To go off on a tangent for a paragraph or so... I would pick the GameCube over the Xbox any day. Personally, I believe the Xbox is simply Microsoft's way of trying to monopolize yet another market with their inferior stuff. With the Sony PS2 and GameCube on the market, I believe there is no room for the Xbox.
Well, it's a pity that in comparison with the XBox, the PS2 is a pile of crap. (As all my friends who've played both of my consoles will attest to; the PS2 just doesn't compare).
As for the GameCube.. the jury is still out on that until I can buy one of those too.
Which reminds me of another thing: how the hell is "giving away" software to poor schools going to help all of the victims of the M$ monopoly? How long have these lawyers been away from the outside world, that they would lose sight of their objectives? I guess since its all money to them, they don't really give two shits one way or the other...
Maybe you should ask the PROSECUTION, as they set the terms of the settlement.
Think about it: don't you want to know that the guy who designed the fly-by-wire software for your 767 or A300 knew what he was doing?
Would you prefer someone fresh out of a CSEng degree, or someone who has 10 years of real-world experience (equivalent to at least a Master's degree in the same field)?
You do realize that real world experience is treated by most universities and employers as equivalent to education? eg. two years in the field will take you from a BSc degree to a Master's degree *automatically*, as far as any University is concerned.
It's true that you would have to rebuild and reboot the Linux kernel to go from non-firewall to firewall; but on the other hand I'd be surprised if Windows can turn this on without a reboot either.
That's a bad analogy - if your kernel came with firewalling compiled in, and your distribution had a nice checkbox, you could do the same thing. The only difference is that you can entirely remove the firewalling code from Linux (not just turn it off, actually make your kernel smaller) if you want to. You can't get into the internals of Windows XP and do that as easily.
The difference being that the firewall isn't built into the kernel in XP; it's a filter-driver.
Much easier for end users.
Re:your statements don't work
on
XBox Released
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· Score: 2
personally, i'm spending $700 on a new computer which has more than twice the power (and 5 times the storage space, and that's nothing) of the X-box. there are actually interesting games for this computer i'm buying; civ3, dark ages of camelot, max payne (which i still haven't played), et cetera.
I doubt that it has twice the power of the X-Box's graphics or sound devices... there's nothing on the consumer market that you can buy currently that compares.
Even so, even if you did manage to match the X-Box specs, let me let you into a little secret...
Games development houses won't be able to give you all of the features that your system could theoretically run with.
Your game will typically run with NORMAL or ABOVE_NORMAL thread priority. Anything else will cripple the rest of the system.
On the XBox, it'll run full pelt, with system services running in the background. No need for anything more than a minor priority boost - it won't be running anything else other than device drivers and ethernet connectivity.
On your super-duper PC, you could have any of a range of graphics cards, all with different capabilities. You could have one of about 5 different processor types, each with different feature sets and instructions (some have MMX, some have 3D-Now... some have... and so on and so on)
Games developers target the lowest common denominator, optimizing for 'reasonably common' cases. This might not include your card. For example, unless a team is just starting out developing a game today, it's unlikely that the finished game will include pixel shading. Or high-order surfaces.
Xbox? It's standard hardware. This frees up a lot of creativity in a developer -- they can write to the METAL. They don't have to consider that there may be over 30 different cards to support, or 4 or 5 subsets of processors, or 8 different sound cards -- they can guarantee that whatever they do on their dev box will work out there in the real world.
That's power. And that is the advantage of the XBox over a standard PC.
Sure, there's disadvantages too -- but thems the breaks.
Apple released iTunes 2.0 on a Saturday night. When a major bug was found, not only did they pull the installer *immediately*, but they fixed the bug and had a new one up in its place (properly labelled 2.0.1) within 24 hours. Not only that, but they have also said that they will pay for DriveSavers recovery for anyone who lost data to the bug. Can anyone imagine MS responding that quickly? On a *weekend* even! (Or accepting responsibility for its bugs like that?)
