it's for your neighbor. Or your uncle, your Mom, or anyone else who DOESN'T have a closet full of overclocked Celeron 366 motherboards
They could just hire the guy with "a closet full of overclocked Celeron 366 motherboards" as it were, have him build a comparable system for a reasonable fee... and have it be both upgradable, possibly cheaper, and probably more effective?
You can find out about things that might have otherwise been hidden from you. Countries that try and restrict knowledge that might be damaging the local government find that in many cases knowledge cannot be fully contained by those that seek it.
Even games are a form of interaction, hell, how else could you get your grandma in Europe to join in a family game of monopoly (or a cousin/friend in quake).
Oh, and for those with a little skill at it in real-life, the internet is a useful way to meet girls. It breaks the initial ice for people of mutual interests, which for many people is harder than a lack of basic social skills... and you may even meet a guy/girl who will cook you dinner (or you can cook for him/her).
and forgot to emasculate my email address. Luckily, it was a generic slashdot@mydomain.com.
Well, my first clue that my article had been accepted was that when my "slashdot@mydomain.com" address started coming in with loads of spam (forwarded to my main address, which I quickly turned off).
Perhaps you should have put a link to email you in your article, I'm sure you'll be seeing lots of spam afterwards
It seems that even spammers do read slashdot, or at least have bots hoarding emails here... good reason for regular users to use an obfuscated email address...
There is definately a REASON why nobody distributes games in that form for the PC
Yet, anyhow, and one of the reasons is probably because the idea is much less feasible in the windows-centric gaming world than on 'nix.
Give it another year or two, liveCD's might become a decent way of gaming on a PC. At the very least the issue could be traced to specific drivers, etc (again, common drivers at the time on the liveCD, only extended ones on the memcard). In the playstation, you can choose "Memory card A, B, etc", so no problem doing the same for a PC I'd imagine.
And remember, just because somebody hasn't done something yet, doesn't mean that - with a little care and effort - it can't be done in the future!
How much cleaner the average countertop is in comparison to the floors these are tested on, and how long the food spends on those.
I try to keep my counters clean, but often they will have a small spot of leaked juice, or a fleck of this-or-that. Do you always wipe your counter down before preparing food, even with a quick snack?
Another nasty to focus on would be how short it takes a dishcloth to become truly smelly and unpleasant... dirty rags don't make clean dishes... which is why I prefer the short-use disposible variety
Can anyone give some samples of basic boot times for a server, or better, desktop.
I haven't rebooted my server in awhile and I'm not about to reboot to test. But from the lilo menu linux boots as:
39 seconds to the "login: " prompt, and 18s to start X (default is CLI login).
Not sure if that's good or not. GUI is using an XP-themed IceWM, with DFM as the desktop manager. basically it looks close enough to XP, but loads a lot faster than XP does on faster machines than this (Celeron 700 laptop, 256MB RAM)
About a year ago I watched Monty Python with my GF. She's from Asia, so she didn't get some of the more suble anglo-humour, but she got some of the better bits. I say if a pretty girl from another country can enjoy some of the subtle humour of the "Holy Grail," changes are that many Eurogeeks or those from North America could take your girlfriend to.
Who can not enjoy the bridge warden, or "it's just a little rabbit" (which must be one of the most well-recognised movie-phrases around).
Of course, you could amend this to mean the slashdot audience:
"A wonderful play 90% of you will never take a date too, unless you pay one"
While I think this lawsuit perhaps a bit silly as an educated "computer person," I can where 'average joe' would benefit from this (after buying an 80GB drive and having windows show it as 72 or whatever).
However, one has to wonder how many other places small corners are cut and the consumer more deliberately deceived. Anyone remember a case where 7-11 was giving out large slushes for medium price because some clever kid busted them for have a cup with capacity less than the advertised size?
Time to break out the measuring cups boys and girls. Is that 10KG bag of dogfood really 10KG. How often are these things checked, or are they checked by a regulating body? Perhaps it is up to the consumer to check, and then sue for disrepencies... I'm sorry to say it but when it comes to shaving a bit to save a buck, corps will sally forth without worry.
This is the best arguement I've heard so far. Basically, if you go 1024KB=1MB your sticking to binary standard, and at 1000KB=1MB your sticking to a base-10 (standard mathematical) standard.
But by using both measurements for components in marketing a systemr, you're effectively breaking either standard and simply attempting to mislead the consumer.
Personally, I've always found it amusing that my 512MB of RAM is a bit over 512,000,000 bytes, but never seen the reason for it due to Mega in proper math being 1e6.
