We did in all that stuff of course too in my data algorithm analysis class, we just used c/c++ for it. Used ASM in another class, pascal in another, prolog in my AI class, etc. It's just about the tools for the job. Sorry I didn't mention every single thing about my education, I could type in my class listing if you wish.:) Actually no, I can't, I'm too lazy for that. They always say a lazy programmer is an efficient programmer, right?:)
What is taught in a CS degree loses currency within 3 years?! What kinda of crack job school did you go to that taught you crap that would be obsolete in 3 years? I went to Ohio Univ and stuck it through their CS program and got a BS. So I guess I can only speak for their school and what they teach. I learned a lot of C/C++, really basic OS stuff, teamwork, a solid math background, a good understanding of databases, and basically how to solve problems and teach myself things when need be. When I got out of school I started as a php/mysql programmer (what I've been doing for close to 2 years now). I was able to dive into php/mysql and write my first page the day I started on the job, keep in mind that I had NEVER even seen php code before that day. Why? Well php is very C like in it's structure, so it was just a matter of looking at examples here and looking up some function calls. All the looping mechanisms and everything are pretty much the same.
I'm constanty doing new things here and I don't see my knowlege of the real world fading in 1 year, not even close. So unless C/C++ and that whole line of programming thinking is going to change in 1 year, then ya, you may be right.
So there ya go, I think that's a pretty good description of CS, as for CIS, I'll let someone who majored in that to tell their story. Personally I knew CIS wasn't for me. I'm more of a get your hands dirty type person.
From my experience the distribution has a lot to do with how easy it is getting the X Server up and running. When I first ran slackware back in '96 it was difficult, but I eventually got it working on an STB Lightspeed 128 2.25 meg card (just retired that card last week btw:). Then I switched over to Redhat, that was a lot easier, I believe it was autodetected by the installer if I remember right.
Now I also run the only true distribution, running Debian unstable woody right now. It's on a box at home that I really don't care too much about, it's just a play box, so I don't get if the packages are in a broken state for a few days or so. I just watch tv or do something else. Anyway getting X to work with that is a breeze too. When installing the X packages it asks you information about your video card (I selected the medium knowlege one because I'm lazy and didn't feel like looking up the exact specs of my hardware). I told it my stb lightspeed has a TSENG chipset, told it my monitor is capable of 1024x768 in 16 bit color at 75hz, which I knew my hardare was capable of, anwered a few more questions about my setup (what resolutions I want to switch between, color depth, type of mouse, etc) and that was all she wrote. X worked great.
Some things with debian aren't that obvious though, say you just apt-get install the xserver. Ok I type startx and it flicks to X server and dies instantly. This actually happened to a friend of mine. I simple asked, do you have a window manager installed? Nope he said. He apt-get install'ed wmaker and everything was fine.
Anyway, I got bought an NVIDIA GF2 MX card the other day. Is there support for that under X? Probably. Am I gonna put it in that box? Hell no. I'll put that card in my win2k gaming/work box. And put gave my linux box my vooodoo3 hand me down. Now why did I do that you ask? Because I don't know of a single person first hand that has been happy with an NVidia card in X. (I only know one person with one, and he was much happier with his Voodoo3) I'm sure there are plently of people out there with that working, but personally I wasn't convinced.
Anyway, my point is that just because hardware is listed as "Supported" doesn't meat that the drivers are rock solid and work with every single card with that chipset. Keep in mind that a lot of people who program the drivers are people who do it in their spare time. Hey, what do you expect for free?
Another example: I bought a $15 sound card for my linux box, the only free drivers are the ASLA drivers. Only recently have those drivers become solid for my card, like within the last month (mtv works and everything now). Would I buy another one of those sound cards again? Probably now I would, but a month ago I would have just shelled out for an SB Live or something because I know those work, I know people who use em.
Another example: I bought a $15 10/100 nic, in the 2.2.x tree the thing would freeze under heavy load. Now I'm running 2.4.0-testX tree and the thing works great. The card was listed as supported in 2.2.x. (realtek card for those wondering) but if I hadn't found out the drivers were fixed in 2.4.x tree there's no way I would have bought another one of those cards.
