VB's just a front-end to the flat text files. Open a.frm file in a text editor and you'll see the code at the end of a string of properties that describe the form, which is simply hidden by the VB editor.
That being said, the IDE does a lot to make those flat text files less flat, even moreso in VS.Net with outlining, regions, and so on.
Isn't this tantamount to purjury? Their claim that it would criple the system and that it couldn't be removed was obviously false, if all that was necessary to satisfy the courts was to remove the icon from the desktop. Sure, MS is allowed to spin things a bit in the media, but in the courtroom, nearly explicit lies are illegal, no?
The court can't hold Microsoft responsible for the media's complete misunderstanding of the statements made (or complete misrepresentation). Microsoft stated they couldn't be removed, and offered instead to hide them (which is what they're doing). Of course, this part: The change will make it possible for hardware vendors to customize their systems by striking business deals to include alternative programs from companies like America Online and RealNetworks.
is pointless as well without the additional mention of in place of Microsoft software, because they can already do that without the ability to hide MS software (though MS had to loosen restrictions on OEMs in order for it to be possible, which was done back in November/December).
It's not necessarily the gamers that drive the market, its the system requirements for games coming out. The target platform/system specs for the next generation of games keeps rising
Last I checked, though, none of my games say aluminum case, plexi-glass window, custom paint job, or neon lights, which accounted for a good part of CNN's discussion of the subject.
My brother built a new computer, and XP REFUSES to work with his whiz-bang 120GB hard drive if he tries to run with NTFS. Strangely enough, FAT32 poses no problems, and Linux and BeOS are fine.
Does it refuse to work or does it refuse to format the full drive with NTFS? I know I had a similar problem when I got my 80GB drive, but it would format at a smaller amount (I think 60GB, but it may have been 40GB), so at the time I just set the partitions accordingly, and then a couple months later a patch was released that addressed the problem. It doesn't seem to have any problems now as a full 80GB drive, but I guess Ill have to get a 120GB drive to find out if that works (hell, I was planning on upgrading my 20GB drive anyway;).
As for the 0 crashes/lockups, I'm honestly not experiencing that. The machine I'm using right now is XP (we're switching over to it at work because the boss decided we weren't wasting enough money yet), and I'm experiencing at least one crash/lockup a day. Plus, the thing seems to have that good ol' Windows 98 lock-up-every-time-you-try-to-shut-down-or-reboot problem. Granted, it's likely a bad driver that is causing the problems and not the OS itself, but then again you'd think the OS would be able to handle errors like these a bit more gracefully. ..
Ouch. My home system's been running for a few days w/ XP Pro since I finally got the hardware upgraded. Before it went down it had been running for about 5 weeks without a reboot, and before I moved from San Diego it had been running for a couple of months. Overall I'd say I've had fewer stability issues with XP than I had with 2k, though 2k was rock solid after SP1 (and only slightly less than before it).
NWN ran just fine on my computer w/ a 1GHz CPU and GeForce2 video card, until the motherboard took a hit from a screw and I couldn't boot the system any more.
Of course, just as the hardware gods cursed his chances of playing NWN by hitting him with just about every failure in the book, they cursed my quest to upgrade (rather than simply replace the dead motherboard) by deciding that a 300W power supply just isn't enough to run a P4-2GHz computer w/ a 64MB GeForce2 GTS, 2 hard drives, DVD-ROM, CD-RW, 3 fans, and SBLive w/ LiveDrive (480W did the job, when in doubt go overkill).
I actually do need this. The code I could get by with a small monitor, but a large one is nice. As for the processor, it takes 10 minutes to build the whole project and 2 minutes to just build the part I'm working on. It was even worse on my old computer.
Exactly, the size of the monitor doesn't really matter to me, but it needs to be a good enough display that I can sit in front of it all day without eye strain setting in. My monitor is 19", but that's only 2" above the average around here (17" on all new computers), and it actually cost about what they were paying for the 17" monitors anyway (because we bought it at a local computer store instead of buying it with the computer from Dell). Build time when going to the new computer on the average project was cut to less than 3 minutes from 10 minutes, and I no longer have to turn off Outlook while I'm running Visual Studio (which means I can actually get those emails they keep asking me about).
Besides, with a 16MB ATI Rage 128 Ultra and the network connection in this place, I wouldn't even dream of playing most of my games on this thing. My computer at home works and plays better than this one, but at least this one is more than just tolerable.
A simple explanation: Alcohol is not addictive (except to a small percentage who are alcoholic). Think how many kids you knew that took up drinking before turning 18. Do they all need to have multiple drinks per day now? Do they have to go outside their office building to drink every hour or so?
I think you meant to say 'Alcohol is not AS addictive'. There's also quite a difference between the most common levels of alcoholism and the far extreem of 'needs a drink to get up in the morning and go to sleep at nite'. Everyone I knew as a teenager (myself included) took up drinking well before 18. Most of them didn't know what to do if they had idle time and were sober (and most of them used drugs eventually, which may have been better or worse depending on the drugs). Of course, I don't know most of them any longer, either, as most of them dropped out of school and I disassociated myself from many of them in order to keep myself from having problems with drugs & alcohol.
I can't believe that alcohol kills more people. There are some spectacular deaths when a drunk driver causes a major auto accident, but consider how many people die of lung cancer, emphysema, strokes, and heart disease from smoking.
Over half of all deaths (in the US) for people over 45 are from heart failure and cancer. Heart failure can be linked to smoking, drinking, eating habits, stress, or other causes. Cancer can be linked the same way, though the particular form of cancer is the best indicator (liver/stomach cancer is most common for alcoholics, lung/throat/oral cancer is most common for tobacco users, either one can have other causes as well, and medical ethics prevent scientific studies to prove the correlation as a causal effect).
The leading cause of death for people under 45 is accidents and adverse effects resulting from the accidents. Of all the causes of death due to accidents, the leading cause is motor vehicle accidents.
