Even if it lowers the cost, it won't especially matter much, will it? You can't entirely remove tuna from the ecosystem as a consumer, and they get a lot of mercury in their diet, pass it along. Eastern little tuna are lower in mercury according to Wikipedia, but they're specifically mapping and going to be modifying bluefin tuna.
This doesn't terribly seem like the most sensible idea to invest large amounts of time and money in if it's just going to produce more fish that you can't safely consume greater amounts of. You've got mass lead poisonings coming out of China; in 10 or 20 years, will you get mass mercury poisonings thanks to Japan and this project?
An ATM technician and/or store security guard is not by any means a law officer, and only has the right to detain you until police arrive if they witness you committing a crime (citizen's arrest), or there's evidence implicating you, not merely because they suspect something.
The notion that you have to be polite to someone like a security guard, just because they carry mace, a baton, or rarely a gun, is just asking for abuse of authority. Even in this case, they didn't ask for him to stop, or delete the photo. They immediately asked for identification so they could file a report. He had every right to refuse, and leave. Frankly, he should've left when it became clear they were trying to detain him. If they tried to physically restrain him, it would've at least made for an amusing assault case. Human nature is usually that if you give someone any minor authority, their ego becomes very large about it.
Only the top website had any useful information, and I did say I looked there. Neither post on Slashdot had any information whatsoever about what the game was, or about. All it mentions are arbitrary features/improvements to previous versions, not plot, setting, let alone any information about how it differs from the pack (aside from the features, which are admittedly paltry even compared to Icculus community improvements to Quake 3).
That must well be a lie, too, considering it was a simple copy and paste of the first two paragraphs, and then responded to with more brainless advertisement, and now this.
It's nice that you're so eager to throw insults after failing to read, though. I'm sure that makes you much different from other games. You even got the "we think everyone must read everything we publish from a long time ago because we're the best in the world and so very noteworthy" thing down. Congrats. Maybe Microsoft will buy you.
No, the underlying question was, literally, "why is a cut-and-paste advertisement here?". Since Slashdot accepts advertising space, that's where it should go.
The advertisement also had no pertinent information about the game, its plot, gameplay elements, or anything else useful.
Responding to my shock at it being a blatant cut-and-paste advertisement, with no information, with yet another advertisement, with no further useful information, is not helpful, and quite frankly, is rude. Did you/they learn how to market from this ad (probably NSFW)?
THIS post has very little pertinent information either. It says it's a modified open source FPS. Even if someone saw that (I sure didn't), how many were likely to pass it off as a Blood source port (which I now understand does not actually exist), or something else for which the developers were too lazy to come up with words to DESCRIBE IT?
Personally, I care about what a game is about, what engine it's based on (mentioned in a post last month, not this one), what kind of single player features and depth of story it has, and moddability. There are a few pretty darn good games out there, a fair number of mediocre with a lot of problems, and a ton of real bombs that are more likely to make your PC beg for forgiveness for whatever it did wrong, than bring the player a good experience.
If there's a Linux port, that's icing, but obviously that can't improve the quality of the game. How is an utter lack of description helping anyone care about your game? How is an utter lack of description in the advertisement posted in response to the complaint helping anyone care about your game? How is advertising compulsively instead of responding Like An Human And Not A Bot to a legitimate point about what's going on, going to do anything other than piss off people? Seriously?
It's a good thing the website (allegedly) has more information, because the post contains absolutely no useful information if you've never heard of whatever this game is or is supposed to be.
Is it bad to ask how it got on Slashdot's front page, when it's basically a cut-and-paste advertisement, rather than descriptive and useful information?
Apparently, you're some kind of android, and have to go around killing zombies.._.
The article apparently fails to contain any full dates, and no years.
See? This is why you always have to use four-digit years when specifying any date, even months, otherwise the 'software', *eyes original poster*, gets confused.
What kind of system administrator or average user, blindly upgrades to a major version, without considering the caveats of such an action? The general disclaimer of "everything has to be ported, this will break things" wasn't obvious enough?
Linus didn't bother to read anything, he doesn't also bother to use KDE. I don't think anyone mentioned compiling from source, or visiting conferences. Please don't tell me you're suggesting we should all follow Linus's example on everything. He's not a god, and even if he were...that'd be a pretty weak-willed excuse.
Somehow, I don't think 'open source software' is going to bend over backwards to cater to that crowd any time soon. Let alone people the people you say are apparently upgrading KDE versions at 6 years old.
Nobody held a gun to anyone's head and said "upgrade to 4.0, especially despite our warnings and disclaimers". If someone does anything with their software, it is their sole responsibility, and that happens to includes (but not be limited to) upgrading, deleting, switching to alternate software, pirating, using it for work, using it for play, or pinging FBI.gov 160000 times per day. Part of that responsibility is such a basic tenet as to understand what you're doing before you do it.
I shudder to think what would happen (and how people would complain) if KDE, GNOME, Linux, and other developers 'just did stuff' because someone it was an option, or because someone else suggested it, without first considering what it means, what the pros and cons are, if it's worth their time.
I believe the proper response to not having time to 'look over things' is let me google that for you.
"The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and connecting different components in any way they want."
From the 4.0 beta 4 release notes. Apparently someone forgot that paragraph in the final notes, but it still stands.
Anyone who actually cared at the time, and was looking over things, playing with pre-release versions, looking over blogs, actually listening to what people were saying, it was said countless times. One KDE developer joked it was the 'eat your children' release.
Even in the KDE keynote address (at the launch event, available online), they talked about how it was more of a foundational release.
Several months later, they officially countered many of the points being put forth about KDE 4.0 and 4.1.
People are happy enough to complain, but people, including KDE developers, were talking about this for months in advance of KDE 4.0's release, and after. It's been widely expected that KDE 4.2 would be the 'proper' release for a long while.
It's not that KDE fanboys, or developers (I'm neither) have revisionist history, it's that some people who'd prefer to argue or complain after the fact, weren't paying attention or conveniently develop amnesia.
Who was expecting the KDE folks to pull a magical perfect fully functional release, all of a sudden out of their collective arses, concurrently with KDevelop, KOffice, Amarok, and other software versions, when they had to rewrite major portions to take full advantage of Qt 4.4? KDE 4.0 was internally in development for over two years. It took them a scant year to circle the wagons after a "we're eating children and releasing early to sync up with third parties and make it possible to develop against more conveniently" release to make a stable user-oriented version. Big deal. According to other posts and snarky comments on Slashdot, it's taking Windows 7 3 years (with no development libraries or early previews to target as an average developer, until Beta 1 SDK released, concurrently with Beta 1 itself) to release an annoying graphical update to Windows Vista. People tend to be 'slightly' overreacting and skewing for their own fan base there as well.
KDE 3.5.10 was released just this last August (2008). I'm not saying that 4.0 or 4.1 was a great idea, just that it was sensible from their point of view, and warned about in a copious manner. It's fairly unbelievable that people would freak out -that- badly if they weren't interested enough about the software or desktop environment to read anything surrounding the event, including previews, beta notes, statements from individual developers, color commentary from the peanut gallery, or much of anything else.
