I think we'd be better off if folks would make less effort to control the size and font of type on the page.
You, sir, are a web usability expert.
I have been screaming this at "professional" webmasters for years now, and it only seems to get worse every year.
I have a 19" monitor. I like to run it at 1280x1024, because that gives me lots of desktop space, while maintaining an 85Hz refresh rate. Back ten or fifteen years ago, I could use a 60Hz refresh rate and laugh at people who thought it flickered too much. Not any more...
When someone tries to make my font size 8-9, it becomes unreadable. At 10, I still need a magnifying glass. Finally, at 12-14, we start getting to a decent size. I admit it... my eyes are getting worse. The eye doctor told me twenty years ago that I'd never have perfect vision, even with glasses.
It's really starting to piss me off. Don't fuck with my fonts! I wish I could strip all FONT tags from HTML using the Junkbuster.
Anyways want to try hacking the Junkbuster to remove FONT?
First of all, you can't just talk to the computer and expect it to know what you're saying. You have to spend time teaching the computer your voice and accent. If you voice ever changes, like you go through puberty or get a cold, then it won't recognize your voice any more.
Likewise, anyone else who wants to talk to the computer has to create a different profile. Say your girlfriend, roommate, or whoever wants to play Klingon Academy, too. Well, I hope that the game takes that into account, or else it will erase your voice setup. I always hated that MS DOS games were single user, in the sense that my dad and I couldn't play the same game with different save game directories. We had to install the game twice, once for him and once for me, which used up massive amounts of disk space.
Also, there are linguistic problems, like the stupid Trek tagline, "Worf, fire at will." How will the game treat that situation? Will Worf shoot Riker? Obviously, this isn't a circumstance that will happen, but the English language is really rather complicated and difficult to understand when spoken aloud. When written, grammar mostly allows us to understand what is meant.
Well, that's my pessimistic, cynical rant for today.
Re:Is part of the problem lack of machines?
on
New Mega Alphas
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· Score: 1
No, no, don't buy those ALR Pentium Pro motherboards! They're totally proprietary. The motherboard uses proprietary riser cards (each of which cost at least $50 in the average auction), plus you need to use a proprietary case and power supply.
Do you really want to end up spending $200, plus $50 per riser card, plus $70 per 166 MHz CPU, plus $250 for the case and power supply? All for an obsolete architecture? That adds up to almost $1500, assuming you're going to use 166 MHz CPUs, not 200 MHz.
That's less than the cost of a quad Xeon motherboard, but it's still stratospheric!!
I don't think that an SMP notebook would be such a good idea. It would suck up lots of power, despite being somewhat famous for its low power requirements.
There was a microSPARC-based notebook from Sun a number of years ago. I don't think microSPARCs come in dual processor configurations, though.
It would indeed be pretty cool to see a specially engineered SMP notebook, though. I would love to work on such a project.
The problem is with the monitor. A monitor costs too much money for a sub-$100 PC. You might be able to do a $200 PC, but only if you used refurbished equipment. I would suggest going to eBay and pricing the used 386/486/Pentium and K6/K6-2 systems. You can buy a complete computer (with monitor, hard drive, CD ROM, and memory!) for under $100. It's so cool...
I'll have to define some terms here, because talking about a "PC" is really rather meaningless without doing so (ie, a IBM PC/XT is a PC, too).
Note also that I make a distinction between Compaq and DEC, which is perhaps unrealistic nowadays.
Let's say that you've got the latest and greatest from Intel, Nvidia (or maybe 3DFX), Adaptec, and Seagate. We're talking about a $3000 system here, assuming, of course, that you want a dual processor Coppermine or Xeon, Ultra160 SCSI, and high-end video.
The big problem is that the i840 chipset doesn't scale well, despite Intel's claims. It only supports dual processing (like the BX and i820 chipsets), suffers from a MTH (memory translator hub) or insanely over-hyped and expensive memory (RDRAM, which has hardly any benefit over PC133), and can only address several gigabytes of RAM. You do (finally) get a 66 MHz, 64 bit PCI slot or two, which is nice. However, I'd like to see more of them.
