Microsoft denies patches to any system it deems "non-authentic". Now the US government is urging, strongly, everyone to patch their systems. This leaves your typical patriotic "pirate" US individual in a bit of a pickle. Skip the patch and "Let the terrorists win" or fess up, pay up and "Think of the children."
That said, it sounds like a new Microsoft slogan:
"Unpatched Windows systems are hurting the war on terror; buy your legitimate license today."
When I first tried it, I blew it up to 1600x1200 and it wasn't happy. When I get it down to about 850x600, everything works great, no blinkies or uglies. This is with my (ahem) work PC with the EXTREME Intel graphics.
So, I can't go to 1600x1200, I could even be stuck at 800x600 until the next stable comes out. I'll cope, it's a mighty effort made and I appreciate the heck out of it.
When run "sudo GoogleEarth . . . " it creates a directory in/usr/local/google-earth. That directory is chock full of.so files, not.DLL files. Also Icculus (Ryan Gordon) is "not a big fan of wine". Ryan and most of the folks who hang their hats at icculus.org are former employees or had connections to Loki Software, a company that made NATIVE PORTS of games.
One other chap who worked at Loki then moved on to Epic Software and brought us NATIVE ports of UT2003 and UT2004.
It's definitely native.
Thanks to Gordon and I hope you had fun working with the folks at Google.
This is indeed a great day, google earth was the only app I ever used on my laptop under Windows.
Yeah, it's not perfect yet, read the forums, play around with it, tweek it and it'll go.
Six months ago, I bought a Toshbia tecra S2 (it had a wicked 6600 Go video card!) and before I even booted M$, I installed Mandriva 2006 December edition (I'm a club member) Here's my experiences:
1. Boot it up, resize the NTFS partition; windows still booted afterwards. 2. Install the usual stuff. 3. Observe that the wireless NIC, the wired NIC, the video, the sound AND the modem all work under mdv2006.
No hassles, no "recompiling the kernel", no endless searches on line; install and go.
Yeah I can just boot-n-go with M$ but I happen to like Linux, I don't like windows.
If someone had the same laptop with a dead HDD, they didn't have recovery media and they didn't want to spend $150 on a new OS, mandriva would at least get their laptop functional.
I switched to Mandrake at mdk7.2. I was futzing around with RedHat 7.0 and not enjoying myself. The thing that did it for me was urpmi(not having to figure out RPM dependencies) and the fact that if I install tuxracer or any other app, it would be available under Gnome, KDE, Icewm, fvwm . . . twm via the pull down menus. That niceity is still there. What puts Mandriva on top of virtually everything else is the RPM repositories. With a broadband connection, you could just download the first ISO then use easy urpmi http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ for the rest of the media. There is the main distro, contribs and, best of all, PLF. PLF has RPMs that aren't as "free" as we like (like lame, libdvdcss etc.) but it makes building typically difficult things like mythtv easy.
I still believe that mandriva is one of the best distros for noobs but it's advanced enough to make the harder things easy.
I am a member of the club $60.00/year, that and the RPM repositories available through PLF, I'm set. $60/year is IMHO less than windows costs at least for what I do with my system. If I weren't a member, I'd have to wait three or so weeks for the free ISOs to become available. If three weeks isn't worth $60 then don't pay and just wait a little.
As for the ISO availability versus bittorrent, the beta distro is NOT supported and will very likely be superceded in a few weeks. There WILL be showstopper bugs in the beta versions and unless you're interested in helping out and making bug reports, the beta isos aren't really worth downloading.
I had the opportunity to "work" with Daniel a few months ago. I was on a project that was late and management said "Get more programmers!" My collegue and I had three resumes shoved in our face and were told to "Pick one".
We saw Daniel's resume and, since adding more programmers doesn't help, at most, he would be able to help and at least it would be cool to meet him.
