Notice the sourceid thing? So I think google knows exactly how many searches are done via opera.
The way I do it is implement a counter in my php or perl code. It even checks unique visitors so that 1 Mozilla user who keeps hitting reload doesn't skew the results. As said I doubt I am better then google.
Using httpd logs for this is wastefull, storing useragent string for every hit? Ouch, what have my harddrives ever done to you? I don't even record hits on images, just main page hits. If I don't filter it like mad I get logs running into gigs in hours. I think google draws a bit more traffic then me.
Most big search engines ignore meta-tags. Just another casualty of spammers and assholes in general. Just as you can no longer just post your email address using meta-tags to describe your site has become impossible. Now you need to hope that the search engine is smart enough to deduct the subject from the text.
Current dictonary dumpters put their spam in the normal text and try to make simple sentences out of it.
I am personally getting tired of it. Perhaps it is time for a.checked domain where only respectable companies are allowed that have in their contract certain behavior codes like DO NOT FRICKING MAKE SEARCH ENGINES IMPOSSIBLE TO USE.
It wouldn't have to be censorship as porn could easily exist in such a domain. Just as long as it just uses porn keywords and only those keywords that actually relate to the content sold.
Oh well, a trusted web where everyone just behaves. I can dream can't I?
It is pretty simple. Say some site is a problem the german court wants to tackle. Perhaps it is luring kids into giving their email address in order to then spam them. Now what are the cops going to do. Well search through the law books for any tiny little thing done wrong and then stack it all up and present it to a judge. He will then have a whole lot of things he can find guilty or not guilty on and slap a sentence.
Law sadly works this way, Al Capone was gotten on tax evasion, Ted Bundy was arrested for ignoring a stop sign (or something like that) etc etc.
With the web becoming more and more important we need to give the law at least some tools to use against fraudsters. It is like slapping those fly-by-night stores that sell crap with fire-safety violations. Just any way to get them.
I would be extremely suprised if any normal site would ever be prosecuted. These kinds of laws ain't for enforcing, they are for slapping people with while you try to proof the thougher crime. Fraud is hard to proof, 1000 keywords is not. Fraud will get the site down and the fraudster in jail. 1000 keywords will get the site down while waiting for the fraud trial.
Writing code ain't all that hard. Writing good code is, writing code that is good and can be maintained is an art.
But the artist can't work in a vacuum. He needs to be told what he needs to create or you will end up with a master sculpture while you were after a painting.
And that is the real problem. Talented programmers are being wasted as their employers are unable to give them detailed instructions on what needs to be done. I can't count the number of times I had to spend days hunting after simple details like for example exactly what the minimum payout is on a cheque. It is not the programmer who can decide that and it not the programmers job to find it out either. Simple things like deciding wich fields in a database got to be unique. Social security number you say? What if people without are employed? Sure it ain't legal but it happens, I been in more then one company where a simple check on the social security number (in holland it can be calculated to see if it is a legit number) showed the company had employed people without a valid number. Wich by the way is illegal.
When managers don't manage programmers spend time not programming and projects run over budget. First step to more efficient development is to make sure that it is known what needs to be developed.
Most software developement is like building a building without it being decided if it shall be a house or flat. How many doors their shall be if any. What windows are.
You can tell how wrong software development is that they decide on the material before they decide on the structure. Would you choose straw as the building material without knowing wether you are going to build a hut or a skyscraper?
Odd, if I get a single negative experience with a shop I STOP GOING THERE. Maybe that is just me but I expect excellent serice all the time. That is what I am paying for. If they only have to give me excellent service half of the time it is okay if I only pay them with real money half of the time? Thought not.
I had to use Dells via work and they sucked, the hardware blew, the installation was bad and the support sucked. Enough for me never to use them. I can get better support from local dealers with physical shops I can visit and demand satisfaction. It helps service a lot when you are face to face and other customers are listening in.
If this is the real thing (what a faked press release using non-existing hardware displaying pre-rendered footage? NEVER!!!!) then Nintendo better rethink the DS or be prepared to cut prices. The GBA screen can't compete. Put these two next to each other and it would be like trying to sell at 14 inch CRT standing next to 21inch sony LCD. With the lcd being only twice as expensive. That could mean that GBA becomes the cheap handheld bought by the poorer parents. I pity them as kids want the latest greatest brand, not something that might be just as much fun.
