Did you actually read the article? They talk at length about how the soil is, well, a giant germ-warfare zone. Bacteria are all attacking each other all the time. Two of the strains they pulled out of the soil were resistant to 15 of the 21 antibiotics with which they tested. They explicitly mention that many of the antibiotics are already synthesized by competing bacteria. They believed, though, that it was very unlikely that any bacterium would ever have been exposed to all the drugs they were resistant to. The researchers believe the germs are using existing defense mechanisms to apply to new (to them) antibiotics.
Your assertion that 'because no superbug yet exists, none ever will' is just, well, stupid. That's like saying that nothing ever changes... yet, somehow, we have people now, and we didn't forty or fifty million years ago.
The modern world is unique, from an evolutionary standpoint, so none of the existing bacteria will have evolved to deal properly with it. They're working on that. A superbug is only a matter of time.
Wow, two semesters for four games? Sure, Civilization has always been great, but geeze. They could just skip 2 and 3 completely... 1 and 4 would be enough for the full Civ experience. You could do those in one semester, and study the Total War series in the second.
I haven't heard of War and Peace, though. Is that from EA? And is the peace part any good? That sounds lame.
That used to be true, but I believe the Republicans rammed through a bill that makes credit card debt very hard to escape.
So, in other words, it IS secured... by almost everything you own. But they still get to charge you the obscene interest rates for 'unsecured' debt. Brilliant move by the banks.
The Republicans utterly shafted the public with this one... jumping up and down pointing at 'people abusing the bankruptcy system'. They conveniently ignore the fact that the banks were allowed to charge high interest BECAUSE it's a risky loan.... and that's what credit scores are for.
You could, likely, also store the image on the external drive he was talking about. Restoring from a local drive should be faster than restoring from most networks.
Personally, I'd go for the network option... reimaging isn't that common, particularly on Macs, and it's nice having to carry only a CD to do it, instead of hauling around a drive and a bunch of cables. It's rare that a reimage is so time-critical that a half-hour would matter that much. If I were in a situation where time was THAT critical on machine rebuilds, I'd just keep a whole spare machine on standby.
The farther out an orbit is, the slower it goes. For an object to be permanently behind the Sun from Earth, it would have to be in a mirror image of the orbit. From the point of view of the Sun, it would have to cross the same angle in the sky as Earth did in a given time period.
If it's closer to the Sun, it will be too slow to maintain position, and will fall into a smaller, faster orbit. If it's further out than the Earth is, it will be going too fast to maintain its orbit based purely on gravity, and will rocket off into the deep dark.
The only way an object could be precisely hidden from Earth without being in Earth's mirror-image orbit would be if it were under power. No natural object could be anywhere else.
The most blatant example I've seen of this was when we were hiring in the middle of the dotcom bubble. We needed another body, so we called a few recruiters.
We got some people we liked, but they were all hideously expensive, so we called back and asked for some that didn't cost quite so much.
The next batch of people were all female, black and hispanic. I kid you not.
I thought one of the black guys would be really good; he had a lot of energy and was able to talk with me very well on a technical level. I suggested we hire him. They ignored my advice and hired a (white) lady instead that I thought was much less-qualified. She turned out to be as junior as I thought.
Fortunately, she also worked like crazy, and ended up being a great addition. By now, she may be fairly senior if she stayed with it. So it wasn't a BAD hiring decision by any means, but I thought at the time, and I still think now, that the black guy didn't get the job because of his skin color.
That last part is just a hypothesis, mind you. Nobody ever SAID anything... but when I asked why we weren't giving him the offer, nobody ever gave me a hard reason. There may have been things going on that I didn't know about, but skin color seems a likely explanation.
But asking for 'cheaper people' and getting all women and minorities.... jesus, that was BLATANT. And I especially found it troubling that nobody seemed to even notice.
Giving the same box two IPs is possible, but awkward... most DHCP servers assign on MAC address. You can sometimes change the visible MAC address at the OS level, but not always. The 'normal' approach would be to configure both sides with static IPs, which is something I avoid religiously. I'll often set up static reservations for people who need to be at a particular IP address, but taking them off the DHCP system guarantees I can't roll out changes by tweaking something on the server. Their machine becomes a 'server' instead of a 'client'... something more I have to think about, and potentially get wrong, anytime I need to push a network change. (new nameserver or what have you.)
