If the N month wait was to even do that, I'd be more tolerant of it. A majority of titles, in my experience, aren't translated from American to English for the European releases - the other European languages are simply added to the American.
Out of curiosity, any Spanish or French residents out there able to comment if the same thing happens to their languages on the trip across the pond? (Assming Canadian-French, and as-spoken-in-the-US-Spanish have the same sorts of issues as going from American to English.)
Totally. RAID is RAID, it helps you with bad hardware (and speed, and size, depending on your config). Backups are backups, they do help with bad hardware too, but more importantly they help you with user error or bad software.
The number of people who mix the two up is sometimes quite scary.
If you can walk or drive to work, maybe. I have a little shy of two hours a day on the train to get to and from work (when they're working, three hours or more when they break), and I'm *very much* looking forward to my PSP. When DVD Box Office decide they have some to ship to Blighty:(
For a handheld games console, probably, yes. For a handheld DivX player, I think it's pretty reasonable. Check out the prices on some of the other "video iPod" style devices - alright, they have hard disks, but a lot of them are also Windows Media based:(
This assumes your application both *is* highly parallelisable, and if you're running commercial software, that it *has* been made so. (I've probably just made that word up, but you know what I mean).
Some things are easily split into small chunks that you can throw thousands of commodity boxes at. Google have made this work incredibly well, but their problem-space is rather different to WoW - what one user is searching for has no bearing on what ten million other users are searching for. WoW is a little bit more interactive than that, which introduces fun issues of data coherency that just aren't there for Google.
To give another example, our systems team at work have some (bought-in) applications that are multi-threaded, *very* CPU hungry, but not clusterable. The "right" answer here is big Sun boxes with lots of CPUs and lots of memory. The "bang per buck" is less on paper, but the point is that you need all that "bang" on the same machine.
I haven't done anything more than very shallow fiddling with Oracle, so I have no idea if it clusters nicely or not, or whether it's appropriate to an MMO scenario.
Neither big iron nor commodity cluster are the One True Way - they're both appropriate solutions to different classes of problems.
I hated OS 9 and earlier Macs. I mean, *really* loathed them. Manual memory management is the dumbest thing ever, co-op multi-tasking is the second, and no command line is the third.
I hated Windows ever since I came across it too. I came from an Amiga, where by and large things also Just Worked (and they had cool hardware too). I'd been using Linux for a good few years before I came across OS X, and while it is a good OS (I still use it for everything server-side), I tended to spend too much time fiddling with the OS and not enough time actually using it. (Partly because I *could*, admittedly, but partly because I had to).
OS X is a thing of beauty. If you want things to just work by clicking on pretty buttons, you can, and the GUI is responsive, elegent, and usually makes simple things easy and complex things possible. When you need the command line, it's there. When you want to hack on stuff, there's a full-blown development suite included for free. When you want to pretend it's "DIY" Unix, roll your own apps, there's a regular GNU(-ish) toolchain there, or fink for Linux-style package management.
I've hit exactly two things that have been harder than they should have been. Re-mapping the keymap to match a PC-102 keyboard is a pain. (Apple's keyboard has lots of punctuation in the wrong places, and anyway I need an ergonomic keyboard with a trackpad, and the only one I've found to suit is PS2-only. I have a PS2USB convertor to get around that.) Secondly, I've never been able to get re-connecting network drives automatically to be very easy. The NFS mount that has all my MP3s on is now in the automounter (via lots of netinfo jiggery-pokery), but my SMB shared drives (home dir on servers etc) still don't re-mount when I log in.
Don't worry, Talisman is a great game only when viewed through rose-tinted glasses. I loved it when I was 13 too. There are much, much better games available for much less money - check the Geek (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/) for lots of detail.
You're assuming version numbers are floats. They're not, they're strings, containing a major version, minor version and optionally a patch-level, separated by periods.
"Version x.y.z" is not intended to represent x + y*10^-1 + z*10^-2.
