MS Word 97 will open almost as fast as it takes you to double click the icon, even without the office startup. At least, on any particular machine I've ever used. Office 97-2000 seems roughly comparable to OO.org. On the other hand, OO on my machine takes about 5 seconds to throw up only the splash screen.
I actually prefer AbiWord myself, it's faster for me.
You know what's funny, I didn't even really want to buy a house, it was something I almost was forced into (for reasons I won't go into here), so it not like I did it to prove how much more mature I am than people on Slashdot or something. But after I got it, the effect was undeniable, I've grown more in the last year than I ever would have thought was possible.
I actually like video games, and I now enjoy collecting systems and carts, and sometimes even playing them. It seems kind of like how my parents' generation collected records from their youth, or coca cola memorabilia, a nostalgia thing. But man, how much FPS can you play before you either get bored and do something else, or want something better? I guess for some people, its a real lot of FPS. And frankly, what's worse is that a lot of the time they play a game and talk about how much it sucks, pretty much negating the entertainment argument.
Well, I can't explain it any better than my parents couldn't explain it to me. One day you'll know it too, and won't be able to explain it either.
I was fully expecting to get moderated down, and I did. But mark my words, one day nearly every one of you will be sitting somewhere with a pained expression, drinking tea and talking about the weather. And it won't be because you were expected to or forced to. Something doesn't have to be explainable for it to be completely, incontrovertibly true.
I don't think you sound immature just because you play video games. By the way, I do volunteer, admittedly not 4 hours a day.
Everybody keeps attacking the quote in the negative, what should they be doing instead? Well, there's only about a million things they could be doing that they shouldn't be bored of by now. I don't know what makes something mature or not. Maybe you can tell me why you are over the drinking all the time, now that you are older. Seriously, can you try?
well, first of all, I don't live where you do. my house payment costs less than 1200 a month, so there you go. However, I was making more than one point here. One, many people choose to live in a condo because it's less work. Two, more people than ever are forced into those kinds of conditions because of the housing market. However, around here that is not the case.
But the effect is the same. My maturity shot through the roof when I got a house. You don't get a house, that's one less growth opportunity, but I'm not insinuating that everyone who lives in an apartment isn't mature. There are plenty of others, like having a child, etc.
I know people who don't own a house because they told me, they don't want to mow grass. That's a pretty low threshold. That's what I'm talking about. It's just an example.
This is so true. I've noticed how many of my friends (I'm 27) took so long to get moved out of their parents houses. Even then, they live like bachelor slobs in Condos, not even a real house. Everyhting seems set up to help people not develop maturity or responsibility.
I know this will probably get me modded down, but I really can't stand being around some of my peers and having to put up with their fascination with X-Box. I mean holy shit, spending 4 hours a day playing video games is something a high-schooler does.
I have seen more and more adults whose maturity is regressing or already low that are sufficiently old that you can't blame it on the last 20 years of upbringing. American society seems to be making everyone less mature, regardless of age.
These groups repeatedly have been talking about how bovine growth hormone (rBGH) used to increase milk production results in milk giving people cancer. I keep trying to find the actual research that they refer to, but coninuously every link just links back to another link, all referring to each other, or on reports that themselves refer to other stories. So far I have found exactly ONE actual, scientific study that supports their assertion, and several that dispute it. They claim that FDA studies are biased. I have no way to evauluate these claims. Monsanto tried to get a report blaming rBGH for cancer prevented from broadcast on television, but this doesn't mean the report was actually truthful. The report's sources seemed to be other reports, not actual studies that I could see.
What assurance can you give me that these people are not spewing bullshit? I have found very little actual scientific evidence to back up their claims, just a giant reporting echo chamber.
I could be wrong, but I don't think it's an unreasonable request. I've done more looking around for actual evidence than most people will. Make it easy for me, otherwise I just have to assume these people are cranks.
A seven year old is more sophisticated watching his movies than George Lucas could muster while actually engaged in writing them. But then, some of us suspected as much, having been exposed to Howard the Duck.
Just what they did to the Dreamcast with the PS2...The PS2 gonna be able to render Toy Story in realtime. This is Sony's Modus Operandi.
I've never forgotten that Sony is an intruder in this market (of course MS is too...) I wish I had my Sega and Nintendo back. The way these guys do business just makes me feel dirty.