So what you're saying is that Apple put even less testing into their bugfix than they did with the original product... which is what let the product ship with the bug in the first place
Note that the Clinton DOJ would have settled this, but Microsoft absolutely refused. We got this point because they are stubbern bastards, not because the government was shooting for the fair deal.
Posner indicated that the problem with settlement earlier was neither with Microsoft, nor the DOJ, but with the State AG's. He made it very plain in previous statements.
But hey, they all want their big fat big tobacco check, so who can blame them?
Actually, I believe that Xerox did NOT have overlapping windows, it only appeared to. In the book "Infinite Loop" by Michael Malone, it talks about how someone at Apple Computer (Bill Atkinson? I can't remember) had such a difficult time duplicating what he thought he saw at Xerox.
No, it had overlapping windows. Check out Fumbling The Future, or Makers of Lightning.
Also, you can see screenshots dotted around the net.
So why does that happen? Well I'll tell you my educated guess: every year, electrical and computer engineers make amazing advances with comptuer hardware, making RAM more plentiful and less expensive, making hard drives larger and faster, implementing devices like L2 cache to decrease read/write times, and most popularly making Processors faster than ever (at least by clock speed.) You would think that these advances would make all software simply fly, be faster and more responsive than ever, and you'd have unlimited storage space for your files. However, that's not the way it is, and somehow, you still run out of disk space, don't have enough RAM, and have programs running slow (on a 2 GHZ Machine!!!) So what is it? Programmers. "Computer Scientists," rather than improving on software that ran well on old architectures, go by the thought process "well now that we have all this power, why don't we use it all" and so they end up writing applications and OS's that hog all the newly available extra resources. I'm not saying all Comp Sci's do this, I mean look at Linux, it's pretty damn efficient. When it comes to commercial apps though like Windoze, rather than make something extraordinarily efficient that runs on the newest machines, they say "well the hardware takes care of efficiency, let's just make something with a lot of bells and whistles." What you end up with is grossly large applications that sloth along on extremely powerful machines that have the capability to be so much more. This is yet another reason to use Linux.
You didn't read the article at all, did you? Infoworld compared the performance of VBA SCRIPTS between Win2k and WinXP.
Doesn't that strike anyone as a little contrived? Personally, I'd run Winstone - or something like that. But VBA? Jeesus.
By the way, my guess would be that Microsoft looked at all the bad press they were getting re: I LOVE YOU virus, et al, and for Windows XP, they took the WSH 5.1 engine, went through it, and added a full stack walk to every single call that touched a system call, to verify that no malicious code would run.
But that's just a theory. It'd certainly explain the slow-down though.
Something must be wrong with your computer if it takes 5 minutes for intellisense to pop up, and you notice any lag whatsoever when typing in Word. I've used both Visual C++ and Word plenty, including on not-so-hot low-end P2s and I've never seen anything like that.
Depending on your installation, Visual C++ can barf and screw up its intellisense support. It runs in the same thread as the GUI for god's sake!
(cue smug grin)
Which is why *I* (tooth twinkle) use Whole Tomato Software's Visual Assist. Intellisense and MORE in one cute package
(end smug grin)
Where were the complaints against software patents prior to the rise of the Open Source trend?
Given that the 'Open Source trend' started largely around the time that the Internet started to get really popular worldwide -- such that the average joe could access it without paying through the nose -- it's perhaps not surprising that the two events correlate somewhat. You don't start hearing complaints until you start hearing from other people:) And for that, you need a communications infrastructure.
...is whether or not they'll help keep down the level of bullshit patents (defensive patents or whatever you call them) so certain companies *cough*adobe*cough*macromedia*cough*microsoft* won't be able to sue willy-nilly anymore. Well, I'm sure they'll find a way to do that anyway, but it might slow them down a bit.
Name ONE case where Microsoft has used their patents aggressively, rather than to defend themselves from lawsuits against others.
They probably don't take physicists because physics majors tend to be too theoretical in everything. "Oops, I admitted a patent on the letter E? Must have been an experimental error."
