True, but all corporations are made up of people pulling the strings. Perhaps it's time we threatened the men behind the curtain, seems like a great way to make these greedy cretins get in line, no ?
My view is that if the wealthy are allowed to use incorporation as a bunker to safely attack the common people, then we need a bunker of our own to fight back. Corporate culture is nothing more than war on a financial level, the strategies are the same. Kill, or be killed.
A few years ago, bankruptcy might have been an option. Today, it's complicated. There are more lopsided rules favoring the creditors, thanks to the anti-social government that's been running the show for so long.
even when SP3 is out, the project will continue to offer a CD that will install all patches offline
When SP3 is out, any decent sysadmin will burn a copy to CD, stick it on a publicly-accessible share, and copy it to their USB key. Same as they did for SP1 and SP2.
This project is yet another waste of time and talent. MS killed Autopatcher, and for posterity's sake I hope they kill this one too. The average doofus should NOT be fooling around with 3rd-party patches.
Not so long ago, residential connections weren't filtered at all. You could run any app on any port, from that lowly Linux-driven 486 in your basement.
The filtering started when internet-borne viruses started crippling the networks, and people's Windows PCs got infested with spam repeaters. Back in the day, it was a security thing. This has led to all sorts of things being censored under guise of security.
The other thing to factor in, is that people today are as computer-illiterate as they were 10 years ago. Some people want BitTorrent and use decent client software, others install any damn software that pops up in their email and get rootkitted, then blame BitTorrent and complain loudly to the ISP's tech support drone.
With a corporate account comes a higher expectation of responsibility. You're supposed to have a tech guy, at the very least a reliable contractor, to handle your network security. You're probably going to run a mail server and try your best to lock it down properly (in theory). You'll run a VPN so your employees can telecommute, and you might use a lot of bandwidth for email and file transfers to/from your colocated servers.
Business internet access is _very_ different from residential service.
The United Nations doesn't need to do squat. Free internet on a country-by-country would be a great start. We don't need a global economy to make these basic things work.
Who pays for what ? Whoever's land it is, that's who pays. If the router is on US soil, send the bill to GeeDub. What about those transcontinental rings ? Go dutch!
If every good idea has to be shot down by "how much does it cost?" then the human race will never evolve.
Bankruptcy doesn't work anymore. The senate fragged that one up BIG TIME!
Leave the country ? How patriotic. What a great double lesson to teach a young adult: "1. your home country will hound you to the death. 2. when shit happens, RUN!"
Living off social services ? What, is this the UK ?
A pre-existing relationship is irrelevant men go to prison all of the time for raping their wifes.
I'm not defending the men (nor women), but maybe if you consider sex with your spouse "rape", you should get the fuck out of that marriage. I don't care if you think "it's complicated", get out. Go have sex with people you actually respect.
Why did they go with DNS filtering ? Of all the ineffective ways to censor stuff on the net, that has to be the weakest! Even nullrouting TPB's ip range would have been at least slightly more potent.
I run my own caching DNS server at home, so I wouldn't even notice a thing. At least a nullroute would require me to add a few hostnames to my proxy;)
Much like everything else in life, if someone wants it badly enough, they will find a way to defeat whatever security is in place, whether it's a bike lock or a bank vault. On the net, the locks are a million times easier to pick and the risks of getting caught are a million times less. It's just plain wasteful to even try to censor content unless you control the whole enchilada, like China, and even they can't keep it completely sealed.
That's precisely why things will be much more interesting over the next 15-20 years. What better way to enter a business relationship than to kick your client in the teeth.
What I'm curious about, is how does an RIAA lawsuit affect a student's ability to pursue their education ? Is the cartel destroying someone's future career over a few hundred overplayed pop songs ? What does that say about the future of the nation ? We all agree that piracy is a crime, but does the punishment fit ?
Corporate America's obsession with instant profits will inevitably have a deleterious effect on tomorrow's economy. It's bad enough that students get pelted with dozens of credit cards and start their life in the red, now we're trying to tack on another few thousand dollars in RIAA settlements. The people who actually wind up paying for this are you and me. We pay when professionals increase their hourly rates, when basic food staples jump in price, heck we're paying it right now with the time spent debating these vengeful issues. Inflation is not an ethereal process that happens on a spreadsheet. The more we screw each other over, the stronger the elastic bounce-back to recover what was ours.
