Toshiba Satellite 1955-S803. For this one, "laptop" is a bit of a misnomer -- it's really more like a portable desktop replacement. Though, I have sat it on my lap while using it before, and it works well enough. It was a bitch finding a decent case that would fit the thing. The one I found is still just a bit too small, but I can cram it in there and it works well enough for now.
Re:BFD. You can do the same thing to the 10k CS
on
Unreal Security Hole
·
· Score: 1
Damn. That's a lot of info. Were you a CS major in college or something?
Would you believe I was? (different definition of "CS", of course) To be honest, I never really liked Counter-Strike all that much. I really don't like a game where I play for 10 seconds, die, and then wait 5 minutes for everybody else to die. If I wanted that little excitement, I'd rather go autocross my car (spend a day at the track for 3 minutes of track time, yay!).
For my entertainment dollar, TeamFortress has always been the way to go. And not that crap they call "TeamFortress Classic", either, but the original Quake 1 mod (TF around version 2.5 or so was the sweet spot). I mean, really, TFC screwed everything up! The scout was too slow, the hwguy could move while shooting (wtf!), they totally butchered canalzon (Best. Map. EVAR!), etc. But now I'm ranting... (oh for the glory days of the 24/7 canalzon server, Holy Hand Grenade, playing canalzon with Ramirez, one of the map authors. brings a tear to my eye)
you would think that would be plenty, but it really isn't, at least not for the complex and intricate parts of maya. You need a fully decked pc with at least a gf4 (preferably a quadro4) 3d studio max on the other hand should run well on a laptop with said specs.
So the bottleneck is the video card, rather than the CPU? I don't really see how.5GHz could make that much of a difference these days (man, and I'm still running a p200mmx and a celeryonion 433MHz).
as for the video editors, yeah, 2.5 is plenty of raw power, but then again, 2.5Ghz is far more than the average user needs. Though i am envious of your laptop.
Don't be:) It cost me an arm and a leg, and I only get about 2 hours of battery time out of it. I probably would've been wiser to go with a 2.0GHz mobile P4 and spend the extra money on a UXGA screen (though the 16" 1280x1024 LCD on my laptop is pretty damned sweet, if not very portable). However, for that arm and leg I did get "built-in" (mini-PCI card) wireless, removeable wireless keyboard and mouse (I've since lost the mouse, though the laptop is less than three months old:), 16" screen, fast processor, etc. I'm happy, but could've gotten by with much less.
i dont know about most of the world (well actually i do, but thats aside the point) i really do need (well, really, really, really want) a 3Ghz laptop. Wouldnt this be a wonderful world if i would run Maya 4.5 from my couch.... well, then again, the graphics card still couldnt handle well, but my video editors would run extra-super--lucky-fast!!!
Can't you already do that? I have a nice 2.5GHz laptop (desktop chip, not mobile) with a GeForce4 Go video chipset. That should be more than enough to run Maya in comfort, or any of your video editors. The only problem I would have with it is doing graphical manipulation using a trackpad. Not fun. But a wireless mouse or a tablet would be perfect.
Now if only I didn't suck at art...
Re:BFD. You can do the same thing to the 10k CS
on
Unreal Security Hole
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Half-Life was based on the Quake 2 engine. Which still has a surprising number of network security issues considering the constant attacks when it was released.
Nope. This is a popular misconception, based on the release dates of Half-Life and Quake 2. Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 codebase, and while they did add functionality that Quake 2 also had (hardware acceleration, though glquake did that too, colored lighting, one or two other things), they did a lot more as well, like skeletal animation. However, at its core, Half-Life was still based on Quake 1. Id Software has said as much (search that page for "Half-Life", you'll come up with "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.").
Re:I really like Rein's comment
on
Unreal Security Hole
·
· Score: 2, Informative
But seriously, it's nice to see a large company admitting it has "F***ed up".
Epic is not a large company by any means. Certainly not in comparison to the Microsofts, Suns, and IBMs of the world, and not even within their own gaming market -- they're positively dwarfed by the big guys like EA, Acclaim, Infogrames/GT Interactive/Atari/whatever they're calling themselves now, etc. No, Epic is what a game development company should be -- small, dedicated, and highly focused on one thing at a time, similar to Id (which is also an extremely tiny company, as these things are measured).
However, it's great to see these relatively small companies having so much influence in a market. Id and Epic literally own the FPS market, considering there are very few shooters that don't use technology from one or the other.
Re:BFD. You can do the same thing to the 10k CS
on
Unreal Security Hole
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The problem with security for games like CS is that it was passed off by two other companies (id to valve and then to the CS team), so you've got a pretty confusing situation to take grasp of with all that passing of the security buck. I don't think the makers of CS are at all in the same league as John Carmack, but it doesn't seem to matter in the wake of HL/CS sales, does it?
For being one of the first CS players, you sure have your timeline screwed up. Id never had anything to do with CS. I assume you mean that Id licensed the Quake 1 engine to Valve, who then modified the fuck out of it to create Half-Life, who then created and published the modification SDK, which was then used by the original volunteer team to create CS, which was eventually picked up by Valve. Similar to the progress of Team Fortress, which started as a Quake 1 modification, then the TF team was picked up by Valve to create Team Fortress 2 based on Half-Life, and who did the Half-Life based Team Fortress Classic, meant mostly as a proof-of-concept for the Half-Life mod SDK.
TheCarmack is a god, but he and the Counter-Strike team are in completely different arenas. TheCarmack and others at Id are generally more interested in doing the infrastructure for games (thus the proliferation of games based on the various Quake engines, while the Id-created games tend to be fairly straight-forward and more or less boring), while the Counter-Strike team is more along the lines of what Legend or Digital Etremes is to Epic, or Raven software is to Id -- they create content (Wheel of Time, Unreal 2, various Quake-based games, etc), while the engine developers (Id, Epic) create the infrastructure. It seems to be a very profitable relationship for both parties, and is highly indicative of the way the game industry is moving -- some companies compete to create infrastructure (a la Windows vs. Linux), while other companies use that infrastructure and compete by making games (a la Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice).