19,171 persons died in 1999 from alcohol-induced causes, which excludes homicides, accidents, and other causes indirectly related to alcohol use, and also excludes fetal alcohol syndrome. 19,102 persons died of drug-induced causes, which includes poisoning from medically prescribed drugs as well as dependent and nondependent use of drugs, but does not include accidents, homicides, or other causes indirectly related to drug use, or newborn deaths related to mother's drug use. 28,874 persons died from firearm injuries, which includes firearms-related suicide and homicide. Tobacco and related diseases are not ranked, because all causes of death termed 'tobacco-related' can be caused by other things, including (but not limited to) industrial pollution (respiratory disorders) and alcohol consumption (cardiovascular disease). Tobacco use leads to lower life-expectancy and higher risk of several types of diseases and forms of cancer, but this is based on the fact that these types of deaths are more common among smokers, and in any particular instance it is almost impossible to determine whether smoking was indeed the cause of the problem, or if it simply lead to a weakening of the system which made the disease more likely to occur (HIV is very similar in this respect, though the presence of HIV is detectable).
The three leading causes of death for 15-24 year olds are automobile crashes, homicides, and suicides. Alcohol is considered a leading factor in all 3. Almost 1/4 of all fatal traffic accidents are alcohol related (on a side note, in 1/5th to 1/4th of all automobile collisions the driver was using a cell phone without a hands-free device while driving). In single-vehicle fatal crashes on weekend nites, 66% of the drivers over 25 were intoxicated, 56% of the drivers under 25 were intoxicated.
Another nice little statistic I noticed was that there are no recorded deaths from marijuana, though studies for the (adverse) health effects of marijuana are usually cited as problematic at best, due to the high rates of tobacco and alcohol use amongst users of marijuana.
As far as the claim that tobacco is more addictive than alcohol, it's completely possible, although the reason is probably not due to physical properties of either alcohol or tobacco. It's far more likely that people see direct effects of alcoholism (hangovers which are the result of withdrawal from alcohol, the varied effects of the body's rejection of alcohol when over-consumption occurs (including vomiting and blackouts), and the normal effects of both consumption and over-consumption of alcohol including impaired judgment and motor skills) which make it easier for them to drink less often and even stop drinking altogether (in other words seeing the immediate effects of drinking makes it easier to break the psychological addiction). Whereas with tobacco the most common short-term adverse effects such as irratability and tension caused by withdrawal from tobacco (which in most moderate users occurs approximately 1 hour after use) are commonly linked in the smoker's mind with not smoking rather than with the tobacco itself. Consuming more alcohol will get rid of most hangover affects as well, but the affects of drinking usually stop most people from doing so (and the hangover is more closely associated with the alcohol consumption by the user than withdrawal effects of tobacco are associated with the tobacco). Hangovers also require higher levels of consumption than the withdrawal effects of tobacco, and usually take longer to set in (because alcohol takes longer to pass through the system). Withdrawal effects of tobacco seem to be most closely related to drugs like cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines, where the most commonly reported symptoms of early withdrawal are cravings for more of the drug and changes in emotional state. Most people also feel that they are 'back to normal' much more quickly after they stop drinking than after they stop smoking.
The most common reason that people I know cite for continuing to use tobacco is 'it keeps them from killing someone', in other words, they associate not smoking with the withdrawal effect, although many also state that their first experiences with smoking caused a noticable relaxed state. Of course, most of the people I know that continue to smoke were also exposed to second-hand smoke from their parent(s) most of their lives before they started smoking. Most of the people I know that have successfully (at least to date) stopped smoking replaced the addiction with another form of addiction, whether it be constant snacking, increased intake of caffeine (possibly an even more addictive substance than either alcohol or tobacco) or something more healthy (one person in particular spends an excessive amount of time in the gym on a daily basis).
Is this really necessary? With 100GB hard drives becoming more commonplace, I think we're at the limit of what normal users need out of hardware. There is just no use whatsoever for 50GB removable discs. In 10 years, we will all still be using DVD+RW. Drives will be a lot faster, sure, but history has shown that there is just no application that requires more than the ample 4.7GB of removable storage provided by DVD technology
I think you just stated for yourself why 50GB optical discs would at least be wanted by some percentage of the population. They won't be needed for popular media (music/movies/software) for the most part (at least not for a while, who knows how much software bloat we'll see). However, when it comes to backing up data, do you really want your hard drive to require 10-20 discs to backup, or would you rather use 1 or 2 50GB discs to backup that 100GB hard drive?
Personally, I'm doing ok with CD-R for now, because the majority of my 100GB of hard drive space is fairly static (my CD collection in MP3 format, software and games that I can simply reinstall), and a minor amount of data that actually needs backing up on a weekly or monthly basis. However, if I was running a critical system that handled large amounts of customer data, I'd want to reduce the number of discs I needed to backup that data whenever possible. I don't need DVD+RW capability for my own personal use, but if I were managing a couple hundred gigs of customer data I would like to back that up with the largest storage media possible, short of putting it onto another magnetic drive.
Thanks for clarifying that looking out for dedicated employees and being socially responsible is "such bullshit." It's like those damned do-gooders who get mad when tobacco companies advertise to kids, isn't it? Don't they realize that getting kids hooked on cigarettes, even if many die from cancer, is a small price to pay in order to enrich investors in RJ Reynolds? Damn social responsibility.
The real question when it comes to the 'do-gooders' getting mad at the tobacco companies is why aren't they also going after the companies advertising alcohol in the same places, with the same target audience? The simple fact is that they're being oppurtunistic. The tobacco companies make more money and are more consolidated, and are easier to target because fewer people smoke than drink. Tobacco gets heavier taxes and smoking gets banned from more and more places while alcohol kills more people and becomes less restricted (after all, they can advertise hard alcohol on TV again).
Stockholders that buy into a company that isn't likely to turn a profit are in the same position as people that work in bars and expect not to be exposed to cigarette smoke. Intelligent people don't do it, the rest bitch about it when they do it.
What we have here is a couple of stock buyers scared of the current market and looking to bail out all together, And in this case try to force every other stock holder to do the same.
and/or stock buyers that never intended to hold stock in the company in the first place. Some of them seem to be all too aware that the company is incapable of making money in it's current incarnation, and you have to wonder why people would invest in a company that they know won't make money. Simply put, they bought into it believing they could liquidate the company for it's value before it drained all of it's cash reserves.
Too many people, in the last few years, have bought into the market looking for a way to make money (as quickly as possible), rather than investing in companies that they believe have good business models. A solid company will give you a good return on investment in the long term, but these people came in knowing that they could buy the stock below the company's value and are simply looking to cash out before the company gets itself into a merger that leaves them holding another company's stock altogether. Sure, it's within the stockholders' rights to do this, but the reality is that those people asking for it to be done only bought the stock to make a quick profit anyway, expecting the company to either hit big or burn out fast (the first of which would have given a good return on investment when they sold out, the second of which would allow them to liquidate the company).
