Not sure what is "happy" about it. No-one (by that I mean *much* less than the 100 Million Sony is shooting for) wants Blu-ray OR HDDVD
I didn't say it was happy, I said Sony was counting on it being happy. But Sony was right about PS2 and DVD, so they may be right about Blu-ray. When DVDs first came out, many thought they weren't going to be the success they've been.
Other than *being Microsoft* what crimes have they committed in the videogame arena?
Dumping is illegal. E.g. you are a huge company making insane amounts of money off some random product. You pick a smaller strategic competitor and then give away or sell at below cost a roughly equivalent product until that competitor dies. At your option you then start charging for the product or integrate it into some other product you sell. This is what Microsoft has done with Borland / Paradox, NetScape, and attempted to do to Apple / QuickTime, Sony etc. Another company well known for operating this way is deBeers (the diamond cartel).
Microsoft's use of XBox as a loss-leader wedge into the games market isn't as egregious as its behavior with, say, Borland, but if the eminently bribable Republicans hadn't won in 2000, Microsoft would be three companies by now and wouldn't be able to fund forays into the games business with Operating Systems sales.
Well, I think we've established that MS has alot more going for it than "getting there first", but whatever.
No, you've just asserted it.
Actually, Microsoft risks being beached on 720p when 1080p becomes dominant, not supporting bluray, isn't 100% backwards compatible with XBox, and has no compelling titles exclusive except the unreleased Halo. (And Halo wouldn't be exclusive if they hadn't bought Bungie.)
The Nintendo N64 has a lot more in common right now with PS3 than the 360, so careful about the analogies.
It does? Let's see -- backwards compatible? No. Lots of compelling titles? No. Plays the up-and-coming (perhaps) video format? No. (Microsoft supports HD-DVD, which is increasingly looking like the loser format, but XBox 360 doesn't have one built in as standard. Bluray may ALSO lose -- and in fact both may lose). Looks to me like all XBox 360 would need to match N64 on every count would be shipping games on cartridges.
It's pretty clear you're pro Microsoft. That's fine. I'm arguing against the conventional wisdom du jour that you can stick a fork in Sony's ass because XBox 360 rocks and PS3 is late when their OLD product is still outselling Microsoft's NEW one. This isn't a zero sum game; both (even all three) may succeed or fail.
One final set of points:
Sony makes money on every PS2 sold.
Microsoft loses money on every XBox and 360 sold (I believe). In any event, as a division, XBox is a net loss so far.
Nintendo makes money on everything it sells, including the DS and Advance. I'd wager Nintendo makes more money on a DS Lite than anyone else makes on any of their platforms.
PS3 isn't launched. Based on current sales the leading console in 2009 will be the PS2 (which is outselling XBox 360). This may sound like a flip joke, but it's actually a fairly likely scenario. Remember the PSOne? It was only just discontinued.
Let's see, what next-gen platform is PS2 (and PSX) compatible?
Sony is betting the farm on a happy convergence of Blu-ray, compelling PS3 titles, and HDTV critical mass.
Microsoft is betting (but not the farm) on getting in first. Microsoft intends to own your digital hub, and they're prepared to lose a whole pile of money getting there. We've seen them behave similarly with Access (which was used to kill Paradox, et al), Video for Windows / Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, and so on. There's a huge market at stake, and it's worth billions to kill its current owner. The fact that this is technically illegal is a minor annoyance.
Indeed by making the XBox 360 far more technically distinct from a Windows PC than the XBox (which basically was a PC) Microsoft may be trying to avoid potential antitrust action (it could be argued that XBox was an attempt to leverage its desktop monopoly power, whereas XBox 360 is merely an attempt to buy into a new market by using money made with its desktop monopoly). It seems highly unlikely they did it to make developers happy. (Yay, another bizarro platform with a new API to develop for!)
