...it was dreadfully uncomfortable, so so disapointed as NO ONE makes a 6 or 7 button optical SMALL mouse which is good for finger mousers (not palm mousers)
Could you explain in a bit more detail what you mean by, "finger mouser?" Apart from the lewd connotations, I mean...
Schwab
Re:In case of slashdotting...
on
ASCII World Cup
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So much for reporting on ASCII art. *sigh*
You can thank the Goatse assholes -- literally -- for that.
This sounds like an attempt to import into the US a goofy "right" that has existed in Europe for some time.
It seems that whoever is first to broadcast a copyrighted work is granted a right, independently of the copyright holder, to enjoin redistribution of that work. In other words, the broadcaster gets right of first refusal for any material they were ever first to broadcast.
It's not at all clear why they got this right in the first place (incentive to broadcast material they didn't produce themselves?), but today it's largely seen as highly anachronistic, and often described in derisive terms.
Most of the Sheeple out there seem to be going with Dual core processors. This seems to be the "shiny" factor. Unless you plan to burn a DVD while gaming I wouldn't bother.
Actually, it's my own personal history that steered me toward dual-core. My previous machine was a dual Pentium III 1GHz, sitting on slocket adapters on a Slot 1 motherboard. And this was a consequence of the fact that I worked for Be, Incorporated for four and a half years (symmetric multiprocessing was our Thing, you see). So I decided to carry forward in that tradition.
I personally have not had good experience with ABIT mobo's either. The problems really seem to crop up when you tweak the memory timings in BIOS to match the spec's of the purchased memory. Several people in the gaming clan I play with have had this issue.
Ummm... I was under the impression that setting the memory timings in the BIOS to "Auto" meant that it pulled the factory timings out of the SDRAM modules and used those. Is this not the case? Why would I need to manually set the timings to match the specs of the SDRAMs when those are the timings it's (presumably) already reporting?
I'm not an overclocker. Performance is important to me, but reliability far more so. This is why the NVidia geForce 7900GT has been such a shock to me. It's inconceivable to me that a company with a good history like NVidia would release a product that was this flaky out of the box.
My personal recommendation is for Asus Mobo's.
My previous motherboard was an Asus P2B-D, and it's still rock solid. But the reviews of the various high-ish end PCI-e motherboards seemed to give ABIT the edge, so I went with them. (Oh. The ABIT AN8-32X has red LEDs along the underside edges which light up when the system is running. This little bit of rice wasn't mentioned anywhere else.)
I am very happy with my Zallman heat sink, but it is very heavy. I cracked my mobo moving in to my new house.
The heatsink AMD packs in with their retail boxed CPUs was already impressive enough. And I had read enough Web reviews of the Zalman to realize that it was a heavy mofo and a b*tch to clamp down. The probability of damaging your motherboard by attaching a Zalman was significantly above zero, so I stayed away, despite the pretty LEDs.
BTW, any opinions on third-party cooling solutions for graphics cards? The 7900GT will creep up to 70C without too much prodding, and the stock fan is the loudest fan in the rig.
There some real info from a real Hard Core Gamer. =vVv=H8RED is what I game as. And yes I am in the IS/IT industry in a technical capacity.
I'm in tech as well. And my Slashdot handle is also my gaming handle.
This is at least the second time they've tried to call a "truce" with FS/OS software developers. And this time, as last time, their "olive branch" is fatuous nonsense.
The only interoperability issues Linux has is with undocumented and/or proprietary hardware and software components. We still don't have a truly Open Source solution to address "WinModems." Graphics cards are pitifully underdocumented. Interoperating with Microsoft Exchange is an ongoing nightmare, despite the valiant efforts of the Evolution team.
Everything else about Linux is right there, out in the open, in man pages, GNU info files, and HTML pages. So any difficulty Microsoft has in interoperating with Linux is entirely their own fault.
Ooo! Is this where we get to compare the sizes of our dic^H^H^Hgaming rigs?
I just bought myself a completely new gaming rig -- my first such rig in about seven years. Prior to that I'd been upgrading various components in my old box. But the newest games were starting to far outstrip my machine's ability to play them (Doom 3/Quake 4 were the earliest offenders). Thanks to a pleasant year-end bonus from my employer (and rather serious prodding from my partner), I got a completely new box:
Sadly, the graphics card has turned out to be the biggest problem in the new rig. It seems that everyone is having trouble with the new NVidia 7900-based boards. My first card would display "exploding" geometry once it warmed up a bit. Happily, eVGA have been very good to deal with, and performed a free cross-ship RMA. The new card still exhibits a few glitches, but only when I expressly go looking for them. When actually playing games, it's been very well behaved. It's only done the exploding geometry thing once since then, during a game of Oblivion. I'll keep leaning on eVGA to perfect this card.
