Well, along with WotC/Hasbro maybe, that is. There was a simular stunt by GW in the early 90s in germany. When gaming still wasn't completley spoiled by trading cards (Save Gaming! Kill a Magic Player today!). They wanted to force all Fanatasy Shops to take a certain minimum amount of GW games and use a certain amount of display space to sell them. The german retailers got the drift and boykotted GW for more than half a year. After that GW started opening up their own shops. It had become evident that they wanted to test the market to check for the best locations for GW-only shops. The Warhammer RPG was quite ok, but since these people have been suckers as long as I've been gaming (just as long as I'm into computing - 15 years) I've never really cared anyway. Bottom line: Don't buy stuff from GW, there are plenty of other, better gaming products, table tops and such out there!
Things to note: If you're into 3D action gaming and not just work/slower gaming you need a good switching speed which almost allways means CRT. There are some iiyama LCD panels that have fast switching and don't blur in fast 3D action (tested by powergamers too!), but they're still not common. Double check before buying. If you're going to get a CRT instead of a LCD consider a high contrast, brilliant color 'Triniton' class. Be carefull though, those've got 2 thin horizontal lines between the 1st and second and 2nd and 3rd part of the screen (stabilization wires). Some find them extremely disturbing. You won't want that to be so! I personally am just sitting in Front of one (Sony E400 Triniton Flatscreen Tube) and I can see the wires if I look for them, but I've got used to it and find the benefits outway the wirelines. Otherwise, if you're not into fast/3D gaming, it's easyer: Get an LCD! iiyama have a good price for top range quality, otherwise I recommend Eizo if you want to be on the safe side. Both are good at CRT and LCD, Eizo being a tad pricier (and better, imho). Allthough the last time I checked (looong time ago), their LCDs where good but had a little yellowish touch to their background light. BTW: You'll also want an digital conection for your brand new LCD screen - maybe consider a digital grafics output GFX adapter. Converting analog VGA back and forth degrades gfx quality in a noticable manner!
Here are the URLs: http://www.iiyama.com/ http://www.eizo.com /index.htm
Another advice: Do not buy cheap junk LCD! It's not just about broken pixels but also the background lighting on bad LCDs that can be unbalanced and screw up the best panel with uneven brightness or darker patches across the screen. Very anoying!
It's a cartoon from 'the worlds best computer mag', the german CT. The one guys saying: "Those were professionals at work. They only took the gold, the stockshares and the printer cartridges."
That's the best thing a pentagoner could do for military infrastructure. Remember? In the end Clifford Stoll was working for the CIA and NSA! in a way, that is. And it didn't hurt him. Or them, for that matter.
I don't want no steenkin' USB mouse...
on
Legacy-Free PCs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I play UT2003, a very fast multiplayer FPS. To me having my Logitech dual optical strung up to the legacy port is crucial. An USB mouse is slower, as the PS/2 signals are better synced, 'closer' to the CPU and waste less ticks per instruction. I definetly don't want my mouse and keyboard gettin' the hickups in midst of a fast multiplayer hackfest. And be it only for a split second. I tried USB once, cause I kinda like the idea of hotplugging (I use my printer via USB and it's a breeze), but it just doesn't cut it for signal intensive input devices. No fscking way are serious gamers going to switch to non-legacy mice any time soon.
Since this guy is jacking of on USB, EFI and whatnot of Intel stuff and goes on bullshitting about how legacy is slowing down PC evolution 'cause people don't buy USB mice (who and what gave him that idea???) I have a hard time taking him for granted. He's most certainly a payed-off Intel advocate.
If they want to get a spammer by the balls this is a good way. If they want to seperate important internal and client mail from junkmail they could do better with the more than obvious: Digital Encryption and Signing. There is no problem whatsoever in building a mailserver that only accepts a set of allowed public keys and signatures. All you have to to is train your folks to use encryption (easy: only send encrypted msgs) and convince your clients to jump the bandwagon when mailing to you (aka tell them you only accept encrypted and signed mail and explain to them why). That would make for some quality increase of email culture too. And if the idea spreads spammers will have a hard time.
I don't quite get your question, really. The japanese had PDAs before we did, and they've *allways* had better ones. Especially due to their set of glyphs! They've also got wristwatch computers and use them in ways useful. Mostly 'cause you get a lot more info on that tiny screen with Kanji and Chinese Symbols than with latin lettering. You can get an entire novel on to something like 100 pages that way. Go figure.
