Agreed, and I think Real *has* made some big steps recently. I tried RealPlayer 10 for Linux a couple of weeks ago, after avoiding Real like the plague since 1999 or so. And you know what? Its actually pretty good. Very simple and straightforward, no offensive behavior. Heck, if it supported all the media codecs, I'd use it over MPlayer any day.
However, I tried the Windows version and wasn't quite as impressed. Interface wasn't bad, bit of a memory hog, and it left some small process running even when the player wasn't that I couldn't immediately figure out how to turn off. Still, nowhere near as bad as it was, and certainly competitive with WMP and iTunes.
Depends whether they can see the dog. I had a dachshund growing up who barked like she was a dog 5 times her size. Scared the crap out of people until they saw her. Even then, she'd fight anyone she didn't like. I had no illusions about her winning though.
Although, NVidia's been pushing that line about not being allowed to release specs for at least 3 years now. So DX9 doesn't have anything to do with it from their point of view. And the R300 is really where ATI all of a sudden caught up to and passed NVidia in the benchmarks... so my guess is once ATI got on top they decided not to risk giving anything away that might help the competition catch up. Whether thats a valid concern on their part is another question entirely.
Well sure... if you've got a pre-8500 Radeon, thats great. For anything more recent you'll get zero acceleration (2D or 3D) with the XFree/Xorg drivers. Which is not to say that you get great acceleration with ATI's driver, but you get something.
Unionization didn't stop em from replacing most of the electric meter readers in Massachusetts with automation. Of course, the meter readers here are just part of the lineman's union, and it seems like the linemen are the only ones who get any real attention.
Anyway, automation of utility meters is rarely a total conversion. There are always a few meters that *can't* be read wirelessly, and wired systems are expensive. This is especially true in big cities, where the meters are quite often in the basements of big buildings surrounded by all sorts of wiring, metal, and concrete. Tough to get a WiFi signal in there.
> I use something like Open Office Writer or AbiWord and I immediately notice all the things they can't do that Word can.
While I don't doubt that Word does a lot of things the others don't, I do wonder if some of the features you think are missing are part of the same discoverability problem you're discussing wrt Word. Certainly going back and forth between Word and OOWriter, I'm always having trouble finding the features I use simply because they're not in similar places or because they're named differently.
> A variety of compression codecs sure makes me think we're going to have options...
Yeah, maybe... you know all the content providers will just pick one and use it though. And naturally, it'll be whichever is most painful to view outside of the Windows world, i.e. the one with crazy DRM.
Bah, I'm sure its just a couple more buttons you can map to whatever you want in imwheel. Besides, how exactly would you implement cross-platform horizontal scrolling in hardware? The regular scroll wheel requires software support too...
I haven't tried it, but I bet you can just copy the cstrike directory from a steam-installed half-life to a regular half-life directory and it'll probably run. It works for Natural Selection anyway.
Sure, steam's great in your situation. But for everyone who actually bought Half-Life back in the day, steam makes no sense. In fact, its a huge pain in the ass because it makes you download all this stuff you already have just so you can continue to play the games you already could play, *and* it forces itself to be the gatekeeper for all those games. Not to mention that steam forces you to authenticate even for LAN games. *That* doesn't go over well at LAN parties. And RAM intensive or not, steam is slooowww. I could be ingame with 3-5 kills in the time it takes steam to get to a serverlist.
Also I'm tremendously bitter because somebody registered my valid CD key with steam before I did. And no, I have no intention of buying another copy. And I'm certainly not buying any new games that use steam.
My friend had the same sort of issue. We never actually figured out what he had installed that Doom3 was objecting to (he's got a lot of crap on his computer). The solution? No-cd crack from GameCopyWorld. Will *I* be buying Doom3 based on what I had to help him through? Hell no! Its a shame, because it looks like a good game too.
Well of course it did. People seem to forget that Win98 runs few-to-no services by default. Heck, it doesn't *have* many to run. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is netbios, and I'm not even sure that its turned on in a default 98 install.
