I don't mean to be the typical troll, here, but I've managed to ween myself from Windows completely now. I really want to play this game, but not enough to go back to the dark side. besides, so many other FPSs support Linux now that it seems like a reasonable thing to expect.
Absolutely correct. Let me add, though, that Memtest86 is still an excellent diagnostic tool, just be prepared to swap out some hardware in the process.
No, I don't, but I do consider having only a single address to secure an advantage, doubly so if the machine that address belongs to has nothing on it that I actually care about.
What about dropping butterfly flyers all over the city and spraying the same pattern all over walls and crap? Is that acting professionally?
No, but MSN isn't being marketed as a professional service, and IBM has professional reputation to burn. IBPheonix is not in either of those positions.
At no point did you say that you've verified that your motherboard is good. If you keep swapping out RAM and all of it seems to be bad, I've got news for you: it's not the RAM that's bad.
A DBMS is a professional product, and if you want your project to be taken seriously you need to conduct yourself in a professional manner. A mass posting campaign is on the same maturity level that an organization like Earth First operates at. Guess how much respect Earth First gets in the typical corporate boardroom? That's the real problem with these kinds of tactics; you might win the name game, but at the cost of your reputation. Anyone who's willing to make that trade certainly sounds like a jerk[1] to me.
I totally agree that you had an obligation to raise awareness, but it needed to be conducted in a more mature manner. Personally, if this is the manner in which the Firebird DBMS community conducts itself, I will never use it.
Finally, we both know that even if someone did download the wrong Firebird, the mistake would be immediately apparent when they first tried to start it up. The real issue here is confusing the communities. People calling up IBPheonix and demanding support for Mozilla Firebird, people asking FirebirdSQL questions on Mozilla Firebird discussion forums, that sort of thing. The issue, I think, is not one being mistaken for the other, but rather thinking that the two projects are somehow associated or linked in some way.
That said, Firebird is a stupid name for a browser, and so is Pheonix. They should have stuck with Chimera.
[1] I mean that in the New York sense (idiot), not the California sense (mean person)
I wouldn't hire one to secure my network, but I would certainly hire one to check the security of my network.
Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses, and a crackers strength is likely in attacking rather than defending.
When I played soccer I was a great halfback, but a shitty goalie. Since my coach was not an idiot, he never had me play goalie. The same principle applies here.
People here are saying that you could get a normal SOHO router and get that set up (which will work). The other option, for less money, would be to pick up an ethernet card (assuming you have a PCI Mac with a free slot).
Run the cable modem into one ethernet port (on-board, for example) and run out to the hub off the other ethernet port. Using Internet Sharing, you can even allow the other computers on the network to use the cable modem as their Internet access (and set up the Mac to act as a firewall).
The downsides are that the Mac will have to be on whenever any of the other machines need to access the internet, and that the Mac, which presumably contains data and such that you care about, is directly exposed to the world. The SOHO router solves both of these problems, for less than the cost of a month of DSL service.
Total cost will be about $20 for the card, as opposed to about $80 for the router.
Routers are as low as $22, though recognizable brands (Linksys, D-Link) start at around $41. PCI NICs sporting the RTL8139 chipset (supported by every OS I know of) start at $4. Prices include shipping.
True, why would you want to hire a _convicted_ felon?
You need to hire the hacker they _didn't_ catch. Surely the guy who managed to cover his tracks so well as to never get caught is a much better person to learn from.
True, but then what proof does the employer have that that hacker really has the skills? Anybody can claim to be a hacker, and plenty of people know enough to fool somebody who isn't a hacker into thinking that they are one. Mitnik has proofthat he has the skills.
Also, I really enjoyed shoplifting when I was younger; that is until I got caught. I haven't stollen a single thing since. Based on my own experience, I'd be much more likely to trust a hacker that has been caught than one that hasn't.
When Doom first came out everyone I knew played it with a joystick, occasionally tapping at the keyboard to change weapons or to hold down shift to run. I didn't start using a mouselook until Quake2.
I think Irish Coffee predates Red Bull by a few years (centuries?). It's generally coffee and whiskey, although kahlua, irish cream, and amaretto are also popular coffee additives.
Do you actually know anyone who wants to carry a terminal with them all over their house? I don't.
If it were a stand-alone system it would have a personal use market. As it is, it's only really going to be useful, let alone desired, in a business environment.
How does it compare with a 10" stylus sensative LCD?
it has a very slow processor compare to a lappy
It's a thin client, it doesn't need a fast processor.
