I must say, rumble is great in some situations, like the heartbeat in Silent Hill telling you just how damaged you are, without having a stupid 100% health gauge on-screen. I also really REALLY like it in certain racing titles like Forza Motorsport and a few others, as it gives you extra information about your car's traction, much like a real car would convey. Try it with a "Momo Force" steering wheel controller, it's a whole new experience!
For everything else, rumble is like that annoying "ding" sound they play whenever you perform some generic action. It has no purpose, except to shut up that dumb young guy who was complaining about the "lack of rumble". Do I really care that my gamepad shakes like the Pope whenever Sonic the Hedgehog walks into a wall ? Do I gain any advantage from buzzing the hell out of my fingers whenever I score a slam dunk in NBA Jam ? If anything, the gratuitous vibration becomes tiresome and makes my hands sore after a short while, so I end up turning the feature off in most games.
Rumble.. blah. Make it optional, with a big red switch on the controller to shut it off at will. Make it into a plug-in accessory for all I care. Just make sure it's built into every racing wheel and I will love your console like a crackbaby.
I'm sure GameGirlAdvance would argue that last point to death. If there's one thing that's consistent with women, they giggle with glee whenever the controller rumbles. I don't care if it's a sexual thing or not, it's the cheesy kind of "fun" women love. We guys, we're just not tactile enough I guess.
The best part about this breakthrough is that we will lose 15 times more data when a tape fails.
Tape backups are great for backups, they just aren't too good at restoring. I just wish hard drive manufacturers would use stronger plastic for SATA connectors, since those use a standardized layout and could potentially be used for hard drive libraries. At less than 50 cents per gigabyte right now, hard drives aren't bad at all. Pay a little more and you can get the shiny new 750gb units for greater density, soon to be 1000gb+ per drive. Yeah, screw tapes!
Would Sony use a burnt DVD for display ? Possible (hey, there's idiot students everywhere), but unlikely. Would Sony use a regular DVD for comparison versus Blu-Ray ? Certainly!
It's not like they have to fake it, they have the drive. They probably have demo content too. I'm pretty sure Blu-Ray video is encoded at a much higher resolution than boring old 720x480 Mpeg-2 DVD. Now maybe if our overzealous reporter had taken a moment to actually examine the demo and see the difference, maybe even chat with the Sony media monkey, perhaps he would have come up with a more valid article. Or maybe he did all that, but decided the notoriety of his lies would be a bigger hit.
Every Nintendo console has been released at 200$. That's their magic price point, any less and people will think it's used or dated, any more and they will skip it. Look at the Xbox 360; I still refuse to buy one because it's too friggin expensive. I'd rather blow 400$ on a Geforce 7800 for my PC. It's just too much for a game console given the limited selection and general expectation that I will only truly enjoy a handful of titles.
Nintendo on the other hand, sells a cheap console but churns out games at decent prices so you can build a nice collection of time wasters. The guilt factor is much less.
The biggest problem with Linux is its target market. Some people want Joe Q. Random to pick up Linux and fight the power, but the people who are actually using it right now want it to be more geeky and tweakable.
The landscape is different with Windows, as the perceived complexity of troubleshooting Windows exists partly to support the billion dollar tech support industry. I mean seriously, if your PC was entirely self-managed and did its own seamless driver updates, virus-proofing and maintenance, a lot of those gouging nerds on wheels would have to find a REAL job. If we make Linux so easy and idiot-proof that it just works out of the box, and keeps working without divine intervention, the very geek gods who make Linux possible would probably grow tired of the idiot-proofing legwork that separates them from what they love: hacking bleeding-edge features.
Correction: Lots of people DISABLE the ugly URL display bar because, well, it's ugly. I almost wish the URL would be displayed in a little bubble whenever I point to something, but that behavior is relegated to the mostly-useless ALT tag. In fact many sites use Javascript to fudge the status bar URL display anyway, sometimes to mislead, sometimes just for cosmetic purposes (like piping outbound links through a hit counter).
It was in Japan that I first heard the word "infomania," a 2005 coinage by Hewlett-Packard, whose study last May showed that compulsive e-mailing and text-messaging do more damage to the I.Q. than regular marijuana use.
Just being a part of today's fast-paced bureaucracy is more damaging to the I.Q. than any controlled substance in existence. Nothing is more destructive than being shoved through the screwed-up consumerist system that's growing ever-further removed from its roots. The fact that I'm kind of seduced by the concept of these digital-immersion cafés is puzzling, yet I have been "living digitally" for nearly a decade. It's a shame this isolated existence is still limited to entertainment. For most people, work means wasting a substantial portion of your day commuting, only to do some faceless job in a cubicle whose only significance is to bring you closer to people who will disturb and distract you.
