The difference is XP SP2 was better than XP SP1 in significant ways. Like not crashing as often:).
Lots of people did stick to Win2K instead of going to XP, and they were right to do so, XP was flaky.
Windows Vista is just WinME2 + DRM:).
Anyway, I'm sticking to Win2K for games. At the office I'm using suse linux, but I might switch to Kubuntu one day. Not because of the novell+microsoft thing, I don't really give a damn, I'd switch because yast sucks, and the rest of their software package management stuff sucks.
That said I had weird problems getting kubuntu's GUI based package manager to work. Only worked after a few attempts (I most certainly typed the correct password).
That's why I said theoretically. I thought that was funny too, and sad, and scary.
It's sad that the US spends billions of dollars (and how many lives) supposedly to pick the leaders in Iraq (ok it was WMD before), but can't even implement a decent voting system for itself. I've already seen a few decent proposals by well known crypto and security people. A random pick will be fine. All of them are better than "diebold". BTW it's amazing how so many people in the USA value anonymous voting systems more than nonfraudulent voting systems. I suppose they'd rather have anonymous fraud, than risk having someone being able to prove they voted for Bush. Priorities eh?
It's scary that most of the US people don't appear to care or they just stick to the pro-wrestling mentality - my team vs the other team, as long as my team wins it doesn't matter how dirty they are, the other side's just as dirty or dirtier.
From the perspective of someone living in a small insignificant country (Malaysia), Saddam Hussein ruling Iraq wasn't a big problem at all. Saddam could trash talk all he wanted but his power was limited.
evilness * power = size of problem.
Who's in charge of the USA is of far greater consequence.
Sure you're trying to be funny, but there are lots of stupid people around who might start thinking that violence is a preferred option. I'd rather they get things right on this issue, rather than go haha ignore same-old-same-old joke.
If you're in the US, theoretically it's still rule via the democratically elected representatives of the citizens (the US should allow their criminals to vote though).
Diebolding aside, despite how much the corporations pump into campaign funds, it's still the votes that decide who wins. Many politicians won't want the average voter to be too educated.
I am not a game programmer, but the way I see it, bandwidth is not the main problem - latency is.
Naive/poor implementations don't degrade gracefully once you have significant latency. And latencies significantly longer than the time to refresh a screen is very common over wan links.
Keep sticking your fingers in your ears if you want. There are other countries (UK, NZ, Canada?) with reasonably working court systems which appear sustainable, I haven't seen a thug-based system which works well for the general populace.
If you don't like the US court/legal system, try to get it fixed. Using the US court/legal system as a counter example is a strawman argument.
It's like using the US election system as an example of why we shouldn't have democracies and dictatorships are preferable.
FWIW, thug systems tend to lead to dictatorships - because the most powerful thug gets to be the Dictator (and that's why Communist Revolutions tend to end up as Dictatorships - because Marx's Communist Manifesto makes violence as a core part of its implementation plan, and guess who rises to the top when there's lots of violence about?).
I hope PHP goes extinct soon, and people come up with more standard everyday idioms (libs) for Lisp (sure you can make up your own macros but talking to yourself all the time gets old quite fast).
Oh you mean like stuff spoken by a tribe of 60 people in Papua New Guinea? Who cares? Only the linguists care, and they make up their own languages all the time, it's no big deal. Tolkien made up a few (based on Finnish or something).
Sure it's a good thing if people are able to speak in more than one language - if only to be more familiar with the idea of not being able to express a thought in a particular language. But don't need thousands of languages around to do that.
Go get the linguists to prove that keeping those languages alive is so important. I'd rather they just take the best of the useful ideas, syntax, grammars and document them for later use.
My reading of Revelations is there won't be a Rapture.
In the end times, people will go about sending good people to God the good old fashioned way (by killing them). I bet a lot of "good" people will be doing that killing too.
I'll be happy if someone would show me where I got it wrong.
Just because huge bunch of people appear in heaven doesn't mean there was a rapture - after all heaven ain't in the same timezone as here;).
