On the other hand, the idea of MS's formidable programmers writing brand-new code without the legacy of the 8088 PC platform and years of legacy applications to deal with should scare the crap out of their competitors.
Bwahahahaha... [choking laughter to the point of near suffocation]
Microsoft has some great programmers, but they also have a lot of extraordinarily poor programmers. They're hardly hobbled by the "legacy" 8088 PC platform (honestly, what a load of shit that is. Do you have any idea how rich, and simple, modern x86 is? Just because something has a long history in no way implies that it's venerable). Maintaining backwards compatibility is a bitch, but it's a huge headstart on someone starting from scratch (you do know about the great Longhorn reset, right? Turns out that trying to do it "from scratch" often isn't as good as it sounds in theory).
And, as touched upon, the idea that starting from scratch is a desirable position is usually the foolish mistake of beginners. Most people starting from scratch just make the same, or similar, mistakes, without the advantage of launching off of prior work.
i have both a w2k box and a win98se box and the win98se box has a far longer uptime than the 2000 box. saying win98se is a piece of shit is stupid.
WINDOWS 98 SE IS A PIECE OF SHIT. The entire design of the operating system was a holdover of a terrible compromise from the era when computers had 16/32 processors and 1MB of RAM. There is absolutely no other way to describe it. I find it extraordinary that anyone would defend.
the win98 boxes dont have their filesystems crap out after a year of usage unlike win2k and are far better in practice to admin.
Admin? There is no admin on a Windows 98 box, as it has virtually zero protections or services that can be administrated.
As far as the filesystem, that's just dumb. Apart from my extensive anecdotal evidence, there are corporations running strong today on Windows 2000/NTFS, installed when it first came out. NTFS is technically and practically an enormously superior file system over the piece of shit FAT, though of course it won't defend you from garbage hardware.
You realise that most network worms *only* affect Win2000 and WinXP, right? Win98SE is probably the most stable and least problematic version of Windows ever. Seriously.
Score: 4 Insightful? Holy crap, at best it should be Score: 4 Hilariously Funny.
Ignoring the laughably ridiculous stability comment, from a worm perspective the only factor that "saves" non-NT based Windows versions is a complete and utter lack of functionality. Worms generally target functional systems, and 98SE users seldom ran SQL Servers or Exchange boxes or network services, so they were "immune", but not because of any pinnacle of design. Of course users who ran IRC clients or messaging clients or simple file sharing or virtually any other listening service quickly found themselves owned.
Windows 98SE was the final polishing of a stinky piece of shit (I'm excluding Windows Me!, as it was adding peanuts to the shit). Revising history to paint it as a good point in the Windows legacy is outrageously ridiculous, and I'm agog that there were idiots that moderated it up.
This is the first sign that the "pendulum" is swinging toward having local job creation again. HP admitted that having the IT folks TOGETHER makes them better.
I think you're over-estimating their judgement: In this case the move apparently came at the demands of a former Walmart exec -- the sort that thinks that you have to be hovering over your employees like a hawk, treating them as temp line workers, or they'll screw around. That sort of 1950s thinking is pervasive throughout the entire industry, and it's the same industry that's super-happy to dump a division and replace it by offshoring, just as long as the other end also has whipmasters watching the serfs intently.
HP has been swirling down the toilet for quite some time, and this is just a continuation of the same. It's going to get worse given that many of their brightest people, who've come to enjoy and expect this luxury, are going to say goodbye rather than be treated like a Walmart floor employee.
Yeah it sucks badly to lose your job, but it doesn't really mean Sun is going down the hole. It means they are cutting the fat. I don't know how profitable of a company they are, but this is typical of companies that are trying to be all things to all people. It generally means they are going to re-focus on their core market (what actually made them money in the first place).
You sound like you're talking about GE or Microsoft -- huge companies with a very wide market presence.
Sun, on the other hand, is extremely focused, already existing in only a couple of extremely small niches. It is absolutely inevitable that such cuts will substantially degrade Sun's operations and innovation/product pipeline going forward (and dreaming, seen elsewhere, that it's all marketing/middle-manager is founded in delusion. If anything Sun is increasingly turning to negligible technical ability, and increased marketing presence, so those would be the last departments to go). However Sun's in a position where it has to suck it and take the cuts, because the market isn't buying what they're selling.