XP on the other hand ships with everything and the kitchen sink accepting remote connections. So its no surprise that there are dozens of worms running around the net that can exploit an unpatched box.
This is not to say that Windows 98 is a safe OS to run. Its not. But you have to actually use the OS in order to break it, whereas XP will do all the work for you.
Word to that. I was watching NBC's Olympic sailing coverage today. They only went in depth on the race the US team placed in, and even that took all of 15 minutes. And then they had some pointless interview with the skipper, without sound for some reason, and then just a quick glossover of the rest of the races that day. Oh, and they made sure to show an Australian boat fouling a US boat at the windward mark.
I enjoyed watching it despite NBC's terrible coverage, but as somebody who sails I obviously wanted to see much much more. And I wish they'd shove the rah-rah-go-US slant and just show the freaking race.
Worst... horror movie... ever. I knew it was going to be terrible. I mean, read the title. But my friend insisted on renting it. Oh my god... First of all, there were essentially no zombies in the movie. Or rather, there were a few, but pretty much all they did was crawl out of ditches and stand in the highway while vampires driving cars ran them down. Looking back, I'm still not sure which of the main characters were human and which were vampires. The plot at no point made any amount of sense, with characters being introduced for seemingly no reason, hanging around for 5 minutes never to be seen afterward.
On the plus side, there was a vampire-lesbian-sex scene. Even that made no sense though, it just kind of happened.
At the end (warning: spoiler alert;) ), the zombies finally show up and eat everybody. No explaination, no buildup, they're just all of a sudden there.
The movie was thoroughly terrible in every way. If I ever meet the director, I'm going to punch him in the mouth for wasting 80 minutes of my life.
Thats usually only a problem because said application uses some random version of some random library that not every distro will have. Windows has exactly the same problem. How do they get around it? All the dlls you might need get included in the installer. You can do the same for your Linux app if you want. A lot of projects don't because they don't want to bother, but there's nothing stopping them. The OS architecture is not at fault here.
The addendum I would add to that is that there *have* been a few bad cases in Linux history that wouldn't have happened on Windows. Mostly things like glibc incompatibilites, but you don't see that often anymore.
I dunno, everytime I see somebody having huge problems with their piece-of-crap HP with an Athlon in it, I think maybe AMD is better off trying to fly under the consumer radar. I mean, if I'm Joe User and I'm aware that my crappy Best Buy PC has an AMD in it, I'm that much more likely to buy Intel next time.
Funny thing about unemployment numbers... Once you're no longer collecting unemployment benefits from the Gov't they pretty much stop counting you. Oh, and those benefits don't last much longer than a year or two. AND unemployment doesn't take into account what sort of work you're doing versus what sort you were doing. So if I lose my (hypothetical) $75k job and end up working at Home Depot, well, I'm not unemployed anymore am I?
Yeah, they're great when it snows. And when it rains. Lots of fun on the freeway too. Plus your boss will just love it when you show up to work dripping with sweat.
This misses the point though. What enhanced support are you going to provide for those chipsets? They don't have an EAX equivalent. The best they have is, well, EAX. No sir, Creative cornered this market when they litigated A3D into oblivion 4 years ago.
Pfft. Unless you can play Halo with a keyboard/mouse on your xbox (and I've never seen it done), its not the LAN experience. Console parties are great and all, but sometimes I want to play a FPS, or a RTS, or some crazy mod that no game company would ever publish. For these things, you *need* a PC.
My 1999 Dell is still chugging along fine. My 1997 Gateway is toast though. On the other hand, my 1995 Gateway is still in running order. Funny how anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything.
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Agreed, and I think Real *has* made some big steps recently. I tried RealPlayer 10 for Linux a couple of weeks ago, after avoiding Real like the plague since 1999 or so. And you know what? Its actually pretty good. Very simple and straightforward, no offensive behavior. Heck, if it supported all the media codecs, I'd use it over MPlayer any day.
