"or have the OS/application recognize what is required and link to where it can be downloaded and automatically installed"
Legal grey area of copyright infringement. If it is automatical, then probably no better than including it on the CD. Linking to copyrighted material is also dodgy.
"Unfortunately, the world is in the midst of a severe water crisis that is only going to get worse in the years to come. Scientists are already warning us to get ready for massive "water wars.""
Eh.. then you just keep the production in areas of the world where you don't have a water problem.
There is more than enough water on this planet for everyone, it just so happens to be practically and economically unviable to transport it over very large distances.
Very dry areas will face problems, but unless the climates changes drastically we are not facing a water shortage in the UK. On the contrary.
This random blogger (*) proposes something fairly wild without any proof whatsoever. Slashdot reports it simply because it is a wild guess.
Hmmm... I think I'll guess that there are only 10 unique internet users in the world excluding Comic Book Guy [tm], maybe that will get me reported on Slashdot giving me 10 hits of sweet, sweet advertisement money.
1. The games differ greatly from the XBox games. You may not like console games. 2. The machine is upgradable 3. The games cost almost twice as much for the Xbox 360 (at least here in the UK). 4. You can use the computer for other things than gaming and watching DVDs. 5. You may already have a PC that can be upgraded decently cheaply.
I still think the latest graphics card are unjustifiably expensive, but the older ones aren't so bad, and it was easier for me to justify spending £70 on a graphics card (GeForce 6600gt) than £300 on an Xbox 360.
In fact the $500 cards perform noticably better than the $300 cards. You may not think it matters much, but new games, such as Oblivion, are incredibly graphics intensive. Only the top-end cards from ATI are able to play Oblivion completely smoothly in 1600x1200 with all the buzzwords activated.
If you play highly intensive games at insane resolutions, then the high-end cards may be for you.
On the other hand, if you ever think about buying a $500 card because it will "last you longer", then you are kidding yourself. You are almost always better off buying $250 cards and replacing them twice as often.
Because the Core Duo is actually being used in desktop machines.
I'm a huge fan of AMD's products and have owned at least 5 AMD cpus, but the Core Duo is a freaking great CPU that really ought to be used in both desktop and mobile computers.
I think their name has been clearly affected by Microsoft's decision to name their most famous product Windows Vista.
Since VistaSource have existed for years and both Microsoft and VistaSource are software makers, I can almost smell a trademark lawsuit. VistaSource had better hurry up as well. If you don't protect your trademark you will lose it.
"It's ashame that I already skip going to the movies because they force you to watch adds after purchasing a license to experience the content of the film in comfy seats with loud surround sound."
I turn up ten minutes late for every film for this exact reason. I catch the last couple of trailers (which I enjoy) and then watch the film without having to watch meaningless commercials.
Personally I think the LiveCD should take over as the standard distribution mechanism. Let people preview before they install and make the install as simple as possible.
The traditional method of installation should be available for techies, but these hardly need a shiny interface with icons and buttons.
There is nothing wrong with a text based installer as long as it is well done.
"Canonical Ltd. looks like they are privately held and might be a relatively easy buy."
In what way does privately held mean easy buy? It all depends on the owner. In this case, Canonical is own pretty much exclusively by Mark Shuttleworth of notorious wealth. Ubuntu is basically his "pet" and he has absolutely no need to sell it.
"I'm taking this idea from nVidia working on load balancing between graphics and physics in a SLI setup"
Sadly, this is not as easy with general purpose CPUs as it is with graphics. A very large part of the graphics process is so-called "embarrassingly parallel". Basically, in many ways each pixel can be rendered independently. If the GPU is too busy, some of these calculations can simply be offloaded to the other GPUs.
For general purpose computing, there may be many, many forms of dependences that ruin this form of load-balancing. It will be interesting to see how well AMD solves this problem, most likely it will involve a lot of guesswork from the cores, but as long as it guesses correctly most of the time (like the branch prediction in super-scalar CPUs), this could very well lead to massive speed increases for single threaded applications.
Not really comparable. The lines of Dells that have a proper graphics card are priced considerably higher than the lines of computers with the integrated crap.
"Yup. And it works really well. Really, really well. Better than on my desktop PC."
