But Linux is a BAD IDEA as all consoles HAVE TO HAVE DRM or you won't get the major players on board and that means the "FOSSie Faction" as I call them will be up in arms and maybe even some lawsuits over GPL violations.
A MUCH better choice would be to do what Sony did and use BSD, that way they can still have the DRM required while sharing the non DRM bits, just as Apple shares the low level stuff but doesn't share their GUI. If they go Linux and DRM free they can say goodbye to Activision, EA, and ubisoft and that would be the kiss of death. After all who is gonna buy a Steambox that only plays indie titles when you can get one of those little Android consoles for $100 that will do the same?
Call it what I do, the Xbox N which is short for "No way in hell I'm call call the third one 'the one' as its stupid and douchey"....as you can see xbox N tends to roll better off the tongue than the full name.
Well I'm not a scientist but with a little common sense being applied and knowing what we know it makes sense. After all what do we know so far? Well we know there is this HUGE band of rock at the outer edge of our system called the Oort Cloud, there is also another huge band of rocks in the inner system which may have been a failed planet. If going through the arm caused changes to the gravitational fields way out there in the oort cloud it probably wouldn't take much to get one of those chunks moving, after all that is where it is believed all our long term comets came from so there had to be something in the past that got the comets going. So if you look at how big a period we are looking at and how much debris we have in the inner belt the idea that going through the arm may occasionally cause one of those big inner rocks to get flung at us,possibly by being hit by something fling out of the oort? Really doesn't sound too implausible to me.
To me the thing I find really interesting is how many times our friend Mr Jupiter has saved us by being a big giant garbage collector and pulling all this crap into it that could have easily headed our way if it wasn't there. i honestly wouldn't be surprised if it turned out for every extinction event there was probably thousands that didn't happen because Jupiter sucked it up or slung it off in another direction,given how many times we have seen impacts in just the little bit of time we've been able to see that far out.
So I wish them all the luck, maybe if we can find out exactly what events cause these maybe we can avoid it happening to us, as while I doubt we'd see 100% fatalities of the human race one really nasty impact could easily send us back to the dark ages.
Well that is where you and I differ, as I go by the "right to swing your fist ends at my nose" school of thought. If the German people, who elected the Nazis by a landslide, wanted to go along with their insane ideas? A country should have the right to choose its leaders, but Germany's rights ended when they began subjugating the neighbors.
As for child porn? just because BF Afghanistan allows raping kids don't make it right but if they want to allow that in their country that is their right, just as we have the right to not allow it in our country. Where I think the laws have gone astray is for manga and other drawings which to me is classic thoughtcrime to ban those, and i think its stupid that I can marry a 16 year old but can't take a pic of my wife naked, that is fucked up. But I think we can both agree there is a pretty big difference between some 16 year old flashing her tits and sexting it to her BF and somebody raping a kid and filming it. Again if it requires someone else to be victimized to create it? NOT free speech IMHO but at the same time you go get some legal age girl to act out a rape fantasy? Should be protected speech as nobody is being victimized to create it.
Ultimately as my grandfather taught me you HAVE to protect the speech you can't stomach as it is that speech which is always used as a justification for curbing free speech. After all no reason to protect popular speech,nobody is gonna be arrested or banned for saying the populist tact, its always the scumbags, the Nazis, pedos, terrorists, etc that are used as an excuse and it NEVER ends, the same law they say will "only target terrorists" as we have seen quickly targets everybody, so no matter what your view on the subject we MUST remain vigilant or lose what rights we have.
That is why I NEVER use my real email on my smartphone, I only use my Gmail which is for forums and spamdump sites and i have it set to not sync as i have a backup app for keeping contacts and the like. BTW if you are on Android its called "Super backup" and its free, works pretty good and lets me just send my backups to my email as an encrypted file which is nice.
As far as linkedIn even when i was working corporate I honestly didn't use it enough to make it worth keeping, I'd have some contact ask about it but when i replied "How much time do you REALLY spend on that site?" it would turn out it was just buzzword bingo, everybody THOUGHT they needed it but then with a little thought they realized they hardly ever touched the thing. it really doesn't surprise me to see them being spammy, the few times i used it all i ended up with is some Chinese scammer or other fly by night crap, its really kinda pointless, at least for me.
The Atari VCS had analog sticks, yet you REALLY think that would give you an advantage? You kinda missed the point, here is a WHOOSH for you, its not the "analog versus digital" you should be looking at, its the "cheap and laggy versus expensive and non laggy" which you should be focusing on and the response time of a keyboard and mouse just curbstomps the average X360 and PS3 stock controller because they were made with cost and NOT performance as the most important metric!
If you don't believe me you might want to look up what happened when Sega allowed the Dreamcast players to play games with the PC players, they were slaughtered so badly they pulled it after less than 2 months. I mean why in the fuck do you think with damned near every game being cross platform now that you console guys aren't allowed to play with us PC gamers? Because we pimpslap the shit out of you because our controls aren't laggy. Several times over the years, in multiple genres, has PC and console playing together been tried and so far they have yet to find any genre where speed or response time has any effect on gameplay at all that the PC controls don't open ye old can of whoop ass on the laggy as fuck game console controllers.
Now if you spent over $100 USD on a third party controller? Then this doesn't apply to you but I bet you are like the majority and use the controllers that came with the system and I'm sorry but they suck, they really do. When you compare the response time and degrees of movement between your average 1600 DPI mouse and your shitty controller? No comparison, same goes for even my clicky clack versus the button input on your controller. Sorry pal but console makers only care about BOM, they don't care about performance.
Sorry but I block those, after all the crap we have learned about how much data Google is hanging onto and their bugging the piss out of me to use my real name everywhere (gotten bad enough I keep a separate browser just for YouTube) I wouldn't allow a Google ad if you paid me and I switched to bing for search. I figure i don't have a MSFT email and a good 90% of my searches are work related so less data to track.
That was what I was thinking. They probably used something similar to the "Yahoo Porn Bug" that I wrote about in my journal in which some porn sites were using a hidden iFrame to get into yahoo using auto-complete and between that and using an open session cookie that would cover a pretty good chunk of the users.
