I know a few companies that are moving forward with plans to use opteron or release opteron-based systems that have been until now 100% intel camps. In one case, I know the company *tried* to embrace itanum first, but found to market rather cold to the thought. A few years ago, the market would have folowed intel anywhere with respect to the future/replacement of the x86 family. AMD has really done a top notch job here. For one, the price is such that system makers can enjoy a decent margin, something they haven't been able to do for a loong time with intel based systems. From a technical perspective, it is the logical next step, the power of 64 bit computing without the detriment of lack of legacy. Legacy has left us with some bad things, but it is vital for organizations and companies that cannot afford an intrusive migration. Plus, a lot of the legacy from 386 days no longer necessitates much of an impact to new development as it does with 32 bit systems. Intel dropped the ball. If the market wanted 64-bit computing without caring about compatibility, there is already Alpha, PA-RISC, Sparc, Power4, MIPS, and others. Windows was *not* the reason, the price was. Now with AMD maintaining compatibility and providing the product at a reasonable price target, they will be really hard to beat.
I just want to state right now that I am an American and recognize that CNN, especially as of late, is little more that an outlet for propaganda. The 'patriotic' stories get huge press, while those that point out potential problems are glossed over and presented with such a slant as to minimize damage. I have stopped using cnn at all for news since their coverage of this situation began. I guess being 'unpatriotic' is jsut too dangerous. I am ashamed of an America where expressing a dissenting view is called unpatriotic...
But seriously, apple has been having *SERIOUS* issues with respect to quality and support. The powermac/powerbook isn't so bad for quality, but the flimsy plastic iMacs and iBooks are, well, flimsy as anything. Also, their hardware is lagging behind more and more. Maybe IBM will turn this around with the 970, but right now the FSB and processor clocks of the PowerPCs they use really hurt them. You can only cry 'MHz myth' so long before the clock speed gaps overcome any inherent architectural advantage the PowerPC architecture may have. Despite all this, Apple charges a significant premium on all their hardware. OSX is certainly a beautiful thing, but by itself falls really short of justifying the pricetag of the systems. Windows 2k/XP actually makes an acceptable workstation platform, and servers ideally are run by people who can understand Linux or another reliable system. Now for my personal rant... It seems from my experience that their support is getting crappier and crappier. I have to fight like crazy to get warranty service. Now I call after running diagnostics and determining the issue (VideoRAM test fails with disp/13/2, and no, it is not a GeForce4) and they refuse to even listen unless I agree to pay 49.99. I interupt and actually give exactly what I did and the result, that should be good enough, but no, they insist I pay. A good company does not try to get the customer to pay 50 bucks to give the servicing company a chance to weasel out of warranty service. If Apple truly wants to make sure it is a warranty issue before servicing, they should be willing to walk through the hardware diagnostics for free while under warranty. That doesn't help if it is not a warranty issue. Any company that demands money before even considering warranty service is a company that will not receive repeat business. I thought maybe it was a fluke support guy, but three different reps I reached said the same mantra about making sure it was a hardware issue and I would have to pay, otherwise they wouldn't send a box. I have never dealt with such horrible support in my life, and they are kidding themselves if they think I'll send them another dime of money for anything.
With the space shooters, I would say they are still alive, just implemented in 3D. The example of this that remains most true to the genre would be the first Starfox games. Even the latest preserved it in the sort of 'mini game' of flying. If you want to relax the definition to allow free-flight as opposed to force progress along a path, a great number of 'space-flight' sims could fit the description (A lot of them are dumming down the micromanagement and physics). If you'll make that same allowance for 'side-scrollers' (how many 3d games force a path?), then I would say the space shooter is quite alive.
Puzzle I think he make the argument himself for. They are widely available online for free and don't require high-end hardware to play, so they are popular. Are they huge at the software stores? No, but they are used to draw in advertising revenue and the like, so they continue to be a commercial success.
The light gun has always been a rather small, niche thing for frequent use. How many games were released that supported the 'zapper'? The 'super scope'? How many platforms ever had 'official' light guns that were that popular? Has Sony ever released a non-controller 'official' method of control? Time Crisis series and its kind are pretty much as numerous and popular as Duck Hunt would have been if it was not bundled. Same with the dance pads, maraccas, etc, they are still quite popular in their niche, *especially* DDR.
