Video games are a medium of entertainment, just like movies or music. Just as movies and music have matured to the point where you rarely see or hear something innovative (not saying you don't, just that it's much more rare), video games are coming up on that point as well. Of your examples, I'd say only the EyeToy was a true innovation, using video recognition as an input mechanism. The DS is just a gimick (oo! two screens, and one of them is a touch screen!), and the other is just an evolution of a concept that's been around for decades (NES Power Pad, any one?). However, that's not a bad thing. At this point, it's more about evolution, taking concepts that have come before and tweaking and fine-tuning them, maybe even merging them (real-time combat in RPGs, RPG elements in action games, etc).
Back when there was nothing to compare against, even a simple scrolling platformer like Super Mario Bros. was innovative. That's not to say that there's no room for new game type innovations (see Katamari Damacy, for example), just that the frequency of such innovations naturally increases as a medium matures. You will see major innovations in video games in the next ten years, but will there be as many as there were in the first ten years of video gaming? Certainly not. Does that mean that the spark is gone, or that the industry is dying? Absolutely not.
As for why more companies don't often make crazy games, I'll leave you with a quote from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back:
You gotta do the safe picture. Then you can do the art picture. But then sometimes you gotta do the payback picture because your friend says you owe him. And sometimes, you have to go back to the well.
I believe the Playstation 2 uses a 128-bit MIPS microprocessor. In fact, I know it.
I don't know whether or not the PS2 uses a 128-bit CPU, but I would be wary about blindly trusting the word of the console's developer. After all, NEC wanted us to believe the TurboGrafix/PCEngine was a 16-bit machine (the CPU was 8-bit, the graphics processor was 16-bit) and Atari tried to tell us that the Jaguar was 64-bit (it was really a mish-mash of 32-bit processors and maybe one or two special-purpose 64-bit processors). If Sony said, "128-bit XXX cpu" where "XXX" is something like, "Intel Pentium III" or "IBM PowerPC" or "NEC SH3/4" or "Motorola 68000" or whatever, then I may believe them because you can use the information about what type of CPU it is to independently verify its "bitness". By just listing "128-bit cpu", I'm going to have assume that they're lying.
Not that bit-ness matters at all anymore except as a way to label a generation. The PS2 may be 128-bit, the XBox is definitely 32-bit, and the GC is 64-bit (well, it's PowerPC based, but I don't know if it's using a 64-bit or 32-bit PPC so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt), but they're all in the "128-bit generation".
There were just as many bad games Back in the Day (tm) as there are now. You've simply forgotten about them. In 5-10 years, you'll forget about the bad games taking up shelf space today and only remember the stand-out titles, and make the same complaint.
This doesn't just apply to games, either. It applies to almost everything. The "Good Old Days" were not necessarily any better than today, but the effects of time have made you forget the bad and remember the good. That's why people want a return to the "values" from the 1950s, or complain that Hollywood is just churning out mindless blockbuster action flick after mindless blockbuster action flick, or complain that the airwaves are overrun by Britney Spears wannabes. Do you really think that there wasn't divorce, death, rape, abortion, violent crime, or any of the other ills of today's society back in the 50s? Do you really believe that back in the day Hollywood only released one or two films a year, or even went years without releasing antyhing because nothing was good enough? Do you really think that there were entire stretches of years where no artist released any music at all? Of course not. The collective consciousness has just swept all of the bad behavior, bad movies, bad music, etc under the rug and idolized what came before.
Tuck this thought away in the back of your mind, and drag it out in 10 years when you find yourself lamenting that the current crop of video games pale in comparison to the gameplay found in the "classic" Half-Life 2.
As a visual example, look at the spinning wheels of a car on a TV show. As the car starts moving, the wheel looks like it's spinning forward, because it's spinning slower than half the sampling rate of the TV cameras. As the wheel increases in rotational speed, it will eventually look like it's rotating in reverse, or even stopped. That's because it's now gone past the Nyquist frequency for reconstructing the proper spinning of the wheel, and there's no longer enough information to accurately depict the wheel. Wheels don't do this in real life, because your eyes sample fast enough to reconstruct the full waveform.
Jessica Alba may be a fine piece of ass, but she is totally wrong for this film, as is the rest of the cast.
Jessica Alba is hot as a brunette, but Susan Storm is a blonde, and I don't think Alba can pull off blonde well. However, Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm and Julian McMahon as Dr. Doom look like good matches to me. As for the rest, I'm not really familiar with them, so I couldn't really say.
even if it had a 270mile range (which I suspect will vastly increase with time).
That's all the range I get out of my gasoline-powered car!! I average 250-280miles per 13.5gal fill-up, or around 20mpg. Pretty good for a sports car. Of course, that's with a lot of conservative driving, keeping the revs between 2000 and 3000 and puttering along in 5th gear when cruising. If I really wind it out, my mpg is much worse. The worst I've done was around 8 or 10mpg, and that was during an afternoon of driving laps at the local track (I had to fill up halfway through the afternoon).
You can't sue someone that you can't bring into court, and it's difficult to remain anonymous when you do get brought into court. This case is interesting to me purely for its procedural side.
Yes you can, and many people do file John Doe lawsuits. If the suit goes forward, then a subpoena can be issued to determine the identity of the John or Jane Doe named in the suit. Of course, this does provide a bit of a Catch-22. How do you fight a subpoena to reveal your identity if you don't know that it's your identity that's going to be revealed?
Re:The "drift racing" show idea is even dumber.
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For those who don't know, drifting is the act of powersliding your car sideways. It's something rally drivers do to maintain speed around tight corners, but apparently idiots get together in parking lots and just drift in big stupid circles for hours. So it's not even a sport, it's a small part of a sport. It's as if someone took away the football and just had 22 guys run up and down the field for three hours, and said, "look, a new sport."
