> Too bad nobody else uses it though.... Yeah, agreed. Bash still sucks in some ways compared to 4DOS/4NT. I miss the directory history popup (Ctrl-PageUp/Dn) I wrote a poormans 17-line bash script which is a replacement for CD. I'll have to post it sometime.
At least you can simulate the cd-up-directory..{.} functionality in Bash
To move up 1 dir
function..() { cd ".." ; } To move up 2 dirs
function...() {.. ;.. ; } To move up 3 dirs
function....() {... ;.. ; }
Cheers
Grrrr, stupid lameness filter for the bash up() function....
For proof, simply look at the litany of missed opportunities that should have been directly in Sony's sweet spot: - game players as mobile phones (Sony missed it entirely, while the Apple iPhone is now the world's largest selling portable gaming platform, eclipsing the multi-year headstart of Sony's PSP), - notebook computers (Sony's insistence on incorporating proprietary components relegated them to single digit market share), - MP3 players ( a market that Sony owned and surrendered entirely), - digital cameras (again, an insistence on proprietary components limited their appeal, and they're now an also ran), - ebooks (they had the early lead with a gorgeous product that made the Kindle look like a cheap plastic toy, but again Sony's insistence on proprietary software and file formats allowed Amazon's Kindle to grab a dominant position they will not relinquish) - digital music sales (Sony has an enormous catalog, but their feeble attempts to sell digitally were hampered by proprietary software and file formats, fanatical concern for piracy and a miserable user experience in finding, buying and syncing music.)
I am not saying Apple is the poster child of "Do No Evil" either, but while Apple was taken to court where it was declared perfectly legal to jailbreak your iPhone, they seem to have a better sense that you need _both_ hardware and software. I'd be interested in a list of Apple failures, (the Apple///, Lisa, and Newton, not-with-standing.)
Ebert is an idiot who doesn't recognize that while a picture or song that could stand on its own is considered "art" but yet if the same thing is included inside a computer game, somehow it is no longer art. He is archaic relic from the past who doesn't grok "The _medium_ does not matter."
You keep using this word, legally. It doesn't mean what you think it does. The fact that something is enforceable or not, is completely beside the point.
Gasp, here's a concept: Why don't you _actually_ talk to a real _lawyer_, instead of spouting your ignorance of IANAL. You don't know jack about Contract Law; I would highly recommend you actually take some time to learn _how_ Law works, because you seem be under the delusion that governments just wave a magic wand and can mandate anything anything legally they like, while you are completely clueless where they get the power to do so in the first place.
First, WHO creates the laws? Government. Second, WHO creates the Government? People. Third, WHERE does government get its power from? From, We The People, who GRANTS rights & privileges TO IT.
The creator is the master; the created is always subject to the creator.
> Taxes are mandatory, and has fuck all to do with whether or not you have a 'contract' with other people.
Sorry, I know 2 people who are legally out of the system. Now, they can't buy/own houses/property, can't have American Bank account(s), etc, but it CAN be done. They have been to court and the Judge has ruled that what they are doing is perfectly legal. Like I said, take some time and talk to a _real_ lawyer, instead of pretending you think you know how Law works, because you know fuck all about a little thing called _Jurisdiction_.
> Don't get me wrong, here. I'm not the kind of guy who thinks the moon landings were faked or that the U.S. planned 9-11 or any of that horseshit.
Don't shoot the messenger please, just asking a honest question here: I am still wondering "What _was_ the official reason Building 7 collapsed" ?
I'm not interested in Conspiracy Theories, I just want the honest facts, and a government to treat its citizen with respect by valuing honesty, like most other people want.
> So maybe the 16th amendment isn't as superfluous as you claim.
You may want to take a look at your history. The Supreme Court in Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co., 240 U.S. 103 (1916), stated that "by the previous ruling [in Brushaber] it was settled that the provisions of the 16th Amendment conferred no new power of taxation, but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of INDIRECT taxation to which it inherently belonged, and being placed in the category of direct taxation...."
Regardless, a lawyer friend _really_ hated to admit this years ago when I pressed him on the issue, is that ALL Law is based on Contract Law. The ONLY reason you are are legally required to pay taxes is because you gave (implicit) tacit consent that you agreed to the contract. i.e. You don't pay taxes to a foreign country because you have no _contract_ with _that_ government.
If you want to legally void paying Taxes, you must rescind EACH and EVERY contract. There are people who have done this, but there are more important wars to fight then trying to win one battle with people who have more money & laws then you.
