If anything, nVidia was the real underdog in the 3D wars...they were the only company with nothing going from them
Nothing going for them? Uh... do you know anything about nVidia's history?
nVidia was formed from disgruntled SGI employees. You know, the same SGI that created OpenGL and pioneered 3D graphics on computers? Yeah, that one. Why were they disgruntled? Because they had gone to the powers that be at SGI and said "you know, we could make a buttload of money off our technology -- we can make cards that do a large subset of the OpenGL calls and sell it to the PC market for cheap!" SGI management was all about profit margin though, and there's a lot more margin (although not as much profit) in selling a few cards for $50-100k than there is in selling hundreds of thousands or millions of cards for $150-450.
So a bunch of the top SGI graphics engineers left and went off to make their own company. The first few cards released by nVidia were actually OEM'd cards from another company. IIRC, the TNT was the first silicon and code from the ex-SGI engineers, and it was not "butt ugly with a handful of problems" by any means. There were initial problems with running 3Dfx only games (as in, it couldn't...), but Quake and OpenGL remedied that issue. The GeForce completely blew away 3Dfx and they never recovered.
Oh yeah... that little bit about them being ex-SGI engineers? Well, it came back to bite them. SGI sued the hell out of nVidia and it wound up being settled out of court. SGI retains options on advanced features in the silicon and drivers. One of the many reasons that the drivers can't be open sourced.
It seems that nVidia is now suffering from the same problem that plagues a lot of hot tech companies -- many of the primaries have made millions of dollars and decided they don't have the need/desire to work there anymore. So they retire, cash in their stock options, and then go pursue other interests, which robs the company of not only its top engineers but also its visionaries and leaders. The last couple generations of cards from nVidia appear to be due to this. They may come back still, and they're still better off than 3Dfx was, but they've certainly fallen from the lofty heights they used to occupy.
Which is why, I'm sure, that every single real DX9benchmark has shown nVidia falling far, far behind ATI.
The quotes from that second link are particularly damning -- and they're from a variety of companies, including id Software, not just Valve.
I've never owned an ATI card. My last 5 or 6 cards in all my computers (and my wife's) have been nVidia. My next card is almost certainly going to be ATI though because they're currently the performance leaders. I have some reservations about drivers still -- not with performance or stability but with long term support since ATI has still failed to deliver a unified driver architecture -- but I'm unwilling to sacrifice that much performance while still paying a higher price.
Frankly, at this point anyone who is still wondering about the validity of the benchmarks is deserving of the title "nVidia fanboy".
Re:Let's make this a press release!
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Back To SCO
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I agree on the facts bit, but that hasn't stopped SCO from doing press releases. I'd honestly like to see ESR follow up on the "slanderous" bits from the response statement and take SCO to court though -- except that he'd have to foot the bill himself while McBride can use the corporate lawyers of SCO. Not a good case.
As for doing a press release -- it may not cost much, but unless you're a publicly listed company or some other well known entity (research/consulting group, non-profit group, etc. -- with the emphasis on "well known") it won't do you any good. There's a ton of cranks out there putting out press releases daily on everything from UFOs to perpetual motion machines.
The reality is that Redhat, SuSE, IBM, Novell, or some other large company would have to put out the press release to do any good. Redhat and IBM are currently engaged in legal actions and aren't likely to do so, since it could be used as evidence at that point. SuSE could, but being a foreign company it would largely be ignored by the US press and financial media (that whole "well known" bit). Novell seems to have backed out of the case after dropping a bombshell (and a dud -- which was rather embarassing for them I'm sure).
I'm sure there's other outlets available -- research groups and major trade or mainstream papers seem the most obvious -- but they're still fairly inaccessible.
Rogue/Nethack/etc. are no different from Civ/MOO or any other strategy game (because that's what they all are - strategy. Rogue/Nethack/etc are certainly NOT RPGs) -- the location of content is randomized, but content itself is not dramatically different. Nor is the strategy for beating the game different, despite the randomization. In fact, people who have mastered the game and can beat it on a regular basis have to invent challenges for themselves -- Nethack has a whole list of things like vegetarian, vegan, atheist, pacifist, etc. intended purely as additional challenges.
When it comes to puzzles though they don't offer anything different from game to game. No, I don't consider maze levels to be "puzzles" -- they're merely tedious. Look at the Sokoban levels in Nethack 3.4 and up -- they're always the same, simply because writing a generalized puzzle generator for such a thing would be very difficult.
What Rogue/Nethack/etc have isn't graphics, it's gameplay. They're damned difficult, even for those who are good at them.
I know some people that talk about the allure of paper, and the sentimentality they have for holding a book with paper, but personally if I could buy eBooks and download them into a nice sized reader that had acceptable battery life and a nice, easy to read screen
The "nice, easy to read screen" cannot be emphasized enough.
Most portable electronics have tiny screens with low resolutions, horrible DPI, and glare issues. And they suck down batteries.
Newspaper print is generally the worst in terms of DPI for printed material, and even it exceeds 2400 DPI. I distinctly recall talking to a friend of my father who was in the newspaper business. He was wondering when I thought traditional printed newspapers would be in significant danger from portable devices, home printing, etc. I, as a know-it-all geeky CS student, said it'd probably be about 10 years before the display technologies got there.
