Re:Most ridiculous piece of hardware ever concepte
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PS3 To Run At 120 FPS?
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· Score: 2, Informative
People often get caught up in this mess because studies that try to determine what our senses are capable of are often based on being able to *differentiate* between two different triggers.
So yeah, pull up a gradient at 256 color, 16bit color, and 24bit color. You can see the steps in all of them, with 24bit being the best, of course.
Now pull up one shade of red that is only one step different from another shade of red, at the same time. Can you tell the difference between the two? At 256 color, probably. At 16bit color, no way. At 24bit color, absolutely not. Aha, well the human eye can only detect 256 colors! Wrong, clearly. What we have to realize is that all of this is limited by our BRAIN, not necessarily our EYES. The brain is not very good at differentiating between two very similar things unless that difference is magnified...and in fact it's quite easy to FOOL the crap out of the brain by simply telling an observer that two things are different, when they're not. So, when we look at two very similar colors, we might not recognize that they are different, because we're not so good at that. But we are good at seeing things like "blockiness" in gradients, even though no matter how hard we zoom in we can't quite key in on exactly *what* is causing the blockiness.
Our brains and senses are not simple sampling devices with well-defined limits.
The framerate thing is another good example. I know that movies at 24 frames per second at the theater don't bother me at all, even though I am well aware of the flickering if I concentrate on it (via peripheral vision). So why should 60 frames per second on my CRT monitor bother me? I dunno, but it does. Maybe it's because you have to throw in other factors like the fact that your focal point *moves* around the screen. Maybe it's the florescent lights overhead blinking away at a similar rate. Maybe it's analogous to the gradient effect! When you hit a sensor that is working more in a continuous domain with a discrete signal pretending to be continuous by moving very quickly...it sure seems to be easy to pick up. Dunno, but when I sit down in front of a computer with a CRT at 60hz I sense it *immediately* and adjust the rate up. Most people who are aware of the fact that they *can* adjust refresh rate and have seen the difference between 60 and 70+ will also immediately sense it.
I do this to some extent. Not only can you save on hardware, but it's nice to pick up a game for $19 instead of $49 or $59. In multiplayer games after a couple years the number of wankers is substantially lower, and the abilities of the good players are much better, which can make it more fun. (but wait too long and everybody's playing retarded mods like a redeemer-only bathroom map in UT, heh)
It is hard though when a new game you've been looking forward to only plays well at 800x600 with all the goodies turned off.
You can always scale back graphics to bump up fps, but some of these new games are so memory intensive that 512MB just isn't cutting it anymore. I certainly regret making the decision to do 256x2 in my machine...especially since upgrading to gig and maintaining dual channel means I have to buy 2 sticks of 512. Bummer. Swapping is something I've had to deal with in a number of games, from HL2 to BF2. It's not terrible, but enough that I do have to go and shut down a lot of stuff I run at startup before playing to minimize it. I would spend the extra dough on a gig right off if I had to do it over.
This article assumes (hopefully intentionally) that you're reusing a bit of stuff from your last machine...I mean, a *case*, mouse/keyboard, monitor, speakers, etc. Money might be found for more memory then by recycling a hard drive and CDROM/DVD drive.
My favorite MS bandaid of all time was when they blocked "bad" file attachment types in Outlook, requiring a registry hack to allow them. One of the blocked attachment types was the infamous.lnk, which at that time was the *default* way that IE would send links to web pages via email. So, in a Microsoft world, people would use Microsoft IE to send a link to their buddy running Microsoft Outlook and it wouldn't work. *slaps forehead* Why it took them so long to figure out that you didn't need to send a *file* to link to a web page when URL's were already parsed by Outlook, well, I have no idea.
Yeah this is how MS tends to work as well. Case in point: the IIS Lockdown tool, which just bandaids the crap out of IIS... and of course ends up annoying the hell out of users: for instance, not being able to open an email message in OWA when the subject line contains a dot. Wee.
Re:Defiance is a changing the system too
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Modding and the Law
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· Score: 1
Change in the government can only come through the will of the people, which has to be strong. If it's not strong enough, nothing will change. Pretending that downloading illegal copies of music is some how on the level of humanity's duty to change tyrannical government is way over the top.
I've downloaded music illegally because it doesn't morally offend me that much and the chance of getting caught is nil. I don't believe that "art is art", either. I think there is a distinction between "entertainment art" and "art for the sake of art." One of which should be paid for always, and another which shouldn't have to play by the same rules. However, I do understand the inherent flaw in my reasoning, because suddenly everything that I like is "art" and everything else is "entertainment." While it does work out in my mind, I'm certainly not going to go so far as to say that all creations should be free unless there are material costs.
Everything could be construed as "art." I've designed t-shirts for my company, and the crap on them I called "artwork", but I don't consider them to be "art." I don't think it's your right to copy and sell them, or copy and give them away, or copy in any way shape or form.
Anyhow, I steal songs occasionally because it usually doesn't feel like like stealing and the price to purchase is way too high. I have hundreds of CDs and continue to buy them when I can. I avoid any artist who's ever made a commercial for the gap:) I avoid artists who speak out against file sharing. I keep a low profile and don't teach other people how to steal. I have a large *paid for* music collection and have never considered dumping it in favor of illegal copying, like many of my friends have. I'm not proud of stealing, but I do it, and I don't buy into the corporate loss numbers that have never added up correctly (same is true with software piracy to a degree). I believe that artists who aren't heavily sponsored will always do better if their music is flying around the net. The only artists seriously hurt by file sharing are those who have to recoup millions of dollars in recording and advertising budgets. It shouldn't cost a million dollars and take a year in the studio to record an album. An album shouldn't require millions and millions of dollars worth of publicity and advertising. In an ideal world the music would speak for itself and become popular through word of mouth - sharing.
