Can't believe anyone from the UK hasn't replied yet - June was literally absurd in terms of rain here - Where I live, we get an average of 12 inches of rain per _year_, distributed evenly between the months, on average.
Incidental temperatures fucking are a coincidence. More storms, less rain, cold winters, whatever - it's not the issue. That's the argument AGW denialists have been using for years, ok?
Headlines like this prove nothing - the overwhelming body of scientific literature shows that AGW does exist, and localised weather is not really a good indication of it (though some, especially those in the media, try to make it so).
All defects are not created equal. A defect that is known that hits in a 1 in a billion UI interface offchance that just throws up an error, and nothing more is a defect, but 99.9% of people would not fix it, if it requires significant work. Why would they - it's a waste of time. A defect that drops all keyboard interface onto the internet in a secure system every time is still 1 defect - it's just a bigger one.
Your post (GP from this) has no troll mods. I'm guessing whoever modded it down posted to the discussion, and thus voided their mod points. (though I never saw your post with a troll mod, so I'm taking your word for it).
That being said, if this is the way it works, I hope we can metamod temporary mod points. Someone who is shilling can abuse the system by modding everyone they want to down, then post later to prevent metamodding.
What has been killing Microsoft is that the world is moving to something other than the PC.
I don't think this is the whole story. The desktop is not dying, and the PC gaming market is not dying. Revenues are higher than they ever have been.
What I believe is happening is that innovations in the desktop market just aren't there now, to the same extent that they were 10-20 years ago. Making a game pretty is not enough, anymore, since it's relatively easy to make a game pretty now. I am not one of the apologists decrying unoriginality within the PC game sector, if anything I believe it's healthier than it's ever been. However, despite their efforts to make new versions of Windows essential upgrades with deliberate incompatibility in some cases, there isn't a decent reason to upgrade from Windows 2000 in most user's cases.
Nearly all of the things used for gaming could have been accomplished within win2k with a hell of a lot less effort than was used to develop 3 new operating systems since. Artificially not supporting older OS's is part of Microsoft's tactics, as seen with the XP directx10/11 debacle. This is their prerogative, but users are beginning to get wise to it, and just not upgrading until they need to, and are bitter when they have to. They're looking for alternatives, which is one of the reasons IMO why macs have had a resurgence.
Operating systems are starting less and less to rely on killer apps. As code is getting more portable, companies are offering up more multi-platform alternatives, including within the console world. Optimisation is no longer the be all and end all, writing stuff so it can be ported relatively easily is so much more important.
To some degree, I think Win2k and Vista helped introduce this by pushing forward hardware abstraction for applications. It was inevitable, anyway, but I think these operating systems may have quickened the trend.
tl;dr : The PC market is fine, what's been killing MS is not the move to another platform, it's the lack of incentive for people to upgrade their OS.
You'd have thought that those living in the land of the free would object more to government intrusion upon civil liberties.
I'm not Swiss, but to OP : you're a fucking idiot. You do not know what you are saying, literally. If you want Swiss banks to stop trading in the US, I'm sure they can.
PC's are always ahead - it's just a smaller market. Bear in mind the standard resolution for consoles for next generation will be lower than the resolution on my PC prior to the launch of current consoles. They're years behind, in some ways.
Realistic detail would be catastrophic in any game. Literally any game would collapse under overwhelming micromanagement if realistic detail were involved.
Every single game there has ever been has not come anywhere near close to representing one small town. All the brilliant stories you get from games revolve about a maximum of 100 people or so, and there's a reason for that. 10,000 people is not worth it, and it's a nightmare for gamers too.
I've though about this for a while, and have come to the conclusion that games simple cannot be realistic in this sense - Managing possible interactions between 7 billion characters does not work, it'll never work, and making the gamer manage that many people is counterproductive. 1,000 is too many people in a game, really. If it were possible to create the realistic billions, it would not be desirable.
If you want to programme games there are. If you want to write machine code, just about every appliance has a computer in them, and they're all hardware limited. Depressingly, the best place to look for hardware limited code to write now commercially is with dishwashers and ovens and other simple appliances.
While it may not fit the dictionary definition, IMHO ANY software that allows someone to delete/alter/lock up something on my machine without my permission is essentially a rootkit.