-- Question for Homework: How does the Bill of Rights apply to a person when they _never_ signed the contract?
> If you need multiple monitors to write code productively, you aren't writing serious code.
You're an idiot. Some of us write _graphic_ / game programs and/or write kernel code. The ability to debug/run your game/kernel full-screen on one monitor, whilst debugging / viewing code on the other is extremely tedious if you only have one monitor.
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so muchâ"the wheel, New York, wars and so onâ"whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than manâ"for precisely the same reasons."
-- You can either view life as: A series of [old] problems, or as [new] opportunities. The _circumstances_ don't matter, only your _perspective_ does.
> Having built my last two gaming rigs to utilize SLI, my opinion is that it's more trouble than it's worth. My current Gaming Rig has a XFire 5770 (XFire = AMD/ATI version of nVidia's SLI). I got it almost a year ago -- I paid ~$125 x 2 and saved at least $50 over the 5870.
I regular play L4D, BFBC2, RB6LV2. I too have mixed opinions on XFire/SLI but for different reasons.
> worth until two years later when No one says you have to wait 2 years:-) I waited 6 months.
Regardless of when you buy, you ARE saving money. Of course there are trade-offs as your post correctly mentions.
> Then buy a second card, which is now very affordable, I am surprised you didn't mention the REAL reason why the perceived advantage doesn't pan out in practice... Try _finding_ the second card that is STILL SELLING and that IS _compatible_ with your existing card. (A lot of times it has to be made by the same manufacture of the first one!) You also need to be a little wiser upfront when you buy your initial video card -- which model will still be selling in 2 years? For AMD/ATI, the xx70 cards seem to be the ones that stick around.
> A bug that only affected SLI users. 1) This is shitty programming -- be vocal so that game devs can fix their game AND nVidia / ATI can fix their drivers!
*glares at EA/Dice for Battlefield Bad Company 2* 2) Again, you missed the "reality" -- until the bug is fixed, you are forced to play the game with only 1 GPU. This sucks. At least ATI has been getting better in their SLI "game profiles" now.
> Having two graphics cards going at full tear will heat up your case extremely quickly. I have to question your case cooling. My bottom case fan is "pull", my top case fan is "push". I haven't noticed any extreme temps.
Again, the "reality" you missed to mention is noise (dBA) and Load. Running 2 GPUs is a little louder and uses a little more juice. i.e. http://techreport.com/articles.x/19404/10
> and this is the last machine I will build with SLI, end of story. I've been custom building gaming rigs since the '80s. This is my first XfFre rig and I _would_ consider it again. Basically the price points for me are...
~ $150 video card (XFire/SLI)
OR ~ $350 video card (single card)
I usually wait 1-2 years before buying brand new games, as I'm sick and tired of paying $60, when I could pay ~$20. XFire has let me play all my current and past games with everything cranked and still get 60 Hz.
> How many TV series for example do you see that people create in their spare time? Hmm? Or let's say movies?
Oh right, I forgot the the majority of TV series and Hollywood movies are such an paragon of QUALITY that amatuers can't produce anything of similiar or better quality./sarcasm
Now I agree that 99% of people would rather consume then create. Of the few that do, the scope is usually too large for enough people to consider doing it for free, but if money really was the only issue that people cared about though then we wouldn't have free movies at all. (See next paragraph.)
> Hell, there would be nothing worth watching or playing if everything was created in 'spare time' by hobbyists.
These artists would probably beg to differ...
- Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning - Art of the Saber - Big Buck Bunny - Bounty Trail - Broken Allegiance - The Dark Redemption - Duality - Elephants Dream - Fanimatrix - The Formula - Machinima, such as Red vs Blue - The Phantom Edit - Pink Five - Reciprocity See: http://soosck.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/20-open-source-movies-edit-redistribute-free/
Why is xkcd freely available?
> I am personally a F/OSS proponent, but even I admit that most F/OSS software is really poor compared to their closed-source competitors, even so much as being completely unusable cr*p
Yeah, I work on OSS myself and totally agee with this. At least 95% of OSS _is_ crap. 10 clones that each implement a difference 60% of what you need. The OOTB (out-of-the-box experience) is rubbish because most geeks don't understand User Expereience let alone good User Interface design. ( i.e. Cygwin / Bash wouldn't suck so bad if the man pages actually included fucking _examples_ like the BSD crowd does.)
> GIMP and Firefox are great, but even there Photoshop trumps GIMP.
