Yes, Area 51 has always been a "real base", just a military base (secretive like most military bases out there).
My guess is that they're conducting experiments and tests on areas they don't want the public to see (WMDs, biological/chemical warfare, etc.) Conspiracy theorists take the tight security and wrap it around inplausable stories, which the government probably doesn't mind (better having the crackpots think they know what's going on than important people ACTUALLY knowing what's going on).
"yes, windows did say "This is unsigned, on your head be it", but I still don't expect the whole OS to crash and die when a driver is dodgy. Sure, stop the device working, but the OS ought to be robust enough that the rest keeps going."
Not necessarily. Think how the OS presented this to you:
Windows: Ok, looks like the user wants to install X. I'm not sure if X is important or not (could be critical to this user). Windows: Ok, wait... user is going to install X with a driver I'm not sure will work. I'll throw up a warning. Windows: Ok, user ignored warning, wants me to install anyway, will do. *Later* Windows: Ok, I'm waiting on this device. Obviously it's an important device (the user installed it). Holy shit... it just tried to write to the kernel. Panic! *Blue screen*
I'd rather let Windows blue screen in that case then let the digicam wreck the machine.
I don't think I've ever seen a Windows Update talk require dependencies before. Require? Sometimes. But usually the service is pretty good at keeping that invisible from the user (unless you bring up the details). Apt-get on the other hand.:/
"Windows (even in the current Win2003) is far too large for use in a high performance computing environment."
Uh, hello, headless servers? Introduced with Win2003. Zero processing time required to display NO GUI. Please, if you're going to comment about something, at least have some knowledge about what you're commenting on. It's almost like saying "Cars will never take off because a team of horses will go faster" with everyone scratching their head going "What year is this?"
Probably with unsigned drivers. So, basically, Windows said "you know, if you use this crappy digicam, I'm probably going to crash" during the install. No different than any other OS (try using a really high-speed Firewire drive on Linux 2.4 without getting a kernel panic).
Who necessarily says MS will keep the same licensing scheme? The most notable example (IE) was totally free. They give away compilers and source code without charge (although, often with very limiting EULAs). They could just say: "Pay one amount and run it on whatever you want".
Uh, hello: OS X? One of the fastest supercomputers in the world? Heck, Apple even provides an ad hoc supercomputing implementation with a pretty GUI.
If it's coded right (run mostly in the background and don't eat up CPU cycles), the GUI shouldn't matter. MS already has a headless way of running Windows with no GUI in 2003. This is just the next logical step.
"The correct solution is for the M$ OS to popup a meaningful error message pointing the finger at the appropriate broken driver and manufacturer."
You're joking, right? Currently you get a full hex dump and often the exact name of the driver file causing the problem. The fact that the system doesn't have time to intercept an errant hardware call and pop-up a web address of the manufacturer certainly shouldn't be held against it.
Look at Mac OS X. If the system crashes, all you get is a single graphic in 5 different languages telling you to reboot. Absolutely no troubleshooting information whatsoever. After the reboot, you can check out the logs (if you know where to look), but Mac users have to painstakingly hunt down which piece of hardware has gone bad. At least Windows points people in the right direction.
Honestly, dude, your views are quite outdated. I don't think you've even programmed for hardware before. If you did, you'd realize that MS (it's not M$, by the way, unless you're still in highschool) does a reasonable job. Not perfect, but certainly not as bad and evil as you make them out to be.
"point of that was to scare new users into buying alternate forms of hardware which have been produced by a manufacturer paid by Microsoft."
Actually, the point was to make sure hardware manufacturers (probably the weakest link Microsoft has to rely on) kept with the standards they set.
Of all the crashes I've had in Windows 2000 and XP, 9 out of 10 have been driver related. 1 of those 9 are signed drivers, but the vast majority are unsigned drivers that I install (and ignore the warnings for).
Think about it: if you're Microsoft, *everything* that happens wrong on most PCs is presumably your fault. If they don't help hardware manufacturers along, they get blamed anyway. There's no question in my mind that signed drivers lead to stable computers.
