FFX-2 isn't as sparse as you say. It's not very clear by the game that you have tasks to complete in *every* area during each stage of the storyline, the location where your objective is located just drives the story forward and skips the side-quests.
I do have to give it credit also that the active combat system was tough to grasp in a Final Fantasy title, but a good addition.
That said, X-2 is the most girly videogame EVER, and that's hard to tolerate long enough to see it through. It's more blatantly aimed at little girls than Barbie Horse Adventures. 'Eeee! Let's play dress up, and have fun and look for Yuna's lost boyfriend and learn about true love!'
It is talking about operations/sec. A better (and more valid-sounding) analysis is on Anandtech, which says this is basically an engineer's toy and not something they're pushing to really develop:
It'd be interesting to find out what freakish benchmarks you're looking at where somehow AMD scored higher on any significant number of tests. I've never seen such numbers.
Anyway, the riot over Core2 isn't that it's faster, it's because Intel stole all the advantages AMD used to have. Intel is no longer making clumsy, high heat/power, and expensive processors by comparison, they're equal now. More than equal, since directly comparing prices puts Intel *way* ahead. That's the catch, Intel is now better on the cost/performace ratio for all but the outrageous high-end parts, which are very deservedly low in demand.
The fact that Intel also made every one of their old models look like absolute shit is just an interesting side effect of their catch-up.
Not the same thing. You don't use a big storage array for you operating system, that goes on a normal hard drive. OR you install the drivers as stated.
Yes, you can slipstream drivers into an installation CD, but for regular home users the floppy drive is the only way to make newer drive controllers bootable. Some newer motherboards let SATA ports emulate IDE so that drivers aren't required, but that's kind of a silly workaround to fix Microsoft's blindingly stupid inability to take drivers off any other storage medium.
Please. Have you seen any of the so-called "protective measures" that have been implemented since 9/11? All they've done is restrict the rights of innocents by the millions in order to catch a handfull of "detainees" who may or may not be guilty of acts of terrorism. Security at our borders is still a joke, and we also came very close to allowing control of our busiest container ship ports to an Arab state-based country! I would say the more likely options there are "we've been lucky" or "they haven't done anything."
Oh yeah? Well, next time terrorists kill 50 million people by squirting shampoo in their eyes and clipping their toenails, don't come crying here!
I think calling ANY of this crap 'protective measures' is being excessively generous. It's just the same fearmongering in a different flavor so it doesn't get too bland. The intelligence that stopped last month's impending attacks is what really counts, cautionary measures at the airports don't make a difference at all. Who'd be dumb enough to attack a target that's already aware and waiting for it anyway?
That's an excellent match for how I view the current political climate. I don't really dig in to the historical adaptability because there are plenty of problems right on the surface. Bullshit partisan bickering and feuds and finger pointing and blaming that OTHER SIDE for problems rather than realizing they aren't an enemy or a radically different ideology, it's just a differing of opinion. But because politics are so polarized it's becoming harder for individual viewpoints to reach beyond the party-generated noise.
I would *love* to see independent candidates take a bigger chunk out of registered voting. It pisses me off to no end that someone might just register and vote along party lines and never even pay attention to how well that candidate matches their expectations. I keep voting for independents hoping for them to gain enough of a percentage to make the bipartisan candidates panic, but it's hard to exert any change when political parties are, above all, highly focused business with a *lot* of money.
It may not matter in presidential elections, but in a case where there are a lot of elections going on at once it could screw up minor government positions. If I looked away from the screen for a second and then back, I might have forgotten which blanks I was at, looked at one that coincidentally had the 'right' entry and kept going from there. I might not even care enough to go back and double-check who I've picked for county treasurer before submitting.
Apathetic or undecided voters may not care, but if a candidate is set as a default instead of leaving the vote blank, they will get a HUGE boost. Enough that greasing a few palms to get them 'accidentally' set as a default in the voting machine may very well buy someone the election.
Because you have to examine paper ballots to see who they're voting for, throwing away a box of ballots to affect an election is a gamble in statistics. You have to collect a lot stack of them to make any difference in the result. You have to dispose of them all. And you have to do those time-consuming or visibly shady acts in a way that no one notices what you're doing.
On an electronic-only record, you can sort votes by result, delete half, and maybe reset a counter. And if expertise is required to operate the machines, you can get away with that while an untrained volunteer is right there watching you do it.
Just because a computer doesn't handle voting doesn't mean to have to go to the complete Amish-style extreme of technical exclusion. Ever taken a standardized test before?
