I had a 2000FP -- it failed after 5 months. Groups of pixels started to go bad in "puke" colors (red/green/blue clusters) I called Dell tech. support, and at first they didn't even consider it a failure, saying it was how LCDs were manufacturered, and that there is always going to be a bad pixel here or there. Realllly? And I had paid $1500 for this? (I bought them when they first came out.) Finally I got the guy to admit that this is clearly not acceptable, and he offered to replace it with a NEW one. He said they'd ship one out overnight and I'd just send the old one back. They needed my credit card to do this (which made no sense to me, since he had my address/credit card info/name/phone/etc. on his screen) so I gave him the information.
Two days went by, and I get the monitor, and discover it's a REFURBISHED unit. Plug it in, and there are three bright red "bad" pixels spread all over the screen. I call up Dell and ask to speak to the same tech. support person-- they say he isn't working today, so I deal with another person. They tell me that three dead pixels is perfectly acceptable, and falls under Dell's policies on LCDs. I asked why I wasn't shipped a brand new LCD, and he explained that they didn't make too many 2000FP's, and that refurbished units is all they have in stock sometimes. I demanded a brand new replacement, and he kept quoting the policy. Has to be "seven or more" to constitute a replacement. Tried to talk to his supervisor but he said they weren't available.
I've written complaint letters to Dell's PR department, and received back a standard "Thanks for giving us feedback" letter, along with a SURVEY. I filled it out all negative and sent it back. Still haven't heard back from this day.
After burning me on my $1500 2000FP and my $3000 Dell Inspiron 8000, I'm not spending another cent with Dell.
Horizons was an awful awful game. I beta tested it for three months or so, and they never fixed the major problems that people were reporting (very low FPS, sound problems, network lag.) It also just wasn't a very fun game. You'd have to practically read an entire manual to even get started. There was no "jumping in" right away.
You apparently don't remember all the "site builder" type apps that existed on the internet years and years ago.
There were also quite a few HTML editors around "back in the day", such as Hotdog and HoTMetal, which are still around to this day. People used those to make some pretty cheesy sites.
It's been said here before, and apparently you don't believe it. If your pages rely on flashy formatting and movement and pixel-level formatting, you're letting the formatting get in the way of content.
I believe the original response was in regards to dynamic content; ie. information pulled from a database. Just look at how often Slashdot's main page changes.
Right tools? Heh. Sorry, I've tried PageMill, and FrontPage, and Netscape and Mozilla built-in editors, and even MS Office's HTML editing.
You just named some of the worst HTML editors, ever. The best HTML editor (and everyone knows this) is a text editor. For real. If you need a WYSIWYG editor, though.. I'd suggest Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive! or even Microsoft's new Visual Web Dev 2005.
If you think "News for Nerds" is only technical, then you're just a geek who doesn't grok the Web.
The problem is, we're basically taking something technical (a way to splice together audio/video client side) and turning it into a slam on the president at the end. That's not really "news for nerds," and is pretty unnecessary.
Anyhow, looking at the site, it looks like quite a few of those people contributing streams don't like Bush, or the U.S. for that matter. That alone is enough to keep this nerd away from that site.
I'll get rated flamebait for this anyway; liberal posts are in this year, while conservative ones are not.
not even a damn stress test of the steam server has taken place
I assume you mean SERVERS, since Valve has close to 50 of them serving up Steam content on a regular basis, averaging 110,000 users a day.
There were speedbumps in the past with major releases on the Steam network, but nowadays a patch is released and has almost nil affect on the entire network. For Half-Life 2, they are supposedly going to double or triple the amount of servers they have.
Why would someone pay 10$/month for a list of games you can play on the good old HL you bought for 50$ some 5 years ago?
We're not talking about "someone", we're talking about CyberCafes, who PROFIT from the playing of these games/mods, regardless of how old they are. That's besides the point anyway, since Valve is still updating HL/CS/etc. to this day.
You can't just buy multiple copies of Half-Life and setup a CyberCafe. Valve makes that pretty clear on their SteamPowered.com website.
The only improvements have been in the graphics department.
I'd say running on an entirely brand new game engine is a bit different than just graphics improvement.
I don't know why ValvE has focused a considerable amount of effort to porting an old game to a new engine instead of just making Counter-Strike 2.
Maybe because it's easy, and a cool way to show off the new engine's features to the masses? Counter-Strike is probably the world's must popular game, easily.
I'm not going to pay for a rehash.
