What are you talking about? Do you honestly not find it suspicious that nVidia left Futuremarks beta program mere months (2 i think) before the NV30 was released? They by that time realised NV30s performance could't touch the R300 and that it was too late to fix it...
Well...of course, that's not even in question. The new card sucked, so they didn't feel the need to pay Futuremark to tell them their card sucked. Sounds reasonable all the way around. We're not questioning whether nVidia are a bunch of whores - they most certainly are. We're questioning whether Futuremark are, and that's a significantly scarier prospect.
nVidia is the one doing the extortion, not Futuremark. They simply threatened Futuremark with a lawsuit.
I'm sure they did, but I'll turn things around a bit - don't you find it suspicious that Futuremark made a much bigger deal about nVidia's "cheating" than ATI's? Seems to me that it was a bit of "punishment" for nVidia not paying them. And I have a decent idea that Futuremark happened upon a pile of cash in the meantime. Looks a bit like extortion to me. Yes, nVidia certainly put the screws on Futuremark - again, I thought that was so damned obvious not to need mentioning, but there you go anyway. So they extorted each other.
Now, to set the record straight, I'm not suggesting that nVidia didn't cheat - they most certainly did. Unquestioned. However, I find it mighty suspicious that Futuremark was willing to do a 180 so quickly on the matter, and I have lost all respect for them in the process. Even if they feared the lawyers, they could have retracted the statement with a bit less enthusiasm. That's why I think they were just waiting for a payout from Day 1.
I guess the ultimate point is this - hardware makers are dogs. They will do anything to make their stuff look faster. That's why we need benchmarks - to keep the cheating from happening.
Unfortunately, now we have a situation where the maker of the benchmark, the "referee" as it were, is willing to look the other way for a bit of cash.
So we always knew that nVidia were a bunch of whores - it's sad to discover that Futuremark are as well.
Highly unlikely they would be knocking on your door then- usually lots of stuff is planned on saturdays, and knocking on stranger's doors is about the last thing that is on the list. Even so, 10 am is not an unreasonable time. Do you scream at the UPS delivery man when he stops by at 9?
It's my door, so it's reasonable (or un-) if I say it is. And if I didn't order something, then the UPS asshole better be knocking on my door. If I did, then it sucks to be me. And I don't remember ordering any dogma.
It is not trespassing- the courts have ruled several times that it is protected speech.
I'm using trespassing in the general sense, as in, someone I don't want there.
I'm going to go ahead and raise the bullcrap flag on this story. Who actually believes that some football player just happens to have a full length black hooded robe and 6' sword handy?
They do some strange things to initiate the freshmen, I hear. I would have believed it if he had said a 6' strap-on too.
You know, when I was on a Mormon mission, all you had to do was say "I'm not interested" and I would wish you a nice day and walk away. What is so hard about that?
You're the one who woke me up at 10 am on a Saturday when I had a hangover and had been asleep for all of 3 hours, huh? Well, for my trouble of getting out of bed and answering an unsolicited and unwanted trespasser, you're going to entertain me. And the way you're going to do that is you're going to make very strange reactions, hopefully Fear and Loathing, or possibly just crying and screaming, when I do extremely strange and frightening things to you.
Do we understand each other? Because if not, you can just not knock on my door. You're lucky I'm not one of the crazy bastards from Colorado who just shoot on sight. I'm trying to be a nice guy and not shoot you, but sometimes you have to go and make it difficult.
Its not a waste of time because EVERYONE now knows that NVIDIA was caught cheating by futuremark.
Really? Everybody on slashdot...which, if everyone who ever belonged to slashdot read it regularly, is about 700,000 people. So I would say there is a large segment of the gamer population who hasn't looked into this thoroughly and believe Futuremark, or who have never even heard of the whole deal and believe 3DMark stats.
Futuremark did the wrong thing here. They should have licensed the test results so they are illegal to publicize if, in Futuremark's estimation, you cheated, which they could concey to you through a C&D. That way they avoid the libel suits, but they keep the integrity of their stuff.