I've been running multiple video cards in Windows and Linux for several years now. My experience has been the following:
1) 3D across video cards does not work well. I assume this is because DirectX has to map to a virtual framebuffer before rendering to the screen. Dragging 3D apps across screens (on different video cards) causes slowdown. 2) Some apps have to be specially programmed to use 3D across multiple cards. Particularly true with games or anything that is going to change screen resolutions on you. 3) Configuration can be a cast iron BITCH. Particularly on Linux. For example, the proprietary ATI radeon drivers give you unresolved symbol errors when trying to use Xinerama across multiple ATI cards. In Windows, the drivers' bugginess seems to double once you have multiple cards.
Your mileage may vary. As a matter of fact, this ask slashdot question is going to be a godsend for me, because just this day I decided I was going to sell my two Radeon cards and try to find a single card that would support triple monitor for EXACTLY the reasons I listed. Configuration and use of multiple cards has ranged from merely acceptable to gun-in-mouth torturous for me over the years.
I think you're right there. Regardless of whether or not his machines are intentionally flawed, he knows good and well his machines are flawed. He'd have had to know his statements would cause something like this.
I'd just rather see his ass nailed to the wall over how fucking terrible his voting machines are, which is a crime IMO even if it wasn't intentional fixing, which I admit is a very real possibility.
I think China, like most countries, always had censorship, and the lack of censorship is the exception. Even in the USA, where our country was founded with the first member of the bill of rights dedicated to freedom of speech, today we have less censorship than when our founding fathers were alive.
The trick over the years has been teaching people to demand they _not_ be censored. The internet was too big for China to handle at first, so now they are trying to cope and censor it as much as everything else in their society. However, perhaps momentary lapses of government control of media are helping people there to see what they are missing. I hope. I have a great fondness for China and it's people, and I wish they could be more free.
I want to thank you for your car analogy. I've found it hard in the past to explain to some people in ways that they "get" why I'm so concerned about the erosion of rights, even on a small scale. The camel's nose under the tent just doesn't work as well as pointing out that no one wants people messing with their car, so why would I let someone mess with my rights until they were gone.
To the contrary, it's well within his rights to support whatever candidate he wants. What they SHOULD be doing, is going out of their way to make their voting machines VERIFIABLE. If they were, no one could cast aspersions on his choice for political candidates.
If you're going to assert things that are at best misleading, expect to be called on it. No one would be arguing with you if he'd said "I intend to exploit my voting machines to ensure Ohio's electoral votes are delivered to GWB." He didn't say that. He was exercising his rights as an American citizen.
He has the right to free speech, which means he has the right to support whatever candidate he wants. He has the right to make campaign contributions and he has the right to be involved in the political process just as much as any other american.
There is no fucking impropriety in the head of a voting machine company exercising his rights as a citizen. What makes this such a mess is that his voting machines appear to be pieces of shit that are easy to tamper with. THAT is the impropriety.
If his machines were good and auditable, anyone who made the argument you people are making would just sound like an asshole to most people, but the argument is surviving based on the fact that his machines do suck. So at best, YOUR post is splitting hairs unless someone proves he intentionally made his voting machines tamperable, or intentionally vote fixed via his machines.
Maybe it got modded as flamebait because the insinuation that a campaign contribution is some sort of proof of intentional vote fixing is kinda...flamebait.
"Xlr8yourmac provides an account of a mere single processor Pentium 4 running at 3.6GHz outperforming a dual processor G5 running at 2.7GHz:"
This was an account of an individual claiming to have a development kit, running benchmarks. When he was talking about the 4-cpu pentium 4 (which, as you have stated does not exist) he was referring to the machine at the keynote presentation.
I don't necessarily think it's that easy to blame him, for two reasons: firstly, OS X on Intel was a giant surprise, who is to say that a 4-cpu system was not possible on their own custom motherboard? There have been SMP motherboards that would work with non-SMP CPUs. It was false information, but it would have been well within the realm of possibility. Besides, "Pentium 4" means whatever Intel wants it to mean.
Secondly, if he can be blamed for getting information from a mac rumor site, he's not any less of an asshat than any other mac fanatic he rails against. It WAS a MACINTOSH rumor site, if it's full of shit, it's just proving his point. The pot's calling the kettle black, but the kettle is still black.
The tubes were, however, the exact size specified in a particularly old (1950's), and unclassified set of documents on Uranium enrichment. They weren't totally unsuitable, just not very good. Weather coating can be removed.
I'm not saying he was getting anywhere on his program, but one can definitely make the case that the tubes were bought for this purpose because a) they matched a document on Uranium enrichment that it is very likely Saddam's scientists would have sought, and b) dual-use materials are the best way to get supplies for weapons development if you're under scrutiny.
