...probably owes a lot to Tetris. When I worked at FuncoLand, Tetris was the most bought and sold game we had for that system. It just had this long-term appeal.
My step mom interrupted my games all the time. The only time she ever apologized for it was when I was playing Tetris. That was the only game she'd play on it, so we finally came to an understanding. Heh.
Ahhh that's right. The p3 550 was the 'minimum requirement', and it started a huge debate on the game site that I frequented. Anybody remember next-generation.com (later called dailyradar.com)? Heh.
People were upset that the minimum requirements were so high at the time. Assuming that's true (and who knows, right?) that would have been rather steep in the year 2000. Personally, I think they made a good choice with XBOX. Halo will probably be purchased frequently for the next two years. That's harder to do on a PC where the market is already over-saturated with FPS shooters.
About your sig:
"chmod a+x/bin/laden" -- My boss used to have a poster on his wall that was similar: 'rm -f/bin/laden'
Yeah, damn him for submitting a story he was covering that interests Slashdot users. Only other people should be able to report stories, never the ones that know the most about what the article is saying.
My mom IS using linux, and it's easy for me.:) This is the first box she uses and I don't get questions like:
Where is the start button? Why my screen turns blue? What happen with the E icon?
Okay, so you're not getting questions that people don't normally ask anyway. Does she ask questions like these:
- Why are there 6 programs that do the same thing? - Why does it keep asking for my root password? - Why is there no sound? - Why can't I find anything at the store for my computer? - Why don't the websites I visit look right?
Sad thing is, when your mom and sisters decide they want to do more with their computer than you have set up for them, you're going to get called again. They're not going to be able to go to the store and buy the progs or games they want.
I'm not shooting down what you said in your post. I'm just saying that there is a big limitation to that strategy that others should consider. Of course, I wish you luck.
"I'm surprised noone as modded you as "troll" yet."
He wasn't modded down as troll because he's right. Why would she install RPMs? Why WOULDN'T she? Face it, you build your mom a Linux box, and she's stuck with whatever you gave her. She cannot go to the store and buy new apps. At best she could get them on-line. So either she learns how to do RPM's, or she doesn't add anything to her computer.
Haven't you noticed all the times people have to use the phrase "All she really needs..." in order to explain their ability to use Linux as her OS? Don't you see a problem with that?
Who says it's anything to do with bandwidth? Maybe I'm unusual, but I've never hit full bandwidth with Kazaa. Instead, I get 1 5KB/s stream for a few hours. I may have used as much as 400kbits at one time for a small bursty period, but I have trouble getting a number of connections going once all at the same time.
I think the real reason they're doing it is because of the ridiculously high number of requests that go through. The overhead of the chattiness between P2P users is enough to make the connection lag. I ran Kazaa for 2 weeks and then turned it off so I could play QUake. Was I able to? No. I was getting so many inoming requests from Kazaa users not realizing that I had shut down that my game was getting 2-second lags every 10 seconds or so.
I'm sure that at some point, this is a problem for my provider. Fortunately, they've never contacted me about it.
It took a little digging around, but I finally found a pic of one of the test pilots in training. Click here. I'm surprised at how athletic she appears for a Russian woman.
Interesting stuff. Was I a supernode? I honestly don't know. However, the traffic bombardment lasted for 2-3 days, not 10 minutes. (That may be proof it was supernode, no idea.)
With that amount of time involved, it's possible my IP could have been given to somebody and be affected by it. I'm not saying it'd happen so frequently that AT&T'd be punting users left and right, but it could be a '2-day' problem that ATTBI would have to credit back.
Fortunately, AT&T doesn't reassign IP's too often. I'm only aware of them doing it once. I vaguely remember heearing it's done once a month, but have never personally verified that. It's been a long time since I've peeked into my own IP.
Again, thanks for the info. Never knew about SuperNode before.:)
Yeah I'm aware of that. As a matter of fact, quite a few of the eps I've found on Kazaa are D.A.P.'s. Until Best Brains can get DVD's made of all the episodes, I don't have a lot of choice.
Good news is, though, that they do have a few eps available on DVD and VHS. Hopefully more will trickle down over time.
Oo oo I did run across a very early ep of MST3k back before Kevin Murphy did the voice of Servo. That was interesting to see heh.