IF the PSP can really deliver this kinda quality then WOW. Fuck battery life, fuck price. I can carry extra batteries. I can always sell my body to science. BUT I GOTTA HAVE IT.
Or whatever it is called BUT on the whole it is better to sell a million products at 30 bucks then a hundred thousand at 50 bucks. GBA games are expensive. 30 bucks is far more reasonable. And since the cost of games is the same regardless of the number of sales (it is not like the cost is in duplication) it is better to get a bigger slice.
Having seen the PSP now (not sure if this stuff was pre-rendered or not) I think Nintendo has got a problem. Sure I like my GBA but the graphics are not that good. All Sony has to do is put up demo stands and the PSP will sell itself.
Those winging about the price difference. One word. iPod. Everyone else has cheaper MP3 players. Still iPods sell like hotcakes.
IE controls the web. If you code a webpage to make use of the latest standards then good luck, only a tiny percentage of installed browsers can view it. Just look at what can be done with PNG. A very simple example. the SLASHDOT image at the top left is an image with white letters and the site color as the background. Since/. uses different site colors for different sections it needs a different image for every section. With PNG it could use alpha (don't pin me down on the names I am not a photoshop monkey) channels and have the background transparant. Then only 1 image is needed for all the different color styles.
Does this matter in real life? Well say that I override the whiter then white background color on all sites with my own slightly yellow color wich is less hard on the eyes. With gif or jpeg every an image like the slashdot logo doesn't blend. With png and alpha channels it would.
Not terribly important but it would make life a little easier for developers. If you want to change the color of a site a tiny bit for say christmas you don't need to change every image.
Other stuff like CSS2 and such are also on the backburner while we wait for MS to catch up.
So MS controls what can be done with the web, they don't need to make frontpage support the latest standards because IE doesn't support them anyway. In short MS is saving big bucks in development by holding the web back.
If IE had say only 50% of the market and someone came up with the next big thing that IE didn't support then IE would have to adapt real fast or users would switch. Since 50% of installed browsers would be up-to-date launching something new could be worth the risk. At the moment it isn't.
Why does MS want to control everything? Because that is how they got big. Not quality, not the latest tech, not being first, not being inovators. They are big because they are big and the way to stay big by being big is to keep everything under your control.
Also there is another smaller problem. Install Mozilla on windows and MSN is gone. You might even hear stories about linux that have not been through MS spin machine. You may learn about Mac's You may even get the idea that there are alternatives. Can't have that.
Even for a giant like MS developing a new browser costs money. Cost deduct from profits. Plus there are hidden costs like the costs of supporting the upgrade, the costs of the downloads, the costs of having yet another version to support, the risk that the next IE will be another ME.
So MS has a clear choice, profit on a crappy browser or loose money on creating a new one. Hmmmm. Though one.
It is like wondering why rich people are always such penny-pinchers. It is because they are penny-pinchers that they gotta be rich.
It doesn't matter how crap your product is as long as people continue to buy it. Just look at the history of the american car industry. They just kept pumping out the gas gussling 3 ton monsters because the buyers kept buying them. Then all of a sudden japan entered the market and boom. It all collapsed. Well at least that is what the books say. If you check you will notice that a lot of japanese car makers are in trouble or in fact now owned again by american car companies.
What is they saying again? Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the consumer. When it comes to windows user you just can't loose. Just get a focus group made up out of dead slugs.
Do you really think the people at google can't decipher the useragent string? It is possible but somehow I find it unlikely.
You see if you examine your opera useragent string closely you will see that the word Opera definitly is there. I myself filter it out to get some really usable statistics (IE users vs IE pretenders) and I doubt I am a better coder then Google.
I take high taxes any time over country where families live in cars.
Sadly of late that argument is loosing weight as we keep the high taxes but most of the social services are hollowed out to american levels. So no free health care but still the high mandatory taxes for it. Less schooling and more and more money needed to be paid by students. Higher and higher sales taxes coupled with greater reductions in social security.
