At the time of the revolution, the most destructive weapon reasonably available was a cannon or perhaps some dynamite.
Would 3% of the country had been able to pull off the revolution if their rifles were matched against bomber jets with nuclear capabilities? Even assuming they were able to obtain illegal arms, do you think they could have pulled together enough to hold off the British Empire's air force?
A militia isn't very valuable when it takes one button press to wipe out thousands.
I played GTA3 and Vice City on PC and never got the PS2 versions. My goal was to get better graphics. I've played on 3 different video cards over the years, and never played through either game without severe glitches.
In GTA3, if I didn't turn some of the effects off, the draw distance would get wonky. Parts of the road just a few yards ahead of me would be completely invisible, and the whole game looked hazy.
In Vice City, if I turned the frame limiter off the game ran smooth as silk but forgot to render a lot of things. It sucks when you hit invisible walls. Large portions of buildings weren't there. Turning the frame limiter on made the game run at an awful 30 FPS and generally reduced the fidelity of the graphics, but at least everything rendered.
When I asked around on the internet, responses were mixed between "SHUT UP THE GAME IS AWESOME" and "Buy the PS2 version." A few people chimed in that they had problems, and that all in all there were no solutions and it seemed like the PC ports were just cash grabs.
So I'm not really surprised that the PC port of GTA IV has problems.
Handhelds have more than 4 shades of green these days, buddy. The Game Boy Advance boasts graphics on par with the Super Nintendo. The PSP and now the DS claim even higher resolution and better graphics.
"They don't stand up to the likes of the XBox and PS2."
Yeah I can see how it would be preferable to hold my Xbox in my lap while riding down the road and playong on the tiny screen within the car instead of holding a unit in my hand and looking at a tiny screen.
It looks like those old dual-screen Game and Watches. This is pretty exciting, I want to see what kind of games are planned for this. It's kind of like most seafood dishes: it has the potential to be really good or really bad, but nothing in between.
If you're assuming the user isn't stupid then perhaps you haven't worked very long in IT;)
I liken our users to toddlers. If there is any way, no matter how ridiculous, for a toddler to injure himself with a toy, he will do it. After only 6 months in IT, I see the user as a toddler and computers as their toys.
I tell them time and again that their Windows XP computers synchronize their time with our servers, but they still install Gator's time manager because the banner says "OH NO YOUR COMPUTER CLOCK COULD BE WRONG!!! IF YOU DON'T INSTALL OUR SOFTWARE YOU SUPPORT TERRORISM!!!" As many posters in this thread have stated, you tell them time and again that MyComet cursor and all those goodies are what makes their computer run slow, but by the week's end you will return because they have installed it again and now their box is hosed.
It's even worse when the computers on the production line turn up with these things. The cost of a stopped line per minute is quite a good bit more than my annual salary. Whoever wrote Sasser owes me a lunch break, because I had to skip it to deal with infected machines on the line. (Yeah yeah, "You should have patched sooner". No one mentions the issues that were reported with early patchers, such as frozen computers, 100% CPU usage, and inability to log in to Windows. We chose to wait until the issues were settled, and it bit us. What good is an uninstall, Mr. Anderson, if you can't boot your box?)_
You forget that the user can still download and install WeatherBug, Precision Date Time Manager, and many other helpful products. Using an alternative browser does not prevent this action.
For some reason a lot of people seem to believe that using Mozilla/Firefox/Opera makes their box invincible. It's a good start, but should only be one layer of your security.
I use Windows and I have used Gentoo. Windows update rarely requires more than a click on an "I accept" button, and one reboot. OTOH, I guess some people would rather wait a few hours for their updates in order to completely automate the system. *shrug*
The knee-jerk reaction is that this is a P2P bust, but the article never seemed to verify. There is this quote:
"Federal agents in Phoenix and elsewhere in the country raided schools and other targets in a national crackdown on pirated music CDs and movies."
