No way, not by a long shot. ClamAV/ClamWin can't touch Avira. Yes, it's Free and that's nice, but it's not terribly effective. I run the latest version of ClamAV, automatically updated hourly, on the servers I operate and while certainly better than nothing, I appreciate it and I like the way it operates, it misses a lot of fairly common "ecard.zip" type trojans that come in email. I can upload the same files to jotti, and Avira and other good ones catch them even if by heuristics. I don't really care, and I'm not spending money, because clients need to have their own resident antivirus software anyway but I have observed ClamAV for several years and it's certainly not the best. I don't need it to catch "phishing" emails with its detection patterns, rightly or wrongly, I'm more concerned about trojans and root kit droppers.
I have also tried ClamWin as a scanner to attempt to identify malware on infected PCs (I run a computer service in my town), and is not very effective and very slow. (It takes a long time to find out that you've just wasted your time)
FarCry and FarCry 2 (though very different from each other) are some of my favourite games in existence. I still play FarCry occasionally (though with the enhanced 64 bit patches from AMD). The original graphics were amazing in its day.
I also like the Crysis games, but mostly for ogling the graphics. I agree with some posters here that that game play isn't the best (it's not total crap though). I mostly just goof off in those games. Get a bunch of saved games and then just use those to get back to my favourite parts to trip around and kill stuff.
I would have to say that the best dollar value I've ever gotten from a game is Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm still playing that 6 years later.
1) It's a game I don't have to reboot to Windows to play. I've even got it working on a modern, pure 64 bit system (no 32 bit compatibility libraries or kernel support) by using the 64 bit binary that came with one of the patches, and dropping some 64 bit compiled libraries into the game's System directory (e.g. OpenAL, libstdc++.so.5, libartc.so.0, though that one is just to satisfy a dependency, it doesn't actually have to work, I don't actually have KDE3)
2) The server is a very well written, well behaved Linux program that I don't mind running on my Web server. I just start it up (manually, with a script) and it runs for months without crashing or needing a restart. It even goes to fucking sleep and stops map rotation when there are no human players on. (yet as soon as someone joins they can play with the bots until others come along to replace them)
3) There are assloads of beautiful addon maps and mods being produced for it even to this day.
4) Besides a product key, there is no DRM. It's of absolutely no hassle to me under Linux. I haven't run the Loki installer for it since that initial install 6 years ago, I just copy over the directory and fix it up to work on a new system.
Yeah, but I generally don't want "pretty good things that run on low hardware specs". There are already plenty of games for folks satisfied with that... Nexuiz for one example. Even a graphics whore or "content tourist" like me had to admit Nexuiz is a blast, after giving it a chance for a whole 5 minutes. It's multi platform and can be compiled locally too. They are probably at the limits of what they can do with that old Quake engine. (You can only sew a limited number of arms on an old octopus)
I'm mostly into gaming for the graphics, and indie developers without budgets to have studios stocked with professional graphics artists and equipment can't really do it. No offense to people who work really hard with what they have and do a great job with it, I do appreciate that effort, but I'm spoiled. I didn't spend 2 grand on PC hardware to play "world of goo" or similar.
I have certainly lowered the bar for what I'll tolerate in terms of DRM (I used to hate even one time "product activation" but had to learn to live with it. Then, I even started to tolerate Steam because I realized it also came with convenience), but I won't tolerate what Ubisoft is doing. I was looking forward to Assassin's Creed 2 but I have not and will not purchase it, or anything from Ubisoft ever again. I used to like Ubisoft, because their games were relatively hassle free.
If the day ever comes that game studios finally rip the teats off the cow they are milking and stop supporting the PC platform, I envision hardware vendors like ATI and Nvidia sponsoring some game development. Something like that happening could give a good indie studio the budget they need to make something really nice that could make money for everyone, and pave the way for future titles.
I have not been one to use pirated games. I have done it exactly once, for revenge... I ordered the expansion pack "Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil" directly from ID Software's web site and never got it. Support just blew me off. I even contacted their payment processor and got better support but still no results, despite the promise to try to help. So I downloaded it. I actually paid a lot of money for that... by the time I paid the shipping and exchange it was almost $70 Canadian for a $20 USD expansion pack. I didn't mind, because I thought I was rewarding the vendor directly (I was grateful that they allowed Linux ports of their games), with no middle men. But with the way I was treated I had no other recourse. I should have just done that in the first place and paid fuck all.
I have pirated other software for various reasons occasionally (usually to spite a company that I hated), but never games because I felt that for all the work (art) that goes into them, and for the relatively low cost, in addition to the fact that it's just entertainment software, I couldn't in good conscience use pirated games.
I spend a lot of money on PC games... thousands of dollars tied up in games. Ubisoft was one of my favourite game companies, because their titles were hassle free. But now they are on my black list... I'll never buy anything from them again, even though I was looking forward to Assassin's Creed 2.
I almost was going to stop buying games altogether due to developing trends of asshole DRM mechanisms, but there are still reasonable titles coming out. Even EA seems to be smartening up. (Battlefield Bad Company 2 is relatively hassle free). I even bought a game through Steam for the first time yesterday, "Just Cause 2". I used to hate Steam, but I have to admit that they are the lesser of the evils and they give you something in return. Convenience.
