I think its the big studio's which will suffer, the small indie label's are apparently (or so my little sister in the business tells me) are doing better than ever. What it really means is the end of the rock and roll life style of music stars having millions of pounds, limos and fancy parties. Which looking at many of the people who were given this fame (britney is a great example) is probably a good thing.
To put things in perspective a local band known as Madd Dog (irish folk music) make a regular living by giving gigs at the local pubs/clubs they even have two or three albums you can buy when they do sets. Almost a year ago a "big" (sorry can't remember who except it was a blonde woman) pop act was showing in Plymouth Pavilions theatre with Madd Dog supporting. 70-80% of the audience who went watched Madd Dog and then left before the main show. Bands can and do make a living without big record companies they can even acrew fame and go touring (I remember seeing a canadian band called College Fall last year who were excellent.)
What we will lose is the record companies deciding to force one type of music down our necks all the time. Jack Johnson got really big over here in the UK so now it seems all we here is rnb or the chilled out guitar and voice genre. I'd say I'd miss the ease of buying albums in shops but its so rare to hear a completly good album these days.
02 were opening at 9:02pm I walked past the O2 store yesterday around 4pm and there was a mum with her daughter waiting outside as things happened I walked past the same store about five past nine and the only customers inside were the mum and daughter. I don't think its going to make that much of an impact over here since the general consensus I've heard from my non techy friends is don't waste your money on a rubbish phone by a iTouch instead and have a good phone.
Because the American phone market is so backward? In europe we actually have good phones, the idea of having a built in MP3 player, radio tuner, 2 Megapixel camera and GPRS, if you actually go contract you can start looking at getting GPS and WiFi as standard. Heck I got a XDA Mini S for free on a lower and better contract than the O2 deal requires. As for this "interface" nonsense pretty much every phone I have seen (excusing the Windows Mobile ones) goes for a Symbian style interface which makes things easy to use because its a good and simple interface.
As it stands the markets pretty much well divided over here, expensive flash phones tend to be the latest Nokia's (Nokia n95 atm) the phone 90% of people have tends to be a Sony Erricson (the current one to get is the w880i) if you want a small phone people tend to get some form of samsung and then moan about it and finally the whole cool market seems to be made up of Motorolla V3's. Every last one of those phones is cheaper on pay as you go than the Apple iPhone (excusing the n95 which is still cheaper on a lower tariff.)
The Apple iPhone is a status symbol, just like owning an iPod is. I'm actually really interested to see how well it does over here in the UK, since its a status symbol I'm guessing teens are going to be the most likely to buy it. Having only recently stopped being a teen and knowing many teenagers (well all of us) we all go out and like to drink, many of my friends and others have asked me why I'd bring such an expensive phone (the Xda mentioned above) out with me. Since most of them wouldn't bring an iPod Nano out with them I'm curious to see if anyone I know will get one.
You realise they do allow downloadable content (just like the PS3) the thing is they don't big it up, The wipeout game for it is probably the best example out of my collection I've gained about 10 tracks a bout 5/6 new songs, an extra vehicle or two as well as a new race mode. I know its not an entire game but its amazing how much it can help.
Your comment about "scratching the disk" is kinda stupid, UMD is alot like mini-disc (there in a big protective case), my Wipeout disc from launch day still works fine and has been quite abused. I would love to be able to install a disc onto the PSP and play it off the system but only for battery reasons you actually have to shake my PSP quite hard to get it to skip and even then it recovers well.
My Mistake after so many replies I grabbed the DVD, he compared a Lotus Exige against a Ford Mustang which was given to Rausch (sp?) and supercharged engine(after comparing to the Shelby Mustang GT 500.) The Exige won.
I confused a small sketch on the same DVD about driving a escape car. The land rover is now owned by Ford after BMW killed rover. However as far as I am aware all the range is designed in the UK, in fact last time I checked the Defender, Disco and Range Rover are very close (if not the same) to their Rover/BMW designs.
You've pointed out one American car which is quick, my original post was about the lack of technology generally in American cars (designed in America.) If you ever get a chance watch Top gear they have a wall which has the lap times of whatever car they have on the show, count the number of European designed/manufactured cars at the top compared to American designed/manufactured. COnsidering the American market is supposed to be aimed at performing muscle cars there are really very few which actually do ok.
Not Top gear read my original post, Jeremy Clarkson does some of his own DVD's, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one he did where he travelled to america to find a "good" american car, he's done about five or six DVD's.
My Mistake after so many replies I grabbed the DVD, he compared a Lotus Exige against a Ford Mustang which was given to Rausch (sp?) and supercharged (after comparing to the Shelby Mustang GT 500.) The Exige won by a good margin although they did import the Stig to drive it;)
The idea that American cars "perfom" is non sense, American cars have huge engines that doesn't mean they preform. For example in the program I mentioned in my post they pitted a Atom against an American car which was in the same class(I forget which) the Atom won even though on paper the American car should have won, they pitted a American muscle car against a BMW, the BMW wins, they pitted a Land Rover discovery (the worst land rover off road in my opinion) against 3 other American 4x4's and the Disco beat the rest driving up a hill.