Or they can hold out for a pile of cash, which is what they were obviously doing all along. nVidia was right when they called Futuremark on the extortion angle - nVidia dropped out of the 3dmark beta program, stopped paying Futuremark, so FM go after nVidia until nVidia pay. Sounds a lot like SCO and IBM, except that Futuremark actually had a basis for making a stink. Which makes it all the more sad that they settled. Thanks a lot guys.
IBM's market share reaches far wider than Dell's. First off, IBM is heavy in the mainframe market, as opposed to Dell which only sells intel-based servers. Secondly, IBM also has a large non-US marketshare, of which Dell only recently broke into.
And IBM makes cutting-edge chips...and IBM is heavily involved in "blue sky" R&D for stuff like carbon nanotube transistors...and IBM sells services and consulting...and IBM develops OS's (ties in to your mainframe point).
IBM and Dell really aren't in the same league. IBM invents things. Dell assembles them.
Damn, my doorbell just rang, I bet somebody wants to witness with me something about their God...
See, that's where you have fun, with the religious nuts. Have a knife covered with fake blood at the door. Tell them they're just in time to help sacrifice the virgin.
Or open it wearing an outfit like The Gimp in Pulp Fiction. Tell them they're just in time for "Punishment Phase."
Or, if you're bald, put on a white robe and try to convert THEM...very calmly.
Or just point a watergun at them and shoot them every time they try to talk. The madder they get, the more you shoot!
Or answer the door nude. See if they can look you in the eye as you converse about the finer points of being a Jehovah's Witness. Ask them if their religion bans nudity.
See, there's lots you can do to get some enjoyment outta them!
This being MIT, there's plenty of time for that later. I TA some classes at Caltech, and they're obscenely intense. If MIT's are anything similar, and I expect they are, then the kids won't be getting shorted on "theory."
And of course the myth(debunked) that advertising has any impact on sales. You believe that the magazine you pay for has value, so you pay for it. The advertisers believe you will pay attention to advertising in a vehicle that has value and also pay for it
I love the "I paid more for it so it must be better" effect. My favorite example (outside of IT purchasing practices) was a weight loss formula sold on TV. Their main justification for charging $150/bottle was that you wouldn't pay that if it didn't work. Nice and circular argument, and I suspect lost on the public. And obviously they find suckers.
I expect, as you state, it's similar for newspapers and their advertisers, so they charge a token cost at the newsstand.
Last time I checked - they were a 'for profit' business... monthly fees + selling of data = more profit ~= happier shareholders.
Well, network TV is for profit and free. And newspapers that cost $0.50 cost more than that to distribute. It's all about whether the extra revenue from advertisers outweigh the lower fees.
My business is suing...and bizniss is GOOD!
on
Today's SCO News
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· Score: 1
The SCO Group, Inc. develops and markets software based onthe Linux operating system and provides related services that enable the development, deployment and management of Internet access devices and specialized servers.
Does SCO know thats what they do?
Yeah, I saw that too - barrel of laughs. Brings up a good point, though, really - this suit has caused them to COMPLETELY abandon one of their most (if not THE most) significant revenue streams for...what? A lawsuit? If they actually expected to be a real company that makes products after all this is over, I think they would have worked out a deal with IBM, assuming there's anything real anyway. As it is, their actions have forced them to kill their business for a chance of a lawsuit. Charming.
That line should have been "The SCO Group, Inc. develops and markets LAWSUITS based on the Linux operating system."
...I'd be shorting the FUCK out of SCO. That's how confident I am that they won't win this lawsuit. Of course, if they did, that would give them $1B, divided by about 11M shares outstanding...or, in other words, their stock would be worth about $91/share assuming all their other assets are worthless...which of course they are.
What were they expecting
on
Today's SCO News
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course, the Novell bit really hurt them, and now they're getting a bit desperate.
This is where I can't understand who is running this strategy - Darl or the VERY expensive lawyers they're supposedly paying. Because it seems pretty easy to predict. First, they claimed property they do not own - property actually owned by the Open Group and Novell. These organizations then bitchslaped SCO in public.