One thing I can't bring myself to do, though, is to say that sharing music online is my right. I can't bring myself to not support copyright law. Really what it boils down to is this: somebody creates something and says that I have to pay for it. I say "nah ah." They say, "why should you have my creation for free?" I say.............. I've never heard a response to that question that didn't sound like total illogical (or at best purely hypothetical) bullshit.
I'm not understanding your point here. A poorly-made video game doesn't have anything to do with video games as a whole being "good" or "bad."
The community reaction you're referring to is normal regardless of the product. You take just about any product that you're not happy with and post your complaints to a forum dedicated to that product and you'll get some serious back talk. People *want* to be happy with the things they've purchased, and it's quite normal to defend it, faults and all. You should expect to hear everything from "you don't know how to use it or maintain it" to "hey it was only X dollars." In fact, it's not uncommon for people who were once vocally unhappy with a product to receive a "fixed" version of the product, and then begin to defend the product when somebody else comes along with complaints.
I remember when the original Unreal game came out, and that damned thing *only* worked well 3dfx video cards and Intel processors. I must have had that stupid game for a year before I could finally play it well on my K6-2 400Mhz (admitedly a bad processor) and TNT video card, despite the fact that the minimum requirements were something like a 166Mhz processor and 3D video card, with a sticker "Optimized for 3dfx." I went through several changes during this time. At first I was a bit unhappy but still polite and gave the game credit because it had some great points to it. People were polite in return for the most part. After the long patch delays I started getting seriously pissed off and that came through in my posts, which were always met by dozens of people who defended the crap out of the game and the company. When I was finally able to play it I suddenly became a bit of a defender of the game, because shit, I'd waited so long and tried so hard to get it to run, it's going to be great damnit!
These kinds of reactions are pretty normal, and have nothing to do with video games making people dumb or smart.
Now I would have seen more of a correlation if you'd mentioned something like cheaters or campers or any kind of online player that exists just to piss people off. These kinds of people have been growing in what seems to be disproportionate numbers since multiplayer gaming started and have ruined countless game experiences for people. Now, whether this has something to do with our modern culture, or it's just a new way of being confronted with personality types that have always been there...I dunno. I'd say a mixture of both...anonimity and distance allow people prone to rude ("dumb") behavior to become more rude than they would in normal daily life.
"I used Linux because it was more convenient. I was writing a lot of code that had to run on UNIX systems, and it was nice to be able to write and compile it on my home computer. I also had better connectivity; the Windows terminal programs I had at the time were quite lacking. I did use Windows for a while in the summer of 2000, when I had a job writing code for Windows and Macintosh."
When I was in college my geek buddy and I had slackware running on one of our machines and we used it for a lot of projects...much easier to work at home than to try and get on an x terminal at school. Anyhow, for the most part it worked out cool. But then during a big opengl project in '95 or '96, we were pushing it to the last minute and had to run to campus to demonstrate our project to the professor. It was that day that I realized that OSF on Alpha was going to be just a wee bit different than Linux on x86. Hehe:) Damn thing wouldn't compile but luckily we did get a few extra hours after explaining the situation.
1) It's fun. Pure and simple, it's just neat. It's a bit of a challenge (well it used to be) to get a system up and running with some cool desktop environment with all the bells and whistles. Or it's a challenge to get a minimal install running on some seriously old machine to use as a proxy server or something silly you thought up. I can't tell you how many machines that I've installed Linux on just for the hell of it.
2) It's free. While it may be born from a community of swell "information should be free" types, the simple fact that it costs *no money* is a major selling point (pun intended!).
3) Perceived security. Linux can be much more secure that Windows, and by default it often is. Of course I fell asleep behind the wheel of a Redhat machine once and got rooted, but I learned my lesson and I'm still convinced that it's a much more secure OS.
4) Perceived stability. This is one I don't go for, at least on the desktop. Maybe back in the Win9x days, yeah, but not anymore. I've had my share of kernel panics and we've all experienced irritating desktop bugs. On a server I do believe that Linux is more stable...if anything, it's *extremely* rare for a program to hose the machine and require a reboot, which does happen on Windows servers (well, a service might not hose the OS, but it might hose itself in such a way that it can't be restarted without a reboot).
5) Status. Coolness. Anti-corporate fantasies. People who wouldn't give a dollar to the red cross can still feel like they're doing something good by sticking it to the man. And since Windows is on 90% of the PCs out there, you get to feel like everybody else is a mindless sheep and you know something they don't. There's a lot of truth to all of this, but in most cases come on, we're just a bunch of guys playing on computers.
6) Configurability. Choice of desktop environments, widgets, etc. While Windows doesn't give you nearly the same options, most of the popular desktop environments for Linux don't give you a ton of options either unless you really want to work for em (see #1).
Personally I don't think that any Linux distro is user-friendly enough to replace Windows at this time FOR AVERAGE JOE BLOW USERS. It's sooooo close, but not there. Ubuntu is a serious step in the right direction. Everything that should be easy has got to be easy, and this isn't the case yet.
For domain servers in a windows workstation environment, I'd still choose a windows server because the management options are enormously beneficial. Everything has become very automated, giving me more time to post on slashdot:)
For web servers, special purpose servers, gateway machines, generic file servers, etc, I choose Linux. Security, stability, free. I also like not having to use a shell, and just whack at text files the old fashioned way. It can be very efficient.
