Yeah, their comments about the D-Link and port 113 illustrate the basic nature of the review.
It's very easy to configure the D-Link routers to stealth 113 if you really want to. Just use the advanced tab in the setup to create a virtual-server at an unassigned IP address in the router's 192.168.0.* range and shunt the port 113 traffic there.
Has DirecTV taken the shackles off of the Series 2 based DirecTV DVR w/TiVO (it's no longer called DirecTiVO) and allowed the USB ports to be enabled, USB->ethernet (or usb wireless) dongles to be recognized, or any of the TiVO home media center options to be purchased and used on the devices? Last I checked the answer was "no" to all of the above.
I have a Series 1 TiVo with TiVOnet and a DirecTV receiver. It's great because I have my unit on my lan and I don't need to pay for a POTS line just to have the TiVO call home. I'd like to get a DirecTV DVR w/TiVO box, as my monthly payment would be less. But, I can't, to date, use DirecTV DVR on my LAN. Hughes refues, for whatever reason, to enable all of the Series2 features on the hardware.
GIMP 2(third release) - 2D almost ready to topple paintshoppro and then on to the long road to victory over photoshop http://www.gimp.org/
Hyperbole like this only helps to underscore either a)the closed mindedness of OSS developers or b)the ignorance of the person who said it.
Software development is not a war or a contest. A rival piece of software rarely (EXTREMELY RARELY) ever obliterates the market for its competitors. Most of the time, though, the decline/loss of a viable program is due to the developer being lost in a merger or acquisition or by the advertising money spent by a rival to achieve massive market penetration. Mergers, buyouts, and marketing blitzes aren't something for which most OSS projects have the $, time, or inclination.
The GIMP is not going to "topple" PaintShop Pro. Most people aren't OSS savvy but they can buy PSPro off of the shelf at BestBuy--so they'll get what they can acquire. If GIMP shows any detectable difference to Photoshop it will probably only be in the lessening of Photoshop piracy since there is an adequate free tool some people to use. Even then, though, the warez-monkeys will still download Photoshop because it's available to them.
Um, I was replying to prockcore, who said, "Yup, sounds like a photoshop user. Using the wrong tool for the wrong job." in response to your store about your GF's experience with GiMP.
I wasn't calling you rude, I was calling him rude (ignorant might be a better word choice) for implying that Photoshop users don't know what a vector tool is for and that they should just use some badly named, poorly produced, piece of OSS for no other reason than it's OSS.
I wasn't slighting you or your GF. I was calling prockcore out for being an OSS zealot.
Yup, sounds like an OSS user. Rudely suggesting the wrong program for the wrong task.
Drawing bezier lines in Photoshop is useful for any number of bitmap editing reasons. You wouldn't do a full on vector based layout with it, it's not designd for that. But bezier shapes that can be resized without resolution loss are great for masking, selecting, using as templates, vitural frisket for airbrushing, etc...
Since isn't a bitmap editor it wouldn't have served the poster's wife's needs at all.
His point about the menus in the image windows is 100% spot on! The menu shouldn't be in the image window. Images can be any arbitrary size and there are times when you absolutely must size the window to be the exact size of the image (e.g. comparing n versions of a picture on one monitor while showing changes to a client).
Nerfing the menu system so some, potentially needed, menu items are just chopped off if an image window is below a certain size is stupid. If they're going to do the multiple window style of interface the need a global menu bar at the top of the screen, ala Macintosh.
Why would it be so bad if the PS3 was delayed? Is there some *huge* need for it to be relased now? The PS2 is selling like gangbusters and it has a huge (and growing) library of outstanding games. Games that are the 3rd, 4th, even 5th generation PS2 games from some devs. Those devs have a HUGE knowledge base about how to milk every last bit of performance out of the PS2 to make the most interesting and graphically complex games they can.
Remember the games available when the PS2 first hit? How about, "Fantavision", anyone? 1st gen console titles are for suck most times. They devs are still using the half finished and lack luster vendor supplied libraries, they're pressed for time because they want their game to be available at launch--since that usually guarantees a sale, and they don't have any institutional knowledge on the hardware. Ergo they cut corners and drop features just to get the game done.
Consoles are always better after they've been out for a couple of years.
