Yeah, and the point of the Firing Squad article was that 8800GT cards (replacing the 8400/8600 at that price point) could be had for nearly the same cost as a 1950Pro, and are DX10 and have 512MB of memory instead of DX9 and 256.
Interesting to see how prices compare - here in the UK, the X1950 Pro is much cheaper (e.g., £160 for 8800GT 512MB, £72 for X1950 Pro 256MB, from MicroDirect). I myself am about to go for the slightly cheaper 8600GT, as I'm not too bothered about playing games at super-high resolutions.
That just reminded me that OpenGL still has yet to provide their answer to DX10 - hopefully still this year, but possibly next year, according to the latest info. On the plus side, OGL3 is supposed to run on any new hardware released after Nov 6, 1996 (it's an API change on current hardware). Still, most new features (e.g. geometry shaders) will still be extensions until mid-next year at this rate - a full year-and-a-half behind Microsoft
I don't understand - extensions is the way that OpenGL does things, so I don't see how it counts as being behind Microsoft until they are included as standard? Or do I misunderstand you?
Let's see you test this. Take your fingers and make nice clear prints on a postcard, then write a death threat to the president on it and send it from your neighborhood post office to the White House. Repeat this action once every month.
But in that case, sending the postcard itself constitutes a crime, in that you're making a threat. I presume he meant the information obtained by the authorities reading a postcard whilst it's sent through the post. A better experiment would be to send it to someone else, detailing your plans.
Maybe they can crack it, but I'm betting they can't.
The UK Government already have this covered, by making it a criminal offence not to hand over your keys. Don't worry, I'm sure the US will catch up soon, as obviously only criminals have something to hide...
and a mobile phone that can browse the web and access e-mail
It's true that most people are only concerned with games and the Internet, but it seems hard to believe that for the latter, people will be happy with a tiny screen, and having to type by pressing on mobile phone keys. It's possible we may see the PC give way to some "Internet appliance" that gives you a keyboard and plugs into a TV. But we're not there yet - we've been hearing of "Internet appliances" and "convergence" for at least 17 years now, and it's still not happened.
Plus, as another commenter pointed out, smartphones at least are still general purpose computers (and even non-smartphones can run Java applications). Perhaps even in future, it'll be possible to plug a phone into a keyboard, mouse and TV for when you're not on the move. Also, note that any "Internet appliance" will need to have at least some general ability to run general programs, as otherwise things like Java won't work.
So no - the PC is here to stay. It might not be the "IBM compatible PC" anymore; it might get smaller (we already have laptops taking over desktops - but they're still PCs); we may switch to running code on virtual machines like Java and.NET rather than native code. But people will still be using computers.
Thanks for the info, but okay, so there exists one program which had bugs on a new OS release. That's not really support for the original claim, and we don't even know if this was a problem in Vista, as opposed to a Firefox bug that simply didn't show up in earlier Windows versions. Nor is there evidence that this is any more of a problem than happens with any other new release of an OS.
at the time of the statement being made it WAS true.
Well yes, it was true, and it isn't true any more.
Now if you REALLY want to count something you have to download off a porn site and run, then put in your password etc etc as equivilant to something which will install because you recieved (note reading not required) an email or went to a website and never clicked a thing then sure... OS X and Windows are the same... you win, enjoy your fantasy world.
You have to jump through hoops to be stupid enough to get a virus on Windows too, but apparentely that's good enough to moan about it. Only if you use broken products like Outlook are you subject to risk of viruses without warning. I've never had a virus on Windows, even though I don't even run a virus checker. Avoiding them is easy if you don't go downloading off porn sites or running obviously suspect programs etc.
The claim that OS X will never get viruses or malware? Really, someone was stupid enough to claim that?
I never said that, but it is a bragging point that OS X doesn't, er, didn't have any viruses.
I don't think you get my point, so I'll type real slow this time. My point was that everytime anything about OS X comes up, such as a virus, malware, or bugs, someone jumps on it and shouts "Aha!", as if that somehow proves that OS X does indeed suck, and their beloved OS (usually Windows) isn't as bad as everyone says.
No - the point is that Windows has viruses, Mac OS has viruses. Maybe Windows has more, but big deal - the point is that in both cases, you should exercise some basic caution, and are not invulnerable. Mac OS X only has a plus point whilst it has no viruses, but as soon as it has some, you have to exercise that caution. I've never experienced a virus on Windows, btw.
