cs majors here at uiuc.edu use java for our first programming class. in my experience it did a good job teaching basics without needing to understand things like memory usage and data structures.
the *second* class, which teaches data structures and object orientation, is taught in c++.
in my opinion, having gone through it, that order works pretty well.
As a requirement to graduate at UIUC, everyone has to take a non-western humanities class of some sort. Mine was "Introduction to Japanese Culture."
One of the topics discussed in that class was the way Japanese businesses work, a concept that seems fundamentally wrong to most Americans. I can't speak as someone who's been to Japan, but we were told that Japanese corporations value loyalty and unity very highly, especially when compared to their American counterparts. At a Japanese board meeting, the CEO will introduce a new plan for the future, and everyone will show their support for it, regardless of their feelings. Anyone acting as a dissident would corrupt the "Wa" (loosely translates to peace and harmony among people), thus hurting the company.
Along the same lines, workers are expected to keep their jobs and advance through the ranks based on time spent at the company, rather than exceptional work and ingenuity. We were told that a Japanese worker leaving a company for a job at a competing firm would start at the bottom of the ladder in his new job, regardless of past experience. However, that's been changing in the past few years as competition met greater acceptance in the marketplace. It appears that now, those rules are losing their strength, since competing firms will offer pretty nice incentives to draw the best employees away from a company. It's interesting to see the spirit of competition overwhelming the traditional conservative ethics of the workplace (imo).
Of course, that's all based on a class I took. I don't really know anything about Japan.
And I suppose game designers, beta testers, and that guy down the street making a killer game mod have absolutely no use for these? That's like saying only drunks have a use for cars. It makes no sense, just because a small group of people might abuse them doesn't mean that they're not valuable tools to many more.
While I don't like the analogy (drunks aren't the primary users of cars), that's an excellent point I'd not considered. The driver could be a valuable resource to developers, but I'm not sure if that's enough to merit its widespread availability. But I guess that's why there's a poll and the ensuing discussion here.
I would think that the gaming community as a whole is against the availability of these drivers. Just like the Quake2 aiming bots and all the cheats that have been found in counterstrike in the past year(s), its existence makes the game less entertaining for those people who play the game honestly. Only cheaters want this technology to be available.
If Asus can find a way to make it game specific and alert the server that the person is using the driver, it might be accepted, but that seems like a silly thing to try and do from a driver.
My guess is that Eazel really wasn't out to make money with nautilus. Free software for free software doesn't net much money.
The REAL plot was to take all the venture capital they got with buzzwords and invest that...make money with that. It's just too bad they invested most of it in the XFL.
chris
(note: none of the above accusations are based on truth)
...what the limit is where adding more people to a lanparty begins to take away from the fun. It may be personal preference, but I've found that once a party expands to have more people than the game can accomodate, and multiple games start up in parallel, all of a sudden the screaming and taunting is out of sync, and IMO, that's one of the best parts of playing in the same room as your friends. Along those same lines, the larger a party gets, the more likely it is that participants will be required to use headphones, so as not to distract their fellow gamers. And of course, headphones help to kill the idle banter that people like me find so entertaining.
I could see a 32 or 64 person lan, but 3000 is just crazy. Also, with that many machines, I'm assuming each section would have a local game server. Otherwise, wouldn't the 100Mb links throughout the facility get saturated pretty quickly?
Well, I'll probably be accused of trolling, but... who cares about the MHz? For the regular PC user, or even gamers or big number crunchers, the MHz doesn't make that much difference. Especially as far as gamers are concerned, the graphics card is far more important. At this point, there isn't really much difference between a few hundred MHz.
A nice gaming rig still needs a fast processor, or all the power of the graphics card goes to waste. You can put a GeForce3 in a P2-450, but I'll bet you'd see higher framerates with that same video card paired with a top of the line CPU that can run the game and feed the card all the geometry data and such that it needs.
I do, of course, agree that these clock speed increases are largely unnecessary, at least until Doom 3 is released. Allegedly, counterstrike is the most popular online game now, and it uses a modified Quake 2 engine. Year old machines can run Quake 3 pretty well, so there's no need.
