ET is an awesome game. RTCW was ok, pretty to look at if nothing else, but ET was what made buying RTCW worthwhile in the end. I still play it at least once a week and for about 3 hours a sitting. It's simply the best MP FPS I've seen / played. Honestly, I'd much prefer a "new" ET before a new RTCW.
You must be a student because I can guaran-f*ing-tee you that.NET is not displacing Java in the data center. I can't speak for the desktop side of things since I don't work in that area, but in the data center and in the embedded space Java is king right now, and it's getting bigger, not smaller. However, if you don't want to study it, fine, more money for the rest of us to make. Oh, and to put things in perspective for you, the GTA has what, 3 million people? That's ~1% of the population of the US, or about the size of Minneapolis-St. Paul, do you honestly think that a second tier market like that is going to set the trends for the IT world? When I see it happening in NYC, LA, Chicago, Washington, SanFran, or Boston metros (which has *double* the population of Toronto) then I'll consider your argument.
Bite you tongue pal, you're gonna piss off all the creationists with your "life on Mars" heresy. Everyone knows that God created man, and... umm... put those bacteria into those rocks... uhh... to... test our faith. Yeah that's the ticket, it's a test! Heathen! You need a good leeching to drain those evil spirits from ya!
No man, that's too much of a stretch. The reason they got into it is simple, it's an extension of their software business. Games have a huge upfront development cost, but after that, it's pure profit margin gravy. That said, there's a fundamental difference in the market for games vs. the market for OS and Office software. Games become "obselete" way more quickly than OS or Office software. I remember reading something to the effect that games have a profitable shelf life of 3 months, contrast that to the still profitable XP boxsets that are going on 3 years now.
Even better, it could be a build option like SVG is right now. That way we wouldn't need a one off to patch it out. The only non-standard patch I use right now is with regards to the password cacheing for a few financial institutions I use.
I made the switch back in 2000 and it's going to take you a little getting used to. Your problem is really with the C# aspect, especially if you're doing Win Forms stuff. If you use Dev Studio, you'll be spending more time in emulated Windows than anything else. Anyhow, back on topic, I started out on RedHat but switched to SuSE (7.0 was my first) after a brief stop on Mandrake. My primary reasons for moving to SuSE were a) the fact that the entire distro came on a DVD, b) built-in support for FreeSWAN, and c) the fact that the entire distro can run fully featured in a CLI env.
Right now, I use the Windows software I can't part with (WebEX... ugh) on Win98SE running on Win4Lin. I prefer Win4Lin to VMWare because it's fast, light on resources, and does the job for $90. The drawback to Win4Lin is that W2K support won't be available until the November timeframe.
This is gonna start a flame war, but if you want to have a resume worthy distro, either spring for RedHat or SuSE, they're the two you'll run into in the data center, at least state side. These are also the only flavors on which Oracle, 90% of the linux setups I run into, is supported.
As for a desktop, it depends, KDE has innumerable bells and whistles but it's not the lightest desktop. I use KDE primarily because of Konsole and it's task bar, I am a huge fan of Konsole. If I didn't absolutely love Konsole, I'd probably be using XFCE. Honestly, I spend most of my time with my windows maximized, so the rest of the desktop is mainly irrelevant to me but YMMV.
Looks like you'll need to keep fscking with the ndiswrapper since Broadcom are still being bitches about releasing the chip specs. I've heard rumors of a native alpha driver but I think they're just that, rumors.
And it's quite possible that fiscal year 2004 (which ended 2 weeks ago) will be Microsoft's worst since fiscal year 1998, we'll see soon.
That gives more credence to Ballmer's "cut a billion" memo. Makes you wonder where they're generating that revenue from, could it be XBox sales? Those would generate a lot of revenue but negative profits.
Plus of course over 90% of Windows installed... is of course pirated, so the so-called Linx cost advantage simply doesn't exist.