Well Daniel came on and he is a very interesting and unique person, he also made it clear that he was VERY interested in exploring some of Microsoft's technology. Before anyone goes into "went to the dark side", and "bought out", the jobe he got was EXACTLY what he wanted to do.
I'm a hopeless Linux fanboy but I also have a reasonably steady job, and a good income; Daniel, at the time, did not. When I asked him about his experiences with OSS, he explained that people are VERY enthusiastic until things get hard or take time, he worked with volunteers and never had much leverage other than the good will of those he worked with.
So I salute Daniel and wish him the very best in his new career at Microsoft. In this time of geek-types getting laid off, not finding work and corporate America looking for mercinary types to get the job done, it's nice to know that an artist like Daniel still has a place; even if it's with Microsoft.
The wife's GF 4200TI croaked so I gave her my FX5900 and went back to the IGP (nForce2 IGP). The nice thing about the IGP is that it's there if you need it, you don't have to stuff it in a drawer when you don't need it and if you ever retire the machine from gaming, your power consumption goes way down without the 1337 g4m1ng card.
Now if nVidia would release drivers so my GF6200 AGP would work, I'd be back in business gaming under Linux again.
I realize that ponying up the extra $16 bucks to get a $56 dollar motherboard from your typical $40 dollar motherboard is quite a strech but if you get this board, you'll be able to play virtually every game made before 2003 and, if your patient, some stuff afterwards.
Not to sound like a snot, but if you become a u83r 1337 g4m3r, you can always give the system to your sister.
Still, to replace all our current lighting needs, just imagine, it would take a beowulf cluster of LEDs.
In soviet russia, the LEDs illuminate YOU!
Aaah, it had to be said, I searched to -1.
There goes my karma.
It's better now than it's EVER been.
on
Does Linux Have Game?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Gee whiz folks, we've got UT2004 with a NATIVE PORT, we've got Doom 3 with a NATIVE PORT (excellent port thank you ID), HL2 plays under Cedega (you need a brute of a CPU tho.) Lots of games with nice installers: Check out http://liflg.org/ for installers for the best games.
People cry that it's too hard to get your video to work; I'm really sorry you were too cheap to get the GeForce Go 5200 and got the Intel "Extreme" integrated graphics and now your pixel shader games look crappy. Nevertheless, UT2004 and the UT2004 DEMO play under linux with the DRI drivers.
Stop complaining, Loki is gone, but http://icculus.org/ is still around, and several of those guys WORKED for loki. If you want it EASY, you want GAMES then either USE WINDOWS or buy an X-Box. If you prefer Linux and are willing to expend the time and energy (and reap the rewards of what you learn) then USE LINUX and play the games that work well, there are a bloody AWFUL lot of games that work, work well and aren't that difficult to set up.
IWFTEC (I work for the electric company). It's great that wind generation is taking off but it isn't without cost, the utility I work for charges twice for wind power what it charges for "regular" power; yes, people pay it, gladly (odd eh?)
The issue with wind power is that it is, in effect, a run-away generator. To balance the system, another generator must be able to move to keep the grid stable (anyone remember First Power?) The _kicker_ is that a generator with 80%-90% is necessary to regulate the wind farm. The bigger the farm, the bigger the generator (and higher percentage) necessary to control the grid. So, in a perfect situation, if you've got 500 MW of potential wind power, you'll need 350-500 MW of conventional generation. Furthermore, most generators don't work very efficiently unless they're 70%-100% of their capacity.
Okay, I suck but these are the facts, if we're going to connect every control area together, we need a stable grid, for a stable grid, we must have the abilty to control, and do without, the "green" power. Utilities are for profit businesses and only the government can get away with running at a loss, even for idealistic reasons.
It sounds like a good idea, I've read about companies who have moved to linux and were able to only install the minimum number of applications on a computer. In a corporate enviroment, an employee could only run three things, virus-protection, the application they're supposed to run and e-mail. It also sounds like a boon for gamers, most high-end gaming rigs only come with XP-home because gamers don't need the chaff.