It's silly to think that loading a stack of vote cards into a scanner and pushing the button is such a hideous thing to endure. If it jams or has problems, *then* bring in the counting volunteers.
There. No confusion (ballots can be brightly colored for the near-blind in Florida or they can have picture menus for the truly idiotic). And a physical record. And if you want to get fancy by putting barcodes or other junk on official votes as part of the initial scanning process, then you can have a security check too. No dumb poorly-manufactured cards to blame on mismarked votes, just a regular 3x5 with a printed grid and a big permanent marker in hand.
You keep throwing that virusmyth website out- You do realize that right there at the top it's got an "S" replaced by a dollar sign? Nothing screams 'crackpot persecution conspiracy' quite like that does.
The new line of Core2 processors are faster and cheaper, but only when comparing the top-shelf products. The 'average consumer' isn't going to be buying those except for the hype, and with a war of price cuts coming, the lower-market CPUs will be cheaper still.
Oh, NO! This is a disaster, how could they make such a horribly shortsighted definition that will be alter the definition of our moon in only a few billion years?
Man, the post-human super-terrestial inhabitants of this solar system are gonna be pissed that they have to redefine the name of that uninhabitable incinerated, waterless, solar-flare-battered planet's satellite! I bet they'll be so peeved, they go back and relearn English too, just so they can curse it properly before the orbits of everything in the solar system begin to destabilize.
That's all true, but Microsoft has other advantages in their pocket that could allow a total reconstruction. They they have the near-universal install base, and they have money.
It's kind of hard for me to believe that they can't come up with *any* workaround hacks like emulating oldschool windows and its registry for applications that require it. If they run poorly, it's all the more reason for software vendors to crank out a newer version. If that's not an option, users can still hobble along. They'll keep using Windows because they perceive their choices to be limited.
Consider also that Windows isn't the only bag Microsoft has. What about an upgrade incentive? Ditch your your old versions, and during the adoption phase they throw in the Office suite for free. Or server licenses. Or even no-charge support. Sure, they'll have to take a big financial hit during the transition, but a few years later they get an even tighter grip on the OS market and anyone who didn't voluntarily switch can just be pushed off the end-of-support through obsolesence. Microsoft has never really done anything to show off how deep their pockets are, but I bet they could come up with some pretty tempting bribes.
If they wanted to. Then again, why disturb the status quo when it provides more money for less work?
Obviously Windows is NOT becoming more secure if Symantec & all already know a workaround but it's not an approved method. I doubt it'd really fall to being 'illegal', but definitely a hassle if security software is at risk of being broken by future updates.
PC protection is a racket, sure, but that doesn't mean it's unneccessary.
The reason dumb callers are reviled is because a 30 second fix gets drawn out into a half hour ordeal. It's not that hard to tell when someone is powering off their monitor instead of rebooting, but there are times when it's extremely difficult to figure out just how they're failing to follow instructions. Not typing correctly, not reading (or ignoring and silently closing error messages), and losing all common sense makes it tedious to get anything done without shoving them out of the way and doing it yourself.
"But I don't have a Next button! All I have is Finish and Cancel, what should I do?"
* I have to power-cycle the cable modem anytime I change the plug in its Ethernet port so that the computer plugged into it will be able to discover it. Amazing advances like hot-plugging 10Base-T and DHCP apparently don't exist.
Hah. It doesn't.
I had this very problem, TODAY. After getting run around the corporate helpdesk and the guy's cable company, none of them thought anything of the fact that he couldn't get an IP address on one of two computers.
I don't know if it's just shitty componentry or ancient firmware revisions, but cablemodems DO NOT always time out unresponsive DHCP clients and make the address available again.
The sad truth is that many of those staffing front-line tech support are clueless, too, just at a slightly higher level.
Well, I can't really argue there, being in the biz myself. Let's hear it for cost-cutting measures! Hopefully there's at least one clever monkey in the stack who writes the procedures, so problems get fixed even if by accident.
Emigrating wives-to-be aren't really 'exports', even if you consider them from the standpoint of raw materials. Besides, not all would wind up in the porno industry, I'm sure there's plenty of other tedious and demeaning destinations for them.
The **AA orgs have never bothered to chase downloaders, it's attacking the wrong end of the problem. Not to mention downloading is much farther up the legal greyscale, especially if you believe that you're getting things from a legitimate source. License agreements aren't focused on forbidding you from *buying* the illegal copies (they tend to not include a license agreement at all), they try to prevent copies from being made in the first place because that's clearly where infringement happens.
