When are Microsoft going to learn that just because you change the name of something to make it sound "cooler", it does not mean that Joe Sixpack will immediately understand what it is and only serves to make it more of a PITA for those of us who do know what we're doing with computers.
If it's a VPN then ***PLEASE*** keep calling it VPN rather than "DirectAccess"!!! I'm far more Linux Geek than Windows Guru and my personal "Windows Experience" will hopefully end (on an admittedly positive note) with Windows XP because I see no need to upgrade to anything higher.
However, if, say, in a year's time, my nephew phones me to say he has a problem with his Windows 7 VPN link, then I can probably start giving him some good things to try to see if we can fix the problem, even though I won't have been near Windows 7 myself. If, however, he tells me the problem is with Windows 7 DirectAccess, what am I supposed to do then?
...then when you get bored pretending that you are piloting a vehicle-morphing robot, you can pretend you are Virgil Tracy rushing to the scene of a huge disaster in Thunderbird 2.
Thus you will keep your options open despite having a tiny penis.
You are not, and never will be, John Lennon or Angus Young.
So put the polythene axe away and go spend your money on CDs and concerts so that those with musical talent can make a nice living from what they are doing and thus feel more inclined to make more nice music for you to listen to.
Kind Regards
A middle-aged hard rock fan who himself stopped air-guitarring when he got to about 21 years old because he suddenly realised he looked like a pillock.
I never used to do any decomposition of music before. I listened to the whole piece as if it were one monolithic, inseparable thing.
What utter rubbish!
Listening to music has been my number one hobby for over thirty years now and the reason why you and others cannot "decompose" music is that you're in a younger generation who is too caught up in running around after flashy gadgets and having very low attention spans.
If what you want is to have music playing through your ears from an iPod while you're off doing other things then good luck to you. But proper appreciation of music just comes from sitting down, listening to it properly and *not doing anything else*.
Only when you sit down and really focus on the what you're hearing can you appreciate what the different musicians are actually doing and certainly not while "beating yourself off" with a plastic guitar in front of a TV screen.
Take one metal dustbin, roll it down some stone steps, record it and then loop your recording so it's 40 minutes long and call it "Master Of Puppets".
When you've had enough, go listen to early Black Sabbath and finally understand what makes good rock music.
Though I have to admit, Metallica make me laugh whenever I see them on the TV - because they always look like they're having a race to see who can get to the end of the song first.
Steam, Sony and Microsoft figured this out ages ago. As internet connections and digital distribution become more ubiquitous, the consumers will resolve this situation themselves. Prices should be much lower and will make developers and gamers much happier.
Don't get me wrong, I love Half-Life, TF2 and Left 4 Dead as much as the next guy - but please let's not kid ourselves that anything downloadable from any of those companies, especially Steam, is particularly *cheap*.
On the day Left 4 Dead got released, here in the UK it was cheaper to buy the DVD version from Amazon that download it from Steam.
Mankind would establish the first permanent settlement on the moon which would logically be called "Alpha".
And because several hundred technicians and scientists would be working in this base, NASA would have to build special Earth-Moon transport ships that, in honour of the first Moon landing would be called "Eagles".
These Eagle craft would have interchangeable central pods that could either carry passengers or transport nuclear waste to the Moon so it could be buried on the dark side. Unfortunately, almost 30 years to the day of the first moon landing, on September 13th 1999, the build up waste would cause a massive explosion that would hurl the moon out of Earth's orbit, taking with it the moonbase people deep into the universe.
I'm prepared to stand corrected here but doesn't Amazon charge a monthly fee to sell on their site?
I make a small amount of "pocket money" for myself buying a selling used PC games - I was doing it on eBay until (here in the UK at least) they forced all games to be listed with free postage (bastards!), and since I sell as auctions (not "Buy It Now") then I had to raise the start price to include postage costs in it. (This makes it more expensive to list so eBay benefit from that also.)
I did look at selling at fixed prices on Amazon but last time I looked they wanted a £25 per month subscription fee as well as taking a cut of the final sale price - and I don't sell enough volume to justify £25 per month (although I don't mind them taking their cut if it sells.)