Did they not think the "bitchslap" step would occur? Because it looked pretty obvious to me. Did they think Novell wouldn't tell the world that they were begging for Unix copyrights? Did they think Novell would actually give it to them? That's pretty damaging to your case there, guys.
it is rather interesting that wd escaped this round. i used to reccomend and buy wd drives primarily because they were very reliable. however, i have had a number of them die in the last 7 years and for that reason, i've reccomended against them for quite some time. their standards seemed to have dropped a while back and never really recovered.
Yeah, isn't it? I was only half kidding, as I have had issues with WD in the past as well (intermittent seek failures and such) The problem with the IDE mass storage market is that margins are so tiny that no one can afford to offer frills like longer warranties - you might see the wisdom in it, but OEM's could really care less about your HDD warranty as long as it's as long as their base warranty.
The way I look at it is defective components are the price we pay for having good computers available for less than $1000. Problem is for people like me, where I have over 1GB of priceless data (gonna be my thesis in about a year), and your employer (I'm assuming). These days, it seems like the only way to have any data security is to go SCSI (which seem to have better quality still, owing to the higher margins they make on them), or go with a big ol' redundant RAID. That and backup like a fiend, obviously.
Hasn't been a problem for lilo since before grub was even created.
I'm not so sure that has been completely fixed, or maybe it was my BIOS. I had a partition that LILO completely puked on, GRUB had NO problem with it. And my LILO config was fine - I could boot other partitions fine, just not the 20 GB one. Could be that GRUB, being a bit higher-level, was able to overcome this, I don't know. Or maybe I missed a LILO trick (though I tried everything I could think of, like LBA stuff). Either way, after a while of searching and cursing, I couldn't get LILO to work. GRUB took under 10 minutes includnig the download.
You've got one there, but I don't consider it a real big hassle to type "lilo". If nothing else, it provides a good syntax check before you try to use the new config.
Well, it's not the hassle, it's more my forgetful nature. And I don't think I'm completely alone there.;)
My main complaint (although there are plenty of others), is that the boot/time command-line is very clunky, tedious, and hard to use. That is one area where lilo just beats the crap out of grub (and it's something I use very often, so it's a major problem for me).
That's true, but that's also why I take 1 minute (if that) to make a boot choice screen in my GRUB config file. It's simple as hell. Here's mine:
timeout 60
default 0
fallback 1
color light-gray/blue red/light-gray
#(2) Winblows
title Winblows
root(hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
I would say that config is cleaner than LILO's, and as soon as I change that file, I have a nice menu system that takes no effort at boot time. Hell, if I had to use GRUB's command-line crap every time I booted, I'd punt it too! It sure as hell is kind of klunky. But that's what I like - GRUB's command line is really powerful (if clunky) for when you need it - when you don't, it's easy to set up a choice screen. Best of both worlds for me, and you don't have to muck around trying to get LILO, your BIOS, and your HDD to play nicely.
Wonderful. I was asking what exactly those features are... I would especially like to hear what incredible features make it worth the effort of doing the coding work, and worth the hassle of actually using the GRUB command-line, which is more cumbersome than any other boot-loader (with a command-line) that I've used. Saying "It's so great dude!" isn't exactly going to change my mind.
First, to disclose, I'm a linux user (Hey! stop throwing things!) though I'm thinking of trying some *BSD flavor. I used to use LILO, it really sucks (I'm sure you guys are really going to argue that one, huh?), so I tried GRUB. It doesn't.
Now, as some pundits have said, GRUB does sort of render your box a tad inoperable if you remove the HDD or partition that contains GRUB. Now, that's not so fun, but it would screw you the same if you removed the HDD with the MBR you're booting from, even if you use a different loader, and that's a similar issue. And really, reinstalling grub on the new HDD isn't hard either assuming you're not swapping drives every day (at which point it might become tedious). So I don't think GRUB's immobilizing one of your drives is a big deal.
I like a few things about GRUB. First, it has no cylinder issues or boot partition size issues like some boot loaders (ahem: LILO!). Also, you don't have to reinstall the loader when you make a configuration change, which is nice if you're screwing with things. Changing the config file is sufficient. Configuration is pretty simple too. It just seems to have a good clean implementation of whatever you'd need to do - kind of like the opposite of sendmail, that's the best way I can put it.