I have very mixed feelings about the Creative sound card. Creative has a very spotty reputation for drivers, especially when multiple CPUs are involved. However, virtually all the competing sound card vendors have gone away, or have chosen instead to go for a race to the bottom in terms of price (and, sadly, quality). So I got the Creative X-Fi. It makes the games sound pretty good (it's breathed new life into QuakeWorld), but I would have much preferred something that works with Linux. I have my eye on the upcoming Razer Barracuda sound card, though...
I'd have to say that I'm probably happiest with the case. I was very paranoid that I wouldn't have enough space for all the cruft I planned on putting in it, or that it would be very difficult to work with, but it's turned out to be just lovely. It weighs a ton, but no more than the old Antec tower it's replacing. It's very accessible, has a large interior, very well ventilated, very sturdy, has a clean appearance, and the blue LEDs don't hurt, either.
As I said, this is the first new rig I've put together in seven years (the last machine I built was a dual-Pentium III on a PC-100 motherboard). I'd appreciate commentary from a more experienced eye. Could I have selected better RAM? Better drives?
Just assume that their property went to the next of kin, or got repossessed by the county.
Huh. Well then why, when Shameer gets killed for pickpocketing (I witnessed him creep up to a stablehand, who then yelled, "Stop, thief!" and shortly thereafter got killed by a guard -- it was completely AI-driven; I did nothing to trigger it), you can loot the key off his corpse and then wander through his house in town and snarf whatever you like. You can even sleep there. Or is that a bug, too?
Has anyone else tried to help the Fisherman in Weye by killing enough slaughterfish for him, but accidentally already killed one of the slaughterfish in the lake in the quest area before you took on the quest?
I bumped into exactly the same problem. If you start killing Rumare Slaughterfish before accepting the fisherman's quest (and making it your current quest), you will only be able to find and kill six slaughterfish, well short of the ten (twelve?) you need to complete the quest.
Luckily, I had a saved game from shortly before I started slaughtering slaughterfish, and was able to do everything in the correct order and complete the quest.
On another tentacle, I'd rather like to be able to take posession of the houses of people who have been killed. Argamir is a character in a quest you end up killing for graverobbing. Glarthir gets killed by the Imperial Guard for being a nutjob. Both of them own houses in their respective cities but, once they're dead, the game still marks me as a trespasser when entering their houses.
...used more than $1 million he received from his customers to go on a spending spree, buying real estate in south Florida, a 40-foot Sea Ray Mercruiser motor boat, and luxury cars including a BMW and a Cadillac Escalade. [emphasis mine]
Why is it that most thieves have no taste? The BMW is okay, but most of that is tacky sh*t you could win on The Price is Right.
I thought about this idea some time ago, and came up with a system where the media's friendliness was measured according to three aspects:
Ability to Copy The media should contain no measures to prevent or deter duplication, nor should it require measures on the part of the playback platform to support such deterrents.
Ability to Distribute The media should contain no measures to prevent or deter redistribution, nor should it require measures on the part of the playback platform to support such deterrents.
No Usage Monitoring/Metering Usage of the media should not be monitored, metered, or compromise the user's privacy or usage habits in any other way, nor should it require measures on the part of the playback platform to support such monitoring.
Each aspect would represent one leg of an iconic triangle. The triangle logo (and sub-permutations thereof) would be trademarked so it could only lawfully be used by the authority performing the evaluations. So all you'd have to do to know which media were safe would be to look for a complete triangle.
The United States Government lied to you to get you to agree to go to war;
The United States Government is sending your children half way across the world to be killed;
The United States House and Senate are refusing to their jobs of representing you and advocating for your rights and interests;
The United States Government has undermined your reputation among nations by abandoning global cooperation and diplomacy and acting unilaterally;
The United States Government has endangered your safety by antagonizing and attacking foreign people, thereby turning them into extremist people;
The Federal Government and the governments of several states are eliminating your right to self-determination via voting by systematically ignoring all evidence placed before them of voting irregularities and compromised electronic voting machines;
Etc., etc., etc....
In case you haven't been paying attention for the last seven years, it may interest you to know: You are being systematically fucked. The press has been bought off; they will do nothing to help you. There is only one person left who can do something about it...
But, you see s/he's too busy, and can't be bothered, at least not yet. See, there was the American Idol finale a couple weeks ago where whatshisface (or was it whatsherface?) won, thanks to your attentive help and eager phone calls. Oh! And, and missing the final episodes of Survivor, Will and Grace, The Amazing Race, and House were simply unthinkable! And then there was "March Madness" back in... uh, March, I guess...
"Public corruption? Senate scandals? Incompetent emergency management officials? Mendacious Attorney Generals? Fuck that! I need to know if Natalee Holloway is still dead..."
See? Very very busy. So if something important is going on, it will need to be really important before we get his/her attention and they start to act and save the United States. It will need to be shocking so that we grab his/her attention. And it will need to be big so that they understand the importance of acting now. In fact, it will need to be so big that it will swamp out all the other "important" stuff for months.
Fine, Microsoft, go right ahead. Transition your business to, "software as a service." And when you get there, you'll realize there's no "there" there, and will implode to a business of relative insignificance.
