There's no real point to cracking it if you have a legal version.
I find the No-CD crack for most of my single-player games. I travel a lot, and I don't want to take the CDs with me on a trip, or have a spinning CD-ROM eating at my battery life.
CDs also fill up a laptop case, and the only time I've lost a CD is when I accidentally left it in a hotel room, so I like to leave the CDs at home or the office. I used to take copies of the CD-ROMS, which were sometimes hard to make, but they were all repossesed by the cultural police at the Jeddah airport in Saudia Arabia. So now it's just No-CD cracks.
With HL2, it's a moot point, since there is no way it will play on my laptop, and I have no desire to play it on an airplane. But still, I have no ethical problems with installing the No-CD crack for games I own, and I've yet to find one that did anything malicious to my laptop.
I never replayed the original Half Life. It was the most enjoyable FPS I've ever played, but I'm no longer a college kid with lots of time on my hands, so it took me about a month of weekend sessions to beat it. Then, I moved on to other things, like bills and dishes.
However, I'd estimate that the original Half-Life saved me over $300 since the release. I'm not a serious gamer, but I do buy about 3 or 4 games a year, at about $30 a game. Since I bought Half Life in 2000, that has been reduced to about 1 game a year. So, at the low end, that's about 10 games I didn't buy, that don't sit on my shelf gathering dust.
Half-Life was great, but the multiplayer was just standard death-match. It was fun, though - we installed it at work, and would play from 5 PM to late at night on the weekends.
It was the mods that were amazing. Team Fortress Classic was challenging, and a good intro to online team-based gameplay. With half-a-dozen classes, fairly well balanced, there was enough variety to keep you interested for a long time. This was the game that made me get broadband.
Then, I tried Counterstrike. It is hard to remember how revolutionary this game was the first time you played it. I was never a top-flight player, making crazy kills with a sniper rifle. But I could use the lower weapons well, and usually positioned myself where I could take out two or three enemies before getting killed. The feeling of getting "in the zone", combined with the social pressure to make sure your side won, made for addictive gameplay. And then there was the drama of being the last one alive, and the game turning into a one-on-one deathmatch.
After a few years of this, I moved on to other mods. I never played the Day of Defeat, although it sounds as addictive (and may have spawned the whole WW2 genre). I enjoyed Science and Industry, but I felt the voting on technology got in the way of learning to play the game.
Then, a Penny Arcade post pointed out Natural Selection. NS is an amazing combination of a resource management game and an FPS, with a cool science-fiction theme. There are three games in one - a team-based marine vs. aliens game, a looser but still collaborative aliens vs. marines game, and the leadership and resource management game as the marine commander. That was before they added the new gametype for version 2.0. NS is one of the best and most addictive games I have ever played.
All of these mods were free, except for the monthly charge for broadband. I'm now at the point where I am slightly allergic to paying for games, but I have no interest in pirated games. Instead, if I get bored of NS, I work on my web server or play around with a programming project. So, Half-Life has helped my resume, too.
Valve realizes that what made Half-Life so sucessful was a first player experience that easily won Game of the Year for many reviewers, followed by a mod community that gave it a lifetime far beyond that of any other game (with the possible exception of the Civilization series). They have developed the mod tools along with the game, and released the Source SDK (for the HL2 engine) a few weeks ago. You may want to wait for the price to go down (which could be a while), and to see what the mods look like. I know it sounds silly, but HL2 is an investment.
Unless you don't have broadband. In which case, Greetings from the 21st Century! How are things back in the 1990's?
900,000, at approximatly 3 minutes 30 seconds per song, comes to almost 6 years of music, played 24 hours a day. I'd be more than happy if my playlist only repeated every month.
My complaint about ChronicLogic is that their demos are far too short, taking 15-30 minutes to beat. It was true for Bridge Construction Set - it looked interesting, but not interesting enough. For Gish, I couldn't tell whether it was an interesting game that I would enjoy, or whether I'd just get annoyed or bored after another half-hour. So, I erred on the side of caution, and ignored it.
I think the demo should cover 10%-33% of the game, the more the better, and tell you how much you are getting. It worked for iD software, back when they were primarily a shareware company, and it works today, for companies like SpiderWeb Software. After playing a few hours of Avernum 3, I couldn't stop myself from buying the full version.
Sorry to say, but any conflict which we've fought SINCE WW2 has been a halfassed joke. To put it bluntly, we should have used our whole military, sealed off the country, and levelled every major city, annihilate (not simply defeat) every military formation that existed, and smash their infrastructure entirely, making peace only when something crawled out of the rubble begging us to stop.
First, the Funny: Ah, the Civ3 answer.
And now the Troll: Good Final Solution, Hitler. It's too bad:
Iraq didn't have terrorists (except for areas protected from Baghdad by the UN no-fly zone),
they didn't have any weapons of mass destruction to speak of, because
the inspections were keeping Saddam from accumulating any, and
Saddam would never give the people that hate his regime a thimble of nerve gas, much less a nuclear device, but of course
Saddam wasn't anywhere near a nuclear device. And, of course,
Iraq was a distraction from the fact that a full ground offensive in Afghanistan couldn't find Osama Bin Laden, because he was probably hiding in the backyard of our ally, Pakistan.
And, perhaps the Insightful: If we had done like we did for the Germans and Japanese, and relocated all the military personnel to Prisoner of War camps in the Midwest, giving them a chance to acclimate to a life without war, then maybe we would have had a chance to rebuild the country. Accountants and Idealists lost these particular wars for the US.
