The IOC worked out from tests that his prosthetic limbs were more efficient at running than regular legs are, which is why he was not allowed to run. He DOES have an unfair advantage because of his prosthetics. The prosthetics are better at running than normal legs are.
It sickens me that people are trying to spin this as "disabled runner is not allowed to compete in regular olympics". Flat-out disagreeing with the IOC's tests and results on the simple basis of personal opinion doesn't hold much water.
ISPs have been constantly upping the ante in their advertising, promising more and more while simultaneously delivering less and less. Since broadband started with 256k/512k lines, up to today's 20M+ lines, they are obviously telling you their line is faster, you can do more, etc etc. But with bandwidth usage restriction, total download restriction, not to mention banning services on ports they don't like, there is absolutely no need for high bandwidth connectivity. 24Mb/s is useless if all you can do is email and web browsing. Perhaps streaming video gets faster, yeah, but:
a) most streaming video is tailored for lower bandwidth, eg 300k/s b) watch a few of them and you'll hit your bandwidth cap anyway.
These restrictions are only about "fair use" in that the network has not invested enough in its infrastructure to actually support all their customers. They are selling ultra-fast connections but not expecting people to actually use them, and thus putting small-print restrictions on these accounts while still accepting more customers and more revenue (which is ostensibly being spent on marketing rather than bandwidth).
Vote with your feet, refuse to sign up to a deal with bandwidth restriction, and tell them why. Would you buy a car, if they only allowed you one liter of fuel a week?
It's simple to see that in the past, there have been many attempts to unify technologies, sites, communication mechanisms online, don't succeed. Not because they're bad products, but because aggregation doesn't offer most users anything they actually want. From Jabber or Trillian to RSS feeds or anything else, they've always been a niche product and probably always will be.
I still read slashdot, news.bbc, the onion and so forth, plus sites like Facebook and Livejournal, on their individual pages, I don't use an "aggregator", such as RSS feeds and my own interface. Firstly, because it's fiddly to set up, and secondly, each of those sites usually offers something different in their interface which suits the content they're providing - often the most interesting stuff is outside of the "headlines", which is all you get on an RSS feed. You may be an avid user of aggregation, but as a Slashdot reader you're probably a lot more geeky than most people, and killer apps are those used by the Great Unwashed, not just us nerds.
This is particularly true for social networking sites, in my opinion. While there are many out there, and many people have profiles on each (from Friendster to Orkut to Livejournal to Myspace to Facebook), most people are "on" one at a time. The fads come and go, the popularity for each application comes and goes - something new comes along and people either migrate to it or they don't. Something will come along in 2008 that everyone will leave Facebook for - just as happened to Myspace in 2006/2007. Most users don't want the overhead of managing multiple online profiles, aggregation will make *access* to each one easier, but not the management of each one.
I am one of those people who likes lots of code. So much so that I've developed a style, similar to how I used to code 68k assembler, of running comments down a second column (usually 40-60 characters in) that describes what is going on. After all, it doesn't interrupt the flow of the code, and if you're editing Java on an 80-column fixed-width interface, you're doing it wrong to begin with. I wouldn't say I comment every line, probably one in every 3. However, this gripe with over-commenting is fundamentally flawed:
and I've met people who won't even look at code unless every single line is commented telling them precisely what it does, so "int i = a + 2;" has to have a comment above it saying "// create a signed 32-bit integer variable, i, and assign it two more than the value of a".
Why on earth would you write a comment like that? That is ridiculous. However, the line DOES need a comment. It's declaring a variable with a non-descriptive name and doing something specific with it. Now, the comment should do something like say what the variable is used for, if it's non-obvious. In this case, "int i" is usually used for loops, so it doesn't need a comment unless it's *not* used for loops.:) However, if it was being used in a loop, why is it being set to a+2? Is a some sort of offset in an array? Is it a user-entered value? THIS is what the comments will illustrate, eg:
int i = a + 2;// skip the first two elements in the loop as they contain other data
or
int i = a + 2;// user input will be off by 2 because of (strange reason here)
writing comments like "initialise variable" is useless, but thinking that may be all there is shows a misunderstanding about how comments work.
