Oh please! Isn't this what the FOSS community has been wanting for years? Haven't all the FOSS guys said 'if MSFT has patents lets see them"? Well here you go, now it is up to the courts to ultimately decide.
Now personally I've always thought software patents are a BAD IDEA in giant 50 foot neon letters since we all stand on the shoulders of giants and all software comes down to math anyway, so it basically lets good math implementations get locked up by whomever gets to the USPTO first.
But on the other hand I've seen dickish behavior by BOTH sides such as everyone cheering TomTom even though MSFT offered them the same RAND license for FAT32 they offer everyone else and got the finger even though they did invent the bloody thing. And RAND is something we should support, as RAND makes tech available without making it a barrier to enter which is how we got the name RAND in the first place Reasonable And Non Discriminatory.
So maybe it is better this way, just let the courts sort it all out so that then either Linux developers can pay some RAND license and never have to deal with whatever the patents cover again, find a way around it even it if doesn't work as well like Theora, or just throw out everything that is covered and find new ways of doing it.
But if MSFT just files lawsuits against Linux for every patent they think is infringing then FOSS guys can't scream FUD! and can finally look at the patents in question while the courts sort the whole mess out. Seems like whichever side you're on (and personally I don't really HAVE a side on this one, since I use Windows on the desktop, Linux on the server, and dumbphones so that I can just get bloody calls instead of waiting for a battery to recharge) you should be happy that this mess is finally gonna get sorted out.
Or he could just work at Best Buy, as when I filled in there for a few days for a friend I found damned near all the guys in the back had USB drives with.bat files to rip every tune, video, and naughty pics that crossed their desks.
As for TFA the AMD Fusion Media Explorer is free and pretty nice, or you can create all kinds of custom libraries in Windows 7 pretty easy. That said it would be a royal PITA to fill in all the blanks but it sounds like what you are wanting is a media DB. Making your own DB isn't hard (just the filling in the shitload of data is hard) and with your own DB you can add as much or little info as you like and sort any way you want.
So there are several ways you can go about it and none are more "right" than another, it is more of a personal preference thing really. I use WMP 12 for my tunes and Windows 7 MC software for my video, works for me, but it may be too much or too little for you just depending on how deep you want to go here.
I'll start from the top and try to keep up, sorry if I'm a little over the place as my GF is here and that tends to make me a little "bouncy". As for the 2011 game? There is no reason why a 2011 game, with the graphics turned down and frankly half the details of something like Far Cry should run like ass, and THAT is what I was talking about. For an example try "Turning Point: Fall of Liberty" which plays like the console no matter what your specs.
As for how do I know that it isn't optimized? Simple, when even the controls are nearly unusable on the platform you can tell it has had ZERO optimization. I hate to use TP:Fall of Liberty again but it gives a PERFECT example in that even the controls shown on screen are the X360 buttons but you could also try Just Cause I, where the game loads at the same places that it does on the console complete with "jerk" even though the machine it was running on had 20 TIMES the memory so it would make NO sense to buffer that often!
As for the reason it is no excuse is called "pride in your work" which we ALL should try to have. And NO, I don't blame the developers whenever something goes wrong. For example Bloodlines, which simply bit off more than they could chew. The problem I HAVE (since you stated what was wrong with my post, it is only fair that I retort) is that you have these guys wanting bare metal when frankly I would argue that it is crappy code NOT APIs that are the problem. For a great example the above mentioned Just Cause 2, which no matter what CPU/GPU combo was thrown at it STILL gave a great experience, or the original Medal of Honor:Allied Assault which frankly ran great on a P3 400MHz with an MX4000 and just ran better the more hardware you threw at it JUST LIKE Just Cause 2.
So I would argue if so many other have done it why can't them? Bioshock I, ran great on a wide range of machines. Bioshock II, which anyone playing it for any length of time would be able to tell it is a console port? Glitchy, skippy, just not a great experience.
Look, I'm not asking for miracles here, I'm not asking for them to have to rewrite the code from scratch. but is it really so much to ask to have testers run it on a wide range of hardware, or at least can run on the minimum specs on the box? As for the developers not being able to make things better, I'm sure that getting fired would affect their outlook, a lousy games tend to drop off whereas good games sell better. Simple supply and demand. Mercs 2, which I'm sure they spent millions upon millions on is $6 at Fred's.
So I'm sorry if you are a developer or my post bothers you, same as I'm sorry if my thoughts are a little off, as I'm said I'm kinda bouncy ATM. But if others could do it then today's developers can do it too and let us not forget what "fun" it was like before DirectX, with custom APIs like Glide that only worked on certain hardware, or code that ran on setup X but ran like shit on setup Y. I don't want to go back to that, do you? Whether you approve or not DirectX gives us a common framework so it doesn't matter if you are team green or red you can simply look at the level of DX and know what works, unless of course if it is just a console port, then 'throw more cycles at it!" is the order of the day.
Exactly, and if you have ever been around someone who was gay you would know its not a "choice" or else people wouldn't choose it to escape horseshit like this from bigots like in TFA. It would be like saying some would "choose" to be born Jewish in pre WWII Europe, or "choose" to be born black in 1920s America. What horseshit and I've seen with my own two eyes it is horseshit.
My youngest nephew (whom with his brother I consider my sons, as my sister developed a terminal illness after the second and wasn't able to raise them so I stepped up) is gay and frankly it was obvious almost from the time he could walk. His mannerisms, his voice, hell everything about him screamed "gay!" and he and his brother (which is as straight as straight can be) were raised side by side with NO differences in rearing. Nobody in my family said anything because we believe who you choose to love is YOUR business and it is OUR job to give the child a loving home, NOT to beat any one way of living into them.
Well sure enough at 14 he said he "had a big announcement" and called a family meeting where he said "I'm gay" and I nearly died laughing at the reaction,as everyone was like "aaaand?" Even my 94 year old grandmom was like "Son, that news isn't exactly shocking, heck I'm nearly blind and even I could see that!". I'll always remember the way my friend Dale, who is ex USAF and can bench press some serious weight, put it when some punk overheard me talking about the youngest (and apparently didn't know Dale's little sister is a lesbian and likewise they knew almost since birth) when the punk said "I'd beat that boy straight!" Dale said 'Really, so if me and my buddy here take you out back and beat the living shit out of you for a couple of hours we can just turn you gay? I bet after we knocked them teeth out you'd be a good little cocksucker".
And that is why TFA is total horseshit, it would be like someone expecting they could change me to where I'd look at some hairy guy the way I look at my little Cherokee princess sleeping in the bed down the hall. It ain't gonna happen, not in a million years and for all the tea in China. I'm just glad I found a wonderful woman with a wonderful old country family that only care about how you treat people and not who you love, because after my sis passed away they really went above and beyond to make my boys feel like family.
Of course I'll never forget what my princess said after I took them to meet the boys and told her afterward the youngest was gay to see what her reaction would be and whether we had a future (because if it came down to a girl or the boys the girl would have to go, I don't abandon family) and she said "Hon, my glasses aren't THAT thick, and it doesn't change the fact he is a sweetie and my daughter (who loves having someone who has taste and loves shopping like she does) just adores him, does it?"
Instead of trying to make everyone fit into your myopic world view, why not just treat them like people? And if it is family then you should damned well treat them like family and love and stick up for them instead of being a horse's ass like the group from TFA. If your God is so petty and spiteful that they would condemn a decent person to some eternal suffering because of who they love and nothing else? Well that isn't a God I want anything to do with, just keep him to yourself, thanks.
And you are what I call a "FOSSie" which like a Moonie or any other religious nut goes "la la la!" if you hear something you don't like.
Now since you have reading comprehension issues I suggest you read my post again as I said I support RMS and the GPL but since you obviously don't understand the issue I would suggest you type "TiVoization" into Wikipedia and read what it says, allow me to quote the first line before you go "la la la" again:" TiVoization: a term to describe the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license (like the GPL), but uses hardware restrictions to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware.
Sound familiar Herman? Why that sounds just like Android right now since whether you have freedoms or not is entirely dependent on the wishes of the corporation and NOT the GPL, and furthermore they can take your freedoms at any time and many already have such as many of the Motorola droids which use code signing.
But go "la la la" all you want Herman, ignore the sound of that zipper behind you as the corps screw you out of your freedoms while you blindly scream 'shill!" at anyone who doesn't suck the koolaid. You support the GPL? Then support GPL V3 which is the ONLY GPL which still gives you freedom. But don't believe me, go look up RMS's reasons for creating GPL V3. Or is he a shill too Herman?
Well I have to call bullshit on your bullshit, as in point of fact if 5 year plus old games like Far Cry or FEAR can run damned well on a 3.4Ghz P4 with an HD3650 then there is no damned excuse why your 2011 game looks like ass and runs like shit on the latest and greatest, there just isn't.
Sadly in my own research into cheapo games (I like cheese, so I often hit the bargain bins looking for the next MST3K of gaming) I have found even the big budget games that run like ass turn out to be console ports that is obvious there was ZERO optimization on the platform. That is like taking an app written for ARM, adding just enough to where it will actually run, and then bitching when it doesn't run fast,well duh! ALL of the current consoles are PPC based and you can't just drop PPC code straight onto i586, be it x86 or x64, and expect to have it run well, you just can't do it.
