Did I mention that your flashlight is separate from your guns, and you can't even have a pistol and flashlight out at the same time? Combine that with how freaking dark Doom 3 is (and it is VERY dark), and you'll either be getting chewed up switching back and forth from flashlight to gun, or just firing blindly in the dark. Yeah, that's fun alright.
I agree. While it's an interesting idea, it's also frequently just annoying. You are frequently just shooting into the dark with no idea if the zombie you are shooting at is dead or not. You have to wait litteraly till it whacks you, or switch to the light then switch back. That's frankly just dull and irrtating. I wouldn't mind so much if when you hit zombies with the flash light it did decent damange, but it's basically worthless (not like melee in Halo).
Speaking of which, why doesn't EVERY game allow you to melee attack with every weapon? That was a great idea in Halo, as was the damage / health system. They make for great gameplay and I'm stunned that certainly the former wasn't implimented. It's so simple and yet huge amounts of fun.
I did like some elements, like how you unlock the Chaingun, and some of the traps which I thought were funny (like the one where the floor drops early on) but as you say, many are repetative, and frankly annoying.
Shooting zombies is basically fun though, and the shotgun is well balanced, but they could so easily have done much more. I had more fun with Halo if I'm honest (which I've had on both X-Box and PC and played repeatedly, having done some levels easily 20 times or more I'd play it more if they released that damn Halo CE patch for the PC single player version so it perform on a par with other games, but the PC port was pretty shoddy).
A lot of the elements in Far Cry where simply much more impressive, and Unreal approximates similar quality in many levels while still having an engine capeable of rendering scenes seen in the *origional* Doom series). The origional Doom 1 and 2 levels were more fun IMO. They were far more open and much less repetative, even if the action was cruder.
The zombie marines in Doom 3 either run up and empty their clip at you, or find a single spot of cover and pop out every couple seconds to shoot. Pretty much everything demonic just rushes you from whatever wall compartment you walked by.
Agreed and agreed. The ability IMP's have to jump to your position only makes this situation worse IMO (I dont mean the 'spawning/warping in' I mean the jumping ability that allows them go from the other side of the room to in your face, which make obstacle design in the level pointless).
Doom 3 makes an awesome first impression, but in the end the whole experience is just shallow. The engine is incredible and no doubt the mod scene will do some amazing stuff with it, but Doom 3 isn't revolutionary. Hell, it's barely evolutionary.
I very much agree with that. A shame really given the team and the license. Great engine, maps, art, sounds, models, animation and some nice touches (like the PDA system & various set pieces). But it seems like it didn't have someone arguing strongly enough in support of overall gameplay as the top priority, ensuring it was a really fun experience.
I just come away with the impression it was a showboat for ID's latest engine to entice licencees. I haven't got my hands on HL2 yet of course, but if I was developing a game I'd be strongly be considering the value added gameplay elements that comes from using the physics of HL2's Source engine.
I'm interested to see what the modding community do, but frankly it's so hard to create levels with the requisite amount of detail that people have come to expect these days that modding is becoming increasingly difficult - so I'm a little aprehensive about that, and don't think it will be nearly as popular as the origional in that respect.
Personally I think it would have been much more in the spirit of the origional to create an engine and development tool that allowed anyone with a spare weekend to crank out a reasonable level (you could have it use a standard tile system for room design, much like creating a level for Wolf 3D, and have it be themeable)
> All finnish men have to do their military service, which is 180, 270 or 360 days.
Not true.
They can come to any decent EU country (like the UK) and not do it. We are not still living in the 1900's.
Finns can tell their government to fuck off, but so many find it's easier 'just to go along' with things and not rock the boat then justify that to themselves later (with some spurious trite reasoning).
It amazes me that a nation of largely intelligent people fall for the propaganda that national service being useful, and that governments in countries like Finland and Germany still manage to get away with it. In reality it's a barbaric anachronism and in the face of so many other countries that have had it in the past having now phased it out, or having announced plans to end it, people in Finland should really be questioning this rather than going along with the idea out of a sense of tradition. The lack of recognition for conscientious objectors in Finland is something I find particularly morally repugnant (and let's not even get into the sexism debate).
It would have been phased out by the EU by now, if it hadn't been for the dissent of countries like Germany that are so dependant on it for the success of the state, where it's used to make up for a shortfall of civil service employees (and so to allow the state to get away with not paying real wages) but that's a different matter that has to do with poor, neigh incompetent governance, it that's not a valid excuse for keeping in place a system of forced slave labour.
The overwhelming chorus of advice from renowned intelligence organisations like Janes continues to be that it's not a way to create any sort of useful military force, and that's it detrimental to overall performance of what should a dedicated and professional organisation made up exclusively of people who want to be there to do what is a very important job.
My advice to people in Finland would be to just go and live in another EU member state like the UK, where we don't force people to signup to work for the government (and where they don't get to tell you what weekends you can go home and what ones you cant).
We don't have national service and it's precisely because of that (and because we do the Right Thing (TM) and choose to pay to have a large, competent and professional army rather than trying to scrape one together from kids who don't really want to be there) that we have one of the most powerful armies in the world (in the top 10, after the USA, India, Russia and Korea (north and south)). For such a small country, that's not bad going, and vastly better than the majority of the rest of the world, even with their swelled ranks fluffed with conscripts.
Given the evidence against it, and the insistence by the intelligence community that it's not only of no value, but can be of negative value it's a wonder people still do it. It all comes back to 'doing what's right' vrs. 'doing what's easiest'. If more people had a backbone it would have been abolished long ago, the army would be stronger, the people would have more freedom and they'd be quite a bit happier.
With a society that has the kind of outlook they do on issues like this, perhaps it is not surprising that Finland has the highest suicide rate of any western nation.
Finns, the government are there to serve you, not the other way around. Do yourself and your entire nation a favour and them to get stuffed. National service costs your nation money overall (through lossed taxes, equipment and wages), it doesn't give you a useful fighting force and it is part of an oppressive environment that harms the physiological well being of the nations citizens.
That's not always the case. You can fail to live up to a fiduciary duty and not be deemed to have breached the law. And of course, a legal duty is of course not always a fiduciary one.
and it's not traditionally owed to investors by workers.It's for situations like lawyer-client or doctor-patient.
I know it to be very frequently used term in the context of directors and corporations - I would even argue that today it's far more commonly spoken about in that context than any other and find your assertion quite bizzare.
Google seems to agree with me, feel free to search for 'fiduciary duties' and see what sort of results you get. It seems your assertion is quite erroneous.
This guy had complained to his superior's superiors. They apparently didn't care. So this guy's crusade basically ends right there. He did what he should have done, and when those higher ups don't care, you can get pissed all you want, but you don't take matters into your own hands.
Actually, in a corporate organsation you could easily find that your required to take additional action such as informing someone more senior who represents the investors (e.g. a non executive director) and you tell them that company policy is not being followed. You may find you are legally required to ensure that company policy is followed through or you can lose your job. In this case there are no 'non executive directors', but there are investors - the taxpayers of the state of Alabama.
This was his BOSS.
So? Are you suggesting that cover ups and failure to follow offical policy (as far as following the offical complaints proceedure and enforcing the existing policy prohibiting such use of equipment) simply were not criminal enough to be worth him drawing attention to or that 'your boss' can engage in whatever criminal acts he likes, including misuse of public property and/or funds, and that you should be complicit out of some kind of automatic respect for someone in your organisation who happens to be in a higher pay band than you are?
It's taxpayers money. If it was a private enterprise it would be investors money. I shouldn't need to remind you that employees have a fiduciary (and, in the case of corporate enterprises, frequently legal) responsiblity to that organisations investors. Senior employees can be personally liable and can face not only fines but jail time for acting against the interests of an organisation they are explicitly employed to represent the interests of.
If someone is jerking around like this guys boss in a company I've invested in, or if my local government representatives where up to this (which I'm quite sure they are) as an investor/taxpayer I'm damn sure I want to know and I'm sure I want the senior executives who've tried to sweep this under the carpet and who have failed to act in the manner in which there were hired to exposed and fired (it's their job to ensure this sort of thing doesn't go on, it's not a charity, if they can't do the job for which they are very well paid they should be slung out on their ear).