You can assume the person reading your code is a programmer, familiar with the language used, and able to follow general program flow. However, he may not be familiar with the rest of the system, nor with any specific tricks you may use[1]. Comments should be like a director's commentary on the code, pointing out what may not be obvious, and giving the bigger picture - the reason why a specific variable is used a certain way, or what a messy few lines of code may be achieving, eg:// now split the input into an array and parse ready to give to the file handler (horrible loop declaration here) (even more horrible regex here) (custom function calling here)
It's said comments are like sex - even when they're bad, they're still pretty good. I'm pretty sure I've never spent 3 hours trying to work out how to get THAT to work, though!
[1] eg, I use a relatively uncommon trick in Java doing string comparisons of if(!"blah".equals(myString)) because it can't fail on the null pointer check that if(!myString.equals("blah")) can. A simple example, but something more complicated will save someone time if it just has a quick comment next to it saying what that section of code is achieving.
As a programmer you are often building an application for someone else - someone else is paying the bills, and they want to see value for money. Hence you need to be delivering value, this can be in straight code, but it can be in other ways too.
Generally however, a lot of projects consist of building one application for a specific purpose and then leaving it as it is - this is the problem of the business, not yours - they have no plan for an evolving or expanding system, they want something that can get them kickstarted and able to fund enough money to do their next development, a bridge they will cross when they come to it. And fair enough, usually budgets are so tight on first implementations that an extra 10-20% could make or break that first stage, and without a first stage, the project will go no further, no matter how elegant the code is.
Therefore, as someone who may code something more elegantly and more maintainably, but more slowly, you become less effective and hence less valuable to your employer, than someone who slaps it together in half the time and ends up with a nightmare of spaghetti code and hacks. While the latter approach may make the coder feel they are irreplacable as they are the only one who understands the system, such a system will often be treated as a prototype once funding is secured, and rewritten from scratch.
The only way out of that situation is to avoid it in the first place - don't be forced to work to tight deadlines and have to compromise your work in order to fit a business plan. However, it's a very lucky artist indeed who can pick and choose his work, and is given the time and money to do something that will last. Sometimes we have to make this compromise, but hopefully with more experience you'll be able to negotiate a better position.
I mentioned at the top that you can give value to your employer in other ways: documentation, stability and reliability of your code, hassle-free maintenance, the ability to provide long-term development plans and milestones. These are only useful if your employer is also planning that far ahead. Until then, you may have to concentrate on trying to plan your code ahead of time and anticipating and second-guessing what your employer will want 6 months or 6 years from now.
I remember holding my walkman's microphone up to the TV speakers in order to capture the music to particular games. In some cases where the music was in-game (and before I learned how to hack them out), I'd have to play the game for as long as possible without dying (and causing as few sound effects as possible) in order to tape it.
There were several 8-bit masterpieces I liked that are well known (Rob Hubbard's, for instance) but I liked a lot from the Amiga too. Hybris, Turrican, Project X, Shadow of the Beast to name a few, plus of course lots of the music from demos - I don't think anything will ever beat the music from Static Chaos by Silents for me.
The good news is there are tons of sites full of fans of this music, Aminet is the best place to start.
I think Microsoft is more concerned about OLPC machines being able to run Windows XP versus actually giving XP away.
So how about making the OLPC have 8G of flash memory, so it can run Vista by the time the next version of OLPC ships (which will undoubtedly be after the end of support time for XP, or about 18 months' time)
Trust me, the 8800GT is well worth it. Especially if it's a pre-overclocked one (or you do it yourself, though I've heard yields of OCing on stock cards is low, probably as manufacturers are now testing and OCing themselves), it's blindingly fast.
I can run WoW in 1680x1050/8xAA with *everything* turned on max and not drop a frame under 60fps for 99% of the game - worst I ever saw was 47 fps flying through a particularly dense part of Shattrath. My rig is a Q6600 (of which WoW will only use one core) and a single 8800GT - this laptop is more powerful than my system by a fair chunk, and on mine the fan never even comes on on the graphics card while playing it.
I wish they did more branding than just the cover though, seems a bit lame.
I have the model up of your botherboard (P5N32-E SLi, with the 680i chipset), so I'm waiting to go SLi in time... hopefully delay it until it's sorted out, I know a few people with SLi problems.
I got a decent boost going from 2G ram up, but I turned off my page file. I like to alt-tab (and, playing WoW too!), and that made the system much, much more responsive. For some reason XP dumps tons of stuff to swap even when it has more ram available than it knows what to do with.
I've since found out my midi box would have problems under Vista 64 (not 32 though) so I may just give it a trial on a separate partition and see how it copes. Thanks for the very descriptive post though!
