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Louisville, Kentucky has been the home to the Million Man Lan for several years running, and the facilities at their convention center are huge. It seems like an odd place, but having been to both the MML and to events in the midst of San Francisco, it's a lot easier to handle parking, lodging, and space issues in rural areas like KY, so it's not a bad choice. Just hope nobody gets wanderlust and wants to go exploring, because there's not a whole lot to see outside of the convention center.

Million Man LAN is in Louisville, KY. Its the summer event hosted by the same people as LanWar. Every 3 months they have a 500 person event, and once a year they do 1300 (more this year!) people.

Linux as a server, yes.

Linux as a desktop, no.. dual booting is useful. I keep all my binaries & important media in linux. The only thing windows really does well is games. Having the ability to nuke the windows partition every few months and lose nothing feels good.

Yea, using samba is fine, but it seems windows only acts up when you're at a lanparty or something. All you wanna do is play games.. so you nuke it, recopy over a backed up fresh install.. you're playing again in minutes.

But, i do agree with you to a point. Linux is best after it's been up for 200+ days or so. Gives the feeling of true reliability.

A) MillionManLan is just really large lanwar, which was started, and continues, in Louisville.

B) Louisville does have a Six flags, and a minor league baseball team or two if you really want to get out for a while.

C) It's a lan party, not a family vaction. 98% of the attendies are between the ages of 16 and 24 or so.

D) It's a central location in the US, so more ppl can attend.

D) Your there to play games!

E) I've been to a few lanwars, and the first mml. They totally kick ass, and there really is no reason to leave. ever. period. I wish I could be there right now with a couple of my really good friends, but I haven't earned enough vaction time at work yet to get a few days off and drive down.

1) He bashed on gamers, yet when you go to his (annoying blog) homepage, the second paragraph says this:

For some really dumb reason I've gotten hooked on Civilization 3. Yeah I know, the game is like 2 years old, but it's pretty cool. Last night I played it until about 4 am, at which point I developed an insane migrane and had to drink myself into a stupor just to make the pain go away (and let me fall asleep.) Good times had by all.

2) He claims that people who game too much can't get good jobs (using his 'old high school buddies' as examples), yet if you go read his homepage, you'll also see that not only does he not have a job, he's currently maybe getting one at a fast food place, and even that was unexpected. Hello, hypocrites anonymous calling.

3) In a reply to a reply he bashes on his 'old high school buddies' some more, and implies that LAN gaming centers don't work, then he says of the original story "it sounds like any number of half-baked plans that will never happen". Hello, earth to Ryan Amos, these things happen all the time, and that's just the ones I know by heart.

4) And finally, and by far the most damning, he said 'This is not a troll.' That's really all the evidence the moderators should need.

Now let's not start stereotyping LAN parties as a bunch of gaming tightwads arguing over who "hax."

Take LANwar for example. Parties such as LANwar are more of a fun time. There are no cash prizes, just small, nothing-too-outstanding tournaments like CPL. The aim is mostly fun

Also, there are forums set up with people from Tom's Hardware, ATI, AMD, Corsair, and people from other companies to talk to. Not to mention the ever-popular case modding competition. On the whole, the event isn't a typical LAN party. Everyone tries to have fun rather than pwnzor bitches and calling each other haxor noobs.

MML2 is coming up in June, it's slate for 1200 people or more i believe, probably one of the biggest events in North America.

Yeah, I actually asked the lead developer of the ATI's catalyst drivers about Linux support at lanwar 18 (reviewed here), and he blew me off with a "go look at the website, next!" answer.

I paid $5000 several months ago. It doesn't bother me, but it might bother some people.

Dell now offers the 8000, which is some degree cheaper. It's not nearly as light as the 5000e, but in most respects it is a superior system minus the extreme compact nature of the 5000e.

It's easy to say that if I were buying the system today I would rather have the 8000, for $2000 less.

Incidently, you are very wrong. I have a Pentium III based desktop system graced with 256 megabytes of ram and a GeForce 2 GTS and I can honestly say from personal experience that my desktop doesn't game THAT MUCH better than my laptop.

Yes, there is a performance difference. And in some things you can REALLY tell. But no, it's not "half as fast" as you put it. I can EASILY say without a doubt that my Laptop was outperforming many desktops I saw present at Lanwar.

I speak as an owner of both. If my 5000e gets to the point where the latest, greatest game isn't going to play well, I'll buy a new laptop.

As for the question of my Laptop getting stolen, I've known of few items* turn up missing at Lanwars in general. Maybe it's the mentality of gamers that the only thing it's okay to steal is copyrighted material. Besides, at Lanwar 9, I think I was the only person out of 380+ that showed up with a Laptop. I looked for others, but didn't see any.

*(As I recall, someone's stuffed animal turned up missing at Lanwar 9. It was announced over the PA, but this doesn't mean it was stolen, it could have just been misplaced.)

"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"

Yup. A Notbook. A fully loaded Dell 5000e.

128 megabytes of ram (ready for the other 128 megs any day now...) 30 gig HD, 850mhz Pentium III, Rage Mobility 128, 1600x1200 15+ inch display with RatioMetric Scaling, a DVD, and a 3Com CardBus 10/100+56k double height dongle-free Nic/Modem.

I've found that for almost any game I want to play, this groovy little gig is light, powerful, and a whole lot less trouble than "dragging along my big leather suitcase and my garment bag and my tenor saxophone and my twelve-pound bowling ball and my lucky, lucky autographed glow-in-the-dark snorkel" (well, hey, at least THAT'S what it feels like to drag your whole computer to LANWAR.

Anyway, I normally get a lot of ooohs and aaahs from the people sitting next to me. Their first reactions are "You aren't seriously going to play on a Laptop are you?"

But by the time they see me pulling off acceptable frame-rates in Quake 3 they soon realize maybe it's not so bad for games after all. (Just bring along a good mouse, touch-pads blow for games.)

Incidently, it even plays Black And White fairly well, and of course it plays Diablo II like a dream.

One thing to note about portables that anybody looking to buy one should keep in mine is the RatioMetric Displays.

Some LCDs only look good in their native resolution, requiring lower screen sizes to be scaled up into a blocky mess or to be reduced down and not viewed fullscreen.

ATI's later offerings have used a method where somewhere between the video output and the LCD, any display that isn't full screen is blown up to fill the full LCD with a natural Anti-Aliasing effect. This form of "Mode Promotion" works really well for almost any display mode, though anything less than 640x480 does seem to suffer from a slight blurr, but who uses anything lower than that for games?

Anyway, the point of this message is that you shouldn't discount very high end Laptops as Lanparty material. Just get over the $5000 price tag of one with good performance and you'll be fine.

"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"