Why can't the community get togeather and create an open API like Microsofts Direct-X?
You mean like OpenGL? (Ok, yes, I know, DirectX does more than just graphics...)
In any event, you don't usually play games on enterprise Linux distributions. So your post is rather out of place here.
I would say Linux is that OS. But it really needs support from the entertainment gaming industry to push is public support to the masses.
Since we're talking about enterprise Linux distibutions, what enterprise Linux really needs is native application support from vendors. You know, vendors like
Oracle,
IBM,
BEA, etc. That's what it needs before it can become a viable alternative to running the sorts of products that enterprises seem to like running outside of Solaris, AIX or Windows (or a few others.)
(And if your sarcasm detector needs some calibration, click on some of the links I gave before you post a comment based on my comment...)
Minimum latency -- you're assuming that the two parties communicating via the satellite are both directly below it (in the same location:)
In reality, when you use a communication satellite, the two parties are generally quite a ways away from it on the ground. This adds to the distance, though the distance added is smaller than the 22,000 miles it's above the Earth. (I'd have to do some math, but I'd estimate that the added distance would be between 0 and 6000 miles, depending on where you are.
And you probably realize this, but others may not -- most communication satellites are in
geosynchronous orbits. In fact, most are in
geostationary orbits, or a close approximation to one. In a geostationary orbit, they're always above the equator, and always at about 22,400 miles above the Earth.
And then there's also latency introduced by the processing in the satellite, and whatever you're using to communicate to it, though that part is usually small compared to the round trip time to the satellite.
about 22370.39 miles
About? You narrow it down to less than 100 feet, and you say `about' ?:)
Either way, 300 ms of latency isn't nearly as bad as people make it sound.
This is on top of the normal internet delays. A response from the other end will take just as long to come back so your looking at one second delay. Not good for most any use.
Aside from web, email, irc. Even a videophone is still acceptable with a one second delay.
_Most_ Internet application are usable with 1000 ms ping times. Web, email and IRC will barely even notice. Even interactive things like ssh will work, though you'll probably find the lag to be most annoying as you find yourself counting keystrokes to move your cursor around in your editor, for example.
Back before the Internet, email was sent via things like UUCP. The equivilent ping times would be hours or even days. I've IRCed when the ping times were 5-10 seconds -- it's annoying if you're trying to do more than talk, but as long as your client is local, it's perfectly usable.
Really, the main class of things that won't really work are first person shooters and similar games. Even something like Everquest ought to work, because it's not based on twitch reflexes.
If you have enough bandwidth, you can use that to hide latency in some situations.
VoIP is not one of those situations.
Think of an RPC-style app: if you migrate the client to the other side of the world via a high-latency/high-bandwidth pipe
Um, we're talking about phone conversations. The only way to `migrate the client' is to get grandma onto a plane. Or get onto a plane yourself and fly to grandma. Though there is always the old saying --
"Never understimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling
down the highway"
--Andrew Tannenbaum.
Now, I did say that lots of bandwidth won't let you hide the latency, and I meant that. But I'm also going to say that while a second of latency in a phone converstaion might be annoying (especially if there's an echo) it's not going to prevent you from having a conversation. It might make you think that grandma is spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about her responses, but you can still have the converstaion.
What's acceptable and what's not is entirely in the mind of the user. Given a completely mobile home with no wires, I might find a small bit of latency in talking on the phone to be completely acceptable. Especially if it enables me to ask grandma for money -- because after spending all this money on gadgets, I'd definately need it!
the latency involved with satellite communications would really inhibit the use of VoIP.
We've been making long distance phone calls via satellite for decades now. True, it's not over VoIP, but the cause of the latency (the long distance to the satellite) is still there, so the latency is there too.
Yes, it's a bit odd to hear an echo of what you say into the phone a signifigant fraction of a second later, but you got used to it. You were just happy to speak to grandma, even though she was 6000 miles away and this call was costing you $0.40/minute!
