I actually completely hide the textual menu with the addon Hide Menubar. I still leave the standard back, forward, reload and friends, but only because they're on the same bar as the address bar, which I pretty much always want visible.
I started doing this after realizing that the only elements of Firefox's UI that I actually use with any frequency is the address bar and quick search bar. For the rest of it, I'd rather just have a larger viewport. If I need the menus i just press ALT, which is consistent with the rest of a Windows Vista/7 UI that hides menubars. Incidentally, the most common reason for me to need the textual menus is to unclose a tab. This is a feature I need regularly, but not terribly frequently compared to most other functions. I hate that it's buried in the History menu - I just don't make that connection. It's also very hard to bind to mouse gestures in the common mouse gesture addons (Usability be damned, I heart my mouse gestures).
If I remember correctly PAE was actually enabled in at least some versions of Windows XP 32-bit. It was disabled in one of the service packs or something because it caused a bunch of trouble for people with code that wasn't PAE-aware. I may be mis-remembering things, but that's how my fuzzy view of history is choosing to remember things.
It may or may not be a related issue, but after disabling the.Net extension a while back, visiting Hulu now locks up Firefox until I kill it. I also have a lot of addons in general, though.
I believe it was the philosopher Kant who offered as a moral test the question, "What would the world be like if everyone did this?"
It's not a hypothetical question when it comes to auto updaters. Look at your average Windows box and you'll see that there's quite a few of these, and they're typically annoying and consuming far more resources than is called for. Off the top of my head, I know I have to kill the one that comes with Java regularly. Google's is nigh impossible to keep gone. Apple's Quicktime updater is common as well. HP's fond of cramming one in their hundreds-of-megs-of-god-knows-what printer drivers. Far too many Windows applications leave things running in the background. Even OpenOffice installs a damn quickstarter app. Installed a recent version of Nero lately? The newer versions absolutely rape your computer.
It's getting to be a problem to the point where in addition to removing all the malware I kill most of these background processes, and I'm not sure which one improves the performance more. It wouldn't be such a problem except Windows gives programs a thousand ways to start up at boot, hidden, with no UI to control it. Is it a service? A shell extension? Or a registry entry? In the Startup section of the boot menu? Time to whip out regedit and third party apps, because Windows in no way consolidates any of this, and some it is just flat out hidden from the user. When people say Windows is hard to administer, this is a good example of what's being talked about.
I've been using the same laptop for years, because despite the various vendors, models, and form factors portable computers come in these days, I've yet to find a replacement I like. So Apple with their exactly 3 options for portable computers will almost never convince me to buy. I really don't this the Apples are overpriced for the hardware you get, but the lack of options means I can never buy from.
I want a decent discreet graphics adapter in a 14" or smaller notebook that can switch to integrated when it's on battery. I need rendering power when I'm plugged in, but I do want good battery life. I don't think this is too much to ask; Nvidia practically gives you the solution when you combine their northbridge and GPUs. Yet the only notebook I've seen that makes any use of it is Dell's Studio XPS 13, which would be a perfect system except they somehow managed to negate both benefits: the graphics adapter is still only marginally better than the typical garbage, and the battery life still sucks. Also, slot loading optical drives, glossy finishes, and leather on my notebooks doesn't excite me. I think most notebook designers eat paint chips for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Maybe people in general are just driving faster for no real reason.
Maybe people drive faster because it's such a frustrating situation, at least in the US. I drive to work every morning, and drive home every afternoon, in rush hour traffic. I really have no choice in the matter. My employer says I will be at work at 9 am, and I can leave at 5 pm. There is no public transit that would get me where I want to go and the apartments near where I work are way out of my price range. It takes me half an hour and two toll roads that cost over $2 a day. If I don't take the toll roads it's even longer in the car.
It really grinds my nerves that voters continue shoot down competent public transportation, but I can't drive anywhere without seeing miles of road covered in orange cones, snarling traffic for miles because the already congested highway system is in need of expansion (half the reason it takes so long to drive anywhere in the first place). And by the time they finish the work (five years from now) they'll just have to start again. I really just hate driving. Even without all the traffic, I'd rather just get on a train and have someone else do the driving. You can drive and eat breakfast, listen to music, and basically turn your car into a living room, but you need only see rush hour once to see that everyone does it poorly. Traffic would probably move faster if people didn't try. Or if they had another option for eating that breakfast while commuting.
Yes, repositories are a source of trusted software assuming that everyone doesn't just run their own repository server, which is what's happening now. Joe's repository with his self-signed certificate is really no better than downloading random tarballs off the internet from a security point of view. Read what I wrote again: I am not saying repositories are bad. In fact I think they're great. They allow distros to make it dead simple to keep your OS and the apps it comes with secure and up to date. What I'm arguing against is XML syndrome - it doesn't apply everywhere.
Repositories have their limits. Repository selection will never be as good as the internet. Google will always beat your repository, no matter how many people you hire to keep your repository up to date. Some are more up to date than others, but less popular packages are often neglected; Ubuntu let my wireless driver rot for over a year, and it never worked to begin with. In a twist of irony, package managers sometimes make it harder to install software, because they get totally borked if you try go around them.