At least in america it seems you get an anti-social society but low taxes. Here we got anti-social society with high taxes. Yippie.
Then again Doom3 ain't even out here yet. Grrrrr. Forcing me to pirate when I got the money itching in my pocket. Wasn't there a recent article about how game publishers are greater enemies of games then pirates? Certainly is true for Doom 3. I have the money, I got the machine but ID ain't selling. So I gotta a choice. Wait to spend money while everyone is getting Doom 3 goodness OR get Doom 3 goodness for free. I held out for a week. I caved in yesterday. Now just waiting for it to become dark again so I can go back to mars. Playing it in sunny weather just ain't right.
So yeah there are high-end gaming systems running linux. Just not with a huge variety of games. Don't be suprised however if you see the highest benchmark scores come from penquin machines. Kinda helps when your memory isn't polluted with MS bloat.
2x256mb is cheaper then 1x512mb. So multiply that by the kind of bulk buying dell does and you are talking some serious saving. Remember that Dell is Dell because it saves every dollar it can.
That is why dell is so looked down upon. If you ever have to work with them you just know you are dealing wich a "company/piece of hardware" were everything was done by the lowest bidder. Such tricks as finding out a 128mb machine had all its memories slots full (wich as you say makes it harder and more expensive to upgrade). Finding out that for some unspeakable reason yes this PC comes with only 1 IDE slot. That the case size means no expansion card fits.
It is not that Dell actually makes bad stuff. Just that if you are used to make your own cages or worse IBM style hardware Dell feels cheap. The biggest problem is that they feel cheap but often really aren't. If you buy your dell as is and never ever touch its insides then it is a decent enough deal. Else just don't. Friends don't let friends dell.
Do you really think that people that overclock their CPU's, have overclocked graphics cards and water cooling care all that much about reliability?
Well I got a very simple solution to that, one that the overclockers I care about all use. It is called a small server with real Raid to store all the "real work" they got.
The game machine is the game machine and it doesn't need to have a long live as it won't be around longer then a year anyway.
Raid 0 fits in the "getting 1% extra fps" scene. It does not fit in the office scene.
Anatech and a whole lot of/.ers just don't seem to get that to some people every bit of extra speed is worth it. You would review a ferrari as a lesser car then a ford focus since a ferrari costs more and who needs the speed.
Does speed matter? Oh yeah, does reliability? Hell no, this ain't a server. Only thing I could loose is a few hours reinstalling windows and my games. I do that often enough anyway whenever a new piece of hardware arrives.
When a game loads it access the HD a lot. Depends a bit on the game of course and on the amount of memory but the bigger games outthere spend a few seconds loading like mad.
The faster the HD the faster it loads. Most "desktop" business applications don't really load that much, even a piece of bloatware like office would load pretty fast. At least the reading from HD bit.
Saying raid 0 is of no use is like saying a 7200 drive is of no use on a desktop. Or a large cache is of no use. Or SCSI is of no use. Just for fun try working/playing on an older PC and a modern laptop. Notice how much slower the laptop is? Why? Look at the HD specs.
Making the example of movies shows you ain't got a clue about what raid 0 and speed is about. Movies typically load very slowly, hell they can be read from CD and it doesn't get much slower then that.
Level loads in games are different. There you gotta wait until the full level is loaded and to some people that matters. I know for a fact that in MMORPG's you can see wich people got the slowass PC's with the dell HD's. They are the people that arrive in a new location minutes after everyone else.
Raid 0 makes sense when you have to read or write a fair amount of data in as short a time as possible. Just like 7200 beats 5400 or SCSI beats IDE, raid 0 beats single disk. Wether YOU need it is irrelevant. That is taste, never argue about taste on a tech site.
The quality of any forum depends in the reader
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Raid 0: Blessing or hype?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
If the reader agrees then the forum is the best, if the reader disagrees the forum is the worst. So to windows users/. is a bunch of hippie penquin loving MS bashers.
Tweakers.net is kinda like/. except it focusses on tech and to where you got some real rocket scientists posting on/. tweakers.net seems to have more kids. Maybe a lack of moderation?
