They didn't remove the unstable mask from Firefox 3 until Mozilla basically said, "We are no longer supporting 2.x in any way" and Mozilla had released 3.5.
KDE 3.5 is still the "Stable" release in Gentoo, despite the KDE team EOLing 3.5 a while ago. Yeah, 4.0 and 4.1 sucked, but 4.2 was quite good and 4.3 fixed nearly all remaining issues. Ubuntu has been successfully using KDE 4.x releases in Kubuntu since 8.10 (or maybe even 8.04 I think?)
This is why all of my new systems are getting Ubuntu installed instead of Gentoo - It's simply too much time and effort to try and get a stable Gentoo system with even remotely up-to-date packages.
madwifi had that same capability 3-4 years ago. I think that capability has been migrated to most Linux wireless drivers with the new mac80211-based wireless stack.
There has been software written for Windows Mobile phones that provides this functionality in one package too. I haven't tested it yet, but it is supposedly supported by the HTC Touch Pro 2 that I got last week. It is known to occasionally cause overheating issues for the device though...
The only special thing about the MiFi is that the terminal device, battery, and WiFi router/AP are all in one package.
The W7 functionality is, as you point out, nothing new, it just may be easier to set up.
X10 is CRAP. It supports only 16 device codes and 16 house codes, and the majority of their controllers are only able to control one housecode at a time.
In short, there's a total address space of only 256 devices, and it's partitioned into 16 chunks of 16.
Also, it's heavily unreliable. The modulation scheme hasn't been revamped in decades to take advantage of modern ECC schemes (which are no longer computationally expensive).
They could have had great success with an "X10 version 2" with a more robust ECC scheme and larger address space, the closest thing is Insteon which has its own set of problems (namely a history of unfriendliness to open-source efforts.)
At least as of Feb-March of this year, T-Mobile was waaaay behind the ballgame. In theory they have a roaming agreement with AT&T so that T-Mo users will at least have voice service in AT&T areas, but in reality, a T-Mo SIM will frequently result in your phone's IMEI being blacklisted by an AT&T tower for 15-20 minutes, even if you swap an AT&T SIM back into the phone. (That's why my ex switched to AT&T. Her phone didn't work at all anywhere more than 1-2 miles from her home, and nowhere near where she worked/frequently spent her time.)
Second most expensive after Verizon. In general, you get what you pay for, although Verizon's quality of service compared to their price has suffered over the past 2-3 years.
T-Mobile and Sprint are dirt cheap but have horrific networks. T-Mo in theory has a roaming agreement with AT&T, but in reality that agreement seems to fail so badly that putting a T-Mobile SIM into a phone will cause that phone's IMEI to be blacklisted with the local AT&T tower even after an AT&T SIM is put back into the phone. (I tried this back when my ex had T-Mobile and couldn't get service anywhere near my apartment/work - I put her SIM in my unlocked phone and had no service where I had 4 bars before. I put my AT&T SIM back in and the phone couldn't get service for 15-20 minutes!)
The only time I've needed to do anything "special" was to get 185-series or later drivers for kernel compatibility issues. (I was using a newer than standard kernel to fix some Intel wireless issues.)
Of course, there's a Launchpad PPA that has those exact drivers, perfectly set up to work with DKMS.
Although in the end, it proved easier to move to the Karmic beta than to try and fix wireless the way I was going about it.
I think you just proved that open-source, while USUALLY superior, is not always the way to go.
The state of Intel graphics in Linux over the past year has been, despite being complete open-source, pitiful. Intel graphics is in general not a good performer, but even the GMA950 is enough to run Google Earth in Windows with decent performance. For the last two Ubuntu releases, it hasn't been the case in Linux. Intel graphics performance in Linux has been PITIFUL (even my GMA graphics standards) due to excessive architecture churn.
This is why I don't understand the requests for an improved installer.
The way the NVidia drivers are distributed already makes it annoying for packagers, the installer someone was asking about makes that situation WORSE. It's a step backwards.
