And many people expect very slow sales of XP. There's no lines-around-the-corner as with 95, but they do expect a modest amount of sales today. But they don't believe that XP is going to be a big economic burst into the market as Microsoft tried to make it out as; again, since most seats of the OS are sold to business, and most appear to be sticking to 2000 until necessary, there's going to be very few sales from that market.
From what I've observed, from smaller companies or state/government agencies, there are a lot of machines still running NT 4.0, who have been holding off on the Win2k migration. Granted, I haven't been in any big dot-com campus, but I do think we'll see XP sales exceeding Windows 98SE, ME, and Win2k combined, at least within the next 6 months. There'll be businesses with NT 4.0 who will soon be ready to migrate to XP and skip Win2k altogether, and there will be consumers who will actually upgrade their home OS; Win98SE and ME, for the most part, have been OEM-only updates. Win98 was the last real upgrade the people actually bought to upgrade their 95 machines. Since both the business and consumer markets are involved with this product launch (like Win95 was, before NT 4.0 came out), I'm pretty sure we'll see pretty big sales figures.
What does XP offer me over and above my current win2k? I'm tired of updating to the latest and greatest just for the fun of it. My current os runs all of my applications without much trouble, so what do I get for my money?
For the most part, not very much. Some of the bundled features, such as MP3 support, CD burning, etc., won't be new for most of us. And the interface certainly isn't worth the upgrade.
But there are other things that will set itself apart from Win2k pretty well. Various hardware manufacturers were very slow with making drivers for Win2k, especially from those who make "consumer" hardware. Their argument was that Win2k is just a business OS, and that they didn't need to support it. Creative Labs was pretty slow in getting updated Live!Ware drivers out, and even the latest Live!Ware 3.0 drivers for Win2k are inferior to their Win9x counterparts (for one thing, it takes a lot longer to load up the speaker icon in the taskbar). Now that XP is out, I'm sure the driver support for Win2k can only go downhill.
XP will have an advantage that Win2k didn't have. Since XP is now the combination of the 9x and NT line, only one set of drivers needs to be written, which will make it that much easier for hardware manufacturers to release the drivers. That to me is probably the biggest reason why I'll eventually switch from Win2k to XP (eventually, but not yet).
Here's a personal list of why I think Google rules:
Lightning-fast searches. I like how Google rubs it in, too ("search took 0.14 seconds").
Windows IE toolbar. The most convenient way to search, which includes other neat features like page rank, easy keyword highlighting, etc.
Good Usenet listing.
Result translations (someone's already mentioned Swedish Chef, hehe)
Web Directory has won me over, goodbye Yahoo!
Almost every single search I've done on Google has given me the most relevant results on the first page. I hardly need to see any further result pages unless my search is obscure or vague.
Uses very little bandwidth (read: advertising)
It seems like a one-sided battle now. There's just no comparison.
With the release of ATI's newest Radeon 8500 and 7500 graphics cards, hardware review sites have been proportedly using ATI drivers that have been sepecifically optimized for Quake III.
Various ATI fan sites are now reporting new "Quackified" drivers, originally authored by Kyle Bennett of [H]ard|OCP. Rumors are flying about this unofficial driver's unfair optimization of games such as "Duck Hunter 5: More Buckshot" and "Donald Duck's Red-Light District Exploration".
"Wow, the animated ducks are faster, and die better," one anonymous gamer said on a forum. "And Donald gets so better action with these new drivers!"
ATI spokeduck, Rob Erduckie, denies any involvement in these modifications. "The claims are just false," said Rob. "We do not believe in unfairly offering advantages to one side or another."
Rob also made reference to cheating, "We also vehemently oppose offering cheat options, such as Asus's 'See-Through Duck' modification. We're totally about fair game play."
Environmentalists have been picketing federal facilities today in protest of unfair portrayal of their favorite bird today, with writings on picket signs such as "Free the Ducks!," "No luck for Ducks," and "Ducks Need Rights Too!."
Department of Fish & Game officials were unavailable to comment.
The Linux penguin released a brief statement: "I understand the pain that ducks are going through right now. Did you read what Linus said about me? 'A happily drunk penguin who just got some'? Sheesh!"
I wonder if Microsoft plans on offering an Academic discount below the quoted $1,000 entry-level price. My first tastes of programming were with MS's QBasic, then in college I bought their Academic version of Visual Basic (which was bundled with NT 4.0 for free) for $99. That was quite a deal, especially for the bundle. It made the appearance that Microsoft had a market for learners on a tight budget.
If $1,000 is going to be the lowest Microsoft will go, then I'm sad to say that beginning developers in the Windows/.NET arena will be stifled. They'll approad other venues, such as Linux, Qt, etc. for learning how to program.
