Yes, it's just a PC-in-a-box. However, this is something a bit more interesting in that at long last it'd set a more modern minimum spec for games. For too long PC games have been crippled graphically, as no games maker wants to lose out on the Windows XP-with-DX9 graphics crowd. If enough of these boxes are shifted it would work to further PC games in terms of graphics, as developers could assume a certain minimum level - and I'd wager it wouldn't be crusty old DX9-level graphics.
As a bonus, everyone who has a decent gaming PC already would stand to benefit from a larger pool of developers and games.
Things like this have been tried before, however. Remember MPC and MPC2? They quickly fizzled out, as did use of the Experience Index that's present in consumer versions of Windows from Vista onwards.
The main fly in the ointment is likely to be cost, however. i7s are around £230 alone in the UK and a decent midrange graphics card (like the GTX560) is another £120. A PS3 is cheaper than an i7 CPU, around £190.
I rebooted 3 hours ago and I've got 9 tabs open in Firefox - Slashdot, some weather charts, a Livejournal page, a WoWWiki page, two BBC news items and a couple of xkcd pages. I don't have any addons other than Downloadhelper and Flashblock.
The commit size of firefox.exe is 1,334,304 KB - over one and a quarter gigabytes for 9 pages! (The private working set is around 30 MB lower, FWIW).
Although I've got the RAM, 1.3GB for a web brower is just plain silly.
There's actually a registry key you can change which flips back into the old non-Metro way of doing things - which is the default UI in all the leaked versions of 8 so far.
http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-8-how-to-re-enable-the-classic-start-menu
I'd say it's safe to assume that there will be an option to revert to that in the final product. This is a developer preview and as such it's no wonder that MS wants everyone to get used to the Metro interface.
No, my problem isn't that at all - I know full well that programming is a different path to helpdesk/sysadmin roles. When I say "high level" I mean management type roles, the sort of thing where you don't actually do the hands-on stuff. I was flexible enough to consider several different career paths and had relevant experience for two of them - helpdesk and programming. Those formed the bulk of my job applications.
The problem is simply that across the IT segment as a whole, be it programming to web design to sysadmin roles to helpdesk support, degrees are seen as pointless and "experience" is required but as others have said - the "experience" required is all but impossible to acquire at Uni.
And you're wrong when you say "Your CS degree makes you qualified to be a programmer, but unqualified for IT roles". My degree covered a broad array of disciplines, from formal logic and yes, programming, to hardware details (including a series of lectures about the IBM PS/2, bizarrely!) to troubleshooting, databse theory (inner and outer joins, 3rd normal form etc) and systems design (the old "systems analyst" type stuff). Most CS courses are the same in the UK, they include a bit of everything.
The whole point of getting a CS degree isn't to say "yeah, I'm an uber programmer - hire me!". It's to say "I have a sound knowledge of the basics and I know how to learn". That, added to whatever personal things you've done (be it building PCs, managing a website or writing games/apps) ought to be enough to get you in the door. Sadly, as others have said on here it isn't, simple as that.
A computer scientist should not be maintaining AD or playing with VMs for a day job. Building PCs does not qualify you for IT work any more than replacing the water pump on a car qualifies you as a fleet manager
Well, I wanted to get into IT and the traditional way to do that is to start at the bottom and work your way up. Building PCs is absolutely relevant experience for the helpdesk role, where you get called to a PC and have to replace the hard drive as it's sprouted bad sectors (etc). Similarly, knowing how to design, implement and test code is entirely relevant towards a low-end programming job.
You seem to be assuming I was planning to go straight in at a high level, which simply wouldn't have happened due to the lack of experience issue. My complaint is that even at the low levels there's an overwhelming attitude of "you need experience" (but that which you have doesn't count) and "degrees are worthless".
I graduated in 2001 (with a CS degree). Couldn't get an IT-related job in my area as the employers kept saying they wanted experience. For some reason, the fact I'd built PCs for myself and family for the past 7 years didn't count. Nor did the fact I'd written several Symbian games and had them published, which was how I paid my way through Uni. It wasn't as though I was after high-powered jobs, just typical helpdesk type roles or an entry-level programming position.