Let me give an example of a game that I love...Just Cause 2. Now that game it is pretty obvious that it has been optimized for PC, as the PC game not only looks MUCH better than the console, but I've tried it on everything from a 2.8Ghz Netburst Pentium D to the latest AMD quads (before anyone screams Pirate! My friends watched me play it and they all bought it so they could experience the fun) and on all the systems it plays beautifully, on everything from a 9xxx Geforce (sorry I don't his exact make) through the ATI 4650,4830,4850, and 5770. On ALL it runs great, some may have less bling like smoke, but all are smooth and controls work well, from Vista HP 32 to Win 7 pro X64.
So I saw the first Just Cause for $6 at Amazon and thought "Yay, more Just Cause!" and picked it up, frankly even with me having an AMD quad with the 4850 it is still glitchy and skippy when compared to the new one, even though the new one has better graphics,why? Because you play it for 5 minutes you realize it is just a straight console port with the code even having the loading "jerk" in the same spots it had on the console. The sad part is one of the ports was for the original Xbox which is basically an HTPC, yet it STILL runs like ass, why?
Because it is still acting like it is running on a console with the same optimizations for the constrained CPU,RAM, and GPU of the console and not instead taking advantage of the platform and it is THAT, that right there, that is the problem. So while I feel sorry for anybody that works a shit job, and after reading "EA wife" I believe most game coder jobs ARE shitty, but still that is no excuse. Screaming about bare metal when you don't even use what you have is just the classic "throw more (insert cycles,CPU,RAM,GPU) at it!" which is just as much bullshit as "Intel giveth,MSFT taketh away". Well they tried that with Vista, didn't go over too well did it?
If you want us to buy your product then give us a product for our platform and not some console reguritation designed to play "lets screw them out of some cash" okay? because frankly there are thousands of games out there written for the PC platform that run excellent so I (and I bet many others) would prefer nothing at all than to waste $40+ on a retread that is about as enjoyable as a stale McDonald's cheeseburger. If so many other can do it and have done it in the past, what's the excuse for halfassing now?
And sorry about the length but after getting burnt so many times by console lameness that I have a whole shelf full of games I'll never play again it really bugs me.
Can I say something AC? As a game developer you can bitch all you want (in fact I'm gonna bitch about you in a minute) but I sure as hell don't trust your coding skills which means letting you have "bare metal access" so you can make my PC as crashy as Win9x is a big DO NOT WANT.
People seem to forget we've already been down this road and it was called DOS. Sure games ran crazy fast, and frankly could pull off graphics that you weren't able to imagine the hardware was capable of. The problem was one buggy game could bring it falling down and things like rebooting or even having to yank the power cord to get control of your PC after the game went FUBAR was SOP of the day. Do we REALLY want to go back to that, when games are already so drool worthy on PCs you can spend 30 minutes dying on a new game because you're too busy admiring the purty to play the thing?
Now for the ragging part: game developers suck I'm sorry but its true, you guys really really REALLY suck. You want us to trust you with bare metal when every damned game that comes out nowadays needs damned near the size of the game in fricking patches because your shit is so buggy? And for every ONE developer that puts out a TRUE PC PORT, you know, one actually designed to take advantage of the PC platform with decent controls and will upgrade and degrade gracefully depending on GPU we have two dozen shitball console ports that frankly all the "bare metal" in the world won't help since your code is designed for a different arch than what it is running on. That would be like the guys at SheepShaver bitching because OS9 doesn't run with native speed and control on Intel OSX. Well duh! One is for a PPC and the other x86!
So frankly IMHO both you and the AMD guy are so full of shit your eyes are brown. There is not a damned thing wrong with DirectX and these designers that are bitching about "bare metal" are most likely putting out shitty unoptimized console ports and then having the brass balls to bitch because their sloppy code doesn't run fast. Frankly do us both a favor and just don't bother, as I'd rather have no game at all than your shitty unoptimized console twaddle. When my quad core with an HD4850 struggles because of your crap console code it ain't the fault of DirectX, it is your fault for putting out lame console shit without bothering to optimize for the platform. So make the world a better place, either do the job right or don't do it at all. Me and the other PC gamers will thank you for it.
Oh Please! It is NOT FUD if there is a serious problem and the fact that Google is tossing copyright header files is in fact a serious problem as anyone with half a brain knows that USA copyright law is murky as hell when it comes to notices, EULAs, and altering the copyrights of someone else without permission which is what Google is doing.
Now will this cause someone problems down the road? Who knows, which is the whole point of the story as like tax laws you are lucky to get two different answers from three copyright attorneys when it comes to areas such as this. So it is NOT FUD if copyright lawyers are unsure if this is a "gotcha" or not which is what I took away from the articles.
Of course what I find funny as hell is there is already a serious gotcha in Android that FOSS advocates are either ignoring on purpose to spread Android or are simply ignorant of, either way it isn't good if you write FOSS code. What is the gotcha? Let me put it this way: notice anything...funny...about Android? Like how Google has gone out of their way to avoid GPL V3 and have made it clear there will be NO GPL V3 in any code Google touches? Why do you think that is?
I'll tell you why, it is so they can TiVo trick your rights away by using hardware lockdowns, that's why. try updating to the latest Android on Motorola phones, see what happens. Don't work does it? The simple fact is GPL V2 is now completely useless thanks to the TiVo trick making it so corporations can take away your freedoms while helping themselves to your code. Now I may be primarily a Windows guy but I do respect RMS's right to have his own license, and developers right to choose a license that agrees with their beliefs. Thanks to TiVo finding that loophole The GPL V2 is completely worthless because ANY corp can simply ignore it by putting code signing or other trivial tricks to lock down your machine!
So if these articles start the FOSS community taking a closer look at Google and their practices I'm ALL for it, because just because a corp uses some GPL code does NOT make them your friend nor a friend of the community. And if you are a coder use GPL V3 ONLY and push everyone around you releasing code to do the same. Because without the four freedoms you may as well just release as PD or BSD for all the freedom you'll have thanks to TiVo tricking. After all what good is Linux running on every cell if you can't actually modify, update, or change it in ANY way without being given explicit permission by the corps first? Hell you may as well just stick with Apple or MSFT if that is the case.
Thank you. Nice to see someone else had to deal with the crap, even if I wouldn't wish dealing with them for all the tea in China.
We didn't allow the passing or sharing of files since me and the fellow repairmen mods all had our own servers so if someone needed a file for a fix we could point them to the public server and have the files (along with step by step instructions, because in the days of Win9x some of those.VXD drivers could be a bear) waiting for them. At the time my boss had set up an INSANE 600 Gb (this was when the average drive was 40Gb and 80Gb would break you on price) filled with just about every driver from Win3.x to Win2K (this was long before the days of driverpacks) set up in this monster Frankenstein cage made up of two ATX towers spot welded together. It was VERY cool!
But the reason I ended up passing on the channel and walking away was after the "AZ Lolita" we ended up getting crapflodded by "Hi I'm a (insert age) girl, want to see my naked pics?" kind of crap which I have NO doubt was nothing but cops and which quickly made wading through their bullshit to get to the actual people needing help more trouble than it was worth. I heard later the channel closed down soon after because the mods ended up spending more time blocking cops than they did helping people and like me got sick of it.
Pretty sad when you can't even set up a simple site like that or like your trading ancient oldies without it being filled with cops trolling. I wonder how much of our taxpayer's money is blown each year for these "sting" which as I said if were anything like mine were the classic definition of entrapment. I hate kiddie pervs but I bet if the cops spent just 1/6th the time actually going after those that touch kids instead of trolling forums the world would be a better place.
Nice to see that I wasn't alone in dealing with this shit though and I wouldn't doubt the CP pushers on your site were cops as I talked to another of the former mods a year later who told me that the "AZ Lolita" was pushing a crapload of CP that actually had a.BAT script in it (as he ended up cleaning a PC the Lolita infected) that would shotgun the files all over the drive. My guess is it was to make sure they would be able to easily find a copy of the files even if they tried to delete them, since copies would be dumped in weird places like subfolders on Win32. really scummy crap if you ask me.
He said, and I quote "volunteer for a non-profit that organizes Model UN conferences for high school students which means that running wires since we are talking about a bunch that moves from place to place is right out, as is cell phone since we are talking HS kids and most schools frown on telling the kids to bring their phones.
I'm shocked nobody here has thought about going "old school" with it...light guns. The tech is old but its cheap, a couple of colored LEDs connected to a couple of buttons and a target to aim at. If you wanted to get fancy you could probably use a MSFT Kinetic as the target and have someone at rent a coder cook up some counting software, shouldn't be hard. After all you have only 3 possible answers...yes, no, abstain. Hell if you wanted to be extra cheap you could use a single LED apiece and have the LED pulse a set number for each choice. Might even be easier that way since the Kinetic will only have to count pulses.
So rent a coder, BGMicro for the parts, and a Kinetic, seems like the bottom of the barrel cheapest you can go and have it do want you want wireless without sinking in the dough. Hell we have enough coders here I'm sure someone would be nice enough to offer to whip up the code since you're helping kids and all.
So why not look at one of the AMD offerings? The GPU on the AMD side is better anyway and from the sounds of it what you are doing isn't gonna need max performance or you wouldn't be looking at onboard. I recently helped my oldest pick out a nice Turion dual laptop and it runs great, has an HD4250 with 256Mb discrete RAM, and gets around 6 hours on a battery.
Now that the new Bobcat and Bulldozer units are out you'll get even longer battery life and even better graphics since the minimum is an HD6250 APU. Also don't forget Intel has been caught rigging its compiler AND bribing OEMs, so if you actually want there to be competition supporting the little guy that has been playing by the rules might be a good thing.