The American market (this is only a broad semi-educated guess) seems to be far more concerned with cost and engine size rather than anything else. The UK market seems to be far more driven by fuel efficency, build quality and handling. I think its something thats broadly backfired in America, over here we have cars which all happily do 80/90MPH, since theres lots of town driving most small cars are very nippy (quick and agile),because we're currently paying around 96p per litre of petrol pretty much everything does 40/50MPG.
My point about Harley's wasn't meant to be an attack on that, I took a 1100cc (I think) engined harley bike out. The seat used springs which was less conformtable than the Suzuki's foam, the brakes were drums (compared to disc's on everything else I've ever driven), it didn't have a built in immobiliser and to top it off it struggled to do 60MPH and wasn't quick to accelerate. If I were to compare it to say a Suzuki GSF 1100cc (made ten years ago) which has front a rear disc brakes, does 50MPG, handles (as in the turning cicle is less than a car lane, although its quite heavy for me) a bike which will do 160MPH and it will get there quickly. My 200cc Honda will do 70MPH and get there in less time than the Harley, so why can a 200cc bike perfom better than a 1100cc? Where is the perfomance? I think engine size in america has become a bit like the GHz race, everyone knows bigger engines are better but what about fuel injection, and other technologies which also produce great results?
PS I know Harleys are more of a lifestyle choice but I think my point is still valid
I know your joking but until the recent eco drive most cars had poor MPG. American cars lag hugely when compared the the european market. Here we have lots of small town driving cars which unleaded will do 50MPG, my Dad's just bought a Toyota Yaris which does an average of 66MPG. We also have things like the land rover defender which may only do 25-30MPG but can actually go off-road, up mountains and everything else (they also fit about 8 people in them if your squueze.) The technology in American cars does tend to lag, the Ford GT is only as cool as it is because very little technology in it is American. For a rather biased but amusing program watch Jeremy Clarkson's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and you'll see what I mean.
I have to ask whats the deal with Harleys as well, the weekend just gone I had the distinct displeasure of driving one. The rumours of having the turning circle of a brick, no acceleration and an amazing top speed of 60 MPH the same as my 100mpg 200cc motorcycle. That Harley emboded everything I hate about Cars, then again I might be biased since I bought a Suzuki GSR 600 that day (light, handled brilliantly, did reasonable MPG, good in town traffic and will still do more than 100MPH if you want it to.)
Perhaps american car manufactures do need to start doubling fuel efficency every year if they best they can do is a Humvee
In university myself and my fellow EE students got through using Maple,Matlab and Equation editor from MS Word. It worked well for us, if someone could have ported the maple into word in a usefull fashion (equation editor is slow at times) that would have been perfect.
The idea of learning a several thousand large charracter set with all the associated keyboard shortcuts holds no interest for me, I'm pretty certain no other engineer on my course would have even attempted it. Perhaps these people could have better spent their time writing a plugin for OpenOffice which gives a highly responsive and good adaptive menu system at the click of a button.
What about motorstorm, Resistance fall of man, Dirt and Oblivion. I'l agree not every PS3 game is a winner (cough Sonic the hedgehog) There is also guitar heroe 3 coming out for the PS3 this month and although I haven't played it I've heard Heavenly Sword is great and apparently the new Tony Hawks will be worth a spin (out this week I believe.)
Personnally I love whats on the PS3 it took me two months to get through Motorstorm and even then I'm still playing online multiplayer with a house mate. I've just started Oblivion and while I have never been a fan of the genre (the whole elder scrolls/final fantasy stuff) I am really enjoying the game. Resistance Fall of Man only took me a week to complete but the multiplayer and copoperative modes are great, its become the game to play when all my friends come around. The only thing we've lacked until are wireless countrollers for guitar heroe, so we've had to keep a PS2 around.
I'm finding myself in the position of being unlikely to have completed the 5 games I own before GTAIV, RockBand and Ratchet and Clank come out.
Interesting point, hrmm let me open Visual Studio 2005 oh wait theres no Allow or Cancel box, hrmm lets copy my music collection from my external USB hard drive to my music folder, oh wait theres no Allow or Cancel box.
But your right if I try copying into the Program Files (x86), the Program Files folder or try putting stuff into the Windows directory it asks me to Allow or Cancel, how usefull it makes me think before I start dumping rubbish into key system folders, how usefull.Nice FUD
I own three copies of Vista, Vista Business, Vista Home Base and Vista Home Premium, all played DVD's out of the box.
The only thing those copies lacked was a driver for the individual wireless cards I own, I'd mod you troll but I since your that badly misinformed I thought it best to correct you.