Plus, there's no guarantee that a particular set of patches won't interfere with the other install on the box. The bootloader environment is often fragile in a dual-boot setup. If you want NT to be the Master Boot Loader, for instance, you can do that. However, at least as of a couple of years ago, you had to copy the LILO boot sector to an XP file, and tell the XP bootloader to load the file from its system partition. So if you update the Linux kernel, you have to rerun LILO, and then you have to overwrite the file on the NT side with the new boot sector. That's hard to automate.
You can dodge that messiness with GRUB (which doesn't change bootloader every time the kernel changes), but GRUB tends to be more complex to administer than LILO does. It's simpler in THIS case, but if you've standardized already on LILO, having that one box with GRUB is, again, something to think about.
Additionally, there are usually hacks in the Linux environment so that you can see the XP side of the box, like loading the NTFS DLL to read the Windows partitions. This sort of thing is also fragile and prone to breakage. Updating softwarebecomes, again, a hit-or-miss proposition. T
Particularly as you scale up to very large environments, you want everything as standardized as possible. When you have a thousand machines to administer, the 10 'weird' installations give you as much trouble as the 990 'normal' ones. Plunking down two desktops with a switchbox turns an installation from one 'weird' machine to two 'N+1' machines. From my perspective, that's a huge win. From the end-user perspective, there's a higher chance of (rare) hardware breakage, and a lower chance of (common) software breakage.
Most users, if you put it like that, will tend to agree that a second box is a good idea.:)
The beauty of the GPL is simple... it grants rights, it doesn't take them away. If you don't accept the terms of the GPL, that's fine, but then you can't distribute GPL software, just as you can't (legally) copy a CD and share it with your friends.
If a court were to somehow state that GPL copyright violation was okay, making it okay to distribute the software without living up to all the provisions of the license, it would be open season on all content. To break the GPL, they would have to break copyright, and that would be exceedingly painful to Big Money.
In other words, it's pretty unlikely to happen. The collateral damage would be far too high.
It's absolutely trivial to admin one more standard Windows or Linux box remotely.
It is NOT trivial to try to remotely deal with a dual-boot environment.
His list of reasons were very solid, backed by experience. Your 'rebuttal' is crap. Twice the machines is HALF the cost... because MOST of the cost of a machine is maintenance. Unless the machines are just appallingly expensive, most secondary computers would pay for themselves by about the fifth manual patch visit. All the user has to do is leave both computers on all the time. Every place I've ever worked has left ALL machines on all the time.
VMWare images are easy to deal with. They look just like the other machines on the network, although perhaps not always running. You don't have to do anything special to support them; they just work. You can think of them like laptops. It's a total non-issue.
If you supervise IT employees, I feel very bad for them. If any of those theoretical employees are reading this: get the hell out. There are sane bosses in the world.
I meant the generic 'you', as in, 'the Slashdot organization'; I apologize for my poor wording.
I don't think it was you specifically... when I was still trying to help, it was, hmm, two years ago maybe? Articles would get posted with obvious/glaring problems. I'd send in email. The article would still be posted with the glaring error intact. And this was stuff like broken or wrong links... not judgement calls, outright errors. They'd generally be fixed later, after going to full release. I was submitting to the 'on-duty-maintainer' link or whatever it was called. (I haven't seen one in a long time, so I'm not sure what the exact wording is.)
About the third time that happened, I just gave up entirely.
Again, I don't think it was you. For a long time, you didn't really submit stories. I've never emailed you directly to my knowledge. (I did mail Hemos once, and he answered me promptly.) It was just the on-duty-editor mailbox that didn't seem to be read.
By the way, just so you know, your 'we won't fix grammar/spelling errors' policy has pushed me yet further away from the site. This was once my homepage, and I was a subscriber... neither is true any longer. It's not just mediocrity, but aggressive mediocrity.
