What do you have to say to those who criticize Q3A for being just a tired, albeit beautiful, rehash of Quake 1 and Quake 2? Do you feel that with games like Unreal Tournament coming out, with tons of new weapons, powerups, even moves (like built in strafe-jump), people are going to want to go back to playing the the same old, shotgun, same old rocket launcher, same old lightning gun, and same old quad?
Going hand in hand with this, what made you choose to try to balance gameplay versus stick in lots of cool new stuff? To be sure, Q3A is almost perfectly balanced when I play it - no more respawn instafrags, a rocket launcher without too much splash or speed, even a decent spawn weapon. However, I can't help but feel a little bored when playing Quake now - it's more challenging and fair, but not as exciting as firing five rockets at a time in UT or egonning nineteen people in a row in Half-Life. Do you think that, given a choice, people will choose balance over excitement?
A few months ago I read a comment by you stating, basically, that developing a multiplayer-only first-person-shooter was pretty much an entire new paradigm for the gaming industry, and that you wouldn't be surprised if iD did not turn a profit on Q3A, or only a marginal one. Now that situation has changed a bit - Starsiege: Tribes is out, and Unreal Tournament will be out when Arena is released, among others. Q3A now has a lot of competition from games like those. Do you still see Quake 3 as catering to a niche market or do you think that the world has warmed to the idea of multiplayer-only gameplay? Do you think that the release of other games such as the aforementioned will help/hurt sales of Quake 3?
There are two that I know of that try to emulate those features of their Windows counterpart:
Getleft - Three guesses as to what software their modeling after:)
DPS-FTP - DPS-FTP is an FTP client whose interface is loosely based on that of Bulletproof FTP. It has a transfer queue which allows multiple files from multiple directories on multiple sites to be uploaded and downloaded, in any order, and can automatically resume partially transferred files, among other features.
I find this issue to be overblown in my completely untested opinion. I've been running a 400 at 83mhz FSB with a 1:1 AGP:PCI ratio for some time now, with no problems, and I know quite a few people who are at 83 or 75 mhz FSB with no problems either. Where you start to run into problems is with older hardware, like my Future Domain SCSI card from `94, AKA the AHA-2920A, which simply refuses to work. Put it this way: anyone who needs to actually worry about FSB incompatibly problems obviously knows their stuff, and is more than likely going to be building their own system with cutting-edge parts that won't have FSB issues. For most of us it's not going to matter.
Mozilla may not be dead, but the browser war was over long ago. IE isn't a perfect browser, but neither is Netscape. However, that's enough for Microsoft to win. They have the dominant OS, and a "good-enough" browser packaged with it. Why should I install another app to duplicate functionality on my machine? And I used to be a die-hard Netscape fan. I would imagine the family purchasing a new computer wouldn't even think of Netscape.
That's exactly how I feel. I had always regarded IE users as heretics until I upgraded to Windows 98 and discovered the beauty of the incorporated browser/file manager. It's just too damn convienent. If you've ever used KDE, it's like kfm except faster, better supported, and much more widely used. Going to the trouble of firing up Netscape simply wasn't worth it anymore, and to this day it still isn't. You can't really relate to what the government said about packaging the browser with the OS until you use Win 98 or above: it's a part of the OS; the functionality between them is blurred. Web pages can be your wallpaper and the filemanager has a built in browser. It's insidious, but it's the way things should be, and it's how Micros~1 now leads the browser war by a huge margin despite not even having an Internet strategy while Netscape was already rolling out a product in the early Nineties.
Re: If Mac users are influential with Apple...
on
Whither Netscape 5.0?
·
· Score: 1
Check any Mac newsgroup and you're sure to find a couple hundred posts from people absolutely incensed about this. To a non Mac person like me, it's actually kind of funny how much the community is freaking out over - egads! - a new interface. Then again I'm from the Enlightenment school of thought, so... Anyways my point is is that this is the first time in memory that Apple has violated their hallowed interface guidelines in the fifteen years since that they have existed, to my knowledge, and trust me, every product they've ever released has followed the religiously. It's highly unlikey that they'll do it again based on the respsonce they've gotten. There's a piece on Salon all about this if you want to read more.
