Well, not that they're crappy games, they were indeed revolutionary, and quite a bit of fun, but none of the games they had the kids play were games *I* get urges to go back and play. Classic games aren't necessarily classic because of their fun factor.
If I had to recommend some classic games that I would ask kids to "tolerate", it'd be games like Pitfall, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Galaga, Legend of Zelda, Super Mario 3, King's Quest, Space Quest, heck even Nethack. These games were all a lot of fun, unlike say, E.T.
Doesn't do us much. The bottleneck is at the backbones. Maybe not directly at the backbone, but at my ISP's ISP's uplink to it at least. Broadband to the home is here. Now we need the uplink capacity so that everyone who has broadband can actually use it at something resembling full speed.
Why is it, for example, that a 7Mbps down/1Mbps up ADSL line costs $80/mo, when a 1.54Mbps T1 line costs $800/mo. for non-bursted full bandwidth? Alternatively, why does an ADSL over standard copper get similar upload speeds to a T1 over a dedicated line? At rates like that, how can you NOT expect the ISPs to vastly oversell their uplinks?
The biggest advancement that could come to broadband right now has nothing to do with getting faster access to the home. ADSL/SDSL and Cable do that adequately for now. What is needed is a major enhancement for ISP-level connections. Hopefully a significant price drop combined with a massive bandwidth increase for the ISP's upstream connections would reduce overselling to a minimum.
Heh, you ran into the network driver problem too? Stupid nForce motherboards. I am scrapping my nForce PC as soon as possible and replacing it with something a bit more standard.
The disgusting part is, that many people seem to think the nVidia NIC is just a rebranded Realtek 8139, it's just that all it's identification codes have changed so that rtl8139 and 8139too refuse to recognize it. The Realtek is so common and so cheap that I wouldn't even be remotely surprised.
If that's the case, then here they are putzing around with a closed source Realtek 8139 driver. WTF?
You're amusing. Those "artists" you're so concerned about giving money to are the same fools who signed up for the RIAA's "Get Rock Star Rich" lottery in the first place.
While I agree with your uncompromising anti-RIAA sentiment, I don't really see that as a reason not to give them (the ARTISTS) my money. Just because someone made a naive mistake by signing an album deal doesn't mean they deserve to be screwed from then on. That's the RIAA's job. I don't want to be like them.
Remember, getting an album deal is heavily glorified thanks in no small part to the major labels hyping it up at every opportunity. If you've been offered an album deal, it's your big break. It means your music is superstar quality! These people love your creation so much that they want pay you to make 10 more albums!
Imagine how that feels to a struggling artist who is currently working some shit job just to pay the bills, leaving little money for supporting his/her musical talents. It really does feel like "all my hard work has paid off!" A lot of people make mistakes early in life and regret them later. I don't think those people deserve to be punished any more than they already are.
Actually, I've been getting a lot of "Connection: close" pages. Which is the same way that LiveJournal fails when it is overloaded (which is often). I do believe that Slashdot is experiencing some heavy load for one reason or another but can't really confirm this. Attempted DDoS perhaps?
I beg to differ. I have a Soyo DRAGON too, and yes it certainly does have 5.1 outputs. Assuming you're not interested in using a microphone or line-in (you've lost me already). It's also crappy fake 5.1 audio. Taking two channels of sound and running it through a 'Concert Hall' filter is not what I consider 5.1 audio, sorry. Nor does it have any digital outputs, it uses 3 analog outs to get the 5.1.
There is a group of computer users who is desperately waiting for the death of Creative Labs and the rebirth of computer audio. Marketers would probably call us "prosumers" or "audiophiles". Regardless, we want better audio, we want more features.
The feature I'm waiting for personally? DirectSound/EAX/A3D to DTS encoding. Want your game to sound just like you're in a movie? I know I sure as hell do. nVIDIA's nForce2 APU had a DTS encoder chip, but it seems to have been abandoned. If only they had put that damn APU onto a PCI card, I would've bought three.
If you have a problem with Nvidia's drivers, complain to them, or buy a video card from a vendor who works with the Linux community to provide open-source drivers.
It's not Linux's fault Nvidia's got stupid drivers that need to be connected to the kernel with duct tape.