You stay in official channels when dealing with any personel problem, and you ESPECIALLY do this when a superior is involved
I say you obay your fiduciary and legal obligations to taxpayers/investors FIRST and if that's contrary to 'staying within the little white lines of company policy' SCREW THEM (after all they [both this guys boss, and his seniors] have already thrown the rule book out the window and are using it to shaft this guy, and all the state taxpayers and more fool you if you let them continue).
What your suggesting is that he be complicit in a system which is supressing evidence of corruption in a government organisation (the act of corruption being not the act of the origional employee, but complete failure to take any action to enforce the organisations existing policy when complaints were made). What you are suggesting is that he 'stays within the box' and acts in the best interests of his management, even if thats not in the best intrests of taxpayers/investors.
In short, what you are suggesting is completely immoral.
I say screw that, rat on the bastards and tell everyone who'll listen.
It's you - the taxpayer and investor in this service - that's getting screwed by these incompotent lazy slobs, and it's only the very people being ratted on for being incompotent lazy slobs that are trying to cover it up to save their own fat underworked and overpaid behinds.
Why does Real need Apple's permission to hack iPods? The only argument that you could make against Real is to support the DMCA
They are not hacking iPods.
You can find people who are hacking iPods at ipodhacks.com, and Apple have been fine with that thusfar it seems.
Real are attempting to take revenue from Apple after Apple approached Real when they were trying to start up the Apple store, but Real told them to get screwed (they had their own ideas, involving Real's own shitty software and appauling DRM system with glorious features such as 'limited number times you can play back files' and 'limited lifetime for files').
If Apple was my company, I'd want to shaft Real now too (both to rub their noses in it, but most importnatly to kick them when they were down and eliminate marginal competition in a legal manner, using means avalible in and endorsed by the capitalist infrastructure of the country they are trading in).
This all has bupkis to do with 'what's good for us', Real is just playing the underdog card (as Apple does against it's competitors). I don't think I'd hold the same position if it was some nordic teenager they were harrasing, but it's not, it's Real, who is a competitor to Apple in quite a few areas, and it's for highly contextal reasons - and, I don't give a flying squirrel about Real. In fact, I like the streaming audio/video client but I hate their horrible music software and their Helix DRM implimentation, not to mention all the spyware they bundle with it.
The focus should be on fixing the clearly inappropriate law.
It has put companies into a bind:
If Apple don't invoke it, it's easy to say they are not protecting their own interests and so those of their shareholders. So who should they shaft? Real or their shareholders? Board members can be fined and prosectuted if the company doesn't act in the interest of it's investors (the general public in this case).
Better not to put any company in that postion and just remove the law. If you fail to do that, and simply go after companies with the pressure of 'public opinon' as your weapon, sooner or later some company is going to realise that potential dip in revenue from sales lossed is going to be less than the amount they stand to lose if a competitor gets the upper hand, then consumers are screwed when someone like Sony decides to make a test case out of it and sets their sharpest lawyers on the case to make as sure as possible they don't fail.
The test was completly meaningless as you couldn't do all the correct things you SHOULD to to check the authenticity of an email.
It encorages people to base decisions based on *hunches*, which is utterly retarded. You could take a genunine email and alter the URL and you'd never know you'd been duped if you went by the examples in this test - you'd just think it looked real, click on the URL, login and end up being scammed.
This 'test' is utterly worthless as a result. You *can't* tell just by looking at the surface content of an HTML rendered email. If you can't look at the email headers or the URLs you have no way of knowing all of them arn't spoofed.
This is a *moronic quiz* (and no I haven't taken it - I refuse to on the grounds the permise is so retarded, but I did look it over carefully).
In this quiz, your not allowed to examine the URLs (to see if the 'links' point to where they appear to)...*boggle*. That's exactly what you SHOULD do.
I've had a couple of emails over the last year asking me to 'check my account details' and 'login or it will be suspended', thinking they sounded suspicious I checked them out, the domains in the URLs and the RIPE records to make sure the IP's the hostnames pointed to matched up with the company in question. Both sounded very suspicious, but turned out to be completely geninue becase I know how to check them (whois netsol, RIPE, ARIN (et al), host/dig are you friends - well not netsol they are cu^W^W...).
If I'd simply dismissed those two emails out of hand I would have locked myself out of accounts I find most useful. Encoraging people to base decisions on *hunches* when it's staightforward to check the facts and make an informed decision is completely irresponsible.
This test completly misses the oppertunity to educate people in a really meaningful way by allowing you to actually example the 'emails' in full, because it would be bloody obvious to tell the fraudulent ones apart from the geniune ones, just as it is in reality.
If you are directed to a URL like https://www.paypal.com/ - which you recognise as the offical website for the company in question, you may as well assume it's legitimate. However, if the link actually takes you to a URL like http://www.paypal.ru/,or if they email you from an address like/solicit replies to paypal@yahoo.com - your fairly obviously being shafted. Really it's not rocket science.
I had this when I was directed to a site called www.ups-europe.es from a guy in Spain, who I'd been in contact with via eBay. One quick 'whois' check showed clearly dubious registration details for the domain, and the whois against ripe.net against the IP the hostname pointed to showed the site was hosted on a virtual server at an el-cheapo ~10 Euro-a-month consumer hosting company (not the sort of setup a UPS site which handles fanancial transaction services is going to be hosted on). So I strung him along, got some details out of him, and eventually handed everything over the police when I was done playing with the guy.
The point here should be to teach people how to check for themselves (and make it easier for them too, though better software design), not to encourage people to make decisions like this based on 'their feelings' about an email.
I'd heard about that and was looking forward to it, this is the first I've heard that they have take a step back (and effectively nerfed it).
As someone who like to devote there time to other things (including free software) I was looking forward to having some levelling field against college kids who are busy wasting tax payers money on pointless degrees (as is the case here in the UK where 'fees' are virtually nill and education is state funded, and as someone who pays 40% tax I'm pissed it's my money they are wasting).
I hope there is still enough content and fun to be had without playing 35 hours a week just to keep up and be involved with all the cool things and to go to all the interesting places.
I think powerlevellers are pandered to too often and that they have a negative impact on games (because in practice its hard - but I belive by no means impossible - to design a game that suits both them and 'normal' players). I notice they rarely care about gameplay, nor do they understand what makes good gameplay.
I'd add it's also worth noting they typically arn't the ones with the most money either (being young, and often not in full time employment) so it puzzles me further that they are catered for so much (e.g. in SWG, which is EQ in space, and EQ is bascially exlusively about levelling).
I'd happily drop 50 USD a month per MMOG game JUST to avoid having to deal with kids and teenagers (and forum trolls). Hopefully, when the MMOG market establishes itself a bit we might see companies who will feel confident enough to change more and cater for a different sort of market segment (those of us who are sick of crappy forum and in game atmospheres, leet speak, and people sending/t {nick} n00b! (even when you defeat them)).
Personally if I ever have kids (unlikely) and I caught them using 1337 speak or using the 'n' word to describe anyone I'd stop their allowance for a month and have them out washing the car and mowing the lawn the whole summer. Or worse, I'd make them grind out a Jedi in SWG. On a 486.
Some of the systems, both Windows and Linux are having this problem, while others are not, dispite being on the same subnet (on our NOC lan here in the UK).
Go figure. Session handling switches deciding which IP's go where and some end servers of Google's being borked is my best guess.
No I didn't have to, I deliberately chose to so I could make it clear how much it was unwelcome and inappropriate (as seems to be the general feeling about it judging but the posts of others). It's a very simple concept, called 'feedback'. I didn't care about the quality of the articles I would not have posted.
Your post was equally as superfluous and devoid of useful purpose as the origional story however (and deliciously ironic).
As someone with a top end Intel system (P4 3.2 Ghz, 2 GB DDR400, Radeon 9800 256MB, SATA RAID0) and a high end PowerBook (1.5 Ghz, Radeon 9700 128MB, 1 GB RAM) and a long time multi system owner (I also have dual Sparc box) I can testify that Intel/AMD based systems are cheaper than Apple branded equipment, with the sole exception of in the Laptop arena (where Apple actually offers very good value for money, in stark contrast to their desktop range).
