Apple makes nothing comparable to the size of the X series thinkpads and I assure you they are very durable. Cost a fortune for their performance, too.
The real reason there exists so much dislike for Opera within certain circles is that it puts certain 'libre software' dogmas to the question. And they are shown to be ridiculous, undeniably. How is it that a team that a team which in all likelihood has a mere fraction of Firefox's man-power is able to produce an all around better product? Certainly we can agree that Opera has no larger a team than Firefox.
In my book, Opera is really the only first class browser. It has so many features that may not make it into other browsers for several generations that it isn't even funny. Even extending Firefox with the legion of extensions necessary to make it roughly equivalent to Opera leaves some gaps, not to mention it goes from unbearably slow to god awfully slow. It isn't even worth speculating about the increase in attack surface area.
That's true about almost all open source projects though. They continually play 'follow the leader' because they lack the resources/vision to actually develop novel features and integrate them in a useful way.
Firefox isn't the only sample point, either. Konquerer is a total piece of shit, in my experience. More pages break, hang, or render terribly malformed in konquerer than any other browser i've used, including this alpha build. I would also make the bet that konquerers resources are more in line with what the opera team has.
And that observation is borne out by casual comparisons between the browsers. Safari feels dog slow on Windows, quite contrary to Apple's bogus benchmarks.
I feel the best use of it would be the surveillance of our protectors and elected officials while on duty. It will never happen of course, but it should. Fuck, our vice president seems to think that the number of state secrets he is keeping is a state secret. Top level government officials should not have any form of privacy that cannot be audited. It's not that we don't believe that they're honest folks. "trust, but verify", that's one of many conservative parenting ethos, is it not?
Or perhaps I put 'a volunteer' in quotes to suggest that one doesn't volunteer to commit 'government sanctioned murder.' I volunteered for something, not this -- which I've no control over. Both of you are obviously made of a higher grade moral fibre, and I commend you for it.
the 'final fantasy' model is broken.
on
Ten Years of FFXIII?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The final fantasy RPG model is an evolutionary dead end. The problem isn't so much what these type of RPGs are, but rather what they aren't: a game. I like the idea of playing a game that has a deep story line but it has to present some kind of challenge as well. 'Combat' is merely rote memorization and the 'secrets' are just a ploy to get you to shell out an extra 20 bucks for the strategy guide.
These sort of RPGs give video games a bad name. An RPG can be done well. Ultima Online is perhaps the finest example in my book. Combat had dynamics even if it was horribly unbalanced (only a handful of viable skill/stat combinations) and the economies were real in a way that nobody who has followed has been able to replicate (which was what I thought made the game a faithful rpg).
World of Warcraft, despite its massive shortcomings, is also light years ahead of this style of game. Player versus player and raid combat introduce dynamics that something like Final Fantasy can never hope to replicate. Now I disagree with the premises that raiding and pvp were designed with in warcraft but they are good ideas and do have a future. Namely - more isn't harder, and that goes both with respect to personnel requirements and time investment.
Final fantasy is simply the spiritual successor to Dragon Quest, and we all know how 'great' of a 'game' that is.
To point, though, it isn't surprising that they're going to continue to milk their greatest success. They're taking a page out of a novelist's book. The wheel of time is a shining example of this mentality.
On the other end of the spectrum there is Oblivion, which in my book is just as big of a piece of shit as Final fantasy is.
I've been using vista for awhile now (since January). No major problems on my somewhat dated machine which is a 2.6GHz A64 Dual Core with an x1900xtx and 2 GiB of system memory.
iTunes has proved problematic and Ultramon has yet to come around (though the new beta definitely improves the situation). I don't think I've lost any data but the system has crashed a few times and seems to have intermittent issues with standby (to be fair it didn't work at all in Windows XP), so I just use hibernate.
