Gimme a break. No one reading this far into the comments on this article are clueless as to RMS's activism. In fact, several years ago, I had an email conversation with him about whether the Hurd was ready. It's this kind of person - one who knows what he's about - that's reading this. Take yourself for instance.
I disagree with the most common complaint I'm seeing in this thread. People keep saying that the value of Slashdot is in the commentaries. Balogna! Most of the comments are TOTAL CRAP. I read at a +3 just to stay sane on the 10% of the articles I click through. Even then, like on this thread, I must filter to a +5, or I just couldn't read all the posts in several hours. I find that the main value I get out of Slashdot is the fact that it's the one place to get all the relevant news. On top of that, you can get various sites linked to the front page.
To wit: Slashdot has become my "Home Page." In the 8 years I've been using the web (all the way back to a Trumpet connection to Concentric, just after the brief flirtation with Prodigy), I've never had a "Home Page." Now, Slashdot has replaced regular reading of both ArsTechnica and Blue's News. In addition, I keep up with the headlines from The Register, Linux Today, and even the DNA Lounge. To me, someone who reads at least an hour on the internet every morning, having a place to keep it all in one location has a lot of value.
But will I pay? I'd say "yes" right now, but I'll have to wait until all this feedback is heard, discussed, and acted upon. With some of the great ideas I've read in these comments, there's no way that the currently-proposed system can stand. There's just too many better ways of doing this. What's been proposed is the "admin's" way out, because he's the one that has to do the work. It's a technological cop-out; and I think it's doomed to failure.
There was a resource kit utility to open up software RAID sets and fix them under NT/2000. I have played with it only to see what it does, and that was years ago. It was made for exactly what you're talking about doing.
However...
I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think you're going to get done in software what the hardware was doing for you. If the data is truly sacred, I think one of the other posters was correct: go to a data-recovery service and let a professional do it. If the data is only partly holy, then try finding a utility from the controller maker.
This is an easy question. I just hosted another LAN party, and have thought this through a couple times. There are some places on the net to get info about how to have a LAN party, but I want to preface my comments so that you understand where I'm coming from. We had 11 people in attendance, though I was hoping for 15, so that will give you an idea of where I'm coming from, and we did it from noon till almost 10 pm last Saturday. (Hey, some of use are old guys bringing our teenagers these days. )
Some comments about the mechanics are in order because it goes directly to the issue of the fun factor. If you're going to play a game that can have a dedicated server, do it. I was lucky to be hosting this LAN party in a big conference room at my work, and had a "spare" quad Xeon with 2 GB RAM and 4 36 GB Ultra3 160 drives striped together as a server. It hosted all of the game servers I talk about below, and never even knew it was working. However, it took me most of a day to get all the configurations tweaked just right. On the other hand, no one person could take down the game because his computer crashed. We pulled a 24-port switch from a wiring closet that gave us less than 10 msec ping times. So, though setting up dedicated servers will be more work, it's more stable, and though switches are a little more expensive than hubs, they give great performance. One more thing, the point of a LAN party is to interact. Get everyone in the same room if at all possible. I've done it both ways (with people in individual offices so that we wouldn't have to move computers). Pack 'em in; it's much more fun. With On to the games...
We played UT DM FFA with the bonus pack relics to get everyone up and running, then we had a (small) UT one-on-one tournament. Again, the server hosted the FFA room and 4 tourney rooms all setup exactly the same way. UT - as of the latest patch - doesn't require a CD. However, it does require you to use a CD to load the latest patch. After that, you're good to go. You can even copy the CD to the server along with all the patches and bonus packs, and everyone should be able to get to them. I say "should" because Windows domain issues bit us in the behind and made browsing the server problematic. If you don't know what I'm saying, just make a bunch of CD copies for your friends to get up and running. I don't know if this sort of use of UT is legit, but based on the fact that Epic consciously took the CD requirement out of the game as of the 4.36 patch, I assume that they had this in mind.
After the UT stuff, I had everyone warm up to the Quake 3 engine in an Excessive Overkill DM FFA. If you haven't seen this, it's really neat. It'll wear you out, though, so don't plan to spend all day with it. Although it's available for UT as well as Q3, I like the Q3 engine slightly better, and that's what I went with. We only played it for about an hour before moving onto Threewave CTF, and that's what I really want to talk about. Threewave was the hit of the day. (I must point out that Threewave has been available for Q1 and Q2 as well, and though I have no experience with the Q1 version, I like the Q2 version just as well.) Once again, the dedicated server hosted both of these games as well. Once again, you can serve up the CD and the patches for your friends, or make copies of the disc. id Software made the game such that you can just ignore entering the CD key, and unless you want to play on a public internet server, you're fine. It was designed to play on a LAN like this.