Chances are that you are getting spam that has been directed at your AOL username for quite some time. An AOL username gets released back into the wild at some point after the user has cancelled their AOL subscription. It used to be six months. I don't know what the time frame is now.
You probably just picked a screen name that had been used before and has had spam sent to it since it was first created.
Well, WineX, in it's current state won't support all of their games with 100% compatibility. That is, unless your friends only play:
* Warcraft III (and Frozen Throne)
* The Sims (Mandrake Gaming pack)
* Hoyle Card Games 5
* Max Payne
* Diablo II
* Kohan
If your friends like a game made after 2000/01 then they are better off staying on Windows.
Actually, I have been paying attention. I know that the Q1/Q2 engine games have been somewhat supported (Working Rating 4 for all HL based games) for a while now. But, even by Transgaming's admission on their website, you're better off playing them in OpenGL mode than the D3D mode.
WineX 3.3 can't even fully support the version of Direct3D (I'm guessing DirectX 3) used in games released circa 1998. That doesn't bode well for them supporting any game released now.
A quick search of the Supported Games List over at Transgaming shows that there are only seven (7!) titles that get a Working Rating of 5. Only two of those titles are 3D games and both of those have OpenGL renderers. There are no Direct3D only games that WineX 3.3 supports 100%. The newest game of the seven is Warcraft III, which is fast approaching two years old. The other five games are Direct 2D based and average in age from 3-4 years old.
Extrapolating out that means that I could reasonably expect to play a game released in 2004 sometime in 2007 if I'm going to use WineX. That's being lenient and assuming they will somehow leapfrog DirectX versions 4-8 and get to D3D 9 sometime soon. If I were to start paying my $5.00/month subscription now I will have paid $185.00 (5 * 37) by the time I can play a game made in 2004. I don't even have a guarantee that there will be another WineX release between now and then to hold me over.
I can buy an XBox or a PS2 now for $180.00 (or a Gamecube for $100) and know with 100% certainty that it will play any modern game released for it. High polygon counts, pixel and vertex shaders, high resolutions, large textures, etc... It's all there and I can play those games now. Currently on WineX I can enjoy, with 100% compatibility, five 2D sprite based games, a three year old third person shooter (Max Payne), or Warcraft III.
Check out this paragraph I took from the Business Plan page at Transgaming.com: "TransGaming is working with among the largest game developers globally to bring the most popular and the highest demand gaming titles to new platforms. Our core technology has demonstrated that it is the only technology of its kind and allows us to accomplish within a couple of months what would take most other companies as long as two years to achieve. TransGaming's technology is taking the video games industry to new levels and is changing the rules in how multi-platform games are deployed."
(emphasis mine)
The newest game they support fully is almost two years old, yet they claim to have technology that allows the translation of games to Linux in just a matter of months.
At best you can say they've taken two years to get Warcraft III working. By their own admission their library of 100% fully supported games could've been made to run under Linux in half the time if they'd ported them directly instead of working on WineX.
Supporting Steam is ok, but that's really just a Windows app, regular Wine could probably support it.
Announcing that WineX 3.3 has support for Valve games that were written on the Quake 2 engine back when the 3DFX Voodoo2 was new and nVidia was pushing their soon to be released TNT2 cards really isn't that amazing to me. In fact, it kind of underwhelms me.
The mean time between WineX releases is slowing and the gap between the stuff they can support and the stuff being done on current and modern games is always widening. The utopian dream of being able to install any Windows based game you buy off the shelf at BestBuy on your Linux box and run it seamlessly won't, imho, ever become reality.
Whether it is hyperbole, FUD, or BS, your statement of, "...Windows and X Windows finally now can do that if you kill a chicken at the full moon." is patently false.
All it takes to run dual monitors on Windows (from 98SE on) is either 2 video cards or a dual head video card (which most modern cards are) and 2 monitors.
I can't speak for X, but using dual monitors on Windows is extremely easy.
Buzzz.... wrong.
Please provide a credible source.
This is from serious sources
No, it's hearsay from a Slashdot poster. If the sources are truly "serious" and not just, "a friend overheard a guy in the latte line last week talking about a discussion he had in a noisy bar with this random guy that sat down next to him", then please cite the sources.
(I was laid off a short while back as well...)
Were you laid off from Discreet? If so, what was your job capacity there? Were you in any position, or working with people who were in a position, to know anything credible about your allegations?
