Yeah, but that was back when the Cold War was still on and the former Soviet Union was the enemy, not an ally in building it. The station was proposed in 1984 by Ronald Reagan as a replacement for Skylab, which crashed to earth in 1979. Post Cold War NASA budgets and the Challenger disaster killed the timeline and the size of the thing and in 1993 the name got changed (to the International Space Station or ISS) when Russia climbed aboard. I believe one of the requirements for Russia to join the project was that the name get changed because Freedom was associated with the Cold War.
Here's the Wikipedia entry on it, which probably covers it in a lot more detail than I can off the top of my head.
joking aside, Lesbos was a Greek island and had nothing to do with Roman gods (which our planets are named after). The island got its reputation from Sappho, the poet (also the synonym sapphic is derived from her, though rare to see these days).
Incidentally, Sappho was married and if she did munch the rug it would make her bisexual, which makes the association incorrect, anyway.
Now that I've shot that option down, I need to catch the first shuttle to Bacchus;)
An old roomie of mine (a New York rapper, incidentally, but not a terribly good one) claimed rap is an acronym for "Rhythm And Poetry." Don't know if that's true or not, but supposedly it was used by artists in the mid-1970s to describe the a cappella form.
You could argue that the guy spewing garbage over an old record is music and old rap isn't - but then again, you could just say it's all a bunch of noise, which would be technically correct, too. But every genre has some noise - try listening to Free Jazz sometime (like a good percentage of what Sun Ra put out)... eugh.
Finally someone that hit on indies (independent promoters), but the good news is none of the big three radio owners take indie bribes anymore - Cox and Clear Channel stopped the practice in 2003 (or 2002, depending on source, and who started it varies by source too, but Clear Channel appears to have started it) and Infinity since Nov 2004.
The bad thing is that nothing is stopping them from changing their policy back, outside of bad press, and nothing is stopping stations owned by others from taking these bribes. The wording of the Clear Channel announcement back in April 2003 even gives them an "out" if approved by management.
The other bad thing is that since there are fewer owners of radio stations, the music formats have become more conservative, though some people claim this is the result of fewer indies - read the last paragraph from this Billboard article.
I would say companies are willing to spend $2500 for a variety of reasons
a) computers are 2 year depreciating assets in the US, last time I checked ($1250 a year for 2 years written off on taxes)
b) large companies offer hardware support (Dell, Gateway, HP, etc). If you build your own, your own support staff is responsible, and what if the builder leaves? Management doesn't like risks like that.
c) software support is also required - OEM Windows requires the hardware vendor to provide most support (and therefore costs less). This isn't always supplied by the hardware vendor, so I list it separately (I've worked for a hardware vendor and redirected calls for bundled software to the software vendor, so have firsthand experience on this).
d) established vendors (like Dell, Gateway, HP, and Apple) have volume discount contracts and often bundle software (like MS Office), as well (as mentioned).
I know companies that have made large purchases of Linux boxes, but always from established Linux companies like RedHat and Novell (SuSE). You'll never find Slackware because of support, or GenToo because no party is responsible for "owning" it (i.e. can't pressure vendor to make bug fixes).
totally offtopic, but coincidental, that made me think of the old Skinny Puppy album VIVISect VI, which was meant to be read 66Sect 6 (and indicate that animal testing was a devil cult)...
That got me to thinking that they should change the name to eVista, like the popular menopause pill (it's also a UGS software product, so that probably won't fly, but I still laugh every time I think of it).
right, but there are some differences that they've stated:
a) you don't need to own the add-on to go into the new areas if someone that owns it takes you with them.
b) $50 every 6 months is not $15/month, it's about $9 per month, and I've seen the game for $36 online, which means the expansions are more like $6/month.
c) you can choose to add the expansion at any time, which is good for people like me that generally only have 3-10 hours of game time per week (depending on how busy my OSS projects are, how much weekend time I've got, and how much sleep I'm willing to sacrifice) and may not have even finished the main game until later.
d) some people only want to play PvP and they may not benefit much from a PvE expansion (depends on skills added, I guess). I have guild members that only played PvE to unlock skills, but now that Arena.net made it possible to unlock them without PvE, they've been exclusively playing PvP (and are very good, as our guild rank has been rising rapidly).
All software and hardware companies are evil in some way once they have stockholders they have to appease.
Microsoft is nothing compared to what they used to be now that every action they do is scrutinized. Do you remember when Microsoft would give huge discounts on OEM software if the hardware vendor would agree to only bundle Microsoft software products? Then there was the strong-arming of vendors to only bundle IE and not Netscape with similar tactics, and when they got in regulatory trouble, they claimed IE was an integral part of Windows. Incidentally, they attempted to do the same thing with MS-SQL by only selling the server OS's with MS-SQL bundled and it failed because business customers were willing to chip in to extra dough to add Oracle or some other database on top, anyway (something consumer customers would be less likely to do). Even Windows Networking was pretty sneaky (at the expense of Novell).