A lot of you might already know this, but if you've been cursed into having to buy SDRAM right now, probably the cheapest prices you'll find will be at the office supply stores. Okay, I'll wait for you to stop laughing... yes, Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot, etc. all have pretty cheap SDRAM at the moment. Basically RAM isn't exactly a hot seller at these stores (you probably hadn't considered buying it there until just now) so their inventory is a couple months old. If you've been following RAM prices lately, you'll know that a couple months makes all the difference in the world in terms of price. Most stores, unless their inventory guys are really on the ball, will still be charging the price from three months ago for the RAM they got three months ago. Even if you don't need RAM, you can make a real killing on Ebay this way.
The Palm IIIe/se is _not_ flash upgradeable, and I found this out thirty one days after buying it from a store with a thiry-day return policy:) Guess it's my own stupid fault for being an impulsive buyer, but 3.3 isn't that groundbreaking anyways. Faster Hotsync - yawn. If they'd come out with a USB cradle I'd be much, much happier. Downloading 1.5 megs of Avantgo everyday over a 115kbps serial link isn't fun, especially when pages start to timeout.
Think about it: if you were a small, third world country looking to steal a few secrets from the last remaining superpower in the world, whom do you pick to masquerade as the actual attacker? Duh! It's Russia - the same Russia who we (America) has spent hundreds of billions racing for arms with, stockpiling nukes with, etcetera, etcetera. From an outdated historical perspective, it's perfectly reasonable, almost impulsive, to assume that any probe concerning classified data would be coming from Russia, public enemy #1 for pretty much the latter half of this century.
The problem is that just because "the intrustions appear to originate from Russia," doesn't mean the KGB or whoever is responsible. In fact, the only thing this proves is just that: that the packets came from a computer in Russia. Whether that computer was itself cracked, and whether the information theft was performed at the console, or via a telnet session from Libya, is impossible to determine. But let's be honest: no self-respecting cracker would ever leave a blatant calling card like this, especially not when you're dealing with the US DoD. Chain-telnetting between two,three,five,six boxes before actually cracking a site is pretty much SOP for any serious cracker, which is why I submit that it's far more likely that this crack did not originate from Russia, or if it did, not in direct connection to the University mentioned. I think whoever perpetrated this wanted us to see the University and notice the military connection, and as far as that's concerned we've all fallen hook, line, and sinker.
The cost of the operating system is only a small percentage of the overall total cost of ownership (TCO). In general Windows NT has proven to have a lower cost of ownership than UNIX. Previous studies have shown that Windows NT has 37 percent lower TCO than UNIX. There is no reason to believe that Linux is significantly different than other versions of UNIX when it comes to TCO.
Really? How bout the fact that Linux is free, morons. Oh yeah, and it runs on non-proprietary hardware. This means that, while the hardware available won't be as incredible as that offered by Sun, you don't have to pay for a proprietary system and operating system. This is, in my opinion, a blatant lie. Just a paragraph before they long for "Real World Proof Points Rather than Anecdotal Stories," but then throw out this crud without a single bit of real world data. Hypocrisy - ain't it a bitch?
Linux lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System.
Well, NO. In fact SGI has donated XFS to Linux, an implementation which, by the way, kicks the sh*t out of the half-journaling NTFS that Microsoft developed.
The very definition of Linux as an Open Software effort means that commercial companies like Red Hat will make money by charging for services. Therefore, commercial support services for Linux will be fee-based and will likely be priced at a premium. These costs have to be factored into the total cost model.
Okay, I've got some time, let's do it: 1 "Unlimited User License", RHL 6.1: $29.95 1 Incident Support: $225.00 Total: $254.95 ------------------ 1 Windows NT Enterprise 25 Client: $3,428.95 1 Incident Support: $245.00 Total: $3673.95
Want Web/FTP? Better throw in IIS, too. How about Mail? Exchange server has your name written all over it. Program development? Visual C++. I deem their contention that the TCO for NT approaches within an order of magnitude that of Linux to be the most ludicrous on the site.