I've used.deb files on Ubuntu before and that seems to be pretty simple to use, but not every project releases in that format - the author of the article mentions that he was trying to use RPMs, which is why he couldn't make it work, of course. And here we come to the crux of the problem. RPM, DEB, TAR; I really don't care how you do it, but any installer we did would have to be an agreed-upon format. This is exactly why we don't have an installer system. Because we could never have an installer system; there would be no less than three. And they'd all be woefully incompatible. Instead we got three or so walled-garden repository systems. I love the open source community, but damnit...sometimes you guys piss me off.
It could be worse, I suppose. But it could have been so much better.
The author had lots of trouble installing things. I've gotten into arguments over it before, but here's my take: package managers were the wrong answer to the installation problem. They make installing and updating the the libraries and components that make up the the OS itself very easy, but you'll never satisfy diverse application preferences with a central repository. In his original piece, he tries to update OpenOffice from the web because the package manager isn't offering the update yet. Naturally, this is difficult and not really designed with users in mind. This is why I hate package managers - they leave you with two really crappy choices: either don't use it and have no install management at all, or use it and be doomed to only what's in the repositories and having to wait until New Widget 3.0 is blessed by your distro. Certainly don't try to mix the two options or you'll break everything. The fact that some projects now offer their own repositories is just a terrible band-aid.
My Windows box on the other hand always has the latest version of OpenOffice, and I didn't have to touch a console - anyone could do it. I just go download the installer and run it, without even bothering to uninstall the old version. And it's very easy because it's not just a tarball full of crap - it's actually a well-tested package. This way, I get managed installs - I have a list of programs and if I chose to remove one I just choose it and click the uninstall button. I know the Windows install system is much-maligned for being fragile (breaks, or breaks other stuff), messy (throwing crap everywhere, and not completely removing things), and causing as many problems as it solves. I don't disagree with that assessment, but I'd blame the implementation. The open source community could have made a standard install system. Something nice for a front end, something reliable. Hell, you could even integrate it with your fancy package manager, if you really want to. But apparently nobody finds having to wait to get software they want to be as unpleasant as I do. While I could honestly care less about system libraries most of the time, I demand very specific things of my applications, and I don't like handing control over to whoever runs the package servers.
Proper user account permissions? Like the ACL system that Windows has had for more than a decade? The one that's more granular than what you can get on Linux? I guess Linux needs to ditch sudo and get real "user account permissions" too?
I don't see what you're getting at here: UAC fills almost the same role as sudo on a Linux system. Okay, I admit - it's a little different "under the hood" from the way sudo works under Ubuntu, but it legitimately works, and Microsoft actually did sit down and think this one through. For example, instead of asking to elevate for every piece of software that does terrible crap like writing into the Program Files directory, it just virtualizes that file system operation into a folder in your user account. Doesn't even ask to elevate. It does kinda cause problems when files don't end up where you expected them to, but most users never notice and it's actually a very nice way to deal with developers who refuse to follow the rules. Thanks to nice things like that, I generally only get prompted for elevation when I install new software or legitimately need access to a restricted directory, which is exactly the way it should be.
Don't misunderstand me here - there's plenty of things wrong with Vista. UAC and the NT security model weren't one of them, though. UAC was a step towards a sane default of limited users instead of having everyone run as an administrator. Defaulting everyone to admin is one of those bad decisions Microsoft made and we've been paying for ever since. Windows needs UAC, and it's the main reason I use Vista on my home box.
Try this: enable Vista's Administrator account (it's disabled by default), give it a password, then make your user account a "Limited User." What happens when it asks to elevate? Yep, a password prompt instead of the regular UAC. It's not technically sudo but it's the same effect and it works extremely well.
In my mind there are mods, and then there are total conversions. Mods alter aspects of the original game. A great example of this is Dawn of War. It's a really good RTS, but given the wealth of lore it was inevitable that the game would have to omit or modify a lot of material. The game also has strong mod support, and the number of mods designed to bring the game closer to lore, add more units, and so on is just absurd. On the other hand, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are frequently host to total conversions, where people pretty much make their own games and just borrow the engine and some textures. I got Half-Life 1 for Christmas the year it was released. I really didn't feel the need to buy a new shooter for years after that thanks to the variety of mods available.
The common thread in both of the games I mentioned? They both released mod tools. In Dawn of War's case, there was even a menu in the game where you could choose which mod to start. I'm sure this has paid off for the developers. In Valve's case, they even hired some of the mod teams. I'm sure Counter-Strike alone kept Half-Life 1 selling years after it should have been forgotten. I know my family owned a second copy so my brother and I could play online together, something I don't think I'd bother with for the majority of the games I play.
My phone isn't anything terribly special - it was free with my plan. And yet it's got some really nice features. It will play MP3s, I can have ringtones, watch movies, text, browse the web, and a million other little things. I'll also pay through the nose if I so much as think about touching any of it. The only thing I've figured out how to do so far is copy my MP3s to the phone and play them. But I can't set them as ringtones or anything. And I can't set my background to a picture I copied either (though pictures I take with the camera seem to work).