I wasn't aware that you could extend Direct3D, I guess that you'd need a seperate API from the card manufacturer or something right? OpenGL assumes that each card will have it's own extensions and thus provides a common extension mechanism.
DirectX doesn't have an extension mechanism (that I'm aware of), but it also doesn't stop you from extending or overloading it's functions, or, as you said, adding your own API. Of course, if you break DirectX functionality with your extensions, it's your (card's) funeral, at least in the gaming market.
The reason that DirectX has been able to grow so quickly is that MS has kept complete control over the platform, only with versions 8 and higher have they actually let the other companies (read nVidia and ATI) have a real say in the api it seems like. I know that they always consulted the card manufacturers, but they still had the final say.
I agree there, but DirectX is a case where they've been getting input from card manufacturers and game developers since version 1 flopped. Versions 3 and 5 showed remarkable improvement and adoption from developers because of that input. Sure, MS has final say, but they definitely haven't been ignoring people or going their own way with it. Probably the only thing they won't do if there's demand for it is break backwards compatibility.
So, Windows is running right on the hardware, with no intervening VM. Sorry for any confusion. (If you meant the Java VM, it was the latest one available at the time, although some browsers may use their own implementation instead.)
I meant the Java VM. Specifically I've had problems with certain VM's from Sun (and a few problems with a couple of Microsoft's VMs), and find that many times when people are complaining about sites not working it's related to their Java installation, though, of course, it depends on what the site is using in the first place.
The only settings I mess with in the registry are the ones that applications abuse to start themselves at system start time. Allowing apps to do this seriously degrades system performance. If one app does it, that app starts a bit faster, but when twelve[1] apps do it, they all start slower, because you have no RAM left. So I don't let any apps do this, especially not ones we don't use all the time. What's really annoying about misbehaved apps that put themselves in the Run keys without asking is, they invariably take measures to insert themselves into the Run keys not just on install but every time they run.
Yeah, I understand that. There are very few apps that I would allow to run automatically, and I have a tendency to seek out alternatives when a particular app is pushy about it. msconfig and gpedit.msc (depending on the version of Windows being used) are really helpful at keeping those out of there without having to remove the registry entries on every startup.
I was personally surprised that he didn't find more sites using MS-specific code (mainly, the document.all interface), but there weren't that many (that he visited -- YMMV). Mostly he got sites in one of two categories: their HTML was obviously broken (you know, mismatched tags, misspelled tags, imaginary tags, tags missing their closing right angle bracket, required close tags missing, imaginary attributes, attributes from one tag placed on another tag that has never accepted them in any known browser, unquoted attributes containing spaces, and that sort of nonsense) or else they relied on the Plugin Of The Week (by which I mean, some plugin that is not listed on Netscape's plugin finder service and does not come with IE; the only one I remember is Shockwave (which as it turns out is produced by the same company as Flash, but less well-known), but we ran across perhaps a couple dozen different ones, all obscure).
Shockwave isn't all that obscure, and is installed by default in newer versions of IE. At one time it was more common than Flash, back in the days when everyone was on dial-up;) Overall, though, it sounds like he's simply hitting a lot of obscure sites, which is unusual, because I don't see all that many sites that have those kinds of problems. One thing I do see a lot, though, is generated HTML that does the broken tag thing and ends up cutting half the content from the page, but then view source usually lets me finish reading the article that was cut off.
[1] A slight exaggeration only. MSIE, AIM, the MSN IM client
(and its associated spyware), and YIM all do this without
even asking. Other apps (Mozilla, Netscape, OpenOffice,...)
ask, and respect your choice, so I don't have a problem with
them. But the misbehaved ones I keep in check by editing the
registry, yes. There were at one time some other apps doing
this (well, trying to) that I haven't listed, but they've
been uninstalled now.
MSN IM, in my experience, is pretty good about respecting the choice as well, though you're right in that it doesn't ask in the first place, and it's not very nice about presenting the choice to the user, as it's buried in the options dialogue. I don't think I ever figured out a good way to get rid of AIM except for removing it from the system, and I've never used YIM. Real Player and QuickTime are also banned from my systems (though QT eventually finds it's way back for content reasons) for similar behavior, though I do find that eventually they'll go away when told to as well.
CGShaders has a collection of shaders available for developers to use as a base (or as is) in their applications. It may not be a 'standard library', but at least it's a good starting point for some people, and should grow with time.
Then again, if you get poor support, or worse, no support (like with *cough*ASUS*cough*), then that's another story. But if they give you your money back and their blessings on buying a new card, you can't really hold it against them.
I found that although ASUS is slow updating their drivers (I had an ASUS GeForce 256 SDR), their cards work extremely well with the reference drivers. Of course, you probably still can't get many special features working with reference drivers, but there are a few that do (TV out should work for one).
I didn't know anyone bothered with hardware DVD decoders beyond the on-board MPEG-2 acceleration that's standard on most video cards anymore, though. I stopped messing with the decoder cards and/or cards that included specific mention of on-board DVD-decoding when the difference between hardware and software decoding became mostly an issue of whether or not the software would run rather than the difference in image quality.
All of that said, I've seen a lot of people have problems with both. The difference is that I've usually been able to trace most of the problems with nVidia cards back to Via AGP drivers, whereas most of the ATI problems traced to ATI-specific updates for the games involved or ATI driver updates (though there have been a fair number of nVidia driver updates to fix specific problems too).
My own experience has been that nVidia cards are about 90% flawless on my systems (the other 10% being that brand new game that needs that driver that nVidia didn't release until the next day, even though the developers had them and they were available as 'leaked' drivers if you knew where to look for that sort of thing). My biggest worry with nVidia has been deciding which card vendor to deal with (especially since I was a die-hard DiamondMM fan before S3 bought them, and my Hercules card has been great but they're only releasing ATI cards now, and the ASUS card was good but they never kept up with drivers), but at the same time I like having that choice and knowing that nVidia's reference drivers work (and very well at that) with 99% of the cards out there using their chips.
