9800 is quite decent for gaming though. I don't know why they mentioned "Intel's Ion Graphics". For starters, Ion is made by nVidia, and it's primarily a chipset with an integrated 9400 which is pretty much garbage for gaming, AND it's for the Atom CPU, which is weak.
Very little, I'd wager. Don't attribute something to careful thought and consideration for what can easily be explained by stupidity and/or ignorance.
Most users are too stupid to have opinions on trustworthiness in the first place. They get infected because just click the X on the stupid bubble that keeps popping up in their system tray telling them to update or renew their 30 day trial of crap antivirus that came with their PC.
You're looking at a demographic of probably less than 5% that actually gives a shit. The rest are just blissfully ignorant (and malware-ridden).
IE is removable in Win7. I know RTFA is not standard practice on Slashdot, but at least read the summary.
And you're right, the user prompt is stupid. 90% of people don't know or don't care what browser they use. Many of them will click on the blue e that they are used to. But, I also see this as drastically increasing Chrome's marketshare, because a lot of people will see 'Google' and click on that instead.
Opera and Firefox on the other hand, will see little love, unless someone really likes red or furry animals.
I don't understand this unwritten law that telcos must all act like they have some kind of mental handicap.
They're acting? Holy shit, they're good. That explains why Hollywood has almost no talent, and my cell bill is higher than my cable, internet, and home phone bill combined.
Really, the best option will be a second computer. You can buy great video cards just shy of $100, throw it in any computer with a PCI-Express slot, and be able to play CoH on pretty high settings.
Yeah seriously...back in my EQ heydays, $10-$15/month for 20-40 hours of entertainment (I was in college and highschool back then, what did you expect me to do, homework??) every WEEK. Plus the occasional $30 expansion.
Or $10 for 2 hours of entertainment at the movies. Real tough decision.
DVDs not as bad, but they aren't available at launch. Also, you almost never watch them enough compared to a game to get the same entertainment value. However, my LOTR Extended rivals ES4: Oblivion in dollars per hour of entertainment. And I did just about everything in that game...twice. On an unrelated note, I am now fluent in Elvish.
While I agree with you for Indiana and Terminator, Ghostbusters is different. It's a comedy/action movie. Who the hell can replace Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd?
I was mainly teaching a lesson: Never make blanket statements about technology on an open forum full of geeks. If a contradiction exists, they will find it.
I've never used either of them, personally. I just knew he was wrong:-)
Oh, and a side note, what you just said about the Porche can kinda apply to that other guy talking about BSOD's in Windows. It's been years since I have had one that was not a result of bad hardware drivers (or me tinkering with good drivers on unsupported hardware:-). I mean really, you can get essentially the same effect in Linux or OSX....mmm kernel panics....
Obviously you've never had to back up about 8TB of data, with about 200GB of incremental changes weekly. We manufacture products with custom artwork, so we go through a lot of larger art files every week. You have any idea how much fun it would be to split up that much data across LTO-3 tapes? And then do incrementals? And then test it regularly? Our stateside IT staff that would be responsible for the backups consists of one other person aside from myself. We don't have the time to maintain a tape-based system. We do a combination of offsite, online backups...some to our facilities in the Philippines in China for both backup and operating purposes, and some to our 'local' IPSs for purely backup purposes. We do keep an additional copy our 40GB SQL database for our ERP system backed up weekly to a portable hard drive that we switch with one in our safety deposit box each week.
While tapes have been 'standard business practice' for years, the technology is lagging behind and is becoming inadequeate, especially for large businesses (you think Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. back everything up on tapes?), but also smaller businesses, too.
I think you could get more than $2....$5 is a very reasonable number. Maybe even $10, but probably $5.
The bottom line is, anyone who does not want to pay for your book, IS NOT GOING TO PAY FOR YOUR BOOK. It doesn't really matter why. Don't even bother with anti-piracy measures, they won't work (Other than making your own site and working up some SEO magic to pagerank a bit higher).
What you want to do is to find the magic price point where virtually everyone who wants to buy your book, will buy your book. For an ebook, I think $5-$10 is probably it, depending on the book (ie a textbook normailly retailing for $100+ may be able to get more). This will eat into the paper sales too, and I'm definately not qualified to give you a good method to calculate what would be best. But the point is, you want a cheap, DRM-free, ebook.
