Re:Something tells me this guy has never set one u
on
Macintosh Clustering
·
· Score: 2
I think more to the point is you can use Macs that your organization probably already has. If you're at a school whose got a big pile of Macs in the library or graphics labs or something you can turn them into a super computer by night and still have them usable by students during the day. The same can't be said for the highly tuned Beowulf all the systems need to be idendical and within four feet of one another or the doppler shift over the copper wire will fuck something up system. Beowulfs are cool and in some cases are very effective (when you have the money to buy and build a new system) but if you need to use stuff you already have (and you've got Macs) the Appleseed is a good choice.
Run the same thing with some Linux boxes using the 2.2.x kernel and some running the 2.4.x kernel and see what happens. Those are truely different kernels, not just kernel patches. You can get 700$/CPU on the Apple system if you consider that you can buy X number of systems and distribute them around your network in different offices and when they aren't busy run some highly parallel code on them. Arguably you aren't going to do this with the Linux cluster which means you have to buy two times the systems (for an office and lab) which effectively doubles the cost per CPU since you've got to by twice the computers but only half of them can actually be used in a cluster. Or you can just use systems you've already got which lowers the cost of your lab cluster to virtually nothing because you're using computers that are already there. You can have an iMac user lab by day and lab super computer by night.
I've had my Powerbook for a couple years and have trounced all over the place with it and it still works just fine. I'm pretty careful with it for the most part but I know for a fact it stands up to my high G-force driving, airport X-ray machines, playing SW pod racer whilst driving on the freeway (I wasn't the one playing of course), and being toted all over the place in a backpack. I may not be able to play CS on my Powerbook but it has never had to be sent in for repairs form my touching some portion of it with a little too much force (I've never had to send it in for repairs). The Lombard and Pismo PBs (and to an extent the Wall Streets) have curved shells which makes them a little tougher when it comes to pressure being applied to them. The back to the LCD is curved enough I can set two fair sized computer books on the top of the PB without breaking my screen (done that). The only part I really worry about when I have it in a bag in the CD-ROM faceplate because it doesn't sit exactly flush with the side of the case. The one drawback is it is a little fat to carry around in my usual bag (one of those "daypack" style backpacks with the sinle strap going across your chest) so I usually have to use a normal two srap bag when I want to take it someplace.
That is a waste of energy. To mine something from a planet and get it to another planet requires massive amounts of energy and very long periods of time (much longer periods of time than societies on Earth last). By the time any materials mined from other planets got back to Earth the society that deemed it a good idea would be long gone. Not only would that society be gone but by the time the technology to make a lumber planet or oil planet existed there'd be no need for oil or lumber on such a massive scale. It takes alot of energy to get something from a planet into space. What you're saying would require an economy based around energy (in whatever form) thus shipping anything from the surface of a planet to the surface of another planet (scores of light years away) would cost absurb amounts of money (energy). You're trying to solve problems of 1890 by importing materials from space. Doesn't that seem a bit silly?
The Canadian host for fuck sake. I'm thinking along the lines of the second season or so. Maybe it was only a couple episodes or so but the episodes I did catch were all teams with a bit of mechanical experience behind them. Who the fuck pissed in your Cherrios anyway?
While I'm up for a robot running a hazard course that has the potential to destroy said robot I'm not the biggest fan of the new fangled americanized JYW. While the Canadian is funny ("You're like totally runnin out of time eh!") the new method for forming teams sucks. I liked the old days of the entire team being engineers not just people who knew how to weld. Too many times it is the expert just giving instructions only to get confused looks on the faces of their teammates. It is also a pretty regular occurance that the team doesn't know what the fuck it is they're building. Maybe it is just me who likes to see engineers add features to their designs until it doesn't work following the old adage. Oh well, here's hoping one of these robots goes on a rampage and somebody has to call Ultraman to come fight it.
The NBC crew in Afganistan kept a Powerbook as part of their equipment because they could do in field editing of footage shot with the Sony VX2000 they were carrying. More interesting than that (which I find damn cool) is a lot of editing was done with iMovie. I think it is an NBC policy now that PBs are given to crews using DV cameras. How many companies offer a full video editing suite that can run off of a battery?
Why does eceryone in their loath for the P4 forget about its trace cache? They included it specifically so a branch mispredict wouldn't result in a 20 stage pipeline stall. IIRC the trache cache limits most mispredicts to a 5 stage stall. The P4 definitely cranks numbers slower than an Athlon but it doesn't have the performance pentalty from 20 stage branch mispredicts like you're saying.
