But this hasn't always been true. My linux box, back "in the day" when I first got a cablemodem back in '98, was targetted and sucessfully hacked into twice. At the time, I was a complete linux newbie and the distributions weren't as secure as they are now.
A unix box presents a lot more opportunity for a script kiddie, which is what most of the hacking consists of now a days. A unix shell is a powerful thing to have.
Of course, now, my linux box hasn't been tampered with at all. I put it online, unfirewalled, for about a year. No issues. On the other side of things, however, I did have a Windows 2000 server online unfirewalled for about a year as well, and it never had any issues either. Of course, this was before the fairly recent hack attack madness on windows boxes.
Well, NT on Alpha didn't fail miserably. There were a lot of these boxes out there, and I'm willing to bet there still are. Microsoft developed for Alpha longer then the other ports; they had Exchange for Alpha and some of their other server software packages.
Alpha was quite a bit quicker then x86 in it's day; it was a full 64-bit system from the start and the processors were clocked pretty aggressively. NT's x86 compatibility layer for the Alpha actually worked pretty damned good too- it ran 95% of the software on x86 and once you ran the apps enough, they ran pretty quickly. Alphas also weren't outrageously priced.
They just didn't keep up with the x86 boxes in the end, Digital was on the way out, and the Alpha just faded away.
At 18 years old, I was downloading more warez then I had space for, and I laughed at how easy it was to get around the copy protection.
At 18 years old, if he's making a spamming program to sell for the use of spamming by others, then he DEFINATELY knew that he should have protected his software better. Or, just accepted the fact that you can't copy protect anything, it's not even worth trying anymore.
I thought that people like you were only on TV? You had to discuss this with your wife and "*children*"? Why would you want to ever discuss this with your kids?
I doubt you did, I believe you're full of shit. Building a porn site and spamming are completely different things. You don't *have* to go to a porn site.
X is very fast for me. I see no tangable performance concerns in 2D desktop modes. Everything runs really snappy and smooth. And I run X on some machines with yesterday's tech, like Pentium 3's and nVidia TNT cards. Runs just as well as Windows 2D stuff.
Over the network, it's snappy and quick too, unless you're trying to do something like OpenGL, which DOES work, but it's slow. XVideo works in some cases as well and it's usable but it uses a lot of bandwidth.
So, I wouldn't say it sucks for graphics. Or, I'd say it sucks as much as any 2D desktop.
As a footnote, even if Doom 3 DID work over the network, I don't think a gigabit network connection would be even close to fast enough for it.
Ahh yes, you have multiple desktop PC's at home. Therefore you are able to judge the rest of the billion PC's out there. I see.
Any PC you buy "off the shelf" these days have condieration to noise. I dare you to pick up a dell or acer box and try to hear the so called loud noise. They're essentially silent.
All you guys here trying to blindly defend your Macs are really sounding like a broken record. I never said Macs were bad, or loud. I simply said that all PC's are not - and ten Mac zealots jumped on me saying that they are. It's pretty funny, actually.
I'll repeat again - if you have a crazy super home-brew overclocked PC from hell, it's bound to be filled with fans and loud. But these machines will be pushing the envelope for performance, and that's not something you even have the option to do with a Mac. You're stuck with what apple hands you - but if you could, it would be just as loud.
Plus. One of my machins is one of those home-brew crazy boxes, and truthfully, it's not that loud. The CPU has a very quiet fan, the three case fans are essentially silent, and even the video boards' dual fans would take a special microphone to hear. It's much more quiet then you'd think and still allows you to hear the clock on the wall tick.
Just because john-doe puts in a 10,000RPM CPU fan so he can get that extra 100Mhz out of the thing, or because nVidia once released a really loud video card, DOESN'T MEAN ALL PC'S ARE LOUD.
I'd like to see how well the management would appreciate that.
Why are you being so amazingly retarded about this?
Ohh and so, you've lived there your whole life - that automatically makes you an expert on all things related to the city. How do you know I haven't lived across the bridge my entire life?
It's been Six Flags for over 15 years. People call it Six Flags now. Maybe they call it Six Flags Great Adventure. But never just Great Adventure - nobody would know what the hell you were talking about unless you were within 30 miles of the place.
My Opteron system runs fantastic with one cpu fan that you can barely hear - the HDD is more audible.