The problem as I saw it back then was that there were loads of not-really-interested-in-IT people floating around as a result of the Y2K problem - people went on training courses just to make some cash from it, then once Y2K was over they had the much-coveted experience that employers were calling for. New graduates didn't get a look in.
There's a general perception in the IT industry in the UK that degrees are worthless and only vocational qualifications count. Being a member of the BCS doesn't count for anything. It's quite maddening (yes, MCSEs and the like are handy but hardly the be all and end all - a degree shows the ability to learn, an MCSE shows the ability to learn a more specific set of skills) but there's nothing much that can be done.
After working as a temp in a variety of offices for seven years, I finally landed a job in a school on the IT helpdesk there. I'm now involved in the maintainence of their Active Directory domain, as well as keeping our various VMs ticking over and dealing with software rollouts and so on. All for less than half a teacher's salary!
My advice would be not to bother going to Uni in the UK, employers really don't value it in the IT sector. It's a sad state of affairs IMO.
Quite right - there were dire warnings at the time of what would happen if your Thunderbird's fan died. It was always nagging at the back of mine when I built my 1.3GHz Thunderbird machine back in 2001 - although thankfully the fan worked for the best part of 8 years in daily use and although it's now in retirement in a local school (the machine is used for "take a PC to pieces" lessons) it still works fine.
The more annoying thing was the rubbish VIA chipset that motherboard (KT133A-RAID) contained, which caused distortion every time I played an MP3 in WinAmp on my SB Live.
The PC will not die out, it will merge with the laptop.
As they say around here, nah. Tried pricing a laptop with the equivalent of a GTX 580 in it? (Trick question, as the mobile 580m performs similarly to a desktop 560 GTX despite costing 3 times as much!)
It may be that most people are prepared to put up with slower performance (the fact that people buy Celerons is a good indicator of that) but there will always be those who want or need performance above that which you can get in a mobile platform, or who simply prefer paying half the price for an equivalent desktop.
Case in point: i7-2600K desktop with 8GB RAM, bluray, 24 inch monitor, 1TB HDD, 560 GTX graphics - around £1000.
i7-2820QM laptop with 8GB RAM, 17 inch display, 750 GB HDD, 580m GTX graphics (similar performance to the desktop) - around £1800 if you're happy with Clevo, or if you prefer bling, £2300 for the same specs with Alienware.
And in a couple of years, no prizes for guessing which option wins hands down when it comes to upgrade costs!
Since 1981 and the launch of the IBM PC, which was followed in 1982 by the IBM PC XT and the IBM PC AT in 1984. I guess you don't remember the days when software boxes would have labels saying "Requires IBM PC AT or 100% compatible" on them?
I'll start believing in the end of the home PC when home servers with seamless tablet management and syncing become a reality.
I'll believe it when I see it. Anyone else remember all the hype 15 years ago about how we'd all be running Java thin client machines by the year 2000? Pundits have been calling for the PC to die for the past 15 years, half the platform's life! And yet we're as far away as ever from having PCs die out. About the only real change in that time is that laptops have increased in popularity, phones have absorbed the features previously found in standalone PDAs and yes, tablets have reappeared for the umpteemth time in the last 20 years.
Mind you, twenty years ago something fun happened - Microsoft released Windows for Pen Computing, designed for tablets. It flopped.
The ability to watch blu-rays. The ability to play proper games (in lucious HD) and also MMOs. The ability to encode video and not have to wait ages. The ability to create programs and test them. The ability to run Office natively. The ability to run several VMs and thus simulate a network (for testing or just sheer fun). The ability to switch between MacOS, Windows 7 and Linux as and when needed.
The good side of all this tablet mania is that traditional PCs are stupidly cheap now. Memory is laughably inexpensive ($12 equivalent gets you 2GB RAM here in the UK). An i7-2600K CPU, for example, is the equivalent of $370 in the UK at the moment. 12 years ago a Pentium 3 450, which was the consumer equivalent back then, was the equivalent of $750. Half the price for something an order of magnitude more powerful - bargain!
