Isn't it basically unconscionable that the actual process of elections be a for-profit venture? While the military may buy hardware from outside vendors, it does so because certain problems require such specific, high-level technical knowledge and manufacturing know-how which they don't posess in-house. A voting system is, at it's core, a system of adding numbers together that any first-year comp sci student could create. Why is something so basic to the legitimacy of our government being given to for-profit ventures with closed systems?
At the government's disposal are hundreds of public universities with some of the brightest minds in the country, many of whom would gladly work on implementing the great american open-source voting system. Even if these graduate students and professors were paid market rates for their work, it would still be much cheaper than what Diebold systems are costing the US. There is also no competitive advantate go keeping the system closed-source... so what if Austrailia decides they want to run their elections on our software? We've proud of other countries copying our constitution and systems of government, why not our systems of elections too? Especially if they improve it, and give those improvements back to us? What, are we suddenly going to be exporting less consumables to them because they have more legitimate elected officials?
There are good Playstation 2 to USB adaptors on the market. They map to direct X inputs, which can be reconfigured in-game. My company uses the Lik-Sang version for our PS2 titles in development, though I keep a different one for home use (with dance mat support).
Yes, there are great controllers that are pretty much fully supported on the PC, but ironically not from the XBox.
Captain Malcolm Miller, head of international transport at BNFL, said they were the "safest sea transports" he had ever seen. A naval escort had not been requested and was not necessary, he added.
The farther ahead the release date, the longer they can milk the project without admitting it was a fraud... Maybe even long enough to slip away to South America, if they are smart.
>If your vote doesn't "count" it is because most of the state chose not to vote for your candidate. You really can't blame that on the electoral college.
Actually, my vote doesn't count precicely because most of the people in my state choose to vote for my candidate. Whether or not I vote for the candidate is essentially negated by the flood of other people who are voting for the candidate... We're sending the same number of representatives to the electoral college either way.
Sorry, I'm running a little late this morning, so I don't have time to read the whole thing.
While interesting, Natapoff seems to be suggesting that the maximum effect per vote can be drawn if districting is drawn extremely carefully across all boundaries. Of course, that maximum effect per vote seems to mean how much that vote can swing the election one way or another, or how much a person can lose the popular vote and still win the election. And those district boundaries have to be drawn up in a completely artificial and evenly-contested fashion, though studies have shown that in real-life districts have grown almost totally homogenous.
I've lived in two different states in the past four elections. Because neither of which were contested, neither candidate spent a single penny of their advertising dollars there. Arguably, the only candidate in recent memory who spent any money in my state was Ross Perot, and that was because he bought national airtime. There have been no corner debates, because the supporters of the minority candidate knew that the states were lost causes. Nobody's arguing or debating anything with anyone. 3rd party candidates are the only ones talking, and that's how they're getting a whopping 2%. The electoral college is ensuring that the value of my vote is minimized to the point where nobody really wants it.
I had meant the SE, which ranges much cheaper than the XT.
Never buy the bleeding edge graphics card. It's cheaper to replace a second-best card more frequently, and involves less driver problems. BTW, XT's on this side of the pond are running about $150. Again, England gets the shaft in computer parts.
I've found that in one particular area, bug tracking software which needs to be shared across many people, it makes sense for small development companies to go with 3rd party solutions on a month-to-month basis. It's a lot like webhosting in that respects, though unlike webhosting it can be terminated at any time.
Software rentals probably make the most sense for project-duration needs, especially when some form of remote hosting is involved.
>>Sometimes, when you connect the dots of a story using third-party info, you get something close to the real picture. But you've taken a constellation and turned it into chicken scratches.
Sorry, I was under space constraints, and now that I re-read what I wrote, my coherence leaves much to be desired.
But the basic story remains true... what did I get wrong?
Dr. Emmett Brown : The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?
Dr. Emmett Brown : What on Earth's this thing I'm wearing? Marty McFly : Ah, this, this is a radiation suit. Dr. Emmett Brown : Radiation suit? Of course, because of all the fallout from the atomic wars.
Dr. Emmett Brown : If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour... you're gonna see some serious shit.
Marty McFly : Wait a minute, Doc, are you trying to tell me that my mother has got the hots for me? Dr. Emmett Brown : Precisely. Marty McFly : Whoa, this is heavy. Dr. Emmett Brown : There's that word again; "heavy". Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?