Actually the AMD IGPs aren't half bad. Sure they'll never beat a discrete but while I was waiting for my discrete to show up I was playing Bioshock, FEAR, Swat 4, L4D, pretty much anything I wanted and that was with last years 4250 onboard. The new APU chips have an HD6xxx IIRC, anywhere from an HD6250 to an HD6550 depending on chip.
And the reason nobody allows you to write directly to hardware is we already tried that back in the days of DOS. What you ended up with was a single bit of buggy code could take the whole system down with VERY little trouble. Now add in the malware that would be written to try to hide in the GPU, and you'd have a mess.
The reason you can do that with an X360 OS because it is "DRM...in a box" which means all code is approved by MSFT and no approval? No run. Personally I'd rather NOT have my desktop programs have to be given a seal of approval from MSFT, thank you VERY much. There is a cost to everything, and the cost of having the freedom to run what you want is having to use abstraction since the OS has to have a way to control the program.
But don't worry I have a feeling you may get to try it that way if you switch to Apple, as I have a feeling OSX will end up being replaced by iOS and the app store. Then you'll only run what Apple approves of and I'm sure that having that level of control will make for faster access. Personally I'll take freedom over speed, thanks anyway.
If you're a cop then you should know how many assholes are cops and thus it shouldn't surprise you. I still have a nice scar down the back of my head for being a "God damned hippie riding with a nigger" so I hope it doesn't offend you when I say if I saw one of your kind bleeding in the street I would calmly walk away.
Frankly you and your fellow cops should be ashamed at the "thin blue line" wall of silence protect the scum cops bullshit. look up "the largest gang in America" to see why so many of us can't stand you. There you will see more than 3 and a half hours of cops breaking bones, tasering, and generally acting like gangbangers with badges. Those of us that have gotten a taste of it would frankly rather deal with the thugs than have ANYTHING to do with you.
I have lived on the wrong side of the tracks more than once, dealt with mob, gangbangers, thugs, and all the other assorted nasties and you know what? They didn't go out of their way to be pricks unlike your fellow blue wearing thugs.
And whether this person was a cop should be pretty obvious since I pointed out many were busted a year later by the Scotsdale AZ PD and whether you call it enticement or not it is STILL bullshit and a mockery of our constitution. When I was a kid there was decent cops, but all took early retirement to get away from the gangbangers. Now in my home town half the cops live like Tony Montana thanks to us being on the meth highway, and I can't even remember the last time a cop spent so much as a minute in jail here, no matter what they do.
Want us to respect you? Then follow the constitution and throw every dirty junkie gangbanger cop in the jail as fast as you can. Otherwise the rest of us will look at you for what you are...the biggest gang in America. And I'd say skirting the law and even breaking it to "make the bust" is SOP now in the USA.
If you can't see the problem with this AC you are a major dumbass. The Paypal account was being used to help his defense and now those people can be harassed by Sony. Imagine if those that donated to Manning's defense get put on a terror watchlist? After all Manning "aided terrorists" and Wikileaks is a "terrorist organization" according to some of our more clueless congressmen, so if judges are allowed to hand out lists of who has donated to a defense to the other side you have just killed ANY chance of a non rich person getting a fair trial.
The whole damned point of setting up these Paypal accounts is to give those who cannot afford a defense a chance to fight back against the rich and powerful. if you start handing out lists of everyone that donated you have created a chilling effect that will ensure others in the future won't get enough donations to buy a stick of gum.Sadly in the USA no money means no defense, as I wouldn't let a public pretender defend my dog, and in civil cases you don't even get that. So handing out donation lists is a BAD IDEA and shouldn't be allowed, okay AC?
Well there are other things besides low tech cards you know. As soon as we finish laying down the tracks and getting a gold master for my new band I'll be having some more cards printed up like I had with my last band which were great. The "card" was actually a sleeve that held a business card sized CD that had three singles on it, both in standard audio and MP3 form. It was a great way to network with other musicians and get gigs, and the card was unique enough everybody seemed to hang onto it.
So while I can see some giving up regular cards for e-cards and the like there are still plenty of ways to make a card stand out while with all the electronic back and forth we do today it really wouldn't be hard to get lost in the noise. I had a friend who used the same style card to pass out his resume complete with code snippets so they could see his work. Pretty neat way to do it and get yourself noticed.
Riiiight, just love the script kiddie "it didn't happen to me so I don't believe it" horsehit. First of all who the hell cares what your warez pushing botnet herding script kiddie ass thinks? Did anyone ask your opinion? Frankly it was scum like you that ruined the nice free net we had going so STFU.
Second of all the whole fucking point of the channel was to be for noobs and average Joes who were needing help with computer problems and could get that help without being charged per minute or dealing with 50 tons of spyware and drivebys like what we were dealing with during IE on Win9x being the top combo.
So we weren't herding botnets, spreading warez, playing BOFH and finding new ways to ban people or other dickish douchebag behavior like you yourself are bragging about. because we were dealing with noobs we had to deal with a lot of clueless who didn't read the fucking rules and didn't know shit, that was the whole point of the channel so why would I go though all that horseshit to cook up banlists? Before the douchebags and spammers like yourself spread like the damned clap circa 2000 we frankly didn't really have that kind of trouble so we didn't bother.
So you don't believe? Fine don't really care what a warez pusher thinks, especially one that brags about infecting the people I was trying to help and running botnets. For the rest of/. that is the way it went down, and later I found out that nearly every site connected to that IRC node ended up having a little visit from the "AZ Lolita" as we called her and those that took the bait did get popped less than a year later under a dragnet run by.....drumroll...the Scotsdale AZ PD!
So if you want to believe the cops are really nice guys that never entrap to score a quota or impress a DA? That is your business. As someone who has traveled most of the USA and had my head cracked more than once for being "A god damned hippie driving with a nigger" I know better.
Not to mention you'll still need GTK 3.2 installed on the target machine, which makes it NO different than.NET or Silverlight. Hell I would say Silverlight comes out ahead as unlike this I have been able to run The Silverlight OS in a browser demo on multiple browsers with NO plugins (tested on FF, Comodo Dragon, and Opera) as long as Silverlight is installed on the OS.
So I don't really think they score much bragging rights here when others have not only done it but done it better by making theirs browser agnostic, and if they had truly followed the HTML V5 standard then it should work just as well on IE 9 and Chrome as you pointed out. The fact that it only works on FF 4 smells like a hack to me, and we know how well those end up working out.
You know, as much as I hate kiddie pervs having to actually deal with the cops when running an IRC chat room during the 90s I can say if my experience is typical (and I have no reason to feel it isn't) then entrapment is SOP among the cops when it comes to this crap. My example:
My boss at the time let me run an IRC chat to keep me from being bored between fixes at the shop so I set up A Windows repair chat which was VERY clearly marked as such, had strict rules on the layout of posts (name of OS, brief description of problem, be ready to follow instructions given, etc) when this poster comes on claiming to be a 15 year old girl comes on and start seriously hitting on everyone there. I tell them I"I don't know where you think you are but this a Windows repair site for people that are having serious computer issues, not a sex site. If you're not having PC problems please find another site."
Well after this the "girl" starts targeting me directly, one filthy suggestion after another, offering to send dirty pics of herself and asking for pics of me, etc. Meanwhile I'm dealing with a 28 year old mother of two that is practically in tears because the used PC she picked up for her family is BSODing about every 4 minutes like clockwork (turned out to be a bad graphics driver install) causing her to lose connection and having to have her son hook her back up so I have NO time for this shit and after being interrupted for the dozenth time by the little slut I just said "Look kid, I frankly don't give a shit WHAT you look like, A I have a nice woman I'm quite happy with, B, I don't date women more than 4 years younger than me, and C This is a fucking repair site not a dating site so get lost already!"
So the screen goes silent and I manage to get the freaked out mom fixed and then up pops for the 15 year old "I'm Sgt Maria whatever of the AZ polic dept. I just wanted to say you are the only one who has failed to take my bait and its nice to know there are still guys out there that aren't pervs". Well then I promptly gave the bitch a dressing down about the constitution and entrapment and banned her IP address as well as posted it to every site I could think up, just daring her ass to say anything about it!
So don't take the cops word on these things, as dealing with them myself I can tell you they'll do everything short of sending underage girls to your home trying to score busts. This one was offering tons of pics of "her" including dildo shots which I have NO DOUBT was CP they busted off someone and was using for their little "sting" as bait. It was the most blatant case of entrapment I'd ever seen, and as I said this was a place where the average post was "Sound failed need help!" or "BSOD every time I launch browser, help please!" so they HAD NO REASON to even be there. It was total bullshit and after dealing with them first hand frankly I wouldn't take a cop's word on one of these things if they said it was raining and I was ass deep in water.
Noooo, you are being called a shill because your entire post reads like a press release and normal folks that aren't marketing drones don't actually talk that way.
Hell I've been a Windows guy since Win 3.x yet the folks here (well except for a few FOSSies that believe anyone who isn't dancing with RMS in a field of tulips must be a corporate spy sent from a secret reprogramming facility hidden under Redmond) know I'm not a shill because not only do I not speak marketingese I'm more than happy to point out like every other company on the planet MSFT has put out some real stinkers (Oh Vista how I hated thee, let me count the ways) as well as some gems (Windows 7 rocks).
So unless you spend your 9 to 5 as a marketing drone or have spent so much time ass deep in corporate butt kissing you honestly think you boss's booty smells like roses, well then folks have a legitimate right to call you things like shill and astroturfer. Nearly all the major corp have been involved in astroturfing and your post reads like an ad cooked up on Madison avenue. Hell you might as well have ended it with "Microsoft: We build excitement!"
