This could be true. However the conclusions are wrong. If anything, Microsoft would be on the capitalistic side and Linux would be on the idealistic side. Like communists the followers consist of intellectuals who decide what is good for the masses (the workers in communism) from an ivory tower position, have a superiority feeling over the uneducated and base their ideology on ideas that get reinforced by preaching for their own following and shielding themselves from reality. They are convinced they are right, but day to day reality contradicts them, so they blame this on education, saying 'if users were smarter...', just like communism blamed the unwillingness of workers in capitalist countries to overthrow their governments and adopt communism on religion.
The other major difference is the genericity of commodities. Bottled water is bottled water is bottled water, in much the same way that white sugar is white sugar is white sugar. Or as Bob Young would say, catsup is ketchup is catsup.
Unless you're a brand fanatic, replacing this diner's premium coffe with New Folgers Crystals isn't going to make any difference to anyone. But go recreate that classic television commercial by replacing someone's Mac OSX with a Dell running Linux and you'll hear quite a lot of outraged squawking. Heck, even secretly replacing the Korn shell with bash is liable to get you challenged to a duel with pistols at fifty paces.
Your example is flawed. Replace 'white sugar' with 'red wine'. Red wine is just red wine, it's all the same, tastes the same. I am sure almost everyone would disagree. There are thousands of different wines, prices from $1 to $1000 per bottle, and anyone who drinks wine will tell the difference between a fine $10 bottle and a sour headache-inducing $1 bottle.
This removes the assumptions from your conclusion, which are irrelevant anyway. You act like Linux is the most important thing in the world. Who would care about korn and bash ? Isn't linux all about people developing open source, then after a dispute going their separate ways and developing two almost identical branches ?
PS. the 'classic' commercial (from 1984) didn't feature OS-X...
With CP/M, it was possible for computers from two different manufacturers to run the same application without porting or recompiling.
CP/M was a product of DEC, IIRC, and ran on several of the early 8086 and Z80-based computers.
MSDOS would only run on in IBM-compatable PC, so portability of the applications under it is a fairly shallow point.
Well firstly CP/M was a product of Digital Research, a different company than Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Also in the beginning PC's weren't that compatible. They could put the video memory at a totally different location. You'd run MSDOS on those PC's, while only hardware-compatible PC's could run IBM's PCDOS. Usually the BIOS was so different that a lot of software didn't run. Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 was a good compatibility test then.
Many of those early XT's had 768 KB of memory, and with CGA graphics you could use it all with MS-DOS. The 640 KB limit was because the EGA card put its video memory at A0000. The '640K is enough' quote is from an IBM engineer, not from Microsoft.
The article is misleading when it speaks of taking $45 each year. Why not every day, since PC's get sold every day ? In reality many people still use older versions. A typical home PC is used for at least 4 years. The turnover rate for Linux distributions is much higher. Many people use Windows 98 SE or Windows 2000 (both from 1999) but nobody uses a 4-year old commercial Linux distribution.
If the average home PC is in use for 4 years, $11 per year isn't that much. A game costs $45 as well and that only gets used a few months max before going getting uninstalled.
I can't believe people mention Eudora. The focus is clearly on next-generation email clients. Although Eudora, Pegasus, etc. were popular in the 90's, they haven't made any progress the last few years, and are burdened by old code. And we all know old code becomes harder and harder to maintain, until it grinds to a total halt.
I would rather use a brand new client, preferably with Linux (java) ports available than stuff that was converted from a windows 3.11 version to a windows 95 version almost 10 years ago.
It's about time someone does something. The largest problem threathening the useability of Internet is that old protocols, often UNIX-related, were made, then put in an RFC, and then nothing could change anymore.
No matter how broken it is (for example SMTP's trusting that anything specified in mail from/rcpt to/headers is correct, or FTP's incompatibilty with NAT, or IRC's general uselessness) once it is in use, nobody dares to phase it out anymore. Instead lame kludges are added like EHLO instead of HELO. All to preserve the sacred backwards compatibility, in case someone still runs System III, Ultrix 2 or BSD 2.4
It doesn't matter that the whole service (in this case email) becomes unusable due to massive abuse, UNIX zealots just say "that's the way it's supposed to work, read the RFC". Meanwhile nobody considers email serious anymore, people are forced to use spamblocks and throwaway addresses. I don't care who invents something, just do something already !
