You are forgetting how much people want their mobile devices to do everything their PCs will do and AMD does have a pretty big advantage when it comes to GPUs. it was a big enough advantage that not one, not two, but three of the next gen consoles are using their GPUs and two are using their APUs so having lots of multimedia power is a big plus and Intel is still behind in that area. i'm frankly shocked Intel hasn't bought Nvidia by now, it would give them the graphics expertise they could really use.
Sadly they've let it go to shit the past several releases, probably because they knew they were walking away from it. my oldest was a die HARD Opera user, he wouldn't touch a system without Opera and used to carry Opera portable on a stick so he wouldn't have to use anything else but even he is trying various browsers because he says Opera gets slower and buggier with each release.
If they are gonna abandon presto I really wish they'd open up the code, who knows what good could be made of an open presto engine. After all Mozilla rose from the ashes of netscape, maybe with it open devs could make presto so good opera would end up switching back.
Of course all this is ignoring the rotting elephant in the room which the EU and DoJ really REALLY needs to investigate, and that is Apple's ability to influence the market with their monopolistic practices. Before some Applelite chimes in with "Apple isn't a monopoly" bullshit, total bullshit, look up the wording. it says you do NOT need 100% of the market, you don't even have to own the majority of the market, just that you have the power to assert undue influence and you would be hard pressed to find anybody that says Apple doesn't seriously influence the markets. From the prices of books to whether the web will run on an open format like Theora VS a locked down H.264 ALL of the major calls about the web made in the last couple of years has been made with iPhone in mind.
Do you think Opera would be ditching presto if it could run on the iPhone? Do you think we'd be forced to run HTML V5 before its ready or use a patent troll format like H.264 if iPhone users could choose between that and Flash and WebM and Drac and Theora? No if the company of St Steve of Cupertino says "it is thus" then that is what it is gonna be, no choices in the matter. And I think they need to be investigated as NO company should have that power, I was against MSFT using IE to gain control and I'm against Apple using iPhone/iPad to gain more control. No matter what device or OS you use the web should be about choice, not some corp laying down the law.
Small village in Africa? How about many areas of the USA that can't get anything but dialup or a capped all to fuck connection? At my mom's place the ONLY thing they can get is wiFi run by a Billy Joe Bob that knows jack shit about dividing bandwidth so when some dumbshit is watching netflix on the thing you pretty much have to have something like turbo.
Most folks don't realize how truly shitty our coverage really is because they go by zip code and the way they measure is if ANYBODY in that zip code can get high speed? then they think anybody can.
The POINT is that they SHOULD NOT HAVE TO because the drivers should work fine. they work fine in windows, the work fine in Mac (for the cards made for mac of course) but the ONLY place it does NOT work is in Linux.
At the end of the day a company should NOT have to constantly recompile their drivers because Linus Torvalds is an egotistical douchebag who THINKS he is smarter than every other OS developer on the planet. The simple fact is he is NOT smarter and driver ABIs are there FOR A REASON, so you don't have to recompile everytime somebody gets a wild hair up their ass and changes something!
That would be like asking why the software that runs on an airplane doesn't run on your cellphone. Windows Embedded, just like Linux embedded, runs a stripped down kernel and a MUCH thinner OS because when you are dealing with an embedded system you just aren't gonna be doing as much as a full OS, as they are designed for specific functions.
Just because you don't consider it art doesn't mean you are correct. i once saw an art piece where a guy sat watching TV with a shotgun pointed at his head, there was a timer that was supposed to go off sometime between than and the year 2000 I believe, its been awhile. Now some would just call that insane or stupid, but many others saw it as a comment on our culture of violence and media.
Have you tried Gnash? Adobe hasn't stopped or impeded Gnash development in any way, so you DO have options. try that with H.264 and find out how fast they'll hit you with a cease and desist.
Hell if you are on Linux you should be SUPPORTING Flash, as they don't charge anything to allow you to bundle flash with ANY distro whereas mozilla tried to bundle H.26x support with Firefox and got a "pay your $699 license fee you cocksmoking tea baggers!" for their trouble.
At the end of the day too damned many are supporting a format that is IN EVERY SINGLE METRIC WORSE than Flash and the ONLY reason they are all tripping over themselves to support it is St Steve from Cupertino supported it. Well no shit, it kills the casual gaming market and makes the appstore more money! Duh! if Apple didn't like the way that Adobe was running flash they COULD have put money into gnash, they COULD have put money into Theora or Drac, but they didn't FOR A REASON, because H.26x makes a nice barrier to entry and makes it harder for anybody without corporate backing to compete.