I'm really starting to get hacked off with all the Vista FUD thats out there, only today in work anouther open source person was spouting the nonsense that Vista won't let you play Blu-ray disks.
You right and the solution is to be creative.
Photoshop is apparently a great tool personnally I hate Photoshop and GIMP equally, both are far more powerfull than my needs which range between Microsoft Paint and Adobe Photoshop. If Adobe were to sit down with a bunch of random morons like myself and find out why we hated their product so much and then bring out a Photoshop which might not have the full feature set and for the professional might be horrible to use. But if they sold it cheap enough I bet they would tap a new market.(I'm aware of Photoshop CS but hate the user interface.)
MS Office 2007 would be a good example of this, there really is very little new in MS Office 2007 other than an updated UI, but once you get used to that new user interface its hard not to want to buy the new Office suite, because you gain so much more power out of the expearence. It really adds alot to the product but this sort of thing does require some thinking out of the box.
No it is a troll, there no justification its pure negitive opinion made in a thread about the PS3. Its no different to going into the Ubunutu story and posting "I don't like Ubunutu" he never said it wasn't worth the cost of the PS3 or even that the game was nice.
Personnally I agree in part, there is no single great game on the PS3 which justifies the price tag, however there are a bunch of really good games which together do, from Motorstorm,Resistance,Dirt,Heavenly Sword and Oblivion (the only games I've bought so far.)
Personnally I'm waiting for Divx support I think its the only think my PS3 is missing.
For our international friends OfCOM is the government watch body for communications, a few years back they made the statement that unlocking your phone so it will work on different networks is perfectly legal and carriers have to unlock a phone if asked to do so (not tried it myself.) Apple's recent american update would fly in the face of that and OfCOM aren't afraid to fine companies and force them to follow their rules. OfCOM is currently looking into forcing broadband adverts to be more truthfull so marketing speak like "upto 8MBPS" or "unlimited" won't be allowed (even if they are legal) for Americans out there this is to protect consumers and is a good thing.
I doubt its going to sell many units to the teenage "cool and hip" crowd because every teenager I know in the UK doesn't want to bring an expensive phone out on the town and I doubt your "power manager" type will end up with one because, from my albiet limited expearence with O2 stores. The staff are actually quite good at matching the phone to the individual, it may not necessarily be the most expensive phone they have on offer nor might it be the coolest looking but it will be roughly what the customer is after.
I'm not a linux zealot (go check my previous postings) but my impression from the mailing list's and the previous slashdot stories makes me think Theo is simply a pain in the butt to work with and quite childish. I have the same opinion of Stallman as well, but at least Stallman's rants appear to be ones based on logical reasoning and not generic insults like Theo's
The issue is someone who helped make a BSD released driver and the work was released under a dual license. When this person submitted this patch for the Linux crowd, he decided to remove (strip) the BSD sections from the license. Firstly the BSD license forbids you to do this (apparently) if you do release the program under another license you have to keep the original BSD license in the source code. This person also removed his own name from the copyright. After this infraction was pointed out the person asked for the necessary changes to be made. From the whole wifi GPL/BSD issue a while back the linux community has been quite mature and quick to solve things compared to the BSD people and I don't believe intentional mis-licensing ever met to occur unlike the wifi bsd case
Theo seems to be using this as a platform to attack the Linux crowd and more importantly the GPL, his legal interpretation is subject to IANAL syndrome and from a purely logic point of view I believe what he has been saying is incorrect (however law and logic make poor bedfellows.) He's also attacking people because people are taking BSD drivers and adding GPL code to them so they can't be used in a BSD kernel. I can understand him being upset that BSD developers can't bring GPL drivers upstream but to attack them over this firstly seems quite stupid (in that one of the ideological difference's between the GPL and BSD license is the ability to do that.) His whole handling of the matter seems far more like a immature 12 year olds shouting "mine mine". An adult response would have been to contact the EFF and ask if they would give their legal opinion on the correct way to dual license and what you can and can't do, then release that recommendation. Secondly making a general plea to the main linux driver development teams to see if they would be willing to release the code under a BSD license.
I agree the whole things stupid but it does make interesting reading.
Why did it take you 1.5 hours? I've had to go through the whole windows/office activation dozens of times the longest its taken me is 20 minutes. You know the automated "enter your product key" thing won't work so jab buttons until a phone operator is put on, you'll then get asked how many machines this copy is on? (always say 1) is it the retail or OEM version (say retail as it saves a speech), they'll ask if its your first time (pretty much always going to be no, at this point I'd say "no, I installed a piece of software/hardware it caused the machine to go wonky so I've reloaded it" this response means you skip the next question) next your asked "whats your reason for the reinstall?" (see previous) and finally would you like to take their satisfaction survey (always say no cause its pointless.)
