I agree on the stability point. Vista runs on my Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB RAM and an old GeForce 5900. With Aero and all the fancies turned on. But Remember, this is the same guy who couldn't figure out the Flip 3D thing though. Last time I tried it you hold down the windows and hit tab... it works EXACTLY like ALT+TAB does.
On the flip side, I don't see it being extremely useful, but it's M$'s attempt at showing you a bit of what's running on the process you're trying to flip to, which could be handy. (Much like now in Vista if you hover over the programs on the taskbar it shows a screen cap of what's going on with them... Real time. There are a few other thins in TFA that as I read thought "duh, you just do..." or "And the problem is?" but I don't feel like trashing the whole article atm.
I'm not a Vista Fanboy... but this guy kinda falls in to the Novice User category he so desperately tries to push down in the article. Everyone needs to realize that XP really sucked until SP1, and even then it wasn't great until SP2. Give Vista two service packs, let's see where that gets us. In the mean time, I'll just stick with Enlightenment D17 on Gentoo.
Re:Are they better, or just different?
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eSATA Connectors
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They tend to fall off at the slightest provocation. I can't work in my case without having to check at the end that all of the SATA connectors are still in place (and at least one of them is usually loose or completely off).
Really?? I have the opposite problem. I work in a lab where we have pretty much nothing but SATA drives, and many of the most popular SATA RAID Cards (and some of the just plain expensive ones), and I frequently have to be very careful not to rip the port off of the SATA Card when removing the cable. They just simply WON'T LET GO. It's probably my only gripe with SATA cables that the ends snap together so tightly. I just figured it'd be fine for people who built their PC and didn't move things around often like we do so I've never really complained. We probably have 3 or 4 cards here where at least one of the sata ports was snapped off due to removing the cable, and a few server backplanes where we had to resolder a new plug onto it.
I do however agree with another poster that the cable kinda sticks out a ways sometimes when plugged in, but you can always order the right angle cables if you need to. Over all I think the benifits of the SATA Cables outweigh the old IDE Ribbon Style.
I'd also have to disagree... my Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB of ram is nothing close to quick be it in XP or Linux. But even I was surprised to find that Vista's RC1 has been running on there perfectly stable for the last month or so of hard use. Even gaming didn't seem too horible. (especially considering that it's RC with a Debug kernel and native Vista Drivers because the nVidia's don't work on RC1).
I'm not saying I like it, but it's really not as horrible as everyone's making it out to be. After it's official release (you know, AFTER Service pack 1) it'll be just as good a windows as any before it (says the Linux guy...).
Sounds to me like you have some other issues in your system/house that's causing these errors.
I have one system I used as a server for 3 years. 24/7 uptime and , running off a SmartUPS 750. It has 4 WD 120GB IDE Drives in it along with plenty of other things, one 120 exhaust fan, a P/S fan and a CPU fan and the mobo is full of PCI cards and anything I could fit in there. No issues, still pluggin' right along. Along with a 15GB WD from 1997 also in a heavily used system. With this knowledge, I'd have to say that HD's are pretty resiliant as long as you take care of them properly. For me, it's rare that they fail.
However... I would Never consider them a replacement for DVD or CD Media. Even laptop drives aren't really made to take the same amount of utter abuse that DVDs can take. as long as you don't scratch them, they'll last a long time (especially the stamped ones) and although I do frequent backups onto tape, I don't trust my important data to be safe until it's backed up on DVD with PAR files on a seperate disc as well.
But on the same token, I don't really want everything to be online either. I'm sure part of it might be the fact that I like having the liner notes and the physicality of owning a piece of history I can pass to other people if I want... Most of it is that I just don't trust that the connection will be always available. I remember growing up when the cable went out we'd watch movies or play games. If everything is online and the connection drops, then what? Why do I have to depend upon some server I have no control over just to get to what's mine? I guess that's what I believe I'm paying for when I buy a disc. (and no, if the power goes off you're not screwed, that's what generators are for...)
I'd say that the online venu might be cool with movie rentals, but if I'm going to purchase something, I want to have it avaiable under any circumstances.
Maybe this story is supposed to be pointing out their intro into 945 based mobos... because Gigabyte and many others have been using solid caps in their 965s for around a year now. Even Tyan is starting to catch on to this idea. I've been looking into getting a Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 for like 7 months now (saving up for the rest of the components) and it's already in Rev 2.0. I'm sure we've already all argued if solid caps are worth it... seems good to me, I had two caps blow in the past (though one didn't make jack of difference it seemed. Didn't even know it was leaking until I went to install a new card and saw a stream of dried cap juice down the board.)