Apple has their own evils - the ROM chip that prevented clones and other OS's by holding chunks of the MacOS and startup code, their intentional breaking of macs that used 3rd party upgrade chips (vendors had to supply OpenFirmware hacks to make them work), the early killing of machines and hardware support (going all the way back to the Apple ][gs, but including stuff like the G3 without a floppy drive when many people still used floppies).
Neither company strives for compatibility, though Apple prefers hardware (mac, iPod, etc) lockin and Microsoft prefers software lockin (technologies like.NET and DirectX, Windows Networking, etc.). Apple used to prefer both hardware and software lockin, but in a Windows world, they strive to be compatible.
Yeah - I've thought the morals in the US are completely screwed up for a long time... Since when is nudity and sex this horribly bad thing? OK, rape is bad, but so is killing. Nudity and sex are not equal to rape or killing in any way, since both are essentially violence.
If they seriously think that they are preventing kids from seeing porn, they are seriously misguided, as kids will view it one way or another if they want to... maybe it's the Internet, maybe it's late nite Showtime, maybe it's stealing a Playboy from dad's stash. Heck you can order Playboy and they'll send you 3 or 4 mags free before canceling because you didn't pay the bill (as I know because some jocks ordered it for me as a joke in Jr. High - I know they did it because they asked if I got any good magazines lately).
As for the movie theater not letting you in, isn't that the same as the store not selling or renting the game to you? The parents can tell you if you can or can't have it but ultimately, the store that rents or sells the game has to follow store/state policy. As far as I'm concerned, if the parents feel the kid is old enough to play the game then they can buy or rent if for the kid -- just like an under 21 year old can legally drink in their parent's house under their parent's supervision in most, if not all states (In some states, a husband or wife that's over 21 can serve their under 21 S.O. - I know this is legal in Massachusetts, where I have a friend that did exactly that, but I'm not sure of elsewhere).
I don't think it's a game - probably a bunch of garbage characters being printed and not cleared on startup or a terminal break. I also saw stuff like that in the early days of modems (probably more likely, since it's connecting to a mainframe) when I transferred binary files since I didn't have software with any sort of terminal suppression until about the 1982 or 3 (yes, I [or should I say mom] had a 300/110 modem when 300 baud was considered fast).
yes - I remember lynx - I tried it before there was even a GUI (Mosaic) web browser and I thought that it was ugly and basically only usable for citing references in a bibliography. I didn't find it very easy to use either - it was on par with FTP and not nearly as useful (I didn't know you could link files at that point).
Mosaic had a nice interface, but early on, at least, you had to find stuff by following links, and I don't remember finding any search engines (crawlers) or portals until netscape was nearly out. Mosaic, at that time, seemed hideously slow for finding and downloading stuff, and Netscape seemed much faster. I think Netscape thread loaded images and rendered the text first, even back then.
I recall the beta and later released version of Netscape seemed so much better than Mosaic but I no longer remember the exact specifics on why. I remember reading the hype on trn (thread read news) and wanting to try it, but my attempt to download it that first morning kept failing because of an overloaded FTP server (if I recall correctly, it went live about 2AM my time and I was up late playing a MUD in the computer lab with a bunch of friends, and we finally got the browser to download about 6AM), so not everyone trying to download the beta was from Australia.
Mosaic to me wanted to be to lynx what the GUI version of Gopher was to the text version of Gopher. Netscape wanted to be much more.
I tried that, but Windows XP Pro (required because my work only supports Windows for remote VPN connectivity, the bastards) refused to install unless I inserted a floppy disk with the SATA driver on it. I ended up scavanging the drive out of my linux server box just to install the SATA/RAID driver and then pulled it out again. Haven't needed it since, except to re-install the drivers after one drive crashed (6 months into its 3 year warranty, something fell off inside my WD Caviar 80GB drive, though I've had no problems with my other WD drive [RAID array] after a year and a half and the replacement works fine).
lol - fire the CEO, CFO and CIO... of all those pointy haired bosses, only the CIO probably has an inkling of a clue what a computer virus is - the other two probably think their laptop is defective and just buy a new one.
seriously, though, my company had sasser infections because a) lab machines aren't auto-updated - we actually need to keep some at older release/patch levels due to customer requirements (so it's really their fault). b) we can't install patches on our windows machines until the IS staff tests them - important because we were shut down for almost 2 weeks once because of a Microsoft bug in one of their patches (and stuff like the service pack that added a firewall to XP would play havok if not documented how to turn it off). c) home users connecting through VPNs get infected through their firewall-less home networks and pass the virus or worm in (though this should now be blocked since directory browsing is no longer allowed - only virtual terminals are now allowed). Incidentally, our IS people became over-paranoid about this and block ssh connections in or out as well, because it's bi-directional. Now I have to use non-secure telnet and ftp to tunnel out of the firewall (which sucks in so many ways since I can't forward terminals).
I don't know about you, but my cable modem was getting about 200ms or worse ping times during peak hours (I once saw a 4s ping routing to my work's T1 line 10 miles away), and often had complete dropouts (but it worked great at odd hours like 3AM). My current ADSL connection, although technically slower than the Cable modem, rarely has dropouts and usually tops out at about 120ms pings... overseas (in US is about 60-80ms).