If you don't support flash fine, support Theora, Drac, WebM, there is three choices right there that aren't a patent minefield for the web. but don't help those that want to turn the net into the Home Shopping Club succeed please.
But here is what is gonna make capitalists shit their pants, libertarians too.....capitalism, like every other ism, is doomed and MUST be destroyed, there is no other choice.
Technology has already made most blue collar and now many white collar jobs disappear, after all nobody hires humans to calculate anything, the machines do it. Don't need humans in the factories, only a couple to push buttons as the machines work. Seen the Hondabot? Climbs stairs, can work in hazardous areas, never gets tired, never needs a break, don't need healthcare or sick leave, not ever.
We are ALL John Henry and the true lesson is you can work yourself to death and the machine will still beat you, as it'll be able to keep right on working while they drag your corpse away. What good will be a capitalist system when only a handful at the very top and their lackeys can afford anything because they have the robots and thus the capital? we are in for a rough ride, with lots of revolutions and upheaval in the days to come, but at the end capitalism will have to be eliminated, just as communism and fascism came and went.
A final thought to chew on: if you look at the amount of labor required to keep output at current levels you could kill half the people on this planet, line them up and shoot half of the men, women, and children tomorrow, and not only would the quality of life not go down, it would go up as those that were left would find more demand for what little labor is required to keep things at current levels. Its over friend, the rich at the top will fight it, right up to the second we put them against the wall and shoot them, but capitalism, like every other ism, is doomed, technology will render it obsolete.
Bingo! We have a winner! I have set and argued with some of the big wigs of libertarianism on the web like the one that runs freedomainradio, Stephen something or other, and at the end of the day it ALL comes down to greed, no way they can paint it any different. It was libertarians that shouted "Let him die!" when Ron Paul was given the question of the 22 year old without insurance,it is libertarians that are taking every possible tax dodge they can rather than share a single cent, hell I never understood why they didn't champion Mitt Romney, hell he may have talked like a liberal but he was the biggest tax dodger to ever run!
At the end of the day I'd still take socialism or even communism over libertarianism because no matter how bad those systems may end up in practice at least they come from a "help thy neighbor" belief system whereas with libertarianism no matter how they try to spin it at the end of the day its a vicious and brutal belief system, and if it were implemented tomorrow we'd have full blown feudalism before the end of the year.
You should blame Linus Torvalds for that NOT AMD. I can take the driver it came with and run it right this second, even though that driver is 4+ years old, on Windows XP/Vista/7 and it runs just fine. do you HONESTLY think that Linus fucking Torvalds is smarter than the OS developers for BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS, ChromeOS, Android AND even OS/2? Because thanks to stable driver ABIs they can ALL keep older drivers, YOU CAN NOT.
So I'm sorry you have chosen an OS controlled by religious zealots, i truly am. And before you say they are NOT zealots just read the manifesto put out by the one kernel dev that went on the record about driver ABIs, he even writes "I hope all non free drivers break often!"...I'm sorry but that is a zealot, when he would rather users have a broken OS than a functional one if it doesn't follow his belief system. And ironically the one card manufacturer everyone says to buy, Nvidia, because they work has NEVER supported free drivers LOL!
So to steal a line from RMS I'll be glad when Torvalds is gone, maybe then Linux users won't have to deal with such a piss poor mess of a driver system. Until then i'm sorry, you deserve what you get. If the free drivers don't work write a nasty letter to Torvalds, he is who you should lay the blame upon.
I think Michelangelo was pervy, do I get to ban him? I don't honestly care for any art with guy's junk hanging out, can we ban that too? You DO realize that most of what is considered art now was labeled as controversial and even smut in its own time? Fleurs de Mal was banned in several countries and heavily censored in others, same with Lady Chatterley's Lover.
