I don't want to have to download *anything*. Just use a.zip file. It's good e-fucking-nough and already installed on every computer on Earth. Why the hell *wouldn't* you use it?
Using 100% of your RAM can easily make your computer slower. Firstly, if a page is "dirty", it needs to be saved to disk before it can be used for another activity. This causes a write to disk before a read, automatically making the read slower.
While that's true, it doesn't matter because those pages would be in-use no matter how much RAM you have.
The "free" RAM (that is, RAM not being used for applications, that is, RAM pages that won't ever be marked dirty) is all caching-- disk and DLL caching. It'll never get marked dirty, and therefore never need saving to disk before being reused.
The problem is "which page do you overwrite next?" If a program is about to read from a portion of its program memory, or is about to read data sitting in the disk cache, you don't want to delete that page. It is just that the operating system doesn't know which piece of data the program will need next.
That's... somewhat true.
First of all, while the OS doesn't know what piece of data the program will need next, it certainly can (and does) make a guess based on what the program has requested in the past. Most programs allocate most of their memory when first starting up, and the OS is going to be able to predict these bits almost 100% of the time. (Unless it's the first run of that program. But it's not magic.)
Secondly, even if the guesses are bad, even if only one guess in a thousand is correct you're still better-off. Tossing away RAM from a bad guess takes zero time, for all practical purposes. In reality it takes time, but it takes less time than the disk takes to load up the data to fill that page, so in practice it takes no time.
Therefore, the penalty for a wrong guess is zero. The reward for a correct guess is significantly higher than zero. It's a win-win situation.
The result is that having empty RAM is almost always beneficial.
Wrong, for the reasons listed above.
Blindly swapping program memory to disk is not a good idea. It never really was.
True, but Windows doesn't do that and that's not what we're talking about. That would never happen unless RAM was 100% full of application data. Even if that was the situation, it's hardly "blind" swapping, as the same heuristics that allow Windows to predict what an application will load next can help it predict what an application will never touch again.
But to repeat: this isn't the situation we're talking about. We're talking about a computer filling unused RAM with disk and DLL cache. You're talking about a computer whose RAM is 100% full of application memory. Apples to oranges.
On today's computers, a memory leak can effectively stop/bring down the computer. The real function of the page file is to soften this problem. Instead of dying relatively quickly, today's computers will slow to a crawl, and then die. The page file causes this.
Ok... and? What's your point? Are you saying that if we didn't cache to RAM this wouldn't happen?
If you have good, well behaved software, and 4 GB of RAM, you will likely experience better system performance under Windows XP by turning the page file off.
Unless that software wants to memory-map a large file, in which case your performance will go straight to hell. Also, in practice, there's a ton of stuff Windows loads initially that can be (more or less) swapped-out immediately and stay there.
For example, the login screen is likely to only be displayed once, ever. And when it's needed again, there's plenty of time to load it-- why leave it in RAM? (And Windows is smart enough not to.)
The only time I'd consider turning VM off entirely is if you're running MacOS 8. Which had worse than useless virtual memory support. You're not, you're using an OS made in the 21st century, turn on the fucking swap file.
They also have an irrational and fucking annoying love for the.rar file format, even though.zip is supported natively in every OS ever. You know what's awesome? Having to download WinRAR once a fucking year for one fucking file to make those crackers happy... fucking annoying. Seriously, is there some kind of brain virus or cancer that gives them the sudden urge to give BJs to WinRAR files or something?
You can't memory-map large files if you have swap turned off. If you don't run any applications that do this, well... fine. But if you do, turning off swap is a huge performance hit.
Doesn't require advanced knowledge to make sense of that ouput,
I'd argue that knowledge of what "wired" means in that context is advanced knowledge, required to make sense of that output. I've been working with computers for a hell of a long time, and I have absolutely no clue what "wired" means in regards to allocation of memory.
I also don't have whatever knowledge (advanced or otherwise) to understand the difference between "buffer" and "cache." And I'm only guessing that "inact" means "inactive", although I don't really get the distinction between "inactive" and "free."
