Did you realize that you were making a pro-homeopathy attack on someone who was trying to make a pro-homeopathic argument?
Remind me to keep quiet about any causes you are defending.
GP said, basically: The gubmint is holding homeopathy down! They won't let us use the stuff that would show homeopathy to work!
You said: OMFG YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT HOMEOPATHY IS!!!!
He didn't say 'Gubmint makes us overdilute useful parts', as you seem to conclude. He didn't use the phrase "watered down" to refer to homeopathic concentrations (which are nonsense, IMO), he said that HOMEOPATHY ITSELF was "watered down" in that the most useful ingredients were overregulated.
Congratulations. I've not seen anyone shoot their argument in the foot as hard as you have in quite some time. Perhaps you should check your homeopathic anti-anxiety treatment, it might just be water.
I sincerely appreciate that. The initial announcement (which turned it on) appeared to have two options "OMFG let's play with Buzz" and "Tell me about it later", neither of which translated cleanly to 'Just piss off, you'.
Maybe someone better informed than I could say whether or not if using Gmail corporate services would also expose you to randomly-applied 'great ideas' such as the screwup that is Buzz? I would hope not...
I have Google Services on my domain (Gmail, iGoogle, etc), and Buzz has not appeared to any of my accounts. It hasn't even been offered, as far as I can tell.
On my standard Gmail account, Buzz is making me irritable.
I know I'm not the only example that matters, but I buy almost all my games on Steam these days. When buying on Steam, I check the listing for third party DRM.
If your product has third-party DRM on Steam, I DO NOT BUY IT. Period. No exceptions.
You can check this as well. There are a few where I was misinformed or the terms changed after purchase (Damn you Far Cry 2!!!), but I'd like to point out Borderlands, which I paid full price for and enjoy thoroughly, and the LACK of either of the DLCs, since they use third-party DRM over Steam's. I've heard that I'm missing nothing with Moxxi, but Zombie Island was very very fun.
I see you haven't played Red Faction: Guerrilla. You have a sledgehammer, and you go around whacking any 'crystal deposits' you see for in-game currency, used to purchase upgrades and new weapons.
Actually, Nursie was whining about Norsefire's whining about the GPL being viral. So the chain of whine starts with Norsefire, and you're the grand-whiner.
It's different for everyone but generally the best benchmarks are the ones that relate to work you want done. For 'pro' users, that might be SpecViewPerf. For gamers, it's almost certainly a game. Very few people are looking to interact with glxgears on an ongoing basis, and it's not related to any real workloads I can picture.
Since you're not running glxgears as your primary workload, don't use glxgears as a benchmark.
Ok, I may be dating myself here, but way back in 2000 we were telling people in the Nvidia support channel that GLXGEARS IS NOT A BENCHMARK. Nvidia spent a LOT of time over the years putting absurd amounts of time into over-optimizing the performance of that small snippet of code, and a few others, simply because they noticed that certain clueless noobs were using it as a performance metric.
The ONLY purpose of glxgears as it was designed is to indicate if software or hardware acceleration of 3D was happening. It's now useless for that even, since CPUs have become fast enough to crank out absurd FPS numbers as well.
While I'm reasonably sure you meant the DVDs, you can't back those up without a proper press. Simple DVDRs will NOT cut the mustard without a modded console (the whole point of modding the console, in fact!).
If you meant the hard disk, the answer is equally "no". The X360 uses a custom firmware (copyrighted) on a mildly modified WD 2.5" hard drive. The contents are both obfuscated and lightly encrypted, so you can not meaningfully backup up the disk as a whole, or the contents, without MS sanction and assistance.
It is true that it's being replaced with synthetics, but I believe it's in wider use than the WP article implies. I've talked to several local eye surgeons who swear by it and endure large amounts of additional paperwork to get the Real Thing.