Heck, maybe even increasing the voltage to your CPU would make it run cooler...how weird would that be?
We learned in physics that it takes energy to move energy. Leaving a refridgerator open will heat up the room eventually (that was actually an exam question, I remember). So putting the microcoolers on/in the chip might allow the chip to run with more stability at higher voltages and clock speeds, but it won't make the chip run cooler. If anything, overclockers will need even bigger heatsinks and peltiers than they're using now to deal with the heat of the chip plus the heat generated by the microcoolers moving heat from the inside of the chip to the outside.
-ck
nice interviews, but...
on
Linux in 3D
·
· Score: 1
a little more research would've been nice. there are a few small errors that people like slashdot readers would find annoying. mainly, the gimp is presented as a product of redhat software.
However, Red Hat's GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) may provide an open-source alternative that will eventually work for Linux-based studios.
I just found it strange that a mistake like that would come with an article that did such a good job of presenting insightful, interesting comments from the interviews. All of the interview content really made it seem like the reporter was someone who reads slashdot and uses linux for fun.
Unreal Tournament 2 should be coming out at least 6 months before Doom III, should offer better network connectivity, a stronger graphical environment, AND will be more fun to play, as was the case with Unreal Tournament vs. Quake 3 Arena.
Unreal was revolutionary. UT built on that, but only incrementally. I won't comment on fun, since that's completely subjective, but I would be very surprised if Tim S. wrote a better graphics engine than John C. for their (respective) next games.
UT is a good game. It's well designed, and gives its players what they want, but I don't think it's fair to say anything about UT2 being technologically superior to Doom 3. Carmack has the admiration of the/. crowd because he has consistently single-handedly advanced the game market. I wish I had wolf3d, doom, doom2, quake, quake2, quake3, and doom3 on my resume!
Quake 3 offers great networking and an insane leap in graphics capability over all previous games, UT included. That doesn't mean you should worship John Carmack, but his work does deserve some respect, whether you find it more or less enjoyable than competing games.
is put it all on one or two cds. Thinks about it you could just download the tarballs to make Quake 2 work under GNU/Linux they same thing for UT. I seem to remember Carmack saying that Q3 could have done the same thing but they wanted to release a version to be able to track the GNU/Linux adoption. IMHO this was a mistake put it all in one box and make and put a install script on the net (Just like UT has done.) No fuss no muss no overhead added and we GNU/Linux gamers don't have to pay through the nose. This is one of the reasons why I have and enjoy UT and only have the demo for Q3.
It may not have been the case for the initial release (I didn't have linux gl drivers back then), but now, all you need is the latest q3 patch. that contains the executable you need to play the full version. then just copy the.pk3 files over from your windows install of quake, or from the cd, and all of a sudden all the maps and bots are available to you.
So it's the ideal situation that you'd wanted (and I agree is best), albeit maybe not as early as it should have been.
Many of us would like to know if it's still possible to play LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon). Wow, the memories from playing that game. It was the first time I ever player killed someone. You used to be able to break into the hotel at night, and beat up on the lower level characters. You could also sleep with, and eventually marry, the bartenders daughter. She never stayed your wife for long though.
LORD isn't dead. If you look hard enough, it's still possible to find free telnet-in bbs' running games. One of my old worldgroup favourites just started back up and now I can get my fill of killing and working up to the next item in King Arthur's Weapons, or even flirting with the lovely Violet...
I'm not sure the sysop would appreciate a slashdotting of new accounts, so I'll refrain from posting the URL. But from the number of MUD users on there, I'd imagine it wouldn't be too tough to find something free and cool, especially now that all the old sysops are getting cable modems.
The performance of oms is a bit disappointing, imo. Using a 1 GHz athlon with 256 megs of ram, under gnome in redhat 7, the dvd's framerate fluctuates between 20 and 24 fps. After a while, sound tends to desynchronize itself (using the 2.4 kernel's sblive! driver), and about halfway through a dvd, it stops playing.
