Be careful when using the "NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"=dword:00000001".
I tried that once, and I was surprised at the number of programs that still used 16-bit APIs (and thus required 8.3 name creation). This setting will break those apps.
One that stood out in my mind was one of the more popular installers...I forget which one it was now though.
This is a terrible idea for maintenance. Imagine trying to read the code for a given app that had all sorts of bizarre preferences chosen. You would have to spend a lot of time just understanding what the hell you were looking at.
The whole idea is to make things as uniform and regular as possible because then there is less for everyone else to learn when they look at the code. This suggestion adds a whole layer of confusion, and only buys a modicum of user preference in return. That is a poor tradeoff.
1) My point was that I don't recall the term "office suite" ever being used in reference to computer software prior to the introduction of Microsoft Office 6 in the mid 90s. The introduction of this product shaped the landscape of business productivity software such that the category became known as "office suite". That is what I meant by the brand name being co-opted for the generic.
2) A quick Google search for Kleenex turned up Kimberly-Clark's Kleenex site, and there is no mention of anything but tissues and the like (wet wipes) using the Kleenex brand. In fact, Kimberly-Clark has the Huggies brand for diapers. So I don't quite know what the point you are making is.
Except originally that software was called "Productivity software" and I don't recall a successful productivity software suite before Microsoft Office 6 back in the mid-nineties. Until then, you just had to buy all the programs separate and they didn't work alike, and they sure didn't work together.
So in that sense, calling is "office suite" is really just co-opting the brand name for the generic use, ala Kleenex. The term just didn't exist before Microsoft Office.
It can be a little slow to generate the patches (I found that having 2 physical hard disks helped, 1 for input and 1 for output) but the resultant patch is quite optimized.
The tools are perhaps a little old feeling, with scripts and command line compilation tools, but on the whole the product works really well.
From the accounts I have read, it seemed like the problem with the game was it provided no compelling content for the online gamer.
That is, it was basically a single player game that happened to have other people running around in it. That's not compelling, that just MMO tacked on to a single player game.
It's too bad you can't get DSL service without paying for phone service from the phone company.
Why haven't these 2 services been separated? What if I want DSL for Internet access and Vonage for phone (for example). Why should I have to pay the phone company tax to get that?
I had Comcast digital cable for a several years because I couldn't get Satellite until I moved into my house (no view of of the South in my apt).
Their claims about picture losses are very exaggerated. Here is what I found when I had digital cable:
1) Not all the channels are digital. They don't tell you this upfront, or at least, they don't make it clear. The local stations were analog and the picture looked only marginally better than broadcast. For some reason channel 4 always looked the worst.
2) Outages were common. The excuse was always "we are working on the lines, etc..." Sometimes they would give me a service credit. At least once a month I would not have HBO or other channels available, for no well defined reason other than "we are working on the lines".
3) Prices keep going up. The cable company raised my prices about 8% this year just before I moved, and I saw nothing from it. Just more of the same crappy service and not good channel reception.
I'm moving to satellite as soon as I get settled into the house. Screw the cable companies.
It seems to me that there is a cycle now that is going to be difficult to break:
1) Prices rise 2) People buy used books instead 3) Publishers get less money because people bought more used books. 4) To offset lower sales, see step 1.
"One thing you learn [in the industry] that most gamers don't understand: that game development is a series of compromises."
No game ever shipped without compromises being made. Otherwise, the game would still be in production. The key is identifying the smart compromises to make, and executing on them well.
The whole idea of a console is to have a standard, fixed platform. This includes controller layout. The only way this is achieved is having every system come with the same controller.
Think back to playing PC games with gamepads or joysticks. You never know which button is assigned to do what by default. Instead you have to try and correlate the game's controls with the gamepads. It's a clumsy mess. With a standardized controller, you always know that A is accept/fire/shoot/punch/etc, B is go back/kick/drop bomb/etc. The moment you deviate from this, games get difficult to just "pick up and play" because there is no convention that makes sense.
Ask Slashdot, and you get 1000 geeks posting conflicting answers they "know" to be correct, all with conflicting "supporting evidence" from people that "know" it is correct.
