We got it a couple years back and I refused any information beyond what the regular census requires. I got a phone call where I explained I didn't trust them to secure my information. So far, I haven't been prosecuted for it, nor have I heard back from them. Came down to it, I'd be okay with being the test case.
Well, okay, if the things you want aren't on Linux, that's just the way it is, I guess. Of course, it used to be that way for games in general, but now a lot of "AAA" stuff shows up on Linux, too. If not immediately, then a few months down the road. As I said, I have enough games on my plate right now, I can afford to wait a bit.
Steam is quite dirty to install though... No source, 32-bit only (same for the games), some UI bugs, etc.
Ah, an AC. No, the games can be 64-bit, I run The Talos Principle that way, for example. As to source, for operating systems and utilities and most software, I want source. Games are an area where open-source doesn't work quite as well. I'm fine with closed-source and actually paying money for games. If you want to be a purist, you go on with your bad self.
And for what's left, you have to sort the real and well-made native or ported games, from the clunky ports by people who are not GNU/Linux developers...
Not so far. They've all worked just fine. If I measure, there's a framerate drop on some games between Windows and Linux, but up to this point not so's it bothers me in actual gameplay. Of course, I have an Nvidia card. People with AMD have some legit issues there, but I bought my hardware with Linux in mind.
...it's really not a big deal. Yes, it's not as many as Windows. However, there's so many just on Steam that it's plenty to fill any rational amount of leisure time. I've been mucking with The Talos Principle, Antichamber, and QUBE recently, on a bit of a first-person puzzler kick. Of course, before that I was playing Shadow of Mordor, Alien: Isolation and Tomb Raider (2013), along with XCom Enemy Within. Mucked around with Saint's Row 3 and Dead Island, too. That's just "major studios". But there's plenty of others I've been dipping into - The Fall and The Swapper, Sublevel Zero, Monstrum, Metro 2033, Victor Vran, Stealth Bastard, Doorkickers, the new Day of the Tentacle Remastered. Haven't had a chance to muck with Sir You Are Being Hunted. And I think I'm going to be spending quite a bit of time in Duskers.
More games than I can handle, really. All full Linux ports. I do have Windows, but haven't booted it to play games in at least a couple months now.
I use FB on my phone... via a mobile browser. One that I only use for FB. I have a separate browser I use for websurfing. I don't let the FB browser post notifications or have access to my location. I lose a few features that way, but I can still participate in "social media" without giving FB total access to my phone and life.
I've got some old webcams that I'd like to use Zeros for. Turn them into motion-sensitive security cameras with a FIFO buffer (on SD card). I've got some old Bluetooth dongles for networking purposes, and a powered hub or two. Should make a decent little setup after a little experimentation.
...having an inexpensive, low-power, general-purpose machine around to automate some tasks is actually rather nice. I've got a Pi plus a USB drive as a bittorrent server/client hung up on the wall in my basement. My wife's little website/email account is set to forward to gmail, and that's how she accesses it. But the emails build up and can hit the storage limit. So, presto, a little command-line POP3 client and a cron job later, the account never fills up again.
Certainly there's nothing special about a Raspberry Pi for such purposes, but they are common and inexpensive. I just wish that Pi Zeros were actually available. I've got some old webcams I'd love to turn into security cameras...
I was making fun of those blindly accepting that vaccines are safe.
Well, I was making fun of those blindly accepting that vaccines are terribly unsafe.
In that vein, one more note. You wrote:
Chicken pox itched like crazy, but wasn't life threatening and its spread is easy to prevent.
Chicken pox wasn't easy enough to eliminate before vaccines. And perhaps it wasn't life threatening for you but one of our sons had a classmate who had to have a liver transplant at age 3. (I'm sure poor lifestyle choices led to that...) Chicken pox could easily kill that child. Every time anyone in his school came down with any of several common illnesses, he had to stay home for several days. Vaccination is more than a personal issue.
Does the population around you have a hard time keeping their genitals from crashing into each other accidentally?
Well, actually, a rather large number of humans throughout history have had a spot of trouble controlling their genitals, yes. Humans are, er, far from perfect.