Are there any notable games yet for DirectX10 only? So far many games have not been made for DirectX10 because the market of users who have it is too small (at least this is what was said by Valve and others in the past).
There are several VERY notable games that look far better under DirectX 10. Crysis, Bioshock, Lost Planet, and likely anything good released here-on in. My point is I now have the graphics power in my rig, I may as well use it!
DirectX9's directplay does not work in my experience under Vista.
According to wikipedia, that's been deprecated and replaced by Live since 2004. I personally don't know of any software that uses it.
A lot of 32bit software just does not run under 64bit Vista. I would suggest you try running a trial version of the 64bit Vista version first before committing.
That's what I was looking in to. I've found I have one piece of hardware (albeit 6 years old) that has been discontinued by the manufacturer and won't have Vista 64 drivers, though it runs fine under 32 bit. I'll be looking to see whether I can run it in some sort of compatability wrapper. I will be using a trial on another HD first though, of course:)
What about people who don't want to spend all day running an OS, but are more interested in the *applications* that it supports, in order to get some work done? I don't particularly care how good the shell scripting is on a system given that I probably use that 1% of the time, and do more than tinker with my system the other 99%. I'd rather have Photoshop, Cubase and Bioshock than Gimp, Rosegarden (hahaha!) and Tux Racer.
By all means hack the nasty bits out of Vista or OS/X and turn them off, but isn't the point of a computer to actually run applications than just tinker with shell scripts?
(As basically everyone else is talking about Vista in general, thought I would too.)
I just upgraded my main machine last month (from athlon 3000xp / nforce2 / 2G ram / 6800gs, to core2quad q6600 / nforce 680i sli / 4G 800Mhz ram / BFG 8800GT) I felt I was reaching XP's limits on what I wanted, namely:
- can't access 4G ram, or higher. Maxes out around 3.25G - can't run DirectX 10 (this is the total killer, for games) - also, I'd have to reinstall if I wanted XP-64, so may as well go the whole hog
I use my PC for gaming, and music production (Cubase, etc). Over the last few weeks I've been painstakingly contacting the manufacturers of every peripheral/software I use, ensuring I won't lose the use of anything I currently am used to. That takes care of the driver issue.
The other main issues seem to be memory (4G should be enough for now), and general resource usage. I've looked into it a bit and found a bunch of services that are useless for me and will speed things up when disabled (ReadyBoost, Search index services for example) - but to be honest, this was always the way with any Windows installation - msmsgs, anyone? A bit of tweaking will always be necessary.
Right now, it seems hard for me to find something that doesn't work under Vista, and the new device driver stack, directx 10 and expansion to 64 bit seem worth it to me. Anyone been through a similar upgrade recently and have a story to tell?
but if you're after perfect potatoes, I've got a couple of hints that *always* work.
Roast potatoes: Pre-heat the oven (200C?) and put oil in a big oven-proof pan in the oven to heat. Meat-based fat is better than vegetable, but a mixture is good too. Boil the potatoes until you can scrape them a bit with a fork (20-25 minutes). Drain the water (keep for gravy if you like), put a lid on the pan, and shake it *hard* several times. Some potatoes will disintegrate but mostly they will just get really rough surfaces - this makes them crunchy. Remove pan from oven, pour the fat into a receptacle, leaving a tiny bit behind. Put the potatoes into this pan. Pour a spoonful of the fat on top of each potato. Put back in the oven, cook for 45-50 minutes. They will be soft in the middle, crunchy on the outside.
Mashed potatoes: Don't boil the potatoes, steam them. 20-25 minutes until cooked through. Remove water from steamer, put potatoes in (because it's warm). Add salt, creme fraiche (or butter if you have to), about 2 heaped heaspoons for 800g potatoes. Use an electric whisk, whisk the hell out of them. Keep speeding up as you go, and keep going for a minute after it looks fine. The steaming means they won't be watery, and the whisking means no lumpy bits. Fluffy, rich and smooth mashed potatoes!
Happy thanksgiving to all our North American cousins:)
By changing the food supply and the social context you give yourself a much better chance, but even then, and even with a strong will, it's a tough battle.
Nobody said it wasn't tough - I'll be the first to agree. But just because it's tough doesn't give anyone the right to simply blame it on some "disease" and feign helplessness because they are lazy.
To say it's "your fault" is just as ignorant as saying being gay, or being black, is your fault.
What a pity, you were doing so well until that point! Obesity is a choice. You might argue, nobody would choose it, but many people simply can't be bothered to make the effort to do otherwise.