A hammer is not a "service." A paintbrush is not a "service." A car is not a "service." They are tools. And, unless people use them very infrequently, people don't rent their tools. They buy them so that they may own them. Software follows this analogy to a very high degree. Software is a tool and, as such, the market for "rented" tools is way way smaller than the pundits are predicting. This will become even more true as Open Source solutions continue to make inroads and force aside overpriced proprietary solutions that are buggier and offer almost no extra compelling functionality.
Microsoft does know how to Pwnz0r and expand existing markets but, so far, they have largely failed to create new ones. Software-as-a-service is a dead end, especially for a company the size of Microsoft.
Expect a visit from humorless men with guns. No matter how enormously and obviously mendacious and corrosive to the republic the POTUS and his ethically bankrupt cronies may be, the Secret Service really really get their knickers in a twist when his/her safety is threatened, even in jest.
You'd think that, with the enormous amount of prior art out there, and the amount of time and money Microsoft has had to design and develop Vista, that it would completely and utterly kick ass, from boot logo to shutdown. I mean, there are so many ideas out there, and Microsoft has had so much time to play with all of them and select the best ones, that Vista has no business being anything less that digitally optimized sex.
Well, Microsoft just admitted that Vista sucks.
Because, you see, if Vista was as good as it's supposed to be, it would stand on its own and sell itself. It would be so clearly better than XP or MacOS or even Linux that there would be no question that Vista is The Thing to Have For Your New PC.
But no. Microsoft is telling us that Vista is so appallingly bad that not only can't it stand on its own, it needs to lean on an exclusive binding with Halo 2 to be able to support itself in the marketplace.
There is no rational basis for tying Halo 2 to Vista other than the fact that Vista sucks. Halo 2 does not use DirectX 10 functionality, so Vista is not required. Further, by tying Halo 2 to Vista, Halo 2 sales will be depressed since, rounded to the nearest million, there are zero copies of Vista out there. Therefore, tying Halo 2 to Vista is being done not to drive Halo 2, but to drive Vista. And Vista wouldn't need driving... Unless Vista sucks.
I saw an interview a long time ago about one of the MPAA techniques to ensure ROI on their turkeys. Multi-screen theaters were extorted into showing and advertising known turkeys to maximize viewers before word spread about how bad the movie really was. They also had to commit to a minimum number of showings. In return, they were "allowed", given the privelege, of showing true blockblosters.
That's called "block booking," and it's been illegal for over 50 years.
There's no real comparison; Ghandi was fighting for the right for he and his people to live in their own country, free of occupiers -and he was demonstrating that he was willing to put his life on the line for that cause.
These people are bitching because they can't make copies of the latest slipknot tune, and they're looking like shrill tools at best.
A reasonable person can see the vast devide [sic] both between the severity of the struggle, and the sacrifices being made.
The disparity between the struggles is vast only if you look at it in the most superficial of terms. You look and see only "tools" and "pirates" [sic] looking to get stuff for free. But scratch deeper, and you'll find more similarities than even I'm comfortable admitting.
The British Empire walked into India, unwanted and uninvited, planted a flag and, without regard to what went before, proclaimed, "We will now dictate how things shall be done here," Gandhi raised the awareness of his people (and the Britons) and said, "Your authority is illegitimate, and derives solely from threat of force. It is immoral and unethical for you to be here. Please go away."
Today, we find a struggle with disquieting similarities -- an invading force is occupying territory and proclaiming that they shall now dictate how things shall be done. Except that, instead of an imperial nation, it's multinational media corporations; and instead of occupying someone else's country, they're occupying our computers.
Our computers.
You may find the comparison fatuous. But, once you finally drill down to the core issue, you must ultimately acknowledge that what's at stake is nothing less than your freedom to do with your property as you please.
My interests are not served by ceding control of my computers to a self-appointed authority -- to have another man acting as master in my house. It is an affront to my values and my personal sovereignty, and I will not stand for it.
You are, of course, free to differ, and invite unaccountable corporate control over the computer you bought and paid for. But, in such a case, one is prompted to turn the "tool" ad hominem back at the accuser and ask: Who here is the greater "tool"?
If I was IBM I'd have a team of people reviewing all of Microsoft's patents, it gives IBM an insight into what Microsoft is doing, and if you can block Microsoft from getting patents then it stops you having to deal with the issue later. Of course Microsoft would be reviewing all of IBM's patents too...
This seems reasonable on its face, but it fails to consider the problem of collusion, which is most probable amongst the largest players.
IBM and Microsoft already cross-license an enormous number of patents, so there's very little value in their preventing the other from acquiring new patents. OTOH, there is large value in preventing newcomers from entering the market. Squashing newcomers with a large patent portfolio is one way of doing this. So IBM and Microsoft may likely agree (entirely informally, of couse) to not review each other's patent applications -- thereby enlarging their own portfolios -- but tear into the applications of smaller fish. (It also gives the larger players advance warning of "disruptive technologies" before they hit the market.)
