You seem to think bigger = well ventelated. I suppose that is true if you run with the case side off, but then again odds are that will make actual components run hotter with no directed airflow.
Shuttle (and other SFF systems) have some of the most engineered cooling solutions in the industry, rivaling Apple. http://sfftech.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=563&pid=2138 has a good showing of how Shuttle normally cools their P series chassis. Instead of a few fast fans at the front, and a few fast ones at the back, they have thermal zones. The heat off the CPU never goes into the case, it is all blown out the side, and they do quite a bit to isolate it.
An SLI capable SFF box means that yet again, someone can have the fastest gaming box at a LAN, and it didn't break their back carying in some monstrosity of a case that never actually sees the 8-10 PCI expansion slots on the back used.
Spme Alpha engineers went to AMD when Compaq bought DEC, but not all of them. The ones left went to Intel when HP and Compaq merged, to work on the Itanic.
I loved the B5 series and miss it. But given the [poor] quality of the B5 telemovie (Legend of the Rangers), is this really so bad?
Actually, Legend of the Rangers did decently ratings wise on SciFi, in markets where it did not air alongside the final NFL playoff game before the Super Bowl. Basicially, some crazy people flew some planes into buildings around september 2001, and thus the NFL season was delayed a bit. Normally the movie would have aired on an otherwise uneventful weekend, but none of the execs at SciFi moved it off the date after the attacks.
The ratings were good enough that JMS would have been given a green light for the series.
Of course, with SciFi crapping all over Farscape, the series would have probably been canned when it got out of the season one rut major story arc series have.
Didn't they do something like this with the Trillian protocol on MSN Messenger?
No. Back around the last major MSN protocal change (MSN Messenger v4), Microsoft alerted the Trillian developers to the changes ahead of time.
AOL (AIM and ICQ) and Yahoo have made attempts to block third parties. Microsoft hasn't. Last time MSN broke on Trillian, it was an accident on Microsofts side that also broke compatibility with some 4.x clients, around the time MSN Messenger 6 came out.
I said the Gamecube ships with no network connectivity, and as far as I know that is still true. I am very much aware of the broadband adaptors, as I own one, and have even tried the tunneling solutions.
X-Box didn't really bring anything new to the console market.
Now, I'm no huge fan of the XBox, nor Microsoft. But I will give credit where it is due. The XBox (a year after launch) brought the best online connectivity solution out, passing what Sega was starting to do on the Dreamcast. The XBox live service blows away gaming online on any other console. GameCube has what, one true online game? Playstation has a few, but they don't link in any way, so I can't see if my friends are playing game A or B. Lastly on the online area, the XBox shipped standard with ethernet for online play. Dreamcast shipped standard with a modem. Gamecube ships with no connectivity option, and only recently were PS2s being sold with the networking built in (the mini PS2), or with an adaptor in the box.
The XBox also excels in putting out more HD games then any other console. Gamecube only does 480p, and the PS2 claims to do 480p as well on some games. Neither outdo almost every Dreamcast game supporting 480p, except the XBox going on to also support 720p and in some cases 1080i.
Then there is audio. Way better support from the developers for full 5.1 sound out of the XBox compared to any of the others.
I didn't even touch on the hard drive yet and already have 3 major points. The drive allows expansions to games, like the added game types and maps to MechAssault. Though that I feel was more due to MechAssalult being rushed for release, but hey, at least it could be added later.
The first next gen console I got was the Dreamcast and loved it. Next I got a Gamecube, just because Nintendo does indeed do well in making fun to play games. I picked up my XBox when Steel Battalion came out (I'm a mech junkie), and finally only recently got a mini PS2 and several of the now $20 games. I still have more GameCube games over any other console, but that may change now that I own an HDTV and want to see more games on it take advantage of the higher resolution. I don't like the idea of supporting Microsoft a ton here, but they are doing a decent job in the console space. I saw both the Gamecube and PS2 as a downgrade to the Dreamcast in several areas, only the XBox was an upgrade to me.
Now, it's very likely that the above poster upgraded his config files blindly and this is what messed up his installation
Nope. I spent actually a great deal of time in etc-update after this last upgrade. Problem is, the location of smbpasswd wasn't set in my smb.conf file, so it used the default. It upgraded me to Samba 3.0.10 from I think 3.0.7. I don't recall smb.conf being a file I saw in etc-update, so it remained my old file. I actually just looked uver my saved terminal buffer from the update and found a bug.
