Although it may seem like stupid reasoning to not include ethernet to "apease NBC", it makes absolute sense when you remind yourself that the executives who are in charge of these decisions are certainly not technically inclined, else they'd be doing tech work instead of bullshit work. That's why bozo concepts like HTTP/SSL and those SecurID tokens were born, to give at least a pale illusion of security. To the non-technical, that illusion is more than enough.
Although I personally have no hands-on experience with PostGres, it has often been declared in this here Ask Slashdot forum that PostGres is a somewhat slower but more robust and complete SQL server that doesn't buckle under such load as quickly as MySQL does. I suggest you try it on a test server, migrating from MySQL shouldn't be difficult.
I totally agree with you, that's why I do have Netscape 4.xx installed just to double-check my work. It's a useful tool for spec conformance testing, but once out of the development cycle, it's rendered nearly useless. And you can be sure that if/when M$ adds a toggle to switch between strict HTML and its current relaxed parsing, that's the day I'll fry Netscape off of my drives.
I won't dismiss the fascination of opening up a black box like this one and turning it into a web-enabled toaster, but I don't see why someone would want to buy such a device to turn it into a cheap firewall/router/webserver. Why ? because you can build a better PC for the same money. Sure it won't look as sleek as Oracle's little box, but a Pentium 266 with mb and ram can be purchased for peanuts. Even if you do run up to 199$ in parts, the assembled product is still much more upgradeable and versatile than a bastardized Oracle box.
People.. PEOPLE! Quit preaching Nutscrape and give into the fact that on Windows, Internet Exploder is simply the best you can get. Yes it's by Microsoft, and Yes it's the root of all evil, but goddammit it works and it's pretty. Netscape crashes all the time, totally mangles alot of DHTML that's worked for years on the 'other' browser, and Netscape Corporation itself is somewhat dependent upon their browser for revenue whilst Microsoft already has green bills up the wazoo and is taking every step to ensure everybody falls in love with IE. Any corporate web developer will agree with me that Netscape is a pain in the ass to support and they never innovate. IE is tolerant and extensible with ActiveX controls that just any stupid little VB coder can produce. It's bloated, it's a bit sluggish on the first load, but it excels just about everywhere else, so go flame Opera and their 8088-friendly browser.
(takes a deep breath)
Now if only they would make IE for Linux =)
Basically if you want a delinquent depressive kid with phenomenal concentration and intelligence but pathetic social skills (read: geek goth), skip daycare and let the kid mind for himself in the corner of your office while you hammer down on your keyboard.
Or there's recipe B to make a happy yet stupid kid who will spread gossip and sleep with everything in sight when that age comes around. Do this by putting the kid in the best daycare center you can find and drop him off to granny when you're stuck doing overtime.
And finally there's pseudo-recipe C that involves a reasonable mix of both. Daycare will teach him/her about social interaction and respect, but balance it out with a bit of "boring stuff" to help the child develop hobbies and personal traits to build upon. Let's face it, those daycare professionals are nutcases! They're not there to entertain the child and keep him/her out of trouble, they're just there to clean up the mess and call 911 when that other little fsck decides to shove a pencil in your kid's back and laughs at the bloody fountain. Daycare isn't what it should be but it's a necessary evil, we learn from errors and pain.
Yeah I remember those early DirectX translations, and like today, they sucked. The way I see it, if I wanted to play those age old games, I'd either get an emulator or go to some pawn shop and buy the old console for a few measly bucks.. but certainly I won't pay 30$ for a new "remake" that turns my high-end tweaked PC into a 10 year old console with added GPF functionality. That's just absurd.
To second your point, I just leeched a tiny ISO from the newsgroups called Sega Smash Pack 2. It's basically an 8mb compilation of antique sega games like Comix Zone, Phantasy Star, and 4 or 5 pieces of stinky filler. I was quite overjoyed to see my 32mb video card on my 20" monitor open up a 320x240 fullscreen display. They didn't enhance the games at all.. it rather looks like they put together an emulator and dumped a few old roms that flopped years ago. Of course it's Sega and we owe them pity for their repeated failures to survive in the home market, but if this crap is their reason for fighting abandonware they're just twisting the knife in their own chest. Hasbro might deserve 1% more merit because they at least do half-decent remakes of the classics. Their mindless lawsuits are disgusting and threatening to lone-wolf shareware-style coders around the world, whose indie remakes are often more fun than Hasbro's official offerings, but at least they put a little elbow grease into the "let's rip off our fans" paradigm.