So, what's the problem with PC's again? And don't even say "most PC's" because that doesn't cut it and that's not what you insinuate.
Hell, I don't know what the big deal is. Macs are just as loud as any PC. It's only the super-home-brew-crazy-overclocked machines people build that are loud. And I'm glad I have that option at all, if I wanted to do it.
You can't generalize like that - it's like saying all people of race look the same.
Do you know how many differen't PC's there are? It's countless. Among those are quiet computers that are "engineered" to cool the components and keep noise to a minimum. I'd also be willing to bet that the number of such PC's sold are still higher then the number of macs being sold, even considering that they do not make up the majority of PC's sold.
Again, you can't generalize, it's ignorant and sounds very much like something a zealot would say - you're not an ignorant zealot are you?
I've been to Six Flags New Jersey many, many times. Probably more then most people that live in New Jersey. And nobody called it "Great Adventure." Everyone calls it "Six Flags."
Deal with it. You're not special.
On the topic however, SFNJ is an awesome park. They've got a shit load of coasters - they've pretty much ditched everything else for them. And that's fine by me, coasters are the best.
Few years ago they put up the "Nitro" which was the damned best roller coaster I've ever been on. The cars are open, you sit on a seat with a lap restraint. It's so fast and awesome, and you have nothing boxing you in. It's just you and the track.
And now they're putting this one there - the park is going to be just unbelievable.
I remember when I got one myself, I had to look to see the CPU from the vendor (was a computer show) to see what week the chip was made in. Apparently past week 42 or something, they weren't overclockable.
I think the chip makers do this on purpose sometimes. Every once in awhile, let a few chips through that are overclockable to keep the overclockers happy.
Actually, my Barton 2500+ doesn't get nearly as hot as my older AthlonXP 2200+. The 2500+ runs great at 2100Mhz over the normal 1800, which is why I had gotten it.
But, it still is hot. Fortunately, with a good heat sink (I have this CoolerMaster one in there, lots of little fins) you don't need a monster fan to keep it cool. The thing spins around 3200RPM most of the time, only bumping up to about 5000 (which is still quiet on this fan) during the most grueling work.
The next CPU I'll be getting is one of the Athlon64's or the Opterons. These cpus run a lot cooler and have a heat spreader built in (finally.)
I had the 9700 Pro for about four months - I swapped the Ti4600 with a friend until he got a board that the ATI would work with (there was some weird incompatibility.)
The 9700 Pro is faster, yes, but not even CLOSE to 40% - more like 10% on a good day. And since at the time a lot of stuff was nVidia optimized and not ATI, the 4600 would beat it with a lot of games.
All in all, they are just about equal cards. I'd rather be using the 9700 Pro but the 4600 is really really close with performance.
I got my Ti4600 in 2003. Although it's been great it's already showing it's age quite severely.
EQ2, forget about putting up shadows. Doom3 runs okay but by okay I mean 15 - 20FPS average (and not all the options on.)
So, if you're saying these can beat my Ti4600, then I'm not very impressed. They need to CRUSH it for me to be impressed.
Is paying $200 worth it? Spend the $400, and you'll get a card you can use for a year and a half. If you spend $200 you'll be wanting more in 6 months when new games demand more.
I got my Ti4600 when they were brand new, and it cost me. But I've been using it for a long time, which is worth it.
Re:Argument invalid. uh..
on
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> You don't perform surgery on rockets.
Proceed to the nearest humor transplant facility immediately. You are in serious danger of becoming the dullest person on the face of this planet.
I agree that easy installation of software would be nice. However, that's not how most OSS software is designed.
Because it's GPL or whatever, most linux software uses a ton of libraries and other software to operate. Unlike in a Windows environment where each company has to pretty much re-invent the wheel every time, and package up their own (or leased) software to make their package run. Not to mention, Windows itself is a big "distribution" - it includes a lot of libraries and API's.
Because of this, you need pre-req software to be installed in order for the OSS software in question to be installed. Because generally many different softwares from different people share the same libraries, it doesn't make sense to include them in the software itself. They let you get that one on your own, and if it's already there for something else, there's no problem.
It's a different way of developing software, and since there's no single big distribution to hang all Linux software from, you run into issues installing things. Each distribution includes different libraries of various versions.