If you buy a license to broadcast over specific wavelengths, the Feds will happily track down unauthorized broadcasters, arrest and possibly even fine & imprison them.
Correct in theory, though in practice not so much.
You can complain to the FCC, but they're unlikely to send somebody to investigate unless it's an extreme and repeated violation.
More likely is that you'll need to find the offender yourself, then give the FBI your evidence, and maybe they'll send them a nasty letter that they must respond to within 30 days...
Hams play this sort of game all the time. The FCC is likely to take a commercial interest more seriously, but even so, they're not going to investigate somebody who transmits on your frequency once in a while.
The mind abounds with disturbing images of people abusing batteries in all sorts of different ways..
It's not nearly as interesting as you make it sound.
Common forms of abuse (not specific to LiPo cells, however) :
leaving a battery in a hot car, especially in the sun.
discharging a battery completely in 4 minutes, like many R/C car and plane guys do. The battery generally tolerates it, but it won't last long.
charging a battery at 4C (full charge in 15 minutes.) (Some batteries can tolerate higher charge rates, some can't.)
overcharging a battery (like leaving it on a charger for days at a time. LiPo chargers MUST have circuitry to prevent this, as LiPo cells can explode if overcharged, but NiMH and NiCd cells tolerate it, even though it's still abuse.)
discharging a battery too much (for a NiCd/NiMH cell, you reverse-charge a cell or two, which is bad, and for LiPo/Pb, discharging too much ruins the cell.)
dropping the battery onto a concrete floor. Yes, physical abuse is still abuse.
In a car I'd expect some sort of heat management system to keep the batteries at approx ideal temperature.
I wouldn't expect anything more fancy than a fan with a thermostat.
Ideal temperature for LiPos really depends on what you want. Do you want them to last a long time, or to deliver peak power? For them to last, you want them to stay cool. For peak power, you want them warm (but not too hot -- that ruins them.)
I certainly wouldn't expect your car to have a heater and A/C unit to keep your batteries at the ideal temperature even when the car is off. (After all, your car may be sitting in 110 degree Texas heat, or in -40 degree cold.)
In any event, they say the battery can be charged and discharged 1000 times with only a 1% loss in capacity. If the battery can be charged in 1 minute, I suspect that this `1000 times' figure was obtained by charging it in 10 minutes, discharging in 10 minutes, repeat 1000 times, with a fan keeping it cool the entire time.
(Charging in 1 minute (aka 60C) would probably qualify as abuse, and greatly reduce it's lifespan. On the bright side, if it can handle charging at 60C, it can probably be discharged at 60C. The electric R/C plane guys are probably very interested -- I know I am...)
This would take only 2 weeks to get to 1000 cycles. I'm highly skeptical of the 1% figure, but it may be that they haven't overcome the 2 year from date of manufacture date limitation yet -- that instead, they just charge and discharge really fast to reach 1000 times.
Well, a chess move could be given in two bytes -- starting square (1 of 64) and destination square (1 of 64.) You're not using the entire bytes, but you'll also need to account for castling and maybe some other stuff.
If a game is 50 moves (and that's a long game) that's 50 * 2 (two players) * 2 bytes/move, or 200 bytes for the entire game. I believe a KB of data costs $0.03 on Cingular (which is ludicrously expensive for `normal use') but so this game will cost less than a penny. [ Don't quote me on that price. It's from 2002, so I'm not sure how it's changed. ]
Of course, I'm ignoring any overhead. And the overhead is likely to be many many many times larger than the actual chess data, but I don't know how it's billed. Perhaps they really will bill you for only 2 bytes/move:)
But this ignores loss in capacity that may occur to do other factors, primarily exposure to heat.
To be more precise, Li-ion and Li-poly batteries lost most of their capacity in about two years, no matter how much use they get. (This assumes that they're not abused, of course. Abuse ruins them much faster.)
NiCd and NiMH cells, on the other hand, last longer, especially if not being charged and discharged a lot.