Well, it's roughly 10 years later and we're really no closer than we were. Printing has certainly improved, but not as dramatically as I expected. Display technologies have gone more or less nowhere -- LCD has come down in price and power consumption, but the resolutions haven't gone up dramatically and there's been no really new technologies in that time period. Sure, OLED and similar are on the horizon now, but they don't promise a solution to the resolution issues. Printed circuits, electronic paper, and other technologies are also closer, but still probably a decade or more away.
I still think the bug in converting between metric and imperial units causing a billion dollar Mars probe to crash is the top one.
It certainly tops their "Most Embarassing Bug" that lists the Mariner I probe U-turning into the Atlantic. Ten million, even in today's dollars, isn't even close to $327M (not $1B as you suggest). Of course, I suspect the launch was covered live, so maybe it is more embarassing.
Of course, what I found embarassing was the author's inability to comprehend what a NOT is. If you're writing for USA Today I might buy it, but this is TechTV, which is allegedly for technical people (but it's not).
Loading times can often be abysmally long, and so frequent as to seriously reduce game enjoyment.
The most recent example I can think of is Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex vs. Jax and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy on the Playstation2. CB is essentially unplayable, with loading times >30 seconds for each different area you go into -- something which happens fairly frequently. The loading screen is even abysmal, with lame "stars" falling upward and one of the characters in the middle, plus big letters letting you know it's "LOADING". J&D, on the other hand, has no appreciable loading time between segments. And when it is doing loading it does so while playing a cutscene, which lends to the storyline and doesn't become overly repetitive. By and large, however, there is no disincentive to wander between areas.
In another vein, I'm yet to figure out why FPS's haven't gotten smarter about level loading. Yes, levels are large and complex, and you should really only try to have one in memory at a time. But once the current level has ended there's absolutely no reason that the server shouldn't inform the clients of the next level and start loading it. That way by the time the post game score checking and chatter is over with the next level will be ready to play, or at least nearly ready. Much better than the current substantial breaks between levels.
During the northeast blackout a month ago, my landline phone went dead also
You really should file a complaint then. Unless, of course, your "landline" phone is cordless, in which case your phone service was up but you didn't have a phone that ran off the power supplied by the phone grid.
The phone companies are required to keep the phone service running in case of emergencies. They may not be able to handle the call volume (c.f. 9/11), but they have to provide dial tone, at least for some "reasonable" amount of time (CO's generally have sufficient backup power onsite for 72 hours, and they're usually on the same priority level as hospitals when it comes to getting diesel fuel during emergencies).
Where there is broadband Internet, there can be VoIP. As last-mile broadband gets more economical via wireless and optical (along with traditional copper and cable), so will VoIP.
None of which is available to the rural communities the grandparant mentioned. In the case of some rural farms the "last mile" is more like the "last 20 miles". Even microwave transmission has issues at that range unless you put up some pretty honking big towers. WiFi sure as hell isn't going to cut it. Powerline may be an option at some point in the future though, but even then it's questionable that it will be affordable.
I can dial 911 from my Vonage home telephone just fine, thank you very much.
As the AC pointed out, no you can't -- although it doesn't look as drastic as he points out. Some "local public safety answering points" may be 911 call centers. But not always and roaming 911 is a complete no go. Equally importantly, quoting from here:
911 Dialing and Vonage Service DO NOT function during an electrical power or broadband provider outage.
That makes it an unviable solution for E911 services.
BTW, Sprint's services were all up during the blackout. Landline, cell, and internet. Most of the cell towers were overloaded in volume and most of their customers (including ones in the same physical building) lost Internet access due to no backup power, but any hosted customers in the NE region remained powered up and doing business. And the landlines worked exactly how they're supposed to.
While I agree that a lot of the regulations and cost structures in the telephone arena are designed specifically to keep competition out, the need for a reliable emergency service and the need to continue to supply rural customers with service are two points that still need to be adhered to. Vonage isn't capable of solving the second issue, but they need to address the first if they're going to bill themselves as a phone company.
It's called a swish pan, and it makes for a nice transition, if you cut in between two of them. But you don't have to, and it doesn't look "terrible."
Do a swish pan across a row of vertical lines (like a fence or vertical blinds) and it will, indeed, look horrible. The 24 fps isn't adequate to the job.
It gets even worse on NTSC/PAL though, since the interlaced nature of the picture starts breaking things up horribly.
For true pain, take a movie that does a horrible swish pan like that and then transfer it to NTSC.
If a vault is destroyed in the same disaster, then there are probably more important things to worry about.
If the vault is destroyed, then you're probably right. But it doesn't take that to render the data unusable -- if the bank gets hit, the vault may survive but the keys may be destroyed (yeah, I'm sure they can get more made or have a locksmith come in, but that will take time). Or the vault is inaccessible for some amount of time due to damage. Even if the data is good, having it unavailable does you no good at all.
The data backup services are good, as is just going a bit further afield for a safe deposit box or other repository. As you say, if the data is important you do what it takes.