My first guess would be "wired" is total amount of RAM, but from the numbers that's clearly wrong. In fact, that report doesn't seem to tell you your total amount of RAM at all... which is less than useful.
Anyway, the point is, if you think that readout is obvious, you've completely lost contact with the general public. I hope to God you don't write UIs that you expect other people to use.
Probably not. NTFS gives special priority to the pagefile, it gives it a really wide berth, so it's unlikely to get fragmented no matter what you do. (Unless you have a runaway process that goes *really* nutsoid, possibly.)
The three classifications below the "memory used" indicator in Task Manager (in Vista) are:
1) Total (obviously, your total amount of RAM) 2) Cached (the amount being used for the disk cache/DLL cache) 3) Free (the amount completely 100% free)
Right now, my "Free" is 9 MB, meaning that my computer is using 99.78% of its 4 GB of physical RAM. However, of that, 2109 MB are used for various types of Cache and can be free instantly for application use, if an application requests it.
The problem here obviously is that this company is counting the "Cached" amount with the "Used" amount, in which case it'll almost always read 100% or close to it. That's how the system is *supposed* to work... to say that indicates a problem is just retarded.
It wouldn't surprise me that win7 has a heavier memory footprint though - as more applications move to.net and web browsers use lots of flash / silverlight etc - all of these things have a RAM cost.
This is Vista, which (according to Slashdot lore at least) is more bloated than Windows. I have 1.77 GB being used, and here's what the task bar shows is running:
The OS itself/Explorer Outlook Windows Live Messenger Firefox (about 15 tabs) SQL Management Studio (this guy's a beast) IE7 (about 5 tabs)
That's all in 1.77 GB. If I go ahead and open Visual Studio, it pops up to only 1.86 GB. (Probably because VS shares a large portion of its code with SSMS.)
In any case, considering what my system is doing, I find this amount of memory use perfectly acceptable. And that's on the "bloated" Vista.
I don't see how this is a bad thing... using 100% of RAM doesn't necessarily mean that the system is relying on the disk more than if, say, 50% of RAM was consumed... if the thing you need is on the disk, you gotta hit the disk, right? However, if RAM is 100% full at all times, there's a much greater chance that the thing you need is already in RAM, making it quicker to retrieve and therefore making your computer faster.
I think the thing people miss on this debate is that RAM can be emptied *instantly*. It's not like you have to spend 4 seconds "draining off" the mis-used RAM before you can load in the thing you need, right? So using 100% of RAM can't possibly make your computer slower, it can only make it faster.
I'd actually be more alarmed if your RAM *wasn't* 100% full at all times. I'd be asking my OS, "hey, why aren't you caching more?"
Now we're back at the other extreme. Management has done a great job convincing the labor at all levels, skilled and unskilled, that they're your buddies.
If I ever worked at a job where the management weren't my buddies, I'd leave and go to some other company.
Without any protections against abuses, it becomes easy to demand extra unpaid work or toss people out when they've outlived their short-term usefulness.
And with protections, it becomes impossible to toss the useless dead-weight that holds you and your company back. Look at the quality of education in the US, if you would like a vivid example of how unions harm society.
The adversarial split between labor and management needs to make a comeback - maybe in a less overt form, but with enough teeth to make employee demands count for something.
In good companies, there's no adversarial split. Why would I want to work in an environment where I'm working *against* management instead of my management and I working *for* my customers?
If you *ask* (not demand, because you're not an asshole) something from your boss, and he doesn't provide it, then either suck it up or go to a company that will. It's not hard.
Call me mediocre, but I'd rather give up the potential for being a total rock star employee for a fixed-hour work week, a contract that eliminates the salary shell game seen in corporate jobs, guaranteed raises, work rules and stability.
Losing more money from union dues than I earn from raises, having political contributions made with my money against my will, having to deal with useless dead weight co-workers who can't be fired...
Yah, it's not all sunny. There's no way our company would have a well-stocked bar if it was unionized.
Despite my tone in this post, I'm not really anti-Union-- I'm anti-being-forced-into-a-union. If you want to start a IT union, fine. Knock yourself out. But if you want to *force* me to join it to retain my current job, then you can go screw yourself-- I can't think of anything more anti-American and yet culturally accepted in the US than forced unionization. Hell, it's why I went into IT in the first place instead of becoming a school teacher.
