Who should take the law into their own hands? Obviously, a security expert such as Fyodor is unlikely to misidentify his aggressor. But there is a fine line between trusting somebody like Fyodor to take appropriate measures, and trusting an average sysadmin who has read some books on security but is prone to make mistakes. How can we juxtapose our need for justice with our need to make sure we punish the right person?
Law enforcement are the only ones who should enforce the law. It's not your duty or mine. Fyodor is just as human as anyone else, and is prone to make mistakes. Why is he more trusted than someone else? Because he wrote nmap? Bullshit. Batman et al are comic book characters. They're not real. Real-life vigilantes get in trouble.
Are we hypocrites for denying the RIAA the right to punish those who steal from them? Certainly most of the Slashdot crowd will agree that the RIAA has no right to invade our computers looking for stolen music. Most of us would also agree that what Fyodor did was justified (and even humourous). But we need to ask ourselves: what is the distinction between the two behavioral patterns? Where do we draw the line?
Yes, you're a hypocrite. How can you even consider this without laughing? If you're going to tell the RIAA that they can't do something (hack into someone's machine), what gives you the right to do it yourself? And if you do it yourself, where do you get off telling the RIAA they can't? There is no line to be drawn. Either it's legal or it's illegal.
Who is accountable? As we can see from this incident, Fyodor did indeed break the law almost a year ago, but he has not been prosecuted for it. Most of us would agree that he shouldn't have been - but technically, his troll-busting activities were illegal. Should these sorts of hacks be legalized or decriminalized under certain circumstances so that an honest, hard-working open source luminary (like Fyodor, Linus, or anyone else who commands respect in our community) does not need to fear the consequences of the actions they take to defend their networks?
I disagree. Fyodor should certainly be prosecuted. That he hasn't been does not make him any less guilty (and until the statute of limitation expires on this, he can be brought in and tried at any time). And as for legalizing these attacks, see above. You can't legalize it for Fyodor or Linus or someone you approve of but make it illegal for someone else like the RIAA. Either it's legal, in which case everyone could do it with impunity, or it's illegal and anyone who does it can be prosecuted (whether they are or not is not the point).
In short, you're full of bullshit. You can't have your cake and eat it to. By supporting Fyodor's actions, you're no better than Fyodor himself.
Back in the beta1f days, I always found Quake 3 Fortress to be a much more accurate conversion of Team Fortress than I did Team Fortress Classic.
Pretty sad that a clone of TeamFortress is more TeamFortress-like than a port of TeamFortress by the TeamFortress team, isn't it? I'd put part of the blame on the Half-Life engine, because I don't think it was ever meant to have the faster-paced action of Quake 1 or Quake 3 (nevermind that it was based on Quake 1, it was so modified that it's almost an entirely new engine). Q3F was definitely fun, though I never really found the community to be as tightly knit as the original TF1 community (mostly due to the fact that the idiot population in public online games really exploded in the late 90s/early 00s, and that I don't have time to dedicate to a clan).
used to have faith in the TeamFortress team, even after they "sold out" to Valve as everyone called it at the time. The more products they create -- something which appears to have come to a stop given the speed of development on Team Fortress 2 -- the more I realize that it must have been purely by accident that Team Fortress was as good as it was, and more a function of the community of mapmakers and server admins than it was of the developers.
The original TF was definitely great because of the excellent maps (not the standard CTF maps like the 2forts, though 2forts was a decent fallback, but the innovative ones like canalzon and hunted and rock), great servers, and fun players. However, I'm still enough of a TF fanboy that I still hope TeamFortress Software can pull it out of their ass and give a good showing with TF2. Judging by the suddenness of Half-Life 2 (who really knew they were going to show it at E3 until only a few weeks before? and who knew that it was so close to being done?), I'd expect TF2 is probably only a year and a half away (uh-oh, I just set myself up. come back in two years and I'll eat those words). We can hope, anyway.
In the meantime, I have my RTCW on XBox Live to satisfy my arcadey team-based multiplayer needs (Day of Defeat is too simmy for my tastes, I don't like dying in one or two shots; I haven't played BF1942; and though I have RTCW on PC and there's a free new expansion for it, I'm hooked on the XBox Live Communicator).
Come play good old-fashioned Team Fortress Classic @ chase.bithive.net.
What a sad day it is when TeamFortress Classic is called "old-fashioned". Back in my day, we played the original TeamFortress, the modification for Quake 1. We played on modems, and if we had a 300ms ping, we liked it! Bah, new-fangled TFC. The Holy Hand Grenade server (24/7 canalzon, may it rest in peace) was the place to play.
And don't even get me started on the butchering of TF that TFC did. (HWguy can walk and shoot? and what was that monstrosity cz2 that was supposed to be a follow-up to the venerable and perfect canalzon? And the scout must've put on 30 pounds, because he sure slowed down. Ack!) I guess I'm showing my age (mid-20s, and already ancient).