Not just the content creators but the content viewers as well. I know alot of places buy iMacs specifically because it is very very very simple to administer them and with OS9/10 it is pretty foolproof to keep them up and running. You can set up a lab of fifty Macs and VERY easily keep them up and running without needing some form of certification to do so. Even if you're only buying a single Mac for your home it is still pretty damn easy to keep it up and running. Installing software is rarely harder than dragging an icon from a mounted disk to your Applications folder. I'd also say Apple's support services are the best in the industry (for consumer systems at least). It is rare to hear of complaints about their support services. Shit sometimes AppleCare contracts sell for more money than the machines they're attached to sell for.
That's one of the dumbest proposals I've ever seen on slashdot. If there's no way for somebody to secure rights to a frequency in a given region then I'm going to stick up an antenna so powerful nobody in a 100 mile radius is going to be able to broadcast on any of the frequencies I do. There'd be no ads and no programming because without ads noone could afford to broadcast anything. Unless of course you only cared what the top 10% of the population had to say. Oh yeah, being a devoted internet devotee right now you only care what the top 30% of people have to say anyhow. Good job dude.
One thing I've always for the longest time wanted to see was a digital library accessible from outside the library's physical building. The stuff I'd want online is documentaries magazine and journals newspapers and maybe even copies of the books themselves. I've seen stuff like this before (called Onlamp I think) but it is mostly just old periodicals and has a shitty search utility. The benefits of having texts of all forms online is it becomes much easier to include passages into papers and easier for professors or TAs to go over the work and see if the student's been copying directly out of the book. While this is indeed a ton of work it might be a doable project because somebody somewhere has already thought of this.
That is exactly my point, Windows has a bunch of fucked up binaries all over the place because it is popular. Were Linux in the position Windows is in there would be just as many exploits and virii running around. Lets say you had some sort of Nimda-esque tool you wrote and you wanted to really cause some damage. Would you find an exploit in a BeOS program? A MacOS program? A Linux program? No you'd go for Windows because even if you affect a small percentage of all Windows users you're going to affect more people then all BeOS, Mac, and Linux users combined. Running unsafe binaries isn't exactly a Windows only thing either. How many Linux users REALLY take precautions when running something extracted from an RPM? About the same percentage as Windows users who check out files before running them: too few.
That is absolutely ridiculous. Why are there no BeOS virii running around? No one fucking uses it. Why are there Windows and before that DOS virii all over the place? Because it was the most popular thing since stupidity. It doesn't matter that it isn't there now because Linux doesn't matter. If all of the companies developing Linux stopped tomorrow and all the major distributions just closed their doors would ANYONE give half a shit? No. A couple slashdotters would probably hurl themselves off building. Except for the guy who's new car just got totaled by a fatass Linux geek falling 50 stories onto it most people wouldn't notice. If Linux WAS popular you would be damn sure that it wouldn't be 100% open source free as in libre software running on it. Alot of proprietary shit would be running on it because the selling software service business plan has not been working. You can also be damn sure there'd be as many or more exploits for it as there are for Windows. Just because the source is open doesn't make it somehow magically secure.
Why did all the retards decide to respond to this post. Did I ever once suggest there was ActiveX for Linux? Don't go and make stupid assumptions. If Linux ever managers to get a signifigant number of users there will be plenty of virii running around that do all sorts of bad things to a user's system. This is especially true as Linux actually gains the sort of functionality ActiveX was developed for and runs code from places other than/usr/bin. Software libre is less likely to contain spyware but popular software isn't always going to be software libre man. Get the net. That whole free (libre) alternative thing doesn't work with people like AOL users when they want to do stuff with as little hassle as possible. Of course you're realing you're preaching about an OS whose default operating system does more damage to your files than most virii ever do right?
Whut the fuck did I fucking say about damage being limited to user permissions. If you've got backups of your home directory that is really fucking nice for you. I'm so damned proud of you I could fucking burst. What about that BIG project you just finished that hadn't been backed up yet? What does it matter if you do monthly backups if the shit you just spent a good deal of time working on just got toasted by some asshole kid who think's he's 1337 by rm -rf'ing someone's home directory. Stuff that rm -rf's home directories of course doesn't affect everybody just like alot of virii don't cause everyone problems. However if you're the one guy who got fucked by some virus or just malicious shell script you going's to be fucking pissed. Work on your reading comprehension before you press the submit button next time.
The whiny bitching about when will people learn is ludicrous. Wah wah Windows users ought to use Linux because it is a million times more better than everything. Fuck that. Alot of these shareware/spyware schemes are complete asshole tactics and could affect Linux users too if anyone gave a shit about them.
