Depends on the game as to whether that will work or not; Red Alert 3, for example, can only do coop over the Internet - and now will be unable to do coop at all (legally - I think there's a project that's attempting to emulate the online server). More games are ending up that way.
The best and the brightest, or the most sociopathic? Like many political ideas - most noteworthy being communism - they sound good when you think about them on a local scale, where everyone knows everyone else personally, but once you start adding in layers of detachment the rules break down very quickly; the "best and the brightest" aren't likely to win very often when fighting sociopaths.
Aussie banks (Commonwealth Bank, at least) seem to rely on SMS messages. You're redirected to their website and click a button. They send a 'NetCode SMS' (one-time code specific to that transaction) to your phone with a number you enter into their website, then the payment is processed. Not too bad; something you know (cc number) and something you have (phone).
On the other hand, I only play games that I pay for. I don't want anything for free, and most definitely not a game. Every single F2P game gives me a creepy feeling.
Games funded by microtransactions, like F2P games, tend to activate a defensive mode for me; I'm constantly on the look-out for mechanics that try to make me spend money, to avoid them, which distracts me from focusing my full attention on the fun portion of the game. The money mechanics are going to be presented in a way which is tempting, so it's not easy to let my guard down. I'd take a game that costs money up-front and doesn't require me to guard myself over one with a microtransaction system any day.
Smart phone theft doesn't seem to be much of a thing in Australia (at least where I live), possibly because any phone reported stolen has its IMEI blocked from accessing any of our telecommunications providers until the owner reports it as returned (if this page is to be believed, it reduced theft by 25% over the past seven years, which is impressive given the explosive growth of mobile phones in that time). Sure, it's not perfect, because some phones do allow you to change the IMEI, it doesn't brick the device, and the device can still be disassembled for parts (though I assume it's a little more challenging to sell the parts without identifying their origins here), but it seems to be a sufficient deterrent to prevent casual theft.
It's actually super interesting to see the responses other people have posted, presumably Americans, which assume either that this type of law is fundamentally unacceptable or that their government will use it to silence dissent in the event of an uprising (which seems highly improbable, and if it did occur your cell networks would likely be shut down anyway so the phone is irrelevant). That doesn't seem to be something that people consider likely to occur with the cell blocking here - I assume, but cannot verify, that most people here find the law useful - so it's an interesting division of attitude.
That or it's more about being able to create a level 90 character to play immediately with your friend who just signed up to WoW and got a free 90. WoW, and I assume other MMOs, aren't full of terribly engaging gameplay, but being able to play with friends makes up for that somehow; not many people would play a WoW-like game in permanently-offline single-player mode.
Seems odd that neither the summary didn't link to the demonstration video player on Condition One (it's kinda slow to load, and the first couple of scenes aren't '3D'). As you can see in the 2D version, it's just playing a 2D video on a virtual curved screen that extends half way around the user's viewpoint; that's enough to look pretty damned cool in the later scenes with crowds and on an escalator though.
Worth noting all the scenes there involved the viewpoint remaining either static or very predictably and slowly moving in a single direction, so perhaps this movie won't have quite so many barf moments as some of the demo games out there (doing a barrel roll in a spaceship game demo did me in, so I don't think being shaky-cam '3D' videos are going to work for me).
When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to join you on Apple forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number.
So when you send a product they may collect the address to send it to? Or if you invite someone to join a forum it may collect the email address with which to contact them? Absurd.
When you create an Apple ID, register your products, apply for commercial credit, purchase a product, download a software update, register for a class at an Apple Retail Store, or participate in an online survey, we may collect a variety of information, including your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, contact preferences, and credit card information.
So when you purchase something using a credit card, or add a credit card to an account, they might collect other information which credit card companies require in order to prove your identity (and make charge-backs less likely)? Inconceivable.
Clearly this information collection is not for the same reasons or in the same league as Google or Facebook's data trawling.
And if you do transfer them to the WiiU, there's no way to get them off the WiiU or return them to the original Wii; they're stuck there permanently, or until you erase the device. The console manufacturers really need to take a page out of Steam's book and tie the purchases to an account, not a console; I'm guessing the only reason they haven't is because any solution for multiple accounts on the same console could potentially allow sharing games with friends, which would potentially reduce sales. And we can't have that.
It's not so much Minority Report as it is them trying to find a viable interaction method for augmented reality. The AR versions has some significant benefits over the Minority Report interface, in that it can theoretically overlay data on real-world objects and make things ranging from internal surgery to constructing aircraft a simpler undertaking by allowing you to see inside or where things should go. This method of interacting is severely limited (it's essentially a 1.5inch thick virtual touch screen held 11inches in front of you at all times) but it's more or less the best we have until voice or neural interfaces become practical.