Marty McFly : So does it run on regular unleaded gasoline? Dr. Emmett Brown : Unfortunately no, it needs something with a little more kick - plutonium. Marty McFly : Plutonium... wait, are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear? Dr. Emmett Brown : No no no, this sucker's electrical, but it requires a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need. Marty McFly : Doc, you don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium... did you rip that off? Dr. Emmett Brown : Shhhhhh. Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shiny bomb-casing filled with used pinball machine parts
[seeing a poster for the Enchantment Under the Sea dance] Dr. Emmett Brown : Look. There's a rhythmic ceremonial ritual coming up.
Doc : The time-traveling is just too dangerous. Better that I devote myself to study the other great mystery of the universe: women!
Marty McFly : That's right, Doc. November 12, 1955. Doc : Unbelievable, that old Biff could have chosen that particular date. It could mean that, that point in time inherently contains some sort of cosmic significance. Almost as if it were the junction point for the entire space-time continuum. On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence.
Young Doc : No wonder this circuit failed. It says "Made in Japan". Marty McFly : What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan. Young Doc : Unbelievable.
Doc : Clara was one in a million. One in a billion. One in a googolplex!
Yes, like releasing a budget line of chips that are more powerful and cheaper than the premium line of chips you sell. Intel would never do something that dumb. Or releasing a next-generation chipset that is actually slower than the current generation due to listening to their marketing department over their engineering department. Or, for that matter, release a chip with logic deficiencies that has to be recalled. Intel has been around long enough that they know what they're doing.
No chip company as wise as Intel would launch into the low-price consumer products arena with an ill-concieved sound recorder and a crappy video camera, both of which looked like something fisher price would reject. Intel could never fail if it decided to, say, dominate the market for graphics chipsets. They must know their limitations as a company. Once Intel took control of a system, it would maneuver deftly to keep it instead of, say, losing it to an IBM developed Power PC chip.
You'll notice Beaker and Honeydew were the only traditional scientists on the list. Mr. Spock, the doctor, and Dana are more explorers than scientists, Q is an engineer, Frank 'n Furter, Mr Evil, and Dr Frankenstein are, well, mad. Dr Strangelove is a consultant. Even Emmett Brown is portreyed as more mad than scientist.
Why not include more traditional scientists on the list, such as Bill Nye, Mr. Wizard, or popular untraditional ones like Peter Venkmin or the Answer Guys?
Alt-tab is a pretty common restriction. Dealing with the logic of threaded game elements is hard enough without the player arbitrarily stopping it at any second. Remember when the windows key was actually the crash-me key?
Direct X is an underlying graphics standard that is owned and controlled by Microsoft. Games are displayed using one of two technologies (generally), Direct X and Open GL. This lets the programmers do things like tell the game to display a polygon with XYZ corners and N bitmap stretched to M size with a global light of F, without actually having to program that stuff themselves.
As for 3rd party graphics cards... Games are developed on Nvidia and ATI cards. I've worked on a few games, both PC and console, and we've never tested on anything other than ATI or Nvidia. I've seen publishers that test on-board graphics cards, but unless the required tweak is minor most on-board graphics cards are (rightfully) assumed to be junk. Most on-board graphics cards claim DirectX 9.x or Open GL 1.x compatibility, but most are several orders of magnitude slower than real cards.
This isn't a slander against non ATI, non Nvidia cards. Check out Tom's Hardware guide to XGI graphics cards. They're as fast as the other companies, but their output is terrible. I think we'd all be happy if another company came up to unseat ATI and Nvidia, the way that Nvidia unseated Voodoo. But that really hasn't happened yet... and with the specialized knowledge required for good image processing, that won't happen easily.
Unless your new PC was specifically a "gaming PC," it probably didn't come with a real graphics card. If you plan on playing any games, new or old, I'd plunk down the 80 bucks for an ATI 9600. It's well worth the investment.
I should point out, that Nintendo pulled the plug at the last minute on releasing the original Final Fantasy 2 on the NES here in the states, after hyping it up in Nintendo Power the month before (and a juicy contest that nobody won). What was released here as Final Fantasy 2 was actually Final Fantasy 4, in no small way because Nintendo didn't believe the series would amount to anything in the US.