So just as some people hate/. some hate tweakers.net or some other tech site. It all depends on wether the site agrees or disagrees with their point of view.
Nothing upsets some people more then reading that their latest purchase is a piece of shit.
I agree about the language. While speaking dutch is all nice and local it stops it being usefull to roughly 99% of the world population. It is not like dutch people can't read english well enough for even the techiest of articles.
So I partly agree with the parent and disagree with the grandparent. Tweakers.net is just another tech site with its share of bullshit and crap. No better or worse then any other site.
As to my opionon on raid 0 (Use several raids myself including raid 0 for a while) it is definitly faster. Doesn't matter that much for me since only games require the regular loading of stuff from disk in a speedy fashion and the improvement can be lived without. So a level loads a few seconds faster. Yippie. Then again, raid 0 is pretty cheap and if you want those couple of seconds then it makes perfect sense.
The people who are against raid 0 are the same who are against dual processor or large amounts of ram etc etc. They can't afford it and therefore it must suck. Ignore or pity such people but never take their advice. They are truly the ones who said 640k should be enough for anyone (unlike bill gates who apparently never said it).
It is intresting that this type of music has stopped being used. The way they did it was with midi (midi files are like sheet music to a synthesizer wich requires powerfull hardware BUT is extremely small and very low on the cpu usage). Because of midi they could have several themes in memory and load between them quickly even have crossover music so you don't get a clear switch.
For some reason after tie-fighter they switced to CD music and gone was this advantage.
Sure mp3 or CD music has the advantage that it plays on crappy soundcards but there is really no way to have a neat switch between themes.
In X-wing I loved the music but in more recent games I switch it off. I wished they had continued to develop the tech to have the music match the action and switch seamlessly between themes but sadly the cheap bastards with their onboard soundcards ruined this.
There are certain laws in this world. Some we like, others we don't BUT those who say that it is okay to break some while wanting others enforced are hypocrits.
Spam laws you want enforced because they hurt you, I personally couldn't care less since I don't get more then 1 or 2 a year. I do however have to deal with the aftermath of speeding in the form of taking a good friend who is a ambulance medic drinking after he scraped yet another child out of a car hit by some speeder.
So you think your concerns are more important then mine? Either enforce all laws or enforce none. Spammers got the same excuses (they are not really hurting anyone) as speeders. Last time I checked spam never killed anyone.
I am glad the police has better things to do then catch spammers. Also your example about rapist and traffic violations is wrong. Wasn't ted bundy or another serial rapist/murdered arrested for traffic violation? So going after traffic netted the police a violent criminal. Not bad.
No seriously, computer trading is nothing new. Been there done that. Computers are very good at spotting small trends and acting on them very fast. That whole day trading stuff was related to it. Nothing to do with real investment but then the stockmarket ain't got much to do with investment either.
So no there are no laws against you using a computer or whatever to analyse the market and then use that info to trade. Using a computer to do it automaticcaly is also hardly illegal. Major banks do it.
Of course your first point is valid. By acting on your analysis you are influencing the data meaning you have to re-analyse. Looks like someone is going to need a lot of cpu cycles.
Really doesn't seem to bright to use this thing anywhere but a secure area where everyone knows what it is. All you need is one 911 call and next thing you know you got a swat team asking questions. Questions like "stop twitching or we will shoot you again", "would you like you bunk-mate to be a gigantic horny black guy or a white biker guy".
Something tells me these guys are going to be in the news more often.
Switch of your pc when not in use?
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Ready, Aim, HACK!
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· Score: 1
Wow yeah that is complicated. I barely managed to grasp that I should turn of the engine of my car when I get out. Next thing I should close my door I suppose. Geez whiz this stuff is high-tech.
Oh well just shoot the guy that made blue-tooth have no security. Simple.
Lesson 1: DO NOT SIGNAL YOUR PRESENCE TO THE ENEMY.
One of the things any real soldier knows is that once you give your position away you MOVE. So a sniper never stays in one place after a shot (make note snipers who are suprised that after they shoot me I kill them in computer games). With night fighting the flash of your weapon means that after you fire a round you move since the enemy now knows exactly were you are.
