What's the difference between a service pack and an update rollup?
I mean, doesn't a service pack usually imply a group of patches all bundled into one. And an update rollup is... the same thing. So, besides terminology and semantics, is there any realy difference between the two?
My friend has T-Mobile and a Nokia bluetooth phone. He has a little USB bluetooth dongle attached to his laptop. He connects wirelessly to his cell phone with the bluetooth. Then the cell phone's unlimited data service provides the laptop with an internet connection via the bluetooth. This required no support from T-Mobile.
When open source applications have bugs in them, people report them to bugzilla or equivalent and wait. If anyone complains people say "they'll work on it, if you want it done faster, do it yourself".
As soon as the software isn't free all of a sudden its "those bastards releasing software with more than 0 bugs in it!"
Guess what. The introduction of money doesn't all of a sudden make developers more perfect. They have deadlines, priorities and are imperfect, like other people. Just because software is less than free doesn't mean you can expect it to be perfectly bug free.
It's also funny all the complaints about half-life 2 have to do with the steam system. Nobody seems to be making comments about the actual game itself. Oh, could that be because the game itself is an indisputably amazing work of art? Sorry warez dudes, you can't get a free ride on this one. For me, I don't mind as its probably the only PC game I will buy for the next 5 years. Half-Life 2 and its mods will probably be the only pc game worth playing for a long time to come. Half-Life 1 lived up to that, and I expect no less from 2. It's worth more than the lousy 50 bucks they charge for it. So quit your bitching. If you don't like the DRM, then crack it, just like you do with all the RIAA and MPAA DRM.
Plextor is about as good as it gets. Currently I've got the PX-712A and I couldn't be more pleased. There is one newer model, the PX-716 that supports dual layer discs. It is as we say "teh hotness". Also, their newer drives have serial ata versions, which few others can claim.
I can get steam to work under cedega right now. It plays counter-strike and half-life and such at respectable frame rates, but only up to 800x600. If I turn it up anymore it drops to 1 fps. In my windows XP partition, which I only use for steam, I get perfect vertical sync refresh rates in 1280x1024 32 bit color. Also some mods like natural selection are buggy, but working.
If I can't play every mod at full resolution with no buginess, its not much better than not being able to play at all.
ID software released a doom 3 binary for linux, why can't valve do the same? It might be more difficult because they use directx instead of opengl. But half-life 1 ran in opengl mode, and you only needed directx for the menus and stuff. and with steam, you don't even need the menus since you have the steam interface instead. It shouldn't take that long to convert from one library to another. And if they wrote Half-Life 2 to be directx only, balls to them.
President Bush is expected to sign the legislation when it is passed
The man has never vetoed anything from what I hear. Look it up. They could probably sneak a bill legalizing baby rape past this guy. Or maybe, he would read it, allow it and sign it intentionally?
why is this modded funny? I think its quite true. The only people who have problems with steam are people with crummy net connections and people who try to use it when traffic is very high. If you use steam on a day that isn't close to a big release day, and your bandwith isn't poop it works just fine. In fact, I've never had a problem. The only thing I can say about about steam is that it is windows only. You can tell the last time I played steam by running the uptime command.
You know what I don't do? Watch television. I only watch DVDs or things downloaded from the net. All of which are commercial free. I'll sometimes go to the movie theatre, but I make a concious effort to ignore, talk over, or make obscenities at the pre-movie ads. Except at the artsy theatre, where the ads are for other artsy movies. All the information I get comes through the net, filtered through firefox to remove all ads. Yeah, I don't see slashdot ads. So ha! I don't use the AdBlock extensions either. I have a handy userContent.css file that does it all.
My life is ad free except for physical adsvertisements that get in my way out on the street. Like when I go to the grocery store, or billboards on the highway, or a visit to NYC.
