Actually it's not infinitely improbable. It's actually extremely probable.
Now obviously there is life in our universe whatever it may be. (I think therefore I am. Etc...) If life is capable of evolving into sentient, intelligent, technological life then eventually it's almost guaranteed that they'll simulate another universe. As long as each universe simulates at least ONE other universe then the probability of being in a simulation is > 50%.
The chances that we are at the "Top Level" of the universe and that we aren't being simulated is exceedingly low. I imagine that a civilization capable of creating simulated life is capable of creating more than one simulation of simulated life and therefore had many many simulations.
Yeah... windows definitely must have ripped off KDE's interface.
Window with Minimize, Maximize and then close in the top right.
A Large application list at the bottom which has a launcher icon on the left. Then some quicklaunch icons and then running applications. Finally on the bottom right we have some notification icons and persistent apps and lastly a clock.
Wait... what's this? Instead of having an address bar they've moved to a bread crumb system?
And is that a Vista st---sorry KDE style gradient on the taskbar I see?
And in the official screenshots are those "My Computer" and "My Documents" Icons I see?
Yep. I'm suprised KDE doesn't sue Microsoft for look and feel infringement. Because Windows is just one giant rip off of KDE.
98 was slower than 95 but was more reliable and had more features.
XP was slower than 98 but was more reliable and had more features.
7 is slower than XP but is more reliable and has more features.
In 8 years they've managed to dramatically increase the number of features while simultaneously only taking a very marginal performance hit. I would say that's an accomplishment.
Usually as the quality of a system improves the speed decreases. More overhead. More code. More stuff to keep track of.
If I installed DOS on my new intel i7 it would boot in like 0 seconds. Run DOS games at unthought of speeds and generally be dramatically faster. OR I could accept that a small performance hit is inevitable when my computer does much much more than it used to and that it's a better experience when not rendering 3D games.
Jeff Han even practically says in his presentation: "I'm not doing anything new or patentable. I'm just making it cheaper and bigger."
Apple didn't do anything new or patenatable. They just made it smaller and cheaper. But most importantly they actually did it.
Apple deserves accolades for actually implementing a sane interface on a phone. Then again what made the iphone possible wasn't someone saying "let's do multi-touch!" it was a screen with an accurate enough touch screen that multi-touch was affordable and usable in a product.
Apple is really good at getting to market first with cutting edge technology. Their 'innovation' is really in their hardware aquisition and licensing department. The Toshiba microdrive (not developed for the iPod but certainly exploited at its earliest convenience). Intel small form factor CPU (Macbook Air). Inexpensive capacitive touch LCDs. The hardware which enables these notable products is almost always made by someone else and designed for anybody to use but exploited first and well by Apple.
Does Apple deserve credit for being quick to pick up on opportunities such as Han's amazing presentation? Yes. Do they deserve a patent for putting the finishing touches on a marketable implementation? No.
And just how did they get out of this horseshit disaster?
By recognizing the problem and finding a solution. Street cars, subways and eventually motor vehicles.
You can recognize the foresight of the New York administration of the late 19th century for recognizing that their current path was not a sustainable one and began planning and investing in solutions to the problem.
But no. I'm sure you're right. If we just completely avoid the problem then the inevitability of progress will happen without any research. Without any change and without any effort.
Meanwhile billions go hungry. Tens of thousands die every day from malnutrition. But no I'm sure you're right there was no food crisis. That's why the UN didn't just have a FOOD CRISIS SUMMIT this summer.
Don't get me wrong. When it comes to technology I'm the most hopeless idealistic optimist there is but I also recognize there is a cost. That right now we are wrecklessly spending resources at an astronomically disproportionate rate to our rate of innovation and that we're like kids in a candy store unsupervised.
We're really living in a bubble of inexpensive and practically free energy. Energy is dirt cheap right now. Commodity materials are dirt cheap. If we don't critically reevaluate our energy sources and our resource recycling very soon the bubble will pop.
We have a limited window of nearly free energy and inexpensive commodity materials to build the infrastructure to ensure we don't see an end to cheap energy and inexpensive materials. If we can build renewable power sources *now* then we can continue to use our fossil fuels for fertilizer and plastic. If we wait until energy prices double, triple, quadruple and on and on then your plastic electronics are going to see the plastic quadruple in cost. If we wait until the energy prices double, triple and quadruple the cost of processing the aluminum in the windmill is going to quadruple.