Just a small addition. That should read, "It's something rally drivers do to maintain speed around tight corners in low-traction situations." Rally drivers don't drift on tarmac, because sliding is a good way to lose speed when you have adequate traction available.
Anyway, I agree that drift racing is pretty stupid. It's also horribly named, as it's not "racing" at all. Competitors are judged on form and distance, not time or head-to-head competition. In this respect, drift racing is closer to gymnastics or figure skating than it is to racing (solo against the clock or wheel to wheel).
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't like the "spread-out" IDE layout they've got going on here. It reminds me too much of the GIMP, and not in a good way. Perhaps it's my Windows background, but I want a single window with toolboxes and sidebars inside that window (see Visual Studio or KDevelop). This "Let's have a bunch of floating windows with nothing tying them together" approach just makes me think the developers are trying to copy Mac apps rather than Windows apps, with the main drawback of not having a single app menu across the top of the screen to tie everything together (yes, I know that various desktop environments can optionally move app menus to the top of the screen, but how consistent are they? Will they keep the menu from the "Project" window up top when I have the "Toolbox" window focused? Do they know that the "Properties" window and code window are related, and should raise together?). I'm not saying that copying from either is bad or wrong, just that if you're going to do it, do it right.
I'm sure everybody has seen those ugly black "bras" that you put on the front of your car. Well, this could be a much cooler solution to that problem that could protect your whole car. And its reapplicable.
The bras are supposed to stop rocks and debris from chipping your nice paint job. Due to the nature of the problem, you really only need it on the front of your car. If you don't like bras (because they're ugly, or for more practical reasons like they're more likely to scratch your paint unless properly looked after, and they're not meant as a permanent protection -- you need to remove them for washing, for example), there are plenty of companies that provide a custom-fit transparent film (a 3M design, for most places). I have it on my own car, and I challenge you to detectit. Unless you know what you're looking for, you'll never notice it until you come within mere feet of the car. In the first picture, there's a slight blurring of the reflection on the hood, starting maybe a foot above the hood crest and going down to the bumper -- that's the hood covering. Other portions of the car that are protected are the full front bumper, the sides of the fenders adjacent to the lights (two wedges each, one on the inside between the light and the hood and one on the outside between the light and the bumper seam), the headlights themselves, the leading edge of the side mirrors, the door handle recesses, the edges of the doors, the leading edges of the engine intake scoops, and the trailing edges of the wheel wells both front and rear.
The covering looks great and works very well, but I certainly wouldn't want the entire car covered in the material. The best part is that maintenance is no different than a painted surface. I wash and wax right over the film, and only have to take care around the seams (which really are few, due to Stongard's template design). Only the hood covering's edge is ever really a problem, and a cotton swab takes care of that nicely. Swipe off the accumulated dirt and wax from the edge, and it's back to being invisible again.
I have no affiliation with Stongard, other than as a customer. There are other companies that provide similar protection packages, generally using the same material. I used Stongard because I like their template designs, and they're local which means I could have their experts install the film. If you're not local to Stongard or another similar company, get a good referral for installation because putting this on without any wrinkles or bubbles is very tricky.
But when you think of it in terms of using what tools you have to make one of your own just like someone elses, it becomes a lot less obvious that there's something wrong.
Your analogy is off, too. You're thinking in terms of the medium itself as the final product, and thus "building your own" means burning a CD or DVD yourself, rather than buying one from the store. However, the medium is just the distribution mechanism. The software/movie/music on the media is the final product, and you're not "building your own". Nobody's stopping you from writing your own software, recording your own music, or filming your own movie, and if you were to do any of the above it would not be illegal. Taking somebody else's software/music/movie and burning your own CD/DVD is absolutely not the same thing.
Hell, you might even decide that the more you can do to cut the cartels that own all the media off from their money, the better.
Don't buy the product if you don't want to give your money to the "media cartels", but that doesn't mean you can still use their product. There's no right to "free music" or "free software" or "free movies". The "media cartels" aren't selling you something that should be intrinsically free. They're selling a product, that you may or may not buy. If you want to "stick it to the man", then boycott their product entirely. By pirating their product, you're not really making any statement at all.
Intellectual property is still a relatively new concept in the grand scheme of things, especially since only recently (the past few decades, since the tape recorder and VCR) can you easily "steal" the product without "harming" someone else. However, that doesn't mean that intellectual property is invalid. The old distribution methods cannot keep up, and new methods are only now coming into play (iTunes and the proliferation of online music stores, direct-sale platforms like Steam, streaming movie services). It's fine to get pissed that the *AAs are trying to keep everyone stuck in the past, tied to a dieing industry, but "stealing" their product because they won't embrace new technology is not the way to combat them. Artists still need to feed their families, too, you know (yes, I know, artists get paid crap by the *AAs, but crap is still better than nothing when it comes to putting food on the table).
That's not bad, but what are some other people's "spam indexes"? My work account would be *much* worse...
Wow, what is your employer doing that your work account gets spammed so much? My own work address gets on the order of 100 legitimate emails per day (on average -- there are plenty of days where I get much more than that), while spam seems to be on the average of 1-2 mails per week. Yes, that's a 1/250 spam index using your method.
My other email addresses are much worse, but that's more because I just don't receive any legitimate email on them rather than because they get so much spam. For example, I have about 25 legitimate emails on my gmail account since signing up last spring. At the same time, spam has never really been a problem until lately, where I'll get maybe 4-5 spam emails per week. If I had to work that out, I'd call it 1 legitimate mail per week to 5 spam mails per week, or a current 5/1 index on my gmail account. Prior to December (apparently my gmail address made it onto some spam lists in December), the index was exactly 0 (0/1 = 0, of course).
(No, I'm not a pathetic loser with no friends. I just don't conduct much conversation via email.)
