The Gathering, http://www.gathering.org, 5000 people, 5 days starting on Easter every year. Got showers and food of course. They would be larger but they can't find any place big enough to hold more and, last I heard from one of my friend's on the team, turned away ~5000 people last year.
Well, alot of people think it is just rumor however nintendo.com has their online store selling parts and accessories already (and it wasn't selling a few days ago).
Deep Freeze is a very interesting application for locking a system down. You can modify the system to your hearts content but rebooting results in the original system and data being there. It fakes any system write and instead keeps a copy of changed things in memory. You can have certain drives unfrozen so people can save their work though. Although it is aimed at educational places, it can be used in a business environment.
"Why does the world need a 2-GHz system?" quizzed Glenn Henry, president of Via's Centaur Technology Inc. subsidiary in Austin, Tex.
Quoted from the story, apparently VIA doesn't realize that games are the only real application pushing chips into new speeds. People wants games faster and people want games that are more realistic, by upping the CPU and GPU speeds, we can get to some very stunning graphics.
Might have to be careful, may result in actually creating the Matrix...Or would we be creating a Matrix inside a Matrix?
In reply to this, I have written a script for myself but of course giving it out for others to use also. It will go thru apache's access log and auto-alert security focus to new IPs. Ya jut have to setup a crontab job to fire it off once in awhile.
Just do a wget on http://www.lightspeed.cx/code-red-ii-mail, open it up and modify it slightly for the paths. Going to the link may make the file unreadable in some browsers.
I'm one of the developers of next version of the Genesis3D game engine. We ran into this problem of what do we support on an engine that is to push the latest cards to the limits.
The simple answer was to write the common code in the main part of the engine then write multiple drivers for the engine that would use different features on different cards. This way we could push both cards and optimize the code for each card to get the best performance. Of course this is no easy task either.
This is a pain but if you wish to push what each card can do, you have to write code for each individual card or maker of the cards (IE a nVidia driver and an ATI driver then a 3rd driver for everything else that the other 2 don't optimize and run on).
I've always wanted to do game programming. I found a school in Washington called DigiPen. It is across the street from Nintendo and is backed by Nintendo. It is a great place. What is nice about it is that the teachers are actual game programmers using the current stuff. You don't learn old then have to catch up once you are out of there.
I was going to goto DigiPen but things fell differently here. Instead I found that I prefered working on game engines than writing actual games. There is a great game engine called Genesis3D. After being in the community for alittle while and people seeing what I could do, I was able to join the small team (about 10 people) that actually write the game engine (the engine hasn't been worked on for a year so we are doing a major overhaul).
You don't have to have a CS degree. You don't even have to have high skills in math (unless you are writing complex physics and certain areas of a game engine). What people don't realize is that most games out there use some game engine off the shelf so all the complex work is removed. Barbie: Gotta Groove was written with the Genesis3D game engine (as an example).
Even games written on consoles have alot of the hard work already removed as game engines for the consoles have already been written. Some development houses do modify or write their own engine to have different effects but the main game programmers never see this level of detail in their coding. This is why I went for working on the game engine itself instead of writing games as there is more detail in what you have to do and know.
Bottom line is that you have to know what area of game programming you want to do. There are alot of areas and everyone specializes in just a few. AI, multiplayer coding, graphic display, sound just to name a few (and the game engine usually takes care of all but the AI so there isn't alot for the game programmer to do other than tell the engine "here's a map. I'm here. Display it").
I have DSL thru SpeakEasy.net. They are a very large provider and any person with DSL from an ISP that goes thru COVAD can swap over to them without any problems.
With the recent closing of a few DSL providers, they have taken in thousands of people. If your DSL provider is going under, i'd jump over to Speakeasy's website and give them a call or send them an email. What is even better is that they run linux systems and love setting up on linux systems (if someone needs help getting it setup). Their phone support is growing daily and aiming for a 5 min or less wait on hold and email support is sub-24 hour reply.
