1) DirectX does a hell of a lot more than OpenGL does. It does input, sound, some networking I believe. 2) DirectX is easier to program, because it's designed to be games-centric, where as OpenGL is designed to be more general-purpose. I've not programmed either myself, so I can't personally comment, but I've heard it from multiple people. 3) Most video cards support DirectX better than they support OpenGL. Again, cards are used for games, and DirectX is used for games, but OpenGL is general-purpose. Nobody makes general-purpose video cards, except possibly Matrox.
From the customer's standpoint, generally DirectX games handle things like Alt-Tab, or running in windowed mode better than OpenGL games. It also doesn't help that all the games that specifically advertise themselves as being OpenGL kind of suck, or have non-impressive graphics.
Halo is fun, don't get me wrong, but it controls better (and looks better) on the PC. Some genres, like FPS, RTS, MMORPG, and 4X strategy, just work better on the PC.
Yes, but the PC doesn't work better for the games:
Cost: Sure, Steel Battalion for Xbox has more precise controls than MechAssault, but it also cost $200 when it came out. How many gamers played Steel Battalion compared to MechAssualt? Console gaming is much cheaper. I just spent $800 on a Dell PC that sucks at games (not Dell's fault; I'm not using it for games.) For $400 you can be set with an Xbox.
Bugginess: PC games are buggy as hell. Try playing Battlefield: 2142 and tell me with a straight face that the experience of PC FPS games is better than the experience of Xbox FPS games. Sure, Halo 2 had some exploitable bugs before it was patched, but BF:2142 has been patched multiple times and still has numerous exploits in it. Add to that the fact that PunkBuster kicks you every few minutes because apparently it can't update itself in Vista, the experience system not giving you your upgrades sometimes, the buddy list usually not working, the game randomly popping you out of the menu when you're trying to change a control setting, the inability to join a squad when you're dead (sometimes! sometimes it works!), doesn't work on widescreen monitors, random crashes, both server and client, etc etc. Steaming pile of bugs. Halo 2, and other Xbox FPS games have a small fraction of the experience-ruining bugs of PC games.
Annoyances: In addition to bugs, there's the PC game annoyances. Updating video drivers, putting in serial keys (just having the disk is good enough for copy protection on consoles; why do PC games need a serial key also?) On Xbox you just put in the disk and play.
IMO, the PC gaming industry is either going to have to change to emulate console gaming, or it's going to die-out. Some companies are making the attempt, notably Valve's Steam and Microsoft's "Games For Windows" initiative, but whether they can sign up the big publishers, we'll just have to wait and see.
That may or may not be a fair comparison..Mac includes a lot of services other than just disk space, including a good amount of free software, easy-to-make photo albums and blogs, and some other things. Although, frankly, I think Google already offers almost all of what.Mac does.
Currently, I get a little over 250 GB from Dreamhost and I'm paying $120 a year for it. I've been a Dreamhost customer for a couple years, so I'm not sure how much a new customer gets (Dreamhost increases the storage each week), but I'm sure it's less expensive than Google's rates. I have 199 GB uploaded at the moment, which is a near-100% backup of my DVD collection (in 1-gig-per-movie MP4 format.) Dreamhost supports mounting storage as WebDAV, FTP, or rsync to transfer files. (And of course there's web hosting included.)
The problem with large amounts of storage isn't the amount of space, but the time taken to upload. It took a week to upload my movie files to Dreamhost on a medium-speed DSL connection, and it would take several solid days of downloading to get it back.
Fill a bathtub with hot water. As the tub fills, throw in a few grains of rice. Now, it's the Meterologist's job to predict where the rice will be in an hour, tomorrow and 4 days from now. It's the Climatologists job to predict the temperature of the water in a year, and 5 years, and 10 years.
I just love it when people want the Climatologist to determine the position of the rice before it's put in the tub. And denounce global warming because he can't.
Wow, you just set the record for worst analogy ever. WTF is this supposed to mean? What does the rice represent? What does the tub represent? Why would I denounce global warming because some guy can't figure out where the rice is!? Did he look in the cupboard?
But it will be saddening to see the bought and paid for reviews pour in for the game as gamers where most of us still like to believe that the games market is a place where you live or die on actual game worth and not how many millions a company has to throw at reviews and the press.
