Vista doesn't *require* the extra memory, no. But it makes excellent use of extra memory and is much better and smarter about caching and pre-fetching.
When people catch on to how much faster things will go if they double their memory, they'll start doing it.
Heh. Back when I was playing this game intensely, I always referred to it as "StarCrak". I couldn't put down the pipe, man. Many were the day I'd stumble into work late, bleary-eyed, and my office-mate would ask "... up playing StarCrack all night again?":-)
Ask and you shall receive. That seems to be exactly what SC2 is: higher res, real 3D, and unlimited group sizes. Some new units and new abilities to top it all off.
I agree that the safety net we have now actually penalizes people 'on the edge' and makes it difficult to get out. I think that's mostly because the help is offered at discrete levels at discrete amounts. I've always wondered why the help isn't graduated such that as you make more, you get less help, until you're able to stand on your own two feet. It doesn't seem to me like that should be so difficult. We have smart people around here.
It's the same old problem of the old 'tax brackets'... get a raise and cut your pay because you got bumped to the next tax bracket. I don't understand why there are "brackets"... why isn't it a continuous curve instead? The only thing it would change is the way the tax tables are calculated. Yes, it's more difficult to figure out up front, but we have powerful computers and very smart people that could be tapped for that, and implementing it would be just as simple as it would be today... look it up from a table or on a computer.
I am a very strong believer in a social safety net, and my main issue with libertarianism is that it is an "ism"... a uptopian ideal not much different from communism, in that it can look awfully compelling on paper, but it completely ignores the human condition. Libertarianism would work perfectly if everyone were honest and healthy and intelligent and self-motivated, and not greedy or criminal. But so would Communism. Both fail because people have mental illness, physical illness, are criminal, are greedy, are dishonest, and more. There needs to be a social safety net for the accidents and unexpected consequences that help our citizens get back up on their feet, or help protect one individual from the massive health problems or mental issues of another family member. The society as a whole is STRONGER with a social safety net.
That the current implementation is flawed does not in any way invalidate the concept.
I also belive that completely free and unfettered markets are very, very damaging to the greater good (as we see under this current administration, with the likes of Haliburton and Enron and all the corruption and concentration of wealth, and corporation actions that go directly against the welfare of the citizens of this country). There needs to be a strong central regulation of commerce and the markets, to prevent fraud and graft, and to weigh the consequences of mergers against the welfare of the citizens and the country as a whole... to prevent corporations from polluting indiscriminately and to hold them accountable for their negative environmental impact on the nations resources (land, people, health, air, water, etc). We need labor laws, and laws against discrimination. Those things came to exist in the first place out of a real and dire need. Just because companies like Google now treat their workers very well, does not mean the laws are obsolete or need not be enforced any more.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilence, after all.
FTA: "Sony Corporation posted video of the new 2.5 inch display on its' web page. In the video, a hand squeezes the 0.3 millimetre (0.01 inch)-thick display, which shows color video of a bicyclist stuntman, a picturesque lake and other images."
I looked all over... where is the video? Can anyone find a link to the video? I'd like to see this thing in action...
I'm certain the cause is the immaturity of the video drivers.
I was forced to upgrade to Vista at work, and I've expeirenced all sorts of driver related problems, from inablity to recover if the monitor is unplugged and plugged back in (or KVM's away and back), to repainting issues in several apps (most notably, Visual Studio 2005). In addition, I've seen some very poor performance in many instances, including the much-"Wow"-ed feature of 3D task switching.
I'm sure most of these issues will be ironed out over the next year or so as the drivers become more optimized and stable.
Re:6.5 Billion people and growing
on
Longevity Gene Found
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
True, but imagine the population going from slowly rising in this country to rapidly rising, due to a fall-off in death rates... here in the country where each individual makes a maximum impact on the enviornment, towards energy usage, and towards waste production.
Of course it'll level off after everyone gets the treatment, but the new established 'level' will be higher than it otherwise would be.
I still think the emphasis should be on living better, not living longer. Do we really want the retirement age to go up to 85 or beyond? Oy. I think there would be a lot of social changes and accomodations that would be required as well. Let's not even talk about social security or anything like that, as that gets REALLY messy.
I'm so sick of ECMCMAEIEIO Script or jScript. Ugh.
I'd love to see C# script! Being able to use the same libraries and syntaxes (for the most part) as programming in C# would be a big help. And support in all browsers!
