I mean, not to troll, but that $1M is probably worth it. Mainframes are rock solid, incredibly dependable systems.
For much, much less than $1M/year, you could buy a massive cluster of redundant x86 systems that would end up being at least as dependable as a mainframe.
The other advantage of non-mainframe systems is that you don't have to pay a premium to the dwindling number of people who have both the skills and the interest to work on them.
I have two PS2s. The first is two years old, and the other is almost a year old (it's chipped so I can play imports). Neither have ever had any problems.
Neither have my XBox or Gamecube. I tend to think that some people are just hard on their consoles.
this is about people trying to protect their linguistic heritage, surrounded as they are by 300 million anglophones.
No, it's about a small number of people trying to force a large number of them to isolate themselves from the rest of the world's languages.
If the majority of Quebec's population wanted to speak pure French and nothing else, the government wouldn't have to do silly things like this, because English-labelled products wouldn't sell.
My impression of Canada is that the Parliament tends to have no restraint when it comes to regulation of things I personally deem to be silly.
That is a fair impression.
I went to university in Canada, and was amazed at the number of things they regulate. Restaurants are limited in the number of televisions they can have, and what sizes they can be (this caused problems for Planet Hollywood). A bar in Vancouver wanted to have roller-blading waitresses, but the inspectors decided they could only wear *one* rollerblade and sort of hobble around.
Also note, 98% of ALL masses detected in testicles are cancerous.
It could also be a varicocele (sp?) - a varicose vein that expands to sometimes ridiculous sizes inside the testicle. Either way, though, it's worth getting checked out. If it's not testicular cancer, at least you get to avoid the balloon.
Take a look around other owners of PS2s, though, and you'll find this just doesn't hold for the vast majority of them.
Like the parent's author, I never had a PS1, just a PS2. I have twelve PS2 games, and fifteen or sixteen PS1 games. That doesn't include the box full of demo discs for both platforms.
My friends with PS2s also use them for playing PS1 games. There are a lot of them out there that are still definitely worth playing (e.g. Soul Reaver), that look really good with the texture smoothing enabled.
I think there is a huge market for the ability to turn various items into a quality audio transmitter.
The problem is mostly with the concept of using things like walls and desks as speakers. The material they're made out of just isn't designed for it, and if you're like most people and have pictures hung on your walls and office supplies in your desk drawers or whatnot it's going to add even more distortion.
It sounds like a better use for this metal would be making really high-quality speaker cones and "headphones" that sit on your skull instead of your ears, like they do to the article's author.
I doubt if this guy really ever played "Resident Evil".
Actually, if you watch the featurette on the DVD, the director played the first game and was in the middle of the second when he wrote the film.
I hadn't played the games when I saw the movie, and I thought the movie was all right. It was no masterpiece, but it was visually well done, like Event Horizon which he also directed. The plot was certainly better than Soldier (another Anderson film).
Anyhow, I figured I'd check out the Gamecube remake of the original after watching it, since it was available for cheap on eBay. Seriously, I prefer the film. The controls are terrible, and the save system is lame. If I have to go do something else, I shouldn't be penalized by using up a limited save.
I do agree that he's probably going to butcher AvP though. Setting it in the present sounds like a bad idea, and I can't figure out why they aren't using the awesome script that was written for the project something like a decade ago. I don't know if it's still online, but it was very much in the spirit of Aliens, the best of both series.
If I had mod points, I'd be using them to boost your post.
The general biases on Slashdot are pretty funny to watch. If Microsoft discovers the smallest bug or a spammer is mentioned in any way, it's time to break out the torches and storm the castle. If a bug in Linux is discovered, it's a trivial issue that only affects people who are doing something wrong. And, of course, media companies trying to prevent people from stealing their products are the spawn of Hell's ninth circle itself.
Is Outlook properly multi-threaded now? We use 2000 at work, and it's really frustrating to not be able to have a big message downloading from the Exchange server and read others at the same time.
If a game is long for a legitimate reason - e.g. it has a lot of unique content - then I have no complaints. KOTOR is like this. The game world is huge, there are a ton of optional side stories, and so forth.
IMO, though, most long games are long because the developers have stretched them too thin. Most RPGs are like this. The game world itself isn't very big, but it takes forever to finish the game because you have to fight the same monsters over and over in order to level up.
On the whole, I would prefer to spend 15-30 hours completing a given game the first time through. However, I don't mind if the game is shorter if the entire experience is a good one. Even if a game is only eight hours long, that's still four times the length of most feature films.
I'm about halfway through now, and it seems to be a pretty good game. The on-foot sections early on give it a kind of bad feel, but it does get much better later on.
Update: I just played through one of the on-foot sections again looking for secret power-ups, and got stuck in a wall when I went exploring. Hopefully this will be the extent of Enter The Matrix-esque bugs.
