I logged onto Facebook the other day and got a message that I should upgrade to a "current browser like IE 7". And then there was fine print below saying Firefox and Opera would also work.
Every damn student I know is on Facebook day in day out and now that they've been graduating it seems to be spreading to outside world like wildfire too -- I've suddenly recently been getting all kinds of friend requests from people I haven't seen in something like 10 years (I'm an old grad student -- these are old people way outside of student world as I am). It really pisses me off knowing MS's ways and seeing the upgrade to IE 7 instruction emblazened on login page.
Google should have been on this years ago. The nature of these social networking sites is that everyone joins whichever one is the most popular. In college that's always been Facebook because people outside of college weren't allowed on and Facebook had certain aspects oriented toward campus stuff. Now it's opened up to the outside world. People aren't going to be on five different networks -- they want to be on the One that their friends are on. It could be the case that before long before the overwhelming majority of people's friends are on Facebook or Myspace and that's the end of the story, basically.
The idea that Apple hardware is more expensive than PC hardware is quite outdated, to be frank. Price a few out versus Dell et al. You'll see. I just did a few months ago. Now I own my first Mac ever. This is the first computer I have ever owned that I basically love every single thing about. And that's leaving out the fact that Apple hardware generally comes with damn near all the software people regularly buy separately. Oh and then there's the lightyears better customer service and reliability ratings (see Consumer Reports -- there's no comparison).
You need to talk to a CAD draftsman some time. You'll quickly learn that there is not a gaming card in existence that can hold a candle to even the cheapest CAD-oriented card on the market. The gaming cards are useless as soon as you try to do anything with any movement.
Well I'm pleased to hear that NV and ATI are still working on OpenGL as much as they are DirectX if that's really the case.
Are you really telling me that the only difference between a $1500 Quadro and gamer card is the drivers though? The bad-ass gamer card in my friend's computer chokes and can barely run at even the most basic animation of an of maybe 30 parts in CAD.
Not that I made it extremely clear, but I think most of you are missing my point. The point was that if the same resources went into development of OpenGL and hardware optimized for it as goes into DirectX, then maybe both what 3D graphics was originially invented for and then gaming also could benefit at the same time.
Instead, any CAD use requires $1500 graphics cards because of poor economies of scale. This is a stupid waste.
A lot of you seem to think that I don't understand why DirectX is receiving preferential treatment over the original (non-platform-specific) OpenGL. However, I do -- MS wanted to create something of its own that was deliberately incompatible with existing standards and that gaming development would end up moving to either due to prepodnerance of directx MS hardware (ie XBox), MS buying a ton of gaming companies, or the simple advantage that DirectX is not designed for CAD et al and thus can be optimized for gaming.
I realize that video games are huge business and that that's why, in combination of MS's position in the industry, DirectX has to be the one consumer (gamer) cards are oriented for. So no need for the explaining of this to me.
What many of you are obviously (particularly with the little examples of how you knew like 30 people out of 30,000 or something at school who used cad blah blah) very naive to how practically everything is made now. Look at your computer case -- it was designed in CAD. Look at you keyboard, your mouse, the outlet you plug computer into, the lamps in your room, your furniture, every appliance in your house, etc etc -- Everything is designed in CAD! Half of your gadgets could never be made without cad. Half of everything you use would break easily or weigh way too much, etc if it weren't for FE analysis in CAD, etc.
Anyway, right now every person who wants to actually build, design, test, etc something and manufacture it needs to spend $1500 on a video card because all the kids are using DirectX when games could just as well have been made with OpenGL (or an OpenGL with the gaming emphasis added in rather than directed to DirectX instead). I'm using a lot of hyperbole, but maybe you see what my point was a little better.
Dammit I hate to see all this DirectX10 emphasis. It's games only. I am a scientist and CAD user. Right now there is no laptop let alone "consumer" card in the world that can handle even the kind of CAD work a lot of people have to do. OpenGL was created for science. DirectX was a copy of a subset of it applicable only to games. And now all the graphics cards are focusing on the DirectX and neglecting OpenGL. Arg! This copy of OpenGL is short-circuiting advancement in the very thing 3D graphics were originally, you could say, invented for -- the thing they actually are useful for beyond plain entertainment. These cards cost hundreds of dollars but they can't handle an assembly with 100 parts in a CAD model simply because they barely have any OpenGL hardware in them. A car, airplane, etc has millions of parts.