You are failing to see his point because you're focusing in on only one of his arguments and trying to poke a hole in it. If you truely understood his point, then you'd realize what he's saying is that Linux's 'technical superiority' has very little influence with the average consumer. Windows, and OSX to a lesser extent, have much better consumer focus.
Using Windows, your mom could go to Office Depot, CompUSA, Best Buy, well just about anywhere and buy new progs to use on her computer. Plus, she'd have no trouble installing them. Linux is not at that point and probably won't see it for at least 3 or 4 years.
When she buys a digital camera or a scanner, the CD that comes with it will have the drivers for any flavor of Windows. Linux? Nope. She'll haveta learn not only how to go get the drivers, but how to unpack and install them as well. She'll have to know much more about Linux (like the root password) than any Windows user would ever have to.
The reason you didn't see this is likely because you're close minded and don't think MS could ever do anything right. I'm not so much picking on you about it, but I've seen a lot of this attitude in the Slashdot community. If the Linux development community has the same attitude, I fear that Linux may never get off the ground as a Windows killer.
It is possible to take Linux and make it an awesome desktop OS. Look at what Apple did with BSD. Linux developers should consider doing that as well. You all would be shocked at how successful Linux would be if they were to imitate Apple.
P2P generates a lot of babble with very low throughput. It's decentralized nature makes it really easy to keep it going, but truth be told, the amount of data flying around just to get to where you're going presents a huge problem.
Frankly, I'm a little surprised P2P hasn't caused a larger ruckus than it has. I think that the devleopers of technologies like this should look into ways of reducing the chatter and making it more optimal. I mean think about it, the ISP's not going to care if your 1.5 megabit connection's downloading 4 128 streams. Your ISP is going to care, though, if everybody who uses it is being bombarded with "Hello? Are you there?!?" requests on commonly used P2P ports to the point that the connection's of little use. The last time I turned off Kazaa, it took 3 days for my connection to return to normal.
"At what point of blocking a person's internet capability does this become a breach of contract? "
If you're interfering with other people's connections, then you are breaching contract. I'm not talking about bandwidth hogging, I'm talking about IP addresses.
Let me share a little experience I had with you. I had Kazaa running for a couple of weeks to get some eps of MST3k. When I turned it off, I discovered my IP address was being bombarded with hundreds and hundreds of kazaa users sending requests to the port Kazaa used. The number of these requests was so high that I could barely use the internet, and Quake was a joke.
If ATT&T had rotated addresses, somebody else would have inhereted my garbage. Imagine that for a sec: One day, your internet connection goes to crap, and AT&T has no clue as to why. Chances are pretty good that'll cause customers to blame AT&T's service without realizing the true cause of it.
In that case, it is possible that your use of Kazaa could severely interfere with other people's internet experience. The more Kazaa users there are out there, the more likely it is going to happen to somebody. The one who gets burned the most is the ISP.
I don't agree with what they're doing (personally I think they should send me a cable modem that has a built in firewall so I can stop the kazaa traffic myself), but I understand it.
Only the ISP's know what their real intentions are, but that's something else to consider when you use a prog like that. Now you know why I stopped using it.
Before I comment on this, I just want to be clear that I don't support blocking of ports etc. However, my use of Kazaa opened up some insight into how it works, and why ISP's would kill it.
I used Kazaa solidly for a couple of weeks, trying to get a few eps of MST3k. When I was done, I shut down Kazaa and moved on. When I went to go play Quake, I noticed I had low ping times, but I was still getting intermitting lagging that was ruining my game.
I figured out what happened. Kazaa users were constantly bombarding my IP address with requests. This was happening so often that my connection was getting lagged from it. If AT&T had switched over my IP address, some other user would have gotten all that garbage. It is very possible that this isn't about bandwidth at all, but it's affect on other customers.
Only the ISPs really know for sure, but it is understandable, tho regrettable.
...that this article ran shortly after the articles pointing out Linux's flaws as a desktop OS?
If people want their moms running *nix, get them a Macintosh with OSX. Apple had the right idea, and Linux developers should be eyeballing them very carefully.
Make fun of Windows all you want, but the simple fact of the matter is that it is day and night easier to use than Linux when placed in front of 'a mother'. Want to install your USB camera? Plug it in. Oops, does it need a driver? Put the CD that came with the camera in.
