And? I didn't say MSDN was free. I was questioning the argument of "X amount of money is okay, because if you could afford Y amount of money on something else, this means you also have X amount of money that you should spend on this". If someone made that argument for MSDN, I'd question them too.
Are you (and the mods, evidently) serious suggesting that argument is valid?
I know it's a common sentiment on slashdot that everyone should get everything for free and everyone (else) should work without pay to give you everything you want free, but the attitude is getting tiresome.
I never made that argument. But to correct you - it's a comment sentiment that things which are free are better (e.g., consider Opera vs Firefox debates) - except when it comes to Apple, which for some reason is immune from such criticism.
If you can't afford a $99 developer program, you probably can't afford the $399 device to test it on or the computer to host it, or the food to eat while you code...
This is a common saying which is often seen as "insightful" (as it is modded here), but it makes no sense - the argument assumes that I can use the same money I spent on the iphone to use for the developer program, and on my food. But clearly, I can't. So if I'm weighing up options, I'm looking at $399 PLUS $99 - and if I can save that money by spending less, that's more money to spend on food, beer and whatever else.
Let's be honest - if this was Windows, people would be criticising the price, saying how free is always much better, and there wouldn't be any "Well it's expensive, therefore it's okay that it's expensive because if you couldn't afford something expensive, you wouldn't be interested in something expensive".
It's not just the accuracy either, it's the quality of writing. Virtually every article that's vaguely controversial in any respect is full of weasel worded insinuations, rambling tangents, or outright "some say / others say" crossfires
Though weasel words exist in all sorts of "authoritative" sources, Wikipedia is the only (that I've seen, though maybe there are others) that acknowledges weasel words for what they are, and actively tries to get rid of them. Before I came across this concept of Wikipedia, I never noticed weasel words and I subconsciously accepted them. Now when I read all sorts of texts, I see them painfully sticking out like sore thumbs.
Even in places like museums I've seen them on boards that give information (and I wished I had a bunch of [[weasel words]] stickers to put on them...)
Point us out some examples of these 'outright "some say / others say" crossfires', then I and I'm sure many other readers here will get to work tagging, fixing or removing such examples.
Of course, you can get extremely detailed methodological analysis of virtually every episode of every anime program ever aired, along with all the characters that appear in them.
I don't care about anime, but I often do look at Wikipedia when I want to find out some detail about a TV show. I don't see how that detracts from the other kinds of articles though, which I also find useful.
In fact, Christian/Muslim/Native American teachers will be forced to teach evolution [orlandosentinel.com] even if it contradicts their personal beliefs.
Let me rephrase that for you - science teachers will be expected to teach science. And plenty of Christians, Muslims and presumably Native Americans have no problem with that - it's only those people like Creationists who reject science. And if they have personal beliefs that reject science, why are they becoming a science teacher?
What next - complaining that Christians are "forced" to teach maths, even if it contradicts some "personal belief" that calculus is a load of rubbish, and they believe in Numerology instead?
Oh, for God's sake, try reading my post. I don't have an image to report, I'm just asking a question out of interest. It takes a lot more than 10 seconds to run Google Maps, find somewhere with a photo, following the instructions to test whether I can remove it - even though there's no indication that doing so will give any more information. Not to mention putting the answer on here puts out the information for everyone else to see. Your answer also still doesn't answer whether they would remove any image that someone claims is of them.
That's handy to know - though is it known whether they will remove any image of someone if requested? The page only refers to "objectionable content", and that the request will be reviewed.
This is like someone making a online version of Starcraft and then bitching when Blizzard comes after them. What sense does that make? if you want to use someone's property you have to do the right thing: ask them to use it and pay them if they demand it.
I must be reading a different article to you. I don't see where it says that anyone has taken the PC game you link to, and put it on Facebook. The article I'm reading talks about people who wrote their own game, and now Hasbro want to steal the profits of their efforts.
However, the facts of this case are different. "Scrabble" is hardly a generic term (the word exists on its own in English, but it's nowhere near as common as "windows").
I agree the facts are different, but not quite for that reason. Generic names can be trademarked if used in a different context to their generic meaning (e.g., Apple). I believe the problem was that "window" already had a meaning in the context of computing - it's that meaning which was important, not the generic meaning (well, that's what Wikipedia says too).
