I'd love to see the numbers that show that the "the intrinsic SCSI advantage has been disproven", even once.
Sure, in raw throughput and seek times, IDE drives can perform on a par with SCSI. Certainly, the bus speed is up in nearly the same realm now... but you forget the part that's important to USEFUL speed. A SCSI subsystem will generally operate at about 10% CPU utilization during saturated disk I/O, the same load on an IDE subsystem will suck up closer to 80% of your CPU cycles.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have my CPU doing something more useful than copying bits back and forth between a bus and a controller all day.
IDE is the best way to go if you're building a network file server -- it's MUCH cheaper, just as fast, and the file server by definition has nothing better to do than sit and do disk I/O (and network I/O), but I'd rather have a SCSI disk in my workstation any day.
As far as the CPU arms race... of course faster is better. But it's a question of what you're doing. Do I need a 1GHz+ cpu for moving windows and icons around on my desktop? No (well, I *shouldn't*, if Bill f***ing Gates didn't write such crappy code!).
The things that need fast CPU's are the same things that have always needed fast CPU's. Scientific calculation, Graphics manipulation, and of course Games. I suspect the last one is the only REAL reason most people "NEED" faster CPU's. Of course, I also think game designers lost their way back in the early 90's. I certainly think many of the games from the 1MHz C64 were more original and indeed more entertaining than much of what's on the shelf now. There are exceptions, but most of the "innovations" in gameplay today involve glitter without substance (see Quake 3 vs. Quake 1 -- much better graphics, but gameplay? atomsphere? storyline?).
Show me a game today that has the same level of immersion as Zork, and I'd happily go buy it and whatever hardware it needed to run. UT2003 looks great, and I'm sure will be fun... but it and the 2GHz CPU and $300 graphics card it wants won't engulf me the way a text game I can play on my PDA can.
No matter how fancy the hardware and how clever the graphics rendering, it'll never be as fast or as natural as your own imagination.
There are several good reasons we should all hope that the PC architecture stays healthy for games (be in Windoze or Linux or Plan 9).
Others have mentioned the idea of consoles acquiring keyboards, mice, full internet connections, and monitor plugs. I would like to point out that this would be a nightmare for console developers! One of the really appealing things about developing for the Playstation (or ANY console, possibly excluding the X-Box) is the fact that there is no ambiguity of hardware. You don't have to code your game to care if user A has hardware T&L support, but user B only has Z-buffering. Then you'd have 2-button, 4-button, 6-button joysticks to map, does the user's monitor support 1280x1024x32, and is that at 70Hz or 85Hz?
Currently, a PS2 developer knows exactly what the hardware can do, and exactly what it will look like when running. His choices are... 50Hz PAL or 60Hz NTSC, Steering Wheel or no? Keyboard or no? That's about it.
Half the reason PC games are so buggy (besides having to run atop the Windoze OS) is the fact that they have to support so MANY different configurations of hardware. If I'm writing a game, I can assume you have a mouse... but not nescessarily a scroll wheel. I can assume you have at least 640x480x16-bit these days, but not that you can do full-screen anti-aliasing. I can assume you probably have sound, but maybe only 2-channel. So, I can either code for the lowest common denominator -- or I can put LOTS of cases in to ask if you have this, this, this, or this.
ANOTHER reason the PC's health is important to all of us here, is Linux. If the PC game market starts to dry up, so does the home sale market. Without home sales, PC's go from being cheap commodity hardware to being expensive business machines again. Now, linux starts to dry up too, since the supply of cheap computers to run it on goes away.
Not a pleasant prospect.
As much as I **HATE** PC hardware, I don't wish for it to go away. I hope (foolishly) that it might eventually mutate into something stable and logical... but until then, I'll always have one sitting under my desk -- wishing it was as cool as a Mac, or an Amiga.
What happens when a government organizaton decides to use Microsoft products and has to shut down all operations for N days because:
a) The authentication server at MS crashes or screws up so all the Windows XP desktops can't phone home to get Bill's permission to run?
b) One of those lovely IIS virii starts sending sensitive documents out to every pr0n vendor in anyone's mail spool?
c) The DRM system determines that a critical bit of multimedia presentation, which might decide the creation of a policy, can't be shown since it hasn't been authorized and therefore MIGHT be a violation of someone's copyright?
If you thought your Government was lazy before... man!
Right and Wrong are only mutually exclusive in today's simplistic binary computers, and the minds of some simplistic people.
Should you be able to pop the hood on my car in the Wal-Mart parking lot to see how my car is different than yours? No.
Should you be able to pop the hood on my car to extinguish a fire in the engine compartment and keep it from destroying the vehicle, anything in it, and probably the vehicles on either side? Yes, please do!
But... you still "broke into" my car. Do you want to go to prison and enjoy the tender thrusts of Bubba for your good deed?
If you have an ftp server running on your machine, and I happen to notice it, I feel perfectly justified in connecting to that server. If it allows anonymous logins, I feel fine looking around. If not, I won't sit there and try to guess passwords, as that *would* be wrong.
Yet, if after logging in as an anonymous user, I manage to get access to your filesystem, I would feel obliged to leave you a note, telling you that maybe / isn't the best anonymous ftp root. Would you send me to prison for that? If so, I'd suggest you seek counseling, since you obviously have some personal insecurities and ego problems beyond your server.
The DMCA is an abomination. It creates a situation where one can be punished without actually doing anything beyond research. How many people who just happen to own Sharpies bought them with the criminal intent of listening to protected music CD's? Most of my sharpies pre-date the DMCA, yet I am technically a criminal because they COULD be used to circumvent copy-protection??? All of you out there who have screwdrivers -- you can use those to unscrew poorly secured locks. There, now I'm in trouble for disseminating information about circumvention, and you're all screwed for having the tools. Go Law!
> I don't like butterscotch, but I do like vanilla. You don't see friggin holy wars over pudding, though, do you?
Bah! Vanilla is a weakling neutral flavor that smacks of Switzerland! Now tapioca is a REAL pudding, one that you can FEEL going down. When the tanks roll in to clense away the vanilla pudding factory, you know where I'll be standing!
