When IE7 initially came out, it was marked as a critical update. I've got Windows Update set to prompt me when new updates are available and IE7 showed up along with the normal patches. I don't see why it wouldn't have installed automatically if your computer was set up that way.
Yes, there is. I think you simply underestimate the breadth and quality of the evidence.
No, I'm very well aware of the evidence. I think you have a different meaning of proof. I agree with the points of the article you linked, however, that's just forming a very good hypothesis that cannot be verified.
We have even observed macro evolution.
You didn't read my original comment. I'm well aware of the type of thing pointed out in the article you linked. But that's not the type of thing in dispute when people question evolution. Very few people would dispute that a plant can evolve into a slightly different plant. It's the monkey to human or dinosaur to bird types of evolution that's the issue, which is a very, very different thing.
But there isn't an "overwhelming preponderance of evidence" on the macro scale. We've got a very, very minute sampling of fossils going back hundreds of millions of years. We've got gaps of millions of years between specimens. We look at the ground where we found it and take a guess at how long the dirt and rocks around the fossil have been there. Then we say "well, we've got the lower half of a skeleton here, and it looks kinda like this velociraptor skeleton we have, and kinda like a chicken, so velociraptors might've evolved into chickens."
You can call that a proof if you want. I say it's more like an educated guess.
Do you have a reason to believe DX9 wouldn't work well on Vista? Trains are specifically designed to work with dedicated tracks rather than the general purpose roads cars use. There's nothing like with DX9.
No, evolution has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. It is one of the most solid scientific theories (which is different from the common usage of the word theory) known. In other words, it is one of the best established conclusions of science to date.
Small scale evolution is proven. Plants & insects splitting into strains that can't cross breed, maybe some small noticable differences. That stuff isn't too hard to reproduce.
But an ape evolving into a human, or a dinosaur into a bird can't be proven. You can find evidence that suggests it's highly likely that it happened, but unless you can form a family tree that goes back millions of years, you can't prove it.
Evolution has much more evidence than theories about gravity, chemical structure, the earth going around the sun, etc. To imply evolution has less evidence than other scientific theories is deceptive, when in reality it has much more than most.
Evolution in the form that's in dispute takes millions of years to occur. You can't experiment on that. You can't observe it without a time machine. Everything else you listed you can set up experiments to test.
And I really don't get the point, the bible was already 'wrong' about the earth being the center of the universe. It didn't destroy the religion or change anything. Neither does evolution.
I do agree with you there. The Bible is a set of stories and guidelines written to be understood by people who lived thousands of years ago. You have to treat it in that context, not as an absolute.
Nintendo announced that cartridges would *initially* be limited to 1 gigabit (128 MB). They made it clear from the beginning that larger capacities would be made available later on.
Higher densities would double or triple demand on a single node.
Yes, higher densities increase demand on the nodes. But nodes are cheap to add. Individual fibers are cheap. The expensive thing is digging up the ground to lay the fiber. The lower the density, the more digging you have to do.
It's even simpler than that. DS games are a lot cheaper to make. Games range from 8 MB - 128 MB and have 2D or very low quality 3D art. PSP games are 1.5 GB with drastically higher demands of the art.
So the DS has several times the userbase of the PSP and development costs are much lower. Return on investment looks a lot better on the DS.
Maybe it's time to come up with processor names that actually mean something again instead of confusing and usually meaningless numbers? This is especially true for AMD, whose numbers seem to be based around the clock speed an equivalent Intel chip might have run at many years ago when they invented the convention, but Intel's new "random model numbers" naming doesn't seem much better.
That's what AMD at least used to do. Contrary to popular belief, their numbers had nothing to do with Intel's speeds.
When AMD went from the original Athlon to the Athlon XP, performance per MHz went up. Rather than try to explain why a 1.4 GHz new chip was faster than a 1.5 GHz old chip, they rated the new chips relative to the old ones. An Athlon XP 2000 was equivalent to an original Athlon chip clocked at 2 GHz, despite the clock speed being lower than that. Coincidentally, the chip also happened to perform at roughly the same speed as Intel's 2 GHz chips of the time.
As the Athlon 64 came along, AMD kept the same rating scale as performance per GHz went up further. This created confusion for two reasons. First, the performance number no longer matched up well with Intel's chips, annoying the people who believed that was what the number was supposed to mean. Second, other people got confused when a equivalent speed bump in the chips made the performance number go up different amounts. This made perfect sense if you worked out the performance ratios, but annoyed the people who didn't really understand the method.
Once AMD went dual core, they basically just started making up the numbers, as they felt doubling the single core rating would create unrealistic expectations.
The ability to create proprietary code based on free software - to say, "I got to use X freely to make my program Y, but if you try to use Y freely I will use government force to stop you!" - is not freedom.
