When you've got a market share that most companies in other sectors would kill for, you've got most of the Fortune 500 convinced they can't live without your product, and you make more money than you know what to do with-- I mean, you're Microsoft, fer cripe's sake-- how the heck do you get desperate?
According to the article, Manny Coto is being handed the reins of Enterprise as the executive producer/"show runner". This is a good thing.
Rick Berman can't do it. He's proven it. Trek started heading downhill once Michael Piller quit running the show. Bringing in some new blood can only help.
I'd like to see a JMS-run Trek. If the powers that be stand back and let him run the show, or, heck, anybody with a track record better than Berman's, things will get better.
That said, there's something about Enterprise. I still watch it, and I'm still not sure why...
Foremost from my amateur racer point of view is the cost: Being able to tune any one of 60 some-odd parameters probably means being able to swap out any one of 60 some-odd parts with some other part, so you've got to have one of every possible part on hand or be able to fabricate it.
For an F1 team, cost's not so much a consideration, though, the trouble is time. To be able to change that many parameters means having someone get under the car, swap a pile of parts, and send the test driver back out on track to collect the info for the next evolution. Computer simulations are neat, but they're not perfect, and when you're talking about shaving fractions of a second, that small imperfection can throw it completely away.
I also wonder if this would actually be useful in the real world with real conditions. The sun going behind a cloud for a while has a measurable effect on lap times. The amount of gas in the tank, the temperature of the track, all those things change the way a car handles on the edge. Often, race setup is to dial in a car to be a little tighter or looser than what you really wanted because you expect the track to come to you.
And then there's a possibly even bigger problem: If you go out and look at two cars that are running identical lap times, chances are they're nothing even close to identically set up, because drivers aren't machines. One driver will like a certain setup, and another won't be able to do anything with it.
are the other side of that coin. We gripe that Microsoft can't keep their OS patched, but that's not the real problem. Take Sasser as an example: Sasser exists _because_ Microsoft went and patched their OS. Someone looked at the bugfix, saw what it fixed, and then figured out how to exploit it.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
As it were, I beleive Microsoft AV is irrelevant. They can't bundle the software in with Windows or they get accused of being anti-competitive, so we're not going to magically have a bunch of XP machines with anti-virus software, so what it amounts to is that the people who are going to buy antivirus software and use it now have one more choice. This will not significantly decrease the number of innoculated machines in the wild.
I love my Linux machines at home. I'd love 'em even more if nVidia would get their collective heads out of their asses and write some decent nForce sound drivers. But there's lots of great things about Linux, and my preferred flavor, Gentoo.
1) What, I don't have that piece of software? emerge foo. Poof, now I have that piece of software!
2) I _like_ typing at a computer. My Windows-using friends hate doing things like generating thumbnails of their digital pictures for web use or shrinking them. I just throw imagemagick at it and poof, the computer does it, like it should be. I don't have to make space on my screen for a picture, I don't have to go all pointy-clicky on widgets for resizing, I just type convert -scale 50% foo bar and I'm done.
3) I don't give a hoot in hell about Sasser or SoBig or any of the others.
But every once in a while, I get stuck rebooting and firing up the Windows hard disk. Turbotax and Taxcut don't exist for Linux. Still nobody's written a decent panorama stitcher fot Linux (or, at least, nothing half as good as Canon's PhotoStitch, and that's saying something...) How can I stay away?
You know. "right tool for the job." This ain't Star Trek, and I ain't leaving my PDA on someone else's desk with a quick-and-dirty diagram on it. I'm not even willing to leave a USB stick or CF card on your desk.
On the other hand, I don't carry pens in my shirt pocket, either. They go in my belt pouch with the Leatherman Wave, Mag-Lite, and hands-free unit for my cellphone...
...but I wouldn't recommend them for a newbie. The install's just not geared for newbies.
Has nothing to do with the fact that Gentoo doesn't have a pretty-pretty graphical installer. The docs on the gentoo.org site are _great_, you follow the bouncing ball, and poof. You've got a Gentoo Linux system. Stuff Just Works. Cool.
Here's the problem: Before you have a functional system, you gotta decide: What kernel do I want? 2.4? 2.6? One of the modified kernel branches like -ac or gentoo's "gaming-sources"? Which syslogger do I want? Do I want ncron or vcron?
I'm not entirely certain your average newb has any desire to figure out how to answer those questions for his first install, so I'd recommend against Gentoo. Get 'em hooked, then they might want something like Gentoo.