The best long-term solution is to reform the criteria for patentable inventions, and to re-tune the USPTO's goals as granting only valid, novel patents rather than being a revenue source by printing the moral equivalent of Catholic indulgences.
I mean, I could say there was prior art or that the submitted "invention" completely lacks novelty, but such assertions would be more likely to be heeded if I also provided concrete references, and that takes non-trivial work (no, pointing at a Wikipedia article doesn't count).
So, if I do this, apart from the feel-good karma of smacking down patent trolls, what's in it for me? Maybe a tax credit? Waiver of fees for my own patent/SIR application?
I can't tell if the guy's a troll or just naïve, but it needs to be said for the benefit of the less knowledgeable:
Do you suppose every video display, digital camera, audio converter and so on is somehow uniquely special, that it is so ground breaking in its design that it needs custom crafted code just to make it work?
Yes. It does.
Like it or not, the underlying hardware for computer peripherals -- be they USB cameras, joysticks, mice, SCSI controllers, graphics cards -- can be substantially similar, or completely different, most often because they take completely different approaches to solving the same set of problems.
A splendid example -- and one I can speak to directly, having written several drivers for them in my time -- are graphics cards. Once upon a time, all a graphics card did was display pixels. It was a dumb framebuffer, and the CPU did all the drawing. But even that much wasn't uniform across all cards. Some displayed only monochrome. Others displayed two or four colors per pixel. Sometimes the colors were hard-coded. Other times the colors could be defined by the user and stored in a palette (which could be 6, 8, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, or 24 bits wide). Some had the pixels arranged as a linear array in memory; others stored pixels in an odd pattern based on a logical transform of the X and Y coordinates. Which line draw or rectfill routine you used depended on which card was installed.
Then someone invented a chunk of hardware called a "blitter" which did some of the drawing operations for you. All your old code would work, since it could still write to the framebuffer pixels, but the blitter was faster. But wait! Some blitters used X and Y coordinates and dimensions. Other blitters took memory addresses and byte counts. Some wanted you to write values to in-chip registers to setup and perform the blits. Others preferred you wrote a series of instructions in RAM and told the chip where the instructions were. All would do straight copies, but some would also do logical operations on the pixels (AND, OR, XOR). But not to worry; the device drivers abstracted all this away. All you had to do was call the rectFill() routine; the driver would worry about the gory details.
And that might have been the end of it, except this jerk named John Carmack wrote a game called Quake, and suddenly just 2D hardware support isn't good enough for anyone anymore:-). Enter 3Dfx, ATI, Rendition, NVidia, and others, each with their own approach to draw 3D primitives quickly, each requiring custom software that knows where all the HW registers are, what they mean, and how to manipulate them.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying: The abstract interface at the application level may be the same (rectFill(), glVert3f()), but the actual nuts and bolts of turning that abstract expression into pixels on the screen varies enormously.
You're not completely off-base, though. There are some very simple peripherals where the abstractions have been pushed directly to the hardware layer (keyboards, mice, USB HID devices), but even this is an arguable point, as the firmware running in the peripheral itself is simply translating what's really going on into the commonly-accepted abstraction. Nowhere was this more true than when mice transitioned from opto-mechanical (rolling balls and encoder wheels) to purely optical (tiny cameras). Internally, they're entirely different, but the firmware running inside completely obscures that fact, and all you see on the wire are movement deltas.
So, no, I'm not involved in an elaborate conspiracy to justify my job. As long as silicon designers have new and evolving ideas about how to make things better/faster/cheaper, device drivers will remain a necessity.
Sad thing is, this probably isn't a troll. You sound like most of the kernel developers who refuse to make a stable API or ABI.
It's not a question of "refusing." The issue is that they know they're not done yet.
The kernel API is a moving target because the technology -- and knowledge behind it -- is growing and evolving. One of the more perfect examples of this evolution is Linux power management. The first released API consisted essentially of suspend() and resume(). Even back in the days of APM, this may have seemed adequate, but it really wasn't. This inadequacy was driven home when ACPI happened (ugh!), and the shortcomings of suspend() and resume() became obvious. So the kernel API was changed to try and encompass it.
Whoops! It turns out that, aside from being incomprehensibly baroque, ACPI is absolutely useless when trying to address power management issues on, say, embedded systems where power and clock throttling controls are far richer and more complex. So the API is being spun again, and this time they're trying to get something more future-proof.
Besides, your complaint is specious to begin with. Microsoft has changed its device driver API at least three times in the Windows era (and probably far more in the DOS era). This didn't stop HW manufacturers from supporting it. What it did stop was old peripherals moving forward on to shiny new HW platforms. That old joystick you loved from the company that died just before Windows 98 came out? Too bad, you have to throw it away now; there's no WDM driver for it, and there certainly won't be a Vista driver for it. Oh, hmm. Looks like someone made the necessary changes to the Linux driver source so that it'll compile under 2.6.16.
It sounds like what you're really saying is that Linux is too small a market to bother with, rather than there being any intrinsic issue with publishing driver source. If the market shares of Windows and Linux were swapped, the source code issue wouldn't be; it would just be treated as part of the landscape.