I just LOVE them. I'm famous amongst mz friends for quoting them...
"Hail to the King, baby!" "It hurts to be you." "Hehehe! Wasted." "What are you? Some bottom beating, scum sucking outie eater?" "Lucky son of a bitch." "You're an inspiration for birth control."... and so on.
OSS 0\/\/nZ. Better OSes. Better Servers. Better Appservers. Better SSI technologies. Better architecture. Better Desktops. Better in the sense of: Faster, cheaper, more transparent and 'future safe' in ways proprietary can only dream of. There's no doubt. Yet there's one thing that has a 100% penetration suckage that is only compareable to the worst of commercial software (like Director or Outlook) and that is: Fonts in X. The people who built the first Motif Font architecture didn't no squat what they where doing, even messured on a pixelfont level. They might as well should have sticked to console. We'd be better of today without it! The whole current setup that just barely manages, made up of a bazzilion tidbits from xft ftx sftsxftftxsxstfts bitstreams ftfi (praise them!!!), motif *shatonscreen* pixelfonts, KDEs fontrendering (finally from engineers with more than just a spinal column to think with - Hooray!) and whatnot is so utterly bizzare it makes MS fdisk look like the reference in usability and software design.
I tell you, whatever anybody does, be it uncrapping the given system (it gives me the creeps just thinking of it) or 'reinventing the wheel' (I don't think you can reinvent a pile of shit) it can't make anything worse. So actually I'm quite thankfull for the attempt and whish Sun good look and strong nerves. They need it.
I really don't get it. This could be done with Flash allready. What's the big deal? That they add a Proxy layer that emulates a living conection for Flash? A minimum of commom sense whilst building a Flashapp will circle that problem. It's nothing but marketing hype, if you ask me.
Their scaling and interpolation is nice (also probably patented, which again leads to my point), but rarely worthy of chosing them over a competitor.
Wrong. While I do get your point in the power of OSS and that Gimp could theoretically become a competitor to PS I see no way how this could actually really happen. There are too many factors that would have to be dealt with. It's all about the programmers not interrested in high end grafics editing. Just the same with serious OSS ERP systems. There just to damn boring to programm for those that could do it. Anyone with the skill to yield the power of PS shure won't spend time learning to programm as to bring Gimp up to the bar. They make money using PS. Which is plain and simple old fashion fun too. Just as much as programming too. Look at misery-in-motion for instance. He's on every second Linux Desktop wallpaper. He personally even knows *nix. Yet he uses PS. It would be pointless for him to even attempt to achive the same with Gimp. Same in 3D. Apart from Shigeto Maeda *nobody* with serious artist-only skills uses Blender. They use Lightwave or Cinema. And not KPovmodeler (*shudder*) and PovRay.
Things you'd need for PS-competitive Gimp in detail: 1.) Full Viewport Antialiasing of all elements 2.) Full range suckage free grafics tablet support 3.) Real time layer effects rendering 4.) Top grade interpolation of vectorshapes and scalings (I admit that this is allmost an interesstin CS OSS project - but no f*cking way is that done satisfactory with a plugin - this is topline lowlevel grafics stuff) 5.) Equal variety of integrated filters in equal quality 6.) Interface overhaul / optional decluttering of windows ('all-in-one-interface')
I don't see any chance that someone takes on this biiiig task. More likeley we'll see a not so fortunate grafics competitor (Canvas? Jasc "PainShop" Pro? Painter?) port to Linux.
Ok, so the Slashdot take is a bit sensational, and not fact-heavy, but Adobe does have a rather strong hold on the Mac-using image and publishing market. It seems to me that there's only a few things that have to happen for The Gimp [gimp.org] to all but replace Photoshop for this purpose.
Photoshop and Gimp are wide and far apart Performance and Featurewise. I'm a Linux User all the way through - with strong ties to multimedia. Allthough I hate Windows (for good reasons too) and love Linux it's utterly impossible for Linux to reach design power parity with Windows. Even with a full license of Corel Photopaint and CorelDraw for Linux. This is - along with broad range gaming - still a major drawback with Linux. Since you're talking about 'not fact heavy' I'd like to point out that especially Photoshop is a programm that plays in it's own league with no other competitor even close to reaching the same power in grafical editing. Especially Gimp which, while being an astonishing OSS project with unmatched ease of installation and considerable powers, is far away from stuff like the PS rendering filters and scaling/interpolation algorythyms. One of the strengths of all Adobe 'pixel' programms.
