What the fuck is a permedia? Never heard of it, obviously wasn't big because i was building shitloads of gaming rigs at the time and it was all Nvidia geforce 2s and Voodoo boxes, that's all anybody wanted. And GLIDE was a proprietary hacked all too hell bare metal subset of OpenGL but it had about as much to do with openGL proper as Android has to do with a Linux server, IE not much at all. And I apologize if I got the name of the corp in charge of OpenGL wrong but it was a decade and a half ago, the point still stands that from 97-01 OpenGL was equal and often AHEAD of GPU features while MSFT drug up the rear but around late 01-mid 02 (again that was a long fricking time ago and don't have time to look up the exact date) OpenGL fell behind and frankly they never caught back up again.
But don't take my word for it, look up "OpenGL VS DirectX" into any search engine and you'll be ass deep in seriously pissed off developers because OpenGL simply hadn't kept up with the times. The problem lies in the implantation, instead of simply putting out an up to date standard they basically allowed "forks" where Nvidia has some features done this way, AMD has some features done that way, its all nasty shims and crap because they are afraid of pissing off the CAD companies.
Frankly the only hope for OpenGL now is Valve and its steambox and personally? i hope they just take OpenGL away from Kronos, make their own fork and if the CAD guys don't like it fuck them. valve will be able to put one standard and with their pull with the hardware companies i have no doubt they'll listen to valve, after all they've doubled their profits 7 years in a row.
But I'm sorry but while openGL was okay back in the day the bare metal design 3DFX used frankly just smoked it, if you compare say OpenGL Quake with GLIDE Quake running on a native Voodoo? GLIDE simply performed better and looked better. It wasn't until geforce 4 that hardware became powerful enough it didn't really matter about the overhead MSFT had in their DirectX, before that 3DFX ruled the roost, it was just a better setup. Too bad 3DFX bet the entire farm on Dreamcast and then ended up holding their dicks, as who knows? We might have DirectX 11 and GLIDE 12 going head to head today.
What royally pisses me off is we have a fricking epidemic in this country of what i call "wolf packs" after the WWII submarine tactic of using strength of numbers as a force multiplier and its spreading like a cancer through the black inner city neighborhoods, yet thanks to the media sucking on the political correctness dick nobody will ask the simple logical question "Why?". Why is this happening, why is it nearly 100% a black inner city phenomena and what can we do to stop it?
Its not poverty, as the poorest state in the nation, WV, is also the least likely to suffer from these wolf packs, and videos taken of these wolf packs show black teens with $200 sneakers and smartphones, its not lack of jobs as other minorities have been hard hit as well and again not seeing this behavior with them, this seems to be limited to inner city black youth between the ages of 14-35. If anyone doubts me here is a partial list of these attacks and note that we had one not 3 days ago!
Personally I think its 50 years of a combination of welfare and a victim mentality pushed upon the black community by these so called "black leaders" like Sharpton who blame everything on somebody else. When you have songs celebrating "baby daddies" and leaders standing there with a straight face and claiming Ebonics is a legitimate language and you're racist if you don't accommodate it, and that getting an education is "acting white"? You are setting entire generations up to fail.
I have to believe that this thing is gonna end up exploding, simply because nobody has the balls to speak up and point out so many black youth are heading straight for a cliff. in the previous decades you could get away with being uneducated because there was always the factory jobs, but those are gone, yet you still have women having multiple kids with multiple deadbeats and refusing to even make their children go to school. They spend all day watching TV and wanting all the expensive trappings they see, yet the community turns on them if they attempt to get an education because they are being "Uncle Toms". I truly believe this violence is gonna end up exploding and its gonna get ugly REAL fast.
and honestly with the crime rate the way it is is anyone surprised more and more look on black teens with fear? Just look at the numbers for yourself, its truly fricking scary the levels of violence we are talking about, and for every Trayvon Martin there are a good 3 or more Wichita Massacres you never hear about thanks to our PC media.
In American English one generally doesn't capitalize more than the first letter of a proper noun, but really who cares? could you not understand the context? could you not simply copypasta "Liano" into Google and be taken to the correct page?
seriously dude, take a pill, smoke a joint, drink a beer, whatever. because I have heard of Grammar Nazis being anally retentive before but this is the first time I've ever sen one go to all the trouble to post not because of misspelling or sentence structure, but because he didn't like the fact that a single letter wasn't capitalized.
I just wonder how long its gonna take for the other major corps that are gonna get screwed by this to start bringing out THEIR lawyers and lobbyists and getting nasty. Because i've known a LOT of pirates and ya know what? Frankly they buy just as much if not more than they pirate, in fact many of them pirate because there is just more entertainment out there than their budgets will allow. How many pirates buy from Steam? How many have Hulu or Netflix? And of course the search engines will get dinged as well.
I've known guys that buy the good movies and just download the crappy ones, I've known guys that have dozens if not hundreds of games in Steam and still download new games so they can see if they suck before plunking the cash, and I've known a LOT that will just download TV shows rather than watch them OTA because they would rather watch when THEY want instead of revolving their evenings around somebody else's schedule.
But the dirty little secret the ISPs don't want you to know is they WANT this, not because they give a flying fuck about piracy, but because they are too fucking cheap to upgrade their lines and they oversell the living hell out of them. if they can find an excuse to get rid of anybody that actually uses what they pay for then they can "cherry pick" their customers like they do the neighborhoods. I know in my area neither cable nor DSL has moved a single inch in over a decade, despite their ever rising prices and the fact the town is a third larger than it was a decade ago, because the cost of running lines might cut into their profits ZOMFG!
So for all those that are saying "The ISPs won't want to lose customers" know now that you are DEAD WRONG, they would LOVE to get rid of anybody that does more than watch some crappy SD YouTube videos because that means they can oversell their badly degrading infrastructure that much more. its gonna be all those businesses that rely on the net, your webmail and search, your cloud services and video services, those are the ones that will end up being the ones that break out the lobbyists and actually get heard because they can't afford to watch their customers dry up and blow away in a dead economy.