That said, the consumer uses are extremely limited and wearing bulky glasses is probably more likely to get in the way of a surgeon than help them. Interactive AR is still not there yet.
It's hackable, so you could probably implement the mouse like a trackball; a flicking action could simulate the ball rolling/moving the cursor and touching the pad again would stop the cursor.
There are a lot of possibilities for modifying the control scheme in each game to increase accuracy whilst reducing fatigue - there's no reason you must implement it as 1:1 movement for all games.
That's a pretty poor analogy, those celebrities are constantly harrassed by photographers at all hours of the day and in every location they visit. Could you imagine how irritating it would be to go to the supermarket and have 5 photographers waiting outside for you every time, trying to catch a shot of you so they can publish something negative in a tabloid? That most celebrities are able to control their frustration is impressive.
It's nothing like what a CEO of something as relatively unimportant as AOL has to deal with - someone photographing a meeting (presumably a slide on a presentation).
As noted by MrNemesis, the Ars Technica piece was, as so much journalism unfortunately is these days, written to push a specific "us vs them" mentality; this ultimately resulted in the author compromising their integrity to try and hammer a dubious point home in a concrete manner. A look at the Wikipedia article about the CSIRO patent notes the author had a follow-up article with more dubious attempts to validate their point; he quotes an unrelated and apparently uninformed politican saying Australia invented WiFi - it did not - as evidence of CSIRO claiming it did, and making the unusual assertation that because CSIRO itself wasn't directly involved in the creation of the WiFi standard its patent claim is invalid, even though a company that was licensing CSIRO's patent actively used it as part of their participation in the creation of the WiFi standard. The Register also covers the interesting points.
I'm an Australian and I think CSIRO is an awesome organisation that's earned considerable respect, and I'm not overly fond of the US media's attempts to smear it in order to improve their bottom line (in Ars' case, ad impressions from indignant people on both sides of the fence).
It's easy to jump on a bandwagon, but you should figure out where it came from and where it's going before you do.
First-person is where the story unfolds through the eyes of the main character - you are them, inside and looking out through their vision. Third-person is where you're given a view outside of the character you're controlling. You may be confusing the idea of first person with controlling a single character, but they're unrelated.
The article is pretty vague, only stating that communications routed through undersea cables that carry information to the United States of America must pass through a US government-owned facility; Telstra itself isn't doing anything, it's all occurring on the other end of the cable on US soil. I'm a little surprised that the US government is trying to vet all communications entering their country, but I don't see what Telstra has to do with it other than owning a link to the US (and I'm not a fan of Telstra). Seems like a red herring.
You are not in control of the security of your unencrypted data once it leaves your country (or, more accurately, your home), as anyone on the route it takes could copy it.
It's weird, but I've actually found myself liking Bing's image search feature. The interface allows me to quickly skip through enlarged views of the thumbnails without the jarring expand/collapse animation that Google image search uses. It also allows you to disable the safe searching feature, which Google doesn't seem to permit without an explicit search anymore (sometimes filters aren't perfect). It doesn't do reverse image searches (that I've discovered thus far), but I can still use Google image search for that if it's ever necessary to find an image's source. It seems to rank images differently to Google also, so searching for the same thing using both should provide a better range of results.
The rest, of course, is quite bad. Bing's web search isn't spectacular, and Windows 8 is only tolerable with Start8 and DisplayFusion, but there are a couple of good products still remaining.
It's a good idea to press Win+Q, type "Default Programs", open it and go to Set Default Programs, find Windows Photo Viewer, Adobe Reader, VLC/Windows Media Player, etc. add set all defaults to open with those desktop apps rather than the Metro apps. The last thing you want is for a non-technical user to get lost in Metro hell when doing something innocuous.
Stardock seems to have made a way to test your theory. You can use Start8 to bypass the start screen on boot, heading directly for a desktop with start menu, then you can use ModernMix to run metro apps in a window; the app layout still appears to be full-screen sized with two scrollbars, however, so it's not precisely what you're talking about. Those apps are $5USD each though, so I've only personally acquired the first (as no metro apps I've seen seem useful on desktop).
I think I read that Windows Blue is adding the ability to use metro apps at different sizes, so perhaps it'll be possible to do it properly at some point. At least it's proof that implementing what you're talking about would be really easy for Microsoft to do.