Agreed GIMP is crap. In a few more years it will be "OK" though when they finally add 16-bit support, Layer Groups, 100% Photoshop Layer Blending and Effects, and a Photoshop hotkeys profiles out-of-the-box. I'm not holding my breath though.
Are they perfect? No, but they are "good enough" considering where we were 10 years ago.
> Every single F/OSS game I've tried is simply downright horrible, with horrible graphics, really buggy gameplay, poor story if there is any story at all
Agreed. While most programmers will work for free, most artists don't and won't. OSS game devs haven't hit critical mass yet.
20 years it was crazy to think there would be a OSS *nix clone. We'll have some good OSS apps in another 20.
> If content producers know that anything they produce is "up for grabs", what incentive do they have to keep producing?
Right, because money is the _only_ incentive for people to create./sarcasm.
Why don't you actually talk to people who create in their spare time. The ability of the human soul to express itself is driven by more then purely capitalistic greed. Apparently this paradigm is a foreign concept to you.
> To read summaries like this you get the sense there isn't any value to intellectual property at all.
I'll probably get downmodded for not being civil but, "No Shit, Sherlock."
1. Imaginary Property Rights are neither property, nor rights. Audio, Video, and/or Textual information can be represented as a number. To say someone somehow "magically" "owns" ones a particular sequence of bits is assine.
2. "Value" is _relative_ between 2 parties. What price do you do you put on something that benefits _everyone_, such as concepts like the wheel, numbers, math, formulas, the cure for cancer? So why should entertainment be treated differently? Art is for the benefit of everyone. Certain artists would even argue that once you put a price on art, it is not art; it is pseudo-art, because its purpose of bastard existance has been hi-jacked. Putting a price on something demands that the "value" is one-sided. It is perfectly valid to argue that the "value" of ownership is a myth -- the value of a soceity to freely share what it produces is priceless -- which is what the intent is here.
> Framing those who wish to produce intellectual property and then charge for it as "slavers" is dishonest and counterproductive.
Those who charge for "I.P." are doing it out of greed. It is time the human race grows up, and realizes there is more to life then money.
> And frankly, I think other browsers are wasting time and money developing new code that still runs "exactly the same" on older OSs like XP. It's over a decade old. Time to move on. XP needs to die, if only for security reasons. Never mind it's becoming less and less compatable with newer generations of hardware. It's a dying audience, consistently shrinking. There's no need to target it any more.
And you're offering to pay to have all those old machines upgraded to Win7 ? The Corporate world is still using WinXP. It works. With a decent firewall there are no major security issues so stop with the FUD. Name _one_ technical reason why Win 7 is required?
No they aren't. Like anything else, they have the _potential_ to be used constructively or abused.
Currently, essential services, like Government, Electric Company, or Water company all have monopolies. Replacing them with corporations each with competing standards would be worse.
- Took forever to address the memory leak; devs constantly ignored it in 1.x and 2.x. (Hello, a web browser should NOT consume 1.5 gigs when no tabs are open when it has been runing for a month.) - Keep breaking plugins/extensions. Useful extensions like SunCult (shows Moon Phases) is broken 3.6. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/sun-cult/) - The UI team can't focus on _useful_ tab management, such as giving me a list of ALL tabs across ALL windows, color coding duplicate tabs, etc. Why the hell do I need a ton of plugins for this functionality?? - Removed the ability to resize the bookmarks dialog and down-sized it to be near useless. (WTF?) - Removed the ability to use the arrow keys to scroll up/down Tools, PageInfo, Media. (Another WTF?) - Move the home & reload button (WHY? FF is NOT Chrome!) - Took forever to make tabs multi-threaded. (Hello, one TAB should NOT stall the WHOLE dam browser.)
If I wanted to use Chrome, I would use Chrome. I use FF because it was fast, small, extendendable, and did the MAJORITY things RIGHT Out-Of-The Box. This ePenis versioning is stupid. Focus on thing that people do _day_to_day_.
This reminds of something I ran into work recenetly. I wrote a bash (cygwin) script that was using "tail +#"; it broke on a colleague's machine because he was using a newer version of tail that required "tail -n #" -- WTF?
As great as Open Source is, it also sucks* -- stop breaking functionality when the old version worked fine.
* I work on a popular Open Source Emulator in my spare time.
You have some valid points, however I would like to add another 2 perspectives as a game programmer and game designer.