Text adventures I've always thought were ways of representing a rich world not possible through the power of the computers of the time. Now worlds can be acceptably created in 3D graphics and that has worked well. Could be compared to books vs. movies, except books require no power, and are ultimate in portability and convenience, and with text adventures, whatever is in front of you could just as well play the fancy, 3D graphics world that you are free to explore on your own terms.
With maze games, I really haven't cared much. It is probably safe to say that those games, if they have nothing other than a maze, are dead. A lot of games have mazes in them, but by itself it gets boring now.
VR, well, I agree with the article, except it is not technically 'dying' but rather 'stillborn'.
Edutainment is still alive and kicking. The author may have grown up and doesn't really find anything big happening, but my young nephew loves new games coming out that are edutainment. Far from dead, but the audience of the 80s edutainment has grown out of it.
'Pure' FMV games were a really passing hype when they realized they had the tech to play movies on computers and consoles. They are still quite promiment in other games as a story-telling mechanism, just really really toned down. Those games listed as examples always sucked and never were popular enough to say that genre was ever really 'alive'.
Beat-Em-Up is another one of those things were the definition gets tricky. Does Devil May Cry count? Does Shenmue? Does Tenchu? All these games have a number of characteristics similar to the examples given. Some add a bit more depth and sophistication, but retain the basic principles at their core.
Again, I would say the 'Graphical Adventure' type game is a sticky definition. It is hard to draw the line between those and some RPGs. I'll leave this one alone.
Well, I must again point out that Dubya *lost* the popular vote. Though by a small margin, he still lost and is only in office because of the quirky electoral college system.
And voting for someone does *not* mean that if that official later goes against what you want, you have no right to protest. If someone was elected to an office fairly without him mentioning a capmaign of genocide, and then goes on with a genocide campaign after being elected, are you saying the people got what they asked for? This is an extreme example and not directly referring to the case at hand, but it demonstrates that voting for someone means you have to blindly accept whatever they do.
I would agree that defacement and violent protest are not the best thing and are hypocritical. Defacing these sites would be justified if the media was not covering at all the protests going on, but the protests are getting a decent share of media attention, so hijacking the media is not a justified thing to do. Some outlets are providing heavily biased in favor of the war, but in general there is enough info on the protests that the general populace are aware there are protesters and vaguely know why the protest.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter, those supporting and against the war are set and arguments won't sway them. I'm against the war itsel, but failing peace I can only hope for a quick conclusion with the least amount of collateral damage possible. Meanwhile, the American public in general seems to be dissapointed that there aren't more explosions and stuff. On the radio, some were saying they were all 'hyped up' and 'expecting more fireworks' and 'bigger explosions'. Another station had someone saying, with all seriousness, that "those towel-heads are finally getting what's coming to 'em". I have never been so disgusted at being an American... Oh well, went offtopic at the end.
I've seen this too, and for the out-of-warranty displays, the answer seems to always be 'have to get a new display'. Since it always has been in a business capacity, I just expensed it and didn't care, so it might be possilbe to overcome this. Regardless, shouldn't there be some standard with respect to backlighting form factor and power? The price of the mere backlight has to be significantly lower than that of the actual LCD display, so the possibility of cheaply replacing that one part appeals gratly to me.
Of couse, I'm anxious to see what OLED will bring to the market, but am not holding my breath.
I am not a technician...
on
LCD Overtaking CRT
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· Score: 3, Informative
But from using, I can guess why. With CRT, there is no harm in allowing both high and low resolutions, the lower resolutions are not impacted quality wise just because the monitor can go really high. With LCD displays, it is a much different story, anything smaller than the LCD native resolution will be scaled by the monitor (or shrunk to a smaller area) by some digital scaling technique. While you can have some pretty effective techniques with digital scaling, anything with detail (i.e. text) is a bit distorted and strange looking no matter the technique used. Thus, there is a greater emphasis on having a resolution that would look the best to the most amount of people. Add to this that dead pixels become much more of a problem as the resolution increases (probability increases, and even at 1920x1440 a dead pixel is noticeable), not to mention cost is more directly impacted by the pixel count.
