You think Microsoft has no clout in the UK? Sure, they've been sued and actually penalized over there, but 100 Million is not really that much to a company worth countless billions. Bill Gates alone could wipe his ass with 100 Million and still have enough left to do it 520 more times.
You think you're so high and mighty but you have nothing to be proud of in the UK. Your government is just as fucked up as ours.
Perhaps. Little shit lawsuits haven't stopped the RIAA. Microsoft has *much* more money then them, and they could possibly sue 100,000 people and not even sweat it. They could sue every Linux vendor, every medium and large enterprise using it, and do it all in your home country.
Most of the suits would be bullshit, but they could do some serious damage.
Microsoft has done some sordid things in their time, but I do fear the potential of Microsoft's wrath much more then anything else. With that much money on hand, there's no limit.
No, you can't call the "N" versions different. If you did, you'd have twelve Vistas because they said "There will be UK versions without Media Player" which aren't on that list.
And you can't really call X64 versions different either, because each Vista will also have a 64-bit capability. So, then you'd have 24 Vista versions.
You also can't call "Pro Corp" any different then Pro, because it's just the licensing scheme. You can be sure that Windows Vista Ulimate, Business, and Enterprise will all be available in VLK forms; leaving you with 27 Vistas. But then don't forget the X64 and N versions, so that's 33 Vistas.
There's four versions of Windows XP. Pro, Home, MCE and Tablet. In all honestly, Tablet is just Pro with a keyboard applet and MCE has a little media player add-on. Any other deviations of these are not changing any of the functionality of the systems - Windows XP Pro is the same feature set whether it's VLK, X64, N or whatever. N doesn't have media player on the CD but you can install it for free.
At first, I thought digg was pretty cool. But after a few weeks of sorting through all the links to single paragraph blogs, the 3/4 of all topics are about how amazingly awesome Apple and Macs are, the braindead comments system and the childish posts.. it got old fast.
Slashdot has it's flaws but I still enjoy it more then the alternatives.
No, you're not really correct here. Xen doesn't really emulate any hardware; it basically allows guests access to your hardware on a special time-share system that the guest OS needs to support. This is why Xen is very fast compared to systems like VMWare - Although ESX server is very efficient with memory and network support. Kernel changes are necessary to the guest VM, but they are generally straight forward modifications.
The problem is, you can't change the NT kernel, so no Windows.
However, with hardware virtualization help from the new Intel chips and very soon the AMD chips will allow guests to safely access hardware without modification.
For now, I'm still a VMWare ESX user/admin and I believe I'll continue to be one until Xen matures a little bit more and guest OS support is more seamless. I see great potential in Xen though, especially because of the multi-vendor support and development cooperation.
Hey what's with the stick up your ass? I never said it was a bad idea. In fact, although obviously I'm not as much of a fanboy as you are, from what I've heard about the idea it sounds like a really good one and I'm glad there's people out there that are willing to take the risks and spend the money to try it.
That's what I was thinking, too. 62,000 miles is something like 10 times the diameter of the earth, isn't it? Not to mention how goofy it would look.
But who knows, maybe they do mean 62,000 miles? I thought the elevator's main purpose was to get things in and out of just the atmosphere, as to avoid all the problems with expensive and dangerous rocket launches and dangerous re-entries.
The lasers in Blu-Ray players will likely be very small, very precise devices that would not translate directly into a laser projector system like this.
RMS might seem like a zealot, but if you actually hear what he says in speeches and read what he writes, you'd see that you probably agree with just about everything he says. He's not a madman.
He's been one of the key figures in FOSS and has done quite a lot for the community. While it might seem as though he's unresonable after reading all these slashdot posts calling him a zealot, it's just not the case.
While I'd love to study up and get the PMP, I don't think I'm ready for it yet. Since I have only an Associates degree, I'll have to do 7,500 hours of project management. I'll have to look into the specifics on how you are supposed to qualify that number - I'm pretty sure you can't just say "Yea, I got that. Check."
