Actually, the latest version of Mandrake comes with a decent selection of free fonts that are professional looking.
I was pleasantly surprised when I fired up X on my fresh install and realized I wouldn't have to copy all my.ttf fonts over from my Windows partition and convert them.
At the moment Linux sucks unless you're prepared to put a lot of effort into it
Have you even tried some of the latest distros from RedHat or Mandrake lately? You can't get much easier to use than those for a Linux based OS. The old cliche of "even my could install it" comes to mind - and this is coming from a NT fan.
or never intend to change your hardware ever.
Most common consumer level hardware is automatically detected under the modern distros - so what's the problem?
The only major problem I see right now is a lack hardware accelerated 3D out of the box. However, if you are trying to get OpenGL 3D applications running under Linux, you probably won't be put off by downloading and installing the hardware accelerated drivers for X (speaking specifically of nVidia as I own no ATI hardware).
Any college level engineering numerical methods course will teach you all the pitfalls involved with using floating point calculations on modern processors and how to minimize the impact of rounding errors (cumulative and otherwise) on your calculations.
Hell, any decent numerical methods book should cover stuff like that as well.
Granted, some applications don't function under Wine like you would expect. However, at some point in time you have to admit to yourself that Linux is not the gamer's OS and shell out money for a good copy of W2K like I did.
I tend to agree with you that the language of the bill lends itself to targetting people that are knowingly defrauding communications services and people that manufacture/sell/possess equipment for that purpose.
Still, most of this stuff is already criminalized anyway (except for maybe possession) - why do we need another law to affirm what is already illegal?
You (as in the original author) have the obligation under the GPL to provide the source code to people you've distributed the binary to (whether for financial consideration or not).
However, the GPL doesn't prevent those same people from posting the source to an ftp/web site and distributing it freely.
I used lots of numerical methods related libraries from netlib.org back in the day. For symbolic manipulation (rarely important to me as I solved most stuff by hand anyway) I relied on Maple.
NTFS 5 (in 2000 and XP) supports transparent encryption of entire volumes which might be what you are looking for. I'm not sure if you can encrypt the entire boot partition or not as I'm not interested in that level of security. Unfortunately, if you encrypt data you lose the ability to use NTFS's transparent compression.
My friend does something similar on his iBook and runs into one problem on a fairly regular basis. Certain installers will remove the symlink to his Applications directory and replace it with a regular directory. No workaround other than recognizing that this occasionally happens and moving the new application over and recreating the symlink.
You can't beat MSDN universal. Even with small shops $2500/year for a subscription is a small fraction of what you pay a single developer.
The only drawback that I see typically is the 10 concurrent connection limit that is enforced on the products like SQL Server. This doesn't allow you enough freedom to do real-world load testing -- unlike Oracle where you can download the database for free and pay for it when you go into production. And yes, I know you could use a middle-tier to proxy the calls for clients but if your target architecure is client/server then testing n-tier performance is only going to provide you with a rough idea of how well your app scales.
You don't have to write ASP pages in VBScript - you can always use server side JScript which is a far more featureful language (ie: true classes/inheritance).
Also, ASP pages are compiled and placed in a cache when first requested - so ASP can perform quite decently when the developers in question have more than 40 functioning interconnected neurons in their head and write decent code. The problem with most ASP implementations I've seen were the result of poor programming practices.:)
However, ASP is showing its age and I'm glad to see that Microsoft is somewhat looking to the future by releasing ASP.NET... it will be interesting to see how well it establishes itself in the market compared to J2EE. I always say the more choices you have the better.
Contrary to popular belief, C# is not a straight clone of Java although the syntax of the language is very similar.
Translating a book about Java development concepts w/examples to C# makes about as much sense translating a book about Objective C to C++. You really aren't going to pick up on any of the special features/nuances of the language.
For those developers that may be interested - (and I'm sure there is code out there already that demonstrates this) - you can create your own shim dll to control IP networking accessible to applications. Sockcap32 does this in order to socksify non-socks applications under Windows.
If you want to filter any outgoing packets on your NIC - you'll need to look into writing your own filter driver. The DDK is freely available for download and the documentation should be enough to get an enterprising individual started.
That being said. Ditch ZoneAlarm (never worked correctly for me -- along with Norton Personal Firewall) and get Tiny Personal Firewall (v2.0 is free) or Kerio Personal Firewall. They are both free and provide pretty fine grained control via their ruleset on incoming/outgoing data.
.NET unshackles developers from MS Windows as long as they stick to the features that can be implemented on other platforms.
One thing you are probably never going to see with Mono, DotGnu(sp?), et al. is a compatible implementation of COM+ which MS has thrown into.NET for talking to legacy win32 components/libraries/applications. If you need to use such features with.NET -- you are going to be developing and deploying on Windows (at least the service part will need to be).
This man speaks the truth. 6 months of work per year sounds about right -- if you are really good and have a long work history.
Re:My take on the game after playing it recently:
on
Gaming Goodness
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I've been following this mod for over a year now and while your initial impressions might seem valid -- they are really the result of inexperienced teams playing.
