"Why Nvidia would bother to put chunks of code dedicated to a specific game in the driverset, is beyond me. It would just lead to bloat & other problems down the road."
They all do it all the time already. And you don't consider 26MB for a video driver to be "bloated" right now?
If you're going to inconvenience your legit users in order to reduce illegal copying, just tell it like it is. Protecting the consumer against illegal copying would just require signing the software, no mandatory activation.
Right.
It's just SUCH an "inconvience" to have to press the ok button when prompted to "click ok to activate your product".
Kvetch whine and cry, and everyone DID indeed cry foul at Windows activation , but the fact is that Product activation is for 99.95% of legtimate users, quick, painless and completely unintrusive.
The only people this will be an "inconvience" for is those shmecks without a legitimate product key or readily avaliable working crack.
"Frankly, bikes can travel faster than NEVs can (NEV's, by DEFINITION have a top speed of 25mph"
There aren't a hell of alot of people that can even manage to reach a speed of 25mph on a bicycle, let alone maintain that speed for any reasonable time.A person of average fitness could maintain a max 10-15 Mph.
That NEV isn't sounding so slow anymore is it?
In my opinion, if the vehicle cannot maintain at LEAST the minimum speed limit for a given road, it should not be legal to drive said vehicle on a given road.
Now I just have to stand in line at file planet for 60 mins.
The Unreal engine has never looked better if you ask me, and the ragdoll physics just rock.
The story however, completely sucks. Absolutely nothing memorable or original about it. enemy AI is dumber than a brick (of course) as well.
Weapons are completely uninspired. your starting weapon is quite good, and throughout the game, you pick up quite a few new ones, but there is just no overwhelming tactical reasons to switch weapons at all.
Save your money till this one is in the bargain bin.
From the nationalreview.com article:
"Rather than a solution to the fulfillment of these needs, the shuttle has become an awkward legacy. It will never deliver the cheap access its proponents had promised, and after Columbia's loss, lingering doubts will remain regarding the system's reliability no matter what the result of the investigation may be."
"lingering doubts about reliability"?
Isn't NASA's lifetime record proof enough?
a scant 3 major space accidents over a 30-some odd year span.....how many people went up and back down safely in proportion to those lost?
How many vessels have gone up and back down safely in contrast to those lost?
"Reliability concerns" my ass.. this is just an excuse for the conservatives to tuck their tails in between their legs, run back into the caves and hide.
"Yes, he published a great PC repair book. Great.
However, Whenever someone disagrees with reality, reality always wins."
in reality, you are wrong. Gee, who should I believe? An industry legend, or some putz on/. ?
"Open up a Seagate Cheetah X15 if you don't believe me."
Hrm let me see, what will I find:
A spindle motor
a platter array
a head assembly.
wow, looks very much like a typical ATA hard drive so far.
Should we look on the outside? Oh gee look! there's a Logic board and it has a GASP! SCSI interface IC on it. Wow, amazing.
You make alot of half-assed assertions which are just flat wrong. Just looking At the specs for a WD Protégé 5400 (which is their low end drive) they specify a 5 year service life, with a standard MTBF of 500,000 hours. Seems to me your statement that ATA drives are designed for "3 years of desktop use" is wrong.
Dude, lay it down ok, you're not going to convince me of anything because I know you are wrong.
You want to buy into the marketing propiganda and the naive nonsense your freinds spout out at you, go ahead, I don't want to hear it anymore.
I wasn't making any commentary at all about the spin speeds, access times, interface features, or the protocols whatsoever. I was simply pointing out the fact that SCSI Hard drives are the SAME BASE HARDWARE as ATA drives are with a SCSI interface circuit.
I'd quote the related passage concerning this myself, but I don't happen to have my book handy right now to look it up.
Besides, your arguement about interface differences is totally off the point, since nowhere did i ever claim that the ATA and SCSI interface protocols were the same thing, I was talking about the hardware.
Perhaps you should do your own homework before you insult someone else and make a fool out of yourself in public by arguing the wrong point.
SCSI drives are in reality, nothing more than a standard ATA device with a SCSI interface circuit built into the logic board.