You can if you want to, but you don't have to. That's freedom.
Freedom requires equality; any relationship in which one party will not allow others to do what they do, is not free.
That's what the GPL is doing. The author of the GPL code can do whatever they want with it, such as make it proprietary, but the recipients of the code have restrictions on how they can use it.
Re:Read between the lines
on
Halo 3 Review
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· Score: 3, Interesting
You're forgetting that the Wii is selling largely because of Wii Sports. It's not selling it to the kind of person who buys a system because of Halo, but it certainly is selling a LOT of systems. Probably more than Halo will.
It's not the "sex is bad" crowd that's causing this. It's driven primarily by the Jack Thompson "video games make people murderers" crowd. Hot Coffee was just the final straw on top of all the violence complaints about GTA.
And yeah, video games aren't different than movies. Movies went through this junk too. Unfortunately, this stuff doesn't get resolved until the people who grew up with the thing in question are old enough to have a significant influence in politics.
I enjoy the 2d Metroid games a lot. The 3d games range from horrible (3d on the DS, what the hell?) to "Meh."
Metroid on the DS was just an FPS game with Samus thrown in. It's not a real Metroid game.
Prime 1 felt like Super Metroid from a different camera angle. Slower moving, but just about all 3D games are slower than 2D games.
Prime 2 and 3 are Super Metroid with some elements of Fusion thrown in.
Zelda itself didn't fare too well in the 3d transition. Playing Minish cap on my Gameboy reminded me just how good things used to be.
It's not the transition to 3D that's hurt Zelda. It's Miyamoto handing control over to Eiji Aonuma. Aonuma doesn't like the 2D Zeldas much and prefers story driven games over exploration driven.
Every Zelda game has followed the same formula since the nes.
No, they're not at all.
Zelda 1 was about exploration.
Zelda 2 was a side scrolling game that added RPG elements.
Zelda 3 went back to the Zelda 1 core style, but took away much of the focus on exploration, and replaced it with an emphasis on story and puzzles.
Ocarina of Time shifted further towards story and had only minimal exploration.
Majora's Mask was basically the movie Groundhog Day turned into a video game.
Past that, they aren't as distinct. Wind Waker tried to shift back towards exploration, but didn't work out as well as it could have due to being rushed.
Twilight Princess... well, early on it's so story heavy its a chore to play, so I haven't managed to get very far.
Oh, and all the GameBoy versions are like Zelda 3.
Super Mario Sunshine??? Take Mario 64 and give him a water pistol!
Sunshine is just Mario 64 with easier to land jumps (due to the water pack) and much weaker level design.
Mario Galaxy, put Mario 64 in Space. hmm. There's not denying he makes great games, but they are hardly original.
The point of putting Mario in space is the gravity changing due to the nearby objects. Jump in the air and get pulled over to the asteroid floating nearby. You've got the core concepts the game is built around (your jumping ability) changing as you play. Sounds like a big change to me.
DirectX has had an "easier" and "more pleasant" API for years.
DirectX is a nightmare of ActiveX/COM objects. It's anything but pretty to look at it. It takes a lot of code to get started before you can do anything. There's a very steep learning curve to fight through before you can do anything at all with it. It gets easier once you've managed to get it going, but it still isn't pretty.
OpenGL is a state machine, programmed in good 'ol C.
Which makes it very straightforward to work with. You don't find yourself wondering how something will work. If you have any background in 3D graphics theory, things work in OpenGL exactly as you'd expect.
DirectX has an OO API and what some would argue a more complete library.
The OO API doesn't make things easier, as it's COM based. It's advantage is integration with Windows.
The library is where DirectX has an advantage. It's got some higher level functionality built in that OpenGL doesn't have.
DX10 provides extra flexibility to shaders. And adds virtual memory to graphics cards, which is nice when your GUI runs everything through the 3D hardware, but irrelevant for games.
Check out WarioWare on the Wii. One of the bosses is a sword fight. You're mainly parrying with an attack at the end, but it follows your motion really well.
Latency probably is the issue. Remember the Pentium 4 - it had a pipeline of over 20 stages, with a some of those stages being there simply to allow time for the signals to make it from one side of the chip to the other.
I always thought that too, but the Xbox 360 has a 3 core CPU as well.
Supposedly 3 core is actually pretty nice in some ways, as each core has a direct link to the other two. On a quad core system, each core is linked to two others, so sometimes it takes two hops to get messages from one core to other, slowing things down.
Slashdot Mirror
When IE7 initially came out, it was marked as a critical update. I've got Windows Update set to prompt me when new updates are available and IE7 showed up along with the normal patches. I don't see why it wouldn't have installed automatically if your computer was set up that way.
DX10 was designed for Vista. Not the other way around.