I've heard some weak-ass excuses for infidelity before,
With Gardasil, by far the primary issue is sex before marriage, not adultery. I'm not sure where you're getting that from - certainly not from anything I actually wrote. Did I miss something in the previous comments?
But I'm going to continue the car analogy. Our oldest is learning to drive, and we're teaching him to be careful, cautious, and defensive. Not to take stupid risks, etc. Of course, most parents do that when teaching their kids to drive. And yet, kids do impulsive and stupid things with cars every day. (Heck, so do adults.) So we're also teaching him to use his seatbelt. Even if he does everything right, someone else could do something terrible. (I'm sure you can't imagine any analogy to sex there, right? Something about involuntary sexual activity even if someone's being sensible? There's a word for it...)
I certainly want my kids not to make mistakes. But if I can minimize the consequences of mistakes - particularly preventing long-term and/or fatal consequences - I'm going to do that. You can disagree as you choose, I guess.
Any new vaccine should not be accepted as 100% effective with zero side effects until it is proven.
I don't know of anything - not just any vaccine, any thing that's ever existed in the universe - that is "accepted as 100% effective with zero side effects". That seems to be a high enough bar to be, er, perhaps obstructionist. To be honest, I wonder what your objection might be once this technique gets commercialized.
My wife and are teaching our children about how things work and what contraceptive options are available, emphasizing the effectiveness of each method, and the potential risks and benefits of sex, before and within marriage. And they either have received or will receive Gardasil, too. For much the same reason we have them wear seatbelts.
In the linux driver you have a steaming pile of crap that barely works at all.
Not true - in fact, Nvidia's Linux driver is quite good. The issue is that 'important' games get special attention from the graphics companies, who special-case things in their drivers - replacing whole shaders, etc. That doesn't happen in Linux. It winds up being necessary because OpenGL has grown so complex that it's incredibly hard to write fast code for it.
Vuikan is liable to change that considerably - a much lower-level API, that engines can interface with more directly and consistently. The drivers won't have be huge tangles of special-case code, and will be much simpler to implement on multiple operating systems because they are called upon to do far less.
One of my primary suspects for the difference is the video card - how well optimized are the Linux drivers?
On an absolute scale, probably not as well-optimized as the Windows one. But Nvidia's Linux drivers have consistently been better-performing than AMD's versions. Intel's Linux drivers have had problems, too, and their dependence on Mesa has meant that a lot of recent OpenGL features haven't been exposed. Plus Intel's hardware is significantly slower than AMD or Nvidia's offerings.
Sequencing such a large volume of samples is not - currently - technically or financially practical. In Michigan, if you jump through special hoops, you can get them to cough up the samples to you personally. That's what I'm doing, before they decide to start building a big sequence database (with 'appropriate protections', of course).
I actually am in the process of having the samples destroyed for all of my children - now that I'm actually aware of them. Michigan recently switched to an opt-in research consent, but my kids were born before the cutoff - for them it's opt-out. And we were not informed of this warehousing at any point when any of them were born.
Either way, you have to specifically request destruction. No response so far to either phone or email...
You can also refuse vaccines. But why the hell would you do either of these things ? You can have your sample destroyed so any real objection is pretty flimsy.
There's two separate things going on here. The screening for obscure diseases is one thing - and sure, that's a good thing. The warehousing of samples indefinitely to be used in research - and whatever else might one day be permitted legally - without explicit consent? That's quite a different issue, and there are reasonable objections to that.
If it's specific demos that produce nausea, but not the general case, I'd bet that the demos themselves have problems keeping up. Especially for some people, even if the average frame right is high, a few inconsistent dips would be enough to disturb equilibrium.
That said... every single trait of humans is on some kind of bell curve. There may well be people who need 120fps to avoid 'vr sickness', but they'll be a few standard deviations from the mean.
First off, games that are optimized for pure eye candy strain current cards, yes. But you don't have to have teh bezt pozzible grafix for everything. Take Alien: Isolation - looked really good, but ran at excellent framerates even on older cards. And even has some vr support. Tradeoffs can be made to crank framerate, and not horrible tradeoffs. I can handle 2010 graphics on VR, it's not like those games looked bad.
