I would guess that it's closer to regeneration, like the shields, but hidden. I've definitely been killed much more quickly sometimes, if I've taken a beating, and gotten shields back, but only for a moment.
Either way, it would tend to support what you liked about Halo 1. If you're right, then you absolutely can play a riskier game, and still falling back to let your shields recover.
In real life, you don't feel your health as a percentage, or a number. You feel it as sensations -- if your arm is blown off, you feel massive amounts of pain, but in no way would you be able to quantify it. You'd simply be really fucking hurt.
Now, Halo does flash the screen read when your real health is getting hit. Gears of War has a slowly reddening red-splotch version of their logo in the center of the screen as you get closer and closer to death, but you only really have a vague sense of how close to death you are.
In other words, more realistic. You know you're hurt, and you might know you're badly hurt. You certainly don't know you're 73.2% hurt.
By the way, does Linux have disk I/O prioritization like Vista does, and is it enabled by default?
Without even Googling, the answer is very likely yes, and no.
That is: Yes, Linux probably has disk IO prioritization, in some patches -- although it seems to have focused more on providing a saner disk IO scheduler out of the box.
And no, I doubt it's enabled by default on the source from kernel.org. But that's a nonsensical question -- there is no one "Linux". Any distro worth its salt is building its own kernel, probably patching it quite a bit. So, a better question would be "is it enabled on Ubuntu by default?"
For example, Vista indexing service also generates a LOT of disk I/O
Why does it do this?
OS X seems to be the first one to have really gotten this right, with Spotlight -- rather than trying to index the entire disk over some arbitrary interval, it simply watches the disk for changes, and updates the index in realtime.
I'm not sure how well this is supported by the various Linux desktop searches -- we have inotify and friends, but I don't know how well that scales. I'm really not sure why Ubuntu includes locate at all, as I know of no locate command that's quite this intelligent.
But it seems to me like, even if Windows has an edge here, it's doing things entirely the wrong way.
I'm not wealthy enough to be a patron of the arts.
And yet, if a torrent is available, isn't that what this makes you?
Here's the choice: Pay $15 to the label, knowing a tiny amount goes to the artist, or pay $15 directly to the artist. You get very little out of either deal, other than easing your conscience and making it infinitesimally less likely you'll be hit with a lawsuit.
Now, it does depend on the label, but say it's Sony BMG -- my conscience is going to scream at sending $14.50 to a group of people I hate, to help support a bloated, dying industry. The $0.50 that made it to the artist isn't going to help much with that.
I'm not using "openness" to mean implementation and design. I'm talking about the fundamental requirements to build a competing product.
If I wanted to build a competing car, I wouldn't have to pay patent royalties to anyone to put the pedals in the same places, or to make it run on petrol. However, if I wanted to make a competing web browser, I would have to make it deal with an entirely closed source Flash -- there currently isn't even an option to make a deal with Adobe to get the specs I would need to reimplement it.
Or, suppose HTML5 Video gets supported -- I imagine Apple will support h.264 video and AAC audio in an mp4 container. That's nice and standard, and there are many open source implementations for it. Unfortunately, I can't legally bundle those with Firefox (or IceWeasel), without paying patent royalties to those who own the h.264 and AAC standards. (There's probably some covering.mp4, even.)
Adhering to specs of open standards -- or at least, standards not encumbered by patent legislation -- absolutely does promote openness.
If the W3C were in the habit of publishing specs which required a fee to read, and which depended heavily on proprietary technologies for which there is no open source implementation (or sufficient documentation to build such an implementation), then they'd be about as useful a ISO, and I could see the benefit to building a new foundation.
What's more, 2010 means another iteration of Moore's Law.
Which means, taking the iPhone as a benchmark, we'll have phones with 256 megs of RAM and 1.2 ghz processors.
It's been awhile since I've touched anything with less than 512 megs on it, but I know I used to run Firefox (before it was called Firefox -- remember Phoenix?) on that little RAM, with plenty of other programs open. Most phones are designed to run exactly one app at once.
