Surprise: Slashdot misrepresents facts

And I NEVER said the PS3 would "fail." I have no idea how the PS3 will do.

But all indications are that it will be very expensive. There's a lot riding on their launch line-up, and their timing. But if they're charging over $500 for the thing, I don't see it doing well. Not in the US. Not when the 360 is available with more features and more power at a lower price.

Chris - there are publicly available Vista releases (the CTPs) that run on these systems WITH GLASS. Or run on much older systems without it.

So what the hell are you getting at? You think we're lying about something that you could just as easily verify yourself?

Oh definitely Chris. Still waiting for tech docs on WPF/E other than saying "Yeah, you'll be able to use it one day"

You know, nothings gold until release, "Mr.-PS3-will cost-twice-as-much-and-fail". I don't care what they say, and I don't care (nor trust) what you say. Until it's on the open-market, and had some real world vetting, it's all pure speculation. They hype one extreme, you hype the other. It's pointless. Talk after you get that 'Spruce Goose' to actually fly.

End Prog.

What on earth are you talking about?

There are two points being made. One by Scoble, and one by me.

1) Slashdot posted disinformation as "news" - and so far has not posted a correction. However, they seem to do this daily so I'm not really surprised. As someone said above, Slashdot is basically a blog. It's written by the submitters (most of whom have no authority what-so-ever) and edited/filtered by some extremely biased moderators.

2) The article they linked to is also incorrect. Most integrated chipsets you buy today can run the DWM (Aero Glass) just fine. My Vista machines at work are 6+ months old, with integrated chipsets, and they run Glass perfectly well.

Gee really? Touchy touchy. The context clearly meant 'the whole kit' And a modded +5 post "corrected" the strain-a-gnat glitch, seconds after. And the headline was, "One In Two PCs Won't Run Vista's INTERFACE." Not won't run Vista itself.

Paraphrased sum-up from a linked article...meaning obvious from context.

Tracing. Back. Original. Sources. [and] Not. Jumping. To. Conclusions. And. Not. Going. Off. Half-Cocked. Useful skills.

Now if you want to start parsing down things that narrow, beating chests loudly, then first deal with thy own wooden plank, before you whine about the dust in Slashdot eyes.

What people need to understand about Slashdot is that, firstly, it' is supported in a round-about way by OSDN (Open Source Developer Network) - which is decidedly anti-Microsoft. I've been a poster there for nearly 5 years now and have repeatedly corrected posts and topics related to Microsoft and Microsoft software, but there's a catch; If the readers-nee-contributors that have "mod points" decide that you're pro-Microsoft they will mod-point you down to the point that you can only post 1 comment per day (otherwise known in a cute way as "Negative Karma - and mine is pretty bad at this point) - it's a underhanded way for them to squelch and censor people whom post corrections or comments that are attempts to correct the dis-information spread on Slashdot. Remember, Slashdot is just more than an overblown blog - nothing more.

Chris -

"they won’t be able to handle Vista’s 3D ‘Aero Glass’ compositor, which will prevent roughly half of all PCs from running Microsoft’s new OS."

was added by the person who submitted it to Slashdot, and approved by their mods.

Reading Comprehension. Useful skill.

Christopher and Jon: WRONG. Slashdot CHANGED what the original article said. The original article did NOT say that those PCs that couldn't run Glass wouldn't be able to run Vista at all, yet that's what the Slashdot blurb made it sound like.

Apologize to Slashdot? That's hilarious.

Yeah, I was about to say, Slashdot just doing the pointer. Blame ExtremeTech Staff, who are themselves just pointing to a report from Jon Peddie Research.

Or are you gonna blame Slashdot for mere linking...?

A misrepresentation of facts, about a supposed misrepresentation of facts, that was in fact just a pointer. The irony is killer. Blame Jon Peddie Research, so then you gonna apologize to Slashdot then?

That information is coming from the extremetech site. Not slashdot.

Good job misrepresenting the facts yourself Scoble.

Well, within context, they obviously mean running Vista in all its glory.

Ugh, I meant Brandon....

So you can cofirm that the Intel 950 graphics support glass? Such as those found on the new Toshiba M400?

BB

Brian,

So you can cofirm that the Intel 950 graphics support glass? Such as those found on the new Toshiba M400?

BB

I love all the drive by snark from "anon". More please.

Also, the M200 is perfectly capable of running Glass. It has a Geforce FX 5200 with 32MB of RAM. A Geforce FX or later is all you need for Glass (needs to support DX9).

