The laptop is only 2 years old. That was the best graphics card you could get at the time. It's only been the last six months or so that the decent cards for laptops have come out. But my point was that Blizzard always made sure the game ran on the lower-end computers. Games for the unwashed masses, so to spead. Warcraft to ran on my 486. Starcraft on a P2 300. They sold alot more games that way (and they had that cool spawn-an-install feature).
It plays fine on my Athalon 1.2 gig desktop, but I wanted something to play in the office, against the people I work with. We all have laptops, all Dell Inspiron 7500's.
But my biggest complaint is that the game just isn't that great. I loved Warcraft 2, and Starcraft, and Diablo (never played Diablo 2). Adding a small RPG element doesn't make it a must-have game. A friend in the gaming industry who attends E3 every year said that aside from the cut-scenes, Warcraft 3 excited no one.
And I hate console gaming. Haven't owned one since the Intellivision, and I doubt I ever will.
if you know where to look. I've uninstalled it, and tossed the disk. Reasons are,
1) It won't play smoothly on a P3 500 laptop (with 384 meg of RAM and an ATI Rage Mobility). Blizzard usually tries to get the low-end of the market. Not any longer
2) In the past, Blizzards games were evolutionary (but not revolutionary). This one is not even that. It's just another Real Time Strategy game, but with heros. Warlords Battlecry 2 did the same thing, and I bet there are others.
3) This thing is selling for $90 Canadian (about $60 US) even in the "no one beats our prices" electonics stores.
Screw it. If this game had come out 5 years ago, maybe. But Starcraft is better, and so is Age of Empires 2.
this guy is going to get the shit kicked out of him, now that his name and hometown have been posted on an site known for being passionately anti-spam.
I didn't think that article was that positive - they did talk about some of the evils of spam:
"Once merely an annoyance, junk e-mail is quickly reaching epidemic proportions in cyberspace. Billions of such messages regularly crisscross the Internet, pitching everything from herbal remedies to X-rated websites.
The growing flood of e-mail advertising has crashed Internet servers, clogged connections and cost business untold hours of wasted employee time. It has also forced millions of bleary-eyed Internet users to undertake the seemingly endless chore of clearing the electronic clutter from their in-box."
Replication is not a feature of a relational database (modern or otherwise). It is a fail-over/load-balancing feature that exists in many products (networks components, application servers, message queues, webservers, etc).
For learing SQL, I fail to see how master-master replication is going to help.
"Books like this probably target people who will go to work for some company that will be using a closed database since they need that added functionality. (and can afford it)"
The book is on SQL, not tuning, or database administration. As most databases are mostly SQL 92 compliant, it should be a non-issue.
In most climates, wood frame construction is actually less efficient than other building methods.
In Nebraska, back in the olden days, they had no wood to build homes (and it was cold in the winter), so they dug a hole, and covered it with sod and straw. Great insulation. Cob and straw are catching on in North America now.
Straw bale and cob are more energy efficient, can be used to build zero-toxicity homes, and are often cheaper to build (though that assumes some owner-building). They can be made to comply with building codes, and people are even getting bank-loans to build them.
Amazon has a couple of good books (both of which I own):
We've play Starcraft at work, with 2 legit copies (and 6 people play) with a Battlenet clone.
I know that the BN clones have offered to put the same security into their servers as Battlenet offers so that people can't pirate, but perhaps it's just not an option for Blizzard to give up that info, and then test BNetD (etc) to make sure they conform.
When Warcraft2 came out, Blizzard added the ability for multiple installs off one CD, as "spawns" so that several people could play the game at once. Was a great idea, as everyone who played it, bought it. Even the women in the office (they liked the voices of the peons, etc). I thought that that was pretty cool.
I don't think Blizzard is going over the deep end on this.
Who said the company was broke? They obviously could pony up the cash when they needed to.
I've stayed because of counters, but I never got the raise - the division (of GTE) was closed a month later. They gave me a "bonus" initially because they said the raise would take a while to process.
Obviously, the higher-ups knew what was going on. They wanted to keep the development team together to try to sell the software.
Hanging around is a bad idea - jealousy, bad feelings, etc.
The car is interesting, but the real work is all in the fuel cell. It's kind of like Dell saying, "We made this super fast computer, and it's rated at 5 gigaflops" without mentioning who made the CPU, motherboard, etc, etc.
I did some poking around - Ballard made the fuel cell, and here is their press release summary page:
Actually, this one was good. Less grand moralizing/theorizing, and more interesting facts.
The problem with Katz is that he thinks everyone is interested in his pedantic ramblings. If they were less pedantic, and less rambling, I probably would be.
Our credit card info is stored encrypted in our Oracle database.