That's like saying "because power tools are now popular, all buildings look the same". The reason why games are looking similar is that developers are sharing some of the more common code (as they should do). It's similar to when games first became color and all of them looked like blotchy squares. Over time the graphics start to vary. Give them time.
*Calculates* That's less than what most developers make in a week or two. Coming up with something that'll win the top prize will probably take more than a few weeks of after-hours or programming (or during work-hours, if you're risky). Heck, those who play in those video game tournaments get more money. I'd pass.
Microsoft can have them? What, do you work for Nintendo? Most gamers I know have at least 2 consoles (if not all 3 from this generation). I'll play Rare games no matter what the platform.
Renderware works on the 3 major current-gen platforms. It doesn't work on cell phones. It doesn't work on handheld computers. It doesn't work on airplane terminals and in hotel rooms and who knows what else (what XNA is targetting). The purpose of Renderware is to get relatively the same graphics on different hardware. The purpose of XNA is to have different game experiences on different hardware linked through software. RTFA.
Not to mention, Renderware is a piece of garbage. Just about every game I've seen use Renderware has major problems with collision detection and graphics clipping. The libraries, despite being targetted for only 3 platforms, aren't really optimized: Sonic Heroes, for example, ran great on 1 platform and slow at times on the other 2 (one, inexplicably, the Xbox). If you want to look at a better open-platform rendering solution, look at OpenGL.
Anyone else getting the picture in your head from that one episode of Futurama, advertising "Walrus Juice" with a guy "Riding the Walrus" (and, you know, actually surfing on a walrus)? The message there was "don't make things extreme for the purposes of making them extreme". At this point, I think Lucas is way in over his head with this.
Wow. You really need to turn on indexing. That doesn't sound right at all.
On my XP machine I have in the neighborhood of 300,000 files, and a full-text search takes 1 minute, tops. On my Mac it's closer to 150,000, and a full text search takes about 25 seconds. 90 minutes sounds like something is seriously wrong.
Exactly. The point of the original poster was that Real was producing an open source player without showing the source of the codecs. My point is that those closed source codecs are absolutely necessary, as there are no successful open source codecs. The success of the media player does not depend on the open sourceness of the codecs.
Twice a year? I get a receipt from them every time I buy a single iTune, and they continually put me back on the new music emails.
No, don't bother me if I've spent.99 and no, I don't want to hear about your Britney Spears "exclusive". And to those who say "well, just buy a bunch of songs in a given day, so the receipt tallies them all up at once", sorry. The whole point of iTunes is to let me buy a song I just remembered from years ago, not write them down in a list and save them until I have enough for a decent receipt.
MS took a very conservative approach the first time around. They didn't enable the firewall because they knew thousands of products (including their own) would break. Who wants to have a line monitored 24-7 from kids who cannot connect to Battle.net because the ports are being blocked?
This time around, they're like "screw it". I can't say I blame them.
I could never understand people's horror stories when they can't patch *after* they've been hit with a worm. "I couldn't stay on the internet long enough to download the patch!" Well, why did you wait to download it until after you had a problem?
I can understand system admins who have 5,000+ machines to update and one patch can single-handedly bring down an entire company when they use a proprietary app. I don't get, however, how the average user who downloads Kazaa and seemingly clicks OK on every dialog box on the internet (and now has a browser that's more toolbar than browser) refuses to go to the Windows Update site.
The best example I've seen yet was talking to one person who got messages in the lower right (Windows Update) that downloads had been made and they didn't click to install them. They're reason: "I thought it was a virus". I mean, I know Microsoft is somewhat to blame here (system tray notifications are used for everything from critical problems to the system blowing its nose), but COME ON people. Windows is sitting there, waving a flag in your face, and you're just ignoring it?
The only solution is to have the system update itself by default, silently, without any user interaction whatsoever. Allow it to be disabled for me and other nerds out there, but force updates on everyone else. This is getting out of hand.
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Yes, Area 51 has always been a "real base", just a military base (secretive like most military bases out there).
My guess is that they're conducting experiments and tests on areas they don't want the public to see (WMDs, biological/chemical warfare, etc.) Conspiracy theorists take the tight security and wrap it around inplausable stories, which the government probably doesn't mind (better having the crackpots think they know what's going on than important people ACTUALLY knowing what's going on).