So, there ya go mods. Have fun, and please wait for "Overrated" until it gets a few points...
Now, my friend, he doesn't mind those 100 riders, so he votes on the initial bill. The bill doesn't get enough votes, gets sent back to committee.
...
So, when my friend is up for election, his staff pulls the voting records, and presto! My friend is "against affordable housing for working class families". Even better, he flip-flopped on the issue, because "he voted for it before he voted against it."
And then idiots like you repeat it. This is why our political climate is like it is
I'd say it's a good reason why governors have an easier time getting elected than legislators. Being in the executive branch at the state level lets you take clear stands, while someone at the state or national assembly has to become really good at compromise.
I don't think that people that call legislators "flip-floppers" are idiots. I just think it is a sad reflection on the political knowledge of the average citizen.
Of course, most who state that opinion on a public forum are idiots, or campaign workers...
As banks produce better and better online banking systems, is there still a place for Money / Quicken?
Here's what Microsoft Money tells me:
What bills are due soon, and how much I will probably owe. It helps remind me about twice-a-year bills (auto insurance) and once-every-few-years bills (magazine subscriptions).
An estimate of my cash flow as impacted by bills, salary, and other expenses, projected with some accuracy for one month, six months, years, etc.
Categorization of my expenses. I can calculate my "lazy belly" ratio (money spent on eating out over money spent on groceries), look for trends, and look where I can cut back on expenses
Set a budget, and track how I'm doing. This makes the cash flow estimates more reliable
Track my 401K and retirement accounts, my Roth IRAs, and after-tax account. This includes tracking the performance of individual stocks and funds, and calculating personal rates of return. I also get a reminder to deposit money in the Roths every month.
Quickly determine when I can safely move money from checking to savings, and when I need to move from savings to checking.
Plan for buying a new car, a new house, or bringing home a baby.
Plan for retirement, by estimating my long-term needs (college, health costs, desired retirement date), and creating a plan to meet those needs.
In short, Microsoft Money lets me feel in control of my finances. It has saved me money, in avoiding overdraft charges due to unexpected bills. It has made me money, in being able to keep more in an interest bearing savings account, keeping checking as low as possible. Finally, I am saving more than ever, and I have a retirement plan which I believe will work.
The fact that you think only 1% need this, then maybe you need to think about your retirement needs, and see if you are keeping a good eye on your cash.
One thing the gameing industry needs is a shared content license similar to how open source is set up. If someone spends 6 months makeing a detailed land scape for level 14 of a game and it turns out the everyone blows through level 14 in just a couple of minutes is level 14 worth those 6 months?
Still designing levels in 2034? Can't the games make their own levels on the fly yet? Boy, NetHack still has 'em beat...
Valve has put a lot of work and bug fixes into their internet gaming platform, Steam. It's not perfect, but it's working pretty well these days. As part of their promotion, you can now get Half-Life for free by downloading and registering Steam.
If you haven't played Half-Life yet, it's a great way to try it out (especially since stores still seem to be selling it for $30).
If you are into the online games, that means you can also play Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress Classic, or, my personal favorite, Natural Selection.
I would rather get an e-mail address that I can be sure I'll still have in five years time. When I first migrated from web-based mail to a POP3 service, I went through about three providers until I hit on one (GMX) that was stable, but then they stopped translating the pages into English, and after a year of guessing how to use the spam tools in German, I got fed up.
If you don't want to create your own domain, join a professional organization. Most technical ones offer free email forwarding services, and they are quite popular. I'm pretty sure the IEEE isn't going away any time soon, and most professionals can join. Of course, it means yearly dues, but there are a lot of benefits besides having the same email address forever.
Is this software going to intercept any archives (.rar,.tar.gz,.zip etc.), unarchive them and check them? I'm not against such software - Universities have a right to disallow file trading on their networks, just as I have a right to use an ISP which doesn't use such software for my home connection. However, I just think that this won't work, at least not without blocking or hindering so much legitimate use that everyone revolts against it.
GNU zip: zip -e archive.zip file1 (file2...) to encypt (password is prompted, repeated). unzip will recognize as an encrypted archive and prompt for password. See also zipcloak. Easy to use GNU zip is included with Cygwin (for Windows), Linux, probably BSD.
GNU gzip: No encryption option.
GNU bzip2: No encyrption option.
WinZip: Look for password encryption options. You can lock files in the archive, but not the archive itself.
WinXP zip (e.g., right click on file, Send To->Compressed/Zipped Folder): You can set up certificates for encryption (Properties->Advanced->Encrypt Contents), but they are not password based, and by default the Administrator has access - probably not done in a form where you can email it. Use Cygwin's GNU zip or WinZip (or, maybe winrar).
Poor man's masking: rename the file from "Eminems_new_song.mp3" to Eminems_new_song.mpthree.txt". Recepient renames to undo the "encyption". Two problems - some email clients rightly block attachment sizes, and once the mail filters figure out your devious trick, they will update their filters. See "Arms Race".
He tried it with several distros: Xandros 2.0 Deluxe, two versions of Slackware, two versions of SuSE, Debian, Lindows, Knoppix, Knotix, Morphix, and Gentoo.
"one of the Linux distributions I tried specifically claimed compatibility with the sound system in question"
He didn't like the advice of "get rid of the brand-new, fully functional sound card and install a card from a few years ago, and Linux would work just fine".
The Achilles Heel is "For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux." It's not "My sucky OEM sound card didn't work."