In that case, the burden is on the submitter of the story to cite legal precedents (no, not Wikipedia) that show that the rules of Scrabble are subject to copyright.
Though rent contracts tend to specify minimum terms, or minimum notice periods. It might also be that there are laws requiring this for renting. Internet access however is just seen as a service you buy no different to any other.
Then there is the legal aspect. I'm sure ISPs prefer not to warn for the same reason that my landlord doesn't - why give up a customer? They put the term in the TOS I imagine just to reduce liability (and my rent contract also has a clause about not doing illegal activities). But if they risk being sued for knowingly allowing people to download, then they may respond - this doesn't happen with renting. Furthermore if the Government passes a law requiring ISPs to disconnect their users, they don't have a choice.
(Plus I suspect there is a practical point - an ISP can easily terminate your service, but kicking someone out who's living there and refuses to leave and has all their stuff there it's harder - it's usually better for a landlord to cooperate a little bit so that you are more likely to move out willingly.)
Having said that, given how important Internet access is today, I do think it would be good to have stronger protections for customers. But in the UK, given that the Government thinks it would be perfectly fine to have millions of people unable to get Internet access, I'm not sure that's going to happen here...
No it doesn't. I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. If they put in the terms "and you agree not to be gay" and then they find you having sex with a member of the same gender and end your service because of it you get sue them for breach of contract. Doesn't matter if you knew it was there or not, it's illegal for them to end your contract for that. That's a kinda extreme example, but any terms that aren't legal don't count.
That would only be a problem because of laws against such discrimination (which in the UK were only brought in recently - or possibly not in force at all yet). Otherwise there might be an issue about time lost or getting your money back if you've already paid upfront for some service.
But beyond that, you have no right to force someone to give you a service - they can still end the contract for any reason, just like you can.
Plus I'm not sure that taking them to court where your argument is that you were "only" doing something illegal is a particularly sensible course of action.
I've been seeing a lot of AC posts at -1, often -1 interesting or -1 informative. Generally all these posts have been good, good in the sense that I couldn't imagine modding them down and some I'd mod up. I don't know what is happening but it seems some group has an agenda to mark every AC post as overrated.
I'm glad it's not just me who noticed this - the odd thing though is that I thought that "Overrated" normally still gets listed in the box where it gives the percentage of moderations (along with troll, informative, etc), but in these cases, it's the Starting score which is marked as "-1", and the "Moderation" is marked as "+1" (when it should be 0 if they got marked as overrated, with another person modding them up), with no mention of an overrated mod.
When I first saw this, I wondered if it was possible to have a Karma Penalty (or whatever it's called - when your starting score is lowered) based on IP for anonymous users, but now it's happening a lot...
It's very annoying though, makes it hard to follow a thread unless you view at -1 or 0, which defeats the point of moderation.
Personally I'd rather not see degraded versions of images (if this is even being done) just to get the file size down, I'd rather use a better device which doesn't suck at displaying the real images. Typically images are already compressed on the web anyway, so reducing the quality further is going to lead to massive drops in quality, unless your display is some 120x160 monstrosity and you can't tell the difference.
You're on a phone. The web has moved on from the days when it was Best Viewed In 640x480. So there will be images far larger than you can see on your phone - don't tell me you have a phone with 1600x1050 resolution!
Also note that Opera Mini (as opposed to Mobile) is targetted towards low end (i.e., not stupidly expensive) phones - not that that matters, as even on a smart phone resolution, it won't be enough to display many images on the web.
Who doesn't love calling a company and getting "Press 3 for customer service" and going thru ten menus before getting a human who can actually help.
I agree the interface is the problem, but it's great when it works - the most obvious example of automated computerised system is over the Internet. I imagine many people now prefer doing things on a web page, rather than having to phone up and speak to some person.
What baffles me is the ray tracing being introduced first on mobile and not on desktop computers.
My guess would be lower resolutions (and the article says this too). Also mobile devices tend not to have powerful GPUs dedicated for doing 3D graphics the traditional polygon way - it's much easier to compete with software rendering than with hardware.
