Haven't had use for Sharepoint or anything like it, myself, but what about O3Spaces? From what I've heard, it's quite close to a Linux replacement for Sharepoint.
"Oh, no, it's an FPS, it's not Fallout!" "Durr, it's a tactical shooter now!" "This game sucks because it looks pretty!" "Additional generic fanboy 'they castrated it' comment"
Whatever. First of all, the game hasn't even been released yet. All we have is a gameplay video (which actually shows that you can go third-person, as well), teasers and screenshots to work with. To immediately discount the game because it's first-person (or third-person) instead of isometric is simply moronic, and completely disregards any semblance of intelligence that many people believe the game lacks simply because of its first person perspective. Even more silly is the concept that the graphics look good, and therefore the gameplay must be shit. What the hell? Does it have to be isometric sprite-based 256 colour graphics for it to be a good game? For it to be Fallout?
Stupidity. Wait for the game to be released and make your decisions then - Don't knock it based on a couple-minute long video that shows the very beginning of the game (wherein you have no interaction with anything but a vending machine and whatever you decide to randomly shoot). From what I've seen so far, the level system and the perks system looks more or less identical to the old Fallout games, and the general motif definitely seems in tune. I see nothing that immediately jumps out at me as "non-Fallout", and so until I've seen the game in action, I won't say it is or isn't. But, it certainly does look like Fallout.
Hate to doublepost, but to that end, I'm not sure our work schedules are any different from the United States, and our holidays work the same way, too. There are certain holidays that are considered federal, and businesses must give overtime for anyone working during a holiday, or a full day's pay for those who would have been scheduled in on that day.
As for our telecoms, I'd take a closer look at your own before saying ours is unregulated. The industry here in Canada borders on price-fixing and racketeering, but the industry in the USA is balanced solely by competition. While wireless is one point where American industry is ahead (ours has been battling between GSM (Rogers) and CDMA (Bell-Aliant/Telus) for some time - GSM won), I hear a lot of horror stories about American broadband and cable TV that border on the same kind of monopolistic behaviour as our Wireless providers.
That said, the only cable provider in this neck of the woods is Rogers, and the only traditional phone company is Bell-Aliant. Both offer a phone service (Rogers over the cable network, Bell-Aliant over traditional copper), both offer internet services (both high-speed and dial-up, Rogers by DOCSIS, Bell-Aliant by PPPoE), both offer wireless services (Rogers by GSM, Bell-Aliant by CDMA (going GSM)), and both offer TV services (Rogers by traditional analog and digital cable, Aliant by PPPoE/specialized modem (reduces high-speed transfer rates) and satellite). Both are nation-wide corporations, and they've got a nice duopoly going on in the Atlantic provinces. This isn't a failure of the government (though it would be nice if they could regulate this a little more), but rather a failure in the market; The same could be said of AT&T/Comcast (former co-owner of Rogers) and Bell/Verizon, though due to the market dynamics in the United States (and mostly, the population density), others have been able to squeeze in. Of course, that's just my observation.
Our income tax in Canada is actually less than 30% for the highest tier, and typically 15-22%, which isn't hugely different from that in the United States (actually, we're taxed less if you consider the dollars are more or less on par at the moment).
Just use the non-Dell drivers. If it's a Sigmatel, download a Sigmatel driver from somewhere else for the same chipset. Use Everest or something to report what chipset it actually is, and just go get someone else's driver. I've dived through the.INF files for some of these, and this kind of thing is something you can enable/disable directly within there, if you were so inclined and knew where to look (and had the time and patience to change it in about six different places in the same file). It's actually pretty easy to figure out if you're used to looking at config files, even if it really is a different beast.
How is using the internet as a map any different from using a map? How is using the internet as a calculator any different from using a calculator? Last I checked, you still need to know how to read a map. You still need to know how to use a calculator. The only difference between using the internet (and computers in general) for these things is that it's consolidated into one place. The basic premise behind all of these things remains the same, and in that vein, no, there is no inherent difference and no loss of intelligence.
While Project VGA does look very interesting (and much more practical than this particular project), I have to point out that PCI-X is almost always inherently compatible with PCI, and vice-versa. In this case, the manufacturer specifically states that it will work in a PCI slot. If you're having trouble finding a PCI motherboard, then maybe you're doing it wrong.
That said, the Radeon HD 3450 would be great for that, if only that was a PCI-E slot. A Radeon 9250 or GeForce 6200 is about the most you'll get in PCI nowadays though...
As you said, yes, that's the F-22 (formerly F/A-22, changed from F-22 and back again). But I don't think that the M61A2 is specifically bad news for the bad guys. It's got a high rate of fire and 20mm isn't anything to sneeze at, plus its integration into the F-22 retains the aircraft's stealth design, but there are higher grade cannons out there that can be used to greater effect on both ground and air targets (not specifically the GSh- series of cannons found on Russian planes (they carry too little ammo), but also things like the BK27 (on the Eurofighter Typhoon) and the DEFA (Rafale)), since they have higher accuracy and stopping power while the M61 series has high rate of fire and lower inertia plus initial firing spinup latency (especially on the F-22 with its gun bay door).
Of course it's a powerful weapon, but it's old news; It's been around forever, and it could definitely be improved upon. The GAU-12/U and GAU-22/A Equalizer series are good examples of an advancement on this weapon, though specifically they build upon the menacing GAU-8/A Avenger used on the A-10 with astounding success.