I had a zip drive and at the time it filled a large gap between the floppy and CD rewriteable (which was very costly).
Yeah, the list in question is hugely suspect, and many of the entries are inane. They jump between truly terrible tech, to products and companies that just didn't change with the market. The Zip drive was hugely important and successful (even if the "Clik!" had some technical faults). PointCast was a great solution as well, opening up a lot of people's eyes to the multimedia potential and information sharing of the Internet (and it caused all of the browser makers to focus almost entirely on push for a while).
Laptops are actually more standard these days, IMHO.
Even where laptops use standard chipsets, they often integrate them in novel ways. On all three of my laptops (a Dell, an IBM, and a eMachine), for instance, I can't use the ATI or nvidia drivers (even though I know the chipset), but instead am told that I have to source the driver from the laptop vendor. This is the case with other parts of the install as well (e.g. the wireless driver).
Ha, now they know why Java does not let you conveniently forget to handle most exceptions. Unhandled exception, eh? Well, at least they now have reflection, so they know where to look..NET has always had reflection. Secondly, the exception in question occurred before the user code was even entered. Normally remote users would get a standard error reply with no technical details, however the developers on this site (probably lazily) enabled remote error viewing.
Um...rotational spectroscopy is not new at all. It's been around for a very long time - at least 50 years, probably longer.
Maybe you should read the article first. The breakthrough is the extreme degree of sensitivity, coupled with the fact that it's doing the analysis passively (versus targeting molecules with lasers/microwaves).
Symantec. Ditto what the above say, admin for everyone.
While the GP didn't specifically state it, presumably they were excluding technology companies. Among normal companies where computers and software are tools for achieving some other goal, it is extremely rare to have admin rights. I'm talking about banks, telecommunications companies, etc. For these firms you either have to use special management software to install software, or you have to request that IT come out and do it.
Very painful when you're in a software development group at said corporations.
I'm not going to argue that for the majority of/. readers this article offers absolutely nothing they don't already know. But the fact is, once you leave the cozy confines of the IT world, your average business-person doesn't have a clue what a Wiki is or why anyone would use one.
The issue the other person seems to have isn't that this article exists, but rather that it was posted here (which you agreed to in the next paragraph). This is quite simply a bizarre article for Slashdot -- it's superficial, there are a million Wiki guides that are more comprehensive and more readable, and it's preaching to the choir.
Bull, except in the very early days of telephony, that simply wasn't the case. Mechanical multiplexers were developed very early on, since the need for a separate long distance circuit per connection was considered absurd even in the wire-happy 19th century.
Did I give some sort of time frame that you're disputing, or is this another case of a trigger-fingered slashdotter prematurely blowing their "Bull!".
The same thing occured logically at the local level, where every house had a pair of wires going to the switching station. Eventually they deployed substations so the local loop was as short as possible, and then a high capacity line goes back to the switching station, hugely reducing the volume of cable deployed.
A quick google says a 747-400 has 171 miles of wiring. While some of that is likely not replaceable (power distribution, etc...)-- a good chunk is almost certainly control wiring.
A key part of the 777 systems is a Boeing-patented two-way digital data bus, which has been adopted as a new industry standard: ARINC 629. It permits airplane systems and associated computers to communicate with one another through a common wire path (a twisted pair of wires) instead of through separate one-way wire connections. This further simplifies assembly and saves weight, while increasing reliability through a reduction in the amount of wires and connectors. There are 11 of these ARINC 629 pathways in the 777.
It's hard to imagine 17 miles of anything, even tiny glass fibers, not weighing quite a bit.
There was once a time when the phone networks actually had hundreds, thousands, and millions of copper pairs spun around the globe. If there were 1000 phone calls between two cities, then there had to be at least 1000 copper pairs to support them.
Someone then discovered the amazing invention of digitizing and time duplexing, putting hundreds and thousands of phone calls on a single wire. Of course now there are single optical connections supporting tens of thousands of connections.