Could this be a new consequence of the Slashdot Effect? We all know about the damaging Slashdot Effect, where websites are literally blown out of existence by the huge amount of traffic Slashdot can generate. However, it seems very likely that theCarmack's change in luck so shortly after Slashdot's article had something to do with the Slashdot article. Maybe the widespread airing of his plight got back to the officials who were blocking him, or perhaps there are Slashdot readers involved in the same offices that turned around and decided to help rather than hinder.
Just an interesting observation, is all. Good luck to theCarmack.
Dune is a part of the must-read list, as far as the first book.
Please, please, please recommend reading the other books in the series as well! Book one of Dune is really little more than backstory. It's setting up the history of the Tyrant through to his grandparents (Leto I and Jessica). Books two and three show Paul as a failed messiah, his attempt at redemption, and the effect of his failure on his son and how it helped form the Tyrant Leto II. In short, the story is a lot deeper and more complicated than the first book would lead one to believe.
I applaud Sci-Fi for continuing with the Dune series. Perhaps one day we'll see the entire series in theatrical (well, made-for-tv theater, anyway) form, hopefully leading to video games and such based on the later novels as well. It gets tiring when everything up to now has focused on such a tiny part of the Dune mythos, when there is so much more interesting material to work with.
I have two questions for you. Are you paying money for slashdot?
Supposedly some people are. See that "subscribe" link over on the left? That's how you pay money to Slashdot. Though I'd not do it, because the quality of Slashdot is not worth the money.
Are you submitting plenty of original articles to slashdot yourself?
I've tried to submit a number of stories to Slashdot over the years. Guess what? Every single one of them was rejected. It only takes so many rejections for a guy to give up. What good does it do me to continue to submit well-written stories on interesting articles when they continue to be rejected? None at all. So, it sounds like we have a chicken and egg problem here -- to get better stories, better stories need to be submitted, but the editors keep posting dupes, trips, and rejecting good stories, so the people submitting good stories give up and stop submitting, thus relegating Slashdot to poorly written stories and dupes...
There are three kinds of intelligence. The first is those who just sort of go along ignoring everything. The second are those who criticize everything. But the third, and best, are those who create something at the risk of being criticized...like the people who run slashdot.
I think you need to qualify your third category a bit better. There are the people that create something at the risk of being criticized, and then don't give a shit when they get that criticism (or worse, get defensive, like the Slashdot editors have done in the past), and there are the people that create something at the risk of being criticized, and then take to heart any criticism they receive and use it to enhance their creation. I'd argue that the former type of "intelligence" is no better than your first two types, while the latter is what any creative person should strive toward. If you don't give a shit about criticism you receive, then your act of creation is nothing more than masturbation.
The problem stems from "obvious" libraries being licensed under the GPL. As other posters in this story have pointed out, many coders don't really understand the GPL. They equate it with "open source", when it's not -- it's "Free software", and has a certain set of restrictions (as contradictory as that is). When these programmers write library code that is widely useful (something that is difficult or obtuse enough that you don't want to reinvent the wheel, but obvious enough that many people will want to use it) and license it as GPL, it restricts my freedom -- I now have to spend my time and resources reinventing the wheel because the original inventor didn't understand what he was doing when he licensed the wheel. The same goes for reference code. For example, the BSD tcp/ip stack is the reference implementation for a tcp/ip stack, and is obviously licensed under the BSD license. That means that anyone can look at the code to get an idea of how to properly write a network stack, and even use the code as the basis for their own network stack. If that were instead licensed under the GPL, not only could you not start from that stack to build your own, you couldn't even look at that stack for fear of contamination. In other words, it's not all about wanting to capitalize on other's works, though you can make it seem that way to demonize those that disagree with the GPL.
I just don't think that closed source is the only solution that will work in this case. Sometimes it might be the best solution, but perhaps sometimes it isn't.
Bingo. I'm not saying, "All open source is bad. Down with open source!" Instead, I'm saying, "Proprietary software is not bad. It can coexist, and there are plenty of times when it's more appropriate than open source. Being zealous about the GPL in particular or open source in general to the point where you're blind to any proprietary software is defeatist."
To work with the on-going example, there's a very good chance that your company doesn't initially have the resources necessary to write software. Therefore, to take upon the job yourself requires investment -- people, tools (vi and emacs are good, but integrated IDEs are better, and those aren't always free, and the free ones aren't always good), hardware, etc. That's a big up-front cost and a sizeable on-going cost (payroll). Now that you have all of the necessary resources, you can begin working on your new software. The cost of that software is all of the startup costs mentioned above, plus the wages for the programmers multiplied by the amount of time the project takes. You're probably looking at a few tens of thousands of dollars, at least. Depending on your market, that could be a huge chunk of money, and it's going to take you time to recoup your costs by employing the cost-saving/revenue-enhancing features of the new software. Why, then would you give that software to your competitors? If there's enough demand, you could cetainly sell it to them and help offset some of your costs, but to give it away for free automatically hurts you (your competitor can use the $XX thousands of dollars they saved on not writing the software for something else, possibly undercutting your products or services).
This is not always the case, and there are obviously exceptions (the software wasn't that expensive to write, the benefits of the software are not such that it would put you at an economic advantage v. your competitors, the other people wanting to use your software are not competitors, etc). However, it's something that the zealotry tend not to consider when they blindly advocate open source all the time.
And yet, your company just put thousands of dollars into this software that arguably should help them increase their business (if it doesn't have business value, the company's not going to write it in the first place). The last thing you want to do is give that software to your competitors and let them reap the money saving or revenue generating benefits as well without the associated development costs. You'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
However, if some entrepenuerial (sp?) company took a look at your industry, noticed a problem space they could solve through software, then developed that software and sold it to everybody in the industry for the same price (give or take service contracts), then everyone wins -- you get the software for the same price as your competitors because you're all paying for the developmnent of the software, amortized across the expected number of customers plus some amount for profit.