I don't see why this guy thinks that this matters. Security really doesn't have to do with people being sheep as much as it has to do with recognizing that doing certian things costs you... And I'm not talking about money. Sure you had to buy the ticket, but you also have to spend time in line, submit to either a search of person or a search of ID, or both, and all other negatives that go with flight. Do those costs outweigh your need to travel in the first place? Does it "cost" you more to go through the dog and pony show than it's worth it to you to get to the destination, then don't travel. If you think that it "costs" you more to go through the airport screening than the time that flying will save you, then drive, walk, ride a bike, take the train, ride a bus, etc... I'm sure you can find a way that fits what you're willing to pay. You have freedoms... freedom to choose where to go, when to go, and how to get there. Use it.
I get sick of people who constantly think that being able to fly (read: use someone else's property for your own gain) is a God Given Right. It's not. There are companys that make money off of it and they'll charge you and put you through whatever ringer they feel like putting you through before allowing you on their airplane. Is that wrong? No, it's their aircraft and it's their capitalistic right to charge you whatever fee they deem necessary. In the same sense the airport is the government's property and if you want to use it, you get to go through security checkpoints. That's the price you pay and if you don't like that then find some other way to get to your destination. In the process you might remember that in a capitalistic society, one of the best votes to make is with your wallet.
I can not imagine NOT taking 2-3 weeks off each quarter for a real vacation. What prevents people from doing that? I hear it from friends who are overworked (usually because they are over-indebted): they can't leave because they'll miss something important at work. I never heard of this before because I always make sure that my future replacement in my position is trained for handling any emergencies when I am gone. I guess too many people are too protective of their position -- this usually means they see the future as a dead end or they see their abilities as plateaud. In this case, not taking a vacation really means they are just trying to hold ground.
I'm going to skip the 2-3 weeks comment and go right to the meat of this paragraph. Haven't you EVER heard of someone who ENJOYS their job?? I test software and hardware in an office downtown. I have a great view from my office, I work with great people, I have a strong work ethic, and I have fun at work. Sure, I disconnect when I leave. I shut off the phone, and I rarely ever take my laptop (and when I do it's usually to drop photos on when the CF fills up). However, At the same time that I fit your category of feeling like missing something important, I conflict with everything else you're trying to say.
I don't have a dead end job, I enjoy what I do and enjoy working with the people there.
I learn a lot at my job and I get to apply what I learn every day. Not only is it exciting to learn new things and see a point to them, but it's nice to feel useful, both as an employee and a human being.
I don't have a replacement. I may have a few successors, but my boss, my coworkers and I all know that no one could ever replace me, only succeed me.
I am not over-indebted. Especially when adding in my wife's income, we are quite well off considering we have no car payments, no credit card bills, and my student loans are paid over 3 years in advance (and soon to be completely obliterated). Do I have a $2k PS3 hooked to a 60" Plasma? No. Do I want one? No. Could I afford one? Sure.
I don't think of a lack of vacation as a way to simply "hold ground" where I work. I see a vacation as a change from normal routine, but when you actually LIKE going to work, it's not really a necessity to take 2-3 weeks vacation a quarter.
IMHO, you should REALLY find a new job. You may not get to take 50 days vacation a year, but you might not need to... I like going to my job, I like learning, expanding, being productive, and I like coming home to my lovely wife every night. Don't get me wrong, vacations are great, but usually by the end of a vacation, I'm revitalized and ready to go back to work to see what I missed (not just to deplete the inbox) and jump into things again, not simply look forward to more time off. I hope I never have to live vacation to vacation.
There's actually a book on this topic that I read quite a while ago (as my announced geekness++) called "the Metaphysics of StarTrek". of course the book isn't only on this it goes into other areas as well, but there is atleast one whole chapter on this question. If I remember correctly, the book basically states that our life is comprised of a number of states. That our state changes continuously... Think of your life's major states, birth, puberty, maturity, death. Each state is like the previous other than a number of changes, then realize that the number of states approaches infinity as details of previous states get more detailed (I just lost a skin cell... so there's the state of me before that and the state after that). Being that we get physically transported and reassembled, this new reassembled state is you. It's just as much you as the state of you was you before you lost that skin cell.
Atleast that's as much of the book as I can remember at this moment. It's an interesting read if you're into those sorts of questions, and I recommend it, but it's not really something you can read to your kids.