Kinda sad that it will end up "Battle of the douchebag corporations" but nobody listens nor gives a flying fuck about the consumer anymore, after all you can just bribe the politicians and get declared "too big to fail" and take the money straight from their pockets by gunpoint, why listen to them?
I approve of this message 100%. I USED to be all for fair and just copyright, the kind that was actually written by the founding fathers...but that sure as fuck ain't what we got now. What we have is Jack Valenti's "forever minus a single day" copyrights and if that isn't enough the greedy pricks have even lobbyed and had some of the material that was public domain handed over to them! Meanwhile they fuck the artists as bad or worse than the consumer, see how Cheap Trick gets NOTHING from iTunes and Meatloaf had to spend over a decade in court and ended up filing for bankruptcy because they had the brass balls to claim that Bat Out Of Hell I, the album with the fricking Guiness record for longest stay in the top 200, never made a dime!
So fuck 'em, until We, The People have a say at the table again and copyrights are returned to a sane number instead of a fricking century and a half we should all just give them the bird. My ISP has made a good $7k+ off of me in the past 5 years and have only had to come out twice because of network issues, if they want me to give that money to someone else? I'll be more than happy to.
Well when they started calling programs "apps" instead of programs or software I consider that an Apple ripoff, as hardly anybody called them apps before Apple started doing that.
What seriously irks me though is how so many are just trying to ape Apple and Google instead of trying to innovate, its like the entire tech community saw how much money Apple was making and lost their damned minds. I mean we already HAVE an Apple and a Google, why would we want an ersatz copy? MSFT, Canonical, Mozilla, its like they all got together and said "ZOMFG Apple and Google are making crazy money! If we make a clone then we'll make crazy money too!" but in reality people will just pass the ersatz by, it just makes no damned sense to me.
This is why I'm still selling AMD units, although I've been sticking with the Phenom II and Liano chips. The problem is the Bulldozer chip is really designed for server loads, not desktop. You can find the AMD Phenom II X6 new for less than $120, the Deneb quads for a little less than $100, and the Athlon triples and quads for $60-$80, that's a damned good bang for the buck.
But I wouldn't count AMD out just yet, they did recently hire back the lead designer of the Athlon64 who went to Apple and designed the A6 so the guy knows his stuff. And their APU units are waaay better than anything Intel puts out thanks to the Radeon GPUs. This is one area I think they nailed it, as users get more and more multimedia heavy having a "good enough" CPU with an excellent GPU makes a lot of sense, I can watch videos for nearly 5 hours on my E350 netbook and that is with a year old battery.
So I do hope that more people will put their money where their mouth is and buy AMD, they still have some really good chips at crazy cheap prices. I paid just $110 for my 1035T and when combined with my HD4850 it plays all the latest games and just chews through video transcodes and other multithreaded programs. Oh and you can get the Liano quad laptops starting at just $400 new from tiger, I've picked up a couple of those for customers and they are quite nice, the build quality is good, doesn't get too hot, and gets a hair over 4 hours on the battery which really isn't bad for 4 cores and a midrange GPU. And if the rumors are true and they can get the Bobcat quads under 25w I have NO doubt those will sell. I've already switched offices that were hanging onto old P4s and Pentium Ds for E350s and the lower cost of electricity and cooling make them practically pay for themselves, i can only imagine how many SMBs would like desktops that use so little power yet run all their programs with decent speed.
As for ARM taking over from X86? That is like saying mopeds are gonna replace pickup trucks, they are simply two different use cases. With ARM most folks toss the device every couple of years or when their contract is up, whichever comes first, whereas with X86 frankly the PCs I was selling on the low end 5 years ago would be more than enough for most people. With ARM you are seeing an early 00s style MHz race while on X86 frankly the Phenom I X3s and X4s I was selling 4 years ago give you cycles to spare, its really no comparison.
There have been at least 2 witnesses come forward and said they saw martin bashing Zimmerman's head against the ground, and the video the police took clearly shows blood and torn skin on the BACK of Zimmerman's head. Add to this it was over 85 degrees that night yet he was bundled up in a black hoodie and the reason he was in FLA in the first place was getting kicked out of his former school for theft?
I'm sorry but there is plenty of doubt in this case. mark my words after seeing all the evidence the jury will acquit, which will then be followed by "flash mobs" screaming "justice for Trayvon" while they go on a looting and violence spree, just like they did the day of the funeral. How justice and looting go together damned if I know, but that's what will happen.
AVG has gotten kinda bloated lately and last i checked doesn't support sandboxing of programs, therefor i would go with Comodo Internet Security and then have either Paragon Drive Image or Comodo Time Machine make a locked image of a known good state, that way if the kid does manage to break anything he's still good.
The problem with whitelisting is there have been plenty of legit websites get hit with zero day malware so simply whitelisting really isn't 100% effective. Don't get me wrong its better than just letting him loose and with a decent AV and a disc image would make it pretty much malware proof, but by itself its just not enough.
Drinkypoo get a copy of Win 7 Home, makes a hell of a lot better gaming OS. If you don't care for the UI changes XP X64 is still supported and pretty nice, in fact I avoided XP completely by going from 2K to XP X64 (which is just 2K3 workstation) but for games Win 7 rocks HARD. Better memory management, superfetch and readyboost, DX 11, its just a better choice for gaming.
Although why you'd want to even attempt to run games in a VM is beyond me...is your PC really THAT slow? I have an AMD 1035T with 8Gb of RAM and an HD4850 (great card BTW) and I can boot from Win 7 to Win XP if I need to in less time than it takes for me to waltz over to the fridge and get me a coke. BTW if you insist on using XP 32 look into RAMDisks. My Asrock came with XFast RAMDisk and there are several free and pay RAMDisks out there that will let you use all that RAM in XP 32.
Although frankly now that I've finally switched to Audacity off my old Cubase I really don't miss XP anymore, its just not a great MSFT release like 2K,XP X64, and Win 7 X64. Hell look around for either the OEM or the family pack, both can be found cheap enough and will work great for games. BTW if you want a copy for your VM to laugh at Win 8 X64 is just $40 and it'll have the latest DirectX and support for 192Gb of RAM, and you can always use Start8 to kill that fugly metro shit. Now if you'll excuse me I feel like a little Torchlight 2 in Steam...happy gaming!