Similarly, the reason there are 171 miles of wires is that most are point-to-point single purpose. If you completely overhauled all of the networks on a jet to share a common multiplexed bus, I think the number would drop enormously. Optical isn't even necessary to see huge savings. Even cars are doing this, going from point-to-point single connections to every sensor and system, to all sharing a common data bus.
While media player is delivered with updated codec, the shell is largely codec agnostics. There are already numerous available codec packs/interfaces for playing ogg with WMP.
BF2 is the worst possible example you could have used. The engine is unstable. The netcode is unstable.
It's one of the most complex visual environments out there, yet even it leaves a tremendous amount that can still be done. We're still at the beginnings of what can visually be done.
Of course given that I'm a fan of the wide-open war genre (e.g. Operation Flashpoint, etc), I do find it humorous when "run down tunnel with gun" sorts pronounce judgement on BF2, expecting framerates similar to what they've seen on "surrounded by a wallpapered cardboard box" games like HL2.
In any case, I play it on 1280x1024 with medium-low settings and a 9800 Pro and it tends to stay above 30FPS, so there may be something going on with your rig (or the game hates nVidia).
The 9800 Pro is a world newer, and more powerful, than some of the other video cards being mentioned. Not to mention that one person's "good gameplay" is another persons nightmare. I can't stand any dips in framerate (such as when an ass throws a smoke grenade, or a heavy battle erupts), yet other people will tolerate a slideshow in those situations, just so long as they can watch their FPS sit at 40 when they're looking at a wall in a hanger.
...or it could be the fact that BF2 is a bloated pile of festering code. I have the game, and my clan has fought on it many a time (I am a gunny sgt). If I can play Doom3/HL2 maxed out on my system and yet have the same BF2 video issues that you seem to, it tells me that it is the game not the card.
That's funny, because I'd say that Battlefield 2 gives me far more visual impact than Half Life 2 / Doom 3 (HL2s scripted little world is laughably simple compared to some of the environments of BF2. D3 scripts it to ensure that you fight maybe one or two enemies, lest it overload the poly count). Both of those games very, very heavily rely upon sticking you in tight little areas, where your view of the world is heavily restricted, limiting the number of polys. Then they feed you enemies in nice controlled bunches, ensuring that the poly count is always limited.
A game like BF2, on the other hand, has unbelievably complex environments (some of the city environments in SF are amazing), coupled with up to 63 other highly defined other people, in up to 63 other military vehicles, along with all of the static vehicles and scenery, all interacting with the environment, with huge vistas, where players are scanning close to a KM away through sniper rifles.
Comparing D3 or HL2 to BF2 is laughable, and it discredits your argument from the outset.
The arm-chair game programmers out there number too many, and their ridiculous analysis of "good" versus "bad" programming provides some good humor. You kids stay with your Virge 3Ds, complaining about the "bloat" of modern games, and I'll happily upgrade to take advantage of some of the amazing new functionality.
Exactly! I use the horribly outdated and underpowered Geforce FX6600 card and I can play ANY game very nicely. Even the Quake 4 watermark is very VERY playable at 1024X768 at mid level quality settings.
I suppose "very nice" and "playable" is subjective.
The idea that you can play "ANY" game at a quality that other people would find acceptable is laughable. I have a 6600GT, and Battlefield 2 starts stuttering seriously (hugely ruining immersion) beyond 1024x768 / everything at low / no AA. I've seen how unbelievably gorgeous the game looks at high, but there's no way my graphics card can even come close to playing it well, much less turning on any form of AA, or handling some of the ultra high resolution displays that are available now.
In other words, your comment, and comments like it, is nonsense. Just becuase you don't see a need for a better video card doesn't undermine the value for serious gamers who are willing to put one car payment towards a better video card (the same guys who'll blow their paycheque on a $50,000 car when a Civic gets there just as fast blow their gaskets about a $500 video card).
DNS can be hacked pretty easily on windows machines by sending unsuspecting users malicious code that modifies their host file records. It can make any website address "appear" to be the correct site when in fact that domain is pointing to an entirely different IP address.
