20th century economics has taught us that governments cannot control the economy, they can only guide it. The economy is controlled by market forces; the mass will of the people. It is folly to try and "dream of a better system" because the system dictates itself. Even if you could think of something better, the goal could only be to make more money, or else nobody will bother.
I may not be able to "dream of a better system", but I can dream of a better people. I'm sorry that your limited view of our species limits you to beleiving self-motivation is and will always be the only driving factor behind human advancement. I like to think that it IS possible that the desire to better humanity as a whole, as well as to help people can be just as much a driving factor. Astronauts risk their lives not for the money, but because they believe in their work. Teachers teach because they love to educate, not because of any monetary motivation.
You speak of trolling. I say it is just as ignorant to believe that all human progress is driven by greed, and that such a motivation is the only driving factor behind the growth of our economy. I would argue that view is reflective of the fact that our economic system is built in such a way that greed is rewarded whereas good deeds and humility are taken advantage of. People don't know any better. They live in a world where they need to claw tooth and nail just to get by. The greed exhibited in most is reflective of the environment that cultures it. They don't know any better because they don't know better is possible.
And neither do you.
P.S. I've always hated the fact that anyone who finds fault in capitalism is essentially assumed to be a commie. There are other systems, many of which are simply hybrids of the ones we know. My favorite of course is a Meritocracy, and I've yet to see anyone do THAT right. Capitalism comes close, but fails due to corruption in the system...because money, not merit, is the driving factor, people simply cheat the system by "knowing" people, bribing, cheating, using underhanded business tactics, sabotage, whatever it takes to get ahead. A system that purely rewarded merit wouldn't stand for such tactics.
As for their hardware being "grossly overpriced", you haven't actually looked at their lineup in the last several years, have you? We've been over it a million times here, and for a comparable computer (yes, this means no leaving out wireless, firewire, and all of those things Mac users use and take for granted), their consumer line is either in-line with the PC or better (Mac Mini, especially)
The Mac Mini has no PC equivalent. You can't even buy PCs on today's market with laptop-speed hard drives or video cards 3 generations old. You speak of lowballing. What do you call sticking a bunch of old obsolete crap into a small compact box and calling it a PC?
As far as your wireless, firewire, gigabit ethernet rant goes, these things are commonplace on top of the line motherboards these days. Modern PC motherboards like this one come with everything you just mentioned and more. SATA2, built-in raid, PCI-Express, SLI-enabled. You name it, it has it. And that's $170. Say about $100 for 512 megs of ram, $100 for a sound card, $200 for a video card, and $100 for a hard drive. Throw in a processor and a fancy case and you can _very_ easily price an above-average performance machine below $1000 (one equivalent to a "PowerMac" might run $300-400 more. I couldn't imagine a PC being priced any higher than $1500, and that's top of the line. Beyond that you're simply wasting money (ala additional $500 for 3% performance boost)
I wouldn't say Macs are "grossly" overpriced, but overpriced, yes. You're paying for elite snobbery, not for an equivalent performance machine. Check out some of the benchmarks where the AMD 64-bit processors were run head-to-head against the G5s, then look at cost. AMD is still several hundreds of dollars superior to Apple in cost/performance analysis.
sure worked for quake. id knows (and knew) that the pirated copies of quake and even quake 2 would get TONS of people hooked into quake 3 which pioneered the "valid cd-key to play online" concept.
Hate to burst your bubble man, but Starcraft Bnet was running that online cd-key scheme long before Quake 3 was even released.
Re:DVORAK for real world, SysAdmin/Programming use
on
Advocating Dvorak
·
· Score: 1
Dvorak: Total strokes are 14613 and total distance is 19593.6341607972.
QWERTY: Total strokes are 14869 and total distance is 26349.32260203948.
So, there you have it. If you're a UNIX admin who uses QWERTY, you are moving your fingers around 34% more than a Dvorak administrator, at least if you're using commands similar to mine.
For a second there, that sounded like a really sick contest.
7. Loading...
As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
Easy. Just do pre-loading and background-loading. Either you load in advance, or you load in parallel. There's several games that do this kind of smooth transitioning already. There's absolutely NO need to come to a complete halt in gameplay to do loading. It's just poor/lazy/careless programming.
You can abort a fetus for any reason. Most popular reason is the prom dress won't fit right.