Are all the spams they send out in that format, with ADV: preceding the subject? If so, I think it should not be seen as too bad. What annoys me more are spammers that try everything they can to sidestep filters so the message ends up in front of someone actively trying to not see such things. When a company sends an email helpfully tagging itself as an advertisement, while at the same time providing a *valid* way to contact and be removed from the list, I don't think they should be punished.
Imagine if every credit card offer came with the words CREDIT CARD OFFER stamped on the envelope? Would make things convenient, wouldn't it?
I know, spamming a mailing list like debian-laptop isn't nice, but again I think the spam being helpfully flagged in a reasonable manner as being spam is a nice compromise.
Now for a large business paying by-the-byte, it could be an issue, but relative to othe things going on with a connection, the throughput consumed by spam is rather small in the scheme of things.
Are the old ones. For those seeking to play old DOS games in a modern environment, try dosbox (http://dosbox.zophar.net/) It does better than dosemu in a lot of games, especially with sound.
I just wish I could play Privateer with sound without actually having an ISA sounblaster card... Maybe one day....
Until then, Freelancer is surprisingly close in spirit to Privateer.
Also, to Star Control 2 fans, in case you didn't know (who doesn't by now?), check out http://sc2.sourceforge.net/. A full source release targeted at SDL... Very cool and cross platform.
Well, if you are using freebsd, and accetp the terms of support with FreeBSD, I can find a cheaper 'Linux environment' on redhat's site, ftp.redhat.com, cost: $0.
Red Hat is selling peace of mind and support. Companies that don't want to pay over 50k a year for someone who is decent with Linux or Unix to maintain their servers, but instead 30-40k for someone who can 'wing it', but the support contract is needed for when the cheap administrator's 'winging it' fails. A large number of businesses find this an acceptable compromise. Those who really want 24x7 guaranteed support within a few minutes pay for the real administrators, the rest can settle for a support contract supplementing a mediocre administrator.
If they became very widespread, I would bet that a new TiVo revisions would have 'fix aspect-ratio' as a feature, where it would scale the image to the approriate size and crop out the advertising area. Given a few simple configuration options, such a feature could be quite effective at dealing with all sorts of scroll ad formats. The only means of advertising that cannot be automatically blocked out is product placement, period.
Yes, standard, but considering Microsoft's propensity in pursuing legal action, the agreements bring about a bit more fear to a potential employer. Even after one year if that person went over to a competitor and that competitor soon after released a product very similar to an MS product, I would think that MS may try a bit harder to punish the company that hired the employee, though the employee is no longer in violation of his agreement.
One key factor that should be noted is that fewer and fewer organizations see value in having really large systems in a single unit. They understand the value of rackspace, but clustering technology that can tolerate faults is becoming more and more prevalent. For example, IBM markets a cluster of up to 512, dual 2.8GHz Xeon xSeries linux boxes for high end customers. With Gigabit ethernet and FC storage, it is quite a formidible configuration, especially when you know a node can drop out and the thing work around it. Being able to swap out an entire computer system can mean extra reliability. I've dealt with a few large Sun Enterprise servers that practically nothing could stop and nearly any component fails and you just swap it out and keep moving, but a couple of times I've seen the backplane mess up and then there isn't much of a choice. Now with clustering, you can have a network setup that doesn't have any single piece of equipment as the weak link...
Linux by itself can scale very well, but the x86 architecture can not in a single system, and clustering can bridge the gap. Also, Linux *can* run on those huge systems, but if you buy those Enterprise servers from Sun, why bother changing the OS when Solaris is there?
Run your own postfix server. Then you get account-@server by default forwarded to account@server until you use a forward rule to change that. So account-gta@server is email once you get the game: echo "/dev/null" > ~/.forward-gta
You will never get another email there. If this became widespread, it would be defeated, but for now...
I concur, so many companies are unwilling to set their old titles free, yet at the same time don't want to exert the effort to keep them available for purchase. I *can* understand their not wanting people to know all they have to do is wait a long time and currently new titles will become free.
A few companies keep old titles on hand for download-at-purchase time, which requires very little effort. That is a decent model... Of course, you feel kind of cheated when after downloading it is a royal pain in the ass to get working.