So far, getting in first hasn't worked very well for Atari, Colecovision, Nintendo, and Sega, so good luck to Microsoft there. It's not clear to what extent the PS2's success was driven by it's serving as a (for the time) inexpensive, high quality DVD-player (we've bought and stopped using three or four DVD players since we bought our PS2, and the PS2 still works -- even if it does ask you to override parental controls for almost every DVD; all but one of the other DVD players has eaten it).
In a sense, the success or failure of the Wii is about as relevant to the Sony/Microsoft battle for control of your "digital lifestyle" as the success or failure of the DS (or PSP), which is to say -- not totally irrelevant, but not central. No sane person is going to store the only copy of their family photographs on a PSP. The reason the Wii is so much more exciting (to gamers) than its competitors is that Nintendo is all about games. Wii will never by our digital hub, and we don't care.
Frankly, I wish someone would figure out that a digital hub ought, basically, to be an application-agnostic, really big, reliable mass storage device, and all the other crap should be peripheral.
These days Slashdot seems too slow. Digg and Reddit are better in terms of amount of content (quality -- meh).
It seems to me that Slashdot needs to circulate story filtering the way it does metamoderation and get the "editors" out of the loop. Send article submissions to person A and then let person B second-guess them.
Professor Bob Carter is a fairly prominent Australian Academic with quite a lot of anti-Greenhouse publications to his name (so much for not having a voice). Here's a really interesting article about him from Robyn Williams (he hosts "The Science Show", the Australian equivalent of Science Friday).
You'll see Carter's arguments neatly disassembled. The interesting thing is that reputable scientists are engaging in such quackery. It seems that it's the anti-Greenhouse crowd that's operating outside its area of expertise (or simply pandering to the wealthy Energy lobby).
Apple is already history. It essentially created the personal computer industry (as it likes to mention in every press release... I think it uses the words "ignited" and "revolution"), created the graphical user interface as we know it (sure, it borrowed ideas from others, who doesn't?), and a few other things besides (first consumer-oriented digital cameras, for instance).
Indeed, the iPod may be a business sensation, but among Apple's historical achievements it is chump change. It seems to me important to differentiate business achievements (iPod, iMac) from actual innovation (Apple II, Mac UI, QuickTime). In that respect, iTunes, iLife, the iTunes music store and the iPod "user experience" represent innovation, the iPod itself is just a pretty MP3 player.
Second Life isn't getting close, and they're giving away accounts. The only way this will come true is if WoW somehow sheds enough players (e.g. by being replaced by WoW2 or something).
I think there's enormous potential for something like Second Life (essentially consider an http replacement/extension that treats "web pages" as locations and allows you to interact with other people in those locations -- 2d/3d doesn't matter), but Second Life isn't it.
Does Dvorak even know how most cameras worked back then? There were three kinds: many people used viewfinder cameras (and plenty of digitals have viewfinders), many used twin-lens reflex cameras (and you hold those at waist level while looking at a preview), and very serious photographers (such as Ansel Adams) used cameras with large glass focusing screens and a hood to block out incident light. Each of these is perfectly analogous to a digital camera.
Smokers clustered outside buildings... Well, 1920s folks would be used to seeing segregated washrooms and quite possible the bizarre consequences of prohibition (many of which we live with today, e.g. "The War on Drugs"). I don't think they'd find this too odd.
Folks wandering around with cell phones... Again, most conventional science fiction seems to just assume that something that is expensive or inconvenient becomes cheap and ubiquitous (e.g. everyone commuting to work in their personal biplane), so this is probably exactly the kind of thing someone from the 1920s might expect from the future, only less convenient. (After all, Dick Tracy's "cell phone" was built into his wristwatch.)
Blackberry Thumb Punch. New to the 1920s, but no stranger than someone obsessed with an electro-mechanical stock-ticker. And more convenient than the portable pneumatic tube.
Email and web address on a business card. Big. Fracking. Deal. Try looking at English addresses some time.
