>>Come on, it's not 1997 any more, everyone with a brain doing markup-based UI design knows that color, margin, font family, and border are all style properties, not tag attributes.
You can set all those properties with a style using XAML. Just because it uses different syntax than you would like doesn't make it wrong.
>>Instead of quiety accepting the misbehavior, I would like Microsoft to make these sorts of problems apparent in some manner to make the user aware of their software and demand better behavoir from developers of the software they purchase, and also to shame software developers into behaving well. Continually accommodating intentionally bad software seems to be a bad long-term strategy. Any comment on that?
What do you honestly think would happen here? You upgrade to Vista and application X stops working? Are you going to blame the author of application X or Microsoft?
>>So the question is, how much of a value is the X360 if I really couldn't care less about the Live Marketplace?
You could play your 360 without ever using the market place and you would have a great experience - it's not a core part of any of the games, though from what I understand some games will have optional expansions that can be purchased online. This began even on the classic xbox - Project Gotham Racing 2 had new cars and tracks that you could buy a year after its release for $5.
>> 2. I wouldn't put my money in that thing in a million years.
Out of curiousity, what frightens you about it? Do you buy stuff at online stores? What's different about the xbox?
>>I mean really, for all people call them "C++ without the cruft" missing templates was "C++ without the basic, usable functionality".
Except that you don't need templates in java/c# in the same way that you do in c++, due to a type system that actually worked.
>>The fact that the whole development world jumped over to these JIT platforms
JIT existed before C# and java; don't try to make it some kind of dirty word, since it doesn't have anything to do with the presence or absence of templates in a language.
>>before that kind of basic expressiveness was present in the language
Try writing a cross platform windowed, networked application in c++. That is java's "basic expressiveness."
You can actually turn off the intellisense on every character in VS 2005 if you want, while still retaining the old behavior(complete after a . for a member reference).
Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> c#(or any language) -> Intellisense -> Show completion list after a character is typed
If I had mod points you'd get +1 missed the point. I did not claim they invented network gaming. I said their console gaming network has features which exceed all those of all other gaming networks(such as voice chat), and spans a much larger subscriber base and variety of games. Discounting the work that has been done there simply because you played doom in 1996 is rather silly. Let's compare the experience shall we? Did you have voice chat in doom? No. Could you log on to the internet and see if your friends were online within the game? No. Could you request a matchmaking service to play a game against others who were online? No. Could you see if your friends were online playing Duke3D, and send them a request to play Doom? No. Was it easy enough that your grandma could use it? No. Could you track all-time high scores and demos within the game? No.
If there's no innovation, why is the live experience head and shoulders above any other online system?
>>There is a pint of beer sitting on my desk waiting for the first person who can name a reasonably successful product or technology - past or present - which Microsoft pioneered.
XBox live. Totally blows away the other console online networks, and even does quite well compared to gamespy and other online pc networks, due to cross-game friends lists, announcing online presence, and integrated voice chat.
Uhm, from the page:
I would love an opportunity to speak with you in detail about your interest in a career at Microsoft, along with your experience, background and qualifications.
Doesn't sound like a job offer to me, simply a request for an initial screening interview.
>>Now someone tell me how Microsoft prices Windows XP $20 cheaper than the same PC with a free operating system.
It's not Microsoft, it's Dell. They're offering a limited time $50 savings on their main line of desktops(which carry windows) but not on the alternative OS ones.
Why? They probably actually sell the mainline systems in some sort of volume, and thus make them the target of rebates, savings, marketing, etc, while ignoring their other systems.
Something must be broken with his computer. Word 2003 takes 2 seconds to open for the first time on my computer. Granted, it's a little faster(athlon 64 3200+), but it's not 15x faster.
Also, the objectivity of the article astounds me: "It has been over a year since I installed MS Office, but I know it had to be restarted and that it takes up 450MB (according to Windows)."
So why even mention the install time of OO.org if you're not going to bother measuring the install time of MS office?
Between the highly suspect startup and closing times, the lack of scientific rigor, and the blatant anti-MS bias("I don't like Microsoft"), this is not a comparison - just a thinly-veiled anti MS troll
Actally, if you had bothered to read TFA you'd have noticed that the information comes from a survey conducted by researchers at UCLA, which polls freshmen at universities across the country: The survey
That might make sense, expect
1) MS doesn't charge for beta products
2) How does stock price have any influence on profit?
3) In fact, if the stock price goes up, profit goes down, due to stock-based compensation(such as options)?
In other words, it doesn't make sense at all.
The title of the article is "Get 6 tips for buying an MP3 player with flash memory."
The windows media devices page mentions a number of hard drive based solutions.
But it's way more fun to ignorantly bash Microsoft! Woo hoo!
>>Of course Nvidia's card is going to do better. Doom3 has a specialized codepath for nvidia hardware, while the ATI card does not. >>If a codepath were written for the X800 series of cards, I'm sure the scores would be closer to each other.