Cocaine is, in fact, the only local I know of that can be used in the eye. Go ask an eye surgeon how much cocaine they use in a month. It'll be a non-trivial amount, and absurdly pure, but unfortunately also metered to an extraordinary fineness, and covered with seals and signatures ten ways to Sunday.
There's actually a chemical plant in New Jersey that provides all of the US G'vmt's legal cocaine supply. They give the post-processed leaves to Coca-Cola for extraction of the infamous non-active ingredients afterwords. It's a fun research topic.
Well, I never got to finish Army of Two. There's a big huge gunfight in a courtyard at the end, and I couldn't wipe out the incoming bad guys fast enough. Once enough of them piled up in the courtyard, the frame rate began to plummet. After a minute of that, you're moving the controller, and the screen doesn't follow for 3-5 seconds or more. Unplayable.
On the other hand, I don't spend any time tweaking on my desktop. I start games, they run, they run very well. This 'spend hours for 3FPS' is a completely different thing.
If you're spending hours, you clearly don't understand what you're doing.
Conversely, if that new title gets choppy and stutters at certain points in the game, console owners are boned and just suck it down, while PC users can investigate, tweak settings, or even make a strategic hardware upgrade, and it's fixed.
Don't tell me it doesn't happen, I played Army of Two on X360. If you want more recent but less severe, Halo: ODST got rather ragged at several places.
Did you finish it? Did you (not) notice the absurd truncation and lack of ending? Multiple party PCs just DROP OFF THE FLIPPING PLANET, never to be mentioned again. The main PC suddenly makes a few leaps of location and status and is fighting the Big Bads. This was the result of Obsid. getting the 'release now or never' deadline from the publisher, after delays. There are tons of now-unused voice and animation clips left in the data files, from the very raggedly axed endings.
I would mind this less if they patched it up and restored it in patches, then released a completed GOTY edition, or somesuch, but instead they all scattered and ran as KOTOR2 flopped, besmirching the KOTOR brand near-fatally.
Ah yes, because being lucky once means you should continue playing the lottery. Let's go from a supported but not recommended situation to a completely unsupported one!
Give credit where it is due. During the Athlon64 days (socket 939?), Nvidia were in a class of their own.
They were only in a class of their own because no one else was attending that school. Via was always a joke, Nvidia just provided the punchline. AMD was pulling out of chipsets at that point, and Intel had no interest in chipsets for AMD CPUs. Who then now?
AMD bought ATI, between the two of them they manage to synthesize half a decent chipset, and et viola, Nvidia is irrelevant. Since no one on the Intel side ever had much love for NV, they managed to put THEMSELVES out in the cold.
nForce2 was the high point for Nvidia chipsets. Since then it has all been a slow decline.
What you're not seeing is that the PCIe card **IS** the user-replaceable GPU tech! WHY would you want/need to swap out the socketed GPU? All you're keeping by your method is the ram (which is probably slow and out of date by the time you swap GPUs) and the physical connectors, which cost roughly NOTHING. In exchange you've added a ton of connections to be loose or misconnected.
I put tons of my own books on my Kindle. I do so drag-and-drop, from an OS of my choosing, via USB mass storage. Kindle reads plain text, MOBI/AZW (mine have no DRM, or the Amazon DRM stripped, pretty easy to do), and the newer ones read PDF unconverted.
If Kindle isn't for you, that's fine, but dismissing it out of hand as 'DRM-addled crap' seems a bit knee-jerk.
I have a Kindle, I bought it second hand. I've bought exactly two paid books via Amazon, and have ZERO issues of any type in reading the hundreds I've added.
A Kindle is vendor-locked far less than an iPod. While an iPod will play your existing songs, you need iTunes to add them. Kindle doesn't require anything but a file manager.
I have a Kindle, and on occasion I even buy books from the Amazon store (Note: Amazon: Please make sure Kindle price tracks book price. Knowing that Kindle price is less than hardcover (10$ vs. 30$) means nothing at all once the paperback is out at 1/2 to 2/3 the Kindle price.