Getting supported hardware isn't always the way to go. Getting solid supported hardware proven to work, is the way to go. So the question remains: "How do I find what hardware is proven?" My suggestion is go on irc somewhere, such as irc.debian.org join the channel #debian and simply ask what hardware people recommend. I hang out there sometimes and am happy to answer any questions like that.
Well I walk out to my mail box once a day to find 90 percent of it is crap, does that count?:) Electric bill, that's crap.... car payment, that's crap too... credit card bill, dammit! Hello, what's this? A victoria's sercret catalog? Oooo jackpot!
C'mon man... Mozlla's nice and zippy on my p3-850 under my win2k here at work.... once you get past the initial 7 seconds or so of hard drive crunch starting it up. I'm currently running a night build from a few days ago and it's yet to crash actually.... amazing:)
I'm also running the Debian(woody) mozilla package at home on my linux box, that's on a p3-600 and it's fairly nice too, (crashed once so far, it just disappeared, heh)
Hardware is cheap man, you can probably buy a decent fast p3 for like $200 and a mobo for maybe $100 if you current one isn't sufficient, and maybe an extra 128 meg stick of ram for like $60 at CSO.
Just went to their front page and they have a AMD Duron 700,64MB,7.5GB,40X System $399, give it more ram you you got yourself a screaming box. That's what I did to all my computers recently and now I'm a happy camper.
Ok... I'm a hardware addict, so sue me:)
Err... oops, this comment was supposed to be about Opera, wasn't it?:) I'd think of a joke to add to protect my worthless karma, but I'm really not that funny.:)
I've been a php programmer for a year and a half, and after the first week or so I knew 99% of the function names and args/syntax of everything I needed to do.
Ok, every once in awhile I'll want to do something crazy, but for those cases, just load up http://php.net/manual/ it has GREAT searching capabilities, and I've yet to look for a function that doesn't exist, or that I can't compile in.
The reason that php has lack of a good solid API is because they simply call the mysql client libraries and give you access to them, or oracle 8i functions or whatever. The don't have all sorts of crazy wrappers to slow your app down. Php is made to be extremely modular, if you want a consitant db interface api, then make your OWN functions in php. It's these things called user definable functions, HELLO? COLDFUSION?:) So you say making your own wrapper functions is too difficult and time consuming to spend the extra day on? Then use ODBC if you really want, ya you can compile that into php also...
Just the other day I wanted to gzip some straight text data before storing it in the database, because I knew I wouldn't need that data much and I knew that it would be EXTREMLY compressible (640k down to 4.5k). So I lookup the zlib functions, compile them in, and voila, I'm using them 15 minutes later. I've done perl programming and cold fusion program and I've never found as nice and easy to use docs as php has. The comments on php.net really help a lot to. Chances are, if you want to do something, someone else has done it too and posted a comment helping you.
Oh, and if you ever get really stuck? There's always #php on efnet. You just gotta ask nicely, and made sure you did your homework before asking.:)
Argue with me all you want, but you'll have a really hard time convincing me to switch to anything else. I understand if your programming toysrus.com to not buckle under the load of the Christmas rush you might want to use coldfusion/jsp or whatever. But we just aren't programming anything of that caliber here.:)
are you kidding me? if it isn't in the artits contract, then they aren't seeing a penny of it... yeah right... like some big greedy record company is just going to "split up" it's lump sum settlment among it's customers aka artists
I dunno. I don't see that heirarchy stuff catching on any time soon, or at all... microsoft.com is one hell of a lot easier to type into a web browser than microsoft.vendors.software.com oh wait... microsoft also makes hardware now, so I'd go to microsoft.vendors.hardware.com, or would that be microsoft.softwaregiants.com.... dammit, I can't remember.... I'll just use the ip....:)
No no no, trademark it darn it. You'd have to find something to trademark against the fart smell. Like humans, but that might be too broad so you'd have to narrow it down to old white fat buys with beer belly's cruising/. Ugh, now that painted a nasty picture.
Are you insane? The docs suck for php? php.net is the ultimate in php documentation, it has a great search method for functions. And even allows for users to post comments about functions, like examples of how to use them. It's great. I've always felt that one of the STRENGHTS of php is the documentation. Maybe it's because I used perl before.... now THAT documentation sucks:)
But seriously, the first day of that I programmed with php on my new job I was given a task for a simple admin to a web page. After looking at some example code and such, I was done within an hour. Now that's ease of use. Of course, I have a pretty solid programming background with experience in c/c++, pascal, a little asm... Just stuff I learned in college when I got my BS in Computer Science.