When KDE 3.0 was released, did every possible feature and customization for 2.x somehow survive immediately? People used to be more on the fence until a few releases in.
I bet that by the time KDE 4.3 is released (currently scheduled for July), it won't even matter that everyone was so eager to complain about the developer versions when the stable version (3.5) was still available, worked, was maintained, and could easily be installed side-by-side.
Even if, somehow, you were confused about the nature of KDE 4.0 or 4.1, no one was holding a gun to your head to force
KDE was adamantly clear that KDE 4.0 was not a 'user' release, but was solely for third party developers to actually get involved and start porting, and to make a difference. A pure developer preview. KDE 4.1 was stabilizing third party apps and the platform. KDE 4.2 is the first user-centric general use release for 4.x. It's not their fault that apparently many users and distributors didn't listen or care.
It's not as if they KDE left people without working 3.5, either. KDE 3.5.9 and 3.5.10 both brought bug fixes and improvements. "We're having an unstable/preview release, deal with it, the people who care about it will know about it" used to be common in the open source world.
It tends to lean towards better results if people can get ahold of things ahead of a 'stable' release, bazaar style, so bug fixes can be made, design issues can be settled, before it becomes a 'user' release.
If they were allowed to persist and fester, any such issues outstanding would affect people using the software version for years to come (and longer if backwards compatibility mandates are taken into account).
I'm not trying to be pointed about it, but flaws and bugs creeping in and staying there more or less defines the Windows experience. It's okay if you have an app from 10 years ago you can't recompile (and hopefully still works on current video drivers/hardware), it's not so good if all of the source is available, and bad design choices can cause serious problems in writing and maintaining software.
Just because everyone jumped the gun and wanted KDE 4.0 to be perfect and immediately available even while KDE 3.5 maintenance was ongoing, was pretty much fooling themselves. GNOME seems to maintain a large number of projects under its umbrella, and when a release is made, everything's updated in line. KDE has a lot of major third party apps which required a significant amount of porting and rewriting to move from Qt 3.3 and KDE 3.5. Being able to shake down the libraries, and applications mean that the final release products tend to 'just work'. Less vendor patches needed just to clean things up.
The.0 preview,.1 stabilization,.2 starts as stable tends to mirror GCC's typical schedule in this case, however, and GCC's used for everything, took two years to get to the point where most things would finally touch it and ditch GCC 3.4.
A year's not long when you consider the entire KDE ecosystem has had time to work on things and most projects are releasing near-concurrently with full support.
KDE 4.0, and to a lesser degree 4.1, lacked quite a few nice customization features that KDE has had for the longest time. KDE 4.2 refixes the taskbar configuration...so you can actually do something useful with it again. KDE 4.0 and 4.1 are nowhere near as functional or customizable as 3.5, 4.2 restores virtually all of it as well as adding compelling new standard/addon features. 4.0 was supposedly 'just a developer preview', and I personally think they dropped the ball on 4.1. Everyone was expecting it to just be 'ready'. Though, one begs the question. If Linus is an advanced user, why was he pressured to upgrade from 3.5 to 4.x in the first place? Couldn't he have just kept using 3.5 if that's what he preferred, rather than the GNOME which he hated? I know the 'user friendly' distros tend to be a bit aggressive about pre-planned obsolescence, but that's little excuse not to find a supported and proper way to use the software and specific versions you prefer.
I did say quite a bit that it was more of a driver parity issue than anything else.
The 9600 is faster than 8600. I meant that the price point of $85 was for the 'higher quality' 8600s. $85 was also a happy price point for decent 8600GTs over the holiday. Pre-overclocked, better fans, other things that would supposedly warrant a few dollars extra, compared to the $45-60 'standard' 8600GTs.
The 3870 has better specs, obviously. Specs don't mean much if the driver doesn't take advantage. On Nvidia drivers, some driver versions have been better for some hardware than others, newer hardware can take a few versions for both Nvidia and ATI to exploit the hardware better.
Rivatuner can present the GPU load statistics (as represented by the internal performance counters on the ATI GPU) along with framerate and temeprature via its statistics monitoring, with an overlay similar to FRAPS so you can see it while you play. OpenGL tended to squarely hit into 30% or less range unless blatantly simple. Various games, including GTA4, rarely moved above 50-55%, just so happened to get same or slightly better framerate on the 8600 (usually 2-4 times faster on the 9600). Things that only used basic shading or none at all (including emulators) tended to represent the highest percentage of load on the 3870 (and highest actual performance).
The games where GPU load was low, also happened to be where atrocious unplayable performance was overwhelmingly likely to occur.
The 8600GT didn't beat the 3870 in everything. Most obviously, in games that took better advantage of 512MB, the 256MB on the 8600GT limited it. There was a rather distinct trend across a wide variety of games made since 2004 or so (I play around with a lot of things) that the 8600GT would usually get the same framerate, in some cases better. Quality-wise, the 3870 would usually have minimum framerates that sagged lower and usually there'd be a significant lag in games, particularly with vsync+triple buffer enabled (a necessity with LCD).
Half Life 2 (heck, the 8600GT got ~180 frames on Ep2 with max settings, including AA 4x, 3870 got ~40), GTA 4, Far Cry 2, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, Fallout 3, San Andreas, Mercenaries 2, No One Lives Forever, Oblivion, UT2004, World of Warcraft, Tabula Rasa, among others.
People say 'specs specs specs', but considering a single driver revision can change performance for a particular game for 15% or more, drivers matter a great deal. You could have a really fast car with high horsepower and a novice driver...who crashes it, or has to drive slower to keep it on the road, compared to a Ford Focus, which they drive more easily and confidently, and rack up a higher average speed.
The press tends to use static demos and benchmarks. A benchmark in a 'real game' doesn't much matter if it uses a prescripted static environment which doesn't change and is specifically designed to provide higher framerates than is at all representative of the actual game proper. Very few sites who publish reviews do so in actual Real World game conditions, where they're actually playing in a meaningful circuit and record detailed framerate statistics per second to file. The 3870 scores pretty well on nearly every benchmark, including OpenGL ones. It's only a 'few hundred' points shy of the 9600GT replacement on 3DMark, despite there being no similarity in any game I've yet found. Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
The performance counters only specify what percentage of GPU resource is being used, not how exactly they're defined, and don't relate how different drivers affect it. Hardware counts, how well the drivers can actually spread the load around would generally make the load percentage (and performance) go up. Presumably, the counters count based on how many shaders/render/texture pipelines are being utilized, or some subset thereof, though certainly shaders are being counted.
If you're getting 15 laggy frames per second on a game that should be pushing as hard as the graphic
I've heard NForce motherboards tend to have a fair number of compatibility problems. Don't be so quick to blame the Geforce (VGA) drivers or the Geforce card.
