I'm sorry, but anti-trust issues, in my opinion, are nothing more than a mask to use as an excuse for what this really is - extortion intended to nickle and dime consumers that rely on Windows because they can't/won't/don't know how to use anything else. Am I supposed to believe now that Microsoft won't intentionally keep open holes in their systems in order to "persuade" their users into purchasing this service? Somehow, I don't put such evil past them.
Do you really believe that Symantec/Mcafee/ETC would just sit back and watch their Primary Cash Cow dissolve if Microsoft decided to incorporate Anti virus natively in Vista? Microsoft would be sued for antitrust before Vista was even released.
Microsoft has only three options here: - Let the third party handle it (Sarcasm)Since that's worked so well(/Sarcasm) - bundle it into Vista, which would be the final solution to the problem for good, and then say hello to the judge. - Sell it as a product, which avoids the Courtroom tour and may or may not be better than the third party and can at least possibly advertise it in vista. But get accused to intentionally allowing holes in your product to sell it in the process.
And No. Fixing the OS is not the final solution (or the problem for that matter). I can guarantee that Vista even with all of it's user restrictions, protections and the like will still have a virus problem, because you can patch the OS until the cows come home, but you can never patch the idiot in front of the keyboard. That idiot will run something bad, which will infect his user account (Which doesn't need Admin/Root/Privs to access and infect BTW. Same goes for you linux and OSX people who think your so safe.), and proceed to DOS everything it sees online and off with SPAM and their's nothing that the idiot is going to do about it until he can't use the computer anymore because it's spamming and DOSsing all day instead of looking at the pretty girls on the interweb.
As for Microsoft adding intentional backdoors to sell Onecare, it's highly unlikely, especially when you could easily go to Mcafee or Symantec for all of your security needs let alone the free apps out there.
The counter strike ad's would have worked in a setting that warrants such ad's. for example, if the map was called CS_shoppingmall, and the object is to rescue hostages from the mall, The Subway ad's would have been OK by me as long as they were located in the food court of the mall map, and attached to a subway restaurant in the food court. The way they were doing it was randomly putting the ad's over various maps in awkward locations. I expect a lot of things at a shipping depot or train depot, but a Subway ad is not one of them.
I've said it before that ad's are fine by me as long as they follow similar rules to real life and fit in the world's timeline, setting, and are not overpowering. Replacing billboards in City of Heroes/Villians with static real ad's would be fine as long as they follow simple billboard rules. Ad's in a futuristic game better have a futuristic theme and look like they came from the time period or it will never work. The same goes with any other game out there. It shouldn't blink or need clicked or be interactive or anything like that. basically, If you look at the ad and think to yourself almost immediately, "That doesn't belong here" than it's not going to work.
Banking institutions are interested in DRM to protect their clients (IE: You) from hackers, Disgruntled Employees, ETC. I remember somewhere that MS was testing their TCP DRM so that files could only be opened by certain employees located on certain domains. Even if the file was moved to a floppy, was E-mailed or a laptop / Tape backup was stolen, the data would be virtually useless because it would need permission from the computer, the network domain and the user account to be accessable.
Now, considering that DRM is a double edged sword, and can be used as an extra layer of security to protect users as well as a choke coller to restrain them, could GPLv3 be used to write constructive (Security layer) programs while discouraging Destructive (limit consumer rights) ones?
Same here. Our ghost server at one time had spybot running with full immunity protection on it and we never had a problem. Also images with spybot in them ran ok once imaged. The only thing I could think of that symantec would be taking about is teatimer doing something wierd to block the ghost server from writing to the drive correctly, and that's a real long shot considering that teatimer needs user verification for just about everything it does.
This situation doesn't surprise me comming from Symantec however. I ditched them around NAV 2001 and never looked back, Especially when you could predict when the next antivirus version would come out because the previous version would "mysteriously" start having problems or crashing about a week before the next version release.
Well, we got 2 of those notebooks where we work and we can't take part in the settlement because you must have at least 3 documented failures. So far, they both have had no issues whatsoever, and they're pretty much at their end of life for us.
I guess we had a lucky batch or something, and maybe so did CNet. It's Either that or a golden sample.
At first, I thought that this external drive was a bad idea, but in a way it makes a lot of sense.
For example, lets say that Bluray wins and HD-DVD tanks. There's nothing stopping Microsoft from making a Bluray (or perhaps a bluray HD-DVD combo) drive down the line. The same could probably be said for the PS3 if Bluray tanks.
The only thing that I wish these consoles had is user replaceable Internal Drives. CD/DVD drives seem to be the weak link in all of these consoles and it would be nice if it was user replaceable when it fails.
I'd stick with AS/400 if I were you, especially if you have competent admins to administer it. AS/400's reliability and security is second only to large scale mainframes, and last much better than x86 when it comes to long term investment. Sure it costs a lot up front, but when you consider that system could last 7-15 years easily, it sure beats a 3-5 year price cycle of a x86 farm. Also, if the task is mission critical keep in mind that AS/400 up-time will absolutely destroy Windows, Linux and even industrial Unix systems up-time and those x86 machines will only start to approach AS/400 reliability when you start to farm the x86 machines.