Why is it that a "promotion" in the programming field is always to management or something beyond programming?
I'd say ideally it wouldn't be. Microsoft has enough different levels of "programmer" that you can serve your entire career without ever stopping what you love, or saying no to raises or promotions.
If the company you work for doesn't do that, maybe you should try to change things.
You don't see surgeons hoping to become hospital administrators, or research scientist hoping to become university administrators...
Ah, but you *do* see teachers moving on to be principals or work at the district level. (Also, many hospital administrators are doctors, that's not so weird.)
I have never understood this paradigm - reward for technical prowess shouldn't be to remove that item from the technical realm...
Then work for a company with a different paradigm. Or change the paradigm at your company. None of this is set in stone, you know.
Microsoft gets a lot of grief on this board, but this is something they certainly do right. They have like 7-8 different levels of "programmer"-- you can serve your entire career writing software and never feel like you need to switch jobs to get a raise or get your ideas heard at the company.
Yah. The nuclear submarine USS Scorpion was lost in 1968, but all evidence shows that the nuclear reactor wasn't involved in the loss. The USS Thresher was lost as well, but again, the reactor wasn't a factor in the accident.
So... yeah, unless you count the nuclear fuel sitting on the ocean floor as "incidents", it looks like the record on the reactors is flawless.
At least we know where the hell it is. With coal plants, we just let the wastes into the air to be literally blown away on the winds.
I can't stand environmentalists who get all pissy over where to store nuclear waste, when they're perfectly ok with all other types of power generation waste just being dumped into the air or water. Opposing nuclear plants keeps coal plants on-line. As long as coal plants are on-line, they're spewing waste all over... not in nicely bundled packages in a single location.
Fact is, they've been doing nuclear power a lot, and doing it much more recently than us),
Our Navy runs tons of nuclear reactors with very few incidents. Or in other words, there are plenty of people in the US qualified to safely build and run nuclear reactors. The only advantage France has is in permanently-sited, domestic reactors-- which frankly should be *easier* to build than one being installed onto a moving vessel in a very limited amount of space.
On an unrelated note, I'm constantly amazed at how many people simply forget that our Navy is nuclear powered. That's actually a good thing: it's so safe and unremarkable, it's never mentioned on the news, so people don't think of it.
What's really driving me nuts is that none of these commenters have played the game! Which is not only the *topic* of the article (you know, purple means games section), but is one of the greatest FPSes in the last 10 years. I mean, in a thread above yours, someone even mentions some shitty direct-to-video DVD without bothering to mention the game we're all supposed to be talking about!
It's named Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, BTW.
I guess it just goes to show the motto here should be: "Slashdot Games: The only games forum on the web filled with people who don't play games!"
Yeah but think about the topic at hand... the GAME Chronicles of Riddick was good.
It didn't have the weird and bad art design of the movie. It didn't have any "magic" or anything that could be construed as "magic." (Well... maybe the one bit with his eye replacement.) It had a well-told, tight story. It had action sequences significantly better than the ones in the movie.
If the game was good, and it was, and this movie is being made as a result of the game, it'll probably be good.
I'm frankly shocked at the number of people posting here who have seen the (shitty) movie but haven't played the (excellent) video game-- what's wrong with you people? Play the game! It's good!
Since "targetting" means that 2 ad's in 10,000 are relevant instead of 1 ad in 10,000 then it's pointless from your point of view.
Well, first of all, don't speak for me because I don't believe it's pointless. Obviously, since I posted that original statement in the first place.
Secondly, your argument boils down to: "targeting is useless because not every advertiser does it." That's true, but it doesn't mean my Internet experience is just as bad with targeting as without-- even if those 2 ads in 10,000 are both tampon ads I didn't see, I still consider that worthwhile. (Even though I may have seen tampon ads from non-targeted placements.)
---
If you take unsolicited advertising seriously you need to get a life.
Uh-huh...
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Wow, hypocrisy much? Don't take advertising seriously! ALSO ADVERTISING IS RUINING THE WORLD!
