Games right now are mostly pegged to the consoles, so if you have a reasonable capable Dx9 machine or anything upgraded after that (Dx10 or 11) you can run pretty much anything. Next year or so when we start seeing new consoles we'll see if the next major upgrade cycle needs Directx 12 class hardware (not yet in existence) or if the current crop of dx11 will be good enough.
Lets have a quick glance at the system requirements for borderlands 2: OS: Windows XP SP3 Processor: 2.4 GHz Dual Core Processor Memory: 2 GB(XP)/ 2 GB(Vista) Hard Disk Space: 13 GB free Video Memory: 256 MB Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8500/ATI Radeon HD 2600 Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible
In other words an 8800 series card from Nov 2006 can run the game, probably reasonably well (the 8800 is about 8x faster than the 8500). That will even run black ops 2, which has made press for requiring dx10.
For every other piece of not exceptionally high performance software computers reached good enough with Windows Xp SP1 and it's a matter of convenience, and what versions of things you're most familiar with rather than hardware. SSD's, and hardware that takes full advantage of an SSD is awesome, but it doesn't completely transform what you can do on a computer.
It's never really a capacity issue. With enough money you can always build new fabs or you can have someone else produce for you. AMD spun off its manufacturing business into GlobalFoundries now, which aims to sell foundry capacity to anyone, so that changes the situation a bit.
AMD processors aren't as good as intel ones. At least not right now. They're worse performance, performance per watt etc. Apple is big enough they don't need to deal with the #2 anything. For the same reason McDonalds doesn't sell presidents choice or pepsi. Apple, for all of its many, many faults thinks a lot about the user experience, and frankly Intel CPU's produce a better experience right now than AMD parts.
AMD kinda sorta has the right idea on combined CPU-GPU packages. Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't, and 'eyefinity' while cool isn't a product most people can manage, and Intel CPU's are better performance if you want performance, or better performance per watt if you just want battery life, overall leaving AMD a rough place in the market. For Apple, who are married now to portable devices, and don't care so much about windows gaming API's AMD just isn't making a good enough product. When Intels previous generation (sandy bridge) parts are still wiping the floor with new AMD stuff it's just not a good move to commit your business to the losing team.
*I'm talking about Apple adopting AMD processors across an entire product line. Not individual home use. For whatever problem a particular person has AMD setups can certainly be competitive. But Apple has a brand and a certain user experience it wants, and for them adopting AMD processors is not a good plan.
I'm aware of them. And they've survived as niche products. In the same way you could still buy a zune for years and can still use myspace or google plus. They exist, and are good enough for their communities, but they aren't serious competition for wow.
EVE never was, eve pre -dates wow and is a completely different product. LOTRO seemed like it had potential for a while, same with rift, but they imploded about the same as SWTOR.
And ya, GW2 being very different can be good. But it's not enough like WoW to really pull people away from pandaria it seems. Lots of people tried it, played for a while, and they'll have the old GW crowd and a few hundred k who like it more than WoW. But it's still not going to have 12 million subs.
I certainly wouldn't base 'success'
Then you would be out of context. There are great books that aren't widely read, there are great games that not a lot of people played. But here we're looking at market leaders. Certainly GW, Rift, even Star trek online added things to the genre, and the good stuff worth copying (that was easy to copy) wow copied and everything else define those products as different. Certainly if you hate blue you'll hate facebook, and I guess there's probably a market for a social networking site of people who just hate blue, but it's not a serious market competitor to facebook. No more than eve and its 300k players is going to replace wow and its 10 million overnight. But you're right, in Asia where blizzard has a lot of trouble with market penetration (in mainland china particularly) there's a market for other MMOs, but none of them have made much inroads into north america - they're good enough in the home market, but they don't have much broader appeal.
A serious misstep by the market leader leaves the market open for someone new. Pandas in WoW for example has had millions of WoW players looking for anything that's almost as good, but without pandas. Unfortunately SWTOR was a trainwreck and Guildwars 2 is a very different game (and nothing else has survived long enough to match them).
But I would say Call of Duty, Battlefield and Halo have all managed to find successful space for themselves in the FPS market.
With facebook the problem is getting marginal users to migrate. That friend who isn't tech savvy at all and doesn't know what google plus is or how it's like facebook isn't going to change. But because it's social there's nothing you can do to leave if the people you want to talk to won't leave too. I had someone yesterday try and tell me that the physical keyboard on a blackberry was the key to their stock price rebounding... because some people don't understand technology, at all, getting her off a blackberry is seemingly impossible, just as getting those friends who know nothing about privacy off facebook is impossible. With a social product you're kinda latched to the people who won't leave, even if something else is better.
For facebook their major misstep is going to be privacy. For those of us who are techies it *is* privacy, but facebook is going to end up doing something so catastrophically stupid that all the non tech savvy people are going to panic - or they're going to do subtle things with privacy that regulators are going to catch on to and dry up their revenue stream. Whether or not anyone else is well position to take their user base is hard to say, with myspace I think it was music and allowing you to make your page look like you were on an acid trip, but google plus and diaspora and twitter and everyone else trying to be the next big thing need a polished product to stuff in peoples faces the moment Zuck does something everyone can understand as stupid.
Also, while no one really succeeded in taking down the iPod directly cell phones have wiped out a huge portion the portable music player market by being better and more functional, and are essentially iPod killers. Trying to out iPod the iPod, I agree, not a great plan, nor is trying to out WoW WoW or out Facebook Facebook, that's where I think someone who sees a feature for a product for when facebook really missteps will do well.
Frankly, against F-16's, 16-1 probably isn't unreasonable.
Depends on the missiles you put on an F16.
I'm not as familiar with Eurofighers, but they are more of a F15/F16 class airframe.
The Eurofighter is this odd half step above an F15 but below an F22. Granted it's about a third the price of the F22, and that's part of the point.
Still, it's not very likely a F-22 is going to be in a situation like that either.