Now there might be a way to recover some of those lost piracy sales. Host each page as an image, one per webpage, and stick an ad on it. It's really hard to say if this will generate enogh traffic to be worth the cost to do it, but I think it's worth a shot. For $5, I'd sure as hell pay for a downloadable ebook, as this would be ungodly annoying for practical use. And yes, it's easily piratable this way, but remember...they're going to pirate the ebook format regardless.
Anyway, just my two cents on the matter, take it for what it's worth.
Most entry-level helpdesk people make enough money in 20 minutes to buy a 4GB USB 2.0 flash drive.
However, launching a rocket into space is far from cheap. Sending it to Mars for a successful landing does not decrease the cost in the slightest. And you still need the same rough team size to run the thing.
But they are currently developing a new rover, one built on everything learned from Spirit and Opportunity.
Also, why does Spirit continually get the shaft? Crappy landing spot, bum wheel, can never find good winter shelter, and has been stuck in soil more than once now. Opportunity on the other hand landed near an amazing crater, and has had few mechanical issues, and the terrain has generaly been cooperative.
Well, their Web Admin said on the forums specifically that it is not a "marketing thing".
I don't think he could lie about that...but he could mislead away from the truth. 3DRealms no longer existing does not mean the entire DNF team has not been rehired and is still continuing to work on the game:-) So ultimately it may be a marketing thing in a way, but not directly.
And the timing is just too good. They mentioned this year they are hitting milestones and cutting content for a release....the first hints of a release date in at least 5 years. Not to mention, it happens almost exactly a month before E3. And now concept art, screens, and gameplay footage is 'leaked', and just enough of it to be consistent with the amount of material that other games release leading up to a game launch.
Not only that, what better way to drum up hype about a game? Announce the company is closing and hit news headlines everywhere.
And then we're probably just over-optimistic fools. But I don't think this is the end in either case...the game is an asset that is probably up for sale, and it has a great following, for better or for worse. Someone will release the damn thing.
It's plenty insightful. Installing Ubuntu on a single PC and it working fine is NOT a defintive picture of Linux on the desktop. I've installed various flavors of Linux on a respectable number of machines, and various versions of Windows on quite a few more, and here is what I have noticed:
Linux typically supports more, and comes with more out of the box (assuming a relatively loaded distro like Ubuntu). It has the applications most people need, and supports an amazing range of hardware. Ever so much more than Windows (Although each version does support quite a bit of new hardware at launch, it quickly lags behind).
The problems arise when you need something not in the box. Be it a driver or application, getting 3rd party stuff for Windows is FAR easier than with any Linux distro I have ever used. Yes, sometimes what you need is just a simple apt-get away. But far too often, it involves lengthy searches and scouring forums and downloading and trying different things, editing configs, etc.
This is not really a fault of Linux or the community (well, you can blame a few things on stubborn/elitist Linux fanboys), it's just a fact of the massive Windows marketshare. Which is slowly decreasing, and you can see this as support for OS X and Linux becomes more and more common from mainstream vendors.
But once everything is working, it works very well, and can be quite idiot-proof. Linux does a good job of not letting users screw it up. Windows takes quite a bit of configuraiton to achieve that (usually only seen in corporate domain environments).
nor that we have a divine right just because we built the Internet
You're absolutely right. We don't have the divine right just because we built it. We have the divine right because we built it AND because we can blow anyone who tries to take it away into tiny pieces.
It's just the usual Slashdot anti-MS FUD. One person somewhere probably didn't notice the 'Make browser default' option/dialog box, and it's clearly an epidemic. (I just now installed it on my 2k8 box, and it doesn't even prompt you to change the default until you run IE once) This line just says it all:
"If you have anyone you've set up with a more secure alternative browser, you might want to help check their settings after this."
Obviously, a browser that's been out for like a month must have a plethora of security issues, as it was made by Microsoft. Their prescious Firefox gifted to them by the Mozilla Gods is pure and untaintable, as always...