If it were available without requring registration and a reasonable price ~$30-$40, it sounds like a good alternative to linux users who occasionally want to play a game or MUST use windows for a unique application or a IE-only site.
It makes sense to me, although I'd hate for it to be the only OS on my PC.
The count problem with users/desktops doesn't just apply to Linux, there is multiple counting from Microsoft. Nearly every large company has a site license but still purchases PCs with windows pre-installed. Thus, every corporate PC has at least two licenses. Throw in the MS "encouragement" to upgrade, you've got ANOTHER license added to that. MS proabably also keeps track of the folks who install warez copys of their OS and adds them to the tally.
If they wanted a more accurate count, they would count the corporate licenses and the home/small business users for product activation. The number from that count would probably fall well short of the one billion they're claiming. That number wouldn't look so "impressive".
RH 6.2 seems to be the best thing out there. Redhat kept up support until they invented the idea of EOL for their distros, so if you get the ISO then all the updates, you can get a pretty up to date system. 2.2.24 kernel, most of the modern libraries XFree86-3.3.6. You can build dillo, links and have a usable system. Really, I've got two 486 laptops with 20 megs of RAM, I can build the latest PCMCIA release and have full wireless. And those 486 were TINY and cool. Perfect for acting like a remote control for my myth TV system or a vncviewer for my "macho" system.
Sorry if I come across as a Mandrake fanboy but. . . I'm a Mandrake fanboy. As a distro, it's got several things going for it:
1. Alsa comes with the kernel, this provides better/more choices for sound cards.
2. It's RPM based. Not everyone loves RPM but it does make software easier to install, especially for noobs and winex works quite well from an RPM.
3. 3-D support. Mandrake download comes with what is necessary for the DRI 3D cards and the boxed sets come with ATI and NVIDIA drivers that install at . . . install time. The option of installing 3D acceleration is an option when setting up X.
4. Unborked kernel. A few years ago, the stock Redhat kernel had some problems with winex and users had to use a different kernel for reasonable results.
5. Easy Distro to work with. Well, nobody said that Linux was cake & pie but Mandrake is friendlier than most.
Does this make Mandrake THE GAMING DISTRO. . . does it mean that other distros won't work? No, it's just my $0.02 and my opinion. Flame away.
It is _VERY_ unlikely nVidia will cut off support at 4.4 and above. nVidia makes very nice chipsets but more importantly makes excellent drivers that work with M$, Linux, FreeBSD etc. They are out to make money, they make money by selling products people want AND PRODUCTS RECOMMENDED BY OTHERS; this is where Linux support is important. Linux users are geeks, people ask geeks what kind of HW to get. I enjoy gaming (especially under Linux) so when someone asks me what kind of video card to get, I recommend nVidia. If nVidia told the Linux base to "stuff it", they would lose sales. They've done an excellent job of keeping the drivers for their products up to date, easy to use , fast and stable. I doubt they are going to change.
Sorry if I sound like a fanboy but video _is_ important and nVidia cards are the best supported and work the best under Linux for just about everything; I will continue to purchase and recommend their products.
There is ANOTHER William Shatner album called "Capitain of the Ship". It features Mr. Shatner on the cover holding an upside-down tripod and looking very, well, Shatnery. You can find out more here.
A few years ago, I needed to put together a fairly heavy duty samba/NFS server setup. The important issues were reliability, and cheap (in that order.) I went with a couple of P-4 (after watching the TomsHardware video of the athlon going poof), three 40 GB WD drives (per system) and a total of 3 NIC's per system (we have redudant LANS). I created a 3Gb / on each disk, a swap partition on each disk and a RAID 5 (software) 75 GB MD. I also used heartbeat so that the two systems would be "Highly Available" see linux-ha.org for more HA stuff.