/. basicaly started as a place to bash microsoft, support linux, GNU, etc
Funny, I recall it starting as a place to get a decent summary of the interesting happenings in the world as a technologically-inclined person would see them (ie, more interested in a story on a wearable computer than what runway models in France are wearing). Don't make me play the UID card, as mine's lower than yours. The pro-linux, pro-GNU, anti-microsoft stuff is one part editorial bias to five parts "popular" sentiment ("popular" in reference to comment posters on Slashdot, who can be considered a vocal minority of Slashdot readers-- the editors themselves have said that only a fraction of the visitors to Slashdot ever take the time to actually post anything).
Back In The Day, when Slashdot was young, Linux was enjoying a growth spurt and the dot-commers were bringing it more and more into the spotlight. That translated to more stories about Linux (and thus, more stories about GPL, and thus more stories about RMS) on Slashdot, which would tend to bring the more zealous Linux users to the site for the stories (and apparently they stuck around for the other content), making the place an ad-hoc gathering ground for GPL extremists. Did Rob plan that? Highly unlikely.
As for your suggestion that the poster leave Slashdot if he doesn't conform to the popular opinion, what gives you the right to suggest such a thing? You don't have to read his comments, but you do. Maybe you would be better off posting in alt.linux.advocacy (or is it comp.os.linux.advocacy now? whatever, some linux advocacy newsgroup where you can preach to the choir)?
This isn't about being best in the world, but about helping to keep freedom.
Don't you mean "Freedom", as RMS's definition of "Freedom" is different than the standard definition of "freedom" (same for "Free" v. "free"). As soon as RMS writes a license that allows for true "freedom" (ie, I can do whatever the hell I want with the licensed software, including releasing it under a non-GPL license), I will take his views on "freedom" seriously.
Why not?
Why should he be?
And what does this have to do with the argument? Apache license is indeed open to hoarding, but Plan 9 isn't even free.
It's a perfectly valid comparative argument. If RMS deems a license non-compatible with the GPL, then it is by definition not "Free", and software licensed under that non-compatible license is not "Free Software". Apache's license comes into play to show the absurdity of this. The Apache license is a perfectly valid and acceptable Open Source license, allowing you to do things like read and modify the source code, publish your changes as you see fit (or not, if you see fit not to publish), etc. The same goes for the Plan 9 license (with a few minor caveats, but little different than any other Open Source license). I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure the Plan 9 license is officially recognized as an Open Source license. However, just as the Apache license is not a Free Software license, neither is the Plan 9 license. And that only really makes a difference if you're fanatical about Free Software. For 99% of the population, Open Source is good enough (you get the source code, you get the ability to change that source code, and you get the ability to redistribute your changes -- what more can you conceivably need?).
If RMS had his way, everybody would be licensing their code under the GPL. I won't bother to postulate whether that's a good or bad thing (IMHO, bad, but that's just a HO). What I will say is that it's short-sighted and naive. Software companies are not going to go away overnight (or even in the forseeable future, if you value useable software), but in a world of "GPL, and nothing but GPL" those companies cannot exist.
Welcome to RMS' utopia, where software is free and no programmer has to worry about how they're going to eat, where they're going to live, how they're going to afford clothing, or anything else. Software doesn't spontaneously write itself, but if you're not getting paid to write software, you have to spend time doing something else to be able to survive. How long has it taken to get HURD to a semi-useable state again? And how much is that due to programmers only being able to work nights and weekends (assuming they have no lives) on the code, rather than having a significant core of developers who work on the project as a day job with all of the trappings -- ie, wages?
#10% of the score is based on the number of inquiries on your report. If you've applied for a lot of credit cards or loans, you will have a lot of inquiries on your credit report. These are bad for your score because they indicate that you may be in some kind of financial trouble or may be taking on a lot of debt (even if you haven't used the cards or gotten the loans). The more recent these inquiries are, the worse for your credit score. FICO scores only count inquiries from the past year.
You (or howstuffworks.com) really need to qualify this one. Take a look at your credit report sometime. Holy Crap! Look at all of those credit checks! OMG, WTF is going on? Thus is the penalty of having good credit (not a "penalty" that applies to your credit score, but a "penalty" of annoyance). I bet you get pantloads of credit card offers in the mail. I bet many of them say "pre-approved" or similar. And you know what? Every time you get one of those, there's an accompanying credit check. None of those checks hurt you (and really, shopping around a loan doesn't hurt you as much as you'd think, either -- of course, if you do it right, it won't matter; get yourself a pre-approval from an underwriter, and then no other broker will need to run a credit check until you commit to the loan). I don't know for sure, but I'd hazard a guess that the type of check an employer would do would fall into this same category of lookups. Yes, you get penalized for getting many credit cards, for example, but the problem is not simply one of the credit companies checking your credit. You get hurt because you're decreasing your potential credit ($1000 credit in a credit card is $1000 less credit you can get for that auto loan or mortgage, roughly), you're penalized for age (creditors like seeing long histories of credit, so get 2-3 cards and stick with them; swapping out cards every year or so is bad, because you can't establish age), you're penalized for an increase in your debt/income ratio (why get a credit card if you're not going to use it?), and finally you're possibly penalized a tiny amount (1-2 points, rarely more) for having that extra check on your credit.
Consider it this way -- what looks better on your credit report? A steady (if new job) and an extra credit check by your employer, or no job but a clean record of credit checks in the past year? I'd choose the former, and anybody with a brain would as well.
(I'm not addressing the legal, ethical, or moral issues surrounding an employer requiring a credit check. I'm simply making the point that one extra credit check to get a job is not going to hurt you in any way, unless you're going through many jobs in a year -- and then you're going to be hurt more by insufficient length at each job than you are by the credit checks required to get those jobs.)