It's really quite sad, though. You have to make all the decisions, making it unsuitable for neophytes, but once you make those decisions, Everything Just Works, which'd be excellent for the newbs...
I personally prefer a device called a "digital camera" for my travel note-taking, but it has the same problem, I never seem to get around to dealing with the output.
Many universities' Computer Science programs started in the math department, and those institutions will tend to require more math for a CS degree than some others-- not because you need it, but because that's just the way it's always been there.
My BSCS is from Georgia Tech; I had to take
3 quarters of calculus (15 quarter hours, one academic year, the same stuff the engineers took)
Two more quarters of calculus (eight hours. When I got to Tech, these were the same classes the engineers took, by the time I took them they were more specialized for CS majors)
One quarter of combinatorics (3 quarter-hours)
One semester (yeah, they changed over to semesters part-way through my degree) of probability and sadistics. (3 semester-hours; previously it was one quarter each of prob and stat; 6 total quarter-hours.)
And at Tech, the CS department wasn't part of the math department. Expect even more math from a school where they're still closely related.
I'm a race car driver wannabe
on
Robocones
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· Score: 1
So all the warriors in Ultima Online started with halberds and switched to katanas. Is this necessarily a problem with powergamers, or a problem with the world design?
Knights on our planet carried swords for a reason. Archers carried bows for a reason. Were knights and archers all powergamers because they all carried swords or bows and nobody carried a sai or bec de corbin or something?
It sounds to me like the real problem is that Ultima Online ignored the drawbacks to wielding a halberd-- tough to work close in, too big to move quickly. So folks then switched to the katana-- which, when you get down to it, prolly ought to be pretty much identical to a long sword in game terms. If everyone is carrying around the same sort of weapon, I'm okay with that-- that fits with history. I think the problem here is Ultima Online decided they wanted some weapons to be cooler than others...
That Marsh, of ev1.net, may have underestimated the backlash, but it doesn't say what kind of exodus there is from ev1.net. As an example, Illiad at User Friendly noted that UF is run on ev1.net servers, but he doesn't think it's worth it to switch. We like to think a lot of people are leaving ev1.net, but I'd love to see real numbers.
That said, I know there's at least one person leaving: Illiad can stick around if he wants, but I'm not letting any more of my money flow to SCO. I'm getting out, and cancelling my ev1 account at the end of the month. I hope I'm not the only one; my hundred bucks a month isn't all that important, but a bunch of us together are.
See y'all over at ServerBeach or one of the other hosting companies.
"Oh I don't know. $1m seems like it'll go pretty far however big the size of your company."
Note, though, that nobody's actually said the real amount of the payment, and that it's a SCO droid who 's said, "Oh, it's worth about a million dollars."
The implication here is that ev1.net didn't pay SCO anywhere near a million dollars. SCO doesn't want the real amount to be released, because then their $1599 figures start looking really huge. ev1.net can't release the information, because SCO wasn't willing to let them disclose it as part of the deal.
SCO wanted a "large user" to sign on, and cut a hell of a deal to ev1.net. And ev1.net's sitting in the business section of every newspaper in the free world. Hell, that kind of publicity would be worth a million dollars...
I'm a unix sysdamin for a living. Most of the stresses in my life are directly related to technology, largely because I'm responsible for making the technology do what it was supposed to do when it doesn't.
When I get home, I fire up my PC with its whizzy net connection and surf or play Enemy Territory... or perhaps I see what Tivo watched for me, or pop in a DVD.
When I have time off, I like to travel-- car, airplane, boat, whatever.
It seems to me that technology may be the main cause of my stress, but it's just as large a reducer of stress in my life. What fun would a vacation be if I couldn't go somewhere else and see it? (and shoot pictures of it with my digital camera?) How insane would I be by now if I couldn't come home and blow off steam by blowing up your command post?
But then, what's technology, anyhow? Sure I enjoy a good book now and again, too. But even that took mass-production of paper and electric lighting to do... Does that count?
I'm willing to admit that I'm old enough to remember (and use) vtwm, or Virtual Tom's Window Manager.
Sort of.:)
vtwm was a different fork.
twm was "Tab Window Manager"-- window managers previous to that didn't have the object at the top of the window (called a tab in this case) to do the window manipulation with. However since it was written by a guy named Tom LaStrange, it also was known as "Tom's Window Manager."
vtwm involved a bunch of folks taking twm and adding virtual screen capabilities to it, the same thing Tom LaStrange was doing at Solbourne (remember them?) for swm (Solbourne Window Manager, of course). swm evolved into tvtwm, which is where Tom's name was first "officially" put in the window manager's name: "Tom's Virtual Tab Window Manager."