Not only that, but the MacBook Pro is very competitively priced compared to other high-end Core Duo laptops.
I've tried fiddling with options on the Dell website and the outcome is always a slightly more expensive Dell machine for similar hardware and software. None of these machines are cheap, however.
I'd wait for a few revisions, given how new the system is, but the Macbook Pro is one tasty machine for a decent price.
Re:comments from a non-gamer... awesome
on
Going To Boot Camp
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"Has this idiot never played FarCry before?"
Precious.
First, quite a lot of non-idiots have never played Far Cry.
Second, most modern games, can (and should) automatically detect graphics settings according to the computer hardware. You are free to change the settings afterwards. The importance of this is easily seen with most modern shooters (or Oblivion), which have obscene amounts of graphics settings. I'm sure Oblivion has around 20 different levers with at least ten options each. Giving a massive 10^20 number of combinations. Some help from the game designers in finding an optimal setting automatically is much appreciated.
If I wasn't so diplomatic, I'd be tempted to call anyone wanting to waste time testing all combinations a moron.
If Microsoft were trying to convince OEMs to persuade customers to buy Windows with their PC, then that would be fine ('You really ought to buy Windows Vista with your PC, to get the most out of it'). Instead they are trying to convince OEMs to force customers to buy Windows. Read the line saying "We want to urge all system builds - indeed all Partners - not to supply naked PCs".
Microsoft is thus trying to convince OEMs into forcing customers to pay TWICE for Microsoft software. If you can't buy a naked PC, then how are you going to make the most out of your volume license agreement? Indeed Microsoft recognise this fact in their leaflet, but STILL urge PC-makers to not to sell naked PCs.
This is despicable business practise, and should require no "FUD" to emphasise it.
So basically they expect people to watch the films exclusively on their PC, rather than their living room TV. You end up with a product much worse than a DVD for a strikingly similar price. To make it even worse, you have to spend hours of your own broadband bandwidth to download it.
Not only that, DVDs can regularly be had for reduced prices at high street DVD stores, I'm willing to bet these downloads will not have equally aggressively prices sales periods.
This just lends credibility to people saying they are basically just setting legal downloads up to fail, so they can push for harder legal restrictions afterwards.
A download is a lower quality product than a hard copy DVD, as you don't get the physical copy and packacking. Since there is no physical reproduction, no physical transport and no extra goodies, people have certain expectations to price. Since you don't get physical media, your investment is a lot less secure.
Any download replacement should be: a) much cheaper b) convenient c) easy to backup
"Patent licenses are a large planned revenue stream for Microsoft, and they are only possible when there is a large captive public of infringers who keep infringing. Thus, Linux growth is actually good for Microsoft, seen from this point of view."
Eh. No. Microsoft would be sued by IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sony and Philips among others, for countless patent violations.
IBM alone owns more patents than Microsoft, and with the current patent mess Microsoft is bound to infringe on lots of patents owned by the above-mentioned companies.
Patents are used defensively as well as aggressively and makes the whole situation into a kind of mutually assured destruction. It would be insane for Microsoft to start a patent war focused on Linux, as the only people to gain from it would be the lawyers. Certainly not the shareholders.
Every time Ballmer or some other Microsoft executive is quoted as suggesting Microsoft may use their intellectual property portfolio against Linux, IBM et al should suggest in the media that they may use their intellectual property portfolio against Microsoft. This would highlight how insane the situation is.
Re:A lot less than meets the eye
on
Region-free PS3
·
· Score: 4, Informative
"Europe will STILL have to have a separate set of games because they use PAL instead of NTSC anyway"
Most fairly new European televisions can display both NTSC and PAL picture.
"Buy a new computer with Windows Vista to put under your tree this year."
I'm sure they would love that, but would the majority of PC-buyers care? Most people simply don't know what version of Windows they are running, and treat PCs as an appliance.
To be fair to Skype, you can actually remember it if you know English. It is easily pronouncable and is simply one syllable. Ekiga on the other hand....
"The truth, of course, is that the vast majority of all historical accomplishments were achieved by straight, white, Christian males"
The vast majority of all historical accomplishments? You even use terms like "the truth" and "of course", making it sound ridiculously assumptious.
