Looks like Mr Taylor has a crappy benefits package. He could sure use some collectively-subsidized Prozac.
It's trigger-happy imbeciles like him that make me such a great cynic. 22 years of "computer engineering" doesn't mean squat if you can't read the plain english instructions on the Apache welcome page. I'll bet he calls Homeland Security when he can't find his car keys too!
Me, I'm on the receiving end of many accusations in the wonderful world of retail. Almost every week I get psychotic middle-class bimbos who start bitching before I even start working on their PC, so what I do is I put down the screwdriver, give their money back and quickly shoo them out of my office. I don't give a damn who they work for and how much money they get paid for being idiots, if they can't be disciplined enough to show some respect, then I can't be bothered to flex my technical muscle.
These people fail to realize that BOFHs are made, not born. Piss someone off badly enough and they will seek revenge. It's human nature. It's the natural equilibrium of existence. Hell if I had been the CentOS guy getting these threats, I think I would have "helped" Mr Taylor "solve" his "problem" by giving me his system password so I could "restore" his files... of course!
Shall we compare to the lovely rates of ATARI hard disks ? I had a fun little 20mb CoolDisk that was probably in the 100's of kb/sec range.
I don't think there's much point in comparing first gen ATA with first gen SATA, especially when it was initially 16mb/sec and not 33:p Sure, SATA-150 is ten times faster than the first ATA hard drives from over a decade ago, but what does that prove ? That new interfaces are faster than older.. big surprise.
My original point was that SATA-150 isn't much of an improvement over ATA-133. Reading between the lines, that means I think the SATA working group should have aimed higher. When designing something next-gen, shoot for the stars, especially when dealing with a huge partnership of bureaucrats that will take years before actually producing something tangible. At least take that serial bus and parallelize it so I can keep using 80-pin conductors and get 8x the performance.. SATA-1200, now that would be something to sing about! But then we'll face the problem of a slow main bus across the motherboard.
This ain't rocket science, it's data transmission over copper. Why can't we have one general-purpose system with extremely high speeds that everything could plug into ? Many specialized server devices (blade systems especially) have crazy fast master busses while the lowly PC is still trucking along with 33-mhz PCI that the average FPGA-hacking toddler can max out, yet we change CPU sockets every 10 months, and VGA slots every 2 years.. Lose the legacy!
What does the PS3 have to do with anything ? I miss the good old days when new products were released whenever and people found out once they saw the item at a store. The only thing more ridiculous than PS3 speculation is Nintendo Revolution speculation. If I had a nickel every time I saw a gamer speculation headline, I could afford my own US senator!
PS2 has been out for many many many years and the last I saw of any emulation was a partially working preview of FFX.
What has me baffled is why we don't have Xbox emulation at all, seeing as it runs X86 code, all that should be required is a hardware virtualization layer for the MCPX, no ? Hell I'd do it myself if I could still live like a teenager.. life gets in the way though.
Kind of like how you can give a kid five one-dollar bills and he'll be happier than if you gave him one hundred-dollar bill. If only we could explain this to bandwidth-consuming adults:D
It is rather self-serving how companies will use one measurement over the other to mislead the customer (no matter how small the difference). Hard drives measuring in Gibibytes rather than Giga.. Sneaky HDD vendors, if you're selling a 200gb drive, make sure it shows up as 200gb in Windows so these idiot users can stop calling me a thief. The worst was when I built a file server for some bag of hammers (I think it was a law firm), and the 2.0tb raid array showed up as 1862 gb. Sure enough, they called me asking for 7% of the purchase price back because that's how much space was missing.. 2 hours later, with a car trip and a contract appendix full of math, everything was resolved. Fuck you Western Digital!
Having only one measly tape drive that I used for about 2 days before giving up, can I ask the general nerd population why we're still using tapes ? I'd be fine if there were some sort of cost advantage but cheap hard drives have become cheaper than tapes now, and definitely more reliable.
So here's my idea: hard drive libraries! Since SATA drives have a standardized connector layout, you could simply have a backplane and swap drives in and out as if they were tapes. As a bonus you'd get much faster read/write speeds and random access (if desired). Maybe design a cheap plastic enclosure to protect the drive and simplify robotic handling.. hell, build a cartridge that fits a dozen 500gb drives and you have a 6tb slab of cheap fast storage (that's 12tb if you still believe in 2:1 compression).
All we need now is a robotic library that's tailored to hard drives. Should be easy, no ?
It's almost creepy how I just played through the first 3 episodes of Starcraft last night (okay, so I cheated through some of the Protoss missions - hate em). Then I uninstalled it and asked myself why the hell I even bothered. I seem to be the one guy on this planet who isn't in love with Starcraft. Once my disk was wiped I proceeded to load C&C and Red Alert instead;)
Perhaps in your part of the world, the police force still has power. Where I live, they would treat this sort of call like they do just about anything else that doesn't carry the sensationalism of violence, drugs or sex : they will "file" a "report" and forget about it, partly because they're overloaded with more serious and urgent issues, and partly because today's people can hardly wipe their own ass without calling someone in desperation. The police get calls from upper-white-trash folk about "shady characters" for sitting in a park with a notebook computer. One time the cops came to my parents apartment because a delusional neighbor claimed they were "tapping into her electrical circuits and stealing power from her fridge". WTF?!