What graphic does Slashdot use for "Classic Games"?
What classic, that spawned almost an entire genre of sequels, ain't even on the list?
I mean, sure, there are hella great games that didn't make the list. Uniracers for the Super Nintendo isn't here, but while a really incredible game, it was obscure. I've yet to find a single Intellivision title, but okay, that was a long time ago.
But you gotta tell me, how the heck can they try to do a "Title Fight for the Best All-Time Game" and forget PAC-MAN. It's not like nobody's ever heard of it. It's not out of the depths of obscurity. I mean, sure, Fallout was a good game, but can it possibly deserve its own category when Pac Man isn't even on the list?
but then I get to thinking about hardware drivers and wonder how the heck they did it. One thing Linux has gotten pretty good at over the years is handling a billion zillion hardware drivers so that you know you've got the right ones for installing a system. I've never had good luck in Windows when upgrading the hardware if I leave the old driver in place.
You might be able to get away with a basic set of simple drivers (Basic IDE, sound blaster, NE2000...) but then you lose any sort of performance you might have once had... I'd like to know how this thing actually works.
I call bullshit!
on
Hack Your Car
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· Score: 4, Funny
What I want to know is, why is it you can buy a laptop with that flat panel installed, but you can't buy an LCD monitor for your desktop PC that can do that?
Don't make the mistake of thinking that way. It probably matters a little less what game you play (though I highly recommend Enemy Territory).
Find a fairly small server, maybe ten people total. This will have the benefit that you'll be able to hear yourself think. You might actually see some of the map more than a dozen yards from your spawn area.
Most games have an in-game chat function, and messages will show up on your screen. People will try to point you in the right direction.
If you do decide to try out Enemy Territory, try out the Medic class; you give everyone on your team extra hit points just for being there as a medic. Pick someone and follow him, he'll wind up showing you the objectives as he tries to achieve them. And you'll be able to keep him healthy and revive him as you go. It's not a bad way to learn.
Slashdot Mirror
When you've got a market share that most companies in other sectors would kill for, you've got most of the Fortune 500 convinced they can't live without your product, and you make more money than you know what to do with-- I mean, you're Microsoft, fer cripe's sake-- how the heck do you get desperate?
-JDF
According to the article, Manny Coto is being handed the reins of Enterprise as the executive producer/"show runner". This is a good thing.
Rick Berman can't do it. He's proven it. Trek started heading downhill once Michael Piller quit running the show. Bringing in some new blood can only help.
I'd like to see a JMS-run Trek. If the powers that be stand back and let him run the show, or, heck, anybody with a track record better than Berman's, things will get better.
That said, there's something about Enterprise. I still watch it, and I'm still not sure why...
-JDF
Foremost from my amateur racer point of view is the cost: Being able to tune any one of 60 some-odd parameters probably means being able to swap out any one of 60 some-odd parts with some other part, so you've got to have one of every possible part on hand or be able to fabricate it.
For an F1 team, cost's not so much a consideration, though, the trouble is time. To be able to change that many parameters means having someone get under the car, swap a pile of parts, and send the test driver back out on track to collect the info for the next evolution. Computer simulations are neat, but they're not perfect, and when you're talking about shaving fractions of a second, that small imperfection can throw it completely away.
I also wonder if this would actually be useful in the real world with real conditions. The sun going behind a cloud for a while has a measurable effect on lap times. The amount of gas in the tank, the temperature of the track, all those things change the way a car handles on the edge. Often, race setup is to dial in a car to be a little tighter or looser than what you really wanted because you expect the track to come to you.
And then there's a possibly even bigger problem: If you go out and look at two cars that are running identical lap times, chances are they're nothing even close to identically set up, because drivers aren't machines. One driver will like a certain setup, and another won't be able to do anything with it.
are the other side of that coin. We gripe that Microsoft can't keep their OS patched, but that's not the real problem. Take Sasser as an example: Sasser exists _because_ Microsoft went and patched their OS. Someone looked at the bugfix, saw what it fixed, and then figured out how to exploit it.
Damned if they do, damned if they don't.
As it were, I beleive Microsoft AV is irrelevant. They can't bundle the software in with Windows or they get accused of being anti-competitive, so we're not going to magically have a bunch of XP machines with anti-virus software, so what it amounts to is that the people who are going to buy antivirus software and use it now have one more choice. This will not significantly decrease the number of innoculated machines in the wild.
How can you stay off Windows?