That is a very good question you ask. Also due to the point that you define that there *is* a point where critical mass will boost the Linux Desktop usage. For standard and Office usage the Linux Desktop has effectively reached parrity with 'doze about a year ago (with the arival of acceptable browsing in Netscape 6.1) and since then everyone with a PC I've met has said they'll ditch M$ as soon as official support for Win2K ceases. Even Web Editors and other folks you'd usually supect to really not care. German authorities are switching a dime a dozen just now - and germans 'believe' in authorities too. Everybody with a PC knows a geek-friend or two pressing the issue on the superior alternative Linux. On top of that Germany has a subtacial lead in the highest amount of Linux users per capita. Also there is serious pro-OSS lobying going on in the "German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology" ("Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik": http://www.bsi.de/ ) which pops up sort of every odd week in common media. Bottom Line: I highly suspect M$ to start losing considerable ground in Germany within the next 18 months. Then will have the first figures for required 'critical mass'.
And maybe/probably a first peek of 'M$ Linux. *shudder*
My mom should know, you know? She translated top secret Cruise Missile Techmanuals in the early eigthys from englsh to german. She did the same for the naval Harpoon weapons system. After she had protocolled the radiotransfers for various Apollo Missions a decade earlier. She was often even more tech-savy than my father, who worked as an electronics engineer with the NASA, Airbus and some other cream-of-the-crop companies. And she took DOS lessons when me snot-nosed, then 15 year old kiddie and everybody else still was into Sharp PC (make that "Pocket Computer") 1402 and C64 Commodore Homecomputer. She was the one who warned the townhall definitely not to fall for that 'we'll give you the computers for free' deal from McDonnel Douglas, cause the Software would cost a fortune. And that was back in the 80s. She was something like 20 years ahead of time. So I actually felt it quite fitting when I gave her my beloved first fullscale working PC, one of the first Notebooks ever. An IBM PS/2 Note N33 SX with 6 MB (4 MB being a Kingston extension for something like 300$). It's worked perfect with Win3.1 and AmiPro and whatever any normal human being will ever need to get along his entire life. It had a HP Deskjet Portable along with it. Sort of something like the printer that was built for just that very laptop. And when she said "I don't need it anymore" I transferred 50$ to her and told her to take that and buy packaging for half of it and to wrap and pack it up _real__good_. And to take the rest and have a coffee and cake on her loving son. It came in a box with 1 cm room on every face, filled with sad and sorry 2 layers of bubble plastic. Something you get for 5$ max. It's not damaged on the outside, but it won't fire up and I can't find no lose wires and if I take it apart I just know it will be gone for ever andwhy thehelldidn'tshewrapituprealgoodlikeItoldher...sni ffsniff...sooooob. A crying shame, if you ask me. The keyboard is unmatched, even by my workstation im sitting at just now. Just plain a crying shame. Especially when you think that *my* mom *really* should know better. I still get quite mad at my mom when I think of it.
Check the federal german building standards. The laws for german building(s) are *extremely* conservative by american standards. They have every detail, including fundamention, covered thoroughly. I live in a common house from the 50s (early post war) and it's only a little shoddy because they had to stretch the plaster with to much sand just after the war. You can't drill a hole without half the wall plaster coming down. And directly behind it there's brick, concrete and steel that won't budge a millimeter no matter how long you drill it. That's a real pain for hanging up a shelf, I tell ya. Apart from that I'd presume it could easyly last another 100 years with no big fuss. Houses that are 100 - 200 years old are nothing special around here. The only reason you won't find them extremely much is that lots of the german towns where carpet bombed to bits by the allies during the last phase of WW2. BTW: If you want to see buildings that can't even be demolished check some of the old german Nazi bunkers. I know of one huge ugly block of a air defense bunker in Hamburg near the Domplatz that is being reused as an avantgardistic art gallery because they just can't take it down. The last try was something like in the 80s. Then they had severe problems getting picturehooks into the wall. Even with german drills:-). In the end they had to be glued to the walls!
Allthough I do admit that there truly is more than enough occasions for Non-US Westerners to be startled by the breathtakingly common misseducation of US citizens (just the other day I talkend to a woman who visited NYC... my gosh, those stories...), I usally don't fall into the all-out no-holds barred US bashing that sometimes becomes a sport amongst some European intellectuals. That's not so much due to being a former US citizen myself rather than believing in a general existence of common sense throughout hummanity. The DMCA was 10 steps forward into cyberpunk facisim, there was no doubt that one or two or three would have to be taken back. Let's hope Europe get's the drift and we don't end up having a more insane DMCA than the US....