I think ISPs should be held liable when they ignore and do not do anything to stop actions from their users. If their users use the ISPs newsgroups to send child porn around and the ISP does nothing to stop it then the ISP should be held liable. I think the same should go for things like stopping spam. UU.net is an ISP that most spam bounces thru as UU.net refuses to do anything to their mailservers to stop the anonymous bounces of spam.
How can this be informative when the person doesn't even know how to go from bits to bytes?
"@56MBit = 128Meg Bytes = approx 500 Meg of HIGHY symmetric transistors".
256mbit = 32megabytes. 256mbit != 128megabytes. There are 8 bits in a byte. The Sony chip also have 287.5 million transistors. 1/2 of what you said and the amount of memory does not determine the total number of transistors in the chip. It does affect the count but not how many the chip can hold as you showed in your equation. Current CPU chips (the AMD Athlon/Thunderbird for instance) have ~37 million transistors, it is million or M, not Meg. Please have your numbers correct next time:).
This story puts everything in bits it seems. As a result the numbers appear much better than their byte counterpart. Here are some things I noticed.
462mm x 462mm? You want large? There are 25.4 mm per inch. This is saying it is almost 18.2 inches x 18.2 inches (can anyone say 1 1/2 feet by 1 1/2 feet?). I sure hope this is a mistype of the actual size of this beast.
256mbit of memory? that comes out to 32MB of memory. I got a geForce2 GTS coming in the mail with 32MB of mem. Granted the memory is embedded in the chip itself but I think that would result in the price being alot more, especially if you want 64MB of mem.
75 million polys/sec. Sure, when the chip has nothing else going on, doesn't have to worry about lightning, textures, and the triangles it is drawing are all touching each other so there are less vertice's to draw. Splitting the triangles up so there are 3 vertices being drawn per triangle will easily drop this number to be 1/3 of it. Throw in some lightning and it drops more. Same with textures.
"the chip can process 75 million polygons per second, has a pixel fill rate between 1.2 and 2.6 gigapixels/s and can draw 75 million polygons/s". Anyone like being redundant? I count 2 things in there and it seems they are searching for features.
A 2,000 bit internal bus means a 250 bytes internal bus. Why 250? why not 256? Most chips have the maximum internal bus the size of how many bits the chip can handle. If the chip is a 128bit chip then it appears to have a bus double of that so it is feeding the chip faster than the chip can empty it. This could be good but it can also be bad.
With all said and done, the sony graphics chip is 4x as big as nVidia's geForce2 GTS and only 2x the power. Yep, lets slap a huge beast into a machine that probably sucks up the power supply and generates more heat than the CPUs:)
Can anyone realize this is a joke piece? I reconized it almost immediately. Slashdot has yet to tell it's own users it is closing, companies don't liquidate just because the big MS says they will fail. If anything, the MS report of linux failing by the end of the year has and will cause the linux community to be even stronger as the linux community just loves to prove microsoft wrong. What will be interesting is if linux can do everything that the Microsoft story says linux can not do in the server area. then again, I don't believe Windows supports such features (hot swapping CPUs for instance) so it will be even more points for linux.
Better be careful Microsoft, linux is gaining so much weigh against you that soon it will just have to look at you to cause you to fall, without a fight.
The reason they want to do this is simple. They found some massive security hole and don't want the public to know of it. This can also allow them to patch the important DNS servers and not have to care about Joe Blow's server.
This also means they don't have to tell the public of security holes until patches are found, don't have to admit to security holes outsiders find, and don't have to worry about any security holes. We all know that BIND, due to it's wide spread usage, has security holes and is one of the things to be hit the hardest. Then again, why does it have to have security holes? Apache doesn't have as many root exploitable security holes and it is widely used too.
I do have to argue with the thought of Nintendo dieing off. For game development, the PS2 is very difficult to develop for and you have to jump thru a ton of hoops to get any type of decent framerate with alot of polygons on the screen.
The Gamecube on the other hand is very easy to develop for and, according to more than 1 development group, very easily pumps out more polygones per second than you can do on the PS2, without doing an tweaking or pushing of the hardware.
