I agree completely. The version of the Orange Box I bought isn't even an "sku"; I bought and downloaded it through Steam, which means there isn't any "stock". Would it really be so hard for Slashdot's editors to use an actual word?
By "tripods at the end", do you mean the hunters and striders at the end of Episode 2?
Ok, here's what you do. First of all, you have to take out the hunters that come along with the striders first; if you don't, the hunters will shoot down any Magnusson devices you throw.
Ramming the car into hunters is a pretty good way to kill them, but be careful, because they will try to dodge you; watch them carefully, and remember that you don't have to be going full speed to take one out. After you've closed in on them, trying to maneuver the car around to hit them is a pain, so it's best to just get out. If you have rockets, they're also a good way to take out hunters; two or three to the body will do it. They're also easy to aim from a distance, so you might use rockets to take out a hunter before you drive towards them in the car. The alternate ammo for the AR2 will kill them in one shot, but it's fairly rare and they are good at dodging it unless you're close to them. Aside from that, the best weapon is... logs! Use the gravity gun to pick up a nearby log and chuck it at them. Two or three hits should kill them.
After the hunters are gone, you can lob a Magnusson device at the strider and then shoot it. The game seems to suggest using the handgun, but I prefer to use the machine gun instead. Don't bother aiming too accurately, just spray ammo all over it and it'll explode.
Despite the fact that the NPCs are panicking, don't feel like you have to rush too much. More striders won't appear until you've taken care of the current wave, and you usually have time to swing by a supply depot to pick up some ammo inbetween killing striders. The ones you really have to watch out for are the ones that hunker down close to the ground as they move; they're going to try to destroy building, so you do want to hurry to kill them. It's ok if you lose a few buildings, though, unless you're going for the achievement that involves not losing any.
Their description makes it sound as if everything Just Works, and will never fail to let you recover old files.
Come on, at least read the whole page if you're going to start flaming Apple. I quote:
One day, no matter how large your backup drive is, it will run out of space. And Time Machine has an action plan. It alerts you that it will start deleting previous backups, oldest first. Before it deletes any backup, Time Machine copies files that might be needed to fully restore your disk for every remaining backup. (Moral of the story: The larger the drive, the farther back in time you can back up.)
The reason is that it takes far fewer characters to make a sentence in Japanese than it does in English -- I believe about three times fewer, on average. That's why a per-character speed that is just fine in Japanese will be too slow in English.
You're 100x more likely to be killed by some retard running a red light because they're talking on their cellphone than you are to be killed by a trained driver going at high speed on a deserted road in a carefully prepared and well instrumented car.
Got any statistics or research to back that up, or are you just saying that because you feel it in your gut?
What I mean by that is that XP can let multiple users access a single encrypted file (or directory), which, as far as I'm aware, you can't do in 2k. (but maybe they added that in in an update I don't know about)
Oh, and in your list of enhancements in XP, you forgot ClearType.;)
That's true, but mentioning that probably would've just caused somebody to flame me about how they hate "blurry" fonts.;-)
Windows XP didn't offer anything that Windows 2000 didn't already offer.
I see this get posted on Slashdot a lot, but it's just not true.
Things Windows XP has that 2000 doesn't include system restore, driver rollback, fast user switching, a built-in firewall, an encrypted file system that supported multiple users at once (2k's only worked for a single user at once), smart card support, data excecution prevention, better compatibility with pre-2k applications, remote assistance, a remote desktop server in the professional version, and more. Not all (or even any) of those features might be useful to you, but they are there, and there are people who use them.
How can you quantify this? If you are too sick to work, you are too sick to work.
Although they're commonly called sick days, a more technical term is "medical and bereavement leave," and a better term might be "paid sick days." In other words, they're days that you can take off for being sick and still get paid for it. If you end up being too sick to work for more than your allotted days, you can still not go in to work, but you won't get paid for it. (and some employers will fire you for taking too many unpaid sick days)
(and Qt is pronounced "cute" by the Trolls, just fyi)
A few months ago, one of the TrollTech's developers came and gave a presentation on Qt to several of the developers at my workplace. Interestingly, apparently the "cute" pronunciation is mostly an invention of their marketing people -- many of their own developers still say "Q T".
These creatures were meant to fly free in their native rain forests
Creatures are not "meant" to do anything, unless you believe in an invisible friend in the sky who is pulling all of our strings like puppets.
