A) It causes headaches, because if they mess something up, two people lose work time. The person who messed up their system and now can't use their programs, and the tech that needs to fix it can't go fix something else or support something else. At small shops the tech is generally both the tech and the system administrator, so this can be a real problem.
B) Perfectly fine, but site support shouldn't support it. Also causes some security issues since they're bringing in uncontrolled hardware onto the other side of the firewall. You also might need to load up software, which can cause licensing issues.
That's why if it's more important to need a system up all the time than to have it be user controlled, I think we should go back to dumb terminals. They've got some really neat ones out these days.
When you do it right, no one notices, when you screw up, everyone damn well knows who was responsible.
It's thankless.
One point of contention: Desktops are increasingly being locked down to the point where there's no point in having individual PCs anymore. Most users will never install a program, and most users shouldn't.
No, it wasn't, wasn't the assignment. Easily could have been however. Apart from that, most code these days is OS dependant, not machine dependant.
Yes, I have. Worshipping the tin god and all.
Already would've been, everyone else used non-ANSI C syntax.
I'm aware. I was anal retentive and young, I used to optimize my code down to the bit and would stay up nights figuring out how to make it as tight as possible. I thought I could write a better quick sort.
The point was, that type of thinking isn't encouraged.
When I was still in college I had a typical sort of assignment. Could use any language you wanted. Basically was just a simple sort/db.
I wrote all of the sorting routines in inline assembly. The bulk was in C.
It was small, efficient, fairly portable (so long as you stuck to x86 chips) and faster than anything anyone else had in the class.
I got a C, because "No one uses assembly anymore, it's not efficient." The rules of efficiency have been rewritten, it seems to be drifting towards not how good your program is, but how fast you can crank it out.
COMPLETELY off topic here (hell tangents make any conversation better), but here's the story: I had just gone in, bought a bottle of rum, walked out put my license back in the car (I keep it in my center box). Walked back in to buy the mix I'd forgotten (left the ID, I'm buying mix for christ sakes and I'd just left).
They asked me for my ID again. Checked the bottle, no alcohol (brand isn't alcoholic). Talked to the manager (since I'm getting sick of having to walk out to my car to get my ID for matches as well) who said that since it was grouped with alcohol I needed ID. Admitted it contained not a drop of alcohol. I got irritated, eventually ended up going to a grocery store a block away and buying strawberries and mix for 1/2 the price. At this same rite aid I could've bought all of the components of this mix without being carded.
Also, where I live you can buy liquor pretty much anywhere that has a license to sell it, beer at groceries, and we even have drive through liqour stores.
Evidentally now both fire and strawberry puree are controlled substances. On this same occassion I also asked them if I could buy margarita salt... I couldn't.
It's just the rite aids too, I can go to the local liquor store (used to be a state store) and buy non-alcoholic stuff without ID.
That was my point exactly, at precisely the same time (12:53).
I'm tired of treating linux dedicated servers as big news. Seems a lot of people see the word linux and then ignore the words "dedicated server" immediately following it. I like to think of it as the intentionally blind affect (pull the wool over your eyes and chant tralalalala, happy place everything is going along nicely now).
Evidentally, enough people run the dedicated server under linux to make it worthwhile to keep an up to date port of it, but they're not willing to put forth the effort to actually port the game (and half-life has only been around for HOW long now?).
Doubt we'll need 64-bit computing power to have 500 people playing on a counterstrike server. Doom 3 however....
Ok, so most of the FPS companies are great about releasing servers for linux, but only ID ever releases the game itself.
There STILL isn't a linux version of half-life OR counterstrike that can be played natively under linux... unless you count WINE (not an emulator, still not native).
So for those of you that still have windows boxes and a linux box to dabble with, this is great news I'm sure. Those of us who have gone Linux native however, still can't game... 64 bit or 32 bit. (We gots 16 and 8 bit console emulated ROMs tho!)
Bruce already summed it up above, and a reply to the first thread I started on the original article posted by big_groohere and reformatted for easy reading by Jah-Wren Ryelhere sums up what happened in the AT&T vs BSD court case.
They're highly informative in case you missed them in the last article.
Sorry for the ommission, BSD and linux are unix-likes. Apple is basically next-step[CIC] (mach), I'm sure I ommitted more. I was more going for the traditional UNIX(tm)es.