Same deal really with search lights. Sure they make it easier to see but the poor guy operating it will probably be the first to die as he is the easiest to target.
Putting lights on your body or weapon is a big NO-NO. Why not just paint your self a big fluorescent target on your chest and be done with it?
The only ones who use lights on their guns are special forces like swat teams. They operate at such speed and with such overwhelming force that the enemy doesn't have time to respond. A swat team could go in with sirens on their head since they are not supposed to stay still and engage a heavily armed enemy.
Watch the movie ET and the opening scene where all the cops are walking with their flashlights shining. Now imagine they are soldiers and you are the enemy waiting in ambush. Who do you think is going to win?
There is also an other reason why not to use a flashlight at night. Your eyes can adjust to the dark and make use of what little light there is available. Start shining a flashlight around however and your eyes won't adjust. You will see very good in the small cone of the flashlight and be blind outside. Not good.
So lights on weapons or worse the body are a clear sign you are watching a movie. They can only really be used when you are reasonably certain that you are operating at such speed against a less prepared enemy that the giving away your position and presenting a brightly lit target makes up for you being able to see.
How does this relate to doom3? Well what happened is pretty realistic. The marine realises he is not in a normal combat scenario so he uses duct tape to adjust to the situation. So the question is not why the marins do not have lights on their weapons or body pre-fitted. The question is why ID did not give their soldier some duct-tape after he learned of the changed situation. Then again how many FPS have you seen where the hero tapes clips together for faster reload, tapes two guns together for extra fire power? We seen it in the movies, gotta be sound tactics or they wouldn't use it.
Slashdot Mirror
They are microsoft OEM manufacturers so it is Released To Screwed Manufacturers.
You got two kind of people, dumb criminals and those who are never caught. Innocents? Wich planet have you been living on?
I don't know about mozilla as I am stricly opera and lazy but this is the url for my opera google search bar thingy.
http://www.google.com/search?q=test&sourceid=ope ra&num=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8
Notice the sourceid thing? So I think google knows exactly how many searches are done via opera.
The way I do it is implement a counter in my php or perl code. It even checks unique visitors so that 1 Mozilla user who keeps hitting reload doesn't skew the results. As said I doubt I am better then google.
Using httpd logs for this is wastefull, storing useragent string for every hit? Ouch, what have my harddrives ever done to you? I don't even record hits on images, just main page hits. If I don't filter it like mad I get logs running into gigs in hours. I think google draws a bit more traffic then me.
Current dictonary dumpters put their spam in the normal text and try to make simple sentences out of it.
I am personally getting tired of it. Perhaps it is time for a .checked domain where only respectable companies are allowed that have in their contract certain behavior codes like DO NOT FRICKING MAKE SEARCH ENGINES IMPOSSIBLE TO USE.
It wouldn't have to be censorship as porn could easily exist in such a domain. Just as long as it just uses porn keywords and only those keywords that actually relate to the content sold.
Oh well, a trusted web where everyone just behaves. I can dream can't I?
It is pretty simple. Say some site is a problem the german court wants to tackle. Perhaps it is luring kids into giving their email address in order to then spam them. Now what are the cops going to do. Well search through the law books for any tiny little thing done wrong and then stack it all up and present it to a judge. He will then have a whole lot of things he can find guilty or not guilty on and slap a sentence.
Law sadly works this way, Al Capone was gotten on tax evasion, Ted Bundy was arrested for ignoring a stop sign (or something like that) etc etc.
With the web becoming more and more important we need to give the law at least some tools to use against fraudsters. It is like slapping those fly-by-night stores that sell crap with fire-safety violations. Just any way to get them.
I would be extremely suprised if any normal site would ever be prosecuted. These kinds of laws ain't for enforcing, they are for slapping people with while you try to proof the thougher crime. Fraud is hard to proof, 1000 keywords is not. Fraud will get the site down and the fraudster in jail. 1000 keywords will get the site down while waiting for the fraud trial.
But the artist can't work in a vacuum. He needs to be told what he needs to create or you will end up with a master sculpture while you were after a painting.
