DirectX10 is not "almost imperceptibly" better than 9, it makes vast improvements in the numbers of objects and particles that can be easily rendered onscreen and included in physics calculations. Have you ever, say, played Company of Heroes in DirectX9, and then played it after the DirectX10 patch? I would say that the differences were quite perceptible; each map had practically hundreds of additional objects after the patch, such as small stones on the ground that could be thrown by explosions or moved by vehicle treads. And this is a game which was originally made for DirectX9 and updated after-the-fact; most companies have not fully utilized 10 yet and that may contribute to your perception.
If you really want to see DirectX10 shine, plug in Crysis, and watch the waves for awhile. Consider that the game was written specifically for DirectX10's capabilities. Then compare that to a previous title by the same company, done in DirectX9. Look at how beautiful those particle waves are compared to that flat blue crap! I have never seen such perfect water outside of a pre-rendered CG film.
Anyway, DirectX10 is really the only compatibility issue in the Vista vs. XP battle. It is nothing but silly planned obsolescence; if they didn't want to be jackasses they would sell DirectX10 and Windows as separate products. If there was a quick-and-dirty DirectX10 crack for XP then maybe Vista is just a RAM hog with extra system tools and an inflated price tag.
You are committing THE SAME FALLACY everyone else is -- to be a geek, you don't have to be a "CS/EE type!" In my opinion, if you studied economics and business in graduate school and work as a company's Chief Financial Officer, spending your days figuring out how to play the bond markets or currency markets in order to generate more money for the company and for yourself, that is already an inherently complicated and technical job that really lends itself to glasses-wearing poindexters with heads for numbers. You might be of the opinion that an M.B.A. is for PHB-style "idiots," but finance is complicated.
Another part of geekitude, other than continued education, desk jobs and number crunching is personal interests and hobbies. If you met a guy who said he was, say, a mortgage broker, and it came out in conversation that he was an expert at Dance Dance Revolution and Civilization 4, had memorized every line of Azumanga Daioh, and was listening to MC Frontalot on his iPod, would you even dare to say he wasn't a geek?
I am basically just venting at all of you professional techies who deliberately exclude huge subsets of geek population from your little clique for no reason other than gross stereotypes, similar to the ones that you are so often the victim of.
I picked up a copy of 64-bit Vista Ultimate... the simple facts are just that Vista supports more recent hardware than XP does... XP is fine for business applications, but if you want to run DirectX 10 games (and I mean plug-and-play run them, no cracks or hacks) and have 4gb or more of RAM, you just have to go with Vista.
They've created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated...There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.
This is such stereotyped, self-righteous, pat-myself-on-the-back bullshit. M.B.A.-types can be geeky... business is the study of economics!
But do you really think the price is that elastic? There is a lot of path dependency associated with training a workforce to use a particular software... also, I am not familiar with the Autodesk software, and don't know how many viable alternatives there are. If there were no substitutes then elasticity would be irrelevant.
Sure, that's true of software issued before this ruling. But when software companies realize that they can't sell non-transferable software, they will have their economists do some calculations to determine how that will affect total sales, since people who would have had to buy the software will now buy it second-hand. From those calculations, they will raise the price by an amount necessary to replace the lost revenue. Software prices will fall in the short-term, and rise more in the long-term. If they were allowed to sell non-transferable software, they could offer it at a lower price than transferable software, giving consumers more options.
Of course, that is the ideal, in practice they would probably just sell NOTHING but non-transferable software and use the subsequent monopoly to inflate the price...
I suppose, in summary, it's just hard to say either way. I guess all you can really hope is that for every type of software, there are a few viable alternative, so that regardless of the licensing schemes it will not be profit maximizing to inflate the price beyond what is realistic, due to price competition.
Agreed! And furthermore, I have it on good authority that businesses claiming to be "taxi services" will charge consumers for transportation to a destination, when they could simply walk there for a fraction of the cost and still arrive!
I don't see people flocking to buy ANY video game EVER based on who the voice talent is.
Exactly -- it is financially justifiable to pay Robin Williams or Will Smith millions of dollars for a movie because having their name on the title alone will drive up revenue from the movie by millions of dollars. Nobody knows who the hell Michael Hollick is -- and in the case of a videogame, they don't care. They just want to kill cops and screw hookers in stunning, state-of-the-art 3D graphics.