Is it any worse than flag capturing? I was working on a computer at a house where they were playing some capture the flag deal in World of Warcraft. It could also be like heading to the demesnes of a powerful sorcerer and before you can even think about slaying him, you have to defeat all his shit.
Head for the Sarlacc (wherever they are stationed), fight evil minions and henchmen along the way sort of thing. It also needn't be the whole focus of the game.
But Hey, I'm way out of my league, for I don't actually play MMO's. So I guess I didn't think it through correctly. Also, I went back and scrolled and read everything, and they got extremely silly near the end.
So many april fools jokes today aren't all that funny, and are nearly plausible. This one here I would have believed. It wouldn't be hard to make a story about the Sarlacc. Maybe there is more to them than meets the eye. They live for millennia and it wouldn't be that far off base for them to be intelligent. They could control minions to do their bidding.
I read a story (I think it was a short story in "Tales of Mos Eisley Cantina" but I can't remember, it was years ago) about Boba Fett's time in the gullet of the Sarlacc. It was an intelligent creature that used biochemistry or some such to communicate with and manipulate its victims as it slowly digested parts of them. Sort of like disembodied consciousnesses of its victims. Fett's armour/enviro suit protected him for a time until he could escape.
No, it's not really a democracy. Telling people to go create their own fork of a project is like saying "If you don't like the way our government does things, leave and go start your own country". (Sound familiar?)
That's not criticism, for not everything can be a democracy, it's just a fact. Imagine if you had to get a consensus or majority vote to get anything done?
Open Source projects are more like a meritocracy. The people who contribute the most to the project have the most clout in making decisions.
Not really, no. You were getting some fair CPU time to perform your other tasks. Loading up a bunch of pages in firefox simultaneously isn't trivial and your boinc processes are equally important as far as the kernel knows. If you want your boinc processes to yield in the manner you are expecting, run them through "nice" with a lower priority value. They'll get full CPU time when you're not doing anything else, but tasks with a higher priority will cause them to be preempted.
I don't use boinc, so I don't know if it has its own priority settings but in the general case "nice -n 5 someprogram" (see the man page for nice) will start it with a nice value of 5, which a bit less priority than a nice value of 0 (without any influence from nice)
It's not always practical to break up a single task into umpteen threads for simultaneous processing. Where you benefit from parallel processing are cases where there are things that can be done out of sequence (e.g. "make -jn+1"), multitasking (or server type workloads) and also when it's more than one process involved in completing a task (the program's threads, helper applications, system calls etc.)
People just need to understand this. It means you can keep on using your computer while it's doing other work. It doesn't necessarily mean you can encode a single video clip 8 times faster because you have 8 cores.
Now, since I've got a post form handy... this, from the original article:
The OS could assign an application a CPU and some memory, and the program itself, using metadata generated by the compiler, would best know how to use these resources.
Yes, we all know how well we can trust programs to manage their own resources. I fail to see how virtualizing and assigning resources (that would still have to be allocated based on availability and re-allocated if something else needs them) would solve this problem.
Or it just means EMI have to write out another cheque to Roger, David, Richard, and Nick to get the right to sell individual songs.
That would be cool, thinking about it that way. Also, I'm not adverse to them sticking it to EMI. They have quite the reputation for being vultures. Songs have been written about them in anger, for that matter.
If it's a cash grab at EMI's expense, all the power to them. In the end it would be foolish to deny the sales of their tracks though, if it's to be taken at face value and it's what this is really about.
If you only like 20-30% of Meddle, Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, or Animals, I'm going to have to say you'd be the one with the problem and that you aren't into them at all in the first place. I'd suggest sticking to your local rock station. No offense.
Yes, offense. That's condescending and you know it. Indeed, it is obvious from what I said that I'm not a big Pink Floyd fan (though I like almost all of Dark Side of the Moon). Don't pick at details... it really wasn't a major point. It wasn't about me (I don't actually buy music from Itunes or similar. I don't even listen to very much music)
While an album like Animals is not conducive to being ripped into 3 minute excerpts, many of their tracks are. Some of them would be long, but they would still be salable that way. I don't have to listen to both sides of a Pink Floyd album to enjoy a few songs. It's foolish to not provide it legitimately.
You think that's a win? It just means more Pink Floyd songs will be downloaded on file sharing services rather than purchased legitimately. When all that is left is illegitimate means you can guarantee that's the route people will take. This time, it's the artists I have no sympathy for. That's a switch.
Maybe they don't even mind if people share their music (having "already made their money"), which would be admirable, but it's still a disservice to their fans to not give them a legitimate avenue other than "buy a CD" (which for me personally would amount to maybe 20% to 30% of a Pink Floyd album that I actually like.)
No, stuff like that isn't that important as computers with obsolete buses are likely incapable of running Vista or Windows 7 anyway.