Come to think of it, I don't really know what a desktop environment does. In fact, I've been told many window managers can run on X windows without a desktop manager (blackbox, for example). Moreover, it is still possible to cut and paste text between applications without a desktop environment, though I thought desktop environment had something to do with cutting and pasting. Oh, perhaps it's all those desktop-related libraries that are so important. Still, I'm not really sure why gnome-related processes need to be running in order to use GTK libraries.
A Desktop Environment is "everything else". It's the glue that bonds applications together. For example, desktop environments provide an object model (bonobo for GNOME, KParts for KDE) that allow applications written for those environments to interact. This is where your copy/paste question comes in. By default, X has very primitive copy/paste functionality -- it can only handle text, it will highlight whatever you select (so don't select anything unless you don't mind losing what's in the buffer), and will paste when you click the middle mouse button (don't accidentally click that button, or you're going to get text spew where you didn't want it). Desktop environments like KDE and GNOME enhance and supercede this functionality by implementing proper clipboards -- you can clip anything to the board (within reason, anyway), such as text, images, files, etc. More, any object that accepts pasting and/or drag&drop knows what to do with those various types of objects (for example, a console app may accept a paste or drop of a file from a file manager, and turn that file into the path to the file, while pasting or dropping on another file manager window will copy/move the file). Without your Desktop Environment providing this common functionality, you could not do anything more complex than copy a string and paste it somewhere. The main drawback is that environments usually don't interact with one another, so a GNOME application and a KDE application won't cooperate. This is what happens when you have multiple desktop environments. Also, because of that, that is why you have to have gnome related processes running in order to use GNOME libraries (not GTK libraries -- GNOME uses GTK, but GTK is not GNOME).
mind you, I think it was one of the first Xbox games, then THPS3 and Halo came around, and bamph, it was pulled out of distrobution
Nope. Halo was a launch title. THPS2X was also a launch title, with THPS3 coming some few months later. JSRF was released in February 02, vs. THPS3's March 02 launch. However, if JSRF was pulled out of distribution (I don't know if it was or not), it would be because of slow sales rather than the arrival of competition (if you pull out of a market as soon as competition arrives, you're never going to get anywhere). Of course, the slow sales may be due to the competition, but it could also be that Jet Grind Radio was more of a cult classic than a mainstream favorite, and so was JSRF.
Not that any of that really matters, though, since Halo, THPS series, and JSRF are all completely different games.
I wasn't trying to insinuate that Capcom was the company that Microsoft gave a loan. I was simply correcting the misunderstanding of who did Steel Battalion, and comment on how it was a pretty cool thing to do -- that Microsoft let Capcom do whatever the hell they wanted, even if it did result in a $200 game. However, even at $200, Steel Battalion is selling quite well (the numbers are relatively low, given that it is $200, but for a $200 game, it's selling extremely well). Maybe XBox owners are more affluent, and maybe we'll see more blue sky attempts like this (certainly for Steel Battalion 2, which is already planned and will have XBox Live support, at which point I'll be buying it:). Perhaps the reactions to Capcom's risk with Steel Battalion will show them that the XBox is a good market for their games.
Personally, I wouldn't buy any of the RE games (I have a PSOne, Dreamcast, and Gamecube, and I own none of the Resident Evil series), simply because the gameplay sucks IMHO. I would spend good money for a good Mega Man game on the XBox, and will probably pick up Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO for the XBox when it's released later this month.
I would have thought either Sega (with Steel Battalion, etc)
Steel Battalion was Capcom. Also, it was a pretty good way to entice them onto the XBox. Microsoft said, "Hey Capcom, what's your dream game? Money is no object, do whatever you want, just do it on the XBox," and Capcom replied, "Steel Battalion, baby!" And guess what? It's sold very well. Maybe that will bring Capcom more permanently to the XBox, because wouldn't it be great to have Mega Man on the XBox?
That's pretty much what I've decided. I'm pretty sure there's a permanent note attached to my account that reads, "This guy is a chump. See how bad you can screw this customer." What's worse is that I'm in the Seattle area, which is Speakeasy's home town. If anybody is going to get good service, you'd expect it to be the people from the place where Speakeasy originated. I can't even claim that they're not giving me good service because I'm not paying them much. (I'm on 768 SDSL, though I'd rather not be -- that came from their first attempt to screw me, wherein my initial 1.5/384 ADSL line at $90/mo was deemed to be $250/mo, with three months back charge, so we split the difference with Speakeasy dropping all charges for that line and me moving to $160/mo 768 SDSL. One of the more expensive consumer plans, so theoretically I should be getting stellar service, yes?)
When even the best is shit (from my own experiences), you learn to live with shit. Maybe I should start a pool for when in 2003 Speakeasy will screw me again and make some money off of my misfortunes. (Personally, my money would be on if/when I move -- I'm planning on buying a house/condo/something other than my apartment, and will want to carry my DSL with me on the move, but that's also prime territory for fuck-ups, so that's where the smart money would be if I choose to do that this year).
I'm sure I'm unique in my experiences with Speakeasy, but they've been reliably terrible for me. I should qualify that the problems I've had have not been with any tech support (though the latest problem I dealt with stemmed from their inability to troubleshoot a technical issue), but instead with billing and payment issues, and Speakeasy's inability to keep promises. Most recently, I had a bad SDSL modem (it was bad since day one, but worked well enough that I only suffered nightly DSL outtages). The modem was purchased in November 01, I began bugging their tech support about the nightly outtages in Feb 02, and continued to do so until in Nov 02 they finally decided the modem was faulty -- conveniently right after the modem's warranty expired. Eay enough to solve, you'd think. Plenty of documentation showing I've been having problems long prior to the warranty expiration, so just replace it under warranty. That's what they said they'd do. Imagine my surprise, then, when I got my December bill -- $150 for a new modem, plus $200 for the tech visit (because apparently I'm not qualified to plug the modem into the wall jack), plus some random $80 "miscellaneous" fee, plus all of the assorted taxes on said service (including two poorly named "tax reimbursements" that were no reimbursements at all, but charges). That sure doesn't sound like a modem replaced under warranty to me! Anyway, when I finally noticed the erroneous charges in January (yay autopayments, I didn't see all of this until looking at my credit card statement), it took me about a week to actually speak with someone at a high enough level to credit back those charges. And just to add insult to injury, I had to call them, even though I was promised a call-back (typical Speakeasy -- they'll promise to call you back until they're blue in the face, but you'll never ever get that call).