Everyone should have off-site backups. It's not very expensive (>100 dollars for tapes)
Er, for how much data? For your personal computer, maybe (but the tape drive will cost you considerably more than that $100), but I don't think you're going to back up a few hundred gigs of business data on ~$100 of tapes. And I suspect you meant 100... although if the latter then you're almost certainly correct!
It's not very hard (drive tapes to site). It's not difficult to get the backups if you need them (drive to site with tapes)
If your offsite backup is within convienent driving distance then odds are it's not far enough offsite. A flood, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, or other large scale natural disaster could conceivably destroy both your onsite and offsite backups if they're within a few miles. The flipside is that the further the distance the more the inconvienence on an ongoing basis and the more likely you are to stop doing backups.
There's far more to be considered here, but I'm not the DR expert (my wife is... seriously). It does make sense to have offsite backups, but you have to have some sense about those too.
I disagree... I used to touch type at around 100 wpm, but have slowed down to around 80 wpm nowadays unless I'm really in a groove.
Touch typing is useful for development -- yeah, most of your time is spent thinking and conceptualizing the code, but at some point you do have to write the damn thing, and then touch typing helps reduce your time doing so. The other thing is that most of the good text editors (vi, emacs, etc) make use of the standard QWERTY layout to improve navigation without forcing you to remove your hands from the keyboard home row. Touch typists find navigating with a mouse to be a major PITA, and using cursor keys only slightly less so. Both cause a disruption in your workflow because you have to move your hands away from the primary input keys.
Certainly touch typing most languages is going to be slower than typing a memo -- few memo's contain anywhere near the number of symbols as languages do -- but it's still going to be faster than the two finger pecking that non-touch typers usually employ. And once you do enough touch typing you learn where the number and symbol keys are and it just becomes part of the flow.
The same can be said for pretty much any of the internal network addresses. You might change jobs and they'll use 192.168.88.* for their internal network.
A few months ago I changed my network to 192.168.2.* for this reason -- because work used 1.*. My coworkers also changed their networks for the same reason, each of us picking various numbers randomly (one moved to 10.0.0.*). My cubemate changed to 100. Apparantly TechOps got tired of people having problems when VPN'd in though, so they decided to change all the network IPs as well. To 192.168.100.*. My coworker was annoyed.
A lot of stuff comes preconfigured to use 192.168.1.* though, so no matter what you change your network to, be sure you know enough to change it back when needed. If you ever need to flash the firmware on the device or reset it to factory defaults you'd better be able to talk to it to change it back to whatever address range you actually want.
Config isn't saved remotely (though thats a great idea).
Ok, of all of the things I said, this one I knew I'd read.
From the HL2 Valve Info thread (page 13 on default settings, 3rd message from bottom):
hLABS]tryptefan: when i go to a friends house and play halflife i usually end up wasting around 10 minutes trying to get my config right.
it seems like such a logical step to store configs with steam login info and thus serve up my config anywhere i go. has this been thought of and if so any chance of seeing it?
[Gabe Newell] Yes, we are adding this to Steam (making the distributed file system read/write is the first step, and then there's a lot of data in addition to configurations you'd like to keep like save games or player stats)
There's actually quite a bit of configuration done by some people... my BF1942 config has some rather drastic differences from the standard keyboard layout. My Q3 and UT2k3 layouts are even more different. I don't play anywhere but my own PC, but if I did then this would be a huge convienence.
Ouch. That is silly, particularly the single player bit (yeah, you can play w/o a net connection until you do something that requires Steam... to assume that you will forever thereafter have a net connection is inane).
I seriously think that with the various rediculous distribution methods, this will kill the mod community for HL2 before it even has a chance of being born.
Yeah. I mean, come on... you give the mod community that degree of customization, along with a very high level of support, and then actually let them choose to release their product for free OR make money off it?
How rediculous [sic]! That'll fail in a heartbeat. Stupid Valve.
Last I heard there were no plans for HL2 on any other platform, Xbox included.
We don't know what the one-time cost is going to be for the game without the subscription. It could be $60.
The question isn't how much HL2 itself is, but how much HL2 + all other Valve content over a certain period of time is. Honestly, however, at $120/year, that's going to have to be a TON of additional paid-for content. I'll be buying the one time cost version, thank you very much.
requiring an online connection to play the single player game
Where'd you get this from?
requiring that LAN parties provide internet access to check in with STEAM
Or this?
Checking in with Steam will certainly have advantages -- like being able to access your keyboard/mouse config from any PC -- but I haven't read that it'll be required for single player (it won't) or LAN parties (unclear, but doubtful). If you want to play multiplayer over the Internet, then yes, you'll have to connect to Steam (although I bet you'll be able to use other server browsers like ASE too).
Certainly there's a ton of questions to be answered still, and I also question the degree of market segmentation they've done. This bit id hard when they released Quake (albeit in a different way). I'm betting it's going to bite Valve too.
Right, so if this game is out at the end of this month, is there any way to get a demo of it?
No. Valve has previously stated there would be no demo for HL2 prior to release.
something running on the Source engine to see whether or not this stupid thing will even run on your system
Valve has also stated that they will be releasing a benchmark program for people to use and see how their system will fare with the Source engine, as well as to see what upgrades they may want to make. I'd guess that it'll be a tech demo with no interaction that'll measure frame rate and such, but that's just a guess. It should be out RSN -- Valve has said "September" several times and stated that it would be available before the game was.