Maybe if I had gone with ATI instead of nVidia when I dropped 3dfx I'd feel the same way about ATI. I just have a hard time believing that when I consider where ATI was at the time (the ATI 3D Rage Pro?).
Another addition: the most recent (unless there's been one in the last 2 months) patch for Half-life completely would not work on many ATI cards until an ATI-specific update was released, primarily because some OpenGL cards weren't supported properly.
Personally, I'm glad that ATI's products and drivers have improved (especially since it maintains competition in the market), but I won't buy their cards until I've seen a decent history of quality drivers. I dropped 3dfx in part because of their constant excuses, the last thing I want to do is put myself in the hands of another company doing the same thing.
Your post is the antithesis of the open source philosophy. By your logic, no company would ever write for open source software because it benefits their competitors as much as it benefits them. You can see that isn't the case with many companies these days, betting more and more on open source.
Do you really believe that anyone other than IBM and their customers really benefits more from the biggest portions of their investments in Linux than IBM and their customers? IBM sees all of their customers taking their lucrative support contracts elsewhere and tossing expensive mainframes because they want to use Linux instead of the proprietary lockin that IBM has had for so long. So, to hold on to customers (and maybe even get some new ones) they start porting their software to Linux and start porting Linux to their hardware. I'm sure they spent plenty of time figuring out how much this move would benefit them vs. their competitors before they did it.
In the end a very small number of their customers can become self-supporting because they now have the source code to everything they need, while the majority of their customers stay with IBM when they would've been switching to anyone that could supply them with a boatload of x86 parts and Linux support. IBM even managed to save some of these people some money in the short term by keeping them from having to buy new hardware. Who knows how many people saw IBM's embracing of Linux as some embrace of the 'open source philosophy' and brought their employers into IBM's open arms, but there's little doubt that they've gained some new customers through the tactic.
3DLabs proposal is a proposal for the shader-language portion of the new OpenGL 2.0 spec. NVidia and ATI could also contributr their own proposals, or changes to 3DLabs version, but instead they choose to use proprietary garbage.
nVidia did contribute various proposals for OpenGL 2.0, most of which resulted in Cg's creation in the first place.
You would really think that these guys would listen to John Carmack a little more. I mean, he is the major force driving their sales.
I'm sure they take his proposals with the grain of salt needed, though. Otherwise, nVidia's Direct3D efforts would've never been undertaken (because Carmack didn't think Direct3D was worth supporting). Similarly, ATI's OpenGL support would probably still be complete garbage if they didn't listen to Carmack.
Oh, and I forgot to add that a lot of the high-end workstation graphics cards don't even support Direct3D anyway, and render OpenGL much more efficiently than an equally powerful consumer card, simply because the hardware (and driver) has been optimized for it.
I think that you and the parent are missing the real reason that OpenGL is king on the workstations and Direct3D never will be. OpenGL is extendable by everyone and Direct3D is completly controlled by MS.
That's very true, but you also missed the reason that Direct3D got where it is today, because OpenGL was definitely the king in games up until at least DirectX5. The reason is simply that Direct3D is updated on a fairly regular basis to take advantage of the new features on video cards as quickly as possible (and those features are most often geared towards what the game developers want to see), whereas such support is provided in OpenGL only through those card-specific extensions most of the time (as it takes much longer for OpenGL itself to be updated with those features).
OpenGL is a much more static API and that has it's own appeal in areas where your application may be in use for several years, rather than just the 60 hours that a player may spend on your game. As long as people believe that they need the latest flash-bang-gizmo graphics tricks in order to sell their games, they'll want the API they use to make their lives easier when they use those tricks. Even the idea that OpenGL is faster can be questioned when looking at cards that support the calls being used (though that certainly wasn't the case in earlier versions of Direct3D, which were always slower than properly-written and supported OpenGL).
You can't go and make your own version of Direct3D with a hypercube (or whatever) extension that draws a super widget because Direct3D is closed.
Then again, any graphics chip manufacturer is free to add new features to a card and give the developers the ability to use them alongside Direct3D before Direct3D supports them. This is basically what nVidia and ATI are doing with Cg and RenderMonkey (giving them a higher-level language that compiles down to hardware-level code for DirectX8 while also compiling to OpenGL and DirectX9 code for those calls that are (or will be) supported).
You know what? ALL software has holes. The "l33t haX0r" OS'es have their fair share as well, but you fucking zealots like to try to just sweep that under the carpet. Buuuut, whenever ANY type of problem shows up in a Closed-source product, you use that to trash all over the product, the company, the company's dog, their mothers, the second grade teacher, etc.
Perhaps you responded to the wrong poster, since the window I'm typing this in seems to be IE6 running on Win2k, and the machine on the other side of my desk is running XP Pro, as is my primary home computer.
Use the best tool for the job. I simply mentioned OpenBSD because I tend to believe that OpenBSD and FreeBSD are usually the best tool for the job if you want to setup an older system as a firewall to monitor and/or block traffic on your network. The primary reason for that is, of course, because of the record for security in OpenBSD, though reasons for that abound. In the end, if you know what you're doing with the system, there's a reasonable chance that you can keep it secure.
Pie menus because they make thus far the best use of available 2D space.
Pie menus don't make the best use of available 2d space (in fact they tend to use more space than is strictly necessary). They do make the most efficient use (thus far) of mouse movement, though, which is precisely why people are messing with bringing them out of their normal domain (games) and into normal applications.
Which one will win ? Who knows and indeed who cares, both are well supported and actively developed on. In 5 years, when graphics hardware has gotten to the point where it is really stable then we might have a winner ( my bets on OpenGL because it's so much cleaner ) but until then the two standards both serve a purpose.
I doubt there will be any clear winner unless you focus on the area that each was built for in the first place (ie Direct3D will most likely win in games, especially Windows-only games, OpenGL will remain king on workstations).
As for which is 'cleaner', I guess that depends on how you look at it and what you're used to. An advantage of Direct3D for people learning programming is that the style of the API is kept throughout DirectX, and you'll find that even the most hardcore OpenGL programmers are using DirectX for the sound and input on the Windows versions of their games.
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VB's just a front-end to the flat text files. Open a .frm file in a text editor and you'll see the code at the end of a string of properties that describe the form, which is simply hidden by the VB editor.
That being said, the IDE does a lot to make those flat text files less flat, even moreso in VS.Net with outlining, regions, and so on.