For old dos games, I suggest trying dosemu *and* dosbox (http://dosbox.zophar.net/). They each do better than the other depending on the game. But neither is perfect.
In this case, the free original makes for a great promotion for the series. Series games I can see benefiting greatly from the early titles being free.
Of course, this release and The Ur Quan Masters (re-release of starcon2, sc2.sourceforge.net). Are the ideal way of doing a re-release, free and refreshed for modern platforms. UQM is a tad better as it is open sourced and therefore will evolve to new systems so long as there is any demand.
At least the evolution animation was flawed. The evolution would imply the linear progression, but at fork points, stable releases with lower numbers were released well after development versions of higher numbers. For it to be the most accurate, you would have to only follow a kernel series to the fork point, then switch to the newer fork and ignore releases in the stable fork. 2.0.38 was released well after 2.1.0, though the animation suggests 2.1.0 as the immediate succesor to 2.0.38
I know, it's just eye candy, but thought I'd call them on it since no one else has...
One, the system has no way to tell a non-ABI breaking dll change from an ABI-breaking one, so it always duplicates and wastes space. This is really bad, clutter is worsened.
Adding to that, how do security fixes work? Typically they replace the library with a new, ABI compatible fixed dll. Now the insecure one will be archived? I presume there will be some mechanism for actually replacing a dll at install time, but will that be available to third parties? Would MS get control over security updates?
Unix has it right, keep a symlink with the generic name for compile-time *only*, and maintain the actual libraries for runtime with the version numbers as the filenames. This way, a library installer has an intelligent recourse as to specifying what kind of update it is, ABI compatible or not.
You underestimate the effects of that. Sure, a few promiment programs can do that without issue. However, if every single binary on your system did this, the effect would be horrible.
Quick example. ls is 68k by itseIf you add the size of all libraries it links to, it becomes about 1.7 MB on a typical system. I would say ls is pretty consevative in terms of linking, so I'll pretend everything in/bin would be that size. 110 binaries in/bin. Currently du shows about 4.6M in there. This would grow to 187 MB, and that is using the conservative ls as a comparison, some would be significantly larger. In files that would be in/usr/bin and/usr/X11R6/bin, things get worse as they have more complex linking requirements, libraries that are a lot larger and do a lot more. If every miniscule GUI required to be the size of itself plus system plus whatever toolkit they chose to use, drive space would suck.
Not only is drive space not a moot point, but this has implications in terms of consistency and interoporability. If applications all used internal versions of GUI libraries, there would be absolutely nothing enforcing any sort of consistency and complex inter-process communication becomes really difficult due to version mismatches.
The issue here is that may be the case for MS released.dlls, but they ultimately have no control over what third party applications install, so a vendor could release a dll that breaks ABI compatibility, and it wouldn't be MSs fault.
I think under other systems, it is done right. The library is installed with full version number in the name, with a symlink with the generic name pointing to the most recently installed. At compile time, programs use the link to determine what to link against, but at runtime link with the verbosely named library instead. This way, it only maintains true version differences separately, as opposed to minor, non-ABI changing differences.
I'm wondering if it was more a disagreement between the vendor and Lindows. If MS was trying to strongarm things here, you could bet your ass that they wouldn't be shipping 'naked' laptops.
The toolkits have been LGPLed and the applications in Gnome GPLed for a loooong time....
QT is GPL or Trolltech license only, as they want businesses that intend to profit to be able to do so, they just need to cough up Trolltech's fair share in doing so.
Businesses don't want to share in terms of money if they don't have to, but generally don't mind contributing incidental bugfixes and feature enhancements to the common code, so they can look like good citizens without impacting their bottom line in the least bit. They may fix behavior of a certain widget or even contribute a nice enhanced file selector, and while necessary for their shipping product, the product loses no value by having those trivial bits free and open. This is why businesses love GPL perhaps even better than the BSD license, they can look to be a lot more generous then their true motives. Nothing stops them from doing this with BSD, but people would be more inclined to wonder if they would change their mind one day if they achieved market penetration, as it would be perfectly legal for them to do so.