For someone WITHOUT a programming background it might be different, I'm not to sure since that's not me, and I simply can't relate. I suppose CF's hold your hand approach to documentation might be a little bit easier, but when I was reading CF docs for porting a few windows CF apps over to linux, I got annoyed by all that extra crap they put in the docs. They were too bad I guess, but I still prefer my php docs anyday. Oh yeah... and #php on efnet is by FAR one of the most helpful resources to those REALLY hard to figure out problems:)
However, PHP, even well-written PHP. will never be as fast as a well-written mod_perl handler, for the simple reason that mod_perl handlers are compiled once and live in memory for the life of the Apache server (parent) process.
This is fixed in php4, using the zend engine. It automatically compiles and optimizes your php4 code.http://www.zend.com
I write php for a living, and love every minute of it, it's a dream to code in. I've yet to run into any problem that I can't solve. I hear people bitching about perl all the time, granted most of those people bitching are people that have gotten used to php already....:)
Throttling would be NICE, but is way more complicated to add than something much simpler, say, limiting the number of connections per ip, and the max number of people leeching off of you, and how about the limiting the number of people routing through you. I don't know how many times I woke up in the morning to find out that I providing routing for 40 some people, which is about all the poor upsteam of my cable modem could handle.:) Which would mean I had upstream bandwidth left to share any of my files.
We did something like this for Developbusiness.com. So you can type in http://slashdot.developbusiness.com and get redirected to an intranet of the company "slashdot". I wrote some code that would tear apart the url that the client said it was comming from, and set a cookie of the company name "slashdot" on the browser, and do a header redirect, point the client to the real url "http://developbusiness.com". I thought it was pretty ingenious myself at the time, since you only stay at the fake url for a bit, you don't encounter many "Location poisoning" Since then, we have heard of intranets.com doing a similiar thing, although I never really researched much what they were doing, since I was only a programmer, not someone bent on stealing technology of the competition...:) Unfortunately due to situations way beyond my control, developbusiness.com was shut down by the owners. (they just contracted us out to design and program the site) Oh well things like that happen, and I worked my ass off on that site too, along with only one other programmer and one designer.
I think you can still take a look at a demo copy of it in our portfolio. Located on http://STEEM.COM. Check out... it's a beautiful page that unfortunately I had nothing to do with designing.:)
I played it way too much so my guys where way too beefed up. I had KOtR, but didn't use it because I knew it was cheap. Instead I had two players with 4x cut materia each hitting for around 9k per swipe consistently, that's around 36k per player per turn (the other would use mime), I turned sepiroth into swiss cheese without even using much magic at all.... and having the final attack phoenix combo up to level 2, I had no fear:) I guess my point is that damn I love actually kicking some ass in a game, NOT getting my ass kicked. That's why FF serious is addicting for me and a lot of other people... no one likes to lose... Can't wait for that movie though, wish they'd put out a "real" full length trailer:)
The webserver on that machine is now entirely dead... I am getting an 80ms ping from that box though.:) I swear/. is the most deadly distributed denial of cervix application out there in existence to this date.
No one seems to realize that the money people spend on things isn't infinite. If someone pirates win2k because microsofts *decent* OS's cost an arm and a leg, who's to say that person won't take that 300 bucks and buy a Dreamcast with it? And most of all, if that person COULDN'T pirate win2k because of some uber leet encryption method, who says he/she wouldn't just give up and run linux? Slightyly off topic I know, but kind of relevant I guess... I just had to get it of my chest.
Right on man, same here. I don't buy VHS anymore. Plain and simple. Damn the man, but respect his talent. I'm just not going to give him any of my money on VHS.
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what's with all the articles disappearin?
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Virtual Newscaster
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· Score: 1
Weird stuff, That Linux is Better than Windows one is gone, and now that Roblimo double post of the CSC crack. Time to call in Mulder and Scully.
Does the RIAA do *anything* else besides make trouble and sue other companies? All that money from winning lawsuits and settlements and from the cassette tape tax and nothing to do with it except sue more companies... methinks the RIAA needs an enema. Maybe it'll get the stick of their ass.
