If it wasn't for that 2 digit user number I'd think MS marketting shill. Were you a regular UT PC gamer and how does the Xbox compare/improve on the experience? I'm really interested.
Uh-huh. Seeing as DVD is well less than 800x600, please post back and tell us what your using as a monitor for the Xbox. Or is your computer still on 12" amber?
In the posts I've read prior to yours, I haven't read one that qualifies as outright hating the Xbox. The real debate has centered on its value vs. a PC or other consoles for gaming. In fact I would say the opposite is true, there have been far more one-sided Xbox cheerleader posts than naysayers and it's that attitude which is being slagged.
It certainly does. It fills arenas with pre-pubescent dorks singing, playing the radio, hurling racial slurs and generally ruining the game. HalfLife rolled this in a while ago. I disabled it two days later.
I know it is hard to put away the anti-microsoft bias for just a few minutes
The original post didn't use the word Microsoft anywhere, it compared consoles to PCs as gaming platforms.
Cost: For high resolutions a PC is still much cheaper than an Xbox+HDTV for gaming, with no additional monthly charges for being online. The PC also has a lot more uses including multimedia. Resolution: PCs and PC game resolutions are increasing monthly and HDTV won't for a long time. Even old games are being upgraded, the last HalfLife patch or two bumped its max to 1600x1200. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this midrange PC resolution still well beyond the range of current hi def TVs (or at least any that don't cost like a small car)? Lag: It's not uncommon for game servers to have a minimum ping requirement and some will automically boot laggers. In any case, as regular gamers know, broadband can have as high or higher ping than modem players. It all depends on network latencies and distance to the server. Kicking out the modem users is no guarantee that some players won't lag the server. Cheats: Granted, at least not yet. I don't expect it will take too long.
No need to worry about drivers, compatibilty, or anything else of the sort.
In years of gaming I have never had to upgrade a driver to make a new game work. Ever.
I know the reason why most of my friends work with MS windows and the Mac OS... there is a uniform user interface....
So most (?) of your friends installed and ran different linux desktop environments and, having that expertise plus being accustomed to jumping between the two completely different desktop architectures of MS and Apple, stumbled at Gnome or KDE? What an unusual combination of mental aptitudes.
It is so sad that many in the linux community are so obsessed with "eye candy"....
Like Fluxbox, Ion, Blackbox, IceWm etc., etc., etc., which have less eye candy than XP? You basically describe Enlightenment, most WM's are no more eye-candy than OS-X. Or is anything beyond the official Blue & Grey considered eye candy? Is XP's new desktop look eye candy as well?
..... and the latest experimental GUI.
Because it's a scientific fact that experimentation is bad. Microsoft wrote the bible on desktop UI's with Windows 95 and have stuck religiously to it since then. The fact that Apple uses a different one should be considered a Catholic vs. Protestant sort of thing, not like those dirty linux pagans. What a relief, we have the perfect desktop and there's no reason to think otherwise until Microsoft tells us to. Thanks for lifting that burden from developers.
I don't have to sit there and think... gee do I have widget set X with static libraries Y and did I make the right offerings to the gods of LINUX...
You finally got one right, with many distros you don't. Gentoo is a perfect example. ("..gods of LINUX"? Mark of the Troll.) Oh, and quit posting as AC and self moderating.
...First, they'll have to figure out the cost of changeover and supporting Linux, FreeBSD, etc.
It should be emphasized whenever the cost of changeover is discussed that it only affects the short term. It's a one-time cost with a minimal expenditure afterwards for potentially training new users. The cost of using commercial closed software is permanent and, as history clearly demonstrates, spiralling ever higher with decreasing rights for the consumer.
As more industry moves to free alternatives the cost of support will naturally come down with familiarity. I really don't think all those IT people managing linux servers will have too much trouble extending their expertise to desktops.
RTCW plays better in Linux. Look for the Loki installer. The Windows UI is more mature, however if you don't like that paradigm, its one-size-fits-all design means you're screwed. Normally Fluxbox is my desktop, today I'm playing with Ion to find what suits me best. Can't do that with Windows. Dual boot! Jeez, how much does a 40 gig cost where you live?
Are you using opaque move? Windows doesn't, drawing the window after you release the mouse button. With most linux windowmanagers you have full access to make your desktop as slow or as fast as it will go. For comparison, I run Gentoo/Fluxbox on a P2 - 300 notebook with a 4 meg video card. It plays 1024x768 full screen AVI's and MPg's without skipping. Try that with 98.
