Once again I find myself having to ask the a familiar question. Do you have any evidence at all that there us some massive conspiracy between scientists from many disciplines as well as politicians from all points on the political spectrum?
I feel fairly confident that I can answer for you, and say that you do not. Scientists have been talking about global warming for a very long time, it wasn't something that magically appeared in the 80s. A few politicians were also talking about it back in the 70s.
Finally, it is not the scientists who are pushing for taxation to fix this problem. Of course there are other solutions. They could just make it illegal to emit above a certain amount of CO2. This would result in all of us having to throw out our old cars, and would wipe out certain industries, but it would work.
But that is not a practical solution in anyone's book, and the political fallout would be overwhelmingly higher than people's current complaints about taxes. Perhaps if you can propose a way to fix the problem then people might listen and you could change the world, but denying that there is a problem and claiming that it is all a conspiracy is not a helpful solution.
So basically you are saying that you don't care what happens to the world as long as you are not personally inconvenienced. It all comes down to money.
With a self-centered attitude like that, I am not surprised that you fantasize that anyone who says that we need to do something to stop climate change might be on the payroll of some powerful, yet anonymous, big corporation in the renewable energy industry. It must be totally alien to your way of thinking that anyone could be motivated by anything other than money.
You seem to have gone and deliberately missed my point. You know, the part where I said that nobody had ever suggested that there hadn't been big storms before. I shall patiently await your links to prove me wrong on that part.
Please don't offer them any links to history's most deadly storms.
Actually, please do provide those links. While you are at it, also provide the links where climate scientists said that there had never been big storms in the past.
What? You can't? Then what are you talking about now? It seems to be a common tactic on the denial side to make disparaging remarks about those dreaded "alarmists" that attribute false statements to them. What is the matter? Can't you actually argue against the real things that the scientists say?
Seems funny how all the alarmists say that man is causing all this Global Warming and jumps on articles such as this, completely ignore that as the glaciers are receeding, they are finding remnents that show those areas were green at least once before in the past.
Can you link to any example of this alleged claim that your so-called "alarmists" have ever said that it has never been this warm before. You just made that claim up because it is easier to argue against stupid made up statements rather than what the scientific community has actually said. Yes, it has been hot before, but it is how quickly that it is changing that is raising concerns.
And where is your proof that this is all about fear mongering to put money in politicians pockets? If you claim to be skeptical then you must surely have some good proof of your claim... maybe. Scientists started studying this phenomenon around the start of the last century, and back then they thought that global warming would probably be a good thing. As they gather more data and studied it further they realised that it could become a problem. Until the 80s all sides of politics were on board with the need to do something to combat the issue.
Then business started to realise that it was going to cost them money, and surprise, surprise it suddenly became a political argument. But if any politician was going to be accused of being in it for the money, wouldn't it be the ones that aligned themselves with the interests of business and went against scientific advice?
Advertisers really only have themselves to blame. Huge-sized, CPU intensive Flash ads with jarringly annoying video & sound and which track you across different websites are extremely annoying. As ads get more intrusive, is it any wonder that so many people resort to ad blocking technology?
It is true that in the early days of simple banner ads that some people still blocked them. You are always going to get some freeloaders who block even text only Google ads, but it wouldn't be such a high proportion of viewers if ads were a bit more reasonable. I have always browsed without Flash (or at least with it disabled), and I always turn off GIF animations because I like stable web pages that don't give me a headache. But where ever possible I prefer to show ads to support the sites I use (I don't disable ads on this site). I have even been known to click on them and look at the advertised goods when they are of interest.
However, I would never support an advertiser or the hosting website that makes ads that look like they are legitimate parts of the website (eg. an ad with a big button saying "Download" on a freeware file hosting site). I will always disable sites that track where I browse (oh look, the linked article uses DoubleClick advertising). Be reasonable to your audience and enough of them will be reasonable back. It is not rocket science.
We use Windows 7 N at work. Nice to be able to install the video player one prefers, without having to fight Windows Media Player.
In what way do you have to fight WMP? You can set the default player by file type (and all video players give you the option to make their program the default). Plus you can go into "Turn Windows features on or off" and remove Windows Media Player completely in standard Windows 7.
You can probably do the same thing in Windows 8 by moving the mouse to four seventeenths of the way down the screen near the left side (right side in the sourthern hemisphere) and draw six anti-clockwise circles.