But what about all the perfectly good sound cards that had to go in the trash because they don't play ball with Microsoft's DRM? I recently tracked down some hacked drivers so a customer could use his first generation Sound Blaster Live card in Vista. Guess what? With mere changes to the.inf files the card works perfectly.
What about perfectly good 10/100 network adapters that will never work in Vista or Windows 7 because Microsoft didn't think it was necessary to port drivers?
What about analog game ports? Some people still have those and they are unsupported. I have a perfectly good Microsoft Sidewinder Joystick and guess who doesn't support it anymore? It actually works perfectly in Linux... too bad I don't have anything I'd want to use it for anymore.
How about perfectly good USB scanners? So what if they are 5 years old? I got my parents a new computer the other day. Their HP ScanJet 2200c doesn't work in Windows 7 at all (XP is the last supported OS according to HP). I plugged it in thinking that had to be some kind of mistake but nope, it doesn't work. It's just a PlusTek scanner rebranded. There are zillions of scanners from different vendors based on Plustek. Plug that thing into a Linux computer and udev rules will detect it and with the help of HAL and friends, the appropriate SANE backend will be invoked and it just works.
I'm sorry, but Linux and Linux distros' inclusion of various userspace driver subsystems trump Windows for hardware support any day. The fact that new hardware is only supported in Windows out of the box with third party drivers is the fault of the vendors, not the Linux community and does not praise Windows in any way.
I do believe that is quite unreasonable. Just because I am a juror in a case does not mean I should not be able to do my work, monitor my servers etc. They are making you swear on so many things that only your own honesty could enforce, what's the difference here? "You must not use electronic devices to seek information pertaining to the trial"
Some of these trials can go on for weeks.
It's crap like this that made me shirk jury duty (it's not difficult to get out of, at least in Canada where I live) when facing a lengthy jury service in a child molestation trial where the defendant was pleading not guilty. I was going to do it (I felt it was my duty) until I realized what was going to happen. At that point I had to appear before the judge to get excused, citing the hardships it would have caused me. (I'd have lost clientele etc.) It's also not difficult to make yourself undesirable if reasoning isn't going to get you out of it. "My name is bubba yer honour and I hope we can make $ethnicgroup burn for what they did"
So if you want good jurors, don't expect them to give up their lives or they just aren't going to do it.
The main selling point for me is that it runs my games. That's pretty much the only reason I bother with Windows, to feed my gaming addiction. (I use Linux for everything else)
That said, I think that Windows 7 is a pretty nice system. Fast, stable and attractive, though I would feel crippled if I actually had to use it for getting work done. (I've got open stuff laid out across 8 virtual desktops in XFCE at the moment and I can move between them simply by going to the screen edges with my mouse, or click on my pager. I would hit the brick wall of confusion in Windows... if I actually had useful software)
I mostly agree with that assessment.
I love Mass Effect 2, even though it's a lot different than the original in terms of game play. To me, Mass Effect was not really much of a shooter or combat game so I don't mind the "dumbing down" of inventory and tactics. I've always kind of thought that stuff was a nuisance (I don't like RPG games much) and thought of Mass Effect as more of an interactive story than a "game".
The fighting isn't half bad, and in some ways it's better than the original. It's easier to shoot from cover for one thing, and more realistic to have to reload your weapons and collect ammo. I bought the deluxe edition, so I got some downloadable content including an "Incisor" sniper rifle that fires 3 shot bursts. (my favourite gun in the game)
I love exploring and going back and replaying it with different choices to see the story unfold a bit differently. It's certainly good dollar value (keeps me occupied for hours on end when I should be doing work)
The graphics are (still) somewhat mediocre, at least in terms of scenery (I'd agree that the character detail is fabulous) but good enough for this type of game. It looks decent enough.
That's just typical FUD propaganda
- IE, in low privileged mode, can still compromise the system (All it takes is a malicious codec download for one example and a stupid user for another). Besides, the protected mode only works if User Account Control is on and if it is on, then no app is running as an administrator anyway and it's a moot point. (The user's privileges ARE low, until elevated through the nags. If a user isn't in the administrators group, then they can't even allow the nags without entering an administrator password, which they wouldn't have)
- DEP... so what? That just prevents a specific type of exploit. It can cause problems too... like when there's absolutely nothing wrong on the system and some stupid Windows component gets shut down because DEP throws an exception. (and if a process was headed for a crash, and that's the exception that gets triggered because something got relocated to data pages it's misleading)
- Firefox is pretty easy to update (without it breaking itself) and only a Microsoft stooge could spin that into something difficult. No, it's not the Microsoft way, but that doesn't mean it's difficult.
Internet Explorer is, and will ever remain, shitware. It's still got much of the old code base... they just keep sewing more arms onto the octopus. Here's one example. To this day, that piece of shit can't download files larger than 4 Gb. What other gotchas are lurking in that mess of proprietary code that's been the base of it since the 90's?
That game sucks. It's all campers and noob tube launchers, glitching, sprinting, knifing cocksuckers, air strikes, helicopters, FUCKING LAG and the annoyances of its multiplayer matchmaking system. These people don't know the meaning of the word sporting. The object is to get 25 kills so you can end the match with a nuclear strike. Oh boy, what else did you get for your fucking birthday?
