Do any of the online games have the equivalent of enchanting your own weapons (like Morrowind) yet?
Being able to buy a Dai-Katana at the market for 100 gold and then enchanting it with soul stealing and high fire and shock damage for 5 seconds on a target (the amount of time in between my swings) was a very cool experience... being able to craft several and sell them would be great in an MMORPG.
Comparing emotions to value is not ridiculous, as any psychotherapist would tell you; people pay a very large amount of money every year to be happy. Not to live, or to eat, but to be happy. Why is there so much more money in pro sports than roofing? Why are the expensive homes filled with entertainment equipment? You obviously weren't thinking 'big picture' with your comment; peoples' feelings, emotions and perspectives _are_ the reality we live, the reality _you_ live.
Counterfeiting has a _huge_ impact because of the international money markets. If foreign powers that invest in your country's currency find out that your currency is being devalued by counterfeiting, the value of your currency goes down vis-a-vis theirs and your country has a harder time buying foreign resources. One of the reasons the U.S. has less of a problem (currency-wise) with counterfeiting is that it is less dependant on foreign countries' investments in its currency. Mind you, if major american money holders invested in Yen or Euros instead of US dollars, it would slowly tip the scales. International economy's way too big of a subject for this size of post though...
Gold makes a poor economic tool though when you have to validate that you're being given real gold; its easier to test paper bills (especially here in Canada) for validity than gold.
It should require skill to craft a weapon / armour though. It allows players who choose to develop that skill to make a killing selling their high-quality swords and armour.
If you're saying that it doesn't require skill to craft a weapon at all, but more skill = better weapon, then fine...
You're assuming a few things that you don't acknowledge:
The dns lookup cache has infinite / enough RAM to hold all the entries without expiring the root servers.
The software in question was not restarted yesterday as a part of routine maintenance / reconfiguration / time limits.
Your ISP knows more about DNS resolution / software configuration than you do.
These are not always true. I always configure myself, and my customers, to use their own Linux box running dnscache to query and cache DNS requests because it is fast, secure, and uses a stable memory size. Relying on my ISP for DNS service is solely a backup plan (your OS does allow you to specify backup DNS servers, right?), regular resolution is done by each machine's copy of dnscache.
Because you're helping the developers. You want to help the people who gave you your free OS kernel, right? Well, they would really appreciate it if you would download the latest 2.5, compile it, boot it, and send them bug reports. They may ask you a bunch of questions or give you some patches to try. You may have time to do those things, and help out the rest of the community in the meantime.
If you end up staying on 2.4.x for most of your work (as you should) for the forseable future, that's great, but at least you'll have helped the effort.
If you want to try the test yourself easily, I've put it up on my website as a form (no personal information gathered, although your responses end up being saved as part of the URI for a day or so in our log rotations):
I wish I could have a pocket-sized handheld computer with full cell support and good bluetooth support. I'd then want a bluetooth supporting version of a hard drive MP3 player to use for a storage device. I also want an ear-clip wireless (bluetooth) headset that connects via the handheld computer, so I can use the computer as a computer while talking on the headset without wires.
One last thing, what is this "never having to deal with a software compatibility hassle; never having to deal with an interoperability hassle with another device in my loaded system; and never having less than the best performance that I expect from the equipment"? I've never had any such hassles with IDE.
You are very lucky then... IDE is a mess to support, especially at the OS level. I can imagine MS would be pretty happy if IDE disappeared too, but its so cheap (because of mass production and lower production standards and lower margins) that its hard to marginalize.
If you don't believe the IDE spec is a mess, talk to anyone on the working committee.
With IDE, rotational latency isn't really that big of a deal because the congestion is at the bus level. IDE disks don't have any intelligence built in to speak of...
As another SCSI supporter, I have to point out that IDE stands for 'integrated drive electronics' -- moving the controller intelligence onto the drive and off the controller. SCSI traditionally puts most of the intelligence on the controller, not the drive. These comparisons aren't as true as they used to be; IDE puts a lot of workload on the OS compared to SCSI though.
Why spend money developing faster IDE disks when it's far too difficult to retain compatibility and keeping production costs low..? Because it isn't worth it. It's money in the wishing well.
If you want an entertaining read, look up some of the Linux kernel development logs w.r.t. IDE development. It seems actually supporting the various IDE firmware versions is nearly impossible without proprietary information for each drive + controller.
You do not get that kind of transfer speed out of an IDE bus.
Keep in mind that some drive manufacturers (like IBM) are putting 8MB or more cache right on their drives so that the user sees the speed of offloading the data from the system RAM to the drive RAM (or vice-versa) and not the actual time to write / read the disk. This doesn't help in uncacheable situations, and increases the electronics on the drive (making for a less K.I.S.S.'d solution), but does make those speeds 'possible'
CPU usage is also not negligible.
I'd be interested in seeing a Crusoe-based machine with all SCSI & IEEE1394 components to save CPU cycles. I bet the effective speed would be even closer to P-IV's at that point. Heck, I think a Crusoe-based SCSI controller would be a neat deal too.