Depends on the country. In the US, that is the case. In France... it's arguable (Physics majors tend to have a very very hard math background). In the UK? It'd be closer to having someone with a mech eng. / Eeng degree, who knows a boatload about physics AND engineering.
*shrugs* why the disparity though? I have no idea.
Yes the iPod has less storage, and costs more, but it also weighs less and is smaller, and I think runs longer. Deciding that makes it better doesn't mean someone has been "bought by marketing hordes", or is on crack, but that they value different things.
No, but saying that the iPod has twice the storage of the Nomad, when in fact it has a QUARTER the storage is very suspect, isn't it?
You're assuming that it's a quality/feature issue. No, it's not. It's blatant misrepresentation of the facts that is at stake here.
Now, would *I* pay $400 for either one? Probably not, since marketing hordes or no marketing hordes, I don't need it that badly. What I think the Apple iPod will do is raise the stakes for everybody else. Nobody will be satisfied with an mp3 player that weighs almost a pound, or that can't be used for both songs and software. Firewire is also clearly a better interface for these things than USB, and by enough of a margin that I suspect that this might be what drives the next wave of Firewire peripheral growth.
Hmmmm...
The Nomad Jukebox CAN be used for both songs and software. And as for Firewire, they announced a version of it with Firewire back in January this year. They've not released it yet though; I'm guessing that they're waiting for more people to have Firewire -- which is something they're aiming for with the Audigy sound card.
Unless the host machine is truly unreachable, I can click "Refresh" and get the appropriate page almost instantly about 80% of the time. Does that make you smell a fish? It makes me smell a fish.
No, it doesn't sound fishy to me at all.
The first time you tried to access the file, it could have been one server out of many load-balanced server. That server could be down.
Eg. go to Microsoft.com, and do a gethostbyname on it. It'll return about 6 different host IPs. IE will pick one of these at random. If it fails, you'll see an error. Hit refresh, and a different one is accessed.
Also, with high-load, some servers just kill your connection with a 404 error -- or just do a reset and drop you.
then i ask myself: self when was the last time you rebooted? well i think it was the last time i upgraded my operating system. while the 10 second reboot is nice, it would only become a real issue if you had to reboot alot.
You know, most people 'reboot' in the morning, because they switched their computer (you know, that thing which burns the equivalent of 5 60W lightbulbs all night...) off at night.
I just spent about four hours today screwing with our fastest processing computer (1ghz Athlon, 512mb DDR) because it decided to go down the toilet today, for no apparent reason.
After multiple chkdsk's and defrag's (many of which caused spontaneous reboots in the middle before finishing), I still don't have the problem figured out.
And yes, contrary to some other comments in this thread, I got the BSOD several times. Sometimes it was an invalid page fault, sometimes it was IRQL_yadda_yadda.
Has it been moved recently?
Check:
1. The heatsink and fan. Download the motherboard's probe software (if you've got an asus) and see if the power supply spikes, or the temperature of the board or CPU is above recommended limits.
2. Open the box. Press all the cards home. Press the CPU home. Press the memory home.
3. Find out what has been installed on the system recently. Download a copy of AdAware and see if anyone's been surfing on it and ended up with spyware on there.
If all else fails, work out which driver is having issues based on the module listing you get on the blue-screen, and check *that* specific device out.
Slashdot Mirror
To go off on a tangent for a paragraph or so... I would pick the GameCube over the Xbox any day. Personally, I believe the Xbox is simply Microsoft's way of trying to monopolize yet another market with their inferior stuff. With the Sony PS2 and GameCube on the market, I believe there is no room for the Xbox.
Well, it's a pity that in comparison with the XBox, the PS2 is a pile of crap. (As all my friends who've played both of my consoles will attest to; the PS2 just doesn't compare).
As for the GameCube.. the jury is still out on that until I can buy one of those too.
Simon
Which reminds me of another thing: how the hell is "giving away" software to poor schools going to help all of the victims of the M$ monopoly? How long have these lawyers been away from the outside world, that they would lose sight of their objectives? I guess since its all money to them, they don't really give two shits one way or the other...
