On a modern system, 98 boots up in less than 10 seconds.
Vista, almost a full minute plus.
98 can do almost everything Vista can do (If Microsoft even bothered to make the effort,) so what's the difference?
DRM, HUGE and horribly unoptimized and sloppy code, and last but not least, crap drivers written by third parties.
The last problem will fix itself as devs get used to the way Vista handles everything. the first and second will not go away anytime soon.
If computer makers REALLY wanted boot times under 30 seconds, they'd drop Microsoft altogether, because there's no way a default Vista install will take less than 45 seconds.
MinuetOS, OTOH, with proper tweaking, boots in under 3 seconds (under 5 seconds by default options.) and I've been able to get everything working under it (minus games and MS software, of course.)
Most of the problem lies with the OS manufacturer. Eliminate that factor and you're set to speedy computing.
"How many bombers, jet fighters, armored vehicles and assault helicopters are you allowed to own under the 2nd Amendment?"
The guys from Google just purchased a fully-functional fighter jet. Master P (The rapper) owns a fully-functional gold and platinum-plated tank. (I think it's an M-1 Abrams, haven't seen the "Make'em say uuunngh" video in over a decade.) Arnold owns an actual military HumVee.
You don't need a license to own and operate an ultralight helicopter, and they're fairly inexpensive.
But with all that said, those kinds of weapons won't make much of a difference.
Forget about legal shootings during card games, did we? Even if money wasn't involved, cheating = get shot. That was back in the Wild West. I'm sure putting a knife to a kid to force him to give up his game winnings is just as illegal NOW as it was THEN.
"That is doubly true when the insurgents don't have widespread popular support,"
Congress Approval Rating - 10%. Presidential Approval Rating - 23%
Don't delude yourself. We've got support, we just don't have shitstains that have formed a backbone, YET. Wait until we get a few more hardened turds to join that have a voice, want to bet that support landslides our way?
Hell, I bet if you held a gun to Rupert Murdoch's head, this entire fiasco would start to die off REAL QUICK.
While you guys make mentions of assymetrical wars and such, you both forget one very, VERY critical piece of information.
Those of us who know how to disable technology to bring the fight to more fair terms.
I got first place in my HS science fair by creating an EMP by forcing a magnetotron from a microwave to malfunction. (It happened in my house and wiped out everything in the adjacent living room and computer room.) Totally fucked the auditorium's power grid and all it took was two car batteries directly-wired on a rocker switch with a couple of capacitors.
The knowledge that one possesses could pose a serious threat to any technological means. I know many of your guns aren't electronics-controlled yet, but just how many of your tanks are EMP-proof? How about the electronics on your guns, or portable GPS/satnav devices?
How abuot the fact when you come to our hometown, we'll have the huge advantage - we've been playing cops and robbers and cowboys and injuns in these streets since childhood (those of us that haven't moved.) And those of us that paintball will certainly have better reflexes.
See, back THEN, yea, it was different. There was no shooting humans for sport. Now, we have airsoft, paintball, laser tag, and other fun stuff that can make one lose an eye. We have Time Crisis, with guns that for their weight accurately reflect their recoil, so some people will have an idea of small arms combat (fire off a couple rounds, get behind cover, wait for a chance, try again.)
There are far too many factors to deal with this time around in the case of a civil uprising. While you two do a great job of looking at the conventional warfare and asymmetrical warfare sides of things, you forget that there are many, many more determining factors. It's a new millennium, there are new rules being written every day by unseen people such as myself.
Having read the Art of War many, many times over, Most of that wisdom neither of you have touched, yet. The mindset of the people, as a whole, will heavily influence your military's actions.
So many determining factors, you can't just say "We'll win by technological superiority" with a straight face.
BTW, I'd like to see you roll a tank through DeRidder, LA. You'd be wiped out by black powder bombs before you could spot the rednecks in the tall grass in front of their trailer. I should know, I go down there exclusively for hunting. It's called the Sportmans' Paradise for a reason. These boys all load their own ammo, and many still use black powder in their rounds (why, I don't know, that shit's unstable and you can blow your arm off smacking a quarter-sized pile of it with a hammer.)