There really should be a beginner certification =) Something that says you've trained on the basics of project management and you're serious about it. You know, like an MCSE certification - they're easy to get and you learn the very basics at the same time. Then, after some work experience, you go for the PMP.
My friend has a similar problem with his work in surveying. In order to get your "stamp" you have to put in years of job experience, and it doesn't pay very well (read: crap) until you get the engineer's certification and the stamp. After three years of working in the field, he's every bit as good as the engineer that merely looks at his work and stamps it while collecting his $180K/yr. I'm not saying it should be easy, but sheesh.
I'll check out the book at the bookstore and see if it's too far over my head at this point to make any use of it. I don't think so - if you learn how things should work from the beginning, the 7,500 hours will be worth a whole lot more.
If you have any other suggestions for PM literature, shoot me an e-mail at jjamieson at futurefoundations dotcom.
I agree. Project Management is something I'm hoping to focus on in my career - I'm hoping my current employer will send me to some PM classes to get me started. I've worked with some PM's that are quite good, and I've learned a lot from them. I tend to incorporate what I've learned into my daily work and it is effective even on a very small scale. I like a pragmatic approach to things; it's just less stressful when you have all your bases covered.
You've omitted probably the most important clues to help us out: How much you make now, how much of a paycut it would be, how many bills you have.. etc..
I say, if your current job is good, stay until you find one that pays more. For me, money comes first. That's why we work. Obviously, I won't work at someplace that sucks, but I'll never take a paycut to leave. You can find work that you like, and have it pay more at the same time. The good thing is that you're working now, so you can take your time finding that great job.
Well, sorta. There's a difference between a manager that knows the field, and one that does not. While I can not expect my boss to know all that I do, and perhaps I wouldn't really want him to, I do like my boss to know the basics of the technology so he/she can appreciate the magnitude of the work, timetables, impacts, etc.
Being an IT manager is not so different then being a project manager. Almost everything done is a project in some way or another, besides the normal daily admin tasks that don't generally fill the day. If you have an IT-illiterate boss that is capable of effectively running projects and trusting his "experts" (employees) it can work. Unfortunately, I've met very few effective project managers, so to balance it out, it helps to have a boss that knows the technology - even a little.
The author of this review/article/whatever puts in a LOT of unfounded, incorrect, or just plain stupid claims about each controller.
The article is hack and I'm embarrassed that it's on the front page of Slashdot. I can see it being on Digg, since Digg is just a bunch of blog crap all the time.. but come on.
There's lots of legacy concepts on computers today that might be confusing to a layperson but make perfect sense with a little bit of explination. The "Floppy Disk" that's not floppy at all (3.5" floppies) comes to mind.
In the "real world" applications also don't run at 3FPS, which is what some parts of 3DMark give you even on fast machines. Does that make the benchmark useless too?
Your argument here is that you personally don't believe glxgears is an accurate measurement of overall performance. I agree with you. But it's still a benchmark. GLXGears does tell you how fast glxgears runs: on your hardware, with your software. I can't control what other people do with glxgears data, and I don't personally tout glxgears scores as a measurement of how good my system is. I won't say it's not a benchmark just to stop these people, though.
It's still useful. If I boot up a linux box and run GLXGears, and I see 40FPS, I know that A) The system is severely mis-configured, B) There's no GL accelerator, C) Maybe I'm using it over the network. If I run glxgears and see 3000FPS on my workstation, I know I'm using the OSS driver, not the nVidia one where I'd see 30000.
I'm not confusing them at all - there's no real difference between the two. You certainly notice low frame rates in video games more then a video, however - and it's not just motion blur. Some of it is response time and the fact that you control it, some of it is the fact that you sit very close to a screen when you play video games as a general rule. Another factor is that video games are still not life-like enough to pass as "real" and smoother video helps offset the lack of realism in graphics by adding more immersion.