I would venture that Microsoft Visual Studio and Apple's Project Builder are the only two decent IDEs that I've ever used.
On the other hand, though, Visual Studio is the only Microsoft product I've ever been able to say was decent. Its companion, Visual SourceSafe is quite possibly the worst version control system I've ever seen. I think a source tree spread across multiple floppy disks would be more secure than having your code in a SourceSafe database.
Just how much of a joke it is, even within Microsoft, is quite apparent. There is an option in Visual Studio.NET which has a special annotation which reads (approximately): "Warning, selecting this option with certain source control systems such as Visual SourceSafe can cause data loss or database corruption."
Yeah. IBM doesn't matter. They're only one of the largest technology companies in the entire world, designing and producing 90% of the microchips in the world.
Admittedly in most cases slashdot cares about something, no one else important does.
Well, if you're going to be confrontational about it, let's go:
Feel free to quote meaningless news quips all you like as long as they imply whatever you want to imply.
Me? I'll take some facts and numbers out of official specification documents: The G5 runs between 19 watts of heat dissipation and 42 watts, depending on its clock speed (source as HTML, as PDF)
The Pentium 4 desktop version runs between 60 and 80 watts (source). Indeed, the G5 in its desktop version is in fact competitive with Intel's low power Mobile Pentium 4-M processor for notebooks, which ranges from an impressive 7 watts up to 35 watts (source).
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
P.S. This is the direction in which intel is headed with its Mobile Pentium 4 (not M) processor. 70 watts in a laptop.
No, actually, they're not because the G5 is excessively hot, nor are they for show. They are for maximizing the efficiency of the 9 (VERY low speed) fans in moving heat out of the system with minimal airflow
People assume that because the G5s have a extremely well-engineered cooling solution that the G5 is also extremely hot. It's simply not true, it's all about noise reduction.
Yeah, right. PSP will kick my tiny foldable pocket-sized GameBoy Advance SP out of the water. Sure.
PSP can pry FFTA and Advance Wars and Crystal Chronicles and Metroid Fusion and Lufia and Zelda and my collection of GB/GBC games out of my cold dead hands.
It would be a pain in the ass only being able to code on one machine, but even something as simple as a KVM switch would make it tolerable.
That's stupid. Try working in a world with real deadlines and real programmers. Idealism has its place, but that place does not involve shouting down others because they don't practice things in the "proper" way, and that is the cause of all their ills, despite the fact that it would cause massive outlay of cash and prevents only very unlikely problems in the first place (how many game developers are there? how many have had their entire source tree compromised by an outsider and stolen? insider attacks don't really count for the purposes of this discussion)
Perhaps they should consider replacing Outlook, on the other hand. It's banned on our company network, for good reason. Our firewall protects us from most outside attacks. The only thing that can get in without someone having to go out and download it intentionally is e-mail.
Long-time AC player here too. Asheron's Call had a pretty good community there for awhile. The mostly PVP-free nature of the game helped out a lot I think. If people find it extremely difficult to really hurt one another in a meaningful way, then chances are the griefers will really not get a lot of enjoyment out of it, and will go elsewhere...
PVP can be really enjoyable when done right. But it is so hard to get it right. Even the slightest flaw in an otherwise good PVP implementation will be exploited so badly as to make it a chaotic mess to all but the most extremely hardcore players.
Not only did Sierra On-line games kill you for making a wrong move - they killed you for doing something entirely logical! End result? You creep through the game with a trembling hand, expecting death at every step, stabbing the "Save" key every 30 seconds or so.
So, your school reduced P2P traffic to a fair and reasonable but still usable amount, the result was great, and this is your justification for banning all P2P services completely and utterly?
I do sympathise, actually. My email address is also non-standardly obfuscated in several ALT tags. They should be readable in any non-graphical browser, but without making any clear sense to a traditional spider. (Assuming it even is smart enough to span together multiple alt tags in an attempt to find email addresses)
If it were me, and I was secretly working for the RIAA, I'd just code in a simple client/server protocol that the RIAA could use to delete people's files, entirely seperate from the normal operation of the program itself. This would be much harder to identify as malicious code.