Damn, the Windows version on this computer is 5.00.2195, does that mean I'm running an XBox? I thought it was a Dell...
If your boxes aren't vulnerable, then you've done something 'nonstandard'
You mean like patching them in the 6 days since the patch for this vulnerability was released
Isn't this tantamount to purjury? Their claim that it would criple the system and that it couldn't be removed was obviously false, if all that was necessary to satisfy the courts was to remove the icon from the desktop. Sure, MS is allowed to spin things a bit in the media, but in the courtroom, nearly explicit lies are illegal, no?
The court can't hold Microsoft responsible for the media's complete misunderstanding of the statements made (or complete misrepresentation). Microsoft stated they couldn't be removed, and offered instead to hide them (which is what they're doing). Of course, this part:
The change will make it possible for hardware vendors to customize their systems by striking business deals to include alternative programs from companies like America Online and RealNetworks.
is pointless as well without the additional mention of in place of Microsoft software, because they can already do that without the ability to hide MS software (though MS had to loosen restrictions on OEMs in order for it to be possible, which was done back in November/December).
the 'compact mode' of the newer one's is just plain shite, with the little box floating around the screen.
Options...->Player tab->clear the check on 'When in compact mode, always display anchor window'
works in WMP7 or WMP8(XP).
It's not necessarily the gamers that drive the market, its the system requirements for games coming out. The target platform/system specs for the next generation of games keeps rising
Last I checked, though, none of my games say aluminum case, plexi-glass window, custom paint job, or neon lights, which accounted for a good part of CNN's discussion of the subject.
My brother built a new computer, and XP REFUSES to work with his whiz-bang 120GB hard drive if he tries to run with NTFS. Strangely enough, FAT32 poses no problems, and Linux and BeOS are fine.
;).
.
Does it refuse to work or does it refuse to format the full drive with NTFS? I know I had a similar problem when I got my 80GB drive, but it would format at a smaller amount (I think 60GB, but it may have been 40GB), so at the time I just set the partitions accordingly, and then a couple months later a patch was released that addressed the problem. It doesn't seem to have any problems now as a full 80GB drive, but I guess Ill have to get a 120GB drive to find out if that works (hell, I was planning on upgrading my 20GB drive anyway
As for the 0 crashes/lockups, I'm honestly not experiencing that. The machine I'm using right now is XP (we're switching over to it at work because the boss decided we weren't wasting enough money yet), and I'm experiencing at least one crash/lockup a day. Plus, the thing seems to have that good ol' Windows 98 lock-up-every-time-you-try-to-shut-down-or-reboot problem. Granted, it's likely a bad driver that is causing the problems and not the OS itself, but then again you'd think the OS would be able to handle errors like these a bit more gracefully. .
Ouch. My home system's been running for a few days w/ XP Pro since I finally got the hardware upgraded. Before it went down it had been running for about 5 weeks without a reboot, and before I moved from San Diego it had been running for a couple of months. Overall I'd say I've had fewer stability issues with XP than I had with 2k, though 2k was rock solid after SP1 (and only slightly less than before it).
NWN ran just fine on my computer w/ a 1GHz CPU and GeForce2 video card, until the motherboard took a hit from a screw and I couldn't boot the system any more.
Of course, just as the hardware gods cursed his chances of playing NWN by hitting him with just about every failure in the book, they cursed my quest to upgrade (rather than simply replace the dead motherboard) by deciding that a 300W power supply just isn't enough to run a P4-2GHz computer w/ a 64MB GeForce2 GTS, 2 hard drives, DVD-ROM, CD-RW, 3 fans, and SBLive w/ LiveDrive (480W did the job, when in doubt go overkill).
I actually do need this. The code I could get by with a small monitor, but a large one is nice. As for the processor, it takes 10 minutes to build the whole project and 2 minutes to just build the part I'm working on. It was even worse on my old computer.
Exactly, the size of the monitor doesn't really matter to me, but it needs to be a good enough display that I can sit in front of it all day without eye strain setting in. My monitor is 19", but that's only 2" above the average around here (17" on all new computers), and it actually cost about what they were paying for the 17" monitors anyway (because we bought it at a local computer store instead of buying it with the computer from Dell). Build time when going to the new computer on the average project was cut to less than 3 minutes from 10 minutes, and I no longer have to turn off Outlook while I'm running Visual Studio (which means I can actually get those emails they keep asking me about).
Besides, with a 16MB ATI Rage 128 Ultra and the network connection in this place, I wouldn't even dream of playing most of my games on this thing. My computer at home works and plays better than this one, but at least this one is more than just tolerable.
A simple explanation: Alcohol is not addictive (except to a small percentage who are alcoholic). Think how many kids you knew that took up drinking before turning 18. Do they all need to have multiple drinks per day now? Do they have to go outside their office building to drink every hour or so?
I think you meant to say 'Alcohol is not AS addictive'. There's also quite a difference between the most common levels of alcoholism and the far extreem of 'needs a drink to get up in the morning and go to sleep at nite'. Everyone I knew as a teenager (myself included) took up drinking well before 18. Most of them didn't know what to do if they had idle time and were sober (and most of them used drugs eventually, which may have been better or worse depending on the drugs). Of course, I don't know most of them any longer, either, as most of them dropped out of school and I disassociated myself from many of them in order to keep myself from having problems with drugs & alcohol.
I can't believe that alcohol kills more people. There are some spectacular deaths when a drunk driver causes a major auto accident, but consider how many people die of lung cancer, emphysema, strokes, and heart disease from smoking.
Over half of all deaths (in the US) for people over 45 are from heart failure and cancer. Heart failure can be linked to smoking, drinking, eating habits, stress, or other causes. Cancer can be linked the same way, though the particular form of cancer is the best indicator (liver/stomach cancer is most common for alcoholics, lung/throat/oral cancer is most common for tobacco users, either one can have other causes as well, and medical ethics prevent scientific studies to prove the correlation as a causal effect).
The leading cause of death for people under 45 is accidents and adverse effects resulting from the accidents. Of all the causes of death due to accidents, the leading cause is motor vehicle accidents.