After a couple of years you can take your PC into a store, have them add some more memory, a new CPU, and new CD-RW or DVD drive, a new sound card, or a new graphics card, maybe even add an SATA drive.
With your Mac desktop all most users will be able to do is upgrade the RAM, and that only goes so far, the users end up tossing the system out, or donating it to a local charity or community group (where it sits abandoned because it's too slow to use all the latest sofware).
Hey sure if your a ricer you *can* buy a new Radeon AGP card off ebay, or an Intel based one, borrow a friends PC and flash the Firmware and put it into your mac, or even a new CPU daughter card that allows you to add a second CPU by doing something funky like going in via your graphics card slot.
But realistically, users don't even know that's possible, and it all sounds too hairy for them to try themselves and certainly Apple stores and even Mac retailers won't suggest anything like that to them. It's weird ricer behavior as far as they are concerned, best left to the fanboys on ebay who perform insane mods on those cute little Cubes (which now sell second hand for more than they cost origionally).
The end result is, it's far cheaper for an average person to own an Intel based system over the course of 2+ years, especially when you consider people are able to scrounge second hand parts from other PC owners (like a friends old CD-RW drive, CPU, or Radeon/GeForce card), something Mac won't be able to do.
I certainly recommend Mac's to those who I know can afford to spend 2000 UKP on a desktop every 3 years or so (though also based on an individual users circumstance), because I know how much better the user experience is.
But for those on a budget it would irresponsible of me not to suggest an Intel/AMD system when I know they can get one for 250 UKP and then blag a free 17" monitor (and probably future trickle down upgrades like new graphics cards/CPUs/etc) from someone like me.
That means new boxes, new manuals, new cd cases, new SKU's, shelf space requests from stores, new pressing runs. It is not just a matter of just make a new master when its done. It costs money to do that. Money that could be spent better in other ways instead of catering to the very small market that is mac and linux gaming.
But we know some extra expense (e.g. printing a new run of boxes) would need to happen anyway so your 'argument' makes no sense.
And FWIW, no you don't need 'shelf space requests', 'new cd cases' or new manuals (in the past, publishers have simply put an A3 sheet in with 'Quick Install Instructions' and a helpdesk number). Some publishers have even used the same box for the Mac release as for the Windows release and simply slapped a 'For Mac' sticker on it, and another over the the 'Requirements' section.
Mac and Linux users should consider themselves lucky that they are getting a version at all.
As far as Mac users go it has nothing to do with 'luck', it's economics. Both Epic and ID make Mac versions of their engines because they rely on licensing fees so heavily and being highly portable, with proven multiplatform support is a great selling point to companies looking to license an engine as it represents the possiblity of greater return for their investment in a title.
I would also add that some publishers would argue that Windows-based PC users 'ought to consider themselves lucky' as Windows based PC games typically bring in a small fraction of the revenues for the same title on a console (overall Windows PC games sales being worth about 10% of the revenue that console games manage to bring in). But, as is the case with Mac games, there is still enough money to make it profitable.
"Why should they delay the windows version just so that people that run OS's that are such a small percentage of the population should be able to play at the same time?"
Who said anything about delaying the Windows release?
Adding two binary packages to the disk image (one for Mac OS X and one for Linux) plus a couple of platform specific Read Me files and then sending off a new hybrid image for future masters would not in any way require the release to be delayed. You just have one initial release for Windows, and a second that's multiplatform.
This means people will be able to go into a store and just buy the game anywhere, without having to hunt for a place that carries Mac or Linux titles. Though I do most gaming on my PC (and I do mean a lot, it's very well spec'd out just for gaming) there are many times I've gone into a store looking for something to play on my PowerBook, but they have had no Mac specific titles, so I've just gone and bought whatever they had that was hybrid (even though the guys in the store were so clueless they didn't think they had any Mac titles, something that I've experienced many times over the last 10/15 years while looking for mac games).
It's selfish in that you're still trying to maintain control over something that you've deigned as free. If you're worried about competition, like you say, then you're a dingbat for making it free in the first place.
That assumes competition is always healthy. It is not, especially for small software projects. Split user bases drastically reduce the momentum behind projects and the amount of feedback, support and patches you get. Splitting a small project can actually leave you with two dead projects in a relatively short space of time because neither side manages to keep up sufficient user base (particularly true with innovative software).
It can also end up with the only version that continues a an active project being an badly managed & poorly supported closed sourced shareware hack knocked out by some guy who initially just decided to make a few quid out of a project by adding some features he would otherwise contribute back, but he thought 'what the hell' he'd have a go selling it as shareware because the licence allowed it.
He may not care about supporting the package or managing the project, he just wants to make a little extra money on the side, and so concentrates on the marketing and the CD packaging till the only project with significant mind share is his, however sadly the real work on the free project dies through lack of interest, because no-one wants to bother supporting a program with shrinking user base when there is a 'nearly-as-good' version (that really starts to slip in quality as time goes on, particularly when the pressure from the 'free' version disappears).
Ultimately the 'free' version may die a death from infrequent patches, ultimately falling too far behind, but the commercial implementation limps along, but barely keeping up and eventually (once the 'free' project has been thoroughly abandoned) becoming a worse monstrosity with each release due to lack of any form of effective opposition.
This is very typical of what happens to active small software projects (especially innovative ones trying to get off the ground) in which the investment and potential is not projected. In the long term the community of users suffer and everybody is worse of (apart from the guy who cashed in charging 25 UDS for a minor rehash of someone else program, he's done aright, at the expense of the initial project and the users).
This of course does not apply to no longer 'active' projects, but for actively maintained small software projects it's the reality of the situation. Managing a project correctly (whether it's a commercial project or not) can be absolutely key to it's success.
Other free software competition is good (if you can share each others innovations), but competing against someone who can take all the innovations from the one version without contributing back - and so take away all the other projects support (patches, advice, feedback and moral support) is not good for small projects.
I would quite happily release a project under BSD style license if it was either already complete, abandoned, or had particularly significant code I thought it would be most beneficial to be as free as possible (or if it was just a more trivial implementation). By the sounds of things your project clearly seems to have fallen into the 'completed' category, and so releasing it under something like a BSD style licence or as PD would not be able harm the project. That however cannot be said for all projects.
In the vast majority of instances, choosing to GPL has nothing to do with such emotive concepts as 'selfishness', 'ego' or 'money', but with the ensuring the health of software projects. The GPL is simply a form of protection, especially for more vulnerable small/innovative projects, one that insures against the reality of a world where commercial parties interests inevitably lie in the profits that can be made for as little outlay as possible (so they can reap the best possible return on investment, of time/money). Commercial interests (
Lol I was just going to say 'Clearly you don't live in London' (though this applies to pretty much anywhere in the UK) because of the same thing, my Konfabulator desktop widget changes 5 or more times a day and is quite accurate.
Having just come back from Colorado (Manitau Springs) I can testify that knowing if in 20 minutes time that it's going to be 30C sunshine or completly overcast with torrential downpour with thunder and lightning is quite useful too.:-)
Al Gore has as much claim to "initiative in creating the Internet" as Ronald Reagan has in "winning the Cold War".
Not so. That can quite truly be said of Regan, and it can likewise very truly be claimed that Bush was responsible for ousting Saddam. The claim that Gore was as responsible for the success of the Internet is ludicrious comparison however.
It would have been like Regan had decided to only have a swing at the Berlin wall, after it was already in the process being pulled down, or if Bush had only invaded Iraq after Iran had declared war and already caused the Baath party to retreat.
Both were things he pushed along as a politician, although they were inevitable forces of history that no one man could cause or prevent.
Rather, I assert that he stood flag waving on the sidelines and merely reflecting the profecies of others (something which obviously refelcted very favoriably on himself and he as unthinkably managed to claim credit for), while adding no assitance of real value (he was involved far too late in the game to be of any significant impact).
Yes he did. The concept in question is "The Internet" as a baseline utility available to EVERYONE. With his "Information Superhighway" proposal, Gore was the first politician to say that all Americans should have network access.