I agree with most of your other points, but these 2 are ludicrous. As for who it's targetted at, I have no idea. If it were a standalone machine I would be very interested, although probably not interested enough to buy one until there were comparable handwriting support for it under Linux.
At the risk of sounding buzzwordy, XML might not be a bad choice (or something XML-like that's perhaps not as high overhead).
What benefits, exactly, would XML bring that wouldn't make it a bad idea? First you complain that XF86Config is too complicated, and then you suggest that the solution is to make it more complex and less readable? That makes no sense.
*nix config files are plain text for good reason. Take away the plaintext configs and you might as well be running Windows.
As for hardware detection - it's currently not being handled by anything, either the OS or X. It's being done manually by the installer, or by special auto-detection applications.
That is exactly how it should be. You are apparently unfamiliar with the Unix philosophy. Each peice of software should do one thing, do it well, and play well with others. XFree and the Linux kernel both follow that philosophy. Neither of them are meant to be hardware detection scripts, which is why they don't do that. Good hardware detection scripts, such as SuSE's, are quite capable of telling the kernel and X what they need to know. Each is doing their one job and playing well with others.
It may seem on the surface that adding hardware detection to the kernel or to X would make them better and more useful, but in reality it would accomplish the opposite by dilluting the focus of the project and unnecessarily complicating the code base.
A driver should be able to inform X of the resolutions/refresh rates/colors/etc that it supports, rather than needing to edit a config file to tell X that.
It can and does, via the hardware detection and configuration app (sax, for example). The added bonus of the config file is that it makes it easy to correct the machine when it gets something wrong, like not recognizing my mouse wheel. Try convincing Windows that it made a mistake configuring your hardware sometime! You call that a better system?
comp.os.linux is a good place to start for general Linux questions. alt.linux.suse is a good if you happen to be a SuSE user. If your question is about a specific app, there's likely a group dedicated to it, like comp.protocols.smb for samba.
The Linux Documentation Project is sometimes good, But I often find the info I get there to be either out of date or too specific to a setup that isn't mine.
If I really want to know an app/language/whatever I pony up for the relevant O'Reilly book(s).
You must remember though, that the aim is for the most complex scene to run at 30 fps (or higher). When setting up games, I always try to achieve this, means I'll get no slow down while I'm playing.
Again, that's not hard to do on a console, and, in fact, you have no choice in the matter. Your output will always be 700x525i@30fps and the hardware to crank that out will always be the same. That makes life a lot easier for the developer.
On a PC, it's more difficult. You could be running at 640x480 or 1920x1080, 5fps or 250fps, 2.0GHz P-4 or 3.0GHz Opteron, GF2 MX or Radeon 9800. That makes things a lot more complicated for the developer.
What kind of textures can you use? How big can your textures be? what lighting effects can you use? The answers to these questions are clear cut for a console, and very complicated for a PC.
30fps is an admirable goal on a PC, but isn't always necessary. I doubt I was getting more than 10fps in some parts of Morrowind, but it was still just as playable as Cube was at 300fps (more playable, actually, Cube badly needs better artwork). It was certainly more playable than UT2003 at 30-60fps.
1) This isn't about XFree being fast for you. And if it performs as well as (say) Windows 2k or XP on modern hardware, then you've spent alot of time tweaking X, and probably your kernel. X should be decent out of the box, and it isn't. "Works good enough" isn't something that I personally like settling for.
XFree does perform just as well as Win2k on my hardware (if you care: Athlon XP 1800+, nForce2, 256M, GeForce2 GTS), and I've done no tweaking at all. XFree, Linux kernel, nvidia drivers, and KDE are all SuSE 8.1 default, and the only change I've made to the default XF86Config was to add '"Option" "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"' so my mouse wheel would work (why SuSE doesn't put that in there by default I'll never know). In fact, XFree outperforms Win2k when I'm using WindowMaker (again, SuSE 8.1 default).
If your X performance is really so bad it's likely due to either you haven't enabled DMA for your hard drive, or you've got a graphics card from a company that chooses not to fully support Linux. Either way it's your fault, not XFree's.
2) Standardization is absolutely a point of X. I don't know how you can think otherwise. One of the biggest objections to this port is the possible breaking of the X standards.
I totally agree. The only reason I quoted this is because it condradicts your next statement.