I don't recall if it was to be generally available or not -- they may only release it to benchmarking sites, but that'd seem odd to me.
I have an Athlon 2100 w/ 512M and a GeForce4 Ti4200. I plan to replace the GF4 w/ a ATI Radeon 9800 (non-pro). I think the rest will be fine. I haven't bought the card yet though because I'm waiting on the benchmarking to see what the whole story is.
The thing that makes this even harder to swallow is that there are 41 motions on that website that have been filed, and you know that each and every one of them has cost each side thousands of dollars just to have some guy read it and respond. Thats at least a half a mil on both sides (probably much more), just to deal with the paperwork.
Thousands of dollars? Those are some insanely high priced lawyers. If you get a top flight lawyer at $500/hour and it takes an average of 2 hours to read and respond to each filing, then that's only $41,000. Sure, it's not chump change, but it's hardly the half a million you figured.
how many of the poor sumbitches getting invoices can?
Uh, an invoice is not a legal document. I can invoice you for $50. Are you going to pay it? If so, let me get you a real invoice out post haste.
Most likely you (and most companies) will ignore it because I sent you an invoice for something you didn't order. Better yet, it's an invoice from some company that you've never done business with. Most of the invoices will go in the trash. Some companies will note that legal action is threatened and they'll send it to a lawyer, probably on staff. Or to one that'll charge them There is nothing worse than legitmizing an illegal action because the illegal action would cost less than finding justice.
Is that worse than having to close up shop, fire all your employees, and declare bankruptcy for your business (and maybe yourself if you didn't incorporate, were too dependant on your business, or did a poor job of maintaining the corporate veil)? There are noble concepts and then there's reality.
IANAL, and even if I was you'd be a damn fool to take legal advice off of/.
No more so than the telephone company is a middleman when you make a long distance phone call. Yes, without them you wouldn't be able to make the call. But they're not buying the conversation from you and selling it to the person on the other end.
A middleman is someone who purchases from the producer and sells to the consumer. The ISP/webhost isn't doing this -- they're merely providing transport. And, yes, this is an important economic and (more importantly) legal discrimination. The ISP/webhost is not responsible for policing their content because they aren't creating or selling it.
If the activation would allow me to install it in two places, so long as I only ran it in one place at a time (and even if it required me to be connected to the internet - I'm used to that for massively multiplayer games) that would be acceptable to me.
IIRC, that's allowed. Now this is all based on the reading of one thread on the HL2 forums, but in there Gabe Newell states that you can play from a friend's house using your CD key, even without them having bought the game. Better yet, your key bindings and other settings will follow you (although I'd hope they leave the hardware specific stuff up to each install for obvious reasons).
Oh... and upon reading that thread, the latest information from Gabe is that the interview is a fake.
I'd still recommend reading through that thread if you haven't before. Yes it's long. It's also responses from HL2 developers only (and the mods keep it cleaned up too).
Decisions of the Seventh Circuit (which sits in Chicago) are binding on courts in Illinois and Indiana as well as in Wisconsin
Yes, but the court specifically refered to Wisconsin laws. Certainly the court is now biased toward its prior ruling (as will be courts in Illinois and Indiana, referring to the higher court's ruling), but if there's a substantive difference in state law on the points referenced in Wisconsin law the outcome might be different. I'd be bloody amazed, but stranger things have happened.
Yes, but then you have to find an EULA that contains a clause that causes harm to you. You'll also have to argue that the EULA as an entirety holds no legal merit, which is a lot shakier case than merely arguing that the clause in the EULA is invalid.
Again, you're back into needing several hundred thousand dollars to fight this one. The company you take suit against will probably simply offer to settle, which you'll have to decline since you're wanting to argue this one on ethics, not on actual damages. At that point they'll start using delaying tatics to eat up your money first. It's certainly winnable, but you'll have to pick your target carefully -- you need a software company with a EULA with a damaging clause (and while the liability disclaimers count here, I think they're also the worst chance for success), with borderline profits (positive side; if they're unprofitable they'll just declare bankruptcy and the suit will be dismissed), and which is in a jurisdiction that has favorable laws and judges for your case. It's not impossible, but it is damned difficult.
I do, however, stand corrected on who has to bring suit against who. You're right on that, it's just the particulars of what has to occur that's still a problem. You can't sue the mechanic just because they have the sign -- you have to actually be injured first (and even then if the mechanic can show no lack of negligence on their part, including reasonable precautions against you accessing the garage, you'd be SOL -- not that many mechanics would actually do so. An open garage door would invalidate their defense).
That may spell it out for you, but woe be unto you when you find out differently.
The highest court to rule on it, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, disagrees. They stated that you merely have to be made aware of a license agreement, but you don't have to be able to read the agreement beforehand. Virtually all software nowadays states on the box that there is a license agreement inside the box, which according to the 7th is adequate, as long as you can return the software for the purchase price if you disagree with the license.
Until there's a Supreme Court ruling there won't be any clear ruling on this, but legal scholars appear to be taking the 7th's ruling as guidance for now. And unless you live in one of the small areas with a contrary ruling, it's advisable that you follow it as well. Ignorance of the law is not a valid defense.