And no, 120fps/eye isn't necessary. You need low latency, definitely, but not that low. The DK2 peaks at 76fps, and yet few people report sickness at that rate.
Got "Shadow of Mordor" fro Linux (bought directly from Feral, to reward behavior I approve of, like porting). 42GB, and on the connection we had (allegedly 10Mbps, in practice ~7.5Mbps) it took over two days to download. And Netflix/Youtube/etc. got slow when a big download was happening. So we just this weekend bumped up to 35Mbit (seems to get around 40Mbit in practice). It's already better when two people are trying to watch different streams.
John Carmack is still with Oculus, and he knows graphics tech. If he thinks they can get it right, I'm inclined to believe him. So I'm paying attention to Oculus, still.
Mind you, Valve's stuff is supposed to be out by the time the Rift comes out, so it'll be possible to directly compare them before I'll be in a position to buy. I'm not ruling them out. But overall I like the Rift's odds, based on what I've been reading.
That sounds like something that could be applied to a lot of existing hardware quickly, and should logically have its own heading, but I didn't see it in a very quick skim of the PDF. What kind of settings are they talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
We got it a couple years back and I refused any information beyond what the regular census requires. I got a phone call where I explained I didn't trust them to secure my information. So far, I haven't been prosecuted for it, nor have I heard back from them. Came down to it, I'd be okay with being the test case.
Well, okay, if the things you want aren't on Linux, that's just the way it is, I guess. Of course, it used to be that way for games in general, but now a lot of "AAA" stuff shows up on Linux, too. If not immediately, then a few months down the road. As I said, I have enough games on my plate right now, I can afford to wait a bit.
Ah, an AC. No, the games can be 64-bit, I run The Talos Principle that way, for example. As to source, for operating systems and utilities and most software, I want source. Games are an area where open-source doesn't work quite as well. I'm fine with closed-source and actually paying money for games. If you want to be a purist, you go on with your bad self.
Not so far. They've all worked just fine. If I measure, there's a framerate drop on some games between Windows and Linux, but up to this point not so's it bothers me in actual gameplay. Of course, I have an Nvidia card. People with AMD have some legit issues there, but I bought my hardware with Linux in mind.
There have been at least two Windows 7 updates I've had to temporarily disable Grub for, otherwise they fail.
More games than I can handle, really. All full Linux ports. I do have Windows, but haven't booted it to play games in at least a couple months now.
I use FB on my phone... via a mobile browser. One that I only use for FB. I have a separate browser I use for websurfing. I don't let the FB browser post notifications or have access to my location. I lose a few features that way, but I can still participate in "social media" without giving FB total access to my phone and life.
...like, say, Ted Chiang's "Understand".
I've got some old webcams that I'd like to use Zeros for. Turn them into motion-sensitive security cameras with a FIFO buffer (on SD card). I've got some old Bluetooth dongles for networking purposes, and a powered hub or two. Should make a decent little setup after a little experimentation.
Lots of pictures of, and for, cakes.
Certainly there's nothing special about a Raspberry Pi for such purposes, but they are common and inexpensive. I just wish that Pi Zeros were actually available. I've got some old webcams I'd love to turn into security cameras...
Well, I was making fun of those blindly accepting that vaccines are terribly unsafe.
In that vein, one more note. You wrote:
Chicken pox wasn't easy enough to eliminate before vaccines. And perhaps it wasn't life threatening for you but one of our sons had a classmate who had to have a liver transplant at age 3. (I'm sure poor lifestyle choices led to that...) Chicken pox could easily kill that child. Every time anyone in his school came down with any of several common illnesses, he had to stay home for several days. Vaccination is more than a personal issue.
Well, actually, a rather large number of humans throughout history have had a spot of trouble controlling their genitals, yes. Humans are, er, far from perfect.
With Gardasil, by far the primary issue is sex before marriage, not adultery. I'm not sure where you're getting that from - certainly not from anything I actually wrote. Did I miss something in the previous comments?