Greed begets greed.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
on
X Power Tools
·
· Score: 1
Funny fact: my NX remote is noticeably faster than RDP, at least twice as fast despite the fact that my Linux box is halfway around the world.
Despite that, I strongly dislike X. I feel it takes the Unix philosophy too far outside its comfort zone. What is X anyway ? What does X do by itself that's not delegated to the window manager, the decorator, the QT libs etc... How is X any different from that generic GUI framework I built in a thousand lines of Pascal and assembler back in the 90's before Windows tried to be its own operating system ?
I find X very painful to program, thanks to a zillion libs that all love to fight over the same castrated resources. It's just not pleasant at all, and doesn't lend itself to elegant GUI design.
I think what gets me the most is how poorly various programs interoperate, there's no consistency at all. Pretty much all I can bring myself to do with X is launch a bunch of terminals and a web browser - it's all easier to do on a command line than through the various half-broken GUIs everyone loves to abandon on SourceForge.
Internet service providers are not in this for the warm fuzzy feelings of helping people.
That right there is the fundamental problem with the internet. It's too commercial.
Everyone benefits from ubiquitous net access. It should be a publicly administered service. This old-world mentality of massive telco corporations is the #1 reason why we're stuck in the past.
If you're on a commercial account, I would expressly order them to remove the throttle. It's one thing to crack down on teenagers sucking warez down like there's no tomorrow... it's a whole different ballgame when the ISP is directly impeding the flow of business.
That's funny, I have fond memories of literally hundreds of NES games. It's not that the games were crap, it's the whole gaming scene that was extremely young and new at the time. Today, you can usually spend 2 minutes with a title and immediately spot its flaws, whether it's sloppy controls, outdated visuals or horrible loading lag... these things stand out because we've had excellent games to define the standards.
For the Game Boy, well I was somewhat disappointed with the bulk of new releases, but that's directly tied to the "kidification" of Nintendo. Kids like crappy games with boring repetitive gameplay and unintelligible colored splotches that shoot laser beams from their ass, that's why there are 42 Pokémon sequels and Yugi-Oh crossovers. There were still lots of great games, you just had to sort through the kiddie junk to find them. N64, Gamecube - ditto! But with the Wii I'm definitely seeing a downward shift in the average quality. It had been a long time since I stopped and wondered "Did anyone even _PLAY_ this stupid thing ?" Painfully obvious flaws and "deal-breakers" abound. Pauses, pops, non-sequiturs, random "go hump a moose" quests, and unbalanced challenges that alienate all but a handful of desperate players (like the Chocobo balloon race in FFX). If you ask the question "Is this game fun?" and the answer is anything but an immediate "YES!", then it is a failure. "Maybe/sort-of/sometimes" still means it sucks.
You don't beg to differ. You shouldn't be running it on "hacked Very High settings" in the first place. That's like whining that your Corolla loses maneuverability when doing 160kph on the oval track... 8800GTS 320mb, you should stick to Medium with maybe 3-4 items on High, to taste. Even SLI'd 8800 Ultras struggle with Very High settings unless you run it in 1024x768.
Crysis is a game we'll all be able to revisit in a couple years and be wowed a second time. I'm looking forward to the next generation or two of GPUs, maybe they'll finally release something that can drive my big LCDs half-decently.
I'd like to appoint you as a test-case writer. That's exactly the kind of questions that should be asked, answered, and written down for the lesser minds to absorb.
Part of the problem with the law, is its underlying language. Laws are purposely kept in their cryptic archaic english forms, expressly to give more leeway to the lawyers that profit from the aberration of meaning. It's kind of like the various bibles... they all say more or less the same thing, but they've all been tainted through the "magic" of translation and skilled orators can ply the verses to their will. Jesus / no Jesus, whores / no whores, miracles / no miracles... Guilty / not guilty.
Eliminate the gray areas of the law, and we'll see the resale value of BMWs and Benz' plummet as the snarky word-warpers scamper. We'll also see a more faithful representation of societal ideals in courts and in the news.