Now, don't get me wrong - I don't LIKE that I like GRUB, as I also tend to avoid GNU software whenever possible (if not GPL software), simply because I consider Stallman to be an annoying turd. But all in all, I think GRUB's a pretty nice bootloader, especially for us poor linux hacks who get tired of mucking around with LILO.
Admittedly, I'm not the best person to be comparing GRUB to BSD bootloaders, but no one else seems to be sticking up for it at all.;)
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Well...of course, that's not even in question. The new card sucked, so they didn't feel the need to pay Futuremark to tell them their card sucked. Sounds reasonable all the way around. We're not questioning whether nVidia are a bunch of whores - they most certainly are. We're questioning whether Futuremark are, and that's a significantly scarier prospect.
nVidia is the one doing the extortion, not Futuremark. They simply threatened Futuremark with a lawsuit.
I'm sure they did, but I'll turn things around a bit - don't you find it suspicious that Futuremark made a much bigger deal about nVidia's "cheating" than ATI's? Seems to me that it was a bit of "punishment" for nVidia not paying them. And I have a decent idea that Futuremark happened upon a pile of cash in the meantime. Looks a bit like extortion to me. Yes, nVidia certainly put the screws on Futuremark - again, I thought that was so damned obvious not to need mentioning, but there you go anyway. So they extorted each other.
Now, to set the record straight, I'm not suggesting that nVidia didn't cheat - they most certainly did. Unquestioned. However, I find it mighty suspicious that Futuremark was willing to do a 180 so quickly on the matter, and I have lost all respect for them in the process. Even if they feared the lawyers, they could have retracted the statement with a bit less enthusiasm. That's why I think they were just waiting for a payout from Day 1.
I guess the ultimate point is this - hardware makers are dogs. They will do anything to make their stuff look faster. That's why we need benchmarks - to keep the cheating from happening. Unfortunately, now we have a situation where the maker of the benchmark, the "referee" as it were, is willing to look the other way for a bit of cash.
So we always knew that nVidia were a bunch of whores - it's sad to discover that Futuremark are as well.
It's my door, so it's reasonable (or un-) if I say it is. And if I didn't order something, then the UPS asshole better be knocking on my door. If I did, then it sucks to be me. And I don't remember ordering any dogma.
It is not trespassing- the courts have ruled several times that it is protected speech.
I'm using trespassing in the general sense, as in, someone I don't want there.
You are giving yourself too much credit.
Then come by my house at 10 am and see. ;)
And sign your damned posts coward.
They do some strange things to initiate the freshmen, I hear. I would have believed it if he had said a 6' strap-on too.
You're the one who woke me up at 10 am on a Saturday when I had a hangover and had been asleep for all of 3 hours, huh? Well, for my trouble of getting out of bed and answering an unsolicited and unwanted trespasser, you're going to entertain me. And the way you're going to do that is you're going to make very strange reactions, hopefully Fear and Loathing, or possibly just crying and screaming, when I do extremely strange and frightening things to you.
Do we understand each other? Because if not, you can just not knock on my door. You're lucky I'm not one of the crazy bastards from Colorado who just shoot on sight. I'm trying to be a nice guy and not shoot you, but sometimes you have to go and make it difficult.
Really? Everybody on slashdot...which, if everyone who ever belonged to slashdot read it regularly, is about 700,000 people. So I would say there is a large segment of the gamer population who hasn't looked into this thoroughly and believe Futuremark, or who have never even heard of the whole deal and believe 3DMark stats.
Futuremark did the wrong thing here. They should have licensed the test results so they are illegal to publicize if, in Futuremark's estimation, you cheated, which they could concey to you through a C&D. That way they avoid the libel suits, but they keep the integrity of their stuff.
Or they can hold out for a pile of cash, which is what they were obviously doing all along. nVidia was right when they called Futuremark on the extortion angle - nVidia dropped out of the 3dmark beta program, stopped paying Futuremark, so FM go after nVidia until nVidia pay. Sounds a lot like SCO and IBM, except that Futuremark actually had a basis for making a stink. Which makes it all the more sad that they settled. Thanks a lot guys.
