Dude, post a video of these BSOD problems, or go home. ATI had problems with their drivers back when they were shipping Rage 128 chipsets, but improved on that when they started the Catalyst brand.
The way it used to break down was as follows: Nvidia -> Great drivers, hardware was shit. ATI -> Horrible drivers, hardware was awesome.
Nvidia took months to get their cards up to speed against ATI cards, slowly working on their drivers until they surpassed them. ATI would overtake Nvidia with new hardware, then sit on their laurels while they reread their "Drivers for Dummies" book for the 12th time.
Nvidia got better with their hardware. ATI got their shit together with their drivers. Everyone agrees that if you're having problems with a built-in video card on a $20 motherboard, it's probably not ATI / Nvidia's fault. I am sorry that the guy who sold it to you lied about its capabilities, but then, if you have any common sense, you know that discrete video cards / sound cards are a bare minimum.
Indeed. It amazes me how people buy the bottom of the barrel model, from the cheapest manufacturer they can find, then complain that their problems must be endemic to all of the chipset manufacturer's designs.
I buy the top of the line, or one spot away from top of the line, and these kinds of problems do not occur for me. My 7970 is sitting pretty right now, barely ticking over. My point being: invest a little money in your video cards, people! This is frecking/. of all sites, this should be second nature to you by now.
Ask yourself, why am I screened from receiving unwarranted phone calls / text messages / faxes from everyone, but if they are a political type? Why wouldn't it be everyone?
Yes, but most government types do not consider the Declaration of Independence to enshrine any special rights not granted elsewhere. It's consider a preamble to the Constitution, and thus is unenforceable.
Because the gaming market is NOT one homogeneous bunch?
I mean, let's be honest, casual gamers buying $5 games for their cellphones do not have any of the returns of the dedicated gamer buying $50 games for a console, let alone a fanatical gamer who buys those $80 game + DLC / expansion packs with expensive gaming rigs. You probably won't get rich with the former, whereas the latter has been quite profitable. There may be more 'casual' gamers, but they don't spend nearly as much as intense gamers.
Indeed. The general idea is that an illness spread to several other people will result in larger losses than the one person spending an extra day or two at home. Even the common cold is a productivity wrecker, and the flu is just a terror.
It often amazes how little time people are given for sick days when something like the flu is seasonal. That virus alone will take out a week of your life, which is often times all or more of your sick days for the year. And it certainly isn't anything that the CEO or Chairman wants to catch, even by chance (totally ruin your week in French Polynesia).
I'd like to think that if I ran a reasonably business, I'd give people up to 180 days of sick days (+ maternity leave), provided they had the accompanying 'get out of jail' note from the doctor saying that their illness is real. This, of course, does not account for extreme illnesses, such as cancer.
My employees would work hard, have to turn on a dime, but would be rewarded as such.
Nonsense. The whole point of government is that for a given human population, perhaps.001% of the human beings might be capable of administering Justice without their actions being completely shameful; so, you put them in charge of administering Justice, and the human race will, in theory, be in a better place than it was without their aid.
The problem is, of course, like anything that has existed for several decades, let alone two centuries, mutation, evolution, or, as we say in the programming world, scope creep. Your government is doing well with administering Justice? How about some Social Welfare as well? How about some Defence?
Anyway, at some point, your original government becomes so overwhelmed with responsibilities, with people thrusting power into its hands, while screaming at it to fix every little problem, that it goes mad. When a (monarchy) king goes mad, the nobility usually plan a replacement (usually a relative); when a (democracy) people go mad, there are no easy replacements.
Consider Greece, for an example on a smaller scale. You have foreign powers who are owed money, money that they want paid back. You have a government which is wildly out of touch with its people; they went on a spending binge, cosigning every loan with the people's signature, enjoying the good will that came with spending cash, but didn't have the balls to tell their own people "No."; and you have a people who are not used to the kind of taxation that would be required to pay back those loans (it's pure lunacy, and power-tripping, on the part of the Greek government to believe they could just show up, and slap a yoke across the Greek people's necks, and NOT have a powerful reaction).