Ahhhh, now I understand. Hell, if the 3rd world would just steal everything they need then they wouldn't have to live a life poverty. Don't you think that if Microsoft wanted to they could make their OS unpirateable? Activation keys are very close to that, if it wasn't for the no-call-in Corp edition, the option to pirate wouldn't exist at all. In fact, I'd bet that the Corp edition exists with the no-call-in feature specifically to keep the option to pirate open. I know of very few non-corporate users who, if the OS didn't come with their PC, have a valid licensed copy of XP.
Well, I'd have an issue with an "auto update" in Mozilla. I build my browser with a few home brewed patches and optimizations for my system. Unless the "auto update" pulls down the patch source, applies it, and rebuild Moz, it would F-up my install. That said, on Windows, were the binary versions are very easy to assume, this wouldn't be a bad idea. On Linux, it should be the job of the distro, not the browser, to stay on top of things.
First, it's not a Mozilla exploit, it's a Windows exploit. Second, this "exploit", being a Windows exploit, never existed on Linux. So yeah it's a pretty specious claim, mainly because it never existed "in the open source world" so there was never a need to for it to be "patched in the open source world", only in a mixed open and proprietary world. Fuck, now I'm off on a tangent, back to the point, it was a Windows exploit, not a Mozilla exploit.
... the more demand there will be for XAML applications (which btw, can only be consumed on a Windows machine).
I've seen some XAML samples but I'm curious as to how MS are going to achieve lock in. I'm guessing (just a guess) that XAML has a provision for binary hunks of data? If XAML were just plain text, it would be possible to implement a renderer for it. However, if XAML implements some binary nonsense then it might be a different story. That assumes of course, that patents don't come into play. If MS patents some non-trivial aspect of XAML, then that might be a barrier to reimplementation.
Yeah... it's a pretty lame example, it's the first one that came to mind though. I've also seen it on the WebEx site but that thing is choke full of ActiveX. Did I mention that I don't like WebEx? It's the ONLY and I mean ONLY time I use IE, and even then it's in Win4Lin. Yeah, it's mostly my company's fault for using WebEx but I still resent WebEx for claiming to support Netscape when there's no f-ing way it works in NS.
Zions confirmed that Microsoft is working to replace all open-source code in SFU with commercially licensed alternatives.
Sweet ass!!! I'm gonna be rich!!! Just have to sell my program, ls.bat to M$ and I'll be rolling in it. Here's a sneak peek at my source code, but beware... it has patents pending!!!
If the reviewers had been serious they would have used an optimised distributions such as Gentoo, which would have taken far fuller advantage of the extra 32bits in each register to provide a much fuller experience, more than any current Linux distribution possibly could.
You mean like SuSE 9.1 64-bit edition that comes fully optimized and ready to run on a single DVD? Look, not to be a dick or anything, but Gentoo is in no way the "only sane" option for getting the most from your hardware. Yeah, it's far more oriented towrds optimizing for hardware than any other distro, but for me "sanity" means pop a DVD in, install, configure, and get to leave in under 60 minutes. That doesn't mean Gentoo is bad, it's a fun hacking distro and you can learn a hell of a lot more from using it than any binary distro, but it's certainly not a PHB compatible distro.
I don't think that people didn't pirate off the net in 1994 because they couldn't find stuff. I, ummm, "knew" people who pirated PLENTY of crap off of the then very active alt.binary newsgroups. The problem was that downloading 258 parts of an archive with a 9600 baud modem took the better part of a day and you risked about a 50% chance of the file being corrupted after uudecoding the thing, uhhhh, so I hear. Today you can probably download 800 copies of that same file in the same time frame.
Actually, my experience has been that the number one reason people resist a switch to Linux is the inability to run application 'X'. Whether that application is HL, Yahoo video messaging, some bullshit VB application, or Nero. For the most part, people honestly don't give a crap about the OS or desktop, but they care a whole lot about their applications.
As a side note to that, getting people to understand that they can't just download 'Y' from the web and run it is hard. There's a fundamental lack of understanding that programs are OS specific (Java excluded) and that most of the share/warez out there is Windows only.