The lawyer method is better, because the thug method encourages violence.
If you prefer a place where "rule of thugs" trumps "rule of law" go to one of those thug ridden countries in Africa.
If you don't like the laws, work to get them changed. Many "rule of law" places aren't that crap. Whereas I can't think of a "rule of thugs" place that isn't crap.
It's all relative. Most people compare themselves with others.
USD10K/year is not bad starting pay for a fresh graduate in a 3rd world country;). But if you're living in a city in the USA, USD10k/year isn't going to go far.
There are some people who don't earn a lot, but can afford to buy _almost_ everything they want - they just don't want that much.
Whereas there are some people who have a lot of money but can't afford to buy almost everything they want, and are miserable as a result.
Of course if you want to get married, then the "contentment zone" is different, the wife and kids might not be as easily contented. And the in-laws...
'An "advanced" society will have people who have internalized the law'.
Ah yes, we call that DRM at the moment, but in the future things will be different.
You'll all be like the dog that chases a cat and then stops right at the invisible radio fence. You might even think it's the only way to be safe from the evil hackers and terrorists.
A penny for your thoughts? The *AA et all will want more.
So what's the big deal about companies keeping all that bad code proprietary?
0) What are you going to learn from bad code that you can't already from "The Daily WTF".
1) There's good code and bad code whether it's open source or not. I've seen plenty of crappy code (PHP Nuke comes to mind). I've written some crappy code myself, but I like to think I've also written some good code - all closed source for now.
2) You don't usually have to see the source to know whether it's bad code or not.
3) Whether it's bad or good, why should companies take the effort of releasing something as OSS? If they just chuck the code out as is without docs that outsiders can understand or use, they'll get flamed. There are extra costs involved. So what's the benefit? You get praise? When there's lot more money to be made from that, than from the code, then sure the code gets released.
4) Whether you have a good hand or a bad hand in poker, you don't let other people see it unless you're letting them "see" what you want them to see for strategic reasons.
5) Most of the smart OSS people don't actually want to see the bad code. They just want the specs and APIs, but producing full specs isn't always easy or cheap. Sure having better specs may benefit the company in the long term, but most companies think short term, plus they might change the specs + APIs later for other reasons (some even valid), and then they'll get flamed for that.
"This is true if and only if you don't chop down a bunch of trees in order to make room for the bio-fuel producing crops. As it happens, deforestation causes CO2 emissions similar in magnitude to fossil fuel use"
If you chop the trees and don't burn the wood, you don't get significant CO2 emissions.
Convert the trees to timber and paper and the carbon will be stuck in furniture or a landfill for quite a long while.
"Solid state "disks" have true random access, where accessing blocks in random order costs no more than sequential accesses"
AFAIK for flash, sequential access is still faster than random access, even for NOR flash.
It's quite amazing how slow some flash is (esp NAND flash). Some are 1ms for random access, and others are even 7ms.
For comparison a 15krpm drive has a random access time of about 5-6ms. So if you have RAID10, you might get similar or faster speeds, than a flash drive 10x the total price of a RAID10 system with similar capacity.
I'll buy ALL the "waste" plutonium your country produces at USD1 per gram. That's a pretty good price for _waste_ right? But you have to send at least 50% of all the plutonium produced.
I'll even throw in shipping and handling for free.
Even if you used private networks, determined hackers could still tap into them so you'd have to use encryption, firewalls and all that - which pushes the cost up even more.
"Big, multi-state/province blackouts can only be prevented when the whole system IS internetworked"
Not correct. Big multistate blackouts can be prevented if you don't have a big grid in the first place. Each electrical network will be isolated from the others. But apparently it is more expensive to do things this way (assuming a safer environment), plus some places tend to produce the power while other places use it...
Another advantage of not having the electrical in a big grid is the hackers will have to break into each system to sabotage them, and that might be a bit more difficult if they don't all have the same weaknesses.