Let's look at the processor now. The processor cores, a Coppermine or Cascades (that's what the new Xeons are called, right? I forget and I'm too lazy to look it up), are exactly the same. Why would Intel put a Coppermine in Slot 2 format and call it a Xeon? I dunno. According to Intel's rumored roadmaps, there will be large cache versions of the Cascades available eventually. Until then, use of Cascades is rather... stupid? It's just an overpriced Coppermine, which is still saddled with the 32 bit Pentium Pro core.
Even if you go back to the older Pentium II or Pentium III Xeons on an NX chipset, you're limited to a maximum of eight-way SMP. That's impressive-sounding to an x86 fan, but it's not enough to even make a RISC-based server fan give you the time of day. High end SPARC servers use monstrous amounts of CPUs -- 16, 32, 64, even 128 and beyond. The NX chipset is limited in other ways, because it uses older technology, before the advent of Coppermine and Cascades. x86 technology typically does not scale well beyond two processors, though sometimes you can get some decent performance out of a quad processor setup. In case you were unaware, the eight-way SMP standard for x86 systems came from Compaq, not Intel. This sort of scares me. Compaq has a history of doing this in a highly proprietary manner. I wouldn't be too surprised to see eight-way Xeon systems from nobody but Compaq.
Try using Ultra160 SCSI, gigabit ethernet, and a speedy AGP video card on your 32 bit, 33 MHz PCI bus. I guarantee you that you won't like the results. Wintel systems are not scalable. Intel's i840 is a giant step forward, but it really can't compete with the high-end workstations and mid-range servers made by SGI, Sun, DEC, IBM, etc. x86 is awesome at the low-end, but you'd have to be a little bit silly to use it beyond that.
I love the price/performance ratio of x86 boxes, and the fact that they use industry standard, off-the-shelf parts, but you can't compare them against anything but entry-level RISC-based workstations and servers.
For my money, I'll go for a DEC Alpha or a cheap, dual processor x86 system. One maxes out at $3000, the other starts at $10,000. But there are places are both of them.
I've found that you don't need hope to live, after all.:)
Yeah, you're right about the crimes against humanity perpetrated by people trying to cleanse the Earth. I don't know what to do about stupid people. They just scare me sometimes.
Intelligent people know how to manipulate the masses. Maybe these people should scare me more, but they don't. I still have hope for them. They might change. But you can't become smarter...
It doesn't really have much to do with different generations, different societal moralities, or anything else... people are just stupid.
The sooner that you accept that, the sooner that everything else starts making sense.
People are racist because they're stupid. People want to build up nukes because they're stupid. People think they won't get nuked because of mutually assured destruction because they're stupid.
The quicker the stupid people stop breeding and are sent to jail, the better. Let the drug addicts out and put in the stupid people. Less harm to society as a whole...
To tell you the truth, I don't give a shit about freedom as long as I've got my stereo, my compact disc collection, my computer, and all the sex I could want.
Try and blow a nuke anywhere near my little piece of heaven and I'll show you the price of freedom...
It depends on how you define 'unplayable'. If Diablo had been slightly slower, but playable, then I would have recommended it to all my friends, and we would have loved it to death.
On the other hand, Diablo was unplayable because of the pathetic client/server model. It didn't necessarily need the lowest latency in the world (it was important, yes, but it wasn't as critical as a FPS), but Blizzard took the easy road... they made a really crappy client.
What should they have done? It's easy! They should have done it "the right way".
Would Quake be a little slower? Yes. Would it necessarily be unplayable? No. Like I said, it's possible to get things done on the internet, even with high latency. Try logging into a server via telnet over a 2400 bps modem. Some of us remember doing that. (or stuff even slower!) You will find it painful, but there are workarounds. Data compression, sending optimized data packets (with respect to MTU and MRU), etc.