The second biggest reason (and it's a pretty distant second) is that hardware support, although mostly complete, can still have soft spots, especially if you're converting an existing setup. Stuff like specialty video cards (ie. PVR cards), scanners, and MP3 players. Knowledgeable users can get most hardware running pretty quick but if the distro doesn't set it up for them, most noobs will be left scratching their heads.
That's odd... Mozilla is the fastest browser in terms of rendering on SuSE 9.1, no doubt. It's not TONS faster than Konqueror or Opera but it's certainly 10% faster than them at a minimum. I did just notice that FF is slightly faster than Mozilla, maybe another 10% but I use Mozilla mail and Calendaring so I'm going to tolerate it. I'm running the 1.8 alpha build of Moz so that might be affecting it somewhat.
Well, I know I can disprove at least the first 3 inventions:
Alt-Tab switching is not an invention. That's simply a key binding they used for task switching which was around in mainframes prior to the PC even being invented. Even at that, the Mac had this feature for GUI windows back in 1987.
As for the scroll wheel, a company named Genius had the EasyScroll mouse out long before MS's Intellimouse. MS may have popularized it, but they certainly didn't invent it.
Finally, Samba's networking protocol, SMB, has a twisted history. First came IBM's original PCLAN, on which Microsoft based the Microsoft PC LAN Server Message Block (SMB) which, itself, was a hybrid of the existing X/Open spec 2.07. So again, Microsoft didn't invent it although they certainly evolved it.
So, I'm still unconvinced there's any real innovation to have come out of Redmond -but- I do think that they are very good at taking existing technology and making it mainstream.
Slashdot Mirror
While you're at it, I have a half dozen ASP coders that I'll like to see lined up against the same wall.
ET is an awesome game. RTCW was ok, pretty to look at if nothing else, but ET was what made buying RTCW worthwhile in the end. I still play it at least once a week and for about 3 hours a sitting. It's simply the best MP FPS I've seen / played. Honestly, I'd much prefer a "new" ET before a new RTCW.
You must be a student because I can guaran-f*ing-tee you that .NET is not displacing Java in the data center. I can't speak for the desktop side of things since I don't work in that area, but in the data center and in the embedded space Java is king right now, and it's getting bigger, not smaller. However, if you don't want to study it, fine, more money for the rest of us to make. Oh, and to put things in perspective for you, the GTA has what, 3 million people? That's ~1% of the population of the US, or about the size of Minneapolis-St. Paul, do you honestly think that a second tier market like that is going to set the trends for the IT world? When I see it happening in NYC, LA, Chicago, Washington, SanFran, or Boston metros (which has *double* the population of Toronto) then I'll consider your argument.
Bite you tongue pal, you're gonna piss off all the creationists with your "life on Mars" heresy. Everyone knows that God created man, and ... umm ... put those bacteria into those rocks ... uhh ... to ... test our faith. Yeah that's the ticket, it's a test! Heathen! You need a good leeching to drain those evil spirits from ya!
No man, that's too much of a stretch. The reason they got into it is simple, it's an extension of their software business. Games have a huge upfront development cost, but after that, it's pure profit margin gravy. That said, there's a fundamental difference in the market for games vs. the market for OS and Office software. Games become "obselete" way more quickly than OS or Office software. I remember reading something to the effect that games have a profitable shelf life of 3 months, contrast that to the still profitable XP boxsets that are going on 3 years now.
Even better, it could be a build option like SVG is right now. That way we wouldn't need a one off to patch it out. The only non-standard patch I use right now is with regards to the password cacheing for a few financial institutions I use.
Benedict my good man!!!
molarmass192 [at] yahoo.com
I made the switch back in 2000 and it's going to take you a little getting used to. Your problem is really with the C# aspect, especially if you're doing Win Forms stuff. If you use Dev Studio, you'll be spending more time in emulated Windows than anything else. Anyhow, back on topic, I started out on RedHat but switched to SuSE (7.0 was my first) after a brief stop on Mandrake. My primary reasons for moving to SuSE were a) the fact that the entire distro came on a DVD, b) built-in support for FreeSWAN, and c) the fact that the entire distro can run fully featured in a CLI env.