I just think that with pretty much anything used these days, the big players are pushing the small hobbyists (or those just selling their used games) out of the marketplace.
I can't speak personally about Gamestop because I'm not in the US, but over here in the UK, the main games store is "Game" with a few other smaller chains of CD/game/DVD exchange stores.
I only really buy PC Games (we have a Wii also but the missus just uses it for Wii fit and we drag it for the occasional party game with friends) which are different to console games in that they tend to come down in price a lot quicker and "last longer" due to the fact that for most of them you can download mods and other community-created stuff that extend their playing lives anyway.
But it does amaze me that, in general for console games, the difference between the new and used prices never seems to be very much, and I would be interested how much these exchange shops pay for used games compared to what they sell them for - I guess the margin is at least 100%.
However, I think the reason the used game stores can capitalise on this is because the majority of console gamers are youngsters in the "must have it now" generation; otherwise, they'd take the time to go buy their games invariably a lot cheaper online, or just wait a few months until the actual retail price drops.
These stores are just taking advantage of an opportunity - if (like me most of the time) you don't like their prices then don't pay them; on the other hand, a kid who has to pay for his games out his pocket money probably welcomes the opportunity to sell a game he's finished so as to put some money towards his next purchase.
Funnily enough, you can buy music CDs that have the music already *ON* them.
If you hunt around diligently, you can usually buy them for less than paying for separate tracks on iTunes and have a nice plastic case and sleeve notes to read while on the toilet.
And the *really nice* thing about CDs is that the music isn't in a lossy format in the first place, so you can rip them at whatever bit rate you want to whatever format you want, whilst still keeping the original disks anally alphabetically filed on a nice shelf somewhere.
Oh, and if your hard disk goes tits up and you couldn't afford to buy a backup device because you were buying blank CDs and paying too much for downloadable music from iTunes, you don't need to redownload all your music - you just *RIP THE CD* again!
It's amazing what technology they come up with these days - especially this *new* CD technology that surpasses iTunes *and* gives you better value for money!
I was at a neighborhood party this weekend, which provided something like a random sample of the population. You know, morons.
Presumably you are the guy who works it IT that leaves his phone ringing for at least 15 rings before picking it up and who's first response to the caller is always "Have you turned it off and on again?"
I'm surprised you were even invited to the party - as you sound like a totally arrogant prick.
Before I moved over to Gmail a few years ago, I was using my ISP-provided email and because their spam filtering wasn't that hot, I used to filter it locally on my Linux server using procmail, SpamAssassin and scoring. I used to tweak the procmail rules about once a week but, certainly for the emails that me and the missus were receiving, I used to get between 95-98% correct spam detection rates.
Additionally, I wrote a script that would look at mail headers and fire off an automated email to the "abuse@" email address of the originating email domain.
I keep meaning to get another email address somewhere where I there is either poor spam filtering or where it can be turned off so that I can set up procmail again to have a play with spam filters as I got a kick out of working out rules to defeat spammers.
Well in my days of playing 1st Edition D&D during the late 1970s it was "Role-Playing Game" but when Doom and other FPS games came out, it also became "Rocket-Propelled Grenade".
So I guess for a game like OpenArena, either could apply.
I think you had better say more as I for one have no idea what point you're trying to make.
Mono is an open source suite of tools designed to provide a common programming platform that happens to integrate with DotNET.
Besides which, anyone who complains about Microsoft setting the default search engine probably needs to be spending less time on Slashdot and more time learning how their computer works so they can just change it back if they don't like it.
As a mainly Linux user with a couple of XP machines, even I don't see it as a problem...
For those non-British residents amongst you, "The Sun" is an utter rag of a newspaper that uses any excuse to print parts of the female anatomy for the sake of an article - Page 3 of the paper daily has a topless model.
I'm a lover of the female anatomy as much as any other red-blooded male, but ignore anything published in it or anything else owned by Rupert Murdoch.
I would not even wipe my backside on it following a visit to the toilet, just in case I caught something from it.
Here in the UK, we're enjoying some of the hottest temperatures for many years.