Play on a local LAN. It's very fast. No packet loss, no lag, no connections lost.
We already dealt with many of these issues back in the days of DOOM. Remember play DOOM over a modem?
Why do you think that an app will run faster when it's dynamically linked? There's more work for the operating system to do when you run dynamically linked programs.
If you have a very small amount of memory, you could end up with poorer performance when running statically linked programs, but only when you are running programs that use the same libraries (but they are not dynamically linked). You are loading more copies of the library than necessary. This wastes memory, causing your system to swap. Swapping generally occurs when you don't have enough memory to hold all the information in memory at once.
With today's computers, which typically come standard with 128M, 256M, and more, you shouldn't have any trouble launching both KDE, Gnome, and CDE, all at the same time, in separate X sessions. I have 256M, and I don't think I've ever seen my system swap more than a few hundred kilobytes. If your system does swap more than that, you need to stop editing such large pictures.
The latency ("ping times" in gamer-speak) on my cable modem is incredibly low. When you look at the latency of my two LANs (a 100Mb/s, the other a private 10Mb/s), it's truly amazing. Even on a 486/33 with an ISA NE2000 card, I can get 2ms latency.
I'm not sure why you'd want to play over the internet, what with losing packets left and right, routers going down, and people using 28.8K modems. But if you must, it's still possible. You can optimize how information is sent. This does require a little knowledge of TCP/IP and networking, but nobody said this stuff was easy.
Yeah, I know that current client/server models really suck. But that's true for both closed and open clients. I hate to keep bringing up Diablo, but I really liked that game a lot. I felt it was one of the few games to capture the Roguelike feel, while giving everything a cool Gauntlet-style interface. The client bit, though. It sucked worse than my Calculus grades. It was so easy to hack, people would walk around in the equivilent of god-mode.
There's really no solution but to bite the bullet and do things the right way. I agree, it's going to hurt for a while. But the technology will progress, making this less painful. That's always the way of things...
Perhaps I should have written more, expressed myself better, or examined Quake World (I don't play Quake World).
The key is for the server to authenticate everything, like you said. Yes, this does use more bandwidth, but if you want to do things right, you have to up the ante. You can't play Quake World on a Pentium 133, right? If someone wants to play Quake World on a 14.4K modem, that's too bad. They'll have to upgrade to ISDN, DSL, or cable.
There's a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. The right way may not always be the optimal way. In that case, you make a design choice.
But don't claim it's impossible to do it the right way.
You can get a portable CD-RW (doesn't play DVD videos) or an integrated CD-RW/DVD-ROM (isn't portable). It is not, to my knowledge, possible to get a portable CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. They're not yet available in SCSI format (which sucks royally for the IDE haters).
Slashdot is infamous for moderating up comments that flame Microsoft. Absolutely no one on Slashdot takes a devil's advocate position, and when anything positive is posted, there are twenty replies saying, "You must work for Microsoft!"
Would you like me to prove this for you with URLs?
Oh, come on. This is really silly. Why can't you trust everyone in the game, even if the source code is out there, free for download?
Is security through obscurity suddenly desirable, now that we're talking about games? Has OpenBSD suddenly become a haven for crackers and script kiddies, because the source code is out there?
I never understand these gamers who throw up their hands as soon as someone mentions giving out source code to a multi-player game. Haven't they learned anything from the history of UNIX?
Just look at the problems that Diablo had with cheaters. The game was virtually unplayable. And it used security through obscurity.
Yes, the public is very paranoid about nuclear energy. However, that doesn't mean that they are necessarily all ignorant about the issues surrounding nuclear energy.
There was a hilarious line in The Simpsons a while ago, where Homer said something to the effect of, "Nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest form of energy available, except for solar power, which is just a pipe dream."