Odd. I put Vista RC1 on my Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB RAM and a GeForce 5900 and it seems to run quite well. If it wasn't for incompatibilities with certian software, I'd probably be able to run it without any issues.
But the fact that you can't play NWN on there isn't exactly in keeping with this article. This is talking about people in office situations, who aren't going to be NWN'ing. They're going to be Web-surfing, Doc writing, E-mail reading lemmings, and honestly, the 4 year old PC I installed RC1 on would still be MORE than enough power for even the Debug version of Vista to do these things on. I honestly don't see why these people need Vista over XP, but if they did, it'd work just fine without ANY hardware upgrades. Especially if they don't run Aero or any of the fancy graphics.
Now, if M$ can just send me one of those "Designed for Vista" Stickers so I can smack it on my 4 year old clunker I'll be good to go.
It's a great idea... I mean think of the number of times we go from AC to DC to AC to DC... Espeically when you throw a UPS in there that stores everything on 12V or 6V batteries. You loose so much in the transfers.
How is this really different than a pay per month MMORPG? I mean, you pay 10 bucks a month or whatever to connect to X-Box Live/WoW/FFOnline/etc just so you can play the game. It doesnt do you any good disconnected from the net. That's why I've never bought one of those games. Sure I like playing with friends sometimes, that's what a big screen and 4 controllers are for. I don't mind having the OPTION of connecting to a service to play other people, but I remember the days when that sort of thing was free (Rogue Spear/Starcraft/and others). I mean, you can think about this the same way. If every month you buy yourself a new car and track, it's like you're playing an MMO game. Atleast this one you can stop paying after you got what you want and keep playing the game. WoW isn't really worth anything without the connection.
So, is it just me, or does it seem like, if Blu-Ray and HDDVD both use the exact same codec, at the exact same bitrate, and the players decode the info in the exact same way, it's just like watching the SAME movie stored on a Western Digital Hard drive and a Seagate Hard drive with the same playback software. There's NO DIFFERENCE. Like compressing a file with zip and then extracting that file to two different places. The only real noticable difference between the formats is the amount of space available on them. Which means that the only time difference between the two formats would occur is if one decides to use a higher bitrate to take advantage of that space.
Sure the player will make a difference, but you can say that about two different DVD players now. This almost seems like a pointless struggle. Let's just use the bigger one and put a higher bitrate movie on it and be done, who really cares what kind of platter is in their disk drive anyway as long as it stores data properly.
I agree, however I recently installed Vista Beta 2 on my 4 year old Athlon XP 2500+ system with 512MB RAM, and it's working pretty darn well with every effect the OS can dish out turned on. Only thing I've changed in it since I built it is the addition of a GeForce 5900 Graphics card, which is far from top of the line. Honestly, I WAS thinking of upgrading in the future, not really FOR Vista per se (though that was part of the thought) and after seeing that once again, all my games still run and Vista is smooth so what's the point of dropping more money?
I'm sure other people are in the same boat. Perhaps this is why there have been so many more laptop sales increases than desktop sales recently... people looking for that second computer they can take with them instead of replacing/upgrading that old one at the desk?
So maybe I've played too much Starcraft in my day, but what happens when multiple rockets are launched simultaniously from multiple locations? Let's say there's a airplane taking off, Al Quaida or whoever's closest 4 or 5 minions are standing near the end of the runway, in the path. They all have one shoulder rocket ready to launch, they see the plane, they count down, they shoot. the rockets only take a few seconds to hit the plane, can this laser take out 5 rockets with different trajectories within say 4 seconds max? 'cause only ONE has to hit the plane. Seems aquisition is a bit slow for that. What if there is a coordinated attack from two sides at the same time? What about something smaller than a rocket? It's fairly easy to get close to an airport, I mean, Midway Airport in Chicago is bordered by streets on all 4 sides that are unrestricted last I checked.
In all honesty it's probably more of a deterant than a real solution, just like car alarms and door locks. There are weaknesses in all of them, but we use them anyway and "feel safe". Sure if I have my doors locked and the car next to me doesn't, I can feel better since the theif will probably hit the easy target, but that doesn't mean he can't pop the locks, hot wire mine and take it anyway, does it?
Maybe the airports should just put a sign in the grass infront of the termial that says "Protected by Frickin Lasers!" and we can all save the other few billion.