Erm... all software alters something on your computer without your explicit permission. What do you want, a prompt asking you to allow individual bits to be written to RAM?
GP understands the word perfectly. A christian bookshop not selling satanist books because of their content is censorship. That's in essence the very meaning of the word. The owner of the bookshop is censoring satanist literature.
I think people should have the right to censor, in most cases, even with public companies. That's how it works now.
People keep throwing around the word "censorship" like they think they know what it means, but it's obvious they don't. Censorship is when the government restricts your speech. Even if every single one of her claims is true, she is not being censored.
Looks like you don't know censorship means. To start, we'll keep it simple - the first few lines from Wikipedia : "Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body. It can be done by governments and private organizations or by individuals who engage in self-censorship."
Now... I'm not arguing against your general point, only against your notion of censorship. Notice that you claim that only governments can censor, while I, and wikipedia (though it is a flawed resource) claim that anyone or anything can censor you. You can censor yourself, if you like (see self-censorship).
I'm relatively curious... what do you think censorship means?
There's a difference : Forcing public companies to sell something they don't want to sell is odd, IMO. I don't think there's many times that's happened (save for when those companies have government monopolistic/subsidised involvement). Forcing public companies to sell to the public in the same way isn't all that odd, really, though.
I don't include ACs in the discussion generally. They are beneath my attention threshold.
Then you're missing out. AC posts are often very good. You sound a little arrogant when you say that ACs add nothing.
Your previous post shows you can't even tell who you're replying to, and why they have posted what they did (which most ACs can). It's currently at +5 insightful, which shows some moderators are in the same boat. That post is just 100% wrong, through and through, as anyone who had read the parent of the post you were replying to could see immediately.
Don't get all defensive, just admit you were wrong, and carry on.
Rather, Apple has sued Samsung for combining so many visual and behavioral elements from the iPhone and iPad that they have obviously ripped off the design.
You're allowed to rip off the design : Look and feel used to be not patentable, absolutely. Now it's a little fuzzy, but that patent has not stood up to serious legal challenge - the first didn't.
Established law is that visual and behavioural UI element "feel" is not patentable, usually. That's why "look and feel" lawsuits don't generally work, unless you have a load of lawyers, and a load of time, and the person you're suing doesn't.
You are not hating Apple because of how they do business, you are hating Apple because unlike others they are open about it, you are hating Apple because they're honest.
This is either a fanboy or a shill comment. If you seriously believe it's neither, you're the former.
Seriously, Apple have been abusing patent law for their gain for a while now. You can claim patent law is broken (which it is), and you can claim that their patents are legally valid (which at least some of them are, others are questionable), and you can claim all their competitors are doing the same (which they are, some less aggressively though). However, claiming Apple are being honest and not engaging in anti-competitive patent hoarding and suing is flat out false. Yes, lots of other companies do the same, some are worse, some are better.
The "glory days" of Slashdot? When were those? I've been about since close to the start, lurking, registered later. I don't remember any "glory days".
As long as Slashdot continues to provide stories I'm interested in, and has decent comments, I'm still here. Trolls get modded down relatively well, differing opinions get squashed a bit sometimes, but I try to mod them up even if I don't agree with them if their argument is semi-cogent. I seriously don't believe in group-think accusations, there's generally loads of out there nutjobs on most discussions, some are modded up, some down.
tl;dr - Fuck off if you like, slashdot is not dead.
I've got unlimited transfer too - for not very much a month, so bandwidth costs are not an issue for me. TV over the net is basically free, because I'm not going to ditch the internet.
I also live in the UK, so I can get BBC iplayer free, ITV streaming, loads of other channels streaming for free (non-BBC with ads, but there are less of them over the internet). The only thing you have to pay for is films and sport, and then not a lot of the time. The olympics, for example is all on the BBC free.
Also, because of the law here, you don't have to buy a TV license if you don't watch TV live. I actually did this for a few years when I was poor.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't believe anyone from the UK hasn't replied yet - June was literally absurd in terms of rain here - Where I live, we get an average of 12 inches of rain per _year_, distributed evenly between the months, on average.
Incidental temperatures fucking are a coincidence. More storms, less rain, cold winters, whatever - it's not the issue. That's the argument AGW denialists have been using for years, ok?
Headlines like this prove nothing - the overwhelming body of scientific literature shows that AGW does exist, and localised weather is not really a good indication of it (though some, especially those in the media, try to make it so).
depends how cold it is....