You have three different sets of interests here, and they are all in conflict. Not everyone is going to be happy with the outcome here. The smarter thing to do, IMHO, is to lance the cancer immediately, before it spreads further; that's probably not going to happen, since the foreign powers have some fantasy where they get paid back, and the Greek government is hoping that, somehow, they will end this crisis with more power than they started off with (their ultimate goal was more power, like ratcheting up the tax-rate, and they went with the 'Just War' cause here, citing the need to deal with the (self-created) debt crisis as their reason for seeking more power). It's two against one here, and the Greeks know it. Some will say, "well, the Greeks voted them in, and remained silent while these politicians procured these loans," to which I answer "well, who cooked the books to get Greece into the EU?"
So, that's where the US government is today -> too many responsibilities, resulting in it being overwhelmed. Essentially, it's like trying to put together a new Operating System, that's better than the last one, where every new feature request a customer makes has to go into the next version. Realistically speaking, you'd need to cut down the requests to only absolute must haves, with a handful of special top-notch programmers brought on specifically to fix this mess, in order to make the next release. And only those programmers get to decide the must-haves; otherwise, everyone will declare their feature request as a must-have, and you end up back at square one.
I'd believe it. I've seen enough mental illness up close and personal to believe that they are, against all reason, somewhat contagious under the right circumstances.
See, we've been here before. It's like living through 'Window of Opportunity.' We've done this, and have done this so often, that it's driving a number of us completely nuts.
Allow me to lay out what will (in all probability) inevitably happen:
Congress will pass a bill giving some 'rights', while taking away a number of other 'rights.' Pundits on one side will declare that the new law is a travesty, while pundits on the other side will talk about 'how this is a little better, but there is still much work to be done.'
In a few years time, there will be rumors of some major scandal involving the oversight committee. Someone has been paid off, or owns stock in a company that is profiting obscenely from the new law, or someone's buddy owns the stock or is being paid off; or that the law enforcement has been (once again) forgetting that they need to get a warrant before searching people's stuff, or that government officials have been spending their free time looking through people's private stuff. The oversight committee will, of course, at first deny that any kind of 'lapse' has occurred, before reversing their position, and coming clean. There will be calls to disband the committee, and return the previous rights to their owners, but the government will instead replace some of the people on the committee, and possibly grant them more power.
At some point in the far off future, in the length of time it takes for a corpse to stop smelling, the entire enterprise will be disbanded. Congressman Bob will reintroduce a bill to bring back the committee, but publican opinion may be against him, and the whole matter dropped.
Something like that. We've been here before, we know that the people doing these things are not the right people to be doing them, and yet the dumb will continue pressing that button for a 'quick fix' that doesn't work. The more intelligent types will try to find the source of the problem, but probably come up wanting.
Indeed. Short term, their customers will probably pay; long term, they'll quietly move away.
The people at MS will probably applaud the revenue increase, thinking to themselves "Why didn't we do this sooner?" In a few years, they will be thinking instead "Ah, that's why we shouldn't have done that."
Ballmer is really dropping the ball here. All he needs to do now is announce that MS is getting out of the software business to pursue next year's Big Thing (the micro-tablet market), and MS will officially be done. It will rank up there with HP's announcement that they were considering selling off their hardware division, and will have business majors everywhere groan at the memory of it.
They moved back because the re-training costs were so high. These large price increases are likely to have them revisit those decisions.
It has been one of my more painful experiences that the market does not like to be cornered -> any time you think "And that's why they will have to go through me, and I will soak them for all they're worth!" you wake up with a live badger in your trousers. If MS is thinking "they have nowhere to run!" then the market is thinking "2 for 1 sale! Live badgers and wolverines! Get 'em while you can!"
And people wonder why I have a slight case of the nerves.