Except for the addition of 'My' to desktop icons, a discernable shift towards the KDE-look and a constant re-juggling of lower level system menus, XP's desktop has changed very little since Win 95. Apparently the great UI was discovered some time in the early nineties.
Windows development is driven by refinement of a familiar configuration, not innovation. There may be vastly more efficient and advanced window managers already in use but they wouldn't fly with MS's target user. Famiarity & popularity != best.
I had to smile as I read this. It reminded me of the days when indie music was hard to find and the only thing available were major label artists like Led Zepplin, G. Geils and the Stones, polished musicians who's every uninspired, tired, empty riff was beat to death on the radio.
It's the conventional wisdom that peak proficiency with an instrument by necessity leads to musical worth, but the fact is that it just isn't true. So many top notch technicians have nothing to say, and polish on a record is almost always due to the producer and not the band. Yes, a lot of indie music is shit but that doesn't mean everything mainstream is worth hearing. 99% of it is vacuous dance music or highly marketted, derivative, safe-as-milk 'alternative' bands.
Unfortunately, I've worked in radio for 20 years. I hear mainstream artists all day, week after week. In the last decade I may have bought 2 CDs after hearing songs on the radio.
Bands people like, uploaded by category. Someone has to feel strongly about a release to warrant the time and effort of ripping and uploading. No better way to sample bands you've never heard or heard of sorted by genre, something nearly impossible to do with P2P.
Trying to paint any questioning of Gates' motives as resentment is pathetic. Are you familiar with the term 'ad hominem'?
Instead of ranting, I suggest you look at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's financial statements for 2001. It made $1.2 billion in investment gains and $2.2B in contributions. Also take a look at their grant history, at a rough guess half goes towards installing Microsoft product in needy areas. Or not so needy areas, like the huge rollouts in Canadian libraries. Gates isn't withdrawning from his daily savings account with these donations. He should be given due credit for the good his foundation does but that doesn't mean that we should take the founder and driving force behind one of the most ruthless companies in the world at his word on everything related to it.
Read it again. He cast a "crucial vote" on which format would become the HDTV audio standard and chose the one he developed at MIT. I'm sure he knew at the time he and his school would make millions. The end result still casts MIT as ethically repugnant.
Re:I remember when it was the best...
on
Altavista Renewed
·
· Score: 2
Google needs to make money.
You beg the question, phrasing it as if distorting the rankings is the only way a search engine can make money. Look at their site under 'Services and Tools', they're primarily a software development firm and make money by selling custom search solutions. The website was originally a showcase for demonstrating the power of their product.
Now Google may be choosing to move from a software-based business model to a search/advertisement business model, but that doesn't mean they weren't making money before or that it's a good move. It seems to me if their showcase continuously returns biased results, people will choose to use both the search engine and the software less. It certainly didn't work for Altavista.
Sokal published intentionally grabled crap to expose the lack of post-modernist rigor. He knew it was incoherent, the publishers didn't and praised its 'logic'. Sokal is one of the good guys.
Sorry (if you really are) Kelly, if everyone thought as you did your dad would never have been allowed on stage or your family on TV. He was considered satanic in the seventies and by definition hateful. The same freedom of expression rights that protect the white power example protected Black Sabbath. The only proper way to counter harmful ideologies is with argument and education.
I addressed neither the syntax nor the semantics of the post, but the content, which is the dumbing down of a UI for those "intimidated" by responsive menues.
Delay makes the system faster? Let me ponder that one.
The menu 'flicker' issue is better dealt with by using a menu font larger than the random vertical cursor movements inevitable when menuing.
That's what I use, two spare pieces of 8 x 12 inch grey matrix arborite, glued back to back to prevent warping and the edges rounded with a router. A very thin and flat mouse pad with a fine, random pattern which makes a perfect surface for opticals. Will never wear out and cleans with Windex.
Working from the file manager does exactly this. Clicking on a document icon opens starts the app, closing the app instead of the document (click on a different 'X') will prompt for a save and then shut down. With memory and speed getting cheaper every day I think the whole concept of freeing up resouces on the desktop is best suited to earlier times. I have 3/4 gig in my linux box and have rarely touched the swap partition.