My appologies to all of the Apple fans out there, but what you're running is in the same field as Linux, and to a limited extent Plan9, but not really a UNIX (damned trademarks).
That would give me laugh out loud for days, especially considering BSD came into being because AT&T were being irrational. Not a scrap of unix code in it.
Even the thought of it is making little tears of joy run down my face.
in this case they're defensive, they've cease and desisted with them before. Just so happens, IBM likes linux, so they're the good guys for now (and look to be for the forseable future unless they go into software or something).
Because IBM sells hardware and support, and hardware is an oligopoly, they can use this vast store of evil software patents they have to help out the open source community. This generates good will and ultimately improves the product they place on their hardware.
Look at Sun, solaris upgrades are free for Sparcs (one could argue the OS itself was).
"It's a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company," said Jonathan Eunice, an Illuminata analyst. "Really what beat SCO is not any problem with what IBM did; it's what the market decided. This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can't get by winning in the marketplace." - Best and most accurate quote on SCO/Caldera ever imo.
Seriously tho, IBM says nothing for linux to fear but FUD itself (literally). Caldera/SCO dropped every single ball they've EVER been thrown, so much so that every thread ever started or ended here is basically a litanny of their mistakes. Sun makes UNIX, they're still alive, IBM still makes AIX, they're certainly alive, poor SCO is dead in the water so they sue.
My guess is the next thing they'll do is sell all their IP to microsoft, and microsoft will use it as a giant club against other vendors. So it's in our best interests to see them stay afloat, otherwise some other patent-abusing, money hungry group of corporate bastards with more money will have all of their "intellectual property" and will actually have the cash to use it. IBM has the cash to hold things up in court long enough to A> Have the costs of the settlement (if ever reached) be deferred by inflation and B> Have the underlying patents they're being sued for actually expire.
Plus, IBM is the former evil empire, they have no qualms whatsoever using their vast horde of defensive patents to counter sue someone into the ground.
Cool tech, two LCDs seperated by a screen rather than glasses, but the eye strain problem seems to be a killer. Think of all the problems with eye strain from a regular monitor (ergonomics, hysteria to some degree, possibly law suits).
The CNN and news.com.com articles were a little short on details, the each eye recieving a seperate image makes me think that the alignment of the two screens is horizontally side by side, rather than one behind the other with a slight offset.
I could've missed something however.
Anyway, I seem to remember a projection based holo game (was some kinda wierd space western) I played in the arcade in the early 90's, it used various projectors onto various pieces of glass to generate a 3D image (and looked pretty good if I recall). Isn't there better tech out there for true 3D rather than a flatscreen LCD?
It actually is against federal law to use the SSN as a means of identification.
Get a credit card or pass a credit check without giving one in the US. You won't be able to, which means you can't rent a car, get most services (phone, water, power, gas) turned on, etc. It's de facto compulsory, and de facto a national credit identification card you can't change the number to. Even if you are right, it's being used that way and the banking industry is a 1000 lb gorilla that isn't going to want to change that until it's cost effective for them to do so.
SSN's are valuable because you can use them for identity theft. You can use them for identity theft because they're a national ID card. Something "they" (the mythical them) say they are not.
Apart from that all of the credit reporting, etc. goes through shadow companies that you can do nothing to if they screw you over (IE issue a credit card to a you that's not you).
We need to make using an SSN for identification purposes entirely illegal, credit card companies and banks be damned. Or say it is a National ID and come up with a better way of securing identities.
Otherwise by the time us non-paying plebes get to see the articles, they will be/.ed.
So the future becomes the present and the present becomes the past or some such, and non-paying Slashdot becomes News for Nerds. Stuff that mattered. Or is that Sites that Existed?
My head hurts, wish taco had phrased it differently.
Far be it for me to break from my well-established tradition of idiocy on this UID... but isn't what you just described a console?
Apart from that I can count the number of decent new cross-platform games that come out each year without having to take my shoes off... While looking at pr0n as well.
Maybe I misunderstood what you meant by cross-platform, if you count consoles then the number of "non-exclusive" games certainly dwarfs the cynicism I expressed above.
