there is no safe mechanism to _open_ a file without the risk of _running_ it.
Blatant lie. I can right-click any file and get "Open with" as part of the pop-up menu so that I can open any file in any app I want. And this is on a (mostly) stock and unmodified Windows XP install.
Also, many free apps (like Textpad) automatically add themselves to that same menu so I don't even have to bother with "Open With" when just viewing the file as plain text or hex will do.
Finally, if you're too dumb to use "Open with" or Textpad, you can just rename any file to.txt and open it. Notepad will launch by default and you're not going to be executing anything harmful by opening it in notepad...
Your UID is a bit shorter than mine, but I've got to respond because you're just so full of shit.
[On a console], you never have to deal with patches, hardware upgrades, incompatibility, or any of the other woes of the PC.
You _do_ have to deal with hardware upgrades (often ugly ones) and incompatibility. Talk to anyone who tried playing import games on their PlayStation. Doing so often requires chipping, a procedure which can be (though just like upgrading the hardware on a PC, doesn't have to be) very tricky to perform.
You also need to upgrade your hardware in the more traditional sense, because even consoles eventually get too old - ask any SNES owner. Except with a console, you can't really "upgrade"; Upgrading the hardware on a console means throwing it out and buying a new one! And even then you can't be sure it plays all the games that ran on the previous one, because there are incompatibilities beween manufacturers; the Xbox obviously won't play SNES games, et cetera. Sure, you can keep the old console around (until it breaks - and when it does, you generally can't just swap out the faulty component like on a PC), but then you either need some sort of switch or you need to poke the wires behind the TV every time you want to use the older one (if you don't have multiple sets). My 2003 PC can still play games that were released in the early 90's for completely different hardware, and doing so requires no special reconfiguration between games.
Games themselves are generally of lower quality upon release than their console brethren, and it's not uncommon for it to take many patches to iron out all the problems.
This greatly depends on how you define quality regarding games. If you are talking bugs per line of code, yes, PC games may be buggier overall, but there are millions more PC games than there are console games for any single console. Because it's so easy to develop and release PC games, there are a lot of junk games out there. But on the PC, bugs can always be fixed post-release. On a console, they can't. This is clearly a huge advantage for PC's, and if it leads to (some) games being a bit buggier to start with, that's fine. Most if not all such games are eventually fixed and noone forces you to buy those games before they are. And on PC, you don't need to waste your money, there are always ways to try before you buy (not that console games aren't warezed, too).
Looking at aspects other than bugginess I'd argue that PC games are generally of a higher quality than console ones. PC games generally offer more ways to customize the game, support for more and different input devices (you can configure a keybd+mouse in many more ways than you can configure a simple joypad). Oh, and not to forget, modifications to the games themselves - I don't think I need to tell you how PC's sweep the floor with consoles in that regard.
Successful PC games will likely have a console port, but the reverse is less often true.
Got any facts to back this up? To me it seems too many shitty console games (like Deus Ex 2) end up on PC. The reverse is also true, PC games are released for consoles because the manufacturers want to make more money. Of course, there are also great games (like GTA: Vice City) that are a joy to play on either system.
Into this scenario comes VIA, proposing to combine the worst aspects of a console(non-upgradability, limited functionality)
If you had RTFA'ed, you'd know that this console is in fact NOT impossible to upgrade. They even included an empty DIMM slot on the motherboard for pete's sake! And as far as limited functionality goes, since the damn thing runs Windows XP Embedded, you can probably just connect a mouse and keyboard and have a low-end PC to play with. It should be able to run most apps compatible with WinXP, possibly given some hacks to remove the glossy shell they have no doubt installed over WinXP's default interface.
Admittedly Anandtech write solid reviews, but HardOCP is run by an idiot with an ego problem. I would not rely on their reviews. As for Ace's, I don't visit it very often, so I've no opinion of it.
ALL hardware sites are influenced by advertisers as far as I'm concerned. Though I cannot prove this - some of them may very well be clean - but it's safest to assume this and never put your complete trust in a single site.
I'd have to agree wholeheartedly with you that Joe Sixpack needs to be taught these things. However, I feel the need to point out that:
Your 2 GHz Athlon is not obsolete when the 2.1 GHz one comes out - Joe Sixpack does NOT think this way, however computer geeks with too much money, rich parents or an unhealthy fanaticism with having the hottest hardware on the block just so they can use 10% of its potential performance playing Counter-Strike, do.
WWW is not the Internet - while true, do we really need the poor computer illiterates' heads being bogged down by having to understand there's more to the Internet than what is prefixed with http://? Frankly, the less of them come to pollute IRC (as an example among many), the better. Who, me, elitist?