Would it make you happier if they were x-y-z release numbers? I think it's ugly, but maybe that's just me...
telnet, or telnetd? I'm surprised at the former, it's far too useful for testing pretty much every other service that uses TCP as a transport and isn't encrypted. (Disclaimer: the only distro I've used in a good few years is Debian, no task-select, no dselect, apt-get the things I actually *want*).
If you're enabling telnetd you almost certainly want taking outside and flogging;)
No, he's suggesting that if you weren't receiving so much spam, you wouldn't need so much bandwidth.
Not that relevent, I'll grant, for home users on one of a limited number of flat-rate plans. (I doubt most people get enough spam to bump them from needed the 512K service to the 768K service, for example). *Very* relevent for people on metered dial-up, and businesses on usage-based leased line connections.
Ugh, no. Slashcode manages to make its way up to "mildly horrible", and it's amongst the best of a bad bunch that I've come across. *Open* (as in open membership, not as in open for non-member spammers to mail to) should be news groups, if news wasn't on the brink of death as a viable medium, mailing lists are the next best thing.
My mail client handles threading, searching and archiving very nicely, perhaps you need a better mail client?
On the moderation topic, it should happen up-front, ie all posts to go the moderator for approval / editing, or not at all. That way all subscribers get the same set of messages. After-posting moderation is re-writing history, and wrong.
A lot of VAXen are netbootable - you run some combination of dhcp, rarpd and mopd on another box (eg your Linux PC), and get the boot image across that way.
I got my VaxStation3100 up and running this way. I'm sure it's in the NetBSD install docs somewhere if you search for netboot...
iPod (and iTunes) has "shuffle by album". It picks a random album, plays all the tracks in order, then picks another random album. Rinse and repeat. I've only recently discovered it, and it makes a rather nice change from completely random and often rather mis-matched track selections.
I can't see how *not* being able to get to a specific track when you wanted to without using FF/RW wouldn't be exceedingly annoying. That's one reason we ditched cassettes, no?
"Programming" Excel *is* a skill in its own right. As someone who's done programming in the traditional sense for a living and still does for a hobby, I'd not want to take an Excel guru into a Java development team without a *lot* of cross-training, but equally I wouldn't want to go anywhere near the hairy modelling some of these folks do.
For people who *understand* on either side, there are some common underlying ideas related to "programming" that are environment, language and tool independent. Of course, there are also a lot of people in both camps who are "programming" by voodoo and are completely useless when taken out of the box they're familiar with...
You're confusing embedded, low-latency and "hard" real-time.
Phones, certainly as we move to VoIP, are built to be able to deal with a certain amount of jitter, both in the network moving the packets and in the end device processing them, via buffering. In general, as long as a packet gets dealt with every n ms plus or minus a relatively large delta, a nice waveform comes out of the other end. If a packet or two hit too large a delta, the waveform clicks, pops or goes silent for a fraction of a second and then goes back to normal. A certain amount of low-latency is desirable, but "hard" real-time is not critical.
Similarly for your robot vacuum. If it decides to turn in 10ms or 50ms, it's really not an issue. If it takes 1s, it might bump the wall, but it's not the end of the world.
You could well have embedded systems that don't care that much about latency at all. An example might be home automation. If I have a system set up to switch the lights on, start the coffee maker and put on some relaxing tunes when I open the door, it's not really the end of the world if those things happen 10ms, 1s, 5s after I open the door. Except for the lights, 10s or more might well be acceptable.
The stuff that needs *hard* real-time are those where any deviation is going to have *real* impact, in terms of health and safety or money. Monitoring nuclear reactors in one, controlling industrial machinery is another (in both categories - making something even fractions of a millimeter wrong may make it worthless, and stopping when a piece of metal is replaced by someone's head is important!)
The point is that people in the last category know who the are and what they're doing, and are generally trying to solve a different set of problems in the OS to people in the first two categories, or people using the OS in a more general-purpose way.