If you want to attract the run-of-the-mill, that's a great policy. But once upon a time, you had the best and brightest here. Slashdot once held some of the best thinking on the net. At this point, I rarely see comments that strike me as unusually insightful. Your former luminaries seem to have mostly left. I now get +5, Insightfuls all the time, but the quality of my posts hasn't gone up at all. Rather, the really smart people are mostly gone, so people mod up my junk instead.
I can't prove a causative link, but the correlation seems a strong one. Your editorial policy is mediocre.. your audience quality seems to reflect that. If my posts are doing this well here, you have a problem.
I used to be a subscriber, and you completely ignored messages I sent in about glaring, obvious mistakes... like, say, the wrong link. So I stopped bothering. (and stopped subscribing.)
I don't know if you've changed procedure, but the OLD procedure was 'ignore all email'.
I was born when JFK was president.. when the thought of a computer in the home, much less a computer with graphic capability, was science-fiction.
My original PS2 died, and I had to replace the whole unit. My XBox developed disk errors, and I bought a replacement drive for it from EBay.
The PS2 failure cost me a lot more money.
(the Gamecube has been flawless, so far.)
Re:Take all the time you need, to get it right
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PS3 In U.S. In November?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I've got all three last-gen consoles, plus a 360.
Of the three older systems, I like the XBox the most; I've preferred the games and the presentation there. Most of the time, when you have the same game on both the PS2 and the XBox, it will load and run fastest, and look the best, on the XBox.
The Gamecube, despite being unpopular, has always impressed me. It hasn't had as many games, but they've always been well-done... fast and easy to play. It's quite undeserving of its red-headed stepchild reputation. If it had used full-size disks, I don't see any reason why it couldn't have done just as well or better than the other two. I think the tiny game disks were its biggest limitation.
The PS2 has always felt sort of hackish. It has good games, but the limitations of the hardware are almost always visible in some way. Look at Shadow of the Colossus, for example... a great game, but the PS2 has trouble animating the Colossi. It's still a great ride, but it's rather marred by the lack of horsepower to do what they wanted.
I haven't seen it, but I've read that the PS2's version of Resident Evil 4 is the best of all three consoles. This surprised me, but I'll take it on faith. If it's true, it means that they are still figuring out ways to make the PS2 run faster, which is pretty cool. The major downside is that there must be, like, 12 guys in the world who can make that hardware sing to that level.
An easier-to-program architecture strikes me as a better bet, most of the time, for most gamers. 'Normal' programmers are in pretty good supply... truly brilliant ones are hard to find. An easy architecture means that most games will look good and play well. An arcane architecture like the PS2 will start to pay off late in its life, but for a long time, the games will probably be better on the consoles with simpler architectures.
The best comparison I can think of is the old Commodore Amiga versus Atari ST debates, way back when... the ST, being simpler, had good software sooner. The Amiga's much better architecture started paying off after a few years, and the software (particularly games) on that system ended up being much, much better. But for the first couple years, the ST looked stronger in many ways.
It strikes me, as a multi-console owner, that the smart thing to do is to buy the easy-to-program system early in the lifecycle, and the tough one near the end, when it's cheap. (assuming you're not a diehard that must own everything, at least.) It's not like a computer... it's not an investment that can pay you back. It's just a toy. You don't really CARE what the architecture is like...all you care about is the games.
As far as actual GAMING goes, the Revolution is likely to be the best out of the gate. The 360 will hit its stride a year or two out, as the programmers learn its medium-complex architecture. The PS3, most likely, won't truly develop for another year or two longer.
Ultimately: wait until there's a game you want, and then buy the console. It's about the GAMING, not about wanking over how "powerful" one's console is.
Remember, too, that the 360 is an actual, shipping product, though still hard to get. You can look at the games NOW and judge for yourself. The PS3 may be better. It's easy to compare the present reality of a shipping product with the possibilities of vapor hardware, and of course Sony would love for you to do that.... anything to keep you from buying a 360. But you can't look at the games on the PS3, can you?
I'm sure I'll end up with a PS3 eventually. I do not think, however, that it's likely to make the bed and do the dishes, and if it's as arcane as the PS2 was, it's not truly going to hit its stride until 2010 or so.