Nigerians are not that generous - people who fall for nigerian scams have it coming to begin with. I knew those e-mails were scams from the minute I set eyes on them and I don't understand how anyone with a shred of common sense could. Anyway, while certainly something Joe Sixpack may need to be told, this could be better said as the more general: "If anything seems to be too good to be true, it always is."
Downloading those MP3s... is definitely legal in some countries. Don't assume everyone lives in the US, please.
MS Office is NOT the gold standard... maybe not "the" gold standard, but the de facto standard it is - why else would the OpenOffice folks put so much effort into copying every aspect of it? Putting licensing and pricing issues aside, there is certainly no better Office package for Windows on the market at the moment - and yes, I know OpenOffice is making great strides, and even has advantages over MS Office in some areas (for one thing, I prefer OO's equation editor) but it is NOT yet up to Office's standards in every way that counts to mr. Sixpack.
Regarding "Simplify Web publishing": As Wired and several other posters seem to have missed, Windows XP has this too. It's called web folders. You can mount, say, an FTP site as a folder in explorer, though it's not as neat as I wish it would be, it certainly does provide the "post files from our desktop to a web site in one drag-and-drop move" which the author of Wired's article so desires.
The fact that the only things you found to criticise in my (rather long) posting were two counts of minor misspellings, brings my ego to new heights.
But then again, you're posting as AC, so why should I care.
You call yourself a zealot, and then you admit that Windows can be a superior solution in some cases. Based on these two statements, I can tell you're obviously not a zealot. A real *nix zealot would never admit to being one (same as spammers always define spamming as what they don't do) and he would never under any circumstances claim that Windows is good for anything.
As for your example, anyone using Sun/SGI boxes at home is clearly not a potential customer of Microsoft's anyway, so even if they truthfully consider Linux to have better hardware support (for the specific hardware which they use, anyway), their answers are as uninteresting as a zealot's to Microsoft and can thus be safely disregarded. The same goes for users of any other hardware which can not run a Microsoft OS.
The survey sites themselves are slashdotted but from people's comments here and on NF, I can tell Microsoft have tailored these surveys very specifically to make it easy for them to simply filter out all the zealots. For example, anyone who suggests Linux provides a superior gaming experience, better hardware support, or other things which are known Linux weak points is an obvious zealot and can be safely ignored.
There was apparently a section at the end of one survey asking users why they didn't want to use Microsoft - and the options included "don't want to use commercial software", "I feel satisfaction in not giving Microsoft any money", something like that. Another obvious zealot filter. And from the comments, people seem to be falling for it big time. Seriously, zealots do nothing but hurt the free software movement in taking every chance to ridicule Microsoft, no matter what they do. Eventually, someone will go too far, Microsoft will slam him/her with a lawsuit and it will be another HUGE PR fiasco for free software - even if the person was just a random zealot and not in any way involved with any free software projects.
What zealots don't realize is that by posting bogus and/or hateful answers to the survey, they will in fact be helping Microsoft - moreso than if they were to answer it seriously and professionally. When trying to persuade a company to use MS products rather than free-software ones, MS will be able to simply show them some survey results and say "look, these are the people you will be trusting your business with". And noone will be there to contradict them, obviously.
But if that's the way you want it, fine. Not my problem. I've always chosen software depending on what gets the work done, I don't care much about whose license says what or whose software is free as in speech or in beer. Being zealoty about software is useless. But being zealoty and accomplishing the exact opposite of what you're trying to do is ridicilious, and I laugh at those people.
Last time I served in it, the Armed Forces of Sweden were still running SCO Unix for a lot of communications control computers. The systems were very buggy and would often crash. When I left they were just starting to migrate over to (customized) FreeBSD boxes and Windows NT. Now, knowing the Swedish army, I know they are NOT an organization that changes it ways unless it desperately has to (despite what their PR keeps saying). So if they're dropping SCO.. well.. I used their old systems myself, so I know pretty well how much they suck. It's all over for SCO. When all the legal bullshit is done and over with, there'll be nothing but bones left, and maybe the world will be rid of the horror that is UnixWare.
Fines here in Sweden are stiff, up to $500k for infractions.
I don't know where you pulled the figure $500k from - the exchange rate between SEK and USD is nowhere near 10 (SEK/USD) at the moment. The SEK 5000000 that are supposedly the maximum fine for spamming translate into around $685k, or 560k euros. [why doesn't Slashdot like the euro (U+20AC) character?]
Not that it matters a lot, apart from this minor error I found your post most interesting.
You and 7658880 are both right in saying nVidia hasn't given anything (of value) to Linux. They have, however, given something to users of Linux (Linux on i386, anyway), and from what I am reading elsewhere in this discussion, there certainly are people for whom the nVidia drivers have proven very useful. So they have definitely given _something_ to the Linux community, though clearly, not everyone thinks it's worth cheering over.