In general, Dvorak's "hilarious take" shows that he's even more ignorant of the past than the present or the future.
What this article basically forgets is that the established studios are, in a sense, indie developers.
Consider that id, Eidos, Blizzard, Bioware, etc. are, essentially successful indie developers. In some cases -- e.g. 989/Verant -- a big company gets involved to bring what essentially started as an indie game (EverQuest) successfully to market.
I note that Snood is available for Gameboy DS -- that's an indie game.
The big game companies are analogous to movie studios. They try to pick winners at various stages of development (with similar degrees of success). A no-name independent developer might become interesting to a studio when they have a compelling alpha, while a big-game developer might essentially get backing for any hare-brained idea.
An innovative smash hit game essentially becomes a game genre. E.g. Wolfenstein 3D / DOOM created the 3d first person shooter genre. Having decided you're making a game in this genre, given there's pretty much no "script" (even a comparatively plot-heavy FPS such as Half Life has a laughable plot) so it all comes down to production values.
Unless you're being truly original, you're only going to compete with the big guys on production values. Independent movies can compete on the basis of writing (which doesn't cost a lot of money), acting (which needn't cost a lot of money), subject matter (...). By and large, these aren't seriously useful options for indie game developers -- so unless they're very original they're limited to competing on production values, and they'll lose.
1) We've measured the heliopause twice, years apart. 2) During that time, the sun has gotten measurably brighter. 3) Based on these TWO observations, taken a long time apart, we conclude...
The joke:
Three scientists are taking a break from a conference in Scotland. They walk together over some grassy hills and come upon a black sheep.
"My goodness," exclaims the Astrophysicist. "I had no idea that Scottish sheep are black."
"I don't know how you call yourself a scientist," retorts the Physicist. "You've made one observation and from it lept to a sweeping conclusion. All we know is that there is at least one black sheep in Scotland."
"Hmph!" says the Mathematician. "In fact, it may only be black on this side."
But but but... Clinton had consensual sex with Monica Lewinsky and then lied about it.
All Bush has done is lie about his reasons for invading Iraq and a bunch of other stuff, given huge amounts of public money to his friends and campaign contributors, put complete idiots into positions of great responsibility, ignored the sage advice of experts, and hailed proven incompetents as heroes.
It's about time the Democrats learned about Values and Morality.
DSLRs produce pictures that are vastly superior to compact digitals (I own several Sonys and a Nikon). Even the less than outstanding kit lenses on a low-end Nikon or Canon DSLR is a much better piece of glass than the lens on a Sony digital (which itself is a cut above most digital compacts).
I ran Vista on my rather standard laptop ( Amd 64 3ghz, 1gig, craptastic nvidia card and a 5400rpm hard drive ) and to be honest, it was snappier on that machine then it was on the XP install it replaced.
I've looked at a lot of "rather standard laptops" lately and AMD 64 3GHz / nVidia video card is way beyond most of them. I'd say that a "rather standard laptop" bought in the last six months might well have a 1.6GHz Celeron-M, 512MB RAM, and integrated video. It's going to choke on Vista.
Then again, I doubt someone with the laptop I'm describing is likely to upgrade their OS.
As for Vista being snappier than XP on the machine you describe -- this makes sense since its UI is GPU-accelerated.
I was initially attracted by the low cost international calls, but unlimited long distance is pretty good. All of their features have worked fine for us (over cable -- we briefly tried it over DSL and it was terrible, with really wierd lag in the audio) and even large file downloads don't seem to be a problem.
That said, Vonage looks to me like a financial train wreck. The fact that they're making it hard for customers to leave seems to be indicative of a company that has lost sight of its true goals. (You mess around with customer retention AFTER you get the core stuff right -- you don't tie customers into a broken product. The "one mad customer tells ten people" problem is surely magnified by such shenanigans.)
After reading their IPO prospectus, I wouldn't touch Vonage with a proverbial 10' pole. I will, however, continue to use them for my home phone for a while since other investors seem to be happy to subsidize my phone service.
