It was released in 1998, the same year as Deus Ex and Half Life. again five will get you ten that if you'd have played it on any current AMD card it would play just fine, Nvidia tends to drop support in their drivers for older games quicker while AMD tends to keep support.
Like I said I have Deus Ex 1, Half life 1, even the old Team Fortress Classic (man that is STILL fun and packed with players BTW) and while my HD4850 isn't cutting edge (I plan to go HD6850 after the holidays) it plays those games just fine, both the stand alone and steam versions. When I was running Nvidia cards (I got bit by bumpgate so I will NEVER buy Nvidia again) I often had to hunt down tweaks because as i said they drop support pretty quick. Now I don't know if this will still be the case after AMD switches to vector over VLIW when it comes to their graphics engine, but if previous years are an indicator they will simply keep support in the drivers and have some sort of translator to emulate the VLIW for older games.
I just wish someone would come out with a DOSBox for Win9X, there are several games from that era that will NOT run on XP or newer because of all the hacks they used to speed up performance. try Mechwarrior 3 or i76 sometime, both are completely unplayable on anything other than a less than 2Ghz single core running win98. While I used to keep a SFF 733MHz just for Win9X it finally died and I just don't have the room to keep another tower just for a few old games.
So you can enjoy their ads and pandering for money? sign me up! BTW I wouldn't be pinning any hopes on Ubuntu, after Shuttleworth closed the wallet they have been frantically throwing crap at the wall trying to get enough revenue to actually pay the bills and so far have come up short.
My prediction? Ubuntu dead in 2, maybe sooner, just depends on how many will actually click through the Amazon ads. Since even their own forums are filled with "How to remove the Amazon ads in Ubuntu" my guess is there won't be many, not to mention its a lawsuit waiting to happen since there are schools and families using Ubuntu and in the most retarded move they could have made they chose Amazon who doesn't filter shit. there have already been several complaints of kids looking for innocent files and getting porn, somebody is gonna sue their asses off, especially when Amazon's own terms of service say its for those over 18. Has anybody seen a "You must be 18 to use Ubuntu" on Canonical's website? me neither, they are practically begging for someone to play lawsuit lotto and take what little is left of Canonical's money.
Won't have to worry about it in any case, just look at how they refused to backport DX 11 and to this day most games are still DX 9. Some may have the option to run DX 11 but I have only seen one game so far (Just Cause II) that required DX 10 and none that is DX 11 exclusive. Oh there may be a few out there, but cutting out a huge number of potential customers is retarded.
Oh and it looks like the first half of my prediction, that after Win 8 flops that Ballmer and Sinofsky will "pursue other interests" is coming true because Sinofsky is outta there fuck yeah! Now that Snickerdouche, the asshole that forced so many of the bad design choices of Win 8 down our throats is gone, that will only leave Ballmer...guess who the board is gonna blame when Win 8 turns out to be Vista II? They have spent 2 BILLION on advertising and actually had the balls to brag they sold 4 million copies...that is $500 for each $40 sale, so I'd say we are already on our way to flop city baby yeah! Now that everyone other than MSFT has decided to "delay" (read not put out) WinRT tablets its all on Ballmer's head now.
Finally I hate to burst your bubble but until Torvalds is booted like Sinofsky good fucking luck on Linux going anywhere. Quick, what do BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, and OS/2 have in common that Linux does NOT have? A stable driver ABI and boy does it show. Anyone who can do basic math could see Torvalds "let the devs handle it" simply won't work. you have MAYBE 200 devs (probably closer to 50, but benefit, doubt, yadda yadda) that are truly experienced enough and qualified to do low level driver writing and diagnostics, and you have 100,000+ drivers and every subsystem from the kernel on up in a constant state of flux...see the problem?
Anyone that thinks Linux is ready is welcome to take the Hairyfeet challenge, not a single Linux variant has passed it yet, it simulates a typical 5 year PC lifespan and is less than half the support cycle of Windows yet every single distro ends up with one or more drivers busted. Anyone who wants to see the conditions can look it up by Googling "Hairyfeet Challenge".
In the end the problem with Linux is Torvalds and his arrogant fellow devs, to truly gain the masses you have to do things at LEAST as easy as the competition, yet Torvalds thinks its perfectly fine to have to Google for fixes, do forum hunts, and input piles of CLI (that often one has to tweak because it was written for hardware A, rev B, firmware C and Linux is so damned picky it won't take it if you have hardware A, rev C, firmware D if you don't tweak the damned thing) just to get the drivers that were working before the update to work after.
so I'm sorry but you'd have better odds of Apple Macs becoming the new gaming platform, at least you can update OSX for the lifecycle of the version without the drivers crapping themselves.
I bet if you'd ran it on an AMD card instead of an Nvidia you wouldn't have had that problem, Nvidia tends to drop support for older games fairly quickly while AMD don't. I don't have that game to fire up and test but I do have Deus Ex 1, by the same company, and it plays just fine without any tweaks.
As for TFA I'm all for emulators, it quickly becomes a royal PITA to keep up with all the damned carts and consoles, anything that will let me play more games on my device of choice is a plus in my book.
Uhhh..I think we all know where Europe is friend, its where...drumroll...the EU is now. Kinda pointless to use the old name since they've been the EU for a couple of decades now, don't ya think?
Oh please! While FOSS might be able to work in the server niche that is pretty much the ONLY place it works and even then not great, as the redistribution clause means you can't stop people from simply making endless copies. By distributing as a binary you make people buy the next version to get bug fixes and upgrades, which in turn pays for the bug fixes and upgrades to be written. There is a good reason why the largest FOSS company on the planet, Red hat, wouldn't make a pimple on the ass of MSFT and Apple, and that's because you can simply take all their work for free with Cent, the FOSS model simply cuts your own throat if you need to actually get paid, see Canonical putting ads into ubuntu and holding out a tin cup begging for donations as an example.