Whether they gave it (or are giving it) away for free is arguable. Clearly, someone who bought an nVidia card prior to there being Linux drivers for it got something more than he originally paid for when the Linux drivers were released. Linux desktop users are still in the minority; are there any figures to back up your claim that nVidia have sold thousands more cards than they otherwise would have just because they have Linux drivers out now? My guess is the actual number of additional cards sold is much lower. Most Linux users I know are developers who do their work on Linux but boot into Windows for games and other graphics-heavy applications. I consider this as simply choosing the right tool for the job.
If NVIDIA gets away with providing half-hearted binary-only support for Linux, why can't every other hardware manufacturer? "No, you can't have any specifications for this Ethernet chipset, it's top secret -- here's a binary HAL instead".
If the binary driver works at least for the majority of Linux users, the majority won't really care if it's binary or not. Most Linux users, myself included (though I don't have a funtioning linux box atm) are content with drivers that work as specified, though we would of course also rather see the drivers open-sourced. Until Linux (or rather, the community) becomes a powerful force in the harldware marketplace (having Linux drivers becomes a major competitive advantage) I believe we must get used to compromises like this or throw out binary-only drivers altogether and face the possiby dire consequences.
So in your opinion, having no nVidia drivers would be better than the current state, which is that there are drivers for the vast majority of systems that need them (which is to say desktop PC's) which are closed-source but mostly working.
How typical of "free software" zealots to whine and whine for improvement, and when they get it, to whine again that it isn't good enough because it is missing feature X or because it doesn't support obscure platform Y. nVidia is giving you drivers for free, whining because you think they should just give away all their source is not the way to get more companies follow in their footsteps, releasing drivers for Linux.
I've heard the argument that welcoming binary drivers is counter-productive to getting more drivers that are fully open source. While this may well be true, having a somewhat functional driver which works on some platforms (or better yet as in the nVidia case, a well-functioning driver that works on most platforms) is certainly better for the users than having no driver at all.
And the N-Gage is surprisingly snappy, not like playing Java games on other GSMs, which is slow and boring.
You clearly haven't tried playing Java games on a Sony Ericsson T610. Sure, the built-in games aren't that great, but T610Downloads takes care of that. After that, it's the best hand-held console I've ever used (disclaimer: I haven't used many). And it looks damn good to boot.
Anyway, I guess I don't really "get" why anyone would want to put a full hand-held console into a mobile phone. Whenever I'm on a trip long enough that I _need_ games so as not to die of boredom, I generally just lug along my laptop. Better games and I can get some work done, too, when I feel like it. Battery life is a problem of course, but when I travel for more than two hours it's almost always on a train or an airplane, most of which have power outlets... That or by car, in which case I'm driving, in which case I don't have the time to play games to begin with.
You can make anyone's story seem like a loser's story if your mind is set on viewing it that way. It's all about perspective, you will automatically interpret a story in such a way that it turns out as you would like it to, if at all possible, effectively fooling yourself.
Take Slashdot as a prime example of this. How many articles and headlines on this site cannot be considered misleading, just because the authors have a heavy pro-free-software/pro-linux bias which colors the language of their posts? Looking at the (usually) more objectively written original story linked from a typical/. article, the truth is often quite different from what we get presented with on this site, which is simply someone's biased interpretation. Same thing as what's going on here. If your mind is set on viewing mr "mob hacker" as a loser, that's the way you're going to see it, so certain that your own point of view is the One True.
I for one will have to agree that the author does seem to have something of a swollen ego, though I don't think he fails in portraying his life in a "romanticized" way, I wouldn't consider him a "dropout loser" either. At least he's got a job, which is more than can be said for many/. readers.
I don't foresee this going very well for XGI. Firstly, look at the cards. Dual chips, non-shared memory? 256 megs on the card, only 128 available because the chips can't share. "Wasting" 128 megs might be acceptable, considering the card is still pretty cheap, but how about when high-end cards start coming with 512 MB or more? If XGI start putting 1024 MB of memory on their cards they are going to see any advantages their cards may have in pricing go bye-bye pretty quickly. Remember, going for quantity rather than quality was what killed 3dfx. How quickly some people forget:)
Second problem is that due to the size of the card, it's not gonna fit in smaller form-factor PC's. Why they put such a huge HS on the back of the card, where there's usually not much space, versus just putting more cooling on the front of the card, where high-end users (of nVidia cards, anyway) are already accustomed to leaving a PCI slot open to make room, is beyond me.