Kids. I suppose that's to imply that we're too young to have used a commodore. Au contraire, I have fond memories of early PC experience in these little beasts. However, I never took one apart, back then there was a mystique around computer hardware that made one avoid cracking it open... not to mention that for what would now be more-or-less a doorstop, any computer was damn expensive.
In the end it doesn't matter hugely though. Games lose support over time, and a lost of my older games (win95/98, DOS) don't won't on XP anyhow - so not a huge different.
As per the USB-drive though, the advantage would be in autodetecting and using the drive, as well as portability. No specifying hard-drive save locations, etc. Most users could probably figure out how to stick a USB dongle in the port... and if you consider that a proper liveCD game would run in most PCs you could drag dongle and game disc with you anywhere...
Whether large companies even *consider* something other than windows. Do these banks know about linux? Haven't they been watching current virus headlines? Maybe open-sourcedness scares them, since that means that to a certain extent, anyone can view the code the banking system is based on.
I mean, what is the justification for using windows... or even linux for that matter. Why not a for-ATM OS, I'm sure a bank could afford the dev work and in the end it'll like cut costs more than having windows-based ATM crashes.
Meanwhilst, I'm waiting for a windows hack that plays a "laugh track" WAV file when somebody checks their balance... that and I'm expecting a few windows errors due to "division by zero"
I think it is more than the windows OS/kernel is a bit tight on some things, and you cannot stop a running DLL/core-process in order to update it as you can in linux. Not entirely sure though, as of course much of the windows spec is closed.
What issue? Load up the USB mass-storage driver. Save to USB. And is it really that much slower than an HD, no moving parts and with USB 2.0 it should be reasonably fast.
As per inserting different disks. Yes, blah, annoying... but not that much worse than the old sierra games (5 1/4 floppies with Kings Quest on a 286 or less anyone?) or perhaps something like Final Fantasy where the game spanned CD's (until DVD took over as popular format).
Also, how are newer cards for legacy support? I know that Nvidia drivers often come bundled now, so perhaps an older Nvidia card could run a future GeForce 7 on a GF4 commanset, just without the inherant extra functionality (which, in and old game, wouldn't matter anyhow).
You know, that process probably has more computing power than the C64... at least in terms of specific mathematical operations per second.
Seriously though, I could understand getting kicks out of modding newer PC's to run in the C64 case... but running a C64 online?
The only possibly use I could see for this is as a low-power-consumption dumb-terminal. My Pentium 1's run without fan and have a small heatsink, perhaps the C64 runs with no heatsink (or virtually none)? I suppose for those concerned about heat output and/or power consumption it would possibly useful, but a 386 would probably do as well too with more power.
Do a lot of these patches require rebooting in order to be effective? I remember the days when MS machines, even servers, required a reboot to make major changes effective. Kinda kills your uptime, must kill and operation that depends on being up too.
Of course, this seems to be another RPC bug. I don't think most people use RPC, so turning off the RPC service - or at least setting it to manual instead of automatic - would at least keep you safe for awhile, correct?
True, but that's only after the point if it can't liveboot by itself, which in most situations one would hope that it still could.
Another solution would simply be to have a "companion disc" for updated drivers etc. Lots of games load off multiple CD's anyhow... though I thing this would just make it a bit more annoying.
By default, you could boot-from-CD, need only the hard-disk for incompatible drivers or perhaps savegames - which again a USB-dongle would save you the trouble of this (and heck, if it were a generic USB-mass-storage people just find it cool to get the additional USB dongle with the game - no different from console memcards).
It won't work? Why not?
Nothing is restricting the CD from loading files off the hard-drive, and linux can read windows and 'nix files equally. The idea is to make a bootcd semi-independent of the loaded OS, not the hard-disk itself. Most people wouldn't object to having a/livecd folder on the hard-drive - which the game CD could scan for on bootup.
The aforementioned USB-dongle could also be used to save an updated driver, or, with the above mentioned, to reference the mountpoint where the file is saved.
You're right... jailing spammers wouldn't be an appropriate solution. Clogging up already-filled prisons for sending email is a bit foolish:
I'm option for the stake-honey-anthill solution instead, but I've heard other good solutions. I've heard that some countries favor slowly lowering one into boiling water.... or maybe cutting off the hand they type with?
Keeps our prisons from overflowing, and the spammers off our internet. I'm still debating on the "sticking viagara spammers in a cell with bubba... who's just been given viagara" solution though.