Notice, however, there are no statements from the FBI about the nature of this raid. It is possible they are looking for pirated software more than pirated music. I used to work in the Office of Technology for a school district, and I know for a fact that at least 25% of our software was unlicensed. Just innocent little things like 1 Windows 98 CD and key for a 25-computer lab and so forth. At one point, we did order 25 copies of Win2k but they were sent with no product keys. We were told to wait for the keys to come in, but we installed with one of our existing keys anyway. If I had to estimate, I would say that we had no less than 300 computers running off of the same product key with no site license.
I had to search for cracks for a few utilities a couple of times, as well. When the librarian's database was backed up on 8 floppies and disk 4 went bad, I needed something to repair a corrupted.ZIP file. The only shareware utilities I could find had a 1MB filesize limit, so a crack was necessary.
Was it so wrong, though? The kids needed computers for education. Our department's budget was very small, and we had to maintain dying hand-me-down servers and PCs with next to nothing. Microsoft was willing to give free copies of Win2k, but only if we had been given donated machines and only if those donated machines had blank hard drives.
I'm waiting for the press release before I grab my pitchfork and torch. It could very well be that our villains are not the RIAA but the ever-unpopular Microsoft and other software companies.
My University requires engineering students to purchase a laptop. It is OK to have a desktop, but a laptop is required. The reasoning is the engineering labs are limited and have aging computers, so by requiring the students to have their own laptop, labs that don't have computers/have computers below requirements become available.
It seems like a dirty cost-cutting measure, but there is one large advantage. My largest CS lab had 8 people in it. This meant the TA was able to provide individual assistance easily. My Microprocessors lab was a different story. To perform well you needed an oscilloscope. Scopes were limited, so the lab sections had about 25-30 students per section. I was often in the lab for 45 minutes before the TA could get around to checking my prelab so I could start on the lab itself. (Often the prelab involved a circuit you would tear apart during the lab, so working ahead was out of the question).
Anyway, I haven't been able to play the newer games for a year or so now. I even have problems with older games like Quake III. Due to the financial strains of the university and the internships I'm doing, a new desktop is a luxury I cannot afford. I would have loved the choice of a performance laptop when I was looking for one.
Plus, a laptop is sometimes more convenient. In the small kitchen of our dorm, four of my friends had a small LAN party at one table using their laptops and a switch. This would not have been possible with their desktops, as they would have had no room. Playing from the rooms was unacceptable; the network seemed designed to thwart gaming. So there are a few reasons people want to game from a laptop. Some people do not have the luxury of a desktop AND a laptop, and must use a laptop for both work and play.
Yeah, but the PS3X* will probably be cheaper than a PS3 + TiVo, because the PS3X is all in one box.
"All in one" does not make a device cheaper. Look at the N-gage at launch. at $300 it cost more than a mid-range cell phone and a GBA SP, but my $90 phone is (to me at least) a better phone, and the GBA is a better gaming system.
The only advantage Sony has is they can produce and manufacture the PS3 in-house, as opposed to paying companies to produce their chips and parts. Sony does not leverage this very well, though. IIRC, PS2 was the last to perform a price drop.
Can someone explain the last paragraph to me? It's supposedly talking about the PS3, but I'm at a loss as to how PS3 games are expected to be under 30MB.
Or am I just a stupid monkey and I missed something?
Whoever modded that informative obviously did not click the link. The link is NOT a mirror of the file, but a link to goatse. If you don't know who/what goatse is, then you are lucky. Don't click the link.
It'd be nice if this stayed legal and we could all get ROMs for unattainable games in a legal way. Somehow I feel that there's going to be one bad company that will ruin it for everyone.
"The Direct Marketing Association and its fellow plaintiffs are grateful that the federal District Court in Oklahoma City understood and upheld the industry's belief that the Federal Trade Commission does not have authority to implement and enforce a national do-not-call list," the trade group said in a press release."
