This is a disturbing trend I am seeing more and more these days. It used to be that you only ever met other nerds who were well into their comp. sci. and related stuff (games, martial arts, roleplaying). Nowadays, the places I work are full of disinterested people who are only doing it strictly for cash. They often don't even *own* home machine(s), and those that do shun broadband saying "the last thing I want to do is switch on a PC when I get home". This is like having a doctor who isn't interested in health and medicine.
Typically these people are also low grade programmers. Since they're not interested in the *art* of programming they never try to learn new techniques, languages and OSes. They drag their heels whenever a product they aren't trained in is mentioned, thus everything is written in lowest common denominator i.e. VB, MS SQL, ASP.
Personally, I just wish these fucktards would get out of the game and leave it to the people who actually enjoy it for a living since I'm sick of dragging their sorry asses around on a project.
Twat, did you even follow the link? It was a link to Windows Update service, which does *not* work fine with Mozilla. Try reading the web page the link takes you to. So much for your "witty" put-down.
Back 5 years ago they were the only game in town, unless you thought an MP3 player that stored 10 tracks was worth owning. Minidisc had better sound, and was easier to store more music on. Nowadays swapping discs is more hassle and since there are decent sized players out there MP3 has the advantage, but it wasn't always so.
I've been using it for years since it comes as the standard in my minidisc player. It sounds decent, gets good compression and now the CODEC is even available for use on PCs (which it wasn't when I got my minidisc player). Sure, Ogg sounds better and compresses better, but AAC is nothing to sniff at either.
15 voters! You consider that to be a big enough sample to be representative of the brower using habits on slashdot? That makes me wonder, if when TV ads say 9 out of 10 doctors recommend X, did they only ask 10 doctors?
All the modern games are simple evolutions of their progenitors. The reason to choose this version of an RPG over others is the quality of the polish that Blizzard will provide to the genre. They always release cracking good software and I see no reason to believe this game will be any different.
WOW has mechanisms to avoid this most annoying habit of lame-ass RPGers. They have instance areas where only you and your group will be present so there is no spawn camping outside your own group members.
Now, if only we could rid our Windows systems of that pile of shit IE as well. I hate the way Media Player phones home every time I play a media file, and I hate my inability to remove the retarded IE from my system without resorting to potentially dangerous removal toolkits.
Additionally, most of these distros are provided free of charge on FTP servers operated and paid for by the distros. You *can* get them for nothing if you want, and that seems to be a clear distinction to me.
Any game that uses graphics that are fancier than colour ASCII is too modern and not worth playing. Even nethack is getting a little too fancy for my liking now;->
Rather then putting Python in there a Mono runtime would be better. You'd get compiled code in a language that tons of programmers can write, and good performance characteristics. That would rock.
No, what's a waste is having to wade through multiple levels of commercials, FBI warnings, pre-menus, and sub menus to watch a film. At least video tape would let you wind the film to the start of the movie, it didn't force you to see the warnings and previews. I wish that the movie would just start to play when I drop a disc in since the MENU button on my remote can take me to a menu should I ever need it.
By boxes I meant the IBM PC compatible range which was released in 1980, so that's over 20 years now. Windows itself is a lot younger but has it's roots in good old DOS, so it's no spring chicken either.
I used to look after the Windows servers for the London Stock Exchange and we had to reboot them as a scheduled job every week to prevent them from running out of resources and crashing. They also get an IISRESET at 6AM every morning to prevent them from locking up.
By contrast the mail server I set up for them hasn't needed a reboot or reset for 3 years bar to update the kernel. The web/mail server for a large shipping company which runs Linux hasn't rebooted in over 18 months.
Linux developers don't have to work to the same release schedules as the MS guys so they tend to release better drivers, even if it takes a little longer. The number of users will not affect this, it is the business model that drives the crappy driver problem. Instead of trying to bang out some code to score more cash from the consumer market they should look into making the code quality higher and the stabilty better.
One of the reasons I encounter occassionally is when trying to update a COM+ component on the server. When you remove the component it will very occasionally shut down the machine. Not reboot, or anything like that, but shut it down completely. I have never discovered why, and have seen the behaviour on several machines so it wasn't hardware specific.
I use Windows for work and games and Linux for home and am a web developer by trade. I've been using these boxes for well over 20 years now and my general opinion is that Windows, although better, is still not as stable as Linux. It hangs more on the same hardware (dual boot) than Linux, and is less secure. Linux also runs faster on the same hardware in my experience, and can be tuned to run lightening fast for a server since you can trim out all the unnecessary crap (like the GUI).
It looks like things are getting better for the Windows crowd, and maybe Longhorn with address the stability a little more and it will pull up even with Linux, but I suspect it will always be a terrible resource hog since they try and cram too many "features" in that can't be removed (e.g. IE).
A Rode NT 2 would be a better choice for home studio use since it is a cheap but decent capacitor mic. They go for around the 200 mark IIRC. CuBase however is more like 600 - 1000 (Nuendo) so even in a project studio this is going to make little difference to the setup costs.
I don't see the cost of an audio editing program affecting the overall cost of record production. Records cost so much because they hire engineers, prodcuers, marketeers (like bucaneers but robbing your cash not your jewels) and then have to also pay the band. Let's not forget the prohibitive cost of a Neve console or an Appoge sound channel. The 200 or so they will save on a commercial audio product is not really going to make a noticeable difference here.