For the record, the F-22 is also capable of mounting weapons on wing-mounted pylons, though these are strictly optional and would definitely reduce the aircraft's stealthiness. There are supposedly ongoing tests to creating a coating that can be applied to external stores to keep this from becoming a big deal. As it stands, the F-22 can carry (along with two sidewinders in the side bays) at maximum 6 AIM-120C AMRAAM missiles in its internal weapons bay, fewer if air to ground stores are carried. Its limited payload ensures that a single F-22 isn't going to dominate the skies anytime soon in comparison to its predecessor, the F-15C, which could carry much more than that. The name of the game, though, is survivability, but I don't personally think that means as much. All the talk about "beyond visual range" combat is pretty silly. Many fighters can do that, but most rules of engagement would strictly prohibit it. True, it would be easier to get into the range required to positively ID the target without being seen, but once in visual range, you're in visual range, and radar absorbing materials won't help much against the naked eye. It just seems to me that the F-22 is a very expensive, less capable fighter that simply won't be shot down as easily. But what was wrong with the F-15? As I recall, it's never been shot down in aerial combat, and the F-15S/MTD ACTIVE, while just a tech demonstrator, in my mind may have been a better candidate for the next generation of fighter aircraft. But that's getting off on a tangent.
Just so you know and back on-topic, the F-117A Nighthawk has no radar - Only IR and laser targeting. It has no gun, and no Air-to-Air weapons support. Its internal bay can carry up to two bombs, generally laser-or-GPS-guided smart-bombs such as the JDAM and GBU- series. It's a single seater, has no afterburners and is strictly subsonic, while its canopy offers very little in the way of a view of the outside world.
Well, initially they showed off some very impressive things with Aero that were very Compiz-like, such as window opacity controls, fine-tuning of the available effects, and promise of huge performance increases. While the latter happens to be somewhat true, it tends to pay for that with greatly increased RAM usage, and all you're really saving is CPU cycles, which in some cases might be less important than your RAM (especially in Vista).
WinFS was something that I was looking forward to, because SQL on your filesystem would indeed be very awesome and very useful. I can't even begin describing the stuff that you could do with that - Actually, Microsoft's explanation is probably accurate of it if you want to take a look at their site. However, chances are it won't be quite as powerful as they make it seem - I'm sure they'll cripple it somehow, just like they did to Aero.
But no, there are other things, too. They promised a blazing fast startup time, which so far as I've seen has never happened because any efficiency put into the startup instantly got eaten up the moment they more than doubled the amount of memory usage to get to the desktop. They promised a superior command interpreter, similar in versatility and performance to a *NIX-based shell (now released as PowerShell). This was pushed back, and AFAIK now not many people other than system admins and those "in the know" know it exists. We were told that Vista "would be secure enough to not require an antivirus for everyday use", which was also a lie (and knowing that they meant UAC, also a joke (which Microsoft has also admitted to)). And let's not go into their idea of what kind of hardware is "Vista-Ready" or "Vista-Compatible".
Overall, I feel like Vista is a huge flop, and I was really looking forward to it, too. I sort of knew from the get-go that it wouldn't be the "next generation", but I at least thought that it would make a decent attempt. From my perspective as a PC technician, there really isn't much that sets Vista aside from XP at this time, and that's what I've been recommending to people. Hopefully, Windows 7 will be a complete product; Otherwise, I may begin recommending Linux or even Mac OS (the interface to which I loathe for various reasons) over it.
I believe the sales figures would be due to systems with Vista pre-loaded (which is practically everything now). In my experience, very few stores will offer to do an XP downgrade (we do), and if they do, they need to be sure that drivers exist for all hardware beforehand or end up with a half functional computer. Before you ask, yes, there are Vista-only pieces of hardware out there, and yes, they are common and mostly OEM, especially on Dells and HPs. Sony are starting to get pretty bad, too, though they actually have a pretty good track record AFAIK. I'm fairly certain there's a good reason for this, in spite of XP still being officially supported by Microsoft.
I wouldn't be so sure. Linux is something that's more ambiguous than Windows is - Windows is a packaged, supposedly complete product that costs real money (a lot of it), is extremely widespread, and most importantly to your point, used by almost everyone in North America at some point in their lives - Which, in essence, means that Ma, Pa and Uncle Tusky are alpha/beta testers. And they're paying for it.
Linux is at its core a community effort, rather than a commercial product (though many have been made from it). As such, it is constantly changing and evolving, and is quite difficult to "keep up" with for most who aren't enthusiasts (Windows version upgrades gives most people a hard time to begin with). There exist shiny, polished distros like Ubuntu and Fedora that are meant to be a "whole product", being almost literally a snapshot of stable, tested software bundled with a stable version of the kernel, but these OSes are generally non-profit or free (as in both these cases).
The core difference between them at first glance is that Windows costs money. Coupled with what Ballmer went on record with in TA, that basically means that Microsoft doesn't consider Vista a "complete" product as yet, but has no problem charging inordinate amounts of money for the privilege of running it. That said, my experiences with Ubuntu in the past have always been a lot more polished than my experiences in Windows, and I would consider Windows to be an inferior product on most days. I still use Windows XP (my X-Fi doesn't yet have a driver for Ubuntu and Wine still isn't perfect), but I doubt I'll be making a jump to Vista "Just Because". There don't seem to be any compelling reasons to make the change (aside from having Aero and DX10 support, the latter of which won't run on my system and the former of which is a memory hog for a decrease in desktop CPU usage), and a lot of people feel the same way - Even Joe and Jane Average.
Another difference between Windows and Linux is that while the Linux kernel itself may be in perpetual development (as is the general mindset of Linux), this is because it falls under a different development model than the Microsoft mindset. Linux' greatest trait is that it IS in perpetual development - Because this is desired and necessary. For Microsoft, it's supposed to be one spit-shined, heavily-tested operating system every few years. A different model; Not necessarily better or worse, but different, more similar to Mac OS and most traditional software development cycles. In this model, however, being in a state of perpetual development is something that is absolutely catastrophic, because as with the XP->Vista jump, more development time is spent fixing holes and bugs in the previous generation of software to bring it up to spec than is spent working on the next big release. This is what we're looking at with Vista, which Ballmer confirmed.