Hell, if surgeons can perform their work remotely with a TV and robot arms, why the hell can't I do tech support at home in my underwear, or write my 8 hours of code at a cozy cyber café with plentiful food & drink a mere footsteps away. A cube farm is a cube farm, doesn't matter what building it's in, it's a desk with a computer and a phone; I don't see why most office jobs couldn't be abstracted to any desk+PC+phone setup anywhere on the grid. Why do we have to squeeze in traffic every day, burning this so-called "precious" gasoline ? Japan has always been an early adopter of technology, they seem to understand it better than we do. I hope this type of reality-disconnect café concept grows beyond the entertainment sphere. Webcam, phone/headset, internet.. you can hear me, you can see me, now let me do my work!
Friend, I wish I had mod points. Now I'm a DDR freak, yet I'm not much of a dancer. I tried DrumMania and thoroughly enjoyed it, yet I suck at drumming. I played Guitar Freaks, and well I sucked ass at that one, but it was still kind of fun. I've been trying to learn guitar on-and-off for 20 years, I just can't do it.
The great appeal of these music games is that they're simple and easy to pick up. They tell you exactly what to do, you just have to get your rhythm down and hit the buttons with proper timing. Learning a real instrument inevitably requires learning at least a minimum of musical theory that must be committed to memory, then practiced until it becomes fused with your subconscious mind. Great musicians just kind of "know" their scale progressions, and what sounds right together chord-wise. Playing Guitar Hero you can shut off your brain (the part responsible for stress headaches), and just flick buttons while watching an excessively gratifying display with a goofy engrish announcer cheering you on.
If anyone ever came out with a realistic music game that actually teaches you to play, most people would play once, fail horribly and never play it again because the game didn't give them satisfaction. We like games because they give us easy feedback on our progress and improvement. Your score gets better, you play longer, you get to see/hear new things later in the game, but most importantly that progress happens quickly, keeping you interested. Learning an instrument takes years, for the technically-minded among us it can even seem like a horrid waste of time, we're so used to instant gratification and having machines do the "hard" work for us. Then there's the problem of coming up with music to play, either by composing your own, or learning someone else's work (then dealing with the grueling comparisons).
Yes and no. It's true that asking a web browser to become an application client is a deadly blunder, but the underlying problem is that few sites today serve static content anymore. It's all about logins and forums and customization. Essentially we're going back to the 80's and 90's with BBS'es, where each sysop would painstakingly tweak and customize their server to offer a unique experience. Myself, I ran Maximus and I had pretty much rewritten every function using the MEX scripting language built into the BBS software, though I am known for being a masochistic code poet.
With Ajax, the corporate sites want to use it to extend their online service portfolio. The vanity sites want to use it for the coolness factor. I'm actually surprised it took this long for Ajax to catch on. I was doing funky tricks with Javascript years ago, specifically in 1998 for a spiffy navbar on my personal site, then a newer style in 2003 for thumbnail galleries a-la Flickr streams, browsing pictures quickly without reloading the static HTML template.
It's a fair bit of extra work getting all the browsers to play nice, but it's easier than inventing a standard for thin-client apps that will please everyone.
There are so many problems with this, off the top of my head:
1. Power companies don't know shit about ISP operations, at least cable/bell have had fifteen years to start figuring things out.
2. Transmitting anything over power lines induces tons of noise because you're asking a low-frequency transport to cope with a high-frequency carrier. Noise going INTO the electrical system will cause things like power supplies, clocks, motors and many other devices to either work harder (and wear out) because of "dirty" power, or deviate out of sync because they're no longer seeing a clean, predictable sine wave. One early sign of dirty power is when power bricks get too hot, or your laptop's power supply shuts off (voltage/current/temp protection).
3. Noise also leaks OUT of electrical wiring because most of it is only electrically shielded for safety, which involves just a non-conductive insulator. Take that 60hz and crank it up to the 35Mhz range, you need a whole different kind of insulator to keep noise from radiating out the cables like antennae.
I know fiber is a pain in the ass to implement, but we're going to need it sooner or later, might as well get those strands buried and hooked up to our homes instead of sinking resources in half-assed stop-gap solutions like BPL. This is little more than the power companies being jealous of the telecoms.
Actually it's the "Start Up" program group, which means background tasks and stuff. Obviously when you have half-a-zillion background apps sucking CPU like only poorly-written Windows apps can do, you're going to lose some gaming performance.
I don't game much, yet I strip my background processes to the bare minimum.. If nothing is wiggling onscreen, and I'm not running any apps, I want that CPU activity to stay at Zero. Windows follows the "include everything" school of thought, loading services that most people never use, but for that odd windows admin who uses it in a Fortune-500 network, it's there waiting for him. Better for MS to waste CPU cycles invisibly, than have to deal with the average shit-brained corporate Windows IT guy trying to fix a problem he doesn't understand, thus can't explain, involving a daemon whose name he doesn't even know.