All defects are not created equal. A defect that is known that hits in a 1 in a billion UI interface offchance that just throws up an error, and nothing more is a defect, but 99.9% of people would not fix it, if it requires significant work. Why would they - it's a waste of time. A defect that drops all keyboard interface onto the internet in a secure system every time is still 1 defect - it's just a bigger one.
Your post (GP from this) has no troll mods. I'm guessing whoever modded it down posted to the discussion, and thus voided their mod points. (though I never saw your post with a troll mod, so I'm taking your word for it).
That being said, if this is the way it works, I hope we can metamod temporary mod points. Someone who is shilling can abuse the system by modding everyone they want to down, then post later to prevent metamodding.
What has been killing Microsoft is that the world is moving to something other than the PC.
I don't think this is the whole story. The desktop is not dying, and the PC gaming market is not dying. Revenues are higher than they ever have been.
What I believe is happening is that innovations in the desktop market just aren't there now, to the same extent that they were 10-20 years ago. Making a game pretty is not enough, anymore, since it's relatively easy to make a game pretty now. I am not one of the apologists decrying unoriginality within the PC game sector, if anything I believe it's healthier than it's ever been. However, despite their efforts to make new versions of Windows essential upgrades with deliberate incompatibility in some cases, there isn't a decent reason to upgrade from Windows 2000 in most user's cases.
Nearly all of the things used for gaming could have been accomplished within win2k with a hell of a lot less effort than was used to develop 3 new operating systems since. Artificially not supporting older OS's is part of Microsoft's tactics, as seen with the XP directx10/11 debacle. This is their prerogative, but users are beginning to get wise to it, and just not upgrading until they need to, and are bitter when they have to. They're looking for alternatives, which is one of the reasons IMO why macs have had a resurgence.
Operating systems are starting less and less to rely on killer apps. As code is getting more portable, companies are offering up more multi-platform alternatives, including within the console world. Optimisation is no longer the be all and end all, writing stuff so it can be ported relatively easily is so much more important.
To some degree, I think Win2k and Vista helped introduce this by pushing forward hardware abstraction for applications. It was inevitable, anyway, but I think these operating systems may have quickened the trend.
tl;dr : The PC market is fine, what's been killing MS is not the move to another platform, it's the lack of incentive for people to upgrade their OS.
It's just not possible to keep malware off a system, not even with good judgement.
So how would a walled garden help?
You'd have thought that those living in the land of the free would object more to government intrusion upon civil liberties.
I'm not Swiss, but to OP : you're a fucking idiot. You do not know what you are saying, literally. If you want Swiss banks to stop trading in the US, I'm sure they can.
PC's are always ahead - it's just a smaller market. Bear in mind the standard resolution for consoles for next generation will be lower than the resolution on my PC prior to the launch of current consoles. They're years behind, in some ways.
So it takes a good LCD to compare to a good CRT?
Some early LCDs were crap, and I didn't convert until they surpassed my CRT in most ways - that happened more than 5 years ago though.
Realistic detail would be catastrophic in any game. Literally any game would collapse under overwhelming micromanagement if realistic detail were involved.
Every single game there has ever been has not come anywhere near close to representing one small town. All the brilliant stories you get from games revolve about a maximum of 100 people or so, and there's a reason for that. 10,000 people is not worth it, and it's a nightmare for gamers too.
I've though about this for a while, and have come to the conclusion that games simple cannot be realistic in this sense - Managing possible interactions between 7 billion characters does not work, it'll never work, and making the gamer manage that many people is counterproductive. 1,000 is too many people in a game, really. If it were possible to create the realistic billions, it would not be desirable.
Go right ahead and nurture the believe that aches and pains, forgetfulness, brain-fog, worsening vision are just a matter of age.
You're down on you oily fish, grandpa! Cod liver oil intravenously, pronto!
If you want to programme games there are. If you want to write machine code, just about every appliance has a computer in them, and they're all hardware limited. Depressingly, the best place to look for hardware limited code to write now commercially is with dishwashers and ovens and other simple appliances.
While it may not fit the dictionary definition, IMHO ANY software that allows someone to delete/alter/lock up something on my machine without my permission is essentially a rootkit.
