1). AMD Athlon 64 3000+ on an AS Rock motherboard = stable
2). Have you checked the temperatures at idle and at load of a 3000+ vs a P4E 3.0 ghz? Cool n Quiet keeps AMD processors at low, low temps, far lower than they've had in years. This is not an Athlon XP we're talking about here! The tables are turned, and it's Intel that has the over-heated processor now(i.e. Prescott).
I'm sorry, but I have to call BS on this "Intel stuff always works" drivel.
The i820 had flaws, the i925 had a recall, the Lindenhurst chipset apparently has flaws that won't be rectified until a newer revision of the chipset is released in Q4 2004(and apparently the flawed boards/chispets are shipping anyway!). Even the old Pentiums had that FPU error in them . . why are people praising the virtues of Intel platforms when they have had a long history of problems with both CPUs and chipsets? Anyone remember the P3 1.13 ghz? How about the fact that they can't get enough 3.6 ghz Prescotts to market because most of the cpus are failing validation? How about the Dothan cpu/chipset delays?
The only difference between Intel and, say, VIA, is that Intel has a habit of recalling SOME of their flawed releases, whereas VIA . . . does not. But who really wants VIA anymore? SiS sold me on their chipsets years ago. They really are good! I'd go with SiS chipsets for AMD OR Intel processors, if I could get them in a board I liked.
There have been viable alternatives to VIA-equipped motherboards ever since the SiS735 chipset hit the market. That's not counting the old boards using AMD-supplied chipsets(of which there were precious few. They were generally good, but expensive). Slagging AMD on account of VIA is not reasonable.
In fact, SiS has made some very nice chipsets for the P4 as well.
Don't be so certain about that. Check out this and this. Intel is having production problems. They had to do a recall on the i925, availability of the 3.6ghz P4 is so low that even their bread-and-butter OEM Dell is having problems supplying the chip for their top-tier systems(to the point that the 3.6 ghz P4 is currently, effectively, a paper release), and they have bugs in the Lindenhurst chipset that will likely put a damper on anyone wanting to adopt this technology(other than Dell). I suspect that, if their 3.6 ghz desktop P4 is not coming out of production in large numbers, they may have similar problems producing Nocona CPUs as well.
Pardon me for saying so, but I fail to see how anything you've posted casts doubt upon my speculation.
First off, I speculated that one or more people outside the paper knew of the security flaw, because someone tipped off the paper. If your claims are correct, the entire college IT department knew about the problem, at the very least. Others may have known about it as well. I severely doubt the average Oxford student knew about it, though, so the fact that the paper investigated the security flaw and then published an article about it clearly indicates that they did uncover a major security flaw, at least as far as the average Oxford student is concerned.
Secondly, I speculated that the university didn't want to pay out the cash to secure the network. In this case, as you said, there was(and probably still is) an old unswitched hub that could be exploited. The hub, as you said, had not been replaced as scheduled due to budgetary constraints. The fact that the replacement of the old hub had been scheduled indicates to me that whatever body is responsible for funding the aforementioned college's IT department knew of the scheduled operation but didn't care enough to fund it.
Along come Foster and White from the paper, reporting security flaws in the network to the university. It's very likely that the Proctors, or whoever handled the report from Foster and White in the first place, traced the reported problem back to the old switch with the help of the college IT department, saw that the replacement would require an additional(and undesirable) allocation of funds, and decided to keep things quiet by slapping down Foster and White with threats.
Or, even worse, they paid no heed to the report sent to them and branded Foster and White as hackers attacking an otherwise-secure network. They then proceeded to investigate with the intent of punishing Foster and White without considering the relatively benign nature of the policy violation.
Yes, Foster and White DID violate computer use policy, but they did no harm in the process. It is certainly the right of the university to punish them, just as it was the right of the university to keep the entire thing secret, not punish them, and simply allocate the necessary funds to the IT department for the purpose of replacing said old switch, thereby depriving the glory-hound reporters at the paper of any reason to run a story about it in the future. The switch-replacement was already scheduled. It would have made all the sense in the world to silence the paper by replacing the old switch. I'm sure the college IT department would have been more than happy to comply.
Instead, the university took the authoritarian approach, and look what it got them. Not much good PR, that's what. All this because they were too cheap to replace an old switch on schedule. Sheesh.
I'm sure the IT staff there does a good job. However, it is beyond their ability to dictate how funds will be allocated to their department. It would seem that those who hold the purse strings are to blame here.
It also doesn't change the fact that the legal violation was so minor that the police couldn't be bothered to follow up on the matter. Police typically put more effort into handing out traffic violations than that.
