But hasn't 32bpp been a standard color depth for quite some time now? Hell, by very first "powerful" graphics card (ATI Rage series with a whopping 4MB of RAM on it) had an option for 32 bit color depth up to 1024*768, as I recall.
So, why exactly is 30-bit depth news?
No, it's known as "Clark's Law". Actually, the third of three, but the best-known and most frequently cited. Asimov's got the Three Laws Of Robotics to his credit.
While I realize your intent was to be humorous, I still feel the need to point out that if you just want to play the bloody game, clicking next five or six times is a lot less hassle than playing around with ten or twenty dependencies (like I had to when I installed Q3A on my Linux machine). And as for required packages... as others have mentioned later in this thread, it's exceedingly rare these days for a game to require anything additional to be installed. Stuff as far back as the mid 1990s has come with directx.
You are right about vista... but I said the same thing about XP back when it was still new. Win2k had much less cruft, and there was no compelling reason to upgrade. Given enough time, I expect the kinks to be worked out. Just not anytime soon.
Windows may not be easy to use, but when you use it, it is easier to get things done. Playing a game, for example. Windows, you put disc in, installer runs, you play game. Linux... well, if it's a native game (are there any, anymore?), you may or may not have to download a patch, compile binaries, etc. If you're trying to play a windows game in WINE or something exotic like that... good luck.
Windows and OS X are the OSs for people trying to accomplish a specific task. If you need to do something and not screw around trying to make it work, they're the better choice. That's what some people (myself included, at times) mean when they say "easier to use".
Do you/they use it more or less than 10hrs/week? That seems to be the threshold amount of use that typically sees issues. Not that that's the only problem. Another friend had his simply fail to power on one day. MS's QA has gone straight to hell these days... not that it was ever that great.
I'm not suggesting that it's inevitable, just that for something that costs $350 (and a lot of people I know that are having problems bought at launch... when they were $500 or more) I think that a 60% or so chance of failure is unacceptable. And that it's the only next-gen console to have well-know reliability issues is one more reason people have to favor the PS3.
This of course in addition to the inherent hardware unreliability of the Xbox 360. I only know one person who hasn't had one give the red lights of death at least once, and one of them actually had their console die on them three times.
Much as we all love to hate on Sony for being evil, the PS3 has proven itself more reliable than the Xbox 360, and as such is an additional point as big as the choice of HD video format they picked to support.
Sadly, this is exactly the case. I saw something very similar happen to my paternal grandparents (who were never in the best of health) as they reached the last few years of their lives, and they were reasonably prepared.
It may be kind of depressing to think about, and people often think that I'm kidding when I say that if I ever get sick, I plan to run up massive debt, and then die. I just think that's the only way to deal with the U.S. "health care" system as it is... just don't get sick, because if you do, you're screwed. Game over.
Inquiring minds want to know... to run this thing, do they have an on-premises nuclear reactor, or just an obscenely high electric bill? TFA is short on details in that department.
I know it's not actually using that full rated 300 terawatts ("300 times the capacity of the entire U.S. electricity grid") in such incredibly short bursts, but nonetheless, it's still got to eat a lot of juice.
The article yesterday about electronics seizure at US airports bought out a lot of snotty, holier-than-thou trolls of European origin eager to mock the overly paranoid US airport "security" force.
I hope this current news item forces these folks to realize that this isn't just a US problem, it's a global problem with paranoia. And until there's global political climate change, flying internationally is just going to become more and more of a hassle for everyone.
A single-filament of fiber can be a lot thinner than a CAT5/CAT5E cable. In fact, it's closer to on par with one of the single strands of copper in an Ethernet cable. The fiber Verizon ran to my home (I have FiOS) is approximately 1/4th of the size, and that carries TV, phone, and 50/5Mb internet access. I don't see a reason why we could halve that for shorter-distance runs, like within a home.
What would be really neat would be if we could merge and cut ends of strands at will, which has potential to be possible if plastic fiber becomes more common. Imagine putting the ends of two strands into a little box, and it melts and melds them together. I saw a demonstration of a similar concept years ago, involving plastic pipes being melded together in such a fashion, with the end result being completely seamless. You can't do that with the high temperatures required to melt glass, but it's entirely possible with plastic (ever use a hot glue gun?).
Plastic can be organically produced from corn and citrus oil, possibly even other sources. That makes it at least a potentially renewable resource. Copper is a finite one, there's only so much of it to dig up out of the ground.
If we recycled it better than we do now, it wouldn't be as a big a concern... but I know several people who throw away the last 60 or so feet on a 1000' spool of CAT5 because they're too lazy to be bothered to use it.
Back when I had a working scanner / OCR setup, I spent a lot of time trying to reverse-engineer the barcodes on coupons. You might be surprised how lenient cashiers are with those things these days... even after a former co-worker of mine printed up (and handed out) about 1,200 self-made "Free 20oz Coke Product" coupons.
With internet-printable coupons more popular than ever, I wonder how long it'll be before we start seeing larger-scale scams involving reverse-engineered "custom coupons"?