I'm rambling - the main point is you can't say one way or another a civil uprising would be so easily squashed or quelled. Especially amongst the rebellious youth who can find just about anything they want on the local black market. One of my pals obtained an old.30-06 bolt-action rifle, fully-functional, easily from WWII era or before. Still works, ungodly smooth operation after a quick oiling (it's faster than my brother's.30-06, and it's still using the 5-round metal back-clip for top-loading.) I KNOW that rifle has power behind it. And if you can find weapons like that, still in awesome working condition that old, I'm sure you'll find plenty of working RPGs (hi, Florida!) and whatnot.
We can arm ourselves. We know our land. We know your soldiers. In all reality, we truly have the advantage. All you have is force, and even then, that's at a very limited supply with how it's distributed across the globe.
Give me ONE malfunctioning microwave magnetotron and all your modern equipment fails from the resulting EMP. Then you're on our level again.
See, While you serve, I have my grandfather's entire knowledge (retired LT.COL, USMC) and let me tell you, as of just a couple of years ago, you still had no real EMP protection on any vehicles or electronics-controlled weapons.
You would be screwed with someone opening up their engine, loosening a spark plug, and creating a spark-gap emitter that'll futz your GPS and othe nav equipment signals.
What, you think us little people can't do something? We can rig things to work just about any way we wish while you stick with standards.
And let's face it - the moment the military fired upon it's own citizens in any MASSIVE amount, it would be an outright war, and your PUNY 5+ million army (with only about 600,000 stationed at home currently) would be SORELY OUTNUMBERED and by sheer volume alone TOTALLY OUTGUNNED.
Fighter you may be, and I salute you, but tactician you are NOT.
"The Cell processor in the PS3 is much faster doing Folding@Home calculations than a regular Intel or AMD CPU for example, but isn't well designed for other workloads."
Sorry, my 9800GTX+ TEARS up F@H and goes through more folds than my PS3.
You might want to read your own garbage before using it to point out something I know for a fact.
"They surpass most PCs in terms of power and cost a lot less."
Sorry, my 9800GTX+ by itself is just over half the total floating point power of the entire PS3. So if I ran SLI, I'd have higher floating point power (over 2TFLOPS) now lets add in my dual-core 64-bit processor..... etc.
The only thing that makes the PS3 so powerful is they're writing native code for the most part. There's less overhead due to the OS and whatnot, no need to code for generic APIs and such. As always, Consoles seem more powerful because there's less crap to write AROUND than in a modern PC environment.
Remember on the PS3 one processing unit is reserved for redundancy and disabled until one of the others fails, so the console is effectively designed crippled. (this also probably explains the issues I have with framerate in some games, that disabled processing unit could REALLY add a power boost, and games would run properly (Turok, Assassin's Creed, MGS4)
"Especially absurd is the recurring theory that private guns prevent the national government from becoming dictatorship."
I love how people tend to forget we're a nation born of revolt and war, tempered in the fires of combat, using pretty much PRIVATE WEAPONS against a MUCH LARGER ARMY.
Pay closer attention to history. If it can happen ONCE and create a new country, it can happen again.
"If you join a scrabble tournament, and you draw your seven tiles, are they now your property? When you play monopoly, are the pieces, property, and currency your "legal property"? Of course not."
Yes they are. They are legally mine (by game rules) until they are played and out of my control. For anyone else to attempt to peek or steal a tile or faux dollar would be CHEATING, which by most societal standards is a big ++ungood no-no.
Most any court would look at (besides the obvious assault,) the fact that time and effort was expended (hereafter referred to as 'work') and said work had the payment of said virtual property. He was deprived of what he gained through his work through unjust and unfair means (not to mention just outright insufferable,) and as such, any criminal system would find for the victim.
Unless we're in some bizarro world of yours where things like rules and cheating and game structure have no existence or meaning.
I haven't had a problem with my Rocketfish 700w PSU for quite a good while, now. And also, I'm not the kind of person silly enough to connect the power rails while the thing's running. (SATA is hot-swap, and certainly enough I know people that will hook up SATA while the power supply is still running, arcing the contacts and screwing them up.)
If you treat it right and don't CONSTANTLY tool around with the cables, you should not have ANY problem with a modular power supply.
I run a purely open case (both side panels off) right next to a 5" long-throw subwoofer, one of the satellite speakers is on top of the computer, so's the external hard drive, right in front of the speaker. There's a mixer board atop the subwoofer (comp and subwoofer are only at most 4" apart) and then it's a whole slew of N64, PS3, Wii, PS2, GameCube. My 32" 1080p LCD is right above those, and I have YET to hear or even SEE any interference. I haven't had any issues even with my guitar hooked up directly to the line-in.