The ATI card doesn't have a special codepath. NVidia exposes their advanced functionality through the NV_vertex_program2 and GL_NV_fragment_program2 extensions. ATI doesn't have any special extensions, they use the GL_ARB_vertex_shader and GL_ARB_fragment_shader extensions(which NVidia also supports, at a lesser speed).
Looking at the table of contents, I'd mostly agree with your assessment, however...
>> C++ doesn't have massive problems with stack overflows the way C does, but trades it off for big problems in heap overflows (due to leaving all those function pointers around on the stack).
What? Are you talking about vtables of stack allocated objects? Because aside from that I don't see how a typical c++ program would have more function pointers on the stack than a typical C program. Furthermore, what does that have to do with heap overflows?
Yes there is. You still get a net performance gain, even if the cache can't keep up. Furthermore, when the kernel of your program fits in cache, you'll go zipping along quite merrily.
You are the one who completely missed the point. The new intel chips *are* faster than previous models. The p4 is the strongest 32bit chip in the market today, because intel has the ability to aggresively rev the clockspeed.
If you want to talk about itanium, realize that itanium was something of a false start, whereas itanium 2 is actually quite a good chip. If you look at spec scores, not only does it scale reasonably well, it also destroys those 64 bit risc chips you're so proud of.
I don't understand why you have this romantic notion that we shouldn't alter IPC. Modern processor design is all about tradeoffs, and Intel traded off some IPC for more clockspeed. It was a net gain.
In particular: "Unlike a game developer, Future Mark has a motive to make their application run poorly on one IHV's hardware becasuse that IHV refuses to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to be part of their beta program."
3dMark isn't a standard. It's a business, who makes money by charging hardware developers LOTS of money to be included in their "BETA" program.
In real life(TM), manufacturer-specific optimizations matter. Many games will look better and run faster if they use vendor-specific OpenGL extensions, for instance.
For a gamer looking to buy the fastest card to run his favorite game, he should look for benchmarks on that game. FutureMark is trying to make a business by predicting behavior of games that aren't out. Well, either the game you want to play is out or it isn't. If it's out, buy your card based on benchmarks for it. If it's not, wait until it's out before you spend your money.
There is no guarantee that 3dMark is a good predictor of DirectX 9 performance.
Slashdot Mirror
A few notes:
1) Moore's law predicts number of transistors(chip size) rather than performance.
2) Don't forget to account for inflation.
Nice summary, but don't forget that .NET apps can NGEN themselves when they install, which avoids the dogging it up step, since they won't have to JIT.
>>Come on, it's not 1997 any more, everyone with a brain doing markup-based UI design knows that color, margin, font family, and border are all style properties, not tag attributes.
You can set all those properties with a style using XAML. Just because it uses different syntax than you would like doesn't make it wrong.
>>Instead of quiety accepting the misbehavior, I would like Microsoft to make these sorts of problems apparent in some manner to make the user aware of their software and demand better behavoir from developers of the software they purchase, and also to shame software developers into behaving well. Continually accommodating intentionally bad software seems to be a bad long-term strategy. Any comment on that? What do you honestly think would happen here? You upgrade to Vista and application X stops working? Are you going to blame the author of application X or Microsoft?
>>So the question is, how much of a value is the X360 if I really couldn't care less about the Live Marketplace? You could play your 360 without ever using the market place and you would have a great experience - it's not a core part of any of the games, though from what I understand some games will have optional expansions that can be purchased online. This began even on the classic xbox - Project Gotham Racing 2 had new cars and tracks that you could buy a year after its release for $5. >> 2. I wouldn't put my money in that thing in a million years. Out of curiousity, what frightens you about it? Do you buy stuff at online stores? What's different about the xbox?
>>I mean really, for all people call them "C++ without the cruft" missing templates was "C++ without the basic, usable functionality". Except that you don't need templates in java/c# in the same way that you do in c++, due to a type system that actually worked. >>The fact that the whole development world jumped over to these JIT platforms JIT existed before C# and java; don't try to make it some kind of dirty word, since it doesn't have anything to do with the presence or absence of templates in a language. >>before that kind of basic expressiveness was present in the language Try writing a cross platform windowed, networked application in c++. That is java's "basic expressiveness."
You can actually turn off the intellisense on every character in VS 2005 if you want, while still retaining the old behavior(complete after a . for a member reference). Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> c#(or any language) -> Intellisense -> Show completion list after a character is typed
Or he could use VS.NET 2005 and have edit and continue for VB:5 /242853.aspx
http://blogs.msdn.com/somasegar/archive/2004/10/1
Considering you didn't even get the guy's name right, I have to doubt if anything else you said is correct.
.NET Framework Security
There's a book by Brian LaMacchia:
If I had mod points you'd get +1 missed the point. I did not claim they invented network gaming. I said their console gaming network has features which exceed all those of all other gaming networks(such as voice chat), and spans a much larger subscriber base and variety of games. Discounting the work that has been done there simply because you played doom in 1996 is rather silly. Let's compare the experience shall we? Did you have voice chat in doom? No. Could you log on to the internet and see if your friends were online within the game? No. Could you request a matchmaking service to play a game against others who were online? No. Could you see if your friends were online playing Duke3D, and send them a request to play Doom? No. Was it easy enough that your grandma could use it? No. Could you track all-time high scores and demos within the game? No.