Things are sorted out now, but I'm eagerly anticipating how they plan to screw me over this year. After having been screwed in 2001 and screwed in 2002, I have no reason to believe 2003 will be any different.
If it weren't that Speakeasy is the best DSL provider in the business (and that says more about their competition than it does about Speakeasy), I'd switch immediately. As it is, I put up with their bullshit so that I can have DSL how I want it. It sucks, but such is life.
AOL is losing lots of customers to services like speakeasy [speakeasy.net] because the speed and support are better.
Yes and no. As a Speakeasy customer, I can say that you're right that the speed is better, but you're dead wrong when you say the support is better. I've never had worse support from an ISP than I've had from Speakeasy.
I've always heard those referred to as "non-profit organizations", especially since it's odd for an unincorporated entity to be referred to as a corporation. I realize that there are non-profit organizations out there, but I've never heard one of them referred to as a "company". Companies conduct business with the ultimate goal of creating profits (whether they're publicly or privately held doesn't matter, that just determines how the profits are distributed if there are any). Non-profit organizations don't.
Slashdot Mirror
Toshiba Satellite 1955-S803. For this one, "laptop" is a bit of a misnomer -- it's really more like a portable desktop replacement. Though, I have sat it on my lap while using it before, and it works well enough. It was a bitch finding a decent case that would fit the thing. The one I found is still just a bit too small, but I can cram it in there and it works well enough for now.
Would you believe I was? (different definition of "CS", of course) To be honest, I never really liked Counter-Strike all that much. I really don't like a game where I play for 10 seconds, die, and then wait 5 minutes for everybody else to die. If I wanted that little excitement, I'd rather go autocross my car (spend a day at the track for 3 minutes of track time, yay!).
For my entertainment dollar, TeamFortress has always been the way to go. And not that crap they call "TeamFortress Classic", either, but the original Quake 1 mod (TF around version 2.5 or so was the sweet spot). I mean, really, TFC screwed everything up! The scout was too slow, the hwguy could move while shooting (wtf!), they totally butchered canalzon (Best. Map. EVAR!), etc. But now I'm ranting ... (oh for the glory days of the 24/7 canalzon server, Holy Hand Grenade, playing canalzon with Ramirez, one of the map authors. brings a tear to my eye)
So the bottleneck is the video card, rather than the CPU? I don't really see how .5GHz could make that much of a difference these days (man, and I'm still running a p200mmx and a celeryonion 433MHz).
Don't be :) It cost me an arm and a leg, and I only get about 2 hours of battery time out of it. I probably would've been wiser to go with a 2.0GHz mobile P4 and spend the extra money on a UXGA screen (though the 16" 1280x1024 LCD on my laptop is pretty damned sweet, if not very portable). However, for that arm and leg I did get "built-in" (mini-PCI card) wireless, removeable wireless keyboard and mouse (I've since lost the mouse, though the laptop is less than three months old :), 16" screen, fast processor, etc. I'm happy, but could've gotten by with much less.
Can't you already do that? I have a nice 2.5GHz laptop (desktop chip, not mobile) with a GeForce4 Go video chipset. That should be more than enough to run Maya in comfort, or any of your video editors. The only problem I would have with it is doing graphical manipulation using a trackpad. Not fun. But a wireless mouse or a tablet would be perfect.
Now if only I didn't suck at art ...
Nope. This is a popular misconception, based on the release dates of Half-Life and Quake 2. Half-Life was based on the Quake 1 codebase, and while they did add functionality that Quake 2 also had (hardware acceleration, though glquake did that too, colored lighting, one or two other things), they did a lot more as well, like skeletal animation. However, at its core, Half-Life was still based on Quake 1. Id Software has said as much (search that page for "Half-Life", you'll come up with "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.").
Epic is not a large company by any means. Certainly not in comparison to the Microsofts, Suns, and IBMs of the world, and not even within their own gaming market -- they're positively dwarfed by the big guys like EA, Acclaim, Infogrames/GT Interactive/Atari/whatever they're calling themselves now, etc. No, Epic is what a game development company should be -- small, dedicated, and highly focused on one thing at a time, similar to Id (which is also an extremely tiny company, as these things are measured).
However, it's great to see these relatively small companies having so much influence in a market. Id and Epic literally own the FPS market, considering there are very few shooters that don't use technology from one or the other.
For being one of the first CS players, you sure have your timeline screwed up. Id never had anything to do with CS. I assume you mean that Id licensed the Quake 1 engine to Valve, who then modified the fuck out of it to create Half-Life, who then created and published the modification SDK, which was then used by the original volunteer team to create CS, which was eventually picked up by Valve. Similar to the progress of Team Fortress, which started as a Quake 1 modification, then the TF team was picked up by Valve to create Team Fortress 2 based on Half-Life, and who did the Half-Life based Team Fortress Classic, meant mostly as a proof-of-concept for the Half-Life mod SDK.
TheCarmack is a god, but he and the Counter-Strike team are in completely different arenas. TheCarmack and others at Id are generally more interested in doing the infrastructure for games (thus the proliferation of games based on the various Quake engines, while the Id-created games tend to be fairly straight-forward and more or less boring), while the Counter-Strike team is more along the lines of what Legend or Digital Etremes is to Epic, or Raven software is to Id -- they create content (Wheel of Time, Unreal 2, various Quake-based games, etc), while the engine developers (Id, Epic) create the infrastructure. It seems to be a very profitable relationship for both parties, and is highly indicative of the way the game industry is moving -- some companies compete to create infrastructure (a la Windows vs. Linux), while other companies use that infrastructure and compete by making games (a la Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice).