Today's electronics, while not so robust against ESD, are pretty well-shielded (if built PROPERLY) as they are. If EM was REALLY a problem from a motherboard, they wouldn't put the hard drives right in front of the damned thing.
Before Tennis for Two at MIT back in 56 a game was created on the huge machine, operated with a bunch of switches, was an asteroid-like game but multiplayer against each other, not asteroids.
I need to re-read Stephen Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" again, that's where I read about it.
Japan has 1Gb internal, fully symmetrical. By comparison to the USA, where the normal is currently approximately 10Mb/2Mb on our internal networks.
Now what were you saying? The fastest consumer connections are NOT IN THE USA. I used to work for IXL Memphis back in the days of Dial-up - they FOUGHT upgrading their infrastructure to provide better service at lower prices, because THEY WERE MAKING A KILLING selling dial-up 33.6K at $40/month.
"What need do you have of a game you made yourself? That you played over and over during development and know every secret of? It would be boring as hell to play, the developer would have no use for it. "
"Doesn't Steam suffer from everything DRM does? It isn't portable"
Actually, I can just copy my entire steam directory from my desktop to my laptop, and play as long as I have my password, or I can play in offline mode.
"you need Steam to be ON to play "
Nope, there's a play offline mode. Doesn't work for the online games like TF2 but hey, you should KNOW that.
"what happens when Steam goes offline one day?"
Well, let's see, since scene people like dopeman and such have already managed to rip the actual games and make it steam-free, you won't have to worry that much except for maybe the multiplayer games.
Slashdot Mirror
On a modern system, 98 boots up in less than 10 seconds.
Vista, almost a full minute plus.
98 can do almost everything Vista can do (If Microsoft even bothered to make the effort,) so what's the difference?
DRM, HUGE and horribly unoptimized and sloppy code, and last but not least, crap drivers written by third parties.
The last problem will fix itself as devs get used to the way Vista handles everything. the first and second will not go away anytime soon.
If computer makers REALLY wanted boot times under 30 seconds, they'd drop Microsoft altogether, because there's no way a default Vista install will take less than 45 seconds.
MinuetOS, OTOH, with proper tweaking, boots in under 3 seconds (under 5 seconds by default options.) and I've been able to get everything working under it (minus games and MS software, of course.)
Most of the problem lies with the OS manufacturer. Eliminate that factor and you're set to speedy computing.
WTF, I did NOT have post anonymously checked.
Fix your fucking shit, Slashdot.
"How many bombers, jet fighters, armored vehicles and assault helicopters are you allowed to own under the 2nd Amendment?"
The guys from Google just purchased a fully-functional fighter jet. Master P (The rapper) owns a fully-functional gold and platinum-plated tank. (I think it's an M-1 Abrams, haven't seen the "Make'em say uuunngh" video in over a decade.) Arnold owns an actual military HumVee.
You don't need a license to own and operate an ultralight helicopter, and they're fairly inexpensive.
But with all that said, those kinds of weapons won't make much of a difference.
Armored vehicles?
Forget about legal shootings during card games, did we? Even if money wasn't involved, cheating = get shot. That was back in the Wild West. I'm sure putting a knife to a kid to force him to give up his game winnings is just as illegal NOW as it was THEN.
People need a real grip of history, it seems.
For your second sentence alone, if I were not the originator of this discussion, I would mod you up so hard /. would be more broken than it already is.
"That is doubly true when the insurgents don't have widespread popular support,"
Congress Approval Rating - 10%. Presidential Approval Rating - 23%
Don't delude yourself. We've got support, we just don't have shitstains that have formed a backbone, YET. Wait until we get a few more hardened turds to join that have a voice, want to bet that support landslides our way?
Hell, I bet if you held a gun to Rupert Murdoch's head, this entire fiasco would start to die off REAL QUICK.
While you guys make mentions of assymetrical wars and such, you both forget one very, VERY critical piece of information.
Those of us who know how to disable technology to bring the fight to more fair terms.
I got first place in my HS science fair by creating an EMP by forcing a magnetotron from a microwave to malfunction. (It happened in my house and wiped out everything in the adjacent living room and computer room.) Totally fucked the auditorium's power grid and all it took was two car batteries directly-wired on a rocker switch with a couple of capacitors.
The knowledge that one possesses could pose a serious threat to any technological means. I know many of your guns aren't electronics-controlled yet, but just how many of your tanks are EMP-proof? How about the electronics on your guns, or portable GPS/satnav devices?
