Yes, PS3/X-Box 360 have massively more powerful graphics hardware than current PCs. Yay, go them.
Except, this stuff is, *gasp*, next gen PC graphics chips. That means, 6 or so months from now, I'll be able to buy these chips on an AGP/PCI-E card.
Ah, I hear you say, but it's much more expensive. Well, yes, you're right. So lets fast forward to 2007, when the next, next gen of graphics chips come out. Now my card, while more expensive, is twice as fast as your PS3/X-Box 360. Repeat again for 2008, 2009, and 2010. In particular, by then we can expect PCs have have 2+GB of RAM as recommended spec, and game maps to be getting bigger, with everyone complaining how little memory the PS3/X-Box 360 will have.
But don't panic, we'll have the PS 4 and X-Box 4096, which will be REALLY REALLY POWERFUL, and will DEFINITELY kill PC gaming this time. 'cos, y'know, it's like Apple and *BSD, everyone knows they're already dead, and just haven't noticed yet.
Okay, and breathe.
Next thing to remember; the next gen consoles are using PC graphics hardware, not to mention the same APIs used on PCs (OpenGL for the PS3, and next-gen DirectX for the X-Box 360). While we might see more PC games which are ports of existing console games, this should reinforce the PC gaming market, not kill it off.
Correction - it should be pretty obvious. As much as there are bosses that think it's best to wring every hour they can from their employee, there will be teachers that don't realise that too much homework will be a bad thing.
Ah, but I can at least get an adaptor to plug console controllers into my PC. That's just a few minutes searching the web, I'm sure there's an X-Box version out there somewhere too...
This is an all digital DVI-I goofy external dongle, so theoretically there should be no degredation (unlike VGA goofy external dongles, which should be taken outside and shot).
ATi did actually have a demo of their next-gen R520 at E3, which should be launched later this year (a time frame that at worst puts it in line with X-Box 360). No news from Nvidia on the GF70, from what I can tell, but I'd imagine they'll try to launch around the same time as ATi.
Anyway, if you've been following the graphics card market (which you really should if you're thinking of buying a multi-GPU rig), you'd know that new cards are released regularly, and that their power doubles every 18 months or so. This stuff should suprise no-one these days.
The really big advantage to a PC is the controls. Quite why no-one makes console games that can talk to USB keyboard & mouse, I don't know; FPSs on a console drive me nuts, just can't get used to the control system.
There are other issues, like consoles have substantially less memory, which makes it harder for game designers to put large maps in (I'm really puzzled the next gen consoles aren't going for more memory; 512mb is okay now, but in 5 years time?).
Actually, if they had got the same information from the secretary, I would expect them to be punished. It's reasonably obvious they shouldn't have the information, and getting it through trickery is wrong. If they'd simply asked the secretary "Have I been accepted?", and they'd mistakenly told them, that would be different, of course.
I hate this idea of "It wasn't protected enough, so it's okay". Yes, the website screwed up, but that doesn't mean it's right for the students to have accessed a page they were not meant to.
Having said that, Stanford really need to make sure the people managing the website realise what went wrong, and why, and never make the same mistake again. There are too many coders out there who don't get simple ideas like verifying user input (let alone the input of hidden fields), and that needs to change.
This scares me, a lot. At 25, I look back at code I wrote when I started working here (at 21), and wince. The lack of structure is incredible, for one, not to mention far too much of a tendency to do things my own strange way instead of how you're meant to.
Even code I've written a year or so ago, I can look back at and see mistakes I wouldn't make today. What's even worse, is that until recently I've been the best coder in my group; we had someone older, but he's really not so good, leaving me with no-one to learn from.
If no-one's hiring anyone with real experience, no wonder we've got so many bugs/unusable interfaces/etc. in software!
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.... Iris scan? Ahahahahahahahahaha! RFID tag? Bwahahahahahahahahha!
What, they're serious? This is WAY, WAY OVER my threshold for hassle I'll go through for playing DVDs. I cannot express in words just how much I don't care enough to go through this.
Let me put it this way. If the only way I could watch TV or films was by buying these DVDs, I still wouldn't even vaguely consider it. Not a bit. Nope, not at all.