But they're SO SLOW.... just terrible. Even with the cards that are "designed" for RAID5, a RAID5 array is unbelievably slow.
You'll do much, much better with Linux software RAID on a reasonably fast CPU. My Athlon 1900+ server is easily three times faster at RAID5 than the 3Ware card. I actually am still using the 3Ware card as a JBOD controller.
If you want RAID 1 or 10, 3Ware is ok. RAID5 on those controllers is TERRIBLE.
I don't think that's true. I believe ISA was simply reverse engineered, I don't think it was ever licensed by anybody. That was the whole point to the PS/2 and the Micro Channel architecture... it was something IBM actually owned and COULD license. They had this vision of a piece of every PC out there, but MCA was complex, expensive to implement, and then expensive to license on top of that. So, for the most part, the industry just went around them, with EISA (never broadly taken up), VESA Local Bus for graphics, and then eventually PCI. Micro Channel died a quiet death.
I don't think anyone has ever attempted to license VGA, either. NVidia and ATI license out their modern 3D chips to third parties, but basic VGA functionality is, to my best knowledge, a completely free specification, and always has been.
NPR does great in places that are affluent and well-educated. It doesn't do as well in the South; many folks down here are poor and very conservative. Atlanta's WABE does pretty well, but I think it's quite different in the more rural areas. I have exactly one NPR station where I live, for example, yet the AM band is full of conservative stations. Right wing talk radio is all over the dial.
Keep in mind that the OP said 'many', not 'most'. Neither he nor I are asserting that these folks are an actual physical majority. Whatever their actual size, they have a disproportionate influence on the nation as a whole. The country is so evenly split that the politicians have to pander to the extremes to get those swing votes.
Regardless of what the nationwide percentages are, there's a lot of these folks around here.
Because they are powerful here. You hear the same things in the workplace every day. People here really listen to these guys, as sad as it is... they buy the outright lies wholesale. And repeating NPR quotes is not, in general, how to make points.
Myself, I listen to NPR about 90% of the time. It's an oasis of sense in a dry, dry desert.
What's really stupid is that, fundamentally, the two systems aren't that much different. Europeans spend a great deal of money on social welfare, which the conservatives here say makes them non-competitive. I can actually, to some degree, buy that argument.
However, you can't say that America is better in any significant way. Instead of spending huge amounts of money on social programs, we spend absolutely obscene amounts of money on the military. Money we don't even have... we are borrowing incredibly heavily to finance our war machine. (and you people are giving us the wealth to do it!) Both are consumption items; money spent on welfare or the military is just gone, consumed. It can't be used for investment or research. And it's no longer in the taxpayers' pocketbooks for them to use themselves. Our taxes, in essence, is organized theft of the population at gunpoint.... to make more guns.
The only reason the US standard of living isn't a lot lower is because we're borrowing from our children to live high on the hog... we'll have guns AND butter, dammit. Somehow, I don't think our kids are going to be willing to pay our debts.
There's an old aphorism, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." Europe seems kind of stuck in the fish-giving stage.
The US, on the other hand, appears to subscribe to the theory, "If you have the biggest guns, you can just take all the goddamn fish you want."
Nuclear missiles, as presently deployed, are largely ballistic. You don't need much of a guidance system... you throw them way, way up, nearly to orbit, and let gravity take care of the rest.
Have you ever listened to conservative talk radio? That's pretty much the party line with them... I don't think you can call yourself a conservative if you don't look down on the European way of doing things.
I'm living in the South, a transplant from California... and let me tell you, the OP's assertion is pretty darn good.
GPS satellites broadcast a (very weak) radio signal on certain frequencies. If you build a medium-strength radio transmitter blasting out noise on those frequencies, GPS receivers in the vicinity will stop working properly.
You can't easily touch the satellites, but you don't have to.... you just have to broadcast louder than they do.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you actually read the article? They talk at length about how the soil is, well, a giant germ-warfare zone. Bacteria are all attacking each other all the time. Two of the strains they pulled out of the soil were resistant to 15 of the 21 antibiotics with which they tested. They explicitly mention that many of the antibiotics are already synthesized by competing bacteria. They believed, though, that it was very unlikely that any bacterium would ever have been exposed to all the drugs they were resistant to. The researchers believe the germs are using existing defense mechanisms to apply to new (to them) antibiotics.