Sure you can answer the questions honestly but if what your trying to activate is perfectly legitmate I've found it best not to explain what your actually doing, they like to lecture you if you admit to an OEM license but they can't tell if its retail so by just saying retail you save yourself a lecture. Finally for the is this installed on one machine, unless your a business you can't install it on more.
The activation step is annoying but I've used far worse systems
This works with companies, a couple of years back Orange tripple billed me in a month. I'd just broken my arm and the tripple bill equalled the entire money in my account. Since I couldn't work, the orange shop staffed sympathised with me and the phone staff kept shouting data protection act and "company policy" I stood outside the city centre's shops with a sign saying "Orange ilegally took money from me". I'll admit the dejected look I put on and the wire frame coming out of my wrist might have helped but on that day that shop only had customers who were after pay as you go top ups. I'm pretty certain I cost the company thousands that day and yes it took perhaps the better part of five hours but it worked. Eventually the manager of the shop got the phone people to give me my £40 and they would give me the next two months free (before they refused to repay me just promised to use the extra money to pay line rental.)
Meet my antecedental evidence I've run HL2 Episode 1 maxed out on four different machines on XP and Vista without a problem, Two of the machines were apparently below spec's (that warning thing popped up) and yet ran it at maximum settings.
Some off the cuff idea's for your problems, lock ups and crashes usually occur because of three things Hard Drive, Ram or your graphics card/driver. Some games don't like certain graphics drivers for example Uru: Ages beyond Myst has huge rendering issues (with textures) if you used a 5 series nvidia cards with a driver past 57.xx. An old machine of mine used to either crash out of a game or hard reset because I used an Hercules ATi 7500 AiW card with 7500 drivers, that card drove me crazy as using the AiW driver would cause all sorts of texture errors but the 7500 drivers were unstable. I discovered the reason why Deus Ex and HL2 were taking so long to load by using a benchmarking tool which showed my hard drive was transferring data at quite a low rate (much lower than it should have) a new IDE drive fixed that issue. Just last week I discovered why The Sims 2 kept crashing all the time which was because of a faulty memory module in a 512mb stick of ram. Sim 2 was the only thing to take the memory usuage on the machine past 790mb and what ever application caused that crashed, guess what new ram solved that problem.
Instead of attacking the game as many clueless people do why not sit back and try and figure out whats broken or not working as it should, it takes less time. (by the way these aren't necessarily all my machines but ones I've sat down and fixed)
In fairness I've fallen into your first example, after spending £150 on clothing in debenham's I took it home and the next day I was in town saw they had a a upto 50% sales and everything I bought was in it. I took the clothes back and asked for the discount which they gave me after the sales assistant confirmed with her manager she was allowed to do it. Anouther example would be a MP3 player I purchased for someone as a gift from Maplins (a month before their birthday) after three weeks Maplins ran a sale on the item so I took it back and asked for the same, they said they couldn't so I returned the item and purchased one off the shelf. Was I being cheap? No cause I then went and purchased something else for that person with the difference.
This is of course the UK with its 28 days return policy, where as long as you can return something in its original condition you can return it for any reason. Although there are items which fall outside this but the seller has to inform you of this fact or they can't refuse your return.
I bought a PS3 in the UK a month or so ago, it came with software version 1.6 which couldn't play the few PS2 games I threw at it. Once I setup the wireless connection I was imediatly upgrade to 1.9 and my small library of PS1 and PS2 games (probably a total of 60) all play on it. I'll agree some games (GTA SA) don't look as good on the PS3 as they do on the PS2 but Sony do seem aware of that. I'm more than willing to believe Sony will fix the issue considering how many times they've released software updates for my PSP.
This is only my expearence there are probably games out there which don't play but I'm betting Sony will get the emulation upto 99% before jacking it in. I just wish PS1/PS2 memory cards could be connected to my PS3.
You realise capacitors explode if you put to much energy into them right? So your argueing instead of using a technology that builds up and catches fire we instead compress the energy into a smaller density in a design which can and does explode. Sure there might be easier ways to contain an explosion. But its not better it just presents different problems.
I have to agree here and I think its a problem with almost all of the FOSS stuff from openoffice to linux. Even using the compiz/beryl program my ubunutu installation did not look anywhere near as good as my XP one and while Vista may just be "resource intensive eye candy" in many peoples eyes. When you go from Vista's interface to Ubunutu's it feels like going back to windows 3.1 (visually.)
I think this is an important step I've messed X up several times in various linux installs and always found it easier just to reload whatever distro I'm trying than to surf forums trying to learn which tools I need to use to fix things. I really ope the Ubunutu team can keep going like this for years now I've had a list of reasons of why I won't use Linux and every Ubunutu release seems to knock or or two items off my list.
Slashdot Mirror
I think its the big studio's which will suffer, the small indie label's are apparently (or so my little sister in the business tells me) are doing better than ever. What it really means is the end of the rock and roll life style of music stars having millions of pounds, limos and fancy parties. Which looking at many of the people who were given this fame (britney is a great example) is probably a good thing.