After reading a post here, I decided to give xine a try. It's much better. Video is smooth, sound syncs better, and I can watch the end of my dvd's!
Regardless, my next card will prolly be a Matrox. Yeah, the 3D is pokey compared to NVIDIA's, but Matrox 2D quality supposedly can't be beat, and the 3D drivers are open. If I bought a GEForce, I'd essentially be buying an overpriced, inferior 2D card.
For some real life perspective on that, my (former) roomate and I have the exact same monitor (Sony G400 (19" Flat Trinitron)). He has a Matrox G400, and I have a Hercules GeForce2 GTS 64 Mb.
In 2d, neither of us can tell a difference in image quality, either in windows or linux (no bsd on here yet).
However, in 3d applications, he finds that sofware rendering is faster for games that aren't supported by Matrox' turbogl. Obviously, that's not cool.
The rumoured 2d difference is negligible in my experience (if it even exists), and nvidia's 3d power just kicks ass over everything else. GeForce2 MX's are now going for ~$99, so I'd think it silly to get something else.
nVidia's driver contains intellectual property owned by other companies -- information that they're legally bound not to release. They've posted this info in the past. They'd like to release an open source driver, but starting from scratch isn't very appealing when they already have a driver that works very well.
I'm running 2.4.0 final with full acceleration on my GeForce 2MX right now.
I was under the impression that the nvidia binary drivers only worked with the 2.2 series kernels. It was working for me with a gf2, but broke when I started playing with 2.4.0-test kernels. Is there anything fancy that needed to be done to make the kernel module work under 2.4?
The company who issued me my MasterCard has a pretty neat program aimed at preventing problems with situations just like this.
You basically get a new credit card number valid for x number of months and with a credit line of y dollars (you specify the details). You use the new number for one purchase and you're done with it.
Now, skip ahead a few months to the day the online retailer's database is cracked. The one-month valid card with the $90 credit line you used is long since expired, so you have no reason to worry.
MBNA (my issuer) isn't alone in providing services like these. I suspect that as cracking continues, you'll see a lot more people paying attention to the extra services their credit card company is trying to tell them about.
Although florida still can't be called CNBC just said that right now Bush is up 4% over Gore in florida right now. Florida is the key to this election, whoever takes florida will win.
Yeah, but then they got the rest of the votes in and accourding to the Florida Secretary of State, Bush is only winning by 569 votes. Automatic recount!
naww..I think that IE has not beaten Netscape by any means. In fact, at our school, we only have netscape, and that is the same at some colleges i have visited. Netscape might not be as popular, but it hasn't lost the browser war.
My job at UIUC entails installing and configuring software to run on our lab machines (nt 4.0). In past years, IE was not installed because it required a lot of special installation steps for which we had no time. So when I started, netscape was the only browser available in our labs. That's since changed, with our staff having more time and (presumably) a less demanding ieak. But Netscape (4.x, at least), is far easier to install in a lab environment, and I suspect that's why you see it. Netscape's prevalence doesn't mean it's a better browser, just easier to maintain.
For the recourd, I use IE when I'm in windows and Mozilla M18 in linux. I can't stand Netscape 4 for any platform.
This seems to me like an issue centered around money (as always). The less people fear broadband, the more likely they are to use it with their machines. To really make their customers feel safe, a broadband provider should at least offer a howto for installing windows security software (zonealarm comes to mind).
But even with a download link saying "this software is not supported by " a large ISP would still have to dedicate a large amount of their tech support time to help people install and configure the software. Since most large companies are cheap bastards when it comes to things like this, it's no suprise that they lie about the security of their network instead.
chris
# turn off icmp replies to confuse skript kiddiez
echo 1 >/proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all
I wish to patent a system for using the diaphragm to expand one's chest cavity, thereby drawing oxygen-laden air into the body. This air would then have its oxygen sent to the brain via the circulatory system so that the user may maintain life.
