I can honestly say I've never seen this. I have two DVD burners, two USB hard drives, 3 flash drives, a card reader that shows up as 5 drives, and a few network shares to various servers.
These devices are often unplugged, moved around, put in different computers, etc., and I've never once seen anything worse than one of my DVD burners getting it's drive letter changed when I temporarily installed an IDE hard drive and moved the DVD burner to slave (small case + cable-select).
Even between two Windows installations on the same computer, the drive letters don't stay the same.
And it's been said they're soon going to halt production of the original XBox.
They already did. nVidia stopped making the NV2X/MCPX chips some time last year, which meant all Xboxes produced since then were just burning through stock. As of a few weeks ago, I could not find a new Xbox available through the website of any major retailers, and the on-shelf stocks have been dwindling for a few months. When I bought an Xbox about a month back to mod for a friend, I had to search 4 stores before I found one, and it even turned out to have been manufactured nearly a year before I bought it.
Basically, the Xbox has been terminal since last year when the chip production stopped after Microsoft's contract with nVidia ran out (it had not been renewed due to some major arguements between the companies, which is also why the 360 uses ATI). It's been dead from a production perspective since early this year, and it's just barely clinging on to life in the retail market with the few still left on shelves.
Yea, the Microsoft extender software was clearly half-assed. IMO no extenders for XP MCE were bearable until the 360, the rest were just too damn slow and incapable of HDTV.
Definately try XBMC though, it'll change the way you use your Xbox. Mine's set up to stream movies in almost any format I throw at it from my media server, so I can use the entire hard drive to back up games and store all my movies, music, and emulator ROMs in one place shared between my two modded Xboxes and 6 PCs.
(though the XBOX does lack an optical out, which I love on the PS2)
Only on the two lower-end output packs. Face it, the people who don't even have a S-Video capable TV are not exactly the market for a 5.1 or larger surround system, and optical out for sterro is pointless. All S-Video and Component output dongles have either optical or coax S/PDIF output.
Yes it would have been nice to have it out of the box, but if you have a decent enough system to take advantage of optical you've probably upgraded the output pack for a cleaner video signal as well.
Build computers with a robot arm that will reach out and smack the user in the back of the head every time they're about to run an EXE from a IM or popup.
A slightly lower-tech implementation has worked for me. When my friends ask me to fix their computer for the 30 billionth time after they infected it, I smack them in the back of the head and tell them not to be a moron, and then send them on to pay the Geek Squad to deal with their problems.
Where these people used to be reinfecting themselves on a weekly basis, they seem to have stopped now, so a combination of physical and wallet pain seems to be the best motivation to not be a retard.
If you in any way NEED thse kind of things to drive, get the fuck off the road. The problem isn't that we have too few safety features in our cars, it's that the DMV makes the written test so easy that anyone with the slightest hint of common sense can pass it and the road test is so short as to be useless.
Truckers have to repeatedly prove that they can handle their massive vehicles with precision to get a CDL, and if you've ever seen someone back a 45 foot trailer in to a spot on a crowded loading dock, you know they've got skill. I think that all driver's licenses should require this level of proficiency.
At the least, one should be able to back a full-size car (FULL size, meaning Caprice, Roadmaster, Crown Vic, etc....not Taurus, Intrepid, or whatever they're claiming is full size now) in to a standard parking space.
I consider myself a pretty good driver, and I attribute it to driving large pickups and my Crown Vic, since they just take more skill to pilot through tight areas.
If I left my laptop playing porn on the rear deck of my car, I'm sure an accident would occur. Then someone probably would be injured due to my carelessness with porn.
Most cars do indeed have speed limiting governors. Even the Bugatti Veyron has one, though it's at 253MPH so no one's complaining.
Here's a few othersthat I know off the top of my head:
Late-model Ford Ranger: ~95 MPH Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor: Varies based on axle gearing (driveshaft resonance issue) Ford Crown Victoria: Just over 100 MPH
The cable provider around here guarantees that the connection will be at least twice as fast as dialup (their "starter" plan is 128/128, so that's the baseline). Obviously with a 8m/768 plan, that takes "varying degrees of accuracy" to an extreme, but it still is a guarantee.
If one pays extra for a business plan, the guarantee increases to 256/256.
What I meant by that was during off-peak hours when the ISP's bandwidth is not saturated.
If they prioritize traffic so that HTTP and realtime applications get more bandwidth, I have no problem with that. The problem is that some ISPs are artificially limiting P2P traffic even when it's not needed. Some Canadian users I've talked to say that their torrents run at dialup speeds or worse no matter what time of day, where they can max out their lines with HTTP traffic. If the ISP's connection isn't saturated, the only "shaping" that should occur is prioritization for low latency of games/SSH/VoIP. Once the line is peaked, then and only then should bandwidth shaping be applied.