It depends. If I could view 1000 sites using Safari, and 900 sites using IE6, then quite possibly Safari would be the better product.
The purpose of a web browser is to view web pages. If one browser works on more pages than another, then it's a better product. (From a functional point of view.)
That said, I doubt IE6 can view more sites than, say, IE8. It was just an example of how end-users think, and how developers need to realize end-users think. The disconnect between developers and users is so huge, anything I can do to reduce that I think is helpful. You're welcome to disagree.
Why do I care? Potential. Even if not all open source software is great now, it has the POTENTIAL to be better. Closed-source software only has a certain level of potential, and cannot improve past that point - it will always stay good enough to use but not good enough to be used comfortably.
I don't see any difference between the potential of open source and commercial software. What potential feature could an open source OS implement than a commercial one couldn't?
And while Linux certainly has tons of potential, I think closed-source OSes have done a better job (to date) of making the potential real.
You're welcome to disagree with me and use whatever you like. I'm not preaching and telling you what to use, you know.
I usually try to make an attempt to see things from the other person's position, but all I see is a lazy idiot who would rather have crap shoveled down his throat than make an effort to get something much better.
When Linux does get "much better" I'll probably switch to it. What's wrong with using the best product on the market for my needs? How does that make me a lazy idiot? (Lazy maybe, but idiot?)
I wouldn't call that a bug, I'd call that a disagreement.
For example, at my work we have our corporate network, and the guest network "Partner." Partner exists as a wifi network *and* as network jacks in some of the conference rooms-- in our case, if I used Partner at my workplace, I'd find this feature super-handy, it would instantly tell me if I've plugged into Partner or accidentally plugged into the corporate network.
Microsoft could have added an option to turn network auto-naming off (if it's not already there), but I think calling it a "bug" would be a stretch.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to have to download *anything*. Just use a .zip file. It's good e-fucking-nough and already installed on every computer on Earth. Why the hell *wouldn't* you use it?
You know it draws a little circle around the city's territory right? You don't have to manually count it.
Ok that's retarded.
Using 100% of your RAM can easily make your computer slower. Firstly, if a page is "dirty", it needs to be saved to disk before it can be used for another activity. This causes a write to disk before a read, automatically making the read slower.
While that's true, it doesn't matter because those pages would be in-use no matter how much RAM you have.
The "free" RAM (that is, RAM not being used for applications, that is, RAM pages that won't ever be marked dirty) is all caching-- disk and DLL caching. It'll never get marked dirty, and therefore never need saving to disk before being reused.
The problem is "which page do you overwrite next?" If a program is about to read from a portion of its program memory, or is about to read data sitting in the disk cache, you don't want to delete that page. It is just that the operating system doesn't know which piece of data the program will need next.
That's... somewhat true.
First of all, while the OS doesn't know what piece of data the program will need next, it certainly can (and does) make a guess based on what the program has requested in the past. Most programs allocate most of their memory when first starting up, and the OS is going to be able to predict these bits almost 100% of the time. (Unless it's the first run of that program. But it's not magic.)
Secondly, even if the guesses are bad, even if only one guess in a thousand is correct you're still better-off. Tossing away RAM from a bad guess takes zero time, for all practical purposes. In reality it takes time, but it takes less time than the disk takes to load up the data to fill that page, so in practice it takes no time.
Therefore, the penalty for a wrong guess is zero. The reward for a correct guess is significantly higher than zero. It's a win-win situation.
The result is that having empty RAM is almost always beneficial.
Wrong, for the reasons listed above.
Blindly swapping program memory to disk is not a good idea. It never really was.
True, but Windows doesn't do that and that's not what we're talking about. That would never happen unless RAM was 100% full of application data. Even if that was the situation, it's hardly "blind" swapping, as the same heuristics that allow Windows to predict what an application will load next can help it predict what an application will never touch again.
But to repeat: this isn't the situation we're talking about. We're talking about a computer filling unused RAM with disk and DLL cache. You're talking about a computer whose RAM is 100% full of application memory. Apples to oranges.
On today's computers, a memory leak can effectively stop/bring down the computer. The real function of the page file is to soften this problem. Instead of dying relatively quickly, today's computers will slow to a crawl, and then die. The page file causes this.