While I am not a fan of Microsoft, you have to be fair. Computers get more powerful, and it's only natural the services that the operating system provides
In the 80's people bought or used shareware stuff like programmer's editors, macro tools, norton utilities, backup software that made backups to floppy, etc. If you wanted TCP/IP you'd buy something like Trumpet winsock for windows 3.11. Then 95 just integrated it into the OS, where it should be. I cannot imagine such things being unbundled. Can you imagine Linux with TCP/IP on the user level ?
Stuff like media player isn't in Windows without a reason. 90% of it are libraries, directshow filters etc. The player is just a token app that calls a few API functions. Any beginner with C# can write a simple mediaplayer in 30 minutes.
The idea that a browser is a separate application that can be sold for profit died together with Netscape. The whole idea is so 90's. Nowadays every damn application does html, help files are chm (compress html), etc.
Oversaturated is an exaggerated term. Right now you have a few big ones, world of warcraft coming up. Apart from that there's not much really. 10-15 years ago there were also hundreds of muds, but not nearly as many people as now with internet connectivity (basically only students then).
What is definitely missing are some good free 3D MMORPG's. The only one I know that's good and fun is Runescape, the rest seem to be abandoned projects or stuff that doesn't go anywhere.
Neverwinter nights is just about the only game that allows you to host your own RPG server.
I've never used bnetd, but here are a number of reasons I could see someone legitimately using it:
* Blizzard kicks a player off Battle.Net, for whatever reason. They can still play their game, just not using Blizzard's servers.
For 99% of the players that means "Blizzard bans your keygen-generated CD key you used to install your warezed copy".
I don't know other reasons why battle.net wouldn't work yet bnetd would, since they are so similar.
I had one. After about a year it failed, in summer so I suspect it had been running too hot. More and more bad sectors with the familiar scraping sound.
But after I got tired of running scandisk for hours to mark bad sectors daily, I erased it with IBM's DFT (drive fitness test). And it has been fine ever since.
It looked like the heat made it lose its calibration, unable to find the exact position on the disk for some sectors.
You missed the point. They are not complaining about animal cruelty, but that the game depicts researchers as cruel animal torturers who torture animals for fun.
The extreme left animal rights terrorists have gotten out of control, even if you work as a secretary or cleaner for a company that is only remotely connected to another company, you risk getting your house molotoved or your car destroyed while you are away, and the police won't do anything about it, since for some strange reason these terrorists have a 'good guy' image despite their violent terrorism.
There are already groups of people trying to ban Sports, especially boxing
I think they succeeded a long time ago. I can vaguely remember 10-15 years ago one would occasionally see boxing on TV, or at least a summary of a title fight. But for the last 10 years the sports programs in Europe sometimes mention the result, and occasionally even show a press photograph of the fight, but video seems to be too expensive, even a 1-minute summary is impossible. Blame it on US pay-per-view and greedy promoters trying to milk the last dollars out of everybody.
Here is something I cut&pasted... It describes 2400x600 on a matrox parhelia (3 screens)
Almost all of the games based on the Quake 3 Arena 3D engine can be played in Surround Gaming mode. Still, in order to actually use Surround Gaming, you need to push up your shirt sleeves and manually adjust the configuration files of the game as well as the registry. Here's how you do it, using Star Wars: Jedi Knight II as an example:
Run game first time (required to create configuration file) Go to Jedi Knight 2 installed directory Go to \GameData\base subdirectory Edit file 'jk2config.cfg' (for single player gameplay) Find line 'seta r_customwidth,' set to "2400" (if not present, add 'seta r_customwidth "2400"') Find line 'seta r_customheight,' set to "600" (if not present, add 'seta r_customheight "600"') Find the line 'seta r_mode' set to "-1" Find the line 'seta r_mode,' set to "-1" Find line 'seta cg_fov,' set to "138" (if not present, add 'seta cg_fov "138"') Edit registry Find line \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Serv ices\MTXPARH\Device0 Add binary key named 'OGL.TripleHead' - set to '01 00 00 00' Run single player game (HUD should now be only displaying on central screen). Note: Do not change resolution in-game, or these changes will have to be repeated.