Buddy, why do you think CPUs crash when they're overclocked too far ? Standard practice in overclocking is to push it 'till it fails, then bring it back a few notches. The problem is that a vast majority of overclockers are so speed-hungry that they will push it to the very edge of stability. Today, your PD805 is stable at 4.1ghz, tomorrow might be a hotter day, just enough to push your CPU over the edge. Or maybe it's your power supply that's borderline, and a week from now will have weakened from the constant load and start wavering on the voltages.
I overclock just for kicks, but I do run my machine through extensive testing to make sure it's 100% stable. My AMD dual core is running at 2.3ghz (stock is 2.0), and has been for 6 months without a hitch. I could boot at 2.4ghz, but when both cores were fully stressed it would start popping minor errors every few minutes, so I pulled it back a little. Now I could have invested in a higher-end power supply and aftermarket CPU cooler, but we're really just talking about 200 or 300mhz, a less than 10% difference that I could have gotten by spending the same money on a higher-rated processor.
There's little gained by overclocking if you spend all your time losing data and rebooting. That said, the tinkerer in me would love to get his hands on a phase-change cooling tower like a Vapochill or Prometeia, simply because that becomes an investment that you can carry over to future PCs, and I would actually benefit from having a 4ghz dual-core AMD:) Or maybe even a 4ghz quad dual-core Opteron rig. Mmmmm.. 32ghz *drool*
I think the underlying problem is how everyone wants to be unique "just like everyone else". It used to be that if you wanted fly clothing, you'd sit at a sewing machine and get creative. Nowadays people just want to buy creativity. Look at all the crappy tuner cars on the road with their me-too sticker gallery. You go to a car show and you see 100 of those idiot white nigger kids, and a handful of truly artistic vehicles with airbrushing and pinstriping, chromed manifolds etc. Then you get the fashion industry that's all about indie.. mass-produced "indie". Take a piece of jewelry that looks like it was designed by a rabid gorilla, attach a picture of a chubby country-style "artist" girl with a soap-opera life story, then sell trailer loads to The Bay and JC Penney for mega profit. Or take a flimsy bright-pink made-in-Malaysia handbag, poke a few holes in it and put band-aids or duct-tape over the wound, stamp "La Sapée" on it in ShelleyVolante 24-point, then add a digit to the price and you've got the next bimbo fad.
The world is so lost in consumerism that most people can't even remember what it was like when advertising didn't run our lives.
10 mil.. bleh.. any bets on who's going to "win" this ? Like everything in today's world, it's not so much a contest as it is a thinly-veiled grant wrapped in gobs of PR. 10 million is peanuts for anything energy-related. The point of this exercise is to single out some Bush-favored company and give them tons of government-mandated press. The money doesn't matter to any of the major players, but all the peons still thing 10 mil is significant in today's world, so they tune in to the 6 o'clock news and let the product placements begin!
On a related note, this reminds me of research previously done linking finger-length ratios with things like testosterone levels, sexual orientation, and male aggressiveness.
Hey I could be a great supporter of that research. I have very large and long fingers, medically dangerous high testerone levels, progressive sexual orientation *rimshot*, and unrivalled aggressiveness. Where my paid testimonial ?:P
While our crack team of experts work to dig up the sketchy source of this disinformation, I would like to announce that researchers at U of Billco have discovered that men have a remarkable ability to assess a women's bitchiness levels and their interest in no-string-attached sex merely by looking at their facial features. 69 percent of men were able to correctly identify psychos based on early skin wrinkling and fake tans. Saliva samples were also taken from each woman in the study and tested for rabies with a $20-a-pop test. Of course, the study did not look at what women were able to tell about men by conniving with their exes.
As the article points out, if Microsoft truly thinks something is amiss "it sics the Business Software Alliance on the company. It doesn't turn the matter over to one of its sales managers".
I don't see much of a difference. The BSA is just a FUD agency anyways. They have no authority over anyone, you can very well have your security guards throw them out as they would any other trespassers. The BSA is paid by Microsoft and the other big cheeses to spread fear, but the only authority in any licensing dispute, or piracy claim for that matter, is a court of law.
From what little I know, SGI used to make kickass workstations. I know, because around a decade ago I used a small cluster of four Indy workstations for audio work. The MIPS architecture was a joy to code on, compared to kludgy x86. They were a heck of a lot faster too.
