Surprise: Slashdot misrepresents facts

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…)

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.xvid.avi

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.)

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.xvid.avi

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.

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.

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.

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

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

http://www.intel.com/products/chipsets/gma950/index.htm

Also stating Windows Vista ready spec here:
http://www.intel.com/business/bss/products/client/vistasolutions/mobile.htm

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

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.

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?

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.

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?

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).