Those two big fans they've stuck on their reference board sure aren't going help keep noise levels down, either. My (reference) Radeon 9800 Pro still beats the crap out of most cards on the market today, and it's only got a small HSF for the chipset and nothing on the memory chips. And I was still able to OC it quite a bit. If nVidia's and XGI's chips really require as much cooling as manufacturers stick on them, even on "reference" boards, they must be very inefficient chips indeed.
These things aside, it's always nice to see more competition in the graphics chipset business, hopefully prices might come down a bit as a result if ATi and/or nVidia see XGI as a real contenter, rather than a wannabe like Matrox (though I don't know if they're even at the "wannabe" level any longer, considering how poor their chips are nowadays).
Writing "perfect" code is not possible. You can certainly aim for perfect, but the best you can realistically hope for is "good enough". Gates is right in the sense that because there is no such thing as perfect code (especially not in commercial software, which, among other things, doesn't get the benefit of peer review like open source software does), users are very well advised indeed to use firewalls, anti-virus apps, et cetera, to help keep their systems safe. As for the stuff that still leaks through, well, keeping backups and using common sense takes care of most of that. Has for me, anyway. And yeah, I do run Windows.
That's not what "set the bar" means. Max Payne (and to an even greater extent, MP2) truly does set an example for any FPS seeking to be realistic (at least in graphics). The MP developers have clearly sought to give the player the feeling of being in a movie, and in that, they have succeeded. True, the physics are not quite true to life, but name one action movie in which they are? Max Payne is actually more realistic than most action movies I've seen in that the hero dies, at least temporarily:)
What have you been smoking?
You're damn right in saying BitTorrent rocks. But what you're describing in the paragraph immediately following that sentence is not BT, but Direct Connect. BitTorrent does not use hubs, does not require you to share anything (though you're expected to at least share what you download) and BT links are provided by public websites; they're not trying to hide from Joe Schmoe. And, unlike with DC, the more popular a file is on BitTorrent, the easier it is to get, even if just one guy is serving it.
Okay, so I forgot to include the fact that your AOL's $10/month is actually flatrate, no per-minute charges, making it cheaper than our $3/mo + $1-2/hr for anyone who uses the Internet more than only very little (<6 hrs per month, was it?)
I apologize for my mistake. Good thing I have lots of karma points to burn.
I can't believe you americans still put up with shit like this. Here in Sweden, it has been possible for ages to get dial-up Internet from our largest ISP for only slightly more than $3/month - and that includes five POP3 accounts (with optional webmail access), 50 megs of webspace (accessible via FTP) and free telephone support.
A dial-up without the extra features (just the web, baby) costs nothing per month, and per-minute charges are less than $2 per hour during peak hours (less than $1 off-peak).
Most importantly, we don't have any ISP's that require their customers to run special bugware (read "AOL Software" - and I'm blatantly assuming here that it's a required install, feel free to correct me). You lot obviously need to let your ISP's know what exactly constitutes acceptable pricing for stuff like "simple" Internet access:)
Mozilla, powerful and free web browser/mail suite. OpenOffice, powerful office suite. Ad-Aware for keeping spyware (Gator etc) out. BitTorrent for all your P2P needs. ZomeAlarm a good firewall. Avast! Antivirus good AV app, free for home use. TextPad powerful and easy-to-use text editor. SmartFTP powerful and free FTP client.
On top of these, I always install these non-free apps (non-development related): Paint Shop Pro all the relevant functionality from Photoshop at a much better price. Klient the best IRC client. Ever.
Some people have mentioned:
CygWin - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it
VNC - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it, and it has security issues
Dev-C++ - not needed on a home PC, it's for development.
NetHack - huh!?
Boingo - the article submitter didn't mention anything about having a WLAN card, so why would he need to find hotspots?
Winamp - redundant since Microsoft released WMP9, which I've found to be just as fast, more stable than WA3, and better at playing movies. Of course, YMMV, and some people prefer to stay away from MS stuff for ideological reasons.
Intellisense is not a language feature of VB.NET, it's a development environment feature of Visual Studio. I have it when coding C++ and C# in VS.NET 2003 as well, and though it worked poorly for C++ in VS.NET 7.0, it's been vastly improved since.
Now, when coding Java at school (they want us to use emacs, ugh), I'm actually a bit handicapped in being so used to Intellisense. So not having it can be a good thing, too, as you certainly learn the language faster that way.
Slashdot Mirror
there is no safe mechanism to _open_ a file without the risk of _running_ it.
.txt and open it. Notepad will launch by default and you're not going to be executing anything harmful by opening it in notepad...
Blatant lie. I can right-click any file and get "Open with" as part of the pop-up menu so that I can open any file in any app I want. And this is on a (mostly) stock and unmodified Windows XP install.