I recently rant into a nice little spyware program called winad (wnad.exe) which somehow ended up on the machine (nothing has been installed on the system in eight months) and would hook into IE and launch pop under windows at random when IE was sitting idle viewing a web page. My only guess is some ActiveX program loaded it onto the system from a website somewhere. This program disturbed me a bit because it got onto the system and though didn't do any damage it had the potential to. For elitist Linux users who think they're hot shit, the same thing can be done (though limited to a user's access privileges). It would annoy the piss out of alot of people to have $HOME rm -rf'ed. The whole invasion of privacy in the name of advertising crap is a blow to the whole freedom to roam thing the web is all about. Thinking you're a badass because you can compile a kernel doesn't mean you're somehow better than somebody else who doesn't compile their kernel. It gets real old real fast.
Man standing on toilet is high on pot
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Why game makers need to charge a fee to play their games: nothing is free. While this seems like an obvious statement it doesn't seem many slashdotters get it. Playing Quake or CS online doesn't cost a whole lot. Severs run by [whoever] are as a relay server giving a central hub which lets people with the game get together and play the game. Tons of of bandwidth and equipment isn't required on the vendor's end because they don't actually host the games. Said bandwidth and equipment is the onus of the clients playing their P2P game. MMORPGs however are the hosts of the game and the users are merely clients. Thus the onus of equipment and bandwidth falls entirely on them. They need X equipment to support Y users which costs Z money. No matter how efficiently you get the network design down you've always got Z cost. This cost only goes up as the number of users increases.
Why I won't pay to play a game online: it isn't because I feel a game publisher owes me something, I just don't feel that I ought to spending both time and money on a game. Subscription services I get a decent amount of use from I will obviously pay for but a video game which only eats up my time I'm not going to throw money at. Some people of course will throw money at them yet not at something like cable TV. Whatever floats your boat. However with the whole persistant environment thing you end up investing a fair chunk of change into the service. If the game employs an economy where virtual items have a real monetary value what sort of security guarantee do I have that my investment is going to be secure? The game would have to be effectively unhackable so some joker couldn't hack himself The Armor of Mostest Rareness and sell it on eBay for ten grand. I also don't want to invest hundreds of dollars into building up a character only to be PK'ed by some jackass who got a lucky shot. Hell I don't want to invest hundreds of dollars (hundreds of dollars is easy if you've been playing for a couple years paying upwards of 10$ a month) into a character that gets bitten by a rabid squirrel and dies.
Re:Semi-real-world business model
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 2
You run into a snag there because you limit the game to players who have access to a credit card or can legally add stuff to bills. You make the games 18 and older. You also limit the game to very specific castes. A college student who gets the game for Christmas can't afford the items a 30 year old geek bachelor can thus has a worse play experience than said geek bachelor. Said college student will also be taking up server resources without ever paying any money for them. A game like that would be very elitist because you'd know the guy running around in gold armor was richer than the guy with the cloth breast plate and wooden sword. You'd also need to provide a REALLY secure environment. There could be no cheating whatsoever and security on the servers would have to be tip top. If items in the game had a real monetary value they could be sold. If you had a hack that could make some super rare item and sell it to somebody you just commited fraud but there's probably little that would be done to you IF you were caught. What happens when your character get PK'ed and the bastard takes your equipment. It's like you handed the guy money right out of your wallet. Same thing if a hard drive crashes and your character is wiped out. You've spent beaucoup money buying items or earning them only to have all that money be stuck in an information blender and set to puree.
I probably do need to read a bit more on the UWB transmitters because I was under the impression they were just an extension of FHSS transmission systems. That's how I've seen it explained in several cases, this is the first time I've ever had someone relate UWB to spark-gaps. At least I was right about the BS being thrown about UWB being interference proof.
Why do all Linux users think that AMD is somehow more Linux friendly than Intel is? AMD is out to make the beaucoup bucks and the beaucoup bucks are in the Microsoft using populace, not a population that is smaller than a margin of error. AMD does not automagically become the friend of Linux simply because it is a competitor to Intel which Linux users see as the Great Satan Jr. It is in AMD's best interest to like Microsoft because they need Microsoft's users in order to make money. They've got a 64-bit chip coming out in the near future, they need an OS to stick on top of it that people have a desire for. Selling a handful of these processors to Linux users isn't exactly going to keep AMD in the black.
That said, it would be cool if chip manufacturers did put some optimizations back into open compilers. However this is bad business. Would you buy Intel's compiler if GCC had the same performance? No. Thus Intel would be losing market share in the compiler world. Same with AMD or any other chip manufacturer. It is much better business to sell optimizations to people selling compilers and get a little kickback from each sale. Vendors using these optimized compilers can offer a higher performance version of their product with little extra overhead (the price of the optimized compiler and the few manhours to do a recompile and repackage). Letting users of particular processors buy or download a patch to increase performance on their machines is going to sell more copies of said software.