...the OP doesn't like FPSes, same as I don't?...Metroid is about *exploration* first, shooting things second. You FPS-lovers would have doubtless complained had Doom 3 been a kart racer;)
That's a couple of reasons off the top of my head.
Exactly, and this is the same reason copy protection is going to hurt the music industry more than help it in the long run too.
People - regular people, not just geeks, are buying MP3 players. Lots of them. They want to turn their CDs into MP3s. If they can't press the "make MP3s" button on whatever software they're using, they're going to turn to their techie friends, and *they* are more than likely going to introduce them to the wonders of file sharing. (The CDs *will* be available on these services, regardless of the protection used. It only takes *one* smart person to make the original rip (somehow), then millions can not only download but upload to others.)
Once you get to the position that you *have* to go to the file sharing networks to get the MP3 version of most of the CDs you buy, a whole lot of people are going start wondering why they're paying for the CD in the first place...
You can largely ignore the monetary cost, and the fact that people would *like* to have a legitimate version, if the illegal version gives more utility, that's the way people are going to go.
Section 46 of the Sex Offences Act 2003 provides a statutory defence for IWF work and an agreement has been drawn up between the police, CPS and IWF, which sets out our role and is supported by the government. In order to ensure best practice in carrying out that role IWF Board have approved a policy for vetting all Board and staff appointments"
ie they've agreed it with Plod so you don't get nicked for doing your job, and they're going to take a good stab at checking you're not a pervert before they let you do that for a living.
Bear in mind that IWF isn't just a random bunch of do-gooders. They were set up by agreement between the government, the police and the UK ISP community, in effect, they *are* an official organization, if not technically an "official police organization".
You could always try reading their web site (www.iwf.org.uk). Their definition of child pornography is that supplied by UK legislation, that is:
" Protection of Children Act 1978
The law on images of child abuse is relatively clear. It means any images of children, apparently under 18 years old, involved in sexual activity or posed to be sexually provocative."
Obviously both "apparently under 18 years old" and "posed to be sexually provocative" are judgement calls. It's also worth noting that simple posession of these images is a offence carrying a jail term under UK law. Not production, not distribution, *posession*.
I'm not 100% in support of some of their other criteria, such as those for recommending the removal of newsgroups based on "predominantly" illegal content, but I believe that their reports of indivdual images / posts etc are generally pretty accurate.
Be careful with the registry / registrar distinction.
I'm all in favour of lots of for profit, for free, for the common good, for great justic registrars, as long as they meet some basic technical standards for interfacing with the registry and generally not breaking stuff.
The registry, on the other hand, should be run by a non-profit that understands the Internet and can run it for the common good.
"I mean, how many GC/X-Box owners made that their FIRST system? Usually it was because PS2 owners had a moment of boredome and weakness (e.g. exclusive title, e.g. Halo, Resident Evil, and Smash Melee) and picked one up for the hell of it."
Me, for one. I bought a Cube on launch day because it had *far* more interesting (to me) titles than the PS2 or than was planned for the XBox.
I picked up a PS2 on a whim a few months ago because I wanted an EyeToy. There's some other things on it that are worth having now I've got one, and getting more Final Fantasy will be cool, but not much in the way of "killer apps".
Slashdot Mirror
If the N month wait was to even do that, I'd be more tolerant of it. A majority of titles, in my experience, aren't translated from American to English for the European releases - the other European languages are simply added to the American.
Out of curiosity, any Spanish or French residents out there able to comment if the same thing happens to their languages on the trip across the pond? (Assming Canadian-French, and as-spoken-in-the-US-Spanish have the same sorts of issues as going from American to English.)
Totally. RAID is RAID, it helps you with bad hardware (and speed, and size, depending on your config). Backups are backups, they do help with bad hardware too, but more importantly they help you with user error or bad software.