Since the recent NYS minimum wage raise, pretty much anyone working in fast food (and grocery, and some retail) makes minimum wage, or at best, a dollar or two more.
There's a lot of people like myself that just are victims or circumstance. Some of us even have to work two (or more) jobs just to make ends meet.
New cars wit diesel engines are effectively banned (anything under commercial / school bus sized, that is) in NY state. Used cars are another story.
Interestingly enough, all school buses continue to run on it. Including the fleet of brand-new ones I've started to see rolling out.
The law doesn't limit used cars and trucks, nor does it limit registering a new one in another state and then transferring the registration to NY. But banning registration of new "small" diesel vehicles does strike me as rather stupid. Oh well, that's just NY for you. Shoot themselves in the collective foot.
So, does this mean that if I own a Zune, that I'm then entitled to pirate enough music to fill it? And if not that much, then where do they intend to draw the line? After all, if I've already effectively paid for the lost profits from pirated material, why would I want to pay twice?
Your co-workers let you stay with them? You must have been quite close... even my friends didn't let me stay with them when I was thrown out of my parents' house when I turned 21.
As for public transit... it's really not an option where I live. Walking over a mile before and after work in tempratures that often go as low as -10F this time of year isn't accpetable. It's downright inhumane, in fact. In this part of NYC, you either own a car, or severely curtail your ability to work.
Where do you live where you can find a even a studio for $300/mo? I pay $380 for a rather small one.
I work no less than a full 40 hours per week, and sleep 18+ hours every single day off to make up for the massive expenditure of energy I end up putting into my job. Every little bit of extra money I get ends up going to pay for something I don't need but am forced to have (car insurance) or something that I need that breaks (stove, microwave, car parts)... and I've overdrafted my bank account in the past to buy a loaf of bread.
Work is misery that keeps you from starving, and a roof over your head. Any other definition is wishful thinking.
The folks behind Trillian seem to do a pretty bang-up job of reverse-engineeering those specs.
Maybe it's just me, but I expect more from OSS than just adequacy. There's such great potnetial, and so seldom is anything done with it except losing interest in the project a year or so after it begins.
It looks like Trillian is one of those cases where the closed-source app is the superior to the open-source alternitive. Sometimes, it happens.
Slashdot Mirror
But hasn't 32bpp been a standard color depth for quite some time now? Hell, by very first "powerful" graphics card (ATI Rage series with a whopping 4MB of RAM on it) had an option for 32 bit color depth up to 1024*768, as I recall. So, why exactly is 30-bit depth news?
Will it suck as hard as St. Anger?
No, it's known as "Clark's Law". Actually, the third of three, but the best-known and most frequently cited. Asimov's got the Three Laws Of Robotics to his credit.
While I realize your intent was to be humorous, I still feel the need to point out that if you just want to play the bloody game, clicking next five or six times is a lot less hassle than playing around with ten or twenty dependencies (like I had to when I installed Q3A on my Linux machine). And as for required packages... as others have mentioned later in this thread, it's exceedingly rare these days for a game to require anything additional to be installed. Stuff as far back as the mid 1990s has come with directx.
You are right about vista... but I said the same thing about XP back when it was still new. Win2k had much less cruft, and there was no compelling reason to upgrade. Given enough time, I expect the kinks to be worked out. Just not anytime soon.
Windows may not be easy to use, but when you use it, it is easier to get things done. Playing a game, for example. Windows, you put disc in, installer runs, you play game. Linux... well, if it's a native game (are there any, anymore?), you may or may not have to download a patch, compile binaries, etc. If you're trying to play a windows game in WINE or something exotic like that... good luck.
Windows and OS X are the OSs for people trying to accomplish a specific task. If you need to do something and not screw around trying to make it work, they're the better choice. That's what some people (myself included, at times) mean when they say "easier to use".
Do you/they use it more or less than 10hrs/week? That seems to be the threshold amount of use that typically sees issues. Not that that's the only problem. Another friend had his simply fail to power on one day. MS's QA has gone straight to hell these days... not that it was ever that great.
I'm not suggesting that it's inevitable, just that for something that costs $350 (and a lot of people I know that are having problems bought at launch... when they were $500 or more) I think that a 60% or so chance of failure is unacceptable. And that it's the only next-gen console to have well-know reliability issues is one more reason people have to favor the PS3.
This of course in addition to the inherent hardware unreliability of the Xbox 360. I only know one person who hasn't had one give the red lights of death at least once, and one of them actually had their console die on them three times.
Much as we all love to hate on Sony for being evil, the PS3 has proven itself more reliable than the Xbox 360, and as such is an additional point as big as the choice of HD video format they picked to support.
Sadly, this is exactly the case. I saw something very similar happen to my paternal grandparents (who were never in the best of health) as they reached the last few years of their lives, and they were reasonably prepared.
It may be kind of depressing to think about, and people often think that I'm kidding when I say that if I ever get sick, I plan to run up massive debt, and then die. I just think that's the only way to deal with the U.S. "health care" system as it is... just don't get sick, because if you do, you're screwed. Game over.