Yeah, it sucks that he didn't mention the card. It sucks that he didn't try distro X, and that Knoppix couldn't detect it. It sucks that the forums didn't help. It sucks that he didn't try a half-a-dozen things. But, the fact is, a good amount of hardware that works out of the box with Windows won't work with Linux. Every user that trys and gets a bad experience will hold the opinion "Linux Sucks" until they are proved otherwise, years later perhaps.
Recursive Make Considered Harmful
on
Optimizing distcc
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There was an interesting paper by Peter Miller in 1997 called
"Recursive Make Considered Harmful".
It makes a good case for why recursive make is a bad idea, slowing down compile times and clouding dependancies. Benjamin Meyer has proved the point again, with his use of unsermake - if you generate a non-recursive make, then distributed compiles are twice as fast.
Unfortunately, the makefile creator most people use, automake, creates only recursive makefiles. Maybe a replacement like unsermake will get automake developers thinking about radical changes. I wouldn't mind seeing M4 go away, for one.
All your games could be played on a console if you just added a keyboard. None are super graphics intensive, If MMORPG become popular, wireless keyboards may become standard on consoles, and then the only "intellegent" part of playing on a PC will be finding a free server to download the patch from.
As for communism vrs capitalism, you aren't even comparing apples and oranges, and you're doing it in such a way that makes me think you don't even know the difference. It's not an all or nothing issue, communism is a social structure, not an economic one, capitalism is economic, not social, socialism (which is probably what you mean) has nothing to do with shooting people who speak up, and the countries with the highest standards of health and education are largely socialist (although, again, it's not a cut and dried difference).
You are correct, I'm being a bit sloppy. I blame trying to read/respond during my lunch break. When you started comparing folks getting fired to killing 30% of the population, I had an emotional response, and took us both a little closer to mentioning Hitler and ending the discussion.
I often wonder if anyone in America has noticed that outsourcing is remarkably like mercantilism. Am I the only one who has spotted this?
I keep wanting to change the Subject line, but "Wow". I haven't heard the word Mercantilism since grade school. Could you please explain what you mean?
I'm not going to argue with the economic principles, because it's not really something that anyone can resolve any way except by doing it (and note that economocists tend to think of "the good of the majority" as "the good of people like me who're upper middle class at least and play the stockmarket"), but the idea that we should applaud the loss to an individual, and especially to a very large set of individuals, because we're all better off is so morally bankrupt it makes my ears bleed. If we just killed 30% of the population, then the rest of us would all be better off, but we don't because it's morally repugnant. Offshoring may be good economically (or it may not), but it's NOT good for the morale of the country, especially in the sectors being offshored (everything except management, basically).
I think you might be confused. Capitalism is the one that brought us most modern innovations, raised standards of health and living, supports democracy, and causes workers to be fired when someone can do it cheaper. It's Communism where all workers are guarenteed jobs, that has barely improved (or lowered) standards of health and living, and that kills academics when they get too big for their britches, and kills citizens through mass starvations when the planned grain harvests don't work as well as the Chairman was told.
I'm not applauding when a person loses their job. I'm also not implying they should be taken out back and shot if they lose their job. Being fired is not the end of the world, and our government should soften the blow for all workers who lose their jobs.
I think the best thing for the morale of the country is to raise the standard of living for everyone (occasionally at the temporary expense of the few). I don't think parades and tariffs will help much, in the long run.
It's interesting to be marked a Troll and a Flamebaiter for mentioning ideas that are considered fundamental in the academic discipline that studies the subject. It's a little like being modded down for mentioning that most English majors think Shakespeare was a pretty important dramatist.
Oh Please. Nobody has proven that outsourcing will create more jobs.......let alone *skilled* jobs, let alone a sufficent number of *skilled* jobs.
This ain't an academic proof (Slashdot isn't a great place for such proofs), but consider computers. In the beginning, the manufacturing, assembly, and sales of computers were almost entirely in the U.S. As the industry became larger, companies found that they could outsource the manufacturing jobs to Southeast Asia, ship the parts (or assembled computers) to the U.S., and still make a larger profit over those who made them in the U.S. Soon enough, the vast majority of computer parts were manufactured in Southeast Asia, spelling doom for anyone in the computer industry in the U.S. Only the upper managers of IBM (and the stockholders, of course) were making any money.
Or, maybe not. While moving computer manufacturing to Southeast Asia was bad for the worker trying to make a living constructing computers, it was pretty good for anyone that used a computer in their job. As they became cheaper, businesses could buy more, until you got to the point where it was common to have every employee with a computer. Whole industries were created around maintaining an office of computers (which employed huge numbers of people), and some of the largest fortunes of the modern age were made from selling computers, software, and services.
Computers got cheap enough that many American families bought them for the home. Enough people had computers (hooked up to the Internet) that businesses scrambled to find ways to make money off of these people. For a while, you could actually get a job creating web pages and web sites, just so that companies could reach consumers in new ways (either directly or through advertising).
I'd argue that outsourcing those computer manufacturing jobs to Asia directly resulted in cheaper computers and their widespread ownership, and that creates millions of jobs, many more than the hundreds to thousands that Cray ever employed in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It also made it possible for a few folks to collaborate on a free Unix clone for the (newly cheap) PC. There are people arguing that that little development will mean the end of anyone making money in software, but anyone who has worked with FreeBSD or Linux knows that there is still plenty of work to be done.