Remember, the Vista Aero UI runs through DX9, so MS has a damn good reason to make sure DX9 runs well on Vista.
Yes, there is. I think you simply underestimate the breadth and quality of the evidence.
No, I'm very well aware of the evidence. I think you have a different meaning of proof. I agree with the points of the article you linked, however, that's just forming a very good hypothesis that cannot be verified.
We have even observed macro evolution.
You didn't read my original comment. I'm well aware of the type of thing pointed out in the article you linked. But that's not the type of thing in dispute when people question evolution. Very few people would dispute that a plant can evolve into a slightly different plant. It's the monkey to human or dinosaur to bird types of evolution that's the issue, which is a very, very different thing.
But there isn't an "overwhelming preponderance of evidence" on the macro scale. We've got a very, very minute sampling of fossils going back hundreds of millions of years. We've got gaps of millions of years between specimens. We look at the ground where we found it and take a guess at how long the dirt and rocks around the fossil have been there. Then we say "well, we've got the lower half of a skeleton here, and it looks kinda like this velociraptor skeleton we have, and kinda like a chicken, so velociraptors might've evolved into chickens."
You can call that a proof if you want. I say it's more like an educated guess.
Do you have a reason to believe DX9 wouldn't work well on Vista? Trains are specifically designed to work with dedicated tracks rather than the general purpose roads cars use. There's nothing like with DX9.
No, evolution has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt. It is one of the most solid scientific theories (which is different from the common usage of the word theory) known. In other words, it is one of the best established conclusions of science to date.
Small scale evolution is proven. Plants & insects splitting into strains that can't cross breed, maybe some small noticable differences. That stuff isn't too hard to reproduce.
But an ape evolving into a human, or a dinosaur into a bird can't be proven. You can find evidence that suggests it's highly likely that it happened, but unless you can form a family tree that goes back millions of years, you can't prove it.
Evolution has much more evidence than theories about gravity, chemical structure, the earth going around the sun, etc. To imply evolution has less evidence than other scientific theories is deceptive, when in reality it has much more than most.
Evolution in the form that's in dispute takes millions of years to occur. You can't experiment on that. You can't observe it without a time machine. Everything else you listed you can set up experiments to test.
And I really don't get the point, the bible was already 'wrong' about the earth being the center of the universe. It didn't destroy the religion or change anything. Neither does evolution.
I do agree with you there. The Bible is a set of stories and guidelines written to be understood by people who lived thousands of years ago. You have to treat it in that context, not as an absolute.
Nintendo announced that cartridges would *initially* be limited to 1 gigabit (128 MB). They made it clear from the beginning that larger capacities would be made available later on.
Try a red eye that's got an entire troup of girl scouts with a large supply of pixie sticks.
Higher densities would double or triple demand on a single node.
Yes, higher densities increase demand on the nodes. But nodes are cheap to add. Individual fibers are cheap. The expensive thing is digging up the ground to lay the fiber. The lower the density, the more digging you have to do.
DSL speeds are dependent on your distance from the central office. As you get further away, the max speed you can get goes down.
It's even simpler than that. DS games are a lot cheaper to make. Games range from 8 MB - 128 MB and have 2D or very low quality 3D art. PSP games are 1.5 GB with drastically higher demands of the art.
So the DS has several times the userbase of the PSP and development costs are much lower. Return on investment looks a lot better on the DS.
Maybe it's time to come up with processor names that actually mean something again instead of confusing and usually meaningless numbers? This is especially true for AMD, whose numbers seem to be based around the clock speed an equivalent Intel chip might have run at many years ago when they invented the convention, but Intel's new "random model numbers" naming doesn't seem much better.
That's what AMD at least used to do. Contrary to popular belief, their numbers had nothing to do with Intel's speeds.
When AMD went from the original Athlon to the Athlon XP, performance per MHz went up. Rather than try to explain why a 1.4 GHz new chip was faster than a 1.5 GHz old chip, they rated the new chips relative to the old ones. An Athlon XP 2000 was equivalent to an original Athlon chip clocked at 2 GHz, despite the clock speed being lower than that. Coincidentally, the chip also happened to perform at roughly the same speed as Intel's 2 GHz chips of the time.
As the Athlon 64 came along, AMD kept the same rating scale as performance per GHz went up further. This created confusion for two reasons. First, the performance number no longer matched up well with Intel's chips, annoying the people who believed that was what the number was supposed to mean. Second, other people got confused when a equivalent speed bump in the chips made the performance number go up different amounts. This made perfect sense if you worked out the performance ratios, but annoyed the people who didn't really understand the method.
Once AMD went dual core, they basically just started making up the numbers, as they felt doubling the single core rating would create unrealistic expectations.
The ability to create proprietary code based on free software - to say, "I got to use X freely to make my program Y, but if you try to use Y freely I will use government force to stop you!" - is not freedom.
