The only reason you need Steam to play Half-Life(and all it's various mods) online is for client authentication purposes. This used to be handled by WON, which became redundant after Steam was established and fully functional. I'd rather have them spending money on making Steam as stable as possible, rather than keeping a very old system running in tandem with the new one. Hell, it was only in June or July of this year that they took WON down, it's not like they just pulled the plug as soon as Steam went online.
As far as "adding nothing to the game"... Client authentication in online gaming is critical to keeping the gameplay as free as possible from cheaters. Without authenticating that a user is connecting with a trusted client, it would bring the whole community down in a matter of months. A group would reverse engineer the protocol used by the game when talking to the servers, and build their own client that could do whatever they wanted. It would be impossible for the host server to know a good client from a bad one and it wouldn't be long before people would move on to another game. Granted, cheating happens anyway due to client bugs, but at least Valve has strived to eliminate as many bugs as possible over the years (Something like 17 client patches in the past 5 or 6 years. You only see that kind of commitment towards a product from a very select few companies.)
There is also that whole "Making sure that you actually compensated the over-worked people that made the game" thing, but I won't comment on that...
Zapwizard'sAmmo Case Mod The hardware inside is a little older since it was designed to play Half-life 2 last year(AthlonXP 3200 and a Radeon 9600SE), but it doesn't take a way from the sheer niftyness of the case.
If you look at bastion of fairness, moderation, and level headed debate that is politics.slashdot.org and look down about 9 stories you will see that the "Kerry Concedes Election To Bush" story got 4961 comments. HOWEVER, if you dig deeper you will see that there are in fact 5620 Comments as of the time of this post. This is obviously a ploy by our "Evil Republican"(tm) Slashcode maintainer and moderator Pudge to quell the liberal outcry(AKA whiney trolls).
This simply cannot stand, we should have verified commenting with paper printouts that can be recounted manually if necessary.
on a side note: Where does Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory get all that money to keep buying the latest and greatest super computer
LLNL does nuclear research (basically simulating nuclear weapon detonations). We spend $400 Billion on defense per year, what is $200 - $300 million for the latest and greatest super-computer?
In the case of Doom, you find yourself asking "WTF?". Why on Earth ARE you running around in the dark? How on Earth are you the ONLY person? Why are you completely unarmed, especially since you find weapons all over the place?
Well duh... that's easy to explain, it doesn't take place on Earth, it takes place on Mars.:-)
It's the rocket launcher from Quake 3, and you should be able to play most games (other than Doom 3) at lower resolutions.
I was able to get Farcry to run at 640x480 on a P3 800 with 768M of RAM and a GeforceFX 5900XT. Most settings at medium or high and not much choppyness at all. Anything older than Farcry and you should be able to play at 800x600 or higher with most eyecandy on. Max Payne 2 and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory run like a dream at 1024x768 on the system I mentioned above. You should be able to play Counter-Strike, or really any Half-Life Mod at 1600x1200 with everything Maxed (you would have to activate Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering in the driver prefs, but it's worth it)
If you want to play online though, you would do with a slightly better system (Something that you can put together for less than $500, $750 if you want to pad it a bit for upcoming games) and broadband.
Unreal Tournament 2k4 is also available on DVD, comes in a nice DVD case and has a bonus disk with a couple dozen hours worth of video tutorials on UnrealEd.
Most RSS feeders *should* just download every hour from the time they start, making the download intervals between users more or less random and well-dispersed.
While it would certainly help, you would still see spikes during the week from workers starting their computers at 9 AM +/- 5 minutes or so. A better method would be to add or subtract a random value of between 5-15 minutes from the hourly check which should spread it even more(of course in a worse-case scenario it would be 90 minutes from one check to another, but we aren't talking about mission-critical tasks here...)
If it's anything like the iPod remote, it's actually a tethered device that can clip to your sleeve or collar while keeping the device itself in your pocket or bookbag. Comes in handy when you need to do some simple things(Skip/Pause/Volume) quickly or discretely.
Mark my words, there will be a day that will come when you will all see many, many documents that will directly contradict IBM's current public posturing.
Given the way the quote is worded... I wonder if he is related to This Guy?
"With all the media coverage of the viruses and spam the average user doesn't want to even think about installing something"
Don't know where you have been but the reason that viruses and spam are a problem is that "The Average User"(TM) installs nifty looking malware and responds to spam ALL THE TIME...
It isn't serializing the data, it is actually creating a Scalable Vector Graphics file which is an XML based language that you could then use on a web page or in any app that can read it. Think png vs psd.