Now if the ERP software your currently using is out of business, or is absoletly prohibitly expensive vs other ERP solutions, then look at all of your ERP options and pick the best one that will work for you and your business regardless of price, platform, or OS. Too many PHB's get sucked into the magical speak that comes out of the guy with the plaid suit and big shiny teeth to see if the software their actually buying will work for them. Make sure that whatever you're going to spend $100,000+ on is really going to do the job that your AS/400 is doing. Period. Call other companies using those solutions, get demos, get all the plaid suit big shiny teeth people in a room and play Corporate ThunderDome. Either way, Hardware wise IBM is the way to go when it comes to hardware and support.
I swear. the only way this is going to go away is if the Mythbusters bust it.
IE doesn't and never ran in kernel space. it ran in the Windows Shell. It's the same thing KDE does with Konqueror in linux.
The big problem is twofold, the first being the ActiveX design itself. It's basically a whiz bang way of installing and executing a Windows executable file through a browser. If MS made ActiveX properly and forced it to be confined to a sandbox like Java did it never would have ever been a problem, but MS didn't look as security when they designed ActiveX, they looked at what customers (IE:PHB) wanted that Java wasn't delivering, which was speed at the time. So someone at MS got the bright idea to run native code instead of run-time code, and BAM! ActiveX.
Now comes problem 2, which is single user windows. Windows at the time (Excluding NT) ran as administrator (Root) at all times regardless of who's logged in, so when you ran a executable file under windows, it could do anything from show a spreadsheet to format your Hard drive. Java since it was sand-boxed couldn't do this without prompting you like crazy that you were probably doing something stupid right now if a program was trying to do something malicious. Even under 2000/XP, by default your running as Administrator because they decided that running all those legacy programs was more important than security, so the problem still exists today.
How could MS fix it? well they could emulate the core OS run-time for activeX programs (or any executable called by IE for that matter) so that it's completely separate from the primary OS so anything that is run under it is effectively sand-boxed, or they could enforce permissions on the next OS release. It looks like for vista their choosing option 2, although IMHO they should remove all native legacy support from vista and VM anything legacy in a kernel-space designed specifically for the legacy application.
Now that I think about it, you bring up a good point on the Dev kit. So far MS hasn't shown any Dev kit for the 360 when it comes to the Indy Scene outside of the commercial Dev kits the big Dev's have. Sometime down the line they may make some SDK available for VS2K5 (even make it compatible with the express versions) to allow you to compile code for the 360, but MS has been relatively silent about the role of the marketplace in general when it comes to independent gaming outside of it's PR hype.
The Code Signing is a gimme, but if there trying to attract Indie Dev's into making small games for the 360, it cannot be too expensive to obtain a licence and signed code, and its not like Mozilla for example couldn't recoup the loss by charging a micropayment like fee to download it. Again, without any official word from MS where the marketplace is headed it's a moot point, but MS might surprise us there, especially if the Revolution is as open an architecture as the rumors have been saying for a while.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I thought that this was the entire reason MS made the Xbox Marketplace, So that independent Dev's could make a game/program and sell it over Xbox live.
What's stopping any Dev from making a NES emulator for example, and selling it on the marketplace for 100 points? Is there restrictions on what you can and cannot sell on the marketplace?
I know linux is a different story, since it's an OS replacement, but I don't see any reason why the Mozilla Foundation for example couldn't make a 360 port of Firefox and sell it for the points equivalent of $0.25 over Xbox Live.
This seems to be a perfect thread for this question.
I have an old Pentium 133 Sitting in my basement, and I want to run a SMAUG based mud off of it using Linux, however I would like the Linux distro to be as stripped as possible to allow full function of the MUD but take the least amount of space on the hard drive and memory.
I've looked at DSL and Slackware, and they seem by default to add stuff that you don't really need for a text based game, such as X windows and other unwanted programming language support. so I guess the real question is is there a distro of linux specificially designed for Mud only linux based servers?
All I really need the Linux distro to so is the following: 1) Run FTP and Telnet servers so I can add/manage the server remotely 2) Compile (C++) and Execute Smaug as well as restart Smaug if a crash occurs 3) Connect to the network so I can access Smaug as well as the FTP and telnet servers.
Also, rolling my own distro isn't really an option since I'm more a Windows user than Linux, and I know Cygnus will compile it on windows, but Windows 2000 doesn't run really great on that slow of a machine.
So you've got a friend who abuses his consoles. That's certainly not representative. My release day PS2 is still working just fine.
Actually, he takes good care of his consoles. He does use them roughly 6-8 hours a day. So far, the last gen old PS2 has lasted the longest, the other two died within 6 months to a year. The Xbox was a first Gen, and the Cube is still going strong. Again, If the PS2 drives were so good, there wouldn't be a Class action lawsuit Thrown at them.
They did the same with the DVD drive in the PS2 in 2000. And this is a Sony technology we're talking about, it would be saying a lot more if they didn't trust Blu-ray enough to include it.
So Sony would rather put a drive in their next gen platform that could possibly be susceptible to cause system failures rather than let the Bluray Market mature enough to make a more stable system just to make their own tech look better to a few MPAA execs. Sounds like a company I want to buy from, but then again, they have been doing this to their customers for years now and they still come back.
And by the way, DVD players were out around 96-98, which gave them a good 2 to 4 years of market share to work out cost and reliability issues. Show me where all the BluRay players are. It wouldn't susprise me one bit that the PS3 will be the first one (if not the second or third) to come to market.