Didn't you read the article/news post? It WILL be free, to CyberCafe owners, then Condition Zero owners. I'd say that's not too shabby. Half-Life 2 owners will also be able to play it when HL2 comes out.
"There isn't really a different version of Steam for Cafés. But when an official Café product key is used in Steam, a couple of special things happen: - Your Steam account gives you access to all of the games currently on Steam - Steam requires a password to be entered when the user tries to logout or quit"
Also, you might want to read up on how a CyberCafe should setup Steam.
access to all of Valve's games, which right now is the original Counter-Strike
Check again:
* Half-Life * Half-Life: Opposing Force * Half-Life: Codename Gordon * Counter-Strike * Counter-Strike: Condition Zero * Day of Defeat * Ricochet * Deathmatch Classic * Team Fortress Classic
This may not seem like a lot, but multiply this charge by every major game publisher and pretty soon you've strangled the nascent cybercafe industry.
$10 for a PC to have access to all those for a month is NOTHING. If you are losing money with that deal, then I would seriously re-examine where your company's money is going, how much your charging, and how many customers you're really getting. Most cyber cafes I've seen (in the San Diego area) have folded within months because they were run piss-poor, with no regard as to what it really costs to run a business.
Valve should be encouraging cybercafes with generous licensing terms, rather than trying to squeeze every last dime of profit.
You want all of their current games for less than $10 a month for a PC? And you're profiting off their games? What's wrong with you? Would $5 be better? Sheesh.
The worst part is that Valve is targeting high-profile cybercafes that are trying to act as responsible members of the community
If they were trying to act as responsible members of the community, they would be getting properly licensed through Valve.
I'm thinking your post is sarcasm? But it's not that apparent. Anyways:
Built in client side anti cheat tools
VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) is already implemented. It finds (and automatically bans your CD key) if you are found to be using hacks. An appeals system is in place if you have a good reason for needing to be unbanned. I fail to see what's wrong with this?
Complete control over your games and your rights when playing them
How does Steam have "complete control over your games" ? Last I checked, you can still install Half-Life off the original CD and play all you want. You can even still use the Counter-Strike add-on via WON's servers. Even after WON shuts down, you will still be able to play Half-Life, and CS via Steam. Steam even offers an "offline" mode, so you don't even need an internet connection to play Half-Life/Opposing Force/etc. after it's downloaded.
Only being able to buy games through steam
Valve has never said this would be the case, so this is pure bull. CS:CZ was available on CD as well as Steam, and HL2 will be done the same way.
What will happen if a company like ea makes a program like this and then every other game maker does the same
I would hope they would try to come up with some sort of standard protocls for this, if it becomes widespread, but I have no problem with other companies doing something similiar to Steam. I must own 5 or 6 EA games on my computer, it would be great to be able to access them on any computer I want at any time, and have them all organized in one place. Another advantage I just thought of is not having to search and re-enter CD keys every time you reinstall.
Do you want 6 different programs that you have to run in the background to play your games?
Like I said, I would hope they would coordinate into some sort of standard, so we could run a single third party app to handle this. Realistically this will probably never happen, but why would you need all XX apps running at once? You can only play one game at a time anyway. I don't leave Steam running on my PC all the time. If I'm done with CS, I exit. Pretty simple.
Huh? What's wrong with a launcher for Valve games? What's wrong with being able to load up Steam on nearly any PC (with a broadband connection) and start playing your games, even though that PC never had them installed prior? That's the real trick of Steam, not "preventing piracy".
When Half-Life 2 comes out, it will be available on both CD and online formats (through Steam) -- If you buy the CD, you can add your CD key to your Steam profile, and it will be available from any computer you have Steam installed on.
What's not to like about that? I think it's awesome.
People love to bash on Steam, but usually for no good reason. I've been using it since the very very beginning (earliest betas), and have never had the amount of problems that some people claim to have. Most of the time it's probably bad hardware, conflicting software (NetLimiter is a big cause of problems on Steam/other programs) or just the person hating the idea of change/progress ("don't kill the WON servers! waaah!")
I've never really liked them, but I got to play Horizons in beta testing, and I hated every second of it. There's absolutely nothing engaging about it, nor is there a desire to progress forward. A lot of us have what you call "jobs" and are unable to dedicate 5+ hours a day to an online world.
I also beta tested for Planetside, and while it was more enjoyable than Horzions, it still didn't catch my interest.