One could question the wisdom of designing an interface catering to users intimidated by immediately responsive menues. I find it infuriating that as hardware gets ever faster companies find more ways to slow the system down.
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If it wasn't for that 2 digit user number I'd think MS marketting shill. Were you a regular UT PC gamer and how does the Xbox compare/improve on the experience? I'm really interested.
You ban IP's, MAC addresses, game ID's, not credit card numbers. Trust me, I've been banned beofre.
Uh-huh. Seeing as DVD is well less than 800x600, please post back and tell us what your using as a monitor for the Xbox. Or is your computer still on 12" amber?
In the posts I've read prior to yours, I haven't read one that qualifies as outright hating the Xbox. The real debate has centered on its value vs. a PC or other consoles for gaming. In fact I would say the opposite is true, there have been far more one-sided Xbox cheerleader posts than naysayers and it's that attitude which is being slagged.
It certainly does. It fills arenas with pre-pubescent dorks singing, playing the radio, hurling racial slurs and generally ruining the game. HalfLife rolled this in a while ago. I disabled it two days later.
The original post didn't use the word Microsoft anywhere, it compared consoles to PCs as gaming platforms.
Cost: For high resolutions a PC is still much cheaper than an Xbox+HDTV for gaming, with no additional monthly charges for being online. The PC also has a lot more uses including multimedia.
Resolution: PCs and PC game resolutions are increasing monthly and HDTV won't for a long time. Even old games are being upgraded, the last HalfLife patch or two bumped its max to 1600x1200. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this midrange PC resolution still well beyond the range of current hi def TVs (or at least any that don't cost like a small car)?
Lag: It's not uncommon for game servers to have a minimum ping requirement and some will automically boot laggers. In any case, as regular gamers know, broadband can have as high or higher ping than modem players. It all depends on network latencies and distance to the server. Kicking out the modem users is no guarantee that some players won't lag the server.
Cheats: Granted, at least not yet. I don't expect it will take too long.
No need to worry about drivers, compatibilty, or anything else of the sort.
In years of gaming I have never had to upgrade a driver to make a new game work. Ever.
I know the reason why most of my friends work with MS windows and the Mac OS... there is a uniform user interface....
So most (?) of your friends installed and ran different linux desktop environments and, having that expertise plus being accustomed to jumping between the two completely different desktop architectures of MS and Apple, stumbled at Gnome or KDE? What an unusual combination of mental aptitudes.
It is so sad that many in the linux community are so obsessed with "eye candy"....
Like Fluxbox, Ion, Blackbox, IceWm etc., etc., etc., which have less eye candy than XP? You basically describe Enlightenment, most WM's are no more eye-candy than OS-X. Or is anything beyond the official Blue & Grey considered eye candy? Is XP's new desktop look eye candy as well?
Because it's a scientific fact that experimentation is bad. Microsoft wrote the bible on desktop UI's with Windows 95 and have stuck religiously to it since then. The fact that Apple uses a different one should be considered a Catholic vs. Protestant sort of thing, not like those dirty linux pagans. What a relief, we have the perfect desktop and there's no reason to think otherwise until Microsoft tells us to. Thanks for lifting that burden from developers.
I don't have to sit there and think... gee do I have widget set X with static libraries Y and did I make the right offerings to the gods of LINUX...
You finally got one right, with many distros you don't. Gentoo is a perfect example. ("..gods of LINUX"? Mark of the Troll.)
Oh, and quit posting as AC and self moderating.
The Imperial US appears to interoperate quite well in a Metric world.
It should be emphasized whenever the cost of changeover is discussed that it only affects the short term. It's a one-time cost with a minimal expenditure afterwards for potentially training new users. The cost of using commercial closed software is permanent and, as history clearly demonstrates, spiralling ever higher with decreasing rights for the consumer.
As more industry moves to free alternatives the cost of support will naturally come down with familiarity. I really don't think all those IT people managing linux servers will have too much trouble extending their expertise to desktops.
RTCW plays better in Linux. Look for the Loki installer.
The Windows UI is more mature, however if you don't like that paradigm, its one-size-fits-all design means you're screwed. Normally Fluxbox is my desktop, today I'm playing with Ion to find what suits me best. Can't do that with Windows.
Dual boot! Jeez, how much does a 40 gig cost where you live?