Re:For the love of God, don't start the Wheel of T
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A Good Summer Read?
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On the other hand, if you want a good fantasy series, take a look at George R. R. Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" (starts with _A Game of Thrones_). Another multivolume, incomplete series, but he promises only 6 books, so maybe it'll work out.
Then again, Martin started out aiming for a trilogy and missed it. "Song of Ice and Fire" is his largest work (mostly just editting collections, mostly), and we'll see if it pans out. I'm hooked on it though, and will certainly be buying the next in the series this fall.
I also just recently read Neil Gaiman's _Neverwhere_, a dark-comedy urban fantasy (how's that for a sub-sub-genere?), which is excellent.
I liked Gaiman's "American Gods" quite a bit more than "Neverwhere". "Neverwhere" was good, but it just didn't grab me. If you like Gaiman, you might want to check out some Sandman graphic novels.
And just to add another author to the list, I really liked Mary Gentle's "Book of Ash" series. It's an alternate-reality history set in the late middle ages. And just for a lark, her book "Grunts!" was hilarious. Sci-fi comedy with a military twist (imagine orcs as marines, and you'll have a good idea of the book).
As it is, Microsoft is at least partially responsible for the demise of Sega (Since they collaborated on the Dreamcast)
Whoa, nelly! Back it up right there. Yes, Microsoft and Sega collaborated on the Dreamcast. That doesn't mean they're even partially responsible for Sega's demise. No, the main thing that killed the Dreamcast was Sony's effective (if underhanded) marketing of the PS2 over a year before its launch. Sony essentially convinced people to wait for the PS2 in a year rather than buy the Dreamcast "now" (1999). If you don't sell many units, there's nothing you can do. And that has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft (IIRC, there were maybe 2 or 3 Dreamcast games using Windows CE, and that was it).
You can thank Nintendo for that one. A company called Tengen tried to make a game (Tetris I believe) using a cloned unlicensed cartridge. The result? Nintendo sued, and won. As a matter of fact, the Tengen Tetris is a collector's item. Sega won't pursue that with the DC.
The Tengen Tetris case you're referring to was not about Tengen publishing unlicensed titles, but about who had the rights to publish Tetris. It was a big convoluted mess, in part because the Tetris creator (Sergei Kosmansomethingorother) kinda screwed up and gave rights to several people without nailing down just exactly what they can do (A can publish in Japan on PC, but not on any other platform, B can publish on anything in Europe, but not Japan and America, etc). Tengen's Tetris (aside from having a really cool two-player mode, making it more fun than Nintendo's version) is a collector because it turns out Tengen/Atari didn't have the rights to publish Tetris.
However, there was another case, Atari v. Nintendo, where Atari (Tengen) lost because they copied large portions of Nintendo's protection code without license. On the flip side, Accolade won the Sega v. Accolade case because Accolade properly reverse engineered Sega's protection code. So, the moral of the story is that if you do things correctly, you can publish your own games just fine. But screw up even slightly and you're screwed. There were lots of unlicensed developers making games and peripherals for the NES, and only Tengen/Atari got smacked down hard by Nintendo.
Nvidia used brute force and overtook 3dfx (barring 3dfx's stumbles and fall).
Not exactly. 3dfx (3Dfx, before they changed their name, bought STB, and went crazy, wasn't that bad at all) fucked themselves. If anything, 3dfx was guilty of brute-forcing. The Voodoo2 was not much more than a brute-force step from the Voodoo1. The Voodoo3 wasn't much better, with the addition of fairly poor 2D. "22bpp", blah. Gamers wanted 32bpp, nVidia gave them 32bpp. 3dfx had their eyes firmly closed. And let's not even get into the Voodoo4/5 fiasco (nVidia almost pulled a 3dfx with the FX, which isn't very surprising given that nVidia bought out 3dfx). No, 3dfx screwed themselves. nVidia was just in the right place at the right time to take advantage (and they almost weren't there, but Sega bailed them out during their rough times, offering them the contract to make the Saturn video chipset).
Ati tried to "brute force" the Radeon series and could not keep up with Nvidia, until, they (Ati) got smart with the hardware and software optimizations (i.e. finesse).
Except that ATI is still struggling with building rock-solid drivers like nVidia. Yes, they've gotten better (to the "good enough" point), but I'll still choose nVidia over ATI even if ATI gets a few more 3DMarks simply because I know I can trust nVidia to build rock-solid drivers for the life of my card and beyond (hell, nVidia was able to squeeze a good amount of speed out of the old TNT2 with a driver update during the late-GeForce2/early-GeForce3 time frame).
At least Sony supports Linux and supports, for the most part, the right of its customers to tinker.