- Single Player vs Multi-Player. You must consider the audience. For a single player game, a linear increase in power works great! In multiplayer not so great.. which dovetails into my next point:
- "Proper" Weapon Balance has become a Rock-Paper-Scissor approach.. Otherwise what happens is that you [literally] get a death-spiral for who can find, for the sake of argument lets say the Weapon X (i.e. Doom/Quake Rocket Launcher) is the baddest weapon, find weapon X first AND gib people. There is nothing wrong with this approach -- it is the "old-skool" FPS experience, ala Quake and Unreal, and a lot of fun, but it does get old after all these years. The trend is that you want to balance weapons so that one person has certain strengths AND certain weaknesses -- this _dynamic_ nature of power is _much_ more interesting in the long run then a linear perspective where there is no weaknesses. i.e. Shotgun = uber damage up front and in your face + instant hit, Rocket Launcher = Slower but great damage from a distance.
Take a look at Team Fortress. The weapons you use depend on the _situtation_ you are in. Rightly or Wrongly, it is the evolution of game design.
> Then there's the ridiculously short campaigns that are often justified on the basis of multiplayer.
You can blame publishers for that --due to most people never getting past 50% of the campaign. Why waste time develping content when the majority of players NEVER finish it?
Borderlands and Diablo are great examples. Long single player story AND you can play co-op campaigns. It really is the ideal match.
These days I pretty much refuse to play shooters that don't have at least 2 or 4 player co-op. I've been there, done that, killed it excessively, in single-player.
> that wasn't a massive multiplayer phenomenon like a CoD or Halo and then try to find a server with more than 2 people on it.
Uhm, L4D, RB2LV2 (Rainbow Six Lost Vegas 2), and Borderlands, but yeah, point taken.
> That's because they're disparate constructs with completely different purposes that should not be lumped together.
They are ALL imaginary property, aka "artificially restricted rights based on GREED."
Trademarks = somebody has an exclusive on a word to prevent competitors from profiting from it Copyright = somebody wants to restrict the public distribution of information, entertainment, etc. Patents = somebody wants compensation for implementing an idea
I am not saying people shouldn't be compensated for their time, knowledge, and skill, but honestly, this artificial notion of property is archaic and insane. "Yes, kids, you are supposed to share you toys, you selfish bastard. Yes, Johnny when you become an adult in the Real World (TM) you sue everybody who decides to shares "your" imaginary property. Who brainwashed you with this "sharing is caring" hippie bullshit? Don't you know people are "stealing" "derived income" from you! Yeah, unfortunately you can't patent the wheel due to prior art."
No wonder society have a fucked up contradictory schizophrenia view of "property." Every time we want our kids to have a certain behaviour, we turn around and teach them the exact opposite as adults.
> Unfortunately, the Square Enix taint is already there, and you get half a game out of the box with the rest being released as an endless stream of DLC.
Slashdot Mirror
> I use 4NT based on 4DOS based on NDOS, so it's a 20+ yr legacy. Too bad nobody else uses it though....
I'm a big fan of 4DOS/4NT too, but you do realize 4DOS was around _before_ NDOS (Norton Dos). NDOS was a licensed version of 4DOS 4.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4DOS
"The last version of NDOS was bundled with Norton Utilities 8, and corresponded to 4DOS 4.03."
> Too bad nobody else uses it though....
Yeah, agreed. Bash still sucks in some ways compared to 4DOS/4NT. I miss the directory history popup (Ctrl-PageUp/Dn) I wrote a poormans 17-line bash script which is a replacement for CD. I'll have to post it sometime.
At least you can simulate the cd-up-directory ..{.} functionality in Bash
To move up 1 dir ..() { cd ".." ; } ...() { .. ; .. ; } ....() { ... ; .. ; }
function
To move up 2 dirs
function
To move up 3 dirs
function
Cheers
Grrrr, stupid lameness filter for the bash up() function ....
Sorry for the bad netiquette, but this article hilights the differences between Apple and Sony
http://orange-envelopes.com/blog/2011/01/08/sony-failed-because-of-sony-not-bad-timing/
For proof, simply look at the litany of missed opportunities that should have been directly in Sony's sweet spot:
- game players as mobile phones (Sony missed it entirely, while the Apple iPhone is now the world's largest selling portable gaming platform, eclipsing the multi-year headstart of Sony's PSP),
- notebook computers (Sony's insistence on incorporating proprietary components relegated them to single digit market share),
- MP3 players ( a market that Sony owned and surrendered entirely),
- digital cameras (again, an insistence on proprietary components limited their appeal, and they're now an also ran),
- ebooks (they had the early lead with a gorgeous product that made the Kindle look like a cheap plastic toy, but again Sony's insistence on proprietary software and file formats allowed Amazon's Kindle to grab a dominant position they will not relinquish)
- digital music sales (Sony has an enormous catalog, but their feeble attempts to sell digitally were hampered by proprietary software and file formats, fanatical concern for piracy and a miserable user experience in finding, buying and syncing music.)