As for TFA? Cute video but frankly getting burnt having to clean up IE 6 infections for years after MSFT abandoned IE after winning the browser war frankly I just don't trust them in the browser dept anymore. I have also found due to the faster update turnaround of the other guys my customers infection rate goes down when IE goes bye bye.
Now I give out Mozilla Firefox but frankly after all of the memory sucking and bloat of the last couple of 3.6.x releases I'm testing Chromium based Comodo Dragon, which has the sandboxing and low rights like IE and a lower memory and CPU footprint than FF. Add in the fact it runs both Adblock Plus and ForecastFox which are the two most popular plugins around here? If FF isn't better on the memory and CPU hogging come 4.0 RTM I'll be switching everyone over to Dragon. I already give out Dragon to all Vista and 7 users since FF doesn't support the safer low rights mode.
But go back to IE? Sorry, fool me once and all. They'd have to do a hell of a lot better than just some HTML V5 fish demos for me to risk IE again for my customers and family, and the fact they've abandoned XP while everyone else works fine on XP makes me just dislike it even more.
And what if the TOS is buried in a filing cabinet in the basement behind the door of an unused lavatory with "beware of the leopard" on it? I'd agree with you if the TOS were required to use plain language but instead they are nearly always written in such legalese bullshit you'd need to hire a contract lawyer just to translate the stupid thing.
Now if you want to pass a law that the TOS only counts if it falls under the "reasonable person" rule, that is that a reasonable person with an average HS education can read it and make heads or tails of it then I agree it is buyer beware, but most of the things have so much legalese bullshit you'd need a paddle-boat to cut through the muck.
You know, I'm starting to wonder if that isn't the entire point of those reality TV shows and making money is just a secondary goal. Think about it: What better way for a government to keep their populace docile and willing to put up with shitty service and treatment than by numbing their brains with the TV equivalent of Quaaludes?
I had friends that had no idea there was an earthquake in Japan or unrest in the middle east until it showed up on FB because their non work hours are FB and reality TV. I tried watching one for a whole 15 minutes and had to walk away, the levels of stupid were hurting my brain. Hell half the USA could have been rioting and they wouldn't know it if it wasn't in front of their house or brought up on an episode of Jersey Shore. yuck
As for TFA I simply won't even look at a $50 game anymore, even though I can afford it. There are simply too many choices and between Amazon, Good Old Games, and Steam I simply have so many choices in the $20 and less pile I could never go through them all. When I could pick up Bioshock II for $2.99 or Prince of Persia the complete Sands Of Time series for $6, why would I blow $50 on a single game?
By the time I'm halfway through the backlog of impulse buys I've gotten from sales there are new sales and that $50 game I can get for $10. For me $50 games simply make NO sense and provide me with no utility, as nobody cares whether you play a game now or 6 months from now and since I prefer single player I don't have to worry about what my friends want to play online. But by offering great deals like this Steam managed to get me as a customer and get money they never would have, all by simply offering Portal I for free. Between Steam, Amazon, and GOG I simply have no need for $50 games anymore and I'm sure I'm not alone.
Except if you would have bothered to read his link Gabe Newell himself stated that at 75" off the made 15% MORE than the game made at the original release price because the amount of sales were so huge (1470% increases in sales is nothing to sneeze at) and you are also forgetting that once they have your product you have a possible source of future revenue by selling them more discount games as well as DLC.
For example Valve got me to try Steam when they offered the free Portal download and now I'm up to nearly 20 games, simply by picking up the specials. This is money they would have never saw because I didn't have Steam and didn't see their ads and had been shopping at Good Old Games and Amazon exclusively.
So I would say that the answer is right in front of their faces, but like so many industries pure bald faced greed is keeping them from making increased profits. Same as so many of the teleco/cableco duopolies like the one in my area could make massively increased profits by offering lower tier packages affordable to the poor, but because of their greed and their "damn everything but the quarterly earnings reports!" they constantly RAISE prices and run more and more customers out of their markets.
Sadly unlike with the black market known as piracy there is no option to escape the duopolies and in my area the cheapest dialup is now $60 and cheapest broadband is now $80 with a ridiculous contract required so a good 70% in my area simply don't have any Internet at all. But just as if the price were lowered on my net connection I would be much more likely to look at their video offers so too would I be buying even more games than I am now if the price were lowered, and not by simply distributing the same money onto more games, but because once you hit my sweet spot I'll impulse buy your game whereas at $50 I won't give it a second glance. .
It has already gotten to the point that if a game is $50 I simply won't buy, and at $40 it better have excellent reviews and be something I really want, at $20 I will give them my CC for a decent game easily, and at $10 I'm willing to take chances on games that may be stinkers. But the stage may already be set to change that, as Steam has been offering so many good games for cheap on their "midweek madness" that I doubt I'll be paying more than $10 a game. there are simply too many titles out there I haven't tried along with a backlog of games I've gotten from GOG and Amazon to keep me busy if the only games are expensive.
We have a saying for what you are advocating and it is called security through obscurity and if you are gonna go that route you are better off using AROS or Ecomstation or any of the other even more obscure OSes.
Of course that is also ignoring there is a downside to STO, and that is when a bug DOES come along you're fucked just as there were several thousand that got bit by the KDE theme virus, even though it was on a relatively obscure site that required an activity that many don't do.
I would argue that using the latest and greatest, Windows 7 X64 with a good AV such as Avast or Comodo and low rights browser like IE or Chromium based you will be more protected in the long run since the OS is hardened and has much tougher security thanks to DEP, ASLR, low rights mode, and file and registry virtualization. You can even harden it further if you like (I've been using this for months, if you have friend on Windows 7 I would recommend you send them this link) by adding Structured Exception Handling Overwrite Protection (SEHOP).
So while I'm glad it works for you there is a reason why an OS is obscure and in the case of Linux it is because it is a giant PITA on the desktop. Six month update deathmarch, updates that fix one thing and break three more, drivers that rarely survive updates, the fact that it is pretty much useless without CLI (if you don't believe me disable your access to Bash for a year. I had a couple of Linux advocates try it and they had to re-enable in less than 6 months as they couldn't fix anything without Bash), in short for the vast majority it just doesn't work. After all I can make a 100% secure machine by cutting all the wires and burying it in a hole filled with concrete, but that doesn't make the machine very useful does it?
I wonder how much of that is because Michelangelo is old? So much of what existed in the time is lost forever for all we know he was just decent compared to what they had, it is kinda like judging ancient Greek or Roman art.
Well as for the subject of TFA, I would point out the original Bioshock and Deus Ex. How anyone could say those two games weren't art is beyond me, as they carried you into their world and made you think, especially Bioshock with the undercurrent of what it means to have free will.
I could name plenty of others that I would consider "pop art" in that they didn't rise to the level of the above were fun while still trying new things and finding new ways to express themselves which to me is one of the marks of art, to try to find new ways and new expressions, such as No One Live Forever which gave us a heroine that wasn't just a walking set of tits and which replaced the gore which was SOP of the time for humor, or Nosferatu which while everyone else treated horror as a slasher flick used sound, lighting, and a randomly generated castle complete with randomly generated monsters to make us feel we had stepped into a 1930s Universal Monster movie, complete with excellent film score which added to the dark undertones.
But to judge games simply as trash for mass consumption (Sorry Ebert, in this case you're full of shit) just because few attempt to try to reach the level of art would be as unfair as judging film as a medium for art by the 99.998% of movies released that are just cheap thrills or just plain trash. Remember for every Godfather there are probably 5,000 "Dude, Where's my car?" or worse Battlefield:Earth.
Does that makes films unable to produce art? No, and I would argue as more of these excellent engines are released free for public use and the Internet allows for groups of like minded individuals to come together we will see the birth of an indie movement where just like the indie movies the budgets won't be high or the effects top notch but they will come up with decent stories or new ideas. For an example there is the classic "They Hunger" mod for Half Life, which frankly gave me more creeps and scares than nearly all the horror movies of that time put together, while having a decent story and hellishly scary atmosphere.
Frankly if any of them are reading this I would have NO problem paying $20-$30 for a game with Far Cry I level graphics or even No One Lives Forever II graphics if the story is good and gives me a new experience. But to judge the medium by the likes of Activision, where the CEO is a major douchenozzle that has said milking any idea into a cookie cutter franchise is his one and only goal? Really not fair to the medium.
Actually it is a damned smart thing to do and here is why: If you look up the talks that AMD released right after they bought ATI one of the things they stressed is how they would change development by instead of sinking huge amount of R7D into the "ePeen card" and then having to figure out how to selectively cripple it to fit the lower markets they would instead focus on the mid market chip where the vast majority of sale are and then simply add memory, a bigger pipe, a second GPU, etc to ramp UP to the ePeen instead of ramping DOWN.
Now what this does is give them a BIG advantage over Nvidia in that they aren't having to cook up an uber expensive GPU and then cripple it, which still costs you a top o' the line GPU, but instead by focusing on the MOR chip it costs less per chip and makes it trivial if you do need to cripple for a lower niche as you aren't having to change that much.
So I would say it is a damned smart business move, as they can sell more chips without alteration and can simply add features to make higher cards than taking features away which is usually harder to do. This equals big savings which AMD has been passing onto the consumer in the form of plenty of baddass MOR cards in the $150 or less market, which is the biggest market by far.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh please! Isn't this what the FOSS community has been wanting for years? Haven't all the FOSS guys said 'if MSFT has patents lets see them"? Well here you go, now it is up to the courts to ultimately decide.