Maybe Napster should just make their client open source, then no one will be able to stop it. There is already a linux client available. >:)
Thanks to everyone for actually answering this guy's question and NOT flaming him. I had no idea what this news item was about, I got intruged, but not intriged enough to read that entire article. Some of us have a life outside of keeping up on/. articles remember.:)
I Usually come to the comments for the "good" information, but usually refrain from posting, because *gasp*!!! I don't actually read the entire articles. A good skim is what they usually get.:)
so we need to submit an AC post just to be PC now?
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John Carmack Answers
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gimme a break... there were a lot of good questions, there were some that I'd like to have seen posted... particularly the one about voxels, but eh... you can't post them all... sorry for the rant:)
here here... that's sadly the reason why I run win98 on my work box almost all the time now, no decent linux browser... I develop php3/mysql database interactive pages that are supposed to look pretty. I simply can't do that as well under linux. Netscape 4.x has weird looking fonts, buttons, etc under linux and all are different size than the standard windows ie/netscape browser widgets. Really frustrating too... seeing as how nedit is a darn nice editor:)
Slashdot Mirror
We did in all that stuff of course too in my data algorithm analysis class, we just used c/c++ for it. Used ASM in another class, pascal in another, prolog in my AI class, etc. It's just about the tools for the job. Sorry I didn't mention every single thing about my education, I could type in my class listing if you wish. :) Actually no, I can't, I'm too lazy for that. They always say a lazy programmer is an efficient programmer, right? :)
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What is taught in a CS degree loses currency within 3 years?! What kinda of crack job school did you go to that taught you crap that would be obsolete in 3 years? I went to Ohio Univ and stuck it through their CS program and got a BS. So I guess I can only speak for their school and what they teach. I learned a lot of C/C++, really basic OS stuff, teamwork, a solid math background, a good understanding of databases, and basically how to solve problems and teach myself things when need be. When I got out of school I started as a php/mysql programmer (what I've been doing for close to 2 years now). I was able to dive into php/mysql and write my first page the day I started on the job, keep in mind that I had NEVER even seen php code before that day. Why? Well php is very C like in it's structure, so it was just a matter of looking at examples here and looking up some function calls. All the looping mechanisms and everything are pretty much the same.
I'm constanty doing new things here and I don't see my knowlege of the real world fading in 1 year, not even close. So unless C/C++ and that whole line of programming thinking is going to change in 1 year, then ya, you may be right.
So there ya go, I think that's a pretty good description of CS, as for CIS, I'll let someone who majored in that to tell their story. Personally I knew CIS wasn't for me. I'm more of a get your hands dirty type person.
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oops, bound to make a mistake: alsa drivers
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Now I also run the only true distribution, running Debian unstable woody right now. It's on a box at home that I really don't care too much about, it's just a play box, so I don't get if the packages are in a broken state for a few days or so. I just watch tv or do something else. Anyway getting X to work with that is a breeze too. When installing the X packages it asks you information about your video card (I selected the medium knowlege one because I'm lazy and didn't feel like looking up the exact specs of my hardware). I told it my stb lightspeed has a TSENG chipset, told it my monitor is capable of 1024x768 in 16 bit color at 75hz, which I knew my hardare was capable of, anwered a few more questions about my setup (what resolutions I want to switch between, color depth, type of mouse, etc) and that was all she wrote. X worked great.
Some things with debian aren't that obvious though, say you just apt-get install the xserver. Ok I type startx and it flicks to X server and dies instantly. This actually happened to a friend of mine. I simple asked, do you have a window manager installed? Nope he said. He apt-get install'ed wmaker and everything was fine.
Anyway, I got bought an NVIDIA GF2 MX card the other day. Is there support for that under X? Probably. Am I gonna put it in that box? Hell no. I'll put that card in my win2k gaming/work box. And put gave my linux box my vooodoo3 hand me down. Now why did I do that you ask? Because I don't know of a single person first hand that has been happy with an NVidia card in X. (I only know one person with one, and he was much happier with his Voodoo3) I'm sure there are plently of people out there with that working, but personally I wasn't convinced.
Anyway, my point is that just because hardware is listed as "Supported" doesn't meat that the drivers are rock solid and work with every single card with that chipset. Keep in mind that a lot of people who program the drivers are people who do it in their spare time. Hey, what do you expect for free?