Uhhh...GLIDE stomped the living shit out of OpenGL and as far as I know there wasn't any "MiniGL" at the time, because even at that point in the game Kronos was dropping the ball when it came to OpenGL by focusing more on CAD than gaming. This is the same problem Linux has, where the kernel devs bend over backwards to rush out a fix for some tiny server issue while the desktop suffers from shittier and shittier performance, its kissing the ass too much of the ones cutting the checks.
But I had both the Voodoo 2 and the Geforce 2 and frankly GLIDE just bitchslapped anything that OpenGL had put out, anything that MSFT put out as well. It wasn't until the Geforce 4 (and Radeon equivalent but I was an Nvidia man at the time) and 3DFX betting the farm on Dreamcast and losing that DirectX really took the top spot and again it was NOT because MSFT did it so much better, it was that Kronos did OpenGL that much worse.
Hell you look at the history of MSFT its one case after another of competition that royally fucked up rather than MSFT truly kicking it with a winning hand, from OpenGL to WordPefect coming out with a bad DOS port in 97 instead of building a native Windows program to Netscape putting out the utterly broken Netscape 4 which made IE 4 look like a slice of heaven by comparison. Time after time it wasn't MSFT doing it better, it was everybody else doing it worse, only now under Ballmer they have a fat moron for a "leader" that doesn't even have the sense to capitalize when others fuck up.
Fuck put ME in charge of MSFT and I'd capitalize the fuck out of it and I'd do a Steve Jobs on the company. there are soooo many areas where the competition is royally fucking up but Ballmer can only dream of being an ersatz Apple rather than focus on the task at hand and do his damned job!
Except they didn't name the iPad a Mac tablet now did they? I've been saying for months this would happen, when you have consumers that don't know ARM from leg and retail employees that are glorified "card readers" like on the NewEgg commercial you have a perfect storm of fail for Windows 8 all around. Now once the word gets out that SOME Windows 8 will run their stuff and SOME Windows 8 won't and they can't tell by looking, how many will just avoid it altogether?
mark my words Win 7 is the new XP, Win 8 the new Vista, and WinRT the new WinPhone 7, Win 8 devices end up joining the Touchpad and playbook on Woot! and the web will be filled with people saying how much you should avoid Win 8. Kinda telling how for every. single. new. version. of Windows released there were transformation packs to bring the look and feel to previous users, now there is a pack to bring the Win 7 look and feel to Win 8.
Well to be fair they have also been releasing a lot of the "newer" games in the Ubisoft catalog, such as Far Cry 1 & 2 and Assassins Creed. These are of course certainly not the latest and greatest but certainly newer than the games they usually carry.
Question: As someone who hasn't ever played the Marathon series what is good about it, other than it being made by the guys that made Halo? Looking at the screenshots other than the Blake Stone style bright colors it doesn't look any better than DOOM, so what is the appeal?
Don't get me wrong I love a good shooter even with bad graphics, Redneck Rampage is one of my favs (bought from GOG, check it out if you haven't gotten it already) but that is because it mixes humor, a great rockabilly soundtrack and TONS of cool secrets and crazy weapons to rise above being just another DOOM clone. I mean who can't love shooting a titty gun while drinking beer for health and listening to Mojo Nixon while you blast?
But what sets the Marathon series apart from the bazillion and one DOOM clones we had in that era. Better level design? Weapons? Story? i honestly want to know as I have more games than i have time to play now but I'll always enjoy a well made shooter.
There is a reason for that, Win 3.x used WinG for graphics and it was VERY primitive and crash prone, DirectX came out with Win95 and was head and shoulders better than WinG.
Its just a shame that OpenGL dropped the ball and cared more about CAD compatibility and letting the GPU manufacturers use "shims" than they did about actually competing with DirectX because between 98-02 there was a real shot at taking gaming from DirectX and OpenGL being cross platform was really nice. Now between Windows and the X360 many games are built for DirectX first and OpenGL later if at all, just a damned shame.
The problem is we really need a DOSBox for Win9X because frankly there are a LOT of games that won't run in Windows OR Linux anymore from that era. For example GOG sells i76 but frankly its hit or miss, more miss, because the game used a hack that used the CPU timer as an event timer in game and it just doesn't know what to make of anything newer than a non HT P4. I've personally tried all the patches, MoSlo, there are simply several in game events that are impossible to get past, the same holds true for MechWarrior 3 (which is arguably one of the best of the series) where enemy tanks will "bounce" hundreds of feet in the air and make it impossible to win, and don't even get me started on all the hacks Sony used on FF VII.
So what we need is an emulator that will give us an emulation of what would be considered close to a perfect Win9X box, let's say a P3 1GHz with 384Mb of RAM and a choice of a Geforce 4 Ti or a Voodoo 2 along with a Soundblaster. This would give everyone the perfect system to run Win9X games on and with our systems being so powerful I don't see why specs that old couldn't be successfully emulated. Otherwise many of those cool games of the Win9X era will be lost forever because I can tell you its getting harder and harder to find decent systems from that era thanks to the cheap caps they used back then. its a damned shame that you can play the latest games, and the games from the DOS era, but that funky 16/32bit hybrid makes it a living hell trying to get many games from that era to run smoothly.
Well considering most I have seen simply put their own "spin" on the AP wire stories? Good riddance. If their content is worth anything let them put it behind a paywall and if enough people buy? Then and ONLY then should Google talk to them about paying for access.
Until then its just another failing business that is trying to get paid for doing shoddy substandard work. I bet if you were to remove the wire stories from all these "newspapers" you wouldn't have 3 pages worth of "content" left and that would just be press releases and obituaries.
Oh and OT but WTF with the/. logo in the corner? Seriously I thought Bing was irritating with those animated home pages but that thing flashing in the corner is even more irritating, at least Bing picks a pretty wildlife shot with little "did you know?" blurbs, this is like an old neon sign just flashing out the corner of your eye constantly, it sucks.
This is true and there is even a list of both those that work in DOSBox on Linux and those that work with WINE so I really don't see what the fuss is about. After all its not like you have to worry about DRM and with the games being...well old, most have been tested and you can always look at the list.