*/etc/samba/private moved to/var/lib/samba/private
* Copying/etc/samba/private/* to/var/lib/samba/private/ cp: `/var/tmp/portage/samba-3.0.10/image//var/lib/samb a/private/': specified destination directory does not exist Try `cp --help' for more information.
So emerge did try to move things for me to the new default, but failed. Since it figured this was automaticially done, it didn't hilite the change at the end of the ebuild process.
Bugs like this shouldn't make it into stable for a distribution that is "enterprise ready".
I hate to say this, but after running Gentoo on my home server for a year, it is not enterprise worthy.
Main reason?
Sure, on the surface, Gentoo seems easy to update. Problem is, updates break things. Time and again, I have watched emerge upgrade things, possibly give me important info somewhere in the millions of lines of code it scrolls pointlessly, then I reboot to a service not acting right. This last emerge cycle left me with:
Samba in a broken state. Non protected shares worked, anything else gave access denied. Why? Someone decided to move the default location of smbpasswd and didn't notify me in a way to catch it since I wasn't watching emerge line by line.
Apache was broken. It would start one process and hang. Examining the error log showed a problem in PHP. For some reason, it missed a package that has to be recompiled every time PHP is upgraded.
Postfix has been broken in the past by similar, as well as my imap server. Filing a bug report on one of the changes was simply met with "so, deal with it" basicially.
Gentoo has a lot of hype. Actually using it across 10 servers scares me though. It turns out to be worse then any other distro in the amount of work needed to keep it up to date, since you get to spend time hunting down problems. At lease SuSE was nice enough to generate messages to root about important changes I may need to check on manually.
and the 9800 doesn't have a centrino processor (those P4 M processors get very warm).
I own the i9100, it's not even a P4-M chip. It's a complete normal P4 Prescott running on a 865G desktop chipset. The only speedstepping it does is BIOS controlled when on battery and it is mandatory. Probably to avoid trying to pull so much power from just the battery. The mobile 9800 is just a desktop R420 chip slapped onto a mobile board. Great gaming system though. I got it to LAN with some friends a few times a month.
For a real portable system, I have the Powerbook. It has never had a critical issue affect it. Sure, since I was an early adoptor of the 15 inch aluminum, I got to deal with the white spots. But that consisted of me taking it to a local reseller and drooling over the G5 while they replaced the screen in 20 mins. The iBook logic board problem is really the only recent issue from Apple that could cause downtime, and the fact that they are extending warranty coverage on that particular issue is great.
Make sure never to buy from them either, since aparently a company admitting a problem and fixing it for free is too much for you to deal with. While your at it, make sure to sell any vehicle you own, as it is likely that company has also issued recall notices on some of their products. Next up, make sure to avoid the grocery stores. They have recall notices posted all the time too.
Shadowbane was another MMO released on a hybrid disc day one. Though it was pretty crappy, and only the recent expansion is bring it up to kinda crappy. The player controlled world was a nice concept, but lacked any way of holding people responsible for their actions. The devs couldn't fix over used exploits, and gold duping ruined the economy very quickly. GM events died early on (though the GM events I attended managed to keep Shadowbane in high praise by me for a while).
WoW on the other hand has impressed me day one, has had less launch issues then SB with quite literially 10 times the players day one alone, and has content everywhere. The holiday patch was amazing for how much stuff it actually added to the world.
The fact that I can play on my Powerbook or PC is awesome, though I learned with SB, playing in bed is a bad idea. Fell asleep once and woke up to my party asking what happened, and my corpse on the ground.
Being that I own 2 Rio Cars, I rather quite like them. And because I have used a variant for now over 5 years, anything less seems wrong. It is why I can't really stand an iPod, has too many limitations. The Karma is better, but yet it still doesn't officially do hierarchal playlists.
The best solutions would be the iPod style dock. However, the head unit should not use the iPod for the interface, instead pull the database files and present a more user friendly interface on the head unit. User friendly in this case being one specificially adapted for car use.
The theoritical Mark 3 design of the empeg (Rio Car was Mark 2) used a removable hard drive instead of a removable DIN unit, and has a CD drive in it as well. Sadly Rio exited the car market before one could be made.
