It's not "There are only 10 types of people who understand binary." It is "There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't."
I find it hilarious that people think we could have faked the moon landings. I mean, we were in an international space *race*; probably the biggest rivalry in the history of the world. If there were any way in hell those men weren't actually on the moon, the Soviets would have been all over it and shamed us forever.
Some things are too risky to fake... and way too risky to fake multiple times.
The ability to feel sadness, yet no humor. Truly thou hast received the raw end of the Vulcan deal.
Posting facts in response to a joke serves no purpose. Unless... you were trying to build +5 informative karma by posting common knowledge to a thread near the top of the discussion. If that was your intent, *that* is sad.
And, to the AC's (if it's not actually just you): say what you want about the attempt at humor: humor is subjective. It was at least modded +5 funny (for now, anyway) on the merits of wordplay; I don't care if you personally didn't get it or if all your humor has to be scientifically accurate (in which case, you miss out on the enjoyment of a hell of a lot of jokes).
Security FROM the user is fine, until *I* can't turn it off and run the programs that I wrote. And no, I'm not going to spend $50,000 to buy a signed network management package that includes a haphazard partial-implementation of the one feature I actually need.
But there's the rub: if you can turn it off, or bypass it via a click-through warning, most people will - especially when the screensaver site gives them instructions on how to do it.
Linux distributions already sign packages with keys. If you add new sources to Ubuntu, you also have to import the associated keys. How does having a company, instead of me, decide which ones should be trusted provide any value?
If a closed system only provides value to people too stupid to own computers, it provides no value at all: stupid people don't buy the right product for their need anyway. The only way to make sure they buy the right thing is to eliminate all the other choices, and free software with them. That will never fly, because almost every company in the world needs at least one in-house-developed piece of software for some purpose.
As a US citizen, I applaud you. More people need to realize that the Internet is global. Government can handicap its citizens all it wants, but it's not likely to have much of an effect beyond their own borders.
"Vote for stupid laws that put us at a disadvantage. See how your re-election campaigns turn out."
The killswitch would, likely, boost Microsoft's sales. But it would also boost the download stats for Ubuntu and Mandriva by some amount.
There are plenty of people that are getting to a tipping point, but just haven't had any incentive to try the alternatives: People that used keys/cracks because their OEM restore disk won't work now that they've upgraded their hard-drive. People that are getting tired of having to completely re-format their system with the restore disk every time their kids get the latest IE-trojan. People that were in the previously mentioned situation and got a taste of Linux while using Knoppix to back up their data first.
One of the reason's Linux is gaining desktop steam is that Microsoft has already bled off more than a few enthusiasts with their authorization scheme: These are people who want to replace their motherboard every other year without being presented with a blue-screen and Microsoft's solution of completely re-installing the OS (which won't work from the OEM disk, since it's customized for the wrong chipset). These are people that have the legal right to use the OS, and are pissed off that they are being shut out by Microsoft (who knows that most will just fork over more money to buy another copy).
Some might say Linux won't work for "grandma"s. It will. It's perfect for them. You set it up once and they can eBay/eMail with no fear of viruses/trojans. Newer distributions are just as easy as Windows to install. Projects like Wine are making it easier and easier to convert - The one Windows app my parents *had* to have runs flawlessly under Wine.
I hope Microsoft does a great job marketing the 360. Because, every person that buys one loses a good bit of the only major advantage Windows still has as an OS - gaming support.
Does *anyone* do important business over IRC?!?! What kind of "damage" do you think they could do?
I haven't been on IRC in seven or eight years, but the last time I checked it was 99.99% cybering and warez-bots.
Sure: *Maybe* *someone* (who doesn't know you and has never glanced once at your source address) might think you're really the leader of some Linux distro and that your command to announce its disolvement is true. So freaking what? Like you can't fix that with a single post to your web page, and get great publicity in the process?
