But I don't think so... Things are much better on the hardware front than they use to be. Forget the OS. The hardware alone is head and shoulders from where is was when I pieced together my first 286.
First off - No more bloody jumpers. Most of the current motherboards set the voltages, frequencies, and all the other stuff that use to require careful jumpering all over now is done via the BIOS. Way cool.
Secondly, the processors are stupendously faster than what they use to be. Just rebuilt a Sun 420 with 4x450mhz CPU, 4G of RAM, and some old 18G SCSI HHD. This thing went for stupid money a few years ago (like over 50k USD). Built a home system for me with 4G of RAM, RAID 0 SATA drives, and a 3800+ CPU for under a grand which runs circles around the Sun box. Getting ready to build a dual core Photoshop box for my bride in a couple months for under 2K.
Back in the day I use to take a razor to my IDE and SCSI cables to get better airflow. Now we have SATA ribbons that are fast enough to walk away from SCSI in a workstation config. Hey, they are hot swappable too! Did I mention cheap?
Onboard equipment is pretty nice these days. Dual gigabit Ethernet ports, sound, firewire, a mess of USB ports, 4-8 SATA ports with RAID 0,1, or 5... Getting hard to find an excuss to use the PCI/PCIe ports. (nature abhors a vacuum, however)
That, and the hundreds/thousands of Access/Excel/Word apps/macros/templates that a lot of businesses rely on. Yes, they can be recreated in other platforms, but it will take a significant amount of work to do so.
Power users with legacy applications and current Office licenses can be handled for $40USD or less in volume. The key is to make sure folks understand that path is deprecated.
As for Cingular threatning to close the call-center... Come on... like they hadn't already planned to ship the jobs overseas or open up a call center in the midwest where they can get labor for half the cost?
I'm sure the city had some sort of early termination fee, right? I hear that is a requirement for anything in the telco space... /ducks
People who don't know these things should not be running networks.
Beyond setting up for a lan party, that was all the networking savvy I wanted as a developer. Problem is they went off and right-sized the IT folks who would handle that sort of thing. I just got done setting up a Solaris box - and other than running patchadd and googling through the network config - I have no clue what else is running with a 'normal' Solaris 8 install. Not even sure how to check what ports are listening. All that has very little to do with the code I will write and run on the box. Admining a box to run WebLogic was the last thing I wanted to do.
That said, the article seemed like a bit of a fluff piece. When things settle down, I've got to sort out what is actually running on the box. Hoped this might give some n00b pointers, but not so much.
A friend gave me a couple of these in 2004, and I added it to my camping/hunting supplies. Thought he was joking when he said they retailed for about $100 each, but put one in my med kit that I pack into the woods with me. Unfortunately, I had the opportunity to use it.
A couple days into the BWCA, one guy slips off a slope and takes a good size chunk of meat out of his leg due to a branch. Applied pressure and used a t-shirt to try to stop the bleeding, but recognized we were in serious trouble since we were a good day of hard paddling away from the car. (not arterial, but a real mess) Got him back to the campsite and pulled out my battlefield bandage. Did a fantastic job of stopping the bleeding, and stayed on as we paddled/portaged back to the car to take him to the hospital. Fantastic kit. Wish the costs were low enough to have it in every school, car, or any med kit that might find it's way into something ugly.
I had installed DB2, and used db2admin/db2admin as the default account. Win32 box, but was undead by the time I got back from a roadtrip. Not only do you need to make sure your passwords are strong, but avoid the 'common' passwords folks will set up for a dev account. Looking at my firewall logs for the last year just confirms how fast you will go down if you use a simple/common account and password.
Hard to say. Most politicians seem to think it is worth spending time talking about it, for no other apparent reason than to have lobbyist fill their coffers trying to 'influence' the decisions - be that yes, no, or not make one.
They may have even broke out the good campaign ...I, too, used to have trouble remembering how to spell "champagne"
Typo, or solid insight as to what the Apple's Marketing folks plan to do. Now had it been an announcement from Sale - no contest, they were talking booze.
If these are the same ones I downloaded, they spent a few minutes chatting before they started the music. Not quite as bad as ads, but still, nothing that would cause folks who just played music anything to worry about.
Too bad - but made me take the time to rip a couple CD's for my MP3 player.