I'm just glad I gave them my spamdump email and quit using it after a month or so, that place seemed awful spammy to me and if you can't keep your site going without spamming folks? Then frankly you probably aren't worth messing with in the first place.
And those people DON'T BUY AAA TITLES and thus aren't the audience...your point? Grandma won't buy a copy of GTA V, News At 11.
That doesn't change the fact you have piles of money being left on the table (or in reality given to saints 4 instead) because they haven't released it for PC and by the time they do? Most won't give a fuck. and again look at the Steam hardware survey, they cover everything from IGP to i7 and you'll see the vast majority while having relatively modest specs (most GPUs are around the HD7750 lvl) still curbstomp anything on the console so PCs needing more hardware is bullshit...unless the devs can't code for shit, just ask PS3 owners about GTA IV about how great Rockstar codes.
for the record my PC cost less than $500 and even spending that little and having an HD4850 which is nearly 6 years old even i curbstomp the consoles because honestly? The consoles weren't even cutting edge when they were released, much less 7 years on. frankly I slap a whole $100 into mine for an HD7790 and I'll be curbstomping the PS4 and Xbox N as they went with the crazy weak jaguar (based on bobcat, a chip built for netbooks and NOT even Celeron levels) so this next gen is gonna be blown away that much faster, in fact I'd say a good half or better using Steam now could beat the new systems when it comes to FLOPS.
THIS is why I'm against it as not only does it rob you of privacy but it DOESN'T EVEN WORK when it comes to targeting ads so its fucking pointless!
The first time the whole "targeted ads" became a big thing I set up a browser at the shop with ZERO blocking, just so I could see if it actually worked. the results? Its actually WORSE than just picking ads based on what site they are on! For examples when my laptop was getting long in the tooth I decided to get an AMD netbook (as I had tried the Atom and it was painfully slow) so i did a little research and then for nearly 8 months I got nothing but ads for netbooks, long after I had quit searching for netbooks because i had bought one! My nephews use the shop PC only ONCE to find a release date for a game? i got console ads non stop for months, my mom when she came by the shop does a search to find out when the next book in a series comes out? Ditto.
The sad part is when i blocked all the "targeting" the ads got BETTER because they had only what site i was on to go for! As someone who works retail this whole thing just baffles the shit out of me, basic common sense says if I'm reading an article about SSDs you should show me ads for...drumroll...SSDs! How hard is that? Instead I got ads for car insurance, cell phones, anything and everything EXCEPT what I was fricking reading about and thus shown I had interest in! The only one I have seen do it with any skill at all is Amazon with their "well people that looked at this often buy that, would you like to see that?" and a good 9 times out of 10 yes i WOULD like to see that, as its actually relevant to what I'm fricking looking at!
This is why I'll block this crap just like I've blocked third party adverts, not because i give a crap if the ad company knows I'm pricing C2D chips for an upgrade for a customer but because the crap doesn't work. in a way it reminds me of the old MSN Search...anybody remember how badly that thing would guess? I'd have just done three searches looking for data storage so you would think when I typed in "D" it would give me data storage as the top option, right? instead it was like word salad, it would spew out "dog, delivery, dollar bills, duck ala orange!" and that is just what the targeted ads do only worse, as it'll ignore what I'm actively looking for and instead either give me ads for something I bought last year or ads for some stupid little thing I looked at once 6 months ago and promptly quit caring about. This entire thing is just dumb, doesn't increase the likelihood of getting a sale, and is generally a giant waste of time.
I think the AC was asking why GPUs are always locked and proprietary and the answer is simple...patents. Everything from S3 compression on up is patented up the ying yang so to make a GPU with more power than an Atari VCS you end up in the patent minefield. Even companies that try to open their chips have to watch out for the minefield, look at how AMD had to have a lawyer go over their specs with a fine tooth comb to make sure they didn't release anything which could step on HDCP, as that is owned by Intel and licensed under an NDA.
So the reason why you won't see open GPUs is simple, it can't be done as its all patented and licensed under NDAs.
You can get the same thing on a Bobcat board for $65, and those are dual core, support 8-16GB of RAM depending on the board, and most come with HDMI.
I'm sorry but there is just no way to spin a single core Atom with GMA (graphics My Ass) chip for $200 as a good thing, its just too overpriced and underpowered. if I had to guess Intel took the chips they couldn't move and dumped them here and just like the netbook which Intel crippled their offerings so they wouldn't compete with Celeron I wouldn't be surprised if some PHB made the selling price high, again to keep competition away from their precious Celery.
Yeah no crap, AMD put out their own X86 micro last year (sorry I can't find the link, my Google Fu is off ATM) and at $199 it had a 64bit OOO Bobcat APU with a Radeon GPU powerful enough to do 1080p. This thing literally looks like its made from the chips that Intel couldn't sell and the price just adds insult to injury. At least the Bobcat held 4GB of RAM and had enough graphical muscle to be used for most video tasks. I have one of the E350s and with fast memory you can even do some halfway decent gaming on them, I play the Torchlights and Portals on mine no problem.
Speaking of the E series if you don't absolutely HAVE to have micro you can pick up an E350 board, complete with a PCI-E slot and the ability to hold 16GB of DDR 3 (kinda overkill IMHO) and its only $65 shipped. I have built several units with these boards, both HTPCs and office boxes, and I can say they are pretty damned nice. They are great for getting rid of those aging P4s many places still have and at just 18w under load it pulls less maxed out than a P4 did at idle. They also have plenty of graphical power, they make great media tank HTPCs and are even good for casual gaming, they also support hybrid crossfire so if you want even more graphics power you can slap in a dirt cheap HD5450 and be able to play a surprising number of games on the thing.
But $200 for a 32bit Atom with a GMA 600? That is beyond lame, hell its not even a dual core.
Well WTF do you call their billionaire CEOs handing American public the bill for their Lear jet? fucking charity? I don't give a shit HOW you word it, its douchebag behavior and their sorry asses need to be brought before a court, have to pay ten times what they got in fines, and if there was ANY justice left in this country somebody would be going to jail.