However, I tried the Windows version and wasn't quite as impressed. Interface wasn't bad, bit of a memory hog, and it left some small process running even when the player wasn't that I couldn't immediately figure out how to turn off. Still, nowhere near as bad as it was, and certainly competitive with WMP and iTunes.
Depends whether they can see the dog. I had a dachshund growing up who barked like she was a dog 5 times her size. Scared the crap out of people until they saw her. Even then, she'd fight anyone she didn't like. I had no illusions about her winning though.
Although, NVidia's been pushing that line about not being allowed to release specs for at least 3 years now. So DX9 doesn't have anything to do with it from their point of view. And the R300 is really where ATI all of a sudden caught up to and passed NVidia in the benchmarks... so my guess is once ATI got on top they decided not to risk giving anything away that might help the competition catch up. Whether thats a valid concern on their part is another question entirely.
Well sure... if you've got a pre-8500 Radeon, thats great. For anything more recent you'll get zero acceleration (2D or 3D) with the XFree/Xorg drivers. Which is not to say that you get great acceleration with ATI's driver, but you get something.
Unionization didn't stop em from replacing most of the electric meter readers in Massachusetts with automation. Of course, the meter readers here are just part of the lineman's union, and it seems like the linemen are the only ones who get any real attention.
Anyway, automation of utility meters is rarely a total conversion. There are always a few meters that *can't* be read wirelessly, and wired systems are expensive. This is especially true in big cities, where the meters are quite often in the basements of big buildings surrounded by all sorts of wiring, metal, and concrete. Tough to get a WiFi signal in there.
> I use something like Open Office Writer or AbiWord and I immediately notice all the things they can't do that Word can.
While I don't doubt that Word does a lot of things the others don't, I do wonder if some of the features you think are missing are part of the same discoverability problem you're discussing wrt Word. Certainly going back and forth between Word and OOWriter, I'm always having trouble finding the features I use simply because they're not in similar places or because they're named differently.
> A variety of compression codecs sure makes me think we're going to have options...
Yeah, maybe... you know all the content providers will just pick one and use it though. And naturally, it'll be whichever is most painful to view outside of the Windows world, i.e. the one with crazy DRM.
Bah, I'm sure its just a couple more buttons you can map to whatever you want in imwheel. Besides, how exactly would you implement cross-platform horizontal scrolling in hardware? The regular scroll wheel requires software support too...
Ah, but lots of stupid people buy $2000 HPs. They'll get suckered into an iPod for sure.
I haven't tried it, but I bet you can just copy the cstrike directory from a steam-installed half-life to a regular half-life directory and it'll probably run. It works for Natural Selection anyway.
Sure, steam's great in your situation. But for everyone who actually bought Half-Life back in the day, steam makes no sense. In fact, its a huge pain in the ass because it makes you download all this stuff you already have just so you can continue to play the games you already could play, *and* it forces itself to be the gatekeeper for all those games. Not to mention that steam forces you to authenticate even for LAN games. *That* doesn't go over well at LAN parties. And RAM intensive or not, steam is slooowww. I could be ingame with 3-5 kills in the time it takes steam to get to a serverlist.
Also I'm tremendously bitter because somebody registered my valid CD key with steam before I did. And no, I have no intention of buying another copy. And I'm certainly not buying any new games that use steam.
My friend had the same sort of issue. We never actually figured out what he had installed that Doom3 was objecting to (he's got a lot of crap on his computer). The solution? No-cd crack from GameCopyWorld. Will *I* be buying Doom3 based on what I had to help him through? Hell no! Its a shame, because it looks like a good game too.
Well of course it did. People seem to forget that Win98 runs few-to-no services by default. Heck, it doesn't *have* many to run. The only one I can think of off the top of my head is netbios, and I'm not even sure that its turned on in a default 98 install.
XP on the other hand ships with everything and the kitchen sink accepting remote connections. So its no surprise that there are dozens of worms running around the net that can exploit an unpatched box.
