honestly, I don't keep it open when I put that computer to sleep/hibernate. As for horrible lag when resizing/minimizing, I haven't noticed it. That doesn't mean that it won't do it, though... but my system is running the 64-bit version of the software, with 4GB of physical RAM, so it's a little bit out of the mainstream.
See, on my server (Feathermoon), I belong to a guild which has a strict PG rule for guildchat and vent (and I have seen people encouraged to find the door after breaking it). As the raiding time is also daytime (US), we don't tend to attract the little kids, and quite honestly, it's been one of the more pleasant experiences I've had in game. It's not the lack of kids that does it for me, though, it's the lack of swearing and vulgarity. I've raided with foulmouthed 16 yo's, and it just detracts from the experience (could be a difference thing between female/male gamers, I belong to the former, but I'm thinking not). Every time I hear it, I remember what my grandfather used to say... the whole point of using words like that is for emphasis and shock value. The more you use them, the less power they have. Use them sparingly, and people will actually pay attention when you choose to swear.
Still, it's not quite as annoying as those stupid "anal" banter that goes on in trade...
He is a troll, but VLC has a *long* way to go in terms of UI and useability. I much prefer xine or mplayer in that respect, and with the codecs installed, I don't need to worry about not being able to play something. Actually, I haven't run into a file I can't play even with Windows Media Player 12 (the one with Windows 7), as it just goes off to the Internet and downloads codecs automatically when you try to play something it doesn't recognize. As long as the file's meta information is intact, I haven't run into a single media file it won't play... even DivX/XviD. Like VLC, it plays DVD, and unlike VLC, it also plays Blu-Ray.
If you want to name OSS that's better than its closed-source competition, then I'd suggest you point at things like Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL (some versions are GPL'd), Firefox (realms better than MSIE, but its superiority to Opera is debateable), and offerings like Evolution.
As I stated above, I don't live in the US. I've served in the Canadian military, and held TS clearance.... I worked in signals, and needed the clearance to be able to read anything that I might hear or transmit.
In the Canadian military, they didn't take my DNA. They took fingerprint samples, and they have access to my dental records, but they never took my DNA. I currently hold a government job, and they never took my fingerprints... they took my photo for the building's photo ID, but DNA? No frigging way.
As for buying a weapon, I swore when I left the military that I would never again own or use a firearm. What weapons I do have, I never needed to provide fingerprints, let alone DNA to purchase. They've all been acquired legally, and parts of my collection are on the restricted weapons list (or would be, if they were classed as weapons and not antiques). I understand that for something like a Possession-Acquisition License for firearms in this country, I'd need to provide fingerprints. But DNA? Not on your life.
You and I both know that serving in the military, there's a completely different set of rules in play. Your privacy doesn't really exist, and things that wouldn't get you in trouble at all as a civilian could get you confined to barracks in the military. Seeing as a comparatively small proportion of the population ever serves in the military, though, I'd say that it's a bad example of how they are collecting a DNA database.
The case in question was cited as an example of police ignoring contradictory evidence because it didn't support their case, and that decision to ignore evidence leading to the death of an innocent man.
So you're right. It wasn't intended as evidence of DNA evidence being found wrong. For that, you'd have to look at much more recent events. There are, however, still cases of DNA being used to wrongly convict an innocent person.:)
Won't increasing efficiency lower energy prices? Am I right in thinking that there really isn't any incentive for power companies to do this?
You're not right. From TFS/TFA, there's currently no link between the three different power grids. The incentive for the corporations to back this is the potential for them to save money (by buying power from other grids during peak times, rather than building more power plants to make up for the shortfall), and the potential to make money (by selling power to other grids during off-peak hours).
As an example, TX can sell power to the north during the winter to help cover the increased cost of heating, and they can buy power in the summer to help cover the cost of air conditioning. Also, the East can sell to the West when it's 1am on the East Coast (most people in bed, off-peak hours), but still 10pm in California. Likewise, California can sell to the east when it's 5am there (people are still asleep), but 8am in the east.
All in all, it should make a *huge* difference for their bottom lines, while also helping the environment by reducing the amount of power that we have to generate.:)
Somebody's going to moderate you troll for what you've said, but I don't think that'd be entirely fair... I do, however, feel that I should address what you're saying...
I don't want the government to have its grubby mitts on my DNA. I don't object to photo identification. I don't even object to having my fingerprints in a national database, even though fingerprints have been shown to be falsifiable, and aren't really all that reliable as a 100% certain way to identify somebody. I do, however, object to the idea of the government taking a sample of my DNA for a very simple reason: it's private. While it is a slippery slope argument, have you ever seen the movie Gattaca? I don't live in the US, but you need to prove your identity to do a great many things, including buying health insurance. If your DNA is part of that identity proof, how long is it going to be before companies start looking through the sequence for markers, and decide that your car insurance rate is going to be 3X as high as mine because you have a marker that indicates you might be slightly more predisposed to narcilepsy?