I think the amount of battery required to power the transmitter long enough to make a connection and transmit data from your phone would be far greater than running the phone CPU to compute that move.
It depends. Chess is probably an extreme example, but it wasn't me that first brought it up.
Sure, you could make a chess game that only looked forward one move and this could probably run on a cell phone just fine, and be pretty fast. But if you want a game that can beat almost anybody, you'll need a lot more computing power and memory. Deep Blue did
one trillion operations per second -- and this was needed, as it only had a few minutes per move to calculate it's next move --
40 moves/2 hours in the first two hours.
In any event, chess fits the `low bandwidth used, but extreme amounts of cpu needed to compute each move' paradigm perfectly. At least for world class chess:)
You are not waiting for a slow computer. You are instead waiting for a rather frazzled guy in Mumbai whose job it is to play the computer opponent in anywhere from 10 to 50 phone chess games at any given time
I know you're joking, but you could very well be giving the future of cell phone chess games too.
Cell phone cpus are slow, and suck up the battery while they're working. But an entire chess board layout is very simple, and it wouldn't take much bandwidth to transmit your entire chess board layout to a remote computer which could then calculate the next move and transmit it back. (And that's assuming that the remote computer keeps no state information. If it kept track of the chess board itself, the bandwidth needed per move would just be a few bytes.)
I could see a cell phone company buying Deep Blue or some similar big honking box and reprogramming it to play lots of games at once. Then release a chess application for cell phones that uses the data capability to allow you to play chess `against Deep Blue.'
Sure, Deep Blue would not be playing 1000 simultaneous world-class chess games (though for an extra fee, you could get more cpu dedicated to you giving you a better opponnent), but it could probably beat most people. (The only reason to use Deep Blue itself is for the name recognition. A number of racks of PCs would work too, but it wouldn't have the obvious marketing potential.)
This is one case where having a remote server do most of the work makes perfect sense. (Having a PC play chess with a remote server doing the work makes less sense, as a PC has much more cpu to work with, so it's not as needed.)
After all, slackware does not provide support for the hurd kernel or the bsd kernel either.
And never did. But Slackware did support Gnome, which is why your analogy is rather poor.
I don't know why other distributions are still wasting their time supporting both.
Probably because people want a choice. Some customers want one, some want another, many (most?) probably don't care what they get, and some are going to rip out whatever they get and install their own. (Personally, I use fvwm95. Though I do install both KDE and Gnome just for the apps and libraries they come with. Disk is cheap.)
I think this is a mature decision, and I would imagine that other distributions will (or should) follow suit.
It seems a mature enough decision -- being `too hard to keep up with' is a good reason. (Though that's why FreeBSD dropped perl, and I don't really agree with that.)
But to claim it's not a slap in the face to the Gnome people, I don't see how you could claim that. Gnome and KDE are probably the #1 and #2 (I don't know which is which) strictly because they're installed on people's boxes by default. Remove that, and they'll drop to #3 or lower.
If every distribution drops Gnome, you'll find a lot fewer people using Gnome after a few years, as people upgrade and install new systems. Sure, a few die hards will install Gnome, but not many.
Can you provide some evidence to back this up? I don't personally use Slackware any more (I did use it for a while, as it was quite an improvement over SLS and MCC, however) but it seems that I know lots of people who do use Slackware. Anecdotal evidence, I know, but still -- once you get enough people, anecdotes become statistics.
Simply put, it's probably better for Slack to work on parts they care about.
Of course, this is true for any Linux distribution. Or even Windows for, that matter.
Seriously, Microsoft is not the `Ultimate anti-open-source company' or anything. (And where did you hear that it was Microsoft anyways?) They're probably less closed-source than many other companies out there.
Ultimately, it's difficult to pay the bills by writing open source software. So many open source developers work for companies making closed source software. It may not be ideal, but it's reality.