Obesity is not an "epidemic". It is not contagious. Being fat is not a disease. It is a by-product of poor nutritional choices and poor lifestyle. Some people have a predisposition or even illness that can cause obesity, but they are a tiny minority. If you eat Cheetos and sit on your sofa all day, you're going to get fat. And it's YOUR fault.
Treating fat as a "disease" is the typical victim mentality that's so prevalent these days to try to shirk responsibility. I'm not fat, I have a disease. I am not an alcoholic bum, I have a disease. Whether or not one tries to reclassify the word to include behavioral dysfunction, the fact is that it is self-inflicted and people would rather play victim than stand up for themselves, take responsibility for their actions, and stop cramming themselves full of cake or booze or heroin or whatever.
Cancer is a disease. If someone kept injecting themselves with malignant cells of their own will, would you have any sympathy for them?
The market is good so I just sold my Wii to fund a PC upgrade. Why? I'm afraid it's a boring reason - I'm just not a console player, when I want to game, I want to play on the PC. Just couldn't get comfortable gaming on the sofa on the TV.
I have to say the Wii is the most varied and interesting console playing experience I've come across. It has games that focus on the wiimote, some of them are good, a lot of them are gimmicky. People who only play those, are going to be disappointed eventually. But it also has good games that don't use it, like more regular console games. One that uses the wiimote just a little (but does it well) but is more like a conventional game, is Mario Strikers Charged. The Wiimote minigame was an improvement on the original, but otherwise, it was a straight console type game, and a good one at that.
Zelda wasn't so much of a killer app as a killer *launch* app, it's great, but people are talking more about Wii Sports now, it's had better longevity (in the public eye, if not with each player. Though I have to say it's the game I'll miss the most). Super Mario Galaxy looks like it will be an absolute must-have, everyone is raving about it already, and its unique presentation and (again) minimal-but-useful use of the Wiimote will attract people in droves. I think this will be bigger than Halo 3 was for the 360.
Sometimes I think Nintendo doesn't want to publish "Hardcore" games, because their presence might detract from the casual image of the Wii, but I imagine they will do more of those with time, once the concept of the Wiimote style control is more embedded in people's minds. Mario coming out a year after launch and Brawl soon are good examples of this.
Suffice to say, if I'm at someone else's place and a 360 is on, I'll watch and be amazed by the graphics, but if a Wii is on, I'll probably get up and have a go.
. . . is it *really* that hard to get to the gym or outside to exercise?
Yes. YES. It's hard to get the TIME. Many people have so many demands on their time, both business and social, that taking an hour (or make it 1h30, what with changing, showering, warming up/down etc) is very difficult. If you can take that long for your lunch hour and go during the day, lucky you. I know I can't, and I would much rather use the time I am sitting at my desk letting my brain do the work, to exercise my body at the same time.
Stuff like this just preserves the sweatshop mentality already too prevalent in many IT shops.
This is ridiculous. You're not doing it to benefit THEM, you're doing it for yourself.
This is using current-gen hardware - namely the 8800 GT GPU, which is so new most places haven't even got stock in yet, or have sold out of their first shipments. The processor isn't as cutting-edge, but is still current generation.
Their point is that current-gen has multiple price points, some of them more accessible than others.
(I'm in the process of upgrading a 3 year old PC (6800 GS / Athlon 3000) so paying attention to how not to spend a billion dollars on the thing)
They know they're competing against World of Warcraft, a game that's had 2.5 years to iron out all the bugs, improve the interface, and turn it from an okay to a great experience. This is their core market, they are seeking to take players from WoW (mostly bored ones, of course) so they have to get it absolutely right on launch, or they'll lose momentum.
WoW is the game that brought MMORPGs into the mainstream - existing MMORPG players from pre-WoW are a small part of their audience. WAR is going to be aiming for that same audience, so they have to actively lure people away from one game into another.
As one of those WoW players, I am hugely looking forward to WAR and have been for a long time, I'm happy to raid SSC/BT for a couple of extra months to make sure they get everything right.
Slashdot Mirror
The IOC worked out from tests that his prosthetic limbs were more efficient at running than regular legs are, which is why he was not allowed to run. He DOES have an unfair advantage because of his prosthetics. The prosthetics are better at running than normal legs are.
It sickens me that people are trying to spin this as "disabled runner is not allowed to compete in regular olympics". Flat-out disagreeing with the IOC's tests and results on the simple basis of personal opinion doesn't hold much water.