If Slashdot would ever give me mod points, I'd do it myself. The anonymous coward parent makes very good points and should be seen.
Could this be a new consequence of the Slashdot Effect? We all know about the damaging Slashdot Effect, where websites are literally blown out of existence by the huge amount of traffic Slashdot can generate. However, it seems very likely that theCarmack's change in luck so shortly after Slashdot's article had something to do with the Slashdot article. Maybe the widespread airing of his plight got back to the officials who were blocking him, or perhaps there are Slashdot readers involved in the same offices that turned around and decided to help rather than hinder.
Just an interesting observation, is all. Good luck to theCarmack.
Please, please, please recommend reading the other books in the series as well! Book one of Dune is really little more than backstory. It's setting up the history of the Tyrant through to his grandparents (Leto I and Jessica). Books two and three show Paul as a failed messiah, his attempt at redemption, and the effect of his failure on his son and how it helped form the Tyrant Leto II. In short, the story is a lot deeper and more complicated than the first book would lead one to believe.
I applaud Sci-Fi for continuing with the Dune series. Perhaps one day we'll see the entire series in theatrical (well, made-for-tv theater, anyway) form, hopefully leading to video games and such based on the later novels as well. It gets tiring when everything up to now has focused on such a tiny part of the Dune mythos, when there is so much more interesting material to work with.
Supposedly some people are. See that "subscribe" link over on the left? That's how you pay money to Slashdot. Though I'd not do it, because the quality of Slashdot is not worth the money.
I've tried to submit a number of stories to Slashdot over the years. Guess what? Every single one of them was rejected. It only takes so many rejections for a guy to give up. What good does it do me to continue to submit well-written stories on interesting articles when they continue to be rejected? None at all. So, it sounds like we have a chicken and egg problem here -- to get better stories, better stories need to be submitted, but the editors keep posting dupes, trips, and rejecting good stories, so the people submitting good stories give up and stop submitting, thus relegating Slashdot to poorly written stories and dupes ...
I think you need to qualify your third category a bit better. There are the people that create something at the risk of being criticized, and then don't give a shit when they get that criticism (or worse, get defensive, like the Slashdot editors have done in the past), and there are the people that create something at the risk of being criticized, and then take to heart any criticism they receive and use it to enhance their creation. I'd argue that the former type of "intelligence" is no better than your first two types, while the latter is what any creative person should strive toward. If you don't give a shit about criticism you receive, then your act of creation is nothing more than masturbation.
The problem stems from "obvious" libraries being licensed under the GPL. As other posters in this story have pointed out, many coders don't really understand the GPL. They equate it with "open source", when it's not -- it's "Free software", and has a certain set of restrictions (as contradictory as that is). When these programmers write library code that is widely useful (something that is difficult or obtuse enough that you don't want to reinvent the wheel, but obvious enough that many people will want to use it) and license it as GPL, it restricts my freedom -- I now have to spend my time and resources reinventing the wheel because the original inventor didn't understand what he was doing when he licensed the wheel. The same goes for reference code. For example, the BSD tcp/ip stack is the reference implementation for a tcp/ip stack, and is obviously licensed under the BSD license. That means that anyone can look at the code to get an idea of how to properly write a network stack, and even use the code as the basis for their own network stack. If that were instead licensed under the GPL, not only could you not start from that stack to build your own, you couldn't even look at that stack for fear of contamination. In other words, it's not all about wanting to capitalize on other's works, though you can make it seem that way to demonize those that disagree with the GPL.
Bingo. I'm not saying, "All open source is bad. Down with open source!" Instead, I'm saying, "Proprietary software is not bad. It can coexist, and there are plenty of times when it's more appropriate than open source. Being zealous about the GPL in particular or open source in general to the point where you're blind to any proprietary software is defeatist."
To work with the on-going example, there's a very good chance that your company doesn't initially have the resources necessary to write software. Therefore, to take upon the job yourself requires investment -- people, tools (vi and emacs are good, but integrated IDEs are better, and those aren't always free, and the free ones aren't always good), hardware, etc. That's a big up-front cost and a sizeable on-going cost (payroll). Now that you have all of the necessary resources, you can begin working on your new software. The cost of that software is all of the startup costs mentioned above, plus the wages for the programmers multiplied by the amount of time the project takes. You're probably looking at a few tens of thousands of dollars, at least. Depending on your market, that could be a huge chunk of money, and it's going to take you time to recoup your costs by employing the cost-saving/revenue-enhancing features of the new software. Why, then would you give that software to your competitors? If there's enough demand, you could cetainly sell it to them and help offset some of your costs, but to give it away for free automatically hurts you (your competitor can use the $XX thousands of dollars they saved on not writing the software for something else, possibly undercutting your products or services).
This is not always the case, and there are obviously exceptions (the software wasn't that expensive to write, the benefits of the software are not such that it would put you at an economic advantage v. your competitors, the other people wanting to use your software are not competitors, etc). However, it's something that the zealotry tend not to consider when they blindly advocate open source all the time.
And yet, your company just put thousands of dollars into this software that arguably should help them increase their business (if it doesn't have business value, the company's not going to write it in the first place). The last thing you want to do is give that software to your competitors and let them reap the money saving or revenue generating benefits as well without the associated development costs. You'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
However, if some entrepenuerial (sp?) company took a look at your industry, noticed a problem space they could solve through software, then developed that software and sold it to everybody in the industry for the same price (give or take service contracts), then everyone wins -- you get the software for the same price as your competitors because you're all paying for the developmnent of the software, amortized across the expected number of customers plus some amount for profit.