Damn state deregulated it in 1997 and within a couple years the company's assetts were all fragmented and they had a failed fiber optic offshoot that just ate money. Prices started soaring then in about '99. Prior to that I never worried about the power bill, it was just $20-$30 or whatever, no big deal. Suddenly it was $60, then $80, and now I can pay over $120 in the winter and I don't use a lot of power. Small place. Gas heat. Thermostat sits at an uncomfortable 64 degrees. I don't leave *anything* on when I'm not using it. I do dishes by hand even though I have a dishwasher. I don't have a washer/dryer. I keep my place weatherized in the winter. It's retarded.
If I owned a much larger place there is a real chance that I simply wouldn't be able to afford the utility bill. I don't know how some people are able to get by.
Parent shouldn't have been modded troll. This is a very common complaint amongst Office users, myself included. In our organization I've dealt with dozens and dozens of Word documents that just totally crapped out and would no longer open. I've also seen a whole ton of errors when tables are used in Word documents...some of them are recoverable, some of them are not. Sometimes copying and pasting into a new document works, sometimes not. Unfortunately I'm paid for this all to be my fault.
One positive thing I'll say is that Office doesn't *crash* like it used to. Back on Office 97 I think I was helping people recover documents from Word crashes quite frequently. I believe that with the release of that version, this became a much more difficult process (if memory serves me, recovering documents from temp files was pretty easy in Office 95).
I was a little concerned that Calc might use up 211MB of memory, but it didn't sound right so I checked it myself.
The OpenOffice binaries on Windows use up just over 40MB when OO is "closed" (e.g. the quickstart program is still in memory).
When I launch calc, that number shoots up to an astronomical 42MB. Heh. Opening a few fairly simple spreadsheets in MS Excel format and the number goes up to 60MB.
Excel (2002) on its own uses 15MB when it's running empty, and opening the same few fairly simple spreadsheets jumps that number up to 21MB.
So yeah, Excel is smaller in memory. I also find it to be much more responsive. But Calc is not 600% bigger for crying out loud.
Anyhow, sorry for the lack of details but I don't feel like going into detail. I'm on XP SP2 with 1GB RAM. Office XP 2002 and OpenOffice 2.
I had the robot guy and Gyromite. Pretty crappy experience after the novelty wore off (like say 15 minutes), even to a kid as young as I was at the time...I dunno, 10 or 11? Anyhow, I just liked spinning the gyros up and playing with them like tops. Gyromite you could play without the robot, but the game was about as much fun as Duck Hunt, which was also bundled with the system, and wasn't any fun at all either IMO.
One memory I have of the NES is waiting to get Double Dragon. For some reason I remember Double Dragon being really fun at the arcade, so I was really excited. My grandma was going to get it for me for my birthday, and I'd run home every day from school to check the mail for it. Talked it up to my friends how sweet it would be when Double Dragon came. Well it didn't come and didn't come and didn't come...finally about six months later my grandma (I never asked her about it because I didn't want to be rude) found it in her closet all wrapped up and sent it to me. Heh. Anyhow, it took only a few levels to realize that Double Dragon absolutely SUCKED on the NES. The only fun thing was to take advantage of the bug in the first screen where you could hop up on top of the building....not much to do up there but think about how cool it was to be up there.
The best games in my opinion were Zelda, Ikari Warriors, and some top down spaceship game that started with a Z...crap my brain wants to say Zaxxon but it wasn't that (had Zaxxon on Coleco, sweet!)...Zanac? We were kinda poor so most of my gaming experiences were on rentals, and there was no such thing as "five day rentals" back then...it was due the next day at 3PM. That meant extreme marathon play all night long and hoping against all hope to have enough energy to bike back to the rental shop before 3. Long before bike helmets, I can't believe we survived (*sarcasm*)! In college I discovered that track and field was actually pretty fun too (with beer).
Are you sure? TFA does say "Noted Finnish over-clockers Sampsa Kurri and Ville Suvanto achieved graphics engine clocks of 1.003 GHz and a memory speed of 1.881 GHz (940.50 MHz DDR (dual data-rate) memory clocks) with maximum system stability and no visual artifacts."
The phrase "maximum system stability" though might be misleading. If you define it as just POSTing, then man I've done some awesome overclocking myself!:)
Interesting that these overclockers are "noted", and "Finnish." That does sort of give them a little mystique, no? Anytime I hear about a Noted [country name] [scientist|engineer] I always think of an older guy in a white lab coat in some top secret super science facility working on amazing advances in science, like overclocking consumer video cards.
Agreed. Yes it's pretty neat, but I'm not sure if it tells us anything useful.
They had the GPU cooled to -80C. Heat is a *huge* limiting factor in what a processor is capable of. So taking heat out of the equation and then being amazed that a GPU reached 1Ghz is a tad silly.
What would be cool is to see some gaming benchmarks on the GPU running that fast as a sort of look into the future. Although it's not really looking into the future since there is a lot more to a next generation GPU than just clock speeds. Actually, you can just imagine it with about the same results... so maybe it's not so cool, scratch that:)
Anyhow, I'm sure they had a lot of fun doing it, so good for them!
Cheap labor AND skill?
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The H-1B Swindle
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The article summary would lead us to believe that companies are hiring foreign workers who are less skilled, for less money. If that's true, then it actually makes sense, and doesn't imply any kind of terrible unethical business practice.
However, I'm guessing that they're hiring foreign workers that ARE skilled, but paying them less money. That certainly does sound bad. But what if the jobs aren't disposable? If a person makes himself invaluable within an organization, I wonder if he couldn't demand proper compensation regardless of his nationality.