No one accesses the credit card info directly - we generate reports for billing staff. When credit card info is sent across the net (to process charges), we use secure sockets (as does everyone I'm sure).
The only machine that knows how to decrypt is a weblogic app server with the key, running on Solaris.
The database is on one virtual LAN, the webservers on another, and the app servers on a third.
We have PIX firewalls to keep out intruders, and our boxes are physically locked down in a cage.
In addition, our hardware topology is based on Windows 2000, Linux and Solaris. You would need to take advantage of security flaws in all three OSs in order to be able to traverse our site.
We make sure the passwords are not words or phrases. Numbers, funny characters, and letters.
The holes in our system are:
1) On weblogic, the connection info to the database is out in the open in the connection pools.
2) Billing staff need to be careful with how they handle paper reports. Perhaps we should only show the last 4 digits of the CC number when generating.
3) We refresh our QA environment once in a while. I have to be sure that I wipe credit card info, passwords, and email addresses from the QA database. While it's fairly secure as well, no point in leaving it around.
No system is perfect. So long as they are encrypted, on a machine that has the latest security patches, the machine is in a secure environment, and the passwords are "strong", you can sleep at night. Most of the large credit card thefts have been against systems that violated one or more of those rules.
Hey, maybe he really was designing a firewall...
on
Tracking Mafiaboy
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· Score: 3, Funny
After all, many firewalls are designed by highschool students who don't show up to class with books/homework, who hate math, can't type ("agents watched him in real time as he attempted hacks and had to retype commands three, four, or five times before he got them right"), and download their tools from the Internet rather than programming them themselves.
My point wasn't about taste in music (that was an aside). My point was that she had more than one hit, her album sold very well, and she got great critical aclaim for an album where she wrote all the songs, and produced it.
If you're starting a company that will sell CDs to consumers, you need to know the going-ons of the music business, and this guy doesn't.
And I'm not a big Paula Cole fan - I don't like her two other CDs.
Re:Jack Scalfani is more right than you think...
on
CDs Want To Be Free
·
· Score: 2
I've seen her live, and her voice is great.
But more importantly, she writes her own music, and produces her own music. Britney doesn't write or produce, and Metallica doesn't produce.
You need to go back to economics class (quick, stop reading Slashdot).
The law of diminishing returns states that, for non-essentials, as the price goes up, sales go down. So you might sell 2 million at $4, but price it to $14, and you might only sell 50,000. The idea is to find the optimum point where you maximize your return. Competition obviously isn't factored into that, but the less competition you have, the more closely you can follow the rule.
Re:The industry makes me so mad because I want to
on
CDs Want To Be Free
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· Score: 2
Dennis Miller said,
"Considering how badly you get fucked every time you go into a record store, I have to assume Richard Branson was trying to be ironic when he named the place Virgin."
On the Web Log (lot 49), he said, "Here is the biggest mistake of them all: two good songs on a CD. How many times do we have that? Remember that girl who sang "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone"? Vaguely. She was a kind of folksy singer. That was the only good song on that CD."
That was Paula Cole, and for that albumn she got nominations for Best New Artist, Best Album of the Year, Best Pop Albumn, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and Producer of the Year.
If this guy didn't know that, how would you feel about his business acumen? And if his musical taste is that bad (Paula Cole's This Fire is one of my top 10 CDs of all time), then I don't want to listen to what ever else he's selling (Kid Rock ripoffs?).
"With patience, insight, and self-confidence to spare...."
Most intersting was his claim that the single rule of the universe could be defined in a few lines of code if it were a well-designed language (so stop coding in C++ *grin*). I would suspect that the rule, if it exists, looks much like an obfuscated C program - subtle, with side-effects that have important ramifications a few iterations later.
Now, what penatly does God traditionally hand out for hubris? Still, I can't wait to read it.
but I'm not sure that article was about. Consumers will be broadband, but won't be driven by entertainment; IP networks will take over.
I have broadband, and it has several uses, including but not limited to music and video. IP networks already have taken over in my world.
He probably gets paid by the word. Perhaps this was a teaching tool by Slashdot to show you how to really pad a story. That he got two pages out of that was pretty amazing.
Slashdot Mirror
The laptop is only 2 years old. That was the best graphics card you could get at the time. It's only been the last six months or so that the decent cards for laptops have come out. But my point was that Blizzard always made sure the game ran on the lower-end computers. Games for the unwashed masses, so to spead. Warcraft to ran on my 486. Starcraft on a P2 300. They sold alot more games that way (and they had that cool spawn-an-install feature).
It plays fine on my Athalon 1.2 gig desktop, but I wanted something to play in the office, against the people I work with. We all have laptops, all Dell Inspiron 7500's.