Sony supports Linux because they can make money off of it. When you have to pay another $200-$300 on top of the $200 (well, $180 now) price of a PS2, almost all of it pure profit, it just makes sense. However, Sony certainly doesn't support modchips. IIRC, it wasn't just Microsoft that went after Lik Sang for selling mod chips -- Nintendo and Sony also had a hand in that. What company would willingly support any market that at its core is all about stealing games? (blah blah just want to play imports blah blah bullshit.)
What else should we expect from MS except for Fear & Control and all of those things we hate, but when has it been any different?
When it comes to online gaming (which is the only area where Microsoft can really control what you do with your XBox), I'll happily take Microsoft's approach over Sony's. Add a mod chip, and you're banned from Live. No questions, you're gone. On the flip side, one of the major PS2 online titles, SOCOM, suffers horribly from cheaters. Yes, you can cheat in XBox Live games too, but you're limited to only in-game bugs. Those can be patched (see Unreal Championship's recent patch to fix a number of exploits with weapons and maps).
Anyway, it really brwaks down like this. I buy a car, and can buy any carburetor I want and install it. Not only that, but I can legally get many third party books on how to modify my car. The fact that xbox is a computer does not make one whit of a difference...no matter whatr MS say, or what they put in their eula (which, iirc, isn't there for an xbox).
So any limitation MS tries to pull flies right in the face of hundreds of years of precedent concerning motoring vehicles, shaving devices and even computers (remember the clone wars [as in pc clones...])!
There's nothing Microsoft can do to stop you from modifying your XBox, exactly in the same way that Chevrolet or Ford can't stop you from modifying your car. What Microsoft/Ford/Chevy can do is refuse you services if you've modified your property. That means if you replace your fuel injectors with a high performance carbeurator, or foul your MAF sensor because you replaced your air filter with an overly-oiled replacement, or put a a mod chip in your XBox, you can be refused warranty service or XBox Live service. Sucks, but that's the price you pay. You can certainly live without those services, but it's a decision you have to make: is modifying your property worth losing access to those services? In some cases, it is (building a car up for racing, you're certainly going to void any warranty -- you're probably also going to make the car uninsurable, and you're going to have to handle any issues on your own). In other cases, it's not. Make your own decision.
We really must get over our prejudices of labeling such a great work as children's literature.
Alternatively, your professor was either a kook and had no clue what he was doing, or had a mean streak and wanted to see just how much bullshit his students would absorb. And I bet you all ate it up greedily.
I'll buy Photoshop Elements as soon as they release a Linux version. Until then, I'll continue to use and contribute to the GIMP effort.
Of course you will, because you don't have a choice. You also can't use Photoshop. That's not the point. The original parent brought up Photoshop pricing as a reason to use the GIMP, which means that he must be using (or willing to use) an operating system which Photoshop supports. Therefore, if Photoshop Elements satisfies his needs and fits within his budget ($99 vs. $500), it should also be considered a valid alternative.
But the $500 price tag for Photoshop makes me a big, big Gimp fan. It does everything I need.
Unless you're a graphics design professional (in which case, $500 is a business expense and can be written off on your taxes, and is a small price to pay to have the industry-standard tool), you probably don't need most of what Photoshop does. However, Photoshop's interface is one of its greatest assets, and you can get that and all the functionality most enthusiasts need in Adobe's Photoshop Elements product. It's $99 and available for Mac and Windows. If you're too lazy to go to the store, you can pay online and download it.
If $99 is still too much for you, then I can't help you.
Re:Cruel Intentions...
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Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Anonymous Coward is right. Sexism, "discrimination based on gender, especially discrimination against women." (emphasis added by me)
I didn't say it was a quote. I called it an aphorism. It's something you'll hear from pretty much every racer in one form or another, and surely predates Mario Andretti.
One big use would be for displaying speed/rpm/etc on your windshield instead of the dash so you don't have to look down while your driving.
GM has been doing this for years already, using just light and mirrors. The first time I saw it was in a Grand Prix GTP back in 96. The HUD technology is still around, and I believe you can even get it in a Corvette. Nothing quite like seeing "150mph" flashing up on your windscreen while driving. I guess that obsoletes the old racer's aphorism, "If you have time to look down to see how fast you're going, you're not going fast enough."
The law applies to minors, who don't have credit cards and therefore can't buy online anyway.
Hello, and welcome to the 1990s. Most teenagers have credit cards on their parents' accounts. Oftentimes, the cards are even in the child's name (because you legally cannot use a card in someone else's name, regardless that most places let you do it anyway). Yes, they still have to answer to their parents for the charge, but as the saying goes, "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission."
Before any mods take the parent seriously, please realize that this is a troll. He gives himself away in the second paragraph: (emphasis added by me)
While I've never coded in C before I have coded in VB for
fifteen years, and in Java for over ten, I was stunned to see how poorly C fared compared to these two, more low-level languages.