On top of that I used their hotmail account to register for the Passport, since that's their recommended option. I never use Hotmail for my daily webmail, in fact, the only message I have there is a thank-you for signing up. The bozos from hotmail kept threatening me with turning off the account, and they did execute their threats every 90 days. So unless I remember to log in to the Hotmail account, which I never use, I lose my passport, and have to go through easy but still frustrating retrival system at hotmail.
You don't need to use a hotmail.com or msn.com email address to get a Passport. Any email address will work.
Relative is exactly my point. You say SQL Server is ALWAYS the best choice over MySQL. That simply doesn't make any sense. Those same cost-conscious business people you refer to in the first paragraph would be nuts to buy SQL Server when MySQL will do the exact same job for nothing.
I refer you once again to the original poster, who said that MySQL was a replacement for SQL Server. What I'm saying is that's completely untrue. Of course, what I'm also saying is that MySQL is huge crap, and there are better alternatives out there (which does not necessarily imply SQL Server).
Oh, really? Last I heard, to set up SQL Server and IIS took a couple of techs several days. Not to mention the constant problems ALL Windows software have that render them virtually useless and certainly more expensive in terms of constant downtime and crises that eat up admin time and money.
Whoever you're hearing this from should invest in people with the necessary skills to run their chosen technology. If it takes "a couple of techs several days" to setup SQL Server and IIS (which, BTW, should not be run on the same machine, but you already knew that, right?), then you need to get rid of those couple of techs. As for the "constant downtime and crises", once again I would refer you to the quality of your techs. Where I work, it's been quite some time since we've had any major downtime or crisis, and our operations team runs quite a few Win2K3 boxes running IIS6, SQL Server (again, different boxes), and our own software.
sk the thousands of sites that use MySQL if you don't know why.
Oh, I know why, and it's not because they need a database. They think they need a database because they have some persistant data they need to store, and MySQL has inertia among *nix geeks. Therefore, when Joe Webmaster asks you, "I need to store X, Y, and Z for my web site. What should I do?" you tell him, "Use MySQL."
Didn't say it was. I said it did a specific job cheaper than SQL Server - which ALSO has scale, performance and stability problems based on what I've heard about it.
All RDBMS software can have scale, perf, and stability issues if you want it to. I'm sure I could write code that would make Oracle measure performance in minutes per transaction rather than transactions per minute. However, when configured properly, administered properly, and developed against properly, SQL Server is very fast and stable. As for scaling, several clustering mechanisms are supported out of the box, and it's pretty simple to setup a partitioning mechanism as well (using the built-in partitioned views, for example).
If it's Microsoft software, it ALWAYS has scale, performance and stability problems.
The biggest problem here is that *nix is still very much command-line driven, and therefore the PATH environment variable comes into play. Desktop environments can alleviate that by providing good program launchers (menus or otherwise), but you're still going to want to use the command line for many things.
There is a solution, however. Encap is a system where applications all install into their own directories (say,/usr/local/encap/yourapp-version.number), and are linked into the "standard" places so that you don't have to muck with your PATH. For software using autoconf, simply use the --prefix option when running configure and build away. When you make install, everything is put into the app-specific directory, with bin, lib, share, etc directories underneath that. Afterwards, use epkg to link everything up. The only drawback is that there's not much in the way of software pre-packaged for encap, so if you're into using RPM or apt, encap won't help. If you like building everything from sources but don't run something like Gentoo or a BSD with ports, encap is a very good thing indeed.
There are other linkage systems similar to encap, but encap comes from my alma mater so I'm biased. When I was there, all of the software on all of the unix clusters (the engineering and CS departments had their own separate systems, consisting of many different workstations all using a shared DFS for applications and such) used encap for software management. From a management perspective, it gives you a lot of flexibility when upgrading. Installing a new version of a piece of software does not require removing the old version, so you can keep them side-by-side until you're sure there'll be no problems with the new version.
Notice the capitalization. Open Source does not necessarily create Free Software, even though the software may be free and Free Software is also by definition Open Source (the source is open). In neither case are the real proponents of the two movements concerned about price. RMS himself has even said you can charge for distribution of your software. So, when you say "free", mentally translate that to "Free"*, and you'll have things about right.
Your take on the Open Source movement is also not quite right. More correctly, it is, "Use whatever is better technically for your purposes so long as it's Open Source, even if it's not Free." That difference between Free and free bites again here. Your version makes it sound as though an Open Source proponent could advocate Microsoft Office (it's not free, and is often better technically for your purpose), but that will never happen because it's not Open Source.
* "Free" with a capital 'F' means, "the software can't be co-opted by non-Free entities (such as businesses), and any public changes made to the software due to its Open Source nature must be contributed back to the open and Free codebase." It also means that if you use Free Software in your project (the code from it, including linking to libraries -- this doesn't include building your software with other Free Software), you're now required to make your software Free if it's for anything other than personal consumption. Open Source, on the other hand, just means that the source is available. The BSD license is certainly open source, but it's not Free because companies can take BSD code, incorporate it in a commercial product, and not release the code to the commercial product. RMS doesn't like that. Pretty much anyone else doesn't give a shit. Well, unless you're talking about Slashdot...
Use mysql if you're more worried about speed than data integrity
Depends on the scenario, but for any complex data schema or for many concurrent requests, MySQL breaks down. Besides, speed without good data is worthless.
Use mysql if you are more worried about spending hard dollars than data integrity.
There are many better free databases than MySQL. Besides, the fact that I didn't pay anything for MySQL (which may or may not be true) isn't really going to comfort me much when my data is corrupted.
Use php/mysql if you are thinking of creating a database using msaccess
Even Access supports more of SQL-92 than MySQL. Besides, why would I want to replace a rich client with a web app? VBA and Access may suck, but I much prefer a well-written rich client to a web-browser-based app (believe it or not, you can have well-written apps with VBA and Access; that you can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done). Yes, I know you can do that with PHP as well (gtk bindings, for example), but most people associate PHP with web development and GTK on Windows is the suck.