Also, many free apps (like Textpad) automatically add themselves to that same menu so I don't even have to bother with "Open With" when just viewing the file as plain text or hex will do.
Finally, if you're too dumb to use "Open with" or Textpad, you can just rename any file to
Your UID is a bit shorter than mine, but I've got to respond because you're just so full of shit.
[On a console], you never have to deal with patches, hardware upgrades, incompatibility, or any of the other woes of the PC.
You _do_ have to deal with hardware upgrades (often ugly ones) and incompatibility. Talk to anyone who tried playing import games on their PlayStation. Doing so often requires chipping, a procedure which can be (though just like upgrading the hardware on a PC, doesn't have to be) very tricky to perform.
You also need to upgrade your hardware in the more traditional sense, because even consoles eventually get too old - ask any SNES owner. Except with a console, you can't really "upgrade"; Upgrading the hardware on a console means throwing it out and buying a new one! And even then you can't be sure it plays all the games that ran on the previous one, because there are incompatibilities beween manufacturers; the Xbox obviously won't play SNES games, et cetera. Sure, you can keep the old console around (until it breaks - and when it does, you generally can't just swap out the faulty component like on a PC), but then you either need some sort of switch or you need to poke the wires behind the TV every time you want to use the older one (if you don't have multiple sets). My 2003 PC can still play games that were released in the early 90's for completely different hardware, and doing so requires no special reconfiguration between games.
Games themselves are generally of lower quality upon release than their console brethren, and it's not uncommon for it to take many patches to iron out all the problems.
This greatly depends on how you define quality regarding games. If you are talking bugs per line of code, yes, PC games may be buggier overall, but there are millions more PC games than there are console games for any single console. Because it's so easy to develop and release PC games, there are a lot of junk games out there. But on the PC, bugs can always be fixed post-release. On a console, they can't. This is clearly a huge advantage for PC's, and if it leads to (some) games being a bit buggier to start with, that's fine. Most if not all such games are eventually fixed and noone forces you to buy those games before they are. And on PC, you don't need to waste your money, there are always ways to try before you buy (not that console games aren't warezed, too).
Looking at aspects other than bugginess I'd argue that PC games are generally of a higher quality than console ones. PC games generally offer more ways to customize the game, support for more and different input devices (you can configure a keybd+mouse in many more ways than you can configure a simple joypad). Oh, and not to forget, modifications to the games themselves - I don't think I need to tell you how PC's sweep the floor with consoles in that regard.
Successful PC games will likely have a console port, but the reverse is less often true.
Got any facts to back this up? To me it seems too many shitty console games (like Deus Ex 2) end up on PC. The reverse is also true, PC games are released for consoles because the manufacturers want to make more money. Of course, there are also great games (like GTA: Vice City) that are a joy to play on either system.
Into this scenario comes VIA, proposing to combine the worst aspects of a console(non-upgradability, limited functionality)
If you had RTFA'ed, you'd know that this console is in fact NOT impossible to upgrade. They even included an empty DIMM slot on the motherboard for pete's sake! And as far as limited functionality goes, since the damn thing runs Windows XP Embedded, you can probably just connect a mouse and keyboard and have a low-end PC to play with. It should be able to run most apps compatible with WinXP, possibly given some hacks to remove the glossy shell they have no doubt installed over WinXP's default interface.
In conclusion, there is no reas
Admittedly Anandtech write solid reviews, but HardOCP is run by an idiot with an ego problem. I would not rely on their reviews. As for Ace's, I don't visit it very often, so I've no opinion of it.
ALL hardware sites are influenced by advertisers as far as I'm concerned. Though I cannot prove this - some of them may very well be clean - but it's safest to assume this and never put your complete trust in a single site.
I'd have to agree wholeheartedly with you that Joe Sixpack needs to be taught these things. However, I feel the need to point out that:
Your 2 GHz Athlon is not obsolete when the 2.1 GHz one comes out - Joe Sixpack does NOT think this way, however computer geeks with too much money, rich parents or an unhealthy fanaticism with having the hottest hardware on the block just so they can use 10% of its potential performance playing Counter-Strike, do.
WWW is not the Internet - while true, do we really need the poor computer illiterates' heads being bogged down by having to understand there's more to the Internet than what is prefixed with http://? Frankly, the less of them come to pollute IRC (as an example among many), the better. Who, me, elitist?
Nigerians are not that generous - people who fall for nigerian scams have it coming to begin with. I knew those e-mails were scams from the minute I set eyes on them and I don't understand how anyone with a shred of common sense could. Anyway, while certainly something Joe Sixpack may need to be told, this could be better said as the more general: "If anything seems to be too good to be true, it always is."