Hope that sheds some light on it for you..
Point 2, well, with each release of Gnome and KDE, they are getting things "more right." I prefer KDE, but Gnome is great too. They are mature, usuable "desktop environments." Now that a lot of the peices are in place, we're seeing more improvements to UI experience. This is just a matter of time.
Point 3: It will be awhile before any peice of crap hardware from staples will support your OS of choice. It's a Windows world. Deal with it. Make sure your hardware will work before you buy it. And if it is supported, and you need "plug and play" functionality, there's some distributions that are pretty good at it. Sure, it's not perfect, but often the drivers are written by people with no association with the hardware vendors. They do it for free and they do a fuck of a good job. You can't blame Linux for this - and when Linux keeps gaining more acceptance, more hardware at Staples will support it out of the box.
Argument invalid.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Computers haven't always been under a grand. It's a fairly recent trend, last few years. Before that, they were usually very expensive, and people STILL didn't learn how to use them.
I believe in the parent's arguement. You should learn how to use a computer if you're going to own one. It's not rocket surgery. With modern point and click updates and easy to read instructions, there's no excuse.
It doesn't end up working that way but I really don't feel too bad when someone can't figure out their computer. The information you need is right in front of you.
And yes, I believe you should know how to change a tire on your car. Most people know how to do it.
They could have all sorts of software that requires manual steps on shutdown and restart. It happens all the time.
Whereas on a modern Linux box you could probably script most actions, on Windows it's usually not that easy - even with Windows Scripting Host, most MS shops like to keep everything "standard" or "out of the box."
Was it the Tseng ET4000? I stuck with the Matrox cards - they had decent VESA support. The Millenium and Millenium 2 were good. The Mistique wasn't so bad - in fact it was the first 3D board available for the PC (tomb raider baby.) Then the VooDoo cards came out and it was all over.
It was never supported correctly, either. In order to get somewhat acceptable levels of performance and/or resolution selections, you'd have to run helper applications like UNIVBE.
Slashdot Mirror
But this hasn't always been true. My linux box, back "in the day" when I first got a cablemodem back in '98, was targetted and sucessfully hacked into twice. At the time, I was a complete linux newbie and the distributions weren't as secure as they are now.
A unix box presents a lot more opportunity for a script kiddie, which is what most of the hacking consists of now a days. A unix shell is a powerful thing to have.
Of course, now, my linux box hasn't been tampered with at all. I put it online, unfirewalled, for about a year. No issues. On the other side of things, however, I did have a Windows 2000 server online unfirewalled for about a year as well, and it never had any issues either. Of course, this was before the fairly recent hack attack madness on windows boxes.
Well, NT on Alpha didn't fail miserably. There were a lot of these boxes out there, and I'm willing to bet there still are. Microsoft developed for Alpha longer then the other ports; they had Exchange for Alpha and some of their other server software packages.
Alpha was quite a bit quicker then x86 in it's day; it was a full 64-bit system from the start and the processors were clocked pretty aggressively. NT's x86 compatibility layer for the Alpha actually worked pretty damned good too- it ran 95% of the software on x86 and once you ran the apps enough, they ran pretty quickly. Alphas also weren't outrageously priced.
They just didn't keep up with the x86 boxes in the end, Digital was on the way out, and the Alpha just faded away.
At 18 years old, I was downloading more warez then I had space for, and I laughed at how easy it was to get around the copy protection.
At 18 years old, if he's making a spamming program to sell for the use of spamming by others, then he DEFINATELY knew that he should have protected his software better. Or, just accepted the fact that you can't copy protect anything, it's not even worth trying anymore.
I thought that people like you were only on TV? You had to discuss this with your wife and "*children*"? Why would you want to ever discuss this with your kids?
I doubt you did, I believe you're full of shit. Building a porn site and spamming are completely different things. You don't *have* to go to a porn site.
How does that work?
You've proved my point about you being an ignorant zealot. Well done!
Haha, who's the freak..
I'm talking about local X here.
X is very fast for me. I see no tangable performance concerns in 2D desktop modes. Everything runs really snappy and smooth. And I run X on some machines with yesterday's tech, like Pentium 3's and nVidia TNT cards. Runs just as well as Windows 2D stuff.