Schools are deathly afraid of anything and anyone. They'd rather expel a victimized child than do something constructive about it, because a fair chunk of these idiot bully kids have idiot bully parents. I've personally taught many full classes of college students who threatened to sue me or cause physical harm to myself and my belongings, simply because they were too dumb and lazy to learn introductory C programming. Rather than shape up and put some actual effort into their education, they cried to mommy and daddy who is a lawyer/doctor/bar owner and sent threatening letters to myself and my boss. Was I a bad teacher ? I don't think so. Were they bad students ? Definitely! Am I a little scared that those teens are now in charge of major jobs ? Terrified!
Not so long ago, when someone issued a challenge, you took it, and you put in 110% effort to beat it. That's what growing up is supposed to be.
Can't you control yourself at all and STOP buying stuff you don't need ? Do you have a survival need to spend all your money on unsatisfying products ? Is it impossible to find alternate sources for this entertainment ? If movies and music cartels are evil, go watch a live theatre performance at the local art hall. Go outside and practice a sport. Visit a park and reflect on quantum theory for all I care. The fact remains that you have a choice: to buy or not to buy. Why can't you "not buy" ?
Humans existed long before media cartels were ever conceived. If you're unable to shear yourself from the self-deprecating lifestyle the media has infested you with, what good are you ?
You've hit the nail on the head friend. I don't plan on having kids, not in this lifetime. I won't have to ruin some kid's life by slowing down their rabid consumerism. I'm one of those psychos who thinks modern kids aren't worth the meat they're made of, and much of that is due to their parents granting their every wish and spoiling them rotten. There was a time when people had to face the realities of life head-on. 14 year olds with jobs, little jobs, not to fund their daily reefer, but to prepare them for a real career when they've reached maturity. Today's kids can barely understand common language as you try to order your junk food at the drive-thru.
I'd rather die alone, than spawn a child and force them to coexist with these cretins. The world doesn't need more kids, the world needs more SMART.
It's not Tommy that needs a discount on anything, it's the rest of the overconsuming world that needs discounts on group therapy. There are few things that irritate me more than wearing a trademark. I don't want his stinking red and white pattern any more than I'd want the Nike swoosh on my left butt cheek. This trend of "belonging" to a pretentious clothing brand is ridiculous. We're supposed to praise QUALITY products that satisfy our needs at the prices we can afford. Some people drive a Ford because they like the handling and cheap maintenance costs, some people drive a Toyota because they like the reliability and simplicity. I don't see any Tommy fashionistas praising the durability of the product or its stain-resistance.
Why does the world like Microsoft ? We don't NOT like them apparently, since they dominate the market for desktop OS. Is it because their product offers better value at a competitive price ? Is it because they provide must-have features that others do not ? Or is it just because everyone else is using it ?
The disturbing trend is that more and more companies are trying to market a vision or style rather than a product. Microsoft may have done some good things with Vista, but they're not selling us just another operating system. It's more like a designer ensemble.. first you get Vista, then you get the matching Office suite, and whatever else they feel like introducing. They want to create computer fashion hounds out of us all, where it's less of a "what do I need" attitude and more of a "I want the matching green speakers to go with my desktop theme". Tommy and Microsoft have more in common than we'd like to admit.
Bumping up the sector size from 512 to 4096 means we can access disks 8 times larger without widening the address registers. We already have 48bit sector addressing which yields up to 128 petabytes PER DISK. 10 years ago drives were 1/1000th the size of current models, perhaps in 10 years we will be seeing drives approaching the petabyte range.. perhaps not. Either way we don't need enlarged sectors for capacity reasons yet.
If this helps to reduce overhead in the design and manufacturing of hardware, then be my guest! What I would really love to see though, is more speed. Capacity grows several orders of magnitude faster than speed, and it is a significant bottleneck for most data-intensive jobs. That's why we have RAID in desktop rigs. Why not implement a black-box raid-like solution for future hard drives ? To hell with form factors, give me a 5.25" height hard drive that boasts 2 terabytes across 8 platters running in parallel, just like a bigass raid-0 stripe, but transparent. 8 platters times 512 bytes per sector = 4096 byte striped sectors. The real advantage would be the 400mb/sec sustained transfer rate (or better). That sort of performance leap would warrant a new interface. SATA is convenient, but we went from 133mb/sec with ATA-133 to 150mb.. coitus interruptus ?
Man can I borrow your soapbox ? Looks like yours has a big built-in amplifier:)
Torrent networks don't "attack" things.. while it might be possible to add someone's IP to the list of tracked peers and generate bogus SYN traffic, it wouldn't accomplish much as Bittorrent clients are designed to initiate a connection less than once every 5 minutes to any given host or tracker.