If you have malicious code on their machine, then the rest is easy game anyways. Changing hosts files seems to be one of the least likely scenarios, and it'd be much easier, and more powerful, and likely to succeed, to simply keylog when they hit any of countless secure sites.
I have yet to hear of widespread pharming, or any real world pharming at all.
Someone smart once told me that in addition to savings, you should always have enough money spare to be able to walk away from your job and last you until you get a new one.
In addition to savings? That doesn't make any sense to partition savings into specific purposes like that, and the whole premise of savings is to deal with such a rainy day for most people.
I'm sorry if I came off that way. I'm really just financially paranoid. When I say I live in a hovel, I mean it. While most of my colleagues have $300k+ houses, I bought a $50k house, 500sq feet. I drive a 14 year old car. I live *really* cheap, because I'm financially paranoid. I've seen enough of the "I've been laid off for 3 years" stories that I want to be prepared for such a situation. I guess my comment about saving money was meant to be my contribution to the thread, and I'm sorry if it came off as bragging. I'm just wondering if there's an alternative to self imposed deprivation.
To me it came off more as self-justification more than bragging: You feel some bizarre need to explain to people why you drive an old car and live in a hovel, justifying your lifestyle, while simultaneously taking a jab at those who choose to live otherwise. I've known people in real life like this, and honestly they were entirely intolerable -- if they ever found out about anything you've done (such as gone on a vacation), or anything you've bought (seeing a new TV at your house), they immediately launch into a subtle jab that it was fiscal irresponsibility. "What if..." they ask, "the entire financial market collapses, bird flu erupts, and inflation goes haywire! That television purchase could have been used in an offshore banking investment!"
That guy living in a the 300K house probably bought it when it was 200K, and can easily liquidate it at a huge price advantage, barring some sort of huge house collapse (which would be more a worry with a $900K house). Leased cars are similarly easy to offload, possibly at a small cost. I think you're a little unreasonably smug.
Isn't pharming when DNS is actually hacked in some manner? How many cases of this actually happening have been documented? Simply setting up a website that mimics a legitimate financial institution or pertinent party (e.g. Ebay), is, and has always been, phishing. The phishing emails are just lures to the bait of the phishing websites.
Should convicted felons on probation have privacy rights over their DNA? Or is a blood sample like a fingerprint, something that everyone should provide to their government?
Nice transitions from convicted felons to "everyone" there.
This database is being built using the MOMENTUM of terrorism, not FOR terrorism
Exactly. Any belief that these sorts of things are, or will be, limited to catching Osama and crew are terribly, terribly deluded. These systems have the potential of much more dangerous, more nefarious purposes. Terrorism, and the War on Terror, is the wonderful Freebie Card that all levels of government are using to get what they want.
Just this morning I heard a US Senator railing against Toronto garbage being shipped into Michigan -- the terrorists, he tells us, are going to use it to transport WMDs (nevermind silly incidentals, like the fact that shipped garbage gets checked to a far greater extent than most other methods of getting the same over the border). Failing to stop it on legal or trade grounds, the Freebie Terrorism card is being played.
Recently I caught a Dateline or 20/20 or CNN segment about a dangerous, unmonitored border crossing. It was the crossing over to
(It's a little geographical abberation, and is sort of a little piece of the US in Canada. The border crossing is to only go into this little piece -- you can't get anywhere else)
Local police, desperate for empire building funds, claim that they've heard that this is a big terrorism crossing. Yes, they said it with a straight face - terrorists are busy getting into the US by travelling to the middle of nowhere (where every person and car that's out of place gets close scrutiny), and then passing into a little jutty of land that isn't even a part of the continental US. It's so unbelievably ridiculous -- so mind bendingly illogical, and laughable given the endless options terrorists already have, including just immigrating to the US and buying an arsenal at one of the many gun shows -- yet it was presented as a completely logical argument. Once again the terrorism freebie was used.
And amazingly so many Americans buy it. Remarkably, the ones who buy it the most are the ones who are the least likely to fall victim to terrorism, which the ones living in the hubs of urbanity discount such vapid arguments.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, the idea of MS's formidable programmers writing brand-new code without the legacy of the 8088 PC platform and years of legacy applications to deal with should scare the crap out of their competitors.