I'm confused by the "Moore's Law works in favor of Ray-Tracing" bit though - Moore's Law works in favour of any computation. And traditional polygon rasterisation 3D graphics is just as parallelisable as raytracing, and has already been taking advantage of multiprocessing for years on the GPU (e.g., the NVIDIA 8800 has 128 processors).
Nvidia measures performance with the second digit in the card's model. 5600 is 5th generation, 8400 is 8th generation, however since the "600" is higher than the "400", the 5600 is the faster card.
Benchmarks? Just because it's true that the 8600 was similar to the 7600 doesn't mean it's true that all x600 are the same, or that a card with a second higher digit will always outperfom a later generation card with lower digit. Are you seriously suggesting that in all the years since the first NVIDIA chipsets, they haven't improved in performance? That a 4600 will outperform an 8500? Sorry, that's ludicrous.
The GMA 950 may not have hardware T&L, but it does support pixel shader 2.0, which should be all Morrowind needs. In any case, I can't imagine that you get very good performance out of that IGP since the Geforce 6150 IGPs in one of my laptops can't even run Morrowind at an acceptable speed. What's your average, 10-15fps tops? Have fun with that...
It gets 100FPS indoors. On large outdoor scenes it drops to about 20-30FPS, but as others have said, that's more than adequate for a roleplaying game, not a fast shooter. So yes, I do have fun with that. And as I said, I know what it's like on a faster card anyway.
I've no idea why the lack of reflections - if it isn't shader model, it may be some other missing feature (unfortunately the Intel chipsets lack a lot - another reason to prefer the NVIDIA laptops).
Not everyone is a gamer interested in the latest games, games where high frame rates are needed and so on - but we still might play an occasional old game.
But not something as old as the GeForce FX 5600.
I don't know if you had a bad experience on that card or what, but seriously - the graphics industry has moved on light years since then.
I don't think not having them is that much of a problem, but I don't see how it actually makes things worse ("a piece of crap" the OP said). I don't have VGA on my laptop which isn't a problem - but the fact that it does have a PS/2 slot also isn't a problem.
And I was just parodying the way that whenever Macs have something done slightly simpler or as standard, even if you can do the same thing on a PC, the Mac's claimed to be better by chanting "It Just Works(TM)!" Strangely this doesn't apply when the situation is reversed.
That includes a game like Morrowind, which even ran poorly on a discrete Geforce 5600 (which could only manage to run it at 800x600 with FPS a lowly 15-30 range).
A 5600? How old is that? How does that suggest a much more recent 8400 wouldn't be able to run it well?
I shudder to think how low you have to reduce details/draw distance and resolution to run Morrowind on your GMA 950 or the GPUs in those laptops.
Not at all, I run at max settings at 1024x768, though I miss a few features like reflections (probably due to older shader model, which isn't an issue on newer cards). And I know how well it works on a faster card, as I have an 8600GT in my desktop. But yes, I'd rather have something better than the GMA for playing games - which is why the NVIDIA laptops are preferred over the Mac.
If a game cannot achieve a minimum of 60fps at 1024x768 then it is thoroughly unplayable unless you like blocky slideshows.
For an FPS or other game where fast action is always needed, yes, but not for other types of games. Unless you think watching a TV is like a blocky slideshow.
Actually the ATI x1270 is a piece of crap and I wouldn't be surprised of the Intel x3100 performed as just as well or possibly better.
The X3100 couldn't even run any of gaming benchmarks in the tests...
It doesn't really matter, you won't be playing games on any of those systems. Even the Nvidia 8400M would have a hard time running most games made within the past few years very well.
That misses the point - yes, they won't play the latest high-performance FPS games and so on, but people might still like to play older games (e.g., I only have the GMA 950 in my laptop, but I can still play a game like Morrowind - however, it runs better with a faster graphics card).
Slashdot Mirror
And? I didn't say MSDN was free. I was questioning the argument of "X amount of money is okay, because if you could afford Y amount of money on something else, this means you also have X amount of money that you should spend on this". If someone made that argument for MSDN, I'd question them too.
Are you (and the mods, evidently) serious suggesting that argument is valid?
I know it's a common sentiment on slashdot that everyone should get everything for free and everyone (else) should work without pay to give you everything you want free, but the attitude is getting tiresome.
I never made that argument. But to correct you - it's a comment sentiment that things which are free are better (e.g., consider Opera vs Firefox debates) - except when it comes to Apple, which for some reason is immune from such criticism.