Ultimately, Vonage is doomed. They don't own the "last mile" or any other key infrastructure so basically once their business model becomes profitable they will be annihilated by low cost competition that isn't servicing $???B in debt (they're already a few hundred million in the hole).
Integrated graphics? I thought Apple was about being better equipped? This is the deal killer for me. I can't imagine using integrated graphics.
Sounds like a failure of imagination.
Go look at the performance of the 950. It kicks the ass of low end ATI and nVidia options (such as those in the previous iBook models, which had dedicated RAM). And since it's cheap enough to stick 2GB of (non-Apple) RAM into the machine, there's really no issue.
Oh and I note the MacBook supports desktop spanning -- a heck of a lot more useful for most people than allowing people to play bleeding edge games.
The main difference between the iBook and PowerBook lines was not processor speed or even RAM capacity but video (the PowerBooks had dual monitor support (available via firmware hack on the iBook) and a substantially beefier video card. However, the iBook still had dedicated video RAM -- so in a sense the gap has widened.
Still, the $1099 machine is mighty tempting given what you get for your money. If you option up the $1499 "black" MacBook, you quickly get into MacBook Pro territory price-wise.
The patent was applied for Jan 5 2001, the iPod came out in October 2001, but iTunes (which has a substantially similar UI) came out Jan 9 2001. I'd be surprised if Apple didn't have internal iPod prototypes substantially earlier than the release date.
This all assumes it's a valid patent, isn't obvious, and is sufficiently similar to the iPod's UI (which I doubt). It's not like Creative's players were lauded for usability.
You can't seriously believe that running MINIX is going to magically give you expertise that lets you talk about operating system kernel design.
It's apparent from this thread that one needs no expertise whatsoever to talk about operating system kernel design, so running MINIX should if anything overqualify you.
His fundamental argument -- texture tiling is just a form of data compression -- is at the heart of why I think this is not the right direction to go.
Fundamentally, texturing objects is a way of saying "this object is made of something that looks like this". Using textures as mere "appearances" is a shortcut for representing geometry and physical properties. E.g. if you represent a door in a wall made of bricks and mortar as a rectangle with a picture of bricks and a door on it you are taking a shortcut. If you're going to build highly complex environments, giving artists a 4GB bitmap to paint isn't going to suddenly fix your problems. (Carmack doesn't say that it will either.)
In the end, a balanced use of geometry and textures will get you far more than going hog wild with one or the other.
I also wonder if this is an appropriate way to use artists' time. If you imagine a typical World of Warcraft "zone" suddenly your megatextures aren't going to come close to cutting it anyway. If your artists end up filling megatextures with repeating fill patterns... what have you accomplished?
I object to folks like Bush characterising people they disagree with as "Nazis". And just to be consistent I object to people characterizing Bush as a Nazi. Bush is a simple kleptocrat.
I'd be far more afraid of the unbridled power of American Corporations than that of the US government.
Half of the folks playing WoW have been playing for less than a year and are on servers with a far sparser population of folks with good gear and raiding experience. I'd ballpark the number of folks who've killed Nefarian on *our* server to be less than 25%, and that's an original server with a large hardcore population. (It was one of the first ten servers to open up the AQ zones; I think it was fifth or so but not sure.)
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure what is "happy" about it. No-one (by that I mean *much* less than the 100 Million Sony is shooting for) wants Blu-ray OR HDDVD
I didn't say it was happy, I said Sony was counting on it being happy. But Sony was right about PS2 and DVD, so they may be right about Blu-ray. When DVDs first came out, many thought they weren't going to be the success they've been.
Other than *being Microsoft* what crimes have they committed in the videogame arena?