I clicked for the german page. It's hilarious. Like some non-german speaking guy was pulling a leg on the german language. They should have used babelfish. It would have done a better job.:-)
Those are all interressting points you mention that make Inet inattractive both for IPSs and users. But there is more: Don't also forget about DMCA, insane Cybercrime laws (soon also in a european state near you) and the like. What IMHO eventually - in a mid to long term - will happen is this: Other nets will rise again. Think of something remotely like a Fido II with one document standard, a per bandwith payment model, no anonymity and thus serious trouble for anyone who compromises the mutual benefit of such a net. I'd rather join a net like that then be put to jail because somebody hacked my account and spread some killerworm over it.
Same as with everything else. It's hideously bloated and aiming for shareholder value rather than doing the creative fun stuff in between once in a while. Look at ID Soft, my favorite example: I don't like their games very much nor are they extremely innovative, but they've remained the same 15 head team since god know's when and something like twice a decade they release a game they like and their fans like. Just like it should be.
The counterexample: Dynamics and their last hit Tribes2. Great game. Best Multiplayer only game out there. I LOVE it. It rocks and still kicks UT2k3 and whatnot around the block fun and varietywise. UT2k3 will take another 2 years till they've patched the server overview to meet T2s standard. Yet the fan base built up to slow for the VCs so they shut them down. That's what happens when you get greedy. Game developers should do just that without getting greedy: Develope games. And nothing else. Then their products would be better, they would be fewer, they would make a fine living and I as a gamer would be happier and have to spend less money on crap. And I'm shure they would be happier too.
Space, Power, Noise, Setup Time? How about...
on
RAMdisk RAID?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
..one or two of these Briefly said: Kicks any RAID (SCSI or not) and your RAMdisk solution up and down the street. It could be a tad pricey though, as you might wanna suspect.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Well, along with WotC/Hasbro maybe, that is.
There was a simular stunt by GW in the early 90s in germany. When gaming still wasn't completley spoiled by trading cards (Save Gaming! Kill a Magic Player today!). They wanted to force all Fanatasy Shops to take a certain minimum amount of GW games and use a certain amount of display space to sell them. The german retailers got the drift and boykotted GW for more than half a year. After that GW started opening up their own shops.
It had become evident that they wanted to test the market to check for the best locations for GW-only shops. The Warhammer RPG was quite ok, but since these people have been suckers as long as I've been gaming (just as long as I'm into computing - 15 years) I've never really cared anyway.
Bottom line:
Don't buy stuff from GW, there are plenty of other, better gaming products, table tops and such out there!
Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.
And no, that's *not* Perl.
I wonder who got that idea at first.
Things to note:
m /index.htm
If you're into 3D action gaming and not just work/slower gaming you need a good switching speed which almost allways means CRT. There are some iiyama LCD panels that have fast switching and don't blur in fast 3D action (tested by powergamers too!), but they're still not common. Double check before buying.
If you're going to get a CRT instead of a LCD consider a high contrast, brilliant color 'Triniton' class. Be carefull though, those've got 2 thin horizontal lines between the 1st and second and 2nd and 3rd part of the screen (stabilization wires). Some find them extremely disturbing. You won't want that to be so! I personally am just sitting in Front of one (Sony E400 Triniton Flatscreen Tube) and I can see the wires if I look for them, but I've got used to it and find the benefits outway the wirelines.
Otherwise, if you're not into fast/3D gaming, it's easyer: Get an LCD!
iiyama have a good price for top range quality, otherwise I recommend Eizo if you want to be on the safe side. Both are good at CRT and LCD, Eizo being a tad pricier (and better, imho). Allthough the last time I checked (looong time ago), their LCDs where good but had a little yellowish touch to their background light.
BTW: You'll also want an digital conection for your brand new LCD screen - maybe consider a digital grafics output GFX adapter. Converting analog VGA back and forth degrades gfx quality in a noticable manner!
Here are the URLs:
http://www.iiyama.com/
http://www.eizo.co
Another advice: Do not buy cheap junk LCD! It's not just about broken pixels but also the background lighting on bad LCDs that can be unbalanced and screw up the best panel with uneven brightness or darker patches across the screen. Very anoying!