Video drivers you say? The greater majority of systems I plop this one into run very nicely in the GUI. Now for accelerated video drivers... it could be a bit more of a pain, but I'm sure if they've come this far they could figure it out.
Oh, and yes, as mentioned consoles use savable memory cards. They're also taking games away from the original internet-gaming system (the PC)... so perhaps if a linux system that in some ways worked like a console would be better than a console that acted like a PC (hard drive, network addons, etc).
I don't know about FFX-2, though I'd lean towards "not right now" possibly just plain "no" as I've yet to see either FF9 or FFX come out on PC (could just be that I wasn't looking hard enough, but pretty sure they are console only) - and why create a sequel on PC when the original is not?
On the bright side though, the FFXI (FF11) beta is out on PC, as will be the actual game, so if you want to see how Final Fantasy does in the land of MMORPG then perhaps you'd like to check that one out.
But ISP's could still level special "surcharges" on excessive emails, etc etc that would have the same effect, much in the way you are already charged for exceeding your bandwidth quota.
In the end, would it really be a bad thing? A surcharge on emails over amount XYZ, unless you registered for a special mass-email account (for listserves) and signed a non-spamming declaration.
Truely, if we had to label ever little thing that could possible be side effect X of product Y, we wouldn't even be able to see the labels on Y anymore.
Vasaline: Warning, misuse may case dehydration and overheating possibly leading to death.
I mean, come on, is there anything you can't like to something else? Do I like to shoot stuff because I play GTA, or perhaps it's because I like to shoot things that I like GTA. Should MacDonalds be responsible for people eating too much greasy food. Could computer monitors be the reason I am shortsited... or slashdot the reason I spend too much time reading online
There needs to be a back-penalty for: frivolous lawsuit without justifiable cause.
I mean, think of the relations you could draw if you really wanted:
Sue Mattel: Your sister always left her barbies naked. You decided to rip the clothes off that women in the subway because you thought it way more natural. Or, you took multiple wives because you were influenced by Ken coming with multiple barbies.
Adultery: It was on "Daze of Our Lives", it must be acceptable behavior.
I mean, is there something you can not relate to as "the evil cause of XX" if you really tried?
Slashdot Mirror
it's for your neighbor. Or your uncle, your Mom, or anyone else who DOESN'T have a closet full of overclocked Celeron 366 motherboards
They could just hire the guy with "a closet full of overclocked Celeron 366 motherboards" as it were, have him build a comparable system for a reasonable fee... and have it be both upgradable, possibly cheaper, and probably more effective?
You can find out about things that might have otherwise been hidden from you. Countries that try and restrict knowledge that might be damaging the local government find that in many cases knowledge cannot be fully contained by those that seek it.
Even games are a form of interaction, hell, how else could you get your grandma in Europe to join in a family game of monopoly (or a cousin/friend in quake).
Oh, and for those with a little skill at it in real-life, the internet is a useful way to meet girls. It breaks the initial ice for people of mutual interests, which for many people is harder than a lack of basic social skills... and you may even meet a guy/girl who will cook you dinner (or you can cook for him/her).
D'oh. Will apologies to the preview gods... a tag is a poor substitute for a
tag. Please forgive my boldness...
and forgot to emasculate my email address. Luckily, it was a generic slashdot@mydomain.com.
Well, my first clue that my article had been accepted was that when my "slashdot@mydomain.com" address started coming in with loads of spam (forwarded to my main address, which I quickly turned off).
Perhaps you should have put a link to email you in your article, I'm sure you'll be seeing lots of spam afterwards
It seems that even spammers do read slashdot, or at least have bots hoarding emails here... good reason for regular users to use an obfuscated email address...
There is definately a REASON why nobody distributes games in that form for the PC
Yet, anyhow, and one of the reasons is probably because the idea is much less feasible in the windows-centric gaming world than on 'nix.
Give it another year or two, liveCD's might become a decent way of gaming on a PC. At the very least the issue could be traced to specific drivers, etc (again, common drivers at the time on the liveCD, only extended ones on the memcard). In the playstation, you can choose "Memory card A, B, etc", so no problem doing the same for a PC I'd imagine.
And remember, just because somebody hasn't done something yet, doesn't mean that - with a little care and effort - it can't be done in the future!
How much cleaner the average countertop is in comparison to the floors these are tested on, and how long the food spends on those.
I try to keep my counters clean, but often they will have a small spot of leaked juice, or a fleck of this-or-that. Do you always wipe your counter down before preparing food, even with a quick snack?