Your assertion that 'because no superbug yet exists, none ever will' is just, well, stupid. That's like saying that nothing ever changes... yet, somehow, we have people now, and we didn't forty or fifty million years ago.
The modern world is unique, from an evolutionary standpoint, so none of the existing bacteria will have evolved to deal properly with it. They're working on that. A superbug is only a matter of time.
MRSA is a pretty damn good first iteration.
Wow, two semesters for four games? Sure, Civilization has always been great, but geeze. They could just skip 2 and 3 completely... 1 and 4 would be enough for the full Civ experience. You could do those in one semester, and study the Total War series in the second.
I haven't heard of War and Peace, though. Is that from EA? And is the peace part any good? That sounds lame.
That used to be true, but I believe the Republicans rammed through a bill that makes credit card debt very hard to escape.
So, in other words, it IS secured... by almost everything you own. But they still get to charge you the obscene interest rates for 'unsecured' debt. Brilliant move by the banks.
The Republicans utterly shafted the public with this one... jumping up and down pointing at 'people abusing the bankruptcy system'. They conveniently ignore the fact that the banks were allowed to charge high interest BECAUSE it's a risky loan.... and that's what credit scores are for.
Debt is absolutely toxic. Stay out of it.
You could, likely, also store the image on the external drive he was talking about. Restoring from a local drive should be faster than restoring from most networks.
Personally, I'd go for the network option... reimaging isn't that common, particularly on Macs, and it's nice having to carry only a CD to do it, instead of hauling around a drive and a bunch of cables. It's rare that a reimage is so time-critical that a half-hour would matter that much. If I were in a situation where time was THAT critical on machine rebuilds, I'd just keep a whole spare machine on standby.
The farther out an orbit is, the slower it goes. For an object to be permanently behind the Sun from Earth, it would have to be in a mirror image of the orbit. From the point of view of the Sun, it would have to cross the same angle in the sky as Earth did in a given time period.
If it's closer to the Sun, it will be too slow to maintain position, and will fall into a smaller, faster orbit. If it's further out than the Earth is, it will be going too fast to maintain its orbit based purely on gravity, and will rocket off into the deep dark.
The only way an object could be precisely hidden from Earth without being in Earth's mirror-image orbit would be if it were under power. No natural object could be anywhere else.
The most blatant example I've seen of this was when we were hiring in the middle of the dotcom bubble. We needed another body, so we called a few recruiters.
We got some people we liked, but they were all hideously expensive, so we called back and asked for some that didn't cost quite so much.
The next batch of people were all female, black and hispanic. I kid you not.
I thought one of the black guys would be really good; he had a lot of energy and was able to talk with me very well on a technical level. I suggested we hire him. They ignored my advice and hired a (white) lady instead that I thought was much less-qualified. She turned out to be as junior as I thought.
Fortunately, she also worked like crazy, and ended up being a great addition. By now, she may be fairly senior if she stayed with it. So it wasn't a BAD hiring decision by any means, but I thought at the time, and I still think now, that the black guy didn't get the job because of his skin color.
That last part is just a hypothesis, mind you. Nobody ever SAID anything... but when I asked why we weren't giving him the offer, nobody ever gave me a hard reason. There may have been things going on that I didn't know about, but skin color seems a likely explanation.
But asking for 'cheaper people' and getting all women and minorities.... jesus, that was BLATANT. And I especially found it troubling that nobody seemed to even notice.
Giving the same box two IPs is possible, but awkward... most DHCP servers assign on MAC address. You can sometimes change the visible MAC address at the OS level, but not always. The 'normal' approach would be to configure both sides with static IPs, which is something I avoid religiously. I'll often set up static reservations for people who need to be at a particular IP address, but taking them off the DHCP system guarantees I can't roll out changes by tweaking something on the server. Their machine becomes a 'server' instead of a 'client'... something more I have to think about, and potentially get wrong, anytime I need to push a network change. (new nameserver or what have you.)