It's possible a judgement against allofmp3 opens them up to say "See?! This is clearly illegal!", and then pursue downloaders who use it despite the ruling. That gives them a nice, happy birthday present but the box is still empty. Think allofmp3 will turn over its transaction logs so BPI can chase downloaders?
That's valid, up to the point of the perfume 'industry' having that kind of influence.
This isn't DeBeers or the **AA media giants you're talking about, there is no giant evil manipulative force being wielded by an elitist circle of perfume manufacturers. Copyright agents from Glade aren't going to bust down your door if they find out you've been analyzing the smells from their newest products.
This is a pretty farfetched application of technology. It's assuming an unskilled medic actually has this equipment on him, and has time to set it up, take a sample, and get a response back from someone who knows what's up. There's no sense in taking an electronic nose, and then turning its results back into a potentially flawed interpretation, only to be analyzed by a nose that's not perfect either.
A better application would be the reverse. Use it to reproduce smells that are not easily recreated on demand. So in basic training, everyone gets a whiff of what the onset of ganrene is like so they know what to watch out for.
I'm still skeptical that it'll be able to create smells that are a close enough match. Most volatile compounds are very complex molecules, it depends on how well they be imitated by constructing fake smells 'phonetically'.
Magnet extraction doesn't necessarily kill the drive, the platters are usually not directly affected even if you've screwed their calibration. Still, after many drives' practice it seems drive-head scratches and fingerprints will usually ruin the platters while you're trying to get the drive arm out of the way.
Smashing the platters speeds everything up, but it's too hazardous to leave wickedly sharp little metallic slivers everywhere.
Data destruction was not the problem. It was probably swiped by someone else in the store *thinking* it was a functional drive, and then hastily sold. Maybe it was the tech who actually worked on the system, but if the drive was crippled enough to need replacement it's doubtful he would have bothered taking it.
The rar and 7z formats also steal marketshare from ace.
It is to be hoped that they would all dilute each other enough to fall out of use, but they still tend to be compression-of-choice for l33t-wannabes. FWIW, Tugzip is a decent though sometimes crashy utility that handles a large number of compression/container formats.
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FFX-2 isn't as sparse as you say. It's not very clear by the game that you have tasks to complete in *every* area during each stage of the storyline, the location where your objective is located just drives the story forward and skips the side-quests.
I do have to give it credit also that the active combat system was tough to grasp in a Final Fantasy title, but a good addition.
That said, X-2 is the most girly videogame EVER, and that's hard to tolerate long enough to see it through. It's more blatantly aimed at little girls than Barbie Horse Adventures. 'Eeee! Let's play dress up, and have fun and look for Yuna's lost boyfriend and learn about true love!'
It is talking about operations/sec. A better (and more valid-sounding) analysis is on Anandtech, which says this is basically an engineer's toy and not something they're pushing to really develop:
8 40&p=6
http://anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2
So they don't really want to make this into the P5, they're just playing around with reduced-instruction processors to see what happens.
It'd be interesting to find out what freakish benchmarks you're looking at where somehow AMD scored higher on any significant number of tests. I've never seen such numbers.
Anyway, the riot over Core2 isn't that it's faster, it's because Intel stole all the advantages AMD used to have. Intel is no longer making clumsy, high heat/power, and expensive processors by comparison, they're equal now. More than equal, since directly comparing prices puts Intel *way* ahead. That's the catch, Intel is now better on the cost/performace ratio for all but the outrageous high-end parts, which are very deservedly low in demand.
The fact that Intel also made every one of their old models look like absolute shit is just an interesting side effect of their catch-up.
Not the same thing. You don't use a big storage array for you operating system, that goes on a normal hard drive. OR you install the drivers as stated.
Yes, you can slipstream drivers into an installation CD, but for regular home users the floppy drive is the only way to make newer drive controllers bootable. Some newer motherboards let SATA ports emulate IDE so that drivers aren't required, but that's kind of a silly workaround to fix Microsoft's blindingly stupid inability to take drivers off any other storage medium.
Ugh! Your grammar is atrocious!
Remember: In shitbird leetspeak, every paragraph must end with some variation of a 'lol'.
Please. Have you seen any of the so-called "protective measures" that have been implemented since 9/11? All they've done is restrict the rights of innocents by the millions in order to catch a handfull of "detainees" who may or may not be guilty of acts of terrorism. Security at our borders is still a joke, and we also came very close to allowing control of our busiest container ship ports to an Arab state-based country! I would say the more likely options there are "we've been lucky" or "they haven't done anything."