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I know a few companies that are moving forward with plans to use opteron or release opteron-based systems that have been until now 100% intel camps. In one case, I know the company *tried* to embrace itanum first, but found to market rather cold to the thought. A few years ago, the market would have folowed intel anywhere with respect to the future/replacement of the x86 family. AMD has really done a top notch job here. For one, the price is such that system makers can enjoy a decent margin, something they haven't been able to do for a loong time with intel based systems. From a technical perspective, it is the logical next step, the power of 64 bit computing without the detriment of lack of legacy. Legacy has left us with some bad things, but it is vital for organizations and companies that cannot afford an intrusive migration. Plus, a lot of the legacy from 386 days no longer necessitates much of an impact to new development as it does with 32 bit systems. Intel dropped the ball. If the market wanted 64-bit computing without caring about compatibility, there is already Alpha, PA-RISC, Sparc, Power4, MIPS, and others. Windows was *not* the reason, the price was. Now with AMD maintaining compatibility and providing the product at a reasonable price target, they will be really hard to beat.
Easy:
Unemployed
This is why I like .ogm.... one file... all the streams, including the text ones.. For sub/dub combinationn, it cannot be beat...
But then why say 'optical brightness'. The word 'sees' can be ambiguous, but optical brightness is very clearly something in the visible spectrum...
I just want to state right now that I am an American and recognize that CNN, especially as of late, is little more that an outlet for propaganda. The 'patriotic' stories get huge press, while those that point out potential problems are glossed over and presented with such a slant as to minimize damage. I have stopped using cnn at all for news since their coverage of this situation began. I guess being 'unpatriotic' is jsut too dangerous. I am ashamed of an America where expressing a dissenting view is called unpatriotic...
But seriously, apple has been having *SERIOUS* issues with respect to quality and support. The powermac/powerbook isn't so bad for quality, but the flimsy plastic iMacs and iBooks are, well, flimsy as anything. Also, their hardware is lagging behind more and more. Maybe IBM will turn this around with the 970, but right now the FSB and processor clocks of the PowerPCs they use really hurt them. You can only cry 'MHz myth' so long before the clock speed gaps overcome any inherent architectural advantage the PowerPC architecture may have. Despite all this, Apple charges a significant premium on all their hardware. OSX is certainly a beautiful thing, but by itself falls really short of justifying the pricetag of the systems. Windows 2k/XP actually makes an acceptable workstation platform, and servers ideally are run by people who can understand Linux or another reliable system.
Now for my personal rant...
It seems from my experience that their support is getting crappier and crappier. I have to fight like crazy to get warranty service. Now I call after running diagnostics and determining the issue (VideoRAM test fails with disp/13/2, and no, it is not a GeForce4) and they refuse to even listen unless I agree to pay 49.99. I interupt and actually give exactly what I did and the result, that should be good enough, but no, they insist I pay. A good company does not try to get the customer to pay 50 bucks to give the servicing company a chance to weasel out of warranty service. If Apple truly wants to make sure it is a warranty issue before servicing, they should be willing to walk through the hardware diagnostics for free while under warranty. That doesn't help if it is not a warranty issue. Any company that demands money before even considering warranty service is a company that will not receive repeat business. I thought maybe it was a fluke support guy, but three different reps I reached said the same mantra about making sure it was a hardware issue and I would have to pay, otherwise they wouldn't send a box. I have never dealt with such horrible support in my life, and they are kidding themselves if they think I'll send them another dime of money for anything.
With the space shooters, I would say they are still alive, just implemented in 3D. The example of this that remains most true to the genre would be the first Starfox games. Even the latest preserved it in the sort of 'mini game' of flying. If you want to relax the definition to allow free-flight as opposed to force progress along a path, a great number of 'space-flight' sims could fit the description (A lot of them are dumming down the micromanagement and physics). If you'll make that same allowance for 'side-scrollers' (how many 3d games force a path?), then I would say the space shooter is quite alive.
Puzzle I think he make the argument himself for. They are widely available online for free and don't require high-end hardware to play, so they are popular. Are they huge at the software stores? No, but they are used to draw in advertising revenue and the like, so they continue to be a commercial success.
The light gun has always been a rather small, niche thing for frequent use. How many games were released that supported the 'zapper'? The 'super scope'? How many platforms ever had 'official' light guns that were that popular? Has Sony ever released a non-controller 'official' method of control? Time Crisis series and its kind are pretty much as numerous and popular as Duck Hunt would have been if it was not bundled. Same with the dance pads, maraccas, etc, they are still quite popular in their niche, *especially* DDR.