Anyhow, I fail to see how leeching wi-fi has any benefit since it will connect to a land line and they probably have the same IDSL as he does, or a laggy/bad latency cable line like I had (unless the wi-fi connection is unreliable, but if it's a fairly decent connection it should more than saturate the land line bandwidth before it saturates the wi-fi bandwidth). There's no benefit whatsoever if he's hosting games, most cable providers cap the upload speed at 128 or 256, which is as bad as typical IDSL and ISDN lines.
It's really hard to answer a general question without some idea of hardware specifics.
Then again, sometimes it doesn't matter - I play Guild Wars during lunch on my PIII 1000 with a GeForce2 MX400 (a completely too slow and unsupported configuration that only works with all settings at low, though I usually have to reboot afterward as it gets really flaky after that). If you have something along that line, try Unreal Tournament 2004 - it works quite well. Far Cry works on my GF4 and I think even my old GF3 (though not very well). For action RPGs I've played Diablo II, Dungeon Siege, and NWN on this machine.
Just avoid Battlefield 2... it runs great on my 2.4GHz Athlon with a 9600SE card, but that is the minimum graphics card it will work on and near the minimum CPU (1.7GHz). It won't run at all on a GeForce 3 or 4 (the other 2 machines in my house, one with a 1.87GHz CPU and the other with an overclocked 2.0 running around 2.2GHz).
I'd take that a step further - console game controls are difficult to learn and use, period. I've played a lot of games on many different platforms, but only recently have played console games of the latest generation (XBox/PS2) and the learning curve on the controller alone is incredible. Three or four joysticks/direction pads (2 analog and one or two digital) and a dozen or so buttons, all of which are required in some cases. I played XBox for almost 6 hours straight and still mixing up buttons and joysticks (though we played several games).
The thumb buttons for the XBox and PS2 are too far apart to make quick switches, and this was made doubly-difficult if you're a lefty since all the buttons are on the right. I often didn't know if I needed to use the analog joysticks or the digital pad and it didn't seem consistent. Then there's weird stuff like having to use a different joystick button sequences for some actions. One game I played (Medal of Honor, I think) required me to press a button to bring up the sniper zoom, then I had to switch joysticks to zoom and switch joysticks again on the same hand to target. Watching seasoned pros, they just quickly flick their thumb over the analog control, but as a noob it took me almost 5 minutes to figure out how to manage the zoom, another 5 to aim and about another 20 before I could hit anything with it (over about a 3 hour period, as the skilled people liked to club me like a baby seal with their rifle butts while I was trying to figure it out).
We also still haven't figured out some weird quantum effects where some matter appears to move faster than light (I believe it's part of the uncertainty principle, but physics is WAAAY behind me, and far understudied).
A physics major I once knew suggested a bubble of slow time riding on a bubble of fast time. If that were possible, then you wouldn't need to go faster than the speed of light to travel faster than the speed of light.
Then there's the possibility that some constant isn't really a constant and can be manipulated that may upend everything we know about physics. Einstein did this with time-space already (relativity), and I'm sure we don't even fully understand the implications and possibilities from that, alone.
Just because someone's trying to make an informed decision doesn't mean the clerk should be an asshole about it. I'd consider never shopping at your store again if you treated me like crap as a customer, especially if it's something I don't know a lot about - flashback to my first digital camera... I spent 3x the camera's value in accessories since then, and I'm sure that's what XBox and PS2 gamers do, too, in getting their games for their systems.
Worse than snubbing the person is the misinformation these people provided - I mean, you're working an electronics counter at a store, spend 10 minutes getting to know your products already. I overheard a Best Buy guy say that the only choice for Internet in my area was Comcast cable, so I said what about DSL? His answer - only Qwest has that and their speeds are only 256/256 (wrong on both providers and speeds offered, as there are over a dozen providers and Qwest offers faster packages). I then asked them what they were going to use it for and how much they wanted to spend a month, as well as asked if they already had basic cable, and concluded that Comcast was probably the best choice for them. I also told them where they could get more information on the Internet (like broadbandreports).
Anyhow, the basic problem is that the clerks aren't trained or informed enough in either customer support or the products they sell. C'mon - a progressive scan and DVD question on a product that's 2 years+ old should be answerable by any electronics rep in the store with more than 6 months of experience.
The polygon question was dumb, as it really doesn't say anything - max triangles/sec is like telling someone a Pentium PC runs everything faster because it has the highest clock speed.
And from the parent thread, as far as Nintendo goes, they deserve the comments they get about being a kiddie system because they market themselves to kids, even if there are adult-oriented games for it. The only adults I know that have one also have kids. For that matter, they named their portable "game boy" for a reason - to target male boys, and they've outright said it.
hmm... after surfing around, I found no information on incompatibilities... I could swear the original Pentium had binary compatibility issues with the x86 (by that I mean 386/486 machines, not the instruction set... damn this is confusing...) when first released, and required a code recompile. I could be inadvertently thinking of the 286-386 change in addressing (16 to 32 bit), as I was computerless (aside from roommates and school machines) from about the mid-1980s through 1992 and only followed them through the news.