There is a supermarket chain where I am, Farm Fresh, that has been using fingerprints and "PayByTouch" for atleast a year now. Never tried it, they're food kinda went down the toilet (though they have a good beer selection) so I don't go there that much and the cash I usually use hasn't been rejected yet... It's just one of those POS attachments that sits there but never gets used. Anyone tried it? Anyone had real experience with this system? Is it anything like the fingerprint scanners coming with some laptops now-a-days?
As much as no one likes war, it is a goal to work towards that helps in the R&D of new technologies. I mean, if I were to tell you "Go out and invent something cool." you'd probably make something interesting. But if I told you "We need to beat these guys!" People generally get a lot more fired up. They tend to focus on the problem at hand and come up with possible solutions, in this case, going faster. It always helps to have some sort of focus.
Now, a similar thing occured when we had the space race for instance, so it's not war only, but war is a powerful force that drives civilizations time and time again.
Also, it's a good defense. If people know we're constantly developing new technologies to swiftly kick their ass, they'll be less likely to try a conventional attack on us.
a performance drop-off in many of the games when using anti-aliasing.
NO WAY!! I mean, the game has to render like 2-8 times as many pixels as without AA, who would have thought that would slow it down?
instant delivery of whatever content I want at any time. A plastic disc is always going to require me to drive to a store or wait for the mail.
However, what you buy from the store will be available at anytime and not subject to network downtime, blackout dates, obscurity (they can't offer EVERY MOVIE, especially when the service starts, and likely some obscure movie you like won't get digitized for ages)... 'course the big thing that breaks your argument are home movies you record yourself... gotta have some way to get them on the screen. Sure you can hook a HTPC up there, but gramma and grampa aren't going to do that, and transfering a large High Res HD Movie from your house to your grandparents house in the middle of an iowa cornfield over a shotty network or bittorrent isn't always the best idea. Which brings up Eaze of Use. Right now, they can grab a Disc, put it in the drive and close the drawer. They don't even have to hit play.
I don't meant to shoot your ideal dream medium down, but physical storage will ALWAYS have a purpose.
All we need to do is wait for it to collapse a little further and then Chuck Norris can it it with a roundhouse kick and everything will be back to normal.
I have to agree that ads add more realistic game environments. The coke machine in the office, the Pirelli or Brigestone adds in racing games, etc. As long as the add looks like it's just a texture that's supposed to be there to make things look right, I'm all for it. In fact, I'd say that this should have been done a long time ago! But I don't think that I want to be playing FFXIII and right after I tell my Aeon/Limitbreak/whatever to kill some guy and have some "This asskicking moment brought to you by McDonalds". I mean that's just distracting, and I hope they realize that I will immediately associate McDonalds in this example to an evil corporation that needs to no longer get my or my friends business. (though I will have to say that I've never bought a product because I saw an ad in a game, but I suppose having it there and the usefulness of it being there are two different things...)
Your analogy is slightly flawed (aren't they all). There's not just one shipping company (UPS). In the case of the internet there may be a half dozen. You paid the two on the ends of the route only.
However, if it wasn't for the 4 in the middle, the two on the ends wouldn't have made ANY money because they would have been useless. So they should pay the ones in the middle for the use of their lines just as we pay the outer two for getting it to us. Now, if they can't afford to pay the inner 4 then they would have to up their fees for the outer two so they can afford it.
It's still a valid analogy if you take the cost of gas and trucks and such into effect. We pay UPS to bring us the package. In essence what we're paying for is not just the guy's salary to drive a truck. We're paying for the truck, it's maintence and the gas required to move the package from pt A to pt B. Without the gas and truck, the roads and driver would be useless, so these fees are figured into the cost of shipping the package. Gas prices go up, so the $7.50 package now costs $8 to ship.
What these people want to do is charge both the reciever and the sender for the gas/driver/truck/maintence when really the charge only occurs once. Theoretically, if they halved the price for both ends, then the total price would be the same it would just be distributed differently. But someone didn't tell them that part of the equation.
Honestly, my main reason for liking Anime (some atleast, not all... it is a rather broad spectrum you know) is that it's not American TV. It's not crappy re-runs, it's not "reality tv" which sucks the perverbal donkey, nor is it overhyped "funny" shows that aren't that funny. It is what it is and it's different. The perspectives on issues are different, the way it's drawn is different, the plot and humor is different, etc. It's like drinking a glass of soda after having nothing but water for years. Sure they're both refreshing, but the soda is more interesting to your palette.