The reason that big name actors get paid millions of dollars is because their names and faces are recognized by consumers. People like Adam Sandler or Tom Cruise are able to demand millions for their work because they are one-of-a-kind; Michael Hollick, on the other hand, is not a household name. His voice acting, while it may be good, could be done by any number of no-name actors. That fact alone is why Michael doesn't get the sort of paycheck he'd like to -- if he suddenly demanded royalties for his services, video game companies would simply hire a different voice actor who would agree to the original contract terms.
Does anyone know how long he had to work for $100,000? If it was a single year then he is making more money than most police officers or grade school teachers, and he should be quite content.
There are quality parameters but, ultimately, how should the government punish a forecaster if he said it would rain but actually it was a sunny day?
By standardizing the conditions that different predictions are made under. If the gov't were to regulate bond-rating, they would have to create and publish their own set of guidelines for giving different ratings based on analysis of the various company's financial statements.
Hopefully that's exactly what happens! I'm studying economics and I'd love a big new gov't dept. to work in.
My guess is, there wasn't that much of a budget for the first movie.
There was definitely some sort of budget. I watched this "making of Star Wars" video some time ago, and it had footage that showed how they made the original Death Star photon-torpedo-up-the-exhaust-port scene -- basically, the SFX guys painstakingly made miniature models of TIE-Fighters, X-Wings, and the surface of the Death Star itself (which was built on top of a long table). Then they wired up little firecrackers to the models, and ran them down the trench on thin wires, in front of a blue-screen and next to a camera that was on a track. The parts of the Death Star and the fighters that got blown up were all exploded with push-button remote fuses and the stars/lasers were edited in after shooting.
I'm not sure how much that cost to set up, but I bet it took a lot of model paint and a lot of painstaking man-hours. Ahhh, before CG!
I think it would have been much funnier if he was just generally portrayed as clumsy (like he already was), and then got killed instantly in a single accident, by doing something patently stupid, like walking onto a pod racing track, or walking up to a ship afterburner immediately before it took off. It would elicit a single, epic cheer from every fan.
There is a new form of punctuation that we are trying to get people to adopt for this situation. Basically, all you do is add a tilde ("~") to the end of any sentence that is sarcastic. Like this:
No baby, those pants don't make your ass look big at all.~
Hey, let our great-great-great-great-great-mutated-cyborg-grandchildren worry about it. We will fill up the earth with radioactive material far faster than we could fill up space -- at some point on that continuum, the increasing cost of real estate (made even more scarce by it's use for radioactive waste storage) will make putting it onto a rocket more economic.
Also, there is a major difference in your strategy, that being that you aren't accounting for the damages we will accrue over time as a result of spills and leaks.
Of course, I'm not accounting for the increasing cost of rocket fuel...
I would rather occasionally drop 1% of it on top of the ground than consistently bury 100% of it under the ground. Besides, if we knew that we were going to be putting radioactive waste in the rockets, we'd have cleanup crews on site in case of an accident, and a very large, open, uninhabited desert to use as a launch site. The engineers launching the rocket would drive a mile away (or more, IANA Rocket Scientist) before hitting the "big red button."
I think the health hazards outweigh the potential benefit of keeping it around.
I don't think that the Yucca Mountain problem is an essential difficulty of nuclear power like everyone assumes it is -- why do we bury radioactive waste in the ground, where it will surely cause harm, when we could just launch it into the void of space on an unmanned one-way rocket?
isn't it great to blow your parents' cash on beer and computers without a care in the world?
Actually, I purchased my current computer with a federally subsidized stafford loan. Do you know what that means? It means that I'm not blowing my parents' cash on beer and computers without a care in the world -- I'm blowing your cash. Your hard-earned tax dollars are paying the 6.8% fixed interest rate on this 2.4ghz AMD Phenom, 4GB DDR2 RAM, ATI Radeon 3870x2 PCI-e 2.0, 1680x1050 widescreen LCD monitor-equipped computer. How does that make you feel? Like a bitch? I hope so.
If the fiction is not based in science, then it should be classified as fantasy, not science fiction. We don't think there's a conspiracy -- we just think people are too stupid to categorize correctly.
Probably more, because I won't be living on $12,000/year! Computers are cheap, yo, especially when you assemble them yourself. Everyone over the age of 5 deserves one.
because the multiplayer mode requires more gaming PCs (one per player) than you own (one per household).
What does this look like to you, the ghetto? Me and my roommate have 3 computers between the 2 of us (two quad-cores and a dual-core), and we're starving college students!