Against a Eurofighter? I'm sure someone in the US government thought the same when they sold Iran F14's in the 1970's. For all the bluster over China you never know where the next revolution or revolt will happen, and India, Pakistan, a major breakup of Europe, god knows what in various US allies in the middle east could make F22 vs top of the line other aircraft a very real possibility.
One of the huge advantages that F-22s have that no one seems to mention is an incredible capability to work in conjunction with other F-22's and other platforms.
I'm not sure it's incredible. It's better than older electronics suites but nothing other countries can't do as well. But sure, that capability makes for some really interesting opportunities, a aircraft as a C&C platform for drones with a wide variety of ordinance for example completely transforms how one thinks about air power.
I don't know of any air to air engagments since the falklands that actually involved guns. (Discounting A10 ground attack stuff). Any idea on where I can find a source? Everything I find says 'dogfight' but dogfight includes missile attacks.
The question is it stealth enough to fool the missile's and enemy plane's radar?
For a missile that's a trivial problem to overcome, since you don't need to be radar guided. Aircraft... less so.
There have over the years been various unlicenced sports game, sometimes where players can create their own roster. The public however are usually too lazy to want to do their own data entry.
Also, how is the business model of 'rosters for money' much different than what they do? Sure you go to store and buy a shiny disk and in most of the versions they try and improve some parts of the game, but ultimately the business question of whether or not people would rather a disk or download from the web seems to have landed very much on the side of people preferring to buy a disk for the moment.
Also, as much as EA and activision and the rest of us would love to find a way to sell our games without retailers the public still do a lot of casual shopping and having a game for free means it won't get carried in stores. Running a storefront isn't free. Nor would be distributing a game for 2 or 3 dollars, and at some point your base distribution cost makes it hard to justify a game much less than 10 bucks at retail, and if you're charging 10 bucks you may + a roster you may as well just sell the damn game.
Drones can do it all, so long as whomever you're fighting has no appreciable airforce, or is unwilling to risk any pilots or resources on the air component of operations.
Against a capably armed adversary is a whole other ball game. And the problem is that 10 years from now you don't know who you might be at war with, or for what. Whomever you're up against might have drones, might be able to jam drones, might be able to trivially shoot down most of the 'ground support' type drones etc. no one knows.
Against an enemy willing to shoot down or jam your communications satellites drones become a lot less useful. If the Russians or chinese figure out how to make a 'drone killer' kit for 10 grand that can shoot down reaper drones for 10 000 bucks suddenly they become a lot less useful. Trying to build an unmanned replacement for a full aircraft has some advantages (no pilot makes the plane a lot easier to design aerodynamically), but you're then either relying on AI or remote piloting to run the thing, and both of those come with their own problems.
They said the same thing about missles. And it was just as wrong then int eh 50's and 60's as it is now. Vietnam proved them wrong, and all of a sudden the replacements to the F4 needed to have dogfight capability.
And when was the last air to air dogfight with guns? How often (as a percentage of air combat) does that happen? Most of the air -air engagements of the last 30 years have been missile driven, with a relatively poor 'missiles fired to planes killed' success ratio. The falklands, where the UK was using harriers and the argies using Vietnam era fighters is the last gun to gun dogfight I know of, but I'm by no means and expert and the documentation I can find doesn't distinguish between missiles or guns. And just because no one has done it lately doesn't mean they can't. The reason you still put guns on things isn't so much that you expect there to be gun level dogfights as the fact that you don't want to be caught with a knife at a gunfight so to speak.
We have to be careful here to distinguish between 'BVR' (beyond visual range) kills, and missles vs. guns, those are, I think, separate debates. Lots of air combat is becoming BVR, but just because it's visual range doesn't mean you don't use missiles.
As it stands the F22 was designed to meet the goal of taking on 16 - 1 odds and winning
That's a nonsense talking point if I ever heard one. What are you a conservative in the US Air force? You can design for whatever the hell you want, that doesn't mean it can actually do it in practice. You think the Brazillians, or the North Koreans or god knows who is going to show up to a fight with 20 year old aircraft that you can take down 16 to 1? Right. Depends on who you're up against. Pakistani F16 C/D's are a very different problem than a North Korean MIG 21, or a Saudi EuroFighter. In a 1v1 against a Eurofighter at long range I'd be thinking it's a lot more about the missiles than the airplane, and in that situation both aircraft don't look all that promising.
You forget that the F22 is stealth?
You think the F22 is stealth. That's cute. The russians and chinese have other ideas. And you know. Radar researchers.
Your entire post is 100% clueless.
And your post is about 25% naive and myopic talking points. It's like you've bought into your own countries propaganda about just how capable it is.
Virtually all military procurement is about trying to find the best platform for the types of problems you might face, and then getting the best thing you can with the money you have. That applies as much to Monaco and their 250 person military as it does to China and their 2.3 million. The US faces the unfortunate problem of needing to be capable of fighting virtually everyone in the world, so I agree, there's a place for dones, there's a place for manned aircraft, and there's a place for the rest of us to be capable to shooting both down.
That seems to depend a lot on hardware. I have one laptop (my own) which is a 4 year old HP and the touch screen that works fine on vista doesn't behave at all on 8. But the work laptop everything seems to behave as expected.
My lingering suspicion this is a manufacturer problem not a microsoft problem. Though I could be proven wrong.
Windows 8 isn't so much buggy (at least not on microsofts end), it's just badly designed. Those are two different problems. Deliberately choosing something to behave stupidly isn't a bug.
Also, both of your examples (SEL4 and TeX) have no relationship to a full product. One is a single piece of the product that, as an isolated microkernel might be bug free, but is not a full OS, and the other is a typsetting specification. The core kernel in Windows 8 could be bug free or close thereto (I'll show some sympathy for compatibility with new hardware, but it would still be a bug).