They have ENABLED these lamers to rack up the kills with all the crap in this game. It's utterly ridiculous. The glitches that some of them exploit are still not fixed either.
I should NEVER be exposed to those pukes... if it were a real Call of Duty game I'd be playing on servers with like minded people.
Sales means nothing to me. Like I give a shit. People are just mindless herbivores. The numbers of online players on the PC is dwindling. It was all the hype for a month or so, but now it's getting harder to find a game and when you do, it's just annoying assfucks anyway. I only played it to get level 70 so I'd have all the weapons choices for private matches with friends. As it turns out, I have one friend that plays it and our schedules rarely are compatible. Everyone else I know is boycotting it.
Now, I have had a few very good runs playing with good people, but they don't last long. 2 or 3 matches and then something always happens to break up the group and it's back to annoying twats again.
The single player modes are very nice though. The campaign gets worn out after a few runs through, but the special ops missions are better than playing with the public.
This is the last game I am paying for, ever. I am very bitter about this game and the general trends that I am seeing from game vendors towards PC gaming.
The current government in Canada needs to go. I don't give a shit about environmentalists and their agendas, but they have every right to publish them on their web sites.
ServerLoft was most likely bullied into taking that action... it's the Harper government's MO. Behind closed doors, "or else" type directives. What a bunch of spineless fucks... they don't even have datacenters in Canada. Just the threat of being sued.
We all know what hosting datacenter to avoid now. ServerLoft can go piss up a rope. The negative publicity from this will punish them.
I'm by no means highly experienced with a lot of hosting providers, but any "dedicated" TOS I've been subjected to for hosting my servers has always clearly stated that the company has the right to take servers offline and investigate things. (e.g. If one of my servers get hacked, they have the right to take it offline, analyze the intrusion and bill me for any work they do). In other words it's their box.
This is OK for me personally, I'm not up to anything I have to conceal. (Not even any "ecommerce" other than a few paypal transactions), though I completely understand your point.
I can change the root password and not give it to them, but then this only makes their job more difficult. I personally want them to have it. One of my dedicated hosting providers adds another account named "admin" (how original!) on their servers and changes the UID and GID to 0, essentially making it a second root account. I have to wonder about their password policies on those accounts... do they have a master password that all of their technicians know? Not on my fucking box they aren't... So I changed the numbers and chowned its directory and/var/spool stuff appropriately and informed them about it. They told me that was fine, but that it might cause delays in getting it serviced. I always make sure they have the root password on record. They'll have to retrieve it and use su.
I'm pretty good, and have never lost communication with any of my servers so I don't give a rat's ass about support (I've never needed it), as long as the machine boots and is accessible by SSH. If I do a kernel compile and for some reason it won't come up, I would just need them to go to the machine and boot another kernel for me. They don't need any login for that.
I would prefer colo, but the nearest would probably be about 3 hours driving for me.
That said, if they did something stupid to me, like they did to you (Instead of replacing a power supply, putting the hard drive in different machine and booting it up to oblivion... which could put my data at risk from corruption) not only would I cease to do business with them, I'd probably think about going for a nice long drive and personally administering behaviour corrections.
No, I don't care how fast your DSL is, it's not appropriate for hosting services of this type. If you can somehow get a 100 Mbit full duplex connection to your house, then hosting it yourself would be ideal, but even if you could convince a communications company to run such lines to your residence (They would be leery because they would have reasonable doubts that you're not going to pay the fees for long enough for them to recoup their investment), the monthly fees would kill you quickly. You would need to be an established business in a commercial location, or possibly pay up front to convince them to do it.
Yeah, right. Like society is going to suddenly get over their prejudices about "drugs" and it's going to be acceptable to consume this, take an antidote and drive or go to work or other drinking taboo. In societies where they still criminally prosecute and jail people for the mere possession of marijuana. (which to an established, regular user is relatively harmless)
1) Quit listening to the propaganda from the Big Brother, police state.
2) If you think that potent cannabis is something new, where have you been for the last few millennia? I remember Sativa strains from the 70's and 80's that were far superior to the (often) hydroponically grown strains of today. I hear crap like "It's not like the marijuana you smoked in your college days. It's worse than HEROIN now!" from police spokespeople and the like. Ignorance or malice... it's still false.
3) Cannabis does not have dangerous synergistic effects with alcohol. Maybe you'd peter out on drinking earlier in the evening but it isn't dangerously toxic. (unlike the synergistic effects of, say, barbiturates or tranquilizers with alcohol)
4) Cannabis does not cause psychosis. There are all kinds of studies with false correlations. Just because samples of schizophrenics and psychotics also tend to use cannabis and other drugs doesn't mean it caused, or even exacerbated the imbalance.
You really ought to get out more. Go to a place where a sizable portion of the population uses cannabis every day of their lives (like Canada, for example). They have jobs, businesses, families and homes. They aren't psychotic, they aren't driving dangerously and they aren't dead. Hell, I know people who have been smoking cannabis for over 50 years and it hasn't done them the harm that has been promised.