Marine anti-rush build order:
1 IP 1 Turret Factory A few turrets 1 armory
Have one or two marines tops building -- the rest hang around at base ready to shoot anything that enters it.
Dealing with marine defensive turrets in mid-late game:
Lerks + Umbra + any melee alien class. Anything inside the umbra cloud will take virtually no damage from machine gun and turret fire.
Also, unmanaged turret farms are easily taken out by persistantly attacking them with skulks. It may take a while but it is an effective strategy as the commander can't have his marines spread out all over the map defending every resource nozzle + turret farm.
With the latest patch, taking out the turret becomes easier as you can destroy the turret factory -- which disables all turret guns in the area.
Flying problems:
I've found that most maps can be navigated once you become adept at flying (either as a marine or a lerk). It just takes a lot of practice. You are always going to have some small/cramped areas in maps where flying is difficult or impossible.
Will this game appeal to everyone? Probably not. I can see where it can be quite dull if you are playing on public servers where people are disorganized and refuse to play as a team (ie: everyone on alien going builder class, marines not following commander's orders, etc).
This is a different issue altogether as anyone building sendmail from the contaminated source would end up with an infected system.
The script worm you are referring to was found in an html help file which was a native language translation done by a third party and inadequately checked by MS before mastering the cd. You couldn't get infected by installing.NET from the cd and the particular exploit the script relied on was fairly old -- so any recent version of IE wouldn't have executed the script.
It just goes to show that there is no such thing as 100% secure. I can be really bad about not checking signatures on source I download before compiling/installing.
Slightly less catastrophic, I'm editing the crontab on a Solaris box as root (production system).
I mean to type
crontab -e
unfortunately I have a typo and it comes out:
crontab -r
The aformentioned human autocompletion feature compels my right hand to pounce on the return key even though I'm blatantly staring at my mistake.
grrrrr.... it took 4 hours to get that one simple file restored from tape backup and that meant 4 missed cycles of accounting processes that run hourly. Fortunately, the processes aren't time sensitive -- they just run longer if they haven't been run in a while.
Needless to say, the joke around the office for the next few days was something along the lines of "But I thought 'e' meant ERASE and 'r' meant REVISE!". [/bad *nix joke]
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Actually, the latest version of Mandrake comes with a decent selection of free fonts that are professional looking.
.ttf fonts over from my Windows partition and convert them.
I was pleasantly surprised when I fired up X on my fresh install and realized I wouldn't have to copy all my
"even my could install it" should have showed up as "even my [insert older family relation] could install it"
At the moment Linux sucks unless you're prepared to put a lot of effort into it
Have you even tried some of the latest distros from RedHat or Mandrake lately? You can't get much easier to use than those for a Linux based OS. The old cliche of "even my could install it" comes to mind - and this is coming from a NT fan.
or never intend to change your hardware ever.
Most common consumer level hardware is automatically detected under the modern distros - so what's the problem?
The only major problem I see right now is a lack hardware accelerated 3D out of the box. However, if you are trying to get OpenGL 3D applications running under Linux, you probably won't be put off by downloading and installing the hardware accelerated drivers for X (speaking specifically of nVidia as I own no ATI hardware).
Any college level engineering numerical methods course will teach you all the pitfalls involved with using floating point calculations on modern processors and how to minimize the impact of rounding errors (cumulative and otherwise) on your calculations.
Hell, any decent numerical methods book should cover stuff like that as well.
Granted, some applications don't function under Wine like you would expect. However, at some point in time you have to admit to yourself that Linux is not the gamer's OS and shell out money for a good copy of W2K like I did.
According to the Wine App Compatibility database it works fine.
HL (and most HL mods) should run fine on low-end machines with dialup connections.
I tend to agree with you that the language of the bill lends itself to targetting people that are knowingly defrauding communications services and people that manufacture/sell/possess equipment for that purpose.
Still, most of this stuff is already criminalized anyway (except for maybe possession) - why do we need another law to affirm what is already illegal?
You (as in the original author) have the obligation under the GPL to provide the source code to people you've distributed the binary to (whether for financial consideration or not).
However, the GPL doesn't prevent those same people from posting the source to an ftp/web site and distributing it freely.
I used lots of numerical methods related libraries from netlib.org back in the day. For symbolic manipulation (rarely important to me as I solved most stuff by hand anyway) I relied on Maple.
NTFS 5 (in 2000 and XP) supports transparent encryption of entire volumes which might be what you are looking for. I'm not sure if you can encrypt the entire boot partition or not as I'm not interested in that level of security. Unfortunately, if you encrypt data you lose the ability to use NTFS's transparent compression.
My friend does something similar on his iBook and runs into one problem on a fairly regular basis. Certain installers will remove the symlink to his Applications directory and replace it with a regular directory. No workaround other than recognizing that this occasionally happens and moving the new application over and recreating the symlink.
Restart IE not reboot.
Drunken missiles were almost as fun as the GOD (and DOG) mode powerups... :)
I can't even begin to count the number of hours I played this game.
You can't beat MSDN universal. Even with small shops $2500/year for a subscription is a small fraction of what you pay a single developer.