Ugh... Thinkpads. Sure, they were sturdy, but they were perpetually nine months behind the curve for features and performance. It was like owning an Acer with plate armor; a well guarded piece of shit.
I have yet to see an IBM server with my own eyes, but the datacenters are full of commodity PC hardware. That's probably because there is a glut of commodity PC developers in my town (yay government). I barely trust these drones with a Celeron, there isn't enough Ibuprofen in the world for me to let them loose on big iron. That's just one big-ass infinite loop just dying to happen with these asshats. The only saving grace is the inevitable memory leak that ultimately crashes the process, not so much garbage collection but garbage regurgitation.
I've seen quite a few large SPARC installations. Those have a bit of traction because they're both cheap and effective for what little Unix filth gets thrown around in these parts.
We're there to make it more difficult for another 9/11.
Transport safety is not going to prevent another 9/11. If you don't want the rest of the world to blow your people up, then tell the Bushes to stop fucking with everyone.
Does China have a problem with the middle east ? Does Russia have a problem with the middle east ? No. Do they both have a problem with the USA ? Yes. Lowest common denominator.
Crippling your own civilians isn't going to make your borders any safer. All it does is piss off the locals and generate unrest. The next terrorist attack will probably come from within. Hate doesn't care which country it's born in.
That's what I like about the light-gun party games like Point Blank or Police Training... a bunch of mini-games that challenge you in different ways, not just a bunch of ugly green aliens dodging big fake-breasted "actresses".
Maybe I'm a purist, but if/when I want to see tits, the internet is there. Get them out of my games!
And in the age of the lemming, words of wisdom get modded down with prejudice.
I'm in this boat with you; a phone is a phone is a phone. Every single one of its features should be directly tied to communication. If I wanted a cheap chinese gadget that tries (and fails) to be a game boy, media player, webcam, AM radio, IUD and chia pet all at once, well... I'd have to hire someone to end my miserable brainwashed life.
My ideal phone features ? address book, call history, voice mail, SMS / pager, maybe a simple date planner and/or notepad. No camera, no music, no Java, not even a stupid web browser.
I might be less opposed to convergence if they could actually do it decently. The last thing I need is yet another overpriced fragile thingamajig that can't do anything right. I'd much rather buy separate devices that each excel at their single task.
To compound things, I really don't understand why the music "industry" is trying to shove tunes into people's cell phones. Perhaps I'm being far too logical for the common peon, but I would assert that the type of person who listens to music on an LG cell phone probably isn't the biggest music fan on the block. I'd be surprised if that individual were more inclined to buy music on other platforms, if they're content with the free low-bitrate junk they save to that stupid little memory card sticking out the back of their phone, piped over those horrible earbuds that come from wherever Taiwan outsources the work even their sweatshops consider too cheap.
I'm certainly not plugging a phone into my lovingly-tuned DRM-free car stereo, or my carefully selected home speakers. I wouldn't even disgrace my Sennheisers with such a perverted audio source. Once again, the music industry has failed the very people that once consumed its wares. There's already so little music worth hearing these days, if you're going to shove it into a pathetic cell phone, well you might as well just go deaf once and for all.
Party games were an obscure niche - now it's a dominant theme but they're all crap. It's hardly any different from the FPS craze of the early 90's, when every game was a Doom or Wolf3d knockoff (of inferior quality).
I love the few big party games, but that's enough. Rabbids 3 : yes. Super Flonky Flonk China Party IV : no.
The other big problem with the Wii is the huge number of absolute garbage games like Jenga... who wants to pay $30-40 for the Wii Game that sucks ass, when you can buy the physical game for $12 ? Another one that peeved me was the CSI game: it's your standard "Blade Runner"-style pixel hunt adventure, but it looks and plays like it came straight out of the 90's - eternal loading sequences, choppy graphics. The game itself is decent, when it's not stuck in sloppy-land. My 486 ran smoother!
It simply feels like Nintendo is giving licenses to every half-breed on the planet. They used to guard them carefully, and all the games had to get approved by Nintendo's QA staff before they could release. Now they're running it like the Playstation : 9 out of 10 games aren't worth the media they're pressed on.