Rewinding to the main topic, the only way to communicate to these media conglomerates isn't whining on/. or threatening to pirate their movies. We are dealing with business.. big business. The only language businesses speak is the language of money. Don't buy their stuff.. any of their stuff! Stop buying DVD movies, stop going to the cinemas, tell little Nicky he can shove his Harry Potter up his ass. Now I'm not saying this will hurt the company, but their bean counters will notice and those bean counters are the ones in power. They won't listen to our voice, but they will listen to our dollars.
The day common people understand the democratic power of money, is the day democracy will start working for everyone.
It would make business sense to make a 4gb vram graphics card because some bag of hammers would happily blow a couple grand on that slab of pointlessness. Only a handful, and I do mean 0.01% of the high-end customer base would really find a proper use for all that vram. Maybe if someone's doing very high-res renders, they might be able to justify the huge texture maps. For real-time graphics there is little sense in using gigabytes of graphics to render a little over a million pixels per frame. More efficient rendering techniques and procedural texturing would be immensely more useful IMHO.
There are exceptions to every statement, including this one. Suffice to say that graphic violence in video games wasn't nearly as prevalent in the 80's, whereas modern games revel in it.
Not at all, I was just constantly obsessed with the demoscene-quality of everything that I never got any real work done with it. But I did code demos and create MOD music.. ohhhhh yes;)
One big thing we didn't have "back in the day" was ever-increasingly violent games. Now don't get me wrong, there's a curious satisfaction in pumping a flying zombie doctor with a dozen rockets and blowing his guts all over the room, but I feel it has cheapened our entertainment. I remember when the first Carmageddon was released, part racing game, part pedestrian squishing game. If you look at the game from an objective standpoint, both parts sucked, but the game was a hit because it's inevitable for human animals to fantasize at one time or another, what it would be like to run people over with a car, or ram other drivers off the road. Okay, maybe I have a homicidal mind but I think about it every day when driving around my big crazy city full of imbeciles. Perhaps the only reason I haven't hit anyone yet, is that I don't want to scratch my car;)
I also got kicks out of the Medal of Honor series, and Soldier of Fortune.. standard-fare military FPS, but the fact that it was a realistic fantasy; being set in WW2, or a rogue mercenary like a trigger-happy James Bond. It's easier to sink into character playing those games, than it is to believe the environment of Quake or Doom where you're quashing zombies and six-legged hell demons.
This leaves at least two types of games: puzzles and arcade-style games. Puzzles like Tetris, Hexic, Bejeweled etc, all are purely abstract mental jogs that don't give a rats ass about realism, they're just scientifically sterile applications of game design theory. There is no world to escape to, nobody to shoot, it's just you and the flashy geometric interface. The simpler the better, so that anyone can pick it up and play; the mantra is "Easy to play, hard to master". Those games have remained mostly unchanged since the dawn of computing, except for sharper graphics and sound effects. They're still every bit as fun as their 20-year old ancestors.
Arcade games are a special bunch, they're the conceptual sibling of puzzles, except you use your brain less and your hands more. They're equally designed for mass appeal with a low or progressive difficulty scale. Think Dig-Dug, Galaga, Pac-Man.. they often have a minor puzzle element that separates experts from casual players. Sometimes it's just a satisfying button mash like Contra or MegaMan, because the ape in all of us likes to push buttons that make things go.
It doesn't always have to do with imagination. Often it's just about giving the player what they want at the primal level, with minimal fuss. Give me shiny things that make fun sounds, give me generous positive feedback when I achieve a small goal, give me a funny colorful game world that brings me back to my saturday morning childhood before I ever knew about politics, money or STD's. We knew what "fun" was back then.
Re:A lot less than meets the eye
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Thank your modchip and/or dashboard for that. They just force the video mode to NTSC when the game boots up, plus maybe some timing fixes (talking out of my ass here). It's far different from PAL-NTSC movies because those have interlacing issues that require much more than a simple speed tweak. Games are rendered in real-time, and usually in progressive frames so to region-convert a game is typically just a matter of switching the refresh rate from 50 to 60 fps, the game engine handles the rest.
No code is unportable if it's properly written. Even if they were to use a proprietary API, nothing's preventing you from writing proper abstraction classes (as any good programmer should), that can then easily be retargeted to a different clustering solution with minimal hassle.
Overlooking the obvious, has anyone seen the Spore demo yet ? That's what they're talking about. All of you have played SimCity or The Sims at some point ? That's what they're talking about. They're talking about games that let you do whatever the interface provides, with very few rules or restrictions. Not much of a pre-scripted story or bulletized goals, just a free-roaming environment for you to play in.. play like a kid, using a few props and a double-dose of imagination and creativity.