Of course that is ignoring the truth of this country, if a poor man steals $500 he gets 10 years, if a rich man steals 500 million he get an awards banquet.
Oh bullshit! You may think its the best thing since sliced bread but for every guy like you that will beat the thing there are a good 100 that will get bored halfway through and end up dropping the game, never to return. This has been documented and just because you are a fanboy of the series will NOT change those figures. For the record i have GTA III, GTA:VC, and GTA:SA, know how many of those I finished? NONE, that is how many, as it never fails but the GTA games always end up feeling like a slog once you get a little passed the halfway point. The second a game starts feeling like I'm punching a clock instead of playing a game? I'm out of there and the figures show I'm far from being alone in that sentiment.
For the record the only sandbox games i had enough of a fun time playing the missions to complete were Just Cause II and Saints Row games, JCII because they kept ramping up the "cool guys don't look at explosions" badass-o-meter and with the saints games the missions kept getting more and more batshit so I stuck it out just to see how crazy they got by the end. With the GTA games it always felt like you had seen all the best stuff by the halfway point and they started feeling repetitive so i bailed. Just because this guy doesn't feel its some epic adventure doesn't change the fact that the majority probably won't see the end of GTA V anymore than I saw the end of GTA III-GTA:SA.
Sorry Miss AC, that argument would have held water 5 years ago but it does NOT when consoles are so long in the tooth. hell my youngest boy's bargain basement quad (hell the whole system cost less than $400 after MIR) would curbstomp the X360 and PS3 and his HD7750 (which cost a whole $80) would run rings around the GPUs of the consoles. Hell my HD4850 would run rings around the consoles and its nearly 6 years old!
You look at the hardware listed on the Steam hardware survey, which is where any dev frankly should be looking to find out what PC gamers are packing? A good 70%+ of the PC gamers out there are running hardware that would just slaughter either current gen console by a pretty large margin. This is what happens when you keep a console in circulation a lot longer than it should be, even those low end Athlon quads and Core i3s would just pimpslap the shit out of your average console.
Of course this is ignoring the rotting elephant in the room, which is Rockstar can't code for shit. the most infamous being GTA IV of course but frankly when you look at the quality of the graphics and the number of NPCs and vehicles on screen and how much power it is using? Rockstar is just shitty at coding, simple as that. With so many to choose from in the sandbox genre it makes it all the more obvious, just load up something like Just Cause II where you have this huge scenic island and compare the huge landscapes and heavily populated areas to the GTA games and you'll see the problem is NOT the PC, its the fact that Rockstar is just shitty coders.
I don't know, maybe I'm weird, but I love FPS games, play them constantly (just blasted through some Borderlands II last night, hence why I'm a dreary eyed zombie at work right now) but I just don't get what the big fucking whoop was about the Halo series. The guns were VERY "pew pew" and just didn't have any real power behind them, the vehicles all handled like ass, the writing was VERY predictable, the levels kinda boring and other than a few cute lines from the little fat minions (which got old REAL fast as they had such limited dialog) the whole thing just screamed "generic shooter" to me. I had both Halo I and II and frankly after a single play through I was "is that it? Really?" and promptly uninstalled them never to go back.
So I really don't get why there was such a big hoopla over those games when the whole thing to me felt about as special as a Mickey D's combo, bland,tasteless, and boring. Hell if anything I'd say they should be looked down upon for pushing that whole "two gun" thing which even in the context of that game made no damned sense! You telling me a guy in fricking power armor can't carry more than a single rifle and a pistol? Really? Hell give me a backpack to drop the ammo in and even my old behind can carry more weapons than that!
Uhhh...go to Craigslist and type in "cracked (name of console)" or "Jailbroken (name of console)" and there ya go, you don't have to know jack shit except where to meet the guy to pick it up. Since I do a lot of HTPC installs i get to see the inside of a lot of homes and I can tell you that the X360 is one of the most pirated platforms out there, PS3 less so but even out here in BF AR I've sen more cracked consoles than i could count in folk's living rooms. With a cheap pre-cracked console one trip to TPB and some blank discs and you are good to go friend, its really not difficult.
Keyboard stomps a controller, sorry but it does. if we were to race in something like Burnout Paradise, you on controller while I used a keyboard? i'd murder you and the reason why is response time. With a keyboard i can pop between the handbrake and the gas insanely fast which makes drifts as smooth as butter and with all those game controllers you seem to get a tiny lag and with a game where you are dodging incoming traffic at over 200MPH? Lag equals death.
Hell if anything I've found you take those console racing games and put them on the PC as long as the devs make the controls keyboard compatible (for an example of why that is important see TP:Sons Of Liberty sometime,where anything but a 360 controller will cause the game to become unresponsive for up to several seconds on any fast movement as the game translates your input,hell you even go into key bindings and it shows an X360 controller) the PC game will often be piss easy simply because the much quicker response makes what was challenging on the consoles a cakewalk on the PC. There really is no comparisons and this is why every attempt to get console players and PC gamers playing against each other has ended in failure, the console controls are sluggish enough that the PC gamer will run rings around the console guy.
if I had to guess why I'd say it comes down to build quality, I have used PC controllers that were just as responsive as a keyboard and mouse but the cost nearly $100 a pop so my guess is the price for getting console controllers price down is response time, as we know when it comes to manufacturing it all comes down to trade offs. But I have tried every kind of console controller, both on their native consoles and on the PC, and they all tend to be inaccurate and laggy when compared to even a $20 1600 DPI mouse and OEM keyboard, much less a good clicky clack and Razor mouse.
I've been a PC only gamer since the late 90s and to GTA V I have a big old...meh. After GTA IV and the whole "take me bowling" bit and comparing it to the batshit crazy fun of flying down the street on a broomstick or sucking up gangbangers in what looks like a giant Hello Kitty mobile (if the kitty went on a 3 day crack binge) and launching the gangbangers from the attached cannon several blocks into enemy vehicles?