It was great....up until the last 20 minutes or so. Then it was just terrible. Seriously. Once the rape, and the banishment, and all the saoldier fighting started, the movie was just not the same. Watching the DVD extras showed they had a decent idea for what to do instead, but couldn't because of continuity issues. I wish they had solved those and proceeded down that path, because it would have been much better IMO than the soldier slug fest.
Many newer titles (like Halo PC) run just fine in LUA scenarios. The only exception is of course patching the game, which should be done by the trusted authority (i.e., parent) anyways.
In the future check for and insist that all games you purchase are LUA compliant. Let the publisher know this matters to you.
The idea of paying for virtual land is absurd. Real estate is based on the fact that there is a finite amount of land available. That fundamental fact is violated in a virtual world, when an additional server is only a CPU/hard drive/memory upgrade away.
Online is a dead end. It has a tiny attachment rate (10% for the XBOX, which I believe is the highest). That means only 10% of xbox customers have Live.
Why bother spending all the time needed to make the game play well online, when only 10% of your customer base can possibly use it?
I would prefer this if I was running a mission critical system based on 2.4 kernel. If I am happy with the feature set, I just want security patches. Every new feature adds a potential new exploit, or potential new crash. If the damn thing is stable, leave it alone - just maintain the security!
Don't know why people insist on having their cake and eating it too. Greedy/lazy I suppose.
It strikes me as funny that corporate IT won't stand for that type of release cycle, but that is the defacto standard for PC games. A new video card generation comes out every 6 months or so, and inbetween that are driver releases that break the apps in new and different ways.
You don't think you need multi-million dollar investment to run a stable server farm for 24/7 world-wide fault tolerant access? And to develop and maintain the applications consumers use to access the service? And to advertise or otherwise promote the service to users? And to negotiate contracts with artists and other recording groups to sell content?
Slashdot Mirror
Be careful when using the "NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation"=dword:00000001".
I tried that once, and I was surprised at the number of programs that still used 16-bit APIs (and thus required 8.3 name creation). This setting will break those apps.
One that stood out in my mind was one of the more popular installers...I forget which one it was now though.
This is a terrible idea for maintenance. Imagine trying to read the code for a given app that had all sorts of bizarre preferences chosen. You would have to spend a lot of time just understanding what the hell you were looking at.
The whole idea is to make things as uniform and regular as possible because then there is less for everyone else to learn when they look at the code. This suggestion adds a whole layer of confusion, and only buys a modicum of user preference in return. That is a poor tradeoff.
Two points:
1) My point was that I don't recall the term "office suite" ever being used in reference to computer software prior to the introduction of Microsoft Office 6 in the mid 90s. The introduction of this product shaped the landscape of business productivity software such that the category became known as "office suite". That is what I meant by the brand name being co-opted for the generic.
2) A quick Google search for Kleenex turned up Kimberly-Clark's Kleenex site, and there is no mention of anything but tissues and the like (wet wipes) using the Kleenex brand. In fact, Kimberly-Clark has the Huggies brand for diapers. So I don't quite know what the point you are making is.
Except originally that software was called "Productivity software" and I don't recall a successful productivity software suite before Microsoft Office 6 back in the mid-nineties. Until then, you just had to buy all the programs separate and they didn't work alike, and they sure didn't work together.
So in that sense, calling is "office suite" is really just co-opting the brand name for the generic use, ala Kleenex. The term just didn't exist before Microsoft Office.
Having to retest while the car is in motion seems like something that could cause accidents to me!
Imagine going down the freeway at 60+mph and having to fiddle around for the tester to keep the car running! Your options are
1) Take your eyes off the road and concentrate on the test
2) Don't test, and hav ethe car stall
Neither of these sound especially safe to me.
I've used it before, it works really well.
It can be a little slow to generate the patches (I found that having 2 physical hard disks helped, 1 for input and 1 for output) but the resultant patch is quite optimized.
The tools are perhaps a little old feeling, with scripts and command line compilation tools, but on the whole the product works really well.
From the accounts I have read, it seemed like the problem with the game was it provided no compelling content for the online gamer.
That is, it was basically a single player game that happened to have other people running around in it. That's not compelling, that just MMO tacked on to a single player game.
Regulation really needs to get on the ball with this one IMO.
It's too bad you can't get DSL service without paying for phone service from the phone company.
