It is, it is basically Windows 2K with a shiny theme on it much like how Vista is like XP with a bunch of crap thrown on it and a shiny GUI.
Isn't that what new versions of OS's are supposed to be? What are they going to do, take a bunch of crap out?
Of course theres plenty of things updated and redone at a low level, but thats not really stuff users notice. They notice things like the (vastly improved) start menu, or the useful but taxing 3d acceleration on the desktop. Yes it's wasteful. No I wouldn't run it on a laptop, or a low end machine, but just like firefox I accept the memory rape in exchange for useful features that justify it.
Not that I even run Vista at home, but I've tried it out for a while and would not object to it on a new PC.
I sort of disagree. The blue laws are bulllshit with no justification, whereas this is a tactical decision made for good reason. If someone starts turning their phones off regularly at night they'll be just as suspicious. Granted they could just leave it on and at home, but overall you're in a better tactical position if you can completely black out the information source if you can't 100% control the information.
There are no respawns in Counter-Strike so it doesn't matter that you can spec after death.
It matters when my friend dies and tells me where the person who killed them is (or that they all ran back after he died..or that they ran in and had the bomb, etc).
I personally think it would lead to a more skillful game if you needed to communicate what you saw BEFORE you get killed, but thats never going to happen as even if you convinced your team not to ghost, you know the other team will do it against you.
Theres an mp_fadetoblack cvar, but in the time it takes for the camera to go black you can still pan around and see exactly what happens. What would be needed would be a mp_instadeath or similar where as soon as your health hits 0, you're teleported outside of the map with your screen black for 5 seconds or so. This way you can't see or even hear what went on, but then you could go back to normal spectating so as not to be bored out of your mind.
Of course then you would need to fix the problem with switching between two live players dragging the camera through the wall allowing the spectator to see through walls temporarily and call out whats on the other side.
Back on topic though: Dying doesn't negatively impact my emotions, failing does. I don't care that I died if the person defending with me cleaned them up, I care when I get ran over without so much as getting a shot off, then we procede to lose the round due to my actions.
Team games are inherently different like that though. In a 1 vs 1 game its an entirely different feeling since your death is directly your score, but at the same time as soon as you die you need to get back up and recover. There isnt any time to sit around and mope in a close game, but if you're losing 0-10 you probably will feel pretty awful with each additional death knowing your goal of winning is further and further away.
Lets just hope someone didn't compromise the password (man in the middle, hacking the backend of a site you have an account on that doesn't store them hashed, etc) at some point in the last N years. Or that you don't ever have to give your password out for something, say you're in the hospital suddenly injured and your coworker or family need SOME access to your files but not access to your personal email, photobucket, what have you.
Not that I'm not just as guilty, I just at least feel bad about this level of insecurity.
I kind of have to wonder why nobody has proposed some kind of govt subsidized antivirus program. If we can spend tax dollars on Americas Army, why not buy out ESET or similar and allow all US residents (or the world, for good will) to get a good free antivirus?
The price of computers keeps coming down. Anyone can buy a $400 walmart pc if not a cheaper second hand one from someone upgrading. Not everybody is going to be willing to shell out $80/yr or so on an antivirus that they don't understand the point to. Yet at the same time due to the nature of worms and botnets, its in everyones best interest if these people are protected*. Note that this should be OPTIONAL as personally I would worry about the privacy aspects of it, but if all the big and cheap pc manufacturers shipped with it I think the internet might clean up a bit.
While I'm normally for smaller government and less spending, I think we're past the point of that being an option and would really rather see the money spent on a program like that than many other proposals.
* I know you or I don't really need an antivirus, but these people do.
You missed my real point though. While I don't find the alternatives good (and I used pidgin about a month ago), if I wanted to I can run pidgin on windows natively, same with any other 'alternative' like GIMP, audacity, firefox, vim, etc.
Yet to run the good windows apps you're stuck using wine and unless wines gotten really advanced, i think you'll still be missing out on a lot of stuff. I doubt foobar2000 can keep the global hotkeys i use, or the popupplus window that transparently slides out from the side of my screen on track change, or anything else more advanced than simple screen drawing that isn't a game.