And then, of course, the Final Fantasy for the SNES made the platform in Japan, at a time when the Mega Drive (Genesis) was swimming in great RPG's... but Nintendo's fiasco with the Sony-made Nintendo Playstation (SNES CD) upon which Square developed a fully realized "greatest game ever..." the Secret of Mana, then had to chop it to little bits to make it fit on a cartridge when the SNES CD was not released, soured the relationship on Square's side. Then Square deciding to make the next Final Fantasy game on, you guessed it, the Sony Playstation was taken as a personal slap in the face by Nintendo's president Hiroshi Yamauchi, which not only burned the bridge between them but salted the ground for many years.
Of course, the SNES CD couldn't be released as it was originally invisioned... In a momentary and tremendous lapse of judgement, the Nintendo lawyers signed to Sony the profits for any CD games sold, while they kept the profits on any Cartridge games sold. Nintendo asked for a redrawing of the iron-clad contract, Sony refused, and while Nintendo was contractually obligated to approve of Sony's release, they found a sneaky loophole and drew up a contract with (I believe) Philips to make a CDI compatible SNES CD, which they would throw their marketing muscle behind. Philips, of course, was an earlier partner which Nintendo had scorned in favor of Sony. Anyway, it was a big ugly mess.
I won't even get into how Square and Nintendo finally made up.
In other words, while Nintendo was not responsible for creating the Final Fantasy series, they do have a sorded past with the series.
True. I didn't mean to jest that the technology is so basic that everyone in the world would blow it off. I meant that the detection and tracking of motion, watching people come and go, is a very basic technology which we've had for many years.
We don't need to imagine what sort of technology which will make you and I feel frightened and amazed... we just need to wait a few more years. Of course, by then the people living in the technology will take it for granted. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic only to those who do not live in that culture... many cultures thought the Spanish guns were magic, yet by our standards they were grossly primitive.
This reminds me a lot of a tactic to get ahead in the military: get cited for minor infractions. Weeks later when deciding who should have what important duties, your superiors will remember your name from somewhere, but they won't remember where, and that name recognition is worth a lot more than a few fines and a few nights of pushups. And even if they do remember you had a few minor infractions, a known slightly negative variable is a lot safer than an unknown, potentially severely negative variable.
I went to the grocery store the other day, and as I was walking up close to the door the darned thing opened for me. It was the weirdest thing ever. Then, when I got to the other side... It closed.
I've seen this before. Why do people refer to Walm*rt with a star in the name? Is there a whole chain of Walmerts, Walmurts, and Walmirts? Or is it sometimes spelled Walmrt, Walmmmmmmrt, or Walrt? Does G*d shop there?
>The woman learned how Gabrielyan was following her when she discovered him under her car attempting to change the cell phone's battery, police said.
This is a perfect metaphor for the 21 century... Hyped futuristic capabilities with obvious and forgotten shortcomings. 12v line from the power system, anyone?
If you are going to be compulsively obsessed to the exclusion of all else, at least sweat the details.
If you look closely, you'll see that internet explorer 6 usage has been pretty level, but internet explorer 5 usage plumetted in almost exactly the same proportion that firefox / moz increased.
It appears, then, that these are people with old machines who won't put up with an increasingly exploited browser but who can't run I.E. 6... either from a power standpoint or an access standpoint. Windows 98 usage only dropped 3% in that time, so nearly all of the converts must be running the older platform.
I'd be interested to see statistics correlating the two, and whether or not the people visiting w3 skew towards having older computers than the average surfers.
Either way the conclusion is clear: Microsoft is losing people at the tail end of their product line, because they refuse to offer a low-power, efficient alternative for older platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't it basically unconscionable that the actual process of elections be a for-profit venture? While the military may buy hardware from outside vendors, it does so because certain problems require such specific, high-level technical knowledge and manufacturing know-how which they don't posess in-house. A voting system is, at it's core, a system of adding numbers together that any first-year comp sci student could create. Why is something so basic to the legitimacy of our government being given to for-profit ventures with closed systems?