It's not completely harmless, but harmless enough that it doesn't warrant the prejudice that it gets.
Cannabis itself won't make a loser out of you... it's just that in America, they will see to it that it does.
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No way, not by a long shot. ClamAV/ClamWin can't touch Avira. Yes, it's Free and that's nice, but it's not terribly effective. I run the latest version of ClamAV, automatically updated hourly, on the servers I operate and while certainly better than nothing, I appreciate it and I like the way it operates, it misses a lot of fairly common "ecard.zip" type trojans that come in email. I can upload the same files to jotti, and Avira and other good ones catch them even if by heuristics. I don't really care, and I'm not spending money, because clients need to have their own resident antivirus software anyway but I have observed ClamAV for several years and it's certainly not the best. I don't need it to catch "phishing" emails with its detection patterns, rightly or wrongly, I'm more concerned about trojans and root kit droppers. I have also tried ClamWin as a scanner to attempt to identify malware on infected PCs (I run a computer service in my town), and is not very effective and very slow. (It takes a long time to find out that you've just wasted your time)
FarCry and FarCry 2 (though very different from each other) are some of my favourite games in existence. I still play FarCry occasionally (though with the enhanced 64 bit patches from AMD). The original graphics were amazing in its day.
I also like the Crysis games, but mostly for ogling the graphics. I agree with some posters here that that game play isn't the best (it's not total crap though). I mostly just goof off in those games. Get a bunch of saved games and then just use those to get back to my favourite parts to trip around and kill stuff.
I would have to say that the best dollar value I've ever gotten from a game is Unreal Tournament 2004. I'm still playing that 6 years later.
1) It's a game I don't have to reboot to Windows to play. I've even got it working on a modern, pure 64 bit system (no 32 bit compatibility libraries or kernel support) by using the 64 bit binary that came with one of the patches, and dropping some 64 bit compiled libraries into the game's System directory (e.g. OpenAL, libstdc++.so.5, libartc.so.0, though that one is just to satisfy a dependency, it doesn't actually have to work, I don't actually have KDE3)
2) The server is a very well written, well behaved Linux program that I don't mind running on my Web server. I just start it up (manually, with a script) and it runs for months without crashing or needing a restart. It even goes to fucking sleep and stops map rotation when there are no human players on. (yet as soon as someone joins they can play with the bots until others come along to replace them)
3) There are assloads of beautiful addon maps and mods being produced for it even to this day.
4) Besides a product key, there is no DRM. It's of absolutely no hassle to me under Linux. I haven't run the Loki installer for it since that initial install 6 years ago, I just copy over the directory and fix it up to work on a new system.
Sadly, those days are over.
Yeah, but I generally don't want "pretty good things that run on low hardware specs". There are already plenty of games for folks satisfied with that... Nexuiz for one example. Even a graphics whore or "content tourist" like me had to admit Nexuiz is a blast, after giving it a chance for a whole 5 minutes. It's multi platform and can be compiled locally too. They are probably at the limits of what they can do with that old Quake engine. (You can only sew a limited number of arms on an old octopus)
I'm mostly into gaming for the graphics, and indie developers without budgets to have studios stocked with professional graphics artists and equipment can't really do it. No offense to people who work really hard with what they have and do a great job with it, I do appreciate that effort, but I'm spoiled. I didn't spend 2 grand on PC hardware to play "world of goo" or similar.
I have certainly lowered the bar for what I'll tolerate in terms of DRM (I used to hate even one time "product activation" but had to learn to live with it. Then, I even started to tolerate Steam because I realized it also came with convenience), but I won't tolerate what Ubisoft is doing. I was looking forward to Assassin's Creed 2 but I have not and will not purchase it, or anything from Ubisoft ever again. I used to like Ubisoft, because their games were relatively hassle free.
If the day ever comes that game studios finally rip the teats off the cow they are milking and stop supporting the PC platform, I envision hardware vendors like ATI and Nvidia sponsoring some game development. Something like that happening could give a good indie studio the budget they need to make something really nice that could make money for everyone, and pave the way for future titles.
I have not been one to use pirated games. I have done it exactly once, for revenge... I ordered the expansion pack "Doom 3 Resurrection of Evil" directly from ID Software's web site and never got it. Support just blew me off. I even contacted their payment processor and got better support but still no results, despite the promise to try to help. So I downloaded it. I actually paid a lot of money for that... by the time I paid the shipping and exchange it was almost $70 Canadian for a $20 USD expansion pack. I didn't mind, because I thought I was rewarding the vendor directly (I was grateful that they allowed Linux ports of their games), with no middle men. But with the way I was treated I had no other recourse. I should have just done that in the first place and paid fuck all.
I have pirated other software for various reasons occasionally (usually to spite a company that I hated), but never games because I felt that for all the work (art) that goes into them, and for the relatively low cost, in addition to the fact that it's just entertainment software, I couldn't in good conscience use pirated games.
I spend a lot of money on PC games... thousands of dollars tied up in games. Ubisoft was one of my favourite game companies, because their titles were hassle free. But now they are on my black list... I'll never buy anything from them again, even though I was looking forward to Assassin's Creed 2.