Use MySQL if you're brainwashed into thinking that there's nothing out there that's faster. Use MySQL if you truly believe you can replicate 20+ years of database development in your PHP application. Use MySQL if you don't care about proper database design, and don't care if the skills you're building will apply beyond MySQL in the future. Use MySQL if you think data integrity is "not a big deal". Use MySQL if you're too lazy to find something better.
Use mssql if you purchased a program that only supports mssql. Otherwise use oracle.
SQL Server is competitive to Oracle in nearly every way (and is certainly more than competitive in pricing -- Oracle doesn't even make it into the top five in the price/performance comparison of TPC-C results). Go with Oracle if you have in-house expertise with Oracle. Go with DB2 if you have in-house expertise with DB2. Go with SQL Server if you have in-house expertise with SQL Server. Otherwise, rather than blindly saying, "Use Oracle if you're willing to pay for a full feature RDBMS," why not recommend investigating which is right for you? (And yes, that means that SQL Server might be right for you, and there's nothing wrong with that.)
"If you have a reason to use SQL Server in the first place MySQL is not a valid replacement."
Can you say "circular reasoning"? I knew you could.
Call it circular reasoning if you will, but if you're using SQL Server, chances are there's a reason. SQL Server is not bundled with any PCs that I've ever heard of (not servers, and especially not workstations). Thus, I think it's pretty safe to say that if you've put out the money to license SQL Server, there's a reason you've done so. In today's economic climate, smart businesses don't just buy enterprise software on a whim (sure, there are exceptions, but poor decisions like that tend to cause firms to go out of business). If you need a relational database solution, I would expect that you've done your research into the various options. If you're just a hobbiest, you're still using SQL Server for a reason (to increase your skills, for example), and replacing it with MySQL would still be detrimental.
There is never a reason to use SQL Server. MySQL is lame compared to PostgreSQL or Oracle, but it serves for a lot of people. If you need something better than MySQL, try FireBird or PostgreSQL.
First off, the article is about Windows software, and as I mentioned in my post Postgres doesn't qualify (the Windows port only runs under cygwin, not natively). Second, you agree that MySQL is lame in comparison to Oracle, which means you also agree it's lame in comparison to SQL Server. SQL Server is competitive to Oracle and DB2 in terms of features, reliability, scalability, performance, etc, and actually costs less than the other Big Boys. Finally, considering the original poster said that MySQL made a good replacement for SQL Server (not the other way around!), your argument is looking the wrong way. In this case, the only "better" criteria would be "cheaper", and really only leaves Firebird given the disqualification of Postgres before.
Spending a fortune (in money and configuration time) on SQL Server is not an option for people who are considering just running a Web site (unless they are General Motors - in which case use Oracle.)
Spending a "fortune" in money for SQL Server is relative, as it would cost a whole lot more to setup a similar Oracle or DB2 system. You're not going to spend a "fortune" in time setting up SQL Server, either, as it's very simple to configure (that doesn't mean you can get by in a professional situation without proper DBA skills, only that setting it up is less difficult and time consuming than setting up MySQL or Postgres). If you're "just running a web site", I would ask why you need a database at all. Perhaps you need some place to store persistant data, but you don't need a relational database for that (good thing MySQL isn't a relational database...). Even then, MySQL is still not the best choice for scale, performance, or stability. Even Slashdot has periodic MySQL-related troubles.
Great development environment. Installs apache, mysql, php all in one go. Great replacement for mssql and iis
Ha ha ha ha ha ha *breathe* ah ha ha ha ha ha ha! MySQL makes a "great replacement" for MS SQL Server? I'm sorry, but ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Seriously, though. PHP makes a decent ASP replacement, but it's not even in the same ballpark as ASP.NET. It'd be nice to have a proper DBI abstraction layer built into the core libraries without having to use something like PEAR, but it's a little too late for that now (most hosting providers don't run on the cutting edge, so even if PHP did that most users won't see it for years to come anyway).
Apache vs. IIS5 makes sense, but IIS6 is rock-solid and has not had a vulnerability in quite some time. Secunia lists three vulnerabilities for IIS6 in the past year and while one does remain unpatched, it's in an administration tool shipped with IIS6 and not the server itself. Apache had seven last year. However, replacing IIS with Apache isn't a difficult case to make since they're both full-featured web servers, so I can buy that one.
Replacing SQL Server with MySQL? If you have a reason to use SQL Server in the first place MySQL is not a valid replacement. If you don't have a reason to use SQL Server, you probably don't have a reason to use a RDBMS at all -- stick with XML, flat files, or some other lighter-weight storage mechanism. Also note that SQL Server does not come pre-loaded on any system I'm aware of, so you can't make the same argument as something like Word, where "it's already there, so why not use it?" You have to actively purchase SQL Server.
MySQL isn't even very useful for learning purposes, unless your goal is to learn bad database design skills. Using MySQL will teach you to work around MySQL's shortcomings, which is very bad indeed when you graduate to a full-featured product like SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, DB2, etc. Too bad Postgres doesn't have a native Windows port (it will run under Cygwin).
I'm not sure all of the software on your list would fit. For example, GDS is pretty heinous (not good if you have multiple accounts on a single machine, known security issues, the blurring of web content and local content allowing someone to shoulder-surf sensitive documents from your local content when doing a web search, etc). iTunes includes Quicktime, and both are horrible about trying to startup stub apps at boot (qttask, ituneshelper) and taking over your file associations. SETI is not really a tool of any sort. While it's not loaded down with spyware or other crap, it's also not much more than a pretty screensaver or an excuse to buy a faster machine to most people.