To put things in perspective a local band known as Madd Dog (irish folk music) make a regular living by giving gigs at the local pubs/clubs they even have two or three albums you can buy when they do sets. Almost a year ago a "big" (sorry can't remember who except it was a blonde woman) pop act was showing in Plymouth Pavilions theatre with Madd Dog supporting. 70-80% of the audience who went watched Madd Dog and then left before the main show. Bands can and do make a living without big record companies they can even acrew fame and go touring (I remember seeing a canadian band called College Fall last year who were excellent.)
What we will lose is the record companies deciding to force one type of music down our necks all the time. Jack Johnson got really big over here in the UK so now it seems all we here is rnb or the chilled out guitar and voice genre. I'd say I'd miss the ease of buying albums in shops but its so rare to hear a completly good album these days.
02 were opening at 9:02pm I walked past the O2 store yesterday around 4pm and there was a mum with her daughter waiting outside as things happened I walked past the same store about five past nine and the only customers inside were the mum and daughter. I don't think its going to make that much of an impact over here since the general consensus I've heard from my non techy friends is don't waste your money on a rubbish phone by a iTouch instead and have a good phone.
Because the American phone market is so backward? In europe we actually have good phones, the idea of having a built in MP3 player, radio tuner, 2 Megapixel camera and GPRS, if you actually go contract you can start looking at getting GPS and WiFi as standard. Heck I got a XDA Mini S for free on a lower and better contract than the O2 deal requires. As for this "interface" nonsense pretty much every phone I have seen (excusing the Windows Mobile ones) goes for a Symbian style interface which makes things easy to use because its a good and simple interface.
As it stands the markets pretty much well divided over here, expensive flash phones tend to be the latest Nokia's (Nokia n95 atm) the phone 90% of people have tends to be a Sony Erricson (the current one to get is the w880i) if you want a small phone people tend to get some form of samsung and then moan about it and finally the whole cool market seems to be made up of Motorolla V3's. Every last one of those phones is cheaper on pay as you go than the Apple iPhone (excusing the n95 which is still cheaper on a lower tariff.)
The Apple iPhone is a status symbol, just like owning an iPod is. I'm actually really interested to see how well it does over here in the UK, since its a status symbol I'm guessing teens are going to be the most likely to buy it. Having only recently stopped being a teen and knowing many teenagers (well all of us) we all go out and like to drink, many of my friends and others have asked me why I'd bring such an expensive phone (the Xda mentioned above) out with me. Since most of them wouldn't bring an iPod Nano out with them I'm curious to see if anyone I know will get one.
You realise they do allow downloadable content (just like the PS3) the thing is they don't big it up, The wipeout game for it is probably the best example out of my collection I've gained about 10 tracks a bout 5/6 new songs, an extra vehicle or two as well as a new race mode. I know its not an entire game but its amazing how much it can help.
Your comment about "scratching the disk" is kinda stupid, UMD is alot like mini-disc (there in a big protective case), my Wipeout disc from launch day still works fine and has been quite abused. I would love to be able to install a disc onto the PSP and play it off the system but only for battery reasons you actually have to shake my PSP quite hard to get it to skip and even then it recovers well.
My Mistake after so many replies I grabbed the DVD, he compared a Lotus Exige against a Ford Mustang which was given to Rausch (sp?) and supercharged engine(after comparing to the Shelby Mustang GT 500.) The Exige won.
Ford Mustang - http://www.roushperformance.com/mustang_427r.shtml
Lotus Exige - http://www.pistonheads.com/lotus/default.asp?storyId=13118
I confused a small sketch on the same DVD about driving a escape car. The land rover is now owned by Ford after BMW killed rover. However as far as I am aware all the range is designed in the UK, in fact last time I checked the Defender, Disco and Range Rover are very close (if not the same) to their Rover/BMW designs.
You've pointed out one American car which is quick, my original post was about the lack of technology generally in American cars (designed in America.) If you ever get a chance watch Top gear they have a wall which has the lap times of whatever car they have on the show, count the number of European designed/manufactured cars at the top compared to American designed/manufactured. COnsidering the American market is supposed to be aimed at performing muscle cars there are really very few which actually do ok.
Not Top gear read my original post, Jeremy Clarkson does some of his own DVD's, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is one he did where he travelled to america to find a "good" american car, he's done about five or six DVD's.
;)
My Mistake after so many replies I grabbed the DVD, he compared a Lotus Exige against a Ford Mustang which was given to Rausch (sp?) and supercharged (after comparing to the Shelby Mustang GT 500.) The Exige won by a good margin although they did import the Stig to drive it
Ford Mustang - http://www.roushperformance.com/mustang_427r.shtml
Lotus Exige - http://www.pistonheads.com/lotus/default.asp?storyId=13118
I confused a small sketch on the same DVD about driving a escape car
The idea that American cars "perfom" is non sense, American cars have huge engines that doesn't mean they preform. For example in the program I mentioned in my post they pitted a Atom against an American car which was in the same class(I forget which) the Atom won even though on paper the American car should have won, they pitted a American muscle car against a BMW, the BMW wins, they pitted a Land Rover discovery (the worst land rover off road in my opinion) against 3 other American 4x4's and the Disco beat the rest driving up a hill.