I guess in the current economy, inexperienced, entry-level programmers are not important to Microsoft, making it that much harder for college graduates to get their foot in the door.
Whatever Microsoft does with passport is nothing compared to the fact that they're taking java out of the next version IE. They're using their dominance in the desktop OS/Browser market to promote.NET and crush java.
Oh dear lord, gonna have to explain this again.
Microsoft isn't removing Java from IE by choice. They were ordered to remove their implementation of Java after the MS/Sun lawsuit. I remember hearing about Symantec going crazy because they were going to be able to supply MS with a Sun-compliant Java engine. I'm not sure if that's actually happened, haven't heard anymore about it since.
Everything in the U.S. Constitution doesn't directly translate over to the workplace very well. As a paid individual, you are basically forking over your person to a company or agency. They own you for that period of time because they are paying you for it.
You don't have a right to free speech, from searches, to bear arms, etc. Certain other rights, such as being able to practice your own religion, are only specifically granted by Federal labor laws. Sexual harrassment isn't illegal because it's in the constitution, neither is equal opportunity rights. Employees all work within the framework of labor laws, not the Constitution. Once you clock out, and aren't on company time, then you actually have all your "personal" rights again.
So unfortunately, there isn't much you can do, except for extraordinary circumstances such as being racially singled out when being searched. If you don't like it, you either grin and bear it, or resign.
One classic remake I'm really looking forward to is StarFlight III. The original StarFlight, and StarFlight II, were the predecessors to games such as Masters of Orion and Star Control, and an inspiration for later games like Ascension.
StarFlight contained a HUGE static universe (i.e., every time you play, all the systems are the same). While a lot of people like random maps nowadays, StarFlight worked really well because the universe was so large and rich that each game is almost guaranteed to be different. It had all the essential elements for a fun space strategy game: exploration, mining, colonization, alien interaction, intrigue. You can find artifacts with odd or incomplete messages, but sometimes would find some coordinates. It was fun jotting down all these coordinates and clues and exploring from there. Sometimes it would end up being a series of messages detailing the next location, sometimes they just ended (or so it seemed). And let's not forget the eerie feeling of finding a blue-green planet, slowly realizing that the shapes of the continents look familiar (it's Earth!).
I have a huge pile of notes saved up from my first StarFlight game. Only problem is that it's on 5.25" floppies. I found a copy of it online, but then I realized how archaic the savegame system is. It saves your game state into the game executable. If you don't exit the game properly, or get stuck between a rock and a hard place, your main game executable is history. This is the main reason why I haven't played StarFlight that much in the past couple of years. It's a major pain in the butt to contend with.
Now I'm eagerly awaiting StarFlight III. It's a "volunteer" project, and they've got two of the original StarFlight programmers consulting for the game.
My roommate from college put together a really nice oak computer case. Sure, it doesn't have the best thermal transfer, but who cares. It's not an overclocker box. Oh yeah, and it'll give you wood, heh-heh. It r0x0rz your world.
IMO mouses and keyboards are the BEST products Microsoft EVER did.
Yep, I'm a big fan of Microsoft hardware too. I'll go through a list of the ones I own and why I like them:
Natural Keyboard Pro: I think it's safe to say that MS's Natural keyboard line is just about the best ergonomic keyboard on the market. The new keys on the Pro are cool too, I can adjust volume, open up calculator (which I use at least once a day), suspend system, etc. all from the keyboard. Nice.
Intellimouse Optical: Optical is cool. Even though MS isn't the very first one to use optical technology, they definately did improve and vitalise them in a big way. No need for those metal grid pads. Fast enough refresh rate for gamers. Comfortable, and even two extra buttons (front and back in browser by default but configurable).
Sidewinder Gamepad: The most comfortable gamepad I've tried, beats using Gravis's classic gamepad. I use it for car racing games every time.
Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro: Kinda big and clunky (the new Pro2 is a smaller footprint), but it sure beats using old joysticks for things like flight simulators (feeling the guns firing, the landing, or just wind resistance when turning is ultra cool!).
There's no comparison. I'll eventually get the voice commander and strategy commander, those look like winner gaming hardware too.
Re:The usability of Linux (is pretty good by now)
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Red Hat 7.2 Released
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· Score: 2
Usability is (generally speaking) just fine, provided you're working on a well-setup & installed box...
I agree totally.
I started playing around with Linux back around 1996 with Slackware. It was great to play around with as far as being an alternate OS with a powerful command-line interface (after MS-DOS, I needed more than what Windows 95 offered). After a while, though, I determined that all my GUI applications for Win95 were irreplacable and there was nothing in Linux that could convince me to use it as a primary bootup.