The litigation protecting this patent will extend its power to include the filling of one's lungs with any substance, so after I collect royalties from everyone on the planet, I'll go after smokers and glue-sniffers.
In the united states, dell has a reputation for selling computers with very good components and good technical support. One main example of that is that Dell ships systems with (albeit on-board) 3Com 10/100 nics. Compaq, HP, and the others I've worked on never seem to put a brand name nic in the machine.
Among my personal job responsibilities, I go to students' dorm rooms and diagnose network problems. During the last schoolyear, I probably saw over 200 HP's with problems and well over 50 Compaq systems (HP had particularly bad network cards last fall). I worked on one Dell system. And I only saw the Dell because its owner was afraid to open it. We put in the nic she'd bought and it was fine.
Dell really does make a good product, and is respected by most techies I know. They tend to have listening ears when they say someting like this.
While their practices may well be unethical, you're overlooking the fact that unlike Microsoft, Creative Labs has consistently put out products that are among the best in their field.
WinNT vs. Linux as a web/ftp/mail/samba server
SBLive! vs. Vortex2 as a soundcard
one of those matchups is a lot closer than the other.
chris
full disclosure: chris uses a sound blaster live! value under win98, win2k, and linux.
Yes, You could use your PC100 SDRAM with the current Tbirds. the current Athlon runs on 100Mhz FSB.
But the 100 MHz fsb doesn't matter. The athlon's memory bus is asynchronous to the cpu bus speed. That's why it's so easy to support either pc100 (cheap upgraders like me) or pc133 (getting a new system?) ram speeds.
The good old Intel BX chipset, on the other hand, uses the cpu's bus speed and some ratios to figure out how fast the agp, pci and ram clocks should go. That's a bit annoying for overclockers which cheap components, and is one of the reasons that the Athlon was well-received by the overclocking community.
Slashdot Mirror
cs majors here at uiuc.edu use java for our first programming class. in my experience it did a good job teaching basics without needing to understand things like memory usage and data structures.
the *second* class, which teaches data structures and object orientation, is taught in c++.
in my opinion, having gone through it, that order works pretty well.
chris
As a requirement to graduate at UIUC, everyone has to take a non-western humanities class of some sort. Mine was "Introduction to Japanese Culture."
One of the topics discussed in that class was the way Japanese businesses work, a concept that seems fundamentally wrong to most Americans. I can't speak as someone who's been to Japan, but we were told that Japanese corporations value loyalty and unity very highly, especially when compared to their American counterparts. At a Japanese board meeting, the CEO will introduce a new plan for the future, and everyone will show their support for it, regardless of their feelings. Anyone acting as a dissident would corrupt the "Wa" (loosely translates to peace and harmony among people), thus hurting the company.
Along the same lines, workers are expected to keep their jobs and advance through the ranks based on time spent at the company, rather than exceptional work and ingenuity. We were told that a Japanese worker leaving a company for a job at a competing firm would start at the bottom of the ladder in his new job, regardless of past experience. However, that's been changing in the past few years as competition met greater acceptance in the marketplace. It appears that now, those rules are losing their strength, since competing firms will offer pretty nice incentives to draw the best employees away from a company. It's interesting to see the spirit of competition overwhelming the traditional conservative ethics of the workplace (imo).
Of course, that's all based on a class I took. I don't really know anything about Japan.
chris
And I suppose game designers, beta testers, and that guy down the street making a killer game mod have absolutely no use for these? That's like saying only drunks have a use for cars. It makes no sense, just because a small group of people might abuse them doesn't mean that they're not valuable tools to many more.
While I don't like the analogy (drunks aren't the primary users of cars), that's an excellent point I'd not considered. The driver could be a valuable resource to developers, but I'm not sure if that's enough to merit its widespread availability. But I guess that's why there's a poll and the ensuing discussion here.
chris
I would think that the gaming community as a whole is against the availability of these drivers. Just like the Quake2 aiming bots and all the cheats that have been found in counterstrike in the past year(s), its existence makes the game less entertaining for those people who play the game honestly. Only cheaters want this technology to be available.