I recently came across a PC that had a hacked Vista install... the curious thing is it used some sort of Linux bootloader before the Vista loader, which apparently does something to the A20 line. It flashed much too quickly for me to read anything else, but this loader presumably stays resident and convinces Vista that it's legit.
I would expect that one to be rather difficult to fight, seeing as it loads before the OS itself. Make the boot sector read-only (in the BIOS) and even MS can't tear it out.
Actually, I think the FPS display is a great measure of actual performance. The benchmarks will give you abstract numbers, but the FPS display is what you're actually getting out of the game.
It doesn't matter if you don't follow the same path each time, what counts is the actual feel... some games can get away with lower framerates in the flashy areas (e.g. Crysis), while others would be totally unacceptable.
I believe it's HardOCP that plots graphs of the minimum, maximum and average FPS. That's a step in the right direction, IMHO.
It's funny that you mention Crysis... people are freaking out over Crysis the same way they freaked out over Aero Glass a year ago. The reality is, Crysis runs fine on midrange gaming systems. It won't run in 1920x1200 with DX10 eyecandy on that crusty old Geforce 6200, but it certainly does not require a $2500 powerhouse to be enjoyable.
In the end, benchmarks can be useful as long as you don't accept their results as the gospel truth. Some benchmarks favor ATI, some favor NVidia, and I'm sure there's gotta be one benchmark that favors Intel Extreme Graphics:P... the important thing is to find parallels that relate to your own needs and wants so you can put those numbers into perspective.
The big problem with law is the human aspect: different people interpret things differently, and that's why lawyers get paid tons of money to be anal-retentive pricks. They pick one side, not necessarily caring whether it's "right" or "wrong", and defend that side to the death, making up arguments as they go along. It's all about convincing people, and that's why some blatantly absurd stuff gets away while harmless people get fined and jailed. It's just a big game of spin.
Take the spin out of the law, and people will freak out at first, but at least we'll be able to tell with certainly what flies and what doesn't. People will push to the edge of the law, and stop. Those who don't, we throw away.
Slashdot Mirror
They have no conscience
True, but all corporations are made up of people pulling the strings. Perhaps it's time we threatened the men behind the curtain, seems like a great way to make these greedy cretins get in line, no ?
My view is that if the wealthy are allowed to use incorporation as a bunker to safely attack the common people, then we need a bunker of our own to fight back. Corporate culture is nothing more than war on a financial level, the strategies are the same. Kill, or be killed.
A few years ago, bankruptcy might have been an option. Today, it's complicated. There are more lopsided rules favoring the creditors, thanks to the anti-social government that's been running the show for so long.
Funny, I feel my 2.4ghz => 4ghz Intel quad-core has more finger than my old 300A ever did.
Overclocker culture has come a loooooong way in ten years.
even when SP3 is out, the project will continue to offer a CD that will install all patches offline
When SP3 is out, any decent sysadmin will burn a copy to CD, stick it on a publicly-accessible share, and copy it to their USB key. Same as they did for SP1 and SP2.
This project is yet another waste of time and talent. MS killed Autopatcher, and for posterity's sake I hope they kill this one too. The average doofus should NOT be fooling around with 3rd-party patches.
Not so long ago, residential connections weren't filtered at all. You could run any app on any port, from that lowly Linux-driven 486 in your basement.
The filtering started when internet-borne viruses started crippling the networks, and people's Windows PCs got infested with spam repeaters. Back in the day, it was a security thing. This has led to all sorts of things being censored under guise of security.
The other thing to factor in, is that people today are as computer-illiterate as they were 10 years ago. Some people want BitTorrent and use decent client software, others install any damn software that pops up in their email and get rootkitted, then blame BitTorrent and complain loudly to the ISP's tech support drone.
With a corporate account comes a higher expectation of responsibility. You're supposed to have a tech guy, at the very least a reliable contractor, to handle your network security. You're probably going to run a mail server and try your best to lock it down properly (in theory). You'll run a VPN so your employees can telecommute, and you might use a lot of bandwidth for email and file transfers to/from your colocated servers.
Business internet access is _very_ different from residential service.
The United Nations doesn't need to do squat. Free internet on a country-by-country would be a great start. We don't need a global economy to make these basic things work.