Dumping is illegal. E.g. you are a huge company making insane amounts of money off some random product. You pick a smaller strategic competitor and then give away or sell at below cost a roughly equivalent product until that competitor dies. At your option you then start charging for the product or integrate it into some other product you sell. This is what Microsoft has done with Borland / Paradox, NetScape, and attempted to do to Apple / QuickTime, Sony etc. Another company well known for operating this way is deBeers (the diamond cartel).
Microsoft's use of XBox as a loss-leader wedge into the games market isn't as egregious as its behavior with, say, Borland, but if the eminently bribable Republicans hadn't won in 2000, Microsoft would be three companies by now and wouldn't be able to fund forays into the games business with Operating Systems sales.
Well, I think we've established that MS has alot more going for it than "getting there first", but whatever.
No, you've just asserted it.
Actually, Microsoft risks being beached on 720p when 1080p becomes dominant, not supporting bluray, isn't 100% backwards compatible with XBox, and has no compelling titles exclusive except the unreleased Halo. (And Halo wouldn't be exclusive if they hadn't bought Bungie.)
The Nintendo N64 has a lot more in common right now with PS3 than the 360, so careful about the analogies.
It does? Let's see -- backwards compatible? No. Lots of compelling titles? No. Plays the up-and-coming (perhaps) video format? No. (Microsoft supports HD-DVD, which is increasingly looking like the loser format, but XBox 360 doesn't have one built in as standard. Bluray may ALSO lose -- and in fact both may lose). Looks to me like all XBox 360 would need to match N64 on every count would be shipping games on cartridges.
It's pretty clear you're pro Microsoft. That's fine. I'm arguing against the conventional wisdom du jour that you can stick a fork in Sony's ass because XBox 360 rocks and PS3 is late when their OLD product is still outselling Microsoft's NEW one. This isn't a zero sum game; both (even all three) may succeed or fail.
One final set of points:
Sony makes money on every PS2 sold.
Microsoft loses money on every XBox and 360 sold (I believe). In any event, as a division, XBox is a net loss so far.
Nintendo makes money on everything it sells, including the DS and Advance. I'd wager Nintendo makes more money on a DS Lite than anyone else makes on any of their platforms.
PS3 isn't launched. Based on current sales the leading console in 2009 will be the PS2 (which is outselling XBox 360). This may sound like a flip joke, but it's actually a fairly likely scenario. Remember the PSOne? It was only just discontinued.
Let's see, what next-gen platform is PS2 (and PSX) compatible?
Sony is betting the farm on a happy convergence of Blu-ray, compelling PS3 titles, and HDTV critical mass.
Microsoft is betting (but not the farm) on getting in first. Microsoft intends to own your digital hub, and they're prepared to lose a whole pile of money getting there. We've seen them behave similarly with Access (which was used to kill Paradox, et al), Video for Windows / Windows Media Player, Internet Explorer, and so on. There's a huge market at stake, and it's worth billions to kill its current owner. The fact that this is technically illegal is a minor annoyance.
Indeed by making the XBox 360 far more technically distinct from a Windows PC than the XBox (which basically was a PC) Microsoft may be trying to avoid potential antitrust action (it could be argued that XBox was an attempt to leverage its desktop monopoly power, whereas XBox 360 is merely an attempt to buy into a new market by using money made with its desktop monopoly). It seems highly unlikely they did it to make developers happy. (Yay, another bizarro platform with a new API to develop for!)
So far, getting in first hasn't worked very well for Atari, Colecovision, Nintendo, and Sega, so good luck to Microsoft there. It's not clear to what extent the PS2's success was driven by it's serving as a (for the time) inexpensive, high quality DVD-player (we've bought and stopped using three or four DVD players since we bought our PS2, and the PS2 still works -- even if it does ask you to override parental controls for almost every DVD; all but one of the other DVD players has eaten it).
In a sense, the success or failure of the Wii is about as relevant to the Sony/Microsoft battle for control of your "digital lifestyle" as the success or failure of the DS (or PSP), which is to say -- not totally irrelevant, but not central. No sane person is going to store the only copy of their family photographs on a PSP. The reason the Wii is so much more exciting (to gamers) than its competitors is that Nintendo is all about games. Wii will never by our digital hub, and we don't care.