Maybe you should ask the PROSECUTION , as they set the terms of the settlement.
Simon
Think about it: don't you want to know that the guy who designed the fly-by-wire software for your 767 or A300 knew what he was doing?
Would you prefer someone fresh out of a CSEng degree, or someone who has 10 years of real-world experience (equivalent to at least a Master's degree in the same field)?
You do realize that real world experience is treated by most universities and employers as equivalent to education? eg. two years in the field will take you from a BSc degree to a Master's degree *automatically*, as far as any University is concerned.
Just a thought...
Simon
It's true that you would have to rebuild and reboot the Linux kernel to go from non-firewall to firewall; but on the other hand I'd be surprised if Windows can turn this on without a reboot either.
Yep. No reboot necessary.
That's a bad analogy - if your kernel came with firewalling compiled in, and your distribution had a nice checkbox, you could do the same thing. The only difference is that you can entirely remove the firewalling code from Linux (not just turn it off, actually make your kernel smaller) if you want to. You can't get into the internals of Windows XP and do that as easily.
The difference being that the firewall isn't built into the kernel in XP; it's a filter-driver.
Much easier for end users.
personally, i'm spending $700 on a new computer which has more than twice the power (and 5 times the storage space, and that's nothing) of the X-box. there are actually interesting games for this computer i'm buying; civ3, dark ages of camelot, max payne (which i still haven't played), et cetera.
... and so on and so on)
I doubt that it has twice the power of the X-Box's graphics or sound devices... there's nothing on the consumer market that you can buy currently that compares.
Even so, even if you did manage to match the X-Box specs, let me let you into a little secret...
Games development houses won't be able to give you all of the features that your system could theoretically run with.
Your game will typically run with NORMAL or ABOVE_NORMAL thread priority. Anything else will cripple the rest of the system.
On the XBox, it'll run full pelt, with system services running in the background. No need for anything more than a minor priority boost - it won't be running anything else other than device drivers and ethernet connectivity.
On your super-duper PC, you could have any of a range of graphics cards, all with different capabilities. You could have one of about 5 different processor types, each with different feature sets and instructions (some have MMX, some have 3D-Now... some have
Games developers target the lowest common denominator, optimizing for 'reasonably common' cases. This might not include your card. For example, unless a team is just starting out developing a game today, it's unlikely that the finished game will include pixel shading. Or high-order surfaces.
Xbox? It's standard hardware. This frees up a lot of creativity in a developer -- they can write to the METAL. They don't have to consider that there may be over 30 different cards to support, or 4 or 5 subsets of processors, or 8 different sound cards -- they can guarantee that whatever they do on their dev box will work out there in the real world.
That's power. And that is the advantage of the XBox over a standard PC.
Sure, there's disadvantages too -- but thems the breaks.
Simon
Apple released iTunes 2.0 on a Saturday night. When a major bug was found, not only did they pull the installer *immediately*, but they fixed the bug and had a new one up in its place (properly labelled 2.0.1) within 24 hours. Not only that, but they have also said that they will pay for DriveSavers recovery for anyone who lost data to the bug. Can anyone imagine MS responding that quickly? On a *weekend* even! (Or accepting responsibility for its bugs like that?)
So what you're saying is that Apple put even less testing into their bugfix than they did with the original product... which is what let the product ship with the bug in the first place
Now THAT is what I call lack of quality control.
Simon
Note that the Clinton DOJ would have settled this, but Microsoft absolutely refused. We got this point because they are stubbern bastards, not because the government was shooting for the fair deal.
Posner indicated that the problem with settlement earlier was neither with Microsoft, nor the DOJ, but with the State AG's. He made it very plain in previous statements.
But hey, they all want their big fat big tobacco check, so who can blame them?
er...
well, me for a start.
I wouldn't go that far :)
Yes, Iain M. Banks. And Iain Banks, his evil twin.
Makes more sense to have it edge-based for complex regions though. Just a thought. You get better perf that way too.