It's a cartoon from 'the worlds best computer mag', the german CT.
The one guys saying:
"Those were professionals at work. They only took the gold, the stockshares and the printer cartridges."
That's the best thing a pentagoner could do for military infrastructure.
Remember? In the end Clifford Stoll was working for the CIA and NSA! in a way, that is. And it didn't hurt him. Or them, for that matter.
I play UT2003, a very fast multiplayer FPS. To me having my Logitech dual optical strung up to the legacy port is crucial. An USB mouse is slower, as the PS/2 signals are better synced, 'closer' to the CPU and waste less ticks per instruction.
I definetly don't want my mouse and keyboard gettin' the hickups in midst of a fast multiplayer hackfest. And be it only for a split second.
I tried USB once, cause I kinda like the idea of hotplugging (I use my printer via USB and it's a breeze), but it just doesn't cut it for signal intensive input devices. No fscking way are serious gamers going to switch to non-legacy mice any time soon.
Since this guy is jacking of on USB, EFI and whatnot of Intel stuff and goes on bullshitting about how legacy is slowing down PC evolution 'cause people don't buy USB mice (who and what gave him that idea???) I have a hard time taking him for granted. He's most certainly a payed-off Intel advocate.
If they want to get a spammer by the balls this is a good way. If they want to seperate important internal and client mail from junkmail they could do better with the more than obvious:
Digital Encryption and Signing.
There is no problem whatsoever in building a mailserver that only accepts a set of allowed public keys and signatures. All you have to to is train your folks to use encryption (easy: only send encrypted msgs) and convince your clients to jump the bandwagon when mailing to you (aka tell them you only accept encrypted and signed mail and explain to them why). That would make for some quality increase of email culture too.
And if the idea spreads spammers will have a hard time.
I don't quite get your question, really. The japanese had PDAs before we did, and they've *allways* had better ones. Especially due to their set of glyphs!
They've also got wristwatch computers and use them in ways useful. Mostly 'cause you get a lot more info on that tiny screen with Kanji and Chinese Symbols than with latin lettering. You can get an entire novel on to something like 100 pages that way.
Go figure.
I just LOVE them. I'm famous amongst mz friends for quoting them...
... and so on.
"Hail to the King, baby!"
"It hurts to be you."
"Hehehe! Wasted."
"What are you? Some bottom beating, scum sucking outie eater?"
"Lucky son of a bitch."
"You're an inspiration for birth control."
The best oneliners in a game ever!
They'll run their search cluster on WinXP.
And figure the poor bastards that have to set the thing up...
OSS 0\/\/nZ.
Better OSes. Better Servers. Better Appservers. Better SSI technologies. Better architecture. Better Desktops. Better in the sense of: Faster, cheaper, more transparent and 'future safe' in ways proprietary can only dream of. There's no doubt.
Yet there's one thing that has a 100% penetration suckage that is only compareable to the worst of commercial software (like Director or Outlook) and that is:
Fonts in X.
The people who built the first Motif Font architecture didn't no squat what they where doing, even messured on a pixelfont level. They might as well should have sticked to console. We'd be better of today without it!
The whole current setup that just barely manages, made up of a bazzilion tidbits from xft ftx sftsxftftxsxstfts bitstreams ftfi (praise them!!!), motif *shatonscreen* pixelfonts, KDEs fontrendering (finally from engineers with more than just a spinal column to think with - Hooray!) and whatnot is so utterly bizzare it makes MS fdisk look like the reference in usability and software design.
I tell you, whatever anybody does, be it uncrapping the given system (it gives me the creeps just thinking of it) or 'reinventing the wheel' (I don't think you can reinvent a pile of shit) it can't make anything worse.
So actually I'm quite thankfull for the attempt and whish Sun good look and strong nerves. They need it.
I really don't get it. This could be done with Flash allready. What's the big deal? That they add a Proxy layer that emulates a living conection for Flash?
A minimum of commom sense whilst building a Flashapp will circle that problem.
It's nothing but marketing hype, if you ask me.
The best laughs are the posted comments. :-)
Absolutely unbelievable!
Wrong.