The Motorola A1200 (MING) has only been released in the Asian market. So far, no US cell providers have deigned to carry it (although you can probably find someone to import it).
Let's review: The ILECs have been salivating for decades over the idea of becoming "cable companies," and distributing television content over the telephone infrastructure. (They wanted to be able to force customers to go only to their servers, but Judge Harold Greene said, "No, you don't get to control both content and carriage, because you'll abuse that position.") For the past several decades, it has been no secret just how much bandwidth video broadcasting requires, even with compression. It has also been no secret that the broadcasting industry has been moving in fits and starts toward hi-def.
Now here we are on the eve of large-scale HD rollout, and the ILECs are whining that the network backbone may not be able to handle the load. Well, kee-ryst on toast, what the fsck have you been doing the last twenty years? You knew Internet "television" was coming, you knew hi-def was coming, you knew it was going to be a bandwidth hog, you had at least twenty years warning, and you're telling us with a straight face that you didn't prepare for it??
And by the way, who else here is old enough to remember a few years ago when the same ILECs were complaining that all those modem users phoning ISPs were overloading their switches, and wanted to start charging a premium for data calls? My response then was as it is now: Why the hell aren't you building out your network?
Sympathy factor zero, Captain. You either get to work and build out the network like you were supposed to be doing, or stand aside and let the CableCos eat your lunch.
If they really want to kick Microsoft in the nuts and gain some love back from those who hate rootkits, they would ship Vaio's with Linux.
Actually, all they'd have to do is publish the source code to a working Sony Peripheral Interface driver, so the weird buttons and jog shuttles on their laptops will work properly.
And some power management enhancements wouldn't hurt, either.
Trip, as you may know, was the CEO of 3DO, whose console was released amid much fanfare for a retail price of $700.00. It over a year to get the price down to even $500.00, and further price reductions were slow in coming. Meanwhile, the Sony Playstation came out, and the rest was history.
Slashdot Mirror
Could you explain in a bit more detail what you mean by, "finger mouser?" Apart from the lewd connotations, I mean...
Schwab
You can thank the Goatse assholes -- literally -- for that.
Schwab
It seems that whoever is first to broadcast a copyrighted work is granted a right, independently of the copyright holder, to enjoin redistribution of that work. In other words, the broadcaster gets right of first refusal for any material they were ever first to broadcast.
It's not at all clear why they got this right in the first place (incentive to broadcast material they didn't produce themselves?), but today it's largely seen as highly anachronistic, and often described in derisive terms.
Schwab
Actually, it's my own personal history that steered me toward dual-core. My previous machine was a dual Pentium III 1GHz, sitting on slocket adapters on a Slot 1 motherboard. And this was a consequence of the fact that I worked for Be, Incorporated for four and a half years (symmetric multiprocessing was our Thing, you see). So I decided to carry forward in that tradition.
Ummm... I was under the impression that setting the memory timings in the BIOS to "Auto" meant that it pulled the factory timings out of the SDRAM modules and used those. Is this not the case? Why would I need to manually set the timings to match the specs of the SDRAMs when those are the timings it's (presumably) already reporting?
I'm not an overclocker. Performance is important to me, but reliability far more so. This is why the NVidia geForce 7900GT has been such a shock to me. It's inconceivable to me that a company with a good history like NVidia would release a product that was this flaky out of the box.
My previous motherboard was an Asus P2B-D, and it's still rock solid. But the reviews of the various high-ish end PCI-e motherboards seemed to give ABIT the edge, so I went with them. (Oh. The ABIT AN8-32X has red LEDs along the underside edges which light up when the system is running. This little bit of rice wasn't mentioned anywhere else.)
The heatsink AMD packs in with their retail boxed CPUs was already impressive enough. And I had read enough Web reviews of the Zalman to realize that it was a heavy mofo and a b*tch to clamp down. The probability of damaging your motherboard by attaching a Zalman was significantly above zero, so I stayed away, despite the pretty LEDs.
BTW, any opinions on third-party cooling solutions for graphics cards? The 7900GT will creep up to 70C without too much prodding, and the stock fan is the loudest fan in the rig.
I'm in tech as well. And my Slashdot handle is also my gaming handle.
Ugh. Sony. Had too many problems with those in the past. I got a Teac.
Dude, this is almost twice what I paid for my 4400+ dual-core. What percentage boost in performance would you say you're getting by using this?
Thanks very much for taking the time to respond.
Schwab
The only interoperability issues Linux has is with undocumented and/or proprietary hardware and software components. We still don't have a truly Open Source solution to address "WinModems." Graphics cards are pitifully underdocumented. Interoperating with Microsoft Exchange is an ongoing nightmare, despite the valiant efforts of the Evolution team.
Everything else about Linux is right there, out in the open, in man pages, GNU info files, and HTML pages. So any difficulty Microsoft has in interoperating with Linux is entirely their own fault.