If I was to believe such a claim, I would require proof. European and American history is Eurocentric, so we know far more about European history than we do of Chinese, Arabian, Japanese, Indian, African or native american history. The Chinese and Japanese have for instance an extremely rich history full of accomplisments, lots of which are not well known by westeners. The same goes for most other civilisations.
Also, just because the white, christian male conquered large parts of the world, does not mean we were culturally superiour. We just happened to better at killing than them.
"XGL alone is a bit of a gamble(though I cannot wait to have it running soon after a full install) and I think he's looking at some of the QA for some of these features and flinching"
XGL is not part of the default install. It is available in the repositories, yes, but it requires some manual work to install still. I doubt that the Ubuntu-team are putting much work into XGL and I'm pretty certain that it will be an unsupported feature.
Every single time this subject comes up, someone tells us that it is about the obnoxious other people in the cinema and how crappy the cinema experience is because of it and every single time these people get modded up even though they are talking about a pretty much non-existant problem that almost noone seems to care about but them and some people on Slashdot.
You have all heard the stories about people answering mobile phones during the film and actually talking loud for fifteen minutes.
It has hardly every happened to me, and I have literally gone to the cinema thousands of times. I am not alone either. It has never impacted on the movie experience of any of my movie-crazy friends.
I'd say much less than 1% of movie goers are seriously bothered about this problem on a regular basis, so there is very little chance of this actually causing this decline.
The fact is that 8% decline in one year is absolutely no statistical basis for claiming the movie industry is in general decline. It may very well be, but the 8% decline proves absolutely nothing. It might just be a slow year.
Looking at the oscar winners, and remembering the films I watched this year I'd say this year was definetely a slow year. I personally loved King Kong, but it does not seem to have had the massive appeal the studio hoped for.
It is not however some terminal decline, and all the great films of all time were not made in the 60s and 70s. It annoys me when people claim this, as they obviously has not followed film in the last 15 years in any detail.
Slashdot Mirror
"1 GB RAM (can't get 512)"
Then why not just upgrade the iBook to 1GB? It then costs $1,249.
Thus the price difference is $1540 - $1249 = $291.
Your price difference is wrong, and you have not included the cost of the 80GB HD upgrade.
I still think that is an amazing deal, even though you get a slightly smaller screen.
"Either include them in the distro"
Copyright infringement.
"or have the OS/application recognize what is required and link to where it can be downloaded and automatically installed"
Legal grey area of copyright infringement. If it is automatical, then probably no better than including it on the CD. Linking to copyrighted material is also dodgy.
"Unfortunately, the world is in the midst of a severe water crisis that is only going to get worse in the years to come. Scientists are already warning us to get ready for massive "water wars.""
Eh.. then you just keep the production in areas of the world where you don't have a water problem.
There is more than enough water on this planet for everyone, it just so happens to be practically and economically unviable to transport it over very large distances.
Very dry areas will face problems, but unless the climates changes drastically we are not facing a water shortage in the UK. On the contrary.
This random blogger (*) proposes something fairly wild without any proof whatsoever. Slashdot reports it simply because it is a wild guess.
Hmmm... I think I'll guess that there are only 10 unique internet users in the world excluding Comic Book Guy [tm], maybe that will get me reported on Slashdot giving me 10 hits of sweet, sweet advertisement money.
(*) Well, I've never heard of him.
1. The games differ greatly from the XBox games. You may not like console games.
2. The machine is upgradable
3. The games cost almost twice as much for the Xbox 360 (at least here in the UK).
4. You can use the computer for other things than gaming and watching DVDs.
5. You may already have a PC that can be upgraded decently cheaply.
I still think the latest graphics card are unjustifiably expensive, but the older ones aren't so bad, and it was easier for me to justify spending £70 on a graphics card (GeForce 6600gt) than £300 on an Xbox 360.
The Nvidia cards can't handle both HDR and AA at the same time. At least not in the way it is solved in Oblivion.
In fact the $500 cards perform noticably better than the $300 cards. You may not think it matters much, but new games, such as Oblivion, are incredibly graphics intensive. Only the top-end cards from ATI are able to play Oblivion completely smoothly in 1600x1200 with all the buzzwords activated.
If you play highly intensive games at insane resolutions, then the high-end cards may be for you.