Windows 8 is badly designed. There will inevitably be some bugs related to the new UI, UEFI, new hardware, etc. But those are easily at the level of satisfactory. The problem is that it's just hugely inconsistent in how it behaves. It still runs 7 or 8 year old directx 8 code fine. But it can't figure out if it's 'metro' or a desktop, which one it should be in when, or how to just produce a list of installed software that I can semi easily navigate. No, metro is not easy to navigate, it tries, and it makes sense for 'apps' but it fails for serious software that has both applications and documentation.
Which is what I do all day and don't need a retina display for. Again though, mobile devices are a slightly different problem because of where they sit relative to the face varying quite a lot. Desktop displays are supposed to sit to occupy a particular field of view.
A bold if flawed assertion. I have glasses for vision correction, which take me to 20/20, and I do computer graphics for about 50% of my time. I can very much tell the difference, if I couldn't my artists would murder me. And much higher res doesn't justify itself on the desktop. Tablets and mobile are a different problem a bit because it depends where exactly you think you're supposed to hold the device and where it's comfortable. If you're young and short you're going to have a different experience than a tall adult.
because they're past the age where they can see the difference
So you mean they're in their 20's?
Just because you claim to have super human vision or sit with a giant display glued to your nose doesn't mean designing for you is a good idea.
Yep. I can't fathom why anyone in apple design thought sticking on a high pixel density display was a good idea. It doesn't look appreciably better than a regular display and requires a lot more computing power to drive applications natively. Which is why no one else seriously tried something so stupid in the last 20 years.
Now they're all following along like sheep because apple is doing it, and it certainly makes sense to have standards and so on for larger displays, but there's virtually no benefit for a significant increase in performance cost.
We've been held back by repurposed 1080p HDTV panels for too long.
Sure. Monitors are not TV's. Nor should they be. A 32 inch TV (1920x1080) is a shitty monitor, a 32 inch monitor is supposed to be 2560x1600. A big display needs a higher resolution. But that's a 'TV' problem, not a monitor problem, and if someone is using a monitor as a TV well... that's they're own fault. Sure, you can double the pixel count (from 4 million to 8 million) on a 4k display, so pixels are 40% smaller in each dimension basically (sqrt(2)) but that effect isn't really all that big a deal unless you're like 15 with perfect eyesight. For everyone else it's a waste of money and processing power.
What 1600x1200 display did you have 20 years ago? A 20 inch CRT? That's roughly the same pixel density as a 22inch 1920x1200 or 1920x1080. Aspect ratios screw things up a bit. Also, part of making shit cheaper has been making it lower quality, that's a separate problem.
In 1992 we were still looking at 15 inch 1280 x1024 displays, which is about the same as today, give or take an aspect ratio.
To your specific points
1. Clearer pictures. My phone can snap images many times larger than the effective res of my monitor. My monitor should not be the bottleneck.
And? How well can you tell the difference for most tasks? If you quadrupole the number of pixels you roughly quadrupole the amount of memory and processing power needed to display stuff on it. Is that actually worth while?
Pixel densities where chosen way back in the 90's precisely because they were pretty much good enough. Apple's 'retina' display aims to be the point at which there is literally no further benefit from more pixel density, but 'no further benefit' and 'good enough for virtually every task' are not the same thing.
2. Font smoothing - Subpixel rendering is an ugly hack and makes things look like garbage (If it looks good to you, you need glasses. Yes. You do.) You really need "retina" level pixel densities before font smoothing should even be considered.
Do you really need font smoothing? Can I read the text quickly enough without it? yep. And yes, I have glasses. Also, if you have any vision degeneration and can't notice font smoothing what is this getting you?
3. Truely scalable UIs - Until you reach a certain pixel density you can't scale small UI elements without looking like complete garbage. Think about it. If you have pixels many times smaller than you can see, then your UI should scale to any aspect ratio or any size and still look ok.
Huh? Thems some nonsense phrases there. You're right, aliasing and scalability is always a problem with UI's, but the question is whether current pixel densities are inadequate. Why does it matter if my UI can scale neatly at a level I can't see? Oh you want me to zoom in and use more pixels... so wait... what are you talking about?
I think you read a bunch of apple talking points.
Don't get me wrong there is a case for higher res displays, but you need a lot more computing power to supply them, and a 60 inch TV at 1920 by 1080 looks terrible compared to a 24 inch display at the same resolution - but that's the point, you're changing the pixel density a lot. Sure, 'retina' displays etc are slightly better looking, but only slightly, and that's the point. That's why your 1600x1200 display from 20 years ago was good enough - and is still good enough, any more than that generally doesn't justify the cost (in computing power) to run the display.
1080p is just 1920x1080 - that part almost certainly works fine. It's that pixel density has, for years, been within a fairly narrow range (22-27 inch displays all maxing out at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080). The problem is pixel density is now increasing, think apple retina displays, and that's a problem most of us on the software side were never expecting and aren't used to having to cope with. At least not for desktops/laptops (phones is another matter because they are a rapidly maturing product used in a completely different way).
Besides that, different groups will have people who are more or less aware of this problem and trying to deal with it. Microsoft *should* have testing labs for all of these different things, and feedback about a very uneven experience should have moved up and down the chain. But as someone who writes games for a living, most of the stuff I have done in the last 5 or 6 years would look like shit on a 13 inch display at 1920x1080. Everything would be too small unless the screen is 10cm from your face. That's the catch here, we've designed for a single pixel to take up a certain fraction of your personal field of view, suddenly higher density displays come along, to which we initially ask, why, was there something wrong with the old pixel densities? Is this technology actually better or is it just going to be a method to sell expensive video cards. These new displays people are physically positioning the way their old setups were, but well, all of the assumptions about field of view get tossed.
And how many people actually do that? Presumably one of the 400 who downloaded it did, figured out who to alert and that's why we know.
But that's a very very small percentage.
This is likely a UI problem, doing an MD5 is easy enough, it's a matter of browsers showing them automatically and keeping the 'official' md5 page around while the download is finishing. None of this is hard, but the vast majority of users don't.