The point is just because i don't like something does NOT give me the right to destroy it or bury it where others can not see, and just because i stick a letter D or R behind my name and sling enough bullshit to get into a public office doesn't magically give me a better understanding. Lets take one the right had a living shitfit over, Robert Mapplethorpe. Many labeled his work as smut and filth, many probably still do. while i may not care for most of his work I at least have enough common sense to look at the broader context and the time in which he lived. he was a gay man in the 70s and 80s, a time when outright hatred of gays was practically the law, the right wing administration originally labeled AIDS as GRID, remember? so they wouldn't have to give any money towards a cure? So no shit he was probably bitter and fucking angry at how he was treated and that should be taken into consideration.
at the end of the day I go by the words of one of the wisest men i had the privilege to know, my grandfather. I asked when the Illinois Nazis were demanding to march if he would ban then, figuring he'd say "hell yes!". after all this was a man who had faced the PAK 88 in France and ended the war in a full body cast after one of the rag tag Werewulf squads dropped a wall on him and his buddies, two of whom didn't survive. To my shock he said we should support 100% their rights to say and do as they pleased, no matter how ugly as long as they didn't hurt anybody else. He said "That is what makes us different from them" and explained how important freedom of speech was and how we didn't need to protect popular speech, after all too many agree with it hence its popular. its the unpopular things we need to protect, because if the Illinois Nazis were silenced today, who is to say that we wouldn't be the ones silenced tomorrow?
Would you rather they just kept upping the numbers on the old drivers? They have already squeezed every last drop of performance they are gonna get out of that hardware, any bugs that show up will still get fixed but putting out a constant stream of drivers that is really just the same driver with new version numbers just makes no sense.
So I honestly don't see what the problem is. I'm gaming with an HD4850 now and its fine, games look good, the driver is stable, what more could they do when they have already got it as optimized as they can possibly get on 4+ year old hardware?
Honestly from what I've seen just like with CPUs its now about doing the same that we were doing but with less heat and power usage. look at what an HD4850 used and then compared it to an HD7770 which according to sites like HWCompare is just a little ahead of the HD4850 and you'll see its a pretty big drop in power used to get the same performance.
But as far as graphics goes? i think this is pretty much it guys, its not gonna get much better. Hell it costs nearly 100 million dollars to do a triple A game with today's graphics, more graphics, more physics, all that is more work which will drive the price up and I don't see that happening. THQ is gone, EA is on the selling block, and Activision's parent company is looking at restructuring. It simply costs too much to focus everything on the graphics like we did in the old days folks so I'm betting we have pretty much reached a plateau and new consoles won't change that.
My guess is the future is gonna be a combination of episodic gaming, DLCs, and a mix of big devs and small because graphics won't be the sole selling point anymore. Games like Torchlight II and Legend of Grimrock have shown you can have games without bleeding edge graphics still sell well and I wouldn't be surprised if games like the Borderlands series make nearly as much off the DLC sales as they do the game itself, so to help lower costs I can easily see games changing to more of an episodic and DLC model.
Finally as for AMD if the rumors are true they are looking at 3 out of the 4 consoles using their chips in some manner (the lone holdout being the rumored Steambox but until we get some hard data we can't be sure of that) so I can see them not having the capacity to do a new chip rollout at the same time they are having to supply all these consoles. I'm just glad to see them get the work as we need competition and having 3 out of the 4 consoles ought to give them a regular source of income they can count on while they work on new chips.
Its probably a variation, one thing we have learned from the exploit kits and the like is if they figure out something that works suddenly it will be used in a bazillion different ways, like some flu bug it mutates like crazy.
Well to me as a geek I prefer following logic whenever possible and it is simply logical that if you are forced by the state to pay X then you should be perfectly fine to accept that money back up to X, as you are just getting back what was taken from you.
What i have a problem with is those who have a "do as i say not as i do" attitude and who accept dole from that very system they railed against. after others have pointed out 2 out of the 3 founding women of libertarianism actually walked the walk and did their best to avoid the system altogether, one even quitting a job rather than be forced to pay in to social security. the one who didn't practice what she preached was ironically Rand herself as she took much more from the state for her cancer treatments than she paid in to protect her fortune.
Yes because the pile of chemicals that make up artificial sweetners is so much better than the HFCS. This is why I prefer to drink the "throw back" drinks when I can get them or good old fashioned home brewed sweet tea if I can't, you don't seem to need nearly as much sugar as you do HFCS to get the same taste in a drink.
That's not awesome, know what was awesome? Jolt Cola. Double the caffeine and double the sugar, the theme song for that drink should have been Kickstart My heart by Motley Crue as that shit would smack you upside the head in the morning and get your ass in gear. Man I miss Jolt.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the site was more about championing libertarianism, which Ron Paul has simply been one of the most visible faces in that fight.