I used to watch a lot of it, I still watch a decent amount when taken in a percentage to the amount of TV/movies I watch, but in the end I it's because I end up choosing the Anime, it wasn't forced on me.
And if I make a random number generator create random bit patterns it'll eventually create an MP3 file. Or Windows (No wonder Vista is taking so long), or any other copyrighted file.
Which I'm sure they'll go ahead and sue me for pointing out that they're copyrighting a bunch of random bit patterns that anyone can duplicate given enough time.
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I agree on the stability point. Vista runs on my Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB RAM and an old GeForce 5900. With Aero and all the fancies turned on. But Remember, this is the same guy who couldn't figure out the Flip 3D thing though. Last time I tried it you hold down the windows and hit tab... it works EXACTLY like ALT+TAB does.
On the flip side, I don't see it being extremely useful, but it's M$'s attempt at showing you a bit of what's running on the process you're trying to flip to, which could be handy. (Much like now in Vista if you hover over the programs on the taskbar it shows a screen cap of what's going on with them... Real time. There are a few other thins in TFA that as I read thought "duh, you just do..." or "And the problem is?" but I don't feel like trashing the whole article atm.
I'm not a Vista Fanboy... but this guy kinda falls in to the Novice User category he so desperately tries to push down in the article. Everyone needs to realize that XP really sucked until SP1, and even then it wasn't great until SP2. Give Vista two service packs, let's see where that gets us. In the mean time, I'll just stick with Enlightenment D17 on Gentoo.
Really?? I have the opposite problem. I work in a lab where we have pretty much nothing but SATA drives, and many of the most popular SATA RAID Cards (and some of the just plain expensive ones), and I frequently have to be very careful not to rip the port off of the SATA Card when removing the cable. They just simply WON'T LET GO. It's probably my only gripe with SATA cables that the ends snap together so tightly. I just figured it'd be fine for people who built their PC and didn't move things around often like we do so I've never really complained. We probably have 3 or 4 cards here where at least one of the sata ports was snapped off due to removing the cable, and a few server backplanes where we had to resolder a new plug onto it.
I do however agree with another poster that the cable kinda sticks out a ways sometimes when plugged in, but you can always order the right angle cables if you need to. Over all I think the benifits of the SATA Cables outweigh the old IDE Ribbon Style.
Agreed, a 2-D one would be MUCH more handy. Something you can fold up and take to class or just keep in your briefcase.
I'd also have to disagree... my Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB of ram is nothing close to quick be it in XP or Linux. But even I was surprised to find that Vista's RC1 has been running on there perfectly stable for the last month or so of hard use. Even gaming didn't seem too horible. (especially considering that it's RC with a Debug kernel and native Vista Drivers because the nVidia's don't work on RC1).
I'm not saying I like it, but it's really not as horrible as everyone's making it out to be. After it's official release (you know, AFTER Service pack 1) it'll be just as good a windows as any before it (says the Linux guy...).
-Joe
Sounds to me like you have some other issues in your system/house that's causing these errors.
I have one system I used as a server for 3 years. 24/7 uptime and , running off a SmartUPS 750. It has 4 WD 120GB IDE Drives in it along with plenty of other things, one 120 exhaust fan, a P/S fan and a CPU fan and the mobo is full of PCI cards and anything I could fit in there. No issues, still pluggin' right along. Along with a 15GB WD from 1997 also in a heavily used system.
With this knowledge, I'd have to say that HD's are pretty resiliant as long as you take care of them properly. For me, it's rare that they fail.
However... I would Never consider them a replacement for DVD or CD Media. Even laptop drives aren't really made to take the same amount of utter abuse that DVDs can take. as long as you don't scratch them, they'll last a long time (especially the stamped ones) and although I do frequent backups onto tape, I don't trust my important data to be safe until it's backed up on DVD with PAR files on a seperate disc as well.
But on the same token, I don't really want everything to be online either. I'm sure part of it might be the fact that I like having the liner notes and the physicality of owning a piece of history I can pass to other people if I want... Most of it is that I just don't trust that the connection will be always available. I remember growing up when the cable went out we'd watch movies or play games. If everything is online and the connection drops, then what? Why do I have to depend upon some server I have no control over just to get to what's mine? I guess that's what I believe I'm paying for when I buy a disc. (and no, if the power goes off you're not screwed, that's what generators are for...)
I'd say that the online venu might be cool with movie rentals, but if I'm going to purchase something, I want to have it avaiable under any circumstances.
