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| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15522 |  larsig (780) May 18, 2007 - 10:13 am
| Concede what point? Concede that you were wrong and that you can get laptops without a Windows OS? All right, I'll concede to that.
As for building a custom computer, I misinterpreted your post and thought that you moved on to talk about computers in generals. To that I will concede, but I still don't see what you read my post as conceding to.
As for your argument that there is a "Windows Tax" on laptops.. what the hell are you smoking man? It's something called demand. People want laptops with Windows. Most of the market does not want a laptop that has only linux on it. If they wanted linux they would dual boot with windows or something. Most companies will only support one OS because it takes quite a few resources just to maintain one OS. A lot of companies even have to write their own drivers for the hardware. Guess what? If a company has to choose one OS to provide support for, are they gonna choose an obscure one that almost no one would want? No, they're gonna go with the most popular choice, or at least one that would allow them to turn a profit. Your argument seems to try to argue that Microsoft is forcing us to buy laptops with Windows. They're not, we're forcing ourselves to. If we demanded laptops with Linux, I'm sure that companies like IBM and Dell would be more than happy to comply. But, we don't.
Bring an argument that would actually make me take a moment to think of a response plz, this is starting to get boring. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15522 | larsig (780) May 17, 2007 - 05:53 pm
| | How often do you see the big monopoly company being portrayed as the good guy? :) Note, the word monopoly has a negative connotation, but its denotation implies neither good nor bad. Monopolies are everywhere in the US, just look at your public transportation system or local power provider. All of those are monopolies, but we don't usually see them as monopolies because they are a necessity and are natural monopolies. What I was trying to describe with my big=evil comment was our irrational mentality that a company that controls a large share of the market is a monopoly, and all monopolies are bad and evil. Basically, the reason people are on a witch hunt with Microsoft is because they are large, and through history we have witnessed very abusive monopolies. Hence, we start to associate large controlling companies with unethical business practices, even if they don't perform such acts. Now, I'm not saying Microsoft never did any of that, I'm sure they have, but my comment wasn't about that. Unfortunately, our system will always result in corporate bullying, it's inherent in a capitalist system with corporations. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15522 | larsig (780) May 17, 2007 - 05:10 pm
| I agree, but theres a lot of barriers in the way. The competition between Intel and AMD is a bit different, they both use the x86 ISA. The ISA is a layer that isolates the software from the hardware, making it so software can run regardless of how the transistors in the CPU are laid out and such. That general of a layer doesn't exist between the OS and applications. I think its more for historical reason than anything else. Writing an OS just ended up including the API for system calls without any sort of standard between them. The OS equivalent of Intel allowing AMD to use the x86 ISA is Microsoft allowing OSX to use their API, which includes everything from system calls to do things like file access to the GUI system calls. I dunno what Microsoft would think of it, and Apple would probably never do it since they would essentially bow to Microsoft's power and would make them depend on Microsoft to an extent.
Oh yeah, Java actually provides that cross platform capability although at a pretty significant performance hit. It takes the ISA idea to an extreme by completely isolating the program from the hardware and OS, essentially running programs on an emulator. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15533 | larsig (780) May 17, 2007 - 08:24 am » Edited on May 17, 2007 - 08:27 am
| | Yeah, I've read a few articles on it too. Pretty nice idea since if you think about it, cable and stuff are pretty much power lines too. Just not a high enough capacity to actually work well as one. Hopefully the tests they do prove it to be commercially viable and it starts to show up everywhere. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15522 | larsig (780) May 17, 2007 - 07:52 am » Edited on May 17, 2007 - 07:54 am
| Lol, how does seeing 1 virus make me a geek? All it makes me is careful of what I do. All it takes is a little common sense and bam, most viruses/spyware wont have a chance to get at you. Unfortunately, it looks to me that most of America has lost its basic common sense.
