I've been checking out SecondLife for awhile, and it seems to be a lot more about toys and things then it does about social interaction.
You own land, you buy toys and houses for it for other people to look at..
SecondLife is glitchy, the controls are awkward, and the graphics are buggy. There is a noticable lag between when you move and when you actually move on the screen.
The scripting functionality is neat, but your average player doesn't want to write them or even bother with ones other people have written.
In There, it's all about social interaction. There is actually fun to play and it's fun to interact with other people. The graphics are not world class, but the character animation is superb and the items in the world are actually fun to use. The buggies drive easy, movement is easier, exploration is more fun.
The chat system in There is interesting as well. When you join a conversation (conversations are automatically created when two people talk a few lines to each other) you are automatically positioned around the group like you were really standing in a group talking.
In There, anyone can use anyone's vehicles and other items. I can find a buggy and jump in and drive. I can even hold it in my own inventory. When the owner logs in and wants it back, all he has to do is recall it. I've been loaned all sorts of cool stuff for weeks at a time.
I'm not even someone who likes to try and make friends in virtual spaces, such as MMORPGs. But in There, it's pleasantly unavoidable. Most people are really friendly and it's quite easy to hang out with people for hours and not even notice the clock ticking away.
There's game show events where you can win virtual cash, there's clubs, there's paintball wars, and buggy races. Tons of stuff to do, and it's fun to do with other people.
I'm not saying that SecondLife is terrible, but if you're into just relaxing, chatting a little, and playing a laid back game, SecondLife can't even be compared to There.
There isn't as cheap as SecondLife for a basic membership but There isn't any more expensive then your average MMORPG if you want to buy all the fun items. And like SecondLife, you don't have to buy everything, there's plenty you can do to make money in the game.
Often times it's cheaper for a manufacturer to do this.
I mean, they've already got production on the higher end model. It's a professional unit and is in line with competition prices.
So, they swap out some metal with plastic, remove some features in software, and sell the camera for a lower priced segment.
It's likely that they wouldn't have been able to do that at all if they had to design a whole new unit from the ground up for the lower market segment. It would have been too expensive for all the R&D and the new production line. In the end, the new lower cost model would have cost too much.
So what would you rather have? An inexpensive camera mostly based from a high end model or a low end camera built from the ground up and costs more with less quality parts?
I think it's an acceptable practice and it works out for the consumer in the end. Better product and less money.
No. It was paid for independently and they have the rights to charge people for crossing it for 75 years. I think 75 years is a little much but it wasn't your tax money paying for it.
It's not cheap to cross, either. But, you always have the option of going the old way, if you want to save the money.
Although what you say about possible performance may very well be true, I have reservations about how cool the Xbox2 might be =)
It doesn't sound microsoftish enough. They are much more likely to make a PC"ish" machine that will only run things that microsoft approves (and likely gets royalty for.)
The thing is, if you can just write a PC game and it'll run on the Xbox2 with resonable speed, game developers might be less compelled to write native games. It's the same arguement used against Linux software such as WINE, but without the fact that you can develop on linux for no software license costs on a OS that's been steadily gaining momentum for the last decade.
Yea, we have an openvpn over the internet now. But cablemodems are so dismal with their upstream (256k) and we'd like to achieve better speeds then that. We don't need 54 mbits, 2 would be great.
Well, thanks for the info. We're going to keep looking and maybe we'll find something that might work. I need to get on the roof and see if we have any common points we could maybe use.
Boy, if you live in the city I bet this is easy shmeezy.
Yea, and satellite is slow. You can download streams pretty quick, but latency is double a modem. Forget online gaming.
Cellular? You have cellular broadband available? Yikes, that probably is expensive.
I have a cablemodem, so I can't really complain.. (okay yes I can, Cox sucks ass) but my friend and I would really like a network connection that's better then 25K a second between us. We have an openvpn connection between us that's extremely reliable (It's been running for two years with zero configuration changes) but it's just slow.