None of the games I play run noticably slower so I don't really mind the insignificant performance penalty. For the most part I do the exact same things I did with Windows XP only some things are nicer, such as the well integrated search (which does lack some features I would like, however) and the significantly improved file browser (which is still lacking compared to something like Directory Opus but that can be forgiven as the experience is more cohesive).
I don't know if I'd rush out and buy a copy today (I recieved mine for free through the ms academic program) but I certainly think it is an improvement.
Repeating "Apple computers have a longer useful life" doesn't make it any truer. I've got a PII 233 that is a router (running m0n0wall). I've got a 1.2 GHz K7 (running linux) I use as a fileserver/repository (it originally had a 800 MHz K7 in it but I got an upgrade for free). That's some vintage equipment in my book.
In addition I have numerous left over components from machines long since gone which I could easily work into something servicable should the need arise. I think the exact opposite of what you're trying to argue is true. When a PPC Apple machine expires you'd be hard pressed to find a good source of cheap components to bring it back into action. There are so many cheap pc parts available people practically give them away.
Unless of course you're trying to imply that an Apple machine does more "work" per MHz, which is a laudable claim at best.
XP and linux both run just fine on my notebook with the processor throttled to 600 MHz. The disk subsystem is also in line (1.8" 4200 RPM drive with ~10 MB/s sequential reads), and it only has 512 MiB of memory.
Go have fun burning candles on those faulty G4 iBook logic boards hoping to resolder the BGA.
for starters, the AI in warcraft 3 does 'cheat' on Insane, they harvest more gold and wood per trip but their mine is only deducted the standard 10 gold per 'harvesting'. Second, it is very beatable and plays nothing like a human opponent. There is a mod that can give the machine player better AI but it still doesn't wow me.
Most of the reasons people have listed that make the iPod 'better' baffle me. An aftermarket ecosystem? You mean people actually pay 200 USD for tinny speakers slapped into a bullnosed white box and labeled "Bose"?
The music store? I find this particularly interesting. I took a course last quarter that involved discussions about ethical and moral issues in computer science. Naturally piracy crops up, I do believe every single person in the class (~40) admitting to pirating music and only 2 people said they had actually purchased music through ITMS. The music store is a complete non feature for at least a very sizable portion of the demographic.
I guess it makes sense then, why people don't like the "squirting" feature. Funny that, actually the Zune popped up into the mentioned discussion, and was immediately derided for 'violating' the creative commons license. I imagine if it was that trivial to share copyrighted works microsoft would be promptly barred from selling said product. I think it could be a cool way to discover new music, though it is obviously worthless at the moment, because as this story shows, nobody is buying the damn thing.
I'm inclined to believe that Apple recognizes this as a valuable new selling point and will in fact incorporate it into their players somewhere down the line, with similar restrictions, and it will be heralded as a 'great thing.' In the ensuing media frenzy several copies of Windows Vista will be sacrificed, and heretics will be formatted with a kudgel to appease the almighty jobs.
In short I'm convinced that a genuine hatred for Microsoft among the constituents of the tech community has been quite effective in spreading anti-marketing about the Zune. Reviewers actually seem to be somewhat neutral about it, James Kim of CNET liked it quite a bit, and Ars Technica, Gizmodo, etc. had some good things to say about it (with a lot of negatives as well).
Personally I'm not convinced there is anything truly wrong with the Zune and would consider buying one when my current portable music player (an iPod) expires. It has at least one nice feature that I would actually use, and that is an integrated radio tuner. We've got some good stations with strong signals (KEXP) here so I think it would be quite nice, and would save me from the endless cycle of ripping shows from their internet broadcast (though with the right tools this can be pretty automated) and putting them on my iPod.
I think things actually look pretty damn good for Microsoft's console considering it has been out for over a year. How many consoles do you think Nintendo and Sony will be selling next holiday season? For reference, Microsoft moved about 900,000 units in 2005 when they launched and due to supply issues it was almost impossible to find one until mid february according to wikipedia.
