Assuming your fingers are rounded and not completely fat, it isn't an issue. The screen reacts as soon as the tip of your finger touches it (and helpfully shows which letter you're on by popping that up above, so that if you hit the wrong one you can drag to the correct one)
Ironically the space for each key on the iPhone interface is larger than that on most physical keyboards on mobile devices, eg Treos
As soon as you try the current iPhone keyboard for more than 10 minutes and see it actually is REALLY good.
As a long-time Treo 600/650 user I was really sceptical about not having a proper keyboard, but the fact is that I (and everyone I know who has tried it for a while) got used to it surprisingly quickly, 3 days at most I'd say, and now can type on it about as fast as I could my Treo. At first the predictive text (which I have to say is better than most) helped, but now I simply don't make that many mistakes.
Comments implying it's unusable without a physical keyboard just perpetuate the fallacy that there is no other alternative. There's just stubborn people, the same ones who last generation refused to adapt to touch-tone phones, broadband, automatic gearboxes, digital synths, electric shavers, you name it. Welcome to being a Grumpy Old Man;)
To me that says you are not reading the right documentation. I have found the documentation fairly extensive, and at least one of the introductory iPhone programming tutorials on the iPhone developer website builds a Hello World from scratch using Interface Builder. That aspect is well explained in at least a few documents, you have not read enough if you did not know about IB apart from accidentally launching it.
I started on the iPhone SDK pretty early on, and didn't find any such tutorials. There was sample code (I learned what I knew by dissecting that), there were a bunch of videos essentially glorifying the sdk but not providing any real demos - called the "iPhone Getting Started" videos, and nothing that actually demonstrated what all the tools were and how they worked to build soemthing from the ground up.
Like I said, I only found the IB as I was trying to work out what the other files in the Hello World directory were, and how I could affect layout and such with them. Nothing before then showed me even the concept of using the IB for laying out UI elements (and as someone new to Cocoa, I didn't know what the environment was).
I'd appreciate a link to those tutorials, as I'm sure I'm missing a lot more information. I read the Objective C primer, so I'm familiar with lots of the concepts and important classes, but the language itself is only a small part of the dev environment.
I don't know about you, but as a one-time C programmer, 12 year Java programmer, I HATE Objective C. The syntax is all fucked up, it has a whole lot of really weird design decisions that seem to be made simply to provide a workaround to some problem, and I find the documentation for the SDK lacking. Yes, there is a lot of it, but I've tried to use it, and it's been a complete pain in the ass.
For an example of a design "feature" of Objective C, you can extend/override a class. Any class. A class you don't even have source code access to. A class you don't even have package access to - it happens dynamically. Scary, important classes such as the base class. And you don't even do it IN the class, just another random file somewhere. Before anyone says that's useful, that rather destroys the whole concept of encapsulation.
I'm sure the rest is that I don't like XCode either, but reading through the docs and writing some simple iPhone apps has been painful mostly because of the language and the lack of documentation (it really lacks a "here are all the tools you'll need to use to make an iPhone app", eg I completely found the UI editor by chance)
When the Amiga first came out, it had a very strange 4-colour basic set-up for Workbench - a sky blue background, white text, with orange and black used as highlight/secondary colours. Apparently (and of course I can't cite a reference for it now!) this was based on the colours Nasa used for their GUI systems, which gave high clarity. I trust they did their research.
The oft-quoted green on black or amber on black were never chosen for their suitability, they were simply the most affordable solution at the time in the land of monochrome CRTs.
First, I am not sure that email is really by Gates -- from reading his writing or listening to him in the past, it really does not sound like his style. Also, "I reboot my computer... why should I have to reboot my computer?" I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs. However, maybe I'm giving too much credit here.
Bill gates certainly knows what a dll is, how one installs, and has indeed probably written several in his career. What he is doing in that email is trying to USE his company's own product and coming up with issues that need to be addressed.
You'd be surprised how often this *doesn't* happen, management not using their own products, not understand what it's like to be a consumer (bosses are generally clued in enough to do so, but middle management doesn't care). These are issues that SHOULD have been picked up before the product got to him - they have usability teams and QA after all. Bill is asking, "what the fuck are these people doing?"
