Yes, but with the willful disregard for battery life the current trend in cell phone design, you'll be just as tethered to an outlet for your cell phone as you are to the 360 when gaming. I mean, yeah, great, you can run Doom 3 on a cell phone and connect it to an HDTV with HDMI, but can I just have the inexpensive, quick-enough option that lets me perform basic smartphone duties and has a battery life of two days with light to moderate use?
The circumvention method will probably amount to another registry hack-a-thon that treats the new UI as a speedbump to be swerved around, published online and ready for use well before the blighted thing's release. Everything old is new again - I'm so tired of fighting Microsoft's sad attempts to commune with the zeitgeist upon every new OS release. If it weren't for Netflix and video games I'd never run Windows outside a VM again.
The desktop isn't dying - the market's mature, but people are still replacing their desktops. Because the market's founded on a manic pace of consumption and disposal - remember the late '90s? - the fact that it isn't growing at the velocity of the lifestyle appliance / portable tablet and phone market sector means that people are panicking. I can picture a business strategy meeting where someone says, "People are buying smart phones and tablets. Because this is a growth market and they are computing devices, it therefore follows that usability paradigms applicable to those devices will be EVEN BETTER on other devices!" Unfortunately, this isn't so - not by any stretch of the imagination - and I think we're in for a bumpy ride as Gnome, Microsoft, and other people in The Biz* realize that "one interface for all" doesn't actually fit.
* Yes, even the sainted Apple. Trying to converge iOS and OS X isn't going to go anywhere that's good for UI flexibility or getting under the hood, let me tell you.
In what way is this an undesirable outcome, then? In all honesty, if a given employee upgrades a company system to circumvent the request / acquisition process, and IT gets to sponge off whatever's been left in the systems (since the brought-from-home hardware is off the books), is there any reasonable objection to be voiced? If you cite needless upgrades - which can be a very real problem - as a major money sink for a company, but then turn around and ridicule him for spending his own money to make himself more productive and happier, what's his option supposed to be? Just suffer with sluggishness? It sounds like both parties get a nice benefit the old way.
Yep. A big $7.50 for that stick of RAM, $5 for a secondhand Sound Blaster Audigy, and a free Quadro NVS 285 given by a friend, and my office PC's gone from unbearable to worth using. Why the Audigy? Because Dell shielded the audio so badly on this thing that even moving a USB mouse creates interference.
It's always been difficult to make CAD or GIS apps work productively on poorly configured, under-spec systems. That was true a generation ago, and it's true today.
* Ever have to do serious work in ArcGIS 9.3 on a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 with 768 MB of Rambus and a 4 MB video card? I sincerely advise against it.
An SSD is a nicety, but not really necessary for most of these problematic old systems. Slap a cheap stick or two of DDR2 into a system, perform a stealth CPU upgrade with something you'd already decommissioned from your private stash, and a low-end discrete graphics card ("Yes, of course it's so I can use dual-head..."), and if you've done any kind of reasonable software tweaking, it won't even feel like the same computer.
Incidentally, "nerd authenticity" was placed in quotes because it's an ill-defined concept, and entirely subjective. As for merit, that's a term used to describe whether something has worth, and in this case, "shaking the foundations" is a way of evaluating whether something is worthwhile and has value regardless of what some outer constituency's consensus is on the subject. A more careful reading of what I said would show that you and I are on the same page. Don't pick fights where none exist!
I don't agree with everything you've said, but your perspective's interesting. More importantly, it's entirely worth defending. When a friend told me to hand in my geek card because I've never cared for Firefly, I turned it around on him. After a few questions, he admitted that didn't know who Jerome Bixby or Harlan Ellison were*, and that he'd never read anything by Isaac Asimov. Long story, made short: "Nerd authenticity" is relative, and it's worth shaking the foundations a little to ensure that they stand on merit rather than orthodoxy.
As for Doctor Who, start any place. The Fourth Doctor's a classic for a reason, and I'm partial to Chris Eccleston's turn (2005 series). Don't worry too much about formality or getting off on the wrong foot; it's designed to be pretty approachable.
* You don't have to like them, but they were both influential enough that it really helps to know why they matter.