Now as for why Itanic went nowhere? simple...VLIW. With VLIW the compiler is everything, it has to be damned near perfect to get any kind of performance and no matter how well you write it there will still be tons of corner cases that will cause it to stall, yet in the case of Itanic Intel had only a half ass compiler out the gate and by the time they came out with a halfway decent one AMD had forced them to go X64 and multicore which fricking killed any advantage Itanic had. It is obvious that VLIW is a dead end, hell even the GPUs are moving away from it, with AMD replacing VLIW for Vector, first in their GPUs followed by their APUs.
The simple fact is you can do everything you could on Itanic with a Tesla or Firepro card and STILL enjoy the incredible amount of software and OSes for X86, no point in taking a platform with less software and compiler issues.
SSDs have a "dark side" that I have a feeling is gonna ultimately torpedo that market, and that is the crazy failure rate which is made worse by the fact that it is usually NOT the drive chips themselves but the controller that fails with NO WARNING so if you don't have a VERY recent backup? Bye bye data. I have some gamer customers that are already into double digits on the number of drives they've owned, ALL died of controller failure.
So I wouldn't write off HDDs yet, they may not have the speed but they are a HELL of a lot more reliable. While the gamers are willing to risk it for the benches, my regular customers that have tried SSD and gotten burnt have already sworn off SSds, they won't own another one. Enough people hear and see the crazy failure rate the market will fall, I'm just waiting for the SSD equivalent of the IBM Desktar 80Gb or the Maxtor 400Gb, only since they nearly all use the same controllers when they have their bad line its gonna bite a LOT of people in the ass. When that happens I wouldn't be surprised to see SSD purchases to drop like a stone, because most people if given a choice of raw speed or risking losing all their data? they'll choose reliable over fast any day of the week.
Exactly, one of the last conversations I had with my grandfather who fought in EU during WWII was about the Illinois Nazis, it was during the time they were suing for the right to march. I asked him if that pissed him off and he said " I support their right to march, even if I don't believe in what they are marching for. The reason we fought against the Nazis was for the right to speak your mind, even if those words are rude or hateful. True freedom isn't just protecting people saying nice things but protecting even the hateful and ignorant".
I'm sure you could power most of the UK off the revolutions of the soldiers spinning in their grave, of course they've been spinning like tops for several years now, what with the UK heading more and more towards a classic Big Brother style police state. Ironic that they disbanded the pre war British Fascist society because it looks like they were simply ahead of their time sadly.
Funny, Torchlight 2 doesn't seem to have that problem, everything plays just fine. hell they even allow mods, which means the game will still be fresh and have new content years after they have moved onto TL3.
Don't fall for the bullshit friend, they've had anti-cheating tech like Punkbuster for years, the ONLY reason Diablo 3 was made online only was so they could rape your wallet with a real money market, that's all. hell look up any of Blizzard's talks before the release, they hardly talked about the game at all, it was ALL about their real money market, aka "Buy your progress instead of earn it"
Grow a pair of what? Tits like you? No thanks. BTW just FYI but every time you say "M$" People look at you like this a total loser nerd. And don't worry as a public service I'll be sure to post that cartoon every time I see you post M$. wouldn't want people not to laugh at you, now would we?
Sorry but unless you haven't heard this is the Internet, where all the guys are guys and most of the girls are...well guys wearing women's panties, so dude usually covers a good 90% of the pop, especially on a geek site. In fact if you are an actual female you join a VERY small club here, as i know of only two other females that regularly post here, Gaygirlie and Girlintraining, which I think is the handle Werecat from OSNews uses here. But my bad, sorry.
But I would suggest in the future you use the preview button, I know its easy to forget in a heated back and forth but it really did kinda derail your whole argument when you had a half a dozen posts citing a link...that went nowhere but itself.
Uhhh...dude? yeah you might want to go back and check that link, as you simply linked back tp the post that the links was in. Kinda derails your argument when your link be busted, just FYI.
I don't know if its right to blame the people though, because when you are just pounded by propaganda day after day AFTER DAY it can be hard to separate the truth from the bullshit, especially about high tech where many might have trouble understanding enough of the fundamentals to really see where the truth and the bullshit meet. its like that old saying "tell a truth, a half truth, and a lie together and people will believe it all" and with tech frankly they know so little about how it REALLY works that by just mixing a kernel of truth into their bullshit they can get people to go along.
That is why its important that we geeks warn those that don't know better when they are being had. We have to be vigilant and point out the horseshit as often as we can because not everybody can know everything and tech is one of those subjects if you aren't REALLY interested enough to actually study it frankly many of the concepts will just woosh over your head.
Because the people came to Blizzard with pitchforks and said "We want single player to be online only, with lots of lag and a real money market so you can assrape us on loot!"...ohhh wait, nobody wanted that but Blizzard, which is why I bought Torchlight II instead where I can host my own games and play SP without the net.
Frankly I don't give a fuck WHAT Toshiba wants, what I want to know is where is the EFF? This seems like a PERFECT case for them, as we aren't talking about some copied songs here, we are talking about basic information like what kind of power adapter a laptop takes and what the part number is for a new screen.
As someone who has a need to look this kind of stuff up from time to time, when my parts guy drops a load of laptops in with the desktops, i know what company I'll be telling my customers to avoid, good job Toshiba.
Except these things are solvable WITHOUT killing the economy, if you can get rid of the damned NIMBYs and the tree huggers that scream "You may kill the (insert some bug you never heard of)!"..how? Desalinization. We can set up desalinization plants and turn the oceans into the biggest source of fresh water in history, then you can use that to either make the deserts into fields or you can build huge hydroponics towers that crank out food like nobody's business. All it takes is the will, if we could make it to the moon in a decade with frankly primitive tech we can do this with tech that already exists. Hell they already have a pilot plant in the UK that is making pure gasoline out of fricking seawater, we combine that tech with desalinization plants and the two biggest problems, food and fuel, could become solvable.