If Asus can find a way to make it game specific and alert the server that the person is using the driver, it might be accepted, but that seems like a silly thing to try and do from a driver.
chris
My guess is that Eazel really wasn't out to make money with nautilus. Free software for free software doesn't net much money.
The REAL plot was to take all the venture capital they got with buzzwords and invest that...make money with that. It's just too bad they invested most of it in the XFL.
chris
(note: none of the above accusations are based on truth)
...what the limit is where adding more people to a lanparty begins to take away from the fun. It may be personal preference, but I've found that once a party expands to have more people than the game can accomodate, and multiple games start up in parallel, all of a sudden the screaming and taunting is out of sync, and IMO, that's one of the best parts of playing in the same room as your friends. Along those same lines, the larger a party gets, the more likely it is that participants will be required to use headphones, so as not to distract their fellow gamers. And of course, headphones help to kill the idle banter that people like me find so entertaining.
I could see a 32 or 64 person lan, but 3000 is just crazy. Also, with that many machines, I'm assuming each section would have a local game server. Otherwise, wouldn't the 100Mb links throughout the facility get saturated pretty quickly?
Well, I'll probably be accused of trolling, but... who cares about the MHz? For the regular PC user, or even gamers or big number crunchers, the MHz doesn't make that much difference. Especially as far as gamers are concerned, the graphics card is far more important. At this point, there isn't really much difference between a few hundred MHz.
A nice gaming rig still needs a fast processor, or all the power of the graphics card goes to waste. You can put a GeForce3 in a P2-450, but I'll bet you'd see higher framerates with that same video card paired with a top of the line CPU that can run the game and feed the card all the geometry data and such that it needs.
I do, of course, agree that these clock speed increases are largely unnecessary, at least until Doom 3 is released. Allegedly, counterstrike is the most popular online game now, and it uses a modified Quake 2 engine. Year old machines can run Quake 3 pretty well, so there's no need.
chris
I was reading hardocp.com, and noticed this link, which looks to be exactly the kind of info you're after.
i 010405a-1.htm
The Making of a Portable Athlon
http://myhome.netsgo.com/wesleycrushr/Hardware/gu
chris
From the article:
Heck, maybe even increasing the voltage to your CPU would make it run cooler...how weird would that be?
We learned in physics that it takes energy to move energy. Leaving a refridgerator open will heat up the room eventually (that was actually an exam question, I remember). So putting the microcoolers on/in the chip might allow the chip to run with more stability at higher voltages and clock speeds, but it won't make the chip run cooler. If anything, overclockers will need even bigger heatsinks and peltiers than they're using now to deal with the heat of the chip plus the heat generated by the microcoolers moving heat from the inside of the chip to the outside.
-ck
a little more research would've been nice. there are a few small errors that people like slashdot readers would find annoying. mainly, the gimp is presented as a product of redhat software.
However, Red Hat's GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) may provide an open-source alternative that will eventually work for Linux-based studios.
I just found it strange that a mistake like that would come with an article that did such a good job of presenting insightful, interesting comments from the interviews. All of the interview content really made it seem like the reporter was someone who reads slashdot and uses linux for fun.
I'll never understand reporters.
-ck
Unreal Tournament 2 should be coming out at least 6 months before Doom III, should offer better network connectivity, a stronger graphical environment, AND will be more fun to play, as was the case with Unreal Tournament vs. Quake 3 Arena.
/. crowd because he has consistently single-handedly advanced the game market. I wish I had wolf3d, doom, doom2, quake, quake2, quake3, and doom3 on my resume!
Unreal was revolutionary. UT built on that, but only incrementally. I won't comment on fun, since that's completely subjective, but I would be very surprised if Tim S. wrote a better graphics engine than John C. for their (respective) next games.
UT is a good game. It's well designed, and gives its players what they want, but I don't think it's fair to say anything about UT2 being technologically superior to Doom 3. Carmack has the admiration of the
Quake 3 offers great networking and an insane leap in graphics capability over all previous games, UT included. That doesn't mean you should worship John Carmack, but his work does deserve some respect, whether you find it more or less enjoyable than competing games.