Rather than complain that something like TV has ads you can't remove, just don't watch TV as long as it has ads. If slashdot's ads were unremovable I would probably stop reading it too.
gnumerc is it, and everybody knows it. You don't have to have gnome in order to use it. But you do need GTK, which you have because you use abiword. And you have to have libgsf which has to be built with gnome support, but gnome itself is not really needed. If you use gentoo all this means is you have to put on the gnome use flag for just the libgsf package and gnumeric will work. You don't need to emerge gnome.
Is that clear enough? I hope you understand.
Hey, you can always use moodss, the module object oriented dynamic spreadsheet. Or you can use sc, which is curses based. But then, you might as well use visicalc.
How come you guys disrespect your east coast readers so much? I mean, you cancelled on our Otakon and you only came here once ever. At a very bad time to a not easy to get to convention. Then you have PAX, which is like the best thing ever, all the way on the other side of the country.
What will you do to make up for the lack of love for the east coast? If I don't like your answer I'm going to come to PAX2 with water from the Atlantic Ocean and drench both of you with it. Seriously, watch out.
Not only can you get your bookmarks from anywhere, but you can also share them with the rest of the world.
Even better than that, if you use firefox ( which I hope you do ) your bookmarks are stored as an html file. Just put this html file in any web accessible place, and you can visit it and whoah! your bookmarks are there.
I know another one. Get a USB thumb drive and carry your bookmarks with you.
btw. I didn't razz the guy who did install firefox. I supported him. Meanwhile, spreadfirefox.com is starting up many a grass-roots campaign to spread firefox. Its quite obvious to me that the only people who can decry firefox and those who haven't used it. Everyone who I've shown it to and actually taught to use the advanced non-obvious features never turns back.
Oh, you mean hardware? Every 5 years. I had a Pentium III 450mhz with a TNT2. Bought it the day the TNT2 came out. Didn't buy my new computer until last year. Waited until the very last minute when the old computer just couldn't do it anymore. Now I have an Athlon XP 2500+ and an FX5900. I probably wont upgrade for at least that much time again. I will wait until this computer really just can't hack it anymore. When there are applications it just can't run and what it does run is just too slow to bear. This might take longer than before actually because I run gentoo now instead of Windows XP
Update everything all the time. Of course, this is only for my personal desktop machine where having the latest goods actually makes a difference.
On my server I do the above very very rarely, if ever. Actually, only when there is a serious security issue or a fix for an annoying bug.
If using the system and having things work better and newer is the priority, like on a desktop, update all the freaking time, especially if that updating is effortless. If stability and functionality are important, and it already provides all necessary functionality, like a server, then update as rarely as possible.
Scale somewhere between the two extremes depending on your specific situation. This isn't brain surgery.
Digital Audio and Video editing. Stuff like Premiere. Acid Music. Reason. CoolEdit. ProTools. iMovie. Doing audio and video editing should be as good on Linux as it is on a Mac.
Also, burning of optical disks. Yes k3b exists. yes, technically you can burn just about anything. But nothing linux can do comes close to Nero. I need all the perfect functionality of Nero in linux.
Steam. The only pc game I play other than puzzle pirates, which is java, needs to run better on linux. Using cedega I can only get the resolution up to 800x600. Anything higher drops the framerate from perfect to less than 1 fps.
Someone else mentioned audio mixers. Alsa is very good, and is about as good as I can expect, but not as good as I can hope for. I have an SBLive! Value with the latest alsa kernel drivers. It works and plays music very well. But if I use winamp in windows with directaudio not only does the mixer work properly and is labeled correctly, but the sound quality is imporoved tenfold. I don't know what the difference is, but even my non-audiophile self can hear a noticeable difference. All my friends hear it too. It's the same hardware, it should work the same regardless of OS.