How abuot the fact when you come to our hometown, we'll have the huge advantage - we've been playing cops and robbers and cowboys and injuns in these streets since childhood (those of us that haven't moved.) And those of us that paintball will certainly have better reflexes.
See, back THEN, yea, it was different. There was no shooting humans for sport. Now, we have airsoft, paintball, laser tag, and other fun stuff that can make one lose an eye. We have Time Crisis, with guns that for their weight accurately reflect their recoil, so some people will have an idea of small arms combat (fire off a couple rounds, get behind cover, wait for a chance, try again.)
There are far too many factors to deal with this time around in the case of a civil uprising. While you two do a great job of looking at the conventional warfare and asymmetrical warfare sides of things, you forget that there are many, many more determining factors. It's a new millennium, there are new rules being written every day by unseen people such as myself.
Having read the Art of War many, many times over, Most of that wisdom neither of you have touched, yet. The mindset of the people, as a whole, will heavily influence your military's actions.
So many determining factors, you can't just say "We'll win by technological superiority" with a straight face.
BTW, I'd like to see you roll a tank through DeRidder, LA. You'd be wiped out by black powder bombs before you could spot the rednecks in the tall grass in front of their trailer. I should know, I go down there exclusively for hunting. It's called the Sportmans' Paradise for a reason. These boys all load their own ammo, and many still use black powder in their rounds (why, I don't know, that shit's unstable and you can blow your arm off smacking a quarter-sized pile of it with a hammer.)
I'm rambling - the main point is you can't say one way or another a civil uprising would be so easily squashed or quelled. Especially amongst the rebellious youth who can find just about anything they want on the local black market. One of my pals obtained an old .30-06 bolt-action rifle, fully-functional, easily from WWII era or before. Still works, ungodly smooth operation after a quick oiling (it's faster than my brother's .30-06, and it's still using the 5-round metal back-clip for top-loading.) I KNOW that rifle has power behind it. And if you can find weapons like that, still in awesome working condition that old, I'm sure you'll find plenty of working RPGs (hi, Florida!) and whatnot.
We can arm ourselves. We know our land. We know your soldiers. In all reality, we truly have the advantage. All you have is force, and even then, that's at a very limited supply with how it's distributed across the globe.
You forget the French WOULD NOT JOIN until they were assured of our victory.
Give me ONE malfunctioning microwave magnetotron and all your modern equipment fails from the resulting EMP. Then you're on our level again.
See, While you serve, I have my grandfather's entire knowledge (retired LT.COL, USMC) and let me tell you, as of just a couple of years ago, you still had no real EMP protection on any vehicles or electronics-controlled weapons.
You would be screwed with someone opening up their engine, loosening a spark plug, and creating a spark-gap emitter that'll futz your GPS and othe nav equipment signals.
What, you think us little people can't do something? We can rig things to work just about any way we wish while you stick with standards.
And let's face it - the moment the military fired upon it's own citizens in any MASSIVE amount, it would be an outright war, and your PUNY 5+ million army (with only about 600,000 stationed at home currently) would be SORELY OUTNUMBERED and by sheer volume alone TOTALLY OUTGUNNED.
Fighter you may be, and I salute you, but tactician you are NOT.
WHAT?
http://playstation.about.com/od/ps3/a/PS3SpecsDetails_3.htm
"* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy"
I know EXACTLY what I'm talking about.
From you linked page:
"The Cell processor in the PS3 is much faster doing Folding@Home calculations than a regular Intel or AMD CPU for example, but isn't well designed for other workloads."
Sorry, my 9800GTX+ TEARS up F@H and goes through more folds than my PS3.
You might want to read your own garbage before using it to point out something I know for a fact.
Remember this phrase:
"Possession is 9/10 of the law."
It gets used quite often in many court cases worldwide, and it's being used in this one.
"They surpass most PCs in terms of power and cost a lot less."
Sorry, my 9800GTX+ by itself is just over half the total floating point power of the entire PS3. So if I ran SLI, I'd have higher floating point power (over 2TFLOPS) now lets add in my dual-core 64-bit processor..... etc.
The only thing that makes the PS3 so powerful is they're writing native code for the most part. There's less overhead due to the OS and whatnot, no need to code for generic APIs and such. As always, Consoles seem more powerful because there's less crap to write AROUND than in a modern PC environment.