Next time you watch a movie, pay attention to pans across landscapes and such. Usually a DVD is sourced from 24FPS film, so it applies here too. You can usually easily see the jerkiness of the video when it pans. Then, watch some panning video from a home camcorder which usually records at 60 interlaced frames a second. The difference is immediately noticeable.
My point is, the human eye is perfectly capable of perceiving well over 25FPS. 24FPS is the standard for movie film, and it's really the minimum you can use and still have it seem fluid enough. Any lower and it's distracting. Any higher and it looks strange because we're so conditioned to 24/25FPS. That's why home video tends to look like exactly that (cheesy) - it's a much higher frame rate.
Video games exasperate the issue, and frame rates mean even more. 60FPS is smooth enough for most people that it seems perfectly fluid, which is why the industry has pretty much standardized on it as a base-line.
It certainly is a benchmark - anything that's used to compare is a benchmark.
Obviously, glxgears isn't a comprehensive benchmark as it only utilizes a small set of GL functions - but everyone uses it to see if their video drivers are performing up to where they would expect basic functions to run.
That's entirely untrue. You can easily spot the difference in smoothness between video captured in 24FPS and video captured in 60iFPS.
Try playing a video game at 25FPS, and then at 60FPS. Can't tell the difference? If you can't, you've got to be full of it.
Maybe your brain can't absorb all the information on each frame past a certian point, but *anyone* sure as hell can see the difference when it comes to smoothness and fluidness of movement.
And a note about GLXGears - the higher the number, the better chances of getting more complex objects on the screen at a decent frame rate. If you haven't noticed, games are a little more detailed then GLXGears. So while you can spin a few objects at 2000FPS, you might only see 20FPS in the latest game title. But if you get 10,000FPS in GLXGears, you'll probably see much higher performance in the game. It's a BENCHMARK. Seriously.
And what does this mean: "a lot of resources are wasted computing and rendering"? Explain to me what else you want the computer doing when you're running a graphics benchmark? I want mine running the damned benchmark, what else? It's not like everyone's machines are attempting to cure cancer and we should let that happen at all costs. I buy fast computers because I want to use all of the speed, not have an abundance unused in the background.
I'm all about letting the consumers decide the way the market will go. For things like clothes, cars, food and toys for the kids, this seems to work exceptionally well. People can choose to buy whatever clothes, cars or toys they want because all are readily available across the country.
For something like a utility or high speed internet, it fails exceptionally so. I can't simply choose to use a different cable company, or internet provider. There's nothing else available. I can't choose a different electric company, or water company. These have all been chosen FOR me. So to call that a free market, and let these companies charge whatever they want, provide whatever service they want, and there's nothing I can do about it? Sorry, but that needs to be regulated. There is no free market when consumers only have one choice in product.
Still the year of low-def self-built PVR's...
on
The Year of the HTPC
·
· Score: 1
Because of the greed of the cable and satellite providers, we won't be building our own MythTV boxes to support HDTV anytime soon, if ever.
There's no cablecard capture cards yet. While Microsoft has made some deal with CableLabs to get CableCard support in MCE sometime this year perhaps, it's all encrypted with proprietary encryption systems and will require an HDCP-enabled HDMI display. It will be more useless then an HDTV PVR from the cable company. Basically, you'll be able to add more storage if you want. That's just about all the difference. It effectively eliminates Open Source from the equation.
Which is crap, because you just know the cable and satellite companies are using Linux systems for lots of stuff. But they won't let other people use it for *their* stuff.
I know that they want some level of copy protection, but this HDCP and cable/sat encryption secure-path bullshit seriously hinders the proliferation of HDTV and the average consumer's ability to fairly use content.
Slashdot Mirror
You think Microsoft has no clout in the UK? Sure, they've been sued and actually penalized over there, but 100 Million is not really that much to a company worth countless billions. Bill Gates alone could wipe his ass with 100 Million and still have enough left to do it 520 more times.