But at the end of the day it honestly doesn't matter WHY they set up the site as Ron Paul has been one of the most outspoken opponents of governments and agencies taking things without paying "market rates" for them and he has said a billion times that individual property rights are what its all about so here when given a chance to walk the walk he shows what a hypocrite he is by using an agency to try to take by force something which does not belong to him rather than pay market value.
If that isn't "do as I say, not as I do" and a complete slap in the face to libertarian beliefs then WTF is folks? To me it looks like he only walks the walk when it benefits HIM and when it doesn't he's happy to do a 180.
And this is why I'd take full blown communism over libertarianism, because at its root its a vicious belief system. I remember the stories my grandparents told me of what it was like before the new deal, my own father never had to worry about the draft because he had to work in the fields with a badly broken leg because his family couldn't afford to take him to a doctor or survive the winter without every child that could walk and follow basic instructions out in the field so his leg never healed correctly and bothers him to this very day. Great grandma talked of entire families riding the rails like nomads, just trying to find enough to eat and many children ended up blind of brain damaged simply because they couldn't get enough nutrients.
So i could never support a "fuck you, I got mine you get yours" philosophy because it at its roots ignores how much of those advantages are nothing but accidents of birth. You think if Mitt Romney had been born to a dirt poor family in Alabama he would be so rich now? What are the odds Ron Paul would have gotten where he is if he were born black? If both were born in one of the war torn African nations do you think they'd have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of? No too much ends up coming down to which womb you come out of and I can't in good conscience punish someone for something they had no choice about. Then again that is why I'll never be rich, even if I won the lotto I would have to help those around me that were suffering as there just isn't enough greed in me to ignore that.
You also just described insurance which many libertarians see as a panacea...do you consider insurance a Ponzi scheme as well? After all they aren't just paying out what you put in it, you can pay 30k in on a million dollar policy and if the event happens (death, building burns, whatever) and they pay up they certainly haven't just handed you your 30K back, they are taking money from those that have paid in but not collected anything and handing it to you.
Frankly I think libertarians love the words "Ponzi Scheme" the way the right wing loved the word communism back in the 50s, as they seem to see them everywhere.
But due to the ever expanding lifespan many will end up living long enough to take more than they gave so if you truly believe its wrong to live off the government dole the SECOND you get back what you put in you should reject every other cent. Give it to charity, tear up the checks, do as you will be if you take a single penny more than you gave...you are the parasite, just as Ayn Rand sitting on her money while medicare paid for her cancer treatment was a parasite.
Because it makes you full of shit as you are benefiting from the very thing you CLAIM you are against? If you are truly against it have some fucking balls and stand up and be counted, otherwise you are just another Internet blowhard who doesn't put their money where their mouths are.
This is why even though I don't believe the same as her I respect the hell out of Joan Baez, she figured up when she was protesting Vietnam how much of her taxes would go to pay for bullets and bombs and she has not paid that EVER. she goes to jail about twice a decade until somebody decides to pay her fine but not a single cent of her money has paid for a single bullet or bomb to be used on another human being.
So if you are gonna talk the talk you need to walk the walk, otherwise you can just sit in the hypocrite box and be seen for being full of shit. you don't even have to go to jail for your beliefs as she does, if you truly believe in libertarian ideals then you can give that money to a local charity as libertarians support local control. But if you cash those checks and put them in your pocket you need to STFU as you are just spouting bullshit, you are gaining more than you put in while bitching about what little they took out, based on the average lifespan today VS the amount they take.
Exactly, Randians think the Free market is a magical cure all (Even though we already tried that, it was called "the age of the robber barons" and was a LOT like feudalism) and rail about how SS and medicare/aid should be abolished (along with pretty much ALL aid to the poor and defenseless, they are very "dog eat dog") yet there was their queen taking Social Security and making up bullshit justifications on how it didn't make her a hypocrite (Protip: It did make her a hypocrite).
But this is even more juicy as Ron Paul has railed against eminent domain for ages, and how the free markets should be respected above all...except when he doesn't get what he wants then he can pull eminent domain with no problem apparently, fuck the free markets.
So I think this is it as far as Ron Paul is concerned as all his bullshit has just been shown to be just that, bullshit that he believes when it benefits HIM but not when it'll cost him precious dollars. Its just a damned shame this didn't happen a decade ago before so many were duped into supporting his hypocrite ass with their time and money. Oh well a fool and their money and all that.