Bwahahahaha... [choking laughter to the point of near suffocation]
Microsoft has some great programmers, but they also have a lot of extraordinarily poor programmers. They're hardly hobbled by the "legacy" 8088 PC platform (honestly, what a load of shit that is. Do you have any idea how rich, and simple, modern x86 is? Just because something has a long history in no way implies that it's venerable). Maintaining backwards compatibility is a bitch, but it's a huge headstart on someone starting from scratch (you do know about the great Longhorn reset, right? Turns out that trying to do it "from scratch" often isn't as good as it sounds in theory).
And, as touched upon, the idea that starting from scratch is a desirable position is usually the foolish mistake of beginners. Most people starting from scratch just make the same, or similar, mistakes, without the advantage of launching off of prior work.
i have both a w2k box and a win98se box and the win98se box has a far longer uptime than the 2000 box. saying win98se is a piece of shit is stupid.
WINDOWS 98 SE IS A PIECE OF SHIT. The entire design of the operating system was a holdover of a terrible compromise from the era when computers had 16/32 processors and 1MB of RAM. There is absolutely no other way to describe it. I find it extraordinary that anyone would defend.
the win98 boxes dont have their filesystems crap out after a year of usage unlike win2k and are far better in practice to admin.
Admin? There is no admin on a Windows 98 box, as it has virtually zero protections or services that can be administrated.
As far as the filesystem, that's just dumb. Apart from my extensive anecdotal evidence, there are corporations running strong today on Windows 2000/NTFS, installed when it first came out. NTFS is technically and practically an enormously superior file system over the piece of shit FAT, though of course it won't defend you from garbage hardware.
You realise that most network worms *only* affect Win2000 and WinXP, right? Win98SE is probably the most stable and least problematic version of Windows ever. Seriously.
Score: 4 Insightful? Holy crap, at best it should be Score: 4 Hilariously Funny.
Ignoring the laughably ridiculous stability comment, from a worm perspective the only factor that "saves" non-NT based Windows versions is a complete and utter lack of functionality. Worms generally target functional systems, and 98SE users seldom ran SQL Servers or Exchange boxes or network services, so they were "immune", but not because of any pinnacle of design. Of course users who ran IRC clients or messaging clients or simple file sharing or virtually any other listening service quickly found themselves owned.
Windows 98SE was the final polishing of a stinky piece of shit (I'm excluding Windows Me!, as it was adding peanuts to the shit). Revising history to paint it as a good point in the Windows legacy is outrageously ridiculous, and I'm agog that there were idiots that moderated it up.
If you read the rest of that bloggers post (another slashdot member posted it above) you'll really see my point.
You mean the manufactured, fictional troll that someone posted above? Perhaps you should be more careful in what you choose to believe.
This is the first sign that the "pendulum" is swinging toward having local job creation again. HP admitted that having the IT folks TOGETHER makes them better.
I think you're over-estimating their judgement: In this case the move apparently came at the demands of a former Walmart exec -- the sort that thinks that you have to be hovering over your employees like a hawk, treating them as temp line workers, or they'll screw around. That sort of 1950s thinking is pervasive throughout the entire industry, and it's the same industry that's super-happy to dump a division and replace it by offshoring, just as long as the other end also has whipmasters watching the serfs intently.
HP has been swirling down the toilet for quite some time, and this is just a continuation of the same. It's going to get worse given that many of their brightest people, who've come to enjoy and expect this luxury, are going to say goodbye rather than be treated like a Walmart floor employee.
Yeah it sucks badly to lose your job, but it doesn't really mean Sun is going down the hole. It means they are cutting the fat. I don't know how profitable of a company they are, but this is typical of companies that are trying to be all things to all people. It generally means they are going to re-focus on their core market (what actually made them money in the first place).
You sound like you're talking about GE or Microsoft -- huge companies with a very wide market presence.