Instead, I'm supposed to download all this crap to my phone, meaning I pay for the item and then I pay for the data transfer. It's insane - it'd cost me something like $50 to get a freakin' MP3 as my ringtone! My phone has a camera, but I'm inclined to believe that if I try to send a picture I take to someone else's phone I'll be charged for data, plus the flat service fee for sending a picture, which would be something like $5.20 all said and done. It's not worth that to me. So instead I've disabled all the data services on the phone to avoid accidentally accruing charges. Anytime it runs into an area where it would connect to the 'net, it now just fails with some error message. And I don't use hardly any of my phone's features.
Long story short: I don't use my phone features because cell plans prevent me from doing so.
It's not that people don't like puzzle games, it's the manner in which they've been used in games lately. In many games they're nothing more than an annoyance, with variants of the same puzzle appearing over and over again in a desperate attempt at stretching the game out and make it seem longer. I have no patience for this sort of thing at all and doubt many people do. If you want to make a puzzle game, or incorporate puzzles into your game, you'd better not make them annoying, mandatory, and long. That sounds like an honest job description; how could anyone not hate that?
I loved Portal by the way. All the puzzles were different, and the rewards for completion (the humorous voiceover and further interesting puzzles) were excellent.
The last router I had that really worked was a trusty old Linksys BEFSR41. This is not the same router that's going by that model number today. The hardware has completely changed and the new one I bought when my old one finally died was absolute trash. Since then I've been through all the major manufacturers, and they all have issues locking up, resetting, and other weird crap. I finally got fed up and converted an old Pentium (floating point bug included!) into a router running Smoothwall. It's the most stable router I've ever had.
I really have no idea why the purpose made stuff doesn't work. Many people say the issue is that the routing table fills up, or they run out of memory, or something to that effect. But my ancient Pentium with 32 MB of RAM doesn't seem to have that issue, and most of the top end Linksys boxes are coming with 16 or 32 MB of RAM, though the cheap ones only come with 8. Still, Smoothwall indicates most of my RAM is being used as disk cache - not for running anything in particular. So, I don't think RAM's really the issue. It's obviously a software related issue of some sort: flashed Linksys routers with one of the custom firmwares are apparently quite nice.
The problem is that people have this perception that you absolutely need these super high end setups just to play games with. The reality is that most of these reviews are done at giant resolutions like 2560 * 1600 on 30" LCDs or 1920 * 1200 on 24" LCDs, which is unlikely to be a common setup. Valve's hardware survey says 3 out of 4 people still use non-widescreen monitors, with the most common sizes being 16", 17", or 19" monitors. Meaning most people probably don't game any higher than 1280 * 1024 or 1600*1200. For those 1 out of 4 users with widescreen monitors (probably LCDs), only about 35% of them run a monitor 24" or larger, so people with these huge monitors are really not quite the top 10% of respondents to the survey.
This is about what I would expect: that top 10% or so is who these cards are for. Everyone else can get something that's cheaper and runs cooler, and be perfectly happy. These hardware enthusiast websites are for that top 10% - basing your purchasing decision on how well games run on a 30" LCD is kinda pointless when you still use 19" CRT.
For a more realistic take on hardware, I offer my gaming system: a 1680 * 1050 22" LCD (which is large, but not near as huge as a 30"), an 8800GT video card, and an E6300 processor. None of it's what you would call high end - 22" monitors are about $200 on sale (and Dell ships them withs ome desktops now as well!), the video card is less than $150 right now, and that processor is so old that it's not sold anymore (but comparable things can be had for around $130). I've been perfectly happy with this system, and it runs games like a champ. The video card is new, but the old 7900GS that I was running was perfectly fine if you weren't interested in Crysis. Interestingly enough, I paid more for the 7900GS (I belive close to $180) than I did for the 8800GT, though both seem to have occupied similar market segments, which tells me that getting good gaming hardware is only getting cheaper, even if the high end cards get more outrageously expensive with every iteration.
Actually, with your standard raster renderer, they're mostly cheating to make this stuff work. Yes, you can get away with it in very specific scenes, but it's really kinda annoying to have to count how many doorknobs the player can cram into their field of view at one time, to make sure performance doesn't drop to crap when they're suddenly staring at 10 doors instead of just one or two. What happens when you start running around a hotel? Whaddya know - none of the doorknobs reflect anything anymore! Why? Because PowerPoint isn't in the games section at your local BestBuy.
Dynamic shadows are still optional in just about every game that features them. Why? Because only really fast, expensive cards can do it, and even that's stretching it. Some engines will only render dynamic shadows from one light, and the ones that do it for more than one have to be very careful about not placing too many light sources too close together. This will get better as games finally drop support for DirectX 8 fallback (DX8 is generally not able to do dynamic lights at all), but the other restrictions will likely remain for quite some time.
There's a lot of shortcuts, hacks, and arbitrary map design rules to make this type of thing work. Even things that we're pretty good at these days like water are often more restricted than they seem. You know that nice water in Valve's Source engine? You can't have more than one body of that high-quality water on the screen at the same time, or you're liable to get "unexpected behavior." In other words, it doesn't work. This is specifically mentioned in some of the map making tutorials. So you'll find nowhere in a decently designed map where you can have two different pools with that nice high-quality, reflective, refractive water. You can use the "cheaper" water, though. The cheaper stuff still looks OK, but it's not the real deal and looks strange to see the two side by side. This is mostly an issue where the level of the water is different between two pools of water, such as having a diving pool next to a raised water tank or something. If they're the same height, you can just cheat and use one one body of water clipped through the intervening area for both both bodies of water. This only works, of course, in places where the area in between is unimportant - water floating in mid-air just might be an unexplainable phenomenon in the context of some story lines.
