It's a loyalty ploy - agree or disagree. It's the same thing as one of those "free sub" Subway® cards. You walk in off the street and you pay full price but if you've been hanging around for a while you get a discount. All loyalty programs are like bribes too, "stick with us and you'll get a discount" instead of going over to the competition. Whether or not you should go to the competition is another discussion.
Of course I need *both* those 3870x2's for... climate modelling? Yes! Climate modeling, if its gonna rain I'll let you know! Think of the money we'll save by knowing... Ah, to dream - I'd probably get a TNT2 instead no matter what I asked for.
Here in Canada we have a band-aid that helps: the monopolies are forced to allow smaller companies to resell their bandwidth. So a big monopoly makes a flat rate and competition still occurs in companies that are small enough to care about it. Ymmv, I could be an idiot.
How about they give you what they promise, set their price against what they actually think it costs and let competition work its magic. Promising what they don't deliver fscks up Adam Smith's invisible hand.
I'm completely secular so I don't really adhere to anything at all - the closest I would come to religion would not have anything to do with organized religion. But most religions in the world have some kind of organization with again most having a central point of authority like the Pope in Christianity with a hierarchy reporting throughout.
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron who was strongly associated and interacted greatly with Percy Shelly who was married to Mary Shelly. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein which - wrapped in the language of the times - was a stab at Artificial Intelligence - but without intelligence separated from the physical representation (i.e. no concept of an artifact such as a computer) so artificial life was the metaphor instead. Blah blah blah I should go on Jeopardy.
Vista and XP are more similar kernal wise than XP and 98se. What this means in my direct experience is in the transition from 98se to XP quite a few of my games broke and could just not be made to work. On my current Vista install I have about 50 games installed (some even win98 like Alpha Centauri) and the only game I could not get to work was Alpha Prime (audio issues). This experience independent of the actual differences of what makes the respective kernals tick is what I mean when I say the transition has given me less grief. Two percent (1/50) coming from XP do not work on Vista in my random test. 98se to XP I don't have an actual number since it was so long ago but I remember the frustration of incompatibility until games caught up clearly.
Windows XP is far from dead, Microsoft will still be supporting existing installs when they usher Windows 7 out the door. In this regard they are similar to the support given by Ubuntu on some releases. Vista is simply better however. I have had it installed for about three months now and the transition from XP to Vista was a heck of a lot less painful than moving from 98se to XP. Vista is XP mark II, at its core it provides at least as much as XP and in addition it overhauls or adds new systems. Memory utilization is high compared to XP but thats because Vista actually puts wasted memory to use as cache (like an article for a Linux subsystem the other day). Aero is a nice facelift, Direct X 10 while questionable as a Vista exclusive also adds some nice new effects, prefetch and other cacheing mechanisms automatically tune the system over time, and the new security model while minorly problematic with older software (sometimes an old program needs to be run as administator) is a welcome addition to the number one target for malware. As Windows 95 wouldn't run well on a 486, Vista won't run well on hardware that is sufficient for XP. I have a dual-core 3.0Ghz, 2GB RAM, and an HD2600XT and it is the equivalent of Win95 with 16MB and a Voodoo 1. Quake in that mixture is replaced with Bioshock. Objectively Vista when run on appropriate hardware represents progress - I'm sure a decade from now the operating system of that time will have hardware requirements that dwarf what exists today and be very shiny but for now Vista on a new machine isn't a bad thing. Especially with Service Pack 1.
Changing the goalposts to include things that are of a greater magnitude of amazing does not diminish those things that previously would have been a breakthrough. 365 straight days of achievements that used to occur once a year remains an unimaginable way to live through time.
The Nobel prize frequency needs to be updated. Once a year used to be fine but now they could give out a prize once a week and still have deserving people go unnoticed. I suppose in another decade they could be giving it out every day. Singularity here we come!
Of course since you stopped using it a few months ago you wouldn't have noticed that Service Pack 1 addresses most or all of these issues. And it's only going to get better.
I use it and it works great. I also have hardware that suits it: Dual core 3.0ghz, 2gb ram, hd2600xt video. If you have old hardware (e.g. what came with XP) then I wouldn't recommened using Vista but if your computer doesn't contain parts made of stone then Vista works good. SP1 makes it even better. And some people complain that it's a RAM hog, it is *but* the reason RAM utilization is high is because Vista takes unused RAM and dynamically uses it as a cache. When Vista does it it's considered a pig but the other day when an article talking about doing the same thing for Linux came up of course it was a giant leap for computing kind. Check your bias around here I guess.