Sorry, couldn't help it... the image was just too funny.:)
Yup, but alas I live in a representative democracy, so I don't get an opportunity to vote on most things before they've become laws and are already being used. It's much harder to repeal an established law than to defeat a pending bill.
Out of curiosity, how many people got a chance to offer any input on the Patriot Act before it became a law? When the government decides to push something through quickly, most people don't have an opportunity to voice their opinions to their congressmen before it's already too late.
Ok, let's see. "United" Linux wants to make a single unified base for linux distributions, what once upon a time was called a "standard". Good for them!
Since too many people have different ideas about what the "right" way is, and many of them have the technical ability to say "Fine! I'll go build my own linux distro, with blackjack, and hookers!"... they decided to make a corporate entity and just say "I am the law!" instead of continuing to argue with everyone else. Ummm, ok.
Now, they decide that all that GPL stuff, which each of the members has -- at one time or another -- spoken lots of pretty poetic phrases of support, and did much clapping of hands for... is not really as important as making their new business model/standards base work. Sooo, they ignore the SPIRIT of the GPL, even if they might or might not be violating the letter of the law. Ewwwww.
Let me ask this question of the United Linux folks... what are you afraid of? The traditional reason people DON'T embrace the GPL is fear that if their code (and thus algorithms) became public knowledge, others might do it better than they have, and thus steal away their market share. The assumption there is that service means nothing, and that the original developers would rather sit back and drink beer than continue to advance and evolve their product.
Why should I buy into the "United Linux" front? What do they do for me? It sounds to me like they want to be RedHat, but NONE of them individually have the talent, ability, or balls to make a better Redhat than RedHat. Don't get me wrong, I don't like RedHat... I actually like SuSE -- but that's why I don't want UL. I don't want SuSE, SCO, and all the others to become the next RedHat. We don't need it. We need cooperation, not more "our way or the highway" attitude.
Grow up people. If you don't like the GPL, then go rewrite things for yourself and call it something other than linux... call it ulix, call it moneyix, but play nice or go away.
Got your attention, did I? Got your flamethrowers all fired up and ready? Good. (Call it a TROLL if you want, but not until you read the rest of it, eh?)
First of all, I'd like to see some proof that the alleged "kiddie porn" really involved minors. If it did, then those responsible should be thrown in jail and the keys should be lost. I have no wish to see anyone go though that kind of abusive hell.
The reason I say this is that the definition of child pornography is probably not the same as what most people think when they hear the term. I suspect the image that jumps to mind for MOST people is of very young (less than 10 years old) kids, but that's usually not what's being targeted. By definition, it is any act of a sexually explicit nature (including suggestive poses, but NOT simple nudity) involving a person under the legal age of majority (which is generally 18, but varies from place to place). Think about that. How many of you know people in their 20's who still get carded at the bar? How many 19 year-olds could pass for 14 or even younger if they have the right anatomy, makeup and lighting? For that matter, how many 14 year-olds are well-developed enough to pass for 17 or 18 at a glance?
Add to this the incredible advances in digital image processing, and you might realize that it's not THAT hard to make someone look far younger than they are. Even childlike. So, if the people in the images were not underage, or perhaps not even real (fully computer generated images are not impossible), whose rights have been violated?
Secondly, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, where will this end? Today, a bunch of people make laws to force ISP's and backbone providers to block horrible kiddie porn and keep everyone safe from the horror. Next year, a bunch of other people decide that it's important to block access to information regarding nuclear materials, explosives, or other terrorist paraphenalia, on the grounds that it allows and encourages Terrorist Activities and is a threat to National Security... and this censorship has a precedant, the blocking of kiddie porn.
A bit later, information about the principles of nuclear fission, operation of automatic weapons, the history of the middle east are censored or "adjusted" to make them safe for consumption by the public. This is done under the guise of further efforts in the War On Terrorism, and earlier rulings are used to show that these too are perfectly legal, as they are nearly identical to the prior bans.
In one generation, we could very easily lose the one thing that so many people in the last 200 years have fought and died for... freedom. If you let them take the little things now, you can be sure they'll take bigger things later, until you have nothing left.
Once upon a time, I could walk into a library anywhere in the country and sit down to research any topic I was curious about. I would have no fear of persecution (other than raised eyebrows from the library staff, perhaps), and would be content in the knowledge that even if someone tried to bury my work or hide the truth, at least the law protected my right to ask questions (even if the answers were classified).
Then came the DMCA. Now, asking the wrong questions might land you in the circumvention camp, and curiosity might earn you jail time. Next, an unfortunate terrorist attack allows the door to swing open on Homeland Security -- talking too loudly about the wrong things might land you in the conspiracy to commit acts of terror camp, in which case you might disappear for a long time. Now, I'm being "protected" from things that tend to distrub "most" people. If I happen to stumble across an image of a naked little girl running from a burning building, SOMEONE might decide that it's porn and so I can no longer see that historical print from a war that was fought before I knew what "war" meant.
Do we *REALLY* want to go back to the idea of Government Approved Information? Is it really more comforting to know that anything you read, see, or hear has been sanitized by Uncle Sam to be sure you don't see anything upsetting? Is everyone THAT thin-skinned, that we have to hide behind lawyers, lobbyists, and laws?
The distribution of kiddie porn is NOT the problem. The creation of it IS. Let's stop making laws that do a poor job of curing the symptom and try enforcing already existing laws that might cure the sickness. Go after the people MAKING the stuff!
Ah yes, the wonderful MS Sidewinder joystick... that would be the one that comes with drivers specifically for Windows 2000 which DO NOT WORK with Windows 2000!
Great product.
Of course I'd trust my sensitive corporate R&D data to a Microsoft Switch, given their proven track record on security.
In a traditional (wired) LAN, if I were to install rj45 jacks in the outside surface of my building, at ground level, and someone walked up with a laptop and plugged in AND my dhcp server happily gave them an address and allowed them to use my resources -- is that really "theft"?