As long as it's happy -- as long as any pet is happy, for that matter -- why does it matter if they're not living in their natural habitat? Just because there's one more parrot in the US doesn't mean there's one less in Africa. You should be attacking people who abuse them, not somebody who has given one a caring home.
Also Firefox being GPL really doesn't matter to me anymore, they should explain WHY they dropped official support from that IMAP Client, Thunderbird. Some say it has something to do with Google relations and Gmail.
Wait, what? Why would anybody think that? Gmail is an e-mail service provider, Thunderbird is an e-mail client. They don't compete at all. Heck, Thunderbird works great for accessing your Gmail account via POP3.
This is a Really Good Thing(tm) because it would invariably mean that the one person in each group who got saddled with building a character capable of crafting specialized magic weapons for everyone got shafted good and hard when the time came to start whipping up custom +5 swords of Destroy All Life that cast Karsus Avatar three times a day (injoke, sorry).
Don't be silly! It's impossible to cast 12th-level spells since the Weave was reconstructed after Mystryl died.
Vinyl stores more information than CDs do. Quite a bit more.
This is not as big of an issue as you make it sound. Let me introduce you to the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. In a nutshell -- vinyl being able to store more information than a CD can doesn't matter. As long as the bandwidth if your digital sample is large enough that you cover all of the frequencies a human can hear at and your sampling frequency is at least twice that, it is possible to perfectly reconstruct the original signal; in other words, no information that a human is capable of hearing is actually lost.
Most humans can hear up to 20 kHz; some can hear as high as 22 kHz. Since the sample rate of a CD is 44.1 kHz, that means that, unless you have amazingly good hearing, a CD is capable of perfectly storing anything that you would be capable of hearing on a vinyl disc.
BTW, I have given MS a grand total of 7 dollars, lol.
Assuming you obtained Windows legally: no you haven't. The site license your college has with Microsoft isn't free -- and they're paying for it using your tuition. The sad truth is that you (and every other student there) has already paid Microsoft for Windows, and you have to cough up a few more dollars before they'll actually let you have the disc.
Also, you should probably review the terms of agreement that you agreed to when you got that disc. It's more than likely that you're not legally allowed to use it after you're no longer a student.
I belong to the gamer user base
You have to realize that the laptops under discussion are very low-end. You won't be doing any serious gaming at all with them. If you discount games, why would you want to run a stripped-down version of Windows rather than Linux? Many older games either have Linux ports or run just fine through Wine, anyway.
I can't think of any state worse in which to try to sell this car... I don' think they're worried.
If you're not trolling -- why not? I think a car like this would be great in any of Texas' major cities, especially considering that traffic congestion generally isn't as bad as it is in the nation's other major cities, so you'll be spending less time idling in traffic. It wouldn't be ideal for driving the long distances between cities, but there are other states that are worse in that regard. Heck, I don't think I've driven outside of my city in about two years, it always ends up being more economical for me to just take a plane somewhere and get a rental car.
Huh? What have you been smoking? May I have some of it?
Would you care to state why you think he's so wrong rather than making ad hominem attacks?
I like Linux a lot -- I use it as my primary development environment at work, even -- but I have to agree that, despite any other problems it may have, XP's remote desktop is much easier to use than forwarding X connections. Under Linux I have to start up an SSH connection to another computer, enable X forwarding, then figure out the command line to execute whatever GUI I'm interested in. If you actually want to use your desktop environment on that computer, you'll get to jump through some other hoops to make it play nicely with your desktop on your current computer. In XP, you just establish a remote desktop connection to whatever computer you're interested in, and poof, you're connected with full GUI access.
You can accomplish something similar in Linux with VNC, but that doesn't actually let you log in to a new session, you just take control of an existing X session. It's also much more bandwidth intensive than XP's RDP; you can use RDP over even a dial-up connection. VNC is an exercise in patience and watching windows redraw.
X has its advantages, but easier? No, sir, what are you smoking?
Because USB and FireWire are still incredibly slow compared to SATA. FireWire 800 is rated at 786.432 Mbps; "Hi-Speed" USB 2.0 trails behind at 480 Mbps. On the other hand, currently available SATA devices run at 3 Gbps. You could use USB and FireWire for internal devices, but the performance would be painful, at best. It's not like SATA is stagnant, either -- a 6 Gbps standard is in the works.