Well that's all nice but mostly impossible or impractical business-wise.
1. Set top boxes have to be priced cheap, 400$ is the absolute ceiling if you want your product to even be placed on shelves.
2. CD Ripping is a gray area thanks to the RIAA, don't expect to see it in a set-top box, it would merely take a few instants to bury the new Amiga in lawsuits and drive the whole thing into the river.
3. Console emulation just won't happen unless they plunk down zillions of bucks down Sony/Nintendo/Sega's whoring throats in licensing fees, making the whole thing unappealing to Amiga's finance and marketing departments. The higher your cost, the higher the selling price.. the higher the selling price, the less it will sell.. end result : big loss.
4. Don't expect to see a 40g hard drive in there anytime soon. I just bought two such drives for about 200$ each. Many set-top boxes sell for 200$ total. The most space I'd see for now is 15g at around 60$. Remember the key factor in acceptance isn't even quality, it's low price.
Why call it a Broadband adapter when it's really just a recycled ISA 10bT nic ? To really be able to call it a broadband adapter, it would have to handle tcp/ip in the hardware/firmware, but then it would make it totally useless for non-broadband use. Imagine Dreamcast lan-parties =) (well no, not really.. I'm not a fan of the Dreamcast but at least I don't hate it half as much as the PS2)
Maybe I'm just purely ignorant in the matters of these new laws, but since when can a business "order" some other business to waste resources to produce these tacky reports merely to please the plaintiff ? You don't see me threatening my neighbor and calling the cops just to make sure he's paid for his cable TV. Last time I checked, donating to the police department was reserved for crime lords.. hmm.. well I guess Microsoft are in their own class of criminality.. nevermind!
What is it with buckyballs ? why does everything come from buckyballs ? Why couldn't a beowulf cluster of dodecahedrons do the job ? I just can't imagine any media scientist (read : dumb guy in an apron reading someone else's report) being taken seriously after using the term "buckyballs" on TV.
Let's face it : supporting home console systems is difficult, not only do they have to come up with decent hardware at a decent price (!=PS2), but then they're expected to develop, at least license games for it. The problem is that console gamers have much broader interests than arcade gamers. You need a little bit of action, a little bit of sports, a little bit of RPG. Arcade games are quick and dirty, they don't require months of storyboarding and artwork creation. You won't see huge sleep-depriving games like Final Fantasy or their legendary Phantasy Star in a standing arcade box. They can therefore make more games that are still top quality, but focusing on the "quick thrills" genre like shoot'em-ups and fighters. They really make an art form of their arcade machines, from the huge molded base of Virtua Fighter 3, to the detailed sniper rifle in that Virtual Sniper (?) game. Console games are all alike, they sit on the shelf all in similar boxes where the only difference is a 4"x4" image and title, easily overlooked.. but you just can't walk into a crowded arcade and not notice that big white pillar where a lineup is gathering in front of Virtua Fighter. Same crowd perhaps, but a totally different mindset.
I'm no network guru, but taking from another reader's example on Potsdam University, why do they even need internet IP addresses for everyone ? Couldn't they just settle with just a handful and set up a gateway for the dorms ? The only reason one really needs a dedicated globally-routable IP is for a server and some multiplayer games (Quake isn't one of them). Same thing for most businesses, they don't need 64k IP's when most of the terminals are used for only web browsing. How many boxes really need to be directly accessible from anywhere in the world ? Certainly not 4 billion.
How does Billco Linux sound ? Of course it would just be Redhat 7.0 with Corel's installer and a root-access samba share for remote administration with a windows box, but I could surely go for an IPO within months... right ?
(this satire does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Billco and/or his other conscience)
Quick solution : Buy a truckload of Guinness (everyone stockpile it for years ahead), then quit buying for a few years. They'll stop acting so cocky after they realize the plunge they've taken..
Why don't we just shoot those bastards and take a bite out of the United States of Corrupt America ? We don't see the RCMP raiding dorms or overreacting in any similar style to computer crime. It's akin to sending a swat team for a speeding ticket, except security geeks don't cause fatalities. Time to turn off Corporate MindFuck TV and get back to reality.