Valve attempted to change things by setting up direct download rather than buying from the shelf. Interesting as it changes delivery, but there was no compelling reason to buy it on-line once it hit the shelves. (Compelling to me would have been a couple bucks savings) Starting to see some of the retail box versions sold off in the bargain bin, but with the expansion set probably getting positioned as a steam delivered game - I may never see it. I'm not holding my breath for a $4.99 version at Office Max in a couple years.
I think the wingspan limit had more to do with Airbus expecting the US (with prodding by Boeing) to give them crap about airports not being able to 'handle' what would have been the optimal wingspan for those new 800 passenger cattle cars.
That is an enormous runway. Back in the day, I flew into Fargo ND's hector field as one of the way points on my solo cross-country. As I landed the C152, the thought that I could probably land on the runway sideways did cross my mind.
The runway at 9000x150 was rumored to be a 747 training ground for the airlines. With a longer and wider runway, I can see it getting use for folks learning how to fly the big jets.
Seems to me the games are getting broken up into 'chapters' that maximize the expansion revenue. C&C:Generals, for instance, was way too bloody short. You got around seven missions with three different nationalities. Fine, except half the missions were introducing new portions of the tech tree. Add in the extra 'Zero Hour' missions and the solo play was about right. Add up the money spent and it was just wrong. Same applies to Warcraft III. Were it not for the multiplayer aspects and some of the solo skirmish stuff, I'd be pissed. What they have done is train me to wait till the game is sold together with the expansion set.
Total Annihilation was about right. Total Annihilation: Kingdoms struck me as a bit long. HL: Blue Shift left me feeling robbed by how fast it was over.
Doom 3 is a tech demo for Carmack's engine just like most of his games are. Nothing's changed to make id's prestige go any higher or lower than it always has been
A $55USD technology demo marketed as a highly anticipated video game. The $15-20 you can buy it for today is closer to what it should have been sold for. Better - he should have skipped the game and just released it as a benchmarking tool for those wanting to focus on the engine.
I know I feel robbed.
Both of the 'flagship' games out - Half Life 2 and Doom 3 - had a couple things in common. Both had absolutely stunning graphics and the potential to interact with the environment. Both games were about as linear as a ride at Disney land... Both wanting stupid ($60ish) amounts of cash.
At first, Doom was a bit scary - but there were just not that many different monsters about. Did not take long for things to get old. Even worse - the step forward, closet open behind you, and random monster jump out at you got very old. No multi-player? Come on! Talk about zero replay value there... Skipping whatever expansion gets put on the shelves as well.
With HL2, I heard the same 'linear' complaints and they were right. Could they make fewer options for how to make an objective? I eventually picked it up for $30, and that was largely due to CS: Source rather than the HL game itself as the driver.
With all the millions of dollars spend on the technology, HOW BLOODY HARD is it to find a decent story writer. Really? When they say games are becoming the next Hollywood, guess that applies to budget for scripting as well.
Anyhow, ended up getting small pile of games that were bundled with hardware and one of the more pleasant surprises is FarCry. Graphics and physics seemed comparable to the games going for three times the amount. The gameplay is fairly unrestricted - lots of different ways to go about meeting the objectives. Don't know why it missed out on the press.
Looks like I'm standing on a soap box here... The Doom 3 was the last game I will ever spend $50 on without 'stars shooting out of it's ass' positive reviews by people who actually parted cash for the game.
The 9.2 pro came with it in the box (not downloaded). That cut went for ~99USD, the enterprise went for ~300-500. I'm running the SLES version these days, so did not try 9.3. The standard crossover cut is just fine for single users. Fantastic bit of kit. If you want media without the faf, the personal version comes in at $40 or you can do the free FTP install and then pick up crossover by itself. I assumed the parent was looking for support contracts rather than media, however.
I've used both, and I'd say the hardware support for SuSE is a bit better. Took RH forever to finally move over to the 2.6 kernel or any of the current video drivers. One of the things that turned me off to RH was the 'all your base' clause in the agreement - they have the brass to stipulate on site audits if the mood so swings. With 4-6 users, it is right on the edge... take a look at setting up a partnership with either company as you can save some major change.
On a more practical note: BEA seems to team up with RH, most IBM stuff seems to default to SuSE. The SuSE pro distribution comes with crossover (for running win32 apps), but is well worth the $40 if they have any legacy stuff. Depends on what your developers are running. Look to see what your apps support.
I use a combo of pricewatch.com and resellerratings.com when sniffing out a new shop. I've tossed these companies a lot of coin with positive results, with the first two being my first stop.