I bet there is a lot of lazy coding using the quirks of the browser going on, but in those days HTML didn't offer anywhere near the experience that we have today. There was no AJAX available to make interactive web page (except as an Active-X object in Internet Explorer). There was only basic support of CSS (some versions of Netscape Communicator would crash with simple CSS).
If you were writing pages for internal company use and wanted a complicated Intranet then you often had no choice but to use Active-X.
How were they supposed to provide a decent alternative when they were being frozen out of the market by Microsoft's anticompetitive practices, like forcing PC OEMs to promote IE?
You obviously don't remember how bad Netscape Navigator got towards the end. It became a huge, bloated and buggy mess. It was so bad that they open source it and virtually rewrite it.
I believe that a web browser is a core technology that any OS should provide. It appears all the other OS makers agree. I remember way back when I used an Amiga that there some shareware authors complained that an update to AmigaDOS included functionality the same as their programs. Sometimes that is just what happens when an operating system expands.
So I'm a shill? Do you really believe that Microsoft would pay any to talk up such an old browser like IE6? Even they ran a campaign to stop people from using that browser.
It is also rather unlikely that any shill would talk about a product being a pain in the arse. It is far more likely that you have just fallen back on what has become an Internet meme that if someone isn't completely filled with hated for Microsoft then they are a shill. It is a comforting thought for people who don't want to put any thought into their arguments.
IE6 was a disaster from a technological point of view, but Microsoft sure got a lot of vendor lock-in from it!!!
I don't think that it was that bad, and it was still better than anything else available at the time. As much as I hated the concept of Active-X, the technology did fill a need and was used quite a lot - hence the lock-in with company's Intranets, etc.
It was a huge pain in the arse when it was disabled though, as almost every page load caused a prompt to appear to warn that Active-X was off.
There are other shit apple is doing, that have nothing to do with monopoly.
Well then they are just a member of a cartel of companies that bundle a browser with their operating systems. It is still the same to the consumer; when EVERY company does the same thing then all together they are a monopoly.
IE6 lock-in is still causing harm now, over a decade after it was first inflicted on us.
Surely the majority of the blame for that should go to companies like Netscape for not providing a decent alternative for such a long time. The beginning of the fall of Internet Explorer came with the release of Firefox.
Of course, you could say that Opera was around during that period, but even today when more and more people find alternatives to the bundled browser nobody hardly anybody chooses Opera.
No, he should be treated innocent UNTIL proven guilty in a court. That mean bail unless he is a flight risk or danger to the public at large. Also it does not mean freezing his bank accounts.
You might think that it means freezing bank accounts is not allowed, but the law does not agree. Considering that he was apparently in cahoots with at least one other person overseas, they really don't want to allow him to transfer any proceeds of crime offshore.
I don't see the problem with that. For all the authorities know, he stole the information to sell to the highest bidder. It doesn't seem like an unusual measure to take in hacking cases. You might try to play down the hacking offense by calling him a "kid" and saying that it was just "plans for a toy", but this is a billion dollar business here. And who knows what other offenses could be uncoverred during the course of the investigation.
It should be up to the courts to decide whether this deserves just a slap on the wrist. Until that time, it should be treated seriously.
... and as a Canadian, inaccurate to the point of being offensive, I think.
It is hardly unprecedented for a a movie to attribute credit to the US where it was not deserved. The movie U-571 substituted an American crew for the British who captured the Enigma machine. On the other hand, the British 2001 film Enigma, about the cracking of the device at Bletchley Park whitewashed Poland's earlier cracking efforts and how they advised the Brits on how to do it (although the British did take this effort much further).
So it is not just a US phenomenon to cast themselves in the starring role. The easiest way to deal with this is to assume that all war films are propaganda films, and will always skew the facts for reasons of patriotism.
The patent system is broken, I'll agree with you there, but this is different from what any other company does regarding the patent system. This isn't exploiting a broken system, it's extortion.
How do you think that this is different? The only way that I can see that this is different to what the other companies do is that they are asking for a license fee rather than using patents to attempt to stop the product from being sold at all.
It's pretty widely known now that MS is extorting money almost exclusively for its ancient FAT filesystem patents.
It might be pretty widely known, but it is also pretty widely wrong. Microsoft has a massive portfolio of patents which can be used against Android, a lot of which is just useless user interface minutia. If you look at the bottom of the press release it distinguishes between Android patents and exFAT patent agreements. You can see an example of the kind of the patents Microsoft use from the various times they have had to list them publicly.