Avert the energy bubble crashing by saving the 'free food' for when they're needed.
We are already starting to see population constriction. LA is importing almost all of its water. Where do you get more fresh water? Desalination? That's great when energy is practically free, but if fresh water starts costing energy and energy is from limited poorly scaleable sources such as coal then you're going to see the cost of water rise with energy.
Everything is getting tied into our energy supply. Our food. Our water. This is all fine as long as energy stays cheap. Fossil fuels are a limited supply and are requiring more and more energy to extract. We can only expect their prices to rise and rise and rise.
You can say that "technology found a way to solve the environmental problems of the 19th century." and you would be right. They were to STOP POLLUTING. We could be saving a lot of money if we just dumped and polluted like the 19th century. But instead of just throwing up our hands and saying "Oh! Hey! Technology will save us." They actually bought the technology that would save us and accepted the price tag. It's not free.
We can keep continue tapping our free energy credit line but we need to realize it is a bubble. It will increase in price. Our lives are becoming intimately tied to its cost and the best time to start planning for the future is yesterday. These technological advances don't happen when we aren't researching them. We can't just invest trillions of dollars in oil drilling and expect efficient solar panels to spontaneously emerge. It takes interst and investment.
Will we look back on this time and laugh? I hope so. But we'll laugh because we reacted to a threat and fixed it. Our costly and difficult choice will be seen as trivial and obvious. Just as was digging a giant tunnel into manhattan to feed it with water. Just as was building a subway system.
Let's look at the story of Horse shit and highlight the key point. The solution to the horse shit problem... wasn't more horses. We've got a horse shit problem and buying more horses isn't the technological whiz kid solution you're proclaiming will save us.
It could even be argued that the ability to navigate a room is the same set of problem solving skills that informs all other intelligence.
It's spacial understanding combined with analyzing the capabilities of the agent to complete the task. Include a door and you have extremely complex problem solving and learning abilities.
He would go into a holodeck to learn about emotions from computer software.
Was I the only one confused by this? Why not... you know... just give him the same programming as all of the holodeck characters? It seemed emotional and social behavior was easy to teach to 20 billion unique characters on a holodeck program for earth but beyond the abilities of Data?
Microsoft won't kill the Zune. Or at least they better not and here is why:
1) They would never be able to sell music again ever... EVER. After play for sure people were cautious to buy another microsoft DRM'ed product. "Fool me once shame on me..." Microsoft wants to sell music through Xbox, through Windows Mobile, through the PC. They want to sell music in the future. Killing the Zune would end that dream. Killing the Zune would end Microsoft's Live Media sales in the in the music department permanantly. 2) They want to integrate it into WM for free. As soon as Windows Mobile has Zune then hit has a decent media player. It's already running a custom Windows Mobile build so it shouldn't be too difficult. 3) The XBox. The XBox is still successful (Profits were up.) Microsoft already sells movies. It's only a matter of time before the music store is available as well. 4) They're in second place! A distant second perhaps. But it's hard to argue to kill a team which has succesfully managed to go from nowhere to second place in only 2 years.
We might not ever see another hardware Zune. But the Zune concept isn't going to die. I think we're going to see Zune follow the classic arc of:
1) Play for sure commodity software. 2) Hardware iPod competitor 3) Commodity software.
Microsoft probably wants to get out of the vertical market competition with Apple. They aren't winning and they can see the writing on the wall as well as apple. The 'music player' is nearing the end of its marketability. It's time to to start fighting over the 'all in one' device. The cell phone.
You put Zune on every Windows Mobile 6.5 device and you've got more Zune Players than iPhones. How is that for a reversal?
And you have to be very good to get something on TV
Good Lord, man. Have you ever watched TV in your entire life?
Good lord, man. Have you never been to film school or at least a film festival?
Even craptastic TV shows are orders of magnitude better than educated beginners. And if you've ever had to sit through a class project in highschool you would see just how good TV really is.
Bad TV is just the worst good tv. Even a Sci-Fi original like Mammoth is high quality television compared to the level of bad that's possible. Most people just judge television on the spectrum of what they see with the worst shows being a 0 and the best shows being 100. They haven't been subjected to the -1 through -1000 that is also produced.
Compared to the quality of most Monty Python releases (I'm looking at you Life of Brian in Particular) YouTube is a step up in compression, sound and packaging.
$150 to upgrade a desktop to 1GB of RAM and a DX9 video card?