The number of people who mix the two up is sometimes quite scary.
TTFN,
Tim.
If you can walk or drive to work, maybe. I have a little shy of two hours a day on the train to get to and from work (when they're working, three hours or more when they break), and I'm *very much* looking forward to my PSP. When DVD Box Office decide they have some to ship to Blighty :(
TTFN,
Tim.
For a handheld games console, probably, yes. For a handheld DivX player, I think it's pretty reasonable. Check out the prices on some of the other "video iPod" style devices - alright, they have hard disks, but a lot of them are also Windows Media based :(
TTFN,
Tim.
I'm buying it to dump video to a memory stick and watch it on my commute. If there's some games I want for it, it'll be a nice bonus.
TTFN,
Tim.
This assumes your application both *is* highly parallelisable, and if you're running commercial software, that it *has* been made so. (I've probably just made that word up, but you know what I mean).
Some things are easily split into small chunks that you can throw thousands of commodity boxes at. Google have made this work incredibly well, but their problem-space is rather different to WoW - what one user is searching for has no bearing on what ten million other users are searching for. WoW is a little bit more interactive than that, which introduces fun issues of data coherency that just aren't there for Google.
To give another example, our systems team at work have some (bought-in) applications that are multi-threaded, *very* CPU hungry, but not clusterable. The "right" answer here is big Sun boxes with lots of CPUs and lots of memory. The "bang per buck" is less on paper, but the point is that you need all that "bang" on the same machine.
I haven't done anything more than very shallow fiddling with Oracle, so I have no idea if it clusters nicely or not, or whether it's appropriate to an MMO scenario.
Neither big iron nor commodity cluster are the One True Way - they're both appropriate solutions to different classes of problems.
TTFN,
Tim.
Yes, for 99% of things it does Just Work.
I hated OS 9 and earlier Macs. I mean, *really* loathed them. Manual memory management is the dumbest thing ever, co-op multi-tasking is the second, and no command line is the third.
I hated Windows ever since I came across it too. I came from an Amiga, where by and large things also Just Worked (and they had cool hardware too). I'd been using Linux for a good few years before I came across OS X, and while it is a good OS (I still use it for everything server-side), I tended to spend too much time fiddling with the OS and not enough time actually using it. (Partly because I *could*, admittedly, but partly because I had to).
OS X is a thing of beauty. If you want things to just work by clicking on pretty buttons, you can, and the GUI is responsive, elegent, and usually makes simple things easy and complex things possible. When you need the command line, it's there. When you want to hack on stuff, there's a full-blown development suite included for free. When you want to pretend it's "DIY" Unix, roll your own apps, there's a regular GNU(-ish) toolchain there, or fink for Linux-style package management.
I've hit exactly two things that have been harder than they should have been. Re-mapping the keymap to match a PC-102 keyboard is a pain. (Apple's keyboard has lots of punctuation in the wrong places, and anyway I need an ergonomic keyboard with a trackpad, and the only one I've found to suit is PS2-only. I have a PS2USB convertor to get around that.) Secondly, I've never been able to get re-connecting network drives automatically to be very easy. The NFS mount that has all my MP3s on is now in the automounter (via lots of netinfo jiggery-pokery), but my SMB shared drives (home dir on servers etc) still don't re-mount when I log in.
TTFN,
Tim.
Don't worry, Talisman is a great game only when viewed through rose-tinted glasses. I loved it when I was 13 too. There are much, much better games available for much less money - check the Geek (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/) for lots of detail.
TTFN,
Tim.
You're assuming version numbers are floats. They're not, they're strings, containing a major version, minor version and optionally a patch-level, separated by periods.
"Version x.y.z" is not intended to represent x + y*10^-1 + z*10^-2.
Would it make you happier if they were x-y-z release numbers? I think it's ugly, but maybe that's just me...
TTFN,
Tim.
Use IMAP, and back up off the server?