If the police can't be bothered to act, the fact that laws were broken is irrelevant. You may as well brand jaywalkers as criminals if you're gonna tar these two.
"The police referred the matter back to the university, saying it was best dealt with internally."
If they had committed actual crimes, don't you think the police would be willing to throw the book at the perps? Sure, they probably violated university policy, but . . .
I can't say that I agree completely. This reminds me all too much of a small "controversy" that went on in my highschool alma mater here in the States. Several members of the school's newspaper staff uncovered information regarding the existance of a peculiar group within the school known as the "Cotton Club"(as I recall) whose purpose was unclear, but which contained members from both the student body, alumni, and supposedly trustees who were all male, white, and rather racist. The only known function of the group that I can recall was that there was a great deal of consumption of alcohol involved. They probably did some other dull things.
Anyway, the school newspaper staff(full of multicultural liberals) found the existance of this Cotton Club to be horrendous and wished investigate the matter. Shortly after this became known to the school's administration, the faculty member at the head of the newspaper staff was pressured into forcing his staff to avoid writing any stories about the Cotton Club.
In other words, there was a secret club in the school that contributed to the deliquency of minors(as well as the violation of the school's Honor Code), adults were sponsoring this, and the administration didn't want anyone to find out about it or bring an end to the secret club(which is what they should have done).
The University Proctors seem to be behaving in the same fashion while also being less successful in covering up their mess. There was, and likely still is, a security flaw within the Oxford network. Someone tipped off the school newspaper(why they went to the paper is anyone's guess), indicating that at least one person, if not a small number of people, outside the newspaper staff knew about the problem. Foster and White investigated, reported their findings to the University, and were slapped in the face and told that they may have comitted a crime. Mind you that, reportedly, this happened BEFORE the article was published.
What this tells me is that the university knew about the problem and did not want to fix it. A number of reasons for this could exist, such as:
1). It'd cost too much to secure the network. Quote from the article, "A university spokesperson quoted in the story admitted that, in some cases, a cheaper computer set-up was chosen to provide wider access".
2). Someone, or several someones, within the university staff may have been exploiting security flaw towards their own ends. I don't know that I buy that, however. You'd think they'd have similar access just through their IT department or whatever it is they have there.
Whatever the reasons may be, Foster and White obviously felt that it was their duty to let the student body know about the security loophole so that the university would be pressured into fixing the problem. They may have done quite a bit of good.
Or maybe not. Hard to tell with the details in the linked articles.
Single-player games can be played alone and can be played quite successfully without any expansion packs. Any multi-player game and/or online game adds immediate pressure upon the game player to buy expansion packs just so they can join games with all their friends using the new expansion features. MMORPGS capitlize on this phenomenon brilliantly.
In other words, with a game like Morrowind, you might get one fan of the original game buying the expansion. With Everquest, you get one fan who buys the expansion, and then 5-10(or more) of his friends or guild-mates who also have to buy it just to keep going on adventures with him. Works with some non-MMORPG multiplayer games like Diablo II as well.
Horizons is not exactly a shining example of what an online RPG could/should be.
In many ways, Everquest isn't, either. It, like Ultima Online, just arrived on the current scene fairly early and got a lot of attention. It was also more polished than games like Meridian 59, The Realm, Dark Sun Online, and some others that aren't coming to mind currently.
If you ever want to get at the core of what a MMORPG could/should be doing to be fun, find a MUD that you like, if you can. Most MMORPGS are patterned after MUDS, at least partially.
I still say that the best online CRPG I ever played was Ultima Online pre-alpha. It had levels, it had orcs and skeletons, and it was buggy. I had a blast playing that. The E3 pre-alpha was pretty good too, though they introduced the stat cap, and that sucked.
One wonders how many Slashdot trolls will abuse this. Can you imagine all the goatse ASCII art stickies that will be everywhere? I wonder if they'll try to censor these things.
Slashdot Mirror
So, I guess . . . it's not a tumor!
Wrong. There are two versions of the Athlon 64 3200+.
Clawhammer, the one to which you refer, is 2.0 ghz with 1 meg l2 cache. That is the old core for the 3200+.
Newcastle is 2.2 ghz with 512k l2 cache. It should be noted that the 3000+ is 2.0 ghz with 512k cache, also making it a Newcastle.
So yes, the Newcastle 3200+ is, in fact, clocked 200 mhz higher than the 3000+ Newcastle.