This is what happens when geeks try to pretend to be engineers. This whole thing just was so ridiculous in the first place. Unfortunately, can't say I'm surprised it'd been on Slashdot before the launch though. It's not that hard to make a model rocket that can launch without disintegrating people.
I know they've been primary developer of Symbian OS. It's not as if, though, in the case that no one else used Symbian then Nokia would be screwed and lose their "dominance as a phone company" -- it's a tiny part of their income -- they're a phone and networking hardware company above all, not a software company.
I don't understand your reasoning. You seem to think that Nokia couldn't just use Linux itself the second that was the more advantageous option. Right now all the other companies are using linux because they have nothing else, basically. It's not as if it is hard to adopt linux.
Hell, if there's a mobile handset maker that's gotta know and understand linux better than Nokia it'd sure be surprising -- they're both from the same little (amazing) country with the lowest population density in the world. Linux and Nokia are the two most famous things about Finland!
I think the notion that all the generic asian handset makers out there throwing linux and a crappy interfaces onto their phones to make them "smartphones" as the end-all be-all of the future has pretty much already been shown to be overly cynical -- the generic's have been around for years now -- Nokia and Apple are the two growing faster than anyone else.
Google acquiring Nokia? That's a laughable notion at best. Nokia is the largest wireless network hardware and phone company in the world. Some would say they're sitting on top of the biggest goldmine there is in tech or least consumer electronics. And they only seem to big extending the gap with their competitors more and more (look at Motorola's last quarter vs Nokia's). For Americans here who don't know, by the way, Nokia is far and away the largest builder of the networks wireless services are provided by -- phones are only the smaller part of their business, yet they are the largest phone maker in the world too.
My personal experience is that the Americans in engineering graduate school are extremely smart -- "frighteningly smart" even, is how I would describe. The thing is that engineering graduate school is so difficult and so much work for the relatively small payoff compared to law school and medical school that engagement in it is discouraged by the fact that most people that would consider it could just as easily go be a doctor or something and make 2 or 3 times as much money.
In countries like China and India (most of the rest of the world, for that matter), engineering is about the highest paid and most admired field out there. This is in stark contrast to the USA where people have lived with advanced technology for so long that they take it for granted and seem to be oblivious to where it comes from.
Basically, maybe similarly to math and physics, the brightest minds are as highly concentrated in advanced engineering education as anywhere, but those who do not find as much fulfillment directly in their accomplishment within these kinds of fields itself, are going to be drawn to fields where, one could say, the more easily appreciatable rewards of money and recognition by general public are in greater abundance.
Maybe you could say it goes back to how American mommies and daddies stereotypically want to be able to tell everyone their daughter's becoming a doctor or lawyer. What impresses mommy and daddy has a lot of weight at the age where young adults enter college and determine their career paths (loathe as they may be to admit it). It kind of takes the [i]really[/i] talented ones that stand out as something different and also able to find the kind of intellectual fulfillment in these other fields great enough to offset the lure of America's more obviously rewarding careers, to get through an advanced engineering education.
Gates been nervous for years and that's why he distanced himself from company and transfered his name and ego to The Gates Foundation stuff. That's my personal opinion.
From the perspective of someone into digital music recording and production, USB 2 seems like a terrible thing -- it sends data in clumps with high latency not particularly fast, whereas Firewire 800 is insanely fast with no latency and no problems with "smoothness", but computers have all come with USB2 instead of Firewire ever since 2.0 came out.
Could someone explain what the justification behind the vast majority of computers coming with USB 2 rather than Firewire? I realize the reason for it is prblem Intel promotion etc. But could someone tell me any reasons why it isn't just completely inferior to Firewire for the consumer?
USB3 strikes me as just an extension of this sad thing of computers not using Firewre because USB exists.
Wow, your perception of Nokia is the complete opposite of mine. In my opinion, and frankly it's a very predominant one in the industry, Nokia is synonymous with the highest quality hardware and most intuitive interfaces in the mobile phone market. This is relative to the other phone companies, of course, not Apple because no one has made a phone anything like the iPhone before and it's too early to see what kind of phone company Apple will prove to be.
Anyway, Nokia phones are generally [i]very[/i] expensive relative to their competition as far as comparisons in terms of features go. It is in ease of use, build quality, aesthetics, and performance that Nokia's have traditionally been admired -- certainly not cost.