Another nasty to focus on would be how short it takes a dishcloth to become truly smelly and unpleasant... dirty rags don't make clean dishes... which is why I prefer the short-use disposible variety
Can anyone give some samples of basic boot times for a server, or better, desktop.
I haven't rebooted my server in awhile and I'm not about to reboot to test. But from the lilo menu linux boots as:
39 seconds to the "login: " prompt, and 18s to start X (default is CLI login).
Not sure if that's good or not. GUI is using an XP-themed IceWM, with DFM as the desktop manager. basically it looks close enough to XP, but loads a lot faster than XP does on faster machines than this (Celeron 700 laptop, 256MB RAM)
About a year ago I watched Monty Python with my GF. She's from Asia, so she didn't get some of the more suble anglo-humour, but she got some of the better bits. I say if a pretty girl from another country can enjoy some of the subtle humour of the "Holy Grail," changes are that many Eurogeeks or those from North America could take your girlfriend to.
Who can not enjoy the bridge warden, or "it's just a little rabbit" (which must be one of the most well-recognised movie-phrases around).
Of course, you could amend this to mean the slashdot audience:
"A wonderful play 90% of you will never take a date too, unless you pay one"
While I think this lawsuit perhaps a bit silly as an educated "computer person," I can where 'average joe' would benefit from this (after buying an 80GB drive and having windows show it as 72 or whatever).
However, one has to wonder how many other places small corners are cut and the consumer more deliberately deceived. Anyone remember a case where 7-11 was giving out large slushes for medium price because some clever kid busted them for have a cup with capacity less than the advertised size?
Time to break out the measuring cups boys and girls. Is that 10KG bag of dogfood really 10KG. How often are these things checked, or are they checked by a regulating body? Perhaps it is up to the consumer to check, and then sue for disrepencies... I'm sorry to say it but when it comes to shaving a bit to save a buck, corps will sally forth without worry.
This is the best arguement I've heard so far. Basically, if you go 1024KB=1MB your sticking to binary standard, and at 1000KB=1MB your sticking to a base-10 (standard mathematical) standard.
But by using both measurements for components in marketing a systemr, you're effectively breaking either standard and simply attempting to mislead the consumer.
Personally, I've always found it amusing that my 512MB of RAM is a bit over 512,000,000 bytes, but never seen the reason for it due to Mega in proper math being 1e6.
Kids. I suppose that's to imply that we're too young to have used a commodore. Au contraire, I have fond memories of early PC experience in these little beasts. However, I never took one apart, back then there was a mystique around computer hardware that made one avoid cracking it open... not to mention that for what would now be more-or-less a doorstop, any computer was damn expensive.
In the end it doesn't matter hugely though. Games lose support over time, and a lost of my older games (win95/98, DOS) don't won't on XP anyhow - so not a huge different.
As per the USB-drive though, the advantage would be in autodetecting and using the drive, as well as portability. No specifying hard-drive save locations, etc. Most users could probably figure out how to stick a USB dongle in the port... and if you consider that a proper liveCD game would run in most PCs you could drag dongle and game disc with you anywhere...
Whether large companies even *consider* something other than windows. Do these banks know about linux? Haven't they been watching current virus headlines? Maybe open-sourcedness scares them, since that means that to a certain extent, anyone can view the code the banking system is based on.
I mean, what is the justification for using windows... or even linux for that matter. Why not a for-ATM OS, I'm sure a bank could afford the dev work and in the end it'll like cut costs more than having windows-based ATM crashes.
Meanwhilst, I'm waiting for a windows hack that plays a "laugh track" WAV file when somebody checks their balance... that and I'm expecting a few windows errors due to "division by zero"
I think it is more than the windows OS/kernel is a bit tight on some things, and you cannot stop a running DLL/core-process in order to update it as you can in linux. Not entirely sure though, as of course much of the windows spec is closed.
What issue? Load up the USB mass-storage driver. Save to USB. And is it really that much slower than an HD, no moving parts and with USB 2.0 it should be reasonably fast.
As per inserting different disks. Yes, blah, annoying... but not that much worse than the old sierra games (5 1/4 floppies with Kings Quest on a 286 or less anyone?) or perhaps something like Final Fantasy where the game spanned CD's (until DVD took over as popular format).
Also, how are newer cards for legacy support? I know that Nvidia drivers often come bundled now, so perhaps an older Nvidia card could run a future GeForce 7 on a GF4 commanset, just without the inherant extra functionality (which, in and old game, wouldn't matter anyhow).
You know, that process probably has more computing power than the C64... at least in terms of specific mathematical operations per second.