I dunno man...I remember that guy from those stupid Dell commercials. That guy they call "The Customizer," he looked pretty highly trained.
...but then I realized there wasn't anything in it that wasn't pretty much true. If anything it's flamebait...but correct flamebait. Sorry.
# A foreign language
# Jibberish
# Elvish, or
# Klingon
I dunno man...if you can actually converse in Elvish and Klingon, you have far bigger problems than the JW on your front step.
And IBM makes cutting-edge chips...and IBM is heavily involved in "blue sky" R&D for stuff like carbon nanotube transistors...and IBM sells services and consulting...and IBM develops OS's (ties in to your mainframe point).
IBM and Dell really aren't in the same league. IBM invents things. Dell assembles them.
:)
See, that's what they WANT, though - if you're a religious nut, you dream of being a martyr. Don't give them the pleasure!
See, that's where you have fun, with the religious nuts. Have a knife covered with fake blood at the door. Tell them they're just in time to help sacrifice the virgin.
Or open it wearing an outfit like The Gimp in Pulp Fiction. Tell them they're just in time for "Punishment Phase."
Or, if you're bald, put on a white robe and try to convert THEM...very calmly.
Or just point a watergun at them and shoot them every time they try to talk. The madder they get, the more you shoot!
Or answer the door nude. See if they can look you in the eye as you converse about the finer points of being a Jehovah's Witness. Ask them if their religion bans nudity.
See, there's lots you can do to get some enjoyment outta them!
This being MIT, there's plenty of time for that later. I TA some classes at Caltech, and they're obscenely intense. If MIT's are anything similar, and I expect they are, then the kids won't be getting shorted on "theory."
I love the "I paid more for it so it must be better" effect. My favorite example (outside of IT purchasing practices) was a weight loss formula sold on TV. Their main justification for charging $150/bottle was that you wouldn't pay that if it didn't work. Nice and circular argument, and I suspect lost on the public. And obviously they find suckers.
I expect, as you state, it's similar for newspapers and their advertisers, so they charge a token cost at the newsstand.
Well, network TV is for profit and free. And newspapers that cost $0.50 cost more than that to distribute. It's all about whether the extra revenue from advertisers outweigh the lower fees.
The SCO Group, Inc. develops and markets software based onthe Linux operating system and provides related services that enable the development, deployment and management of Internet access devices and specialized servers.
Does SCO know thats what they do?
Yeah, I saw that too - barrel of laughs. Brings up a good point, though, really - this suit has caused them to COMPLETELY abandon one of their most (if not THE most) significant revenue streams for...what? A lawsuit? If they actually expected to be a real company that makes products after all this is over, I think they would have worked out a deal with IBM, assuming there's anything real anyway. As it is, their actions have forced them to kill their business for a chance of a lawsuit. Charming.
That line should have been "The SCO Group, Inc. develops and markets LAWSUITS based on the Linux operating system."
...I'd be shorting the FUCK out of SCO. That's how confident I am that they won't win this lawsuit. Of course, if they did, that would give them $1B, divided by about 11M shares outstanding...or, in other words, their stock would be worth about $91/share assuming all their other assets are worthless...which of course they are.
This is where I can't understand who is running this strategy - Darl or the VERY expensive lawyers they're supposedly paying. Because it seems pretty easy to predict. First, they claimed property they do not own - property actually owned by the Open Group and Novell. These organizations then bitchslaped SCO in public.
Did they not think the "bitchslap" step would occur? Because it looked pretty obvious to me. Did they think Novell wouldn't tell the world that they were begging for Unix copyrights? Did they think Novell would actually give it to them? That's pretty damaging to your case there, guys.
Fools.
I *might* give them one of the "Please try again" caps. Nothing more.
Yeah, isn't it? I was only half kidding, as I have had issues with WD in the past as well (intermittent seek failures and such) The problem with the IDE mass storage market is that margins are so tiny that no one can afford to offer frills like longer warranties - you might see the wisdom in it, but OEM's could really care less about your HDD warranty as long as it's as long as their base warranty.