FWIW, really basic computer literacy a problem in most adults also.
Without a doubt.
I understand where the questioner is coming from, people know behaviours, not understanding, so the panic at things like the ribbon because they have to actually learn to use something new. But at the same time, muddying the issue with trying to teach understanding is beyond a lot of these students (at this stage). Walking before running sort of thing.
Ya I was on the undergrad curriculum committee, between the squabbling over C++/Java or C# and trying to figure out how basic we can make a course on 'how to use MS word' it wasn't a good time. All of the interesting stuff, in third and 4th year, is pretty much up to the professor, so you don't get a lot of say in that from committees (and committees don't react fast enough to be suitable for senior topics anyway).
But beyond that, why does it have to be all about MS Office and nothing else? Couldn't they just teach people to create documents, etc., and let them use any office software, like Libre Office?
We tried this at the last school I was at. If by the time you get to university you can't create a document in word, you're not going to learn to use libre office in 12 weeks. We have to teach behaviours before we can expect much understanding, and a course textbook that is about MS office is decidedly at the level of giving basic behaviours without underlying principles.
The problem with people who are completely computer illiterate is that high minded ideas about teaching them 'principles' is a step ahead of them, at least by the time they're university or college age. They're scared of breaking anything, and you're jumping the gun asking for more than that.
I know doing it the way they do now is easy for the college, but it's not really teaching students much about what they can do with computers.
Nor is that the point. If the course is a book in Office the class is targeted at people who know next to nothing and trying to get them to the point of accomplishing basic tasks that will be useful in university.
So when the class is over, I plan to write a letter to the college asking them to change the course as I suggested above. I'm not real hopeful
Nor should you be. It's not a good idea. We can seat 400 kids in a class about how to use MS word whereas the next largest CS course is 120, with an entrance class in science of about 6000. Exceptionally basic classes are popular because so many students know next to nothing. The Deans office likes these classes because they put seats in chairs, the other science departments like us because their TA's don't have to cover basic things like how to do bullet points in a document, etc. It's sad, but this is the reality of computer literacy. Complaining to the dean is just going to make you unpopular with the department because you're trying to make people look bad, when absolutely everyone knows how pathetic it is that this is required. But you can't control worldwide highschool curriculum.
Look, I realize you're trying to help. But you're not. You're in the wrong class. It's that simple. If your university/college has an actual computer science programme absolutely no one in that department, who is running the course, thinks this is the level we really want students to be at. But you have to realize we still get foreign students who've never lived with regular electricity, and most of the domestic ones basically open word and start mashing buttons to type, they don't actually know anything. These are exceptionally basic courses because the people coming in are at an exceptionally basic level, and that's the market that needs to be served. It shouldn't be a university level credit, but no one would take it if we only gave a college level credit for it (they have other things to spend time on), and that means it attracts people looking for some free easy marks, there's no way to avoid that, but for the people who actually need this level of material (which is a lot of students, and a lot more who don't even realize they need this level of material) what you're suggesting is completely disconnected from their reality.
Do folks out there have any good suggestions as to what might be the most persuasive arguments I can make?"
Literally the only argument is that students shouldn't need this in the first place, which isn't even true. Everything else is you just living in a bubble of 'first world problems' so to speak.
We, I kid you not, have students majoring in computer science and electrical engineering where I am that grew up without electricity, and their first plane flight was to come here. It's mostly a India/China/Africa thing, but it's rare that someone from China or india hasn't had at le
You don't, naturally, it's more of a Bill Clinton versus whomever is running as the communist party candidate. You might know slick willy is a womanizing asshole, but at least he's not actually a communist.
These are like co-op and part time positions for people fresh out of high school who are trying to get some money to pay for a college diploma in being a linux tech guy. I didn't realize how big a market that was until one of my friends got a gig doing hardware installs at a linux shop just bought by cisco. They had about 20 guys manually doing installations for about 30 servers a month (each), a lot of the job was physically connecting the servers, which needs to be done anyway, but the software side was to put in a red hat CD and attend the installation.
His tax returns have no impact on his ability to act as President.
They could, it depends what they say. My tax returns are unlikely to say anything to qualify or disqualify me from anything. I make no money, I pay no tax. Pretty straightforward.
Romney on the other hand... makes about 300x the median income (14 million vs 50 000, but his income is down what, 8, 9 million from 2010), but pays 14% tax, some of which is voluntary(which is bizarre given his previous statements), and donates 4 million to charity. So he clearly believes* in helping the poor - hence giving 4 million to charity- but his position on how big government should be is more... tenuous. He has clearly tried to shrink the size of government (legally) by paying it less, and by giving more to charity - that's an ideological position worth discussing. The idea that someone who makes 300x the median income is only going to pay 14% income tax is a valid argument to have too, just how big should the government be, and where will that money come from? If, where it stands right now, government is floating around 24% of GDP (with revenues around 15%) is about as big as you want government, he is significantly underpaying his share as a percentage of income, not even getting into the legitimate discussion of a graduated tax system and where someone with 300x the median income should be on tax percentages.
Mitt Romney taxes, his ability to find ways to dodge tax, his willingness to voluntarily pay tax, his desired distribution of income very much impact his credibility as a politician, and his ability to actual enact changes. He certainly knows what tax loopholes exist to be closed, he takes advantage of all of them.
All of that is assuming he's not hiding from having had money illegally stowed in a swiss bank account. Which, incidentally, counts as another loophole he'd be aware of that needs to be closed, though I can't imagine he'd want to be a whistleblower on his own activities, you never know.
*Well, he at least believes in the benefits of the optics of giving 4 million to charity, whether he actually believes or not is impossible to discern.
Slashdot Mirror
Depends on the software.
Games right now are mostly pegged to the consoles, so if you have a reasonable capable Dx9 machine or anything upgraded after that (Dx10 or 11) you can run pretty much anything. Next year or so when we start seeing new consoles we'll see if the next major upgrade cycle needs Directx 12 class hardware (not yet in existence) or if the current crop of dx11 will be good enough.