Frankly, I wish someone would figure out that a digital hub ought, basically, to be an application-agnostic, really big, reliable mass storage device, and all the other crap should be peripheral.
Where the hero decrypts a bullet that is speeding from a bad guy's gun towards his head while being fellated.
These days Slashdot seems too slow. Digg and Reddit are better in terms of amount of content (quality -- meh).
It seems to me that Slashdot needs to circulate story filtering the way it does metamoderation and get the "editors" out of the loop. Send article submissions to person A and then let person B second-guess them.
The site may have some anti-Bush ads but the writer is from a lobbyist organization with Energy links.
a sp?ArticleID=1585&HomepageID=142
http://www.highparkgroup.com/services.htm
Professor Bob Carter is a fairly prominent Australian Academic with quite a lot of anti-Greenhouse publications to his name (so much for not having a voice). Here's a really interesting article about him from Robyn Williams (he hosts "The Science Show", the Australian equivalent of Science Friday).
http://newmatilda.com/home/articledetailmagazine.
You'll see Carter's arguments neatly disassembled. The interesting thing is that reputable scientists are engaging in such quackery. It seems that it's the anti-Greenhouse crowd that's operating outside its area of expertise (or simply pandering to the wealthy Energy lobby).
If the iPod market fails the company is history.
Apple is already history. It essentially created the personal computer industry (as it likes to mention in every press release... I think it uses the words "ignited" and "revolution"), created the graphical user interface as we know it (sure, it borrowed ideas from others, who doesn't?), and a few other things besides (first consumer-oriented digital cameras, for instance).
Indeed, the iPod may be a business sensation, but among Apple's historical achievements it is chump change. It seems to me important to differentiate business achievements (iPod, iMac) from actual innovation (Apple II, Mac UI, QuickTime). In that respect, iTunes, iLife, the iTunes music store and the iPod "user experience" represent innovation, the iPod itself is just a pretty MP3 player.
Second Life isn't getting close, and they're giving away accounts. The only way this will come true is if WoW somehow sheds enough players (e.g. by being replaced by WoW2 or something).
I think there's enormous potential for something like Second Life (essentially consider an http replacement/extension that treats "web pages" as locations and allows you to interact with other people in those locations -- 2d/3d doesn't matter), but Second Life isn't it.
Does Dvorak even know how most cameras worked back then? There were three kinds: many people used viewfinder cameras (and plenty of digitals have viewfinders), many used twin-lens reflex cameras (and you hold those at waist level while looking at a preview), and very serious photographers (such as Ansel Adams) used cameras with large glass focusing screens and a hood to block out incident light. Each of these is perfectly analogous to a digital camera.
Smokers clustered outside buildings... Well, 1920s folks would be used to seeing segregated washrooms and quite possible the bizarre consequences of prohibition (many of which we live with today, e.g. "The War on Drugs"). I don't think they'd find this too odd.
Folks wandering around with cell phones... Again, most conventional science fiction seems to just assume that something that is expensive or inconvenient becomes cheap and ubiquitous (e.g. everyone commuting to work in their personal biplane), so this is probably exactly the kind of thing someone from the 1920s might expect from the future, only less convenient. (After all, Dick Tracy's "cell phone" was built into his wristwatch.)
Blackberry Thumb Punch. New to the 1920s, but no stranger than someone obsessed with an electro-mechanical stock-ticker. And more convenient than the portable pneumatic tube.
Email and web address on a business card. Big. Fracking. Deal. Try looking at English addresses some time.
In general, Dvorak's "hilarious take" shows that he's even more ignorant of the past than the present or the future.
I agree with other posters. The parent is not flamebait.
What this article basically forgets is that the established studios are, in a sense, indie developers.