Now personally I've always thought software patents are a BAD IDEA in giant 50 foot neon letters since we all stand on the shoulders of giants and all software comes down to math anyway, so it basically lets good math implementations get locked up by whomever gets to the USPTO first.
But on the other hand I've seen dickish behavior by BOTH sides such as everyone cheering TomTom even though MSFT offered them the same RAND license for FAT32 they offer everyone else and got the finger even though they did invent the bloody thing. And RAND is something we should support, as RAND makes tech available without making it a barrier to enter which is how we got the name RAND in the first place Reasonable And Non Discriminatory.
So maybe it is better this way, just let the courts sort it all out so that then either Linux developers can pay some RAND license and never have to deal with whatever the patents cover again, find a way around it even it if doesn't work as well like Theora, or just throw out everything that is covered and find new ways of doing it.
But if MSFT just files lawsuits against Linux for every patent they think is infringing then FOSS guys can't scream FUD! and can finally look at the patents in question while the courts sort the whole mess out. Seems like whichever side you're on (and personally I don't really HAVE a side on this one, since I use Windows on the desktop, Linux on the server, and dumbphones so that I can just get bloody calls instead of waiting for a battery to recharge) you should be happy that this mess is finally gonna get sorted out.
Or he could just work at Best Buy, as when I filled in there for a few days for a friend I found damned near all the guys in the back had USB drives with .bat files to rip every tune, video, and naughty pics that crossed their desks.
As for TFA the AMD Fusion Media Explorer is free and pretty nice, or you can create all kinds of custom libraries in Windows 7 pretty easy. That said it would be a royal PITA to fill in all the blanks but it sounds like what you are wanting is a media DB. Making your own DB isn't hard (just the filling in the shitload of data is hard) and with your own DB you can add as much or little info as you like and sort any way you want.
So there are several ways you can go about it and none are more "right" than another, it is more of a personal preference thing really. I use WMP 12 for my tunes and Windows 7 MC software for my video, works for me, but it may be too much or too little for you just depending on how deep you want to go here.
I'll start from the top and try to keep up, sorry if I'm a little over the place as my GF is here and that tends to make me a little "bouncy". As for the 2011 game? There is no reason why a 2011 game, with the graphics turned down and frankly half the details of something like Far Cry should run like ass, and THAT is what I was talking about. For an example try "Turning Point: Fall of Liberty" which plays like the console no matter what your specs.
As for how do I know that it isn't optimized? Simple, when even the controls are nearly unusable on the platform you can tell it has had ZERO optimization. I hate to use TP:Fall of Liberty again but it gives a PERFECT example in that even the controls shown on screen are the X360 buttons but you could also try Just Cause I, where the game loads at the same places that it does on the console complete with "jerk" even though the machine it was running on had 20 TIMES the memory so it would make NO sense to buffer that often!
As for the reason it is no excuse is called "pride in your work" which we ALL should try to have. And NO, I don't blame the developers whenever something goes wrong. For example Bloodlines, which simply bit off more than they could chew. The problem I HAVE (since you stated what was wrong with my post, it is only fair that I retort) is that you have these guys wanting bare metal when frankly I would argue that it is crappy code NOT APIs that are the problem. For a great example the above mentioned Just Cause 2, which no matter what CPU/GPU combo was thrown at it STILL gave a great experience, or the original Medal of Honor:Allied Assault which frankly ran great on a P3 400MHz with an MX4000 and just ran better the more hardware you threw at it JUST LIKE Just Cause 2.
So I would argue if so many other have done it why can't them? Bioshock I, ran great on a wide range of machines. Bioshock II, which anyone playing it for any length of time would be able to tell it is a console port? Glitchy, skippy, just not a great experience.
Look, I'm not asking for miracles here, I'm not asking for them to have to rewrite the code from scratch. but is it really so much to ask to have testers run it on a wide range of hardware, or at least can run on the minimum specs on the box? As for the developers not being able to make things better, I'm sure that getting fired would affect their outlook, a lousy games tend to drop off whereas good games sell better. Simple supply and demand. Mercs 2, which I'm sure they spent millions upon millions on is $6 at Fred's.
So I'm sorry if you are a developer or my post bothers you, same as I'm sorry if my thoughts are a little off, as I'm said I'm kinda bouncy ATM. But if others could do it then today's developers can do it too and let us not forget what "fun" it was like before DirectX, with custom APIs like Glide that only worked on certain hardware, or code that ran on setup X but ran like shit on setup Y. I don't want to go back to that, do you? Whether you approve or not DirectX gives us a common framework so it doesn't matter if you are team green or red you can simply look at the level of DX and know what works, unless of course if it is just a console port, then 'throw more cycles at it!" is the order of the day.
Exactly, and if you have ever been around someone who was gay you would know its not a "choice" or else people wouldn't choose it to escape horseshit like this from bigots like in TFA. It would be like saying some would "choose" to be born Jewish in pre WWII Europe, or "choose" to be born black in 1920s America. What horseshit and I've seen with my own two eyes it is horseshit.
My youngest nephew (whom with his brother I consider my sons, as my sister developed a terminal illness after the second and wasn't able to raise them so I stepped up) is gay and frankly it was obvious almost from the time he could walk. His mannerisms, his voice, hell everything about him screamed "gay!" and he and his brother (which is as straight as straight can be) were raised side by side with NO differences in rearing. Nobody in my family said anything because we believe who you choose to love is YOUR business and it is OUR job to give the child a loving home, NOT to beat any one way of living into them.
Well sure enough at 14 he said he "had a big announcement" and called a family meeting where he said "I'm gay" and I nearly died laughing at the reaction,as everyone was like "aaaand?" Even my 94 year old grandmom was like "Son, that news isn't exactly shocking, heck I'm nearly blind and even I could see that!". I'll always remember the way my friend Dale, who is ex USAF and can bench press some serious weight, put it when some punk overheard me talking about the youngest (and apparently didn't know Dale's little sister is a lesbian and likewise they knew almost since birth) when the punk said "I'd beat that boy straight!" Dale said 'Really, so if me and my buddy here take you out back and beat the living shit out of you for a couple of hours we can just turn you gay? I bet after we knocked them teeth out you'd be a good little cocksucker".
And that is why TFA is total horseshit, it would be like someone expecting they could change me to where I'd look at some hairy guy the way I look at my little Cherokee princess sleeping in the bed down the hall. It ain't gonna happen, not in a million years and for all the tea in China. I'm just glad I found a wonderful woman with a wonderful old country family that only care about how you treat people and not who you love, because after my sis passed away they really went above and beyond to make my boys feel like family.
Of course I'll never forget what my princess said after I took them to meet the boys and told her afterward the youngest was gay to see what her reaction would be and whether we had a future (because if it came down to a girl or the boys the girl would have to go, I don't abandon family) and she said "Hon, my glasses aren't THAT thick, and it doesn't change the fact he is a sweetie and my daughter (who loves having someone who has taste and loves shopping like she does) just adores him, does it?"
Instead of trying to make everyone fit into your myopic world view, why not just treat them like people? And if it is family then you should damned well treat them like family and love and stick up for them instead of being a horse's ass like the group from TFA. If your God is so petty and spiteful that they would condemn a decent person to some eternal suffering because of who they love and nothing else? Well that isn't a God I want anything to do with, just keep him to yourself, thanks.
And you are what I call a "FOSSie" which like a Moonie or any other religious nut goes "la la la!" if you hear something you don't like.
Now since you have reading comprehension issues I suggest you read my post again as I said I support RMS and the GPL but since you obviously don't understand the issue I would suggest you type "TiVoization" into Wikipedia and read what it says, allow me to quote the first line before you go "la la la" again:" TiVoization: a term to describe the creation of a system that incorporates software under the terms of a copyleft software license (like the GPL), but uses hardware restrictions to prevent users from running modified versions of the software on that hardware.
Sound familiar Herman? Why that sounds just like Android right now since whether you have freedoms or not is entirely dependent on the wishes of the corporation and NOT the GPL, and furthermore they can take your freedoms at any time and many already have such as many of the Motorola droids which use code signing.
But go "la la la" all you want Herman, ignore the sound of that zipper behind you as the corps screw you out of your freedoms while you blindly scream 'shill!" at anyone who doesn't suck the koolaid. You support the GPL? Then support GPL V3 which is the ONLY GPL which still gives you freedom. But don't believe me, go look up RMS's reasons for creating GPL V3. Or is he a shill too Herman?
Well I have to call bullshit on your bullshit, as in point of fact if 5 year plus old games like Far Cry or FEAR can run damned well on a 3.4Ghz P4 with an HD3650 then there is no damned excuse why your 2011 game looks like ass and runs like shit on the latest and greatest, there just isn't.
Sadly in my own research into cheapo games (I like cheese, so I often hit the bargain bins looking for the next MST3K of gaming) I have found even the big budget games that run like ass turn out to be console ports that is obvious there was ZERO optimization on the platform. That is like taking an app written for ARM, adding just enough to where it will actually run, and then bitching when it doesn't run fast,well duh! ALL of the current consoles are PPC based and you can't just drop PPC code straight onto i586, be it x86 or x64, and expect to have it run well, you just can't do it.