However, Java has only been around since 1995, making it physically impossible for this guy to have over ten years of experience. I'm sure that's not even possible if he actually was one of the Java architects -- "over ten years" implies that the latest he could have first used Java was 1992, a good three years before Java was officially announced. While Java could have been around in some form or another internally at Sun, I sincerely doubt it would've been in any kind of useable form that early.
Others may say he gave himself away even earlier, saying that Perl is a retired language. I'm optimistic, and would like to think Perl is dead, so I won't hold that one against him:)
Seriously, if you want to do CLI scripting on windows install cygwin.
Often that is not an option. However, that's okay. cmd.exe's scripting capabilities are quite powerful once you learn what you're doing (there's a lot more there than the batch scripting you did back in the day with DOS). And if that's not enough, you can use WSH and system COM objects to do more. A classic example is expiring users' passwords (for example, if there was a security breach and you believe that some passwords may have been compromised). In unix-land, you'll generally script passwd with some sh glue, and you're done. Maybe you'll write a perl script, but that's often overkill. In Windows, you write a vbscript or jscript using a COM object to run through the users and expire their passwords. The same functionality is there, but a unix admin won't know necessarily how to do it in Windows. Similarly, a Windows admin generally won't know how to do it in Unix. In neither case does it mean that it can't be done.
since you are touting Windows sooo much, where can i download it from. oh yeah, i want the source code also, so it will be optimized for MY system.
For the record, the original poster never mentioned price or open sourcedness (new word?) as a winning factor for KDE. Maybe it was implicit, but it wasn't stated explicitly and so I didn't address it. Of course Windows isn't free, and of course it isn't open source. Not the point. Everybody already knows that.
and seriosuly, you need to stop comparing a DOS prompt to bash, they dont compare. the "DOS Prompt " in windows always was a joke and always will be
Please note that I was talking about Windows XP. Windows XP, being the latest (desktop OS -- Windows Server 2003 is obviously the latest) in the NT family of operating systems, has no "DOS Prompt". It has a command shell, cmd.exe, with a scripting syntax similar to old-school batch scripting, but it's certainly not the same thing. You'd be surprised at how much you can do with cmd scripting. Sure, it may not be quite as powerful as bash, but it can hold its own if you know what you're doing. As well, I wasn't trying to compare shell interpreters. All I was doing was pointing out that Konqueror's design is directly based upon Explorer's -- they're both little more than containers for other objects. As such, while Explorer may not have a CLI view directly built into it like Konqueror apparently does, it's not that difficult (already been done, you don't even have to write the code) to add it yourself.
[KDE] Windows respond to mouse overs after the time I specified, right number of desktops with the correct visibility of other apps, themability also a big plus. Don't know if XP has themability or to what degree but I don't consider it a major function.
All of that is available in Windows. Get TweakUI from the Power Toys page and you can enable X-Mouse if you like focus-follows-mouse functionality (personally, I don't like it, but to each his own). You can also theme XP with StyleXP from TGTSoft (or if you don't want to pay, you can find the uxtheme.dll hack on google -- search for "uxtheme.dll SP1", no quotes). Tons of themes are available.
However I do prefer the KMenus method for listing large numbers of programs as a heirarchy, when Windows tries to list 3 full columns at once it's much too slow especially since you probably already know the location of the item you're looking for.
That's just organization. There's nothing stopping you from organizing your Program Files menu on the Start Menu in Windows. KDE has a nice organization because it comes with a lot of apps to begin with. Windows on the other hand tends to rely on separate software, and each installer wants to have its own top-level menu. Don't let it. Some apps play nice, like all of Microsoft Games Studio's games -- they all install under "Microsoft Games" rather than having one menu for each game. So, organize the menu if you don't like the default.
Also KDE gets points for multiple desktops, yes I know that you can get programs for Windows to mimic that but it doesn't work as well, most notably it simply hide apps so that cycling through apps in one desktop gives you apps for all desktops. The file manager for windows is generally nicer but the combination of file manager and CLI built in for KDE should give it the advantage there but I'll call it a tie.
Try the Virtual Desktop Manager, again from Power Toys. It does multiple desktops correctly, though it does have some other issues. Also, I guess I'm not familiar with KDE's file manager/CLI (I assume you mean Konqueror?), but remember that the Konqueror design is essentially Explorer/Internet Explorer's design -- it's really little more than a container for other objects. There's a Power Toy to open a command prompt from a folder, or you could try something like this instead, a command prompt explorer bar to put a CLI directly in the explorer window. Is that what you mean KDE does?
Sure, right out of the box KDE is more configurable and has a little more functionality (virtual desktops, mostly). But with a little work and using only that which is built into Windows or Power Toys provided by Microsoft directly (ie, not replacing your shell with something like LiteStep, or paying for something like StarDock's WindowBlinds) you can make Windows (XP) do everything that made you choose KDE over Windows. The only thing Windows can't do is run on top of Linux:).