You can if you want to, but you don't have to. That's freedom.
Freedom requires equality; any relationship in which one party will not allow others to do what they do, is not free.
That's what the GPL is doing. The author of the GPL code can do whatever they want with it, such as make it proprietary, but the recipients of the code have restrictions on how they can use it.
You're forgetting that the Wii is selling largely because of Wii Sports. It's not selling it to the kind of person who buys a system because of Halo, but it certainly is selling a LOT of systems. Probably more than Halo will.
It's not the "sex is bad" crowd that's causing this. It's driven primarily by the Jack Thompson "video games make people murderers" crowd. Hot Coffee was just the final straw on top of all the violence complaints about GTA.
And yeah, video games aren't different than movies. Movies went through this junk too. Unfortunately, this stuff doesn't get resolved until the people who grew up with the thing in question are old enough to have a significant influence in politics.
I enjoy the 2d Metroid games a lot. The 3d games range from horrible (3d on the DS, what the hell?) to "Meh."
Metroid on the DS was just an FPS game with Samus thrown in. It's not a real Metroid game.
Prime 1 felt like Super Metroid from a different camera angle. Slower moving, but just about all 3D games are slower than 2D games.
Prime 2 and 3 are Super Metroid with some elements of Fusion thrown in.
Zelda itself didn't fare too well in the 3d transition. Playing Minish cap on my Gameboy reminded me just how good things used to be.
It's not the transition to 3D that's hurt Zelda. It's Miyamoto handing control over to Eiji Aonuma. Aonuma doesn't like the 2D Zeldas much and prefers story driven games over exploration driven.
Every Zelda game has followed the same formula since the nes.
No, they're not at all.
Zelda 1 was about exploration.
Zelda 2 was a side scrolling game that added RPG elements.
Zelda 3 went back to the Zelda 1 core style, but took away much of the focus on exploration, and replaced it with an emphasis on story and puzzles.
Ocarina of Time shifted further towards story and had only minimal exploration.
Majora's Mask was basically the movie Groundhog Day turned into a video game.
Past that, they aren't as distinct. Wind Waker tried to shift back towards exploration, but didn't work out as well as it could have due to being rushed.
Twilight Princess... well, early on it's so story heavy its a chore to play, so I haven't managed to get very far.
Oh, and all the GameBoy versions are like Zelda 3.
Super Mario Sunshine??? Take Mario 64 and give him a water pistol!
Sunshine is just Mario 64 with easier to land jumps (due to the water pack) and much weaker level design.
Mario Galaxy, put Mario 64 in Space. hmm. There's not denying he makes great games, but they are hardly original.
The point of putting Mario in space is the gravity changing due to the nearby objects. Jump in the air and get pulled over to the asteroid floating nearby. You've got the core concepts the game is built around (your jumping ability) changing as you play. Sounds like a big change to me.
Forgot about that. Although rare, there was also plain Windows 3.11. I don't remember offhand if there was a Windows for Workgroups 3.1.
DirectX has had an "easier" and "more pleasant" API for years.
DirectX is a nightmare of ActiveX/COM objects. It's anything but pretty to look at it. It takes a lot of code to get started before you can do anything. There's a very steep learning curve to fight through before you can do anything at all with it. It gets easier once you've managed to get it going, but it still isn't pretty.
OpenGL is a state machine, programmed in good 'ol C.
Which makes it very straightforward to work with. You don't find yourself wondering how something will work. If you have any background in 3D graphics theory, things work in OpenGL exactly as you'd expect.
DirectX has an OO API and what some would argue a more complete library.
The OO API doesn't make things easier, as it's COM based. It's advantage is integration with Windows.
The library is where DirectX has an advantage. It's got some higher level functionality built in that OpenGL doesn't have.
DX10 provides extra flexibility to shaders. And adds virtual memory to graphics cards, which is nice when your GUI runs everything through the 3D hardware, but irrelevant for games.
Win2K came out before Windows ME. You're also missing Win NT 3.1 and 3.5, and Windows 2003.
Win2K was only used at home by the Slashdot crowd. If you bought a computer from Dell Home or Best Buy, you got Win98 SE or Win ME.
Check out WarioWare on the Wii. One of the bosses is a sword fight. You're mainly parrying with an attack at the end, but it follows your motion really well.
Latency probably is the issue. Remember the Pentium 4 - it had a pipeline of over 20 stages, with a some of those stages being there simply to allow time for the signals to make it from one side of the chip to the other.
I always thought that too, but the Xbox 360 has a 3 core CPU as well.
Supposedly 3 core is actually pretty nice in some ways, as each core has a direct link to the other two. On a quad core system, each core is linked to two others, so sometimes it takes two hops to get messages from one core to other, slowing things down.