In my mind this is another issue of the American worker getting screwed. I'm sure that many people take it the same way. If something is done to even the score here, then it should be to benefit the American workforce, and not the foreigner who comes here by choice and is willing to work for lower pay. The outcome would likely be the same though no matter which side you approach it from.
Another thing to consider is that by hiring lower paid foreigners, companies may have more money to throw at US workers. Although that argument would probably work a little better if programmers were calling the shots and employers were scrambling to hire good people, like it was 6-10 years ago.
I'm not against foreign workers and I'm not a strict nationalist, but I do believe that a strong middle class is necessary to sustain our economy long term.
I'll always remember Black and White as being one of the most emotional gaming experiences I've ever had.
At first the game was amazing, simply amazing. We immediately bought copies so that everybody could play. The AI was SOOO impressive. The graphics were great. The animation was clever and funny. The game was unique and bizzare. For days and days we played.
But then after a few days we quickly realized that they forgot to make the GAME part of the equation fun. In fact, it was less than fun, it was downright irritating, frustrating, annoying, rage inspiring.
I have never played a game where I actually grew to HATE every aspect of it. I hated my creature and my only release was to torture him repeatedly. I'm not a hateful person, mind you, but I hated that zebra bastard who I had once found cute and entertaining. So yeah, he of course would rampage and burninate all my peasants, but I didn't care because I HATED my peasants. Needy good for nothing worthless sacks of shit that couldn't do anything efficiently but die. It wasn't long before I just destroyed everything. Everything. I even realized that I hated the whole game concept and I didn't really care about the outcome. Oh no you captured my creature? You can have the bastard, I'd rather play without him. Multiplayer was an terrible excercise in who cares. I played Dungeon Keeper 2 for quite a while so I was familiar with the concept of playing a game where the only thing in your direct control is micro-managing resources, but at least DK2 was fun. B&W missed the boat.
After a week, maybe a little longer, we sold all our copies on eBay and I remember feeling GOOD as I was mailing them out. Not good because I got a fraction of my money back, but good because I'd never have to see that zebra's sour face or hear those whiney ass peons bitching and moaning ever again.
I've played many games that turned out to be pretty bad, but this was the only one to actually inspire inner rage. Playing Black and White was about as much fun as dragging a cart load of cranky kids through a crowded Walmart.
When somebody is looking for a high end gaming machine, of course a Celeron is the wrong choice.
I think that the Celeron, aside from the initial offering, has always been a great processor for the money. I used to use Celerons in my DAWs until I jumped on the AMD bandwagon. Had a 400 and then an 850, both of which I overclocked. Saw very good performance in highly CPU-intensive applications, especially considering that I paid *way* less than I would have for full PIIIs, which I would have chosen had money not been tight.
I'm even running a web server now on a Celeron 1.7Ghz. Several very dynamic websites with fairly active forums. Only about 7 million hits per month and about 200GB of traffic. The processor has never been a bottleneck. So why should I have gone with a much more "appropriate" processor when it would have been overkill?
Anyhow, if I were building a new machine today I'd probably go with the cheapest Althon 64. If I were building a machine on a super tight budget though, a 3Ghz Celeron processor at $75 would be a definate consideration....and most applications would perform wonderfully on it.
The one reason I typically don't recommend Celeron processors to people is that they're usually stuck into garbage ultra-budget machines. And sometimes if they're actually being sold with good hardware, the machine price doesn't always reflect the cheaper processor.
I don't have a problem with advertisements most of the time.
However, I'm not comfortable with ads in this case, because advertisements can lead to the skewing of information. If wikipedia becomes reliant on an advertiser, and a politically-motivated group doesn't like something in the wiki, then they start smacking around the advertiser who in turn starts putting pressure on the wiki.
This is why organizations like PBS and NPR exist, although neither is perfect in this regard. Advertisement-free information isn't about providing people with a nicer experience, it's about being free to share information without having to filter it first through the corporations who are paying the bills. Again, I'm not saying that either of these organizations are free of corporate sponsorship, they're not.
I do think that the wiki people should think twice before taking this path.
No. A minor flaw would be one that doesn't affect a primary task performed by the software in such a way as to produce an incorrect result. A major flaw is one that does.
This is especially bad because a prisoner's sentence length should not be determined by a computer flaw! It's bad on a very fundamental level.
Consider a spreadsheet application. If a bug caused the application to crash during a particular calculation, it's an inconvenience. If the same bug produces a completely incorrect result, and that result is used to make a decision of some sort (of course it would be, or you wouldn't be calculating it), then the bug is, in my mind, not at all minor.
This is a small device that's intended to be pocketed, and it should have been designed to withstand the expected insult. Add to this the fact that the way the iPod *looks* is a huge part of why people want to buy it, and I think this might be a legitimate case.
If falling autumn leaves were enough to scratch the hell out of your new car, you'd probably be upset with the car manufacturer, and even more upset with people who tell you that you should have wrapped the whole thing in plastic.
There's no catch-22. You need a court order to obtain private information, for which you'll need evidence of illegal activity. You don't need to know WHO is committing the crime, because that's what you're trying to find out.
If you're my neighbor and I suspect your kids of stealing something from me, I don't have any right to walk into your house and start rummaging around in their rooms. If a record company suspects that a customer of an ISP is sharing copyright material, they shouldn't have any right to just walk into that ISP and demand to see customer records. They should have to go through the legal system on a case per case basis like everyone else.
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People often get caught up in this mess because studies that try to determine what our senses are capable of are often based on being able to *differentiate* between two different triggers.