Bill (or whoever it actually is) seems to be really trying to use the product as a user, rather than as a programmer. A user generally knows what they want to do at any time, but not how they do it, and they go with what seems most obvious to them at the time. In this example, Bill is a user who says "I want to install moviemaker" and tries the obvious routes to do so. And comes up with a frustrating experience.
There is no value in saying things like "pah, just apt-get install on Linux" - that sidesteps the issue entirely. The windows usability experience, for that matter ANY OS user experience, should handhold the user through doing something they don't know how to do. A Linux user who is just a user, like your grandma or secretary or 95% of the population, won't know about apt-get, and won't know how to get moviemaker on windows. I'm sure Bill wouldn't have a problem looking for a zip file online, extracting it himself and so forth, but he's looking from the point of view of those who can't, his customer base.
I think the shift to usability is very important, it's identifying who actually uses the software, ie technically inexperienced people with little knowledge or interest in their OS as a whole. They're not doing it as well as Apple is, but at least they recognise the problem, and that's a start.
Because people like modifying things and see what they can make them do. This is the hacker ethic.
Make your car go faster? Or run on vegetable oil perhaps? Changing your fridge into a computer cooling system? Messing with a synthesizer's innards to get some sounds it never had before? Improving an item by doing something with it the original manufacturers never considered.
For any reason from souping-up, to making it more envrionmentally friendly, to just off-the-wall crazy, hacking is about repurposing something because it suits you. It's inventing, innovation, creativity. If you can't see the point in these, then you don't understand hacking and I wonder what you're doing here.
For the Wii and PSP specifically, they are awesome platforms (and unique in their features), which inspire people. They are obviously having ideas for games, or uses for the consoles, that they are not available commercially. These homebrew guys have to work their own way in as the manufacturers have chosen to make dev kits and release methods prohibitively expensive (tens of thousands of dollars), so kudos to them for doing so. I hope they continue to use homebrew to make the next great set of applications and games.
If you want a comparison of how a manufacturer can get it right, look at what is going to happen with iPhone development over the next 6 months. With a free SDK and cheap way to distribute apps commercially, there will be a LOT of people eager to join in, and Apple will get a ton of apps and even some revenue, from doing this.
Whether the companies embrace homebrew or not, it will always be there one way or another. They should recognise it as a pool of talent and creativity and allow it the space to grow.
- the meeting was NOT on private property, it was in a public place. - the attendees did NOT venture onto private property. - the other side of the road from where they were, was private property, owned by someone who drove up, with guns in sight, and proceeded to take photos of their numberplates (without permission, one presumes)
(this is all taken/derived from the wiki entry.)
I can't vouch for the behaviour of the meeting attendees, but by all means the property owner acted like an asshat, in an intimidating fashion. However the dialogue went, arriving with guns (and note, NOT on his own property) is not a cordial way to start investigating what is going on.
This is news to slashdot, perhaps the headline should read "Warning to geohashers: outsider-hating, gun-toting rednecks may crash your meeting on public property and take photographs of you or your vehicles without permission, because they 'don't take kindly to your kinda people round these parts'"
and maybe keep their systems offline or only on a secured and firewalled intranet. I believe the Chinese may know a thing or two about this, and probably have such an intranet they'd be more than happy for those computers to use.
Funny coming a day after the wwdc announcement from Apple that one of the most important features for the iphone 3g is... an SDK for writing tools and applications.
He's only bitching because everyone is using Eclipse (or more to the point, not using his IDE).
The best solution is don't meet/exceed expectations, but completely sidestep them. TF2 was so different from the uber-realism tack they'd initially started on, that it was judged primarily on its own merits when it eventually came out.
Interestingly, most savvy traders shun top-flight stocks (such as S&P 500, DJI, FTSE 100). The reasoning is that to get chosen to join these indices/groups, the stock needs to have performed well in the past. Once they get to that level, they've generally plateaued. Look at eg coca cola, AT&T or other companies in the Dow 30, they aren't making great strides. Most investors are more interested in the stocks that still have to make their huge rises - that is where the money is to be made.