Yeah, that's a good idea you have there. Obviously these guys are amateurs. No security expert ever notices when a program opens a second connection completely unrelated to the operation of the program. If they had done that they would be golden. That sort of thing is so rare that they don't even have a name for it, like they do for things like trojans.... Oh, wait.
Anyone who is too lazy to read the image of my email address I provide rather than just clicking on it probably didn't have anything important to say to me anyway.
There are way too many ridiculously lazy people around these days.
How much are you willing to bet that an Office 97 document can be opened in the current version of Office 6 years from now? How about 12 years? That's a really long time in software terms.
Some of this data should be archived for hundreds of years at least. We can still read ASCII text because that is an open specification with no extensions. We can still read basic HTML 1.0 documents because that is an open specification with no extensions. The same is not-- and probably never will be --true with Microsoft formats.
Yes, it's entirely possible that from now on we'll keep good track of all our data formats, upgrading them when neccesary and we will never lose any data. Unlikely in my opinion, but possible. But why bother taking that chance if you don't have to?
Well, my TV sucks at the moment, so quality doesn't make much difference to me. My TV has composite inputs (not component) only, not even S-Video. How sad is that?
That said, I don't imagine that the difference between a standalone DVD player and the PS2 really amounts to a whole lot more than the difference between the PS2's (at most) S-Video out versus the DVD player's component out. There is no Component out for the PS2 as far as I know (and if there was one, I wouldn't buy it because it would be 99% likely to be made by those consumer fraud kings, Monster Cable. Ugh)
I don't know about X-Box, as I would never touch one of those, but my PS2 has an optical out port and is very much capable of outputting everything right up to full Dolby DTS. I often use it for playing DVDs, and FFX (among other games) also plays 5.1 surround in its FMVs. I would be immensely surprised if X-Box did not have similar features -- X-Box's specs either equal or beat out all the other consoles in every other area, why should sound be any different?
Are you trolling, or have you simply never seen a current-generation console?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, not that they're crappy games, they were indeed revolutionary, and quite a bit of fun, but none of the games they had the kids play were games *I* get urges to go back and play. Classic games aren't necessarily classic because of their fun factor.
If I had to recommend some classic games that I would ask kids to "tolerate", it'd be games like Pitfall, Asteroids, Space Invaders, Galaga, Legend of Zelda, Super Mario 3, King's Quest, Space Quest, heck even Nethack. These games were all a lot of fun, unlike say, E.T.
Doesn't do us much. The bottleneck is at the backbones. Maybe not directly at the backbone, but at my ISP's ISP's uplink to it at least. Broadband to the home is here. Now we need the uplink capacity so that everyone who has broadband can actually use it at something resembling full speed.
Why is it, for example, that a 7Mbps down/1Mbps up ADSL line costs $80/mo, when a 1.54Mbps T1 line costs $800/mo. for non-bursted full bandwidth? Alternatively, why does an ADSL over standard copper get similar upload speeds to a T1 over a dedicated line? At rates like that, how can you NOT expect the ISPs to vastly oversell their uplinks?
The biggest advancement that could come to broadband right now has nothing to do with getting faster access to the home. ADSL/SDSL and Cable do that adequately for now. What is needed is a major enhancement for ISP-level connections. Hopefully a significant price drop combined with a massive bandwidth increase for the ISP's upstream connections would reduce overselling to a minimum.
Heh, you ran into the network driver problem too? Stupid nForce motherboards. I am scrapping my nForce PC as soon as possible and replacing it with something a bit more standard.
The disgusting part is, that many people seem to think the nVidia NIC is just a rebranded Realtek 8139, it's just that all it's identification codes have changed so that rtl8139 and 8139too refuse to recognize it. The Realtek is so common and so cheap that I wouldn't even be remotely surprised.
If that's the case, then here they are putzing around with a closed source Realtek 8139 driver. WTF?
You're amusing. Those "artists" you're so concerned about giving money to are the same fools who signed up for the RIAA's "Get Rock Star Rich" lottery in the first place.
While I agree with your uncompromising anti-RIAA sentiment, I don't really see that as a reason not to give them (the ARTISTS) my money. Just because someone made a naive mistake by signing an album deal doesn't mean they deserve to be screwed from then on. That's the RIAA's job. I don't want to be like them.