Your comparison to gyms is misplaced and not accurate. There is nothing in the XBox Live! agreement that says you have to snail mail Microsoft a written letter to cancel. At worst you have to call them. There's nothing hard about the process. The problem with the original poster, though, is that he never even did that and now thinks that Microsoft is shafting him. All he had to do was call when his XBox broke and say, "Please don't renew my subscription, as I won't be needing it". Instead he just forgot about it.
Any frustration and/or anger he is feeling now should be directed at himself for failing to fully understand his responsibilities when he entered into a business contract with Microsoft.
There is need to involve the court system in this. It would be just another useless lawsuit tying up an already overstressed and abused court system.
Gettng a chargeback from the CC company for this would be at best underhanded and at worst immoral or fraudulent. He was not charged for something he didn't approve. He was charged for something he forgot about. Chargebacks are not a refund for stupidity. The more people abuse chargebacks the less chance the CC companies will grant them to people with valid complaints. Besides, like another poster said, the second he calls the CC company he will be asked, "Was this for a subscription service you agreed to?" The CC companies are already sick to death of people buying a month's pr0n subscription online and then calling 30 days later trying to get their money back for those "obviously fraudulent" charges that appeared on their bills.
The only respectable thing for the original poster to do is to admit to himself he forgot to cancel the account, pay the $50 and learn a lesson from this.
You don't say in your post if your subscription was for a full on Live! kit (12 months, headset, etc..) or just one of those Free 2 Months of Live! cards they are sticking in the games now.
Either way, when you entered in the access code, postal address, email address, and CC # the Live! system put up a big full screen text window on your TV that said (paraphrasing), "Your account is good for X days from today. If you don't cancel your account before then it will be automatically renewed and your CC will be charged."
They then warned you of the impending CC charge via email. That you didn't update your email address with them isn't their fault, it's yours.
Bottom line - You agreed to the Terms of Service. You agreed to allow Microsoft to charge your CC for a yearly renewal, you didn't cancel by the date specified, and you didn't provide Microsoft with current contact information.
Next time you should remember when you enter into a revolving service contract that the bill will come due at some point unless you take responsibility for cancelling the service if you no longer need or want it.
"A computer should more aptly be treated like a motor vehicle."
Your statement implies an inherent belief that computers should be hard to use. Personally, I think that would be more correctly stated as, "A computer needs to be treated like a motor vehicle."
Computers should, in the utopian case, be treated as nothing more than appliances. People buy TVs, plug them in, and have years of enjoyment without having to know how to do anything other than change the channel. Modern cars can go for tens of thousands of miles before they need to be serviced. And then, you usually get a card in the mail from your dealer letting you know that it's time to bring it in. For most people it's just, "Turn it on and go". Heck, even a TiVO, which is a pretty complex system, is as easy to use as plug it in, turn it on, and read a few pretty screens.
That people treat computers like appliances speaks more to the fact that computers should be engineered to work like appliances than it does to the thought that people are using them incorrectly.
Slashdot Mirror
Stop playing with yourself, Kent!
Yeah, their comments about the D-Link and port 113 illustrate the basic nature of the review. It's very easy to configure the D-Link routers to stealth 113 if you really want to. Just use the advanced tab in the setup to create a virtual-server at an unassigned IP address in the router's 192.168.0.* range and shunt the port 113 traffic there.
Has DirecTV taken the shackles off of the Series 2 based DirecTV DVR w/TiVO (it's no longer called DirecTiVO) and allowed the USB ports to be enabled, USB->ethernet (or usb wireless) dongles to be recognized, or any of the TiVO home media center options to be purchased and used on the devices? Last I checked the answer was "no" to all of the above. I have a Series 1 TiVo with TiVOnet and a DirecTV receiver. It's great because I have my unit on my lan and I don't need to pay for a POTS line just to have the TiVO call home. I'd like to get a DirecTV DVR w/TiVO box, as my monthly payment would be less. But, I can't, to date, use DirecTV DVR on my LAN. Hughes refues, for whatever reason, to enable all of the Series2 features on the hardware.
I was using an OS'less motherboard in 1983. My Commodore 64 kicked butt!
I would suspect most people haven't. At least most people who are older than say...13.
Hyperbole like this only helps to underscore either a)the closed mindedness of OSS developers or b)the ignorance of the person who said it.