I thought it meant the developer who originally wrote them has been let out of his nice padded room.
ISPs have been constantly upping the ante in their advertising, promising more and more while simultaneously delivering less and less. Since broadband started with 256k/512k lines, up to today's 20M+ lines, they are obviously telling you their line is faster, you can do more, etc etc. But with bandwidth usage restriction, total download restriction, not to mention banning services on ports they don't like, there is absolutely no need for high bandwidth connectivity. 24Mb/s is useless if all you can do is email and web browsing. Perhaps streaming video gets faster, yeah, but:
a) most streaming video is tailored for lower bandwidth, eg 300k/s
b) watch a few of them and you'll hit your bandwidth cap anyway.
These restrictions are only about "fair use" in that the network has not invested enough in its infrastructure to actually support all their customers. They are selling ultra-fast connections but not expecting people to actually use them, and thus putting small-print restrictions on these accounts while still accepting more customers and more revenue (which is ostensibly being spent on marketing rather than bandwidth).
Vote with your feet, refuse to sign up to a deal with bandwidth restriction, and tell them why. Would you buy a car, if they only allowed you one liter of fuel a week?
It's simple to see that in the past, there have been many attempts to unify technologies, sites, communication mechanisms online, don't succeed. Not because they're bad products, but because aggregation doesn't offer most users anything they actually want. From Jabber or Trillian to RSS feeds or anything else, they've always been a niche product and probably always will be.
I still read slashdot, news.bbc, the onion and so forth, plus sites like Facebook and Livejournal, on their individual pages, I don't use an "aggregator", such as RSS feeds and my own interface. Firstly, because it's fiddly to set up, and secondly, each of those sites usually offers something different in their interface which suits the content they're providing - often the most interesting stuff is outside of the "headlines", which is all you get on an RSS feed. You may be an avid user of aggregation, but as a Slashdot reader you're probably a lot more geeky than most people, and killer apps are those used by the Great Unwashed, not just us nerds.
This is particularly true for social networking sites, in my opinion. While there are many out there, and many people have profiles on each (from Friendster to Orkut to Livejournal to Myspace to Facebook), most people are "on" one at a time. The fads come and go, the popularity for each application comes and goes - something new comes along and people either migrate to it or they don't. Something will come along in 2008 that everyone will leave Facebook for - just as happened to Myspace in 2006/2007. Most users don't want the overhead of managing multiple online profiles, aggregation will make *access* to each one easier, but not the management of each one.
I am one of those people who likes lots of code. So much so that I've developed a style, similar to how I used to code 68k assembler, of running comments down a second column (usually 40-60 characters in) that describes what is going on. After all, it doesn't interrupt the flow of the code, and if you're editing Java on an 80-column fixed-width interface, you're doing it wrong to begin with. I wouldn't say I comment every line, probably one in every 3. However, this gripe with over-commenting is fundamentally flawed:
:) However, if it was being used in a loop, why is it being set to a+2? Is a some sort of offset in an array? Is it a user-entered value? THIS is what the comments will illustrate, eg:
// skip the first two elements in the loop as they contain other data
// user input will be off by 2 because of (strange reason here)
// now split the input into an array and parse ready to give to the file handler
and I've met people who won't even look at code unless every single line is commented telling them precisely what it does, so "int i = a + 2;" has to have a comment above it saying "// create a signed 32-bit integer variable, i, and assign it two more than the value of a".
Why on earth would you write a comment like that? That is ridiculous. However, the line DOES need a comment. It's declaring a variable with a non-descriptive name and doing something specific with it. Now, the comment should do something like say what the variable is used for, if it's non-obvious. In this case, "int i" is usually used for loops, so it doesn't need a comment unless it's *not* used for loops.
int i = a + 2;
or
int i = a + 2;
writing comments like "initialise variable" is useless, but thinking that may be all there is shows a misunderstanding about how comments work.
You can assume the person reading your code is a programmer, familiar with the language used, and able to follow general program flow. However, he may not be familiar with the rest of the system, nor with any specific tricks you may use[1]. Comments should be like a director's commentary on the code, pointing out what may not be obvious, and giving the bigger picture - the reason why a specific variable is used a certain way, or what a messy few lines of code may be achieving, eg:
(horrible loop declaration here)
(even more horrible regex here)
(custom function calling here)
It's said comments are like sex - even when they're bad, they're still pretty good. I'm pretty sure I've never spent 3 hours trying to work out how to get THAT to work, though!