At the government's disposal are hundreds of public universities with some of the brightest minds in the country, many of whom would gladly work on implementing the great american open-source voting system. Even if these graduate students and professors were paid market rates for their work, it would still be much cheaper than what Diebold systems are costing the US. There is also no competitive advantate go keeping the system closed-source... so what if Austrailia decides they want to run their elections on our software? We've proud of other countries copying our constitution and systems of government, why not our systems of elections too? Especially if they improve it, and give those improvements back to us? What, are we suddenly going to be exporting less consumables to them because they have more legitimate elected officials?
There are good Playstation 2 to USB adaptors on the market. They map to direct X inputs, which can be reconfigured in-game. My company uses the Lik-Sang version for our PS2 titles in development, though I keep a different one for home use (with dance mat support).
Yes, there are great controllers that are pretty much fully supported on the PC, but ironically not from the XBox.
Captain Malcolm Miller, head of international transport at BNFL, said they were the "safest sea transports" he had ever seen. A naval escort had not been requested and was not necessary, he added.
Can you say "Doomed?"
The farther ahead the release date, the longer they can milk the project without admitting it was a fraud... Maybe even long enough to slip away to South America, if they are smart.
Next to the nuke plant parking lot.
>If your vote doesn't "count" it is because most of the state chose not to vote for your candidate. You really can't blame that on the electoral college.
Actually, my vote doesn't count precicely because most of the people in my state choose to vote for my candidate. Whether or not I vote for the candidate is essentially negated by the flood of other people who are voting for the candidate... We're sending the same number of representatives to the electoral college either way.
Sorry, I'm running a little late this morning, so I don't have time to read the whole thing.
While interesting, Natapoff seems to be suggesting that the maximum effect per vote can be drawn if districting is drawn extremely carefully across all boundaries. Of course, that maximum effect per vote seems to mean how much that vote can swing the election one way or another, or how much a person can lose the popular vote and still win the election. And those district boundaries have to be drawn up in a completely artificial and evenly-contested fashion, though studies have shown that in real-life districts have grown almost totally homogenous.
I've lived in two different states in the past four elections. Because neither of which were contested, neither candidate spent a single penny of their advertising dollars there. Arguably, the only candidate in recent memory who spent any money in my state was Ross Perot, and that was because he bought national airtime. There have been no corner debates, because the supporters of the minority candidate knew that the states were lost causes. Nobody's arguing or debating anything with anyone. 3rd party candidates are the only ones talking, and that's how they're getting a whopping 2%. The electoral college is ensuring that the value of my vote is minimized to the point where nobody really wants it.
All three films look much crisper and brighter - I almost thought for a second that Lucas had added some new stuff.
Trust me, that's exactly what you don't want.
I had meant the SE, which ranges much cheaper than the XT.
Never buy the bleeding edge graphics card. It's cheaper to replace a second-best card more frequently, and involves less driver problems. BTW, XT's on this side of the pond are running about $150. Again, England gets the shaft in computer parts.
Salesman: Surely you can't put a price on your family's lives?
Homer: I wouldn't have thought so either, but here we are. [slams door]
I've found that in one particular area, bug tracking software which needs to be shared across many people, it makes sense for small development companies to go with 3rd party solutions on a month-to-month basis. It's a lot like webhosting in that respects, though unlike webhosting it can be terminated at any time.
Software rentals probably make the most sense for project-duration needs, especially when some form of remote hosting is involved.
>>Sometimes, when you connect the dots of a story using third-party info, you get something close to the real picture. But you've taken a constellation and turned it into chicken scratches.
Sorry, I was under space constraints, and now that I re-read what I wrote, my coherence leaves much to be desired.
But the basic story remains true... what did I get wrong?
Dr. Emmett Brown : The way I see it, if you're gonna build a time machine into a car, why not do it with some style?
Dr. Emmett Brown : What on Earth's this thing I'm wearing?
Marty McFly : Ah, this, this is a radiation suit.
Dr. Emmett Brown : Radiation suit? Of course, because of all the fallout from the atomic wars.
Dr. Emmett Brown : If my calculations are correct, when this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour... you're gonna see some serious shit.
Marty McFly : Wait a minute, Doc, are you trying to tell me that my mother has got the hots for me?
Dr. Emmett Brown : Precisely.
Marty McFly : Whoa, this is heavy.