Well, it's been adopted as an English word, and often in English we don't adopt the foreign conjugations along with the word itself. Or, we do it wrong like "virii". Which brings up an interesting point. Adopted foreign words often don't mean the exact same thing. Otaku is a terrible appellation in Japan, but Anime fans here in the USA wear it as a badge of honor. It's become a new word in English.
Personally, I would rather use "otaku" as plural as well, but there's no rule.
I visited Tokyo and Akihabara in 1993. I have to say that it was one of the coolest places I have ever seen. Shops oozing with electronics and games. I went for two reasons: Laserdiscs and Super Famicom games. Games were often marked down to 15-40% of retail a few months after release. I was used to a trickle of Anime in the USA on Laserdisc, but in Akihabara, there were stores that only carried anime on laserdisc, isles full. It was pretty amazing.
I have a friend in Japan right now, but he won't go there because he says it's too nerdy. I don't know if it got worse in 12 years, or I got better.
Because of derision by blindly ignorant platform partisans, you're saying you've become trained to be blindly ignorant platform partisans. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
All you people who said it was stupid and/or infeasible for Apple to do this, what are you thinking...right...now.
I was about to sell my PC rig, if OS X will run on it, I'm totally going for it. AMD Athlon XP, gig of RAM with three 19" monitors...running OS X. I'm so there.
They could get extra colors by using a software trick from the Amiga, "Hold and Modify", where they would change palette values in the middle of an horizontal blanking interval. However, that eats up CPU that could be used for important game logic. It should have been possible on just the Sega Genesis. You can do a similar trick on the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance to boost colors, but it eats the crap out of your battery.
Only one game ever used 256 colors. I do not know if it is implemented in software or hardware. I suspect software.
Point being, I don't think they actually changed their video hardware at all, which was completely stupid. FMV games looked grainy as crap, and 128 colors was still terrible. By that time the SNES was already out, and even with a slower CPU and lower video resolution, Sega CD games generally looked pretty terrible compared to SNES.
It was a robot add-on peripheral for the original NES that was total junk. I've read that even in product tests, kids were saying things like "this sucks!", but an exec's reputation was riding on the product, so they greenlighted it anyway. It failed as expected.
Slashdot Mirror
MS Word 97 will open almost as fast as it takes you to double click the icon, even without the office startup. At least, on any particular machine I've ever used. Office 97-2000 seems roughly comparable to OO.org. On the other hand, OO on my machine takes about 5 seconds to throw up only the splash screen. I actually prefer AbiWord myself, it's faster for me.
You know what's funny, I didn't even really want to buy a house, it was something I almost was forced into (for reasons I won't go into here), so it not like I did it to prove how much more mature I am than people on Slashdot or something. But after I got it, the effect was undeniable, I've grown more in the last year than I ever would have thought was possible.
I actually like video games, and I now enjoy collecting systems and carts, and sometimes even playing them. It seems kind of like how my parents' generation collected records from their youth, or coca cola memorabilia, a nostalgia thing. But man, how much FPS can you play before you either get bored and do something else, or want something better? I guess for some people, its a real lot of FPS. And frankly, what's worse is that a lot of the time they play a game and talk about how much it sucks, pretty much negating the entertainment argument.
Well, I can't explain it any better than my parents couldn't explain it to me. One day you'll know it too, and won't be able to explain it either.
I was fully expecting to get moderated down, and I did. But mark my words, one day nearly every one of you will be sitting somewhere with a pained expression, drinking tea and talking about the weather. And it won't be because you were expected to or forced to. Something doesn't have to be explainable for it to be completely, incontrovertibly true.
I don't think you sound immature just because you play video games. By the way, I do volunteer, admittedly not 4 hours a day.
Everybody keeps attacking the quote in the negative, what should they be doing instead? Well, there's only about a million things they could be doing that they shouldn't be bored of by now. I don't know what makes something mature or not. Maybe you can tell me why you are over the drinking all the time, now that you are older. Seriously, can you try?
well, first of all, I don't live where you do. my house payment costs less than 1200 a month, so there you go. However, I was making more than one point here. One, many people choose to live in a condo because it's less work. Two, more people than ever are forced into those kinds of conditions because of the housing market. However, around here that is not the case.
But the effect is the same. My maturity shot through the roof when I got a house. You don't get a house, that's one less growth opportunity, but I'm not insinuating that everyone who lives in an apartment isn't mature. There are plenty of others, like having a child, etc.
I know people who don't own a house because they told me, they don't want to mow grass. That's a pretty low threshold. That's what I'm talking about. It's just an example.