So, can I say that sending x-rays to India has created new skilled jobs? Well, I can't give their names and numbers, but there is someone who closed the deal on the dedicated bandwidth between U.S. and India, someone else who maintains the equipment that makes it cheap enough to send those images, someone in the U.S. whose job it is to interface with his Indian counterparts to negotiate rates and solve issues, etc. etc. There are companies that pay a few dollars less per employee for health care costs, and perhaps a couple of people that don't get laid off because of it. There is an emergency room doctor that can see an additional patient per hour. And on, and on, and on. And, yep, there is an x-ray technician, bitter and out of a job.
I'm sorry for you if you have been outsourced. I'm angry if the government has failed to pay benefits because the laws haven't caught up to the fact that service industry jobs are now being targeted. But I'm pretty tired of paying more for food because the government is trying to protect farmers and for paying more taxes because the government just can't close a military base that employs half a town. And, as much as it hurts, I'm tired of paying more for software because some folks thought four years of school would be enough to employ them for life.
Microsoft is also contributing money to the Bush campaign( the administration quoted as saying that outsourcing is good for everyone and plans to do nothing about it)
I'm no fan of the Bush Administration, but they are right here. Outsourcing hurts the folks that get outsourced, but the rest of us win. The people that can do the job the cheapest get the job, the basic goods and services we use get cheaper, our standard of living goes up, etc. etc. Again, the person who loses a job is hurt, but it's often temporary. Because we all benefit from the individuals loss, we should support temporary benefits while that person changes careers.
From the Economist, Feb 19th 2004 (the India issue):
EARLIER this month, President George Bush's chief economic adviser, Gregory
Mankiw, once Harvard's youngest tenured professor, attracted a storm of
abuse. He told Congress that if a thing or a service could be produced more
cheaply abroad, then Americans were better off importing it than producing
it at home. As an example, Mr Mankiw uses the case of radiologists in India
analysing the X-rays, sent via the internet, of American patients.
Mr Mankiw's proposition, in essence, is the law of comparative advantage, first postulated by David Ricardo two centuries ago and demonstrated to astonishing effect since. Yet the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, joined Democrats in their rebuke of Mr Mankiw for approving of jobs going overseas; another Republican called for his resignation. The White House gave Mr Mankiw only lukewarm support -- unsurprisingly, since Mr Bush recently signed a bill forbidding the outsourcing of federal contracts overseas. And the Democratic presidential contenders? Mr Mankiw had just written their attack ads.
...
She uses the example of cheaper IT hardware, one of the main aspects of globalisation in the 1990s. Most of the drop in prices for PCs, mainframes and so on was caused by the relentless advance of technology; but she still thinks that trade and globalised production -- all those Dell Computer factories in China, for instance -- was responsible for 10-30% of the fall in hardware prices. These lower prices led to higher American productivity growth and added $230 billion of extra GDP between 1995 and 2002, equivalent to an extra 0.3 percentage points of growth a year.
These days, software spending is increasing at twice the rate of hardware spending, as businesses struggle to make their new computers work better. The manufacturing sector is where such integration has gone furthest. In many other parts of the American economy, the process has barely begun -- particularly among smaller- and medium-sized businesses. Mr Mankiw's example of the Indian radiologist shows how the internet could help lower costs and raise productivity in health care. Who would object to that?
It's painful to see outsourcing move from the manufacturing sector to the service sector, but we're better off because of it. Keep your skills up-to-date folks, and think about those management jobs.
As the son of a U.S. Postal Service employee, I'm forced to tell you that it's Direct Mail, not snail spam or junk mail. The big difference is with direct mail, the marketer is paying for every item sent, but with spam, most of the cost is placed on the ISP and the end user. Direct mail is more targeted, often more effective, and helps keep the cost of first-class mail (that's your mail) down. Spam just makes the spammers richer, and annoys the rest of us to tears.
Of course, if it still annoys you, there are a few simple steps you can take to drastically reduce the amount of direct mail you get. The majority of the mail I get is now mail I want to get. I still get AOL CDs, but it's down to twice a year - usually due to a new magazine subscription where I haven't told them my preferences.
This is not Microsoft taking an established standard, "improving" it, and making the rest of the world follow it. This is someone making an adaption of one work of art, a book, into another work or art, a movie. You don't need little footnotes refering back to the text in the corner of the screen. The only thing that is necessary is that it works AS A MOVIE.
The Lord of the Rings is the Geek Bible. For the true believers, Peter Jackson comitted blashphemy by cutting Bombadil, the closing scenes in the Shire, and elevating Arwen to a major character. The fact is, just about every single choice he made created a better MOVIE. Screw the literalists who think Noah fit two of every animal on the Ark and waited with baited breath for the Final Undoing of Saruman. Enjoy the books as books, and enjoy the movie as a movie.
We've talking software here, the same stuff that many of you do for free with Linux. You have a computer, you have the skills, your marketing and selling might not be great, but at least one of you will be street smart and presentable enough to talk to customers.
I don't know about other programmers, but I work 40-60 hours a week at my paying job, then spend any extra time on free software. If there is ever a time conflict between the two of them, I give the extra time to my job. Free software doesn't pay the electric bill, the mortgage, etc. etc.
When I look at mirror pages for servers in the Middle East, there are few or none. What servers do you use to download software? Are they specific servers, or servers in particular countries? Is it faster to use a server, to get a friend to burn a CD, or to buy them off the streets?
I'm probably headed back to Saudia Arabia for a week in February, and I had a heck of a time finding good servers. You never know how much you rely on a fast Internet connection until you spend three days downloading the source for Open Office for your Gentoo-based laptop.