Although frankly this is what dual booting is made for, even the most rabid Linux users I've talked to admit Windows makes a good gaming OS so why not just keep the install that came with the OEM and have a dual boot? Seems like a no brainer to me.
Not to mention you can't even do anything to "unbrick" when there is no net, you are just SOL. And who thought $250 was a good price? They sell the new Atom dual core netbooks for that at Walmart and those have a fully functional OS and can have the OS changed for anything you want.
I honestly thought Google was gonna slaughter when I heard about Chrome OS, I thought they'd price it in the $100 range and just wipe out the low end. instead they first tried selling it for more than a quad AMD laptop! and now they are pricing it even with the Atom which gives you more hard drive space,more features, and most importantly can run anything you want off and online. I just wonder how long it will be before these things end up on Woot! because that price has fail written all over it.
Look up the E350 barebones friend, don't know if its the same there but here those sell for around $130 USD with a nice HTPC style case and PSU. I've built a couple of them for use as HTPCs and office boxes and the owners are quite happy, you are talking a max of less than 20w under load, full 1080P over HDMI, hell they even have a PCIe slot in case you want to upgrade the graphics later. Its pretty nice as an HTPC but just remember to get the fastest RAM the board supports as it has shared memory so the RAM speed counts. i changed the 2Gb of 1066 for 2 4Gb sticks of 1333 in my EEE and I could tell a pretty big difference, games that would be laggy before play nice now.
But one thing we seem to agree on is the price, it just makes NO sense! Why would anyone pay the same price as a netbook for something that isn't as good? When they first announced Chrome OS I thought it would be a game changer, I thought they'd sell them in the $100-$150 range and just take over the low end market, but the price is simply too high, you'd be better off with a netbook or a Kindle as with both of those they are at least useful offline.
Anyway good luck on your HTPC, I can say they are pretty sweet for the task and if you don't want to pay for Windows OpenELEC has a build just for the AMD Fusion chips, its got the XBMC UI and is actually pretty nice.
One crucial difference, because Android is made by Google Chrome has mobile share while Firefox? Doesn't even show up on most charts.
Just one more example of how Mozilla doesn't seem to get the market. if they released a fast and light version of FF for 2.2, which is the version most of the low end has settled on and just FYI but 2.2 devices were selling last numbers I saw something like 18 to 1 compared to ICS, well they would have a captive audience and could have gained some serious share. Instead all they do is copy Chrome right down to the needing a later version thus insuring they don't gain squat, way to go Moz!
Of course they aren't the only one, MSFT doesn't have shit in the way of mobile browser share either yet doesn't have enough sense to release a stripped down IE for Android, instead acting like its 2002 and they can just muscle their way into a market...sigh, its like the entire tech sector took one look at Apple and Google and the image literally knocked the brains right out of 'em, now they all run around like chickens with the head cut off squawking "We gotta copy them, we gotta copy them!" without bothering to even look at the landscape and notice that everyone that tried being an ersatz has failed miserably.
This is what is sad to me, its nothing but one company after another trying to force us into their own version of Apple's little walled garden...why? Do you HONESTLY think you are gonna take shit away from Apple when it comes to share? Here's a hint, Apple has a rabid fanbase that wait outside the Apple store like waiting for concert tickets when they release a new model...you ain't gonna compete with that.
So just stop it Mozilla, its getting embarrassing. First with the aping Chrome, then with the aping Apple, we already have a Chrome and an Apple, we do NOT need an ersatz. But hey, if that makes ya happy join MSFT and Canonical on the fail train, all aboard! Oh and if an Ubuntu appstore makes you want to slit your wrists, better grab the razor because an appstore is obvious what they are going for with software center. So all aboard the fail train, where we rip off one successful company with a legion of ersatz nobody wants!
But you just proved my point, even you admit you'd be more likely to get a C-60 Bobcat and have offline and online from one unit, instead of being stuck with a thin client in a laptop form factor.
BTW I have one of the 12 inch AMD E-350 EEE netbooks and I have to say i just love the thing. i get nearly 6 hours on a battery, it only weighs 2.5 pounds, nice clear screen, and does 1080p over HDMI so I can just plug it into a TV and use it for an HTPC, its nice.
Other than schools though I just don't see the selling point of Chromebooks, I mean how many are 100% within WiFi range 24/7/365? With my netbook if I have to set while my mom is in the doctor's office and there is no net, no problem, I even took mine camping so I could have my tunes and just charged it off the 12v adapter. With the ChomeBook though if I didn't have a net connection I'd be SOL and paying $250 for a device that limited when i could buy a new Atom dual for that is just nuts.
BTW I don't know if you are in the USA or not but if you are and want one of those netbooks cheap just keep an eye on this site because they get different models every day and you can get some crazy deals. I had a couple of friends buy from there, one got a dual core Atom Dell mini from there for $120 and it was like new, another waited and got an AMD C-60 Acer for $149 which other than a scratch on the bottom of the thing you couldn't tell wasn't new.
Yep betting on the cloud is the WRONG move ATM, not with the ISPs and carriers playing "let's fuck the consumer!" with price hikes and diminishing caps. I think this will also bite Win 8 in the ass, MSFT built it around phoning home and social media and both of which won't work without bandwidth.
So with the economy in the crapper and network prices going nowhere but up Google should be worried, because when every ad costs you you'll be more likely to block and Chrome OS? A non starter I'm betting.
Ugh don't remind me. You have NO idea how many times I've seen customers use the fricking search bar to get to Google to search for something even when they were in Yahoo mail with a search box in front of them and when i point out they had not one but TWO different search boxes, the title bar itself and the yahoo search box they always go "You can just type in what you want and find it? Without going to Google first?"...ugh. I think Google is responsible for removing common sense when it comes to browsers and search as now nobody seems to think they can search unless they are the Google page.
And I have to agree, isn't this what robots.txt and paywalls are for? If they don't want to be in the search engine THEN DON'T, it couldn't be simpler. but no, this is classic corporate thinking, they want their benefits of being in the search AND getting a check like it was paywalled...must be nice to own your own government like that.
