Hey! I just finished translating the whole article;_; Since it reveals some things about the magazine's attitude as well, I publish it here anyway: (Note that I didn't proof-read it)
Atari really tries everything to obfuscate our reports: First they ignored our questions about Alone in the Dark in its early stages of development, then they canceled an already arranged advertising deal after our preview, then they didn't provide us with samples of the test version even though we asked, and now they're even getting out their lawyers and want to instill fear in us with a 50,000 Euro lawsuit. What's next? Activating firecrackers in our offices? Throwing soccer-balls at the editors' wives?
It's getting more and more ridiculous. The fact that publishers like to interfere with the freedom of the press has been demonstrated by JoWooD in 2006 in a most demonstrating way in the case of Gothic 3: They wanted us to take our report offline after a threatening call, and the magazine PC PowerPlay was to vanish from newspaper stands. Both magazines resisted and have in doing so strengthened the Culture of Criticism of the German press landscape.
Atari is now demonstrating that publishers tend to lose their nerves when their games receive unfavorable reviews. And now, with their specious accusations of laughableness, they're [making it worse]. [Here's the order of events:] Yesterday afternoon, we published our review of Alone in the Dark. The game got 68% and therefore got a satisfactory rating. Yesterday evening, we got a facsimile from Atari's lawyers, extracts of which we can't help but share with you. If Germany shouldn't be able to laugh about anything anymore after tonight's match with Portugal, check this out:
'By publishing this "review" (original: "test") you are violating applicable laws and infringing upon Atari's rights.'
Hello? Are we in China now? Or in Iran? Here I had to gag on this as a journalist because Atari with its sloppy dubs against the rights of German listeners - Are they now allowed to sue for damages because they are avoiding paying for professional voice actors but still want the full price for a game with amateurish voice acting?
And now the quintessence of the ridiculous accusations:
'Your "review" isn't. The game is to be published on June 20, 2008. Your "review" must therefore be based on the pre-release version that was only to be used for preliminary commentatorship.'
So is it the job of lawyers and publishers now, to determine what constitutes a "review"? The fact that some printed magazines didn't use the pre-release version either for their test, because their articles were published much earlier than ours, doesn't appear to concern Atari. Because it is quite common now that printed reviews aren't always based on the final versions of a game - See Gothic 3.
Just too bad that we actually reviewed the final version. Atari's thinks (in surprising ignorance about distribution channels), that we can't even have the offical final releases - because Atari, as a precaution, didn't even send us those, even though we asked for them. However, we're used to such methods after years of reviewing and bought the final versions for the Wii, PS2, Xbox 360, and PC already on Monday at a retailer that we trust, who gets almost all games a couple days before their official release date.
Instead of thinking about that, Atari speculated freely about how we could have managed to get ahold of the game, and accuses us of criminal activities:
'The only possible explanation is that your "review" is based on an illegally downloaded version.'
That isn't just extremely naive, that's insolent. But let's go on:
'At the same time you're ignoring standards that usually apply to product reviews. Because product reviews have to be based on objective and informed analyses.'
And "informed" is probably everything that gives a rating of more than 80%, right? And "objective" begins at 85%? Just for the lawyer who wrote this outrag
K, I did it for speed, not for quality.
The city of Vienna is going to migrate its open-source poster child installation to Windows Vista in 2008. In total, Vienna will pay about 8,000,000 Euros for this migration. The final choice is to be made on Wednesday in the district council.
"That's a major setback to the conversion to linux of the city.", Marie Ringler, a member of the district council and representative of the Vienna Green party, said to ORF.at. On Wednesday the Vienna district council will decide that the most important linux installation (720 computers) of the city council be migrated to Windows Vista. The corresponding proposal was made available to ORF.net
-----8,000,000 Euros for Microsoft----- The MA 14, the body that is responsible for the city's IT-systems, has thus made available a budget of 8,000,000 Euros for the purchase of software licenses. These costs will be reimbursed to the MA 14 by MA 10 (kindergartens) and MA 56 (school administration).