Yes, nuclear power is rather safe and clean, compared to burning fossil fuels. However, it is massively dirty, dangerous, and expensive when compared to something like solar or hydroelectric power. Solar and hydroelectric power also do not involve mining uranium. That's some nasty stuff. I dare you to mine uranium for a few years, then say that nuclear power doesn't hurt anyone. I suppose you've never seen pictures of nuclear waste barrels being washed up on land. I've read about people finding them in rather corroded states. Perhaps it's majorly difficult for them to actually burst or open, but if I found a barrel with a hazardous waste label and it looked like someone had lit it on fire with jet fuel, I'd scream bloody murder.
There are better solutions than nuclear energy, though I would prefer that over burning fossil fuels.
I'm going to try not to make this sound like flamebait, but.... you were a fool to buy into Intel's marketing. Why the hell did you pre-order untested, new technology from an overpriced online store (CDW)?
Didn't you read a single review of the i820 chipset before placing your order? There are hundreds of web sites dedicated to educating consumers about new hardware trends.
Putting SDRAM on an i820 board is ridiculous. It slows everything down to a crawl (it's slower than a previous generation BX board!), the chipset is unreliable, the major innovation is proprietary RAM, and you're buying an Intel motherboard, something definitely not recommended by any hardware review site.
Next time, do a little research before you buy your hardware.
How could Transmeta possibly take over the CPU business? They make mobile CPUs, not general purpose CPUs.
Even if the technology is new and innovative, if it's not demonstrably better than what Intel, AMD, and other embedded/mobile chip manufacturers are producing, the market will ignore them.
I figure that someone will buy Transmeta before they make it too big. Intel or IBM could afford to buy small European nations.
[Always wait] a while until picking up on new chipsets until the bugs are worked out... Like a few years later.
Yeah, it's always good to wait a while before adopting brand new technology. At least visit the reputable hardware review sites (Tom's Hardware, AnandTech, Ars Technica, etc) before making a purchase. Remember that each site has a bias, too; Tom's Hardware is heavily biased towards VIA and AMD, while Sharky Extreme is heavily biased towards Intel and Rambus.
I, and almost every hardware review site on the internet, would suggest getting a tried and true BX chipset-based motherboard, a VIA chipset-based FCPGA motherboard, or an Athlon system.
The problem with the BX chipset is that it only supports AGP 2X. This doesn't really matter right now, but it could be a performance bottleneck in the future, if you use high-end AGP video cards and play state-of-the-art games. On a workstation or server, it doesn't matter one bit.
The VIA chipsets are often a little slower than the competing Intel chipsets. I'm not really that big of a fan of VIA, but I truly appreciate the competition that they bring to the chipset marketplace. Current VIA chipsets for both the Coppermine and Athlon support PC133 and AGP 4X. Still, it tends to perform slightly worse than an overclocked BX chipset. Not all BX boards can be reliably overclocked, though. And I would never recommend overclocking a workstation or server. That's for gaming PCs only.
My favorite solution is a dual processor BX board. Get one that supports 100 MHz FSB Coppermine chips, so that you can put in dual 600E or 650 chips (or, if you're rich, dual 700+ MHz chips). Remember that most FCPGA CPUs do not support SMP, as per Intel's press releases.
If you can't afford a dual processor setup, then you should look into the Athlon. It's incredibly inexpensive, plus it's quite fast, up until the 750 MHz mark or so. After that, the ultra-slow cache makes it rather uncompetitive (but it's still much cheaper than a Coppermine).
If you can afford it, go with a DEC Alpha. The 21164A is pretty cheap now, and it uses a standard ATX power supply (300W absolute minimum, so you'll probably want a new tower case with a big power supply). A barebones 21164A should set you back around $500 to $1000, depending on the speed, case, and amount of cache and memory. You can buy a nice Quantum Atlas V 7200 RPM 18GB SCSI hard drive to go along with that barebones system for around $300. Now you're ready to kick some Wintel and Macintoy ass.
Slashdot Mirror
You, sir, are a web usability expert.
I have been screaming this at "professional" webmasters for years now, and it only seems to get worse every year.
