It's not a clone, it's an OS that is trying to be Windows binary compatible.
You could say they're trying to make a better "Windows".
I know we all love linux here, but IMO the only way to take desktops away from MSFT is to replace them with something thats compatible: something that runs all the same apps and games and supports all the same hardware by way of the same drivers.
Put it on kazaa with all the Britney mp3s and other media that we "don't want to buy anyways", and it's no harm, no foul - thats the slashdot logic, right?
If you cant collect taxes on the VoIP, the purpose of which is to pay for 911 services, then I can see 911 services being cut off from VoIP.
Thus, VoIP never becomes a replacement for POTS. Not that it even should be, IMO. With no regulation there will be no guarantee of the quality or availability of the service.
Government regulation usually sucks, but it does have good side effects. The fact that my phone worked even when a hurricane knocked power out for 9 days is one of them.
Do you think Bell installed all that redundant equipment and all those generators because they wanted to offer me the best possible service?
You don't really want to work in some beurocratic hell with HR people who think like that anyways, do you?
I didn't. I held out until I went into an interview with an actual person with sense on the other side of the desk, not a robot with a cert checklist.
I looked him straight in the eye and told him "I can do this job. In fact, I can do a whole lot more for this company than just doing this job." We talked about what they do, what they'd like to do. I didn't try to bullshit or impress him with buzzwords, I was just straightforward and said "yes, I know C. Yes, I know SQL. Yes, I've used a few variants of Unix." and so on.
I just prefer the atmosphere of a smaller company where I actually have a chance to accomplish something and make a difference. You don't get that from the Initechs of the world.
Only until a judge orders you to decrypt it. And then you decide whether you want to face child porn charges, or somewhat weaker child porn charges + contempt of court charges.
If you're at the point that your hardware was siezed, you know they already have enough on you to get a warrant. The cops are just trying to make their case against you airtight, but that doesn't mean that it doesnt already float.
I'm willing to bet that he doesn't have a hardware drive copier that supports SATA. And his software doesn't recognize reiser4 or xfs.
I'm willing to bet you're wrong. A SATA-PATA converter is 20 bucks, if thats what it takes. And even if you don't recreate the files, you can still search bit for bit for tags like "JFIF" which denote the start of a jpeg file, and then just grab the data to see what the jpeg file is of.
Believe me, linux is not beyond the long arm of the law. When the FBI raids the big warez sites, do you think those are all windows machines? They manage to get convictions.
That's what I've been saying for a while. IT jobs are constantly being de-skilled. If you want to stay in the industry, you need to keep acquiring new skills.
You used to be able to make good money configuring networking stuff back in the days of thicknets and vampire tap adapters, when you had to manually assign IDs to each device, etc. Nowadays you plug a cat5 cable into a switch and thats the end of it.
You probably don't own your own home and have never had to call a plumber for emergency service when a water line bursts or your hot water heater rusts out.
So long as water is necessary for human life, plumbers will be in high demand.
I'd advise kids today to learn a trade, I wish I had. The world will always need master carpenters, plumbers, electricians, masons, welders, etc...
That's a self-correcting problem. There is a demand for IT workers, programmers, administrators, but the demand is for good ones.
We've gone through about 10 people in the last year trying to find someone who can do the job. This is a company with only 20 employees, so that's a relatively big number.
We're having a hard time finding someone who can cut it. We don't have a supervisor to hold someones hand, and we aren't DeVry. So the kid with a degree and some cert may get in the door, but he's back out in a week. What matters to us is what you can do on the job.
Of course, in a small company, you wear lots of hats. So just knowing how to code isn't enough. You have to be able to design, code, implement, market, and support the stuff around here.
Good employees will always be in demand. But there's no longer a guarantee that having computer skills will net you a high paying job, that's really what's changed since the 90s.
Really, there's no demand for people who know how to use a computer. Everyone knows how to use a computer.
I'm tired of reading "poor me! I used to make 100,000 a year because I knew Lotus 1-2-3, and now the only work I can get is data entry for minimum wage" stories.
We all know how it works. The IT industry is rife with deskilling. What is today a marketable skill (I don't know, configuring LANs by hand, for instance) is tomorrow a useless one (autosensing switches and DHCP, etc). New technologies are constantly being created to replace IT workers.