Maybe this story is supposed to be pointing out their intro into 945 based mobos... because Gigabyte and many others have been using solid caps in their 965s for around a year now. Even Tyan is starting to catch on to this idea. I've been looking into getting a Gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 for like 7 months now (saving up for the rest of the components) and it's already in Rev 2.0. I'm sure we've already all argued if solid caps are worth it... seems good to me, I had two caps blow in the past (though one didn't make jack of difference it seemed. Didn't even know it was leaking until I went to install a new card and saw a stream of dried cap juice down the board.)
I don't see why this guy thinks that this matters. Security really doesn't have to do with people being sheep as much as it has to do with recognizing that doing certian things costs you... And I'm not talking about money. Sure you had to buy the ticket, but you also have to spend time in line, submit to either a search of person or a search of ID, or both, and all other negatives that go with flight. Do those costs outweigh your need to travel in the first place? Does it "cost" you more to go through the dog and pony show than it's worth it to you to get to the destination, then don't travel. If you think that it "costs" you more to go through the airport screening than the time that flying will save you, then drive, walk, ride a bike, take the train, ride a bus, etc... I'm sure you can find a way that fits what you're willing to pay. You have freedoms... freedom to choose where to go, when to go, and how to get there. Use it.
I get sick of people who constantly think that being able to fly (read: use someone else's property for your own gain) is a God Given Right. It's not. There are companys that make money off of it and they'll charge you and put you through whatever ringer they feel like putting you through before allowing you on their airplane. Is that wrong? No, it's their aircraft and it's their capitalistic right to charge you whatever fee they deem necessary. In the same sense the airport is the government's property and if you want to use it, you get to go through security checkpoints. That's the price you pay and if you don't like that then find some other way to get to your destination. In the process you might remember that in a capitalistic society, one of the best votes to make is with your wallet.
- I don't have a dead end job, I enjoy what I do and enjoy working with the people there.
- I learn a lot at my job and I get to apply what I learn every day. Not only is it exciting to learn new things and see a point to them, but it's nice to feel useful, both as an employee and a human being.
- I don't have a replacement. I may have a few successors, but my boss, my coworkers and I all know that no one could ever replace me, only succeed me.
- I am not over-indebted. Especially when adding in my wife's income, we are quite well off considering we have no car payments, no credit card bills, and my student loans are paid over 3 years in advance (and soon to be completely obliterated). Do I have a $2k PS3 hooked to a 60" Plasma? No. Do I want one? No. Could I afford one? Sure.
- I don't think of a lack of vacation as a way to simply "hold ground" where I work. I see a vacation as a change from normal routine, but when you actually LIKE going to work, it's not really a necessity to take 2-3 weeks vacation a quarter.
IMHO, you should REALLY find a new job. You may not get to take 50 days vacation a year, but you might not need to... I like going to my job, I like learning, expanding, being productive, and I like coming home to my lovely wife every night. Don't get me wrong, vacations are great, but usually by the end of a vacation, I'm revitalized and ready to go back to work to see what I missed (not just to deplete the inbox) and jump into things again, not simply look forward to more time off. I hope I never have to live vacation to vacation.There's actually a book on this topic that I read quite a while ago (as my announced geekness++) called "the Metaphysics of StarTrek". of course the book isn't only on this it goes into other areas as well, but there is atleast one whole chapter on this question. If I remember correctly, the book basically states that our life is comprised of a number of states. That our state changes continuously... Think of your life's major states, birth, puberty, maturity, death. Each state is like the previous other than a number of changes, then realize that the number of states approaches infinity as details of previous states get more detailed (I just lost a skin cell... so there's the state of me before that and the state after that). Being that we get physically transported and reassembled, this new reassembled state is you. It's just as much you as the state of you was you before you lost that skin cell.
Atleast that's as much of the book as I can remember at this moment. It's an interesting read if you're into those sorts of questions, and I recommend it, but it's not really something you can read to your kids.
Odd. I put Vista RC1 on my Athlon XP 2500+ with 512MB RAM and a GeForce 5900 and it seems to run quite well. If it wasn't for incompatibilities with certian software, I'd probably be able to run it without any issues.
But the fact that you can't play NWN on there isn't exactly in keeping with this article. This is talking about people in office situations, who aren't going to be NWN'ing. They're going to be Web-surfing, Doc writing, E-mail reading lemmings, and honestly, the 4 year old PC I installed RC1 on would still be MORE than enough power for even the Debug version of Vista to do these things on. I honestly don't see why these people need Vista over XP, but if they did, it'd work just fine without ANY hardware upgrades. Especially if they don't run Aero or any of the fancy graphics.