I don't know about anybody else but when i play a sandbox i want total batshit balls to the wall FUN with a capital F made from fire and awesome and until another Just Cause comes out so I can grapple pursuing cars to the street and recreate the scene from T3 again I'll take the Saints Row series. The action is more extreme, the missions are often challenging without being frustrating, I just find the Saints games to be more FUN. From what I have seen so far it looks like GTA V has gone even further into that whole "dark, depressing, and gritty" feel and real life has enough of that already, thanks. What GTA needs is another Vice City so I can do 140+ MPH in a Hawaiian shirt and jump what feels like miles while Flock of Seagulls blasts on the stereo, now THAT was FUN.
Can we NOW put the "do no evil" bullshit to bed since TFA points out the fat cat CEOs of Google were flying on fuel that the American taxpayer was footing the bill for? If that would have been Cook or Ballmer pulling that shit the pitchforks would already be out and screams for a fraud investigation would be heard across the net, so fair is fair and I think an investigation is called for to see what other bills they may be sticking the American people. Of course since the DoJ was defanged ages ago its doubtful anybody will say boo to Google but at least it would be brought to the attention of the public.
As for solar planes? The problem is that even the best solar cells simply can't generate enough power to make it viable, the cells just haven't reached the level of efficiency required to get the job done. There is a reason why nobody has been able to truly replace internal combustion engines and that is the amount of energy per pound is unmatched by anything we've come up with so far,IIRC the closest we have come up with is hydrogen but it has 10 times less energy per pound than gas. Until we can come up with much more efficient solar cells and electric motors it'll always be a novelty.
I agree this is a good thing and for all of us who have customers that have one or more mission critical Java based applications this should make a pretty good dent in the risk of running Java.
In the case of my customers I have several that have to send data to the main branch via a Java applet and then there are the SMBs whom are using GoToMyPC to have remote access to their work systems from home. In both cases if it weren't for that single requirement I wouldn't have Java installed on their systems but they have to have it to get their work done so this should help minimize the risk.
Uhhh...might want to read up about posting again, as AC posting DOES undo karma, its based on IP address not whether you are logged in or not.
And I dare you to count the number of AC posts in a thread and then compare how many are modded up versus how many are at zero or below, just because a few people are too lazy to log in and post insightful comments as AC does NOT change the fact that the vast majority are trolls, for every insightful post you'll get a good half dozen of the "nigger faggot shill" type. finally I would point out as the number of AC posts go up the quality of the thread GOES DOWN as it really isn't hard for a troll to derail a thread. You go to the wayback machine and look up threads from/. from 5 years ago? You'd find threads that go as high as 200+ posts talking thoughtfully about various subjects, everything from FTL travel to filesystems, we used to get some really meaty threads here and even when you didn't agree with the sentiment you'd learn something, now? if a threads makes a dozen its a miracle and in damned near EVERY case it gets derailed by an AC troll.
So I think getting rid of AC would be a real boon here. this of course would only be beneficial if the mods stay the fuck out of it and let metamodding and user modding take care of things, for an example of why we need the forum mods to stay out just look at Ars where anybody who doesn't sing the praises of Google and Apple end up banned by mods, probably from their fricking iPhones. But at the end of the day it takes...what? 3 minutes to make an account? and/. already has a setting for public places and supports HTTPS log ins so there really isn't a point in keeping ACs unless you think "nigger faggot shill" posts are worth having. Personally I'd be happy to give up the 3% of insightful ACs if that meant getting rid of the 97% of the crapfloods.
And the UK is HOW big of a market again? And I'm sorry if you didn't hear but the consumer electronics market? VERY USA-Centric as what has been a hit here seems to translate well overseas, see iPhone,Samsung Galaxy, Huawei Ascend for examples. this is why most of the stock market isn't gonna pay much attention if you don't have at least one stateside hit and Nokia hasn't had one since they had Mulder and Sculley using Nokia on the X-Files.
And again with the rose colored glasses about the N series, the N series was NEVER a hit, it never sold in high enough numbers to justify itself, hence why they moved away from it. Its OpenMoko all over again where a few FOSS lovers trumpted it like it was the second coming when in reality? didn't ever even get 5% of the market. Last figures i saw had the N series sales hovering around 4% at its peak, in the high volume low margin market that is smartphones that equals a dud.
I know it sucks to hear that, I know what its like to like a product that fails as I thought the Asus brazos EEE netbooks were the best thing since sliced bread. AMD dual core APU, crazy long bettery life, less than 3 pounds yet had enough power to do 1080P over HDMI? It was a fricking sweet product. Sadly what a handful of geeks like rarely translates into market share and Nokia is a great example as while you sing the praises of the N series in reality they ended up with warehouses full of the things, they just couldn't move 'em for a profit and ended up dumping a ton of 'em on places like Woot!, shades of the Touchpad all over again.
Straight Talk has several njice android phones for under $150, I have tried a few of theirs and I have to say...they are quite nice actually. in fact because i got tired of getting assraped on contracts and tend to be VERY hard on phones when my last contract went out I went ahead and got the bottom of the line Android they had figuring it would last a month or two and then if I liked the service I'd get a better phone. surprisingly the phone (an LG Optimus slider) has held up VERY well and while its Gingerbread I've found a ROM for it from AreaROMQ...if I ever bother. Honestly Gingerbread is a nice OS, why they added all the bloat to ICS is beyond me but my little single core running Gingerbread loads faster and launches apps quicker than my GF's roomie's brand new Galaxy Rocket, hell I even have a bunch of emulators loaded and they all run great.
As for CM? Too limited when it comes to support IMHO, I have found AreaROMQ seems to have more phones and tablets supported and their releases seem to be faster, again IMHO. I have been offering to mod phones on the side and having tried both on several phones I have to say the AreaROMQ releases just seem...I don't know, nicer? They are fast, have nice features like that app that loads most of the bloated Android crap onto the SD (A2SD I think?) and overall they just seem to be snappier. Of course they don't support only the latest and greatest Android so the fact that they don't try to jam ICS onto Gingerbread phones might be part of it, but even on ICS devices i find the AreaROMQ releases just seem to be snappier on the same hardware. I wish the CM guys luck though as I would like nothing more than to see phones and tablets be as open as PC hardware when it comes to changing OSes.