I must change course here and talk about administrating the games: Q3 wins over UT. Although I have thought for a long time that UT was better, I got my opinion changed at this LAN party. Yes, UT has a web browser interface for administrating the server, but that - for me - means going somewhere else to do it. I don't want to tempt Windows 98 fate by Alt-Tab'ing over to a browser to make changes. (Hey, I had everything setup to play under Linux, but my hard drive ate it that morning. Besides, you can't Alt-Tab at all under Linux anyway.) So I wound up walking over to the server to get rid of the bots under UT FFA when everyone got up and running. On the other hand, changing something on the server with Q3 is easy with rcon. Yes, you have to know the command you want, which takes some learning, but you can just get a console in-game, do your thing, and get on with life.
On a related note, with UT you can use the in-game setup to configure your server and then launch in dedicated mode. On my particular server, with no 3D video card, I couldn't do that with Q3. However, setting up a config file for a dedicated Q3 server actually paled in diffculty compared to getting the command line correct for launching a UT server without the aid of the game engine. (I didn't realize till later that the UT engine tells you what command line it's using to start the game in the console. Grrr.) So, even though UT looks easier to setup and admin on paper, Q3 wins on both in actual usability in my book. And being able to change things on the fly for the group is a huge win. (For example: although Threewave allows you to call votes on lots of things in-game, most people aren't die-hard gamers like you and I, and don't understand how to respond to vote requests. Being able to hit "~", type "rcon capturelimit 7", and move on is really great.)
Some people say Counter-Strike is great, and I would agree on principle, except that I couldn't get it to work with a single CD-key. I tried this on a previous LAN party, and we seemed to be limited to 4 people on it. It was goofy for me, and I gave up trying to make it work. I didn't have time to set it up this time around, but I had planned on trying Strike Force, which is a Counter Strike-like mod for UT. It seems to have a few bugs, but being that it's based on UT, you wouldn't need CD's or keys for it at all.
We also have a sub-group that likes to play Rogue Spear. While I'm not a huge fan, I appreciate that we need to play it so that everyone gets to have some time on their favorite engine. However, this is one is definitely not LAN-party friendly. You have to either make copies of the disk or use a crack. Of course, we all had legal copies of the disc, and so were just fine playing this game.;-) One bad thing about RS is that there is no dedicated server for the game. And it's the flakiest game I've discussed here. So, when the person hosting goes down, everyone stops. Get the person with the fastest, most-stable machine to host.
Lastly, we have some goofballs that like to play Starcraft, but play it at its fastest setting. To me, that takes all the strategy out of it, and I won't play it that way. YMMV. To me, using a strategy game like this in a LAN party is ridiculous becuase you have to sit out so long between rounds. Counter Strike or Rogue Spear are bad enough, but when a game can last for 30 or 45 minutes, that's just boring, except for the last two guys in the game.
We don't play it, because I really dominate in it, but I still love Quake 2 Lithium. You can tweak it to your hearts content, and I still think it's the best DM ever. Really fast-paced like Excessive Overkill, but not so senses-numbing. If you can get away with it, try it. You'll love it. And no CD's or keys, either.
There's no other way around it. If you want a community centered around a service, you have to sell subscriptions. I think this is the lesson that people need to learn. If people don't value something enough to pay something for it, then you don't need them downloading whatever it is you're creating. Sure, I want stuff for free. Everyone does. But there's nothing wrong in charging for a product with value. If you started charging, yes, your downloads are going to fall off sharply. BUT, there comes an intersection point where your bandwidth costs drop off to meet a rising income, and you can tweak your pricing model (and donated bandwidth) to find a happy medium. This seems so obvious to me, and I've said exactly this to at least one very popular web site's creator, that it's just like a magazine subscription. Charge about that price for about that level of content. It's very simple math: if you can't find enough people willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile (even if that means breaking even to you), then it just doesn't make sense.
If there were ever a more perfect example of how Microsoft's monopoly is hurting the market (and individuals), I don't know what it would be. This perfectly shows that because of their presence, they feel that they can do whatever they want.
Just look at CE. When I was deciding between a Palm and a CE machine, I was extremely tempted to go with the Microsoft-based products because they were giving away their easy-to-use development tools. I didn't. I bought the Palm, but I never spent the $300 on CodeWarrior, nor did I spend the many hours it would have taken to figure out how to make a GUI using the open-source tools.