Ever since then, I would download a new distribution each year or two, which usually was RedHet (and now I play with Mandrake). GUI usability seems to jump in quick strides; each distribution impresses me more and more. More applications suited to my needs, more neat-looking window managers, and better hardware support (this is a major plus!).
I've just downloaded and installed Mandrake 8.1. I had some problems with 8.0 (the KDE and Gnome default setups weren't flawless and would crash here and there). Even within a 0.1 version change, I see things are more tightly and logically integrated. Office applications are becoming professional grade. Networking is a cinch. And hardware management is awesome; I'm particularly impressed with HardDrake's automatic hardware detection. I swapped graphics cards (which, in the past, meant having to reconfigure X and editing files, etc.) and it was all automatic.
Pretty soon, I believe we'll start seeing people deciding that Windows isn't exactly worth the $99+, especially with the new activation "feature".
In a sweeping move today, Intel Corporation has decided to boost revenue during the current looming recession by making drastic changes to the chip market.
It plans on killing off the consumer base.
"Consumers are starting to get smart," tertiary chief marketing analyst Joe Nooty said, "They are realizing that they don't actually need to upgrade from a 866MHz Pentium III to a 2.0GHz Pentium 4 to have a good Internet experience."
"We don't appreciate how our clients becoming unemployed and unable to think about buying our absolute latest product," said another marketing person, "It's time to give them the axe and redefine the market."
Execution of human beings, except for those employed by Intel, will commence in Q1 2002. The new Pentium 5 (or Pentium Pentium, codenamed Pentium Squared) will debut and will offer a fish-friendly interface.
"The reason for the fish-interface is simple. The world is 75% covered by water. We'll make a killing in sales by targetting the largest body of species in the world," claimed Nooty.
Intel representatives refused to answer our calls when we asked sent in questions such as: How do you plan to make "money" off of fish? Where will all these human consumers be burried? What will Intel do as a lone-standing human civilization? And did you ask Microsoft how they plan to port Windows XP (for eXPired) for oceanic fauna?
I used to use a 2 port Linksys and a hub, which worked great. I replaced them both with this closeout 3com model [tigerdirect.com] which is $50, and has a built-in print spooler.
Hey, now that's snazzy (the print spooler part). And it's got a COM port for analog modem access to boot. I wonder if the COM port, besides being for sharing a modem connection, can automatically dial an analog modem as a backup to a Cable/DSL connection going down (which D-Link's router can do).
Why, oh why, do people still want to build cheap/small PCs into Linux routers?
As far as cost, convenience, uptime, ease of configuration, power consumption, and upteen other advantages, why not just pick up a Linksys Etherfast 4-port Cable/DSL Router (or an 8-port version) for ~$80?
Before these babies came out, Linux routers were the bomb and fun to play with. But these new routers seem like no-brainers to me. You can configure them through a Web interface (which is only accessible by the "internal" network for security), such as setting up forwarding ports, disable certain ports from accessing the Internet (i.e., just an internal gaming port). It's a teeny box that hardly uses any power, is up all time and doesn't need to be rebooted, it's fast, it's cute, and it's cheap. It's the ultimate Internet connection sharing device with sufficient firewall capabilities. I believe D-Link and Netgear also have similar routers.
The reason Microsoft is pushing their.NET architecture so strongly, of course, is because it's their last recourse for their domination of the computer world. Yes, now it's not just the "PC" world.
And in true Bill Gates fashion, Microsoft is always picking up these trends after some other notable people declare how things will be. First, Bill Gates didn't believe in the Internet. Now he realizes, after sitting on the wayside while Mosaic then Netscape initially dominated the browser market, that this may perhaps be the biggest opportunity of his company's life. He's already had control of the PC market by essentially requiring all PC manufacturers to bundle his operating system with their machines, but this influence pretty much stops at the x86 market (with a brief stint in the Alpha market with NT). Keeping things proprietary meant a tight control over the PC world.
Now, in a strange twist of irony, the open, non-proprietary Internet standards will perhaps offer Bill Gates a new domination over the Internet. A good portion of the market is already under Wintel domination, and the vast majority of such systems are likely connected to the Internet. What better progression than to use this as a portal into the "whole" Internet?
We're going to need to be watchful over this one. Either.NET is a genuine, open architecture that will make all our lives easier, or it'll be just another MS sugar coating to take over the market. After these anti-trust trials, I am hoping that the former is true. But we will still need to be careful, and remain critical of.NET.
(Perhaps this is just preaching to the converted and stating the obvious, but important issues like these can never be said enough.)
Perhaps having a fiber-optic bus will allow for a more modular motherboard design, where the CPU socket, memory slots, PCI/AGP slots, etc. are individual components connected to a central northbridge/southbridge via fiber cable?
