I am the pusher robot. I am here to protect you. I am here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.
Pushing is not the answer. I am the shover robot. I shove you around. I am here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Seriously, please pay MS so they can save me from me. I am my own worst enemy when it comes to working in my chosen trade. This will just lead more honest people to use 3rd party cracks and cheats to work around this crippleware so they can do their work unhindered.
That should teach you a lesson about buying substandard equipment for your developers. Your biggest expense with an in-house programmer is not the computer they use, it's the salary. The faster the machine and tools work, the more productivity you can get out of them and happy programmers work faster and better than grumpy whiney underequipped code grunts.
Go ahead and spend the extra $20 on the MS Natural, or whatever they want. Go and spend the extra $100 on the dual-core. They want 2GB ? One-up them and get 4Gb for a couple hundred more, then you can tell them the machine's maxed out and they will stop whining.
What if they want a whole new PC from Boxxtech ? Buy it! You can give the perfectly fine Dell to an office worker and they will brag about it being the fastest machine in HR. And of course your programmer will be delighted and much more willing to help you out when crunch time comes along and overtime is involved.
Business intelligence is mainly data driven, but the sticker price is only a tiny portion of the value of a good computer.
I remember a few months ago when AM2 came out, I briefly contemplated selling my 939 setup to get an AM2 setup. Briefly! The boards cost about the same, the CPUs cost about the same, the ram cost about the same. So I would have sold my old gear for about 2/3rd's the price of the new stuff, to get a synthetic 3-6% improvement I'll never notice. I passed.
The biggest problem with AM2 is that it's nothing new. All it is, is 939 with DDR2 memory. It could have been a bit better, if the new architecture had maximized DDR2's performance like 939 did for DDR1, but it didn't. So why would people pay 100-200$ more for the same mhz, the same features, and a lackluster memory controller ? They didn't. We're all waiting for the next big thing. I even had a look at Core2Duo, even though I have less-than-fond thoughts about Intel and their exploitive pricing schemes. I'm not so much an AMD fanboi, I've just had unpleasant experiences with Intel chipsets in the past and that is a strong stigma to purge.
Right now my gaming rig is a very respectable AMD X2 2.7ghz, 4gig ram on an Nforce4 Ultra board. If I were to upgrade, I need all-new ram, a new CPU that won't give me any more speed as I'm already overclocked beyond the fastest stock AMD processor, and I even have to sacrifice some chipset features as the Nforce5 has less builtins than my NF4 Ultra. It's just not worth it for me, and a lot of people are in the same boat.
If/when AM3 comes around, if they give us a significant jump in speed that justifies the investment, then I'll dive in. I would love to see a 3ghz quad-core AMD, priced at the crucial 299$ point just like the pivotal X2 3800 was at first.. the one that brought dual-core to the dirty smelly unwashed welfare-mongering masses. This means AMD has some homework cut out for them, as they have to research performance improvements, manufacturing efficiencies and design tradeoffs in order to reach that performance/price target.
The CPU industry is much like the graphics card industry, the big players constantly leapfrog each other and stimulate innovation and competition. In theory this is good news for the customers as we have both companies working hard to deliver the best bang for the buck and win our hearts. On the backhand it also means we end up replacing hardware very often if we want to have the best gear, jumping back and forth and relearning each company's products and software every time.
I've never heard of an existing app that does this, but I have done it myself on a few occasions as a throwaway script. Just run a script every second (or faster), get the list of running processes ("tasklist" command), diff the output with the previous result and dump it to a log file with a time stamp. If you have the Win32-ported GNU tools you can do this with a batch file.
I'm just guessing he means those little scammy insurances you can get for loans and credit cards, where they cover your monthly payment if you're involuntarily out of work. It's kind of like "pogey" for your debt.
As someone who just lost 1.4tb of HTPC stuff to a raid misconfiguration:P I can certainly vouch for the lack of efficient, high-capacity backup solutions for power users. Hard drives are around $0.35/gb for online storage. Why don't we have an uber-cheap offline backup solution ? How about a terabyte tape for $50 ? or a large-format optical medium.. hell, I wouldn't mind having an 8-inch optical drive if it could burn 100+gb per disc, and the media was in the $10-15 range.
So why do we not have these solutions available ? Technologically feasible ? yes. Economically feasible ? Sure. Commercially feasible ? that depends. Today's backup systems are fickle, overpriced and marketed with fear. Tape backups cost an arm and a leg compared to plain old hard drives, because of this aggressive corporate marketing. How can an Exabyte drive cost thousands and the tapes hundreds, when every goddamned Walmart sells a 4-head VCR for $24.99 and dollar tapes ? Sure, the data drive has higher resolution and error correction, but why would it cost orders of magnitude more to build when it uses the same basic components ?
Just like medicine, there's more money in prolonging the problem than selling the solution. That's why more and more people are turning to homebrew backup solutions like file servers and portable drives. They're cheaper, faster and easier to use than most commercial products out there.