You think you're so high and mighty but you have nothing to be proud of in the UK. Your government is just as fucked up as ours.
Perhaps. Little shit lawsuits haven't stopped the RIAA. Microsoft has *much* more money then them, and they could possibly sue 100,000 people and not even sweat it. They could sue every Linux vendor, every medium and large enterprise using it, and do it all in your home country.
Most of the suits would be bullshit, but they could do some serious damage.
Microsoft has done some sordid things in their time, but I do fear the potential of Microsoft's wrath much more then anything else. With that much money on hand, there's no limit.
Wait, which one of them doesn't do Searching, Web News, Web Mail, Online Mapping, and Image Searching?
Because if Word Processors are the only thing they compete on, something else must have changed.
No, you can't call the "N" versions different. If you did, you'd have twelve Vistas because they said "There will be UK versions without Media Player" which aren't on that list.
And you can't really call X64 versions different either, because each Vista will also have a 64-bit capability. So, then you'd have 24 Vista versions.
You also can't call "Pro Corp" any different then Pro, because it's just the licensing scheme. You can be sure that Windows Vista Ulimate, Business, and Enterprise will all be available in VLK forms; leaving you with 27 Vistas. But then don't forget the X64 and N versions, so that's 33 Vistas.
There's four versions of Windows XP. Pro, Home, MCE and Tablet. In all honestly, Tablet is just Pro with a keyboard applet and MCE has a little media player add-on. Any other deviations of these are not changing any of the functionality of the systems - Windows XP Pro is the same feature set whether it's VLK, X64, N or whatever. N doesn't have media player on the CD but you can install it for free.
You might as well just use a Turion =) They're quick, cheap, use hardly any power, and can use nearly any Socket 754 board.
At first, I thought digg was pretty cool. But after a few weeks of sorting through all the links to single paragraph blogs, the 3/4 of all topics are about how amazingly awesome Apple and Macs are, the braindead comments system and the childish posts.. it got old fast.
Slashdot has it's flaws but I still enjoy it more then the alternatives.
No, you're not really correct here. Xen doesn't really emulate any hardware; it basically allows guests access to your hardware on a special time-share system that the guest OS needs to support. This is why Xen is very fast compared to systems like VMWare - Although ESX server is very efficient with memory and network support. Kernel changes are necessary to the guest VM, but they are generally straight forward modifications.
The problem is, you can't change the NT kernel, so no Windows.
However, with hardware virtualization help from the new Intel chips and very soon the AMD chips will allow guests to safely access hardware without modification.
For now, I'm still a VMWare ESX user/admin and I believe I'll continue to be one until Xen matures a little bit more and guest OS support is more seamless. I see great potential in Xen though, especially because of the multi-vendor support and development cooperation.
Hey what's with the stick up your ass? I never said it was a bad idea. In fact, although obviously I'm not as much of a fanboy as you are, from what I've heard about the idea it sounds like a really good one and I'm glad there's people out there that are willing to take the risks and spend the money to try it.
That's what I was thinking, too. 62,000 miles is something like 10 times the diameter of the earth, isn't it? Not to mention how goofy it would look.
But who knows, maybe they do mean 62,000 miles? I thought the elevator's main purpose was to get things in and out of just the atmosphere, as to avoid all the problems with expensive and dangerous rocket launches and dangerous re-entries.
The lasers in Blu-Ray players will likely be very small, very precise devices that would not translate directly into a laser projector system like this.
If you say "mum" one more fucking time I'll fucking kill you.
RMS might seem like a zealot, but if you actually hear what he says in speeches and read what he writes, you'd see that you probably agree with just about everything he says. He's not a madman.
He's been one of the key figures in FOSS and has done quite a lot for the community. While it might seem as though he's unresonable after reading all these slashdot posts calling him a zealot, it's just not the case.