As I get on in years, it's increasingly interesting to me how much we can learn from history. We've seen this before. Many times. Once Microsoft gets a lock on a market, they make that market a revenue generator. After taking a bath on IE for years - don't think that didn't take millions to get coded - we're paying for it with higher costs for XP and strong-arm tactics to force companies to upgrade every seat they own (my company allowed themselves to be used).
Now, they've taken a long enough bath on IIS (which was also offered for free, remember), and they're going to get they're money back on it. The only hope in this case is that they
don't have a lock on this market.
You have made comments to the effect of poo-poo'ing celebrity opinions about issues in general. Yet in your blogs, you spend a lot of time discussing politics, and you make no bones about which side of the isle you favor. As someone in the public spotlight - and especially as someone in the geek spotlight (being a celeb that has your own self-coded web site) - do you consider it a duty of sorts to be an activist? Does being a celeb bring any more responsibility over the common, first-amendment-empowered citizen in voicing your opinion? Also, do you feel that you have qualities above and beyond other Hollywood celebrities that makes it important that you share your feelings?
What to do with Microsoft? It's very simple really. Just make them sell the major components of Windows separately. Sell the OS for $50. Sell the browser for $20 or $30. Sell the media player (and encoder) for $20. Sell the... Well, you get the idea. When someone has to choose between Microsoft's CD burning software or Roxio's, instead of getting it force fed to them, then we'll see what the market really thinks about Microsoft's products. That's it. No need for breaking the company up; no need for tying their hands as to what they can make. Just don't let them bundle. Just make them market each major add-on like their competition.
Does it occur to anyone else that we might be living in a time where a real "Dark Angel" could be made? With all the knowledge that we have about genetics now, it may indeed be possible to make a human being with "better" characteristics than "average." Someone who would be as quick as a mongoose and as strong as a bear? I don't know. The possibilities are endless to speculate about. But then you have to ask yourself that if it *were* possible (and it *will* be someday), wouldn't this kind of technology be just as power-unbalancing as nuclear weapons? Now what 3rd-world dictator with a lot of money can you see trying to get just such capability? A couple spring to my mind right now.
Slashdot Mirror
Gimme a break. No one reading this far into the comments on this article are clueless as to RMS's activism. In fact, several years ago, I had an email conversation with him about whether the Hurd was ready. It's this kind of person - one who knows what he's about - that's reading this. Take yourself for instance.
Oh boy. Here we go...
I disagree with the most common complaint I'm seeing in this thread. People keep saying that the value of Slashdot is in the commentaries. Balogna! Most of the comments are TOTAL CRAP. I read at a +3 just to stay sane on the 10% of the articles I click through. Even then, like on this thread, I must filter to a +5, or I just couldn't read all the posts in several hours. I find that the main value I get out of Slashdot is the fact that it's the one place to get all the relevant news. On top of that, you can get various sites linked to the front page. To wit: Slashdot has become my "Home Page." In the 8 years I've been using the web (all the way back to a Trumpet connection to Concentric, just after the brief flirtation with Prodigy), I've never had a "Home Page." Now, Slashdot has replaced regular reading of both ArsTechnica and Blue's News. In addition, I keep up with the headlines from The Register, Linux Today, and even the DNA Lounge. To me, someone who reads at least an hour on the internet every morning, having a place to keep it all in one location has a lot of value. But will I pay? I'd say "yes" right now, but I'll have to wait until all this feedback is heard, discussed, and acted upon. With some of the great ideas I've read in these comments, there's no way that the currently-proposed system can stand. There's just too many better ways of doing this. What's been proposed is the "admin's" way out, because he's the one that has to do the work. It's a technological cop-out; and I think it's doomed to failure.
There was a resource kit utility to open up software RAID sets and fix them under NT/2000. I have played with it only to see what it does, and that was years ago. It was made for exactly what you're talking about doing.
However...
I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think you're going to get done in software what the hardware was doing for you. If the data is truly sacred, I think one of the other posters was correct: go to a data-recovery service and let a professional do it. If the data is only partly holy, then try finding a utility from the controller maker.
dk
they don't already use Postscript. Don't leave home without it when it comes to printing with any sort of *nix.