Also, I wouldn't really recommend searching SourceForge, simply because there are way too many blue-sky projects there ("blue-sky" being a nice way of saying, "software that's listed as pre-alpha, planning stage for years, without ever actually going anywhere"). Unfortunately, there's really not a good place to find free Windows software similar to Freshmeat.net. Download.com or TuCows worked back in the day, but they're pretty much useless now but for mirroring of demos and such (or so I've found).
For power users, mostly (because they'll confuse your grandma)
Startup Monitor. Priceless for dealing with crap like Real or Quicktime that always want to setup stubs to run at boot. The popup warning is pretty non-descriptive, though.
Startup Control Panel, also from Mike Lin (the Startup Monitor guy). Similar to msconfig's Startup tab, but more powerful.
Pretty much anything from Sysinternals. And they provide source!
I'm sure there are many others, but those are the ones that immediately came to mind.
OT, but FYI, Mt. St. Helens is in the very southern part of Washington State, almost in Oregon, no where close to the Seattle/Redmond area. It's a common misconception.
Many people see pictures of Mt. Rainier (which is close enough to Seattle to severely harm the city were it to violently erupt) and just assume it's Mt. St. Helens. Apparently many people think Washington state has only the one mountain. Mt. St. Helens gets all the attention because it likes to blow up more often, but Rainier is larger and more important. Neither are mountains you would want to ski.
No kidding, I'm less than 45 minutes from the city limits of a fairly large city (St. Louis), and approx 5 miles (8km) from a state highway that runs nearly straight into the city.
45 minutes away from the city limits (as opposed to city center) is quite a distance. For comparison, that would put you almost halfway between St. Louis, MO, and Springfield, IL, on I-55. That's at slightly above-legal highway speeds, of course, and since you said "city limits" I'm not factoring much in the way of traffic, so you can get a pretty fair distance away. Now, if you said you were 45 minutes from downtown St. Louis, I would be more sympathetic. It's not like you're "right outside" the city. You're way out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Video games are a medium of entertainment, just like movies or music. Just as movies and music have matured to the point where you rarely see or hear something innovative (not saying you don't, just that it's much more rare), video games are coming up on that point as well. Of your examples, I'd say only the EyeToy was a true innovation, using video recognition as an input mechanism. The DS is just a gimick (oo! two screens, and one of them is a touch screen!), and the other is just an evolution of a concept that's been around for decades (NES Power Pad, any one?). However, that's not a bad thing. At this point, it's more about evolution, taking concepts that have come before and tweaking and fine-tuning them, maybe even merging them (real-time combat in RPGs, RPG elements in action games, etc).
Back when there was nothing to compare against, even a simple scrolling platformer like Super Mario Bros. was innovative. That's not to say that there's no room for new game type innovations (see Katamari Damacy, for example), just that the frequency of such innovations naturally increases as a medium matures. You will see major innovations in video games in the next ten years, but will there be as many as there were in the first ten years of video gaming? Certainly not. Does that mean that the spark is gone, or that the industry is dying? Absolutely not.
As for why more companies don't often make crazy games, I'll leave you with a quote from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back:
I don't know whether or not the PS2 uses a 128-bit CPU, but I would be wary about blindly trusting the word of the console's developer. After all, NEC wanted us to believe the TurboGrafix/PCEngine was a 16-bit machine (the CPU was 8-bit, the graphics processor was 16-bit) and Atari tried to tell us that the Jaguar was 64-bit (it was really a mish-mash of 32-bit processors and maybe one or two special-purpose 64-bit processors). If Sony said, "128-bit XXX cpu" where "XXX" is something like, "Intel Pentium III" or "IBM PowerPC" or "NEC SH3/4" or "Motorola 68000" or whatever, then I may believe them because you can use the information about what type of CPU it is to independently verify its "bitness". By just listing "128-bit cpu", I'm going to have assume that they're lying.
Not that bit-ness matters at all anymore except as a way to label a generation. The PS2 may be 128-bit, the XBox is definitely 32-bit, and the GC is 64-bit (well, it's PowerPC based, but I don't know if it's using a 64-bit or 32-bit PPC so I'll give it the benefit of the doubt), but they're all in the "128-bit generation".
There were just as many bad games Back in the Day (tm) as there are now. You've simply forgotten about them. In 5-10 years, you'll forget about the bad games taking up shelf space today and only remember the stand-out titles, and make the same complaint.
This doesn't just apply to games, either. It applies to almost everything. The "Good Old Days" were not necessarily any better than today, but the effects of time have made you forget the bad and remember the good. That's why people want a return to the "values" from the 1950s, or complain that Hollywood is just churning out mindless blockbuster action flick after mindless blockbuster action flick, or complain that the airwaves are overrun by Britney Spears wannabes. Do you really think that there wasn't divorce, death, rape, abortion, violent crime, or any of the other ills of today's society back in the 50s? Do you really believe that back in the day Hollywood only released one or two films a year, or even went years without releasing antyhing because nothing was good enough? Do you really think that there were entire stretches of years where no artist released any music at all? Of course not. The collective consciousness has just swept all of the bad behavior, bad movies, bad music, etc under the rug and idolized what came before.
Tuck this thought away in the back of your mind, and drag it out in 10 years when you find yourself lamenting that the current crop of video games pale in comparison to the gameplay found in the "classic" Half-Life 2.
That "some guy" would be Nyquist, who found that you need to sample at least twice as fast as the highest frequency in a waveform if you want to be able to reconstruct that waveform. Sample at a lower rate and you run into "aliasing".
As a visual example, look at the spinning wheels of a car on a TV show. As the car starts moving, the wheel looks like it's spinning forward, because it's spinning slower than half the sampling rate of the TV cameras. As the wheel increases in rotational speed, it will eventually look like it's rotating in reverse, or even stopped. That's because it's now gone past the Nyquist frequency for reconstructing the proper spinning of the wheel, and there's no longer enough information to accurately depict the wheel. Wheels don't do this in real life, because your eyes sample fast enough to reconstruct the full waveform.