Simon
Actually, I believe that Xerox did NOT have overlapping windows, it only appeared to. In the book "Infinite Loop" by Michael Malone, it talks about how someone at Apple Computer (Bill Atkinson? I can't remember) had such a difficult time duplicating what he thought he saw at Xerox.
No, it had overlapping windows. Check out Fumbling The Future, or Makers of Lightning.
Also, you can see screenshots dotted around the net.
So why does that happen? Well I'll tell you my educated guess: every year, electrical and computer engineers make amazing advances with comptuer hardware, making RAM more plentiful and less expensive, making hard drives larger and faster, implementing devices like L2 cache to decrease read/write times, and most popularly making Processors faster than ever (at least by clock speed.) You would think that these advances would make all software simply fly, be faster and more responsive than ever, and you'd have unlimited storage space for your files. However, that's not the way it is, and somehow, you still run out of disk space, don't have enough RAM, and have programs running slow (on a 2 GHZ Machine!!!) So what is it? Programmers. "Computer Scientists," rather than improving on software that ran well on old architectures, go by the thought process "well now that we have all this power, why don't we use it all" and so they end up writing applications and OS's that hog all the newly available extra resources. I'm not saying all Comp Sci's do this, I mean look at Linux, it's pretty damn efficient. When it comes to commercial apps though like Windoze, rather than make something extraordinarily efficient that runs on the newest machines, they say "well the hardware takes care of efficiency, let's just make something with a lot of bells and whistles." What you end up with is grossly large applications that sloth along on extremely powerful machines that have the capability to be so much more. This is yet another reason to use Linux.
You didn't read the article at all, did you? Infoworld compared the performance of VBA SCRIPTS between Win2k and WinXP.
Doesn't that strike anyone as a little contrived? Personally, I'd run Winstone - or something like that. But VBA? Jeesus.
By the way, my guess would be that Microsoft looked at all the bad press they were getting re: I LOVE YOU virus, et al, and for Windows XP, they took the WSH 5.1 engine, went through it, and added a full stack walk to every single call that touched a system call, to verify that no malicious code would run.
But that's just a theory. It'd certainly explain the slow-down though.
Simon
Something must be wrong with your computer if it takes 5 minutes for intellisense to pop up, and you notice any lag whatsoever when typing in Word. I've used both Visual C++ and Word plenty, including on not-so-hot low-end P2s and I've never seen anything like that.
Depending on your installation, Visual C++ can barf and screw up its intellisense support. It runs in the same thread as the GUI for god's sake!
(cue smug grin)
Which is why *I* (tooth twinkle) use Whole Tomato Software's Visual Assist. Intellisense and MORE in one cute package
(end smug grin)
Simon
They charge a fee for licensing their intellectual property. That is exactly one.
... well... the rest of the world.
You obviously have a differing view of what constitutes using patents to attack people than
Simon
Where were the complaints against software patents prior to the rise of the Open Source trend?
:) And for that, you need a communications infrastructure.
Given that the 'Open Source trend' started largely around the time that the Internet started to get really popular worldwide -- such that the average joe could access it without paying through the nose -- it's perhaps not surprising that the two events correlate somewhat. You don't start hearing complaints until you start hearing from other people
Simon
...is whether or not they'll help keep down the level of bullshit patents (defensive patents or whatever you call them) so certain companies *cough*adobe*cough*macromedia*cough*microsoft* won't be able to sue willy-nilly anymore. Well, I'm sure they'll find a way to do that anyway, but it might slow them down a bit.
Name ONE case where Microsoft has used their patents aggressively, rather than to defend themselves from lawsuits against others.
Just ONE. That's all I ask.
Simon
They probably don't take physicists because physics majors tend to be too theoretical in everything. "Oops, I admitted a patent on the letter E? Must have been an experimental error."
Depends on the country. In the US, that is the case. In France... it's arguable (Physics majors tend to have a very very hard math background). In the UK? It'd be closer to having someone with a mech eng. / Eeng degree, who knows a boatload about physics AND engineering.