And the only way to challenge it in court is to actually violate it and get sued.
You go to court claiming that you don't want to be held to some piece of paper and the clerk won't even bother scheduling your case -- because you don't have one.
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If anything, nVidia was the real underdog in the 3D wars...they were the only company with nothing going from them
Nothing going for them? Uh... do you know anything about nVidia's history?
nVidia was formed from disgruntled SGI employees. You know, the same SGI that created OpenGL and pioneered 3D graphics on computers? Yeah, that one. Why were they disgruntled? Because they had gone to the powers that be at SGI and said "you know, we could make a buttload of money off our technology -- we can make cards that do a large subset of the OpenGL calls and sell it to the PC market for cheap!" SGI management was all about profit margin though, and there's a lot more margin (although not as much profit) in selling a few cards for $50-100k than there is in selling hundreds of thousands or millions of cards for $150-450.
So a bunch of the top SGI graphics engineers left and went off to make their own company. The first few cards released by nVidia were actually OEM'd cards from another company. IIRC, the TNT was the first silicon and code from the ex-SGI engineers, and it was not "butt ugly with a handful of problems" by any means. There were initial problems with running 3Dfx only games (as in, it couldn't...), but Quake and OpenGL remedied that issue. The GeForce completely blew away 3Dfx and they never recovered.
Oh yeah... that little bit about them being ex-SGI engineers? Well, it came back to bite them. SGI sued the hell out of nVidia and it wound up being settled out of court. SGI retains options on advanced features in the silicon and drivers. One of the many reasons that the drivers can't be open sourced.
It seems that nVidia is now suffering from the same problem that plagues a lot of hot tech companies -- many of the primaries have made millions of dollars and decided they don't have the need/desire to work there anymore. So they retire, cash in their stock options, and then go pursue other interests, which robs the company of not only its top engineers but also its visionaries and leaders. The last couple generations of cards from nVidia appear to be due to this. They may come back still, and they're still better off than 3Dfx was, but they've certainly fallen from the lofty heights they used to occupy.
Which is why, I'm sure, that every single real DX9 benchmark has shown nVidia falling far, far behind ATI.
The quotes from that second link are particularly damning -- and they're from a variety of companies, including id Software, not just Valve.
I've never owned an ATI card. My last 5 or 6 cards in all my computers (and my wife's) have been nVidia. My next card is almost certainly going to be ATI though because they're currently the performance leaders. I have some reservations about drivers still -- not with performance or stability but with long term support since ATI has still failed to deliver a unified driver architecture -- but I'm unwilling to sacrifice that much performance while still paying a higher price.
Frankly, at this point anyone who is still wondering about the validity of the benchmarks is deserving of the title "nVidia fanboy".
I agree on the facts bit, but that hasn't stopped SCO from doing press releases. I'd honestly like to see ESR follow up on the "slanderous" bits from the response statement and take SCO to court though -- except that he'd have to foot the bill himself while McBride can use the corporate lawyers of SCO. Not a good case.
As for doing a press release -- it may not cost much, but unless you're a publicly listed company or some other well known entity (research/consulting group, non-profit group, etc. -- with the emphasis on "well known") it won't do you any good. There's a ton of cranks out there putting out press releases daily on everything from UFOs to perpetual motion machines.
The reality is that Redhat, SuSE, IBM, Novell, or some other large company would have to put out the press release to do any good. Redhat and IBM are currently engaged in legal actions and aren't likely to do so, since it could be used as evidence at that point. SuSE could, but being a foreign company it would largely be ignored by the US press and financial media (that whole "well known" bit). Novell seems to have backed out of the case after dropping a bombshell (and a dud -- which was rather embarassing for them I'm sure).
I'm sure there's other outlets available -- research groups and major trade or mainstream papers seem the most obvious -- but they're still fairly inaccessible.
Rogue/Nethack/etc. are no different from Civ/MOO or any other strategy game (because that's what they all are - strategy. Rogue/Nethack/etc are certainly NOT RPGs) -- the location of content is randomized, but content itself is not dramatically different. Nor is the strategy for beating the game different, despite the randomization. In fact, people who have mastered the game and can beat it on a regular basis have to invent challenges for themselves -- Nethack has a whole list of things like vegetarian, vegan, atheist, pacifist, etc. intended purely as additional challenges.
When it comes to puzzles though they don't offer anything different from game to game. No, I don't consider maze levels to be "puzzles" -- they're merely tedious. Look at the Sokoban levels in Nethack 3.4 and up -- they're always the same, simply because writing a generalized puzzle generator for such a thing would be very difficult.
What Rogue/Nethack/etc have isn't graphics, it's gameplay. They're damned difficult, even for those who are good at them.
I know some people that talk about the allure of paper, and the sentimentality they have for holding a book with paper, but personally if I could buy eBooks and download them into a nice sized reader that had acceptable battery life and a nice, easy to read screen
The "nice, easy to read screen" cannot be emphasized enough.
Most portable electronics have tiny screens with low resolutions, horrible DPI, and glare issues. And they suck down batteries.