Consider that id, Eidos, Blizzard, Bioware, etc. are, essentially successful indie developers. In some cases -- e.g. 989/Verant -- a big company gets involved to bring what essentially started as an indie game (EverQuest) successfully to market.
I note that Snood is available for Gameboy DS -- that's an indie game.
The big game companies are analogous to movie studios. They try to pick winners at various stages of development (with similar degrees of success). A no-name independent developer might become interesting to a studio when they have a compelling alpha, while a big-game developer might essentially get backing for any hare-brained idea.
An innovative smash hit game essentially becomes a game genre. E.g. Wolfenstein 3D / DOOM created the 3d first person shooter genre. Having decided you're making a game in this genre, given there's pretty much no "script" (even a comparatively plot-heavy FPS such as Half Life has a laughable plot) so it all comes down to production values.
Unless you're being truly original, you're only going to compete with the big guys on production values. Independent movies can compete on the basis of writing (which doesn't cost a lot of money), acting (which needn't cost a lot of money), subject matter (...). By and large, these aren't seriously useful options for indie game developers -- so unless they're very original they're limited to competing on production values, and they'll lose.
OK, rambling. Will shut up now.
In five years apparently we will all have desktops with 16 cores, practically unlimited disk storage, etc. etc.
Running gOffice 2011 which is written entirely in JavaScript.
I'd rather see someone sue the LAWS that are bad rather than take advantage of other bad laws to try to fix the system in their favor.
You can't sue laws. Even if you could, they have no money to pay damages. You need to VOTE to change laws.
This is a tough one for me. As an anarcho-capitalist, I believe...
Ah well, that explains it.
Which I've probably posted before...
...
1) We've measured the heliopause twice, years apart.
2) During that time, the sun has gotten measurably brighter.
3) Based on these TWO observations, taken a long time apart, we conclude
The joke:
Three scientists are taking a break from a conference in Scotland. They walk together over some grassy hills and come upon a black sheep.
"My goodness," exclaims the Astrophysicist. "I had no idea that Scottish sheep are black."
"I don't know how you call yourself a scientist," retorts the Physicist. "You've made one observation and from it lept to a sweeping conclusion. All we know is that there is at least one black sheep in Scotland."
"Hmph!" says the Mathematician. "In fact, it may only be black on this side."
But but but... Clinton had consensual sex with Monica Lewinsky and then lied about it.
All Bush has done is lie about his reasons for invading Iraq and a bunch of other stuff, given huge amounts of public money to his friends and campaign contributors, put complete idiots into positions of great responsibility, ignored the sage advice of experts, and hailed proven incompetents as heroes.
It's about time the Democrats learned about Values and Morality.
DSLRs produce pictures that are vastly superior to compact digitals (I own several Sonys and a Nikon). Even the less than outstanding kit lenses on a low-end Nikon or Canon DSLR is a much better piece of glass than the lens on a Sony digital (which itself is a cut above most digital compacts).
I ran Vista on my rather standard laptop ( Amd 64 3ghz, 1gig, craptastic nvidia card and a 5400rpm hard drive ) and to be honest, it was snappier on that machine then it was on the XP install it replaced.
I've looked at a lot of "rather standard laptops" lately and AMD 64 3GHz / nVidia video card is way beyond most of them. I'd say that a "rather standard laptop" bought in the last six months might well have a 1.6GHz Celeron-M, 512MB RAM, and integrated video. It's going to choke on Vista.
Then again, I doubt someone with the laptop I'm describing is likely to upgrade their OS.
As for Vista being snappier than XP on the machine you describe -- this makes sense since its UI is GPU-accelerated.
I was initially attracted by the low cost international calls, but unlimited long distance is pretty good. All of their features have worked fine for us (over cable -- we briefly tried it over DSL and it was terrible, with really wierd lag in the audio) and even large file downloads don't seem to be a problem.