Remember on the PS3 one processing unit is reserved for redundancy and disabled until one of the others fails, so the console is effectively designed crippled. (this also probably explains the issues I have with framerate in some games, that disabled processing unit could REALLY add a power boost, and games would run properly (Turok, Assassin's Creed, MGS4)
Obviously written by someone that does not own a PSP.
*goes back to video chat on the PSP*
Looks like someone forgot about the Statute of Limitations.
"Especially absurd is the recurring theory that private guns prevent the national government from becoming dictatorship."
I love how people tend to forget we're a nation born of revolt and war, tempered in the fires of combat, using pretty much PRIVATE WEAPONS against a MUCH LARGER ARMY.
Pay closer attention to history. If it can happen ONCE and create a new country, it can happen again.
PDP-1 was it, yes. The original incarnation was made on the PDP-1 back in I think 56, maybe 57 (gotta find that book!)
Well, let's see what our USA average is for broadband...
1.9 Mbps according to a recent CWA survey.
What was that, again? People who've worked in this field for years, if not DECADES, are talking. Be quiet, and listen. You're spreading the FUD.
"If you join a scrabble tournament, and you draw your seven tiles, are they now your property? When you play monopoly, are the pieces, property, and currency your "legal property"? Of course not."
Yes they are. They are legally mine (by game rules) until they are played and out of my control. For anyone else to attempt to peek or steal a tile or faux dollar would be CHEATING, which by most societal standards is a big ++ungood no-no.
Most any court would look at (besides the obvious assault,) the fact that time and effort was expended (hereafter referred to as 'work') and said work had the payment of said virtual property. He was deprived of what he gained through his work through unjust and unfair means (not to mention just outright insufferable,) and as such, any criminal system would find for the victim.
Unless we're in some bizarro world of yours where things like rules and cheating and game structure have no existence or meaning.
I haven't had a problem with my Rocketfish 700w PSU for quite a good while, now. And also, I'm not the kind of person silly enough to connect the power rails while the thing's running. (SATA is hot-swap, and certainly enough I know people that will hook up SATA while the power supply is still running, arcing the contacts and screwing them up.)
If you treat it right and don't CONSTANTLY tool around with the cables, you should not have ANY problem with a modular power supply.
I run a purely open case (both side panels off) right next to a 5" long-throw subwoofer, one of the satellite speakers is on top of the computer, so's the external hard drive, right in front of the speaker. There's a mixer board atop the subwoofer (comp and subwoofer are only at most 4" apart) and then it's a whole slew of N64, PS3, Wii, PS2, GameCube. My 32" 1080p LCD is right above those, and I have YET to hear or even SEE any interference. I haven't had any issues even with my guitar hooked up directly to the line-in.
Today's electronics, while not so robust against ESD, are pretty well-shielded (if built PROPERLY) as they are. If EM was REALLY a problem from a motherboard, they wouldn't put the hard drives right in front of the damned thing.
Before Tennis for Two at MIT back in 56 a game was created on the huge machine, operated with a bunch of switches, was an asteroid-like game but multiplayer against each other, not asteroids.
I need to re-read Stephen Levy's "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution" again, that's where I read about it.
You don't see how we're falling behind?
Japan has 1Gb internal, fully symmetrical. By comparison to the USA, where the normal is currently approximately 10Mb/2Mb on our internal networks.
Now what were you saying? The fastest consumer connections are NOT IN THE USA. I used to work for IXL Memphis back in the days of Dial-up - they FOUGHT upgrading their infrastructure to provide better service at lower prices, because THEY WERE MAKING A KILLING selling dial-up 33.6K at $40/month.
Want a source of axles, chain drive, gears, etc?
Raid busted Xerox machines, the large ones you find in offices. I've rebuilt my bike totally from Xerox machine parts.
"What need do you have of a game you made yourself? That you played over and over during development and know every secret of? It would be boring as hell to play, the developer would have no use for it. "
You've obviously never played Plasma Pong.
"Doesn't Steam suffer from everything DRM does? It isn't portable"
Actually, I can just copy my entire steam directory from my desktop to my laptop, and play as long as I have my password, or I can play in offline mode.
"you need Steam to be ON to play "
Nope, there's a play offline mode. Doesn't work for the online games like TF2 but hey, you should KNOW that.
"what happens when Steam goes offline one day?"
Well, let's see, since scene people like dopeman and such have already managed to rip the actual games and make it steam-free, you won't have to worry that much except for maybe the multiplayer games.