Interestingly enough, I did find that secret stash on my own the first time I played FF7. You could hear the baby phoenix chirping and if you just happened to hit your "Action" button, Cloud would automatically jump up and start climbling. It's no different than the old-school Wolf3D searching for secrets, where you'd hump each interesting wall until something happened. What's changed however, is that people who are used to strategy guides have lost that sense of exploration because we have the quick fix. Why do the hard guesswork when you can google the answer, or pay 15$ for a book that tells you everything about anything.. but I feel it takes away from the fun of playing on your own.
Yes, FF7 has a few of "wtf" quests, but for the most part you can figure it out fairly well on your own. You might die a few times along the way, but that's part of the gaming experience. The point is to challenge you.. if you can never lose with your strategy guide breezing you through all the tough spots, there is no challenge and there is no fun. It's human nature.
The truth is that good service is cost-prohibitive. It would be great if every ISP had a team of operators whose sole job is to find out what you need and directly transfer you to the proper department, but people cost money, to the tune of 25-30k yearly. That same money can be pumped into an irritating phone system that not only does the same job without a salary, but also deters a non-negligible number of callers and forces them to try other solutions. Let's face it: some people are addicted to phones.. when I was running a retail shop, I had people call me up for no reason at all, they were just creepy losers trying to kill time by talking to a semi-stranger. In the case of tech support, it's even worse because people are just plain ignorant and they expect everyone to hold their hand. I don't care that "you" paid "good money" for "a high end computer", or that "you" will "take" your "business" "elsewhere" if I don't clean out *YOUR* spyware and send you a "FREE" copy of MS Office because you "misplaced" your CD. Phones enable stupidity because people eventually learn to rely on the phone rather than use their own brain. How many times have you had someone call you with a question, only to end up saying "Nevermind, I just figured it out", just after they've talked your ear off and indirectly accused you for their ignorance, nevermind interrupting your lv60 raid while a 350$/hr hooker was peeing on your rug in seven different languages.
If someone can come up with an even more hostile, alienating device for call centers, I'm rooting for them!
So she spent her entire god-forsaken life in a classroom and has no training whatsoever on this thing we call Real Life(tm). Good for her. Now give me my Grand Theft Mortal Metal Kombat Auto Gear.
Howsabout you help me lobby for nationwide eugenics so we can sterilize the young dumb adults before they become young dumb parents who can't raise their goddamned kids ?
What we're seeing is the product of too much freedom. Kids today do whatever, whenever, with little guidance or structure. Youths have the friggin' Child Services number on speed-dial if you don't give them what they want. Parents are either basket cases from the stupid overcompetitive world of greed, or simply useless because they had their kids at 15 and now they're 35 and still don't have a car, or a house, or a job for that matter. We're seeing de-evolution as failures reproduce quicker than diligent, planned families. It's a heck of a lot easier for little suburbanite girls to make babies with the half-breed next door, than it is for the university grad to actually meet someone worth their patience. We're suffocating society with this sexually transmitted ignorance.
Floats are never good enough. In fact floats are the very seeds of evil. They are inaccurate even with what should be benign numbers like 0.0001. To you and me, 0.0001 is simple. To a float, 0.0001 is something like 99999e-7 or whatever.. I suck at this type of math but just as an example, let's say you store 0.0001 in a float, it might actually end up being 0.00010132 or something. Do a bunch of additions, mults divs whatever and you end up with wacky errors. You might tell it to do 0.0001 times a million, to you and me that equals 100. The computer might say 100.7 and you wonder where the hell that.7 came from.
The way my non-math-genius mind has been doing it all these years, is with strings. If I need true arbitrary-precision math, I do it the way humans do it: visually. Take the last digit, add, carry, repeat. There are a few optimizations the careful coder can implement, like working on several digits though the added complexity can bite you in the ass. That's pretty much the only way to ensure error-free decimals. It is slow as hell which is fine for business applications since they spend most of their time waiting for stupid users, but for scientific apps you have to find a tradeoff between precision and speed.
Amen brother.. I just went from an X700 Pro to a 7900GT and there is a huge difference in driver performance. I don't mean triangles per second, I mean the thing just works better. No more 10-second mode switches, no more 2 minutes of loading the stupid control center I never use. No more blue screens every time I update my chipset drivers. I don't care if the 1900XTX runs faster than my NVidia, because frankly I don't game _that_ much (yet), and I'm quite content to have reliable, lightweight drivers that do what I need and don't jerk me around. Is it really necessary to have that dinky little race-car demo in the ATI drivers ? No, because anyone who's tweaking AA and Aniso settings already knows what they're doing and doesn't need some inaccurate demo scene to show off the results. And what's with the 3rd party skinning engine that eats up 30-40 mb just for red textured windows ?! Why the hell did they spend money on licensing a skinning engine in the first place ? It's a freaking system driver! Just give me a few tabbed windows and a handful of checkboxes for crying out loud.
No, No, NO! The BSA is bad, we DON'T want to give them money. How would you like to have a bunch of armed rent-a-cops and dial-a-lawyers show up at your door for an "audit" ? They're not exactly nice people, in fact I'd venture to say I'd sooner trust a hell's angel-type dude than a BSA "agent", mainly because the biker doesn't lie about pursuing criminal behavior. My honest advice is that if a BSA team shows up at your door, let them in, lead them to your server room, then beat them over the head with an old HP rig until they stop moving. They are trespassers and racketeers, nothing more. They get paid by the top software publishers to keep the sheep aligned. They'll shake down a few strategic offices, make the news and instill fear into everyone else in true Orwellian fashion.