Who pays for what ? Whoever's land it is, that's who pays. If the router is on US soil, send the bill to GeeDub. What about those transcontinental rings ? Go dutch!
If every good idea has to be shot down by "how much does it cost?" then the human race will never evolve.
Bankruptcy doesn't work anymore. The senate fragged that one up BIG TIME!
Leave the country ? How patriotic. What a great double lesson to teach a young adult: "1. your home country will hound you to the death. 2. when shit happens, RUN!"
Living off social services ? What, is this the UK ?
A pre-existing relationship is irrelevant men go to prison all of the time for raping their wifes.
I'm not defending the men (nor women), but maybe if you consider sex with your spouse "rape", you should get the fuck out of that marriage. I don't care if you think "it's complicated", get out. Go have sex with people you actually respect.
Why did they go with DNS filtering ? Of all the ineffective ways to censor stuff on the net, that has to be the weakest! Even nullrouting TPB's ip range would have been at least slightly more potent.
;)
I run my own caching DNS server at home, so I wouldn't even notice a thing. At least a nullroute would require me to add a few hostnames to my proxy
Much like everything else in life, if someone wants it badly enough, they will find a way to defeat whatever security is in place, whether it's a bike lock or a bank vault. On the net, the locks are a million times easier to pick and the risks of getting caught are a million times less. It's just plain wasteful to even try to censor content unless you control the whole enchilada, like China, and even they can't keep it completely sealed.
That's precisely why things will be much more interesting over the next 15-20 years. What better way to enter a business relationship than to kick your client in the teeth.
What I'm curious about, is how does an RIAA lawsuit affect a student's ability to pursue their education ? Is the cartel destroying someone's future career over a few hundred overplayed pop songs ? What does that say about the future of the nation ? We all agree that piracy is a crime, but does the punishment fit ?
Corporate America's obsession with instant profits will inevitably have a deleterious effect on tomorrow's economy. It's bad enough that students get pelted with dozens of credit cards and start their life in the red, now we're trying to tack on another few thousand dollars in RIAA settlements. The people who actually wind up paying for this are you and me. We pay when professionals increase their hourly rates, when basic food staples jump in price, heck we're paying it right now with the time spent debating these vengeful issues. Inflation is not an ethereal process that happens on a spreadsheet. The more we screw each other over, the stronger the elastic bounce-back to recover what was ours.
Greed begets greed.
Funny fact: my NX remote is noticeably faster than RDP, at least twice as fast despite the fact that my Linux box is halfway around the world.
Despite that, I strongly dislike X. I feel it takes the Unix philosophy too far outside its comfort zone. What is X anyway ? What does X do by itself that's not delegated to the window manager, the decorator, the QT libs etc... How is X any different from that generic GUI framework I built in a thousand lines of Pascal and assembler back in the 90's before Windows tried to be its own operating system ?
I find X very painful to program, thanks to a zillion libs that all love to fight over the same castrated resources. It's just not pleasant at all, and doesn't lend itself to elegant GUI design.
I think what gets me the most is how poorly various programs interoperate, there's no consistency at all. Pretty much all I can bring myself to do with X is launch a bunch of terminals and a web browser - it's all easier to do on a command line than through the various half-broken GUIs everyone loves to abandon on SourceForge.
Internet service providers are not in this for the warm fuzzy feelings of helping people.
That right there is the fundamental problem with the internet. It's too commercial.
Everyone benefits from ubiquitous net access. It should be a publicly administered service. This old-world mentality of massive telco corporations is the #1 reason why we're stuck in the past.
If you're on a commercial account, I would expressly order them to remove the throttle. It's one thing to crack down on teenagers sucking warez down like there's no tomorrow... it's a whole different ballgame when the ISP is directly impeding the flow of business.
That's funny, I have fond memories of literally hundreds of NES games. It's not that the games were crap, it's the whole gaming scene that was extremely young and new at the time. Today, you can usually spend 2 minutes with a title and immediately spot its flaws, whether it's sloppy controls, outdated visuals or horrible loading lag... these things stand out because we've had excellent games to define the standards.