The very fact that most of the more impressive features of Windows Vista (hi, WinFS!) were ripped from it later on in its development stunted its ability to really compete against even its own predecessor, and for me, cast doubt upon its legitimacy as a valid entry in the product line.
Thanks, this'll be useful later on. But, without a Vista machine in front of me to test, what constitutes a "classic" start menu? Win9x style, or XP style? I've grown quite fond of the XP style start menu... I'm planning to build myself a new computer down the road and dual boot XP+Vista; What start menu would I get by switching it to "classic"?
It's similar, but it doesn't, and it still acts exactly the same way, regardless as to whether or not you're using Aero. The "search" portion of the Start Menu is still there (wherein typing drive letters like E: and so on will launch programs instead of the Explorer window one might expect; Gotta add that slash!), as are all the "user friendly", "task-oriented" control panel windows, the complete axing of the Display Properties window except to change screen resolutions, etc.
Nothing you do to Vista short of formatting the drive and installing 2k/XP will make it act like 2k/XP. Hell, if it were possible to just make Vista *work* like 2k/XP, Aero would actually be a good thing for those with decent graphics chipsets if not for the fact that it takes up an atrocious amount of memory over the standard interface. Why Vista's (extremely basic by comparison) compositing window manager can't keep up with Compiz in terms of overall performance and hardware/memory requirements is beyond me. My old LG laptop, a Pentium M 1.5GHz with 768MB RAM, has an 845GM chipset in it, and most of even the advanced effects in Compiz under Ubuntu work great with very little slowdown, negligible memory usage, and near zero CPU usage. By comparison, the 945GM chipset (GMA 950) on a dual core system with 2GB of RAM can barely handle Aero with decent performance, and it's a far more powerful chipset and overall system. Get stuck with an SiS UniChrome9 series chipset, which is still more powerful than the 845GM, and you've got a VERY subpar Aero experience.
But then, I guess if everything ran on old hardware, there wouldn't be much of a market for upgrades, would there?
It's actually too bad that it's dying this way; I remember the days when Rainbow Six and Unreal Tournament were released. Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear ran excellently on everything I've tried it on, all the way down to a P2 333 with a Voodoo 3 card (which exceeds the minimum requirements, admittedly, but it ran like silk and looked good doing it). Hell, I could play Unreal Tournament at low settings on a P233 with 64MB of RAM and an S3 Virge in software rendering mode (which also exceeds the minimum spec), and it not only didn't look half bad, but at the time, looked particularly stunning at max quality with all the bells and whistles turned on, and required only a modest system to come close to it (that P2 333 did pretty well). I know several people who still play it, in fact, and again, it still looks good. What the hell happened? Why the sudden lack of support for those low-end systems? In my opinion, there hasn't been that great an increase in visual quality to warrant such requirements nor slowdown, and to this day I continue to complain about muddy textures and poor polycounts in supposedly graphically-stunning games. I feel like I'm stuck in 2002.
And why the hell are the system requirements simply the bare minimum to *run* the game?
None of it makes any sense. If software devs want their product to reach the widest possible audience, which is always a Good Thing (TM), then they need to realize that low end stuff is the norm, unlike the consoles they're porting to/from. Crysis was just one big shot in the foot, as far as I'm concerned; Which is OK, because it's just trying to sell the engine more so than the game itself, just like Half-Life 2 (which was a good game all told) and Doom 3 were. However, what good is an engine that powerful if it requires a system more powerful than currently available to fully take advantage of it in "HD" quality (and a system at least of the mid range to even run it at an acceptable speed)?... Get off my lawn!
Probably a bad example. I can confirm crysis will work with a radeon X600, 3.4GHz P4. Doesn't look good at lowest settings, but I did get enjoyable speeds. Download the demo & try it out.
The Radeon 9600 Pro was recently rebranded, repackaged, and resold. It's now the X1050, which is subpar for an IGP these days, much less an X600 (which, while also a rebranded 9600, and not much faster, is PCI-E and comes stock with better memory and higher frequencies, which gives it an edge at higher loads) or any respectable discrete solution. So even though I'm not using onboard graphics, I may as well be at this point.
The hell? Don't buy gaming rigs from dell. Again I can personally confirm a $700 desktop from newegg (not including the LCD) will run crysis at all but high settings.
No, of course not, but while people may not buy gaming rigs from Dell, they'll buy a Dell and then try to run a game on it. You have no idea how often I have customers coming into our shop complaining that their system is too slow (or objects are solid white, crashes, etc), only to pop an eMachines or a Dell onto the counter with an Intel (or SiS!) integrated chip in it looking to run Call of Duty 4 or similar. The fact that their machine is totally incapable of doing so is a stumbling block for PC gaming. It's not the software devs' fault, but it's definitely something that those devs should take into consideration if they want to expand to the widest possible audience.
That said, I was estimating a full system, from scratch, and if you are building a PC specifically for gaming, then you're already several steps ahead of what I'm talking about here. Usually, Ma and Pa won't buy a computer from Newegg though, and while you can get a much better deal building one yourself that way, it's much easier to just buy a Dell, Gateway, HP, or *insert brand name here*. And that's the truth for the majority of PC's out there; I would be very surprised if there were more "white boxes" in the world than brand name PC's, and even so, "white box" PC's are typically either already gaming rigs, or filled with more bottom of the barrel budget parts. That said, they're usually far more expandable, which is a definite plus to any Ma or Pa who shops at a local computer shop instead of Best Buy.
All good points, though I'm not partial to World of Warcraft. However, I am currently playing Warrock, which is a graphically mediocre game with excellent gameplay, especially in the team-based side of it. It's a lot of fun with voice chat going with a clan all in the one map, and it's a lot of fun alone, too, for anyone who likes online Battlefield/Counterstrike-style FPS games. This game also runs pretty well on even IGP chipsets, which is a complete departure from the norm. And I like it. The games that push the envelope are indeed a necessary evil, but as long as they push it faster than the hardware does, low to mid-range graphics solutions won't cut it for pretty much anyone who wants to do some gaming. I'm of the firm belief that IGP-friendly settings, even if they look like absolute crap, should be incorporated into releases. It'd be weird playing CoD4 with pretty flat textures and polygons more at home in the first Rainbow Six, but hell, if I could play it on a $500 Dell, who's complaining? How much extra work would it be to shrink/compress textures and down the polycount? How much extra space would it take up? I can't imagine very much.