I have a 19" monitor. I like to run it at 1280x1024, because that gives me lots of desktop space, while maintaining an 85Hz refresh rate. Back ten or fifteen years ago, I could use a 60Hz refresh rate and laugh at people who thought it flickered too much. Not any more...
When someone tries to make my font size 8-9, it becomes unreadable. At 10, I still need a magnifying glass. Finally, at 12-14, we start getting to a decent size. I admit it... my eyes are getting worse. The eye doctor told me twenty years ago that I'd never have perfect vision, even with glasses.
It's really starting to piss me off. Don't fuck with my fonts! I wish I could strip all FONT tags from HTML using the Junkbuster.
Anyways want to try hacking the Junkbuster to remove FONT?
I'd rather not talk to my computer, really.
First of all, you can't just talk to the computer and expect it to know what you're saying. You have to spend time teaching the computer your voice and accent. If you voice ever changes, like you go through puberty or get a cold, then it won't recognize your voice any more.
Likewise, anyone else who wants to talk to the computer has to create a different profile. Say your girlfriend, roommate, or whoever wants to play Klingon Academy, too. Well, I hope that the game takes that into account, or else it will erase your voice setup. I always hated that MS DOS games were single user, in the sense that my dad and I couldn't play the same game with different save game directories. We had to install the game twice, once for him and once for me, which used up massive amounts of disk space.
Also, there are linguistic problems, like the stupid Trek tagline, "Worf, fire at will." How will the game treat that situation? Will Worf shoot Riker? Obviously, this isn't a circumstance that will happen, but the English language is really rather complicated and difficult to understand when spoken aloud. When written, grammar mostly allows us to understand what is meant.
Well, that's my pessimistic, cynical rant for today.
No, no, don't buy those ALR Pentium Pro motherboards! They're totally proprietary. The motherboard uses proprietary riser cards (each of which cost at least $50 in the average auction), plus you need to use a proprietary case and power supply.
Do you really want to end up spending $200, plus $50 per riser card, plus $70 per 166 MHz CPU, plus $250 for the case and power supply? All for an obsolete architecture? That adds up to almost $1500, assuming you're going to use 166 MHz CPUs, not 200 MHz.
That's less than the cost of a quad Xeon motherboard, but it's still stratospheric!!
I don't think that an SMP notebook would be such a good idea. It would suck up lots of power, despite being somewhat famous for its low power requirements.
There was a microSPARC-based notebook from Sun a number of years ago. I don't think microSPARCs come in dual processor configurations, though.
It would indeed be pretty cool to see a specially engineered SMP notebook, though. I would love to work on such a project.
The problem is with the monitor. A monitor costs too much money for a sub-$100 PC. You might be able to do a $200 PC, but only if you used refurbished equipment. I would suggest going to eBay and pricing the used 386/486/Pentium and K6/K6-2 systems. You can buy a complete computer (with monitor, hard drive, CD ROM, and memory!) for under $100. It's so cool...
I'll have to define some terms here, because talking about a "PC" is really rather meaningless without doing so (ie, a IBM PC/XT is a PC, too).
Note also that I make a distinction between Compaq and DEC, which is perhaps unrealistic nowadays.
Let's say that you've got the latest and greatest from Intel, Nvidia (or maybe 3DFX), Adaptec, and Seagate. We're talking about a $3000 system here, assuming, of course, that you want a dual processor Coppermine or Xeon, Ultra160 SCSI, and high-end video.
The big problem is that the i840 chipset doesn't scale well, despite Intel's claims. It only supports dual processing (like the BX and i820 chipsets), suffers from a MTH (memory translator hub) or insanely over-hyped and expensive memory (RDRAM, which has hardly any benefit over PC133), and can only address several gigabytes of RAM. You do (finally) get a 66 MHz, 64 bit PCI slot or two, which is nice. However, I'd like to see more of them.