And that is the real problem. Talented programmers are being wasted as their employers are unable to give them detailed instructions on what needs to be done. I can't count the number of times I had to spend days hunting after simple details like for example exactly what the minimum payout is on a cheque. It is not the programmer who can decide that and it not the programmers job to find it out either. Simple things like deciding wich fields in a database got to be unique. Social security number you say? What if people without are employed? Sure it ain't legal but it happens, I been in more then one company where a simple check on the social security number (in holland it can be calculated to see if it is a legit number) showed the company had employed people without a valid number. Wich by the way is illegal.
When managers don't manage programmers spend time not programming and projects run over budget. First step to more efficient development is to make sure that it is known what needs to be developed.
Most software developement is like building a building without it being decided if it shall be a house or flat. How many doors their shall be if any. What windows are.
You can tell how wrong software development is that they decide on the material before they decide on the structure. Would you choose straw as the building material without knowing wether you are going to build a hut or a skyscraper?
I had to use Dells via work and they sucked, the hardware blew, the installation was bad and the support sucked. Enough for me never to use them. I can get better support from local dealers with physical shops I can visit and demand satisfaction. It helps service a lot when you are face to face and other customers are listening in.
IF the PSP can really deliver this kinda quality then WOW. Fuck battery life, fuck price. I can carry extra batteries. I can always sell my body to science. BUT I GOTTA HAVE IT.
Or whatever it is called BUT on the whole it is better to sell a million products at 30 bucks then a hundred thousand at 50 bucks. GBA games are expensive. 30 bucks is far more reasonable. And since the cost of games is the same regardless of the number of sales (it is not like the cost is in duplication) it is better to get a bigger slice.
Having seen the PSP now (not sure if this stuff was pre-rendered or not) I think Nintendo has got a problem. Sure I like my GBA but the graphics are not that good. All Sony has to do is put up demo stands and the PSP will sell itself.
Those winging about the price difference. One word. iPod. Everyone else has cheaper MP3 players. Still iPods sell like hotcakes.
Does this matter in real life? Well say that I override the whiter then white background color on all sites with my own slightly yellow color wich is less hard on the eyes. With gif or jpeg every an image like the slashdot logo doesn't blend. With png and alpha channels it would.
Not terribly important but it would make life a little easier for developers. If you want to change the color of a site a tiny bit for say christmas you don't need to change every image.
Other stuff like CSS2 and such are also on the backburner while we wait for MS to catch up.
So MS controls what can be done with the web, they don't need to make frontpage support the latest standards because IE doesn't support them anyway. In short MS is saving big bucks in development by holding the web back.
If IE had say only 50% of the market and someone came up with the next big thing that IE didn't support then IE would have to adapt real fast or users would switch. Since 50% of installed browsers would be up-to-date launching something new could be worth the risk. At the moment it isn't.
Why does MS want to control everything? Because that is how they got big. Not quality, not the latest tech, not being first, not being inovators. They are big because they are big and the way to stay big by being big is to keep everything under your control.
Also there is another smaller problem. Install Mozilla on windows and MSN is gone. You might even hear stories about linux that have not been through MS spin machine. You may learn about Mac's You may even get the idea that there are alternatives. Can't have that.
So MS has a clear choice, profit on a crappy browser or loose money on creating a new one. Hmmmm. Though one.
It is like wondering why rich people are always such penny-pinchers. It is because they are penny-pinchers that they gotta be rich.
It doesn't matter how crap your product is as long as people continue to buy it. Just look at the history of the american car industry. They just kept pumping out the gas gussling 3 ton monsters because the buyers kept buying them. Then all of a sudden japan entered the market and boom. It all collapsed. Well at least that is what the books say. If you check you will notice that a lot of japanese car makers are in trouble or in fact now owned again by american car companies.
What is they saying again? Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the consumer. When it comes to windows user you just can't loose. Just get a focus group made up out of dead slugs.
You see if you examine your opera useragent string closely you will see that the word Opera definitly is there. I myself filter it out to get some really usable statistics (IE users vs IE pretenders) and I doubt I am a better coder then Google.
Sadly of late that argument is loosing weight as we keep the high taxes but most of the social services are hollowed out to american levels. So no free health care but still the high mandatory taxes for it. Less schooling and more and more money needed to be paid by students. Higher and higher sales taxes coupled with greater reductions in social security.