The way I read this, raytracing makes solutions for these types of problems more universal (ie. you just have water, no BS about what kind of water it is and where it can be), and the performance hit for doing it several times in a scene is way less. I'm in no way involved with graphics engines, but I would assume that most of these features require rendering the scene multiple times with different deformations, and that raytracing is somehow faster at this.
I believe may stem from the fact that the Orange Box is going to include the original Half-Life 2 and Episode One (as well as TF2, Portal, and Episode 2), and is currently the only package I see available on Steam. Well, being the loyal fan I am, I already purchased Half-Life 2 and Episode One - I would really prefer a cheaper package that didn't include stuff I already paid for.
Apparently Valve has already thought of this, as this is at the bottom of the order page:
Already own Half-Life 2 or Half-Life 2: Episode One? Give your extra game as a gift to a friend when you purchase The Orange Box. Learn more here. But still, it's not an ideal solution for people who are already fans of the game. Valve also quotes IGN on the page, in what I thought was a dim revelation:
"...the package which could legitimately be called the deal of the century." - IGN" Great. I'm gonna guess there's not a cheaper package in the works anytime soon. Thanks IGN.
Being able to get a console and edit xorg.conf will probably always be with us, but it should never be the primary means of configuration for a desktop machine. I see this as a major step forward for Ubuntu in reaching it's target audience. I use many distros, but I generally choose Ubuntu for desktop systems because I really don't have the motivation to do all that by hand just for a lousy desktop. It's also for people like my dad: he can follow instructions and install an OS, but he's not touching a config file.
I kinda thought that projectors were a kind of special case somehow because of the fact that the shutter doesn't stay open for the whole length of the frame; I don't really know where I got that impression from. Like I said, far from an expert on this stuff. Actually, I don't really like watching movies in a theater, in part because of the flicker. It's not something I see straight on, but it bothers my peripheral vision to no end. The color's never right either.
Really? I'm no expert on displays and such, but don't we generally consider 30 Hz (or that 29.9-something) to be the absolute minimum needed to fool the human eye? And wouldn't all this high tech, high definition stuff want to have a decent refresh rate?
Do you know how many organizations go through deleting mass storage drivers off their Windows systems, because they don't want that type of stuff to work? Also, if there's anywhere a system like this makes sense, it's at a school. Pretty much every school system I've seen goes to great lengths to make sure students and even staff can't modify the software setup even a little bit. To me, it always seemed useless to build full PCs and deal with all the maintenance that entails when you've essentially turned them into dumb terminals anyways. Also, I do believe there are ways to handle local drives, though I don't have any solutions off the top of my head. In a perfect world I'd just grab any data I needed from my account on the central server, or be able to connect remotely to my computer at home and grab my data. If only we lived in a perfect world.
I can see a lot of good coming out of something like this. It's like asking "what would I build assuming I had all the money in the world? Then you get as close as you can with the money you have, and that's the best you can do. We can do the same thing with this: "If I knew then what I know now, how would build it?" Then we can go out and shoot for the best can get out of what we have. It's basically goal-setting.
On the other hand IPv6 is kinda the result of this already. Read it very literally: Internet Protocol version 6. We've already revised the Internet in some big ways, and no one even cared. Most people are saying "what we have is good enough. I've even seen Slashdot comments that say "we don't need more IPs, NAT is fine, your computer doesn't need a public IP!" These comments actually get modded up.
At this point, I think a better question would be: "How do we convince people that IPv6 is worth it?" IPv6 may not be a silver bullet, but it's a start. And I like some of the "shortcomings" of the current internet. It's tough to be completely anonymous, but you can do it. That'll never happen again if we start redesigning it, and it's more valuable than many people realize.
Actually, I download and burn the CDs, and when I look through the list, I see the following for CentOS 4 (which is what we're using at the moment):
File: CentOS-4.4-i386-LiveCD.iso 705044 KB 8/19/2006 12:00:00 AM File: CentOS-4.4-i386-LiveCD.torrent 55 KB 8/27/2006 12:00:00 AM File: CentOS-4.4-i386-bin1of4.iso 637412 KB 8/23/2006 12:00:00 AM File: CentOS-4.4-i386-bin1to4.torrent 174 KB 8/27/2006 12:00:00 AM File: CentOS-4.4-i386-bin2of4.iso 651502 KB 8/23/2006 12:00:00 AM File: CentOS-4.4-i386-bin3of4.iso 652852 KB 8/23/2006 12:00:00 AM File: CentOS-4.4-i386-bin4of4.iso 320304 KB 8/23/2006 12:00:00 AM File: CentOS-4.4-i386-binDVD.torrent 173 KB 8/27/2006 12:00:00 AM File: CentOS-4.4.ServerCD-i386.iso 593758 KB 9/16/2006 12:00:00 AM
There's also some others, but for the sake of brevity, I cut it short. We use the last one labelled "ServerCD", which contains a lot less than the standard 4 CD method. You can still use apt and get all the desktop stuff from repository, sure, but the Server CD doesn't bother with it in it's basic install.