This is an easy question. I just hosted another LAN party, and have thought this through a couple times. There are some places on the net to get info about how to have a LAN party, but I want to preface my comments so that you understand where I'm coming from. We had 11 people in attendance, though I was hoping for 15, so that will give you an idea of where I'm coming from, and we did it from noon till almost 10 pm last Saturday. (Hey, some of use are old guys bringing our teenagers these days. )
Some comments about the mechanics are in order because it goes directly to the issue of the fun factor. If you're going to play a game that can have a dedicated server, do it. I was lucky to be hosting this LAN party in a big conference room at my work, and had a "spare" quad Xeon with 2 GB RAM and 4 36 GB Ultra3 160 drives striped together as a server. It hosted all of the game servers I talk about below, and never even knew it was working. However, it took me most of a day to get all the configurations tweaked just right. On the other hand, no one person could take down the game because his computer crashed. We pulled a 24-port switch from a wiring closet that gave us less than 10 msec ping times. So, though setting up dedicated servers will be more work, it's more stable, and though switches are a little more expensive than hubs, they give great performance. One more thing, the point of a LAN party is to interact. Get everyone in the same room if at all possible. I've done it both ways (with people in individual offices so that we wouldn't have to move computers). Pack 'em in; it's much more fun. With On to the games...
We played UT DM FFA with the bonus pack relics to get everyone up and running, then we had a (small) UT one-on-one tournament. Again, the server hosted the FFA room and 4 tourney rooms all setup exactly the same way. UT - as of the latest patch - doesn't require a CD. However, it does require you to use a CD to load the latest patch. After that, you're good to go. You can even copy the CD to the server along with all the patches and bonus packs, and everyone should be able to get to them. I say "should" because Windows domain issues bit us in the behind and made browsing the server problematic. If you don't know what I'm saying, just make a bunch of CD copies for your friends to get up and running. I don't know if this sort of use of UT is legit, but based on the fact that Epic consciously took the CD requirement out of the game as of the 4.36 patch, I assume that they had this in mind.
After the UT stuff, I had everyone warm up to the Quake 3 engine in an Excessive Overkill DM FFA. If you haven't seen this, it's really neat. It'll wear you out, though, so don't plan to spend all day with it. Although it's available for UT as well as Q3, I like the Q3 engine slightly better, and that's what I went with. We only played it for about an hour before moving onto Threewave CTF, and that's what I really want to talk about. Threewave was the hit of the day. (I must point out that Threewave has been available for Q1 and Q2 as well, and though I have no experience with the Q1 version, I like the Q2 version just as well.) Once again, the dedicated server hosted both of these games as well. Once again, you can serve up the CD and the patches for your friends, or make copies of the disc. id Software made the game such that you can just ignore entering the CD key, and unless you want to play on a public internet server, you're fine. It was designed to play on a LAN like this.
I must change course here and talk about administrating the games: Q3 wins over UT. Although I have thought for a long time that UT was better, I got my opinion changed at this LAN party. Yes, UT has a web browser interface for administrating the server, but that - for me - means going somewhere else to do it. I don't want to tempt Windows 98 fate by Alt-Tab'ing over to a browser to make changes. (Hey, I had everything setup to play under Linux, but my hard drive ate it that morning. Besides, you can't Alt-Tab at all under Linux anyway.) So I wound up walking over to the server to get rid of the bots under UT FFA when everyone got up and running. On the other hand, changing something on the server with Q3 is easy with rcon. Yes, you have to know the command you want, which takes some learning, but you can just get a console in-game, do your thing, and get on with life.
On a related note, with UT you can use the in-game setup to configure your server and then launch in dedicated mode. On my particular server, with no 3D video card, I couldn't do that with Q3. However, setting up a config file for a dedicated Q3 server actually paled in diffculty compared to getting the command line correct for launching a UT server without the aid of the game engine. (I didn't realize till later that the UT engine tells you what command line it's using to start the game in the console. Grrr.) So, even though UT looks easier to setup and admin on paper, Q3 wins on both in actual usability in my book. And being able to change things on the fly for the group is a huge win. (For example: although Threewave allows you to call votes on lots of things in-game, most people aren't die-hard gamers like you and I, and don't understand how to respond to vote requests. Being able to hit "~", type "rcon capturelimit 7", and move on is really great.)
Some people say Counter-Strike is great, and I would agree on principle, except that I couldn't get it to work with a single CD-key. I tried this on a previous LAN party, and we seemed to be limited to 4 people on it. It was goofy for me, and I gave up trying to make it work. I didn't have time to set it up this time around, but I had planned on trying Strike Force, which is a Counter Strike-like mod for UT. It seems to have a few bugs, but being that it's based on UT, you wouldn't need CD's or keys for it at all.
