Anecdote: Classic Shell completely hosed my W8 install after some Windows Updates. Most desktop functions simply stopped operating. I grudgingly reinstalled Windows 8 and paid the $5 for Start8 instead, which has been a good investment so far.
YMMV, of course, but in this case the free app was more hassle than it was worth.
The example in TFS is stupid. In what sense is technology or Silicon Valley responsible for the way in which information or opinion is suppressed?
Individual companies set their own content standards, tune their own algorithms and make their own bad decisions. There's no digital conspiracy here.
TFA complains about Google's selective autocomplete. What's the big deal? It doesn't actually stop you from searching for terms that will potentially turn up material that some people might find offensive. It simply makes you type the whole term yourself.
Basically, the article seems to insinuate that the companies implementing these filters are maneuvering to become our de facto moral guardians, deciding for society what is "good" and "safe" to read or search for. This is backwards. The companies are merely responding to the demands of an already easily-offended society.
They had sufficient passengers to make operation viable until all the airlines were squeezed post-9/11.
It was that coupled with the increasing costs of maintaining the aging Concorde fleet that doomed them.
I believe there is plenty of demand for faster air travel. My brother lives in Dallas, I live in Scotland, and the thing I hate most about visiting him (insert Texas joke here) is the 10-11 hour flight between Heathrow and DFW.
If I could pay a bit more and shave several hours off that time, I would do it in a heartbeat.
So Samsung finally release a phone that hits all the marks, that reviewers and consumers go crazy for, that actually has decent software on it.
So OBVIOUSLY to maintain this level of success they should go and fork Android and create a crappy customized version that nobody wants... yeah, that makes PERFECT sense.
I think Samsung (and TFA's author) are seriously overestimating the appeal of Samsung's own apps. I've got an S3 (the first smartphone I've owned, because it's the first one I've ever really wanted) and the Samsung apps and features are just bloatware:
AllShare Play seems to be a cloud storage service for media files, with the curious limitation that it can only be used on the S3 and Windows computers. So in other words, it sucks. Dropbox or a similar service would seem to be a far better option.
ChatOn is one of the stronger apps that Samsung bundle with the S3. It's a chat/messaging service that works cross-platform (it's available for Android, iOS, Blackberry and Windows Phone) and it's actually not too bad at what it does. Still, there are lots of other communications apps out there, so it's not exactly a killer app.
S Memo is a simple note/sketch app with sync capabilities. It can sync up nicely with...
S Planner is a decent calendar app, and it can import/export and sync with most calendar sources (Exchange, Google, Samsung account, etc.). It's not too bad. Shame the default (perhaps only?) skin is a brown/beige colour scheme that really doesn't fit with the rest of the phone. Again, there are LOADS of good calendar/task planning apps out there.
S Suggest is like a social frontend to an app store. It integrates with Facebook (though I haven't tried that feature) and lets you see what apps your friends download and recommends new apps based on your preferences. I looked at a bunch of featured apps, and none of them had any comments whatsoever, so perhaps without FB integration enabled it's useless. I wouldn't go near this app, tbh.
I haven't used S Voice. It certainly looks like a ghetto Siri, but I don't know how functional it is. Personally, I think Siri on iOS is a gimmick, which would make this a knock-off of a gimmick. I have no desire to use it.
What I actually love about the S3 is that it runs ICS like a dream, has a nice large, bright, vibrant screen, lots of connectivity options and a reasonable battery life. That, and the best content of the Google Play store are what attracted me, not Samsung's own apps which range in quality from "ok" to "why even bother?".
He is a narcissistic fantasist, and nothing would give me more pleasure than seeing him in prison.
I remember him from back in the Quake days, when he used to hang out in the #quake.uk IRC channel and talk about how awesome he was.
He sucked at Quake tho, and spent far more time on IRC boasting about his lifestyle, being a "security expert" and claiming he could basically hack anything. He was insufferable, and I'm sure he hasn't changed.
There was a particularly good photo of him standing in his office back in 1997, surrounded by computer monitors. An enterprising photoshopper wasted no time in replacing the contents of the monitors with swastikas. Kimble didn't care, he just liked attention. Sadly, it seems this image has been lost in the mists of time.