Also, it is not the ancient FAT filesystem that is patented (although Microsoft would like that), but the long filename extension to the filesystem (which is still pretty old) as well as exFAT (which was introduced in 2006). Nikon would probably need to use exFAT to work with SDXC memory cards.
Those video cards are six or seven years old - about the same as the PS3. I don't think that many people would put a lot of thought into the specs required for this game. I have a pretty low end system, and I don't pay much attention to the specs unless it is a game that I want to run on my netbook. For my main system, I just play everything in the default mainstream settings. You tend to get a feel by looking at the game whether you will be able to bump up the video settings to full.
And if you do decide to update your PC, you know that all the old games that you bought since the the time the PS3 was released will suddenly look and play a lot better with all the settings maxed out with your faster hardware. It will be as if your game library was re-released in HD versions. You will probably have enough grunt to run them in Eyefinity mode and play with three monitors at once.
With the PS4... Well, the emulation might work OK but you should check the compatibility lists. And you won't see any improvement over the old hardware.
Just like a recent Linux kernel might be at say 3.7.8, ie... so Windows 7 SP1 is 7.1 and the concept of is unused by Microsoft?
No, The Windows kernel does have the concept of <major>.<minor>.<increment>, but it is not the same as the OS version. The version of Windows kernel on the netbook I am using now is 6.1.7601. To the general public, this is Windows 7 (Service Pack 1). It is like how Linux Mint 14 does not use Linux kernel version 14
If you're going to upgrade your graphics card, you need to reduce the bottlenecks in the system.
I think that it is a case of finding the right card to upgrade to. The GTX 660 is going to be wasted, and frankly it is way too expensive to consider. But I would like to see the comparison done with the GTX 650 Ti, or even the plain GTX 650. It would be the more interesting article to find the sweet spot of graphics cards for such an old system - the point at which the performance increase not match the price increase.
Ah yes, the alledged "evil" open document standard that inconvenienced nobody, and the UEFI secure boot "fiasco" that wasn't invented by Microsoft and closes a huge security hole. These aren't evil or treacherous. And for that matter, my example of DR-DOS was another example of a non-event beat up. No version of Windows 3.x was shipped that didn't run on DR-DOS.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again I find myself having to ask the a familiar question. Do you have any evidence at all that there us some massive conspiracy between scientists from many disciplines as well as politicians from all points on the political spectrum?
I feel fairly confident that I can answer for you, and say that you do not. Scientists have been talking about global warming for a very long time, it wasn't something that magically appeared in the 80s. A few politicians were also talking about it back in the 70s.
Finally, it is not the scientists who are pushing for taxation to fix this problem. Of course there are other solutions. They could just make it illegal to emit above a certain amount of CO2. This would result in all of us having to throw out our old cars, and would wipe out certain industries, but it would work.
But that is not a practical solution in anyone's book, and the political fallout would be overwhelmingly higher than people's current complaints about taxes. Perhaps if you can propose a way to fix the problem then people might listen and you could change the world, but denying that there is a problem and claiming that it is all a conspiracy is not a helpful solution.
So basically you are saying that you don't care what happens to the world as long as you are not personally inconvenienced. It all comes down to money.
With a self-centered attitude like that, I am not surprised that you fantasize that anyone who says that we need to do something to stop climate change might be on the payroll of some powerful, yet anonymous, big corporation in the renewable energy industry. It must be totally alien to your way of thinking that anyone could be motivated by anything other than money.
You seem to have gone and deliberately missed my point. You know, the part where I said that nobody had ever suggested that there hadn't been big storms before. I shall patiently await your links to prove me wrong on that part.
Please don't offer them any links to history's most deadly storms.
Actually, please do provide those links. While you are at it, also provide the links where climate scientists said that there had never been big storms in the past.
What? You can't? Then what are you talking about now? It seems to be a common tactic on the denial side to make disparaging remarks about those dreaded "alarmists" that attribute false statements to them. What is the matter? Can't you actually argue against the real things that the scientists say?
Seems funny how all the alarmists say that man is causing all this Global Warming and jumps on articles such as this, completely ignore that as the glaciers are receeding, they are finding remnents that show those areas were green at least once before in the past.
Can you link to any example of this alleged claim that your so-called "alarmists" have ever said that it has never been this warm before. You just made that claim up because it is easier to argue against stupid made up statements rather than what the scientific community has actually said. Yes, it has been hot before, but it is how quickly that it is changing that is raising concerns.