But as we have seen trying to build everything from nuclear plants to even windmills the fucking NIMBYs and treehuggers will cockblock you at every turn, you can't get a damned thing built in this fricking country anymore. hell the Chinese will have TWENTY FIVE nuclear reactors built before we can get a single one through all the damned committees and political bullshit!
I have a feeling they want to list it as a national security problem for that exact reason, so they can tell the NIMBYs and treehuggers to STFU and actually get shit built in this country again. Like it or not there are facts one simply has to accept 1.- We HAVE to have ever growing amounts of power, without power our standard of living is gonna go right down the shitter, 2.- Ditto on fuel, this country is just too damned big for limited range electrics to do the job without having a trillion dollar overhaul of our road system to embed power transfer lines, and we just don't have the money to undertake that massive of an overhaul at this time, and 3.- We have to have food that everyone can afford, without food you have riots and upheaval.
So I'd say this problem is solvable if we can get the fucking leeches like Al Gore and the damned NIMBYs out of the way, because horseshit like carbon credits only torpedo what little manufacturing we have in the USA (since China and India have already stated they won't play our carbon three card monty) and like it or not when you build shit you are gonna be dealing with some kind of insect or animal, since there pretty much isn't a single inch on the planet that don't have bugs or critters. If the NIMBYs and treehuggers would have been around during the early twentieth century we wouldn't have a single power plant or dam or reactor in this country as they would have cockblocked. So while I may not agree that it should be labeled a national security matter, as that bring in eminent domain and a bunch of other nasty power grabs, i can at least see why they would want to take that route.
This is what I don't get, you look up the numbers and the chip is all but a corpse, my guess is they already had these designs done before itanic lost any chance of gaining real share and now they are hoping to simply carve a niche out with it, something like how POWER and SPARC have their niches.
But according to the Wikipedia they sell than 200k Itanium chips a year which while that makes it not a money loser for a giant like Intel you have to wonder if its worth keeping the lights on for such a small market share. All I can figure is they can keep this a step or two behind on the die shrinks and use them to fill capacity. After all in TFA they say its 32nm and isn't Intel about to release 20nm X86 chips? or did they get them out the door already?
Who knows, maybe there is some niche contractor that Intel wants to keep happy, look how they kept cranking the 486 chips out until just a couple of years ago, they get enough sales from the US military and defense contractors for the 486 (because its easy to harden against radiation) that even with such a tiny niche it was worth keeping it running just to keep them happy. last i heard they had a warehouse full of 386 and 486 where they had that last run cranked to the max so they'd have plenty of spares to keep the contractors happy for several more years.
Uhhh...where did I say ANYTHING about TCO? Linux is cheaper because you can run a bunch of copies on a single blade thanks to VMs and not have to worry about license issues, also you don't get reamed if you want to have a system with a lot of RAM and cores, whereas you obviously haven't looked at WinServer DataCenter Edition because Jesus tapdancing Christ are they making out like bandits on THAT one.
And frankly even on the server unless you can roll your own or deal with the constant issues frankly windows curbstomps Linux when it comes to drivers, which if you would think about it makes total sense. BTW they are NOT fantards, they are FOSSies because like Moonies they use FOSS as a religion. But back to drivers you have...oh lets say 200 kernel devs (number waaay too high i know, but benefit, doubt, yadda yadda) that have the years of experience and skills required to truly write and troubleshoot low level system drivers, you have a kernel that is changing every 6 months or so, and subsystems being yanked and tweaked left and right, oh and something on the order of 100,000 drivers...see the problem? Even if you locked those devs in a room filled with Bolivian marching powder the math just doesn't work, no way to get the kind of QA and QC that you can with the guys that actually built the device building the drivers, just no way.
But its NOT the license that fucks you, hell working retail selling machines all day i KNOW that all it takes is the devs fucking up a single driver to blow through any savings, which is why i won't ever carry Linux systems at the shop, its the license issues and the threat of BSA audits that makes Linux a better deal, at least in datacenters. When you figure in the cost of licenses PLUS the cost of CALs PLUS the assraping prices for the higher SKUs? it really adds up and more than makes up for the higher cost of a Linux admin over a Windows one. this is why I recommend WinServer for small companies and for large I tell them to run WinServer standard edition on a machine inside the firewall for GPO and AD support, and to run Linux on the web and data servers simply because the cost adds up and one BSA audit can cost serious money. Remember all it takes is a single disgruntled employee to drop a dime and suddenly you are ass deep in a time and money sucking audit. I've had friends that worked IT for companies that got a BSA audit, it pretty much grinds the place to a halt.
Sorry Crosshair but it doesn't matter WHAT his policies were if he came off as a spoiled rich douchebag, and that was Romney in a nutshell. his "I like to fire people" bit, which is the WRONG MOVE in a down economy when people are scared of losing their jobs, his spoiled brat stories, his kissing the neocon ass by insinuating he would be willing to go to war with Iran, not to mention his "I served my country by running a company" bit which took a big old piss right on the vets...he was a fucking clueless PHB.
At the end of the day you could have the best policies and ideas on the planet but if you come off as "President Beltzer" in that old Groove Tube sketch "The president came out today and gave the cameras the finger, followed by telling everyone to suck his dick" well you just aren't gonna win. No matter what he has done in office Obama has stayed pretty much center left when it came to his speeches and wasn't giving us Bushism the entire campaign, whereas every damned time Romney opened his mouth he gave the press and comedians a week's worth of cannon fodder. Oh and don't forget the tax returns, Romney had his own Whitewater before he had even been elected, yeah that was smart, run a tax dodger for the highest office.
But I don't think it had a damned thing to do with race, although of course the blacks voted nearly 100% Obama because of race, i think it was because Romney was just so damned unlikeable. Hell even the people I knew that were voting for him hated his fucking guts, they just hated Obama more, NOBODY liked him because he came off as this spoiled rotten rich clueless prick which...well that is pretty much what he is. I haven't looked at his specifics but I DID look at Ryan's and he sure as hell wasn't anywhere close to Obama, being another damned randian, and when Romney couldn't even win his home state and in fact left office with a less than 30% approval rating? Obviously there was some serious flaws in his policies or he wouldn't have been so damned disliked by his own state. Compare that to someone like Clinton who if he wanted the job could be guv in AR this very minute, he left with crazy high approval ratings and is still loved to this very day.