I always knew it was possible to make a "ATA to SCSI converter" by simply buiding a pluggable circuit with a SCSI logic controller on it into the ATA device, but what would the point be?
...in grand theft auto? or only play 1 sim. those games would have lasted maybe 5 minutes."
You are talking about a totally different type of game in reference to GTA. There's no persistant online world, there's no storage server being paid for by the developer, etc etc.
And in Sims Online, you are INDEED limited to Three total charecters, only allowed to have one Sim per town. If you've already created a Sim in one town, you cannot create another in that same town.
Reason: Prevent Abuse (prevent people from getting a roomie and lot size bonus illegitimately)
Promote diversity - get people playing on and working in different game worlds and people
Prevent one server from getting "too popular" and becoming overloaded while another server sits with empty capacity.
So go ahead, try different aspects of the game. When you get bored of the charecter, give your belongings to a trusted freind to hold, delete your charecter and make a new one. Or just make another charecter on a different server.
and when they get it, the "petition" to have the real life aspect, because it "Smacks of commercialism" removed.
Sure, i'll sit here eating my quarter pounder while playing sims.. the difference is,unlike me, my sim won't get fat too, so why SHOULDN'T the sim be able to load up on greasy fries and burgers?
MMoRPG games are expensive to develop and operate, I think that commercial product placement into the game fits well into the established context of the game itself (a virtual people simulator, we were can all be beautiful have maxed bod skills, and still eat like pigs!). Maxis/EA is just looking for a way to offset some of the development and operational costs. What's wrong with that? The product placement fits well into the context of the game itself.
Now, if they were sticking McDee emblems on the sides of ships in Earth and Beyond, that would strike me as out of place.
I recently ended a Contract position i was working as a Service Technician for Gateway. My job was basically to perform diagnostics and replace parts on the systems (duh!).
I can tell you from experience, that Fujitsu drives were easily, by far and the way the most failed brand of drive that we replaced. It used to be Maxtor's that died in record numbers some time back, but the difference there is that Maxtor's were much more widely installed.
A majority of the time that we had a system in with a bad HDD failure, we'd say "I bet it's a Fujitsu".. 90% of the time, that's exactly what we'd find inside the computer. After a while, we just stopped doing diagnostics troubleshooting on Fujitsu drives..we'd just close the system up and order a new drive.
And if we got a Fujitsu drive back as a replacement, we wouldn't even install it, we'd close it up and send it back requesting another replacement HDD.
They stopped us from doing that, said we couldn't send back drives that were working fine just because we didn't like the brand. So.. we said "ok", and resigned ourselves to the fact that the unlucky customer who got a Fujistu replacement drive would be back within a month.
And guess what? A majority of the time.. they were.
This is already being addressed, and it's coming soon.
http://www.serialata.org/
As it is, current ATA specs rival that of SCSI( though in real world performance, SCSI is stil of course faster, primarily due to queueing.), but ATA is quite a bit more economical for the home user. There is simply no reason for Joe Shmoe sitting at home playing Sims/Unreal/Quake/etc to blow so much money on SCSI since the full potential of it will never be realized.
First generation performance estimates of Serial ATA really aren't all that impressive, but looking forward, serial ATA is going to scale very nicely, providing plenty of performance, without burning a huge hole in your pocket either.
BTW, rotational speed is really indicative of nothing. Average seek speed is a much more important performance indicator.
Granted, typically faster rotation ~SHOULD~ translate into lower seek times, but that's not always true.
Aside from the above URL, I ~could~ cite about a billion different "previews" and discussion articles from various HW news/review sites, but that's pointless. you know how to use www.google.com, have at it if you want more information.
Re:And if they didn't?
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Yes, it DOES have to do with the Windows Automatic Updates.
I checked the Automatic Updates Control Panel Applet, It was clearly unchecked, as in "Don't check for updates".
Yes, when I checked my system services, there was Automatic updates set to Start automatically and currently started and running even though It was clearly disabled in Control Panel.
Set to manual, stop the service, that should do it.