Your resolution issue is odd, as I haven't had any trouble getting it to detect some pretty out there LCDs - it got my 22" Westinghouse (offbrand) LCD's native 1680*1050 correct (your monitor is probably 1440*900, not the other way around, btw). As I understand it, those JMicron IDE controllers are nothing but a royal pain the ass. They're actually a newer controller, and they apparently are kinda hard to deal with (I don't know how, not my area of interest). I have one on a Gigabyte GA-965-DS3 board I'm working with, and it's really a poor controller, even under Windows. It doesn't surprise me that Ubuntu is choking on it, especially a beta.
There are several launchpad pages revolving around the issue of the Ralink drivers, particularly the fact that the open-source driver that they use right now is kinda half-baked. A Google search for "ubuntu rt73 launchpad" returns some good results. I can't find it now but I specifically remember reading a launchpad page where it was discussed that the driver would probably not be updated in time for Feisty, because they wouldn't have time to test it. It has been known for some time that the rt73usb driver is broken, according to the forums (many tutorials I found specifically stipulate that you blacklist rt73usb, because it's broken).
Slashdot Mirror
I actually completely hide the textual menu with the addon Hide Menubar. I still leave the standard back, forward, reload and friends, but only because they're on the same bar as the address bar, which I pretty much always want visible.
I started doing this after realizing that the only elements of Firefox's UI that I actually use with any frequency is the address bar and quick search bar. For the rest of it, I'd rather just have a larger viewport. If I need the menus i just press ALT, which is consistent with the rest of a Windows Vista/7 UI that hides menubars. Incidentally, the most common reason for me to need the textual menus is to unclose a tab. This is a feature I need regularly, but not terribly frequently compared to most other functions. I hate that it's buried in the History menu - I just don't make that connection. It's also very hard to bind to mouse gestures in the common mouse gesture addons (Usability be damned, I heart my mouse gestures).
If I remember correctly PAE was actually enabled in at least some versions of Windows XP 32-bit. It was disabled in one of the service packs or something because it caused a bunch of trouble for people with code that wasn't PAE-aware. I may be mis-remembering things, but that's how my fuzzy view of history is choosing to remember things.
It may or may not be a related issue, but after disabling the .Net extension a while back, visiting Hulu now locks up Firefox until I kill it. I also have a lot of addons in general, though.
It's not a hypothetical question when it comes to auto updaters. Look at your average Windows box and you'll see that there's quite a few of these, and they're typically annoying and consuming far more resources than is called for. Off the top of my head, I know I have to kill the one that comes with Java regularly. Google's is nigh impossible to keep gone. Apple's Quicktime updater is common as well. HP's fond of cramming one in their hundreds-of-megs-of-god-knows-what printer drivers. Far too many Windows applications leave things running in the background. Even OpenOffice installs a damn quickstarter app. Installed a recent version of Nero lately? The newer versions absolutely rape your computer.
It's getting to be a problem to the point where in addition to removing all the malware I kill most of these background processes, and I'm not sure which one improves the performance more. It wouldn't be such a problem except Windows gives programs a thousand ways to start up at boot, hidden, with no UI to control it. Is it a service? A shell extension? Or a registry entry? In the Startup section of the boot menu? Time to whip out regedit and third party apps, because Windows in no way consolidates any of this, and some it is just flat out hidden from the user. When people say Windows is hard to administer, this is a good example of what's being talked about.
I've been using the same laptop for years, because despite the various vendors, models, and form factors portable computers come in these days, I've yet to find a replacement I like. So Apple with their exactly 3 options for portable computers will almost never convince me to buy. I really don't this the Apples are overpriced for the hardware you get, but the lack of options means I can never buy from.
I want a decent discreet graphics adapter in a 14" or smaller notebook that can switch to integrated when it's on battery. I need rendering power when I'm plugged in, but I do want good battery life. I don't think this is too much to ask; Nvidia practically gives you the solution when you combine their northbridge and GPUs. Yet the only notebook I've seen that makes any use of it is Dell's Studio XPS 13, which would be a perfect system except they somehow managed to negate both benefits: the graphics adapter is still only marginally better than the typical garbage, and the battery life still sucks. Also, slot loading optical drives, glossy finishes, and leather on my notebooks doesn't excite me. I think most notebook designers eat paint chips for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Maybe people drive faster because it's such a frustrating situation, at least in the US. I drive to work every morning, and drive home every afternoon, in rush hour traffic. I really have no choice in the matter. My employer says I will be at work at 9 am, and I can leave at 5 pm. There is no public transit that would get me where I want to go and the apartments near where I work are way out of my price range. It takes me half an hour and two toll roads that cost over $2 a day. If I don't take the toll roads it's even longer in the car.
It really grinds my nerves that voters continue shoot down competent public transportation, but I can't drive anywhere without seeing miles of road covered in orange cones, snarling traffic for miles because the already congested highway system is in need of expansion (half the reason it takes so long to drive anywhere in the first place). And by the time they finish the work (five years from now) they'll just have to start again. I really just hate driving. Even without all the traffic, I'd rather just get on a train and have someone else do the driving. You can drive and eat breakfast, listen to music, and basically turn your car into a living room, but you need only see rush hour once to see that everyone does it poorly. Traffic would probably move faster if people didn't try. Or if they had another option for eating that breakfast while commuting.