The magic of this style of gameplay is that you become attached to your game as it is your own creation. When you build a city in SimCity, it's YOUR city. YOU designed it, and YOU named the various neighborhoods. You might even have various opinions about your virtual neighbors through the news flashes and economic relationships.. these things aren't real, they're pictures on a screen, numbers in a budget dialog, but they come to life within the depths of your imagination.
When's the last time you got emotionally attached to a rocket launcher ?:P
He suggests beefing up salaries and convincing young people that IT is a viable long-term career path would help to change this sentiment.
I always wonder if these reports are really aimed at managers, or just pretty propaganda to try and restore my faith in IT. Some people might call me a wiz, some people might call me an encyclopedia (abridged;), yet I haven't had a decent salary in years thanks to techie saturation. I can't get a high-tech job because someone else will do it for half the money, and I can't get a lameass dead-end job because "I'm overqualified". So where's that comfy medium-tech job where I make medium income for medium effort ? The Walmart effect is killing everything in my home town, nevermind that it's the #4 biggest city in Canada.
What scared me a couple years back is that a whole bunch of techies I used to know are now doing much lesser jobs, like taxi or construction. Ironically, the bad techs who have no real skills, forced to compensate with bullshit tactics, are the ones who still have IT jobs. What a waste of talent to put an experienced programmer in charge of mounting drywall! Most bureaucrats seems to think of tech workers as worthless bags of shit, like we all just got off a short bus or something. It's not that there isn't enough demand for IT staff, I think the corporate world still hasn't figured out how to put IT to good use.
I see lots of people who are looking at a career shift in their early 30's, looking toward IT, or teens who want to be game developers. I take them on a tour of failure, introduce them to some of the people I know.. this network engineer works for a call center.. this hardware tech does outbound sales for some telemarketer.. this C++ developer drives a truck. The lucky ones do QA testing or tech support. One CS grad mods xboxes, sells pirated movies and games with a little dope on the side to make ends meet while he's busy designing a server appliance he plans to market. Meanwhile, Booger from high school has a house, a brand new truck and a 60" plasma TV, because he didn't waste 3-4 years and tens of thousands of dollars on college (and technolust). He even acknowledges the nonsense of how he can be better off than his bright, educated childhood friend.
I don't care about bigger salaries, I care about more new jobs. Progress doesn't happen by giving some old fart more change. Progress happens by spawning new projects and investing funds into new areas of study. You can't take your bankroll to the grave, but you can plant the seeds of innovation for another generation to burgeon.
That reminds me of a much bigger problem where I live: parking. I'm in Canada's capital, where there are more cars than brain cells (yay government workers). Parking costs 3 bucks an hour, and they have a dedicated meter maid (I prefer the term Parking Nazi) for every 3 square blocks, such that any Nazi can do their rounds in about 15 minutes on foot. Your only other option is the friendly neighborhood parking scalper at $15 a day (for the early-bird special).
The real problem is parking fines. The fine is nominally $35, but they lower it to $25 if you pay it in the first 2 weeks without fuss. It vaguely reminds me of those corporate scare tactics where they sue you for 2 million, but are willing to "settle" for a quarter mil because they have no legal standing (but you don't know that). Anyways, of the $35 fine, $10 is the actual fine, the rest goes to "administrative fees". Does that mean I get my very own filing clerk for two hours every time I get nailed ? Where my bitch ?
I never did understand all the hurrahs about Grub. It doesn't even feel like it belongs on a Linux box, doesn't use the same device naming conventions, doesn't even install in a consistent manner. The upside is that once you've installed it, you don't need to rerun Grub every time you change your configs, and if you're a Grub guru you can drop to a boot-time command line and boot anything. If you screw up your Lilo conf your only option is a rescue disc.
I wouldn't mind some sort of cross-pollenation to produce one uber-mega-tronic boot loader to rule them all. Heck, I'd probably be happy if Grub used lilo.conf (and fixed the 4gb bug). I don't care whose dev has more Futurama action figures, I just want it to work.
Does it really matter when Vista ships ? Are there really so many slashdotters who are going to stand in line at 4 in the morning on release day to get the first copy like we did for Win95 ? I'm deathly scared of Vista myself, I will probably wait a bit for the early adopters to trash their data or discover all the neat things you CAN'T do with Vista, then hopefully play with it very discreetly within a VMWare sandbox. I hate to say this, but Windows XP does what I need today, since most of the functionality I use comes from 3rd party software, and DirectX. I don't think it would be horribly contorted for someone with a purpose, to create a Vista-like suite of apps/interfaces that run on a 2003/XP kernel.
What does everyone want from Vista anyways ? system-wide search ?:P That's not rocket science. 3D-Accelerated display ? We've got XGL and Quartz for inspiration. Integrated firewall ? Norton/McAfee/roll your own.
Windows Vista would have been hot THREE YEARS AGO. Now it feels like we'll simply be paying to turn our Windows PC's into slow mac clones.
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Looks like Mr Taylor has a crappy benefits package. He could sure use some collectively-subsidized Prozac.