The whole point I was making was that it "only" includes an incrementally improved picture and sound. This is NOTHING compared to the improvements of DVD over VHS. There's nothing fundamentally new. DVD brought lots of new concepts, including but not limited to: no rewinding; instant access to any chapter; longer movies didn't require two tapes; commentary tracks; deleted scenes; alternate audio tracks; less storage required for the movies; no more broken/stretched tapes; etc, etc. This was all IN ADDITION TO the digital clarity and audio enchancements DVD brought with it.
HD-DVD/Blu-Ray bring nothing new like that. No new paradigm. No completely new functionality.
The only thing it brings is "I just bought an expensive HD TV, and to make that expense worth it, I really need to get an expensive new HD DVD player. Oh, and then I get to re-buy all my movies on this new format just to... get slightly improved picture and sound!"
For you, that may be a huge selling point. But not everyone is bleeding-edge or early-adopter or technophile, videophile, audiophile. There isn't going to be that same "gotta have it" pressure to upgrade that existed for DVD over VHS. It's not a massively huge new convenience like DVD was over VHS. Going to DVD made it worth reinvesting in your movie library. Going to HD DVD, well, doesn't all that much. At least the old DVDs are still compatible, but still.
I think it'll be a lot slower adoption than we saw with DVDs over VHS.
I'm a developer and I turned UAC off after just ten minutes. It was so far beyond merely 'annoying' as to make the Apple "I'm a PC/Mac" commercial spoofing it seem like a quaint and naive interpretation.
Look, if I JUST clicked on a button to say "do this", AND I'm logged in as an administrator, what is the point of even asking me "are you sure"? Why can't the knowledge that I physically clicked on the button just now from the console as an administrator be preserved somehow, and made distinct from just some application trying to call some privileged API from a non-privileged state?
The whole design of UAC is just so poor. It completely ignores human psychology. The typical individual is just going to start clicking "allow" to make the damn box go away as soon as possible.
Is it just me, or is windows getting more "irritating" over time? A few years ago, I don't recall bitching at my computer to just let me do my job, and to stop bothering me with things I dont' care about. When I tell it to shut down, it should just shut down, not prompt me endlessly about updates or get hung up because some aspect is asking "are you sure?" when it receives the close notice. Ugh. And don't get me started on Norton or McAffee constantly popping up notifications. I don't CARE that you just updated crap. I don't CARE that the hardware is safe to remove now (I mean, I KNOW that, I just said "safely remove hardware"!).
Why all these pointless and useless notifications? UAC is just the worst of these. It's really driving me insane.
In many cases, the sound and picture improvements in HD-DVD/BluRay are minimal over plain DVDs, especially if you don't have the expensive up-to-date equipment to take advantage of the higher resolutions and better sound encoding. You may find the statement funny, but I think it's completely valid. There's a cost/benefit ratio here, and most people aren't going to want to invest the thousands required to get the next little bump in picture quality or sound quality. Lots of people will, but most people won't. "Good enough" is the enemy of better. There's just not that huge of a win for a whole heck of a lot of people, to justify the expense.
You have to look around. I found a brand that has no 'warm-up' time, no delay in coming on to full brightness, no noticable noise, hum, or strobing, and a relatively warm light compared to most. I've replaced a lot of bulbs in my house with them. But they're the ugly spiral form, so that limits the bulbs I can replace.
There are some 'bulb-shaped' ones for exposed light sources, like my ceiling fan lights, but those have that annoying warm-up period. They start out VERY dim, and take over a minute to get to full brightness. VERY irritating.
... well, until you wanted to pause. Or randomly seek to a specific scene. Or lots of little things like that.
And while I've seen some early DVDs and players where the compression artifacts in the picture were pretty horrible, today, most of the DVD images are far, far clearer than the analog and slightly fuzzy VHS images you can see. Espeically when it comes to using equivalently priced systems for playback. DVD players are damn cheap. Oh yeah, and the basic size and bulk of the media is also a factor. Four DVD packages fit in the space of two VHS casettes, and tend to hold a lot more content.
In short, there were a great many advantages.