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But Linux is a BAD IDEA as all consoles HAVE TO HAVE DRM or you won't get the major players on board and that means the "FOSSie Faction" as I call them will be up in arms and maybe even some lawsuits over GPL violations.
A MUCH better choice would be to do what Sony did and use BSD, that way they can still have the DRM required while sharing the non DRM bits, just as Apple shares the low level stuff but doesn't share their GUI. If they go Linux and DRM free they can say goodbye to Activision, EA, and ubisoft and that would be the kiss of death. After all who is gonna buy a Steambox that only plays indie titles when you can get one of those little Android consoles for $100 that will do the same?
Call it what I do, the Xbox N which is short for "No way in hell I'm call call the third one 'the one' as its stupid and douchey"....as you can see xbox N tends to roll better off the tongue than the full name.
Well I'm not a scientist but with a little common sense being applied and knowing what we know it makes sense. After all what do we know so far? Well we know there is this HUGE band of rock at the outer edge of our system called the Oort Cloud, there is also another huge band of rocks in the inner system which may have been a failed planet. If going through the arm caused changes to the gravitational fields way out there in the oort cloud it probably wouldn't take much to get one of those chunks moving, after all that is where it is believed all our long term comets came from so there had to be something in the past that got the comets going. So if you look at how big a period we are looking at and how much debris we have in the inner belt the idea that going through the arm may occasionally cause one of those big inner rocks to get flung at us,possibly by being hit by something fling out of the oort? Really doesn't sound too implausible to me.
To me the thing I find really interesting is how many times our friend Mr Jupiter has saved us by being a big giant garbage collector and pulling all this crap into it that could have easily headed our way if it wasn't there. i honestly wouldn't be surprised if it turned out for every extinction event there was probably thousands that didn't happen because Jupiter sucked it up or slung it off in another direction,given how many times we have seen impacts in just the little bit of time we've been able to see that far out.
So I wish them all the luck, maybe if we can find out exactly what events cause these maybe we can avoid it happening to us, as while I doubt we'd see 100% fatalities of the human race one really nasty impact could easily send us back to the dark ages.
Well that is where you and I differ, as I go by the "right to swing your fist ends at my nose" school of thought. If the German people, who elected the Nazis by a landslide, wanted to go along with their insane ideas? A country should have the right to choose its leaders, but Germany's rights ended when they began subjugating the neighbors.
As for child porn? just because BF Afghanistan allows raping kids don't make it right but if they want to allow that in their country that is their right, just as we have the right to not allow it in our country. Where I think the laws have gone astray is for manga and other drawings which to me is classic thoughtcrime to ban those, and i think its stupid that I can marry a 16 year old but can't take a pic of my wife naked, that is fucked up. But I think we can both agree there is a pretty big difference between some 16 year old flashing her tits and sexting it to her BF and somebody raping a kid and filming it. Again if it requires someone else to be victimized to create it? NOT free speech IMHO but at the same time you go get some legal age girl to act out a rape fantasy? Should be protected speech as nobody is being victimized to create it.
Ultimately as my grandfather taught me you HAVE to protect the speech you can't stomach as it is that speech which is always used as a justification for curbing free speech. After all no reason to protect popular speech,nobody is gonna be arrested or banned for saying the populist tact, its always the scumbags, the Nazis, pedos, terrorists, etc that are used as an excuse and it NEVER ends, the same law they say will "only target terrorists" as we have seen quickly targets everybody, so no matter what your view on the subject we MUST remain vigilant or lose what rights we have.
That is why I NEVER use my real email on my smartphone, I only use my Gmail which is for forums and spamdump sites and i have it set to not sync as i have a backup app for keeping contacts and the like. BTW if you are on Android its called "Super backup" and its free, works pretty good and lets me just send my backups to my email as an encrypted file which is nice.
As far as linkedIn even when i was working corporate I honestly didn't use it enough to make it worth keeping, I'd have some contact ask about it but when i replied "How much time do you REALLY spend on that site?" it would turn out it was just buzzword bingo, everybody THOUGHT they needed it but then with a little thought they realized they hardly ever touched the thing. it really doesn't surprise me to see them being spammy, the few times i used it all i ended up with is some Chinese scammer or other fly by night crap, its really kinda pointless, at least for me.
The Atari VCS had analog sticks, yet you REALLY think that would give you an advantage? You kinda missed the point, here is a WHOOSH for you, its not the "analog versus digital" you should be looking at, its the "cheap and laggy versus expensive and non laggy" which you should be focusing on and the response time of a keyboard and mouse just curbstomps the average X360 and PS3 stock controller because they were made with cost and NOT performance as the most important metric!
If you don't believe me you might want to look up what happened when Sega allowed the Dreamcast players to play games with the PC players, they were slaughtered so badly they pulled it after less than 2 months. I mean why in the fuck do you think with damned near every game being cross platform now that you console guys aren't allowed to play with us PC gamers? Because we pimpslap the shit out of you because our controls aren't laggy. Several times over the years, in multiple genres, has PC and console playing together been tried and so far they have yet to find any genre where speed or response time has any effect on gameplay at all that the PC controls don't open ye old can of whoop ass on the laggy as fuck game console controllers.
Now if you spent over $100 USD on a third party controller? Then this doesn't apply to you but I bet you are like the majority and use the controllers that came with the system and I'm sorry but they suck, they really do. When you compare the response time and degrees of movement between your average 1600 DPI mouse and your shitty controller? No comparison, same goes for even my clicky clack versus the button input on your controller. Sorry pal but console makers only care about BOM, they don't care about performance.
Sorry but I block those, after all the crap we have learned about how much data Google is hanging onto and their bugging the piss out of me to use my real name everywhere (gotten bad enough I keep a separate browser just for YouTube) I wouldn't allow a Google ad if you paid me and I switched to bing for search. I figure i don't have a MSFT email and a good 90% of my searches are work related so less data to track.
That was what I was thinking. They probably used something similar to the "Yahoo Porn Bug" that I wrote about in my journal in which some porn sites were using a hidden iFrame to get into yahoo using auto-complete and between that and using an open session cookie that would cover a pretty good chunk of the users.