Because they actually had real competition before? Before the flood there were FOUR hard drive manufacturers, Seagate, WD, Samsung, and Hitachi, now there is only WD and Seagate. Since there is only two they will simply watch and match each other's prices, nice way to have a duopoly.
But this is why competition is so important, just look at how quickly prices are falling and sizes growing in SSDs whereas with HDDs they seem to be stagnant, that's because as long as they simply match each other's prices they don't have to worry about price wars since its only the two of them.
Then the place is doomed, get out now. Because I've seen what happens when guys like Bob croak and its left in such a clusterfuck they end up having to close the doors because the amount of money required to bring in pros familiar with the old shit and transfer the data to something from this century will cost a fricking arm and a leg.
If you think this place does good and deserves to stay around you better fight, if not just walk away. Because old Bob WILL have cancer, or a heart attack, or something, and without being able to get to the data required for taxes and legal and all the other headaches they are gonna be royally fucked.
Riiight, because the courts NEVER make mistakes. How many have been gotten off death row due to DNA now? Something like 60+ right?
And I would remind you there is a DARK AND UGLY side nobody wants to talk about, and that is how many times wives in a bitter divorce will coerce or even bribe a child to say "daddy touched me" to fuck over their soon to be ex. I had a friend that this was done to, hell he even had the fricking cops come in ON HIS SIDE because they said the girl changed stories more than a half a dozen times and they even caught granny coaching the girl between interviews when they didn't know the cameras were still rolling, but because we had a fucking bitch from hell prosecutor that believed "If you have a penis you're a rapist" because she was raped in college she ignored even the police and went after my friend.
It ended up costing him his home, which had been in his family 4 generations, and while he was tied up fighting for his life the slut wife loaded up with a guy she met at work and moved out of the country so he'll never see his son again. The bitch stepdaughter who made the claim, which he had always treated like his own daughter but wouldn't let her go party and run wild like "mommy" would ended up knocked up by a dope dealer before the trial was even over and is now on welfare and living next to the prison so she can see her baby's daddy. Hell the court fees and lawyer fees left him so fucking broke he couldn't even afford to sue that bitch prosecutor!
So I'd be pretty fucking careful if I were you, all it takes is for your woman to decide to jam you up and to talk one of the kids into going along to plunge you into a nightmare that will cost you tons of money and possibly if you had your way, your very life.
How about we just cut the "M$" bullshit and speak like adults, how about that? That bit was fucking old when Win95 was new, its even lamer now. If you don't want to type the name or be snarky just use MSFT which is the stock ticker, it lets you be snarky without looking like some loser that figured out how to look up memes last week.
As for TFA....Is it possible that Ballmer is shorting the stock? or is he just THAT incompetent as a CEO? I know Forbes labeled him worst CEO but I didn't think he was also the most retarded, the kind of shit he's been pulling lately frankly reminds me of the PHB from Dilbert, in fact if you'd have told me about turning the desktop into a giant cell phone, pushing ads onto the paid version, and trying to force touch to be the primary interface when less than 4% of the desktops that ship NOW have touch, much less the hundreds of millions of laptops and desktops MSFT wants to upgrade? i would have honestly thought you were simply ripping off a Dilbert strip.
I mean Good God, look at the man's "accomplishments" during his tenure, rushing the X360 out with a 2 billion dollar flaw, spending 8.5 billion of Skype thus making sure the carriers treat WinPhone like an STD wrapped in AIDS infected needles, Zune, Kin, killing PlaysForSure and soon Windows Messenger, Windows 8 forcing desktops to have a cellphone UI...its a fucking trainwreck over there, he is making the reign of the Pepsi guy at Apple look good by comparison.
If the board doesn't get his fat sweaty clueless ass out of the big chair in the next year and a half i could see them becoming another RIM, a company only holding onto legacy markets while the rest of the world forgets they even existed. Hell the ONLY things that are saving his ass on the desktop is that Apple has no desire to own the low end and the Linux devs won't quit futzing with critical subsystems long enough for it to become stable, otherwise they might be in trouble even there.
I know I've been hearing from a LOT of customers lately just to make sure i could still get Win 7, nobody wants that damned Win 8 and after 2 billion in ads they sold just 4 million copies...that's $500 for every $40 sale. talk about a waste of advertising money! As a retailer I'm just glad Win 7 is good until 2020 and is solid as a rock, hopefully fatass will be "pursuing other interests" before Win 9 comes out so someone with a functioning brain can right the ship. as it is now its as retarded as someone slapping a $100K sticker on a Ford and thinking that means it can compete with Ferrari...nope, it just means you run off the market you had in pursuit of a market that doesn't want your product...brilliant move Ballmer, just fucking brilliant. I can see why they pay you the big bucks.
Actually as a retailer I consider it a public service to show what religious morons they are and what an absolute failure their OS is, so that others will see its a waste of time and completely pointless.
Year after year it gets worse, NOT better, because at the end of the day the FOSSie devs make damned sure to break every single thing that isn't "pure GPL"which since there isn't ANY hardware that is GPL on X86 all they do is fuck shit up for everybody.
But hopefully anybody that saw that post now knows how fucking clueless the FOSSies are, and how their way of doing things simply leads to failure. As far as they are concerned there is never a reason to compromise, even if the result is a completely broken system, that's just fine with them. meanwhile MSFT could put out Windows Goatse and not lose any users because Linux will ALWAYS be worse than anything MSFT puts out. Hell Vista is a dream compared to your average distro, at least the drivers that are installed at RTM will still work at EOL, something not a SINGLE Linux can boast.