As for the article saying "For about $5 million and between three to five years of preparation, an organization, whether it be transnational terrorist groups or nation states, could mount a strategic attack against the United States"
For that amount of money and preparation you could do _other_ stuff that doesn't involve "hacking power utilities" which would be pretty damaging to the USA too.
I'm sure you get that already with stuff like ventrilo and other voice chat thingy.
e.g. you hear some 8-year old guild leader over vent ordering his 30+ year old guildmembers around in a voice that won't be breaking for another 4 years. Yes sir!:)
Maybe it's because I'm a nerd/geek/techie - I'd have no probs with respecting competence when I see it wheter it's from a little girl or a border collie.
I do give out stuff _free_ to low lev chars from time to time, doesn't matter what gender they are. I usually don't even notice what they look like, or even remember their names. I decide more on - do they sound new to the game, and not the annoying type:).
Thing is in Guild Wars there could actually be a high proportion of female chars around who are played by male players - the male avatars look crap, and the male elementalist dance is really bad for instance.
This might happen a lot more in Guild Wars though - since storage space is very limited (that's how they make money though the game has no monthly subscription - many people buy extra character slots to create "mules" to store stuff).
Other times I help them out in quests etc - helping out in easier/low lev quests can be more relaxing sometimes:p.
But I prefer not to help the overly whiney ones though - e.g. those who say "This game sucks. Why won't anyone help me?".
Slashdot Mirror
The difference is XP SP2 was better than XP SP1 in significant ways. Like not crashing as often :).
:).
Lots of people did stick to Win2K instead of going to XP, and they were right to do so, XP was flaky.
Windows Vista is just WinME2 + DRM
Anyway, I'm sticking to Win2K for games. At the office I'm using suse linux, but I might switch to Kubuntu one day. Not because of the novell+microsoft thing, I don't really give a damn, I'd switch because yast sucks, and the rest of their software package management stuff sucks.
That said I had weird problems getting kubuntu's GUI based package manager to work. Only worked after a few attempts (I most certainly typed the correct password).
That's true. Maybe someone might redo Alien vs Predator too.
Someone should also make a new FPS AvP computer game with a less crappy engine. AVP2 the game was ok, but it could have been so much better.
That's why I said theoretically. I thought that was funny too, and sad, and scary.
It's sad that the US spends billions of dollars (and how many lives) supposedly to pick the leaders in Iraq (ok it was WMD before), but can't even implement a decent voting system for itself. I've already seen a few decent proposals by well known crypto and security people. A random pick will be fine. All of them are better than "diebold". BTW it's amazing how so many people in the USA value anonymous voting systems more than nonfraudulent voting systems. I suppose they'd rather have anonymous fraud, than risk having someone being able to prove they voted for Bush. Priorities eh?
It's scary that most of the US people don't appear to care or they just stick to the pro-wrestling mentality - my team vs the other team, as long as my team wins it doesn't matter how dirty they are, the other side's just as dirty or dirtier.
From the perspective of someone living in a small insignificant country (Malaysia), Saddam Hussein ruling Iraq wasn't a big problem at all. Saddam could trash talk all he wanted but his power was limited.
evilness * power = size of problem.
Who's in charge of the USA is of far greater consequence.
Sure you're trying to be funny, but there are lots of stupid people around who might start thinking that violence is a preferred option. I'd rather they get things right on this issue, rather than go haha ignore same-old-same-old joke.
If you're in the US, theoretically it's still rule via the democratically elected representatives of the citizens (the US should allow their criminals to vote though).
Diebolding aside, despite how much the corporations pump into campaign funds, it's still the votes that decide who wins. Many politicians won't want the average voter to be too educated.
I am not a game programmer, but the way I see it, bandwidth is not the main problem - latency is.
Naive/poor implementations don't degrade gracefully once you have significant latency. And latencies significantly longer than the time to refresh a screen is very common over wan links.
Keep sticking your fingers in your ears if you want. There are other countries (UK, NZ, Canada?) with reasonably working court systems which appear sustainable, I haven't seen a thug-based system which works well for the general populace.