It's not just a matter of Windows being easier to use, but it is better supported too. You're not going to buy a digital camera with Linux drivers shipped on the CD.
Let's be realistic here: If you set up a Linux box for your mother, she is stuck with the software you put on it. She's not gonna know how to.TAR or.Z or any of that other crap. She's not going to recompile any software. I doubt she'll even use RPM . With a Windows (or even a Mac) box, she can go to the store, buy a prog, slap the CD in, and get going.
Linux needs: a.) Better desktop support, i.e. fix the problems mentioned in that article a couple of days back. b.) Software, on the shelves, in stores. c.) To have a Desktop distro that doesn't require that mommy dearest go type in badly spelt, unintuitive commands in order to muck with things.
This is not flamebait or trolling people, this is exactly what is holding Linux back as a 'Windows killer'. Some of the Slashdot Community needs to face the fact that both Microsoft and Apple did quite a few important things right. The karma I've burned trying to explain this emphasizes my point.
"It's like saying 'or why do we need a X button to close a window when alt-f4 does the trick?"
No no, Alt+f4 is a Windows thing. Here's what does the trick:
1.) Open a Shell window 2.) Log in as Root 3.) Then type 'ps axu | grep my_process_name' (replacing 'my process name' with the name of your window...' and get the GID or UID to indetify it. 4.) Type in: "wcls -xywzvbeha p:(put in the U/GID here
That is so much more powerful than Alt+f4 because once you put in the window ID then you can't possibly close the wrong program by accident!
"1. No 'best' browser. Gosh, how about the nice thing we call choice?"
Heh. Like anybody's going to know that 'Knoquerer' is a web browser until they read about it somewhere. As a matter of fact, there are way too many choices. I just installed Redhat the other day (I'm a Windows guy), and I'm still trying to figure out wtf all those programs are. I was actually hoping I could find an advert or something so I could get an idea which of the 6 text editors I should use.
"4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things. Yeah, reading a book or taking a class (or searching online) is so hard. When will people realize that a computer it a techinical thing? You have to be willing to do a little homework, even with a mac (if you've never used one)."
Yeah, everybody should go take classes to use Linux when they typically don't need to with Mac or Windows. This couldn't possibly be representative of a real obvious design problem with using Linux as a desktop replacement. I suggest you gander over the direction of OSX (built on BSD) before you say it's okay to demand people take classes. Mac users don't even need to know the root password. Damn good design if you ask me.
"8. Sound support. Ok, if you want professional audio production cards, you got me, but for most other sound cards there just isn't a problem."
err Im not sure that's what he meant. I installed RedHat and by default it didn't like my sound card. I finally got 'sndconfig' to work, and it played sound, but guess what? KDE still, for some reason, cannot play sounds. I have NFI why it's like that. I have NFI where to go fix this. Sound Server's not helping me much. I'm still exploring this issue, but the fact I had to run sndconfig at all is a huge design flaw for general use. Windows (and OSX presumably) kicks Linux's butt in usability for fixing probs like that.
Linux is powerful and neat and all. But if the Linux community has aspirations of making it into a 'Windows Killer', then they need to address nearly all of those issues. A lot of people think that MS put a gun to people's heads and made them buy an inferior product. But the truth is that lots of people bought Windows because they can use it. A good UI overall design can make up for low stability and a few bugs.
The Linux Community should be observing what all MS and Apple did right in the usability design of their products instead of trying to fix the problems they see with it. They're going to have trouble getting adopted by a broader audience until this is done.
That's possible. I don't remember. I remember a news story that said the ending was spoiled by the website. I have no interest in Survivor so I never followed up on it.
I did a Google search and wasn't able to find a follow up story. Anybody know where I could find one? *curious if that's true*
Slashdot Mirror
...probably owes a lot to Tetris. When I worked at FuncoLand, Tetris was the most bought and sold game we had for that system. It just had this long-term appeal.
My step mom interrupted my games all the time. The only time she ever apologized for it was when I was playing Tetris. That was the only game she'd play on it, so we finally came to an understanding. Heh.
Was that directed at me? If so, where's this trip I'm supposed to take a trip to? *needs your comment explained*
Ahhh that's right. The p3 550 was the 'minimum requirement', and it started a huge debate on the game site that I frequented. Anybody remember next-generation.com (later called dailyradar.com)? Heh.