Configuring Linux security requires an administrator to be an expert in the intricacies of the operating system and how components interact. Misconfigure any part of the operating system and the system could be vulnerable to attack. Windows NT security is easy to set up and administer with tools such as the Security Configuration Editor.
Imagine that - putting a trained professional in charge of security! It seems odd to me that everyone in charge of security in other fields - the armed service and national defense, the police and domestic protection - go through years of training to become proficient at their trade, but in a perfectly Microsoftian world any moron off the street should be able to protect potentially valuable data from intruders.
I wasn't talking about the military; in the article an IT guy for the Australian stock exchange mentions multi-level (or something to that effect) firewalls. Think NYSE and all their computer gadgetry, which is light years ahead of anything the US military has, except for maybe a few exceptions for code-breaking or whatever they do.
I hope for their sake it wasn't #1. It would be humbling, to say the least, to brag to the press about your "multi-level" firewalls and then, oops, find out that they can't even detect spoofed packets.
Ok, it seems highly unlikely that the US government would actually be behind this (If you really wanted to do some damage, go after an exchange that's important like the Nikkei, FTSE, etc.) What's more likely is that someone cracked a box which resides under a government domain and did all their telnetting from there. Haven't a couple of the armed services websites been defaced lately? If you can overwrite files you can certainly run telnet. Thus, it may have looked like the attack was coming from a military installation, but was actually just some bored kid who finished his math homework.
I'm very taken with the idea of resurrecting the hulking, beautiful creature. But let's be honest with ourselves: this will never happen in an era where we still are losing a couple million a year to AIDS/cancer/Parkinson's/Leukemia. Hell, the US government has even been reluctant to maintain funding on even those vital projects as of late; how many budget spinsters on capitol hill are going to bite for this one? I guess maybe you could find an eccentric philahnthropist to finance it (Nathan Mhyrvold is supposed to be big into paleontology, isn't he?) This is a very Utopian project, one that makes me dream of a day when there is no poverty, disease, war, or any societal problems to worry about and all we have to do is resurrect dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and explore space. Makes you want to live forever, huh?
Actually the Word 2000 format is perfectly backwards compatible with the previous version of Word (Word 97? I think?). I guess after your market cap has surpassed $200 billion you can ease up on the forced-upgrade bullshit:)
I've been contemplating the switch to Dvorak for a long time now, but what's always kept me from doing so was the fact that part of my job is working on a wide variety of client's PCs, and I'm not sure if it is possible (or even desirable) to be well versed in both Qwerty and Dvorak. It seems like using Dvorak at home all the time and Qwerty everywhere else would be pretty tough, if not confusing. I could just make the switch, but I'm worried that I might get out of practice with Qwerty. The prospect of regressing to hunt-and-peck on the most popular keyboard layout doesn't exactly entice me. Can any of you guys type well in both? What's the learning curve - how long does it take?
Forgive my lack of knowledge about lasers, but this is absolutely impossible, right? Lasers being parallel lightwaves, they don't diverge like white light, so I guess that means that they'd need an array the size of Texas to paint an image the size of Texas? The story didn't really make it clear. Can someone just assure me that no money-grubbing marketing-obsessed corporation can ever do this w/today's technology?:) It just seems so... perverse.
I wouldn't be too worried about Solaris stealing a significant amount of Linux's steam through this, for a few reasons:
Solaris is immense. The sheer amount of time it would take for people to familiarize themselves with that much code and actually launch a coordinated development project with it would be equally as immense. Linux, in contrast, was built from the ground up and obviously doesn't have those problems. There are people (Linux, Cox, others) that know that kernel like the back of their hand, which is an immeasurable plus when it comes to fixing bugs, etc. Thus Linux is a lot more attractive for code hackers who are just looking to pitch in.