The sad thing is that we live in a society where abortion is so widely accepted that something like this would get modded +5 funny instead of being appalling (despite how true it might be)
That 95% -- probably more like 99% -- of Windows fanboys have never tried a Mac, I can well believe. But the reverse? Uh-uh.
That's debatable.
I've met quite a few Mac users who don't even know that Windows now has a built-in firewall. Or that such FREE applications such as Zonealarm existed that do the exact same thing. Or that applications like Stardock's DesktopX exist for full customizable skinning of the Windows desktop environment (if style is your major complaint)...hell, some people have already written Mac OS X skins for their Windows XP machines.
Most Mac zealots are too busy preaching about whatever latest feature to even LOOK to see if said feature already exists as a Windows application.
SIRIUS doesn't just have Stern. Can you say "sports"? Exclusive NFL, exclusive NASCAR soon (ditching XM in favor of SIRIUS, no less), exclusive March Madness... versus XM's exclusive baseball.
SIRIUS has been winning a lot of battles on fronts other than Howard Stern.
Ditching? What a deluded fanboy you are. XM chose to drop the Nascar contract in favor of saving money. Nascar didn't go anywhere. XM decided to let the contract lapse and Sirius picked them up.
This is because XM acts like a responsible business entity that does real market valuations and cost/earnings analysis, whereas Sirius acts like the typical irresponsible dotcom loon and spends spends spends, regardless of whether or not the expense is worth the projected income. Sirius is spending money like MAD and they have nowhere NEAR the numbers OR the growth that XM is showing. The management there is loony. Chucking money at celebrities is not the way to bring people into the fold. Most people listen to radio for music, not for exclusives. Car manufacturer deals are key. XM is dominating in that regard.
And you say Sirius in winning on "other fronts"? Name them. I don't see a single example.
C'mon, dude. The Mac mini is only $500. Apple has put out a product that seems to address your complaints about "a whole bunch of expensive hardware" as a barrier to checking OS X out, and yet you still complain about the barrier that's no longer there.
The Mac mini includes hardware some 3 generations behind modern (such as the 4200 RPM hard drive and the 2 year old video card).
Frankly, for that equipment, I say $500 is overpriced. I bet you could get a crappy eMachine with better/newer parts for cheaper.
I am sick and tired of people linking "good games" to the "mature market."
I did not get this from the parent's poster at all (I don't know why the hell he got marked a troll, he had decent and fairly accurate comments). Maybe YOU're the one taking a bit too personal. He said it would be nice if Nintendo OPENED UP more to the mature market. In other words, if they'd get the hell out of their niche market of rehashing the same characters.
What's wrong with having the fun kiddy games AS WELL AS a segment of realistic games? That's what PS2 does. They have silly games like Katamari Damacy and Lego Star Wars, but they ALSO have mature games. They target MULTIPLE demographic segments of the market, rather than just the cartoony stuff. While it's fun and all, it does get old after awhile and you really do find yourself wanting to do something "real" for once.
For instance, the Grand Turismo/Need for Speed/etc series have been as popular as they have because they're a HUGE demographic of realistic car fanatics out there. What's Nintendo going to win them over with? Mario Kart?
On a side note, I very much enjoy the gamecube and it is without a doubt HANDS-DOWN the best "party" system around
They say that DirectX is entirely backwards compatible, but I tried to play Deus Ex: Invisible War the other day (which was built around DirectX 8.1) and it kept crashing
Pish, I played that game when it was brand new ON DirectX 8.1 and the damn thing still crashed.
It's another example of a rushed-out-the-door poorly coded piece of a game. And believe me, you aren't missing much. It was a travesty compared to its predecessor.
I'm guessing that software companies with any code developers worth a damn can probably write games such that they are backwards compatible.
There is no benefit, as described above, to "getting to a stop light quicker" if it is red; hence the driver behind you has no real reason to be annoyed.
Incorrect.
To provide just one real-world example...there are two lights on the same road near my house that provide a similar scenario. This scenario is: a long stretch of road followed by a light with a short timer. Essentially, you can spot the light from a half mile to a mile away, and most (if not all) travelers on this road are commuters that KNOW it's a short green and a HELL of a long red. Also, knowing the timing of the light, and counting the number of cars waiting ahead at the light, you can estimate how long it has been red, and approximately how long until it changes green. Knowing this, if you increased your speed by about 10 mph upon seeing the red, you could hit the light just as traffic gets going through the green to allow yourself (and the people behind you) to also procede through the light without waiting the 3+ minutes at the red.