The way I look at it is defective components are the price we pay for having good computers available for less than $1000. Problem is for people like me, where I have over 1GB of priceless data (gonna be my thesis in about a year), and your employer (I'm assuming). These days, it seems like the only way to have any data security is to go SCSI (which seem to have better quality still, owing to the higher margins they make on them), or go with a big ol' redundant RAID. That and backup like a fiend, obviously.
I'm not so sure that has been completely fixed, or maybe it was my BIOS. I had a partition that LILO completely puked on, GRUB had NO problem with it. And my LILO config was fine - I could boot other partitions fine, just not the 20 GB one. Could be that GRUB, being a bit higher-level, was able to overcome this, I don't know. Or maybe I missed a LILO trick (though I tried everything I could think of, like LBA stuff). Either way, after a while of searching and cursing, I couldn't get LILO to work. GRUB took under 10 minutes includnig the download.
You've got one there, but I don't consider it a real big hassle to type "lilo". If nothing else, it provides a good syntax check before you try to use the new config.
Well, it's not the hassle, it's more my forgetful nature. And I don't think I'm completely alone there. ;)
My main complaint (although there are plenty of others), is that the boot/time command-line is very clunky, tedious, and hard to use. That is one area where lilo just beats the crap out of grub (and it's something I use very often, so it's a major problem for me).
That's true, but that's also why I take 1 minute (if that) to make a boot choice screen in my GRUB config file. It's simple as hell. Here's mine:
timeout 60
default 0
fallback 1
color light-gray/blue red/light-gray
#(0) Slackware 9
title Slackware9
root (hd2,0)
kernel
#(1) Slackware 8
title Slackware8
root (hd1,0)
kernel
mem=512M
#(2) Winblows
title Winblows
root(hd0,0)
makeactive
chainloader +1
I would say that config is cleaner than LILO's, and as soon as I change that file, I have a nice menu system that takes no effort at boot time. Hell, if I had to use GRUB's command-line crap every time I booted, I'd punt it too! It sure as hell is kind of klunky. But that's what I like - GRUB's command line is really powerful (if clunky) for when you need it - when you don't, it's easy to set up a choice screen. Best of both worlds for me, and you don't have to muck around trying to get LILO, your BIOS, and your HDD to play nicely.
Is the "Acknowledgement" stipulation completely rescinded?
Well, 1) I would say that a bachelor's isn't "highly educated," even if it's Yale; 2) I wasn't speaking in specifics, nor of all possible fields.
And for fairness, it's not like Gore was intelligent either. How about the Dems come up with a candidate who actually has a pulse for '04, eh?
First, to disclose, I'm a linux user (Hey! stop throwing things!) though I'm thinking of trying some *BSD flavor. I used to use LILO, it really sucks (I'm sure you guys are really going to argue that one, huh?), so I tried GRUB. It doesn't.
Now, as some pundits have said, GRUB does sort of render your box a tad inoperable if you remove the HDD or partition that contains GRUB. Now, that's not so fun, but it would screw you the same if you removed the HDD with the MBR you're booting from, even if you use a different loader, and that's a similar issue. And really, reinstalling grub on the new HDD isn't hard either assuming you're not swapping drives every day (at which point it might become tedious). So I don't think GRUB's immobilizing one of your drives is a big deal.
I like a few things about GRUB. First, it has no cylinder issues or boot partition size issues like some boot loaders (ahem: LILO!). Also, you don't have to reinstall the loader when you make a configuration change, which is nice if you're screwing with things. Changing the config file is sufficient. Configuration is pretty simple too. It just seems to have a good clean implementation of whatever you'd need to do - kind of like the opposite of sendmail, that's the best way I can put it.
Now, don't get me wrong - I don't LIKE that I like GRUB, as I also tend to avoid GNU software whenever possible (if not GPL software), simply because I consider Stallman to be an annoying turd. But all in all, I think GRUB's a pretty nice bootloader, especially for us poor linux hacks who get tired of mucking around with LILO.
Admittedly, I'm not the best person to be comparing GRUB to BSD bootloaders, but no one else seems to be sticking up for it at all. ;)
Wait - where's that smoke coming from? Aw, fuck.
Make that 4 hard drive manufacturers.
Oh, my bad, that's only for non-subscribers.