When you're the single person in the office, you don't have as much free time and social life as the married people think you do. Additionally, if you're the single one in an office full of married people, I would suggest you need as much time as you can get to devote to your social life (or maybe this is just me)...
I'd just like to repeat here is that I'm fine with putting in a little extra time because someone needs to pick up their kid from school, look after them when they're ill, etc., as long as they make the time up later.
I'm sure everyone occaisionally has something that means they have to leave work early (mine tends to involve something going horribly wrong with the flat I live in, but that's another story entirely), and kids are just one particularly common example. They key point though, is that you make the time up later.
If you have to pick up your kid from school, come in for a few hours at the weekend. If you have to stay home for a day to look after them when they're ill, maybe you could do some work from home?
If you consistently cannot meet the time requirements of your work, for whatever reason, the answer is NOT to place an addition burden on your colleagues, the answer is to get a job with less hours.
Unlike the responses so far, I'm actually okay with this. You have a previous appointment that you must keep, and that's fine. I'm even okay with wrapping up whatever you're working on, at the time.
What I do ask, however, is that you return the favour. Put a few hours in sometime to help me out with what I'm doing, and I'm happy.
Absolutely. I understand that people will always have something come up which limits _when_ they have time available. All I ask is that you put the time in elsewhere. I may be in an unusual situation where it is extremely easy for me to work from home (my work system is a laptop, so I just carry it to and from work), but I would have assumed that even if you're home looking after your kid, you can still get some work done, for example.
In particular, I do feel we all have some responsibility to ensuring that the next generation grows up well. That my taxes go towards education for kids I don't have is a good thing. The key point here is that I pay taxes according to a method of calculation I feel is at least vaguely fair.
Compare this to the situation where the single people in a group are expected to work longer so those with families can spend more time with them. This is a relatively arbitary amount of time, depending more on the ratio of people with and without families, than anythin else. This is what I don't like.
Hope that all makes sense.
Re:My Faith in Speculation is Still Waining...
on
Star Wars Sickout
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· Score: 1
Also, flexitime anyone? As long as I put in roughly the right number of hours in a day, at work, no-one cares when (which is great, because I tend to find it easier to focus at the silly hours of the morning). If I cared enough about seeing this film, I could simply walk out of my office at 2, come back for 4, and put the two hours in later.
*looks at parent* *looks at your message* *looks at parent*
Huh? As far as I can tell you've read a little too far between the lines. Your message's parent seemed to just be complaining that they were expected to put in more time to make up for people with families.
In particular, I see no reason for you to complain about being expected to work as many hours as the single people do. If your job demands more hours than you can provide, get a job that doesn't, don't expect others to pick up the slack because you feel we have more time available than you.
Admittadely, flexibility may be an issue; if something needs rushed to completion, or you genuinely need to be away from work to look after a sick kid, I don't mind throwing in some extra time, but I expect for you to put in extra hours later to make up for it, and let me take it easy for a bit.
On a related note; for those of us who are single, particularly long term single, free time for our social lives is key to changing that. Or would you prefer we stay single so we can continue to spend more time at work so you can keep a job that expects more hours than you have available?
Which is great if you have a good idea, the self-motivation to stick to it, and the time to put into it.
For those of us lacking all three, that's not so useful. My abilities lie in coding, not in creativity, or design, or management, or marketing. I'm terrible at working on projects I want to do in my free time, I imagine I'd be equally bad at running my own company. And finally, I'm trying to put more time into my social life, not less!
Yes, but if you know women that tend to go for funky gadgets, being able to go "Look, I have an iPod, it is pretty, and IT PLAYS VIDEO!!!" is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of us with space limitations, being able to run OS X on the same computer we can run Windows on (for games) is really useful.
/. with severely limited space, which is odd, because my flatmates all read /. too :)
At times it feels like I'm the only person on
I'd like to point out, I have a Sony branded USB keyboard and mouse for my PS2, and no games that support them (came with the PS2 Linux kit).
Now, if you can get the game developers to provide support for these, it would be a real start...
Yes, PS3/X-Box 360 have massively more powerful graphics hardware than current PCs. Yay, go them.
Except, this stuff is, *gasp*, next gen PC graphics chips. That means, 6 or so months from now, I'll be able to buy these chips on an AGP/PCI-E card.