This is so true. I've noticed how many of my friends (I'm 27) took so long to get moved out of their parents houses. Even then, they live like bachelor slobs in Condos, not even a real house. Everyhting seems set up to help people not develop maturity or responsibility.
I know this will probably get me modded down, but I really can't stand being around some of my peers and having to put up with their fascination with X-Box. I mean holy shit, spending 4 hours a day playing video games is something a high-schooler does.
I have seen more and more adults whose maturity is regressing or already low that are sufficiently old that you can't blame it on the last 20 years of upbringing. American society seems to be making everyone less mature, regardless of age.
These groups repeatedly have been talking about how bovine growth hormone (rBGH) used to increase milk production results in milk giving people cancer. I keep trying to find the actual research that they refer to, but coninuously every link just links back to another link, all referring to each other, or on reports that themselves refer to other stories. So far I have found exactly ONE actual, scientific study that supports their assertion, and several that dispute it. They claim that FDA studies are biased. I have no way to evauluate these claims. Monsanto tried to get a report blaming rBGH for cancer prevented from broadcast on television, but this doesn't mean the report was actually truthful. The report's sources seemed to be other reports, not actual studies that I could see.
What assurance can you give me that these people are not spewing bullshit? I have found very little actual scientific evidence to back up their claims, just a giant reporting echo chamber.
I could be wrong, but I don't think it's an unreasonable request. I've done more looking around for actual evidence than most people will. Make it easy for me, otherwise I just have to assume these people are cranks.
A seven year old is more sophisticated watching his movies than George Lucas could muster while actually engaged in writing them. But then, some of us suspected as much, having been exposed to Howard the Duck.
Just what they did to the Dreamcast with the PS2...The PS2 gonna be able to render Toy Story in realtime. This is Sony's Modus Operandi. I've never forgotten that Sony is an intruder in this market (of course MS is too...) I wish I had my Sega and Nintendo back. The way these guys do business just makes me feel dirty.
I've been running multiple video cards in Windows and Linux for several years now. My experience has been the following:
1) 3D across video cards does not work well. I assume this is because DirectX has to map to a virtual framebuffer before rendering to the screen. Dragging 3D apps across screens (on different video cards) causes slowdown.
2) Some apps have to be specially programmed to use 3D across multiple cards. Particularly true with games or anything that is going to change screen resolutions on you.
3) Configuration can be a cast iron BITCH. Particularly on Linux. For example, the proprietary ATI radeon drivers give you unresolved symbol errors when trying to use Xinerama across multiple ATI cards. In Windows, the drivers' bugginess seems to double once you have multiple cards.
Your mileage may vary. As a matter of fact, this ask slashdot question is going to be a godsend for me, because just this day I decided I was going to sell my two Radeon cards and try to find a single card that would support triple monitor for EXACTLY the reasons I listed. Configuration and use of multiple cards has ranged from merely acceptable to gun-in-mouth torturous for me over the years.
I think you're right there. Regardless of whether or not his machines are intentionally flawed, he knows good and well his machines are flawed. He'd have had to know his statements would cause something like this. I'd just rather see his ass nailed to the wall over how fucking terrible his voting machines are, which is a crime IMO even if it wasn't intentional fixing, which I admit is a very real possibility.
I think China, like most countries, always had censorship, and the lack of censorship is the exception. Even in the USA, where our country was founded with the first member of the bill of rights dedicated to freedom of speech, today we have less censorship than when our founding fathers were alive.
The trick over the years has been teaching people to demand they _not_ be censored. The internet was too big for China to handle at first, so now they are trying to cope and censor it as much as everything else in their society. However, perhaps momentary lapses of government control of media are helping people there to see what they are missing. I hope. I have a great fondness for China and it's people, and I wish they could be more free.
I want to thank you for your car analogy. I've found it hard in the past to explain to some people in ways that they "get" why I'm so concerned about the erosion of rights, even on a small scale. The camel's nose under the tent just doesn't work as well as pointing out that no one wants people messing with their car, so why would I let someone mess with my rights until they were gone.
To the contrary, it's well within his rights to support whatever candidate he wants. What they SHOULD be doing, is going out of their way to make their voting machines VERIFIABLE. If they were, no one could cast aspersions on his choice for political candidates.
If you're going to assert things that are at best misleading, expect to be called on it. No one would be arguing with you if he'd said "I intend to exploit my voting machines to ensure Ohio's electoral votes are delivered to GWB." He didn't say that. He was exercising his rights as an American citizen.