[1] eg, I use a relatively uncommon trick in Java doing string comparisons of if(!"blah".equals(myString)) because it can't fail on the null pointer check that if(!myString.equals("blah")) can. A simple example, but something more complicated will save someone time if it just has a quick comment next to it saying what that section of code is achieving.
As a programmer you are often building an application for someone else - someone else is paying the bills, and they want to see value for money. Hence you need to be delivering value, this can be in straight code, but it can be in other ways too.
Generally however, a lot of projects consist of building one application for a specific purpose and then leaving it as it is - this is the problem of the business, not yours - they have no plan for an evolving or expanding system, they want something that can get them kickstarted and able to fund enough money to do their next development, a bridge they will cross when they come to it. And fair enough, usually budgets are so tight on first implementations that an extra 10-20% could make or break that first stage, and without a first stage, the project will go no further, no matter how elegant the code is.
Therefore, as someone who may code something more elegantly and more maintainably, but more slowly, you become less effective and hence less valuable to your employer, than someone who slaps it together in half the time and ends up with a nightmare of spaghetti code and hacks. While the latter approach may make the coder feel they are irreplacable as they are the only one who understands the system, such a system will often be treated as a prototype once funding is secured, and rewritten from scratch.
The only way out of that situation is to avoid it in the first place - don't be forced to work to tight deadlines and have to compromise your work in order to fit a business plan. However, it's a very lucky artist indeed who can pick and choose his work, and is given the time and money to do something that will last. Sometimes we have to make this compromise, but hopefully with more experience you'll be able to negotiate a better position.
I mentioned at the top that you can give value to your employer in other ways: documentation, stability and reliability of your code, hassle-free maintenance, the ability to provide long-term development plans and milestones. These are only useful if your employer is also planning that far ahead. Until then, you may have to concentrate on trying to plan your code ahead of time and anticipating and second-guessing what your employer will want 6 months or 6 years from now.
I remember holding my walkman's microphone up to the TV speakers in order to capture the music to particular games. In some cases where the music was in-game (and before I learned how to hack them out), I'd have to play the game for as long as possible without dying (and causing as few sound effects as possible) in order to tape it.
There were several 8-bit masterpieces I liked that are well known (Rob Hubbard's, for instance) but I liked a lot from the Amiga too. Hybris, Turrican, Project X, Shadow of the Beast to name a few, plus of course lots of the music from demos - I don't think anything will ever beat the music from Static Chaos by Silents for me.
The good news is there are tons of sites full of fans of this music, Aminet is the best place to start.
I think Microsoft is more concerned about OLPC machines being able to run Windows XP versus actually giving XP away.
So how about making the OLPC have 8G of flash memory, so it can run Vista by the time the next version of OLPC ships (which will undoubtedly be after the end of support time for XP, or about 18 months' time)
Trust me, the 8800GT is well worth it. Especially if it's a pre-overclocked one (or you do it yourself, though I've heard yields of OCing on stock cards is low, probably as manufacturers are now testing and OCing themselves), it's blindingly fast.
I can run WoW in 1680x1050/8xAA with *everything* turned on max and not drop a frame under 60fps for 99% of the game - worst I ever saw was 47 fps flying through a particularly dense part of Shattrath. My rig is a Q6600 (of which WoW will only use one core) and a single 8800GT - this laptop is more powerful than my system by a fair chunk, and on mine the fan never even comes on on the graphics card while playing it.
I wish they did more branding than just the cover though, seems a bit lame.
I have the model up of your botherboard (P5N32-E SLi, with the 680i chipset), so I'm waiting to go SLi in time... hopefully delay it until it's sorted out, I know a few people with SLi problems.
I got a decent boost going from 2G ram up, but I turned off my page file. I like to alt-tab (and, playing WoW too!), and that made the system much, much more responsive. For some reason XP dumps tons of stuff to swap even when it has more ram available than it knows what to do with.
I've since found out my midi box would have problems under Vista 64 (not 32 though) so I may just give it a trial on a separate partition and see how it copes. Thanks for the very descriptive post though!
Are there any notable games yet for DirectX10 only? So far many games have not been made for DirectX10 because the market of users who have it is too small (at least this is what was said by Valve and others in the past).
:)
There are several VERY notable games that look far better under DirectX 10. Crysis, Bioshock, Lost Planet, and likely anything good released here-on in. My point is I now have the graphics power in my rig, I may as well use it!