It'll be an interesting competition. In a sense, Nokia would be the Apple of traditional mobile phone manufacturers. Indeed, particularly since Nokia has traditional been the innovator in form factors, technologies -- certainly the one cloned rather than the cloner -- I'm actually pleasantly a bit surprised by their shrewdness and humility in simply recognizing the excellence of the Apple phone and quickly taking advantage of the position they have (unusually), of being second and thus, able to copy it;)
Hey storage tech master, are you really so naive as to think that it's Seagate-only tech that's at issue and that all the US govt would have to do to make the the Seagate tech useless is to hot-swap to all Maxtors or something?
Another great MS product designed, in the spirit of Microsoft Media Player, IE, etc, to kill off an equivalent product by being included in the MS OS for free when non-monopolist competitor has no monopoly cash cow to fund its product, and not charging for the development tool.
Yeah, real cross-platform -- you have to use.NET to create content with it. We all know how cross-platform.NET development tools are -- Windows only.
Hardly much of a definition of cross-platform the one calling Silverlight cross-platform.
Put an HD DVD compatible drive in there for $100-200 bucks more, or if someone would make an add-on hd-dvd drive that matches in appearance/dimensions so you can mate them much like the external hard drives such as this one, then you'd have something extra interesting.
If your theory that marketing is irrelevant were true then there wouldn't be maketing. The companies spend billions on marketing because it works. Most people who buy computers do not know squat so they buy based on image or reputation, obviously. Marketing and hype, obviously, affect people's perceptions of products.
So, I really do not know what the hell you are talking about.
Of course, all the hype everywhere these days is revolting. That has nothing to do with whether or not it works. How else do you think the PIVs have been outselling Athlons ratios of at least 5:1 for nearly ten years?
Google thinks it knows mechanical engineering. And they think they know where to put money in efficient cars. And they think it's plug-in hybrids. Please stick to what you know Google. You're basically awesome at what you've done, but take it from a mechanical engineer, you're barking up the wrong tree with this one.
Slashdot Mirror
Based on the giant upgrade to IE7 suggestion that started popping up every time you log in, I'd thought this had already happened.
I logged onto Facebook the other day and got a message that I should upgrade to a "current browser like IE 7". And then there was fine print below saying Firefox and Opera would also work.
Every damn student I know is on Facebook day in day out and now that they've been graduating it seems to be spreading to outside world like wildfire too -- I've suddenly recently been getting all kinds of friend requests from people I haven't seen in something like 10 years (I'm an old grad student -- these are old people way outside of student world as I am). It really pisses me off knowing MS's ways and seeing the upgrade to IE 7 instruction emblazened on login page.
Google should have been on this years ago. The nature of these social networking sites is that everyone joins whichever one is the most popular. In college that's always been Facebook because people outside of college weren't allowed on and Facebook had certain aspects oriented toward campus stuff. Now it's opened up to the outside world. People aren't going to be on five different networks -- they want to be on the One that their friends are on. It could be the case that before long before the overwhelming majority of people's friends are on Facebook or Myspace and that's the end of the story, basically.
The idea that Apple hardware is more expensive than PC hardware is quite outdated, to be frank. Price a few out versus Dell et al. You'll see. I just did a few months ago. Now I own my first Mac ever. This is the first computer I have ever owned that I basically love every single thing about. And that's leaving out the fact that Apple hardware generally comes with damn near all the software people regularly buy separately. Oh and then there's the lightyears better customer service and reliability ratings (see Consumer Reports -- there's no comparison).
You need to talk to a CAD draftsman some time. You'll quickly learn that there is not a gaming card in existence that can hold a candle to even the cheapest CAD-oriented card on the market. The gaming cards are useless as soon as you try to do anything with any movement.
And doing so as if Vista was even competitive with the first version of OS X from 6 years ago.
Step Six occuring at bare minimum 3 Years later that originally claimed.
Why do NVidia cards that can run CAD/OpenGL cost several times as much as NVidia cards that can't?
Well I'm pleased to hear that NV and ATI are still working on OpenGL as much as they are DirectX if that's really the case.
Are you really telling me that the only difference between a $1500 Quadro and gamer card is the drivers though? The bad-ass gamer card in my friend's computer chokes and can barely run at even the most basic animation of an of maybe 30 parts in CAD.
Not that I made it extremely clear, but I think most of you are missing my point. The point was that if the same resources went into development of OpenGL and hardware optimized for it as goes into DirectX, then maybe both what 3D graphics was originially invented for and then gaming also could benefit at the same time.