Now, if M$ can just send me one of those "Designed for Vista" Stickers so I can smack it on my 4 year old clunker I'll be good to go.
Rackable systems is doing this. 48VDC racks.
http://www.rackable.com/products/dcpower.htm
It's a great idea... I mean think of the number of times we go from AC to DC to AC to DC... Espeically when you throw a UPS in there that stores everything on 12V or 6V batteries. You loose so much in the transfers.
How is this really different than a pay per month MMORPG? I mean, you pay 10 bucks a month or whatever to connect to X-Box Live/WoW/FFOnline/etc just so you can play the game. It doesnt do you any good disconnected from the net. That's why I've never bought one of those games. Sure I like playing with friends sometimes, that's what a big screen and 4 controllers are for. I don't mind having the OPTION of connecting to a service to play other people, but I remember the days when that sort of thing was free (Rogue Spear/Starcraft/and others). I mean, you can think about this the same way. If every month you buy yourself a new car and track, it's like you're playing an MMO game. Atleast this one you can stop paying after you got what you want and keep playing the game. WoW isn't really worth anything without the connection.
So, is it just me, or does it seem like, if Blu-Ray and HDDVD both use the exact same codec, at the exact same bitrate, and the players decode the info in the exact same way, it's just like watching the SAME movie stored on a Western Digital Hard drive and a Seagate Hard drive with the same playback software. There's NO DIFFERENCE. Like compressing a file with zip and then extracting that file to two different places. The only real noticable difference between the formats is the amount of space available on them. Which means that the only time difference between the two formats would occur is if one decides to use a higher bitrate to take advantage of that space.
Sure the player will make a difference, but you can say that about two different DVD players now. This almost seems like a pointless struggle. Let's just use the bigger one and put a higher bitrate movie on it and be done, who really cares what kind of platter is in their disk drive anyway as long as it stores data properly.
Just my $.02.
I know, if there was a known issue with reliability on this rockets, software should have coded around it!
I agree, however I recently installed Vista Beta 2 on my 4 year old Athlon XP 2500+ system with 512MB RAM, and it's working pretty darn well with every effect the OS can dish out turned on. Only thing I've changed in it since I built it is the addition of a GeForce 5900 Graphics card, which is far from top of the line. Honestly, I WAS thinking of upgrading in the future, not really FOR Vista per se (though that was part of the thought) and after seeing that once again, all my games still run and Vista is smooth so what's the point of dropping more money?
I'm sure other people are in the same boat. Perhaps this is why there have been so many more laptop sales increases than desktop sales recently... people looking for that second computer they can take with them instead of replacing/upgrading that old one at the desk?
So maybe I've played too much Starcraft in my day, but what happens when multiple rockets are launched simultaniously from multiple locations? Let's say there's a airplane taking off, Al Quaida or whoever's closest 4 or 5 minions are standing near the end of the runway, in the path. They all have one shoulder rocket ready to launch, they see the plane, they count down, they shoot. the rockets only take a few seconds to hit the plane, can this laser take out 5 rockets with different trajectories within say 4 seconds max? 'cause only ONE has to hit the plane. Seems aquisition is a bit slow for that. What if there is a coordinated attack from two sides at the same time? What about something smaller than a rocket? It's fairly easy to get close to an airport, I mean, Midway Airport in Chicago is bordered by streets on all 4 sides that are unrestricted last I checked.
In all honesty it's probably more of a deterant than a real solution, just like car alarms and door locks. There are weaknesses in all of them, but we use them anyway and "feel safe". Sure if I have my doors locked and the car next to me doesn't, I can feel better since the theif will probably hit the easy target, but that doesn't mean he can't pop the locks, hot wire mine and take it anyway, does it?
Maybe the airports should just put a sign in the grass infront of the termial that says "Protected by Frickin Lasers!" and we can all save the other few billion.
There is a supermarket chain where I am, Farm Fresh, that has been using fingerprints and "PayByTouch" for atleast a year now. Never tried it, they're food kinda went down the toilet (though they have a good beer selection) so I don't go there that much and the cash I usually use hasn't been rejected yet... It's just one of those POS attachments that sits there but never gets used. Anyone tried it? Anyone had real experience with this system? Is it anything like the fingerprint scanners coming with some laptops now-a-days?