The migration of the public authorities' computers from Windows 2000 and Office 2000 to Vista and Office 2007 will cost 7,600,000 Euros, and the purchase of 2,600 licenses for Windows, Office, and Server-software in Vienna's [Bildungsnetz] education network will cost 324,000 Euros. The changeover of the 720 kindergarten computers from the city-branded linux distribution "Wienux"* to Vista will cost around 105,000 Euros.
-----Language skill tests for children----- The migration of the kindergarten computers is because of a piece of software that tests kindergarten children's language abilities is only available on the Internet Explorer platform. The makers will have a Firefox version of their product only by 2009, according to Ringler.
"The city could have gotten the company to get their version that runs on Firefox out the door faster with only a fraction of the money that the changeover to Windows will cost, Ringler said, who also accuses the city of not following the Open Source concept and not producing any incentive to migrate from Windows to Wienux. The city also missed the opportunity to subsidize the 1,000 companies that make open source software in the Vienna region.
In Fall 2008, the STOSS2 studies, which was initiated by Vienna and is concerned with the analysis of costs and benefits of using open source software in the city council, will be published.
-----The MA 14 continues to polish Wienux----- Klaus Rohr, spokesman of the MA 14, confirmed the roll-back on Tuesday afternoon, which is to be completed in 2008. The most important reason for the migration from Linux to Windows is the availability of the aforementioned software only for Windows via Internet Explorer. But there have also been problems with hardware detection in linux, according to him.
But the re-migration to Windows doesn't imply that Wienux will die. The distribution is to be continued to be developed and distributed, according to Rohr.
-----SPÖ: "Wienux is not dead"----- SPÖ-district councilor Siegfried Lindenmayr doesn't view Wienux as dead either. "Wienux isn't dead. The city of Vienna has used open source software since 20 years and will also continue to do so," he said to ORF.at. "The use of software isn't a question of ideology to us, however. The best educational software runs on Windows, and therefore we will use Windows in our kindergartens."
The city's general open source strategy hasn't changed. The MA 14 will continue to offer linux and install it wherever departments want it. * Wien is the German word for Vienna
You should have taken a quick look at the article first. The author basically experienced excessive lag even though he did cap his upload rate, compared to what an upload or download via a different protocol (FTP, HTTP, VoIP) would cause. This is because the BT client fires or receives packets whenever they are available, while the others receive or send packets in a spaced manner (unless they saturate the pipe). That means that even though your upload rate may be limited to 10 KB/s, if your total upload is 20 KB/s, you might experience a maximum lag of 0.5 seconds. The guy put up a lot of graphs to illustrate that it happens quite often actually. It seems that he got those patterns with the "official" client and with Azureus.
Another reason could be that the report fails to take into account that some ISPs have a download/upload cap. This practice appears to be relatively rare in America, but quite common in Australia (which got a higher overall score) from what I have heard. I.e. a country full of cheap ISPs that offer nothing but 1 Gbit/s connections with a 1 GB cap and 100% penetration would end up first place...
Tell you what. If there are people who use some site for idiotic things, they don't deserve better than to be pushed out. I don't go to 4chan, but now that you said that I might just troll around there and get some more idiots to abandon the site.
Gamepack ROMs were up to 8 Mbits in size (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy), while the article says something about padding a 2 MB ROM with random stuff. Hmm.
The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.
People from Microsoft browse here too you know. And what are they gonna do?
Besides, there are a variety of cases in which it wouldn't make sense to run an antivirus program:
1) Your computer is behind a NAT or firewall (this is most often the case nowadays). This will take care of all "automatic" infections (unless the settings are weird).
2) You are running as an unprivileged user, you aren't running many services in the background, and your system is up to date. Almost no attack area. Your apps should be up to date too. Or you could run them as a special user with limited access to even your normal home directory.