From those numbers it really seems like nintendo has screwed the pooch with this launch or that they are artificially restricting supply to give the illusion that greater demand exists. They should have had many more units available for sale given they are using essentially the same hardware that was found in the gamecube. To be fair I do believe Microsoft's advertising budget absolutely dwarfed what Nintendo has spent on launch advertising. But from where we are standing right now it seems Microsoft has positioned itself well and stands a good chance of taking the lion's share of the 'next generation.'
I have to disagree. Anyone who really cares to know the truth can see the difference for themselves. Foobar2k is packaged with a plugin called ABX Comparator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test You don't need special equipment. Anyone can do it if they actually own a cd.
I've used both 64 bit and 32 bit RC1 images and they work well. I encountered some problems with driver signing in the 64 bit version simply because few of the 64 bit drivers are signed (they're under development). Disabling driver signing didn't seem to work. The system worked flawlessly otherwise. I just had no sound, funny, I have the same problem with linux. Of course, I can't say I spent much time testing the stability, but it seemed nice enough. I can't say that anything felt significantly different, but there were some nice changes and the default window decorators are a huge step up from the default xp theme. Nothing felt noticably faster or slower. Apparently most of the significant changes are under the hood. I'll tell you what the killer app is though. DirectX 10. I think spyware and "z0mg pwn3d" will be a thing of the past. There exists more than a few soft spots in the new security model, that much I am sure, but in comparison Window's XP is "running around naked." Simply sandboxing IE will make a huge difference. The piece of software pretty much meets my expectations for what the next iteration of windows should be. Yeah, it doesn't really work on 512 MiB of memory, but neither does linux with gnome or kde.
Does it really matter? As long as the term is well defined in the context it is being used in (and this is most certainly the case). Definitions are relative metrics, there exists no "real" or "absolute" definitions outside of very specific contexts. Software Development release jargon is not one of those contexts. Get over it.
The damn thing isn't even out yet and it is already the headline of every other article at tech news aggregators. I'd say Microsoft has done a good job astroturfing thus far. But that doesn't have jack shit about the long term survivability of the product. My guess is that it will put the squeeze on the other competition and approach parity in the market with Apple. When the iPod came out nobody had a fucking clue it would be so succesful, even the apple zealots hated it (zomg its not a iNewton). Give it six months.
Technically, it appears to be a functional and solid player and seems to be equivalent to an apple player in most respects and even includes some cool new features. Of course, I "have never seen a checkbox I didn't love." I'd consider buying one when my current DAP reaches the end of its useful lifespan.
I'm not exactly a vetted linux administrator (in fact I have practically no experience) and I managed to get Gentoo 2006.0 installed on my x86-64 box with only minor inconveniences. I don't really see the point of building all the programs from source as it takes an eternity to install anything. It takes 15-20 minutes to compile 64 bit native firefox on a 2.6GHz dual core. The 32 bit Opera binaries are still much faster at rendering (which isn't exactly a surprising observation).
It's an interesting way to do things but given the frequency of patches in many programs simply too time consuming to be worth the effort. Compiler optimizations don't make a big difference in performance and for most applications the difference vanishes completely (zomg openoffice which took 32 fucking years to compile opened 2 milliseconds faster!). The actual way you install packages is pretty straight forward and not much different from other systems (aside from the compiling).
The hardware support seemed to be on par with other distributions I've tried and using the system after you get it setup is just like any other distribution.
Two completely different and incompatible market segments. Simply fucking brilliant!!! I'll just message my PC buddy and ask him if he wants to play Final Fantasy XCIIV ONLINE, now featuring absolutely no game play!
Well, it is no "big surprise" people are up in arms about this. They've suddenly become conscious of all the data people can easily mine out of their facebook profiles. Before this it all seemed innocent enough. Simple enough though, don't post what you don't want others to know
Slashdot Mirror
Apple makes nothing comparable to the size of the X series thinkpads and I assure you they are very durable. Cost a fortune for their performance, too.