This article drives the point home: "Cheap and long always beats expensive and high-quality."
http://www.11points.com/Web-Tech/11_Famous_Sony_Products,_Ranked_From_Worst_Failure_to_Biggest_Success
Fortunately, Microsoft and Sony have far too much pride to work cooperatively together. (East vs West)
> are you saying that Apple has catastrophically bad failure rates, and has dismal software security
I am not aware of Apple doing this ...
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootkit_scandal
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Manning_(fictitious_writer)
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_Network_shutdown
I am not saying Apple is the poster child of "Do No Evil" either, but while Apple was taken to court where it was declared perfectly legal to jailbreak your iPhone, they seem to have a better sense that you need _both_ hardware and software. I'd be interested in a list of Apple failures, (the Apple ///, Lisa, and Newton, not-with-standing.)
Cheers
Dear God, I sure hope so.
Ebert is an idiot who doesn't recognize that while a picture or song that could stand on its own is considered "art" but yet if the same thing is included inside a computer game, somehow it is no longer art. He is archaic relic from the past who doesn't grok "The _medium_ does not matter."
Please mod up, because that is exactly a concise summary.
Interestingly enough, Apple is both a hardware and software company.
You keep using this word, legally. It doesn't mean what you think it does. The fact that something is enforceable or not, is completely beside the point.
Gasp, here's a concept: Why don't you _actually_ talk to a real _lawyer_, instead of spouting your ignorance of IANAL. You don't know jack about Contract Law; I would highly recommend you actually take some time to learn _how_ Law works, because you seem be under the delusion that governments just wave a magic wand and can mandate anything anything legally they like, while you are completely clueless where they get the power to do so in the first place.
First, WHO creates the laws? Government.
Second, WHO creates the Government? People.
Third, WHERE does government get its power from? From, We The People, who GRANTS rights & privileges TO IT.
The creator is the master; the created is always subject to the creator.
> Taxes are mandatory, and has fuck all to do with whether or not you have a 'contract' with other people.
Sorry, I know 2 people who are legally out of the system. Now, they can't buy/own houses/property, can't have American Bank account(s), etc, but it CAN be done. They have been to court and the Judge has ruled that what they are doing is perfectly legal. Like I said, take some time and talk to a _real_ lawyer, instead of pretending you think you know how Law works, because you know fuck all about a little thing called _Jurisdiction_.
> Don't get me wrong, here. I'm not the kind of guy who thinks the moon landings were faked or that the U.S. planned 9-11 or any of that horseshit.
Don't shoot the messenger please, just asking a honest question here: I am still wondering "What _was_ the official reason Building 7 collapsed" ?
I'm not interested in Conspiracy Theories, I just want the honest facts, and a government to treat its citizen with respect by valuing honesty, like most other people want.
> Many economists would argue that a flat tax is not fair.
Oh right, and a progressive tax system is. Here, let me google that for you, since you seem to have trouble understanding the concept of "fair"
Petition to Redistribute GPA Scores
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lOyaJ2UI7Ss
> So maybe the 16th amendment isn't as superfluous as you claim.
You may want to take a look at your history. The Supreme Court in Stanton v. Baltic Mining Co., 240 U.S. 103 (1916), stated that "by the previous ruling [in Brushaber] it was settled that the provisions of the 16th Amendment conferred no new power of taxation, but simply prohibited the previous complete and plenary power of income taxation possessed by Congress from the beginning from being taken out of the category of INDIRECT taxation to which it inherently belonged, and being placed in the category of direct taxation...."
Regardless, a lawyer friend _really_ hated to admit this years ago when I pressed him on the issue, is that ALL Law is based on Contract Law. The ONLY reason you are are legally required to pay taxes is because you gave (implicit) tacit consent that you agreed to the contract. i.e. You don't pay taxes to a foreign country because you have no _contract_ with _that_ government.
If you want to legally void paying Taxes, you must rescind EACH and EVERY contract. There are people who have done this, but there are more important wars to fight then trying to win one battle with people who have more money & laws then you.
--
Question for Homework: How does the Bill of Rights apply to a person when they _never_ signed the contract?
> If you need multiple monitors to write code productively, you aren't writing serious code.