'Anything from overclocking options to simple fan speed adjustments' are handled by the NTune options, not the Nvidia geforce options. It integrates into the same control panel, but they're different things. There are also usually enough quirks with NTune itself to prefer relying on Rivatuner (driver overclock, hardware direct fan speed control) if you're going to tweak those. It has nothing to do with the drivers or their quality, as they're not a part of the drivers.
Have you tried configuring things NOT in an SLI setup to narrow down the diagnosis of a root cause?
8600GT usually bests the 3870 for a similar price. Recently the 9600GT was priced similarly to the faster/better 8600GTs at ~$85.
The 8600GT can slightly edge out in a variety of games (including GTA4), whereas the 3870's higher processing power can beat it in a few things that don't use complex shaders at all. The 9600GT utterly demolishes both in virtually everything, was within 10-15% of the 9800 GT, at $60 cheaper. Both are slightly more expensive with the big sales season over, though I'm sure there'll be more deals soon.
The 3870 supposedly has better hardware than both, but basically all recent drivers (since at least 8.8) appear to botch the GPU load (with fixed clock speeds mind, no power throttling) so that most games only use 30-50% of the GPU's capacity. Obviously the 3870 has more a great many more shaders, but they're simply not getting utilized properly.
It's a bad feeling when you get a low price on a decent 3870 GDDR4, only to have to have your older 8600 consistently performing better and providing superior gameplay experience.
Nvidia's GTX 295 was around 1.7 teraflops I believe, while the (similarly priced) 4870X2 is 2.4. The 'mere' 295 supposedly beats the 4870X2 by 15% average. The difference is? Nvidia always has pretty good drivers. ATI struggles to allow games to take >50% advantage of even the lowly 3870 (as measured by the card's own performance counters)...let alone a 2.4 tflop card...let alone a massive array of 4870s.
Plus, wouldn't a 1000 GPU 4870 cloud...only allow some 1000 users some fractional percentage of one 4870 capped by latency and other overhead?
Or...are we talking about providing a larger number of mobile devices the equivalent capabilities and speed of 1999's Geforce 256?
Either way...I don't think it'll catch on, and will be a huge money sink for AMD when it needs to be fixing its processor and video card issues for the average, real consumers who are losing faith in AMD's ability to provide reasonable and usefully competitive products.
Spore and Dead Space are both fairly conventional when broken down. Dead Space gives a fairly interesting UI, but by-the-numbers story, standard-but-laggier-than-usual graphics, uninspired audio. Spore is a few minigames that have no real depth, and even the developers admit they're just like stripped down, simplistic versions of other EA/Maxis classics. Also, both heavily pirated as far as the news goes. And Mirror's Edge isn't out yet for PC. We're talking about PCs on a Windows/Mac/Linux story, yes?:b I hope Mirror's Edge is good, but you can reasonably guarantee now that if it's an EA game (Mercenaries 2 also sadly comes to mind), it's surprisingly conventional no matter how much hype is applied, expensive, and DRM-laden.
Ok, so being a creep is a crime now? Half the readership of Slashdot might be at risk !!!
The notable point from Wikipedia is: "and "fourteen digital photographs of actual children engaging in sexually explicit conduct".
Hence, creep.
They shouldn't have charged him or added on time for Fake Things, is what I said. They probably should charge him for Actual Things.
The whole thing is slightly misleading in that the Slashdot story implies that he was only charged for computer-generated images, when he wasn't. He probably got extra time for the computer-generated images. He probably got extra time for the fact that he was on parole at the time for 'unspecified sexual offenses'. It must've been pretty serious if he was still on parole over ten years later.
Does half of Slashdot have sexually explicit Actual Kiddy Porn[tm] in their possession? Are they registered sex offenders reoffending?
Apparently, they're not even prosecuting the artists, they're prosecuting the people who have access to what the artists draw.
Whorley is a creep. He also had real pornographic images, but he was charged equally over having according to the charges is purely computer-generated, fabricated imagery.
Artist/computer-generated imagery which is produced (usually) in Japan, and depicts no actual person, harms no person, slights no person.
I don't mind predators being taken off the streets, but you start limiting what drawings someone can look at...particularly when the drawings aren't based on actual people...that gets pretty freaking insane.
A recent study suggests that there are too many recent studies.
Eh. Whatever happened to multiple studies, or recurring studies over a longer period of time?
All you ever hear these days is 'a recent study', as if the mere fact that one group of researchers came up with it, it's golden fact.
Mind, it's a group of researchers...basically saying that group-research mentality is where it's at and that individual pioneers are all but over. Isn't that the fox guarding the hen house? ^^;
A great many studies are also done by fringe researchers, or paid for/sponsored by companies. If any news source runs with it, there often seems to be little (if any) fact checking done to make sure it's legit, and we never hear about/keep tabs on who is behind the studies. So you always here the 'a recent study suggests' part, but you never hear everyone else in the scientific/research community laughing or ignoring it because it's a joke.
Of course research groups would find out that research groups are great at research. Would Stephen Hawking find that Stephen Hawking is great at theoretical cosmology research?
Always take studies with a side of common sense and skepticism, particularly if there's not a fair mountain of corroboration.
Gamers will always game. Some gamers would just become game makers, some would simply keep playing and/or modding existing games, some would pretend they're a character in a game and start trying to act out scenes of Metroid involving thousands of leeches.
In all seriousness, though. The "game industry" isn't quite the same as many others. If one major car maker suddenly can't produce vehicles, you start seeing shortages. In games and software, if someone goes under, there's always someone there to happily replace them, and you have a few giants in the game industry, but no one even has close to a monopoly.
And the industry is quick to complain that everyone pirates, about used game sales, etc...but the case has always been with modern games (after 1998 or so?), the actually high quality games don't get pirated nearly as much, and if someone's selling a used copy (which only seems to be viable at all with awful consoles anymore), why shouldn't someone be able to buy it second-hand? If your game's worth the disc its printed on, more people will simply keep it indefinitely, especially the older gamers, such as those who still would prefer to hang onto 16-bit games (if only there were enough space).
I still have my disc for UT99, one of the few games I've ever bought where I felt the price vs content/lifespan was justified.
If virtually every game out there is just terrible, myred in controversy (usually), laden with DRM, and provides 4-10 hours of average game play for $60...companies used to develop game projects, in no small part, because there was a compelling story to tell and designers and developers could come up with good and interesting ideas.
Now, every game out there is like clicking on a link and being rickrolled...only you had to pay through the nose for the dupe.
Games are very personal to the gamer. If basically every last developer and publisher has a completely tarnished reputation and produces crap that's short and buggy and trash and won't even run on most decent computers out there due to inadaquete testing, is it any wonder that people'd rather spend money on...damn near anything else these days?
If someone put together a company with an absolute stirling reputation for quality, quantity, respecting the customer(such as need for patches [patching because they simply weren't finished, and then not fixing bugs...doesn't count], decent support and responsiveness to support inquiries), and setting a fair price for what you get...they could sell a game for $60, and people'd pay happily knowing they could play it for years, and years, and it'd stay interesting (Morrowind and Oblivion are rather decent examples of this, flawed though they may be).