Downloading those MP3s... is definitely legal in some countries. Don't assume everyone lives in the US, please.
MS Office is NOT the gold standard... maybe not "the" gold standard, but the de facto standard it is - why else would the OpenOffice folks put so much effort into copying every aspect of it? Putting licensing and pricing issues aside, there is certainly no better Office package for Windows on the market at the moment - and yes, I know OpenOffice is making great strides, and even has advantages over MS Office in some areas (for one thing, I prefer OO's equation editor) but it is NOT yet up to Office's standards in every way that counts to mr. Sixpack.
Regarding "Simplify Web publishing": As Wired and several other posters seem to have missed, Windows XP has this too. It's called web folders. You can mount, say, an FTP site as a folder in explorer, though it's not as neat as I wish it would be, it certainly does provide the "post files from our desktop to a web site in one drag-and-drop move" which the author of Wired's article so desires.
The fact that the only things you found to criticise in my (rather long) posting were two counts of minor misspellings, brings my ego to new heights.
But then again, you're posting as AC, so why should I care.
You call yourself a zealot, and then you admit that Windows can be a superior solution in some cases. Based on these two statements, I can tell you're obviously not a zealot. A real *nix zealot would never admit to being one (same as spammers always define spamming as what they don't do) and he would never under any circumstances claim that Windows is good for anything.
As for your example, anyone using Sun/SGI boxes at home is clearly not a potential customer of Microsoft's anyway, so even if they truthfully consider Linux to have better hardware support (for the specific hardware which they use, anyway), their answers are as uninteresting as a zealot's to Microsoft and can thus be safely disregarded. The same goes for users of any other hardware which can not run a Microsoft OS.
The survey sites themselves are slashdotted but from people's comments here and on NF, I can tell Microsoft have tailored these surveys very specifically to make it easy for them to simply filter out all the zealots. For example, anyone who suggests Linux provides a superior gaming experience, better hardware support, or other things which are known Linux weak points is an obvious zealot and can be safely ignored.
There was apparently a section at the end of one survey asking users why they didn't want to use Microsoft - and the options included "don't want to use commercial software", "I feel satisfaction in not giving Microsoft any money", something like that. Another obvious zealot filter. And from the comments, people seem to be falling for it big time. Seriously, zealots do nothing but hurt the free software movement in taking every chance to ridicule Microsoft, no matter what they do. Eventually, someone will go too far, Microsoft will slam him/her with a lawsuit and it will be another HUGE PR fiasco for free software - even if the person was just a random zealot and not in any way involved with any free software projects.
What zealots don't realize is that by posting bogus and/or hateful answers to the survey, they will in fact be helping Microsoft - moreso than if they were to answer it seriously and professionally. When trying to persuade a company to use MS products rather than free-software ones, MS will be able to simply show them some survey results and say "look, these are the people you will be trusting your business with". And noone will be there to contradict them, obviously.
But if that's the way you want it, fine. Not my problem. I've always chosen software depending on what gets the work done, I don't care much about whose license says what or whose software is free as in speech or in beer. Being zealoty about software is useless. But being zealoty and accomplishing the exact opposite of what you're trying to do is ridicilious, and I laugh at those people.
Last time I served in it, the Armed Forces of Sweden were still running SCO Unix for a lot of communications control computers. The systems were very buggy and would often crash. When I left they were just starting to migrate over to (customized) FreeBSD boxes and Windows NT. Now, knowing the Swedish army, I know they are NOT an organization that changes it ways unless it desperately has to (despite what their PR keeps saying). So if they're dropping SCO .. well .. I used their old systems myself, so I know pretty well how much they suck. It's all over for SCO. When all the legal bullshit is done and over with, there'll be nothing but bones left, and maybe the world will be rid of the horror that is UnixWare.
Fines here in Sweden are stiff, up to $500k for infractions.
I don't know where you pulled the figure $500k from - the exchange rate between SEK and USD is nowhere near 10 (SEK/USD) at the moment. The SEK 5000000 that are supposedly the maximum fine for spamming translate into around $685k, or 560k euros. [why doesn't Slashdot like the euro (U+20AC) character?]
Not that it matters a lot, apart from this minor error I found your post most interesting.
but as a Swede you maybe understand german
Huh? Whatever gave you that idea? That's like assuming someone knows swedish because they live in britain, or something...
Damn. I didn't know it was THAT good. For once, I'm extra proud to be living in Sweden.
Now, what was that about a 6000% raise on recordable media taxes?
You and 7658880 are both right in saying nVidia hasn't given anything (of value) to Linux. They have, however, given something to users of Linux (Linux on i386, anyway), and from what I am reading elsewhere in this discussion, there certainly are people for whom the nVidia drivers have proven very useful. So they have definitely given _something_ to the Linux community, though clearly, not everyone thinks it's worth cheering over.