They're selling me a TCP/IP connection to a global network with a service level guaranteed to varying degrees of accuracy depending on how much I pay. Unless it's spelled out in the contract, artificial restrictions should not be allowed.
If I'm on a residential connection, I can expect to not get full speed during peak times due to overselling, but if I can download HTTP at the full 8mbit but only 2mbit from a torrent, something is wrong.
Hopefully users of the ISPs that do this will choose to switch, though I'd imagine that the choices are limited in many areas.
I was discussing why this was done in previous consoles. Note that the only time I mentioned current consoles was saying that they now are powerful enough to run an OS at all times.
Anyways, how much are you willing to bed on your 0.1% figure? Did you even read the article? It claims that both the PS3 and Xbox 360 OSes take well over that.
It's a matter of efficiency. In a small embedded platform like a game console, it makes sense to have the "OS" as part of the game code to an extent, because it can work more efficiently within the constraints of the hardware. Ever notice how a console tends to blow away an equivalently powerful PC when comparing the level of shiny things it can display? (This comparo's easy with an Xbox...try running Halo PC on a 733MHz Celeron with only 64MB of RAM shared with the video card)
Only now are consoles getting powerful enough that it's less of an issue. The Dreamcast offered this functionality as well (games could be built for the version of WinCE in ran), but few used it for performance reasons.
The idea of embedding OS code in to the binaries has it's downsides (or upsides, dependong on who you talk to). For the Xbox, any code compiled with the XDK (all games and most homebrew aside from Linux) contains Microsoft code, and thus can not be legally distributed without Microsoft's permission. This prevents any "issues" of unlicensed third party games like other manufacturers tried to fight in previous generations.
Xbox GOTY edition got you both expansions and cost less than the original game, or those with a proper Xbox could just FTP over the files from the PC expansions and they worked.
From my experience, this is one of the most bug-free games I've played in a while. The bugs I know of are minor script issues, not serious engine glitches.
As for patches within weeks, think about it this way: Bethesda's beta testing probably encompassed a few hundred machines at most. Upon release, the game was being run on hundreds of thousands of machines with various hardware and software configurations. Bugs are inevitable which weren't discovered in the testing process. The fact that they responded this quickly with a patch is a good thing.
I'm totally against shipping a known broken game where you have to patch it to play in the first place, but so far I have heard of no showstopper bugs in Oblivion, just minor issues and a few hardware conflicts which could just as well be bad drivers. There's a big difference between "we can always patch it later" and "oh, we didn't know about that, here's a patch".
I'd rather pay $14 for a pair of jeans that I can wear for 4 days straight without them showing any dirt, but then go 4-wheeling in them and wash them off with ease.
Anyway, what people must understand is some drivers simply cannot be open source, notably video and wireless drivers. Look at Mac OS X: all hardware drivers are open source, save for... yep, video and wireless drivers. Think about it.
That's retarded. Look at the multitude of open source wireless drivers. Look at every single ATI video card before r300 (and even r300 is getting some support now). Video and wireless drivers can be just as open source as the rest of the system, just the manufacturers of the various chipsets don't want that to happen. They seem to think (justifiably or not) that opening their drivers would either give their competitors an advantage, or in the case of wireless, open them up to legal issues if their customers modify the driver to transmit on other frequencies or otherwise fuck with things.
Of course, in my mind both of those are bogus claims, because a company who has engineers capable of designing a 300+ million transistor GPU can surely find the people to reverse-engineer a mere driver. With regards to the wireless issue, since when have manufacturers been liable for what a customer does with their gear? Ford's not liable for me going well above 100MPH on public roads, so why should Broadcom be worried about me tweaking their chipset to transmit on another frequency?
Woodgrain? Flying icons? What the fuck kind of Mac are you using?
I'll agree the brushed metal look kinda sucks, but it's not horrible when used right (i.e. Finder, not Safari). The closest thing I can figure to flying icons is how an app's icon bounces in the dock when it's starting up or needs attention. Better than Windows where you can double-click an app and get absolutely no feedback for a minute or two, and then *poof* there it is.
You'd think, but having another OS option reduces efficiency. In an environment where they can rapidly throw together a PC assembly-line style, seperating off a few machines for low volume changes takes time and labor, which in turn means money.
Obviously the cost isn't as much as the insane difference from the Windows model, but I'm sure it's enough that Dell wants to discourage people from buying them, thus the artificially increased price.
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I can honestly say I've never seen this. I have two DVD burners, two USB hard drives, 3 flash drives, a card reader that shows up as 5 drives, and a few network shares to various servers.
These devices are often unplugged, moved around, put in different computers, etc., and I've never once seen anything worse than one of my DVD burners getting it's drive letter changed when I temporarily installed an IDE hard drive and moved the DVD burner to slave (small case + cable-select).