Let's look at the processor now. The processor cores, a Coppermine or Cascades (that's what the new Xeons are called, right? I forget and I'm too lazy to look it up), are exactly the same. Why would Intel put a Coppermine in Slot 2 format and call it a Xeon? I dunno. According to Intel's rumored roadmaps, there will be large cache versions of the Cascades available eventually. Until then, use of Cascades is rather... stupid? It's just an overpriced Coppermine, which is still saddled with the 32 bit Pentium Pro core.
Even if you go back to the older Pentium II or Pentium III Xeons on an NX chipset, you're limited to a maximum of eight-way SMP. That's impressive-sounding to an x86 fan, but it's not enough to even make a RISC-based server fan give you the time of day. High end SPARC servers use monstrous amounts of CPUs -- 16, 32, 64, even 128 and beyond. The NX chipset is limited in other ways, because it uses older technology, before the advent of Coppermine and Cascades. x86 technology typically does not scale well beyond two processors, though sometimes you can get some decent performance out of a quad processor setup. In case you were unaware, the eight-way SMP standard for x86 systems came from Compaq, not Intel. This sort of scares me. Compaq has a history of doing this in a highly proprietary manner. I wouldn't be too surprised to see eight-way Xeon systems from nobody but Compaq.
Try using Ultra160 SCSI, gigabit ethernet, and a speedy AGP video card on your 32 bit, 33 MHz PCI bus. I guarantee you that you won't like the results. Wintel systems are not scalable. Intel's i840 is a giant step forward, but it really can't compete with the high-end workstations and mid-range servers made by SGI, Sun, DEC, IBM, etc. x86 is awesome at the low-end, but you'd have to be a little bit silly to use it beyond that.
I love the price/performance ratio of x86 boxes, and the fact that they use industry standard, off-the-shelf parts, but you can't compare them against anything but entry-level RISC-based workstations and servers.
For my money, I'll go for a DEC Alpha or a cheap, dual processor x86 system. One maxes out at $3000, the other starts at $10,000. But there are places are both of them.
Heineken? FUCK THAT SHIT! Pabst Blue Ribbon!
I've found that you don't need hope to live, after all. :)
Yeah, you're right about the crimes against humanity perpetrated by people trying to cleanse the Earth. I don't know what to do about stupid people. They just scare me sometimes.
Intelligent people know how to manipulate the masses. Maybe these people should scare me more, but they don't. I still have hope for them. They might change. But you can't become smarter...
People are stupid all over.
It doesn't really have much to do with different generations, different societal moralities, or anything else... people are just stupid.
The sooner that you accept that, the sooner that everything else starts making sense.
People are racist because they're stupid. People want to build up nukes because they're stupid. People think they won't get nuked because of mutually assured destruction because they're stupid.
The quicker the stupid people stop breeding and are sent to jail, the better. Let the drug addicts out and put in the stupid people. Less harm to society as a whole...
To tell you the truth, I don't give a shit about freedom as long as I've got my stereo, my compact disc collection, my computer, and all the sex I could want.
Try and blow a nuke anywhere near my little piece of heaven and I'll show you the price of freedom...
Human stupidity is always astounding.... or not, once you become cynical enough.
It depends on how you define 'unplayable'. If Diablo had been slightly slower, but playable, then I would have recommended it to all my friends, and we would have loved it to death.
On the other hand, Diablo was unplayable because of the pathetic client/server model. It didn't necessarily need the lowest latency in the world (it was important, yes, but it wasn't as critical as a FPS), but Blizzard took the easy road... they made a really crappy client.
What should they have done? It's easy! They should have done it "the right way".
Would Quake be a little slower? Yes. Would it necessarily be unplayable? No. Like I said, it's possible to get things done on the internet, even with high latency. Try logging into a server via telnet over a 2400 bps modem. Some of us remember doing that. (or stuff even slower!) You will find it painful, but there are workarounds. Data compression, sending optimized data packets (with respect to MTU and MRU), etc.