Schwab
I just bought myself a completely new gaming rig -- my first such rig in about seven years. Prior to that I'd been upgrading various components in my old box. But the newest games were starting to far outstrip my machine's ability to play them (Doom 3/Quake 4 were the earliest offenders). Thanks to a pleasant year-end bonus from my employer (and rather serious prodding from my partner), I got a completely new box:
Sadly, the graphics card has turned out to be the biggest problem in the new rig. It seems that everyone is having trouble with the new NVidia 7900-based boards. My first card would display "exploding" geometry once it warmed up a bit. Happily, eVGA have been very good to deal with, and performed a free cross-ship RMA. The new card still exhibits a few glitches, but only when I expressly go looking for them. When actually playing games, it's been very well behaved. It's only done the exploding geometry thing once since then, during a game of Oblivion. I'll keep leaning on eVGA to perfect this card.
I have very mixed feelings about the Creative sound card. Creative has a very spotty reputation for drivers, especially when multiple CPUs are involved. However, virtually all the competing sound card vendors have gone away, or have chosen instead to go for a race to the bottom in terms of price (and, sadly, quality). So I got the Creative X-Fi. It makes the games sound pretty good (it's breathed new life into QuakeWorld), but I would have much preferred something that works with Linux. I have my eye on the upcoming Razer Barracuda sound card, though...
I'd have to say that I'm probably happiest with the case. I was very paranoid that I wouldn't have enough space for all the cruft I planned on putting in it, or that it would be very difficult to work with, but it's turned out to be just lovely. It weighs a ton, but no more than the old Antec tower it's replacing. It's very accessible, has a large interior, very well ventilated, very sturdy, has a clean appearance, and the blue LEDs don't hurt, either.
As I said, this is the first new rig I've put together in seven years (the last machine I built was a dual-Pentium III on a PC-100 motherboard). I'd appreciate commentary from a more experienced eye. Could I have selected better RAM? Better drives?
Schwab
Huh. Well then why, when Shameer gets killed for pickpocketing (I witnessed him creep up to a stablehand, who then yelled, "Stop, thief!" and shortly thereafter got killed by a guard -- it was completely AI-driven; I did nothing to trigger it), you can loot the key off his corpse and then wander through his house in town and snarf whatever you like. You can even sleep there. Or is that a bug, too?
Schwab
I bumped into exactly the same problem. If you start killing Rumare Slaughterfish before accepting the fisherman's quest (and making it your current quest), you will only be able to find and kill six slaughterfish, well short of the ten (twelve?) you need to complete the quest.
Luckily, I had a saved game from shortly before I started slaughtering slaughterfish, and was able to do everything in the correct order and complete the quest.
On another tentacle, I'd rather like to be able to take posession of the houses of people who have been killed. Argamir is a character in a quest you end up killing for graverobbing. Glarthir gets killed by the Imperial Guard for being a nutjob. Both of them own houses in their respective cities but, once they're dead, the game still marks me as a trespasser when entering their houses.
Schwab
Why is it that most thieves have no taste? The BMW is okay, but most of that is tacky sh*t you could win on The Price is Right.
Schwab
Elitist Scum
Schwab
I thought about this idea some time ago, and came up with a system where the media's friendliness was measured according to three aspects:
The media should contain no measures to prevent or deter duplication, nor should it require measures on the part of the playback platform to support such deterrents.
The media should contain no measures to prevent or deter redistribution, nor should it require measures on the part of the playback platform to support such deterrents.
Usage of the media should not be monitored, metered, or compromise the user's privacy or usage habits in any other way, nor should it require measures on the part of the playback platform to support such monitoring.
Each aspect would represent one leg of an iconic triangle. The triangle logo (and sub-permutations thereof) would be trademarked so it could only lawfully be used by the authority performing the evaluations. So all you'd have to do to know which media were safe would be to look for a complete triangle.
Schwab
There's a word for that, you know...
Let's review:
In case you haven't been paying attention for the last seven years, it may interest you to know: You are being systematically fucked. The press has been bought off; they will do nothing to help you. There is only one person left who can do something about it...
But, you see s/he's too busy, and can't be bothered, at least not yet. See, there was the American Idol finale a couple weeks ago where whatshisface (or was it whatsherface?) won, thanks to your attentive help and eager phone calls. Oh! And, and missing the final episodes of Survivor, Will and Grace, The Amazing Race, and House were simply unthinkable! And then there was "March Madness" back in... uh, March, I guess...
"Public corruption? Senate scandals? Incompetent emergency management officials? Mendacious Attorney Generals? Fuck that! I need to know if Natalee Holloway is still dead..."
See? Very very busy. So if something important is going on, it will need to be really important before we get his/her attention and they start to act and save the United States. It will need to be shocking so that we grab his/her attention. And it will need to be big so that they understand the importance of acting now. In fact, it will need to be so big that it will swamp out all the other "important" stuff for months.
And so, the question we all need to ask is:
What Will It Take?