Text adventures I've always thought were ways of representing a rich world not possible through the power of the computers of the time. Now worlds can be acceptably created in 3D graphics and that has worked well. Could be compared to books vs. movies, except books require no power, and are ultimate in portability and convenience, and with text adventures, whatever is in front of you could just as well play the fancy, 3D graphics world that you are free to explore on your own terms.
With maze games, I really haven't cared much. It is probably safe to say that those games, if they have nothing other than a maze, are dead. A lot of games have mazes in them, but by itself it gets boring now.
VR, well, I agree with the article, except it is not technically 'dying' but rather 'stillborn'.
Edutainment is still alive and kicking. The author may have grown up and doesn't really find anything big happening, but my young nephew loves new games coming out that are edutainment. Far from dead, but the audience of the 80s edutainment has grown out of it.
'Pure' FMV games were a really passing hype when they realized they had the tech to play movies on computers and consoles. They are still quite promiment in other games as a story-telling mechanism, just really really toned down. Those games listed as examples always sucked and never were popular enough to say that genre was ever really 'alive'.
Beat-Em-Up is another one of those things were the definition gets tricky. Does Devil May Cry count? Does Shenmue? Does Tenchu? All these games have a number of characteristics similar to the examples given. Some add a bit more depth and sophistication, but retain the basic principles at their core.
Again, I would say the 'Graphical Adventure' type game is a sticky definition. It is hard to draw the line between those and some RPGs. I'll leave this one alone.
Well, I must again point out that Dubya *lost* the popular vote. Though by a small margin, he still lost and is only in office because of the quirky electoral college system.
And voting for someone does *not* mean that if that official later goes against what you want, you have no right to protest. If someone was elected to an office fairly without him mentioning a capmaign of genocide, and then goes on with a genocide campaign after being elected, are you saying the people got what they asked for? This is an extreme example and not directly referring to the case at hand, but it demonstrates that voting for someone means you have to blindly accept whatever they do.
I would agree that defacement and violent protest are not the best thing and are hypocritical. Defacing these sites would be justified if the media was not covering at all the protests going on, but the protests are getting a decent share of media attention, so hijacking the media is not a justified thing to do. Some outlets are providing heavily biased in favor of the war, but in general there is enough info on the protests that the general populace are aware there are protesters and vaguely know why the protest.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter, those supporting and against the war are set and arguments won't sway them. I'm against the war itsel, but failing peace I can only hope for a quick conclusion with the least amount of collateral damage possible. Meanwhile, the American public in general seems to be dissapointed that there aren't more explosions and stuff. On the radio, some were saying they were all 'hyped up' and 'expecting more fireworks' and 'bigger explosions'. Another station had someone saying, with all seriousness, that "those towel-heads are finally getting what's coming to 'em". I have never been so disgusted at being an American... Oh well, went offtopic at the end.
I've seen this too, and for the out-of-warranty displays, the answer seems to always be 'have to get a new display'. Since it always has been in a business capacity, I just expensed it and didn't care, so it might be possilbe to overcome this. Regardless, shouldn't there be some standard with respect to backlighting form factor and power? The price of the mere backlight has to be significantly lower than that of the actual LCD display, so the possibility of cheaply replacing that one part appeals gratly to me.
Of couse, I'm anxious to see what OLED will bring to the market, but am not holding my breath.
But from using, I can guess why. With CRT, there is no harm in allowing both high and low resolutions, the lower resolutions are not impacted quality wise just because the monitor can go really high. With LCD displays, it is a much different story, anything smaller than the LCD native resolution will be scaled by the monitor (or shrunk to a smaller area) by some digital scaling technique. While you can have some pretty effective techniques with digital scaling, anything with detail (i.e. text) is a bit distorted and strange looking no matter the technique used. Thus, there is a greater emphasis on having a resolution that would look the best to the most amount of people. Add to this that dead pixels become much more of a problem as the resolution increases (probability increases, and even at 1920x1440 a dead pixel is noticeable), not to mention cost is more directly impacted by the pixel count.