For the Game Boy, well I was somewhat disappointed with the bulk of new releases, but that's directly tied to the "kidification" of Nintendo. Kids like crappy games with boring repetitive gameplay and unintelligible colored splotches that shoot laser beams from their ass, that's why there are 42 Pokémon sequels and Yugi-Oh crossovers. There were still lots of great games, you just had to sort through the kiddie junk to find them. N64, Gamecube - ditto! But with the Wii I'm definitely seeing a downward shift in the average quality. It had been a long time since I stopped and wondered "Did anyone even _PLAY_ this stupid thing ?" Painfully obvious flaws and "deal-breakers" abound. Pauses, pops, non-sequiturs, random "go hump a moose" quests, and unbalanced challenges that alienate all but a handful of desperate players (like the Chocobo balloon race in FFX). If you ask the question "Is this game fun?" and the answer is anything but an immediate "YES!", then it is a failure. "Maybe/sort-of/sometimes" still means it sucks.
You don't beg to differ. You shouldn't be running it on "hacked Very High settings" in the first place. That's like whining that your Corolla loses maneuverability when doing 160kph on the oval track... 8800GTS 320mb, you should stick to Medium with maybe 3-4 items on High, to taste. Even SLI'd 8800 Ultras struggle with Very High settings unless you run it in 1024x768.
Crysis is a game we'll all be able to revisit in a couple years and be wowed a second time. I'm looking forward to the next generation or two of GPUs, maybe they'll finally release something that can drive my big LCDs half-decently.
I'd like to appoint you as a test-case writer. That's exactly the kind of questions that should be asked, answered, and written down for the lesser minds to absorb.
Part of the problem with the law, is its underlying language. Laws are purposely kept in their cryptic archaic english forms, expressly to give more leeway to the lawyers that profit from the aberration of meaning. It's kind of like the various bibles... they all say more or less the same thing, but they've all been tainted through the "magic" of translation and skilled orators can ply the verses to their will. Jesus / no Jesus, whores / no whores, miracles / no miracles... Guilty / not guilty.
Eliminate the gray areas of the law, and we'll see the resale value of BMWs and Benz' plummet as the snarky word-warpers scamper. We'll also see a more faithful representation of societal ideals in courts and in the news.
Ugh... Thinkpads. Sure, they were sturdy, but they were perpetually nine months behind the curve for features and performance. It was like owning an Acer with plate armor; a well guarded piece of shit.
I have yet to see an IBM server with my own eyes, but the datacenters are full of commodity PC hardware. That's probably because there is a glut of commodity PC developers in my town (yay government). I barely trust these drones with a Celeron, there isn't enough Ibuprofen in the world for me to let them loose on big iron. That's just one big-ass infinite loop just dying to happen with these asshats. The only saving grace is the inevitable memory leak that ultimately crashes the process, not so much garbage collection but garbage regurgitation.
I've seen quite a few large SPARC installations. Those have a bit of traction because they're both cheap and effective for what little Unix filth gets thrown around in these parts.
We're there to make it more difficult for another 9/11.
Transport safety is not going to prevent another 9/11. If you don't want the rest of the world to blow your people up, then tell the Bushes to stop fucking with everyone.
Does China have a problem with the middle east ? Does Russia have a problem with the middle east ? No. Do they both have a problem with the USA ? Yes. Lowest common denominator.
Crippling your own civilians isn't going to make your borders any safer. All it does is piss off the locals and generate unrest. The next terrorist attack will probably come from within. Hate doesn't care which country it's born in.
That's what I like about the light-gun party games like Point Blank or Police Training... a bunch of mini-games that challenge you in different ways, not just a bunch of ugly green aliens dodging big fake-breasted "actresses".
Maybe I'm a purist, but if/when I want to see tits, the internet is there. Get them out of my games!
And in the age of the lemming, words of wisdom get modded down with prejudice.
I'm in this boat with you; a phone is a phone is a phone. Every single one of its features should be directly tied to communication. If I wanted a cheap chinese gadget that tries (and fails) to be a game boy, media player, webcam, AM radio, IUD and chia pet all at once, well... I'd have to hire someone to end my miserable brainwashed life.
My ideal phone features ? address book, call history, voice mail, SMS / pager, maybe a simple date planner and/or notepad. No camera, no music, no Java, not even a stupid web browser.
