Let's face it..the indy HW sites rely upon vendors providing them with samples of their goods to play with, benchmark, and generally drool over (as geeks tend to do with any new hardware). Sometimes, yes, you do see examples of an indy site getting pressured by a big name vendor to do a good review (was Nvidia the latest culprit? Can't remember...), but by and large, they are no better than a large network like CNet or ZDNet
The simple fact of the matter is that the best so-called "indy" sites have an incestous and recursive relationship with the vendors, which goes like this:
1) review cool hardware, get lots of readers
2) get lots of readers, get more cool hardware for free to review
3) get lots of banner revenue:)
4) goto (2)
I still find the best way to evaluate new hardware is to:
1) wait at least 4 weeks before making your purchase
2) read the "indy" sites:)
3) check the newsgroups and see what the pioneers with the arrows in their backs have to say
4) weed out the idiots on the newsgroups who couldn't get new hardware to work to save their lives
5) start looking for the best prices
6) never buy any hardware until the second driver revision.
Wow..a whole three guys? At my company (not to be named, but the smaller of the two national railroads in Canada who's initials end in P) we manage 212 NT servers, 14,000 users, and about 2000 printers with three guys. This is not a joke or exageration.
On top of that, we have a change management process that requires a minimum of three days notice for any outage. Try handling a large NT environment with that sort of burden.
If you feel overworked, I invite you to come up north and experience my world:)
They are in the business of archiving, indexing, and offering search capabilities of newsgroups. Obviously, they aren't laying claim or ownership of posts that don't originate from their servers, but at the same time, they need to have some sort of legal statement in order to grant themselves the ability to perform the services they are offering.
What it boils down to is that if you don't like the terms, use an external (to google) news server. But if you do use their services, realize that anything you post is going to published, is going to be indexed, and is going to be availble for them to use.
Given the state of usenet, this is hardly a burdensome request on their part.
I loved this part:
"If irregularities should occur despite intensive safety measures
which are built into the machine, error codes are displayed and alternatives
to solve the situation are offered by the computer."
I can see it now, halfway up the Empire State Building: Poor suction detected. Please shutdown and perform a check-disk.
Seriously, when you're halfway up a building and not generating enough suction, what suggestions can the computer offer other than "pray!" ???
"I switched to Linux specifically to get out of this rut of having to rely upon a company for support and having no avenues to turn to if that company goes under"
Gee, if you're that insecure about OS support, you should probably consider switching to MS based OS'es..Nice try, but not a good enough excuse. Run what you love, and stop worrying.
A pontoon boat anchored offshore...How far offshore? Do you have any idea how much batter capacity you're gonna need to keep this electronic sh*t running? And if the boat is offshore, how are you going to recharge them? Are you really planning on running a generator as well?
That's a lot of work to protect a bunch of crustaceans..
The Sims, the entire EA*Sports line (the best PC sports games on the planet), the Janes military flight simulators, Black&White, Dungeon Keeper, Command&Conquer, Alpha Centauri, the Need for Speed series, SimCity...
Saying none of those are great games is ludicrous...
I've seen lots of rumours that Black and White will eventually be open source. Is there any evidence on the web, from interviews, etc, that this might actually happen? I do recall reading that Lionhead wants to port the game to lots of platforms, including Linux and BeOS, but I don't know where the open source rumour started.
P2P is the very essence of the internet. It's the very essence of TCP/IP for that matter.
Before Napster and all the hoopla over this buzzword, people were doing the same thing via IRC, FTP, NFS, etc. The protocols have changed, but the idea certainly hasn't. Now businesses are scrambling to implement "P2P", when they've been doing it all along, using things like EDI.
Heck, we were doing it in the BBS days. The old FidoNet feeds used to trickle from peer to peer, with each node making local phone calls to transfer to a nearby node. The whole system was set up to avoid long distance charges, by forming a web of nodes.
Does anybody remember the bad old days of CR-R's? Some drives could read CDR's, other's couldn't. Some machines could read stuff burnt at 4x, other's couldn't. Nowadays, there isn't a drive out there that can't handle CDR's.