Why do we need this? OpenGL isn't going to die because MS pulled out, they rarely contribute anything to anyone anyway (I can't be bothered to google for a good link, but google for "MS innovations" and you'll see some good MS bashing with facts on their ability to "innovate"). I'd dare you to find the last thing MS actually contributed to the OpenGL spec. Hardware wise we have the console market which possesses tightly controlled hardware, and no incentive to standardize API's, and the PC market. The PC gaming market is pretty much ruled by MS and the best/easiest API will win out. Even if everyone used openGL, and quite a few games do support it, I still doubt we'd see a lot of say native linux games as a result (judging by the present).
I don't even play games much, but id/Carmack are quite good about releasing things on all platforms pretty much simultaneously and that still hasn't killed Gate's empire or even dented it. You could probably make a DVD right now that would boot up a copy of say Return to Castle Wolfenstien with no problems based off of knoppix[sic]. Go do it, we'll see what happens, should be fun.
Process limitations (the scheduler), default is a max of 512 processes. Treating threads as processes (which limits you when you're doing certain things...).
Supposedly going to be fixed by 2.6 (also improving the heap). So within the next few years?
You forget my friend, that most of these chipset/mainboard specs are defined by the CPU vendor. Of which currently there are only 2 major players, and soon there will probably be only one.
Market forces don't really factor in to PC's if you think about it. The frameworks of yesterday could still work, they would just require more development time to get all the whizbang features into the smaller memory space and cpu pipe. If those features are even needed. Windows is what has pushed CPU's and CPU's are what has pushed Windows into being what it is today.
PC economics is odd, apart from that, it's not like economics is a science. I mean come on, they can't even predict the stock market tommorrow, even weathermen are better than that.
Excellent point, but since when do you have to upgrade everything at once?
I mean come on, I can't think of a processor upgrade yet that forced me to actually replace an entire system (graphics card, peripherals, etc.). This system is more like buying a PS3 over a PS1 than your typical computer upgrade. I'll swap a mainboard out, no problem.
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excellent post, countered fallacy with fallacy.
A) It causes headaches, because if they mess something up, two people lose work time. The person who messed up their system and now can't use their programs, and the tech that needs to fix it can't go fix something else or support something else. At small shops the tech is generally both the tech and the system administrator, so this can be a real problem.
B) Perfectly fine, but site support shouldn't support it. Also causes some security issues since they're bringing in uncontrolled hardware onto the other side of the firewall. You also might need to load up software, which can cause licensing issues.
That's why if it's more important to need a system up all the time than to have it be user controlled, I think we should go back to dumb terminals. They've got some really neat ones out these days.
I've been wondering about why we have PC's at work anymore with the lockdowns, actually today I wrote a thing in my journal about it.
Glad to see I'm not the only one going, "why the hell are we doing this?"
being invisible is tough to do.
When you do it right, no one notices, when you screw up, everyone damn well knows who was responsible.
It's thankless.
One point of contention: Desktops are increasingly being locked down to the point where there's no point in having individual PCs anymore. Most users will never install a program, and most users shouldn't.
No, it wasn't, wasn't the assignment. Easily could have been however. Apart from that, most code these days is OS dependant, not machine dependant.
Yes, I have. Worshipping the tin god and all.
Already would've been, everyone else used non-ANSI C syntax.
I'm aware. I was anal retentive and young, I used to optimize my code down to the bit and would stay up nights figuring out how to make it as tight as possible. I thought I could write a better quick sort.
The point was, that type of thinking isn't encouraged.
Here's a funny story for you.
When I was still in college I had a typical sort of assignment. Could use any language you wanted. Basically was just a simple sort/db.
I wrote all of the sorting routines in inline assembly. The bulk was in C.
It was small, efficient, fairly portable (so long as you stuck to x86 chips) and faster than anything anyone else had in the class.
I got a C, because "No one uses assembly anymore, it's not efficient." The rules of efficiency have been rewritten, it seems to be drifting towards not how good your program is, but how fast you can crank it out.
COMPLETELY off topic here (hell tangents make any conversation better), but here's the story:
I had just gone in, bought a bottle of rum, walked out put my license back in the car (I keep it in my center box). Walked back in to buy the mix I'd forgotten (left the ID, I'm buying mix for christ sakes and I'd just left).
They asked me for my ID again. Checked the bottle, no alcohol (brand isn't alcoholic). Talked to the manager (since I'm getting sick of having to walk out to my car to get my ID for matches as well) who said that since it was grouped with alcohol I needed ID. Admitted it contained not a drop of alcohol. I got irritated, eventually ended up going to a grocery store a block away and buying strawberries and mix for 1/2 the price. At this same rite aid I could've bought all of the components of this mix without being carded.