And yes, I know for the future that the binary Open Office package is smaller, just about as fast, and that it doesn't take 30 hours to build on a P3 system.
I was recently in Saudia Arabia (Nov 2003), in the city of Jeddah. Jeddah is the considered "the Gateway to Mecca", and the city's administrators have spent quite a bit of money making it very attractive. For instance, most major intersections are roundabouts, and every roundabout has a little park or a sculpture in the center. Islam prohibits showing images of the human form (billboards either don't show people or pixelate the faces), so the scupltures are always abstract art, and Jeddah might have one of the largest public collections of large-scale abstract sculpture in the world. However, it seems that just about every block also has a empty lot filled with construction trash or a building under construction. The impression while driving is one alternating between amazement and depression.
Jeddah is a little more inviting than Ridyah. Our driver was never stopped at a checkpoint, unless we were entering the job site or the compound. Restraunts and shops all closed for prayer, which meant more planning for meals than normal. Westerners were free to smoke, eat, and drink (no alcohol, of course) during daylight in Ramadan, as long as it was done within the compound walls or behind a closed, locked door. The restrictions only bothered me when I was hungry (invariably just as prayer was starting), but some of my coworkers had a hard time not wearing shorts in public (the rumor is that only prostitutes wear shorts).
Yes, there were prostitutes, alcohol, gambling, etc. etc., but it was all behind closed doors. The local "alcohol mafia" appears to be run by the Brits, and some people make millions. Others ferment their own in bathtubs. All illegal, but in Jeddah they have stopped random raids for the time. Just don't go driving with any in the trunk...
We only had a dial-up connection to the internet - management never came through on the promised DSL line. I knew that Gentoo Linux required a network connection, but I never realized how much it absolutely requires broadband until it took 3 days to download the Open Office source code. BTW, it's not worth compiling Open Office from source, especially when you are averaging a MB an hour.
Bookstores don't generally sell books - just office supplies. The one "real" bookstore I found sold some computer books, but mostly for web design (Flash, etc.). There was one Linux book. It seems to me that the cache servers / firewalls make it especially hard for Linux users - hard to download ISOs, and hard to browse forums and usenet postings. I can see where LUGs would be much more important - one guy can get the DSL line to get the ISOs, and the rest can help each other translate documentation and debug problems. It seems piracy is widespread as well, with many of the compilation CDs and DVDs that come out of Asia. That seems to hurt Linux as well - if you can get Windows XP for $15, why mess around with Linux?
You need a visa to visit Saudia Arabia, and the visas are given for work (with a company sponsering you), for pilgramage (I think you still need a citizen to sponsor), or for travel (but only for tour groups in buses). If you have a chance to go, it's worth the experience.
Slashdot Mirror
I find the No-CD crack for most of my single-player games. I travel a lot, and I don't want to take the CDs with me on a trip, or have a spinning CD-ROM eating at my battery life.
CDs also fill up a laptop case, and the only time I've lost a CD is when I accidentally left it in a hotel room, so I like to leave the CDs at home or the office. I used to take copies of the CD-ROMS, which were sometimes hard to make, but they were all repossesed by the cultural police at the Jeddah airport in Saudia Arabia. So now it's just No-CD cracks.
With HL2, it's a moot point, since there is no way it will play on my laptop, and I have no desire to play it on an airplane. But still, I have no ethical problems with installing the No-CD crack for games I own, and I've yet to find one that did anything malicious to my laptop.
However, I'd estimate that the original Half-Life saved me over $300 since the release. I'm not a serious gamer, but I do buy about 3 or 4 games a year, at about $30 a game. Since I bought Half Life in 2000, that has been reduced to about 1 game a year. So, at the low end, that's about 10 games I didn't buy, that don't sit on my shelf gathering dust.
Half-Life was great, but the multiplayer was just standard death-match. It was fun, though - we installed it at work, and would play from 5 PM to late at night on the weekends.
It was the mods that were amazing. Team Fortress Classic was challenging, and a good intro to online team-based gameplay. With half-a-dozen classes, fairly well balanced, there was enough variety to keep you interested for a long time. This was the game that made me get broadband.
Then, I tried Counterstrike. It is hard to remember how revolutionary this game was the first time you played it. I was never a top-flight player, making crazy kills with a sniper rifle. But I could use the lower weapons well, and usually positioned myself where I could take out two or three enemies before getting killed. The feeling of getting "in the zone", combined with the social pressure to make sure your side won, made for addictive gameplay. And then there was the drama of being the last one alive, and the game turning into a one-on-one deathmatch.
After a few years of this, I moved on to other mods. I never played the Day of Defeat, although it sounds as addictive (and may have spawned the whole WW2 genre). I enjoyed Science and Industry, but I felt the voting on technology got in the way of learning to play the game.
Then, a Penny Arcade post pointed out Natural Selection. NS is an amazing combination of a resource management game and an FPS, with a cool science-fiction theme. There are three games in one - a team-based marine vs. aliens game, a looser but still collaborative aliens vs. marines game, and the leadership and resource management game as the marine commander. That was before they added the new gametype for version 2.0. NS is one of the best and most addictive games I have ever played.
All of these mods were free, except for the monthly charge for broadband. I'm now at the point where I am slightly allergic to paying for games, but I have no interest in pirated games. Instead, if I get bored of NS, I work on my web server or play around with a programming project. So, Half-Life has helped my resume, too.