Quite aside from that, DNA evidence as a means of identifying somebody has been called into question. The genome as it resides in you changes over time, developping small mutations with cell division. Beyond that, there's 3.2million base pairs in the human genome, which would take an inordinate amount of time to sequence completely. As a result, a DNA test usually only looks at certain indicators, rather than the whole sequence. The possibility for false positives resides in members of your own family... even "distant" relations have the possibility of generating a false positive on a search through a DNA database, with the probability increasing as you reduce the number of comparison points that they store. When you're considering a database with hundreds of millions of data points, with the potential for billions if it's expanded to a global scale, you're going to run into a feasibility issue: if you want to store that many records, you either spend billions of dollars developping and maintaining a computer system that's capable of storing and searching through that many records (and allowing fudging in the search to account for mutations due to aging), or you start making decisions as to which search points to store, and which to drop.
And in response to your point:
And dont be so droll as to think that cops are going to be pinning crimes on John Q Innocent because he matches 80%...they are going to investigate just as they would any other crime. Are there going to be some false positives? Of course there will be - just like there is in standard police investigations.
Have you ever heard of police tunnel vision? We've got a match from the DNA database. Sure it's only 80%, but clearly it must be them! The police have been known on many many occasions to ignore evidence that proves the innocence of their suspect because they've decided that the suspect must be guilty. Often, it's only come to light after the suspect has been convicted, and sometimes it's not until after that wrongly accused suspect has been executed. (one such case is actually why capital punishment is illegal in Canada)
So no. You're not going to get your hands on my DNA for national identification. There's other ways to ID me, thanks.
I liked the option in the most recent Prince of Persia, where if you failed at a particular sequence a few times, the game would give you the option of sitting back while it played through the sequence for you.
It's a great compromise... you have the challenge of the sequence, you have the reward for completing it on your own, but at the same time, you don't marginalise those gamers who simply don't have the timing or skills required to do some of the harder parts of the game.
The question a developper needs to ask themself is this: what do you want people to do with your game? If you have a story to tell, or if you want people to come back to the game and have replayability, then you're going to have to make some kind of sacrifice in difficulty to entice those gamers who simply don't have the time or desire to put in hours upon hours to learn how to defeat a sequence. I don't agree with having the game level up with you (though in linear games that does make a certain amount of sense to do, else the endgame risks becoming ridiculously easy), and I think that making the game so laughably easy as to not present a challenge is a mistake. So how do you keep a challenge in the game while still giving casual gamers the ability to finish the game and enjoy the story you've spent so much time doing? That's where the Prince of Persia example comes up as an excellent example of what to do, IMO:)
A quick Google Search reveals a reputable site reporting that the superconductivity record as of 18 Aug 2005 was -113'C. In Kelvins, that's about 160K, more than 20 Kelvins higher than Wikipedia claims. It's entirely possible, and in fact likely (given the amount of research happening in the field), that the record superconductivity temperature will have increased in the last 4 years.
While I agree that the site looks like it was designed by a 3-year old, I can't discount it simply because Wikipedia claims that it's wrong. In this case, I know that Wikipedia's claim is, itself, wrong. That doesn't mean that TFA is correct, mind you, just that you can't claim it's automatically wrong because it disagrees with Wiki. I'll look on it with my normal scepticism until I see it reported and backed up in another publication.
Yup... it's actually illegal in Canada for corporations to make political campaign contributions to candidates or parties (either monetary or in goods/services). It's considered serious fraud to conceal the source of a donation (as in, something that could get a party de-listed as an official party*, and could get individual candidates sent to jail). And any donation over $200 is a matter of public record that anybody with an Internet connection can see and review, just by going to the Elections Canada website.
Because of that, while there are cases where a coproration tries to buy an individual candidate, it's a *lot* harder for a corporation to dictate public policy. It's just the way the party system works in this country.
*De-listing an official party has some serious negative effects on the party... First, they can't put their party name on the ballot with the candidates they endorse. That'll make it harder for voters who vote party line to know who they're going to vote for. Their party logo is no longer recognized as a trademark, meaning anybody can use it. Also, listed parties are entitled to have up to 60% of their campaign costs reimbursed on a riding-by-riding basis if they get more than 10% of the popular vote... when you consider that an election could, theoretically, cost a party upwards of $30million across all 308 ridings, that's pretty big. Listed parties are also entitled to free airtime on tv/radio in which to advertise, and they can transfer funds between ridings. Not only that, but the personal donation limit on campaign contributions is separated into several categories, each of which has the same upper limit, and is cumulative. For an independant, you can only donate to the candidate. For a registered party, you can also donate to the riding association and to the national party. (meaning you can donate 3x as much money). Nobody's ever been stupid enough to try the kind of electoral fraud that'd get a party de-listed.
In Ontario, they have done that, though... But while the number of rural MTO offices has reduced, it's still possible to have your driving test done in a rural location. You just have to book it in advance, and ask whether there's a rural location to test. There's a location in a suburb outside the city where I live that, for example, only tests on Tuesdays.
AFAIK, they haven't made the test any harder. I wish they would, though... there's far too many idiots on the roads in this city who don't have a clue how to drive. I'm sorry, but with no traffic, no pedestrians, and a nice wide turn with a *yield* sign, you do not need to come to a complete stop to make your right turn. Situational awareness. One of the most important skills in driving: look around, and know what's coming and around before you get to the point where you have to decide whether you need to stop or continue. That way, you have a lot more time to react, and you can make the correct decision in plenty of time without causing a hazard to other drivers. You don't even need to come to a complete stop to make your left turn, if there's no oncoming traffic or pedestrians. And don't get me started on peoples' definitions of speed limits... it seems to mean either "do 20km/h below what's posted" (downright annoying when the limit is 40km/h) or "do 50km/h over what's posted" (downright idiotic when the limit is 100km/h).