At OEM bulk rates I could probably do it for less than $20. (New Egg has a $20 video card and $6 for the RAM).
As to laptops.
$300-$500 to upgrade a laptop?
Pass. You can get refurb laptops for $300 that are better all around and run Aero just fine.
The costs projected are massively inflated. I'm no 'expert witness'. But I would put the actual costs at
$20 for a desktop and $200 for a laptop. Then lets say that the average 20% of all class action plaintiffs actually claim you need to cut that 8 billion down to like 100 million.
Imagine looking through an official Ferrari dealer's book at pictures of the Ferrari F430 you're going to buy, and your newly purchased F430 shows up with the body panels and upholstery of a Scion xB instead of those in the pictures. You ask the dealer about it, and they say you can flip a switch to make it look like it does in the pictures -- but if you do, the car can't run.
No it's like going down to the dealership and asking if you can legally drive a Ferarri F430 around town. The dealer replies. "Of course!"
8 months later you take delivery of your shiny new Ferrari and tear out of the dealership. The engine roars as you race down the freeway at 180mph. Hundreds of horsepower roaring as you fly past a speed trap. The police lights come on. You pull over and they impound your car.
Furious you return to the dealership after a night in prison.
"You told me I could use the car on local roads!" "You can. I didn't say you could use all the features of your car on the roads though." "False advertising it says Top Speed 200mph!" "Yes but there are limitations to our road system which don't let you use that feature."
"Vista Capable. It's capable of running Vista when you buy a copy of Vista." Not every feature is expected to work on every computer. Vista also supports wireless networking. If my computer doesn't include a wireless network card is Microsoft failing to deliver a feature of Vista?
Vista includes DVR software. If I don't have a TV tuner are they failing to deliver a feature of Vista?
Vista includes DVD player software. If my OEM doesn't include a DVD drive are they failing to deliver a feature?
I really really really don't see how Microsoft did anything illegal by allowing OEMs to take a shit on their image. I tried out an 800mhz 8" touchscreen UMPC which shipped with Vista. It was the first computer that I could definitively say was too slow to run Vista. But I wouldn't have blamed Microsoft for it. It booted. It loaded applications. It even had Aero. It was just slow. That's a bad computing experience not a failed computing experience.
Here is another F430 analogy. Two for the price of one!
You see an F430 on Craigs List:
F430! Perfect factory paint! Runs great! Starts without a hitch! 150HP engine. $30,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!
You buy it over the phone. You take it home and it is slow, barely makes it up a hill and takes 10 seconds to get up the hill.
You sue the guy. "YOU SOLD ME AN F430 and it's terribly slow! It's nothing like what I see on TV." "I told you in the ad. It was a 150 HP engine. I had to swap it out for another engine after the original developed a crack in the block."
You buy a cheap crappy computer. You get a cheap slow experience. Welcome to life.
The only exception to this would be a difference matte of the player.
I would 'render' out a patch around any visible opponent to see *how* visible they are.
If they're standing still in front of a tree trunk the average luminance at the border of the player and tree need to measured. If the player is instead a black SWAT player on a white snow field then his visibility would be increased.
Motion should also be multiplied.
Contrast * %of Player Visible * percieved velocity (If they're crouching and creeping at '100 yards' they'll be moving slower in the bot's view than if they were 2" in front of them.
You want to make sure that just because the player model is visible it doesn't mean the player would actually be visible to an opponent. I can't count how many times a black hooded enemy in a darkened window has sniped me.
Also a bot should have its sound perception nerfed. Just because it hears a set of footsteps doesn't mean it shouldn't be biased to stereo or at least 5 channel restrictions.
That's a good plan. But I'm still confused by the $250 figure.
Vista is STILL VISTA without the pretty Aero effects. Just because your window isn't translucent doesn't make it any less Vista.
I can buy a "Crysis Capable" computer that meets the low end system requirements but not be able to play with full AA at 1080p with all effects turned on.
Furthermore I've run Vista on a system with 1GB of RAM and an integrated graphics chip. It was slow. But it ran. And I've run vista on a computer with 2GB of RAM, a low end Core 2 Duo and cheap AGP video card. It ran fine but not as fast as my quad core i7. At what point is a computer "Too slow".
Microsoft knowingly lowered its targets for what it considered an acceptable user experience--- and payed the price in spades through bad reviews and user backlash. But it did install. It did boot. It did run applications which provided drivers (which is pretty much every piece of hardware made in the last 5 years.)