Schwab
A hammer is not a "service." A paintbrush is not a "service." A car is not a "service." They are tools. And, unless people use them very infrequently, people don't rent their tools. They buy them so that they may own them. Software follows this analogy to a very high degree. Software is a tool and, as such, the market for "rented" tools is way way smaller than the pundits are predicting. This will become even more true as Open Source solutions continue to make inroads and force aside overpriced proprietary solutions that are buggier and offer almost no extra compelling functionality.
Microsoft does know how to Pwnz0r and expand existing markets but, so far, they have largely failed to create new ones. Software-as-a-service is a dead end, especially for a company the size of Microsoft.
Schwab
Schwab
Well, Microsoft just admitted that Vista sucks.
Because, you see, if Vista was as good as it's supposed to be, it would stand on its own and sell itself. It would be so clearly better than XP or MacOS or even Linux that there would be no question that Vista is The Thing to Have For Your New PC.
But no. Microsoft is telling us that Vista is so appallingly bad that not only can't it stand on its own, it needs to lean on an exclusive binding with Halo 2 to be able to support itself in the marketplace.
There is no rational basis for tying Halo 2 to Vista other than the fact that Vista sucks. Halo 2 does not use DirectX 10 functionality, so Vista is not required. Further, by tying Halo 2 to Vista, Halo 2 sales will be depressed since, rounded to the nearest million, there are zero copies of Vista out there. Therefore, tying Halo 2 to Vista is being done not to drive Halo 2, but to drive Vista. And Vista wouldn't need driving... Unless Vista sucks.
QED.
Schwab
That's called "block booking," and it's been illegal for over 50 years.
Schwab
The disparity between the struggles is vast only if you look at it in the most superficial of terms. You look and see only "tools" and "pirates" [sic] looking to get stuff for free. But scratch deeper, and you'll find more similarities than even I'm comfortable admitting.
The British Empire walked into India, unwanted and uninvited, planted a flag and, without regard to what went before, proclaimed, "We will now dictate how things shall be done here," Gandhi raised the awareness of his people (and the Britons) and said, "Your authority is illegitimate, and derives solely from threat of force. It is immoral and unethical for you to be here. Please go away."
Today, we find a struggle with disquieting similarities -- an invading force is occupying territory and proclaiming that they shall now dictate how things shall be done. Except that, instead of an imperial nation, it's multinational media corporations; and instead of occupying someone else's country, they're occupying our computers.
Our computers.
You may find the comparison fatuous. But, once you finally drill down to the core issue, you must ultimately acknowledge that what's at stake is nothing less than your freedom to do with your property as you please.
My interests are not served by ceding control of my computers to a self-appointed authority -- to have another man acting as master in my house. It is an affront to my values and my personal sovereignty, and I will not stand for it.
You are, of course, free to differ, and invite unaccountable corporate control over the computer you bought and paid for. But, in such a case, one is prompted to turn the "tool" ad hominem back at the accuser and ask: Who here is the greater "tool"?
Schwab
This seems reasonable on its face, but it fails to consider the problem of collusion, which is most probable amongst the largest players.
IBM and Microsoft already cross-license an enormous number of patents, so there's very little value in their preventing the other from acquiring new patents. OTOH, there is large value in preventing newcomers from entering the market. Squashing newcomers with a large patent portfolio is one way of doing this. So IBM and Microsoft may likely agree (entirely informally, of couse) to not review each other's patent applications -- thereby enlarging their own portfolios -- but tear into the applications of smaller fish. (It also gives the larger players advance warning of "disruptive technologies" before they hit the market.)
The best long-term solution is to reform the criteria for patentable inventions, and to re-tune the USPTO's goals as granting only valid, novel patents rather than being a revenue source by printing the moral equivalent of Catholic indulgences.
Schwab
I mean, I could say there was prior art or that the submitted "invention" completely lacks novelty, but such assertions would be more likely to be heeded if I also provided concrete references, and that takes non-trivial work (no, pointing at a Wikipedia article doesn't count).
So, if I do this, apart from the feel-good karma of smacking down patent trolls, what's in it for me? Maybe a tax credit? Waiver of fees for my own patent/SIR application?
Schwab
Yes. It does.
Like it or not, the underlying hardware for computer peripherals -- be they USB cameras, joysticks, mice, SCSI controllers, graphics cards -- can be substantially similar, or completely different, most often because they take completely different approaches to solving the same set of problems.
A splendid example -- and one I can speak to directly, having written several drivers for them in my time -- are graphics cards. Once upon a time, all a graphics card did was display pixels. It was a dumb framebuffer, and the CPU did all the drawing. But even that much wasn't uniform across all cards. Some displayed only monochrome. Others displayed two or four colors per pixel. Sometimes the colors were hard-coded. Other times the colors could be defined by the user and stored in a palette (which could be 6, 8, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, or 24 bits wide). Some had the pixels arranged as a linear array in memory; others stored pixels in an odd pattern based on a logical transform of the X and Y coordinates. Which line draw or rectfill routine you used depended on which card was installed.