This is tried and tested. This is my drive home from work and I pass those two lights _every day_. And without fail, if there's no one in front of me I 90+% of the time catch the green. However, when there's someone in front of me doing 35, 40, or 45 (whatever the slow speed of the day is) who refuses to speed up for the light, I always get the red.
On a side note, getting to a GREEN light quicker is ALSO a benefit, and MUCH more frustrating when people take their time approaching the light. It's ESPECIALLY frustrating when they take their time, and then just BARELY inch through at the yellow and leave a dozen pissed off people stranded behind them.
You speak of "ignorance is bliss". It's THIS kind of ignorance and total disregard for anyone else on the road that causes harsh feelings, road rage, and consequently accidents. The same kind of ignorance held by people who feel they have a right to obstruct traffic and force people to go whatever speed they do. Or the people that jump into one of those lanes of traffic that they KNOW is closing within 2000 feet, and then take their time merging back into traffic. Or the ones that don't use turn signals when turning. Or the ones that don't ACCELERATE off a merge/ramp. Or the ones that come to a complete stop at YIELDS. These people are all ignorant. They think of themselves and no one else on the road. Manners are one of the most important things on the road (I believe second only to thinking AHEAD instead of when you get there), and a HELL of alot more speeders have road manners than slow drivers.
On a side note, I agree with your notion of not accelerating into a red unless you have a reason...I always let off the gas and brake gingerly if I know it isn't going to save me or anyone behind me any time.
Will be this fancy device known as a "mouse" that makes FPS games 500% more usable and fun.
I'm unbelievably sick of seeing "newer" consoles doing nothing more than moving closer and closer to the PC market that already exists (network adapter, hard drive, blah blah blah) whereas the PC gaming market has taken a downturn.
Plus, knowing how the underlying hardware works will allow you to write much more efficient code.
Knowing how to hard-wire a NAND gate and how to use soldering tools does not "allow you to write more efficient code".
It's assinine to think anyone could get through a CS degree without an understanding of hardware (assembly, hard-drive/memory speed differences & latencies, buses, clock speeds, etc etc)
And EE/CE degree is overkill for someone who never wants to (nor has any interest in) building actual circuit boards or microcoding. You'll learn enough hardware in CS to sufficiently know anything that affects the realm of software.
You're proud of the fact you take advantage of and abuse the goodwill of others? It's comments like that that make me want to write off your entire gender as a bunch of selfish, uncaring bitches and stay single for the rest of my life. The funny (and ironic) thing is that you probably feel in "the right" and consider yourself a nice and decent person too.
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I may not be able to "dream of a better system", but I can dream of a better people. I'm sorry that your limited view of our species limits you to beleiving self-motivation is and will always be the only driving factor behind human advancement. I like to think that it IS possible that the desire to better humanity as a whole, as well as to help people can be just as much a driving factor. Astronauts risk their lives not for the money, but because they believe in their work. Teachers teach because they love to educate, not because of any monetary motivation.
You speak of trolling. I say it is just as ignorant to believe that all human progress is driven by greed, and that such a motivation is the only driving factor behind the growth of our economy. I would argue that view is reflective of the fact that our economic system is built in such a way that greed is rewarded whereas good deeds and humility are taken advantage of. People don't know any better. They live in a world where they need to claw tooth and nail just to get by. The greed exhibited in most is reflective of the environment that cultures it. They don't know any better because they don't know better is possible.
And neither do you.
P.S. I've always hated the fact that anyone who finds fault in capitalism is essentially assumed to be a commie. There are other systems, many of which are simply hybrids of the ones we know. My favorite of course is a Meritocracy, and I've yet to see anyone do THAT right. Capitalism comes close, but fails due to corruption in the system...because money, not merit, is the driving factor, people simply cheat the system by "knowing" people, bribing, cheating, using underhanded business tactics, sabotage, whatever it takes to get ahead. A system that purely rewarded merit wouldn't stand for such tactics.
The Chinese will turn it into a U.S. controlled territory? :)
Why, how nice of them
Dealcatcher is one of the better rebate sites around that I've seen.