So, extrapolating all of that -- I'd say they could do absolutely no coding, other than developing a skin and ensuring that it compiles for ARM, and still have a usable product.
But maybe that's your point -- by the time they get their act together, it should be possible to simply put Linux on an iPhone and run the desktop version of Firefox.
(games are NOT something where release early, release often works well)
Not true. Games absolutely should be released early and often.
The trick is, they shouldn't be sold as a finished product until they're actually solid -- release your beta product early and often, but don't pretend it's done.
And they shouldn't charge full price for patches, full stop.
It was the regenerating shields that made halo1 great for me, meant you could play a risker game, while still falling back to protect the actual health. That is why ive never finished the others.
Erm, you do realize that the others also have regenerating shields? The only difference is that your actual health isn't in the HUD, so you never know if you can take a hit after your shield fails. (I consider that to be a feature, not a bug.)
You shouldn't need to have to rely on a search engine when installing an OS and making the basics function
Yet another case where Windows is no better -- ever try to install Windows on even moderately unusual hardware? (Consider that just about all hardware made in the last two years is "unusual" to Windows XP.)
I use ubuntu myself but by no means is it absolutely trivial to get everything set up the way you like
I'll agree with that -- but then, it's far more difficult for me to get things set up the way I like on other OSes. I'm on a Mac at the moment, due to the untimely death (or grave injury) of my work laptop, and I've got to tell you -- it's really easy to get things set up the way Steve Jobs likes. It's hard to get things set up the way I like.
There should be enough local cache for every user to have access to every document they could possibly create, unless you are working at a movie company. Given proper indexing, it should be possible for users to find what they need.
Storage is cheap enough for this to work, even if some documents are slow (compressed, maybe combined as deltas with other very similar documents) or very slow (have to pull from tape or something). But again, all of that which an average user needs should be cacheable on their own local hard drive.
Granted, the tech isn't really there, especially for desktop apps. But how much is it costing not to purge? How much would it cost to write software to make it easier to purge (and train users on that software), vs writing software to better archive (and just taking the hit on hardware)?
- Every time an update occurs, it takes more and more space on my hard disk, and the boot screen is filled with 100 versions of linux kernels.
So, you've been using Ubuntu for 100 Linux kernel upgrades? You must really love it!
Modern versions hide all those past kernels, and if wasting a few megabytes every kernel upgrade is your complaint, I can't imagine you like Windows any better.
- It took me one week to get my wifi card to work properly with wpa, with all the incomplete/outdated documentation available. Eventually, I found, by chance, a message on a forum.
Mine worked out of the box. When I've tried other laptops which don't, I hit the forums right away -- it's called "Google", have you heard of it?
- So I went back to the older kernel. What happened? Nautilus didn't work anymore!
I use Kubuntu, and I barely browse files, so I can't speak to that. But I've never found downgrading a kernel to break anything.
- A certain indexation service (I forgot its name) runs regularly. Then my computer does not respond anymore. It's a modern computer (AMD64 quad-core with 3 Gb of RAM).
First: "Not respond" is utter BS. It does respond, just slowly.
Second: Sounds like you don't know how to build a computer. Quad-core with 3 gigs of RAM, and I'll bet it all runs off a single 7200 RPM drive.
And finally, updatedb can be disabled easily -- and even if it couldn't, newer Ubuntus come with a version that only does partial sweeps.
And I have to agree with the other AC -- sounds like you would agree that it's an upgrade from Vista.
Hey Microsoft want a advertising campaign that will make everyone love vista? Give the Vista Home edition away to EVERYONE.
Given that XP costs money, that would make XP seem like the "Professional" version, and Vista would be the "cheap" version.
Not that it really matters. They give it away with plenty of new computers, and people still pay extra to upgrade to XP. I know at this point that I wouldn't even pirate Vista.
Someone in charge of marketing at MS really needs to be encouraged to find greener pastures at another company over this one....
Actually, I'd rather they stay at Microsoft, where they can do the least damage. No matter what they do, they're unlikely to make a dent, but if they do somehow succeed in making Microsoft products less popular, that's a win, too.