I follow the speed limits to the letter becasue I've NEVER seen an unreasonable speed limit anywhere in my travels. (I've driven in almost every state except, Hawaii and Alaska) Sorry folks, but the roads are for people like me to get safely from one place to another. I
I see you missed out on Eastern North Dakota... Nothing like getting actually seeing the curvature of the earth on a 55 mph road. Yup, there are a couple high way, but lord almighty, nothing but grass with an absolute lack of any hills, trees, or other object for as far as the eye can see.
You want casual gamers, then sell a game rather than a subscription. Nothing could be more of a turn off to these massive multiplayer games than shelling out 50 clams and then asking for monthly installments. I want to join in, play a game, and perhaps jump back in a few months later. Hell, there is even a couple recent threads to start up Diablo2 games with folks in the zoo. Have not touched that game in years - but I know I could install and be ready to rock and roll for a weekend of fun any time. I like to OWN games, not rent them.
nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
You know, I would love to think I could interpret that to mean exactly like it sounds, but after seeing how
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
The real question is "Why does Windows XP SP2 setup still only accept SCSI and RAID drivers from a standard old floppy drive?". I know you can slipstream drivers into an install CD, because that's what I had to do the last time I built up a PC without a floppy, but the setup routine really should at least allow drivers to be installed from a USB floppy drive by now.
Yup - but you can work around it. Check out this thread for more info on not only adding SP2, but all the other NVidia drivers on your CD only install.
This looks targeted for those looking to give a home library that 'bling bling' factor. No one would actually read all the books, but I sure can imagine a home decorator setting up a wall of books in the study. Cost less than most leather chairs.
Why would the (lack of) avilability of a media player influence my OS decision?
I know I gave Linux distros the cold sholder because they made it hard to play MP3's. Yes, you could get it to work, but heck - I'm lazy! Sometimes it can be something that mickey mouse....
Slashdot Mirror
But I don't think so... Things are much better on the hardware front than they use to be. Forget the OS. The hardware alone is head and shoulders from where is was when I pieced together my first 286.
First off - No more bloody jumpers. Most of the current motherboards set the voltages, frequencies, and all the other stuff that use to require careful jumpering all over now is done via the BIOS. Way cool.
Secondly, the processors are stupendously faster than what they use to be. Just rebuilt a Sun 420 with 4x450mhz CPU, 4G of RAM, and some old 18G SCSI HHD. This thing went for stupid money a few years ago (like over 50k USD). Built a home system for me with 4G of RAM, RAID 0 SATA drives, and a 3800+ CPU for under a grand which runs circles around the Sun box. Getting ready to build a dual core Photoshop box for my bride in a couple months for under 2K.
Back in the day I use to take a razor to my IDE and SCSI cables to get better airflow. Now we have SATA ribbons that are fast enough to walk away from SCSI in a workstation config. Hey, they are hot swappable too! Did I mention cheap?
Onboard equipment is pretty nice these days. Dual gigabit Ethernet ports, sound, firewire, a mess of USB ports, 4-8 SATA ports with RAID 0,1, or 5... Getting hard to find an excuss to use the PCI/PCIe ports. (nature abhors a vacuum, however)
That, and the hundreds/thousands of Access/Excel/Word apps/macros/templates that a lot of businesses rely on. Yes, they can be recreated in other platforms, but it will take a significant amount of work to do so.
Power users with legacy applications and current Office licenses can be handled for $40USD or less in volume. The key is to make sure folks understand that path is deprecated.
As for Cingular threatning to close the call-center... Come on... like they hadn't already planned to ship the jobs overseas or open up a call center in the midwest where they can get labor for half the cost?
/ducks
I'm sure the city had some sort of early termination fee, right? I hear that is a requirement for anything in the telco space...
People who don't know these things should not be running networks.
Beyond setting up for a lan party, that was all the networking savvy I wanted as a developer. Problem is they went off and right-sized the IT folks who would handle that sort of thing. I just got done setting up a Solaris box - and other than running patchadd and googling through the network config - I have no clue what else is running with a 'normal' Solaris 8 install. Not even sure how to check what ports are listening. All that has very little to do with the code I will write and run on the box. Admining a box to run WebLogic was the last thing I wanted to do.
That said, the article seemed like a bit of a fluff piece. When things settle down, I've got to sort out what is actually running on the box. Hoped this might give some n00b pointers, but not so much.
