Valid points. Managers/administrators which accept such MS proposition deserve to be shot, because they force MS lock-in on students. In practice, admins are willing to accept this because then they don't have to mantain custom mail server, while managers do whatever admin advises.
Then it ends up with students not even having a choice, because their automatically created MS Live account will likely be used as default for official communication with every person working on a college.
Who (the hell) would use web mail account which doesn't have at least forwarding (and no way to have alternate access)? This reminds me of the lockdown that OutlookExpress had(still has). Soon, many programs appeared which could back up and migrate mail and acocunt settings another windows install or mail agent. I guess someone will make a "Live" parser which will fetch that data anyway.
Unfortunately, many unsuspecting students will not see the lock-in problem until they try to switch, or want to have mail delivered to local mail agent. Others (avg. slashdot user) will stay far away from Windows Live.
Is that really true, or are you referring to the once-a-day automatic update cron job? The former method would require interrupt-based functionality (server notifies you) while the latter uses polling (you periodically check the server for updates).
No way Apple would try to implement Win32 API from scratch. It took nearly a decade for Wine. It is impossible to do in reliable fashion without huge manpower and testers. It would be easy with clean, fully documented (and properly tested) modular API. Win32 is all but that (not eve MS can get compatibility working right!)
It is possible that Apple modifies WINE to use native GUI libraries and few such tweaks, maybe a few new kernel calls to speed up file handling or threading.
And to spoil a party, Crossover is already working on OSX Wine port. There are some fundamental differences compared to linux, but no showstoppers.
I heard once that MS studied linux kernel development process and wanted to structure their own kernel dev team in similar fashion. So, LKLM folks are probably exceeding MS methods. Of course, among kernel hackers there are many corporate professionals hired by companies such as IBM, Novell, etc.
Firefox, if installed into home/$user directory, will notify user of new version and update if he agrees. Can't be simpler than that. Distributions can also be configured (Ubuntu e.g.) to automatically update when new version pops up in the repostory.
If he asked stupid questions about windows, it'd be equally recieved.
Annoying mediocre people. For them it is easier (and more entertaining because they feel "active") to bore people repetitively, instead of short googling for information which most often reveals everything they need to know.
Very good example: Idiots on Usenet which ask a question despite there already is one two lines below the latest thread!
Sadly, as you say, their hardware is unstable crapware, riddled with bugs and rushed to market just to compete with the other company. Unfortunately, that is the nature of graphic hardware; as long as games work, people are happy (game developers aren't, as they must test with multiple versions/hardware). Making properly designed and tested hardware lasts longer, and hw makers don't want to spend time and money on that without benefits.
Therefore I believe in that nvidia statement that driver writing for their GPU's too complex to be opensourced: the hardware is probably horribly designed.
IMHO, main "problem" behind starforce was it's effectiveness against pirate means to play games. People ranted and, strangely, succeeded in pressuring top publisher to drop it. Other protections aren't better.
It is possible they will dump SF, but I don't think the reason is bad PR. Reason is that SF3/4 is now ineffective. Reloaded is getting grip on it, Daemon-Tools4 is owning it, while in the same time it is too expensive for something which can be beatenwhile for probably less money you can have Securom or Safedisc which still renders most simple attacks useless and sometimes can even be uncrackable or at least hard ot do it.
Year ago, Ubisoft released SC:Chaos Theory and protection was invincible for 6 months until sfcure trick came. Probably a world record for AAA PC game title (OK, not counting USB trick, but not many people had facility to do that). It just isn't possible to have that today, although SF4 might try again.
Problem is that those chips are massively overpriced just because of their famed overclockability. When buyer (usually performance freak) finds out that it isn't working, it is disappopinting, especially because he could get same thing for much less of investment.
It's because people (kids with rich parents and/or videogame nerds) are likely to spend insane amounts fo money to have a setup costing few thousand $$. Such as AthlonFX X2 with OCZ memory, Creative X-Fi, SLI 2x7900GTX, 22" LCD etc. This equipment as always costs significantly less after 6-12 months, so it's pointless to buy it for a sane middle-class person.
I sometimes used similar technique to make music in Fast Tracker 2. That application did have the possibility to use keyboard as instrument with selected samples. Later you just switch audio track(channel) and record another instrument. Very effective and quick, it was possible to make very good sounding tunes (and if needed adjust them later).
Internet. It's much more entertaining to lead flamewars, download porn/music/movies than to play a mediocre game (such as recently released TES Oblivion). Lots of people perceieve gamers as nerds, and noone wants to be a nerd (he gets to be one unknowingly).