It is a very common occurence already, especially on the short term market. Simple scripts set to buy and sell when the spread hits certain levels. If you watch the order book for any major stock, you can see these. Rapidly-injected identical small sequential orders.
The Pringles can never struck me as particularly good design - chips would still smash at the bottom, it was just a tube, and you can't even get your hand in to the bottom like a regular bag of chips, you need to tilt it and shower yourself in crumbs.
Anyone mind giving some information on why it was supposedly so revolutionary and he would be so proud of it?
Loot tables in eg sunken temple now have a far larger chance at their end bosses to drop an epic (I've seen them drop every other run), and possibly the same with BRD. But your point does stand, the 50s are really just a race to get to Outland and lose much of the charm of the original game.
Not to mention all the old endgame content (MC, BWL, ZG, AQ, Naxx) which is now just ignored and rotting. very poor decision there.
I've been playing WoW since the beta, I played a LOT for the first year or two, less lately. I have 4 level 70s, most Karazhan geared, two with some SSC/TK stuff.
I've bee playing Age of Conan's early access program for the last few days, levelled 4 characters up to 10, and can really see what will be its good points and what will appeal to people.
First thing to determine though, is the audience for the game. It's not really the few thousand wishing MMOs went back to EQ/UO style in some way or other. It's the several MILLION who play WoW, probably never played an MMO before, and want something new.
The good points: - the graphics engine is really, really good. Great light/fog/bump mapping effects. The textures are brilliant, and the modelling exquisite. Tortage looks great, but when you get to the cities further on, it takes your breath away. People used to WoW will be completely blown away. - the character creation is amazing as well, dozens of sliders to tweak every facial and body characteristic if you so choose. - the starting quests are pretty good, even though all characters start in the same area, the quest lines diverge by class quite early on. this will give replayability value. - lots of tweaking of stats through abilities, feats and the like - a more interesting hierarchical approach to classes, with explicit subclasses of different types. - different pvp styles, such as free for all or culture vs culture. - the combat system, will spellweaving and combos, is really awesome. a good innovation and a lot of fun.
Bad points: - the interface needs a lot of work. A LOT of work. "/cc addbuddy name" to add someone to a friends list? The clunky chat windows? WoW with no mods is pretty bad too, but this is even worse. - needs better guides to learn how to use the interface. this will probably come with the full game. - Some abilities peter out at higher levels, but there is no indication of this. eg Slam is awesome around level 5-6, but around level 7 or 8 simply stops working, without telling you this will happen. - needs to make it easier to group with people to do group quests/areas. there is no indication of even what these *are*. WoW's LFG system is a good example of how to do it better. - some open areas are "instanced", to keep the number of visible players low. eg you can both be in tortage but not see each other, until one moves to the other's instance. i understand this is a performance issue, but it can be a real problem and very disorientating for new players.
Overall, I'm really excited about it. The game is gorgeous which is incentive enough to play it, but with a bit more handholding to players for new concepts and the clunky UI. It looks like it could be really awesome.
In terms of the launch, it was delayed about 4 hours from the original time, but then came up without a glitch. Some people are forgetting how bad WoW used to be around major patches:)
They refuse to join the US in Iraq. You really think that's a bad idea? Pretty much every country involved in that "peacekeeping" operation now wishes they'd never got involved. Including the UK, and even the US.
They hold a rally supporting the oppressed people who've been subjected to an invasion, abduction of their spiritual leder, systematic destruction of their culture and history. This is a BAD thing?
And in your third link, to quote "...Delhi's insistence on using diplomacy to resolve the Iranian nuclear controversy". Heaven forbid we do something other than run in, kill a million of them and destroy their country.
Topping it off with "everything's a commie plot". Nice one.
You're either a very good tongue in cheek troll, or the type of american I'm most scared of.
I bet they're getting a handsome licence fee for every Blu-ray reader sold. So Microsoft will be paying them every time they sell a 360.
They've already won the format war, they have little chance of winning the console war (A large chunk of PS3 sales have been purely for its capability as a good Blu-ray player / DVD upscaler), if they're smart they'll stick to what they're making money on now and work on getting it right for the next generation.