The article is erroneously missing the statement: "Our check is in the mail, as promised."
I remember at the end of the summer I used MS's little auto updater thing to install a patch that killed my network connection. MS reported a week later that it was a "minor problem", but the patch could disable networking on a "few systems".
It was really fun, because had I not remembered System Restore, I would have had to wait a week or so for MS to release a fix for the patch, a double patch if you will.
Can you imagine opting in when you maintain hundreds of systems, only to have your networking killed by said update?
The comma is a punctuation mark that must be used only in certain cases. You cannot just throw them around like they are salt at a feast. I somehow detect from most of your posts that you rewrite your sentences multiple times. First, you write a simple sentence. Then, you decide how you can add words to it. Then, you add parenthetical expressions to make the sentence even longer. On top of that, you frequently mix up the proper order of your words. Let's look at an example from the last post:
It is very reassuring to know, that there are indeed some intelligent people on Slashdot, even if we are in minority.
The first comma is entirely uneccessary. You made the clause that was a very important part of the sentence a parenthetical expression, something that either defines the previous term (like this part after the comma) or can be dropped from the original sentence. Your sentence reads as if you had typed "It is reassuring to know even if we are in the minority".
Twain once said, "It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear an idiot than to open it and remove all doubt."
It is very fascinating how often those who expose the weaknesses of others expose the very weaknesses they possess themselves.
It'd be far easier to pay MS for a program to look up the address of people as opposed to writing the address yourself.
Easier for MS's bank account, that is.
People who play video games can make friends? How can this be?
I've learned from experience playing MUDs that in this type of game, just like life, it's not what you know, it's who you know that gets you ahead. From items to money, there's nothing that a high experienced friend can't get you.
Slashdot Mirror
At the time of the revolution, the most destructive weapon reasonably available was a cannon or perhaps some dynamite. Would 3% of the country had been able to pull off the revolution if their rifles were matched against bomber jets with nuclear capabilities? Even assuming they were able to obtain illegal arms, do you think they could have pulled together enough to hold off the British Empire's air force? A militia isn't very valuable when it takes one button press to wipe out thousands.
I played GTA3 and Vice City on PC and never got the PS2 versions. My goal was to get better graphics. I've played on 3 different video cards over the years, and never played through either game without severe glitches. In GTA3, if I didn't turn some of the effects off, the draw distance would get wonky. Parts of the road just a few yards ahead of me would be completely invisible, and the whole game looked hazy. In Vice City, if I turned the frame limiter off the game ran smooth as silk but forgot to render a lot of things. It sucks when you hit invisible walls. Large portions of buildings weren't there. Turning the frame limiter on made the game run at an awful 30 FPS and generally reduced the fidelity of the graphics, but at least everything rendered. When I asked around on the internet, responses were mixed between "SHUT UP THE GAME IS AWESOME" and "Buy the PS2 version." A few people chimed in that they had problems, and that all in all there were no solutions and it seemed like the PC ports were just cash grabs. So I'm not really surprised that the PC port of GTA IV has problems.
Handhelds have more than 4 shades of green these days, buddy. The Game Boy Advance boasts graphics on par with the Super Nintendo. The PSP and now the DS claim even higher resolution and better graphics.
"They don't stand up to the likes of the XBox and PS2." Yeah I can see how it would be preferable to hold my Xbox in my lap while riding down the road and playong on the tiny screen within the car instead of holding a unit in my hand and looking at a tiny screen.
It looks like those old dual-screen Game and Watches. This is pretty exciting, I want to see what kind of games are planned for this. It's kind of like most seafood dishes: it has the potential to be really good or really bad, but nothing in between.
If you're assuming the user isn't stupid then perhaps you haven't worked very long in IT ;)
I liken our users to toddlers. If there is any way, no matter how ridiculous, for a toddler to injure himself with a toy, he will do it. After only 6 months in IT, I see the user as a toddler and computers as their toys.