Oh yeah? Well, next time terrorists kill 50 million people by squirting shampoo in their eyes and clipping their toenails, don't come crying here!
I think calling ANY of this crap 'protective measures' is being excessively generous. It's just the same fearmongering in a different flavor so it doesn't get too bland. The intelligence that stopped last month's impending attacks is what really counts, cautionary measures at the airports don't make a difference at all. Who'd be dumb enough to attack a target that's already aware and waiting for it anyway?
That's an excellent match for how I view the current political climate. I don't really dig in to the historical adaptability because there are plenty of problems right on the surface. Bullshit partisan bickering and feuds and finger pointing and blaming that OTHER SIDE for problems rather than realizing they aren't an enemy or a radically different ideology, it's just a differing of opinion. But because politics are so polarized it's becoming harder for individual viewpoints to reach beyond the party-generated noise.
I would *love* to see independent candidates take a bigger chunk out of registered voting. It pisses me off to no end that someone might just register and vote along party lines and never even pay attention to how well that candidate matches their expectations. I keep voting for independents hoping for them to gain enough of a percentage to make the bipartisan candidates panic, but it's hard to exert any change when political parties are, above all, highly focused business with a *lot* of money.
It may not matter in presidential elections, but in a case where there are a lot of elections going on at once it could screw up minor government positions. If I looked away from the screen for a second and then back, I might have forgotten which blanks I was at, looked at one that coincidentally had the 'right' entry and kept going from there. I might not even care enough to go back and double-check who I've picked for county treasurer before submitting.
Apathetic or undecided voters may not care, but if a candidate is set as a default instead of leaving the vote blank, they will get a HUGE boost. Enough that greasing a few palms to get them 'accidentally' set as a default in the voting machine may very well buy someone the election.
Because you have to examine paper ballots to see who they're voting for, throwing away a box of ballots to affect an election is a gamble in statistics. You have to collect a lot stack of them to make any difference in the result. You have to dispose of them all. And you have to do those time-consuming or visibly shady acts in a way that no one notices what you're doing.
On an electronic-only record, you can sort votes by result, delete half, and maybe reset a counter. And if expertise is required to operate the machines, you can get away with that while an untrained volunteer is right there watching you do it.
Just because a computer doesn't handle voting doesn't mean to have to go to the complete Amish-style extreme of technical exclusion. Ever taken a standardized test before?
It's silly to think that loading a stack of vote cards into a scanner and pushing the button is such a hideous thing to endure. If it jams or has problems, *then* bring in the counting volunteers.
There. No confusion (ballots can be brightly colored for the near-blind in Florida or they can have picture menus for the truly idiotic). And a physical record. And if you want to get fancy by putting barcodes or other junk on official votes as part of the initial scanning process, then you can have a security check too. No dumb poorly-manufactured cards to blame on mismarked votes, just a regular 3x5 with a printed grid and a big permanent marker in hand.
You keep throwing that virusmyth website out- You do realize that right there at the top it's got an "S" replaced by a dollar sign? Nothing screams 'crackpot persecution conspiracy' quite like that does.
The new line of Core2 processors are faster and cheaper, but only when comparing the top-shelf products. The 'average consumer' isn't going to be buying those except for the hype, and with a war of price cuts coming, the lower-market CPUs will be cheaper still.
Oh, NO! This is a disaster, how could they make such a horribly shortsighted definition that will be alter the definition of our moon in only a few billion years?
Man, the post-human super-terrestial inhabitants of this solar system are gonna be pissed that they have to redefine the name of that uninhabitable incinerated, waterless, solar-flare-battered planet's satellite! I bet they'll be so peeved, they go back and relearn English too, just so they can curse it properly before the orbits of everything in the solar system begin to destabilize.
That's all true, but Microsoft has other advantages in their pocket that could allow a total reconstruction. They they have the near-universal install base, and they have money.
It's kind of hard for me to believe that they can't come up with *any* workaround hacks like emulating oldschool windows and its registry for applications that require it. If they run poorly, it's all the more reason for software vendors to crank out a newer version. If that's not an option, users can still hobble along. They'll keep using Windows because they perceive their choices to be limited.
Consider also that Windows isn't the only bag Microsoft has. What about an upgrade incentive? Ditch your your old versions, and during the adoption phase they throw in the Office suite for free. Or server licenses. Or even no-charge support. Sure, they'll have to take a big financial hit during the transition, but a few years later they get an even tighter grip on the OS market and anyone who didn't voluntarily switch can just be pushed off the end-of-support through obsolesence. Microsoft has never really done anything to show off how deep their pockets are, but I bet they could come up with some pretty tempting bribes.