From TFA, interestingly this bypasses DirectX and interfaces with the card directly (I guess you'd want to, to throw maths at it instead of vertices)
However it only runs on R600-based Ati cards right now. It also requires.Net framework. They do say they're "investigating" an nVidia version, but that sounds a while away.
Interestingly also, it claims to parallelize processing the atoms, so it must use the individual stream processors on the graphics card directly.
This card is actually the most power-hungry of the lot.
They only give power consumption for the whole system, 214W when idle, 374W when under load (!)
SOme basic math on their results gives you the 3870 consumes 50W when idle, and the X2 consuming 100W when idle and up to a massive 260W when under full load.
(3870 at idle = 164W, 3870 X2 at idle = 214W, hence 3870 = 50W)
This isn't really news, is it? It's not even a new graphics card, just a new way of packaging existing ones. The X2 card costs about the same as two 3870s anyway, so you may as well SLi them for the same performance...
The benchmarks really are a bit weird though, comparing the card *only* against single-card Geforce systems, and old ones at that (such as the 8800GTX, which is the same generation as the ATI 2900 rather than 3800 series), and not even the top end, ie the Ultra. For comparison, the costs in the UK for the cards are about:
3850: £110 3870: £135 3870 X2: £255 8800GTS: £170 (the new model, out last month, which they didn't even test, and performs between a GT and GTX)
The 3800 series is obviously aimed at the low end 3d gaming market (and I don't mean tux racer:p ), while the 8800GTS gives the best "bang for your buck" at the moment. The X2 is currently the fastest card in a single socket, but why not benchmark it against an 8800 SLi system, if you are going to bother testing against 3870s in crossfire?
Apart of course from the fact it wouldn't be the fastest card out, and having a new flagship card which is second-best isn't a great thing in that industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Assuming your fingers are rounded and not completely fat, it isn't an issue. The screen reacts as soon as the tip of your finger touches it (and helpfully shows which letter you're on by popping that up above, so that if you hit the wrong one you can drag to the correct one)
Ironically the space for each key on the iPhone interface is larger than that on most physical keyboards on mobile devices, eg Treos
As soon as you try the current iPhone keyboard for more than 10 minutes and see it actually is REALLY good.
As a long-time Treo 600/650 user I was really sceptical about not having a proper keyboard, but the fact is that I (and everyone I know who has tried it for a while) got used to it surprisingly quickly, 3 days at most I'd say, and now can type on it about as fast as I could my Treo. At first the predictive text (which I have to say is better than most) helped, but now I simply don't make that many mistakes.
Comments implying it's unusable without a physical keyboard just perpetuate the fallacy that there is no other alternative. There's just stubborn people, the same ones who last generation refused to adapt to touch-tone phones, broadband, automatic gearboxes, digital synths, electric shavers, you name it. Welcome to being a Grumpy Old Man ;)
To me that says you are not reading the right documentation. I have found the documentation fairly extensive, and at least one of the introductory iPhone programming tutorials on the iPhone developer website builds a Hello World from scratch using Interface Builder. That aspect is well explained in at least a few documents, you have not read enough if you did not know about IB apart from accidentally launching it.
I started on the iPhone SDK pretty early on, and didn't find any such tutorials. There was sample code (I learned what I knew by dissecting that), there were a bunch of videos essentially glorifying the sdk but not providing any real demos - called the "iPhone Getting Started" videos, and nothing that actually demonstrated what all the tools were and how they worked to build soemthing from the ground up.
Like I said, I only found the IB as I was trying to work out what the other files in the Hello World directory were, and how I could affect layout and such with them. Nothing before then showed me even the concept of using the IB for laying out UI elements (and as someone new to Cocoa, I didn't know what the environment was).
I'd appreciate a link to those tutorials, as I'm sure I'm missing a lot more information. I read the Objective C primer, so I'm familiar with lots of the concepts and important classes, but the language itself is only a small part of the dev environment.
I don't know about you, but as a one-time C programmer, 12 year Java programmer, I HATE Objective C. The syntax is all fucked up, it has a whole lot of really weird design decisions that seem to be made simply to provide a workaround to some problem, and I find the documentation for the SDK lacking. Yes, there is a lot of it, but I've tried to use it, and it's been a complete pain in the ass.