The books I do buy from Amazon, I strip the DRM and use the stripped copy thereafter. I also archive all my books to a NAS with redundancy, and I burn a DVDR of all my books once a year. It works very well, my digital books are probably more disaster-resistant than my paper ones.
Don't bother. The IMax version isn't in IMax, and it gets some serious aspect ratio skew from the distortion and upscaling they've done.
If the price were the same, that would be one thing (physically bigger screen), but the IMax tickets generally command a healthy premium, and the presentation of this movie really doesn't deserve it IMO.
- The guy who saw a Friday night/Sat. morning 12:45AM showing (it was SOLD OUT, too!).
What, like IE? Before Firefox it was always 90%+ of market share, precisely because it came 'free' with Windows. MS turned their desktop monopoly into an internet monopoly very easily and well, they just failed to maintain and extend it until Mozilla/Firefox had already grabbed a fairly large piece of the pie.
"Whenever a trojan hits Windows, people are talking about how poorly designed Windows security is and how the user usually always runs as "administrator"."
Yes, and Windows security has been garbage, too. It's gotten better, but it's got some ways to go. You'll often find that victims are sympathized with according to their security/liability, far beyond just IT comparisons.
A fairly secure system being rooted is a shame. A wide-open Windows XP or earlier box getting rooted is business as usual.
*THAT* is the difference. If you don't lock your doors, most folks won't want to hear about how you got burglarized.
"I find it anoying that under Linux most software really expects to be installed as root."
Untrue. Entirely untrue.
You install as root if you're installing software to the system, for everyone to use. Anything that only you personally need to install, you install to your home directory, and with a few exceptions, it'll install and run fine, but only for you.
This is the same as how OSX does it. Most apps ask to install system-wide, since that's what most folks want, but you can install things into your personal Apps folder and they only show up/work for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you realize that you were making a pro-homeopathy attack on someone who was trying to make a pro-homeopathic argument?
Remind me to keep quiet about any causes you are defending.
GP said, basically: The gubmint is holding homeopathy down! They won't let us use the stuff that would show homeopathy to work!
You said: OMFG YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT HOMEOPATHY IS!!!!
He didn't say 'Gubmint makes us overdilute useful parts', as you seem to conclude. He didn't use the phrase "watered down" to refer to homeopathic concentrations (which are nonsense, IMO), he said that HOMEOPATHY ITSELF was "watered down" in that the most useful ingredients were overregulated.
Congratulations. I've not seen anyone shoot their argument in the foot as hard as you have in quite some time. Perhaps you should check your homeopathic anti-anxiety treatment, it might just be water.
I sincerely appreciate that. The initial announcement (which turned it on) appeared to have two options "OMFG let's play with Buzz" and "Tell me about it later", neither of which translated cleanly to 'Just piss off, you'.
Thanks again for the direction.
Maybe someone better informed than I could say whether or not if using Gmail corporate services would also expose you to randomly-applied 'great ideas' such as the screwup that is Buzz?
I would hope not...
I have Google Services on my domain (Gmail, iGoogle, etc), and Buzz has not appeared to any of my accounts. It hasn't even been offered, as far as I can tell.
On my standard Gmail account, Buzz is making me irritable.
I know I'm not the only example that matters, but I buy almost all my games on Steam these days. When buying on Steam, I check the listing for third party DRM.
If your product has third-party DRM on Steam, I DO NOT BUY IT. Period. No exceptions.
You can check this as well. There are a few where I was misinformed or the terms changed after purchase (Damn you Far Cry 2!!!), but I'd like to point out Borderlands, which I paid full price for and enjoy thoroughly, and the LACK of either of the DLCs, since they use third-party DRM over Steam's. I've heard that I'm missing nothing with Moxxi, but Zombie Island was very very fun.
I see you haven't played Red Faction: Guerrilla. You have a sledgehammer, and you go around whacking any 'crystal deposits' you see for in-game currency, used to purchase upgrades and new weapons.
The future is now, but it sucks.