And it's utterly impossible that opinions may vary, and that some people might actually like the Halo series of games without being bribed? I've played a hell of a lot of FPS games, going back to Marathon, Doom, System Shock 2, Unreal Tourney, etc. The fact of the matter is that I think Halo 2 is a really, really fun game, and that's all I care about. Then again, I'm not a snob with the whole "oh games without a mouse all suck!" crap that you see around here so often.
I'd like to see some additional corroboration on this.
Uh, NASA admitted to the error and corrected the data in question, producing the exact same data set as the investigator. How much more corroboration do you need? It's in the article, if you took the time to read it.
I read some of the logic chopping in the blog post's comments, but I didn't see any climatologists speaking there.
Wait... you skipped the article, and read the *comments*? Sheesh.
The original investigation and corrected data should have been linked, not that blog entry (which just reports it.)
In any case, the point is that NASAs data was wrong, and they have admitted to that and corrected it. (In some places; if you read the comments of the linked article, you can see that NASA still has some pages with the old data in it. Probably not maliciously, though, just an oversight.)
We know ATI does software as well as Microsoft does hardware (how many Xbox 360s are dead?);
I assume your question is rhetorical. So an abnormal amount of Xbox 360s have problems. Microsoft, to resolve this issue, extended the warranty for every Xbox 360 to three years for free. That's a lot of commitment to their customers, above and beyond what the vast majority of the industry does when hardware defects arise. (You mention Apple; they're a good exception also. Their replacement program for faulty iBooks was great. And a hell of a lot more, by percentage, of those G3 iBooks are dead than Xbox 360s-- I'd be surprised to see any of them still running now.)
In any case, I have had no problems with my Microsoft keyboards and mouses. I have a Microsoft wireless internet router that's the best one I've ever owned: My Netgear one's antenna busted, the Seimens one couldn't keep a connection open longer than an hour without cutting it off, and the LinkSys one just randomly died one day. This Microsoft one is the second one I bought, years and years ago, and it keeps on chugging on like a champ with no problems. (Pity they don't make them anymore!)
We could build a colony ship to go to Alpha Centauri right now, the instant, if we figured out a way to preserve humans frozen for long periods of time. Maybe the aliens are capable of hibernation, and human levels of medical knowledge is all that's needed to prolong their hibernation long enough to reach another star. Maybe they devote more of their economy to building spacecraft, again, at human technology levels we could do it. It wouldn't be easy, it certainly wouldn't be safe, and we'd have no way of knowing whether the ship reached the target or not... but we could send one, if we figured out the hibernation problem. There's no reason to believe aliens couldn't also.
Aliens aren't necessarily going to have extremely advanced technology. It's only your lack of imagination that's limiting your viewpoint.
Questions like yours are nearly always the result of bad editing, or a moronic story submitter.
In this case, Microsoft didn't say anything about the war on terror. One Microsoft employee, however, did. That's very, very different from what the headline says.
You're talking about Windows XP SP2, which was a huge leap forward for security. Before the service packs, XP was pretty bad, security-wise. It had a firewall, but it was disabled by default (IIRC). It didn't have any sort of monitoring of whether you were running a firewall/antivirus/antispyware program, that was added later.
So I guess the point is that Windows XP failed at security, and Service Pack 2 was Microsoft repairing some of the problems with the stock OS.
Why not just buy a third-party adapter? As long as it spits out ethernet, you're fine using it. (Although you might need to plug it into a computer to configure it initially.) I know from experience that Belkin ones work just fine on both original Xbox and Xbox 360.
Personally, I put my wireless router in my entertainment center and wire-in the Xbox and my media server, then use my computers wirelessly. But then I'm strange.
And my point is that they could be equally useless because of some similar botched project that was botched using Apache instead of botched using IIS. I'm not buying his premise that botched projects ONLY happen with IIS and never any other web server, I think that's utter bunk. I've seen terrible projects made with all kinds of technology.
The rest of the point is a long rant about one specific project that says nothing about IIS or Apache in general.
If, as you say, "I don't even think I understand what the hell you're talking about," then what good can come of putting your fingers on the keyboard?
I got the rest, it was just that one paragraph that eluded me.