3) There is no reason whatsoever that XF86Config needs to be the monster that it is. A logical hierarchy of settings would be a good first step. Alot of the crap in XF86Config is handled by drivers using a standardized interface in Windows - this is a reasonable model to copy. That would help eliminate the need for every distro that's trying to be user-friendly to write it's own hardware detection program.
X makes as few assumptions as possible about the OS running under it and the environment running on top of it. That's a big part of what has made it such a successful standard.
The Windows configuration interface is NOT a reasonable model to copy precisely because X is so flexible and Windows is not. The Windows graphical framework has only one OS and only one environment to deal with, and is able operate on the assumption that the graphical interface is already working (indeed, Windows is basically unusable without a functioning GUI). X doesn't have that luxury, which is why it's configuration MUST be via text file.
When it comes down to it, I'd say that XF86Config is incredibly streamlined and simple considering all that it handles. I very much doubt that the Windows solution would be so clean if you were actually able to see all of it.
It makes no sense to have X handling drivers and hardware detection, that's the job of the OS. In fact, it would be a mind-bogglingly stupid idea to have all that handled by X, since X is not an essential part of a functioning *nix system.
Sure, it would be nice if there was a single interactive config app for, say, X on Linux, but a combination of ego and economics prevents that from happening. The big three (SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake) will continue to use their own config tools, regardless of the licensing status of competing tools, because that's largely what defines them and differentiates them from other distros. Even if you could get them to agree, you'd still have a different tool for the BSDs.
Frankly, even on the XBox, the graphics will be diminished, as the XBox's GF3 core is a far cry from the GeForceFX and the Radeon 9700/9800 cores, which are more or less required to have decent performance with all the options on.
That's pretty much irrelevant. Sure, you need a pretty sweet video card to get 90fps at 1280x1024 on your PC, but that isn't an issue for the XBox since it's stuck at 700x525 at 30fps/interleved because that's all your TV can handle. I'm willing to bet that even my lowly GF2 GTS would be able to handle that.
We are essentially in agreement. I feel I should clarify one thing, though, and that is what I mean when I say there is no justification for this war.
The important question, IMO, is, "What gives us the right to force regime change in a sovereign nation?" I believe genocide is one thing that does give us that right. As a moral people, we have a compelling obligation to put a stop to something like this, and that's what I mean when I say that, for example, our actions in Yugoslavia were justified. As you said, our strike in Iraq is preemptive.
What is more important, though, is the precedent it sets. Sure, we have a long history of supporting foreign revolutions, and while it makes me a little uncomfortable, I think it's still reasonable that we support a change of regime if the current one is unfavorable to us. Actually going in and doing it ourselves is on a completely different level, though, and lacking a compelling justification, such as genocide, makes us an aggressor nation, which I think is a very dangerous position to be in. That is, after all, the compelling justification we used against Iraq in 1991.
I have actually heard one reason why it should be us, and not the Iraqi people, who should be changing the regime in Iraq. It was presented by an Iraqi exile who called in to a radio show I listen to regularly. She said that Iran claims parts of Iraq, and that internal strife would open the door to invasion by Iran, but that Iran won't try anythiong with US forces there. I still don't think that's a compelling justification, but it did force me to re-evaluate my position.
Anyway, it's been a pleasure to discuss this with you. I have family in town, so I probably won't get another post in before this article is closed.
Thanks. For some reason I get a lot of AC "fuck you, commie!" posts because of it, a sad reflection on the state of reading comprehension in America.
No, that is exactly the example I meant to use. Please see my last journal entry for more information. It is all there.
It seems that we are arguing from very similar positions. I thought you were trying to counter my point, I apologize for my confusion.
They see us as a potential savior and are jaded by our continued lack of support and hypocrisy. This is the cause of terrorism, IMO.
I have to disagree here. If we were taking a passive or agnostic stance in the region it might make sense that they would be bitter about it, but certainly not to the point of commiting acts of terrorism against us. I think the main reason for terrorism against the US is our active support of Isreal, and a close second is that many of the times we have supported Arabs we have left them worse off than they were before. Maybe that's what you mean by hypocrisy, but I think lack of support is not the problem, rather we are giving lots of support to all the wrong people. We aren't simply not saving the Arab people, we are actively supporting their oppressors. That is the cause of terrorism, IMO.
If we change the way we conduct ourselves in the world, we would be perceived as weak.
So? What's wrong with that? There's no reason international politics needs to be conducted as if it were a pissing contest. How does it serve us to reinforce the world opinion that Americans are nothing but a bunch of swaggering cowboys?
