Any graphics developer will tell you what a fine API DirectX is.
I've used them both, and while OpenGL isn't a slouch, DX is a lot easier to use (especially in the shader department). Supposedly OpenGL has even that under control nowadays, so it's just a matter of taste, really (and performance, Ati's OpenGL drivers are still buggy).
Intel said that DDR was on the go, and that RDRAM was the way to go. AMD and a lot of others thought Intel was smoking crack, and turns out they were right. I seriously doubt GPU manufacturers will stop making DX10 cards in 6 months, because even if Vista is never released the DX10 cards will still run all DX9 games a lot faster than any DX9 cards today.
I think you do not understand the gaming crowd. On one side is the ones who pirate all their games, and on the other those who buy all their games. The ones who pirate will pirate Vista, those who buy will buy Vista because another ~70 bucks is nothing compared to the many years they will use it, not to mention the price of their hardware. So the end result is that gamers will upgrade, the small percent who doesn't is either too poor (in which case they don't need DX10 as it's only useful on new DX10 cards) or too dumb (some people might disagree, this is just my opinion) to get Vista.
I don't really understand what your point about "Also soon emulators, peripherals, add on cards etc would pop up if dx10 includes that much goodies to go with, and still meet the market demand." is? Obviously there will be graphics cards that support DX10, but they are backwards compatible, NVidia and Ati won't stop making DX9 drivers for XP. Emulators would be slow and useless, and would have to emulate large parts of Vista (and in that case why not just install Vista on your computer?) to get DX10 on XP.
WTH are you talking about? In what way does that change the fact that Vista drivers are incompatible with XP? Not to mention that DX10 requires support for (almost) everything in the spec, there is no DX9 level hardware running with DX10 level drivers scenario available as in previous versions.
Do you realise how extensive the changes in DX10 are? Besides, even if it was somehow possible to "add a compatibility layer" it would be a slow, bugged PITA, so what's the point? Everyone would still upgrade to Vista to get a better and faster DX10, and those who wouldn't probably didn't need DX10 in the first place. I know people have fallen in love with XP and are afraid of change, but Vista is better, so just stop whining and upgrade. If you can't afford it, then use piratebay or whatever, I.P. is no excuse to stay behind. XP will be 6 years old in 2007, that's the same amount of time as between Win95 and WinXP for crying out loud!
The GP meant Mb/s, but his math still adds up as the GGP was talking about a 5 Mb/s connection that is capable of downloading 3 movies simultaneously. While HDTV rips compressed to 350 MB usually are ok quality, it's still a far cry from DVD which is 720x576@25 or 720x480@29.97. MPEG 4 does have better image quality, but it's not enough to offset the huge difference in bitrate and resolution.
Given 4-5 hours 10-20 seeds will take over where the orginal started.
Why would someone stay around to seed? In illegal BT downloads some people stick around because they feel they owe it to the other downloaders, with a commercial system no one would care because they paid for the download.
In Heinlein's story, it leads to a new war which the US wins, gaining domination over the whole world but becoming a military dictatorship in the process
But the irony is...if the Virii/Worms didn't exist in the first place, then we wouldn't NEED to improve security against such attacks.
I think the article is about worms in the wild evolving our security to better withstand against intentional attacks from hostile nations/aliens/whatever, not from the worms themselves. I didn't really RTFA though.:P
Just curious, what part of their platform is ridiculous? The part about increased privacy? Or maybe the part about more reasonable copyright laws? Or did you just look at the name and decide they're ridiculous?
While quick passage to India was the reason the Americas were discovered, it wasn't the reason colonies were built. The moon doesn't really have a lot of resources though, I think it would be a better idea to mine asteroids, some of those rocks are worth trillions!
I don't really think we need to be afraid of that, it would require explosions in the teraton (petaton?) range to break the moon apart. I suspect using that kind of explosives for mining would be slight overkill.
Wasn't a free market and capitalism supposed to drive innovation and technology?
Yes, and it does. Bittorrent, warez, mp3s are all products of the market. But the RIAA/MPAA doesn't want to compete and decrease their profit margins, so they push for laws that make their competitors illegal, thus resulting in a market that certainly is not free. If you want an example of how things go when the cartels can't legislate their competitors away, look at China where they had to drop their prices to compete with piracy.
He died at the age of 78, so it is in fact suprising that he lived that long and didn't die from something else before that. And, as the wikipedia article points out:
Röntgen died in 1923 of carcinoma of the bowel. It is not believed his carcinoma was a result of his work with ionizing radiation because his investigations were only for a short time and he was one of the few pioneers in the field who used protective lead shields routinely.
While a lot of people like to feel clever by deducing that the inventor of the x-ray died from cancer because overexposing himself to it, it just isn't true.
The rumor mill has justified the delay by saying Episode 2 will bring big changes to the Source engine and create new game experiences. I wouldn't mind that at all, but that is NOT what you use episodic content to market. Save it for Half-Life 3, and have the content team work with the status quo for Half-Life 2 episodes while the engine team finalizes the changes to Source.
If the writer isn't even aware that these episodes are HL3, then I don't put much stock in his release dates either. As the interview of Gabe Newell states:
The original Half-Life took us two years to develop. With a considerably larger team Half-Life 2 took us six years to develop, so we thought if we were going to continue our trend with Half-Life 3 we would basically ship after we had all retired.... I always thought of it as Episodes One through Three because that's how we planned the products out. I think people thought we'd need a name for them, and Aftermath ended up being more confusing than helpful.
Probably a better name for it would have been Half Life 3: Episode One, but these three are what we're doing as our way of taking the next step forward, but Half-Life 2 was the name we used.