Who cares ? It's just spam porn.. if someone wanted to see Liv Tyler nude they'd have better luck just walking up to her and asking. The only people who can't grok the spam phenomenon shouldn't be told of Google anyway, it's too good for them. Just like we have safety scissors for clumsy kids, well we have safety (stupid) search engines (*cough*Altavista*cough*) for clumsy users.
Google should use a two-handed key combo for the "Search" button... No more one-hand-surfing AOL'ers.
I bet these big kids wax their CPU's every day, thinking it makes them faster. It brings back the uplifting gino conversations that sounded like "You suck because I drive a corvette and you drive a camaro.. camaros are for grannies".
Now I'll go mail some Ritalin to Sharky's boys.
Gates said "Blame Linux developers!"
on
Microsoft Cracked
·
· Score: 3
"the company couldn't say one way or the other whether source code had been stolen."
In other news, a new build of Wine was released today boasting 100% emulation of the Windows environment at native speeds. When asked to comment, the dev team replied "We could tell you how we did it, but then we'd have to kill you".
(note to morons : go check on freshmeat just in case!)
Why bother with space exploration.
on
Mir Lives
·
· Score: 2
Let the damned thing crash and burn.. what I want is my own personal HoloDeck. Then everyone will be able to synthesize little green monsters on little round planets and there won't be any little edge rednecks running around with shotguns.
These guys at Sharky need a reality check. They seem to have a serious inferiority complex in claiming that a Celeron 700 or AMD Duron is low-end. I used to run Quake3, and more importantly Unreal Tournament on a P2-400 with Voodoo2 just fine. Of course I absolutely love my Celeron @ 850 with Geforce2 DDR but that's just gravy. In my case, the top-end video card made a world of difference much more noticeable than any blind cpu upgrade. The core motherboard and cpu always suffer from bloated software, while the video card has its own tweaked embedded code that's always running at full blazing speed, as long as the rest of the PC can provide the scene data fast enough to keep up. Sure, maybe getting a P3-1050 might give me 5-10 extra fps in Quake, for a 400$ pricetag, but if you spend all your hard earned simoleans on bleeding-edge hardware, you won't have a penny left to buy games =)
Slashdot Mirror
Although it may seem like stupid reasoning to not include ethernet to "apease NBC", it makes absolute sense when you remind yourself that the executives who are in charge of these decisions are certainly not technically inclined, else they'd be doing tech work instead of bullshit work. That's why bozo concepts like HTTP/SSL and those SecurID tokens were born, to give at least a pale illusion of security. To the non-technical, that illusion is more than enough.
Although I personally have no hands-on experience with PostGres, it has often been declared in this here Ask Slashdot forum that PostGres is a somewhat slower but more robust and complete SQL server that doesn't buckle under such load as quickly as MySQL does. I suggest you try it on a test server, migrating from MySQL shouldn't be difficult.
I totally agree with you, that's why I do have Netscape 4.xx installed just to double-check my work. It's a useful tool for spec conformance testing, but once out of the development cycle, it's rendered nearly useless. And you can be sure that if/when M$ adds a toggle to switch between strict HTML and its current relaxed parsing, that's the day I'll fry Netscape off of my drives.
I won't dismiss the fascination of opening up a black box like this one and turning it into a web-enabled toaster, but I don't see why someone would want to buy such a device to turn it into a cheap firewall/router/webserver. Why ? because you can build a better PC for the same money. Sure it won't look as sleek as Oracle's little box, but a Pentium 266 with mb and ram can be purchased for peanuts. Even if you do run up to 199$ in parts, the assembled product is still much more upgradeable and versatile than a bastardized Oracle box.
Someone had simply assembled a fake dinosaur with fake aging and all that crap, just to see how stupid these researchers could really prove to be ?
People.. PEOPLE! Quit preaching Nutscrape and give into the fact that on Windows, Internet Exploder is simply the best you can get. Yes it's by Microsoft, and Yes it's the root of all evil, but goddammit it works and it's pretty. Netscape crashes all the time, totally mangles alot of DHTML that's worked for years on the 'other' browser, and Netscape Corporation itself is somewhat dependent upon their browser for revenue whilst Microsoft already has green bills up the wazoo and is taking every step to ensure everybody falls in love with IE. Any corporate web developer will agree with me that Netscape is a pain in the ass to support and they never innovate. IE is tolerant and extensible with ActiveX controls that just any stupid little VB coder can produce. It's bloated, it's a bit sluggish on the first load, but it excels just about everywhere else, so go flame Opera and their 8088-friendly browser.