For an example of a design "feature" of Objective C, you can extend/override a class. Any class. A class you don't even have source code access to. A class you don't even have package access to - it happens dynamically. Scary, important classes such as the base class. And you don't even do it IN the class, just another random file somewhere. Before anyone says that's useful, that rather destroys the whole concept of encapsulation.
I'm sure the rest is that I don't like XCode either, but reading through the docs and writing some simple iPhone apps has been painful mostly because of the language and the lack of documentation (it really lacks a "here are all the tools you'll need to use to make an iPhone app", eg I completely found the UI editor by chance)
When the Amiga first came out, it had a very strange 4-colour basic set-up for Workbench - a sky blue background, white text, with orange and black used as highlight/secondary colours. Apparently (and of course I can't cite a reference for it now!) this was based on the colours Nasa used for their GUI systems, which gave high clarity. I trust they did their research.
The oft-quoted green on black or amber on black were never chosen for their suitability, they were simply the most affordable solution at the time in the land of monochrome CRTs.
First, I am not sure that email is really by Gates -- from reading his writing or listening to him in the past, it really does not sound like his style. Also, "I reboot my computer ... why should I have to reboot my computer?" I find it hard to realize that he wouldn't know the technical difficulties in replacing a dll while the system is running, and possible ways around this, and the current state of affairs. However, maybe I'm giving too much credit here.
Bill gates certainly knows what a dll is, how one installs, and has indeed probably written several in his career. What he is doing in that email is trying to USE his company's own product and coming up with issues that need to be addressed.You'd be surprised how often this *doesn't* happen, management not using their own products, not understand what it's like to be a consumer (bosses are generally clued in enough to do so, but middle management doesn't care). These are issues that SHOULD have been picked up before the product got to him - they have usability teams and QA after all. Bill is asking, "what the fuck are these people doing?"
Bill (or whoever it actually is) seems to be really trying to use the product as a user, rather than as a programmer. A user generally knows what they want to do at any time, but not how they do it, and they go with what seems most obvious to them at the time. In this example, Bill is a user who says "I want to install moviemaker" and tries the obvious routes to do so. And comes up with a frustrating experience.
There is no value in saying things like "pah, just apt-get install on Linux" - that sidesteps the issue entirely. The windows usability experience, for that matter ANY OS user experience, should handhold the user through doing something they don't know how to do. A Linux user who is just a user, like your grandma or secretary or 95% of the population, won't know about apt-get, and won't know how to get moviemaker on windows. I'm sure Bill wouldn't have a problem looking for a zip file online, extracting it himself and so forth, but he's looking from the point of view of those who can't, his customer base.
I think the shift to usability is very important, it's identifying who actually uses the software, ie technically inexperienced people with little knowledge or interest in their OS as a whole. They're not doing it as well as Apple is, but at least they recognise the problem, and that's a start.
Because people like modifying things and see what they can make them do. This is the hacker ethic.
Make your car go faster? Or run on vegetable oil perhaps? Changing your fridge into a computer cooling system? Messing with a synthesizer's innards to get some sounds it never had before? Improving an item by doing something with it the original manufacturers never considered.
For any reason from souping-up, to making it more envrionmentally friendly, to just off-the-wall crazy, hacking is about repurposing something because it suits you. It's inventing, innovation, creativity. If you can't see the point in these, then you don't understand hacking and I wonder what you're doing here.
For the Wii and PSP specifically, they are awesome platforms (and unique in their features), which inspire people. They are obviously having ideas for games, or uses for the consoles, that they are not available commercially. These homebrew guys have to work their own way in as the manufacturers have chosen to make dev kits and release methods prohibitively expensive (tens of thousands of dollars), so kudos to them for doing so. I hope they continue to use homebrew to make the next great set of applications and games.
If you want a comparison of how a manufacturer can get it right, look at what is going to happen with iPhone development over the next 6 months. With a free SDK and cheap way to distribute apps commercially, there will be a LOT of people eager to join in, and Apple will get a ton of apps and even some revenue, from doing this.
Whether the companies embrace homebrew or not, it will always be there one way or another. They should recognise it as a pool of talent and creativity and allow it the space to grow.