NVIDIA Surround and AMD Eyefinity are both fairly clumsy technologies; both approaches merge two or more physical screens into one logical screen. Whilst active the spanned mode results in oddities like a stretched task bar, the inability to properly borderless maximise windows to one monitor only, and things such as full-screen movies which would usually fit on one monitor with black bars above/below will instead stretch across the three and look terrible.
The best approach is to get 3D software to support three screens without crutches like Eyefinity. I've seen it with some mild success in Supreme Commander 2 and OpenSceneGraph, but it looks like it'll be down to graphics API and game developers to support multi-monitors properly. Given the only groups of people that seem to be really interested in multi-monitor solutions are the simulation crew (driving or otherwise), it doesn't seem like the available support is going to improve any time soon.
Your specific series of GPU didn't have a crossfire profile for a specific game, resulting in no performance increase, and this means that both Crossfire and SLI are worthless? Granted they aren't for everyone but, for higher resolutions at high settings they border on mandatory and, at least in the case of SLI, make a massive performance difference.
Messenger coop jigsaws (Jigsaw Too) using your own pictures (or ones you acquired elsewhere) were quite a lot of fun, but such features wouldn't be good for a business client and probably don't fit in well with Microsoft's other platforms (I assume an xbox of some description will get it in the future).
TechReport analysed the nVidia 680 a bit after its release and had a piece on adaptive vsync which should answer your question.
Quoted from an nVidia software engineer:
There are two definitions for triple buffering. One applies to OGL and the other to DX. Adaptive v-sync provides benefits in terms of power savings and smoothness relative to both.
- Triple buffering solutions require more frame-buffer memory than double buffering, which can be a problem at high resolutions.
- Triple buffering is an application choice (no driver override in DX) and is not frequently supported.
- OGL triple buffering: The GPU renders frames as fast as it can (equivalent to v-sync off) and the most recently completed frame is display at the next v-sync. This means you get tear-free rendering, but entire frames are affectively dropped (never displayed) so smoothness is severely compromised and the effective time interval between successive displayed frames can vary by a factor of two. Measuring fps in this case will return the v-sync off frame rate which is meaningless when some frames are not displayed (can you be sure they were actually rendered?). To summarize- this implementation combines high power consumption and uneven motion sampling for a poor user experience.
- DX triple buffering is the same as double buffering but with three back buffers which allows the GPU to render two frames before stalling for display to complete scanout of the oldest frame. The resulting behavior is the same as adaptive vsync (or regular double-buffered v-sync=on) for frame rates above 60Hz, so power and smoothness are ok. It's a different story when the frame rate drops below 60 though. Below 60Hz this solution will run faster than 30Hz (i.e. better than regular double buffered v-sync=on) because successive frames will display after either 1 or 2 v-blank intervals. This results in better average frame rates, but the samples are uneven and smoothness is compromised.
- Adaptive vsync is smooth below 60Hz (even samples) and uses less power above 60Hz.
- Triple buffering adds 50% more latency to the rendering pipeline. This is particularly problematic below 60fps. Adaptive vsync adds no latency.
So triple buffering is bad because it could cause an intermediary frame to be dropped, resulting in a small visual stutter despite being 60fps. There's a video of adaptive vsync on YouTube.
Perhaps those who are getting used to it are simply ignoring the changed components and continuing to use their PC as they did under previous versions of Windows, much as I am.
It's actually pretty easy to ignore metro entirely if you install something like Start8 to replace the start menu. It's a bit daft that we have to - particularly with a third-party program - but once you've done it the general experience is more or less like using Windows 7 with a couple of minor feature upgrades (file history, multi-monitor taskbar).
Attempting to explain how to shut down the PC to older computer users has been a challenge though, particularly for my folks with dual monitors; it's quite hard to summon the charm bar properly in the gap between the two screens, and going to "Settings" to shut down is just...weird. I've just told them to press the power button once and let the PC shut itself down that way, or installed Start8.
You may be suffering a little from rose-coloured glasses. The third LOTR movie still had some pretty obvious CGI issues that were a bit jarring, such as the beacon flames (distant ones), Pippin climbing down the beacon tower, the lava behind Frodo and Sam whilst they exited Mount Doom, and others; most of the CGI worked really well, but some parts were immersion-breaking at critical moments. That its latest installment continues to have the problem in parts is probably to be expected, and not necessarily the fault of the frame rate.
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Depends on the game as to whether that will work or not; Red Alert 3, for example, can only do coop over the Internet - and now will be unable to do coop at all (legally - I think there's a project that's attempting to emulate the online server). More games are ending up that way.