I almost was going to stop buying games altogether due to developing trends of asshole DRM mechanisms, but there are still reasonable titles coming out. Even EA seems to be smartening up. (Battlefield Bad Company 2 is relatively hassle free). I even bought a game through Steam for the first time yesterday, "Just Cause 2". I used to hate Steam, but I have to admit that they are the lesser of the evils and they give you something in return. Convenience.
Is it any worse than flag capturing? I was working on a computer at a house where they were playing some capture the flag deal in World of Warcraft. It could also be like heading to the demesnes of a powerful sorcerer and before you can even think about slaying him, you have to defeat all his shit.
Head for the Sarlacc (wherever they are stationed), fight evil minions and henchmen along the way sort of thing. It also needn't be the whole focus of the game.
But Hey, I'm way out of my league, for I don't actually play MMO's. So I guess I didn't think it through correctly. Also, I went back and scrolled and read everything, and they got extremely silly near the end.
So many april fools jokes today aren't all that funny, and are nearly plausible. This one here I would have believed. It wouldn't be hard to make a story about the Sarlacc. Maybe there is more to them than meets the eye. They live for millennia and it wouldn't be that far off base for them to be intelligent. They could control minions to do their bidding.
I read a story (I think it was a short story in "Tales of Mos Eisley Cantina" but I can't remember, it was years ago) about Boba Fett's time in the gullet of the Sarlacc. It was an intelligent creature that used biochemistry or some such to communicate with and manipulate its victims as it slowly digested parts of them. Sort of like disembodied consciousnesses of its victims. Fett's armour/enviro suit protected him for a time until he could escape.
No, it's not really a democracy. Telling people to go create their own fork of a project is like saying "If you don't like the way our government does things, leave and go start your own country". (Sound familiar?)
That's not criticism, for not everything can be a democracy, it's just a fact. Imagine if you had to get a consensus or majority vote to get anything done?
Open Source projects are more like a meritocracy. The people who contribute the most to the project have the most clout in making decisions.
Not really, no. You were getting some fair CPU time to perform your other tasks. Loading up a bunch of pages in firefox simultaneously isn't trivial and your boinc processes are equally important as far as the kernel knows. If you want your boinc processes to yield in the manner you are expecting, run them through "nice" with a lower priority value. They'll get full CPU time when you're not doing anything else, but tasks with a higher priority will cause them to be preempted.
I don't use boinc, so I don't know if it has its own priority settings but in the general case "nice -n 5 someprogram" (see the man page for nice) will start it with a nice value of 5, which a bit less priority than a nice value of 0 (without any influence from nice)
People just need to understand this. It means you can keep on using your computer while it's doing other work. It doesn't necessarily mean you can encode a single video clip 8 times faster because you have 8 cores.
Now, since I've got a post form handy... this, from the original article:
Yes, we all know how well we can trust programs to manage their own resources. I fail to see how virtualizing and assigning resources (that would still have to be allocated based on availability and re-allocated if something else needs them) would solve this problem.
That would be cool, thinking about it that way. Also, I'm not adverse to them sticking it to EMI. They have quite the reputation for being vultures. Songs have been written about them in anger, for that matter.
If it's a cash grab at EMI's expense, all the power to them. In the end it would be foolish to deny the sales of their tracks though, if it's to be taken at face value and it's what this is really about.
Yes, offense. That's condescending and you know it. Indeed, it is obvious from what I said that I'm not a big Pink Floyd fan (though I like almost all of Dark Side of the Moon). Don't pick at details... it really wasn't a major point. It wasn't about me (I don't actually buy music from Itunes or similar. I don't even listen to very much music)
While an album like Animals is not conducive to being ripped into 3 minute excerpts, many of their tracks are. Some of them would be long, but they would still be salable that way. I don't have to listen to both sides of a Pink Floyd album to enjoy a few songs. It's foolish to not provide it legitimately.
You think that's a win? It just means more Pink Floyd songs will be downloaded on file sharing services rather than purchased legitimately. When all that is left is illegitimate means you can guarantee that's the route people will take. This time, it's the artists I have no sympathy for. That's a switch.
Maybe they don't even mind if people share their music (having "already made their money"), which would be admirable, but it's still a disservice to their fans to not give them a legitimate avenue other than "buy a CD" (which for me personally would amount to maybe 20% to 30% of a Pink Floyd album that I actually like.)
No, stuff like that isn't that important as computers with obsolete buses are likely incapable of running Vista or Windows 7 anyway.
But what about all the perfectly good sound cards that had to go in the trash because they don't play ball with Microsoft's DRM? I recently tracked down some hacked drivers so a customer could use his first generation Sound Blaster Live card in Vista. Guess what? With mere changes to the .inf files the card works perfectly.
What about perfectly good 10/100 network adapters that will never work in Vista or Windows 7 because Microsoft didn't think it was necessary to port drivers?