I love my Linux machines at home. I'd love 'em even more if nVidia would get their collective heads out of their asses and write some decent nForce sound drivers. But there's lots of great things about Linux, and my preferred flavor, Gentoo.
1) What, I don't have that piece of software? emerge foo. Poof, now I have that piece of software!
2) I _like_ typing at a computer. My Windows-using friends hate doing things like generating thumbnails of their digital pictures for web use or shrinking them. I just throw imagemagick at it and poof, the computer does it, like it should be. I don't have to make space on my screen for a picture, I don't have to go all pointy-clicky on widgets for resizing, I just type convert -scale 50% foo bar and I'm done.
3) I don't give a hoot in hell about Sasser or SoBig or any of the others.
But every once in a while, I get stuck rebooting and firing up the Windows hard disk. Turbotax and Taxcut don't exist for Linux. Still nobody's written a decent panorama stitcher fot Linux (or, at least, nothing half as good as Canon's PhotoStitch, and that's saying something...) How can I stay away?
-JDF
A few years ago, all the geeks with too much income would be all over this.
Now there's not as many geeks with too much income, and the ones who still have it look at the watch and say, "What, no Tivo?"
-JDF
The WAP I'm using is in out-of-the-box factory default insecure mode.
I really wish I knew which of my neighbors owns it.
-JDF
Hm. So a summer camp sold its land to Paul Allen, and I'm supposed to feel bad that they can't use the land anymore?
-F
What geek nowadays uses pens?
Uh, I do.
You know. "right tool for the job." This ain't Star Trek, and I ain't leaving my PDA on someone else's desk with a quick-and-dirty diagram on it. I'm not even willing to leave a USB stick or CF card on your desk.
On the other hand, I don't carry pens in my shirt pocket, either. They go in my belt pouch with the Leatherman Wave, Mag-Lite, and hands-free unit for my cellphone...
...but I wouldn't recommend them for a newbie. The install's just not geared for newbies.
Has nothing to do with the fact that Gentoo doesn't have a pretty-pretty graphical installer. The docs on the gentoo.org site are _great_, you follow the bouncing ball, and poof. You've got a Gentoo Linux system. Stuff Just Works. Cool.
Here's the problem: Before you have a functional system, you gotta decide: What kernel do I want? 2.4? 2.6? One of the modified kernel branches like -ac or gentoo's "gaming-sources"? Which syslogger do I want? Do I want ncron or vcron?
I'm not entirely certain your average newb has any desire to figure out how to answer those questions for his first install, so I'd recommend against Gentoo. Get 'em hooked, then they might want something like Gentoo.
It's really quite sad, though. You have to make all the decisions, making it unsuitable for neophytes, but once you make those decisions, Everything Just Works, which'd be excellent for the newbs...
...and the device you described is called a PDA.
I personally prefer a device called a "digital camera" for my travel note-taking, but it has the same problem, I never seem to get around to dealing with the output.
-JDF
My BSCS is from Georgia Tech; I had to take
And at Tech, the CS department wasn't part of the math department. Expect even more math from a school where they're still closely related.
...and I compete in SCCA Solo II autocross.
These things're gonna give me nightmares...
So all the warriors in Ultima Online started with halberds and switched to katanas. Is this necessarily a problem with powergamers, or a problem with the world design?
Knights on our planet carried swords for a reason. Archers carried bows for a reason. Were knights and archers all powergamers because they all carried swords or bows and nobody carried a sai or bec de corbin or something?
It sounds to me like the real problem is that Ultima Online ignored the drawbacks to wielding a halberd-- tough to work close in, too big to move quickly. So folks then switched to the katana-- which, when you get down to it, prolly ought to be pretty much identical to a long sword in game terms. If everyone is carrying around the same sort of weapon, I'm okay with that-- that fits with history. I think the problem here is Ultima Online decided they wanted some weapons to be cooler than others...
-JDF
When the MPAA comes a callin' with their CSS encryption, the answer is the DMCA.
But when it comes to open-standards for automobiles, they're all for it.
Why won't they make up their minds?
That Marsh, of ev1.net, may have underestimated the backlash, but it doesn't say what kind of exodus there is from ev1.net. As an example, Illiad at User Friendly noted that UF is run on ev1.net servers, but he doesn't think it's worth it to switch. We like to think a lot of people are leaving ev1.net, but I'd love to see real numbers.
That said, I know there's at least one person leaving: Illiad can stick around if he wants, but I'm not letting any more of my money flow to SCO. I'm getting out, and cancelling my ev1 account at the end of the month. I hope I'm not the only one; my hundred bucks a month isn't all that important, but a bunch of us together are.