So yeah, pull up a gradient at 256 color, 16bit color, and 24bit color. You can see the steps in all of them, with 24bit being the best, of course.
Now pull up one shade of red that is only one step different from another shade of red, at the same time. Can you tell the difference between the two? At 256 color, probably. At 16bit color, no way. At 24bit color, absolutely not. Aha, well the human eye can only detect 256 colors! Wrong, clearly. What we have to realize is that all of this is limited by our BRAIN, not necessarily our EYES. The brain is not very good at differentiating between two very similar things unless that difference is magnified...and in fact it's quite easy to FOOL the crap out of the brain by simply telling an observer that two things are different, when they're not. So, when we look at two very similar colors, we might not recognize that they are different, because we're not so good at that. But we are good at seeing things like "blockiness" in gradients, even though no matter how hard we zoom in we can't quite key in on exactly *what* is causing the blockiness.
Our brains and senses are not simple sampling devices with well-defined limits.
The framerate thing is another good example. I know that movies at 24 frames per second at the theater don't bother me at all, even though I am well aware of the flickering if I concentrate on it (via peripheral vision). So why should 60 frames per second on my CRT monitor bother me? I dunno, but it does. Maybe it's because you have to throw in other factors like the fact that your focal point *moves* around the screen. Maybe it's the florescent lights overhead blinking away at a similar rate. Maybe it's analogous to the gradient effect! When you hit a sensor that is working more in a continuous domain with a discrete signal pretending to be continuous by moving very quickly...it sure seems to be easy to pick up. Dunno, but when I sit down in front of a computer with a CRT at 60hz I sense it *immediately* and adjust the rate up. Most people who are aware of the fact that they *can* adjust refresh rate and have seen the difference between 60 and 70+ will also immediately sense it.
I do this to some extent. Not only can you save on hardware, but it's nice to pick up a game for $19 instead of $49 or $59. In multiplayer games after a couple years the number of wankers is substantially lower, and the abilities of the good players are much better, which can make it more fun. (but wait too long and everybody's playing retarded mods like a redeemer-only bathroom map in UT, heh)
It is hard though when a new game you've been looking forward to only plays well at 800x600 with all the goodies turned off.
You can always scale back graphics to bump up fps, but some of these new games are so memory intensive that 512MB just isn't cutting it anymore. I certainly regret making the decision to do 256x2 in my machine...especially since upgrading to gig and maintaining dual channel means I have to buy 2 sticks of 512. Bummer. Swapping is something I've had to deal with in a number of games, from HL2 to BF2. It's not terrible, but enough that I do have to go and shut down a lot of stuff I run at startup before playing to minimize it. I would spend the extra dough on a gig right off if I had to do it over.
This article assumes (hopefully intentionally) that you're reusing a bit of stuff from your last machine...I mean, a *case*, mouse/keyboard, monitor, speakers, etc. Money might be found for more memory then by recycling a hard drive and CDROM/DVD drive.
Dude, you haven't experienced gaming until you've played Tux Racer at 300fps! ;)
My favorite MS bandaid of all time was when they blocked "bad" file attachment types in Outlook, requiring a registry hack to allow them. One of the blocked attachment types was the infamous .lnk, which at that time was the *default* way that IE would send links to web pages via email. So, in a Microsoft world, people would use Microsoft IE to send a link to their buddy running Microsoft Outlook and it wouldn't work. *slaps forehead* Why it took them so long to figure out that you didn't need to send a *file* to link to a web page when URL's were already parsed by Outlook, well, I have no idea.
Yeah this is how MS tends to work as well. Case in point: the IIS Lockdown tool, which just bandaids the crap out of IIS... and of course ends up annoying the hell out of users: for instance, not being able to open an email message in OWA when the subject line contains a dot. Wee.
Change in the government can only come through the will of the people, which has to be strong. If it's not strong enough, nothing will change. Pretending that downloading illegal copies of music is some how on the level of humanity's duty to change tyrannical government is way over the top.
:) I avoid artists who speak out against file sharing. I keep a low profile and don't teach other people how to steal. I have a large *paid for* music collection and have never considered dumping it in favor of illegal copying, like many of my friends have. I'm not proud of stealing, but I do it, and I don't buy into the corporate loss numbers that have never added up correctly (same is true with software piracy to a degree). I believe that artists who aren't heavily sponsored will always do better if their music is flying around the net. The only artists seriously hurt by file sharing are those who have to recoup millions of dollars in recording and advertising budgets. It shouldn't cost a million dollars and take a year in the studio to record an album. An album shouldn't require millions and millions of dollars worth of publicity and advertising. In an ideal world the music would speak for itself and become popular through word of mouth - sharing.
I've downloaded music illegally because it doesn't morally offend me that much and the chance of getting caught is nil. I don't believe that "art is art", either. I think there is a distinction between "entertainment art" and "art for the sake of art." One of which should be paid for always, and another which shouldn't have to play by the same rules. However, I do understand the inherent flaw in my reasoning, because suddenly everything that I like is "art" and everything else is "entertainment." While it does work out in my mind, I'm certainly not going to go so far as to say that all creations should be free unless there are material costs.
Everything could be construed as "art." I've designed t-shirts for my company, and the crap on them I called "artwork", but I don't consider them to be "art." I don't think it's your right to copy and sell them, or copy and give them away, or copy in any way shape or form.