Other nations expect us to use our power as only a superpower can.
I think the distinct lack of international support for our current actions in Iraq shows that this is not necessarily true.
Our hegemony is both a boon and a bane as I mentioned above. People expect us also to provide for their needs and fix their problems.
While this is certainly true in some cases, it doesn't mean we have to, or even that we should. I have no problem with humanitarian aid, building infrastructure, etc, but I don't think we have any business playing world police. We overstep our mandate far too frequently.
I knew I detected a hint of pacifism in your arguments. Nothing wrong with that...but sometimes violence is necessary, expecially when dealing with the incompetent who know nothing else.
I'm mostly a pacifist WRT our current actions in Iraq. I don't believe the case for this war was ever made, and it seems from my perspective that the Bush administration did everything it possibly could to prevent a peaceful resolution. Violence in this case was approached as the first choice. Who exactly is the incompetent who understands nothing else? Bush certainly seems to fit that description.
I don't deny that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy, nor that the Iraqi people would be better off without him in power, but I see no reason why it is our job to make that happen, and that's what I mean by "respecting sovereignty". There were very good justifications for what we did in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iraq in 1991, and even in Afghanistan. There is no justification for what we are doing in Iraq now. There is Bush's personal vendetta ("he tried to kill my daddy"), and there are perhaps moral reasons (Saddam is evil), but neither of those are legitimate grounds for invasion.
the boards _HAD_ support for it(thus, suffered from any performance hit there might have been), they just missed the physical slot, that's what i meant was pointless, as the (some) boards had almost exact versions on market but with cnr slot on place of isa slot and 100% else was same.
Yes, the chipset still had support for ISA, and disabling it still improved PCI performance. The overall system performance boost to be had from that is certainly not pointless, especially when weighed against the number of ISA peripherals still on the market.
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Last I heard they were using the Tribes2 engine, which Loki did some work on, so who knows?
I don't mean to be the typical troll, here, but I've managed to ween myself from Windows completely now. I really want to play this game, but not enough to go back to the dark side. besides, so many other FPSs support Linux now that it seems like a reasonable thing to expect.
Absolutely correct. Let me add, though, that Memtest86 is still an excellent diagnostic tool, just be prepared to swap out some hardware in the process.
You confuse NAT for a firewall.
No, I don't, but I do consider having only a single address to secure an advantage, doubly so if the machine that address belongs to has nothing on it that I actually care about.
What about dropping butterfly flyers all over the city and spraying the same pattern all over walls and crap? Is that acting professionally?
No, but MSN isn't being marketed as a professional service, and IBM has professional reputation to burn. IBPheonix is not in either of those positions.
At no point did you say that you've verified that your motherboard is good. If you keep swapping out RAM and all of it seems to be bad, I've got news for you: it's not the RAM that's bad.
Someone already said it, adopt IPv6 and NATs will fade away.
Speak for yourself... I'm quite pleased that all the machines in my home aren't directly exposed to the internet.
A DBMS is a professional product, and if you want your project to be taken seriously you need to conduct yourself in a professional manner. A mass posting campaign is on the same maturity level that an organization like Earth First operates at. Guess how much respect Earth First gets in the typical corporate boardroom? That's the real problem with these kinds of tactics; you might win the name game, but at the cost of your reputation. Anyone who's willing to make that trade certainly sounds like a jerk[1] to me.
I totally agree that you had an obligation to raise awareness, but it needed to be conducted in a more mature manner. Personally, if this is the manner in which the Firebird DBMS community conducts itself, I will never use it.
Finally, we both know that even if someone did download the wrong Firebird, the mistake would be immediately apparent when they first tried to start it up. The real issue here is confusing the communities. People calling up IBPheonix and demanding support for Mozilla Firebird, people asking FirebirdSQL questions on Mozilla Firebird discussion forums, that sort of thing. The issue, I think, is not one being mistaken for the other, but rather thinking that the two projects are somehow associated or linked in some way.
That said, Firebird is a stupid name for a browser, and so is Pheonix. They should have stuck with Chimera.
[1] I mean that in the New York sense (idiot), not the California sense (mean person)
I wouldn't hire one to secure my network, but I would certainly hire one to check the security of my network.
Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses, and a crackers strength is likely in attacking rather than defending.
When I played soccer I was a great halfback, but a shitty goalie. Since my coach was not an idiot, he never had me play goalie. The same principle applies here.