19,171 persons died in 1999 from alcohol-induced causes, which excludes homicides, accidents, and other causes indirectly related to alcohol use, and also excludes fetal alcohol syndrome. 19,102 persons died of drug-induced causes, which includes poisoning from medically prescribed drugs as well as dependent and nondependent use of drugs, but does not include accidents, homicides, or other causes indirectly related to drug use, or newborn deaths related to mother's drug use. 28,874 persons died from firearm injuries, which includes firearms-related suicide and homicide. Tobacco and related diseases are not ranked, because all causes of death termed 'tobacco-related' can be caused by other things, including (but not limited to) industrial pollution (respiratory disorders) and alcohol consumption (cardiovascular disease). Tobacco use leads to lower life-expectancy and higher risk of several types of diseases and forms of cancer, but this is based on the fact that these types of deaths are more common among smokers, and in any particular instance it is almost impossible to determine whether smoking was indeed the cause of the problem, or if it simply lead to a weakening of the system which made the disease more likely to occur (HIV is very similar in this respect, though the presence of HIV is detectable).
The three leading causes of death for 15-24 year olds are automobile crashes, homicides, and suicides. Alcohol is considered a leading factor in all 3. Almost 1/4 of all fatal traffic accidents are alcohol related (on a side note, in 1/5th to 1/4th of all automobile collisions the driver was using a cell phone without a hands-free device while driving). In single-vehicle fatal crashes on weekend nites, 66% of the drivers over 25 were intoxicated, 56% of the drivers under 25 were intoxicated.
Another nice little statistic I noticed was that there are no recorded deaths from marijuana, though studies for the (adverse) health effects of marijuana are usually cited as problematic at best, due to the high rates of tobacco and alcohol use amongst users of marijuana.
As far as the claim that tobacco is more addictive than alcohol, it's completely possible, although the reason is probably not due to physical properties of either alcohol or tobacco. It's far more likely that people see direct effects of alcoholism (hangovers which are the result of withdrawal from alcohol, the varied effects of the body's rejection of alcohol when over-consumption occurs (including vomiting and blackouts), and the normal effects of both consumption and over-consumption of alcohol including impaired judgment and motor skills) which make it easier for them to drink less often and even stop drinking altogether (in other words seeing the immediate effects of drinking makes it easier to break the psychological addiction). Whereas with tobacco the most common short-term adverse effects such as irratability and tension caused by withdrawal from tobacco (which in most moderate users occurs approximately 1 hour after use) are commonly linked in the smoker's mind with not smoking rather than with the tobacco itself. Consuming more alcohol will get rid of most hangover affects as well, but the affects of drinking usually stop most people from doing so (and the hangover is more closely associated with the alcohol consumption by the user than withdrawal effects of tobacco are associated with the tobacco). Hangovers also require higher levels of consumption than the withdrawal effects of tobacco, and usually take longer to set in (because alcohol takes longer to pass through the system). Withdrawal effects of tobacco seem to be most closely related to drugs like cocaine, heroin, and amphetamines, where the most commonly reported symptoms of early withdrawal are cravings for more of the drug and changes in emotional state. Most people also feel that they are 'back to normal' much more quickly after they stop drinking than after they stop smoking.
The most common reason that people I know cite for continuing to use tobacco is 'it keeps them from killing someone', in other words, they associate not smoking with the withdrawal effect, although many also state that their first experiences with smoking caused a noticable relaxed state. Of course, most of the people I know that continue to smoke were also exposed to second-hand smoke from their parent(s) most of their lives before they started smoking. Most of the people I know that have successfully (at least to date) stopped smoking replaced the addiction with another form of addiction, whether it be constant snacking, increased intake of caffeine (possibly an even more addictive substance than either alcohol or tobacco) or something more healthy (one person in particular spends an excessive amount of time in the gym on a daily basis).
Is this really necessary? With 100GB hard drives becoming more commonplace, I think we're at the limit of what normal users need out of hardware. There is just no use whatsoever for 50GB removable discs. In 10 years, we will all still be using DVD+RW. Drives will be a lot faster, sure, but history has shown that there is just no application that requires more than the ample 4.7GB of removable storage provided by DVD technology
I think you just stated for yourself why 50GB optical discs would at least be wanted by some percentage of the population. They won't be needed for popular media (music/movies/software) for the most part (at least not for a while, who knows how much software bloat we'll see). However, when it comes to backing up data, do you really want your hard drive to require 10-20 discs to backup, or would you rather use 1 or 2 50GB discs to backup that 100GB hard drive?
Personally, I'm doing ok with CD-R for now, because the majority of my 100GB of hard drive space is fairly static (my CD collection in MP3 format, software and games that I can simply reinstall), and a minor amount of data that actually needs backing up on a weekly or monthly basis. However, if I was running a critical system that handled large amounts of customer data, I'd want to reduce the number of discs I needed to backup that data whenever possible. I don't need DVD+RW capability for my own personal use, but if I were managing a couple hundred gigs of customer data I would like to back that up with the largest storage media possible, short of putting it onto another magnetic drive.
Thanks for clarifying that looking out for dedicated employees and being socially responsible is "such bullshit." It's like those damned do-gooders who get mad when tobacco companies advertise to kids, isn't it? Don't they realize that getting kids hooked on cigarettes, even if many die from cancer, is a small price to pay in order to enrich investors in RJ Reynolds? Damn social responsibility.
The real question when it comes to the 'do-gooders' getting mad at the tobacco companies is why aren't they also going after the companies advertising alcohol in the same places, with the same target audience? The simple fact is that they're being oppurtunistic. The tobacco companies make more money and are more consolidated, and are easier to target because fewer people smoke than drink. Tobacco gets heavier taxes and smoking gets banned from more and more places while alcohol kills more people and becomes less restricted (after all, they can advertise hard alcohol on TV again).
Stockholders that buy into a company that isn't likely to turn a profit are in the same position as people that work in bars and expect not to be exposed to cigarette smoke. Intelligent people don't do it, the rest bitch about it when they do it.
What we have here is a couple of stock buyers scared of the current market and looking to bail out all together, And in this case try to force every other stock holder to do the same.
and/or stock buyers that never intended to hold stock in the company in the first place. Some of them seem to be all too aware that the company is incapable of making money in it's current incarnation, and you have to wonder why people would invest in a company that they know won't make money. Simply put, they bought into it believing they could liquidate the company for it's value before it drained all of it's cash reserves.