Then for the backup up stuff, I just rsync the primary box to the secondary twice a day. Worked great . . . until I lost TWO disks on one of the boxes. I was able to run on the secondary until I replaced my disks AND backing up 55 GB of files only took 2.5 hours. NOTE: I had 455 days of uptime on the primary when it crashed because of the bad disk. It DOES make sense to occasionally verify your box CAN reboot.
It IS possible, think about Los Alamos, Livermore or any site. You have a completely separate LAN that your secure stuff lives on and you have a LAN that connects to the Internet. It's really not that damn hard, if you have to move stuff over, you use removable media or do it across VERY special equipment.
There are LOTS of examples of places which have reasonable security (think about the recipe for froot loops, you won't find THAT on the Internet.)
It sucks that Valve's code got hoarked, it sucks that we'll have to wait for the game, it sucks that they didn't take proper precautions; now it's a lesson to the rest of the industry.
This sets a terrible precident!! The next thing you will see is advertisements on TV, advertisements on the radio, advertisements on web pages, where will it end?
Seriously, how damn intrusive is this? I kinda liked the tractors on 8.1 but who really cares what is happening during the install (unless the adverts are REALLY obnoxious and crash the installer?)
I suppose it could be a problem with bandwidth usage. If my screensaver kicks on and my demand dialer (the missus won't let me have broadband) connects to my ISP and my box is displaying ads for three days, that will pretty much use up my 40 hours/month.
Still, if you're smart enough to grok linux, you're probably smart enough to defeat the screen saver. I'm just glad that mandrake is exploring other avenues of capital than going under or selling out.
The fact that mandrake delivers spamassassin with the downloadable package and privoxy is available through a contrib mirror says that mandrake DOES care about their users desires to escape adverts.
And yes, I click on the banner adds when I visit slashdot, not because I give a damn about the product, it's just easier than joining the slashdot club (I am a mandrake club member and a transgaming member and I donate money to the FSF)
Now, if GCC could display adverts while building that kernel. . .
I don't know any company (other than small businesses) who don't do their bulk shopping through general (crappy) vendors. My company has been using HP for years, they're "standardized", just because one will have a FIC motherboard and the next will have an MSI mother etc. etc. etc.
Then there is the "site license" thing which cuts down on system administration but implies that two licenses are being purchased for every machine.
What has bugged me in the past is when I needed a linux machine, we HAD to purchase the crappy HP AND just tossed the M$ license out the window. Fortunately the machine had one of those pretty license stickers on the side so WHEN the BSA comes, we can say "See, it has a license, it's not running windows but it has a license. Can we get away with just paying $10,000 for the violation?"
About perfect?!?!? That is really very funny. Maybe you bought Half-Life this weekend at Best Buy but Half-Life was FAR FAR from perfect. I managed to install it (yes the installer mostly worked.) then proceeded to D/L a 5MB patch. A week later the patch had swelled to 26 MB and is CURRENTLY 82 MB!! A game requiring an 82 MB patch is not "perfect"
OTOH when Half-Life came out, I regularly repeated "Hell, nothing works out of the box". Still, 82 Freakin' Megabytes.
I'm just sore, the missus won't let me get broadband.
In a "don't go home" environment (a la Microsoft) where you are encouraged to spend every possible moment working and being productive gaming, free food, anything you might do at home is gladly provided at work; in the hopes you won't go home and you might be able to squeek out a few more lines of code. Places such as this want to make work a place where you will WANT to be (especially for more than 40 hours/week.)
For the rest of us who "do the eight & hit the gate", our work is either not on such a tight timetable or is on a stable production environment where EVERYTHING is done carefully and deliberately to avoid downtime, gaming doesn't make sense.
Don't get me wrong, I read slashdot and do NOT agree with the boss who says "The company is losing MILLIONS OF $$$$ while the slacker trenchers screw around with the internet."
Work is for work, home is for home and lunch & after hours are for LAN parties (if IT & boss permits.)
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft denies patches to any system it deems "non-authentic". Now the US government is urging, strongly, everyone to patch their systems. This leaves your typical patriotic "pirate" US individual in a bit of a pickle. Skip the patch and "Let the terrorists win" or fess up, pay up and "Think of the children."