See y'all over at ServerBeach or one of the other hosting companies.
-JDF
"Oh I don't know. $1m seems like it'll go pretty far however big the size of your company."
Note, though, that nobody's actually said the real amount of the payment, and that it's a SCO droid who 's said, "Oh, it's worth about a million dollars."
The implication here is that ev1.net didn't pay SCO anywhere near a million dollars. SCO doesn't want the real amount to be released, because then their $1599 figures start looking really huge. ev1.net can't release the information, because SCO wasn't willing to let them disclose it as part of the deal.
SCO wanted a "large user" to sign on, and cut a hell of a deal to ev1.net. And ev1.net's sitting in the business section of every newspaper in the free world. Hell, that kind of publicity would be worth a million dollars...
-JDF
I'm a unix sysdamin for a living. Most of the stresses in my life are directly related to technology, largely because I'm responsible for making the technology do what it was supposed to do when it doesn't.
When I get home, I fire up my PC with its whizzy net connection and surf or play Enemy Territory... or perhaps I see what Tivo watched for me, or pop in a DVD.
When I have time off, I like to travel-- car, airplane, boat, whatever.
It seems to me that technology may be the main cause of my stress, but it's just as large a reducer of stress in my life. What fun would a vacation be if I couldn't go somewhere else and see it? (and shoot pictures of it with my digital camera?) How insane would I be by now if I couldn't come home and blow off steam by blowing up your command post?
But then, what's technology, anyhow? Sure I enjoy a good book now and again, too. But even that took mass-production of paper and electric lighting to do... Does that count?
I'm willing to admit that I'm old enough to remember (and use) vtwm, or Virtual Tom's Window Manager.
:)
Sort of.
vtwm was a different fork.
twm was "Tab Window Manager"-- window managers previous to that didn't have the object at the top of the window (called a tab in this case) to do the window manipulation with. However since it was written by a guy named Tom LaStrange, it also was known as "Tom's Window Manager."
vtwm involved a bunch of folks taking twm and adding virtual screen capabilities to it, the same thing Tom LaStrange was doing at Solbourne (remember them?) for swm (Solbourne Window Manager, of course). swm evolved into tvtwm, which is where Tom's name was first "officially" put in the window manager's name: "Tom's Virtual Tab Window Manager."
What graphic does Slashdot use for "Classic Games"?
What classic, that spawned almost an entire genre of sequels, ain't even on the list?
I mean, sure, there are hella great games that didn't make the list. Uniracers for the Super Nintendo isn't here, but while a really incredible game, it was obscure. I've yet to find a single Intellivision title, but okay, that was a long time ago.
But you gotta tell me, how the heck can they try to do a "Title Fight for the Best All-Time Game" and forget PAC-MAN. It's not like nobody's ever heard of it. It's not out of the depths of obscurity. I mean, sure, Fallout was a good game, but can it possibly deserve its own category when Pac Man isn't even on the list?
-JDF
the number of competitors would still be reduced by one. Vodafone is a major player in Verizon Wireless.
but then I get to thinking about hardware drivers and wonder how the heck they did it. One thing Linux has gotten pretty good at over the years is handling a billion zillion hardware drivers so that you know you've got the right ones for installing a system. I've never had good luck in Windows when upgrading the hardware if I leave the old driver in place.
You might be able to get away with a basic set of simple drivers (Basic IDE, sound blaster, NE2000...) but then you lose any sort of performance you might have once had... I'd like to know how this thing actually works.
Computer chips don't improve vehicle performance. Stickers, spoilers, and exhaust tips improve performance.
I mean, duh...
WUXGA+ screen, which is 1920x1200 pixels.
What I want to know is, why is it you can buy a laptop with that flat panel installed, but you can't buy an LCD monitor for your desktop PC that can do that?
-JDF
It must be good!
Don't make the mistake of thinking that way. It probably matters a little less what game you play (though I highly recommend Enemy Territory).
Find a fairly small server, maybe ten people total. This will have the benefit that you'll be able to hear yourself think. You might actually see some of the map more than a dozen yards from your spawn area.
Most games have an in-game chat function, and messages will show up on your screen. People will try to point you in the right direction.
If you do decide to try out Enemy Territory, try out the Medic class; you give everyone on your team extra hit points just for being there as a medic. Pick someone and follow him, he'll wind up showing you the objectives as he tries to achieve them. And you'll be able to keep him healthy and revive him as you go. It's not a bad way to learn.
-JDF