I don't know how mice work, either, but let's think of a way to do it. Let's say that our mouse is an optical mouse that will take 200 samples per second (that's actually quite a lot), and it transmits back to the computer how much its X and Y positions have changed. Surely a 4-byte int is enough precision for each of those. We can assume that actual clicks happen incredibly infrequently compared to that, and they only take up a few bits, so they're insignificant. So, that's 1,600 bytes per second, or about 0.00000019 Gbps. Not the same order of magnitude as a keyboard, but close. (It's also probably safe to assume that real mouse designers have come up with more efficient methods than I just did)
What you're talking about is a remote (aka "dummy") terminal -- those already exist, and you can build one yourself, if you want. However, they require more expensive (and bulky) hardware than a simple monitor, since you'll actually be responding to X events. On top of that, such a solution wouldn't work with any operating system that didn't use X (or whatever other windowing system it was based on), and you wouldn't be able to use it as a primary display before your operating system had loaded (or had started its network device, really). The only way to do that would be to have support for the device built into your video card itself, and it still wouldn't be able to decompose rendered images into high-level drawing commands.
If you want an actual wireless monitor -- that is, cutting out the cable between the DVI port on your video card and the one on your monitor -- yes, you have to draw every pixel 60 times per second (or some other rate, but 60 is common), because that's what the hardware expects. It takes up a huge amount of bandwidth, and the only ways to reduce that which don't require operating system-level support are compression; lossless compression still isn't good enough to use 802.11n, and lossy compression simply isn't acceptable for many purposes.
I believe the max data rate for 802.11n is 248 Mbps, so it's unlikely. I've rarely seen PNG get better than 2-to-1 compression on photo-quality images -- not to mention that compressing that much data in real time would take a significant amount of CPU time.
Well, let's do some math. Let's say we've got a 1680x1050 display at 24 bpp and an update rate of 60 Hz. That's 1680*1050*24*60 bits per second -- in other words, 2.37 Gbps. So, yes, a connection like this could conceivably run a remote display.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree completely. The version of the Orange Box I bought isn't even an "sku"; I bought and downloaded it through Steam, which means there isn't any "stock". Would it really be so hard for Slashdot's editors to use an actual word?
By "tripods at the end", do you mean the hunters and striders at the end of Episode 2?
Ok, here's what you do. First of all, you have to take out the hunters that come along with the striders first; if you don't, the hunters will shoot down any Magnusson devices you throw.
Ramming the car into hunters is a pretty good way to kill them, but be careful, because they will try to dodge you; watch them carefully, and remember that you don't have to be going full speed to take one out. After you've closed in on them, trying to maneuver the car around to hit them is a pain, so it's best to just get out. If you have rockets, they're also a good way to take out hunters; two or three to the body will do it. They're also easy to aim from a distance, so you might use rockets to take out a hunter before you drive towards them in the car. The alternate ammo for the AR2 will kill them in one shot, but it's fairly rare and they are good at dodging it unless you're close to them. Aside from that, the best weapon is... logs! Use the gravity gun to pick up a nearby log and chuck it at them. Two or three hits should kill them.
After the hunters are gone, you can lob a Magnusson device at the strider and then shoot it. The game seems to suggest using the handgun, but I prefer to use the machine gun instead. Don't bother aiming too accurately, just spray ammo all over it and it'll explode.
Despite the fact that the NPCs are panicking, don't feel like you have to rush too much. More striders won't appear until you've taken care of the current wave, and you usually have time to swing by a supply depot to pick up some ammo inbetween killing striders. The ones you really have to watch out for are the ones that hunker down close to the ground as they move; they're going to try to destroy building, so you do want to hurry to kill them. It's ok if you lose a few buildings, though, unless you're going for the achievement that involves not losing any.
Their description makes it sound as if everything Just Works, and will never fail to let you recover old files.
Come on, at least read the whole page if you're going to start flaming Apple. I quote:
One day, no matter how large your backup drive is, it will run out of space. And Time Machine has an action plan. It alerts you that it will start deleting previous backups, oldest first. Before it deletes any backup, Time Machine copies files that might be needed to fully restore your disk for every remaining backup. (Moral of the story: The larger the drive, the farther back in time you can back up.)
The reason is that it takes far fewer characters to make a sentence in Japanese than it does in English -- I believe about three times fewer, on average. That's why a per-character speed that is just fine in Japanese will be too slow in English.