I believe Tom's Hardware itself showed a photo of someone playing Quake 3 on three screens when he reviewed the Matrox Parhelia card (which can drive 3 monitors). This was in 2002.
Here is the relevant page. and Here is another one
Dude.. Over an hour ago someone already quoted from the article which you obviously didn't read: The films are then beamed by satellite from Rain's central computer in Sao Paulo to picture houses across the country. Depending on bandwidth, it can take as little as 20 minutes to send a 90-minute film to a theater.
Your sarcasm has made a fool of yourself...
I remember playing some of the old Bard's Tale games back in the day, and for the time those games were quite awesome. I have a feeling that a lot of fans are going to be put off if this game does not live up to the series.
Those games were great at the time, however games have made a lot of progress since, and that's not just in the graphics department. Back then games were hard, really hard, if you didn't know that to progress you needed to order wine in the bar so you could go to the cellar and enter a dungeon from there you'd just walk around without making progress.
To play the bard's tale games you needed a lot of time, make lots of notes and draw your own maps, or else you'd get hopelessly lost.
It's definitely a game from before the era of in-game help, customizable keys, in-game maps, a tutorial mission before you start, etc. I've played some games recently that I was playing 10-15 years ago. And the advice is - don't do it. Like old movies or tv series you vaguely remember from your youth, the memory is the best, actually seeing them again ruins that feeling.
Depends what you call parts and what you call expansions. Does a part have to end in a cliffhanger, not be complete on its own ? Else, many games are doing this already. I don't mean the old Apogee/ID software technique of making part 1 free and 2 and 3 commercial.
A lot of work is done on the engine/game, but content also takes a lot of time. If you just release when you have enough but keep on making new content with the same engine, you can sell it again.
Half-Life, then Opposing force, then Blue shift. Medal of Honor, a year later Spearhead and now Breakthrough. The Dungeon Siege expansion. The expansions/new stories for Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights. Road to Rome for Battlefield 1942 (not much of a story but still something new). Almost every game seems to get an expansion/new release a year later with additional content. It looks like this business model is already being used a lot.
The article claims that Razor "sold" over a half-million dollars of software - don't they mean "copied and gave away?" I've seen tons of Razor releases, but never heard about them making a penny off of it.
Maybe you didn't hear enough then. When I read the article I clearly read that in addition to spreading their warez all over Internet they also made a lot of money selling warez.
But the summary also chose not to mention the majority of the 50 months sentence was for carding, ordering over a million dollar of computer hardware using fake credit cards, including about $700.000 worth of Cisco routers.
Sure, sure you can be blind to those things, and claim he was unjustly convicted for giving the world free warez, but the truth is sometimes not as rosy as the image those guys tried to create.
That's good news. I liked the cylons, they looked more realistic than other robots of that era. Their 'by your command' was impressive. At least they used some kind of voice encoder device to make it sound real, as opposed to actors trying to talk metallic in other series.
compared to the massive edits in the new DVD versions. C3PO will be digitally replaced by a cylon, Luke will have an new digital up-to-date haircut instead of that lame 70's long hair, the deathstar explosion will be redone (again).
Instead of just shooting in the saloon Han and Greedo will duke it out kung-fu style, since the Matrix made that compulsory for any fight scene. Darth Vader will speak with an english accent because the actor's guild requires this for all villains nowadays. The stormtroopers will probably speak with an arabic accent.
And wait till you see the product placements:)
Re:Bill Gates, Hall of Fame Hacker? (P.S. First Po
on
Hackers Hall of Fame
·
· Score: 2, Informative
8.3 filenames came straight from CP/M, just like the file control blocks it used. In MS-DOS 2 they switched to file handles instead.
That reminds me of the movie State and Main. It's about a crew making a movie in a small town. They have ran out of money and the producer pushes the director to put a product placement in the movie to earn a million dollar. The only problem is, it's an ad for a website and the movie is set in the 19th century... This was just before the dotcom bubble burst.