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You are forgetting how much people want their mobile devices to do everything their PCs will do and AMD does have a pretty big advantage when it comes to GPUs. it was a big enough advantage that not one, not two, but three of the next gen consoles are using their GPUs and two are using their APUs so having lots of multimedia power is a big plus and Intel is still behind in that area. i'm frankly shocked Intel hasn't bought Nvidia by now, it would give them the graphics expertise they could really use.
Uhhh...isn't that running in a VM anyway? by that logic one could say windows supports EXT since a VM of Linux runs EXT.
Sadly they've let it go to shit the past several releases, probably because they knew they were walking away from it. my oldest was a die HARD Opera user, he wouldn't touch a system without Opera and used to carry Opera portable on a stick so he wouldn't have to use anything else but even he is trying various browsers because he says Opera gets slower and buggier with each release.
If they are gonna abandon presto I really wish they'd open up the code, who knows what good could be made of an open presto engine. After all Mozilla rose from the ashes of netscape, maybe with it open devs could make presto so good opera would end up switching back.
Of course all this is ignoring the rotting elephant in the room which the EU and DoJ really REALLY needs to investigate, and that is Apple's ability to influence the market with their monopolistic practices. Before some Applelite chimes in with "Apple isn't a monopoly" bullshit, total bullshit, look up the wording. it says you do NOT need 100% of the market, you don't even have to own the majority of the market, just that you have the power to assert undue influence and you would be hard pressed to find anybody that says Apple doesn't seriously influence the markets. From the prices of books to whether the web will run on an open format like Theora VS a locked down H.264 ALL of the major calls about the web made in the last couple of years has been made with iPhone in mind.
Do you think Opera would be ditching presto if it could run on the iPhone? Do you think we'd be forced to run HTML V5 before its ready or use a patent troll format like H.264 if iPhone users could choose between that and Flash and WebM and Drac and Theora? No if the company of St Steve of Cupertino says "it is thus" then that is what it is gonna be, no choices in the matter. And I think they need to be investigated as NO company should have that power, I was against MSFT using IE to gain control and I'm against Apple using iPhone/iPad to gain more control. No matter what device or OS you use the web should be about choice, not some corp laying down the law.
Small village in Africa? How about many areas of the USA that can't get anything but dialup or a capped all to fuck connection? At my mom's place the ONLY thing they can get is wiFi run by a Billy Joe Bob that knows jack shit about dividing bandwidth so when some dumbshit is watching netflix on the thing you pretty much have to have something like turbo.
Most folks don't realize how truly shitty our coverage really is because they go by zip code and the way they measure is if ANYBODY in that zip code can get high speed? then they think anybody can.
So its buh bye Opera then? I mean why should I bother with Opera when its just gonna be another Maxthon, a skin on somebody else's engine?
The POINT is that they SHOULD NOT HAVE TO because the drivers should work fine. they work fine in windows, the work fine in Mac (for the cards made for mac of course) but the ONLY place it does NOT work is in Linux.
At the end of the day a company should NOT have to constantly recompile their drivers because Linus Torvalds is an egotistical douchebag who THINKS he is smarter than every other OS developer on the planet. The simple fact is he is NOT smarter and driver ABIs are there FOR A REASON, so you don't have to recompile everytime somebody gets a wild hair up their ass and changes something!
That would be like asking why the software that runs on an airplane doesn't run on your cellphone. Windows Embedded, just like Linux embedded, runs a stripped down kernel and a MUCH thinner OS because when you are dealing with an embedded system you just aren't gonna be doing as much as a full OS, as they are designed for specific functions.
Just because you don't consider it art doesn't mean you are correct. i once saw an art piece where a guy sat watching TV with a shotgun pointed at his head, there was a timer that was supposed to go off sometime between than and the year 2000 I believe, its been awhile. Now some would just call that insane or stupid, but many others saw it as a comment on our culture of violence and media.
Have you tried Gnash? Adobe hasn't stopped or impeded Gnash development in any way, so you DO have options. try that with H.264 and find out how fast they'll hit you with a cease and desist.
Hell if you are on Linux you should be SUPPORTING Flash, as they don't charge anything to allow you to bundle flash with ANY distro whereas mozilla tried to bundle H.26x support with Firefox and got a "pay your $699 license fee you cocksmoking tea baggers!" for their trouble.