I meant MMX as the marketing term, not the tech (which still lives in SSE). The limits on the FPU by means of context switching came at a time when developers were starting to rely on the FPU rather than doing all the math using fixed point (at least in games), so basically, it came at a bad time to not work in parallel.
I forgot one key argument - MMX style instructions are incompatible with other manufacturers like AMD's 3D-Now!, so there is extra work to do for every set of hardware. I'm sure that has been a big damper on adaptation.
I don't really know the Intel compiler - I've been afraid to try it because my PC uses an Athlon and figured that there'd be compatibility issues, so I didn't even know it auto-vectorized.
Sheesh - my post wasn't "filled with misinformation" - one thing I wasn't quite sure about, but I said "maybe" because I wasn't sure, and an opinion about MMX/SSE. I remembered there was a Pentium prior to the Pentium II with RISC, but couldn't remember which, so I said "maybe back to the original Pentium" (and what I really meant was the Pentium line of processors there). For that matter, the "original" Pentium processor (not product line) wasn't even x86 compatible!
There's no denying that the x86 CISC instruction set is ugly, I was making a comment on the relative performance and that the Pentium (Pro and beyond) is essentially a RISC CPU with a CISC instruction set bolted on top. Because they essentially use a RISC instruction set, they were able to throttle the clock much higher and keep the performance comparable or better than many RISC CPUs. EPIC also can help with this performance, but that's a separate topic altogether.
I think you're confused with what I was saying about MMX - I meant that MMX itself has been dead for a while and that it was not parallel capable with the FPU. Worse yet, switching between MMX and the FPU was a cost intensive operation - it was such a speed hit that some guys I was programming a game with in college moved all our FPU functions to fixed point integers, something we thought was a bit backwater (though most of us had used fixed point in the past, so the transition was pretty seamless). I honestly haven't used SSE, but was happy to hear they eliminated the context switch and made the FPU usable in parallel again after my experiences with MMX.
I admit, I probably was a bit harsh/speculative on SSE by basically saying that it's obsolete, since I know some applications and games use it well and it's become a prominent part of some physics engines. I think to seriously be adopted, though, it needs to be handled automatically by the compiler (like gcc 4.1 plans).
VLIW really is like another layer of abstraction designed to simplify out-of-order execution from the processor point-of-view. You pass in a block of RISC commands that are compiler optimized to not stall the pipeline and execute them in parallel. Intel basically made a VLIW for CISC called EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing). A fairly detailed analysys of the architectures is here
The benefit, as you've said, is that you can reduce hardware complexity by removing the instruction reordering and branch prediction units typical of RISC processors (like PPC or Alpha) and force those tasks onto the compiler, which, in turn, reduces the heat and power consumption of the CPU. It does make code larger, as the compiler has to duplicate and rearrange code to most efficiently optimize for the instruction words.
Quite simply, Intel no longer uses CISC. Sure the instruction set is CISC, but it's all microcode reduced to RISC instructions underneath the hood (which was done WAAAY back with the Pentium II and may have partially been implemented on the original Pentium). MMX has been dead for a while, replaced by SIMD and SIMD2, which can actually run in parallel to the floating point unit and no longer requires a context switch. Seriously, though, outside of the math world, you probably don't need either unless you're doing software rendering of graphics - the original reason for MMX was to speed up processing of games and video effects in software and this work is now pretty much entirely handled by the GPU.
lol - the technical term is that Itanium is a bi-endian CPU, so it's funny seeing endian-agnostic (a term more used informally) in the HP docs on it. Looks like something out of marketing - probably trying to avoid the term bytesexual in any way possible.
I don't remember when I was cured of processor chauvanism (though I still prefer AMD to Intel on a price/performance comparison in the x86 world), but I can't agree more on your x86 problem, and honestly BIOS has needed to die a hard death for years, though I dread the Microsoft solution I've heard about coming in Longhorn, with required built in hardware DRM. Intel apparently doesn't agree with them, so I hope that has some leverage.
About the only bias I have on processors is that I find Big Endian more natural (read: human readable), especially when looking at file loaded byte-code (which I do a LOT when porting), but that's my preference. My understanding is the machine doesn't care what endian-ness it is, and there are no performance issues either way, so the only benefit is how easy it is for me to read. Little endian is a bit of a misnomer, anyway - the least significant byte is first in an object that requires more than one byte (word, integer, float, etc), yet the bits are sorted by most significant to least significant within the byte on x86. That seems a bit ass-backwards to me, but that may have something to do with the Big Endians secretly encroaching into the little endian world.