That's just ignorant fanboism, no matter which way you look at it. Assuming something will be a certain way without giving it a chance to show you what it can do. IE8 may be just as crappy as 6, but it has yet to prove itself either way. I've got a long list of tech companies I dislike or at least distrust, but I will give their product a fair shot, and give credit where it's due. Case-in-point: Intel. Sleazy, monopolistic bastards that produced sub-par CPUs compared to AMD for years. But their current Conroe/Core and subsequent architectures are amazing products.
I actually keep my less computer-savvy relatives and friends on IE. The amount of time I spend cleaning spyware is less than the amount of time I would spend explaining why certain websites don't work (and anything serious NOD32 picks up). And FF is far from immune to spyware...it will still let stupid users download and run executables.
And for the record, I'm an Opera user. I switched when FF was in version 2, because Opera was the faster browser by a pretty wide margin. I like FF3 just fine, it's speed is essentially identical to Opera...but I am just used to Opera's featuers so I stick with it for now. I guess the reason I am defensive about IE8 is the fact I see Microsoft focusing very hard on security, and doing good things like staying web-standards compliant, yet they recieve almost no credit for it, while at the same time I see people turning a blind eye to any issue with Firefox, or coming up with excuses for them, no matter how severe.
There was also an episode of DS9 where they go back in time to the 'Tribble' episode and run into Kirk, etc., and either O'Brien or Sisko asks Wharf about why the Klingons look different, and he says something like, "We do not discuss it with outsiders."
My biggest question is, what's the big deal with Quake 3? It's quite old and was never anything special...heck, I had it running my Dell Axim PDA nearly four years ago (shortly after the source was released).
Is it just because it's one of the most recent game engines where the source is availible? Or is there some other attribute that people like?
I know that may not be true for some large ISPs, but if it is a smaller ISP, they oversell bandwidth. And they HAVE to in order to survive and make a profit.
That is, if they're interested in making a profit. My ISP is a small, local, 100-year-old phone co-op. All profits get reinvested into the infrastructure and even occasionally paid out as dividends to the subscribers. They've fortunately had the foresight to start laying fiber all over town, so I get great high-speed internet, TV, and phone service. I usually run through around 300GB-400GB a month.
I know they don't oversell the bandwidth, cap, or throttle, because the General Manager is a good friend of mine:-) Most of their internet is currently done via WISP (Wireless microwave-based antennas..a lot of rural countryside, so), and those packages start at 512 and go to 3Mb..and despite being wireless, it works very well. The standard fiber service is 3/1Mb, 5/2Mb, and 10/3Mb....which isn't much compared to most fiber ISPs, but they can deliver custom amounts...I have 20/3Mb here at home and they only charge an additional $20 over the 10Mb plan. So at those speeds for a couple thousand subscribers, they don't need to have a lot of bandwidth available.
The other ISPs in the area are Verizon DSL and Time Warner Cable. I get something in the mail at least once a week from TWC begging me to switch. The funniest thing is their introductory rate is more expensive than what I pay now going by equivalent features.
Not just a newsletter, but any place that you know is a legitimate website/business, etc. should be more than safe to opt out of, because they have to adhere to CAN-SPAM Act or similar laws/regulations in other countries. Not only that, they may have a reputation worth upholding.
Virtually everything else is going to be a red flag to send you even more spam. They have zero accountability, and no incentive to stop because they are probably stealing the bandwidth from someone else's compromised PC anyway.
Really, this should be common sense for most of the Slashdot readership.
That is an extremely good point, however it may unfortunately be too late to stop the piracy by just improving economic/environmental conditions alone. From my limited understanding of the issue, there are many organized groups of pirates now, most with a hierarchal leadership structure. Those at the top are probably doing considerably better for themselves than what they did as fishermen (or whatever they did before). And if it's like most other organized crime, the leaders will go to great lengths to ensure they remain in power. So even if other ways to make a living become viable again, the pirates may still be forced to remain pirates for fear of repercussions from the leadership.
I think the best approach may be to do both...use the gung ho approach to take out the leadership and collapse the organization, and rejuvenate the economic conditions so that pirates may return to other occupations, and thereby prevent the whole mess from happening again.
Slashdot Mirror
If you use enough paint it becomes green.
9800 is quite decent for gaming though. I don't know why they mentioned "Intel's Ion Graphics". For starters, Ion is made by nVidia, and it's primarily a chipset with an integrated 9400 which is pretty much garbage for gaming, AND it's for the Atom CPU, which is weak.