Jessica Alba is hot as a brunette, but Susan Storm is a blonde, and I don't think Alba can pull off blonde well. However, Michael Chiklis as Ben Grimm and Julian McMahon as Dr. Doom look like good matches to me. As for the rest, I'm not really familiar with them, so I couldn't really say.
That's all the range I get out of my gasoline-powered car!! I average 250-280miles per 13.5gal fill-up, or around 20mpg. Pretty good for a sports car. Of course, that's with a lot of conservative driving, keeping the revs between 2000 and 3000 and puttering along in 5th gear when cruising. If I really wind it out, my mpg is much worse. The worst I've done was around 8 or 10mpg, and that was during an afternoon of driving laps at the local track (I had to fill up halfway through the afternoon).
Yes you can, and many people do file John Doe lawsuits. If the suit goes forward, then a subpoena can be issued to determine the identity of the John or Jane Doe named in the suit. Of course, this does provide a bit of a Catch-22. How do you fight a subpoena to reveal your identity if you don't know that it's your identity that's going to be revealed?
Just a small addition. That should read, "It's something rally drivers do to maintain speed around tight corners in low-traction situations." Rally drivers don't drift on tarmac, because sliding is a good way to lose speed when you have adequate traction available.
Anyway, I agree that drift racing is pretty stupid. It's also horribly named, as it's not "racing" at all. Competitors are judged on form and distance, not time or head-to-head competition. In this respect, drift racing is closer to gymnastics or figure skating than it is to racing (solo against the clock or wheel to wheel).
Except that Unscrewed used real women, not video game characters.
Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't like the "spread-out" IDE layout they've got going on here. It reminds me too much of the GIMP, and not in a good way. Perhaps it's my Windows background, but I want a single window with toolboxes and sidebars inside that window (see Visual Studio or KDevelop). This "Let's have a bunch of floating windows with nothing tying them together" approach just makes me think the developers are trying to copy Mac apps rather than Windows apps, with the main drawback of not having a single app menu across the top of the screen to tie everything together (yes, I know that various desktop environments can optionally move app menus to the top of the screen, but how consistent are they? Will they keep the menu from the "Project" window up top when I have the "Toolbox" window focused? Do they know that the "Properties" window and code window are related, and should raise together?). I'm not saying that copying from either is bad or wrong, just that if you're going to do it, do it right.
The bras are supposed to stop rocks and debris from chipping your nice paint job. Due to the nature of the problem, you really only need it on the front of your car. If you don't like bras (because they're ugly, or for more practical reasons like they're more likely to scratch your paint unless properly looked after, and they're not meant as a permanent protection -- you need to remove them for washing, for example), there are plenty of companies that provide a custom-fit transparent film (a 3M design, for most places). I have it on my own car, and I challenge you to detect it. Unless you know what you're looking for, you'll never notice it until you come within mere feet of the car. In the first picture, there's a slight blurring of the reflection on the hood, starting maybe a foot above the hood crest and going down to the bumper -- that's the hood covering. Other portions of the car that are protected are the full front bumper, the sides of the fenders adjacent to the lights (two wedges each, one on the inside between the light and the hood and one on the outside between the light and the bumper seam), the headlights themselves, the leading edge of the side mirrors, the door handle recesses, the edges of the doors, the leading edges of the engine intake scoops, and the trailing edges of the wheel wells both front and rear.
The covering looks great and works very well, but I certainly wouldn't want the entire car covered in the material. The best part is that maintenance is no different than a painted surface. I wash and wax right over the film, and only have to take care around the seams (which really are few, due to Stongard's template design). Only the hood covering's edge is ever really a problem, and a cotton swab takes care of that nicely. Swipe off the accumulated dirt and wax from the edge, and it's back to being invisible again.
I have no affiliation with Stongard, other than as a customer. There are other companies that provide similar protection packages, generally using the same material. I used Stongard because I like their template designs, and they're local which means I could have their experts install the film. If you're not local to Stongard or another similar company, get a good referral for installation because putting this on without any wrinkles or bubbles is very tricky.
Your analogy is off, too. You're thinking in terms of the medium itself as the final product, and thus "building your own" means burning a CD or DVD yourself, rather than buying one from the store. However, the medium is just the distribution mechanism. The software/movie/music on the media is the final product, and you're not "building your own". Nobody's stopping you from writing your own software, recording your own music, or filming your own movie, and if you were to do any of the above it would not be illegal. Taking somebody else's software/music/movie and burning your own CD/DVD is absolutely not the same thing.
Don't buy the product if you don't want to give your money to the "media cartels", but that doesn't mean you can still use their product. There's no right to "free music" or "free software" or "free movies". The "media cartels" aren't selling you something that should be intrinsically free. They're selling a product, that you may or may not buy. If you want to "stick it to the man", then boycott their product entirely. By pirating their product, you're not really making any statement at all.
Intellectual property is still a relatively new concept in the grand scheme of things, especially since only recently (the past few decades, since the tape recorder and VCR) can you easily "steal" the product without "harming" someone else. However, that doesn't mean that intellectual property is invalid. The old distribution methods cannot keep up, and new methods are only now coming into play (iTunes and the proliferation of online music stores, direct-sale platforms like Steam, streaming movie services). It's fine to get pissed that the *AAs are trying to keep everyone stuck in the past, tied to a dieing industry, but "stealing" their product because they won't embrace new technology is not the way to combat them. Artists still need to feed their families, too, you know (yes, I know, artists get paid crap by the *AAs, but crap is still better than nothing when it comes to putting food on the table).
Wow, what is your employer doing that your work account gets spammed so much? My own work address gets on the order of 100 legitimate emails per day (on average -- there are plenty of days where I get much more than that), while spam seems to be on the average of 1-2 mails per week. Yes, that's a 1/250 spam index using your method.