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DirectX10 is not "almost imperceptibly" better than 9, it makes vast improvements in the numbers of objects and particles that can be easily rendered onscreen and included in physics calculations. Have you ever, say, played Company of Heroes in DirectX9, and then played it after the DirectX10 patch? I would say that the differences were quite perceptible; each map had practically hundreds of additional objects after the patch, such as small stones on the ground that could be thrown by explosions or moved by vehicle treads. And this is a game which was originally made for DirectX9 and updated after-the-fact; most companies have not fully utilized 10 yet and that may contribute to your perception.
If you really want to see DirectX10 shine, plug in Crysis, and watch the waves for awhile. Consider that the game was written specifically for DirectX10's capabilities. Then compare that to a previous title by the same company, done in DirectX9. Look at how beautiful those particle waves are compared to that flat blue crap! I have never seen such perfect water outside of a pre-rendered CG film.
In fact, it almost seems photorealistic, huh?
Anyway, DirectX10 is really the only compatibility issue in the Vista vs. XP battle. It is nothing but silly planned obsolescence; if they didn't want to be jackasses they would sell DirectX10 and Windows as separate products. If there was a quick-and-dirty DirectX10 crack for XP then maybe Vista is just a RAM hog with extra system tools and an inflated price tag.
You are committing THE SAME FALLACY everyone else is -- to be a geek, you don't have to be a "CS/EE type!" In my opinion, if you studied economics and business in graduate school and work as a company's Chief Financial Officer, spending your days figuring out how to play the bond markets or currency markets in order to generate more money for the company and for yourself, that is already an inherently complicated and technical job that really lends itself to glasses-wearing poindexters with heads for numbers. You might be of the opinion that an M.B.A. is for PHB-style "idiots," but finance is complicated.
Another part of geekitude, other than continued education, desk jobs and number crunching is personal interests and hobbies. If you met a guy who said he was, say, a mortgage broker, and it came out in conversation that he was an expert at Dance Dance Revolution and Civilization 4, had memorized every line of Azumanga Daioh, and was listening to MC Frontalot on his iPod, would you even dare to say he wasn't a geek?
I am basically just venting at all of you professional techies who deliberately exclude huge subsets of geek population from your little clique for no reason other than gross stereotypes, similar to the ones that you are so often the victim of.
I picked up a copy of 64-bit Vista Ultimate ... the simple facts are just that Vista supports more recent hardware than XP does ... XP is fine for business applications, but if you want to run DirectX 10 games (and I mean plug-and-play run them, no cracks or hacks) and have 4gb or more of RAM, you just have to go with Vista.
I am not disappointed with the purchase at all.
They've created a new definition of what it means to be cool, a definition that leaves out the talents of the jocks, the M.B.A.-types and the less educated...There are now millions of educated-class types guided by geek manners and status rules.
This is such stereotyped, self-righteous, pat-myself-on-the-back bullshit. M.B.A.-types can be geeky ... business is the study of economics!
In before "the price isn't elastic, demand is elastic." I don't need econ 101 from you.
But do you really think the price is that elastic? There is a lot of path dependency associated with training a workforce to use a particular software ... also, I am not familiar with the Autodesk software, and don't know how many viable alternatives there are. If there were no substitutes then elasticity would be irrelevant.
Sure, that's true of software issued before this ruling. But when software companies realize that they can't sell non-transferable software, they will have their economists do some calculations to determine how that will affect total sales, since people who would have had to buy the software will now buy it second-hand. From those calculations, they will raise the price by an amount necessary to replace the lost revenue. Software prices will fall in the short-term, and rise more in the long-term. If they were allowed to sell non-transferable software, they could offer it at a lower price than transferable software, giving consumers more options.
Of course, that is the ideal, in practice they would probably just sell NOTHING but non-transferable software and use the subsequent monopoly to inflate the price ...
I suppose, in summary, it's just hard to say either way. I guess all you can really hope is that for every type of software, there are a few viable alternative, so that regardless of the licensing schemes it will not be profit maximizing to inflate the price beyond what is realistic, due to price competition.
Agreed! And furthermore, I have it on good authority that businesses claiming to be "taxi services" will charge consumers for transportation to a destination, when they could simply walk there for a fraction of the cost and still arrive!
I don't see people flocking to buy ANY video game EVER based on who the voice talent is.
Exactly -- it is financially justifiable to pay Robin Williams or Will Smith millions of dollars for a movie because having their name on the title alone will drive up revenue from the movie by millions of dollars. Nobody knows who the hell Michael Hollick is -- and in the case of a videogame, they don't care. They just want to kill cops and screw hookers in stunning, state-of-the-art 3D graphics.