Newspaper print is generally the worst in terms of DPI for printed material, and even it exceeds 2400 DPI. I distinctly recall talking to a friend of my father who was in the newspaper business. He was wondering when I thought traditional printed newspapers would be in significant danger from portable devices, home printing, etc. I, as a know-it-all geeky CS student, said it'd probably be about 10 years before the display technologies got there.
Well, it's roughly 10 years later and we're really no closer than we were. Printing has certainly improved, but not as dramatically as I expected. Display technologies have gone more or less nowhere -- LCD has come down in price and power consumption, but the resolutions haven't gone up dramatically and there's been no really new technologies in that time period. Sure, OLED and similar are on the horizon now, but they don't promise a solution to the resolution issues. Printed circuits, electronic paper, and other technologies are also closer, but still probably a decade or more away.
Paper is here to stay for quite some time.
I still think the bug in converting between metric and imperial units causing a billion dollar Mars probe to crash is the top one.
It certainly tops their "Most Embarassing Bug" that lists the Mariner I probe U-turning into the Atlantic. Ten million, even in today's dollars, isn't even close to $327M (not $1B as you suggest). Of course, I suspect the launch was covered live, so maybe it is more embarassing.
Of course, what I found embarassing was the author's inability to comprehend what a NOT is. If you're writing for USA Today I might buy it, but this is TechTV, which is allegedly for technical people (but it's not).
Loading times can often be abysmally long, and so frequent as to seriously reduce game enjoyment.
The most recent example I can think of is Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex vs. Jax and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy on the Playstation2. CB is essentially unplayable, with loading times >30 seconds for each different area you go into -- something which happens fairly frequently. The loading screen is even abysmal, with lame "stars" falling upward and one of the characters in the middle, plus big letters letting you know it's "LOADING". J&D, on the other hand, has no appreciable loading time between segments. And when it is doing loading it does so while playing a cutscene, which lends to the storyline and doesn't become overly repetitive. By and large, however, there is no disincentive to wander between areas.
In another vein, I'm yet to figure out why FPS's haven't gotten smarter about level loading. Yes, levels are large and complex, and you should really only try to have one in memory at a time. But once the current level has ended there's absolutely no reason that the server shouldn't inform the clients of the next level and start loading it. That way by the time the post game score checking and chatter is over with the next level will be ready to play, or at least nearly ready. Much better than the current substantial breaks between levels.
You really should file a complaint then. Unless, of course, your "landline" phone is cordless, in which case your phone service was up but you didn't have a phone that ran off the power supplied by the phone grid.
The phone companies are required to keep the phone service running in case of emergencies. They may not be able to handle the call volume (c.f. 9/11), but they have to provide dial tone, at least for some "reasonable" amount of time (CO's generally have sufficient backup power onsite for 72 hours, and they're usually on the same priority level as hospitals when it comes to getting diesel fuel during emergencies).
Where there is broadband Internet, there can be VoIP. As last-mile broadband gets more economical via wireless and optical (along with traditional copper and cable), so will VoIP.
None of which is available to the rural communities the grandparant mentioned. In the case of some rural farms the "last mile" is more like the "last 20 miles". Even microwave transmission has issues at that range unless you put up some pretty honking big towers. WiFi sure as hell isn't going to cut it. Powerline may be an option at some point in the future though, but even then it's questionable that it will be affordable.
I can dial 911 from my Vonage home telephone just fine, thank you very much.
As the AC pointed out, no you can't -- although it doesn't look as drastic as he points out. Some "local public safety answering points" may be 911 call centers. But not always and roaming 911 is a complete no go. Equally importantly, quoting from here:
That makes it an unviable solution for E911 services.
BTW, Sprint's services were all up during the blackout. Landline, cell, and internet. Most of the cell towers were overloaded in volume and most of their customers (including ones in the same physical building) lost Internet access due to no backup power, but any hosted customers in the NE region remained powered up and doing business. And the landlines worked exactly how they're supposed to.
While I agree that a lot of the regulations and cost structures in the telephone arena are designed specifically to keep competition out, the need for a reliable emergency service and the need to continue to supply rural customers with service are two points that still need to be adhered to. Vonage isn't capable of solving the second issue, but they need to address the first if they're going to bill themselves as a phone company.
It's called a swish pan, and it makes for a nice transition, if you cut in between two of them. But you don't have to, and it doesn't look "terrible."
Do a swish pan across a row of vertical lines (like a fence or vertical blinds) and it will, indeed, look horrible. The 24 fps isn't adequate to the job.
It gets even worse on NTSC/PAL though, since the interlaced nature of the picture starts breaking things up horribly.
For true pain, take a movie that does a horrible swish pan like that and then transfer it to NTSC.
If a vault is destroyed in the same disaster, then there are probably more important things to worry about.
If the vault is destroyed, then you're probably right. But it doesn't take that to render the data unusable -- if the bank gets hit, the vault may survive but the keys may be destroyed (yeah, I'm sure they can get more made or have a locksmith come in, but that will take time). Or the vault is inaccessible for some amount of time due to damage. Even if the data is good, having it unavailable does you no good at all.
The data backup services are good, as is just going a bit further afield for a safe deposit box or other repository. As you say, if the data is important you do what it takes.