Lawsuits have little to do with law, and everything to do with money. There is little point in suing a GPL violator because the free software projects don't have the financial justification to pursue legal actions, plus it's hard to defend in court when you're giving your product away for free. Software licenses don't mean shit to the average state judge, unless the software license is in defense of a Fortune-500 company.
Seriously, I often wonder if all game developers are from a different solar system. Games just aren't that fun anymore, or they feature revolting design mistakes that take away from the entertainment factor. Take for example F.E.A.R., which is hailed as an impressive graphics extravaganza.. well okay, it's neat looking, but why the hell do the bullet holes vanish after a minute ? The first time I noticed my history of beautiful carnage gradually being wiped clean, it totally killed the sense of immersion and made this top-budget game just about as realistic as Commander Keen EGA.
That's just one example.. few games are released without these ignorant flaws. They build something up to be grand, hire a bunch of marketing monkeys to hype it up, then drop the ball. Coitus interruptus! "We maxed out our development budget", "That's impossible to implement with the current engine", "Our boss is being sued for totaling a stolen Ferrari Enzo". If the world of software had less idiots and more brilliant minds, maybe it wouldn't struggle so much to make a dime. Aggressive marketing can only go so far if the product sucks, eventually people figure it out and lose confidence.
These days it seems the only games that are consistently successful are the sports franchises, and even they are starting to suck because the developers waste too many resources on non-gameplay aspects to make nicer box shots or boast some bullshit engine feature.
Fence-sitter here. I still run Windows as my main OS despite being somewhat dissatisfied with it. I run Linux in a VM just because its CLI is wonderfully useful and efficient, but I don't care much for Xorg.. mainly because of the two or three games I very occasionally play, we're talking maybe once a week or even less. I certainly enjoy tinkering with Gentoo and thus getting to know what makes a distro tick, but I can't yet dedicate my main PC to pure Linux, it just doesn't do what I need when I'm acting as a consumer. As a geek it's a godsend, but for everyone else it's blah at best.
It's Paul Thurrott, MS fanboy. The whole thing was orchestrated from the very beginning, come on guys! Let's not be fatuous. This guy most likely runs MSDN copies of Windows because that's what most of us do, those who have MSDN subscriptions that is. Steve Ballmer probably wanted Paul to "whine" at Microsoft about his WGA woes, then MS would swoop in like an angel on the wings of the phoenix and GIVE him a free copy of Windows to save his poor deceptive blogger's life. Then Paul (or someone with a clue) decided it was a little over the top and decided to concoct this moral story about how even goody-two-shoes Paul was fooled by these evil pirates. It's more of a message to tech weenies, inspiring them to check the legitimacy of their copy of Windows, and buy a legit one.
Let's take a different crime: say you were out with some friends and you were drinking a little too much, and decided to smash some guy's windows. One of your buddies gets arrested and possibly jailed, everyone else gets away scot-free. Wouldn't you turn yourself in out of sympathy for your pal, and maybe negotiate a lesser punishment as he was only partly responsible for the damage ? Yes you would. This is a similar case.. Paul is supposed to be our buddy, our pal, our chum... right ? And he got nailed, but he did "The Right Thing(tm)". Should we all follow in his footsteps and be kind to the almighty Micro$oft ? Riiiiight.
Read my tagline.. now re-read it. If we could do away with drivers, we would have done so long ago because there is no greater pain than having idiot users complain about drivers, call tech support because their drivers are corrupt because their OS is an infested pool of shite, or whine about how your expensive gadget doesn't work on their exotic "look what I made" OS derivative. Trust me, if all hardware companies could get rid of the software part of their product, they'd do it in a heartbeat. They can't.
What does a network driver do ? It takes your data, slices it into packet-sized chunks, adds error protection/recovery, keeps tabs on what's going where and how much, then gives you a shout whenever it's done or wants more data. It does this through a mostly standardized interface, but each network device has its peculiarities and unique features. The drivers are what presents these varieties in a consistent way to whatever software or OS wants to play with them.
If you want an example of what we did before drivers were "in", look ten years ago with sound cards. You never knew if a game that supported "Sound Blaster" would work properly on your "Sound Blaster Pro".. much less on your "Sound Blaster 16". Why the hell not ? All three are capable of digitized sound and FM synthesis, so why does the game that runs on the grainy, 8bit mono 22khz SB not work on the 16bit stereo 44khz SB16 ? Because it was coded directly to the original hardware with no indirection whatsoever. How bad was it ? We actually had Sound Blaster emulators for the Sound Blaster AWE64, that were essentially device drivers that presented an SB1 interface and translated those accesses into AWE64 functions.
Feigning ignorance for a moment, let's pretend all sound cards could present a consistent interface no matter what the brand or model was. We'd still need a "universal driver" to manage our sound, right ? Something like DirectX, or OpenAL, or ALSA, or ESound..... whatever you call it, we'd still have some means to pander to our laziness as programmers.