As I've said commercial email, online (including grocery shopping), banking, services like TV listing and movie reviews, and online forums (etc) were all available to consumers in the 1970's (note, these were aimed at consumers, not business, who had their own services). Gore wasn't the last person to grok the importance of networked computer services, but he was over a decade away from being one of the first.
If the US Congress hadn't pushed to bring a network based on government standards to the people, we might all today be stuck paying Compuserve, Prodigy, GE, or AOL for a specific site hosting in a different proprietary format for each Balkanized section of home network users. That would not be "The Internet".
The government have nothing to do with enforcing or even advocating some form of magic goldern standard. I could email users on other platforms on my Compuserve account in the early 90's, all the big providers had gateways to other systems, integration was already taking place, we were just wating on standards that wern't even invented in the US or an American (let alone by the US government) to allow to be free of Gopher and truly let the Internet revolution begin (namely, the WWW).
nor did he raise funding the technology,
Oh yes he did
That's very much a shining example of my point, that was in 1998. I was working at an ISP in 1994, I've had an internet email address for getting on for 15 years now. Al Gore did not assist me with that I can assure you. The party was already in full swing and some people were already passed out drunk in the corner by that stage.
Ethernet came about in the early 1970's and came from Xerox, the Web came from Academia and Europe in 1994 - as I've already said, the significant government involvement was ARPANET, there after (from the early 70's onwards) it was out if their hands in in the hands of private companies and academic institututions.
Also note that "took the initiative in creating" is a way of explicitly stating that "I didn't create, but suggested to others that they should
I fully understand that, and I'm certainly not attempting to argue over semantics, simply say that others had already created these services before he understood it (or eveb before Microsoft got involved you quite correctly point out). That doesn't leave him much to have contributed though.
Poppycock. It was at best a grandious self grandising exaggeration, and at worst a lie.
You are attempting to use semantics to justify what was clearly a false claim by a man ought to, by the very nature of his chosen profession be an excellent communicator. I think you ought to take a hard look at what was said and how he has chosen to defend this comment. He's made it more than clear this was not simply an 'off the cuff' remark, yet he shies away from defending it vocally and backing it with hard evidence in the context of a public interview, because he knows the claim does not stand up to serious scrutiny.
The 'internet' is based on ideas from ARPANET that had nothing to do with Al Gore, and the technology used to build the 'Internet' we know today came from that idea but was funded by private investment and by spending and research directed by academic institutions and had nothing to do with funding raised by him. You discredit those at ARPANET and the adacemic community in the US by defending Gores claim and that's quite a shameful display of ignorance and revisionist history (especially when it's to satisfy the ego and further the career of a politician).
I am aware that respected luminaries like Vint Cerf have attempted to defend Gore's comments to some degree, and Gore can claim due credit for being less short sighted than those around him at the time, but all Gore managed to do that was of signifcant impact at the end of the day was to draw some attention to an issue that didn't need any help from him in any case, and the primary benificator of all this was, at the end of the day, Gore.
Commerical network computer services (with email, 'ASCII art', online shopping all built using multiple interacting networks) were already avalible to consumers (not just companies) in the UK by the end of the 1970's, and academic institutions were already hooking up together and exchanging email before that.
To review, Gore did not popularise the concept (as they were commercial realities before he got started), nor did he raise funding the technology, nor did he increase awareness that led to direct political investment (even Microsoft didn't see the Internet coming, most of the senior old men of Congress are only even very vaguely aware of what it is). What specifically, in bullet points, is it that you assert he did that had any real impact?
It is in the nature of politians to claim credit for initiatives not of their making, it should be in your nature as a voter to be able to recognise such snake oil when so brazenly banded about.
These are the kind of people that you drop any obscure UNIX box in front of, or any problem that has stumped everyone else, and they go "Oh yeah, saw that back in 82, here's what you do..."
I don't like to randomly pick arguments with others passing comments but I completely disagree with that as a vision of what makes a good system administrator.
Certainly one of the tricky problems I solve involve technologies that were around in an applicable form in *'92* let alone '82. If they are problems that get to me, by definition they are usually things that no one else has been able to solve yet and haven't been seen before and are only occurring because of new, not before seen bugs or incompatibly issues.
I'm not saying I don't have instances where I can say "Oh yes I've seen that ECACHE error before it means...", but they are relatively rare in practice as problems, particularly the most interesting problems, are new (though effective knowledge base retention and documentation systems are something I think most companies could do a lot better).
They key is in more in their attitude IMO, as getting the base knowledge can be done by simply reading up (and some people can do this very quickly, most of us just float by sucking up information and knowledge as we go, but often those who set out to specifically learn about a subject in a short space of time can catch up surprisingly quickly).
I value knowing how to problem solve, being able to adapt to new languages, dealing with wildly varying problems effectively, taking ownership for problems, automatically performing root cause analysis on problems, building bridges with the people they need to communicate regularly with, enabling others, and helping the organisation they are working for realise the possibilities for improvement in the way they operate through better use of available technology.
And sometimes this means being able to look 'out side the box' for problems , though use this not as a hackneyed cliché but in a deliberate a literal sense, as sometimes the real issues are with procedure or the way an organisation operates at quite a fundamental level, meaning soft skills and the ability to be an effective communicator are the most valued skills at the highest levels.
That said, it's still surprises me how many people are able to earn very significant salaries doing very mundane and trivial levels of administration in the financial sector (where mere knowledge of Solaris, Veritas and SAN technology and very little else besides will get you 80K). It would take quite a hefty salary hike of 100% to get me to move from the fast paced and existing technology focused emerging telecoms industry to move to a stifling and comparatively backwards financial environment however.:-) [1]
[1] I just turned one away this week as it happens (I can't imagine most banking environments being happy with my PowerBook laptop, my own G3 under the desk with Linux, and company supplied FreeBSD box:-).
Linksys are really notoriously cheap and shonkey though, so this short of thing shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone (not a troll).
While Linksys devices are a option if your looking for something thats very cheap and easy to administer (the CLI and Web based interfaces on their more complex switches are really user friendly), but they are historically flakey (to lack of support for key options, non upgradability or straight forward incompatibility with other devices) as well as insecure.
I wouldn't use a linksys device (even for my home wireless access point or as a switch) based purely on how unreliable an incompatible they have proven to be, you really do get what you pay for in this case, all I can say is I am completely conviced it's worth spending a little extra to get something which will save you trouble later.
the toy will outlast the camera. Easily. Cameral = sensitive. Toy = NOT.
Speaking as someone who's installed web cams in albeit a midly hostile outdoor environment (specically, the hills surrounding Loch Ness) I think it's safe to say the senstive camera is encaused by it's own not-so-sensitive big feck off housing designed to deal with whatever the environment is likely to throw at it (other than perhaps large high velocity rocks, or lava). That is, assmuing the folks at New Zealand GeoNet Project know anything about volcanoes (which I think is a safe bet).
I'd fancy the plastic toy's chances of first getting blown/washed away, quickly discolored by sunlight and slowly disfigured by the environment are higher than the chances of the more carefully placed and completely encased camera rotting away.
At the very worst, even assuming the toy was made of the most resistant material for the job (and it's really not going to be, you can get very expensive camera casings specifically for hazerdous outdoor environments, and I'm sure they used something far appropriate), they would have just surrounded the expensive camera with that.
FWIW (and I'm sure they haven't really gone this far) if they really wanted to go to town, they could encase it in insulating dry silica material (as used in black boxes) which is used to allow such sensitive electronic equipment to stand being covered in the ~2,000 degree Fahrenheit temprature of lava for a half hour or more (which is a fair bit longer than the toy would last I should think, to understate it).
Slashdot Mirror
Did I mention that your flashlight is separate from your guns, and you can't even have a pistol and flashlight out at the same time? Combine that with how freaking dark Doom 3 is (and it is VERY dark), and you'll either be getting chewed up switching back and forth from flashlight to gun, or just firing blindly in the dark. Yeah, that's fun alright.