Everyone should have off-site backups. It's not very expensive (>100 dollars for tapes)
Er, for how much data? For your personal computer, maybe (but the tape drive will cost you considerably more than that $100), but I don't think you're going to back up a few hundred gigs of business data on ~$100 of tapes. And I suspect you meant 100... although if the latter then you're almost certainly correct!
It's not very hard (drive tapes to site). It's not difficult to get the backups if you need them (drive to site with tapes)
If your offsite backup is within convienent driving distance then odds are it's not far enough offsite. A flood, tornado, hurricane, earthquake, or other large scale natural disaster could conceivably destroy both your onsite and offsite backups if they're within a few miles. The flipside is that the further the distance the more the inconvienence on an ongoing basis and the more likely you are to stop doing backups.
There's far more to be considered here, but I'm not the DR expert (my wife is... seriously). It does make sense to have offsite backups, but you have to have some sense about those too.
I disagree... I used to touch type at around 100 wpm, but have slowed down to around 80 wpm nowadays unless I'm really in a groove.
Touch typing is useful for development -- yeah, most of your time is spent thinking and conceptualizing the code, but at some point you do have to write the damn thing, and then touch typing helps reduce your time doing so. The other thing is that most of the good text editors (vi, emacs, etc) make use of the standard QWERTY layout to improve navigation without forcing you to remove your hands from the keyboard home row. Touch typists find navigating with a mouse to be a major PITA, and using cursor keys only slightly less so. Both cause a disruption in your workflow because you have to move your hands away from the primary input keys.
Certainly touch typing most languages is going to be slower than typing a memo -- few memo's contain anywhere near the number of symbols as languages do -- but it's still going to be faster than the two finger pecking that non-touch typers usually employ. And once you do enough touch typing you learn where the number and symbol keys are and it just becomes part of the flow.
The same can be said for pretty much any of the internal network addresses. You might change jobs and they'll use 192.168.88.* for their internal network.
A few months ago I changed my network to 192.168.2.* for this reason -- because work used 1.*. My coworkers also changed their networks for the same reason, each of us picking various numbers randomly (one moved to 10.0.0.*). My cubemate changed to 100. Apparantly TechOps got tired of people having problems when VPN'd in though, so they decided to change all the network IPs as well. To 192.168.100.*. My coworker was annoyed.
A lot of stuff comes preconfigured to use 192.168.1.* though, so no matter what you change your network to, be sure you know enough to change it back when needed. If you ever need to flash the firmware on the device or reset it to factory defaults you'd better be able to talk to it to change it back to whatever address range you actually want.
Ok, of all of the things I said, this one I knew I'd read.
From the HL2 Valve Info thread (page 13 on default settings, 3rd message from bottom):
There's actually quite a bit of configuration done by some people... my BF1942 config has some rather drastic differences from the standard keyboard layout. My Q3 and UT2k3 layouts are even more different. I don't play anywhere but my own PC, but if I did then this would be a huge convienence.
Ouch. That is silly, particularly the single player bit (yeah, you can play w/o a net connection until you do something that requires Steam... to assume that you will forever thereafter have a net connection is inane).
My apologies.
I seriously think that with the various rediculous distribution methods, this will kill the mod community for HL2 before it even has a chance of being born.
Yeah. I mean, come on... you give the mod community that degree of customization, along with a very high level of support, and then actually let them choose to release their product for free OR make money off it?
How rediculous [sic]! That'll fail in a heartbeat. Stupid Valve.
Will HL2 for Xbox
Last I heard there were no plans for HL2 on any other platform, Xbox included.
We don't know what the one-time cost is going to be for the game without the subscription. It could be $60.
The question isn't how much HL2 itself is, but how much HL2 + all other Valve content over a certain period of time is. Honestly, however, at $120/year, that's going to have to be a TON of additional paid-for content. I'll be buying the one time cost version, thank you very much.
requiring an online connection to play the single player game
Where'd you get this from?
requiring that LAN parties provide internet access to check in with STEAM
Or this?
Checking in with Steam will certainly have advantages -- like being able to access your keyboard/mouse config from any PC -- but I haven't read that it'll be required for single player (it won't) or LAN parties (unclear, but doubtful). If you want to play multiplayer over the Internet, then yes, you'll have to connect to Steam (although I bet you'll be able to use other server browsers like ASE too).
Certainly there's a ton of questions to be answered still, and I also question the degree of market segmentation they've done. This bit id hard when they released Quake (albeit in a different way). I'm betting it's going to bite Valve too.
Right, so if this game is out at the end of this month, is there any way to get a demo of it?
No. Valve has previously stated there would be no demo for HL2 prior to release.
something running on the Source engine to see whether or not this stupid thing will even run on your system
Valve has also stated that they will be releasing a benchmark program for people to use and see how their system will fare with the Source engine, as well as to see what upgrades they may want to make. I'd guess that it'll be a tech demo with no interaction that'll measure frame rate and such, but that's just a guess. It should be out RSN -- Valve has said "September" several times and stated that it would be available before the game was.
I don't recall if it was to be generally available or not -- they may only release it to benchmarking sites, but that'd seem odd to me.