Lets have a quick glance at the system requirements for borderlands 2: /ATI Radeon HD 2600
OS: Windows XP SP3
Processor: 2.4 GHz Dual Core Processor
Memory: 2 GB(XP)/ 2 GB(Vista)
Hard Disk Space: 13 GB free
Video Memory: 256 MB
Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8500
Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible
In other words an 8800 series card from Nov 2006 can run the game, probably reasonably well (the 8800 is about 8x faster than the 8500). That will even run black ops 2, which has made press for requiring dx10.
For every other piece of not exceptionally high performance software computers reached good enough with Windows Xp SP1 and it's a matter of convenience, and what versions of things you're most familiar with rather than hardware. SSD's, and hardware that takes full advantage of an SSD is awesome, but it doesn't completely transform what you can do on a computer.
It's never really a capacity issue. With enough money you can always build new fabs or you can have someone else produce for you. AMD spun off its manufacturing business into GlobalFoundries now, which aims to sell foundry capacity to anyone, so that changes the situation a bit.
AMD processors aren't as good as intel ones. At least not right now. They're worse performance, performance per watt etc. Apple is big enough they don't need to deal with the #2 anything. For the same reason McDonalds doesn't sell presidents choice or pepsi. Apple, for all of its many, many faults thinks a lot about the user experience, and frankly Intel CPU's produce a better experience right now than AMD parts.
AMD kinda sorta has the right idea on combined CPU-GPU packages. Unfortunately nVidia cards are a bit better (support for PhysX) which AMD doesn't, and 'eyefinity' while cool isn't a product most people can manage, and Intel CPU's are better performance if you want performance, or better performance per watt if you just want battery life, overall leaving AMD a rough place in the market. For Apple, who are married now to portable devices, and don't care so much about windows gaming API's AMD just isn't making a good enough product. When Intels previous generation (sandy bridge) parts are still wiping the floor with new AMD stuff it's just not a good move to commit your business to the losing team.
*I'm talking about Apple adopting AMD processors across an entire product line. Not individual home use. For whatever problem a particular person has AMD setups can certainly be competitive. But Apple has a brand and a certain user experience it wants, and for them adopting AMD processors is not a good plan.
I'm aware of them. And they've survived as niche products. In the same way you could still buy a zune for years and can still use myspace or google plus. They exist, and are good enough for their communities, but they aren't serious competition for wow.
EVE never was, eve pre -dates wow and is a completely different product. LOTRO seemed like it had potential for a while, same with rift, but they imploded about the same as SWTOR.
And ya, GW2 being very different can be good. But it's not enough like WoW to really pull people away from pandaria it seems. Lots of people tried it, played for a while, and they'll have the old GW crowd and a few hundred k who like it more than WoW. But it's still not going to have 12 million subs.
I certainly wouldn't base 'success'
Then you would be out of context. There are great books that aren't widely read, there are great games that not a lot of people played. But here we're looking at market leaders. Certainly GW, Rift, even Star trek online added things to the genre, and the good stuff worth copying (that was easy to copy) wow copied and everything else define those products as different. Certainly if you hate blue you'll hate facebook, and I guess there's probably a market for a social networking site of people who just hate blue, but it's not a serious market competitor to facebook. No more than eve and its 300k players is going to replace wow and its 10 million overnight. But you're right, in Asia where blizzard has a lot of trouble with market penetration (in mainland china particularly) there's a market for other MMOs, but none of them have made much inroads into north america - they're good enough in the home market, but they don't have much broader appeal.
A serious misstep by the market leader leaves the market open for someone new. Pandas in WoW for example has had millions of WoW players looking for anything that's almost as good, but without pandas. Unfortunately SWTOR was a trainwreck and Guildwars 2 is a very different game (and nothing else has survived long enough to match them).
But I would say Call of Duty, Battlefield and Halo have all managed to find successful space for themselves in the FPS market.
With facebook the problem is getting marginal users to migrate. That friend who isn't tech savvy at all and doesn't know what google plus is or how it's like facebook isn't going to change. But because it's social there's nothing you can do to leave if the people you want to talk to won't leave too. I had someone yesterday try and tell me that the physical keyboard on a blackberry was the key to their stock price rebounding... because some people don't understand technology, at all, getting her off a blackberry is seemingly impossible, just as getting those friends who know nothing about privacy off facebook is impossible. With a social product you're kinda latched to the people who won't leave, even if something else is better.
For facebook their major misstep is going to be privacy. For those of us who are techies it *is* privacy, but facebook is going to end up doing something so catastrophically stupid that all the non tech savvy people are going to panic - or they're going to do subtle things with privacy that regulators are going to catch on to and dry up their revenue stream. Whether or not anyone else is well position to take their user base is hard to say, with myspace I think it was music and allowing you to make your page look like you were on an acid trip, but google plus and diaspora and twitter and everyone else trying to be the next big thing need a polished product to stuff in peoples faces the moment Zuck does something everyone can understand as stupid.
Also, while no one really succeeded in taking down the iPod directly cell phones have wiped out a huge portion the portable music player market by being better and more functional, and are essentially iPod killers. Trying to out iPod the iPod, I agree, not a great plan, nor is trying to out WoW WoW or out Facebook Facebook, that's where I think someone who sees a feature for a product for when facebook really missteps will do well.
Frankly, against F-16's, 16-1 probably isn't unreasonable.
Depends on the missiles you put on an F16.
I'm not as familiar with Eurofighers, but they are more of a F15/F16 class airframe.
The Eurofighter is this odd half step above an F15 but below an F22. Granted it's about a third the price of the F22, and that's part of the point.
Still, it's not very likely a F-22 is going to be in a situation like that either.
Against a Eurofighter? I'm sure someone in the US government thought the same when they sold Iran F14's in the 1970's. For all the bluster over China you never know where the next revolution or revolt will happen, and India, Pakistan, a major breakup of Europe, god knows what in various US allies in the middle east could make F22 vs top of the line other aircraft a very real possibility.