It seems like AMD 'might' just be slightly desperate to try to psychologically compete now, if they can't compete with real numbers. Even their 9850 Phenom, 2.5Ghz, gets an average of less than half the performance in many benchmarks and many reviews, compared to the classic 2.4Ghz Q6600. The revision stepping that fixed the 'TLB errata' in hardware, rather than the 'slow software workaround' saw...no performance improvement clock for clock? And they use a -lot- more power.
But all AMD really has to do is try to compete in 'the hearts and minds' of the consumer, like Intel used to try to do with the Pentium 4/D revisions (when I cheerily went with a budget Athlon 64+ S939).
If they say "we're better, faster, more power efficient!", and some people won't do the research, will believe it wholesale.
If they sell roughly one processor per person, per Intel/AMD-works-best tradeoff, it's probably working in their favor.
Why are there so many of these pseudo-science-voodoo style reviews/benchmarks floating around? They're not touching on any real or user-meaningful metrics for performance, usability, compatibility, or anything else.
Getting near-identical performance on a pre-beta OS is damn near a miracle, as most people who've been this befeore can attest.
SPTD refuses to run on anything that's a beta, it's well known, nothing new, and isn't a compatibility issue. Why is someone expecting a ring-0 SCSI emulation driver to work on Windows 7 as soon as any developer builds are out the door, anyway?
Inherent multi-core scalability, DWM/Aero, WDDM, Resource Monitor, Explorer, and the kernel have all received pretty major upgrades.
Does anyone remember NT4 to Win2K differences? XP to Vista was like that. Win2K to XP differences were fairly minor, but incremental, and very useful, and everyone loves them now...called WinXP 'the worst OS ever', and 'another WinME', on day one (and before), too. Windows 7 more represents Win2K to XP, but isn't shying away from meaningful changes.
Let's take ReadyBoost, for instance. It was introduced in Vista with a great deal of hype...which was mostly disappointing for limitations. In this release, they've enhanced it, enabled dedicating a USB flash drive to ReadyBoost specifically, allowing the use of -multiple- USB drives, allowed the use of ExFAT, allowed the use of slower drives (particularly with FAT16/ExFAT). A lot of the claimed "Windows 7 boots faster"...can already be experienced with a pair of sludge-cheap $5 2GB usb keys used in tandem with ReadyBoost. Everything seriously launches oodles faster, but Windows 7 tends to launch and boot significantly faster than Vista with a single 2GB ReadyBoost key.
Windows 7's kernel received a few meaningful enhancements, like some heap error correction. DWM takes advantage of DirectX 10.1 class hardware, has little overhead or compatibility issues now. Sound drivers have sampling rate enforced more sanely to prevent needless resampling issues. Filesystem operations tend to scale far better with more than one CPU (finally).
Aside from the pre-beta "unfinished UI" issues, I'd be happy to use the PDC build every day to replace Vista completely in a heartbeat for full-time everyday use.
I'm tired of the bloody nit-picking. We're at least 7 months away from Windows 7 RTM, can't the so-called bloggers find something more useful to do than claim imaginary faults with an OS not even close to being out yet and stir up yet more drama and controversy?
I'm just as tired of people doing it with various aspects/versions of Linux/BSD/Solaris/wine.
Slashdot, frankly, should know a bit better. A article like that isn't news, it's a troll.
I think the bottom line is that the majority of the focus on Windows 7 has been usability, with a fair amount on performance/functionality, with a very small subset focusing on 'eye candy'.
SuperBar isn't flashy. It focuses almost exclusively on UI functionality, doesn't look any different really than regular taskbar. There are a few new 'user visible' Aero features (like the 'Shake' thing?), but the real bulk of changes have been under the hood, with a surprising number of applications and utilities getting improved.
The article's kind of fear mongering is simply assinine.
It does use a modified kernel. Not necessarily overwhelming changes, but better memory management and automatically fixing heap problems are at least two significant features coming in. Like Vista, most of the kernel changes are (obviously) under the hood, but multi-core performance, filesystem/disk, and actual-application memory performance are better. DWM/Aero also uses DirectX 10.1 instead this time, and offers 2D acceleration while compositing, so...the performance hit is minimal, and it's more compatible, this time around, despite needing heftier hardware. Are most people in Vista actually using DWM/Aero for anything useful, though? It's mostly eye-candy distraction, I had it disabled for the longest time. The only reason I turned it back on? The compositing prevents simple video tearing on ATI. I don't know why it tears otherwise, but no tearing at all with DWM enabled. For people with DirectX 9/10 class hardware (DWM only used DX9 features), DWM isn't the most important thing, especially as it has imposed a fairly large performance hit to real games. Upping the requirements for purely technical reasons means that if you're upgrading to Windows 7...a lot of people simply aren't going to care about DWM, but utilizing 10.1 (SM4.1) features means that there'll be a more consistent user experience, even if you have bizarrely weak 10.1 class hardware, and that the improved experience will be the same even with video hardware 4-5 years into the future.
No matter how you slice it, though, most actual OS improvements, even the ones that make everyone gasp and say "they actually fixed THAT?", won't make even a 1% difference on modern microbenchmarks because they already lock the resources they use, and use accurate accounting methods. The only difference -between- OSes you can muster there are because of architectural differences...so you're not likely to get a different score between Win2K (5.0) and Windows 7 (6.1).
Microbenchmarks are meaningless for actual OS or real-world performance...it can't even account for actual gaming performance. They're rather specifically for testing hardware, since they're reliable for that...not how nifty the OS is, or introspecting into the differences of versions.
My tests, which -of course- mean little to anyone else at the end of the day...it improves the explorer file operation speed by 4-5 times compared to Vista SP1, but more usefully, on all regular operations, it eeks out around twice the overall read/write speed on everything from 7-zip to SDK installers from 1998. DWM can be enabled without reducing the framerate of a game by 1FPS, and not introducing even minor UI lag on -most-.
It more strictly enforces some provisions in the audio subsystem, but that prevents extra resampling, too. It's compatible with Vista drivers, and Vista programs. It's not even at Beta 1 yet, and it's already tearing Vista up in most comparisons. If they push hard for enhanced video drivers (WHQL/Windows Certified now requires passing Windows 7 tests in addition now, as I recall), which are stable by the time of retail release, it'll be absolutely nothing like the fiasco of Vista launch, and actually work on anything that doesn't get crushed under Vista already.
To screw this up, they'd actively have to sabotage themselves pretty far, without anyone noticing. It's happened before, and I'm about the last person to actually -like- Microsoft, but for the sake of actually having games play nicely on nice hardware, I'm hoping they do well for once.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if it lowers the cost, it won't especially matter much, will it? You can't entirely remove tuna from the ecosystem as a consumer, and they get a lot of mercury in their diet, pass it along. Eastern little tuna are lower in mercury according to Wikipedia, but they're specifically mapping and going to be modifying bluefin tuna.