At least in america it seems you get an anti-social society but low taxes. Here we got anti-social society with high taxes. Yippie.
Then again Doom3 ain't even out here yet. Grrrrr. Forcing me to pirate when I got the money itching in my pocket. Wasn't there a recent article about how game publishers are greater enemies of games then pirates? Certainly is true for Doom 3. I have the money, I got the machine but ID ain't selling. So I gotta a choice. Wait to spend money while everyone is getting Doom 3 goodness OR get Doom 3 goodness for free. I held out for a week. I caved in yesterday. Now just waiting for it to become dark again so I can go back to mars. Playing it in sunny weather just ain't right.
So yeah there are high-end gaming systems running linux. Just not with a huge variety of games. Don't be suprised however if you see the highest benchmark scores come from penquin machines. Kinda helps when your memory isn't polluted with MS bloat.
That is why dell is so looked down upon. If you ever have to work with them you just know you are dealing wich a "company/piece of hardware" were everything was done by the lowest bidder. Such tricks as finding out a 128mb machine had all its memories slots full (wich as you say makes it harder and more expensive to upgrade). Finding out that for some unspeakable reason yes this PC comes with only 1 IDE slot. That the case size means no expansion card fits.
It is not that Dell actually makes bad stuff. Just that if you are used to make your own cages or worse IBM style hardware Dell feels cheap. The biggest problem is that they feel cheap but often really aren't. If you buy your dell as is and never ever touch its insides then it is a decent enough deal. Else just don't. Friends don't let friends dell.
Well I got a very simple solution to that, one that the overclockers I care about all use. It is called a small server with real Raid to store all the "real work" they got.
The game machine is the game machine and it doesn't need to have a long live as it won't be around longer then a year anyway.
Raid 0 fits in the "getting 1% extra fps" scene. It does not fit in the office scene.
Anatech and a whole lot of /.ers just don't seem to get that to some people every bit of extra speed is worth it. You would review a ferrari as a lesser car then a ford focus since a ferrari costs more and who needs the speed.
Does speed matter? Oh yeah, does reliability? Hell no, this ain't a server. Only thing I could loose is a few hours reinstalling windows and my games. I do that often enough anyway whenever a new piece of hardware arrives.
The faster the HD the faster it loads. Most "desktop" business applications don't really load that much, even a piece of bloatware like office would load pretty fast. At least the reading from HD bit.
Saying raid 0 is of no use is like saying a 7200 drive is of no use on a desktop. Or a large cache is of no use. Or SCSI is of no use. Just for fun try working/playing on an older PC and a modern laptop. Notice how much slower the laptop is? Why? Look at the HD specs.
Making the example of movies shows you ain't got a clue about what raid 0 and speed is about. Movies typically load very slowly, hell they can be read from CD and it doesn't get much slower then that.
Level loads in games are different. There you gotta wait until the full level is loaded and to some people that matters. I know for a fact that in MMORPG's you can see wich people got the slowass PC's with the dell HD's. They are the people that arrive in a new location minutes after everyone else.
Raid 0 makes sense when you have to read or write a fair amount of data in as short a time as possible. Just like 7200 beats 5400 or SCSI beats IDE, raid 0 beats single disk. Wether YOU need it is irrelevant. That is taste, never argue about taste on a tech site.
Tweakers.net is kinda like /. except it focusses on tech and to where you got some real rocket scientists posting on /. tweakers.net seems to have more kids. Maybe a lack of moderation?
So just as some people hate /. some hate tweakers.net or some other tech site. It all depends on wether the site agrees or disagrees with their point of view.
Nothing upsets some people more then reading that their latest purchase is a piece of shit.
I agree about the language. While speaking dutch is all nice and local it stops it being usefull to roughly 99% of the world population. It is not like dutch people can't read english well enough for even the techiest of articles.
So I partly agree with the parent and disagree with the grandparent. Tweakers.net is just another tech site with its share of bullshit and crap. No better or worse then any other site.