And where is your proof that this is all about fear mongering to put money in politicians pockets? If you claim to be skeptical then you must surely have some good proof of your claim... maybe. Scientists started studying this phenomenon around the start of the last century, and back then they thought that global warming would probably be a good thing. As they gather more data and studied it further they realised that it could become a problem. Until the 80s all sides of politics were on board with the need to do something to combat the issue.
Then business started to realise that it was going to cost them money, and surprise, surprise it suddenly became a political argument. But if any politician was going to be accused of being in it for the money, wouldn't it be the ones that aligned themselves with the interests of business and went against scientific advice?
Advertisers really only have themselves to blame. Huge-sized, CPU intensive Flash ads with jarringly annoying video & sound and which track you across different websites are extremely annoying. As ads get more intrusive, is it any wonder that so many people resort to ad blocking technology?
It is true that in the early days of simple banner ads that some people still blocked them. You are always going to get some freeloaders who block even text only Google ads, but it wouldn't be such a high proportion of viewers if ads were a bit more reasonable. I have always browsed without Flash (or at least with it disabled), and I always turn off GIF animations because I like stable web pages that don't give me a headache. But where ever possible I prefer to show ads to support the sites I use (I don't disable ads on this site). I have even been known to click on them and look at the advertised goods when they are of interest.
However, I would never support an advertiser or the hosting website that makes ads that look like they are legitimate parts of the website (eg. an ad with a big button saying "Download" on a freeware file hosting site). I will always disable sites that track where I browse (oh look, the linked article uses DoubleClick advertising). Be reasonable to your audience and enough of them will be reasonable back. It is not rocket science.
We use Windows 7 N at work. Nice to be able to install the video player one prefers, without having to fight Windows Media Player.
In what way do you have to fight WMP? You can set the default player by file type (and all video players give you the option to make their program the default). Plus you can go into "Turn Windows features on or off" and remove Windows Media Player completely in standard Windows 7.
You can probably do the same thing in Windows 8 by moving the mouse to four seventeenths of the way down the screen near the left side (right side in the sourthern hemisphere) and draw six anti-clockwise circles.
So what? Did you expect them to develop a competition product for their own browser because nobody else had done so?
I bet there is a lot of lazy coding using the quirks of the browser going on, but in those days HTML didn't offer anywhere near the experience that we have today. There was no AJAX available to make interactive web page (except as an Active-X object in Internet Explorer). There was only basic support of CSS (some versions of Netscape Communicator would crash with simple CSS).
If you were writing pages for internal company use and wanted a complicated Intranet then you often had no choice but to use Active-X.
How were they supposed to provide a decent alternative when they were being frozen out of the market by Microsoft's anticompetitive practices, like forcing PC OEMs to promote IE?
You obviously don't remember how bad Netscape Navigator got towards the end. It became a huge, bloated and buggy mess. It was so bad that they open source it and virtually rewrite it.
I believe that a web browser is a core technology that any OS should provide. It appears all the other OS makers agree. I remember way back when I used an Amiga that there some shareware authors complained that an update to AmigaDOS included functionality the same as their programs. Sometimes that is just what happens when an operating system expands.
So I'm a shill? Do you really believe that Microsoft would pay any to talk up such an old browser like IE6? Even they ran a campaign to stop people from using that browser.
It is also rather unlikely that any shill would talk about a product being a pain in the arse. It is far more likely that you have just fallen back on what has become an Internet meme that if someone isn't completely filled with hated for Microsoft then they are a shill. It is a comforting thought for people who don't want to put any thought into their arguments.
IE6 was a disaster from a technological point of view, but Microsoft sure got a lot of vendor lock-in from it!!!
I don't think that it was that bad, and it was still better than anything else available at the time. As much as I hated the concept of Active-X, the technology did fill a need and was used quite a lot - hence the lock-in with company's Intranets, etc.
It was a huge pain in the arse when it was disabled though, as almost every page load caused a prompt to appear to warn that Active-X was off.
There are other shit apple is doing, that have nothing to do with monopoly.
Well then they are just a member of a cartel of companies that bundle a browser with their operating systems. It is still the same to the consumer; when EVERY company does the same thing then all together they are a monopoly.
IE6 lock-in is still causing harm now, over a decade after it was first inflicted on us.
Surely the majority of the blame for that should go to companies like Netscape for not providing a decent alternative for such a long time. The beginning of the fall of Internet Explorer came with the release of Firefox.
Of course, you could say that Opera was around during that period, but even today when more and more people find alternatives to the bundled browser nobody hardly anybody chooses Opera.