Also, where I live you can buy liquor pretty much anywhere that has a license to sell it, beer at groceries, and we even have drive through liqour stores.
Evidentally now both fire and strawberry puree are controlled substances. On this same occassion I also asked them if I could buy margarita salt... I couldn't.
It's just the rite aids too, I can go to the local liquor store (used to be a state store) and buy non-alcoholic stuff without ID.
Things like that just strike me as ridiculous.
That was my point exactly, at precisely the same time (12:53).
I'm tired of treating linux dedicated servers as big news. Seems a lot of people see the word linux and then ignore the words "dedicated server" immediately following it. I like to think of it as the intentionally blind affect (pull the wool over your eyes and chant tralalalala, happy place everything is going along nicely now).
Evidentally, enough people run the dedicated server under linux to make it worthwhile to keep an up to date port of it, but they're not willing to put forth the effort to actually port the game (and half-life has only been around for HOW long now?).
Doubt we'll need 64-bit computing power to have 500 people playing on a counterstrike server. Doom 3 however....
Ok, so most of the FPS companies are great about releasing servers for linux, but only ID ever releases the game itself.
There STILL isn't a linux version of half-life OR counterstrike that can be played natively under linux... unless you count WINE (not an emulator, still not native).
So for those of you that still have windows boxes and a linux box to dabble with, this is great news I'm sure. Those of us who have gone Linux native however, still can't game... 64 bit or 32 bit. (We gots 16 and 8 bit console emulated ROMs tho!)
I'd rather be in a wheelchair than be cancelled by the WB.
Bruce already summed it up above, and a reply to the first thread I started on the original article posted by big_groo here and reformatted for easy reading by Jah-Wren Ryel here sums up what happened in the AT&T vs BSD court case.
They're highly informative in case you missed them in the last article.
Sueing IBM for patent infringement is like playing russian roulette with a semi-auto gun..... and going first, and second, and third... etc.
Sorry for the ommission, BSD and linux are unix-likes. Apple is basically next-step[CIC] (mach), I'm sure I ommitted more. I was more going for the traditional UNIX(tm)es.
My appologies to all of the Apple fans out there, but what you're running is in the same field as Linux, and to a limited extent Plan9, but not really a UNIX (damned trademarks).
That would give me laugh out loud for days, especially considering BSD came into being because AT&T were being irrational. Not a scrap of unix code in it.
Even the thought of it is making little tears of joy run down my face.
in this case they're defensive, they've cease and desisted with them before. Just so happens, IBM likes linux, so they're the good guys for now (and look to be for the forseable future unless they go into software or something).
Because IBM sells hardware and support, and hardware is an oligopoly, they can use this vast store of evil software patents they have to help out the open source community. This generates good will and ultimately improves the product they place on their hardware.
Look at Sun, solaris upgrades are free for Sparcs (one could argue the OS itself was).
"It's a fairly end-of-life move for the stockholders and managers of that company," said Jonathan Eunice, an Illuminata analyst. "Really what beat SCO is not any problem with what IBM did; it's what the market decided. This is a way of salvaging value out of the SCO franchise they can't get by winning in the marketplace." - Best and most accurate quote on SCO/Caldera ever imo.
Seriously tho, IBM says nothing for linux to fear but FUD itself (literally). Caldera/SCO dropped every single ball they've EVER been thrown, so much so that every thread ever started or ended here is basically a litanny of their mistakes. Sun makes UNIX, they're still alive, IBM still makes AIX, they're certainly alive, poor SCO is dead in the water so they sue.
My guess is the next thing they'll do is sell all their IP to microsoft, and microsoft will use it as a giant club against other vendors. So it's in our best interests to see them stay afloat, otherwise some other patent-abusing, money hungry group of corporate bastards with more money will have all of their "intellectual property" and will actually have the cash to use it. IBM has the cash to hold things up in court long enough to A> Have the costs of the settlement (if ever reached) be deferred by inflation and B> Have the underlying patents they're being sued for actually expire.
Plus, IBM is the former evil empire, they have no qualms whatsoever using their vast horde of defensive patents to counter sue someone into the ground.