That's all nice and well, but you forgot Windows Server 2003. Which means...
The real reason there exists so much dislike for Opera within certain circles is that it puts certain 'libre software' dogmas to the question. And they are shown to be ridiculous, undeniably. How is it that a team that a team which in all likelihood has a mere fraction of Firefox's man-power is able to produce an all around better product? Certainly we can agree that Opera has no larger a team than Firefox.
In my book, Opera is really the only first class browser. It has so many features that may not make it into other browsers for several generations that it isn't even funny. Even extending Firefox with the legion of extensions necessary to make it roughly equivalent to Opera leaves some gaps, not to mention it goes from unbearably slow to god awfully slow. It isn't even worth speculating about the increase in attack surface area.
That's true about almost all open source projects though. They continually play 'follow the leader' because they lack the resources/vision to actually develop novel features and integrate them in a useful way.
Firefox isn't the only sample point, either. Konquerer is a total piece of shit, in my experience. More pages break, hang, or render terribly malformed in konquerer than any other browser i've used, including this alpha build. I would also make the bet that konquerers resources are more in line with what the opera team has.
Well, that is an interesting claim, but isn't corrobrated by my experience. To wit:
Opera 9.5 alpha
Safari 3 alpha?(beta?)
And that observation is borne out by casual comparisons between the browsers. Safari feels dog slow on Windows, quite contrary to Apple's bogus benchmarks.
I feel the best use of it would be the surveillance of our protectors and elected officials while on duty. It will never happen of course, but it should. Fuck, our vice president seems to think that the number of state secrets he is keeping is a state secret. Top level government officials should not have any form of privacy that cannot be audited. It's not that we don't believe that they're honest folks. "trust, but verify", that's one of many conservative parenting ethos, is it not?
Or perhaps I put 'a volunteer' in quotes to suggest that one doesn't volunteer to commit 'government sanctioned murder.' I volunteered for something, not this -- which I've no control over. Both of you are obviously made of a higher grade moral fibre, and I commend you for it.
Honestly, fuck you.
'a volunteer'
And by dragon's quest I mean dragon's Lair.
The final fantasy RPG model is an evolutionary dead end. The problem isn't so much what these type of RPGs are, but rather what they aren't: a game. I like the idea of playing a game that has a deep story line but it has to present some kind of challenge as well. 'Combat' is merely rote memorization and the 'secrets' are just a ploy to get you to shell out an extra 20 bucks for the strategy guide.
These sort of RPGs give video games a bad name. An RPG can be done well. Ultima Online is perhaps the finest example in my book. Combat had dynamics even if it was horribly unbalanced (only a handful of viable skill/stat combinations) and the economies were real in a way that nobody who has followed has been able to replicate (which was what I thought made the game a faithful rpg).
World of Warcraft, despite its massive shortcomings, is also light years ahead of this style of game. Player versus player and raid combat introduce dynamics that something like Final Fantasy can never hope to replicate. Now I disagree with the premises that raiding and pvp were designed with in warcraft but they are good ideas and do have a future. Namely - more isn't harder, and that goes both with respect to personnel requirements and time investment.
Final fantasy is simply the spiritual successor to Dragon Quest, and we all know how 'great' of a 'game' that is.
To point, though, it isn't surprising that they're going to continue to milk their greatest success. They're taking a page out of a novelist's book. The wheel of time is a shining example of this mentality.
On the other end of the spectrum there is Oblivion, which in my book is just as big of a piece of shit as Final fantasy is.
I've been using vista for awhile now (since January). No major problems on my somewhat dated machine which is a 2.6GHz A64 Dual Core with an x1900xtx and 2 GiB of system memory.
iTunes has proved problematic and Ultramon has yet to come around (though the new beta definitely improves the situation). I don't think I've lost any data but the system has crashed a few times and seems to have intermittent issues with standby (to be fair it didn't work at all in Windows XP), so I just use hibernate.