Let me give an example of a game that I love...Just Cause 2. Now that game it is pretty obvious that it has been optimized for PC, as the PC game not only looks MUCH better than the console, but I've tried it on everything from a 2.8Ghz Netburst Pentium D to the latest AMD quads (before anyone screams Pirate! My friends watched me play it and they all bought it so they could experience the fun) and on all the systems it plays beautifully, on everything from a 9xxx Geforce (sorry I don't his exact make) through the ATI 4650,4830,4850, and 5770. On ALL it runs great, some may have less bling like smoke, but all are smooth and controls work well, from Vista HP 32 to Win 7 pro X64.
So I saw the first Just Cause for $6 at Amazon and thought "Yay, more Just Cause!" and picked it up, frankly even with me having an AMD quad with the 4850 it is still glitchy and skippy when compared to the new one, even though the new one has better graphics,why? Because you play it for 5 minutes you realize it is just a straight console port with the code even having the loading "jerk" in the same spots it had on the console. The sad part is one of the ports was for the original Xbox which is basically an HTPC, yet it STILL runs like ass, why?
Because it is still acting like it is running on a console with the same optimizations for the constrained CPU,RAM, and GPU of the console and not instead taking advantage of the platform and it is THAT, that right there, that is the problem. So while I feel sorry for anybody that works a shit job, and after reading "EA wife" I believe most game coder jobs ARE shitty, but still that is no excuse. Screaming about bare metal when you don't even use what you have is just the classic "throw more (insert cycles,CPU,RAM,GPU) at it!" which is just as much bullshit as "Intel giveth,MSFT taketh away". Well they tried that with Vista, didn't go over too well did it?
If you want us to buy your product then give us a product for our platform and not some console reguritation designed to play "lets screw them out of some cash" okay? because frankly there are thousands of games out there written for the PC platform that run excellent so I (and I bet many others) would prefer nothing at all than to waste $40+ on a retread that is about as enjoyable as a stale McDonald's cheeseburger. If so many other can do it and have done it in the past, what's the excuse for halfassing now?
And sorry about the length but after getting burnt so many times by console lameness that I have a whole shelf full of games I'll never play again it really bugs me.
Can I say something AC? As a game developer you can bitch all you want (in fact I'm gonna bitch about you in a minute) but I sure as hell don't trust your coding skills which means letting you have "bare metal access" so you can make my PC as crashy as Win9x is a big DO NOT WANT.
People seem to forget we've already been down this road and it was called DOS. Sure games ran crazy fast, and frankly could pull off graphics that you weren't able to imagine the hardware was capable of. The problem was one buggy game could bring it falling down and things like rebooting or even having to yank the power cord to get control of your PC after the game went FUBAR was SOP of the day. Do we REALLY want to go back to that, when games are already so drool worthy on PCs you can spend 30 minutes dying on a new game because you're too busy admiring the purty to play the thing?
Now for the ragging part: game developers suck I'm sorry but its true, you guys really really REALLY suck. You want us to trust you with bare metal when every damned game that comes out nowadays needs damned near the size of the game in fricking patches because your shit is so buggy? And for every ONE developer that puts out a TRUE PC PORT, you know, one actually designed to take advantage of the PC platform with decent controls and will upgrade and degrade gracefully depending on GPU we have two dozen shitball console ports that frankly all the "bare metal" in the world won't help since your code is designed for a different arch than what it is running on. That would be like the guys at SheepShaver bitching because OS9 doesn't run with native speed and control on Intel OSX. Well duh! One is for a PPC and the other x86!
So frankly IMHO both you and the AMD guy are so full of shit your eyes are brown. There is not a damned thing wrong with DirectX and these designers that are bitching about "bare metal" are most likely putting out shitty unoptimized console ports and then having the brass balls to bitch because their sloppy code doesn't run fast. Frankly do us both a favor and just don't bother, as I'd rather have no game at all than your shitty unoptimized console twaddle. When my quad core with an HD4850 struggles because of your crap console code it ain't the fault of DirectX, it is your fault for putting out lame console shit without bothering to optimize for the platform. So make the world a better place, either do the job right or don't do it at all. Me and the other PC gamers will thank you for it.
Oh Please! It is NOT FUD if there is a serious problem and the fact that Google is tossing copyright header files is in fact a serious problem as anyone with half a brain knows that USA copyright law is murky as hell when it comes to notices, EULAs, and altering the copyrights of someone else without permission which is what Google is doing.
Now will this cause someone problems down the road? Who knows, which is the whole point of the story as like tax laws you are lucky to get two different answers from three copyright attorneys when it comes to areas such as this. So it is NOT FUD if copyright lawyers are unsure if this is a "gotcha" or not which is what I took away from the articles.
Of course what I find funny as hell is there is already a serious gotcha in Android that FOSS advocates are either ignoring on purpose to spread Android or are simply ignorant of, either way it isn't good if you write FOSS code. What is the gotcha? Let me put it this way: notice anything...funny...about Android? Like how Google has gone out of their way to avoid GPL V3 and have made it clear there will be NO GPL V3 in any code Google touches? Why do you think that is?
I'll tell you why, it is so they can TiVo trick your rights away by using hardware lockdowns, that's why. try updating to the latest Android on Motorola phones, see what happens. Don't work does it? The simple fact is GPL V2 is now completely useless thanks to the TiVo trick making it so corporations can take away your freedoms while helping themselves to your code. Now I may be primarily a Windows guy but I do respect RMS's right to have his own license, and developers right to choose a license that agrees with their beliefs. Thanks to TiVo finding that loophole The GPL V2 is completely worthless because ANY corp can simply ignore it by putting code signing or other trivial tricks to lock down your machine!
So if these articles start the FOSS community taking a closer look at Google and their practices I'm ALL for it, because just because a corp uses some GPL code does NOT make them your friend nor a friend of the community. And if you are a coder use GPL V3 ONLY and push everyone around you releasing code to do the same. Because without the four freedoms you may as well just release as PD or BSD for all the freedom you'll have thanks to TiVo tricking. After all what good is Linux running on every cell if you can't actually modify, update, or change it in ANY way without being given explicit permission by the corps first? Hell you may as well just stick with Apple or MSFT if that is the case.
Thank you. Nice to see someone else had to deal with the crap, even if I wouldn't wish dealing with them for all the tea in China.
We didn't allow the passing or sharing of files since me and the fellow repairmen mods all had our own servers so if someone needed a file for a fix we could point them to the public server and have the files (along with step by step instructions, because in the days of Win9x some of those .VXD drivers could be a bear) waiting for them. At the time my boss had set up an INSANE 600 Gb (this was when the average drive was 40Gb and 80Gb would break you on price) filled with just about every driver from Win3.x to Win2K (this was long before the days of driverpacks) set up in this monster Frankenstein cage made up of two ATX towers spot welded together. It was VERY cool!
But the reason I ended up passing on the channel and walking away was after the "AZ Lolita" we ended up getting crapflodded by "Hi I'm a (insert age) girl, want to see my naked pics?" kind of crap which I have NO doubt was nothing but cops and which quickly made wading through their bullshit to get to the actual people needing help more trouble than it was worth. I heard later the channel closed down soon after because the mods ended up spending more time blocking cops than they did helping people and like me got sick of it.
Pretty sad when you can't even set up a simple site like that or like your trading ancient oldies without it being filled with cops trolling. I wonder how much of our taxpayer's money is blown each year for these "sting" which as I said if were anything like mine were the classic definition of entrapment. I hate kiddie pervs but I bet if the cops spent just 1/6th the time actually going after those that touch kids instead of trolling forums the world would be a better place.
Nice to see that I wasn't alone in dealing with this shit though and I wouldn't doubt the CP pushers on your site were cops as I talked to another of the former mods a year later who told me that the "AZ Lolita" was pushing a crapload of CP that actually had a .BAT script in it (as he ended up cleaning a PC the Lolita infected) that would shotgun the files all over the drive. My guess is it was to make sure they would be able to easily find a copy of the files even if they tried to delete them, since copies would be dumped in weird places like subfolders on Win32. really scummy crap if you ask me.
He said, and I quote "volunteer for a non-profit that organizes Model UN conferences for high school students which means that running wires since we are talking about a bunch that moves from place to place is right out, as is cell phone since we are talking HS kids and most schools frown on telling the kids to bring their phones.
I'm shocked nobody here has thought about going "old school" with it...light guns. The tech is old but its cheap, a couple of colored LEDs connected to a couple of buttons and a target to aim at. If you wanted to get fancy you could probably use a MSFT Kinetic as the target and have someone at rent a coder cook up some counting software, shouldn't be hard. After all you have only 3 possible answers...yes, no, abstain. Hell if you wanted to be extra cheap you could use a single LED apiece and have the LED pulse a set number for each choice. Might even be easier that way since the Kinetic will only have to count pulses.
So rent a coder, BGMicro for the parts, and a Kinetic, seems like the bottom of the barrel cheapest you can go and have it do want you want wireless without sinking in the dough. Hell we have enough coders here I'm sure someone would be nice enough to offer to whip up the code since you're helping kids and all.
So why not look at one of the AMD offerings? The GPU on the AMD side is better anyway and from the sounds of it what you are doing isn't gonna need max performance or you wouldn't be looking at onboard. I recently helped my oldest pick out a nice Turion dual laptop and it runs great, has an HD4250 with 256Mb discrete RAM, and gets around 6 hours on a battery.
Now that the new Bobcat and Bulldozer units are out you'll get even longer battery life and even better graphics since the minimum is an HD6250 APU. Also don't forget Intel has been caught rigging its compiler AND bribing OEMs, so if you actually want there to be competition supporting the little guy that has been playing by the rules might be a good thing.