I would say no. I have (perhaps unwittingly) created a public terminal and allowd people to share my network. Perhaps I didn't *intend* for unauthorized people to use it (maybe I had the idea that a salesman could stop by and download something without having to go up to their office, or some other equally stupid idea), but then again, they didn't *steal* the ip-address, nor did they *force* my router to accept their traffic. I gave it to them without bothering to validate their identity... Stupid me.
Now, how is wireless access any different? If you are stupid enough to setup a WAP without restricting it by MAC address and/or using encryption, then you essentially have an open rj45 port on your wall. It would be theft if I asked for a dhcp address, you said no, and then I tried to hack my way in anyways.
As another analogy, if I leave my car open and you get in and drive off, you're stealing because you deprived me of the use of my car. If I leave my car open and you hop in the back seat without my permission, you're guilty of trespass. If, on the other hand, you see a city bus with has no place to pay fares and no indications that you need to do so, how is it stealing if you get on and ride it? It costs the city money to cart your butt around... but if they're too dumb to charge you or keep you off, that's their fault.
An unprotected WAP is like a big flashing neon VACANCY sign. Please don't try to pass YET MORE STUPID ANAL-RETENTIVE LAWS to make it a punishable-by-finger-removal crime... instead, learn how to secure your network and make your sysadmin do their job!
No worries until your hardware breaks down and you have to buy shiny new DRM-Enabled hardware you mean?
Oh, you mean you doubt that our friendly PC motherboard/video-card/sound-card manufacturers would make hardware that only accepted input from sources that have a valid DRM certificate?
Let's see.. if they did that, M$ would love them and promote them and offer them incentives. The government would love them and give them tax incentives or duty-free imports for building hardware that will work with the new hardware-DRM bios requirements. The RIAA/MPAA would love them and off free media to bundle as promo material.
If they DON'T do this, a bunch of geeks who make up about 1% of the potential revenue stream will priase them for their Open Source policies... and they'll make no money and crash-and-burn just like all the other dot-bombs.
I didn't think they were being childish, I just assumed that by using Micro$oft and Windoze, you protect yourself from the sea of lawyers who might come after you for trademark infringment. Afterall, when you corrected the fellow, you didn't specify it correctly as Microsoft(TM).
Let me ask you this... was there ANY doubt or confusion in your mind about the entity which was referenced by the slang "Windoze" term? If so, then you have a legitimate complaint, as the corruption introduces confusion. The purpose of language is to share ideas in a clear manner. If everyone understands what the slang refers to, then it is not really a problem for the intended audience is it?
Of course, the archaeologists who unearth the terrabytes of slashdot posts in years to come (the only useable record of this period of time, since it isn't DRM protected...yet), may be a bit bewildered (or perhaps they'll burn it as blaspheme since the Church of Microsoft(TM) would not look kindly upon it).
This is to try and convince the SETI@Home people to produce binaries for the Dreamcast and PS2 linux enviornments, isn't it?
If we hack the X-Box to run linux, won't that be an i386 platform console that can run seti@home? And then we can say, "See! People *DO* want to run seti@home on their game consoles. When can we get dreamcast and PS2 binaries to download?"
Does no one think of the effect their frivolus patents might have on the industry as a whole? So, let's assume Woolston does indeed have an enforceable patent, and he manages to sue eBay and either get a big chunk of cash, or force them to change their business model to avoid infringement... does this guy realize the potential damange he can cause to the industry as a whole? Does he care?
Probably not. Personal greed is the American Way. It's more important that I get MY piece of the pie, even if it means letting the rest of the pie spoil -- at least I got mine!
eBay is one of those *few* examples of a pure internet business that is doing well and making money. Given the state of the economy today, I feel this kind of attempt is almost criminal in intent. It's pretty close to sabotage for this corner of the technology sector, way to go! Make sure your lawyer asks for the firstborn of their CEO too!
I'm pretty certain that the exact implementation details of eBay's software (the algorithm, if you will) are pretty different than what this guy envisioned for this baseball trading-card exchange system. I'm quite sure that had he written software to do this, there would be no copyright infringement between the two... and there's the problem. He's claiming an overly broad patent on an idea, when he probably only has the right to an algorithm. Yeah, *I* had ideas about online trading in the 1980's too buddy, so did half the people who had even heard of the internet (or how about fidonet? or just plain bbs's???). Anyone remember the online trading games from those days? If anything, THOSE probably pre-dated his scheme -- they just didn't handle real products.
I got called to pay my "voting tax" next week (Jury Duty), and I would dread being on a case like this. While common sense would have me acquit on the basis that a broad "patent" like this is a mockery of the Office, and that even if eBay were abusing it with intent, I'd still not have much sympathy for this guy -- it's still the law, and I'd still have to vote according to what the law says, not what it means (since laws are no longer by the people -- if you need a lawyer to explain a law, there's something WRONG!).
Re:Netscapes Market Share Down to 3.4%
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Netscape 7.0 is Out
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· Score: 1, Flamebait
"because everyone sets their browser ident to IE..."
I've tried Netscape (Hell, I used Mosaic -- now THAT was evil), and Mozilla, and Opera, and Konquerer, and a few others I can't recall. ALL of them have good features, and NONE of them works as consistantly as the dread M$ IE.
I don't mean consistant as in "doesn't crash" (although Mozilla is sometimes a close competitors for cph (crashes-per-hour)), I mean that in IE I can almost always see the page without broken parts.
Why is this? Two reasons. One: IE is MUCH simpler to configure, in fact most of the configuration is done for you by M$, or via their install-on-demand style of plugins. Mozilla tries to do this, but it usually fails because the plugin doesn't configure just right. Two: web admins who write pages for a browser, will usually write it so that it works in IE. If it also works in other browsers, cool.. but it's seldom as high on their priority list.
So, my choices are... stick with the browser that I know works, and is likely to continue to work for as long as M$ holds a lion's share of the market (or the sun goes dark) -- but live with the taint of EVIL(TM) caused by using this horrible totalitarian product, or endure having a growing number of web sites that I either can't read, or can't enjoy properly -- but get to be C001 in the eyes of the Open Source Gods?
BZZZT, wrong answers.