NVidia needs to make the drivers more packager-friendly, not less.
Every time I've used non-distro-packaged NVidia drivers it has led to much pain and suffering.
A strobe requires: 1) Pulsed energy storage (big photo-grade electrolytic capacitor) 2) Lots of energy per pulse (eats battery - look at how much battery life of cameras drops when the flash is used)
It's basically impossible to put a strobe into a phone without making it unacceptably large or brutally killing battery life, especially with the general trend in phone design - Thinner/smaller.
As to physical keyboard - there are lots of QWERTY slider phones out there. In fact the original G1 was just such a phone (although the sliding mechanism was WEIRD and seemed extremely flimsy to me compared to other HTC sliders).
My site eventually changed policy to allow employees to carry cameraphones if they took appropriate training, which was basically, "Don't use the camera on site."
There are areas we can't even bring cameraphones, but we're not even allowed to bring non-camera phones into those areas.
The only reasons I can think of for bringing a laptop into a movie theater: 1) You want to pirate 2) You're an incredible internet addict that can't even escape IRC/AIM long enough to sit through a movie in the theater 3) You don't have a trunk in your car to lock it in - but why the hell did you have your laptop with you in the first place if you were driving to a movie? "Went to the movie directly after work" isn't a valid reason: a) If you're going to see a movie, highly unlikely you were going to work from home that night. Lock the laptop in your desk cabinet. b) Few people want to go see a movie in their work clothes. Even if going home is out of the way, most people are going to change for comfort.
The new heroics mechanics were updated in 3.2. It solves, at least partially, the "I'm not geared for Ulduar but no one wants to run Naxx with me" problem.
That said, the gear treadmill and endgame in general stopped holding my interest after a while. It didn't help that all of my friends reside on a West Coast server - I'm East. I'm playing Aion now.
As others have said, if it's shady like one of those offshore Internet gambling companies or anything not quite legal - yeah it'll be a black mark.
If it's connected with the big Las Vegas casinos, or other casinos that are fully legal and HEAVILY regulated, you not only should be fine, but knowing the reputation such institutions have for security, it is likely going to be a significant positive.
Yes, Eve uses what they call a deterministic physics simulation. For example, if you click "orbit" around an object, with known initial conditions and when the command was executed, server, client, and other clients all can predict an object's exact location accurately.
As a result far less info needs to be sent from server to client. Main problem is "load lag", when a particular client's state needs to change rapidly (after a jump, after warping to a new grid) - The server has a bandwidth throttle that means that no matter how fast YOUR connection is, it will take a while to load.
Also, 2-10 minutes for module activation is NOT acceptable lag. EVE routinely has nodes crash during combat with 1000-1500 pilots involved. Hell, only a year or so ago 1000 was pretty much a guaranteed node drop.
Either way, EVE's game design of multiple star systems with systems being split up into areas you need to warp between makes it fundamentally far more scalable than most other MMOs can be.
Actually, Aion DOES have a mechanism like you describe, called "channels".
There's no reason NCSoft couldn't have added more hardware and more channels to the affected zones.
As to launching with too many servers being a mistake - That wasn't Warhammer's problem. Everyone says it is because eventually they consolidated, but they consolidated because an above average number of people gave up on the game quickly, for a variety of reasons NONE of which had to do with server underpopulation: 1) Significant realm imbalance. Destruction had a number of class advantages over Order, resulting in every server having Order underpopulated and Destruction overpopulated. People who rolled Order got sick of getting rolled all the time by uneven numbers in scenario instances (Destro always full but Order frequently with only half-spots filled), people who rolled Destruction got sick of waiting in scenario queues for enough Order players to show. 2) System requirements out of line with graphics quality. People bashed WAR for graphics being not any significant improvement over WoW - This alone isn't a problem, but it is when your system requirements are significantly more than WoW. Two friends of mine had machines more than capable of playing WoW, but were not able to play WAR with acceptable framerates, leading me to leave WAR within a month or so for WoW.