I have 2 machines at work that are running Vista WITH GLASS on ATI integrated video chipsets (on-board ATI PCI-Express chips), and one that runs WITH GLASS on an integrated Intel video chipset.

So what are they smoking?

It's amazing that Microsoft shills complain about misinformation while their own convicted monopolist felon employer runs an anti-Linux "Get the Facts" site full of Martin Taylor's - a Microsoft employee - fabrications and misrepresentation.

Slashdot trades on the thin distinction between something they stand behind and something a contributor says. Hence, those all-important quotes around the pertinent parts. It might be a lie, they'd say, but we didn't say it. We only published it.

Isn't it interesting that they get way with that only because they publish online, not on paper? Could your morning newspaper survive doing the same thing?

Mujibur: the NeXT story came from Dan'l Lewin, who was a co-founder of NeXT. He watched as I typed that post. It has been corrected by many other people involved, but if Dan'l's recollection is what it was who am I to argue with it? I'm not a co-founder of NeXT.

Btw, I should have added, the Intel spec can be found here:

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/i...

Also stating Windows Vista ready spec here:
http://www.intel.com/business/bss/products/clie...

Finally note this on the Vista page:
The Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 950 on both the Intel® 945G and Mobile Intel® 945GM Express Chipsets will support the Windows Vista Display Driver model (WDDM) drivers.

As for Nvidia and Ati, they have similar pages which I will not bother posting since Intel has had the worst support for Vista.

BB

My understanding is that while this is true for past integrated graphics.. the Intel 950 series of ig will work fine as it has LDDM drivers available is is considered Vista Ready. That also applies to Nvidia LDDM and ATI graphics. If I am wrong on this - I would like to know? That said, games of almost any type will not play real well, if at all... for example 11 fps. Basically anything with shared memory is not going to be a gaming machine, but if it is Vista ready with LDDM, then it is glass ready.

-bb

One thing's nearly certain - you won't find Slashdot issuing a correction or retraction. Flame wars mean page impressions mean profits. I've no doubt the editors take the most intentionally inflammatory version of a writeup on any given linked article.

Scoble,

I agree slashdot should fix the story. That having been said, you still haven't corrected the NeXT story you posted ages ago. You claim you are right but have never explained why.

Have you checked out Compiz yet? Now THAT is open source window manager goodness: http://www.linuxedge.org/?q=node/58
The video of the demo is pretty mindblowing:
http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xv...

That is awesome, waaaaayyyyy better than Vista and its aero/glass, or whatever they call that horrible UI this week.

It's annoying that a $300billion corporation with a monopoly, $40 billion in cash, 50,000+ of the "smartest" employees and basically full permission to run roughshod over antitrust laws and use monopoly leverage (cash from price-gouging, bundling, etc) to enter new markets still can't release products as cool as the open source community.

Instead, we are invited to listen to paid Microsoft shills whine about lack of support from the community for its newest edition of Windows XP.

Wow, imagine a blogging site being more concerned with "first" than "correct". That must really burn Robert, seeing that happen to your company.

Of course, when *you* complain about that, there's a definite "Pot calling the kettle black" aspect. But I doubt you'll learn the lesson that's at hand here, you haven't the last few times it's burned you.

When you yourself have a rather blatant disregard for accuracy in favor of being first poster in your own writing, and then defend it time after time after time as being justified, your complaints that others are doing this lack a certain, shall we say, moral high ground?

Maybe you should set the example and hold yourself to the standards you want others to follow.

Well if you guys would publish SPECS maybe speculations wouldn't happen.

Microsoft up to it's usual platform tricks, about to ruin a game franchise, both on the 360 and PC front. Who is going to care about Halo 2 on PC anyways in that timeframe? PS3 and Rev will be fever pitch, and then Halo 3 hitting for 360. I don't even think Halo 3 can save them, uptick sure, but salvation no.

Apparently, the "XP is crap" campaign has begun. The reality is that most people out there play a video using a fullscreen player while doing nothing else. So adding stress does not sound like a real-world scenario anyway. Nice try tho.

I see you managed to never speak or link to what Novell is doing with xgl. What an authority!

And for the record, playing video makes sense if you explain what you are trying to achieve. You can get skewed behaviors if you don't know what's really going on. For instance, playing a video using WMP requires executing a lot more code than raw DirectShow video playback, and exhibits strong differences in behavior.