But my biggest complaint is that the game just isn't that great. I loved Warcraft 2, and Starcraft, and Diablo (never played Diablo 2). Adding a small RPG element doesn't make it a must-have game. A friend in the gaming industry who attends E3 every year said that aside from the cut-scenes, Warcraft 3 excited no one.
And I hate console gaming. Haven't owned one since the Intellivision, and I doubt I ever will.
if you know where to look. I've uninstalled it, and tossed the disk. Reasons are,
1) It won't play smoothly on a P3 500 laptop (with 384 meg of RAM and an ATI Rage Mobility). Blizzard usually tries to get the low-end of the market. Not any longer
2) In the past, Blizzards games were evolutionary (but not revolutionary). This one is not even that. It's just another Real Time Strategy game, but with heros. Warlords Battlecry 2 did the same thing, and I bet there are others.
3) This thing is selling for $90 Canadian (about $60 US) even in the "no one beats our prices" electonics stores.
Screw it. If this game had come out 5 years ago, maybe. But Starcraft is better, and so is Age of Empires 2.
this guy is going to get the shit kicked out of him, now that his name and hometown have been posted on an site known for being passionately anti-spam.
I didn't think that article was that positive - they did talk about some of the evils of spam:
"Once merely an annoyance, junk e-mail is quickly reaching epidemic proportions in cyberspace. Billions of such messages regularly crisscross the Internet, pitching everything from herbal remedies to X-rated websites.
The growing flood of e-mail advertising has crashed Internet servers, clogged connections and cost business untold hours of wasted employee time. It has also forced millions of bleary-eyed Internet users to undertake the seemingly endless chore of clearing the electronic clutter from their in-box."
Replication is not a feature of a relational database (modern or otherwise). It is a fail-over/load-balancing feature that exists in many products (networks components, application servers, message queues, webservers, etc).
For learing SQL, I fail to see how master-master replication is going to help.
"Books like this probably target people who will go to work for some company that will be using a closed database since they need that added functionality. (and can afford it)"
The book is on SQL, not tuning, or database administration. As most databases are mostly SQL 92 compliant, it should be a non-issue.
I'm an Oracle DBA, and while it's easy to setup, it's difficult to set up correctly.
And last I heard, Oracle is not free. We pay $14,000 per CPU every 2 years.
Postgres under Cygwin is slow, and can be more difficult to setup and maintain (so says the people posting to the PostgresQL.org lists).
Closed source, proprietary.
Why not Postgres 7.2 for the Linux crowd, and Firebird (Open Source version of Borland's Interbase db) for the Windows crowd.
Lots of graphical tools available, and not that difficult to set up (compared to Oracle, anyway).
Both implement all features that a modern relational database are supposed to support.
In most climates, wood frame construction is actually less efficient than other building methods.
In Nebraska, back in the olden days, they had no wood to build homes (and it was cold in the winter), so they dug a hole, and covered it with sod and straw. Great insulation. Cob and straw are catching on in North America now.
Straw bale and cob are more energy efficient, can be used to build zero-toxicity homes, and are often cheaper to build (though that assumes some owner-building). They can be made to comply with building codes, and people are even getting bank-loans to build them.
Amazon has a couple of good books (both of which I own):
Serious Straw Bale
The Beauty of Straw Bale Homes
Save the 3-little-pigs jokes. Most people interested in straw bale have heard them, oh, 5000 times already.
We've play Starcraft at work, with 2 legit copies (and 6 people play) with a Battlenet clone.
I know that the BN clones have offered to put the same security into their servers as Battlenet offers so that people can't pirate, but perhaps it's just not an option for Blizzard to give up that info, and then test BNetD (etc) to make sure they conform.
When Warcraft2 came out, Blizzard added the ability for multiple installs off one CD, as "spawns" so that several people could play the game at once. Was a great idea, as everyone who played it, bought it. Even the women in the office (they liked the voices of the peons, etc). I thought that that was pretty cool.
I don't think Blizzard is going over the deep end on this.
Who said the company was broke? They obviously could pony up the cash when they needed to.
I've stayed because of counters, but I never got the raise - the division (of GTE) was closed a month later. They gave me a "bonus" initially because they said the raise would take a while to process.
Obviously, the higher-ups knew what was going on. They wanted to keep the development team together to try to sell the software.
Hanging around is a bad idea - jealousy, bad feelings, etc.
The car is interesting, but the real work is all in the fuel cell. It's kind of like Dell saying, "We made this super fast computer, and it's rated at 5 gigaflops" without mentioning who made the CPU, motherboard, etc, etc.