Since motherboard manufacturers have to choose a particular memory/CPU/PCI slot design, purchasing a motherboard can be limiting to the consumer (at least the hardware enthusiast). By splitting all motherboard sub-components up, you'd be able to pair whatever CPU to whatever memory type you want, and have a PCI module that lets you tack on as many PCI/ISA as you need. Literally a custom-built motherboard.
I'm sure this is slightly costlier, as far as an initial sunk cost, but upgrades should be easier. To make your investment go even further, things like the northbridge module should be a flashable module, so you can update it to support some new processor or memory module type (buy a software upgrade instead of replace the central hardware module).
Okay, so perhaps this is a little far-fetched, and perhaps gone on a very bad tangent from what the original intention of fiber-optic motherboards. But I can still dream, can't I?:)
Not quite what I meant. HTML 'standard' is set by the W3C, but it evolves. Its currently at 4.3 (I think). So does the Moz team work toward that? After all, by the time they're done it might be at 4.7. This is the trap into which NS and IE fell. They tried to code for a standard that they hoped would be *the* standard by the time they shipped.
Sorry, but this is inaccurate.
HTML and CSS are pretty standardized and have remained fairly static; they haven't changed much (except for the CSS1 and CSS2 thing). The latest HTML standard (or rather, "recommendation") by the W3C is HTML 4.01, which was released back in December 1997. Both Netscape and IE have had multiple browser releases since then, and IE has been the most successfuly with implementing CSS earlier on (try a Netscape 4.7 browser on some advanced CSS pages and you'll see what I mean).
And for the most part, both NS and IE have been remaining true to the standards. Adding features to these standards is fine, as long as they remain true to the overall structure of HTML and CSS. The colored-scrollbar feature in IE may not be seen by other browsers, but the additional CSS statement that Microsoft added is compliant with the overall structure of CSS, and it doesn't break any functionality with other browsers. The Mozilla team should have no problems whatsoever implementing the latest standards, since they've been around for long enough, and are actually written with browser parsing in mind.
The only evolving standard at the moment is XHTML. XHTML 1.0 was recently released, and 1.1 is being drafted. The Consortium has a good track record of making sound judgements in the past, and previous proposals had been successful in allowing implementors to predict what the final draft would look like and what the trends are.
So as far as I'm concerned, the W3C has been an invaluable source for implementors, I don't see this evolving standards problem at all, and I don't understand how the Mozilla team would have any problems with them. The only problematic areas in the browsing arena are proprietary extensions, such as JavaScript, ActiveX, Flash, etc. For those, we have to turn to the companies who created these extensions to open them up for portability.
Using an expensive watercooler solution (well, expensive compared to a $30 air cooler that will work perfectly fine) to squeeze out a few extra megahertz, is that really worth all of the hassle?
At this point in the game, it doesn't look like it makes much difference if you take the fastest CPU today and stuck a watercooler on it. People just aren't seeing as high as a gain in speed as the older Celerons and PIIs. Watercooled setups use to give people as high as a legendary 100% increase in speed from the fastest CPUs of yesteryear, which r0x0rd a Quake player's world. Now, people would be extremely lucky to see 50%.
And I think this trend is basically being reflected in the overclocking market. We don't hear the Kryotech machines being hyped as much as two years ago for that very reason. Intel and AMD are ramping up processors at close to their theoretical (yield) speeds, unlike the older Celerons which were just fast PIIs that were underclocked. That's not to say that there aren't anymore CPUs out there that have a high overclocking potential, they're just less common. And we also no longer see as much of a price gap between lower and higher performing CPUs.
So you're right, it's hardly worth the investment in watercooler equipment. But two years ago, it made a lot of difference for hardcore gamers.
Now we're seeing a shift from watercooled CPUs to watercooled graphics cards (can we guess where the bottleneck has gone?), which seems to yield a bit more performance for those highly ambitious hardware enthusiasts.
This "equivalent" argument is pure crap. A Suzuki motorcycle has about 115 horsepower, while a Porsche 911 Turbo has 300 more. And yet the Suzuki could easily beat the 911 off the line, so therefore Suzuki should market its motorcycles as "GT 415HP" because it has the equivalent acceleration of a 911, right?
To me, this is an apples vs. oranges analogy. On one hand, we have the apples, who are the auto and motorcycle enthusiasts. On the other hand, we have the oranges, or the vast uninformed PC-buying public walking into CompUSA and Circuit City stores. Two completely different species.
Intel's ability to con the public into buying into the MHz game is obhorrent, at best. They manufactured an inferior processor, the P4, basically to outmatch AMD in numbers. Intel knew that AMD wouldn't be able to ramp up their Athlons to the same level within a reasonable amount of time. The P4's inferiority is backed up by the fact that P3s outperform P4s MHz-per-MHz.