Yes, repositories are a source of trusted software assuming that everyone doesn't just run their own repository server, which is what's happening now. Joe's repository with his self-signed certificate is really no better than downloading random tarballs off the internet from a security point of view. Read what I wrote again: I am not saying repositories are bad. In fact I think they're great. They allow distros to make it dead simple to keep your OS and the apps it comes with secure and up to date. What I'm arguing against is XML syndrome - it doesn't apply everywhere.
Repositories have their limits. Repository selection will never be as good as the internet. Google will always beat your repository, no matter how many people you hire to keep your repository up to date. Some are more up to date than others, but less popular packages are often neglected; Ubuntu let my wireless driver rot for over a year, and it never worked to begin with. In a twist of irony, package managers sometimes make it harder to install software, because they get totally borked if you try go around them.
I've used .deb files on Ubuntu before and that seems to be pretty simple to use, but not every project releases in that format - the author of the article mentions that he was trying to use RPMs, which is why he couldn't make it work, of course. And here we come to the crux of the problem. RPM, DEB, TAR; I really don't care how you do it, but any installer we did would have to be an agreed-upon format. This is exactly why we don't have an installer system. Because we could never have an installer system; there would be no less than three. And they'd all be woefully incompatible. Instead we got three or so walled-garden repository systems. I love the open source community, but damnit...sometimes you guys piss me off.
It could be worse, I suppose. But it could have been so much better.
The author had lots of trouble installing things. I've gotten into arguments over it before, but here's my take: package managers were the wrong answer to the installation problem. They make installing and updating the the libraries and components that make up the the OS itself very easy, but you'll never satisfy diverse application preferences with a central repository. In his original piece, he tries to update OpenOffice from the web because the package manager isn't offering the update yet. Naturally, this is difficult and not really designed with users in mind. This is why I hate package managers - they leave you with two really crappy choices: either don't use it and have no install management at all, or use it and be doomed to only what's in the repositories and having to wait until New Widget 3.0 is blessed by your distro. Certainly don't try to mix the two options or you'll break everything. The fact that some projects now offer their own repositories is just a terrible band-aid.
My Windows box on the other hand always has the latest version of OpenOffice, and I didn't have to touch a console - anyone could do it. I just go download the installer and run it, without even bothering to uninstall the old version. And it's very easy because it's not just a tarball full of crap - it's actually a well-tested package. This way, I get managed installs - I have a list of programs and if I chose to remove one I just choose it and click the uninstall button. I know the Windows install system is much-maligned for being fragile (breaks, or breaks other stuff), messy (throwing crap everywhere, and not completely removing things), and causing as many problems as it solves. I don't disagree with that assessment, but I'd blame the implementation. The open source community could have made a standard install system. Something nice for a front end, something reliable. Hell, you could even integrate it with your fancy package manager, if you really want to. But apparently nobody finds having to wait to get software they want to be as unpleasant as I do. While I could honestly care less about system libraries most of the time, I demand very specific things of my applications, and I don't like handing control over to whoever runs the package servers.
Proper user account permissions? Like the ACL system that Windows has had for more than a decade? The one that's more granular than what you can get on Linux? I guess Linux needs to ditch sudo and get real "user account permissions" too?
I don't see what you're getting at here: UAC fills almost the same role as sudo on a Linux system. Okay, I admit - it's a little different "under the hood" from the way sudo works under Ubuntu, but it legitimately works, and Microsoft actually did sit down and think this one through. For example, instead of asking to elevate for every piece of software that does terrible crap like writing into the Program Files directory, it just virtualizes that file system operation into a folder in your user account. Doesn't even ask to elevate. It does kinda cause problems when files don't end up where you expected them to, but most users never notice and it's actually a very nice way to deal with developers who refuse to follow the rules. Thanks to nice things like that, I generally only get prompted for elevation when I install new software or legitimately need access to a restricted directory, which is exactly the way it should be.
Don't misunderstand me here - there's plenty of things wrong with Vista. UAC and the NT security model weren't one of them, though. UAC was a step towards a sane default of limited users instead of having everyone run as an administrator. Defaulting everyone to admin is one of those bad decisions Microsoft made and we've been paying for ever since. Windows needs UAC, and it's the main reason I use Vista on my home box.
Try this: enable Vista's Administrator account (it's disabled by default), give it a password, then make your user account a "Limited User." What happens when it asks to elevate? Yep, a password prompt instead of the regular UAC. It's not technically sudo but it's the same effect and it works extremely well.
In my mind there are mods, and then there are total conversions. Mods alter aspects of the original game. A great example of this is Dawn of War. It's a really good RTS, but given the wealth of lore it was inevitable that the game would have to omit or modify a lot of material. The game also has strong mod support, and the number of mods designed to bring the game closer to lore, add more units, and so on is just absurd. On the other hand, Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are frequently host to total conversions, where people pretty much make their own games and just borrow the engine and some textures. I got Half-Life 1 for Christmas the year it was released. I really didn't feel the need to buy a new shooter for years after that thanks to the variety of mods available.
The common thread in both of the games I mentioned? They both released mod tools. In Dawn of War's case, there was even a menu in the game where you could choose which mod to start. I'm sure this has paid off for the developers. In Valve's case, they even hired some of the mod teams. I'm sure Counter-Strike alone kept Half-Life 1 selling years after it should have been forgotten. I know my family owned a second copy so my brother and I could play online together, something I don't think I'd bother with for the majority of the games I play.