I've given up backing up anything on Windows boxes. If it's important, it lives server-side, or at least gets copied there on a regular basis.
TTFN,
Tim.
News is (technically) an astonishingly bad way of distributing binaries. Please join us in the 21st century.
For *reading* news, Thunderbird is fine.
TTFN,
Tim.
In everywhere where people can punctuate, Bob the Angry Flower objects loudly to your new sig.
TTFN,
Tim.
telnet, or telnetd? I'm surprised at the former, it's far too useful for testing pretty much every other service that uses TCP as a transport and isn't encrypted. (Disclaimer: the only distro I've used in a good few years is Debian, no task-select, no dselect, apt-get the things I actually *want*).
;)
If you're enabling telnetd you almost certainly want taking outside and flogging
TTFN,
Tim.
No, he's suggesting that if you weren't receiving so much spam, you wouldn't need so much bandwidth.
Not that relevent, I'll grant, for home users on one of a limited number of flat-rate plans. (I doubt most people get enough spam to bump them from needed the 512K service to the 768K service, for example). *Very* relevent for people on metered dial-up, and businesses on usage-based leased line connections.
TTFN,
Tim.
Ugh, no. Slashcode manages to make its way up to "mildly horrible", and it's amongst the best of a bad bunch that I've come across. *Open* (as in open membership, not as in open for non-member spammers to mail to) should be news groups, if news wasn't on the brink of death as a viable medium, mailing lists are the next best thing.
My mail client handles threading, searching and archiving very nicely, perhaps you need a better mail client?
On the moderation topic, it should happen up-front, ie all posts to go the moderator for approval / editing, or not at all. That way all subscribers get the same set of messages. After-posting moderation is re-writing history, and wrong.
TTFN,
Tim.
A lot of VAXen are netbootable - you run some combination of dhcp, rarpd and mopd on another box (eg your Linux PC), and get the boot image across that way.
I got my VaxStation3100 up and running this way. I'm sure it's in the NetBSD install docs somewhere if you search for netboot...
TTFN,
Tim.
iPod (and iTunes) has "shuffle by album". It picks a random album, plays all the tracks in order, then picks another random album. Rinse and repeat. I've only recently discovered it, and it makes a rather nice change from completely random and often rather mis-matched track selections.
I can't see how *not* being able to get to a specific track when you wanted to without using FF/RW wouldn't be exceedingly annoying. That's one reason we ditched cassettes, no?
Regards,
Tim.
"Programming" Excel *is* a skill in its own right. As someone who's done programming in the traditional sense for a living and still does for a hobby, I'd not want to take an Excel guru into a Java development team without a *lot* of cross-training, but equally I wouldn't want to go anywhere near the hairy modelling some of these folks do.
For people who *understand* on either side, there are some common underlying ideas related to "programming" that are environment, language and tool independent. Of course, there are also a lot of people in both camps who are "programming" by voodoo and are completely useless when taken out of the box they're familiar with...
You're confusing embedded, low-latency and "hard" real-time.
Phones, certainly as we move to VoIP, are built to be able to deal with a certain amount of jitter, both in the network moving the packets and in the end device processing them, via buffering. In general, as long as a packet gets dealt with every n ms plus or minus a relatively large delta, a nice waveform comes out of the other end. If a packet or two hit too large a delta, the waveform clicks, pops or goes silent for a fraction of a second and then goes back to normal. A certain amount of low-latency is desirable, but "hard" real-time is not critical.
Similarly for your robot vacuum. If it decides to turn in 10ms or 50ms, it's really not an issue. If it takes 1s, it might bump the wall, but it's not the end of the world.
You could well have embedded systems that don't care that much about latency at all. An example might be home automation. If I have a system set up to switch the lights on, start the coffee maker and put on some relaxing tunes when I open the door, it's not really the end of the world if those things happen 10ms, 1s, 5s after I open the door. Except for the lights, 10s or more might well be acceptable.