But the advantages for HD-DVD over DVD are minimal. For movies, there's only better picture and sound, and then only if you have the (expensive) equipment to tell. For data, there's a lot more space to store stuff, so HD-DVD+R will really be useful for backup media, etc. In fact, I'll be surprised if just data size alone doesn't drive the adoption of HD-DVD (or BluRay) in the future, for data applications. It might end up that most computers come with built-in HDDVD readers/writers before most home entertainment players do. For now, all of Office and Vista and video games can fit on one DVD, but soon it'll require two and more, and suddenly it becomes cost-effective and convenient to get the HDDVD readers into computers.
I was waiting to buy an XBox until they came out with one that had a built in HD-DVD player. I want a new DVD player that can play HD DVDs, and if I can get a decent gaming console at the same time, more power to me. I was expecting the "refresh" to have this built in. I don't want a separate box hanging around. And I want the DVD player functionality to be well integrated.
Do I have to wait for an "Ultimate" version? Or am I S.O.L. when I want something so *obvious*?
That is, in fact, precisely what I'm waiting for. The moment they come out with something like that, I'm buying it. I've already decided. I'd get an XBox360 today, except I really want the integrated HD-DVD drive (not an add-on), with proper HDMI.
I'm presuming it's going to be released in time for the Holiday Season 2007. I hope I'm not wrong.
By far the best game I played this year was F.E.A.R.
In fact, it's by far the best game I've played EVER. It's the first FPS game I've ever played through *again*, after completing it.
I only play PC games (I don't own a console), and I'm not sure if F.E.A.R. was actually released in 2006 or not, I just know I played it this year. I enjoyed the expansion too, but it was just a bit more of the same, and thus doesn't stick out in my mind as much.
But F.E.A.R. is so heads-and-shoulders above every other game I've played, I just had to mention it here.
Slashdot Mirror
A few nights of having a star in the night sky that is brighter than the moon, perhaps?
And lets not forget all the religious fanatics taking it as a sign, and panicking, and causing social unrest or upheaval around the globe.
The idea that election rigging is being done by the voters is one of the biggest frauds ever.
The fraud is all on the backend... voter supression (valid, legal voters), and counting mistakes/scams.
I'm for picture IDs as long as they're easy to get and free. At least no more difficult that a current voter registration card.
A friend of mine asked, "Doesn't that violate about a billion copyrights?"
I shrugged. Can someone take my photos on Flikr and use them to create new content without my approval?
Vista doesn't *require* the extra memory, no. But it makes excellent use of extra memory and is much better and smarter about caching and pre-fetching.
When people catch on to how much faster things will go if they double their memory, they'll start doing it.
Men always have to check, and adjust if necessary, the state of the toilet seat. Every time. It's hardly a big deal.
;-)
Women can simply do the same.
Any woman who sits down backwards towards a hole filled with water without checking that it's safe to do so first gets exactly what she deserves.
Heh. Back when I was playing this game intensely, I always referred to it as "StarCrak". I couldn't put down the pipe, man. Many were the day I'd stumble into work late, bleary-eyed, and my office-mate would ask "... up playing StarCrack all night again?" :-)
That's one reason I really enjoy "Rise of Nations" ... no depleting of resources. You set up your resources and go.
I still play "rise of nations" nearly every day. It's one of the best RTS games ever made.
Ask and you shall receive. That seems to be exactly what SC2 is: higher res, real 3D, and unlimited group sizes. Some new units and new abilities to top it all off.
I, for one, am really looking forward to this.
I agree that the safety net we have now actually penalizes people 'on the edge' and makes it difficult to get out. I think that's mostly because the help is offered at discrete levels at discrete amounts. I've always wondered why the help isn't graduated such that as you make more, you get less help, until you're able to stand on your own two feet. It doesn't seem to me like that should be so difficult. We have smart people around here.
... a uptopian ideal not much different from communism, in that it can look awfully compelling on paper, but it completely ignores the human condition. Libertarianism would work perfectly if everyone were honest and healthy and intelligent and self-motivated, and not greedy or criminal. But so would Communism. Both fail because people have mental illness, physical illness, are criminal, are greedy, are dishonest, and more. There needs to be a social safety net for the accidents and unexpected consequences that help our citizens get back up on their feet, or help protect one individual from the massive health problems or mental issues of another family member. The society as a whole is STRONGER with a social safety net.
It's the same old problem of the old 'tax brackets'... get a raise and cut your pay because you got bumped to the next tax bracket. I don't understand why there are "brackets"... why isn't it a continuous curve instead? The only thing it would change is the way the tax tables are calculated. Yes, it's more difficult to figure out up front, but we have powerful computers and very smart people that could be tapped for that, and implementing it would be just as simple as it would be today... look it up from a table or on a computer.