Remember, getting an album deal is heavily glorified thanks in no small part to the major labels hyping it up at every opportunity. If you've been offered an album deal, it's your big break. It means your music is superstar quality! These people love your creation so much that they want pay you to make 10 more albums!
Imagine how that feels to a struggling artist who is currently working some shit job just to pay the bills, leaving little money for supporting his/her musical talents. It really does feel like "all my hard work has paid off!" A lot of people make mistakes early in life and regret them later. I don't think those people deserve to be punished any more than they already are.
Actually, I've been getting a lot of "Connection: close" pages. Which is the same way that LiveJournal fails when it is overloaded (which is often). I do believe that Slashdot is experiencing some heavy load for one reason or another but can't really confirm this. Attempted DDoS perhaps?
I beg to differ. I have a Soyo DRAGON too, and yes it certainly does have 5.1 outputs. Assuming you're not interested in using a microphone or line-in (you've lost me already). It's also crappy fake 5.1 audio. Taking two channels of sound and running it through a 'Concert Hall' filter is not what I consider 5.1 audio, sorry. Nor does it have any digital outputs, it uses 3 analog outs to get the 5.1.
There is a group of computer users who is desperately waiting for the death of Creative Labs and the rebirth of computer audio. Marketers would probably call us "prosumers" or "audiophiles". Regardless, we want better audio, we want more features.
The feature I'm waiting for personally? DirectSound/EAX/A3D to DTS encoding. Want your game to sound just like you're in a movie? I know I sure as hell do. nVIDIA's nForce2 APU had a DTS encoder chip, but it seems to have been abandoned. If only they had put that damn APU onto a PCI card, I would've bought three.
The revival of MIDI would also be nice.
If you have a problem with Nvidia's drivers, complain to them, or buy a video card from a vendor who works with the Linux community to provide open-source drivers.
It's not Linux's fault Nvidia's got stupid drivers that need to be connected to the kernel with duct tape.
I would venture that Microsoft Visual Studio and Apple's Project Builder are the only two decent IDEs that I've ever used.
.NET which has a special annotation which reads (approximately): "Warning, selecting this option with certain source control systems such as Visual SourceSafe can cause data loss or database corruption."
On the other hand, though, Visual Studio is the only Microsoft product I've ever been able to say was decent. Its companion, Visual SourceSafe is quite possibly the worst version control system I've ever seen. I think a source tree spread across multiple floppy disks would be more secure than having your code in a SourceSafe database.
Just how much of a joke it is, even within Microsoft, is quite apparent. There is an option in Visual Studio
Yeah. IBM doesn't matter. They're only one of the largest technology companies in the entire world, designing and producing 90% of the microchips in the world.
Admittedly in most cases slashdot cares about something, no one else important does.
This is not one of those cases. Go away, troll.
Well, if you're going to be confrontational about it, let's go:
Feel free to quote meaningless news quips all you like as long as they imply whatever you want to imply.
Me? I'll take some facts and numbers out of official specification documents: The G5 runs between 19 watts of heat dissipation and 42 watts, depending on its clock speed (source as HTML, as PDF)
The Pentium 4 desktop version runs between 60 and 80 watts (source). Indeed, the G5 in its desktop version is in fact competitive with Intel's low power Mobile Pentium 4-M processor for notebooks, which ranges from an impressive 7 watts up to 35 watts (source).
Put that in your pipe and smoke it.
P.S.
This is the direction in which intel is headed with its Mobile Pentium 4 (not M) processor. 70 watts in a laptop.
remember that the one exec who has been selling his stock had filed a plan with the SEC back in January to do so.
Uh, you sound remarkably sure of that for someone who is wrong.
No, actually, they're not because the G5 is excessively hot, nor are they for show. They are for maximizing the efficiency of the 9 (VERY low speed) fans in moving heat out of the system with minimal airflow
People assume that because the G5s have a extremely well-engineered cooling solution that the G5 is also extremely hot. It's simply not true, it's all about noise reduction.
Yeah, right. PSP will kick my tiny foldable pocket-sized GameBoy Advance SP out of the water. Sure.
PSP can pry FFTA and Advance Wars and Crystal Chronicles and Metroid Fusion and Lufia and Zelda and my collection of GB/GBC games out of my cold dead hands.