1). AMD Athlon 64 3000+ on an AS Rock motherboard = stable
2). Have you checked the temperatures at idle and at load of a 3000+ vs a P4E 3.0 ghz? Cool n Quiet keeps AMD processors at low, low temps, far lower than they've had in years. This is not an Athlon XP we're talking about here! The tables are turned, and it's Intel that has the over-heated processor now(i.e. Prescott).
I'm sorry, but I have to call BS on this "Intel stuff always works" drivel.
The i820 had flaws, the i925 had a recall, the Lindenhurst chipset apparently has flaws that won't be rectified until a newer revision of the chipset is released in Q4 2004(and apparently the flawed boards/chispets are shipping anyway!). Even the old Pentiums had that FPU error in them . . why are people praising the virtues of Intel platforms when they have had a long history of problems with both CPUs and chipsets? Anyone remember the P3 1.13 ghz? How about the fact that they can't get enough 3.6 ghz Prescotts to market because most of the cpus are failing validation? How about the Dothan cpu/chipset delays?
The only difference between Intel and, say, VIA, is that Intel has a habit of recalling SOME of their flawed releases, whereas VIA . . . does not. But who really wants VIA anymore? SiS sold me on their chipsets years ago. They really are good! I'd go with SiS chipsets for AMD OR Intel processors, if I could get them in a board I liked.
Please consider motherboards sporting chipsets supplied by nVidia or SiS. VIA is trouble.
There have been viable alternatives to VIA-equipped motherboards ever since the SiS735 chipset hit the market. That's not counting the old boards using AMD-supplied chipsets(of which there were precious few. They were generally good, but expensive). Slagging AMD on account of VIA is not reasonable.
In fact, SiS has made some very nice chipsets for the P4 as well.
AGP video cards will continue to be released for the next 18 months or so.
Don't be so certain about that. Check out this and this. Intel is having production problems. They had to do a recall on the i925, availability of the 3.6ghz P4 is so low that even their bread-and-butter OEM Dell is having problems supplying the chip for their top-tier systems(to the point that the 3.6 ghz P4 is currently, effectively, a paper release), and they have bugs in the Lindenhurst chipset that will likely put a damper on anyone wanting to adopt this technology(other than Dell). I suspect that, if their 3.6 ghz desktop P4 is not coming out of production in large numbers, they may have similar problems producing Nocona CPUs as well.
They could release an Athlon 64 3800+ huh? You mean like uh, this one?
No, this is a pretty light bike.
The RIAA is launching a probe to investigate the issue.
If it's an old walkman, you could be just like Steve Bartman.
Pardon me for saying so, but I fail to see how anything you've posted casts doubt upon my speculation.
First off, I speculated that one or more people outside the paper knew of the security flaw, because someone tipped off the paper. If your claims are correct, the entire college IT department knew about the problem, at the very least. Others may have known about it as well. I severely doubt the average Oxford student knew about it, though, so the fact that the paper investigated the security flaw and then published an article about it clearly indicates that they did uncover a major security flaw, at least as far as the average Oxford student is concerned.
Secondly, I speculated that the university didn't want to pay out the cash to secure the network. In this case, as you said, there was(and probably still is) an old unswitched hub that could be exploited. The hub, as you said, had not been replaced as scheduled due to budgetary constraints. The fact that the replacement of the old hub had been scheduled indicates to me that whatever body is responsible for funding the aforementioned college's IT department knew of the scheduled operation but didn't care enough to fund it.
Along come Foster and White from the paper, reporting security flaws in the network to the university. It's very likely that the Proctors, or whoever handled the report from Foster and White in the first place, traced the reported problem back to the old switch with the help of the college IT department, saw that the replacement would require an additional(and undesirable) allocation of funds, and decided to keep things quiet by slapping down Foster and White with threats.
Or, even worse, they paid no heed to the report sent to them and branded Foster and White as hackers attacking an otherwise-secure network. They then proceeded to investigate with the intent of punishing Foster and White without considering the relatively benign nature of the policy violation.
Yes, Foster and White DID violate computer use policy, but they did no harm in the process. It is certainly the right of the university to punish them, just as it was the right of the university to keep the entire thing secret, not punish them, and simply allocate the necessary funds to the IT department for the purpose of replacing said old switch, thereby depriving the glory-hound reporters at the paper of any reason to run a story about it in the future. The switch-replacement was already scheduled. It would have made all the sense in the world to silence the paper by replacing the old switch. I'm sure the college IT department would have been more than happy to comply.
Instead, the university took the authoritarian approach, and look what it got them. Not much good PR, that's what. All this because they were too cheap to replace an old switch on schedule. Sheesh.