Of course, that PC isn't exactly portable. But I, for one, do most of my serious computing tasks in a fixed location and thus a phone suffices for Internet on the move.
Bah - having looked at the data it's only a tiny, miniscule portion of what's available - a far cry from "virtually all" as the article stated!
In the 100-mile radius of where I live, there's only Gatwick. Gravesend, Brogdale, Sheerness, Manston, Southend, Shoeburyness, Heathrow, Lydd and more are nowhere to be seen and I know they all provide data to the Met Office as they appear elsewhere online.
So, either the climate research is only being done with a small number of stations or there's a hell of a lot of data still to be released. The Met Office's money-spinning climate data service is safe for now, it seems.
Part of that reasons is because the Met Office in the UK has a nice little sideline selling climate data - if it's all available for free they'll lose that income. It was a bit daft though, as there were cases of people who'd submitted data to the Met Office for years having to pay for their own data when they lost their local copy! Other European meteorological agencies have similar policies.
It's a different culture in the US where all this data is freely available and interestingly the same applies to the raw weather model output too - the American GFS is free for all (and is widely used commercially in the UK) while the equivalent from the ECMWF costs a small fortune to access, especially ensemble output.
That's a US layout rather than the UK layour I have, but it's the same basic model. The IBM PC and PC XT had the same keyboards. It was only the PC AT of 1984 that saw a change (and the PCjr).
I completely disagree. The model F IBM-XT keyboard was one of the best keyboards I've had the pleasure to use, the tactile feeling is something I'll never forget. In fact, when I ditched the XT (bad move, it'd now be worth a bit as a collectible) I kept the keyboard and I still have it to this day. I took it into work (a school) a year or so ago for a teacher to use in their lesson, showing the evolution of hardware and everyone who tried it was amazed at how good it felt. It makes modern membrane keyboards feel like typing into a pot of mushy peas. No idea what you mean about the spacebar, having just tried it again it's super - it works no matter where you press it, it's six inches long and makes a clacky noise when you use it.
The layout was, erm, "interesting" what with control being where caps lock is now and caps lock being down at the bottom right but back then the "enhanced 101 key" keyboards hadn't been invented. Even the IBM AT in 1984 shipped with a similar keyboard, the famous Model M didn't come out for a while afterwards.
Due to the lack of cursor keys I grew up using the numeric keypad as cursor control - and to this day I still use the numpad as my cursor control, that inverted-T layout is just weird.
IBM did indeed invent the modern usage of the term Personal Computer - for years afterwards you'd see "requires IBM PC or 100% compatible" on software boxes. Even today, 30 years on, if you say "PC" to someone they think of a machine running Windows (or perhaps Linux) but not generally a Mac despite the majority of the hardware being the same. Such is the legacy of the IBM PC that if you've got some 30-year old software it'll still run on a modern PC, assuming you can a) install a 5.25" disk drive and b) know how to boot into MS-DOS.
Over the decades PC has become shorthand for Wintel, basically.
I await the same arguments again in August, when the IBM PC celebrates its 30th anniversary.
First, the loading times are awful. They're about 75 seconds and you have to sit through a load screen even if all you did was die.
Takes less than 10 seconds on a decent PC. 75 seconds? Ouch!
That said, I wish the demo had been longer. An hour's play (out of the 16 to 18 that the full game offers) would have made for a better experience I feel.
The demo was fun but by gum it was short - an interactive intro (as seen in the various trailers) and a single level littered with weapons and scripted set-pieces. It's a far cry from Duke Nukem 3D, which gave a third of the game away as its demo. Games such as Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Quake also gave a third away, but of course it's not the mid 90s any more and the old rules no longer seem to apply.