The only reason that the google toolbar is IE-Only is that pretty much every other browser already has a built-in Google search box, they aren't making money off of it so why bother duplicating effort? There are other reasons that this will probably be windows-only but this isn't one of them.
Can't help it, I must feed the troll... Am I being denied fair use becaue I cant run windows 98 on my iMac. After all I bought and paid for that copy, I should be able to use it how I like.
Your example is flawed in that you can run Windows 98 on an iMac via an emulation layer and it is legal to do so. What the MPAA does with the DVD-CCA, would be like Microsoft lobbying to make it illegal to create an emulator that runs Win98 on hardware that they haven't blessed.
The problem isn't that the DVD won't play on 'grandma's victrola' it's that it would be illegal to even try.
I don't know about other areas, but around here 90% of the telemarketer calls show up on Caller ID as one of the following: "Out of the Area", "Private", or the state of origin. "Oh boy, someone in California is calling, that only narrows it down to 40 Million people..."
Doubt this will be different, just a few extra bytes added to every E-Mail, clogging up the networks worse than before.
The specs are no different than current tungsten foil discs, and I don't see how a paper media layer is going to be any more prone to damage than the ultra-thin foil we currently use. Have you ever tried peeling off a CD label that is firmly affixed? good chance you can rip the media right off the plastic.
It would be nice if they just sandwiched the media between two.6mm pieces of plastic, wouldn't change the thickness of the disc, but at least there would be a bit more protection for the media.
On a 100BaseT NIC the theoretical max transfer rate is 12.5 MBps with a realistic speed of 8 MBps. Multiply that by 10 to get a rough estimate of Gigabit speed. Most ATA HDD's can transfer around 40-60 MBps. You can easily saturate a 100BaseT network with bargain basement machines.
Gigabit Ethernet is faster than what your typical ATA drive will absorb, but it is still going to be quite a bit faster than 100BaseT.
Spend the Money on a nicer HDD or a decent RAID setup and you will be able to make full use of a Gigabit pipe.
Slashdot Mirror
The only reason you need Steam to play Half-Life(and all it's various mods) online is for client authentication purposes. This used to be handled by WON, which became redundant after Steam was established and fully functional. I'd rather have them spending money on making Steam as stable as possible, rather than keeping a very old system running in tandem with the new one. Hell, it was only in June or July of this year that they took WON down, it's not like they just pulled the plug as soon as Steam went online.
As far as "adding nothing to the game"... Client authentication in online gaming is critical to keeping the gameplay as free as possible from cheaters. Without authenticating that a user is connecting with a trusted client, it would bring the whole community down in a matter of months. A group would reverse engineer the protocol used by the game when talking to the servers, and build their own client that could do whatever they wanted. It would be impossible for the host server to know a good client from a bad one and it wouldn't be long before people would move on to another game. Granted, cheating happens anyway due to client bugs, but at least Valve has strived to eliminate as many bugs as possible over the years (Something like 17 client patches in the past 5 or 6 years. You only see that kind of commitment towards a product from a very select few companies.)
There is also that whole "Making sure that you actually compensated the over-worked people that made the game" thing, but I won't comment on that...
Zapwizard's Ammo Case Mod The hardware inside is a little older since it was designed to play Half-life 2 last year(AthlonXP 3200 and a Radeon 9600SE), but it doesn't take a way from the sheer niftyness of the case.
If you look at bastion of fairness, moderation, and level headed debate that is politics.slashdot.org and look down about 9 stories you will see that the "Kerry Concedes Election To Bush" story got 4961 comments. HOWEVER, if you dig deeper you will see that there are in fact 5620 Comments as of the time of this post. This is obviously a ploy by our "Evil Republican"(tm) Slashcode maintainer and moderator Pudge to quell the liberal outcry(AKA whiney trolls).
This simply cannot stand, we should have verified commenting with paper printouts that can be recounted manually if necessary.
Slashcode 3 for '08!
meh, I listened to et al before it went mainstream, I've moved on to etc and ...
on a side note: Where does Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory get all that money to keep buying the latest and greatest super computer
LLNL does nuclear research (basically simulating nuclear weapon detonations). We spend $400 Billion on defense per year, what is $200 - $300 million for the latest and greatest super-computer?
In the case of Doom, you find yourself asking "WTF?". Why on Earth ARE you running around in the dark? How on Earth are you the ONLY person? Why are you completely unarmed, especially since you find weapons all over the place?
:-)
Well duh... that's easy to explain, it doesn't take place on Earth, it takes place on Mars.
It's the rocket launcher from Quake 3, and you should be able to play most games (other than Doom 3) at lower resolutions.