It's $99 not $999. If you can afford an iPhone you can afford the developer fee.
I like that logic, let's try it another way: If you can afford an iphone, you can afford to give me $99.
If you can't afford a $99 developer program, you probably can't afford the $399 device to test it on or the computer to host it, or the food to eat while you code...
This is a common saying which is often seen as "insightful" (as it is modded here), but it makes no sense - the argument assumes that I can use the same money I spent on the iphone to use for the developer program, and on my food. But clearly, I can't. So if I'm weighing up options, I'm looking at $399 PLUS $99 - and if I can save that money by spending less, that's more money to spend on food, beer and whatever else.
Let's be honest - if this was Windows, people would be criticising the price, saying how free is always much better, and there wouldn't be any "Well it's expensive, therefore it's okay that it's expensive because if you couldn't afford something expensive, you wouldn't be interested in something expensive".
It's not just the accuracy either, it's the quality of writing. Virtually every article that's vaguely controversial in any respect is full of weasel worded insinuations, rambling tangents, or outright "some say / others say" crossfires
Though weasel words exist in all sorts of "authoritative" sources, Wikipedia is the only (that I've seen, though maybe there are others) that acknowledges weasel words for what they are, and actively tries to get rid of them. Before I came across this concept of Wikipedia, I never noticed weasel words and I subconsciously accepted them. Now when I read all sorts of texts, I see them painfully sticking out like sore thumbs.
Even in places like museums I've seen them on boards that give information (and I wished I had a bunch of [[weasel words]] stickers to put on them...)
Point us out some examples of these 'outright "some say / others say" crossfires', then I and I'm sure many other readers here will get to work tagging, fixing or removing such examples.
Of course, you can get extremely detailed methodological analysis of virtually every episode of every anime program ever aired, along with all the characters that appear in them.
I don't care about anime, but I often do look at Wikipedia when I want to find out some detail about a TV show. I don't see how that detracts from the other kinds of articles though, which I also find useful.
In fact, Christian/Muslim/Native American teachers will be forced to teach evolution [orlandosentinel.com] even if it contradicts their personal beliefs.
Let me rephrase that for you - science teachers will be expected to teach science. And plenty of Christians, Muslims and presumably Native Americans have no problem with that - it's only those people like Creationists who reject science. And if they have personal beliefs that reject science, why are they becoming a science teacher?
What next - complaining that Christians are "forced" to teach maths, even if it contradicts some "personal belief" that calculus is a load of rubbish, and they believe in Numerology instead?
Oh, for God's sake, try reading my post. I don't have an image to report, I'm just asking a question out of interest. It takes a lot more than 10 seconds to run Google Maps, find somewhere with a photo, following the instructions to test whether I can remove it - even though there's no indication that doing so will give any more information. Not to mention putting the answer on here puts out the information for everyone else to see. Your answer also still doesn't answer whether they would remove any image that someone claims is of them.
That's handy to know - though is it known whether they will remove any image of someone if requested? The page only refers to "objectionable content", and that the request will be reviewed.
This is like someone making a online version of Starcraft and then bitching when Blizzard comes after them. What sense does that make? if you want to use someone's property you have to do the right thing: ask them to use it and pay them if they demand it.
I must be reading a different article to you. I don't see where it says that anyone has taken the PC game you link to, and put it on Facebook. The article I'm reading talks about people who wrote their own game, and now Hasbro want to steal the profits of their efforts.
However, the facts of this case are different. "Scrabble" is hardly a generic term (the word exists on its own in English, but it's nowhere near as common as "windows").
I agree the facts are different, but not quite for that reason. Generic names can be trademarked if used in a different context to their generic meaning (e.g., Apple). I believe the problem was that "window" already had a meaning in the context of computing - it's that meaning which was important, not the generic meaning (well, that's what Wikipedia says too).
I agree, although note also that the name can be trademarked, which I imagine is the area most likely to be an issue in this case.
In that case, the burden is on the submitter of the story to cite legal precedents (no, not Wikipedia) that show that the rules of Scrabble are subject to copyright.
Though rent contracts tend to specify minimum terms, or minimum notice periods. It might also be that there are laws requiring this for renting. Internet access however is just seen as a service you buy no different to any other.