Standards are ONLY useful if people follow them. This means web page authors MORE than browser programmers! What good is it to say "My browser is 100% W3C compliant" when the pages you're going to use it on are not? That's like saying your electrical device is 100% compliant with the US 110VAC/60Hz standard while you're travelling in Europe! I'd love to see all the M$ extensions go away, I'd love to see real standards compliance out there... I'd love to see the internet as clean as it was before commercialization too, and I'd love to see all pollution solved, and everyone enjoying the beautiful shiny world we all share... but... I don't have those kinds of drugs.
Until someone makes a web browser that correctly handles ALL the content that IE does, I have no incentive to switch. I don't care about cutesy skins, or sounds. I don't care about spam blocking (I have a proxy to do that). I don't feel the NEED to have the source code (although I probably would recompile IE for the Athalon if I could). I just want to look at the stupid pages and see what's on them without having to spend half my life fiddling with various config files and downloading even more helper-apps that only work half the time.
So, if you want Mozilla/Netscape to survive and grow, stop whining about web pages written for IE... they're a fact of life and will NOT change anytime soon. Yell at the Mozilla/Netscape developers to come down off the high-horse of "Standards" and make their product work in the real world, where we all have to live. If you really MUST have a standards compliant mode, make it an option (TurnOffEvilMSExtensions = true). I know it's impossible to keep up with the M$ standards shell game, but ignoring them doesn't make the web any easier to use.
That's the beauty of the DMCA... It doesn't have to really make sense.:)
If I add the line "This post is copy-protected by my YOU-NO-READ-ME encryption tags", and then you go ahead and read it anyways, you have technically circumvented my copy protection (which asked you not to read it), and are in violation of the DMCA.
So, basically, if you put any kind of restriction into a software (or hardware!) product, and someone gets around that restriction (even accidentally!), they are in violation of the DMCA. It has nothing to do with actual duplication, it's just the circumvention that matters.
Any questions citizen? Please place your tongue on the screen for identification...
"It enables finely tuned licensing terms and conditions, such as limited 24-hour play, a set number of plays over a given time, or an outright purchase licence that lets the viewer watch the video or listen to music whenever they want. It will also be used to bind content to a specific PC, so that it cannot be redistributed"
Oh, this also means that when your internet connection is down, OR the "certificate clearinghouse" server is down, you can't listen to music or watch videos that you already purchased, since the certificate can't be verified. We all know how stable M$ servers are, and of course the certificate server will have to run M$ software, or it couldn't trust itself.:)
Oh, and while I'm grumbling... today's DMCA thought: Does humming a copyrighted tune violate the DMCA? You are using your neurons to circumvent copy-protection and allow others to hear the tune without paying...
And just who does the government think they are in deciding what is or is not "correct information"?
As far as I'm concerned, there is no "correct" answer to religion. By definition, it's what YOU (personally) believe, and has nothing to do with any organizations that might think they somehow represent your worldview.
I, personally, would like to see organized religion stop sucking away all my tax money (by claiming excemption, all the churches force ME to pay higher taxes and carry THEIR part of the burden). I recognize that some few of them do good work for the community, but I also see constant remodelling of perfectly good church buildings, and very nice cars the clergy drive.
Government is not God, although perhaps the Australian government thinks it is...
I don't hate them for that. In fact, I only marginally dislike them for the abomination that is RPM. The people I really hate are the ones who decided that following the "Linux Filesystem Standard" meant dumping EVERY SINGLE PACKAGE into/usr!
C'mon people... BSD has it right here. You put core OS packages into/usr, and you put extras that you install yourself info/usr/local. RedHat (and almost every other linux distro) tries to make everything seem as if it is "part of the OS", which makes it a nightmare to maintain.
RPM could be nearly as good as the ports system (although rpm -ba blah.spec will never be as elegant as "make install"), but it needs to allow for easier integration with non-rpm'd elements. Besides, it's hard to go wrong with the defacto standard of configure; make; make install.
Oh, and/sbin is for STATIC binaries... you know, the things you need to have work when you screw up and hose libc? What good are dynamically linked binaries in/sbin????
Add to this the fact that most FPS fans seem to be intent on moving as FASTASPOSSIBLEATALLTIMES, since very few games reward you for being careful (Thief was one).
Prediction only works well for things that are, well, predictable! Large vehicles are great for this, because their ability to turn and change speed quickly is usually limited, hence a missed packet or three will cause a seeminly more abrupt change. RPG's take advantage of this because people generally move in a line, and it's seldom nescessary to follow someone exactly (they NEVER do traps very well, although maybe NWN does).
The golden rule though is that the server is always right. If your move-forward command didn't get there, you didn't move yet. If your screen shows you moving, it is lying to you. I think the client side should only predict ahead about 1 or 2 packet-times, and it should always smoothly correct paths and speeds accordingly.
Otherwise, things work as they do now, and anyone who constantly dodges in semi-random ways will appear to blit to different parts of the screen under all but the best latency conditions.
HINT to ID (and friends): Not everyone can get 80ms, and 2 packets lost puts the predictive code a good 250ms into badness.
Why pin your financial future on the flaky business plans of advertisers? Why not just get your income directly from the people whom you serve?
I have cable TV (evil or not, there it is). I buy subscriptions to several premium channels. WHY do I have to put up with advertising on them? The Sci-Fi channel is my prime example, it's a channel that is only available via cable or satellite (TMK), yet they have commercials.
Wasn't the original point of commericials to avoid having to charge the customer for the airwaves?
If everyone could agree on a standard (ha!), the local stations could encrypt their broadcasts and charge directly for the decryption key. Cable already does this, so does satellite.... but screw the advertisers.
At least until they adopt my only-1-showing-of-a-given-ad-per-day law, enforceable through Homeland Security (multiple viewings of the Nike human-chasing-cat-man commercials sap the mental energy from our citizens and allow terrorists to infiltrate with ease!).:)
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I'd love to see the numbers that show that the "the intrinsic SCSI advantage has been disproven", even once.