3) The machine isn't connected to the internet and doesn't touch possibly virus-infested media either.
4) You are able to detect and to get rid of viruses on your own. (Do antivirus programs actually do anything besides moving stuff into a special folder?)
5) You're relying on security through obscurity (for example by using hardware or software (especially OS's) that noone else is using) - almost bulletproof, actually.
6) You're running a honeypot project.
7) You're being asked each time something odd happens if said thing should be allowed to happen (okay, so this is actually pretty close to antivirus software).
8) You're using specialized hardware to prevent common attack methods (such as buffer overruns) from working.
I'm sure there are some more interesting conditions, but it's getting late, and I'd like to hear what you guys think. (Boilerplate line to cover up place where I got tired of thinking.)
Disclaimer: I'm not a Windows-user.
Select All (Ctrl+A), drag picture around so that the top left corner of the canvas touches the top left corner of the region you would like to crop; resize canvas from the bottom right corner to the bottom right corner of your region; save (NOT AS JPEG KTHNX).
Thanks for contributing something useful to this thread. That should dispel all denying spurred forth in this discussion.
However, while it may be interesting to measure power usage of your display constantly (if you're into that kind of stuff anyway), I am pretty sure that your power meter also uses a small amount of power to do its job.
Of course, this depends (a little) on the display used, for instance, the original GBA's (and perhaps a variety of other handhelds' displays) default state was an ugly yellow (therefore suggesting that a lighter color would use less energy on those displays).
In Biology, it has been observed that animals that are somehow related to each other, are larger in colder areas than in warmer areas. This is called Bergmann's Rule. Therefore, as we are talking about a warm area, it could indeed be beneficial for those giant Linusaurs to evolve to become smaller.
You see, the sizes of animals yield different surface area to volume ratios, and therefore may be more or less prone to heat loss. A related rule is Allen's Rule, that concerns the extremities of animals, because these, being usually non-round structures, are more prone to heat loss. Thus, animals in hot climates have longer/larger extremities than their more or less direct counterparts in colder regions.
They very well can say that it won't work on non-Vista, and of course they mean "out of the box." Does it constitute false advertising if Nintendo writes "only for GBA" on their packaging? I mean, you can play it via an emulator, can't you? Also, Windows and Linux have different architectures, and you can still just layer most of the API calls to windows over, sometimes a couple of, API calls in linux, via wine. So is it false advertising if the packaging on an ancient game says "For Windows 98 only"?
Not only have we heard of this just last week (haven't we? My memory's really bad these days;_;), but also in 2004. Unfortunately, that study claims almost the opposite of this one: researchers, programmers and men teaching mathematics and physics tend to have longer index fingers. So, WTF?
Bart: Hey, G.I.Joe: your sign's broken. We're already in Australia.
Marine: Actually, Sir, the embassy is considered American soil, Sir!
Homer: Really? Look, boy, now I'm in Australia...[hops over the line] Now I'm in America...Australia! America!
Bart: I get it, Dad.
Homer: Australia! America!
Marge: Homer, that's enough!
Homer: Australia! America! [gets punched] Ow!
Marine: Here in America we don't tolerate that kind of crap, Sir!
Can we really be sure that none of the various people involved work for Square-Enix? I mean, it's been there since February, and I don't know that kind of resources you'd need to get something like that done.
Leaving the conspiracy theories be for a moment, a quick google search for 'square enix cease desist' yields this. Includes some hopeful theories for why the game (Chrono Trigger: Resurrection) was shut down. If someone knows whether these theories are unlikely (what with three years having passed in the meantime), feel free to comment...
Oh yeah? How do you know they aren't going to support their hardware by such methods? On the same note, in case they'll ship with proprietary graphics technologies (nVidia and AMD), I don't think they'd ship anything else than the stock driver from the companies' respective sites.