Several games have multiplayer demo's that are excellently playable. They are usually only one level/map but then you can get a decent feel of how the gameplay is like. I played the Soldier of Fortune II multiplayer demo for months, and it's still quite fun to just play that for an hour now and then.
Slashdot Mirror
This could be true. However the conclusions are wrong. If anything, Microsoft would be on the capitalistic side and Linux would be on the idealistic side. Like communists the followers consist of intellectuals who decide what is good for the masses (the workers in communism) from an ivory tower position, have a superiority feeling over the uneducated and base their ideology on ideas that get reinforced by preaching for their own following and shielding themselves from reality. ...', just like communism blamed the unwillingness of workers in capitalist countries to overthrow their governments and adopt communism on religion.
They are convinced they are right, but day to day reality contradicts them, so they blame this on education, saying 'if users were smarter
A SCO article. So almost all the replies will be lame SCO/Linux jokes.
Unless you're a brand fanatic, replacing this diner's premium coffe with New Folgers Crystals isn't going to make any difference to anyone. But go recreate that classic television commercial by replacing someone's Mac OSX with a Dell running Linux and you'll hear quite a lot of outraged squawking. Heck, even secretly replacing the Korn shell with bash is liable to get you challenged to a duel with pistols at fifty paces.
Your example is flawed. Replace 'white sugar' with 'red wine'. Red wine is just red wine, it's all the same, tastes the same. I am sure almost everyone would disagree. There are thousands of different wines, prices from $1 to $1000 per bottle, and anyone who drinks wine will tell the difference between a fine $10 bottle and a sour headache-inducing $1 bottle.
This removes the assumptions from your conclusion, which are irrelevant anyway. You act like Linux is the most important thing in the world. Who would care about korn and bash ? Isn't linux all about people developing open source, then after a dispute going their separate ways and developing two almost identical branches ?
PS. the 'classic' commercial (from 1984) didn't feature OS-X...
CP/M was a product of DEC, IIRC, and ran on several of the early 8086 and Z80-based computers.
MSDOS would only run on in IBM-compatable PC, so portability of the applications under it is a fairly shallow point.
Well firstly CP/M was a product of Digital Research, a different company than Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Also in the beginning PC's weren't that compatible. They could put the video memory at a totally different location. You'd run MSDOS on those PC's, while only hardware-compatible PC's could run IBM's PCDOS. Usually the BIOS was so different that a lot of software didn't run. Microsoft Flight Simulator 1.0 was a good compatibility test then.
Many of those early XT's had 768 KB of memory, and with CGA graphics you could use it all with MS-DOS. The 640 KB limit was because the EGA card put its video memory at A0000. The '640K is enough' quote is from an IBM engineer, not from Microsoft.
The article is misleading when it speaks of taking $45 each year. Why not every day, since PC's get sold every day ?
In reality many people still use older versions. A typical home PC is used for at least 4 years.
The turnover rate for Linux distributions is much higher. Many people use Windows 98 SE or Windows 2000 (both from 1999) but nobody uses a 4-year old commercial Linux distribution.
If the average home PC is in use for 4 years, $11 per year isn't that much. A game costs $45 as well and that only gets used a few months max before going getting uninstalled.
I can't believe people mention Eudora. The focus is clearly on next-generation email clients. Although Eudora, Pegasus, etc. were popular in the 90's, they haven't made any progress the last few years, and are burdened by old code. And we all know old code becomes harder and harder to maintain, until it grinds to a total halt. I would rather use a brand new client, preferably with Linux (java) ports available than stuff that was converted from a windows 3.11 version to a windows 95 version almost 10 years ago.
It's about time someone does something. The largest problem threathening the useability of Internet is that old protocols, often UNIX-related, were made, then put in an RFC, and then nothing could change anymore.
No matter how broken it is (for example SMTP's trusting that anything specified in mail from/rcpt to/headers is correct, or FTP's incompatibilty with NAT, or IRC's general uselessness) once it is in use, nobody dares to phase it out anymore. Instead lame kludges are added like EHLO instead of HELO. All to preserve the sacred backwards compatibility, in case someone still runs System III, Ultrix 2 or BSD 2.4
It doesn't matter that the whole service (in this case email) becomes unusable due to massive abuse, UNIX zealots just say "that's the way it's supposed to work, read the RFC". Meanwhile nobody considers email serious anymore, people are forced to use spamblocks and throwaway addresses.