Beyond that, there's the source (and IRB + tab-completion), and for the really tough questions, the ruby-talk mailing list.
Can't really recommend the jQuery docs, as they're down half the time, the UI is lacking some critical features, and it doesn't seem to quite work in Konqueror. For a library claiming to be cross-browser, you should at least have your docs be cross-browser!
So you've never needed to troubleshoot a network problem. Good for you.
Correction: Never needed to troubleshoot a DNS network problem.
And DNS is solveable -- one example is to perform a query on 4.2.2.1, since they're usually working.
For example, where I work, our dynamic DNS is broken, and the server team refuses to work on the problem (or delete bad entries...).
So the rest of the Internet should be held back, just so your server team doesn't have to do the work they're paid for?
So, when I want to work on one of my user's machines remotely, I sometimes need to find out from the user what their IP address is.
If they've got any connectivity at all, the simple solution is to tell them to paste that into an IM window. Much easier for IPv4, also -- have them paste a whole ifconfig/ipconfig log, rather than having to keep telling them things to type and guessing at what's wrong.
And what if you suspect the name servers are down, but want to be sure that they are, indeed, the problem? Boy, it would sure be nice to have a nice, easy IPv4 address memorized for testing, than a long, unwieldy IPv6 address.
I suspect that, if this is ever the case, I'll simply write down that IPv6 address and keep it somewhere safe. Maybe a hosts file, maybe a piece of paper.
How many times a month do you suspect the nameservers are down? I can count on one hand.
With public IPs, there is always the possibility that the firewall fails or is shut off and you can get at a system. With NAT, you have to get inside to be able to get at anything.
In that sense, it's also always possible that the NAT gets shut off -- thus implying that a handful of computers on your network have live Internet IP addresses, and the rest are denied DHCP access -- or it's possible that it fails, as is the case with things like NAT hole punching.
Privacy you also get just by the way NAT works. Since you have many people using a few (or one) IP addresses, it is much harder to track what any given computer is doing.
An anonymizer may make sense for an individual behind the NAT, but I doubt it helps the corporation at all. In fact, if I get a ton of spam, and I send mail to your domain saying "It's from <IP>", wouldn't you rather know exactly which computer that IP corresponds to, so you can shut it down?
Since the corporation has no real reason to provide that privacy, why should it be their obligation?
My initial reaction was: There's far more Democratic economists than Republican ones. Perhaps their Democratic bias is because of their evaluation of who's better for the economy, and not the other way around?
I think probably the easiest way to prove this would be to show not just independents, but those who have switched from Republican to Democrat, or vice versa. Someone who's been Democratic for 50 years isn't likely to change their mind, and that could influence the economic evaluation.
However, someone who tends to think independently, even if they actually register with one party or another -- that is, someone who was recently the other party -- might provide a better indicator.
Then again, it's still impossible to tell. Maybe, long-term, Democrats have been better for the economy, and thus, economists tend to be long-time Democrats?
I find that YouTube is also an example of why this doesn't matter, so much. So long as the idea isn't so offensive (or illegal) as to get the video pulled entirely, you can always search for what you're interested in.
And more complex ratings and rankings don't necessarily lead to more accuracy. In fact, they're vulnerable to the same things.
Is there a reason the W3C doesn't do that? I can't remember a W3C spec being closed. Given that, compliance with W3C specs certainly helps encourage openness.
Slashdot Mirror
I would guess that it's closer to regeneration, like the shields, but hidden. I've definitely been killed much more quickly sometimes, if I've taken a beating, and gotten shields back, but only for a moment.
Either way, it would tend to support what you liked about Halo 1. If you're right, then you absolutely can play a riskier game, and still falling back to let your shields recover.
In real life, you don't feel your health as a percentage, or a number. You feel it as sensations -- if your arm is blown off, you feel massive amounts of pain, but in no way would you be able to quantify it. You'd simply be really fucking hurt.