Most developers who have decided to release free code do it "all the way" e.g. they are very savvy on licensing issues and recognize the Community Source License for what it is: code grubbing by a giant corporation. "Here's our source, now fix it and oh, be sure everything you do makes it back to us to that we don't waste actual money on engineers to fix that same problem." Right. How many hackers that support Open Source in the libre sense are going to go for that?
There's also a positive offshoot for Linux in that we are free to steal a lot of Solaris's cool features. I don't mean plagiarize the code (Not sure what the SCSL has to say about that), but this should speed the development of, among other things, XFS for Linux, which was announced several months ago but since I haven't heard any news on from either the Sun or Linux camp.
It's fortunate for Petreley that he was using 3c905b's and an LNE100TX, probably two of the most ubiquitous NICs around. These have had support for literally years in the kernel, and have worked fine. However this shouldn't be misread; Linux still has a long way to go when it comes to hardware support. The fact is that many (a decreasing number, but still many) hardware makers by default only support Windows. So I guess what I'm saying is keep on evangelizing to whatever hardware vendors you use to support Linux and don't be lulled into complacency. It's a sign of progress when Linux can install more smoothly than Windows (one which I would've laughed at if you'd told me a year ago), but we still have a long road ahead of us.
The fact is that the morons at Podunk Cable, Inc. typically won't be messing with your cable modem service, thank god. I've had Century@Home from Century cable & @Home for over five months now with only two periods of extended downtime - and this comes from a company whose cable offering is arguably the worst in the industry. It's a miracle in itself that Century even still has a franchise what with the numerous illegal rate hikes they've tried to perpetrate on their subscribers in recent years. Your ISP (@Home, RR) leases the lines from the cable company but that's it. There are still a million different ways an imcompetent maintenace man can thrash your entire city's internet service, but all that bureacracy and waste that you've come to know and love from your cable company shouldn't transfer over into your internet service. Of course, @Home is considered by some to be just as bad as they cable company:)
It's just good old RF gluttony. The French military has those frequencies, and there's no incentive to give them back. Like anything governmental in nature, they've decided to air on the side of caution simply because they can. I presume if Apple was willing to pay a hefty chunk of change they could buy that frequency, much like the FCC is auctioning off your airwaves right now. Wouldn't that be interesting: Apple with an monopoly on all 802.11 networking devices in the entire country.
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What do you have to say to those who criticize Q3A for being just a tired, albeit beautiful, rehash of Quake 1 and Quake 2? Do you feel that with games like Unreal Tournament coming out, with tons of new weapons, powerups, even moves (like built in strafe-jump), people are going to want to go back to playing the the same old, shotgun, same old rocket launcher, same old lightning gun, and same old quad?
Going hand in hand with this, what made you choose to try to balance gameplay versus stick in lots of cool new stuff? To be sure, Q3A is almost perfectly balanced when I play it - no more respawn instafrags, a rocket launcher without too much splash or speed, even a decent spawn weapon. However, I can't help but feel a little bored when playing Quake now - it's more challenging and fair, but not as exciting as firing five rockets at a time in UT or egonning nineteen people in a row in Half-Life. Do you think that, given a choice, people will choose balance over excitement?
A few months ago I read a comment by you stating, basically, that developing a multiplayer-only first-person-shooter was pretty much an entire new paradigm for the gaming industry, and that you wouldn't be surprised if iD did not turn a profit on Q3A, or only a marginal one. Now that situation has changed a bit - Starsiege: Tribes is out, and Unreal Tournament will be out when Arena is released, among others. Q3A now has a lot of competition from games like those. Do you still see Quake 3 as catering to a niche market or do you think that the world has warmed to the idea of multiplayer-only gameplay? Do you think that the release of other games such as the aforementioned will help/hurt sales of Quake 3?
There are two that I know of that try to emulate those features of their Windows counterpart:
:)
Getleft - Three guesses as to what software their modeling after
DPS-FTP - DPS-FTP is an FTP client whose interface is loosely based on that of Bulletproof FTP. It has a transfer queue which allows multiple files from multiple directories on multiple sites to be uploaded and downloaded, in any order, and can automatically resume partially transferred files, among other features.