Upon looking at the XBox specs it appears to be something that can blow the Gamecube and the PS2 away but what most people do not realize are some of it's bottlenecks that brings is speed and power down to the Gamecube level, and sometimes below. These bottlenecks mostly reside around the way it works with memory. What is interesting is that Nintendo has always been careful with it's numbers and always predicts numbers low. All the other consoles predict numbers that are super high but don't take into account that polygons need textures and many other things that can bring the number down drasticly. The Gamecube is comparable to the XBox right now, in specs, without the hardware being pushed. Nintendo's polygon count is with full texturing with 8 filters on the texture (all in hardare which is a first) and the sound area is how many voices can be done in 3D. Take a voice out of 3D and your number is much higher and learn the details of the hardware and you can push the Gamecube farther than the XBox.
Another fact is that the XBox will be running a modified version of Windows 2000. Not a special OS for the console, but a modified Windows OS. It's display will use DirectX so development for the XBox can be quick, but pushing the hardware will be difficult.
In short, the PS2 can't even stack up against the XBox nor the Gamecube, no matter which way you cut it for what things are allowed. What will kill another company will be bad decision making. Nintendo did it awhile back when they came out with the Virtual Boy, which was a flop, and resulted in them being one of the console developers to come out last in the hardware line.
BIND has always been the subject of security holes for awhile for many reasons. What people don't realize is that there are HOWTO's out there are doing things that can limit what an attacker can do.
If you chroot/jail bind to a directory then the attacker can not mess with the rest of the drive and they have very few applications at their disposal. It is possible to jump out of a chroot'd application if it is running as root. But to fix this, i modified chroot to allow a user and/or group to be passed in so that chroot is swapped to this user/group and runs the application as this person. This greatly limits the attacks from bind as bind has usually had buffer overflow security bugs that allow execution of data. The worse that happens now is for bind to lock up and need to be restarted.
There are some simple rules that microsoft is going by.
1. They can not use Java
2. Because of 1 they have to produce a product that is better than 1
3. They are a big company
4. Because of 3, bullying and stealing of other products is legal to them.
5. If 2 can not be met, 3 can be which means they can make it appear to be a big deal
6. If 5 can't be met than it can be forced onto the consumer because of 3.
If the code is under the GPL then you have to give it all out. All, not just a section. This was changed in the LPGL license due to this limitation in the GPL license. A project I am working on has ran into this. Unless your program is completely open source and free then it is very likely to conflict with the GPL license.
I'm a game developer working on the Open Source Genesis3D game engine for a new version coming out.
It has always been my dream to do some type of programming that was constantly a challenge as I tend to become bored very easily. There is always some challenge to game programming as you do your best at something then have to do even better next time around. You are constantly trying to out perform the best out there and constantly pushing the computer to it's limits with the latest games.
It can be a great field to be in but getting in is the difficult part as along the way you are viewed as a game programming wannabe and most people don't even make it over the "write a simple game" hurdle. Even after getting into the area you have to prove your worth against others at or possibly above your level of knowledge. Reading a ton of tutorials doesn't always help as you have to break away from the tutorials sometime and take your own steps out in doing a game or an area of a game. Alot of people fall down at this point too and never get back up because they decide it is too hard and don't really understand what is going on so they continue on the tutorial path or just quit all together. For those that break away from tutorials and understand what is really going on to make the game run can great some good games. From there it is a matter of finding a game company to take you in. Of course you would want to get into a company that is constantly using the latest things and this isn't always easy either.
The road is long but can be very enjoyable for those that have the patience, always want a challenge, and have fun with their job.
When Windows 2000 was coming out. It was selling on all the corners over in china BEFORE it was publicly released. This was not beta version, but full versions. They sold for just a few $ too. At the time of the Win2K release, it was said that Win2K would only work on one computer but shortly after it was found out that it could be installed on multiple computers.