Identifies all startups (including the more hidden ones). It even identifies IE plugins. Definitely in a class of it's own.
I'm going mad trying to figure out if the typo was accidental or a planted pun.
That's unpossible!
nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Umm, you kinda emphasized the wrong part of that quote. It should be:
"nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
Nothing at all is keeping the govt from taking your land (even IF the quote read "public or private"). They just have to pay you justly for it.
The Mac Mini has no PC equivalent. You can't even buy PCs on today's market with laptop-speed hard drives or video cards 3 generations old. You speak of lowballing. What do you call sticking a bunch of old obsolete crap into a small compact box and calling it a PC?
As far as your wireless, firewire, gigabit ethernet rant goes, these things are commonplace on top of the line motherboards these days. Modern PC motherboards like this one come with everything you just mentioned and more. SATA2, built-in raid, PCI-Express, SLI-enabled. You name it, it has it. And that's $170. Say about $100 for 512 megs of ram, $100 for a sound card, $200 for a video card, and $100 for a hard drive. Throw in a processor and a fancy case and you can _very_ easily price an above-average performance machine below $1000 (one equivalent to a "PowerMac" might run $300-400 more. I couldn't imagine a PC being priced any higher than $1500, and that's top of the line. Beyond that you're simply wasting money (ala additional $500 for 3% performance boost)
I wouldn't say Macs are "grossly" overpriced, but overpriced, yes. You're paying for elite snobbery, not for an equivalent performance machine. Check out some of the benchmarks where the AMD 64-bit processors were run head-to-head against the G5s, then look at cost. AMD is still several hundreds of dollars superior to Apple in cost/performance analysis.
Hate to burst your bubble man, but Starcraft Bnet was running that online cd-key scheme long before Quake 3 was even released.
QWERTY: Total strokes are 14869 and total distance is 26349.32260203948.
So, there you have it. If you're a UNIX admin who uses QWERTY, you are moving your fingers around 34% more than a Dvorak administrator, at least if you're using commands similar to mine.
For a second there, that sounded like a really sick contest.
As soon as you come up with a mechanism to physically get 16 megs of data off a DVD rom faster than 1 second, I'll be all over improving load times. It's truly staggering how much data has to be loaded from disk and how frequently it has to be done. On the PC, fire up ye old task manager sometime and turn on the I/O stats for the process. Then be shocked as your game loads multiple gigs of data from disk over the run of the game. All in the name of that "immersion" you're looking for.
Easy. Just do pre-loading and background-loading. Either you load in advance, or you load in parallel. There's several games that do this kind of smooth transitioning already. There's absolutely NO need to come to a complete halt in gameplay to do loading. It's just poor/lazy/careless programming.
The sad thing is that we live in a society where abortion is so widely accepted that something like this would get modded +5 funny instead of being appalling (despite how true it might be)
That's debatable.
I've met quite a few Mac users who don't even know that Windows now has a built-in firewall. Or that such FREE applications such as Zonealarm existed that do the exact same thing. Or that applications like Stardock's DesktopX exist for full customizable skinning of the Windows desktop environment (if style is your major complaint)...hell, some people have already written Mac OS X skins for their Windows XP machines.
Most Mac zealots are too busy preaching about whatever latest feature to even LOOK to see if said feature already exists as a Windows application.
SIRIUS has been winning a lot of battles on fronts other than Howard Stern.
Ditching? What a deluded fanboy you are. XM chose to drop the Nascar contract in favor of saving money. Nascar didn't go anywhere. XM decided to let the contract lapse and Sirius picked them up.
This is because XM acts like a responsible business entity that does real market valuations and cost/earnings analysis, whereas Sirius acts like the typical irresponsible dotcom loon and spends spends spends, regardless of whether or not the expense is worth the projected income. Sirius is spending money like MAD and they have nowhere NEAR the numbers OR the growth that XM is showing. The management there is loony. Chucking money at celebrities is not the way to bring people into the fold. Most people listen to radio for music, not for exclusives. Car manufacturer deals are key. XM is dominating in that regard.
And you say Sirius in winning on "other fronts"? Name them. I don't see a single example.
Heh, you're not an english teacher either. :)
Sorry, couldn't help myself
The Mac mini includes hardware some 3 generations behind modern (such as the 4200 RPM hard drive and the 2 year old video card).