I guess I'll never understand how people can tolerate EverQuest. Ugh.
Unless you're shutting down your computer every night and swapping those out.. that's not a very good "backup" solution.
You're better off getting an external hard drive with a seperate power supply, running through firewire or USB2, or something to that effect (SCSI or SATA if you can afford it..)
As a side note, those Vantec racks are a joke for cooling. I don't even know why they put a fan in them, they don't move any air at all, with the way the rack is designed to slide in.
My server has an Antec power supply, with an external molex power connector. I decided I would rig up some case fans (120mm ones) to pull cool air through the window and blow out hot air near the top (my room gets to be 100 or so during the summer and I'm not home.) Anyways, I had to splice in more wire to get it to reach. I wired one of the lines incorrectly along the way, and when I leaned behind my server and tried to plug it in, it instantly arced and the server shut off.
I unplugged the power connector and opened the case, inspecting for damage. I couldn't find any, so I assumed that the power supply's internal fuse had blown (a lot of them use metal strip type fuses that complete the circuit again after a cool down) so I plugged the PS back in and hit the power switch on the front of the server. Green light came on, fans came on.. but nothing on the screen. And then I start to hear clickclickclickclick... clickclickclickclick.. from all four of my server's IDE drives.
In the long run, it ended up frying my video card (an S3 ViRGE, good riddance,) one of my 3Com gigabit NICs, all four hard drives, and my motherboard. It cost me $1000 to get the data retrieved from the backup drive (which were Western Digitals, by the way. My main system drives were IBMs, and they were damaged way beyond what the WDs were.)
Anyhow, I thought that was a pretty good one. I'll never "hot plug" molex connections in anymore, nor will I try to make my own cabling. Hah.
Slashdot Mirror
You think that's bad?
I had a 2000FP -- it failed after 5 months. Groups of pixels started to go bad in "puke" colors (red/green/blue clusters) I called Dell tech. support, and at first they didn't even consider it a failure, saying it was how LCDs were manufacturered, and that there is always going to be a bad pixel here or there. Realllly? And I had paid $1500 for this? (I bought them when they first came out.) Finally I got the guy to admit that this is clearly not acceptable, and he offered to replace it with a NEW one. He said they'd ship one out overnight and I'd just send the old one back. They needed my credit card to do this (which made no sense to me, since he had my address/credit card info/name/phone/etc. on his screen) so I gave him the information.
Two days went by, and I get the monitor, and discover it's a REFURBISHED unit. Plug it in, and there are three bright red "bad" pixels spread all over the screen. I call up Dell and ask to speak to the same tech. support person-- they say he isn't working today, so I deal with another person. They tell me that three dead pixels is perfectly acceptable, and falls under Dell's policies on LCDs. I asked why I wasn't shipped a brand new LCD, and he explained that they didn't make too many 2000FP's, and that refurbished units is all they have in stock sometimes. I demanded a brand new replacement, and he kept quoting the policy. Has to be "seven or more" to constitute a replacement. Tried to talk to his supervisor but he said they weren't available.
I've written complaint letters to Dell's PR department, and received back a standard "Thanks for giving us feedback" letter, along with a SURVEY. I filled it out all negative and sent it back. Still haven't heard back from this day.
After burning me on my $1500 2000FP and my $3000 Dell Inspiron 8000, I'm not spending another cent with Dell.
Horizons was an awful awful game. I beta tested it for three months or so, and they never fixed the major problems that people were reporting (very low FPS, sound problems, network lag.) It also just wasn't a very fun game. You'd have to practically read an entire manual to even get started. There was no "jumping in" right away.
You apparently don't remember all the "site builder" type apps that existed on the internet years and years ago.
There were also quite a few HTML editors around "back in the day", such as Hotdog and HoTMetal, which are still around to this day. People used those to make some pretty cheesy sites.
Don't blame a webpage for not working just because you're using a crappy web browser.
I believe the original response was in regards to dynamic content; ie. information pulled from a database. Just look at how often Slashdot's main page changes.
You just named some of the worst HTML editors, ever. The best HTML editor (and everyone knows this) is a text editor. For real. If you need a WYSIWYG editor, though.. I'd suggest Macromedia Dreamweaver, Adobe GoLive! or even Microsoft's new Visual Web Dev 2005.
http://images.pdsys.org/~delusion_/bad_site.png
Check it out for yourself, it's worse than just an 8 pixel offset.
Good god! That site renders horribly in FireFox. The worst I've seen a webpage mangled.