StarOcean: Till the End of Time is, to the best of my knowledge, the first PS2 game released which required 2 DVDs.
That's one game out of how many? hundreds? Thousands? Hell I still see PS2 games today shipping with CD's. A good majority of games don't need this much space, and the ones that do will simply swap.
In most cases when it comes to consoles, yes the hardware price comes down, but not in the case of the Xbox.
Microsoft made a huge mistake when they designed the Xbox. They designed it as a PC disguised as a game console because they assumed it would depreciate like a PC, but what they didn't realize is that the PC generally stays the same price but with better specs. Since they designed it this way, they had to rely on third party off the shelf parts to build them, and in some cases contract out parts (Nforce for example). When the parts got obsoluted, the suppliers refused to retool/die-shrink them to drop the price and in some cases, raised the price since it was a special order item. This is a lot of the reason why Microsoft sued Nvidia. Also, since Microsoft couldn't just update the Xbox architecture with faster processors or different hardware without causing problems, they were in a real bind and had no choice but to buy the parts regardless of cost.
On the Xbox360, Microsoft wised up and bought all of the chip designs. That way, they can retool the design, shrink the die, manufacture the chips at any fab they choose, ETC. They could even go as far as redesigning the entire console altogether like Sony does around the EOL of their consoles. It wouldn't surprise me if the Xbox360 started turning in a profit in a few years time.
This is a lot of the reasons I got out of console gaming and stick with my PC. None of these consoles seem to be reliable.
A friend of mine is an avid console gamer. So far, he's gone through 2 playstations, 3 PS2's and and Xbox. The only thing he hasn't managed to break so far is his Gamecube, which is a testament of Nintendo building a console to last. Just wait for the PS3 and the revolution to be released, and then lets compare which console has the most problems.
Sony is betting the farm on a lot of market untested technologies, Specifically Bluray. Bluray doesn't nearly have the 5+ years of refinement that DVD has had, and I can bet that looking at a bluray disk funny let alone getting fingerprints or a scratch on the disk will make it very susceptible to read failure. Meanwhile, Nintendo and Microsoft are using much more mature DVD tech, which will pay off with much less failure in the long run.
Speaking of Bluray, Yes 50GB is great, but show me a game that uses more than 8.5GB. The only one that comes to my mind is the Everquest series with every expansion they have. Even HL2 and Quake4/Doom III with their mind blowing graphics doesn't crack a single layer of a dual layer DVD, so my guess is that most of that storage will be used for "Sega CD" uses like audio and video, instead of just using the high powered graphics hardware to do the cut scenes for you. Simply put, the only reason they put Bluray in the PS3 is to stronghold the movie industry to make Bluray the High Dev Movie standard, and in doing so, Sony is risking the relibility of the hardware.
Nintendo wise, it looks like they went the path of refining the gamecube. The Cube's reliability is already pretty high. the only thing in question is the CD-ROM drive. Being a slot loader vs the old top loading design may be a problem, but knowing Nintendo they won't ship until the thing could survive warfare.
Microsoft biggest problem is it likes to use commodity parts for it's hardware. Yes it make it a lot cheaper but it also bites them because it's not designed to take console level abuse. The Detachable hard drive to me looks like a big failure point, especially if there's no active protection on these drives. The CD-Roms are probably a big failure point as well. I also believe that heat problems are going to plague them as well, but time will tell.
Yeah, almost forgot about a bootable CD solution. Although I prefer Pebuilder with XPE over Knoppix, either one works fine.
The Ultimate Boot CD and the UBCD 4 Windows (Basicially PEBuilder with a lot of diagnostic utilities) are also something you should keep around just in case.
1)Like Lone Starr said in Spaceballs, "Take only what you need to survive". Basically only install what you need for the primary task the computer does. The more stuff you install, the slower it gets.
2)Disk Cleanup, Chkdsk, and Defragment the hard drive at least once a month. a lot of speed can be gained just by doing this regularly.
3)Protect windows like the plague. Patch to the latest revisions of Service packs, critical, and recommended updates. also use third party protection to protect against malware. Spywareblaster, Microsoft Antispyware and Grisoft AVG free edition are my personal favorites.
4)Keep system restore on and always make a restore point before you install anything. That way, if it screws up the machine after you installed it, you can uninstall it and roll the computer back to ensure that the system is totally clean of it.
5) If you got Norton ghost lying around, use it to make an image of your machine after you set it all up, that way you can roll back to that image just in case something really hoses windows.
So far, I've kept this mantra going with my machine. It's been a good 1 to 2 years since I reinstalled windows either from scratch or by ghost and I've haven't noticed any slowdown to date that I couldn't attribute to the machine getting more obsolete by the day.
The question is: Do video games make killers? And if so (and that's a big if) where does the line between social conditioning and personal responsibility lay?
I remember back in the 80's the movie industry had to basically kill off the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie series because people were screaming "Freddie makes killers because he makes killing people too much fun!". I've yet to see anyone even remotely emulate Freddy in any way, or Jason, Mike Myers, ETC for that matter.
If it's true that people are emulating games to kill, where's all these killers at? If there were more copycat crimes out there and the game is basically brainwashing children to kill, with the install base GTA has we would be hearing about them all day and night in the news like a epidemic, yet it seems the only one that ever brings them up is Jack Thompson, and he's been bringing up the same few for years now.