Now, Halo does flash the screen read when your real health is getting hit. Gears of War has a slowly reddening red-splotch version of their logo in the center of the screen as you get closer and closer to death, but you only really have a vague sense of how close to death you are.
In other words, more realistic. You know you're hurt, and you might know you're badly hurt. You certainly don't know you're 73.2% hurt.
By the way, does Linux have disk I/O prioritization like Vista does, and is it enabled by default?
Without even Googling, the answer is very likely yes, and no.
That is: Yes, Linux probably has disk IO prioritization, in some patches -- although it seems to have focused more on providing a saner disk IO scheduler out of the box.
And no, I doubt it's enabled by default on the source from kernel.org. But that's a nonsensical question -- there is no one "Linux". Any distro worth its salt is building its own kernel, probably patching it quite a bit. So, a better question would be "is it enabled on Ubuntu by default?"
For example, Vista indexing service also generates a LOT of disk I/O
Why does it do this?
OS X seems to be the first one to have really gotten this right, with Spotlight -- rather than trying to index the entire disk over some arbitrary interval, it simply watches the disk for changes, and updates the index in realtime.
I'm not sure how well this is supported by the various Linux desktop searches -- we have inotify and friends, but I don't know how well that scales. I'm really not sure why Ubuntu includes locate at all, as I know of no locate command that's quite this intelligent.
But it seems to me like, even if Windows has an edge here, it's doing things entirely the wrong way.
I'm not wealthy enough to be a patron of the arts.
And yet, if a torrent is available, isn't that what this makes you?
Here's the choice: Pay $15 to the label, knowing a tiny amount goes to the artist, or pay $15 directly to the artist. You get very little out of either deal, other than easing your conscience and making it infinitesimally less likely you'll be hit with a lawsuit.
Now, it does depend on the label, but say it's Sony BMG -- my conscience is going to scream at sending $14.50 to a group of people I hate, to help support a bloated, dying industry. The $0.50 that made it to the artist isn't going to help much with that.
I'm not using "openness" to mean implementation and design. I'm talking about the fundamental requirements to build a competing product.
If I wanted to build a competing car, I wouldn't have to pay patent royalties to anyone to put the pedals in the same places, or to make it run on petrol. However, if I wanted to make a competing web browser, I would have to make it deal with an entirely closed source Flash -- there currently isn't even an option to make a deal with Adobe to get the specs I would need to reimplement it.
Or, suppose HTML5 Video gets supported -- I imagine Apple will support h.264 video and AAC audio in an mp4 container. That's nice and standard, and there are many open source implementations for it. Unfortunately, I can't legally bundle those with Firefox (or IceWeasel), without paying patent royalties to those who own the h.264 and AAC standards. (There's probably some covering .mp4, even.)
Adhering to specs of open standards -- or at least, standards not encumbered by patent legislation -- absolutely does promote openness.
If the W3C were in the habit of publishing specs which required a fee to read, and which depended heavily on proprietary technologies for which there is no open source implementation (or sufficient documentation to build such an implementation), then they'd be about as useful a ISO, and I could see the benefit to building a new foundation.
What's more, 2010 means another iteration of Moore's Law.
Which means, taking the iPhone as a benchmark, we'll have phones with 256 megs of RAM and 1.2 ghz processors.
It's been awhile since I've touched anything with less than 512 megs on it, but I know I used to run Firefox (before it was called Firefox -- remember Phoenix?) on that little RAM, with plenty of other programs open. Most phones are designed to run exactly one app at once.
So, extrapolating all of that -- I'd say they could do absolutely no coding, other than developing a skin and ensuring that it compiles for ARM, and still have a usable product.
But maybe that's your point -- by the time they get their act together, it should be possible to simply put Linux on an iPhone and run the desktop version of Firefox.
(games are NOT something where release early, release often works well)
Not true. Games absolutely should be released early and often.
The trick is, they shouldn't be sold as a finished product until they're actually solid -- release your beta product early and often, but don't pretend it's done.
And they shouldn't charge full price for patches, full stop.