The best and the brightest, or the most sociopathic? Like many political ideas - most noteworthy being communism - they sound good when you think about them on a local scale, where everyone knows everyone else personally, but once you start adding in layers of detachment the rules break down very quickly; the "best and the brightest" aren't likely to win very often when fighting sociopaths.
Shipping something could also take the form of submitting a patent application, which they probably did.
Aussie banks (Commonwealth Bank, at least) seem to rely on SMS messages. You're redirected to their website and click a button. They send a 'NetCode SMS' (one-time code specific to that transaction) to your phone with a number you enter into their website, then the payment is processed. Not too bad; something you know (cc number) and something you have (phone).
On the other hand, I only play games that I pay for. I don't want anything for free, and most definitely not a game. Every single F2P game gives me a creepy feeling.
Games funded by microtransactions, like F2P games, tend to activate a defensive mode for me; I'm constantly on the look-out for mechanics that try to make me spend money, to avoid them, which distracts me from focusing my full attention on the fun portion of the game. The money mechanics are going to be presented in a way which is tempting, so it's not easy to let my guard down. I'd take a game that costs money up-front and doesn't require me to guard myself over one with a microtransaction system any day.
Smart phone theft doesn't seem to be much of a thing in Australia (at least where I live), possibly because any phone reported stolen has its IMEI blocked from accessing any of our telecommunications providers until the owner reports it as returned (if this page is to be believed, it reduced theft by 25% over the past seven years, which is impressive given the explosive growth of mobile phones in that time). Sure, it's not perfect, because some phones do allow you to change the IMEI, it doesn't brick the device, and the device can still be disassembled for parts (though I assume it's a little more challenging to sell the parts without identifying their origins here), but it seems to be a sufficient deterrent to prevent casual theft.
It's actually super interesting to see the responses other people have posted, presumably Americans, which assume either that this type of law is fundamentally unacceptable or that their government will use it to silence dissent in the event of an uprising (which seems highly improbable, and if it did occur your cell networks would likely be shut down anyway so the phone is irrelevant). That doesn't seem to be something that people consider likely to occur with the cell blocking here - I assume, but cannot verify, that most people here find the law useful - so it's an interesting division of attitude.
That or it's more about being able to create a level 90 character to play immediately with your friend who just signed up to WoW and got a free 90. WoW, and I assume other MMOs, aren't full of terribly engaging gameplay, but being able to play with friends makes up for that somehow; not many people would play a WoW-like game in permanently-offline single-player mode.
Seems odd that neither the summary didn't link to the demonstration video player on Condition One (it's kinda slow to load, and the first couple of scenes aren't '3D'). As you can see in the 2D version, it's just playing a 2D video on a virtual curved screen that extends half way around the user's viewpoint; that's enough to look pretty damned cool in the later scenes with crowds and on an escalator though.
Worth noting all the scenes there involved the viewpoint remaining either static or very predictably and slowly moving in a single direction, so perhaps this movie won't have quite so many barf moments as some of the demo games out there (doing a barrel roll in a spaceship game demo did me in, so I don't think being shaky-cam '3D' videos are going to work for me).
When you share your content with family and friends using Apple products, send gift certificates and products, or invite others to join you on Apple forums, Apple may collect the information you provide about those people such as name, mailing address, email address, and phone number.
So when you send a product they may collect the address to send it to? Or if you invite someone to join a forum it may collect the email address with which to contact them? Absurd.
When you create an Apple ID, register your products, apply for commercial credit, purchase a product, download a software update, register for a class at an Apple Retail Store, or participate in an online survey, we may collect a variety of information, including your name, mailing address, phone number, email address, contact preferences, and credit card information.
So when you purchase something using a credit card, or add a credit card to an account, they might collect other information which credit card companies require in order to prove your identity (and make charge-backs less likely)? Inconceivable.
Clearly this information collection is not for the same reasons or in the same league as Google or Facebook's data trawling.
And if you do transfer them to the WiiU, there's no way to get them off the WiiU or return them to the original Wii; they're stuck there permanently, or until you erase the device. The console manufacturers really need to take a page out of Steam's book and tie the purchases to an account, not a console; I'm guessing the only reason they haven't is because any solution for multiple accounts on the same console could potentially allow sharing games with friends, which would potentially reduce sales. And we can't have that.