For that matter, does anybody remember the bad old days of BIOS'es? Certain OS's like OS/2 required you to have a particular revision, or higher (the AMI BIOSs were particularly bad with OS/2).
How about bi-directional printers. Do any of you remember the heartache when your first inkjet didn't work correctly because you only had a uni-directional printer port?
How about DVD's? There was a time (and there may still be) when certain players couldn't handle certain discs.
How about BIOS support for large IDE devices? Do any of you remember the disappointment when your onboard controller couldn't handle a drive larger than 8 gigs?
How about 5 1/4 floppy drives? Remember not being able to read 360kb formated floppies in certain high density drives?
The list goes on and on...
Bluetooth is at least as complex, and probably more so, than any of these technologies. The manufacturers will get this sorted out in time.
The bleeding edge is exactly that - bloody. And as they say, you can tell who the pioneers are by the arrows in their backs. Don't slag a technology when it's in its infancy, just because things aren't working perfectly yet.
wow..you've clearly been doing a lot of thought and (possibly) some research about cloning..and you're coming from an well reasoned ethical/moral background and your writing is fantastic..do you have any links or source material to share?
Basically, it sounds like you need a dedicated game server, not an HTTP server tied into a game backend.
I'd create a custom HTTP server, that has the game logic built right in. Thanks to open source, getting a fast efficient HTTP handling mechanism is easy (strip down Apache, or look at some other, smaller open source servers). Then just add your game logic, either as statically linked code, or even better, as loadable modules of C or C++ code. You get the best of all worlds; HTTP support, blinding speed (no CGI interface overhead, no JVM, no script interpreters, etc), all in a tightly integrated package.
Just because the net is the big new thing doesn't excuse this guy from doing some research and career management.
Never, ever, accept a new position until you've met all your managers/supervisors, and also talked to some of the people on the inside, to get a feel for not only the stability of the company, but also the culture. Also check out how their stock is doing, compare their performance to other similar companies, etc.
These sorts of precarious financial situations are almost always know about by the current employees of the company well in advance. Often times, I've seen.com employees brainwashed into believing things will right themselves, but that's still a pretty loud and clear warning sign.
It all comes down to research. Most people put more effort into choosing a car than they do their career, which is a real shame.
Surely it would make more sense to use the output of the rocket motor to funnel high speed gas through this thing, or at least launch it sideways and hope that it gains enough velocity.
This "hope" aspect sounds to me like they don't know whether terminal velocity is gonna be enough or not. It would be funny to watch this thing silently fall into the ocean (or wherever) simply because it never sufficiently overcame its own drag.
On the other hand, if it does ignite, it'll make a nice splash (or crater)
First, you show your bigotry by linking only to the RealMedia content (even though Real is as closed source and proprietary as MS), and then to top it off, the one link you do provide is broken!
whatever...when the shoe's on the other foot (or OS in this case), you start whining. How lame is that?
This is open source! Grab the source, and take a look at it. If the developers have done a good job, the rendering code is separated from the GUI code, so it's really just a question of cobbling together a GUI, and probably taking care of a few low level functions like memory allocation. Most of the math routines should move directly over, since they're not API specific.
You can't complain about an Open Source app not running on your favorite OS, particulary that statement that "it'll have to be rewritten in before it's useful"....If everyone in the Linux camp talked like that, the kernel would still be i386 specific!
Slashdot Mirror
Let's face it..the indy HW sites rely upon vendors providing them with samples of their goods to play with, benchmark, and generally drool over (as geeks tend to do with any new hardware). Sometimes, yes, you do see examples of an indy site getting pressured by a big name vendor to do a good review (was Nvidia the latest culprit? Can't remember...), but by and large, they are no better than a large network like CNet or ZDNet
:)
:)
The simple fact of the matter is that the best so-called "indy" sites have an incestous and recursive relationship with the vendors, which goes like this:
1) review cool hardware, get lots of readers
2) get lots of readers, get more cool hardware for free to review
3) get lots of banner revenue
4) goto (2)
I still find the best way to evaluate new hardware is to:
1) wait at least 4 weeks before making your purchase
2) read the "indy" sites
3) check the newsgroups and see what the pioneers with the arrows in their backs have to say
4) weed out the idiots on the newsgroups who couldn't get new hardware to work to save their lives
5) start looking for the best prices
6) never buy any hardware until the second driver revision.