If you'd paused for a moment of thought before posting this knee-jerk Microsoft apologist tripe, you would see I'm not criticizing IIS directly -- only how it's used, and how that affects measurements of market share (which is the topic of TFA, if you had only read it).
Ok, but you also in the same posting admit that Apache couldn't stand up to the same abuses as IIS, and you offered no reason to believe Apache isn't prone to the same crappy product development as affected your IIS install. All you did is tell an anecdote about bad developers.
Quite separately, I'm of the personal opinion that IIS is crap.
Do you have any reasons for your belief, other than blind zealotry and anecdotes about developers?
2) The.net module in IIS is entirely optional, so even if you ignore point one, this still says nothing about the performance of IIS but only the performance of IIS. (Nobody's going to declare Apache a crappy webserver because Ruby On Rails is slow; you have to give the same benefit to IIS.)
This is supposed to read "this still says nothing about the performance of IIS but only the performance of.net." Sorry, brainfart typo.
An IIS server is not equal to an Apache server in any way, shape or form. It would be like saying there are more IIS bicycles on the road than Apache locomotives, so therefore IIS is more important to the transport of people or goods.
Let's take a look at your evidence:
First they modeled the.NET application on the old client-server app, but the network chatter was 20x the capacity of the network because the MS-trained app architects could not wrap their heads around the idea of a constrained WAN. What used to be a small record lookup and update of about 300k over the wire turned into more than 6MB of inter-domain line noise.
And this says what, exactly, about IIS?
1) Crappy programmers exist in every language. I've seen crappy C++ programs, does that mean C++ is a bad language? 2) The.net module in IIS is entirely optional, so even if you ignore point one, this still says nothing about the performance of IIS but only the performance of IIS. (Nobody's going to declare Apache a crappy webserver because Ruby On Rails is slow; you have to give the same benefit to IIS.)
Then they decided that WAN applications must mean that we wanted a web application (how silly of us), and they re-wrote it as a web app.
And this has what to do with IIS?
Not understanding that a significant amount of those users are off-line and synchronize only once a day, the connection/session limits were quickly saturated even before many users complained that they simply could not connect.
Uh, duh? Why would users complain about not being able to connect while they were able to connect? Oh: and it has nothing to do with IIS.
The third solution proposed by Microsoft consultants and one of the largest Indian development houses? Install IIS on every remote user's laptop, and have SQL Server synchronize in the background so that the newly web-ified application can operate offline. Let me clarify that: For these thousands of remote roaming workers in the field, many with a public IP, there is one copy if IIS PER USER for a major MS application. And while every time this comes up the Indian developers mutter under their breath things so foul I didn't think you could say them in Hindi, the MS-employed wonks...BLINK... BLINK... don't seem to recognize there's even an issue.
I don't even think I understand what the hell you're talking about. However, I'm pretty sure it says nothing at all about the quality of IIS....BLINK... BLINK... indeed.
So the discrepancy is not that IIS is "gaining" on Apache, but that IIS is being dumped out in the street in every cereal box and bubblegum wrapper as part of the.NET mess for purposes it's clearly incapable of serving and that even Apache would be no good for.
Saved me some work here: You've admitted you're not even comparing IIS with Apache at this point. What does this have to say about IIS? Well, you said it yourself: Nothing. Even Apache would have failed in the fact of such incompetent developers.
Just my subjective opinion, but I don't think anyone would ever do this with Apache.
And that says what about the quality of IIS? Nothing.
The result is that a single project -- an abject failure of a bad design from every meaningful metric, and the willful ignorance of user requirements in favor of vendor fantasies -- shows up on a webserver market share survey as a several-thousand-instance win for MS.
No it doesn't. This study only counts active, stable web servers on the actual Internet, not copies installed on a laptop for use on a WAN.
Isn't the "mod" in the name "mod_rewrite" an indicator that it isn't, in fact, integrated with Apache? I seem to recall it being an optional install, last time I was playing with it. (Which, given, was ages ago.)
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I think the answer is that:
1) DirectX does a hell of a lot more than OpenGL does. It does input, sound, some networking I believe.
2) DirectX is easier to program, because it's designed to be games-centric, where as OpenGL is designed to be more general-purpose. I've not programmed either myself, so I can't personally comment, but I've heard it from multiple people.