I'm all for copyright reform, but the Megaupload case is not the way to fight for it. Kimble needs to go. The guy is a total douche.
In fact most modern console games don't even run at 720p internally.
Games on both 360 and PS3 are rendered at lower resolutions internally and upscaled to 720p/1080p/whatever for display.
Halo 3 was the first 360 game (that I know of) to render below 720p (just 1152x640 before upscaling).
Microsoft has since relaxed its requirements for developers, so they're free to render at even lower resolutions now.
CoD: Black Ops ran at 1040x600 on the 360 and just 960x544 on the PS3. MW3 then brought the consoles back into parity, with both rendering at 1040x600.
Also, 1080p isn't the "highest possible resolution". 4K displays are coming... maybe not on the next gen of consoles, but perhaps the one after that.
I'm all for protecting our civil liberties, but I'm perfectly fine bending over and letting the government cram its fat bureaucratic cock up my ass anytime it pleases.
Surely, once you'd figured out that the C64 had vastly superior sound and graphics capabilities (that, admittedly, weren't exposed through Commodore's shitty, ancient on-board BASIC) you were less disappointed?
I mean, consider the Spectrum's shitty single channel "beeper" vs. the magnificence of the SID chip.... or the Spectrum's solution to squeezing full colour screens into as small a memory area as possible, leading to the Spectrum's famous (and much-derided) attribute clash. Don't even get me started on the Spectrum's so-called keyboard.
The boy in the store steered you in the right direction. The C64 was a bit more expensive, but the hardware inside was well worth the extra money.
All of which isn't to say that the Spectrum sucked; it didn't. Considering the year, the price and the target market, it was a decent machine.. but the C64 was better, in almost every measurable way.
Sorry to be a pedant, but the stories are from the C16/C128 days and beyond. Herd joined Commodore after the C64 was released (83 or 84, I can't remember).
The VIC chip (as opposed to the VIC-II in the C64) was far less flexible and capable. Also, the SID chip far exceeded the abilities of the sound synthesis capabilities of the VIC.
It's fair to say that both machines had a similar heritage, and similar design philosophy, but to say that the C64 is just a Vic-20 with a memory expansion isn't fair to the engineers and designers at Commodore. The VIC-II and the SID were a substantial leap forward, while maintaining the price-point that made the C64 so popular.
The C64 was my 2nd computer (first was an Acorn Electron) and it's still my favourite computer of all time.
I still have a C128 with several disk drives, cartridges and other peripherals. I've even got a couple of flashable carts and an SD-card based reader with an ethernet port, so I guess I'd be classed as a Commodore enthusiast:P
Commodore were amazing. They should have remained on top, but a confluence of a factors drove them from the market.
I strongly recommend this book for anyone with fond memories of Commodore machines.
That's fine if the salespeople have the authority to offer such discounts, but for many suppliers that's probably not the case, in which case your chit-chat is just that.
If a worker drone isn't allowed to do anything but toe the company line, then they probably won't.
FFS, moderators! Don't mod people up for parroting the same fucking line every time someone mentions RAID. Everyone knows that RAID isn't a backup solution, and the OP didn't say it was.
Throwing mod points at ACs just for mindlessly repeating the incredibly obvious is retarded.
Ok, it seems you're not the only one who gets this wrong, so...
PEDANT MODE ACTIVATED.
The term is "Film at 11".
It comes from the dim and distant past, when news broadcasts from out in the field were recorded on actual film, which had to be cut and processed in studio before it could be aired.
A story would be announced earlier in the evening, promising the "film at 11", when you could tune in and actually see the footage.
That's nice and everything, but I'll wait for Ivy Bridge, which is due March 2012.
According to Wikipedia:
Ivy Bridge feature improvements from Sandy Bridge were expected to include:
Tri-gate transistor technology (up to 50% less power consumption)
PCI Express 3.0 support
Max CPU multiplier of 63 (57 for Sandy Bridge)
RAM support up to 2800MT/s in 200MHz increments
Next Generation Intel HD Graphics with DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1 support
The built-in GPU is believed to have up to 16 execution units (EUs), compared to Sandy Bridge's maximum of 12.
The new random number generator and the RdRand instruction, which is codenamed Bull Mountain.