I'm just glad I gave them my spamdump email and quit using it after a month or so, that place seemed awful spammy to me and if you can't keep your site going without spamming folks? Then frankly you probably aren't worth messing with in the first place.
And those people DON'T BUY AAA TITLES and thus aren't the audience...your point? Grandma won't buy a copy of GTA V, News At 11.
That doesn't change the fact you have piles of money being left on the table (or in reality given to saints 4 instead) because they haven't released it for PC and by the time they do? Most won't give a fuck. and again look at the Steam hardware survey, they cover everything from IGP to i7 and you'll see the vast majority while having relatively modest specs (most GPUs are around the HD7750 lvl) still curbstomp anything on the console so PCs needing more hardware is bullshit...unless the devs can't code for shit, just ask PS3 owners about GTA IV about how great Rockstar codes.
for the record my PC cost less than $500 and even spending that little and having an HD4850 which is nearly 6 years old even i curbstomp the consoles because honestly? The consoles weren't even cutting edge when they were released, much less 7 years on. frankly I slap a whole $100 into mine for an HD7790 and I'll be curbstomping the PS4 and Xbox N as they went with the crazy weak jaguar (based on bobcat, a chip built for netbooks and NOT even Celeron levels) so this next gen is gonna be blown away that much faster, in fact I'd say a good half or better using Steam now could beat the new systems when it comes to FLOPS.
THIS is why I'm against it as not only does it rob you of privacy but it DOESN'T EVEN WORK when it comes to targeting ads so its fucking pointless!
The first time the whole "targeted ads" became a big thing I set up a browser at the shop with ZERO blocking, just so I could see if it actually worked. the results? Its actually WORSE than just picking ads based on what site they are on! For examples when my laptop was getting long in the tooth I decided to get an AMD netbook (as I had tried the Atom and it was painfully slow) so i did a little research and then for nearly 8 months I got nothing but ads for netbooks, long after I had quit searching for netbooks because i had bought one! My nephews use the shop PC only ONCE to find a release date for a game? i got console ads non stop for months, my mom when she came by the shop does a search to find out when the next book in a series comes out? Ditto.
The sad part is when i blocked all the "targeting" the ads got BETTER because they had only what site i was on to go for! As someone who works retail this whole thing just baffles the shit out of me, basic common sense says if I'm reading an article about SSDs you should show me ads for...drumroll...SSDs! How hard is that? Instead I got ads for car insurance, cell phones, anything and everything EXCEPT what I was fricking reading about and thus shown I had interest in! The only one I have seen do it with any skill at all is Amazon with their "well people that looked at this often buy that, would you like to see that?" and a good 9 times out of 10 yes i WOULD like to see that, as its actually relevant to what I'm fricking looking at!
This is why I'll block this crap just like I've blocked third party adverts, not because i give a crap if the ad company knows I'm pricing C2D chips for an upgrade for a customer but because the crap doesn't work. in a way it reminds me of the old MSN Search...anybody remember how badly that thing would guess? I'd have just done three searches looking for data storage so you would think when I typed in "D" it would give me data storage as the top option, right? instead it was like word salad, it would spew out "dog, delivery, dollar bills, duck ala orange!" and that is just what the targeted ads do only worse, as it'll ignore what I'm actively looking for and instead either give me ads for something I bought last year or ads for some stupid little thing I looked at once 6 months ago and promptly quit caring about. This entire thing is just dumb, doesn't increase the likelihood of getting a sale, and is generally a giant waste of time.
I think the AC was asking why GPUs are always locked and proprietary and the answer is simple...patents. Everything from S3 compression on up is patented up the ying yang so to make a GPU with more power than an Atari VCS you end up in the patent minefield. Even companies that try to open their chips have to watch out for the minefield, look at how AMD had to have a lawyer go over their specs with a fine tooth comb to make sure they didn't release anything which could step on HDCP, as that is owned by Intel and licensed under an NDA.
So the reason why you won't see open GPUs is simple, it can't be done as its all patented and licensed under NDAs.
You can get the same thing on a Bobcat board for $65, and those are dual core, support 8-16GB of RAM depending on the board, and most come with HDMI.
I'm sorry but there is just no way to spin a single core Atom with GMA (graphics My Ass) chip for $200 as a good thing, its just too overpriced and underpowered. if I had to guess Intel took the chips they couldn't move and dumped them here and just like the netbook which Intel crippled their offerings so they wouldn't compete with Celeron I wouldn't be surprised if some PHB made the selling price high, again to keep competition away from their precious Celery.
Yeah no crap, AMD put out their own X86 micro last year (sorry I can't find the link, my Google Fu is off ATM) and at $199 it had a 64bit OOO Bobcat APU with a Radeon GPU powerful enough to do 1080p. This thing literally looks like its made from the chips that Intel couldn't sell and the price just adds insult to injury. At least the Bobcat held 4GB of RAM and had enough graphical muscle to be used for most video tasks. I have one of the E350s and with fast memory you can even do some halfway decent gaming on them, I play the Torchlights and Portals on mine no problem.
Speaking of the E series if you don't absolutely HAVE to have micro you can pick up an E350 board, complete with a PCI-E slot and the ability to hold 16GB of DDR 3 (kinda overkill IMHO) and its only $65 shipped. I have built several units with these boards, both HTPCs and office boxes, and I can say they are pretty damned nice. They are great for getting rid of those aging P4s many places still have and at just 18w under load it pulls less maxed out than a P4 did at idle. They also have plenty of graphical power, they make great media tank HTPCs and are even good for casual gaming, they also support hybrid crossfire so if you want even more graphics power you can slap in a dirt cheap HD5450 and be able to play a surprising number of games on the thing.
But $200 for a 32bit Atom with a GMA 600? That is beyond lame, hell its not even a dual core.
Well WTF do you call their billionaire CEOs handing American public the bill for their Lear jet? fucking charity? I don't give a shit HOW you word it, its douchebag behavior and their sorry asses need to be brought before a court, have to pay ten times what they got in fines, and if there was ANY justice left in this country somebody would be going to jail.