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It was released in 1998, the same year as Deus Ex and Half Life. again five will get you ten that if you'd have played it on any current AMD card it would play just fine, Nvidia tends to drop support in their drivers for older games quicker while AMD tends to keep support.
Like I said I have Deus Ex 1, Half life 1, even the old Team Fortress Classic (man that is STILL fun and packed with players BTW) and while my HD4850 isn't cutting edge (I plan to go HD6850 after the holidays) it plays those games just fine, both the stand alone and steam versions. When I was running Nvidia cards (I got bit by bumpgate so I will NEVER buy Nvidia again) I often had to hunt down tweaks because as i said they drop support pretty quick. Now I don't know if this will still be the case after AMD switches to vector over VLIW when it comes to their graphics engine, but if previous years are an indicator they will simply keep support in the drivers and have some sort of translator to emulate the VLIW for older games.
I just wish someone would come out with a DOSBox for Win9X, there are several games from that era that will NOT run on XP or newer because of all the hacks they used to speed up performance. try Mechwarrior 3 or i76 sometime, both are completely unplayable on anything other than a less than 2Ghz single core running win98. While I used to keep a SFF 733MHz just for Win9X it finally died and I just don't have the room to keep another tower just for a few old games.
So you can enjoy their ads and pandering for money? sign me up! BTW I wouldn't be pinning any hopes on Ubuntu, after Shuttleworth closed the wallet they have been frantically throwing crap at the wall trying to get enough revenue to actually pay the bills and so far have come up short.
My prediction? Ubuntu dead in 2, maybe sooner, just depends on how many will actually click through the Amazon ads. Since even their own forums are filled with "How to remove the Amazon ads in Ubuntu" my guess is there won't be many, not to mention its a lawsuit waiting to happen since there are schools and families using Ubuntu and in the most retarded move they could have made they chose Amazon who doesn't filter shit. there have already been several complaints of kids looking for innocent files and getting porn, somebody is gonna sue their asses off, especially when Amazon's own terms of service say its for those over 18. Has anybody seen a "You must be 18 to use Ubuntu" on Canonical's website? me neither, they are practically begging for someone to play lawsuit lotto and take what little is left of Canonical's money.
Won't have to worry about it in any case, just look at how they refused to backport DX 11 and to this day most games are still DX 9. Some may have the option to run DX 11 but I have only seen one game so far (Just Cause II) that required DX 10 and none that is DX 11 exclusive. Oh there may be a few out there, but cutting out a huge number of potential customers is retarded.
Oh and it looks like the first half of my prediction, that after Win 8 flops that Ballmer and Sinofsky will "pursue other interests" is coming true because Sinofsky is outta there fuck yeah! Now that Snickerdouche, the asshole that forced so many of the bad design choices of Win 8 down our throats is gone, that will only leave Ballmer...guess who the board is gonna blame when Win 8 turns out to be Vista II? They have spent 2 BILLION on advertising and actually had the balls to brag they sold 4 million copies...that is $500 for each $40 sale, so I'd say we are already on our way to flop city baby yeah! Now that everyone other than MSFT has decided to "delay" (read not put out) WinRT tablets its all on Ballmer's head now.
Finally I hate to burst your bubble but until Torvalds is booted like Sinofsky good fucking luck on Linux going anywhere. Quick, what do BSD, Solaris, Windows, OSX, and OS/2 have in common that Linux does NOT have? A stable driver ABI and boy does it show. Anyone who can do basic math could see Torvalds "let the devs handle it" simply won't work. you have MAYBE 200 devs (probably closer to 50, but benefit, doubt, yadda yadda) that are truly experienced enough and qualified to do low level driver writing and diagnostics, and you have 100,000+ drivers and every subsystem from the kernel on up in a constant state of flux...see the problem?
Anyone that thinks Linux is ready is welcome to take the Hairyfeet challenge, not a single Linux variant has passed it yet, it simulates a typical 5 year PC lifespan and is less than half the support cycle of Windows yet every single distro ends up with one or more drivers busted. Anyone who wants to see the conditions can look it up by Googling "Hairyfeet Challenge".
In the end the problem with Linux is Torvalds and his arrogant fellow devs, to truly gain the masses you have to do things at LEAST as easy as the competition, yet Torvalds thinks its perfectly fine to have to Google for fixes, do forum hunts, and input piles of CLI (that often one has to tweak because it was written for hardware A, rev B, firmware C and Linux is so damned picky it won't take it if you have hardware A, rev C, firmware D if you don't tweak the damned thing) just to get the drivers that were working before the update to work after.
so I'm sorry but you'd have better odds of Apple Macs becoming the new gaming platform, at least you can update OSX for the lifecycle of the version without the drivers crapping themselves.
I bet if you'd ran it on an AMD card instead of an Nvidia you wouldn't have had that problem, Nvidia tends to drop support for older games fairly quickly while AMD don't. I don't have that game to fire up and test but I do have Deus Ex 1, by the same company, and it plays just fine without any tweaks.
As for TFA I'm all for emulators, it quickly becomes a royal PITA to keep up with all the damned carts and consoles, anything that will let me play more games on my device of choice is a plus in my book.
Uhhh..I think we all know where Europe is friend, its where...drumroll...the EU is now. Kinda pointless to use the old name since they've been the EU for a couple of decades now, don't ya think?
Oh please! While FOSS might be able to work in the server niche that is pretty much the ONLY place it works and even then not great, as the redistribution clause means you can't stop people from simply making endless copies. By distributing as a binary you make people buy the next version to get bug fixes and upgrades, which in turn pays for the bug fixes and upgrades to be written. There is a good reason why the largest FOSS company on the planet, Red hat, wouldn't make a pimple on the ass of MSFT and Apple, and that's because you can simply take all their work for free with Cent, the FOSS model simply cuts your own throat if you need to actually get paid, see Canonical putting ads into ubuntu and holding out a tin cup begging for donations as an example.