You make a good point about antennas which I didn't mention but is very pertienent because not all antennas send or receiver well at all frequencies. The sky high expectations of UWB technologies providing gigabit upon gigabit of data throughput is a bit ridiculous when you figure in the actual physics of the system. UWB is most effective when you use predetermined bands but widen them considerably over conventional channel arrangement techniques. This limits the amount of interference a prevelance of these devices WOULD actually make. It would be rare for a handful of devices ever to send enough bit pulses to cause perceptable interference in electrical equipment but millions and millions of devices all doing the same thing will statistically cause enough interference on one band that narrowband equipment or electrical devices will register it and it will cause problems. Cringly also talks about antennas that need no tuning, millions of tiny antennas all broadcasting radio pulses with no concern for tuning out harmonics is a crappy idea.
As for 2.4GHz phones being made from 1.9GHz parts that is mostly due to the similar antenna and electrical requirements of transmitting on the two different bands. The phones are also operating under the same principals so they have the same bandwidth requirements whether they are transmitting on 2.4 or 1.9GHz. The digitalized voice signal needs a certain amount of throuput no matter what frequency it is eventually transmitted over. Adapting current technologies for UWB is a bit more difficult because it requires VERY high precision electronics in order to make the whole thing feasible. A PCS or GSM cell phone can miss out on a small chunk of data without the phone HCF. An UWB receiver needs to have pretty incredible reception and timing characteristics because the natual SN ratio is just enormously high. I think we're still several years away from marketable products using UWB.
Ultra wide band communication isn't so damn fancy conceptually. The problem is is practically difficult. It works on the same principals as regular sized band radio transmission with the small difference of not splitting the band into channels. Channels are just time slots you set your transciever to listen to or send on which arej ust portions of a band. With UWB there's no channel designations so reception and transmission frequencies can be all over the specified band. It sounds like a good idea because there are not channels to occupy or share with others and your beeps all over a band can be construed as static rather than interference. A random beep in the middle of a frequency used for aviation radio isn't going to crash a plane as it is catagorized as static.
The problem with implimenting UWB is getting the electronics to move fast enough. In order for me to send lets say my voice over UWB I need electronics in my transmitter that can switch really quickly between enough frequencies in order to give me the aggregate bandwidth to send my voice signal. Easy you say modern CDMA cells phones already do that. Granted they make the most of their radio spectrum by splitting up data over the entire band but they are splitting up big chunks of data over a limited band. UWB transceivers will have to switch fast enough where a single radio blip might only be half a word or a quarter of a word and switch over a much higher range of frequencies.
In order to have a gigabit of bandwidth your transceiver would have to switch frequencies in excess of a billion times a second (not merely transmit at a billion hertz). It takes x electronic clock cycles to switch the electronics to switch frequencies you'd have to have electronics working at xgigahertz in order to send a gigabit of data. In a handheld unit? Not likely in the next couple years no matter how fast microprocessors get. Companies have just recently been able to build circuits that can switch at 10GHz it will still be a little while before actual logical circuits can be mass produced and run on batteries. Handheld devices are going to have the same amount of information throughput as they have now even if the radio band they work on is a good portion of the radio spectrum. There is alot of engineering left before UWB is really a viable solution to any problem but it is still a cool concept and I hope these problems get worked out sooner than later.
Oh come on you can't REALLY believe your own drivel can you? From much experience I know rpm -i packagename works about 20% of the fucking time. If you HAPPEN to be running your system with the same configuration as the guy who packaged the program you don't have a problem but most of the time this is not the case. Use SuSE when everyone else is using RH and you'll see how fucked up most RPM packages are. I've had to spend extra time downloading and doing make install to get shit working because the binary packages were fucked up. At least with make I'd know what I was missing. Like the original poster said, it is useless to tell someone a library is missing (no matter what OS you're using). Tell the person where to get it or find it for them and install it and overcome the hurdle. It also has been a really long time since I've had an installation file on Windows break something I already had or refuse to load up or some such. The fact that you have isn't the fault of Windows and the fact I've come across many a fucked up RPM package is not the fault of Linux. The fault is the dumbfucks who make these install packages but can't fathom the concept of alternate configurations besides what they use. On MacOS all I have to do is drag a single icon to the hard drive and installation is complete. You can talk about ease of install when you can do that with Linux.
DOS is not watered down Unix, the fact both share a command line doesn't make them in any way fucking related. Modern OSS GUI systems are just copies of Windows. Windows' modern GUI is a knock off of the MacOS GUI so in essence everything is a knock off of the Mac. Find a respected GUI system developer who hasn't read Apple's HIG if you don't think so.
To expound on the Half-Life route I think it'd be pretty rad seeing Bioware package the most popular modules/adventures onto CD and sell them to registered users for a couple bucks like how CS and such have been marketed. I always thought a good RPG would send you CDs every couple of months for a few dollars so you could keep playing the game for a really long time. BG2 acted sort of like an expansion for the original BG, you could take your old character you've probably put mass amounts of time into and keep playing with it.