That said, it sounds like a new Microsoft slogan:
"Unpatched Windows systems are hurting the war on terror; buy your legitimate license today."
Then again there is always http://windizupdate.com/
When I first tried it, I blew it up to 1600x1200 and it wasn't happy. When I get it down to about 850x600, everything works great, no blinkies or uglies. This is with my (ahem) work PC with the EXTREME Intel graphics.
So, I can't go to 1600x1200, I could even be stuck at 800x600 until the next stable comes out. I'll cope, it's a mighty effort made and I appreciate the heck out of it.
When run "sudo GoogleEarth . . . " it creates a directory in /usr/local/google-earth. That directory is chock full of .so files, not .DLL files. Also Icculus (Ryan Gordon) is "not a big fan of wine". Ryan and most of the folks who hang their hats at icculus.org are former employees or had connections to Loki Software, a company that made NATIVE PORTS of games.
One other chap who worked at Loki then moved on to Epic Software and brought us NATIVE ports of UT2003 and UT2004.
It's definitely native.
Thanks to Gordon and I hope you had fun working with the folks at Google.
This is indeed a great day, google earth was the only app I ever used on my laptop under Windows.
Yeah, it's not perfect yet, read the forums, play around with it, tweek it and it'll go.
Six months ago, I bought a Toshbia tecra S2 (it had a wicked 6600 Go video card!) and before I even booted M$, I installed Mandriva 2006 December edition (I'm a club member) Here's my experiences:
1. Boot it up, resize the NTFS partition; windows still booted afterwards.
2. Install the usual stuff.
3. Observe that the wireless NIC, the wired NIC, the video, the sound AND the modem all work under mdv2006.
No hassles, no "recompiling the kernel", no endless searches on line; install and go.
Yeah I can just boot-n-go with M$ but I happen to like Linux, I don't like windows.
If someone had the same laptop with a dead HDD, they didn't have recovery media and they didn't want to spend $150 on a new OS, mandriva would at least get their laptop functional.
I switched to Mandrake at mdk7.2. I was futzing around with RedHat 7.0 and not enjoying myself. The thing that did it for me was urpmi(not having to figure out RPM dependencies) and the fact that if I install tuxracer or any other app, it would be available under Gnome, KDE, Icewm, fvwm . . . twm via the pull down menus. That niceity is still there. What puts Mandriva on top of virtually everything else is the RPM repositories. With a broadband connection, you could just download the first ISO then use easy urpmi http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ for the rest of the media. There is the main distro, contribs and, best of all, PLF. PLF has RPMs that aren't as "free" as we like (like lame, libdvdcss etc.) but it makes building typically difficult things like mythtv easy.
I still believe that mandriva is one of the best distros for noobs but it's advanced enough to make the harder things easy.
I am a member of the club $60.00/year, that and the RPM repositories available through PLF, I'm set. $60/year is IMHO less than windows costs at least for what I do with my system. If I weren't a member, I'd have to wait three or so weeks for the free ISOs to become available. If three weeks isn't worth $60 then don't pay and just wait a little.
As for the ISO availability versus bittorrent, the beta distro is NOT supported and will very likely be superceded in a few weeks. There WILL be showstopper bugs in the beta versions and unless you're interested in helping out and making bug reports, the beta isos aren't really worth downloading.
Netcraft confirms VHS is dying!
I had the opportunity to "work" with Daniel a few months ago. I was on a project that was late and management said "Get more programmers!" My collegue and I had three resumes shoved in our face and were told to "Pick one".
We saw Daniel's resume and, since adding more programmers doesn't help, at most, he would be able to help and at least it would be cool to meet him.
Well Daniel came on and he is a very interesting and unique person, he also made it clear that he was VERY interested in exploring some of Microsoft's technology. Before anyone goes into "went to the dark side", and "bought out", the jobe he got was EXACTLY what he wanted to do.