Software development is not a war or a contest. A rival piece of software rarely (EXTREMELY RARELY) ever obliterates the market for its competitors. Most of the time, though, the decline/loss of a viable program is due to the developer being lost in a merger or acquisition or by the advertising money spent by a rival to achieve massive market penetration. Mergers, buyouts, and marketing blitzes aren't something for which most OSS projects have the $, time, or inclination.
The GIMP is not going to "topple" PaintShop Pro. Most people aren't OSS savvy but they can buy PSPro off of the shelf at BestBuy--so they'll get what they can acquire. If GIMP shows any detectable difference to Photoshop it will probably only be in the lessening of Photoshop piracy since there is an adequate free tool some people to use. Even then, though, the warez-monkeys will still download Photoshop because it's available to them.
Perrin Kaplan is a woman.
I wasn't calling you rude, I was calling him rude (ignorant might be a better word choice) for implying that Photoshop users don't know what a vector tool is for and that they should just use some badly named, poorly produced, piece of OSS for no other reason than it's OSS.
I wasn't slighting you or your GF. I was calling prockcore out for being an OSS zealot.
Photoshop has had recordable actions since about version 5. It has had a scripting interface since version 7.
Drawing bezier lines in Photoshop is useful for any number of bitmap editing reasons. You wouldn't do a full on vector based layout with it, it's not designd for that. But bezier shapes that can be resized without resolution loss are great for masking, selecting, using as templates, vitural frisket for airbrushing, etc...
Since isn't a bitmap editor it wouldn't have served the poster's wife's needs at all.
Nerfing the menu system so some, potentially needed, menu items are just chopped off if an image window is below a certain size is stupid. If they're going to do the multiple window style of interface the need a global menu bar at the top of the screen, ala Macintosh.
Remember the games available when the PS2 first hit? How about, "Fantavision", anyone? 1st gen console titles are for suck most times. They devs are still using the half finished and lack luster vendor supplied libraries, they're pressed for time because they want their game to be available at launch--since that usually guarantees a sale, and they don't have any institutional knowledge on the hardware. Ergo they cut corners and drop features just to get the game done.
Consoles are always better after they've been out for a couple of years.
It's called a, "broom". It's reuseable, too!
They announced early last week that they're moving Maxis out of Walnut Creek and down into the EA Redwood Shores offices.
Chances are that you are getting spam that has been directed at your AOL username for quite some time. An AOL username gets released back into the wild at some point after the user has cancelled their AOL subscription. It used to be six months. I don't know what the time frame is now. You probably just picked a screen name that had been used before and has had spam sent to it since it was first created.
* Warcraft III (and Frozen Throne) * The Sims (Mandrake Gaming pack) * Hoyle Card Games 5 * Max Payne * Diablo II * Kohan
If your friends like a game made after 2000/01 then they are better off staying on Windows.
WineX 3.3 can't even fully support the version of Direct3D (I'm guessing DirectX 3) used in games released circa 1998. That doesn't bode well for them supporting any game released now.
A quick search of the Supported Games List over at Transgaming shows that there are only seven (7!) titles that get a Working Rating of 5. Only two of those titles are 3D games and both of those have OpenGL renderers. There are no Direct3D only games that WineX 3.3 supports 100%. The newest game of the seven is Warcraft III, which is fast approaching two years old. The other five games are Direct 2D based and average in age from 3-4 years old.
Extrapolating out that means that I could reasonably expect to play a game released in 2004 sometime in 2007 if I'm going to use WineX. That's being lenient and assuming they will somehow leapfrog DirectX versions 4-8 and get to D3D 9 sometime soon. If I were to start paying my $5.00/month subscription now I will have paid $185.00 (5 * 37) by the time I can play a game made in 2004. I don't even have a guarantee that there will be another WineX release between now and then to hold me over.
I can buy an XBox or a PS2 now for $180.00 (or a Gamecube for $100) and know with 100% certainty that it will play any modern game released for it. High polygon counts, pixel and vertex shaders, high resolutions, large textures, etc... It's all there and I can play those games now. Currently on WineX I can enjoy, with 100% compatibility, five 2D sprite based games, a three year old third person shooter (Max Payne), or Warcraft III.