Whether they gave it (or are giving it) away for free is arguable. Clearly, someone who bought an nVidia card prior to there being Linux drivers for it got something more than he originally paid for when the Linux drivers were released. Linux desktop users are still in the minority; are there any figures to back up your claim that nVidia have sold thousands more cards than they otherwise would have just because they have Linux drivers out now? My guess is the actual number of additional cards sold is much lower. Most Linux users I know are developers who do their work on Linux but boot into Windows for games and other graphics-heavy applications. I consider this as simply choosing the right tool for the job.
If NVIDIA gets away with providing half-hearted binary-only support for Linux, why can't every other hardware manufacturer? "No, you can't have any specifications for this Ethernet chipset, it's top secret -- here's a binary HAL instead".
If the binary driver works at least for the majority of Linux users, the majority won't really care if it's binary or not. Most Linux users, myself included (though I don't have a funtioning linux box atm) are content with drivers that work as specified, though we would of course also rather see the drivers open-sourced. Until Linux (or rather, the community) becomes a powerful force in the harldware marketplace (having Linux drivers becomes a major competitive advantage) I believe we must get used to compromises like this or throw out binary-only drivers altogether and face the possiby dire consequences.
So in your opinion, having no nVidia drivers would be better than the current state, which is that there are drivers for the vast majority of systems that need them (which is to say desktop PC's) which are closed-source but mostly working.
How typical of "free software" zealots to whine and whine for improvement, and when they get it, to whine again that it isn't good enough because it is missing feature X or because it doesn't support obscure platform Y. nVidia is giving you drivers for free, whining because you think they should just give away all their source is not the way to get more companies follow in their footsteps, releasing drivers for Linux.
I've heard the argument that welcoming binary drivers is counter-productive to getting more drivers that are fully open source. While this may well be true, having a somewhat functional driver which works on some platforms (or better yet as in the nVidia case, a well-functioning driver that works on most platforms) is certainly better for the users than having no driver at all.
And the N-Gage is surprisingly snappy, not like playing Java games on other GSMs, which is slow and boring.
You clearly haven't tried playing Java games on a Sony Ericsson T610. Sure, the built-in games aren't that great, but T610Downloads takes care of that. After that, it's the best hand-held console I've ever used (disclaimer: I haven't used many). And it looks damn good to boot.
Anyway, I guess I don't really "get" why anyone would want to put a full hand-held console into a mobile phone. Whenever I'm on a trip long enough that I _need_ games so as not to die of boredom, I generally just lug along my laptop. Better games and I can get some work done, too, when I feel like it. Battery life is a problem of course, but when I travel for more than two hours it's almost always on a train or an airplane, most of which have power outlets... That or by car, in which case I'm driving, in which case I don't have the time to play games to begin with.
It's a known fact that Bill Gates never actually said this, or at best, that it is rephrased severely and taken out of context.
Having said that, in 1981, 640kB technically _was_ enough for most people.
I hereby nominate "640k ought to be enough for anybody" as most misquoted phrase ever.
You can make anyone's story seem like a loser's story if your mind is set on viewing it that way. It's all about perspective, you will automatically interpret a story in such a way that it turns out as you would like it to, if at all possible, effectively fooling yourself.
/. article, the truth is often quite different from what we get presented with on this site, which is simply someone's biased interpretation. Same thing as what's going on here. If your mind is set on viewing mr "mob hacker" as a loser, that's the way you're going to see it, so certain that your own point of view is the One True.
/. readers.
Take Slashdot as a prime example of this. How many articles and headlines on this site cannot be considered misleading, just because the authors have a heavy pro-free-software/pro-linux bias which colors the language of their posts? Looking at the (usually) more objectively written original story linked from a typical
I for one will have to agree that the author does seem to have something of a swollen ego, though I don't think he fails in portraying his life in a "romanticized" way, I wouldn't consider him a "dropout loser" either. At least he's got a job, which is more than can be said for many
I don't foresee this going very well for XGI. Firstly, look at the cards. Dual chips, non-shared memory? 256 megs on the card, only 128 available because the chips can't share. "Wasting" 128 megs might be acceptable, considering the card is still pretty cheap, but how about when high-end cards start coming with 512 MB or more? If XGI start putting 1024 MB of memory on their cards they are going to see any advantages their cards may have in pricing go bye-bye pretty quickly. Remember, going for quantity rather than quality was what killed 3dfx. How quickly some people forget :)
Second problem is that due to the size of the card, it's not gonna fit in smaller form-factor PC's. Why they put such a huge HS on the back of the card, where there's usually not much space, versus just putting more cooling on the front of the card, where high-end users (of nVidia cards, anyway) are already accustomed to leaving a PCI slot open to make room, is beyond me.