/bin/laden" -- My boss used to have a poster on his wall that was similar: 'rm -f /bin/laden'
:)
People were upset that the minimum requirements were so high at the time. Assuming that's true (and who knows, right?) that would have been rather steep in the year 2000. Personally, I think they made a good choice with XBOX. Halo will probably be purchased frequently for the next two years. That's harder to do on a PC where the market is already over-saturated with FPS shooters.
About your sig:
"chmod a+x
Heh. I hope I quoted it properly.
"Because I won't under any circumstances buy a Microsoft product?"
;)
Oh that's not a problem then. Most of what MS sells was developed by other people.
Yeah, damn him for submitting a story he was covering that interests Slashdot users. Only other people should be able to report stories, never the ones that know the most about what the article is saying.
I could have sworn they were demo'ing it on a P3 550 with a Geforce 2 card a couple of years ago... Anybody else remember that?
Yes. It's easy. Pop in CD, wait for the install screen to come up.
If you could buy stuff on CD, Linux might be able to do that.
- Why are there 6 programs that do the same thing?
- Why does it keep asking for my root password?
- Why is there no sound?
- Why can't I find anything at the store for my computer?
- Why don't the websites I visit look right?
Just curious.
Sad thing is, when your mom and sisters decide they want to do more with their computer than you have set up for them, you're going to get called again. They're not going to be able to go to the store and buy the progs or games they want.
I'm not shooting down what you said in your post. I'm just saying that there is a big limitation to that strategy that others should consider. Of course, I wish you luck.
"I'm surprised noone as modded you as "troll" yet."
He wasn't modded down as troll because he's right. Why would she install RPMs? Why WOULDN'T she? Face it, you build your mom a Linux box, and she's stuck with whatever you gave her. She cannot go to the store and buy new apps. At best she could get them on-line. So either she learns how to do RPM's, or she doesn't add anything to her computer.
Haven't you noticed all the times people have to use the phrase "All she really needs..." in order to explain their ability to use Linux as her OS? Don't you see a problem with that?
Yeah, that Matrix Screen Saver does look cooler than Windows, doesn't it?
Who says it's anything to do with bandwidth? Maybe I'm unusual, but I've never hit full bandwidth with Kazaa. Instead, I get 1 5KB/s stream for a few hours. I may have used as much as 400kbits at one time for a small bursty period, but I have trouble getting a number of connections going once all at the same time.
I think the real reason they're doing it is because of the ridiculously high number of requests that go through. The overhead of the chattiness between P2P users is enough to make the connection lag. I ran Kazaa for 2 weeks and then turned it off so I could play QUake. Was I able to? No. I was getting so many inoming requests from Kazaa users not realizing that I had shut down that my game was getting 2-second lags every 10 seconds or so.
I'm sure that at some point, this is a problem for my provider. Fortunately, they've never contacted me about it.
It took a little digging around, but I finally found a pic of one of the test pilots in training. Click here. I'm surprised at how athletic she appears for a Russian woman.
Interesting stuff. Was I a supernode? I honestly don't know. However, the traffic bombardment lasted for 2-3 days, not 10 minutes. (That may be proof it was supernode, no idea.)
:)
With that amount of time involved, it's possible my IP could have been given to somebody and be affected by it. I'm not saying it'd happen so frequently that AT&T'd be punting users left and right, but it could be a '2-day' problem that ATTBI would have to credit back.
Fortunately, AT&T doesn't reassign IP's too often. I'm only aware of them doing it once. I vaguely remember heearing it's done once a month, but have never personally verified that. It's been a long time since I've peeked into my own IP.
Again, thanks for the info. Never knew about SuperNode before.
Yeah I'm aware of that. As a matter of fact, quite a few of the eps I've found on Kazaa are D.A.P.'s. Until Best Brains can get DVD's made of all the episodes, I don't have a lot of choice.
Good news is, though, that they do have a few eps available on DVD and VHS. Hopefully more will trickle down over time.
Oo oo I did run across a very early ep of MST3k back before Kevin Murphy did the voice of Servo. That was interesting to see heh.