Fast-forward to today: What does SGI make ? What does anyone make that comes anywhere near the price/performance of commodity PC hardware ? Even for high-end workstations, it's hard to beat Opteron-based systems. Doing lots of rendering ? Go for a quad dual-core opteron for roughly 10k, and toss in a FireGL or Quadro with 4 or 8 gigs of ram. If you're not technically-minded, you can get a similar Boxx Tech system for 20 grand that will knock your socks off, with top-notch service to go with it.
SGI is no longer king of the workstation market. They need to find some other niche to satisfy, or hop on the bandwagon like Sun and start selling Opteron beasts.
If experience has taught me anything, it's that you can't cut someone off "gently". It's an all-or-nothing.. if you don't do it right, they will jam their crowbar into whatever little crack you leave open and keep coming back until you turn into an angry, violent, quiche-eating trainwreck. Want someone else's opinion ? Find a mechanic! Tradespeople are stuck in the same boat as techies, they're always getting hounded by friends and relatives for free labour. Now I don't mind helping out a family member if they're nice about it, but if it turns into a twice-weekly affair of spyware/virus cleaning and other acts of stupidity, I just make myself unavailable.
Some people just take and take and take until you cut them off, that's just how they were raised. When I was single, the best way to get a computer tuned up was to invite me over for dinner; you're computer illiterate, I'm kitchen illiterate : fair trade. For those people who bring nothing to the table, they're just going to have to pay up.
I've been a Coca-Cola junkie since my dad dipped my pacifier in it as a toddler. I drink between 5 and 10 cans a day. I just switched to Diet Pepsi a couple months ago, for healthy and convenience reasons since the lady drinks the same stuff, we can easily stock up when it's on special.
To tell you the truth, I don't care anymore. In the first week or two, yeah there was something "missing", probably the sugar ups and downs that were making me feel crappy in the first place. I'll admit the diet stuff isn't as rich, that's a given, but really once you get used to it, the real pop seems almost TOO rich. My concession is that if I'm dining out, I'll usually have regular pop, almost as a treat.
I came to the conclusion that the only reason I drink pop instead of plain old water is because I'm used to tasting something, anything; also partly because water doesn't come in a convenient can. You could replace Pepsi with Sprite, or Dr Pepper, even the cheap store brands. Most of the times when I'm drinking, I don't care what I'm drinking, my attention is focused on the computer or TV, or whatever work I'm doing. On the other hand, if I'm at Denny's stuffing my face, I want the richest, sweetest, most invigorating drink possible, so I get a bigass Sprite with cherry syrup:D
That's why I started out by saying I've been an early adopter forever. I'm going to take a gamble based on my own gut. I didn't get in like to buy an Xbox 360, and I didn't race to Best Buy for a day-early HD-DVD player, but I will be buying the first Blu-Ray PC drive I can get my hands on, because it represents a good jump forward in terms of storage capacity and performance, the two things that matter the most to me as a computer enthusiast. What happens with the movie releases is of low importance to me, and we will most likely end up with dual-format playback devices a few years down the line so it will be a moot point for everyone else.
If everyone else just sits pretty and waits for the dust to settle, that leaves enthusiastic people like myself to be responsible for choosing the winner. I'm perfectly fine with that, I've been through the process before and I'm still standing.
More like "what part of the 21st century did you not attend ?"
It's now possible to write a nice generic business app with very little code because someone somewhere realized they're all the same. Pick up VB.Net or Delphi or if you like overpriced proprietary single-vendor lock-in, Powerbuilder. Hell, you can design your SQL tables and relationships, point the IDE to your database and it will build a skeleton app for you in a split-second, then you just tweak the interface and add a few dozen lines of logic and branches where needed. These methods have matured to the point where they're very reliable and consistent. They simply capitalize on the prevalent design patterns of the business-app industry: Get input, search database, display results, apply changes.. lather, rinse, repeat! Most RAD tools include a report engine, be it Crystal Reports or Rave or any other, they're all pretty much the same. What more do you need really ?
My decision has already been made, regardless of what happens in the near future. A little about me: I'm not an industry insider, I don't know what secrets are cooking in either camp. I am an early adopter, the kind of guy who buys burners when they're 1000$ and the blanks cost 20$. I'm going with Blu-Ray.. why ? Because it seems that Blu-Ray burners will come out first, and offer greater capacity which makes them very interesting for desktop backups and the good ol' mega huge warez/mp3/pr0n compilation. The fact that Pioneer has had a Blu-Ray burner ready for several months now has a LOT to do with my decision.
I don't care what the format wars decide for the living room. I care what the formats can do for me today, on my PC where I do actual work. If Blu-Ray ends up trumping HD-DVD, hooray for me, if not then I'll just buy another burner if I really really want one. Seeing as I'm moving away from DVD discs entirely, and relying more on media-center functionality, I don't really care what the studios decide. I will end up ripping them to hard disk either way.