Actually, Nursie was whining about Norsefire's whining about the GPL being viral. So the chain of whine starts with Norsefire, and you're the grand-whiner.
Just FYI.
It's different for everyone but generally the best benchmarks are the ones that relate to work you want done. For 'pro' users, that might be SpecViewPerf. For gamers, it's almost certainly a game. Very few people are looking to interact with glxgears on an ongoing basis, and it's not related to any real workloads I can picture.
Since you're not running glxgears as your primary workload, don't use glxgears as a benchmark.
They do say that. Since you insist on using glxgears as a performance metric, they continue to invest manpower into inflating that score.
You're not disagreeing with me.
Ok, I may be dating myself here, but way back in 2000 we were telling people in the Nvidia support channel that GLXGEARS IS NOT A BENCHMARK. Nvidia spent a LOT of time over the years putting absurd amounts of time into over-optimizing the performance of that small snippet of code, and a few others, simply because they noticed that certain clueless noobs were using it as a performance metric.
The ONLY purpose of glxgears as it was designed is to indicate if software or hardware acceleration of 3D was happening. It's now useless for that even, since CPUs have become fast enough to crank out absurd FPS numbers as well.
The partition has an obfuscated copy of the drive's serial number. Data on drive doesn't match drive itself = you can be banned.
While I'm reasonably sure you meant the DVDs, you can't back those up without a proper press. Simple DVDRs will NOT cut the mustard without a modded console (the whole point of modding the console, in fact!).
If you meant the hard disk, the answer is equally "no". The X360 uses a custom firmware (copyrighted) on a mildly modified WD 2.5" hard drive. The contents are both obfuscated and lightly encrypted, so you can not meaningfully backup up the disk as a whole, or the contents, without MS sanction and assistance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine#Cocaine_as_a_local_anesthetic
It is true that it's being replaced with synthetics, but I believe it's in wider use than the WP article implies. I've talked to several local eye surgeons who swear by it and endure large amounts of additional paperwork to get the Real Thing.
Cocaine is, in fact, the only local I know of that can be used in the eye. Go ask an eye surgeon how much cocaine they use in a month. It'll be a non-trivial amount, and absurdly pure, but unfortunately also metered to an extraordinary fineness, and covered with seals and signatures ten ways to Sunday.
There's actually a chemical plant in New Jersey that provides all of the US G'vmt's legal cocaine supply. They give the post-processed leaves to Coca-Cola for extraction of the infamous non-active ingredients afterwords. It's a fun research topic.
Well, I never got to finish Army of Two. There's a big huge gunfight in a courtyard at the end, and I couldn't wipe out the incoming bad guys fast enough. Once enough of them piled up in the courtyard, the frame rate began to plummet. After a minute of that, you're moving the controller, and the screen doesn't follow for 3-5 seconds or more. Unplayable.
On the other hand, I don't spend any time tweaking on my desktop. I start games, they run, they run very well. This 'spend hours for 3FPS' is a completely different thing.
If you're spending hours, you clearly don't understand what you're doing.
Conversely, if that new title gets choppy and stutters at certain points in the game, console owners are boned and just suck it down, while PC users can investigate, tweak settings, or even make a strategic hardware upgrade, and it's fixed.
Don't tell me it doesn't happen, I played Army of Two on X360. If you want more recent but less severe, Halo: ODST got rather ragged at several places.
Did you finish it? Did you (not) notice the absurd truncation and lack of ending? Multiple party PCs just DROP OFF THE FLIPPING PLANET, never to be mentioned again. The main PC suddenly makes a few leaps of location and status and is fighting the Big Bads. This was the result of Obsid. getting the 'release now or never' deadline from the publisher, after delays. There are tons of now-unused voice and animation clips left in the data files, from the very raggedly axed endings.
I would mind this less if they patched it up and restored it in patches, then released a completed GOTY edition, or somesuch, but instead they all scattered and ran as KOTOR2 flopped, besmirching the KOTOR brand near-fatally.