I was born in 1973 so I missed the McCarthy era. It may have just been me being young but I used to perceive that we had more liberties and rights pre-Bush.
I actually own Redneck Rampage, that disc is sitting in a box behind me. I should rip the CD tracks! Your point is supremely valid with that example too: Redneck Rampage was the first game that made me fully savor the feeling of being ripped off. The music is worth more than the game.
To elaborate on the second, I believe that right now game developers in specific deserve to be compensated for their effort. For the fact that division of labor is of a much rougher granularity in that area. Linux is composed of hundreds of thousands (give or take what I'm wrong) packages that happen to get packaged together in tens of major distributions. The sheer number of packages means that an individual can concentrate on a very small focus and still meaningfully contribute to a project. Game development on the other hand is a much more vertical development process. Small concentrated teams of artists and programmers work together in concert over a period of a year or three and in contrast each individuals contribution to the project is of a greater ratio than an individuals contribution to a distribution. This is not counting areas in Linux where corporate sponsoship come into play although. But the point I'm trying to get across is that a person developing games to produce something top-notch needs to devote much more of their time across the same number of years than an equivalent developer in the open world working in a much smaller focus to produce something noteworthy. Open-source has the advantage of reusability games tend to be mostly custom per project work wise so more effort needs to be expended on them. And everyone has to buy food.
As long as the Internet remains a free and open protocol (with the same effect seen in the sneakernet before it) then absolutely nothing will stop a pirate with half a brain cell. The trick is to find a way to not punish your customers who actually bought the product along the way. I hate the inconvienience of digging through a pile of hopefully unscratched from the digging discs to find the one I want to play. Fair-dealing here in Canada lets me use cd-cracks to avoid that hassle. I wouldn't mind seeing a two stage system for games, if you're online contact a authorization server to play (yes single player) so you don't have to have the disc in the drive *or* if the server is unavailable then require the disc in the drive. For me this would mean not even going into the grey area of cd-cracks because the hassle would be mitigated - I wouldn't be punished because others steal the effort of the developers.
As an aside, Information should be free in a perfect world but until shelter and food is then damn well pay what someones asking for their effort. You pay the publisher they pay the developer, they pay their employees, they pay their rent. Until that last requirement is removed then a effort sharing system (aka capitalism) is just required for luxury items. Linux is an example that sidesteps the monetary requirements in that the effort is spread around enough people that the cost per person is actually minimal. If entertainment matured more towards current open-source models then it could benefit from the same situation: organization - open model, sound, geometry, engine packs would mitigate entertainments profit dependence.
Vista Service Pack 1 rolls up 551 bug fixes which are broken down by category in that link. Many of these fixes were not available before even through more advanced sites such as MSDN or TechNet. So, now that SP1 is out the trend to watch for is if it actually spures adoption or just passes by unnoticed. I for one welcome..., err, did buy Vista because SP1 was imminent for it as my primary purchasing reason. SP1 incrementally improves Vista and through the simple realities of OEM distribution like it or not within a few years Vista will probably be at least 40%+ market share.
I upgraded from XP because I have a fairly high spec machine: Pentium D (Dual-Core) @ 3.0Ghz and 2GB ram. It was top of the line when I bought it in 2006 and all I updated for Vista was upgrading the X600 it came with to a HD2600XT for DX10. I would say at the minimum you need a dual-core and 2GB ram for Vista. If it was Windows 95 those specs would be equivalent to a Pentium 100 with 24MB ram (So you could play Quake!, err, I mean Bioshock!)! And so the march of progress goes...
Exactly, I'm another random hardware configuration and my: Sony Walkman, TV card, and soundcard worked off of the fresh install. I had to install my printer driver, SonicStage for the Walkman, and my video card driver all of which had Vista builds. From what I read around the 'net I thought I must have got the Magic Disc or something! On the other hand first impressions do count a lot when people are forming opinions and Vista out of the gate did suffer when you consider that although all my stuff just worked® a significant chunk of the millions of other configurations out there didn't enough to give it a bum rap - out of the gate. It's now 1 year later and it's being preloaded OEM style working properly to form longer term impressions.
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It's a loyalty ploy - agree or disagree. It's the same thing as one of those "free sub" Subway® cards. You walk in off the street and you pay full price but if you've been hanging around for a while you get a discount. All loyalty programs are like bribes too, "stick with us and you'll get a discount" instead of going over to the competition. Whether or not you should go to the competition is another discussion.