You're an idiot. Some of us write _graphic_ / game programs and/or write kernel code. The ability to debug/run your game/kernel full-screen on one monitor, whilst debugging / viewing code on the other is extremely tedious if you only have one monitor.
Oblg.:
"For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so muchâ"the wheel, New York, wars and so onâ"whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than manâ"for precisely the same reasons."
--
You can either view life as: A series of [old] problems, or as [new] opportunities. The _circumstances_ don't matter, only your _perspective_ does.
> Try to disable as many services or daemons as you can to free up RAM. In the Microsoft world,
Uh, MSCONFIG is a band-aid "solution" (although a fast partial one. :-) One really should be disabling all non essential services.
e.g. and scroll down, set Show entries to 100, and use the "SAFE" or "Tweaked" column ...
http://www.blackviper.com/2008/05/19/black-vipers-windows-xp-x86-32-bit-service-pack-3-service-configurations/
> Having built my last two gaming rigs to utilize SLI, my opinion is that it's more trouble than it's worth.
My current Gaming Rig has a XFire 5770 (XFire = AMD/ATI version of nVidia's SLI). I got it almost a year ago -- I paid ~$125 x 2 and saved at least $50 over the 5870.
I regular play L4D, BFBC2, RB6LV2. I too have mixed opinions on XFire/SLI but for different reasons.
> worth until two years later when :-) I waited 6 months.
No one says you have to wait 2 years
Regardless of when you buy, you ARE saving money. Of course there are trade-offs as your post correctly mentions.
> Then buy a second card, which is now very affordable,
I am surprised you didn't mention the REAL reason why the perceived advantage doesn't pan out in practice... Try _finding_ the second card that is STILL SELLING and that IS _compatible_ with your existing card. (A lot of times it has to be made by the same manufacture of the first one!) You also need to be a little wiser upfront when you buy your initial video card -- which model will still be selling in 2 years? For AMD/ATI, the xx70 cards seem to be the ones that stick around.
> A bug that only affected SLI users.
1) This is shitty programming -- be vocal so that game devs can fix their game AND nVidia / ATI can fix their drivers!
*glares at EA/Dice for Battlefield Bad Company 2*
2) Again, you missed the "reality" -- until the bug is fixed, you are forced to play the game with only 1 GPU. This sucks. At least ATI has been getting better in their SLI "game profiles" now.
> Having two graphics cards going at full tear will heat up your case extremely quickly.
I have to question your case cooling. My bottom case fan is "pull", my top case fan is "push". I haven't noticed any extreme temps.
Again, the "reality" you missed to mention is noise (dBA) and Load. Running 2 GPUs is a little louder and uses a little more juice.
i.e.
http://techreport.com/articles.x/19404/10
> and this is the last machine I will build with SLI, end of story.
I've been custom building gaming rigs since the '80s. This is my first XfFre rig and I _would_ consider it again. Basically the price points for me are...
~ $150 video card (XFire/SLI)
OR
~ $350 video card (single card)
I usually wait 1-2 years before buying brand new games, as I'm sick and tired of paying $60, when I could pay ~$20. XFire has let me play all my current and past games with everything cranked and still get 60 Hz.
Cheers
> How many TV series for example do you see that people create in their spare time? Hmm? Or let's say movies?
Oh right, I forgot the the majority of TV series and Hollywood movies are such an paragon of QUALITY that amatuers can't produce anything of similiar or better quality. /sarcasm
Now I agree that 99% of people would rather consume then create. Of the few that do, the scope is usually too large for enough people to consider doing it for free, but if money really was the only issue that people cared about though then we wouldn't have free movies at all. (See next paragraph.)
> Hell, there would be nothing worth watching or playing if everything was created in 'spare time' by hobbyists.
These artists would probably beg to differ...
- Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning
- Art of the Saber
- Big Buck Bunny
- Bounty Trail
- Broken Allegiance
- The Dark Redemption
- Duality
- Elephants Dream
- Fanimatrix
- The Formula
- Machinima, such as Red vs Blue
- The Phantom Edit
- Pink Five
- Reciprocity
See: http://soosck.wordpress.com/2010/11/04/20-open-source-movies-edit-redistribute-free/
Why is xkcd freely available?
> I am personally a F/OSS proponent, but even I admit that most F/OSS software is really poor compared to their closed-source competitors, even so much as being completely unusable cr*p
Yeah, I work on OSS myself and totally agee with this. At least 95% of OSS _is_ crap. 10 clones that each implement a difference 60% of what you need. The OOTB (out-of-the-box experience) is rubbish because most geeks don't understand User Expereience let alone good User Interface design. ( i.e. Cygwin / Bash wouldn't suck so bad if the man pages actually included fucking _examples_ like the BSD crowd does.)