Gaming industry's current lack of inspiration and quality as well as philosophy that games must be adjusted for dumb people to sell is something that must quickly go away if they want to retain current interest in games.
Sex is an addiction. We have problem in our society!
The right question is, since when is porn unnatural and destructive? The only true is that christian fundamentalism has for centuries tortured the world with their anti-sexual attitude.
Leveling and scaling system is crap. At level >10 you get attacked by hordes of enemies with best armor and weapons.
Morrowind, with it's deficiencies was at least playable for some longer time. Amount of items was bigger and actually you were happy to acquire some better piece of metal. Now it is pointless because enemies scale and loot scales with them. There are already mods, though, which somewhat improve the situation.
And I actually liked the setting in MW more. More diverse terrain, harder monsters in areas you shouldn't go until at the end of a game. Ancient ruins and numerous exotic places. Great story with big mountains and mysterious creatures and blight.
Now, Oblivion imposes boring middle week world and childish story. It seems completely uninteresting, doesn't have that spirit that kept me playing MW.
What else we need is fast evolution of lightning part of GPU. It's usage would be to recalculate shadow tesselation, lightmaps, radiosity corrections, etc realtime). Modern GPU's seem to be bogged down when calculating lights, so something is needed to make it less costly.
In that context, I think dynamically rendered shadow maps are the future.
It'd be especially usable for slower changing lights (like shadows and environment light amount for outdoors with daylight changes). Oblivion and it's weak light/shadow dynamics comes to mind.
One game that has this perfected is Chronichles of Riddick, while D3/Q4 are bit weaker (no self-shadowing). Unfortunately, a requirement for this was to have low-poly models for decent performance so it's not good as outdoor engine.
Unreal 3 engine will set some new standards, finally.
There is a big difference between GNOME and KDE already. KDE is heading to robust desktop for power users (especially in KDE4 incentive) While GNOME is going for simplicity (as Linus said, too much), light look and polishing of current form.
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Valid points. Managers/administrators which accept such MS proposition deserve to be shot, because they force MS lock-in on students. In practice, admins are willing to accept this because then they don't have to mantain custom mail server, while managers do whatever admin advises.
Then it ends up with students not even having a choice, because their automatically created MS Live account will likely be used as default for official communication with every person working on a college.
Who (the hell) would use web mail account which doesn't have at least forwarding (and no way to have alternate access)? This reminds me of the lockdown that OutlookExpress had(still has). Soon, many programs appeared which could back up and migrate mail and acocunt settings another windows install or mail agent. I guess someone will make a "Live" parser which will fetch that data anyway.
Unfortunately, many unsuspecting students will not see the lock-in problem until they try to switch, or want to have mail delivered to local mail agent. Others (avg. slashdot user) will stay far away from Windows Live.
So, Betty tries to copy a borrowed blu-ray disc which triggers a player device to phones home and a day later police knocks on her door.
Cron job.
He indeed lost his mind.
No way Apple would try to implement Win32 API from scratch. It took nearly a decade for Wine. It is impossible to do in reliable fashion without huge manpower and testers. It would be easy with clean, fully documented (and properly tested) modular API. Win32 is all but that (not eve MS can get compatibility working right!)
It is possible that Apple modifies WINE to use native GUI libraries and few such tweaks, maybe a few new kernel calls to speed up file handling or threading.
And to spoil a party, Crossover is already working on OSX Wine port. There are some fundamental differences compared to linux, but no showstoppers.
I heard once that MS studied linux kernel development process and wanted to structure their own kernel dev team in similar fashion. So, LKLM folks are probably exceeding MS methods. Of course, among kernel hackers there are many corporate professionals hired by companies such as IBM, Novell, etc.
Firefox, if installed into home/$user directory, will notify user of new version and update if he agrees. Can't be simpler than that. Distributions can also be configured (Ubuntu e.g.) to automatically update when new version pops up in the repostory.
If he asked stupid questions about windows, it'd be equally recieved.
Annoying mediocre people. For them it is easier (and more entertaining because they feel "active") to bore people repetitively, instead of short googling for information which most often reveals everything they need to know.
Very good example: Idiots on Usenet which ask a question despite there already is one two lines below the latest thread!
Sadly, as you say, their hardware is unstable crapware, riddled with bugs and rushed to market just to compete with the other company. Unfortunately, that is the nature of graphic hardware; as long as games work, people are happy (game developers aren't, as they must test with multiple versions/hardware). Making properly designed and tested hardware lasts longer, and hw makers don't want to spend time and money on that without benefits.