Nowhere did I see the Eula state "with or without your consent" either. Stop making stuff up.
If you, as a broadband ISP only have 5,000 customers, then you are a complete small fry.
Cablevision, which has the market on Long Island, boasts a customer base in the millions.
I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but lets take some conservative figures here and say that Cablevision has 1 Million households paying 35 Dollars a month for Cable internet access, that figures to 35 MILLION PER MONTH in revenue generated!
And this completely ignores the income generated by their cable TV blling, not to mention the fact that they likely have more customers than just 1 million, and not all of them pay the same amount (some less, some more).
Again, i'd have no idea what their monthly expenditures on, but based on my (again, very conservative) guesstimate, I think they have it covered with a nice little nest egg left over to boot.
All of the people that are pushing MS to open source would NEVER use MS products anyway, so why do they care??
Let's look at this very simplistically:
Microsoft code is closed source, Microsoft is the industry leader, Microsoft is making more money than most other software companies combined.
It seems to me that MS's marketing tactics and products are working for them so why would they want to change it?
Why would they want to open source their products if that means that some other smart ass is going to come along, build and release a "free" version of the same software on them?
The simple fact of the matter is that Microsoft source is MICROSOFT SOURCE! They own it, it's their property, no one can force them to make their property freely avaliable if they don't want to, and again, even if they did, the same exact people that are pushing for MS to open source would probably never use MS products anyway, so why do they care??
I could perhaps, understand possibly adopting an attitude of release the source for obsolete software, very much the way that Carmack does with his engines. And then again there we see the same phenomenon at work. Those engines are Id propertery, they aren't obligated to eventually open source them, that's done as a gift to the community and it's STRICTLY their descretion to do so if they wish it. But yet, there are those that act as if Id owes them something by expecting them to Open source their engines... They don't.
And then there is the opposite side of the spectrum, there are those users that OPPOSE them open sourcing the engine because it opens the games up to the possibility of cheating. Is it not possible that some smart ass out there will take the MS source and use it for no good?
And Please, no queer "MS doesn't want to open source their code because they know it sucks" responses. Such things are baseless and meaningless. If you have some valid reasonings to debate here, feel free, otherwise, don't talk.
Go ahead and mod me down now, I wasn't going to use what little Karma I have anyway.
I personally can't stand the so called "ergo" keyboards, but I think that it's got alot more to do with personal preference than anything else.
Most people I know that use the "ergo" keyboards have told me that they did so out of necessity (aka, it was the only keyboard they could get). Most have also said that they didn't like the ergo keyboard at first either, but became "used" to them after a period of them, and then after that, standard keyboards were the ones that felt odd to them.
While I did say that I prefer standard keyboards, chances are that if I WAS forced to use an "ergo", i'd probably eventually get used to it as well and eventually be able to type on one as effectively as I do on a standard.
Just keep on using what you have till the machines and/or the software aren't doing what you need them to do anymore.
It's good to plan ahead and see where you have to go, but there's just no reason to push ahead when your current machines and software can probably solider on for a good number of years to come.. depending on how old your stuff currently is that is.
" because in the comic books he actually had to build the spider web machines himself, they didn't just "grow into his wrists."
The web shooters have a special cutter built into them. they cut the strand after firing and he grabs it with his hand.
I'd have to guess that a person with the proportional Strength of a spide probably has denser muscle mass which is more capable of handling the stresses being applies to his body during swinging.
I would consider it a compliment if someone took my invention/product and did some new inventive things with them.
I can't ever see myself forking over the dough to buy one of those things, but i'd think that the average Joe would see these "hacks" and think "wow, look at all the cool things an Aibo can do. Sony made a great product"
Hell, at the very least, it's free (and positive) advertising right?
They are limiting entries into the CONTEST to documentaries and parodies
I'm sure good ol' George is fully aware that there is plenty O' FanFic out there, and he's not looking to stamp that out, he simply doesn't want any of it being entered into this contest because It likely WOULD conflict with the official canon.
And as someone else said, it's about control. It's his property, he can do with it whatever he wants, and obviously he doesn't want to allow any fan created universe fiction into an official function. That might be contruded as him sanctioning the material.