Incidently, here's an interesting if not mildly amusing 'amatuer' traffic analysis:
The "traffic waves research" may be entirely empirical, but I'll be damned if it doesn't work. I ran across that site some months ago, and have consciously been paying attention to the gaps I leave in front of me. Maybe I'm full of it, but I've seen smaller traffic jams clear up just because I left a large enough buffer that by the time I reached the last stopped car, traffic was moving again and I hardly had to slow down at all.
We could all benefit from reading this guy's site and following his recommendations.
You do realize the article only covered Microsoft's direct titles for the XBox, right? For instance, Konami announced DDR (with XBox Live! support, even!) and Silent Scope for the XBox, but you don't see it here because these are only Microsoft titles. Also, this was only focusing on games. The author didn't cover any of the XBox Live enhancements. So, 7 games (at least one guaranteed to be a major blockbuster and system seller), $20 price drop, and major new enhancements to XBox Live really isn't that bad at all.
If you can give me sources, I'll beleive it. I was under the impression (and I think read somewhere) that HL indeeed used the Quake 2 engine...
Is Id a valid source? Id's Technology Licensing Program page, check out the line that reads, "Remember this engine is the foundation for what Valve did with Half-Life, and the software and OpenGL rendering is still as fast as it ever was," in section C, "The GPL'd Quake Engine." I'd think Id would know who's done what with their engines (well, third-party licenses, anyway -- I'm sure they don't keep track of what people have done with the GPL'd code).
People usually get confused and think Half-Life was based on Quake 2 because Valve did use some technology from Quake 2, porting it back into the Quake 1 engine, and they did make major changes to the Q1 engine. Also, Half-Life and Q2 were released fairly close together (Q2 released Christmas 97, HL released spring 98, IIRC).
You're correct, though. Id's main contribution since Quake 1 is the advancement of engine technology. Quake 2's single player game more or less sucked, and Quake 3 didn't even really have one. However, with Doom 3, Id is supposedly focusing mainly on single player. That means that the single player game should be at least decent, if not good, but more importantly that the multiplayer aspects are likely not getting the attention you expect. As well, theCarmack has said in the past that the Doom 3 handles only a few models on-screen at a time. More than that and it can really start to bog down. That means it'll be great for the atmosphere Doom 3 is trying for, with more tension and paranoia than screens full of monsters, and less great for much else. Will that change? Sure. Hardware will get better, and I'm sure some 3rd parties like Raven will have a go at modifying the engine. The point is that the Doom3 engine is going in quite a different direction from the Quake3 engine, and may not be well-suited (at least initially) for most third-party licensees.
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Law enforcement are the only ones who should enforce the law. It's not your duty or mine. Fyodor is just as human as anyone else, and is prone to make mistakes. Why is he more trusted than someone else? Because he wrote nmap? Bullshit. Batman et al are comic book characters. They're not real. Real-life vigilantes get in trouble.
Yes, you're a hypocrite. How can you even consider this without laughing? If you're going to tell the RIAA that they can't do something (hack into someone's machine), what gives you the right to do it yourself? And if you do it yourself, where do you get off telling the RIAA they can't? There is no line to be drawn. Either it's legal or it's illegal.
I disagree. Fyodor should certainly be prosecuted. That he hasn't been does not make him any less guilty (and until the statute of limitation expires on this, he can be brought in and tried at any time). And as for legalizing these attacks, see above. You can't legalize it for Fyodor or Linus or someone you approve of but make it illegal for someone else like the RIAA. Either it's legal, in which case everyone could do it with impunity, or it's illegal and anyone who does it can be prosecuted (whether they are or not is not the point).
In short, you're full of bullshit. You can't have your cake and eat it to. By supporting Fyodor's actions, you're no better than Fyodor himself.
Pretty sad that a clone of TeamFortress is more TeamFortress-like than a port of TeamFortress by the TeamFortress team, isn't it? I'd put part of the blame on the Half-Life engine, because I don't think it was ever meant to have the faster-paced action of Quake 1 or Quake 3 (nevermind that it was based on Quake 1, it was so modified that it's almost an entirely new engine). Q3F was definitely fun, though I never really found the community to be as tightly knit as the original TF1 community (mostly due to the fact that the idiot population in public online games really exploded in the late 90s/early 00s, and that I don't have time to dedicate to a clan).
The original TF was definitely great because of the excellent maps (not the standard CTF maps like the 2forts, though 2forts was a decent fallback, but the innovative ones like canalzon and hunted and rock), great servers, and fun players. However, I'm still enough of a TF fanboy that I still hope TeamFortress Software can pull it out of their ass and give a good showing with TF2. Judging by the suddenness of Half-Life 2 (who really knew they were going to show it at E3 until only a few weeks before? and who knew that it was so close to being done?), I'd expect TF2 is probably only a year and a half away (uh-oh, I just set myself up. come back in two years and I'll eat those words). We can hope, anyway.
