Personally, I don't think forcing people to actually learn about their O/S is a bad thing.
I must disagree with you. This is like saying that if you do not know how to change give your car a tune-up, then you should not be driving.
I certianly admire the true geeks who know Linux inside and out. I am not one of them. I have one full-time job, one wife, two small children, and various other family and church obligations. I like Linux, and I love Ubuntu. But I do not have the time to really learn the nuts and bolts.
If an OS makes people bend over backwards just to get it running, then they will discard and look for something easier (even if that means Windows). Sometimes people may feel like playing around and learning stuff, but most of them just want to accomplish a task. If you make it too hard, they will find other alternatives.
While what you say is correct, you have to look at it in a different way...
Watts = voltage x current, so more wattage = more current.
Manufacturers can play games with these numbers, but if you stick to quality manufacturers (Antec being my favorite), they do not play games. So the watts is a decent "rule of thumb" measurement.
I second this opinion. But here is the strategy that I would use:
1) Pick your processor company. Are you am AMD or an Intel guy? I tend to prefer AMD myself, but you have to make up your own mind..
2) Choose your socket. This should be an easy one. For each company, you have a budget and a premium socket. This should be an easy choice -- just look at your budget. Over $1000 = premium. Under $500 or so, go budget. In between, you will have to decide. Once this is nailed down, choose a processor based on your budget.
3) Chipset selection. You might have a couple of choices here, depending on which processor you choose. To me, a couple of percentage points on a benchmark is not worth much. I look for such things as the interfaces supported (some value mobos do not have firewire, for example). Do you want to run two vid cards (for the rich only)? How many SATA ports will you need. If you are a Linux type of guy, will your chipset be supported by your OS? This is probably the hardest choice to make.
4) Mobo selection. Once you know which chipset you want, then you have to choose a manufacturer. Everybody has favorites here. My only advice is to choose a larger manufacturer. Look at the review web sties to get an idea for the stability of the board (this is a big deal). Note that a long warranty is REALLY nice to have.
5) RAM is easy. All you have to really decide is how much. Get budget RAM from one of the big names (OCZ, for example). Do not get premium RAM. Buy budget RAM and use the difference to upgrade to a faster processor or vid card. Premium RAM is for people who have unlimited budgets and already have top-of-the-line everything else. 1GB is a nice number. If you are on a tighe budget, go 512M, but no lower!
6) Vid card. This is another personal preference thing. Choose ATI or nVidia. I chose nVidia because of Linux support. If you are not a Linux type of guy, then either one will work. Here is where the hardware review sites really become valuable.
7) Hard drives. If you are in the mainstream price range, you have several choices. There is a little difference between different manufacturers as far as speed goes, but I still think that it would be hard to get a bad hard drive. Just make sure that it is large enough. If you have the money to go for NCQ (and your mobo supports it), then do it.
9) Case. This one is a matter of personal preference. Even a cheap case will work great, as long as it has enough cooling capability. Paying more for smooth internal edges is nice, but if you build it once and then do not open it up, sharp edges can be lived with for the cost savings.
10) Power supply. DO NOT SKIMP HERE. Always go for a good name brand with enough watts. I chose Antec. There are others out there with a good reputation.
11) Optical drives. There are so many good choices here, it is hard to go wrong. Even the worst drives are good. But there are a few favorites that keep coming up. Benq and NEC make good DVD burners.
Some more general advice. If you are a gamer, skimp a little on the processor to get a good vid card. If you are a code monkey, get the best processor that you can afford.
Well, you could rip it to your favorite format and throw it in a spare hard drive with an external hard drive USB (or firewire) box. This should be able to hold even.WAV files (unless they released over 200 albums).
When USB begins to be phased out for something faster, simply buy whatever the newest hard drive and interface flavor-of-the-month is, and copy from the old HD to the new.
If you are really paranoid, you can just get two drives, and keep them in separate places (preferably separated by 1000 miles or more).
And if you add to that CD-R backups, then you should be prepared for anything.