I might be less opposed to convergence if they could actually do it decently. The last thing I need is yet another overpriced fragile thingamajig that can't do anything right. I'd much rather buy separate devices that each excel at their single task.
To compound things, I really don't understand why the music "industry" is trying to shove tunes into people's cell phones. Perhaps I'm being far too logical for the common peon, but I would assert that the type of person who listens to music on an LG cell phone probably isn't the biggest music fan on the block. I'd be surprised if that individual were more inclined to buy music on other platforms, if they're content with the free low-bitrate junk they save to that stupid little memory card sticking out the back of their phone, piped over those horrible earbuds that come from wherever Taiwan outsources the work even their sweatshops consider too cheap.
I'm certainly not plugging a phone into my lovingly-tuned DRM-free car stereo, or my carefully selected home speakers. I wouldn't even disgrace my Sennheisers with such a perverted audio source. Once again, the music industry has failed the very people that once consumed its wares. There's already so little music worth hearing these days, if you're going to shove it into a pathetic cell phone, well you might as well just go deaf once and for all.
Yes, hell yes!
Party games were an obscure niche - now it's a dominant theme but they're all crap. It's hardly any different from the FPS craze of the early 90's, when every game was a Doom or Wolf3d knockoff (of inferior quality).
I love the few big party games, but that's enough. Rabbids 3 : yes. Super Flonky Flonk China Party IV : no.
The other big problem with the Wii is the huge number of absolute garbage games like Jenga... who wants to pay $30-40 for the Wii Game that sucks ass, when you can buy the physical game for $12 ? Another one that peeved me was the CSI game: it's your standard "Blade Runner"-style pixel hunt adventure, but it looks and plays like it came straight out of the 90's - eternal loading sequences, choppy graphics. The game itself is decent, when it's not stuck in sloppy-land. My 486 ran smoother!
It simply feels like Nintendo is giving licenses to every half-breed on the planet. They used to guard them carefully, and all the games had to get approved by Nintendo's QA staff before they could release. Now they're running it like the Playstation : 9 out of 10 games aren't worth the media they're pressed on.
I recently came across a PC that had a hacked Vista install... the curious thing is it used some sort of Linux bootloader before the Vista loader, which apparently does something to the A20 line. It flashed much too quickly for me to read anything else, but this loader presumably stays resident and convinces Vista that it's legit.
I would expect that one to be rather difficult to fight, seeing as it loads before the OS itself. Make the boot sector read-only (in the BIOS) and even MS can't tear it out.
Actually, I think the FPS display is a great measure of actual performance. The benchmarks will give you abstract numbers, but the FPS display is what you're actually getting out of the game.
It doesn't matter if you don't follow the same path each time, what counts is the actual feel... some games can get away with lower framerates in the flashy areas (e.g. Crysis), while others would be totally unacceptable.
I believe it's HardOCP that plots graphs of the minimum, maximum and average FPS. That's a step in the right direction, IMHO.
It's funny that you mention Crysis... people are freaking out over Crysis the same way they freaked out over Aero Glass a year ago. The reality is, Crysis runs fine on midrange gaming systems. It won't run in 1920x1200 with DX10 eyecandy on that crusty old Geforce 6200, but it certainly does not require a $2500 powerhouse to be enjoyable.
:P... the important thing is to find parallels that relate to your own needs and wants so you can put those numbers into perspective.
In the end, benchmarks can be useful as long as you don't accept their results as the gospel truth. Some benchmarks favor ATI, some favor NVidia, and I'm sure there's gotta be one benchmark that favors Intel Extreme Graphics
Simple: make the test cases LAW.
If X then Guilty, else !Guilty.
The big problem with law is the human aspect: different people interpret things differently, and that's why lawyers get paid tons of money to be anal-retentive pricks. They pick one side, not necessarily caring whether it's "right" or "wrong", and defend that side to the death, making up arguments as they go along. It's all about convincing people, and that's why some blatantly absurd stuff gets away while harmless people get fined and jailed. It's just a big game of spin.
Take the spin out of the law, and people will freak out at first, but at least we'll be able to tell with certainly what flies and what doesn't. People will push to the edge of the law, and stop. Those who don't, we throw away.