It's trigger-happy imbeciles like him that make me such a great cynic. 22 years of "computer engineering" doesn't mean squat if you can't read the plain english instructions on the Apache welcome page. I'll bet he calls Homeland Security when he can't find his car keys too!
Me, I'm on the receiving end of many accusations in the wonderful world of retail. Almost every week I get psychotic middle-class bimbos who start bitching before I even start working on their PC, so what I do is I put down the screwdriver, give their money back and quickly shoo them out of my office. I don't give a damn who they work for and how much money they get paid for being idiots, if they can't be disciplined enough to show some respect, then I can't be bothered to flex my technical muscle.
These people fail to realize that BOFHs are made, not born. Piss someone off badly enough and they will seek revenge. It's human nature. It's the natural equilibrium of existence. Hell if I had been the CentOS guy getting these threats, I think I would have "helped" Mr Taylor "solve" his "problem" by giving me his system password so I could "restore" his files... of course!
Shall we compare to the lovely rates of ATARI hard disks ? I had a fun little 20mb CoolDisk that was probably in the 100's of kb/sec range.
:p Sure, SATA-150 is ten times faster than the first ATA hard drives from over a decade ago, but what does that prove ? That new interfaces are faster than older.. big surprise.
.. SATA-1200, now that would be something to sing about! But then we'll face the problem of a slow main bus across the motherboard.
I don't think there's much point in comparing first gen ATA with first gen SATA, especially when it was initially 16mb/sec and not 33
My original point was that SATA-150 isn't much of an improvement over ATA-133. Reading between the lines, that means I think the SATA working group should have aimed higher. When designing something next-gen, shoot for the stars, especially when dealing with a huge partnership of bureaucrats that will take years before actually producing something tangible. At least take that serial bus and parallelize it so I can keep using 80-pin conductors and get 8x the performance
This ain't rocket science, it's data transmission over copper. Why can't we have one general-purpose system with extremely high speeds that everything could plug into ? Many specialized server devices (blade systems especially) have crazy fast master busses while the lowly PC is still trucking along with 33-mhz PCI that the average FPGA-hacking toddler can max out, yet we change CPU sockets every 10 months, and VGA slots every 2 years.. Lose the legacy!
What does the PS3 have to do with anything ? I miss the good old days when new products were released whenever and people found out once they saw the item at a store. The only thing more ridiculous than PS3 speculation is Nintendo Revolution speculation. If I had a nickel every time I saw a gamer speculation headline, I could afford my own US senator!
PS2 has been out for many many many years and the last I saw of any emulation was a partially working preview of FFX.
What has me baffled is why we don't have Xbox emulation at all, seeing as it runs X86 code, all that should be required is a hardware virtualization layer for the MCPX, no ? Hell I'd do it myself if I could still live like a teenager.. life gets in the way though.
Kind of like how you can give a kid five one-dollar bills and he'll be happier than if you gave him one hundred-dollar bill. If only we could explain this to bandwidth-consuming adults :D
It is rather self-serving how companies will use one measurement over the other to mislead the customer (no matter how small the difference). Hard drives measuring in Gibibytes rather than Giga.. Sneaky HDD vendors, if you're selling a 200gb drive, make sure it shows up as 200gb in Windows so these idiot users can stop calling me a thief. The worst was when I built a file server for some bag of hammers (I think it was a law firm), and the 2.0tb raid array showed up as 1862 gb. Sure enough, they called me asking for 7% of the purchase price back because that's how much space was missing.. 2 hours later, with a car trip and a contract appendix full of math, everything was resolved. Fuck you Western Digital!
Having only one measly tape drive that I used for about 2 days before giving up, can I ask the general nerd population why we're still using tapes ? I'd be fine if there were some sort of cost advantage but cheap hard drives have become cheaper than tapes now, and definitely more reliable.
So here's my idea: hard drive libraries! Since SATA drives have a standardized connector layout, you could simply have a backplane and swap drives in and out as if they were tapes. As a bonus you'd get much faster read/write speeds and random access (if desired). Maybe design a cheap plastic enclosure to protect the drive and simplify robotic handling.. hell, build a cartridge that fits a dozen 500gb drives and you have a 6tb slab of cheap fast storage (that's 12tb if you still believe in 2:1 compression).
All we need now is a robotic library that's tailored to hard drives. Should be easy, no ?
PS1 is cute and all, but I'd kill to run some PS2 games on anything other than a PS2. FFX, Frequency/Amplitude and Devil May Cry.. Mmmmmmm Mmmm Good!
It's almost creepy how I just played through the first 3 episodes of Starcraft last night (okay, so I cheated through some of the Protoss missions - hate em). Then I uninstalled it and asked myself why the hell I even bothered. I seem to be the one guy on this planet who isn't in love with Starcraft. Once my disk was wiped I proceeded to load C&C and Red Alert instead ;)
Perhaps in your part of the world, the police force still has power. Where I live, they would treat this sort of call like they do just about anything else that doesn't carry the sensationalism of violence, drugs or sex : they will "file" a "report" and forget about it, partly because they're overloaded with more serious and urgent issues, and partly because today's people can hardly wipe their own ass without calling someone in desperation. The police get calls from upper-white-trash folk about "shady characters" for sitting in a park with a notebook computer. One time the cops came to my parents apartment because a delusional neighbor claimed they were "tapping into her electrical circuits and stealing power from her fridge". WTF?!