The way most of these games are made, any crime on the street could be attributed to them. All you have to do is shoot one guy in the street, put on your "GTA made me do it" Shirt and watch Rockstar take the heat rather than frying the guy responsible for the murder because he's "just an innocent victim of the rockstar killing frenzy known as GTA" even though he may have never touched the game once in his life.
Seriously, What ever happened to Blaming the person responsible for the crime rather than what influenced him? Why must we analyze anything that they were exposed to in order to find out why they did it instead of just saying He did it, end of story.
I got SSII a few days ago, and it definetly feels like it's missing something.
Cutscenes dont bother me much at all. Actually the thing that bugged me more was the fact that they were pre rendered, and sometimes he would wear a serious sam II shirt which he doesn't in the game. Cutscenes beat Netrissa poping up that stupid Email icon every five minutes in the old game.
My biggest problem with it, was that it didn't seem to inundate you with unending hords of enemies. Sure your getting a lot in SSII, but not nearly the initial count the first SS:FE and SS:SE gave you. There were levels where you would fight 30-50 werebulls easily, the most I counted on SSII was 15. You always had this feeling that they aren't throwing nearly enough enemies at you and are throwing smaller multiple waves at you rather than sending one huge wave your way. The Final level of SSII literaly felt like halfway through the first or second encounter. Nowhere near the amount you saw in the final stages of those games.
Another problem was less one liners. in the first two games, Just about every big battle sam spewed something funny, but This one he stays too quiet. I really wanted to hear comments on each new enemy, and more random comedy that the first few games were swarming with. this game seemed to be more serious so to speak.
I don't know if it can be said it's a weakness of open source as of yet. This openoffice is still relatively new code. It will probably get some patches that will speed up functionality over time.
Yes, Microsoft has the programming resources and capital, but they never seem to use it for streamlining except for once in a blue moon. I think Office 2003 is the only time I can think of that they actually released a product more for streamlining than for functionality, and what resulted from it is one of the best running offices in a long time.
There really isn't much of a difference functionality wise between office XP and office 2003 (outside of outlook), but there is a big difference when it comes to size, where office 2003 fits on one CD, Office XP takes about 3-4. (1 for most office apps, 1 for clipart, 1 for publisher and an optional 1 for a tutorial CD.) They even added infopath and onenote to office 2003 and it's still fits on that single CD. On top of that, it's more reliable, faster and easy to migrate people familiar with XP.
Added functionality is one of the things that gets Microsoft into trouble a lot. They love to add functionality instead of streamlining their product. The next office and windows just looks like their going to be a mess from the pictures I'm seeing. I really wish that Microsoft would just keep streamlining their products instead of reinventing the wheel every three years to try and get that Whiz! Bang! Wow! reaction they got when Win95 was released.
I was praying that some big name company would make his game.
Why you ask? because just for the chance that they'd make the game, and Jack would come out and say, who do I make the 10,000 out to, and the dev's would say "Child's Play" just to piss him off. The only thing that could make it even better if all the Proceeds when to "Child's Play".
Hell I'd give $50 to child's play just to see his reaction when they say that.
It really doesn't matter who is controlling Palladium (or a palladium like system created by someone else). In the end it is an iron clad system governed by some body. So if you create executable code, your dealing with that body or it never runs, and that body has the final say on the matter. I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA would love a system like that. Not me however.
for example, the PS2. I could write code for it, but if I want to play that code on someone Else's PS2 I would either have to defeat the protection in it or buy a licence from Sony. Since most PS2's aren't modded, there isn't an influx of viruses even though they have writable Memory cards that could be used in some way to infect PS2's
Sandboxing, memory protection and all is better protection, but it's not foolproof. There are java exploits (which is a sandbox environment), and not all malicious code runs on a memory exploit. Combined it would be a good system, but the idea is to have the maximum amount of protection without severely sacrificing usability, So adding another layer of protection (such as a virus scanner) isn't going to hurt.
Check out OS X! They have the best installation system ever - just copy that shiny vector-graphics based icon to your Applications folder, ENTER your password once and DONE!
Joe Stupid: "Gee this fine Pam Anderson file that Bob sent me is going to be great! But it needs installed. Well, Let me drag this Nice Shiny Vector-graphics based icon to my Applications folder, type in my password, and HEY it's not Pam Anderson, it's Paypal telling me to enter my password...."
If you notice, the example I gave in the grandparent is (outside of the filename I gave for effect) OS agnostic. It doesn't talk about browsers, or Specific security, or focuses on simply windows. Just about every OS has a hierarchy of steps that try to warn you, and many of the operating systems out there have ways to bypass that security.
I'm not saying that Microsoft doesnt have things to fix, but not everything can be fixable without either Shock treatment, or total lockout. Simply put, you cannot underestimate the stupidity of the common computer user. It will always bite you back.
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I'm sorry, but anti-trust issues, in my opinion, are nothing more than a mask to use as an excuse for what this really is - extortion intended to nickle and dime consumers that rely on Windows because they can't/won't/don't know how to use anything else. Am I supposed to believe now that Microsoft won't intentionally keep open holes in their systems in order to "persuade" their users into purchasing this service? Somehow, I don't put such evil past them.