Are all the spams they send out in that format, with ADV: preceding the subject? If so, I think it should not be seen as too bad. What annoys me more are spammers that try everything they can to sidestep filters so the message ends up in front of someone actively trying to not see such things. When a company sends an email helpfully tagging itself as an advertisement, while at the same time providing a *valid* way to contact and be removed from the list, I don't think they should be punished.
Imagine if every credit card offer came with the words CREDIT CARD OFFER stamped on the envelope? Would make things convenient, wouldn't it?
I know, spamming a mailing list like debian-laptop isn't nice, but again I think the spam being helpfully flagged in a reasonable manner as being spam is a nice compromise.
Now for a large business paying by-the-byte, it could be an issue, but relative to othe things going on with a connection, the throughput consumed by spam is rather small in the scheme of things.
Are the old ones. For those seeking to play old DOS games in a modern environment, try dosbox (http://dosbox.zophar.net/) It does better than dosemu in a lot of games, especially with sound.
I just wish I could play Privateer with sound without actually having an ISA sounblaster card... Maybe one day....
Until then, Freelancer is surprisingly close in spirit to Privateer.
Also, to Star Control 2 fans, in case you didn't know (who doesn't by now?), check out http://sc2.sourceforge.net/. A full source release targeted at SDL... Very cool and cross platform.
Well, if you are using freebsd, and accetp the terms of support with FreeBSD, I can find a cheaper 'Linux environment' on redhat's site, ftp.redhat.com, cost: $0.
Red Hat is selling peace of mind and support. Companies that don't want to pay over 50k a year for someone who is decent with Linux or Unix to maintain their servers, but instead 30-40k for someone who can 'wing it', but the support contract is needed for when the cheap administrator's 'winging it' fails. A large number of businesses find this an acceptable compromise. Those who really want 24x7 guaranteed support within a few minutes pay for the real administrators, the rest can settle for a support contract supplementing a mediocre administrator.
on if there will be along the way a Super Matrix: Champion Edition? Maybe the viewer could go through the movie from the perspective of an agent...
If they became very widespread, I would bet that a new TiVo revisions would have 'fix aspect-ratio' as a feature, where it would scale the image to the approriate size and crop out the advertising area. Given a few simple configuration options, such a feature could be quite effective at dealing with all sorts of scroll ad formats. The only means of advertising that cannot be automatically blocked out is product placement, period.
Yes, standard, but considering Microsoft's propensity in pursuing legal action, the agreements bring about a bit more fear to a potential employer. Even after one year if that person went over to a competitor and that competitor soon after released a product very similar to an MS product, I would think that MS may try a bit harder to punish the company that hired the employee, though the employee is no longer in violation of his agreement.
One key factor that should be noted is that fewer and fewer organizations see value in having really large systems in a single unit. They understand the value of rackspace, but clustering technology that can tolerate faults is becoming more and more prevalent. For example, IBM markets a cluster of up to 512, dual 2.8GHz Xeon xSeries linux boxes for high end customers. With Gigabit ethernet and FC storage, it is quite a formidible configuration, especially when you know a node can drop out and the thing work around it. Being able to swap out an entire computer system can mean extra reliability. I've dealt with a few large Sun Enterprise servers that practically nothing could stop and nearly any component fails and you just swap it out and keep moving, but a couple of times I've seen the backplane mess up and then there isn't much of a choice. Now with clustering, you can have a network setup that doesn't have any single piece of equipment as the weak link...
Linux by itself can scale very well, but the x86 architecture can not in a single system, and clustering can bridge the gap. Also, Linux *can* run on those huge systems, but if you buy those Enterprise servers from Sun, why bother changing the OS when Solaris is there?
Run your own postfix server. Then you get account-@server by default forwarded to account@server until you use a forward rule to change that. So
account-gta@server is email
once you get the game:
echo "/dev/null" > ~/.forward-gta
You will never get another email there. If this became widespread, it would be defeated, but for now...
I concur, so many companies are unwilling to set their old titles free, yet at the same time don't want to exert the effort to keep them available for purchase. I *can* understand their not wanting people to know all they have to do is wait a long time and currently new titles will become free.