Funny, I recall it starting as a place to get a decent summary of the interesting happenings in the world as a technologically-inclined person would see them (ie, more interested in a story on a wearable computer than what runway models in France are wearing). Don't make me play the UID card, as mine's lower than yours. The pro-linux, pro-GNU, anti-microsoft stuff is one part editorial bias to five parts "popular" sentiment ("popular" in reference to comment posters on Slashdot, who can be considered a vocal minority of Slashdot readers-- the editors themselves have said that only a fraction of the visitors to Slashdot ever take the time to actually post anything).
Back In The Day, when Slashdot was young, Linux was enjoying a growth spurt and the dot-commers were bringing it more and more into the spotlight. That translated to more stories about Linux (and thus, more stories about GPL, and thus more stories about RMS) on Slashdot, which would tend to bring the more zealous Linux users to the site for the stories (and apparently they stuck around for the other content), making the place an ad-hoc gathering ground for GPL extremists. Did Rob plan that? Highly unlikely.
As for your suggestion that the poster leave Slashdot if he doesn't conform to the popular opinion, what gives you the right to suggest such a thing? You don't have to read his comments, but you do. Maybe you would be better off posting in alt.linux.advocacy (or is it comp.os.linux.advocacy now? whatever, some linux advocacy newsgroup where you can preach to the choir)?
Don't you mean "Freedom", as RMS's definition of "Freedom" is different than the standard definition of "freedom" (same for "Free" v. "free"). As soon as RMS writes a license that allows for true "freedom" (ie, I can do whatever the hell I want with the licensed software, including releasing it under a non-GPL license), I will take his views on "freedom" seriously.
Why should he be?
It's a perfectly valid comparative argument. If RMS deems a license non-compatible with the GPL, then it is by definition not "Free", and software licensed under that non-compatible license is not "Free Software". Apache's license comes into play to show the absurdity of this. The Apache license is a perfectly valid and acceptable Open Source license, allowing you to do things like read and modify the source code, publish your changes as you see fit (or not, if you see fit not to publish), etc. The same goes for the Plan 9 license (with a few minor caveats, but little different than any other Open Source license). I'd have to check, but I'm pretty sure the Plan 9 license is officially recognized as an Open Source license. However, just as the Apache license is not a Free Software license, neither is the Plan 9 license. And that only really makes a difference if you're fanatical about Free Software. For 99% of the population, Open Source is good enough (you get the source code, you get the ability to change that source code, and you get the ability to redistribute your changes -- what more can you conceivably need?).
If RMS had his way, everybody would be licensing their code under the GPL. I won't bother to postulate whether that's a good or bad thing (IMHO, bad, but that's just a HO). What I will say is that it's short-sighted and naive. Software companies are not going to go away overnight (or even in the forseeable future, if you value useable software), but in a world of "GPL, and nothing but GPL" those companies cannot exist.
Welcome to RMS' utopia, where software is free and no programmer has to worry about how they're going to eat, where they're going to live, how they're going to afford clothing, or anything else. Software doesn't spontaneously write itself, but if you're not getting paid to write software, you have to spend time doing something else to be able to survive. How long has it taken to get HURD to a semi-useable state again? And how much is that due to programmers only being able to work nights and weekends (assuming they have no lives) on the code, rather than having a significant core of developers who work on the project as a day job with all of the trappings -- ie, wages?
You (or howstuffworks.com) really need to qualify this one. Take a look at your credit report sometime. Holy Crap! Look at all of those credit checks! OMG, WTF is going on? Thus is the penalty of having good credit (not a "penalty" that applies to your credit score, but a "penalty" of annoyance). I bet you get pantloads of credit card offers in the mail. I bet many of them say "pre-approved" or similar. And you know what? Every time you get one of those, there's an accompanying credit check. None of those checks hurt you (and really, shopping around a loan doesn't hurt you as much as you'd think, either -- of course, if you do it right, it won't matter; get yourself a pre-approval from an underwriter, and then no other broker will need to run a credit check until you commit to the loan). I don't know for sure, but I'd hazard a guess that the type of check an employer would do would fall into this same category of lookups. Yes, you get penalized for getting many credit cards, for example, but the problem is not simply one of the credit companies checking your credit. You get hurt because you're decreasing your potential credit ($1000 credit in a credit card is $1000 less credit you can get for that auto loan or mortgage, roughly), you're penalized for age (creditors like seeing long histories of credit, so get 2-3 cards and stick with them; swapping out cards every year or so is bad, because you can't establish age), you're penalized for an increase in your debt/income ratio (why get a credit card if you're not going to use it?), and finally you're possibly penalized a tiny amount (1-2 points, rarely more) for having that extra check on your credit.
Consider it this way -- what looks better on your credit report? A steady (if new job) and an extra credit check by your employer, or no job but a clean record of credit checks in the past year? I'd choose the former, and anybody with a brain would as well.
(I'm not addressing the legal, ethical, or moral issues surrounding an employer requiring a credit check. I'm simply making the point that one extra credit check to get a job is not going to hurt you in any way, unless you're going through many jobs in a year -- and then you're going to be hurt more by insufficient length at each job than you are by the credit checks required to get those jobs.)
A Desktop Environment is "everything else". It's the glue that bonds applications together. For example, desktop environments provide an object model (bonobo for GNOME, KParts for KDE) that allow applications written for those environments to interact. This is where your copy/paste question comes in. By default, X has very primitive copy/paste functionality -- it can only handle text, it will highlight whatever you select (so don't select anything unless you don't mind losing what's in the buffer), and will paste when you click the middle mouse button (don't accidentally click that button, or you're going to get text spew where you didn't want it). Desktop environments like KDE and GNOME enhance and supercede this functionality by implementing proper clipboards -- you can clip anything to the board (within reason, anyway), such as text, images, files, etc. More, any object that accepts pasting and/or drag&drop knows what to do with those various types of objects (for example, a console app may accept a paste or drop of a file from a file manager, and turn that file into the path to the file, while pasting or dropping on another file manager window will copy/move the file). Without your Desktop Environment providing this common functionality, you could not do anything more complex than copy a string and paste it somewhere. The main drawback is that environments usually don't interact with one another, so a GNOME application and a KDE application won't cooperate. This is what happens when you have multiple desktop environments. Also, because of that, that is why you have to have gnome related processes running in order to use GNOME libraries (not GTK libraries -- GNOME uses GTK, but GTK is not GNOME).