Valve realizes that what made Half-Life so sucessful was a first player experience that easily won Game of the Year for many reviewers, followed by a mod community that gave it a lifetime far beyond that of any other game (with the possible exception of the Civilization series). They have developed the mod tools along with the game, and released the Source SDK (for the HL2 engine) a few weeks ago. You may want to wait for the price to go down (which could be a while), and to see what the mods look like. I know it sounds silly, but HL2 is an investment.
Unless you don't have broadband. In which case, Greetings from the 21st Century! How are things back in the 1990's?
900,000, at approximatly 3 minutes 30 seconds per song, comes to almost 6 years of music, played 24 hours a day. I'd be more than happy if my playlist only repeated every month.
I think the demo should cover 10%-33% of the game, the more the better, and tell you how much you are getting. It worked for iD software, back when they were primarily a shareware company, and it works today, for companies like SpiderWeb Software. After playing a few hours of Avernum 3, I couldn't stop myself from buying the full version.
First, the Funny: Ah, the Civ3 answer.
And now the Troll: Good Final Solution, Hitler. It's too bad:
And, perhaps the Insightful: If we had done like we did for the Germans and Japanese, and relocated all the military personnel to Prisoner of War camps in the Midwest, giving them a chance to acclimate to a life without war, then maybe we would have had a chance to rebuild the country. Accountants and Idealists lost these particular wars for the US.
So, there ya go mods. Have fun, and please wait for "Overrated" until it gets a few points...
So, when my friend is up for election, his staff pulls the voting records, and presto! My friend is "against affordable housing for working class families". Even better, he flip-flopped on the issue, because "he voted for it before he voted against it."
And then idiots like you repeat it. This is why our political climate is like it is
I'd say it's a good reason why governors have an easier time getting elected than legislators. Being in the executive branch at the state level lets you take clear stands, while someone at the state or national assembly has to become really good at compromise.
I don't think that people that call legislators "flip-floppers" are idiots. I just think it is a sad reflection on the political knowledge of the average citizen.
Of course, most who state that opinion on a public forum are idiots, or campaign workers...
Here's what Microsoft Money tells me:
What bills are due soon, and how much I will probably owe. It helps remind me about twice-a-year bills (auto insurance) and once-every-few-years bills (magazine subscriptions).
An estimate of my cash flow as impacted by bills, salary, and other expenses, projected with some accuracy for one month, six months, years, etc.
Categorization of my expenses. I can calculate my "lazy belly" ratio (money spent on eating out over money spent on groceries), look for trends, and look where I can cut back on expenses
Set a budget, and track how I'm doing. This makes the cash flow estimates more reliable
Track my 401K and retirement accounts, my Roth IRAs, and after-tax account. This includes tracking the performance of individual stocks and funds, and calculating personal rates of return. I also get a reminder to deposit money in the Roths every month.
Quickly determine when I can safely move money from checking to savings, and when I need to move from savings to checking.
Plan for buying a new car, a new house, or bringing home a baby.
Plan for retirement, by estimating my long-term needs (college, health costs, desired retirement date), and creating a plan to meet those needs.
In short, Microsoft Money lets me feel in control of my finances. It has saved me money, in avoiding overdraft charges due to unexpected bills. It has made me money, in being able to keep more in an interest bearing savings account, keeping checking as low as possible. Finally, I am saving more than ever, and I have a retirement plan which I believe will work.
The fact that you think only 1% need this, then maybe you need to think about your retirement needs, and see if you are keeping a good eye on your cash.
Still designing levels in 2034? Can't the games make their own levels on the fly yet? Boy, NetHack still has 'em beat...
If you haven't played Half-Life yet, it's a great way to try it out (especially since stores still seem to be selling it for $30).
If you are into the online games, that means you can also play Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, Team Fortress Classic, or, my personal favorite, Natural Selection.
I haven't tried it, but you can also try installing steam under Linux, using WineX
If you don't want to create your own domain, join a professional organization. Most technical ones offer free email forwarding services, and they are quite popular. I'm pretty sure the IEEE isn't going away any time soon, and most professionals can join. Of course, it means yearly dues, but there are a lot of benefits besides having the same email address forever.
GNU zip: zip -e archive.zip file1 (file2...) to encypt (password is prompted, repeated). unzip will recognize as an encrypted archive and prompt for password. See also zipcloak. Easy to use GNU zip is included with Cygwin (for Windows), Linux, probably BSD.
GNU gzip: No encryption option.
GNU bzip2: No encyrption option.
WinZip: Look for password encryption options. You can lock files in the archive, but not the archive itself.
WinXP zip (e.g., right click on file, Send To->Compressed/Zipped Folder): You can set up certificates for encryption (Properties->Advanced->Encrypt Contents), but they are not password based, and by default the Administrator has access - probably not done in a form where you can email it. Use Cygwin's GNU zip or WinZip (or, maybe winrar).
Poor man's masking: rename the file from "Eminems_new_song.mp3" to Eminems_new_song.mpthree.txt". Recepient renames to undo the "encyption". Two problems - some email clients rightly block attachment sizes, and once the mail filters figure out your devious trick, they will update their filters. See "Arms Race".
He tried it with several distros: Xandros 2.0 Deluxe, two versions of Slackware, two versions of SuSE, Debian, Lindows, Knoppix, Knotix, Morphix, and Gentoo.
"one of the Linux distributions I tried specifically claimed compatibility with the sound system in question"
He didn't like the advice of "get rid of the brand-new, fully functional sound card and install a card from a few years ago, and Linux would work just fine".