Ok... and? What's your point? Are you saying that if we didn't cache to RAM this wouldn't happen?
If you have good, well behaved software, and 4 GB of RAM, you will likely experience better system performance under Windows XP by turning the page file off.
Unless that software wants to memory-map a large file, in which case your performance will go straight to hell. Also, in practice, there's a ton of stuff Windows loads initially that can be (more or less) swapped-out immediately and stay there.
For example, the login screen is likely to only be displayed once, ever. And when it's needed again, there's plenty of time to load it-- why leave it in RAM? (And Windows is smart enough not to.)
The only time I'd consider turning VM off entirely is if you're running MacOS 8. Which had worse than useless virtual memory support. You're not, you're using an OS made in the 21st century, turn on the fucking swap file.
They also have an irrational and fucking annoying love for the .rar file format, even though .zip is supported natively in every OS ever. You know what's awesome? Having to download WinRAR once a fucking year for one fucking file to make those crackers happy... fucking annoying. Seriously, is there some kind of brain virus or cancer that gives them the sudden urge to give BJs to WinRAR files or something?
BTW mod this off-topic.
You can't memory-map large files if you have swap turned off. If you don't run any applications that do this, well... fine. But if you do, turning off swap is a huge performance hit.
Doesn't require advanced knowledge to make sense of that ouput,
I'd argue that knowledge of what "wired" means in that context is advanced knowledge, required to make sense of that output. I've been working with computers for a hell of a long time, and I have absolutely no clue what "wired" means in regards to allocation of memory.
I also don't have whatever knowledge (advanced or otherwise) to understand the difference between "buffer" and "cache." And I'm only guessing that "inact" means "inactive", although I don't really get the distinction between "inactive" and "free."
My first guess would be "wired" is total amount of RAM, but from the numbers that's clearly wrong. In fact, that report doesn't seem to tell you your total amount of RAM at all... which is less than useful.
Anyway, the point is, if you think that readout is obvious, you've completely lost contact with the general public. I hope to God you don't write UIs that you expect other people to use.
Probably not. NTFS gives special priority to the pagefile, it gives it a really wide berth, so it's unlikely to get fragmented no matter what you do. (Unless you have a runaway process that goes *really* nutsoid, possibly.)
The three classifications below the "memory used" indicator in Task Manager (in Vista) are:
1) Total (obviously, your total amount of RAM)
2) Cached (the amount being used for the disk cache/DLL cache)
3) Free (the amount completely 100% free)
Right now, my "Free" is 9 MB, meaning that my computer is using 99.78% of its 4 GB of physical RAM. However, of that, 2109 MB are used for various types of Cache and can be free instantly for application use, if an application requests it.
The problem here obviously is that this company is counting the "Cached" amount with the "Used" amount, in which case it'll almost always read 100% or close to it. That's how the system is *supposed* to work... to say that indicates a problem is just retarded.
It wouldn't surprise me that win7 has a heavier memory footprint though - as more applications move to .net and web browsers use lots of flash / silverlight etc - all of these things have a RAM cost.
This is Vista, which (according to Slashdot lore at least) is more bloated than Windows. I have 1.77 GB being used, and here's what the task bar shows is running:
The OS itself/Explorer
Outlook
Windows Live Messenger
Firefox (about 15 tabs)
SQL Management Studio (this guy's a beast)
IE7 (about 5 tabs)
That's all in 1.77 GB. If I go ahead and open Visual Studio, it pops up to only 1.86 GB. (Probably because VS shares a large portion of its code with SSMS.)
In any case, considering what my system is doing, I find this amount of memory use perfectly acceptable. And that's on the "bloated" Vista.
I don't see how this is a bad thing... using 100% of RAM doesn't necessarily mean that the system is relying on the disk more than if, say, 50% of RAM was consumed... if the thing you need is on the disk, you gotta hit the disk, right? However, if RAM is 100% full at all times, there's a much greater chance that the thing you need is already in RAM, making it quicker to retrieve and therefore making your computer faster.