I'm now on the third mission of the game, and so far here are my impressions:
- The graphics are really nice.
- The cinematics are well-done.
- The menus and other prompts, as well as their music and sounds are **exactly** like RS2. This feels really cheap to me. Even the descriptions you get of the vehicles in the hanger appear to be word-for-word identical.
- The controls for the on-foot sections aren't very good. They are VERY sensitive, which is tough when the camera pulls back so far that your character is a tiny spot.
- Many of the same problems with RS2 are still present. My biggest gripe is the arbitrary three life limit combined with some missions which are relatively long, meaning you're going to play through the same sections over and over when you encounter difficulties late in a level.
- The speederbikes are really fast, but the one level with them I've played so far had a very short distance you could see ahead, which meant lots of crashing into things or off cliffs and having to replay the early sections of that level.
- The writers seem to be suffering from Badly Written Expanded Universe Novel syndrome, and coming up with unconvincing names for things. I'll have to see how this pans out.
- I am **really** disappointed that the RS2 missions which are included are two-player only. If they went to the trouble of improving their graphics, it would be cool to be able to see them properly instead of on a split screen, and then only when I can drag someone else into playing them.
Obviously I haven't had a chance to try out the whole thing yet, but my impression so far is that if this were released in the PC world, it would be a $30 expansion pack, not a $50 full game.
X: Beyond the Frontier got good reviews, but it seemed to tank in stores. I bought a copy for $4.99 a few months after it came out that I've been meaning to play for over a year now.
Not everyone can afford to buy new computers every 1-2 years.
Especially if they don't need to. I work for a retail corporation, so the only real reason to upgrade is if it either helps us do a better job of selling things, or the product is no longer supported.
On another note, don't call a program something that has a negative meaning! Gimp = Cripple
Whenever I hear someone talking about using Gimp, I get a mental picture of the leather-fetish guy from Pulp Fiction hopping out of a box.
You are very right to suggest that open source software tends to need better names if it's going to be widely accepted. Made-up or hybridized names like "Linux" are good if they're short and snappy-sounding. Common (but previously unused) ones like "Apache" are too, especially if they have connotations that people will generally appreciate. Conglomerates of simple words that convey a point (e.g. "OpenOffice") are good too.
"Sodipodi" is kind of cute, but it sounds like a dot-com that sells carrying pods full of soda or something and is about to go out of business. Still, it's better than taking the name of the commercial equivalent and tacking "free" onto the beginning.
I'm far from a master of marketing, but having apps called something like "OpenPaint" and "OpenDraw" would seem to me to be a lot more likely to pull in potential users.
Small companies (at least in my experience) used to be even worse about this than big ones. I guess they figured they had more to lose every time someone pirated their software, but some of them took it to ridiculous extremes.
A few years ago I worked in tech support, and I thought it would be cool to set up an IRC server so everybody on the phone could "talk" to each other and pool troubleshooting resources while they were on the phone. The company I work for is very much against free software (because of support issues), so it had to run on Windows. I managed to convince them to let me use a free port of ircd for the test, but for the real rollout they insisted on something that cost money (and didn't crash every twenty minutes).
I found two commercial IRC servers for Windows. One was very overpriced, and the other seemed like what we were after. It cost about $100 for the number of clients we were going to have, had support, etc.
So I got a license, and installed it on a server. But hey, it needed to connect to the vendor's website to validate my unlock code. Okay, fair enough, I got security to open up a few ports for fifteen minutes. It validated itself, and then I noticed some kind of timer that said it would need to do so again... in a day or two. I emailed the vendor, and confirmed that yes, that ridiculously short interval was by design, and couldn't I set up some kind of perpetually recurring window to open in the firewall to allow the machine to revalidate itself? After I explained to them that this was not the case, they agreed to send me a file that would validate the app for six months if I put it in the install folder.
Anyhow, it seems that the big companies are now catching right back up. Entering a serial number is one thing, but I'll buy an app and then download a crack for it before I have thirty dubious authentication systems running in the background on my machine.
You're forgetting that this is Slashdot, where media pirates are brave freedom fighters trying to liberate music and movies from the hands of the wealthy and very wealthy and give it to the only moderately wealthy.
Slashdot Mirror
I mean, not to troll, but that $1M is probably worth it. Mainframes are rock solid, incredibly dependable systems.
For much, much less than $1M/year, you could buy a massive cluster of redundant x86 systems that would end up being at least as dependable as a mainframe.
The other advantage of non-mainframe systems is that you don't have to pay a premium to the dwindling number of people who have both the skills and the interest to work on them.
Yes, I'm pretty sure he's supposed to be the same kid. IIRC, he's mentioned as such in one of the bonus sections on the Animatrix DVD.