As much as I'd like to see an operating system that can "figure stuff out" on its own, it's just not gonna happen in this decade. It would require close collaboration between software developers and hardware designers.. collaboration usually means a governing body that charges fees for certification, a governing body means something that can be manipulated to favor the interests of whoever has the most money to throw around. From that perspective, it is a doomed concept.
Now if something like the Linux community could come up with open-source hardware type stuff.. like a standard for sound cards, video cards, TV tuners.. and enough friendly supporters to manufacture compliant devices and fully commit to the cause, maybe over time we could see a transition if the project turns out beneficial to all parties involved. No drivers means no need to pay a cocky driver developer team the big bucks.. no more "I need a network driver but I can't get on the net" chicken-and-egg bullshit.. no more Billco having to hold some redneck's hand while I have them reinstall the drivers on their X-brand-name spyware-infested PC. Yeah it would be sweet! But it would take a big commitment from everyone.
Why don't we enlarge the form factor ? We have 5.25" optical drives but 3.5" hard drives... 50% larger diameter should translate to roughly 125% greater surface area.. minus the hub and whatnot, we're still looking at roughly doubling the size of the platters. I'll take my 1.5 TB SATA drive thank you.. ten of those in RAID-5 and I could have a dozen TB's of HD pr0n.
Nah, that's why we need a new police force, one that's not paid by the government. In the good old days we called them bikers, but now even they have gone loony. When someone steps out of line, they need to be knocked back into place.
I think this "artist" should do like other shammy artists and get a goddamned job. I'm usually one to see beauty in ugly-ass technological creations.. hell I'll even admire code if it shows a curious attention to detail, but this stuff.. bleh! It looks like "cat/dev/urandom | povray"
Actually I've come up with more inspiring images just smacking my head against the keyboard.
I work in tech support, and the biggest mistake new agents make is trying to troubleshoot parts when they should really be troubleshooting symptoms. The same applies here.
Gaming addiction is no different that drug abuse, youth violence, sexual misconduct, disobedience.. they all point to the same root cause: ineffective parenting. To hell with this clinic for game addiction; I say open a clinic for bad parenting. Prescribe therapy, dictate behavioral changes, heck just bend the parents over and give them the strap for all I care, they have failed. The latest fad is "helicopter parents", the ones who give their kids cell phones so they can check up on them ten times a day. I can tell you that if one of my students, I don't care if they're 8 or 18, whips out a phone during class to answer his pea-brained mother, I'm picking up the phone and giving a lesson on four letter words. There is no greater shame than seeing a young adult who can't do anything for themselves and has no authority, no independence, are living under mommy's skirt after high school. Heck I remember thinking 18 years was too long a wait for me to become legally independent.. a fifth of my life gone already and I hadn't yet seen the forest for the trees.
In a world where technology is bringing information to the masses, I would expect people to learn faster, to be more versatile and successful, to waste less time on childhood and more time doing interesting things. Instead we're seeing people age 25 who still can't hold a full time job, don't know what they want to do for a career, can't drive, can't cook, can't clean.. oh they can read the fuck out of a textbook though.. then a year later they're having kids and polluting the earth with yet more failed humans. Where the hell did humanity go wrong ?
I think this 100$ laptop gimmick is a load of crap. Kids don't need laptops, kids need to have the snot beat out of them so they can turn into productive, successful adults like the generations that preceded them. I'd rather see the governments spend 100$ on parenting classes for young expecting parents. Toss them 30-40 of them in a classroom, pay some loony teacher and yell some sense into these baby mamas. Better yet, toss them in the classroom, throw in some dynamite and run like a girl.. the world is overpopulated with morons, let's fix the people that are here before bringing new cletuses into the world.
The greatest flaw with the one-laptop-per-child idea is that we're looking at it as mature, responsible adults. Kids don't share the same attitude, and they certainly don't care about having a laptop everywhere they go. These things will probably get smashed, stolen or sold within weeks after the kids get a hold of them.
How thoughtful of the japanese researchers to be applying their time, money and intellect toward solving a problem that didn't exist in the first place. Are you sure there isn't a whoremongering american behind it who's just looking to get free escorts at the casino ? Hell, get Ron Popeil to sell this useless gadget at 1 in the morning and you'll get a second one absolutely free when you buy the magic orange juicer.
Really.. if my job for the past few years had been to research writing on water, I would have hanged myself by now. What a ridiculous waste of resources.
Wow now I feel special.. I'm very annoyed by the rainbow effect, I see it everywhere, whether it's a projector or television.. I've tried the high-end ones that are supposed to spin faster, still no improvement. Samsung is coming out with triple-DLP units within the next few months, they've already been announced, but at the consumer end it's likely that 3-DLP will cost as much as Plasma TV's. I'm playing the waiting game as I'm in the market for a large (60"+) TV. A projector could be an option, but I have yet to see an affordable projector that supports high resolutions as I will invariably be hooking it up to my PC some of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I am the pusher robot. I am here to protect you. I am here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.
Pushing is not the answer. I am the shover robot. I shove you around. I am here to protect you from the terrible secret of space.