> GIMP and Firefox are great, but even there Photoshop trumps GIMP.
Agreed GIMP is crap. In a few more years it will be "OK" though when they finally add 16-bit support, Layer Groups, 100% Photoshop Layer Blending and Effects, and a Photoshop hotkeys profiles out-of-the-box. I'm not holding my breath though.
There are some good OSS apps though:
- Audacity
- Blender
- Firefox (before it jumped the shark)
- flac
- lame
- LAMP (Linux, Appache, MySql, PHP/Perl)
- OpenBSD
- OpenOffice
- Pov-Ray
- TrueCrypt
- VirtualBox
Are they perfect? No, but they are "good enough" considering where we were 10 years ago.
> Every single F/OSS game I've tried is simply downright horrible, with horrible graphics, really buggy gameplay, poor story if there is any story at all
Agreed. While most programmers will work for free, most artists don't and won't. OSS game devs haven't hit critical mass yet.
20 years it was crazy to think there would be a OSS *nix clone. We'll have some good OSS apps in another 20.
> If content producers know that anything they produce is "up for grabs", what incentive do they have to keep producing?
Right, because money is the _only_ incentive for people to create. /sarcasm.
Why don't you actually talk to people who create in their spare time. The ability of the human soul to express itself is driven by more then purely capitalistic greed. Apparently this paradigm is a foreign concept to you.
> To read summaries like this you get the sense there isn't any value to intellectual property at all.
I'll probably get downmodded for not being civil but, "No Shit, Sherlock."
1. Imaginary Property Rights are neither property, nor rights. Audio, Video, and/or Textual information can be represented as a number. To say someone somehow "magically" "owns" ones a particular sequence of bits is assine.
2. "Value" is _relative_ between 2 parties. What price do you do you put on something that benefits _everyone_, such as concepts like the wheel, numbers, math, formulas, the cure for cancer? So why should entertainment be treated differently? Art is for the benefit of everyone. Certain artists would even argue that once you put a price on art, it is not art; it is pseudo-art, because its purpose of bastard existance has been hi-jacked. Putting a price on something demands that the "value" is one-sided. It is perfectly valid to argue that the "value" of ownership is a myth -- the value of a soceity to freely share what it produces is priceless -- which is what the intent is here.
> Framing those who wish to produce intellectual property and then charge for it as "slavers" is dishonest and counterproductive.
Those who charge for "I.P." are doing it out of greed. It is time the human race grows up, and realizes there is more to life then money.
> And frankly, I think other browsers are wasting time and money developing new code that still runs "exactly the same" on older OSs like XP. It's over a decade old. Time to move on. XP needs to die, if only for security reasons. Never mind it's becoming less and less compatable with newer generations of hardware. It's a dying audience, consistently shrinking. There's no need to target it any more.
And you're offering to pay to have all those old machines upgraded to Win7 ? The Corporate world is still using WinXP. It works. With a decent firewall there are no major security issues so stop with the FUD. Name _one_ technical reason why Win 7 is required?
> Monopolies are bad.
No they aren't. Like anything else, they have the _potential_ to be used constructively or abused.
Currently, essential services, like Government, Electric Company, or Water company all have monopolies. Replacing them with corporations each with competing standards would be worse.
> Jesus wouldn't say "For millions of years" because he believes his father only made us 4,000 years ago.
I was going to mod you down for ignorant but then you wouldn't know the reason why.
At the risk of being a prick: [citation required]
Completely agree. FF 4 has jumped the shark.
- Took forever to address the memory leak; devs constantly ignored it in 1.x and 2.x. (Hello, a web browser should NOT consume 1.5 gigs when no tabs are open when it has been runing for a month.)
- Keep breaking plugins/extensions. Useful extensions like SunCult (shows Moon Phases) is broken 3.6. (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/sun-cult/)
- The UI team can't focus on _useful_ tab management, such as giving me a list of ALL tabs across ALL windows, color coding duplicate tabs, etc. Why the hell do I need a ton of plugins for this functionality??
- Removed the ability to resize the bookmarks dialog and down-sized it to be near useless. (WTF?)
- Removed the ability to use the arrow keys to scroll up/down Tools, PageInfo, Media. (Another WTF?)
- Move the home & reload button (WHY? FF is NOT Chrome!)
- Took forever to make tabs multi-threaded. (Hello, one TAB should NOT stall the WHOLE dam browser.)