It was the regenerating shields that made halo1 great for me, meant you could play a risker game, while still falling back to protect the actual health. That is why ive never finished the others.
Erm, you do realize that the others also have regenerating shields? The only difference is that your actual health isn't in the HUD, so you never know if you can take a hit after your shield fails. (I consider that to be a feature, not a bug.)
Visual jQuery was out of date, last I checked. It also doesn't cover nearly all the plugins that exist these days.
jQuery isn't a gem, it's a Javascript library.
Still, I always forget about that, and I do tend to use the official site. Sometimes, things are covered a lot better outside the rdoc itself.
You shouldn't need to have to rely on a search engine when installing an OS and making the basics function
Yet another case where Windows is no better -- ever try to install Windows on even moderately unusual hardware? (Consider that just about all hardware made in the last two years is "unusual" to Windows XP.)
I use ubuntu myself but by no means is it absolutely trivial to get everything set up the way you like
I'll agree with that -- but then, it's far more difficult for me to get things set up the way I like on other OSes. I'm on a Mac at the moment, due to the untimely death (or grave injury) of my work laptop, and I've got to tell you -- it's really easy to get things set up the way Steve Jobs likes. It's hard to get things set up the way I like.
There should be enough local cache for every user to have access to every document they could possibly create, unless you are working at a movie company. Given proper indexing, it should be possible for users to find what they need.
Storage is cheap enough for this to work, even if some documents are slow (compressed, maybe combined as deltas with other very similar documents) or very slow (have to pull from tape or something). But again, all of that which an average user needs should be cacheable on their own local hard drive.
Granted, the tech isn't really there, especially for desktop apps. But how much is it costing not to purge? How much would it cost to write software to make it easier to purge (and train users on that software), vs writing software to better archive (and just taking the hit on hardware)?
I wonder which has more resources: Scientology, or the RIAA?
Certainly, Scientology isn't going anywhere soon. I doubt the RIAA is, either.
- Every time an update occurs, it takes more and more space on my hard disk, and the boot screen is filled with 100 versions of linux kernels.
So, you've been using Ubuntu for 100 Linux kernel upgrades? You must really love it!
Modern versions hide all those past kernels, and if wasting a few megabytes every kernel upgrade is your complaint, I can't imagine you like Windows any better.
- It took me one week to get my wifi card to work properly with wpa, with all the incomplete/outdated documentation available. Eventually, I found, by chance, a message on a forum.
Mine worked out of the box. When I've tried other laptops which don't, I hit the forums right away -- it's called "Google", have you heard of it?
- So I went back to the older kernel. What happened? Nautilus didn't work anymore!
I use Kubuntu, and I barely browse files, so I can't speak to that. But I've never found downgrading a kernel to break anything.
- A certain indexation service (I forgot its name) runs regularly. Then my computer does not respond anymore. It's a modern computer (AMD64 quad-core with 3 Gb of RAM).
First: "Not respond" is utter BS. It does respond, just slowly.
Second: Sounds like you don't know how to build a computer. Quad-core with 3 gigs of RAM, and I'll bet it all runs off a single 7200 RPM drive.
And finally, updatedb can be disabled easily -- and even if it couldn't, newer Ubuntus come with a version that only does partial sweeps.
And I have to agree with the other AC -- sounds like you would agree that it's an upgrade from Vista.
Hey Microsoft want a advertising campaign that will make everyone love vista? Give the Vista Home edition away to EVERYONE.
Given that XP costs money, that would make XP seem like the "Professional" version, and Vista would be the "cheap" version.
Not that it really matters. They give it away with plenty of new computers, and people still pay extra to upgrade to XP. I know at this point that I wouldn't even pirate Vista.
Someone in charge of marketing at MS really needs to be encouraged to find greener pastures at another company over this one....
Actually, I'd rather they stay at Microsoft, where they can do the least damage. No matter what they do, they're unlikely to make a dent, but if they do somehow succeed in making Microsoft products less popular, that's a win, too.