Now as for why Itanic went nowhere? simple...VLIW. With VLIW the compiler is everything, it has to be damned near perfect to get any kind of performance and no matter how well you write it there will still be tons of corner cases that will cause it to stall, yet in the case of Itanic Intel had only a half ass compiler out the gate and by the time they came out with a halfway decent one AMD had forced them to go X64 and multicore which fricking killed any advantage Itanic had. It is obvious that VLIW is a dead end, hell even the GPUs are moving away from it, with AMD replacing VLIW for Vector, first in their GPUs followed by their APUs.
The simple fact is you can do everything you could on Itanic with a Tesla or Firepro card and STILL enjoy the incredible amount of software and OSes for X86, no point in taking a platform with less software and compiler issues.
SSDs have a "dark side" that I have a feeling is gonna ultimately torpedo that market, and that is the crazy failure rate which is made worse by the fact that it is usually NOT the drive chips themselves but the controller that fails with NO WARNING so if you don't have a VERY recent backup? Bye bye data. I have some gamer customers that are already into double digits on the number of drives they've owned, ALL died of controller failure.
So I wouldn't write off HDDs yet, they may not have the speed but they are a HELL of a lot more reliable. While the gamers are willing to risk it for the benches, my regular customers that have tried SSD and gotten burnt have already sworn off SSds, they won't own another one. Enough people hear and see the crazy failure rate the market will fall, I'm just waiting for the SSD equivalent of the IBM Desktar 80Gb or the Maxtor 400Gb, only since they nearly all use the same controllers when they have their bad line its gonna bite a LOT of people in the ass. When that happens I wouldn't be surprised to see SSD purchases to drop like a stone, because most people if given a choice of raw speed or risking losing all their data? they'll choose reliable over fast any day of the week.
Exactly, one of the last conversations I had with my grandfather who fought in EU during WWII was about the Illinois Nazis, it was during the time they were suing for the right to march. I asked him if that pissed him off and he said " I support their right to march, even if I don't believe in what they are marching for. The reason we fought against the Nazis was for the right to speak your mind, even if those words are rude or hateful. True freedom isn't just protecting people saying nice things but protecting even the hateful and ignorant".
I'm sure you could power most of the UK off the revolutions of the soldiers spinning in their grave, of course they've been spinning like tops for several years now, what with the UK heading more and more towards a classic Big Brother style police state. Ironic that they disbanded the pre war British Fascist society because it looks like they were simply ahead of their time sadly.
Funny, Torchlight 2 doesn't seem to have that problem, everything plays just fine. hell they even allow mods, which means the game will still be fresh and have new content years after they have moved onto TL3.
Don't fall for the bullshit friend, they've had anti-cheating tech like Punkbuster for years, the ONLY reason Diablo 3 was made online only was so they could rape your wallet with a real money market, that's all. hell look up any of Blizzard's talks before the release, they hardly talked about the game at all, it was ALL about their real money market, aka "Buy your progress instead of earn it"
Grow a pair of what? Tits like you? No thanks. BTW just FYI but every time you say "M$" People look at you like this a total loser nerd. And don't worry as a public service I'll be sure to post that cartoon every time I see you post M$. wouldn't want people not to laugh at you, now would we?
Sorry but unless you haven't heard this is the Internet, where all the guys are guys and most of the girls are...well guys wearing women's panties, so dude usually covers a good 90% of the pop, especially on a geek site. In fact if you are an actual female you join a VERY small club here, as i know of only two other females that regularly post here, Gaygirlie and Girlintraining, which I think is the handle Werecat from OSNews uses here. But my bad, sorry.
But I would suggest in the future you use the preview button, I know its easy to forget in a heated back and forth but it really did kinda derail your whole argument when you had a half a dozen posts citing a link...that went nowhere but itself.
Uhhh...dude? yeah you might want to go back and check that link, as you simply linked back tp the post that the links was in. Kinda derails your argument when your link be busted, just FYI.
I don't know if its right to blame the people though, because when you are just pounded by propaganda day after day AFTER DAY it can be hard to separate the truth from the bullshit, especially about high tech where many might have trouble understanding enough of the fundamentals to really see where the truth and the bullshit meet. its like that old saying "tell a truth, a half truth, and a lie together and people will believe it all" and with tech frankly they know so little about how it REALLY works that by just mixing a kernel of truth into their bullshit they can get people to go along.
That is why its important that we geeks warn those that don't know better when they are being had. We have to be vigilant and point out the horseshit as often as we can because not everybody can know everything and tech is one of those subjects if you aren't REALLY interested enough to actually study it frankly many of the concepts will just woosh over your head.
Because the people came to Blizzard with pitchforks and said "We want single player to be online only, with lots of lag and a real money market so you can assrape us on loot!"...ohhh wait, nobody wanted that but Blizzard, which is why I bought Torchlight II instead where I can host my own games and play SP without the net.
Frankly I don't give a fuck WHAT Toshiba wants, what I want to know is where is the EFF? This seems like a PERFECT case for them, as we aren't talking about some copied songs here, we are talking about basic information like what kind of power adapter a laptop takes and what the part number is for a new screen.
As someone who has a need to look this kind of stuff up from time to time, when my parts guy drops a load of laptops in with the desktops, i know what company I'll be telling my customers to avoid, good job Toshiba.
Except these things are solvable WITHOUT killing the economy, if you can get rid of the damned NIMBYs and the tree huggers that scream "You may kill the (insert some bug you never heard of)!"..how? Desalinization. We can set up desalinization plants and turn the oceans into the biggest source of fresh water in history, then you can use that to either make the deserts into fields or you can build huge hydroponics towers that crank out food like nobody's business. All it takes is the will, if we could make it to the moon in a decade with frankly primitive tech we can do this with tech that already exists. Hell they already have a pilot plant in the UK that is making pure gasoline out of fricking seawater, we combine that tech with desalinization plants and the two biggest problems, food and fuel, could become solvable.