I run 98 at the house. I bought it. But running 9 computers tends to become exspensive when your OS costs $200 (any ideas how much Whistler will be? Likely to cost as much as NT and MS is trying to merge the 9x/NT lines) for 1 comp. There is always Linux with WINE. WINE keeps getting better and better at emulating window's apps too.
Either one of the following will happen:
1. MS shoots themselves in the foot and a bunch of people jump to linux
2. Patches are created to patch the OS into working as modifying the MAC on the nic card can cause a problem for a network (even a home network like I have)
3. People dig deep into their pockets to purchase Whistler for each computer they have
4. MS turns the feature completely off due to issues and/or problems
On a side note, did you know that MS is the only company I know of that people will buy a beta version from to have it expire and have to purchase another beta. MS probably turns a good penny just on the beta's alone.
EFNet has been under a constant DDos for awhile now. It has been to the point sometimes that chat is impossible and almost all servers delink. Upon looking at EFNet.org it is obvious how many servers have permamently left. Also, did the DDos ever stop on the LinPeople IRC network? I know it was being hammered by someone that wanted things his way.
The real issue is that there are scripts and applications out there than make it 1-click possible to hack computers. This is to the point of 1-click to hack the whole internet. People need to learn about security and how to tighten their computers down and keep up with security holes so they are not prone to being hacked. There are a ton of linux users out there, but a very small percentage that know how to correctly use it and secure it so their computer is not part of the DDoS's.
http://www.battle.net/forums/diablo2-realmstatus/p osts/ac/52.shtml
According the Blizzard the problem is fixed, any players affected can be flagged for a restore as of Dec 19th. Any hardcore players that died recently will also be restored.
The full method in which a company or person, the Suer, uses to try to force another person or company, the Suie, to stop some action they are doing. The following are included:
Any written request (commonly called a 'Cease and Desist' letter) by the Suer to the Suie
The method in which the Suer penalizes the Suie via payment or other actions that result in the Suie stopping said action or an agreement is met between the Suer and Suie
All Suer's will be forced to pay said owner of this patent for usage of this patent. Payment is determined by said owner.
This patent is retro-active to the beginning of time.
Slashdot Mirror
The Gathering, http://www.gathering.org, 5000 people, 5 days starting on Easter every year. Got showers and food of course. They would be larger but they can't find any place big enough to hold more and, last I heard from one of my friend's on the team, turned away ~5000 people last year.
Well, alot of people think it is just rumor however nintendo.com has their online store selling parts and accessories already (and it wasn't selling a few days ago).
http://www.deepfreezeusa.com
Deep Freeze is a very interesting application for locking a system down. You can modify the system to your hearts content but rebooting results in the original system and data being there. It fakes any system write and instead keeps a copy of changed things in memory. You can have certain drives unfrozen so people can save their work though. Although it is aimed at educational places, it can be used in a business environment.
"Why does the world need a 2-GHz system?" quizzed Glenn Henry, president of Via's Centaur Technology Inc. subsidiary in Austin, Tex.
Quoted from the story, apparently VIA doesn't realize that games are the only real application pushing chips into new speeds. People wants games faster and people want games that are more realistic, by upping the CPU and GPU speeds, we can get to some very stunning graphics.
Might have to be careful, may result in actually creating the Matrix...Or would we be creating a Matrix inside a Matrix?
In reply to this, I have written a script for myself but of course giving it out for others to use also. It will go thru apache's access log and auto-alert security focus to new IPs. Ya jut have to setup a crontab job to fire it off once in awhile.
Just do a wget on http://www.lightspeed.cx/code-red-ii-mail, open it up and modify it slightly for the paths. Going to the link may make the file unreadable in some browsers.
I'm one of the developers of next version of the Genesis3D game engine. We ran into this problem of what do we support on an engine that is to push the latest cards to the limits.
The simple answer was to write the common code in the main part of the engine then write multiple drivers for the engine that would use different features on different cards. This way we could push both cards and optimize the code for each card to get the best performance. Of course this is no easy task either.
This is a pain but if you wish to push what each card can do, you have to write code for each individual card or maker of the cards (IE a nVidia driver and an ATI driver then a 3rd driver for everything else that the other 2 don't optimize and run on).