If you don't like the US court/legal system, try to get it fixed. Using the US court/legal system as a counter example is a strawman argument.
It's like using the US election system as an example of why we shouldn't have democracies and dictatorships are preferable.
FWIW, thug systems tend to lead to dictatorships - because the most powerful thug gets to be the Dictator (and that's why Communist Revolutions tend to end up as Dictatorships - because Marx's Communist Manifesto makes violence as a core part of its implementation plan, and guess who rises to the top when there's lots of violence about?).
I hope PHP goes extinct soon, and people come up with more standard everyday idioms (libs) for Lisp (sure you can make up your own macros but talking to yourself all the time gets old quite fast).
Oh you mean like stuff spoken by a tribe of 60 people in Papua New Guinea? Who cares? Only the linguists care, and they make up their own languages all the time, it's no big deal. Tolkien made up a few (based on Finnish or something).
Sure it's a good thing if people are able to speak in more than one language - if only to be more familiar with the idea of not being able to express a thought in a particular language. But don't need thousands of languages around to do that.
Go get the linguists to prove that keeping those languages alive is so important. I'd rather they just take the best of the useful ideas, syntax, grammars and document them for later use.
My reading of Revelations is there won't be a Rapture.
;).
In the end times, people will go about sending good people to God the good old fashioned way (by killing them). I bet a lot of "good" people will be doing that killing too.
I'll be happy if someone would show me where I got it wrong.
Just because huge bunch of people appear in heaven doesn't mean there was a rapture - after all heaven ain't in the same timezone as here
The lawyer method is better, because the thug method encourages violence.
If you prefer a place where "rule of thugs" trumps "rule of law" go to one of those thug ridden countries in Africa.
If you don't like the laws, work to get them changed. Many "rule of law" places aren't that crap. Whereas I can't think of a "rule of thugs" place that isn't crap.
Wow.
I don't know what to say...
What's next, a remake of Uwe Boll's stuff?
It's all relative. Most people compare themselves with others.
;). But if you're living in a city in the USA, USD10k/year isn't going to go far.
USD10K/year is not bad starting pay for a fresh graduate in a 3rd world country
There are some people who don't earn a lot, but can afford to buy _almost_ everything they want - they just don't want that much.
Whereas there are some people who have a lot of money but can't afford to buy almost everything they want, and are miserable as a result.
Of course if you want to get married, then the "contentment zone" is different, the wife and kids might not be as easily contented. And the in-laws...
'An "advanced" society will have people who have internalized the law'.
Ah yes, we call that DRM at the moment, but in the future things will be different.
You'll all be like the dog that chases a cat and then stops right at the invisible radio fence. You might even think it's the only way to be safe from the evil hackers and terrorists.
A penny for your thoughts? The *AA et all will want more.
So what's the big deal about companies keeping all that bad code proprietary?
0) What are you going to learn from bad code that you can't already from "The Daily WTF".
1) There's good code and bad code whether it's open source or not. I've seen plenty of crappy code (PHP Nuke comes to mind). I've written some crappy code myself, but I like to think I've also written some good code - all closed source for now.
2) You don't usually have to see the source to know whether it's bad code or not.
3) Whether it's bad or good, why should companies take the effort of releasing something as OSS? If they just chuck the code out as is without docs that outsiders can understand or use, they'll get flamed. There are extra costs involved. So what's the benefit? You get praise? When there's lot more money to be made from that, than from the code, then sure the code gets released.
4) Whether you have a good hand or a bad hand in poker, you don't let other people see it unless you're letting them "see" what you want them to see for strategic reasons.
5) Most of the smart OSS people don't actually want to see the bad code. They just want the specs and APIs, but producing full specs isn't always easy or cheap. Sure having better specs may benefit the company in the long term, but most companies think short term, plus they might change the specs + APIs later for other reasons (some even valid), and then they'll get flamed for that.