Anyhow, I steal songs occasionally because it usually doesn't feel like like stealing and the price to purchase is way too high. I have hundreds of CDs and continue to buy them when I can. I avoid any artist who's ever made a commercial for the gap
One thing I can't bring myself to do, though, is to say that sharing music online is my right. I can't bring myself to not support copyright law. Really what it boils down to is this: somebody creates something and says that I have to pay for it. I say "nah ah." They say, "why should you have my creation for free?" I say.............. I've never heard a response to that question that didn't sound like total illogical (or at best purely hypothetical) bullshit.
I'm not understanding your point here. A poorly-made video game doesn't have anything to do with video games as a whole being "good" or "bad."
The community reaction you're referring to is normal regardless of the product. You take just about any product that you're not happy with and post your complaints to a forum dedicated to that product and you'll get some serious back talk. People *want* to be happy with the things they've purchased, and it's quite normal to defend it, faults and all. You should expect to hear everything from "you don't know how to use it or maintain it" to "hey it was only X dollars." In fact, it's not uncommon for people who were once vocally unhappy with a product to receive a "fixed" version of the product, and then begin to defend the product when somebody else comes along with complaints.
I remember when the original Unreal game came out, and that damned thing *only* worked well 3dfx video cards and Intel processors. I must have had that stupid game for a year before I could finally play it well on my K6-2 400Mhz (admitedly a bad processor) and TNT video card, despite the fact that the minimum requirements were something like a 166Mhz processor and 3D video card, with a sticker "Optimized for 3dfx." I went through several changes during this time. At first I was a bit unhappy but still polite and gave the game credit because it had some great points to it. People were polite in return for the most part. After the long patch delays I started getting seriously pissed off and that came through in my posts, which were always met by dozens of people who defended the crap out of the game and the company. When I was finally able to play it I suddenly became a bit of a defender of the game, because shit, I'd waited so long and tried so hard to get it to run, it's going to be great damnit!
These kinds of reactions are pretty normal, and have nothing to do with video games making people dumb or smart.
Now I would have seen more of a correlation if you'd mentioned something like cheaters or campers or any kind of online player that exists just to piss people off. These kinds of people have been growing in what seems to be disproportionate numbers since multiplayer gaming started and have ruined countless game experiences for people. Now, whether this has something to do with our modern culture, or it's just a new way of being confronted with personality types that have always been there...I dunno. I'd say a mixture of both...anonimity and distance allow people prone to rude ("dumb") behavior to become more rude than they would in normal daily life.
"I used Linux because it was more convenient. I was writing a lot of code that had to run on UNIX systems, and it was nice to be able to write and compile it on my home computer. I also had better connectivity; the Windows terminal programs I had at the time were quite lacking. I did use Windows for a while in the summer of 2000, when I had a job writing code for Windows and Macintosh."
:) Damn thing wouldn't compile but luckily we did get a few extra hours after explaining the situation.
When I was in college my geek buddy and I had slackware running on one of our machines and we used it for a lot of projects...much easier to work at home than to try and get on an x terminal at school. Anyhow, for the most part it worked out cool. But then during a big opengl project in '95 or '96, we were pushing it to the last minute and had to run to campus to demonstrate our project to the professor. It was that day that I realized that OSF on Alpha was going to be just a wee bit different than Linux on x86. Hehe
1) It's fun. Pure and simple, it's just neat. It's a bit of a challenge (well it used to be) to get a system up and running with some cool desktop environment with all the bells and whistles. Or it's a challenge to get a minimal install running on some seriously old machine to use as a proxy server or something silly you thought up. I can't tell you how many machines that I've installed Linux on just for the hell of it.
:)
2) It's free. While it may be born from a community of swell "information should be free" types, the simple fact that it costs *no money* is a major selling point (pun intended!).
3) Perceived security. Linux can be much more secure that Windows, and by default it often is. Of course I fell asleep behind the wheel of a Redhat machine once and got rooted, but I learned my lesson and I'm still convinced that it's a much more secure OS.
4) Perceived stability. This is one I don't go for, at least on the desktop. Maybe back in the Win9x days, yeah, but not anymore. I've had my share of kernel panics and we've all experienced irritating desktop bugs. On a server I do believe that Linux is more stable...if anything, it's *extremely* rare for a program to hose the machine and require a reboot, which does happen on Windows servers (well, a service might not hose the OS, but it might hose itself in such a way that it can't be restarted without a reboot).
5) Status. Coolness. Anti-corporate fantasies. People who wouldn't give a dollar to the red cross can still feel like they're doing something good by sticking it to the man. And since Windows is on 90% of the PCs out there, you get to feel like everybody else is a mindless sheep and you know something they don't. There's a lot of truth to all of this, but in most cases come on, we're just a bunch of guys playing on computers.
6) Configurability. Choice of desktop environments, widgets, etc. While Windows doesn't give you nearly the same options, most of the popular desktop environments for Linux don't give you a ton of options either unless you really want to work for em (see #1).
Personally I don't think that any Linux distro is user-friendly enough to replace Windows at this time FOR AVERAGE JOE BLOW USERS. It's sooooo close, but not there. Ubuntu is a serious step in the right direction. Everything that should be easy has got to be easy, and this isn't the case yet.
For domain servers in a windows workstation environment, I'd still choose a windows server because the management options are enormously beneficial. Everything has become very automated, giving me more time to post on slashdot
For web servers, special purpose servers, gateway machines, generic file servers, etc, I choose Linux. Security, stability, free. I also like not having to use a shell, and just whack at text files the old fashioned way. It can be very efficient.
Yeah we only have one power choice here too.