(sorry, couldn't resist)
Seriously, please pay MS so they can save me from me. I am my own worst enemy when it comes to working in my chosen trade. This will just lead more honest people to use 3rd party cracks and cheats to work around this crippleware so they can do their work unhindered.
That should teach you a lesson about buying substandard equipment for your developers. Your biggest expense with an in-house programmer is not the computer they use, it's the salary. The faster the machine and tools work, the more productivity you can get out of them and happy programmers work faster and better than grumpy whiney underequipped code grunts.
Go ahead and spend the extra $20 on the MS Natural, or whatever they want. Go and spend the extra $100 on the dual-core. They want 2GB ? One-up them and get 4Gb for a couple hundred more, then you can tell them the machine's maxed out and they will stop whining.
What if they want a whole new PC from Boxxtech ? Buy it! You can give the perfectly fine Dell to an office worker and they will brag about it being the fastest machine in HR. And of course your programmer will be delighted and much more willing to help you out when crunch time comes along and overtime is involved.
Business intelligence is mainly data driven, but the sticker price is only a tiny portion of the value of a good computer.
I remember a few months ago when AM2 came out, I briefly contemplated selling my 939 setup to get an AM2 setup. Briefly! The boards cost about the same, the CPUs cost about the same, the ram cost about the same. So I would have sold my old gear for about 2/3rd's the price of the new stuff, to get a synthetic 3-6% improvement I'll never notice. I passed.
The biggest problem with AM2 is that it's nothing new. All it is, is 939 with DDR2 memory. It could have been a bit better, if the new architecture had maximized DDR2's performance like 939 did for DDR1, but it didn't. So why would people pay 100-200$ more for the same mhz, the same features, and a lackluster memory controller ? They didn't. We're all waiting for the next big thing. I even had a look at Core2Duo, even though I have less-than-fond thoughts about Intel and their exploitive pricing schemes. I'm not so much an AMD fanboi, I've just had unpleasant experiences with Intel chipsets in the past and that is a strong stigma to purge.
Right now my gaming rig is a very respectable AMD X2 2.7ghz, 4gig ram on an Nforce4 Ultra board. If I were to upgrade, I need all-new ram, a new CPU that won't give me any more speed as I'm already overclocked beyond the fastest stock AMD processor, and I even have to sacrifice some chipset features as the Nforce5 has less builtins than my NF4 Ultra. It's just not worth it for me, and a lot of people are in the same boat.
If/when AM3 comes around, if they give us a significant jump in speed that justifies the investment, then I'll dive in. I would love to see a 3ghz quad-core AMD, priced at the crucial 299$ point just like the pivotal X2 3800 was at first.. the one that brought dual-core to the dirty smelly unwashed welfare-mongering masses. This means AMD has some homework cut out for them, as they have to research performance improvements, manufacturing efficiencies and design tradeoffs in order to reach that performance/price target.
The CPU industry is much like the graphics card industry, the big players constantly leapfrog each other and stimulate innovation and competition. In theory this is good news for the customers as we have both companies working hard to deliver the best bang for the buck and win our hearts. On the backhand it also means we end up replacing hardware very often if we want to have the best gear, jumping back and forth and relearning each company's products and software every time.
I've never heard of an existing app that does this, but I have done it myself on a few occasions as a throwaway script. Just run a script every second (or faster), get the list of running processes ("tasklist" command), diff the output with the previous result and dump it to a log file with a time stamp. If you have the Win32-ported GNU tools you can do this with a batch file.
I'm just guessing he means those little scammy insurances you can get for loans and credit cards, where they cover your monthly payment if you're involuntarily out of work. It's kind of like "pogey" for your debt.
As someone who just lost 1.4tb of HTPC stuff to a raid misconfiguration :P I can certainly vouch for the lack of efficient, high-capacity backup solutions for power users. Hard drives are around $0.35/gb for online storage. Why don't we have an uber-cheap offline backup solution ? How about a terabyte tape for $50 ? or a large-format optical medium .. hell, I wouldn't mind having an 8-inch optical drive if it could burn 100+gb per disc, and the media was in the $10-15 range.
So why do we not have these solutions available ? Technologically feasible ? yes. Economically feasible ? Sure. Commercially feasible ? that depends. Today's backup systems are fickle, overpriced and marketed with fear. Tape backups cost an arm and a leg compared to plain old hard drives, because of this aggressive corporate marketing. How can an Exabyte drive cost thousands and the tapes hundreds, when every goddamned Walmart sells a 4-head VCR for $24.99 and dollar tapes ? Sure, the data drive has higher resolution and error correction, but why would it cost orders of magnitude more to build when it uses the same basic components ?
Just like medicine, there's more money in prolonging the problem than selling the solution. That's why more and more people are turning to homebrew backup solutions like file servers and portable drives. They're cheaper, faster and easier to use than most commercial products out there.