So if you want to stay with the computers, you have to constantly acquire new skills to stay a step ahead. People who think they can just sit back and live the fat life and let their A+ certification take care of them are dead wrong and deserve what they get.
Re:I hope they improved the AI
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, I have, it's not the same, at least I didn't find it to be.
When I played, the Covenant weren't ducking, rolling or hiding behind their shields, they were just standing there saying "shoot me". I found the AI to be totally missing.
But then I gave up on it before any patches came out, so maybe it was fixed eventually. All retail PC titles are beta these days.
Re:Hopefully not as terrible as the first
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
No actually we were recycling old equipment, and the kids quickly learned the different motherboard form factors and interconnects and were saying things like "I have a Slot 1 CPU here, anyone need it?" or "this things so old it takes EDO, should I throw it out?"
There's absolutely no skill required in putting a PC together. People who think there is are kidding themselves.
My dog would tear it up and have the kids crying inside of 5 minutes.
She destroyed our vaccuum cleaner last week. My wife left it out in the open, and it was turned off and unplugged and couldnt defend itself. The dog had been barking, growling, stalking, and biding her time..
They've had them since I was a kid. There were little motion alarms, something that shot ping pong balls, etc. I built one of these in my high school electronics class - the assignment was to wire a "home security" system to the user port of a C64, the home security system was then installed in the framing of the "house" that the wood shop students would build, then tear down every year.
We wired up an electronic valve attached to an air compressors tank, and it would blast "invaders" in the face with air, and a sparker right in front of the nozzle. As you can imagine, we weren't allowed to use acetalyne.
This is a pretty chinsy looking toy, a plastic piece of shit that shoots foam disks. There's no technology there to be interested in. Oooh ooh a motion sensor! Buy it for christmas, its broken by new years.
Answering the phone is your job. If you dont like it, and dont have the skills to work at McDonalds, tough shit.
Did you ever think that you're only marginally more in the know than the people calling, else you'd be doing something more sophisticated than level 1 phone support?
Then fine, Japs dont get credit for Metroid Prime.
Since I was trying to make the point that the games I've been playing aren't Japanese, it doesn't bother me in the least that the british made Burnout 3.
I'm one of the few who enjoyed Shenmue so far, and I also know that the third game is complete. They were all completed for the Saturn years ago! Shenmue II for the XBox is full of footage from the original Saturn incarnation. It's just a matter of jumping it to whatever console it needs to be on.
Since when did Yu Suzuki care about budgets or numbers, I thought he was all about vision and the art of the game. Fuck that guy. Sega/AM2 owe me another Shenmue game, damnit.
Re:Hopefully not as terrible as the first
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
No my super duper optical mouse wont track on the woodgrain of my desk, for whatever reason.
So I bought one of those amazing high tech ratpadz because it supposedly would make me the best fragg0r evar!!!!11!!!
I don't like sitting at a desk with keyboard and mouse. I do that all day at work. At home I like to kick back on the couch with beer and controller. Keyboard and mouse make wandering around in Doom 3 feel like I'm still at work.
Re:Hopefully not as terrible as the first
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 0, Troll
Oh please.
You PC "gamerz" and your bullshit elitism. Halo didn't do well because everyone who owns an Xbox is a dummy who cant run a PC. Halo did well because it's a good game, plain and simple.
Here's some news that may upset you so you might want to stop reading:
A few years ago, I worked with a charity supervising mentally handicapped kids who were putting together PCs for resale. CPU goes in this slot, RAM sticks go in these slots, PCI cards go into the other slots. Hooking up a PC is no more complicated or technical than hooking up an XBox.
My point is, building your own "rig", installing a game and playing it does not make you some kind of technical genious.
In fact, there are many who say it makes you an idiot to spend $3000 on a gaming PC when you can have a better experience on a $150 console.
If you want to talk worldwide, sure, you're correct.
If you were to just talk about sales in North America, you might be wrong. There are a lot of kids with PS2s who's parents wont buy them GTA:SA, for one. Halo 2 is rated Mature as well, but it's not as potentially offensive as SA.
Halo became huge because of the multiplayer. GTA has no multiplayer, which was something I was hoping they'd pull off with SA. Halo 2 on XBL with stats and clans and all that crap will push a lot of product.
Halo sold a lot of XBoxes. Halo 2, coupled with a price drop for christmas, will sell a lot more XBoxes. I think we'll see the installed base in NA between PS2 and XBox narrow quickly, or even dissappear.