Another example: I bought a $15 sound card for my linux box, the only free drivers are the ASLA drivers. Only recently have those drivers become solid for my card, like within the last month (mtv works and everything now). Would I buy another one of those sound cards again? Probably now I would, but a month ago I would have just shelled out for an SB Live or something because I know those work, I know people who use em.
Another example: I bought a $15 10/100 nic, in the 2.2.x tree the thing would freeze under heavy load. Now I'm running 2.4.0-testX tree and the thing works great. The card was listed as supported in 2.2.x. (realtek card for those wondering) but if I hadn't found out the drivers were fixed in 2.4.x tree there's no way I would have bought another one of those cards.
Getting supported hardware isn't always the way to go. Getting solid supported hardware proven to work, is the way to go. So the question remains: "How do I find what hardware is proven?" My suggestion is go on irc somewhere, such as irc.debian.org join the channel #debian and simply ask what hardware people recommend. I hang out there sometimes and am happy to answer any questions like that.
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Well I walk out to my mail box once a day to find 90 percent of it is crap, does that count? :) Electric bill, that's crap.... car payment, that's crap too... credit card bill, dammit! Hello, what's this? A victoria's sercret catalog? Oooo jackpot!
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I'm also running the Debian(woody) mozilla package at home on my linux box, that's on a p3-600 and it's fairly nice too, (crashed once so far, it just disappeared, heh)
Hardware is cheap man, you can probably buy a decent fast p3 for like $200 and a mobo for maybe $100 if you current one isn't sufficient, and maybe an extra 128 meg stick of ram for like $60 at CSO. Just went to their front page and they have a AMD Duron 700,64MB,7.5GB,40X System $399, give it more ram you you got yourself a screaming box. That's what I did to all my computers recently and now I'm a happy camper.
Ok... I'm a hardware addict, so sue me :)
Err... oops, this comment was supposed to be about Opera, wasn't it? :) I'd think of a joke to add to protect my worthless karma, but I'm really not that funny. :)
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Ok, every once in awhile I'll want to do something crazy, but for those cases, just load up http://php.net/manual/ it has GREAT searching capabilities, and I've yet to look for a function that doesn't exist, or that I can't compile in.
The reason that php has lack of a good solid API is because they simply call the mysql client libraries and give you access to them, or oracle 8i functions or whatever. The don't have all sorts of crazy wrappers to slow your app down. Php is made to be extremely modular, if you want a consitant db interface api, then make your OWN functions in php. It's these things called user definable functions, HELLO? COLDFUSION? :) So you say making your own wrapper functions is too difficult and time consuming to spend the extra day on? Then use ODBC if you really want, ya you can compile that into php also...
Just the other day I wanted to gzip some straight text data before storing it in the database, because I knew I wouldn't need that data much and I knew that it would be EXTREMLY compressible (640k down to 4.5k). So I lookup the zlib functions, compile them in, and voila, I'm using them 15 minutes later. I've done perl programming and cold fusion program and I've never found as nice and easy to use docs as php has. The comments on php.net really help a lot to. Chances are, if you want to do something, someone else has done it too and posted a comment helping you.
Oh, and if you ever get really stuck? There's always #php on efnet. You just gotta ask nicely, and made sure you did your homework before asking. :)
Argue with me all you want, but you'll have a really hard time convincing me to switch to anything else. I understand if your programming toysrus.com to not buckle under the load of the Christmas rush you might want to use coldfusion/jsp or whatever. But we just aren't programming anything of that caliber here. :)
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are you kidding me? if it isn't in the artits contract, then they aren't seeing a penny of it... yeah right... like some big greedy record company is just going to "split up" it's lump sum settlment among it's customers aka artists
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I dunno. I don't see that heirarchy stuff catching on any time soon, or at all... microsoft.com is one hell of a lot easier to type into a web browser than microsoft.vendors.software.com oh wait... microsoft also makes hardware now, so I'd go to microsoft.vendors.hardware.com, or would that be microsoft.softwaregiants.com.... dammit, I can't remember.... I'll just use the ip.... :)
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No no no, trademark it darn it. You'd have to find something to trademark against the fart smell. Like humans, but that might be too broad so you'd have to narrow it down to old white fat buys with beer belly's cruising /. Ugh, now that painted a nasty picture.