As for the guy's question, yes, I'd suggest giving them a list of every program or project he's ever contributed to in any way, even if the contribution was as simple as suggesting that they fix a misspelled word on page 4 of the documentation. And if this isn't practical, I'd suggest not taking the job.
As far as the contract being non-negotiable, everything is negotiable. If he's made up his mind that he's not going to take the job with the contract as written, bring a marker and strike (black out) the offending parts of the contract at signing and initial each one. Then sign the new contract. They may just go ahead and accept it.
Oh, and I'd suggest consulting an attorney -- $100 to have somebody read over the contract could be very cheap insurance. Consulting/. is not a subsitute for competent legal advice.
To be fair, old desktop box computers typically use less power than modern ones.
386 cpus use less than 5 watts of power, compared to 70+ watts for modern Athlons or P4s.
Of course, there's also the rest of the box using power too, so the difference isn't quite that drastic. And it may take 1000 of these 386 boxes to match the performance of one 3 gHz Athlon, and the power used by those 1000 boxes would be higher than the one Athlon box.
...except you don't have to worry about %1 of your postal mail being a mail bomb.
The worst email bomb I have to worry about is somebody renaming goatse.jpg to something like picture-of-our-new-baby.jpg and sending it from my cousin's address.
Beyond that, I don't think it's likely for some bad email to cause grief for mutt and me just by opening it.
At least with postal mail, I have the danger of getting a paper cut.
I get tons of junk mail, and I'm annoyed about it, but at least the pattern recognition portion of my brain can almost instantaneously decide that some peice of mail is crap. Aside from a minute of time and desposal (I live in a city, so I can pretty much load the dumpster if need-be), it costs me nothing.
Several things --
The pattern recognition part of my brain can look at an email, just the Subject and From headers, and determine with around 99% accuracy if a given email is spam. However, being the recipient of around 3000 spams/day, that still gives an error rate of around 30 emails/day, and nevermind the amount of time this requires. Assuming 1 second per email, that's still about one hour per day. For more accuracy, I need to actually open the mails up, and that takes much more time.
So I employ things like Spamassassin to help do my filtering for me. If it weren't for SA or a similar spam filter, I'd have to either give up on email, only allow friends email me, or change my email address on a regular basis -- I can't afford one hour/day just to weed out spam.
I probably average 3 mails/day junk snail mail. It's not so easy to employ computerized aid to filter these, but since it's only 3/day, I can handle it, and can devote enough time to each item to reduce the error rate to almost zero. If I were receiving 3000 mails/day, things would be different. Similarly, if I received 3 spam emails/day, I wouldn't have spent hours setting up and tweaking spamassassin to help me out.
In any event, spam costs me time. Quite a bit of time, actually, and I can calculate money from that, and it's quite a bit. But the only reason it's signifigant is the volume -- I receive 1000x as much spam as postal junk mail.
It may only take you a minute, but I can assign a reasonable dollar value to a lost minute pretty easily. There's also the danger that junk mail or spam mail makes you overlook an important mail, and then the cost can be a lot more.
The junk postal mail I receive is quite often something I might be interested in. Since it costs them money to send it, they know that a 0.001% success rate will put them out of business. Therefore, I tend to actually look at junk postal mail.
If I received 3 email spams/day, and 2 of them were for something I might be interested in, I'd think very differently of spam. Alas, my penis doesn't really need a few more inches...
Divx sucks, nobody has used that crap in a long time. If you use compressed content then xvid is current
Divx 4+ and Xvid are basically the same thing, both
implementations of the ISO MPEG-4 standard (note that there are many other coding formats that use this same standard.) Differences between the two are very small.
If you use compressed content then xvid is current. Since DVD burners have gone sub $100 and 3mbit connections are common, actual dvd-r images are becoming vogue.
Hopefully you already realize this, but DVD (even the ones you buy at the store with movies on them) are compressed too. Quite heavily, in fact -- at 30 fps, 720x480, 24 bits/pixel, a 2 hour movie works out to 209 GB of data, and that doesn't even count any audio tracks. This huge amount of data is compressed down to fit on a 9 GB DVD.