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Did you actually read his post?
new OpenGL ICDs may be written that works with Aero.
That's the exact same situation that is in XP at the moment, graphics card manufacturers have an OpenGL ICD included in their drivers.
Any graphics developer will tell you what a fine API DirectX is.
I've used them both, and while OpenGL isn't a slouch, DX is a lot easier to use (especially in the shader department). Supposedly OpenGL has even that under control nowadays, so it's just a matter of taste, really (and performance, Ati's OpenGL drivers are still buggy).
Intel said that DDR was on the go, and that RDRAM was the way to go. AMD and a lot of others thought Intel was smoking crack, and turns out they were right. I seriously doubt GPU manufacturers will stop making DX10 cards in 6 months, because even if Vista is never released the DX10 cards will still run all DX9 games a lot faster than any DX9 cards today.
I think you do not understand the gaming crowd. On one side is the ones who pirate all their games, and on the other those who buy all their games. The ones who pirate will pirate Vista, those who buy will buy Vista because another ~70 bucks is nothing compared to the many years they will use it, not to mention the price of their hardware. So the end result is that gamers will upgrade, the small percent who doesn't is either too poor (in which case they don't need DX10 as it's only useful on new DX10 cards) or too dumb (some people might disagree, this is just my opinion) to get Vista.
I don't really understand what your point about "Also soon emulators, peripherals, add on cards etc would pop up if dx10 includes that much goodies to go with, and still meet the market demand." is? Obviously there will be graphics cards that support DX10, but they are backwards compatible, NVidia and Ati won't stop making DX9 drivers for XP. Emulators would be slow and useless, and would have to emulate large parts of Vista (and in that case why not just install Vista on your computer?) to get DX10 on XP.
WTH are you talking about? In what way does that change the fact that Vista drivers are incompatible with XP? Not to mention that DX10 requires support for (almost) everything in the spec, there is no DX9 level hardware running with DX10 level drivers scenario available as in previous versions.
Do you realise how extensive the changes in DX10 are? Besides, even if it was somehow possible to "add a compatibility layer" it would be a slow, bugged PITA, so what's the point? Everyone would still upgrade to Vista to get a better and faster DX10, and those who wouldn't probably didn't need DX10 in the first place. I know people have fallen in love with XP and are afraid of change, but Vista is better, so just stop whining and upgrade. If you can't afford it, then use piratebay or whatever, I.P. is no excuse to stay behind. XP will be 6 years old in 2007, that's the same amount of time as between Win95 and WinXP for crying out loud!
There's a big difference between being watched and a poster of a person watching...
The GP meant Mb/s, but his math still adds up as the GGP was talking about a 5 Mb/s connection that is capable of downloading 3 movies simultaneously. While HDTV rips compressed to 350 MB usually are ok quality, it's still a far cry from DVD which is 720x576@25 or 720x480@29.97. MPEG 4 does have better image quality, but it's not enough to offset the huge difference in bitrate and resolution.
Given 4-5 hours 10-20 seeds will take over where the orginal started.
Why would someone stay around to seed? In illegal BT downloads some people stick around because they feel they owe it to the other downloaders, with a commercial system no one would care because they paid for the download.
In Heinlein's story, it leads to a new war which the US wins, gaining domination over the whole world but becoming a military dictatorship in the process
That sounds eerily familiar.
But the irony is...if the Virii/Worms didn't exist in the first place, then we wouldn't NEED to improve security against such attacks.
:P
I think the article is about worms in the wild evolving our security to better withstand against intentional attacks from hostile nations/aliens/whatever, not from the worms themselves. I didn't really RTFA though.
But their tails are so tasty! If they get out of control, we just need to create an army of undead zombies, what could go wrong?
Professor: That's not good news. That's not good news at all!
What's the hardest thing about eating a vegetable? The chair.
:)
Apperently the Shinese dog breed have taken over the government of China Hopefully they will be kind to their previous masters.
:)
(Score:2, Informative)
Hmmm.
Because they have an even smaller chance of succeeding at that...
Just curious, what part of their platform is ridiculous? The part about increased privacy? Or maybe the part about more reasonable copyright laws? Or did you just look at the name and decide they're ridiculous?
While quick passage to India was the reason the Americas were discovered, it wasn't the reason colonies were built. The moon doesn't really have a lot of resources though, I think it would be a better idea to mine asteroids, some of those rocks are worth trillions!
I don't really think we need to be afraid of that, it would require explosions in the teraton (petaton?) range to break the moon apart. I suspect using that kind of explosives for mining would be slight overkill.
when the truth is that it's just an effort on the part of the people who own things and want to be able to sell them without having them stolen
The problem is that these people want to sell the things they own and still own them afterwards.
Wasn't a free market and capitalism supposed to drive innovation and technology?
Yes, and it does. Bittorrent, warez, mp3s are all products of the market. But the RIAA/MPAA doesn't want to compete and decrease their profit margins, so they push for laws that make their competitors illegal, thus resulting in a market that certainly is not free. If you want an example of how things go when the cartels can't legislate their competitors away, look at China where they had to drop their prices to compete with piracy.
While a lot of people like to feel clever by deducing that the inventor of the x-ray died from cancer because overexposing himself to it, it just isn't true.
Oops. I seem to have misread that part of your article. I apologise for my rather pointless criticism.
If the writer isn't even aware that these episodes are HL3, then I don't put much stock in his release dates either. As the interview of Gabe Newell states:
Sigh... And after writing the above, guess what captcha I get? "losers". Not so subtle hint, oh Gods of Slashdot?
Why did you get a captcha? I never get that when logged in.