Could it be possible that he is shorting his own company's stock? I mean, he must be getting paid to drive the OS industry's equivalent of the Titanic into an iceberg; it's not possible for someone to remain so daft with so many of his customers screaming at the top of their lungs.
Indeed. Raising your core product prices by an extravagant amount, when you are flush with cash, because your most recent bet did not pay off, is dumb.
MS putting out a stinker, in the form of Windows 8, will prevent customers from upgrading to this OS.
MS raising their prices, because of this mistake, will cause their customers to look at other long term options.
And the sad part, as I highlighted above, is that they are doing it purely to meet Street 'expectations.' Probably one of the more important follies of the current age: pissing off your customer base, driving away / disowning techs because of their non-commitment to Windows 8, screwing up the developer tools, and not giving a damn, because your only worry is your stock price is entirely the ass-ended way to run a business.
Many of the financial traders have shown, in recent times, that they care more about a short-term gain than a long-term gain. For them a half-penny increase today is worth more than a $30 increase a year from now. And these are the people MS is listening to? They'd set the company on fire if it would get them an extra dollar.
Not that there aren't a handful of sane traders out there, but I think they divested themselves of this nonsense a long time ago. It simply wasn't profitable enough.
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Dude, post a video of these BSOD problems, or go home. ATI had problems with their drivers back when they were shipping Rage 128 chipsets, but improved on that when they started the Catalyst brand.
The way it used to break down was as follows:
Nvidia -> Great drivers, hardware was shit.
ATI -> Horrible drivers, hardware was awesome.
Nvidia took months to get their cards up to speed against ATI cards, slowly working on their drivers until they surpassed them.
ATI would overtake Nvidia with new hardware, then sit on their laurels while they reread their "Drivers for Dummies" book for the 12th time.
Nvidia got better with their hardware. ATI got their shit together with their drivers. Everyone agrees that if you're having problems with a built-in video card on a $20 motherboard, it's probably not ATI / Nvidia's fault. I am sorry that the guy who sold it to you lied about its capabilities, but then, if you have any common sense, you know that discrete video cards / sound cards are a bare minimum.
Indeed. It amazes me how people buy the bottom of the barrel model, from the cheapest manufacturer they can find, then complain that their problems must be endemic to all of the chipset manufacturer's designs.
I buy the top of the line, or one spot away from top of the line, and these kinds of problems do not occur for me. My 7970 is sitting pretty right now, barely ticking over. My point being: invest a little money in your video cards, people! This is frecking /. of all sites, this should be second nature to you by now.
Yeah, you need to buy the active-version of those adapters for the mini-display ports.
XFX got you as well?
This is true. Someone can stand on public property, and say whatever they like, but it doesn't mean people walking nearby must stop and listen.
Ask yourself, why am I screened from receiving unwarranted phone calls / text messages / faxes from everyone, but if they are a political type? Why wouldn't it be everyone?
Yes, but most government types do not consider the Declaration of Independence to enshrine any special rights not granted elsewhere. It's consider a preamble to the Constitution, and thus is unenforceable.
Fair enough. Then let people choose to opt-out of Spam Assassin the next time their bill comes due from their ISP.
All they have to do is logon to a the provided URL, fill in their username and password, and tick the box which says "MOAR SPAM PLZ."
Because we're told that opt-out is just as effective as opt-in, by the same people.
Ah, but with NuSoul, they won't be bothered by that.
So far as our current government seems to be concerned, everyone is a potential enemy.
Depends how tuned the emulator for it turns out to be. I would find it entertaining to play PS3 and XBox360 games on a Steam 'console.'
It's even more amusing to think of the presidents of those respective companies hearing that news.
Depends. Game developers tend to target the current high-end, because by the time the game is released (a year or so later), it will be mid-range.
Because the gaming market is NOT one homogeneous bunch?