You could also test the patches and read the bulletins to see whether they actually apply to your situation before you let them anywhere near the systems you administer...
What nVidia's doing isn't against any of the agreements or practices they have with Microsoft. It's not illegal, either. It's dirty and underhanded, but they can quite easily and simply justify it by saying that there's known issues in game X where the PhysX acceleration doesn't play friendly with the ATi hardware, and until ATi updates their drivers, they have disabled PhysX to prevent crashing.
They can also disable the functionality on the grounds that they have not been able to test the functionality with ATi hardware, and so in order to maintain their WHQL certification, they *have* to disable it.
It's perfectly legal, and well in keeping with the agreements they have with Microsoft. But... distributing a patch that traps the function call in their drivers and returns a false regardless of whether ATi's got drivers installed is also perfectly legal. The only thing being, if you have the patch installed and things don't work as expected, then you have no recourse going to nVidia.
Not necessarily... when IE 5.0 came out, it was up against IE3 and IE4, both of which really sucked. On the other side of the table, their main competition were Netscape Communicator 4.5, which was bloated as all fuck and ran really really slow, and Opera, which had some nice features you didn't see anywhere else, but also ran pretty slow. At the time Opera still expected you to pay for the privilege of using their software, too, which really hurt their adoption when they were running against free alternatives.
While there were a large number of other browsers available at the time, those were the three main competitors. IE5 was a security nightmare, but it ran reasonably fast, it loaded a lot faster than either of the alternatives, and the price point was in the right place. Depending on your criteria, it actually was the best option out there.
Of course, that didn't stop me from sticking faithfully to Mozilla's offerings. >.> I used IE when I had no choice, but other than that I preferred Netscape.
Yes, any anti-virus is better than no anti-virus, but it won't take long before malware authors discover how to circumvent the Microsoft tool.
Microsoft bought out an antivirus company a couple of years ago. This is simply the rebranding and current version of that company's software.
And you know that virus-writers have figured out how to circumvent more expensive antivirus programs like McAfee, Norton, and PC-Cillin, right? This is why you update the virus database... so that it detects viruses that can disable your antivirus before they get that chance.
Give MS a chance. They could actually have stumbled onto a good product, and it could be something that actually helps the world at large.
I won't be installing it myself, but that's because I'm quite happy with the Avast that I have running. I'll wait for the next report over at av-comparatives before I pass judgement on it. Interesting to note that for the last several reports, several free options have been in the top 5 and occupied the top spot over all. In the latest report (August 2009), AntiVir had a 99.4% trap rate, Avast has a 98.0% trap rate. (Norton and McAfee had 98.7% and 98.4% trap rates, by comparison) But here's the rub... Avast had the lowest false positive rate of any of the top 5 antivirus programs. Norton had almost 3x as many false positives as Avast. AntiVir had more than 4x as many. And McAfee had more than 8x as many false positives. Out of the top 4 antivirus solutions, I'll stick with Avast.
But they do those tests on a regular basis, and you have no idea how well Microsoft's offering will fare in the next one. It could actually do very well. I wouldn't hold my breath, though... on the most recent testing, while MS's pay-for service tied Avast in false positives, it had a pretty lousy 90% trap rate... Still, that's nowhere near the worst offering out there.
Anyway... do your research before you decide that something is automatically bad just because it comes from Microsoft. Even if it just ties the other software, a 90% trap rate on viruses is better than a 0% from not having antivirus at all. And suggesting that it won't be long before virus writers figure out how to circumvent the software is completely ignoring the fact that virus writers figured out, a long time ago, how to circumvent commercial offerings like Norton and McAfee, and that hasn't actually hurt their trap rates at all.
I wonder if MS will be within their rights if they were to pay OEMs to pre-install Security Essentials on PCs they sell. Will it be seen as a sneaky way of offering a discount with Windows ("install this with Windows and we'll knock 5 bucks off each Windows OEM license"), or is it seen as something that's beneficial to consumers, so it's ok for MS to make pre-installation deals with OEMs.
OEMs like Dell and HP make more than $5 for every trial copy of Norton or McAfee that they bundle with coimputers.
Microsoft *could* simply include this in the base OS image, however. You install Windows, you get it right off the bat. As long as they make it easy to uninstall, then they'd get around anti-competitive behaviour rules. After all, they aren't preventing users from installing alternatives, and they aren't making it hard for competitve products to be installed. They are, however, making things better for the world at large by having some kind of self-updating anti-malware protection enabled out of the box.
You'll find Avast is a lot less intrusive when you disable the sounds. That stupid voiceover is pretty annoying...
As to Microsoft's offering, it could be good, it could be bad. What matters to me is the trap rate, not the price. The reason I use Avast is because its trap rate is on a par with some of the most expensive (and system-lagging) antivirus options out there, while still being free, and while still not slowing my computer down. If this product is able to do the same thing, then I might very well switch to it. If, for no other reason, then because software updates (new virus engine) can be tied to Windows Update, and so will be updated on that machine automatically without me having to think about it.