Instead, any CAD use requires $1500 graphics cards because of poor economies of scale. This is a stupid waste.
A lot of you seem to think that I don't understand why DirectX is receiving preferential treatment over the original (non-platform-specific) OpenGL. However, I do -- MS wanted to create something of its own that was deliberately incompatible with existing standards and that gaming development would end up moving to either due to prepodnerance of directx MS hardware (ie XBox), MS buying a ton of gaming companies, or the simple advantage that DirectX is not designed for CAD et al and thus can be optimized for gaming.
I realize that video games are huge business and that that's why, in combination of MS's position in the industry, DirectX has to be the one consumer (gamer) cards are oriented for. So no need for the explaining of this to me.
What many of you are obviously (particularly with the little examples of how you knew like 30 people out of 30,000 or something at school who used cad blah blah) very naive to how practically everything is made now. Look at your computer case -- it was designed in CAD. Look at you keyboard, your mouse, the outlet you plug computer into, the lamps in your room, your furniture, every appliance in your house, etc etc -- Everything is designed in CAD! Half of your gadgets could never be made without cad. Half of everything you use would break easily or weigh way too much, etc if it weren't for FE analysis in CAD, etc.
Anyway, right now every person who wants to actually build, design, test, etc something and manufacture it needs to spend $1500 on a video card because all the kids are using DirectX when games could just as well have been made with OpenGL (or an OpenGL with the gaming emphasis added in rather than directed to DirectX instead). I'm using a lot of hyperbole, but maybe you see what my point was a little better.
Dammit I hate to see all this DirectX10 emphasis. It's games only. I am a scientist and CAD user. Right now there is no laptop let alone "consumer" card in the world that can handle even the kind of CAD work a lot of people have to do. OpenGL was created for science. DirectX was a copy of a subset of it applicable only to games. And now all the graphics cards are focusing on the DirectX and neglecting OpenGL. Arg! This copy of OpenGL is short-circuiting advancement in the very thing 3D graphics were originally, you could say, invented for -- the thing they actually are useful for beyond plain entertainment. These cards cost hundreds of dollars but they can't handle an assembly with 100 parts in a CAD model simply because they barely have any OpenGL hardware in them. A car, airplane, etc has millions of parts.
This is what happens when geeks try to pretend to be engineers. This whole thing just was so ridiculous in the first place. Unfortunately, can't say I'm surprised it'd been on Slashdot before the launch though. It's not that hard to make a model rocket that can launch without disintegrating people.
I know they've been primary developer of Symbian OS. It's not as if, though, in the case that no one else used Symbian then Nokia would be screwed and lose their "dominance as a phone company" -- it's a tiny part of their income -- they're a phone and networking hardware company above all, not a software company.
I don't understand your reasoning. You seem to think that Nokia couldn't just use Linux itself the second that was the more advantageous option. Right now all the other companies are using linux because they have nothing else, basically. It's not as if it is hard to adopt linux.
Hell, if there's a mobile handset maker that's gotta know and understand linux better than Nokia it'd sure be surprising -- they're both from the same little (amazing) country with the lowest population density in the world. Linux and Nokia are the two most famous things about Finland!
I think the notion that all the generic asian handset makers out there throwing linux and a crappy interfaces onto their phones to make them "smartphones" as the end-all be-all of the future has pretty much already been shown to be overly cynical -- the generic's have been around for years now -- Nokia and Apple are the two growing faster than anyone else.
Google acquiring Nokia? That's a laughable notion at best. Nokia is the largest wireless network hardware and phone company in the world. Some would say they're sitting on top of the biggest goldmine there is in tech or least consumer electronics. And they only seem to big extending the gap with their competitors more and more (look at Motorola's last quarter vs Nokia's). For Americans here who don't know, by the way, Nokia is far and away the largest builder of the networks wireless services are provided by -- phones are only the smaller part of their business, yet they are the largest phone maker in the world too.
My personal experience is that the Americans in engineering graduate school are extremely smart -- "frighteningly smart" even, is how I would describe. The thing is that engineering graduate school is so difficult and so much work for the relatively small payoff compared to law school and medical school that engagement in it is discouraged by the fact that most people that would consider it could just as easily go be a doctor or something and make 2 or 3 times as much money.