That's really what linux has to do now. Firefox and 2.6 brought us to the top of the hill, we're just nearing the peak of the mountain. We have support for most hardware and enough software to replace windows as a non-gaming desktop machine that is technologically superior in almost every fashion. But a lot of the hardware support is existent but non-perfect. Sound works, but not perfectly. CD burning works, but not as simple and perfect and beautiful as nero. ATI cards work, but are a pain in the ass. Nvidia cards work, but with closed source drivers. It's like everything works 90% perfectly, we need to push it to perfect, then linux will have smooth seas.
Oh this is so true. Look at all the freaking live journals where whenever some small insignificant moment occurrs in someone's life they go and write a big dramatic production in their blog. Look at all the people who simply put out their personal opinions of the world in a freely available format for the people to read. There are good and bad things that come from blogging. And you are correct, very little of blogging actually provides new primary or secondary source information. It is primarily commentary on information garnered by other sources.
But then again, TV and radio media are simply distributors and spinners of information. The AP and UPI are the companies which actually go out and get the "news". Other than local newspapers and independent curious people there is very little actual news gathering done by people at Fox or CBS or NBC or even the New York Times. Most of it is simply elaborate essays generated from the few facts that come down the AP news wire.
So blogs are good in that they provide alternate elaborations and maybe deeper less restricted thought on these factual news items. However, they are bad for the same reason.
It's not like everyone can pay to get the news wire in their home.
This is why on my blog I try to avoid doing this kind of thing. Not that I never do it, but I try not to. And when I do I try to put an interesting twist on it. Usually I write about ideas I had that I feel are interesting/insightful.
But that's the wonderful thing about the net. Be glad you aren't behind the great firewall of China.
I agree. I am the kind of person who doesn't pass judgement on a game until I've played it. I haven't played Halo 2 yet, but Halo one was crap poop. FPS games of that style were impressive when Goldeneye came out for the N64. Releasing the same crap with a different theme and shinier graphics isn't going to make it any fresher. The enhanced multiplayer of multiple X-Boxen adds a little bit to the experience, but most still do the four player split screen.
Games like Counter-Strike and Natural Selection DO exist. There's a reason that CS is still the #1 multiplayer fps, no matter what your stereotypes of the game may be it kicks the living snot out of every other multiplayer fps. Keep in mind I am judging the game on its own merits, and not taking into account the attitudes and mannerisms of its players, which may vary.
Oh, yeah, so Halo 1 couldn't hold a candle to CS or NS or even UT2k4 or Tribes 2. Based on that, I don't have high expecations of Halo 2, but I wont pass judgement until I play it. Maybe because my expecations are low, it will beat those expecations and make a good impression.
Oh, the reason people played Halo 1? My guess is they are mostly young kids who didn't already have the Goldeneye experience. Or they were people who didn't have fast Internet connections and didn't have the internet multiplayer fps experience to compare it to. So when a goldeneye with a new theme, better graphics and expanded multiplayer showed up they were wowed away because they had not yet experienced something which you and me have had for over 6 years.
Meridian 59 is soo old. It was a 3d MMORPG back when I had a 486 and a video card with 1MB of RAM. Only 16MB of system ram. At this point they are probably so far behind the game compared to EQ and others. They should totally work on getting their game out on Linux and Mac. It would definitely get them some of the $ they need without worrying about too much competition in those departments.
Here are some tricks I use to fold and hide cable in my pc.
First, any ribbon cables usually go from motherboard to drive, and not a very long distance. This leaves a lot of slack ribbon. Fold up the slack and tuck it into a space in-between drives or in an emtpy 3.5" drive bay.
Circle around back. Most modern cases have a pull out try with the motherboard on it. Then there is a metal frame and then there is another piece of metal which is the right side panel of the case. There are many things that need to go from the top of the case to the bottom Such as power cables for your front intake fan and such. Route these wires in-between the metal frame and the right side panel. Nobody can see them back there unless it is an all acrylic case.