This is why I eventually decided it wouldn't be detrimental to me at all to outright block outgoing SMTP at my router - I exclusively use gmail for my email now.
Unfortunately, precedent says they will act on this by blocking all access if a compromise is detected - Time Warner has a "two strikes and you're out" deal - The first time ANY sort of complaint comes in, you get a temp-block that can be lifted by clicking a URL. Second report, even if it's 1.5 months later, will result in service shutoff until you call the company. (Which is annoying because the notification page does NOT provide any phone numbers.)
(I know this because my Windows gaming machine got compromised.)
I have that unit. EXTREMELY well supported by DD-WRT, and an excellent performer with DD-WRT.
I cannot speak as to how much better DD-WRT is than the stock firmware - I bought the Buffalo specifically because of good DD-WRT support and my first task upon unboxing was to flash it, so I have zero experience with stock firmware.
The WHR-G54S + DD-WRT + a 500 mW amp + 15 dBi sector antenna will outperform 75%+ of 802.11n routers at almost any range. (Anywhere beyond 20 foot range and the Buffalo outperforms my 5 GHz N unit, although the N unit has internal antennas, but the majority of 5 GHz N units do.)
The problem wasn't the phones, but with the provider they were released with. T-Mobile's probably the smallest of the U.S. service providers with the worst coverage, and unlike Sprint, their roaming agreement with AT&T breaks completely on a regular basis. For example, in 2008, T-Mobile phones were unusable for miles around my apartment and workplace, while AT&T worked perfectly.
Well, yeah, it was with the phones - no support for UMTS850/1900 means it's crippled to any US resident on a provider other than T-Mobile even if you get an unlocked phone.
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Gentoo has been falling behind lately.
They didn't remove the unstable mask from Firefox 3 until Mozilla basically said, "We are no longer supporting 2.x in any way" and Mozilla had released 3.5.
KDE 3.5 is still the "Stable" release in Gentoo, despite the KDE team EOLing 3.5 a while ago. Yeah, 4.0 and 4.1 sucked, but 4.2 was quite good and 4.3 fixed nearly all remaining issues. Ubuntu has been successfully using KDE 4.x releases in Kubuntu since 8.10 (or maybe even 8.04 I think?)
This is why all of my new systems are getting Ubuntu installed instead of Gentoo - It's simply too much time and effort to try and get a stable Gentoo system with even remotely up-to-date packages.
Upgrading memory on the Eee 1000HE is definately allowed.
Heck, Amazon basically autoreccomends a stick of RAM as one of the "frequently bought together" combos.
madwifi had that same capability 3-4 years ago. I think that capability has been migrated to most Linux wireless drivers with the new mac80211-based wireless stack.
You missed one:
"Configure dad's laptop as a wireless router."
There has been software written for Windows Mobile phones that provides this functionality in one package too. I haven't tested it yet, but it is supposedly supported by the HTC Touch Pro 2 that I got last week. It is known to occasionally cause overheating issues for the device though...
The only special thing about the MiFi is that the terminal device, battery, and WiFi router/AP are all in one package.
The W7 functionality is, as you point out, nothing new, it just may be easier to set up.
Looks like they improved signal quality/reliability, but address space was my biggest annoyance.
X10 is CRAP. It supports only 16 device codes and 16 house codes, and the majority of their controllers are only able to control one housecode at a time.
In short, there's a total address space of only 256 devices, and it's partitioned into 16 chunks of 16.
Also, it's heavily unreliable. The modulation scheme hasn't been revamped in decades to take advantage of modern ECC schemes (which are no longer computationally expensive).
They could have had great success with an "X10 version 2" with a more robust ECC scheme and larger address space, the closest thing is Insteon which has its own set of problems (namely a history of unfriendliness to open-source efforts.)
I don't see any low UIDs, young grasshopper...