If we had a faster connection we'd be able to do a lot more cool stuff, one being fault tolerance; when one of us is down we could route traffic over the wireless connection.
If you can get a wireless relay running from solar panels and batteries, I'd like to know how you do it because I could probably throw one in a tree somewhere =)
You musn't live in the Northeast, because my Nextel works about 60% of the time. There's about 4 dead spots on the 26 mile stretch of i95 between rhode island and the 128 split alone.
But it seems that most carriers use the same towers and the same power rating, because I've had the same dead spots and coverage with three other companies as well.
Cell phones are a pain in the ass. I am required to use it for work, and I do like having it when I'm out in case I need to call someone and ask a question. But they are just so damned frustrating.
They can interfere all they want, as long as it's within the FCC regulations as to how much power in the interference they can generate.
And the FCC also states that consumer electronics (including your phone) are to accept interference; not using some sophisticated blocking mechanism to keep it out.
Unfortunately, not really =( There's a lot of trees. On the good side, there's a country club and a park between us, so there's a lot of empty fields. On the bad side, the trees are very tall and there's a hill near my friends' house that's pretty tall.
I don't know if there's much I can do in this situation.
If there were a commercial product with a resonable price I'd consider it.. but the few that I've looked at cost over $1,000 on each end for both the box and the antenna.
If it's just a matter of finding someone to help, please, help me out here.
I'm trying to do this with a friend that's 3 miles away. thing is, we don't have LoS. There's mostly trees between us but even if we stand on each others houses I doubt we have a clear line of sight.
Do you know what the options are? I can't exactly mount a 20' tower on the roof.
But, you need line of sight? I'm trying to do exactly that, connect to my friends network. If we got 2mbit, we'd be happy. We live three miles apart.
But this whole line of sight thing. How are you supposed to do that? It's not like there's a grassy field between us. There's harldy a building though, it's all trees, but if you need LoS you'd need a very tall tower to mount this thing on regardless?
I'm trying to find a way to get this done without a LoS. It doesn't have to be 802.11, we just need some method of doing it wirelessly.
I've been having trouble getting an exact definition of Line of Sight. This means you have to actually be able to SEE the remote side with nothing in the way at all? I don't know how useful a 10km range is if you need that type of LoS.
See, I'm trying to get a wireless connection to my friends network about three miles away, directly. We can't erect 100' towers so we're trying to figure out our options. We can mount the things on our roofs but we won't have direct line of sight (some trees, the curve of the earth, etc..) Do you have any idea? We'd like to do it for under a few hundred bucks each.
Is there some sort of amplifier you can get? Maybe that with a directional antenna pointed at each other? I am not concerned about FCC regulations at this point.
Because almost every SUV I look into has a woman in the drivers seat. And they aren't good drivers. When they are in little toyotas, we all have a better chance of living.
I know it sounds shovanistic but I'm just telling it how I see it.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been checking out SecondLife for awhile, and it seems to be a lot more about toys and things then it does about social interaction.
You own land, you buy toys and houses for it for other people to look at..
SecondLife is glitchy, the controls are awkward, and the graphics are buggy. There is a noticable lag between when you move and when you actually move on the screen.
The scripting functionality is neat, but your average player doesn't want to write them or even bother with ones other people have written.
In There, it's all about social interaction. There is actually fun to play and it's fun to interact with other people. The graphics are not world class, but the character animation is superb and the items in the world are actually fun to use. The buggies drive easy, movement is easier, exploration is more fun.
The chat system in There is interesting as well. When you join a conversation (conversations are automatically created when two people talk a few lines to each other) you are automatically positioned around the group like you were really standing in a group talking.
In There, anyone can use anyone's vehicles and other items. I can find a buggy and jump in and drive. I can even hold it in my own inventory. When the owner logs in and wants it back, all he has to do is recall it. I've been loaned all sorts of cool stuff for weeks at a time.