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I must say, rumble is great in some situations, like the heartbeat in Silent Hill telling you just how damaged you are, without having a stupid 100% health gauge on-screen. I also really REALLY like it in certain racing titles like Forza Motorsport and a few others, as it gives you extra information about your car's traction, much like a real car would convey. Try it with a "Momo Force" steering wheel controller, it's a whole new experience!
For everything else, rumble is like that annoying "ding" sound they play whenever you perform some generic action. It has no purpose, except to shut up that dumb young guy who was complaining about the "lack of rumble". Do I really care that my gamepad shakes like the Pope whenever Sonic the Hedgehog walks into a wall ? Do I gain any advantage from buzzing the hell out of my fingers whenever I score a slam dunk in NBA Jam ? If anything, the gratuitous vibration becomes tiresome and makes my hands sore after a short while, so I end up turning the feature off in most games.
Rumble.. blah. Make it optional, with a big red switch on the controller to shut it off at will. Make it into a plug-in accessory for all I care. Just make sure it's built into every racing wheel and I will love your console like a crackbaby.
I'm sure GameGirlAdvance would argue that last point to death. If there's one thing that's consistent with women, they giggle with glee whenever the controller rumbles. I don't care if it's a sexual thing or not, it's the cheesy kind of "fun" women love. We guys, we're just not tactile enough I guess.
The best part about this breakthrough is that we will lose 15 times more data when a tape fails.
Tape backups are great for backups, they just aren't too good at restoring. I just wish hard drive manufacturers would use stronger plastic for SATA connectors, since those use a standardized layout and could potentially be used for hard drive libraries. At less than 50 cents per gigabyte right now, hard drives aren't bad at all. Pay a little more and you can get the shiny new 750gb units for greater density, soon to be 1000gb+ per drive. Yeah, screw tapes!
Dumbass journalist alert!!!
Repeat after me: DVD is not HD.
Would Sony use a burnt DVD for display ? Possible (hey, there's idiot students everywhere), but unlikely. Would Sony use a regular DVD for comparison versus Blu-Ray ? Certainly!
It's not like they have to fake it, they have the drive. They probably have demo content too. I'm pretty sure Blu-Ray video is encoded at a much higher resolution than boring old 720x480 Mpeg-2 DVD. Now maybe if our overzealous reporter had taken a moment to actually examine the demo and see the difference, maybe even chat with the Sony media monkey, perhaps he would have come up with a more valid article. Or maybe he did all that, but decided the notoriety of his lies would be a bigger hit.
Every Nintendo console has been released at 200$. That's their magic price point, any less and people will think it's used or dated, any more and they will skip it. Look at the Xbox 360; I still refuse to buy one because it's too friggin expensive. I'd rather blow 400$ on a Geforce 7800 for my PC. It's just too much for a game console given the limited selection and general expectation that I will only truly enjoy a handful of titles.
Nintendo on the other hand, sells a cheap console but churns out games at decent prices so you can build a nice collection of time wasters. The guilt factor is much less.
Reach out and hit somebody: the perfect application for my USB boxing glove accessory!
The biggest problem with Linux is its target market. Some people want Joe Q. Random to pick up Linux and fight the power, but the people who are actually using it right now want it to be more geeky and tweakable.
The landscape is different with Windows, as the perceived complexity of troubleshooting Windows exists partly to support the billion dollar tech support industry. I mean seriously, if your PC was entirely self-managed and did its own seamless driver updates, virus-proofing and maintenance, a lot of those gouging nerds on wheels would have to find a REAL job. If we make Linux so easy and idiot-proof that it just works out of the box, and keeps working without divine intervention, the very geek gods who make Linux possible would probably grow tired of the idiot-proofing legwork that separates them from what they love: hacking bleeding-edge features.
Correction: Lots of people DISABLE the ugly URL display bar because, well, it's ugly. I almost wish the URL would be displayed in a little bubble whenever I point to something, but that behavior is relegated to the mostly-useless ALT tag. In fact many sites use Javascript to fudge the status bar URL display anyway, sometimes to mislead, sometimes just for cosmetic purposes (like piping outbound links through a hit counter).
Just being a part of today's fast-paced bureaucracy is more damaging to the I.Q. than any controlled substance in existence. Nothing is more destructive than being shoved through the screwed-up consumerist system that's growing ever-further removed from its roots. The fact that I'm kind of seduced by the concept of these digital-immersion cafés is puzzling, yet I have been "living digitally" for nearly a decade. It's a shame this isolated existence is still limited to entertainment. For most people, work means wasting a substantial portion of your day commuting, only to do some faceless job in a cubicle whose only significance is to bring you closer to people who will disturb and distract you.