How so? Try deleting a wireless network. Really, try it. You have to find a GUID link in the Help system to bring up the old-style control panel which allows you to delete a network. Gah!
R.click on your wireless icon in the task bar, and go to "Network and Sharing Center". On the left, there's a link "Manage wireless networks". Click on that, it'll give you a list of all active and inactive wireless networks. Right-click on any of them, and you can delete it by clicking "Remove Network".
I agree that it can be irritating for power users, but that's mainly because power users expect things to be in one place. They've gone and changed the locations, but they haven't removed the functionality.
Out of curiosity, did you *have* to install a video card driver, or did you just want to install the one from nVidia's website instead of using the one on Windows Update?
I installed the one direct from nVidia's website because I was getting jaggies and screen flickering in some video games.... Out of the box, it had a perfectly adequate 2D driver and was able to use the display at the native 1680x1050 resolution, but 3D performance was non-existant.
I also prefer not to install drivers from Windows Update. I like knowing exactly which version of a driver I have installed, and I don't like replacing drivers unless I'm having an issue that needs to be addressed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it and all.:)
While you're likely to shoot me down without bothering to look at what's being said, I'd like to point something out to you:
when cifs said that he'd been using it for several months, and that it wasn't bad, you decided that because he installed a beta OS from MS, he automatically didn't count.
What you're overlooking is that you have no idea the circumstances under which he's using it. He could be using it in a virtual machine. He could be dual-booting with another OS. He could actually be using the beta for its intended purpose: to test it. To see if he can break it. To see if it's actually functional. You have no way of knowing what other systems he's using, or what other computers he's got.
And even if he is using it as his primary OS, has it ocurred to you to ask why he's using it over some of the alternatives? This is Slashdot. Is it really possible to be a user here and not know what Linux is, or OS/X, or BSD, or Solaris? Even in passing, I'd say that most of the reader base here has tried at least one of the above at some point in time, and that a significant portion of them are using one or more of those alternative OSes right now as we speak.
Considering that he's probably well aware of the options available to him, why is he using Win7? Honestly, chalking it up to fanboi-ism is selling yourself short. You'd do well to try it out in a VM and see what it's actually about before you spout off mindless drivel like you just did. If you're going to shoot down his choice to use Win7, do it on a point-by-point basis, explaining exactly why one of the alternatives is better. And "it's free" isn't really a dealbreaker... neither is DRM, really, since I can still play downloaded MP3's, downloaded OGG/Vorbis, downloaded divx and xvid videos, and was able to do all of the above without ever going off and finding codecs. When I opened the file, it was already associated with WMP, and WMP was able to find the codec for me. While there's DRM in the OS, it isn't slowing things down significantly for me, and it isn't interfering with my ability to do what I want with the computer. I could see it causing you issues if you were trying to rip DVDs or Blu-rays, but most of us won't be affected by it.
As for myself, I needed to do an OS reinstall on my gaming machine about a month and a half ago. As I've got an MSDN subscription (was a benefit from a job I had a while back, and they "forgot" to disable it), I downloaded and installed the RTM version of 64-bit Windows 7. It starts up faster than XP (MCE 2005) did on my machine, it's more responsive, and it's got a heck of a lot more eye candy. I decided to keep it, and have been using it, quite happily, on that system ever since. As for the tweaked/redesigned UI, I find that I'm quite comfortable with it, and that I really enjoy the updates they've made. It's not perfect, but no OS is. I would say, from experience, that it's about on a par with OS/X (only 10 years late!), as well as KDE4 and XFCE.
The thing is... for the first time, ever, in my experience with Windows, I don't feel like I'm fighting with the OS to achieve even simple tasks. Things just work. (on that note, every piece of my laptop's hardware worked out of the box, and the only driver I had to install was the video card). It's responsive enough, and it just gets out of my way and lets me do things, without cluttering up my screen with useless crap and warnings.
And the system in question is by no means top of the line, either. It's got a T5450 processor (1.66GHz Core2Duo), 2GB of RAM, a 120GB 7200rpm laptop hard drive, and a 256MB GeForce 8600M GT.
That's basically what I was going to suggest, and I think it's more in line with what the clients of the OP are asking for... in Paradox, when a record was locked it was tagged read-only until it was unlocked (or the lock expired). This way, when you're using a multi-user database access program, one user can open/edit a record, and other users can access the information within, but nobody else can modify it. So if you implement it the way parent is saying, you'll end up with a system that's much more in line with the behaviour that the client had with their Paradox database, and will likely give better functionality.
The way that other people are suggesting, honestly, would just annoy me. I'd be *really* pissed if I opened a document, spent half an hour working on it, then committed my changes only to find out that somebody else had been spending time working on it as well. That adds up to a lot of wasted time. If, however, I were given an indication that somebody else was editing it, I could work on a different record without wasting my time.
Um... weren't some of the in-game maps on Wolfenstein shaped like swastikas? Even if they removed the textures that had swastikas on them, wouldn't that still count?
And people are unlikely to be able to explore Venus, Jupiter, etc for many decades -- maybe not ever.
There's a very good reason to think in terms of manned deep space exploration: manned deep space colonization. Something about putting all your eggs in one basket. If something happens to this planet, or this solar system, we're screwed. Now, we're a long way away from being interstellar, but we should at least start trying to be interplanetary now.