Those two big fans they've stuck on their reference board sure aren't going help keep noise levels down, either. My (reference) Radeon 9800 Pro still beats the crap out of most cards on the market today, and it's only got a small HSF for the chipset and nothing on the memory chips. And I was still able to OC it quite a bit. If nVidia's and XGI's chips really require as much cooling as manufacturers stick on them, even on "reference" boards, they must be very inefficient chips indeed. These things aside, it's always nice to see more competition in the graphics chipset business, hopefully prices might come down a bit as a result if ATi and/or nVidia see XGI as a real contenter, rather than a wannabe like Matrox (though I don't know if they're even at the "wannabe" level any longer, considering how poor their chips are nowadays).
Writing "perfect" code is not possible. You can certainly aim for perfect, but the best you can realistically hope for is "good enough". Gates is right in the sense that because there is no such thing as perfect code (especially not in commercial software, which, among other things, doesn't get the benefit of peer review like open source software does), users are very well advised indeed to use firewalls, anti-virus apps, et cetera, to help keep their systems safe. As for the stuff that still leaks through, well, keeping backups and using common sense takes care of most of that. Has for me, anyway. And yeah, I do run Windows.
That's not what "set the bar" means. Max Payne (and to an even greater extent, MP2) truly does set an example for any FPS seeking to be realistic (at least in graphics). The MP developers have clearly sought to give the player the feeling of being in a movie, and in that, they have succeeded. True, the physics are not quite true to life, but name one action movie in which they are? Max Payne is actually more realistic than most action movies I've seen in that the hero dies, at least temporarily :)
What have you been smoking?
You're damn right in saying BitTorrent rocks. But what you're describing in the paragraph immediately following that sentence is not BT, but Direct Connect. BitTorrent does not use hubs, does not require you to share anything (though you're expected to at least share what you download) and BT links are provided by public websites; they're not trying to hide from Joe Schmoe. And, unlike with DC, the more popular a file is on BitTorrent, the easier it is to get, even if just one guy is serving it.
*cough*
Okay, so I forgot to include the fact that your AOL's $10/month is actually flatrate, no per-minute charges, making it cheaper than our $3/mo + $1-2/hr for anyone who uses the Internet more than only very little (<6 hrs per month, was it?)
I apologize for my mistake. Good thing I have lots of karma points to burn.
I can't believe you americans still put up with shit like this. Here in Sweden, it has been possible for ages to get dial-up Internet from our largest ISP for only slightly more than $3/month - and that includes five POP3 accounts (with optional webmail access), 50 megs of webspace (accessible via FTP) and free telephone support.
:)
A dial-up without the extra features (just the web, baby) costs nothing per month, and per-minute charges are less than $2 per hour during peak hours (less than $1 off-peak).
Most importantly, we don't have any ISP's that require their customers to run special bugware (read "AOL Software" - and I'm blatantly assuming here that it's a required install, feel free to correct me). You lot obviously need to let your ISP's know what exactly constitutes acceptable pricing for stuff like "simple" Internet access
Mozilla, powerful and free web browser/mail suite.
OpenOffice, powerful office suite.
Ad-Aware for keeping spyware (Gator etc) out.
BitTorrent for all your P2P needs.
ZomeAlarm a good firewall.
Avast! Antivirus good AV app, free for home use.
TextPad powerful and easy-to-use text editor.
SmartFTP powerful and free FTP client.
On top of these, I always install these non-free apps (non-development related):
Paint Shop Pro all the relevant functionality from Photoshop at a much better price.
Klient the best IRC client. Ever.
Some people have mentioned:
CygWin - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it
VNC - a home, non-dev PC doesn't need it, and it has security issues
Dev-C++ - not needed on a home PC, it's for development.
NetHack - huh!?
Boingo - the article submitter didn't mention anything about having a WLAN card, so why would he need to find hotspots?
Winamp - redundant since Microsoft released WMP9, which I've found to be just as fast, more stable than WA3, and better at playing movies. Of course, YMMV, and some people prefer to stay away from MS stuff for ideological reasons.
Intellisense is not a language feature of VB.NET, it's a development environment feature of Visual Studio. I have it when coding C++ and C# in VS.NET 2003 as well, and though it worked poorly for C++ in VS.NET 7.0, it's been vastly improved since.
Now, when coding Java at school (they want us to use emacs, ugh), I'm actually a bit handicapped in being so used to Intellisense. So not having it can be a good thing, too, as you certainly learn the language faster that way.