Of course that is ignoring the truth of this country, if a poor man steals $500 he gets 10 years, if a rich man steals 500 million he get an awards banquet.
Oh bullshit! You may think its the best thing since sliced bread but for every guy like you that will beat the thing there are a good 100 that will get bored halfway through and end up dropping the game, never to return. This has been documented and just because you are a fanboy of the series will NOT change those figures. For the record i have GTA III, GTA:VC, and GTA:SA, know how many of those I finished? NONE, that is how many, as it never fails but the GTA games always end up feeling like a slog once you get a little passed the halfway point. The second a game starts feeling like I'm punching a clock instead of playing a game? I'm out of there and the figures show I'm far from being alone in that sentiment.
For the record the only sandbox games i had enough of a fun time playing the missions to complete were Just Cause II and Saints Row games, JCII because they kept ramping up the "cool guys don't look at explosions" badass-o-meter and with the saints games the missions kept getting more and more batshit so I stuck it out just to see how crazy they got by the end. With the GTA games it always felt like you had seen all the best stuff by the halfway point and they started feeling repetitive so i bailed. Just because this guy doesn't feel its some epic adventure doesn't change the fact that the majority probably won't see the end of GTA V anymore than I saw the end of GTA III-GTA:SA.
Sorry Miss AC, that argument would have held water 5 years ago but it does NOT when consoles are so long in the tooth. hell my youngest boy's bargain basement quad (hell the whole system cost less than $400 after MIR) would curbstomp the X360 and PS3 and his HD7750 (which cost a whole $80) would run rings around the GPUs of the consoles. Hell my HD4850 would run rings around the consoles and its nearly 6 years old!
You look at the hardware listed on the Steam hardware survey, which is where any dev frankly should be looking to find out what PC gamers are packing? A good 70%+ of the PC gamers out there are running hardware that would just slaughter either current gen console by a pretty large margin. This is what happens when you keep a console in circulation a lot longer than it should be, even those low end Athlon quads and Core i3s would just pimpslap the shit out of your average console.
Of course this is ignoring the rotting elephant in the room, which is Rockstar can't code for shit. the most infamous being GTA IV of course but frankly when you look at the quality of the graphics and the number of NPCs and vehicles on screen and how much power it is using? Rockstar is just shitty at coding, simple as that. With so many to choose from in the sandbox genre it makes it all the more obvious, just load up something like Just Cause II where you have this huge scenic island and compare the huge landscapes and heavily populated areas to the GTA games and you'll see the problem is NOT the PC, its the fact that Rockstar is just shitty coders.
I don't know, maybe I'm weird, but I love FPS games, play them constantly (just blasted through some Borderlands II last night, hence why I'm a dreary eyed zombie at work right now) but I just don't get what the big fucking whoop was about the Halo series. The guns were VERY "pew pew" and just didn't have any real power behind them, the vehicles all handled like ass, the writing was VERY predictable, the levels kinda boring and other than a few cute lines from the little fat minions (which got old REAL fast as they had such limited dialog) the whole thing just screamed "generic shooter" to me. I had both Halo I and II and frankly after a single play through I was "is that it? Really?" and promptly uninstalled them never to go back.
So I really don't get why there was such a big hoopla over those games when the whole thing to me felt about as special as a Mickey D's combo, bland,tasteless, and boring. Hell if anything I'd say they should be looked down upon for pushing that whole "two gun" thing which even in the context of that game made no damned sense! You telling me a guy in fricking power armor can't carry more than a single rifle and a pistol? Really? Hell give me a backpack to drop the ammo in and even my old behind can carry more weapons than that!
Uhhh...go to Craigslist and type in "cracked (name of console)" or "Jailbroken (name of console)" and there ya go, you don't have to know jack shit except where to meet the guy to pick it up. Since I do a lot of HTPC installs i get to see the inside of a lot of homes and I can tell you that the X360 is one of the most pirated platforms out there, PS3 less so but even out here in BF AR I've sen more cracked consoles than i could count in folk's living rooms. With a cheap pre-cracked console one trip to TPB and some blank discs and you are good to go friend, its really not difficult.
Keyboard stomps a controller, sorry but it does. if we were to race in something like Burnout Paradise, you on controller while I used a keyboard? i'd murder you and the reason why is response time. With a keyboard i can pop between the handbrake and the gas insanely fast which makes drifts as smooth as butter and with all those game controllers you seem to get a tiny lag and with a game where you are dodging incoming traffic at over 200MPH? Lag equals death.
Hell if anything I've found you take those console racing games and put them on the PC as long as the devs make the controls keyboard compatible (for an example of why that is important see TP:Sons Of Liberty sometime,where anything but a 360 controller will cause the game to become unresponsive for up to several seconds on any fast movement as the game translates your input,hell you even go into key bindings and it shows an X360 controller) the PC game will often be piss easy simply because the much quicker response makes what was challenging on the consoles a cakewalk on the PC. There really is no comparisons and this is why every attempt to get console players and PC gamers playing against each other has ended in failure, the console controls are sluggish enough that the PC gamer will run rings around the console guy.
if I had to guess why I'd say it comes down to build quality, I have used PC controllers that were just as responsive as a keyboard and mouse but the cost nearly $100 a pop so my guess is the price for getting console controllers price down is response time, as we know when it comes to manufacturing it all comes down to trade offs. But I have tried every kind of console controller, both on their native consoles and on the PC, and they all tend to be inaccurate and laggy when compared to even a $20 1600 DPI mouse and OEM keyboard, much less a good clicky clack and Razor mouse.
I've been a PC only gamer since the late 90s and to GTA V I have a big old...meh. After GTA IV and the whole "take me bowling" bit and comparing it to the batshit crazy fun of flying down the street on a broomstick or sucking up gangbangers in what looks like a giant Hello Kitty mobile (if the kitty went on a 3 day crack binge) and launching the gangbangers from the attached cannon several blocks into enemy vehicles?