Sun, on the other hand, is extremely focused, already existing in only a couple of extremely small niches. It is absolutely inevitable that such cuts will substantially degrade Sun's operations and innovation/product pipeline going forward (and dreaming, seen elsewhere, that it's all marketing/middle-manager is founded in delusion. If anything Sun is increasingly turning to negligible technical ability, and increased marketing presence, so those would be the last departments to go). However Sun's in a position where it has to suck it and take the cuts, because the market isn't buying what they're selling.
I had a zip drive and at the time it filled a large gap between the floppy and CD rewriteable (which was very costly).
Yeah, the list in question is hugely suspect, and many of the entries are inane. They jump between truly terrible tech, to products and companies that just didn't change with the market. The Zip drive was hugely important and successful (even if the "Clik!" had some technical faults). PointCast was a great solution as well, opening up a lot of people's eyes to the multimedia potential and information sharing of the Internet (and it caused all of the browser makers to focus almost entirely on push for a while).
Laptops are actually more standard these days, IMHO.
Even where laptops use standard chipsets, they often integrate them in novel ways. On all three of my laptops (a Dell, an IBM, and a eMachine), for instance, I can't use the ATI or nvidia drivers (even though I know the chipset), but instead am told that I have to source the driver from the laptop vendor. This is the case with other parts of the install as well (e.g. the wireless driver).
Ha, now they know why Java does not let you conveniently forget to handle most exceptions. Unhandled exception, eh? Well, at least they now have reflection, so they know where to look. .NET has always had reflection. Secondly, the exception in question occurred before the user code was even entered. Normally remote users would get a standard error reply with no technical details, however the developers on this site (probably lazily) enabled remote error viewing.
Um...rotational spectroscopy is not new at all. It's been around for a very long time - at least 50 years, probably longer.
Maybe you should read the article first. The breakthrough is the extreme degree of sensitivity, coupled with the fact that it's doing the analysis passively (versus targeting molecules with lasers/microwaves).
Symantec. Ditto what the above say, admin for everyone.
While the GP didn't specifically state it, presumably they were excluding technology companies. Among normal companies where computers and software are tools for achieving some other goal, it is extremely rare to have admin rights. I'm talking about banks, telecommunications companies, etc. For these firms you either have to use special management software to install software, or you have to request that IT come out and do it.
Very painful when you're in a software development group at said corporations.
I'm not going to argue that for the majority of /. readers this article offers absolutely nothing they don't already know. But the fact is, once you leave the cozy confines of the IT world, your average business-person doesn't have a clue what a Wiki is or why anyone would use one.
The issue the other person seems to have isn't that this article exists, but rather that it was posted here (which you agreed to in the next paragraph). This is quite simply a bizarre article for Slashdot -- it's superficial, there are a million Wiki guides that are more comprehensive and more readable, and it's preaching to the choir.
BTW: Here's my wiki guide for setting up MediaWiki on Windows. At least it has some uniqueness and value to someone.
Bull, except in the very early days of telephony, that simply wasn't the case. Mechanical multiplexers were developed very early on, since the need for a separate long distance circuit per connection was considered absurd even in the wire-happy 19th century.
n .html
http://www.att.com/history/nethistory/transmissio
Did I give some sort of time frame that you're disputing, or is this another case of a trigger-fingered slashdotter prematurely blowing their "Bull!".
The same thing occured logically at the local level, where every house had a pair of wires going to the switching station. Eventually they deployed substations so the local loop was as short as possible, and then a high capacity line goes back to the switching station, hugely reducing the volume of cable deployed.
To follow-up my other post, I found this link:
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/777family/pf/pf_
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARINC
So the old "hundreds of pounds of wiring" thing is a thing of the past. Pardon the pun, but the wireless communications system idea simply won't fly.
It's hard to imagine 17 miles of anything, even tiny glass fibers, not weighing quite a bit.
There was once a time when the phone networks actually had hundreds, thousands, and millions of copper pairs spun around the globe. If there were 1000 phone calls between two cities, then there had to be at least 1000 copper pairs to support them.
Someone then discovered the amazing invention of digitizing and time duplexing, putting hundreds and thousands of phone calls on a single wire. Of course now there are single optical connections supporting tens of thousands of connections.