I would like toe see the empirical definition of what constitutes a vista Incapable machine. Especially because my Athlon 2600XP with a 1GB of ram handled it fine.
ersonally, KDE and Gnome both suck. They're both heavy-weight X-Window environments. I like XFCE better because it's simple, doesn't contain all of those "extra applications" I will never use, and is lightweight (IMHO).
So because a product has more features than you'll use it sucks?
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Yeah when you have a total market dominance and put your product on 90% of all computers sold you know it's time to quit before you make too much money.
You know what facilitates memory even better in the real world?
Google.
"What's the equation for the volume of a cylinder?" "I don't know, but if I did need to know I know I could look it up in Google in under 10 seconds. Furthermore if I need to know the volume of a cylinder enough times that it'll be important to memorize the brain will do this thing called learn it from repetitive Google searches."
School should be a timed open book and open internet affair. You would stop learning retarded things (like dates) and focus on the important parts of history for instance like possible causes and motivations.
Which is more important the date that the Napoleonic war began or the reasons it began? The more thorough the understanding necessary the more research that will be necessary the less banal the education.
Slashdot Mirror
To ruin a perfectly good Hitchhiker's guide:
Actually it's not infinitely improbable. It's actually extremely probable.
Now obviously there is life in our universe whatever it may be. (I think therefore I am. Etc...) If life is capable of evolving into sentient, intelligent, technological life then eventually it's almost guaranteed that they'll simulate another universe. As long as each universe simulates at least ONE other universe then the probability of being in a simulation is > 50%.
The chances that we are at the "Top Level" of the universe and that we aren't being simulated is exceedingly low. I imagine that a civilization capable of creating simulated life is capable of creating more than one simulation of simulated life and therefore had many many simulations.
So confusing that I can't buy it?
If I'm standing in a store I'm not going to see the option to buy Enterprise edition.
"OH you forgot the NSA, China and Farsi Editions!"
Yeah well... I'm not going to be buying those either now will I?
The marketing could really be summarized as such:
"DO you want Windows Media Center and DVD burning or Remote Desktop and Fax? If you want both you need ultimate."
Yeah... windows definitely must have ripped off KDE's interface.
Window with Minimize, Maximize and then close in the top right.
A Large application list at the bottom which has a launcher icon on the left. Then some quicklaunch icons and then running applications. Finally on the bottom right we have some notification icons and persistent apps and lastly a clock.
Wait... what's this? Instead of having an address bar they've moved to a bread crumb system?
And is that a Vista st---sorry KDE style gradient on the taskbar I see?
And in the official screenshots are those "My Computer" and "My Documents" Icons I see?
Yep. I'm suprised KDE doesn't sue Microsoft for look and feel infringement. Because Windows is just one giant rip off of KDE.
What video card doesn't support T&L?
T&L was added to the Geforce 2 series. Do you have a Voodoo 2 tucked away somewhere that you're wanting to use?
Exactly. The only place I've heard about the "Disasterous Confusion" of vista's multiple versions is on Slashdot.
Who's up for guessing what the difference is between Windows 7 'Starter' and Windows 7 'Home Basic?
There is another method... it's far more effective than guessing. You could... look at the feature list.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/compare-editions/default.aspx
OMG The confusion!!!
Let me break it down for ya'all
Do you need remote desktop?
Ultimate or Business.
Do you need Faxes?
Ultimate or Business.
Do you need Media Center?
Home Premium or Ultimate.
Do you want to burn DVDs and HD-DVDs out of the box?
Home Premium or Ultimate.
Do you live in a third world country and have flies on your face?
Home Basic
Was that REALLY so difficult?
98 was slower than 95 but was more reliable and had more features.
XP was slower than 98 but was more reliable and had more features.
7 is slower than XP but is more reliable and has more features.
In 8 years they've managed to dramatically increase the number of features while simultaneously only taking a very marginal performance hit. I would say that's an accomplishment.
Usually as the quality of a system improves the speed decreases. More overhead. More code. More stuff to keep track of.
If I installed DOS on my new intel i7 it would boot in like 0 seconds. Run DOS games at unthought of speeds and generally be dramatically faster. OR I could accept that a small performance hit is inevitable when my computer does much much more than it used to and that it's a better experience when not rendering 3D games.
No good. We need those for paper towels and houses.
Jeff Han even practically says in his presentation: "I'm not doing anything new or patentable. I'm just making it cheaper and bigger."