But the reason behind the PC market struggling to keep up with the X-Box 360/PS3 in terms of graphical prowess (and the reason for no IGP friendly graphics options in most cases) is simple: Nobody wants the PC gaming market to die off, much less to consoles, whose traditional role in the world of gaming has been a back seat to the mighty PC, even if only armed with an S3 Virge back in the days of software rendering. Graphics don't make the game, but to many people I talk to, it's common to hear "this game's graphics suck" or "I don't want to play that, look at how shitty it looks". However, they're mostly console gamers, and again, there's where the emphasis comes from. Consoles have evolved such that they rival high-end PC's in terms of raw graphical power, and because of their price tag, one might wonder why their $500-700 budget PC can't run games as well or that look as good as their $400 X-Box 360. They don't really care much about the gameplay, or why it happens to be.
But, those that HAVE found games that conform to their budget PC's that happen to actually be really great games are likely to know what to look for in a game. The unfortunate truth about these games, though, is that their follow-ups are very likely to be far more graphically intensive than these systems can handle. That said, in the coming years, more and more IGP's are shaping up to be capable game performers (the integrated Radeon HD 3200, for example, and its ability to scale in "hybrid" mode with other Radeon HD's provides excellent expandability and initial performance for an IGP, especially in comparison to the current standard), and video card tech is moving along at a rapid pace, making mid-range cards today sell at low-end prices tomorrow. The only problem there is, by tomorrow, they really will be low-end. It's an unfortunate treadmill.
That brings to light an interesting conversation I had with my boss. He was saying how a number of releases of keygens, cracks and serials are supposedly created by the very staff who wrote the software to begin with, the major reasoning being that eventually, if the software is useful and/or entertaining, it will likely turn into a sale; Marketing disagrees with that, however. This is why we've seen a decline of "shareware"/"trialware" and a rise of "demos", which are crippled in almost every fashion imaginable. I remember back in the days of Duke Nukem 3D and Doom, having an almost complete game in front of me - for free - but the full version offered three times that, plus new weapons and enemies. Needless to say, when I got the chance, I ran out and got them, gleefully installing the full versions and spending hours more at it. Hell, Duke Nukem 3D came with the full versions of all the other Duke Nukem games, plus shareware versions of a number of other great games.
It's pretty much inarguable that today's demos are hit or miss with regard to length and quality, and in some cases, whole games can feel like a demo. By comparison, most demos like what we have today are almost like watching a trailer. They're typically incomplete, pre-release, and only a single level. Not only that, but they're huge!... Get off my lawn!
That's nice, but as you say, the small-time pirates can crack it pretty easily; What makes you think that the bigtime folks in China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, etc are less skilled in doing so than Cousin Timmy?
The real solution (aside from digital distribution) is to pull the game from the shelves altogether in these places. This will save your company the time, money, and effort of localizing, manufacturing, marketing, and competing against bootlegs, which should save you guys tons of cash. Chances are, the bootleg copies cost less and sell far more quickly than the real deal, if the real thing actually sells to begin with, and chances are your market really doesn't exist there (or barely exists), as such, because of it. Observe the rampant piracy of Vista in these areas. Why did Microsoft continue to attempt to compete with it? To spread their OS, same reason they "tolerate" piracy with WGA. What's your company's reason, it being a company creating entertainment software? Why should we Canadians, for example, have to sacrifice our right to a backup copy of (x) software because the Asian market is flooded with counterfeits? Why should your company have to spend money on DRM/Antipiracy software when it's only going to be cracked a few weeks after release? Does your company not realize that people are employed full-time in these areas to reverse engineer this software? No software is uncrackable (oh, except BD+. BD+ is God. Right, Sony?), and the sooner the software industry realizes it, the better it will be for the consumer.
No, see, that's not it at all. The biggest problem plaguing most PC releases nowadays is that in order to keep up with the high power of most console games, a huge amount of PC horsepower is required; Hell, the X-Box 360 is more powerful than my PC. The Wii probably is, for that matter.
So, PC game developers whip up these massive, beautiful games (Crysis), wherein no earthly system of the time can possibly run it at a decent speed, and what can people do? Your $500 Dell desktop isn't going to cut it. You'll need at least $1000 ($1400 for a laptop) worth of hardware just to hope to be able to play the game at a playable speed, and you'd better hope you didn't skimp on the video. The problem with this is, not many people opt for the heavyweight PC; Most families, companies, bachelors, etc will want to run as cost-effectively as possible and thus won't bother with expensive video cards (the ones in question being at least $200 and at most $600-$700). There's really a very small market for "hardcore" PC gamers (the ones who want a 360/PS3-style experience and are willing to spend the sum of both consoles' worth in high-end gadgetry to do so), though it's very, very lucrative for hardware manufacturers.
So, why should I, stuck with my crappy old Radeon 9600 Pro, go out and buy Crysis, even if I really wanted to? The answer is: I shouldn't. There's no possible way I could even squeeze 2FPS on that one. That's one sale gone. And what about all those people with $500 Dells who are also gamers? There's more missing sales.
The point is, you can't blame software piracy for making a piece of software so unwieldly that only a niche market of users can actually hope to run. At least a 360, Wii, or PS3 will, hopefully, be capable of playing anything certified for release on it. The PC doesn't have such luxuries, and that's where the stumbling block is. Until IGP chipsets become powerful enough to compete with discrete graphics solutions (never), you'll never find the massive reception that you would otherwise find on a platform that's actually genuinely capable of pushing the graphical "wow" you want. End of story.