This means that the pale-skinned Apple fanbois are all indoors today for fear of burning to a crisp.
This in turn means that they're spending more time on Slashdot today.
Which leads to the inevitable conclusion as to why a perfectly reasonable post like yours gets modded down - just because you have the blatant audacity to criticise their beloved company.
Bring it on, fanbois, I've karma to burn at the moment...
Yes, but much as I am a big fan of Linux and it being the OS I most commonly use now, the market doesn't work like that.
You simply can't expect people who do want the functionality in certain Windows-only apps to suddenly stop using those apps whilst they switch to Linux and wait for the software companies to catch up by porting over to Linux.
Wine is a great piece of software but running a Windows app under Wine, which is in many cases a trivial thing for we Linux geeks to do, is a lot more complicated for those people who are happily able to use their PCs at the moment without being tech-heads in computers.
Call me a snob but I'm not sure I want mass migrations over to Linux from Windows. Sure, when friends & family have tried Ubuntu or other distros, I'm first to stick my hand up and volunteer my help to them if they need it - but do we *REALLY* want inexperienced Windows users who currently run all their apps with administrator permissions doing the same thing on Linux? At least in Windows there's Microsoft's (awful) UAC to control some of this stuff, as well as endless amounts of security apps that can check for such things - but if you do the same in Linux then you're on your own when it comes to keeping your PC secure.
Sure, Ubuntu does a good thing with extensive use of "sudo" but even I got hacked off with constantly having to use it recently to the point where I just set a root password and just "su" when I need it - fine for me because I know what I'm doing but I wouldn't want an inexperienced user doing the same thing.
I find it disturbing that, according to the article at least, this particular kid had problems working out for himself that a cassette tape is two-sided and what half of the controls on the Walkman do.
As a kid, I can remember taking some bits of machinery apart to clean or service them, and just to see how they worked. (For example, my parents were in the clothes-making/tailoring trade and I frequently messed about with old sewing machines to fix them or clean them.) I also got into electronics at a fairly young age and knew some basics about car mechanics.
It seems a shame that kids these days don't get the chance to (or are just not interested in) take things apart just to see how they work - from my perspective, I developed an "engineering brain" from a really early age that has served me well throughout my career.
We've been seeing this decline in the games industry for years with the ever-increasing numbers of derivative sequels and even different titles from different companies being copies of each other.
The "remake" is exactly the way Hollywood has gone with movies - now they've all run out of ideas, they just redo the old stuff.
Incidentally, these comments come from a big Serious Sam fan - I still play the First and Second Encounters regularly on LAN parties with friends, it really doesn't need any graphical improvements. Especially because having a few older PCs kicking around the house, it's not always necessary for friends to bring PCs over themselves since one of my older PCs will run it (as well as Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake and a few others).
I wouldn't call myself a "hardcore" gamer, only that I've been doing it as one of my hobbies for a long time.
Yes, I would consider myself a computer geek but I think you are missing the point. I get sick and tired of "garnish", namely the idea that you make a minor change to something that already exists but sell it as something completely new.
The whole point of a game is it has you wanting to play it again and again, so it really doesn't matter whether or not it's the latest FPS shooter or Solitaire in Windows. But what I do have a problem with is being subliminally bombarded with marketing and advertising (as is the case in just about every movie released today) on some kind of pretence that it's all part of the "social gaming experience" or whatever bullshit name they invent for it this week.
You, your parents, your grandparents, etc. (and mine too) all got told early in life that sometimes you can have the best fun by going out and finding it yourself, rather than just have someone dump some fun in your lap.
So don't just sit there waiting for this new revolution because it exists today - go trawl bargain bins in games shops, go find old games at car boot sales, even download an emulator a few illegal roms on the Internet if you have a mind to.
Slashdot Mirror
When are Microsoft going to learn that just because you change the name of something to make it sound "cooler", it does not mean that Joe Sixpack will immediately understand what it is and only serves to make it more of a PITA for those of us who do know what we're doing with computers.