Do you really believe that Symantec/Mcafee/ETC would just sit back and watch their Primary Cash Cow dissolve if Microsoft decided to incorporate Anti virus natively in Vista? Microsoft would be sued for antitrust before Vista was even released.
Microsoft has only three options here:
- Let the third party handle it (Sarcasm)Since that's worked so well(/Sarcasm)
- bundle it into Vista, which would be the final solution to the problem for good, and then say hello to the judge.
- Sell it as a product, which avoids the Courtroom tour and may or may not be better than the third party and can at least possibly advertise it in vista. But get accused to intentionally allowing holes in your product to sell it in the process.
And No. Fixing the OS is not the final solution (or the problem for that matter). I can guarantee that Vista even with all of it's user restrictions, protections and the like will still have a virus problem, because you can patch the OS until the cows come home, but you can never patch the idiot in front of the keyboard. That idiot will run something bad, which will infect his user account (Which doesn't need Admin/Root/Privs to access and infect BTW. Same goes for you linux and OSX people who think your so safe.), and proceed to DOS everything it sees online and off with SPAM and their's nothing that the idiot is going to do about it until he can't use the computer anymore because it's spamming and DOSsing all day instead of looking at the pretty girls on the interweb.
As for Microsoft adding intentional backdoors to sell Onecare, it's highly unlikely, especially when you could easily go to Mcafee or Symantec for all of your security needs let alone the free apps out there.
The counter strike ad's would have worked in a setting that warrants such ad's. for example, if the map was called CS_shoppingmall, and the object is to rescue hostages from the mall, The Subway ad's would have been OK by me as long as they were located in the food court of the mall map, and attached to a subway restaurant in the food court. The way they were doing it was randomly putting the ad's over various maps in awkward locations. I expect a lot of things at a shipping depot or train depot, but a Subway ad is not one of them.
I've said it before that ad's are fine by me as long as they follow similar rules to real life and fit in the world's timeline, setting, and are not overpowering. Replacing billboards in City of Heroes/Villians with static real ad's would be fine as long as they follow simple billboard rules. Ad's in a futuristic game better have a futuristic theme and look like they came from the time period or it will never work. The same goes with any other game out there. It shouldn't blink or need clicked or be interactive or anything like that. basically, If you look at the ad and think to yourself almost immediately, "That doesn't belong here" than it's not going to work.
http://hijackthis.de/ is another good log analyzer to look at.
Actually, I want to expand on this a little bit.
Banking institutions are interested in DRM to protect their clients (IE: You) from hackers, Disgruntled Employees, ETC. I remember somewhere that MS was testing their TCP DRM so that files could only be opened by certain employees located on certain domains. Even if the file was moved to a floppy, was E-mailed or a laptop / Tape backup was stolen, the data would be virtually useless because it would need permission from the computer, the network domain and the user account to be accessable.
Now, considering that DRM is a double edged sword, and can be used as an extra layer of security to protect users as well as a choke coller to restrain them, could GPLv3 be used to write constructive (Security layer) programs while discouraging Destructive (limit consumer rights) ones?
Same here. Our ghost server at one time had spybot running with full immunity protection on it and we never had a problem. Also images with spybot in them ran ok once imaged. The only thing I could think of that symantec would be taking about is teatimer doing something wierd to block the ghost server from writing to the drive correctly, and that's a real long shot considering that teatimer needs user verification for just about everything it does.
This situation doesn't surprise me comming from Symantec however. I ditched them around NAV 2001 and never looked back, Especially when you could predict when the next antivirus version would come out because the previous version would "mysteriously" start having problems or crashing about a week before the next version release.
Wow. This is news? I though just about every tech on earth knew the Scsi 0 Scanjet Trick. I remember showing this to my boss over 6-7 years ago.
It's still cool, but I thought it was well known by now.
Well, we got 2 of those notebooks where we work and we can't take part in the settlement because you must have at least 3 documented failures. So far, they both have had no issues whatsoever, and they're pretty much at their end of life for us.
I guess we had a lucky batch or something, and maybe so did CNet. It's Either that or a golden sample.
At first, I thought that this external drive was a bad idea, but in a way it makes a lot of sense.
For example, lets say that Bluray wins and HD-DVD tanks. There's nothing stopping Microsoft from making a Bluray (or perhaps a bluray HD-DVD combo) drive down the line. The same could probably be said for the PS3 if Bluray tanks.
The only thing that I wish these consoles had is user replaceable Internal Drives. CD/DVD drives seem to be the weak link in all of these consoles and it would be nice if it was user replaceable when it fails.
I'd stick with AS/400 if I were you, especially if you have competent admins to administer it. AS/400's reliability and security is second only to large scale mainframes, and last much better than x86 when it comes to long term investment. Sure it costs a lot up front, but when you consider that system could last 7-15 years easily, it sure beats a 3-5 year price cycle of a x86 farm. Also, if the task is mission critical keep in mind that AS/400 up-time will absolutely destroy Windows, Linux and even industrial Unix systems up-time and those x86 machines will only start to approach AS/400 reliability when you start to farm the x86 machines.