One of the huge advantages that F-22s have that no one seems to mention is an incredible capability to work in conjunction with other F-22's and other platforms.
I'm not sure it's incredible. It's better than older electronics suites but nothing other countries can't do as well. But sure, that capability makes for some really interesting opportunities, a aircraft as a C&C platform for drones with a wide variety of ordinance for example completely transforms how one thinks about air power.
I don't know of any air to air engagments since the falklands that actually involved guns. (Discounting A10 ground attack stuff). Any idea on where I can find a source? Everything I find says 'dogfight' but dogfight includes missile attacks.
The question is it stealth enough to fool the missile's and enemy plane's radar?
For a missile that's a trivial problem to overcome, since you don't need to be radar guided. Aircraft... less so.
There have over the years been various unlicenced sports game, sometimes where players can create their own roster. The public however are usually too lazy to want to do their own data entry.
Also, how is the business model of 'rosters for money' much different than what they do? Sure you go to store and buy a shiny disk and in most of the versions they try and improve some parts of the game, but ultimately the business question of whether or not people would rather a disk or download from the web seems to have landed very much on the side of people preferring to buy a disk for the moment.
Also, as much as EA and activision and the rest of us would love to find a way to sell our games without retailers the public still do a lot of casual shopping and having a game for free means it won't get carried in stores. Running a storefront isn't free. Nor would be distributing a game for 2 or 3 dollars, and at some point your base distribution cost makes it hard to justify a game much less than 10 bucks at retail, and if you're charging 10 bucks you may + a roster you may as well just sell the damn game.
So? You try getting hundreds or thousands of lines of data entry done. It isn't free.
Drones can do it all, so long as whomever you're fighting has no appreciable airforce, or is unwilling to risk any pilots or resources on the air component of operations.
Against a capably armed adversary is a whole other ball game. And the problem is that 10 years from now you don't know who you might be at war with, or for what. Whomever you're up against might have drones, might be able to jam drones, might be able to trivially shoot down most of the 'ground support' type drones etc. no one knows.
Against an enemy willing to shoot down or jam your communications satellites drones become a lot less useful. If the Russians or chinese figure out how to make a 'drone killer' kit for 10 grand that can shoot down reaper drones for 10 000 bucks suddenly they become a lot less useful. Trying to build an unmanned replacement for a full aircraft has some advantages (no pilot makes the plane a lot easier to design aerodynamically), but you're then either relying on AI or remote piloting to run the thing, and both of those come with their own problems.
They said the same thing about missles. And it was just as wrong then int eh 50's and 60's as it is now.
Vietnam proved them wrong, and all of a sudden the replacements to the F4 needed to have dogfight capability.
And when was the last air to air dogfight with guns? How often (as a percentage of air combat) does that happen? Most of the air -air engagements of the last 30 years have been missile driven, with a relatively poor 'missiles fired to planes killed' success ratio. The falklands, where the UK was using harriers and the argies using Vietnam era fighters is the last gun to gun dogfight I know of, but I'm by no means and expert and the documentation I can find doesn't distinguish between missiles or guns. And just because no one has done it lately doesn't mean they can't. The reason you still put guns on things isn't so much that you expect there to be gun level dogfights as the fact that you don't want to be caught with a knife at a gunfight so to speak.
We have to be careful here to distinguish between 'BVR' (beyond visual range) kills, and missles vs. guns, those are, I think, separate debates. Lots of air combat is becoming BVR, but just because it's visual range doesn't mean you don't use missiles.
As it stands the F22 was designed to meet the goal of taking on 16 - 1 odds and winning
That's a nonsense talking point if I ever heard one. What are you a conservative in the US Air force? You can design for whatever the hell you want, that doesn't mean it can actually do it in practice. You think the Brazillians, or the North Koreans or god knows who is going to show up to a fight with 20 year old aircraft that you can take down 16 to 1? Right. Depends on who you're up against. Pakistani F16 C/D's are a very different problem than a North Korean MIG 21, or a Saudi EuroFighter. In a 1v1 against a Eurofighter at long range I'd be thinking it's a lot more about the missiles than the airplane, and in that situation both aircraft don't look all that promising.
You forget that the F22 is stealth?
You think the F22 is stealth. That's cute. The russians and chinese have other ideas. And you know. Radar researchers.
Your entire post is 100% clueless.
And your post is about 25% naive and myopic talking points. It's like you've bought into your own countries propaganda about just how capable it is.
Virtually all military procurement is about trying to find the best platform for the types of problems you might face, and then getting the best thing you can with the money you have. That applies as much to Monaco and their 250 person military as it does to China and their 2.3 million. The US faces the unfortunate problem of needing to be capable of fighting virtually everyone in the world, so I agree, there's a place for dones, there's a place for manned aircraft, and there's a place for the rest of us to be capable to shooting both down.
That seems to depend a lot on hardware. I have one laptop (my own) which is a 4 year old HP and the touch screen that works fine on vista doesn't behave at all on 8. But the work laptop everything seems to behave as expected.
My lingering suspicion this is a manufacturer problem not a microsoft problem. Though I could be proven wrong.
Windows 8 isn't so much buggy (at least not on microsofts end), it's just badly designed. Those are two different problems. Deliberately choosing something to behave stupidly isn't a bug.
Also, both of your examples (SEL4 and TeX) have no relationship to a full product. One is a single piece of the product that, as an isolated microkernel might be bug free, but is not a full OS, and the other is a typsetting specification. The core kernel in Windows 8 could be bug free or close thereto (I'll show some sympathy for compatibility with new hardware, but it would still be a bug).