Sure, in raw throughput and seek times, IDE drives can perform on a par with SCSI. Certainly, the bus speed is up in nearly the same realm now... but you forget the part that's important to USEFUL speed. A SCSI subsystem will generally operate at about 10% CPU utilization during saturated disk I/O, the same load on an IDE subsystem will suck up closer to 80% of your CPU cycles.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather have my CPU doing something more useful than copying bits back and forth between a bus and a controller all day.
IDE is the best way to go if you're building a network file server -- it's MUCH cheaper, just as fast, and the file server by definition has nothing better to do than sit and do disk I/O (and network I/O), but I'd rather have a SCSI disk in my workstation any day.
As far as the CPU arms race... of course faster is better. But it's a question of what you're doing. Do I need a 1GHz+ cpu for moving windows and icons around on my desktop? No (well, I *shouldn't*, if Bill f***ing Gates didn't write such crappy code!).
The things that need fast CPU's are the same things that have always needed fast CPU's. Scientific calculation, Graphics manipulation, and of course Games. I suspect the last one is the only REAL reason most people "NEED" faster CPU's. Of course, I also think game designers lost their way back in the early 90's. I certainly think many of the games from the 1MHz C64 were more original and indeed more entertaining than much of what's on the shelf now. There are exceptions, but most of the "innovations" in gameplay today involve glitter without substance (see Quake 3 vs. Quake 1 -- much better graphics, but gameplay? atomsphere? storyline?).
Show me a game today that has the same level of immersion as Zork, and I'd happily go buy it and whatever hardware it needed to run. UT2003 looks great, and I'm sure will be fun... but it and the 2GHz CPU and $300 graphics card it wants won't engulf me the way a text game I can play on my PDA can.
No matter how fancy the hardware and how clever the graphics rendering, it'll never be as fast or as natural as your own imagination.
There are several good reasons we should all hope that the PC architecture stays healthy for games (be in Windoze or Linux or Plan 9).
Others have mentioned the idea of consoles acquiring keyboards, mice, full internet connections, and monitor plugs. I would like to point out that this would be a nightmare for console developers! One of the really appealing things about developing for the Playstation (or ANY console, possibly excluding the X-Box) is the fact that there is no ambiguity of hardware. You don't have to code your game to care if user A has hardware T&L support, but user B only has Z-buffering. Then you'd have 2-button, 4-button, 6-button joysticks to map, does the user's monitor support 1280x1024x32, and is that at 70Hz or 85Hz?
Currently, a PS2 developer knows exactly what the hardware can do, and exactly what it will look like when running. His choices are... 50Hz PAL or 60Hz NTSC, Steering Wheel or no? Keyboard or no? That's about it.
Half the reason PC games are so buggy (besides having to run atop the Windoze OS) is the fact that they have to support so MANY different configurations of hardware. If I'm writing a game, I can assume you have a mouse... but not nescessarily a scroll wheel. I can assume you have at least 640x480x16-bit these days, but not that you can do full-screen anti-aliasing. I can assume you probably have sound, but maybe only 2-channel. So, I can either code for the lowest common denominator -- or I can put LOTS of cases in to ask if you have this, this, this, or this.
ANOTHER reason the PC's health is important to all of us here, is Linux. If the PC game market starts to dry up, so does the home sale market. Without home sales, PC's go from being cheap commodity hardware to being expensive business machines again. Now, linux starts to dry up too, since the supply of cheap computers to run it on goes away.
Not a pleasant prospect.
As much as I **HATE** PC hardware, I don't wish for it to go away. I hope (foolishly) that it might eventually mutate into something stable and logical... but until then, I'll always have one sitting under my desk -- wishing it was as cool as a Mac, or an Amiga.
What happens when a government organizaton decides to use Microsoft products and has to shut down all operations for N days because:
a) The authentication server at MS crashes or screws up so all the Windows XP desktops can't phone home to get Bill's permission to run?
b) One of those lovely IIS virii starts sending sensitive documents out to every pr0n vendor in anyone's mail spool?
c) The DRM system determines that a critical bit of multimedia presentation, which might decide the creation of a policy, can't be shown since it hasn't been authorized and therefore MIGHT be a violation of someone's copyright?
If you thought your Government was lazy before... man!
...if you didn't have to share bandwidth with all those spammers.
Right and Wrong are only mutually exclusive in today's simplistic binary computers, and the minds of some simplistic people.
Should you be able to pop the hood on my car in the Wal-Mart parking lot to see how my car is different than yours? No.
Should you be able to pop the hood on my car to extinguish a fire in the engine compartment and keep it from destroying the vehicle, anything in it, and probably the vehicles on either side? Yes, please do!
But... you still "broke into" my car. Do you want to go to prison and enjoy the tender thrusts of Bubba for your good deed?
If you have an ftp server running on your machine, and I happen to notice it, I feel perfectly justified in connecting to that server. If it allows anonymous logins, I feel fine looking around. If not, I won't sit there and try to guess passwords, as that *would* be wrong.
Yet, if after logging in as an anonymous user, I manage to get access to your filesystem, I would feel obliged to leave you a note, telling you that maybe / isn't the best anonymous ftp root. Would you send me to prison for that? If so, I'd suggest you seek counseling, since you obviously have some personal insecurities and ego problems beyond your server.
The DMCA is an abomination. It creates a situation where one can be punished without actually doing anything beyond research. How many people who just happen to own Sharpies bought them with the criminal intent of listening to protected music CD's? Most of my sharpies pre-date the DMCA, yet I am technically a criminal because they COULD be used to circumvent copy-protection??? All of you out there who have screwdrivers -- you can use those to unscrew poorly secured locks. There, now I'm in trouble for disseminating information about circumvention, and you're all screwed for having the tools. Go Law!
> I don't like butterscotch, but I do like vanilla. You don't see friggin holy wars over pudding, though, do you?
:)
Bah! Vanilla is a weakling neutral flavor that smacks of Switzerland! Now tapioca is a REAL pudding, one that you can FEEL going down. When the tanks roll in to clense away the vanilla pudding factory, you know where I'll be standing!
Sorry, couldn't help it... the image was just too funny.