Damn state deregulated it in 1997 and within a couple years the company's assetts were all fragmented and they had a failed fiber optic offshoot that just ate money. Prices started soaring then in about '99. Prior to that I never worried about the power bill, it was just $20-$30 or whatever, no big deal. Suddenly it was $60, then $80, and now I can pay over $120 in the winter and I don't use a lot of power. Small place. Gas heat. Thermostat sits at an uncomfortable 64 degrees. I don't leave *anything* on when I'm not using it. I do dishes by hand even though I have a dishwasher. I don't have a washer/dryer. I keep my place weatherized in the winter. It's retarded.
If I owned a much larger place there is a real chance that I simply wouldn't be able to afford the utility bill. I don't know how some people are able to get by.
Parent shouldn't have been modded troll. This is a very common complaint amongst Office users, myself included. In our organization I've dealt with dozens and dozens of Word documents that just totally crapped out and would no longer open. I've also seen a whole ton of errors when tables are used in Word documents...some of them are recoverable, some of them are not. Sometimes copying and pasting into a new document works, sometimes not. Unfortunately I'm paid for this all to be my fault.
One positive thing I'll say is that Office doesn't *crash* like it used to. Back on Office 97 I think I was helping people recover documents from Word crashes quite frequently. I believe that with the release of that version, this became a much more difficult process (if memory serves me, recovering documents from temp files was pretty easy in Office 95).
Oops, I should know better than to trust article summaries.
The summary lead me to believe that the author claimed that Calc had a 211MB footprint. This is not the case.
My bad.
I was a little concerned that Calc might use up 211MB of memory, but it didn't sound right so I checked it myself.
The OpenOffice binaries on Windows use up just over 40MB when OO is "closed" (e.g. the quickstart program is still in memory).
When I launch calc, that number shoots up to an astronomical 42MB. Heh. Opening a few fairly simple spreadsheets in MS Excel format and the number goes up to 60MB.
Excel (2002) on its own uses 15MB when it's running empty, and opening the same few fairly simple spreadsheets jumps that number up to 21MB.
So yeah, Excel is smaller in memory. I also find it to be much more responsive. But Calc is not 600% bigger for crying out loud.
Anyhow, sorry for the lack of details but I don't feel like going into detail. I'm on XP SP2 with 1GB RAM. Office XP 2002 and OpenOffice 2.
I had the robot guy and Gyromite. Pretty crappy experience after the novelty wore off (like say 15 minutes), even to a kid as young as I was at the time...I dunno, 10 or 11? Anyhow, I just liked spinning the gyros up and playing with them like tops. Gyromite you could play without the robot, but the game was about as much fun as Duck Hunt, which was also bundled with the system, and wasn't any fun at all either IMO.
One memory I have of the NES is waiting to get Double Dragon. For some reason I remember Double Dragon being really fun at the arcade, so I was really excited. My grandma was going to get it for me for my birthday, and I'd run home every day from school to check the mail for it. Talked it up to my friends how sweet it would be when Double Dragon came. Well it didn't come and didn't come and didn't come...finally about six months later my grandma (I never asked her about it because I didn't want to be rude) found it in her closet all wrapped up and sent it to me. Heh. Anyhow, it took only a few levels to realize that Double Dragon absolutely SUCKED on the NES. The only fun thing was to take advantage of the bug in the first screen where you could hop up on top of the building....not much to do up there but think about how cool it was to be up there.
The best games in my opinion were Zelda, Ikari Warriors, and some top down spaceship game that started with a Z...crap my brain wants to say Zaxxon but it wasn't that (had Zaxxon on Coleco, sweet!)...Zanac? We were kinda poor so most of my gaming experiences were on rentals, and there was no such thing as "five day rentals" back then...it was due the next day at 3PM. That meant extreme marathon play all night long and hoping against all hope to have enough energy to bike back to the rental shop before 3. Long before bike helmets, I can't believe we survived (*sarcasm*)! In college I discovered that track and field was actually pretty fun too (with beer).
Are you sure? TFA does say "Noted Finnish over-clockers Sampsa Kurri and Ville Suvanto achieved graphics engine clocks of 1.003 GHz and a memory speed of 1.881 GHz (940.50 MHz DDR (dual data-rate) memory clocks) with maximum system stability and no visual artifacts."
:)
The phrase "maximum system stability" though might be misleading. If you define it as just POSTing, then man I've done some awesome overclocking myself!
Interesting that these overclockers are "noted", and "Finnish." That does sort of give them a little mystique, no? Anytime I hear about a Noted [country name] [scientist|engineer] I always think of an older guy in a white lab coat in some top secret super science facility working on amazing advances in science, like overclocking consumer video cards.
Agreed. Yes it's pretty neat, but I'm not sure if it tells us anything useful.
:)
They had the GPU cooled to -80C. Heat is a *huge* limiting factor in what a processor is capable of. So taking heat out of the equation and then being amazed that a GPU reached 1Ghz is a tad silly.
What would be cool is to see some gaming benchmarks on the GPU running that fast as a sort of look into the future. Although it's not really looking into the future since there is a lot more to a next generation GPU than just clock speeds. Actually, you can just imagine it with about the same results... so maybe it's not so cool, scratch that
Anyhow, I'm sure they had a lot of fun doing it, so good for them!
The article summary would lead us to believe that companies are hiring foreign workers who are less skilled, for less money. If that's true, then it actually makes sense, and doesn't imply any kind of terrible unethical business practice.
However, I'm guessing that they're hiring foreign workers that ARE skilled, but paying them less money. That certainly does sound bad. But what if the jobs aren't disposable? If a person makes himself invaluable within an organization, I wonder if he couldn't demand proper compensation regardless of his nationality.