The game is unmistakably Duke Nukem, however and yes - it keeps a health bar unlike some of the more modern FPS games. Unfortunately it's succumbed to the easy mode "automatically heal if not being hit" thing, the days of frantically running down a corridor with 3% health trying to find a medkit while avoiding monsters are in the past...
I'm looking forward to next week now. The demo was like getting a single chocolate from a box box!
LOL, cheers for that troll reply. I put my hand up rather than blurting it out, as the speaker said when they started that if you had a comment or observation to make then you should put your hand up and he'd ask you to share it with the others (if it sounds school-like, it was a schools security conferenec).
The 10 second thing has never been true in general - at least not since 1995, which is when I first went online. The only change I've seen over the years is that rather than a single probe at a port you might now get several at once.
Note that I'm not saying that security is irrelevant, as it's clearly very important. I just have an issue with that utterly rubbish "A Windows machine gets probed within x seconds/minutes" line. It's simply not true and never has been. (Well, unless x is 604800 or something!)
Those "Windows machines get attacked in 10 seconds" type things are utter rubbish. It was quoted at a recent security conference I went to and I interrupted the speaker about it as it's a blatantly false claim.
I have an unpatched Windows 2000 machine behind a cheap Netgear router. It's never once been attacked and it sits on the Internet 24/7 sending weather data to an FTP site. It doesn't get used for anything else and it's been up for four years now. The hard drive is too small to install the service packs (the machine is a P133 from 1996).
Furthermore, I don't know what ISP these people are using but I get a couple of port scans a day (at most) coming into my router. I'm on a static IP too.
It's my opinion that the 10-second claim (or 4 minutes, as in the one I heard at that security conference) was made up by a security vendor in order to hawk their products. The claim has then been spread over the years, Chinese Whispers style, until it's accepted as a truth.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's just a PC-in-a-box. However, this is something a bit more interesting in that at long last it'd set a more modern minimum spec for games. For too long PC games have been crippled graphically, as no games maker wants to lose out on the Windows XP-with-DX9 graphics crowd. If enough of these boxes are shifted it would work to further PC games in terms of graphics, as developers could assume a certain minimum level - and I'd wager it wouldn't be crusty old DX9-level graphics.
As a bonus, everyone who has a decent gaming PC already would stand to benefit from a larger pool of developers and games.
Things like this have been tried before, however. Remember MPC and MPC2? They quickly fizzled out, as did use of the Experience Index that's present in consumer versions of Windows from Vista onwards.
The main fly in the ointment is likely to be cost, however. i7s are around £230 alone in the UK and a decent midrange graphics card (like the GTX560) is another £120. A PS3 is cheaper than an i7 CPU, around £190.
I rebooted 3 hours ago and I've got 9 tabs open in Firefox - Slashdot, some weather charts, a Livejournal page, a WoWWiki page, two BBC news items and a couple of xkcd pages. I don't have any addons other than Downloadhelper and Flashblock.
The commit size of firefox.exe is 1,334,304 KB - over one and a quarter gigabytes for 9 pages! (The private working set is around 30 MB lower, FWIW).
Although I've got the RAM, 1.3GB for a web brower is just plain silly.
37mph is more than you need for most Sunday afternoons on the M25!
There's actually a registry key you can change which flips back into the old non-Metro way of doing things - which is the default UI in all the leaked versions of 8 so far. http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-8-how-to-re-enable-the-classic-start-menu I'd say it's safe to assume that there will be an option to revert to that in the final product. This is a developer preview and as such it's no wonder that MS wants everyone to get used to the Metro interface.
No, my problem isn't that at all - I know full well that programming is a different path to helpdesk/sysadmin roles. When I say "high level" I mean management type roles, the sort of thing where you don't actually do the hands-on stuff. I was flexible enough to consider several different career paths and had relevant experience for two of them - helpdesk and programming. Those formed the bulk of my job applications.
The problem is simply that across the IT segment as a whole, be it programming to web design to sysadmin roles to helpdesk support, degrees are seen as pointless and "experience" is required but as others have said - the "experience" required is all but impossible to acquire at Uni.