... ugh) on Win98SE running on Win4Lin. I prefer Win4Lin to VMWare because it's fast, light on resources, and does the job for $90. The drawback to Win4Lin is that W2K support won't be available until the November timeframe.
Right now, I use the Windows software I can't part with (WebEX
This is gonna start a flame war, but if you want to have a resume worthy distro, either spring for RedHat or SuSE, they're the two you'll run into in the data center, at least state side. These are also the only flavors on which Oracle, 90% of the linux setups I run into, is supported.
As for a desktop, it depends, KDE has innumerable bells and whistles but it's not the lightest desktop. I use KDE primarily because of Konsole and it's task bar, I am a huge fan of Konsole. If I didn't absolutely love Konsole, I'd probably be using XFCE. Honestly, I spend most of my time with my windows maximized, so the rest of the desktop is mainly irrelevant to me but YMMV.
Looks like you'll need to keep fscking with the ndiswrapper since Broadcom are still being bitches about releasing the chip specs. I've heard rumors of a native alpha driver but I think they're just that, rumors.
And it's quite possible that fiscal year 2004 (which ended 2 weeks ago) will be Microsoft's worst since fiscal year 1998, we'll see soon. That gives more credence to Ballmer's "cut a billion" memo. Makes you wonder where they're generating that revenue from, could it be XBox sales? Those would generate a lot of revenue but negative profits.
Plus of course over 90% of Windows installed ... is of course pirated, so the so-called Linx cost advantage simply doesn't exist.
Ahhhh, now I understand. Hell, if the 3rd world would just steal everything they need then they wouldn't have to live a life poverty. Don't you think that if Microsoft wanted to they could make their OS unpirateable? Activation keys are very close to that, if it wasn't for the no-call-in Corp edition, the option to pirate wouldn't exist at all. In fact, I'd bet that the Corp edition exists with the no-call-in feature specifically to keep the option to pirate open. I know of very few non-corporate users who, if the OS didn't come with their PC, have a valid licensed copy of XP.
Well, I'd have an issue with an "auto update" in Mozilla. I build my browser with a few home brewed patches and optimizations for my system. Unless the "auto update" pulls down the patch source, applies it, and rebuild Moz, it would F-up my install. That said, on Windows, were the binary versions are very easy to assume, this wouldn't be a bad idea. On Linux, it should be the job of the distro, not the browser, to stay on top of things.
More specifically, *Nix is the second most popular *DESKTOP* OS. *Nix is the most popular server OS.
First, it's not a Mozilla exploit, it's a Windows exploit. Second, this "exploit", being a Windows exploit, never existed on Linux. So yeah it's a pretty specious claim, mainly because it never existed "in the open source world" so there was never a need to for it to be "patched in the open source world", only in a mixed open and proprietary world. Fuck, now I'm off on a tangent, back to the point, it was a Windows exploit, not a Mozilla exploit.
I've seen some XAML samples but I'm curious as to how MS are going to achieve lock in. I'm guessing (just a guess) that XAML has a provision for binary hunks of data? If XAML were just plain text, it would be possible to implement a renderer for it. However, if XAML implements some binary nonsense then it might be a different story. That assumes of course, that patents don't come into play. If MS patents some non-trivial aspect of XAML, then that might be a barrier to reimplementation.
Yeah ... it's a pretty lame example, it's the first one that came to mind though. I've also seen it on the WebEx site but that thing is choke full of ActiveX. Did I mention that I don't like WebEx? It's the ONLY and I mean ONLY time I use IE, and even then it's in Win4Lin. Yeah, it's mostly my company's fault for using WebEx but I still resent WebEx for claiming to support Netscape when there's no f-ing way it works in NS.