I don't know if any of you have watched the "Making of" videos on the official Star wars site, but in one of them, (Wedgie Em' Out) A stunt Coordinater starts talking a little bit about the droid in Obi Wan's Starfighter.
"The R4 is really an R2 painted Red.."
George interupts him saying "Be careful.. what you say about the R4. Because you'll get bopped on the head real quick."
Then then the next clip shows George mockingly "beating up" the guy.
It was already well known that George is very possessive about Star Wars and related information being released, and as we said, it's his property, he can do with it what he wants.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why Nvidia would bother to put chunks of code dedicated to a specific game in the driverset, is beyond me. It would just lead to bloat & other problems down the road." They all do it all the time already. And you don't consider 26MB for a video driver to be "bloated" right now?
Right.
It's just SUCH an "inconvience" to have to press the ok button when prompted to "click ok to activate your product".
Kvetch whine and cry, and everyone DID indeed cry foul at Windows activation , but the fact is that Product activation is for 99.95% of legtimate users, quick, painless and completely unintrusive.
The only people this will be an "inconvience" for is those shmecks without a legitimate product key or readily avaliable working crack.
I find it interesting how you call Warcraft III both an "excrable peice of garbage" and a "great game" in the same sentence.
There aren't a hell of alot of people that can even manage to reach a speed of 25mph on a bicycle, let alone maintain that speed for any reasonable time.A person of average fitness could maintain a max 10-15 Mph.
That NEV isn't sounding so slow anymore is it?
In my opinion, if the vehicle cannot maintain at LEAST the minimum speed limit for a given road, it should not be legal to drive said vehicle on a given road.
The Unreal engine has never looked better if you ask me, and the ragdoll physics just rock.
The story however, completely sucks. Absolutely nothing memorable or original about it. enemy AI is dumber than a brick (of course) as well.
Weapons are completely uninspired. your starting weapon is quite good, and throughout the game, you pick up quite a few new ones, but there is just no overwhelming tactical reasons to switch weapons at all.
Save your money till this one is in the bargain bin.
if you bothered to check the site, you'd see that the first line of it reads:
"Dungeon Master Java is a remake of the classic FTL game Dungeon Master"
Engage brain before running mouth please.
"Rather than a solution to the fulfillment of these needs, the shuttle has become an awkward legacy. It will never deliver the cheap access its proponents had promised, and after Columbia's loss, lingering doubts will remain regarding the system's reliability no matter what the result of the investigation may be."
"lingering doubts about reliability"?
Isn't NASA's lifetime record proof enough?
a scant 3 major space accidents over a 30-some odd year span.....how many people went up and back down safely in proportion to those lost?
How many vessels have gone up and back down safely in contrast to those lost?
"Reliability concerns" my ass.. this is just an excuse for the conservatives to tuck their tails in between their legs, run back into the caves and hide.
in reality, you are wrong. Gee, who should I believe? An industry legend, or some putz on /. ?
"Open up a Seagate Cheetah X15 if you don't believe me."
Hrm let me see, what will I find: A spindle motor a platter array a head assembly.
wow, looks very much like a typical ATA hard drive so far.
Should we look on the outside? Oh gee look! there's a Logic board and it has a GASP! SCSI interface IC on it. Wow, amazing.
You make alot of half-assed assertions which are just flat wrong. Just looking At the specs for a WD Protégé 5400 (which is their low end drive) they specify a 5 year service life, with a standard MTBF of 500,000 hours. Seems to me your statement that ATA drives are designed for "3 years of desktop use" is wrong. Dude, lay it down ok, you're not going to convince me of anything because I know you are wrong.
You want to buy into the marketing propiganda and the naive nonsense your freinds spout out at you, go ahead, I don't want to hear it anymore.
You don't believe me?
Go ask Scott Mueller
I'd quote the related passage concerning this myself, but I don't happen to have my book handy right now to look it up.
Besides, your arguement about interface differences is totally off the point, since nowhere did i ever claim that the ATA and SCSI interface protocols were the same thing, I was talking about the hardware.