While I'd love to study up and get the PMP, I don't think I'm ready for it yet. Since I have only an Associates degree, I'll have to do 7,500 hours of project management. I'll have to look into the specifics on how you are supposed to qualify that number - I'm pretty sure you can't just say "Yea, I got that. Check."
There really should be a beginner certification =) Something that says you've trained on the basics of project management and you're serious about it. You know, like an MCSE certification - they're easy to get and you learn the very basics at the same time. Then, after some work experience, you go for the PMP.
My friend has a similar problem with his work in surveying. In order to get your "stamp" you have to put in years of job experience, and it doesn't pay very well (read: crap) until you get the engineer's certification and the stamp. After three years of working in the field, he's every bit as good as the engineer that merely looks at his work and stamps it while collecting his $180K/yr. I'm not saying it should be easy, but sheesh.
I'll check out the book at the bookstore and see if it's too far over my head at this point to make any use of it. I don't think so - if you learn how things should work from the beginning, the 7,500 hours will be worth a whole lot more.
If you have any other suggestions for PM literature, shoot me an e-mail at jjamieson at futurefoundations dotcom.
Thanks!
I agree. Project Management is something I'm hoping to focus on in my career - I'm hoping my current employer will send me to some PM classes to get me started. I've worked with some PM's that are quite good, and I've learned a lot from them. I tend to incorporate what I've learned into my daily work and it is effective even on a very small scale. I like a pragmatic approach to things; it's just less stressful when you have all your bases covered.
You've omitted probably the most important clues to help us out: How much you make now, how much of a paycut it would be, how many bills you have.. etc..
I say, if your current job is good, stay until you find one that pays more. For me, money comes first. That's why we work. Obviously, I won't work at someplace that sucks, but I'll never take a paycut to leave. You can find work that you like, and have it pay more at the same time. The good thing is that you're working now, so you can take your time finding that great job.
ur kunfuz1ng br41n d4m4g3 w/ kultur d3m4g3
Well, sorta. There's a difference between a manager that knows the field, and one that does not. While I can not expect my boss to know all that I do, and perhaps I wouldn't really want him to, I do like my boss to know the basics of the technology so he/she can appreciate the magnitude of the work, timetables, impacts, etc.
Being an IT manager is not so different then being a project manager. Almost everything done is a project in some way or another, besides the normal daily admin tasks that don't generally fill the day. If you have an IT-illiterate boss that is capable of effectively running projects and trusting his "experts" (employees) it can work. Unfortunately, I've met very few effective project managers, so to balance it out, it helps to have a boss that knows the technology - even a little.
The author of this review/article/whatever puts in a LOT of unfounded, incorrect, or just plain stupid claims about each controller.
The article is hack and I'm embarrassed that it's on the front page of Slashdot. I can see it being on Digg, since Digg is just a bunch of blog crap all the time.. but come on.
There's lots of legacy concepts on computers today that might be confusing to a layperson but make perfect sense with a little bit of explination. The "Floppy Disk" that's not floppy at all (3.5" floppies) comes to mind.
In the "real world" applications also don't run at 3FPS, which is what some parts of 3DMark give you even on fast machines. Does that make the benchmark useless too?
Your argument here is that you personally don't believe glxgears is an accurate measurement of overall performance. I agree with you. But it's still a benchmark. GLXGears does tell you how fast glxgears runs: on your hardware, with your software. I can't control what other people do with glxgears data, and I don't personally tout glxgears scores as a measurement of how good my system is. I won't say it's not a benchmark just to stop these people, though.
It's still useful. If I boot up a linux box and run GLXGears, and I see 40FPS, I know that A) The system is severely mis-configured, B) There's no GL accelerator, C) Maybe I'm using it over the network. If I run glxgears and see 3000FPS on my workstation, I know I'm using the OSS driver, not the nVidia one where I'd see 30000.