Too many people, in the last few years, have bought into the market looking for a way to make money (as quickly as possible), rather than investing in companies that they believe have good business models. A solid company will give you a good return on investment in the long term, but these people came in knowing that they could buy the stock below the company's value and are simply looking to cash out before the company gets itself into a merger that leaves them holding another company's stock altogether. Sure, it's within the stockholders' rights to do this, but the reality is that those people asking for it to be done only bought the stock to make a quick profit anyway, expecting the company to either hit big or burn out fast (the first of which would have given a good return on investment when they sold out, the second of which would allow them to liquidate the company).
I wasn't aware that you could extend Direct3D, I guess that you'd need a seperate API from the card manufacturer or something right?
OpenGL assumes that each card will have it's own extensions and thus provides a common extension mechanism.
DirectX doesn't have an extension mechanism (that I'm aware of), but it also doesn't stop you from extending or overloading it's functions, or, as you said, adding your own API. Of course, if you break DirectX functionality with your extensions, it's your (card's) funeral, at least in the gaming market.
The reason that DirectX has been able to grow so quickly is that MS has kept complete control over the platform, only with versions 8 and higher have they actually let the other companies (read nVidia and ATI) have a real say in the api it seems like. I know that they always consulted the card manufacturers, but they still had the final say.
I agree there, but DirectX is a case where they've been getting input from card manufacturers and game developers since version 1 flopped. Versions 3 and 5 showed remarkable improvement and adoption from developers because of that input. Sure, MS has final say, but they definitely haven't been ignoring people or going their own way with it. Probably the only thing they won't do if there's demand for it is break backwards compatibility.
So, Windows is running right on
;) Overall, though, it sounds like he's simply hitting a lot of obscure sites, which is unusual, because I don't see all that many sites that have those kinds of problems. One thing I do see a lot, though, is generated HTML that does the broken tag thing and ends up cutting half the content from the page, but then view source usually lets me finish reading the article that was cut off.
...)
the hardware, with no intervening VM. Sorry for any confusion.
(If you meant the Java VM, it was the latest one available at the
time, although some browsers may use their own implementation
instead.)
I meant the Java VM. Specifically I've had problems with certain VM's from Sun (and a few problems with a couple of Microsoft's VMs), and find that many times when people are complaining about sites not working it's related to their Java installation, though, of course, it depends on what the site is using in the first place.
The only settings I mess with in the registry are the ones that
applications abuse to start themselves at system start time.
Allowing apps to do this seriously degrades system performance.
If one app does it, that app starts a bit faster, but when
twelve[1] apps do it, they all start slower, because you have no
RAM left. So I don't let any apps do this, especially not ones
we don't use all the time. What's really annoying about
misbehaved apps that put themselves in the Run keys without
asking is, they invariably take measures to insert themselves
into the Run keys not just on install but every time they run.
Yeah, I understand that. There are very few apps that I would allow to run automatically, and I have a tendency to seek out alternatives when a particular app is pushy about it. msconfig and gpedit.msc (depending on the version of Windows being used) are really helpful at keeping those out of there without having to remove the registry entries on every startup.
I was personally surprised that he didn't find more sites using
MS-specific code (mainly, the document.all interface), but there
weren't that many (that he visited -- YMMV). Mostly he got sites
in one of two categories: their HTML was obviously broken (you
know, mismatched tags, misspelled tags, imaginary tags, tags
missing their closing right angle bracket, required close tags
missing, imaginary attributes, attributes from one tag placed on
another tag that has never accepted them in any known browser,
unquoted attributes containing spaces, and that sort of nonsense)
or else they relied on the Plugin Of The Week (by which I mean,
some plugin that is not listed on Netscape's plugin finder
service and does not come with IE; the only one I remember is
Shockwave (which as it turns out is produced by the same company
as Flash, but less well-known), but we ran across perhaps a
couple dozen different ones, all obscure).
Shockwave isn't all that obscure, and is installed by default in newer versions of IE. At one time it was more common than Flash, back in the days when everyone was on dial-up
[1] A slight exaggeration only. MSIE, AIM, the MSN IM client
(and its associated spyware), and YIM all do this without
even asking. Other apps (Mozilla, Netscape, OpenOffice,
ask, and respect your choice, so I don't have a problem with
them. But the misbehaved ones I keep in check by editing the
registry, yes. There were at one time some other apps doing
this (well, trying to) that I haven't listed, but they've
been uninstalled now.
MSN IM, in my experience, is pretty good about respecting the choice as well, though you're right in that it doesn't ask in the first place, and it's not very nice about presenting the choice to the user, as it's buried in the options dialogue. I don't think I ever figured out a good way to get rid of AIM except for removing it from the system, and I've never used YIM. Real Player and QuickTime are also banned from my systems (though QT eventually finds it's way back for content reasons) for similar behavior, though I do find that eventually they'll go away when told to as well.
CGShaders has a collection of shaders available for developers to use as a base (or as is) in their applications. It may not be a 'standard library', but at least it's a good starting point for some people, and should grow with time.
Then again, if you get poor support, or worse, no support (like with *cough*ASUS*cough*), then that's another story. But if they give you your money back and their blessings on buying a new card, you can't really hold it against them.
I found that although ASUS is slow updating their drivers (I had an ASUS GeForce 256 SDR), their cards work extremely well with the reference drivers. Of course, you probably still can't get many special features working with reference drivers, but there are a few that do (TV out should work for one).
I didn't know anyone bothered with hardware DVD decoders beyond the on-board MPEG-2 acceleration that's standard on most video cards anymore, though. I stopped messing with the decoder cards and/or cards that included specific mention of on-board DVD-decoding when the difference between hardware and software decoding became mostly an issue of whether or not the software would run rather than the difference in image quality.
All of that said, I've seen a lot of people have problems with both. The difference is that I've usually been able to trace most of the problems with nVidia cards back to Via AGP drivers, whereas most of the ATI problems traced to ATI-specific updates for the games involved or ATI driver updates (though there have been a fair number of nVidia driver updates to fix specific problems too).
My own experience has been that nVidia cards are about 90% flawless on my systems (the other 10% being that brand new game that needs that driver that nVidia didn't release until the next day, even though the developers had them and they were available as 'leaked' drivers if you knew where to look for that sort of thing). My biggest worry with nVidia has been deciding which card vendor to deal with (especially since I was a die-hard DiamondMM fan before S3 bought them, and my Hercules card has been great but they're only releasing ATI cards now, and the ASUS card was good but they never kept up with drivers), but at the same time I like having that choice and knowing that nVidia's reference drivers work (and very well at that) with 99% of the cards out there using their chips.