Interestingly enough, I did find that secret stash on my own the first time I played FF7. You could hear the baby phoenix chirping and if you just happened to hit your "Action" button, Cloud would automatically jump up and start climbling. It's no different than the old-school Wolf3D searching for secrets, where you'd hump each interesting wall until something happened. What's changed however, is that people who are used to strategy guides have lost that sense of exploration because we have the quick fix. Why do the hard guesswork when you can google the answer, or pay 15$ for a book that tells you everything about anything .. but I feel it takes away from the fun of playing on your own.
Yes, FF7 has a few of "wtf" quests, but for the most part you can figure it out fairly well on your own. You might die a few times along the way, but that's part of the gaming experience. The point is to challenge you.. if you can never lose with your strategy guide breezing you through all the tough spots, there is no challenge and there is no fun. It's human nature.
The truth is that good service is cost-prohibitive. It would be great if every ISP had a team of operators whose sole job is to find out what you need and directly transfer you to the proper department, but people cost money, to the tune of 25-30k yearly. That same money can be pumped into an irritating phone system that not only does the same job without a salary, but also deters a non-negligible number of callers and forces them to try other solutions. Let's face it: some people are addicted to phones.. when I was running a retail shop, I had people call me up for no reason at all, they were just creepy losers trying to kill time by talking to a semi-stranger. In the case of tech support, it's even worse because people are just plain ignorant and they expect everyone to hold their hand. I don't care that "you" paid "good money" for "a high end computer", or that "you" will "take" your "business" "elsewhere" if I don't clean out *YOUR* spyware and send you a "FREE" copy of MS Office because you "misplaced" your CD. Phones enable stupidity because people eventually learn to rely on the phone rather than use their own brain. How many times have you had someone call you with a question, only to end up saying "Nevermind, I just figured it out", just after they've talked your ear off and indirectly accused you for their ignorance, nevermind interrupting your lv60 raid while a 350$/hr hooker was peeing on your rug in seven different languages.
If someone can come up with an even more hostile, alienating device for call centers, I'm rooting for them!
So she spent her entire god-forsaken life in a classroom and has no training whatsoever on this thing we call Real Life(tm). Good for her. Now give me my Grand Theft Mortal Metal Kombat Auto Gear.
Howsabout you help me lobby for nationwide eugenics so we can sterilize the young dumb adults before they become young dumb parents who can't raise their goddamned kids ?
What we're seeing is the product of too much freedom. Kids today do whatever, whenever, with little guidance or structure. Youths have the friggin' Child Services number on speed-dial if you don't give them what they want. Parents are either basket cases from the stupid overcompetitive world of greed, or simply useless because they had their kids at 15 and now they're 35 and still don't have a car, or a house, or a job for that matter. We're seeing de-evolution as failures reproduce quicker than diligent, planned families. It's a heck of a lot easier for little suburbanite girls to make babies with the half-breed next door, than it is for the university grad to actually meet someone worth their patience. We're suffocating society with this sexually transmitted ignorance.
Floats are never good enough. In fact floats are the very seeds of evil. They are inaccurate even with what should be benign numbers like 0.0001. To you and me, 0.0001 is simple. To a float, 0.0001 is something like 99999e-7 or whatever.. I suck at this type of math but just as an example, let's say you store 0.0001 in a float, it might actually end up being 0.00010132 or something. Do a bunch of additions, mults divs whatever and you end up with wacky errors. You might tell it to do 0.0001 times a million, to you and me that equals 100. The computer might say 100.7 and you wonder where the hell that .7 came from.
The way my non-math-genius mind has been doing it all these years, is with strings. If I need true arbitrary-precision math, I do it the way humans do it: visually. Take the last digit, add, carry, repeat. There are a few optimizations the careful coder can implement, like working on several digits though the added complexity can bite you in the ass. That's pretty much the only way to ensure error-free decimals. It is slow as hell which is fine for business applications since they spend most of their time waiting for stupid users, but for scientific apps you have to find a tradeoff between precision and speed.
Amen brother.. I just went from an X700 Pro to a 7900GT and there is a huge difference in driver performance. I don't mean triangles per second, I mean the thing just works better. No more 10-second mode switches, no more 2 minutes of loading the stupid control center I never use. No more blue screens every time I update my chipset drivers. I don't care if the 1900XTX runs faster than my NVidia, because frankly I don't game _that_ much (yet), and I'm quite content to have reliable, lightweight drivers that do what I need and don't jerk me around. Is it really necessary to have that dinky little race-car demo in the ATI drivers ? No, because anyone who's tweaking AA and Aniso settings already knows what they're doing and doesn't need some inaccurate demo scene to show off the results. And what's with the 3rd party skinning engine that eats up 30-40 mb just for red textured windows ?! Why the hell did they spend money on licensing a skinning engine in the first place ? It's a freaking system driver! Just give me a few tabbed windows and a handful of checkboxes for crying out loud.
No, No, NO! The BSA is bad, we DON'T want to give them money. How would you like to have a bunch of armed rent-a-cops and dial-a-lawyers show up at your door for an "audit" ? They're not exactly nice people, in fact I'd venture to say I'd sooner trust a hell's angel-type dude than a BSA "agent", mainly because the biker doesn't lie about pursuing criminal behavior. My honest advice is that if a BSA team shows up at your door, let them in, lead them to your server room, then beat them over the head with an old HP rig until they stop moving. They are trespassers and racketeers, nothing more. They get paid by the top software publishers to keep the sheep aligned. They'll shake down a few strategic offices, make the news and instill fear into everyone else in true Orwellian fashion.