Moving on to another poster, however...
I got a theoretical 4x150 = 600MB/s transfer rate. Yes I know it's *theoretical* but it sure scales better than SCSI.
Being theoretical makes your last statement silly; I want 'real' performance. That, I get with 1500RPM SCSI drives on an ICP-Vortex Ultra-160 RAID controller (which comes with up to 3 SCSI channels). Ultra-320 is out now too, at 320MB/sec, and the way SCSI communicates with its drives makes sharing that bandwidth per cable more efficient than IDE's master-slave system.
I've read a hundred reasons at least to use IDE-RAID with Linux instead of SCSI drives (mostly due to price). Everyone seems to think that IDE drives are just as reliable as SCSI drives. These people obviously don't run high-demand servers. I've gone through at least a dozen IDE drives this year that have seized up and died (from Maxtor, IBM and Fujitsu). I've had no SCSI drives die. I have SCSI drives in sites running constantly; some doing database, faxing and E-mail work off one set of drives -- they never go down, and the CPU use is minimal because of the SCSI controller's on-board chips.
I've always tried to source SCSI CD-ROMs and CD Burners because they end up being more reliable by being less CPU dependant; this is a good thing, and I hope Plextor keeps making them.
I would be more impressed with IEEE1394 support for burners, especially right on DVR boxen, especially if proposed updates happen (bringing it up to 800M, 1600M and 3200M/s.)
I hate to point this out, but having good CD-R/RW support is a great selling feature given the price of CD-R/RWs these days compared to writable DVD discs.
You ask about setting up XFree86 directly from the XFree86 site. I've done this a few times in fact; the first time I thought it would be daunting. After all, the instructions say to download these 1o or so.tgz files, and two programs, make the two programs executable, and then run one of them.
However, by taking the default answer to every question, I had a working X system every time. XFree85 -detect did the rest, and I was done. This is a far cry from the description of installing Debian.
I'm with the other poster (and more picky); I want a de-centralized client that can read from multiple servers.
A PHP / CGI / Java client that is WAP-accessible would be nice. I've seen a good PHP-based (including WAP) webmail interface with calendaring support, but it didn't have any support for groupmail / calendar features outside its own database.
It would be a very interesting piece of research to see how often the 'enemy' already knew the information contained in `The Allies'' research when it was considered classified / secret / sensitive.
OTOH, if the intelligence community knows that most of our enemies already know a given piece of information or that its not reasonably protectable (they could find out if they wanted to), then perhaps it should be allowed to be published, even if it could have been sensitive, for the sake of better research.
Slashdot Mirror
Or paying someone else to build it (as most of us probably do / would) ...
Do any of the online games have the equivalent of enchanting your own weapons (like Morrowind) yet?
... being able to craft several and sell them would be great in an MMORPG.
Being able to buy a Dai-Katana at the market for 100 gold and then enchanting it with soul stealing and high fire and shock damage for 5 seconds on a target (the amount of time in between my swings) was a very cool experience
Comparing emotions to value is not ridiculous, as any psychotherapist would tell you; people pay a very large amount of money every year to be happy. Not to live, or to eat, but to be happy. Why is there so much more money in pro sports than roofing? Why are the expensive homes filled with entertainment equipment? You obviously weren't thinking 'big picture' with your comment; peoples' feelings, emotions and perspectives _are_ the reality we live, the reality _you_ live.
Counterfeiting has a _huge_ impact because of the international money markets. If foreign powers that invest in your country's currency find out that your currency is being devalued by counterfeiting, the value of your currency goes down vis-a-vis theirs and your country has a harder time buying foreign resources. One of the reasons the U.S. has less of a problem (currency-wise) with counterfeiting is that it is less dependant on foreign countries' investments in its currency. Mind you, if major american money holders invested in Yen or Euros instead of US dollars, it would slowly tip the scales. International economy's way too big of a subject for this size of post though ...
Gold makes a poor economic tool though when you have to validate that you're being given real gold; its easier to test paper bills (especially here in Canada) for validity than gold.
It should require skill to craft a weapon / armour though. It allows players who choose to develop that skill to make a killing selling their high-quality swords and armour.
...
If you're saying that it doesn't require skill to craft a weapon at all, but more skill = better weapon, then fine
You're assuming a few things that you don't acknowledge:
These are not always true. I always configure myself, and my customers, to use their own Linux box running dnscache to query and cache DNS requests because it is fast, secure, and uses a stable memory size. Relying on my ISP for DNS service is solely a backup plan (your OS does allow you to specify backup DNS servers, right?), regular resolution is done by each machine's copy of dnscache.
Because you're helping the developers. You want to help the people who gave you your free OS kernel, right? Well, they would really appreciate it if you would download the latest 2.5, compile it, boot it, and send them bug reports. They may ask you a bunch of questions or give you some patches to try. You may have time to do those things, and help out the rest of the community in the meantime.
If you end up staying on 2.4.x for most of your work (as you should) for the forseable future, that's great, but at least you'll have helped the effort.