Now if the ERP software your currently using is out of business, or is absoletly prohibitly expensive vs other ERP solutions, then look at all of your ERP options and pick the best one that will work for you and your business regardless of price, platform, or OS. Too many PHB's get sucked into the magical speak that comes out of the guy with the plaid suit and big shiny teeth to see if the software their actually buying will work for them. Make sure that whatever you're going to spend $100,000+ on is really going to do the job that your AS/400 is doing. Period. Call other companies using those solutions, get demos, get all the plaid suit big shiny teeth people in a room and play Corporate ThunderDome. Either way, Hardware wise IBM is the way to go when it comes to hardware and support.
merged IE with the OS
I swear. the only way this is going to go away is if the Mythbusters bust it.
IE doesn't and never ran in kernel space. it ran in the Windows Shell. It's the same thing KDE does with Konqueror in linux.
The big problem is twofold, the first being the ActiveX design itself. It's basically a whiz bang way of installing and executing a Windows executable file through a browser. If MS made ActiveX properly and forced it to be confined to a sandbox like Java did it never would have ever been a problem, but MS didn't look as security when they designed ActiveX, they looked at what customers (IE:PHB) wanted that Java wasn't delivering, which was speed at the time. So someone at MS got the bright idea to run native code instead of run-time code, and BAM! ActiveX.
Now comes problem 2, which is single user windows. Windows at the time (Excluding NT) ran as administrator (Root) at all times regardless of who's logged in, so when you ran a executable file under windows, it could do anything from show a spreadsheet to format your Hard drive. Java since it was sand-boxed couldn't do this without prompting you like crazy that you were probably doing something stupid right now if a program was trying to do something malicious. Even under 2000/XP, by default your running as Administrator because they decided that running all those legacy programs was more important than security, so the problem still exists today.
How could MS fix it? well they could emulate the core OS run-time for activeX programs (or any executable called by IE for that matter) so that it's completely separate from the primary OS so anything that is run under it is effectively sand-boxed, or they could enforce permissions on the next OS release. It looks like for vista their choosing option 2, although IMHO they should remove all native legacy support from vista and VM anything legacy in a kernel-space designed specifically for the legacy application.
Now that I think about it, you bring up a good point on the Dev kit. So far MS hasn't shown any Dev kit for the 360 when it comes to the Indy Scene outside of the commercial Dev kits the big Dev's have. Sometime down the line they may make some SDK available for VS2K5 (even make it compatible with the express versions) to allow you to compile code for the 360, but MS has been relatively silent about the role of the marketplace in general when it comes to independent gaming outside of it's PR hype.
The Code Signing is a gimme, but if there trying to attract Indie Dev's into making small games for the 360, it cannot be too expensive to obtain a licence and signed code, and its not like Mozilla for example couldn't recoup the loss by charging a micropayment like fee to download it. Again, without any official word from MS where the marketplace is headed it's a moot point, but MS might surprise us there, especially if the Revolution is as open an architecture as the rumors have been saying for a while.
Maybe I'm missing something, but I thought that this was the entire reason MS made the Xbox Marketplace, So that independent Dev's could make a game/program and sell it over Xbox live.
What's stopping any Dev from making a NES emulator for example, and selling it on the marketplace for 100 points? Is there restrictions on what you can and cannot sell on the marketplace?
I know linux is a different story, since it's an OS replacement, but I don't see any reason why the Mozilla Foundation for example couldn't make a 360 port of Firefox and sell it for the points equivalent of $0.25 over Xbox Live.
This seems to be a perfect thread for this question.
I have an old Pentium 133 Sitting in my basement, and I want to run a SMAUG based mud off of it using Linux, however I would like the Linux distro to be as stripped as possible to allow full function of the MUD but take the least amount of space on the hard drive and memory.
I've looked at DSL and Slackware, and they seem by default to add stuff that you don't really need for a text based game, such as X windows and other unwanted programming language support. so I guess the real question is is there a distro of linux specificially designed for Mud only linux based servers?
All I really need the Linux distro to so is the following:
1) Run FTP and Telnet servers so I can add/manage the server remotely
2) Compile (C++) and Execute Smaug as well as restart Smaug if a crash occurs
3) Connect to the network so I can access Smaug as well as the FTP and telnet servers.
Also, rolling my own distro isn't really an option since I'm more a Windows user than Linux, and I know Cygnus will compile it on windows, but Windows 2000 doesn't run really great on that slow of a machine.
So you've got a friend who abuses his consoles. That's certainly not representative. My release day PS2 is still working just fine.
Actually, he takes good care of his consoles. He does use them roughly 6-8 hours a day. So far, the last gen old PS2 has lasted the longest, the other two died within 6 months to a year. The Xbox was a first Gen, and the Cube is still going strong. Again, If the PS2 drives were so good, there wouldn't be a Class action lawsuit Thrown at them.
They did the same with the DVD drive in the PS2 in 2000. And this is a Sony technology we're talking about, it would be saying a lot more if they didn't trust Blu-ray enough to include it.
So Sony would rather put a drive in their next gen platform that could possibly be susceptible to cause system failures rather than let the Bluray Market mature enough to make a more stable system just to make their own tech look better to a few MPAA execs. Sounds like a company I want to buy from, but then again, they have been doing this to their customers for years now and they still come back.
And by the way, DVD players were out around 96-98, which gave them a good 2 to 4 years of market share to work out cost and reliability issues. Show me where all the BluRay players are. It wouldn't susprise me one bit that the PS3 will be the first one (if not the second or third) to come to market.
