We already have medicare/medicade for the truly poor and elderly. Anyone in between, can take care of themselves like most of us do.
Or so the theory goes, but a lot of people just above the poverty line still struggle, even though they aren't considered "truly poor," and it's those people who are uninsured.
Well, I don't think that there had been such a large scale bricking of drives before this, so yeah, most people would never need to flash their firmware before.
Dunno, my dad works for a DoE lab (LLNL) and he seems to respect the director. In fact, just this past Friday we ran into two friends of my dad's who work at LBNL, and they both had good things to say about Steven Chu. I think he'll do a good job personally, but we'll see.
Seriously, clean installs make Windows so much faster. That said, the GP does have a point, because some people might just want to do it that way, even if it leads to more pain and suffering for themselves in the long run.
The point that many people are trying to make is that any CPU that doesn't have x86-64 likely isn't powerful enough to run Vista/7 anyway, so why bother? All Intel Core 2 CPUs onward and all AMD Athlon 64s onward support x86-64, and those are really the only CPUs that should be running 7 anyway. Just because you can theoretically run it on a P III doesn't mean it's a good idea. I think anyone who is on hardware that doesn't support 64 bit probably isn't going to upgrade to Windows 7 anyway. The sticky point is the original Core Duo; they're faster than P4s but lack the 64 bit extensions that some later P4s had, and my understanding is that the early Intel Macs used Core Duos. However, I think that's not too much to worry about since the Core Duo was a very shortlived processor line. I think the best thing for MS to do would be to push the 64 bit version, and have the 32 bit version labeled as legacy or something, because the longer 64 bit is a second class citizen in the Windows world, the worse it is for consumers.
These days they've got nVidia ones too though. The nVidia ones get more PPD somehow, even though the ATI clients have been out longer and ATI GPUs seem to have higher theoretical output. And yay, I'm contributing to that major FLOPpage with my ATI GPU.
For some people, maybe. But professional RTS gamers can have between 300-400 actions per minute, and some ridiculously good ones have 500, and if they had that much lag I wager they would notice. And of course, that's on top of the amount of time it takes for the supercomputer to generate the image.
Actually, I realized that I occasionally do use multiple windows, usually when watching a video on youtube and wanting to look up other stuff at the same time. For some reason I usually open up another browser, since I've specifically disabled Firefox from allowing multiple windows. If you're interested in that feature you might want to try a 3.1 beta or nightly; the feature currently needs a lot of polish IMO. I haven't done anything to trigger it recently but I remember when it first landed people were complaining that it was too oversensitive to dragging tabs around by accident. Since you seem like you would use it, maybe you would be a good tester. If you check out the mozillazine.org forums in the Firefox Builds board, there are threads on how to set up nightlies alongside your stable install with a new profile and such so as not to cause any problems.
I agree, although Chrome actually did add some nice web development tools they aren't on the level of Firebug yet. But they did add an Inspect Element menu item which shows all the CSS properties applied on an element fairly nicely, almost exactly the way Firebug does it, too. Too bad it doesn't let you modify on the fly like Firebug does, which is the real useful feature. They also ripped another feature straight from Firefox 3.1 - if you drag a tab off of the tab bar it pops out into its own window. Personally, I think that feature is useless but it's interesting to see them mirroring Firefox development like they are.
I probably will check it out sometime later, maybe within the next two weeks since I'm still on winter break. I hear git is slower on Windows though, and while my laptop has a virtualbox Linux install and a real Linux install, my desktop which I use more right now doesn't want to work with Virtualbox for some reason and I never bothered installing Linux because it was my gaming PC. I've also heard that hg is better on Windows than git so I'll probably play around with that.
Thanks for that post, I had been wondering what the excitement about DVCSes for a long time and couldn't really see the point for a while, but your post made it clear. It seems to me that theoretically using a DVCS would be useful even on a 2 person project that I'm doing right now, which we are currently using SVN for. On the other hand though, we rarely touch the same files and we're both on Windows, and Eclipse does have some nice SVN plugins and so does JDeveloper which is what the other guy uses. But I will be sure to give git/hg a look the next time I start a project.
I thought that was funny too, but from what I've read it's so that software that checks for the major version number of Windows doesn't break when running on 7. I think that might have happened with Vista and the 5.1->6.0 thing and they wanted to avoid it with 7, although I don't know why anyone would hardcode in a check like that.