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Yeah, but that was back when the Cold War was still on and the former Soviet Union was the enemy, not an ally in building it. The station was proposed in 1984 by Ronald Reagan as a replacement for Skylab, which crashed to earth in 1979. Post Cold War NASA budgets and the Challenger disaster killed the timeline and the size of the thing and in 1993 the name got changed (to the International Space Station or ISS) when Russia climbed aboard. I believe one of the requirements for Russia to join the project was that the name get changed because Freedom was associated with the Cold War.
Here's the Wikipedia entry on it, which probably covers it in a lot more detail than I can off the top of my head.
Sigh...
;)
joking aside, Lesbos was a Greek island and had nothing to do with Roman gods (which our planets are named after). The island got its reputation from Sappho, the poet (also the synonym sapphic is derived from her, though rare to see these days).
Incidentally, Sappho was married and if she did munch the rug it would make her bisexual, which makes the association incorrect, anyway.
Now that I've shot that option down, I need to catch the first shuttle to Bacchus
option a)
rename Pluto Plutonium and notice its rapid decay from being called a "Planet" to a "big ass rock."
Then name 2003 EL61 as Pluto so it can be the next planet to be renamed Plutonium for its rapid decay to massive frozen rock in the near future.
option b)
define what, exactly, a planet is already.
An old roomie of mine (a New York rapper, incidentally, but not a terribly good one) claimed rap is an acronym for "Rhythm And Poetry." Don't know if that's true or not, but supposedly it was used by artists in the mid-1970s to describe the a cappella form.
You could argue that the guy spewing garbage over an old record is music and old rap isn't - but then again, you could just say it's all a bunch of noise, which would be technically correct, too. But every genre has some noise - try listening to Free Jazz sometime (like a good percentage of what Sun Ra put out)... eugh.
Finally someone that hit on indies (independent promoters), but the good news is none of the big three radio owners take indie bribes anymore - Cox and Clear Channel stopped the practice in 2003 (or 2002, depending on source, and who started it varies by source too, but Clear Channel appears to have started it) and Infinity since Nov 2004.
The bad thing is that nothing is stopping them from changing their policy back, outside of bad press, and nothing is stopping stations owned by others from taking these bribes. The wording of the Clear Channel announcement back in April 2003 even gives them an "out" if approved by management.
The other bad thing is that since there are fewer owners of radio stations, the music formats have become more conservative, though some people claim this is the result of fewer indies - read the last paragraph from this Billboard article.
I would say companies are willing to spend $2500 for a variety of reasons
a) computers are 2 year depreciating assets in the US, last time I checked ($1250 a year for 2 years written off on taxes)
b) large companies offer hardware support (Dell, Gateway, HP, etc). If you build your own, your own support staff is responsible, and what if the builder leaves? Management doesn't like risks like that.
c) software support is also required - OEM Windows requires the hardware vendor to provide most support (and therefore costs less). This isn't always supplied by the hardware vendor, so I list it separately (I've worked for a hardware vendor and redirected calls for bundled software to the software vendor, so have firsthand experience on this).
d) established vendors (like Dell, Gateway, HP, and Apple) have volume discount contracts and often bundle software (like MS Office), as well (as mentioned).
I know companies that have made large purchases of Linux boxes, but always from established Linux companies like RedHat and Novell (SuSE). You'll never find Slackware because of support, or GenToo because no party is responsible for "owning" it (i.e. can't pressure vendor to make bug fixes).
totally offtopic, but coincidental, that made me think of the old Skinny Puppy album VIVISect VI, which was meant to be read 66Sect 6 (and indicate that animal testing was a devil cult)...
That got me to thinking that they should change the name to eVista, like the popular menopause pill (it's also a UGS software product, so that probably won't fly, but I still laugh every time I think of it).
right, but there are some differences that they've stated:
a) you don't need to own the add-on to go into the new areas if someone that owns it takes you with them.
b) $50 every 6 months is not $15/month, it's about $9 per month, and I've seen the game for $36 online, which means the expansions are more like $6/month.
c) you can choose to add the expansion at any time, which is good for people like me that generally only have 3-10 hours of game time per week (depending on how busy my OSS projects are, how much weekend time I've got, and how much sleep I'm willing to sacrifice) and may not have even finished the main game until later.
d) some people only want to play PvP and they may not benefit much from a PvE expansion (depends on skills added, I guess). I have guild members that only played PvE to unlock skills, but now that Arena.net made it possible to unlock them without PvE, they've been exclusively playing PvP (and are very good, as our guild rank has been rising rapidly).
All software and hardware companies are evil in some way once they have stockholders they have to appease.
.NET and DirectX, Windows Networking, etc.). Apple used to prefer both hardware and software lockin, but in a Windows world, they strive to be compatible.
Microsoft is nothing compared to what they used to be now that every action they do is scrutinized. Do you remember when Microsoft would give huge discounts on OEM software if the hardware vendor would agree to only bundle Microsoft software products? Then there was the strong-arming of vendors to only bundle IE and not Netscape with similar tactics, and when they got in regulatory trouble, they claimed IE was an integral part of Windows. Incidentally, they attempted to do the same thing with MS-SQL by only selling the server OS's with MS-SQL bundled and it failed because business customers were willing to chip in to extra dough to add Oracle or some other database on top, anyway (something consumer customers would be less likely to do). Even Windows Networking was pretty sneaky (at the expense of Novell).