In the meantime, I have my RTCW on XBox Live to satisfy my arcadey team-based multiplayer needs (Day of Defeat is too simmy for my tastes, I don't like dying in one or two shots; I haven't played BF1942; and though I have RTCW on PC and there's a free new expansion for it, I'm hooked on the XBox Live Communicator).
What a sad day it is when TeamFortress Classic is called "old-fashioned". Back in my day, we played the original TeamFortress, the modification for Quake 1. We played on modems, and if we had a 300ms ping, we liked it! Bah, new-fangled TFC. The Holy Hand Grenade server (24/7 canalzon, may it rest in peace) was the place to play.
And don't even get me started on the butchering of TF that TFC did. (HWguy can walk and shoot? and what was that monstrosity cz2 that was supposed to be a follow-up to the venerable and perfect canalzon? And the scout must've put on 30 pounds, because he sure slowed down. Ack!) I guess I'm showing my age (mid-20s, and already ancient).
Then again, Martin started out aiming for a trilogy and missed it. "Song of Ice and Fire" is his largest work (mostly just editting collections, mostly), and we'll see if it pans out. I'm hooked on it though, and will certainly be buying the next in the series this fall.
I liked Gaiman's "American Gods" quite a bit more than "Neverwhere". "Neverwhere" was good, but it just didn't grab me. If you like Gaiman, you might want to check out some Sandman graphic novels.
And just to add another author to the list, I really liked Mary Gentle's "Book of Ash" series. It's an alternate-reality history set in the late middle ages. And just for a lark, her book "Grunts!" was hilarious. Sci-fi comedy with a military twist (imagine orcs as marines, and you'll have a good idea of the book).
Whoa, nelly! Back it up right there. Yes, Microsoft and Sega collaborated on the Dreamcast. That doesn't mean they're even partially responsible for Sega's demise. No, the main thing that killed the Dreamcast was Sony's effective (if underhanded) marketing of the PS2 over a year before its launch. Sony essentially convinced people to wait for the PS2 in a year rather than buy the Dreamcast "now" (1999). If you don't sell many units, there's nothing you can do. And that has absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft (IIRC, there were maybe 2 or 3 Dreamcast games using Windows CE, and that was it).
The Tengen Tetris case you're referring to was not about Tengen publishing unlicensed titles, but about who had the rights to publish Tetris. It was a big convoluted mess, in part because the Tetris creator (Sergei Kosmansomethingorother) kinda screwed up and gave rights to several people without nailing down just exactly what they can do (A can publish in Japan on PC, but not on any other platform, B can publish on anything in Europe, but not Japan and America, etc). Tengen's Tetris (aside from having a really cool two-player mode, making it more fun than Nintendo's version) is a collector because it turns out Tengen/Atari didn't have the rights to publish Tetris.
However, there was another case, Atari v. Nintendo, where Atari (Tengen) lost because they copied large portions of Nintendo's protection code without license. On the flip side, Accolade won the Sega v. Accolade case because Accolade properly reverse engineered Sega's protection code. So, the moral of the story is that if you do things correctly, you can publish your own games just fine. But screw up even slightly and you're screwed. There were lots of unlicensed developers making games and peripherals for the NES, and only Tengen/Atari got smacked down hard by Nintendo.
Not exactly. 3dfx (3Dfx, before they changed their name, bought STB, and went crazy, wasn't that bad at all) fucked themselves. If anything, 3dfx was guilty of brute-forcing. The Voodoo2 was not much more than a brute-force step from the Voodoo1. The Voodoo3 wasn't much better, with the addition of fairly poor 2D. "22bpp", blah. Gamers wanted 32bpp, nVidia gave them 32bpp. 3dfx had their eyes firmly closed. And let's not even get into the Voodoo4/5 fiasco (nVidia almost pulled a 3dfx with the FX, which isn't very surprising given that nVidia bought out 3dfx). No, 3dfx screwed themselves. nVidia was just in the right place at the right time to take advantage (and they almost weren't there, but Sega bailed them out during their rough times, offering them the contract to make the Saturn video chipset).
Except that ATI is still struggling with building rock-solid drivers like nVidia. Yes, they've gotten better (to the "good enough" point), but I'll still choose nVidia over ATI even if ATI gets a few more 3DMarks simply because I know I can trust nVidia to build rock-solid drivers for the life of my card and beyond (hell, nVidia was able to squeeze a good amount of speed out of the old TNT2 with a driver update during the late-GeForce2/early-GeForce3 time frame).
Sony supports Linux because they can make money off of it. When you have to pay another $200-$300 on top of the $200 (well, $180 now) price of a PS2, almost all of it pure profit, it just makes sense. However, Sony certainly doesn't support modchips. IIRC, it wasn't just Microsoft that went after Lik Sang for selling mod chips -- Nintendo and Sony also had a hand in that. What company would willingly support any market that at its core is all about stealing games? (blah blah just want to play imports blah blah bullshit.)