I'm a hopeless Linux fanboy but I also have a reasonably steady job, and a good income; Daniel, at the time, did not. When I asked him about his experiences with OSS, he explained that people are VERY enthusiastic until things get hard or take time, he worked with volunteers and never had much leverage other than the good will of those he worked with.
So I salute Daniel and wish him the very best in his new career at Microsoft. In this time of geek-types getting laid off, not finding work and corporate America looking for mercinary types to get the job done, it's nice to know that an artist like Daniel still has a place; even if it's with Microsoft.
The wife's GF 4200TI croaked so I gave her my FX5900 and went back to the IGP (nForce2 IGP). The nice thing about the IGP is that it's there if you need it, you don't have to stuff it in a drawer when you don't need it and if you ever retire the machine from gaming, your power consumption goes way down without the 1337 g4m1ng card.
Now if nVidia would release drivers so my GF6200 AGP would work, I'd be back in business gaming under Linux again.
I realize that ponying up the extra $16 bucks to get a $56 dollar motherboard from your typical $40 dollar motherboard is quite a strech but if you get this board, you'll be able to play virtually every game made before 2003 and, if your patient, some stuff afterwards.
Not to sound like a snot, but if you become a u83r 1337 g4m3r, you can always give the system to your sister.
. . . our new LED overlights.
Still, to replace all our current lighting needs, just imagine, it would take a beowulf cluster of LEDs.
In soviet russia, the LEDs illuminate YOU!
Aaah, it had to be said, I searched to -1.
There goes my karma.
Gee whiz folks, we've got UT2004 with a NATIVE PORT, we've got Doom 3 with a NATIVE PORT (excellent port thank you ID), HL2 plays under Cedega (you need a brute of a CPU tho.) Lots of games with nice installers: Check out http://liflg.org/ for installers for the best games.
People cry that it's too hard to get your video to work; I'm really sorry you were too cheap to get the GeForce Go 5200 and got the Intel "Extreme" integrated graphics and now your pixel shader games look crappy. Nevertheless, UT2004 and the UT2004 DEMO play under linux with the DRI drivers.
Stop complaining, Loki is gone, but http://icculus.org/ is still around, and several of those guys WORKED for loki. If you want it EASY, you want GAMES then either USE WINDOWS or buy an X-Box. If you prefer Linux and are willing to expend the time and energy (and reap the rewards of what you learn) then USE LINUX and play the games that work well, there are a bloody AWFUL lot of games that work, work well and aren't that difficult to set up.
Take a little time, subscribe to http://www.transgaming.com/, make a little donation to http://liflg.org/, buy products from http://www.nvidia.com/ and shut up & enjoy the games!
IWFTEC (I work for the electric company). It's great that wind generation is taking off but it isn't without cost, the utility I work for charges twice for wind power what it charges for "regular" power; yes, people pay it, gladly (odd eh?)
The issue with wind power is that it is, in effect, a run-away generator. To balance the system, another generator must be able to move to keep the grid stable (anyone remember First Power?) The _kicker_ is that a generator with 80%-90% is necessary to regulate the wind farm. The bigger the farm, the bigger the generator (and higher percentage) necessary to control the grid. So, in a perfect situation, if you've got 500 MW of potential wind power, you'll need 350-500 MW of conventional generation. Furthermore, most generators don't work very efficiently unless they're 70%-100% of their capacity.
Okay, I suck but these are the facts, if we're going to connect every control area together, we need a stable grid, for a stable grid, we must have the abilty to control, and do without, the "green" power. Utilities are for profit businesses and only the government can get away with running at a loss, even for idealistic reasons.
It sounds like a good idea, I've read about companies who have moved to linux and were able to only install the minimum number of applications on a computer. In a corporate enviroment, an employee could only run three things, virus-protection, the application they're supposed to run and e-mail. It also sounds like a boon for gamers, most high-end gaming rigs only come with XP-home because gamers don't need the chaff.