I feel that AMD's new effective/relative performance ratings are justified in this case, especially since the numbers are realistic (as opposed to their 486/K5 series or Cyrix's CPUs). If Intel wants to bloat numbers, AMD has to catch up in the marketing game in order to survive in this industry. People are walking into the major retail stores and being convinced by salespeople that the P4 systems are better and just as cheap (only because they bundle inferior components such as nVidia TNT2 graphics cards and generic sound cards to reduce the price) as an Athlon-based system. The regular Joe Blow will see a bigger MHz number and an affordable price, which is the killer combination.
The Linux/hardware enthusiasts are by far a minority in the PC market. Thus, the battlegrounds look ugly to those who are more informed, but I'm sure they look even worse within the buildings of Intel and AMD. It's a dog-eat-dog world.
General concensus in messages boards seems to be that IBM hard drives manufactured in Hungary seem to fail at a greater rate than from other factories.
I myself have had a failed IBM hard drive. It was defective upon shipping, and had it replaced immediately with an advance RMA. The replacement failed on me about a month later, and I didn't qualify for an advance RMA because I already RMA'ed it once (even though the first one didn't techically fail on me, it was DOA). This was a 10GB Deskstar 14GXP (I think).
So during the excruciating one-month replacement, I bought a Maxtor drive, and now use it as my primary drive (I'm not trusting my third IBM replacement). The Maxtor's a faster drive anyway, so I'm not complaining. I'll just stay clear of IBMs for a while.
Little did the NASA scientists know that what appeared to be just Martian rocks would end up being dehydrated imps, cacodemons, mancubii, cyberdemons, and John Romero's severed head. Just add water, and then we'll have Hell on Earth.
Slashdot Mirror
But there are other things that will set itself apart from Win2k pretty well. Various hardware manufacturers were very slow with making drivers for Win2k, especially from those who make "consumer" hardware. Their argument was that Win2k is just a business OS, and that they didn't need to support it. Creative Labs was pretty slow in getting updated Live!Ware drivers out, and even the latest Live!Ware 3.0 drivers for Win2k are inferior to their Win9x counterparts (for one thing, it takes a lot longer to load up the speaker icon in the taskbar). Now that XP is out, I'm sure the driver support for Win2k can only go downhill.
XP will have an advantage that Win2k didn't have. Since XP is now the combination of the 9x and NT line, only one set of drivers needs to be written, which will make it that much easier for hardware manufacturers to release the drivers. That to me is probably the biggest reason why I'll eventually switch from Win2k to XP (eventually, but not yet).
- Lightning-fast searches. I like how Google rubs it in, too ("search took 0.14 seconds").
- Windows IE toolbar. The most convenient way to search, which includes other neat features like page rank, easy keyword highlighting, etc.
- Good Usenet listing.
- Result translations (someone's already mentioned Swedish Chef, hehe)
- Web Directory has won me over, goodbye Yahoo!
- Almost every single search I've done on Google has given me the most relevant results on the first page. I hardly need to see any further result pages unless my search is obscure or vague.
- Uses very little bandwidth (read: advertising)
It seems like a one-sided battle now. There's just no comparison.Check this link out of pages linked to /.
Go look through Google's Advanced search options. You'll be surprised.
PRESS RE-RELEASE:
With the release of ATI's newest Radeon 8500 and 7500 graphics cards, hardware review sites have been proportedly using ATI drivers that have been sepecifically optimized for Quake III.
Various ATI fan sites are now reporting new "Quackified" drivers, originally authored by Kyle Bennett of [H]ard|OCP. Rumors are flying about this unofficial driver's unfair optimization of games such as "Duck Hunter 5: More Buckshot" and "Donald Duck's Red-Light District Exploration".
"Wow, the animated ducks are faster, and die better," one anonymous gamer said on a forum. "And Donald gets so better action with these new drivers!"
ATI spokeduck, Rob Erduckie, denies any involvement in these modifications. "The claims are just false," said Rob. "We do not believe in unfairly offering advantages to one side or another."
Rob also made reference to cheating, "We also vehemently oppose offering cheat options, such as Asus's 'See-Through Duck' modification. We're totally about fair game play."
Environmentalists have been picketing federal facilities today in protest of unfair portrayal of their favorite bird today, with writings on picket signs such as "Free the Ducks!," "No luck for Ducks," and "Ducks Need Rights Too!."
Department of Fish & Game officials were unavailable to comment.
The Linux penguin released a brief statement: "I understand the pain that ducks are going through right now. Did you read what Linus said about me? 'A happily drunk penguin who just got some'? Sheesh!"
If $1,000 is going to be the lowest Microsoft will go, then I'm sad to say that beginning developers in the Windows/.NET arena will be stifled. They'll approad other venues, such as Linux, Qt, etc. for learning how to program.