I agree. While it's an interesting idea, it's also frequently just annoying. You are frequently just shooting into the dark with no idea if the zombie you are shooting at is dead or not. You have to wait litteraly till it whacks you, or switch to the light then switch back. That's frankly just dull and irrtating. I wouldn't mind so much if when you hit zombies with the flash light it did decent damange, but it's basically worthless (not like melee in Halo).
Speaking of which, why doesn't EVERY game allow you to melee attack with every weapon? That was a great idea in Halo, as was the damage / health system. They make for great gameplay and I'm stunned that certainly the former wasn't implimented. It's so simple and yet huge amounts of fun.
I did like some elements, like how you unlock the Chaingun, and some of the traps which I thought were funny (like the one where the floor drops early on) but as you say, many are repetative, and frankly annoying.
Shooting zombies is basically fun though, and the shotgun is well balanced, but they could so easily have done much more. I had more fun with Halo if I'm honest (which I've had on both X-Box and PC and played repeatedly, having done some levels easily 20 times or more I'd play it more if they released that damn Halo CE patch for the PC single player version so it perform on a par with other games, but the PC port was pretty shoddy).
A lot of the elements in Far Cry where simply much more impressive, and Unreal approximates similar quality in many levels while still having an engine capeable of rendering scenes seen in the *origional* Doom series). The origional Doom 1 and 2 levels were more fun IMO. They were far more open and much less repetative, even if the action was cruder.
The zombie marines in Doom 3 either run up and empty their clip at you, or find a single spot of cover and pop out every couple seconds to shoot. Pretty much everything demonic just rushes you from whatever wall compartment you walked by.
Agreed and agreed. The ability IMP's have to jump to your position only makes this situation worse IMO (I dont mean the 'spawning/warping in' I mean the jumping ability that allows them go from the other side of the room to in your face, which make obstacle design in the level pointless).
Doom 3 makes an awesome first impression, but in the end the whole experience is just shallow. The engine is incredible and no doubt the mod scene will do some amazing stuff with it, but Doom 3 isn't revolutionary. Hell, it's barely evolutionary.
I very much agree with that. A shame really given the team and the license. Great engine, maps, art, sounds, models, animation and some nice touches (like the PDA system & various set pieces). But it seems like it didn't have someone arguing strongly enough in support of overall gameplay as the top priority, ensuring it was a really fun experience.
I just come away with the impression it was a showboat for ID's latest engine to entice licencees. I haven't got my hands on HL2 yet of course, but if I was developing a game I'd be strongly be considering the value added gameplay elements that comes from using the physics of HL2's Source engine.
I'm interested to see what the modding community do, but frankly it's so hard to create levels with the requisite amount of detail that people have come to expect these days that modding is becoming increasingly difficult - so I'm a little aprehensive about that, and don't think it will be nearly as popular as the origional in that respect.
Personally I think it would have been much more in the spirit of the origional to create an engine and development tool that allowed anyone with a spare weekend to crank out a reasonable level (you could have it use a standard tile system for room design, much like creating a level for Wolf 3D, and have it be themeable)
How do I see videogame trade shows evolving?
Booth babes with EVEN BIGGER hooters!
-1 Unfunny
+1 True
> All finnish men have to do their military service, which is 180, 270 or 360 days.
Not true.
They can come to any decent EU country (like the UK) and not do it. We are not still living in the 1900's.
Finns can tell their government to fuck off, but so many find it's easier 'just to go along' with things and not rock the boat then justify that to themselves later (with some spurious trite reasoning).
It amazes me that a nation of largely intelligent people fall for the propaganda that national service being useful, and that governments in countries like Finland and Germany still manage to get away with it. In reality it's a barbaric anachronism and in the face of so many other countries that have had it in the past having now phased it out, or having announced plans to end it, people in Finland should really be questioning this rather than going along with the idea out of a sense of tradition. The lack of recognition for conscientious objectors in Finland is something I find particularly morally repugnant (and let's not even get into the sexism debate).
It would have been phased out by the EU by now, if it hadn't been for the dissent of countries like Germany that are so dependant on it for the success of the state, where it's used to make up for a shortfall of civil service employees (and so to allow the state to get away with not paying real wages) but that's a different matter that has to do with poor, neigh incompetent governance, it that's not a valid excuse for keeping in place a system of forced slave labour.
The overwhelming chorus of advice from renowned intelligence organisations like Janes continues to be that it's not a way to create any sort of useful military force, and that's it detrimental to overall performance of what should a dedicated and professional organisation made up exclusively of people who want to be there to do what is a very important job.
My advice to people in Finland would be to just go and live in another EU member state like the UK, where we don't force people to signup to work for the government (and where they don't get to tell you what weekends you can go home and what ones you cant).
We don't have national service and it's precisely because of that (and because we do the Right Thing (TM) and choose to pay to have a large, competent and professional army rather than trying to scrape one together from kids who don't really want to be there) that we have one of the most powerful armies in the world (in the top 10, after the USA, India, Russia and Korea (north and south)). For such a small country, that's not bad going, and vastly better than the majority of the rest of the world, even with their swelled ranks fluffed with conscripts.
Given the evidence against it, and the insistence by the intelligence community that it's not only of no value, but can be of negative value it's a wonder people still do it. It all comes back to 'doing what's right' vrs. 'doing what's easiest'. If more people had a backbone it would have been abolished long ago, the army would be stronger, the people would have more freedom and they'd be quite a bit happier.
With a society that has the kind of outlook they do on issues like this, perhaps it is not surprising that Finland has the highest suicide rate of any western nation.
Finns, the government are there to serve you, not the other way around. Do yourself and your entire nation a favour and them to get stuffed. National service costs your nation money overall (through lossed taxes, equipment and wages), it doesn't give you a useful fighting force and it is part of an oppressive environment that harms the physiological well being of the nations citizens.
Fiduciary duty *is* a legal duty,
That's not always the case. You can fail to live up to a fiduciary duty and not be deemed to have breached the law. And of course, a legal duty is of course not always a fiduciary one.
and it's not traditionally owed to investors by workers.It's for situations like lawyer-client or doctor-patient.
I know it to be very frequently used term in the context of directors and corporations - I would even argue that today it's far more commonly spoken about in that context than any other and find your assertion quite bizzare.
Google seems to agree with me, feel free to search for 'fiduciary duties' and see what sort of results you get. It seems your assertion is quite erroneous.
This guy had complained to his superior's superiors. They apparently didn't care. So this guy's crusade basically ends right there. He did what he should have done, and when those higher ups don't care, you can get pissed all you want, but you don't take matters into your own hands.
Actually, in a corporate organsation you could easily find that your required to take additional action such as informing someone more senior who represents the investors (e.g. a non executive director) and you tell them that company policy is not being followed. You may find you are legally required to ensure that company policy is followed through or you can lose your job. In this case there are no 'non executive directors', but there are investors - the taxpayers of the state of Alabama.
This was his BOSS.
So? Are you suggesting that cover ups and failure to follow offical policy (as far as following the offical complaints proceedure and enforcing the existing policy prohibiting such use of equipment) simply were not criminal enough to be worth him drawing attention to or that 'your boss' can engage in whatever criminal acts he likes, including misuse of public property and/or funds, and that you should be complicit out of some kind of automatic respect for someone in your organisation who happens to be in a higher pay band than you are?
It's taxpayers money. If it was a private enterprise it would be investors money. I shouldn't need to remind you that employees have a fiduciary (and, in the case of corporate enterprises, frequently legal) responsiblity to that organisations investors. Senior employees can be personally liable and can face not only fines but jail time for acting against the interests of an organisation they are explicitly employed to represent the interests of.
If someone is jerking around like this guys boss in a company I've invested in, or if my local government representatives where up to this (which I'm quite sure they are) as an investor/taxpayer I'm damn sure I want to know and I'm sure I want the senior executives who've tried to sweep this under the carpet and who have failed to act in the manner in which there were hired to exposed and fired (it's their job to ensure this sort of thing doesn't go on, it's not a charity, if they can't do the job for which they are very well paid they should be slung out on their ear).