Fortunately, the algorithms used are good enough that it's not usually noticable. (Note that I said `not usually' -- there are certainly cases where you can notice the compression artifacts.)
If you want video that's not compressed, get a Video Disc player. They're analog, though some do have a CD quality digital soundtrack. Or a VHS tape deck.
KOTOR2 would have been so much better if they'd spent, say, another four or five months on it.
I haven't finished KOTOR2 yet, but so far I'm finding it to be one of the best games I've played in a long time, probably since KOTOR1. (But yes, I've heard that the ending sucketh, and I've seen the way-cool (but dark) dialog options that are still in the game but aren't actually used anymore.)
Star Wars has made a number of good games. (And then there's Force Commander.) Star Trek is usually the example brought up when one wants to talk about stinkers, but there's a few winners there too -- Starfleet Command, Bridge Commander, Elite Forces.
Perhaps the difference there is that the ST and SW games are generally not tied to the release of a specific movie (though there were SW games tied to the release of episode 1 and 2, but these are the exception rather than the rule.) Perhaps they should stop making games to go with movies and instead make them to go with franchises (like SW and ST), so they have the time they need to make the game, and don't need to rush it out the door.
Of course, I can only think of a few franchises where they've made 6+ movies. I guess by my reasoning, they should make a Friday the 13th game now? (too late!) Police Academy?
Nightmare on Elm Street? Revenge of the Nerds is getting close...
For myself, when I had a converted closet for an office, the most important thing for me was good lighting.
Back before our company moved us all into cubes (grrrr), I had Christmas lights lighting my office. They last perhaps three months before they start burning out (and at $1/100 or so, it's often easier to just replace the whole strand than find out which one burned out) so you want to buy quite a lot right after Christmas, but they definately do make a nice light for the office when you want it dim but not pitch black.
The load times are on average 4-5 seconds longer than KOTOR I load times. (In computer time, 5 seconds is a LONG time.)
Even so, KOTOR2 has some of the fastest load times I've seen in a long time. Seriously, I can take a breath, click on the KOTOR2 icon, click through the movies/logos, load a game, and be up and playing (wiht a saved game even loaded) before I needed to take a breath again. (And no, I can't hold my breath terribly long. Less than a minute, though I think the entire procedure only takes about 25 seconds.)
Compare to HL2, which took like six minutes to get loaded if my computer had just started (time to start Steam, though it did get better later on) or Doom3 which still took a few minutes.
I'm still playing through KOTOR2, and I'm really enjoying it. I've noticed some quirks -- I'm done with Nar Shaddah, and all of the bounty hunters are still hanging around the place, even though I've killed them all, and one is now part of my party. Lots of little scripting things too -- I've beat some bad guy, and now I can talk to him and have the exact same discussion as before, then we fight again, but it's a very short fight as he's out of hit points...
I hope the ending isn't as disappointing as everybody has claimed... I haven't really read those posts carefully. But so far, the game is rocking. My wife is threatening to leave, my children haven't been bathed in days...
Slashdot Mirror
In any event, you don't usually play games on enterprise Linux distributions. So your post is rather out of place here.
Since we're talking about enterprise Linux distibutions, what enterprise Linux really needs is native application support from vendors. You know, vendors like Oracle, IBM, BEA, etc. That's what it needs before it can become a viable alternative to running the sorts of products that enterprises seem to like running outside of Solaris, AIX or Windows (or a few others.)(And if your sarcasm detector needs some calibration, click on some of the links I gave before you post a comment based on my comment ...)
In reality, when you use a communication satellite, the two parties are generally quite a ways away from it on the ground. This adds to the distance, though the distance added is smaller than the 22,000 miles it's above the Earth. (I'd have to do some math, but I'd estimate that the added distance would be between 0 and 6000 miles, depending on where you are.