The number of "stream processors" doesn't necessarily scale as a linear performance metric. As an example (using dated lower midrange hardware, as it's what I still know), a Radeon 3850 sports 320 stream processors. My Geforce 9600GT advertises 64 SPs, yet pulls ahead of the 3850 in many benchmarks. It's not as simple as quoting a number used in marketing material as a universal metric, any more than a 3 GHz Pentium 4 is 50% faster in real-world performance than a 2 GHz Athlon64.
As for the other issue, Nvidia supports CUDA and has a long-term commitment to GPU computing, with the product line to show for it. Most other potential competitors don't have the same proven track record, and don't support as many platforms.
My God, do you remember when we were actually looking forward to ME? Shudder.
I'm not sure anyone ever really did. Even when it was new and in the process of being hyped up, people looked at it as an awkward surprise, like a lasagna sitting right in the middle of a Chinese buffet. The release still doesn't make any sense to me - XP was barely more than a full year away, Windows 98SE was ensconced as a standard with most of its bugs and limitations either accepted or worked around, and Microsoft suddenly dumps a half-baked, vaguely NT-flavored version of Win9x into the marketplace. It's a product for which no one asked. Does anyone have some insight? Were they trying to give a crew of engineers something to do before XP's release?
1) For simplicity's sake the video's creator appears to have stuck with x86 versions of the OSes, to ensure maximum forward compatibility. This would not go so smoothly if he were installing 64-bit versions of Vista or Win7, though he'd probably just need to run the settings migration wizard and point it to the old Windows install.
2) There's relatively little to MS-DOS, so maintaining backward compatibility was pretty easy. As you correctly point out, the recent deprecation of early versions of DirectX has made a lot of old Windows games difficult to run, if not impossible. Combined with the transition between 16-bit and 32-bit code used for installers, trying to get old games to install and run in Vista/Win7 x64 is less trouble than setting up a VM, or keeping around an ancient PC to handle those titles.
3) Doom engine games all supported the PC speaker. Something's subtly off about the timing or framerate when running fullscreen DOS games in a CMD session, but the games will (nominally) run. As you say, DOSBox is overwhelmingly preferable.
4) If I tracked down two 256 MB PC133 DIMMs, my old Pentium 3 could accomplish this same test on physical hardware. If only I had that kind of time to blow any more...
Doom doesn't care what filesystem it's installed on; so long as the original DOS source port's able to read the filesystem (which Microsoft's command interpreter / DOS emulation environment for NT helpfully abstracts to the status of a non-concern), it will work fine on NTFS. With DOSBox I've seen it run on Ext4, ReiserFS, BeFS, and HFS+.
Sequentially upgrading MacOS would involve running an OS image on at three different lineages of CPU - from Motorola's 68000 series to PowerPC to x86 - but would be an interesting and much more involved project.
A cable TV channel is a huge initial investment, and requires millions of dollars just to keep running. Nobody wants to declare failure - thousands of jobs, stock value, and reputation are at stake - so appealing to a long-term, well-entrenched market of potential viewers has to be done. If that involves synergistic clusterfuckery with content that doesn't belong on the channel according to its initial vision, there's not much to prevent people from blurring the lines in the name of saving the network. Unfortunately, with time that can go from "a well-intentioned but ultimately dubious patch" to flat-out network decay, where very little of the original material or guiding vision of the station remains. As a famous b-movie actress once said, "No one sets out to do bad work."
And Syfy's still better off than TLC, which has dropped any meaning associated with those three letters and shows endless permutations of freak show reality TV gawkery. Network decay is an ugly thing.
They probably killed SGU because it wasn't giving them the ratings they wanted. Viacom wanted to squeeze wrestling into a potentially profitable space; they saw that lots of 18-29 aged folk watch Syfy and figured they could just patch the hole left by Stargate. Clearly one block of 18-29'ers is not representative of the whole thing since the experiment flopped, and now they're aggressively backpedaling.
That doesn't really excuse the reruns of Law & Order: SVU on the station though, does it?
Seconded. A friend gave me the entire series as a boxed set two years ago, and I can't wade through it. Inventive puppet design be damned; halfway through season 2 I just gave up, and feel no compulsion to pick it back up again.
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Compared to digital cable that would still be a cost savings. How warped is that?
Yes, but with the willful disregard for battery life the current trend in cell phone design, you'll be just as tethered to an outlet for your cell phone as you are to the 360 when gaming. I mean, yeah, great, you can run Doom 3 on a cell phone and connect it to an HDTV with HDMI, but can I just have the inexpensive, quick-enough option that lets me perform basic smartphone duties and has a battery life of two days with light to moderate use?