On the other hand, if you ever think about buying a $500 card because it will "last you longer", then you are kidding yourself. You are almost always better off buying $250 cards and replacing them twice as often.
Because the Core Duo is actually being used in desktop machines.
I'm a huge fan of AMD's products and have owned at least 5 AMD cpus, but the Core Duo is a freaking great CPU that really ought to be used in both desktop and mobile computers.
I think their name has been clearly affected by Microsoft's decision to name their most famous product Windows Vista.
Since VistaSource have existed for years and both Microsoft and VistaSource are software makers, I can almost smell a trademark lawsuit. VistaSource had better hurry up as well. If you don't protect your trademark you will lose it.
"It's ashame that I already skip going to the movies because they force you to watch adds after purchasing a license to experience the content of the film in comfy seats with loud surround sound."
I turn up ten minutes late for every film for this exact reason. I catch the last couple of trailers (which I enjoy) and then watch the film without having to watch meaningless commercials.
Personally I think the LiveCD should take over as the standard distribution mechanism. Let people preview before they install and make the install as simple as possible.
The traditional method of installation should be available for techies, but these hardly need a shiny interface with icons and buttons.
There is nothing wrong with a text based installer as long as it is well done.
"Canonical Ltd. looks like they are privately held and might be a relatively easy buy."
In what way does privately held mean easy buy? It all depends on the owner. In this case, Canonical is own pretty much exclusively by Mark Shuttleworth of notorious wealth. Ubuntu is basically his "pet" and he has absolutely no need to sell it.
"I'm taking this idea from nVidia working on load balancing between graphics and physics in a SLI setup"
Sadly, this is not as easy with general purpose CPUs as it is with graphics. A very large part of the graphics process is so-called "embarrassingly parallel". Basically, in many ways each pixel can be rendered independently. If the GPU is too busy, some of these calculations can simply be offloaded to the other GPUs.
For general purpose computing, there may be many, many forms of dependences that ruin this form of load-balancing. It will be interesting to see how well AMD solves this problem, most likely it will involve a lot of guesswork from the cores, but as long as it guesses correctly most of the time (like the branch prediction in super-scalar CPUs), this could very well lead to massive speed increases for single threaded applications.
Not really comparable. The lines of Dells that have a proper graphics card are priced considerably higher than the lines of computers with the integrated crap.
"Yup. And it works really well. Really, really well. Better than on my desktop PC."
Not only that, but the MacBook Pro is very competitively priced compared to other high-end Core Duo laptops.
I've tried fiddling with options on the Dell website and the outcome is always a slightly more expensive Dell machine for similar hardware and software. None of these machines are cheap, however.
I'd wait for a few revisions, given how new the system is, but the Macbook Pro is one tasty machine for a decent price.
"Has this idiot never played FarCry before?"
Precious.
First, quite a lot of non-idiots have never played Far Cry.
Second, most modern games, can (and should) automatically detect graphics settings according to the computer hardware. You are free to change the settings afterwards. The importance of this is easily seen with most modern shooters (or Oblivion), which have obscene amounts of graphics settings. I'm sure Oblivion has around 20 different levers with at least ten options each. Giving a massive 10^20 number of combinations. Some help from the game designers in finding an optimal setting automatically is much appreciated.
If I wasn't so diplomatic, I'd be tempted to call anyone wanting to waste time testing all combinations a moron.
If Microsoft were trying to convince OEMs to persuade customers to buy Windows with their PC, then that would be fine ('You really ought to buy Windows Vista with your PC, to get the most out of it'). Instead they are trying to convince OEMs to force customers to buy Windows. Read the line saying "We want to urge all system builds - indeed all Partners - not to supply naked PCs".
Microsoft is thus trying to convince OEMs into forcing customers to pay TWICE for Microsoft software. If you can't buy a naked PC, then how are you going to make the most out of your volume license agreement? Indeed Microsoft recognise this fact in their leaflet, but STILL urge PC-makers to not to sell naked PCs.
This is despicable business practise, and should require no "FUD" to emphasise it.
So basically they expect people to watch the films exclusively on their PC, rather than their living room TV. You end up with a product much worse than a DVD for a strikingly similar price. To make it even worse, you have to spend hours of your own broadband bandwidth to download it.