At the end of the day too damned many are supporting a format that is IN EVERY SINGLE METRIC WORSE than Flash and the ONLY reason they are all tripping over themselves to support it is St Steve from Cupertino supported it. Well no shit, it kills the casual gaming market and makes the appstore more money! Duh! if Apple didn't like the way that Adobe was running flash they COULD have put money into gnash, they COULD have put money into Theora or Drac, but they didn't FOR A REASON, because H.26x makes a nice barrier to entry and makes it harder for anybody without corporate backing to compete.
If you don't support flash fine, support Theora, Drac, WebM, there is three choices right there that aren't a patent minefield for the web. but don't help those that want to turn the net into the Home Shopping Club succeed please.
But here is what is gonna make capitalists shit their pants, libertarians too.....capitalism, like every other ism, is doomed and MUST be destroyed, there is no other choice.
Technology has already made most blue collar and now many white collar jobs disappear, after all nobody hires humans to calculate anything, the machines do it. Don't need humans in the factories, only a couple to push buttons as the machines work. Seen the Hondabot? Climbs stairs, can work in hazardous areas, never gets tired, never needs a break, don't need healthcare or sick leave, not ever.
We are ALL John Henry and the true lesson is you can work yourself to death and the machine will still beat you, as it'll be able to keep right on working while they drag your corpse away. What good will be a capitalist system when only a handful at the very top and their lackeys can afford anything because they have the robots and thus the capital? we are in for a rough ride, with lots of revolutions and upheaval in the days to come, but at the end capitalism will have to be eliminated, just as communism and fascism came and went.
A final thought to chew on: if you look at the amount of labor required to keep output at current levels you could kill half the people on this planet, line them up and shoot half of the men, women, and children tomorrow, and not only would the quality of life not go down, it would go up as those that were left would find more demand for what little labor is required to keep things at current levels. Its over friend, the rich at the top will fight it, right up to the second we put them against the wall and shoot them, but capitalism, like every other ism, is doomed, technology will render it obsolete.
Bingo! We have a winner! I have set and argued with some of the big wigs of libertarianism on the web like the one that runs freedomainradio, Stephen something or other, and at the end of the day it ALL comes down to greed, no way they can paint it any different. It was libertarians that shouted "Let him die!" when Ron Paul was given the question of the 22 year old without insurance,it is libertarians that are taking every possible tax dodge they can rather than share a single cent, hell I never understood why they didn't champion Mitt Romney, hell he may have talked like a liberal but he was the biggest tax dodger to ever run!
At the end of the day I'd still take socialism or even communism over libertarianism because no matter how bad those systems may end up in practice at least they come from a "help thy neighbor" belief system whereas with libertarianism no matter how they try to spin it at the end of the day its a vicious and brutal belief system, and if it were implemented tomorrow we'd have full blown feudalism before the end of the year.
You should blame Linus Torvalds for that NOT AMD. I can take the driver it came with and run it right this second, even though that driver is 4+ years old, on Windows XP/Vista/7 and it runs just fine. do you HONESTLY think that Linus fucking Torvalds is smarter than the OS developers for BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, iOS, ChromeOS, Android AND even OS/2? Because thanks to stable driver ABIs they can ALL keep older drivers, YOU CAN NOT.
So I'm sorry you have chosen an OS controlled by religious zealots, i truly am. And before you say they are NOT zealots just read the manifesto put out by the one kernel dev that went on the record about driver ABIs, he even writes "I hope all non free drivers break often!"...I'm sorry but that is a zealot, when he would rather users have a broken OS than a functional one if it doesn't follow his belief system. And ironically the one card manufacturer everyone says to buy, Nvidia, because they work has NEVER supported free drivers LOL!
So to steal a line from RMS I'll be glad when Torvalds is gone, maybe then Linux users won't have to deal with such a piss poor mess of a driver system. Until then i'm sorry, you deserve what you get. If the free drivers don't work write a nasty letter to Torvalds, he is who you should lay the blame upon.
I think Michelangelo was pervy, do I get to ban him? I don't honestly care for any art with guy's junk hanging out, can we ban that too? You DO realize that most of what is considered art now was labeled as controversial and even smut in its own time? Fleurs de Mal was banned in several countries and heavily censored in others, same with Lady Chatterley's Lover.