As much as no one likes war, it is a goal to work towards that helps in the R&D of new technologies. I mean, if I were to tell you "Go out and invent something cool." you'd probably make something interesting. But if I told you "We need to beat these guys!" People generally get a lot more fired up. They tend to focus on the problem at hand and come up with possible solutions, in this case, going faster. It always helps to have some sort of focus.
Now, a similar thing occured when we had the space race for instance, so it's not war only, but war is a powerful force that drives civilizations time and time again.
Also, it's a good defense. If people know we're constantly developing new technologies to swiftly kick their ass, they'll be less likely to try a conventional attack on us.
a performance drop-off in many of the games when using anti-aliasing. NO WAY!! I mean, the game has to render like 2-8 times as many pixels as without AA, who would have thought that would slow it down?
instant delivery of whatever content I want at any time. A plastic disc is always going to require me to drive to a store or wait for the mail.
However, what you buy from the store will be available at anytime and not subject to network downtime, blackout dates, obscurity (they can't offer EVERY MOVIE, especially when the service starts, and likely some obscure movie you like won't get digitized for ages)... 'course the big thing that breaks your argument are home movies you record yourself... gotta have some way to get them on the screen. Sure you can hook a HTPC up there, but gramma and grampa aren't going to do that, and transfering a large High Res HD Movie from your house to your grandparents house in the middle of an iowa cornfield over a shotty network or bittorrent isn't always the best idea. Which brings up Eaze of Use. Right now, they can grab a Disc, put it in the drive and close the drawer. They don't even have to hit play.
I don't meant to shoot your ideal dream medium down, but physical storage will ALWAYS have a purpose.
All we need to do is wait for it to collapse a little further and then Chuck Norris can it it with a roundhouse kick and everything will be back to normal.
I have to agree that ads add more realistic game environments. The coke machine in the office, the Pirelli or Brigestone adds in racing games, etc. As long as the add looks like it's just a texture that's supposed to be there to make things look right, I'm all for it. In fact, I'd say that this should have been done a long time ago! But I don't think that I want to be playing FFXIII and right after I tell my Aeon/Limitbreak/whatever to kill some guy and have some "This asskicking moment brought to you by McDonalds". I mean that's just distracting, and I hope they realize that I will immediately associate McDonalds in this example to an evil corporation that needs to no longer get my or my friends business. (though I will have to say that I've never bought a product because I saw an ad in a game, but I suppose having it there and the usefulness of it being there are two different things...)
Your analogy is slightly flawed (aren't they all). There's not just one shipping company (UPS). In the case of the internet there may be a half dozen. You paid the two on the ends of the route only.
However, if it wasn't for the 4 in the middle, the two on the ends wouldn't have made ANY money because they would have been useless. So they should pay the ones in the middle for the use of their lines just as we pay the outer two for getting it to us. Now, if they can't afford to pay the inner 4 then they would have to up their fees for the outer two so they can afford it.
It's still a valid analogy if you take the cost of gas and trucks and such into effect. We pay UPS to bring us the package. In essence what we're paying for is not just the guy's salary to drive a truck. We're paying for the truck, it's maintence and the gas required to move the package from pt A to pt B. Without the gas and truck, the roads and driver would be useless, so these fees are figured into the cost of shipping the package. Gas prices go up, so the $7.50 package now costs $8 to ship.
What these people want to do is charge both the reciever and the sender for the gas/driver/truck/maintence when really the charge only occurs once. Theoretically, if they halved the price for both ends, then the total price would be the same it would just be distributed differently. But someone didn't tell them that part of the equation.
Honestly, my main reason for liking Anime (some atleast, not all... it is a rather broad spectrum you know) is that it's not American TV. It's not crappy re-runs, it's not "reality tv" which sucks the perverbal donkey, nor is it overhyped "funny" shows that aren't that funny. It is what it is and it's different. The perspectives on issues are different, the way it's drawn is different, the plot and humor is different, etc. It's like drinking a glass of soda after having nothing but water for years. Sure they're both refreshing, but the soda is more interesting to your palette.
I used to watch a lot of it, I still watch a decent amount when taken in a percentage to the amount of TV/movies I watch, but in the end I it's because I end up choosing the Anime, it wasn't forced on me.
And if I make a random number generator create random bit patterns it'll eventually create an MP3 file. Or Windows (No wonder Vista is taking so long), or any other copyrighted file.
Which I'm sure they'll go ahead and sue me for pointing out that they're copyrighting a bunch of random bit patterns that anyone can duplicate given enough time.