Schools are deathly afraid of anything and anyone. They'd rather expel a victimized child than do something constructive about it, because a fair chunk of these idiot bully kids have idiot bully parents. I've personally taught many full classes of college students who threatened to sue me or cause physical harm to myself and my belongings, simply because they were too dumb and lazy to learn introductory C programming. Rather than shape up and put some actual effort into their education, they cried to mommy and daddy who is a lawyer/doctor/bar owner and sent threatening letters to myself and my boss. Was I a bad teacher ? I don't think so. Were they bad students ? Definitely! Am I a little scared that those teens are now in charge of major jobs ? Terrified!
Not so long ago, when someone issued a challenge, you took it, and you put in 110% effort to beat it. That's what growing up is supposed to be.
Why doesn't it work ?
Can't you control yourself at all and STOP buying stuff you don't need ? Do you have a survival need to spend all your money on unsatisfying products ? Is it impossible to find alternate sources for this entertainment ? If movies and music cartels are evil, go watch a live theatre performance at the local art hall. Go outside and practice a sport. Visit a park and reflect on quantum theory for all I care. The fact remains that you have a choice: to buy or not to buy. Why can't you "not buy" ?
Humans existed long before media cartels were ever conceived. If you're unable to shear yourself from the self-deprecating lifestyle the media has infested you with, what good are you ?
Have a kid , its a whole new reality.
You've hit the nail on the head friend. I don't plan on having kids, not in this lifetime. I won't have to ruin some kid's life by slowing down their rabid consumerism. I'm one of those psychos who thinks modern kids aren't worth the meat they're made of, and much of that is due to their parents granting their every wish and spoiling them rotten. There was a time when people had to face the realities of life head-on. 14 year olds with jobs, little jobs, not to fund their daily reefer, but to prepare them for a real career when they've reached maturity. Today's kids can barely understand common language as you try to order your junk food at the drive-thru.
I'd rather die alone, than spawn a child and force them to coexist with these cretins. The world doesn't need more kids, the world needs more SMART.
It's not Tommy that needs a discount on anything, it's the rest of the overconsuming world that needs discounts on group therapy. There are few things that irritate me more than wearing a trademark. I don't want his stinking red and white pattern any more than I'd want the Nike swoosh on my left butt cheek. This trend of "belonging" to a pretentious clothing brand is ridiculous. We're supposed to praise QUALITY products that satisfy our needs at the prices we can afford. Some people drive a Ford because they like the handling and cheap maintenance costs, some people drive a Toyota because they like the reliability and simplicity. I don't see any Tommy fashionistas praising the durability of the product or its stain-resistance.
Why does the world like Microsoft ? We don't NOT like them apparently, since they dominate the market for desktop OS. Is it because their product offers better value at a competitive price ? Is it because they provide must-have features that others do not ? Or is it just because everyone else is using it ?
The disturbing trend is that more and more companies are trying to market a vision or style rather than a product. Microsoft may have done some good things with Vista, but they're not selling us just another operating system. It's more like a designer ensemble.. first you get Vista, then you get the matching Office suite, and whatever else they feel like introducing. They want to create computer fashion hounds out of us all, where it's less of a "what do I need" attitude and more of a "I want the matching green speakers to go with my desktop theme". Tommy and Microsoft have more in common than we'd like to admit.
Bumping up the sector size from 512 to 4096 means we can access disks 8 times larger without widening the address registers. We already have 48bit sector addressing which yields up to 128 petabytes PER DISK. 10 years ago drives were 1/1000th the size of current models, perhaps in 10 years we will be seeing drives approaching the petabyte range.. perhaps not. Either way we don't need enlarged sectors for capacity reasons yet.
If this helps to reduce overhead in the design and manufacturing of hardware, then be my guest! What I would really love to see though, is more speed. Capacity grows several orders of magnitude faster than speed, and it is a significant bottleneck for most data-intensive jobs. That's why we have RAID in desktop rigs. Why not implement a black-box raid-like solution for future hard drives ? To hell with form factors, give me a 5.25" height hard drive that boasts 2 terabytes across 8 platters running in parallel, just like a bigass raid-0 stripe, but transparent. 8 platters times 512 bytes per sector = 4096 byte striped sectors. The real advantage would be the 400mb/sec sustained transfer rate (or better). That sort of performance leap would warrant a new interface. SATA is convenient, but we went from 133mb/sec with ATA-133 to 150mb.. coitus interruptus ?