If it were available without requring registration and a reasonable price ~$30-$40, it sounds like a good alternative to linux users who occasionally want to play a game or MUST use windows for a unique application or a IE-only site.
It makes sense to me, although I'd hate for it to be the only OS on my PC.
The count problem with users/desktops doesn't just apply to Linux, there is multiple counting from Microsoft. Nearly every large company has a site license but still purchases PCs with windows pre-installed. Thus, every corporate PC has at least two licenses. Throw in the MS "encouragement" to upgrade, you've got ANOTHER license added to that. MS proabably also keeps track of the folks who install warez copys of their OS and adds them to the tally.
If they wanted a more accurate count, they would count the corporate licenses and the home/small business users for product activation. The number from that count would probably fall well short of the one billion they're claiming. That number wouldn't look so "impressive".
RH 6.2 seems to be the best thing out there. Redhat kept up support until they invented the idea of EOL for their distros, so if you get the ISO then all the updates, you can get a pretty up to date system. 2.2.24 kernel, most of the modern libraries XFree86-3.3.6. You can build dillo, links and have a usable system. Really, I've got two 486 laptops with 20 megs of RAM, I can build the latest PCMCIA release and have full wireless. And those 486 were TINY and cool. Perfect for acting like a remote control for my myth TV system or a vncviewer for my "macho" system.
Sorry if I come across as a Mandrake fanboy but. . . I'm a Mandrake fanboy. As a distro, it's got several things going for it:
/more choices for sound cards.
1. Alsa comes with the kernel, this provides better
2. It's RPM based. Not everyone loves RPM but it does make software easier to install, especially for noobs and winex works quite well from an RPM.
3. 3-D support. Mandrake download comes with what is necessary for the DRI 3D cards and the boxed sets come with ATI and NVIDIA drivers that install at . . . install time. The option of installing 3D acceleration is an option when setting up X.
4. Unborked kernel. A few years ago, the stock Redhat kernel had some problems with winex and users had to use a different kernel for reasonable results.
5. Easy Distro to work with. Well, nobody said that Linux was cake & pie but Mandrake is friendlier than most.
Does this make Mandrake THE GAMING DISTRO. . . does it mean that other distros won't work? No, it's just my $0.02 and my opinion. Flame away.
It is _VERY_ unlikely nVidia will cut off support at 4.4 and above. nVidia makes very nice chipsets but more importantly makes excellent drivers that work with M$, Linux, FreeBSD etc. They are out to make money, they make money by selling products people want AND PRODUCTS RECOMMENDED BY OTHERS; this is where Linux support is important. Linux users are geeks, people ask geeks what kind of HW to get. I enjoy gaming (especially under Linux) so when someone asks me what kind of video card to get, I recommend nVidia. If nVidia told the Linux base to "stuff it", they would lose sales. They've done an excellent job of keeping the drivers for their products up to date, easy to use , fast and stable. I doubt they are going to change.
Sorry if I sound like a fanboy but video _is_ important and nVidia cards are the best supported and work the best under Linux for just about everything; I will continue to purchase and recommend their products.
There is ANOTHER William Shatner album called "Capitain of the Ship". It features Mr. Shatner on the cover holding an upside-down tripod and looking very, well, Shatnery. You can find out more here.
A few years ago, I needed to put together a fairly heavy duty samba/NFS server setup. The important issues were reliability, and cheap (in that order.) I went with a couple of P-4 (after watching the TomsHardware video of the athlon going poof), three 40 GB WD drives (per system) and a total of 3 NIC's per system (we have redudant LANS). I created a 3Gb / on each disk, a swap partition on each disk and a RAID 5 (software) 75 GB MD. I also used heartbeat so that the two systems would be "Highly Available" see linux-ha.org for more HA stuff.