Also something to look out for is the range. I don't think the beam would lose too much power when hitting a target, causing everything else behind it to become more or less destroyed (depending on material etc.) as well. This is something that you don't get to see often in FPS's and Science Fiction movies, I guess...
Uh, actually, there are huge buildings/stores (for example the Pacific Digital Plaza (and neighboring buildings) in Xu Jia Hui in Shanghai, although it should be possible to find stuff cheaper than what they sell it for) over there that carry bucketloads of computer equipment, cheaply (I guess there aren't many layers to sever before you're near the factories). It may be true that there aren't too many ready-to-use sales, but computers are usually built by salesmen directly, or by the purchaser, in China. Therefore, few OEM OSs sell (pretty much for notebooks only, I daresay). Original Vista costs a huge amount of money in China, something like 250 Euros, if memory serves. The guys who sell this kind of stuff may get roughly 200 Euros per month.
I think that OEM system builder XP's seem to be the best-selling version of pirated Windows (for private users) in China. Haven't seen a pirated version of Vista for sale yet, though, unless you count the Windows 98 (or something) with Vista theme, heh. Unfortunately, I don't know what it was like when XP came around... If someone wants to contribute this information, please do so:)
WTF? I must be dreaming, that doesn't make the slightest of senses. Please clarify before I wake up, so I can tell the real world what a bunch of fucking weirdos you guys are! Sheesh.
Disregarding the fact that doing as is stated in the title would generate two tags, I completely disagree. Damn them if they do, damn them if they don't, huh? I think that DRM should be abandoned as quickly as possible, and any step toward this goal should be greeted with respect.
On a different note, I don't understand why most people say that the Zune has the same feature-set as the iPod (or something along those lines). I'm not exactly a visionary, but I think adding Wifi-capabilities is pretty damn innovative. Even though they are limited at the moment. (Of course, I don't know whether they really innovated here, at least I haven't researched it further, or heard anything to the contrary.)
I'd say we undo the "metoo" tag by tagging this story "!metoo".
Yeah, but much more TFLOPS/PU on the GPU row than on the PS3 row. But I think the Pony Slaystation 3 (sorry ponies) could theoretically get some more out of its hardware if it'd be using the GPU as well on the FAH client (correct me if it actually does). The fact that the client has been out for a short time only probably wouldn't make the measured performance better.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey! I just finished translating the whole article ;_;
Since it reveals some things about the magazine's attitude as well, I publish it here anyway:
(Note that I didn't proof-read it)
Atari really tries everything to obfuscate our reports: First they ignored our questions about Alone in the Dark in its early stages of development, then they canceled an already arranged advertising deal after our preview, then they didn't provide us with samples of the test version even though we asked, and now they're even getting out their lawyers and want to instill fear in us with a 50,000 Euro lawsuit. What's next? Activating firecrackers in our offices? Throwing soccer-balls at the editors' wives?
It's getting more and more ridiculous. The fact that publishers like to interfere with the freedom of the press has been demonstrated by JoWooD in 2006 in a most demonstrating way in the case of Gothic 3: They wanted us to take our report offline after a threatening call, and the magazine PC PowerPlay was to vanish from newspaper stands. Both magazines resisted and have in doing so strengthened the Culture of Criticism of the German press landscape.
Atari is now demonstrating that publishers tend to lose their nerves when their games receive unfavorable reviews. And now, with their specious accusations of laughableness, they're [making it worse]. [Here's the order of events:] Yesterday afternoon, we published our review of Alone in the Dark. The game got 68% and therefore got a satisfactory rating. Yesterday evening, we got a facsimile from Atari's lawyers, extracts of which we can't help but share with you. If Germany shouldn't be able to laugh about anything anymore after tonight's match with Portugal, check this out:
'By publishing this "review" (original: "test") you are violating applicable laws and infringing upon Atari's rights.'
Hello? Are we in China now? Or in Iran? Here I had to gag on this as a journalist because Atari with its sloppy dubs against the rights of German listeners - Are they now allowed to sue for damages because they are avoiding paying for professional voice actors but still want the full price for a game with amateurish voice acting?