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What the fuck is a permedia? Never heard of it, obviously wasn't big because i was building shitloads of gaming rigs at the time and it was all Nvidia geforce 2s and Voodoo boxes, that's all anybody wanted. And GLIDE was a proprietary hacked all too hell bare metal subset of OpenGL but it had about as much to do with openGL proper as Android has to do with a Linux server, IE not much at all. And I apologize if I got the name of the corp in charge of OpenGL wrong but it was a decade and a half ago, the point still stands that from 97-01 OpenGL was equal and often AHEAD of GPU features while MSFT drug up the rear but around late 01-mid 02 (again that was a long fricking time ago and don't have time to look up the exact date) OpenGL fell behind and frankly they never caught back up again.
But don't take my word for it, look up "OpenGL VS DirectX" into any search engine and you'll be ass deep in seriously pissed off developers because OpenGL simply hadn't kept up with the times. The problem lies in the implantation, instead of simply putting out an up to date standard they basically allowed "forks" where Nvidia has some features done this way, AMD has some features done that way, its all nasty shims and crap because they are afraid of pissing off the CAD companies.
Frankly the only hope for OpenGL now is Valve and its steambox and personally? i hope they just take OpenGL away from Kronos, make their own fork and if the CAD guys don't like it fuck them. valve will be able to put one standard and with their pull with the hardware companies i have no doubt they'll listen to valve, after all they've doubled their profits 7 years in a row.
But I'm sorry but while openGL was okay back in the day the bare metal design 3DFX used frankly just smoked it, if you compare say OpenGL Quake with GLIDE Quake running on a native Voodoo? GLIDE simply performed better and looked better. It wasn't until geforce 4 that hardware became powerful enough it didn't really matter about the overhead MSFT had in their DirectX, before that 3DFX ruled the roost, it was just a better setup. Too bad 3DFX bet the entire farm on Dreamcast and then ended up holding their dicks, as who knows? We might have DirectX 11 and GLIDE 12 going head to head today.
What royally pisses me off is we have a fricking epidemic in this country of what i call "wolf packs" after the WWII submarine tactic of using strength of numbers as a force multiplier and its spreading like a cancer through the black inner city neighborhoods, yet thanks to the media sucking on the political correctness dick nobody will ask the simple logical question "Why?". Why is this happening, why is it nearly 100% a black inner city phenomena and what can we do to stop it?
Its not poverty, as the poorest state in the nation, WV, is also the least likely to suffer from these wolf packs, and videos taken of these wolf packs show black teens with $200 sneakers and smartphones, its not lack of jobs as other minorities have been hard hit as well and again not seeing this behavior with them, this seems to be limited to inner city black youth between the ages of 14-35. If anyone doubts me here is a partial list of these attacks and note that we had one not 3 days ago!
Personally I think its 50 years of a combination of welfare and a victim mentality pushed upon the black community by these so called "black leaders" like Sharpton who blame everything on somebody else. When you have songs celebrating "baby daddies" and leaders standing there with a straight face and claiming Ebonics is a legitimate language and you're racist if you don't accommodate it, and that getting an education is "acting white"? You are setting entire generations up to fail.
I have to believe that this thing is gonna end up exploding, simply because nobody has the balls to speak up and point out so many black youth are heading straight for a cliff. in the previous decades you could get away with being uneducated because there was always the factory jobs, but those are gone, yet you still have women having multiple kids with multiple deadbeats and refusing to even make their children go to school. They spend all day watching TV and wanting all the expensive trappings they see, yet the community turns on them if they attempt to get an education because they are being "Uncle Toms". I truly believe this violence is gonna end up exploding and its gonna get ugly REAL fast.
and honestly with the crime rate the way it is is anyone surprised more and more look on black teens with fear? Just look at the numbers for yourself, its truly fricking scary the levels of violence we are talking about, and for every Trayvon Martin there are a good 3 or more Wichita Massacres you never hear about thanks to our PC media.
In American English one generally doesn't capitalize more than the first letter of a proper noun, but really who cares? could you not understand the context? could you not simply copypasta "Liano" into Google and be taken to the correct page?
seriously dude, take a pill, smoke a joint, drink a beer, whatever. because I have heard of Grammar Nazis being anally retentive before but this is the first time I've ever sen one go to all the trouble to post not because of misspelling or sentence structure, but because he didn't like the fact that a single letter wasn't capitalized.
I just wonder how long its gonna take for the other major corps that are gonna get screwed by this to start bringing out THEIR lawyers and lobbyists and getting nasty. Because i've known a LOT of pirates and ya know what? Frankly they buy just as much if not more than they pirate, in fact many of them pirate because there is just more entertainment out there than their budgets will allow. How many pirates buy from Steam? How many have Hulu or Netflix? And of course the search engines will get dinged as well.
I've known guys that buy the good movies and just download the crappy ones, I've known guys that have dozens if not hundreds of games in Steam and still download new games so they can see if they suck before plunking the cash, and I've known a LOT that will just download TV shows rather than watch them OTA because they would rather watch when THEY want instead of revolving their evenings around somebody else's schedule.
But the dirty little secret the ISPs don't want you to know is they WANT this, not because they give a flying fuck about piracy, but because they are too fucking cheap to upgrade their lines and they oversell the living hell out of them. if they can find an excuse to get rid of anybody that actually uses what they pay for then they can "cherry pick" their customers like they do the neighborhoods. I know in my area neither cable nor DSL has moved a single inch in over a decade, despite their ever rising prices and the fact the town is a third larger than it was a decade ago, because the cost of running lines might cut into their profits ZOMFG!
So for all those that are saying "The ISPs won't want to lose customers" know now that you are DEAD WRONG, they would LOVE to get rid of anybody that does more than watch some crappy SD YouTube videos because that means they can oversell their badly degrading infrastructure that much more. its gonna be all those businesses that rely on the net, your webmail and search, your cloud services and video services, those are the ones that will end up being the ones that break out the lobbyists and actually get heard because they can't afford to watch their customers dry up and blow away in a dead economy.