You act like the prices are really outragous, but this is what we call the "early adopter" cost. I had one of the first CD recorders, years ago (when people were still shocked there even was such a thing):
- $1995 price tag
- Could only record 650MB CD's, and at 2x speed
- Blank CD's started at $20 to $25 each.
- Could not handle rewritables, as there were none.
- No buffer underrun protection (i.e., $20+ coasters)
- The Pinnacle Micro drive I had came with super-beta software,
so you were guaranteed to get one of those pricey
coasters for every dozen disks.
The Blue Ray drive doesn't sound bad at all, in comparison. Expect media price to plummet as soon as there's competition, and expect the drives prices to drop 400% within 3 years.
As a (hobbyist, nowadays) programmer, I myself have been torn when describing something I created as a "script" instead of a program just because of the language/environment. Especially so when the script uses simple but clever manipulation to accomplish things that require dozens and dozens of lines of overhead code to even start to "program" in C, C++, or the like...
Don't get me wrong, I love to program more than anything... but there's something to be said for speed of creation, elegance and ease of maintenance.
I wondered this as well. It might be as simple as buying additional blocks and tubing for the video cards and putting them in a serial loop with the CPU.
Are there any cooling gurus that can hazard a guess as to whether this thing woould actually keep multiple CPU/GPUs cool enough to make it worth it?
This thing is seriously so ugly that I would hide the cooling unit under a desk or something... put it as far away as the hoses/pump allows.
I wouldn't trust a premade water-cooling setup. There's a certain ease-of-mind to putting it together yourself and knowing the parts are all good quality inside.
I wouldn't trust premade quality parts. There's a certain ease-of-mind to forging the copper blocks yourself and knowing the heatsinks aren't full of nitroglycerin.
20 degrees? Close your windows and turn on the air conditioner or something. My home never varies from the thermostat by more than a couple of degrees.
If you don't have air conditioning, then you probably don't live in a climate where it's hot enough for it to matter anyway. I can't recall the last time I saw a home without air conditioning here in Louisiana. People who can't afford air can't afford a 360, nor would any sane individual put a 360 higher on their list of priorities.
I have to go along with the people calling BS on these pics. This fan only appears to cool the main XBox, when the external PSU brick is what would overheat first. If it's not a hoax, then it is at least an extremely ill-conceived idea.
See, why couldn't Microsoft relase the 360 as an "add-on" to the X-Box? Then they could have released their real next next-gen console in a year or two. As to how such an add-on would attach to the system is left as an exercise for the reader.
Either you misunderstood my sarcasm, or you're playing at a whole other level way above my league.
I somehow doubt there are a lot of people that won't buy a 360 just because it doesn't support an older XBox game that they don't already own.
If they want to play that particular game so bad, they could still buy an XBox, instead of an XBox 360. Something tells me there will be a ton of "previously owned" XBox systems at bargain basement prices very soon.
I see a bunch of people here freaking out that most of their games are not on the list, so I wanted to throw some thoughts out:
Is someone going to come into your house and smash your old XBox as soon as you buy the 360? I know, I know: some people might be doing a trade in, where you give them a perfectly good XBox and they give you a pitance.
From Microsoft's perspective, backwards compatibility is not primarily so that you can still play your old games. Backwards compatibility is to give Microsoft a larger set of working titles at launch, where they can still sell a few of those games to people who never owned an XBox.
If a software producer is already releasing a "new" 360 version of your old game, don't expect Microsoft to spend a lot of time right now making the old version compatible - because that does nothing to bring in revenue.
So, if you own unsupported games, keep the old XBox for now. Eventually, Microsoft might have *every* XBox title emulated properly, simply to be able to say they have x-thousand working titles on the 360.
That's exactly what the 360 needs to make it a resounding success: More features that cause people to draw direct comparisons between it and the Sega32x.
Slashdot Mirror
The quote in your sig is wrong.
It's not "There are only 10 types of people who understand binary." It is "There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't."