Ah yes, because being lucky once means you should continue playing the lottery. Let's go from a supported but not recommended situation to a completely unsupported one!
Give credit where it is due. During the Athlon64 days (socket 939?), Nvidia were in a class of their own.
They were only in a class of their own because no one else was attending that school. Via was always a joke, Nvidia just provided the punchline. AMD was pulling out of chipsets at that point, and Intel had no interest in chipsets for AMD CPUs. Who then now?
AMD bought ATI, between the two of them they manage to synthesize half a decent chipset, and et viola, Nvidia is irrelevant. Since no one on the Intel side ever had much love for NV, they managed to put THEMSELVES out in the cold.
nForce2 was the high point for Nvidia chipsets. Since then it has all been a slow decline.
What you're not seeing is that the PCIe card **IS** the user-replaceable GPU tech! WHY would you want/need to swap out the socketed GPU? All you're keeping by your method is the ram (which is probably slow and out of date by the time you swap GPUs) and the physical connectors, which cost roughly NOTHING. In exchange you've added a ton of connections to be loose or misconnected.
Locked-down DRM-addled crap?
I put tons of my own books on my Kindle. I do so drag-and-drop, from an OS of my choosing, via USB mass storage. Kindle reads plain text, MOBI/AZW (mine have no DRM, or the Amazon DRM stripped, pretty easy to do), and the newer ones read PDF unconverted.
If Kindle isn't for you, that's fine, but dismissing it out of hand as 'DRM-addled crap' seems a bit knee-jerk.
I have a Kindle, I bought it second hand. I've bought exactly two paid books via Amazon, and have ZERO issues of any type in reading the hundreds I've added.
A Kindle is vendor-locked far less than an iPod. While an iPod will play your existing songs, you need iTunes to add them. Kindle doesn't require anything but a file manager.
I have a Kindle, and on occasion I even buy books from the Amazon store (Note: Amazon: Please make sure Kindle price tracks book price. Knowing that Kindle price is less than hardcover (10$ vs. 30$) means nothing at all once the paperback is out at 1/2 to 2/3 the Kindle price.
The books I do buy from Amazon, I strip the DRM and use the stripped copy thereafter. I also archive all my books to a NAS with redundancy, and I burn a DVDR of all my books once a year. It works very well, my digital books are probably more disaster-resistant than my paper ones.
Don't bother. The IMax version isn't in IMax, and it gets some serious aspect ratio skew from the distortion and upscaling they've done.
If the price were the same, that would be one thing (physically bigger screen), but the IMax tickets generally command a healthy premium, and the presentation of this movie really doesn't deserve it IMO.
- The guy who saw a Friday night/Sat. morning 12:45AM showing (it was SOLD OUT, too!).
What, like IE? Before Firefox it was always 90%+ of market share, precisely because it came 'free' with Windows. MS turned their desktop monopoly into an internet monopoly very easily and well, they just failed to maintain and extend it until Mozilla/Firefox had already grabbed a fairly large piece of the pie.
"Whenever a trojan hits Windows, people are talking about how poorly designed Windows security is and how the user usually always runs as "administrator"."
Yes, and Windows security has been garbage, too. It's gotten better, but it's got some ways to go. You'll often find that victims are sympathized with according to their security/liability, far beyond just IT comparisons.
A fairly secure system being rooted is a shame.
A wide-open Windows XP or earlier box getting rooted is business as usual.
*THAT* is the difference. If you don't lock your doors, most folks won't want to hear about how you got burglarized.
"I find it anoying that under Linux most software really expects to be installed as root."
Untrue. Entirely untrue.
You install as root if you're installing software to the system, for everyone to use. Anything that only you personally need to install, you install to your home directory, and with a few exceptions, it'll install and run fine, but only for you.
This is the same as how OSX does it. Most apps ask to install system-wide, since that's what most folks want, but you can install things into your personal Apps folder and they only show up/work for you.