This doesn't terribly seem like the most sensible idea to invest large amounts of time and money in if it's just going to produce more fish that you can't safely consume greater amounts of. You've got mass lead poisonings coming out of China; in 10 or 20 years, will you get mass mercury poisonings thanks to Japan and this project?
An ATM technician and/or store security guard is not by any means a law officer, and only has the right to detain you until police arrive if they witness you committing a crime (citizen's arrest), or there's evidence implicating you, not merely because they suspect something.
The notion that you have to be polite to someone like a security guard, just because they carry mace, a baton, or rarely a gun, is just asking for abuse of authority. Even in this case, they didn't ask for him to stop, or delete the photo. They immediately asked for identification so they could file a report. He had every right to refuse, and leave. Frankly, he should've left when it became clear they were trying to detain him. If they tried to physically restrain him, it would've at least made for an amusing assault case. Human nature is usually that if you give someone any minor authority, their ego becomes very large about it.
Only the top website had any useful information, and I did say I looked there. Neither post on Slashdot had any information whatsoever about what the game was, or about. All it mentions are arbitrary features/improvements to previous versions, not plot, setting, let alone any information about how it differs from the pack (aside from the features, which are admittedly paltry even compared to Icculus community improvements to Quake 3).
That must well be a lie, too, considering it was a simple copy and paste of the first two paragraphs, and then responded to with more brainless advertisement, and now this.
It's nice that you're so eager to throw insults after failing to read, though. I'm sure that makes you much different from other games. You even got the "we think everyone must read everything we publish from a long time ago because we're the best in the world and so very noteworthy" thing down. Congrats. Maybe Microsoft will buy you.
No, the underlying question was, literally, "why is a cut-and-paste advertisement here?". Since Slashdot accepts advertising space, that's where it should go.
The advertisement also had no pertinent information about the game, its plot, gameplay elements, or anything else useful.
Responding to my shock at it being a blatant cut-and-paste advertisement, with no information, with yet another advertisement, with no further useful information, is not helpful, and quite frankly, is rude. Did you/they learn how to market from this ad (probably NSFW)? THIS post has very little pertinent information either. It says it's a modified open source FPS. Even if someone saw that (I sure didn't), how many were likely to pass it off as a Blood source port (which I now understand does not actually exist), or something else for which the developers were too lazy to come up with words to DESCRIBE IT?
Personally, I care about what a game is about, what engine it's based on (mentioned in a post last month, not this one), what kind of single player features and depth of story it has, and moddability. There are a few pretty darn good games out there, a fair number of mediocre with a lot of problems, and a ton of real bombs that are more likely to make your PC beg for forgiveness for whatever it did wrong, than bring the player a good experience.
If there's a Linux port, that's icing, but obviously that can't improve the quality of the game. How is an utter lack of description helping anyone care about your game? How is an utter lack of description in the advertisement posted in response to the complaint helping anyone care about your game? How is advertising compulsively instead of responding Like An Human And Not A Bot to a legitimate point about what's going on, going to do anything other than piss off people? Seriously?
Actually...it IS a cut and paste advertisement (see first two paragraphs).
It's a good thing the website (allegedly) has more information, because the post contains absolutely no useful information if you've never heard of whatever this game is or is supposed to be.
._.
Is it bad to ask how it got on Slashdot's front page, when it's basically a cut-and-paste advertisement, rather than descriptive and useful information?
Apparently, you're some kind of android, and have to go around killing zombies.
The article apparently fails to contain any full dates, and no years.
See? This is why you always have to use four-digit years when specifying any date, even months, otherwise the 'software', *eyes original poster*, gets confused.
What kind of system administrator or average user, blindly upgrades to a major version, without considering the caveats of such an action? The general disclaimer of "everything has to be ported, this will break things" wasn't obvious enough?
Linus didn't bother to read anything, he doesn't also bother to use KDE. I don't think anyone mentioned compiling from source, or visiting conferences. Please don't tell me you're suggesting we should all follow Linus's example on everything. He's not a god, and even if he were...that'd be a pretty weak-willed excuse.
Somehow, I don't think 'open source software' is going to bend over backwards to cater to that crowd any time soon. Let alone people the people you say are apparently upgrading KDE versions at 6 years old.
Nobody held a gun to anyone's head and said "upgrade to 4.0, especially despite our warnings and disclaimers". If someone does anything with their software, it is their sole responsibility, and that happens to includes (but not be limited to) upgrading, deleting, switching to alternate software, pirating, using it for work, using it for play, or pinging FBI.gov 160000 times per day. Part of that responsibility is such a basic tenet as to understand what you're doing before you do it.
I shudder to think what would happen (and how people would complain) if KDE, GNOME, Linux, and other developers 'just did stuff' because someone it was an option, or because someone else suggested it, without first considering what it means, what the pros and cons are, if it's worth their time. I believe the proper response to not having time to 'look over things' is let me google that for you.
"The aim of the KDE project for the 4.0 release is to put the foundations in place for future innovations on the Free Desktop. The many newly introduced technologies incorporated in the KDE libraries will make it easier for developers to add rich functionality to their applications, combining and connecting different components in any way they want."
From the 4.0 beta 4 release notes. Apparently someone forgot that paragraph in the final notes, but it still stands.
Anyone who actually cared at the time, and was looking over things, playing with pre-release versions, looking over blogs, actually listening to what people were saying, it was said countless times. One KDE developer joked it was the 'eat your children' release.
Even in the KDE keynote address (at the launch event, available online), they talked about how it was more of a foundational release.
Several months later, they officially countered many of the points being put forth about KDE 4.0 and 4.1.
People are happy enough to complain, but people, including KDE developers, were talking about this for months in advance of KDE 4.0's release, and after. It's been widely expected that KDE 4.2 would be the 'proper' release for a long while.
It's not that KDE fanboys, or developers (I'm neither) have revisionist history, it's that some people who'd prefer to argue or complain after the fact, weren't paying attention or conveniently develop amnesia.
Who was expecting the KDE folks to pull a magical perfect fully functional release, all of a sudden out of their collective arses, concurrently with KDevelop, KOffice, Amarok, and other software versions, when they had to rewrite major portions to take full advantage of Qt 4.4? KDE 4.0 was internally in development for over two years. It took them a scant year to circle the wagons after a "we're eating children and releasing early to sync up with third parties and make it possible to develop against more conveniently" release to make a stable user-oriented version. Big deal. According to other posts and snarky comments on Slashdot, it's taking Windows 7 3 years (with no development libraries or early previews to target as an average developer, until Beta 1 SDK released, concurrently with Beta 1 itself) to release an annoying graphical update to Windows Vista. People tend to be 'slightly' overreacting and skewing for their own fan base there as well.
KDE 3.5.10 was released just this last August (2008). I'm not saying that 4.0 or 4.1 was a great idea, just that it was sensible from their point of view, and warned about in a copious manner. It's fairly unbelievable that people would freak out -that- badly if they weren't interested enough about the software or desktop environment to read anything surrounding the event, including previews, beta notes, statements from individual developers, color commentary from the peanut gallery, or much of anything else.