I think for the Wii onscreen QWERTY keyboards aren't that bad, but the thing has USB ports, so if I were ever to do anything that involved a lot of typing (eg. Wii Linux) I would probably just plug in a USB keyboard. No need to find ugly hackish workarounds when there's a simpler solution, IMO. I think the HexInput idea would work pretty well on the DS though, and maybe other handhelds like the PSP, but onscreen QWERTY will always have the advantage that people are used to the layout.
I don't think so either, but hmm. I guess I started off that post mainly refuting the fact that he's down-to-earth, which he most decidedly is not. The rest of it was just a rant about how his reviews are more entertainment than anything else.
Well, that's basically what I was trying to say. Yahtzee goes more for entertainment value than quality of the review. It's just a nice side effect that he's often right about stuff, but there are times when he's dead wrong, and there are certain types of games he just can't review or doesn't like so there's no point watching those reviews. As I mentioned in another reply, The World Ends With You was an excellent game that he panned because he just didn't get it, and I guess he doesn't like JRPGs, although TWEWY is probably the most unorthodox JRPG in recent history.
Yeah, but what I was trying to say was that for most people watching Yahtzee isn't going to be a good way to decide whether a game is good because he focuses almost entirely on negatives. Also, there are some games he just doesn't get. Case in point: he kind of failed at reviewing The World Ends With You, probably the first original IP from Square Enix in a decade and one of the best games on the DS, because he doesn't really understand it. I share Tycho's (of Penny Arcade) opinion completely on that game. http://www.penny-arcade.com/2008/5/2/
Abrasive I will agree with, and they are also enjoyable and entertaining, but down to earth is not something Yahtzee exudes. If anything he's got one of the hugest egos of any reviewer. He does point out a lot of things that suck about modern gaming, but it seems like his reviews are more intended to be negative for the sake of being negative rather than making a decent review. I wouldn't recommend Yahtzee to find out whether a game is good, but more to find out the flaws in a game, and check other reviews to find out whether you should buy the game.
That advantage becomes moot if you live somewhere they have a warehouse or something. At least in California, we still have to pay taxes for stuff from Newegg, although I'm not sure about Amazon.
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Or so the theory goes, but a lot of people just above the poverty line still struggle, even though they aren't considered "truly poor," and it's those people who are uninsured.
How is it vaporware if it exists in beta form? I think you need to look up what that word means.
Well, I don't think that there had been such a large scale bricking of drives before this, so yeah, most people would never need to flash their firmware before.
Right. My point was that managerial types haven't done so good in the past 8 years, so this might be a better idea, but we shall see.
Dunno, my dad works for a DoE lab (LLNL) and he seems to respect the director. In fact, just this past Friday we ran into two friends of my dad's who work at LBNL, and they both had good things to say about Steven Chu. I think he'll do a good job personally, but we'll see.
Err, he is the director of LBNL, so I would assume he would be a good manager as well as a good scientist.
I agree, I started a torrent and got around 100kbps, then found the direct download links and got 300kbps which maxes out my connection more or less.
Seriously, clean installs make Windows so much faster. That said, the GP does have a point, because some people might just want to do it that way, even if it leads to more pain and suffering for themselves in the long run.
The point that many people are trying to make is that any CPU that doesn't have x86-64 likely isn't powerful enough to run Vista/7 anyway, so why bother? All Intel Core 2 CPUs onward and all AMD Athlon 64s onward support x86-64, and those are really the only CPUs that should be running 7 anyway. Just because you can theoretically run it on a P III doesn't mean it's a good idea. I think anyone who is on hardware that doesn't support 64 bit probably isn't going to upgrade to Windows 7 anyway. The sticky point is the original Core Duo; they're faster than P4s but lack the 64 bit extensions that some later P4s had, and my understanding is that the early Intel Macs used Core Duos. However, I think that's not too much to worry about since the Core Duo was a very shortlived processor line. I think the best thing for MS to do would be to push the 64 bit version, and have the 32 bit version labeled as legacy or something, because the longer 64 bit is a second class citizen in the Windows world, the worse it is for consumers.
Well, the desktop variants are 64 bit, but for some reason it's disabled in the netbook variants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Atom
These days they've got nVidia ones too though. The nVidia ones get more PPD somehow, even though the ATI clients have been out longer and ATI GPUs seem to have higher theoretical output. And yay, I'm contributing to that major FLOPpage with my ATI GPU.
For some people, maybe. But professional RTS gamers can have between 300-400 actions per minute, and some ridiculously good ones have 500, and if they had that much lag I wager they would notice. And of course, that's on top of the amount of time it takes for the supercomputer to generate the image.