:)
Plus, there's no guarantee that a particular set of patches won't interfere with the other install on the box. The bootloader environment is often fragile in a dual-boot setup. If you want NT to be the Master Boot Loader, for instance, you can do that. However, at least as of a couple of years ago, you had to copy the LILO boot sector to an XP file, and tell the XP bootloader to load the file from its system partition. So if you update the Linux kernel, you have to rerun LILO, and then you have to overwrite the file on the NT side with the new boot sector. That's hard to automate.
You can dodge that messiness with GRUB (which doesn't change bootloader every time the kernel changes), but GRUB tends to be more complex to administer than LILO does. It's simpler in THIS case, but if you've standardized already on LILO, having that one box with GRUB is, again, something to think about.
Additionally, there are usually hacks in the Linux environment so that you can see the XP side of the box, like loading the NTFS DLL to read the Windows partitions. This sort of thing is also fragile and prone to breakage. Updating softwarebecomes, again, a hit-or-miss proposition. T
Particularly as you scale up to very large environments, you want everything as standardized as possible. When you have a thousand machines to administer, the 10 'weird' installations give you as much trouble as the 990 'normal' ones. Plunking down two desktops with a switchbox turns an installation from one 'weird' machine to two 'N+1' machines. From my perspective, that's a huge win. From the end-user perspective, there's a higher chance of (rare) hardware breakage, and a lower chance of (common) software breakage.
Most users, if you put it like that, will tend to agree that a second box is a good idea.
The beauty of the GPL is simple... it grants rights, it doesn't take them away. If you don't accept the terms of the GPL, that's fine, but then you can't distribute GPL software, just as you can't (legally) copy a CD and share it with your friends.
If a court were to somehow state that GPL copyright violation was okay, making it okay to distribute the software without living up to all the provisions of the license, it would be open season on all content. To break the GPL, they would have to break copyright, and that would be exceedingly painful to Big Money.
In other words, it's pretty unlikely to happen. The collateral damage would be far too high.
It's absolutely trivial to admin one more standard Windows or Linux box remotely.
It is NOT trivial to try to remotely deal with a dual-boot environment.
His list of reasons were very solid, backed by experience. Your 'rebuttal' is crap. Twice the machines is HALF the cost... because MOST of the cost of a machine is maintenance. Unless the machines are just appallingly expensive, most secondary computers would pay for themselves by about the fifth manual patch visit. All the user has to do is leave both computers on all the time. Every place I've ever worked has left ALL machines on all the time.
VMWare images are easy to deal with. They look just like the other machines on the network, although perhaps not always running. You don't have to do anything special to support them; they just work. You can think of them like laptops. It's a total non-issue.
If you supervise IT employees, I feel very bad for them. If any of those theoretical employees are reading this: get the hell out. There are sane bosses in the world.
I meant the generic 'you', as in, 'the Slashdot organization'; I apologize for my poor wording.
I don't think it was you specifically... when I was still trying to help, it was, hmm, two years ago maybe? Articles would get posted with obvious/glaring problems. I'd send in email. The article would still be posted with the glaring error intact. And this was stuff like broken or wrong links... not judgement calls, outright errors. They'd generally be fixed later, after going to full release. I was submitting to the 'on-duty-maintainer' link or whatever it was called. (I haven't seen one in a long time, so I'm not sure what the exact wording is.)
About the third time that happened, I just gave up entirely.
Again, I don't think it was you. For a long time, you didn't really submit stories. I've never emailed you directly to my knowledge. (I did mail Hemos once, and he answered me promptly.) It was just the on-duty-editor mailbox that didn't seem to be read.
By the way, just so you know, your 'we won't fix grammar/spelling errors' policy has pushed me yet further away from the site. This was once my homepage, and I was a subscriber... neither is true any longer. It's not just mediocrity, but aggressive mediocrity.
If you want to attract the run-of-the-mill, that's a great policy. But once upon a time, you had the best and brightest here. Slashdot once held some of the best thinking on the net. At this point, I rarely see comments that strike me as unusually insightful. Your former luminaries seem to have mostly left. I now get +5, Insightfuls all the time, but the quality of my posts hasn't gone up at all. Rather, the really smart people are mostly gone, so people mod up my junk instead.