I think the thing people miss on this debate is that RAM can be emptied *instantly*. It's not like you have to spend 4 seconds "draining off" the mis-used RAM before you can load in the thing you need, right? So using 100% of RAM can't possibly make your computer slower, it can only make it faster.
I'd actually be more alarmed if your RAM *wasn't* 100% full at all times. I'd be asking my OS, "hey, why aren't you caching more?"
Now we're back at the other extreme. Management has done a great job convincing the labor at all levels, skilled and unskilled, that they're your buddies.
If I ever worked at a job where the management weren't my buddies, I'd leave and go to some other company.
Without any protections against abuses, it becomes easy to demand extra unpaid work or toss people out when they've outlived their short-term usefulness.
And with protections, it becomes impossible to toss the useless dead-weight that holds you and your company back. Look at the quality of education in the US, if you would like a vivid example of how unions harm society.
The adversarial split between labor and management needs to make a comeback - maybe in a less overt form, but with enough teeth to make employee demands count for something.
In good companies, there's no adversarial split. Why would I want to work in an environment where I'm working *against* management instead of my management and I working *for* my customers?
If you *ask* (not demand, because you're not an asshole) something from your boss, and he doesn't provide it, then either suck it up or go to a company that will. It's not hard.
Call me mediocre, but I'd rather give up the potential for being a total rock star employee for a fixed-hour work week, a contract that eliminates the salary shell game seen in corporate jobs, guaranteed raises, work rules and stability.
Losing more money from union dues than I earn from raises, having political contributions made with my money against my will, having to deal with useless dead weight co-workers who can't be fired...
Yah, it's not all sunny. There's no way our company would have a well-stocked bar if it was unionized.
Despite my tone in this post, I'm not really anti-Union-- I'm anti-being-forced-into-a-union. If you want to start a IT union, fine. Knock yourself out. But if you want to *force* me to join it to retain my current job, then you can go screw yourself-- I can't think of anything more anti-American and yet culturally accepted in the US than forced unionization. Hell, it's why I went into IT in the first place instead of becoming a school teacher.
Don't forget Marathon and Myst. :P
I personally enjoyed the caption: "The image below is of the Mac version" Followed immediately by a screenshot of the Windows 3.11 version.
The article was pretty poorly-edited.
Why is it that a "promotion" in the programming field is always to management or something beyond programming?
I'd say ideally it wouldn't be. Microsoft has enough different levels of "programmer" that you can serve your entire career without ever stopping what you love, or saying no to raises or promotions.
If the company you work for doesn't do that, maybe you should try to change things.
You don't see surgeons hoping to become hospital administrators, or research scientist hoping to become university
administrators...
Ah, but you *do* see teachers moving on to be principals or work at the district level. (Also, many hospital administrators are doctors, that's not so weird.)
I have never understood this paradigm - reward for technical prowess shouldn't be to remove that item from the technical realm...
Then work for a company with a different paradigm. Or change the paradigm at your company. None of this is set in stone, you know.
Microsoft gets a lot of grief on this board, but this is something they certainly do right. They have like 7-8 different levels of "programmer"-- you can serve your entire career writing software and never feel like you need to switch jobs to get a raise or get your ideas heard at the company.
Yah. The nuclear submarine USS Scorpion was lost in 1968, but all evidence shows that the nuclear reactor wasn't involved in the loss. The USS Thresher was lost as well, but again, the reactor wasn't a factor in the accident.
So... yeah, unless you count the nuclear fuel sitting on the ocean floor as "incidents", it looks like the record on the reactors is flawless.
At least we know where the hell it is. With coal plants, we just let the wastes into the air to be literally blown away on the winds.
I can't stand environmentalists who get all pissy over where to store nuclear waste, when they're perfectly ok with all other types of power generation waste just being dumped into the air or water. Opposing nuclear plants keeps coal plants on-line. As long as coal plants are on-line, they're spewing waste all over... not in nicely bundled packages in a single location.
Fact is, they've been doing nuclear power a lot, and doing it much more recently than us),
Our Navy runs tons of nuclear reactors with very few incidents. Or in other words, there are plenty of people in the US qualified to safely build and run nuclear reactors. The only advantage France has is in permanently-sited, domestic reactors-- which frankly should be *easier* to build than one being installed onto a moving vessel in a very limited amount of space.