What about analog game ports? Some people still have those and they are unsupported. I have a perfectly good Microsoft Sidewinder Joystick and guess who doesn't support it anymore? It actually works perfectly in Linux... too bad I don't have anything I'd want to use it for anymore.
How about perfectly good USB scanners? So what if they are 5 years old? I got my parents a new computer the other day. Their HP ScanJet 2200c doesn't work in Windows 7 at all (XP is the last supported OS according to HP). I plugged it in thinking that had to be some kind of mistake but nope, it doesn't work. It's just a PlusTek scanner rebranded. There are zillions of scanners from different vendors based on Plustek. Plug that thing into a Linux computer and udev rules will detect it and with the help of HAL and friends, the appropriate SANE backend will be invoked and it just works.
I'm sorry, but Linux and Linux distros' inclusion of various userspace driver subsystems trump Windows for hardware support any day. The fact that new hardware is only supported in Windows out of the box with third party drivers is the fault of the vendors, not the Linux community and does not praise Windows in any way.
I do believe that is quite unreasonable. Just because I am a juror in a case does not mean I should not be able to do my work, monitor my servers etc. They are making you swear on so many things that only your own honesty could enforce, what's the difference here? "You must not use electronic devices to seek information pertaining to the trial"
Some of these trials can go on for weeks.
It's crap like this that made me shirk jury duty (it's not difficult to get out of, at least in Canada where I live) when facing a lengthy jury service in a child molestation trial where the defendant was pleading not guilty. I was going to do it (I felt it was my duty) until I realized what was going to happen. At that point I had to appear before the judge to get excused, citing the hardships it would have caused me. (I'd have lost clientele etc.) It's also not difficult to make yourself undesirable if reasoning isn't going to get you out of it. "My name is bubba yer honour and I hope we can make $ethnicgroup burn for what they did"
So if you want good jurors, don't expect them to give up their lives or they just aren't going to do it.
The main selling point for me is that it runs my games. That's pretty much the only reason I bother with Windows, to feed my gaming addiction. (I use Linux for everything else)
That said, I think that Windows 7 is a pretty nice system. Fast, stable and attractive, though I would feel crippled if I actually had to use it for getting work done. (I've got open stuff laid out across 8 virtual desktops in XFCE at the moment and I can move between them simply by going to the screen edges with my mouse, or click on my pager. I would hit the brick wall of confusion in Windows... if I actually had useful software)
I don't know, I think that if I'm told a beta is going to be valid until June, I wouldn't expect harassment 3 months before that time.
I mostly agree with that assessment. I love Mass Effect 2, even though it's a lot different than the original in terms of game play. To me, Mass Effect was not really much of a shooter or combat game so I don't mind the "dumbing down" of inventory and tactics. I've always kind of thought that stuff was a nuisance (I don't like RPG games much) and thought of Mass Effect as more of an interactive story than a "game". The fighting isn't half bad, and in some ways it's better than the original. It's easier to shoot from cover for one thing, and more realistic to have to reload your weapons and collect ammo. I bought the deluxe edition, so I got some downloadable content including an "Incisor" sniper rifle that fires 3 shot bursts. (my favourite gun in the game) I love exploring and going back and replaying it with different choices to see the story unfold a bit differently. It's certainly good dollar value (keeps me occupied for hours on end when I should be doing work) The graphics are (still) somewhat mediocre, at least in terms of scenery (I'd agree that the character detail is fabulous) but good enough for this type of game. It looks decent enough.
That's just typical FUD propaganda - IE, in low privileged mode, can still compromise the system (All it takes is a malicious codec download for one example and a stupid user for another). Besides, the protected mode only works if User Account Control is on and if it is on, then no app is running as an administrator anyway and it's a moot point. (The user's privileges ARE low, until elevated through the nags. If a user isn't in the administrators group, then they can't even allow the nags without entering an administrator password, which they wouldn't have) - DEP... so what? That just prevents a specific type of exploit. It can cause problems too... like when there's absolutely nothing wrong on the system and some stupid Windows component gets shut down because DEP throws an exception. (and if a process was headed for a crash, and that's the exception that gets triggered because something got relocated to data pages it's misleading) - Firefox is pretty easy to update (without it breaking itself) and only a Microsoft stooge could spin that into something difficult. No, it's not the Microsoft way, but that doesn't mean it's difficult. Internet Explorer is, and will ever remain, shitware. It's still got much of the old code base... they just keep sewing more arms onto the octopus. Here's one example. To this day, that piece of shit can't download files larger than 4 Gb. What other gotchas are lurking in that mess of proprietary code that's been the base of it since the 90's?
That game sucks. It's all campers and noob tube launchers, glitching, sprinting, knifing cocksuckers, air strikes, helicopters, FUCKING LAG and the annoyances of its multiplayer matchmaking system. These people don't know the meaning of the word sporting. The object is to get 25 kills so you can end the match with a nuclear strike. Oh boy, what else did you get for your fucking birthday?
They have ENABLED these lamers to rack up the kills with all the crap in this game. It's utterly ridiculous. The glitches that some of them exploit are still not fixed either.
I should NEVER be exposed to those pukes... if it were a real Call of Duty game I'd be playing on servers with like minded people.