Play on a local LAN. It's very fast. No packet loss, no lag, no connections lost.
We already dealt with many of these issues back in the days of DOOM. Remember play DOOM over a modem?
Why do you think that an app will run faster when it's dynamically linked? There's more work for the operating system to do when you run dynamically linked programs.
If you have a very small amount of memory, you could end up with poorer performance when running statically linked programs, but only when you are running programs that use the same libraries (but they are not dynamically linked). You are loading more copies of the library than necessary. This wastes memory, causing your system to swap. Swapping generally occurs when you don't have enough memory to hold all the information in memory at once.
With today's computers, which typically come standard with 128M, 256M, and more, you shouldn't have any trouble launching both KDE, Gnome, and CDE, all at the same time, in separate X sessions. I have 256M, and I don't think I've ever seen my system swap more than a few hundred kilobytes. If your system does swap more than that, you need to stop editing such large pictures.
The latency ("ping times" in gamer-speak) on my cable modem is incredibly low. When you look at the latency of my two LANs (a 100Mb/s, the other a private 10Mb/s), it's truly amazing. Even on a 486/33 with an ISA NE2000 card, I can get 2ms latency.
I'm not sure why you'd want to play over the internet, what with losing packets left and right, routers going down, and people using 28.8K modems. But if you must, it's still possible. You can optimize how information is sent. This does require a little knowledge of TCP/IP and networking, but nobody said this stuff was easy.
Yeah, I know that current client/server models really suck. But that's true for both closed and open clients. I hate to keep bringing up Diablo, but I really liked that game a lot. I felt it was one of the few games to capture the Roguelike feel, while giving everything a cool Gauntlet-style interface. The client bit, though. It sucked worse than my Calculus grades. It was so easy to hack, people would walk around in the equivilent of god-mode.
There's really no solution but to bite the bullet and do things the right way. I agree, it's going to hurt for a while. But the technology will progress, making this less painful. That's always the way of things...
You make some very well thought out points.
Perhaps I should have written more, expressed myself better, or examined Quake World (I don't play Quake World).
The key is for the server to authenticate everything, like you said. Yes, this does use more bandwidth, but if you want to do things right, you have to up the ante. You can't play Quake World on a Pentium 133, right? If someone wants to play Quake World on a 14.4K modem, that's too bad. They'll have to upgrade to ISDN, DSL, or cable.
There's a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. The right way may not always be the optimal way. In that case, you make a design choice.
But don't claim it's impossible to do it the right way.
Ricoh USA CD-RW kits
You can get a portable CD-RW (doesn't play DVD videos) or an integrated CD-RW/DVD-ROM (isn't portable). It is not, to my knowledge, possible to get a portable CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive. They're not yet available in SCSI format (which sucks royally for the IDE haters).
Are you crazy?
Slashdot is infamous for moderating up comments that flame Microsoft. Absolutely no one on Slashdot takes a devil's advocate position, and when anything positive is posted, there are twenty replies saying, "You must work for Microsoft!"
Would you like me to prove this for you with URLs?
Oh, come on. This is really silly. Why can't you trust everyone in the game, even if the source code is out there, free for download?
Is security through obscurity suddenly desirable, now that we're talking about games? Has OpenBSD suddenly become a haven for crackers and script kiddies, because the source code is out there?
I never understand these gamers who throw up their hands as soon as someone mentions giving out source code to a multi-player game. Haven't they learned anything from the history of UNIX?
Just look at the problems that Diablo had with cheaters. The game was virtually unplayable. And it used security through obscurity.
Yes, the public is very paranoid about nuclear energy. However, that doesn't mean that they are necessarily all ignorant about the issues surrounding nuclear energy.
There was a hilarious line in The Simpsons a while ago, where Homer said something to the effect of, "Nuclear energy is the safest and cleanest form of energy available, except for solar power, which is just a pipe dream."