If they wanted to. Then again, why disturb the status quo when it provides more money for less work?
Obviously Windows is NOT becoming more secure if Symantec & all already know a workaround but it's not an approved method. I doubt it'd really fall to being 'illegal', but definitely a hassle if security software is at risk of being broken by future updates. PC protection is a racket, sure, but that doesn't mean it's unneccessary.
The reason dumb callers are reviled is because a 30 second fix gets drawn out into a half hour ordeal. It's not that hard to tell when someone is powering off their monitor instead of rebooting, but there are times when it's extremely difficult to figure out just how they're failing to follow instructions. Not typing correctly, not reading (or ignoring and silently closing error messages), and losing all common sense makes it tedious to get anything done without shoving them out of the way and doing it yourself.
"But I don't have a Next button! All I have is Finish and Cancel, what should I do?"
Hah! Preposterous!
A real techie wouldn't even *know* that the Packers are a baseball team.
* I have to power-cycle the cable modem anytime I change the plug in its Ethernet port so that the computer plugged into it will be able to discover it. Amazing advances like hot-plugging 10Base-T and DHCP apparently don't exist.
Hah. It doesn't.
I had this very problem, TODAY. After getting run around the corporate helpdesk and the guy's cable company, none of them thought anything of the fact that he couldn't get an IP address on one of two computers.
I don't know if it's just shitty componentry or ancient firmware revisions, but cablemodems DO NOT always time out unresponsive DHCP clients and make the address available again.
The sad truth is that many of those staffing front-line tech support are clueless, too, just at a slightly higher level.
Well, I can't really argue there, being in the biz myself. Let's hear it for cost-cutting measures! Hopefully there's at least one clever monkey in the stack who writes the procedures, so problems get fixed even if by accident.
Emigrating wives-to-be aren't really 'exports', even if you consider them from the standpoint of raw materials. Besides, not all would wind up in the porno industry, I'm sure there's plenty of other tedious and demeaning destinations for them.
The **AA orgs have never bothered to chase downloaders, it's attacking the wrong end of the problem. Not to mention downloading is much farther up the legal greyscale, especially if you believe that you're getting things from a legitimate source. License agreements aren't focused on forbidding you from *buying* the illegal copies (they tend to not include a license agreement at all), they try to prevent copies from being made in the first place because that's clearly where infringement happens.
It's possible a judgement against allofmp3 opens them up to say "See?! This is clearly illegal!", and then pursue downloaders who use it despite the ruling. That gives them a nice, happy birthday present but the box is still empty. Think allofmp3 will turn over its transaction logs so BPI can chase downloaders?
That's valid, up to the point of the perfume 'industry' having that kind of influence.
This isn't DeBeers or the **AA media giants you're talking about, there is no giant evil manipulative force being wielded by an elitist circle of perfume manufacturers. Copyright agents from Glade aren't going to bust down your door if they find out you've been analyzing the smells from their newest products.
This is a pretty farfetched application of technology. It's assuming an unskilled medic actually has this equipment on him, and has time to set it up, take a sample, and get a response back from someone who knows what's up. There's no sense in taking an electronic nose, and then turning its results back into a potentially flawed interpretation, only to be analyzed by a nose that's not perfect either. A better application would be the reverse. Use it to reproduce smells that are not easily recreated on demand. So in basic training, everyone gets a whiff of what the onset of ganrene is like so they know what to watch out for. I'm still skeptical that it'll be able to create smells that are a close enough match. Most volatile compounds are very complex molecules, it depends on how well they be imitated by constructing fake smells 'phonetically'.
Magnet extraction doesn't necessarily kill the drive, the platters are usually not directly affected even if you've screwed their calibration. Still, after many drives' practice it seems drive-head scratches and fingerprints will usually ruin the platters while you're trying to get the drive arm out of the way. Smashing the platters speeds everything up, but it's too hazardous to leave wickedly sharp little metallic slivers everywhere.
Kind of kills the resale value, dun'nit?
Data destruction was not the problem. It was probably swiped by someone else in the store *thinking* it was a functional drive, and then hastily sold. Maybe it was the tech who actually worked on the system, but if the drive was crippled enough to need replacement it's doubtful he would have bothered taking it.
Yes.
The rar and 7z formats also steal marketshare from ace.
It is to be hoped that they would all dilute each other enough to fall out of use, but they still tend to be compression-of-choice for l33t-wannabes. FWIW, Tugzip is a decent though sometimes crashy utility that handles a large number of compression/container formats.