It would be a pain in the ass only being able to code on one machine, but even something as simple as a KVM switch would make it tolerable.
That's stupid. Try working in a world with real deadlines and real programmers. Idealism has its place, but that place does not involve shouting down others because they don't practice things in the "proper" way, and that is the cause of all their ills, despite the fact that it would cause massive outlay of cash and prevents only very unlikely problems in the first place (how many game developers are there? how many have had their entire source tree compromised by an outsider and stolen? insider attacks don't really count for the purposes of this discussion)
Perhaps they should consider replacing Outlook, on the other hand. It's banned on our company network, for good reason. Our firewall protects us from most outside attacks. The only thing that can get in without someone having to go out and download it intentionally is e-mail.
Long-time AC player here too. Asheron's Call had a pretty good community there for awhile. The mostly PVP-free nature of the game helped out a lot I think. If people find it extremely difficult to really hurt one another in a meaningful way, then chances are the griefers will really not get a lot of enjoyment out of it, and will go elsewhere...
PVP can be really enjoyable when done right. But it is so hard to get it right. Even the slightest flaw in an otherwise good PVP implementation will be exploited so badly as to make it a chaotic mess to all but the most extremely hardcore players.
Not only did Sierra On-line games kill you for making a wrong move - they killed you for doing something entirely logical! End result? You creep through the game with a trembling hand, expecting death at every step, stabbing the "Save" key every 30 seconds or so.
Man have I got the perfect game for you!
So, your school reduced P2P traffic to a fair and reasonable but still usable amount, the result was great, and this is your justification for banning all P2P services completely and utterly?
Huh.
I do sympathise, actually. My email address is also non-standardly obfuscated in several ALT tags. They should be readable in any non-graphical browser, but without making any clear sense to a traditional spider. (Assuming it even is smart enough to span together multiple alt tags in an attempt to find email addresses)
If it were me, and I was secretly working for the RIAA, I'd just code in a simple client/server protocol that the RIAA could use to delete people's files, entirely seperate from the normal operation of the program itself. This would be much harder to identify as malicious code.
... Oh, wait.
Yeah, that's a good idea you have there. Obviously these guys are amateurs. No security expert ever notices when a program opens a second connection completely unrelated to the operation of the program. If they had done that they would be golden. That sort of thing is so rare that they don't even have a name for it, like they do for things like trojans.
Anyone who is too lazy to read the image of my email address I provide rather than just clicking on it probably didn't have anything important to say to me anyway.
There are way too many ridiculously lazy people around these days.
That may be a disgustingly racist and idiotic website, but his "woman english"/"man english" comparison at the end of this page was pretty amusing.
The problem with arson as an economic driver is that you are just taking money out of the insurance companies.
Sweet deal! Where do I sign up?
How much are you willing to bet that an Office 97 document can be opened in the current version of Office 6 years from now? How about 12 years? That's a really long time in software terms.
Some of this data should be archived for hundreds of years at least. We can still read ASCII text because that is an open specification with no extensions. We can still read basic HTML 1.0 documents because that is an open specification with no extensions. The same is not-- and probably never will be --true with Microsoft formats.
Yes, it's entirely possible that from now on we'll keep good track of all our data formats, upgrading them when neccesary and we will never lose any data. Unlikely in my opinion, but possible. But why bother taking that chance if you don't have to?
Well, my TV sucks at the moment, so quality doesn't make much difference to me. My TV has composite inputs (not component) only, not even S-Video. How sad is that?
That said, I don't imagine that the difference between a standalone DVD player and the PS2 really amounts to a whole lot more than the difference between the PS2's (at most) S-Video out versus the DVD player's component out. There is no Component out for the PS2 as far as I know (and if there was one, I wouldn't buy it because it would be 99% likely to be made by those consumer fraud kings, Monster Cable. Ugh)
I don't know about X-Box, as I would never touch one of those, but my PS2 has an optical out port and is very much capable of outputting everything right up to full Dolby DTS. I often use it for playing DVDs, and FFX (among other games) also plays 5.1 surround in its FMVs. I would be immensely surprised if X-Box did not have similar features -- X-Box's specs either equal or beat out all the other consoles in every other area, why should sound be any different?
Are you trolling, or have you simply never seen a current-generation console?