Issues with pornography? More like a subscription.
Oops, I'll get out of your box now. You might want to secure that network though ;)
By the account on xkcd's wiki page now:
- the meeting was NOT on private property, it was in a public place.
- the attendees did NOT venture onto private property.
- the other side of the road from where they were, was private property, owned by someone who drove up, with guns in sight, and proceeded to take photos of their numberplates (without permission, one presumes)
(this is all taken/derived from the wiki entry.)
I can't vouch for the behaviour of the meeting attendees, but by all means the property owner acted like an asshat, in an intimidating fashion. However the dialogue went, arriving with guns (and note, NOT on his own property) is not a cordial way to start investigating what is going on.
This is news to slashdot, perhaps the headline should read "Warning to geohashers: outsider-hating, gun-toting rednecks may crash your meeting on public property and take photographs of you or your vehicles without permission, because they 'don't take kindly to your kinda people round these parts'"
It's either very informed indeed, or complete rubbish. I mean, "heterojunctiontions"?
Well done, I'm completely stumped.
Funny coming a day after the wwdc announcement from Apple that one of the most important features for the iphone 3g is... an SDK for writing tools and applications.
He's only bitching because everyone is using Eclipse (or more to the point, not using his IDE).
after what, 8 years of waiting?
The best solution is don't meet/exceed expectations, but completely sidestep them. TF2 was so different from the uber-realism tack they'd initially started on, that it was judged primarily on its own merits when it eventually came out.
Interestingly, most savvy traders shun top-flight stocks (such as S&P 500, DJI, FTSE 100). The reasoning is that to get chosen to join these indices/groups, the stock needs to have performed well in the past. Once they get to that level, they've generally plateaued. Look at eg coca cola, AT&T or other companies in the Dow 30, they aren't making great strides. Most investors are more interested in the stocks that still have to make their huge rises - that is where the money is to be made.
It is a very common occurence already, especially on the short term market. Simple scripts set to buy and sell when the spread hits certain levels. If you watch the order book for any major stock, you can see these. Rapidly-injected identical small sequential orders.
The Pringles can never struck me as particularly good design - chips would still smash at the bottom, it was just a tube, and you can't even get your hand in to the bottom like a regular bag of chips, you need to tilt it and shower yourself in crumbs.
Anyone mind giving some information on why it was supposedly so revolutionary and he would be so proud of it?
Loot tables in eg sunken temple now have a far larger chance at their end bosses to drop an epic (I've seen them drop every other run), and possibly the same with BRD. But your point does stand, the 50s are really just a race to get to Outland and lose much of the charm of the original game.
Not to mention all the old endgame content (MC, BWL, ZG, AQ, Naxx) which is now just ignored and rotting. very poor decision there.
I've been playing WoW since the beta, I played a LOT for the first year or two, less lately. I have 4 level 70s, most Karazhan geared, two with some SSC/TK stuff.
:)
I've bee playing Age of Conan's early access program for the last few days, levelled 4 characters up to 10, and can really see what will be its good points and what will appeal to people.
First thing to determine though, is the audience for the game. It's not really the few thousand wishing MMOs went back to EQ/UO style in some way or other. It's the several MILLION who play WoW, probably never played an MMO before, and want something new.
The good points:
- the graphics engine is really, really good. Great light/fog/bump mapping effects. The textures are brilliant, and the modelling exquisite. Tortage looks great, but when you get to the cities further on, it takes your breath away. People used to WoW will be completely blown away.
- the character creation is amazing as well, dozens of sliders to tweak every facial and body characteristic if you so choose.
- the starting quests are pretty good, even though all characters start in the same area, the quest lines diverge by class quite early on. this will give replayability value.
- lots of tweaking of stats through abilities, feats and the like
- a more interesting hierarchical approach to classes, with explicit subclasses of different types.
- different pvp styles, such as free for all or culture vs culture.
- the combat system, will spellweaving and combos, is really awesome. a good innovation and a lot of fun.
Bad points:
- the interface needs a lot of work. A LOT of work. "/cc addbuddy name" to add someone to a friends list? The clunky chat windows? WoW with no mods is pretty bad too, but this is even worse.