But as we have seen trying to build everything from nuclear plants to even windmills the fucking NIMBYs and treehuggers will cockblock you at every turn, you can't get a damned thing built in this fricking country anymore. hell the Chinese will have TWENTY FIVE nuclear reactors built before we can get a single one through all the damned committees and political bullshit!
I have a feeling they want to list it as a national security problem for that exact reason, so they can tell the NIMBYs and treehuggers to STFU and actually get shit built in this country again. Like it or not there are facts one simply has to accept 1.- We HAVE to have ever growing amounts of power, without power our standard of living is gonna go right down the shitter, 2.- Ditto on fuel, this country is just too damned big for limited range electrics to do the job without having a trillion dollar overhaul of our road system to embed power transfer lines, and we just don't have the money to undertake that massive of an overhaul at this time, and 3.- We have to have food that everyone can afford, without food you have riots and upheaval.
So I'd say this problem is solvable if we can get the fucking leeches like Al Gore and the damned NIMBYs out of the way, because horseshit like carbon credits only torpedo what little manufacturing we have in the USA (since China and India have already stated they won't play our carbon three card monty) and like it or not when you build shit you are gonna be dealing with some kind of insect or animal, since there pretty much isn't a single inch on the planet that don't have bugs or critters. If the NIMBYs and treehuggers would have been around during the early twentieth century we wouldn't have a single power plant or dam or reactor in this country as they would have cockblocked. So while I may not agree that it should be labeled a national security matter, as that bring in eminent domain and a bunch of other nasty power grabs, i can at least see why they would want to take that route.
This is what I don't get, you look up the numbers and the chip is all but a corpse, my guess is they already had these designs done before itanic lost any chance of gaining real share and now they are hoping to simply carve a niche out with it, something like how POWER and SPARC have their niches.
But according to the Wikipedia they sell than 200k Itanium chips a year which while that makes it not a money loser for a giant like Intel you have to wonder if its worth keeping the lights on for such a small market share. All I can figure is they can keep this a step or two behind on the die shrinks and use them to fill capacity. After all in TFA they say its 32nm and isn't Intel about to release 20nm X86 chips? or did they get them out the door already?
Who knows, maybe there is some niche contractor that Intel wants to keep happy, look how they kept cranking the 486 chips out until just a couple of years ago, they get enough sales from the US military and defense contractors for the 486 (because its easy to harden against radiation) that even with such a tiny niche it was worth keeping it running just to keep them happy. last i heard they had a warehouse full of 386 and 486 where they had that last run cranked to the max so they'd have plenty of spares to keep the contractors happy for several more years.
Uhhh...where did I say ANYTHING about TCO? Linux is cheaper because you can run a bunch of copies on a single blade thanks to VMs and not have to worry about license issues, also you don't get reamed if you want to have a system with a lot of RAM and cores, whereas you obviously haven't looked at WinServer DataCenter Edition because Jesus tapdancing Christ are they making out like bandits on THAT one.
And frankly even on the server unless you can roll your own or deal with the constant issues frankly windows curbstomps Linux when it comes to drivers, which if you would think about it makes total sense. BTW they are NOT fantards, they are FOSSies because like Moonies they use FOSS as a religion. But back to drivers you have...oh lets say 200 kernel devs (number waaay too high i know, but benefit, doubt, yadda yadda) that have the years of experience and skills required to truly write and troubleshoot low level system drivers, you have a kernel that is changing every 6 months or so, and subsystems being yanked and tweaked left and right, oh and something on the order of 100,000 drivers...see the problem? Even if you locked those devs in a room filled with Bolivian marching powder the math just doesn't work, no way to get the kind of QA and QC that you can with the guys that actually built the device building the drivers, just no way.
But its NOT the license that fucks you, hell working retail selling machines all day i KNOW that all it takes is the devs fucking up a single driver to blow through any savings, which is why i won't ever carry Linux systems at the shop, its the license issues and the threat of BSA audits that makes Linux a better deal, at least in datacenters. When you figure in the cost of licenses PLUS the cost of CALs PLUS the assraping prices for the higher SKUs? it really adds up and more than makes up for the higher cost of a Linux admin over a Windows one. this is why I recommend WinServer for small companies and for large I tell them to run WinServer standard edition on a machine inside the firewall for GPO and AD support, and to run Linux on the web and data servers simply because the cost adds up and one BSA audit can cost serious money. Remember all it takes is a single disgruntled employee to drop a dime and suddenly you are ass deep in a time and money sucking audit. I've had friends that worked IT for companies that got a BSA audit, it pretty much grinds the place to a halt.
Sorry Crosshair but it doesn't matter WHAT his policies were if he came off as a spoiled rich douchebag, and that was Romney in a nutshell. his "I like to fire people" bit, which is the WRONG MOVE in a down economy when people are scared of losing their jobs, his spoiled brat stories, his kissing the neocon ass by insinuating he would be willing to go to war with Iran, not to mention his "I served my country by running a company" bit which took a big old piss right on the vets...he was a fucking clueless PHB.
At the end of the day you could have the best policies and ideas on the planet but if you come off as "President Beltzer" in that old Groove Tube sketch "The president came out today and gave the cameras the finger, followed by telling everyone to suck his dick" well you just aren't gonna win. No matter what he has done in office Obama has stayed pretty much center left when it came to his speeches and wasn't giving us Bushism the entire campaign, whereas every damned time Romney opened his mouth he gave the press and comedians a week's worth of cannon fodder. Oh and don't forget the tax returns, Romney had his own Whitewater before he had even been elected, yeah that was smart, run a tax dodger for the highest office.
But I don't think it had a damned thing to do with race, although of course the blacks voted nearly 100% Obama because of race, i think it was because Romney was just so damned unlikeable. Hell even the people I knew that were voting for him hated his fucking guts, they just hated Obama more, NOBODY liked him because he came off as this spoiled rotten rich clueless prick which...well that is pretty much what he is. I haven't looked at his specifics but I DID look at Ryan's and he sure as hell wasn't anywhere close to Obama, being another damned randian, and when Romney couldn't even win his home state and in fact left office with a less than 30% approval rating? Obviously there was some serious flaws in his policies or he wouldn't have been so damned disliked by his own state. Compare that to someone like Clinton who if he wanted the job could be guv in AR this very minute, he left with crazy high approval ratings and is still loved to this very day.