I'm not even someone who likes to try and make friends in virtual spaces, such as MMORPGs. But in There, it's pleasantly unavoidable. Most people are really friendly and it's quite easy to hang out with people for hours and not even notice the clock ticking away.
There's game show events where you can win virtual cash, there's clubs, there's paintball wars, and buggy races. Tons of stuff to do, and it's fun to do with other people.
I'm not saying that SecondLife is terrible, but if you're into just relaxing, chatting a little, and playing a laid back game, SecondLife can't even be compared to There.
There isn't as cheap as SecondLife for a basic membership but There isn't any more expensive then your average MMORPG if you want to buy all the fun items. And like SecondLife, you don't have to buy everything, there's plenty you can do to make money in the game.
What happens to anything if you lose it?
What kind of question is that?
Often times it's cheaper for a manufacturer to do this.
I mean, they've already got production on the higher end model. It's a professional unit and is in line with competition prices.
So, they swap out some metal with plastic, remove some features in software, and sell the camera for a lower priced segment.
It's likely that they wouldn't have been able to do that at all if they had to design a whole new unit from the ground up for the lower market segment. It would have been too expensive for all the R&D and the new production line. In the end, the new lower cost model would have cost too much.
So what would you rather have? An inexpensive camera mostly based from a high end model or a low end camera built from the ground up and costs more with less quality parts?
I think it's an acceptable practice and it works out for the consumer in the end. Better product and less money.
nt
Read the symantic security advisory, it says IA64, and specifically says NOT AMD64.
Your post is almost as bad as the fact that this article was even put up here today.
Unless of course, you're traveling in the correct direction.
Then you're out of Jersey.
If it was, do you think the company would have spent almost 400 million on the thing to say "Oops. we forgot about earthquakes. Darn."?
The local neighbors are like, 400 feet below the bridge.
I don't think noise will be a big issue, certianly less then living near an expressway.
No. It was paid for independently and they have the rights to charge people for crossing it for 75 years. I think 75 years is a little much but it wasn't your tax money paying for it.
It's not cheap to cross, either. But, you always have the option of going the old way, if you want to save the money.
Although what you say about possible performance may very well be true, I have reservations about how cool the Xbox2 might be =)
It doesn't sound microsoftish enough. They are much more likely to make a PC"ish" machine that will only run things that microsoft approves (and likely gets royalty for.)
The thing is, if you can just write a PC game and it'll run on the Xbox2 with resonable speed, game developers might be less compelled to write native games. It's the same arguement used against Linux software such as WINE, but without the fact that you can develop on linux for no software license costs on a OS that's been steadily gaining momentum for the last decade.
Well, I suppose so..
There is the version of VPC for the mac, and if the console is a G5 it could possible be ported to run on it.
Of course, emulating x86 isn't very fast and you won't be able to play much in the way of PC games, or much of anything that's not MS Sanctioned.
Of course, I'm sure some smart guys will get Linux on it. Then you'll be able to do whatever you want.
You, sir, are an idiot.
"Just bad writing, if you ask me."
Yes I agree and if you are a reviewer of hardware and software you should know better then to make mistakes like that.
This guy's credibility went out the door before I even knew who he was.
I was wondering the same thing. Who knows how their farm is setup, but if it's anything like ones I've seen, each computer renders it's own frame.
So if you have 1,600 computers, you could get 1,600 frames in two hours, on average. Not too bad considering the detail and resolution.
I'd imagine they had to re-render a lot of frames because they contained something they didn't like.
Yea, we have an openvpn over the internet now. But cablemodems are so dismal with their upstream (256k) and we'd like to achieve better speeds then that. We don't need 54 mbits, 2 would be great.
Well, thanks for the info. We're going to keep looking and maybe we'll find something that might work. I need to get on the roof and see if we have any common points we could maybe use.
Boy, if you live in the city I bet this is easy shmeezy.