Similarly, the reason there are 171 miles of wires is that most are point-to-point single purpose. If you completely overhauled all of the networks on a jet to share a common multiplexed bus, I think the number would drop enormously. Optical isn't even necessary to see huge savings. Even cars are doing this, going from point-to-point single connections to every sensor and system, to all sharing a common data bus.
Any word on OGG support?
While media player is delivered with updated codec, the shell is largely codec agnostics. There are already numerous available codec packs/interfaces for playing ogg with WMP.
BF2 is the worst possible example you could have used. The engine is unstable. The netcode is unstable.
It's one of the most complex visual environments out there, yet even it leaves a tremendous amount that can still be done. We're still at the beginnings of what can visually be done.
Of course given that I'm a fan of the wide-open war genre (e.g. Operation Flashpoint, etc), I do find it humorous when "run down tunnel with gun" sorts pronounce judgement on BF2, expecting framerates similar to what they've seen on "surrounded by a wallpapered cardboard box" games like HL2.
In any case, I play it on 1280x1024 with medium-low settings and a 9800 Pro and it tends to stay above 30FPS, so there may be something going on with your rig (or the game hates nVidia).
The 9800 Pro is a world newer, and more powerful, than some of the other video cards being mentioned. Not to mention that one person's "good gameplay" is another persons nightmare. I can't stand any dips in framerate (such as when an ass throws a smoke grenade, or a heavy battle erupts), yet other people will tolerate a slideshow in those situations, just so long as they can watch their FPS sit at 40 when they're looking at a wall in a hanger.
...or it could be the fact that BF2 is a bloated pile of festering code. I have the game, and my clan has fought on it many a time (I am a gunny sgt). If I can play Doom3/HL2 maxed out on my system and yet have the same BF2 video issues that you seem to, it tells me that it is the game not the card.
That's funny, because I'd say that Battlefield 2 gives me far more visual impact than Half Life 2 / Doom 3 (HL2s scripted little world is laughably simple compared to some of the environments of BF2. D3 scripts it to ensure that you fight maybe one or two enemies, lest it overload the poly count). Both of those games very, very heavily rely upon sticking you in tight little areas, where your view of the world is heavily restricted, limiting the number of polys. Then they feed you enemies in nice controlled bunches, ensuring that the poly count is always limited.
A game like BF2, on the other hand, has unbelievably complex environments (some of the city environments in SF are amazing), coupled with up to 63 other highly defined other people, in up to 63 other military vehicles, along with all of the static vehicles and scenery, all interacting with the environment, with huge vistas, where players are scanning close to a KM away through sniper rifles.
Comparing D3 or HL2 to BF2 is laughable, and it discredits your argument from the outset.
The arm-chair game programmers out there number too many, and their ridiculous analysis of "good" versus "bad" programming provides some good humor. You kids stay with your Virge 3Ds, complaining about the "bloat" of modern games, and I'll happily upgrade to take advantage of some of the amazing new functionality.
Exactly! I use the horribly outdated and underpowered Geforce FX6600 card and I can play ANY game very nicely. Even the Quake 4 watermark is very VERY playable at 1024X768 at mid level quality settings.
I suppose "very nice" and "playable" is subjective.
The idea that you can play "ANY" game at a quality that other people would find acceptable is laughable. I have a 6600GT, and Battlefield 2 starts stuttering seriously (hugely ruining immersion) beyond 1024x768 / everything at low / no AA. I've seen how unbelievably gorgeous the game looks at high, but there's no way my graphics card can even come close to playing it well, much less turning on any form of AA, or handling some of the ultra high resolution displays that are available now.
In other words, your comment, and comments like it, is nonsense. Just becuase you don't see a need for a better video card doesn't undermine the value for serious gamers who are willing to put one car payment towards a better video card (the same guys who'll blow their paycheque on a $50,000 car when a Civic gets there just as fast blow their gaskets about a $500 video card).
DNS can be hacked pretty easily on windows machines by sending unsuspecting users malicious code that modifies their host file records. It can make any website address "appear" to be the correct site when in fact that domain is pointing to an entirely different IP address.