StarOcean: Till the End of Time is, to the best of my knowledge, the first PS2 game released which required 2 DVDs.
That's one game out of how many? hundreds? Thousands? Hell I still see PS2 games today shipping with CD's. A good majority of games don't need this much space, and the ones that do will simply swap.
In most cases when it comes to consoles, yes the hardware price comes down, but not in the case of the Xbox.
Microsoft made a huge mistake when they designed the Xbox. They designed it as a PC disguised as a game console because they assumed it would depreciate like a PC, but what they didn't realize is that the PC generally stays the same price but with better specs. Since they designed it this way, they had to rely on third party off the shelf parts to build them, and in some cases contract out parts (Nforce for example). When the parts got obsoluted, the suppliers refused to retool/die-shrink them to drop the price and in some cases, raised the price since it was a special order item. This is a lot of the reason why Microsoft sued Nvidia. Also, since Microsoft couldn't just update the Xbox architecture with faster processors or different hardware without causing problems, they were in a real bind and had no choice but to buy the parts regardless of cost.
On the Xbox360, Microsoft wised up and bought all of the chip designs. That way, they can retool the design, shrink the die, manufacture the chips at any fab they choose, ETC. They could even go as far as redesigning the entire console altogether like Sony does around the EOL of their consoles. It wouldn't surprise me if the Xbox360 started turning in a profit in a few years time.
This is a lot of the reasons I got out of console gaming and stick with my PC. None of these consoles seem to be reliable.
A friend of mine is an avid console gamer. So far, he's gone through 2 playstations, 3 PS2's and and Xbox. The only thing he hasn't managed to break so far is his Gamecube, which is a testament of Nintendo building a console to last. Just wait for the PS3 and the revolution to be released, and then lets compare which console has the most problems.
Sony is betting the farm on a lot of market untested technologies, Specifically Bluray. Bluray doesn't nearly have the 5+ years of refinement that DVD has had, and I can bet that looking at a bluray disk funny let alone getting fingerprints or a scratch on the disk will make it very susceptible to read failure. Meanwhile, Nintendo and Microsoft are using much more mature DVD tech, which will pay off with much less failure in the long run.
Speaking of Bluray, Yes 50GB is great, but show me a game that uses more than 8.5GB. The only one that comes to my mind is the Everquest series with every expansion they have. Even HL2 and Quake4/Doom III with their mind blowing graphics doesn't crack a single layer of a dual layer DVD, so my guess is that most of that storage will be used for "Sega CD" uses like audio and video, instead of just using the high powered graphics hardware to do the cut scenes for you. Simply put, the only reason they put Bluray in the PS3 is to stronghold the movie industry to make Bluray the High Dev Movie standard, and in doing so, Sony is risking the relibility of the hardware.
Nintendo wise, it looks like they went the path of refining the gamecube. The Cube's reliability is already pretty high. the only thing in question is the CD-ROM drive. Being a slot loader vs the old top loading design may be a problem, but knowing Nintendo they won't ship until the thing could survive warfare.
Microsoft biggest problem is it likes to use commodity parts for it's hardware. Yes it make it a lot cheaper but it also bites them because it's not designed to take console level abuse. The Detachable hard drive to me looks like a big failure point, especially if there's no active protection on these drives. The CD-Roms are probably a big failure point as well. I also believe that heat problems are going to plague them as well, but time will tell.
Yeah, almost forgot about a bootable CD solution. Although I prefer Pebuilder with XPE over Knoppix, either one works fine.
The Ultimate Boot CD and the UBCD 4 Windows (Basicially PEBuilder with a lot of diagnostic utilities) are also something you should keep around just in case.
1)Like Lone Starr said in Spaceballs, "Take only what you need to survive". Basically only install what you need for the primary task the computer does. The more stuff you install, the slower it gets.
2)Disk Cleanup, Chkdsk, and Defragment the hard drive at least once a month. a lot of speed can be gained just by doing this regularly.
3)Protect windows like the plague. Patch to the latest revisions of Service packs, critical, and recommended updates. also use third party protection to protect against malware. Spywareblaster, Microsoft Antispyware and Grisoft AVG free edition are my personal favorites.
4)Keep system restore on and always make a restore point before you install anything. That way, if it screws up the machine after you installed it, you can uninstall it and roll the computer back to ensure that the system is totally clean of it.
5) If you got Norton ghost lying around, use it to make an image of your machine after you set it all up, that way you can roll back to that image just in case something really hoses windows.
So far, I've kept this mantra going with my machine. It's been a good 1 to 2 years since I reinstalled windows either from scratch or by ghost and I've haven't noticed any slowdown to date that I couldn't attribute to the machine getting more obsolete by the day.
The question is: Do video games make killers? And if so (and that's a big if) where does the line between social conditioning and personal responsibility lay?
I remember back in the 80's the movie industry had to basically kill off the "Nightmare on Elm Street" movie series because people were screaming "Freddie makes killers because he makes killing people too much fun!". I've yet to see anyone even remotely emulate Freddy in any way, or Jason, Mike Myers, ETC for that matter.