Actually the AMD IGPs aren't half bad. Sure they'll never beat a discrete but while I was waiting for my discrete to show up I was playing Bioshock, FEAR, Swat 4, L4D, pretty much anything I wanted and that was with last years 4250 onboard. The new APU chips have an HD6xxx IIRC, anywhere from an HD6250 to an HD6550 depending on chip.
And the reason nobody allows you to write directly to hardware is we already tried that back in the days of DOS. What you ended up with was a single bit of buggy code could take the whole system down with VERY little trouble. Now add in the malware that would be written to try to hide in the GPU, and you'd have a mess.
The reason you can do that with an X360 OS because it is "DRM...in a box" which means all code is approved by MSFT and no approval? No run. Personally I'd rather NOT have my desktop programs have to be given a seal of approval from MSFT, thank you VERY much. There is a cost to everything, and the cost of having the freedom to run what you want is having to use abstraction since the OS has to have a way to control the program.
But don't worry I have a feeling you may get to try it that way if you switch to Apple, as I have a feeling OSX will end up being replaced by iOS and the app store. Then you'll only run what Apple approves of and I'm sure that having that level of control will make for faster access. Personally I'll take freedom over speed, thanks anyway.
If you're a cop then you should know how many assholes are cops and thus it shouldn't surprise you. I still have a nice scar down the back of my head for being a "God damned hippie riding with a nigger" so I hope it doesn't offend you when I say if I saw one of your kind bleeding in the street I would calmly walk away.
Frankly you and your fellow cops should be ashamed at the "thin blue line" wall of silence protect the scum cops bullshit. look up "the largest gang in America" to see why so many of us can't stand you. There you will see more than 3 and a half hours of cops breaking bones, tasering, and generally acting like gangbangers with badges. Those of us that have gotten a taste of it would frankly rather deal with the thugs than have ANYTHING to do with you.
I have lived on the wrong side of the tracks more than once, dealt with mob, gangbangers, thugs, and all the other assorted nasties and you know what? They didn't go out of their way to be pricks unlike your fellow blue wearing thugs.
And whether this person was a cop should be pretty obvious since I pointed out many were busted a year later by the Scotsdale AZ PD and whether you call it enticement or not it is STILL bullshit and a mockery of our constitution. When I was a kid there was decent cops, but all took early retirement to get away from the gangbangers. Now in my home town half the cops live like Tony Montana thanks to us being on the meth highway, and I can't even remember the last time a cop spent so much as a minute in jail here, no matter what they do.
Want us to respect you? Then follow the constitution and throw every dirty junkie gangbanger cop in the jail as fast as you can. Otherwise the rest of us will look at you for what you are...the biggest gang in America. And I'd say skirting the law and even breaking it to "make the bust" is SOP now in the USA.
If you can't see the problem with this AC you are a major dumbass. The Paypal account was being used to help his defense and now those people can be harassed by Sony. Imagine if those that donated to Manning's defense get put on a terror watchlist? After all Manning "aided terrorists" and Wikileaks is a "terrorist organization" according to some of our more clueless congressmen, so if judges are allowed to hand out lists of who has donated to a defense to the other side you have just killed ANY chance of a non rich person getting a fair trial.
The whole damned point of setting up these Paypal accounts is to give those who cannot afford a defense a chance to fight back against the rich and powerful. if you start handing out lists of everyone that donated you have created a chilling effect that will ensure others in the future won't get enough donations to buy a stick of gum.Sadly in the USA no money means no defense, as I wouldn't let a public pretender defend my dog, and in civil cases you don't even get that. So handing out donation lists is a BAD IDEA and shouldn't be allowed, okay AC?
Well there are other things besides low tech cards you know. As soon as we finish laying down the tracks and getting a gold master for my new band I'll be having some more cards printed up like I had with my last band which were great. The "card" was actually a sleeve that held a business card sized CD that had three singles on it, both in standard audio and MP3 form. It was a great way to network with other musicians and get gigs, and the card was unique enough everybody seemed to hang onto it.
So while I can see some giving up regular cards for e-cards and the like there are still plenty of ways to make a card stand out while with all the electronic back and forth we do today it really wouldn't be hard to get lost in the noise. I had a friend who used the same style card to pass out his resume complete with code snippets so they could see his work. Pretty neat way to do it and get yourself noticed.
Riiiight, just love the script kiddie "it didn't happen to me so I don't believe it" horsehit. First of all who the hell cares what your warez pushing botnet herding script kiddie ass thinks? Did anyone ask your opinion? Frankly it was scum like you that ruined the nice free net we had going so STFU.
Second of all the whole fucking point of the channel was to be for noobs and average Joes who were needing help with computer problems and could get that help without being charged per minute or dealing with 50 tons of spyware and drivebys like what we were dealing with during IE on Win9x being the top combo.
So we weren't herding botnets, spreading warez, playing BOFH and finding new ways to ban people or other dickish douchebag behavior like you yourself are bragging about. because we were dealing with noobs we had to deal with a lot of clueless who didn't read the fucking rules and didn't know shit, that was the whole point of the channel so why would I go though all that horseshit to cook up banlists? Before the douchebags and spammers like yourself spread like the damned clap circa 2000 we frankly didn't really have that kind of trouble so we didn't bother.
So you don't believe? Fine don't really care what a warez pusher thinks, especially one that brags about infecting the people I was trying to help and running botnets. For the rest of /. that is the way it went down, and later I found out that nearly every site connected to that IRC node ended up having a little visit from the "AZ Lolita" as we called her and those that took the bait did get popped less than a year later under a dragnet run by.....drumroll...the Scotsdale AZ PD!
So if you want to believe the cops are really nice guys that never entrap to score a quota or impress a DA? That is your business. As someone who has traveled most of the USA and had my head cracked more than once for being "A god damned hippie driving with a nigger" I know better.
Not to mention you'll still need GTK 3.2 installed on the target machine, which makes it NO different than .NET or Silverlight. Hell I would say Silverlight comes out ahead as unlike this I have been able to run The Silverlight OS in a browser demo on multiple browsers with NO plugins (tested on FF, Comodo Dragon, and Opera) as long as Silverlight is installed on the OS.
So I don't really think they score much bragging rights here when others have not only done it but done it better by making theirs browser agnostic, and if they had truly followed the HTML V5 standard then it should work just as well on IE 9 and Chrome as you pointed out. The fact that it only works on FF 4 smells like a hack to me, and we know how well those end up working out.
You know, as much as I hate kiddie pervs having to actually deal with the cops when running an IRC chat room during the 90s I can say if my experience is typical (and I have no reason to feel it isn't) then entrapment is SOP among the cops when it comes to this crap. My example:
My boss at the time let me run an IRC chat to keep me from being bored between fixes at the shop so I set up A Windows repair chat which was VERY clearly marked as such, had strict rules on the layout of posts (name of OS, brief description of problem, be ready to follow instructions given, etc) when this poster comes on claiming to be a 15 year old girl comes on and start seriously hitting on everyone there. I tell them I"I don't know where you think you are but this a Windows repair site for people that are having serious computer issues, not a sex site. If you're not having PC problems please find another site."
Well after this the "girl" starts targeting me directly, one filthy suggestion after another, offering to send dirty pics of herself and asking for pics of me, etc. Meanwhile I'm dealing with a 28 year old mother of two that is practically in tears because the used PC she picked up for her family is BSODing about every 4 minutes like clockwork (turned out to be a bad graphics driver install) causing her to lose connection and having to have her son hook her back up so I have NO time for this shit and after being interrupted for the dozenth time by the little slut I just said "Look kid, I frankly don't give a shit WHAT you look like, A I have a nice woman I'm quite happy with, B, I don't date women more than 4 years younger than me, and C This is a fucking repair site not a dating site so get lost already!"
So the screen goes silent and I manage to get the freaked out mom fixed and then up pops for the 15 year old "I'm Sgt Maria whatever of the AZ polic dept. I just wanted to say you are the only one who has failed to take my bait and its nice to know there are still guys out there that aren't pervs". Well then I promptly gave the bitch a dressing down about the constitution and entrapment and banned her IP address as well as posted it to every site I could think up, just daring her ass to say anything about it!
So don't take the cops word on these things, as dealing with them myself I can tell you they'll do everything short of sending underage girls to your home trying to score busts. This one was offering tons of pics of "her" including dildo shots which I have NO DOUBT was CP they busted off someone and was using for their little "sting" as bait. It was the most blatant case of entrapment I'd ever seen, and as I said this was a place where the average post was "Sound failed need help!" or "BSOD every time I launch browser, help please!" so they HAD NO REASON to even be there. It was total bullshit and after dealing with them first hand frankly I wouldn't take a cop's word on one of these things if they said it was raining and I was ass deep in water.
Noooo, you are being called a shill because your entire post reads like a press release and normal folks that aren't marketing drones don't actually talk that way.
Hell I've been a Windows guy since Win 3.x yet the folks here (well except for a few FOSSies that believe anyone who isn't dancing with RMS in a field of tulips must be a corporate spy sent from a secret reprogramming facility hidden under Redmond) know I'm not a shill because not only do I not speak marketingese I'm more than happy to point out like every other company on the planet MSFT has put out some real stinkers (Oh Vista how I hated thee, let me count the ways) as well as some gems (Windows 7 rocks).
So unless you spend your 9 to 5 as a marketing drone or have spent so much time ass deep in corporate butt kissing you honestly think you boss's booty smells like roses, well then folks have a legitimate right to call you things like shill and astroturfer. Nearly all the major corp have been involved in astroturfing and your post reads like an ad cooked up on Madison avenue. Hell you might as well have ended it with "Microsoft: We build excitement!"