I mean, let's be honest, casual gamers buying $5 games for their cellphones do not have any of the returns of the dedicated gamer buying $50 games for a console, let alone a fanatical gamer who buys those $80 game + DLC / expansion packs with expensive gaming rigs. You probably won't get rich with the former, whereas the latter has been quite profitable. There may be more 'casual' gamers, but they don't spend nearly as much as intense gamers.
In short, you can be Ford, or you can be BMW.
Indeed. The general idea is that an illness spread to several other people will result in larger losses than the one person spending an extra day or two at home. Even the common cold is a productivity wrecker, and the flu is just a terror.
It often amazes how little time people are given for sick days when something like the flu is seasonal. That virus alone will take out a week of your life, which is often times all or more of your sick days for the year. And it certainly isn't anything that the CEO or Chairman wants to catch, even by chance (totally ruin your week in French Polynesia).
I'd like to think that if I ran a reasonably business, I'd give people up to 180 days of sick days (+ maternity leave), provided they had the accompanying 'get out of jail' note from the doctor saying that their illness is real. This, of course, does not account for extreme illnesses, such as cancer.
My employees would work hard, have to turn on a dime, but would be rewarded as such.
Nonsense. The whole point of government is that for a given human population, perhaps .001% of the human beings might be capable of administering Justice without their actions being completely shameful; so, you put them in charge of administering Justice, and the human race will, in theory, be in a better place than it was without their aid.
The problem is, of course, like anything that has existed for several decades, let alone two centuries, mutation, evolution, or, as we say in the programming world, scope creep. Your government is doing well with administering Justice? How about some Social Welfare as well? How about some Defence?
Anyway, at some point, your original government becomes so overwhelmed with responsibilities, with people thrusting power into its hands, while screaming at it to fix every little problem, that it goes mad. When a (monarchy) king goes mad, the nobility usually plan a replacement (usually a relative); when a (democracy) people go mad, there are no easy replacements.
Consider Greece, for an example on a smaller scale. You have foreign powers who are owed money, money that they want paid back. You have a government which is wildly out of touch with its people; they went on a spending binge, cosigning every loan with the people's signature, enjoying the good will that came with spending cash, but didn't have the balls to tell their own people "No."; and you have a people who are not used to the kind of taxation that would be required to pay back those loans (it's pure lunacy, and power-tripping, on the part of the Greek government to believe they could just show up, and slap a yoke across the Greek people's necks, and NOT have a powerful reaction).
You have three different sets of interests here, and they are all in conflict. Not everyone is going to be happy with the outcome here. The smarter thing to do, IMHO, is to lance the cancer immediately, before it spreads further; that's probably not going to happen, since the foreign powers have some fantasy where they get paid back, and the Greek government is hoping that, somehow, they will end this crisis with more power than they started off with (their ultimate goal was more power, like ratcheting up the tax-rate, and they went with the 'Just War' cause here, citing the need to deal with the (self-created) debt crisis as their reason for seeking more power). It's two against one here, and the Greeks know it. Some will say, "well, the Greeks voted them in, and remained silent while these politicians procured these loans," to which I answer "well, who cooked the books to get Greece into the EU?"
So, that's where the US government is today -> too many responsibilities, resulting in it being overwhelmed. Essentially, it's like trying to put together a new Operating System, that's better than the last one, where every new feature request a customer makes has to go into the next version. Realistically speaking, you'd need to cut down the requests to only absolute must haves, with a handful of special top-notch programmers brought on specifically to fix this mess, in order to make the next release. And only those programmers get to decide the must-haves; otherwise, everyone will declare their feature request as a must-have, and you end up back at square one.
Ah, but they did.
So, according to the Constitution, what are we supposed to do when Congress violates the Constitution?
Indeed. If companies would actually make decent offers, it would be easier to fill spots.
I'd believe it. I've seen enough mental illness up close and personal to believe that they are, against all reason, somewhat contagious under the right circumstances.
I for one do.