And OK, I'll admit I'm a geek, I'm a freaking CS major, what do you expect? And what's your point? being a geek hasn't done anything to my social life, I still go out to the bars, party, and get wasted like any other college student. Not really sure where you were going with that aside from a weak attempt to make me feel socially inadequate by fitting me with the usual geek stereotype. Plus you all depend on people like me to fix your computers ;). Remember, geeks shall inherit the earth lol.
A lot of things do exist for Macs, I'll even admit to games. A lot of Blizzard games are for both PC and Mac. The problem comes from selection, and price for what you get. Macs have a limited selection, even less if you want to look at exclusive software for Macs. Why? cause Macs represent such a small share that a lot of companies don't want to invest the resources to port their software to Macs. The shift from the PowerPC processors to Intel ones help a lot for porting (Assembly code doesn't need to be changed anymore, as well as some optimizations). Well, because of the shift the smaller selection for Macs may no longer be true in the future. But then, comes the price. Remember the new 8 core Intel CPU? Well, I checked out the price for a Mac that uses it, and I think it starts at about 17k. Yeah. I priced an equivalent custom PC using prices that are a couple of months old, with the current price of the CPU. I was really generous with the pricing, and I could still only get the price of that PC up to 10k. Yeah yeah, that doesn't include software, but if the software cost 7k I'd shit my pants. And with this you can install Windows and/or Linux on it, and with like... 90% of the software in the world. In fact, my computer I built for about $700 and an equivalent Mac at the time would have cost me close to $2000. Don't see why you want to pay twice as much for something that is so inflexible. Macs are like consoles, you can't change much with them in terms of hardware once you get em with the added negative of insane cost.
Oh yeah, I've been planning on getting a console for a long time now, just haven't gotten the money for it yet. I'm torn between a 360 and a PS3, 360 has more games(That I wanna get) and is cheaper but the PS3 has great future potential. Being a poor college student sucks. Plus, why wouldn't I want a console just cause I'm a geek? Go back in the day with the PS2 and you'll hit geek heaven. Anything electronic and you'll run into a geek that has it, and this includes Macs. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15522 | larsig (780) May 17, 2007 - 07:23 am » Edited on May 17, 2007 - 08:02 am
| A laptop without a windows OS... how about a Mac? Plus, ever tried to build a computer from parts you get yourself or ask a friend to do it for you? No? Guess you can't figure out that if a piece doesn't fit, don't put a hammer to it till it does. That or you don't have any friends.
Oh, and I wish I was getting paid for this. Tearing holes in the arguments of ignorant people is so much fun. A 360 would be nice. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15522 | larsig (780) May 16, 2007 - 12:43 pm
| And it also means almost no one writes other programs for it, like games :). In the 10 years that I've worked with computers and known to some extent how they work, I've only gotten 1 virus on my computer, and that was because of a virus that got leaked into a patch for a game I used to play. Of course there's the usual spyware problems but the only time I had problems with that was in the ole Kazaa days. Now all I get are those annoying cookie tracking ones. I use Windows btw if you couldn't tell. Oh my, does that make me some magical gnome with super elite hacker skillz? No, I am far from that, I can't pretend to know everything since I would get my ass owned by someone that does know everything. What do I do to avoid all those viruses and stuff? Nothing really. When I check my e-mails I see hundreds of attachments from email addresses I don't know. Guess what? Unlike some geniuses out there I just delete them instead of stupidly downloading a virus on my computer. Viruses don't just magically appear on your computer, it's usually the result of you doing something incredibly stupid and putting it on your computer/allowing someone else to put it on your computer. Same goes for spyware. There are exceptions, like certain web sites that will exploit your browser's loopholes and get into your system, but I've learned to avoid certain searches that would bring me to sites like that and if I suspect something is wrong I bring up spybot to do a scan. Plus I use spywareblaster to protect exploits in both IE and Firefox.