Nope. Halo was a launch title. THPS2X was also a launch title, with THPS3 coming some few months later. JSRF was released in February 02, vs. THPS3's March 02 launch. However, if JSRF was pulled out of distribution (I don't know if it was or not), it would be because of slow sales rather than the arrival of competition (if you pull out of a market as soon as competition arrives, you're never going to get anywhere). Of course, the slow sales may be due to the competition, but it could also be that Jet Grind Radio was more of a cult classic than a mainstream favorite, and so was JSRF.
Not that any of that really matters, though, since Halo, THPS series, and JSRF are all completely different games.
I wasn't trying to insinuate that Capcom was the company that Microsoft gave a loan. I was simply correcting the misunderstanding of who did Steel Battalion, and comment on how it was a pretty cool thing to do -- that Microsoft let Capcom do whatever the hell they wanted, even if it did result in a $200 game. However, even at $200, Steel Battalion is selling quite well (the numbers are relatively low, given that it is $200, but for a $200 game, it's selling extremely well). Maybe XBox owners are more affluent, and maybe we'll see more blue sky attempts like this (certainly for Steel Battalion 2, which is already planned and will have XBox Live support, at which point I'll be buying it :). Perhaps the reactions to Capcom's risk with Steel Battalion will show them that the XBox is a good market for their games.
Personally, I wouldn't buy any of the RE games (I have a PSOne, Dreamcast, and Gamecube, and I own none of the Resident Evil series), simply because the gameplay sucks IMHO. I would spend good money for a good Mega Man game on the XBox, and will probably pick up Capcom vs. SNK 2 EO for the XBox when it's released later this month.
Steel Battalion was Capcom. Also, it was a pretty good way to entice them onto the XBox. Microsoft said, "Hey Capcom, what's your dream game? Money is no object, do whatever you want, just do it on the XBox," and Capcom replied, "Steel Battalion, baby!" And guess what? It's sold very well. Maybe that will bring Capcom more permanently to the XBox, because wouldn't it be great to have Mega Man on the XBox?
That's pretty much what I've decided. I'm pretty sure there's a permanent note attached to my account that reads, "This guy is a chump. See how bad you can screw this customer." What's worse is that I'm in the Seattle area, which is Speakeasy's home town. If anybody is going to get good service, you'd expect it to be the people from the place where Speakeasy originated. I can't even claim that they're not giving me good service because I'm not paying them much. (I'm on 768 SDSL, though I'd rather not be -- that came from their first attempt to screw me, wherein my initial 1.5/384 ADSL line at $90/mo was deemed to be $250/mo, with three months back charge, so we split the difference with Speakeasy dropping all charges for that line and me moving to $160/mo 768 SDSL. One of the more expensive consumer plans, so theoretically I should be getting stellar service, yes?)
When even the best is shit (from my own experiences), you learn to live with shit. Maybe I should start a pool for when in 2003 Speakeasy will screw me again and make some money off of my misfortunes. (Personally, my money would be on if/when I move -- I'm planning on buying a house/condo/something other than my apartment, and will want to carry my DSL with me on the move, but that's also prime territory for fuck-ups, so that's where the smart money would be if I choose to do that this year).
I'm sure I'm unique in my experiences with Speakeasy, but they've been reliably terrible for me. I should qualify that the problems I've had have not been with any tech support (though the latest problem I dealt with stemmed from their inability to troubleshoot a technical issue), but instead with billing and payment issues, and Speakeasy's inability to keep promises. Most recently, I had a bad SDSL modem (it was bad since day one, but worked well enough that I only suffered nightly DSL outtages). The modem was purchased in November 01, I began bugging their tech support about the nightly outtages in Feb 02, and continued to do so until in Nov 02 they finally decided the modem was faulty -- conveniently right after the modem's warranty expired. Eay enough to solve, you'd think. Plenty of documentation showing I've been having problems long prior to the warranty expiration, so just replace it under warranty. That's what they said they'd do. Imagine my surprise, then, when I got my December bill -- $150 for a new modem, plus $200 for the tech visit (because apparently I'm not qualified to plug the modem into the wall jack), plus some random $80 "miscellaneous" fee, plus all of the assorted taxes on said service (including two poorly named "tax reimbursements" that were no reimbursements at all, but charges). That sure doesn't sound like a modem replaced under warranty to me! Anyway, when I finally noticed the erroneous charges in January (yay autopayments, I didn't see all of this until looking at my credit card statement), it took me about a week to actually speak with someone at a high enough level to credit back those charges. And just to add insult to injury, I had to call them, even though I was promised a call-back (typical Speakeasy -- they'll promise to call you back until they're blue in the face, but you'll never ever get that call).
Things are sorted out now, but I'm eagerly anticipating how they plan to screw me over this year. After having been screwed in 2001 and screwed in 2002, I have no reason to believe 2003 will be any different.
If it weren't that Speakeasy is the best DSL provider in the business (and that says more about their competition than it does about Speakeasy), I'd switch immediately. As it is, I put up with their bullshit so that I can have DSL how I want it. It sucks, but such is life.
Yes and no. As a Speakeasy customer, I can say that you're right that the speed is better, but you're dead wrong when you say the support is better. I've never had worse support from an ISP than I've had from Speakeasy.
I've always heard those referred to as "non-profit organizations", especially since it's odd for an unincorporated entity to be referred to as a corporation. I realize that there are non-profit organizations out there, but I've never heard one of them referred to as a "company". Companies conduct business with the ultimate goal of creating profits (whether they're publicly or privately held doesn't matter, that just determines how the profits are distributed if there are any). Non-profit organizations don't.