I am very flattered that you regard me so highly, but no, I am not Jesus.
have you heard of due diligence?
And your point is? At some point, you have to trust your vendors. Let me put it this way. If you write software, and you license some components from another vendor, what are you supposed to do if they refuse show you the source code (note that this is NOT an OSS rant)? You have to take their word for it.
Business is built on trust. If I am a carpenter and I buy some nails, then I have to trust that the people who make the nails knew what they were doing and made them properly. Of course I can check to see if they are the right color and shape, but I will not send the nails off to a lab to have the metal examined.
I am not sure that I would come down too hard on Sony for this...
The GPL violations lie firmly on the shoulders of F4I. If Sony did not disassemble the code or inspect the source, they had no way of knowing.
We certainly CAN blame Sony for throwing crap DRM at us in the first place, and we can criticize their PR response to this whole mess. But we cannot blame them for GPL stuff.
And as far as the uninstall fiasco goes, Sony did not write the software, so I am sure that they do not know how to remove it. They have to rely on F4I to supply the uninstall software. But, once again, it IS their fault that they did not pull the uninstall program earlier once the security holes had been found. But Sony is a corporation, with probably 1,000 layers of management, so even that is understandable.
Those 64 bits are not just used for addresses. You can actually process 64 bits of DATA at the same time.
This could be a big deal in applications like video processing and encryption. I believe that a 64-bit data path speeds up encryption operations big time, and this is the sort of thing that you tend to do with web servers.
So, what I am hearing is some people saying "I like vanilla. I wish that it was vanilla again" and others saying "I tried it and didn't like vanilla. Now it is chocolate. Good move."
Wrong. If the ISO has some spare room, you could throw in a trojan or two, and just throw in some random data in a junk file to make the hashes match. This is a big deal.
One CD with every Infocom game that Activision could legaly put on one disc. Activision lost the rights for games like HHGTG and Shogun. Yes, they are in the UK, and yes, they ship to the USA. I ordered this from them a few years ago. I have no affiliation with the company other than being a satisfied customer.
But these are electrical engineering tools. The original article seemed to be more about mechanical engineering tools. My guess is that people write what they need and what interestes them. Mechanical engineers might not have as much software skill as other diciplines. Mechanical engineering seems more "physical" and likely appeals to a different type of person than electrical engineering and computer engineering. Of course, I could just be a biased EE.
Processing power != fun (or for you VHDL jocks, processing_power/= fun) (or PERL, processing_power ne fun)
What really matters is the GAMEPLAY. A great game with fewer polygons is still a great game. A crappy game with more polygons is still a crappy game. This war will NOT be won or lost on technical specifications. It will be decided by the game quality, availability, and price. Period. In the end, that is what people look at.
Maybe, but the "videogame generation" who grew up on the NES is now in their 20s and 30s, probably don't have a family to support, and are willing to buy 2-3 consoles. We have money, and we are the gamers.
Huh? What planet are you from? People in their 20's are generally starting a family. People in their 30's are mostly firmly entrenched in doing the "family" thing. I am a part of the Nintendo generation. My first console was an Odyssey 2 (look it up).
If you look at the demographics, I think that you will find a fair amount of hard-core gamers with money. But you will probably also find even more teenagers who rely on their parents money on order to buy games and systems. A 16-year-old kid likely cannot afford multiple consoles. If you totally ignore the limited-income families, then you are ignoring a large market. Halo 3 might be the killer app, but how many copies of Halo 3 are you going to buy? Will you enjoy it enough to buy three or four copies
You are not the sort who supports the industry; you are the "later buyers" who support sales in the 3rd and 4th generation, after the large chunk of the market has adopted, and keep playing the last-gen consoles well after the next gen has launched. Do not think that most people are like you. The market is already well-defined by the time you buy in.
You are right. That is because I have a wife and two kids to support. But I still "support the industry." Every sale is still a sale. The initial cost of a console is high partially because of trying to recover the NRE costs. By the time the price drops, the NRE is paid for, so Nintendo will still make a profit off of me. While I am certain that Nintendo would rather have a bunch of early adopters, they would rather have the "late buyers" buy their stuff rather than Microsofts.