If it's a VPN then ***PLEASE*** keep calling it VPN rather than "DirectAccess"!!! I'm far more Linux Geek than Windows Guru and my personal "Windows Experience" will hopefully end (on an admittedly positive note) with Windows XP because I see no need to upgrade to anything higher.
However, if, say, in a year's time, my nephew phones me to say he has a problem with his Windows 7 VPN link, then I can probably start giving him some good things to try to see if we can fix the problem, even though I won't have been near Windows 7 myself. If, however, he tells me the problem is with Windows 7 DirectAccess, what am I supposed to do then?
...then when you get bored pretending that you are piloting a vehicle-morphing robot, you can pretend you are Virgil Tracy rushing to the scene of a huge disaster in Thunderbird 2.
Thus you will keep your options open despite having a tiny penis.
I thoroughly recommend the Trinity Rescue Kit precisely for this purpose and for repairing and/or cloning NTFS partitions from a bootable Linux CD.
And, no, I'm nothing to do with any of the team who develop it, I came across it pretty much by accident and have used it ever since.
Dear Plastic Guitar Person
You are not, and never will be, John Lennon or Angus Young.
So put the polythene axe away and go spend your money on CDs and concerts so that those with musical talent can make a nice living from what they are doing and thus feel more inclined to make more nice music for you to listen to.
Kind Regards
A middle-aged hard rock fan who himself stopped air-guitarring when he got to about 21 years old because he suddenly realised he looked like a pillock.
I never used to do any decomposition of music before. I listened to the whole piece as if it were one monolithic, inseparable thing.
What utter rubbish!
Listening to music has been my number one hobby for over thirty years now and the reason why you and others cannot "decompose" music is that you're in a younger generation who is too caught up in running around after flashy gadgets and having very low attention spans.
If what you want is to have music playing through your ears from an iPod while you're off doing other things then good luck to you. But proper appreciation of music just comes from sitting down, listening to it properly and *not doing anything else*.
Only when you sit down and really focus on the what you're hearing can you appreciate what the different musicians are actually doing and certainly not while "beating yourself off" with a plastic guitar in front of a TV screen.
Take one metal dustbin, roll it down some stone steps, record it and then loop your recording so it's 40 minutes long and call it "Master Of Puppets".
When you've had enough, go listen to early Black Sabbath and finally understand what makes good rock music.
Though I have to admit, Metallica make me laugh whenever I see them on the TV - because they always look like they're having a race to see who can get to the end of the song first.
Steam, Sony and Microsoft figured this out ages ago. As internet connections and digital distribution become more ubiquitous, the consumers will resolve this situation themselves. Prices should be much lower and will make developers and gamers much happier.
Don't get me wrong, I love Half-Life, TF2 and Left 4 Dead as much as the next guy - but please let's not kid ourselves that anything downloadable from any of those companies, especially Steam, is particularly *cheap*.
On the day Left 4 Dead got released, here in the UK it was cheaper to buy the DVD version from Amazon that download it from Steam.
Mankind would establish the first permanent settlement on the moon which would logically be called "Alpha".
And because several hundred technicians and scientists would be working in this base, NASA would have to build special Earth-Moon transport ships that, in honour of the first Moon landing would be called "Eagles".
These Eagle craft would have interchangeable central pods that could either carry passengers or transport nuclear waste to the Moon so it could be buried on the dark side. Unfortunately, almost 30 years to the day of the first moon landing, on September 13th 1999, the build up waste would cause a massive explosion that would hurl the moon out of Earth's orbit, taking with it the moonbase people deep into the universe.
Oh wait...
Has anyone checked to see if Steve Ballmer fell out of an airliner on his way to a Windows 7 pre-launch in Asia?
I'm prepared to stand corrected here but doesn't Amazon charge a monthly fee to sell on their site?
I make a small amount of "pocket money" for myself buying a selling used PC games - I was doing it on eBay until (here in the UK at least) they forced all games to be listed with free postage (bastards!), and since I sell as auctions (not "Buy It Now") then I had to raise the start price to include postage costs in it. (This makes it more expensive to list so eBay benefit from that also.)