I find this issue to be overblown in my completely untested opinion. I've been running a 400 at 83mhz FSB with a 1:1 AGP:PCI ratio for some time now, with no problems, and I know quite a few people who are at 83 or 75 mhz FSB with no problems either. Where you start to run into problems is with older hardware, like my Future Domain SCSI card from `94, AKA the AHA-2920A, which simply refuses to work. Put it this way: anyone who needs to actually worry about FSB incompatibly problems obviously knows their stuff, and is more than likely going to be building their own system with cutting-edge parts that won't have FSB issues. For most of us it's not going to matter.
Mozilla may not be dead, but the browser war was over long ago. IE isn't a perfect browser, but neither is Netscape. However, that's enough for Microsoft to win. They have the dominant OS, and a "good-enough" browser packaged with it. Why should I install another app to duplicate functionality on my machine? And I used to be a die-hard Netscape fan. I would imagine the family purchasing a new computer wouldn't even think of Netscape.
That's exactly how I feel. I had always regarded IE users as heretics until I upgraded to Windows 98 and discovered the beauty of the incorporated browser/file manager. It's just too damn convienent. If you've ever used KDE, it's like kfm except faster, better supported, and much more widely used. Going to the trouble of firing up Netscape simply wasn't worth it anymore, and to this day it still isn't. You can't really relate to what the government said about packaging the browser with the OS until you use Win 98 or above: it's a part of the OS; the functionality between them is blurred. Web pages can be your wallpaper and the filemanager has a built in browser. It's insidious, but it's the way things should be, and it's how Micros~1 now leads the browser war by a huge margin despite not even having an Internet strategy while Netscape was already rolling out a product in the early Nineties.
Check any Mac newsgroup and you're sure to find a couple hundred posts from people absolutely incensed about this. To a non Mac person like me, it's actually kind of funny how much the community is freaking out over - egads! - a new interface. Then again I'm from the Enlightenment school of thought, so... Anyways my point is is that this is the first time in memory that Apple has violated their hallowed interface guidelines in the fifteen years since that they have existed, to my knowledge, and trust me, every product they've ever released has followed the religiously. It's highly unlikey that they'll do it again based on the respsonce they've gotten. There's a piece on Salon all about this if you want to read more.
My OfficeMax isn't even within $50. Like I said, it depends on the diligency of the staff.
A lot of you might already know this, but if you've been cursed into having to buy SDRAM right now, probably the cheapest prices you'll find will be at the office supply stores. Okay, I'll wait for you to stop laughing... yes, Staples, OfficeMax, Office Depot, etc. all have pretty cheap SDRAM at the moment. Basically RAM isn't exactly a hot seller at these stores (you probably hadn't considered buying it there until just now) so their inventory is a couple months old. If you've been following RAM prices lately, you'll know that a couple months makes all the difference in the world in terms of price. Most stores, unless their inventory guys are really on the ball, will still be charging the price from three months ago for the RAM they got three months ago. Even if you don't need RAM, you can make a real killing on Ebay this way.
What time are you syncing? I think the NYT reupdates at 5AM EDT.
The Palm IIIe/se is _not_ flash upgradeable, and I found this out thirty one days after buying it from a store with a thiry-day return policy :) Guess it's my own stupid fault for being an impulsive buyer, but 3.3 isn't that groundbreaking anyways. Faster Hotsync - yawn. If they'd come out with a USB cradle I'd be much, much happier. Downloading 1.5 megs of Avantgo everyday over a 115kbps serial link isn't fun, especially when pages start to timeout.
Think about it: if you were a small, third world country looking to steal a few secrets from the last remaining superpower in the world, whom do you pick to masquerade as the actual attacker? Duh! It's Russia - the same Russia who we (America) has spent hundreds of billions racing for arms with, stockpiling nukes with, etcetera, etcetera. From an outdated historical perspective, it's perfectly reasonable, almost impulsive, to assume that any probe concerning classified data would be coming from Russia, public enemy #1 for pretty much the latter half of this century.