Of course I need *both* those 3870x2's for ... climate modelling? Yes! Climate modeling, if its gonna rain I'll let you know! Think of the money we'll save by knowing... Ah, to dream - I'd probably get a TNT2 instead no matter what I asked for.
Here in Canada we have a band-aid that helps: the monopolies are forced to allow smaller companies to resell their bandwidth. So a big monopoly makes a flat rate and competition still occurs in companies that are small enough to care about it. Ymmv, I could be an idiot.
How about they give you what they promise, set their price against what they actually think it costs and let competition work its magic. Promising what they don't deliver fscks up Adam Smith's invisible hand.
I'm completely secular so I don't really adhere to anything at all - the closest I would come to religion would not have anything to do with organized religion. But most religions in the world have some kind of organization with again most having a central point of authority like the Pope in Christianity with a hierarchy reporting throughout.
Something the person at the top when looking into themselves honestly believes.
Calling Scientology a "religious group" stretches it in my books: they are a scam that hides behind being a cult which promotes itself as a religion.
Shelley! Shelley! I'll take foot in mouth for $1000 Alex.
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron who was strongly associated and interacted greatly with Percy Shelly who was married to Mary Shelly. Mary Shelly wrote Frankenstein which - wrapped in the language of the times - was a stab at Artificial Intelligence - but without intelligence separated from the physical representation (i.e. no concept of an artifact such as a computer) so artificial life was the metaphor instead. Blah blah blah I should go on Jeopardy.
I re-read your comment, when I first installed Vista I just spent a few days poking around. I don't remember it being overly traumatizing.
Vista and XP are more similar kernal wise than XP and 98se. What this means in my direct experience is in the transition from 98se to XP quite a few of my games broke and could just not be made to work. On my current Vista install I have about 50 games installed (some even win98 like Alpha Centauri) and the only game I could not get to work was Alpha Prime (audio issues). This experience independent of the actual differences of what makes the respective kernals tick is what I mean when I say the transition has given me less grief. Two percent (1/50) coming from XP do not work on Vista in my random test. 98se to XP I don't have an actual number since it was so long ago but I remember the frustration of incompatibility until games caught up clearly.
Windows XP is far from dead, Microsoft will still be supporting existing installs when they usher Windows 7 out the door. In this regard they are similar to the support given by Ubuntu on some releases. Vista is simply better however. I have had it installed for about three months now and the transition from XP to Vista was a heck of a lot less painful than moving from 98se to XP. Vista is XP mark II, at its core it provides at least as much as XP and in addition it overhauls or adds new systems. Memory utilization is high compared to XP but thats because Vista actually puts wasted memory to use as cache (like an article for a Linux subsystem the other day). Aero is a nice facelift, Direct X 10 while questionable as a Vista exclusive also adds some nice new effects, prefetch and other cacheing mechanisms automatically tune the system over time, and the new security model while minorly problematic with older software (sometimes an old program needs to be run as administator) is a welcome addition to the number one target for malware. As Windows 95 wouldn't run well on a 486, Vista won't run well on hardware that is sufficient for XP. I have a dual-core 3.0Ghz, 2GB RAM, and an HD2600XT and it is the equivalent of Win95 with 16MB and a Voodoo 1. Quake in that mixture is replaced with Bioshock. Objectively Vista when run on appropriate hardware represents progress - I'm sure a decade from now the operating system of that time will have hardware requirements that dwarf what exists today and be very shiny but for now Vista on a new machine isn't a bad thing. Especially with Service Pack 1.
Changing the goalposts to include things that are of a greater magnitude of amazing does not diminish those things that previously would have been a breakthrough. 365 straight days of achievements that used to occur once a year remains an unimaginable way to live through time.
The Nobel prize frequency needs to be updated. Once a year used to be fine but now they could give out a prize once a week and still have deserving people go unnoticed. I suppose in another decade they could be giving it out every day. Singularity here we come!
Of course since you stopped using it a few months ago you wouldn't have noticed that Service Pack 1 addresses most or all of these issues. And it's only going to get better.
I use it and it works great. I also have hardware that suits it: Dual core 3.0ghz, 2gb ram, hd2600xt video. If you have old hardware (e.g. what came with XP) then I wouldn't recommened using Vista but if your computer doesn't contain parts made of stone then Vista works good. SP1 makes it even better. And some people complain that it's a RAM hog, it is *but* the reason RAM utilization is high is because Vista takes unused RAM and dynamically uses it as a cache. When Vista does it it's considered a pig but the other day when an article talking about doing the same thing for Linux came up of course it was a giant leap for computing kind. Check your bias around here I guess.