People here are saying that you could get a normal SOHO router and get that set up (which will work). The other option, for less money, would be to pick up an ethernet card (assuming you have a PCI Mac with a free slot).
Run the cable modem into one ethernet port (on-board, for example) and run out to the hub off the other ethernet port. Using Internet Sharing, you can even allow the other computers on the network to use the cable modem as their Internet access (and set up the Mac to act as a firewall).
The downsides are that the Mac will have to be on whenever any of the other machines need to access the internet, and that the Mac, which presumably contains data and such that you care about, is directly exposed to the world. The SOHO router solves both of these problems, for less than the cost of a month of DSL service.
Total cost will be about $20 for the card, as opposed to about $80 for the router.
Routers are as low as $22, though recognizable brands (Linksys, D-Link) start at around $41. PCI NICs sporting the RTL8139 chipset (supported by every OS I know of) start at $4. Prices include shipping.
True, why would you want to hire a _convicted_ felon?
You need to hire the hacker they _didn't_ catch. Surely the guy who managed to cover his tracks so well as to never get caught is a much better person to learn from.
True, but then what proof does the employer have that that hacker really has the skills? Anybody can claim to be a hacker, and plenty of people know enough to fool somebody who isn't a hacker into thinking that they are one. Mitnik has proofthat he has the skills.
Also, I really enjoyed shoplifting when I was younger; that is until I got caught. I haven't stollen a single thing since. Based on my own experience, I'd be much more likely to trust a hacker that has been caught than one that hasn't.
You're a young one, aren't you?
When Doom first came out everyone I knew played it with a joystick, occasionally tapping at the keyboard to change weapons or to hold down shift to run. I didn't start using a mouselook until Quake2.
I think Irish Coffee predates Red Bull by a few years (centuries?). It's generally coffee and whiskey, although kahlua, irish cream, and amaretto are also popular coffee additives.
Some government agencies have good kids pages. I was particularly impressed with the NSA's kid's page, which has a lot of great math puzzles.
What other market does it actually have?
Do you actually know anyone who wants to carry a terminal with them all over their house? I don't.
If it were a stand-alone system it would have a personal use market. As it is, it's only really going to be useful, let alone desired, in a business environment.
it costs more then a basic laptop
How does it compare with a 10" stylus sensative LCD?
it has a very slow processor compare to a lappy
It's a thin client, it doesn't need a fast processor.
I agree with most of your other points, but these 2 are ludicrous. As for who it's targetted at, I have no idea. If it were a standalone machine I would be very interested, although probably not interested enough to buy one until there were comparable handwriting support for it under Linux.
At the risk of sounding buzzwordy, XML might not be a bad choice (or something XML-like that's perhaps not as high overhead).
What benefits, exactly, would XML bring that wouldn't make it a bad idea? First you complain that XF86Config is too complicated, and then you suggest that the solution is to make it more complex and less readable? That makes no sense.
*nix config files are plain text for good reason. Take away the plaintext configs and you might as well be running Windows.
As for hardware detection - it's currently not being handled by anything, either the OS or X. It's being done manually by the installer, or by special auto-detection applications.
That is exactly how it should be. You are apparently unfamiliar with the Unix philosophy. Each peice of software should do one thing, do it well, and play well with others. XFree and the Linux kernel both follow that philosophy. Neither of them are meant to be hardware detection scripts, which is why they don't do that. Good hardware detection scripts, such as SuSE's, are quite capable of telling the kernel and X what they need to know. Each is doing their one job and playing well with others.
It may seem on the surface that adding hardware detection to the kernel or to X would make them better and more useful, but in reality it would accomplish the opposite by dilluting the focus of the project and unnecessarily complicating the code base.
A driver should be able to inform X of the resolutions/refresh rates/colors/etc that it supports, rather than needing to edit a config file to tell X that.
It can and does, via the hardware detection and configuration app (sax, for example). The added bonus of the config file is that it makes it easy to correct the machine when it gets something wrong, like not recognizing my mouse wheel. Try convincing Windows that it made a mistake configuring your hardware sometime! You call that a better system?
comp.os.linux is a good place to start for general Linux questions. alt.linux.suse is a good if you happen to be a SuSE user. If your question is about a specific app, there's likely a group dedicated to it, like comp.protocols.smb for samba.
The Linux Documentation Project is sometimes good, But I often find the info I get there to be either out of date or too specific to a setup that isn't mine.