This has to be the most retarded Slashdot article, ever. Of all time, even.
If you think "News for Nerds" is only technical, then you're just a geek who doesn't grok the Web.
The problem is, we're basically taking something technical (a way to splice together audio/video client side) and turning it into a slam on the president at the end. That's not really "news for nerds," and is pretty unnecessary.
Anyhow, looking at the site, it looks like quite a few of those people contributing streams don't like Bush, or the U.S. for that matter. That alone is enough to keep this nerd away from that site.
I'll get rated flamebait for this anyway; liberal posts are in this year, while conservative ones are not.
not even a damn stress test of the steam server has taken place
I assume you mean SERVERS, since Valve has close to 50 of them serving up Steam content on a regular basis, averaging 110,000 users a day.
There were speedbumps in the past with major releases on the Steam network, but nowadays a patch is released and has almost nil affect on the entire network. For Half-Life 2, they are supposedly going to double or triple the amount of servers they have.
http://www.steampowered.com/status/status.html
1996: Duke Nukem 3D 1.0 came out using modified Doom II engine
Bzzt. Wrong. It was the BUILD engine, written by Ken Silverman.
Does anyone know why AutoPatcher wants to install like 30-40 "hotfixes", even though WindowsUpdate says I'm completely up to date?
Doesn't make much sense to me.. and makes me reluctant to use AutoPatcher.
If only 99% of the world had your sort of foresight and intelligence on this matter, it would be a better place to live.
http://www.rssreader.com/
It's free and for Windows. Pretty sweet and simple.
Why would someone pay 10$/month for a list of games you can play on the good old HL you bought for 50$ some 5 years ago?
We're not talking about "someone", we're talking about CyberCafes, who PROFIT from the playing of these games/mods, regardless of how old they are. That's besides the point anyway, since Valve is still updating HL/CS/etc. to this day.
You can't just buy multiple copies of Half-Life and setup a CyberCafe. Valve makes that pretty clear on their SteamPowered.com website.
The Sims has always run like crap for me, even on my Radeon 9800 Pro/Athlon 2GHz with a gig of RAM.
You can't polish a turd.
The only improvements have been in the graphics department.
I'd say running on an entirely brand new game engine is a bit different than just graphics improvement.
I don't know why ValvE has focused a considerable amount of effort to porting an old game to a new engine instead of just making Counter-Strike 2.
Maybe because it's easy, and a cool way to show off the new engine's features to the masses? Counter-Strike is probably the world's must popular game, easily.
I'm not going to pay for a rehash.
Didn't you read the article/news post? It WILL be free, to CyberCafe owners, then Condition Zero owners. I'd say that's not too shabby. Half-Life 2 owners will also be able to play it when HL2 comes out.
Last I heard, Valve was shooting for a late August release (to compete with Doom3 being released around then.)
If Valve is smart, then they would have a special 'CyberCafe' edition
From the FAQ:
"There isn't really a different version of Steam for Cafés. But when an official Café product key is used in Steam, a couple of special things happen:
- Your Steam account gives you access to all of the games currently on Steam
- Steam requires a password to be entered when the user tries to logout or quit"
Also, you might want to read up on how a CyberCafe should setup Steam.
access to all of Valve's games, which right now is the original Counter-Strike
Check again:
* Half-Life
* Half-Life: Opposing Force
* Half-Life: Codename Gordon
* Counter-Strike
* Counter-Strike: Condition Zero
* Day of Defeat
* Ricochet
* Deathmatch Classic
* Team Fortress Classic
This may not seem like a lot, but multiply this charge by every major game publisher and pretty soon you've strangled the nascent cybercafe industry.
$10 for a PC to have access to all those for a month is NOTHING. If you are losing money with that deal, then I would seriously re-examine where your company's money is going, how much your charging, and how many customers you're really getting. Most cyber cafes I've seen (in the San Diego area) have folded within months because they were run piss-poor, with no regard as to what it really costs to run a business.
Valve should be encouraging cybercafes with generous licensing terms, rather than trying to squeeze every last dime of profit.
You want all of their current games for less than $10 a month for a PC? And you're profiting off their games? What's wrong with you? Would $5 be better? Sheesh.
The worst part is that Valve is targeting high-profile cybercafes that are trying to act as responsible members of the community
If they were trying to act as responsible members of the community, they would be getting properly licensed through Valve.