One reason that they lost (IIRC) is that they locked down the format. Anybody could make a VHS box. Beta was Sony's ball, and they weren't letting others play. So the ball game was won by the only ball that people could play with.
Of course, this is all from my memory, which could be wrong. Take anything in the internet with a block of salt.
No, no, no no, no no. Customers don't have to decide between the three. They can choose more than one. I own all three (actually four, Dreamcast too) of this generations systems. Eventually I will own all three of the next gens too. There is no law that says I can only get one and I won't.
You are every company's wet dream. Unfortunately, people like you are in the minority, and cannot support an entire industry for very long.
The average family has a lot of financial stress. Even affording one next-gen system would be tough. In the end, it might be a choice of the Revolution that you can afford, or the PS2 that you will have to save up for in time for next year's Christmas. As for me, I will likely pick up a Revolution after the first round of price cuts (probably a year after release). I do not see a 260 or PS3 in my future.
Perhaps you are right. In the eyes of the law, a corporation is a single entity. I guess that people (myself included) also tend to think of it as a single entity. Maybe I should think of it as having "multiple personality disorder." The only problem is that I like to spend my money with companies who support linux, and I like to not spend my money on companies who support DRM. *Harrkev's head explodes.*
But seriously, I also wonder what the requirements for membership in this group is. This is a "if you don't sue me, then I won't sue you" club. But what if a corporation wants to join without holding any patents? They would get a lot out of joining, but not really have anything to contribute. Would they still be allowed to join?
This certainly seems like a good idea, but am I the only one that thinks that seeing Sony in this list is rather out of character, especially given Sony's recent actions?
I'll tell you what, anyone wants some practice exploiting the hole, here's the IP address of a vulnerable machine to practice on: http://127.0.0.1/
Wow. Thanks. The guy who owns that computer is an idiot. It only took me ten minutes to hack in! He has a lot of warez, too, but nothing that I don't already have. I think that I'll delete a bunch of stuff to teach him a lesson.
What annoys me is that the cruise ship used a non-lethal sonic weapon. We are talking about real pirates here. People who kill and loot. I wouldl ave rather the cuise ship used the sonic weapon to stun them, and then follow up with an RPG and machine guns. Otherwise, these jerks will try this again with a less-well prepared ship, and the outcome may be quite different.
Slashdot Mirror
I certianly admire the true geeks who know Linux inside and out. I am not one of them. I have one full-time job, one wife, two small children, and various other family and church obligations. I like Linux, and I love Ubuntu. But I do not have the time to really learn the nuts and bolts.
If an OS makes people bend over backwards just to get it running, then they will discard and look for something easier (even if that means Windows). Sometimes people may feel like playing around and learning stuff, but most of them just want to accomplish a task. If you make it too hard, they will find other alternatives.
So, what you are saying is that you agree with me completely.
While what you say is correct, you have to look at it in a different way...
Watts = voltage x current, so more wattage = more current.
Manufacturers can play games with these numbers, but if you stick to quality manufacturers (Antec being my favorite), they do not play games. So the watts is a decent "rule of thumb" measurement.
I second this opinion. But here is the strategy that I would use:
1) Pick your processor company. Are you am AMD or an Intel guy? I tend to prefer AMD myself, but you have to make up your own mind..
2) Choose your socket. This should be an easy one. For each company, you have a budget and a premium socket. This should be an easy choice -- just look at your budget. Over $1000 = premium. Under $500 or so, go budget. In between, you will have to decide. Once this is nailed down, choose a processor based on your budget.
3) Chipset selection. You might have a couple of choices here, depending on which processor you choose. To me, a couple of percentage points on a benchmark is not worth much. I look for such things as the interfaces supported (some value mobos do not have firewire, for example). Do you want to run two vid cards (for the rich only)? How many SATA ports will you need. If you are a Linux type of guy, will your chipset be supported by your OS? This is probably the hardest choice to make.