Yup, but alas I live in a representative democracy, so I don't get an opportunity to vote on most things before they've become laws and are already being used. It's much harder to repeal an established law than to defeat a pending bill.
Out of curiosity, how many people got a chance to offer any input on the Patriot Act before it became a law? When the government decides to push something through quickly, most people don't have an opportunity to voice their opinions to their congressmen before it's already too late.
Ok, let's see. "United" Linux wants to make a single unified base for linux distributions, what once upon a time was called a "standard". Good for them!
Since too many people have different ideas about what the "right" way is, and many of them have the technical ability to say "Fine! I'll go build my own linux distro, with blackjack, and hookers!"... they decided to make a corporate entity and just say "I am the law!" instead of continuing to argue with everyone else. Ummm, ok.
Now, they decide that all that GPL stuff, which each of the members has -- at one time or another -- spoken lots of pretty poetic phrases of support, and did much clapping of hands for... is not really as important as making their new business model/standards base work. Sooo, they ignore the SPIRIT of the GPL, even if they might or might not be violating the letter of the law. Ewwwww.
Let me ask this question of the United Linux folks... what are you afraid of? The traditional reason people DON'T embrace the GPL is fear that if their code (and thus algorithms) became public knowledge, others might do it better than they have, and thus steal away their market share. The assumption there is that service means nothing, and that the original developers would rather sit back and drink beer than continue to advance and evolve their product.
Why should I buy into the "United Linux" front? What do they do for me? It sounds to me like they want to be RedHat, but NONE of them individually have the talent, ability, or balls to make a better Redhat than RedHat. Don't get me wrong, I don't like RedHat... I actually like SuSE -- but that's why I don't want UL. I don't want SuSE, SCO, and all the others to become the next RedHat. We don't need it. We need cooperation, not more "our way or the highway" attitude.
Grow up people. If you don't like the GPL, then go rewrite things for yourself and call it something other than linux... call it ulix, call it moneyix, but play nice or go away.
Got your attention, did I? Got your flamethrowers all fired up and ready? Good. (Call it a TROLL if you want, but not until you read the rest of it, eh?)
First of all, I'd like to see some proof that the alleged "kiddie porn" really involved minors. If it did, then those responsible should be thrown in jail and the keys should be lost. I have no wish to see anyone go though that kind of abusive hell.
The reason I say this is that the definition of child pornography is probably not the same as what most people think when they hear the term. I suspect the image that jumps to mind for MOST people is of very young (less than 10 years old) kids, but that's usually not what's being targeted. By definition, it is any act of a sexually explicit nature (including suggestive poses, but NOT simple nudity) involving a person under the legal age of majority (which is generally 18, but varies from place to place). Think about that. How many of you know people in their 20's who still get carded at the bar? How many 19 year-olds could pass for 14 or even younger if they have the right anatomy, makeup and lighting? For that matter, how many 14 year-olds are well-developed enough to pass for 17 or 18 at a glance?
Add to this the incredible advances in digital image processing, and you might realize that it's not THAT hard to make someone look far younger than they are. Even childlike. So, if the people in the images were not underage, or perhaps not even real (fully computer generated images are not impossible), whose rights have been violated?
Secondly, and MORE IMPORTANTLY, where will this end? Today, a bunch of people make laws to force ISP's and backbone providers to block horrible kiddie porn and keep everyone safe from the horror. Next year, a bunch of other people decide that it's important to block access to information regarding nuclear materials, explosives, or other terrorist paraphenalia, on the grounds that it allows and encourages Terrorist Activities and is a threat to National Security... and this censorship has a precedant, the blocking of kiddie porn.
A bit later, information about the principles of nuclear fission, operation of automatic weapons, the history of the middle east are censored or "adjusted" to make them safe for consumption by the public. This is done under the guise of further efforts in the War On Terrorism, and earlier rulings are used to show that these too are perfectly legal, as they are nearly identical to the prior bans.
In one generation, we could very easily lose the one thing that so many people in the last 200 years have fought and died for... freedom. If you let them take the little things now, you can be sure they'll take bigger things later, until you have nothing left.
Once upon a time, I could walk into a library anywhere in the country and sit down to research any topic I was curious about. I would have no fear of persecution (other than raised eyebrows from the library staff, perhaps), and would be content in the knowledge that even if someone tried to bury my work or hide the truth, at least the law protected my right to ask questions (even if the answers were classified).
Then came the DMCA. Now, asking the wrong questions might land you in the circumvention camp, and curiosity might earn you jail time. Next, an unfortunate terrorist attack allows the door to swing open on Homeland Security -- talking too loudly about the wrong things might land you in the conspiracy to commit acts of terror camp, in which case you might disappear for a long time. Now, I'm being "protected" from things that tend to distrub "most" people. If I happen to stumble across an image of a naked little girl running from a burning building, SOMEONE might decide that it's porn and so I can no longer see that historical print from a war that was fought before I knew what "war" meant.
Do we *REALLY* want to go back to the idea of Government Approved Information? Is it really more comforting to know that anything you read, see, or hear has been sanitized by Uncle Sam to be sure you don't see anything upsetting? Is everyone THAT thin-skinned, that we have to hide behind lawyers, lobbyists, and laws?
The distribution of kiddie porn is NOT the problem. The creation of it IS. Let's stop making laws that do a poor job of curing the symptom and try enforcing already existing laws that might cure the sickness. Go after the people MAKING the stuff!
Ah yes, the wonderful MS Sidewinder joystick... that would be the one that comes with drivers specifically for Windows 2000 which DO NOT WORK with Windows 2000!
Great product.
Of course I'd trust my sensitive corporate R&D data to a Microsoft Switch, given their proven track record on security.
Agreed, but with one caveat.
In a traditional (wired) LAN, if I were to install rj45 jacks in the outside surface of my building, at ground level, and someone walked up with a laptop and plugged in AND my dhcp server happily gave them an address and allowed them to use my resources -- is that really "theft"?