Manned space exploration isn't about the human gathering information, it's about gathering information about what happens to humans out there.
This is like walking around with $600 in your pocket and giving a bum on the street $3.
Not quite. You need to give that bum on the street some more credentials... he's living from meal to meal, and sometimes goes 2 or 3 days between chances to eat. Oh, and he's a former Nobel laureate, and invented things like Velcro and Kevlar, without which the military's equipment wouldn't be anywhere near as effective as it is....
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honestly, I don't keep it open when I put that computer to sleep/hibernate. As for horrible lag when resizing/minimizing, I haven't noticed it. That doesn't mean that it won't do it, though... but my system is running the 64-bit version of the software, with 4GB of physical RAM, so it's a little bit out of the mainstream.
See, on my server (Feathermoon), I belong to a guild which has a strict PG rule for guildchat and vent (and I have seen people encouraged to find the door after breaking it). As the raiding time is also daytime (US), we don't tend to attract the little kids, and quite honestly, it's been one of the more pleasant experiences I've had in game. It's not the lack of kids that does it for me, though, it's the lack of swearing and vulgarity. I've raided with foulmouthed 16 yo's, and it just detracts from the experience (could be a difference thing between female/male gamers, I belong to the former, but I'm thinking not). Every time I hear it, I remember what my grandfather used to say... the whole point of using words like that is for emphasis and shock value. The more you use them, the less power they have. Use them sparingly, and people will actually pay attention when you choose to swear.
Still, it's not quite as annoying as those stupid "anal" banter that goes on in trade...
He is a troll, but VLC has a *long* way to go in terms of UI and useability. I much prefer xine or mplayer in that respect, and with the codecs installed, I don't need to worry about not being able to play something. Actually, I haven't run into a file I can't play even with Windows Media Player 12 (the one with Windows 7), as it just goes off to the Internet and downloads codecs automatically when you try to play something it doesn't recognize. As long as the file's meta information is intact, I haven't run into a single media file it won't play... even DivX/XviD. Like VLC, it plays DVD, and unlike VLC, it also plays Blu-Ray.
If you want to name OSS that's better than its closed-source competition, then I'd suggest you point at things like Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL (some versions are GPL'd), Firefox (realms better than MSIE, but its superiority to Opera is debateable), and offerings like Evolution.
As I stated above, I don't live in the US. I've served in the Canadian military, and held TS clearance.... I worked in signals, and needed the clearance to be able to read anything that I might hear or transmit.
In the Canadian military, they didn't take my DNA. They took fingerprint samples, and they have access to my dental records, but they never took my DNA. I currently hold a government job, and they never took my fingerprints... they took my photo for the building's photo ID, but DNA? No frigging way.
As for buying a weapon, I swore when I left the military that I would never again own or use a firearm. What weapons I do have, I never needed to provide fingerprints, let alone DNA to purchase. They've all been acquired legally, and parts of my collection are on the restricted weapons list (or would be, if they were classed as weapons and not antiques). I understand that for something like a Possession-Acquisition License for firearms in this country, I'd need to provide fingerprints. But DNA? Not on your life.
You and I both know that serving in the military, there's a completely different set of rules in play. Your privacy doesn't really exist, and things that wouldn't get you in trouble at all as a civilian could get you confined to barracks in the military. Seeing as a comparatively small proportion of the population ever serves in the military, though, I'd say that it's a bad example of how they are collecting a DNA database.
The case in question was cited as an example of police ignoring contradictory evidence because it didn't support their case, and that decision to ignore evidence leading to the death of an innocent man.
So you're right. It wasn't intended as evidence of DNA evidence being found wrong. For that, you'd have to look at much more recent events. There are, however, still cases of DNA being used to wrongly convict an innocent person. :)
You're not right. From TFS/TFA, there's currently no link between the three different power grids. The incentive for the corporations to back this is the potential for them to save money (by buying power from other grids during peak times, rather than building more power plants to make up for the shortfall), and the potential to make money (by selling power to other grids during off-peak hours).
As an example, TX can sell power to the north during the winter to help cover the increased cost of heating, and they can buy power in the summer to help cover the cost of air conditioning. Also, the East can sell to the West when it's 1am on the East Coast (most people in bed, off-peak hours), but still 10pm in California. Likewise, California can sell to the east when it's 5am there (people are still asleep), but 8am in the east.
All in all, it should make a *huge* difference for their bottom lines, while also helping the environment by reducing the amount of power that we have to generate. :)
Somebody's going to moderate you troll for what you've said, but I don't think that'd be entirely fair... I do, however, feel that I should address what you're saying...
I don't want the government to have its grubby mitts on my DNA. I don't object to photo identification. I don't even object to having my fingerprints in a national database, even though fingerprints have been shown to be falsifiable, and aren't really all that reliable as a 100% certain way to identify somebody. I do, however, object to the idea of the government taking a sample of my DNA for a very simple reason: it's private. While it is a slippery slope argument, have you ever seen the movie Gattaca? I don't live in the US, but you need to prove your identity to do a great many things, including buying health insurance. If your DNA is part of that identity proof, how long is it going to be before companies start looking through the sequence for markers, and decide that your car insurance rate is going to be 3X as high as mine because you have a marker that indicates you might be slightly more predisposed to narcilepsy?