On an unrelated note, I'm constantly amazed at how many people simply forget that our Navy is nuclear powered. That's actually a good thing: it's so safe and unremarkable, it's never mentioned on the news, so people don't think of it.
What's really driving me nuts is that none of these commenters have played the game! Which is not only the *topic* of the article (you know, purple means games section), but is one of the greatest FPSes in the last 10 years. I mean, in a thread above yours, someone even mentions some shitty direct-to-video DVD without bothering to mention the game we're all supposed to be talking about!
It's named Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay, BTW.
I guess it just goes to show the motto here should be: "Slashdot Games: The only games forum on the web filled with people who don't play games!"
Yeah but think about the topic at hand... the GAME Chronicles of Riddick was good.
It didn't have the weird and bad art design of the movie.
It didn't have any "magic" or anything that could be construed as "magic." (Well... maybe the one bit with his eye replacement.)
It had a well-told, tight story.
It had action sequences significantly better than the ones in the movie.
If the game was good, and it was, and this movie is being made as a result of the game, it'll probably be good.
I'm frankly shocked at the number of people posting here who have seen the (shitty) movie but haven't played the (excellent) video game-- what's wrong with you people? Play the game! It's good!
Since "targetting" means that 2 ad's in 10,000 are relevant instead of 1 ad in 10,000 then it's pointless from your point of view.
Well, first of all, don't speak for me because I don't believe it's pointless. Obviously, since I posted that original statement in the first place.
Secondly, your argument boils down to: "targeting is useless because not every advertiser does it." That's true, but it doesn't mean my Internet experience is just as bad with targeting as without-- even if those 2 ads in 10,000 are both tampon ads I didn't see, I still consider that worthwhile. (Even though I may have seen tampon ads from non-targeted placements.)
---
If you take unsolicited advertising seriously you need to get a life.
Uh-huh...
Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.
Wow, hypocrisy much? Don't take advertising seriously! ALSO ADVERTISING IS RUINING THE WORLD!
Get a life, Bit01.
It depends. If I could view 1000 sites using Safari, and 900 sites using IE6, then quite possibly Safari would be the better product.
The purpose of a web browser is to view web pages. If one browser works on more pages than another, then it's a better product. (From a functional point of view.)
That said, I doubt IE6 can view more sites than, say, IE8. It was just an example of how end-users think, and how developers need to realize end-users think. The disconnect between developers and users is so huge, anything I can do to reduce that I think is helpful. You're welcome to disagree.
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sqltools/thread/b2668b56-f021-4680-9997-4413620c1474
Is the one about SQL Management Studio. The Apple one, I no longer remember... sadly.
Why do I care? Potential. Even if not all open source software is great now, it has the POTENTIAL to be better. Closed-source software only has a certain level of potential, and cannot improve past that point - it will always stay good enough to use but not good enough to be used comfortably.
I don't see any difference between the potential of open source and commercial software. What potential feature could an open source OS implement than a commercial one couldn't?
And while Linux certainly has tons of potential, I think closed-source OSes have done a better job (to date) of making the potential real.
You're welcome to disagree with me and use whatever you like. I'm not preaching and telling you what to use, you know.
I usually try to make an attempt to see things from the other person's position, but all I see is a lazy idiot who would rather have crap shoveled down his throat than make an effort to get something much better.
When Linux does get "much better" I'll probably switch to it. What's wrong with using the best product on the market for my needs? How does that make me a lazy idiot? (Lazy maybe, but idiot?)
I wouldn't call that a bug, I'd call that a disagreement.
For example, at my work we have our corporate network, and the guest network "Partner." Partner exists as a wifi network *and* as network jacks in some of the conference rooms-- in our case, if I used Partner at my workplace, I'd find this feature super-handy, it would instantly tell me if I've plugged into Partner or accidentally plugged into the corporate network.
Microsoft could have added an option to turn network auto-naming off (if it's not already there), but I think calling it a "bug" would be a stretch.
Not anymore! Too many gamers out there!