The only drawback that I see typically is the 10 concurrent connection limit that is enforced on the products like SQL Server. This doesn't allow you enough freedom to do real-world load testing -- unlike Oracle where you can download the database for free and pay for it when you go into production. And yes, I know you could use a middle-tier to proxy the calls for clients but if your target architecure is client/server then testing n-tier performance is only going to provide you with a rough idea of how well your app scales.
You don't have to write ASP pages in VBScript - you can always use server side JScript which is a far more featureful language (ie: true classes/inheritance).
:)
Also, ASP pages are compiled and placed in a cache when first requested - so ASP can perform quite decently when the developers in question have more than 40 functioning interconnected neurons in their head and write decent code. The problem with most ASP implementations I've seen were the result of poor programming practices.
However, ASP is showing its age and I'm glad to see that Microsoft is somewhat looking to the future by releasing ASP.NET... it will be interesting to see how well it establishes itself in the market compared to J2EE. I always say the more choices you have the better.
That is true only for non-NT based Microsoft OS's (ie: 95/98/ME) and the non-home version of XP (Pro/.NET Server/etc).
All other allow only processes operating under SYSTEM or members of the administrators groups to bind to ports 1024.
Contrary to popular belief, C# is not a straight clone of Java although the syntax of the language is very similar.
Translating a book about Java development concepts w/examples to C# makes about as much sense translating a book about Objective C to C++. You really aren't going to pick up on any of the special features/nuances of the language.
For those developers that may be interested - (and I'm sure there is code out there already that demonstrates this) - you can create your own shim dll to control IP networking accessible to applications. Sockcap32 does this in order to socksify non-socks applications under Windows.
If you want to filter any outgoing packets on your NIC - you'll need to look into writing your own filter driver. The DDK is freely available for download and the documentation should be enough to get an enterprising individual started.
That being said. Ditch ZoneAlarm (never worked correctly for me -- along with Norton Personal Firewall) and get Tiny Personal Firewall (v2.0 is free) or Kerio Personal Firewall. They are both free and provide pretty fine grained control via their ruleset on incoming/outgoing data.
Just my $0.07(US) worth (adjust for inflation)
.NET unshackles developers from MS Windows as long as they stick to the features that can be implemented on other platforms.
.NET for talking to legacy win32 components/libraries/applications. If you need to use such features with .NET -- you are going to be developing and deploying on Windows (at least the service part will need to be).
One thing you are probably never going to see with Mono, DotGnu(sp?), et al. is a compatible implementation of COM+ which MS has thrown into
This man speaks the truth. 6 months of work per year sounds about right -- if you are really good and have a long work history.
I've been following this mod for over a year now and while your initial impressions might seem valid -- they are really the result of inexperienced teams playing.
Marine anti-rush build order:
1 IP
1 Turret Factory
A few turrets
1 armory
Have one or two marines tops building -- the rest hang around at base ready to shoot anything that enters it.
Dealing with marine defensive turrets in mid-late game:
Lerks + Umbra + any melee alien class. Anything inside the umbra cloud will take virtually no damage from machine gun and turret fire.
Also, unmanaged turret farms are easily taken out by persistantly attacking them with skulks. It may take a while but it is an effective strategy as the commander can't have his marines spread out all over the map defending every resource nozzle + turret farm.
With the latest patch, taking out the turret becomes easier as you can destroy the turret factory -- which disables all turret guns in the area.
Flying problems:
I've found that most maps can be navigated once you become adept at flying (either as a marine or a lerk). It just takes a lot of practice. You are always going to have some small/cramped areas in maps where flying is difficult or impossible.
Will this game appeal to everyone? Probably not. I can see where it can be quite dull if you are playing on public servers where people are disorganized and refuse to play as a team (ie: everyone on alien going builder class, marines not following commander's orders, etc).
This is a different issue altogether as anyone building sendmail from the contaminated source would end up with an infected system.
.NET from the cd and the particular exploit the script relied on was fairly old -- so any recent version of IE wouldn't have executed the script.
The script worm you are referring to was found in an html help file which was a native language translation done by a third party and inadequately checked by MS before mastering the cd. You couldn't get infected by installing
It just goes to show that there is no such thing as 100% secure. I can be really bad about not checking signatures on source I download before compiling/installing.
Slightly less catastrophic, I'm editing the crontab on a Solaris box as root (production system).
I mean to type
crontab -e
unfortunately I have a typo and it comes out:
crontab -r
The aformentioned human autocompletion feature compels my right hand to pounce on the return key even though I'm blatantly staring at my mistake.
grrrrr.... it took 4 hours to get that one simple file restored from tape backup and that meant 4 missed cycles of accounting processes that run hourly. Fortunately, the processes aren't time sensitive -- they just run longer if they haven't been run in a while.
Needless to say, the joke around the office for the next few days was something along the lines of "But I thought 'e' meant ERASE and 'r' meant REVISE!". [/bad *nix joke]
plex86 is an offshoot of the bochs project by the original author and offers native code execution (as opposed to bochs emulation of a x86).