"yes, windows did say "This is unsigned, on your head be it", but I still don't expect the whole OS to crash and die when a driver is dodgy. Sure, stop the device working, but the OS ought to be robust enough that the rest keeps going."
Not necessarily. Think how the OS presented this to you:
Windows: Ok, looks like the user wants to install X. I'm not sure if X is important or not (could be critical to this user).
Windows: Ok, wait... user is going to install X with a driver I'm not sure will work. I'll throw up a warning.
Windows: Ok, user ignored warning, wants me to install anyway, will do.
*Later*
Windows: Ok, I'm waiting on this device. Obviously it's an important device (the user installed it). Holy shit... it just tried to write to the kernel. Panic! *Blue screen*
I'd rather let Windows blue screen in that case then let the digicam wreck the machine.
Well, everything was accurate up until this:
:/
Before being able to install this, you will need:
[ ] S-Prepatch 3030WSA 6.7TB
I don't think I've ever seen a Windows Update talk require dependencies before. Require? Sometimes. But usually the service is pretty good at keeping that invisible from the user (unless you bring up the details). Apt-get on the other hand.
"Windows (even in the current Win2003) is far too large for use in a high performance computing environment."
Uh, hello, headless servers? Introduced with Win2003. Zero processing time required to display NO GUI. Please, if you're going to comment about something, at least have some knowledge about what you're commenting on. It's almost like saying "Cars will never take off because a team of horses will go faster" with everyone scratching their head going "What year is this?"
Probably with unsigned drivers. So, basically, Windows said "you know, if you use this crappy digicam, I'm probably going to crash" during the install. No different than any other OS (try using a really high-speed Firewire drive on Linux 2.4 without getting a kernel panic).
Who necessarily says MS will keep the same licensing scheme? The most notable example (IE) was totally free. They give away compilers and source code without charge (although, often with very limiting EULAs). They could just say: "Pay one amount and run it on whatever you want".
If it's coded right (run mostly in the background and don't eat up CPU cycles), the GUI shouldn't matter. MS already has a headless way of running Windows with no GUI in 2003. This is just the next logical step.
"The correct solution is for the M$ OS to popup a meaningful error message pointing the finger at the appropriate broken driver and manufacturer."
You're joking, right? Currently you get a full hex dump and often the exact name of the driver file causing the problem. The fact that the system doesn't have time to intercept an errant hardware call and pop-up a web address of the manufacturer certainly shouldn't be held against it.
Look at Mac OS X. If the system crashes, all you get is a single graphic in 5 different languages telling you to reboot. Absolutely no troubleshooting information whatsoever. After the reboot, you can check out the logs (if you know where to look), but Mac users have to painstakingly hunt down which piece of hardware has gone bad. At least Windows points people in the right direction.
Honestly, dude, your views are quite outdated. I don't think you've even programmed for hardware before. If you did, you'd realize that MS (it's not M$, by the way, unless you're still in highschool) does a reasonable job. Not perfect, but certainly not as bad and evil as you make them out to be.
"point of that was to scare new users into buying alternate forms of hardware which have been produced by a manufacturer paid by Microsoft."
Actually, the point was to make sure hardware manufacturers (probably the weakest link Microsoft has to rely on) kept with the standards they set.
Of all the crashes I've had in Windows 2000 and XP, 9 out of 10 have been driver related. 1 of those 9 are signed drivers, but the vast majority are unsigned drivers that I install (and ignore the warnings for).
Think about it: if you're Microsoft, *everything* that happens wrong on most PCs is presumably your fault. If they don't help hardware manufacturers along, they get blamed anyway. There's no question in my mind that signed drivers lead to stable computers.
That's like saying "because power tools are now popular, all buildings look the same". The reason why games are looking similar is that developers are sharing some of the more common code (as they should do). It's similar to when games first became color and all of them looked like blotchy squares. Over time the graphics start to vary. Give them time.