The stuff that needs *hard* real-time are those where any deviation is going to have *real* impact, in terms of health and safety or money. Monitoring nuclear reactors in one, controlling industrial machinery is another (in both categories - making something even fractions of a millimeter wrong may make it worthless, and stopping when a piece of metal is replaced by someone's head is important!)
The point is that people in the last category know who the are and what they're doing, and are generally trying to solve a different set of problems in the OS to people in the first two categories, or people using the OS in a more general-purpose way.
Regards,
Tim.
...the OP doesn't like FPSes, same as I don't? ...Metroid is about *exploration* first, shooting things second. You FPS-lovers would have doubtless complained had Doom 3 been a kart racer ;)
That's a couple of reasons off the top of my head.
Regards,
Tim.
Exactly, and this is the same reason copy protection is going to hurt the music industry more than help it in the long run too.
People - regular people, not just geeks, are buying MP3 players. Lots of them. They want to turn their CDs into MP3s. If they can't press the "make MP3s" button on whatever software they're using, they're going to turn to their techie friends, and *they* are more than likely going to introduce them to the wonders of file sharing. (The CDs *will* be available on these services, regardless of the protection used. It only takes *one* smart person to make the original rip (somehow), then millions can not only download but upload to others.)
Once you get to the position that you *have* to go to the file sharing networks to get the MP3 version of most of the CDs you buy, a whole lot of people are going start wondering why they're paying for the CD in the first place...
You can largely ignore the monetary cost, and the fact that people would *like* to have a legitimate version, if the illegal version gives more utility, that's the way people are going to go.
Regards,
Tim.
"Vetting IWF appointments
Section 46 of the Sex Offences Act 2003 provides a statutory defence for IWF work and an agreement has been drawn up between the police, CPS and IWF, which sets out our role and is supported by the government. In order to ensure best practice in carrying out that role IWF Board have approved a policy for vetting all Board and staff appointments"
ie they've agreed it with Plod so you don't get nicked for doing your job, and they're going to take a good stab at checking you're not a pervert before they let you do that for a living.
Bear in mind that IWF isn't just a random bunch of do-gooders. They were set up by agreement between the government, the police and the UK ISP community, in effect, they *are* an official organization, if not technically an "official police organization".
Regards,
Tim.
You could always try reading their web site (www.iwf.org.uk). Their definition of child pornography is that supplied by UK legislation, that is:
" Protection of Children Act 1978
The law on images of child abuse is relatively clear. It means any images of children, apparently under 18 years old, involved in sexual activity or posed to be sexually provocative."
Obviously both "apparently under 18 years old" and "posed to be sexually provocative" are judgement calls. It's also worth noting that simple posession of these images is a offence carrying a jail term under UK law. Not production, not distribution, *posession*.
I'm not 100% in support of some of their other criteria, such as those for recommending the removal of newsgroups based on "predominantly" illegal content, but I believe that their reports of indivdual images / posts etc are generally pretty accurate.
Regards,
Tim.
Be careful with the registry / registrar distinction.
I'm all in favour of lots of for profit, for free, for the common good, for great justic registrars, as long as they meet some basic technical standards for interfacing with the registry and generally not breaking stuff.
The registry, on the other hand, should be run by a non-profit that understands the Internet and can run it for the common good.
Regards,
Tim.
"I mean, how many GC/X-Box owners made that their FIRST system? Usually it was because PS2 owners had a moment of boredome and weakness (e.g. exclusive title, e.g. Halo, Resident Evil, and Smash Melee) and picked one up for the hell of it."
Me, for one. I bought a Cube on launch day because it had *far* more interesting (to me) titles than the PS2 or than was planned for the XBox.
I picked up a PS2 on a whim a few months ago because I wanted an EyeToy. There's some other things on it that are worth having now I've got one, and getting more Final Fantasy will be cool, but not much in the way of "killer apps".
Regards,
Tim.