The Achilles Heel is "For broad hardware support, Windows is still much better than Linux." It's not "My sucky OEM sound card didn't work."
Yeah, it sucks that he didn't mention the card. It sucks that he didn't try distro X, and that Knoppix couldn't detect it. It sucks that the forums didn't help. It sucks that he didn't try a half-a-dozen things. But, the fact is, a good amount of hardware that works out of the box with Windows won't work with Linux. Every user that trys and gets a bad experience will hold the opinion "Linux Sucks" until they are proved otherwise, years later perhaps.
Unfortunately, the makefile creator most people use, automake, creates only recursive makefiles. Maybe a replacement like unsermake will get automake developers thinking about radical changes. I wouldn't mind seeing M4 go away, for one.
Wow, we've found the one guy who saw that movie.
All your games could be played on a console if you just added a keyboard. None are super graphics intensive, If MMORPG become popular, wireless keyboards may become standard on consoles, and then the only "intellegent" part of playing on a PC will be finding a free server to download the patch from.
You are correct, I'm being a bit sloppy. I blame trying to read/respond during my lunch break. When you started comparing folks getting fired to killing 30% of the population, I had an emotional response, and took us both a little closer to mentioning Hitler and ending the discussion.
I keep wanting to change the Subject line, but "Wow". I haven't heard the word Mercantilism since grade school. Could you please explain what you mean?
I think you might be confused. Capitalism is the one that brought us most modern innovations, raised standards of health and living, supports democracy, and causes workers to be fired when someone can do it cheaper. It's Communism where all workers are guarenteed jobs, that has barely improved (or lowered) standards of health and living, and that kills academics when they get too big for their britches, and kills citizens through mass starvations when the planned grain harvests don't work as well as the Chairman was told.
I'm not applauding when a person loses their job. I'm also not implying they should be taken out back and shot if they lose their job. Being fired is not the end of the world, and our government should soften the blow for all workers who lose their jobs.
I think the best thing for the morale of the country is to raise the standard of living for everyone (occasionally at the temporary expense of the few). I don't think parades and tariffs will help much, in the long run.
Oh Please. Nobody has proven that outsourcing will create more jobs.......let alone *skilled* jobs, let alone a sufficent number of *skilled* jobs.
This ain't an academic proof (Slashdot isn't a great place for such proofs), but consider computers. In the beginning, the manufacturing, assembly, and sales of computers were almost entirely in the U.S. As the industry became larger, companies found that they could outsource the manufacturing jobs to Southeast Asia, ship the parts (or assembled computers) to the U.S., and still make a larger profit over those who made them in the U.S. Soon enough, the vast majority of computer parts were manufactured in Southeast Asia, spelling doom for anyone in the computer industry in the U.S. Only the upper managers of IBM (and the stockholders, of course) were making any money.
Or, maybe not. While moving computer manufacturing to Southeast Asia was bad for the worker trying to make a living constructing computers, it was pretty good for anyone that used a computer in their job. As they became cheaper, businesses could buy more, until you got to the point where it was common to have every employee with a computer. Whole industries were created around maintaining an office of computers (which employed huge numbers of people), and some of the largest fortunes of the modern age were made from selling computers, software, and services.
Computers got cheap enough that many American families bought them for the home. Enough people had computers (hooked up to the Internet) that businesses scrambled to find ways to make money off of these people. For a while, you could actually get a job creating web pages and web sites, just so that companies could reach consumers in new ways (either directly or through advertising).
I'd argue that outsourcing those computer manufacturing jobs to Asia directly resulted in cheaper computers and their widespread ownership, and that creates millions of jobs, many more than the hundreds to thousands that Cray ever employed in Wisconsin and Minnesota. It also made it possible for a few folks to collaborate on a free Unix clone for the (newly cheap) PC. There are people arguing that that little development will mean the end of anyone making money in software, but anyone who has worked with FreeBSD or Linux knows that there is still plenty of work to be done.
So, can I say that sending x-rays to India has created new skilled jobs? Well, I can't give their names and numbers, but there is someone who closed the deal on the dedicated bandwidth between U.S. and India, someone else who maintains the equipment that makes it cheap enough to send those images, someone in the U.S. whose job it is to interface with his Indian counterparts to negotiate rates and solve issues, etc. etc. There are companies that pay a few dollars less per employee for health care costs, and perhaps a couple of people that don't get laid off because of it. There is an emergency room doctor that can see an additional patient per hour. And on, and on, and on. And, yep, there is an x-ray technician, bitter and out of a job.
I'm sorry for you if you have been outsourced. I'm angry if the government has failed to pay benefits because the laws haven't caught up to the fact that service industry jobs are now being targeted. But I'm pretty tired of paying more for food because the government is trying to protect farmers and for paying more taxes because the government just can't close a military base that employs half a town. And, as much as it hurts, I'm tired of paying more for software because some folks thought four years of school would be enough to employ them for life.
I'm no fan of the Bush Administration, but they are right here. Outsourcing hurts the folks that get outsourced, but the rest of us win. The people that can do the job the cheapest get the job, the basic goods and services we use get cheaper, our standard of living goes up, etc. etc. Again, the person who loses a job is hurt, but it's often temporary. Because we all benefit from the individuals loss, we should support temporary benefits while that person changes careers.
From the Economist, Feb 19th 2004 (the India issue):
EARLIER this month, President George Bush's chief economic adviser, Gregory Mankiw, once Harvard's youngest tenured professor, attracted a storm of abuse. He told Congress that if a thing or a service could be produced more cheaply abroad, then Americans were better off importing it than producing it at home. As an example, Mr Mankiw uses the case of radiologists in India analysing the X-rays, sent via the internet, of American patients.