If you have malicious code on their machine, then the rest is easy game anyways. Changing hosts files seems to be one of the least likely scenarios, and it'd be much easier, and more powerful, and likely to succeed, to simply keylog when they hit any of countless secure sites.
I have yet to hear of widespread pharming, or any real world pharming at all.
Someone smart once told me that in addition to savings, you should always have enough money spare to be able to walk away from your job and last you until you get a new one.
In addition to savings? That doesn't make any sense to partition savings into specific purposes like that, and the whole premise of savings is to deal with such a rainy day for most people.
I'm sorry if I came off that way. I'm really just financially paranoid. When I say I live in a hovel, I mean it. While most of my colleagues have $300k+ houses, I bought a $50k house, 500sq feet. I drive a 14 year old car. I live *really* cheap, because I'm financially paranoid. I've seen enough of the "I've been laid off for 3 years" stories that I want to be prepared for such a situation. I guess my comment about saving money was meant to be my contribution to the thread, and I'm sorry if it came off as bragging. I'm just wondering if there's an alternative to self imposed deprivation.
To me it came off more as self-justification more than bragging: You feel some bizarre need to explain to people why you drive an old car and live in a hovel, justifying your lifestyle, while simultaneously taking a jab at those who choose to live otherwise. I've known people in real life like this, and honestly they were entirely intolerable -- if they ever found out about anything you've done (such as gone on a vacation), or anything you've bought (seeing a new TV at your house), they immediately launch into a subtle jab that it was fiscal irresponsibility. "What if..." they ask, "the entire financial market collapses, bird flu erupts, and inflation goes haywire! That television purchase could have been used in an offshore banking investment!"
That guy living in a the 300K house probably bought it when it was 200K, and can easily liquidate it at a huge price advantage, barring some sort of huge house collapse (which would be more a worry with a $900K house). Leased cars are similarly easy to offload, possibly at a small cost. I think you're a little unreasonably smug.
Isn't pharming when DNS is actually hacked in some manner? How many cases of this actually happening have been documented? Simply setting up a website that mimics a legitimate financial institution or pertinent party (e.g. Ebay), is, and has always been, phishing. The phishing emails are just lures to the bait of the phishing websites.
Should convicted felons on probation have privacy rights over their DNA? Or is a blood sample like a fingerprint, something that everyone should provide to their government?
Nice transitions from convicted felons to "everyone" there.
This database is being built using the MOMENTUM of terrorism, not FOR terrorism
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Exactly. Any belief that these sorts of things are, or will be, limited to catching Osama and crew are terribly, terribly deluded. These systems have the potential of much more dangerous, more nefarious purposes. Terrorism, and the War on Terror, is the wonderful Freebie Card that all levels of government are using to get what they want.
Just this morning I heard a US Senator railing against Toronto garbage being shipped into Michigan -- the terrorists, he tells us, are going to use it to transport WMDs (nevermind silly incidentals, like the fact that shipped garbage gets checked to a far greater extent than most other methods of getting the same over the border). Failing to stop it on legal or trade grounds, the Freebie Terrorism card is being played.
Recently I caught a Dateline or 20/20 or CNN segment about a dangerous, unmonitored border crossing. It was the crossing over to
http://maps.google.ca/?ll=49.262876,-94.972687&sp
(It's a little geographical abberation, and is sort of a little piece of the US in Canada. The border crossing is to only go into this little piece -- you can't get anywhere else)
Local police, desperate for empire building funds, claim that they've heard that this is a big terrorism crossing. Yes, they said it with a straight face - terrorists are busy getting into the US by travelling to the middle of nowhere (where every person and car that's out of place gets close scrutiny), and then passing into a little jutty of land that isn't even a part of the continental US. It's so unbelievably ridiculous -- so mind bendingly illogical, and laughable given the endless options terrorists already have, including just immigrating to the US and buying an arsenal at one of the many gun shows -- yet it was presented as a completely logical argument. Once again the terrorism freebie was used.
And amazingly so many Americans buy it. Remarkably, the ones who buy it the most are the ones who are the least likely to fall victim to terrorism, which the ones living in the hubs of urbanity discount such vapid arguments.