In summary, you're comparing apples and oranges. PC's have wildly varying specs, and even users interested in playing your game, in many cases, may not be able to. Consoles are rigid, and have typically zero differences between variations of the same model in terms of horsepower; Thus, anyone who owns a 360/PS3/Wii will also be able to, without question, play your 360/PS3/Wii game.
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Haven't had use for Sharepoint or anything like it, myself, but what about O3Spaces? From what I've heard, it's quite close to a Linux replacement for Sharepoint.
"Oh, no, it's an FPS, it's not Fallout!"
"Durr, it's a tactical shooter now!"
"This game sucks because it looks pretty!"
"Additional generic fanboy 'they castrated it' comment"
Whatever. First of all, the game hasn't even been released yet. All we have is a gameplay video (which actually shows that you can go third-person, as well), teasers and screenshots to work with. To immediately discount the game because it's first-person (or third-person) instead of isometric is simply moronic, and completely disregards any semblance of intelligence that many people believe the game lacks simply because of its first person perspective. Even more silly is the concept that the graphics look good, and therefore the gameplay must be shit. What the hell? Does it have to be isometric sprite-based 256 colour graphics for it to be a good game? For it to be Fallout?
Stupidity. Wait for the game to be released and make your decisions then - Don't knock it based on a couple-minute long video that shows the very beginning of the game (wherein you have no interaction with anything but a vending machine and whatever you decide to randomly shoot). From what I've seen so far, the level system and the perks system looks more or less identical to the old Fallout games, and the general motif definitely seems in tune. I see nothing that immediately jumps out at me as "non-Fallout", and so until I've seen the game in action, I won't say it is or isn't. But, it certainly does look like Fallout.
Hate to doublepost, but to that end, I'm not sure our work schedules are any different from the United States, and our holidays work the same way, too. There are certain holidays that are considered federal, and businesses must give overtime for anyone working during a holiday, or a full day's pay for those who would have been scheduled in on that day.
As for our telecoms, I'd take a closer look at your own before saying ours is unregulated. The industry here in Canada borders on price-fixing and racketeering, but the industry in the USA is balanced solely by competition. While wireless is one point where American industry is ahead (ours has been battling between GSM (Rogers) and CDMA (Bell-Aliant/Telus) for some time - GSM won), I hear a lot of horror stories about American broadband and cable TV that border on the same kind of monopolistic behaviour as our Wireless providers.
That said, the only cable provider in this neck of the woods is Rogers, and the only traditional phone company is Bell-Aliant. Both offer a phone service (Rogers over the cable network, Bell-Aliant over traditional copper), both offer internet services (both high-speed and dial-up, Rogers by DOCSIS, Bell-Aliant by PPPoE), both offer wireless services (Rogers by GSM, Bell-Aliant by CDMA (going GSM)), and both offer TV services (Rogers by traditional analog and digital cable, Aliant by PPPoE/specialized modem (reduces high-speed transfer rates) and satellite). Both are nation-wide corporations, and they've got a nice duopoly going on in the Atlantic provinces. This isn't a failure of the government (though it would be nice if they could regulate this a little more), but rather a failure in the market; The same could be said of AT&T/Comcast (former co-owner of Rogers) and Bell/Verizon, though due to the market dynamics in the United States (and mostly, the population density), others have been able to squeeze in. Of course, that's just my observation.
Our income tax in Canada is actually less than 30% for the highest tier, and typically 15-22%, which isn't hugely different from that in the United States (actually, we're taxed less if you consider the dollars are more or less on par at the moment).
Most awesome Bush-related post ever.
It just had to be said.
Well, there went the logic.
Just use the non-Dell drivers. If it's a Sigmatel, download a Sigmatel driver from somewhere else for the same chipset. Use Everest or something to report what chipset it actually is, and just go get someone else's driver. I've dived through the .INF files for some of these, and this kind of thing is something you can enable/disable directly within there, if you were so inclined and knew where to look (and had the time and patience to change it in about six different places in the same file). It's actually pretty easy to figure out if you're used to looking at config files, even if it really is a different beast.
How is using the internet as a map any different from using a map? How is using the internet as a calculator any different from using a calculator? Last I checked, you still need to know how to read a map. You still need to know how to use a calculator. The only difference between using the internet (and computers in general) for these things is that it's consolidated into one place. The basic premise behind all of these things remains the same, and in that vein, no, there is no inherent difference and no loss of intelligence.
This is a rather stupid concept.
While Project VGA does look very interesting (and much more practical than this particular project), I have to point out that PCI-X is almost always inherently compatible with PCI, and vice-versa. In this case, the manufacturer specifically states that it will work in a PCI slot. If you're having trouble finding a PCI motherboard, then maybe you're doing it wrong.
I stand corrected - One of these Radeon HD 2400's would be great. Apparently X1550's have been made in PCI variants and nobody told me, either.
Video cards have IP addresses now?
That said, the Radeon HD 3450 would be great for that, if only that was a PCI-E slot. A Radeon 9250 or GeForce 6200 is about the most you'll get in PCI nowadays though...
As you said, yes, that's the F-22 (formerly F/A-22, changed from F-22 and back again). But I don't think that the M61A2 is specifically bad news for the bad guys. It's got a high rate of fire and 20mm isn't anything to sneeze at, plus its integration into the F-22 retains the aircraft's stealth design, but there are higher grade cannons out there that can be used to greater effect on both ground and air targets (not specifically the GSh- series of cannons found on Russian planes (they carry too little ammo), but also things like the BK27 (on the Eurofighter Typhoon) and the DEFA (Rafale)), since they have higher accuracy and stopping power while the M61 series has high rate of fire and lower inertia plus initial firing spinup latency (especially on the F-22 with its gun bay door).