And you're wrong when you say "Your CS degree makes you qualified to be a programmer, but unqualified for IT roles". My degree covered a broad array of disciplines, from formal logic and yes, programming, to hardware details (including a series of lectures about the IBM PS/2, bizarrely!) to troubleshooting, databse theory (inner and outer joins, 3rd normal form etc) and systems design (the old "systems analyst" type stuff). Most CS courses are the same in the UK, they include a bit of everything.
The whole point of getting a CS degree isn't to say "yeah, I'm an uber programmer - hire me!". It's to say "I have a sound knowledge of the basics and I know how to learn". That, added to whatever personal things you've done (be it building PCs, managing a website or writing games/apps) ought to be enough to get you in the door. Sadly, as others have said on here it isn't, simple as that.
Well, I wanted to get into IT and the traditional way to do that is to start at the bottom and work your way up. Building PCs is absolutely relevant experience for the helpdesk role, where you get called to a PC and have to replace the hard drive as it's sprouted bad sectors (etc). Similarly, knowing how to design, implement and test code is entirely relevant towards a low-end programming job.
You seem to be assuming I was planning to go straight in at a high level, which simply wouldn't have happened due to the lack of experience issue. My complaint is that even at the low levels there's an overwhelming attitude of "you need experience" (but that which you have doesn't count) and "degrees are worthless".
I graduated in 2001 (with a CS degree). Couldn't get an IT-related job in my area as the employers kept saying they wanted experience. For some reason, the fact I'd built PCs for myself and family for the past 7 years didn't count. Nor did the fact I'd written several Symbian games and had them published, which was how I paid my way through Uni. It wasn't as though I was after high-powered jobs, just typical helpdesk type roles or an entry-level programming position.
The problem as I saw it back then was that there were loads of not-really-interested-in-IT people floating around as a result of the Y2K problem - people went on training courses just to make some cash from it, then once Y2K was over they had the much-coveted experience that employers were calling for. New graduates didn't get a look in.
There's a general perception in the IT industry in the UK that degrees are worthless and only vocational qualifications count. Being a member of the BCS doesn't count for anything. It's quite maddening (yes, MCSEs and the like are handy but hardly the be all and end all - a degree shows the ability to learn, an MCSE shows the ability to learn a more specific set of skills) but there's nothing much that can be done.
After working as a temp in a variety of offices for seven years, I finally landed a job in a school on the IT helpdesk there. I'm now involved in the maintainence of their Active Directory domain, as well as keeping our various VMs ticking over and dealing with software rollouts and so on. All for less than half a teacher's salary!
My advice would be not to bother going to Uni in the UK, employers really don't value it in the IT sector. It's a sad state of affairs IMO.
Every 3 minutes here - my weather station FTP's data to my ISP's personal homepages server.
Quite right - there were dire warnings at the time of what would happen if your Thunderbird's fan died. It was always nagging at the back of mine when I built my 1.3GHz Thunderbird machine back in 2001 - although thankfully the fan worked for the best part of 8 years in daily use and although it's now in retirement in a local school (the machine is used for "take a PC to pieces" lessons) it still works fine.
The more annoying thing was the rubbish VIA chipset that motherboard (KT133A-RAID) contained, which caused distortion every time I played an MP3 in WinAmp on my SB Live.
As they say around here, nah. Tried pricing a laptop with the equivalent of a GTX 580 in it? (Trick question, as the mobile 580m performs similarly to a desktop 560 GTX despite costing 3 times as much!)
It may be that most people are prepared to put up with slower performance (the fact that people buy Celerons is a good indicator of that) but there will always be those who want or need performance above that which you can get in a mobile platform, or who simply prefer paying half the price for an equivalent desktop.
Case in point: i7-2600K desktop with 8GB RAM, bluray, 24 inch monitor, 1TB HDD, 560 GTX graphics - around £1000. i7-2820QM laptop with 8GB RAM, 17 inch display, 750 GB HDD, 580m GTX graphics (similar performance to the desktop) - around £1800 if you're happy with Clevo, or if you prefer bling, £2300 for the same specs with Alienware.