Then there is the legal aspect. I'm sure ISPs prefer not to warn for the same reason that my landlord doesn't - why give up a customer? They put the term in the TOS I imagine just to reduce liability (and my rent contract also has a clause about not doing illegal activities). But if they risk being sued for knowingly allowing people to download, then they may respond - this doesn't happen with renting. Furthermore if the Government passes a law requiring ISPs to disconnect their users, they don't have a choice.
(Plus I suspect there is a practical point - an ISP can easily terminate your service, but kicking someone out who's living there and refuses to leave and has all their stuff there it's harder - it's usually better for a landlord to cooperate a little bit so that you are more likely to move out willingly.)
Having said that, given how important Internet access is today, I do think it would be good to have stronger protections for customers. But in the UK, given that the Government thinks it would be perfectly fine to have millions of people unable to get Internet access, I'm not sure that's going to happen here...
No it doesn't. I'm sorry, but you're just wrong. If they put in the terms "and you agree not to be gay" and then they find you having sex with a member of the same gender and end your service because of it you get sue them for breach of contract. Doesn't matter if you knew it was there or not, it's illegal for them to end your contract for that. That's a kinda extreme example, but any terms that aren't legal don't count.
That would only be a problem because of laws against such discrimination (which in the UK were only brought in recently - or possibly not in force at all yet). Otherwise there might be an issue about time lost or getting your money back if you've already paid upfront for some service.
But beyond that, you have no right to force someone to give you a service - they can still end the contract for any reason, just like you can.
Plus I'm not sure that taking them to court where your argument is that you were "only" doing something illegal is a particularly sensible course of action.
I've been seeing a lot of AC posts at -1, often -1 interesting or -1 informative. Generally all these posts have been good, good in the sense that I couldn't imagine modding them down and some I'd mod up. I don't know what is happening but it seems some group has an agenda to mark every AC post as overrated.
I'm glad it's not just me who noticed this - the odd thing though is that I thought that "Overrated" normally still gets listed in the box where it gives the percentage of moderations (along with troll, informative, etc), but in these cases, it's the Starting score which is marked as "-1", and the "Moderation" is marked as "+1" (when it should be 0 if they got marked as overrated, with another person modding them up), with no mention of an overrated mod.
When I first saw this, I wondered if it was possible to have a Karma Penalty (or whatever it's called - when your starting score is lowered) based on IP for anonymous users, but now it's happening a lot...
It's very annoying though, makes it hard to follow a thread unless you view at -1 or 0, which defeats the point of moderation.
I considered this issue, although it's not clear it's any different to my phone company knowing where I go (plus they have my details...)
Personally I'd rather not see degraded versions of images (if this is even being done) just to get the file size down, I'd rather use a better device which doesn't suck at displaying the real images. Typically images are already compressed on the web anyway, so reducing the quality further is going to lead to massive drops in quality, unless your display is some 120x160 monstrosity and you can't tell the difference.
You're on a phone. The web has moved on from the days when it was Best Viewed In 640x480. So there will be images far larger than you can see on your phone - don't tell me you have a phone with 1600x1050 resolution!
Also note that Opera Mini (as opposed to Mobile) is targetted towards low end (i.e., not stupidly expensive) phones - not that that matters, as even on a smart phone resolution, it won't be enough to display many images on the web.
Who doesn't love calling a company and getting "Press 3 for customer service" and going thru ten menus before getting a human who can actually help.
I agree the interface is the problem, but it's great when it works - the most obvious example of automated computerised system is over the Internet. I imagine many people now prefer doing things on a web page, rather than having to phone up and speak to some person.
What baffles me is the ray tracing being introduced first on mobile and not on desktop computers.
My guess would be lower resolutions (and the article says this too). Also mobile devices tend not to have powerful GPUs dedicated for doing 3D graphics the traditional polygon way - it's much easier to compete with software rendering than with hardware.
I'm confused by the "Moore's Law works in favor of Ray-Tracing" bit though - Moore's Law works in favour of any computation. And traditional polygon rasterisation 3D graphics is just as parallelisable as raytracing, and has already been taking advantage of multiprocessing for years on the GPU (e.g., the NVIDIA 8800 has 128 processors).