And you probably realize this, but others may not -- most communication satellites are in geosynchronous orbits. In fact, most are in geostationary orbits, or a close approximation to one. In a geostationary orbit, they're always above the equator, and always at about 22,400 miles above the Earth.
And then there's also latency introduced by the processing in the satellite, and whatever you're using to communicate to it, though that part is usually small compared to the round trip time to the satellite.
About? You narrow it down to less than 100 feet, and you say `about' ?Either way, 300 ms of latency isn't nearly as bad as people make it sound.
Certainly, I never said that all long distance calls went via satellite.
And what do you know? The article is about a mobile home that'sBack before the Internet, email was sent via things like UUCP. The equivilent ping times would be hours or even days. I've IRCed when the ping times were 5-10 seconds -- it's annoying if you're trying to do more than talk, but as long as your client is local, it's perfectly usable.
Really, the main class of things that won't really work are first person shooters and similar games. Even something like Everquest ought to work, because it's not based on twitch reflexes.
Now, I did say that lots of bandwidth won't let you hide the latency, and I meant that. But I'm also going to say that while a second of latency in a phone converstaion might be annoying (especially if there's an echo) it's not going to prevent you from having a conversation. It might make you think that grandma is spending an inordinate amount of time thinking about her responses, but you can still have the converstaion.
What's acceptable and what's not is entirely in the mind of the user. Given a completely mobile home with no wires, I might find a small bit of latency in talking on the phone to be completely acceptable. Especially if it enables me to ask grandma for money -- because after spending all this money on gadgets, I'd definately need it!
Yes, it's a bit odd to hear an echo of what you say into the phone a signifigant fraction of a second later, but you got used to it. You were just happy to speak to grandma, even though she was 6000 miles away and this call was costing you $0.40/minute!
You can complain to the FCC, but they're unlikely to send somebody to investigate unless it's an extreme and repeated violation.
More likely is that you'll need to find the offender yourself, then give the FBI your evidence, and maybe they'll send them a nasty letter that they must respond to within 30 days ...
Hams play this sort of game all the time. The FCC is likely to take a commercial interest more seriously, but even so, they're not going to investigate somebody who transmits on your frequency once in a while.
Common forms of abuse (not specific to LiPo cells, however) :
leaving a battery in a hot car, especially in the sun.
discharging a battery completely in 4 minutes, like many R/C car and plane guys do. The battery generally tolerates it, but it won't last long.
charging a battery at 4C (full charge in 15 minutes.) (Some batteries can tolerate higher charge rates, some can't.)
overcharging a battery (like leaving it on a charger for days at a time. LiPo chargers MUST have circuitry to prevent this, as LiPo cells can explode if overcharged, but NiMH and NiCd cells tolerate it, even though it's still abuse.)
discharging a battery too much (for a NiCd/NiMH cell, you reverse-charge a cell or two, which is bad, and for LiPo/Pb, discharging too much ruins the cell.)
dropping the battery onto a concrete floor. Yes, physical abuse is still abuse.
People deliberately overcharging a LiPo pack and filming it to see what happens.
There's a lot more, but this should give you an idea.
Ideal temperature for LiPos really depends on what you want. Do you want them to last a long time, or to deliver peak power? For them to last, you want them to stay cool. For peak power, you want them warm (but not too hot -- that ruins them.)
I certainly wouldn't expect your car to have a heater and A/C unit to keep your batteries at the ideal temperature even when the car is off. (After all, your car may be sitting in 110 degree Texas heat, or in -40 degree cold.)
In any event, they say the battery can be charged and discharged 1000 times with only a 1% loss in capacity. If the battery can be charged in 1 minute, I suspect that this `1000 times' figure was obtained by charging it in 10 minutes, discharging in 10 minutes, repeat 1000 times, with a fan keeping it cool the entire time.
(Charging in 1 minute (aka 60C) would probably qualify as abuse, and greatly reduce it's lifespan. On the bright side, if it can handle charging at 60C, it can probably be discharged at 60C. The electric R/C plane guys are probably very interested -- I know I am ...)