Slashdot Mirror
I think more to the point is you can use Macs that your organization probably already has. If you're at a school whose got a big pile of Macs in the library or graphics labs or something you can turn them into a super computer by night and still have them usable by students during the day. The same can't be said for the highly tuned Beowulf all the systems need to be idendical and within four feet of one another or the doppler shift over the copper wire will fuck something up system. Beowulfs are cool and in some cases are very effective (when you have the money to buy and build a new system) but if you need to use stuff you already have (and you've got Macs) the Appleseed is a good choice.
Run the same thing with some Linux boxes using the 2.2.x kernel and some running the 2.4.x kernel and see what happens. Those are truely different kernels, not just kernel patches. You can get 700$/CPU on the Apple system if you consider that you can buy X number of systems and distribute them around your network in different offices and when they aren't busy run some highly parallel code on them. Arguably you aren't going to do this with the Linux cluster which means you have to buy two times the systems (for an office and lab) which effectively doubles the cost per CPU since you've got to by twice the computers but only half of them can actually be used in a cluster. Or you can just use systems you've already got which lowers the cost of your lab cluster to virtually nothing because you're using computers that are already there. You can have an iMac user lab by day and lab super computer by night.
I've had my Powerbook for a couple years and have trounced all over the place with it and it still works just fine. I'm pretty careful with it for the most part but I know for a fact it stands up to my high G-force driving, airport X-ray machines, playing SW pod racer whilst driving on the freeway (I wasn't the one playing of course), and being toted all over the place in a backpack. I may not be able to play CS on my Powerbook but it has never had to be sent in for repairs form my touching some portion of it with a little too much force (I've never had to send it in for repairs). The Lombard and Pismo PBs (and to an extent the Wall Streets) have curved shells which makes them a little tougher when it comes to pressure being applied to them. The back to the LCD is curved enough I can set two fair sized computer books on the top of the PB without breaking my screen (done that). The only part I really worry about when I have it in a bag in the CD-ROM faceplate because it doesn't sit exactly flush with the side of the case. The one drawback is it is a little fat to carry around in my usual bag (one of those "daypack" style backpacks with the sinle strap going across your chest) so I usually have to use a normal two srap bag when I want to take it someplace.
That is a waste of energy. To mine something from a planet and get it to another planet requires massive amounts of energy and very long periods of time (much longer periods of time than societies on Earth last). By the time any materials mined from other planets got back to Earth the society that deemed it a good idea would be long gone. Not only would that society be gone but by the time the technology to make a lumber planet or oil planet existed there'd be no need for oil or lumber on such a massive scale. It takes alot of energy to get something from a planet into space. What you're saying would require an economy based around energy (in whatever form) thus shipping anything from the surface of a planet to the surface of another planet (scores of light years away) would cost absurb amounts of money (energy). You're trying to solve problems of 1890 by importing materials from space. Doesn't that seem a bit silly?
The Canadian host for fuck sake. I'm thinking along the lines of the second season or so. Maybe it was only a couple episodes or so but the episodes I did catch were all teams with a bit of mechanical experience behind them. Who the fuck pissed in your Cherrios anyway?
While I'm up for a robot running a hazard course that has the potential to destroy said robot I'm not the biggest fan of the new fangled americanized JYW. While the Canadian is funny ("You're like totally runnin out of time eh!") the new method for forming teams sucks. I liked the old days of the entire team being engineers not just people who knew how to weld. Too many times it is the expert just giving instructions only to get confused looks on the faces of their teammates. It is also a pretty regular occurance that the team doesn't know what the fuck it is they're building. Maybe it is just me who likes to see engineers add features to their designs until it doesn't work following the old adage. Oh well, here's hoping one of these robots goes on a rampage and somebody has to call Ultraman to come fight it.
The NBC crew in Afganistan kept a Powerbook as part of their equipment because they could do in field editing of footage shot with the Sony VX2000 they were carrying. More interesting than that (which I find damn cool) is a lot of editing was done with iMovie. I think it is an NBC policy now that PBs are given to crews using DV cameras. How many companies offer a full video editing suite that can run off of a battery?
You made me spit Coke all over my monitor. Thanks.
Why does eceryone in their loath for the P4 forget about its trace cache? They included it specifically so a branch mispredict wouldn't result in a 20 stage pipeline stall. IIRC the trache cache limits most mispredicts to a 5 stage stall. The P4 definitely cranks numbers slower than an Athlon but it doesn't have the performance pentalty from 20 stage branch mispredicts like you're saying.