I tell them time and again that their Windows XP computers synchronize their time with our servers, but they still install Gator's time manager because the banner says "OH NO YOUR COMPUTER CLOCK COULD BE WRONG!!! IF YOU DON'T INSTALL OUR SOFTWARE YOU SUPPORT TERRORISM!!!" As many posters in this thread have stated, you tell them time and again that MyComet cursor and all those goodies are what makes their computer run slow, but by the week's end you will return because they have installed it again and now their box is hosed.
It's even worse when the computers on the production line turn up with these things. The cost of a stopped line per minute is quite a good bit more than my annual salary. Whoever wrote Sasser owes me a lunch break, because I had to skip it to deal with infected machines on the line. (Yeah yeah, "You should have patched sooner". No one mentions the issues that were reported with early patchers, such as frozen computers, 100% CPU usage, and inability to log in to Windows. We chose to wait until the issues were settled, and it bit us. What good is an uninstall, Mr. Anderson, if you can't boot your box?)_
You forget that the user can still download and install WeatherBug, Precision Date Time Manager, and many other helpful products. Using an alternative browser does not prevent this action.
For some reason a lot of people seem to believe that using Mozilla/Firefox/Opera makes their box invincible. It's a good start, but should only be one layer of your security.
I use Windows and I have used Gentoo. Windows update rarely requires more than a click on an "I accept" button, and one reboot. OTOH, I guess some people would rather wait a few hours for their updates in order to completely automate the system. *shrug*
The knee-jerk reaction is that this is a P2P bust, but the article never seemed to verify. There is this quote:
.ZIP file. The only shareware utilities I could find had a 1MB filesize limit, so a crack was necessary.
"Federal agents in Phoenix and elsewhere in the country raided schools and other targets in a national crackdown on pirated music CDs and movies."
Notice, however, there are no statements from the FBI about the nature of this raid. It is possible they are looking for pirated software more than pirated music. I used to work in the Office of Technology for a school district, and I know for a fact that at least 25% of our software was unlicensed. Just innocent little things like 1 Windows 98 CD and key for a 25-computer lab and so forth. At one point, we did order 25 copies of Win2k but they were sent with no product keys. We were told to wait for the keys to come in, but we installed with one of our existing keys anyway. If I had to estimate, I would say that we had no less than 300 computers running off of the same product key with no site license.
I had to search for cracks for a few utilities a couple of times, as well. When the librarian's database was backed up on 8 floppies and disk 4 went bad, I needed something to repair a corrupted
Was it so wrong, though? The kids needed computers for education. Our department's budget was very small, and we had to maintain dying hand-me-down servers and PCs with next to nothing. Microsoft was willing to give free copies of Win2k, but only if we had been given donated machines and only if those donated machines had blank hard drives.
I'm waiting for the press release before I grab my pitchfork and torch. It could very well be that our villains are not the RIAA but the ever-unpopular Microsoft and other software companies.
My University requires engineering students to purchase a laptop. It is OK to have a desktop, but a laptop is required. The reasoning is the engineering labs are limited and have aging computers, so by requiring the students to have their own laptop, labs that don't have computers/have computers below requirements become available.
It seems like a dirty cost-cutting measure, but there is one large advantage. My largest CS lab had 8 people in it. This meant the TA was able to provide individual assistance easily. My Microprocessors lab was a different story. To perform well you needed an oscilloscope. Scopes were limited, so the lab sections had about 25-30 students per section. I was often in the lab for 45 minutes before the TA could get around to checking my prelab so I could start on the lab itself. (Often the prelab involved a circuit you would tear apart during the lab, so working ahead was out of the question).
Anyway, I haven't been able to play the newer games for a year or so now. I even have problems with older games like Quake III. Due to the financial strains of the university and the internships I'm doing, a new desktop is a luxury I cannot afford. I would have loved the choice of a performance laptop when I was looking for one.