--ck
is put it all on one or two cds. Thinks about it you could just download the tarballs to make Quake 2 work under GNU/Linux they same thing for UT. I seem to remember Carmack saying that Q3 could have done the same thing but they wanted to release a version to be able to track the GNU/Linux adoption. IMHO this was a mistake put it all in one box and make and put a install script on the net (Just like UT has done.) No fuss no muss no overhead added and we GNU/Linux gamers don't have to pay through the nose. This is one of the reasons why I have and enjoy UT and only have the demo for Q3.
.pk3 files over from your windows install of quake, or from the cd, and all of a sudden all the maps and bots are available to you.
It may not have been the case for the initial release (I didn't have linux gl drivers back then), but now, all you need is the latest q3 patch. that contains the executable you need to play the full version. then just copy the
So it's the ideal situation that you'd wanted (and I agree is best), albeit maybe not as early as it should have been.
--ck
Many of us would like to know if it's still possible to play LORD (Legend of the Red Dragon). Wow, the memories from playing that game. It was the first time I ever player killed someone. You used to be able to break into the hotel at night, and beat up on the lower level characters. You could also sleep with, and eventually marry, the bartenders daughter. She never stayed your wife for long though.
LORD isn't dead. If you look hard enough, it's still possible to find free telnet-in bbs' running games. One of my old worldgroup favourites just started back up and now I can get my fill of killing and working up to the next item in King Arthur's Weapons, or even flirting with the lovely Violet...
I'm not sure the sysop would appreciate a slashdotting of new accounts, so I'll refrain from posting the URL. But from the number of MUD users on there, I'd imagine it wouldn't be too tough to find something free and cool, especially now that all the old sysops are getting cable modems.
-ck
The performance of oms is a bit disappointing, imo. Using a 1 GHz athlon with 256 megs of ram, under gnome in redhat 7, the dvd's framerate fluctuates between 20 and 24 fps. After a while, sound tends to desynchronize itself (using the 2.4 kernel's sblive! driver), and about halfway through a dvd, it stops playing.
After reading a post here, I decided to give xine a try. It's much better. Video is smooth, sound syncs better, and I can watch the end of my dvd's!
One less reason to reboot into windows...
ck
Regardless, my next card will prolly be a Matrox. Yeah, the 3D is pokey compared to NVIDIA's, but Matrox 2D quality supposedly can't be beat, and the 3D drivers are open. If I bought a GEForce, I'd essentially be buying an overpriced, inferior 2D card.
For some real life perspective on that, my (former) roomate and I have the exact same monitor (Sony G400 (19" Flat Trinitron)). He has a Matrox G400, and I have a Hercules GeForce2 GTS 64 Mb.
In 2d, neither of us can tell a difference in image quality, either in windows or linux (no bsd on here yet).
However, in 3d applications, he finds that sofware rendering is faster for games that aren't supported by Matrox' turbogl. Obviously, that's not cool.
The rumoured 2d difference is negligible in my experience (if it even exists), and nvidia's 3d power just kicks ass over everything else. GeForce2 MX's are now going for ~$99, so I'd think it silly to get something else.
nVidia's driver contains intellectual property owned by other companies -- information that they're legally bound not to release. They've posted this info in the past. They'd like to release an open source driver, but starting from scratch isn't very appealing when they already have a driver that works very well.
ck
I'm running 2.4.0 final with full acceleration on my GeForce 2MX right now.
I was under the impression that the nvidia binary drivers only worked with the 2.2 series kernels. It was working for me with a gf2, but broke when I started playing with 2.4.0-test kernels. Is there anything fancy that needed to be done to make the kernel module work under 2.4?
chris
The company who issued me my MasterCard has a pretty neat program aimed at preventing problems with situations just like this.
You basically get a new credit card number valid for x number of months and with a credit line of y dollars (you specify the details). You use the new number for one purchase and you're done with it.