Of course it's a powerful weapon, but it's old news; It's been around forever, and it could definitely be improved upon. The GAU-12/U and GAU-22/A Equalizer series are good examples of an advancement on this weapon, though specifically they build upon the menacing GAU-8/A Avenger used on the A-10 with astounding success.
For the record, the F-22 is also capable of mounting weapons on wing-mounted pylons, though these are strictly optional and would definitely reduce the aircraft's stealthiness. There are supposedly ongoing tests to creating a coating that can be applied to external stores to keep this from becoming a big deal. As it stands, the F-22 can carry (along with two sidewinders in the side bays) at maximum 6 AIM-120C AMRAAM missiles in its internal weapons bay, fewer if air to ground stores are carried. Its limited payload ensures that a single F-22 isn't going to dominate the skies anytime soon in comparison to its predecessor, the F-15C, which could carry much more than that. The name of the game, though, is survivability, but I don't personally think that means as much. All the talk about "beyond visual range" combat is pretty silly. Many fighters can do that, but most rules of engagement would strictly prohibit it. True, it would be easier to get into the range required to positively ID the target without being seen, but once in visual range, you're in visual range, and radar absorbing materials won't help much against the naked eye. It just seems to me that the F-22 is a very expensive, less capable fighter that simply won't be shot down as easily. But what was wrong with the F-15? As I recall, it's never been shot down in aerial combat, and the F-15S/MTD ACTIVE, while just a tech demonstrator, in my mind may have been a better candidate for the next generation of fighter aircraft. But that's getting off on a tangent.
Just so you know and back on-topic, the F-117A Nighthawk has no radar - Only IR and laser targeting. It has no gun, and no Air-to-Air weapons support. Its internal bay can carry up to two bombs, generally laser-or-GPS-guided smart-bombs such as the JDAM and GBU- series. It's a single seater, has no afterburners and is strictly subsonic, while its canopy offers very little in the way of a view of the outside world.
Well, initially they showed off some very impressive things with Aero that were very Compiz-like, such as window opacity controls, fine-tuning of the available effects, and promise of huge performance increases. While the latter happens to be somewhat true, it tends to pay for that with greatly increased RAM usage, and all you're really saving is CPU cycles, which in some cases might be less important than your RAM (especially in Vista).
WinFS was something that I was looking forward to, because SQL on your filesystem would indeed be very awesome and very useful. I can't even begin describing the stuff that you could do with that - Actually, Microsoft's explanation is probably accurate of it if you want to take a look at their site. However, chances are it won't be quite as powerful as they make it seem - I'm sure they'll cripple it somehow, just like they did to Aero.
But no, there are other things, too. They promised a blazing fast startup time, which so far as I've seen has never happened because any efficiency put into the startup instantly got eaten up the moment they more than doubled the amount of memory usage to get to the desktop. They promised a superior command interpreter, similar in versatility and performance to a *NIX-based shell (now released as PowerShell). This was pushed back, and AFAIK now not many people other than system admins and those "in the know" know it exists. We were told that Vista "would be secure enough to not require an antivirus for everyday use", which was also a lie (and knowing that they meant UAC, also a joke (which Microsoft has also admitted to)). And let's not go into their idea of what kind of hardware is "Vista-Ready" or "Vista-Compatible".
Overall, I feel like Vista is a huge flop, and I was really looking forward to it, too. I sort of knew from the get-go that it wouldn't be the "next generation", but I at least thought that it would make a decent attempt. From my perspective as a PC technician, there really isn't much that sets Vista aside from XP at this time, and that's what I've been recommending to people. Hopefully, Windows 7 will be a complete product; Otherwise, I may begin recommending Linux or even Mac OS (the interface to which I loathe for various reasons) over it.
I believe the sales figures would be due to systems with Vista pre-loaded (which is practically everything now). In my experience, very few stores will offer to do an XP downgrade (we do), and if they do, they need to be sure that drivers exist for all hardware beforehand or end up with a half functional computer. Before you ask, yes, there are Vista-only pieces of hardware out there, and yes, they are common and mostly OEM, especially on Dells and HPs. Sony are starting to get pretty bad, too, though they actually have a pretty good track record AFAIK. I'm fairly certain there's a good reason for this, in spite of XP still being officially supported by Microsoft.
I wouldn't be so sure. Linux is something that's more ambiguous than Windows is - Windows is a packaged, supposedly complete product that costs real money (a lot of it), is extremely widespread, and most importantly to your point, used by almost everyone in North America at some point in their lives - Which, in essence, means that Ma, Pa and Uncle Tusky are alpha/beta testers. And they're paying for it.
Linux is at its core a community effort, rather than a commercial product (though many have been made from it). As such, it is constantly changing and evolving, and is quite difficult to "keep up" with for most who aren't enthusiasts (Windows version upgrades gives most people a hard time to begin with). There exist shiny, polished distros like Ubuntu and Fedora that are meant to be a "whole product", being almost literally a snapshot of stable, tested software bundled with a stable version of the kernel, but these OSes are generally non-profit or free (as in both these cases).
The core difference between them at first glance is that Windows costs money. Coupled with what Ballmer went on record with in TA, that basically means that Microsoft doesn't consider Vista a "complete" product as yet, but has no problem charging inordinate amounts of money for the privilege of running it. That said, my experiences with Ubuntu in the past have always been a lot more polished than my experiences in Windows, and I would consider Windows to be an inferior product on most days. I still use Windows XP (my X-Fi doesn't yet have a driver for Ubuntu and Wine still isn't perfect), but I doubt I'll be making a jump to Vista "Just Because". There don't seem to be any compelling reasons to make the change (aside from having Aero and DX10 support, the latter of which won't run on my system and the former of which is a memory hog for a decrease in desktop CPU usage), and a lot of people feel the same way - Even Joe and Jane Average.