Very little, I'd wager. Don't attribute something to careful thought and consideration for what can easily be explained by stupidity and/or ignorance.
Most users are too stupid to have opinions on trustworthiness in the first place. They get infected because just click the X on the stupid bubble that keeps popping up in their system tray telling them to update or renew their 30 day trial of crap antivirus that came with their PC.
You're looking at a demographic of probably less than 5% that actually gives a shit. The rest are just blissfully ignorant (and malware-ridden).
IE is removable in Win7. I know RTFA is not standard practice on Slashdot, but at least read the summary.
And you're right, the user prompt is stupid. 90% of people don't know or don't care what browser they use. Many of them will click on the blue e that they are used to. But, I also see this as drastically increasing Chrome's marketshare, because a lot of people will see 'Google' and click on that instead.
Opera and Firefox on the other hand, will see little love, unless someone really likes red or furry animals.
I don't understand this unwritten law that telcos must all act like they have some kind of mental handicap.
They're acting? Holy shit, they're good. That explains why Hollywood has almost no talent, and my cell bill is higher than my cable, internet, and home phone bill combined.
RDP is NOT designed for 3D Games :-)
Really, the best option will be a second computer. You can buy great video cards just shy of $100, throw it in any computer with a PCI-Express slot, and be able to play CoH on pretty high settings.
Yeah seriously...back in my EQ heydays, $10-$15/month for 20-40 hours of entertainment (I was in college and highschool back then, what did you expect me to do, homework??) every WEEK. Plus the occasional $30 expansion.
Or $10 for 2 hours of entertainment at the movies. Real tough decision.
DVDs not as bad, but they aren't available at launch. Also, you almost never watch them enough compared to a game to get the same entertainment value. However, my LOTR Extended rivals ES4: Oblivion in dollars per hour of entertainment. And I did just about everything in that game...twice. On an unrelated note, I am now fluent in Elvish.
While I agree with you for Indiana and Terminator, Ghostbusters is different. It's a comedy/action movie. Who the hell can replace Bill Murray and Dan Akroyd?
I was mainly teaching a lesson: Never make blanket statements about technology on an open forum full of geeks. If a contradiction exists, they will find it.
I've never used either of them, personally. I just knew he was wrong :-)
Oh, and a side note, what you just said about the Porche can kinda apply to that other guy talking about BSOD's in Windows. It's been years since I have had one that was not a result of bad hardware drivers (or me tinkering with good drivers on unsupported hardware :-). I mean really, you can get essentially the same effect in Linux or OSX....mmm kernel panics....
Yeah, only amateurs use Windows software like this for multimedia.
Obviously you've never had to back up about 8TB of data, with about 200GB of incremental changes weekly. We manufacture products with custom artwork, so we go through a lot of larger art files every week. You have any idea how much fun it would be to split up that much data across LTO-3 tapes? And then do incrementals? And then test it regularly? Our stateside IT staff that would be responsible for the backups consists of one other person aside from myself. We don't have the time to maintain a tape-based system. We do a combination of offsite, online backups...some to our facilities in the Philippines in China for both backup and operating purposes, and some to our 'local' IPSs for purely backup purposes. We do keep an additional copy our 40GB SQL database for our ERP system backed up weekly to a portable hard drive that we switch with one in our safety deposit box each week.
While tapes have been 'standard business practice' for years, the technology is lagging behind and is becoming inadequeate, especially for large businesses (you think Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc. back everything up on tapes?), but also smaller businesses, too.
I think you could get more than $2....$5 is a very reasonable number. Maybe even $10, but probably $5.
The bottom line is, anyone who does not want to pay for your book, IS NOT GOING TO PAY FOR YOUR BOOK. It doesn't really matter why. Don't even bother with anti-piracy measures, they won't work (Other than making your own site and working up some SEO magic to pagerank a bit higher).
What you want to do is to find the magic price point where virtually everyone who wants to buy your book, will buy your book. For an ebook, I think $5-$10 is probably it, depending on the book (ie a textbook normailly retailing for $100+ may be able to get more). This will eat into the paper sales too, and I'm definately not qualified to give you a good method to calculate what would be best. But the point is, you want a cheap, DRM-free, ebook.