I would say no. I have (perhaps unwittingly) created a public terminal and allowd people to share my network. Perhaps I didn't *intend* for unauthorized people to use it (maybe I had the idea that a salesman could stop by and download something without having to go up to their office, or some other equally stupid idea), but then again, they didn't *steal* the ip-address, nor did they *force* my router to accept their traffic. I gave it to them without bothering to validate their identity... Stupid me.
Now, how is wireless access any different? If you are stupid enough to setup a WAP without restricting it by MAC address and/or using encryption, then you essentially have an open rj45 port on your wall. It would be theft if I asked for a dhcp address, you said no, and then I tried to hack my way in anyways.
As another analogy, if I leave my car open and you get in and drive off, you're stealing because you deprived me of the use of my car. If I leave my car open and you hop in the back seat without my permission, you're guilty of trespass. If, on the other hand, you see a city bus with has no place to pay fares and no indications that you need to do so, how is it stealing if you get on and ride it? It costs the city money to cart your butt around... but if they're too dumb to charge you or keep you off, that's their fault.
An unprotected WAP is like a big flashing neon VACANCY sign. Please don't try to pass YET MORE STUPID ANAL-RETENTIVE LAWS to make it a punishable-by-finger-removal crime... instead, learn how to secure your network and make your sysadmin do their job!
No worries until your hardware breaks down and you have to buy shiny new DRM-Enabled hardware you mean?
Oh, you mean you doubt that our friendly PC motherboard/video-card/sound-card manufacturers would make hardware that only accepted input from sources that have a valid DRM certificate?
Let's see.. if they did that, M$ would love them and promote them and offer them incentives. The government would love them and give them tax incentives or duty-free imports for building hardware that will work with the new hardware-DRM bios requirements. The RIAA/MPAA would love them and off free media to bundle as promo material.
If they DON'T do this, a bunch of geeks who make up about 1% of the potential revenue stream will priase them for their Open Source policies... and they'll make no money and crash-and-burn just like all the other dot-bombs.
Sure, no worries here mate.
I didn't think they were being childish, I just assumed that by using Micro$oft and Windoze, you protect yourself from the sea of lawyers who might come after you for trademark infringment. Afterall, when you corrected the fellow, you didn't specify it correctly as Microsoft(TM).
Let me ask you this... was there ANY doubt or confusion in your mind about the entity which was referenced by the slang "Windoze" term? If so, then you have a legitimate complaint, as the corruption introduces confusion. The purpose of language is to share ideas in a clear manner. If everyone understands what the slang refers to, then it is not really a problem for the intended audience is it?
Of course, the archaeologists who unearth the terrabytes of slashdot posts in years to come (the only useable record of this period of time, since it isn't DRM protected...yet), may be a bit bewildered (or perhaps they'll burn it as blaspheme since the Church of Microsoft(TM) would not look kindly upon it).
This is to try and convince the SETI@Home people to produce binaries for the Dreamcast and PS2 linux enviornments, isn't it?
If we hack the X-Box to run linux, won't that be an i386 platform console that can run seti@home? And then we can say, "See! People *DO* want to run seti@home on their game consoles. When can we get dreamcast and PS2 binaries to download?"
Does no one think of the effect their frivolus patents might have on the industry as a whole? So, let's assume Woolston does indeed have an enforceable patent, and he manages to sue eBay and either get a big chunk of cash, or force them to change their business model to avoid infringement... does this guy realize the potential damange he can cause to the industry as a whole? Does he care?
Probably not. Personal greed is the American Way. It's more important that I get MY piece of the pie, even if it means letting the rest of the pie spoil -- at least I got mine!
eBay is one of those *few* examples of a pure internet business that is doing well and making money. Given the state of the economy today, I feel this kind of attempt is almost criminal in intent. It's pretty close to sabotage for this corner of the technology sector, way to go! Make sure your lawyer asks for the firstborn of their CEO too!
I'm pretty certain that the exact implementation details of eBay's software (the algorithm, if you will) are pretty different than what this guy envisioned for this baseball trading-card exchange system. I'm quite sure that had he written software to do this, there would be no copyright infringement between the two... and there's the problem. He's claiming an overly broad patent on an idea, when he probably only has the right to an algorithm. Yeah, *I* had ideas about online trading in the 1980's too buddy, so did half the people who had even heard of the internet (or how about fidonet? or just plain bbs's???). Anyone remember the online trading games from those days? If anything, THOSE probably pre-dated his scheme -- they just didn't handle real products.
I got called to pay my "voting tax" next week (Jury Duty), and I would dread being on a case like this. While common sense would have me acquit on the basis that a broad "patent" like this is a mockery of the Office, and that even if eBay were abusing it with intent, I'd still not have much sympathy for this guy -- it's still the law, and I'd still have to vote according to what the law says, not what it means (since laws are no longer by the people -- if you need a lawyer to explain a law, there's something WRONG!).
"because everyone sets their browser ident to IE..."
I've tried Netscape (Hell, I used Mosaic -- now THAT was evil), and Mozilla, and Opera, and Konquerer, and a few others I can't recall. ALL of them have good features, and NONE of them works as consistantly as the dread M$ IE.
I don't mean consistant as in "doesn't crash" (although Mozilla is sometimes a close competitors for cph (crashes-per-hour)), I mean that in IE I can almost always see the page without broken parts.
Why is this? Two reasons. One: IE is MUCH simpler to configure, in fact most of the configuration is done for you by M$, or via their install-on-demand style of plugins. Mozilla tries to do this, but it usually fails because the plugin doesn't configure just right. Two: web admins who write pages for a browser, will usually write it so that it works in IE. If it also works in other browsers, cool.. but it's seldom as high on their priority list.
So, my choices are... stick with the browser that I know works, and is likely to continue to work for as long as M$ holds a lion's share of the market (or the sun goes dark) -- but live with the taint of EVIL(TM) caused by using this horrible totalitarian product, or endure having a growing number of web sites that I either can't read, or can't enjoy properly -- but get to be C001 in the eyes of the Open Source Gods?
BZZZT, wrong answers.