When KDE 3.0 was released, did every possible feature and customization for 2.x somehow survive immediately? People used to be more on the fence until a few releases in.
I bet that by the time KDE 4.3 is released (currently scheduled for July), it won't even matter that everyone was so eager to complain about the developer versions when the stable version (3.5) was still available, worked, was maintained, and could easily be installed side-by-side.
Even if, somehow, you were confused about the nature of KDE 4.0 or 4.1, no one was holding a gun to your head to force
KDE was adamantly clear that KDE 4.0 was not a 'user' release, but was solely for third party developers to actually get involved and start porting, and to make a difference. A pure developer preview. KDE 4.1 was stabilizing third party apps and the platform. KDE 4.2 is the first user-centric general use release for 4.x. It's not their fault that apparently many users and distributors didn't listen or care.
It's not as if they KDE left people without working 3.5, either. KDE 3.5.9 and 3.5.10 both brought bug fixes and improvements. "We're having an unstable/preview release, deal with it, the people who care about it will know about it" used to be common in the open source world.
It tends to lean towards better results if people can get ahold of things ahead of a 'stable' release, bazaar style, so bug fixes can be made, design issues can be settled, before it becomes a 'user' release.
If they were allowed to persist and fester, any such issues outstanding would affect people using the software version for years to come (and longer if backwards compatibility mandates are taken into account).
I'm not trying to be pointed about it, but flaws and bugs creeping in and staying there more or less defines the Windows experience. It's okay if you have an app from 10 years ago you can't recompile (and hopefully still works on current video drivers/hardware), it's not so good if all of the source is available, and bad design choices can cause serious problems in writing and maintaining software.
Just because everyone jumped the gun and wanted KDE 4.0 to be perfect and immediately available even while KDE 3.5 maintenance was ongoing, was pretty much fooling themselves. GNOME seems to maintain a large number of projects under its umbrella, and when a release is made, everything's updated in line. KDE has a lot of major third party apps which required a significant amount of porting and rewriting to move from Qt 3.3 and KDE 3.5. Being able to shake down the libraries, and applications mean that the final release products tend to 'just work'. Less vendor patches needed just to clean things up.
The .0 preview, .1 stabilization, .2 starts as stable tends to mirror GCC's typical schedule in this case, however, and GCC's used for everything, took two years to get to the point where most things would finally touch it and ditch GCC 3.4.
A year's not long when you consider the entire KDE ecosystem has had time to work on things and most projects are releasing near-concurrently with full support.
KDE 4.0, and to a lesser degree 4.1, lacked quite a few nice customization features that KDE has had for the longest time. KDE 4.2 refixes the taskbar configuration...so you can actually do something useful with it again.
KDE 4.0 and 4.1 are nowhere near as functional or customizable as 3.5, 4.2 restores virtually all of it as well as adding compelling new standard/addon features.
4.0 was supposedly 'just a developer preview', and I personally think they dropped the ball on 4.1. Everyone was expecting it to just be 'ready'.
Though, one begs the question.
If Linus is an advanced user, why was he pressured to upgrade from 3.5 to 4.x in the first place? Couldn't he have just kept using 3.5 if that's what he preferred, rather than the GNOME which he hated?
I know the 'user friendly' distros tend to be a bit aggressive about pre-planned obsolescence, but that's little excuse not to find a supported and proper way to use the software and specific versions you prefer.
I did say quite a bit that it was more of a driver parity issue than anything else.
The 9600 is faster than 8600. I meant that the price point of $85 was for the 'higher quality' 8600s. $85 was also a happy price point for decent 8600GTs over the holiday. Pre-overclocked, better fans, other things that would supposedly warrant a few dollars extra, compared to the $45-60 'standard' 8600GTs.
The 3870 has better specs, obviously. Specs don't mean much if the driver doesn't take advantage. On Nvidia drivers, some driver versions have been better for some hardware than others, newer hardware can take a few versions for both Nvidia and ATI to exploit the hardware better.
Rivatuner can present the GPU load statistics (as represented by the internal performance counters on the ATI GPU) along with framerate and temeprature via its statistics monitoring, with an overlay similar to FRAPS so you can see it while you play. OpenGL tended to squarely hit into 30% or less range unless blatantly simple. Various games, including GTA4, rarely moved above 50-55%, just so happened to get same or slightly better framerate on the 8600 (usually 2-4 times faster on the 9600). Things that only used basic shading or none at all (including emulators) tended to represent the highest percentage of load on the 3870 (and highest actual performance).
The games where GPU load was low, also happened to be where atrocious unplayable performance was overwhelmingly likely to occur.
The 8600GT didn't beat the 3870 in everything. Most obviously, in games that took better advantage of 512MB, the 256MB on the 8600GT limited it. There was a rather distinct trend across a wide variety of games made since 2004 or so (I play around with a lot of things) that the 8600GT would usually get the same framerate, in some cases better. Quality-wise, the 3870 would usually have minimum framerates that sagged lower and usually there'd be a significant lag in games, particularly with vsync+triple buffer enabled (a necessity with LCD).
Half Life 2 (heck, the 8600GT got ~180 frames on Ep2 with max settings, including AA 4x, 3870 got ~40), GTA 4, Far Cry 2, Crysis, Crysis Warhead, Brothers in Arms: Hell's Highway, Fallout 3, San Andreas, Mercenaries 2, No One Lives Forever, Oblivion, UT2004, World of Warcraft, Tabula Rasa, among others.
People say 'specs specs specs', but considering a single driver revision can change performance for a particular game for 15% or more, drivers matter a great deal. You could have a really fast car with high horsepower and a novice driver...who crashes it, or has to drive slower to keep it on the road, compared to a Ford Focus, which they drive more easily and confidently, and rack up a higher average speed.
The press tends to use static demos and benchmarks. A benchmark in a 'real game' doesn't much matter if it uses a prescripted static environment which doesn't change and is specifically designed to provide higher framerates than is at all representative of the actual game proper. Very few sites who publish reviews do so in actual Real World game conditions, where they're actually playing in a meaningful circuit and record detailed framerate statistics per second to file. The 3870 scores pretty well on nearly every benchmark, including OpenGL ones. It's only a 'few hundred' points shy of the 9600GT replacement on 3DMark, despite there being no similarity in any game I've yet found. Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks.
The performance counters only specify what percentage of GPU resource is being used, not how exactly they're defined, and don't relate how different drivers affect it. Hardware counts, how well the drivers can actually spread the load around would generally make the load percentage (and performance) go up. Presumably, the counters count based on how many shaders/render/texture pipelines are being utilized, or some subset thereof, though certainly shaders are being counted.
If you're getting 15 laggy frames per second on a game that should be pushing as hard as the graphic
I've heard NForce motherboards tend to have a fair number of compatibility problems. Don't be so quick to blame the Geforce (VGA) drivers or the Geforce card.