Ah, I hear you say, but it's much more expensive. Well, yes, you're right. So lets fast forward to 2007, when the next, next gen of graphics chips come out. Now my card, while more expensive, is twice as fast as your PS3/X-Box 360. Repeat again for 2008, 2009, and 2010. In particular, by then we can expect PCs have have 2+GB of RAM as recommended spec, and game maps to be getting bigger, with everyone complaining how little memory the PS3/X-Box 360 will have.
But don't panic, we'll have the PS 4 and X-Box 4096, which will be REALLY REALLY POWERFUL, and will DEFINITELY kill PC gaming this time. 'cos, y'know, it's like Apple and *BSD, everyone knows they're already dead, and just haven't noticed yet.
Okay, and breathe.
Next thing to remember; the next gen consoles are using PC graphics hardware, not to mention the same APIs used on PCs (OpenGL for the PS3, and next-gen DirectX for the X-Box 360). While we might see more PC games which are ports of existing console games, this should reinforce the PC gaming market, not kill it off.
I've always felt that deleting critical parts of the network stack would have a similar effect, while still remaining mostly white hat...
Correction - it should be pretty obvious. As much as there are bosses that think it's best to wring every hour they can from their employee, there will be teachers that don't realise that too much homework will be a bad thing.
Ah, but I can at least get an adaptor to plug console controllers into my PC. That's just a few minutes searching the web, I'm sure there's an X-Box version out there somewhere too...
This is an all digital DVI-I goofy external dongle, so theoretically there should be no degredation (unlike VGA goofy external dongles, which should be taken outside and shot).
Certainly, the X-Box 360 demos were all all run on PowerMacs with X800 cards, not any kind of next gen hardware.
ATi did actually have a demo of their next-gen R520 at E3, which should be launched later this year (a time frame that at worst puts it in line with X-Box 360). No news from Nvidia on the GF70, from what I can tell, but I'd imagine they'll try to launch around the same time as ATi.
Anyway, if you've been following the graphics card market (which you really should if you're thinking of buying a multi-GPU rig), you'd know that new cards are released regularly, and that their power doubles every 18 months or so. This stuff should suprise no-one these days.
The really big advantage to a PC is the controls. Quite why no-one makes console games that can talk to USB keyboard & mouse, I don't know; FPSs on a console drive me nuts, just can't get used to the control system.
There are other issues, like consoles have substantially less memory, which makes it harder for game designers to put large maps in (I'm really puzzled the next gen consoles aren't going for more memory; 512mb is okay now, but in 5 years time?).
While I'm not saying you're wrong, would either side please quote some numbers?
Actually, if they had got the same information from the secretary, I would expect them to be punished. It's reasonably obvious they shouldn't have the information, and getting it through trickery is wrong. If they'd simply asked the secretary "Have I been accepted?", and they'd mistakenly told them, that would be different, of course.
I hate this idea of "It wasn't protected enough, so it's okay". Yes, the website screwed up, but that doesn't mean it's right for the students to have accessed a page they were not meant to.
Having said that, Stanford really need to make sure the people managing the website realise what went wrong, and why, and never make the same mistake again. There are too many coders out there who don't get simple ideas like verifying user input (let alone the input of hidden fields), and that needs to change.
They did that already, and the kids do indeed just go elsewhere.
This scares me, a lot. At 25, I look back at code I wrote when I started working here (at 21), and wince. The lack of structure is incredible, for one, not to mention far too much of a tendency to do things my own strange way instead of how you're meant to.
Even code I've written a year or so ago, I can look back at and see mistakes I wouldn't make today. What's even worse, is that until recently I've been the best coder in my group; we had someone older, but he's really not so good, leaving me with no-one to learn from.
If no-one's hiring anyone with real experience, no wonder we've got so many bugs/unusable interfaces/etc. in software!
I find chip & PIN faster than signing, but the time for the system to read the card and authorise it easily dwarfs the time for me to enter my PIN.
The idea of these cards that don't require any authentication from the user just seems dumb to me, though, be it contactless or otherwise.
Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha....
Iris scan? Ahahahahahahahahaha!
RFID tag? Bwahahahahahahahahha!