Next Generation Intel Quick Sync Video
DDR3 low voltage for mobile processors
Multiple 4k video playback
So yeah, just hang on for the die shrink if you care about performance and power consumption. My next system will definitely be Ivy Bridge based.
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Anecdote: Classic Shell completely hosed my W8 install after some Windows Updates. Most desktop functions simply stopped operating. I grudgingly reinstalled Windows 8 and paid the $5 for Start8 instead, which has been a good investment so far. YMMV, of course, but in this case the free app was more hassle than it was worth.
The example in TFS is stupid. In what sense is technology or Silicon Valley responsible for the way in which information or opinion is suppressed?
Individual companies set their own content standards, tune their own algorithms and make their own bad decisions. There's no digital conspiracy here.
TFA complains about Google's selective autocomplete. What's the big deal? It doesn't actually stop you from searching for terms that will potentially turn up material that some people might find offensive. It simply makes you type the whole term yourself.
Basically, the article seems to insinuate that the companies implementing these filters are maneuvering to become our de facto moral guardians, deciding for society what is "good" and "safe" to read or search for. This is backwards. The companies are merely responding to the demands of an already easily-offended society.
No way! I never get up before 3AM in the afternoon...
wait...
awkward attempt to awkwardly shoehorn a political opinion
Would you say the awkward attempt was... awkward?
They had sufficient passengers to make operation viable until all the airlines were squeezed post-9/11.
It was that coupled with the increasing costs of maintaining the aging Concorde fleet that doomed them.
I believe there is plenty of demand for faster air travel. My brother lives in Dallas, I live in Scotland, and the thing I hate most about visiting him (insert Texas joke here) is the 10-11 hour flight between Heathrow and DFW.
If I could pay a bit more and shave several hours off that time, I would do it in a heartbeat.
I'm continually dismayed that large numbers of people...
...exist.
So Samsung finally release a phone that hits all the marks, that reviewers and consumers go crazy for, that actually has decent software on it.
So OBVIOUSLY to maintain this level of success they should go and fork Android and create a crappy customized version that nobody wants... yeah, that makes PERFECT sense.
I think Samsung (and TFA's author) are seriously overestimating the appeal of Samsung's own apps. I've got an S3 (the first smartphone I've owned, because it's the first one I've ever really wanted) and the Samsung apps and features are just bloatware:
What I actually love about the S3 is that it runs ICS like a dream, has a nice large, bright, vibrant screen, lots of connectivity options and a reasonable battery life. That, and the best content of the Google Play store are what attracted me, not Samsung's own apps which range in quality from "ok" to "why even bother?".
Kimble, aka Kim Dotcom is a total asshat.
He is a narcissistic fantasist, and nothing would give me more pleasure than seeing him in prison.
I remember him from back in the Quake days, when he used to hang out in the #quake.uk IRC channel and talk about how awesome he was.
He sucked at Quake tho, and spent far more time on IRC boasting about his lifestyle, being a "security expert" and claiming he could basically hack anything. He was insufferable, and I'm sure he hasn't changed.
There was a particularly good photo of him standing in his office back in 1997, surrounded by computer monitors. An enterprising photoshopper wasted no time in replacing the contents of the monitors with swastikas. Kimble didn't care, he just liked attention. Sadly, it seems this image has been lost in the mists of time.
I'm all for copyright reform, but the Megaupload case is not the way to fight for it. Kimble needs to go. The guy is a total douche.
Obvious troll is obvious.
Then again, I'm reading Slashdot at work, so you're "potentially" correct.
In fact most modern console games don't even run at 720p internally.
Games on both 360 and PS3 are rendered at lower resolutions internally and upscaled to 720p/1080p/whatever for display.
Halo 3 was the first 360 game (that I know of) to render below 720p (just 1152x640 before upscaling).
Microsoft has since relaxed its requirements for developers, so they're free to render at even lower resolutions now.
CoD: Black Ops ran at 1040x600 on the 360 and just 960x544 on the PS3. MW3 then brought the consoles back into parity, with both rendering at 1040x600.
Also, 1080p isn't the "highest possible resolution". 4K displays are coming... maybe not on the next gen of consoles, but perhaps the one after that.
FTFY
Surely, once you'd figured out that the C64 had vastly superior sound and graphics capabilities (that, admittedly, weren't exposed through Commodore's shitty, ancient on-board BASIC) you were less disappointed?