Even between two Windows installations on the same computer, the drive letters don't stay the same.
And it's been said they're soon going to halt production of the original XBox.
They already did. nVidia stopped making the NV2X/MCPX chips some time last year, which meant all Xboxes produced since then were just burning through stock. As of a few weeks ago, I could not find a new Xbox available through the website of any major retailers, and the on-shelf stocks have been dwindling for a few months. When I bought an Xbox about a month back to mod for a friend, I had to search 4 stores before I found one, and it even turned out to have been manufactured nearly a year before I bought it.
Basically, the Xbox has been terminal since last year when the chip production stopped after Microsoft's contract with nVidia ran out (it had not been renewed due to some major arguements between the companies, which is also why the 360 uses ATI). It's been dead from a production perspective since early this year, and it's just barely clinging on to life in the retail market with the few still left on shelves.
Yea, the Microsoft extender software was clearly half-assed. IMO no extenders for XP MCE were bearable until the 360, the rest were just too damn slow and incapable of HDTV.
Definately try XBMC though, it'll change the way you use your Xbox. Mine's set up to stream movies in almost any format I throw at it from my media server, so I can use the entire hard drive to back up games and store all my movies, music, and emulator ROMs in one place shared between my two modded Xboxes and 6 PCs.
(though the XBOX does lack an optical out, which I love on the PS2)
Only on the two lower-end output packs. Face it, the people who don't even have a S-Video capable TV are not exactly the market for a 5.1 or larger surround system, and optical out for sterro is pointless. All S-Video and Component output dongles have either optical or coax S/PDIF output.
Yes it would have been nice to have it out of the box, but if you have a decent enough system to take advantage of optical you've probably upgraded the output pack for a cleaner video signal as well.
Build computers with a robot arm that will reach out and smack the user in the back of the head every time they're about to run an EXE from a IM or popup.
A slightly lower-tech implementation has worked for me. When my friends ask me to fix their computer for the 30 billionth time after they infected it, I smack them in the back of the head and tell them not to be a moron, and then send them on to pay the Geek Squad to deal with their problems.
Where these people used to be reinfecting themselves on a weekly basis, they seem to have stopped now, so a combination of physical and wallet pain seems to be the best motivation to not be a retard.
Started driving with a F-150 SuperCrew 4x4. The rear blind spot was enough to hide a midsize car. My CVPI is a breeze compared to that thing.
I'd rather see just the advanced license.
If you in any way NEED thse kind of things to drive, get the fuck off the road. The problem isn't that we have too few safety features in our cars, it's that the DMV makes the written test so easy that anyone with the slightest hint of common sense can pass it and the road test is so short as to be useless.
Truckers have to repeatedly prove that they can handle their massive vehicles with precision to get a CDL, and if you've ever seen someone back a 45 foot trailer in to a spot on a crowded loading dock, you know they've got skill. I think that all driver's licenses should require this level of proficiency.
At the least, one should be able to back a full-size car (FULL size, meaning Caprice, Roadmaster, Crown Vic, etc....not Taurus, Intrepid, or whatever they're claiming is full size now) in to a standard parking space.
I consider myself a pretty good driver, and I attribute it to driving large pickups and my Crown Vic, since they just take more skill to pilot through tight areas.
If I left my laptop playing porn on the rear deck of my car, I'm sure an accident would occur. Then someone probably would be injured due to my carelessness with porn.
Most cars do indeed have speed limiting governors. Even the Bugatti Veyron has one, though it's at 253MPH so no one's complaining.
Here's a few othersthat I know off the top of my head:
Late-model Ford Ranger: ~95 MPH
Ford Crown Victoria Police Interceptor: Varies based on axle gearing (driveshaft resonance issue)
Ford Crown Victoria: Just over 100 MPH
That's why I said varying degrees of accuracy.
The cable provider around here guarantees that the connection will be at least twice as fast as dialup (their "starter" plan is 128/128, so that's the baseline). Obviously with a 8m/768 plan, that takes "varying degrees of accuracy" to an extreme, but it still is a guarantee.
If one pays extra for a business plan, the guarantee increases to 256/256.
What I meant by that was during off-peak hours when the ISP's bandwidth is not saturated.
If they prioritize traffic so that HTTP and realtime applications get more bandwidth, I have no problem with that. The problem is that some ISPs are artificially limiting P2P traffic even when it's not needed. Some Canadian users I've talked to say that their torrents run at dialup speeds or worse no matter what time of day, where they can max out their lines with HTTP traffic. If the ISP's connection isn't saturated, the only "shaping" that should occur is prioritization for low latency of games/SSH/VoIP. Once the line is peaked, then and only then should bandwidth shaping be applied.
Of course having no contract means the ISP isn't obligated to anything either.