At least as of Feb-March of this year, T-Mobile was waaaay behind the ballgame. In theory they have a roaming agreement with AT&T so that T-Mo users will at least have voice service in AT&T areas, but in reality, a T-Mo SIM will frequently result in your phone's IMEI being blacklisted by an AT&T tower for 15-20 minutes, even if you swap an AT&T SIM back into the phone. (That's why my ex switched to AT&T. Her phone didn't work at all anywhere more than 1-2 miles from her home, and nowhere near where she worked/frequently spent her time.)
Second most expensive after Verizon. In general, you get what you pay for, although Verizon's quality of service compared to their price has suffered over the past 2-3 years.
T-Mobile and Sprint are dirt cheap but have horrific networks. T-Mo in theory has a roaming agreement with AT&T, but in reality that agreement seems to fail so badly that putting a T-Mobile SIM into a phone will cause that phone's IMEI to be blacklisted with the local AT&T tower even after an AT&T SIM is put back into the phone. (I tried this back when my ex had T-Mobile and couldn't get service anywhere near my apartment/work - I put her SIM in my unlocked phone and had no service where I had 4 bars before. I put my AT&T SIM back in and the phone couldn't get service for 15-20 minutes!)
The only time I've needed to do anything "special" was to get 185-series or later drivers for kernel compatibility issues. (I was using a newer than standard kernel to fix some Intel wireless issues.)
Of course, there's a Launchpad PPA that has those exact drivers, perfectly set up to work with DKMS.
Although in the end, it proved easier to move to the Karmic beta than to try and fix wireless the way I was going about it.
I think you just proved that open-source, while USUALLY superior, is not always the way to go.
The state of Intel graphics in Linux over the past year has been, despite being complete open-source, pitiful. Intel graphics is in general not a good performer, but even the GMA950 is enough to run Google Earth in Windows with decent performance. For the last two Ubuntu releases, it hasn't been the case in Linux. Intel graphics performance in Linux has been PITIFUL (even my GMA graphics standards) due to excessive architecture churn.
This is why I don't understand the requests for an improved installer.
The way the NVidia drivers are distributed already makes it annoying for packagers, the installer someone was asking about makes that situation WORSE. It's a step backwards.
NVidia needs to make the drivers more packager-friendly, not less.
Every time I've used non-distro-packaged NVidia drivers it has led to much pain and suffering.
A strobe requires:
1) Pulsed energy storage (big photo-grade electrolytic capacitor)
2) Lots of energy per pulse (eats battery - look at how much battery life of cameras drops when the flash is used)
It's basically impossible to put a strobe into a phone without making it unacceptably large or brutally killing battery life, especially with the general trend in phone design - Thinner/smaller.
As to physical keyboard - there are lots of QWERTY slider phones out there. In fact the original G1 was just such a phone (although the sliding mechanism was WEIRD and seemed extremely flimsy to me compared to other HTC sliders).
AT&T has the least incentive of any USA carrier to offer an iPhone-killer...
My site eventually changed policy to allow employees to carry cameraphones if they took appropriate training, which was basically, "Don't use the camera on site."
There are areas we can't even bring cameraphones, but we're not even allowed to bring non-camera phones into those areas.
The only reasons I can think of for bringing a laptop into a movie theater:
1) You want to pirate
2) You're an incredible internet addict that can't even escape IRC/AIM long enough to sit through a movie in the theater
3) You don't have a trunk in your car to lock it in - but why the hell did you have your laptop with you in the first place if you were driving to a movie? "Went to the movie directly after work" isn't a valid reason:
a) If you're going to see a movie, highly unlikely you were going to work from home that night. Lock the laptop in your desk cabinet.
b) Few people want to go see a movie in their work clothes. Even if going home is out of the way, most people are going to change for comfort.
The new heroics mechanics were updated in 3.2. It solves, at least partially, the "I'm not geared for Ulduar but no one wants to run Naxx with me" problem.
That said, the gear treadmill and endgame in general stopped holding my interest after a while. It didn't help that all of my friends reside on a West Coast server - I'm East. I'm playing Aion now.