You are failing to see his point because you're focusing in on only one of his arguments and trying to poke a hole in it. If you truely understood his point, then you'd realize what he's saying is that Linux's 'technical superiority' has very little influence with the average consumer. Windows, and OSX to a lesser extent, have much better consumer focus.
Using Windows, your mom could go to Office Depot, CompUSA, Best Buy, well just about anywhere and buy new progs to use on her computer. Plus, she'd have no trouble installing them. Linux is not at that point and probably won't see it for at least 3 or 4 years.
When she buys a digital camera or a scanner, the CD that comes with it will have the drivers for any flavor of Windows. Linux? Nope. She'll haveta learn not only how to go get the drivers, but how to unpack and install them as well. She'll have to know much more about Linux (like the root password) than any Windows user would ever have to.
The reason you didn't see this is likely because you're close minded and don't think MS could ever do anything right. I'm not so much picking on you about it, but I've seen a lot of this attitude in the Slashdot community. If the Linux development community has the same attitude, I fear that Linux may never get off the ground as a Windows killer.
It is possible to take Linux and make it an awesome desktop OS. Look at what Apple did with BSD. Linux developers should consider doing that as well. You all would be shocked at how successful Linux would be if they were to imitate Apple.
...if I wanted her to call me more often.
"Son? What's this seashell thing?"
"Son? What's with all these programs that begin with K?"
"I keep typing soundconfig but nothing happens.... what do you mean it's spelled 'snd'?"
"What are all these progs that begin with K? Err why do 6 of them do the same thing? Okay... okay.. whatever..."
"Your sister wants you to bring a new a game over.... that's it? Are you serious? Why did you give this to me then?"
Heh.
I agree with you.
P2P generates a lot of babble with very low throughput. It's decentralized nature makes it really easy to keep it going, but truth be told, the amount of data flying around just to get to where you're going presents a huge problem.
Frankly, I'm a little surprised P2P hasn't caused a larger ruckus than it has. I think that the devleopers of technologies like this should look into ways of reducing the chatter and making it more optimal. I mean think about it, the ISP's not going to care if your 1.5 megabit connection's downloading 4 128 streams. Your ISP is going to care, though, if everybody who uses it is being bombarded with "Hello? Are you there?!?" requests on commonly used P2P ports to the point that the connection's of little use. The last time I turned off Kazaa, it took 3 days for my connection to return to normal.
"At what point of blocking a person's internet capability does this become a breach of contract? "
If you're interfering with other people's connections, then you are breaching contract. I'm not talking about bandwidth hogging, I'm talking about IP addresses.
Let me share a little experience I had with you. I had Kazaa running for a couple of weeks to get some eps of MST3k. When I turned it off, I discovered my IP address was being bombarded with hundreds and hundreds of kazaa users sending requests to the port Kazaa used. The number of these requests was so high that I could barely use the internet, and Quake was a joke.
If ATT&T had rotated addresses, somebody else would have inhereted my garbage. Imagine that for a sec: One day, your internet connection goes to crap, and AT&T has no clue as to why. Chances are pretty good that'll cause customers to blame AT&T's service without realizing the true cause of it.
In that case, it is possible that your use of Kazaa could severely interfere with other people's internet experience. The more Kazaa users there are out there, the more likely it is going to happen to somebody. The one who gets burned the most is the ISP.
I don't agree with what they're doing (personally I think they should send me a cable modem that has a built in firewall so I can stop the kazaa traffic myself), but I understand it.
Only the ISP's know what their real intentions are, but that's something else to consider when you use a prog like that. Now you know why I stopped using it.
Before I comment on this, I just want to be clear that I don't support blocking of ports etc. However, my use of Kazaa opened up some insight into how it works, and why ISP's would kill it.
I used Kazaa solidly for a couple of weeks, trying to get a few eps of MST3k. When I was done, I shut down Kazaa and moved on. When I went to go play Quake, I noticed I had low ping times, but I was still getting intermitting lagging that was ruining my game.
I figured out what happened. Kazaa users were constantly bombarding my IP address with requests. This was happening so often that my connection was getting lagged from it. If AT&T had switched over my IP address, some other user would have gotten all that garbage. It is very possible that this isn't about bandwidth at all, but it's affect on other customers.
Only the ISPs really know for sure, but it is understandable, tho regrettable.