It's not so much Minority Report as it is them trying to find a viable interaction method for augmented reality. The AR versions has some significant benefits over the Minority Report interface, in that it can theoretically overlay data on real-world objects and make things ranging from internal surgery to constructing aircraft a simpler undertaking by allowing you to see inside or where things should go. This method of interacting is severely limited (it's essentially a 1.5inch thick virtual touch screen held 11inches in front of you at all times) but it's more or less the best we have until voice or neural interfaces become practical.
That said, the consumer uses are extremely limited and wearing bulky glasses is probably more likely to get in the way of a surgeon than help them. Interactive AR is still not there yet.
It's hackable, so you could probably implement the mouse like a trackball; a flicking action could simulate the ball rolling/moving the cursor and touching the pad again would stop the cursor.
There are a lot of possibilities for modifying the control scheme in each game to increase accuracy whilst reducing fatigue - there's no reason you must implement it as 1:1 movement for all games.
That's a pretty poor analogy, those celebrities are constantly harrassed by photographers at all hours of the day and in every location they visit. Could you imagine how irritating it would be to go to the supermarket and have 5 photographers waiting outside for you every time, trying to catch a shot of you so they can publish something negative in a tabloid? That most celebrities are able to control their frustration is impressive.
It's nothing like what a CEO of something as relatively unimportant as AOL has to deal with - someone photographing a meeting (presumably a slide on a presentation).
As noted by MrNemesis, the Ars Technica piece was, as so much journalism unfortunately is these days, written to push a specific "us vs them" mentality; this ultimately resulted in the author compromising their integrity to try and hammer a dubious point home in a concrete manner. A look at the Wikipedia article about the CSIRO patent notes the author had a follow-up article with more dubious attempts to validate their point; he quotes an unrelated and apparently uninformed politican saying Australia invented WiFi - it did not - as evidence of CSIRO claiming it did, and making the unusual assertation that because CSIRO itself wasn't directly involved in the creation of the WiFi standard its patent claim is invalid, even though a company that was licensing CSIRO's patent actively used it as part of their participation in the creation of the WiFi standard. The Register also covers the interesting points.
I'm an Australian and I think CSIRO is an awesome organisation that's earned considerable respect, and I'm not overly fond of the US media's attempts to smear it in order to improve their bottom line (in Ars' case, ad impressions from indignant people on both sides of the fence).
It's easy to jump on a bandwagon, but you should figure out where it came from and where it's going before you do.
First-person is where the story unfolds through the eyes of the main character - you are them, inside and looking out through their vision. Third-person is where you're given a view outside of the character you're controlling. You may be confusing the idea of first person with controlling a single character, but they're unrelated.
The article is pretty vague, only stating that communications routed through undersea cables that carry information to the United States of America must pass through a US government-owned facility; Telstra itself isn't doing anything, it's all occurring on the other end of the cable on US soil. I'm a little surprised that the US government is trying to vet all communications entering their country, but I don't see what Telstra has to do with it other than owning a link to the US (and I'm not a fan of Telstra). Seems like a red herring.
You are not in control of the security of your unencrypted data once it leaves your country (or, more accurately, your home), as anyone on the route it takes could copy it.
It's weird, but I've actually found myself liking Bing's image search feature. The interface allows me to quickly skip through enlarged views of the thumbnails without the jarring expand/collapse animation that Google image search uses. It also allows you to disable the safe searching feature, which Google doesn't seem to permit without an explicit search anymore (sometimes filters aren't perfect). It doesn't do reverse image searches (that I've discovered thus far), but I can still use Google image search for that if it's ever necessary to find an image's source. It seems to rank images differently to Google also, so searching for the same thing using both should provide a better range of results.
The rest, of course, is quite bad. Bing's web search isn't spectacular, and Windows 8 is only tolerable with Start8 and DisplayFusion, but there are a couple of good products still remaining.
It's a good idea to press Win+Q, type "Default Programs", open it and go to Set Default Programs, find Windows Photo Viewer, Adobe Reader, VLC/Windows Media Player, etc. add set all defaults to open with those desktop apps rather than the Metro apps. The last thing you want is for a non-technical user to get lost in Metro hell when doing something innocuous.
Stardock seems to have made a way to test your theory. You can use Start8 to bypass the start screen on boot, heading directly for a desktop with start menu, then you can use ModernMix to run metro apps in a window; the app layout still appears to be full-screen sized with two scrollbars, however, so it's not precisely what you're talking about. Those apps are $5USD each though, so I've only personally acquired the first (as no metro apps I've seen seem useful on desktop).