And of course if you want to do something like wine, theres always coLinux which is like wine for linux except instead of just interpretting api calls, its a port of the linux kernel entirely.
Admittedly it's been a long time since I've ran linux on anything otehr than my servers, and maybe when I get a new machine I'll throw ubuntu on here to see how its changed, but in the end its really hard to get past the fact that all good linux software runs on windows(usually natively), yet not all good windows software runs on linux (even when you include emulation)
True, but unfortunately I'd say thats because of a combination of lack of software available and lack of standardization to exploit. Theres no common systray everything can target for example.
So instead of installing AIM and getting their annoying browser hook, systray icon, quicklaunch shortcut, desktop shortcut, start menu shortcut, etc (a huge annoyance for sure), you get.. nothing. Well, okay, there is one official aim client for linux, but its fallen so far behind on features i'd be surprised if it even still works.
You're stuck with almost primarily third party software for both apps and drivers. This isn't always a bad thing, but often they lack a lot of polish and features (again, look at all the IM clients out there official or third party, and then check out their ability to do things like voiecchat, webcams, direct connections, games, etc). You also miss out on a lot of useful tools and niche software not available for windows, whereas on windows you pretty much have access to any worth-while linux software as its almost all designed to be portable.
Theres also still something to be said for hardware support, but I couldn't say too much about it as I havent ran linux on the desktop since back when ALSA vs OSS was still a legit decision to make while compiling.
Obviously the solution is to legislate against internet terrorist tools like IRC encryption.
Really though, I don't think they're just grepping for.udpflood here, that would not be news. What I gut from the summary was that they were using anomaly detection to see for example that 25 hosts all started sending mass data after having a communication with one ip. Doesn't matter whats in that connection, it at least gives you somewhere to start.
All you would need to do to circumvent that is use something stateless like UDP. If they want to limit UDP to something like no more than 100 different IP's sending you packets within a set time period, they just created an amazingly simple DoS attack against all of their customers.
Even without udp you could just make sure you fully close all your connections as soon as possible, if not sooner (i.e kill slow clients to make room for fast ones).
Also setting this too low could limit legit use, like when you start up your computer and have a burst of all your software checking for updates, checking for mail, rss feeds/podcasts/etc going off, all your IM clients connecting to their various servers, etc.
I'm pretty much the same way with my XP install, I think the OS is more of a bootstrap to get you your OS (once you replace software components you dont like, install new things to do tasks you otherwise would have done differently, rethemed things, etc). The only thing you really miss by using different bases is hardware support, package management, init management, and software support.
I do have a question though, what do you find brings you to boot openbsd or freebsd? When I last ran them they were so similar that I'd be hard to find a reason to want to switch from one to the other at boot time. Maybe for software testing if you're a developer, but for that I'd think virtual machines would work better.
I know I used to dualboot xp/linux (after many years of being linux only, with some bsds thrown in there for good measure).. After a few months I never really felt like booting into linux as I could do everything I wanted in windows.
The revolutionary part is that by playing, you're creating the content and sharing it. You don't go out of your way to download Worldcraft and spend a week creating a nice bsp with some custom textures, you design your species in game as part of the game and if you're online then that species you create is going to end up in someone else's game.
The difference is in that custom content IS the content of the game for the most part. Not an external entity you go out of your way to get, but something that you seamlessly create and acquire.
I do hope they let you put some kind of restrictions in there, just because I think it would be more fun to be able to join a pre-made group (say, your friends or wow guild or cs clan or what have you) and have their creations pulled more often and with preference to others, so that you get more of the social feel in. And some way to see who authored something, so you can rub it in their face when you wreck it.
Better idea: They could just develope for what they have available and prefer to use, but release the source code so that people with lesser machine can tweak things to run better for what they have!
Well. Except they do. Pick up the source and optimize what you think needs it and remove the features you think slow you down. Don't expect me to use your fork though as frankly i'd rather waste the resources for features than go without the features.
You could get a quad core 2.4ghz machine for less than the money bush is giving to stimulate the economy. Just saying.