The emtpy 5.25" drive bays, if any, are a great place to put extra wiring. My PSU has many many more wires than I use, so far. So I take them all and just put them in the empty space under my dvd burner. The ribbon cable for the burner also travels into this space and then out of it again just a couple inches from the ide plug on the motherboard. Think of it as a bucket to put unused wires in where nobody can see them.
Let's use nvidia as the example because it is easy. Nvidia as a company has no real opposition to making their drivers open source. In fact, I bet that a lot of people working there want to make the graphics drivers open. But they can't or they will go out of business.
Why is this? Well let's look at the competition, which is ATI. Hardware wise ATI is NVidia's equal. If you look at the big picture ATI vs. NVidia the hardware is equivalent between the two vendors. Sure at any given point in time one of them might have a more powerful chip. But the other always counters with better pricing back and forth until the end of days.
The reason that Nvidia has a slight edge is drivers. In windows the Nvidia drivers are god. Sure, the ATI drivers work, but in terms of stability, number of features and correct functioning of features NVidia 0wnz ATI. Hands down. And in terms of Linux support ATI is a joke . I specifically purchased Nvidia only because of their awesome linux driver.
Now. If Nvidia open sourced its drivers you know what would happen? ATI would look at the code and learn how to make better drivers. Then the ATI driver would be just as good if not better than the NVidia. Linux users wouldn't choose nvidia because of better support because ATI would be a reasonable alternative.
The reason drivers for other things arne't given away are similar. It's not that they care so much about the customer being able to use the hardware. In fact, they want as many people as possible to be able to use their hardware. They keep drivers closed so that they can have one thing that seperates them from the competition.
A computer forensics guy came to talk to my computer crime class last year. He showed us this windows tool they use to look at confiscated drives. Pretty much first they make a bit for bit copy of a drive onto a drive of equal or greater size using a hardware device. Then they put the original drive away in the evidence box without touching it again.
Then they use this software tool, which I forget the name of, which is the only tool that holds water in a court of law. It examines the whole drive one piece at a time to recreate every file on all partitions and filesystems even if the files are "deleted". His example was how he caught a bunch of kiddy porn perverts.
Well that's great for catching those guys, but against someone using out of the ordinary stuff this guy is screwed. I've got serial ATA drives and reiser4 and xfs file systems. I'm willing to bet that he doesn't have a hardware drive copier that supports SATA. And his software doesn't recognize reiser4 or xfs. He would either need a different tool or he would have to send the drive someone higher up to be examined. And if the case is too small they wont bother. The real problem is that the average nerds and the hackers are so far ahead of the forensics guys in terms of knowledge about modern technology and software that they can't keep up. Hackers will always have bleeding edge tools, and police budgets can't
Yes! I have the iPod mini, and I can't understand how anyone can use those freakin' white earbuds. They don't stay in your ear and are totally uncomfortable. I use 5 dollar sony headphones with the little hooks and they are a million times better.
As for the gaming on mac issue. First, there are technical reasons you can't port games to mac, directX, etc. There are other reasons you don't want to, only one button mouse no good for fps. Also mac people aren't into gaming mostly, so you wont sell too much. And you wont get people to convert to the mac because of the games, because it will eternally be less than windows in gaming. What you have to do is mac a few mac games the mac people will buy and enjoy. i.e: marathon.
gizmodo and engadget are two blogs that look at all sorts of electronic goodness daily. A lot of times they dupe each other, but mostly not. Reading both of them is far from redundant. And if you read them you start to laugh at how often slashdot gets the same news so much later.
In other words, if you read these two sites, you can turn off the matching topics on/.
How much does an ad in the NYT cost?? 250K is enough to buy a house, or a superbadass server farm, or a Ferrari! You can't seriously tell me that an ad in the times costs as much as a Ferrari, that's ludicrous. They definitely need to take that extra money and go for some television ads. Or even give some to the developers, they deserve it.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the difference between a service pack and an update rollup?
I mean, doesn't a service pack usually imply a group of patches all bundled into one. And an update rollup is... the same thing. So, besides terminology and semantics, is there any realy difference between the two?