I did look at selling at fixed prices on Amazon but last time I looked they wanted a £25 per month subscription fee as well as taking a cut of the final sale price - and I don't sell enough volume to justify £25 per month (although I don't mind them taking their cut if it sells.)
I just think that with pretty much anything used these days, the big players are pushing the small hobbyists (or those just selling their used games) out of the marketplace.
I can't speak personally about Gamestop because I'm not in the US, but over here in the UK, the main games store is "Game" with a few other smaller chains of CD/game/DVD exchange stores.
I only really buy PC Games (we have a Wii also but the missus just uses it for Wii fit and we drag it for the occasional party game with friends) which are different to console games in that they tend to come down in price a lot quicker and "last longer" due to the fact that for most of them you can download mods and other community-created stuff that extend their playing lives anyway.
But it does amaze me that, in general for console games, the difference between the new and used prices never seems to be very much, and I would be interested how much these exchange shops pay for used games compared to what they sell them for - I guess the margin is at least 100%.
However, I think the reason the used game stores can capitalise on this is because the majority of console gamers are youngsters in the "must have it now" generation; otherwise, they'd take the time to go buy their games invariably a lot cheaper online, or just wait a few months until the actual retail price drops.
These stores are just taking advantage of an opportunity - if (like me most of the time) you don't like their prices then don't pay them; on the other hand, a kid who has to pay for his games out his pocket money probably welcomes the opportunity to sell a game he's finished so as to put some money towards his next purchase.
Funnily enough, you can buy music CDs that have the music already *ON* them.
If you hunt around diligently, you can usually buy them for less than paying for separate tracks on iTunes and have a nice plastic case and sleeve notes to read while on the toilet.
And the *really nice* thing about CDs is that the music isn't in a lossy format in the first place, so you can rip them at whatever bit rate you want to whatever format you want, whilst still keeping the original disks anally alphabetically filed on a nice shelf somewhere.
Oh, and if your hard disk goes tits up and you couldn't afford to buy a backup device because you were buying blank CDs and paying too much for downloadable music from iTunes, you don't need to redownload all your music - you just *RIP THE CD* again!
It's amazing what technology they come up with these days - especially this *new* CD technology that surpasses iTunes *and* gives you better value for money!
Kindly phuck off.
Regards
BT
I was at a neighborhood party this weekend, which provided something like a random sample of the population. You know, morons.
Presumably you are the guy who works it IT that leaves his phone ringing for at least 15 rings before picking it up and who's first response to the caller is always "Have you turned it off and on again?"
I'm surprised you were even invited to the party - as you sound like a totally arrogant prick.
Before I moved over to Gmail a few years ago, I was using my ISP-provided email and because their spam filtering wasn't that hot, I used to filter it locally on my Linux server using procmail, SpamAssassin and scoring. I used to tweak the procmail rules about once a week but, certainly for the emails that me and the missus were receiving, I used to get between 95-98% correct spam detection rates.
Additionally, I wrote a script that would look at mail headers and fire off an automated email to the "abuse@" email address of the originating email domain.
I keep meaning to get another email address somewhere where I there is either poor spam filtering or where it can be turned off so that I can set up procmail again to have a play with spam filters as I got a kick out of working out rules to defeat spammers.
Well in my days of playing 1st Edition D&D during the late 1970s it was "Role-Playing Game" but when Doom and other FPS games came out, it also became "Rocket-Propelled Grenade".
So I guess for a game like OpenArena, either could apply.
Is there a difference?
... if "urine" Italy, you will get faster Internet - though I wonder if that means the ISP have bigger "logs".
And I don't envy the guy who has to clean the R/C submarines afterwards, either!
I think you had better say more as I for one have no idea what point you're trying to make.
Mono is an open source suite of tools designed to provide a common programming platform that happens to integrate with DotNET.
Besides which, anyone who complains about Microsoft setting the default search engine probably needs to be spending less time on Slashdot and more time learning how their computer works so they can just change it back if they don't like it.
As a mainly Linux user with a couple of XP machines, even I don't see it as a problem...
For those non-British residents amongst you, "The Sun" is an utter rag of a newspaper that uses any excuse to print parts of the female anatomy for the sake of an article - Page 3 of the paper daily has a topless model.