...that this article ran shortly after the articles pointing out Linux's flaws as a desktop OS?
.TAR or .Z or any of that other crap. She's not going to recompile any software. I doubt she'll even use RPM . With a Windows (or even a Mac) box, she can go to the store, buy a prog, slap the CD in, and get going.
If people want their moms running *nix, get them a Macintosh with OSX. Apple had the right idea, and Linux developers should be eyeballing them very carefully.
Make fun of Windows all you want, but the simple fact of the matter is that it is day and night easier to use than Linux when placed in front of 'a mother'. Want to install your USB camera? Plug it in. Oops, does it need a driver? Put the CD that came with the camera in.
It's not just a matter of Windows being easier to use, but it is better supported too. You're not going to buy a digital camera with Linux drivers shipped on the CD.
Let's be realistic here: If you set up a Linux box for your mother, she is stuck with the software you put on it. She's not gonna know how to
Linux needs: a.) Better desktop support, i.e. fix the problems mentioned in that article a couple of days back. b.) Software, on the shelves, in stores. c.) To have a Desktop distro that doesn't require that mommy dearest go type in badly spelt, unintuitive commands in order to muck with things.
This is not flamebait or trolling people, this is exactly what is holding Linux back as a 'Windows killer'. Some of the Slashdot Community needs to face the fact that both Microsoft and Apple did quite a few important things right. The karma I've burned trying to explain this emphasizes my point.
"It's like saying 'or why do we need a X button to close a window when alt-f4 does the trick?"
:)
No no, Alt+f4 is a Windows thing. Here's what does the trick:
1.) Open a Shell window
2.) Log in as Root
3.) Then type 'ps axu | grep my_process_name' (replacing 'my process name' with the name of your window...' and get the GID or UID to indetify it.
4.) Type in: "wcls -xywzvbeha p:(put in the U/GID here
That is so much more powerful than Alt+f4 because once you put in the window ID then you can't possibly close the wrong program by accident!
Damn you Windows users are thick! heh
"1. No 'best' browser.
Gosh, how about the nice thing we call choice?"
Heh. Like anybody's going to know that 'Knoquerer' is a web browser until they read about it somewhere. As a matter of fact, there are way too many choices. I just installed Redhat the other day (I'm a Windows guy), and I'm still trying to figure out wtf all those programs are. I was actually hoping I could find an advert or something so I could get an idea which of the 6 text editors I should use.
"4. Make it easy for the user to find out how to do things.
Yeah, reading a book or taking a class (or searching online) is so hard. When will people realize that a computer it a techinical thing? You have to be willing to do a little homework, even with a mac (if you've never used one)."
Yeah, everybody should go take classes to use Linux when they typically don't need to with Mac or Windows. This couldn't possibly be representative of a real obvious design problem with using Linux as a desktop replacement. I suggest you gander over the direction of OSX (built on BSD) before you say it's okay to demand people take classes. Mac users don't even need to know the root password. Damn good design if you ask me.
"8. Sound support.
Ok, if you want professional audio production cards, you got me, but for most other sound cards there just isn't a problem."
err Im not sure that's what he meant. I installed RedHat and by default it didn't like my sound card. I finally got 'sndconfig' to work, and it played sound, but guess what? KDE still, for some reason, cannot play sounds. I have NFI why it's like that. I have NFI where to go fix this. Sound Server's not helping me much. I'm still exploring this issue, but the fact I had to run sndconfig at all is a huge design flaw for general use. Windows (and OSX presumably) kicks Linux's butt in usability for fixing probs like that.
Linux is powerful and neat and all. But if the Linux community has aspirations of making it into a 'Windows Killer', then they need to address nearly all of those issues. A lot of people think that MS put a gun to people's heads and made them buy an inferior product. But the truth is that lots of people bought Windows because they can use it. A good UI overall design can make up for low stability and a few bugs.
The Linux Community should be observing what all MS and Apple did right in the usability design of their products instead of trying to fix the problems they see with it. They're going to have trouble getting adopted by a broader audience until this is done.
That's possible. I don't remember. I remember a news story that said the ending was spoiled by the website. I have no interest in Survivor so I never followed up on it.
I did a Google search and wasn't able to find a follow up story. Anybody know where I could find one? *curious if that's true*