PureTracks
With Moz's default UA, no go. Change it to spoof IE on WinNT, no problems.
Sweet ass!!! I'm gonna be rich!!! Just have to sell my program, ls.bat to M$ and I'll be rolling in it. Here's a sneak peek at my source code, but beware
If the reviewers had been serious they would have used an optimised distributions such as Gentoo, which would have taken far fuller advantage of the extra 32bits in each register to provide a much fuller experience, more than any current Linux distribution possibly could.
You mean like SuSE 9.1 64-bit edition that comes fully optimized and ready to run on a single DVD? Look, not to be a dick or anything, but Gentoo is in no way the "only sane" option for getting the most from your hardware. Yeah, it's far more oriented towrds optimizing for hardware than any other distro, but for me "sanity" means pop a DVD in, install, configure, and get to leave in under 60 minutes. That doesn't mean Gentoo is bad, it's a fun hacking distro and you can learn a hell of a lot more from using it than any binary distro, but it's certainly not a PHB compatible distro.
Here's a few I wouldn't mind seeing:
1) Spellcheck on right click for text areas (/. needs this badly!).
2) Search "history", mentioned elsewhere.
3) Web session recorder / playback, like a macro recorder if you like. This would be real useful for web developers in stress testing apps.
4) Validate HTML for rendered pages, like Opera offers on right click.
I don't think that people didn't pirate off the net in 1994 because they couldn't find stuff. I, ummm, "knew" people who pirated PLENTY of crap off of the then very active alt.binary newsgroups. The problem was that downloading 258 parts of an archive with a 9600 baud modem took the better part of a day and you risked about a 50% chance of the file being corrupted after uudecoding the thing, uhhhh, so I hear. Today you can probably download 800 copies of that same file in the same time frame.
Actually, my experience has been that the number one reason people resist a switch to Linux is the inability to run application 'X'. Whether that application is HL, Yahoo video messaging, some bullshit VB application, or Nero. For the most part, people honestly don't give a crap about the OS or desktop, but they care a whole lot about their applications.
As a side note to that, getting people to understand that they can't just download 'Y' from the web and run it is hard. There's a fundamental lack of understanding that programs are OS specific (Java excluded) and that most of the share/warez out there is Windows only.
The second biggest reason (and it's a pretty distant second) is that hardware support, although mostly complete, can still have soft spots, especially if you're converting an existing setup. Stuff like specialty video cards (ie. PVR cards), scanners, and MP3 players. Knowledgeable users can get most hardware running pretty quick but if the distro doesn't set it up for them, most noobs will be left scratching their heads.
FYI SuSE 9.1 users, ipv6 is also enabled by default. Follow the parent poster's recs if you want to disable it.
That's odd ... Mozilla is the fastest browser in terms of rendering on SuSE 9.1, no doubt. It's not TONS faster than Konqueror or Opera but it's certainly 10% faster than them at a minimum. I did just notice that FF is slightly faster than Mozilla, maybe another 10% but I use Mozilla mail and Calendaring so I'm going to tolerate it. I'm running the 1.8 alpha build of Moz so that might be affecting it somewhat.
Well, I know I can disprove at least the first 3 inventions:
Alt-Tab switching is not an invention. That's simply a key binding they used for task switching which was around in mainframes prior to the PC even being invented. Even at that, the Mac had this feature for GUI windows back in 1987.
As for the scroll wheel, a company named Genius had the EasyScroll mouse out long before MS's Intellimouse. MS may have popularized it, but they certainly didn't invent it.
Finally, Samba's networking protocol, SMB, has a twisted history. First came IBM's original PCLAN, on which Microsoft based the Microsoft PC LAN Server Message Block (SMB) which, itself, was a hybrid of the existing X/Open spec 2.07. So again, Microsoft didn't invent it although they certainly evolved it.
So, I'm still unconvinced there's any real innovation to have come out of Redmond -but- I do think that they are very good at taking existing technology and making it mainstream.