In my mind this is another issue of the American worker getting screwed. I'm sure that many people take it the same way. If something is done to even the score here, then it should be to benefit the American workforce, and not the foreigner who comes here by choice and is willing to work for lower pay. The outcome would likely be the same though no matter which side you approach it from.
Another thing to consider is that by hiring lower paid foreigners, companies may have more money to throw at US workers. Although that argument would probably work a little better if programmers were calling the shots and employers were scrambling to hire good people, like it was 6-10 years ago.
I'm not against foreign workers and I'm not a strict nationalist, but I do believe that a strong middle class is necessary to sustain our economy long term.
I suppose this is a bit off topic.
I'll always remember Black and White as being one of the most emotional gaming experiences I've ever had.
At first the game was amazing, simply amazing. We immediately bought copies so that everybody could play. The AI was SOOO impressive. The graphics were great. The animation was clever and funny. The game was unique and bizzare. For days and days we played.
But then after a few days we quickly realized that they forgot to make the GAME part of the equation fun. In fact, it was less than fun, it was downright irritating, frustrating, annoying, rage inspiring.
I have never played a game where I actually grew to HATE every aspect of it. I hated my creature and my only release was to torture him repeatedly. I'm not a hateful person, mind you, but I hated that zebra bastard who I had once found cute and entertaining. So yeah, he of course would rampage and burninate all my peasants, but I didn't care because I HATED my peasants. Needy good for nothing worthless sacks of shit that couldn't do anything efficiently but die. It wasn't long before I just destroyed everything. Everything. I even realized that I hated the whole game concept and I didn't really care about the outcome. Oh no you captured my creature? You can have the bastard, I'd rather play without him. Multiplayer was an terrible excercise in who cares. I played Dungeon Keeper 2 for quite a while so I was familiar with the concept of playing a game where the only thing in your direct control is micro-managing resources, but at least DK2 was fun. B&W missed the boat.
After a week, maybe a little longer, we sold all our copies on eBay and I remember feeling GOOD as I was mailing them out. Not good because I got a fraction of my money back, but good because I'd never have to see that zebra's sour face or hear those whiney ass peons bitching and moaning ever again.
I've played many games that turned out to be pretty bad, but this was the only one to actually inspire inner rage. Playing Black and White was about as much fun as dragging a cart load of cranky kids through a crowded Walmart.
When somebody is looking for a high end gaming machine, of course a Celeron is the wrong choice.
I think that the Celeron, aside from the initial offering, has always been a great processor for the money. I used to use Celerons in my DAWs until I jumped on the AMD bandwagon. Had a 400 and then an 850, both of which I overclocked. Saw very good performance in highly CPU-intensive applications, especially considering that I paid *way* less than I would have for full PIIIs, which I would have chosen had money not been tight.
I'm even running a web server now on a Celeron 1.7Ghz. Several very dynamic websites with fairly active forums. Only about 7 million hits per month and about 200GB of traffic. The processor has never been a bottleneck. So why should I have gone with a much more "appropriate" processor when it would have been overkill?
Anyhow, if I were building a new machine today I'd probably go with the cheapest Althon 64. If I were building a machine on a super tight budget though, a 3Ghz Celeron processor at $75 would be a definate consideration....and most applications would perform wonderfully on it.
The one reason I typically don't recommend Celeron processors to people is that they're usually stuck into garbage ultra-budget machines. And sometimes if they're actually being sold with good hardware, the machine price doesn't always reflect the cheaper processor.
I don't have a problem with advertisements most of the time.
However, I'm not comfortable with ads in this case, because advertisements can lead to the skewing of information. If wikipedia becomes reliant on an advertiser, and a politically-motivated group doesn't like something in the wiki, then they start smacking around the advertiser who in turn starts putting pressure on the wiki.
This is why organizations like PBS and NPR exist, although neither is perfect in this regard. Advertisement-free information isn't about providing people with a nicer experience, it's about being free to share information without having to filter it first through the corporations who are paying the bills. Again, I'm not saying that either of these organizations are free of corporate sponsorship, they're not.
I do think that the wiki people should think twice before taking this path.
No. A minor flaw would be one that doesn't affect a primary task performed by the software in such a way as to produce an incorrect result. A major flaw is one that does.
This is especially bad because a prisoner's sentence length should not be determined by a computer flaw! It's bad on a very fundamental level.
Consider a spreadsheet application. If a bug caused the application to crash during a particular calculation, it's an inconvenience. If the same bug produces a completely incorrect result, and that result is used to make a decision of some sort (of course it would be, or you wouldn't be calculating it), then the bug is, in my mind, not at all minor.
Awwww, but validation is haaard....
This is a small device that's intended to be pocketed, and it should have been designed to withstand the expected insult. Add to this the fact that the way the iPod *looks* is a huge part of why people want to buy it, and I think this might be a legitimate case.
If falling autumn leaves were enough to scratch the hell out of your new car, you'd probably be upset with the car manufacturer, and even more upset with people who tell you that you should have wrapped the whole thing in plastic.
I noticed that immediately as well, and I'm on XP at the moment. They must be doing something a little differently under the hood.
There's no catch-22. You need a court order to obtain private information, for which you'll need evidence of illegal activity. You don't need to know WHO is committing the crime, because that's what you're trying to find out.
If you're my neighbor and I suspect your kids of stealing something from me, I don't have any right to walk into your house and start rummaging around in their rooms. If a record company suspects that a customer of an ISP is sharing copyright material, they shouldn't have any right to just walk into that ISP and demand to see customer records. They should have to go through the legal system on a case per case basis like everyone else.