My phone isn't anything terribly special - it was free with my plan. And yet it's got some really nice features. It will play MP3s, I can have ringtones, watch movies, text, browse the web, and a million other little things. I'll also pay through the nose if I so much as think about touching any of it. The only thing I've figured out how to do so far is copy my MP3s to the phone and play them. But I can't set them as ringtones or anything. And I can't set my background to a picture I copied either (though pictures I take with the camera seem to work).
Instead, I'm supposed to download all this crap to my phone, meaning I pay for the item and then I pay for the data transfer. It's insane - it'd cost me something like $50 to get a freakin' MP3 as my ringtone! My phone has a camera, but I'm inclined to believe that if I try to send a picture I take to someone else's phone I'll be charged for data, plus the flat service fee for sending a picture, which would be something like $5.20 all said and done. It's not worth that to me. So instead I've disabled all the data services on the phone to avoid accidentally accruing charges. Anytime it runs into an area where it would connect to the 'net, it now just fails with some error message. And I don't use hardly any of my phone's features.
Long story short: I don't use my phone features because cell plans prevent me from doing so.
It's not that people don't like puzzle games, it's the manner in which they've been used in games lately. In many games they're nothing more than an annoyance, with variants of the same puzzle appearing over and over again in a desperate attempt at stretching the game out and make it seem longer. I have no patience for this sort of thing at all and doubt many people do. If you want to make a puzzle game, or incorporate puzzles into your game, you'd better not make them annoying, mandatory, and long. That sounds like an honest job description; how could anyone not hate that?
I loved Portal by the way. All the puzzles were different, and the rewards for completion (the humorous voiceover and further interesting puzzles) were excellent.
The last router I had that really worked was a trusty old Linksys BEFSR41. This is not the same router that's going by that model number today. The hardware has completely changed and the new one I bought when my old one finally died was absolute trash. Since then I've been through all the major manufacturers, and they all have issues locking up, resetting, and other weird crap. I finally got fed up and converted an old Pentium (floating point bug included!) into a router running Smoothwall. It's the most stable router I've ever had.
I really have no idea why the purpose made stuff doesn't work. Many people say the issue is that the routing table fills up, or they run out of memory, or something to that effect. But my ancient Pentium with 32 MB of RAM doesn't seem to have that issue, and most of the top end Linksys boxes are coming with 16 or 32 MB of RAM, though the cheap ones only come with 8. Still, Smoothwall indicates most of my RAM is being used as disk cache - not for running anything in particular. So, I don't think RAM's really the issue. It's obviously a software related issue of some sort: flashed Linksys routers with one of the custom firmwares are apparently quite nice.
The problem is that people have this perception that you absolutely need these super high end setups just to play games with. The reality is that most of these reviews are done at giant resolutions like 2560 * 1600 on 30" LCDs or 1920 * 1200 on 24" LCDs, which is unlikely to be a common setup. Valve's hardware survey says 3 out of 4 people still use non-widescreen monitors, with the most common sizes being 16", 17", or 19" monitors. Meaning most people probably don't game any higher than 1280 * 1024 or 1600*1200. For those 1 out of 4 users with widescreen monitors (probably LCDs), only about 35% of them run a monitor 24" or larger, so people with these huge monitors are really not quite the top 10% of respondents to the survey.
This is about what I would expect: that top 10% or so is who these cards are for. Everyone else can get something that's cheaper and runs cooler, and be perfectly happy. These hardware enthusiast websites are for that top 10% - basing your purchasing decision on how well games run on a 30" LCD is kinda pointless when you still use 19" CRT.
For a more realistic take on hardware, I offer my gaming system: a 1680 * 1050 22" LCD (which is large, but not near as huge as a 30"), an 8800GT video card, and an E6300 processor. None of it's what you would call high end - 22" monitors are about $200 on sale (and Dell ships them withs ome desktops now as well!), the video card is less than $150 right now, and that processor is so old that it's not sold anymore (but comparable things can be had for around $130). I've been perfectly happy with this system, and it runs games like a champ. The video card is new, but the old 7900GS that I was running was perfectly fine if you weren't interested in Crysis. Interestingly enough, I paid more for the 7900GS (I belive close to $180) than I did for the 8800GT, though both seem to have occupied similar market segments, which tells me that getting good gaming hardware is only getting cheaper, even if the high end cards get more outrageously expensive with every iteration.
Actually, with your standard raster renderer, they're mostly cheating to make this stuff work. Yes, you can get away with it in very specific scenes, but it's really kinda annoying to have to count how many doorknobs the player can cram into their field of view at one time, to make sure performance doesn't drop to crap when they're suddenly staring at 10 doors instead of just one or two. What happens when you start running around a hotel? Whaddya know - none of the doorknobs reflect anything anymore! Why? Because PowerPoint isn't in the games section at your local BestBuy.
Dynamic shadows are still optional in just about every game that features them. Why? Because only really fast, expensive cards can do it, and even that's stretching it. Some engines will only render dynamic shadows from one light, and the ones that do it for more than one have to be very careful about not placing too many light sources too close together. This will get better as games finally drop support for DirectX 8 fallback (DX8 is generally not able to do dynamic lights at all), but the other restrictions will likely remain for quite some time.