Over the network, it's snappy and quick too, unless you're trying to do something like OpenGL, which DOES work, but it's slow. XVideo works in some cases as well and it's usable but it uses a lot of bandwidth.
So, I wouldn't say it sucks for graphics. Or, I'd say it sucks as much as any 2D desktop.
As a footnote, even if Doom 3 DID work over the network, I don't think a gigabit network connection would be even close to fast enough for it.
Ahh yes, you have multiple desktop PC's at home. Therefore you are able to judge the rest of the billion PC's out there. I see.
Any PC you buy "off the shelf" these days have condieration to noise. I dare you to pick up a dell or acer box and try to hear the so called loud noise. They're essentially silent.
All you guys here trying to blindly defend your Macs are really sounding like a broken record. I never said Macs were bad, or loud. I simply said that all PC's are not - and ten Mac zealots jumped on me saying that they are. It's pretty funny, actually.
I'll repeat again - if you have a crazy super home-brew overclocked PC from hell, it's bound to be filled with fans and loud. But these machines will be pushing the envelope for performance, and that's not something you even have the option to do with a Mac. You're stuck with what apple hands you - but if you could, it would be just as loud.
Plus. One of my machins is one of those home-brew crazy boxes, and truthfully, it's not that loud. The CPU has a very quiet fan, the three case fans are essentially silent, and even the video boards' dual fans would take a special microphone to hear. It's much more quiet then you'd think and still allows you to hear the clock on the wall tick.
Just because john-doe puts in a 10,000RPM CPU fan so he can get that extra 100Mhz out of the thing, or because nVidia once released a really loud video card, DOESN'T MEAN ALL PC'S ARE LOUD.
Yes, please do, mr Anonymous Coward.
I'd like to see how well the management would appreciate that.
Why are you being so amazingly retarded about this?
Ohh and so, you've lived there your whole life - that automatically makes you an expert on all things related to the city. How do you know I haven't lived across the bridge my entire life?
It's been Six Flags for over 15 years. People call it Six Flags now. Maybe they call it Six Flags Great Adventure. But never just Great Adventure - nobody would know what the hell you were talking about unless you were within 30 miles of the place.
Are you gaff? I lived in NYC for over a year, and nobody called it Great Adventure. At least, none of the people I met...
My Opteron system runs fantastic with one cpu fan that you can barely hear - the HDD is more audible.
So, what's the problem with PC's again? And don't even say "most PC's" because that doesn't cut it and that's not what you insinuate.
Hell, I don't know what the big deal is. Macs are just as loud as any PC. It's only the super-home-brew-crazy-overclocked machines people build that are loud. And I'm glad I have that option at all, if I wanted to do it.
You can't generalize like that - it's like saying all people of race look the same.
Do you know how many differen't PC's there are? It's countless. Among those are quiet computers that are "engineered" to cool the components and keep noise to a minimum. I'd also be willing to bet that the number of such PC's sold are still higher then the number of macs being sold, even considering that they do not make up the majority of PC's sold.
Again, you can't generalize, it's ignorant and sounds very much like something a zealot would say - you're not an ignorant zealot are you?
I've been to Six Flags New Jersey many, many times. Probably more then most people that live in New Jersey. And nobody called it "Great Adventure." Everyone calls it "Six Flags."
Deal with it. You're not special.
On the topic however, SFNJ is an awesome park. They've got a shit load of coasters - they've pretty much ditched everything else for them. And that's fine by me, coasters are the best.
Few years ago they put up the "Nitro" which was the damned best roller coaster I've ever been on. The cars are open, you sit on a seat with a lap restraint. It's so fast and awesome, and you have nothing boxing you in. It's just you and the track.
And now they're putting this one there - the park is going to be just unbelievable.
I remember when I got one myself, I had to look to see the CPU from the vendor (was a computer show) to see what week the chip was made in. Apparently past week 42 or something, they weren't overclockable.
I think the chip makers do this on purpose sometimes. Every once in awhile, let a few chips through that are overclockable to keep the overclockers happy.
Actually, my Barton 2500+ doesn't get nearly as hot as my older AthlonXP 2200+. The 2500+ runs great at 2100Mhz over the normal 1800, which is why I had gotten it.