Apple didn't do anything new or patenatable. They just made it smaller and cheaper. But most importantly they actually did it.
Apple deserves accolades for actually implementing a sane interface on a phone. Then again what made the iphone possible wasn't someone saying "let's do multi-touch!" it was a screen with an accurate enough touch screen that multi-touch was affordable and usable in a product.
Apple is really good at getting to market first with cutting edge technology. Their 'innovation' is really in their hardware aquisition and licensing department. The Toshiba microdrive (not developed for the iPod but certainly exploited at its earliest convenience). Intel small form factor CPU (Macbook Air). Inexpensive capacitive touch LCDs. The hardware which enables these notable products is almost always made by someone else and designed for anybody to use but exploited first and well by Apple.
Does Apple deserve credit for being quick to pick up on opportunities such as Han's amazing presentation? Yes. Do they deserve a patent for putting the finishing touches on a marketable implementation? No.
And just how did they get out of this horseshit disaster?
By recognizing the problem and finding a solution. Street cars, subways and eventually motor vehicles.
You can recognize the foresight of the New York administration of the late 19th century for recognizing that their current path was not a sustainable one and began planning and investing in solutions to the problem.
But no. I'm sure you're right. If we just completely avoid the problem then the inevitability of progress will happen without any research. Without any change and without any effort.
Meanwhile billions go hungry. Tens of thousands die every day from malnutrition. But no I'm sure you're right there was no food crisis. That's why the UN didn't just have a FOOD CRISIS SUMMIT this summer.
Don't get me wrong. When it comes to technology I'm the most hopeless idealistic optimist there is but I also recognize there is a cost. That right now we are wrecklessly spending resources at an astronomically disproportionate rate to our rate of innovation and that we're like kids in a candy store unsupervised.
We're really living in a bubble of inexpensive and practically free energy. Energy is dirt cheap right now. Commodity materials are dirt cheap. If we don't critically reevaluate our energy sources and our resource recycling very soon the bubble will pop.
We have a limited window of nearly free energy and inexpensive commodity materials to build the infrastructure to ensure we don't see an end to cheap energy and inexpensive materials. If we can build renewable power sources *now* then we can continue to use our fossil fuels for fertilizer and plastic. If we wait until energy prices double, triple, quadruple and on and on then your plastic electronics are going to see the plastic quadruple in cost. If we wait until the energy prices double, triple and quadruple the cost of processing the aluminum in the windmill is going to quadruple.
Avert the energy bubble crashing by saving the 'free food' for when they're needed.
We are already starting to see population constriction. LA is importing almost all of its water. Where do you get more fresh water? Desalination? That's great when energy is practically free, but if fresh water starts costing energy and energy is from limited poorly scaleable sources such as coal then you're going to see the cost of water rise with energy.
Everything is getting tied into our energy supply. Our food. Our water. This is all fine as long as energy stays cheap. Fossil fuels are a limited supply and are requiring more and more energy to extract. We can only expect their prices to rise and rise and rise.
You can say that "technology found a way to solve the environmental problems of the 19th century." and you would be right. They were to STOP POLLUTING. We could be saving a lot of money if we just dumped and polluted like the 19th century. But instead of just throwing up our hands and saying "Oh! Hey! Technology will save us." They actually bought the technology that would save us and accepted the price tag. It's not free.
We can keep continue tapping our free energy credit line but we need to realize it is a bubble. It will increase in price. Our lives are becoming intimately tied to its cost and the best time to start planning for the future is yesterday. These technological advances don't happen when we aren't researching them. We can't just invest trillions of dollars in oil drilling and expect efficient solar panels to spontaneously emerge. It takes interst and investment.
Will we look back on this time and laugh? I hope so. But we'll laugh because we reacted to a threat and fixed it. Our costly and difficult choice will be seen as trivial and obvious. Just as was digging a giant tunnel into manhattan to feed it with water. Just as was building a subway system.
Let's look at the story of Horse shit and highlight the key point. The solution to the horse shit problem... wasn't more horses. We've got a horse shit problem and buying more horses isn't the technological whiz kid solution you're proclaiming will save us.
It would seem to me that prior art of moving things around on my desk should nullify their patent.
"Using one or more fingers the piece of paper uses heuristics to determine where the hand wants the paper to slide."
That's not true when Data goes into the Holodeck to learn humor his teacher tells him outright what is and is not funny.