While I do get your point in the power of OSS and that Gimp could theoretically become a competitor to PS I see no way how this could actually really happen. There are too many factors that would have to be dealt with. It's all about the programmers not interrested in high end grafics editing. Just the same with serious OSS ERP systems. There just to damn boring to programm for those that could do it. Anyone with the skill to yield the power of PS shure won't spend time learning to programm as to bring Gimp up to the bar. They make money using PS. Which is plain and simple old fashion fun too. Just as much as programming too. Look at misery-in-motion for instance. He's on every second Linux Desktop wallpaper. He personally even knows *nix. Yet he uses PS. It would be pointless for him to even attempt to achive the same with Gimp. Same in 3D. Apart from Shigeto Maeda *nobody* with serious artist-only skills uses Blender. They use Lightwave or Cinema. And not KPovmodeler (*shudder*) and PovRay.
Things you'd need for PS-competitive Gimp in detail:
1.) Full Viewport Antialiasing of all elements
2.) Full range suckage free grafics tablet support
3.) Real time layer effects rendering
4.) Top grade interpolation of vectorshapes and scalings (I admit that this is allmost an interesstin CS OSS project - but no f*cking way is that done satisfactory with a plugin - this is topline lowlevel grafics stuff)
5.) Equal variety of integrated filters in equal quality
6.) Interface overhaul / optional decluttering of windows ('all-in-one-interface')
I don't see any chance that someone takes on this biiiig task.
More likeley we'll see a not so fortunate grafics competitor (Canvas? Jasc "PainShop" Pro? Painter?) port to Linux.
Photoshop and Gimp are wide and far apart Performance and Featurewise. I'm a Linux User all the way through - with strong ties to multimedia. Allthough I hate Windows (for good reasons too) and love Linux it's utterly impossible for Linux to reach design power parity with Windows. Even with a full license of Corel Photopaint and CorelDraw for Linux. This is - along with broad range gaming - still a major drawback with Linux.
Since you're talking about 'not fact heavy' I'd like to point out that especially Photoshop is a programm that plays in it's own league with no other competitor even close to reaching the same power in grafical editing. Especially Gimp which, while being an astonishing OSS project with unmatched ease of installation and considerable powers, is far away from stuff like the PS rendering filters and scaling/interpolation algorythyms. One of the strengths of all Adobe 'pixel' programms.
That is a very good question you ask.
Also due to the point that you define that there *is* a point where critical mass will boost the Linux Desktop usage. For standard and Office usage the Linux Desktop has effectively reached parrity with 'doze about a year ago (with the arival of acceptable browsing in Netscape 6.1) and since then everyone with a PC I've met has said they'll ditch M$ as soon as official support for Win2K ceases. Even Web Editors and other folks you'd usually supect to really not care. German authorities are switching a dime a dozen just now - and germans 'believe' in authorities too.
Everybody with a PC knows a geek-friend or two pressing the issue on the superior alternative Linux. On top of that Germany has a subtacial lead in the highest amount of Linux users per capita. Also there is serious pro-OSS lobying going on in the "German Federal Office for Security in Information Technology" ("Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik": http://www.bsi.de/ ) which pops up sort of every odd week in common media.
Bottom Line:
I highly suspect M$ to start losing considerable ground in Germany within the next 18 months. Then will have the first figures for required 'critical mass'.
And maybe/probably a first peek of 'M$ Linux.
*shudder*
Microsoft Linux Distribution
A year ago people would have thought "M$" bought "Linux". But it still is a doable way and wouldn't be that late for them to do it.
My mom should know, you know? She translated top secret Cruise Missile Techmanuals in the early eigthys from englsh to german. She did the same for the naval Harpoon weapons system. After she had protocolled the radiotransfers for various Apollo Missions a decade earlier. She was often even more tech-savy than my father, who worked as an electronics engineer with the NASA, Airbus and some other cream-of-the-crop companies. And she took DOS lessons when me snot-nosed, then 15 year old kiddie and everybody else still was into Sharp PC (make that "Pocket Computer") 1402 and C64 Commodore Homecomputer. She was the one who warned the townhall definitely not to fall for that 'we'll give you the computers for free' deal from McDonnel Douglas, cause the Software would cost a fortune. And that was back in the 80s. She was something like 20 years ahead of time.i ffsniff...sooooob.
So I actually felt it quite fitting when I gave her my beloved first fullscale working PC, one of the first Notebooks ever. An IBM PS/2 Note N33 SX with 6 MB (4 MB being a Kingston extension for something like 300$). It's worked perfect with Win3.1 and AmiPro and whatever any normal human being will ever need to get along his entire life. It had a HP Deskjet Portable along with it. Sort of something like the printer that was built for just that very laptop. And when she said "I don't need it anymore" I transferred 50$ to her and told her to take that and buy packaging for half of it and to wrap and pack it up _real__good_. And to take the rest and have a coffee and cake on her loving son.