None of the games I play run noticably slower so I don't really mind the insignificant performance penalty. For the most part I do the exact same things I did with Windows XP only some things are nicer, such as the well integrated search (which does lack some features I would like, however) and the significantly improved file browser (which is still lacking compared to something like Directory Opus but that can be forgiven as the experience is more cohesive).
I don't know if I'd rush out and buy a copy today (I recieved mine for free through the ms academic program) but I certainly think it is an improvement.
Repeating "Apple computers have a longer useful life" doesn't make it any truer. I've got a PII 233 that is a router (running m0n0wall). I've got a 1.2 GHz K7 (running linux) I use as a fileserver/repository (it originally had a 800 MHz K7 in it but I got an upgrade for free). That's some vintage equipment in my book.
In addition I have numerous left over components from machines long since gone which I could easily work into something servicable should the need arise. I think the exact opposite of what you're trying to argue is true. When a PPC Apple machine expires you'd be hard pressed to find a good source of cheap components to bring it back into action. There are so many cheap pc parts available people practically give them away.
Unless of course you're trying to imply that an Apple machine does more "work" per MHz, which is a laudable claim at best.
XP and linux both run just fine on my notebook with the processor throttled to 600 MHz. The disk subsystem is also in line (1.8" 4200 RPM drive with ~10 MB/s sequential reads), and it only has 512 MiB of memory.
Go have fun burning candles on those faulty G4 iBook logic boards hoping to resolder the BGA.
for starters, the AI in warcraft 3 does 'cheat' on Insane, they harvest more gold and wood per trip but their mine is only deducted the standard 10 gold per 'harvesting'. Second, it is very beatable and plays nothing like a human opponent. There is a mod that can give the machine player better AI but it still doesn't wow me.
Most of the reasons people have listed that make the iPod 'better' baffle me. An aftermarket ecosystem? You mean people actually pay 200 USD for tinny speakers slapped into a bullnosed white box and labeled "Bose"?
The music store? I find this particularly interesting. I took a course last quarter that involved discussions about ethical and moral issues in computer science. Naturally piracy crops up, I do believe every single person in the class (~40) admitting to pirating music and only 2 people said they had actually purchased music through ITMS. The music store is a complete non feature for at least a very sizable portion of the demographic.
I guess it makes sense then, why people don't like the "squirting" feature. Funny that, actually the Zune popped up into the mentioned discussion, and was immediately derided for 'violating' the creative commons license. I imagine if it was that trivial to share copyrighted works microsoft would be promptly barred from selling said product. I think it could be a cool way to discover new music, though it is obviously worthless at the moment, because as this story shows, nobody is buying the damn thing.
I'm inclined to believe that Apple recognizes this as a valuable new selling point and will in fact incorporate it into their players somewhere down the line, with similar restrictions, and it will be heralded as a 'great thing.' In the ensuing media frenzy several copies of Windows Vista will be sacrificed, and heretics will be formatted with a kudgel to appease the almighty jobs.
In short I'm convinced that a genuine hatred for Microsoft among the constituents of the tech community has been quite effective in spreading anti-marketing about the Zune. Reviewers actually seem to be somewhat neutral about it, James Kim of CNET liked it quite a bit, and Ars Technica, Gizmodo, etc. had some good things to say about it (with a lot of negatives as well).
Personally I'm not convinced there is anything truly wrong with the Zune and would consider buying one when my current portable music player (an iPod) expires. It has at least one nice feature that I would actually use, and that is an integrated radio tuner. We've got some good stations with strong signals (KEXP) here so I think it would be quite nice, and would save me from the endless cycle of ripping shows from their internet broadcast (though with the right tools this can be pretty automated) and putting them on my iPod.