I can't prove a causative link, but the correlation seems a strong one. Your editorial policy is mediocre.. your audience quality seems to reflect that. If my posts are doing this well here, you have a problem.
That is just WRONG. You are purposely embracing mediocrity.
If you wonder why people are leaving... that's a lot of it.
I used to be a subscriber, and you completely ignored messages I sent in about glaring, obvious mistakes... like, say, the wrong link. So I stopped bothering. (and stopped subscribing.)
I don't know if you've changed procedure, but the OLD procedure was 'ignore all email'.
I was born when JFK was president.. when the thought of a computer in the home, much less a computer with graphic capability, was science-fiction.
My original PS2 died, and I had to replace the whole unit. My XBox developed disk errors, and I bought a replacement drive for it from EBay.
The PS2 failure cost me a lot more money.
(the Gamecube has been flawless, so far.)
I've got all three last-gen consoles, plus a 360.
Of the three older systems, I like the XBox the most; I've preferred the games and the presentation there. Most of the time, when you have the same game on both the PS2 and the XBox, it will load and run fastest, and look the best, on the XBox.
The Gamecube, despite being unpopular, has always impressed me. It hasn't had as many games, but they've always been well-done... fast and easy to play. It's quite undeserving of its red-headed stepchild reputation. If it had used full-size disks, I don't see any reason why it couldn't have done just as well or better than the other two. I think the tiny game disks were its biggest limitation.
The PS2 has always felt sort of hackish. It has good games, but the limitations of the hardware are almost always visible in some way. Look at Shadow of the Colossus, for example... a great game, but the PS2 has trouble animating the Colossi. It's still a great ride, but it's rather marred by the lack of horsepower to do what they wanted.
I haven't seen it, but I've read that the PS2's version of Resident Evil 4 is the best of all three consoles. This surprised me, but I'll take it on faith. If it's true, it means that they are still figuring out ways to make the PS2 run faster, which is pretty cool. The major downside is that there must be, like, 12 guys in the world who can make that hardware sing to that level.
An easier-to-program architecture strikes me as a better bet, most of the time, for most gamers. 'Normal' programmers are in pretty good supply... truly brilliant ones are hard to find. An easy architecture means that most games will look good and play well. An arcane architecture like the PS2 will start to pay off late in its life, but for a long time, the games will probably be better on the consoles with simpler architectures.
The best comparison I can think of is the old Commodore Amiga versus Atari ST debates, way back when... the ST, being simpler, had good software sooner. The Amiga's much better architecture started paying off after a few years, and the software (particularly games) on that system ended up being much, much better. But for the first couple years, the ST looked stronger in many ways.
It strikes me, as a multi-console owner, that the smart thing to do is to buy the easy-to-program system early in the lifecycle, and the tough one near the end, when it's cheap. (assuming you're not a diehard that must own everything, at least.) It's not like a computer... it's not an investment that can pay you back. It's just a toy. You don't really CARE what the architecture is like...all you care about is the games.
As far as actual GAMING goes, the Revolution is likely to be the best out of the gate. The 360 will hit its stride a year or two out, as the programmers learn its medium-complex architecture. The PS3, most likely, won't truly develop for another year or two longer.
Ultimately: wait until there's a game you want, and then buy the console. It's about the GAMING, not about wanking over how "powerful" one's console is.
Remember, too, that the 360 is an actual, shipping product, though still hard to get. You can look at the games NOW and judge for yourself. The PS3 may be better. It's easy to compare the present reality of a shipping product with the possibilities of vapor hardware, and of course Sony would love for you to do that.... anything to keep you from buying a 360. But you can't look at the games on the PS3, can you?
I'm sure I'll end up with a PS3 eventually. I do not think, however, that it's likely to make the bed and do the dishes, and if it's as arcane as the PS2 was, it's not truly going to hit its stride until 2010 or so.
So why not wait and buy it when it's cheaper?