Another difference between Windows and Linux is that while the Linux kernel itself may be in perpetual development (as is the general mindset of Linux), this is because it falls under a different development model than the Microsoft mindset. Linux' greatest trait is that it IS in perpetual development - Because this is desired and necessary. For Microsoft, it's supposed to be one spit-shined, heavily-tested operating system every few years. A different model; Not necessarily better or worse, but different, more similar to Mac OS and most traditional software development cycles. In this model, however, being in a state of perpetual development is something that is absolutely catastrophic, because as with the XP->Vista jump, more development time is spent fixing holes and bugs in the previous generation of software to bring it up to spec than is spent working on the next big release. This is what we're looking at with Vista, which Ballmer confirmed.
The very fact that most of the more impressive features of Windows Vista (hi, WinFS!) were ripped from it later on in its development stunted its ability to really compete against even its own predecessor, and for me, cast doubt upon its legitimacy as a valid entry in the product line.
Thanks, this'll be useful later on. But, without a Vista machine in front of me to test, what constitutes a "classic" start menu? Win9x style, or XP style? I've grown quite fond of the XP style start menu... I'm planning to build myself a new computer down the road and dual boot XP+Vista; What start menu would I get by switching it to "classic"?
It's similar, but it doesn't, and it still acts exactly the same way, regardless as to whether or not you're using Aero. The "search" portion of the Start Menu is still there (wherein typing drive letters like E: and so on will launch programs instead of the Explorer window one might expect; Gotta add that slash!), as are all the "user friendly", "task-oriented" control panel windows, the complete axing of the Display Properties window except to change screen resolutions, etc.
Nothing you do to Vista short of formatting the drive and installing 2k/XP will make it act like 2k/XP. Hell, if it were possible to just make Vista *work* like 2k/XP, Aero would actually be a good thing for those with decent graphics chipsets if not for the fact that it takes up an atrocious amount of memory over the standard interface. Why Vista's (extremely basic by comparison) compositing window manager can't keep up with Compiz in terms of overall performance and hardware/memory requirements is beyond me. My old LG laptop, a Pentium M 1.5GHz with 768MB RAM, has an 845GM chipset in it, and most of even the advanced effects in Compiz under Ubuntu work great with very little slowdown, negligible memory usage, and near zero CPU usage. By comparison, the 945GM chipset (GMA 950) on a dual core system with 2GB of RAM can barely handle Aero with decent performance, and it's a far more powerful chipset and overall system. Get stuck with an SiS UniChrome9 series chipset, which is still more powerful than the 845GM, and you've got a VERY subpar Aero experience.
But then, I guess if everything ran on old hardware, there wouldn't be much of a market for upgrades, would there?
Sigh. I'm pretty sure that by temperature, they mean color temperature.
It's actually too bad that it's dying this way; I remember the days when Rainbow Six and Unreal Tournament were released. Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear ran excellently on everything I've tried it on, all the way down to a P2 333 with a Voodoo 3 card (which exceeds the minimum requirements, admittedly, but it ran like silk and looked good doing it). Hell, I could play Unreal Tournament at low settings on a P233 with 64MB of RAM and an S3 Virge in software rendering mode (which also exceeds the minimum spec), and it not only didn't look half bad, but at the time, looked particularly stunning at max quality with all the bells and whistles turned on, and required only a modest system to come close to it (that P2 333 did pretty well). I know several people who still play it, in fact, and again, it still looks good. What the hell happened? Why the sudden lack of support for those low-end systems? In my opinion, there hasn't been that great an increase in visual quality to warrant such requirements nor slowdown, and to this day I continue to complain about muddy textures and poor polycounts in supposedly graphically-stunning games. I feel like I'm stuck in 2002.
... Get off my lawn!
And why the hell are the system requirements simply the bare minimum to *run* the game?
None of it makes any sense. If software devs want their product to reach the widest possible audience, which is always a Good Thing (TM), then they need to realize that low end stuff is the norm, unlike the consoles they're porting to/from. Crysis was just one big shot in the foot, as far as I'm concerned; Which is OK, because it's just trying to sell the engine more so than the game itself, just like Half-Life 2 (which was a good game all told) and Doom 3 were. However, what good is an engine that powerful if it requires a system more powerful than currently available to fully take advantage of it in "HD" quality (and a system at least of the mid range to even run it at an acceptable speed)?
That said, I was estimating a full system, from scratch, and if you are building a PC specifically for gaming, then you're already several steps ahead of what I'm talking about here. Usually, Ma and Pa won't buy a computer from Newegg though, and while you can get a much better deal building one yourself that way, it's much easier to just buy a Dell, Gateway, HP, or *insert brand name here*. And that's the truth for the majority of PC's out there; I would be very surprised if there were more "white boxes" in the world than brand name PC's, and even so, "white box" PC's are typically either already gaming rigs, or filled with more bottom of the barrel budget parts. That said, they're usually far more expandable, which is a definite plus to any Ma or Pa who shops at a local computer shop instead of Best Buy.
All good points, though I'm not partial to World of Warcraft. However, I am currently playing Warrock, which is a graphically mediocre game with excellent gameplay, especially in the team-based side of it. It's a lot of fun with voice chat going with a clan all in the one map, and it's a lot of fun alone, too, for anyone who likes online Battlefield/Counterstrike-style FPS games. This game also runs pretty well on even IGP chipsets, which is a complete departure from the norm. And I like it. The games that push the envelope are indeed a necessary evil, but as long as they push it faster than the hardware does, low to mid-range graphics solutions won't cut it for pretty much anyone who wants to do some gaming. I'm of the firm belief that IGP-friendly settings, even if they look like absolute crap, should be incorporated into releases. It'd be weird playing CoD4 with pretty flat textures and polygons more at home in the first Rainbow Six, but hell, if I could play it on a $500 Dell, who's complaining? How much extra work would it be to shrink/compress textures and down the polycount? How much extra space would it take up? I can't imagine very much.