I've always wanted to do game programming. I found a school in Washington called DigiPen. It is across the street from Nintendo and is backed by Nintendo. It is a great place. What is nice about it is that the teachers are actual game programmers using the current stuff. You don't learn old then have to catch up once you are out of there. I was going to goto DigiPen but things fell differently here. Instead I found that I prefered working on game engines than writing actual games. There is a great game engine called Genesis3D. After being in the community for alittle while and people seeing what I could do, I was able to join the small team (about 10 people) that actually write the game engine (the engine hasn't been worked on for a year so we are doing a major overhaul). You don't have to have a CS degree. You don't even have to have high skills in math (unless you are writing complex physics and certain areas of a game engine). What people don't realize is that most games out there use some game engine off the shelf so all the complex work is removed. Barbie: Gotta Groove was written with the Genesis3D game engine (as an example). Even games written on consoles have alot of the hard work already removed as game engines for the consoles have already been written. Some development houses do modify or write their own engine to have different effects but the main game programmers never see this level of detail in their coding. This is why I went for working on the game engine itself instead of writing games as there is more detail in what you have to do and know. Bottom line is that you have to know what area of game programming you want to do. There are alot of areas and everyone specializes in just a few. AI, multiplayer coding, graphic display, sound just to name a few (and the game engine usually takes care of all but the AI so there isn't alot for the game programmer to do other than tell the engine "here's a map. I'm here. Display it").
I have DSL thru SpeakEasy.net. They are a very large provider and any person with DSL from an ISP that goes thru COVAD can swap over to them without any problems.
With the recent closing of a few DSL providers, they have taken in thousands of people. If your DSL provider is going under, i'd jump over to Speakeasy's website and give them a call or send them an email. What is even better is that they run linux systems and love setting up on linux systems (if someone needs help getting it setup). Their phone support is growing daily and aiming for a 5 min or less wait on hold and email support is sub-24 hour reply.
So why did you turn to the dark side?
I think ISPs should be held liable when they ignore and do not do anything to stop actions from their users. If their users use the ISPs newsgroups to send child porn around and the ISP does nothing to stop it then the ISP should be held liable. I think the same should go for things like stopping spam. UU.net is an ISP that most spam bounces thru as UU.net refuses to do anything to their mailservers to stop the anonymous bounces of spam.
How can this be informative when the person doesn't even know how to go from bits to bytes? "@56MBit = 128Meg Bytes = approx 500 Meg of HIGHY symmetric transistors". :).
256mbit = 32megabytes. 256mbit != 128megabytes. There are 8 bits in a byte. The Sony chip also have 287.5 million transistors. 1/2 of what you said and the amount of memory does not determine the total number of transistors in the chip. It does affect the count but not how many the chip can hold as you showed in your equation. Current CPU chips (the AMD Athlon/Thunderbird for instance) have ~37 million transistors, it is million or M, not Meg. Please have your numbers correct next time
This story puts everything in bits it seems. As a result the numbers appear much better than their byte counterpart. Here are some things I noticed.
:)
462mm x 462mm? You want large? There are 25.4 mm per inch. This is saying it is almost 18.2 inches x 18.2 inches (can anyone say 1 1/2 feet by 1 1/2 feet?). I sure hope this is a mistype of the actual size of this beast.
256mbit of memory? that comes out to 32MB of memory. I got a geForce2 GTS coming in the mail with 32MB of mem. Granted the memory is embedded in the chip itself but I think that would result in the price being alot more, especially if you want 64MB of mem.
75 million polys/sec. Sure, when the chip has nothing else going on, doesn't have to worry about lightning, textures, and the triangles it is drawing are all touching each other so there are less vertice's to draw. Splitting the triangles up so there are 3 vertices being drawn per triangle will easily drop this number to be 1/3 of it. Throw in some lightning and it drops more. Same with textures.
"the chip can process 75 million polygons per second, has a pixel fill rate between 1.2 and 2.6 gigapixels/s and can draw 75 million polygons/s". Anyone like being redundant? I count 2 things in there and it seems they are searching for features.