The American market (this is only a broad semi-educated guess) seems to be far more concerned with cost and engine size rather than anything else. The UK market seems to be far more driven by fuel efficency, build quality and handling. I think its something thats broadly backfired in America, over here we have cars which all happily do 80/90MPH, since theres lots of town driving most small cars are very nippy (quick and agile),because we're currently paying around 96p per litre of petrol pretty much everything does 40/50MPG.
My point about Harley's wasn't meant to be an attack on that, I took a 1100cc (I think) engined harley bike out. The seat used springs which was less conformtable than the Suzuki's foam, the brakes were drums (compared to disc's on everything else I've ever driven), it didn't have a built in immobiliser and to top it off it struggled to do 60MPH and wasn't quick to accelerate. If I were to compare it to say a Suzuki GSF 1100cc (made ten years ago) which has front a rear disc brakes, does 50MPG, handles (as in the turning cicle is less than a car lane, although its quite heavy for me) a bike which will do 160MPH and it will get there quickly. My 200cc Honda will do 70MPH and get there in less time than the Harley, so why can a 200cc bike perfom better than a 1100cc? Where is the perfomance? I think engine size in america has become a bit like the GHz race, everyone knows bigger engines are better but what about fuel injection, and other technologies which also produce great results?
PS I know Harleys are more of a lifestyle choice but I think my point is still valid
I know your joking but until the recent eco drive most cars had poor MPG. American cars lag hugely when compared the the european market. Here we have lots of small town driving cars which unleaded will do 50MPG, my Dad's just bought a Toyota Yaris which does an average of 66MPG. We also have things like the land rover defender which may only do 25-30MPG but can actually go off-road, up mountains and everything else (they also fit about 8 people in them if your squueze.) The technology in American cars does tend to lag, the Ford GT is only as cool as it is because very little technology in it is American. For a rather biased but amusing program watch Jeremy Clarkson's The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and you'll see what I mean.
I have to ask whats the deal with Harleys as well, the weekend just gone I had the distinct displeasure of driving one. The rumours of having the turning circle of a brick, no acceleration and an amazing top speed of 60 MPH the same as my 100mpg 200cc motorcycle. That Harley emboded everything I hate about Cars, then again I might be biased since I bought a Suzuki GSR 600 that day (light, handled brilliantly, did reasonable MPG, good in town traffic and will still do more than 100MPH if you want it to.)
Perhaps american car manufactures do need to start doubling fuel efficency every year if they best they can do is a Humvee
In university myself and my fellow EE students got through using Maple,Matlab and Equation editor from MS Word. It worked well for us, if someone could have ported the maple into word in a usefull fashion (equation editor is slow at times) that would have been perfect.
The idea of learning a several thousand large charracter set with all the associated keyboard shortcuts holds no interest for me, I'm pretty certain no other engineer on my course would have even attempted it. Perhaps these people could have better spent their time writing a plugin for OpenOffice which gives a highly responsive and good adaptive menu system at the click of a button.
What about motorstorm, Resistance fall of man, Dirt and Oblivion. I'l agree not every PS3 game is a winner (cough Sonic the hedgehog) There is also guitar heroe 3 coming out for the PS3 this month and although I haven't played it I've heard Heavenly Sword is great and apparently the new Tony Hawks will be worth a spin (out this week I believe.)
Personnally I love whats on the PS3 it took me two months to get through Motorstorm and even then I'm still playing online multiplayer with a house mate. I've just started Oblivion and while I have never been a fan of the genre (the whole elder scrolls/final fantasy stuff) I am really enjoying the game. Resistance Fall of Man only took me a week to complete but the multiplayer and copoperative modes are great, its become the game to play when all my friends come around. The only thing we've lacked until are wireless countrollers for guitar heroe, so we've had to keep a PS2 around.
I'm finding myself in the position of being unlikely to have completed the 5 games I own before GTAIV, RockBand and Ratchet and Clank come out.
Interesting point, hrmm let me open Visual Studio 2005 oh wait theres no Allow or Cancel box, hrmm lets copy my music collection from my external USB hard drive to my music folder, oh wait theres no Allow or Cancel box.
But your right if I try copying into the Program Files (x86), the Program Files folder or try putting stuff into the Windows directory it asks me to Allow or Cancel, how usefull it makes me think before I start dumping rubbish into key system folders, how usefull.Nice FUD
I own three copies of Vista, Vista Business, Vista Home Base and Vista Home Premium, all played DVD's out of the box.