What, they're serious? This is WAY, WAY OVER my threshold for hassle I'll go through for playing DVDs. I cannot express in words just how much I don't care enough to go through this.
Let me put it this way. If the only way I could watch TV or films was by buying these DVDs, I still wouldn't even vaguely consider it. Not a bit. Nope, not at all.
I can't be alone in this feeling, right?
When you're the single person in the office, you don't have as much free time and social life as the married people think you do.
Additionally, if you're the single one in an office full of married people, I would suggest you need as much time as you can get to devote to your social life (or maybe this is just me)...
I'd just like to repeat here is that I'm fine with putting in a little extra time because someone needs to pick up their kid from school, look after them when they're ill, etc., as long as they make the time up later.
I'm sure everyone occaisionally has something that means they have to leave work early (mine tends to involve something going horribly wrong with the flat I live in, but that's another story entirely), and kids are just one particularly common example. They key point though, is that you make the time up later.
If you have to pick up your kid from school, come in for a few hours at the weekend. If you have to stay home for a day to look after them when they're ill, maybe you could do some work from home?
If you consistently cannot meet the time requirements of your work, for whatever reason, the answer is NOT to place an addition burden on your colleagues, the answer is to get a job with less hours.
Because I stopped working on what I should be doing, to help you?
Unlike the responses so far, I'm actually okay with this. You have a previous appointment that you must keep, and that's fine. I'm even okay with wrapping up whatever you're working on, at the time.
What I do ask, however, is that you return the favour. Put a few hours in sometime to help me out with what I'm doing, and I'm happy.
Sound good to everyone?
Absolutely. I understand that people will always have something come up which limits _when_ they have time available. All I ask is that you put the time in elsewhere. I may be in an unusual situation where it is extremely easy for me to work from home (my work system is a laptop, so I just carry it to and from work), but I would have assumed that even if you're home looking after your kid, you can still get some work done, for example.
In particular, I do feel we all have some responsibility to ensuring that the next generation grows up well. That my taxes go towards education for kids I don't have is a good thing. The key point here is that I pay taxes according to a method of calculation I feel is at least vaguely fair.
Compare this to the situation where the single people in a group are expected to work longer so those with families can spend more time with them.
This is a relatively arbitary amount of time, depending more on the ratio of people with and without families, than anythin else. This is what I don't like.
Hope that all makes sense.
Also, flexitime anyone? As long as I put in roughly the right number of hours in a day, at work, no-one cares when (which is great, because I tend to find it easier to focus at the silly hours of the morning). If I cared enough about seeing this film, I could simply walk out of my office at 2, come back for 4, and put the two hours in later.
This is what always amused me about the idea of winning the lottery, and being able to tell your boss just what you think of him.
"Hey, boss, you're a great guy to work for, although possibly a little firmer leadership would be nice" just doesn't have the right ring to it...
*looks at parent* *looks at your message* *looks at parent*
Huh? As far as I can tell you've read a little too far between the lines. Your message's parent seemed to just be complaining that they were expected to put in more time to make up for people with families.
In particular, I see no reason for you to complain about being expected to work as many hours as the single people do. If your job demands more hours than you can provide, get a job that doesn't, don't expect others to pick up the slack because you feel we have more time available than you.
Admittadely, flexibility may be an issue; if something needs rushed to completion, or you genuinely need to be away from work to look after a sick kid, I don't mind throwing in some extra time, but I expect for you to put in extra hours later to make up for it, and let me take it easy for a bit.
On a related note; for those of us who are single, particularly long term single, free time for our social lives is key to changing that. Or would you prefer we stay single so we can continue to spend more time at work so you can keep a job that expects more hours than you have available?
Which is great if you have a good idea, the self-motivation to stick to it, and the time to put into it.
For those of us lacking all three, that's not so useful. My abilities lie in coding, not in creativity, or design, or management, or marketing. I'm terrible at working on projects I want to do in my free time, I imagine I'd be equally bad at running my own company. And finally, I'm trying to put more time into my social life, not less!
Yes, but if you know women that tend to go for funky gadgets, being able to go "Look, I have an iPod, it is pretty, and IT PLAYS VIDEO!!!" is a good thing.