And mods should learn what flamebait means - I wasn't the one who started the car analogy (but we're used to anything said not in praise of Apple getting modded down - it's why I always have to browse Apple articles at -1, because it's the only topic on Slashdot where the moderation system simply doesn't work).
It's like me saying "my new car gets 1,000 miles on a gallon of gas, and yours only gets 25", and they you respond "Aha! you admitted it, yours still uses gas, just like mine, you can shut up now, it's no better"
No, it's like claiming your car gets 1,000 miles per gallon, and it turning out it only gets 25, the same as my car. The point is that the claim being made has been proven wrong.
We are used to having many windows open and overlapping, which is, after all, kind of the point of multitasking. I have never understood why Windows pushes so hard to make you fill your screen with one window.
Firstly, it doesn't push you into that, unless you want it. And I would have said the reverse with respect to multitasking. When you have many applications, it's often useful to have the windows of each application grouped in some way. With Windows, this is often done via MDI, where each application's windows are grouped in a master window. AmigaOS on the other hand tends to have separate windows like MacOS, but unlike MacOS can be each grouped on a separate workspace ("screen") if you want.
I suspect that the OS X behaviour was borrowed from classic MacOS in the interest of making it look similar to its namesake. Classic MacOS had poor multitasking, and since you would only have a single application, it didn't matter if the windows were all over the screen, and you wouldn't have to worry about them getting cluttered and confused with other applications' windows.
The image linked to above only shows a single application, so isn't any good at showing whether the classic MacOS / OS X method works well with multitasking.
Guess I'll run out and grab a copy tonight before they re-rate it AO and get it pulled from shelves.
Think yourself lucky;) Let's not forget that here in the UK, even adults aren't legally allowed to buy it - even the censored version was banned by the BBFC.
I looked forward to the day when adults are allowed to choose what they watch, rather than being told what they can watch by other people. But things seem to be getting worse in this respect, not better (possessing certain material not classified by the BBFC may soon be illegal in the UK, thanks to a law currently passing through Parliament - the Government thinks it's a "loophole" that we can get hold of banned material by downloading it, so seeks to put people in prison for viewing a website it disapproves of).
As I understand it, a lot of the BBC's content these days is made by independent production companies and licensed to the BBC.
That's interesting, and a bigger problem that needs to be addressed. I support the licence fee on the basis that it can be seen as a good thing to produce content owned by a corporation that's accountable to the people/Government. If the money's just going to be used to bid for content produced and owned by private companies, then the licence fee should be ditched, so we can pay for what we watch. I don't see why we should be forced to pay so these independent companies can profit.
The BBC don't own, and therefore can't (be seen to) give away, the content.
They own a large amount of content, surely. If all of the BBC material was available for free viewing, that would be a huge amount of content, and I suspect people would then be far less bothered about using DRM on the remaining non-BBC material.
The problem is I suspect that they don't want licence payers to be able to view the content that they've already paid for - they'd rather get them to pay again and again, by selling it to channels like UKTV Gold (where we also have adverts on top of paying for it twice).
And there's the problem - the OP addressed that by saying "placing content protection above equal treatment of fee-paying users was, again, a poor design decision for an organization like the BBC".
I agree with him. I don't want DRM on content that I'm forced to pay for.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I just find it hard to believe there's widespread cases of admins putting typos back in and so on. Possibly there was some reason for this (e.g., sometimes I see people capitalising the words in headings, when Wikipedia style is to use lowercase; or people think they are fixing spellings, when the original is valid British English - obviously I can't comment on what happened here without seeing examples). If you are right OTOH, it would be good to fix up what's going on:)
What a son of a bitch. "I am", says he, "more qualified than you to judge what belongs." Doctorfluffy, kiss my ass, you self-appointed keeper of the One True Way. Your opinion counts for no more than mine or anyone else. I know it's easier to destroy than to create, but I can't imagine bragging about it any more than I'd brag about torturing puppies.
I think I agree with you.
In particular, I can't stand people who talk about "Cruft". It's not even the same thing as notability. I think notability is a necessary policy, but "cruft" is about deleting things because they are deemed only important to a few people. By that reasoning, articles on academic topics such as high level mathematics should get deleted!
It's a shame that people spend so much effort on deleting, when in some cases that effort could be spent searching for evidence of notability (a similar pet hate of mine is the people going on a rampage deleting images that don't have a fair use rationale added - even though the fair use rationale is blatantly satisfied, and it would be just as quick to write out the rationale themselves!)