The point is just because i don't like something does NOT give me the right to destroy it or bury it where others can not see, and just because i stick a letter D or R behind my name and sling enough bullshit to get into a public office doesn't magically give me a better understanding. Lets take one the right had a living shitfit over, Robert Mapplethorpe. Many labeled his work as smut and filth, many probably still do. while i may not care for most of his work I at least have enough common sense to look at the broader context and the time in which he lived. he was a gay man in the 70s and 80s, a time when outright hatred of gays was practically the law, the right wing administration originally labeled AIDS as GRID, remember? so they wouldn't have to give any money towards a cure? So no shit he was probably bitter and fucking angry at how he was treated and that should be taken into consideration.
at the end of the day I go by the words of one of the wisest men i had the privilege to know, my grandfather. I asked when the Illinois Nazis were demanding to march if he would ban then, figuring he'd say "hell yes!". after all this was a man who had faced the PAK 88 in France and ended the war in a full body cast after one of the rag tag Werewulf squads dropped a wall on him and his buddies, two of whom didn't survive. To my shock he said we should support 100% their rights to say and do as they pleased, no matter how ugly as long as they didn't hurt anybody else. He said "That is what makes us different from them" and explained how important freedom of speech was and how we didn't need to protect popular speech, after all too many agree with it hence its popular. its the unpopular things we need to protect, because if the Illinois Nazis were silenced today, who is to say that we wouldn't be the ones silenced tomorrow?
Would you rather they just kept upping the numbers on the old drivers? They have already squeezed every last drop of performance they are gonna get out of that hardware, any bugs that show up will still get fixed but putting out a constant stream of drivers that is really just the same driver with new version numbers just makes no sense.
So I honestly don't see what the problem is. I'm gaming with an HD4850 now and its fine, games look good, the driver is stable, what more could they do when they have already got it as optimized as they can possibly get on 4+ year old hardware?
Honestly from what I've seen just like with CPUs its now about doing the same that we were doing but with less heat and power usage. look at what an HD4850 used and then compared it to an HD7770 which according to sites like HWCompare is just a little ahead of the HD4850 and you'll see its a pretty big drop in power used to get the same performance.
But as far as graphics goes? i think this is pretty much it guys, its not gonna get much better. Hell it costs nearly 100 million dollars to do a triple A game with today's graphics, more graphics, more physics, all that is more work which will drive the price up and I don't see that happening. THQ is gone, EA is on the selling block, and Activision's parent company is looking at restructuring. It simply costs too much to focus everything on the graphics like we did in the old days folks so I'm betting we have pretty much reached a plateau and new consoles won't change that.
My guess is the future is gonna be a combination of episodic gaming, DLCs, and a mix of big devs and small because graphics won't be the sole selling point anymore. Games like Torchlight II and Legend of Grimrock have shown you can have games without bleeding edge graphics still sell well and I wouldn't be surprised if games like the Borderlands series make nearly as much off the DLC sales as they do the game itself, so to help lower costs I can easily see games changing to more of an episodic and DLC model.
Finally as for AMD if the rumors are true they are looking at 3 out of the 4 consoles using their chips in some manner (the lone holdout being the rumored Steambox but until we get some hard data we can't be sure of that) so I can see them not having the capacity to do a new chip rollout at the same time they are having to supply all these consoles. I'm just glad to see them get the work as we need competition and having 3 out of the 4 consoles ought to give them a regular source of income they can count on while they work on new chips.
Its probably a variation, one thing we have learned from the exploit kits and the like is if they figure out something that works suddenly it will be used in a bazillion different ways, like some flu bug it mutates like crazy.
Well to me as a geek I prefer following logic whenever possible and it is simply logical that if you are forced by the state to pay X then you should be perfectly fine to accept that money back up to X, as you are just getting back what was taken from you.
What i have a problem with is those who have a "do as i say not as i do" attitude and who accept dole from that very system they railed against. after others have pointed out 2 out of the 3 founding women of libertarianism actually walked the walk and did their best to avoid the system altogether, one even quitting a job rather than be forced to pay in to social security. the one who didn't practice what she preached was ironically Rand herself as she took much more from the state for her cancer treatments than she paid in to protect her fortune.
Yes because the pile of chemicals that make up artificial sweetners is so much better than the HFCS. This is why I prefer to drink the "throw back" drinks when I can get them or good old fashioned home brewed sweet tea if I can't, you don't seem to need nearly as much sugar as you do HFCS to get the same taste in a drink.
That's not awesome, know what was awesome? Jolt Cola. Double the caffeine and double the sugar, the theme song for that drink should have been Kickstart My heart by Motley Crue as that shit would smack you upside the head in the morning and get your ass in gear. Man I miss Jolt.
Correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the site was more about championing libertarianism, which Ron Paul has simply been one of the most visible faces in that fight.