I have two PS2s. The first is two years old, and the other is almost a year old (it's chipped so I can play imports). Neither have ever had any problems.
Neither have my XBox or Gamecube. I tend to think that some people are just hard on their consoles.
this is about people trying to protect their linguistic heritage, surrounded as they are by 300 million anglophones.
No, it's about a small number of people trying to force a large number of them to isolate themselves from the rest of the world's languages.
If the majority of Quebec's population wanted to speak pure French and nothing else, the government wouldn't have to do silly things like this, because English-labelled products wouldn't sell.
My impression of Canada is that the Parliament tends to have no restraint when it comes to regulation of things I personally deem to be silly.
That is a fair impression.
I went to university in Canada, and was amazed at the number of things they regulate. Restaurants are limited in the number of televisions they can have, and what sizes they can be (this caused problems for Planet Hollywood). A bar in Vancouver wanted to have roller-blading waitresses, but the inspectors decided they could only wear *one* rollerblade and sort of hobble around.
It's more than a little ridiculous.
Also note, 98% of ALL masses detected in testicles are cancerous.
It could also be a varicocele (sp?) - a varicose vein that expands to sometimes ridiculous sizes inside the testicle. Either way, though, it's worth getting checked out. If it's not testicular cancer, at least you get to avoid the balloon.
Take a look around other owners of PS2s, though, and you'll find this just doesn't hold for the vast majority of them.
Like the parent's author, I never had a PS1, just a PS2. I have twelve PS2 games, and fifteen or sixteen PS1 games. That doesn't include the box full of demo discs for both platforms.
My friends with PS2s also use them for playing PS1 games. There are a lot of them out there that are still definitely worth playing (e.g. Soul Reaver), that look really good with the texture smoothing enabled.
I think there is a huge market for the ability to turn various items into a quality audio transmitter.
The problem is mostly with the concept of using things like walls and desks as speakers. The material they're made out of just isn't designed for it, and if you're like most people and have pictures hung on your walls and office supplies in your desk drawers or whatnot it's going to add even more distortion.
It sounds like a better use for this metal would be making really high-quality speaker cones and "headphones" that sit on your skull instead of your ears, like they do to the article's author.
I doubt if this guy really ever played "Resident Evil".
Actually, if you watch the featurette on the DVD, the director played the first game and was in the middle of the second when he wrote the film.
I hadn't played the games when I saw the movie, and I thought the movie was all right. It was no masterpiece, but it was visually well done, like Event Horizon which he also directed. The plot was certainly better than Soldier (another Anderson film).
Anyhow, I figured I'd check out the Gamecube remake of the original after watching it, since it was available for cheap on eBay. Seriously, I prefer the film. The controls are terrible, and the save system is lame. If I have to go do something else, I shouldn't be penalized by using up a limited save.
I do agree that he's probably going to butcher AvP though. Setting it in the present sounds like a bad idea, and I can't figure out why they aren't using the awesome script that was written for the project something like a decade ago. I don't know if it's still online, but it was very much in the spirit of Aliens, the best of both series.
If I had mod points, I'd be using them to boost your post.
The general biases on Slashdot are pretty funny to watch. If Microsoft discovers the smallest bug or a spammer is mentioned in any way, it's time to break out the torches and storm the castle. If a bug in Linux is discovered, it's a trivial issue that only affects people who are doing something wrong. And, of course, media companies trying to prevent people from stealing their products are the spawn of Hell's ninth circle itself.
Developers are working with prototype PS3 hardware right now. I am betting on a release in late 2004.
I dunno how much more doom3 is going to need in terms of power.
A lot more. The last I read, it was going to run at about 30fps on a GeForce3.
Is Outlook properly multi-threaded now? We use 2000 at work, and it's really frustrating to not be able to have a big message downloading from the Exchange server and read others at the same time.
If a game is long for a legitimate reason - e.g. it has a lot of unique content - then I have no complaints. KOTOR is like this. The game world is huge, there are a ton of optional side stories, and so forth.
IMO, though, most long games are long because the developers have stretched them too thin. Most RPGs are like this. The game world itself isn't very big, but it takes forever to finish the game because you have to fight the same monsters over and over in order to level up.
On the whole, I would prefer to spend 15-30 hours completing a given game the first time through. However, I don't mind if the game is shorter if the entire experience is a good one. Even if a game is only eight hours long, that's still four times the length of most feature films.
I'm about halfway through now, and it seems to be a pretty good game. The on-foot sections early on give it a kind of bad feel, but it does get much better later on.
Update: I just played through one of the on-foot sections again looking for secret power-ups, and got stuck in a wall when I went exploring. Hopefully this will be the extent of Enter The Matrix-esque bugs.
I preordered RS3 in order to get the bonus disc.
I'm now on the third mission of the game, and so far here are my impressions:
- The graphics are really nice.