Not just the content creators but the content viewers as well. I know alot of places buy iMacs specifically because it is very very very simple to administer them and with OS9/10 it is pretty foolproof to keep them up and running. You can set up a lab of fifty Macs and VERY easily keep them up and running without needing some form of certification to do so. Even if you're only buying a single Mac for your home it is still pretty damn easy to keep it up and running. Installing software is rarely harder than dragging an icon from a mounted disk to your Applications folder. I'd also say Apple's support services are the best in the industry (for consumer systems at least). It is rare to hear of complaints about their support services. Shit sometimes AppleCare contracts sell for more money than the machines they're attached to sell for.
That's one of the dumbest proposals I've ever seen on slashdot. If there's no way for somebody to secure rights to a frequency in a given region then I'm going to stick up an antenna so powerful nobody in a 100 mile radius is going to be able to broadcast on any of the frequencies I do. There'd be no ads and no programming because without ads noone could afford to broadcast anything. Unless of course you only cared what the top 10% of the population had to say. Oh yeah, being a devoted internet devotee right now you only care what the top 30% of people have to say anyhow. Good job dude.
One thing I've always for the longest time wanted to see was a digital library accessible from outside the library's physical building. The stuff I'd want online is documentaries magazine and journals newspapers and maybe even copies of the books themselves. I've seen stuff like this before (called Onlamp I think) but it is mostly just old periodicals and has a shitty search utility. The benefits of having texts of all forms online is it becomes much easier to include passages into papers and easier for professors or TAs to go over the work and see if the student's been copying directly out of the book. While this is indeed a ton of work it might be a doable project because somebody somewhere has already thought of this.
That is exactly my point, Windows has a bunch of fucked up binaries all over the place because it is popular. Were Linux in the position Windows is in there would be just as many exploits and virii running around. Lets say you had some sort of Nimda-esque tool you wrote and you wanted to really cause some damage. Would you find an exploit in a BeOS program? A MacOS program? A Linux program? No you'd go for Windows because even if you affect a small percentage of all Windows users you're going to affect more people then all BeOS, Mac, and Linux users combined. Running unsafe binaries isn't exactly a Windows only thing either. How many Linux users REALLY take precautions when running something extracted from an RPM? About the same percentage as Windows users who check out files before running them: too few.
That is absolutely ridiculous. Why are there no BeOS virii running around? No one fucking uses it. Why are there Windows and before that DOS virii all over the place? Because it was the most popular thing since stupidity. It doesn't matter that it isn't there now because Linux doesn't matter. If all of the companies developing Linux stopped tomorrow and all the major distributions just closed their doors would ANYONE give half a shit? No. A couple slashdotters would probably hurl themselves off building. Except for the guy who's new car just got totaled by a fatass Linux geek falling 50 stories onto it most people wouldn't notice. If Linux WAS popular you would be damn sure that it wouldn't be 100% open source free as in libre software running on it. Alot of proprietary shit would be running on it because the selling software service business plan has not been working. You can also be damn sure there'd be as many or more exploits for it as there are for Windows. Just because the source is open doesn't make it somehow magically secure.
Why did all the retards decide to respond to this post. Did I ever once suggest there was ActiveX for Linux? Don't go and make stupid assumptions. If Linux ever managers to get a signifigant number of users there will be plenty of virii running around that do all sorts of bad things to a user's system. This is especially true as Linux actually gains the sort of functionality ActiveX was developed for and runs code from places other than /usr/bin. Software libre is less likely to contain spyware but popular software isn't always going to be software libre man. Get the net. That whole free (libre) alternative thing doesn't work with people like AOL users when they want to do stuff with as little hassle as possible. Of course you're realing you're preaching about an OS whose default operating system does more damage to your files than most virii ever do right?
Whut the fuck did I fucking say about damage being limited to user permissions. If you've got backups of your home directory that is really fucking nice for you. I'm so damned proud of you I could fucking burst. What about that BIG project you just finished that hadn't been backed up yet? What does it matter if you do monthly backups if the shit you just spent a good deal of time working on just got toasted by some asshole kid who think's he's 1337 by rm -rf'ing someone's home directory. Stuff that rm -rf's home directories of course doesn't affect everybody just like alot of virii don't cause everyone problems. However if you're the one guy who got fucked by some virus or just malicious shell script you going's to be fucking pissed. Work on your reading comprehension before you press the submit button next time.
The whiny bitching about when will people learn is ludicrous. Wah wah Windows users ought to use Linux because it is a million times more better than everything. Fuck that. Alot of these shareware/spyware schemes are complete asshole tactics and could affect Linux users too if anyone gave a shit about them.