Erm... all software alters something on your computer without your explicit permission. What do you want, a prompt asking you to allow individual bits to be written to RAM?
Yeah... that's where you're getting confused. Selection _is_ censorship in many cases.
GP understands the word perfectly. A christian bookshop not selling satanist books because of their content is censorship. That's in essence the very meaning of the word. The owner of the bookshop is censoring satanist literature.
I think people should have the right to censor, in most cases, even with public companies. That's how it works now.
People keep throwing around the word "censorship" like they think they know what it means, but it's obvious they don't. Censorship is when the government restricts your speech. Even if every single one of her claims is true, she is not being censored.
Looks like you don't know censorship means. To start, we'll keep it simple - the first few lines from Wikipedia : "Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body. It can be done by governments and private organizations or by individuals who engage in self-censorship."
Now... I'm not arguing against your general point, only against your notion of censorship. Notice that you claim that only governments can censor, while I, and wikipedia (though it is a flawed resource) claim that anyone or anything can censor you. You can censor yourself, if you like (see self-censorship).
I'm relatively curious... what do you think censorship means?
There's a difference : Forcing public companies to sell something they don't want to sell is odd, IMO. I don't think there's many times that's happened (save for when those companies have government monopolistic/subsidised involvement). Forcing public companies to sell to the public in the same way isn't all that odd, really, though.
I don't include ACs in the discussion generally. They are beneath my attention threshold.
Then you're missing out. AC posts are often very good. You sound a little arrogant when you say that ACs add nothing.
Your previous post shows you can't even tell who you're replying to, and why they have posted what they did (which most ACs can). It's currently at +5 insightful, which shows some moderators are in the same boat. That post is just 100% wrong, through and through, as anyone who had read the parent of the post you were replying to could see immediately.
Don't get all defensive, just admit you were wrong, and carry on.
No, it's not a stretch. GGP was asking for public companies to be forced to carry everything - GP was making a simple point, relatively succinctly :
Forcing public companies to not censor to leads to stupid consequences, like companies aimed exclusively at kids carrying porn.
Rather, Apple has sued Samsung for combining so many visual and behavioral elements from the iPhone and iPad that they have obviously ripped off the design.
You're allowed to rip off the design : Look and feel used to be not patentable, absolutely. Now it's a little fuzzy, but that patent has not stood up to serious legal challenge - the first didn't.
Established law is that visual and behavioural UI element "feel" is not patentable, usually. That's why "look and feel" lawsuits don't generally work, unless you have a load of lawyers, and a load of time, and the person you're suing doesn't.
You are not hating Apple because of how they do business, you are hating Apple because unlike others they are open about it, you are hating Apple because they're honest.
This is either a fanboy or a shill comment. If you seriously believe it's neither, you're the former.
Seriously, Apple have been abusing patent law for their gain for a while now. You can claim patent law is broken (which it is), and you can claim that their patents are legally valid (which at least some of them are, others are questionable), and you can claim all their competitors are doing the same (which they are, some less aggressively though). However, claiming Apple are being honest and not engaging in anti-competitive patent hoarding and suing is flat out false. Yes, lots of other companies do the same, some are worse, some are better.
What the fuck are you people talking about?
The "glory days" of Slashdot? When were those? I've been about since close to the start, lurking, registered later. I don't remember any "glory days".
As long as Slashdot continues to provide stories I'm interested in, and has decent comments, I'm still here. Trolls get modded down relatively well, differing opinions get squashed a bit sometimes, but I try to mod them up even if I don't agree with them if their argument is semi-cogent. I seriously don't believe in group-think accusations, there's generally loads of out there nutjobs on most discussions, some are modded up, some down.
tl;dr - Fuck off if you like, slashdot is not dead.
I've got unlimited transfer too - for not very much a month, so bandwidth costs are not an issue for me. TV over the net is basically free, because I'm not going to ditch the internet.
I also live in the UK, so I can get BBC iplayer free, ITV streaming, loads of other channels streaming for free (non-BBC with ads, but there are less of them over the internet). The only thing you have to pay for is films and sport, and then not a lot of the time. The olympics, for example is all on the BBC free.
Also, because of the law here, you don't have to buy a TV license if you don't watch TV live. I actually did this for a few years when I was poor.
No, they're S-IPS. They're the same LG panels everyone else is using.