I mean, consider the Spectrum's shitty single channel "beeper" vs. the magnificence of the SID chip.... or the Spectrum's solution to squeezing full colour screens into as small a memory area as possible, leading to the Spectrum's famous (and much-derided) attribute clash. Don't even get me started on the Spectrum's so-called keyboard.
The boy in the store steered you in the right direction. The C64 was a bit more expensive, but the hardware inside was well worth the extra money.
All of which isn't to say that the Spectrum sucked; it didn't. Considering the year, the price and the target market, it was a decent machine.. but the C64 was better, in almost every measurable way.
I'm pretty sure teens will always have a love of tinkering and tweaking their "little guys".
Sorry to be a pedant, but the stories are from the C16/C128 days and beyond. Herd joined Commodore after the C64 was released (83 or 84, I can't remember).
The VIC chip (as opposed to the VIC-II in the C64) was far less flexible and capable. Also, the SID chip far exceeded the abilities of the sound synthesis capabilities of the VIC.
It's fair to say that both machines had a similar heritage, and similar design philosophy, but to say that the C64 is just a Vic-20 with a memory expansion isn't fair to the engineers and designers at Commodore. The VIC-II and the SID were a substantial leap forward, while maintaining the price-point that made the C64 so popular.
The C64 was my 2nd computer (first was an Acorn Electron) and it's still my favourite computer of all time.
I still have a C128 with several disk drives, cartridges and other peripherals. I've even got a couple of flashable carts and an SD-card based reader with an ethernet port, so I guess I'd be classed as a Commodore enthusiast :P
Commodore were amazing. They should have remained on top, but a confluence of a factors drove them from the market.
I strongly recommend this book for anyone with fond memories of Commodore machines.
...it seems the tone of religious arguments on Slashdot shifts dramatically as the US wakes up.
Really, the vast majority of fervent Christians start popping out of the woodwork here as morning rolls around in the Land of the Free.
It ain't easy being white,
It ain't easy being brown,
All this pressure to be bright,
I got childrens all over town!
Oh yeah, the guy in the $4000 suit is holding the elevator for the guy who doesn't make that in 3 months... COME ON!"
That's fine if the salespeople have the authority to offer such discounts, but for many suppliers that's probably not the case, in which case your chit-chat is just that.
If a worker drone isn't allowed to do anything but toe the company line, then they probably won't.
FFS, moderators! Don't mod people up for parroting the same fucking line every time someone mentions RAID. Everyone knows that RAID isn't a backup solution, and the OP didn't say it was.
Throwing mod points at ACs just for mindlessly repeating the incredibly obvious is retarded.
Amen. Backup Exec is a steaming pile of turds. How do you turn a simple backup operation into a hideous unreliable abomination? Ask Symantec.
You could all go out and buy a copy of Rage to show your thanks. You don't even have to play it. ;)
Ok, it seems you're not the only one who gets this wrong, so...
PEDANT MODE ACTIVATED.
The term is "Film at 11".
It comes from the dim and distant past, when news broadcasts from out in the field were recorded on actual film, which had to be cut and processed in studio before it could be aired.
A story would be announced earlier in the evening, promising the "film at 11", when you could tune in and actually see the footage.
Get it now, Mr Frosty Piss?
That's nice and everything, but I'll wait for Ivy Bridge, which is due March 2012.
According to Wikipedia:
Ivy Bridge feature improvements from Sandy Bridge were expected to include:
Tri-gate transistor technology (up to 50% less power consumption)
PCI Express 3.0 support
Max CPU multiplier of 63 (57 for Sandy Bridge)
RAM support up to 2800MT/s in 200MHz increments
Next Generation Intel HD Graphics with DirectX 11, OpenGL 3.1, and OpenCL 1.1 support
The built-in GPU is believed to have up to 16 execution units (EUs), compared to Sandy Bridge's maximum of 12.
The new random number generator and the RdRand instruction, which is codenamed Bull Mountain.
Next Generation Intel Quick Sync Video
DDR3 low voltage for mobile processors
Multiple 4k video playback
So yeah, just hang on for the die shrink if you care about performance and power consumption. My next system will definitely be Ivy Bridge based.