Hell, if surgeons can perform their work remotely with a TV and robot arms, why the hell can't I do tech support at home in my underwear, or write my 8 hours of code at a cozy cyber café with plentiful food & drink a mere footsteps away. A cube farm is a cube farm, doesn't matter what building it's in, it's a desk with a computer and a phone; I don't see why most office jobs couldn't be abstracted to any desk+PC+phone setup anywhere on the grid. Why do we have to squeeze in traffic every day, burning this so-called "precious" gasoline ? Japan has always been an early adopter of technology, they seem to understand it better than we do. I hope this type of reality-disconnect café concept grows beyond the entertainment sphere. Webcam, phone/headset, internet.. you can hear me, you can see me, now let me do my work!
Friend, I wish I had mod points. Now I'm a DDR freak, yet I'm not much of a dancer. I tried DrumMania and thoroughly enjoyed it, yet I suck at drumming. I played Guitar Freaks, and well I sucked ass at that one, but it was still kind of fun. I've been trying to learn guitar on-and-off for 20 years, I just can't do it.
The great appeal of these music games is that they're simple and easy to pick up. They tell you exactly what to do, you just have to get your rhythm down and hit the buttons with proper timing. Learning a real instrument inevitably requires learning at least a minimum of musical theory that must be committed to memory, then practiced until it becomes fused with your subconscious mind. Great musicians just kind of "know" their scale progressions, and what sounds right together chord-wise. Playing Guitar Hero you can shut off your brain (the part responsible for stress headaches), and just flick buttons while watching an excessively gratifying display with a goofy engrish announcer cheering you on.
If anyone ever came out with a realistic music game that actually teaches you to play, most people would play once, fail horribly and never play it again because the game didn't give them satisfaction. We like games because they give us easy feedback on our progress and improvement. Your score gets better, you play longer, you get to see/hear new things later in the game, but most importantly that progress happens quickly, keeping you interested. Learning an instrument takes years, for the technically-minded among us it can even seem like a horrid waste of time, we're so used to instant gratification and having machines do the "hard" work for us. Then there's the problem of coming up with music to play, either by composing your own, or learning someone else's work (then dealing with the grueling comparisons).
Guitar Hero is a good thing, trust me.
Yes and no. It's true that asking a web browser to become an application client is a deadly blunder, but the underlying problem is that few sites today serve static content anymore. It's all about logins and forums and customization. Essentially we're going back to the 80's and 90's with BBS'es, where each sysop would painstakingly tweak and customize their server to offer a unique experience. Myself, I ran Maximus and I had pretty much rewritten every function using the MEX scripting language built into the BBS software, though I am known for being a masochistic code poet.
With Ajax, the corporate sites want to use it to extend their online service portfolio. The vanity sites want to use it for the coolness factor. I'm actually surprised it took this long for Ajax to catch on. I was doing funky tricks with Javascript years ago, specifically in 1998 for a spiffy navbar on my personal site, then a newer style in 2003 for thumbnail galleries a-la Flickr streams, browsing pictures quickly without reloading the static HTML template.
It's a fair bit of extra work getting all the browsers to play nice, but it's easier than inventing a standard for thin-client apps that will please everyone.
There are so many problems with this, off the top of my head:
1. Power companies don't know shit about ISP operations, at least cable/bell have had fifteen years to start figuring things out.
2. Transmitting anything over power lines induces tons of noise because you're asking a low-frequency transport to cope with a high-frequency carrier. Noise going INTO the electrical system will cause things like power supplies, clocks, motors and many other devices to either work harder (and wear out) because of "dirty" power, or deviate out of sync because they're no longer seeing a clean, predictable sine wave. One early sign of dirty power is when power bricks get too hot, or your laptop's power supply shuts off (voltage/current/temp protection).
3. Noise also leaks OUT of electrical wiring because most of it is only electrically shielded for safety, which involves just a non-conductive insulator. Take that 60hz and crank it up to the 35Mhz range, you need a whole different kind of insulator to keep noise from radiating out the cables like antennae.
I know fiber is a pain in the ass to implement, but we're going to need it sooner or later, might as well get those strands buried and hooked up to our homes instead of sinking resources in half-assed stop-gap solutions like BPL. This is little more than the power companies being jealous of the telecoms.
Actually it's the "Start Up" program group, which means background tasks and stuff. Obviously when you have half-a-zillion background apps sucking CPU like only poorly-written Windows apps can do, you're going to lose some gaming performance.