The official site is always a good bet. But I also make it a habit to memorize the url to the rdoc of whatever I'm doing:
ruby-doc.org/core
api.rubyonrails.org
Beyond that, it's more about the framework. For example:
ramaze.net
sequel.rubyforge.org
Beyond that, there's the source (and IRB + tab-completion), and for the really tough questions, the ruby-talk mailing list.
Can't really recommend the jQuery docs, as they're down half the time, the UI is lacking some critical features, and it doesn't seem to quite work in Konqueror. For a library claiming to be cross-browser, you should at least have your docs be cross-browser!
When its a device without a DNS name or entry whose admin interface is set to be accessed via specific IP address? They do exist you know.
Yes -- until I enter them into a hosts file.
So you've never needed to troubleshoot a network problem. Good for you.
Correction: Never needed to troubleshoot a DNS network problem.
And DNS is solveable -- one example is to perform a query on 4.2.2.1, since they're usually working.
For example, where I work, our dynamic DNS is broken, and the server team refuses to work on the problem (or delete bad entries...).
So the rest of the Internet should be held back, just so your server team doesn't have to do the work they're paid for?
So, when I want to work on one of my user's machines remotely, I sometimes need to find out from the user what their IP address is.
If they've got any connectivity at all, the simple solution is to tell them to paste that into an IM window. Much easier for IPv4, also -- have them paste a whole ifconfig/ipconfig log, rather than having to keep telling them things to type and guessing at what's wrong.
And what if you suspect the name servers are down, but want to be sure that they are, indeed, the problem? Boy, it would sure be nice to have a nice, easy IPv4 address memorized for testing, than a long, unwieldy IPv6 address.
I suspect that, if this is ever the case, I'll simply write down that IPv6 address and keep it somewhere safe. Maybe a hosts file, maybe a piece of paper.
How many times a month do you suspect the nameservers are down? I can count on one hand.
With public IPs, there is always the possibility that the firewall fails or is shut off and you can get at a system. With NAT, you have to get inside to be able to get at anything.
In that sense, it's also always possible that the NAT gets shut off -- thus implying that a handful of computers on your network have live Internet IP addresses, and the rest are denied DHCP access -- or it's possible that it fails, as is the case with things like NAT hole punching.
Privacy you also get just by the way NAT works. Since you have many people using a few (or one) IP addresses, it is much harder to track what any given computer is doing.
An anonymizer may make sense for an individual behind the NAT, but I doubt it helps the corporation at all. In fact, if I get a ton of spam, and I send mail to your domain saying "It's from <IP>", wouldn't you rather know exactly which computer that IP corresponds to, so you can shut it down?
Since the corporation has no real reason to provide that privacy, why should it be their obligation?
My initial reaction was: There's far more Democratic economists than Republican ones. Perhaps their Democratic bias is because of their evaluation of who's better for the economy, and not the other way around?
I think probably the easiest way to prove this would be to show not just independents, but those who have switched from Republican to Democrat, or vice versa. Someone who's been Democratic for 50 years isn't likely to change their mind, and that could influence the economic evaluation.
However, someone who tends to think independently, even if they actually register with one party or another -- that is, someone who was recently the other party -- might provide a better indicator.
Then again, it's still impossible to tell. Maybe, long-term, Democrats have been better for the economy, and thus, economists tend to be long-time Democrats?
I find that YouTube is also an example of why this doesn't matter, so much. So long as the idea isn't so offensive (or illegal) as to get the video pulled entirely, you can always search for what you're interested in.
And more complex ratings and rankings don't necessarily lead to more accuracy. In fact, they're vulnerable to the same things.
I work in Ruby, and most of us seem to use TextMate on OS X -- in fact, it's cited as a reason for wanting OS X in the first place.
I use Linux and Kate.
Is there a reason OP can't install their OS of choice?
Is there a reason the W3C doesn't do that? I can't remember a W3C spec being closed. Given that, compliance with W3C specs certainly helps encourage openness.
TOR nodes let you get from the anonymous net to the outside world... I2P gateways let you get from the outside world to the anonymous net.
So, if you combine the two, you'd get a poor-man's Freenet?