3) Most video cards support DirectX better than they support OpenGL. Again, cards are used for games, and DirectX is used for games, but OpenGL is general-purpose. Nobody makes general-purpose video cards, except possibly Matrox.
From the customer's standpoint, generally DirectX games handle things like Alt-Tab, or running in windowed mode better than OpenGL games. It also doesn't help that all the games that specifically advertise themselves as being OpenGL kind of suck, or have non-impressive graphics.
Wait, how has Microsoft's music service (Urge, IIRC) harmed the consumer? Did I miss a story?
Halo is fun, don't get me wrong, but it controls better (and looks better) on the PC. Some genres, like FPS, RTS, MMORPG, and 4X strategy, just work better on the PC.
Yes, but the PC doesn't work better for the games:
Cost: Sure, Steel Battalion for Xbox has more precise controls than MechAssault, but it also cost $200 when it came out. How many gamers played Steel Battalion compared to MechAssualt? Console gaming is much cheaper. I just spent $800 on a Dell PC that sucks at games (not Dell's fault; I'm not using it for games.) For $400 you can be set with an Xbox.
Bugginess: PC games are buggy as hell. Try playing Battlefield: 2142 and tell me with a straight face that the experience of PC FPS games is better than the experience of Xbox FPS games. Sure, Halo 2 had some exploitable bugs before it was patched, but BF:2142 has been patched multiple times and still has numerous exploits in it. Add to that the fact that PunkBuster kicks you every few minutes because apparently it can't update itself in Vista, the experience system not giving you your upgrades sometimes, the buddy list usually not working, the game randomly popping you out of the menu when you're trying to change a control setting, the inability to join a squad when you're dead (sometimes! sometimes it works!), doesn't work on widescreen monitors, random crashes, both server and client, etc etc. Steaming pile of bugs. Halo 2, and other Xbox FPS games have a small fraction of the experience-ruining bugs of PC games.
Annoyances: In addition to bugs, there's the PC game annoyances. Updating video drivers, putting in serial keys (just having the disk is good enough for copy protection on consoles; why do PC games need a serial key also?) On Xbox you just put in the disk and play.
IMO, the PC gaming industry is either going to have to change to emulate console gaming, or it's going to die-out. Some companies are making the attempt, notably Valve's Steam and Microsoft's "Games For Windows" initiative, but whether they can sign up the big publishers, we'll just have to wait and see.
+4, Insightful?
I guess what we really need is some kind of required anti-paranoia class.
That may or may not be a fair comparison. .Mac includes a lot of services other than just disk space, including a good amount of free software, easy-to-make photo albums and blogs, and some other things. Although, frankly, I think Google already offers almost all of what .Mac does.
Currently, I get a little over 250 GB from Dreamhost and I'm paying $120 a year for it. I've been a Dreamhost customer for a couple years, so I'm not sure how much a new customer gets (Dreamhost increases the storage each week), but I'm sure it's less expensive than Google's rates. I have 199 GB uploaded at the moment, which is a near-100% backup of my DVD collection (in 1-gig-per-movie MP4 format.) Dreamhost supports mounting storage as WebDAV, FTP, or rsync to transfer files. (And of course there's web hosting included.)
The problem with large amounts of storage isn't the amount of space, but the time taken to upload. It took a week to upload my movie files to Dreamhost on a medium-speed DSL connection, and it would take several solid days of downloading to get it back.
Here, let me give you a bad analogy;
Fill a bathtub with hot water. As the tub fills, throw in a few grains of rice. Now, it's the Meterologist's job to predict where the rice will be in an hour, tomorrow and 4 days from now. It's the Climatologists job to predict the temperature of the water in a year, and 5 years, and 10 years.
I just love it when people want the Climatologist to determine the position of the rice before it's put in the tub. And denounce global warming because he can't.
Wow, you just set the record for worst analogy ever. WTF is this supposed to mean? What does the rice represent? What does the tub represent? Why would I denounce global warming because some guy can't figure out where the rice is!? Did he look in the cupboard?
I've never been more confused.
But it will be saddening to see the bought and paid for reviews pour in for the game as gamers where most of us still like to believe that the games market is a place where you live or die on actual game worth and not how many millions a company has to throw at reviews and the press.