If there's no innovation, why is the live experience head and shoulders above any other online system?
>>There is a pint of beer sitting on my desk waiting for the first person who can name a reasonably successful product or technology - past or present - which Microsoft pioneered. XBox live. Totally blows away the other console online networks, and even does quite well compared to gamespy and other online pc networks, due to cross-game friends lists, announcing online presence, and integrated voice chat.
Uhm, from the page:
I would love an opportunity to speak with you in detail about your interest in a career at Microsoft, along with your experience, background and qualifications.
Doesn't sound like a job offer to me, simply a request for an initial screening interview.
>>Now someone tell me how Microsoft prices Windows XP $20 cheaper than the same PC with a free operating system.
It's not Microsoft, it's Dell. They're offering a limited time $50 savings on their main line of desktops(which carry windows) but not on the alternative OS ones.
Why? They probably actually sell the mainline systems in some sort of volume, and thus make them the target of rebates, savings, marketing, etc, while ignoring their other systems.
Something must be broken with his computer. Word 2003 takes 2 seconds to open for the first time on my computer. Granted, it's a little faster(athlon 64 3200+), but it's not 15x faster.
Also, the objectivity of the article astounds me:
"It has been over a year since I installed MS Office, but I know it had to be restarted and that it takes up 450MB (according to Windows)."
So why even mention the install time of OO.org if you're not going to bother measuring the install time of MS office?
Between the highly suspect startup and closing times, the lack of scientific rigor, and the blatant anti-MS bias("I don't like Microsoft"), this is not a comparison - just a thinly-veiled anti MS troll
Ever heard of auto_ptr?
Actally, if you had bothered to read TFA you'd have noticed that the information comes from a survey conducted by researchers at UCLA, which polls freshmen at universities across the country:
The survey
So who's part of the clueless masses now?
That might make sense, expect 1) MS doesn't charge for beta products 2) How does stock price have any influence on profit? 3) In fact, if the stock price goes up, profit goes down, due to stock-based compensation(such as options)? In other words, it doesn't make sense at all.
The title of the article is "Get 6 tips for buying an MP3 player with flash memory." The windows media devices page mentions a number of hard drive based solutions. But it's way more fun to ignorantly bash Microsoft! Woo hoo!
>>So this will just be like the last time Rambus had their hooks into a product, it will die a very expensive and slow death.
Oh, you mean like the PS2? Yep, that sure died a very expensive and slow death...not!
>>Of course Nvidia's card is going to do better. Doom3 has a specialized codepath for nvidia hardware, while the ATI card does not.
>>If a codepath were written for the X800 series of cards, I'm sure the scores would be closer to each other.
The ATI card doesn't have a special codepath. NVidia exposes their advanced functionality through the NV_vertex_program2 and GL_NV_fragment_program2 extensions. ATI doesn't have any special extensions, they use the GL_ARB_vertex_shader and GL_ARB_fragment_shader extensions(which NVidia also supports, at a lesser speed).
OpenGL extension registry
Looking at the table of contents, I'd mostly agree with your assessment, however...
>> C++ doesn't have massive problems with stack overflows the way C does, but trades it off for big problems in heap overflows (due to leaving all those function pointers around on the stack).
What?
Are you talking about vtables of stack allocated objects? Because aside from that I don't see how a typical c++ program would have more function pointers on the stack than a typical C program. Furthermore, what does that have to do with heap overflows?
Yes there is. You still get a net performance gain, even if the cache can't keep up. Furthermore, when the kernel of your program fits in cache, you'll go zipping along quite merrily.
You are the one who completely missed the point. The new intel chips *are* faster than previous models. The p4 is the strongest 32bit chip in the market today, because intel has the ability to aggresively rev the clockspeed. If you want to talk about itanium, realize that itanium was something of a false start, whereas itanium 2 is actually quite a good chip. If you look at spec scores, not only does it scale reasonably well, it also destroys those 64 bit risc chips you're so proud of. I don't understand why you have this romantic notion that we shouldn't alter IPC. Modern processor design is all about tradeoffs, and Intel traded off some IPC for more clockspeed. It was a net gain.
Did you RTFA?
In particular:
"Unlike a game developer, Future Mark has a motive to make their application run poorly on one IHV's hardware becasuse that IHV refuses to pay them hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to be part of their beta program."
3dMark isn't a standard. It's a business, who makes money by charging hardware developers LOTS of money to be included in their "BETA" program. In real life(TM), manufacturer-specific optimizations matter. Many games will look better and run faster if they use vendor-specific OpenGL extensions, for instance. For a gamer looking to buy the fastest card to run his favorite game, he should look for benchmarks on that game. FutureMark is trying to make a business by predicting behavior of games that aren't out. Well, either the game you want to play is out or it isn't. If it's out, buy your card based on benchmarks for it. If it's not, wait until it's out before you spend your money. There is no guarantee that 3dMark is a good predictor of DirectX 9 performance.