My friend has T-Mobile and a Nokia bluetooth phone. He has a little USB bluetooth dongle attached to his laptop. He connects wirelessly to his cell phone with the bluetooth. Then the cell phone's unlimited data service provides the laptop with an internet connection via the bluetooth. This required no support from T-Mobile.
He set up a page about it here.
When open source applications have bugs in them, people report them to bugzilla or equivalent and wait. If anyone complains people say "they'll work on it, if you want it done faster, do it yourself".
As soon as the software isn't free all of a sudden its "those bastards releasing software with more than 0 bugs in it!"
Guess what. The introduction of money doesn't all of a sudden make developers more perfect. They have deadlines, priorities and are imperfect, like other people. Just because software is less than free doesn't mean you can expect it to be perfectly bug free.
It's also funny all the complaints about half-life 2 have to do with the steam system. Nobody seems to be making comments about the actual game itself. Oh, could that be because the game itself is an indisputably amazing work of art? Sorry warez dudes, you can't get a free ride on this one. For me, I don't mind as its probably the only PC game I will buy for the next 5 years. Half-Life 2 and its mods will probably be the only pc game worth playing for a long time to come. Half-Life 1 lived up to that, and I expect no less from 2. It's worth more than the lousy 50 bucks they charge for it. So quit your bitching. If you don't like the DRM, then crack it, just like you do with all the RIAA and MPAA DRM.
Plextor is about as good as it gets. Currently I've got the PX-712A and I couldn't be more pleased. There is one newer model, the PX-716 that supports dual layer discs. It is as we say "teh hotness". Also, their newer drives have serial ata versions, which few others can claim.
I can get steam to work under cedega right now. It plays counter-strike and half-life and such at respectable frame rates, but only up to 800x600. If I turn it up anymore it drops to 1 fps. In my windows XP partition, which I only use for steam, I get perfect vertical sync refresh rates in 1280x1024 32 bit color. Also some mods like natural selection are buggy, but working.
If I can't play every mod at full resolution with no buginess, its not much better than not being able to play at all.
ID software released a doom 3 binary for linux, why can't valve do the same? It might be more difficult because they use directx instead of opengl. But half-life 1 ran in opengl mode, and you only needed directx for the menus and stuff. and with steam, you don't even need the menus since you have the steam interface instead. It shouldn't take that long to convert from one library to another. And if they wrote Half-Life 2 to be directx only, balls to them.
President Bush is expected to sign the legislation when it is passed
The man has never vetoed anything from what I hear. Look it up. They could probably sneak a bill legalizing baby rape past this guy. Or maybe, he would read it, allow it and sign it intentionally?
why is this modded funny? I think its quite true. The only people who have problems with steam are people with crummy net connections and people who try to use it when traffic is very high. If you use steam on a day that isn't close to a big release day, and your bandwith isn't poop it works just fine. In fact, I've never had a problem. The only thing I can say about about steam is that it is windows only. You can tell the last time I played steam by running the uptime command.
You know what I don't do? Watch television. I only watch DVDs or things downloaded from the net. All of which are commercial free. I'll sometimes go to the movie theatre, but I make a concious effort to ignore, talk over, or make obscenities at the pre-movie ads. Except at the artsy theatre, where the ads are for other artsy movies. All the information I get comes through the net, filtered through firefox to remove all ads. Yeah, I don't see slashdot ads. So ha! I don't use the AdBlock extensions either. I have a handy userContent.css file that does it all.
My life is ad free except for physical adsvertisements that get in my way out on the street. Like when I go to the grocery store, or billboards on the highway, or a visit to NYC.
Rather than complain that something like TV has ads you can't remove, just don't watch TV as long as it has ads. If slashdot's ads were unremovable I would probably stop reading it too.
gnumerc is it, and everybody knows it. You don't have to have gnome in order to use it. But you do need GTK, which you have because you use abiword. And you have to have libgsf which has to be built with gnome support, but gnome itself is not really needed. If you use gentoo all this means is you have to put on the gnome use flag for just the libgsf package and gnumeric will work. You don't need to emerge gnome.