And now the quintessence of the ridiculous accusations:
'Your "review" isn't. The game is to be published on June 20, 2008. Your "review" must therefore be based on the pre-release version that was only to be used for preliminary commentatorship.'
So is it the job of lawyers and publishers now, to determine what constitutes a "review"? The fact that some printed magazines didn't use the pre-release version either for their test, because their articles were published much earlier than ours, doesn't appear to concern Atari. Because it is quite common now that printed reviews aren't always based on the final versions of a game - See Gothic 3.
Just too bad that we actually reviewed the final version. Atari's thinks (in surprising ignorance about distribution channels), that we can't even have the offical final releases - because Atari, as a precaution, didn't even send us those, even though we asked for them. However, we're used to such methods after years of reviewing and bought the final versions for the Wii, PS2, Xbox 360, and PC already on Monday at a retailer that we trust, who gets almost all games a couple days before their official release date.
Instead of thinking about that, Atari speculated freely about how we could have managed to get ahold of the game, and accuses us of criminal activities:
'The only possible explanation is that your "review" is based on an illegally downloaded version.'
That isn't just extremely naive, that's insolent. But let's go on:
'At the same time you're ignoring standards that usually apply to product reviews. Because product reviews have to be based on objective and informed analyses.'
And "informed" is probably everything that gives a rating of more than 80%, right? And "objective" begins at 85%? Just for the lawyer who wrote this outrag
"That's a major setback to the conversion to linux of the city.", Marie Ringler, a member of the district council and representative of the Vienna Green party, said to ORF.at. On Wednesday the Vienna district council will decide that the most important linux installation (720 computers) of the city council be migrated to Windows Vista. The corresponding proposal was made available to ORF.net
-----8,000,000 Euros for Microsoft-----
The MA 14, the body that is responsible for the city's IT-systems, has thus made available a budget of 8,000,000 Euros for the purchase of software licenses. These costs will be reimbursed to the MA 14 by MA 10 (kindergartens) and MA 56 (school administration).
The migration of the public authorities' computers from Windows 2000 and Office 2000 to Vista and Office 2007 will cost 7,600,000 Euros, and the purchase of 2,600 licenses for Windows, Office, and Server-software in Vienna's [Bildungsnetz] education network will cost 324,000 Euros. The changeover of the 720 kindergarten computers from the city-branded linux distribution "Wienux"* to Vista will cost around 105,000 Euros.
-----Language skill tests for children-----
The migration of the kindergarten computers is because of a piece of software that tests kindergarten children's language abilities is only available on the Internet Explorer platform. The makers will have a Firefox version of their product only by 2009, according to Ringler.
"The city could have gotten the company to get their version that runs on Firefox out the door faster with only a fraction of the money that the changeover to Windows will cost, Ringler said, who also accuses the city of not following the Open Source concept and not producing any incentive to migrate from Windows to Wienux. The city also missed the opportunity to subsidize the 1,000 companies that make open source software in the Vienna region.
In Fall 2008, the STOSS2 studies, which was initiated by Vienna and is concerned with the analysis of costs and benefits of using open source software in the city council, will be published.
-----The MA 14 continues to polish Wienux-----
Klaus Rohr, spokesman of the MA 14, confirmed the roll-back on Tuesday afternoon, which is to be completed in 2008. The most important reason for the migration from Linux to Windows is the availability of the aforementioned software only for Windows via Internet Explorer. But there have also been problems with hardware detection in linux, according to him.
But the re-migration to Windows doesn't imply that Wienux will die. The distribution is to be continued to be developed and distributed, according to Rohr.
-----SPÖ: "Wienux is not dead"-----
SPÖ-district councilor Siegfried Lindenmayr doesn't view Wienux as dead either. "Wienux isn't dead. The city of Vienna has used open source software since 20 years and will also continue to do so," he said to ORF.at. "The use of software isn't a question of ideology to us, however. The best educational software runs on Windows, and therefore we will use Windows in our kindergartens."