I don't care who invents something, just do something already !
While I am not a fan of Microsoft, you have to be fair. Computers get more powerful, and it's only natural the services that the operating system provides
In the 80's people bought or used shareware stuff like programmer's editors, macro tools, norton utilities, backup software that made backups to floppy, etc. If you wanted TCP/IP you'd buy something like Trumpet winsock for windows 3.11. Then 95 just integrated it into the OS, where it should be. I cannot imagine such things being unbundled. Can you imagine Linux with TCP/IP on the user level ?
Stuff like media player isn't in Windows without a reason. 90% of it are libraries, directshow filters etc. The player is just a token app that calls a few API functions. Any beginner with C# can write a simple mediaplayer in 30 minutes.
The idea that a browser is a separate application that can be sold for profit died together with Netscape. The whole idea is so 90's. Nowadays every damn application does html, help files are chm (compress html), etc.
Oversaturated is an exaggerated term. Right now you have a few big ones, world of warcraft coming up. Apart from that there's not much really. 10-15 years ago there were also hundreds of muds, but not nearly as many people as now with internet connectivity (basically only students then).
What is definitely missing are some good free 3D MMORPG's. The only one I know that's good and fun is Runescape, the rest seem to be abandoned projects or stuff that doesn't go anywhere.
Neverwinter nights is just about the only game that allows you to host your own RPG server.
* Blizzard kicks a player off Battle.Net, for whatever reason. They can still play their game, just not using Blizzard's servers. For 99% of the players that means "Blizzard bans your keygen-generated CD key you used to install your warezed copy".
I don't know other reasons why battle.net wouldn't work yet bnetd would, since they are so similar.
I had one. After about a year it failed, in summer so I suspect it had been running too hot. More and more bad sectors with the familiar scraping sound.
But after I got tired of running scandisk for hours to mark bad sectors daily, I erased it with IBM's DFT (drive fitness test).
And it has been fine ever since.
It looked like the heat made it lose its calibration, unable to find the exact position on the disk for some sectors.
You missed the point. They are not complaining about animal cruelty, but that the game depicts researchers as cruel animal torturers who torture animals for fun. The extreme left animal rights terrorists have gotten out of control, even if you work as a secretary or cleaner for a company that is only remotely connected to another company, you risk getting your house molotoved or your car destroyed while you are away, and the police won't do anything about it, since for some strange reason these terrorists have a 'good guy' image despite their violent terrorism.
I think they succeeded a long time ago. I can vaguely remember 10-15 years ago one would occasionally see boxing on TV, or at least a summary of a title fight. But for the last 10 years the sports programs in Europe sometimes mention the result, and occasionally even show a press photograph of the fight, but video seems to be too expensive, even a 1-minute summary is impossible. Blame it on US pay-per-view and greedy promoters trying to milk the last dollars out of everybody.
d00d ..
... It describes 2400x600 on a matrox parhelia (3 screens)
v ices\MTXPARH\Device0
Here is something I cut&pasted
Almost all of the games based on the Quake 3 Arena 3D engine can be played in Surround Gaming mode. Still, in order to actually use Surround Gaming, you need to push up your shirt sleeves and manually adjust the configuration files of the game as well as the registry. Here's how you do it, using Star Wars: Jedi Knight II as an example:
Run game first time (required to create configuration file)
Go to Jedi Knight 2 installed directory
Go to \GameData\base subdirectory
Edit file 'jk2config.cfg' (for single player gameplay)
Find line 'seta r_customwidth,' set to "2400" (if not present, add 'seta r_customwidth "2400"')
Find line 'seta r_customheight,' set to "600" (if not present, add 'seta r_customheight "600"')
Find the line 'seta r_mode' set to "-1"
Find the line 'seta r_mode,' set to "-1" Find line 'seta cg_fov,' set to "138" (if not present, add 'seta cg_fov "138"')
Edit registry
Find line \\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Ser
Add binary key named 'OGL.TripleHead' - set to '01 00 00 00'
Run single player game (HUD should now be only displaying on central screen).