DirectX9's directplay does not work in my experience under Vista.
According to wikipedia, that's been deprecated and replaced by Live since 2004. I personally don't know of any software that uses it.
A lot of 32bit software just does not run under 64bit Vista. I would suggest you try running a trial version of the 64bit Vista version first before committing.
That's what I was looking in to. I've found I have one piece of hardware (albeit 6 years old) that has been discontinued by the manufacturer and won't have Vista 64 drivers, though it runs fine under 32 bit. I'll be looking to see whether I can run it in some sort of compatability wrapper. I will be using a trial on another HD first though, of course
What about people who don't want to spend all day running an OS, but are more interested in the *applications* that it supports, in order to get some work done? I don't particularly care how good the shell scripting is on a system given that I probably use that 1% of the time, and do more than tinker with my system the other 99%. I'd rather have Photoshop, Cubase and Bioshock than Gimp, Rosegarden (hahaha!) and Tux Racer.
By all means hack the nasty bits out of Vista or OS/X and turn them off, but isn't the point of a computer to actually run applications than just tinker with shell scripts?
(As basically everyone else is talking about Vista in general, thought I would too.)
I just upgraded my main machine last month (from athlon 3000xp / nforce2 / 2G ram / 6800gs, to core2quad q6600 / nforce 680i sli / 4G 800Mhz ram / BFG 8800GT) I felt I was reaching XP's limits on what I wanted, namely:
- can't access 4G ram, or higher. Maxes out around 3.25G
- can't run DirectX 10 (this is the total killer, for games)
- also, I'd have to reinstall if I wanted XP-64, so may as well go the whole hog
I use my PC for gaming, and music production (Cubase, etc). Over the last few weeks I've been painstakingly contacting the manufacturers of every peripheral/software I use, ensuring I won't lose the use of anything I currently am used to. That takes care of the driver issue.
The other main issues seem to be memory (4G should be enough for now), and general resource usage. I've looked into it a bit and found a bunch of services that are useless for me and will speed things up when disabled (ReadyBoost, Search index services for example) - but to be honest, this was always the way with any Windows installation - msmsgs, anyone? A bit of tweaking will always be necessary.
Right now, it seems hard for me to find something that doesn't work under Vista, and the new device driver stack, directx 10 and expansion to 64 bit seem worth it to me. Anyone been through a similar upgrade recently and have a story to tell?
but if you're after perfect potatoes, I've got a couple of hints that *always* work.
:)
Roast potatoes:
Pre-heat the oven (200C?) and put oil in a big oven-proof pan in the oven to heat. Meat-based fat is better than vegetable, but a mixture is good too.
Boil the potatoes until you can scrape them a bit with a fork (20-25 minutes). Drain the water (keep for gravy if you like), put a lid on the pan, and shake it *hard* several times. Some potatoes will disintegrate but mostly they will just get really rough surfaces - this makes them crunchy.
Remove pan from oven, pour the fat into a receptacle, leaving a tiny bit behind. Put the potatoes into this pan. Pour a spoonful of the fat on top of each potato. Put back in the oven, cook for 45-50 minutes. They will be soft in the middle, crunchy on the outside.
Mashed potatoes:
Don't boil the potatoes, steam them. 20-25 minutes until cooked through.
Remove water from steamer, put potatoes in (because it's warm). Add salt, creme fraiche (or butter if you have to), about 2 heaped heaspoons for 800g potatoes.
Use an electric whisk, whisk the hell out of them. Keep speeding up as you go, and keep going for a minute after it looks fine.
The steaming means they won't be watery, and the whisking means no lumpy bits. Fluffy, rich and smooth mashed potatoes!
Happy thanksgiving to all our North American cousins
By changing the food supply and the social context you give yourself a much better chance, but even then, and even with a strong will, it's a tough battle.
Nobody said it wasn't tough - I'll be the first to agree. But just because it's tough doesn't give anyone the right to simply blame it on some "disease" and feign helplessness because they are lazy.
To say it's "your fault" is just as ignorant as saying being gay, or being black, is your fault.
What a pity, you were doing so well until that point! Obesity is a choice. You might argue, nobody would choose it, but many people simply can't be bothered to make the effort to do otherwise.
Obesity is not an "epidemic". It is not contagious. Being fat is not a disease. It is a by-product of poor nutritional choices and poor lifestyle. Some people have a predisposition or even illness that can cause obesity, but they are a tiny minority. If you eat Cheetos and sit on your sofa all day, you're going to get fat. And it's YOUR fault.