That said, Vonage looks to me like a financial train wreck. The fact that they're making it hard for customers to leave seems to be indicative of a company that has lost sight of its true goals. (You mess around with customer retention AFTER you get the core stuff right -- you don't tie customers into a broken product. The "one mad customer tells ten people" problem is surely magnified by such shenanigans.)
After reading their IPO prospectus, I wouldn't touch Vonage with a proverbial 10' pole. I will, however, continue to use them for my home phone for a while since other investors seem to be happy to subsidize my phone service.
Ultimately, Vonage is doomed. They don't own the "last mile" or any other key infrastructure so basically once their business model becomes profitable they will be annihilated by low cost competition that isn't servicing $???B in debt (they're already a few hundred million in the hole).
Integrated graphics? I thought Apple was about being better equipped? This is the deal killer for me. I can't imagine using integrated graphics.
Sounds like a failure of imagination.
Go look at the performance of the 950. It kicks the ass of low end ATI and nVidia options (such as those in the previous iBook models, which had dedicated RAM). And since it's cheap enough to stick 2GB of (non-Apple) RAM into the machine, there's really no issue.
Oh and I note the MacBook supports desktop spanning -- a heck of a lot more useful for most people than allowing people to play bleeding edge games.
Finally, a laptop that can do blogging and podcasting.
It's a reference, I suspect, to iLife and wireless that *just works*.
It's not like Intel "inventing" multimedia by adding the MMX instructions to the Pentium.
The main difference between the iBook and PowerBook lines was not processor speed or even RAM capacity but video (the PowerBooks had dual monitor support (available via firmware hack on the iBook) and a substantially beefier video card. However, the iBook still had dedicated video RAM -- so in a sense the gap has widened.
Still, the $1099 machine is mighty tempting given what you get for your money. If you option up the $1499 "black" MacBook, you quickly get into MacBook Pro territory price-wise.
The patent was applied for Jan 5 2001, the iPod came out in October 2001, but iTunes (which has a substantially similar UI) came out Jan 9 2001. I'd be surprised if Apple didn't have internal iPod prototypes substantially earlier than the release date.
This all assumes it's a valid patent, isn't obvious, and is sufficiently similar to the iPod's UI (which I doubt). It's not like Creative's players were lauded for usability.
You can't seriously believe that running MINIX is going to magically give you expertise that lets you talk about operating system kernel design.
It's apparent from this thread that one needs no expertise whatsoever to talk about operating system kernel design, so running MINIX should if anything overqualify you.
His fundamental argument -- texture tiling is just a form of data compression -- is at the heart of why I think this is not the right direction to go.
... what have you accomplished?
Fundamentally, texturing objects is a way of saying "this object is made of something that looks like this". Using textures as mere "appearances" is a shortcut for representing geometry and physical properties. E.g. if you represent a door in a wall made of bricks and mortar as a rectangle with a picture of bricks and a door on it you are taking a shortcut. If you're going to build highly complex environments, giving artists a 4GB bitmap to paint isn't going to suddenly fix your problems. (Carmack doesn't say that it will either.)
In the end, a balanced use of geometry and textures will get you far more than going hog wild with one or the other.
I also wonder if this is an appropriate way to use artists' time. If you imagine a typical World of Warcraft "zone" suddenly your megatextures aren't going to come close to cutting it anyway. If your artists end up filling megatextures with repeating fill patterns
I object to folks like Bush characterising people they disagree with as "Nazis". And just to be consistent I object to people characterizing Bush as a Nazi. Bush is a simple kleptocrat.
I'd be far more afraid of the unbridled power of American Corporations than that of the US government.
Oh, and we're on one of the original servers.
Half of the folks playing WoW have been playing for less than a year and are on servers with a far sparser population of folks with good gear and raiding experience. I'd ballpark the number of folks who've killed Nefarian on *our* server to be less than 25%, and that's an original server with a large hardcore population. (It was one of the first ten servers to open up the AQ zones; I think it was fifth or so but not sure.)