I'm thinking your post is sarcasm? But it's not that apparent. Anyways:
Built in client side anti cheat tools
VAC (Valve Anti-Cheat) is already implemented. It finds (and automatically bans your CD key) if you are found to be using hacks. An appeals system is in place if you have a good reason for needing to be unbanned. I fail to see what's wrong with this?
Complete control over your games and your rights when playing them
How does Steam have "complete control over your games" ? Last I checked, you can still install Half-Life off the original CD and play all you want. You can even still use the Counter-Strike add-on via WON's servers. Even after WON shuts down, you will still be able to play Half-Life, and CS via Steam. Steam even offers an "offline" mode, so you don't even need an internet connection to play Half-Life/Opposing Force/etc. after it's downloaded.
Only being able to buy games through steam
Valve has never said this would be the case, so this is pure bull. CS:CZ was available on CD as well as Steam, and HL2 will be done the same way.
What will happen if a company like ea makes a program like this and then every other game maker does the same
I would hope they would try to come up with some sort of standard protocls for this, if it becomes widespread, but I have no problem with other companies doing something similiar to Steam. I must own 5 or 6 EA games on my computer, it would be great to be able to access them on any computer I want at any time, and have them all organized in one place. Another advantage I just thought of is not having to search and re-enter CD keys every time you reinstall.
Do you want 6 different programs that you have to run in the background to play your games?
Like I said, I would hope they would coordinate into some sort of standard, so we could run a single third party app to handle this. Realistically this will probably never happen, but why would you need all XX apps running at once? You can only play one game at a time anyway. I don't leave Steam running on my PC all the time. If I'm done with CS, I exit. Pretty simple.
Huh? What's wrong with a launcher for Valve games? What's wrong with being able to load up Steam on nearly any PC (with a broadband connection) and start playing your games, even though that PC never had them installed prior? That's the real trick of Steam, not "preventing piracy".
When Half-Life 2 comes out, it will be available on both CD and online formats (through Steam) -- If you buy the CD, you can add your CD key to your Steam profile, and it will be available from any computer you have Steam installed on.
What's not to like about that? I think it's awesome.
People love to bash on Steam, but usually for no good reason. I've been using it since the very very beginning (earliest betas), and have never had the amount of problems that some people claim to have. Most of the time it's probably bad hardware, conflicting software (NetLimiter is a big cause of problems on Steam/other programs) or just the person hating the idea of change/progress ("don't kill the WON servers! waaah!")
I've never really liked them, but I got to play Horizons in beta testing, and I hated every second of it. There's absolutely nothing engaging about it, nor is there a desire to progress forward. A lot of us have what you call "jobs" and are unable to dedicate 5+ hours a day to an online world.
I also beta tested for Planetside, and while it was more enjoyable than Horzions, it still didn't catch my interest.
I guess I'll never understand how people can tolerate EverQuest. Ugh.
Unless you're shutting down your computer every night and swapping those out.. that's not a very good "backup" solution.
You're better off getting an external hard drive with a seperate power supply, running through firewire or USB2, or something to that effect (SCSI or SATA if you can afford it..)
As a side note, those Vantec racks are a joke for cooling. I don't even know why they put a fan in them, they don't move any air at all, with the way the rack is designed to slide in.
My server has an Antec power supply, with an external molex power connector. I decided I would rig up some case fans (120mm ones) to pull cool air through the window and blow out hot air near the top (my room gets to be 100 or so during the summer and I'm not home.) Anyways, I had to splice in more wire to get it to reach. I wired one of the lines incorrectly along the way, and when I leaned behind my server and tried to plug it in, it instantly arced and the server shut off.
I unplugged the power connector and opened the case, inspecting for damage. I couldn't find any, so I assumed that the power supply's internal fuse had blown (a lot of them use metal strip type fuses that complete the circuit again after a cool down) so I plugged the PS back in and hit the power switch on the front of the server. Green light came on, fans came on.. but nothing on the screen. And then I start to hear clickclickclickclick... clickclickclickclick.. from all four of my server's IDE drives.
In the long run, it ended up frying my video card (an S3 ViRGE, good riddance,) one of my 3Com gigabit NICs, all four hard drives, and my motherboard. It cost me $1000 to get the data retrieved from the backup drive (which were Western Digitals, by the way. My main system drives were IBMs, and they were damaged way beyond what the WDs were.)
Anyhow, I thought that was a pretty good one. I'll never "hot plug" molex connections in anymore, nor will I try to make my own cabling. Hah.