I don't know about anybody else but when i play a sandbox i want total batshit balls to the wall FUN with a capital F made from fire and awesome and until another Just Cause comes out so I can grapple pursuing cars to the street and recreate the scene from T3 again I'll take the Saints Row series. The action is more extreme, the missions are often challenging without being frustrating, I just find the Saints games to be more FUN. From what I have seen so far it looks like GTA V has gone even further into that whole "dark, depressing, and gritty" feel and real life has enough of that already, thanks. What GTA needs is another Vice City so I can do 140+ MPH in a Hawaiian shirt and jump what feels like miles while Flock of Seagulls blasts on the stereo, now THAT was FUN.
Can we NOW put the "do no evil" bullshit to bed since TFA points out the fat cat CEOs of Google were flying on fuel that the American taxpayer was footing the bill for? If that would have been Cook or Ballmer pulling that shit the pitchforks would already be out and screams for a fraud investigation would be heard across the net, so fair is fair and I think an investigation is called for to see what other bills they may be sticking the American people. Of course since the DoJ was defanged ages ago its doubtful anybody will say boo to Google but at least it would be brought to the attention of the public.
As for solar planes? The problem is that even the best solar cells simply can't generate enough power to make it viable, the cells just haven't reached the level of efficiency required to get the job done. There is a reason why nobody has been able to truly replace internal combustion engines and that is the amount of energy per pound is unmatched by anything we've come up with so far,IIRC the closest we have come up with is hydrogen but it has 10 times less energy per pound than gas. Until we can come up with much more efficient solar cells and electric motors it'll always be a novelty.
I agree this is a good thing and for all of us who have customers that have one or more mission critical Java based applications this should make a pretty good dent in the risk of running Java.
In the case of my customers I have several that have to send data to the main branch via a Java applet and then there are the SMBs whom are using GoToMyPC to have remote access to their work systems from home. In both cases if it weren't for that single requirement I wouldn't have Java installed on their systems but they have to have it to get their work done so this should help minimize the risk.
Uhhh...might want to read up about posting again, as AC posting DOES undo karma, its based on IP address not whether you are logged in or not.
And I dare you to count the number of AC posts in a thread and then compare how many are modded up versus how many are at zero or below, just because a few people are too lazy to log in and post insightful comments as AC does NOT change the fact that the vast majority are trolls, for every insightful post you'll get a good half dozen of the "nigger faggot shill" type. finally I would point out as the number of AC posts go up the quality of the thread GOES DOWN as it really isn't hard for a troll to derail a thread. You go to the wayback machine and look up threads from /. from 5 years ago? You'd find threads that go as high as 200+ posts talking thoughtfully about various subjects, everything from FTL travel to filesystems, we used to get some really meaty threads here and even when you didn't agree with the sentiment you'd learn something, now? if a threads makes a dozen its a miracle and in damned near EVERY case it gets derailed by an AC troll.
So I think getting rid of AC would be a real boon here. this of course would only be beneficial if the mods stay the fuck out of it and let metamodding and user modding take care of things, for an example of why we need the forum mods to stay out just look at Ars where anybody who doesn't sing the praises of Google and Apple end up banned by mods, probably from their fricking iPhones. But at the end of the day it takes...what? 3 minutes to make an account? and /. already has a setting for public places and supports HTTPS log ins so there really isn't a point in keeping ACs unless you think "nigger faggot shill" posts are worth having. Personally I'd be happy to give up the 3% of insightful ACs if that meant getting rid of the 97% of the crapfloods.
And the UK is HOW big of a market again? And I'm sorry if you didn't hear but the consumer electronics market? VERY USA-Centric as what has been a hit here seems to translate well overseas, see iPhone,Samsung Galaxy, Huawei Ascend for examples. this is why most of the stock market isn't gonna pay much attention if you don't have at least one stateside hit and Nokia hasn't had one since they had Mulder and Sculley using Nokia on the X-Files.
And again with the rose colored glasses about the N series, the N series was NEVER a hit, it never sold in high enough numbers to justify itself, hence why they moved away from it. Its OpenMoko all over again where a few FOSS lovers trumpted it like it was the second coming when in reality? didn't ever even get 5% of the market. Last figures i saw had the N series sales hovering around 4% at its peak, in the high volume low margin market that is smartphones that equals a dud.
I know it sucks to hear that, I know what its like to like a product that fails as I thought the Asus brazos EEE netbooks were the best thing since sliced bread. AMD dual core APU, crazy long bettery life, less than 3 pounds yet had enough power to do 1080P over HDMI? It was a fricking sweet product. Sadly what a handful of geeks like rarely translates into market share and Nokia is a great example as while you sing the praises of the N series in reality they ended up with warehouses full of the things, they just couldn't move 'em for a profit and ended up dumping a ton of 'em on places like Woot!, shades of the Touchpad all over again.
Straight Talk has several njice android phones for under $150, I have tried a few of theirs and I have to say...they are quite nice actually. in fact because i got tired of getting assraped on contracts and tend to be VERY hard on phones when my last contract went out I went ahead and got the bottom of the line Android they had figuring it would last a month or two and then if I liked the service I'd get a better phone. surprisingly the phone (an LG Optimus slider) has held up VERY well and while its Gingerbread I've found a ROM for it from AreaROMQ...if I ever bother. Honestly Gingerbread is a nice OS, why they added all the bloat to ICS is beyond me but my little single core running Gingerbread loads faster and launches apps quicker than my GF's roomie's brand new Galaxy Rocket, hell I even have a bunch of emulators loaded and they all run great.
As for CM? Too limited when it comes to support IMHO, I have found AreaROMQ seems to have more phones and tablets supported and their releases seem to be faster, again IMHO. I have been offering to mod phones on the side and having tried both on several phones I have to say the AreaROMQ releases just seem...I don't know, nicer? They are fast, have nice features like that app that loads most of the bloated Android crap onto the SD (A2SD I think?) and overall they just seem to be snappier. Of course they don't support only the latest and greatest Android so the fact that they don't try to jam ICS onto Gingerbread phones might be part of it, but even on ICS devices i find the AreaROMQ releases just seem to be snappier on the same hardware. I wish the CM guys luck though as I would like nothing more than to see phones and tablets be as open as PC hardware when it comes to changing OSes.