Apple has their own evils - the ROM chip that prevented clones and other OS's by holding chunks of the MacOS and startup code, their intentional breaking of macs that used 3rd party upgrade chips (vendors had to supply OpenFirmware hacks to make them work), the early killing of machines and hardware support (going all the way back to the Apple ][gs, but including stuff like the G3 without a floppy drive when many people still used floppies).
Neither company strives for compatibility, though Apple prefers hardware (mac, iPod, etc) lockin and Microsoft prefers software lockin (technologies like
Yeah - I've thought the morals in the US are completely screwed up for a long time... Since when is nudity and sex this horribly bad thing? OK, rape is bad, but so is killing. Nudity and sex are not equal to rape or killing in any way, since both are essentially violence.
If they seriously think that they are preventing kids from seeing porn, they are seriously misguided, as kids will view it one way or another if they want to... maybe it's the Internet, maybe it's late nite Showtime, maybe it's stealing a Playboy from dad's stash. Heck you can order Playboy and they'll send you 3 or 4 mags free before canceling because you didn't pay the bill (as I know because some jocks ordered it for me as a joke in Jr. High - I know they did it because they asked if I got any good magazines lately).
As for the movie theater not letting you in, isn't that the same as the store not selling or renting the game to you? The parents can tell you if you can or can't have it but ultimately, the store that rents or sells the game has to follow store/state policy. As far as I'm concerned, if the parents feel the kid is old enough to play the game then they can buy or rent if for the kid -- just like an under 21 year old can legally drink in their parent's house under their parent's supervision in most, if not all states (In some states, a husband or wife that's over 21 can serve their under 21 S.O. - I know this is legal in Massachusetts, where I have a friend that did exactly that, but I'm not sure of elsewhere).
I don't think it's a game - probably a bunch of garbage characters being printed and not cleared on startup or a terminal break. I also saw stuff like that in the early days of modems (probably more likely, since it's connecting to a mainframe) when I transferred binary files since I didn't have software with any sort of terminal suppression until about the 1982 or 3 (yes, I [or should I say mom] had a 300/110 modem when 300 baud was considered fast).
yes - I remember lynx - I tried it before there was even a GUI (Mosaic) web browser and I thought that it was ugly and basically only usable for citing references in a bibliography. I didn't find it very easy to use either - it was on par with FTP and not nearly as useful (I didn't know you could link files at that point).
Mosaic had a nice interface, but early on, at least, you had to find stuff by following links, and I don't remember finding any search engines (crawlers) or portals until netscape was nearly out. Mosaic, at that time, seemed hideously slow for finding and downloading stuff, and Netscape seemed much faster. I think Netscape thread loaded images and rendered the text first, even back then.
I recall the beta and later released version of Netscape seemed so much better than Mosaic but I no longer remember the exact specifics on why. I remember reading the hype on trn (thread read news) and wanting to try it, but my attempt to download it that first morning kept failing because of an overloaded FTP server (if I recall correctly, it went live about 2AM my time and I was up late playing a MUD in the computer lab with a bunch of friends, and we finally got the browser to download about 6AM), so not everyone trying to download the beta was from Australia.
Mosaic to me wanted to be to lynx what the GUI version of Gopher was to the text version of Gopher. Netscape wanted to be much more.
I tried that, but Windows XP Pro (required because my work only supports Windows for remote VPN connectivity, the bastards) refused to install unless I inserted a floppy disk with the SATA driver on it. I ended up scavanging the drive out of my linux server box just to install the SATA/RAID driver and then pulled it out again. Haven't needed it since, except to re-install the drivers after one drive crashed (6 months into its 3 year warranty, something fell off inside my WD Caviar 80GB drive, though I've had no problems with my other WD drive [RAID array] after a year and a half and the replacement works fine).
lol - fire the CEO, CFO and CIO... of all those pointy haired bosses, only the CIO probably has an inkling of a clue what a computer virus is - the other two probably think their laptop is defective and just buy a new one.
seriously, though, my company had sasser infections because
a) lab machines aren't auto-updated - we actually need to keep some at older release/patch levels due to customer requirements (so it's really their fault).
b) we can't install patches on our windows machines until the IS staff tests them - important because we were shut down for almost 2 weeks once because of a Microsoft bug in one of their patches (and stuff like the service pack that added a firewall to XP would play havok if not documented how to turn it off).
c) home users connecting through VPNs get infected through their firewall-less home networks and pass the virus or worm in (though this should now be blocked since directory browsing is no longer allowed - only virtual terminals are now allowed). Incidentally, our IS people became over-paranoid about this and block ssh connections in or out as well, because it's bi-directional. Now I have to use non-secure telnet and ftp to tunnel out of the firewall (which sucks in so many ways since I can't forward terminals).