I recently rant into a nice little spyware program called winad (wnad.exe) which somehow ended up on the machine (nothing has been installed on the system in eight months) and would hook into IE and launch pop under windows at random when IE was sitting idle viewing a web page. My only guess is some ActiveX program loaded it onto the system from a website somewhere. This program disturbed me a bit because it got onto the system and though didn't do any damage it had the potential to. For elitist Linux users who think they're hot shit, the same thing can be done (though limited to a user's access privileges). It would annoy the piss out of alot of people to have $HOME rm -rf'ed. The whole invasion of privacy in the name of advertising crap is a blow to the whole freedom to roam thing the web is all about. Thinking you're a badass because you can compile a kernel doesn't mean you're somehow better than somebody else who doesn't compile their kernel. It gets real old real fast.
Why game makers need to charge a fee to play their games: nothing is free. While this seems like an obvious statement it doesn't seem many slashdotters get it. Playing Quake or CS online doesn't cost a whole lot. Severs run by [whoever] are as a relay server giving a central hub which lets people with the game get together and play the game. Tons of of bandwidth and equipment isn't required on the vendor's end because they don't actually host the games. Said bandwidth and equipment is the onus of the clients playing their P2P game. MMORPGs however are the hosts of the game and the users are merely clients. Thus the onus of equipment and bandwidth falls entirely on them. They need X equipment to support Y users which costs Z money. No matter how efficiently you get the network design down you've always got Z cost. This cost only goes up as the number of users increases.
Why I won't pay to play a game online: it isn't because I feel a game publisher owes me something, I just don't feel that I ought to spending both time and money on a game. Subscription services I get a decent amount of use from I will obviously pay for but a video game which only eats up my time I'm not going to throw money at. Some people of course will throw money at them yet not at something like cable TV. Whatever floats your boat. However with the whole persistant environment thing you end up investing a fair chunk of change into the service. If the game employs an economy where virtual items have a real monetary value what sort of security guarantee do I have that my investment is going to be secure? The game would have to be effectively unhackable so some joker couldn't hack himself The Armor of Mostest Rareness and sell it on eBay for ten grand. I also don't want to invest hundreds of dollars into building up a character only to be PK'ed by some jackass who got a lucky shot. Hell I don't want to invest hundreds of dollars (hundreds of dollars is easy if you've been playing for a couple years paying upwards of 10$ a month) into a character that gets bitten by a rabid squirrel and dies.
You run into a snag there because you limit the game to players who have access to a credit card or can legally add stuff to bills. You make the games 18 and older. You also limit the game to very specific castes. A college student who gets the game for Christmas can't afford the items a 30 year old geek bachelor can thus has a worse play experience than said geek bachelor. Said college student will also be taking up server resources without ever paying any money for them. A game like that would be very elitist because you'd know the guy running around in gold armor was richer than the guy with the cloth breast plate and wooden sword. You'd also need to provide a REALLY secure environment. There could be no cheating whatsoever and security on the servers would have to be tip top. If items in the game had a real monetary value they could be sold. If you had a hack that could make some super rare item and sell it to somebody you just commited fraud but there's probably little that would be done to you IF you were caught. What happens when your character get PK'ed and the bastard takes your equipment. It's like you handed the guy money right out of your wallet. Same thing if a hard drive crashes and your character is wiped out. You've spent beaucoup money buying items or earning them only to have all that money be stuck in an information blender and set to puree.
I probably do need to read a bit more on the UWB transmitters because I was under the impression they were just an extension of FHSS transmission systems. That's how I've seen it explained in several cases, this is the first time I've ever had someone relate UWB to spark-gaps. At least I was right about the BS being thrown about UWB being interference proof.
Why do all Linux users think that AMD is somehow more Linux friendly than Intel is? AMD is out to make the beaucoup bucks and the beaucoup bucks are in the Microsoft using populace, not a population that is smaller than a margin of error. AMD does not automagically become the friend of Linux simply because it is a competitor to Intel which Linux users see as the Great Satan Jr. It is in AMD's best interest to like Microsoft because they need Microsoft's users in order to make money. They've got a 64-bit chip coming out in the near future, they need an OS to stick on top of it that people have a desire for. Selling a handful of these processors to Linux users isn't exactly going to keep AMD in the black.
That said, it would be cool if chip manufacturers did put some optimizations back into open compilers. However this is bad business. Would you buy Intel's compiler if GCC had the same performance? No. Thus Intel would be losing market share in the compiler world. Same with AMD or any other chip manufacturer. It is much better business to sell optimizations to people selling compilers and get a little kickback from each sale. Vendors using these optimized compilers can offer a higher performance version of their product with little extra overhead (the price of the optimized compiler and the few manhours to do a recompile and repackage). Letting users of particular processors buy or download a patch to increase performance on their machines is going to sell more copies of said software.