Moral of all that? I'd rather not pay twice as much for something(Wow, can't believe the prices they charge for macs) that has some "features" that I really don't need if I can prevent the problem in the first place by taking some simple precautions. They really need to make an intro to computer security class for high schools and require it or something cause somethings people do... are just stupid. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15522 | larsig (780) May 16, 2007 - 12:23 pm
| | Microsoft hater anyone? Microsoft never forced anyone to buy Vista. All they did was spend a ton of money advertising it, not their fault you bought their OS when all the problems weren't worked out yet. Big deal, Vista came prebooted on a PC. If you hate it so much, go and install Linux or XP on it. Its not like when you try to boot up another OS the computer goes NO!!! YOU MUST USE VISTA!!! I WILL EAT YOUR BABIES IF YOU BOOT THIS OTHER OS!!! Though that'd be kidna cool and I'd want to sleep with a shotgun next to me since my computer is two feet away from my bed. Plus, what about Macs? They come with their latest OS and I don't see you complaining about them forcing it down the throats of people who buy macs. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15522 | larsig (780) May 16, 2007 - 11:03 am
| | Simple reason, a common American mindset, Big = evil. We don't like big companies that hold sway over most of our lives, particularly these days as computers become a larger part of our professional and personal lives. Personally I think this way is better. Seriously, would you rather have to choose from like... 50 different OS's, and a thousand different pieces of software for each one of them? Monopolies are bound to happen in the world of software, just glad it was Microsoft rather than Apple. Apple is too pricey and too controlling in terms of hardware and such for my tastes. I left out Linux cause it requires quite a bit more computer knowledge than the majority of the people, plus it's open source. Windows is a nice balance between the two. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15522 | larsig (780) May 16, 2007 - 10:44 am
| | I would have to agree, Microsoft definitely slaughters Apply in the security field. It pains me to watch those PC v Mac commercials on how Mac is better cause they target people that wouldn't read articles like this one or don't have much computer knowledge in the first place. Like that one where they show the PC getting a virus and the Mac not having to worry about it. Those that read Ctrl-Alt-Del will probably remember a nice comic on it, can't remember which one it was exactly. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15471 | larsig (780) May 12, 2007 - 08:05 pm
| | A few games and certain applications support multiple cores. The reason that a lot of programs dont support multiple cores is cause it adds a whole bunch of new things that can go wrong while debugging and that equates to a lot of lost money. Considering the fact that we can no longer make CPUs go faster without creating massive power consumption and heat generation problems, we need to increase the nnumber of them. The change to multicores was bound to happen eventually, the hardware manufactureres might as well be the ones to start it. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15344 | larsig (780) May 04, 2007 - 09:07 am
| | It is free2play with restrictions, a lot actually. I played it when it was still in beta and i played it for about 2 years after that and I just got bored of it. Now that I think about it, runescape's been around for at least 7-8 years. Wonder if WoW will ever catch up. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15267 | larsig (780) Apr 27, 2007 - 07:41 am
| Vista is far superior to xp, but most people don't see it unless they have a powerful computer. All the people complaining so far either have a crappy computer or don't quite realize that the first year of an os is almost always bad. Especially considering how much of an overhaul vista is.
Oh yes, people often complain about vista's memory use. There's actually a very good reason for it, although in some cases it may cause an initial performance hit, ie first couple of minutes in a game with a computer with relatively low ram since the os has to swap out some pages. Vista caches the hard drive into main memory, kind of pre-loading your most used programs and stuff, and acting like the cache in your CPU. To those of you that don't know, hard drive access is huge bottleneck in a system. As an example, if 1 cycle of a 3ghz processor were 1 second, then reading 1 meg off a 5900 rpm hdd could take almost 600 days, while main memory is in the order of a few days or a few hours, don't remember the specific nor is it particularly significant to the point.