Nvidia measures performance with the second digit in the card's model. 5600 is 5th generation, 8400 is 8th generation, however since the "600" is higher than the "400", the 5600 is the faster card.
Benchmarks? Just because it's true that the 8600 was similar to the 7600 doesn't mean it's true that all x600 are the same, or that a card with a second higher digit will always outperfom a later generation card with lower digit. Are you seriously suggesting that in all the years since the first NVIDIA chipsets, they haven't improved in performance? That a 4600 will outperform an 8500? Sorry, that's ludicrous.
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/07/05/vga_charts_vii/page4.html#3d_mark_2005 shows how even a 6600 demolishes the FX 5700, let alone a 5600. Then check out http://www23.tomshardware.com/graphics_2007.html?modelx=33&model1=716&model2=722&chart=308 to see the jump from a 6600 to a 7600 (about another factor of 2).
The GMA 950 may not have hardware T&L, but it does support pixel shader 2.0, which should be all Morrowind needs. In any case, I can't imagine that you get very good performance out of that IGP since the Geforce 6150 IGPs in one of my laptops can't even run Morrowind at an acceptable speed. What's your average, 10-15fps tops? Have fun with that...
It gets 100FPS indoors. On large outdoor scenes it drops to about 20-30FPS, but as others have said, that's more than adequate for a roleplaying game, not a fast shooter. So yes, I do have fun with that. And as I said, I know what it's like on a faster card anyway.
I've no idea why the lack of reflections - if it isn't shader model, it may be some other missing feature (unfortunately the Intel chipsets lack a lot - another reason to prefer the NVIDIA laptops).
Not everyone is a gamer interested in the latest games, games where high frame rates are needed and so on - but we still might play an occasional old game.
But not something as old as the GeForce FX 5600.
I don't know if you had a bad experience on that card or what, but seriously - the graphics industry has moved on light years since then.
I don't think not having them is that much of a problem, but I don't see how it actually makes things worse ("a piece of crap" the OP said). I don't have VGA on my laptop which isn't a problem - but the fact that it does have a PS/2 slot also isn't a problem.
And I was just parodying the way that whenever Macs have something done slightly simpler or as standard, even if you can do the same thing on a PC, the Mac's claimed to be better by chanting "It Just Works(TM)!" Strangely this doesn't apply when the situation is reversed.
That includes a game like Morrowind, which even ran poorly on a discrete Geforce 5600 (which could only manage to run it at 800x600 with FPS a lowly 15-30 range).
A 5600? How old is that? How does that suggest a much more recent 8400 wouldn't be able to run it well?
I shudder to think how low you have to reduce details/draw distance and resolution to run Morrowind on your GMA 950 or the GPUs in those laptops.
Not at all, I run at max settings at 1024x768, though I miss a few features like reflections (probably due to older shader model, which isn't an issue on newer cards). And I know how well it works on a faster card, as I have an 8600GT in my desktop. But yes, I'd rather have something better than the GMA for playing games - which is why the NVIDIA laptops are preferred over the Mac.
If a game cannot achieve a minimum of 60fps at 1024x768 then it is thoroughly unplayable unless you like blocky slideshows.
For an FPS or other game where fast action is always needed, yes, but not for other types of games. Unless you think watching a TV is like a blocky slideshow.
But, but ... I'd rather have something that I can just plug straight in - that Just Works.
If I'm dropping $1800 on a laptop, I'm expecting design AND performance at the expense of affordability. For that kind of money, why not get a Mac?
Or the Asus or Sony. Acer aren't the only maker of PC laptops.
Actually the ATI x1270 is a piece of crap and I wouldn't be surprised of the Intel x3100 performed as just as well or possibly better.
The X3100 couldn't even run any of gaming benchmarks in the tests...
It doesn't really matter, you won't be playing games on any of those systems. Even the Nvidia 8400M would have a hard time running most games made within the past few years very well.
That misses the point - yes, they won't play the latest high-performance FPS games and so on, but people might still like to play older games (e.g., I only have the GMA 950 in my laptop, but I can still play a game like Morrowind - however, it runs better with a faster graphics card).
True - although note that the Sony and Asus have the NVIDIA 8400M GS, which according to the benchmarks in the article do even better.