*shrugs* why the disparity though? I have no idea.
Simon
It's not a quarter, that's the high-end nomad you're talking about
Which is the same price as the iPod, so why not compare apples to apples? (no pun intended)
Simon
Yes the iPod has less storage, and costs more, but it also weighs less and is smaller, and I think runs longer. Deciding that makes it better doesn't mean someone has been "bought by marketing hordes", or is on crack, but that they value different things.
No, but saying that the iPod has twice the storage of the Nomad, when in fact it has a QUARTER the storage is very suspect, isn't it?
You're assuming that it's a quality/feature issue. No, it's not. It's blatant misrepresentation of the facts that is at stake here.
Simon
Now, would *I* pay $400 for either one? Probably not, since marketing hordes or no marketing hordes, I don't need it that badly. What I think the Apple iPod will do is raise the stakes for everybody else. Nobody will be satisfied with an mp3 player that weighs almost a pound, or that can't be used for both songs and software. Firewire is also clearly a better interface for these things than USB, and by enough of a margin that I suspect that this might be what drives the next wave of Firewire peripheral growth.
Hmmmm...
The Nomad Jukebox CAN be used for both songs and software. And as for Firewire, they announced a version of it with Firewire back in January this year. They've not released it yet though; I'm guessing that they're waiting for more people to have Firewire -- which is something they're aiming for with the Audigy sound card.
Simon
Timothy;
The Nomad has a 6Gb and a 20Gb version. The 20Gb version is the same price as the 5Gb Apple iPod.
Please, please, please, learn how not to be bought by apple's marketing hoardes.
Simon
Unless the host machine is truly unreachable, I can click "Refresh" and get the appropriate page almost instantly about 80% of the time. Does that make you smell a fish? It makes me smell a fish.
No, it doesn't sound fishy to me at all.
The first time you tried to access the file, it could have been one server out of many load-balanced server. That server could be down.
Eg. go to Microsoft.com, and do a gethostbyname on it. It'll return about 6 different host IPs. IE will pick one of these at random. If it fails, you'll see an error. Hit refresh, and a different one is accessed.
Also, with high-load, some servers just kill your connection with a 404 error -- or just do a reset and drop you.
Simon
then i ask myself: self when was the last time you rebooted? well i think it was the last time i upgraded my operating system. while the 10 second reboot is nice, it would only become a real issue if you had to reboot alot.
You know, most people 'reboot' in the morning, because they switched their computer (you know, that thing which burns the equivalent of 5 60W lightbulbs all night...) off at night.
Simon
My uptimes with Windows 2000 were ocasionally about a week, but I am REALLY hard on paging systems... And I really do push this machine.
I've got 9 days, 2 hours and 20 minutes on my XP Pro box at home (I just connected to it with Remote Desktop and checked).
Unfortunately, I need to boot into Win2k to do any video editing, so that uptime may be the highest it'll get.
*sigh*
Come on, Pinnacle! Release new drivers!
Simon
Check my bio and you'll see my job description.
I just spent about four hours today screwing with our fastest processing computer (1ghz Athlon, 512mb DDR) because it decided to go down the toilet today, for no apparent reason.
After multiple chkdsk's and defrag's (many of which caused spontaneous reboots in the middle before finishing), I still don't have the problem figured out.
And yes, contrary to some other comments in this thread, I got the BSOD several times. Sometimes it was an invalid page fault, sometimes it was IRQL_yadda_yadda.
Has it been moved recently?
Check:
1. The heatsink and fan. Download the motherboard's probe software (if you've got an asus) and see if the power supply spikes, or the temperature of the board or CPU is above recommended limits.
2. Open the box. Press all the cards home. Press the CPU home. Press the memory home.
3. Find out what has been installed on the system recently. Download a copy of AdAware and see if anyone's been surfing on it and ended up with spyware on there.
If all else fails, work out which driver is having issues based on the module listing you get on the blue-screen, and check *that* specific device out.
Simon