give to the rich and 2) taking more energy than can be sustainably supplied.
People complain about the planet and the system and all sorts of other things a lot but never do anything about it. The most common complaint is "it's too hard to do anything about it" followed by "what can one person do?" Give me a fucking break: it's the LITTLE things that matter, like not stuffing a 2 GB hard drive in your system (which has the worst energy to size ratio you can get for modern drives) that you don't need.
Seriously, find passion. If this is something you're passionate about, you'll make it work. You'll bring it into existence yourself. A lot of sites, like Slashdot to E2 to Fark to Neowin to Penny Arcade, all came into being because the creators were very passionate and put forth the effort themselves. It was important enough for them to be able to do it themselves and get through the initial lean years themselves.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a lot easier to walk away from something that you've had five people working on for two months rather than something you've worked on by yourself for ten months.
...the electricity that you'll spend over the years on having this extra hard drive that does essentially nothing, yet remains spinning at all times because it's always being accessed, then yeah, go for it.
Otherwise, forget about it and realize that the cumulative extra two seconds you spend each day because your primary drives are so bogged down by accessing your swap partition are worth not only the money you save by not wasting electricity but also worth making the world that much nicer by not creating an energy drain.
It's just too bad there was nothing said of bluetooth; anyone that's tried to get bluetooth working on Windows now know what it's like trying to get a new driver working in Linux.
Microsoft has such terrible, backwards bluetooth support that it's ghastly. SP2 is supposed to bring "improvements" for bluetooth, but somehow I doubt we're going to see anything along the lines of iSync in the near future.
This is one area where Microsoft is definitely kicked in the pants. Repeatedly, daily.
That's a good point, but I tend to lean more to the "why are we slaves to the alarm clock" way of thinking, which is why I interpreted it the way I did.
why don't you just try sleeping like a normal person?
He *is* sleeping like a normal person. He goes to sleep when he's sleepy, and wakes up when he's refreshed, the latter of which is sadly interrupted by an alarm clock.
I should also point out that everyone, save for a few persons, have an internal clock outside the standard 24 hour day that approaches 25 hours. If you were to sleep/wake/sleep/wake for about a week, without interruptions, you'd slowly move about until you hit around a 25 hour day.
What card did you purchase? I have a D-Link DWL-520+ PCI 802.11b card in a Dell V400 -- that'd be an Intel 440 BX motherboard designed for use with slot 1 PII/PIII processors -- and it has always worked fine, and worked fine right out of the box.
The computer was purchased in 1999, the card about six months ago. Can I ask what your setup is?
In case you didn't notice, I try to read every reply from everyone, even -1 comments. Especially in this case, I think it's a good idea to read every comment made; why bother asking a question if you don't want to see answers?
I got a lot of the jokes. Maybe I missed some, but most just plain weren't funny, they were flames. Where you may have read jest, I read seriousness in some statements about ditching the girlfriend for a mouse.
Please don't misunderstand and believe that I'm unhappy with the replies made. I'd say that I'm mostly disappointed that 1) there is no such mouse, and 2) so many people were quick to say ditch the bitch in favor of some lonely geek lifestyle. It doesn't show much forethought or effort, but again, that's probably expecting way too much from Slashdot.
For me, making my own isn't the right answer. I work a lot of over time, and as you can tell I have to work into the night sometimes. My weekends aren't full of free time to DIY with a mouse. And I don't feel like I have the time, and certainly don't feel inclined at this point, to try to learn a new keyboard when I'd have to use a standard keyboard at work and an expensive one at home. Trying to learn the ThinkGeek keyboard would take twice as long or cost twice as much, and neither solution is very eloquent.
It's not a matter of reading too much Slashdot, again: I do a lot of work. But it seems that you, like a few others, didn't take the time to really read, and spent more time trying to read between the lines (vis a vis: "its not realy the mouse she's complaing about.."). Try reading again.
Slashdot Mirror
... and Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge
I'll wait for Bonestorm. Buy me Bonestorm or go to Hell!
After reading the site a bit and reading about how he mapped a lot of Direct3D calls to the Xbox operating system to Direct3D calls for the Windows operating system, I'm wondering if it's possible to get FSAA and/or Anisotropic filtering going on. Not to inflame anyone, but Xbox graphics downright suck. A little AA would do it some good.
In fact, the only thing funny is how it makes me feel to be in there. And the fact that it's only three hundred bucks for two strippers in a closed, private shower with you. Wahoo!
Steve Jobs admitted that Apple makes no revenue from the online download service, the iTunes Music Store.
"We would like to break even/make a little bit of money but it's not a money maker," he said, candidly.
"The iPod makes money. The iTunes Music Store doesn't," Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller told CNET News.com.
Schiller said the music store is close to profitability but is still losing money.
Analysts have said the costs could well exceed the 99 cents per song that Apple typically gets.