I don't game much, yet I strip my background processes to the bare minimum.. If nothing is wiggling onscreen, and I'm not running any apps, I want that CPU activity to stay at Zero. Windows follows the "include everything" school of thought, loading services that most people never use, but for that odd windows admin who uses it in a Fortune-500 network, it's there waiting for him. Better for MS to waste CPU cycles invisibly, than have to deal with the average shit-brained corporate Windows IT guy trying to fix a problem he doesn't understand, thus can't explain, involving a daemon whose name he doesn't even know.
Buddy, why do you think CPUs crash when they're overclocked too far ? Standard practice in overclocking is to push it 'till it fails, then bring it back a few notches. The problem is that a vast majority of overclockers are so speed-hungry that they will push it to the very edge of stability. Today, your PD805 is stable at 4.1ghz, tomorrow might be a hotter day, just enough to push your CPU over the edge. Or maybe it's your power supply that's borderline, and a week from now will have weakened from the constant load and start wavering on the voltages.
:) Or maybe even a 4ghz quad dual-core Opteron rig. Mmmmm.. 32ghz *drool*
I overclock just for kicks, but I do run my machine through extensive testing to make sure it's 100% stable. My AMD dual core is running at 2.3ghz (stock is 2.0), and has been for 6 months without a hitch. I could boot at 2.4ghz, but when both cores were fully stressed it would start popping minor errors every few minutes, so I pulled it back a little. Now I could have invested in a higher-end power supply and aftermarket CPU cooler, but we're really just talking about 200 or 300mhz, a less than 10% difference that I could have gotten by spending the same money on a higher-rated processor.
There's little gained by overclocking if you spend all your time losing data and rebooting. That said, the tinkerer in me would love to get his hands on a phase-change cooling tower like a Vapochill or Prometeia, simply because that becomes an investment that you can carry over to future PCs, and I would actually benefit from having a 4ghz dual-core AMD
I think the underlying problem is how everyone wants to be unique "just like everyone else". It used to be that if you wanted fly clothing, you'd sit at a sewing machine and get creative. Nowadays people just want to buy creativity. Look at all the crappy tuner cars on the road with their me-too sticker gallery. You go to a car show and you see 100 of those idiot white nigger kids, and a handful of truly artistic vehicles with airbrushing and pinstriping, chromed manifolds etc. Then you get the fashion industry that's all about indie.. mass-produced "indie". Take a piece of jewelry that looks like it was designed by a rabid gorilla, attach a picture of a chubby country-style "artist" girl with a soap-opera life story, then sell trailer loads to The Bay and JC Penney for mega profit. Or take a flimsy bright-pink made-in-Malaysia handbag, poke a few holes in it and put band-aids or duct-tape over the wound, stamp "La Sapée" on it in ShelleyVolante 24-point, then add a digit to the price and you've got the next bimbo fad.
The world is so lost in consumerism that most people can't even remember what it was like when advertising didn't run our lives.
10 mil.. bleh.. any bets on who's going to "win" this ? Like everything in today's world, it's not so much a contest as it is a thinly-veiled grant wrapped in gobs of PR. 10 million is peanuts for anything energy-related. The point of this exercise is to single out some Bush-favored company and give them tons of government-mandated press. The money doesn't matter to any of the major players, but all the peons still thing 10 mil is significant in today's world, so they tune in to the 6 o'clock news and let the product placements begin!
On a related note, this reminds me of research previously done linking finger-length ratios with things like testosterone levels, sexual orientation, and male aggressiveness.
:P
Hey I could be a great supporter of that research. I have very large and long fingers, medically dangerous high testerone levels, progressive sexual orientation *rimshot*, and unrivalled aggressiveness. Where my paid testimonial ?
While our crack team of experts work to dig up the sketchy source of this disinformation, I would like to announce that researchers at U of Billco have discovered that men have a remarkable ability to assess a women's bitchiness levels and their interest in no-string-attached sex merely by looking at their facial features. 69 percent of men were able to correctly identify psychos based on early skin wrinkling and fake tans. Saliva samples were also taken from each woman in the study and tested for rabies with a $20-a-pop test. Of course, the study did not look at what women were able to tell about men by conniving with their exes.
I don't see much of a difference. The BSA is just a FUD agency anyways. They have no authority over anyone, you can very well have your security guards throw them out as they would any other trespassers. The BSA is paid by Microsoft and the other big cheeses to spread fear, but the only authority in any licensing dispute, or piracy claim for that matter, is a court of law.
From what little I know, SGI used to make kickass workstations. I know, because around a decade ago I used a small cluster of four Indy workstations for audio work. The MIPS architecture was a joy to code on, compared to kludgy x86. They were a heck of a lot faster too.