I think things actually look pretty damn good for Microsoft's console considering it has been out for over a year. How many consoles do you think Nintendo and Sony will be selling next holiday season? For reference, Microsoft moved about 900,000 units in 2005 when they launched and due to supply issues it was almost impossible to find one until mid february according to wikipedia.
h _America [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_launch#Nort
From those numbers it really seems like nintendo has screwed the pooch with this launch or that they are artificially restricting supply to give the illusion that greater demand exists. They should have had many more units available for sale given they are using essentially the same hardware that was found in the gamecube. To be fair I do believe Microsoft's advertising budget absolutely dwarfed what Nintendo has spent on launch advertising. But from where we are standing right now it seems Microsoft has positioned itself well and stands a good chance of taking the lion's share of the 'next generation.'
I have to disagree. Anyone who really cares to know the truth can see the difference for themselves. Foobar2k is packaged with a plugin called ABX Comparator. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test You don't need special equipment. Anyone can do it if they actually own a cd.
I honestly think you pulled that straight out of your ass.
I doubt there is anything more to completely defeating this then a 5 line wget / sed script for those so inclined. You could
That's a good piece of comedy. Haven't laughed that hard for a week.
I've used both 64 bit and 32 bit RC1 images and they work well. I encountered some problems with driver signing in the 64 bit version simply because few of the 64 bit drivers are signed (they're under development). Disabling driver signing didn't seem to work. The system worked flawlessly otherwise. I just had no sound, funny, I have the same problem with linux. Of course, I can't say I spent much time testing the stability, but it seemed nice enough. I can't say that anything felt significantly different, but there were some nice changes and the default window decorators are a huge step up from the default xp theme. Nothing felt noticably faster or slower. Apparently most of the significant changes are under the hood. I'll tell you what the killer app is though. DirectX 10. I think spyware and "z0mg pwn3d" will be a thing of the past. There exists more than a few soft spots in the new security model, that much I am sure, but in comparison Window's XP is "running around naked." Simply sandboxing IE will make a huge difference. The piece of software pretty much meets my expectations for what the next iteration of windows should be. Yeah, it doesn't really work on 512 MiB of memory, but neither does linux with gnome or kde.
Does it really matter? As long as the term is well defined in the context it is being used in (and this is most certainly the case). Definitions are relative metrics, there exists no "real" or "absolute" definitions outside of very specific contexts. Software Development release jargon is not one of those contexts. Get over it.
The damn thing isn't even out yet and it is already the headline of every other article at tech news aggregators. I'd say Microsoft has done a good job astroturfing thus far. But that doesn't have jack shit about the long term survivability of the product. My guess is that it will put the squeeze on the other competition and approach parity in the market with Apple. When the iPod came out nobody had a fucking clue it would be so succesful, even the apple zealots hated it (zomg its not a iNewton). Give it six months.
Technically, it appears to be a functional and solid player and seems to be equivalent to an apple player in most respects and even includes some cool new features. Of course, I "have never seen a checkbox I didn't love." I'd consider buying one when my current DAP reaches the end of its useful lifespan.
It's an interesting way to do things but given the frequency of patches in many programs simply too time consuming to be worth the effort. Compiler optimizations don't make a big difference in performance and for most applications the difference vanishes completely (zomg openoffice which took 32 fucking years to compile opened 2 milliseconds faster!). The actual way you install packages is pretty straight forward and not much different from other systems (aside from the compiling).
The hardware support seemed to be on par with other distributions I've tried and using the system after you get it setup is just like any other distribution.
Two completely different and incompatible market segments. Simply fucking brilliant!!! I'll just message my PC buddy and ask him if he wants to play Final Fantasy XCIIV ONLINE, now featuring absolutely no game play!
Well, it is no "big surprise" people are up in arms about this. They've suddenly become conscious of all the data people can easily mine out of their facebook profiles. Before this it all seemed innocent enough. Simple enough though, don't post what you don't want others to know
I think he will be vindicated in the future if Apple "quietly" releases an update to the wireless driver. Else, who knows.