Windows 8 is badly designed. There will inevitably be some bugs related to the new UI, UEFI, new hardware, etc. But those are easily at the level of satisfactory. The problem is that it's just hugely inconsistent in how it behaves. It still runs 7 or 8 year old directx 8 code fine. But it can't figure out if it's 'metro' or a desktop, which one it should be in when, or how to just produce a list of installed software that I can semi easily navigate. No, metro is not easy to navigate, it tries, and it makes sense for 'apps' but it fails for serious software that has both applications and documentation.
Which is what I do all day and don't need a retina display for. Again though, mobile devices are a slightly different problem because of where they sit relative to the face varying quite a lot. Desktop displays are supposed to sit to occupy a particular field of view.
Just because you have vision problems
A bold if flawed assertion. I have glasses for vision correction, which take me to 20/20, and I do computer graphics for about 50% of my time. I can very much tell the difference, if I couldn't my artists would murder me. And much higher res doesn't justify itself on the desktop. Tablets and mobile are a different problem a bit because it depends where exactly you think you're supposed to hold the device and where it's comfortable. If you're young and short you're going to have a different experience than a tall adult.
because they're past the age where they can see the difference
So you mean they're in their 20's?
Just because you claim to have super human vision or sit with a giant display glued to your nose doesn't mean designing for you is a good idea.
Have you ever tried using the new iPad?
Yep. I can't fathom why anyone in apple design thought sticking on a high pixel density display was a good idea. It doesn't look appreciably better than a regular display and requires a lot more computing power to drive applications natively. Which is why no one else seriously tried something so stupid in the last 20 years.
Now they're all following along like sheep because apple is doing it, and it certainly makes sense to have standards and so on for larger displays, but there's virtually no benefit for a significant increase in performance cost.
We've been held back by repurposed 1080p HDTV panels for too long.
Sure. Monitors are not TV's. Nor should they be. A 32 inch TV (1920x1080) is a shitty monitor, a 32 inch monitor is supposed to be 2560x1600. A big display needs a higher resolution. But that's a 'TV' problem, not a monitor problem, and if someone is using a monitor as a TV well... that's they're own fault. Sure, you can double the pixel count (from 4 million to 8 million) on a 4k display, so pixels are 40% smaller in each dimension basically (sqrt(2)) but that effect isn't really all that big a deal unless you're like 15 with perfect eyesight. For everyone else it's a waste of money and processing power.
As someone else pointed out. Pixel densities reached 'good enough' about 20 years ago, and haven't increased since.
Well, that's not the point he was trying to make, but that's the point he made anyway.
Right, and how much computing power does that take and is it worth it?
What 1600x1200 display did you have 20 years ago? A 20 inch CRT? That's roughly the same pixel density as a 22inch 1920x1200 or 1920x1080. Aspect ratios screw things up a bit. Also, part of making shit cheaper has been making it lower quality, that's a separate problem.
In 1992 we were still looking at 15 inch 1280 x1024 displays, which is about the same as today, give or take an aspect ratio.
To your specific points
1. Clearer pictures. My phone can snap images many times larger than the effective res of my monitor. My monitor should not be the bottleneck.
And? How well can you tell the difference for most tasks? If you quadrupole the number of pixels you roughly quadrupole the amount of memory and processing power needed to display stuff on it. Is that actually worth while?
Pixel densities where chosen way back in the 90's precisely because they were pretty much good enough. Apple's 'retina' display aims to be the point at which there is literally no further benefit from more pixel density, but 'no further benefit' and 'good enough for virtually every task' are not the same thing.
2. Font smoothing - Subpixel rendering is an ugly hack and makes things look like garbage (If it looks good to you, you need glasses. Yes. You do.) You really need "retina" level pixel densities before font smoothing should even be considered.
Do you really need font smoothing? Can I read the text quickly enough without it? yep. And yes, I have glasses. Also, if you have any vision degeneration and can't notice font smoothing what is this getting you?
3. Truely scalable UIs - Until you reach a certain pixel density you can't scale small UI elements without looking like complete garbage. Think about it. If you have pixels many times smaller than you can see, then your UI should scale to any aspect ratio or any size and still look ok.
Huh? Thems some nonsense phrases there. You're right, aliasing and scalability is always a problem with UI's, but the question is whether current pixel densities are inadequate. Why does it matter if my UI can scale neatly at a level I can't see? Oh you want me to zoom in and use more pixels... so wait... what are you talking about?
I think you read a bunch of apple talking points.
Don't get me wrong there is a case for higher res displays, but you need a lot more computing power to supply them, and a 60 inch TV at 1920 by 1080 looks terrible compared to a 24 inch display at the same resolution - but that's the point, you're changing the pixel density a lot. Sure, 'retina' displays etc are slightly better looking, but only slightly, and that's the point. That's why your 1600x1200 display from 20 years ago was good enough - and is still good enough, any more than that generally doesn't justify the cost (in computing power) to run the display.
1080p is just 1920x1080 - that part almost certainly works fine. It's that pixel density has, for years, been within a fairly narrow range (22-27 inch displays all maxing out at 1920x1200 or 1920x1080). The problem is pixel density is now increasing, think apple retina displays, and that's a problem most of us on the software side were never expecting and aren't used to having to cope with. At least not for desktops/laptops (phones is another matter because they are a rapidly maturing product used in a completely different way).
Besides that, different groups will have people who are more or less aware of this problem and trying to deal with it. Microsoft *should* have testing labs for all of these different things, and feedback about a very uneven experience should have moved up and down the chain. But as someone who writes games for a living, most of the stuff I have done in the last 5 or 6 years would look like shit on a 13 inch display at 1920x1080. Everything would be too small unless the screen is 10cm from your face. That's the catch here, we've designed for a single pixel to take up a certain fraction of your personal field of view, suddenly higher density displays come along, to which we initially ask, why, was there something wrong with the old pixel densities? Is this technology actually better or is it just going to be a method to sell expensive video cards. These new displays people are physically positioning the way their old setups were, but well, all of the assumptions about field of view get tossed.
And how many people actually do that? Presumably one of the 400 who downloaded it did, figured out who to alert and that's why we know.