Lawsuits have little to do with law, and everything to do with money. There is little point in suing a GPL violator because the free software projects don't have the financial justification to pursue legal actions, plus it's hard to defend in court when you're giving your product away for free. Software licenses don't mean shit to the average state judge, unless the software license is in defense of a Fortune-500 company.
Pirates don't kill games, people kill games.
Seriously, I often wonder if all game developers are from a different solar system. Games just aren't that fun anymore, or they feature revolting design mistakes that take away from the entertainment factor. Take for example F.E.A.R., which is hailed as an impressive graphics extravaganza.. well okay, it's neat looking, but why the hell do the bullet holes vanish after a minute ? The first time I noticed my history of beautiful carnage gradually being wiped clean, it totally killed the sense of immersion and made this top-budget game just about as realistic as Commander Keen EGA.
That's just one example.. few games are released without these ignorant flaws. They build something up to be grand, hire a bunch of marketing monkeys to hype it up, then drop the ball. Coitus interruptus! "We maxed out our development budget", "That's impossible to implement with the current engine", "Our boss is being sued for totaling a stolen Ferrari Enzo". If the world of software had less idiots and more brilliant minds, maybe it wouldn't struggle so much to make a dime. Aggressive marketing can only go so far if the product sucks, eventually people figure it out and lose confidence.
These days it seems the only games that are consistently successful are the sports franchises, and even they are starting to suck because the developers waste too many resources on non-gameplay aspects to make nicer box shots or boast some bullshit engine feature.
Fence-sitter here. I still run Windows as my main OS despite being somewhat dissatisfied with it. I run Linux in a VM just because its CLI is wonderfully useful and efficient, but I don't care much for Xorg.. mainly because of the two or three games I very occasionally play, we're talking maybe once a week or even less. I certainly enjoy tinkering with Gentoo and thus getting to know what makes a distro tick, but I can't yet dedicate my main PC to pure Linux, it just doesn't do what I need when I'm acting as a consumer. As a geek it's a godsend, but for everyone else it's blah at best.
It's Paul Thurrott, MS fanboy. The whole thing was orchestrated from the very beginning, come on guys! Let's not be fatuous. This guy most likely runs MSDN copies of Windows because that's what most of us do, those who have MSDN subscriptions that is. Steve Ballmer probably wanted Paul to "whine" at Microsoft about his WGA woes, then MS would swoop in like an angel on the wings of the phoenix and GIVE him a free copy of Windows to save his poor deceptive blogger's life. Then Paul (or someone with a clue) decided it was a little over the top and decided to concoct this moral story about how even goody-two-shoes Paul was fooled by these evil pirates. It's more of a message to tech weenies, inspiring them to check the legitimacy of their copy of Windows, and buy a legit one.
Let's take a different crime: say you were out with some friends and you were drinking a little too much, and decided to smash some guy's windows. One of your buddies gets arrested and possibly jailed, everyone else gets away scot-free. Wouldn't you turn yourself in out of sympathy for your pal, and maybe negotiate a lesser punishment as he was only partly responsible for the damage ? Yes you would. This is a similar case.. Paul is supposed to be our buddy, our pal, our chum... right ? And he got nailed, but he did "The Right Thing(tm)". Should we all follow in his footsteps and be kind to the almighty Micro$oft ? Riiiiight.
Read my tagline.. now re-read it. If we could do away with drivers, we would have done so long ago because there is no greater pain than having idiot users complain about drivers, call tech support because their drivers are corrupt because their OS is an infested pool of shite, or whine about how your expensive gadget doesn't work on their exotic "look what I made" OS derivative. Trust me, if all hardware companies could get rid of the software part of their product, they'd do it in a heartbeat. They can't.
What does a network driver do ? It takes your data, slices it into packet-sized chunks, adds error protection/recovery, keeps tabs on what's going where and how much, then gives you a shout whenever it's done or wants more data. It does this through a mostly standardized interface, but each network device has its peculiarities and unique features. The drivers are what presents these varieties in a consistent way to whatever software or OS wants to play with them.
If you want an example of what we did before drivers were "in", look ten years ago with sound cards. You never knew if a game that supported "Sound Blaster" would work properly on your "Sound Blaster Pro".. much less on your "Sound Blaster 16". Why the hell not ? All three are capable of digitized sound and FM synthesis, so why does the game that runs on the grainy, 8bit mono 22khz SB not work on the 16bit stereo 44khz SB16 ? Because it was coded directly to the original hardware with no indirection whatsoever. How bad was it ? We actually had Sound Blaster emulators for the Sound Blaster AWE64, that were essentially device drivers that presented an SB1 interface and translated those accesses into AWE64 functions.
Feigning ignorance for a moment, let's pretend all sound cards could present a consistent interface no matter what the brand or model was. We'd still need a "universal driver" to manage our sound, right ? Something like DirectX, or OpenAL, or ALSA, or ESound..... whatever you call it, we'd still have some means to pander to our laziness as programmers.