I do have 1 problem with vista, reverse compatibility. Microsoft used to enforce that programs that ran on older versions of their os can run on their new ones through exhaustive test runs and compatibility patches (Note, this is something apple neglected between their os changes. See, not in all cases is apple "better" than microsoft apple fanboys). That's probably the reason the core of how windows works didn't change until Vista. Unfortunately Microsoft is deviating from that policy, although I can't complain about the new interface. Glad I never really learned how to use the old windows API, though it may have helped me to figure out the new one. Flag this | Edit this post |
| Siteseeing Link » /news/siteseeingarticle.asp?searchid=4048 | larsig (780) Apr 18, 2007 - 07:17 pm
| Seriously, I wanna see that bastard Jack Thompson continue blaming games on this. Seriously, this guy had issues, maybe issues that could have been fixed if he had been helped soon enough and avoided this entire tragedy. If Thompson's gonna blame this on games, I'll blame Thompson cause it was politicians like him that drove the shooter to go insane and to want revenge and go crazy by selfishly pursuing their own agenda.
Anyway, his package probably raises more questions than answers... Namely why he was so angry. In a way I wanna watch his videos/see his notes to answer that myself because the media rarely gives things as it is in its entirety and unbiased. That article itself left a lot out that may have helped us figure out more about his state aside from he was just insane.
Makes me sick just thinking about politicians using this tragedy to advance their own selfish agenda... Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=15084 | larsig (780) Apr 17, 2007 - 04:19 pm
| | Well, thats democracy for you. When the majority of the population does something stupid, everyone gets screwed. Democracy doesn't work too well when most of the population is retarded, that's why we have a public education system. Unfortunately that's gone to crap so there's not much we can do anymore but watch how things go. Flag this | Edit this post |
| Siteseeing Link » /news/siteseeingarticle.asp?searchid=4042 | larsig (780) Apr 17, 2007 - 09:21 am
| | Violence is always present, but its one of those things that even though its always there we shouldn't have to live in constant fear of it and don't worry about it much, kinda like fires. Even if you live your life constantly on the watch for violent situations, there's not much you can do when some random guy comes into your class with a gun and starts shooting everything up. Best you can do is keep your cool and be smart. Perfect example, those students in one of the classrooms the guy shot up barricaded the door after he left and he couldn't get back in when he wanted to. Flag this | Edit this post |
| Siteseeing Link » /news/siteseeingarticle.asp?searchid=4042 | larsig (780) Apr 16, 2007 - 12:25 pm » Edited on Apr 16, 2007 - 12:38 pm
| No kidding. I can see the headlines now... "Politician claims that the violence in viva pinata caused shootings on Virginia campus"
But yeah... that really sucks. College is supposed to be the best time of your life, and something like this just ruins it for all of them. I'd hate for anything like that to happen on my campus... Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=14991 | larsig (780) Apr 09, 2007 - 03:21 pm
| | I'd have to agree. This suit just further display's america's stupidity. Its kinda like people hating Bush, a lot of Americans hate him but half of them don't know why or can't give a good valid reason when you ask them(I'm not a Bush lover, there's plenty of stuff that I hate him for, but there are other things I have to give him a pat on the back for). Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=14953 | larsig (780) Apr 07, 2007 - 10:12 am
| | Actually, you can easily argue that pcs can easily replace the wii and can't replace the 360 or ps3. With the wii with its lower hardware, all you need to do is develop a driver for the wii mote and an emulator for wii games then bam, you got a fully functional wii on your computer with fairly decent performance. Remember, anything a console or handheld can do, a computer can do, just a question of how well. The hardware that the ps3 or 360 has is years beyond what we can buy at an affordable price for a pc, so it'll be hard to replace those with pcs. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=14938 | larsig (780) Apr 06, 2007 - 09:55 am
| | Wow... This goes in the pile of "I'm suing the food companies cause I can't control myself and got fat" legal cases.Seriously, common sense people. You don't sink 1k into a system without doing research on it. Seriously, how hard is it to look up minimum requirements and system specs? If this number is less than this number then hmmm, what could that mean? I guess smaller means better! Plus, correct me if i'm wrong, but I don't think the full version of aero is standard, many of the lower end versions of vista don't have it, namely home basic. Flag this | Edit this post |
| Siteseeing Link » /news/siteseeingarticle.asp?searchid=3977 | larsig (780) Mar 27, 2007 - 08:13 am
| Wow, i've forgotten a lot of what I learned in history. The war of 1812 was actually a draw, both sides signed a treaty that essentially undid the war. All captured territory was returned. If the war had gone on we would have lost. Plus lets make this point, if we lost, why would the US exist? Back then they weren't nice like us today, if they won a war, they kept the territory.