I'm sure the IT staff there does a good job. However, it is beyond their ability to dictate how funds will be allocated to their department. It would seem that those who hold the purse strings are to blame here.
It also doesn't change the fact that the legal violation was so minor that the police couldn't be bothered to follow up on the matter. Police typically put more effort into handing out traffic violations than that.
If the police can't be bothered to act, the fact that laws were broken is irrelevant. You may as well brand jaywalkers as criminals if you're gonna tar these two.
To quote the Guardian article,
"The police referred the matter back to the university, saying it was best dealt with internally."
If they had committed actual crimes, don't you think the police would be willing to throw the book at the perps? Sure, they probably violated university policy, but . . .
I can't say that I agree completely. This reminds me all too much of a small "controversy" that went on in my highschool alma mater here in the States. Several members of the school's newspaper staff uncovered information regarding the existance of a peculiar group within the school known as the "Cotton Club"(as I recall) whose purpose was unclear, but which contained members from both the student body, alumni, and supposedly trustees who were all male, white, and rather racist. The only known function of the group that I can recall was that there was a great deal of consumption of alcohol involved. They probably did some other dull things.
Anyway, the school newspaper staff(full of multicultural liberals) found the existance of this Cotton Club to be horrendous and wished investigate the matter. Shortly after this became known to the school's administration, the faculty member at the head of the newspaper staff was pressured into forcing his staff to avoid writing any stories about the Cotton Club.
In other words, there was a secret club in the school that contributed to the deliquency of minors(as well as the violation of the school's Honor Code), adults were sponsoring this, and the administration didn't want anyone to find out about it or bring an end to the secret club(which is what they should have done).
The University Proctors seem to be behaving in the same fashion while also being less successful in covering up their mess. There was, and likely still is, a security flaw within the Oxford network. Someone tipped off the school newspaper(why they went to the paper is anyone's guess), indicating that at least one person, if not a small number of people, outside the newspaper staff knew about the problem. Foster and White investigated, reported their findings to the University, and were slapped in the face and told that they may have comitted a crime. Mind you that, reportedly, this happened BEFORE the article was published.
What this tells me is that the university knew about the problem and did not want to fix it. A number of reasons for this could exist, such as:
1). It'd cost too much to secure the network. Quote from the article, "A university spokesperson quoted in the story admitted that, in some cases, a cheaper computer set-up was chosen to provide wider access".
2). Someone, or several someones, within the university staff may have been exploiting security flaw towards their own ends. I don't know that I buy that, however. You'd think they'd have similar access just through their IT department or whatever it is they have there.
Whatever the reasons may be, Foster and White obviously felt that it was their duty to let the student body know about the security loophole so that the university would be pressured into fixing the problem. They may have done quite a bit of good.
Or maybe not. Hard to tell with the details in the linked articles.
Let's just hope they go back to Fallout/Fallout 2 for inspiration and ignore Fallout Tactics completely.
I honestly did not like Tactics at all.
Guys? I think not. Fear Martha Stewart.
Single-player games can be played alone and can be played quite successfully without any expansion packs. Any multi-player game and/or online game adds immediate pressure upon the game player to buy expansion packs just so they can join games with all their friends using the new expansion features. MMORPGS capitlize on this phenomenon brilliantly.
In other words, with a game like Morrowind, you might get one fan of the original game buying the expansion. With Everquest, you get one fan who buys the expansion, and then 5-10(or more) of his friends or guild-mates who also have to buy it just to keep going on adventures with him. Works with some non-MMORPG multiplayer games like Diablo II as well.
Horizons is not exactly a shining example of what an online RPG could/should be.
In many ways, Everquest isn't, either. It, like Ultima Online, just arrived on the current scene fairly early and got a lot of attention. It was also more polished than games like Meridian 59, The Realm, Dark Sun Online, and some others that aren't coming to mind currently.
If you ever want to get at the core of what a MMORPG could/should be doing to be fun, find a MUD that you like, if you can. Most MMORPGS are patterned after MUDS, at least partially.
I still say that the best online CRPG I ever played was Ultima Online pre-alpha. It had levels, it had orcs and skeletons, and it was buggy. I had a blast playing that. The E3 pre-alpha was pretty good too, though they introduced the stat cap, and that sucked.
Set dodgeball to Stun
Aye Captain!
Some people believe in the strangest things.
This page seems to have some good links. Just check out the bottom of the page as it indicates if you're new to the idea of space elevators.
One wonders how many Slashdot trolls will abuse this. Can you imagine all the goatse ASCII art stickies that will be everywhere? I wonder if they'll try to censor these things.
That's no error. He's a metrosexual.