As to my opionon on raid 0 (Use several raids myself including raid 0 for a while) it is definitly faster. Doesn't matter that much for me since only games require the regular loading of stuff from disk in a speedy fashion and the improvement can be lived without. So a level loads a few seconds faster. Yippie. Then again, raid 0 is pretty cheap and if you want those couple of seconds then it makes perfect sense.
The people who are against raid 0 are the same who are against dual processor or large amounts of ram etc etc. They can't afford it and therefore it must suck. Ignore or pity such people but never take their advice. They are truly the ones who said 640k should be enough for anyone (unlike bill gates who apparently never said it).
For some reason after tie-fighter they switced to CD music and gone was this advantage.
Sure mp3 or CD music has the advantage that it plays on crappy soundcards but there is really no way to have a neat switch between themes.
In X-wing I loved the music but in more recent games I switch it off. I wished they had continued to develop the tech to have the music match the action and switch seamlessly between themes but sadly the cheap bastards with their onboard soundcards ruined this.
Spam laws you want enforced because they hurt you, I personally couldn't care less since I don't get more then 1 or 2 a year. I do however have to deal with the aftermath of speeding in the form of taking a good friend who is a ambulance medic drinking after he scraped yet another child out of a car hit by some speeder.
So you think your concerns are more important then mine? Either enforce all laws or enforce none. Spammers got the same excuses (they are not really hurting anyone) as speeders. Last time I checked spam never killed anyone.
I am glad the police has better things to do then catch spammers. Also your example about rapist and traffic violations is wrong. Wasn't ted bundy or another serial rapist/murdered arrested for traffic violation? So going after traffic netted the police a violent criminal. Not bad.
No seriously, computer trading is nothing new. Been there done that. Computers are very good at spotting small trends and acting on them very fast. That whole day trading stuff was related to it. Nothing to do with real investment but then the stockmarket ain't got much to do with investment either.
So no there are no laws against you using a computer or whatever to analyse the market and then use that info to trade. Using a computer to do it automaticcaly is also hardly illegal. Major banks do it.
Of course your first point is valid. By acting on your analysis you are influencing the data meaning you have to re-analyse. Looks like someone is going to need a lot of cpu cycles.
Anyway wouldn't it be smarter the other way around? Last time I checked the menu salmon sells for a hell of lot less then trout.
Something tells me these guys are going to be in the news more often.
Oh well just shoot the guy that made blue-tooth have no security. Simple.
One of the things any real soldier knows is that once you give your position away you MOVE. So a sniper never stays in one place after a shot (make note snipers who are suprised that after they shoot me I kill them in computer games). With night fighting the flash of your weapon means that after you fire a round you move since the enemy now knows exactly were you are.
Same deal really with search lights. Sure they make it easier to see but the poor guy operating it will probably be the first to die as he is the easiest to target.
Putting lights on your body or weapon is a big NO-NO. Why not just paint your self a big fluorescent target on your chest and be done with it?
The only ones who use lights on their guns are special forces like swat teams. They operate at such speed and with such overwhelming force that the enemy doesn't have time to respond. A swat team could go in with sirens on their head since they are not supposed to stay still and engage a heavily armed enemy.
Watch the movie ET and the opening scene where all the cops are walking with their flashlights shining. Now imagine they are soldiers and you are the enemy waiting in ambush. Who do you think is going to win?
There is also an other reason why not to use a flashlight at night. Your eyes can adjust to the dark and make use of what little light there is available. Start shining a flashlight around however and your eyes won't adjust. You will see very good in the small cone of the flashlight and be blind outside. Not good.
So lights on weapons or worse the body are a clear sign you are watching a movie. They can only really be used when you are reasonably certain that you are operating at such speed against a less prepared enemy that the giving away your position and presenting a brightly lit target makes up for you being able to see.
How does this relate to doom3? Well what happened is pretty realistic. The marine realises he is not in a normal combat scenario so he uses duct tape to adjust to the situation. So the question is not why the marins do not have lights on their weapons or body pre-fitted. The question is why ID did not give their soldier some duct-tape after he learned of the changed situation. Then again how many FPS have you seen where the hero tapes clips together for faster reload, tapes two guns together for extra fire power? We seen it in the movies, gotta be sound tactics or they wouldn't use it.