If I really want to know an app/language/whatever I pony up for the relevant O'Reilly book(s).
You must remember though, that the aim is for the most complex scene to run at 30 fps (or higher). When setting up games, I always try to achieve this, means I'll get no slow down while I'm playing.
Again, that's not hard to do on a console, and, in fact, you have no choice in the matter. Your output will always be 700x525i@30fps and the hardware to crank that out will always be the same. That makes life a lot easier for the developer.
On a PC, it's more difficult. You could be running at 640x480 or 1920x1080, 5fps or 250fps, 2.0GHz P-4 or 3.0GHz Opteron, GF2 MX or Radeon 9800. That makes things a lot more complicated for the developer.
What kind of textures can you use? How big can your textures be? what lighting effects can you use? The answers to these questions are clear cut for a console, and very complicated for a PC.
30fps is an admirable goal on a PC, but isn't always necessary. I doubt I was getting more than 10fps in some parts of Morrowind, but it was still just as playable as Cube was at 300fps (more playable, actually, Cube badly needs better artwork). It was certainly more playable than UT2003 at 30-60fps.
1) This isn't about XFree being fast for you. And if it performs as well as (say) Windows 2k or XP on modern hardware, then you've spent alot of time tweaking X, and probably your kernel. X should be decent out of the box, and it isn't. "Works good enough" isn't something that I personally like settling for.
XFree does perform just as well as Win2k on my hardware (if you care: Athlon XP 1800+, nForce2, 256M, GeForce2 GTS), and I've done no tweaking at all. XFree, Linux kernel, nvidia drivers, and KDE are all SuSE 8.1 default, and the only change I've made to the default XF86Config was to add '"Option" "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"' so my mouse wheel would work (why SuSE doesn't put that in there by default I'll never know). In fact, XFree outperforms Win2k when I'm using WindowMaker (again, SuSE 8.1 default).
If your X performance is really so bad it's likely due to either you haven't enabled DMA for your hard drive, or you've got a graphics card from a company that chooses not to fully support Linux. Either way it's your fault, not XFree's.
2) Standardization is absolutely a point of X. I don't know how you can think otherwise. One of the biggest objections to this port is the possible breaking of the X standards.
I totally agree. The only reason I quoted this is because it condradicts your next statement.
3) There is no reason whatsoever that XF86Config needs to be the monster that it is. A logical hierarchy of settings would be a good first step. Alot of the crap in XF86Config is handled by drivers using a standardized interface in Windows - this is a reasonable model to copy. That would help eliminate the need for every distro that's trying to be user-friendly to write it's own hardware detection program.
X makes as few assumptions as possible about the OS running under it and the environment running on top of it. That's a big part of what has made it such a successful standard.
The Windows configuration interface is NOT a reasonable model to copy precisely because X is so flexible and Windows is not. The Windows graphical framework has only one OS and only one environment to deal with, and is able operate on the assumption that the graphical interface is already working (indeed, Windows is basically unusable without a functioning GUI). X doesn't have that luxury, which is why it's configuration MUST be via text file.
When it comes down to it, I'd say that XF86Config is incredibly streamlined and simple considering all that it handles. I very much doubt that the Windows solution would be so clean if you were actually able to see all of it.
It makes no sense to have X handling drivers and hardware detection, that's the job of the OS. In fact, it would be a mind-bogglingly stupid idea to have all that handled by X, since X is not an essential part of a functioning *nix system.
Sure, it would be nice if there was a single interactive config app for, say, X on Linux, but a combination of ego and economics prevents that from happening. The big three (SuSE, Red Hat, Mandrake) will continue to use their own config tools, regardless of the licensing status of competing tools, because that's largely what defines them and differentiates them from other distros. Even if you could get them to agree, you'd still have a different tool for the BSDs.
Frankly, even on the XBox, the graphics will be diminished, as the XBox's GF3 core is a far cry from the GeForceFX and the Radeon 9700/9800 cores, which are more or less required to have decent performance with all the options on.
That's pretty much irrelevant. Sure, you need a pretty sweet video card to get 90fps at 1280x1024 on your PC, but that isn't an issue for the XBox since it's stuck at 700x525 at 30fps/interleved because that's all your TV can handle. I'm willing to bet that even my lowly GF2 GTS would be able to handle that.
Didn't I read a short story about this? Or was it the Chinese who were doing it?
I sure hope this experiement goes better than that one did.