There's a lot of shortcuts, hacks, and arbitrary map design rules to make this type of thing work. Even things that we're pretty good at these days like water are often more restricted than they seem. You know that nice water in Valve's Source engine? You can't have more than one body of that high-quality water on the screen at the same time, or you're liable to get "unexpected behavior." In other words, it doesn't work. This is specifically mentioned in some of the map making tutorials. So you'll find nowhere in a decently designed map where you can have two different pools with that nice high-quality, reflective, refractive water. You can use the "cheaper" water, though. The cheaper stuff still looks OK, but it's not the real deal and looks strange to see the two side by side. This is mostly an issue where the level of the water is different between two pools of water, such as having a diving pool next to a raised water tank or something. If they're the same height, you can just cheat and use one one body of water clipped through the intervening area for both both bodies of water. This only works, of course, in places where the area in between is unimportant - water floating in mid-air just might be an unexplainable phenomenon in the context of some story lines.
The way I read this, raytracing makes solutions for these types of problems more universal (ie. you just have water, no BS about what kind of water it is and where it can be), and the performance hit for doing it several times in a scene is way less. I'm in no way involved with graphics engines, but I would assume that most of these features require rendering the scene multiple times with different deformations, and that raytracing is somehow faster at this.
Apparently Valve has already thought of this, as this is at the bottom of the order page: Already own Half-Life 2 or Half-Life 2: Episode One?
Give your extra game as a gift to a friend when you purchase The Orange Box. Learn more here. But still, it's not an ideal solution for people who are already fans of the game. Valve also quotes IGN on the page, in what I thought was a dim revelation: "...the package which could legitimately be called the deal of the century." - IGN" Great. I'm gonna guess there's not a cheaper package in the works anytime soon. Thanks IGN.
Being able to get a console and edit xorg.conf will probably always be with us, but it should never be the primary means of configuration for a desktop machine. I see this as a major step forward for Ubuntu in reaching it's target audience. I use many distros, but I generally choose Ubuntu for desktop systems because I really don't have the motivation to do all that by hand just for a lousy desktop. It's also for people like my dad: he can follow instructions and install an OS, but he's not touching a config file.
I kinda thought that projectors were a kind of special case somehow because of the fact that the shutter doesn't stay open for the whole length of the frame; I don't really know where I got that impression from. Like I said, far from an expert on this stuff. Actually, I don't really like watching movies in a theater, in part because of the flicker. It's not something I see straight on, but it bothers my peripheral vision to no end. The color's never right either.
Do you know how many organizations go through deleting mass storage drivers off their Windows systems, because they don't want that type of stuff to work? Also, if there's anywhere a system like this makes sense, it's at a school. Pretty much every school system I've seen goes to great lengths to make sure students and even staff can't modify the software setup even a little bit. To me, it always seemed useless to build full PCs and deal with all the maintenance that entails when you've essentially turned them into dumb terminals anyways. Also, I do believe there are ways to handle local drives, though I don't have any solutions off the top of my head. In a perfect world I'd just grab any data I needed from my account on the central server, or be able to connect remotely to my computer at home and grab my data. If only we lived in a perfect world.
I can see a lot of good coming out of something like this. It's like asking "what would I build assuming I had all the money in the world? Then you get as close as you can with the money you have, and that's the best you can do. We can do the same thing with this: "If I knew then what I know now, how would build it?" Then we can go out and shoot for the best can get out of what we have. It's basically goal-setting.
On the other hand IPv6 is kinda the result of this already. Read it very literally: Internet Protocol version 6. We've already revised the Internet in some big ways, and no one even cared. Most people are saying "what we have is good enough. I've even seen Slashdot comments that say "we don't need more IPs, NAT is fine, your computer doesn't need a public IP!" These comments actually get modded up.
At this point, I think a better question would be: "How do we convince people that IPv6 is worth it?" IPv6 may not be a silver bullet, but it's a start. And I like some of the "shortcomings" of the current internet. It's tough to be completely anonymous, but you can do it. That'll never happen again if we start redesigning it, and it's more valuable than many people realize.
Your resolution issue is odd, as I haven't had any trouble getting it to detect some pretty out there LCDs - it got my 22" Westinghouse (offbrand) LCD's native 1680*1050 correct (your monitor is probably 1440*900, not the other way around, btw). As I understand it, those JMicron IDE controllers are nothing but a royal pain the ass. They're actually a newer controller, and they apparently are kinda hard to deal with (I don't know how, not my area of interest). I have one on a Gigabyte GA-965-DS3 board I'm working with, and it's really a poor controller, even under Windows. It doesn't surprise me that Ubuntu is choking on it, especially a beta.
There are several launchpad pages revolving around the issue of the Ralink drivers, particularly the fact that the open-source driver that they use right now is kinda half-baked. A Google search for "ubuntu rt73 launchpad" returns some good results. I can't find it now but I specifically remember reading a launchpad page where it was discussed that the driver would probably not be updated in time for Feisty, because they wouldn't have time to test it. It has been known for some time that the rt73usb driver is broken, according to the forums (many tutorials I found specifically stipulate that you blacklist rt73usb, because it's broken).