Are you using opaque move? Windows doesn't, drawing the window after you release the mouse button. With most linux windowmanagers you have full access to make your desktop as slow or as fast as it will go. For comparison, I run Gentoo/Fluxbox on a P2 - 300 notebook with a 4 meg video card. It plays 1024x768 full screen AVI's and MPg's without skipping. Try that with 98.
The really scary part is we were much worse. It's amazing we got this far.
Or, taking an example from the 50's controversy, Gray's Anatomy.
Except for the addition of 'My' to desktop icons, a discernable shift towards the KDE-look and a constant re-juggling of lower level system menus, XP's desktop has changed very little since Win 95. Apparently the great UI was discovered some time in the early nineties.
Windows development is driven by refinement of a familiar configuration, not innovation. There may be vastly more efficient and advanced window managers already in use but they wouldn't fly with MS's target user. Famiarity & popularity != best.
It's the conventional wisdom that peak proficiency with an instrument by necessity leads to musical worth, but the fact is that it just isn't true. So many top notch technicians have nothing to say, and polish on a record is almost always due to the producer and not the band. Yes, a lot of indie music is shit but that doesn't mean everything mainstream is worth hearing. 99% of it is vacuous dance music or highly marketted, derivative, safe-as-milk 'alternative' bands.
Unfortunately, I've worked in radio for 20 years. I hear mainstream artists all day, week after week. In the last decade I may have bought 2 CDs after hearing songs on the radio.
Bands people like, uploaded by category. Someone has to feel strongly about a release to warrant the time and effort of ripping and uploading. No better way to sample bands you've never heard or heard of sorted by genre, something nearly impossible to do with P2P.
Instead of ranting, I suggest you look at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's financial statements for 2001. It made $1.2 billion in investment gains and $2.2B in contributions. Also take a look at their grant history, at a rough guess half goes towards installing Microsoft product in needy areas. Or not so needy areas, like the huge rollouts in Canadian libraries. Gates isn't withdrawning from his daily savings account with these donations. He should be given due credit for the good his foundation does but that doesn't mean that we should take the founder and driving force behind one of the most ruthless companies in the world at his word on everything related to it.
Read it again. He cast a "crucial vote" on which format would become the HDTV audio standard and chose the one he developed at MIT. I'm sure he knew at the time he and his school would make millions. The end result still casts MIT as ethically repugnant.
You beg the question, phrasing it as if distorting the rankings is the only way a search engine can make money. Look at their site under 'Services and Tools', they're primarily a software development firm and make money by selling custom search solutions. The website was originally a showcase for demonstrating the power of their product.
Now Google may be choosing to move from a software-based business model to a search/advertisement business model, but that doesn't mean they weren't making money before or that it's a good move. It seems to me if their showcase continuously returns biased results, people will choose to use both the search engine and the software less. It certainly didn't work for Altavista.
Sokal published intentionally grabled crap to expose the lack of post-modernist rigor. He knew it was incoherent, the publishers didn't and praised its 'logic'. Sokal is one of the good guys.
Sorry (if you really are) Kelly, if everyone thought as you did your dad would never have been allowed on stage or your family on TV. He was considered satanic in the seventies and by definition hateful. The same freedom of expression rights that protect the white power example protected Black Sabbath. The only proper way to counter harmful ideologies is with argument and education.
I addressed neither the syntax nor the semantics of the post, but the content, which is the dumbing down of a UI for those "intimidated" by responsive menues.
Delay makes the system faster? Let me ponder that one.
The menu 'flicker' issue is better dealt with by using a menu font larger than the random vertical cursor movements inevitable when menuing.
Can't use TweakUI, it doesn't work in Fluxbox.
That's what I use, two spare pieces of 8 x 12 inch grey matrix arborite, glued back to back to prevent warping and the edges rounded with a router. A very thin and flat mouse pad with a fine, random pattern which makes a perfect surface for opticals. Will never wear out and cleans with Windex.
Working from the file manager does exactly this. Clicking on a document icon opens starts the app, closing the app instead of the document (click on a different 'X') will prompt for a save and then shut down. With memory and speed getting cheaper every day I think the whole concept of freeing up resouces on the desktop is best suited to earlier times. I have 3/4 gig in my linux box and have rarely touched the swap partition.
One could question the wisdom of designing an interface catering to users intimidated by immediately responsive menues. I find it infuriating that as hardware gets ever faster companies find more ways to slow the system down.