Cool tech, two LCDs seperated by a screen rather than glasses, but the eye strain problem seems to be a killer. Think of all the problems with eye strain from a regular monitor (ergonomics, hysteria to some degree, possibly law suits).
The CNN and news.com.com articles were a little short on details, the each eye recieving a seperate image makes me think that the alignment of the two screens is horizontally side by side, rather than one behind the other with a slight offset.
I could've missed something however.
Anyway, I seem to remember a projection based holo game (was some kinda wierd space western) I played in the arcade in the early 90's, it used various projectors onto various pieces of glass to generate a 3D image (and looked pretty good if I recall). Isn't there better tech out there for true 3D rather than a flatscreen LCD?
It actually is against federal law to use the SSN as a means of identification.
Get a credit card or pass a credit check without giving one in the US. You won't be able to, which means you can't rent a car, get most services (phone, water, power, gas) turned on, etc. It's de facto compulsory, and de facto a national credit identification card you can't change the number to. Even if you are right, it's being used that way and the banking industry is a 1000 lb gorilla that isn't going to want to change that until it's cost effective for them to do so.
SSN's are valuable because you can use them for identity theft. You can use them for identity theft because they're a national ID card. Something "they" (the mythical them) say they are not.
Apart from that all of the credit reporting, etc. goes through shadow companies that you can do nothing to if they screw you over (IE issue a credit card to a you that's not you).
We need to make using an SSN for identification purposes entirely illegal, credit card companies and banks be damned. Or say it is a National ID and come up with a better way of securing identities.
Otherwise by the time us non-paying plebes get to see the articles, they will be /.ed.
So the future becomes the present and the present becomes the past or some such, and non-paying Slashdot becomes News for Nerds. Stuff that mattered. Or is that Sites that Existed?
My head hurts, wish taco had phrased it differently.
Far be it for me to break from my well-established tradition of idiocy on this UID... but isn't what you just described a console?
Apart from that I can count the number of decent new cross-platform games that come out each year without having to take my shoes off... While looking at pr0n as well.
Maybe I misunderstood what you meant by cross-platform, if you count consoles then the number of "non-exclusive" games certainly dwarfs the cynicism I expressed above.
Why do we need this? OpenGL isn't going to die because MS pulled out, they rarely contribute anything to anyone anyway (I can't be bothered to google for a good link, but google for "MS innovations" and you'll see some good MS bashing with facts on their ability to "innovate"). I'd dare you to find the last thing MS actually contributed to the OpenGL spec. Hardware wise we have the console market which possesses tightly controlled hardware, and no incentive to standardize API's, and the PC market. The PC gaming market is pretty much ruled by MS and the best/easiest API will win out. Even if everyone used openGL, and quite a few games do support it, I still doubt we'd see a lot of say native linux games as a result (judging by the present).
I don't even play games much, but id/Carmack are quite good about releasing things on all platforms pretty much simultaneously and that still hasn't killed Gate's empire or even dented it. You could probably make a DVD right now that would boot up a copy of say Return to Castle Wolfenstien with no problems based off of knoppix[sic]. Go do it, we'll see what happens, should be fun.
Process limitations (the scheduler), default is a max of 512 processes. Treating threads as processes (which limits you when you're doing certain things...). Supposedly going to be fixed by 2.6 (also improving the heap). So within the next few years?
You forget my friend, that most of these chipset/mainboard specs are defined by the CPU vendor. Of which currently there are only 2 major players, and soon there will probably be only one.
Market forces don't really factor in to PC's if you think about it. The frameworks of yesterday could still work, they would just require more development time to get all the whizbang features into the smaller memory space and cpu pipe. If those features are even needed. Windows is what has pushed CPU's and CPU's are what has pushed Windows into being what it is today.
PC economics is odd, apart from that, it's not like economics is a science. I mean come on, they can't even predict the stock market tommorrow, even weathermen are better than that.
True, but it would be more efficient for desktop usage and less for server usage....
We need a windowing fork, one for servers, one for desktops. The compromises between the two just make things a little silly.
Excellent point, but since when do you have to upgrade everything at once?
I mean come on, I can't think of a processor upgrade yet that forced me to actually replace an entire system (graphics card, peripherals, etc.). This system is more like buying a PS3 over a PS1 than your typical computer upgrade. I'll swap a mainboard out, no problem.
Surely you can admit that?