Why haven't these 2 services been separated? What if I want DSL for Internet access and Vonage for phone (for example). Why should I have to pay the phone company tax to get that?
I havent seen any information anywhere about number portability of local landline numbers. Do you have more information on this?
The only thing worse than an OS zealot is a font snob.
I had Comcast digital cable for a several years because I couldn't get Satellite until I moved into my house (no view of of the South in my apt).
Their claims about picture losses are very exaggerated. Here is what I found when I had digital cable:
1) Not all the channels are digital. They don't tell you this upfront, or at least, they don't make it clear. The local stations were analog and the picture looked only marginally better than broadcast. For some reason channel 4 always looked the worst.
2) Outages were common. The excuse was always "we are working on the lines, etc..." Sometimes they would give me a service credit. At least once a month I would not have HBO or other channels available, for no well defined reason other than "we are working on the lines".
3) Prices keep going up. The cable company raised my prices about 8% this year just before I moved, and I saw nothing from it. Just more of the same crappy service and not good channel reception.
I'm moving to satellite as soon as I get settled into the house. Screw the cable companies.
It seems to me that there is a cycle now that is going to be difficult to break:
1) Prices rise
2) People buy used books instead
3) Publishers get less money because people bought more used books.
4) To offset lower sales, see step 1.
"One thing you learn [in the industry] that most gamers don't understand: that game development is a series of compromises."
No game ever shipped without compromises being made. Otherwise, the game would still be in production. The key is identifying the smart compromises to make, and executing on them well.
If it's out of warranty, you pay for service.
What is the problem here???? If someone wants a longer warranty period, they should have paid for an extended warranty contract (like AppleCare)
This would never happen for consoles.
The whole idea of a console is to have a standard, fixed platform. This includes controller layout. The only way this is achieved is having every system come with the same controller.
Think back to playing PC games with gamepads or joysticks. You never know which button is assigned to do what by default. Instead you have to try and correlate the game's controls with the gamepads. It's a clumsy mess. With a standardized controller, you always know that A is accept/fire/shoot/punch/etc, B is go back/kick/drop bomb/etc. The moment you deviate from this, games get difficult to just "pick up and play" because there is no convention that makes sense.
Ask Slashdot, and you get 1000 geeks posting conflicting answers they "know" to be correct, all with conflicting "supporting evidence" from people that "know" it is correct.
Way to go.
It was great....up until the last 20 minutes or so. Then it was just terrible. Seriously. Once the rape, and the banishment, and all the saoldier fighting started, the movie was just not the same. Watching the DVD extras showed they had a decent idea for what to do instead, but couldn't because of continuity issues. I wish they had solved those and proceeded down that path, because it would have been much better IMO than the soldier slug fest.
Many newer titles (like Halo PC) run just fine in LUA scenarios. The only exception is of course patching the game, which should be done by the trusted authority (i.e., parent) anyways.
In the future check for and insist that all games you purchase are LUA compliant. Let the publisher know this matters to you.
Remember, change starts with us - the consumer.
The idea of paying for virtual land is absurd. Real estate is based on the fact that there is a finite amount of land available. That fundamental fact is violated in a virtual world, when an additional server is only a CPU/hard drive/memory upgrade away.
Online is a dead end. It has a tiny attachment rate (10% for the XBOX, which I believe is the highest). That means only 10% of xbox customers have Live.
Why bother spending all the time needed to make the game play well online, when only 10% of your customer base can possibly use it?
I don't recall Nintendo EVER saying it would be online. From day one, it was LAN only.
I would prefer this if I was running a mission critical system based on 2.4 kernel. If I am happy with the feature set, I just want security patches. Every new feature adds a potential new exploit, or potential new crash. If the damn thing is stable, leave it alone - just maintain the security!
Don't know why people insist on having their cake and eating it too. Greedy/lazy I suppose.
It strikes me as funny that corporate IT won't stand for that type of release cycle, but that is the defacto standard for PC games. A new video card generation comes out every 6 months or so, and inbetween that are driver releases that break the apps in new and different ways.
You don't think you need multi-million dollar investment to run a stable server farm for 24/7 world-wide fault tolerant access? And to develop and maintain the applications consumers use to access the service? And to advertise or otherwise promote the service to users? And to negotiate contracts with artists and other recording groups to sell content?
I think you are underestimating the task.