The Grand Unified Theory is now complete. Finally, I can get some sleep.
Wow..a whole three guys? At my company (not to be named, but the smaller of the two national railroads in Canada who's initials end in P) we manage 212 NT servers, 14,000 users, and about 2000 printers with three guys. This is not a joke or exageration.
:)
On top of that, we have a change management process that requires a minimum of three days notice for any outage. Try handling a large NT environment with that sort of burden.
If you feel overworked, I invite you to come up north and experience my world
They are in the business of archiving, indexing, and offering search capabilities of newsgroups. Obviously, they aren't laying claim or ownership of posts that don't originate from their servers, but at the same time, they need to have some sort of legal statement in order to grant themselves the ability to perform the services they are offering.
What it boils down to is that if you don't like the terms, use an external (to google) news server. But if you do use their services, realize that anything you post is going to published, is going to be indexed, and is going to be availble for them to use.
Given the state of usenet, this is hardly a burdensome request on their part.
I loved this part:
"If irregularities should occur despite intensive safety measures
which are built into the machine, error codes are displayed and alternatives
to solve the situation are offered by the computer."
I can see it now, halfway up the Empire State Building: Poor suction detected. Please shutdown and perform a check-disk.
Seriously, when you're halfway up a building and not generating enough suction, what suggestions can the computer offer other than "pray!" ???
bet you're using Cygnus...be gone, troll!
"It's quite fast on a 450 PII with 128MB of ram"
So is IE..So is opera, so is Lynx..what is your point?
"I switched to Linux specifically to get out of this rut of having to rely upon a company for support and having no avenues to turn to if that company goes under"
Gee, if you're that insecure about OS support, you should probably consider switching to MS based OS'es..Nice try, but not a good enough excuse. Run what you love, and stop worrying.
A pontoon boat anchored offshore...How far offshore? Do you have any idea how much batter capacity you're gonna need to keep this electronic sh*t running? And if the boat is offshore, how are you going to recharge them? Are you really planning on running a generator as well?
That's a lot of work to protect a bunch of crustaceans..
The Sims, the entire EA*Sports line (the best PC sports games on the planet), the Janes military flight simulators, Black&White, Dungeon Keeper, Command&Conquer, Alpha Centauri, the Need for Speed series, SimCity...
Saying none of those are great games is ludicrous...
I've seen lots of rumours that Black and White will eventually be open source. Is there any evidence on the web, from interviews, etc, that this might actually happen? I do recall reading that Lionhead wants to port the game to lots of platforms, including Linux and BeOS, but I don't know where the open source rumour started.
Yeah, I knew that EDI sucked when writing that line. Fortunately, I've been able to avoid doing any EDI related work :)
P2P is the very essence of the internet. It's the very essence of TCP/IP for that matter.
Before Napster and all the hoopla over this buzzword, people were doing the same thing via IRC, FTP, NFS, etc. The protocols have changed, but the idea certainly hasn't. Now businesses are scrambling to implement "P2P", when they've been doing it all along, using things like EDI.
Heck, we were doing it in the BBS days. The old FidoNet feeds used to trickle from peer to peer, with each node making local phone calls to transfer to a nearby node. The whole system was set up to avoid long distance charges, by forming a web of nodes.
Every new technology has its teething problems.
Does anybody remember the bad old days of CR-R's? Some drives could read CDR's, other's couldn't. Some machines could read stuff burnt at 4x, other's couldn't. Nowadays, there isn't a drive out there that can't handle CDR's.