A 2,000 bit internal bus means a 250 bytes internal bus. Why 250? why not 256? Most chips have the maximum internal bus the size of how many bits the chip can handle. If the chip is a 128bit chip then it appears to have a bus double of that so it is feeding the chip faster than the chip can empty it. This could be good but it can also be bad.
With all said and done, the sony graphics chip is 4x as big as nVidia's geForce2 GTS and only 2x the power. Yep, lets slap a huge beast into a machine that probably sucks up the power supply and generates more heat than the CPUs
Can anyone realize this is a joke piece? I reconized it almost immediately. Slashdot has yet to tell it's own users it is closing, companies don't liquidate just because the big MS says they will fail. If anything, the MS report of linux failing by the end of the year has and will cause the linux community to be even stronger as the linux community just loves to prove microsoft wrong. What will be interesting is if linux can do everything that the Microsoft story says linux can not do in the server area. then again, I don't believe Windows supports such features (hot swapping CPUs for instance) so it will be even more points for linux.
Better be careful Microsoft, linux is gaining so much weigh against you that soon it will just have to look at you to cause you to fall, without a fight.
It isn't "rm -rf", it is "R M SPACE DASH R F SPACE FORWARD SLASH"
The reason they want to do this is simple. They found some massive security hole and don't want the public to know of it. This can also allow them to patch the important DNS servers and not have to care about Joe Blow's server.
This also means they don't have to tell the public of security holes until patches are found, don't have to admit to security holes outsiders find, and don't have to worry about any security holes. We all know that BIND, due to it's wide spread usage, has security holes and is one of the things to be hit the hardest. Then again, why does it have to have security holes? Apache doesn't have as many root exploitable security holes and it is widely used too.
I do have to argue with the thought of Nintendo dieing off. For game development, the PS2 is very difficult to develop for and you have to jump thru a ton of hoops to get any type of decent framerate with alot of polygons on the screen.
The Gamecube on the other hand is very easy to develop for and, according to more than 1 development group, very easily pumps out more polygones per second than you can do on the PS2, without doing an tweaking or pushing of the hardware.
Upon looking at the XBox specs it appears to be something that can blow the Gamecube and the PS2 away but what most people do not realize are some of it's bottlenecks that brings is speed and power down to the Gamecube level, and sometimes below. These bottlenecks mostly reside around the way it works with memory. What is interesting is that Nintendo has always been careful with it's numbers and always predicts numbers low. All the other consoles predict numbers that are super high but don't take into account that polygons need textures and many other things that can bring the number down drasticly. The Gamecube is comparable to the XBox right now, in specs, without the hardware being pushed. Nintendo's polygon count is with full texturing with 8 filters on the texture (all in hardare which is a first) and the sound area is how many voices can be done in 3D. Take a voice out of 3D and your number is much higher and learn the details of the hardware and you can push the Gamecube farther than the XBox.
Another fact is that the XBox will be running a modified version of Windows 2000. Not a special OS for the console, but a modified Windows OS. It's display will use DirectX so development for the XBox can be quick, but pushing the hardware will be difficult.
In short, the PS2 can't even stack up against the XBox nor the Gamecube, no matter which way you cut it for what things are allowed. What will kill another company will be bad decision making. Nintendo did it awhile back when they came out with the Virtual Boy, which was a flop, and resulted in them being one of the console developers to come out last in the hardware line.
BIND has always been the subject of security holes for awhile for many reasons. What people don't realize is that there are HOWTO's out there are doing things that can limit what an attacker can do.
If you chroot/jail bind to a directory then the attacker can not mess with the rest of the drive and they have very few applications at their disposal. It is possible to jump out of a chroot'd application if it is running as root. But to fix this, i modified chroot to allow a user and/or group to be passed in so that chroot is swapped to this user/group and runs the application as this person. This greatly limits the attacks from bind as bind has usually had buffer overflow security bugs that allow execution of data. The worse that happens now is for bind to lock up and need to be restarted.