Check out this paragraph I took from the Business Plan page at Transgaming.com:
"TransGaming is working with among the largest game developers globally to bring the most popular and the highest demand gaming titles to new platforms. Our core technology has demonstrated that it is the only technology of its kind and allows us to accomplish within a couple of months what would take most other companies as long as two years to achieve. TransGaming's technology is taking the video games industry to new levels and is changing the rules in how multi-platform games are deployed."
(emphasis mine)
The newest game they support fully is almost two years old, yet they claim to have technology that allows the translation of games to Linux in just a matter of months.
At best you can say they've taken two years to get Warcraft III working. By their own admission their library of 100% fully supported games could've been made to run under Linux in half the time if they'd ported them directly instead of working on WineX.
It's just not that impressive.
Announcing that WineX 3.3 has support for Valve games that were written on the Quake 2 engine back when the 3DFX Voodoo2 was new and nVidia was pushing their soon to be released TNT2 cards really isn't that amazing to me. In fact, it kind of underwhelms me.
The mean time between WineX releases is slowing and the gap between the stuff they can support and the stuff being done on current and modern games is always widening. The utopian dream of being able to install any Windows based game you buy off the shelf at BestBuy on your Linux box and run it seamlessly won't, imho, ever become reality.
So small, in fact, that you didn't need to pluralize the word "games" in that sentence.
All it takes to run dual monitors on Windows (from 98SE on) is either 2 video cards or a dual head video card (which most modern cards are) and 2 monitors.
I can't speak for X, but using dual monitors on Windows is extremely easy.
Please provide a credible source.
This is from serious sources
No, it's hearsay from a Slashdot poster. If the sources are truly "serious" and not just, "a friend overheard a guy in the latte line last week talking about a discussion he had in a noisy bar with this random guy that sat down next to him", then please cite the sources.
(I was laid off a short while back as well...)
Were you laid off from Discreet? If so, what was your job capacity there? Were you in any position, or working with people who were in a position, to know anything credible about your allegations?
I didn't realize that Apple had morphed from a software/hardware/services technology company to a private equity company.
Any frustration and/or anger he is feeling now should be directed at himself for failing to fully understand his responsibilities when he entered into a business contract with Microsoft.
There is need to involve the court system in this. It would be just another useless lawsuit tying up an already overstressed and abused court system.
Gettng a chargeback from the CC company for this would be at best underhanded and at worst immoral or fraudulent. He was not charged for something he didn't approve. He was charged for something he forgot about. Chargebacks are not a refund for stupidity. The more people abuse chargebacks the less chance the CC companies will grant them to people with valid complaints. Besides, like another poster said, the second he calls the CC company he will be asked, "Was this for a subscription service you agreed to?" The CC companies are already sick to death of people buying a month's pr0n subscription online and then calling 30 days later trying to get their money back for those "obviously fraudulent" charges that appeared on their bills.
The only respectable thing for the original poster to do is to admit to himself he forgot to cancel the account, pay the $50 and learn a lesson from this.
Either way, when you entered in the access code, postal address, email address, and CC # the Live! system put up a big full screen text window on your TV that said (paraphrasing), "Your account is good for X days from today. If you don't cancel your account before then it will be automatically renewed and your CC will be charged."
They then warned you of the impending CC charge via email. That you didn't update your email address with them isn't their fault, it's yours.
Bottom line - You agreed to the Terms of Service. You agreed to allow Microsoft to charge your CC for a yearly renewal, you didn't cancel by the date specified, and you didn't provide Microsoft with current contact information.
Next time you should remember when you enter into a revolving service contract that the bill will come due at some point unless you take responsibility for cancelling the service if you no longer need or want it.
Your statement implies an inherent belief that computers should be hard to use. Personally, I think that would be more correctly stated as, "A computer needs to be treated like a motor vehicle."
Computers should, in the utopian case, be treated as nothing more than appliances. People buy TVs, plug them in, and have years of enjoyment without having to know how to do anything other than change the channel. Modern cars can go for tens of thousands of miles before they need to be serviced. And then, you usually get a card in the mail from your dealer letting you know that it's time to bring it in. For most people it's just, "Turn it on and go". Heck, even a TiVO, which is a pretty complex system, is as easy to use as plug it in, turn it on, and read a few pretty screens.
That people treat computers like appliances speaks more to the fact that computers should be engineered to work like appliances than it does to the thought that people are using them incorrectly.