For that matter, does anybody remember the bad old days of BIOS'es? Certain OS's like OS/2 required you to have a particular revision, or higher (the AMI BIOSs were particularly bad with OS/2).
How about bi-directional printers. Do any of you remember the heartache when your first inkjet didn't work correctly because you only had a uni-directional printer port?
How about DVD's? There was a time (and there may still be) when certain players couldn't handle certain discs.
How about BIOS support for large IDE devices? Do any of you remember the disappointment when your onboard controller couldn't handle a drive larger than 8 gigs?
How about 5 1/4 floppy drives? Remember not being able to read 360kb formated floppies in certain high density drives?
The list goes on and on...
Bluetooth is at least as complex, and probably more so, than any of these technologies. The manufacturers will get this sorted out in time.
The bleeding edge is exactly that - bloody. And as they say, you can tell who the pioneers are by the arrows in their backs. Don't slag a technology when it's in its infancy, just because things aren't working perfectly yet.
wow..you've clearly been doing a lot of thought and (possibly) some research about cloning..and you're coming from an well reasoned ethical/moral background and your writing is fantastic..do you have any links or source material to share?
Basically, it sounds like you need a dedicated game server, not an HTTP server tied into a game backend.
I'd create a custom HTTP server, that has the game logic built right in. Thanks to open source, getting a fast efficient HTTP handling mechanism is easy (strip down Apache, or look at some other, smaller open source servers). Then just add your game logic, either as statically linked code, or even better, as loadable modules of C or C++ code. You get the best of all worlds; HTTP support, blinding speed (no CGI interface overhead, no JVM, no script interpreters, etc), all in a tightly integrated package.
Just because the net is the big new thing doesn't excuse this guy from doing some research and career management.
.com employees brainwashed into believing things will right themselves, but that's still a pretty loud and clear warning sign.
Never, ever, accept a new position until you've met all your managers/supervisors, and also talked to some of the people on the inside, to get a feel for not only the stability of the company, but also the culture. Also check out how their stock is doing, compare their performance to other similar companies, etc.
These sorts of precarious financial situations are almost always know about by the current employees of the company well in advance. Often times, I've seen
It all comes down to research. Most people put more effort into choosing a car than they do their career, which is a real shame.
Gotta love this quote "They can't be used on one-click shopping sites such as Amazon, where permanent card numbers must be stored. "
Seems to me you could enter the credit card number when making a purchase, click "Buy", and still come in at one click..
The sad thing is that the way it's written, it's like the author really thinks that Amazon _must_ keep credit card numbers on file...
It's "straight", not "streight", and "their", not "there"
:)
Not flaming you, just don't want to see a Taco Jr.
Primus sucks!
Surely it would make more sense to use the output of the rocket motor to funnel high speed gas through this thing, or at least launch it sideways and hope that it gains enough velocity.
This "hope" aspect sounds to me like they don't know whether terminal velocity is gonna be enough or not. It would be funny to watch this thing silently fall into the ocean (or wherever) simply because it never sufficiently overcame its own drag.
On the other hand, if it does ignite, it'll make a nice splash (or crater)
First, you show your bigotry by linking only to the RealMedia content (even though Real is as closed source and proprietary as MS), and then to top it off, the one link you do provide is broken!
Nice job Slashbots!
Then why is practically every Slashdot page equipped with one?
Sorta funny to slam one of Slashdot's only revenue streams...
You're just jealous that Linux doesn't have the kind of suspend/resume technology of even, oh, say, OS/2 had back in the day...
Grow up!
whatever...when the shoe's on the other foot (or OS in this case), you start whining. How lame is that?
This is open source! Grab the source, and take a look at it. If the developers have done a good job, the rendering code is separated from the GUI code, so it's really just a question of cobbling together a GUI, and probably taking care of a few low level functions like memory allocation. Most of the math routines should move directly over, since they're not API specific.
You can't complain about an Open Source app not running on your favorite OS, particulary that statement that "it'll have to be rewritten in before it's useful"....If everyone in the Linux camp talked like that, the kernel would still be i386 specific!