- needs better guides to learn how to use the interface. this will probably come with the full game.
- Some abilities peter out at higher levels, but there is no indication of this. eg Slam is awesome around level 5-6, but around level 7 or 8 simply stops working, without telling you this will happen.
- needs to make it easier to group with people to do group quests/areas. there is no indication of even what these *are*. WoW's LFG system is a good example of how to do it better.
- some open areas are "instanced", to keep the number of visible players low. eg you can both be in tortage but not see each other, until one moves to the other's instance. i understand this is a performance issue, but it can be a real problem and very disorientating for new players.
Overall, I'm really excited about it. The game is gorgeous which is incentive enough to play it, but with a bit more handholding to players for new concepts and the clunky UI. It looks like it could be really awesome.
In terms of the launch, it was delayed about 4 hours from the original time, but then came up without a glitch. Some people are forgetting how bad WoW used to be around major patches
They refuse to join the US in Iraq. You really think that's a bad idea? Pretty much every country involved in that "peacekeeping" operation now wishes they'd never got involved. Including the UK, and even the US. They hold a rally supporting the oppressed people who've been subjected to an invasion, abduction of their spiritual leder, systematic destruction of their culture and history. This is a BAD thing? And in your third link, to quote "...Delhi's insistence on using diplomacy to resolve the Iranian nuclear controversy". Heaven forbid we do something other than run in, kill a million of them and destroy their country. Topping it off with "everything's a commie plot". Nice one. You're either a very good tongue in cheek troll, or the type of american I'm most scared of.
http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=Wii®1=All&cons2=PS3®2=All&cons3=X360®3=All&start=39201&end=39565 says otherwise. In the last 5 months or so, the PS3 has been steadily outselling the 360, by 20-30%, but earlier in the year, the Xbox had the edge. During the last 12 months, the 360 has sold about 8.8 million units, the PS3 about 8.9 million. (from http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=Wii®1=All&cons2=PS3®2=All&cons3=X360®3=All&start=39201&end=39565&weekly=1 )
I bet they're getting a handsome licence fee for every Blu-ray reader sold. So Microsoft will be paying them every time they sell a 360.
They've already won the format war, they have little chance of winning the console war (A large chunk of PS3 sales have been purely for its capability as a good Blu-ray player / DVD upscaler), if they're smart they'll stick to what they're making money on now and work on getting it right for the next generation.
From TFA, interestingly this bypasses DirectX and interfaces with the card directly (I guess you'd want to, to throw maths at it instead of vertices)
.Net framework. They do say they're "investigating" an nVidia version, but that sounds a while away.
However it only runs on R600-based Ati cards right now. It also requires
Interestingly also, it claims to parallelize processing the atoms, so it must use the individual stream processors on the graphics card directly.
There's just a million-to-one chance they'll win.
This card is actually the most power-hungry of the lot.
They only give power consumption for the whole system, 214W when idle, 374W when under load (!)
SOme basic math on their results gives you the 3870 consumes 50W when idle, and the X2 consuming 100W when idle and up to a massive 260W when under full load.
(3870 at idle = 164W, 3870 X2 at idle = 214W, hence 3870 = 50W)
This isn't really news, is it? It's not even a new graphics card, just a new way of packaging existing ones. The X2 card costs about the same as two 3870s anyway, so you may as well SLi them for the same performance...
:p ), while the 8800GTS gives the best "bang for your buck" at the moment. The X2 is currently the fastest card in a single socket, but why not benchmark it against an 8800 SLi system, if you are going to bother testing against 3870s in crossfire?
The benchmarks really are a bit weird though, comparing the card *only* against single-card Geforce systems, and old ones at that (such as the 8800GTX, which is the same generation as the ATI 2900 rather than 3800 series), and not even the top end, ie the Ultra. For comparison, the costs in the UK for the cards are about:
3850: £110
3870: £135
3870 X2: £255
8800GTS: £170 (the new model, out last month, which they didn't even test, and performs between a GT and GTX)
The 3800 series is obviously aimed at the low end 3d gaming market (and I don't mean tux racer
Apart of course from the fact it wouldn't be the fastest card out, and having a new flagship card which is second-best isn't a great thing in that industry.