Yes, nuclear power is rather safe and clean, compared to burning fossil fuels. However, it is massively dirty, dangerous, and expensive when compared to something like solar or hydroelectric power. Solar and hydroelectric power also do not involve mining uranium. That's some nasty stuff. I dare you to mine uranium for a few years, then say that nuclear power doesn't hurt anyone. I suppose you've never seen pictures of nuclear waste barrels being washed up on land. I've read about people finding them in rather corroded states. Perhaps it's majorly difficult for them to actually burst or open, but if I found a barrel with a hazardous waste label and it looked like someone had lit it on fire with jet fuel, I'd scream bloody murder.
There are better solutions than nuclear energy, though I would prefer that over burning fossil fuels.
buy.com is a spammer?
That really sucks. I have patronized them twice, because I thought they were pretty cool about advertising.
All spammers should be tarred and feathered. Or better yet, sent into the Thunderdome.
"Two men enter, one man leaves!"
I'm going to try not to make this sound like flamebait, but.... you were a fool to buy into Intel's marketing. Why the hell did you pre-order untested, new technology from an overpriced online store (CDW)?
Didn't you read a single review of the i820 chipset before placing your order? There are hundreds of web sites dedicated to educating consumers about new hardware trends.
Putting SDRAM on an i820 board is ridiculous. It slows everything down to a crawl (it's slower than a previous generation BX board!), the chipset is unreliable, the major innovation is proprietary RAM, and you're buying an Intel motherboard, something definitely not recommended by any hardware review site.
Next time, do a little research before you buy your hardware.
How could Transmeta possibly take over the CPU business? They make mobile CPUs, not general purpose CPUs.
Even if the technology is new and innovative, if it's not demonstrably better than what Intel, AMD, and other embedded/mobile chip manufacturers are producing, the market will ignore them.
I figure that someone will buy Transmeta before they make it too big. Intel or IBM could afford to buy small European nations.
Why don't you just put "goatse.cx" and "www.goatse.cx" in your /etc/hosts file defined as 127.0.0.1? If you want, "route reject" the IP address, too.
You should really, really read the networking howto.
I, and almost every hardware review site on the internet, would suggest getting a tried and true BX chipset-based motherboard, a VIA chipset-based FCPGA motherboard, or an Athlon system.
The problem with the BX chipset is that it only supports AGP 2X. This doesn't really matter right now, but it could be a performance bottleneck in the future, if you use high-end AGP video cards and play state-of-the-art games. On a workstation or server, it doesn't matter one bit.
The VIA chipsets are often a little slower than the competing Intel chipsets. I'm not really that big of a fan of VIA, but I truly appreciate the competition that they bring to the chipset marketplace. Current VIA chipsets for both the Coppermine and Athlon support PC133 and AGP 4X. Still, it tends to perform slightly worse than an overclocked BX chipset. Not all BX boards can be reliably overclocked, though. And I would never recommend overclocking a workstation or server. That's for gaming PCs only.
My favorite solution is a dual processor BX board. Get one that supports 100 MHz FSB Coppermine chips, so that you can put in dual 600E or 650 chips (or, if you're rich, dual 700+ MHz chips). Remember that most FCPGA CPUs do not support SMP, as per Intel's press releases.
If you can't afford a dual processor setup, then you should look into the Athlon. It's incredibly inexpensive, plus it's quite fast, up until the 750 MHz mark or so. After that, the ultra-slow cache makes it rather uncompetitive (but it's still much cheaper than a Coppermine).
If you can afford it, go with a DEC Alpha. The 21164A is pretty cheap now, and it uses a standard ATX power supply (300W absolute minimum, so you'll probably want a new tower case with a big power supply). A barebones 21164A should set you back around $500 to $1000, depending on the speed, case, and amount of cache and memory. You can buy a nice Quantum Atlas V 7200 RPM 18GB SCSI hard drive to go along with that barebones system for around $300. Now you're ready to kick some Wintel and Macintoy ass.
Dude, I think you need to lay off the X Files for a week.