A friend gave me a couple of these in 2004, and I added it to my camping/hunting supplies. Thought he was joking when he said they retailed for about $100 each, but put one in my med kit that I pack into the woods with me. Unfortunately, I had the opportunity to use it.
A couple days into the BWCA, one guy slips off a slope and takes a good size chunk of meat out of his leg due to a branch. Applied pressure and used a t-shirt to try to stop the bleeding, but recognized we were in serious trouble since we were a good day of hard paddling away from the car. (not arterial, but a real mess) Got him back to the campsite and pulled out my battlefield bandage. Did a fantastic job of stopping the bleeding, and stayed on as we paddled/portaged back to the car to take him to the hospital. Fantastic kit. Wish the costs were low enough to have it in every school, car, or any med kit that might find it's way into something ugly.
http://it.slashdot.org/~(H)elix1/journal/38378
I had installed DB2, and used db2admin/db2admin as the default account. Win32 box, but was undead by the time I got back from a roadtrip. Not only do you need to make sure your passwords are strong, but avoid the 'common' passwords folks will set up for a dev account. Looking at my firewall logs for the last year just confirms how fast you will go down if you use a simple/common account and password.
Can you legislate good parenting?
Hard to say. Most politicians seem to think it is worth spending time talking about it, for no other apparent reason than to have lobbyist fill their coffers trying to 'influence' the decisions - be that yes, no, or not make one.
A better link is here. Lots of good stuff from these guys. Worth a look.
They may have even broke out the good campaign
...I, too, used to have trouble remembering how to spell "champagne"
Typo, or solid insight as to what the Apple's Marketing folks plan to do. Now had it been an announcement from Sale - no contest, they were talking booze.
If these are the same ones I downloaded, they spent a few minutes chatting before they started the music. Not quite as bad as ads, but still, nothing that would cause folks who just played music anything to worry about.
Too bad - but made me take the time to rip a couple CD's for my MP3 player.
Valve attempted to change things by setting up direct download rather than buying from the shelf. Interesting as it changes delivery, but there was no compelling reason to buy it on-line once it hit the shelves. (Compelling to me would have been a couple bucks savings) Starting to see some of the retail box versions sold off in the bargain bin, but with the expansion set probably getting positioned as a steam delivered game - I may never see it. I'm not holding my breath for a $4.99 version at Office Max in a couple years.
I think the wingspan limit had more to do with Airbus expecting the US (with prodding by Boeing) to give them crap about airports not being able to 'handle' what would have been the optimal wingspan for those new 800 passenger cattle cars.
That is an enormous runway. Back in the day, I flew into Fargo ND's hector field as one of the way points on my solo cross-country. As I landed the C152, the thought that I could probably land on the runway sideways did cross my mind.
The runway at 9000x150 was rumored to be a 747 training ground for the airlines. With a longer and wider runway, I can see it getting use for folks learning how to fly the big jets.
Seems to me the games are getting broken up into 'chapters' that maximize the expansion revenue. C&C:Generals, for instance, was way too bloody short. You got around seven missions with three different nationalities. Fine, except half the missions were introducing new portions of the tech tree. Add in the extra 'Zero Hour' missions and the solo play was about right. Add up the money spent and it was just wrong. Same applies to Warcraft III. Were it not for the multiplayer aspects and some of the solo skirmish stuff, I'd be pissed. What they have done is train me to wait till the game is sold together with the expansion set.
Total Annihilation was about right. Total Annihilation: Kingdoms struck me as a bit long. HL: Blue Shift left me feeling robbed by how fast it was over.
Doom 3 is a tech demo for Carmack's engine just like most of his games are. Nothing's changed to make id's prestige go any higher or lower than it always has been
A $55USD technology demo marketed as a highly anticipated video game. The $15-20 you can buy it for today is closer to what it should have been sold for. Better - he should have skipped the game and just released it as a benchmarking tool for those wanting to focus on the engine.
I know I feel robbed.
Both of the 'flagship' games out - Half Life 2 and Doom 3 - had a couple things in common. Both had absolutely stunning graphics and the potential to interact with the environment. Both games were about as linear as a ride at Disney land... Both wanting stupid ($60ish) amounts of cash.
At first, Doom was a bit scary - but there were just not that many different monsters about. Did not take long for things to get old. Even worse - the step forward, closet open behind you, and random monster jump out at you got very old. No multi-player? Come on! Talk about zero replay value there... Skipping whatever expansion gets put on the shelves as well.