Man can I borrow your soapbox ? Looks like yours has a big built-in amplifier :)
/. or threatening to pirate their movies. We are dealing with business.. big business. The only language businesses speak is the language of money. Don't buy their stuff.. any of their stuff! Stop buying DVD movies, stop going to the cinemas, tell little Nicky he can shove his Harry Potter up his ass. Now I'm not saying this will hurt the company, but their bean counters will notice and those bean counters are the ones in power. They won't listen to our voice, but they will listen to our dollars.
Torrent networks don't "attack" things.. while it might be possible to add someone's IP to the list of tracked peers and generate bogus SYN traffic, it wouldn't accomplish much as Bittorrent clients are designed to initiate a connection less than once every 5 minutes to any given host or tracker.
Rewinding to the main topic, the only way to communicate to these media conglomerates isn't whining on
The day common people understand the democratic power of money, is the day democracy will start working for everyone.
It would make business sense to make a 4gb vram graphics card because some bag of hammers would happily blow a couple grand on that slab of pointlessness. Only a handful, and I do mean 0.01% of the high-end customer base would really find a proper use for all that vram. Maybe if someone's doing very high-res renders, they might be able to justify the huge texture maps. For real-time graphics there is little sense in using gigabytes of graphics to render a little over a million pixels per frame. More efficient rendering techniques and procedural texturing would be immensely more useful IMHO.
There are exceptions to every statement, including this one. Suffice to say that graphic violence in video games wasn't nearly as prevalent in the 80's, whereas modern games revel in it.
Not at all, I was just constantly obsessed with the demoscene-quality of everything that I never got any real work done with it. But I did code demos and create MOD music.. ohhhhh yes ;)
One big thing we didn't have "back in the day" was ever-increasingly violent games. Now don't get me wrong, there's a curious satisfaction in pumping a flying zombie doctor with a dozen rockets and blowing his guts all over the room, but I feel it has cheapened our entertainment. I remember when the first Carmageddon was released, part racing game, part pedestrian squishing game. If you look at the game from an objective standpoint, both parts sucked, but the game was a hit because it's inevitable for human animals to fantasize at one time or another, what it would be like to run people over with a car, or ram other drivers off the road. Okay, maybe I have a homicidal mind but I think about it every day when driving around my big crazy city full of imbeciles. Perhaps the only reason I haven't hit anyone yet, is that I don't want to scratch my car ;)
I also got kicks out of the Medal of Honor series, and Soldier of Fortune.. standard-fare military FPS, but the fact that it was a realistic fantasy; being set in WW2, or a rogue mercenary like a trigger-happy James Bond. It's easier to sink into character playing those games, than it is to believe the environment of Quake or Doom where you're quashing zombies and six-legged hell demons.
This leaves at least two types of games: puzzles and arcade-style games. Puzzles like Tetris, Hexic, Bejeweled etc, all are purely abstract mental jogs that don't give a rats ass about realism, they're just scientifically sterile applications of game design theory. There is no world to escape to, nobody to shoot, it's just you and the flashy geometric interface. The simpler the better, so that anyone can pick it up and play; the mantra is "Easy to play, hard to master". Those games have remained mostly unchanged since the dawn of computing, except for sharper graphics and sound effects. They're still every bit as fun as their 20-year old ancestors.
Arcade games are a special bunch, they're the conceptual sibling of puzzles, except you use your brain less and your hands more. They're equally designed for mass appeal with a low or progressive difficulty scale. Think Dig-Dug, Galaga, Pac-Man.. they often have a minor puzzle element that separates experts from casual players. Sometimes it's just a satisfying button mash like Contra or MegaMan, because the ape in all of us likes to push buttons that make things go.
It doesn't always have to do with imagination. Often it's just about giving the player what they want at the primal level, with minimal fuss. Give me shiny things that make fun sounds, give me generous positive feedback when I achieve a small goal, give me a funny colorful game world that brings me back to my saturday morning childhood before I ever knew about politics, money or STD's. We knew what "fun" was back then.
Thank your modchip and/or dashboard for that. They just force the video mode to NTSC when the game boots up, plus maybe some timing fixes (talking out of my ass here). It's far different from PAL-NTSC movies because those have interlacing issues that require much more than a simple speed tweak. Games are rendered in real-time, and usually in progressive frames so to region-convert a game is typically just a matter of switching the refresh rate from 50 to 60 fps, the game engine handles the rest.
No code is unportable if it's properly written. Even if they were to use a proprietary API, nothing's preventing you from writing proper abstraction classes (as any good programmer should), that can then easily be retargeted to a different clustering solution with minimal hassle.
Overlooking the obvious, has anyone seen the Spore demo yet ? That's what they're talking about. All of you have played SimCity or The Sims at some point ? That's what they're talking about. They're talking about games that let you do whatever the interface provides, with very few rules or restrictions. Not much of a pre-scripted story or bulletized goals, just a free-roaming environment for you to play in.. play like a kid, using a few props and a double-dose of imagination and creativity.