The reason that big name actors get paid millions of dollars is because their names and faces are recognized by consumers. People like Adam Sandler or Tom Cruise are able to demand millions for their work because they are one-of-a-kind; Michael Hollick, on the other hand, is not a household name. His voice acting, while it may be good, could be done by any number of no-name actors. That fact alone is why Michael doesn't get the sort of paycheck he'd like to -- if he suddenly demanded royalties for his services, video game companies would simply hire a different voice actor who would agree to the original contract terms.
Does anyone know how long he had to work for $100,000? If it was a single year then he is making more money than most police officers or grade school teachers, and he should be quite content.
There are quality parameters but, ultimately, how should the government punish a forecaster if he said it would rain but actually it was a sunny day?
By standardizing the conditions that different predictions are made under. If the gov't were to regulate bond-rating, they would have to create and publish their own set of guidelines for giving different ratings based on analysis of the various company's financial statements.
Hopefully that's exactly what happens! I'm studying economics and I'd love a big new gov't dept. to work in.
My guess is, there wasn't that much of a budget for the first movie.
There was definitely some sort of budget. I watched this "making of Star Wars" video some time ago, and it had footage that showed how they made the original Death Star photon-torpedo-up-the-exhaust-port scene -- basically, the SFX guys painstakingly made miniature models of TIE-Fighters, X-Wings, and the surface of the Death Star itself (which was built on top of a long table). Then they wired up little firecrackers to the models, and ran them down the trench on thin wires, in front of a blue-screen and next to a camera that was on a track. The parts of the Death Star and the fighters that got blown up were all exploded with push-button remote fuses and the stars/lasers were edited in after shooting.
I'm not sure how much that cost to set up, but I bet it took a lot of model paint and a lot of painstaking man-hours. Ahhh, before CG!
I think it would have been much funnier if he was just generally portrayed as clumsy (like he already was), and then got killed instantly in a single accident, by doing something patently stupid, like walking onto a pod racing track, or walking up to a ship afterburner immediately before it took off. It would elicit a single, epic cheer from every fan.
There is a new form of punctuation that we are trying to get people to adopt for this situation. Basically, all you do is add a tilde ("~") to the end of any sentence that is sarcastic. Like this:
No baby, those pants don't make your ass look big at all.~
Hey, let our great-great-great-great-great-mutated-cyborg-grandchildren worry about it. We will fill up the earth with radioactive material far faster than we could fill up space -- at some point on that continuum, the increasing cost of real estate (made even more scarce by it's use for radioactive waste storage) will make putting it onto a rocket more economic.
Also, there is a major difference in your strategy, that being that you aren't accounting for the damages we will accrue over time as a result of spills and leaks.
Of course, I'm not accounting for the increasing cost of rocket fuel ...
I would rather occasionally drop 1% of it on top of the ground than consistently bury 100% of it under the ground. Besides, if we knew that we were going to be putting radioactive waste in the rockets, we'd have cleanup crews on site in case of an accident, and a very large, open, uninhabited desert to use as a launch site. The engineers launching the rocket would drive a mile away (or more, IANA Rocket Scientist) before hitting the "big red button."
I think the health hazards outweigh the potential benefit of keeping it around.
I don't think that the Yucca Mountain problem is an essential difficulty of nuclear power like everyone assumes it is -- why do we bury radioactive waste in the ground, where it will surely cause harm, when we could just launch it into the void of space on an unmanned one-way rocket?
Well, damn.
isn't it great to blow your parents' cash on beer and computers without a care in the world?
Actually, I purchased my current computer with a federally subsidized stafford loan. Do you know what that means? It means that I'm not blowing my parents' cash on beer and computers without a care in the world -- I'm blowing your cash. Your hard-earned tax dollars are paying the 6.8% fixed interest rate on this 2.4ghz AMD Phenom, 4GB DDR2 RAM, ATI Radeon 3870x2 PCI-e 2.0, 1680x1050 widescreen LCD monitor-equipped computer. How does that make you feel? Like a bitch? I hope so.
If the fiction is not based in science, then it should be classified as fantasy, not science fiction. We don't think there's a conspiracy -- we just think people are too stupid to categorize correctly.
Probably more, because I won't be living on $12,000/year! Computers are cheap, yo, especially when you assemble them yourself. Everyone over the age of 5 deserves one.
Also, who's to say I'm not a member of VHEMT?
because the multiplayer mode requires more gaming PCs (one per player) than you own (one per household).
What does this look like to you, the ghetto? Me and my roommate have 3 computers between the 2 of us (two quad-cores and a dual-core), and we're starving college students!
Okay, how much did they pay you?
Actually, yes, I do believe that.
Wake up, nobody gives a fuck about broadcast TV recording.