But they're SO SLOW.... just terrible. Even with the cards that are "designed" for RAID5, a RAID5 array is unbelievably slow.
You'll do much, much better with Linux software RAID on a reasonably fast CPU. My Athlon 1900+ server is easily three times faster at RAID5 than the 3Ware card. I actually am still using the 3Ware card as a JBOD controller.
If you want RAID 1 or 10, 3Ware is ok. RAID5 on those controllers is TERRIBLE.
We're also six trillion dollars in debt.
You can have a lot of (false) prosperity for six trillion dollars.
I don't think that's true. I believe ISA was simply reverse engineered, I don't think it was ever licensed by anybody. That was the whole point to the PS/2 and the Micro Channel architecture... it was something IBM actually owned and COULD license. They had this vision of a piece of every PC out there, but MCA was complex, expensive to implement, and then expensive to license on top of that. So, for the most part, the industry just went around them, with EISA (never broadly taken up), VESA Local Bus for graphics, and then eventually PCI. Micro Channel died a quiet death.
I don't think anyone has ever attempted to license VGA, either. NVidia and ATI license out their modern 3D chips to third parties, but basic VGA functionality is, to my best knowledge, a completely free specification, and always has been.
NPR does great in places that are affluent and well-educated. It doesn't do as well in the South; many folks down here are poor and very conservative. Atlanta's WABE does pretty well, but I think it's quite different in the more rural areas. I have exactly one NPR station where I live, for example, yet the AM band is full of conservative stations. Right wing talk radio is all over the dial.
Keep in mind that the OP said 'many', not 'most'. Neither he nor I are asserting that these folks are an actual physical majority. Whatever their actual size, they have a disproportionate influence on the nation as a whole. The country is so evenly split that the politicians have to pander to the extremes to get those swing votes.
Regardless of what the nationwide percentages are, there's a lot of these folks around here.
Because they are powerful here. You hear the same things in the workplace every day. People here really listen to these guys, as sad as it is... they buy the outright lies wholesale. And repeating NPR quotes is not, in general, how to make points.
Myself, I listen to NPR about 90% of the time. It's an oasis of sense in a dry, dry desert.
I agree with you wholeheartedly; we have become a cowardly nation, living in constant fear of everything.
Land of the Bound, Home of the Craven.
What's really stupid is that, fundamentally, the two systems aren't that much different. Europeans spend a great deal of money on social welfare, which the conservatives here say makes them non-competitive. I can actually, to some degree, buy that argument.
However, you can't say that America is better in any significant way. Instead of spending huge amounts of money on social programs, we spend absolutely obscene amounts of money on the military. Money we don't even have... we are borrowing incredibly heavily to finance our war machine. (and you people are giving us the wealth to do it!) Both are consumption items; money spent on welfare or the military is just gone, consumed. It can't be used for investment or research. And it's no longer in the taxpayers' pocketbooks for them to use themselves. Our taxes, in essence, is organized theft of the population at gunpoint.... to make more guns.
The only reason the US standard of living isn't a lot lower is because we're borrowing from our children to live high on the hog... we'll have guns AND butter, dammit. Somehow, I don't think our kids are going to be willing to pay our debts.
There's an old aphorism, "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime." Europe seems kind of stuck in the fish-giving stage.
The US, on the other hand, appears to subscribe to the theory, "If you have the biggest guns, you can just take all the goddamn fish you want."
Nuclear missiles, as presently deployed, are largely ballistic. You don't need much of a guidance system... you throw them way, way up, nearly to orbit, and let gravity take care of the rest.
Have you ever listened to conservative talk radio? That's pretty much the party line with them... I don't think you can call yourself a conservative if you don't look down on the European way of doing things.
I'm living in the South, a transplant from California... and let me tell you, the OP's assertion is pretty darn good.
GPS satellites broadcast a (very weak) radio signal on certain frequencies. If you build a medium-strength radio transmitter blasting out noise on those frequencies, GPS receivers in the vicinity will stop working properly.
You can't easily touch the satellites, but you don't have to.... you just have to broadcast louder than they do.
Um, need I remind you that they broke traceroute in 2.6.14? I'd call that a surprise.