I think it depends.
As others have said, if it's shady like one of those offshore Internet gambling companies or anything not quite legal - yeah it'll be a black mark.
If it's connected with the big Las Vegas casinos, or other casinos that are fully legal and HEAVILY regulated, you not only should be fine, but knowing the reputation such institutions have for security, it is likely going to be a significant positive.
Yes, Eve uses what they call a deterministic physics simulation. For example, if you click "orbit" around an object, with known initial conditions and when the command was executed, server, client, and other clients all can predict an object's exact location accurately.
As a result far less info needs to be sent from server to client. Main problem is "load lag", when a particular client's state needs to change rapidly (after a jump, after warping to a new grid) - The server has a bandwidth throttle that means that no matter how fast YOUR connection is, it will take a while to load.
Also, 2-10 minutes for module activation is NOT acceptable lag. EVE routinely has nodes crash during combat with 1000-1500 pilots involved. Hell, only a year or so ago 1000 was pretty much a guaranteed node drop.
Either way, EVE's game design of multiple star systems with systems being split up into areas you need to warp between makes it fundamentally far more scalable than most other MMOs can be.
Actually, Aion DOES have a mechanism like you describe, called "channels".
There's no reason NCSoft couldn't have added more hardware and more channels to the affected zones.
As to launching with too many servers being a mistake - That wasn't Warhammer's problem. Everyone says it is because eventually they consolidated, but they consolidated because an above average number of people gave up on the game quickly, for a variety of reasons NONE of which had to do with server underpopulation:
1) Significant realm imbalance. Destruction had a number of class advantages over Order, resulting in every server having Order underpopulated and Destruction overpopulated. People who rolled Order got sick of getting rolled all the time by uneven numbers in scenario instances (Destro always full but Order frequently with only half-spots filled), people who rolled Destruction got sick of waiting in scenario queues for enough Order players to show.
2) System requirements out of line with graphics quality. People bashed WAR for graphics being not any significant improvement over WoW - This alone isn't a problem, but it is when your system requirements are significantly more than WoW. Two friends of mine had machines more than capable of playing WoW, but were not able to play WAR with acceptable framerates, leading me to leave WAR within a month or so for WoW.
This is why I eventually decided it wouldn't be detrimental to me at all to outright block outgoing SMTP at my router - I exclusively use gmail for my email now.
Unfortunately, precedent says they will act on this by blocking all access if a compromise is detected - Time Warner has a "two strikes and you're out" deal - The first time ANY sort of complaint comes in, you get a temp-block that can be lifted by clicking a URL. Second report, even if it's 1.5 months later, will result in service shutoff until you call the company. (Which is annoying because the notification page does NOT provide any phone numbers.)
(I know this because my Windows gaming machine got compromised.)
You mean specifically the WHR-G54S model?
I have that unit. EXTREMELY well supported by DD-WRT, and an excellent performer with DD-WRT.
I cannot speak as to how much better DD-WRT is than the stock firmware - I bought the Buffalo specifically because of good DD-WRT support and my first task upon unboxing was to flash it, so I have zero experience with stock firmware.
The WHR-G54S + DD-WRT + a 500 mW amp + 15 dBi sector antenna will outperform 75%+ of 802.11n routers at almost any range. (Anywhere beyond 20 foot range and the Buffalo outperforms my 5 GHz N unit, although the N unit has internal antennas, but the majority of 5 GHz N units do.)
The problem wasn't the phones, but with the provider they were released with. T-Mobile's probably the smallest of the U.S. service providers with the worst coverage, and unlike Sprint, their roaming agreement with AT&T breaks completely on a regular basis. For example, in 2008, T-Mobile phones were unusable for miles around my apartment and workplace, while AT&T worked perfectly.
Well, yeah, it was with the phones - no support for UMTS850/1900 means it's crippled to any US resident on a provider other than T-Mobile even if you get an unlocked phone.
I gave up and went to WM on HTC devices myself...