Then someone invented a chunk of hardware called a "blitter" which did some of the drawing operations for you. All your old code would work, since it could still write to the framebuffer pixels, but the blitter was faster. But wait! Some blitters used X and Y coordinates and dimensions. Other blitters took memory addresses and byte counts. Some wanted you to write values to in-chip registers to setup and perform the blits. Others preferred you wrote a series of instructions in RAM and told the chip where the instructions were. All would do straight copies, but some would also do logical operations on the pixels (AND, OR, XOR). But not to worry; the device drivers abstracted all this away. All you had to do was call the rectFill() routine; the driver would worry about the gory details.
And that might have been the end of it, except this jerk named John Carmack wrote a game called Quake, and suddenly just 2D hardware support isn't good enough for anyone anymore :-). Enter 3Dfx, ATI, Rendition, NVidia, and others, each with their own approach to draw 3D primitives quickly, each requiring custom software that knows where all the HW registers are, what they mean, and how to manipulate them.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying: The abstract interface at the application level may be the same (rectFill(), glVert3f()), but the actual nuts and bolts of turning that abstract expression into pixels on the screen varies enormously.
You're not completely off-base, though. There are some very simple peripherals where the abstractions have been pushed directly to the hardware layer (keyboards, mice, USB HID devices), but even this is an arguable point, as the firmware running in the peripheral itself is simply translating what's really going on into the commonly-accepted abstraction. Nowhere was this more true than when mice transitioned from opto-mechanical (rolling balls and encoder wheels) to purely optical (tiny cameras). Internally, they're entirely different, but the firmware running inside completely obscures that fact, and all you see on the wire are movement deltas.
So, no, I'm not involved in an elaborate conspiracy to justify my job. As long as silicon designers have new and evolving ideas about how to make things better/faster/cheaper, device drivers will remain a necessity.
Schwab
It's not a question of "refusing." The issue is that they know they're not done yet.
The kernel API is a moving target because the technology -- and knowledge behind it -- is growing and evolving. One of the more perfect examples of this evolution is Linux power management. The first released API consisted essentially of suspend() and resume(). Even back in the days of APM, this may have seemed adequate, but it really wasn't. This inadequacy was driven home when ACPI happened (ugh!), and the shortcomings of suspend() and resume() became obvious. So the kernel API was changed to try and encompass it.
Whoops! It turns out that, aside from being incomprehensibly baroque, ACPI is absolutely useless when trying to address power management issues on, say, embedded systems where power and clock throttling controls are far richer and more complex. So the API is being spun again, and this time they're trying to get something more future-proof.
Besides, your complaint is specious to begin with. Microsoft has changed its device driver API at least three times in the Windows era (and probably far more in the DOS era). This didn't stop HW manufacturers from supporting it. What it did stop was old peripherals moving forward on to shiny new HW platforms. That old joystick you loved from the company that died just before Windows 98 came out? Too bad, you have to throw it away now; there's no WDM driver for it, and there certainly won't be a Vista driver for it. Oh, hmm. Looks like someone made the necessary changes to the Linux driver source so that it'll compile under 2.6.16.
It sounds like what you're really saying is that Linux is too small a market to bother with, rather than there being any intrinsic issue with publishing driver source. If the market shares of Windows and Linux were swapped, the source code issue wouldn't be; it would just be treated as part of the landscape.
Schwab
Schwab
Let's review: The ILECs have been salivating for decades over the idea of becoming "cable companies," and distributing television content over the telephone infrastructure. (They wanted to be able to force customers to go only to their servers, but Judge Harold Greene said, "No, you don't get to control both content and carriage, because you'll abuse that position.") For the past several decades, it has been no secret just how much bandwidth video broadcasting requires, even with compression. It has also been no secret that the broadcasting industry has been moving in fits and starts toward hi-def.
Now here we are on the eve of large-scale HD rollout, and the ILECs are whining that the network backbone may not be able to handle the load. Well, kee-ryst on toast, what the fsck have you been doing the last twenty years? You knew Internet "television" was coming, you knew hi-def was coming, you knew it was going to be a bandwidth hog, you had at least twenty years warning, and you're telling us with a straight face that you didn't prepare for it??
And by the way, who else here is old enough to remember a few years ago when the same ILECs were complaining that all those modem users phoning ISPs were overloading their switches, and wanted to start charging a premium for data calls? My response then was as it is now: Why the hell aren't you building out your network?
Sympathy factor zero, Captain. You either get to work and build out the network like you were supposed to be doing, or stand aside and let the CableCos eat your lunch.
Schwab
Actually, all they'd have to do is publish the source code to a working Sony Peripheral Interface driver, so the weird buttons and jog shuttles on their laptops will work properly.
And some power management enhancements wouldn't hurt, either.
Schwab
Trip, as you may know, was the CEO of 3DO, whose console was released amid much fanfare for a retail price of $700.00. It over a year to get the price down to even $500.00, and further price reductions were slow in coming. Meanwhile, the Sony Playstation came out, and the rest was history.
I have no idea what Sony is smoking on this one.
Schwab