(takes a deep breath)
Now if only they would make IE for Linux =)
Basically if you want a delinquent depressive kid with phenomenal concentration and intelligence but pathetic social skills (read: geek goth), skip daycare and let the kid mind for himself in the corner of your office while you hammer down on your keyboard.
Or there's recipe B to make a happy yet stupid kid who will spread gossip and sleep with everything in sight when that age comes around. Do this by putting the kid in the best daycare center you can find and drop him off to granny when you're stuck doing overtime.
And finally there's pseudo-recipe C that involves a reasonable mix of both. Daycare will teach him/her about social interaction and respect, but balance it out with a bit of "boring stuff" to help the child develop hobbies and personal traits to build upon. Let's face it, those daycare professionals are nutcases! They're not there to entertain the child and keep him/her out of trouble, they're just there to clean up the mess and call 911 when that other little fsck decides to shove a pencil in your kid's back and laughs at the bloody fountain. Daycare isn't what it should be but it's a necessary evil, we learn from errors and pain.
Yeah I remember those early DirectX translations, and like today, they sucked. The way I see it, if I wanted to play those age old games, I'd either get an emulator or go to some pawn shop and buy the old console for a few measly bucks.. but certainly I won't pay 30$ for a new "remake" that turns my high-end tweaked PC into a 10 year old console with added GPF functionality. That's just absurd.
To second your point, I just leeched a tiny ISO from the newsgroups called Sega Smash Pack 2. It's basically an 8mb compilation of antique sega games like Comix Zone, Phantasy Star, and 4 or 5 pieces of stinky filler. I was quite overjoyed to see my 32mb video card on my 20" monitor open up a 320x240 fullscreen display. They didn't enhance the games at all.. it rather looks like they put together an emulator and dumped a few old roms that flopped years ago. Of course it's Sega and we owe them pity for their repeated failures to survive in the home market, but if this crap is their reason for fighting abandonware they're just twisting the knife in their own chest. Hasbro might deserve 1% more merit because they at least do half-decent remakes of the classics. Their mindless lawsuits are disgusting and threatening to lone-wolf shareware-style coders around the world, whose indie remakes are often more fun than Hasbro's official offerings, but at least they put a little elbow grease into the "let's rip off our fans" paradigm.
Well that's all nice but mostly impossible or impractical business-wise.
1. Set top boxes have to be priced cheap, 400$ is the absolute ceiling if you want your product to even be placed on shelves.
2. CD Ripping is a gray area thanks to the RIAA, don't expect to see it in a set-top box, it would merely take a few instants to bury the new Amiga in lawsuits and drive the whole thing into the river.
3. Console emulation just won't happen unless they plunk down zillions of bucks down Sony/Nintendo/Sega's whoring throats in licensing fees, making the whole thing unappealing to Amiga's finance and marketing departments. The higher your cost, the higher the selling price.. the higher the selling price, the less it will sell.. end result : big loss.
4. Don't expect to see a 40g hard drive in there anytime soon. I just bought two such drives for about 200$ each. Many set-top boxes sell for 200$ total. The most space I'd see for now is 15g at around 60$. Remember the key factor in acceptance isn't even quality, it's low price.
Why call it a Broadband adapter when it's really just a recycled ISA 10bT nic ? To really be able to call it a broadband adapter, it would have to handle tcp/ip in the hardware/firmware, but then it would make it totally useless for non-broadband use. Imagine Dreamcast lan-parties =) (well no, not really.. I'm not a fan of the Dreamcast but at least I don't hate it half as much as the PS2)
Maybe I'm just purely ignorant in the matters of these new laws, but since when can a business "order" some other business to waste resources to produce these tacky reports merely to please the plaintiff ? You don't see me threatening my neighbor and calling the cops just to make sure he's paid for his cable TV. Last time I checked, donating to the police department was reserved for crime lords.. hmm.. well I guess Microsoft are in their own class of criminality.. nevermind!
What is it with buckyballs ? why does everything come from buckyballs ? Why couldn't a beowulf cluster of dodecahedrons do the job ? I just can't imagine any media scientist (read : dumb guy in an apron reading someone else's report) being taken seriously after using the term "buckyballs" on TV.