That would be nice, especially retouching on older ones and also cheaper combos you'd find in generic desktops.
I'd also like to see a benchmark app you canr un from usb or dvd/cdrom booting. Something that gives you a clean slate to compare against running it in your existing install so you can see how much all the various apps and drivers are bogging your performance down.
I'm not saying C should lose, by this system it should, I'm just saying our voting system doesn;t let a lot of people accurately express their interest in the election leading to less desirable outcomes.
As for whoever questioned Obama/Paul overlapping on issues (I'm too lazy to reply twice): It's not as far fetched as you think.
The way I and a lot of others see it is that we'd rather have smaller federal government like Paul's platform pushes, but we don't see that happening and if we're stuck with a large government we'd rather see all that tax money go to healthcare and such instead of the places the republicans would put it.
Because of the reason the grandparent post pointed out: it lowers your credibility. Both in that someone might try them due to your recommendation and get burned, or that they've been burned in the past and think "hey, this guy actually likes them? anything else he likes is probably just as bad"
As someone who got burned by them (had to threaten legal action to get them to stop demanding money and actually cancel my 'free' account), I know I wouldn't trust someone vouching for them. It's not like how some people got crappy xbox360's that died in a few hours and some people got perfectly fine ones, with 1and1 its more some people get fucked over intentionally and hard, and others just haven't gotten there yet.
But limiting people to less then that would be what I consider theft, even if it is only the problematic people.
Agreed, but its not just theft for the problematic people-- If they're charging you $50 for 8mbps but anyone who actually using 8mbps for more than an hour or so a week(~14gigs of transfer) get their service cut, then what they're really doing is selling you a lowered connection but still advertising it as unlimmitted with some large number on how quick they say your downloads will be, charging you far more than they should.
It sucks for people paying $40-$60 and trying to use their service fully, getting the service revoked.
It sucks more for people paying $40-$60 and not using anywhere near the full service capacity, never realizing how badly they are overpaying.
Couldn't agree more, and as someone in texas with RR I'm fully ready to cancel my service if this gets rolled out.
As few as 5 percent of our customers use 50 percent of the network,'
I really hope they publicize this statistic more as they try to justify it. How much $ would a guy have to raise to buy commercial time to let everybody know that (statistically) 95% of you are paying for twice the internet connection that they use?
Because back then they did it based on what should be codified as law, not what was 'moral'? I have plenty of moral beliefs, they shouldn't all be law and they certainly shouldn't be constitutional, as that devalues the importance of the constitution. Think things like prohibition and sodomy laws.
Morals change. We shouldn't need to update the constitution to reflect that when we could just not change it in the first place.
The problem is you vote for who you want to win, with no ability to say who you don't. Random numbers and names pulled out of my ass as an example: 30% of the people wanted Ron Paul to win and hated Romney 30% of the people wanted Obama to win and hated Romney 40% of the people wanted Romney to win.
More people didnt want Romney to be president, yet under our system he would win. Arguably this is what got Bush in office.
Now I'm not saying you shouldn't vote for Paul, just that it isn't as simple as voting for who you want to win. Personally I feel a little lucky that at this point in the election, I don't really dislike any major candidate on either side. I like some more than others, including some that have already dropped out, but theres nobody that I'd strongly vote against if I had the chance.
I do have to say though that it's pretty sad that even Debian has a saner voting system than the US presidential elections.
No, it's a fairly famous guy telling his fans things they may or may not know. The fact that you're already well versed in the field doesn't mean my dad is, but he sure likes mythbusters as much as I do.
I don't think open sores is a fair comparison, as at least its funny. I refer to stuff as open sores all the time.
The difference is "open sores" is at least kind of funny, whereas "windoze" is just retarded and "M$" was clever but is now old. Now if you want a fair comparison, compare it to calling them "Micros~1". "Crapple" falls somewhere in between.
Sometimes using the real names makes a complaint a little too serious. If I was talking about the 10th time I've had to restart Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1 due to an infinite loop in its embed handling, it sounds like I'm writing a troubleticket. If I say "firefux crashed again ", its a lot less formal.