And it's utterly impossible that opinions may vary, and that some people might actually like the Halo series of games without being bribed? I've played a hell of a lot of FPS games, going back to Marathon, Doom, System Shock 2, Unreal Tourney, etc. The fact of the matter is that I think Halo 2 is a really, really fun game, and that's all I care about. Then again, I'm not a snob with the whole "oh games without a mouse all suck!" crap that you see around here so often.
You can also buy 2 and a third normal Halo 3 games for that price.
The premium version isn't the only one, you know. Sheesh.
Who are you replying to, exactly?
I don't think anybody's claimed that "we can draw the conclusion that global warming isn't happening".
I'd like to see some additional corroboration on this.
Uh, NASA admitted to the error and corrected the data in question, producing the exact same data set as the investigator. How much more corroboration do you need? It's in the article, if you took the time to read it.
I read some of the logic chopping in the blog post's comments, but I didn't see any climatologists speaking there.
Wait... you skipped the article, and read the *comments*? Sheesh.
The original investigation and corrected data should have been linked, not that blog entry (which just reports it.)
In any case, the point is that NASAs data was wrong, and they have admitted to that and corrected it. (In some places; if you read the comments of the linked article, you can see that NASA still has some pages with the old data in it. Probably not maliciously, though, just an oversight.)
We know ATI does software as well as Microsoft does hardware (how many Xbox 360s are dead?);
I assume your question is rhetorical. So an abnormal amount of Xbox 360s have problems. Microsoft, to resolve this issue, extended the warranty for every Xbox 360 to three years for free. That's a lot of commitment to their customers, above and beyond what the vast majority of the industry does when hardware defects arise. (You mention Apple; they're a good exception also. Their replacement program for faulty iBooks was great. And a hell of a lot more, by percentage, of those G3 iBooks are dead than Xbox 360s-- I'd be surprised to see any of them still running now.)
In any case, I have had no problems with my Microsoft keyboards and mouses. I have a Microsoft wireless internet router that's the best one I've ever owned: My Netgear one's antenna busted, the Seimens one couldn't keep a connection open longer than an hour without cutting it off, and the LinkSys one just randomly died one day. This Microsoft one is the second one I bought, years and years ago, and it keeps on chugging on like a champ with no problems. (Pity they don't make them anymore!)
Bullshit.
We could build a colony ship to go to Alpha Centauri right now, the instant, if we figured out a way to preserve humans frozen for long periods of time. Maybe the aliens are capable of hibernation, and human levels of medical knowledge is all that's needed to prolong their hibernation long enough to reach another star. Maybe they devote more of their economy to building spacecraft, again, at human technology levels we could do it. It wouldn't be easy, it certainly wouldn't be safe, and we'd have no way of knowing whether the ship reached the target or not... but we could send one, if we figured out the hibernation problem. There's no reason to believe aliens couldn't also.
Aliens aren't necessarily going to have extremely advanced technology. It's only your lack of imagination that's limiting your viewpoint.
Questions like yours are nearly always the result of bad editing, or a moronic story submitter.
In this case, Microsoft didn't say anything about the war on terror. One Microsoft employee, however, did. That's very, very different from what the headline says.
You're talking about Windows XP SP2, which was a huge leap forward for security. Before the service packs, XP was pretty bad, security-wise. It had a firewall, but it was disabled by default (IIRC). It didn't have any sort of monitoring of whether you were running a firewall/antivirus/antispyware program, that was added later.
So I guess the point is that Windows XP failed at security, and Service Pack 2 was Microsoft repairing some of the problems with the stock OS.
We're announcing the fastest microprocessor we've ever shipped this week
"We shipped a faster one last week!"
(Apologies to MST3K and the classic flick Diabolik.)
Why not just buy a third-party adapter? As long as it spits out ethernet, you're fine using it. (Although you might need to plug it into a computer to configure it initially.) I know from experience that Belkin ones work just fine on both original Xbox and Xbox 360.
Personally, I put my wireless router in my entertainment center and wire-in the Xbox and my media server, then use my computers wirelessly. But then I'm strange.
And my point is that they could be equally useless because of some similar botched project that was botched using Apache instead of botched using IIS. I'm not buying his premise that botched projects ONLY happen with IIS and never any other web server, I think that's utter bunk. I've seen terrible projects made with all kinds of technology.
The rest of the point is a long rant about one specific project that says nothing about IIS or Apache in general.