I'm not confusing them at all - there's no real difference between the two. You certainly notice low frame rates in video games more then a video, however - and it's not just motion blur. Some of it is response time and the fact that you control it, some of it is the fact that you sit very close to a screen when you play video games as a general rule. Another factor is that video games are still not life-like enough to pass as "real" and smoother video helps offset the lack of realism in graphics by adding more immersion.
Next time you watch a movie, pay attention to pans across landscapes and such. Usually a DVD is sourced from 24FPS film, so it applies here too. You can usually easily see the jerkiness of the video when it pans. Then, watch some panning video from a home camcorder which usually records at 60 interlaced frames a second. The difference is immediately noticeable.
My point is, the human eye is perfectly capable of perceiving well over 25FPS. 24FPS is the standard for movie film, and it's really the minimum you can use and still have it seem fluid enough. Any lower and it's distracting. Any higher and it looks strange because we're so conditioned to 24/25FPS. That's why home video tends to look like exactly that (cheesy) - it's a much higher frame rate.
Video games exasperate the issue, and frame rates mean even more. 60FPS is smooth enough for most people that it seems perfectly fluid, which is why the industry has pretty much standardized on it as a base-line.
It certainly is a benchmark - anything that's used to compare is a benchmark.
Obviously, glxgears isn't a comprehensive benchmark as it only utilizes a small set of GL functions - but everyone uses it to see if their video drivers are performing up to where they would expect basic functions to run.
That's entirely untrue. You can easily spot the difference in smoothness between video captured in 24FPS and video captured in 60iFPS.
Try playing a video game at 25FPS, and then at 60FPS. Can't tell the difference? If you can't, you've got to be full of it.
Maybe your brain can't absorb all the information on each frame past a certian point, but *anyone* sure as hell can see the difference when it comes to smoothness and fluidness of movement.
And a note about GLXGears - the higher the number, the better chances of getting more complex objects on the screen at a decent frame rate. If you haven't noticed, games are a little more detailed then GLXGears. So while you can spin a few objects at 2000FPS, you might only see 20FPS in the latest game title. But if you get 10,000FPS in GLXGears, you'll probably see much higher performance in the game. It's a BENCHMARK. Seriously.
And what does this mean: "a lot of resources are wasted computing and rendering"? Explain to me what else you want the computer doing when you're running a graphics benchmark? I want mine running the damned benchmark, what else? It's not like everyone's machines are attempting to cure cancer and we should let that happen at all costs. I buy fast computers because I want to use all of the speed, not have an abundance unused in the background.
I'm all about letting the consumers decide the way the market will go. For things like clothes, cars, food and toys for the kids, this seems to work exceptionally well. People can choose to buy whatever clothes, cars or toys they want because all are readily available across the country.
For something like a utility or high speed internet, it fails exceptionally so. I can't simply choose to use a different cable company, or internet provider. There's nothing else available. I can't choose a different electric company, or water company. These have all been chosen FOR me. So to call that a free market, and let these companies charge whatever they want, provide whatever service they want, and there's nothing I can do about it? Sorry, but that needs to be regulated. There is no free market when consumers only have one choice in product.
Because of the greed of the cable and satellite providers, we won't be building our own MythTV boxes to support HDTV anytime soon, if ever.
There's no cablecard capture cards yet. While Microsoft has made some deal with CableLabs to get CableCard support in MCE sometime this year perhaps, it's all encrypted with proprietary encryption systems and will require an HDCP-enabled HDMI display. It will be more useless then an HDTV PVR from the cable company. Basically, you'll be able to add more storage if you want. That's just about all the difference. It effectively eliminates Open Source from the equation.
Which is crap, because you just know the cable and satellite companies are using Linux systems for lots of stuff. But they won't let other people use it for *their* stuff.
I know that they want some level of copy protection, but this HDCP and cable/sat encryption secure-path bullshit seriously hinders the proliferation of HDTV and the average consumer's ability to fairly use content.