Being able to judge humor and react appropriately was beyond data, but not beyond his holographic tutor.
It could even be argued that the ability to navigate a room is the same set of problem solving skills that informs all other intelligence.
It's spacial understanding combined with analyzing the capabilities of the agent to complete the task. Include a door and you have extremely complex problem solving and learning abilities.
Data was an enigma to me.
He would go into a holodeck to learn about emotions from computer software.
Was I the only one confused by this? Why not... you know... just give him the same programming as all of the holodeck characters? It seemed emotional and social behavior was easy to teach to 20 billion unique characters on a holodeck program for earth but beyond the abilities of Data?
I have a brown zune you insensitive clod!
Microsoft won't kill the Zune. Or at least they better not and here is why:
1) They would never be able to sell music again ever... EVER. After play for sure people were cautious to buy another microsoft DRM'ed product. "Fool me once shame on me..." Microsoft wants to sell music through Xbox, through Windows Mobile, through the PC. They want to sell music in the future. Killing the Zune would end that dream. Killing the Zune would end Microsoft's Live Media sales in the in the music department permanantly.
2) They want to integrate it into WM for free. As soon as Windows Mobile has Zune then hit has a decent media player. It's already running a custom Windows Mobile build so it shouldn't be too difficult.
3) The XBox. The XBox is still successful (Profits were up.) Microsoft already sells movies. It's only a matter of time before the music store is available as well.
4) They're in second place! A distant second perhaps. But it's hard to argue to kill a team which has succesfully managed to go from nowhere to second place in only 2 years.
We might not ever see another hardware Zune. But the Zune concept isn't going to die. I think we're going to see Zune follow the classic arc of:
1) Play for sure commodity software.
2) Hardware iPod competitor
3) Commodity software.
Microsoft probably wants to get out of the vertical market competition with Apple. They aren't winning and they can see the writing on the wall as well as apple. The 'music player' is nearing the end of its marketability. It's time to to start fighting over the 'all in one' device. The cell phone.
You put Zune on every Windows Mobile 6.5 device and you've got more Zune Players than iPhones. How is that for a reversal?
And you have to be very good to get something on TV
Good Lord, man. Have you ever watched TV in your entire life?
Good lord, man. Have you never been to film school or at least a film festival?
Even craptastic TV shows are orders of magnitude better than educated beginners. And if you've ever had to sit through a class project in highschool you would see just how good TV really is.
Bad TV is just the worst good tv. Even a Sci-Fi original like Mammoth is high quality television compared to the level of bad that's possible. Most people just judge television on the spectrum of what they see with the worst shows being a 0 and the best shows being 100. They haven't been subjected to the -1 through -1000 that is also produced.
Actually I wasn't joking. The VHS and DVD of Life of Brian is like watching a 20 year old VHS transfer underwater.
Compared to the quality of most Monty Python releases (I'm looking at you Life of Brian in Particular) YouTube is a step up in compression, sound and packaging.
The numbers in the story are bullshit.
$150 to upgrade a desktop to 1GB of RAM and a DX9 video card?
At OEM bulk rates I could probably do it for less than $20. (New Egg has a $20 video card and $6 for the RAM).
As to laptops.
$300-$500 to upgrade a laptop?
Pass. You can get refurb laptops for $300 that are better all around and run Aero just fine.
The costs projected are massively inflated. I'm no 'expert witness'. But I would put the actual costs at
$20 for a desktop and $200 for a laptop. Then lets say that the average 20% of all class action plaintiffs actually claim you need to cut that 8 billion down to like 100 million.
Imagine looking through an official Ferrari dealer's book at pictures of the Ferrari F430 you're going to buy, and your newly purchased F430 shows up with the body panels and upholstery of a Scion xB instead of those in the pictures. You ask the dealer about it, and they say you can flip a switch to make it look like it does in the pictures -- but if you do, the car can't run.
No it's like going down to the dealership and asking if you can legally drive a Ferarri F430 around town. The dealer replies. "Of course!"
8 months later you take delivery of your shiny new Ferrari and tear out of the dealership. The engine roars as you race down the freeway at 180mph. Hundreds of horsepower roaring as you fly past a speed trap. The police lights come on. You pull over and they impound your car.
Furious you return to the dealership after a night in prison.
"You told me I could use the car on local roads!"
"You can. I didn't say you could use all the features of your car on the roads though."
"False advertising it says Top Speed 200mph!"