There is still one big advantage of my Rio Car though. The pull out design means I can take it inside and hook it to my stereo and resume playing the same music. Mark Lord made some excellent home docks for this purpose, so a dock could just sit in the living room attached to the stereo. Then via ethernet, I can still sync new songs. Or via ethernet, control what is playing, or stream music to a computer. This is something the Karma does too, ethernet in the dock, though the built in software only lets you sunc to the Karma, no remote control or streaming is possible currently.
Thus far, the empeg remains the most advanced MP3 player I have seen, and it came out back when people were trying to hook up MP3 players to a CD changer. Sadly 6 years later, people are still trying to do the same in car, and the popular portable player still lacks basic things like gapless playback.
iMovie and iDVD can't play all of the video formats that quicktime does.
Thats likely intentional. Why allow iMovie to edit everything under the sun? Make it work with DV only for home users. If you want more, invest $300 in Final Cut Express.
The Windows Movie Maker/Media player comment was more about the integration iLife has. In iMovie, I click a music tab to see my iTunes collection to add as background music. Movie Maker offers no such integration.
It is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?
Yep. Because when Apple does it, the end user sees a benefit. When Microsoft does it, their market share increases. There was no logical reason to integrate the entire browser into the OS like it was in Windows 9x. The proper and better way is to embed an API, and put a browser out that works off that, like how OS X (Safari) and 2000/XP do it. Remember how in 98 IE crashes could make the taskbar disappear?
The integration between the iLife apps is a great example of good integration. On the Windows side, Movie Maker ignores Windows Media Player to find music, and the photo stuff in the OS is horrible and can't be turned into a movie slideshow easially.
How many people here actually went out and bought a Linux computer from a vendor? Sure, Linux desktops probably outsold Mac desktops, but check on how many of those Linux desktops were sold into enterprise enviornments. It's probably going to be most of them. The home linux market is very hard to measure. So, when a publisher looks at platforms, they tend to choose Mac above Linux due to the home market numbers that they can see, and the ease of porting a game to a platform that hasn't had as many moving API targets.
I run a small web board, and already the e-mail address I use as the admin of that board gets flooded daily with crap like "I haven't actually received your message, click here to verify you are real". I finally got fed up with it and posted this response.
If you implement these, remember you get e-mail from more then just friends you know. Lets see, last week alone, I got 5 messages from companies like Dell from working on issues with them, and none of them are in my address book.
The proper solution is to ensure the outside world sees no difference unless it is spam. I never give my full address to a company, instead I use the postfix feature where anything after _ is ignored. Then I create a one letter alias for me to keep them short. If I get a lot of e-mail, it makes server side filtering into my IMap folders easy. And if one address gets hit by spam, I then block it on the server. It works well, and doesn't inconvenience the people e-mailing me.
"Thank you or ringing my doorbell. I am currently home, but did not hear the doorbell. To properly ring it, please run around my house, braving the dogs in back, and use the doorbell located next to the cat door on the deck. Then I might care enough to see who you are and let you in."
This again brings up a major complaint of mine with Linux on the desktop. Lack of standards for companies to just use and get things done. Why didn't Doom 3 for Linux ship with this? Why does about every game I have bought in the past two years on Windows support surround sound just fine? The community needs to look at issues like this, and agree to come togther to solve them, instead of creating 5 ways to fix it.
For now, and the forseeable future, my OS plans are this: Linux on the server Windows on the gaming PC OS X on the machine to do everything else
I'd love for Linux to replace Windows on my gaming box, and it is one reason I watch WineX carefully.
Microsoft + Echostar = DishPlayer Microsoft + DirecTV = Ultimate TV Microsoft + Comcast = ?
I actually owned a DishPlayer. The problems with it to me wern't horrible, but it did cause a class action lawsuit to be brought against Echostar. Their new PVRs never matched the features of the DishPlayer, but they at least were stable.
Don't tell Alex the chip is similar to the G5, or he might start smashing perfectly good XBox and Playstations on the air to appear as an even bigger idiot then when he smashed the working Mac instead of either trying OS X, or donating it.
I stopped watching The ScreenSavers often when G4 took over, and completly when it moved to LA.
Ok, I'm a new developer. How do I fund my game? Pre-sell it through a Steam like program collecting money at the pre-sell, then coming out with it 3 years later? No.
I go and talk to a game publisher, they loan me money, then when the game does well, the loan is paid off. If it doesn't then thats another story. The publisher also has people to decide if the game idea will do well, by testing it on play testers and such.
I am not saying existing publishers are great. I'm just mostly trying to say getting rid of them completly to me seems like a very bad idea.