We also have a sub-group that likes to play Rogue Spear. While I'm not a huge fan, I appreciate that we need to play it so that everyone gets to have some time on their favorite engine. However, this is one is definitely not LAN-party friendly. You have to either make copies of the disk or use a crack. Of course, we all had legal copies of the disc, and so were just fine playing this game. ;-) One bad thing about RS is that there is no dedicated server for the game. And it's the flakiest game I've discussed here. So, when the person hosting goes down, everyone stops. Get the person with the fastest, most-stable machine to host.
Lastly, we have some goofballs that like to play Starcraft, but play it at its fastest setting. To me, that takes all the strategy out of it, and I won't play it that way. YMMV. To me, using a strategy game like this in a LAN party is ridiculous becuase you have to sit out so long between rounds. Counter Strike or Rogue Spear are bad enough, but when a game can last for 30 or 45 minutes, that's just boring, except for the last two guys in the game.
We don't play it, because I really dominate in it, but I still love Quake 2 Lithium. You can tweak it to your hearts content, and I still think it's the best DM ever. Really fast-paced like Excessive Overkill, but not so senses-numbing. If you can get away with it, try it. You'll love it. And no CD's or keys, either.
dk
There's no other way around it. If you want a community centered around a service, you have to sell subscriptions. I think this is the lesson that people need to learn. If people don't value something enough to pay something for it, then you don't need them downloading whatever it is you're creating. Sure, I want stuff for free. Everyone does. But there's nothing wrong in charging for a product with value. If you started charging, yes, your downloads are going to fall off sharply. BUT, there comes an intersection point where your bandwidth costs drop off to meet a rising income, and you can tweak your pricing model (and donated bandwidth) to find a happy medium. This seems so obvious to me, and I've said exactly this to at least one very popular web site's creator, that it's just like a magazine subscription. Charge about that price for about that level of content. It's very simple math: if you can't find enough people willing to pay enough to make it worthwhile (even if that means breaking even to you), then it just doesn't make sense.
dk
If there were ever a more perfect example of how Microsoft's monopoly is hurting the market (and individuals), I don't know what it would be. This perfectly shows that because of their presence, they feel that they can do whatever they want.
Just look at CE. When I was deciding between a Palm and a CE machine, I was extremely tempted to go with the Microsoft-based products because they were giving away their easy-to-use development tools. I didn't. I bought the Palm, but I never spent the $300 on CodeWarrior, nor did I spend the many hours it would have taken to figure out how to make a GUI using the open-source tools.
As I get on in years, it's increasingly interesting to me how much we can learn from history. We've seen this before. Many times. Once Microsoft gets a lock on a market, they make that market a revenue generator. After taking a bath on IE for years - don't think that didn't take millions to get coded - we're paying for it with higher costs for XP and strong-arm tactics to force companies to upgrade every seat they own (my company allowed themselves to be used).
Now, they've taken a long enough bath on IIS (which was also offered for free, remember), and they're going to get they're money back on it. The only hope in this case is that they don't have a lock on this market.
Wil,
You have made comments to the effect of poo-poo'ing celebrity opinions about issues in general. Yet in your blogs, you spend a lot of time discussing politics, and you make no bones about which side of the isle you favor. As someone in the public spotlight - and especially as someone in the geek spotlight (being a celeb that has your own self-coded web site) - do you consider it a duty of sorts to be an activist? Does being a celeb bring any more responsibility over the common, first-amendment-empowered citizen in voicing your opinion? Also, do you feel that you have qualities above and beyond other Hollywood celebrities that makes it important that you share your feelings?
Thanks,
dk
What to do with Microsoft? It's very simple really. Just make them sell the major components of Windows separately. Sell the OS for $50. Sell the browser for $20 or $30. Sell the media player (and encoder) for $20. Sell the... Well, you get the idea. When someone has to choose between Microsoft's CD burning software or Roxio's, instead of getting it force fed to them, then we'll see what the market really thinks about Microsoft's products. That's it. No need for breaking the company up; no need for tying their hands as to what they can make. Just don't let them bundle. Just make them market each major add-on like their competition.
Does it occur to anyone else that we might be living in a time where a real "Dark Angel" could be made? With all the knowledge that we have about genetics now, it may indeed be possible to make a human being with "better" characteristics than "average." Someone who would be as quick as a mongoose and as strong as a bear? I don't know. The possibilities are endless to speculate about. But then you have to ask yourself that if it *were* possible (and it *will* be someday), wouldn't this kind of technology be just as power-unbalancing as nuclear weapons? Now what 3rd-world dictator with a lot of money can you see trying to get just such capability? A couple spring to my mind right now.