I have an Athlon 2100 w/ 512M and a GeForce4 Ti4200. I plan to replace the GF4 w/ a ATI Radeon 9800 (non-pro). I think the rest will be fine. I haven't bought the card yet though because I'm waiting on the benchmarking to see what the whole story is.
The thing that makes this even harder to swallow is that there are 41 motions on that website that have been filed, and you know that each and every one of them has cost each side thousands of dollars just to have some guy read it and respond. Thats at least a half a mil on both sides (probably much more), just to deal with the paperwork.
/.
Thousands of dollars? Those are some insanely high priced lawyers. If you get a top flight lawyer at $500/hour and it takes an average of 2 hours to read and respond to each filing, then that's only $41,000. Sure, it's not chump change, but it's hardly the half a million you figured.
how many of the poor sumbitches getting invoices can?
Uh, an invoice is not a legal document. I can invoice you for $50. Are you going to pay it? If so, let me get you a real invoice out post haste.
Most likely you (and most companies) will ignore it because I sent you an invoice for something you didn't order. Better yet, it's an invoice from some company that you've never done business with. Most of the invoices will go in the trash. Some companies will note that legal action is threatened and they'll send it to a lawyer, probably on staff. Or to one that'll charge them There is nothing worse than legitmizing an illegal action because the illegal action would cost less than finding justice.
Is that worse than having to close up shop, fire all your employees, and declare bankruptcy for your business (and maybe yourself if you didn't incorporate, were too dependant on your business, or did a poor job of maintaining the corporate veil)? There are noble concepts and then there's reality.
IANAL, and even if I was you'd be a damn fool to take legal advice off of
No more so than the telephone company is a middleman when you make a long distance phone call. Yes, without them you wouldn't be able to make the call. But they're not buying the conversation from you and selling it to the person on the other end.
A middleman is someone who purchases from the producer and sells to the consumer. The ISP/webhost isn't doing this -- they're merely providing transport. And, yes, this is an important economic and (more importantly) legal discrimination. The ISP/webhost is not responsible for policing their content because they aren't creating or selling it.
If the activation would allow me to install it in two places, so long as I only ran it in one place at a time (and even if it required me to be connected to the internet - I'm used to that for massively multiplayer games) that would be acceptable to me.
IIRC, that's allowed. Now this is all based on the reading of one thread on the HL2 forums, but in there Gabe Newell states that you can play from a friend's house using your CD key, even without them having bought the game. Better yet, your key bindings and other settings will follow you (although I'd hope they leave the hardware specific stuff up to each install for obvious reasons).
Oh... and upon reading that thread, the latest information from Gabe is that the interview is a fake.
I'd still recommend reading through that thread if you haven't before. Yes it's long. It's also responses from HL2 developers only (and the mods keep it cleaned up too).
Decisions of the Seventh Circuit (which sits in Chicago) are binding on courts in Illinois and Indiana as well as in Wisconsin
Yes, but the court specifically refered to Wisconsin laws. Certainly the court is now biased toward its prior ruling (as will be courts in Illinois and Indiana, referring to the higher court's ruling), but if there's a substantive difference in state law on the points referenced in Wisconsin law the outcome might be different. I'd be bloody amazed, but stranger things have happened.
Yes, but then you have to find an EULA that contains a clause that causes harm to you. You'll also have to argue that the EULA as an entirety holds no legal merit, which is a lot shakier case than merely arguing that the clause in the EULA is invalid.
Again, you're back into needing several hundred thousand dollars to fight this one. The company you take suit against will probably simply offer to settle, which you'll have to decline since you're wanting to argue this one on ethics, not on actual damages. At that point they'll start using delaying tatics to eat up your money first. It's certainly winnable, but you'll have to pick your target carefully -- you need a software company with a EULA with a damaging clause (and while the liability disclaimers count here, I think they're also the worst chance for success), with borderline profits (positive side; if they're unprofitable they'll just declare bankruptcy and the suit will be dismissed), and which is in a jurisdiction that has favorable laws and judges for your case. It's not impossible, but it is damned difficult.
I do, however, stand corrected on who has to bring suit against who. You're right on that, it's just the particulars of what has to occur that's still a problem. You can't sue the mechanic just because they have the sign -- you have to actually be injured first (and even then if the mechanic can show no lack of negligence on their part, including reasonable precautions against you accessing the garage, you'd be SOL -- not that many mechanics would actually do so. An open garage door would invalidate their defense).
That may spell it out for you, but woe be unto you when you find out differently.
The highest court to rule on it, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, disagrees. They stated that you merely have to be made aware of a license agreement, but you don't have to be able to read the agreement beforehand. Virtually all software nowadays states on the box that there is a license agreement inside the box, which according to the 7th is adequate, as long as you can return the software for the purchase price if you disagree with the license.
Until there's a Supreme Court ruling there won't be any clear ruling on this, but legal scholars appear to be taking the 7th's ruling as guidance for now. And unless you live in one of the small areas with a contrary ruling, it's advisable that you follow it as well. Ignorance of the law is not a valid defense.
And the only way to challenge it in court is to actually violate it and get sued.
You go to court claiming that you don't want to be held to some piece of paper and the clerk won't even bother scheduling your case -- because you don't have one.