Actually, this sort of development might well lead to advances in fusion power, given time.
So it's not really ALL bad.
Inquiring minds want to know... to run this thing, do they have an on-premises nuclear reactor, or just an obscenely high electric bill? TFA is short on details in that department.
I know it's not actually using that full rated 300 terawatts ("300 times the capacity of the entire U.S. electricity grid") in such incredibly short bursts, but nonetheless, it's still got to eat a lot of juice.
The article yesterday about electronics seizure at US airports bought out a lot of snotty, holier-than-thou trolls of European origin eager to mock the overly paranoid US airport "security" force.
I hope this current news item forces these folks to realize that this isn't just a US problem, it's a global problem with paranoia. And until there's global political climate change, flying internationally is just going to become more and more of a hassle for everyone.
A single-filament of fiber can be a lot thinner than a CAT5/CAT5E cable. In fact, it's closer to on par with one of the single strands of copper in an Ethernet cable. The fiber Verizon ran to my home (I have FiOS) is approximately 1/4th of the size, and that carries TV, phone, and 50/5Mb internet access. I don't see a reason why we could halve that for shorter-distance runs, like within a home.
What would be really neat would be if we could merge and cut ends of strands at will, which has potential to be possible if plastic fiber becomes more common. Imagine putting the ends of two strands into a little box, and it melts and melds them together. I saw a demonstration of a similar concept years ago, involving plastic pipes being melded together in such a fashion, with the end result being completely seamless. You can't do that with the high temperatures required to melt glass, but it's entirely possible with plastic (ever use a hot glue gun?).
Plastic can be organically produced from corn and citrus oil, possibly even other sources. That makes it at least a potentially renewable resource. Copper is a finite one, there's only so much of it to dig up out of the ground.
If we recycled it better than we do now, it wouldn't be as a big a concern... but I know several people who throw away the last 60 or so feet on a 1000' spool of CAT5 because they're too lazy to be bothered to use it.
Put bluntly, price. And I think it would be easy to extend it to gigabit at some point, with higher-grade plastics.
Copper is much more expensive than plastic, and 8-wire CAT5 cabling is a lot harder to run than a plastic filament, to boot.
I find it a bit surprising that no one's yet mentioned the free 3of9 barcode font .
Back when I had a working scanner / OCR setup, I spent a lot of time trying to reverse-engineer the barcodes on coupons. You might be surprised how lenient cashiers are with those things these days... even after a former co-worker of mine printed up (and handed out) about 1,200 self-made "Free 20oz Coke Product" coupons.
With internet-printable coupons more popular than ever, I wonder how long it'll be before we start seeing larger-scale scams involving reverse-engineered "custom coupons"?
One word: airlock.
Since the recent NYS minimum wage raise, pretty much anyone working in fast food (and grocery, and some retail) makes minimum wage, or at best, a dollar or two more. There's a lot of people like myself that just are victims or circumstance. Some of us even have to work two (or more) jobs just to make ends meet.
New cars wit diesel engines are effectively banned (anything under commercial / school bus sized, that is) in NY state. Used cars are another story. Interestingly enough, all school buses continue to run on it. Including the fleet of brand-new ones I've started to see rolling out. The law doesn't limit used cars and trucks, nor does it limit registering a new one in another state and then transferring the registration to NY. But banning registration of new "small" diesel vehicles does strike me as rather stupid. Oh well, that's just NY for you. Shoot themselves in the collective foot.
So, does this mean that if I own a Zune, that I'm then entitled to pirate enough music to fill it? And if not that much, then where do they intend to draw the line? After all, if I've already effectively paid for the lost profits from pirated material, why would I want to pay twice?
Perhaps we can lay the blame on George Lucas? That was my first thought when I saw the title...
Your co-workers let you stay with them? You must have been quite close... even my friends didn't let me stay with them when I was thrown out of my parents' house when I turned 21.
As for public transit... it's really not an option where I live. Walking over a mile before and after work in tempratures that often go as low as -10F this time of year isn't accpetable. It's downright inhumane, in fact. In this part of NYC, you either own a car, or severely curtail your ability to work.
Where do you live where you can find a even a studio for $300/mo? I pay $380 for a rather small one.
I work no less than a full 40 hours per week, and sleep 18+ hours every single day off to make up for the massive expenditure of energy I end up putting into my job. Every little bit of extra money I get ends up going to pay for something I don't need but am forced to have (car insurance) or something that I need that breaks (stove, microwave, car parts)... and I've overdrafted my bank account in the past to buy a loaf of bread.
Work is misery that keeps you from starving, and a roof over your head. Any other definition is wishful thinking.
Or for that matter, being able to eat and have a roof over your head.
You're lucky... we have both of those in spades here (god, I hate living in NY).
The folks behind Trillian seem to do a pretty bang-up job of reverse-engineeering those specs.
Maybe it's just me, but I expect more from OSS than just adequacy. There's such great potnetial, and so seldom is anything done with it except losing interest in the project a year or so after it begins.
It looks like Trillian is one of those cases where the closed-source app is the superior to the open-source alternitive. Sometimes, it happens.