But that's a very very small percentage.
This is likely a UI problem, doing an MD5 is easy enough, it's a matter of browsers showing them automatically and keeping the 'official' md5 page around while the download is finishing. None of this is hard, but the vast majority of users don't.
FWIW, really basic computer literacy a problem in most adults also.
Without a doubt.
I understand where the questioner is coming from, people know behaviours, not understanding, so the panic at things like the ribbon because they have to actually learn to use something new. But at the same time, muddying the issue with trying to teach understanding is beyond a lot of these students (at this stage). Walking before running sort of thing.
Ya I was on the undergrad curriculum committee, between the squabbling over C++/Java or C# and trying to figure out how basic we can make a course on 'how to use MS word' it wasn't a good time. All of the interesting stuff, in third and 4th year, is pretty much up to the professor, so you don't get a lot of say in that from committees (and committees don't react fast enough to be suitable for senior topics anyway).
But beyond that, why does it have to be all about MS Office and nothing else? Couldn't they just teach people to create documents, etc., and let them use any office software, like Libre Office?
We tried this at the last school I was at. If by the time you get to university you can't create a document in word, you're not going to learn to use libre office in 12 weeks. We have to teach behaviours before we can expect much understanding, and a course textbook that is about MS office is decidedly at the level of giving basic behaviours without underlying principles.
The problem with people who are completely computer illiterate is that high minded ideas about teaching them 'principles' is a step ahead of them, at least by the time they're university or college age. They're scared of breaking anything, and you're jumping the gun asking for more than that.
I know doing it the way they do now is easy for the college, but it's not really teaching students much about what they can do with computers.
Nor is that the point. If the course is a book in Office the class is targeted at people who know next to nothing and trying to get them to the point of accomplishing basic tasks that will be useful in university.
So when the class is over, I plan to write a letter to the college asking them to change the course as I suggested above. I'm not real hopeful
Nor should you be. It's not a good idea. We can seat 400 kids in a class about how to use MS word whereas the next largest CS course is 120, with an entrance class in science of about 6000. Exceptionally basic classes are popular because so many students know next to nothing. The Deans office likes these classes because they put seats in chairs, the other science departments like us because their TA's don't have to cover basic things like how to do bullet points in a document, etc. It's sad, but this is the reality of computer literacy. Complaining to the dean is just going to make you unpopular with the department because you're trying to make people look bad, when absolutely everyone knows how pathetic it is that this is required. But you can't control worldwide highschool curriculum.
Look, I realize you're trying to help. But you're not. You're in the wrong class. It's that simple. If your university/college has an actual computer science programme absolutely no one in that department, who is running the course, thinks this is the level we really want students to be at. But you have to realize we still get foreign students who've never lived with regular electricity, and most of the domestic ones basically open word and start mashing buttons to type, they don't actually know anything. These are exceptionally basic courses because the people coming in are at an exceptionally basic level, and that's the market that needs to be served. It shouldn't be a university level credit, but no one would take it if we only gave a college level credit for it (they have other things to spend time on), and that means it attracts people looking for some free easy marks, there's no way to avoid that, but for the people who actually need this level of material (which is a lot of students, and a lot more who don't even realize they need this level of material) what you're suggesting is completely disconnected from their reality.
Do folks out there have any good suggestions as to what might be the most persuasive arguments I can make?"
Literally the only argument is that students shouldn't need this in the first place, which isn't even true. Everything else is you just living in a bubble of 'first world problems' so to speak.
We, I kid you not, have students majoring in computer science and electrical engineering where I am that grew up without electricity, and their first plane flight was to come here. It's mostly a India/China/Africa thing, but it's rare that someone from China or india hasn't had at le
You don't, naturally, it's more of a Bill Clinton versus whomever is running as the communist party candidate. You might know slick willy is a womanizing asshole, but at least he's not actually a communist.
pretty much.
Seriously.
These are like co-op and part time positions for people fresh out of high school who are trying to get some money to pay for a college diploma in being a linux tech guy. I didn't realize how big a market that was until one of my friends got a gig doing hardware installs at a linux shop just bought by cisco. They had about 20 guys manually doing installations for about 30 servers a month (each), a lot of the job was physically connecting the servers, which needs to be done anyway, but the software side was to put in a red hat CD and attend the installation.
His tax returns have no impact on his ability to act as President.
They could, it depends what they say. My tax returns are unlikely to say anything to qualify or disqualify me from anything. I make no money, I pay no tax. Pretty straightforward.
Romney on the other hand... makes about 300x the median income (14 million vs 50 000, but his income is down what, 8, 9 million from 2010), but pays 14% tax, some of which is voluntary(which is bizarre given his previous statements), and donates 4 million to charity. So he clearly believes* in helping the poor - hence giving 4 million to charity- but his position on how big government should be is more... tenuous. He has clearly tried to shrink the size of government (legally) by paying it less, and by giving more to charity - that's an ideological position worth discussing. The idea that someone who makes 300x the median income is only going to pay 14% income tax is a valid argument to have too, just how big should the government be, and where will that money come from? If, where it stands right now, government is floating around 24% of GDP (with revenues around 15%) is about as big as you want government, he is significantly underpaying his share as a percentage of income, not even getting into the legitimate discussion of a graduated tax system and where someone with 300x the median income should be on tax percentages.
Mitt Romney taxes, his ability to find ways to dodge tax, his willingness to voluntarily pay tax, his desired distribution of income very much impact his credibility as a politician, and his ability to actual enact changes. He certainly knows what tax loopholes exist to be closed, he takes advantage of all of them.
All of that is assuming he's not hiding from having had money illegally stowed in a swiss bank account. Which, incidentally, counts as another loophole he'd be aware of that needs to be closed, though I can't imagine he'd want to be a whistleblower on his own activities, you never know.
*Well, he at least believes in the benefits of the optics of giving 4 million to charity, whether he actually believes or not is impossible to discern.