It came in a box with 1 cm room on every face, filled with sad and sorry 2 layers of bubble plastic. Something you get for 5$ max.
It's not damaged on the outside, but it won't fire up and I can't find no lose wires and if I take it apart I just know it will be gone for ever andwhy thehelldidn'tshewrapituprealgoodlikeItoldher...sn
A crying shame, if you ask me. The keyboard is unmatched, even by my workstation im sitting at just now. Just plain a crying shame. Especially when you think that *my* mom *really* should know better. I still get quite mad at my mom when I think of it.
Check the federal german building standards. The laws for german building(s) are *extremely* conservative by american standards. They have every detail, including fundamention, covered thoroughly. :-). In the end they had to be glued to the walls!
I live in a common house from the 50s (early post war) and it's only a little shoddy because they had to stretch the plaster with to much sand just after the war. You can't drill a hole without half the wall plaster coming down. And directly behind it there's brick, concrete and steel that won't budge a millimeter no matter how long you drill it. That's a real pain for hanging up a shelf, I tell ya.
Apart from that I'd presume it could easyly last another 100 years with no big fuss. Houses that are 100 - 200 years old are nothing special around here. The only reason you won't find them extremely much is that lots of the german towns where carpet bombed to bits by the allies during the last phase of WW2.
BTW: If you want to see buildings that can't even be demolished check some of the old german Nazi bunkers. I know of one huge ugly block of a air defense bunker in Hamburg near the Domplatz that is being reused as an avantgardistic art gallery because they just can't take it down. The last try was something like in the 80s. Then they had severe problems getting picturehooks into the wall. Even with german drills
But really, who cares? SuSe is french.
SuSE (Software Und SystemEntwicklung) is German.
And they have the sillyest acronym I've seen in years.
Allthough I do admit that there truly is more than enough occasions for Non-US Westerners to be startled by the breathtakingly common misseducation of US citizens (just the other day I talkend to a woman who visited NYC ... my gosh, those stories...), I usally don't fall into the all-out no-holds barred US bashing that sometimes becomes a sport amongst some European intellectuals. That's not so much due to being a former US citizen myself rather than believing in a general existence of common sense throughout hummanity.
The DMCA was 10 steps forward into cyberpunk facisim, there was no doubt that one or two or three would have to be taken back. Let's hope Europe get's the drift and we don't end up having a more insane DMCA than the US....
I clicked for the german page. It's hilarious. Like some non-german speaking guy was pulling a leg on the german language. They should have used babelfish. It would have done a better job. :-)
Those are all interressting points you mention that make Inet inattractive both for IPSs and users. But there is more: Don't also forget about DMCA, insane Cybercrime laws (soon also in a european state near you) and the like.
What IMHO eventually - in a mid to long term - will happen is this: Other nets will rise again. Think of something remotely like a Fido II with one document standard, a per bandwith payment model, no anonymity and thus serious trouble for anyone who compromises the mutual benefit of such a net.
I'd rather join a net like that then be put to jail because somebody hacked my account and spread some killerworm over it.
Same as with everything else. It's hideously bloated and aiming for shareholder value rather than doing the creative fun stuff in between once in a while.
Look at ID Soft, my favorite example: I don't like their games very much nor are they extremely innovative, but they've remained the same 15 head team since god know's when and something like twice a decade they release a game they like and their fans like. Just like it should be.
The counterexample: Dynamics and their last hit Tribes2. Great game. Best Multiplayer only game out there. I LOVE it. It rocks and still kicks UT2k3 and whatnot around the block fun and varietywise. UT2k3 will take another 2 years till they've patched the server overview to meet T2s standard.
Yet the fan base built up to slow for the VCs so they shut them down. That's what happens when you get greedy. Game developers should do just that without getting greedy: Develope games. And nothing else. Then their products would be better, they would be fewer, they would make a fine living and I as a gamer would be happier and have to spend less money on crap. And I'm shure they would be happier too.
..one or two of these :-)
Briefly said: Kicks any RAID (SCSI or not) and your RAMdisk solution up and down the street.
It could be a tad pricey though, as you might wanna suspect.