I don't know about you, but my cable modem was getting about 200ms or worse ping times during peak hours (I once saw a 4s ping routing to my work's T1 line 10 miles away), and often had complete dropouts (but it worked great at odd hours like 3AM). My current ADSL connection, although technically slower than the Cable modem, rarely has dropouts and usually tops out at about 120ms pings... overseas (in US is about 60-80ms).
Anyhow, I fail to see how leeching wi-fi has any benefit since it will connect to a land line and they probably have the same IDSL as he does, or a laggy/bad latency cable line like I had (unless the wi-fi connection is unreliable, but if it's a fairly decent connection it should more than saturate the land line bandwidth before it saturates the wi-fi bandwidth). There's no benefit whatsoever if he's hosting games, most cable providers cap the upload speed at 128 or 256, which is as bad as typical IDSL and ISDN lines.
It's really hard to answer a general question without some idea of hardware specifics.
Then again, sometimes it doesn't matter - I play Guild Wars during lunch on my PIII 1000 with a GeForce2 MX400 (a completely too slow and unsupported configuration that only works with all settings at low, though I usually have to reboot afterward as it gets really flaky after that). If you have something along that line, try Unreal Tournament 2004 - it works quite well. Far Cry works on my GF4 and I think even my old GF3 (though not very well). For action RPGs I've played Diablo II, Dungeon Siege, and NWN on this machine.
Just avoid Battlefield 2... it runs great on my 2.4GHz Athlon with a 9600SE card, but that is the minimum graphics card it will work on and near the minimum CPU (1.7GHz). It won't run at all on a GeForce 3 or 4 (the other 2 machines in my house, one with a 1.87GHz CPU and the other with an overclocked 2.0 running around 2.2GHz).
I'd take that a step further - console game controls are difficult to learn and use, period. I've played a lot of games on many different platforms, but only recently have played console games of the latest generation (XBox/PS2) and the learning curve on the controller alone is incredible. Three or four joysticks/direction pads (2 analog and one or two digital) and a dozen or so buttons, all of which are required in some cases. I played XBox for almost 6 hours straight and still mixing up buttons and joysticks (though we played several games).
The thumb buttons for the XBox and PS2 are too far apart to make quick switches, and this was made doubly-difficult if you're a lefty since all the buttons are on the right. I often didn't know if I needed to use the analog joysticks or the digital pad and it didn't seem consistent. Then there's weird stuff like having to use a different joystick button sequences for some actions. One game I played (Medal of Honor, I think) required me to press a button to bring up the sniper zoom, then I had to switch joysticks to zoom and switch joysticks again on the same hand to target. Watching seasoned pros, they just quickly flick their thumb over the analog control, but as a noob it took me almost 5 minutes to figure out how to manage the zoom, another 5 to aim and about another 20 before I could hit anything with it (over about a 3 hour period, as the skilled people liked to club me like a baby seal with their rifle butts while I was trying to figure it out).
We also still haven't figured out some weird quantum effects where some matter appears to move faster than light (I believe it's part of the uncertainty principle, but physics is WAAAY behind me, and far understudied).
A physics major I once knew suggested a bubble of slow time riding on a bubble of fast time. If that were possible, then you wouldn't need to go faster than the speed of light to travel faster than the speed of light.
Then there's the possibility that some constant isn't really a constant and can be manipulated that may upend everything we know about physics. Einstein did this with time-space already (relativity), and I'm sure we don't even fully understand the implications and possibilities from that, alone.
Just because someone's trying to make an informed decision doesn't mean the clerk should be an asshole about it. I'd consider never shopping at your store again if you treated me like crap as a customer, especially if it's something I don't know a lot about - flashback to my first digital camera... I spent 3x the camera's value in accessories since then, and I'm sure that's what XBox and PS2 gamers do, too, in getting their games for their systems.
Worse than snubbing the person is the misinformation these people provided - I mean, you're working an electronics counter at a store, spend 10 minutes getting to know your products already. I overheard a Best Buy guy say that the only choice for Internet in my area was Comcast cable, so I said what about DSL? His answer - only Qwest has that and their speeds are only 256/256 (wrong on both providers and speeds offered, as there are over a dozen providers and Qwest offers faster packages). I then asked them what they were going to use it for and how much they wanted to spend a month, as well as asked if they already had basic cable, and concluded that Comcast was probably the best choice for them. I also told them where they could get more information on the Internet (like broadbandreports).
Anyhow, the basic problem is that the clerks aren't trained or informed enough in either customer support or the products they sell. C'mon - a progressive scan and DVD question on a product that's 2 years+ old should be answerable by any electronics rep in the store with more than 6 months of experience.
The polygon question was dumb, as it really doesn't say anything - max triangles/sec is like telling someone a Pentium PC runs everything faster because it has the highest clock speed.