Sales means nothing to me. Like I give a shit. People are just mindless herbivores. The numbers of online players on the PC is dwindling. It was all the hype for a month or so, but now it's getting harder to find a game and when you do, it's just annoying assfucks anyway. I only played it to get level 70 so I'd have all the weapons choices for private matches with friends. As it turns out, I have one friend that plays it and our schedules rarely are compatible. Everyone else I know is boycotting it.
Now, I have had a few very good runs playing with good people, but they don't last long. 2 or 3 matches and then something always happens to break up the group and it's back to annoying twats again.
The single player modes are very nice though. The campaign gets worn out after a few runs through, but the special ops missions are better than playing with the public.
This is the last game I am paying for, ever. I am very bitter about this game and the general trends that I am seeing from game vendors towards PC gaming.
The current government in Canada needs to go. I don't give a shit about environmentalists and their agendas, but they have every right to publish them on their web sites.
ServerLoft was most likely bullied into taking that action... it's the Harper government's MO. Behind closed doors, "or else" type directives. What a bunch of spineless fucks... they don't even have datacenters in Canada. Just the threat of being sued.
We all know what hosting datacenter to avoid now. ServerLoft can go piss up a rope. The negative publicity from this will punish them.
I'm by no means highly experienced with a lot of hosting providers, but any "dedicated" TOS I've been subjected to for hosting my servers has always clearly stated that the company has the right to take servers offline and investigate things. (e.g. If one of my servers get hacked, they have the right to take it offline, analyze the intrusion and bill me for any work they do). In other words it's their box. This is OK for me personally, I'm not up to anything I have to conceal. (Not even any "ecommerce" other than a few paypal transactions), though I completely understand your point. I can change the root password and not give it to them, but then this only makes their job more difficult. I personally want them to have it. One of my dedicated hosting providers adds another account named "admin" (how original!) on their servers and changes the UID and GID to 0, essentially making it a second root account. I have to wonder about their password policies on those accounts... do they have a master password that all of their technicians know? Not on my fucking box they aren't... So I changed the numbers and chowned its directory and /var/spool stuff appropriately and informed them about it. They told me that was fine, but that it might cause delays in getting it serviced. I always make sure they have the root password on record. They'll have to retrieve it and use su.
I'm pretty good, and have never lost communication with any of my servers so I don't give a rat's ass about support (I've never needed it), as long as the machine boots and is accessible by SSH. If I do a kernel compile and for some reason it won't come up, I would just need them to go to the machine and boot another kernel for me. They don't need any login for that.
I would prefer colo, but the nearest would probably be about 3 hours driving for me.
That said, if they did something stupid to me, like they did to you (Instead of replacing a power supply, putting the hard drive in different machine and booting it up to oblivion... which could put my data at risk from corruption) not only would I cease to do business with them, I'd probably think about going for a nice long drive and personally administering behaviour corrections.
No, I don't care how fast your DSL is, it's not appropriate for hosting services of this type. If you can somehow get a 100 Mbit full duplex connection to your house, then hosting it yourself would be ideal, but even if you could convince a communications company to run such lines to your residence (They would be leery because they would have reasonable doubts that you're not going to pay the fees for long enough for them to recoup their investment), the monthly fees would kill you quickly. You would need to be an established business in a commercial location, or possibly pay up front to convince them to do it.
Yeah, right. Like society is going to suddenly get over their prejudices about "drugs" and it's going to be acceptable to consume this, take an antidote and drive or go to work or other drinking taboo. In societies where they still criminally prosecute and jail people for the mere possession of marijuana. (which to an established, regular user is relatively harmless)
Me, I'd change the l to an n so he'd be out there "wanking about with his tool"
Stated like a true parrot.
1) Quit listening to the propaganda from the Big Brother, police state.
2) If you think that potent cannabis is something new, where have you been for the last few millennia? I remember Sativa strains from the 70's and 80's that were far superior to the (often) hydroponically grown strains of today. I hear crap like "It's not like the marijuana you smoked in your college days. It's worse than HEROIN now!" from police spokespeople and the like. Ignorance or malice... it's still false.
3) Cannabis does not have dangerous synergistic effects with alcohol. Maybe you'd peter out on drinking earlier in the evening but it isn't dangerously toxic. (unlike the synergistic effects of, say, barbiturates or tranquilizers with alcohol)
4) Cannabis does not cause psychosis. There are all kinds of studies with false correlations. Just because samples of schizophrenics and psychotics also tend to use cannabis and other drugs doesn't mean it caused, or even exacerbated the imbalance.
You really ought to get out more. Go to a place where a sizable portion of the population uses cannabis every day of their lives (like Canada, for example). They have jobs, businesses, families and homes. They aren't psychotic, they aren't driving dangerously and they aren't dead. Hell, I know people who have been smoking cannabis for over 50 years and it hasn't done them the harm that has been promised.
It's not completely harmless, but harmless enough that it doesn't warrant the prejudice that it gets.
Cannabis itself won't make a loser out of you... it's just that in America, they will see to it that it does.