Frankly, for that equipment, I say $500 is overpriced. I bet you could get a crappy eMachine with better/newer parts for cheaper.
Needless to say, cost is still a valid complaint.
I did not get this from the parent's poster at all (I don't know why the hell he got marked a troll, he had decent and fairly accurate comments). Maybe YOU're the one taking a bit too personal. He said it would be nice if Nintendo OPENED UP more to the mature market. In other words, if they'd get the hell out of their niche market of rehashing the same characters.
What's wrong with having the fun kiddy games AS WELL AS a segment of realistic games? That's what PS2 does. They have silly games like Katamari Damacy and Lego Star Wars, but they ALSO have mature games. They target MULTIPLE demographic segments of the market, rather than just the cartoony stuff. While it's fun and all, it does get old after awhile and you really do find yourself wanting to do something "real" for once.
For instance, the Grand Turismo/Need for Speed/etc series have been as popular as they have because they're a HUGE demographic of realistic car fanatics out there. What's Nintendo going to win them over with? Mario Kart?
On a side note, I very much enjoy the gamecube and it is without a doubt HANDS-DOWN the best "party" system around
Pish, I played that game when it was brand new ON DirectX 8.1 and the damn thing still crashed.
It's another example of a rushed-out-the-door poorly coded piece of a game. And believe me, you aren't missing much. It was a travesty compared to its predecessor.
I'm guessing that software companies with any code developers worth a damn can probably write games such that they are backwards compatible.
Incorrect.
To provide just one real-world example...there are two lights on the same road near my house that provide a similar scenario. This scenario is: a long stretch of road followed by a light with a short timer. Essentially, you can spot the light from a half mile to a mile away, and most (if not all) travelers on this road are commuters that KNOW it's a short green and a HELL of a long red. Also, knowing the timing of the light, and counting the number of cars waiting ahead at the light, you can estimate how long it has been red, and approximately how long until it changes green. Knowing this, if you increased your speed by about 10 mph upon seeing the red, you could hit the light just as traffic gets going through the green to allow yourself (and the people behind you) to also procede through the light without waiting the 3+ minutes at the red.
This is tried and tested. This is my drive home from work and I pass those two lights _every day_. And without fail, if there's no one in front of me I 90+% of the time catch the green. However, when there's someone in front of me doing 35, 40, or 45 (whatever the slow speed of the day is) who refuses to speed up for the light, I always get the red.
On a side note, getting to a GREEN light quicker is ALSO a benefit, and MUCH more frustrating when people take their time approaching the light. It's ESPECIALLY frustrating when they take their time, and then just BARELY inch through at the yellow and leave a dozen pissed off people stranded behind them.
You speak of "ignorance is bliss". It's THIS kind of ignorance and total disregard for anyone else on the road that causes harsh feelings, road rage, and consequently accidents. The same kind of ignorance held by people who feel they have a right to obstruct traffic and force people to go whatever speed they do. Or the people that jump into one of those lanes of traffic that they KNOW is closing within 2000 feet, and then take their time merging back into traffic. Or the ones that don't use turn signals when turning. Or the ones that don't ACCELERATE off a merge/ramp. Or the ones that come to a complete stop at YIELDS. These people are all ignorant. They think of themselves and no one else on the road. Manners are one of the most important things on the road (I believe second only to thinking AHEAD instead of when you get there), and a HELL of alot more speeders have road manners than slow drivers.
On a side note, I agree with your notion of not accelerating into a red unless you have a reason...I always let off the gas and brake gingerly if I know it isn't going to save me or anyone behind me any time.
I'm unbelievably sick of seeing "newer" consoles doing nothing more than moving closer and closer to the PC market that already exists (network adapter, hard drive, blah blah blah) whereas the PC gaming market has taken a downturn.
The leader is good. The leader is great :)
Knowing how to hard-wire a NAND gate and how to use soldering tools does not "allow you to write more efficient code".
It's assinine to think anyone could get through a CS degree without an understanding of hardware (assembly, hard-drive/memory speed differences & latencies, buses, clock speeds, etc etc)
And EE/CE degree is overkill for someone who never wants to (nor has any interest in) building actual circuit boards or microcoding. You'll learn enough hardware in CS to sufficiently know anything that affects the realm of software.
That would be correct.
*spit*