Quite aside from that, DNA evidence as a means of identifying somebody has been called into question. The genome as it resides in you changes over time, developping small mutations with cell division. Beyond that, there's 3.2million base pairs in the human genome, which would take an inordinate amount of time to sequence completely. As a result, a DNA test usually only looks at certain indicators, rather than the whole sequence. The possibility for false positives resides in members of your own family... even "distant" relations have the possibility of generating a false positive on a search through a DNA database, with the probability increasing as you reduce the number of comparison points that they store. When you're considering a database with hundreds of millions of data points, with the potential for billions if it's expanded to a global scale, you're going to run into a feasibility issue: if you want to store that many records, you either spend billions of dollars developping and maintaining a computer system that's capable of storing and searching through that many records (and allowing fudging in the search to account for mutations due to aging), or you start making decisions as to which search points to store, and which to drop.
And in response to your point:
Have you ever heard of police tunnel vision? We've got a match from the DNA database. Sure it's only 80%, but clearly it must be them! The police have been known on many many occasions to ignore evidence that proves the innocence of their suspect because they've decided that the suspect must be guilty. Often, it's only come to light after the suspect has been convicted, and sometimes it's not until after that wrongly accused suspect has been executed. (one such case is actually why capital punishment is illegal in Canada)
So no. You're not going to get your hands on my DNA for national identification. There's other ways to ID me, thanks.
You mean, you didn't enjoy being ganked by that level 79 bunny rabbit?
I liked the option in the most recent Prince of Persia, where if you failed at a particular sequence a few times, the game would give you the option of sitting back while it played through the sequence for you.
It's a great compromise... you have the challenge of the sequence, you have the reward for completing it on your own, but at the same time, you don't marginalise those gamers who simply don't have the timing or skills required to do some of the harder parts of the game.
The question a developper needs to ask themself is this: what do you want people to do with your game? If you have a story to tell, or if you want people to come back to the game and have replayability, then you're going to have to make some kind of sacrifice in difficulty to entice those gamers who simply don't have the time or desire to put in hours upon hours to learn how to defeat a sequence. I don't agree with having the game level up with you (though in linear games that does make a certain amount of sense to do, else the endgame risks becoming ridiculously easy), and I think that making the game so laughably easy as to not present a challenge is a mistake. So how do you keep a challenge in the game while still giving casual gamers the ability to finish the game and enjoy the story you've spent so much time doing? That's where the Prince of Persia example comes up as an excellent example of what to do, IMO :)
A quick Google Search reveals a reputable site reporting that the superconductivity record as of 18 Aug 2005 was -113'C. In Kelvins, that's about 160K, more than 20 Kelvins higher than Wikipedia claims. It's entirely possible, and in fact likely (given the amount of research happening in the field), that the record superconductivity temperature will have increased in the last 4 years.
While I agree that the site looks like it was designed by a 3-year old, I can't discount it simply because Wikipedia claims that it's wrong. In this case, I know that Wikipedia's claim is, itself, wrong. That doesn't mean that TFA is correct, mind you, just that you can't claim it's automatically wrong because it disagrees with Wiki. I'll look on it with my normal scepticism until I see it reported and backed up in another publication.
Yup... it's actually illegal in Canada for corporations to make political campaign contributions to candidates or parties (either monetary or in goods/services). It's considered serious fraud to conceal the source of a donation (as in, something that could get a party de-listed as an official party*, and could get individual candidates sent to jail). And any donation over $200 is a matter of public record that anybody with an Internet connection can see and review, just by going to the Elections Canada website.
Because of that, while there are cases where a coproration tries to buy an individual candidate, it's a *lot* harder for a corporation to dictate public policy. It's just the way the party system works in this country.
*De-listing an official party has some serious negative effects on the party... First, they can't put their party name on the ballot with the candidates they endorse. That'll make it harder for voters who vote party line to know who they're going to vote for. Their party logo is no longer recognized as a trademark, meaning anybody can use it. Also, listed parties are entitled to have up to 60% of their campaign costs reimbursed on a riding-by-riding basis if they get more than 10% of the popular vote... when you consider that an election could, theoretically, cost a party upwards of $30million across all 308 ridings, that's pretty big. Listed parties are also entitled to free airtime on tv/radio in which to advertise, and they can transfer funds between ridings. Not only that, but the personal donation limit on campaign contributions is separated into several categories, each of which has the same upper limit, and is cumulative. For an independant, you can only donate to the candidate. For a registered party, you can also donate to the riding association and to the national party. (meaning you can donate 3x as much money). Nobody's ever been stupid enough to try the kind of electoral fraud that'd get a party de-listed.
In Ontario, they have done that, though... But while the number of rural MTO offices has reduced, it's still possible to have your driving test done in a rural location. You just have to book it in advance, and ask whether there's a rural location to test. There's a location in a suburb outside the city where I live that, for example, only tests on Tuesdays.