I've gotta agree with Tim and call BS on the assertion that DX10 is required. If we're talking Halo 3, then yeah maybe, but Halo 2 runs on the XBox, which as Tim says is win2k/dx8 running on an ancient celeron with a jazzed up memory bus.

Now if MS were to come out and say "we're waiting for Vista because it has improved DRM and we want to reduce piracy of a hotly desired game", then we'd believe them and possibly get some respect.

Stop reading slashdot. Stop referring to slashdot. Stop linking to slashdot. Simple.

I've just posted referencing that story, Robert, ie, the original piece by John Peddie.

I didn't think of questioning his stats (heh! I'm a blogger not a journalist...) but whether he's right or wrong, I'd say it is pretty likely that loads of PCs won't be able to take advantage of some of Vista's advanced featured like Vista Aero simply because they won't have the muscle to do so. No doubt such PCs will be able to run the OS itself, just not do the really cool visual stuff.

So I wrote about a 'workaround' to consider - skin XP with WindowBlinds if you want something that has some of the Areo-like look-and-feel.

Some prety creative and imaginative Vista-like skins out there already.

Re: DX10/Vista - I totally agree.

It's clearly impossible to make Halo 2 run on a less powerful machine that doesn't run Vista/DX10.

Er, wait a second...wasn't Halo 2 an Xbox game? D'oh!

There is essentially no convincing reason why it's Vista only (other than a money saving and/or marketing exercise), given that Halo 2 runs on the original Xbox (which, iirc, basically runs a modified version of the Win2k Kernel with a customised version of DX8.1).

As mentioned, I'm a games developer, so you really will need more than transparent marketing bullshit to fool me.

Or is Halo 2 *really* so much more complicated and perf-demanding than games like Far Cry, Doom 3 and HL2, which seem to run ok on XP/DX9? I wonder how they managed it?

"I showed off a video that showed how audio and video would stop working on XP after some CPU stress was applied. It didn’t stop working on Vista"

Oh no. What did the Police say? Thank goodness there aren't any other games on XP that slow down if you run other CPU-intensive apps on them.

(Also: audio/video stops working on XP? That doesn't say much for XP, imho. I take it no-one should buy a copy of XP from today onwards if they want to play games on it.)

Yeah, what do you expect? it's Slashdot. What's next, complaining that the sky is blue? ;)

Have you checked out Compiz yet? Now THAT is open source window manager goodness: http://www.linuxedge.org/?q=node/58

The video of the demo is pretty mindblowing:
http://www.freedesktop.org/~davidr/xgl-demo1.xv...

Apple had the same BS when "Quartz Extreme" debuted. Nothing to get het up about. Besides - it's slashdot. When was the last thing anything was accurate?

At this point I doubt anyone goes to Slashdot expecting to find accurate info on MS. On the other hand, MS PR should (if they don't already) have a couple of people on staff who do nothing other than post corrections to the comments sections of sites like that. What's the old saying: A lie can run halfway around the world while the truth is still tying its shoes.

This has nothing to do with Slashdot. The same article is the third top-level story on Memeorandum now too. If you say that Slashdot is misrepresenting facts, so is Memeorandum. If anything, the blame is on Extremetech for publishing the original article.

Directx 10 is a massive design change over DX9. Virtual Video RAM, geometry shaders, less need for CAPS testing. DX 10 only runs on Vista which i assume is why Halo2 is vista only.

You have to remember that MS is still perceived as the big “Evil” one. Open source advocators, and those that support them will continue to use that to any advantage they can to get readers, regardless of accuracy. Biggest fish in the lake syndrome?

Tim: yesterday at Northern Voice I showed off a video that showed how audio and video would stop working on XP after some CPU stress was applied. It didn't stop working on Vista. There's more than just marketing behind that decision.

You make the mistake in thinking that slashdot is doing something called 'reporting'. It's basically a blog that points to interesting things and often as not includes an inflammatory summary.

Stuff like this usually gets pointed out/corrected in the comments on a story, which for me is what slashdot is about - the comments as much as the story itself. I've learned a lot from slashdot comments (caveat emptor, of course, and some of what I learned was meta-knowledge).

So, you know, it's more about the raw, some might say, naked conversations that happen on the site.

That sounds familiar :-)

(BTW, I also think you get guilt by association sometimes - e.g. the recent story about Halo 2 for PC being Vista only. As a games developer myself, I can think of some technical reasons for this, but they're pretty flimsy and even to me it seems like a cynical marketing move for Vista. So don't be surprised if people assume the worst about Vista stories as a result. Whatever ye sow...)