We are essentially in agreement. I feel I should clarify one thing, though, and that is what I mean when I say there is no justification for this war.
The important question, IMO, is, "What gives us the right to force regime change in a sovereign nation?" I believe genocide is one thing that does give us that right. As a moral people, we have a compelling obligation to put a stop to something like this, and that's what I mean when I say that, for example, our actions in Yugoslavia were justified. As you said, our strike in Iraq is preemptive.
What is more important, though, is the precedent it sets. Sure, we have a long history of supporting foreign revolutions, and while it makes me a little uncomfortable, I think it's still reasonable that we support a change of regime if the current one is unfavorable to us. Actually going in and doing it ourselves is on a completely different level, though, and lacking a compelling justification, such as genocide, makes us an aggressor nation, which I think is a very dangerous position to be in. That is, after all, the compelling justification we used against Iraq in 1991.
I have actually heard one reason why it should be us, and not the Iraqi people, who should be changing the regime in Iraq. It was presented by an Iraqi exile who called in to a radio show I listen to regularly. She said that Iran claims parts of Iraq, and that internal strife would open the door to invasion by Iran, but that Iran won't try anythiong with US forces there. I still don't think that's a compelling justification, but it did force me to re-evaluate my position.
Anyway, it's been a pleasure to discuss this with you. I have family in town, so I probably won't get another post in before this article is closed.
BTW, love your sig...
Thanks. For some reason I get a lot of AC "fuck you, commie!" posts because of it, a sad reflection on the state of reading comprehension in America.
No, that is exactly the example I meant to use. Please see my last journal entry for more information. It is all there.
It seems that we are arguing from very similar positions. I thought you were trying to counter my point, I apologize for my confusion.
They see us as a potential savior and are jaded by our continued lack of support and hypocrisy. This is the cause of terrorism, IMO.
I have to disagree here. If we were taking a passive or agnostic stance in the region it might make sense that they would be bitter about it, but certainly not to the point of commiting acts of terrorism against us. I think the main reason for terrorism against the US is our active support of Isreal, and a close second is that many of the times we have supported Arabs we have left them worse off than they were before. Maybe that's what you mean by hypocrisy, but I think lack of support is not the problem, rather we are giving lots of support to all the wrong people. We aren't simply not saving the Arab people, we are actively supporting their oppressors. That is the cause of terrorism, IMO.
If we change the way we conduct ourselves in the world, we would be perceived as weak.
So? What's wrong with that? There's no reason international politics needs to be conducted as if it were a pissing contest. How does it serve us to reinforce the world opinion that Americans are nothing but a bunch of swaggering cowboys?
Other nations expect us to use our power as only a superpower can.
I think the distinct lack of international support for our current actions in Iraq shows that this is not necessarily true.
Our hegemony is both a boon and a bane as I mentioned above. People expect us also to provide for their needs and fix their problems.
While this is certainly true in some cases, it doesn't mean we have to, or even that we should. I have no problem with humanitarian aid, building infrastructure, etc, but I don't think we have any business playing world police. We overstep our mandate far too frequently.
I knew I detected a hint of pacifism in your arguments. Nothing wrong with that...but sometimes violence is necessary, expecially when dealing with the incompetent who know nothing else.
I'm mostly a pacifist WRT our current actions in Iraq. I don't believe the case for this war was ever made, and it seems from my perspective that the Bush administration did everything it possibly could to prevent a peaceful resolution. Violence in this case was approached as the first choice. Who exactly is the incompetent who understands nothing else? Bush certainly seems to fit that description.
I don't deny that Saddam Hussein is a bad guy, nor that the Iraqi people would be better off without him in power, but I see no reason why it is our job to make that happen, and that's what I mean by "respecting sovereignty". There were very good justifications for what we did in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iraq in 1991, and even in Afghanistan. There is no justification for what we are doing in Iraq now. There is Bush's personal vendetta ("he tried to kill my daddy"), and there are perhaps moral reasons (Saddam is evil), but neither of those are legitimate grounds for invasion.
the boards _HAD_ support for it(thus, suffered from any performance hit there might have been), they just missed the physical slot, that's what i meant was pointless, as the (some) boards had almost exact versions on market but with cnr slot on place of isa slot and 100% else was same.
Yes, the chipset still had support for ISA, and disabling it still improved PCI performance. The overall system performance boost to be had from that is certainly not pointless, especially when weighed against the number of ISA peripherals still on the market.