"This is true if and only if you don't chop down a bunch of trees in order to make room for the bio-fuel producing crops. As it happens, deforestation causes CO2 emissions similar in magnitude to fossil fuel use"
If you chop the trees and don't burn the wood, you don't get significant CO2 emissions.
Convert the trees to timber and paper and the carbon will be stuck in furniture or a landfill for quite a long while.
If people really stick with XP for long enough, I think a decent Win2K/WinXP compatible might appear.
But that's why Microsoft is trying to kill XP. If WinXP really became a defacto standard, they will be like a "BIOS vendor".
And while BIOS vendors make money they don't make that much...
"Solid state "disks" have true random access, where accessing blocks in random order costs no more than sequential accesses"
AFAIK for flash, sequential access is still faster than random access, even for NOR flash.
It's quite amazing how slow some flash is (esp NAND flash). Some are 1ms for random access, and others are even 7ms.
For comparison a 15krpm drive has a random access time of about 5-6ms. So if you have RAID10, you might get similar or faster speeds, than a flash drive 10x the total price of a RAID10 system with similar capacity.
Heh, how about voltron, thundercats, g-force, etc.
:)
Bunch of good guys (the team make up is usually quite similar too ) Fight, lose... Use the "super weapon"... Win.
"this is marriage for convenience and unfortunately business are like this."
Microsoft's track record of "working with other companies" isn't very good.
How about a deal?
I'll buy ALL the "waste" plutonium your country produces at USD1 per gram. That's a pretty good price for _waste_ right? But you have to send at least 50% of all the plutonium produced.
I'll even throw in shipping and handling for free.
And that's why in the USA it's common for homes to have gigabit links to the Internet.
I thought rising sea levels would be a plus. Plenty of cooling around. Just make it capable of operating submerged.
:).
There are a fair number of nuclear powerplants operating underwater. Reasonably stationary ones would be even easier
Even if you used private networks, determined hackers could still tap into them so you'd have to use encryption, firewalls and all that - which pushes the cost up even more.
"Big, multi-state/province blackouts can only be prevented when the whole system IS internetworked"
Not correct. Big multistate blackouts can be prevented if you don't have a big grid in the first place. Each electrical network will be isolated from the others. But apparently it is more expensive to do things this way (assuming a safer environment), plus some places tend to produce the power while other places use it...
Another advantage of not having the electrical in a big grid is the hackers will have to break into each system to sabotage them, and that might be a bit more difficult if they don't all have the same weaknesses.
As for the article saying "For about $5 million and between three to five years of preparation, an organization, whether it be transnational terrorist groups or nation states, could mount a strategic attack against the United States"
For that amount of money and preparation you could do _other_ stuff that doesn't involve "hacking power utilities" which would be pretty damaging to the USA too.
I think the Peelian Principles are still good and sound:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_Principles
If only my country's police force would follow them.
I'm sure you get that already with stuff like ventrilo and other voice chat thingy.
:)
e.g. you hear some 8-year old guild leader over vent ordering his 30+ year old guildmembers around in a voice that won't be breaking for another 4 years. Yes sir!
Maybe it's because I'm a nerd/geek/techie - I'd have no probs with respecting competence when I see it wheter it's from a little girl or a border collie.
Thing is, competence is rare.
I do give out stuff _free_ to low lev chars from time to time, doesn't matter what gender they are. I usually don't even notice what they look like, or even remember their names. I decide more on - do they sound new to the game, and not the annoying type :).
:p.
Thing is in Guild Wars there could actually be a high proportion of female chars around who are played by male players - the male avatars look crap, and the male elementalist dance is really bad for instance.
This might happen a lot more in Guild Wars though - since storage space is very limited (that's how they make money though the game has no monthly subscription - many people buy extra character slots to create "mules" to store stuff).
Other times I help them out in quests etc - helping out in easier/low lev quests can be more relaxing sometimes
But I prefer not to help the overly whiney ones though - e.g. those who say "This game sucks. Why won't anyone help me?".