Therefore I believe in that nvidia statement that driver writing for their GPU's too complex to be opensourced: the hardware is probably horribly designed.
Lenovo doesn't sell because people who used to buy thinkpads were US patriots?
Otherwise Lenovo should upgrade to better designed case, Thinkpads look dated.
IMHO, main "problem" behind starforce was it's effectiveness against pirate means to play games. People ranted and, strangely, succeeded in pressuring top publisher to drop it. Other protections aren't better.
For that you'll need to attach a second drive with FAT32 partition, because linux can't yet (fully) write to NTFS partitions.
It is possible they will dump SF, but I don't think the reason is bad PR.
Reason is that SF3/4 is now ineffective. Reloaded is getting grip on it, Daemon-Tools4 is owning it, while in the same time it is too expensive for something which can be beatenwhile for probably less money you can have Securom or Safedisc which still renders most simple attacks useless and sometimes can even be uncrackable or at least hard ot do it.
Year ago, Ubisoft released SC:Chaos Theory and protection was invincible for 6 months until sfcure trick came. Probably a world record for AAA PC game title (OK, not counting USB trick, but not many people had facility to do that). It just isn't possible to have that today, although SF4 might try again.
Problem is that those chips are massively overpriced just because of their famed overclockability. When buyer (usually performance freak) finds out that it isn't working, it is disappopinting, especially because he could get same thing for much less of investment.
Don't worry, EU will look into that.
It's because people (kids with rich parents and/or videogame nerds) are likely to spend insane amounts fo money to have a setup costing few thousand $$. Such as AthlonFX X2 with OCZ memory, Creative X-Fi, SLI 2x7900GTX, 22" LCD etc. This equipment as always costs significantly less after 6-12 months, so it's pointless to buy it for a sane middle-class person.
I sometimes used similar technique to make music in Fast Tracker 2. That application did have the possibility to use keyboard as instrument with selected samples. Later you just switch audio track(channel) and record another instrument. Very effective and quick, it was possible to make very good sounding tunes (and if needed adjust them later).
Internet.
It's much more entertaining to lead flamewars, download porn/music/movies than to play a mediocre game (such as recently released TES Oblivion). Lots of people perceieve gamers as nerds, and noone wants to be a nerd (he gets to be one unknowingly).
Gaming industry's current lack of inspiration and quality as well as philosophy that games must be adjusted for dumb people to sell is something that must quickly go away if they want to retain current interest in games.
Their innovation is inserting cards into sockets, connecting cables, using screwdriver and putting label onto their "product".
I thought Bush went to Iraq to preserve cheap domestic oil prices, among other (similar) reasons.
Sex is an addiction. We have problem in our society!
The right question is, since when is porn unnatural and destructive?
The only true is that christian fundamentalism has for centuries tortured the world
with their anti-sexual attitude.
Too draconian. Will not pass the voting.
Leveling and scaling system is crap. At level >10 you get attacked by hordes of enemies with best armor and weapons.
Morrowind, with it's deficiencies was at least playable for some longer time.
Amount of items was bigger and actually you were happy to acquire some better piece of metal.
Now it is pointless because enemies scale and loot scales with them.
There are already mods, though, which somewhat improve the situation.
And I actually liked the setting in MW more. More diverse terrain, harder monsters in areas you shouldn't go until at the end of a game. Ancient ruins and numerous exotic places.
Great story with big mountains and mysterious creatures and blight.
Now, Oblivion imposes boring middle week world and childish story. It seems completely uninteresting, doesn't have that spirit that kept me playing MW.
Damn X360...
What else we need is fast evolution of lightning part of GPU. It's usage would be to recalculate shadow tesselation, lightmaps, radiosity corrections, etc realtime). Modern GPU's seem to be bogged down when calculating lights, so something is needed to make it less costly.
In that context, I think dynamically rendered shadow maps are the future.
It'd be especially usable for slower changing lights (like shadows and environment light amount for outdoors with daylight changes). Oblivion and it's weak light/shadow dynamics comes to mind.
One game that has this perfected is Chronichles of Riddick, while D3/Q4 are bit weaker (no self-shadowing). Unfortunately, a requirement for this was to have low-poly models for decent performance so it's not good as outdoor engine.
Unreal 3 engine will set some new standards, finally.
There is a big difference between GNOME and KDE already.
KDE is heading to robust desktop for power users (especially in KDE4 incentive)
While GNOME is going for simplicity (as Linus said, too much), light look and polishing of current form.