I guess in the current economy, inexperienced, entry-level programmers are not important to Microsoft, making it that much harder for college graduates to get their foot in the door.
Microsoft isn't removing Java from IE by choice. They were ordered to remove their implementation of Java after the MS/Sun lawsuit. I remember hearing about Symantec going crazy because they were going to be able to supply MS with a Sun-compliant Java engine. I'm not sure if that's actually happened, haven't heard anymore about it since.
Everything in the U.S. Constitution doesn't directly translate over to the workplace very well. As a paid individual, you are basically forking over your person to a company or agency. They own you for that period of time because they are paying you for it.
You don't have a right to free speech, from searches, to bear arms, etc. Certain other rights, such as being able to practice your own religion, are only specifically granted by Federal labor laws. Sexual harrassment isn't illegal because it's in the constitution, neither is equal opportunity rights. Employees all work within the framework of labor laws, not the Constitution. Once you clock out, and aren't on company time, then you actually have all your "personal" rights again.
So unfortunately, there isn't much you can do, except for extraordinary circumstances such as being racially singled out when being searched. If you don't like it, you either grin and bear it, or resign.
StarFlight contained a HUGE static universe (i.e., every time you play, all the systems are the same). While a lot of people like random maps nowadays, StarFlight worked really well because the universe was so large and rich that each game is almost guaranteed to be different. It had all the essential elements for a fun space strategy game: exploration, mining, colonization, alien interaction, intrigue. You can find artifacts with odd or incomplete messages, but sometimes would find some coordinates. It was fun jotting down all these coordinates and clues and exploring from there. Sometimes it would end up being a series of messages detailing the next location, sometimes they just ended (or so it seemed). And let's not forget the eerie feeling of finding a blue-green planet, slowly realizing that the shapes of the continents look familiar (it's Earth!).
I have a huge pile of notes saved up from my first StarFlight game. Only problem is that it's on 5.25" floppies. I found a copy of it online, but then I realized how archaic the savegame system is. It saves your game state into the game executable. If you don't exit the game properly, or get stuck between a rock and a hard place, your main game executable is history. This is the main reason why I haven't played StarFlight that much in the past couple of years. It's a major pain in the butt to contend with.
Now I'm eagerly awaiting StarFlight III. It's a "volunteer" project, and they've got two of the original StarFlight programmers consulting for the game.
My roommate from college put together a really nice oak computer case. Sure, it doesn't have the best thermal transfer, but who cares. It's not an overclocker box. Oh yeah, and it'll give you wood, heh-heh. It r0x0rz your world.
- Natural Keyboard Pro: I think it's safe to say that MS's Natural keyboard line is just about the best ergonomic keyboard on the market. The new keys on the Pro are cool too, I can adjust volume, open up calculator (which I use at least once a day), suspend system, etc. all from the keyboard. Nice.
- Intellimouse Optical: Optical is cool. Even though MS isn't the very first one to use optical technology, they definately did improve and vitalise them in a big way. No need for those metal grid pads. Fast enough refresh rate for gamers. Comfortable, and even two extra buttons (front and back in browser by default but configurable).
- Sidewinder Gamepad: The most comfortable gamepad I've tried, beats using Gravis's classic gamepad. I use it for car racing games every time.
- Sidewinder Force Feedback Pro: Kinda big and clunky (the new Pro2 is a smaller footprint), but it sure beats using old joysticks for things like flight simulators (feeling the guns firing, the landing, or just wind resistance when turning is ultra cool!).
There's no comparison. I'll eventually get the voice commander and strategy commander, those look like winner gaming hardware too.I started playing around with Linux back around 1996 with Slackware. It was great to play around with as far as being an alternate OS with a powerful command-line interface (after MS-DOS, I needed more than what Windows 95 offered). After a while, though, I determined that all my GUI applications for Win95 were irreplacable and there was nothing in Linux that could convince me to use it as a primary bootup.
Ever since then, I would download a new distribution each year or two, which usually was RedHet (and now I play with Mandrake). GUI usability seems to jump in quick strides; each distribution impresses me more and more. More applications suited to my needs, more neat-looking window managers, and better hardware support (this is a major plus!).
I've just downloaded and installed Mandrake 8.1. I had some problems with 8.0 (the KDE and Gnome default setups weren't flawless and would crash here and there). Even within a 0.1 version change, I see things are more tightly and logically integrated. Office applications are becoming professional grade. Networking is a cinch. And hardware management is awesome; I'm particularly impressed with HardDrake's automatic hardware detection. I swapped graphics cards (which, in the past, meant having to reconfigure X and editing files, etc.) and it was all automatic.