I'm not going to bother with replying further. Keep your head in the goddamned sand if you want.
For one, try reading the news item again, as the submitter clearly quotes the article with mention of it. The article really does have it in there too.
I mean, geez, not reading the article is typical of a slashbot but not even reading the submitted blurb and then commenting on the story?
Also, try these on for size:
The Register pointing out that Steve Jobs said so himself during an Apple financial analyst conference.
A Reuters article states rather matter-of-factly that Apple's store doesn't make money.
Apple's Senior Vice President said the store does not make a profit in this news.com.com.com.com article.
This Washington Post article spells it out pretty clearly.
Do I need to go on, or can you prove that the store does make money for Apple?
Last I heard, the music store was losing money and the only reason Apple ever made it was a vehicle to sell iPods, which it seems to do very well.
Apple has sold about 30 million songs through the iTunes music store. All told, if they had licensed their FairPlay technology and let someone else open a store and sell those 30 million songs, they would have raked in a cool $300,000 dollars at a penny per song.
Apple is already losing money through the store, and while outsourcing it would have staved off costs, they'd still be very much in the red. Imagine if they now started operating their money-losing store in competition with another money-losing store. Gee, lots of winners there, aren't there?
What it comes down to is they need every penny they can from their own store, and competing with someone else for a crowd they now have a monopoly on won't work -- even if it does sell more iPods, it's going to chip away at their image of being a simple, single source. One application, one portable player, one store, one sign-on, etc. etc.
Consoles don't drive innovation, PCs do. You don't see ATI working hard month after month after month to stay ahead of Nvidia in the console market, do you? They work in the PC market to make better video cards for PCs. Those video cards in turn spur the development industry to make games that take advantage of those faster and faster cards.
Compare, for example, the rate of development for PC hardware versus the hardware development between the Famicom and Super Famicom. We're talking twenty years without a major change. The Xbox has a 733 MHz Celeron for crying out loud -- do you think that during the creation of the Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 the developers were thinking "This is going to lookg great on the Xbox!"? No, they probably weren't.
PC gaming pushes the technology. Console gaming is a slow, controlled process that lets the manufacturers rake in the money with low priced games and lets developers rake in the money with lower requirements for development. Consoles are old technology that produces poor quality. People don't see what the Xbox can do and say "Damn, I wish my PC could do that!" They look at their PC games running at 1600x1200 with FSAA at 75 fps and say "Damn, why the hell would I play this on a console at the rough equivalent of 640x480 with lower quality textures and three year old technology?
What truth did I subvert? I stated the facts as they were represented in the article, then I clearly established my opinion by preceding it with the powerful word believe.
So I challenge you to answer your own question: which indeed?
The quote in the blurb is taken totally out of context. It's presented as a way to convince the reader that Microsoft intends to do the following:
1.) Create a search engine that will be popular enough to rival Google.
2.) Create a method of forcing users to view unending advertisements each time they search, click, blink, etc.
3.) Profit unendingly.
What Ballmer was referring to was the amount of money Microsoft spends on advertising. He was using hyperbole to explain that many companies only spend 1% of their budget on advertising, and they should bring that up to 4-5%. He then said that when he gives money to his advertising people, he wants them to spend a metric shitload of it on online advertising, thus when people browse the web, even if they're not visiting Microsoft sites, they see Microsoft advertising.
He's not talking about abusing their own search engine to display ads but rather about spending their own money on advertising in the hopes it will net them more money.
That's not to say that I don't believe Microsoft deliberately manipulates their current search results and will continue to do so in the future in whatever incarnation their search engine may take, and it's not to say that I don't think Microsoft is a horrible company that breaks the law as much and as far as they can and that they need to be broken up in order to stop them from abusing the market any further, and finally it's not to say that they're not contributing to the downfall of capitalism and democracy and society as it is known for much of the Western world, but Jesus, if you're going to play ball, play fair. Only companies like Microsoft play unfair, and that's fucking wrong , and you can't say out one side of your mouth "Microsoft isn't playing fair!" and say out the other "Steve Ballmer rapes horses, with the dead bodies of children!"
Don't try to subvert truth like some neocon on a power trip.
If you want to reduce power consumption, you start with the big things--refrigerators, driers, air conditioners, stoves. You don't start with a 10 W hard drive.
If you had bothered to read what I said, you would have noticed that I specifically pointed out that people aren't willing to do "big" things, like give up their refrigerators, washing machines and air conditioners.
It's like I said, it's easier to get a dollar from a hundred people than a hundred dollars from one person. It's easier to get ten watts out of a hundred people than a thousand watts out of one person.
You're starting to sound a bit like a trained monkey: "less than ten watts," "8 cents per kWh," "7 dollars per year." Utility companies aren't in it to do the public good, they are in it to make money. They don't care about any wasteful effects of electricity being used, they only care about making sure they're putting out the maximum load they can to make as much money as they can. While it seems like a tiny bit of money to you and to me, it can be a metric shitload of money to them when you get millions of people doing it.