Now there might be a way to recover some of those lost piracy sales. Host each page as an image, one per webpage, and stick an ad on it. It's really hard to say if this will generate enogh traffic to be worth the cost to do it, but I think it's worth a shot. For $5, I'd sure as hell pay for a downloadable ebook, as this would be ungodly annoying for practical use. And yes, it's easily piratable this way, but remember...they're going to pirate the ebook format regardless.
Anyway, just my two cents on the matter, take it for what it's worth.
I've seen them go for $6, and I used a little dramatic exaggeration. The point at hand is the rovers. Sheesh.
Most entry-level helpdesk people make enough money in 20 minutes to buy a 4GB USB 2.0 flash drive.
However, launching a rocket into space is far from cheap. Sending it to Mars for a successful landing does not decrease the cost in the slightest. And you still need the same rough team size to run the thing.
But they are currently developing a new rover, one built on everything learned from Spirit and Opportunity.
Also, why does Spirit continually get the shaft? Crappy landing spot, bum wheel, can never find good winter shelter, and has been stuck in soil more than once now. Opportunity on the other hand landed near an amazing crater, and has had few mechanical issues, and the terrain has generaly been cooperative.
Well, their Web Admin said on the forums specifically that it is not a "marketing thing". I don't think he could lie about that...but he could mislead away from the truth. 3DRealms no longer existing does not mean the entire DNF team has not been rehired and is still continuing to work on the game :-) So ultimately it may be a marketing thing in a way, but not directly.
And the timing is just too good. They mentioned this year they are hitting milestones and cutting content for a release....the first hints of a release date in at least 5 years. Not to mention, it happens almost exactly a month before E3. And now concept art, screens, and gameplay footage is 'leaked', and just enough of it to be consistent with the amount of material that other games release leading up to a game launch.
Not only that, what better way to drum up hype about a game? Announce the company is closing and hit news headlines everywhere.
And then we're probably just over-optimistic fools. But I don't think this is the end in either case...the game is an asset that is probably up for sale, and it has a great following, for better or for worse. Someone will release the damn thing.
It's plenty insightful. Installing Ubuntu on a single PC and it working fine is NOT a defintive picture of Linux on the desktop. I've installed various flavors of Linux on a respectable number of machines, and various versions of Windows on quite a few more, and here is what I have noticed:
Linux typically supports more, and comes with more out of the box (assuming a relatively loaded distro like Ubuntu). It has the applications most people need, and supports an amazing range of hardware. Ever so much more than Windows (Although each version does support quite a bit of new hardware at launch, it quickly lags behind).
The problems arise when you need something not in the box. Be it a driver or application, getting 3rd party stuff for Windows is FAR easier than with any Linux distro I have ever used. Yes, sometimes what you need is just a simple apt-get away. But far too often, it involves lengthy searches and scouring forums and downloading and trying different things, editing configs, etc.
This is not really a fault of Linux or the community (well, you can blame a few things on stubborn/elitist Linux fanboys), it's just a fact of the massive Windows marketshare. Which is slowly decreasing, and you can see this as support for OS X and Linux becomes more and more common from mainstream vendors.
But once everything is working, it works very well, and can be quite idiot-proof. Linux does a good job of not letting users screw it up. Windows takes quite a bit of configuraiton to achieve that (usually only seen in corporate domain environments).
nor that we have a divine right just because we built the Internet
You're absolutely right. We don't have the divine right just because we built it. We have the divine right because we built it AND because we can blow anyone who tries to take it away into tiny pieces.
It's just the usual Slashdot anti-MS FUD. One person somewhere probably didn't notice the 'Make browser default' option/dialog box, and it's clearly an epidemic. (I just now installed it on my 2k8 box, and it doesn't even prompt you to change the default until you run IE once) This line just says it all:
"If you have anyone you've set up with a more secure alternative browser, you might want to help check their settings after this."
Obviously, a browser that's been out for like a month must have a plethora of security issues, as it was made by Microsoft. Their prescious Firefox gifted to them by the Mozilla Gods is pure and untaintable, as always...