Plus, a laptop is sometimes more convenient. In the small kitchen of our dorm, four of my friends had a small LAN party at one table using their laptops and a switch. This would not have been possible with their desktops, as they would have had no room. Playing from the rooms was unacceptable; the network seemed designed to thwart gaming. So there are a few reasons people want to game from a laptop. Some people do not have the luxury of a desktop AND a laptop, and must use a laptop for both work and play.
Yeah, but the PS3X* will probably be cheaper than a PS3 + TiVo, because the PS3X is all in one box.
"All in one" does not make a device cheaper. Look at the N-gage at launch. at $300 it cost more than a mid-range cell phone and a GBA SP, but my $90 phone is (to me at least) a better phone, and the GBA is a better gaming system. The only advantage Sony has is they can produce and manufacture the PS3 in-house, as opposed to paying companies to produce their chips and parts. Sony does not leverage this very well, though. IIRC, PS2 was the last to perform a price drop.
Can someone explain the last paragraph to me? It's supposedly talking about the PS3, but I'm at a loss as to how PS3 games are expected to be under 30MB. Or am I just a stupid monkey and I missed something?
Only if the rainforest files suit.
Whoever modded that informative obviously did not click the link. The link is NOT a mirror of the file, but a link to goatse. If you don't know who/what goatse is, then you are lucky. Don't click the link.
Woo hoo! 3hrs 4mins remaining at 33 bytes/sec.
Reminds me of downloading warez from crappy sites on my 28.8 modem. Those were the days.
It'd be nice if this stayed legal and we could all get ROMs for unattainable games in a legal way. Somehow I feel that there's going to be one bad company that will ruin it for everyone.
They used bold italics?!?! Screw diplomacy! This is a full-on war!
"The Direct Marketing Association and its fellow plaintiffs are grateful that the federal District Court in Oklahoma City understood and upheld the industry's belief that the Federal Trade Commission does not have authority to implement and enforce a national do-not-call list," the trade group said in a press release."
The article is erroneously missing the statement:
"Our check is in the mail, as promised."
I remember at the end of the summer I used MS's little auto updater thing to install a patch that killed my network connection. MS reported a week later that it was a "minor problem", but the patch could disable networking on a "few systems". It was really fun, because had I not remembered System Restore, I would have had to wait a week or so for MS to release a fix for the patch, a double patch if you will. Can you imagine opting in when you maintain hundreds of systems, only to have your networking killed by said update?
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Couldn't people just play games on servers in other countries, or get a hosting plan from another country and run a server there?
The comma is a punctuation mark that must be used only in certain cases. You cannot just throw them around like they are salt at a feast. I somehow detect from most of your posts that you rewrite your sentences multiple times. First, you write a simple sentence. Then, you decide how you can add words to it. Then, you add parenthetical expressions to make the sentence even longer. On top of that, you frequently mix up the proper order of your words. Let's look at an example from the last post:
It is very reassuring to know, that there are indeed some intelligent people on Slashdot, even if we are in minority.
The first comma is entirely uneccessary. You made the clause that was a very important part of the sentence a parenthetical expression, something that either defines the previous term (like this part after the comma) or can be dropped from the original sentence. Your sentence reads as if you had typed "It is reassuring to know even if we are in the minority".
Twain once said, "It is better to keep your mouth shut and appear an idiot than to open it and remove all doubt."
It is very fascinating how often those who expose the weaknesses of others expose the very weaknesses they possess themselves.
I say someone should put a BitTorrent to it on /.
It'd be far easier to pay MS for a program to look up the address of people as opposed to writing the address yourself. Easier for MS's bank account, that is.
People who play video games can make friends? How can this be?
I've learned from experience playing MUDs that in this type of game, just like life, it's not what you know, it's who you know that gets you ahead. From items to money, there's nothing that a high experienced friend can't get you.
Good to see the academics are catching up.