Maybe if I had gone with ATI instead of nVidia when I dropped 3dfx I'd feel the same way about ATI. I just have a hard time believing that when I consider where ATI was at the time (the ATI 3D Rage Pro?).
Another addition: the most recent (unless there's been one in the last 2 months) patch for Half-life completely would not work on many ATI cards until an ATI-specific update was released, primarily because some OpenGL cards weren't supported properly.
Personally, I'm glad that ATI's products and drivers have improved (especially since it maintains competition in the market), but I won't buy their cards until I've seen a decent history of quality drivers. I dropped 3dfx in part because of their constant excuses, the last thing I want to do is put myself in the hands of another company doing the same thing.
Your post is the antithesis of the open source philosophy. By your logic, no company would ever write for open source software because it benefits their competitors as much as it benefits them. You can see that isn't the case with many companies these days, betting more and more on open source.
Do you really believe that anyone other than IBM and their customers really benefits more from the biggest portions of their investments in Linux than IBM and their customers? IBM sees all of their customers taking their lucrative support contracts elsewhere and tossing expensive mainframes because they want to use Linux instead of the proprietary lockin that IBM has had for so long. So, to hold on to customers (and maybe even get some new ones) they start porting their software to Linux and start porting Linux to their hardware. I'm sure they spent plenty of time figuring out how much this move would benefit them vs. their competitors before they did it.
In the end a very small number of their customers can become self-supporting because they now have the source code to everything they need, while the majority of their customers stay with IBM when they would've been switching to anyone that could supply them with a boatload of x86 parts and Linux support. IBM even managed to save some of these people some money in the short term by keeping them from having to buy new hardware. Who knows how many people saw IBM's embracing of Linux as some embrace of the 'open source philosophy' and brought their employers into IBM's open arms, but there's little doubt that they've gained some new customers through the tactic.
3DLabs proposal is a proposal for the shader-language portion of the new OpenGL 2.0 spec. NVidia and ATI could also contributr their own proposals, or changes to 3DLabs version, but instead they choose to use proprietary garbage.
nVidia did contribute various proposals for OpenGL 2.0, most of which resulted in Cg's creation in the first place.
You would really think that these guys would listen to John Carmack a little more. I mean, he is the major force driving their sales.
I'm sure they take his proposals with the grain of salt needed, though. Otherwise, nVidia's Direct3D efforts would've never been undertaken (because Carmack didn't think Direct3D was worth supporting). Similarly, ATI's OpenGL support would probably still be complete garbage if they didn't listen to Carmack.
Oh, and I forgot to add that a lot of the high-end workstation graphics cards don't even support Direct3D anyway, and render OpenGL much more efficiently than an equally powerful consumer card, simply because the hardware (and driver) has been optimized for it.
I think that you and the parent are missing the real reason that OpenGL is king on the workstations and Direct3D never will be. OpenGL is extendable by everyone and Direct3D is completly controlled by MS.
That's very true, but you also missed the reason that Direct3D got where it is today, because OpenGL was definitely the king in games up until at least DirectX5. The reason is simply that Direct3D is updated on a fairly regular basis to take advantage of the new features on video cards as quickly as possible (and those features are most often geared towards what the game developers want to see), whereas such support is provided in OpenGL only through those card-specific extensions most of the time (as it takes much longer for OpenGL itself to be updated with those features).
OpenGL is a much more static API and that has it's own appeal in areas where your application may be in use for several years, rather than just the 60 hours that a player may spend on your game. As long as people believe that they need the latest flash-bang-gizmo graphics tricks in order to sell their games, they'll want the API they use to make their lives easier when they use those tricks. Even the idea that OpenGL is faster can be questioned when looking at cards that support the calls being used (though that certainly wasn't the case in earlier versions of Direct3D, which were always slower than properly-written and supported OpenGL).
You can't go and make your own version of Direct3D with a hypercube (or whatever) extension that draws a super widget because Direct3D is closed.
Then again, any graphics chip manufacturer is free to add new features to a card and give the developers the ability to use them alongside Direct3D before Direct3D supports them. This is basically what nVidia and ATI are doing with Cg and RenderMonkey (giving them a higher-level language that compiles down to hardware-level code for DirectX8 while also compiling to OpenGL and DirectX9 code for those calls that are (or will be) supported).
You know what? ALL software has holes. The "l33t haX0r" OS'es have their fair share as well, but you fucking zealots like to try to just sweep that under the carpet. Buuuut, whenever ANY type of problem shows up in a Closed-source product, you use that to trash all over the product, the company, the company's dog, their mothers, the second grade teacher, etc.
Perhaps you responded to the wrong poster, since the window I'm typing this in seems to be IE6 running on Win2k, and the machine on the other side of my desk is running XP Pro, as is my primary home computer.
Use the best tool for the job. I simply mentioned OpenBSD because I tend to believe that OpenBSD and FreeBSD are usually the best tool for the job if you want to setup an older system as a firewall to monitor and/or block traffic on your network. The primary reason for that is, of course, because of the record for security in OpenBSD, though reasons for that abound. In the end, if you know what you're doing with the system, there's a reasonable chance that you can keep it secure.
Pie menus because they make thus far the best use of available 2D space.
Pie menus don't make the best use of available 2d space (in fact they tend to use more space than is strictly necessary). They do make the most efficient use (thus far) of mouse movement, though, which is precisely why people are messing with bringing them out of their normal domain (games) and into normal applications.
Which one will win ? Who knows and indeed who cares, both are well supported and actively developed on. In 5 years, when graphics hardware has gotten to the point where it is really stable then we might have a winner ( my bets on OpenGL because it's so much cleaner ) but until then the two standards both serve a purpose.
I doubt there will be any clear winner unless you focus on the area that each was built for in the first place (ie Direct3D will most likely win in games, especially Windows-only games, OpenGL will remain king on workstations).
As for which is 'cleaner', I guess that depends on how you look at it and what you're used to. An advantage of Direct3D for people learning programming is that the style of the API is kept throughout DirectX, and you'll find that even the most hardcore OpenGL programmers are using DirectX for the sound and input on the Windows versions of their games.