Don't people get it yet? It's about cumulative effects. It's harder to get someone to give you a hundred dollars than it is to get a hundred people to give you a dollar. Even the homeless can figure that out. Whether it's snowballing costs from electricity or snowballing energy waste by a hundred-thousand people blowing through 8.76 million kWh in a year, it's a cumulative effect that's 1) taking more money from the poor to give to the rich and 2) taking more energy than can be sustainably supplied.
People complain about the planet and the system and all sorts of other things a lot but never do anything about it. The most common complaint is "it's too hard to do anything about it" followed by "what can one person do?" Give me a fucking break: it's the LITTLE things that matter, like not stuffing a 2 GB hard drive in your system (which has the worst energy to size ratio you can get for modern drives) that you don't need.
Seriously, find passion. If this is something you're passionate about, you'll make it work. You'll bring it into existence yourself. A lot of sites, like Slashdot to E2 to Fark to Neowin to Penny Arcade, all came into being because the creators were very passionate and put forth the effort themselves. It was important enough for them to be able to do it themselves and get through the initial lean years themselves.
What I'm trying to say is that it's a lot easier to walk away from something that you've had five people working on for two months rather than something you've worked on by yourself for ten months.
...the electricity that you'll spend over the years on having this extra hard drive that does essentially nothing, yet remains spinning at all times because it's always being accessed, then yeah, go for it.
Otherwise, forget about it and realize that the cumulative extra two seconds you spend each day because your primary drives are so bogged down by accessing your swap partition are worth not only the money you save by not wasting electricity but also worth making the world that much nicer by not creating an energy drain.
But real men upload their files up on ftp and let the rest of the world mirror them for them.
An eloquent review of RealPlayer is available on E2.
I always got a kick out of that.
If I am able to understand your double-speak, then I think that CTRL-W is your friend.
It's just too bad there was nothing said of bluetooth; anyone that's tried to get bluetooth working on Windows now know what it's like trying to get a new driver working in Linux.
Microsoft has such terrible, backwards bluetooth support that it's ghastly. SP2 is supposed to bring "improvements" for bluetooth, but somehow I doubt we're going to see anything along the lines of iSync in the near future.
This is one area where Microsoft is definitely kicked in the pants. Repeatedly, daily.
That's a good point, but I tend to lean more to the "why are we slaves to the alarm clock" way of thinking, which is why I interpreted it the way I did.
why don't you just try sleeping like a normal person?
He *is* sleeping like a normal person. He goes to sleep when he's sleepy, and wakes up when he's refreshed, the latter of which is sadly interrupted by an alarm clock.
I should also point out that everyone, save for a few persons, have an internal clock outside the standard 24 hour day that approaches 25 hours. If you were to sleep/wake/sleep/wake for about a week, without interruptions, you'd slowly move about until you hit around a 25 hour day.
This should last only a little while longer as Microsoft cracks down on FAT licensing.
Of course, in the spirit of good will and openness, right?
What card did you purchase? I have a D-Link DWL-520+ PCI 802.11b card in a Dell V400 -- that'd be an Intel 440 BX motherboard designed for use with slot 1 PII/PIII processors -- and it has always worked fine, and worked fine right out of the box.
The computer was purchased in 1999, the card about six months ago. Can I ask what your setup is?
That was The Next Generation, not TOS, and it was therefore Picard, not Kirk, that changed into a giant bug.
Sorry to disappoint.
In case you didn't notice, I try to read every reply from everyone, even -1 comments. Especially in this case, I think it's a good idea to read every comment made; why bother asking a question if you don't want to see answers?
I got a lot of the jokes. Maybe I missed some, but most just plain weren't funny, they were flames. Where you may have read jest, I read seriousness in some statements about ditching the girlfriend for a mouse.
Please don't misunderstand and believe that I'm unhappy with the replies made. I'd say that I'm mostly disappointed that 1) there is no such mouse, and 2) so many people were quick to say ditch the bitch in favor of some lonely geek lifestyle. It doesn't show much forethought or effort, but again, that's probably expecting way too much from Slashdot.
For me, making my own isn't the right answer. I work a lot of over time, and as you can tell I have to work into the night sometimes. My weekends aren't full of free time to DIY with a mouse. And I don't feel like I have the time, and certainly don't feel inclined at this point, to try to learn a new keyboard when I'd have to use a standard keyboard at work and an expensive one at home. Trying to learn the ThinkGeek keyboard would take twice as long or cost twice as much, and neither solution is very eloquent.
It's not a matter of reading too much Slashdot, again: I do a lot of work. But it seems that you, like a few others, didn't take the time to really read, and spent more time trying to read between the lines (vis a vis: "its not realy the mouse she's complaing about.."). Try reading again.
Gotta agree.
Thanks for the reply. I greatly appreciate it.