This would take only 2 weeks to get to 1000 cycles. I'm highly skeptical of the 1% figure, but it may be that they haven't overcome the 2 year from date of manufacture date limitation yet -- that instead, they just charge and discharge really fast to reach 1000 times.
We'll see when it makes it out on the market ...
If a game is 50 moves (and that's a long game) that's 50 * 2 (two players) * 2 bytes/move, or 200 bytes for the entire game. I believe a KB of data costs $0.03 on Cingular (which is ludicrously expensive for `normal use') but so this game will cost less than a penny. [ Don't quote me on that price. It's from 2002, so I'm not sure how it's changed. ]
Of course, I'm ignoring any overhead. And the overhead is likely to be many many many times larger than the actual chess data, but I don't know how it's billed. Perhaps they really will bill you for only 2 bytes/move :)
NiCd and NiMH cells, on the other hand, last longer, especially if not being charged and discharged a lot.
Sure, you could make a chess game that only looked forward one move and this could probably run on a cell phone just fine, and be pretty fast. But if you want a game that can beat almost anybody, you'll need a lot more computing power and memory. Deep Blue did one trillion operations per second -- and this was needed, as it only had a few minutes per move to calculate it's next move -- 40 moves/2 hours in the first two hours.
In any event, chess fits the `low bandwidth used, but extreme amounts of cpu needed to compute each move' paradigm perfectly. At least for world class chess :)
Cell phone cpus are slow, and suck up the battery while they're working. But an entire chess board layout is very simple, and it wouldn't take much bandwidth to transmit your entire chess board layout to a remote computer which could then calculate the next move and transmit it back. (And that's assuming that the remote computer keeps no state information. If it kept track of the chess board itself, the bandwidth needed per move would just be a few bytes.)
I could see a cell phone company buying Deep Blue or some similar big honking box and reprogramming it to play lots of games at once. Then release a chess application for cell phones that uses the data capability to allow you to play chess `against Deep Blue.'
Sure, Deep Blue would not be playing 1000 simultaneous world-class chess games (though for an extra fee, you could get more cpu dedicated to you giving you a better opponnent), but it could probably beat most people. (The only reason to use Deep Blue itself is for the name recognition. A number of racks of PCs would work too, but it wouldn't have the obvious marketing potential.)
This is one case where having a remote server do most of the work makes perfect sense. (Having a PC play chess with a remote server doing the work makes less sense, as a PC has much more cpu to work with, so it's not as needed.)
But to claim it's not a slap in the face to the Gnome people, I don't see how you could claim that. Gnome and KDE are probably the #1 and #2 (I don't know which is which) strictly because they're installed on people's boxes by default. Remove that, and they'll drop to #3 or lower.
If every distribution drops Gnome, you'll find a lot fewer people using Gnome after a few years, as people upgrade and install new systems. Sure, a few die hards will install Gnome, but not many.
I'm sorry to see Troika go.
Seriously, Microsoft is not the `Ultimate anti-open-source company' or anything. (And where did you hear that it was Microsoft anyways?) They're probably less closed-source than many other companies out there.
Ultimately, it's difficult to pay the bills by writing open source software. So many open source developers work for companies making closed source software. It may not be ideal, but it's reality.
As for the guy's question, yes, I'd suggest giving them a list of every program or project he's ever contributed to in any way, even if the contribution was as simple as suggesting that they fix a misspelled word on page 4 of the documentation. And if this isn't practical, I'd suggest not taking the job.
As far as the contract being non-negotiable, everything is negotiable. If he's made up his mind that he's not going to take the job with the contract as written, bring a marker and strike (black out) the offending parts of the contract at signing and initial each one. Then sign the new contract. They may just go ahead and accept it.
Oh, and I'd suggest consulting an attorney -- $100 to have somebody read over the contract could be very cheap insurance. Consulting /. is not a subsitute for competent legal advice.