This is all overly simplistic, but I think it gets the point across.
Sounds like a move to try and get people to see Steam, and consider not buying the next Valve product in the stores.
Some ideas of Steam are nice, but I still don't like the idea of buying a product through it. Skipping the publishers is a bad thing, as they fund the new games. Sure, publishers need to treat the developers better, but to try and axe them out of the picture completely is a bad idea.
hip-e: 1.5 gHz Pentium M 17 inch LCD at 1400x900 DVD reader/CD writer Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64 MB 120 gig PATA drive 7200 RPM 512 MB RAM 802.11g Wireless TV Module and DVR software Wireless Keyboard Wireless Mouse 8-in-1 media card reader Built in Spyware, err, "Sweepstakes LED" Windows XP (no comment on Home or Pro) MS Office Student edition AIM 1 year warranty $1699
iMac: 1.6 gHz G5 17 inch LCD at 1440x900 Combo drive (DVD reader/CD writer) GeForce FX 5200 with 64 MB 160 gig SATA drive 7200 RPM (subtract $100 for an 80 gig) 512 MB RAM Airport Extreme (802.11g wireless) Bluetooth Keyboard Bluetooth Mouse Bluetooth module (comes with the keyboard and mouse when ordered with the iMac) Mac OS X Panther iLife 04 (iTunes, iDVD, iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand) Appleworks 6 WorldBook Encyclopedia Quicken 2004 Nanosaur 2 and Marble Blast games 1 year warranty $1652
A LaCie 8-in-1 reader is $30 from Apple.com An Elgato Eye TV 200 Firewire TV tuner and DVR is $330.
So feature wise on the hardware, the hip-e comes out ahead in price.
Performance I think would go to the iMac though, and the extra software it has is nice.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to think bigger = well ventelated. I suppose that is true if you run with the case side off, but then again odds are that will make actual components run hotter with no directed airflow.
Shuttle (and other SFF systems) have some of the most engineered cooling solutions in the industry, rivaling Apple. http://sfftech.com/showdocs.cfm?aid=563&pid=2138 has a good showing of how Shuttle normally cools their P series chassis. Instead of a few fast fans at the front, and a few fast ones at the back, they have thermal zones. The heat off the CPU never goes into the case, it is all blown out the side, and they do quite a bit to isolate it.
An SLI capable SFF box means that yet again, someone can have the fastest gaming box at a LAN, and it didn't break their back carying in some monstrosity of a case that never actually sees the 8-10 PCI expansion slots on the back used.
Spme Alpha engineers went to AMD when Compaq bought DEC, but not all of them. The ones left went to Intel when HP and Compaq merged, to work on the Itanic.
I loved the B5 series and miss it. But given the [poor] quality of the B5 telemovie (Legend of the Rangers), is this really so bad?
Actually, Legend of the Rangers did decently ratings wise on SciFi, in markets where it did not air alongside the final NFL playoff game before the Super Bowl. Basicially, some crazy people flew some planes into buildings around september 2001, and thus the NFL season was delayed a bit. Normally the movie would have aired on an otherwise uneventful weekend, but none of the execs at SciFi moved it off the date after the attacks.
The ratings were good enough that JMS would have been given a green light for the series.
Of course, with SciFi crapping all over Farscape, the series would have probably been canned when it got out of the season one rut major story arc series have.
Didn't they do something like this with the Trillian protocol on MSN Messenger?
No. Back around the last major MSN protocal change (MSN Messenger v4), Microsoft alerted the Trillian developers to the changes ahead of time.
AOL (AIM and ICQ) and Yahoo have made attempts to block third parties. Microsoft hasn't. Last time MSN broke on Trillian, it was an accident on Microsofts side that also broke compatibility with some 4.x clients, around the time MSN Messenger 6 came out.
I said the Gamecube ships with no network connectivity, and as far as I know that is still true. I am very much aware of the broadband adaptors, as I own one, and have even tried the tunneling solutions.
X-Box didn't really bring anything new to the console market.
Now, I'm no huge fan of the XBox, nor Microsoft. But I will give credit where it is due. The XBox (a year after launch) brought the best online connectivity solution out, passing what Sega was starting to do on the Dreamcast. The XBox live service blows away gaming online on any other console. GameCube has what, one true online game? Playstation has a few, but they don't link in any way, so I can't see if my friends are playing game A or B. Lastly on the online area, the XBox shipped standard with ethernet for online play. Dreamcast shipped standard with a modem. Gamecube ships with no connectivity option, and only recently were PS2s being sold with the networking built in (the mini PS2), or with an adaptor in the box.