See, we've been here before. It's like living through 'Window of Opportunity.' We've done this, and have done this so often, that it's driving a number of us completely nuts.
Allow me to lay out what will (in all probability) inevitably happen:
Congress will pass a bill giving some 'rights', while taking away a number of other 'rights.' Pundits on one side will declare that the new law is a travesty, while pundits on the other side will talk about 'how this is a little better, but there is still much work to be done.'
In a few years time, there will be rumors of some major scandal involving the oversight committee. Someone has been paid off, or owns stock in a company that is profiting obscenely from the new law, or someone's buddy owns the stock or is being paid off; or that the law enforcement has been (once again) forgetting that they need to get a warrant before searching people's stuff, or that government officials have been spending their free time looking through people's private stuff. The oversight committee will, of course, at first deny that any kind of 'lapse' has occurred, before reversing their position, and coming clean. There will be calls to disband the committee, and return the previous rights to their owners, but the government will instead replace some of the people on the committee, and possibly grant them more power.
At some point in the far off future, in the length of time it takes for a corpse to stop smelling, the entire enterprise will be disbanded. Congressman Bob will reintroduce a bill to bring back the committee, but publican opinion may be against him, and the whole matter dropped.
Something like that. We've been here before, we know that the people doing these things are not the right people to be doing them, and yet the dumb will continue pressing that button for a 'quick fix' that doesn't work. The more intelligent types will try to find the source of the problem, but probably come up wanting.
If all you elect to office are politicians, then all you will have in office are politicians.
The people could stop voting for the lizards, but they do not, because they are afraid that if they do, the wrong lizard might get in...
And, just out of curiosity, if he owns a side-company, or stock in a side-company, who is shorting MS's stock, does he need to disclose that?
Indeed. Short term, their customers will probably pay; long term, they'll quietly move away.
The people at MS will probably applaud the revenue increase, thinking to themselves "Why didn't we do this sooner?"
In a few years, they will be thinking instead "Ah, that's why we shouldn't have done that."
Ballmer is really dropping the ball here. All he needs to do now is announce that MS is getting out of the software business to pursue next year's Big Thing (the micro-tablet market), and MS will officially be done. It will rank up there with HP's announcement that they were considering selling off their hardware division, and will have business majors everywhere groan at the memory of it.
They moved back because the re-training costs were so high. These large price increases are likely to have them revisit those decisions.
It has been one of my more painful experiences that the market does not like to be cornered -> any time you think "And that's why they will have to go through me, and I will soak them for all they're worth!" you wake up with a live badger in your trousers. If MS is thinking "they have nowhere to run!" then the market is thinking "2 for 1 sale! Live badgers and wolverines! Get 'em while you can!"
And people wonder why I have a slight case of the nerves.
Could it be possible that he is shorting his own company's stock? I mean, he must be getting paid to drive the OS industry's equivalent of the Titanic into an iceberg; it's not possible for someone to remain so daft with so many of his customers screaming at the top of their lungs.
Indeed. Raising your core product prices by an extravagant amount, when you are flush with cash, because your most recent bet did not pay off, is dumb.
MS putting out a stinker, in the form of Windows 8, will prevent customers from upgrading to this OS.
MS raising their prices, because of this mistake, will cause their customers to look at other long term options.
And the sad part, as I highlighted above, is that they are doing it purely to meet Street 'expectations.' Probably one of the more important follies of the current age: pissing off your customer base, driving away / disowning techs because of their non-commitment to Windows 8, screwing up the developer tools, and not giving a damn, because your only worry is your stock price is entirely the ass-ended way to run a business.
Many of the financial traders have shown, in recent times, that they care more about a short-term gain than a long-term gain. For them a half-penny increase today is worth more than a $30 increase a year from now. And these are the people MS is listening to? They'd set the company on fire if it would get them an extra dollar.
Not that there aren't a handful of sane traders out there, but I think they divested themselves of this nonsense a long time ago. It simply wasn't profitable enough.