I don't think there's a monopoly on evil. To this point, there never has been.
Let 'em dangle. KDE's at least making an honest effort at sanity, and Gnome/Unity ain't the only other game in town...
I've never been more thankful for the diversity of X11 window managers in my life.
The circumvention method will probably amount to another registry hack-a-thon that treats the new UI as a speedbump to be swerved around, published online and ready for use well before the blighted thing's release. Everything old is new again - I'm so tired of fighting Microsoft's sad attempts to commune with the zeitgeist upon every new OS release. If it weren't for Netflix and video games I'd never run Windows outside a VM again.
The desktop isn't dying - the market's mature, but people are still replacing their desktops. Because the market's founded on a manic pace of consumption and disposal - remember the late '90s? - the fact that it isn't growing at the velocity of the lifestyle appliance / portable tablet and phone market sector means that people are panicking. I can picture a business strategy meeting where someone says, "People are buying smart phones and tablets. Because this is a growth market and they are computing devices, it therefore follows that usability paradigms applicable to those devices will be EVEN BETTER on other devices!" Unfortunately, this isn't so - not by any stretch of the imagination - and I think we're in for a bumpy ride as Gnome, Microsoft, and other people in The Biz* realize that "one interface for all" doesn't actually fit.
* Yes, even the sainted Apple. Trying to converge iOS and OS X isn't going to go anywhere that's good for UI flexibility or getting under the hood, let me tell you.
In what way is this an undesirable outcome, then? In all honesty, if a given employee upgrades a company system to circumvent the request / acquisition process, and IT gets to sponge off whatever's been left in the systems (since the brought-from-home hardware is off the books), is there any reasonable objection to be voiced? If you cite needless upgrades - which can be a very real problem - as a major money sink for a company, but then turn around and ridicule him for spending his own money to make himself more productive and happier, what's his option supposed to be? Just suffer with sluggishness? It sounds like both parties get a nice benefit the old way.
Yep. A big $7.50 for that stick of RAM, $5 for a secondhand Sound Blaster Audigy, and a free Quadro NVS 285 given by a friend, and my office PC's gone from unbearable to worth using. Why the Audigy? Because Dell shielded the audio so badly on this thing that even moving a USB mouse creates interference.
It's always been difficult to make CAD or GIS apps work productively on poorly configured, under-spec systems. That was true a generation ago, and it's true today.
* Ever have to do serious work in ArcGIS 9.3 on a 1.6 GHz Pentium 4 with 768 MB of Rambus and a 4 MB video card? I sincerely advise against it.
An SSD is a nicety, but not really necessary for most of these problematic old systems. Slap a cheap stick or two of DDR2 into a system, perform a stealth CPU upgrade with something you'd already decommissioned from your private stash, and a low-end discrete graphics card ("Yes, of course it's so I can use dual-head..."), and if you've done any kind of reasonable software tweaking, it won't even feel like the same computer.
Could someone please mod this up? That's just inspired.
Incidentally, "nerd authenticity" was placed in quotes because it's an ill-defined concept, and entirely subjective. As for merit, that's a term used to describe whether something has worth, and in this case, "shaking the foundations" is a way of evaluating whether something is worthwhile and has value regardless of what some outer constituency's consensus is on the subject. A more careful reading of what I said would show that you and I are on the same page. Don't pick fights where none exist!
I don't agree with everything you've said, but your perspective's interesting. More importantly, it's entirely worth defending. When a friend told me to hand in my geek card because I've never cared for Firefly, I turned it around on him. After a few questions, he admitted that didn't know who Jerome Bixby or Harlan Ellison were*, and that he'd never read anything by Isaac Asimov. Long story, made short: "Nerd authenticity" is relative, and it's worth shaking the foundations a little to ensure that they stand on merit rather than orthodoxy.
As for Doctor Who, start any place. The Fourth Doctor's a classic for a reason, and I'm partial to Chris Eccleston's turn (2005 series). Don't worry too much about formality or getting off on the wrong foot; it's designed to be pretty approachable.
* You don't have to like them, but they were both influential enough that it really helps to know why they matter.