After quite some time of making many minor contributions - manly fixing typos, fixing references, etc - I stopped contributing about a year ago because I kept seeing my fixes being removed and stub articles I filled in being reverted back to blank.
[citation needed]
Really, I'm curious, can you show us some examples? That sounds like outright vandalism, and ought to be fixed if so.
I agree that getting video games to take advantage of multiple cores isn't as easy as some people seem to think - OTOH, games already are massively parallelised. It's just that the parallelisation has already happened on dedicated hardware - a graphics card. Since the CPU tends not to be the bottleneck, it wouldn't benefit from a faster CPU anyway, whether that's higher GHz or more cores.
But think of all the other things that take up CPU time. That's not things like word processors - it's things like DVD authoring, mp3 encoding, 3D rendering, CAD, scientific applications. All of these things are usually easily parallelised.
It's true that (for now, at least) most home users won't need more than 2 cores most the time - but they also won't need a CPU that's twice as fast most the time.
As it is, one person can nominate a little-read article for speedy deletion, and it will be wiped before anyone in the relevant fan community has had a chance to comment on the deletion page.
Even for articles on my watchlist, sometimes I've not been paying attention for a few days, and end up missing an article being tagged for deletion (speedy or otherwise).
For AfDs, it would help if the review period was longer. It would also be useful if articles on your watchlist that were up for deletion were highlighted on your watchlist page.
Another problem I've had is admins speedy deleting things without any warning (in one case this happened, we got the deletion reviewed, and it then survived the AfD, but it's an annoying hassle).
If you didn't have notability guidelines, everyone would be writing articles about themselves, and then adding links to themselves from truly relevant articles.
True - although these articles could also be deleted on the grounds that they are unverifiable. Are there examples of articles where the information can be verified to be true, but which shouldn't exist on Wikipedia due to lack of notability?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, and the point of the Firing Squad article was that 8800GT cards (replacing the 8400/8600 at that price point) could be had for nearly the same cost as a 1950Pro, and are DX10 and have 512MB of memory instead of DX9 and 256.
Interesting to see how prices compare - here in the UK, the X1950 Pro is much cheaper (e.g., £160 for 8800GT 512MB, £72 for X1950 Pro 256MB, from MicroDirect). I myself am about to go for the slightly cheaper 8600GT, as I'm not too bothered about playing games at super-high resolutions.
That just reminded me that OpenGL still has yet to provide their answer to DX10 - hopefully still this year, but possibly next year, according to the latest info. On the plus side, OGL3 is supposed to run on any new hardware released after Nov 6, 1996 (it's an API change on current hardware). Still, most new features (e.g. geometry shaders) will still be extensions until mid-next year at this rate - a full year-and-a-half behind Microsoft
I don't understand - extensions is the way that OpenGL does things, so I don't see how it counts as being behind Microsoft until they are included as standard? Or do I misunderstand you?
Let's see you test this. Take your fingers and make nice clear prints on a postcard, then write a death threat to the president on it and send it from your neighborhood post office to the White House. Repeat this action once every month.
But in that case, sending the postcard itself constitutes a crime, in that you're making a threat. I presume he meant the information obtained by the authorities reading a postcard whilst it's sent through the post. A better experiment would be to send it to someone else, detailing your plans.
Maybe they can crack it, but I'm betting they can't.
The UK Government already have this covered, by making it a criminal offence not to hand over your keys. Don't worry, I'm sure the US will catch up soon, as obviously only criminals have something to hide...
So put a VGA/DVI/S-Video/somesmallvideoport on the side of the cell phone and hook it to your monitor.
... at which point, how is that not a personal computer?
Presumably you want a keyboard and mouse too
The iPhone is the first portable computing platform that shows the future potential of mobile devices.
Getting off-topic, but smart phones have been around for years.
and a mobile phone that can browse the web and access e-mail
.NET rather than native code. But people will still be using computers.
It's true that most people are only concerned with games and the Internet, but it seems hard to believe that for the latter, people will be happy with a tiny screen, and having to type by pressing on mobile phone keys. It's possible we may see the PC give way to some "Internet appliance" that gives you a keyboard and plugs into a TV. But we're not there yet - we've been hearing of "Internet appliances" and "convergence" for at least 17 years now, and it's still not happened.
Plus, as another commenter pointed out, smartphones at least are still general purpose computers (and even non-smartphones can run Java applications). Perhaps even in future, it'll be possible to plug a phone into a keyboard, mouse and TV for when you're not on the move. Also, note that any "Internet appliance" will need to have at least some general ability to run general programs, as otherwise things like Java won't work.