But, it still is hot. Fortunately, with a good heat sink (I have this CoolerMaster one in there, lots of little fins) you don't need a monster fan to keep it cool. The thing spins around 3200RPM most of the time, only bumping up to about 5000 (which is still quiet on this fan) during the most grueling work.
The next CPU I'll be getting is one of the Athlon64's or the Opterons. These cpus run a lot cooler and have a heat spreader built in (finally.)
You're the troll - why do you assume all PC's have 9 fans?
I had the 9700 Pro for about four months - I swapped the Ti4600 with a friend until he got a board that the ATI would work with (there was some weird incompatibility.)
The 9700 Pro is faster, yes, but not even CLOSE to 40% - more like 10% on a good day. And since at the time a lot of stuff was nVidia optimized and not ATI, the 4600 would beat it with a lot of games.
All in all, they are just about equal cards. I'd rather be using the 9700 Pro but the 4600 is really really close with performance.
I got my Ti4600 in 2003. Although it's been great it's already showing it's age quite severely.
EQ2, forget about putting up shadows. Doom3 runs okay but by okay I mean 15 - 20FPS average (and not all the options on.)
So, if you're saying these can beat my Ti4600, then I'm not very impressed. They need to CRUSH it for me to be impressed.
Is paying $200 worth it? Spend the $400, and you'll get a card you can use for a year and a half. If you spend $200 you'll be wanting more in 6 months when new games demand more.
I got my Ti4600 when they were brand new, and it cost me. But I've been using it for a long time, which is worth it.
> You don't perform surgery on rockets.
Proceed to the nearest humor transplant facility immediately. You are in serious danger of becoming the dullest person on the face of this planet.
I agree that easy installation of software would be nice. However, that's not how most OSS software is designed.
Because it's GPL or whatever, most linux software uses a ton of libraries and other software to operate. Unlike in a Windows environment where each company has to pretty much re-invent the wheel every time, and package up their own (or leased) software to make their package run. Not to mention, Windows itself is a big "distribution" - it includes a lot of libraries and API's.
Because of this, you need pre-req software to be installed in order for the OSS software in question to be installed. Because generally many different softwares from different people share the same libraries, it doesn't make sense to include them in the software itself. They let you get that one on your own, and if it's already there for something else, there's no problem.
It's a different way of developing software, and since there's no single big distribution to hang all Linux software from, you run into issues installing things. Each distribution includes different libraries of various versions.
Hope that sheds some light on it for you..
Point 2, well, with each release of Gnome and KDE, they are getting things "more right." I prefer KDE, but Gnome is great too. They are mature, usuable "desktop environments." Now that a lot of the peices are in place, we're seeing more improvements to UI experience. This is just a matter of time.
Point 3: It will be awhile before any peice of crap hardware from staples will support your OS of choice. It's a Windows world. Deal with it. Make sure your hardware will work before you buy it. And if it is supported, and you need "plug and play" functionality, there's some distributions that are pretty good at it. Sure, it's not perfect, but often the drivers are written by people with no association with the hardware vendors. They do it for free and they do a fuck of a good job. You can't blame Linux for this - and when Linux keeps gaining more acceptance, more hardware at Staples will support it out of the box.
Computers haven't always been under a grand. It's a fairly recent trend, last few years. Before that, they were usually very expensive, and people STILL didn't learn how to use them.
I believe in the parent's arguement. You should learn how to use a computer if you're going to own one. It's not rocket surgery. With modern point and click updates and easy to read instructions, there's no excuse.
It doesn't end up working that way but I really don't feel too bad when someone can't figure out their computer. The information you need is right in front of you.
And yes, I believe you should know how to change a tire on your car. Most people know how to do it.
They could have all sorts of software that requires manual steps on shutdown and restart. It happens all the time.
Whereas on a modern Linux box you could probably script most actions, on Windows it's usually not that easy - even with Windows Scripting Host, most MS shops like to keep everything "standard" or "out of the box."
Was it the Tseng ET4000? I stuck with the Matrox cards - they had decent VESA support. The Millenium and Millenium 2 were good. The Mistique wasn't so bad - in fact it was the first 3D board available for the PC (tomb raider baby.) Then the VooDoo cards came out and it was all over.
It was never supported correctly, either. In order to get somewhat acceptable levels of performance and/or resolution selections, you'd have to run helper applications like UNIVBE.