I am a very strong believer in a social safety net, and my main issue with libertarianism is that it is an "ism"
That the current implementation is flawed does not in any way invalidate the concept.
I also belive that completely free and unfettered markets are very, very damaging to the greater good (as we see under this current administration, with the likes of Haliburton and Enron and all the corruption and concentration of wealth, and corporation actions that go directly against the welfare of the citizens of this country). There needs to be a strong central regulation of commerce and the markets, to prevent fraud and graft, and to weigh the consequences of mergers against the welfare of the citizens and the country as a whole... to prevent corporations from polluting indiscriminately and to hold them accountable for their negative environmental impact on the nations resources (land, people, health, air, water, etc). We need labor laws, and laws against discrimination. Those things came to exist in the first place out of a real and dire need. Just because companies like Google now treat their workers very well, does not mean the laws are obsolete or need not be enforced any more.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilence, after all.
FTA: "Sony Corporation posted video of the new 2.5 inch display on its' web page. In the video, a hand squeezes the 0.3 millimetre (0.01 inch)-thick display, which shows color video of a bicyclist stuntman, a picturesque lake and other images."
I looked all over... where is the video? Can anyone find a link to the video? I'd like to see this thing in action...
I'm certain the cause is the immaturity of the video drivers.
I was forced to upgrade to Vista at work, and I've expeirenced all sorts of driver related problems, from inablity to recover if the monitor is unplugged and plugged back in (or KVM's away and back), to repainting issues in several apps (most notably, Visual Studio 2005). In addition, I've seen some very poor performance in many instances, including the much-"Wow"-ed feature of 3D task switching.
I'm sure most of these issues will be ironed out over the next year or so as the drivers become more optimized and stable.
Exactly.
True, but imagine the population going from slowly rising in this country to rapidly rising, due to a fall-off in death rates... here in the country where each individual makes a maximum impact on the enviornment, towards energy usage, and towards waste production.
Of course it'll level off after everyone gets the treatment, but the new established 'level' will be higher than it otherwise would be.
I still think the emphasis should be on living better, not living longer. Do we really want the retirement age to go up to 85 or beyond? Oy. I think there would be a lot of social changes and accomodations that would be required as well. Let's not even talk about social security or anything like that, as that gets REALLY messy.
The population is 6.5 billion and exploding... if everyone lived even just 10% longer, it would seriously exacerbate that problem.
I'd rather they figure out a way to make the years we have healthier and happier.
I'm so sick of ECMCMAEIEIO Script or jScript. Ugh.
I'd love to see C# script! Being able to use the same libraries and syntaxes (for the most part) as programming in C# would be a big help. And support in all browsers!
The whole point I was making was that it "only" includes an incrementally improved picture and sound. This is NOTHING compared to the improvements of DVD over VHS. There's nothing fundamentally new. DVD brought lots of new concepts, including but not limited to: no rewinding; instant access to any chapter; longer movies didn't require two tapes; commentary tracks; deleted scenes; alternate audio tracks; less storage required for the movies; no more broken/stretched tapes; etc, etc. This was all IN ADDITION TO the digital clarity and audio enchancements DVD brought with it.
HD-DVD/Blu-Ray bring nothing new like that. No new paradigm. No completely new functionality.
The only thing it brings is "I just bought an expensive HD TV, and to make that expense worth it, I really need to get an expensive new HD DVD player. Oh, and then I get to re-buy all my movies on this new format just to... get slightly improved picture and sound!"
For you, that may be a huge selling point. But not everyone is bleeding-edge or early-adopter or technophile, videophile, audiophile. There isn't going to be that same "gotta have it" pressure to upgrade that existed for DVD over VHS. It's not a massively huge new convenience like DVD was over VHS. Going to DVD made it worth reinvesting in your movie library. Going to HD DVD, well, doesn't all that much. At least the old DVDs are still compatible, but still.
I think it'll be a lot slower adoption than we saw with DVDs over VHS.
I'm a developer and I turned UAC off after just ten minutes. It was so far beyond merely 'annoying' as to make the Apple "I'm a PC/Mac" commercial spoofing it seem like a quaint and naive interpretation.