No, he should be treated innocent UNTIL proven guilty in a court. That mean bail unless he is a flight risk or danger to the public at large. Also it does not mean freezing his bank accounts.
You might think that it means freezing bank accounts is not allowed, but the law does not agree. Considering that he was apparently in cahoots with at least one other person overseas, they really don't want to allow him to transfer any proceeds of crime offshore.
I don't see the problem with that. For all the authorities know, he stole the information to sell to the highest bidder. It doesn't seem like an unusual measure to take in hacking cases. You might try to play down the hacking offense by calling him a "kid" and saying that it was just "plans for a toy", but this is a billion dollar business here. And who knows what other offenses could be uncoverred during the course of the investigation.
It should be up to the courts to decide whether this deserves just a slap on the wrist. Until that time, it should be treated seriously.
... and as a Canadian, inaccurate to the point of being offensive, I think.
It is hardly unprecedented for a a movie to attribute credit to the US where it was not deserved. The movie U-571 substituted an American crew for the British who captured the Enigma machine. On the other hand, the British 2001 film Enigma, about the cracking of the device at Bletchley Park whitewashed Poland's earlier cracking efforts and how they advised the Brits on how to do it (although the British did take this effort much further).
So it is not just a US phenomenon to cast themselves in the starring role. The easiest way to deal with this is to assume that all war films are propaganda films, and will always skew the facts for reasons of patriotism.
The patent system is broken, I'll agree with you there, but this is different from what any other company does regarding the patent system. This isn't exploiting a broken system, it's extortion.
How do you think that this is different? The only way that I can see that this is different to what the other companies do is that they are asking for a license fee rather than using patents to attempt to stop the product from being sold at all.
It's pretty widely known now that MS is extorting money almost exclusively for its ancient FAT filesystem patents.
It might be pretty widely known, but it is also pretty widely wrong. Microsoft has a massive portfolio of patents which can be used against Android, a lot of which is just useless user interface minutia. If you look at the bottom of the press release it distinguishes between Android patents and exFAT patent agreements. You can see an example of the kind of the patents Microsoft use from the various times they have had to list them publicly.
Also, it is not the ancient FAT filesystem that is patented (although Microsoft would like that), but the long filename extension to the filesystem (which is still pretty old) as well as exFAT (which was introduced in 2006). Nikon would probably need to use exFAT to work with SDXC memory cards.
Those video cards are six or seven years old - about the same as the PS3. I don't think that many people would put a lot of thought into the specs required for this game. I have a pretty low end system, and I don't pay much attention to the specs unless it is a game that I want to run on my netbook. For my main system, I just play everything in the default mainstream settings. You tend to get a feel by looking at the game whether you will be able to bump up the video settings to full.
And if you do decide to update your PC, you know that all the old games that you bought since the the time the PS3 was released will suddenly look and play a lot better with all the settings maxed out with your faster hardware. It will be as if your game library was re-released in HD versions. You will probably have enough grunt to run them in Eyefinity mode and play with three monitors at once.
With the PS4... Well, the emulation might work OK but you should check the compatibility lists. And you won't see any improvement over the old hardware.
If by "x86" they mean "32-bit", then yea, its not that great.
From the linked article:
CPU : x86-64 AMD "Jaguar", 8 cores
Just like a recent Linux kernel might be at say 3.7.8, ie... so Windows 7 SP1 is 7.1 and the concept of is unused by Microsoft?
No, The Windows kernel does have the concept of <major>.<minor>.<increment>, but it is not the same as the OS version. The version of Windows kernel on the netbook I am using now is 6.1.7601. To the general public, this is Windows 7 (Service Pack 1). It is like how Linux Mint 14 does not use Linux kernel version 14
If you're going to upgrade your graphics card, you need to reduce the bottlenecks in the system.
I think that it is a case of finding the right card to upgrade to. The GTX 660 is going to be wasted, and frankly it is way too expensive to consider. But I would like to see the comparison done with the GTX 650 Ti, or even the plain GTX 650. It would be the more interesting article to find the sweet spot of graphics cards for such an old system - the point at which the performance increase not match the price increase.
Wow! It shows how bad things are getting on the Java security front when even Oracle start taking notice of the problem!
Ah yes, the alledged "evil" open document standard that inconvenienced nobody, and the UEFI secure boot "fiasco" that wasn't invented by Microsoft and closes a huge security hole. These aren't evil or treacherous. And for that matter, my example of DR-DOS was another example of a non-event beat up. No version of Windows 3.x was shipped that didn't run on DR-DOS.