As much as I'd like to see an operating system that can "figure stuff out" on its own, it's just not gonna happen in this decade. It would require close collaboration between software developers and hardware designers.. collaboration usually means a governing body that charges fees for certification, a governing body means something that can be manipulated to favor the interests of whoever has the most money to throw around. From that perspective, it is a doomed concept.
Now if something like the Linux community could come up with open-source hardware type stuff.. like a standard for sound cards, video cards, TV tuners.. and enough friendly supporters to manufacture compliant devices and fully commit to the cause, maybe over time we could see a transition if the project turns out beneficial to all parties involved. No drivers means no need to pay a cocky driver developer team the big bucks.. no more "I need a network driver but I can't get on the net" chicken-and-egg bullshit.. no more Billco having to hold some redneck's hand while I have them reinstall the drivers on their X-brand-name spyware-infested PC. Yeah it would be sweet! But it would take a big commitment from everyone.
Why don't we enlarge the form factor ? We have 5.25" optical drives but 3.5" hard drives... 50% larger diameter should translate to roughly 125% greater surface area.. minus the hub and whatnot, we're still looking at roughly doubling the size of the platters. I'll take my 1.5 TB SATA drive thank you.. ten of those in RAID-5 and I could have a dozen TB's of HD pr0n.
Nah, that's why we need a new police force, one that's not paid by the government. In the good old days we called them bikers, but now even they have gone loony. When someone steps out of line, they need to be knocked back into place.
I think this "artist" should do like other shammy artists and get a goddamned job. I'm usually one to see beauty in ugly-ass technological creations.. hell I'll even admire code if it shows a curious attention to detail, but this stuff.. bleh! It looks like "cat /dev/urandom | povray"
Actually I've come up with more inspiring images just smacking my head against the keyboard.
I work in tech support, and the biggest mistake new agents make is trying to troubleshoot parts when they should really be troubleshooting symptoms. The same applies here.
Gaming addiction is no different that drug abuse, youth violence, sexual misconduct, disobedience.. they all point to the same root cause: ineffective parenting. To hell with this clinic for game addiction; I say open a clinic for bad parenting. Prescribe therapy, dictate behavioral changes, heck just bend the parents over and give them the strap for all I care, they have failed. The latest fad is "helicopter parents", the ones who give their kids cell phones so they can check up on them ten times a day. I can tell you that if one of my students, I don't care if they're 8 or 18, whips out a phone during class to answer his pea-brained mother, I'm picking up the phone and giving a lesson on four letter words. There is no greater shame than seeing a young adult who can't do anything for themselves and has no authority, no independence, are living under mommy's skirt after high school. Heck I remember thinking 18 years was too long a wait for me to become legally independent.. a fifth of my life gone already and I hadn't yet seen the forest for the trees.
In a world where technology is bringing information to the masses, I would expect people to learn faster, to be more versatile and successful, to waste less time on childhood and more time doing interesting things. Instead we're seeing people age 25 who still can't hold a full time job, don't know what they want to do for a career, can't drive, can't cook, can't clean.. oh they can read the fuck out of a textbook though.. then a year later they're having kids and polluting the earth with yet more failed humans. Where the hell did humanity go wrong ?
I think this 100$ laptop gimmick is a load of crap. Kids don't need laptops, kids need to have the snot beat out of them so they can turn into productive, successful adults like the generations that preceded them. I'd rather see the governments spend 100$ on parenting classes for young expecting parents. Toss them 30-40 of them in a classroom, pay some loony teacher and yell some sense into these baby mamas. Better yet, toss them in the classroom, throw in some dynamite and run like a girl.. the world is overpopulated with morons, let's fix the people that are here before bringing new cletuses into the world.
The greatest flaw with the one-laptop-per-child idea is that we're looking at it as mature, responsible adults. Kids don't share the same attitude, and they certainly don't care about having a laptop everywhere they go. These things will probably get smashed, stolen or sold within weeks after the kids get a hold of them.
How thoughtful of the japanese researchers to be applying their time, money and intellect toward solving a problem that didn't exist in the first place. Are you sure there isn't a whoremongering american behind it who's just looking to get free escorts at the casino ? Hell, get Ron Popeil to sell this useless gadget at 1 in the morning and you'll get a second one absolutely free when you buy the magic orange juicer.
Really.. if my job for the past few years had been to research writing on water, I would have hanged myself by now. What a ridiculous waste of resources.
Wow now I feel special.. I'm very annoyed by the rainbow effect, I see it everywhere, whether it's a projector or television.. I've tried the high-end ones that are supposed to spin faster, still no improvement. Samsung is coming out with triple-DLP units within the next few months, they've already been announced, but at the consumer end it's likely that 3-DLP will cost as much as Plasma TV's. I'm playing the waiting game as I'm in the market for a large (60"+) TV. A projector could be an option, but I have yet to see an affordable projector that supports high resolutions as I will invariably be hooking it up to my PC some of the time.
How long till Bush tries to stick a goddamned american flag on that rock ? Is he going to blow something up to justify it too ?
Oh, nevermind. Already been done.