Actually, I realized that I occasionally do use multiple windows, usually when watching a video on youtube and wanting to look up other stuff at the same time. For some reason I usually open up another browser, since I've specifically disabled Firefox from allowing multiple windows. If you're interested in that feature you might want to try a 3.1 beta or nightly; the feature currently needs a lot of polish IMO. I haven't done anything to trigger it recently but I remember when it first landed people were complaining that it was too oversensitive to dragging tabs around by accident. Since you seem like you would use it, maybe you would be a good tester. If you check out the mozillazine.org forums in the Firefox Builds board, there are threads on how to set up nightlies alongside your stable install with a new profile and such so as not to cause any problems.
I agree, although Chrome actually did add some nice web development tools they aren't on the level of Firebug yet. But they did add an Inspect Element menu item which shows all the CSS properties applied on an element fairly nicely, almost exactly the way Firebug does it, too. Too bad it doesn't let you modify on the fly like Firebug does, which is the real useful feature. They also ripped another feature straight from Firefox 3.1 - if you drag a tab off of the tab bar it pops out into its own window. Personally, I think that feature is useless but it's interesting to see them mirroring Firefox development like they are.
I probably will check it out sometime later, maybe within the next two weeks since I'm still on winter break. I hear git is slower on Windows though, and while my laptop has a virtualbox Linux install and a real Linux install, my desktop which I use more right now doesn't want to work with Virtualbox for some reason and I never bothered installing Linux because it was my gaming PC. I've also heard that hg is better on Windows than git so I'll probably play around with that.
Thanks for that post, I had been wondering what the excitement about DVCSes for a long time and couldn't really see the point for a while, but your post made it clear. It seems to me that theoretically using a DVCS would be useful even on a 2 person project that I'm doing right now, which we are currently using SVN for. On the other hand though, we rarely touch the same files and we're both on Windows, and Eclipse does have some nice SVN plugins and so does JDeveloper which is what the other guy uses. But I will be sure to give git/hg a look the next time I start a project.
I thought that was funny too, but from what I've read it's so that software that checks for the major version number of Windows doesn't break when running on 7. I think that might have happened with Vista and the 5.1->6.0 thing and they wanted to avoid it with 7, although I don't know why anyone would hardcode in a check like that.
I think for the Wii onscreen QWERTY keyboards aren't that bad, but the thing has USB ports, so if I were ever to do anything that involved a lot of typing (eg. Wii Linux) I would probably just plug in a USB keyboard. No need to find ugly hackish workarounds when there's a simpler solution, IMO. I think the HexInput idea would work pretty well on the DS though, and maybe other handhelds like the PSP, but onscreen QWERTY will always have the advantage that people are used to the layout.
This might be the optimal layout: HexInput. Or at least, it's designed to work in a similar manner to what's described.
I don't think so either, but hmm. I guess I started off that post mainly refuting the fact that he's down-to-earth, which he most decidedly is not. The rest of it was just a rant about how his reviews are more entertainment than anything else.
Well, that's basically what I was trying to say. Yahtzee goes more for entertainment value than quality of the review. It's just a nice side effect that he's often right about stuff, but there are times when he's dead wrong, and there are certain types of games he just can't review or doesn't like so there's no point watching those reviews. As I mentioned in another reply, The World Ends With You was an excellent game that he panned because he just didn't get it, and I guess he doesn't like JRPGs, although TWEWY is probably the most unorthodox JRPG in recent history.
Yeah, but what I was trying to say was that for most people watching Yahtzee isn't going to be a good way to decide whether a game is good because he focuses almost entirely on negatives. Also, there are some games he just doesn't get. Case in point: he kind of failed at reviewing The World Ends With You, probably the first original IP from Square Enix in a decade and one of the best games on the DS, because he doesn't really understand it. I share Tycho's (of Penny Arcade) opinion completely on that game. http://www.penny-arcade.com/2008/5/2/
That's what I just said...?
Abrasive I will agree with, and they are also enjoyable and entertaining, but down to earth is not something Yahtzee exudes. If anything he's got one of the hugest egos of any reviewer. He does point out a lot of things that suck about modern gaming, but it seems like his reviews are more intended to be negative for the sake of being negative rather than making a decent review. I wouldn't recommend Yahtzee to find out whether a game is good, but more to find out the flaws in a game, and check other reviews to find out whether you should buy the game.
That advantage becomes moot if you live somewhere they have a warehouse or something. At least in California, we still have to pay taxes for stuff from Newegg, although I'm not sure about Amazon.