Standards are ONLY useful if people follow them. This means web page authors MORE than browser programmers! What good is it to say "My browser is 100% W3C compliant" when the pages you're going to use it on are not? That's like saying your electrical device is 100% compliant with the US 110VAC/60Hz standard while you're travelling in Europe! I'd love to see all the M$ extensions go away, I'd love to see real standards compliance out there... I'd love to see the internet as clean as it was before commercialization too, and I'd love to see all pollution solved, and everyone enjoying the beautiful shiny world we all share... but... I don't have those kinds of drugs.
Until someone makes a web browser that correctly handles ALL the content that IE does, I have no incentive to switch. I don't care about cutesy skins, or sounds. I don't care about spam blocking (I have a proxy to do that). I don't feel the NEED to have the source code (although I probably would recompile IE for the Athalon if I could). I just want to look at the stupid pages and see what's on them without having to spend half my life fiddling with various config files and downloading even more helper-apps that only work half the time.
So, if you want Mozilla/Netscape to survive and grow, stop whining about web pages written for IE... they're a fact of life and will NOT change anytime soon. Yell at the Mozilla/Netscape developers to come down off the high-horse of "Standards" and make their product work in the real world, where we all have to live. If you really MUST have a standards compliant mode, make it an option (TurnOffEvilMSExtensions = true). I know it's impossible to keep up with the M$ standards shell game, but ignoring them doesn't make the web any easier to use.
That's the beauty of the DMCA... It doesn't have to really make sense. :)
If I add the line "This post is copy-protected by my YOU-NO-READ-ME encryption tags", and then you go ahead and read it anyways, you have technically circumvented my copy protection (which asked you not to read it), and are in violation of the DMCA.
So, basically, if you put any kind of restriction into a software (or hardware!) product, and someone gets around that restriction (even accidentally!), they are in violation of the DMCA. It has nothing to do with actual duplication, it's just the circumvention that matters.
Any questions citizen? Please place your tongue on the screen for identification...
"It enables finely tuned licensing terms and conditions, such as limited 24-hour play, a set number of plays over a given time, or an outright purchase licence that lets the viewer watch the video or listen to music whenever they want. It will also be used to bind content to a specific PC, so that it cannot be redistributed"
:)
Oh, this also means that when your internet connection is down, OR the "certificate clearinghouse" server is down, you can't listen to music or watch videos that you already purchased, since the certificate can't be verified. We all know how stable M$ servers are, and of course the certificate server will have to run M$ software, or it couldn't trust itself.
Oh, and while I'm grumbling... today's DMCA thought: Does humming a copyrighted tune violate the DMCA? You are using your neurons to circumvent copy-protection and allow others to hear the tune without paying...
Troll say, "Religion be best food!"
And just who does the government think they are in deciding what is or is not "correct information"?
As far as I'm concerned, there is no "correct" answer to religion. By definition, it's what YOU (personally) believe, and has nothing to do with any organizations that might think they somehow represent your worldview.
I, personally, would like to see organized religion stop sucking away all my tax money (by claiming excemption, all the churches force ME to pay higher taxes and carry THEIR part of the burden). I recognize that some few of them do good work for the community, but I also see constant remodelling of perfectly good church buildings, and very nice cars the clergy drive.
Government is not God, although perhaps the Australian government thinks it is...
I don't hate them for that. In fact, I only marginally dislike them for the abomination that is RPM. The people I really hate are the ones who decided that following the "Linux Filesystem Standard" meant dumping EVERY SINGLE PACKAGE into /usr!
/usr, and you put extras that you install yourself info /usr/local. RedHat (and almost every other linux distro) tries to make everything seem as if it is "part of the OS", which makes it a nightmare to maintain.
/sbin is for STATIC binaries... you know, the things you need to have work when you screw up and hose libc? What good are dynamically linked binaries in /sbin????
:)
C'mon people... BSD has it right here. You put core OS packages into
RPM could be nearly as good as the ports system (although rpm -ba blah.spec will never be as elegant as "make install"), but it needs to allow for easier integration with non-rpm'd elements. Besides, it's hard to go wrong with the defacto standard of configure; make; make install.
Oh, and
There, rant finished, that wasn't so bad.
Add to this the fact that most FPS fans seem to be intent on moving as FASTASPOSSIBLEATALLTIMES, since very few games reward you for being careful (Thief was one).
Prediction only works well for things that are, well, predictable! Large vehicles are great for this, because their ability to turn and change speed quickly is usually limited, hence a missed packet or three will cause a seeminly more abrupt change. RPG's take advantage of this because people generally move in a line, and it's seldom nescessary to follow someone exactly (they NEVER do traps very well, although maybe NWN does).
The golden rule though is that the server is always right. If your move-forward command didn't get there, you didn't move yet. If your screen shows you moving, it is lying to you. I think the client side should only predict ahead about 1 or 2 packet-times, and it should always smoothly correct paths and speeds accordingly.
Otherwise, things work as they do now, and anyone who constantly dodges in semi-random ways will appear to blit to different parts of the screen under all but the best latency conditions.
HINT to ID (and friends): Not everyone can get 80ms, and 2 packets lost puts the predictive code a good 250ms into badness.
Why pin your financial future on the flaky business plans of advertisers? Why not just get your income directly from the people whom you serve?
:)
I have cable TV (evil or not, there it is). I buy subscriptions to several premium channels. WHY do I have to put up with advertising on them? The Sci-Fi channel is my prime example, it's a channel that is only available via cable or satellite (TMK), yet they have commercials.
Wasn't the original point of commericials to avoid having to charge the customer for the airwaves?
If everyone could agree on a standard (ha!), the local stations could encrypt their broadcasts and charge directly for the decryption key. Cable already does this, so does satellite.... but screw the advertisers.
At least until they adopt my only-1-showing-of-a-given-ad-per-day law, enforceable through Homeland Security (multiple viewings of the Nike human-chasing-cat-man commercials sap the mental energy from our citizens and allow terrorists to infiltrate with ease!).
You won't have to imagine it in MS-Election 2004!
We won't be able to perform that emergency bypass operation until daylight.
But we're in Alaska!
Yes Sir, and that means we only have to wait another couple of weeks.