In countries like China and India (most of the rest of the world, for that matter), engineering is about the highest paid and most admired field out there. This is in stark contrast to the USA where people have lived with advanced technology for so long that they take it for granted and seem to be oblivious to where it comes from.
Basically, maybe similarly to math and physics, the brightest minds are as highly concentrated in advanced engineering education as anywhere, but those who do not find as much fulfillment directly in their accomplishment within these kinds of fields itself, are going to be drawn to fields where, one could say, the more easily appreciatable rewards of money and recognition by general public are in greater abundance.
Maybe you could say it goes back to how American mommies and daddies stereotypically want to be able to tell everyone their daughter's becoming a doctor or lawyer. What impresses mommy and daddy has a lot of weight at the age where young adults enter college and determine their career paths (loathe as they may be to admit it). It kind of takes the [i]really[/i] talented ones that stand out as something different and also able to find the kind of intellectual fulfillment in these other fields great enough to offset the lure of America's more obviously rewarding careers, to get through an advanced engineering education.
Gates been nervous for years and that's why he distanced himself from company and transfered his name and ego to The Gates Foundation stuff. That's my personal opinion.
From the perspective of someone into digital music recording and production, USB 2 seems like a terrible thing -- it sends data in clumps with high latency not particularly fast, whereas Firewire 800 is insanely fast with no latency and no problems with "smoothness", but computers have all come with USB2 instead of Firewire ever since 2.0 came out.
Could someone explain what the justification behind the vast majority of computers coming with USB 2 rather than Firewire? I realize the reason for it is prblem Intel promotion etc. But could someone tell me any reasons why it isn't just completely inferior to Firewire for the consumer?
USB3 strikes me as just an extension of this sad thing of computers not using Firewre because USB exists.
Wow, your perception of Nokia is the complete opposite of mine. In my opinion, and frankly it's a very predominant one in the industry, Nokia is synonymous with the highest quality hardware and most intuitive interfaces in the mobile phone market. This is relative to the other phone companies, of course, not Apple because no one has made a phone anything like the iPhone before and it's too early to see what kind of phone company Apple will prove to be.
;)
Anyway, Nokia phones are generally [i]very[/i] expensive relative to their competition as far as comparisons in terms of features go. It is in ease of use, build quality, aesthetics, and performance that Nokia's have traditionally been admired -- certainly not cost.
It'll be an interesting competition. In a sense, Nokia would be the Apple of traditional mobile phone manufacturers. Indeed, particularly since Nokia has traditional been the innovator in form factors, technologies -- certainly the one cloned rather than the cloner -- I'm actually pleasantly a bit surprised by their shrewdness and humility in simply recognizing the excellence of the Apple phone and quickly taking advantage of the position they have (unusually), of being second and thus, able to copy it
Hey storage tech master, are you really so naive as to think that it's Seagate-only tech that's at issue and that all the US govt would have to do to make the the Seagate tech useless is to hot-swap to all Maxtors or something?
Psh, this is supposed to be news? I made one of these with an apple, two wires, and a digital clock in kindergarden.
It didn't say mandatory teaching. It said 4 years of mandatory teaching or working in the field.
Another great MS product designed, in the spirit of Microsoft Media Player, IE, etc, to kill off an equivalent product by being included in the MS OS for free when non-monopolist competitor has no monopoly cash cow to fund its product, and not charging for the development tool.
.NET to create content with it. We all know how cross-platform .NET development tools are -- Windows only.
Yeah, real cross-platform -- you have to use
Hardly much of a definition of cross-platform the one calling Silverlight cross-platform.
Put an HD DVD compatible drive in there for $100-200 bucks more, or if someone would make an add-on hd-dvd drive that matches in appearance/dimensions so you can mate them much like the external hard drives such as this one, then you'd have something extra interesting.
If your theory that marketing is irrelevant were true then there wouldn't be maketing. The companies spend billions on marketing because it works. Most people who buy computers do not know squat so they buy based on image or reputation, obviously. Marketing and hype, obviously, affect people's perceptions of products.
So, I really do not know what the hell you are talking about.
Of course, all the hype everywhere these days is revolting. That has nothing to do with whether or not it works. How else do you think the PIVs have been outselling Athlons ratios of at least 5:1 for nearly ten years?
Google thinks it knows mechanical engineering. And they think they know where to put money in efficient cars. And they think it's plug-in hybrids. Please stick to what you know Google. You're basically awesome at what you've done, but take it from a mechanical engineer, you're barking up the wrong tree with this one.