I don't really care who wins the numbers game, I'm no fanboy and I don't have any personal stake in it. I just like good games.
Couple Halo 2 with an XBox price drop and you just might see the gap in installed userbases narrow quite a bit. The first game sold a *lot* of XBoxes, we all know someone who bought one just to play Halo.
I don't really care how XBox is doing in Japan, and I'm tired of reading sophomoric "ha MS is teh suck becuz they dont sell gud to japanese! kekeke" comments. Who cares. The XBox can succeed without the Japanese market.
When I think about it, every game I've played and enjoyed recently was made by a (north) American team. I'm not trying to be patriotic or anything of the sort, but I think the days of Japan as the "ruler of all videogames" are coming to an end. I'm talking about Burnout 3, LoK: Defiance, The Suffering, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Mortal Kombat Deception, GTA:SA, Doom 3, coming soon Half Life 2.
The last Japanese game I went out to buy would have been Metroid Prime (and I'll buy the sequel). It seems as though Nintendo is the only japanese house producing quality titles these days. Since Sega became a software-only organization, their games have sucked and blown (Sonic Heroes, for instance) Where's Shenmue III you sunsabitches?
Note to people replying: I truly don't give a rats ass if you like or don't like any games I listed.
Re:I hope they improved the AI
on
Halo 2 Released
·
· Score: 1
The PC version sucked, they didn't port the AI properly at all. The enemies and allies are much "smarter" in the XBox version. If you had a marine in the back of your warthog, he'd actually gun down enemies with some semblance of skill, instead of just spinning around firing randomly.
Halo PC should have never came out, all the flaming and hate is mainly directed at it, and drags down the real game.
Halo was the first FPS since Half Life that actually sucked me in and had me play it all the way through.
Hell, there have only been a handful of FPS that really got my attention: Doom and Quake 1 & 2, Half Life, Halo and Far Cry are the only ones I can think of that I actually played all the way through. I liked them all for different reasons, but the common link was that I had fun playing them all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a clone, it's an OS that is trying to be Windows binary compatible.
You could say they're trying to make a better "Windows".
I know we all love linux here, but IMO the only way to take desktops away from MSFT is to replace them with something thats compatible: something that runs all the same apps and games and supports all the same hardware by way of the same drivers.
Put it on kazaa with all the Britney mp3s and other media that we "don't want to buy anyways", and it's no harm, no foul - thats the slashdot logic, right?
Whoever owns the payphone (usually your local telco) pays the E911 tax, they don't get a free ride.
And everyone can call 911 gratis, whether you have active phone service or not, you should be able to plug in and dial 911.
you mean the FIF!
If you cant collect taxes on the VoIP, the purpose of which is to pay for 911 services, then I can see 911 services being cut off from VoIP.
Thus, VoIP never becomes a replacement for POTS. Not that it even should be, IMO. With no regulation there will be no guarantee of the quality or availability of the service.
Government regulation usually sucks, but it does have good side effects. The fact that my phone worked even when a hurricane knocked power out for 9 days is one of them.
Do you think Bell installed all that redundant equipment and all those generators because they wanted to offer me the best possible service?
You don't really want to work in some beurocratic hell with HR people who think like that anyways, do you?
I didn't. I held out until I went into an interview with an actual person with sense on the other side of the desk, not a robot with a cert checklist.
I looked him straight in the eye and told him "I can do this job. In fact, I can do a whole lot more for this company than just doing this job." We talked about what they do, what they'd like to do. I didn't try to bullshit or impress him with buzzwords, I was just straightforward and said "yes, I know C. Yes, I know SQL. Yes, I've used a few variants of Unix." and so on.
I just prefer the atmosphere of a smaller company where I actually have a chance to accomplish something and make a difference. You don't get that from the Initechs of the world.
Only until a judge orders you to decrypt it. And then you decide whether you want to face child porn charges, or somewhat weaker child porn charges + contempt of court charges.
If you're at the point that your hardware was siezed, you know they already have enough on you to get a warrant. The cops are just trying to make their case against you airtight, but that doesn't mean that it doesnt already float.
I'm willing to bet that he doesn't have a hardware drive copier that supports SATA. And his software doesn't recognize reiser4 or xfs.
I'm willing to bet you're wrong. A SATA-PATA converter is 20 bucks, if thats what it takes. And even if you don't recreate the files, you can still search bit for bit for tags like "JFIF" which denote the start of a jpeg file, and then just grab the data to see what the jpeg file is of.