Kinda sad that it will end up "Battle of the douchebag corporations" but nobody listens nor gives a flying fuck about the consumer anymore, after all you can just bribe the politicians and get declared "too big to fail" and take the money straight from their pockets by gunpoint, why listen to them?
I approve of this message 100%. I USED to be all for fair and just copyright, the kind that was actually written by the founding fathers...but that sure as fuck ain't what we got now. What we have is Jack Valenti's "forever minus a single day" copyrights and if that isn't enough the greedy pricks have even lobbyed and had some of the material that was public domain handed over to them! Meanwhile they fuck the artists as bad or worse than the consumer, see how Cheap Trick gets NOTHING from iTunes and Meatloaf had to spend over a decade in court and ended up filing for bankruptcy because they had the brass balls to claim that Bat Out Of Hell I, the album with the fricking Guiness record for longest stay in the top 200, never made a dime!
So fuck 'em, until We, The People have a say at the table again and copyrights are returned to a sane number instead of a fricking century and a half we should all just give them the bird. My ISP has made a good $7k+ off of me in the past 5 years and have only had to come out twice because of network issues, if they want me to give that money to someone else? I'll be more than happy to.
Well when they started calling programs "apps" instead of programs or software I consider that an Apple ripoff, as hardly anybody called them apps before Apple started doing that.
What seriously irks me though is how so many are just trying to ape Apple and Google instead of trying to innovate, its like the entire tech community saw how much money Apple was making and lost their damned minds. I mean we already HAVE an Apple and a Google, why would we want an ersatz copy? MSFT, Canonical, Mozilla, its like they all got together and said "ZOMFG Apple and Google are making crazy money! If we make a clone then we'll make crazy money too!" but in reality people will just pass the ersatz by, it just makes no damned sense to me.
This is why I'm still selling AMD units, although I've been sticking with the Phenom II and Liano chips. The problem is the Bulldozer chip is really designed for server loads, not desktop. You can find the AMD Phenom II X6 new for less than $120, the Deneb quads for a little less than $100, and the Athlon triples and quads for $60-$80, that's a damned good bang for the buck.
But I wouldn't count AMD out just yet, they did recently hire back the lead designer of the Athlon64 who went to Apple and designed the A6 so the guy knows his stuff. And their APU units are waaay better than anything Intel puts out thanks to the Radeon GPUs. This is one area I think they nailed it, as users get more and more multimedia heavy having a "good enough" CPU with an excellent GPU makes a lot of sense, I can watch videos for nearly 5 hours on my E350 netbook and that is with a year old battery.
So I do hope that more people will put their money where their mouth is and buy AMD, they still have some really good chips at crazy cheap prices. I paid just $110 for my 1035T and when combined with my HD4850 it plays all the latest games and just chews through video transcodes and other multithreaded programs. Oh and you can get the Liano quad laptops starting at just $400 new from tiger, I've picked up a couple of those for customers and they are quite nice, the build quality is good, doesn't get too hot, and gets a hair over 4 hours on the battery which really isn't bad for 4 cores and a midrange GPU. And if the rumors are true and they can get the Bobcat quads under 25w I have NO doubt those will sell. I've already switched offices that were hanging onto old P4s and Pentium Ds for E350s and the lower cost of electricity and cooling make them practically pay for themselves, i can only imagine how many SMBs would like desktops that use so little power yet run all their programs with decent speed.
As for ARM taking over from X86? That is like saying mopeds are gonna replace pickup trucks, they are simply two different use cases. With ARM most folks toss the device every couple of years or when their contract is up, whichever comes first, whereas with X86 frankly the PCs I was selling on the low end 5 years ago would be more than enough for most people. With ARM you are seeing an early 00s style MHz race while on X86 frankly the Phenom I X3s and X4s I was selling 4 years ago give you cycles to spare, its really no comparison.
There have been at least 2 witnesses come forward and said they saw martin bashing Zimmerman's head against the ground, and the video the police took clearly shows blood and torn skin on the BACK of Zimmerman's head. Add to this it was over 85 degrees that night yet he was bundled up in a black hoodie and the reason he was in FLA in the first place was getting kicked out of his former school for theft?
I'm sorry but there is plenty of doubt in this case. mark my words after seeing all the evidence the jury will acquit, which will then be followed by "flash mobs" screaming "justice for Trayvon" while they go on a looting and violence spree, just like they did the day of the funeral. How justice and looting go together damned if I know, but that's what will happen.
AVG has gotten kinda bloated lately and last i checked doesn't support sandboxing of programs, therefor i would go with Comodo Internet Security and then have either Paragon Drive Image or Comodo Time Machine make a locked image of a known good state, that way if the kid does manage to break anything he's still good.
The problem with whitelisting is there have been plenty of legit websites get hit with zero day malware so simply whitelisting really isn't 100% effective. Don't get me wrong its better than just letting him loose and with a decent AV and a disc image would make it pretty much malware proof, but by itself its just not enough.
Drinkypoo get a copy of Win 7 Home, makes a hell of a lot better gaming OS. If you don't care for the UI changes XP X64 is still supported and pretty nice, in fact I avoided XP completely by going from 2K to XP X64 (which is just 2K3 workstation) but for games Win 7 rocks HARD. Better memory management, superfetch and readyboost, DX 11, its just a better choice for gaming.
Although why you'd want to even attempt to run games in a VM is beyond me...is your PC really THAT slow? I have an AMD 1035T with 8Gb of RAM and an HD4850 (great card BTW) and I can boot from Win 7 to Win XP if I need to in less time than it takes for me to waltz over to the fridge and get me a coke. BTW if you insist on using XP 32 look into RAMDisks. My Asrock came with XFast RAMDisk and there are several free and pay RAMDisks out there that will let you use all that RAM in XP 32.
Although frankly now that I've finally switched to Audacity off my old Cubase I really don't miss XP anymore, its just not a great MSFT release like 2K,XP X64, and Win 7 X64. Hell look around for either the OEM or the family pack, both can be found cheap enough and will work great for games. BTW if you want a copy for your VM to laugh at Win 8 X64 is just $40 and it'll have the latest DirectX and support for 192Gb of RAM, and you can always use Start8 to kill that fugly metro shit. Now if you'll excuse me I feel like a little Torchlight 2 in Steam...happy gaming!