The only thing those copies lacked was a driver for the individual wireless cards I own, I'd mod you troll but I since your that badly misinformed I thought it best to correct you.
I'm really starting to get hacked off with all the Vista FUD thats out there, only today in work anouther open source person was spouting the nonsense that Vista won't let you play Blu-ray disks.
You right and the solution is to be creative. Photoshop is apparently a great tool personnally I hate Photoshop and GIMP equally, both are far more powerfull than my needs which range between Microsoft Paint and Adobe Photoshop. If Adobe were to sit down with a bunch of random morons like myself and find out why we hated their product so much and then bring out a Photoshop which might not have the full feature set and for the professional might be horrible to use. But if they sold it cheap enough I bet they would tap a new market.(I'm aware of Photoshop CS but hate the user interface.)
MS Office 2007 would be a good example of this, there really is very little new in MS Office 2007 other than an updated UI, but once you get used to that new user interface its hard not to want to buy the new Office suite, because you gain so much more power out of the expearence. It really adds alot to the product but this sort of thing does require some thinking out of the box.
No it is a troll, there no justification its pure negitive opinion made in a thread about the PS3. Its no different to going into the Ubunutu story and posting "I don't like Ubunutu" he never said it wasn't worth the cost of the PS3 or even that the game was nice.
Personnally I agree in part, there is no single great game on the PS3 which justifies the price tag, however there are a bunch of really good games which together do, from Motorstorm,Resistance,Dirt,Heavenly Sword and Oblivion (the only games I've bought so far.) Personnally I'm waiting for Divx support I think its the only think my PS3 is missing.
For our international friends OfCOM is the government watch body for communications, a few years back they made the statement that unlocking your phone so it will work on different networks is perfectly legal and carriers have to unlock a phone if asked to do so (not tried it myself.) Apple's recent american update would fly in the face of that and OfCOM aren't afraid to fine companies and force them to follow their rules. OfCOM is currently looking into forcing broadband adverts to be more truthfull so marketing speak like "upto 8MBPS" or "unlimited" won't be allowed (even if they are legal) for Americans out there this is to protect consumers and is a good thing.
I doubt its going to sell many units to the teenage "cool and hip" crowd because every teenager I know in the UK doesn't want to bring an expensive phone out on the town and I doubt your "power manager" type will end up with one because, from my albiet limited expearence with O2 stores. The staff are actually quite good at matching the phone to the individual, it may not necessarily be the most expensive phone they have on offer nor might it be the coolest looking but it will be roughly what the customer is after.
I'm not a linux zealot (go check my previous postings) but my impression from the mailing list's and the previous slashdot stories makes me think Theo is simply a pain in the butt to work with and quite childish. I have the same opinion of Stallman as well, but at least Stallman's rants appear to be ones based on logical reasoning and not generic insults like Theo's
The issue is someone who helped make a BSD released driver and the work was released under a dual license. When this person submitted this patch for the Linux crowd, he decided to remove (strip) the BSD sections from the license. Firstly the BSD license forbids you to do this (apparently) if you do release the program under another license you have to keep the original BSD license in the source code. This person also removed his own name from the copyright. After this infraction was pointed out the person asked for the necessary changes to be made. From the whole wifi GPL/BSD issue a while back the linux community has been quite mature and quick to solve things compared to the BSD people and I don't believe intentional mis-licensing ever met to occur unlike the wifi bsd case Theo seems to be using this as a platform to attack the Linux crowd and more importantly the GPL, his legal interpretation is subject to IANAL syndrome and from a purely logic point of view I believe what he has been saying is incorrect (however law and logic make poor bedfellows.) He's also attacking people because people are taking BSD drivers and adding GPL code to them so they can't be used in a BSD kernel. I can understand him being upset that BSD developers can't bring GPL drivers upstream but to attack them over this firstly seems quite stupid (in that one of the ideological difference's between the GPL and BSD license is the ability to do that.) His whole handling of the matter seems far more like a immature 12 year olds shouting "mine mine". An adult response would have been to contact the EFF and ask if they would give their legal opinion on the correct way to dual license and what you can and can't do, then release that recommendation. Secondly making a general plea to the main linux driver development teams to see if they would be willing to release the code under a BSD license.
I agree the whole things stupid but it does make interesting reading.
I thought 83.243% of all stats were made up on the spot?
Why did it take you 1.5 hours? I've had to go through the whole windows/office activation dozens of times the longest its taken me is 20 minutes. You know the automated "enter your product key" thing won't work so jab buttons until a phone operator is put on, you'll then get asked how many machines this copy is on? (always say 1) is it the retail or OEM version (say retail as it saves a speech), they'll ask if its your first time (pretty much always going to be no, at this point I'd say "no, I installed a piece of software/hardware it caused the machine to go wonky so I've reloaded it" this response means you skip the next question) next your asked "whats your reason for the reinstall?" (see previous) and finally would you like to take their satisfaction survey (always say no cause its pointless.)