Believe me, linux is not beyond the long arm of the law. When the FBI raids the big warez sites, do you think those are all windows machines? They manage to get convictions.
That's what I've been saying for a while. IT jobs are constantly being de-skilled. If you want to stay in the industry, you need to keep acquiring new skills.
You used to be able to make good money configuring networking stuff back in the days of thicknets and vampire tap adapters, when you had to manually assign IDs to each device, etc. Nowadays you plug a cat5 cable into a switch and thats the end of it.
Going the way of plumbers?
You probably don't own your own home and have never had to call a plumber for emergency service when a water line bursts or your hot water heater rusts out.
So long as water is necessary for human life, plumbers will be in high demand.
I'd advise kids today to learn a trade, I wish I had. The world will always need master carpenters, plumbers, electricians, masons, welders, etc...
That's a self-correcting problem. There is a demand for IT workers, programmers, administrators, but the demand is for good ones.
We've gone through about 10 people in the last year trying to find someone who can do the job. This is a company with only 20 employees, so that's a relatively big number.
We're having a hard time finding someone who can cut it. We don't have a supervisor to hold someones hand, and we aren't DeVry. So the kid with a degree and some cert may get in the door, but he's back out in a week. What matters to us is what you can do on the job.
Of course, in a small company, you wear lots of hats. So just knowing how to code isn't enough. You have to be able to design, code, implement, market, and support the stuff around here.
Good employees will always be in demand. But there's no longer a guarantee that having computer skills will net you a high paying job, that's really what's changed since the 90s.
Mr Packman had this to say:
"wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka wakka weooweooweoooweoo woop bleep! bleep!"
Really, there's no demand for people who know how to use a computer. Everyone knows how to use a computer.
I'm tired of reading "poor me! I used to make 100,000 a year because I knew Lotus 1-2-3, and now the only work I can get is data entry for minimum wage" stories.
We all know how it works. The IT industry is rife with deskilling. What is today a marketable skill (I don't know, configuring LANs by hand, for instance) is tomorrow a useless one (autosensing switches and DHCP, etc). New technologies are constantly being created to replace IT workers.
So if you want to stay with the computers, you have to constantly acquire new skills to stay a step ahead. People who think they can just sit back and live the fat life and let their A+ certification take care of them are dead wrong and deserve what they get.
Yeah, I have, it's not the same, at least I didn't find it to be.
When I played, the Covenant weren't ducking, rolling or hiding behind their shields, they were just standing there saying "shoot me". I found the AI to be totally missing.
But then I gave up on it before any patches came out, so maybe it was fixed eventually. All retail PC titles are beta these days.
No actually we were recycling old equipment, and the kids quickly learned the different motherboard form factors and interconnects and were saying things like "I have a Slot 1 CPU here, anyone need it?" or "this things so old it takes EDO, should I throw it out?"
There's absolutely no skill required in putting a PC together. People who think there is are kidding themselves.
Maybe he just couldn't think of anything insightful to say about a crappy $20 plastic kids toy that CmdrTaco was paid to hawk.
In fact, I'm pretty sure noone can, and the grandparents post will be remembered as the highlight of this discussion.
My dog would tear it up and have the kids crying inside of 5 minutes.
She destroyed our vaccuum cleaner last week. My wife left it out in the open, and it was turned off and unplugged and couldnt defend itself. The dog had been barking, growling, stalking, and biding her time..
They've had them since I was a kid. There were little motion alarms, something that shot ping pong balls, etc. I built one of these in my high school electronics class - the assignment was to wire a "home security" system to the user port of a C64, the home security system was then installed in the framing of the "house" that the wood shop students would build, then tear down every year.
We wired up an electronic valve attached to an air compressors tank, and it would blast "invaders" in the face with air, and a sparker right in front of the nozzle. As you can imagine, we weren't allowed to use acetalyne.
This is a pretty chinsy looking toy, a plastic piece of shit that shoots foam disks. There's no technology there to be interested in. Oooh ooh a motion sensor! Buy it for christmas, its broken by new years.
Another slashvertisement, nothing more.
Answering the phone is your job. If you dont like it, and dont have the skills to work at McDonalds, tough shit.
Did you ever think that you're only marginally more in the know than the people calling, else you'd be doing something more sophisticated than level 1 phone support?