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Isn't that what new versions of OS's are supposed to be? What are they going to do, take a bunch of crap out?
Of course theres plenty of things updated and redone at a low level, but thats not really stuff users notice. They notice things like the (vastly improved) start menu, or the useful but taxing 3d acceleration on the desktop. Yes it's wasteful. No I wouldn't run it on a laptop, or a low end machine, but just like firefox I accept the memory rape in exchange for useful features that justify it.
Not that I even run Vista at home, but I've tried it out for a while and would not object to it on a new PC.
If you consume beer through an IV I think you're a different type of drinker.
I sort of disagree. The blue laws are bulllshit with no justification, whereas this is a tactical decision made for good reason. If someone starts turning their phones off regularly at night they'll be just as suspicious. Granted they could just leave it on and at home, but overall you're in a better tactical position if you can completely black out the information source if you can't 100% control the information.
It matters when my friend dies and tells me where the person who killed them is (or that they all ran back after he died..or that they ran in and had the bomb, etc).
I personally think it would lead to a more skillful game if you needed to communicate what you saw BEFORE you get killed, but thats never going to happen as even if you convinced your team not to ghost, you know the other team will do it against you.
Theres an mp_fadetoblack cvar, but in the time it takes for the camera to go black you can still pan around and see exactly what happens. What would be needed would be a mp_instadeath or similar where as soon as your health hits 0, you're teleported outside of the map with your screen black for 5 seconds or so. This way you can't see or even hear what went on, but then you could go back to normal spectating so as not to be bored out of your mind.
Of course then you would need to fix the problem with switching between two live players dragging the camera through the wall allowing the spectator to see through walls temporarily and call out whats on the other side.
Back on topic though: Dying doesn't negatively impact my emotions, failing does. I don't care that I died if the person defending with me cleaned them up, I care when I get ran over without so much as getting a shot off, then we procede to lose the round due to my actions.
Team games are inherently different like that though. In a 1 vs 1 game its an entirely different feeling since your death is directly your score, but at the same time as soon as you die you need to get back up and recover. There isnt any time to sit around and mope in a close game, but if you're losing 0-10 you probably will feel pretty awful with each additional death knowing your goal of winning is further and further away.
I did Bush vs Kerry 2fort flags last election, it was pretty fun but didnt make any real difference.
Lets just hope someone didn't compromise the password (man in the middle, hacking the backend of a site you have an account on that doesn't store them hashed, etc) at some point in the last N years. Or that you don't ever have to give your password out for something, say you're in the hospital suddenly injured and your coworker or family need SOME access to your files but not access to your personal email, photobucket, what have you.
Not that I'm not just as guilty, I just at least feel bad about this level of insecurity.
I kind of have to wonder why nobody has proposed some kind of govt subsidized antivirus program. If we can spend tax dollars on Americas Army, why not buy out ESET or similar and allow all US residents (or the world, for good will) to get a good free antivirus?
The price of computers keeps coming down. Anyone can buy a $400 walmart pc if not a cheaper second hand one from someone upgrading. Not everybody is going to be willing to shell out $80/yr or so on an antivirus that they don't understand the point to. Yet at the same time due to the nature of worms and botnets, its in everyones best interest if these people are protected*. Note that this should be OPTIONAL as personally I would worry about the privacy aspects of it, but if all the big and cheap pc manufacturers shipped with it I think the internet might clean up a bit.
While I'm normally for smaller government and less spending, I think we're past the point of that being an option and would really rather see the money spent on a program like that than many other proposals.
* I know you or I don't really need an antivirus, but these people do.
I say windows has all of linux's best apps, yet linux doesn't have windows's best apps.
You missed my real point though. While I don't find the alternatives good (and I used pidgin about a month ago), if I wanted to I can run pidgin on windows natively, same with any other 'alternative' like GIMP, audacity, firefox, vim, etc.
Yet to run the good windows apps you're stuck using wine and unless wines gotten really advanced, i think you'll still be missing out on a lot of stuff. I doubt foobar2000 can keep the global hotkeys i use, or the popupplus window that transparently slides out from the side of my screen on track change, or anything else more advanced than simple screen drawing that isn't a game.