Yea, and satellite is slow. You can download streams pretty quick, but latency is double a modem. Forget online gaming.
Cellular? You have cellular broadband available? Yikes, that probably is expensive.
I have a cablemodem, so I can't really complain.. (okay yes I can, Cox sucks ass) but my friend and I would really like a network connection that's better then 25K a second between us. We have an openvpn connection between us that's extremely reliable (It's been running for two years with zero configuration changes) but it's just slow.
If we had a faster connection we'd be able to do a lot more cool stuff, one being fault tolerance; when one of us is down we could route traffic over the wireless connection.
If you can get a wireless relay running from solar panels and batteries, I'd like to know how you do it because I could probably throw one in a tree somewhere =)
You musn't live in the Northeast, because my Nextel works about 60% of the time. There's about 4 dead spots on the 26 mile stretch of i95 between rhode island and the 128 split alone.
But it seems that most carriers use the same towers and the same power rating, because I've had the same dead spots and coverage with three other companies as well.
Cell phones are a pain in the ass. I am required to use it for work, and I do like having it when I'm out in case I need to call someone and ask a question. But they are just so damned frustrating.
They can interfere all they want, as long as it's within the FCC regulations as to how much power in the interference they can generate.
And the FCC also states that consumer electronics (including your phone) are to accept interference; not using some sophisticated blocking mechanism to keep it out.
Unfortunately, not really =( There's a lot of trees. On the good side, there's a country club and a park between us, so there's a lot of empty fields. On the bad side, the trees are very tall and there's a hill near my friends' house that's pretty tall.
I don't know if there's much I can do in this situation.
If there were a commercial product with a resonable price I'd consider it.. but the few that I've looked at cost over $1,000 on each end for both the box and the antenna.
Unfortunately, it's pretty darned inconvienient to fill up and empty 16 one gallon jugs into your car every few days.
"Sorry I'm late to work, I had to lug 16 gallons of fuel out to my car and fill up."
If it's just a matter of finding someone to help, please, help me out here.
I'm trying to do this with a friend that's 3 miles away. thing is, we don't have LoS. There's mostly trees between us but even if we stand on each others houses I doubt we have a clear line of sight.
Do you know what the options are? I can't exactly mount a 20' tower on the roof.
But, you need line of sight? I'm trying to do exactly that, connect to my friends network. If we got 2mbit, we'd be happy. We live three miles apart.
But this whole line of sight thing. How are you supposed to do that? It's not like there's a grassy field between us. There's harldy a building though, it's all trees, but if you need LoS you'd need a very tall tower to mount this thing on regardless?
I'm trying to find a way to get this done without a LoS. It doesn't have to be 802.11, we just need some method of doing it wirelessly.
If you have any ideas please let me know..
I've been having trouble getting an exact definition of Line of Sight. This means you have to actually be able to SEE the remote side with nothing in the way at all? I don't know how useful a 10km range is if you need that type of LoS.
See, I'm trying to get a wireless connection to my friends network about three miles away, directly. We can't erect 100' towers so we're trying to figure out our options. We can mount the things on our roofs but we won't have direct line of sight (some trees, the curve of the earth, etc..) Do you have any idea? We'd like to do it for under a few hundred bucks each.
Is there some sort of amplifier you can get? Maybe that with a directional antenna pointed at each other? I am not concerned about FCC regulations at this point.
Because almost every SUV I look into has a woman in the drivers seat. And they aren't good drivers. When they are in little toyotas, we all have a better chance of living.
I know it sounds shovanistic but I'm just telling it how I see it.
It's true to a degree; but the procmail stuff will only launch on the server if they have shell accounts and do their mail from the server itself.
I'm guessing most students pop into their mail, download it, and the spam filter would take it from there.
Before, their mail servers had to process all the spam themselves anyways, so at least that load is now gone..
It's a silly descition if you ask me, but I'm sure they will be able to afford some new beefy linux boxes to handle it, being a university and all.