4) Mobo selection. Once you know which chipset you want, then you have to choose a manufacturer. Everybody has favorites here. My only advice is to choose a larger manufacturer. Look at the review web sties to get an idea for the stability of the board (this is a big deal). Note that a long warranty is REALLY nice to have.
5) RAM is easy. All you have to really decide is how much. Get budget RAM from one of the big names (OCZ, for example). Do not get premium RAM. Buy budget RAM and use the difference to upgrade to a faster processor or vid card. Premium RAM is for people who have unlimited budgets and already have top-of-the-line everything else. 1GB is a nice number. If you are on a tighe budget, go 512M, but no lower!
6) Vid card. This is another personal preference thing. Choose ATI or nVidia. I chose nVidia because of Linux support. If you are not a Linux type of guy, then either one will work. Here is where the hardware review sites really become valuable.
7) Hard drives. If you are in the mainstream price range, you have several choices. There is a little difference between different manufacturers as far as speed goes, but I still think that it would be hard to get a bad hard drive. Just make sure that it is large enough. If you have the money to go for NCQ (and your mobo supports it), then do it.
9) Case. This one is a matter of personal preference. Even a cheap case will work great, as long as it has enough cooling capability. Paying more for smooth internal edges is nice, but if you build it once and then do not open it up, sharp edges can be lived with for the cost savings.
10) Power supply. DO NOT SKIMP HERE. Always go for a good name brand with enough watts. I chose Antec. There are others out there with a good reputation.
11) Optical drives. There are so many good choices here, it is hard to go wrong. Even the worst drives are good. But there are a few favorites that keep coming up. Benq and NEC make good DVD burners.
Some more general advice. If you are a gamer, skimp a little on the processor to get a good vid card. If you are a code monkey, get the best processor that you can afford.
Well, you could rip it to your favorite format and throw it in a spare hard drive with an external hard drive USB (or firewire) box. This should be able to hold even .WAV files (unless they released over 200 albums).
When USB begins to be phased out for something faster, simply buy whatever the newest hard drive and interface flavor-of-the-month is, and copy from the old HD to the new.
If you are really paranoid, you can just get two drives, and keep them in separate places (preferably separated by 1000 miles or more).
And if you add to that CD-R backups, then you should be prepared for anything.
And your point is? At some point, you have to trust your vendors. Let me put it this way. If you write software, and you license some components from another vendor, what are you supposed to do if they refuse show you the source code (note that this is NOT an OSS rant)? You have to take their word for it.
Business is built on trust. If I am a carpenter and I buy some nails, then I have to trust that the people who make the nails knew what they were doing and made them properly. Of course I can check to see if they are the right color and shape, but I will not send the nails off to a lab to have the metal examined.
So, if there is a legal problem with Windows XP, then we should nail Dell, Gateway, and HP to the wall too, huh?
IANAL, but it seems that in some cases, people ARE responsible for the entire product shipped, and in other cases, they are not.
Can somebody who "IAAL" comment on this?
I am not sure that I would come down too hard on Sony for this...
The GPL violations lie firmly on the shoulders of F4I. If Sony did not disassemble the code or inspect the source, they had no way of knowing.
We certainly CAN blame Sony for throwing crap DRM at us in the first place, and we can criticize their PR response to this whole mess. But we cannot blame them for GPL stuff.
And as far as the uninstall fiasco goes, Sony did not write the software, so I am sure that they do not know how to remove it. They have to rely on F4I to supply the uninstall software. But, once again, it IS their fault that they did not pull the uninstall program earlier once the security holes had been found. But Sony is a corporation, with probably 1,000 layers of management, so even that is understandable.
Those 64 bits are not just used for addresses. You can actually process 64 bits of DATA at the same time.
This could be a big deal in applications like video processing and encryption. I believe that a 64-bit data path speeds up encryption operations big time, and this is the sort of thing that you tend to do with web servers.
So, what I am hearing is some people saying "I like vanilla. I wish that it was vanilla again" and others saying "I tried it and didn't like vanilla. Now it is chocolate. Good move."