Pretty soon, I believe we'll start seeing people deciding that Windows isn't exactly worth the $99+, especially with the new activation "feature".
Hooray for Linux.
newegg.com carries them here.
In a sweeping move today, Intel Corporation has decided to boost revenue during the current looming recession by making drastic changes to the chip market.
It plans on killing off the consumer base.
"Consumers are starting to get smart," tertiary chief marketing analyst Joe Nooty said, "They are realizing that they don't actually need to upgrade from a 866MHz Pentium III to a 2.0GHz Pentium 4 to have a good Internet experience."
"We don't appreciate how our clients becoming unemployed and unable to think about buying our absolute latest product," said another marketing person, "It's time to give them the axe and redefine the market."
Execution of human beings, except for those employed by Intel, will commence in Q1 2002. The new Pentium 5 (or Pentium Pentium, codenamed Pentium Squared) will debut and will offer a fish-friendly interface.
"The reason for the fish-interface is simple. The world is 75% covered by water. We'll make a killing in sales by targetting the largest body of species in the world," claimed Nooty.
Intel representatives refused to answer our calls when we asked sent in questions such as: How do you plan to make "money" off of fish? Where will all these human consumers be burried? What will Intel do as a lone-standing human civilization? And did you ask Microsoft how they plan to port Windows XP (for eXPired) for oceanic fauna?
As far as cost, convenience, uptime, ease of configuration, power consumption, and upteen other advantages, why not just pick up a Linksys Etherfast 4-port Cable/DSL Router (or an 8-port version) for ~$80?
Before these babies came out, Linux routers were the bomb and fun to play with. But these new routers seem like no-brainers to me. You can configure them through a Web interface (which is only accessible by the "internal" network for security), such as setting up forwarding ports, disable certain ports from accessing the Internet (i.e., just an internal gaming port). It's a teeny box that hardly uses any power, is up all time and doesn't need to be rebooted, it's fast, it's cute, and it's cheap. It's the ultimate Internet connection sharing device with sufficient firewall capabilities. I believe D-Link and Netgear also have similar routers.
The reason Microsoft is pushing their .NET architecture so strongly, of course, is because it's their last recourse for their domination of the computer world. Yes, now it's not just the "PC" world.
.NET is a genuine, open architecture that will make all our lives easier, or it'll be just another MS sugar coating to take over the market. After these anti-trust trials, I am hoping that the former is true. But we will still need to be careful, and remain critical of .NET.
And in true Bill Gates fashion, Microsoft is always picking up these trends after some other notable people declare how things will be. First, Bill Gates didn't believe in the Internet. Now he realizes, after sitting on the wayside while Mosaic then Netscape initially dominated the browser market, that this may perhaps be the biggest opportunity of his company's life. He's already had control of the PC market by essentially requiring all PC manufacturers to bundle his operating system with their machines, but this influence pretty much stops at the x86 market (with a brief stint in the Alpha market with NT). Keeping things proprietary meant a tight control over the PC world.
Now, in a strange twist of irony, the open, non-proprietary Internet standards will perhaps offer Bill Gates a new domination over the Internet. A good portion of the market is already under Wintel domination, and the vast majority of such systems are likely connected to the Internet. What better progression than to use this as a portal into the "whole" Internet?
We're going to need to be watchful over this one. Either
(Perhaps this is just preaching to the converted and stating the obvious, but important issues like these can never be said enough.)
I just thought of something.
:)
Perhaps having a fiber-optic bus will allow for a more modular motherboard design, where the CPU socket, memory slots, PCI/AGP slots, etc. are individual components connected to a central northbridge/southbridge via fiber cable?
Since motherboard manufacturers have to choose a particular memory/CPU/PCI slot design, purchasing a motherboard can be limiting to the consumer (at least the hardware enthusiast). By splitting all motherboard sub-components up, you'd be able to pair whatever CPU to whatever memory type you want, and have a PCI module that lets you tack on as many PCI/ISA as you need. Literally a custom-built motherboard.
I'm sure this is slightly costlier, as far as an initial sunk cost, but upgrades should be easier. To make your investment go even further, things like the northbridge module should be a flashable module, so you can update it to support some new processor or memory module type (buy a software upgrade instead of replace the central hardware module).
Okay, so perhaps this is a little far-fetched, and perhaps gone on a very bad tangent from what the original intention of fiber-optic motherboards. But I can still dream, can't I?
Sorry, but this is inaccurate.
HTML and CSS are pretty standardized and have remained fairly static; they haven't changed much (except for the CSS1 and CSS2 thing). The latest HTML standard (or rather, "recommendation") by the W3C is HTML 4.01, which was released back in December 1997. Both Netscape and IE have had multiple browser releases since then, and IE has been the most successfuly with implementing CSS earlier on (try a Netscape 4.7 browser on some advanced CSS pages and you'll see what I mean).