Not only that, DVDs can regularly be had for reduced prices at high street DVD stores, I'm willing to bet these downloads will not have equally aggressively prices sales periods.
This just lends credibility to people saying they are basically just setting legal downloads up to fail, so they can push for harder legal restrictions afterwards.
A download is a lower quality product than a hard copy DVD, as you don't get the physical copy and packacking. Since there is no physical reproduction, no physical transport and no extra goodies, people have certain expectations to price. Since you don't get physical media, your investment is a lot less secure.
Any download replacement should be:
a) much cheaper
b) convenient
c) easy to backup
This product fails on all of these points.
"Patent licenses are a large planned revenue stream for Microsoft, and they are only possible when there is a large captive public of infringers who keep infringing. Thus, Linux growth is actually good for Microsoft, seen from this point of view."
Eh. No. Microsoft would be sued by IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Sony and Philips among others, for countless patent violations.
IBM alone owns more patents than Microsoft, and with the current patent mess Microsoft is bound to infringe on lots of patents owned by the above-mentioned companies.
Patents are used defensively as well as aggressively and makes the whole situation into a kind of mutually assured destruction. It would be insane for Microsoft to start a patent war focused on Linux, as the only people to gain from it would be the lawyers. Certainly not the shareholders.
Every time Ballmer or some other Microsoft executive is quoted as suggesting Microsoft may use their intellectual property portfolio against Linux, IBM et al should suggest in the media that they may use their intellectual property portfolio against Microsoft. This would highlight how insane the situation is.
"Europe will STILL have to have a separate set of games because they use PAL instead of NTSC anyway"
Most fairly new European televisions can display both NTSC and PAL picture.
"Buy a new computer with Windows Vista to put under your tree this year."
I'm sure they would love that, but would the majority of PC-buyers care? Most people simply don't know what version of Windows they are running, and treat PCs as an appliance.
To be fair to Skype, you can actually remember it if you know English. It is easily pronouncable and is simply one syllable. Ekiga on the other hand....
--
Gaute
"The truth, of course, is that the vast majority of all historical accomplishments were achieved by straight, white, Christian males"
The vast majority of all historical accomplishments? You even use terms like "the truth" and "of course", making it sound ridiculously assumptious.
If I was to believe such a claim, I would require proof. European and American history is Eurocentric, so we know far more about European history than we do of Chinese, Arabian, Japanese, Indian, African or native american history. The Chinese and Japanese have for instance an extremely rich history full of accomplisments, lots of which are not well known by westeners. The same goes for most other civilisations.
Also, just because the white, christian male conquered large parts of the world, does not mean we were culturally superiour. We just happened to better at killing than them.
"XGL alone is a bit of a gamble(though I cannot wait to have it running soon after a full install) and I think he's looking at some of the QA for some of these features and flinching"
XGL is not part of the default install. It is available in the repositories, yes, but it requires some manual work to install still. I doubt that the Ubuntu-team are putting much work into XGL and I'm pretty certain that it will be an unsupported feature.
Every single time this subject comes up, someone tells us that it is about the obnoxious other people in the cinema and how crappy the cinema experience is because of it and every single time these people get modded up even though they are talking about a pretty much non-existant problem that almost noone seems to care about but them and some people on Slashdot.
You have all heard the stories about people answering mobile phones during the film and actually talking loud for fifteen minutes.
It has hardly every happened to me, and I have literally gone to the cinema thousands of times. I am not alone either. It has never impacted on the movie experience of any of my movie-crazy friends.
I'd say much less than 1% of movie goers are seriously bothered about this problem on a regular basis, so there is very little chance of this actually causing this decline.
The fact is that 8% decline in one year is absolutely no statistical basis for claiming the movie industry is in general decline. It may very well be, but the 8% decline proves absolutely nothing. It might just be a slow year.
Looking at the oscar winners, and remembering the films I watched this year I'd say this year was definetely a slow year. I personally loved King Kong, but it does not seem to have had the massive appeal the studio hoped for.
It is not however some terminal decline, and all the great films of all time were not made in the 60s and 70s. It annoys me when people claim this, as they obviously has not followed film in the last 15 years in any detail.