And of course if you want to do something like wine, theres always coLinux which is like wine for linux except instead of just interpretting api calls, its a port of the linux kernel entirely.
Admittedly it's been a long time since I've ran linux on anything otehr than my servers, and maybe when I get a new machine I'll throw ubuntu on here to see how its changed, but in the end its really hard to get past the fact that all good linux software runs on windows(usually natively), yet not all good windows software runs on linux (even when you include emulation)
True, but unfortunately I'd say thats because of a combination of lack of software available and lack of standardization to exploit. Theres no common systray everything can target for example.
So instead of installing AIM and getting their annoying browser hook, systray icon, quicklaunch shortcut, desktop shortcut, start menu shortcut, etc (a huge annoyance for sure), you get.. nothing. Well, okay, there is one official aim client for linux, but its fallen so far behind on features i'd be surprised if it even still works.
You're stuck with almost primarily third party software for both apps and drivers. This isn't always a bad thing, but often they lack a lot of polish and features (again, look at all the IM clients out there official or third party, and then check out their ability to do things like voiecchat, webcams, direct connections, games, etc). You also miss out on a lot of useful tools and niche software not available for windows, whereas on windows you pretty much have access to any worth-while linux software as its almost all designed to be portable.
Theres also still something to be said for hardware support, but I couldn't say too much about it as I havent ran linux on the desktop since back when ALSA vs OSS was still a legit decision to make while compiling.
Obviously the solution is to legislate against internet terrorist tools like IRC encryption.
.udpflood here, that would not be news. What I gut from the summary was that they were using anomaly detection to see for example that 25 hosts all started sending mass data after having a communication with one ip. Doesn't matter whats in that connection, it at least gives you somewhere to start.
Really though, I don't think they're just grepping for
Define 'connection'.
All you would need to do to circumvent that is use something stateless like UDP. If they want to limit UDP to something like no more than 100 different IP's sending you packets within a set time period, they just created an amazingly simple DoS attack against all of their customers.
Even without udp you could just make sure you fully close all your connections as soon as possible, if not sooner (i.e kill slow clients to make room for fast ones).
Also setting this too low could limit legit use, like when you start up your computer and have a burst of all your software checking for updates, checking for mail, rss feeds/podcasts/etc going off, all your IM clients connecting to their various servers, etc.
I'm pretty much the same way with my XP install, I think the OS is more of a bootstrap to get you your OS (once you replace software components you dont like, install new things to do tasks you otherwise would have done differently, rethemed things, etc). The only thing you really miss by using different bases is hardware support, package management, init management, and software support.
I do have a question though, what do you find brings you to boot openbsd or freebsd? When I last ran them they were so similar that I'd be hard to find a reason to want to switch from one to the other at boot time. Maybe for software testing if you're a developer, but for that I'd think virtual machines would work better.
I know I used to dualboot xp/linux (after many years of being linux only, with some bsds thrown in there for good measure).. After a few months I never really felt like booting into linux as I could do everything I wanted in windows.
The revolutionary part is that by playing, you're creating the content and sharing it. You don't go out of your way to download Worldcraft and spend a week creating a nice bsp with some custom textures, you design your species in game as part of the game and if you're online then that species you create is going to end up in someone else's game.
The difference is in that custom content IS the content of the game for the most part. Not an external entity you go out of your way to get, but something that you seamlessly create and acquire.
I do hope they let you put some kind of restrictions in there, just because I think it would be more fun to be able to join a pre-made group (say, your friends or wow guild or cs clan or what have you) and have their creations pulled more often and with preference to others, so that you get more of the social feel in. And some way to see who authored something, so you can rub it in their face when you wreck it.
Better idea: They could just develope for what they have available and prefer to use, but release the source code so that people with lesser machine can tweak things to run better for what they have!
Well. Except they do. Pick up the source and optimize what you think needs it and remove the features you think slow you down. Don't expect me to use your fork though as frankly i'd rather waste the resources for features than go without the features.