Dr. Emmett Brown : There's that word again; "heavy". Why are things so heavy in the future? Is there a problem with the earth's gravitational pull?
Marty McFly : So does it run on regular unleaded gasoline?
Dr. Emmett Brown : Unfortunately no, it needs something with a little more kick - plutonium.
Marty McFly : Plutonium... wait, are you telling me that this sucker is nuclear?
Dr. Emmett Brown : No no no, this sucker's electrical, but it requires a nuclear reaction to generate the 1.21 gigawatts of electricity I need.
Marty McFly : Doc, you don't just walk into a store and buy plutonium... did you rip that off?
Dr. Emmett Brown : Shhhhhh. Of course. From a group of Libyan nationalists. They wanted me to build them a bomb, so I took their plutonium and in turn, gave them a shiny bomb-casing filled with used pinball machine parts
[seeing a poster for the Enchantment Under the Sea dance]
Dr. Emmett Brown : Look. There's a rhythmic ceremonial ritual coming up.
Doc : The time-traveling is just too dangerous. Better that I devote myself to study the other great mystery of the universe: women!
Marty McFly : That's right, Doc. November 12, 1955.
Doc : Unbelievable, that old Biff could have chosen that particular date. It could mean that, that point in time inherently contains some sort of cosmic significance. Almost as if it were the junction point for the entire space-time continuum. On the other hand, it could just be an amazing coincidence.
Young Doc : No wonder this circuit failed. It says "Made in Japan".
Marty McFly : What do you mean, Doc? All the best stuff is made in Japan.
Young Doc : Unbelievable.
Doc : Clara was one in a million. One in a billion. One in a googolplex!
Yes, like releasing a budget line of chips that are more powerful and cheaper than the premium line of chips you sell. Intel would never do something that dumb. Or releasing a next-generation chipset that is actually slower than the current generation due to listening to their marketing department over their engineering department. Or, for that matter, release a chip with logic deficiencies that has to be recalled. Intel has been around long enough that they know what they're doing.
No chip company as wise as Intel would launch into the low-price consumer products arena with an ill-concieved sound recorder and a crappy video camera, both of which looked like something fisher price would reject. Intel could never fail if it decided to, say, dominate the market for graphics chipsets. They must know their limitations as a company. Once Intel took control of a system, it would maneuver deftly to keep it instead of, say, losing it to an IBM developed Power PC chip.
You'll notice Beaker and Honeydew were the only traditional scientists on the list. Mr. Spock, the doctor, and Dana are more explorers than scientists, Q is an engineer, Frank 'n Furter, Mr Evil, and Dr Frankenstein are, well, mad. Dr Strangelove is a consultant. Even Emmett Brown is portreyed as more mad than scientist.
Why not include more traditional scientists on the list, such as Bill Nye, Mr. Wizard, or popular untraditional ones like Peter Venkmin or the Answer Guys?
Alt-tab is a pretty common restriction. Dealing with the logic of threaded game elements is hard enough without the player arbitrarily stopping it at any second. Remember when the windows key was actually the crash-me key?
Direct X is an underlying graphics standard that is owned and controlled by Microsoft. Games are displayed using one of two technologies (generally), Direct X and Open GL. This lets the programmers do things like tell the game to display a polygon with XYZ corners and N bitmap stretched to M size with a global light of F, without actually having to program that stuff themselves.
As for 3rd party graphics cards... Games are developed on Nvidia and ATI cards. I've worked on a few games, both PC and console, and we've never tested on anything other than ATI or Nvidia. I've seen publishers that test on-board graphics cards, but unless the required tweak is minor most on-board graphics cards are (rightfully) assumed to be junk. Most on-board graphics cards claim DirectX 9.x or Open GL 1.x compatibility, but most are several orders of magnitude slower than real cards.
This isn't a slander against non ATI, non Nvidia cards. Check out Tom's Hardware guide to XGI graphics cards. They're as fast as the other companies, but their output is terrible. I think we'd all be happy if another company came up to unseat ATI and Nvidia, the way that Nvidia unseated Voodoo. But that really hasn't happened yet... and with the specialized knowledge required for good image processing, that won't happen easily.