*Calculates* That's less than what most developers make in a week or two. Coming up with something that'll win the top prize will probably take more than a few weeks of after-hours or programming (or during work-hours, if you're risky). Heck, those who play in those video game tournaments get more money. I'd pass.
"Being tired at work is *good*. Give the man your worst hours. Keep the good hours for yourself."
So, how's being a janitor working out?
"Microsoft can have them."
Microsoft can have them? What, do you work for Nintendo? Most gamers I know have at least 2 consoles (if not all 3 from this generation). I'll play Rare games no matter what the platform.
You really sound like you work for the company.
Not even close.
Renderware works on the 3 major current-gen platforms. It doesn't work on cell phones. It doesn't work on handheld computers. It doesn't work on airplane terminals and in hotel rooms and who knows what else (what XNA is targetting). The purpose of Renderware is to get relatively the same graphics on different hardware. The purpose of XNA is to have different game experiences on different hardware linked through software. RTFA.
Not to mention, Renderware is a piece of garbage. Just about every game I've seen use Renderware has major problems with collision detection and graphics clipping. The libraries, despite being targetted for only 3 platforms, aren't really optimized: Sonic Heroes, for example, ran great on 1 platform and slow at times on the other 2 (one, inexplicably, the Xbox). If you want to look at a better open-platform rendering solution, look at OpenGL.
Anyone else getting the picture in your head from that one episode of Futurama, advertising "Walrus Juice" with a guy "Riding the Walrus" (and, you know, actually surfing on a walrus)? The message there was "don't make things extreme for the purposes of making them extreme". At this point, I think Lucas is way in over his head with this.
Wow. You really need to turn on indexing. That doesn't sound right at all.
On my XP machine I have in the neighborhood of 300,000 files, and a full-text search takes 1 minute, tops. On my Mac it's closer to 150,000, and a full text search takes about 25 seconds. 90 minutes sounds like something is seriously wrong.
Exactly. The point of the original poster was that Real was producing an open source player without showing the source of the codecs. My point is that those closed source codecs are absolutely necessary, as there are no successful open source codecs. The success of the media player does not depend on the open sourceness of the codecs.
"thanks for nothing"
Name one reasonably successful open source media player that does not rely on closed source standards for at least a little of its success. Good luck.
And pride, and stupidity. Not necessarily in that order.
Twice a year? I get a receipt from them every time I buy a single iTune, and they continually put me back on the new music emails.
.99 and no, I don't want to hear about your Britney Spears "exclusive". And to those who say "well, just buy a bunch of songs in a given day, so the receipt tallies them all up at once", sorry. The whole point of iTunes is to let me buy a song I just remembered from years ago, not write them down in a list and save them until I have enough for a decent receipt.
No, don't bother me if I've spent
MS took a very conservative approach the first time around. They didn't enable the firewall because they knew thousands of products (including their own) would break. Who wants to have a line monitored 24-7 from kids who cannot connect to Battle.net because the ports are being blocked?
This time around, they're like "screw it". I can't say I blame them.
"Too bad the firewall software loads *last* in the startup sequence"
Supposedly fixed in SP2.
I could never understand people's horror stories when they can't patch *after* they've been hit with a worm. "I couldn't stay on the internet long enough to download the patch!" Well, why did you wait to download it until after you had a problem?
I can understand system admins who have 5,000+ machines to update and one patch can single-handedly bring down an entire company when they use a proprietary app. I don't get, however, how the average user who downloads Kazaa and seemingly clicks OK on every dialog box on the internet (and now has a browser that's more toolbar than browser) refuses to go to the Windows Update site.
The best example I've seen yet was talking to one person who got messages in the lower right (Windows Update) that downloads had been made and they didn't click to install them. They're reason: "I thought it was a virus". I mean, I know Microsoft is somewhat to blame here (system tray notifications are used for everything from critical problems to the system blowing its nose), but COME ON people. Windows is sitting there, waving a flag in your face, and you're just ignoring it?
The only solution is to have the system update itself by default, silently, without any user interaction whatsoever. Allow it to be disabled for me and other nerds out there, but force updates on everyone else. This is getting out of hand.
You can already do this (big red letters on this page).