If you want to try the test yourself easily, I've put it up on my website as a form (no personal information gathered, although your responses end up being saved as part of the URI for a day or so in our log rotations):
p
http://www.fibrespeed.net/~mbabcock/mirrors/aq.ph
I wish I could have a pocket-sized handheld computer with full cell support and good bluetooth support. I'd then want a bluetooth supporting version of a hard drive MP3 player to use for a storage device. I also want an ear-clip wireless (bluetooth) headset that connects via the handheld computer, so I can use the computer as a computer while talking on the headset without wires.
You listening Psion?
You are very lucky then ... IDE is a mess to support, especially at the OS level. I can imagine MS would be pretty happy if IDE disappeared too, but its so cheap (because of mass production and lower production standards and lower margins) that its hard to marginalize.
If you don't believe the IDE spec is a mess, talk to anyone on the working committee.
As another SCSI supporter, I have to point out that IDE stands for 'integrated drive electronics' -- moving the controller intelligence onto the drive and off the controller. SCSI traditionally puts most of the intelligence on the controller, not the drive. These comparisons aren't as true as they used to be; IDE puts a lot of workload on the OS compared to SCSI though.
If you want an entertaining read, look up some of the Linux kernel development logs w.r.t. IDE development. It seems actually supporting the various IDE firmware versions is nearly impossible without proprietary information for each drive + controller.
You do not get that kind of transfer speed out of an IDE bus.Keep in mind that some drive manufacturers (like IBM) are putting 8MB or more cache right on their drives so that the user sees the speed of offloading the data from the system RAM to the drive RAM (or vice-versa) and not the actual time to write / read the disk. This doesn't help in uncacheable situations, and increases the electronics on the drive (making for a less K.I.S.S.'d solution), but does make those speeds 'possible'
I'd be interested in seeing a Crusoe-based machine with all SCSI & IEEE1394 components to save CPU cycles. I bet the effective speed would be even closer to P-IV's at that point. Heck, I think a Crusoe-based SCSI controller would be a neat deal too.
Moving on to another poster, however ...
Being theoretical makes your last statement silly; I want 'real' performance. That, I get with 1500RPM SCSI drives on an ICP-Vortex Ultra-160 RAID controller (which comes with up to 3 SCSI channels). Ultra-320 is out now too, at 320MB/sec, and the way SCSI communicates with its drives makes sharing that bandwidth per cable more efficient than IDE's master-slave system.
Hey, that's almost a selling feature for some of my clients -- no IDE bus.
:)
I think I'll look at Dells again
I've read a hundred reasons at least to use IDE-RAID with Linux instead of SCSI drives (mostly due to price). Everyone seems to think that IDE drives are just as reliable as SCSI drives. These people obviously don't run high-demand servers. I've gone through at least a dozen IDE drives this year that have seized up and died (from Maxtor, IBM and Fujitsu). I've had no SCSI drives die. I have SCSI drives in sites running constantly; some doing database, faxing and E-mail work off one set of drives -- they never go down, and the CPU use is minimal because of the SCSI controller's on-board chips.
I've always tried to source SCSI CD-ROMs and CD Burners because they end up being more reliable by being less CPU dependant; this is a good thing, and I hope Plextor keeps making them.
I would be more impressed with IEEE1394 support for burners, especially right on DVR boxen, especially if proposed updates happen (bringing it up to 800M, 1600M and 3200M/s.)
I hate to point this out, but having good CD-R/RW support is a great selling feature given the price of CD-R/RWs these days compared to writable DVD discs.
Yes, this type of patenting issue seems a lot like some of the WWII humanitarian horrors we don't like to talk about anymore, doesn't it?
You mean the feature they've had on cars for years?
:)
No, the computer industry's not that user-friendly yet
They haven't figured out that non-engineers use computers.
Its just under 20 times quieter by a fraction. You could've worked out that fraction instead and shown us how anal-retentive you are instead ...
You ask about setting up XFree86 directly from the XFree86 site. I've done this a few times in fact; the first time I thought it would be daunting. After all, the instructions say to download these 1o or so .tgz files, and two programs, make the two programs executable, and then run one of them.
However, by taking the default answer to every question, I had a working X system every time. XFree85 -detect did the rest, and I was done. This is a far cry from the description of installing Debian.
I've been installing RedHat as a network install since the 5.x series ...
I'm with the other poster (and more picky); I want a de-centralized client that can read from multiple servers.
A PHP / CGI / Java client that is WAP-accessible would be nice. I've seen a good PHP-based (including WAP) webmail interface with calendaring support, but it didn't have any support for groupmail / calendar features outside its own database.
phpprojekt is the one I was looking at, I think.
So use 'artsy' instead of 'artistically' ... :)
You mean no-one's open sourced Land Warrior systems yet?
It would be a very interesting piece of research to see how often the 'enemy' already knew the information contained in `The Allies'' research when it was considered classified / secret / sensitive.
OTOH, if the intelligence community knows that most of our enemies already know a given piece of information or that its not reasonably protectable (they could find out if they wanted to), then perhaps it should be allowed to be published, even if it could have been sensitive, for the sake of better research.