Perhaps you should do your own homework before you insult someone else and make a fool out of yourself in public by arguing the wrong point.
I always knew it was possible to make a "ATA to SCSI converter" by simply buiding a pluggable circuit with a SCSI logic controller on it into the ATA device, but what would the point be?
You are talking about a totally different type of game in reference to GTA. There's no persistant online world, there's no storage server being paid for by the developer, etc etc. And in Sims Online, you are INDEED limited to Three total charecters, only allowed to have one Sim per town. If you've already created a Sim in one town, you cannot create another in that same town.
Reason: Prevent Abuse (prevent people from getting a roomie and lot size bonus illegitimately)
Promote diversity - get people playing on and working in different game worlds and people
Prevent one server from getting "too popular" and becoming overloaded while another server sits with empty capacity.
So go ahead, try different aspects of the game. When you get bored of the charecter, give your belongings to a trusted freind to hold, delete your charecter and make a new one. Or just make another charecter on a different server.
Sure, i'll sit here eating my quarter pounder while playing sims.. the difference is,unlike me, my sim won't get fat too, so why SHOULDN'T the sim be able to load up on greasy fries and burgers?
MMoRPG games are expensive to develop and operate, I think that commercial product placement into the game fits well into the established context of the game itself (a virtual people simulator, we were can all be beautiful have maxed bod skills, and still eat like pigs!). Maxis/EA is just looking for a way to offset some of the development and operational costs. What's wrong with that? The product placement fits well into the context of the game itself.
Now, if they were sticking McDee emblems on the sides of ships in Earth and Beyond, that would strike me as out of place.
I can tell you from experience, that Fujitsu drives were easily, by far and the way the most failed brand of drive that we replaced. It used to be Maxtor's that died in record numbers some time back, but the difference there is that Maxtor's were much more widely installed.
A majority of the time that we had a system in with a bad HDD failure, we'd say "I bet it's a Fujitsu".. 90% of the time, that's exactly what we'd find inside the computer. After a while, we just stopped doing diagnostics troubleshooting on Fujitsu drives..we'd just close the system up and order a new drive.
And if we got a Fujitsu drive back as a replacement, we wouldn't even install it, we'd close it up and send it back requesting another replacement HDD.
They stopped us from doing that, said we couldn't send back drives that were working fine just because we didn't like the brand. So.. we said "ok", and resigned ourselves to the fact that the unlucky customer who got a Fujistu replacement drive would be back within a month.
And guess what? A majority of the time.. they were.
This is already being addressed, and it's coming soon.
http://www.serialata.org/
As it is, current ATA specs rival that of SCSI( though in real world performance, SCSI is stil of course faster, primarily due to queueing.), but ATA is quite a bit more economical for the home user. There is simply no reason for Joe Shmoe sitting at home playing Sims/Unreal/Quake/etc to blow so much money on SCSI since the full potential of it will never be realized.
First generation performance estimates of Serial ATA really aren't all that impressive, but looking forward, serial ATA is going to scale very nicely, providing plenty of performance, without burning a huge hole in your pocket either.
BTW, rotational speed is really indicative of nothing. Average seek speed is a much more important performance indicator.
Granted, typically faster rotation ~SHOULD~ translate into lower seek times, but that's not always true.
Aside from the above URL, I ~could~ cite about a billion different "previews" and discussion articles from various HW news/review sites, but that's pointless. you know how to use www.google.com, have at it if you want more information.
I checked the Automatic Updates Control Panel Applet, It was clearly unchecked, as in "Don't check for updates".
Yes, when I checked my system services, there was Automatic updates set to Start automatically and currently started and running even though It was clearly disabled in Control Panel.
Set to manual, stop the service, that should do it.
Nowhere did I see the Eula state "with or without your consent" either. Stop making stuff up.
Cablevision, which has the market on Long Island, boasts a customer base in the millions.
I'm not sure of the exact numbers, but lets take some conservative figures here and say that Cablevision has 1 Million households paying 35 Dollars a month for Cable internet access, that figures to 35 MILLION PER MONTH in revenue generated!