Sure you can answer the questions honestly but if what your trying to activate is perfectly legitmate I've found it best not to explain what your actually doing, they like to lecture you if you admit to an OEM license but they can't tell if its retail so by just saying retail you save yourself a lecture. Finally for the is this installed on one machine, unless your a business you can't install it on more.
The activation step is annoying but I've used far worse systems
This works with companies, a couple of years back Orange tripple billed me in a month. I'd just broken my arm and the tripple bill equalled the entire money in my account. Since I couldn't work, the orange shop staffed sympathised with me and the phone staff kept shouting data protection act and "company policy" I stood outside the city centre's shops with a sign saying "Orange ilegally took money from me". I'll admit the dejected look I put on and the wire frame coming out of my wrist might have helped but on that day that shop only had customers who were after pay as you go top ups. I'm pretty certain I cost the company thousands that day and yes it took perhaps the better part of five hours but it worked. Eventually the manager of the shop got the phone people to give me my £40 and they would give me the next two months free (before they refused to repay me just promised to use the extra money to pay line rental.)
Meet my antecedental evidence I've run HL2 Episode 1 maxed out on four different machines on XP and Vista without a problem, Two of the machines were apparently below spec's (that warning thing popped up) and yet ran it at maximum settings.
Some off the cuff idea's for your problems, lock ups and crashes usually occur because of three things Hard Drive, Ram or your graphics card/driver. Some games don't like certain graphics drivers for example Uru: Ages beyond Myst has huge rendering issues (with textures) if you used a 5 series nvidia cards with a driver past 57.xx. An old machine of mine used to either crash out of a game or hard reset because I used an Hercules ATi 7500 AiW card with 7500 drivers, that card drove me crazy as using the AiW driver would cause all sorts of texture errors but the 7500 drivers were unstable. I discovered the reason why Deus Ex and HL2 were taking so long to load by using a benchmarking tool which showed my hard drive was transferring data at quite a low rate (much lower than it should have) a new IDE drive fixed that issue. Just last week I discovered why The Sims 2 kept crashing all the time which was because of a faulty memory module in a 512mb stick of ram. Sim 2 was the only thing to take the memory usuage on the machine past 790mb and what ever application caused that crashed, guess what new ram solved that problem.
Instead of attacking the game as many clueless people do why not sit back and try and figure out whats broken or not working as it should, it takes less time. (by the way these aren't necessarily all my machines but ones I've sat down and fixed)
In fairness I've fallen into your first example, after spending £150 on clothing in debenham's I took it home and the next day I was in town saw they had a a upto 50% sales and everything I bought was in it. I took the clothes back and asked for the discount which they gave me after the sales assistant confirmed with her manager she was allowed to do it. Anouther example would be a MP3 player I purchased for someone as a gift from Maplins (a month before their birthday) after three weeks Maplins ran a sale on the item so I took it back and asked for the same, they said they couldn't so I returned the item and purchased one off the shelf. Was I being cheap? No cause I then went and purchased something else for that person with the difference.
This is of course the UK with its 28 days return policy, where as long as you can return something in its original condition you can return it for any reason. Although there are items which fall outside this but the seller has to inform you of this fact or they can't refuse your return.
I bought a PS3 in the UK a month or so ago, it came with software version 1.6 which couldn't play the few PS2 games I threw at it. Once I setup the wireless connection I was imediatly upgrade to 1.9 and my small library of PS1 and PS2 games (probably a total of 60) all play on it. I'll agree some games (GTA SA) don't look as good on the PS3 as they do on the PS2 but Sony do seem aware of that. I'm more than willing to believe Sony will fix the issue considering how many times they've released software updates for my PSP. This is only my expearence there are probably games out there which don't play but I'm betting Sony will get the emulation upto 99% before jacking it in. I just wish PS1/PS2 memory cards could be connected to my PS3.
You realise capacitors explode if you put to much energy into them right? So your argueing instead of using a technology that builds up and catches fire we instead compress the energy into a smaller density in a design which can and does explode. Sure there might be easier ways to contain an explosion. But its not better it just presents different problems.
So your saying that we're safe as long as they put it into our left hand?
I have to agree here and I think its a problem with almost all of the FOSS stuff from openoffice to linux. Even using the compiz/beryl program my ubunutu installation did not look anywhere near as good as my XP one and while Vista may just be "resource intensive eye candy" in many peoples eyes. When you go from Vista's interface to Ubunutu's it feels like going back to windows 3.1 (visually.)
I think this is an important step I've messed X up several times in various linux installs and always found it easier just to reload whatever distro I'm trying than to surf forums trying to learn which tools I need to use to fix things. I really ope the Ubunutu team can keep going like this for years now I've had a list of reasons of why I won't use Linux and every Ubunutu release seems to knock or or two items off my list.