This is not to say that Windows 98 is a safe OS to run. Its not. But you have to actually use the OS in order to break it, whereas XP will do all the work for you.
Word to that. I was watching NBC's Olympic sailing coverage today. They only went in depth on the race the US team placed in, and even that took all of 15 minutes. And then they had some pointless interview with the skipper, without sound for some reason, and then just a quick glossover of the rest of the races that day. Oh, and they made sure to show an Australian boat fouling a US boat at the windward mark.
I enjoyed watching it despite NBC's terrible coverage, but as somebody who sails I obviously wanted to see much much more. And I wish they'd shove the rah-rah-go-US slant and just show the freaking race.
Worst... horror movie... ever. I knew it was going to be terrible. I mean, read the title. But my friend insisted on renting it. Oh my god... First of all, there were essentially no zombies in the movie. Or rather, there were a few, but pretty much all they did was crawl out of ditches and stand in the highway while vampires driving cars ran them down. Looking back, I'm still not sure which of the main characters were human and which were vampires. The plot at no point made any amount of sense, with characters being introduced for seemingly no reason, hanging around for 5 minutes never to be seen afterward.
On the plus side, there was a vampire-lesbian-sex scene. Even that made no sense though, it just kind of happened.
At the end (warning: spoiler alert ;) ), the zombies finally show up and eat everybody. No explaination, no buildup, they're just all of a sudden there.
The movie was thoroughly terrible in every way. If I ever meet the director, I'm going to punch him in the mouth for wasting 80 minutes of my life.
Bah.
Thats usually only a problem because said application uses some random version of some random library that not every distro will have. Windows has exactly the same problem. How do they get around it? All the dlls you might need get included in the installer. You can do the same for your Linux app if you want. A lot of projects don't because they don't want to bother, but there's nothing stopping them. The OS architecture is not at fault here.
The addendum I would add to that is that there *have* been a few bad cases in Linux history that wouldn't have happened on Windows. Mostly things like glibc incompatibilites, but you don't see that often anymore.
Don't forget:
-OpenSSH and GPG support terrorism.
-Free Software hurts the economy by destroying important American programming jobs. Outsourcing is a red herring.
-blah blah family values blah blah blah won't somebody please think of the children?!
I dunno, everytime I see somebody having huge problems with their piece-of-crap HP with an Athlon in it, I think maybe AMD is better off trying to fly under the consumer radar. I mean, if I'm Joe User and I'm aware that my crappy Best Buy PC has an AMD in it, I'm that much more likely to buy Intel next time.
Funny thing about unemployment numbers... Once you're no longer collecting unemployment benefits from the Gov't they pretty much stop counting you. Oh, and those benefits don't last much longer than a year or two. AND unemployment doesn't take into account what sort of work you're doing versus what sort you were doing. So if I lose my (hypothetical) $75k job and end up working at Home Depot, well, I'm not unemployed anymore am I?
Actually I'm pretty sure ucc-bin has an option to extract UMODs, even in Linux. Damned if I can remember what the switch is right now...
Yeah, they're great when it snows. And when it rains. Lots of fun on the freeway too. Plus your boss will just love it when you show up to work dripping with sweat.
No legal obligation, sure... but whatever happened to ethical obligation?
This misses the point though. What enhanced support are you going to provide for those chipsets? They don't have an EAX equivalent. The best they have is, well, EAX. No sir, Creative cornered this market when they litigated A3D into oblivion 4 years ago.
Pfft. Unless you can play Halo with a keyboard/mouse on your xbox (and I've never seen it done), its not the LAN experience. Console parties are great and all, but sometimes I want to play a FPS, or a RTS, or some crazy mod that no game company would ever publish. For these things, you *need* a PC.
My 1999 Dell is still chugging along fine. My 1997 Gateway is toast though. On the other hand, my 1995 Gateway is still in running order. Funny how anecdotal evidence doesn't prove anything.