The XBox also excels in putting out more HD games then any other console. Gamecube only does 480p, and the PS2 claims to do 480p as well on some games. Neither outdo almost every Dreamcast game supporting 480p, except the XBox going on to also support 720p and in some cases 1080i.
Then there is audio. Way better support from the developers for full 5.1 sound out of the XBox compared to any of the others.
I didn't even touch on the hard drive yet and already have 3 major points. The drive allows expansions to games, like the added game types and maps to MechAssault. Though that I feel was more due to MechAssalult being rushed for release, but hey, at least it could be added later.
The first next gen console I got was the Dreamcast and loved it. Next I got a Gamecube, just because Nintendo does indeed do well in making fun to play games. I picked up my XBox when Steel Battalion came out (I'm a mech junkie), and finally only recently got a mini PS2 and several of the now $20 games. I still have more GameCube games over any other console, but that may change now that I own an HDTV and want to see more games on it take advantage of the higher resolution. I don't like the idea of supporting Microsoft a ton here, but they are doing a decent job in the console space. I saw both the Gamecube and PS2 as a downgrade to the Dreamcast in several areas, only the XBox was an upgrade to me.
Now, it's very likely that the above poster upgraded his config files blindly and this is what messed up his installation
/etc/samba/private moved to /var/lib/samba/private /etc/samba/private/* to /var/lib/samba/private/b a/private/': specified destination directory does not exist
Nope. I spent actually a great deal of time in etc-update after this last upgrade. Problem is, the location of smbpasswd wasn't set in my smb.conf file, so it used the default. It upgraded me to Samba 3.0.10 from I think 3.0.7. I don't recall smb.conf being a file I saw in etc-update, so it remained my old file. I actually just looked uver my saved terminal buffer from the update and found a bug.
*
* Copying
cp: `/var/tmp/portage/samba-3.0.10/image//var/lib/sam
Try `cp --help' for more information.
So emerge did try to move things for me to the new default, but failed. Since it figured this was automaticially done, it didn't hilite the change at the end of the ebuild process.
Bugs like this shouldn't make it into stable for a distribution that is "enterprise ready".
I hate to say this, but after running Gentoo on my home server for a year, it is not enterprise worthy.
Main reason?
Sure, on the surface, Gentoo seems easy to update. Problem is, updates break things. Time and again, I have watched emerge upgrade things, possibly give me important info somewhere in the millions of lines of code it scrolls pointlessly, then I reboot to a service not acting right. This last emerge cycle left me with:
Samba in a broken state. Non protected shares worked, anything else gave access denied. Why? Someone decided to move the default location of smbpasswd and didn't notify me in a way to catch it since I wasn't watching emerge line by line.
Apache was broken. It would start one process and hang. Examining the error log showed a problem in PHP. For some reason, it missed a package that has to be recompiled every time PHP is upgraded.
Postfix has been broken in the past by similar, as well as my imap server. Filing a bug report on one of the changes was simply met with "so, deal with it" basicially.
Gentoo has a lot of hype. Actually using it across 10 servers scares me though. It turns out to be worse then any other distro in the amount of work needed to keep it up to date, since you get to spend time hunting down problems. At lease SuSE was nice enough to generate messages to root about important changes I may need to check on manually.
and the 9800 doesn't have a centrino processor (those P4 M processors get very warm).
I own the i9100, it's not even a P4-M chip. It's a complete normal P4 Prescott running on a 865G desktop chipset. The only speedstepping it does is BIOS controlled when on battery and it is mandatory. Probably to avoid trying to pull so much power from just the battery. The mobile 9800 is just a desktop R420 chip slapped onto a mobile board. Great gaming system though. I got it to LAN with some friends a few times a month.
For a real portable system, I have the Powerbook. It has never had a critical issue affect it. Sure, since I was an early adoptor of the 15 inch aluminum, I got to deal with the white spots. But that consisted of me taking it to a local reseller and drooling over the G5 while they replaced the screen in 20 mins. The iBook logic board problem is really the only recent issue from Apple that could cause downtime, and the fact that they are extending warranty coverage on that particular issue is great.