You stay in official channels when dealing with any personel problem, and you ESPECIALLY do this when a superior is involved
I say you obay your fiduciary and legal obligations to taxpayers/investors FIRST and if that's contrary to 'staying within the little white lines of company policy' SCREW THEM (after all they [both this guys boss, and his seniors] have already thrown the rule book out the window and are using it to shaft this guy, and all the state taxpayers and more fool you if you let them continue).
What your suggesting is that he be complicit in a system which is supressing evidence of corruption in a government organisation (the act of corruption being not the act of the origional employee, but complete failure to take any action to enforce the organisations existing policy when complaints were made). What you are suggesting is that he 'stays within the box' and acts in the best interests of his management, even if thats not in the best intrests of taxpayers/investors.
In short, what you are suggesting is completely immoral.
I say screw that, rat on the bastards and tell everyone who'll listen.
It's you - the taxpayer and investor in this service - that's getting screwed by these incompotent lazy slobs, and it's only the very people being ratted on for being incompotent lazy slobs that are trying to cover it up to save their own fat underworked and overpaid behinds.
Why does Real need Apple's permission to hack iPods? The only argument that you could make against Real is to support the DMCA
They are not hacking iPods.
You can find people who are hacking iPods at ipodhacks.com, and Apple have been fine with that thusfar it seems.
Real are attempting to take revenue from Apple after Apple approached Real when they were trying to start up the Apple store, but Real told them to get screwed (they had their own ideas, involving Real's own shitty software and appauling DRM system with glorious features such as 'limited number times you can play back files' and 'limited lifetime for files').
If Apple was my company, I'd want to shaft Real now too (both to rub their noses in it, but most importnatly to kick them when they were down and eliminate marginal competition in a legal manner, using means avalible in and endorsed by the capitalist infrastructure of the country they are trading in).
This all has bupkis to do with 'what's good for us', Real is just playing the underdog card (as Apple does against it's competitors). I don't think I'd hold the same position if it was some nordic teenager they were harrasing, but it's not, it's Real, who is a competitor to Apple in quite a few areas, and it's for highly contextal reasons - and, I don't give a flying squirrel about Real. In fact, I like the streaming audio/video client but I hate their horrible music software and their Helix DRM implimentation, not to mention all the spyware they bundle with it.
The focus should be on fixing the clearly inappropriate law.
It has put companies into a bind:
If Apple don't invoke it, it's easy to say they are not protecting their own interests and so those of their shareholders. So who should they shaft? Real or their shareholders? Board members can be fined and prosectuted if the company doesn't act in the interest of it's investors (the general public in this case).
Better not to put any company in that postion and just remove the law. If you fail to do that, and simply go after companies with the pressure of 'public opinon' as your weapon, sooner or later some company is going to realise that potential dip in revenue from sales lossed is going to be less than the amount they stand to lose if a competitor gets the upper hand, then consumers are screwed when someone like Sony decides to make a test case out of it and sets their sharpest lawyers on the case to make as sure as possible they don't fail.
Mod Parent Up!
Amen to that.
The test re-enforces stupid decision making processes.
How do we know they weren't all scammed with the URL's changed to point to 'similar sounding' sites if we can't check them, or the headers?
The test was completly meaningless as you couldn't do all the correct things you SHOULD to to check the authenticity of an email.
It encorages people to base decisions based on *hunches*, which is utterly retarded. You could take a genunine email and alter the URL and you'd never know you'd been duped if you went by the examples in this test - you'd just think it looked real, click on the URL, login and end up being scammed.
This 'test' is utterly worthless as a result. You *can't* tell just by looking at the surface content of an HTML rendered email. If you can't look at the email headers or the URLs you have no way of knowing all of them arn't spoofed.
This is a *moronic quiz* (and no I haven't taken it - I refuse to on the grounds the permise is so retarded, but I did look it over carefully).
In this quiz, your not allowed to examine the URLs (to see if the 'links' point to where they appear to)...*boggle*. That's exactly what you SHOULD do.
I've had a couple of emails over the last year asking me to 'check my account details' and 'login or it will be suspended', thinking they sounded suspicious I checked them out, the domains in the URLs and the RIPE records to make sure the IP's the hostnames pointed to matched up with the company in question. Both sounded very suspicious, but turned out to be completely geninue becase I know how to check them (whois netsol, RIPE, ARIN (et al), host/dig are you friends - well not netsol they are cu^W^W...).
If I'd simply dismissed those two emails out of hand I would have locked myself out of accounts I find most useful. Encoraging people to base decisions on *hunches* when it's staightforward to check the facts and make an informed decision is completely irresponsible.
This test completly misses the oppertunity to educate people in a really meaningful way by allowing you to actually example the 'emails' in full, because it would be bloody obvious to tell the fraudulent ones apart from the geniune ones, just as it is in reality.
If you are directed to a URL like https://www.paypal.com/ - which you recognise as the offical website for the company in question, you may as well assume it's legitimate. However, if the link actually takes you to a URL like http://www.paypal.ru/,or if they email you from an address like/solicit replies to paypal@yahoo.com - your fairly obviously being shafted. Really it's not rocket science.
I had this when I was directed to a site called www.ups-europe.es from a guy in Spain, who I'd been in contact with via eBay. One quick 'whois' check showed clearly dubious registration details for the domain, and the whois against ripe.net against the IP the hostname pointed to showed the site was hosted on a virtual server at an el-cheapo ~10 Euro-a-month consumer hosting company (not the sort of setup a UPS site which handles fanancial transaction services is going to be hosted on). So I strung him along, got some details out of him, and eventually handed everything over the police when I was done playing with the guy.
The point here should be to teach people how to check for themselves (and make it easier for them too, though better software design), not to encourage people to make decisions like this based on 'their feelings' about an email.
I'd heard about that and was looking forward to it, this is the first I've heard that they have take a step back (and effectively nerfed it).
/t {nick} n00b! (even when you defeat them)).
As someone who like to devote there time to other things (including free software) I was looking forward to having some levelling field against college kids who are busy wasting tax payers money on pointless degrees (as is the case here in the UK where 'fees' are virtually nill and education is state funded, and as someone who pays 40% tax I'm pissed it's my money they are wasting).
I hope there is still enough content and fun to be had without playing 35 hours a week just to keep up and be involved with all the cool things and to go to all the interesting places.
I think powerlevellers are pandered to too often and that they have a negative impact on games (because in practice its hard - but I belive by no means impossible - to design a game that suits both them and 'normal' players). I notice they rarely care about gameplay, nor do they understand what makes good gameplay.
I'd add it's also worth noting they typically arn't the ones with the most money either (being young, and often not in full time employment) so it puzzles me further that they are catered for so much (e.g. in SWG, which is EQ in space, and EQ is bascially exlusively about levelling).
I'd happily drop 50 USD a month per MMOG game JUST to avoid having to deal with kids and teenagers (and forum trolls). Hopefully, when the MMOG market establishes itself a bit we might see companies who will feel confident enough to change more and cater for a different sort of market segment (those of us who are sick of crappy forum and in game atmospheres, leet speak, and people sending
Personally if I ever have kids (unlikely) and I caught them using 1337 speak or using the 'n' word to describe anyone I'd stop their allowance for a month and have them out washing the car and mowing the lawn the whole summer. Or worse, I'd make them grind out a Jedi in SWG. On a 486.
Spooky, Slashdot just gave me a "500 Internal Server Error" while trying to submit that the first time (and then again, with this post!)
This is not a good sign, eep.
Some of the systems, both Windows and Linux are having this problem, while others are not, dispite being on the same subnet (on our NOC lan here in the UK).
Go figure. Session handling switches deciding which IP's go where and some end servers of Google's being borked is my best guess.
And yet, you had to post a comment...
No I didn't have to, I deliberately chose to so I could make it clear how much it was unwelcome and inappropriate (as seems to be the general feeling about it judging but the posts of others). It's a very simple concept, called 'feedback'. I didn't care about the quality of the articles I would not have posted.
Your post was equally as superfluous and devoid of useful purpose as the origional story however (and deliciously ironic).
This is crap. It's the sort of thing you expect to find on some tedious forum on some backwater newsgroup.
It's not funny, and it's not in the least interesting.