There are some simple rules that microsoft is going by. 1. They can not use Java 2. Because of 1 they have to produce a product that is better than 1 3. They are a big company 4. Because of 3, bullying and stealing of other products is legal to them. 5. If 2 can not be met, 3 can be which means they can make it appear to be a big deal 6. If 5 can't be met than it can be forced onto the consumer because of 3.
If the code is under the GPL then you have to give it all out. All, not just a section. This was changed in the LPGL license due to this limitation in the GPL license. A project I am working on has ran into this. Unless your program is completely open source and free then it is very likely to conflict with the GPL license.
I'm a game developer working on the Open Source Genesis3D game engine for a new version coming out.
It has always been my dream to do some type of programming that was constantly a challenge as I tend to become bored very easily. There is always some challenge to game programming as you do your best at something then have to do even better next time around. You are constantly trying to out perform the best out there and constantly pushing the computer to it's limits with the latest games.
It can be a great field to be in but getting in is the difficult part as along the way you are viewed as a game programming wannabe and most people don't even make it over the "write a simple game" hurdle. Even after getting into the area you have to prove your worth against others at or possibly above your level of knowledge. Reading a ton of tutorials doesn't always help as you have to break away from the tutorials sometime and take your own steps out in doing a game or an area of a game. Alot of people fall down at this point too and never get back up because they decide it is too hard and don't really understand what is going on so they continue on the tutorial path or just quit all together. For those that break away from tutorials and understand what is really going on to make the game run can great some good games. From there it is a matter of finding a game company to take you in. Of course you would want to get into a company that is constantly using the latest things and this isn't always easy either.
The road is long but can be very enjoyable for those that have the patience, always want a challenge, and have fun with their job.
When Windows 2000 was coming out. It was selling on all the corners over in china BEFORE it was publicly released. This was not beta version, but full versions. They sold for just a few $ too. At the time of the Win2K release, it was said that Win2K would only work on one computer but shortly after it was found out that it could be installed on multiple computers.
I run 98 at the house. I bought it. But running 9 computers tends to become exspensive when your OS costs $200 (any ideas how much Whistler will be? Likely to cost as much as NT and MS is trying to merge the 9x/NT lines) for 1 comp. There is always Linux with WINE. WINE keeps getting better and better at emulating window's apps too.
Either one of the following will happen:
1. MS shoots themselves in the foot and a bunch of people jump to linux
2. Patches are created to patch the OS into working as modifying the MAC on the nic card can cause a problem for a network (even a home network like I have)
3. People dig deep into their pockets to purchase Whistler for each computer they have
4. MS turns the feature completely off due to issues and/or problems
On a side note, did you know that MS is the only company I know of that people will buy a beta version from to have it expire and have to purchase another beta. MS probably turns a good penny just on the beta's alone.
EFNet has been under a constant DDos for awhile now. It has been to the point sometimes that chat is impossible and almost all servers delink. Upon looking at EFNet.org it is obvious how many servers have permamently left.
Also, did the DDos ever stop on the LinPeople IRC network? I know it was being hammered by someone that wanted things his way.
The real issue is that there are scripts and applications out there than make it 1-click possible to hack computers. This is to the point of 1-click to hack the whole internet. People need to learn about security and how to tighten their computers down and keep up with security holes so they are not prone to being hacked. There are a ton of linux users out there, but a very small percentage that know how to correctly use it and secure it so their computer is not part of the DDoS's.
What is the correct link for the story? That one is definately the wrong link.
http://www.battle.net/forums/diablo2-realmstatus/p osts/ac/52.shtml
According the Blizzard the problem is fixed, any players affected can be flagged for a restore as of Dec 19th. Any hardcore players that died recently will also be restored.
The full method in which a company or person, the Suer, uses to try to force another person or company, the Suie, to stop some action they are doing. The following are included:
All Suer's will be forced to pay said owner of this patent for usage of this patent. Payment is determined by said owner.
This patent is retro-active to the beginning of time.