You could get a quad core 2.4ghz machine for less than the money bush is giving to stimulate the economy. Just saying.
That would be nice, especially retouching on older ones and also cheaper combos you'd find in generic desktops.
I'd also like to see a benchmark app you canr un from usb or dvd/cdrom booting. Something that gives you a clean slate to compare against running it in your existing install so you can see how much all the various apps and drivers are bogging your performance down.
I'm not saying C should lose, by this system it should, I'm just saying our voting system doesn;t let a lot of people accurately express their interest in the election leading to less desirable outcomes.
As for whoever questioned Obama/Paul overlapping on issues (I'm too lazy to reply twice): It's not as far fetched as you think.
The way I and a lot of others see it is that we'd rather have smaller federal government like Paul's platform pushes, but we don't see that happening and if we're stuck with a large government we'd rather see all that tax money go to healthcare and such instead of the places the republicans would put it.
Because of the reason the grandparent post pointed out: it lowers your credibility. Both in that someone might try them due to your recommendation and get burned, or that they've been burned in the past and think "hey, this guy actually likes them? anything else he likes is probably just as bad"
As someone who got burned by them (had to threaten legal action to get them to stop demanding money and actually cancel my 'free' account), I know I wouldn't trust someone vouching for them. It's not like how some people got crappy xbox360's that died in a few hours and some people got perfectly fine ones, with 1and1 its more some people get fucked over intentionally and hard, and others just haven't gotten there yet.
It's more "Query this url if you don't know how to parse this Public Identifier".
W3C is just shocked that so much software would rather query the url than internally have a copy already.
Agreed, but its not just theft for the problematic people-- If they're charging you $50 for 8mbps but anyone who actually using 8mbps for more than an hour or so a week(~14gigs of transfer) get their service cut, then what they're really doing is selling you a lowered connection but still advertising it as unlimmitted with some large number on how quick they say your downloads will be, charging you far more than they should.
It sucks for people paying $40-$60 and trying to use their service fully, getting the service revoked.
It sucks more for people paying $40-$60 and not using anywhere near the full service capacity, never realizing how badly they are overpaying.
I really hope they publicize this statistic more as they try to justify it. How much $ would a guy have to raise to buy commercial time to let everybody know that (statistically) 95% of you are paying for twice the internet connection that they use?
Because back then they did it based on what should be codified as law, not what was 'moral'? I have plenty of moral beliefs, they shouldn't all be law and they certainly shouldn't be constitutional, as that devalues the importance of the constitution. Think things like prohibition and sodomy laws.
Morals change. We shouldn't need to update the constitution to reflect that when we could just not change it in the first place.
The problem is you vote for who you want to win, with no ability to say who you don't.
Random numbers and names pulled out of my ass as an example:
30% of the people wanted Ron Paul to win and hated Romney
30% of the people wanted Obama to win and hated Romney
40% of the people wanted Romney to win.
More people didnt want Romney to be president, yet under our system he would win.
Arguably this is what got Bush in office.
Now I'm not saying you shouldn't vote for Paul, just that it isn't as simple as voting for who you want to win. Personally I feel a little lucky that at this point in the election, I don't really dislike any major candidate on either side. I like some more than others, including some that have already dropped out, but theres nobody that I'd strongly vote against if I had the chance.
I do have to say though that it's pretty sad that even Debian has a saner voting system than the US presidential elections.
No, it's a fairly famous guy telling his fans things they may or may not know. The fact that you're already well versed in the field doesn't mean my dad is, but he sure likes mythbusters as much as I do.
I don't think open sores is a fair comparison, as at least its funny. I refer to stuff as open sores all the time.
The difference is "open sores" is at least kind of funny, whereas "windoze" is just retarded and "M$" was clever but is now old. Now if you want a fair comparison, compare it to calling them "Micros~1". "Crapple" falls somewhere in between.
Sometimes using the real names makes a complaint a little too serious. If I was talking about the 10th time I've had to restart Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.1 due to an infinite loop in its embed handling, it sounds like I'm writing a troubleticket. If I say "firefux crashed again ", its a lot less formal.
Then again, I troll all the time too, so YMMV.