As someone with a top end Intel system (P4 3.2 Ghz, 2 GB DDR400, Radeon 9800 256MB, SATA RAID0) and a high end PowerBook (1.5 Ghz, Radeon 9700 128MB, 1 GB RAM) and a long time multi system owner (I also have dual Sparc box) I can testify that Intel/AMD based systems are cheaper than Apple branded equipment, with the sole exception of in the Laptop arena (where Apple actually offers very good value for money, in stark contrast to their desktop range).
After a couple of years you can take your PC into a store, have them add some more memory, a new CPU, and new CD-RW or DVD drive, a new sound card, or a new graphics card, maybe even add an SATA drive.
With your Mac desktop all most users will be able to do is upgrade the RAM, and that only goes so far, the users end up tossing the system out, or donating it to a local charity or community group (where it sits abandoned because it's too slow to use all the latest sofware).
Hey sure if your a ricer you *can* buy a new Radeon AGP card off ebay, or an Intel based one, borrow a friends PC and flash the Firmware and put it into your mac, or even a new CPU daughter card that allows you to add a second CPU by doing something funky like going in via your graphics card slot.
But realistically, users don't even know that's possible, and it all sounds too hairy for them to try themselves and certainly Apple stores and even Mac retailers won't suggest anything like that to them. It's weird ricer behavior as far as they are concerned, best left to the fanboys on ebay who perform insane mods on those cute little Cubes (which now sell second hand for more than they cost origionally).
The end result is, it's far cheaper for an average person to own an Intel based system over the course of 2+ years, especially when you consider people are able to scrounge second hand parts from other PC owners (like a friends old CD-RW drive, CPU, or Radeon/GeForce card), something Mac won't be able to do.
I certainly recommend Mac's to those who I know can afford to spend 2000 UKP on a desktop every 3 years or so (though also based on an individual users circumstance), because I know how much better the user experience is.
But for those on a budget it would irresponsible of me not to suggest an Intel/AMD system when I know they can get one for 250 UKP and then blag a free 17" monitor (and probably future trickle down upgrades like new graphics cards/CPUs/etc) from someone like me.
That means new boxes, new manuals, new cd cases, new SKU's, shelf space requests from stores, new pressing runs. It is not just a matter of just make a new master when its done. It costs money to do that. Money that could be spent better in other ways instead of catering to the very small market that is mac and linux gaming.
But we know some extra expense (e.g. printing a new run of boxes) would need to happen anyway so your 'argument' makes no sense.
And FWIW, no you don't need 'shelf space requests', 'new cd cases' or new manuals (in the past, publishers have simply put an A3 sheet in with 'Quick Install Instructions' and a helpdesk number). Some publishers have even used the same box for the Mac release as for the Windows release and simply slapped a 'For Mac' sticker on it, and another over the the 'Requirements' section.
Mac and Linux users should consider themselves lucky that they are getting a version at all.
As far as Mac users go it has nothing to do with 'luck', it's economics. Both Epic and ID make Mac versions of their engines because they rely on licensing fees so heavily and being highly portable, with proven multiplatform support is a great selling point to companies looking to license an engine as it represents the possiblity of greater return for their investment in a title.
I would also add that some publishers would argue that Windows-based PC users 'ought to consider themselves lucky' as Windows based PC games typically bring in a small fraction of the revenues for the same title on a console (overall Windows PC games sales being worth about 10% of the revenue that console games manage to bring in). But, as is the case with Mac games, there is still enough money to make it profitable.
"Why should they delay the windows version just so that people that run OS's that are such a small percentage of the population should be able to play at the same time?"
Who said anything about delaying the Windows release?
Adding two binary packages to the disk image (one for Mac OS X and one for Linux) plus a couple of platform specific Read Me files and then sending off a new hybrid image for future masters would not in any way require the release to be delayed. You just have one initial release for Windows, and a second that's multiplatform.
This means people will be able to go into a store and just buy the game anywhere, without having to hunt for a place that carries Mac or Linux titles. Though I do most gaming on my PC (and I do mean a lot, it's very well spec'd out just for gaming) there are many times I've gone into a store looking for something to play on my PowerBook, but they have had no Mac specific titles, so I've just gone and bought whatever they had that was hybrid (even though the guys in the store were so clueless they didn't think they had any Mac titles, something that I've experienced many times over the last 10/15 years while looking for mac games).
It's selfish in that you're still trying to maintain control over something that you've deigned as free. If you're worried about competition, like you say, then you're a dingbat for making it free in the first place.
That assumes competition is always healthy. It is not, especially for small software projects. Split user bases drastically reduce the momentum behind projects and the amount of feedback, support and patches you get. Splitting a small project can actually leave you with two dead projects in a relatively short space of time because neither side manages to keep up sufficient user base (particularly true with innovative software).
It can also end up with the only version that continues a an active project being an badly managed & poorly supported closed sourced shareware hack knocked out by some guy who initially just decided to make a few quid out of a project by adding some features he would otherwise contribute back, but he thought 'what the hell' he'd have a go selling it as shareware because the licence allowed it.
He may not care about supporting the package or managing the project, he just wants to make a little extra money on the side, and so concentrates on the marketing and the CD packaging till the only project with significant mind share is his, however sadly the real work on the free project dies through lack of interest, because no-one wants to bother supporting a program with shrinking user base when there is a 'nearly-as-good' version (that really starts to slip in quality as time goes on, particularly when the pressure from the 'free' version disappears).
Ultimately the 'free' version may die a death from infrequent patches, ultimately falling too far behind, but the commercial implementation limps along, but barely keeping up and eventually (once the 'free' project has been thoroughly abandoned) becoming a worse monstrosity with each release due to lack of any form of effective opposition.
This is very typical of what happens to active small software projects (especially innovative ones trying to get off the ground) in which the investment and potential is not projected. In the long term the community of users suffer and everybody is worse of (apart from the guy who cashed in charging 25 UDS for a minor rehash of someone else program, he's done aright, at the expense of the initial project and the users).
This of course does not apply to no longer 'active' projects, but for actively maintained small software projects it's the reality of the situation. Managing a project correctly (whether it's a commercial project or not) can be absolutely key to it's success.
Other free software competition is good (if you can share each others innovations), but competing against someone who can take all the innovations from the one version without contributing back - and so take away all the other projects support (patches, advice, feedback and moral support) is not good for small projects.
I would quite happily release a project under BSD style license if it was either already complete, abandoned, or had particularly significant code I thought it would be most beneficial to be as free as possible (or if it was just a more trivial implementation). By the sounds of things your project clearly seems to have fallen into the 'completed' category, and so releasing it under something like a BSD style licence or as PD would not be able harm the project. That however cannot be said for all projects.
In the vast majority of instances, choosing to GPL has nothing to do with such emotive concepts as 'selfishness', 'ego' or 'money', but with the ensuring the health of software projects. The GPL is simply a form of protection, especially for more vulnerable small/innovative projects, one that insures against the reality of a world where commercial parties interests inevitably lie in the profits that can be made for as little outlay as possible (so they can reap the best possible return on investment, of time/money). Commercial interests (
Lol I was just going to say 'Clearly you don't live in London' (though this applies to pretty much anywhere in the UK) because of the same thing, my Konfabulator desktop widget changes 5 or more times a day and is quite accurate.
:-)
Having just come back from Colorado (Manitau Springs) I can testify that knowing if in 20 minutes time that it's going to be 30C sunshine or completly overcast with torrential downpour with thunder and lightning is quite useful too.
Al Gore has as much claim to "initiative in creating the Internet" as Ronald Reagan has in "winning the Cold War".
Not so. That can quite truly be said of Regan, and it can likewise very truly be claimed that Bush was responsible for ousting Saddam. The claim that Gore was as responsible for the success of the Internet is ludicrious comparison however.
It would have been like Regan had decided to only have a swing at the Berlin wall, after it was already in the process being pulled down, or if Bush had only invaded Iraq after Iran had declared war and already caused the Baath party to retreat.
Both were things he pushed along as a politician, although they were inevitable forces of history that no one man could cause or prevent.