The problem is that just because "the intrustions appear to originate from Russia," doesn't mean the KGB or whoever is responsible. In fact, the only thing this proves is just that: that the packets came from a computer in Russia. Whether that computer was itself cracked, and whether the information theft was performed at the console, or via a telnet session from Libya, is impossible to determine. But let's be honest: no self-respecting cracker would ever leave a blatant calling card like this, especially not when you're dealing with the US DoD. Chain-telnetting between two,three,five,six boxes before actually cracking a site is pretty much SOP for any serious cracker, which is why I submit that it's far more likely that this crack did not originate from Russia, or if it did, not in direct connection to the University mentioned. I think whoever perpetrated this wanted us to see the University and notice the military connection, and as far as that's concerned we've all fallen hook, line, and sinker.
There a plenty of shaky claims here:
The cost of the operating system is only a small percentage of the overall total cost of ownership (TCO). In general Windows NT has proven to have a lower cost of ownership than UNIX. Previous studies have shown that Windows NT has 37 percent lower TCO than UNIX. There is no reason to believe that Linux is significantly different than other versions of UNIX when it comes to TCO.
Really? How bout the fact that Linux is free, morons. Oh yeah, and it runs on non-proprietary hardware. This means that, while the hardware available won't be as incredible as that offered by Sun, you don't have to pay for a proprietary system and operating system. This is, in my opinion, a blatant lie. Just a paragraph before they long for "Real World Proof Points Rather than Anecdotal Stories," but then throw out this crud without a single bit of real world data. Hypocrisy - ain't it a bitch?
Linux lacks a commercial quality Journaling File System.
Well, NO. In fact SGI has donated XFS to Linux, an implementation which, by the way, kicks the sh*t out of the half-journaling NTFS that Microsoft developed.
The very definition of Linux as an Open Software effort means that commercial companies like Red Hat will make money by charging for services. Therefore, commercial support services for Linux will be fee-based and will likely be priced at a premium. These costs have to be factored into the total cost model.
Okay, I've got some time, let's do it:
1 "Unlimited User License", RHL 6.1: $29.95
1 Incident Support: $225.00
Total: $254.95
------------------
1 Windows NT Enterprise 25 Client: $3,428.95
1 Incident Support: $245.00
Total: $3673.95
Want Web/FTP? Better throw in IIS, too. How about Mail? Exchange server has your name written all over it. Program development? Visual C++. I deem their contention that the TCO for NT approaches within an order of magnitude that of Linux to be the most ludicrous on the site.
Configuring Linux security requires an administrator to be an expert in the intricacies of the operating system and how components interact. Misconfigure any part of the operating system and the system could be vulnerable to attack. Windows NT security is easy to set up and administer with tools such as the Security Configuration Editor.
Imagine that - putting a trained professional in charge of security! It seems odd to me that everyone in charge of security in other fields - the armed service and national defense, the police and domestic protection - go through years of training to become proficient at their trade, but in a perfectly Microsoftian world any moron off the street should be able to protect potentially valuable data from intruders.
I wasn't talking about the military; in the article an IT guy for the Australian stock exchange mentions multi-level (or something to that effect) firewalls. Think NYSE and all their computer gadgetry, which is light years ahead of anything the US military has, except for maybe a few exceptions for code-breaking or whatever they do.
I hope for their sake it wasn't #1. It would be humbling, to say the least, to brag to the press about your "multi-level" firewalls and then, oops, find out that they can't even detect spoofed packets.
Ok, it seems highly unlikely that the US government would actually be behind this (If you really wanted to do some damage, go after an exchange that's important like the Nikkei, FTSE, etc.) What's more likely is that someone cracked a box which resides under a government domain and did all their telnetting from there. Haven't a couple of the armed services websites been defaced lately? If you can overwrite files you can certainly run telnet. Thus, it may have looked like the attack was coming from a military installation, but was actually just some bored kid who finished his math homework.