Is that clear enough? I hope you understand.
Hey, you can always use moodss, the module object oriented dynamic spreadsheet. Or you can use sc, which is curses based. But then, you might as well use visicalc.
How come you guys disrespect your east coast readers so much? I mean, you cancelled on our Otakon and you only came here once ever. At a very bad time to a not easy to get to convention. Then you have PAX, which is like the best thing ever, all the way on the other side of the country.
What will you do to make up for the lack of love for the east coast? If I don't like your answer I'm going to come to PAX2 with water from the Atlantic Ocean and drench both of you with it. Seriously, watch out.
del.icio.us
Not only can you get your bookmarks from anywhere, but you can also share them with the rest of the world.
Even better than that, if you use firefox ( which I hope you do ) your bookmarks are stored as an html file. Just put this html file in any web accessible place, and you can visit it and whoah! your bookmarks are there.
I know another one. Get a USB thumb drive and carry your bookmarks with you.
You use something not free! shame on you.
btw. I didn't razz the guy who did install firefox. I supported him. Meanwhile, spreadfirefox.com is starting up many a grass-roots campaign to spread firefox. Its quite obvious to me that the only people who can decry firefox and those who haven't used it. Everyone who I've shown it to and actually taught to use the advanced non-obvious features never turns back.
Oh, you mean hardware? Every 5 years. I had a Pentium III 450mhz with a TNT2. Bought it the day the TNT2 came out. Didn't buy my new computer until last year. Waited until the very last minute when the old computer just couldn't do it anymore. Now I have an Athlon XP 2500+ and an FX5900. I probably wont upgrade for at least that much time again. I will wait until this computer really just can't hack it anymore. When there are applications it just can't run and what it does run is just too slow to bear. This might take longer than before actually because I run gentoo now instead of Windows XP
Every night I have a cron job that does
emerge sync
then every few days I do
emerge -uDva world
and every few weeks I throw in
emerge -p depclean
revdep-rebuild
just in case.
Update everything all the time. Of course, this is only for my personal desktop machine where having the latest goods actually makes a difference.
On my server I do the above very very rarely, if ever. Actually, only when there is a serious security issue or a fix for an annoying bug.
If using the system and having things work better and newer is the priority, like on a desktop, update all the freaking time, especially if that updating is effortless. If stability and functionality are important, and it already provides all necessary functionality, like a server, then update as rarely as possible.
Scale somewhere between the two extremes depending on your specific situation. This isn't brain surgery.
Digital Audio and Video editing. Stuff like Premiere. Acid Music. Reason. CoolEdit. ProTools. iMovie. Doing audio and video editing should be as good on Linux as it is on a Mac.
Also, burning of optical disks. Yes k3b exists. yes, technically you can burn just about anything. But nothing linux can do comes close to Nero. I need all the perfect functionality of Nero in linux.
Steam. The only pc game I play other than puzzle pirates, which is java, needs to run better on linux. Using cedega I can only get the resolution up to 800x600. Anything higher drops the framerate from perfect to less than 1 fps.
Someone else mentioned audio mixers. Alsa is very good, and is about as good as I can expect, but not as good as I can hope for. I have an SBLive! Value with the latest alsa kernel drivers. It works and plays music very well. But if I use winamp in windows with directaudio not only does the mixer work properly and is labeled correctly, but the sound quality is imporoved tenfold. I don't know what the difference is, but even my non-audiophile self can hear a noticeable difference. All my friends hear it too. It's the same hardware, it should work the same regardless of OS.