The number of "stream processors" doesn't necessarily scale as a linear performance metric. As an example (using dated lower midrange hardware, as it's what I still know), a Radeon 3850 sports 320 stream processors. My Geforce 9600GT advertises 64 SPs, yet pulls ahead of the 3850 in many benchmarks. It's not as simple as quoting a number used in marketing material as a universal metric, any more than a 3 GHz Pentium 4 is 50% faster in real-world performance than a 2 GHz Athlon64.
As for the other issue, Nvidia supports CUDA and has a long-term commitment to GPU computing, with the product line to show for it. Most other potential competitors don't have the same proven track record, and don't support as many platforms.
My God, do you remember when we were actually looking forward to ME? Shudder.
I'm not sure anyone ever really did. Even when it was new and in the process of being hyped up, people looked at it as an awkward surprise, like a lasagna sitting right in the middle of a Chinese buffet. The release still doesn't make any sense to me - XP was barely more than a full year away, Windows 98SE was ensconced as a standard with most of its bugs and limitations either accepted or worked around, and Microsoft suddenly dumps a half-baked, vaguely NT-flavored version of Win9x into the marketplace. It's a product for which no one asked. Does anyone have some insight? Were they trying to give a crew of engineers something to do before XP's release?
1) For simplicity's sake the video's creator appears to have stuck with x86 versions of the OSes, to ensure maximum forward compatibility. This would not go so smoothly if he were installing 64-bit versions of Vista or Win7, though he'd probably just need to run the settings migration wizard and point it to the old Windows install.
2) There's relatively little to MS-DOS, so maintaining backward compatibility was pretty easy. As you correctly point out, the recent deprecation of early versions of DirectX has made a lot of old Windows games difficult to run, if not impossible. Combined with the transition between 16-bit and 32-bit code used for installers, trying to get old games to install and run in Vista/Win7 x64 is less trouble than setting up a VM, or keeping around an ancient PC to handle those titles.
3) Doom engine games all supported the PC speaker. Something's subtly off about the timing or framerate when running fullscreen DOS games in a CMD session, but the games will (nominally) run. As you say, DOSBox is overwhelmingly preferable.
4) If I tracked down two 256 MB PC133 DIMMs, my old Pentium 3 could accomplish this same test on physical hardware. If only I had that kind of time to blow any more...
Doom doesn't care what filesystem it's installed on; so long as the original DOS source port's able to read the filesystem (which Microsoft's command interpreter / DOS emulation environment for NT helpfully abstracts to the status of a non-concern), it will work fine on NTFS. With DOSBox I've seen it run on Ext4, ReiserFS, BeFS, and HFS+. Sequentially upgrading MacOS would involve running an OS image on at three different lineages of CPU - from Motorola's 68000 series to PowerPC to x86 - but would be an interesting and much more involved project.
Ack, scratch Viacom - it's NBC Universal what done it.
A cable TV channel is a huge initial investment, and requires millions of dollars just to keep running. Nobody wants to declare failure - thousands of jobs, stock value, and reputation are at stake - so appealing to a long-term, well-entrenched market of potential viewers has to be done. If that involves synergistic clusterfuckery with content that doesn't belong on the channel according to its initial vision, there's not much to prevent people from blurring the lines in the name of saving the network. Unfortunately, with time that can go from "a well-intentioned but ultimately dubious patch" to flat-out network decay, where very little of the original material or guiding vision of the station remains. As a famous b-movie actress once said, "No one sets out to do bad work."
And Syfy's still better off than TLC, which has dropped any meaning associated with those three letters and shows endless permutations of freak show reality TV gawkery. Network decay is an ugly thing.
They probably killed SGU because it wasn't giving them the ratings they wanted. Viacom wanted to squeeze wrestling into a potentially profitable space; they saw that lots of 18-29 aged folk watch Syfy and figured they could just patch the hole left by Stargate. Clearly one block of 18-29'ers is not representative of the whole thing since the experiment flopped, and now they're aggressively backpedaling.
That doesn't really excuse the reruns of Law & Order: SVU on the station though, does it?
Seconded. A friend gave me the entire series as a boxed set two years ago, and I can't wade through it. Inventive puppet design be damned; halfway through season 2 I just gave up, and feel no compulsion to pick it back up again.
Because there is a tremendous amount of money to be made in prolonging the inevitable.
Um, x264 is released under the GPL, and I've seen it included in recent Linux distributions.