Wow, you must be fun at parties.
If, as you say, "I don't even think I understand what the hell you're talking about," then what good can come of putting your fingers on the keyboard?
I got the rest, it was just that one paragraph that eluded me.
If you'd paused for a moment of thought before posting this knee-jerk Microsoft apologist tripe, you would see I'm not criticizing IIS directly -- only how it's used, and how that affects measurements of market share (which is the topic of TFA, if you had only read it).
Ok, but you also in the same posting admit that Apache couldn't stand up to the same abuses as IIS, and you offered no reason to believe Apache isn't prone to the same crappy product development as affected your IIS install. All you did is tell an anecdote about bad developers.
Quite separately, I'm of the personal opinion that IIS is crap.
Do you have any reasons for your belief, other than blind zealotry and anecdotes about developers?
2) The .net module in IIS is entirely optional, so even if you ignore point one, this still says nothing about the performance of IIS but only the performance of IIS. (Nobody's going to declare Apache a crappy webserver because Ruby On Rails is slow; you have to give the same benefit to IIS.)
.net." Sorry, brainfart typo.
This is supposed to read "this still says nothing about the performance of IIS but only the performance of
An IIS server is not equal to an Apache server in any way, shape or form. It would be like saying there are more IIS bicycles on the road than Apache locomotives, so therefore IIS is more important to the transport of people or goods.
.NET application on the old client-server app, but the network chatter was 20x the capacity of the network because the MS-trained app architects could not wrap their heads around the idea of a constrained WAN. What used to be a small record lookup and update of about 300k over the wire turned into more than 6MB of inter-domain line noise.
.net module in IIS is entirely optional, so even if you ignore point one, this still says nothing about the performance of IIS but only the performance of IIS. (Nobody's going to declare Apache a crappy webserver because Ruby On Rails is slow; you have to give the same benefit to IIS.)
...BLINK... BLINK... don't seem to recognize there's even an issue.
...BLINK... BLINK... indeed.
.NET mess for purposes it's clearly incapable of serving and that even Apache would be no good for .
Let's take a look at your evidence:
First they modeled the
And this says what, exactly, about IIS?
1) Crappy programmers exist in every language. I've seen crappy C++ programs, does that mean C++ is a bad language?
2) The
Then they decided that WAN applications must mean that we wanted a web application (how silly of us), and they re-wrote it as a web app.
And this has what to do with IIS?
Not understanding that a significant amount of those users are off-line and synchronize only once a day, the connection/session limits were quickly saturated even before many users complained that they simply could not connect.
Uh, duh? Why would users complain about not being able to connect while they were able to connect? Oh: and it has nothing to do with IIS.
The third solution proposed by Microsoft consultants and one of the largest Indian development houses? Install IIS on every remote user's laptop, and have SQL Server synchronize in the background so that the newly web-ified application can operate offline. Let me clarify that: For these thousands of remote roaming workers in the field, many with a public IP, there is one copy if IIS PER USER for a major MS application. And while every time this comes up the Indian developers mutter under their breath things so foul I didn't think you could say them in Hindi, the MS-employed wonks
I don't even think I understand what the hell you're talking about. However, I'm pretty sure it says nothing at all about the quality of IIS.
So the discrepancy is not that IIS is "gaining" on Apache, but that IIS is being dumped out in the street in every cereal box and bubblegum wrapper as part of the
Saved me some work here: You've admitted you're not even comparing IIS with Apache at this point. What does this have to say about IIS? Well, you said it yourself: Nothing. Even Apache would have failed in the fact of such incompetent developers.
Just my subjective opinion, but I don't think anyone would ever do this with Apache.
And that says what about the quality of IIS? Nothing.
The result is that a single project -- an abject failure of a bad design from every meaningful metric, and the willful ignorance of user requirements in favor of vendor fantasies -- shows up on a webserver market share survey as a several-thousand-instance win for MS.
No it doesn't. This study only counts active, stable web servers on the actual Internet, not copies installed on a laptop for use on a WAN.
Stupid question:
Isn't the "mod" in the name "mod_rewrite" an indicator that it isn't, in fact, integrated with Apache? I seem to recall it being an optional install, last time I was playing with it. (Which, given, was ages ago.)
AFAIAC
... Anchor ... Chilis?
As Far As I