With HL2, I heard the same 'linear' complaints and they were right. Could they make fewer options for how to make an objective? I eventually picked it up for $30, and that was largely due to CS: Source rather than the HL game itself as the driver.
With all the millions of dollars spend on the technology, HOW BLOODY HARD is it to find a decent story writer. Really? When they say games are becoming the next Hollywood, guess that applies to budget for scripting as well.
Anyhow, ended up getting small pile of games that were bundled with hardware and one of the more pleasant surprises is FarCry. Graphics and physics seemed comparable to the games going for three times the amount. The gameplay is fairly unrestricted - lots of different ways to go about meeting the objectives. Don't know why it missed out on the press.
Looks like I'm standing on a soap box here... The Doom 3 was the last game I will ever spend $50 on without 'stars shooting out of it's ass' positive reviews by people who actually parted cash for the game.
The 9.2 pro came with it in the box (not downloaded). That cut went for ~99USD, the enterprise went for ~300-500. I'm running the SLES version these days, so did not try 9.3. The standard crossover cut is just fine for single users. Fantastic bit of kit. If you want media without the faf, the personal version comes in at $40 or you can do the free FTP install and then pick up crossover by itself. I assumed the parent was looking for support contracts rather than media, however.
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/pricing/
I've used both, and I'd say the hardware support for SuSE is a bit better. Took RH forever to finally move over to the 2.6 kernel or any of the current video drivers. One of the things that turned me off to RH was the 'all your base' clause in the agreement - they have the brass to stipulate on site audits if the mood so swings. With 4-6 users, it is right on the edge... take a look at setting up a partnership with either company as you can save some major change.
On a more practical note: BEA seems to team up with RH, most IBM stuff seems to default to SuSE. The SuSE pro distribution comes with crossover (for running win32 apps), but is well worth the $40 if they have any legacy stuff. Depends on what your developers are running. Look to see what your apps support.
I use a combo of pricewatch.com and resellerratings.com when sniffing out a new shop. I've tossed these companies a lot of coin with positive results, with the first two being my first stop.
l ue.comr chcomputer.com
. anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=40&ente rcat=y (mind the gap)
www.zipzoomfly.com
www.newegg.com
www.chiefva
www.directron.com
www.ewiz.com
www.mona
I watch the following bargain boards...
www.hardforum.com/forumdisplay.php?f=28
forums
www.bensbargains.net
I follow the speed limits to the letter becasue I've NEVER seen an unreasonable speed limit anywhere in my travels. (I've driven in almost every state except, Hawaii and Alaska) Sorry folks, but the roads are for people like me to get safely from one place to another. I
I see you missed out on Eastern North Dakota... Nothing like getting actually seeing the curvature of the earth on a 55 mph road. Yup, there are a couple high way, but lord almighty, nothing but grass with an absolute lack of any hills, trees, or other object for as far as the eye can see.
You want casual gamers, then sell a game rather than a subscription. Nothing could be more of a turn off to these massive multiplayer games than shelling out 50 clams and then asking for monthly installments. I want to join in, play a game, and perhaps jump back in a few months later. Hell, there is even a couple recent threads to start up Diablo2 games with folks in the zoo. Have not touched that game in years - but I know I could install and be ready to rock and roll for a weekend of fun any time. I like to OWN games, not rent them.
You know, I would love to think I could interpret that to mean exactly like it sounds, but after seeing how
is implemented, I'm not hopeful...
The real question is "Why does Windows XP SP2 setup still only accept SCSI and RAID drivers from a standard old floppy drive?". I know you can slipstream drivers into an install CD, because that's what I had to do the last time I built up a PC without a floppy, but the setup routine really should at least allow drivers to be installed from a USB floppy drive by now.
Yup - but you can work around it. Check out this thread for more info on not only adding SP2, but all the other NVidia drivers on your CD only install.
This looks targeted for those looking to give a home library that 'bling bling' factor. No one would actually read all the books, but I sure can imagine a home decorator setting up a wall of books in the study. Cost less than most leather chairs.
Why would the (lack of) avilability of a media player influence my OS decision?
I know I gave Linux distros the cold sholder because they made it hard to play MP3's. Yes, you could get it to work, but heck - I'm lazy! Sometimes it can be something that mickey mouse....