- The cinematics are well-done.
- The menus and other prompts, as well as their music and sounds are **exactly** like RS2. This feels really cheap to me. Even the descriptions you get of the vehicles in the hanger appear to be word-for-word identical.
- The controls for the on-foot sections aren't very good. They are VERY sensitive, which is tough when the camera pulls back so far that your character is a tiny spot.
- Many of the same problems with RS2 are still present. My biggest gripe is the arbitrary three life limit combined with some missions which are relatively long, meaning you're going to play through the same sections over and over when you encounter difficulties late in a level.
- The speederbikes are really fast, but the one level with them I've played so far had a very short distance you could see ahead, which meant lots of crashing into things or off cliffs and having to replay the early sections of that level.
- The writers seem to be suffering from Badly Written Expanded Universe Novel syndrome, and coming up with unconvincing names for things. I'll have to see how this pans out.
- I am **really** disappointed that the RS2 missions which are included are two-player only. If they went to the trouble of improving their graphics, it would be cool to be able to see them properly instead of on a split screen, and then only when I can drag someone else into playing them.
Obviously I haven't had a chance to try out the whole thing yet, but my impression so far is that if this were released in the PC world, it would be a $30 expansion pack, not a $50 full game.
The genre doesn't sell well anymore.
X: Beyond the Frontier got good reviews, but it seemed to tank in stores. I bought a copy for $4.99 a few months after it came out that I've been meaning to play for over a year now.
Not everyone can afford to buy new computers every 1-2 years.
Especially if they don't need to. I work for a retail corporation, so the only real reason to upgrade is if it either helps us do a better job of selling things, or the product is no longer supported.
And it's just now dying?
That's what I thought until I worked for a big company.
I did an inventory of how many printers we still have on Token Ring last week, and the count was about 1200 (versus about 3000 ethernet).
We just finished phasing out TR for our corporate buildings a year and a half ago.
Next week:
.NET 2003 Discovered To Be Made From The Blood of Linux Users' Babies
Microsoft Visual Studio
Digital Robin Hood Liberates Return of the King Two Months Before The Forces of Darkness Can Profit From It
On another note, don't call a program something that has a negative meaning! Gimp = Cripple
Whenever I hear someone talking about using Gimp, I get a mental picture of the leather-fetish guy from Pulp Fiction hopping out of a box.
You are very right to suggest that open source software tends to need better names if it's going to be widely accepted. Made-up or hybridized names like "Linux" are good if they're short and snappy-sounding. Common (but previously unused) ones like "Apache" are too, especially if they have connotations that people will generally appreciate. Conglomerates of simple words that convey a point (e.g. "OpenOffice") are good too.
"Sodipodi" is kind of cute, but it sounds like a dot-com that sells carrying pods full of soda or something and is about to go out of business. Still, it's better than taking the name of the commercial equivalent and tacking "free" onto the beginning.
I'm far from a master of marketing, but having apps called something like "OpenPaint" and "OpenDraw" would seem to me to be a lot more likely to pull in potential users.
Small companies (at least in my experience) used to be even worse about this than big ones. I guess they figured they had more to lose every time someone pirated their software, but some of them took it to ridiculous extremes.
A few years ago I worked in tech support, and I thought it would be cool to set up an IRC server so everybody on the phone could "talk" to each other and pool troubleshooting resources while they were on the phone. The company I work for is very much against free software (because of support issues), so it had to run on Windows. I managed to convince them to let me use a free port of ircd for the test, but for the real rollout they insisted on something that cost money (and didn't crash every twenty minutes).
I found two commercial IRC servers for Windows. One was very overpriced, and the other seemed like what we were after. It cost about $100 for the number of clients we were going to have, had support, etc.
So I got a license, and installed it on a server. But hey, it needed to connect to the vendor's website to validate my unlock code. Okay, fair enough, I got security to open up a few ports for fifteen minutes. It validated itself, and then I noticed some kind of timer that said it would need to do so again... in a day or two. I emailed the vendor, and confirmed that yes, that ridiculously short interval was by design, and couldn't I set up some kind of perpetually recurring window to open in the firewall to allow the machine to revalidate itself? After I explained to them that this was not the case, they agreed to send me a file that would validate the app for six months if I put it in the install folder.
Anyhow, it seems that the big companies are now catching right back up. Entering a serial number is one thing, but I'll buy an app and then download a crack for it before I have thirty dubious authentication systems running in the background on my machine.
You're forgetting that this is Slashdot, where media pirates are brave freedom fighters trying to liberate music and movies from the hands of the wealthy and very wealthy and give it to the only moderately wealthy.
The idiot then goes on to describing Microsoft pains and curse his users as stupid in complete ignorance of free alternatives that cause no pain.
The problems with their system are not MS-specific. They are poorly-designed-software-specific.