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But seriously, the first day of that I programmed with php on my new job I was given a task for a simple admin to a web page. After looking at some example code and such, I was done within an hour. Now that's ease of use. Of course, I have a pretty solid programming background with experience in c/c++, pascal, a little asm... Just stuff I learned in college when I got my BS in Computer Science.
For someone WITHOUT a programming background it might be different, I'm not to sure since that's not me, and I simply can't relate. I suppose CF's hold your hand approach to documentation might be a little bit easier, but when I was reading CF docs for porting a few windows CF apps over to linux, I got annoyed by all that extra crap they put in the docs. They were too bad I guess, but I still prefer my php docs anyday. Oh yeah... and #php on efnet is by FAR one of the most helpful resources to those REALLY hard to figure out problems :)
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's and made my comment kinda unreadable and hid the intelligent stuff at the end of it ;)
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- However, PHP, even well-written PHP. will never be as fast as a well-written mod_perl handler, for the simple reason that mod_perl handlers are compiled once and live in memory for the life of the Apache server (parent) process.
This is fixed in php4, using the zend engine. It automatically compiles and optimizes your php4 code.http://www.zend.comI write php for a living, and love every minute of it, it's a dream to code in. I've yet to run into any problem that I can't solve. I hear people bitching about perl all the time, granted most of those people bitching are people that have gotten used to php already....
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Yeah, as a matter of fact, the new /. servers are running the icq 2000a beta person web servers... I hear they're blazingly fast
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Throttling would be NICE, but is way more complicated to add than something much simpler, say, limiting the number of connections per ip, and the max number of people leeching off of you, and how about the limiting the number of people routing through you. I don't know how many times I woke up in the morning to find out that I providing routing for 40 some people, which is about all the poor upsteam of my cable modem could handle. :) Which would mean I had upstream bandwidth left to share any of my files.
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I think you can still take a look at a demo copy of it in our portfolio. Located on http://STEEM.COM. Check out... it's a beautiful page that unfortunately I had nothing to do with designing. :)
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I played it way too much so my guys where way too beefed up. I had KOtR, but didn't use it because I knew it was cheap. Instead I had two players with 4x cut materia each hitting for around 9k per swipe consistently, that's around 36k per player per turn (the other would use mime), I turned sepiroth into swiss cheese without even using much magic at all.... and having the final attack phoenix combo up to level 2, I had no fear :) I guess my point is that damn I love actually kicking some ass in a game, NOT getting my ass kicked. That's why FF serious is addicting for me and a lot of other people... no one likes to lose... Can't wait for that movie though, wish they'd put out a "real" full length trailer :)
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The webserver on that machine is now entirely dead... I am getting an 80ms ping from that box though. :) I swear /. is the most deadly distributed denial of cervix application out there in existence to this date.
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No one seems to realize that the money people spend on things isn't infinite. If someone pirates win2k because microsofts *decent* OS's cost an arm and a leg, who's to say that person won't take that 300 bucks and buy a Dreamcast with it? And most of all, if that person COULDN'T pirate win2k because of some uber leet encryption method, who says he/she wouldn't just give up and run linux? Slightyly off topic I know, but kind of relevant I guess... I just had to get it of my chest.
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Right on man, same here. I don't buy VHS anymore. Plain and simple. Damn the man, but respect his talent. I'm just not going to give him any of my money on VHS.
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Weird stuff, That Linux is Better than Windows one is gone, and now that Roblimo double post of the CSC crack. Time to call in Mulder and Scully.
Maybe Napster should just make their client open source, then no one will be able to stop it. There is already a linux client available. >:)
I Usually come to the comments for the "good" information, but usually refrain from posting, because *gasp*!!! I don't actually read the entire articles. A good skim is what they usually get. :)
gimme a break... there were a lot of good questions, there were some that I'd like to have seen posted... particularly the one about voxels, but eh... you can't post them all... sorry for the rant :)
here here... that's sadly the reason why I run win98 on my work box almost all the time now, no decent linux browser... I develop php3/mysql database interactive pages that are supposed to look pretty. I simply can't do that as well under linux. Netscape 4.x has weird looking fonts, buttons, etc under linux and all are different size than the standard windows ie/netscape browser widgets. Really frustrating too... seeing as how nedit is a darn nice editor :)