The city's general open source strategy hasn't changed. The MA 14 will continue to offer linux and install it wherever departments want it. * Wien is the German word for Vienna
You should have taken a quick look at the article first. The author basically experienced excessive lag even though he did cap his upload rate, compared to what an upload or download via a different protocol (FTP, HTTP, VoIP) would cause. This is because the BT client fires or receives packets whenever they are available, while the others receive or send packets in a spaced manner (unless they saturate the pipe). That means that even though your upload rate may be limited to 10 KB/s, if your total upload is 20 KB/s, you might experience a maximum lag of 0.5 seconds. The guy put up a lot of graphs to illustrate that it happens quite often actually. It seems that he got those patterns with the "official" client and with Azureus.
Another reason could be that the report fails to take into account that some ISPs have a download/upload cap. This practice appears to be relatively rare in America, but quite common in Australia (which got a higher overall score) from what I have heard. I.e. a country full of cheap ISPs that offer nothing but 1 Gbit/s connections with a 1 GB cap and 100% penetration would end up first place ...
Tell you what. If there are people who use some site for idiotic things, they don't deserve better than to be pushed out. I don't go to 4chan, but now that you said that I might just troll around there and get some more idiots to abandon the site.
Gamepack ROMs were up to 8 Mbits in size (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Boy), while the article says something about padding a 2 MB ROM with random stuff. Hmm.
The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.
Besides, there are a variety of cases in which it wouldn't make sense to run an antivirus program:
1) Your computer is behind a NAT or firewall (this is most often the case nowadays). This will take care of all "automatic" infections (unless the settings are weird).
2) You are running as an unprivileged user, you aren't running many services in the background, and your system is up to date. Almost no attack area. Your apps should be up to date too. Or you could run them as a special user with limited access to even your normal home directory.
3) The machine isn't connected to the internet and doesn't touch possibly virus-infested media either.
4) You are able to detect and to get rid of viruses on your own. (Do antivirus programs actually do anything besides moving stuff into a special folder?)
5) You're relying on security through obscurity (for example by using hardware or software (especially OS's) that noone else is using) - almost bulletproof, actually.
6) You're running a honeypot project.
7) You're being asked each time something odd happens if said thing should be allowed to happen (okay, so this is actually pretty close to antivirus software).
8) You're using specialized hardware to prevent common attack methods (such as buffer overruns) from working.
I'm sure there are some more interesting conditions, but it's getting late, and I'd like to hear what you guys think. (Boilerplate line to cover up place where I got tired of thinking.)
Disclaimer: I'm not a Windows-user.
Select All (Ctrl+A), drag picture around so that the top left corner of the canvas touches the top left corner of the region you would like to crop; resize canvas from the bottom right corner to the bottom right corner of your region; save (NOT AS JPEG KTHNX).
Please take a look at this link: http://apcmag.com/3912/qantas_ban_may_extend_to_ma c_laptops
Someone a little further into the discussion posted contradicting measurements. The GP probably owns a special kind of display.
Thanks for contributing something useful to this thread. That should dispel all denying spurred forth in this discussion.
However, while it may be interesting to measure power usage of your display constantly (if you're into that kind of stuff anyway), I am pretty sure that your power meter also uses a small amount of power to do its job.
Of course, this depends (a little) on the display used, for instance, the original GBA's (and perhaps a variety of other handhelds' displays) default state was an ugly yellow (therefore suggesting that a lighter color would use less energy on those displays).
You see, the sizes of animals yield different surface area to volume ratios, and therefore may be more or less prone to heat loss. A related rule is Allen's Rule, that concerns the extremities of animals, because these, being usually non-round structures, are more prone to heat loss. Thus, animals in hot climates have longer/larger extremities than their more or less direct counterparts in colder regions.