That's really what linux has to do now. Firefox and 2.6 brought us to the top of the hill, we're just nearing the peak of the mountain. We have support for most hardware and enough software to replace windows as a non-gaming desktop machine that is technologically superior in almost every fashion. But a lot of the hardware support is existent but non-perfect. Sound works, but not perfectly. CD burning works, but not as simple and perfect and beautiful as nero. ATI cards work, but are a pain in the ass. Nvidia cards work, but with closed source drivers. It's like everything works 90% perfectly, we need to push it to perfect, then linux will have smooth seas.
Oh this is so true. Look at all the freaking live journals where whenever some small insignificant moment occurrs in someone's life they go and write a big dramatic production in their blog. Look at all the people who simply put out their personal opinions of the world in a freely available format for the people to read. There are good and bad things that come from blogging. And you are correct, very little of blogging actually provides new primary or secondary source information. It is primarily commentary on information garnered by other sources.
But then again, TV and radio media are simply distributors and spinners of information. The AP and UPI are the companies which actually go out and get the "news". Other than local newspapers and independent curious people there is very little actual news gathering done by people at Fox or CBS or NBC or even the New York Times. Most of it is simply elaborate essays generated from the few facts that come down the AP news wire.
So blogs are good in that they provide alternate elaborations and maybe deeper less restricted thought on these factual news items. However, they are bad for the same reason.
It's not like everyone can pay to get the news wire in their home.
This is why on my blog I try to avoid doing this kind of thing. Not that I never do it, but I try not to. And when I do I try to put an interesting twist on it. Usually I write about ideas I had that I feel are interesting/insightful.
But that's the wonderful thing about the net. Be glad you aren't behind the great firewall of China.
Douglas Ruskoff seems to think so. He also thinks its a good model for religeon.
I agree. I am the kind of person who doesn't pass judgement on a game until I've played it. I haven't played Halo 2 yet, but Halo one was crap poop. FPS games of that style were impressive when Goldeneye came out for the N64. Releasing the same crap with a different theme and shinier graphics isn't going to make it any fresher. The enhanced multiplayer of multiple X-Boxen adds a little bit to the experience, but most still do the four player split screen.
Games like Counter-Strike and Natural Selection DO exist. There's a reason that CS is still the #1 multiplayer fps, no matter what your stereotypes of the game may be it kicks the living snot out of every other multiplayer fps. Keep in mind I am judging the game on its own merits, and not taking into account the attitudes and mannerisms of its players, which may vary.
Oh, yeah, so Halo 1 couldn't hold a candle to CS or NS or even UT2k4 or Tribes 2. Based on that, I don't have high expecations of Halo 2, but I wont pass judgement until I play it. Maybe because my expecations are low, it will beat those expecations and make a good impression.
Oh, the reason people played Halo 1? My guess is they are mostly young kids who didn't already have the Goldeneye experience. Or they were people who didn't have fast Internet connections and didn't have the internet multiplayer fps experience to compare it to. So when a goldeneye with a new theme, better graphics and expanded multiplayer showed up they were wowed away because they had not yet experienced something which you and me have had for over 6 years.
Meridian 59 is soo old. It was a 3d MMORPG back when I had a 486 and a video card with 1MB of RAM. Only 16MB of system ram. At this point they are probably so far behind the game compared to EQ and others. They should totally work on getting their game out on Linux and Mac. It would definitely get them some of the $ they need without worrying about too much competition in those departments.
Here are some tricks I use to fold and hide cable in my pc.
First, any ribbon cables usually go from motherboard to drive, and not a very long distance. This leaves a lot of slack ribbon. Fold up the slack and tuck it into a space in-between drives or in an emtpy 3.5" drive bay.
Circle around back. Most modern cases have a pull out try with the motherboard on it. Then there is a metal frame and then there is another piece of metal which is the right side panel of the case. There are many things that need to go from the top of the case to the bottom Such as power cables for your front intake fan and such. Route these wires in-between the metal frame and the right side panel. Nobody can see them back there unless it is an all acrylic case.