Let's face it : supporting home console systems is difficult, not only do they have to come up with decent hardware at a decent price (!=PS2), but then they're expected to develop, at least license games for it. The problem is that console gamers have much broader interests than arcade gamers. You need a little bit of action, a little bit of sports, a little bit of RPG. Arcade games are quick and dirty, they don't require months of storyboarding and artwork creation. You won't see huge sleep-depriving games like Final Fantasy or their legendary Phantasy Star in a standing arcade box. They can therefore make more games that are still top quality, but focusing on the "quick thrills" genre like shoot'em-ups and fighters. They really make an art form of their arcade machines, from the huge molded base of Virtua Fighter 3, to the detailed sniper rifle in that Virtual Sniper (?) game. Console games are all alike, they sit on the shelf all in similar boxes where the only difference is a 4"x4" image and title, easily overlooked.. but you just can't walk into a crowded arcade and not notice that big white pillar where a lineup is gathering in front of Virtua Fighter. Same crowd perhaps, but a totally different mindset.
So now I can walk up to people who don't grok minesweeper and say "Your NP matrix sucks".
Expect alot of dumb looks.
I'm no network guru, but taking from another reader's example on Potsdam University, why do they even need internet IP addresses for everyone ? Couldn't they just settle with just a handful and set up a gateway for the dorms ? The only reason one really needs a dedicated globally-routable IP is for a server and some multiplayer games (Quake isn't one of them). Same thing for most businesses, they don't need 64k IP's when most of the terminals are used for only web browsing. How many boxes really need to be directly accessible from anywhere in the world ? Certainly not 4 billion.
Doesn't anyone else think that "a taste of Bush" is misleading ? =)
How does Billco Linux sound ? Of course it would just be Redhat 7.0 with Corel's installer and a root-access samba share for remote administration with a windows box, but I could surely go for an IPO within months... right ?
(this satire does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Billco and/or his other conscience)
Quick solution : Buy a truckload of Guinness (everyone stockpile it for years ahead), then quit buying for a few years. They'll stop acting so cocky after they realize the plunge they've taken..
Why don't we just shoot those bastards and take a bite out of the United States of Corrupt America ? We don't see the RCMP raiding dorms or overreacting in any similar style to computer crime. It's akin to sending a swat team for a speeding ticket, except security geeks don't cause fatalities. Time to turn off Corporate MindFuck TV and get back to reality.
Who cares ? It's just spam porn.. if someone wanted to see Liv Tyler nude they'd have better luck just walking up to her and asking. The only people who can't grok the spam phenomenon shouldn't be told of Google anyway, it's too good for them. Just like we have safety scissors for clumsy kids, well we have safety (stupid) search engines (*cough*Altavista*cough*) for clumsy users.
Google should use a two-handed key combo for the "Search" button... No more one-hand-surfing AOL'ers.
Low end : Duron 800
High end : TBird 1000
I bet these big kids wax their CPU's every day, thinking it makes them faster. It brings back the uplifting gino conversations that sounded like "You suck because I drive a corvette and you drive a camaro.. camaros are for grannies".
Now I'll go mail some Ritalin to Sharky's boys.
"the company couldn't say one way or the other whether source code had been stolen."
In other news, a new build of Wine was released today boasting 100% emulation of the Windows environment at native speeds. When asked to comment, the dev team replied "We could tell you how we did it, but then we'd have to kill you".
(note to morons : go check on freshmeat just in case!)
Let the damned thing crash and burn.. what I want is my own personal HoloDeck. Then everyone will be able to synthesize little green monsters on little round planets and there won't be any little edge rednecks running around with shotguns.
These guys at Sharky need a reality check. They seem to have a serious inferiority complex in claiming that a Celeron 700 or AMD Duron is low-end. I used to run Quake3, and more importantly Unreal Tournament on a P2-400 with Voodoo2 just fine. Of course I absolutely love my Celeron @ 850 with Geforce2 DDR but that's just gravy. In my case, the top-end video card made a world of difference much more noticeable than any blind cpu upgrade. The core motherboard and cpu always suffer from bloated software, while the video card has its own tweaked embedded code that's always running at full blazing speed, as long as the rest of the PC can provide the scene data fast enough to keep up. Sure, maybe getting a P3-1050 might give me 5-10 extra fps in Quake, for a 400$ pricetag, but if you spend all your hard earned simoleans on bleeding-edge hardware, you won't have a penny left to buy games =)