I doubt that. I grew up watching The Smurfs.
Yes: I've been to Russia. Shut your pie hole.
I find it hilarious that people think we could have faked the moon landings. I mean, we were in an international space *race*; probably the biggest rivalry in the history of the world. If there were any way in hell those men weren't actually on the moon, the Soviets would have been all over it and shamed us forever.
Some things are too risky to fake... and way too risky to fake multiple times.
The ability to feel sadness, yet no humor. Truly thou hast received the raw end of the Vulcan deal.
Posting facts in response to a joke serves no purpose. Unless... you were trying to build +5 informative karma by posting common knowledge to a thread near the top of the discussion. If that was your intent, *that* is sad.
And, to the AC's (if it's not actually just you): say what you want about the attempt at humor: humor is subjective. It was at least modded +5 funny (for now, anyway) on the merits of wordplay; I don't care if you personally didn't get it or if all your humor has to be scientifically accurate (in which case, you miss out on the enjoyment of a hell of a lot of jokes).
>> Next time please try to make a joke that's actually funny and not just juvenile, OK?
I'm sorry. I thought this was Slashdot.
I have to disagree.
Security FROM the user is fine, until *I* can't turn it off and run the programs that I wrote. And no, I'm not going to spend $50,000 to buy a signed network management package that includes a haphazard partial-implementation of the one feature I actually need.
But there's the rub: if you can turn it off, or bypass it via a click-through warning, most people will - especially when the screensaver site gives them instructions on how to do it.
Linux distributions already sign packages with keys. If you add new sources to Ubuntu, you also have to import the associated keys. How does having a company, instead of me, decide which ones should be trusted provide any value?
If a closed system only provides value to people too stupid to own computers, it provides no value at all: stupid people don't buy the right product for their need anyway. The only way to make sure they buy the right thing is to eliminate all the other choices, and free software with them. That will never fly, because almost every company in the world needs at least one in-house-developed piece of software for some purpose.
As a US citizen, I applaud you. More people need to realize that the Internet is global. Government can handicap its citizens all it wants, but it's not likely to have much of an effect beyond their own borders.
"Vote for stupid laws that put us at a disadvantage. See how your re-election campaigns turn out."
Thank god you posted that! I was totally frickin' serious until your tidbit of info came along.
"My God, it's full of SARS!"
Insightful... not.
The killswitch would, likely, boost Microsoft's sales. But it would also boost the download stats for Ubuntu and Mandriva by some amount.
There are plenty of people that are getting to a tipping point, but just haven't had any incentive to try the alternatives: People that used keys/cracks because their OEM restore disk won't work now that they've upgraded their hard-drive. People that are getting tired of having to completely re-format their system with the restore disk every time their kids get the latest IE-trojan. People that were in the previously mentioned situation and got a taste of Linux while using Knoppix to back up their data first.
One of the reason's Linux is gaining desktop steam is that Microsoft has already bled off more than a few enthusiasts with their authorization scheme: These are people who want to replace their motherboard every other year without being presented with a blue-screen and Microsoft's solution of completely re-installing the OS (which won't work from the OEM disk, since it's customized for the wrong chipset). These are people that have the legal right to use the OS, and are pissed off that they are being shut out by Microsoft (who knows that most will just fork over more money to buy another copy).
Some might say Linux won't work for "grandma"s. It will. It's perfect for them. You set it up once and they can eBay/eMail with no fear of viruses/trojans. Newer distributions are just as easy as Windows to install. Projects like Wine are making it easier and easier to convert - The one Windows app my parents *had* to have runs flawlessly under Wine.
I hope Microsoft does a great job marketing the 360. Because, every person that buys one loses a good bit of the only major advantage Windows still has as an OS - gaming support.
Does *anyone* do important business over IRC?!?! What kind of "damage" do you think they could do?