Fast-forward to today: What does SGI make ? What does anyone make that comes anywhere near the price/performance of commodity PC hardware ? Even for high-end workstations, it's hard to beat Opteron-based systems. Doing lots of rendering ? Go for a quad dual-core opteron for roughly 10k, and toss in a FireGL or Quadro with 4 or 8 gigs of ram. If you're not technically-minded, you can get a similar Boxx Tech system for 20 grand that will knock your socks off, with top-notch service to go with it.
SGI is no longer king of the workstation market. They need to find some other niche to satisfy, or hop on the bandwagon like Sun and start selling Opteron beasts.
If experience has taught me anything, it's that you can't cut someone off "gently". It's an all-or-nothing.. if you don't do it right, they will jam their crowbar into whatever little crack you leave open and keep coming back until you turn into an angry, violent, quiche-eating trainwreck. Want someone else's opinion ? Find a mechanic! Tradespeople are stuck in the same boat as techies, they're always getting hounded by friends and relatives for free labour. Now I don't mind helping out a family member if they're nice about it, but if it turns into a twice-weekly affair of spyware/virus cleaning and other acts of stupidity, I just make myself unavailable.
Some people just take and take and take until you cut them off, that's just how they were raised. When I was single, the best way to get a computer tuned up was to invite me over for dinner; you're computer illiterate, I'm kitchen illiterate : fair trade. For those people who bring nothing to the table, they're just going to have to pay up.
I've been a Coca-Cola junkie since my dad dipped my pacifier in it as a toddler. I drink between 5 and 10 cans a day. I just switched to Diet Pepsi a couple months ago, for healthy and convenience reasons since the lady drinks the same stuff, we can easily stock up when it's on special.
:D
To tell you the truth, I don't care anymore. In the first week or two, yeah there was something "missing", probably the sugar ups and downs that were making me feel crappy in the first place. I'll admit the diet stuff isn't as rich, that's a given, but really once you get used to it, the real pop seems almost TOO rich. My concession is that if I'm dining out, I'll usually have regular pop, almost as a treat.
I came to the conclusion that the only reason I drink pop instead of plain old water is because I'm used to tasting something, anything; also partly because water doesn't come in a convenient can. You could replace Pepsi with Sprite, or Dr Pepper, even the cheap store brands. Most of the times when I'm drinking, I don't care what I'm drinking, my attention is focused on the computer or TV, or whatever work I'm doing. On the other hand, if I'm at Denny's stuffing my face, I want the richest, sweetest, most invigorating drink possible, so I get a bigass Sprite with cherry syrup
That's why I started out by saying I've been an early adopter forever. I'm going to take a gamble based on my own gut. I didn't get in like to buy an Xbox 360, and I didn't race to Best Buy for a day-early HD-DVD player, but I will be buying the first Blu-Ray PC drive I can get my hands on, because it represents a good jump forward in terms of storage capacity and performance, the two things that matter the most to me as a computer enthusiast. What happens with the movie releases is of low importance to me, and we will most likely end up with dual-format playback devices a few years down the line so it will be a moot point for everyone else.
If everyone else just sits pretty and waits for the dust to settle, that leaves enthusiastic people like myself to be responsible for choosing the winner. I'm perfectly fine with that, I've been through the process before and I'm still standing.
More like "what part of the 21st century did you not attend ?"
It's now possible to write a nice generic business app with very little code because someone somewhere realized they're all the same. Pick up VB.Net or Delphi or if you like overpriced proprietary single-vendor lock-in, Powerbuilder. Hell, you can design your SQL tables and relationships, point the IDE to your database and it will build a skeleton app for you in a split-second, then you just tweak the interface and add a few dozen lines of logic and branches where needed. These methods have matured to the point where they're very reliable and consistent. They simply capitalize on the prevalent design patterns of the business-app industry: Get input, search database, display results, apply changes.. lather, rinse, repeat! Most RAD tools include a report engine, be it Crystal Reports or Rave or any other, they're all pretty much the same. What more do you need really ?
My decision has already been made, regardless of what happens in the near future. A little about me: I'm not an industry insider, I don't know what secrets are cooking in either camp. I am an early adopter, the kind of guy who buys burners when they're 1000$ and the blanks cost 20$. I'm going with Blu-Ray.. why ? Because it seems that Blu-Ray burners will come out first, and offer greater capacity which makes them very interesting for desktop backups and the good ol' mega huge warez/mp3/pr0n compilation. The fact that Pioneer has had a Blu-Ray burner ready for several months now has a LOT to do with my decision.
I don't care what the format wars decide for the living room. I care what the formats can do for me today, on my PC where I do actual work. If Blu-Ray ends up trumping HD-DVD, hooray for me, if not then I'll just buy another burner if I really really want one. Seeing as I'm moving away from DVD discs entirely, and relying more on media-center functionality, I don't really care what the studios decide. I will end up ripping them to hard disk either way.