Yup from Worlock I went and listened to it after I posted but I didn't know it came from Manson! Gonna have to google that a bit to get some context!
I was born in 1973 so I missed the McCarthy era. It may have just been me being young but I used to perceive that we had more liberties and rights pre-Bush.
When I was young the police used to watch over the people, now they're watching the people.
I actually own Redneck Rampage, that disc is sitting in a box behind me. I should rip the CD tracks! Your point is supremely valid with that example too: Redneck Rampage was the first game that made me fully savor the feeling of being ripped off. The music is worth more than the game.
Thank you for the first paragraph.
To elaborate on the second, I believe that right now game developers in specific deserve to be compensated for their effort. For the fact that division of labor is of a much rougher granularity in that area. Linux is composed of hundreds of thousands (give or take what I'm wrong) packages that happen to get packaged together in tens of major distributions. The sheer number of packages means that an individual can concentrate on a very small focus and still meaningfully contribute to a project. Game development on the other hand is a much more vertical development process. Small concentrated teams of artists and programmers work together in concert over a period of a year or three and in contrast each individuals contribution to the project is of a greater ratio than an individuals contribution to a distribution. This is not counting areas in Linux where corporate sponsoship come into play although. But the point I'm trying to get across is that a person developing games to produce something top-notch needs to devote much more of their time across the same number of years than an equivalent developer in the open world working in a much smaller focus to produce something noteworthy. Open-source has the advantage of reusability games tend to be mostly custom per project work wise so more effort needs to be expended on them. And everyone has to buy food.
As long as the Internet remains a free and open protocol (with the same effect seen in the sneakernet before it) then absolutely nothing will stop a pirate with half a brain cell. The trick is to find a way to not punish your customers who actually bought the product along the way. I hate the inconvienience of digging through a pile of hopefully unscratched from the digging discs to find the one I want to play. Fair-dealing here in Canada lets me use cd-cracks to avoid that hassle. I wouldn't mind seeing a two stage system for games, if you're online contact a authorization server to play (yes single player) so you don't have to have the disc in the drive *or* if the server is unavailable then require the disc in the drive. For me this would mean not even going into the grey area of cd-cracks because the hassle would be mitigated - I wouldn't be punished because others steal the effort of the developers.
As an aside, Information should be free in a perfect world but until shelter and food is then damn well pay what someones asking for their effort. You pay the publisher they pay the developer, they pay their employees, they pay their rent. Until that last requirement is removed then a effort sharing system (aka capitalism) is just required for luxury items. Linux is an example that sidesteps the monetary requirements in that the effort is spread around enough people that the cost per person is actually minimal. If entertainment matured more towards current open-source models then it could benefit from the same situation: organization - open model, sound, geometry, engine packs would mitigate entertainments profit dependence.
Vista Service Pack 1 rolls up 551 bug fixes which are broken down by category in that link. Many of these fixes were not available before even through more advanced sites such as MSDN or TechNet. So, now that SP1 is out the trend to watch for is if it actually spures adoption or just passes by unnoticed. I for one welcome..., err, did buy Vista because SP1 was imminent for it as my primary purchasing reason. SP1 incrementally improves Vista and through the simple realities of OEM distribution like it or not within a few years Vista will probably be at least 40%+ market share.
I upgraded from XP because I have a fairly high spec machine: Pentium D (Dual-Core) @ 3.0Ghz and 2GB ram. It was top of the line when I bought it in 2006 and all I updated for Vista was upgrading the X600 it came with to a HD2600XT for DX10. I would say at the minimum you need a dual-core and 2GB ram for Vista. If it was Windows 95 those specs would be equivalent to a Pentium 100 with 24MB ram (So you could play Quake!, err, I mean Bioshock!)! And so the march of progress goes...
Exactly, I'm another random hardware configuration and my: Sony Walkman, TV card, and soundcard worked off of the fresh install. I had to install my printer driver, SonicStage for the Walkman, and my video card driver all of which had Vista builds. From what I read around the 'net I thought I must have got the Magic Disc or something! On the other hand first impressions do count a lot when people are forming opinions and Vista out of the gate did suffer when you consider that although all my stuff just worked® a significant chunk of the millions of other configurations out there didn't enough to give it a bum rap - out of the gate. It's now 1 year later and it's being preloaded OEM style working properly to form longer term impressions.