The quote in my sig comes from that most useful ancient tome "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. It is in reference to how warlords would seek to make themselves invincible prior to engaging the enemy. I'm not sure it translates quite as well as it should into english but taken in context of the rest of the book it does make a kind of sense:-)
If Cygnus was invincible then he would eventually be able to tunnel out of the pit they dug since rock is not invincible.
The Art of War goes into many guiding principles for conducting a war (and many of these have application in normal life too) and neither attack or defence is suffient on it's own.
Slashdot Mirror
Typically these people are also low grade programmers. Since they're not interested in the *art* of programming they never try to learn new techniques, languages and OSes. They drag their heels whenever a product they aren't trained in is mentioned, thus everything is written in lowest common denominator i.e. VB, MS SQL, ASP.
Personally, I just wish these fucktards would get out of the game and leave it to the people who actually enjoy it for a living since I'm sick of dragging their sorry asses around on a project.
Twat, did you even follow the link? It was a link to Windows Update service, which does *not* work fine with Mozilla. Try reading the web page the link takes you to. So much for your "witty" put-down.
Back 5 years ago they were the only game in town, unless you thought an MP3 player that stored 10 tracks was worth owning. Minidisc had better sound, and was easier to store more music on. Nowadays swapping discs is more hassle and since there are decent sized players out there MP3 has the advantage, but it wasn't always so.
Damn, I think you're right come to think of it.
I've been using it for years since it comes as the standard in my minidisc player. It sounds decent, gets good compression and now the CODEC is even available for use on PCs (which it wasn't when I got my minidisc player). Sure, Ogg sounds better and compresses better, but AAC is nothing to sniff at either.
Microsoft
15 voters! You consider that to be a big enough sample to be representative of the brower using habits on slashdot? That makes me wonder, if when TV ads say 9 out of 10 doctors recommend X, did they only ask 10 doctors?
All the modern games are simple evolutions of their progenitors. The reason to choose this version of an RPG over others is the quality of the polish that Blizzard will provide to the genre. They always release cracking good software and I see no reason to believe this game will be any different.
WOW has mechanisms to avoid this most annoying habit of lame-ass RPGers. They have instance areas where only you and your group will be present so there is no spawn camping outside your own group members.
Now, if only we could rid our Windows systems of that pile of shit IE as well. I hate the way Media Player phones home every time I play a media file, and I hate my inability to remove the retarded IE from my system without resorting to potentially dangerous removal toolkits.
Additionally, most of these distros are provided free of charge on FTP servers operated and paid for by the distros. You *can* get them for nothing if you want, and that seems to be a clear distinction to me.
Any game that uses graphics that are fancier than colour ASCII is too modern and not worth playing. Even nethack is getting a little too fancy for my liking now ;->
Rather then putting Python in there a Mono runtime would be better. You'd get compiled code in a language that tons of programmers can write, and good performance characteristics. That would rock.
No, what's a waste is having to wade through multiple levels of commercials, FBI warnings, pre-menus, and sub menus to watch a film. At least video tape would let you wind the film to the start of the movie, it didn't force you to see the warnings and previews. I wish that the movie would just start to play when I drop a disc in since the MENU button on my remote can take me to a menu should I ever need it.
Wow 2.5TB of RAM, they must be running the new Beta of Windows Longhorn!
In Soviet Russia your hard drive writes to you.
By boxes I meant the IBM PC compatible range which was released in 1980, so that's over 20 years now. Windows itself is a lot younger but has it's roots in good old DOS, so it's no spring chicken either.
By contrast the mail server I set up for them hasn't needed a reboot or reset for 3 years bar to update the kernel. The web/mail server for a large shipping company which runs Linux hasn't rebooted in over 18 months.
Windows is improving, but it's not there yet.
Linux developers don't have to work to the same release schedules as the MS guys so they tend to release better drivers, even if it takes a little longer. The number of users will not affect this, it is the business model that drives the crappy driver problem. Instead of trying to bang out some code to score more cash from the consumer market they should look into making the code quality higher and the stabilty better.
One of the reasons I encounter occassionally is when trying to update a COM+ component on the server. When you remove the component it will very occasionally shut down the machine. Not reboot, or anything like that, but shut it down completely. I have never discovered why, and have seen the behaviour on several machines so it wasn't hardware specific.
It looks like things are getting better for the Windows crowd, and maybe Longhorn with address the stability a little more and it will pull up even with Linux, but I suspect it will always be a terrible resource hog since they try and cram too many "features" in that can't be removed (e.g. IE).
Ultima Underworld was not a network game like a MMORPG is, so it didn't have to deal with networklag and the like.
A Rode NT 2 would be a better choice for home studio use since it is a cheap but decent capacitor mic. They go for around the 200 mark IIRC. CuBase however is more like 600 - 1000 (Nuendo) so even in a project studio this is going to make little difference to the setup costs.
I don't see the cost of an audio editing program affecting the overall cost of record production. Records cost so much because they hire engineers, prodcuers, marketeers (like bucaneers but robbing your cash not your jewels) and then have to also pay the band. Let's not forget the prohibitive cost of a Neve console or an Appoge sound channel. The 200 or so they will save on a commercial audio product is not really going to make a noticeable difference here.
If Cygnus was invincible then he would eventually be able to tunnel out of the pit they dug since rock is not invincible.
The Art of War goes into many guiding principles for conducting a war (and many of these have application in normal life too) and neither attack or defence is suffient on it's own.