That's just ignorant fanboism, no matter which way you look at it. Assuming something will be a certain way without giving it a chance to show you what it can do. IE8 may be just as crappy as 6, but it has yet to prove itself either way. I've got a long list of tech companies I dislike or at least distrust, but I will give their product a fair shot, and give credit where it's due. Case-in-point: Intel. Sleazy, monopolistic bastards that produced sub-par CPUs compared to AMD for years. But their current Conroe/Core and subsequent architectures are amazing products.
I actually keep my less computer-savvy relatives and friends on IE. The amount of time I spend cleaning spyware is less than the amount of time I would spend explaining why certain websites don't work (and anything serious NOD32 picks up). And FF is far from immune to spyware...it will still let stupid users download and run executables.
And for the record, I'm an Opera user. I switched when FF was in version 2, because Opera was the faster browser by a pretty wide margin. I like FF3 just fine, it's speed is essentially identical to Opera...but I am just used to Opera's featuers so I stick with it for now. I guess the reason I am defensive about IE8 is the fact I see Microsoft focusing very hard on security, and doing good things like staying web-standards compliant, yet they recieve almost no credit for it, while at the same time I see people turning a blind eye to any issue with Firefox, or coming up with excuses for them, no matter how severe.
There was also an episode of DS9 where they go back in time to the 'Tribble' episode and run into Kirk, etc., and either O'Brien or Sisko asks Wharf about why the Klingons look different, and he says something like, "We do not discuss it with outsiders."
My biggest question is, what's the big deal with Quake 3? It's quite old and was never anything special...heck, I had it running my Dell Axim PDA nearly four years ago (shortly after the source was released).
Is it just because it's one of the most recent game engines where the source is availible? Or is there some other attribute that people like?
That's actualy a great idea. Just include this link with a copy of the English language versions:
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=learn+to+speak+english
Problem solved!
I know that may not be true for some large ISPs, but if it is a smaller ISP, they oversell bandwidth. And they HAVE to in order to survive and make a profit.
That is, if they're interested in making a profit. My ISP is a small, local, 100-year-old phone co-op. All profits get reinvested into the infrastructure and even occasionally paid out as dividends to the subscribers. They've fortunately had the foresight to start laying fiber all over town, so I get great high-speed internet, TV, and phone service. I usually run through around 300GB-400GB a month.
:-) Most of their internet is currently done via WISP (Wireless microwave-based antennas..a lot of rural countryside, so), and those packages start at 512 and go to 3Mb..and despite being wireless, it works very well. The standard fiber service is 3/1Mb, 5/2Mb, and 10/3Mb....which isn't much compared to most fiber ISPs, but they can deliver custom amounts...I have 20/3Mb here at home and they only charge an additional $20 over the 10Mb plan. So at those speeds for a couple thousand subscribers, they don't need to have a lot of bandwidth available.
I know they don't oversell the bandwidth, cap, or throttle, because the General Manager is a good friend of mine
The other ISPs in the area are Verizon DSL and Time Warner Cable. I get something in the mail at least once a week from TWC begging me to switch. The funniest thing is their introductory rate is more expensive than what I pay now going by equivalent features.
If by 'safe', you mean 'not damaged beyond re-attachability' then probably.
Doesn't sound strange to me...I thought all that was Dell SOP?
Not just a newsletter, but any place that you know is a legitimate website/business, etc. should be more than safe to opt out of, because they have to adhere to CAN-SPAM Act or similar laws/regulations in other countries. Not only that, they may have a reputation worth upholding.
Virtually everything else is going to be a red flag to send you even more spam. They have zero accountability, and no incentive to stop because they are probably stealing the bandwidth from someone else's compromised PC anyway.
Really, this should be common sense for most of the Slashdot readership.
That is an extremely good point, however it may unfortunately be too late to stop the piracy by just improving economic/environmental conditions alone. From my limited understanding of the issue, there are many organized groups of pirates now, most with a hierarchal leadership structure. Those at the top are probably doing considerably better for themselves than what they did as fishermen (or whatever they did before). And if it's like most other organized crime, the leaders will go to great lengths to ensure they remain in power. So even if other ways to make a living become viable again, the pirates may still be forced to remain pirates for fear of repercussions from the leadership.
I think the best approach may be to do both...use the gung ho approach to take out the leadership and collapse the organization, and rejuvenate the economic conditions so that pirates may return to other occupations, and thereby prevent the whole mess from happening again.