I'm very taken with the idea of resurrecting the hulking, beautiful creature. But let's be honest with ourselves: this will never happen in an era where we still are losing a couple million a year to AIDS/cancer/Parkinson's/Leukemia. Hell, the US government has even been reluctant to maintain funding on even those vital projects as of late; how many budget spinsters on capitol hill are going to bite for this one? I guess maybe you could find an eccentric philahnthropist to finance it (Nathan Mhyrvold is supposed to be big into paleontology, isn't he?) This is a very Utopian project, one that makes me dream of a day when there is no poverty, disease, war, or any societal problems to worry about and all we have to do is resurrect dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and explore space. Makes you want to live forever, huh?
Actually the Word 2000 format is perfectly backwards compatible with the previous version of Word (Word 97? I think?). I guess after your market cap has surpassed $200 billion you can ease up on the forced-upgrade bullshit :)
I've been contemplating the switch to Dvorak for a long time now, but what's always kept me from doing so was the fact that part of my job is working on a wide variety of client's PCs, and I'm not sure if it is possible (or even desirable) to be well versed in both Qwerty and Dvorak. It seems like using Dvorak at home all the time and Qwerty everywhere else would be pretty tough, if not confusing. I could just make the switch, but I'm worried that I might get out of practice with Qwerty. The prospect of regressing to hunt-and-peck on the most popular keyboard layout doesn't exactly entice me. Can any of you guys type well in both? What's the learning curve - how long does it take?
Forgive my lack of knowledge about lasers, but this is absolutely impossible, right? Lasers being parallel lightwaves, they don't diverge like white light, so I guess that means that they'd need an array the size of Texas to paint an image the size of Texas? The story didn't really make it clear. Can someone just assure me that no money-grubbing marketing-obsessed corporation can ever do this w/today's technology? :) It just seems so ... perverse.
There's also a positive offshoot for Linux in that we are free to steal a lot of Solaris's cool features. I don't mean plagiarize the code (Not sure what the SCSL has to say about that), but this should speed the development of, among other things, XFS for Linux, which was announced several months ago but since I haven't heard any news on from either the Sun or Linux camp.
It's fortunate for Petreley that he was using 3c905b's and an LNE100TX, probably two of the most ubiquitous NICs around. These have had support for literally years in the kernel, and have worked fine. However this shouldn't be misread; Linux still has a long way to go when it comes to hardware support. The fact is that many (a decreasing number, but still many) hardware makers by default only support Windows. So I guess what I'm saying is keep on evangelizing to whatever hardware vendors you use to support Linux and don't be lulled into complacency. It's a sign of progress when Linux can install more smoothly than Windows (one which I would've laughed at if you'd told me a year ago), but we still have a long road ahead of us.
The fact is that the morons at Podunk Cable, Inc. typically won't be messing with your cable modem service, thank god. I've had Century@Home from Century cable & @Home for over five months now with only two periods of extended downtime - and this comes from a company whose cable offering is arguably the worst in the industry. It's a miracle in itself that Century even still has a franchise what with the numerous illegal rate hikes they've tried to perpetrate on their subscribers in recent years. Your ISP (@Home, RR) leases the lines from the cable company but that's it. There are still a million different ways an imcompetent maintenace man can thrash your entire city's internet service, but all that bureacracy and waste that you've come to know and love from your cable company shouldn't transfer over into your internet service. Of course, @Home is considered by some to be just as bad as they cable company :)
It's just good old RF gluttony. The French military has those frequencies, and there's no incentive to give them back. Like anything governmental in nature, they've decided to air on the side of caution simply because they can. I presume if Apple was willing to pay a hefty chunk of change they could buy that frequency, much like the FCC is auctioning off your airwaves right now. Wouldn't that be interesting: Apple with an monopoly on all 802.11 networking devices in the entire country.
Oops. Dyslexia for cure found! Try the next post, which is what I meant to say.
Umm.. www.transmeta.com makes this site look like a Picasso. If you have to bag on the guy, do it for content. Not form.