I was able to get Farcry to run at 640x480 on a P3 800 with 768M of RAM and a GeforceFX 5900XT. Most settings at medium or high and not much choppyness at all. Anything older than Farcry and you should be able to play at 800x600 or higher with most eyecandy on. Max Payne 2 and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory run like a dream at 1024x768 on the system I mentioned above. You should be able to play Counter-Strike, or really any Half-Life Mod at 1600x1200 with everything Maxed (you would have to activate Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic Filtering in the driver prefs, but it's worth it)
If you want to play online though, you would do with a slightly better system (Something that you can put together for less than $500, $750 if you want to pad it a bit for upcoming games) and broadband.
Unreal Tournament 2k4 is also available on DVD, comes in a nice DVD case and has a bonus disk with a couple dozen hours worth of video tutorials on UnrealEd.
Actually you just claimed a patent on pretty much all aircraft.
I think Boeing might want a few words with you...
Most RSS feeders *should* just download every hour from the time they start, making the download intervals between users more or less random and well-dispersed.
While it would certainly help, you would still see spikes during the week from workers starting their computers at 9 AM +/- 5 minutes or so. A better method would be to add or subtract a random value of between 5-15 minutes from the hourly check which should spread it even more(of course in a worse-case scenario it would be 90 minutes from one check to another, but we aren't talking about mission-critical tasks here...)
from the segessem-terces-ylotot dept.
Reversal:
totoly-secret-messeges
If it's anything like the iPod remote, it's actually a tethered device that can clip to your sleeve or collar while keeping the device itself in your pocket or bookbag. Comes in handy when you need to do some simple things(Skip/Pause/Volume) quickly or discretely.
When is the election in the US finished?
Depends on wether or not Florida has it's shit together this time.
Anyone else for bringing back HARP
Wasn't that the fake defense satelite from Remo Williams?
Mark my words, there will be a day that will come when you will all see many, many documents that will directly contradict IBM's current public posturing.
Given the way the quote is worded... I wonder if he is related to This Guy?
"With all the media coverage of the viruses and spam the average user doesn't want to even think about installing something"
Don't know where you have been but the reason that viruses and spam are a problem is that "The Average User"(TM) installs nifty looking malware and responds to spam ALL THE TIME...
They aren't even respected in their own country
It isn't serializing the data, it is actually creating a Scalable Vector Graphics file which is an XML based language that you could then use on a web page or in any app that can read it. Think png vs psd.
(Yes I know that PSD is a published format...)
The only reason that the google toolbar is IE-Only is that pretty much every other browser already has a built-in Google search box, they aren't making money off of it so why bother duplicating effort? There are other reasons that this will probably be windows-only but this isn't one of them.
If any one of those were reputable businesses you may have a point...
Can't help it, I must feed the troll...
Am I being denied fair use becaue I cant run windows 98 on my iMac. After all I bought and paid for that copy, I should be able to use it how I like.
Your example is flawed in that you can run Windows 98 on an iMac via an emulation layer and it is legal to do so. What the MPAA does with the DVD-CCA, would be like Microsoft lobbying to make it illegal to create an emulator that runs Win98 on hardware that they haven't blessed.
The problem isn't that the DVD won't play on 'grandma's victrola' it's that it would be illegal to even try.
That Sucks (TM)
I don't know about other areas, but around here 90% of the telemarketer calls show up on Caller ID as one of the following:
"Out of the Area", "Private", or the state of origin. "Oh boy, someone in California is calling, that only narrows it down to 40 Million people..."
Doubt this will be different, just a few extra bytes added to every E-Mail, clogging up the networks worse than before.
The specs are no different than current tungsten foil discs, and I don't see how a paper media layer is going to be any more prone to damage than the ultra-thin foil we currently use. Have you ever tried peeling off a CD label that is firmly affixed? good chance you can rip the media right off the plastic.
.6mm pieces of plastic, wouldn't change the thickness of the disc, but at least there would be a bit more protection for the media.
It would be nice if they just sandwiched the media between two
On a 100BaseT NIC the theoretical max transfer rate is 12.5 MBps with a realistic speed of 8 MBps. Multiply that by 10 to get a rough estimate of Gigabit speed. Most ATA HDD's can transfer around 40-60 MBps. You can easily saturate a 100BaseT network with bargain basement machines.
Gigabit Ethernet is faster than what your typical ATA drive will absorb, but it is still going to be quite a bit faster than 100BaseT.
Spend the Money on a nicer HDD or a decent RAID setup and you will be able to make full use of a Gigabit pipe.
That would be the VIN Number and it is written in several places on the car.