So no - the PC is here to stay. It might not be the "IBM compatible PC" anymore; it might get smaller (we already have laptops taking over desktops - but they're still PCs); we may switch to running code on virtual machines like Java and
Good good, glad to see it catch up with 1985 era AmigaOS ;)
Thanks for the info, but okay, so there exists one program which had bugs on a new OS release. That's not really support for the original claim, and we don't even know if this was a problem in Vista, as opposed to a Firefox bug that simply didn't show up in earlier Windows versions. Nor is there evidence that this is any more of a problem than happens with any other new release of an OS.
at the time of the statement being made it WAS true.
Well yes, it was true, and it isn't true any more.
Now if you REALLY want to count something you have to download off a porn site and run, then put in your password etc etc as equivilant to something which will install because you recieved (note reading not required) an email or went to a website and never clicked a thing then sure... OS X and Windows are the same... you win, enjoy your fantasy world.
You have to jump through hoops to be stupid enough to get a virus on Windows too, but apparentely that's good enough to moan about it. Only if you use broken products like Outlook are you subject to risk of viruses without warning. I've never had a virus on Windows, even though I don't even run a virus checker. Avoiding them is easy if you don't go downloading off porn sites or running obviously suspect programs etc.
The claim that OS X will never get viruses or malware? Really, someone was stupid enough to claim that?
I never said that, but it is a bragging point that OS X doesn't, er, didn't have any viruses.
I don't think you get my point, so I'll type real slow this time. My point was that everytime anything about OS X comes up, such as a virus, malware, or bugs, someone jumps on it and shouts "Aha!", as if that somehow proves that OS X does indeed suck, and their beloved OS (usually Windows) isn't as bad as everyone says.
No - the point is that Windows has viruses, Mac OS has viruses. Maybe Windows has more, but big deal - the point is that in both cases, you should exercise some basic caution, and are not invulnerable. Mac OS X only has a plus point whilst it has no viruses, but as soon as it has some, you have to exercise that caution. I've never experienced a virus on Windows, btw.
And mods should learn what flamebait means - I wasn't the one who started the car analogy (but we're used to anything said not in praise of Apple getting modded down - it's why I always have to browse Apple articles at -1, because it's the only topic on Slashdot where the moderation system simply doesn't work).
Almost every publisher had to modify their apps in order to make it work properly with Vista.
Really? Examples?
It's like me saying "my new car gets 1,000 miles on a gallon of gas, and yours only gets 25", and they you respond "Aha! you admitted it, yours still uses gas, just like mine, you can shut up now, it's no better"
No, it's like claiming your car gets 1,000 miles per gallon, and it turning out it only gets 25, the same as my car. The point is that the claim being made has been proven wrong.
We are used to having many windows open and overlapping, which is, after all, kind of the point of multitasking. I have never understood why Windows pushes so hard to make you fill your screen with one window.
Firstly, it doesn't push you into that, unless you want it. And I would have said the reverse with respect to multitasking. When you have many applications, it's often useful to have the windows of each application grouped in some way. With Windows, this is often done via MDI, where each application's windows are grouped in a master window. AmigaOS on the other hand tends to have separate windows like MacOS, but unlike MacOS can be each grouped on a separate workspace ("screen") if you want.
I suspect that the OS X behaviour was borrowed from classic MacOS in the interest of making it look similar to its namesake. Classic MacOS had poor multitasking, and since you would only have a single application, it didn't matter if the windows were all over the screen, and you wouldn't have to worry about them getting cluttered and confused with other applications' windows.
The image linked to above only shows a single application, so isn't any good at showing whether the classic MacOS / OS X method works well with multitasking.
Guess I'll run out and grab a copy tonight before they re-rate it AO and get it pulled from shelves.
Think yourself lucky;) Let's not forget that here in the UK, even adults aren't legally allowed to buy it - even the censored version was banned by the BBFC.
I looked forward to the day when adults are allowed to choose what they watch, rather than being told what they can watch by other people. But things seem to be getting worse in this respect, not better (possessing certain material not classified by the BBFC may soon be illegal in the UK, thanks to a law currently passing through Parliament - the Government thinks it's a "loophole" that we can get hold of banned material by downloading it, so seeks to put people in prison for viewing a website it disapproves of).
As I understand it, a lot of the BBC's content these days is made by independent production companies and licensed to the BBC.