Unless your new PC was specifically a "gaming PC," it probably didn't come with a real graphics card. If you plan on playing any games, new or old, I'd plunk down the 80 bucks for an ATI 9600. It's well worth the investment.
I should point out, that Nintendo pulled the plug at the last minute on releasing the original Final Fantasy 2 on the NES here in the states, after hyping it up in Nintendo Power the month before (and a juicy contest that nobody won). What was released here as Final Fantasy 2 was actually Final Fantasy 4, in no small way because Nintendo didn't believe the series would amount to anything in the US.
And then, of course, the Final Fantasy for the SNES made the platform in Japan, at a time when the Mega Drive (Genesis) was swimming in great RPG's... but Nintendo's fiasco with the Sony-made Nintendo Playstation (SNES CD) upon which Square developed a fully realized "greatest game ever..." the Secret of Mana, then had to chop it to little bits to make it fit on a cartridge when the SNES CD was not released, soured the relationship on Square's side. Then Square deciding to make the next Final Fantasy game on, you guessed it, the Sony Playstation was taken as a personal slap in the face by Nintendo's president Hiroshi Yamauchi, which not only burned the bridge between them but salted the ground for many years.
Of course, the SNES CD couldn't be released as it was originally invisioned... In a momentary and tremendous lapse of judgement, the Nintendo lawyers signed to Sony the profits for any CD games sold, while they kept the profits on any Cartridge games sold. Nintendo asked for a redrawing of the iron-clad contract, Sony refused, and while Nintendo was contractually obligated to approve of Sony's release, they found a sneaky loophole and drew up a contract with (I believe) Philips to make a CDI compatible SNES CD, which they would throw their marketing muscle behind. Philips, of course, was an earlier partner which Nintendo had scorned in favor of Sony. Anyway, it was a big ugly mess.
I won't even get into how Square and Nintendo finally made up.
In other words, while Nintendo was not responsible for creating the Final Fantasy series, they do have a sorded past with the series.
True. I didn't mean to jest that the technology is so basic that everyone in the world would blow it off. I meant that the detection and tracking of motion, watching people come and go, is a very basic technology which we've had for many years.
We don't need to imagine what sort of technology which will make you and I feel frightened and amazed... we just need to wait a few more years. Of course, by then the people living in the technology will take it for granted. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic only to those who do not live in that culture... many cultures thought the Spanish guns were magic, yet by our standards they were grossly primitive.
This reminds me a lot of a tactic to get ahead in the military: get cited for minor infractions. Weeks later when deciding who should have what important duties, your superiors will remember your name from somewhere, but they won't remember where, and that name recognition is worth a lot more than a few fines and a few nights of pushups.
And even if they do remember you had a few minor infractions, a known slightly negative variable is a lot safer than an unknown, potentially severely negative variable.
I went to the grocery store the other day, and as I was walking up close to the door the darned thing opened for me. It was the weirdest thing ever. Then, when I got to the other side... It closed.
Creepy.
I've seen this before. Why do people refer to Walm*rt with a star in the name? Is there a whole chain of Walmerts, Walmurts, and Walmirts? Or is it sometimes spelled Walmrt, Walmmmmmmrt, or Walrt? Does G*d shop there?
What gives?
>The woman learned how Gabrielyan was following her when she discovered him under her car attempting to change the cell phone's battery, police said.
This is a perfect metaphor for the 21 century... Hyped futuristic capabilities with obvious and forgotten shortcomings. 12v line from the power system, anyone?
If you are going to be compulsively obsessed to the exclusion of all else, at least sweat the details.
Salesmen and con artists are the same kind of people. : (
There is a difference between con artists and salesmen: con artists have been caught.
If you look closely, you'll see that internet explorer 6 usage has been pretty level, but internet explorer 5 usage plumetted in almost exactly the same proportion that firefox / moz increased.
It appears, then, that these are people with old machines who won't put up with an increasingly exploited browser but who can't run I.E. 6... either from a power standpoint or an access standpoint. Windows 98 usage only dropped 3% in that time, so nearly all of the converts must be running the older platform.
I'd be interested to see statistics correlating the two, and whether or not the people visiting w3 skew towards having older computers than the average surfers.
Either way the conclusion is clear: Microsoft is losing people at the tail end of their product line, because they refuse to offer a low-power, efficient alternative for older platforms.