Now, skip ahead a few months to the day the online retailer's database is cracked. The one-month valid card with the $90 credit line you used is long since expired, so you have no reason to worry.
MBNA (my issuer) isn't alone in providing services like these. I suspect that as cracking continues, you'll see a lot more people paying attention to the extra services their credit card company is trying to tell them about.
ck
Although florida still can't be called CNBC just said that right now Bush is up 4% over Gore in florida right now. Florida is the key to this election, whoever takes florida will win.
Yeah, but then they got the rest of the votes in and accourding to the Florida Secretary of State, Bush is only winning by 569 votes. Automatic recount!
Guess it's time for bed, then...
chris
naww..I think that IE has not beaten Netscape by any means. In fact, at our school, we only have netscape, and that is the same at some colleges i have visited. Netscape might not be as popular, but it hasn't lost the browser war.
My job at UIUC entails installing and configuring software to run on our lab machines (nt 4.0). In past years, IE was not installed because it required a lot of special installation steps for which we had no time. So when I started, netscape was the only browser available in our labs. That's since changed, with our staff having more time and (presumably) a less demanding ieak. But Netscape (4.x, at least), is far easier to install in a lab environment, and I suspect that's why you see it. Netscape's prevalence doesn't mean it's a better browser, just easier to maintain.
For the recourd, I use IE when I'm in windows and Mozilla M18 in linux. I can't stand Netscape 4 for any platform.
chris
This seems to me like an issue centered around money (as always). The less people fear broadband, the more likely they are to use it with their machines. To really make their customers feel safe, a broadband provider should at least offer a howto for installing windows security software (zonealarm comes to mind).
/proc/sys/net/ipv4/icmp_echo_ignore_all
But even with a download link saying "this software is not supported by " a large ISP would still have to dedicate a large amount of their tech support time to help people install and configure the software. Since most large companies are cheap bastards when it comes to things like this, it's no suprise that they lie about the security of their network instead.
chris
# turn off icmp replies to confuse skript kiddiez
echo 1 >
I wish to patent a system for using the diaphragm to expand one's chest cavity, thereby drawing oxygen-laden air into the body. This air would then have its oxygen sent to the brain via the circulatory system so that the user may maintain life.
The litigation protecting this patent will extend its power to include the filling of one's lungs with any substance, so after I collect royalties from everyone on the planet, I'll go after smokers and glue-sniffers.
chris
In the united states, dell has a reputation for selling computers with very good components and good technical support. One main example of that is that Dell ships systems with (albeit on-board) 3Com 10/100 nics. Compaq, HP, and the others I've worked on never seem to put a brand name nic in the machine.
Among my personal job responsibilities, I go to students' dorm rooms and diagnose network problems. During the last schoolyear, I probably saw over 200 HP's with problems and well over 50 Compaq systems (HP had particularly bad network cards last fall). I worked on one Dell system. And I only saw the Dell because its owner was afraid to open it. We put in the nic she'd bought and it was fine.
Dell really does make a good product, and is respected by most techies I know. They tend to have listening ears when they say someting like this.
While their practices may well be unethical, you're overlooking the fact that unlike Microsoft, Creative Labs has consistently put out products that are among the best in their field.
WinNT vs. Linux as a web/ftp/mail/samba server
SBLive! vs. Vortex2 as a soundcard
one of those matchups is a lot closer than the other.
chris
full disclosure: chris uses a sound blaster live! value under win98, win2k, and linux.
Yes, You could use your PC100 SDRAM with the current Tbirds. the current Athlon runs on 100Mhz FSB.
But the 100 MHz fsb doesn't matter. The athlon's memory bus is asynchronous to the cpu bus speed. That's why it's so easy to support either pc100 (cheap upgraders like me) or pc133 (getting a new system?) ram speeds.
The good old Intel BX chipset, on the other hand, uses the cpu's bus speed and some ratios to figure out how fast the agp, pci and ram clocks should go. That's a bit annoying for overclockers which cheap components, and is one of the reasons that the Athlon was well-received by the overclocking community.