And in a couple of years, no prizes for guessing which option wins hands down when it comes to upgrade costs!
Since 1981 and the launch of the IBM PC, which was followed in 1982 by the IBM PC XT and the IBM PC AT in 1984. I guess you don't remember the days when software boxes would have labels saying "Requires IBM PC AT or 100% compatible" on them?
I'll believe it when I see it. Anyone else remember all the hype 15 years ago about how we'd all be running Java thin client machines by the year 2000? Pundits have been calling for the PC to die for the past 15 years, half the platform's life! And yet we're as far away as ever from having PCs die out. About the only real change in that time is that laptops have increased in popularity, phones have absorbed the features previously found in standalone PDAs and yes, tablets have reappeared for the umpteemth time in the last 20 years.
Mind you, twenty years ago something fun happened - Microsoft released Windows for Pen Computing, designed for tablets. It flopped.
The ability to watch blu-rays. The ability to play proper games (in lucious HD) and also MMOs. The ability to encode video and not have to wait ages. The ability to create programs and test them. The ability to run Office natively. The ability to run several VMs and thus simulate a network (for testing or just sheer fun). The ability to switch between MacOS, Windows 7 and Linux as and when needed.
The good side of all this tablet mania is that traditional PCs are stupidly cheap now. Memory is laughably inexpensive ($12 equivalent gets you 2GB RAM here in the UK). An i7-2600K CPU, for example, is the equivalent of $370 in the UK at the moment. 12 years ago a Pentium 3 450, which was the consumer equivalent back then, was the equivalent of $750. Half the price for something an order of magnitude more powerful - bargain!
Of course, that PC isn't exactly portable. But I, for one, do most of my serious computing tasks in a fixed location and thus a phone suffices for Internet on the move.
Bah - having looked at the data it's only a tiny, miniscule portion of what's available - a far cry from "virtually all" as the article stated!
In the 100-mile radius of where I live, there's only Gatwick. Gravesend, Brogdale, Sheerness, Manston, Southend, Shoeburyness, Heathrow, Lydd and more are nowhere to be seen and I know they all provide data to the Met Office as they appear elsewhere online.
So, either the climate research is only being done with a small number of stations or there's a hell of a lot of data still to be released. The Met Office's money-spinning climate data service is safe for now, it seems.
Part of that reasons is because the Met Office in the UK has a nice little sideline selling climate data - if it's all available for free they'll lose that income. It was a bit daft though, as there were cases of people who'd submitted data to the Met Office for years having to pay for their own data when they lost their local copy! Other European meteorological agencies have similar policies.
It's a different culture in the US where all this data is freely available and interestingly the same applies to the raw weather model output too - the American GFS is free for all (and is widely used commercially in the UK) while the equivalent from the ECMWF costs a small fortune to access, especially ensemble output.
Yes, a few tweaks but it looks largely the same. Beats me why they didn't just call it 4.1!
You're mistaken. The IBM PC and the IBM PC XT used the same keyboard. It's known as a model F keyboard.
Here's a picture of the original 5150 PC keyboard, from Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_5150_Keyboard.jpg
Here's the picture of my 5160 PC keyboard, which is exactly the same:
http://i52.tinypic.com/24cf8ft.jpg
For further proof, look here:
http://www.clickykeyboards.com/index.cfm/fa/items.main/parentcat/11066/subcatid/0/id/350492
That's a US layout rather than the UK layour I have, but it's the same basic model. The IBM PC and PC XT had the same keyboards. It was only the PC AT of 1984 that saw a change (and the PCjr).
I completely disagree. The model F IBM-XT keyboard was one of the best keyboards I've had the pleasure to use, the tactile feeling is something I'll never forget. In fact, when I ditched the XT (bad move, it'd now be worth a bit as a collectible) I kept the keyboard and I still have it to this day. I took it into work (a school) a year or so ago for a teacher to use in their lesson, showing the evolution of hardware and everyone who tried it was amazed at how good it felt. It makes modern membrane keyboards feel like typing into a pot of mushy peas. No idea what you mean about the spacebar, having just tried it again it's super - it works no matter where you press it, it's six inches long and makes a clacky noise when you use it.