You're 100x more likely to be killed by some retard running a red light because they're talking on their cellphone than you are to be killed by a trained driver going at high speed on a deserted road in a carefully prepared and well instrumented car.
Got any statistics or research to back that up, or are you just saying that because you feel it in your gut?
Huh? Win2K's EFS works for multiple users.
;)
;-)
What I mean by that is that XP can let multiple users access a single encrypted file (or directory), which, as far as I'm aware, you can't do in 2k. (but maybe they added that in in an update I don't know about)
Oh, and in your list of enhancements in XP, you forgot ClearType.
That's true, but mentioning that probably would've just caused somebody to flame me about how they hate "blurry" fonts.
Windows XP didn't offer anything that Windows 2000 didn't already offer.
I see this get posted on Slashdot a lot, but it's just not true.
Things Windows XP has that 2000 doesn't include system restore, driver rollback, fast user switching, a built-in firewall, an encrypted file system that supported multiple users at once (2k's only worked for a single user at once), smart card support, data excecution prevention, better compatibility with pre-2k applications, remote assistance, a remote desktop server in the professional version, and more. Not all (or even any) of those features might be useful to you, but they are there, and there are people who use them.
How can you quantify this? If you are too sick to work, you are too sick to work.
Although they're commonly called sick days, a more technical term is "medical and bereavement leave," and a better term might be "paid sick days." In other words, they're days that you can take off for being sick and still get paid for it. If you end up being too sick to work for more than your allotted days, you can still not go in to work, but you won't get paid for it. (and some employers will fire you for taking too many unpaid sick days)
What are you talking about? It's a great game.
(and Qt is pronounced "cute" by the Trolls, just fyi)
A few months ago, one of the TrollTech's developers came and gave a presentation on Qt to several of the developers at my workplace. Interestingly, apparently the "cute" pronunciation is mostly an invention of their marketing people -- many of their own developers still say "Q T".
These creatures were meant to fly free in their native rain forests
Creatures are not "meant" to do anything, unless you believe in an invisible friend in the sky who is pulling all of our strings like puppets.
As long as it's happy -- as long as any pet is happy, for that matter -- why does it matter if they're not living in their natural habitat? Just because there's one more parrot in the US doesn't mean there's one less in Africa. You should be attacking people who abuse them, not somebody who has given one a caring home.
Also Firefox being GPL really doesn't matter to me anymore, they should explain WHY they dropped official support from that IMAP Client, Thunderbird. Some say it has something to do with Google relations and Gmail.
Wait, what? Why would anybody think that? Gmail is an e-mail service provider, Thunderbird is an e-mail client. They don't compete at all. Heck, Thunderbird works great for accessing your Gmail account via POP3.
Here, here!
So are you not going to fight them anywhere else? That's too bad.
This is a Really Good Thing(tm) because it would invariably mean that the one person in each group who got saddled with building a character capable of crafting specialized magic weapons for everyone got shafted good and hard when the time came to start whipping up custom +5 swords of Destroy All Life that cast Karsus Avatar three times a day (injoke, sorry).
Don't be silly! It's impossible to cast 12th-level spells since the Weave was reconstructed after Mystryl died.
Sorry about that. </dork>
Vinyl stores more information than CDs do. Quite a bit more.
This is not as big of an issue as you make it sound. Let me introduce you to the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem. In a nutshell -- vinyl being able to store more information than a CD can doesn't matter. As long as the bandwidth if your digital sample is large enough that you cover all of the frequencies a human can hear at and your sampling frequency is at least twice that, it is possible to perfectly reconstruct the original signal; in other words, no information that a human is capable of hearing is actually lost.
Most humans can hear up to 20 kHz; some can hear as high as 22 kHz. Since the sample rate of a CD is 44.1 kHz, that means that, unless you have amazingly good hearing, a CD is capable of perfectly storing anything that you would be capable of hearing on a vinyl disc.
In fact I'd say that the Balance requires such beings, unless of course sex is inherently evil in the DnD universe.
Have you seen the Book of Vile Darkness? Yeah, sex is inherently evil. Especially if it's kinky sex.
BTW, I have given MS a grand total of 7 dollars, lol.
Assuming you obtained Windows legally: no you haven't. The site license your college has with Microsoft isn't free -- and they're paying for it using your tuition. The sad truth is that you (and every other student there) has already paid Microsoft for Windows, and you have to cough up a few more dollars before they'll actually let you have the disc.