I haven't been on IRC in seven or eight years, but the last time I checked it was 99.99% cybering and warez-bots.
Sure: *Maybe* *someone* (who doesn't know you and has never glanced once at your source address) might think you're really the leader of some Linux distro and that your command to announce its disolvement is true. So freaking what? Like you can't fix that with a single post to your web page, and get great publicity in the process?
-J
"Yeah man, but it's a dry heat!"
You act like the prices are really outragous, but this is what we call the "early adopter" cost. I had one of the first CD recorders, years ago (when people were still shocked there even was such a thing):
- $1995 price tag
- Could only record 650MB CD's, and at 2x speed
- Blank CD's started at $20 to $25 each.
- Could not handle rewritables, as there were none.
- No buffer underrun protection (i.e., $20+ coasters)
- The Pinnacle Micro drive I had came with super-beta software,
so you were guaranteed to get one of those pricey
coasters for every dozen disks.
The Blue Ray drive doesn't sound bad at all, in comparison. Expect media price to plummet as soon as there's competition, and expect the drives prices to drop 400% within 3 years.
Well said.
As a (hobbyist, nowadays) programmer, I myself have been torn when describing something I created as a "script" instead of a program just because of the language/environment. Especially so when the script uses simple but clever manipulation to accomplish things that require dozens and dozens of lines of overhead code to even start to "program" in C, C++, or the like...
Don't get me wrong, I love to program more than anything... but there's something to be said for speed of creation, elegance and ease of maintenance.
-J
I have no idea why, but I absolutely love that - even if it is way OT.
+5 from me, if I could mod atm.
Don't worry about the safety aspects: In the event of a China Syndrome... it's already there.
I wondered this as well. It might be as simple as buying additional blocks and tubing for the video cards and putting them in a serial loop with the CPU.
Are there any cooling gurus that can hazard a guess as to whether this thing woould actually keep multiple CPU/GPUs cool enough to make it worth it?
This thing is seriously so ugly that I would hide the cooling unit under a desk or something... put it as far away as the hoses/pump allows.
I wouldn't trust premade quality parts. There's a certain ease-of-mind to forging the copper blocks yourself and knowing the heatsinks aren't full of nitroglycerin.
20 degrees? Close your windows and turn on the air conditioner or something. My home never varies from the thermostat by more than a couple of degrees.
If you don't have air conditioning, then you probably don't live in a climate where it's hot enough for it to matter anyway. I can't recall the last time I saw a home without air conditioning here in Louisiana. People who can't afford air can't afford a 360, nor would any sane individual put a 360 higher on their list of priorities.
I have to go along with the people calling BS on these pics. This fan only appears to cool the main XBox, when the external PSU brick is what would overheat first. If it's not a hoax, then it is at least an extremely ill-conceived idea.
I think the majority of people that have XBox360s play them indoors.
Either you misunderstood my sarcasm, or you're playing at a whole other level way above my league.
If they want to play that particular game so bad, they could still buy an XBox, instead of an XBox 360. Something tells me there will be a ton of "previously owned" XBox systems at bargain basement prices very soon.
I see a bunch of people here freaking out that most of their games are not on the list, so I wanted to throw some thoughts out:
Is someone going to come into your house and smash your old XBox as soon as you buy the 360? I know, I know: some people might be doing a trade in, where you give them a perfectly good XBox and they give you a pitance.
From Microsoft's perspective, backwards compatibility is not primarily so that you can still play your old games. Backwards compatibility is to give Microsoft a larger set of working titles at launch, where they can still sell a few of those games to people who never owned an XBox.
If a software producer is already releasing a "new" 360 version of your old game, don't expect Microsoft to spend a lot of time right now making the old version compatible - because that does nothing to bring in revenue.
So, if you own unsupported games, keep the old XBox for now. Eventually, Microsoft might have *every* XBox title emulated properly, simply to be able to say they have x-thousand working titles on the 360.
Wait... that can't be right....