'Anything from overclocking options to simple fan speed adjustments' are handled by the NTune options, not the Nvidia geforce options. It integrates into the same control panel, but they're different things. There are also usually enough quirks with NTune itself to prefer relying on Rivatuner (driver overclock, hardware direct fan speed control) if you're going to tweak those. It has nothing to do with the drivers or their quality, as they're not a part of the drivers.
Have you tried configuring things NOT in an SLI setup to narrow down the diagnosis of a root cause?
8600GT usually bests the 3870 for a similar price. Recently the 9600GT was priced similarly to the faster/better 8600GTs at ~$85.
The 8600GT can slightly edge out in a variety of games (including GTA4), whereas the 3870's higher processing power can beat it in a few things that don't use complex shaders at all. The 9600GT utterly demolishes both in virtually everything, was within 10-15% of the 9800 GT, at $60 cheaper. Both are slightly more expensive with the big sales season over, though I'm sure there'll be more deals soon.
The 3870 supposedly has better hardware than both, but basically all recent drivers (since at least 8.8) appear to botch the GPU load (with fixed clock speeds mind, no power throttling) so that most games only use 30-50% of the GPU's capacity. Obviously the 3870 has more a great many more shaders, but they're simply not getting utilized properly.
It's a bad feeling when you get a low price on a decent 3870 GDDR4, only to have to have your older 8600 consistently performing better and providing superior gameplay experience.
Nvidia's GTX 295 was around 1.7 teraflops I believe, while the (similarly priced) 4870X2 is 2.4. The 'mere' 295 supposedly beats the 4870X2 by 15% average.
The difference is? Nvidia always has pretty good drivers. ATI struggles to allow games to take >50% advantage of even the lowly 3870 (as measured by the card's own performance counters)...let alone a 2.4 tflop card...let alone a massive array of 4870s.
Plus, wouldn't a 1000 GPU 4870 cloud...only allow some 1000 users some fractional percentage of one 4870 capped by latency and other overhead?
Or...are we talking about providing a larger number of mobile devices the equivalent capabilities and speed of 1999's Geforce 256?
Either way...I don't think it'll catch on, and will be a huge money sink for AMD when it needs to be fixing its processor and video card issues for the average, real consumers who are losing faith in AMD's ability to provide reasonable and usefully competitive products.
Spore and Dead Space are both fairly conventional when broken down. Dead Space gives a fairly interesting UI, but by-the-numbers story, standard-but-laggier-than-usual graphics, uninspired audio. Spore is a few minigames that have no real depth, and even the developers admit they're just like stripped down, simplistic versions of other EA/Maxis classics. Also, both heavily pirated as far as the news goes. :b I hope Mirror's Edge is good, but you can reasonably guarantee now that if it's an EA game (Mercenaries 2 also sadly comes to mind), it's surprisingly conventional no matter how much hype is applied, expensive, and DRM-laden.
And Mirror's Edge isn't out yet for PC. We're talking about PCs on a Windows/Mac/Linux story, yes?
Ok, so being a creep is a crime now? Half the readership of Slashdot might be at risk !!!
The notable point from Wikipedia is: "and "fourteen digital photographs of actual children engaging in sexually explicit conduct".
Hence, creep.
They shouldn't have charged him or added on time for Fake Things, is what I said.
They probably should charge him for Actual Things.
The whole thing is slightly misleading in that the Slashdot story implies that he was only charged for computer-generated images, when he wasn't. He probably got extra time for the computer-generated images. He probably got extra time for the fact that he was on parole at the time for 'unspecified sexual offenses'. It must've been pretty serious if he was still on parole over ten years later.
Does half of Slashdot have sexually explicit Actual Kiddy Porn[tm] in their possession? Are they registered sex offenders reoffending?
Apparently, they're not even prosecuting the artists, they're prosecuting the people who have access to what the artists draw.
Whorley is a creep. He also had real pornographic images, but he was charged equally over having according to the charges is purely computer-generated, fabricated imagery.
Artist/computer-generated imagery which is produced (usually) in Japan, and depicts no actual person, harms no person, slights no person.
I don't mind predators being taken off the streets, but you start limiting what drawings someone can look at...particularly when the drawings aren't based on actual people...that gets pretty freaking insane.
A recent study suggests that there are too many recent studies.
Eh. Whatever happened to multiple studies, or recurring studies over a longer period of time?
All you ever hear these days is 'a recent study', as if the mere fact that one group of researchers came up with it, it's golden fact.
Mind, it's a group of researchers...basically saying that group-research mentality is where it's at and that individual pioneers are all but over. Isn't that the fox guarding the hen house? ^^;
A great many studies are also done by fringe researchers, or paid for/sponsored by companies. If any news source runs with it, there often seems to be little (if any) fact checking done to make sure it's legit, and we never hear about/keep tabs on who is behind the studies. So you always here the 'a recent study suggests' part, but you never hear everyone else in the scientific/research community laughing or ignoring it because it's a joke.
Of course research groups would find out that research groups are great at research. Would Stephen Hawking find that Stephen Hawking is great at theoretical cosmology research?
Always take studies with a side of common sense and skepticism, particularly if there's not a fair mountain of corroboration.
Gamers will always game. Some gamers would just become game makers, some would simply keep playing and/or modding existing games, some would pretend they're a character in a game and start trying to act out scenes of Metroid involving thousands of leeches.
In all seriousness, though. The "game industry" isn't quite the same as many others. If one major car maker suddenly can't produce vehicles, you start seeing shortages. In games and software, if someone goes under, there's always someone there to happily replace them, and you have a few giants in the game industry, but no one even has close to a monopoly.
And the industry is quick to complain that everyone pirates, about used game sales, etc...but the case has always been with modern games (after 1998 or so?), the actually high quality games don't get pirated nearly as much, and if someone's selling a used copy (which only seems to be viable at all with awful consoles anymore), why shouldn't someone be able to buy it second-hand? If your game's worth the disc its printed on, more people will simply keep it indefinitely, especially the older gamers, such as those who still would prefer to hang onto 16-bit games (if only there were enough space).
I still have my disc for UT99, one of the few games I've ever bought where I felt the price vs content/lifespan was justified.
If virtually every game out there is just terrible, myred in controversy (usually), laden with DRM, and provides 4-10 hours of average game play for $60...companies used to develop game projects, in no small part, because there was a compelling story to tell and designers and developers could come up with good and interesting ideas.
Now, every game out there is like clicking on a link and being rickrolled...only you had to pay through the nose for the dupe. Games are very personal to the gamer. If basically every last developer and publisher has a completely tarnished reputation and produces crap that's short and buggy and trash and won't even run on most decent computers out there due to inadaquete testing, is it any wonder that people'd rather spend money on...damn near anything else these days? If someone put together a company with an absolute stirling reputation for quality, quantity, respecting the customer(such as need for patches [patching because they simply weren't finished, and then not fixing bugs...doesn't count], decent support and responsiveness to support inquiries), and setting a fair price for what you get...they could sell a game for $60, and people'd pay happily knowing they could play it for years, and years, and it'd stay interesting (Morrowind and Oblivion are rather decent examples of this, flawed though they may be).