HP Recalls
Dell Recalls
Make sure never to buy from them either, since aparently a company admitting a problem and fixing it for free is too much for you to deal with. While your at it, make sure to sell any vehicle you own, as it is likely that company has also issued recall notices on some of their products. Next up, make sure to avoid the grocery stores. They have recall notices posted all the time too.
People are going to be pretty confused about the different key names when they use a regular PC keyboard with the Mini.
Control maps to Control
Alt maps to Alt (Option)
Windows key maps to the Apple (Command) key
The only difference is that Apple keyboards put Ctrl and Alt togther, instead of putting the Windows/Apple key in the middle.
I'm betting it comes with a quick start poster that explains this, so I don't see it being too bad.
Shadowbane was another MMO released on a hybrid disc day one. Though it was pretty crappy, and only the recent expansion is bring it up to kinda crappy. The player controlled world was a nice concept, but lacked any way of holding people responsible for their actions. The devs couldn't fix over used exploits, and gold duping ruined the economy very quickly. GM events died early on (though the GM events I attended managed to keep Shadowbane in high praise by me for a while).
WoW on the other hand has impressed me day one, has had less launch issues then SB with quite literially 10 times the players day one alone, and has content everywhere. The holiday patch was amazing for how much stuff it actually added to the world.
The fact that I can play on my Powerbook or PC is awesome, though I learned with SB, playing in bed is a bad idea. Fell asleep once and woke up to my party asking what happened, and my corpse on the ground.
Being that I own 2 Rio Cars, I rather quite like them. And because I have used a variant for now over 5 years, anything less seems wrong. It is why I can't really stand an iPod, has too many limitations. The Karma is better, but yet it still doesn't officially do hierarchal playlists.
The best solutions would be the iPod style dock. However, the head unit should not use the iPod for the interface, instead pull the database files and present a more user friendly interface on the head unit. User friendly in this case being one specificially adapted for car use.
The theoritical Mark 3 design of the empeg (Rio Car was Mark 2) used a removable hard drive instead of a removable DIN unit, and has a CD drive in it as well. Sadly Rio exited the car market before one could be made.
There is still one big advantage of my Rio Car though. The pull out design means I can take it inside and hook it to my stereo and resume playing the same music. Mark Lord made some excellent home docks for this purpose, so a dock could just sit in the living room attached to the stereo. Then via ethernet, I can still sync new songs. Or via ethernet, control what is playing, or stream music to a computer. This is something the Karma does too, ethernet in the dock, though the built in software only lets you sunc to the Karma, no remote control or streaming is possible currently.
Thus far, the empeg remains the most advanced MP3 player I have seen, and it came out back when people were trying to hook up MP3 players to a CD changer. Sadly 6 years later, people are still trying to do the same in car, and the popular portable player still lacks basic things like gapless playback.
iMovie and iDVD can't play all of the video formats that quicktime does.
Thats likely intentional. Why allow iMovie to edit everything under the sun? Make it work with DV only for home users. If you want more, invest $300 in Final Cut Express.
The Windows Movie Maker/Media player comment was more about the integration iLife has. In iMovie, I click a music tab to see my iTunes collection to add as background music. Movie Maker offers no such integration.
It is amazing when its Apple but evil when its Microsoft?
Yep. Because when Apple does it, the end user sees a benefit. When Microsoft does it, their market share increases. There was no logical reason to integrate the entire browser into the OS like it was in Windows 9x. The proper and better way is to embed an API, and put a browser out that works off that, like how OS X (Safari) and 2000/XP do it. Remember how in 98 IE crashes could make the taskbar disappear?
The integration between the iLife apps is a great example of good integration. On the Windows side, Movie Maker ignores Windows Media Player to find music, and the photo stuff in the OS is horrible and can't be turned into a movie slideshow easially.
How many people here actually went out and bought a Linux computer from a vendor? Sure, Linux desktops probably outsold Mac desktops, but check on how many of those Linux desktops were sold into enterprise enviornments. It's probably going to be most of them. The home linux market is very hard to measure. So, when a publisher looks at platforms, they tend to choose Mac above Linux due to the home market numbers that they can see, and the ease of porting a game to a platform that hasn't had as many moving API targets.
I run a small web board, and already the e-mail address I use as the admin of that board gets flooded daily with crap like "I haven't actually received your message, click here to verify you are real". I finally got fed up with it and posted this response.
If you implement these, remember you get e-mail from more then just friends you know. Lets see, last week alone, I got 5 messages from companies like Dell from working on issues with them, and none of them are in my address book.