386 cpus use less than 5 watts of power, compared to 70+ watts for modern Athlons or P4s.
Of course, there's also the rest of the box using power too, so the difference isn't quite that drastic. And it may take 1000 of these 386 boxes to match the performance of one 3 gHz Athlon, and the power used by those 1000 boxes would be higher than the one Athlon box.
Beyond that, I don't think it's likely for some bad email to cause grief for mutt and me just by opening it.
At least with postal mail, I have the danger of getting a paper cut.
The pattern recognition part of my brain can look at an email, just the Subject and From headers, and determine with around 99% accuracy if a given email is spam. However, being the recipient of around 3000 spams/day, that still gives an error rate of around 30 emails/day, and nevermind the amount of time this requires. Assuming 1 second per email, that's still about one hour per day. For more accuracy, I need to actually open the mails up, and that takes much more time.
So I employ things like Spamassassin to help do my filtering for me. If it weren't for SA or a similar spam filter, I'd have to either give up on email, only allow friends email me, or change my email address on a regular basis -- I can't afford one hour/day just to weed out spam.
I probably average 3 mails/day junk snail mail. It's not so easy to employ computerized aid to filter these, but since it's only 3/day, I can handle it, and can devote enough time to each item to reduce the error rate to almost zero. If I were receiving 3000 mails/day, things would be different. Similarly, if I received 3 spam emails/day, I wouldn't have spent hours setting up and tweaking spamassassin to help me out.
In any event, spam costs me time. Quite a bit of time, actually, and I can calculate money from that, and it's quite a bit. But the only reason it's signifigant is the volume -- I receive 1000x as much spam as postal junk mail.
It may only take you a minute, but I can assign a reasonable dollar value to a lost minute pretty easily. There's also the danger that junk mail or spam mail makes you overlook an important mail, and then the cost can be a lot more.
The junk postal mail I receive is quite often something I might be interested in. Since it costs them money to send it, they know that a 0.001% success rate will put them out of business. Therefore, I tend to actually look at junk postal mail.
If I received 3 email spams/day, and 2 of them were for something I might be interested in, I'd think very differently of spam. Alas, my penis doesn't really need a few more inches ...
Fortunately, the algorithms used are good enough that it's not usually noticable. (Note that I said `not usually' -- there are certainly cases where you can notice the compression artifacts.)
If you want video that's not compressed, get a Video Disc player. They're analog, though some do have a CD quality digital soundtrack. Or a VHS tape deck.
Star Wars has made a number of good games. (And then there's Force Commander.) Star Trek is usually the example brought up when one wants to talk about stinkers, but there's a few winners there too -- Starfleet Command, Bridge Commander, Elite Forces.
Perhaps the difference there is that the ST and SW games are generally not tied to the release of a specific movie (though there were SW games tied to the release of episode 1 and 2, but these are the exception rather than the rule.) Perhaps they should stop making games to go with movies and instead make them to go with franchises (like SW and ST), so they have the time they need to make the game, and don't need to rush it out the door.
Of course, I can only think of a few franchises where they've made 6+ movies. I guess by my reasoning, they should make a Friday the 13th game now? (too late!) Police Academy? Nightmare on Elm Street? Revenge of the Nerds is getting close ...
Compare to HL2, which took like six minutes to get loaded if my computer had just started (time to start Steam, though it did get better later on) or Doom3 which still took a few minutes.
I'm still playing through KOTOR2, and I'm really enjoying it. I've noticed some quirks -- I'm done with Nar Shaddah, and all of the bounty hunters are still hanging around the place, even though I've killed them all, and one is now part of my party. Lots of little scripting things too -- I've beat some bad guy, and now I can talk to him and have the exact same discussion as before, then we fight again, but it's a very short fight as he's out of hit points ...
I hope the ending isn't as disappointing as everybody has claimed ... I haven't really read those posts carefully. But so far, the game is rocking. My wife is threatening to leave, my children haven't been bathed in days ...