TLDR...You are a douchebag. Happy now?
Because they actually had real competition before? Before the flood there were FOUR hard drive manufacturers, Seagate, WD, Samsung, and Hitachi, now there is only WD and Seagate. Since there is only two they will simply watch and match each other's prices, nice way to have a duopoly.
But this is why competition is so important, just look at how quickly prices are falling and sizes growing in SSDs whereas with HDDs they seem to be stagnant, that's because as long as they simply match each other's prices they don't have to worry about price wars since its only the two of them.
Then the place is doomed, get out now. Because I've seen what happens when guys like Bob croak and its left in such a clusterfuck they end up having to close the doors because the amount of money required to bring in pros familiar with the old shit and transfer the data to something from this century will cost a fricking arm and a leg.
If you think this place does good and deserves to stay around you better fight, if not just walk away. Because old Bob WILL have cancer, or a heart attack, or something, and without being able to get to the data required for taxes and legal and all the other headaches they are gonna be royally fucked.
Riiight, because the courts NEVER make mistakes. How many have been gotten off death row due to DNA now? Something like 60+ right?
And I would remind you there is a DARK AND UGLY side nobody wants to talk about, and that is how many times wives in a bitter divorce will coerce or even bribe a child to say "daddy touched me" to fuck over their soon to be ex. I had a friend that this was done to, hell he even had the fricking cops come in ON HIS SIDE because they said the girl changed stories more than a half a dozen times and they even caught granny coaching the girl between interviews when they didn't know the cameras were still rolling, but because we had a fucking bitch from hell prosecutor that believed "If you have a penis you're a rapist" because she was raped in college she ignored even the police and went after my friend.
It ended up costing him his home, which had been in his family 4 generations, and while he was tied up fighting for his life the slut wife loaded up with a guy she met at work and moved out of the country so he'll never see his son again. The bitch stepdaughter who made the claim, which he had always treated like his own daughter but wouldn't let her go party and run wild like "mommy" would ended up knocked up by a dope dealer before the trial was even over and is now on welfare and living next to the prison so she can see her baby's daddy. Hell the court fees and lawyer fees left him so fucking broke he couldn't even afford to sue that bitch prosecutor!
So I'd be pretty fucking careful if I were you, all it takes is for your woman to decide to jam you up and to talk one of the kids into going along to plunge you into a nightmare that will cost you tons of money and possibly if you had your way, your very life.
How about we just cut the "M$" bullshit and speak like adults, how about that? That bit was fucking old when Win95 was new, its even lamer now. If you don't want to type the name or be snarky just use MSFT which is the stock ticker, it lets you be snarky without looking like some loser that figured out how to look up memes last week.
As for TFA....Is it possible that Ballmer is shorting the stock? or is he just THAT incompetent as a CEO? I know Forbes labeled him worst CEO but I didn't think he was also the most retarded, the kind of shit he's been pulling lately frankly reminds me of the PHB from Dilbert, in fact if you'd have told me about turning the desktop into a giant cell phone, pushing ads onto the paid version, and trying to force touch to be the primary interface when less than 4% of the desktops that ship NOW have touch, much less the hundreds of millions of laptops and desktops MSFT wants to upgrade? i would have honestly thought you were simply ripping off a Dilbert strip.
I mean Good God, look at the man's "accomplishments" during his tenure, rushing the X360 out with a 2 billion dollar flaw, spending 8.5 billion of Skype thus making sure the carriers treat WinPhone like an STD wrapped in AIDS infected needles, Zune, Kin, killing PlaysForSure and soon Windows Messenger, Windows 8 forcing desktops to have a cellphone UI...its a fucking trainwreck over there, he is making the reign of the Pepsi guy at Apple look good by comparison.
If the board doesn't get his fat sweaty clueless ass out of the big chair in the next year and a half i could see them becoming another RIM, a company only holding onto legacy markets while the rest of the world forgets they even existed. Hell the ONLY things that are saving his ass on the desktop is that Apple has no desire to own the low end and the Linux devs won't quit futzing with critical subsystems long enough for it to become stable, otherwise they might be in trouble even there.
I know I've been hearing from a LOT of customers lately just to make sure i could still get Win 7, nobody wants that damned Win 8 and after 2 billion in ads they sold just 4 million copies...that's $500 for every $40 sale. talk about a waste of advertising money! As a retailer I'm just glad Win 7 is good until 2020 and is solid as a rock, hopefully fatass will be "pursuing other interests" before Win 9 comes out so someone with a functioning brain can right the ship. as it is now its as retarded as someone slapping a $100K sticker on a Ford and thinking that means it can compete with Ferrari...nope, it just means you run off the market you had in pursuit of a market that doesn't want your product...brilliant move Ballmer, just fucking brilliant. I can see why they pay you the big bucks.
Actually as a retailer I consider it a public service to show what religious morons they are and what an absolute failure their OS is, so that others will see its a waste of time and completely pointless.
Year after year it gets worse, NOT better, because at the end of the day the FOSSie devs make damned sure to break every single thing that isn't "pure GPL"which since there isn't ANY hardware that is GPL on X86 all they do is fuck shit up for everybody.
But hopefully anybody that saw that post now knows how fucking clueless the FOSSies are, and how their way of doing things simply leads to failure. As far as they are concerned there is never a reason to compromise, even if the result is a completely broken system, that's just fine with them. meanwhile MSFT could put out Windows Goatse and not lose any users because Linux will ALWAYS be worse than anything MSFT puts out. Hell Vista is a dream compared to your average distro, at least the drivers that are installed at RTM will still work at EOL, something not a SINGLE Linux can boast.