Rather, I assert that he stood flag waving on the sidelines and merely reflecting the profecies of others (something which obviously refelcted very favoriably on himself and he as unthinkably managed to claim credit for), while adding no assitance of real value (he was involved far too late in the game to be of any significant impact).
Yes he did. The concept in question is "The Internet" as a baseline utility available to EVERYONE. With his "Information Superhighway" proposal, Gore was the first politician to say that all Americans should have network access.
As I've said commercial email, online (including grocery shopping), banking, services like TV listing and movie reviews, and online forums (etc) were all available to consumers in the 1970's (note, these were aimed at consumers, not business, who had their own services). Gore wasn't the last person to grok the importance of networked computer services, but he was over a decade away from being one of the first.
If the US Congress hadn't pushed to bring a network based on government standards to the people, we might all today be stuck paying Compuserve, Prodigy, GE, or AOL for a specific site hosting in a different proprietary format for each Balkanized section of home network users. That would not be "The Internet".
The government have nothing to do with enforcing or even advocating some form of magic goldern standard. I could email users on other platforms on my Compuserve account in the early 90's, all the big providers had gateways to other systems, integration was already taking place, we were just wating on standards that wern't even invented in the US or an American (let alone by the US government) to allow to be free of Gopher and truly let the Internet revolution begin (namely, the WWW).
nor did he raise funding the technology,
Oh yes he did
That's very much a shining example of my point, that was in 1998. I was working at an ISP in 1994, I've had an internet email address for getting on for 15 years now. Al Gore did not assist me with that I can assure you. The party was already in full swing and some people were already passed out drunk in the corner by that stage.
Ethernet came about in the early 1970's and came from Xerox, the Web came from Academia and Europe in 1994 - as I've already said, the significant government involvement was ARPANET, there after (from the early 70's onwards) it was out if their hands in in the hands of private companies and academic institututions.
Also note that "took the initiative in creating" is a way of explicitly stating that "I didn't create, but suggested to others that they should
I fully understand that, and I'm certainly not attempting to argue over semantics, simply say that others had already created these services before he understood it (or eveb before Microsoft got involved you quite correctly point out). That doesn't leave him much to have contributed though.
Poppycock. It was at best a grandious self grandising exaggeration, and at worst a lie.
You are attempting to use semantics to justify what was clearly a false claim by a man ought to, by the very nature of his chosen profession be an excellent communicator. I think you ought to take a hard look at what was said and how he has chosen to defend this comment. He's made it more than clear this was not simply an 'off the cuff' remark, yet he shies away from defending it vocally and backing it with hard evidence in the context of a public interview, because he knows the claim does not stand up to serious scrutiny.
The 'internet' is based on ideas from ARPANET that had nothing to do with Al Gore, and the technology used to build the 'Internet' we know today came from that idea but was funded by private investment and by spending and research directed by academic institutions and had nothing to do with funding raised by him. You discredit those at ARPANET and the adacemic community in the US by defending Gores claim and that's quite a shameful display of ignorance and revisionist history (especially when it's to satisfy the ego and further the career of a politician).
I am aware that respected luminaries like Vint Cerf have attempted to defend Gore's comments to some degree, and Gore can claim due credit for being less short sighted than those around him at the time, but all Gore managed to do that was of signifcant impact at the end of the day was to draw some attention to an issue that didn't need any help from him in any case, and the primary benificator of all this was, at the end of the day, Gore.
Commerical network computer services (with email, 'ASCII art', online shopping all built using multiple interacting networks) were already avalible to consumers (not just companies) in the UK by the end of the 1970's, and academic institutions were already hooking up together and exchanging email before that.
To review, Gore did not popularise the concept (as they were commercial realities before he got started), nor did he raise funding the technology, nor did he increase awareness that led to direct political investment (even Microsoft didn't see the Internet coming, most of the senior old men of Congress are only even very vaguely aware of what it is). What specifically, in bullet points, is it that you assert he did that had any real impact?
It is in the nature of politians to claim credit for initiatives not of their making, it should be in your nature as a voter to be able to recognise such snake oil when so brazenly banded about.
These are the kind of people that you drop any obscure UNIX box in front of, or any problem that has stumped everyone else, and they go "Oh yeah, saw that back in 82, here's what you do..."
:-) [1]
:-).
I don't like to randomly pick arguments with others passing comments but I completely disagree with that as a vision of what makes a good system administrator.
Certainly one of the tricky problems I solve involve technologies that were around in an applicable form in *'92* let alone '82. If they are problems that get to me, by definition they are usually things that no one else has been able to solve yet and haven't been seen before and are only occurring because of new, not before seen bugs or incompatibly issues.
I'm not saying I don't have instances where I can say "Oh yes I've seen that ECACHE error before it means...", but they are relatively rare in practice as problems, particularly the most interesting problems, are new (though effective knowledge base retention and documentation systems are something I think most companies could do a lot better).
They key is in more in their attitude IMO, as getting the base knowledge can be done by simply reading up (and some people can do this very quickly, most of us just float by sucking up information and knowledge as we go, but often those who set out to specifically learn about a subject in a short space of time can catch up surprisingly quickly).
I value knowing how to problem solve, being able to adapt to new languages, dealing with wildly varying problems effectively, taking ownership for problems, automatically performing root cause analysis on problems, building bridges with the people they need to communicate regularly with, enabling others, and helping the organisation they are working for realise the possibilities for improvement in the way they operate through better use of available technology.
And sometimes this means being able to look 'out side the box' for problems , though use this not as a hackneyed cliché but in a deliberate a literal sense, as sometimes the real issues are with procedure or the way an organisation operates at quite a fundamental level, meaning soft skills and the ability to be an effective communicator are the most valued skills at the highest levels.
That said, it's still surprises me how many people are able to earn very significant salaries doing very mundane and trivial levels of administration in the financial sector (where mere knowledge of Solaris, Veritas and SAN technology and very little else besides will get you 80K). It would take quite a hefty salary hike of 100% to get me to move from the fast paced and existing technology focused emerging telecoms industry to move to a stifling and comparatively backwards financial environment however.
[1] I just turned one away this week as it happens (I can't imagine most banking environments being happy with my PowerBook laptop, my own G3 under the desk with Linux, and company supplied FreeBSD box
I agree it's been awful in that respect :-(
Linksys are really notoriously cheap and shonkey though, so this short of thing shouldn't really come as a surprise to anyone (not a troll).
While Linksys devices are a option if your looking for something thats very cheap and easy to administer (the CLI and Web based interfaces on their more complex switches are really user friendly), but they are historically flakey (to lack of support for key options, non upgradability or straight forward incompatibility with other devices) as well as insecure.
I wouldn't use a linksys device (even for my home wireless access point or as a switch) based purely on how unreliable an incompatible they have proven to be, you really do get what you pay for in this case, all I can say is I am completely conviced it's worth spending a little extra to get something which will save you trouble later.
Sigh. another fool
the toy will outlast the camera. Easily. Cameral = sensitive. Toy = NOT.
Speaking as someone who's installed web cams in albeit a midly hostile outdoor environment (specically, the hills surrounding Loch Ness) I think it's safe to say the senstive camera is encaused by it's own not-so-sensitive big feck off housing designed to deal with whatever the environment is likely to throw at it (other than perhaps large high velocity rocks, or lava). That is, assmuing the folks at New Zealand GeoNet Project know anything about volcanoes (which I think is a safe bet).
I'd fancy the plastic toy's chances of first getting blown/washed away, quickly discolored by sunlight and slowly disfigured by the environment are higher than the chances of the more carefully placed and completely encased camera rotting away.
At the very worst, even assuming the toy was made of the most resistant material for the job (and it's really not going to be, you can get very expensive camera casings specifically for hazerdous outdoor environments, and I'm sure they used something far appropriate), they would have just surrounded the expensive camera with that.
FWIW (and I'm sure they haven't really gone this far) if they really wanted to go to town, they could encase it in insulating dry silica material (as used in black boxes) which is used to allow such sensitive electronic equipment to stand being covered in the ~2,000 degree Fahrenheit temprature of lava for a half hour or more (which is a fair bit longer than the toy would last I should think, to understate it).