You make a good point about antennas which I didn't mention but is very pertienent because not all antennas send or receiver well at all frequencies. The sky high expectations of UWB technologies providing gigabit upon gigabit of data throughput is a bit ridiculous when you figure in the actual physics of the system. UWB is most effective when you use predetermined bands but widen them considerably over conventional channel arrangement techniques. This limits the amount of interference a prevelance of these devices WOULD actually make. It would be rare for a handful of devices ever to send enough bit pulses to cause perceptable interference in electrical equipment but millions and millions of devices all doing the same thing will statistically cause enough interference on one band that narrowband equipment or electrical devices will register it and it will cause problems. Cringly also talks about antennas that need no tuning, millions of tiny antennas all broadcasting radio pulses with no concern for tuning out harmonics is a crappy idea.
As for 2.4GHz phones being made from 1.9GHz parts that is mostly due to the similar antenna and electrical requirements of transmitting on the two different bands. The phones are also operating under the same principals so they have the same bandwidth requirements whether they are transmitting on 2.4 or 1.9GHz. The digitalized voice signal needs a certain amount of throuput no matter what frequency it is eventually transmitted over. Adapting current technologies for UWB is a bit more difficult because it requires VERY high precision electronics in order to make the whole thing feasible. A PCS or GSM cell phone can miss out on a small chunk of data without the phone HCF. An UWB receiver needs to have pretty incredible reception and timing characteristics because the natual SN ratio is just enormously high. I think we're still several years away from marketable products using UWB.
Ultra wide band communication isn't so damn fancy conceptually. The problem is is practically difficult. It works on the same principals as regular sized band radio transmission with the small difference of not splitting the band into channels. Channels are just time slots you set your transciever to listen to or send on which arej ust portions of a band. With UWB there's no channel designations so reception and transmission frequencies can be all over the specified band. It sounds like a good idea because there are not channels to occupy or share with others and your beeps all over a band can be construed as static rather than interference. A random beep in the middle of a frequency used for aviation radio isn't going to crash a plane as it is catagorized as static.
The problem with implimenting UWB is getting the electronics to move fast enough. In order for me to send lets say my voice over UWB I need electronics in my transmitter that can switch really quickly between enough frequencies in order to give me the aggregate bandwidth to send my voice signal. Easy you say modern CDMA cells phones already do that. Granted they make the most of their radio spectrum by splitting up data over the entire band but they are splitting up big chunks of data over a limited band. UWB transceivers will have to switch fast enough where a single radio blip might only be half a word or a quarter of a word and switch over a much higher range of frequencies.
In order to have a gigabit of bandwidth your transceiver would have to switch frequencies in excess of a billion times a second (not merely transmit at a billion hertz). It takes x electronic clock cycles to switch the electronics to switch frequencies you'd have to have electronics working at xgigahertz in order to send a gigabit of data. In a handheld unit? Not likely in the next couple years no matter how fast microprocessors get. Companies have just recently been able to build circuits that can switch at 10GHz it will still be a little while before actual logical circuits can be mass produced and run on batteries. Handheld devices are going to have the same amount of information throughput as they have now even if the radio band they work on is a good portion of the radio spectrum. There is alot of engineering left before UWB is really a viable solution to any problem but it is still a cool concept and I hope these problems get worked out sooner than later.
Oh come on you can't REALLY believe your own drivel can you? From much experience I know rpm -i packagename works about 20% of the fucking time. If you HAPPEN to be running your system with the same configuration as the guy who packaged the program you don't have a problem but most of the time this is not the case. Use SuSE when everyone else is using RH and you'll see how fucked up most RPM packages are. I've had to spend extra time downloading and doing make install to get shit working because the binary packages were fucked up. At least with make I'd know what I was missing. Like the original poster said, it is useless to tell someone a library is missing (no matter what OS you're using). Tell the person where to get it or find it for them and install it and overcome the hurdle. It also has been a really long time since I've had an installation file on Windows break something I already had or refuse to load up or some such. The fact that you have isn't the fault of Windows and the fact I've come across many a fucked up RPM package is not the fault of Linux. The fault is the dumbfucks who make these install packages but can't fathom the concept of alternate configurations besides what they use. On MacOS all I have to do is drag a single icon to the hard drive and installation is complete. You can talk about ease of install when you can do that with Linux.
DOS is not watered down Unix, the fact both share a command line doesn't make them in any way fucking related. Modern OSS GUI systems are just copies of Windows. Windows' modern GUI is a knock off of the MacOS GUI so in essence everything is a knock off of the Mac. Find a respected GUI system developer who hasn't read Apple's HIG if you don't think so.
To expound on the Half-Life route I think it'd be pretty rad seeing Bioware package the most popular modules/adventures onto CD and sell them to registered users for a couple bucks like how CS and such have been marketed. I always thought a good RPG would send you CDs every couple of months for a few dollars so you could keep playing the game for a really long time. BG2 acted sort of like an expansion for the original BG, you could take your old character you've probably put mass amounts of time into and keep playing with it.