How's the weather in India, anyways?
Then fine, Japs dont get credit for Metroid Prime.
Since I was trying to make the point that the games I've been playing aren't Japanese, it doesn't bother me in the least that the british made Burnout 3.
I'm one of the few who enjoyed Shenmue so far, and I also know that the third game is complete. They were all completed for the Saturn years ago! Shenmue II for the XBox is full of footage from the original Saturn incarnation. It's just a matter of jumping it to whatever console it needs to be on.
Since when did Yu Suzuki care about budgets or numbers, I thought he was all about vision and the art of the game. Fuck that guy. Sega/AM2 owe me another Shenmue game, damnit.
No my super duper optical mouse wont track on the woodgrain of my desk, for whatever reason.
So I bought one of those amazing high tech ratpadz because it supposedly would make me the best fragg0r evar!!!!11!!!
I don't like sitting at a desk with keyboard and mouse. I do that all day at work. At home I like to kick back on the couch with beer and controller. Keyboard and mouse make wandering around in Doom 3 feel like I'm still at work.
Oh please.
You PC "gamerz" and your bullshit elitism. Halo didn't do well because everyone who owns an Xbox is a dummy who cant run a PC. Halo did well because it's a good game, plain and simple.
Here's some news that may upset you so you might want to stop reading:
A few years ago, I worked with a charity supervising mentally handicapped kids who were putting together PCs for resale. CPU goes in this slot, RAM sticks go in these slots, PCI cards go into the other slots. Hooking up a PC is no more complicated or technical than hooking up an XBox.
My point is, building your own "rig", installing a game and playing it does not make you some kind of technical genious.
In fact, there are many who say it makes you an idiot to spend $3000 on a gaming PC when you can have a better experience on a $150 console.
In short, get over yourself.
If you want to talk worldwide, sure, you're correct.
If you were to just talk about sales in North America, you might be wrong. There are a lot of kids with PS2s who's parents wont buy them GTA:SA, for one. Halo 2 is rated Mature as well, but it's not as potentially offensive as SA.
Halo became huge because of the multiplayer. GTA has no multiplayer, which was something I was hoping they'd pull off with SA. Halo 2 on XBL with stats and clans and all that crap will push a lot of product.
Halo sold a lot of XBoxes. Halo 2, coupled with a price drop for christmas, will sell a lot more XBoxes. I think we'll see the installed base in NA between PS2 and XBox narrow quickly, or even dissappear.
I don't really care who wins the numbers game, I'm no fanboy and I don't have any personal stake in it. I just like good games.
Couple Halo 2 with an XBox price drop and you just might see the gap in installed userbases narrow quite a bit. The first game sold a *lot* of XBoxes, we all know someone who bought one just to play Halo.
I don't really care how XBox is doing in Japan, and I'm tired of reading sophomoric "ha MS is teh suck becuz they dont sell gud to japanese! kekeke" comments. Who cares. The XBox can succeed without the Japanese market.
When I think about it, every game I've played and enjoyed recently was made by a (north) American team. I'm not trying to be patriotic or anything of the sort, but I think the days of Japan as the "ruler of all videogames" are coming to an end. I'm talking about Burnout 3, LoK: Defiance, The Suffering, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Mortal Kombat Deception, GTA:SA, Doom 3, coming soon Half Life 2.
The last Japanese game I went out to buy would have been Metroid Prime (and I'll buy the sequel). It seems as though Nintendo is the only japanese house producing quality titles these days. Since Sega became a software-only organization, their games have sucked and blown (Sonic Heroes, for instance) Where's Shenmue III you sunsabitches?
Note to people replying: I truly don't give a rats ass if you like or don't like any games I listed.
The PC version sucked, they didn't port the AI properly at all. The enemies and allies are much "smarter" in the XBox version. If you had a marine in the back of your warthog, he'd actually gun down enemies with some semblance of skill, instead of just spinning around firing randomly.
Halo PC should have never came out, all the flaming and hate is mainly directed at it, and drags down the real game.
Halo was the first FPS since Half Life that actually sucked me in and had me play it all the way through.
Hell, there have only been a handful of FPS that really got my attention: Doom and Quake 1 & 2, Half Life, Halo and Far Cry are the only ones I can think of that I actually played all the way through. I liked them all for different reasons, but the common link was that I had fun playing them all.