They're selling me a TCP/IP connection to a global network with a service level guaranteed to varying degrees of accuracy depending on how much I pay. Unless it's spelled out in the contract, artificial restrictions should not be allowed.
If I'm on a residential connection, I can expect to not get full speed during peak times due to overselling, but if I can download HTTP at the full 8mbit but only 2mbit from a torrent, something is wrong.
Hopefully users of the ISPs that do this will choose to switch, though I'd imagine that the choices are limited in many areas.
I was discussing why this was done in previous consoles. Note that the only time I mentioned current consoles was saying that they now are powerful enough to run an OS at all times.
Anyways, how much are you willing to bed on your 0.1% figure? Did you even read the article? It claims that both the PS3 and Xbox 360 OSes take well over that.
It's a matter of efficiency. In a small embedded platform like a game console, it makes sense to have the "OS" as part of the game code to an extent, because it can work more efficiently within the constraints of the hardware. Ever notice how a console tends to blow away an equivalently powerful PC when comparing the level of shiny things it can display? (This comparo's easy with an Xbox...try running Halo PC on a 733MHz Celeron with only 64MB of RAM shared with the video card)
Only now are consoles getting powerful enough that it's less of an issue. The Dreamcast offered this functionality as well (games could be built for the version of WinCE in ran), but few used it for performance reasons.
The idea of embedding OS code in to the binaries has it's downsides (or upsides, dependong on who you talk to). For the Xbox, any code compiled with the XDK (all games and most homebrew aside from Linux) contains Microsoft code, and thus can not be legally distributed without Microsoft's permission. This prevents any "issues" of unlicensed third party games like other manufacturers tried to fight in previous generations.
Xbox GOTY edition got you both expansions and cost less than the original game, or those with a proper Xbox could just FTP over the files from the PC expansions and they worked.
From my experience, this is one of the most bug-free games I've played in a while. The bugs I know of are minor script issues, not serious engine glitches.
As for patches within weeks, think about it this way: Bethesda's beta testing probably encompassed a few hundred machines at most. Upon release, the game was being run on hundreds of thousands of machines with various hardware and software configurations. Bugs are inevitable which weren't discovered in the testing process. The fact that they responded this quickly with a patch is a good thing.
I'm totally against shipping a known broken game where you have to patch it to play in the first place, but so far I have heard of no showstopper bugs in Oblivion, just minor issues and a few hardware conflicts which could just as well be bad drivers. There's a big difference between "we can always patch it later" and "oh, we didn't know about that, here's a patch".
funny, but wrong...Ohio (yea, not much better)
or just don't attach it to the network in the first place?
why do we always skip the simple answers.....
I'd rather pay $14 for a pair of jeans that I can wear for 4 days straight without them showing any dirt, but then go 4-wheeling in them and wash them off with ease.
Anyway, what people must understand is some drivers simply cannot be open source, notably video and wireless drivers. Look at Mac OS X: all hardware drivers are open source, save for... yep, video and wireless drivers. Think about it.
That's retarded. Look at the multitude of open source wireless drivers. Look at every single ATI video card before r300 (and even r300 is getting some support now). Video and wireless drivers can be just as open source as the rest of the system, just the manufacturers of the various chipsets don't want that to happen. They seem to think (justifiably or not) that opening their drivers would either give their competitors an advantage, or in the case of wireless, open them up to legal issues if their customers modify the driver to transmit on other frequencies or otherwise fuck with things.
Of course, in my mind both of those are bogus claims, because a company who has engineers capable of designing a 300+ million transistor GPU can surely find the people to reverse-engineer a mere driver. With regards to the wireless issue, since when have manufacturers been liable for what a customer does with their gear? Ford's not liable for me going well above 100MPH on public roads, so why should Broadcom be worried about me tweaking their chipset to transmit on another frequency?
They said equivalent, which basically means a 2.4GHz Athlon 64 or Pentium M/"Core"/Conroe/Whatever.
Remember, P4 gigahertz mean nothing in the world of real processors.
Woodgrain? Flying icons? What the fuck kind of Mac are you using?
I'll agree the brushed metal look kinda sucks, but it's not horrible when used right (i.e. Finder, not Safari). The closest thing I can figure to flying icons is how an app's icon bounces in the dock when it's starting up or needs attention. Better than Windows where you can double-click an app and get absolutely no feedback for a minute or two, and then *poof* there it is.
A Microsoft document, needlessly tossed in a Microsoft format, not working on a non-Microsoft platform? I'm shocked!
I'm sure there was a completely valid reason to wrap this document in a Windows executable.
You'd think, but having another OS option reduces efficiency. In an environment where they can rapidly throw together a PC assembly-line style, seperating off a few machines for low volume changes takes time and labor, which in turn means money.
Obviously the cost isn't as much as the insane difference from the Windows model, but I'm sure it's enough that Dell wants to discourage people from buying them, thus the artificially increased price.