As a note about the secont Iraq war, its arguable that its over. There is still resistance so the fighting is continuing so we can't call it a win or a loss. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=14807 | larsig (780) Mar 26, 2007 - 10:20 am
| | I think that has more to do with underlying psychological issues, often from problems like childhood abuse. I'm sure Ed Gein killed and skinned women because he played Dead Rising. Look up on wiki if you dont know who he is, and more specifically his childhood life. He inspired the killers in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Psycho, and Silence of the Lambs Flag this | Edit this post |
| Siteseeing Link » /news/siteseeingarticle.asp?searchid=3977 | larsig (780) Mar 26, 2007 - 09:51 am » Edited on Mar 26, 2007 - 09:56 am
| I doubt anyone is argueing that any force is invincible. Drop a nuke on the US military forces and we'll see how invincible it is, but that's not the point. Currently the US military is the most advanced and is capable of taking down any military in the world if it is given free reign of its capabilities. If the US military didn't have to worry about maintaining an already badly damaged public image then Vietnam would not have been a loss. And what are you talking about? We didn't lose the wars with Afghanistan and Iraq. Annhilating the official existance of the governments in those countries is what i'd call a victory. Of course there is still resistance, but that will occur in any case where a foreign power is occupying a country.
BTW, the loss in the war of 1812 was before the US became a world power. The US never really became a world power until WWI when the other world powers (In other words European countries) blew themselves up and the US emerged reletively unscathed.
EDIT- I forgot to mention this, but I'm sure we lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's why we're OCCUPYING those countries because they invited us over for tea. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=14769 | larsig (780) Mar 22, 2007 - 05:05 pm
| | "Deepen an already antagonistic relationship" my ass. It's not like the US is made up of 10 year olds (Though sometimes I have doubts...)that can have their beliefs incluenced by a simple game. I'm sure 18 year olds and up are generally smart enough not to vote in the next president that wants to goto war with Venezuela yelling "War with Venezuela because Mercenaries 2 told us to!" Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=14700 | larsig (780) Mar 20, 2007 - 04:03 pm
| | It is a decent gaming platform. The system is very powerful and has the potential to do much more than what we can see in the current games. Give it a few more years when the price for the PS3 has dropped and more developers have had time to adjust and we will see it take off. And no, i'd prefer to keep this debate far from the usual which is better 360/ps3/wii. BTW, saying more than just a gaming platform also implies that the thing you are talking was designed with gaming in mind as a primary/major function. Cell phones are not designed with gaming as a central design goal. Cell phone games are equivelent to those games you find on TI graphing calculators. The hardware wasn't designed for gaming, but you can make a game on anything with a CPU, memory, and a display. Flag this | Edit this post |
| News Link » /news/newsarticle.asp?searchid=14700 | larsig (780) Mar 18, 2007 - 12:57 pm
| | The Cell is not a completely worthless chips, there are planned super computers that will use cell processors. The main advantage of it is that it was designed for parallel computing and does that pretty well. I do agree that a conventional CPU would have been a better choice for a gaming console, though as this shows Sony wanted the PS3 to be more than just a gaming platform. As the saying goes, the CPU is the jack of all trades, can do anything but master of none. Hence why we have GPUs. Flag this | Edit this post |
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