They very well can say that it won't work on non-Vista, and of course they mean "out of the box." Does it constitute false advertising if Nintendo writes "only for GBA" on their packaging? I mean, you can play it via an emulator, can't you? Also, Windows and Linux have different architectures, and you can still just layer most of the API calls to windows over, sometimes a couple of, API calls in linux, via wine. So is it false advertising if the packaging on an ancient game says "For Windows 98 only"?
Not only have we heard of this just last week (haven't we? My memory's really bad these days ;_;), but also in 2004. Unfortunately, that study claims almost the opposite of this one: researchers, programmers and men teaching mathematics and physics tend to have longer index fingers. So, WTF?
Uh ... My religion is: Apple-foeboyism. Don't interfere! Or else!
Bart: Hey, G.I.Joe: your sign's broken. We're already in Australia.
Marine: Actually, Sir, the embassy is considered American soil, Sir!
Homer: Really? Look, boy, now I'm in Australia...[hops over the line] Now I'm in America...Australia! America!
Bart: I get it, Dad.
Homer: Australia! America!
Marge: Homer, that's enough!
Homer: Australia! America! [gets punched] Ow!
Marine: Here in America we don't tolerate that kind of crap, Sir!
(Source)
Leaving the conspiracy theories be for a moment, a quick google search for 'square enix cease desist' yields this. Includes some hopeful theories for why the game (Chrono Trigger: Resurrection) was shut down. If someone knows whether these theories are unlikely (what with three years having passed in the meantime), feel free to comment ...
Oh yeah? How do you know they aren't going to support their hardware by such methods? On the same note, in case they'll ship with proprietary graphics technologies (nVidia and AMD), I don't think they'd ship anything else than the stock driver from the companies' respective sites.
In case you missed the memo.
Also something to look out for is the range. I don't think the beam would lose too much power when hitting a target, causing everything else behind it to become more or less destroyed (depending on material etc.) as well. This is something that you don't get to see often in FPS's and Science Fiction movies, I guess ...
Uh, actually, there are huge buildings/stores (for example the Pacific Digital Plaza (and neighboring buildings) in Xu Jia Hui in Shanghai, although it should be possible to find stuff cheaper than what they sell it for) over there that carry bucketloads of computer equipment, cheaply (I guess there aren't many layers to sever before you're near the factories). It may be true that there aren't too many ready-to-use sales, but computers are usually built by salesmen directly, or by the purchaser, in China. Therefore, few OEM OSs sell (pretty much for notebooks only, I daresay). Original Vista costs a huge amount of money in China, something like 250 Euros, if memory serves. The guys who sell this kind of stuff may get roughly 200 Euros per month. ... If someone wants to contribute this information, please do so :)
I think that OEM system builder XP's seem to be the best-selling version of pirated Windows (for private users) in China. Haven't seen a pirated version of Vista for sale yet, though, unless you count the Windows 98 (or something) with Vista theme, heh. Unfortunately, I don't know what it was like when XP came around
WTF? I must be dreaming, that doesn't make the slightest of senses. Please clarify before I wake up, so I can tell the real world what a bunch of fucking weirdos you guys are! Sheesh.
On a different note, I don't understand why most people say that the Zune has the same feature-set as the iPod (or something along those lines). I'm not exactly a visionary, but I think adding Wifi-capabilities is pretty damn innovative. Even though they are limited at the moment. (Of course, I don't know whether they really innovated here, at least I haven't researched it further, or heard anything to the contrary.)
I'd say we undo the "metoo" tag by tagging this story "!metoo".
Yeah, but much more TFLOPS/PU on the GPU row than on the PS3 row. But I think the Pony Slaystation 3 (sorry ponies) could theoretically get some more out of its hardware if it'd be using the GPU as well on the FAH client (correct me if it actually does). The fact that the client has been out for a short time only probably wouldn't make the measured performance better.