"Yes but there are limitations to our road system which don't let you use that feature."
"Vista Capable. It's capable of running Vista when you buy a copy of Vista." Not every feature is expected to work on every computer. Vista also supports wireless networking. If my computer doesn't include a wireless network card is Microsoft failing to deliver a feature of Vista?
Vista includes DVR software. If I don't have a TV tuner are they failing to deliver a feature of Vista?
Vista includes DVD player software. If my OEM doesn't include a DVD drive are they failing to deliver a feature?
I really really really don't see how Microsoft did anything illegal by allowing OEMs to take a shit on their image. I tried out an 800mhz 8" touchscreen UMPC which shipped with Vista. It was the first computer that I could definitively say was too slow to run Vista. But I wouldn't have blamed Microsoft for it. It booted. It loaded applications. It even had Aero. It was just slow. That's a bad computing experience not a failed computing experience.
Here is another F430 analogy. Two for the price of one!
You see an F430 on Craigs List:
F430! Perfect factory paint! Runs great! Starts without a hitch! 150HP engine.
$30,000!!!!!!!!!!!!!1!
You buy it over the phone. You take it home and it is slow, barely makes it up a hill and takes 10 seconds to get up the hill.
You sue the guy. "YOU SOLD ME AN F430 and it's terribly slow! It's nothing like what I see on TV." "I told you in the ad. It was a 150 HP engine. I had to swap it out for another engine after the original developed a crack in the block."
You buy a cheap crappy computer. You get a cheap slow experience. Welcome to life.
The only exception to this would be a difference matte of the player.
I would 'render' out a patch around any visible opponent to see *how* visible they are.
If they're standing still in front of a tree trunk the average luminance at the border of the player and tree need to measured. If the player is instead a black SWAT player on a white snow field then his visibility would be increased.
Motion should also be multiplied.
Contrast * %of Player Visible * percieved velocity (If they're crouching and creeping at '100 yards' they'll be moving slower in the bot's view than if they were 2" in front of them.
You want to make sure that just because the player model is visible it doesn't mean the player would actually be visible to an opponent. I can't count how many times a black hooded enemy in a darkened window has sniped me.
Also a bot should have its sound perception nerfed. Just because it hears a set of footsteps doesn't mean it shouldn't be biased to stereo or at least 5 channel restrictions.
No. Aero didn't need to be D3D10 only. That's why it's not a system requirement.
It runs just fine on D3D9 hardware (and I presume D3D8 hardware as well.
That's a good plan. But I'm still confused by the $250 figure.
Vista is STILL VISTA without the pretty Aero effects. Just because your window isn't translucent doesn't make it any less Vista.
I can buy a "Crysis Capable" computer that meets the low end system requirements but not be able to play with full AA at 1080p with all effects turned on.
Furthermore I've run Vista on a system with 1GB of RAM and an integrated graphics chip. It was slow. But it ran. And I've run vista on a computer with 2GB of RAM, a low end Core 2 Duo and cheap AGP video card. It ran fine but not as fast as my quad core i7. At what point is a computer "Too slow".
Microsoft knowingly lowered its targets for what it considered an acceptable user experience--- and payed the price in spades through bad reviews and user backlash. But it did install. It did boot. It did run applications which provided drivers (which is pretty much every piece of hardware made in the last 5 years.)
I would like toe see the empirical definition of what constitutes a vista Incapable machine. Especially because my Athlon 2600XP with a 1GB of ram handled it fine.
ersonally, KDE and Gnome both suck. They're both heavy-weight X-Window environments. I like XFCE better because it's simple, doesn't contain all of those "extra applications" I will never use, and is lightweight (IMHO).
So because a product has more features than you'll use it sucks?
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Yeah when you have a total market dominance and put your product on 90% of all computers sold you know it's time to quit before you make too much money.
You know what facilitates memory even better in the real world?
Google.
"What's the equation for the volume of a cylinder?"
"I don't know, but if I did need to know I know I could look it up in Google in under 10 seconds. Furthermore if I need to know the volume of a cylinder enough times that it'll be important to memorize the brain will do this thing called learn it from repetitive Google searches."
School should be a timed open book and open internet affair. You would stop learning retarded things (like dates) and focus on the important parts of history for instance like possible causes and motivations.
Which is more important the date that the Napoleonic war began or the reasons it began? The more thorough the understanding necessary the more research that will be necessary the less banal the education.