And this completely ignores the income generated by their cable TV blling, not to mention the fact that they likely have more customers than just 1 million, and not all of them pay the same amount (some less, some more).
Again, i'd have no idea what their monthly expenditures on, but based on my (again, very conservative) guesstimate, I think they have it covered with a nice little nest egg left over to boot.
Let's look at this very simplistically:
Microsoft code is closed source, Microsoft is the industry leader, Microsoft is making more money than most other software companies combined.
It seems to me that MS's marketing tactics and products are working for them so why would they want to change it?
Why would they want to open source their products if that means that some other smart ass is going to come along, build and release a "free" version of the same software on them?
The simple fact of the matter is that Microsoft source is MICROSOFT SOURCE! They own it, it's their property, no one can force them to make their property freely avaliable if they don't want to, and again, even if they did, the same exact people that are pushing for MS to open source would probably never use MS products anyway, so why do they care??
I could perhaps, understand possibly adopting an attitude of release the source for obsolete software, very much the way that Carmack does with his engines. And then again there we see the same phenomenon at work. Those engines are Id propertery, they aren't obligated to eventually open source them, that's done as a gift to the community and it's STRICTLY their descretion to do so if they wish it. But yet, there are those that act as if Id owes them something by expecting them to Open source their engines... They don't.
And then there is the opposite side of the spectrum, there are those users that OPPOSE them open sourcing the engine because it opens the games up to the possibility of cheating. Is it not possible that some smart ass out there will take the MS source and use it for no good?
And Please, no queer "MS doesn't want to open source their code because they know it sucks" responses. Such things are baseless and meaningless. If you have some valid reasonings to debate here, feel free, otherwise, don't talk.
Go ahead and mod me down now, I wasn't going to use what little Karma I have anyway.
Most people I know that use the "ergo" keyboards have told me that they did so out of necessity (aka, it was the only keyboard they could get). Most have also said that they didn't like the ergo keyboard at first either, but became "used" to them after a period of them, and then after that, standard keyboards were the ones that felt odd to them.
While I did say that I prefer standard keyboards, chances are that if I WAS forced to use an "ergo", i'd probably eventually get used to it as well and eventually be able to type on one as effectively as I do on a standard.
How does it handle rocket jumping?
It's good to plan ahead and see where you have to go, but there's just no reason to push ahead when your current machines and software can probably solider on for a good number of years to come.. depending on how old your stuff currently is that is.
" because in the comic books he actually had to build the spider web machines himself, they didn't just "grow into his wrists." The web shooters have a special cutter built into them. they cut the strand after firing and he grabs it with his hand. I'd have to guess that a person with the proportional Strength of a spide probably has denser muscle mass which is more capable of handling the stresses being applies to his body during swinging.
I can't ever see myself forking over the dough to buy one of those things, but i'd think that the average Joe would see these "hacks" and think "wow, look at all the cool things an Aibo can do. Sony made a great product"
Hell, at the very least, it's free (and positive) advertising right?
I'm sure good ol' George is fully aware that there is plenty O' FanFic out there, and he's not looking to stamp that out, he simply doesn't want any of it being entered into this contest because It likely WOULD conflict with the official canon.
And as someone else said, it's about control. It's his property, he can do with it whatever he wants, and obviously he doesn't want to allow any fan created universe fiction into an official function. That might be contruded as him sanctioning the material.
I don't know if any of you have watched the "Making of" videos on the official Star wars site, but in one of them, (Wedgie Em' Out) A stunt Coordinater starts talking a little bit about the droid in Obi Wan's Starfighter.
"The R4 is really an R2 painted Red.."
George interupts him saying "Be careful.. what you say about the R4. Because you'll get bopped on the head real quick."
Then then the next clip shows George mockingly "beating up" the guy.
It was already well known that George is very possessive about Star Wars and related information being released, and as we said, it's his property, he can do with it what he wants.
You can legally go out, buy, and own a gun. But just because you own that gun doesn't mean you can legally go out and shoot people with it.
That is probably a better analogy.