To summarize: you can't please everybody.
Wrong. If the ISO has some spare room, you could throw in a trojan or two, and just throw in some random data in a junk file to make the hashes match. This is a big deal.
Other than eBay, there is ONE other source of Infocom games... You can buy from here..
http://www.lacegem.com/
One CD with every Infocom game that Activision could legaly put on one disc. Activision lost the rights for games like HHGTG and Shogun. Yes, they are in the UK, and yes, they ship to the USA. I ordered this from them a few years ago. I have no affiliation with the company other than being a satisfied customer.
Because nobody has one yet?
In a similar manner, look at http://www.geda.seul.org/
But these are electrical engineering tools. The original article seemed to be more about mechanical engineering tools. My guess is that people write what they need and what interestes them. Mechanical engineers might not have as much software skill as other diciplines. Mechanical engineering seems more "physical" and likely appeals to a different type of person than electrical engineering and computer engineering. Of course, I could just be a biased EE.
Gaaaa. Processing power again.
/= fun)
Processing power != fun
(or for you VHDL jocks, processing_power
(or PERL, processing_power ne fun)
What really matters is the GAMEPLAY. A great game with fewer polygons is still a great game. A crappy game with more polygons is still a crappy game. This war will NOT be won or lost on technical specifications. It will be decided by the game quality, availability, and price. Period. In the end, that is what people look at.
If you look at the demographics, I think that you will find a fair amount of hard-core gamers with money. But you will probably also find even more teenagers who rely on their parents money on order to buy games and systems. A 16-year-old kid likely cannot afford multiple consoles. If you totally ignore the limited-income families, then you are ignoring a large market. Halo 3 might be the killer app, but how many copies of Halo 3 are you going to buy? Will you enjoy it enough to buy three or four copies
You are right. That is because I have a wife and two kids to support. But I still "support the industry." Every sale is still a sale. The initial cost of a console is high partially because of trying to recover the NRE costs. By the time the price drops, the NRE is paid for, so Nintendo will still make a profit off of me. While I am certain that Nintendo would rather have a bunch of early adopters, they would rather have the "late buyers" buy their stuff rather than Microsofts.
One reason that they lost (IIRC) is that they locked down the format. Anybody could make a VHS box. Beta was Sony's ball, and they weren't letting others play. So the ball game was won by the only ball that people could play with.
Of course, this is all from my memory, which could be wrong. Take anything in the internet with a block of salt.
The average family has a lot of financial stress. Even affording one next-gen system would be tough. In the end, it might be a choice of the Revolution that you can afford, or the PS2 that you will have to save up for in time for next year's Christmas. As for me, I will likely pick up a Revolution after the first round of price cuts (probably a year after release). I do not see a 260 or PS3 in my future.
Perhaps you are right. In the eyes of the law, a corporation is a single entity. I guess that people (myself included) also tend to think of it as a single entity. Maybe I should think of it as having "multiple personality disorder." The only problem is that I like to spend my money with companies who support linux, and I like to not spend my money on companies who support DRM. *Harrkev's head explodes.*
But seriously, I also wonder what the requirements for membership in this group is. This is a "if you don't sue me, then I won't sue you" club. But what if a corporation wants to join without holding any patents? They would get a lot out of joining, but not really have anything to contribute. Would they still be allowed to join?
This certainly seems like a good idea, but am I the only one that thinks that seeing Sony in this list is rather out of character, especially given Sony's recent actions?
What annoys me is that the cruise ship used a non-lethal sonic weapon. We are talking about real pirates here. People who kill and loot. I wouldl ave rather the cuise ship used the sonic weapon to stun them, and then follow up with an RPG and machine guns. Otherwise, these jerks will try this again with a less-well prepared ship, and the outcome may be quite different.
What about using Sony's rootkit to hide Alcohol 120%. Does this work?
But Sony has some MMORPGs too. Any word on using this for the Star Wars RPG?
Curious, since I read about this yesterday...
Maybe the light was slowed down so much, that I moved faster that C, and went backwards in time.