I think I read that Windows Blue is adding the ability to use metro apps at different sizes, so perhaps it'll be possible to do it properly at some point. At least it's proof that implementing what you're talking about would be really easy for Microsoft to do.
NVIDIA Surround and AMD Eyefinity are both fairly clumsy technologies; both approaches merge two or more physical screens into one logical screen. Whilst active the spanned mode results in oddities like a stretched task bar, the inability to properly borderless maximise windows to one monitor only, and things such as full-screen movies which would usually fit on one monitor with black bars above/below will instead stretch across the three and look terrible.
The best approach is to get 3D software to support three screens without crutches like Eyefinity. I've seen it with some mild success in Supreme Commander 2 and OpenSceneGraph, but it looks like it'll be down to graphics API and game developers to support multi-monitors properly. Given the only groups of people that seem to be really interested in multi-monitor solutions are the simulation crew (driving or otherwise), it doesn't seem like the available support is going to improve any time soon.
Your specific series of GPU didn't have a crossfire profile for a specific game, resulting in no performance increase, and this means that both Crossfire and SLI are worthless? Granted they aren't for everyone but, for higher resolutions at high settings they border on mandatory and, at least in the case of SLI, make a massive performance difference.
Messenger coop jigsaws (Jigsaw Too) using your own pictures (or ones you acquired elsewhere) were quite a lot of fun, but such features wouldn't be good for a business client and probably don't fit in well with Microsoft's other platforms (I assume an xbox of some description will get it in the future).
TechReport analysed the nVidia 680 a bit after its release and had a piece on adaptive vsync which should answer your question.
Quoted from an nVidia software engineer:
There are two definitions for triple buffering. One applies to OGL and the other to DX. Adaptive v-sync provides benefits in terms of power savings and smoothness relative to both.
- Triple buffering solutions require more frame-buffer memory than double buffering, which can be a problem at high resolutions.
- Triple buffering is an application choice (no driver override in DX) and is not frequently supported.
- OGL triple buffering: The GPU renders frames as fast as it can (equivalent to v-sync off) and the most recently completed frame is display at the next v-sync. This means you get tear-free rendering, but entire frames are affectively dropped (never displayed) so smoothness is severely compromised and the effective time interval between successive displayed frames can vary by a factor of two. Measuring fps in this case will return the v-sync off frame rate which is meaningless when some frames are not displayed (can you be sure they were actually rendered?). To summarize- this implementation combines high power consumption and uneven motion sampling for a poor user experience.
- DX triple buffering is the same as double buffering but with three back buffers which allows the GPU to render two frames before stalling for display to complete scanout of the oldest frame. The resulting behavior is the same as adaptive vsync (or regular double-buffered v-sync=on) for frame rates above 60Hz, so power and smoothness are ok. It's a different story when the frame rate drops below 60 though. Below 60Hz this solution will run faster than 30Hz (i.e. better than regular double buffered v-sync=on) because successive frames will display after either 1 or 2 v-blank intervals. This results in better average frame rates, but the samples are uneven and smoothness is compromised.
- Adaptive vsync is smooth below 60Hz (even samples) and uses less power above 60Hz.
- Triple buffering adds 50% more latency to the rendering pipeline. This is particularly problematic below 60fps. Adaptive vsync adds no latency.
So triple buffering is bad because it could cause an intermediary frame to be dropped, resulting in a small visual stutter despite being 60fps. There's a video of adaptive vsync on YouTube.
Perhaps those who are getting used to it are simply ignoring the changed components and continuing to use their PC as they did under previous versions of Windows, much as I am.
It's actually pretty easy to ignore metro entirely if you install something like Start8 to replace the start menu. It's a bit daft that we have to - particularly with a third-party program - but once you've done it the general experience is more or less like using Windows 7 with a couple of minor feature upgrades (file history, multi-monitor taskbar).
Attempting to explain how to shut down the PC to older computer users has been a challenge though, particularly for my folks with dual monitors; it's quite hard to summon the charm bar properly in the gap between the two screens, and going to "Settings" to shut down is just...weird. I've just told them to press the power button once and let the PC shut itself down that way, or installed Start8.
You may be suffering a little from rose-coloured glasses. The third LOTR movie still had some pretty obvious CGI issues that were a bit jarring, such as the beacon flames (distant ones), Pippin climbing down the beacon tower, the lava behind Frodo and Sam whilst they exited Mount Doom, and others; most of the CGI worked really well, but some parts were immersion-breaking at critical moments. That its latest installment continues to have the problem in parts is probably to be expected, and not necessarily the fault of the frame rate.