The layout was, erm, "interesting" what with control being where caps lock is now and caps lock being down at the bottom right but back then the "enhanced 101 key" keyboards hadn't been invented. Even the IBM AT in 1984 shipped with a similar keyboard, the famous Model M didn't come out for a while afterwards.
Due to the lack of cursor keys I grew up using the numeric keypad as cursor control - and to this day I still use the numpad as my cursor control, that inverted-T layout is just weird.
IBM did indeed invent the modern usage of the term Personal Computer - for years afterwards you'd see "requires IBM PC or 100% compatible" on software boxes. Even today, 30 years on, if you say "PC" to someone they think of a machine running Windows (or perhaps Linux) but not generally a Mac despite the majority of the hardware being the same. Such is the legacy of the IBM PC that if you've got some 30-year old software it'll still run on a modern PC, assuming you can a) install a 5.25" disk drive and b) know how to boot into MS-DOS.
Over the decades PC has become shorthand for Wintel, basically.
I await the same arguments again in August, when the IBM PC celebrates its 30th anniversary.
Having limited weapons in a "fun" shooter is nothing new - Rise of the Triad (another Apogee game, a year before Duke3D) had the same system.
Takes less than 10 seconds on a decent PC. 75 seconds? Ouch!
That said, I wish the demo had been longer. An hour's play (out of the 16 to 18 that the full game offers) would have made for a better experience I feel.
The demo was fun but by gum it was short - an interactive intro (as seen in the various trailers) and a single level littered with weapons and scripted set-pieces. It's a far cry from Duke Nukem 3D, which gave a third of the game away as its demo. Games such as Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Quake also gave a third away, but of course it's not the mid 90s any more and the old rules no longer seem to apply.
The game is unmistakably Duke Nukem, however and yes - it keeps a health bar unlike some of the more modern FPS games. Unfortunately it's succumbed to the easy mode "automatically heal if not being hit" thing, the days of frantically running down a corridor with 3% health trying to find a medkit while avoiding monsters are in the past...
I'm looking forward to next week now. The demo was like getting a single chocolate from a box box!
Or how about 3. The box isn't hacked, hasn't been hacked and isn't likely to be hacked. Here, have a look at the processes list:
http://i53.tinypic.com/95q7ow.jpg
Note that I don't use it for browsing the Web, email or anything other than running that weather station program.
LOL, cheers for that troll reply. I put my hand up rather than blurting it out, as the speaker said when they started that if you had a comment or observation to make then you should put your hand up and he'd ask you to share it with the others (if it sounds school-like, it was a schools security conferenec).
The 10 second thing has never been true in general - at least not since 1995, which is when I first went online. The only change I've seen over the years is that rather than a single probe at a port you might now get several at once.
Note that I'm not saying that security is irrelevant, as it's clearly very important. I just have an issue with that utterly rubbish "A Windows machine gets probed within x seconds/minutes" line. It's simply not true and never has been. (Well, unless x is 604800 or something!)
Those "Windows machines get attacked in 10 seconds" type things are utter rubbish. It was quoted at a recent security conference I went to and I interrupted the speaker about it as it's a blatantly false claim.
I have an unpatched Windows 2000 machine behind a cheap Netgear router. It's never once been attacked and it sits on the Internet 24/7 sending weather data to an FTP site. It doesn't get used for anything else and it's been up for four years now. The hard drive is too small to install the service packs (the machine is a P133 from 1996).
Furthermore, I don't know what ISP these people are using but I get a couple of port scans a day (at most) coming into my router. I'm on a static IP too.
It's my opinion that the 10-second claim (or 4 minutes, as in the one I heard at that security conference) was made up by a security vendor in order to hawk their products. The claim has then been spread over the years, Chinese Whispers style, until it's accepted as a truth.