A few companies keep old titles on hand for download-at-purchase time, which requires very little effort. That is a decent model... Of course, you feel kind of cheated when after downloading it is a royal pain in the ass to get working.
For old dos games, I suggest trying dosemu *and* dosbox (http://dosbox.zophar.net/). They each do better than the other depending on the game. But neither is perfect.
In this case, the free original makes for a great promotion for the series. Series games I can see benefiting greatly from the early titles being free.
Of course, this release and The Ur Quan Masters (re-release of starcon2, sc2.sourceforge.net). Are the ideal way of doing a re-release, free and refreshed for modern platforms. UQM is a tad better as it is open sourced and therefore will evolve to new systems so long as there is any demand.
At least the evolution animation was flawed. The evolution would imply the linear progression, but at fork points, stable releases with lower numbers were released well after development versions of higher numbers. For it to be the most accurate, you would have to only follow a kernel series to the fork point, then switch to the newer fork and ignore releases in the stable fork. 2.0.38 was released well after 2.1.0, though the animation suggests 2.1.0 as the immediate succesor to 2.0.38
I know, it's just eye candy, but thought I'd call them on it since no one else has...
This solution is bad...
One, the system has no way to tell a non-ABI breaking dll change from an ABI-breaking one, so it always duplicates and wastes space. This is really bad, clutter is worsened.
Adding to that, how do security fixes work? Typically they replace the library with a new, ABI compatible fixed dll. Now the insecure one will be archived? I presume there will be some mechanism for actually replacing a dll at install time, but will that be available to third parties? Would MS get control over security updates?
Unix has it right, keep a symlink with the generic name for compile-time *only*, and maintain the actual libraries for runtime with the version numbers as the filenames. This way, a library installer has an intelligent recourse as to specifying what kind of update it is, ABI compatible or not.
You underestimate the effects of that. Sure, a few promiment programs can do that without issue. However, if every single binary on your system did this, the effect would be horrible.
/bin would be that size. 110 binaries in /bin. Currently du shows about 4.6M in there. This would grow to 187 MB, and that is using the conservative ls as a comparison, some would be significantly larger. In files that would be in /usr/bin and /usr/X11R6/bin, things get worse as they have more complex linking requirements, libraries that are a lot larger and do a lot more. If every miniscule GUI required to be the size of itself plus system plus whatever toolkit they chose to use, drive space would suck.
Quick example. ls is 68k by itseIf you add the size of all libraries it links to, it becomes about 1.7 MB on a typical system. I would say ls is pretty consevative in terms of linking, so I'll pretend everything in
Not only is drive space not a moot point, but this has implications in terms of consistency and interoporability. If applications all used internal versions of GUI libraries, there would be absolutely nothing enforcing any sort of consistency and complex inter-process communication becomes really difficult due to version mismatches.
The issue here is that may be the case for MS released .dlls, but they ultimately have no control over what third party applications install, so a vendor could release a dll that breaks ABI compatibility, and it wouldn't be MSs fault.
I think under other systems, it is done right. The library is installed with full version number in the name, with a symlink with the generic name pointing to the most recently installed. At compile time, programs use the link to determine what to link against, but at runtime link with the verbosely named library instead. This way, it only maintains true version differences separately, as opposed to minor, non-ABI changing differences.
I'm wondering if it was more a disagreement between the vendor and Lindows. If MS was trying to strongarm things here, you could bet your ass that they wouldn't be shipping 'naked' laptops.
The toolkits have been LGPLed and the applications in Gnome GPLed for a loooong time....
QT is GPL or Trolltech license only, as they want businesses that intend to profit to be able to do so, they just need to cough up Trolltech's fair share in doing so.
Businesses don't want to share in terms of money if they don't have to, but generally don't mind contributing incidental bugfixes and feature enhancements to the common code, so they can look like good citizens without impacting their bottom line in the least bit. They may fix behavior of a certain widget or even contribute a nice enhanced file selector, and while necessary for their shipping product, the product loses no value by having those trivial bits free and open. This is why businesses love GPL perhaps even better than the BSD license, they can look to be a lot more generous then their true motives. Nothing stops them from doing this with BSD, but people would be more inclined to wonder if they would change their mind one day if they achieved market penetration, as it would be perfectly legal for them to do so.