And from the parent thread, as far as Nintendo goes, they deserve the comments they get about being a kiddie system because they market themselves to kids, even if there are adult-oriented games for it. The only adults I know that have one also have kids. For that matter, they named their portable "game boy" for a reason - to target male boys, and they've outright said it.
hmm... after surfing around, I found no information on incompatibilities... I could swear the original Pentium had binary compatibility issues with the x86 (by that I mean 386/486 machines, not the instruction set... damn this is confusing...) when first released, and required a code recompile. I could be inadvertently thinking of the 286-386 change in addressing (16 to 32 bit), as I was computerless (aside from roommates and school machines) from about the mid-1980s through 1992 and only followed them through the news.
I meant MMX as the marketing term, not the tech (which still lives in SSE). The limits on the FPU by means of context switching came at a time when developers were starting to rely on the FPU rather than doing all the math using fixed point (at least in games), so basically, it came at a bad time to not work in parallel.
I forgot one key argument - MMX style instructions are incompatible with other manufacturers like AMD's 3D-Now!, so there is extra work to do for every set of hardware. I'm sure that has been a big damper on adaptation.
I don't really know the Intel compiler - I've been afraid to try it because my PC uses an Athlon and figured that there'd be compatibility issues, so I didn't even know it auto-vectorized.
Sheesh - my post wasn't "filled with misinformation" - one thing I wasn't quite sure about, but I said "maybe" because I wasn't sure, and an opinion about MMX/SSE. I remembered there was a Pentium prior to the Pentium II with RISC, but couldn't remember which, so I said "maybe back to the original Pentium" (and what I really meant was the Pentium line of processors there). For that matter, the "original" Pentium processor (not product line) wasn't even x86 compatible!
There's no denying that the x86 CISC instruction set is ugly, I was making a comment on the relative performance and that the Pentium (Pro and beyond) is essentially a RISC CPU with a CISC instruction set bolted on top. Because they essentially use a RISC instruction set, they were able to throttle the clock much higher and keep the performance comparable or better than many RISC CPUs. EPIC also can help with this performance, but that's a separate topic altogether.
I think you're confused with what I was saying about MMX - I meant that MMX itself has been dead for a while and that it was not parallel capable with the FPU. Worse yet, switching between MMX and the FPU was a cost intensive operation - it was such a speed hit that some guys I was programming a game with in college moved all our FPU functions to fixed point integers, something we thought was a bit backwater (though most of us had used fixed point in the past, so the transition was pretty seamless). I honestly haven't used SSE, but was happy to hear they eliminated the context switch and made the FPU usable in parallel again after my experiences with MMX.
I admit, I probably was a bit harsh/speculative on SSE by basically saying that it's obsolete, since I know some applications and games use it well and it's become a prominent part of some physics engines. I think to seriously be adopted, though, it needs to be handled automatically by the compiler (like gcc 4.1 plans).
VLIW really is like another layer of abstraction designed to simplify out-of-order execution from the processor point-of-view. You pass in a block of RISC commands that are compiler optimized to not stall the pipeline and execute them in parallel. Intel basically made a VLIW for CISC called EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing). A fairly detailed analysys of the architectures is here
The benefit, as you've said, is that you can reduce hardware complexity by removing the instruction reordering and branch prediction units typical of RISC processors (like PPC or Alpha) and force those tasks onto the compiler, which, in turn, reduces the heat and power consumption of the CPU. It does make code larger, as the compiler has to duplicate and rearrange code to most efficiently optimize for the instruction words.
Quite simply, Intel no longer uses CISC. Sure the instruction set is CISC, but it's all microcode reduced to RISC instructions underneath the hood (which was done WAAAY back with the Pentium II and may have partially been implemented on the original Pentium). MMX has been dead for a while, replaced by SIMD and SIMD2, which can actually run in parallel to the floating point unit and no longer requires a context switch. Seriously, though, outside of the math world, you probably don't need either unless you're doing software rendering of graphics - the original reason for MMX was to speed up processing of games and video effects in software and this work is now pretty much entirely handled by the GPU.
lol - the technical term is that Itanium is a bi-endian CPU, so it's funny seeing endian-agnostic (a term more used informally) in the HP docs on it. Looks like something out of marketing - probably trying to avoid the term bytesexual in any way possible.
The PPCs prior to the G5 are also bi-endian.
I don't remember when I was cured of processor chauvanism (though I still prefer AMD to Intel on a price/performance comparison in the x86 world), but I can't agree more on your x86 problem, and honestly BIOS has needed to die a hard death for years, though I dread the Microsoft solution I've heard about coming in Longhorn, with required built in hardware DRM. Intel apparently doesn't agree with them, so I hope that has some leverage.
About the only bias I have on processors is that I find Big Endian more natural (read: human readable), especially when looking at file loaded byte-code (which I do a LOT when porting), but that's my preference. My understanding is the machine doesn't care what endian-ness it is, and there are no performance issues either way, so the only benefit is how easy it is for me to read. Little endian is a bit of a misnomer, anyway - the least significant byte is first in an object that requires more than one byte (word, integer, float, etc), yet the bits are sorted by most significant to least significant within the byte on x86. That seems a bit ass-backwards to me, but that may have something to do with the Big Endians secretly encroaching into the little endian world.