That's interesting, and a bigger problem that needs to be addressed. I support the licence fee on the basis that it can be seen as a good thing to produce content owned by a corporation that's accountable to the people/Government. If the money's just going to be used to bid for content produced and owned by private companies, then the licence fee should be ditched, so we can pay for what we watch. I don't see why we should be forced to pay so these independent companies can profit.
The BBC does not hold all rights over all of its programmes
True, but there's still a vast amount of good quality programmes over the years produced by the BBC. It would be great to have that available.
The BBC don't own, and therefore can't (be seen to) give away, the content.
They own a large amount of content, surely. If all of the BBC material was available for free viewing, that would be a huge amount of content, and I suspect people would then be far less bothered about using DRM on the remaining non-BBC material.
The problem is I suspect that they don't want licence payers to be able to view the content that they've already paid for - they'd rather get them to pay again and again, by selling it to channels like UKTV Gold (where we also have adverts on top of paying for it twice).
"Here's the solution with the DRM you require"
And there's the problem - the OP addressed that by saying "placing content protection above equal treatment of fee-paying users was, again, a poor design decision for an organization like the BBC".
I agree with him. I don't want DRM on content that I'm forced to pay for.
If you had a username, it's easy to see your contributions at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/YourUserName
:)
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I just find it hard to believe there's widespread cases of admins putting typos back in and so on. Possibly there was some reason for this (e.g., sometimes I see people capitalising the words in headings, when Wikipedia style is to use lowercase; or people think they are fixing spellings, when the original is valid British English - obviously I can't comment on what happened here without seeing examples). If you are right OTOH, it would be good to fix up what's going on
liberal nanny state
I don't think that word means what you think it means. I agreed with your post until then.
What a son of a bitch. "I am", says he, "more qualified than you to judge what belongs." Doctorfluffy, kiss my ass, you self-appointed keeper of the One True Way. Your opinion counts for no more than mine or anyone else. I know it's easier to destroy than to create, but I can't imagine bragging about it any more than I'd brag about torturing puppies.
I think I agree with you.
In particular, I can't stand people who talk about "Cruft". It's not even the same thing as notability. I think notability is a necessary policy, but "cruft" is about deleting things because they are deemed only important to a few people. By that reasoning, articles on academic topics such as high level mathematics should get deleted!
It's a shame that people spend so much effort on deleting, when in some cases that effort could be spent searching for evidence of notability (a similar pet hate of mine is the people going on a rampage deleting images that don't have a fair use rationale added - even though the fair use rationale is blatantly satisfied, and it would be just as quick to write out the rationale themselves!)
After quite some time of making many minor contributions - manly fixing typos, fixing references, etc - I stopped contributing about a year ago because I kept seeing my fixes being removed and stub articles I filled in being reverted back to blank.
[citation needed]
Really, I'm curious, can you show us some examples? That sounds like outright vandalism, and ought to be fixed if so.
I agree that getting video games to take advantage of multiple cores isn't as easy as some people seem to think - OTOH, games already are massively parallelised. It's just that the parallelisation has already happened on dedicated hardware - a graphics card. Since the CPU tends not to be the bottleneck, it wouldn't benefit from a faster CPU anyway, whether that's higher GHz or more cores.
But think of all the other things that take up CPU time. That's not things like word processors - it's things like DVD authoring, mp3 encoding, 3D rendering, CAD, scientific applications. All of these things are usually easily parallelised.
It's true that (for now, at least) most home users won't need more than 2 cores most the time - but they also won't need a CPU that's twice as fast most the time.
As it is, one person can nominate a little-read article for speedy deletion, and it will be wiped before anyone in the relevant fan community has had a chance to comment on the deletion page.
Even for articles on my watchlist, sometimes I've not been paying attention for a few days, and end up missing an article being tagged for deletion (speedy or otherwise).
For AfDs, it would help if the review period was longer. It would also be useful if articles on your watchlist that were up for deletion were highlighted on your watchlist page.
Another problem I've had is admins speedy deleting things without any warning (in one case this happened, we got the deletion reviewed, and it then survived the AfD, but it's an annoying hassle).
If you didn't have notability guidelines, everyone would be writing articles about themselves, and then adding links to themselves from truly relevant articles.
True - although these articles could also be deleted on the grounds that they are unverifiable. Are there examples of articles where the information can be verified to be true, but which shouldn't exist on Wikipedia due to lack of notability?