AFAIK, they haven't made the test any harder. I wish they would, though... there's far too many idiots on the roads in this city who don't have a clue how to drive. I'm sorry, but with no traffic, no pedestrians, and a nice wide turn with a *yield* sign, you do not need to come to a complete stop to make your right turn. Situational awareness. One of the most important skills in driving: look around, and know what's coming and around before you get to the point where you have to decide whether you need to stop or continue. That way, you have a lot more time to react, and you can make the correct decision in plenty of time without causing a hazard to other drivers. You don't even need to come to a complete stop to make your left turn, if there's no oncoming traffic or pedestrians. And don't get me started on peoples' definitions of speed limits... it seems to mean either "do 20km/h below what's posted" (downright annoying when the limit is 40km/h) or "do 50km/h over what's posted" (downright idiotic when the limit is 100km/h).
You could also test the patches and read the bulletins to see whether they actually apply to your situation before you let them anywhere near the systems you administer...
What nVidia's doing isn't against any of the agreements or practices they have with Microsoft. It's not illegal, either. It's dirty and underhanded, but they can quite easily and simply justify it by saying that there's known issues in game X where the PhysX acceleration doesn't play friendly with the ATi hardware, and until ATi updates their drivers, they have disabled PhysX to prevent crashing.
They can also disable the functionality on the grounds that they have not been able to test the functionality with ATi hardware, and so in order to maintain their WHQL certification, they *have* to disable it.
It's perfectly legal, and well in keeping with the agreements they have with Microsoft. But... distributing a patch that traps the function call in their drivers and returns a false regardless of whether ATi's got drivers installed is also perfectly legal. The only thing being, if you have the patch installed and things don't work as expected, then you have no recourse going to nVidia.
Not necessarily... when IE 5.0 came out, it was up against IE3 and IE4, both of which really sucked. On the other side of the table, their main competition were Netscape Communicator 4.5, which was bloated as all fuck and ran really really slow, and Opera, which had some nice features you didn't see anywhere else, but also ran pretty slow. At the time Opera still expected you to pay for the privilege of using their software, too, which really hurt their adoption when they were running against free alternatives.
While there were a large number of other browsers available at the time, those were the three main competitors. IE5 was a security nightmare, but it ran reasonably fast, it loaded a lot faster than either of the alternatives, and the price point was in the right place. Depending on your criteria, it actually was the best option out there.
Of course, that didn't stop me from sticking faithfully to Mozilla's offerings. >.> I used IE when I had no choice, but other than that I preferred Netscape.
Microsoft bought out an antivirus company a couple of years ago. This is simply the rebranding and current version of that company's software.
And you know that virus-writers have figured out how to circumvent more expensive antivirus programs like McAfee, Norton, and PC-Cillin, right? This is why you update the virus database... so that it detects viruses that can disable your antivirus before they get that chance.
Give MS a chance. They could actually have stumbled onto a good product, and it could be something that actually helps the world at large.
I won't be installing it myself, but that's because I'm quite happy with the Avast that I have running. I'll wait for the next report over at av-comparatives before I pass judgement on it. Interesting to note that for the last several reports, several free options have been in the top 5 and occupied the top spot over all. In the latest report (August 2009), AntiVir had a 99.4% trap rate, Avast has a 98.0% trap rate. (Norton and McAfee had 98.7% and 98.4% trap rates, by comparison) But here's the rub... Avast had the lowest false positive rate of any of the top 5 antivirus programs. Norton had almost 3x as many false positives as Avast. AntiVir had more than 4x as many. And McAfee had more than 8x as many false positives. Out of the top 4 antivirus solutions, I'll stick with Avast.
But they do those tests on a regular basis, and you have no idea how well Microsoft's offering will fare in the next one. It could actually do very well. I wouldn't hold my breath, though... on the most recent testing, while MS's pay-for service tied Avast in false positives, it had a pretty lousy 90% trap rate... Still, that's nowhere near the worst offering out there.
Anyway... do your research before you decide that something is automatically bad just because it comes from Microsoft. Even if it just ties the other software, a 90% trap rate on viruses is better than a 0% from not having antivirus at all. And suggesting that it won't be long before virus writers figure out how to circumvent the software is completely ignoring the fact that virus writers figured out, a long time ago, how to circumvent commercial offerings like Norton and McAfee, and that hasn't actually hurt their trap rates at all.
OEMs like Dell and HP make more than $5 for every trial copy of Norton or McAfee that they bundle with coimputers.
Microsoft *could* simply include this in the base OS image, however. You install Windows, you get it right off the bat. As long as they make it easy to uninstall, then they'd get around anti-competitive behaviour rules. After all, they aren't preventing users from installing alternatives, and they aren't making it hard for competitve products to be installed. They are, however, making things better for the world at large by having some kind of self-updating anti-malware protection enabled out of the box.
You'll find Avast is a lot less intrusive when you disable the sounds. That stupid voiceover is pretty annoying...
As to Microsoft's offering, it could be good, it could be bad. What matters to me is the trap rate, not the price. The reason I use Avast is because its trap rate is on a par with some of the most expensive (and system-lagging) antivirus options out there, while still being free, and while still not slowing my computer down. If this product is able to do the same thing, then I might very well switch to it. If, for no other reason, then because software updates (new virus engine) can be tied to Windows Update, and so will be updated on that machine automatically without me having to think about it.