As for TFA? Cute video but frankly getting burnt having to clean up IE 6 infections for years after MSFT abandoned IE after winning the browser war frankly I just don't trust them in the browser dept anymore. I have also found due to the faster update turnaround of the other guys my customers infection rate goes down when IE goes bye bye.
Now I give out Mozilla Firefox but frankly after all of the memory sucking and bloat of the last couple of 3.6.x releases I'm testing Chromium based Comodo Dragon, which has the sandboxing and low rights like IE and a lower memory and CPU footprint than FF. Add in the fact it runs both Adblock Plus and ForecastFox which are the two most popular plugins around here? If FF isn't better on the memory and CPU hogging come 4.0 RTM I'll be switching everyone over to Dragon. I already give out Dragon to all Vista and 7 users since FF doesn't support the safer low rights mode.
But go back to IE? Sorry, fool me once and all. They'd have to do a hell of a lot better than just some HTML V5 fish demos for me to risk IE again for my customers and family, and the fact they've abandoned XP while everyone else works fine on XP makes me just dislike it even more.
And what if the TOS is buried in a filing cabinet in the basement behind the door of an unused lavatory with "beware of the leopard" on it? I'd agree with you if the TOS were required to use plain language but instead they are nearly always written in such legalese bullshit you'd need to hire a contract lawyer just to translate the stupid thing.
Now if you want to pass a law that the TOS only counts if it falls under the "reasonable person" rule, that is that a reasonable person with an average HS education can read it and make heads or tails of it then I agree it is buyer beware, but most of the things have so much legalese bullshit you'd need a paddle-boat to cut through the muck.
You know, I'm starting to wonder if that isn't the entire point of those reality TV shows and making money is just a secondary goal. Think about it: What better way for a government to keep their populace docile and willing to put up with shitty service and treatment than by numbing their brains with the TV equivalent of Quaaludes?
I had friends that had no idea there was an earthquake in Japan or unrest in the middle east until it showed up on FB because their non work hours are FB and reality TV. I tried watching one for a whole 15 minutes and had to walk away, the levels of stupid were hurting my brain. Hell half the USA could have been rioting and they wouldn't know it if it wasn't in front of their house or brought up on an episode of Jersey Shore. yuck
As for TFA I simply won't even look at a $50 game anymore, even though I can afford it. There are simply too many choices and between Amazon, Good Old Games, and Steam I simply have so many choices in the $20 and less pile I could never go through them all. When I could pick up Bioshock II for $2.99 or Prince of Persia the complete Sands Of Time series for $6, why would I blow $50 on a single game?
By the time I'm halfway through the backlog of impulse buys I've gotten from sales there are new sales and that $50 game I can get for $10. For me $50 games simply make NO sense and provide me with no utility, as nobody cares whether you play a game now or 6 months from now and since I prefer single player I don't have to worry about what my friends want to play online. But by offering great deals like this Steam managed to get me as a customer and get money they never would have, all by simply offering Portal I for free. Between Steam, Amazon, and GOG I simply have no need for $50 games anymore and I'm sure I'm not alone.
Except if you would have bothered to read his link Gabe Newell himself stated that at 75" off the made 15% MORE than the game made at the original release price because the amount of sales were so huge (1470% increases in sales is nothing to sneeze at) and you are also forgetting that once they have your product you have a possible source of future revenue by selling them more discount games as well as DLC.
For example Valve got me to try Steam when they offered the free Portal download and now I'm up to nearly 20 games, simply by picking up the specials. This is money they would have never saw because I didn't have Steam and didn't see their ads and had been shopping at Good Old Games and Amazon exclusively.
So I would say that the answer is right in front of their faces, but like so many industries pure bald faced greed is keeping them from making increased profits. Same as so many of the teleco/cableco duopolies like the one in my area could make massively increased profits by offering lower tier packages affordable to the poor, but because of their greed and their "damn everything but the quarterly earnings reports!" they constantly RAISE prices and run more and more customers out of their markets.
Sadly unlike with the black market known as piracy there is no option to escape the duopolies and in my area the cheapest dialup is now $60 and cheapest broadband is now $80 with a ridiculous contract required so a good 70% in my area simply don't have any Internet at all. But just as if the price were lowered on my net connection I would be much more likely to look at their video offers so too would I be buying even more games than I am now if the price were lowered, and not by simply distributing the same money onto more games, but because once you hit my sweet spot I'll impulse buy your game whereas at $50 I won't give it a second glance. .
It has already gotten to the point that if a game is $50 I simply won't buy, and at $40 it better have excellent reviews and be something I really want, at $20 I will give them my CC for a decent game easily, and at $10 I'm willing to take chances on games that may be stinkers. But the stage may already be set to change that, as Steam has been offering so many good games for cheap on their "midweek madness" that I doubt I'll be paying more than $10 a game. there are simply too many titles out there I haven't tried along with a backlog of games I've gotten from GOG and Amazon to keep me busy if the only games are expensive.
We have a saying for what you are advocating and it is called security through obscurity and if you are gonna go that route you are better off using AROS or Ecomstation or any of the other even more obscure OSes.
Of course that is also ignoring there is a downside to STO, and that is when a bug DOES come along you're fucked just as there were several thousand that got bit by the KDE theme virus, even though it was on a relatively obscure site that required an activity that many don't do.
I would argue that using the latest and greatest, Windows 7 X64 with a good AV such as Avast or Comodo and low rights browser like IE or Chromium based you will be more protected in the long run since the OS is hardened and has much tougher security thanks to DEP, ASLR, low rights mode, and file and registry virtualization. You can even harden it further if you like (I've been using this for months, if you have friend on Windows 7 I would recommend you send them this link) by adding Structured Exception Handling Overwrite Protection (SEHOP) .
So while I'm glad it works for you there is a reason why an OS is obscure and in the case of Linux it is because it is a giant PITA on the desktop. Six month update deathmarch, updates that fix one thing and break three more, drivers that rarely survive updates, the fact that it is pretty much useless without CLI (if you don't believe me disable your access to Bash for a year. I had a couple of Linux advocates try it and they had to re-enable in less than 6 months as they couldn't fix anything without Bash), in short for the vast majority it just doesn't work. After all I can make a 100% secure machine by cutting all the wires and burying it in a hole filled with concrete, but that doesn't make the machine very useful does it?
I wonder how much of that is because Michelangelo is old? So much of what existed in the time is lost forever for all we know he was just decent compared to what they had, it is kinda like judging ancient Greek or Roman art.
Well as for the subject of TFA, I would point out the original Bioshock and Deus Ex. How anyone could say those two games weren't art is beyond me, as they carried you into their world and made you think, especially Bioshock with the undercurrent of what it means to have free will.
I could name plenty of others that I would consider "pop art" in that they didn't rise to the level of the above were fun while still trying new things and finding new ways to express themselves which to me is one of the marks of art, to try to find new ways and new expressions, such as No One Live Forever which gave us a heroine that wasn't just a walking set of tits and which replaced the gore which was SOP of the time for humor, or Nosferatu which while everyone else treated horror as a slasher flick used sound, lighting, and a randomly generated castle complete with randomly generated monsters to make us feel we had stepped into a 1930s Universal Monster movie, complete with excellent film score which added to the dark undertones.
But to judge games simply as trash for mass consumption (Sorry Ebert, in this case you're full of shit) just because few attempt to try to reach the level of art would be as unfair as judging film as a medium for art by the 99.998% of movies released that are just cheap thrills or just plain trash. Remember for every Godfather there are probably 5,000 "Dude, Where's my car?" or worse Battlefield:Earth.
Does that makes films unable to produce art? No, and I would argue as more of these excellent engines are released free for public use and the Internet allows for groups of like minded individuals to come together we will see the birth of an indie movement where just like the indie movies the budgets won't be high or the effects top notch but they will come up with decent stories or new ideas. For an example there is the classic "They Hunger" mod for Half Life, which frankly gave me more creeps and scares than nearly all the horror movies of that time put together, while having a decent story and hellishly scary atmosphere.
Frankly if any of them are reading this I would have NO problem paying $20-$30 for a game with Far Cry I level graphics or even No One Lives Forever II graphics if the story is good and gives me a new experience. But to judge the medium by the likes of Activision, where the CEO is a major douchenozzle that has said milking any idea into a cookie cutter franchise is his one and only goal? Really not fair to the medium.
Actually it is a damned smart thing to do and here is why: If you look up the talks that AMD released right after they bought ATI one of the things they stressed is how they would change development by instead of sinking huge amount of R7D into the "ePeen card" and then having to figure out how to selectively cripple it to fit the lower markets they would instead focus on the mid market chip where the vast majority of sale are and then simply add memory, a bigger pipe, a second GPU, etc to ramp UP to the ePeen instead of ramping DOWN.
Now what this does is give them a BIG advantage over Nvidia in that they aren't having to cook up an uber expensive GPU and then cripple it, which still costs you a top o' the line GPU, but instead by focusing on the MOR chip it costs less per chip and makes it trivial if you do need to cripple for a lower niche as you aren't having to change that much.
So I would say it is a damned smart business move, as they can sell more chips without alteration and can simply add features to make higher cards than taking features away which is usually harder to do. This equals big savings which AMD has been passing onto the consumer in the form of plenty of baddass MOR cards in the $150 or less market, which is the biggest market by far.