The emtpy 5.25" drive bays, if any, are a great place to put extra wiring. My PSU has many many more wires than I use, so far. So I take them all and just put them in the empty space under my dvd burner. The ribbon cable for the burner also travels into this space and then out of it again just a couple inches from the ide plug on the motherboard. Think of it as a bucket to put unused wires in where nobody can see them.
Let's use nvidia as the example because it is easy. Nvidia as a company has no real opposition to making their drivers open source. In fact, I bet that a lot of people working there want to make the graphics drivers open. But they can't or they will go out of business.
Why is this? Well let's look at the competition, which is ATI. Hardware wise ATI is NVidia's equal. If you look at the big picture ATI vs. NVidia the hardware is equivalent between the two vendors. Sure at any given point in time one of them might have a more powerful chip. But the other always counters with better pricing back and forth until the end of days.
The reason that Nvidia has a slight edge is drivers. In windows the Nvidia drivers are god. Sure, the ATI drivers work, but in terms of stability, number of features and correct functioning of features NVidia 0wnz ATI. Hands down. And in terms of Linux support ATI is a joke . I specifically purchased Nvidia only because of their awesome linux driver.
Now. If Nvidia open sourced its drivers you know what would happen? ATI would look at the code and learn how to make better drivers. Then the ATI driver would be just as good if not better than the NVidia. Linux users wouldn't choose nvidia because of better support because ATI would be a reasonable alternative.
The reason drivers for other things arne't given away are similar. It's not that they care so much about the customer being able to use the hardware. In fact, they want as many people as possible to be able to use their hardware. They keep drivers closed so that they can have one thing that seperates them from the competition.
A computer forensics guy came to talk to my computer crime class last year. He showed us this windows tool they use to look at confiscated drives. Pretty much first they make a bit for bit copy of a drive onto a drive of equal or greater size using a hardware device. Then they put the original drive away in the evidence box without touching it again.
Then they use this software tool, which I forget the name of, which is the only tool that holds water in a court of law. It examines the whole drive one piece at a time to recreate every file on all partitions and filesystems even if the files are "deleted". His example was how he caught a bunch of kiddy porn perverts.
Well that's great for catching those guys, but against someone using out of the ordinary stuff this guy is screwed. I've got serial ATA drives and reiser4 and xfs file systems. I'm willing to bet that he doesn't have a hardware drive copier that supports SATA. And his software doesn't recognize reiser4 or xfs. He would either need a different tool or he would have to send the drive someone higher up to be examined. And if the case is too small they wont bother. The real problem is that the average nerds and the hackers are so far ahead of the forensics guys in terms of knowledge about modern technology and software that they can't keep up. Hackers will always have bleeding edge tools, and police budgets can't
Yes! I have the iPod mini, and I can't understand how anyone can use those freakin' white earbuds. They don't stay in your ear and are totally uncomfortable. I use 5 dollar sony headphones with the little hooks and they are a million times better.
As for the gaming on mac issue. First, there are technical reasons you can't port games to mac, directX, etc. There are other reasons you don't want to, only one button mouse no good for fps. Also mac people aren't into gaming mostly, so you wont sell too much. And you wont get people to convert to the mac because of the games, because it will eternally be less than windows in gaming. What you have to do is mac a few mac games the mac people will buy and enjoy. i.e: marathon.
gizmodo and engadget are two blogs that look at all sorts of electronic goodness daily. A lot of times they dupe each other, but mostly not. Reading both of them is far from redundant. And if you read them you start to laugh at how often slashdot gets the same news so much later.
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In other words, if you read these two sites, you can turn off the matching topics on
How much does an ad in the NYT cost?? 250K is enough to buy a house, or a superbadass server farm, or a Ferrari! You can't seriously tell me that an ad in the times costs as much as a Ferrari, that's ludicrous. They definitely need to take that extra money and go for some television ads. Or even give some to the developers, they deserve it.