I did some poking around - Ballard made the fuel cell, and here is their press release summary page:
Ballard Powers DaimlerChrysler's Fuel Cell Vehicle on a 3,000 Mile Drive Across the United States
Ha ha - I know the feeling.
Actually, this one was good. Less grand moralizing/theorizing, and more interesting facts.
The problem with Katz is that he thinks everyone is interested in his pedantic ramblings. If they were less pedantic, and less rambling, I probably would be.
Puppetman.
Our credit card info is stored encrypted in our Oracle database.
No one accesses the credit card info directly - we generate reports for billing staff. When credit card info is sent across the net (to process charges), we use secure sockets (as does everyone I'm sure).
The only machine that knows how to decrypt is a weblogic app server with the key, running on Solaris.
The database is on one virtual LAN, the webservers on another, and the app servers on a third.
We have PIX firewalls to keep out intruders, and our boxes are physically locked down in a cage.
In addition, our hardware topology is based on Windows 2000, Linux and Solaris. You would need to take advantage of security flaws in all three OSs in order to be able to traverse our site.
We make sure the passwords are not words or phrases. Numbers, funny characters, and letters.
The holes in our system are:
1) On weblogic, the connection info to the database is out in the open in the connection pools.
2) Billing staff need to be careful with how they handle paper reports. Perhaps we should only show the last 4 digits of the CC number when generating.
3) We refresh our QA environment once in a while. I have to be sure that I wipe credit card info, passwords, and email addresses from the QA database. While it's fairly secure as well, no point in leaving it around.
No system is perfect. So long as they are encrypted, on a machine that has the latest security patches, the machine is in a secure environment, and the passwords are "strong", you can sleep at night. Most of the large credit card thefts have been against systems that violated one or more of those rules.
After all, many firewalls are designed by highschool students who don't show up to class with books/homework, who hate math, can't type ("agents watched him in real time as he attempted hacks and had to retype commands three, four, or five times before he got them right"), and download their tools from the Internet rather than programming them themselves.
This kid is a serious dimwit.
Only if you're Canadian. Blame Canada. Of course, he's actually from Quebec, so blame them.
My point wasn't about taste in music (that was an aside). My point was that she had more than one hit, her album sold very well, and she got great critical aclaim for an album where she wrote all the songs, and produced it.
If you're starting a company that will sell CDs to consumers, you need to know the going-ons of the music business, and this guy doesn't.
And I'm not a big Paula Cole fan - I don't like her two other CDs.
I've seen her live, and her voice is great.
But more importantly, she writes her own music, and produces her own music. Britney doesn't write or produce, and Metallica doesn't produce.
You need to go back to economics class (quick, stop reading Slashdot).
The law of diminishing returns states that, for non-essentials, as the price goes up, sales go down. So you might sell 2 million at $4, but price it to $14, and you might only sell 50,000. The idea is to find the optimum point where you maximize your return. Competition obviously isn't factored into that, but the less competition you have, the more closely you can follow the rule.
Dennis Miller said,
"Considering how badly you get fucked every time you go into a record store, I have to assume Richard Branson was trying to be ironic when he named the place Virgin."
I wish I could spell "album" consistently.
That was Grammy nominations, not nominations by the fat guy named Ned who lives down the block (though both are of dubious value, I believe).
On the Web Log (lot 49), he said, "Here is the biggest mistake of them all: two good songs on a CD. How many times do we have that? Remember that girl who sang "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone"? Vaguely. She was a kind of folksy singer. That was the only good song on that CD."
That was Paula Cole, and for that albumn she got nominations for Best New Artist, Best Album of the Year, Best Pop Albumn, Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, and Producer of the Year.
If this guy didn't know that, how would you feel about his business acumen? And if his musical taste is that bad (Paula Cole's This Fire is one of my top 10 CDs of all time), then I don't want to listen to what ever else he's selling (Kid Rock ripoffs?).
"With patience, insight, and self-confidence to spare...."
Most intersting was his claim that the single rule of the universe could be defined in a few lines of code if it were a well-designed language (so stop coding in C++ *grin*). I would suspect that the rule, if it exists, looks much like an obfuscated C program - subtle, with side-effects that have important ramifications a few iterations later.
Now, what penatly does God traditionally hand out for hubris? Still, I can't wait to read it.
Neo didn't say a word.
but I'm not sure that article was about. Consumers will be broadband, but won't be driven by entertainment; IP networks will take over.
I have broadband, and it has several uses, including but not limited to music and video. IP networks already have taken over in my world.
He probably gets paid by the word. Perhaps this was a teaching tool by Slashdot to show you how to really pad a story. That he got two pages out of that was pretty amazing.