If I wanted to use Chrome, I would use Chrome. I use FF because it was fast, small, extendendable, and did the MAJORITY things RIGHT Out-Of-The Box. This ePenis versioning is stupid. Focus on thing that people do _day_to_day_.
This reminds of something I ran into work recenetly. I wrote a bash (cygwin) script that was using "tail +#"; it broke on a colleague's machine because he was using a newer version of tail that required "tail -n #" -- WTF?
As great as Open Source is, it also sucks* -- stop breaking functionality when the old version worked fine.
* I work on a popular Open Source Emulator in my spare time.
> It took them 6 years to make Half Life 2.
"No one will remember if you ship a bad game on time.
No one will remember you were late if you ship a great game."
> It took them ONE year to make left 4 dead 2.
Technically it was Turtle Rock Studios who developed L4D. Valve bought them in 2008.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_Rock_Studios
You have some valid points, however I would like to add another 2 perspectives as a game programmer and game designer.
- Single Player vs Multi-Player. You must consider the audience. For a single player game, a linear increase in power works great! In multiplayer not so great .. which dovetails into my next point:
- "Proper" Weapon Balance has become a Rock-Paper-Scissor approach.. Otherwise what happens is that you [literally] get a death-spiral for who can find, for the sake of argument lets say the Weapon X (i.e. Doom/Quake Rocket Launcher) is the baddest weapon, find weapon X first AND gib people. There is nothing wrong with this approach -- it is the "old-skool" FPS experience, ala Quake and Unreal, and a lot of fun, but it does get old after all these years. The trend is that you want to balance weapons so that one person has certain strengths AND certain weaknesses -- this _dynamic_ nature of power is _much_ more interesting in the long run then a linear perspective where there is no weaknesses. i.e. Shotgun = uber damage up front and in your face + instant hit, Rocket Launcher = Slower but great damage from a distance.
Take a look at Team Fortress. The weapons you use depend on the _situtation_ you are in. Rightly or Wrongly, it is the evolution of game design.
> Then there's the ridiculously short campaigns that are often justified on the basis of multiplayer.
You can blame publishers for that --due to most people never getting past 50% of the campaign. Why waste time develping content when the majority of players NEVER finish it?
Borderlands and Diablo are great examples. Long single player story AND you can play co-op campaigns. It really is the ideal match.
These days I pretty much refuse to play shooters that don't have at least 2 or 4 player co-op. I've been there, done that, killed it excessively, in single-player.
> that wasn't a massive multiplayer phenomenon like a CoD or Halo and then try to find a server with more than 2 people on it.
Uhm, L4D, RB2LV2 (Rainbow Six Lost Vegas 2), and Borderlands, but yeah, point taken.
Cheers
> That's because they're disparate constructs with completely different purposes that should not be lumped together.
They are ALL imaginary property, aka "artificially restricted rights based on GREED."
Trademarks = somebody has an exclusive on a word to prevent competitors from profiting from it
Copyright = somebody wants to restrict the public distribution of information, entertainment, etc.
Patents = somebody wants compensation for implementing an idea
When you have a system were colors and flags can be copyright ( http://www.yalelawtech.org/trusted-computing-drm/46-dc-ea-d3-17-fe-45-d8-09-23-eb-97-e4-95-64-10-d4-cd-b2-c2/ ), when 2 prime numbers can be patented ( http://books.google.com/books?id=1MTcYrbTdsUC&pg=PA168 ) you know the _underlying_ philosophy is entirely fucked up.
I am not saying people shouldn't be compensated for their time, knowledge, and skill, but honestly, this artificial notion of property is archaic and insane. "Yes, kids, you are supposed to share you toys, you selfish bastard. Yes, Johnny when you become an adult in the Real World (TM) you sue everybody who decides to shares "your" imaginary property. Who brainwashed you with this "sharing is caring" hippie bullshit? Don't you know people are "stealing" "derived income" from you! Yeah, unfortunately you can't patent the wheel due to prior art."
No wonder society have a fucked up contradictory schizophrenia view of "property." Every time we want our kids to have a certain behaviour, we turn around and teach them the exact opposite as adults.
> Unfortunately, the Square Enix taint is already there, and you get half a game out of the box with the rest being released as an endless stream of DLC.
Oblg.: http://www.jpgdump.com/files/7389
/sarcasm
First LiveJournel, and now MySpace jumped the shark?! No Way!!
Now if only Faceook would as well ... What do you mean lack of privacy, isn't an issue you care about? You should, and will when it breaks.