And for the most part, both NS and IE have been remaining true to the standards. Adding features to these standards is fine, as long as they remain true to the overall structure of HTML and CSS. The colored-scrollbar feature in IE may not be seen by other browsers, but the additional CSS statement that Microsoft added is compliant with the overall structure of CSS, and it doesn't break any functionality with other browsers. The Mozilla team should have no problems whatsoever implementing the latest standards, since they've been around for long enough, and are actually written with browser parsing in mind.
The only evolving standard at the moment is XHTML. XHTML 1.0 was recently released, and 1.1 is being drafted. The Consortium has a good track record of making sound judgements in the past, and previous proposals had been successful in allowing implementors to predict what the final draft would look like and what the trends are.
So as far as I'm concerned, the W3C has been an invaluable source for implementors, I don't see this evolving standards problem at all, and I don't understand how the Mozilla team would have any problems with them. The only problematic areas in the browsing arena are proprietary extensions, such as JavaScript, ActiveX, Flash, etc. For those, we have to turn to the companies who created these extensions to open them up for portability.
At this point in the game, it doesn't look like it makes much difference if you take the fastest CPU today and stuck a watercooler on it. People just aren't seeing as high as a gain in speed as the older Celerons and PIIs. Watercooled setups use to give people as high as a legendary 100% increase in speed from the fastest CPUs of yesteryear, which r0x0rd a Quake player's world. Now, people would be extremely lucky to see 50%.
And I think this trend is basically being reflected in the overclocking market. We don't hear the Kryotech machines being hyped as much as two years ago for that very reason. Intel and AMD are ramping up processors at close to their theoretical (yield) speeds, unlike the older Celerons which were just fast PIIs that were underclocked. That's not to say that there aren't anymore CPUs out there that have a high overclocking potential, they're just less common. And we also no longer see as much of a price gap between lower and higher performing CPUs.
So you're right, it's hardly worth the investment in watercooler equipment. But two years ago, it made a lot of difference for hardcore gamers.
Now we're seeing a shift from watercooled CPUs to watercooled graphics cards (can we guess where the bottleneck has gone?), which seems to yield a bit more performance for those highly ambitious hardware enthusiasts.
To me, this is an apples vs. oranges analogy. On one hand, we have the apples, who are the auto and motorcycle enthusiasts. On the other hand, we have the oranges, or the vast uninformed PC-buying public walking into CompUSA and Circuit City stores. Two completely different species.
Intel's ability to con the public into buying into the MHz game is obhorrent, at best. They manufactured an inferior processor, the P4, basically to outmatch AMD in numbers. Intel knew that AMD wouldn't be able to ramp up their Athlons to the same level within a reasonable amount of time. The P4's inferiority is backed up by the fact that P3s outperform P4s MHz-per-MHz.
I feel that AMD's new effective/relative performance ratings are justified in this case, especially since the numbers are realistic (as opposed to their 486/K5 series or Cyrix's CPUs). If Intel wants to bloat numbers, AMD has to catch up in the marketing game in order to survive in this industry. People are walking into the major retail stores and being convinced by salespeople that the P4 systems are better and just as cheap (only because they bundle inferior components such as nVidia TNT2 graphics cards and generic sound cards to reduce the price) as an Athlon-based system. The regular Joe Blow will see a bigger MHz number and an affordable price, which is the killer combination.
The Linux/hardware enthusiasts are by far a minority in the PC market. Thus, the battlegrounds look ugly to those who are more informed, but I'm sure they look even worse within the buildings of Intel and AMD. It's a dog-eat-dog world.
General concensus in messages boards seems to be that IBM hard drives manufactured in Hungary seem to fail at a greater rate than from other factories.
I myself have had a failed IBM hard drive. It was defective upon shipping, and had it replaced immediately with an advance RMA. The replacement failed on me about a month later, and I didn't qualify for an advance RMA because I already RMA'ed it once (even though the first one didn't techically fail on me, it was DOA). This was a 10GB Deskstar 14GXP (I think).
So during the excruciating one-month replacement, I bought a Maxtor drive, and now use it as my primary drive (I'm not trusting my third IBM replacement). The Maxtor's a faster drive anyway, so I'm not complaining. I'll just stay clear of IBMs for a while.
Little did the NASA scientists know that what appeared to be just Martian rocks would end up being dehydrated imps, cacodemons, mancubii, cyberdemons, and John Romero's severed head. Just add water, and then we'll have Hell on Earth.
you start seeing the Intel Blue Guys(TM) in a new Star Trek episode, cleverly disguised as a primitive morphing race.
I'm getting tired of these specific version dependencies (especially in Qt/KDE apps).