R.click on your wireless icon in the task bar, and go to "Network and Sharing Center". On the left, there's a link "Manage wireless networks". Click on that, it'll give you a list of all active and inactive wireless networks. Right-click on any of them, and you can delete it by clicking "Remove Network".
I agree that it can be irritating for power users, but that's mainly because power users expect things to be in one place. They've gone and changed the locations, but they haven't removed the functionality.
I installed the one direct from nVidia's website because I was getting jaggies and screen flickering in some video games.... Out of the box, it had a perfectly adequate 2D driver and was able to use the display at the native 1680x1050 resolution, but 3D performance was non-existant.
I also prefer not to install drivers from Windows Update. I like knowing exactly which version of a driver I have installed, and I don't like replacing drivers unless I'm having an issue that needs to be addressed. If it ain't broke, don't fix it and all. :)
While you're likely to shoot me down without bothering to look at what's being said, I'd like to point something out to you:
when cifs said that he'd been using it for several months, and that it wasn't bad, you decided that because he installed a beta OS from MS, he automatically didn't count.
What you're overlooking is that you have no idea the circumstances under which he's using it. He could be using it in a virtual machine. He could be dual-booting with another OS. He could actually be using the beta for its intended purpose: to test it. To see if he can break it. To see if it's actually functional. You have no way of knowing what other systems he's using, or what other computers he's got.
And even if he is using it as his primary OS, has it ocurred to you to ask why he's using it over some of the alternatives? This is Slashdot. Is it really possible to be a user here and not know what Linux is, or OS/X, or BSD, or Solaris? Even in passing, I'd say that most of the reader base here has tried at least one of the above at some point in time, and that a significant portion of them are using one or more of those alternative OSes right now as we speak.
Considering that he's probably well aware of the options available to him, why is he using Win7? Honestly, chalking it up to fanboi-ism is selling yourself short. You'd do well to try it out in a VM and see what it's actually about before you spout off mindless drivel like you just did. If you're going to shoot down his choice to use Win7, do it on a point-by-point basis, explaining exactly why one of the alternatives is better. And "it's free" isn't really a dealbreaker... neither is DRM, really, since I can still play downloaded MP3's, downloaded OGG/Vorbis, downloaded divx and xvid videos, and was able to do all of the above without ever going off and finding codecs. When I opened the file, it was already associated with WMP, and WMP was able to find the codec for me. While there's DRM in the OS, it isn't slowing things down significantly for me, and it isn't interfering with my ability to do what I want with the computer. I could see it causing you issues if you were trying to rip DVDs or Blu-rays, but most of us won't be affected by it.
As for myself, I needed to do an OS reinstall on my gaming machine about a month and a half ago. As I've got an MSDN subscription (was a benefit from a job I had a while back, and they "forgot" to disable it), I downloaded and installed the RTM version of 64-bit Windows 7. It starts up faster than XP (MCE 2005) did on my machine, it's more responsive, and it's got a heck of a lot more eye candy. I decided to keep it, and have been using it, quite happily, on that system ever since. As for the tweaked/redesigned UI, I find that I'm quite comfortable with it, and that I really enjoy the updates they've made. It's not perfect, but no OS is. I would say, from experience, that it's about on a par with OS/X (only 10 years late!), as well as KDE4 and XFCE.
The thing is... for the first time, ever, in my experience with Windows, I don't feel like I'm fighting with the OS to achieve even simple tasks. Things just work. (on that note, every piece of my laptop's hardware worked out of the box, and the only driver I had to install was the video card). It's responsive enough, and it just gets out of my way and lets me do things, without cluttering up my screen with useless crap and warnings.
And the system in question is by no means top of the line, either. It's got a T5450 processor (1.66GHz Core2Duo), 2GB of RAM, a 120GB 7200rpm laptop hard drive, and a 256MB GeForce 8600M GT.
Mod parent up.
That's basically what I was going to suggest, and I think it's more in line with what the clients of the OP are asking for... in Paradox, when a record was locked it was tagged read-only until it was unlocked (or the lock expired). This way, when you're using a multi-user database access program, one user can open/edit a record, and other users can access the information within, but nobody else can modify it. So if you implement it the way parent is saying, you'll end up with a system that's much more in line with the behaviour that the client had with their Paradox database, and will likely give better functionality.
The way that other people are suggesting, honestly, would just annoy me. I'd be *really* pissed if I opened a document, spent half an hour working on it, then committed my changes only to find out that somebody else had been spending time working on it as well. That adds up to a lot of wasted time. If, however, I were given an indication that somebody else was editing it, I could work on a different record without wasting my time.
Um... weren't some of the in-game maps on Wolfenstein shaped like swastikas? Even if they removed the textures that had swastikas on them, wouldn't that still count?
There's a very good reason to think in terms of manned deep space exploration: manned deep space colonization. Something about putting all your eggs in one basket. If something happens to this planet, or this solar system, we're screwed. Now, we're a long way away from being interstellar, but we should at least start trying to be interplanetary now.
Manned space exploration isn't about the human gathering information, it's about gathering information about what happens to humans out there.
Not quite. You need to give that bum on the street some more credentials... he's living from meal to meal, and sometimes goes 2 or 3 days between chances to eat. Oh, and he's a former Nobel laureate, and invented things like Velcro and Kevlar, without which the military's equipment wouldn't be anywhere near as effective as it is....