My other email addresses are much worse, but that's more because I just don't receive any legitimate email on them rather than because they get so much spam. For example, I have about 25 legitimate emails on my gmail account since signing up last spring. At the same time, spam has never really been a problem until lately, where I'll get maybe 4-5 spam emails per week. If I had to work that out, I'd call it 1 legitimate mail per week to 5 spam mails per week, or a current 5/1 index on my gmail account. Prior to December (apparently my gmail address made it onto some spam lists in December), the index was exactly 0 (0/1 = 0, of course).
(No, I'm not a pathetic loser with no friends. I just don't conduct much conversation via email.)
You don't need to use a hotmail.com or msn.com email address to get a Passport. Any email address will work.
I refer you once again to the original poster, who said that MySQL was a replacement for SQL Server. What I'm saying is that's completely untrue. Of course, what I'm also saying is that MySQL is huge crap, and there are better alternatives out there (which does not necessarily imply SQL Server).
Whoever you're hearing this from should invest in people with the necessary skills to run their chosen technology. If it takes "a couple of techs several days" to setup SQL Server and IIS (which, BTW, should not be run on the same machine, but you already knew that, right?), then you need to get rid of those couple of techs. As for the "constant downtime and crises", once again I would refer you to the quality of your techs. Where I work, it's been quite some time since we've had any major downtime or crisis, and our operations team runs quite a few Win2K3 boxes running IIS6, SQL Server (again, different boxes), and our own software.
Oh, I know why, and it's not because they need a database. They think they need a database because they have some persistant data they need to store, and MySQL has inertia among *nix geeks. Therefore, when Joe Webmaster asks you, "I need to store X, Y, and Z for my web site. What should I do?" you tell him, "Use MySQL."
All RDBMS software can have scale, perf, and stability issues if you want it to. I'm sure I could write code that would make Oracle measure performance in minutes per transaction rather than transactions per minute. However, when configured properly, administered properly, and developed against properly, SQL Server is very fast and stable. As for scaling, several clustering mechanisms are supported out of the box, and it's pretty simple to setup a partitioning mechanism as well (using the built-in partitioned views, for example).
Nice FUD and blind Microsoft bashing.
The biggest problem here is that *nix is still very much command-line driven, and therefore the PATH environment variable comes into play. Desktop environments can alleviate that by providing good program launchers (menus or otherwise), but you're still going to want to use the command line for many things.
There is a solution, however. Encap is a system where applications all install into their own directories (say, /usr/local/encap/yourapp-version.number), and are linked into the "standard" places so that you don't have to muck with your PATH. For software using autoconf, simply use the --prefix option when running configure and build away. When you make install, everything is put into the app-specific directory, with bin, lib, share, etc directories underneath that. Afterwards, use epkg to link everything up. The only drawback is that there's not much in the way of software pre-packaged for encap, so if you're into using RPM or apt, encap won't help. If you like building everything from sources but don't run something like Gentoo or a BSD with ports, encap is a very good thing indeed.
There are other linkage systems similar to encap, but encap comes from my alma mater so I'm biased. When I was there, all of the software on all of the unix clusters (the engineering and CS departments had their own separate systems, consisting of many different workstations all using a shared DFS for applications and such) used encap for software management. From a management perspective, it gives you a lot of flexibility when upgrading. Installing a new version of a piece of software does not require removing the old version, so you can keep them side-by-side until you're sure there'll be no problems with the new version.
Notice the capitalization. Open Source does not necessarily create Free Software, even though the software may be free and Free Software is also by definition Open Source (the source is open). In neither case are the real proponents of the two movements concerned about price. RMS himself has even said you can charge for distribution of your software. So, when you say "free", mentally translate that to "Free"*, and you'll have things about right.
Your take on the Open Source movement is also not quite right. More correctly, it is, "Use whatever is better technically for your purposes so long as it's Open Source, even if it's not Free." That difference between Free and free bites again here. Your version makes it sound as though an Open Source proponent could advocate Microsoft Office (it's not free, and is often better technically for your purpose), but that will never happen because it's not Open Source.
* "Free" with a capital 'F' means, "the software can't be co-opted by non-Free entities (such as businesses), and any public changes made to the software due to its Open Source nature must be contributed back to the open and Free codebase." It also means that if you use Free Software in your project (the code from it, including linking to libraries -- this doesn't include building your software with other Free Software), you're now required to make your software Free if it's for anything other than personal consumption. Open Source, on the other hand, just means that the source is available. The BSD license is certainly open source, but it's not Free because companies can take BSD code, incorporate it in a commercial product, and not release the code to the commercial product. RMS doesn't like that. Pretty much anyone else doesn't give a shit. Well, unless you're talking about Slashdot ...
Depends on the scenario, but for any complex data schema or for many concurrent requests, MySQL breaks down. Besides, speed without good data is worthless.
There are many better free databases than MySQL. Besides, the fact that I didn't pay anything for MySQL (which may or may not be true) isn't really going to comfort me much when my data is corrupted.
Even Access supports more of SQL-92 than MySQL. Besides, why would I want to replace a rich client with a web app? VBA and Access may suck, but I much prefer a well-written rich client to a web-browser-based app (believe it or not, you can have well-written apps with VBA and Access; that you can't do it doesn't mean it can't be done). Yes, I know you can do that with PHP as well (gtk bindings, for example), but most people associate PHP with web development and GTK on Windows is the suck.
Use MySQL if you're brainwashed into thinking that there's nothing out there that's faster. Use MySQL if you truly believe you can replicate 20+ years of database development in your PHP application. Use MySQL if you don't care about proper database design, and don't care if the skills you're building will apply beyond MySQL in the future. Use MySQL if you think data integrity is "not a big deal". Use MySQL if you're too lazy to find something better.