He has the right to free speech, which means he has the right to support whatever candidate he wants. He has the right to make campaign contributions and he has the right to be involved in the political process just as much as any other american.
There is no fucking impropriety in the head of a voting machine company exercising his rights as a citizen. What makes this such a mess is that his voting machines appear to be pieces of shit that are easy to tamper with. THAT is the impropriety.
If his machines were good and auditable, anyone who made the argument you people are making would just sound like an asshole to most people, but the argument is surviving based on the fact that his machines do suck. So at best, YOUR post is splitting hairs unless someone proves he intentionally made his voting machines tamperable, or intentionally vote fixed via his machines.
Maybe it got modded as flamebait because the insinuation that a campaign contribution is some sort of proof of intentional vote fixing is kinda...flamebait.
That's not what he said:
"Xlr8yourmac provides an account of a mere single processor Pentium 4 running at 3.6GHz outperforming a dual processor G5 running at 2.7GHz:"
This was an account of an individual claiming to have a development kit, running benchmarks. When he was talking about the 4-cpu pentium 4 (which, as you have stated does not exist) he was referring to the machine at the keynote presentation.
I don't necessarily think it's that easy to blame him, for two reasons: firstly, OS X on Intel was a giant surprise, who is to say that a 4-cpu system was not possible on their own custom motherboard? There have been SMP motherboards that would work with non-SMP CPUs. It was false information, but it would have been well within the realm of possibility. Besides, "Pentium 4" means whatever Intel wants it to mean.
Secondly, if he can be blamed for getting information from a mac rumor site, he's not any less of an asshat than any other mac fanatic he rails against. It WAS a MACINTOSH rumor site, if it's full of shit, it's just proving his point. The pot's calling the kettle black, but the kettle is still black.
The tubes were, however, the exact size specified in a particularly old (1950's), and unclassified set of documents on Uranium enrichment. They weren't totally unsuitable, just not very good. Weather coating can be removed.
I'm not saying he was getting anywhere on his program, but one can definitely make the case that the tubes were bought for this purpose because a) they matched a document on Uranium enrichment that it is very likely Saddam's scientists would have sought, and b) dual-use materials are the best way to get supplies for weapons development if you're under scrutiny.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, however.
Well, it's been adopted as an English word, and often in English we don't adopt the foreign conjugations along with the word itself. Or, we do it wrong like "virii". Which brings up an interesting point. Adopted foreign words often don't mean the exact same thing. Otaku is a terrible appellation in Japan, but Anime fans here in the USA wear it as a badge of honor. It's become a new word in English.
Personally, I would rather use "otaku" as plural as well, but there's no rule.
I visited Tokyo and Akihabara in 1993. I have to say that it was one of the coolest places I have ever seen. Shops oozing with electronics and games. I went for two reasons: Laserdiscs and Super Famicom games. Games were often marked down to 15-40% of retail a few months after release. I was used to a trickle of Anime in the USA on Laserdisc, but in Akihabara, there were stores that only carried anime on laserdisc, isles full. It was pretty amazing.
I have a friend in Japan right now, but he won't go there because he says it's too nerdy. I don't know if it got worse in 12 years, or I got better.
Because of derision by blindly ignorant platform partisans, you're saying you've become trained to be blindly ignorant platform partisans. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
All you people who said it was stupid and/or infeasible for Apple to do this, what are you thinking...right...now.
I was about to sell my PC rig, if OS X will run on it, I'm totally going for it. AMD Athlon XP, gig of RAM with three 19" monitors...running OS X. I'm so there.
It would appear that all those roms people are trading on the Internet as "abandonware" aren't so obsolete after all.
They could get extra colors by using a software trick from the Amiga, "Hold and Modify", where they would change palette values in the middle of an horizontal blanking interval. However, that eats up CPU that could be used for important game logic. It should have been possible on just the Sega Genesis. You can do a similar trick on the Gameboy and Gameboy Advance to boost colors, but it eats the crap out of your battery.
Only one game ever used 256 colors. I do not know if it is implemented in software or hardware. I suspect software.
Point being, I don't think they actually changed their video hardware at all, which was completely stupid. FMV games looked grainy as crap, and 128 colors was still terrible. By that time the SNES was already out, and even with a slower CPU and lower video resolution, Sega CD games generally looked pretty terrible compared to SNES.
The NES ROB comes to mind immediately.
It was a robot add-on peripheral for the original NES that was total junk. I've read that even in product tests, kids were saying things like "this sucks!", but an exec's reputation was riding on the product, so they greenlighted it anyway. It failed as expected.