When it comes to online gaming (which is the only area where Microsoft can really control what you do with your XBox), I'll happily take Microsoft's approach over Sony's. Add a mod chip, and you're banned from Live. No questions, you're gone. On the flip side, one of the major PS2 online titles, SOCOM, suffers horribly from cheaters. Yes, you can cheat in XBox Live games too, but you're limited to only in-game bugs. Those can be patched (see Unreal Championship's recent patch to fix a number of exploits with weapons and maps).
There's nothing Microsoft can do to stop you from modifying your XBox, exactly in the same way that Chevrolet or Ford can't stop you from modifying your car. What Microsoft/Ford/Chevy can do is refuse you services if you've modified your property. That means if you replace your fuel injectors with a high performance carbeurator, or foul your MAF sensor because you replaced your air filter with an overly-oiled replacement, or put a a mod chip in your XBox, you can be refused warranty service or XBox Live service. Sucks, but that's the price you pay. You can certainly live without those services, but it's a decision you have to make: is modifying your property worth losing access to those services? In some cases, it is (building a car up for racing, you're certainly going to void any warranty -- you're probably also going to make the car uninsurable, and you're going to have to handle any issues on your own). In other cases, it's not. Make your own decision.
Alternatively, your professor was either a kook and had no clue what he was doing, or had a mean streak and wanted to see just how much bullshit his students would absorb. And I bet you all ate it up greedily.
Of course you will, because you don't have a choice. You also can't use Photoshop. That's not the point. The original parent brought up Photoshop pricing as a reason to use the GIMP, which means that he must be using (or willing to use) an operating system which Photoshop supports. Therefore, if Photoshop Elements satisfies his needs and fits within his budget ($99 vs. $500), it should also be considered a valid alternative.
Unless you're a graphics design professional (in which case, $500 is a business expense and can be written off on your taxes, and is a small price to pay to have the industry-standard tool), you probably don't need most of what Photoshop does. However, Photoshop's interface is one of its greatest assets, and you can get that and all the functionality most enthusiasts need in Adobe's Photoshop Elements product. It's $99 and available for Mac and Windows. If you're too lazy to go to the store, you can pay online and download it.
If $99 is still too much for you, then I can't help you.
The Anonymous Coward is right. Sexism, "discrimination based on gender, especially discrimination against women." (emphasis added by me)
What was your mind wondering about? Ooohhh, you meant your mind was wandering. I get it.
I didn't say it was a quote. I called it an aphorism. It's something you'll hear from pretty much every racer in one form or another, and surely predates Mario Andretti.
GM has been doing this for years already, using just light and mirrors. The first time I saw it was in a Grand Prix GTP back in 96. The HUD technology is still around, and I believe you can even get it in a Corvette. Nothing quite like seeing "150mph" flashing up on your windscreen while driving. I guess that obsoletes the old racer's aphorism, "If you have time to look down to see how fast you're going, you're not going fast enough."
Hello, and welcome to the 1990s. Most teenagers have credit cards on their parents' accounts. Oftentimes, the cards are even in the child's name (because you legally cannot use a card in someone else's name, regardless that most places let you do it anyway). Yes, they still have to answer to their parents for the charge, but as the saying goes, "It's easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission."
Before any mods take the parent seriously, please realize that this is a troll. He gives himself away in the second paragraph: (emphasis added by me)
However, Java has only been around since 1995, making it physically impossible for this guy to have over ten years of experience. I'm sure that's not even possible if he actually was one of the Java architects -- "over ten years" implies that the latest he could have first used Java was 1992, a good three years before Java was officially announced. While Java could have been around in some form or another internally at Sun, I sincerely doubt it would've been in any kind of useable form that early.
Others may say he gave himself away even earlier, saying that Perl is a retired language. I'm optimistic, and would like to think Perl is dead, so I won't hold that one against him :)
Often that is not an option. However, that's okay. cmd.exe's scripting capabilities are quite powerful once you learn what you're doing (there's a lot more there than the batch scripting you did back in the day with DOS). And if that's not enough, you can use WSH and system COM objects to do more. A classic example is expiring users' passwords (for example, if there was a security breach and you believe that some passwords may have been compromised). In unix-land, you'll generally script passwd with some sh glue, and you're done. Maybe you'll write a perl script, but that's often overkill. In Windows, you write a vbscript or jscript using a COM object to run through the users and expire their passwords. The same functionality is there, but a unix admin won't know necessarily how to do it in Windows. Similarly, a Windows admin generally won't know how to do it in Unix. In neither case does it mean that it can't be done.
For the record, the original poster never mentioned price or open sourcedness (new word?) as a winning factor for KDE. Maybe it was implicit, but it wasn't stated explicitly and so I didn't address it. Of course Windows isn't free, and of course it isn't open source. Not the point. Everybody already knows that.