If it's true that people are emulating games to kill, where's all these killers at? If there were more copycat crimes out there and the game is basically brainwashing children to kill, with the install base GTA has we would be hearing about them all day and night in the news like a epidemic, yet it seems the only one that ever brings them up is Jack Thompson, and he's been bringing up the same few for years now.
The way most of these games are made, any crime on the street could be attributed to them. All you have to do is shoot one guy in the street, put on your "GTA made me do it" Shirt and watch Rockstar take the heat rather than frying the guy responsible for the murder because he's "just an innocent victim of the rockstar killing frenzy known as GTA" even though he may have never touched the game once in his life.
Seriously, What ever happened to Blaming the person responsible for the crime rather than what influenced him? Why must we analyze anything that they were exposed to in order to find out why they did it instead of just saying He did it, end of story.
I got SSII a few days ago, and it definetly feels like it's missing something.
Cutscenes dont bother me much at all. Actually the thing that bugged me more was the fact that they were pre rendered, and sometimes he would wear a serious sam II shirt which he doesn't in the game. Cutscenes beat Netrissa poping up that stupid Email icon every five minutes in the old game.
My biggest problem with it, was that it didn't seem to inundate you with unending hords of enemies. Sure your getting a lot in SSII, but not nearly the initial count the first SS:FE and SS:SE gave you. There were levels where you would fight 30-50 werebulls easily, the most I counted on SSII was 15. You always had this feeling that they aren't throwing nearly enough enemies at you and are throwing smaller multiple waves at you rather than sending one huge wave your way. The Final level of SSII literaly felt like halfway through the first or second encounter. Nowhere near the amount you saw in the final stages of those games.
Another problem was less one liners. in the first two games, Just about every big battle sam spewed something funny, but This one he stays too quiet. I really wanted to hear comments on each new enemy, and more random comedy that the first few games were swarming with. this game seemed to be more serious so to speak.
I don't know if it can be said it's a weakness of open source as of yet. This openoffice is still relatively new code. It will probably get some patches that will speed up functionality over time.
Yes, Microsoft has the programming resources and capital, but they never seem to use it for streamlining except for once in a blue moon. I think Office 2003 is the only time I can think of that they actually released a product more for streamlining than for functionality, and what resulted from it is one of the best running offices in a long time.
There really isn't much of a difference functionality wise between office XP and office 2003 (outside of outlook), but there is a big difference when it comes to size, where office 2003 fits on one CD, Office XP takes about 3-4. (1 for most office apps, 1 for clipart, 1 for publisher and an optional 1 for a tutorial CD.) They even added infopath and onenote to office 2003 and it's still fits on that single CD. On top of that, it's more reliable, faster and easy to migrate people familiar with XP.
Added functionality is one of the things that gets Microsoft into trouble a lot. They love to add functionality instead of streamlining their product. The next office and windows just looks like their going to be a mess from the pictures I'm seeing. I really wish that Microsoft would just keep streamlining their products instead of reinventing the wheel every three years to try and get that Whiz! Bang! Wow! reaction they got when Win95 was released.
I always thought the equation was whoever has the biggest bag of money or the Most Rap artists/music or John Madden wins.
So I'm sure if John Madden's NFL Hip Hop Underground with Funkmaster Flex Ever gets made, It will sweep the awards.
I was praying that some big name company would make his game.
Why you ask? because just for the chance that they'd make the game, and Jack would come out and say, who do I make the 10,000 out to, and the dev's would say "Child's Play" just to piss him off. The only thing that could make it even better if all the Proceeds when to "Child's Play".
Hell I'd give $50 to child's play just to see his reaction when they say that.
It really doesn't matter who is controlling Palladium (or a palladium like system created by someone else). In the end it is an iron clad system governed by some body. So if you create executable code, your dealing with that body or it never runs, and that body has the final say on the matter. I'm sure the RIAA/MPAA would love a system like that. Not me however.
for example, the PS2. I could write code for it, but if I want to play that code on someone Else's PS2 I would either have to defeat the protection in it or buy a licence from Sony. Since most PS2's aren't modded, there isn't an influx of viruses even though they have writable Memory cards that could be used in some way to infect PS2's
Sandboxing, memory protection and all is better protection, but it's not foolproof. There are java exploits (which is a sandbox environment), and not all malicious code runs on a memory exploit. Combined it would be a good system, but the idea is to have the maximum amount of protection without severely sacrificing usability, So adding another layer of protection (such as a virus scanner) isn't going to hurt.
First off,
Check out OS X! They have the best installation system ever - just copy that shiny vector-graphics based icon to your Applications folder, ENTER your password once and DONE!
Joe Stupid: "Gee this fine Pam Anderson file that Bob sent me is going to be great! But it needs installed. Well, Let me drag this Nice Shiny Vector-graphics based icon to my Applications folder, type in my password, and HEY it's not Pam Anderson, it's Paypal telling me to enter my password...."
If you notice, the example I gave in the grandparent is (outside of the filename I gave for effect) OS agnostic. It doesn't talk about browsers, or Specific security, or focuses on simply windows. Just about every OS has a hierarchy of steps that try to warn you, and many of the operating systems out there have ways to bypass that security.
I'm not saying that Microsoft doesnt have things to fix, but not everything can be fixable without either Shock treatment, or total lockout. Simply put, you cannot underestimate the stupidity of the common computer user. It will always bite you back.