Coincidentally, I believe most people share the same sentiment about Lightning Guns in general.
Funny, people who have done it disagree.
It seems like AMD 'might' just be slightly desperate to try to psychologically compete now, if they can't compete with real numbers. Even their 9850 Phenom, 2.5Ghz, gets an average of less than half the performance in many benchmarks and many reviews, compared to the classic 2.4Ghz Q6600. The revision stepping that fixed the 'TLB errata' in hardware, rather than the 'slow software workaround' saw...no performance improvement clock for clock? And they use a -lot- more power.
But all AMD really has to do is try to compete in 'the hearts and minds' of the consumer, like Intel used to try to do with the Pentium 4/D revisions (when I cheerily went with a budget Athlon 64+ S939).
If they say "we're better, faster, more power efficient!", and some people won't do the research, will believe it wholesale.
If they sell roughly one processor per person, per Intel/AMD-works-best tradeoff, it's probably working in their favor.
Why are there so many of these pseudo-science-voodoo style reviews/benchmarks floating around? They're not touching on any real or user-meaningful metrics for performance, usability, compatibility, or anything else.
Getting near-identical performance on a pre-beta OS is damn near a miracle, as most people who've been this befeore can attest.
SPTD refuses to run on anything that's a beta, it's well known, nothing new, and isn't a compatibility issue. Why is someone expecting a ring-0 SCSI emulation driver to work on Windows 7 as soon as any developer builds are out the door, anyway?
Inherent multi-core scalability, DWM/Aero, WDDM, Resource Monitor, Explorer, and the kernel have all received pretty major upgrades.
Does anyone remember NT4 to Win2K differences? XP to Vista was like that. Win2K to XP differences were fairly minor, but incremental, and very useful, and everyone loves them now...called WinXP 'the worst OS ever', and 'another WinME', on day one (and before), too. Windows 7 more represents Win2K to XP, but isn't shying away from meaningful changes.
Let's take ReadyBoost, for instance. It was introduced in Vista with a great deal of hype...which was mostly disappointing for limitations. In this release, they've enhanced it, enabled dedicating a USB flash drive to ReadyBoost specifically, allowing the use of -multiple- USB drives, allowed the use of ExFAT, allowed the use of slower drives (particularly with FAT16/ExFAT). A lot of the claimed "Windows 7 boots faster"...can already be experienced with a pair of sludge-cheap $5 2GB usb keys used in tandem with ReadyBoost. Everything seriously launches oodles faster, but Windows 7 tends to launch and boot significantly faster than Vista with a single 2GB ReadyBoost key.
Windows 7's kernel received a few meaningful enhancements, like some heap error correction. DWM takes advantage of DirectX 10.1 class hardware, has little overhead or compatibility issues now. Sound drivers have sampling rate enforced more sanely to prevent needless resampling issues. Filesystem operations tend to scale far better with more than one CPU (finally).
Aside from the pre-beta "unfinished UI" issues, I'd be happy to use the PDC build every day to replace Vista completely in a heartbeat for full-time everyday use.
I'm tired of the bloody nit-picking. We're at least 7 months away from Windows 7 RTM, can't the so-called bloggers find something more useful to do than claim imaginary faults with an OS not even close to being out yet and stir up yet more drama and controversy?
I'm just as tired of people doing it with various aspects/versions of Linux/BSD/Solaris/wine.
Slashdot, frankly, should know a bit better. A article like that isn't news, it's a troll.
I think the bottom line is that the majority of the focus on Windows 7 has been usability, with a fair amount on performance/functionality, with a very small subset focusing on 'eye candy'.
SuperBar isn't flashy. It focuses almost exclusively on UI functionality, doesn't look any different really than regular taskbar. There are a few new 'user visible' Aero features (like the 'Shake' thing?), but the real bulk of changes have been under the hood, with a surprising number of applications and utilities getting improved.
The article's kind of fear mongering is simply assinine.
It does use a modified kernel. Not necessarily overwhelming changes, but better memory management and automatically fixing heap problems are at least two significant features coming in. Like Vista, most of the kernel changes are (obviously) under the hood, but multi-core performance, filesystem/disk, and actual-application memory performance are better. DWM/Aero also uses DirectX 10.1 instead this time, and offers 2D acceleration while compositing, so...the performance hit is minimal, and it's more compatible, this time around, despite needing heftier hardware. Are most people in Vista actually using DWM/Aero for anything useful, though? It's mostly eye-candy distraction, I had it disabled for the longest time. The only reason I turned it back on? The compositing prevents simple video tearing on ATI. I don't know why it tears otherwise, but no tearing at all with DWM enabled. For people with DirectX 9/10 class hardware (DWM only used DX9 features), DWM isn't the most important thing, especially as it has imposed a fairly large performance hit to real games. Upping the requirements for purely technical reasons means that if you're upgrading to Windows 7...a lot of people simply aren't going to care about DWM, but utilizing 10.1 (SM4.1) features means that there'll be a more consistent user experience, even if you have bizarrely weak 10.1 class hardware, and that the improved experience will be the same even with video hardware 4-5 years into the future.
No matter how you slice it, though, most actual OS improvements, even the ones that make everyone gasp and say "they actually fixed THAT?", won't make even a 1% difference on modern microbenchmarks because they already lock the resources they use, and use accurate accounting methods. The only difference -between- OSes you can muster there are because of architectural differences...so you're not likely to get a different score between Win2K (5.0) and Windows 7 (6.1).
Microbenchmarks are meaningless for actual OS or real-world performance...it can't even account for actual gaming performance. They're rather specifically for testing hardware, since they're reliable for that...not how nifty the OS is, or introspecting into the differences of versions.
My tests, which -of course- mean little to anyone else at the end of the day...it improves the explorer file operation speed by 4-5 times compared to Vista SP1, but more usefully, on all regular operations, it eeks out around twice the overall read/write speed on everything from 7-zip to SDK installers from 1998. DWM can be enabled without reducing the framerate of a game by 1FPS, and not introducing even minor UI lag on -most-.
It more strictly enforces some provisions in the audio subsystem, but that prevents extra resampling, too. It's compatible with Vista drivers, and Vista programs. It's not even at Beta 1 yet, and it's already tearing Vista up in most comparisons. If they push hard for enhanced video drivers (WHQL/Windows Certified now requires passing Windows 7 tests in addition now, as I recall), which are stable by the time of retail release, it'll be absolutely nothing like the fiasco of Vista launch, and actually work on anything that doesn't get crushed under Vista already.
To screw this up, they'd actively have to sabotage themselves pretty far, without anyone noticing. It's happened before, and I'm about the last person to actually -like- Microsoft, but for the sake of actually having games play nicely on nice hardware, I'm hoping they do well for once.