Please note that I was talking about Windows XP. Windows XP, being the latest (desktop OS -- Windows Server 2003 is obviously the latest) in the NT family of operating systems, has no "DOS Prompt". It has a command shell, cmd.exe, with a scripting syntax similar to old-school batch scripting, but it's certainly not the same thing. You'd be surprised at how much you can do with cmd scripting. Sure, it may not be quite as powerful as bash, but it can hold its own if you know what you're doing. As well, I wasn't trying to compare shell interpreters. All I was doing was pointing out that Konqueror's design is directly based upon Explorer's -- they're both little more than containers for other objects. As such, while Explorer may not have a CLI view directly built into it like Konqueror apparently does, it's not that difficult (already been done, you don't even have to write the code) to add it yourself.
All of that is available in Windows. Get TweakUI from the Power Toys page and you can enable X-Mouse if you like focus-follows-mouse functionality (personally, I don't like it, but to each his own). You can also theme XP with StyleXP from TGTSoft (or if you don't want to pay, you can find the uxtheme.dll hack on google -- search for "uxtheme.dll SP1", no quotes). Tons of themes are available.
That's just organization. There's nothing stopping you from organizing your Program Files menu on the Start Menu in Windows. KDE has a nice organization because it comes with a lot of apps to begin with. Windows on the other hand tends to rely on separate software, and each installer wants to have its own top-level menu. Don't let it. Some apps play nice, like all of Microsoft Games Studio's games -- they all install under "Microsoft Games" rather than having one menu for each game. So, organize the menu if you don't like the default.
Try the Virtual Desktop Manager, again from Power Toys. It does multiple desktops correctly, though it does have some other issues. Also, I guess I'm not familiar with KDE's file manager/CLI (I assume you mean Konqueror?), but remember that the Konqueror design is essentially Explorer/Internet Explorer's design -- it's really little more than a container for other objects. There's a Power Toy to open a command prompt from a folder, or you could try something like this instead, a command prompt explorer bar to put a CLI directly in the explorer window. Is that what you mean KDE does?
Sure, right out of the box KDE is more configurable and has a little more functionality (virtual desktops, mostly). But with a little work and using only that which is built into Windows or Power Toys provided by Microsoft directly (ie, not replacing your shell with something like LiteStep, or paying for something like StarDock's WindowBlinds) you can make Windows (XP) do everything that made you choose KDE over Windows. The only thing Windows can't do is run on top of Linux :).
The "traffic waves research" may be entirely empirical, but I'll be damned if it doesn't work. I ran across that site some months ago, and have consciously been paying attention to the gaps I leave in front of me. Maybe I'm full of it, but I've seen smaller traffic jams clear up just because I left a large enough buffer that by the time I reached the last stopped car, traffic was moving again and I hardly had to slow down at all.
We could all benefit from reading this guy's site and following his recommendations.
You do realize the article only covered Microsoft's direct titles for the XBox, right? For instance, Konami announced DDR (with XBox Live! support, even!) and Silent Scope for the XBox, but you don't see it here because these are only Microsoft titles. Also, this was only focusing on games. The author didn't cover any of the XBox Live enhancements. So, 7 games (at least one guaranteed to be a major blockbuster and system seller), $20 price drop, and major new enhancements to XBox Live really isn't that bad at all.
Is Id a valid source? Id's Technology Licensing Program page, check out the line that reads, "Remember this engine is the foundation for what Valve did with Half-Life, and the software and OpenGL rendering is still as fast as it ever was," in section C, "The GPL'd Quake Engine." I'd think Id would know who's done what with their engines (well, third-party licenses, anyway -- I'm sure they don't keep track of what people have done with the GPL'd code).
People usually get confused and think Half-Life was based on Quake 2 because Valve did use some technology from Quake 2, porting it back into the Quake 1 engine, and they did make major changes to the Q1 engine. Also, Half-Life and Q2 were released fairly close together (Q2 released Christmas 97, HL released spring 98, IIRC).
Nope. Quake 1 engine.
You're correct, though. Id's main contribution since Quake 1 is the advancement of engine technology. Quake 2's single player game more or less sucked, and Quake 3 didn't even really have one. However, with Doom 3, Id is supposedly focusing mainly on single player. That means that the single player game should be at least decent, if not good, but more importantly that the multiplayer aspects are likely not getting the attention you expect. As well, theCarmack has said in the past that the Doom 3 handles only a few models on-screen at a time. More than that and it can really start to bog down. That means it'll be great for the atmosphere Doom 3 is trying for, with more tension and paranoia than screens full of monsters, and less great for much else. Will that change? Sure. Hardware will get better, and I'm sure some 3rd parties like Raven will have a go at modifying the engine. The point is that the Doom3 engine is going in quite a different direction from the Quake3 engine, and may not be well-suited (at least initially) for most third-party licensees.