SQL Server is competitive to Oracle in nearly every way (and is certainly more than competitive in pricing -- Oracle doesn't even make it into the top five in the price/performance comparison of TPC-C results). Go with Oracle if you have in-house expertise with Oracle. Go with DB2 if you have in-house expertise with DB2. Go with SQL Server if you have in-house expertise with SQL Server. Otherwise, rather than blindly saying, "Use Oracle if you're willing to pay for a full feature RDBMS," why not recommend investigating which is right for you? (And yes, that means that SQL Server might be right for you, and there's nothing wrong with that.)
Call it circular reasoning if you will, but if you're using SQL Server, chances are there's a reason. SQL Server is not bundled with any PCs that I've ever heard of (not servers, and especially not workstations). Thus, I think it's pretty safe to say that if you've put out the money to license SQL Server, there's a reason you've done so. In today's economic climate, smart businesses don't just buy enterprise software on a whim (sure, there are exceptions, but poor decisions like that tend to cause firms to go out of business). If you need a relational database solution, I would expect that you've done your research into the various options. If you're just a hobbiest, you're still using SQL Server for a reason (to increase your skills, for example), and replacing it with MySQL would still be detrimental.
First off, the article is about Windows software, and as I mentioned in my post Postgres doesn't qualify (the Windows port only runs under cygwin, not natively). Second, you agree that MySQL is lame in comparison to Oracle, which means you also agree it's lame in comparison to SQL Server. SQL Server is competitive to Oracle and DB2 in terms of features, reliability, scalability, performance, etc, and actually costs less than the other Big Boys. Finally, considering the original poster said that MySQL made a good replacement for SQL Server (not the other way around!), your argument is looking the wrong way. In this case, the only "better" criteria would be "cheaper", and really only leaves Firebird given the disqualification of Postgres before.
Spending a "fortune" in money for SQL Server is relative, as it would cost a whole lot more to setup a similar Oracle or DB2 system. You're not going to spend a "fortune" in time setting up SQL Server, either, as it's very simple to configure (that doesn't mean you can get by in a professional situation without proper DBA skills, only that setting it up is less difficult and time consuming than setting up MySQL or Postgres). If you're "just running a web site", I would ask why you need a database at all. Perhaps you need some place to store persistant data, but you don't need a relational database for that (good thing MySQL isn't a relational database ...). Even then, MySQL is still not the best choice for scale, performance, or stability. Even Slashdot has periodic MySQL-related troubles.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha *breathe* ah ha ha ha ha ha ha! MySQL makes a "great replacement" for MS SQL Server? I'm sorry, but ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
Seriously, though. PHP makes a decent ASP replacement, but it's not even in the same ballpark as ASP.NET. It'd be nice to have a proper DBI abstraction layer built into the core libraries without having to use something like PEAR, but it's a little too late for that now (most hosting providers don't run on the cutting edge, so even if PHP did that most users won't see it for years to come anyway).
Apache vs. IIS5 makes sense, but IIS6 is rock-solid and has not had a vulnerability in quite some time. Secunia lists three vulnerabilities for IIS6 in the past year and while one does remain unpatched, it's in an administration tool shipped with IIS6 and not the server itself. Apache had seven last year. However, replacing IIS with Apache isn't a difficult case to make since they're both full-featured web servers, so I can buy that one.
Replacing SQL Server with MySQL? If you have a reason to use SQL Server in the first place MySQL is not a valid replacement. If you don't have a reason to use SQL Server, you probably don't have a reason to use a RDBMS at all -- stick with XML, flat files, or some other lighter-weight storage mechanism. Also note that SQL Server does not come pre-loaded on any system I'm aware of, so you can't make the same argument as something like Word, where "it's already there, so why not use it?" You have to actively purchase SQL Server.
MySQL isn't even very useful for learning purposes, unless your goal is to learn bad database design skills. Using MySQL will teach you to work around MySQL's shortcomings, which is very bad indeed when you graduate to a full-featured product like SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, DB2, etc. Too bad Postgres doesn't have a native Windows port (it will run under Cygwin).
I'm not sure all of the software on your list would fit. For example, GDS is pretty heinous (not good if you have multiple accounts on a single machine, known security issues, the blurring of web content and local content allowing someone to shoulder-surf sensitive documents from your local content when doing a web search, etc). iTunes includes Quicktime, and both are horrible about trying to startup stub apps at boot (qttask, ituneshelper) and taking over your file associations. SETI is not really a tool of any sort. While it's not loaded down with spyware or other crap, it's also not much more than a pretty screensaver or an excuse to buy a faster machine to most people.
Also, I wouldn't really recommend searching SourceForge, simply because there are way too many blue-sky projects there ("blue-sky" being a nice way of saying, "software that's listed as pre-alpha, planning stage for years, without ever actually going anywhere"). Unfortunately, there's really not a good place to find free Windows software similar to Freshmeat.net. Download.com or TuCows worked back in the day, but they're pretty much useless now but for mirroring of demos and such (or so I've found).
For power users, mostly (because they'll confuse your grandma)
I'm sure there are many others, but those are the ones that immediately came to mind.
Many people see pictures of Mt. Rainier (which is close enough to Seattle to severely harm the city were it to violently erupt) and just assume it's Mt. St. Helens. Apparently many people think Washington state has only the one mountain. Mt. St. Helens gets all the attention because it likes to blow up more often, but Rainier is larger and more important. Neither are mountains you would want to ski.
"A lot" is two words.
45 minutes away from the city limits (as opposed to city center) is quite a distance. For comparison, that would put you almost halfway between St. Louis, MO, and Springfield, IL, on I-55. That's at slightly above-legal highway speeds, of course, and since you said "city limits" I'm not factoring much in the way of traffic, so you can get a pretty fair distance away. Now, if you said you were 45 minutes from downtown St. Louis, I would be more sympathetic. It's not like you're "right outside" the city. You're way out of it.