The proper solution is to ensure the outside world sees no difference unless it is spam. I never give my full address to a company, instead I use the postfix feature where anything after _ is ignored. Then I create a one letter alias for me to keep them short. If I get a lot of e-mail, it makes server side filtering into my IMap folders easy. And if one address gets hit by spam, I then block it on the server. It works well, and doesn't inconvenience the people e-mailing me.
"Thank you or ringing my doorbell. I am currently home, but did not hear the doorbell. To properly ring it, please run around my house, braving the dogs in back, and use the doorbell located next to the cat door on the deck. Then I might care enough to see who you are and let you in."
This again brings up a major complaint of mine with Linux on the desktop. Lack of standards for companies to just use and get things done. Why didn't Doom 3 for Linux ship with this? Why does about every game I have bought in the past two years on Windows support surround sound just fine? The community needs to look at issues like this, and agree to come togther to solve them, instead of creating 5 ways to fix it.
For now, and the forseeable future, my OS plans are this:
Linux on the server
Windows on the gaming PC
OS X on the machine to do everything else
I'd love for Linux to replace Windows on my gaming box, and it is one reason I watch WineX carefully.
EQ2 did launch with server problems as well, as one got so overcrowded, Sony manually moved people off of it to other servers.
I do highly doubt though that EQ2 has hit even a total of 200k subscribers at this point.
You would think that a few of these video game studios with some resources could join forces and make their own distribution firm.
See Gathering of Developers, later GoDGames. That didn't turn out too well..
Lets see:
Microsoft + Echostar = DishPlayer
Microsoft + DirecTV = Ultimate TV
Microsoft + Comcast = ?
I actually owned a DishPlayer. The problems with it to me wern't horrible, but it did cause a class action lawsuit to be brought against Echostar. Their new PVRs never matched the features of the DishPlayer, but they at least were stable.
Don't tell Alex the chip is similar to the G5, or he might start smashing perfectly good XBox and Playstations on the air to appear as an even bigger idiot then when he smashed the working Mac instead of either trying OS X, or donating it.
I stopped watching The ScreenSavers often when G4 took over, and completly when it moved to LA.
Ok, I'm a new developer. How do I fund my game? Pre-sell it through a Steam like program collecting money at the pre-sell, then coming out with it 3 years later? No.
I go and talk to a game publisher, they loan me money, then when the game does well, the loan is paid off. If it doesn't then thats another story. The publisher also has people to decide if the game idea will do well, by testing it on play testers and such.
I am not saying existing publishers are great. I'm just mostly trying to say getting rid of them completly to me seems like a very bad idea.
This is all overly simplistic, but I think it gets the point across.
Sounds like a move to try and get people to see Steam, and consider not buying the next Valve product in the stores.
Some ideas of Steam are nice, but I still don't like the idea of buying a product through it. Skipping the publishers is a bad thing, as they fund the new games. Sure, publishers need to treat the developers better, but to try and axe them out of the picture completely is a bad idea.
hip-e:
1.5 gHz Pentium M
17 inch LCD at 1400x900
DVD reader/CD writer
Mobility Radeon 9700 with 64 MB
120 gig PATA drive 7200 RPM
512 MB RAM
802.11g Wireless
TV Module and DVR software
Wireless Keyboard
Wireless Mouse
8-in-1 media card reader
Built in Spyware, err, "Sweepstakes LED"
Windows XP (no comment on Home or Pro)
MS Office Student edition
AIM
1 year warranty
$1699
iMac:
1.6 gHz G5
17 inch LCD at 1440x900
Combo drive (DVD reader/CD writer)
GeForce FX 5200 with 64 MB
160 gig SATA drive 7200 RPM (subtract $100 for an 80 gig)
512 MB RAM
Airport Extreme (802.11g wireless)
Bluetooth Keyboard
Bluetooth Mouse
Bluetooth module (comes with the keyboard and mouse when ordered with the iMac)
Mac OS X Panther
iLife 04 (iTunes, iDVD, iPhoto, iMovie, GarageBand)
Appleworks 6
WorldBook Encyclopedia
Quicken 2004
Nanosaur 2 and Marble Blast games
1 year warranty
$1652
A LaCie 8-in-1 reader is $30 from Apple.com
An Elgato Eye TV 200 Firewire TV tuner and DVR is $330.
So feature wise on the hardware, the hip-e comes out ahead in price.
Performance I think would go to the iMac though, and the extra software it has is nice.