Uhhh...GLIDE stomped the living shit out of OpenGL and as far as I know there wasn't any "MiniGL" at the time, because even at that point in the game Kronos was dropping the ball when it came to OpenGL by focusing more on CAD than gaming. This is the same problem Linux has, where the kernel devs bend over backwards to rush out a fix for some tiny server issue while the desktop suffers from shittier and shittier performance, its kissing the ass too much of the ones cutting the checks.
But I had both the Voodoo 2 and the Geforce 2 and frankly GLIDE just bitchslapped anything that OpenGL had put out, anything that MSFT put out as well. It wasn't until the Geforce 4 (and Radeon equivalent but I was an Nvidia man at the time) and 3DFX betting the farm on Dreamcast and losing that DirectX really took the top spot and again it was NOT because MSFT did it so much better, it was that Kronos did OpenGL that much worse.
Hell you look at the history of MSFT its one case after another of competition that royally fucked up rather than MSFT truly kicking it with a winning hand, from OpenGL to WordPefect coming out with a bad DOS port in 97 instead of building a native Windows program to Netscape putting out the utterly broken Netscape 4 which made IE 4 look like a slice of heaven by comparison. Time after time it wasn't MSFT doing it better, it was everybody else doing it worse, only now under Ballmer they have a fat moron for a "leader" that doesn't even have the sense to capitalize when others fuck up.
Fuck put ME in charge of MSFT and I'd capitalize the fuck out of it and I'd do a Steve Jobs on the company. there are soooo many areas where the competition is royally fucking up but Ballmer can only dream of being an ersatz Apple rather than focus on the task at hand and do his damned job!
Except they didn't name the iPad a Mac tablet now did they? I've been saying for months this would happen, when you have consumers that don't know ARM from leg and retail employees that are glorified "card readers" like on the NewEgg commercial you have a perfect storm of fail for Windows 8 all around. Now once the word gets out that SOME Windows 8 will run their stuff and SOME Windows 8 won't and they can't tell by looking, how many will just avoid it altogether?
mark my words Win 7 is the new XP, Win 8 the new Vista, and WinRT the new WinPhone 7, Win 8 devices end up joining the Touchpad and playbook on Woot! and the web will be filled with people saying how much you should avoid Win 8. Kinda telling how for every. single. new. version. of Windows released there were transformation packs to bring the look and feel to previous users, now there is a pack to bring the Win 7 look and feel to Win 8.
Well to be fair they have also been releasing a lot of the "newer" games in the Ubisoft catalog, such as Far Cry 1 & 2 and Assassins Creed. These are of course certainly not the latest and greatest but certainly newer than the games they usually carry.
Question: As someone who hasn't ever played the Marathon series what is good about it, other than it being made by the guys that made Halo? Looking at the screenshots other than the Blake Stone style bright colors it doesn't look any better than DOOM, so what is the appeal?
Don't get me wrong I love a good shooter even with bad graphics, Redneck Rampage is one of my favs (bought from GOG, check it out if you haven't gotten it already) but that is because it mixes humor, a great rockabilly soundtrack and TONS of cool secrets and crazy weapons to rise above being just another DOOM clone. I mean who can't love shooting a titty gun while drinking beer for health and listening to Mojo Nixon while you blast?
But what sets the Marathon series apart from the bazillion and one DOOM clones we had in that era. Better level design? Weapons? Story? i honestly want to know as I have more games than i have time to play now but I'll always enjoy a well made shooter.
There is a reason for that, Win 3.x used WinG for graphics and it was VERY primitive and crash prone, DirectX came out with Win95 and was head and shoulders better than WinG.
Its just a shame that OpenGL dropped the ball and cared more about CAD compatibility and letting the GPU manufacturers use "shims" than they did about actually competing with DirectX because between 98-02 there was a real shot at taking gaming from DirectX and OpenGL being cross platform was really nice. Now between Windows and the X360 many games are built for DirectX first and OpenGL later if at all, just a damned shame.
The problem is we really need a DOSBox for Win9X because frankly there are a LOT of games that won't run in Windows OR Linux anymore from that era. For example GOG sells i76 but frankly its hit or miss, more miss, because the game used a hack that used the CPU timer as an event timer in game and it just doesn't know what to make of anything newer than a non HT P4. I've personally tried all the patches, MoSlo, there are simply several in game events that are impossible to get past, the same holds true for MechWarrior 3 (which is arguably one of the best of the series) where enemy tanks will "bounce" hundreds of feet in the air and make it impossible to win, and don't even get me started on all the hacks Sony used on FF VII.
So what we need is an emulator that will give us an emulation of what would be considered close to a perfect Win9X box, let's say a P3 1GHz with 384Mb of RAM and a choice of a Geforce 4 Ti or a Voodoo 2 along with a Soundblaster. This would give everyone the perfect system to run Win9X games on and with our systems being so powerful I don't see why specs that old couldn't be successfully emulated. Otherwise many of those cool games of the Win9X era will be lost forever because I can tell you its getting harder and harder to find decent systems from that era thanks to the cheap caps they used back then. its a damned shame that you can play the latest games, and the games from the DOS era, but that funky 16/32bit hybrid makes it a living hell trying to get many games from that era to run smoothly.
Well considering most I have seen simply put their own "spin" on the AP wire stories? Good riddance. If their content is worth anything let them put it behind a paywall and if enough people buy? Then and ONLY then should Google talk to them about paying for access.
Until then its just another failing business that is trying to get paid for doing shoddy substandard work. I bet if you were to remove the wire stories from all these "newspapers" you wouldn't have 3 pages worth of "content" left and that would just be press releases and obituaries.
Oh and OT but WTF with the /. logo in the corner? Seriously I thought Bing was irritating with those animated home pages but that thing flashing in the corner is even more irritating, at least Bing picks a pretty wildlife shot with little "did you know?" blurbs, this is like an old neon sign just flashing out the corner of your eye constantly, it sucks.
This is true and there is even a list of both those that work in DOSBox on Linux and those that work with WINE so I really don't see what the fuss is about. After all its not like you have to worry about DRM and with the games being...well old, most have been tested and you can always look at the list.