Seriously though, I could understand getting kicks out of modding newer PC's to run in the C64 case... but running a C64 online?
The only possibly use I could see for this is as a low-power-consumption dumb-terminal. My Pentium 1's run without fan and have a small heatsink, perhaps the C64 runs with no heatsink (or virtually none)? I suppose for those concerned about heat output and/or power consumption it would possibly useful, but a 386 would probably do as well too with more power.
Do a lot of these patches require rebooting in order to be effective? I remember the days when MS machines, even servers, required a reboot to make major changes effective. Kinda kills your uptime, must kill and operation that depends on being up too.
Of course, this seems to be another RPC bug. I don't think most people use RPC, so turning off the RPC service - or at least setting it to manual instead of automatic - would at least keep you safe for awhile, correct?
True, but that's only after the point if it can't liveboot by itself, which in most situations one would hope that it still could.
Another solution would simply be to have a "companion disc" for updated drivers etc. Lots of games load off multiple CD's anyhow... though I thing this would just make it a bit more annoying.
By default, you could boot-from-CD, need only the hard-disk for incompatible drivers or perhaps savegames - which again a USB-dongle would save you the trouble of this (and heck, if it were a generic USB-mass-storage people just find it cool to get the additional USB dongle with the game - no different from console memcards).
It won't work? Why not? /livecd folder on the hard-drive - which the game CD could scan for on bootup.
Nothing is restricting the CD from loading files off the hard-drive, and linux can read windows and 'nix files equally. The idea is to make a bootcd semi-independent of the loaded OS, not the hard-disk itself. Most people wouldn't object to having a
The aforementioned USB-dongle could also be used to save an updated driver, or, with the above mentioned, to reference the mountpoint where the file is saved.
You're right... jailing spammers wouldn't be an appropriate solution. Clogging up already-filled prisons for sending email is a bit foolish:
I'm option for the stake-honey-anthill solution instead, but I've heard other good solutions. I've heard that some countries favor slowly lowering one into boiling water.... or maybe cutting off the hand they type with?
Keeps our prisons from overflowing, and the spammers off our internet. I'm still debating on the "sticking viagara spammers in a cell with bubba... who's just been given viagara" solution though.
Um... just FYI. Go try out gnoppix or morphix
Video drivers you say? The greater majority of systems I plop this one into run very nicely in the GUI. Now for accelerated video drivers... it could be a bit more of a pain, but I'm sure if they've come this far they could figure it out.
Oh, and yes, as mentioned consoles use savable memory cards. They're also taking games away from the original internet-gaming system (the PC)... so perhaps if a linux system that in some ways worked like a console would be better than a console that acted like a PC (hard drive, network addons, etc).
I don't know about FFX-2, though I'd lean towards "not right now" possibly just plain "no" as I've yet to see either FF9 or FFX come out on PC (could just be that I wasn't looking hard enough, but pretty sure they are console only) - and why create a sequel on PC when the original is not?
On the bright side though, the FFXI (FF11) beta is out on PC, as will be the actual game, so if you want to see how Final Fantasy does in the land of MMORPG then perhaps you'd like to check that one out.
But ISP's could still level special "surcharges" on excessive emails, etc etc that would have the same effect, much in the way you are already charged for exceeding your bandwidth quota.
In the end, would it really be a bad thing? A surcharge on emails over amount XYZ, unless you registered for a special mass-email account (for listserves) and signed a non-spamming declaration.
Truely, if we had to label ever little thing that could possible be side effect X of product Y, we wouldn't even be able to see the labels on Y anymore.
Vasaline: Warning, misuse may case dehydration and overheating possibly leading to death.
I mean, come on, is there anything you can't like to something else? Do I like to shoot stuff because I play GTA, or perhaps it's because I like to shoot things that I like GTA. Should MacDonalds be responsible for people eating too much greasy food. Could computer monitors be the reason I am shortsited... or slashdot the reason I spend too much time reading online
There needs to be a back-penalty for: frivolous lawsuit without justifiable cause.
I mean, think of the relations you could draw if you really wanted:
Sue Mattel: Your sister always left her barbies naked. You decided to rip the clothes off that women in the subway because you thought it way more natural. Or, you took multiple wives because you were influenced by Ken coming with multiple barbies.
Adultery: It was on "Daze of Our Lives", it must be acceptable behavior.
I mean, is there something you can not relate to as "the evil cause of XX" if you really tried?
Call the police. Gross negligence (parental negligence) causing death... there's bad parenting, but this goes beyond that.