But at the end of the day it honestly doesn't matter WHY they set up the site as Ron Paul has been one of the most outspoken opponents of governments and agencies taking things without paying "market rates" for them and he has said a billion times that individual property rights are what its all about so here when given a chance to walk the walk he shows what a hypocrite he is by using an agency to try to take by force something which does not belong to him rather than pay market value.
If that isn't "do as I say, not as I do" and a complete slap in the face to libertarian beliefs then WTF is folks? To me it looks like he only walks the walk when it benefits HIM and when it doesn't he's happy to do a 180.
And this is why I'd take full blown communism over libertarianism, because at its root its a vicious belief system. I remember the stories my grandparents told me of what it was like before the new deal, my own father never had to worry about the draft because he had to work in the fields with a badly broken leg because his family couldn't afford to take him to a doctor or survive the winter without every child that could walk and follow basic instructions out in the field so his leg never healed correctly and bothers him to this very day. Great grandma talked of entire families riding the rails like nomads, just trying to find enough to eat and many children ended up blind of brain damaged simply because they couldn't get enough nutrients.
So i could never support a "fuck you, I got mine you get yours" philosophy because it at its roots ignores how much of those advantages are nothing but accidents of birth. You think if Mitt Romney had been born to a dirt poor family in Alabama he would be so rich now? What are the odds Ron Paul would have gotten where he is if he were born black? If both were born in one of the war torn African nations do you think they'd have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of? No too much ends up coming down to which womb you come out of and I can't in good conscience punish someone for something they had no choice about. Then again that is why I'll never be rich, even if I won the lotto I would have to help those around me that were suffering as there just isn't enough greed in me to ignore that.
You also just described insurance which many libertarians see as a panacea...do you consider insurance a Ponzi scheme as well? After all they aren't just paying out what you put in it, you can pay 30k in on a million dollar policy and if the event happens (death, building burns, whatever) and they pay up they certainly haven't just handed you your 30K back, they are taking money from those that have paid in but not collected anything and handing it to you.
Frankly I think libertarians love the words "Ponzi Scheme" the way the right wing loved the word communism back in the 50s, as they seem to see them everywhere.
But due to the ever expanding lifespan many will end up living long enough to take more than they gave so if you truly believe its wrong to live off the government dole the SECOND you get back what you put in you should reject every other cent. Give it to charity, tear up the checks, do as you will be if you take a single penny more than you gave...you are the parasite, just as Ayn Rand sitting on her money while medicare paid for her cancer treatment was a parasite.
Because it makes you full of shit as you are benefiting from the very thing you CLAIM you are against? If you are truly against it have some fucking balls and stand up and be counted, otherwise you are just another Internet blowhard who doesn't put their money where their mouths are.
This is why even though I don't believe the same as her I respect the hell out of Joan Baez, she figured up when she was protesting Vietnam how much of her taxes would go to pay for bullets and bombs and she has not paid that EVER. she goes to jail about twice a decade until somebody decides to pay her fine but not a single cent of her money has paid for a single bullet or bomb to be used on another human being.
So if you are gonna talk the talk you need to walk the walk, otherwise you can just sit in the hypocrite box and be seen for being full of shit. you don't even have to go to jail for your beliefs as she does, if you truly believe in libertarian ideals then you can give that money to a local charity as libertarians support local control. But if you cash those checks and put them in your pocket you need to STFU as you are just spouting bullshit, you are gaining more than you put in while bitching about what little they took out, based on the average lifespan today VS the amount they take.
Exactly, Randians think the Free market is a magical cure all (Even though we already tried that, it was called "the age of the robber barons" and was a LOT like feudalism) and rail about how SS and medicare/aid should be abolished (along with pretty much ALL aid to the poor and defenseless, they are very "dog eat dog") yet there was their queen taking Social Security and making up bullshit justifications on how it didn't make her a hypocrite (Protip: It did make her a hypocrite) .
But this is even more juicy as Ron Paul has railed against eminent domain for ages, and how the free markets should be respected above all...except when he doesn't get what he wants then he can pull eminent domain with no problem apparently, fuck the free markets.
So I think this is it as far as Ron Paul is concerned as all his bullshit has just been shown to be just that, bullshit that he believes when it benefits HIM but not when it'll cost him precious dollars. Its just a damned shame this didn't happen a decade ago before so many were duped into supporting his hypocrite ass with their time and money. Oh well a fool and their money and all that.