Mr Mankiw's proposition, in essence, is the law of comparative advantage, first postulated by David Ricardo two centuries ago and demonstrated to astonishing effect since. Yet the Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Dennis Hastert, joined Democrats in their rebuke of Mr Mankiw for approving of jobs going overseas; another Republican called for his resignation. The White House gave Mr Mankiw only lukewarm support -- unsurprisingly, since Mr Bush recently signed a bill forbidding the outsourcing of federal contracts overseas. And the Democratic presidential contenders? Mr Mankiw had just written their attack ads.
She uses the example of cheaper IT hardware, one of the main aspects of globalisation in the 1990s. Most of the drop in prices for PCs, mainframes and so on was caused by the relentless advance of technology; but she still thinks that trade and globalised production -- all those Dell Computer factories in China, for instance -- was responsible for 10-30% of the fall in hardware prices. These lower prices led to higher American productivity growth and added $230 billion of extra GDP between 1995 and 2002, equivalent to an extra 0.3 percentage points of growth a year.
These days, software spending is increasing at twice the rate of hardware spending, as businesses struggle to make their new computers work better. The manufacturing sector is where such integration has gone furthest. In many other parts of the American economy, the process has barely begun -- particularly among smaller- and medium-sized businesses. Mr Mankiw's example of the Indian radiologist shows how the internet could help lower costs and raise productivity in health care. Who would object to that?
I'd add more, but the Economist doesn't have a free online site. If you don't mind paying $2.95, you can read the whole article. Or, you can find someone who doesn't mind putting the whole article on the web.
A great book for learning basic economics is Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science by Charles Wheelan. And, of course, a subscription to the Economist can't hurt.
It's painful to see outsourcing move from the manufacturing sector to the service sector, but we're better off because of it. Keep your skills up-to-date folks, and think about those management jobs.
Of course, if it still annoys you, there are a few simple steps you can take to drastically reduce the amount of direct mail you get. The majority of the mail I get is now mail I want to get. I still get AOL CDs, but it's down to twice a year - usually due to a new magazine subscription where I haven't told them my preferences.
THANK YOU
This is not Microsoft taking an established standard, "improving" it, and making the rest of the world follow it. This is someone making an adaption of one work of art, a book, into another work or art, a movie. You don't need little footnotes refering back to the text in the corner of the screen. The only thing that is necessary is that it works AS A MOVIE.
The Lord of the Rings is the Geek Bible. For the true believers, Peter Jackson comitted blashphemy by cutting Bombadil, the closing scenes in the Shire, and elevating Arwen to a major character. The fact is, just about every single choice he made created a better MOVIE. Screw the literalists who think Noah fit two of every animal on the Ark and waited with baited breath for the Final Undoing of Saruman. Enjoy the books as books, and enjoy the movie as a movie.
I don't know about other programmers, but I work 40-60 hours a week at my paying job, then spend any extra time on free software. If there is ever a time conflict between the two of them, I give the extra time to my job. Free software doesn't pay the electric bill, the mortgage, etc. etc.
I'm probably headed back to Saudia Arabia for a week in February, and I had a heck of a time finding good servers. You never know how much you rely on a fast Internet connection until you spend three days downloading the source for Open Office for your Gentoo-based laptop.
And yes, I know for the future that the binary Open Office package is smaller, just about as fast, and that it doesn't take 30 hours to build on a P3 system.
Jeddah is a little more inviting than Ridyah. Our driver was never stopped at a checkpoint, unless we were entering the job site or the compound. Restraunts and shops all closed for prayer, which meant more planning for meals than normal. Westerners were free to smoke, eat, and drink (no alcohol, of course) during daylight in Ramadan, as long as it was done within the compound walls or behind a closed, locked door. The restrictions only bothered me when I was hungry (invariably just as prayer was starting), but some of my coworkers had a hard time not wearing shorts in public (the rumor is that only prostitutes wear shorts).
Yes, there were prostitutes, alcohol, gambling, etc. etc., but it was all behind closed doors. The local "alcohol mafia" appears to be run by the Brits, and some people make millions. Others ferment their own in bathtubs. All illegal, but in Jeddah they have stopped random raids for the time. Just don't go driving with any in the trunk...
We only had a dial-up connection to the internet - management never came through on the promised DSL line. I knew that Gentoo Linux required a network connection, but I never realized how much it absolutely requires broadband until it took 3 days to download the Open Office source code. BTW, it's not worth compiling Open Office from source, especially when you are averaging a MB an hour.
Bookstores don't generally sell books - just office supplies. The one "real" bookstore I found sold some computer books, but mostly for web design (Flash, etc.). There was one Linux book. It seems to me that the cache servers / firewalls make it especially hard for Linux users - hard to download ISOs, and hard to browse forums and usenet postings. I can see where LUGs would be much more important - one guy can get the DSL line to get the ISOs, and the rest can help each other translate documentation and debug problems. It seems piracy is widespread as well, with many of the compilation CDs and DVDs that come out of Asia. That seems to hurt Linux as well - if you can get Windows XP for $15, why mess around with Linux?
You need a visa to visit Saudia Arabia, and the visas are given for work (with a company sponsering you), for pilgramage (I think you still need a citizen to sponsor), or for travel (but only for tour groups in buses). If you have a chance to go, it's worth the experience.