Treating fat as a "disease" is the typical victim mentality that's so prevalent these days to try to shirk responsibility. I'm not fat, I have a disease. I am not an alcoholic bum, I have a disease. Whether or not one tries to reclassify the word to include behavioral dysfunction, the fact is that it is self-inflicted and people would rather play victim than stand up for themselves, take responsibility for their actions, and stop cramming themselves full of cake or booze or heroin or whatever.
Cancer is a disease. If someone kept injecting themselves with malignant cells of their own will, would you have any sympathy for them?
For instance The Asus Maximus Extreme, or Abit carries one too.
The market is good so I just sold my Wii to fund a PC upgrade. Why? I'm afraid it's a boring reason - I'm just not a console player, when I want to game, I want to play on the PC. Just couldn't get comfortable gaming on the sofa on the TV.
I have to say the Wii is the most varied and interesting console playing experience I've come across. It has games that focus on the wiimote, some of them are good, a lot of them are gimmicky. People who only play those, are going to be disappointed eventually. But it also has good games that don't use it, like more regular console games. One that uses the wiimote just a little (but does it well) but is more like a conventional game, is Mario Strikers Charged. The Wiimote minigame was an improvement on the original, but otherwise, it was a straight console type game, and a good one at that.
Zelda wasn't so much of a killer app as a killer *launch* app, it's great, but people are talking more about Wii Sports now, it's had better longevity (in the public eye, if not with each player. Though I have to say it's the game I'll miss the most). Super Mario Galaxy looks like it will be an absolute must-have, everyone is raving about it already, and its unique presentation and (again) minimal-but-useful use of the Wiimote will attract people in droves. I think this will be bigger than Halo 3 was for the 360.
Sometimes I think Nintendo doesn't want to publish "Hardcore" games, because their presence might detract from the casual image of the Wii, but I imagine they will do more of those with time, once the concept of the Wiimote style control is more embedded in people's minds. Mario coming out a year after launch and Brawl soon are good examples of this.
Suffice to say, if I'm at someone else's place and a 360 is on, I'll watch and be amazed by the graphics, but if a Wii is on, I'll probably get up and have a go.
Have you seen Strom Thurmond? Or some of his decisions as senator?
(Not recently, thank god)
. . . is it *really* that hard to get to the gym or outside to exercise?
Yes. YES. It's hard to get the TIME. Many people have so many demands on their time, both business and social, that taking an hour (or make it 1h30, what with changing, showering, warming up/down etc) is very difficult. If you can take that long for your lunch hour and go during the day, lucky you. I know I can't, and I would much rather use the time I am sitting at my desk letting my brain do the work, to exercise my body at the same time.
Stuff like this just preserves the sweatshop mentality already too prevalent in many IT shops.
This is ridiculous. You're not doing it to benefit THEM, you're doing it for yourself.
This is using current-gen hardware - namely the 8800 GT GPU, which is so new most places haven't even got stock in yet, or have sold out of their first shipments. The processor isn't as cutting-edge, but is still current generation.
Their point is that current-gen has multiple price points, some of them more accessible than others.
(I'm in the process of upgrading a 3 year old PC (6800 GS / Athlon 3000) so paying attention to how not to spend a billion dollars on the thing)
http://vgchartz.com/hwcomps.php?cons1=PS2®1=All&cons2=PS3®2=All&cons3=X360®3=All&start=39019&end=39383
(if you ignore the spike of the last couple of weeks)
Having said that it still outsells the 360 week by week too...
In SSC now (Hydross down, Lurker to 30%, should go down this week), but as WAR is delayed til April, I'm sure I'll be in BT by then :)
They know they're competing against World of Warcraft, a game that's had 2.5 years to iron out all the bugs, improve the interface, and turn it from an okay to a great experience. This is their core market, they are seeking to take players from WoW (mostly bored ones, of course) so they have to get it absolutely right on launch, or they'll lose momentum.
WoW is the game that brought MMORPGs into the mainstream - existing MMORPG players from pre-WoW are a small part of their audience. WAR is going to be aiming for that same audience, so they have to actively lure people away from one game into another.
As one of those WoW players, I am hugely looking forward to WAR and have been for a long time, I'm happy to raid SSC/BT for a couple of extra months to make sure they get everything right.
And let me into the beta, damnit.