:P
The magic of this style of gameplay is that you become attached to your game as it is your own creation. When you build a city in SimCity, it's YOUR city. YOU designed it, and YOU named the various neighborhoods. You might even have various opinions about your virtual neighbors through the news flashes and economic relationships.. these things aren't real, they're pictures on a screen, numbers in a budget dialog, but they come to life within the depths of your imagination.
When's the last time you got emotionally attached to a rocket launcher ?
He suggests beefing up salaries and convincing young people that IT is a viable long-term career path would help to change this sentiment.
;), yet I haven't had a decent salary in years thanks to techie saturation. I can't get a high-tech job because someone else will do it for half the money, and I can't get a lameass dead-end job because "I'm overqualified". So where's that comfy medium-tech job where I make medium income for medium effort ? The Walmart effect is killing everything in my home town, nevermind that it's the #4 biggest city in Canada.
I always wonder if these reports are really aimed at managers, or just pretty propaganda to try and restore my faith in IT. Some people might call me a wiz, some people might call me an encyclopedia (abridged
What scared me a couple years back is that a whole bunch of techies I used to know are now doing much lesser jobs, like taxi or construction. Ironically, the bad techs who have no real skills, forced to compensate with bullshit tactics, are the ones who still have IT jobs. What a waste of talent to put an experienced programmer in charge of mounting drywall! Most bureaucrats seems to think of tech workers as worthless bags of shit, like we all just got off a short bus or something. It's not that there isn't enough demand for IT staff, I think the corporate world still hasn't figured out how to put IT to good use.
I see lots of people who are looking at a career shift in their early 30's, looking toward IT, or teens who want to be game developers. I take them on a tour of failure, introduce them to some of the people I know.. this network engineer works for a call center.. this hardware tech does outbound sales for some telemarketer.. this C++ developer drives a truck. The lucky ones do QA testing or tech support. One CS grad mods xboxes, sells pirated movies and games with a little dope on the side to make ends meet while he's busy designing a server appliance he plans to market. Meanwhile, Booger from high school has a house, a brand new truck and a 60" plasma TV, because he didn't waste 3-4 years and tens of thousands of dollars on college (and technolust). He even acknowledges the nonsense of how he can be better off than his bright, educated childhood friend.
I don't care about bigger salaries, I care about more new jobs. Progress doesn't happen by giving some old fart more change. Progress happens by spawning new projects and investing funds into new areas of study. You can't take your bankroll to the grave, but you can plant the seeds of innovation for another generation to burgeon.
That reminds me of a much bigger problem where I live: parking. I'm in Canada's capital, where there are more cars than brain cells (yay government workers). Parking costs 3 bucks an hour, and they have a dedicated meter maid (I prefer the term Parking Nazi) for every 3 square blocks, such that any Nazi can do their rounds in about 15 minutes on foot. Your only other option is the friendly neighborhood parking scalper at $15 a day (for the early-bird special).
The real problem is parking fines. The fine is nominally $35, but they lower it to $25 if you pay it in the first 2 weeks without fuss. It vaguely reminds me of those corporate scare tactics where they sue you for 2 million, but are willing to "settle" for a quarter mil because they have no legal standing (but you don't know that). Anyways, of the $35 fine, $10 is the actual fine, the rest goes to "administrative fees". Does that mean I get my very own filing clerk for two hours every time I get nailed ? Where my bitch ?
I never did understand all the hurrahs about Grub. It doesn't even feel like it belongs on a Linux box, doesn't use the same device naming conventions, doesn't even install in a consistent manner. The upside is that once you've installed it, you don't need to rerun Grub every time you change your configs, and if you're a Grub guru you can drop to a boot-time command line and boot anything. If you screw up your Lilo conf your only option is a rescue disc.
I wouldn't mind some sort of cross-pollenation to produce one uber-mega-tronic boot loader to rule them all. Heck, I'd probably be happy if Grub used lilo.conf (and fixed the 4gb bug). I don't care whose dev has more Futurama action figures, I just want it to work.
Bonus points of he can lock down the Gibson.
Does it really matter when Vista ships ? Are there really so many slashdotters who are going to stand in line at 4 in the morning on release day to get the first copy like we did for Win95 ? I'm deathly scared of Vista myself, I will probably wait a bit for the early adopters to trash their data or discover all the neat things you CAN'T do with Vista, then hopefully play with it very discreetly within a VMWare sandbox. I hate to say this, but Windows XP does what I need today, since most of the functionality I use comes from 3rd party software, and DirectX. I don't think it would be horribly contorted for someone with a purpose, to create a Vista-like suite of apps/interfaces that run on a 2003/XP kernel.
:P That's not rocket science. 3D-Accelerated display ? We've got XGL and Quartz for inspiration. Integrated firewall ? Norton/McAfee/roll your own.
What does everyone want from Vista anyways ? system-wide search ?
Windows Vista would have been hot THREE YEARS AGO. Now it feels like we'll simply be paying to turn our Windows PC's into slow mac clones.