Although frankly this is what dual booting is made for, even the most rabid Linux users I've talked to admit Windows makes a good gaming OS so why not just keep the install that came with the OEM and have a dual boot? Seems like a no brainer to me.
Not to mention you can't even do anything to "unbrick" when there is no net, you are just SOL. And who thought $250 was a good price? They sell the new Atom dual core netbooks for that at Walmart and those have a fully functional OS and can have the OS changed for anything you want.
I honestly thought Google was gonna slaughter when I heard about Chrome OS, I thought they'd price it in the $100 range and just wipe out the low end. instead they first tried selling it for more than a quad AMD laptop! and now they are pricing it even with the Atom which gives you more hard drive space,more features, and most importantly can run anything you want off and online. I just wonder how long it will be before these things end up on Woot! because that price has fail written all over it.
Look up the E350 barebones friend, don't know if its the same there but here those sell for around $130 USD with a nice HTPC style case and PSU. I've built a couple of them for use as HTPCs and office boxes and the owners are quite happy, you are talking a max of less than 20w under load, full 1080P over HDMI, hell they even have a PCIe slot in case you want to upgrade the graphics later. Its pretty nice as an HTPC but just remember to get the fastest RAM the board supports as it has shared memory so the RAM speed counts. i changed the 2Gb of 1066 for 2 4Gb sticks of 1333 in my EEE and I could tell a pretty big difference, games that would be laggy before play nice now.
But one thing we seem to agree on is the price, it just makes NO sense! Why would anyone pay the same price as a netbook for something that isn't as good? When they first announced Chrome OS I thought it would be a game changer, I thought they'd sell them in the $100-$150 range and just take over the low end market, but the price is simply too high, you'd be better off with a netbook or a Kindle as with both of those they are at least useful offline.
Anyway good luck on your HTPC, I can say they are pretty sweet for the task and if you don't want to pay for Windows OpenELEC has a build just for the AMD Fusion chips, its got the XBMC UI and is actually pretty nice.
One crucial difference, because Android is made by Google Chrome has mobile share while Firefox? Doesn't even show up on most charts.
Just one more example of how Mozilla doesn't seem to get the market. if they released a fast and light version of FF for 2.2, which is the version most of the low end has settled on and just FYI but 2.2 devices were selling last numbers I saw something like 18 to 1 compared to ICS, well they would have a captive audience and could have gained some serious share. Instead all they do is copy Chrome right down to the needing a later version thus insuring they don't gain squat, way to go Moz!
Of course they aren't the only one, MSFT doesn't have shit in the way of mobile browser share either yet doesn't have enough sense to release a stripped down IE for Android, instead acting like its 2002 and they can just muscle their way into a market...sigh, its like the entire tech sector took one look at Apple and Google and the image literally knocked the brains right out of 'em, now they all run around like chickens with the head cut off squawking "We gotta copy them, we gotta copy them!" without bothering to even look at the landscape and notice that everyone that tried being an ersatz has failed miserably.
This is what is sad to me, its nothing but one company after another trying to force us into their own version of Apple's little walled garden...why? Do you HONESTLY think you are gonna take shit away from Apple when it comes to share? Here's a hint, Apple has a rabid fanbase that wait outside the Apple store like waiting for concert tickets when they release a new model...you ain't gonna compete with that.
So just stop it Mozilla, its getting embarrassing. First with the aping Chrome, then with the aping Apple, we already have a Chrome and an Apple, we do NOT need an ersatz. But hey, if that makes ya happy join MSFT and Canonical on the fail train, all aboard! Oh and if an Ubuntu appstore makes you want to slit your wrists, better grab the razor because an appstore is obvious what they are going for with software center. So all aboard the fail train, where we rip off one successful company with a legion of ersatz nobody wants!
But you just proved my point, even you admit you'd be more likely to get a C-60 Bobcat and have offline and online from one unit, instead of being stuck with a thin client in a laptop form factor.
BTW I have one of the 12 inch AMD E-350 EEE netbooks and I have to say i just love the thing. i get nearly 6 hours on a battery, it only weighs 2.5 pounds, nice clear screen, and does 1080p over HDMI so I can just plug it into a TV and use it for an HTPC, its nice.
Other than schools though I just don't see the selling point of Chromebooks, I mean how many are 100% within WiFi range 24/7/365? With my netbook if I have to set while my mom is in the doctor's office and there is no net, no problem, I even took mine camping so I could have my tunes and just charged it off the 12v adapter. With the ChomeBook though if I didn't have a net connection I'd be SOL and paying $250 for a device that limited when i could buy a new Atom dual for that is just nuts.
BTW I don't know if you are in the USA or not but if you are and want one of those netbooks cheap just keep an eye on this site because they get different models every day and you can get some crazy deals. I had a couple of friends buy from there, one got a dual core Atom Dell mini from there for $120 and it was like new, another waited and got an AMD C-60 Acer for $149 which other than a scratch on the bottom of the thing you couldn't tell wasn't new.
Yep betting on the cloud is the WRONG move ATM, not with the ISPs and carriers playing "let's fuck the consumer!" with price hikes and diminishing caps. I think this will also bite Win 8 in the ass, MSFT built it around phoning home and social media and both of which won't work without bandwidth.
So with the economy in the crapper and network prices going nowhere but up Google should be worried, because when every ad costs you you'll be more likely to block and Chrome OS? A non starter I'm betting.
Ugh don't remind me. You have NO idea how many times I've seen customers use the fricking search bar to get to Google to search for something even when they were in Yahoo mail with a search box in front of them and when i point out they had not one but TWO different search boxes, the title bar itself and the yahoo search box they always go "You can just type in what you want and find it? Without going to Google first?"...ugh. I think Google is responsible for removing common sense when it comes to browsers and search as now nobody seems to think they can search unless they are the Google page.
And I have to agree, isn't this what robots.txt and paywalls are for? If they don't want to be in the search engine THEN DON'T, it couldn't be simpler. but no, this is classic corporate thinking, they want their benefits of being in the search AND getting a check like it was paywalled...must be nice to own your own government like that.