Also, you should probably review the terms of agreement that you agreed to when you got that disc. It's more than likely that you're not legally allowed to use it after you're no longer a student.
I belong to the gamer user base
You have to realize that the laptops under discussion are very low-end. You won't be doing any serious gaming at all with them. If you discount games, why would you want to run a stripped-down version of Windows rather than Linux? Many older games either have Linux ports or run just fine through Wine, anyway.
I can't think of any state worse in which to try to sell this car... I don' think they're worried.
If you're not trolling -- why not? I think a car like this would be great in any of Texas' major cities, especially considering that traffic congestion generally isn't as bad as it is in the nation's other major cities, so you'll be spending less time idling in traffic. It wouldn't be ideal for driving the long distances between cities, but there are other states that are worse in that regard. Heck, I don't think I've driven outside of my city in about two years, it always ends up being more economical for me to just take a plane somewhere and get a rental car.
Huh? What have you been smoking? May I have some of it?
Would you care to state why you think he's so wrong rather than making ad hominem attacks?
I like Linux a lot -- I use it as my primary development environment at work, even -- but I have to agree that, despite any other problems it may have, XP's remote desktop is much easier to use than forwarding X connections. Under Linux I have to start up an SSH connection to another computer, enable X forwarding, then figure out the command line to execute whatever GUI I'm interested in. If you actually want to use your desktop environment on that computer, you'll get to jump through some other hoops to make it play nicely with your desktop on your current computer. In XP, you just establish a remote desktop connection to whatever computer you're interested in, and poof, you're connected with full GUI access.
You can accomplish something similar in Linux with VNC, but that doesn't actually let you log in to a new session, you just take control of an existing X session. It's also much more bandwidth intensive than XP's RDP; you can use RDP over even a dial-up connection. VNC is an exercise in patience and watching windows redraw.
X has its advantages, but easier? No, sir, what are you smoking?
Because USB and FireWire are still incredibly slow compared to SATA. FireWire 800 is rated at 786.432 Mbps; "Hi-Speed" USB 2.0 trails behind at 480 Mbps. On the other hand, currently available SATA devices run at 3 Gbps. You could use USB and FireWire for internal devices, but the performance would be painful, at best. It's not like SATA is stagnant, either -- a 6 Gbps standard is in the works.
I don't know how mice work, either, but let's think of a way to do it. Let's say that our mouse is an optical mouse that will take 200 samples per second (that's actually quite a lot), and it transmits back to the computer how much its X and Y positions have changed. Surely a 4-byte int is enough precision for each of those. We can assume that actual clicks happen incredibly infrequently compared to that, and they only take up a few bits, so they're insignificant. So, that's 1,600 bytes per second, or about 0.00000019 Gbps. Not the same order of magnitude as a keyboard, but close. (It's also probably safe to assume that real mouse designers have come up with more efficient methods than I just did)
What you're talking about is a remote (aka "dummy") terminal -- those already exist, and you can build one yourself, if you want. However, they require more expensive (and bulky) hardware than a simple monitor, since you'll actually be responding to X events. On top of that, such a solution wouldn't work with any operating system that didn't use X (or whatever other windowing system it was based on), and you wouldn't be able to use it as a primary display before your operating system had loaded (or had started its network device, really). The only way to do that would be to have support for the device built into your video card itself, and it still wouldn't be able to decompose rendered images into high-level drawing commands.
If you want an actual wireless monitor -- that is, cutting out the cable between the DVI port on your video card and the one on your monitor -- yes, you have to draw every pixel 60 times per second (or some other rate, but 60 is common), because that's what the hardware expects. It takes up a huge amount of bandwidth, and the only ways to reduce that which don't require operating system-level support are compression; lossless compression still isn't good enough to use 802.11n, and lossy compression simply isn't acceptable for many purposes.
I believe the max data rate for 802.11n is 248 Mbps, so it's unlikely. I've rarely seen PNG get better than 2-to-1 compression on photo-quality images -- not to mention that compressing that much data in real time would take a significant amount of CPU time.
Well, let's do some math. Let's say we've got a 1680x1050 display at 24 bpp and an update rate of 60 Hz. That's 1680*1050*24*60 bits per second -- in other words, 2.37 Gbps. So, yes, a connection like this could conceivably run a remote display.
I saw "Moblin project" first and thought that this was going to be an article about the monsters of the same name from the Zelda games. :-(