Look, if I JUST clicked on a button to say "do this", AND I'm logged in as an administrator, what is the point of even asking me "are you sure"? Why can't the knowledge that I physically clicked on the button just now from the console as an administrator be preserved somehow, and made distinct from just some application trying to call some privileged API from a non-privileged state?
The whole design of UAC is just so poor. It completely ignores human psychology. The typical individual is just going to start clicking "allow" to make the damn box go away as soon as possible.
Is it just me, or is windows getting more "irritating" over time? A few years ago, I don't recall bitching at my computer to just let me do my job, and to stop bothering me with things I dont' care about. When I tell it to shut down, it should just shut down, not prompt me endlessly about updates or get hung up because some aspect is asking "are you sure?" when it receives the close notice. Ugh. And don't get me started on Norton or McAffee constantly popping up notifications. I don't CARE that you just updated crap. I don't CARE that the hardware is safe to remove now (I mean, I KNOW that, I just said "safely remove hardware"!).
Why all these pointless and useless notifications? UAC is just the worst of these. It's really driving me insane.
In many cases, the sound and picture improvements in HD-DVD/BluRay are minimal over plain DVDs, especially if you don't have the expensive up-to-date equipment to take advantage of the higher resolutions and better sound encoding. You may find the statement funny, but I think it's completely valid. There's a cost/benefit ratio here, and most people aren't going to want to invest the thousands required to get the next little bump in picture quality or sound quality. Lots of people will, but most people won't. "Good enough" is the enemy of better. There's just not that huge of a win for a whole heck of a lot of people, to justify the expense.
You have to look around. I found a brand that has no 'warm-up' time, no delay in coming on to full brightness, no noticable noise, hum, or strobing, and a relatively warm light compared to most. I've replaced a lot of bulbs in my house with them. But they're the ugly spiral form, so that limits the bulbs I can replace.
There are some 'bulb-shaped' ones for exposed light sources, like my ceiling fan lights, but those have that annoying warm-up period. They start out VERY dim, and take over a minute to get to full brightness. VERY irritating.
... well, until you wanted to pause. Or randomly seek to a specific scene. Or lots of little things like that.
And while I've seen some early DVDs and players where the compression artifacts in the picture were pretty horrible, today, most of the DVD images are far, far clearer than the analog and slightly fuzzy VHS images you can see. Espeically when it comes to using equivalently priced systems for playback. DVD players are damn cheap. Oh yeah, and the basic size and bulk of the media is also a factor. Four DVD packages fit in the space of two VHS casettes, and tend to hold a lot more content.
In short, there were a great many advantages.
But the advantages for HD-DVD over DVD are minimal. For movies, there's only better picture and sound, and then only if you have the (expensive) equipment to tell. For data, there's a lot more space to store stuff, so HD-DVD+R will really be useful for backup media, etc. In fact, I'll be surprised if just data size alone doesn't drive the adoption of HD-DVD (or BluRay) in the future, for data applications. It might end up that most computers come with built-in HDDVD readers/writers before most home entertainment players do. For now, all of Office and Vista and video games can fit on one DVD, but soon it'll require two and more, and suddenly it becomes cost-effective and convenient to get the HDDVD readers into computers.
I was waiting to buy an XBox until they came out with one that had a built in HD-DVD player. I want a new DVD player that can play HD DVDs, and if I can get a decent gaming console at the same time, more power to me. I was expecting the "refresh" to have this built in. I don't want a separate box hanging around. And I want the DVD player functionality to be well integrated.
Do I have to wait for an "Ultimate" version? Or am I S.O.L. when I want something so *obvious*?
That is, in fact, precisely what I'm waiting for. The moment they come out with something like that, I'm buying it. I've already decided. I'd get an XBox360 today, except I really want the integrated HD-DVD drive (not an add-on), with proper HDMI.
I'm presuming it's going to be released in time for the Holiday Season 2007. I hope I'm not wrong.
By far the best game I played this year was F.E.A.R.
In fact, it's by far the best game I've played EVER. It's the first FPS game I've ever played through *again*, after completing it.
I only play PC games (I don't own a console), and I'm not sure if F.E.A.R. was actually released in 2006 or not, I just know I played it this year. I enjoyed the expansion too, but it was just a bit more of the same, and thus doesn't stick out in my mind as much.
But F.E.A.R. is so heads-and-shoulders above every other game I've played, I just had to mention it here.
That's just a plain old great idea.
Brilliant.