But I'm going to continue the car analogy. Our oldest is learning to drive, and we're teaching him to be careful, cautious, and defensive. Not to take stupid risks, etc. Of course, most parents do that when teaching their kids to drive. And yet, kids do impulsive and stupid things with cars every day. (Heck, so do adults.) So we're also teaching him to use his seatbelt. Even if he does everything right, someone else could do something terrible. (I'm sure you can't imagine any analogy to sex there, right? Something about involuntary sexual activity even if someone's being sensible? There's a word for it...)
I certainly want my kids not to make mistakes. But if I can minimize the consequences of mistakes - particularly preventing long-term and/or fatal consequences - I'm going to do that. You can disagree as you choose, I guess.
...but we still have seatbelts and crumple zones in cars.
I don't know of anything - not just any vaccine, any thing that's ever existed in the universe - that is "accepted as 100% effective with zero side effects". That seems to be a high enough bar to be, er, perhaps obstructionist. To be honest, I wonder what your objection might be once this technique gets commercialized.
My wife and are teaching our children about how things work and what contraceptive options are available, emphasizing the effectiveness of each method, and the potential risks and benefits of sex, before and within marriage. And they either have received or will receive Gardasil, too. For much the same reason we have them wear seatbelts.
Not true - in fact, Nvidia's Linux driver is quite good. The issue is that 'important' games get special attention from the graphics companies, who special-case things in their drivers - replacing whole shaders, etc. That doesn't happen in Linux. It winds up being necessary because OpenGL has grown so complex that it's incredibly hard to write fast code for it.
Vuikan is liable to change that considerably - a much lower-level API, that engines can interface with more directly and consistently. The drivers won't have be huge tangles of special-case code, and will be much simpler to implement on multiple operating systems because they are called upon to do far less.
On an absolute scale, probably not as well-optimized as the Windows one. But Nvidia's Linux drivers have consistently been better-performing than AMD's versions. Intel's Linux drivers have had problems, too, and their dependence on Mesa has meant that a lot of recent OpenGL features haven't been exposed. Plus Intel's hardware is significantly slower than AMD or Nvidia's offerings.
Sequencing such a large volume of samples is not - currently - technically or financially practical. In Michigan, if you jump through special hoops, you can get them to cough up the samples to you personally. That's what I'm doing, before they decide to start building a big sequence database (with 'appropriate protections', of course).
Either way, you have to specifically request destruction. No response so far to either phone or email...
There's two separate things going on here. The screening for obscure diseases is one thing - and sure, that's a good thing. The warehousing of samples indefinitely to be used in research - and whatever else might one day be permitted legally - without explicit consent? That's quite a different issue, and there are reasonable objections to that.
Presently, at the current state of the art.
That said... every single trait of humans is on some kind of bell curve. There may well be people who need 120fps to avoid 'vr sickness', but they'll be a few standard deviations from the mean.
First off, games that are optimized for pure eye candy strain current cards, yes. But you don't have to have teh bezt pozzible grafix for everything. Take Alien: Isolation - looked really good, but ran at excellent framerates even on older cards. And even has some vr support. Tradeoffs can be made to crank framerate, and not horrible tradeoffs. I can handle 2010 graphics on VR, it's not like those games looked bad.
And no, a $4000 PC isn't necessary. The official specs are more like $1K these days. In fact, definitely $1K.
And no, 120fps/eye isn't necessary. You need low latency, definitely, but not that low. The DK2 peaks at 76fps, and yet few people report sickness at that rate.
Got "Shadow of Mordor" fro Linux (bought directly from Feral, to reward behavior I approve of, like porting). 42GB, and on the connection we had (allegedly 10Mbps, in practice ~7.5Mbps) it took over two days to download. And Netflix/Youtube/etc. got slow when a big download was happening. So we just this weekend bumped up to 35Mbit (seems to get around 40Mbit in practice). It's already better when two people are trying to watch different streams.
Mind you, Valve's stuff is supposed to be out by the time the Rift comes out, so it'll be possible to directly compare them before I'll be in a position to buy. I'm not ruling them out. But overall I like the Rift's odds, based on what I've been reading.
That sounds like something that could be applied to a lot of existing hardware quickly, and should logically have its own heading, but I didn't see it in a very quick skim of the PDF. What kind of settings are they talking about?