Note: Do not change resolution in-game, or these changes will have to be repeated.
I believe Tom's Hardware itself showed a photo of someone playing Quake 3 on three screens when he reviewed the Matrox Parhelia card (which can drive 3 monitors). This was in 2002. Here is the relevant page. and Here is another one
Dude.. Over an hour ago someone already quoted from the article which you obviously didn't read: The films are then beamed by satellite from Rain's central computer in Sao Paulo to picture houses across the country. Depending on bandwidth, it can take as little as 20 minutes to send a 90-minute film to a theater. Your sarcasm has made a fool of yourself...
I remember playing some of the old Bard's Tale games back in the day, and for the time those games were quite awesome. I have a feeling that a lot of fans are going to be put off if this game does not live up to the series. Those games were great at the time, however games have made a lot of progress since, and that's not just in the graphics department. Back then games were hard, really hard, if you didn't know that to progress you needed to order wine in the bar so you could go to the cellar and enter a dungeon from there you'd just walk around without making progress. To play the bard's tale games you needed a lot of time, make lots of notes and draw your own maps, or else you'd get hopelessly lost. It's definitely a game from before the era of in-game help, customizable keys, in-game maps, a tutorial mission before you start, etc. I've played some games recently that I was playing 10-15 years ago. And the advice is - don't do it. Like old movies or tv series you vaguely remember from your youth, the memory is the best, actually seeing them again ruins that feeling.
Depends what you call parts and what you call expansions.
Does a part have to end in a cliffhanger, not be complete on its own ?
Else, many games are doing this already. I don't mean the old Apogee/ID software technique of making part 1 free and 2 and 3 commercial.
A lot of work is done on the engine/game, but content also takes a lot of time. If you just release when you have enough but keep on making new content with the same engine, you can sell it again.
Half-Life, then Opposing force, then Blue shift. Medal of Honor, a year later Spearhead and now Breakthrough. The Dungeon Siege expansion. The expansions/new stories for Morrowind and Neverwinter Nights. Road to Rome for Battlefield 1942 (not much of a story but still something new). Almost every game seems to get an expansion/new release a year later with additional content.
It looks like this business model is already being used a lot.
Maybe you didn't hear enough then. When I read the article I clearly read that in addition to spreading their warez all over Internet they also made a lot of money selling warez.
But the summary also chose not to mention the majority of the 50 months sentence was for carding, ordering over a million dollar of computer hardware using fake credit cards, including about $700.000 worth of Cisco routers.
Sure, sure you can be blind to those things, and claim he was unjustly convicted for giving the world free warez, but the truth is sometimes not as rosy as the image those guys tried to create.
That's good news. I liked the cylons, they looked more realistic than other robots of that era. Their 'by your command' was impressive. At least they used some kind of voice encoder device to make it sound real, as opposed to actors trying to talk metallic in other series.
compared to the massive edits in the new DVD versions. C3PO will be digitally replaced by a cylon, Luke will have an new digital up-to-date haircut instead of that lame 70's long hair, the deathstar explosion will be redone (again). Instead of just shooting in the saloon Han and Greedo will duke it out kung-fu style, since the Matrix made that compulsory for any fight scene. Darth Vader will speak with an english accent because the actor's guild requires this for all villains nowadays. The stormtroopers will probably speak with an arabic accent. And wait till you see the product placements :)
8.3 filenames came straight from CP/M, just like the file control blocks it used. In MS-DOS 2 they switched to file handles instead.
That reminds me of the movie State and Main. It's about a crew making a movie in a small town. They have ran out of money and the producer pushes the director to put a product placement in the movie to earn a million dollar. The only problem is, it's an ad for a website and the movie is set in the 19th century... This was just before the dotcom bubble burst.
The article is in the 'washingtonpost.com' highlights. They are just reporting what another paper wrote. So stop blaming Microsoft for everything.
Several games have multiplayer demo's that are excellently playable. They are usually only one level/map but then you can get a decent feel of how the gameplay is like.
I played the Soldier of Fortune II multiplayer demo for months, and it's still quite fun to just play that for an hour now and then.