Then for the backup up stuff, I just rsync the primary box to the secondary twice a day. Worked great . . . until I lost TWO disks on one of the boxes. I was able to run on the secondary until I replaced my disks AND backing up 55 GB of files only took 2.5 hours. NOTE: I had 455 days of uptime on the primary when it crashed because of the bad disk. It DOES make sense to occasionally verify your box CAN reboot.
As root, do this:
/etc/hosts
echo "207.68.176.250 www.google.com" >>
You'll love it.
It IS possible, think about Los Alamos, Livermore or any site. You have a completely separate LAN that your secure stuff lives on and you have a LAN that connects to the Internet. It's really not that damn hard, if you have to move stuff over, you use removable media or do it across VERY special equipment.
There are LOTS of examples of places which have reasonable security (think about the recipe for froot loops, you won't find THAT on the Internet.)
It sucks that Valve's code got hoarked, it sucks that we'll have to wait for the game, it sucks that they didn't take proper precautions; now it's a lesson to the rest of the industry.
This sets a terrible precident!! The next thing you will see is advertisements on TV, advertisements on the radio, advertisements on web pages, where will it end?
Seriously, how damn intrusive is this? I kinda liked the tractors on 8.1 but who really cares what is happening during the install (unless the adverts are REALLY obnoxious and crash the installer?)
I suppose it could be a problem with bandwidth usage. If my screensaver kicks on and my demand dialer (the missus won't let me have broadband) connects to my ISP and my box is displaying ads for three days, that will pretty much use up my 40 hours/month.
Still, if you're smart enough to grok linux, you're probably smart enough to defeat the screen saver. I'm just glad that mandrake is exploring other avenues of capital than going under or selling out.
The fact that mandrake delivers spamassassin with the downloadable package and privoxy is available through a contrib mirror says that mandrake DOES care about their users desires to escape adverts.
And yes, I click on the banner adds when I visit slashdot, not because I give a damn about the product, it's just easier than joining the slashdot club (I am a mandrake club member and a transgaming member and I donate money to the FSF)
Now, if GCC could display adverts while building that kernel. . .
I don't know any company (other than small businesses) who don't do their bulk shopping through general (crappy) vendors. My company has been using HP for years, they're "standardized", just because one will have a FIC motherboard and the next will have an MSI mother etc. etc. etc.
Then there is the "site license" thing which cuts down on system administration but implies that two licenses are being purchased for every machine.
What has bugged me in the past is when I needed a linux machine, we HAD to purchase the crappy HP AND just tossed the M$ license out the window. Fortunately the machine had one of those pretty license stickers on the side so WHEN the BSA comes, we can say "See, it has a license, it's not running windows but it has a license. Can we get away with just paying $10,000 for the violation?"
Whee.
About perfect?!?!? That is really very funny. Maybe you bought Half-Life this weekend at Best Buy but Half-Life was FAR FAR from perfect. I managed to install it (yes the installer mostly worked.) then proceeded to D/L a 5MB patch. A week later the patch had swelled to 26 MB and is CURRENTLY 82 MB!! A game requiring an 82 MB patch is not "perfect"
OTOH when Half-Life came out, I regularly repeated "Hell, nothing works out of the box". Still, 82 Freakin' Megabytes.
I'm just sore, the missus won't let me get broadband.
In a "don't go home" environment (a la Microsoft) where you are encouraged to spend every possible moment working and being productive gaming, free food, anything you might do at home is gladly provided at work; in the hopes you won't go home and you might be able to squeek out a few more lines of code. Places such as this want to make work a place where you will WANT to be (especially for more than 40 hours/week.)
For the rest of us who "do the eight & hit the gate", our work is either not on such a tight timetable or is on a stable production environment where EVERYTHING is done carefully and deliberately to avoid downtime, gaming doesn't make sense.
Don't get me wrong, I read slashdot and do NOT agree with the boss who says "The company is losing MILLIONS OF $$$$ while the slacker trenchers screw around with the internet."
Work is for work, home is for home and lunch & after hours are for LAN parties (if IT & boss permits.)