I'm a lover of the female anatomy as much as any other red-blooded male, but ignore anything published in it or anything else owned by Rupert Murdoch.
I would not even wipe my backside on it following a visit to the toilet, just in case I caught something from it.
Here in the UK, we're enjoying some of the hottest temperatures for many years.
This means that the pale-skinned Apple fanbois are all indoors today for fear of burning to a crisp.
This in turn means that they're spending more time on Slashdot today.
Which leads to the inevitable conclusion as to why a perfectly reasonable post like yours gets modded down - just because you have the blatant audacity to criticise their beloved company.
Bring it on, fanbois, I've karma to burn at the moment...
Yes, but much as I am a big fan of Linux and it being the OS I most commonly use now, the market doesn't work like that.
You simply can't expect people who do want the functionality in certain Windows-only apps to suddenly stop using those apps whilst they switch to Linux and wait for the software companies to catch up by porting over to Linux.
Wine is a great piece of software but running a Windows app under Wine, which is in many cases a trivial thing for we Linux geeks to do, is a lot more complicated for those people who are happily able to use their PCs at the moment without being tech-heads in computers.
Call me a snob but I'm not sure I want mass migrations over to Linux from Windows. Sure, when friends & family have tried Ubuntu or other distros, I'm first to stick my hand up and volunteer my help to them if they need it - but do we *REALLY* want inexperienced Windows users who currently run all their apps with administrator permissions doing the same thing on Linux? At least in Windows there's Microsoft's (awful) UAC to control some of this stuff, as well as endless amounts of security apps that can check for such things - but if you do the same in Linux then you're on your own when it comes to keeping your PC secure.
Sure, Ubuntu does a good thing with extensive use of "sudo" but even I got hacked off with constantly having to use it recently to the point where I just set a root password and just "su" when I need it - fine for me because I know what I'm doing but I wouldn't want an inexperienced user doing the same thing.
I find it disturbing that, according to the article at least, this particular kid had problems working out for himself that a cassette tape is two-sided and what half of the controls on the Walkman do.
As a kid, I can remember taking some bits of machinery apart to clean or service them, and just to see how they worked. (For example, my parents were in the clothes-making/tailoring trade and I frequently messed about with old sewing machines to fix them or clean them.) I also got into electronics at a fairly young age and knew some basics about car mechanics.
It seems a shame that kids these days don't get the chance to (or are just not interested in) take things apart just to see how they work - from my perspective, I developed an "engineering brain" from a really early age that has served me well throughout my career.
We've been seeing this decline in the games industry for years with the ever-increasing numbers of derivative sequels and even different titles from different companies being copies of each other.
The "remake" is exactly the way Hollywood has gone with movies - now they've all run out of ideas, they just redo the old stuff.
Incidentally, these comments come from a big Serious Sam fan - I still play the First and Second Encounters regularly on LAN parties with friends, it really doesn't need any graphical improvements. Especially because having a few older PCs kicking around the house, it's not always necessary for friends to bring PCs over themselves since one of my older PCs will run it (as well as Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake and a few others).
I wouldn't call myself a "hardcore" gamer, only that I've been doing it as one of my hobbies for a long time.
Yes, I would consider myself a computer geek but I think you are missing the point. I get sick and tired of "garnish", namely the idea that you make a minor change to something that already exists but sell it as something completely new.
The whole point of a game is it has you wanting to play it again and again, so it really doesn't matter whether or not it's the latest FPS shooter or Solitaire in Windows. But what I do have a problem with is being subliminally bombarded with marketing and advertising (as is the case in just about every movie released today) on some kind of pretence that it's all part of the "social gaming experience" or whatever bullshit name they invent for it this week.
You, your parents, your grandparents, etc. (and mine too) all got told early in life that sometimes you can have the best fun by going out and finding it yourself, rather than just have someone dump some fun in your lap.
So don't just sit there waiting for this new revolution because it exists today - go trawl bargain bins in games shops, go find old games at car boot sales, even download an emulator a few illegal roms on the Internet if you have a mind to.