But the reason behind the PC market struggling to keep up with the X-Box 360/PS3 in terms of graphical prowess (and the reason for no IGP friendly graphics options in most cases) is simple: Nobody wants the PC gaming market to die off, much less to consoles, whose traditional role in the world of gaming has been a back seat to the mighty PC, even if only armed with an S3 Virge back in the days of software rendering. Graphics don't make the game, but to many people I talk to, it's common to hear "this game's graphics suck" or "I don't want to play that, look at how shitty it looks". However, they're mostly console gamers, and again, there's where the emphasis comes from. Consoles have evolved such that they rival high-end PC's in terms of raw graphical power, and because of their price tag, one might wonder why their $500-700 budget PC can't run games as well or that look as good as their $400 X-Box 360. They don't really care much about the gameplay, or why it happens to be.
But, those that HAVE found games that conform to their budget PC's that happen to actually be really great games are likely to know what to look for in a game. The unfortunate truth about these games, though, is that their follow-ups are very likely to be far more graphically intensive than these systems can handle. That said, in the coming years, more and more IGP's are shaping up to be capable game performers (the integrated Radeon HD 3200, for example, and its ability to scale in "hybrid" mode with other Radeon HD's provides excellent expandability and initial performance for an IGP, especially in comparison to the current standard), and video card tech is moving along at a rapid pace, making mid-range cards today sell at low-end prices tomorrow. The only problem there is, by tomorrow, they really will be low-end. It's an unfortunate treadmill.
That brings to light an interesting conversation I had with my boss. He was saying how a number of releases of keygens, cracks and serials are supposedly created by the very staff who wrote the software to begin with, the major reasoning being that eventually, if the software is useful and/or entertaining, it will likely turn into a sale; Marketing disagrees with that, however. This is why we've seen a decline of "shareware"/"trialware" and a rise of "demos", which are crippled in almost every fashion imaginable. I remember back in the days of Duke Nukem 3D and Doom, having an almost complete game in front of me - for free - but the full version offered three times that, plus new weapons and enemies. Needless to say, when I got the chance, I ran out and got them, gleefully installing the full versions and spending hours more at it. Hell, Duke Nukem 3D came with the full versions of all the other Duke Nukem games, plus shareware versions of a number of other great games.
... Get off my lawn!
It's pretty much inarguable that today's demos are hit or miss with regard to length and quality, and in some cases, whole games can feel like a demo. By comparison, most demos like what we have today are almost like watching a trailer. They're typically incomplete, pre-release, and only a single level. Not only that, but they're huge!
That's nice, but as you say, the small-time pirates can crack it pretty easily; What makes you think that the bigtime folks in China, Malaysia, Hong Kong, etc are less skilled in doing so than Cousin Timmy?
The real solution (aside from digital distribution) is to pull the game from the shelves altogether in these places. This will save your company the time, money, and effort of localizing, manufacturing, marketing, and competing against bootlegs, which should save you guys tons of cash. Chances are, the bootleg copies cost less and sell far more quickly than the real deal, if the real thing actually sells to begin with, and chances are your market really doesn't exist there (or barely exists), as such, because of it. Observe the rampant piracy of Vista in these areas. Why did Microsoft continue to attempt to compete with it? To spread their OS, same reason they "tolerate" piracy with WGA. What's your company's reason, it being a company creating entertainment software? Why should we Canadians, for example, have to sacrifice our right to a backup copy of (x) software because the Asian market is flooded with counterfeits? Why should your company have to spend money on DRM/Antipiracy software when it's only going to be cracked a few weeks after release? Does your company not realize that people are employed full-time in these areas to reverse engineer this software? No software is uncrackable (oh, except BD+. BD+ is God. Right, Sony?), and the sooner the software industry realizes it, the better it will be for the consumer.
No, see, that's not it at all. The biggest problem plaguing most PC releases nowadays is that in order to keep up with the high power of most console games, a huge amount of PC horsepower is required; Hell, the X-Box 360 is more powerful than my PC. The Wii probably is, for that matter.
So, PC game developers whip up these massive, beautiful games (Crysis), wherein no earthly system of the time can possibly run it at a decent speed, and what can people do? Your $500 Dell desktop isn't going to cut it. You'll need at least $1000 ($1400 for a laptop) worth of hardware just to hope to be able to play the game at a playable speed, and you'd better hope you didn't skimp on the video. The problem with this is, not many people opt for the heavyweight PC; Most families, companies, bachelors, etc will want to run as cost-effectively as possible and thus won't bother with expensive video cards (the ones in question being at least $200 and at most $600-$700). There's really a very small market for "hardcore" PC gamers (the ones who want a 360/PS3-style experience and are willing to spend the sum of both consoles' worth in high-end gadgetry to do so), though it's very, very lucrative for hardware manufacturers.
So, why should I, stuck with my crappy old Radeon 9600 Pro, go out and buy Crysis, even if I really wanted to? The answer is: I shouldn't. There's no possible way I could even squeeze 2FPS on that one. That's one sale gone. And what about all those people with $500 Dells who are also gamers? There's more missing sales.
The point is, you can't blame software piracy for making a piece of software so unwieldly that only a niche market of users can actually hope to run. At least a 360, Wii, or PS3 will, hopefully, be capable of playing anything certified for release on it. The PC doesn't have such luxuries, and that's where the stumbling block is. Until IGP chipsets become powerful enough to compete with discrete graphics solutions (never), you'll never find the massive reception that you would otherwise find on a platform that's actually genuinely capable of pushing the graphical "wow" you want. End of story.
In summary, you're comparing apples and oranges. PC's have wildly varying specs, and even users interested in playing your game, in many cases, may not be able to. Consoles are rigid, and have typically zero differences between variations of the same model in terms of horsepower; Thus, anyone who owns a 360/PS3/Wii will also be able to, without question, play your 360/PS3/Wii game.
So I wasn't the only one. :P If only.