"Game playing through NAT is nearly impossible. Scratch that... if there is more than one person trying to play the same MMORPG from the same IP, it IS impossible for many games."
WoW works great. You can have lots of people on different machines behind 1 IP, assuming you have separate WoW accounts (no MMO lets you have multiple characters from the *same* account logged in for obvious reasons).
"Did George Lucas provide a scene (in "Revenge of the Sith") where Darth Vader's own right hand was sliced off? If the answer is "yes", then Lucas has remained true to the original trilogy."
His hand was sliced off in episode 2 by Dooku, and this fact was used by Palpatine/Sidious to goad Anakin into killing Dooku for purposes of revenge when he had him as an unarmed prisoner!
Perhaps if you actually watched the movies, you could be considered a score above 2 commentor; as is, you trolled some ignorant mods. Good day to you!
In Canada, I don't think we have any outdated copyright laws, just the odd ham-handed enforcement of laws by people who know nothing about technology. Those are two different things.
In Canadian law, it's OK for two private people to share (not for profit) things they own which are copyright (IE: music, games), because -- honestly -- how the hell could that ever be enforced, and what kind of negative impact would it have on word of mouth?
The US laws are pretty decent, they just overspecify in a few areas, and try to enforce unenforceable things (the US war on drugs is another great example where throwing money at a minority problem does not solve it).
A GeForce 5200 is 60$ for a reason. That POS may support DX9 features in hardware, but the GeForce ti4400 will outperform it even when emulating those features via cool drivers. I want to get a GeForce 5900XT, because those guys should be roughly 150$ CDN right now. I'd love to buy a GeForce 4 Ti4800 or 4400, on the premise they'd be about 100$ CDN or 80$ CDN. The lowest priced card I can find that will perform better than a GeForce 5900XT or Ti4800 is a GeForce 6600GT. They are 300$ CDN for the AGP versions.
Everything lower than that, well, they don't perform as well. Yes, they have a checkbox that indicates they have the features, but when you benchmark them, you see that they don't push as many pixels, etc.
PC gaming, thanks to CPU pricing and performance ratios, is entirely about the video card. At this point, a GeForce 5900XT will do you for every game. You can run Doom 3 with decent quality settings on any PC, pretty much, that you can afford. For less that 1,000$ CDN, you can have an entire system that does this, plus more.
But you can't buy affordable cards that perform decently. The bare minimum you can buy is something like the 6600GT. There is nothing between 60$ and 300$ that will perform AT ALL.
(Yes, I'm discounting ATI; ATI does not have functioning drivers under Linux 64-bit, nor under the latest rev of the kernel 32-bit, nor do they work correctly on Windows! Don't make the mistake I did in buying a Radeon 8500 a few years back, get nVidia...)
I've never understood why the US view on higher education is that the moment you get into university, your main goal in life becomes the consumption of fermented vegetables and goldfish.
Seriously, this is not the view in Canada, or other countries. There is no inferiority complex for going to a tech school vs. a principles school (IE: University). If you go to a tech school, they teach you how. If you got to a University, they teach you why (you're expected to be able to learn how on your own).
Perhaps if the US legal drinking age were lowered, University wouldn't be seen as such a booze zone (although, frankly, I'm guessing as much underage drinking occurs in the US as in Canada, despite the large legal drinking age gap). Perhaps if the US gov't made public education a priority, we'd also see generally accesible schools for people whose marks qualify them for it. I'd like to see what you could've done in University, instead of resenting people who went.
Of course, you could still go to Canada and pay 1/4th to 1/8th what you'd pay in the US (even after the usual 2-3x doubling of fees that citizens pay!). And you wouldn't have to deal with beer swilling!
I've had my Gmail account open continously throughout this, and Google.ca resolved constantly. Why? I use intelligent caching DNS, and my browsers won't try to magically autocomplete if there is a problem (DNS is handled by Privoxy).
Yet still yesterday I kept seeing people panic about, "google being hacked"....
Obviously these people need to learn a little about computers, and run their own caching DNS servers. Hopefully ones like djbdns, so they aren't vulnerable to cache poisoning attacks.
You can get a motherboard with SATA, ATA, RAID, onboard audio, NIC, etc, for like 60$ CDN. Maybe back in the days when motherboards were 180$ CDN for a barebones, and 250$ for the one with terrible AC'97, was this an issue. Nowadays you buy based on what features you want, and disable the rest.
I use Intel EEPros in all my machines because they are well supported and in every OS I can load. I just disable the onboard NICs. I've noticed, though, that recently onboard audio has become high enough quality that I can move the mouse and not "hear" it on my speakers.
Let's review what they have: * Spider-Man 2 (Activision) * Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Vivendi Universal Games) * Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (EA) * Van Helsing (Vivendi Universal Games) * Incredibles (THQ)
Now, Spider-Man 2 was apparently OK because the core gameplay (not related to the movie stuff) was acceptable. It wasn't super awesome, though. Riddick was good (it was done by a house focused on gaming, and whose deadlines were not tethered to a release date), and then the rest of the games were crap.
If you are going to give awards based on mediocre licence-fodder games, at least name the category that way. Real gaming awards should be about innovative gameplay, new ideas presented, technical achievements, and I'd like to see some for bucking trends (IE: movie games which don't suck, new games, etc).
I also realize that too much of the gaming industry is bought and paid for. Games like Beyond Good and Evil, well, the reason mags kept mentioning it as they dropped the price to 20$ US was because the Ubisoft president came up with the story, and paid off all the gaming press to keep a buzz going on it. This isn't really a rare occurance, either!
I don't mind games that take a while to complete (after all, I can still play it decently, just over a longer period, right?). What I hate are games which do the following:
* No easy quest tracking or other goal tracking coupled with
* A play granularity which is around 2 hours.
Most of the games that are above the 10 hour completion time rating are like this; once you put them down, when you get back to them you realize you don't remember what you were doing. Few games do have a notes on what happened, and a list of what's happening next (Kotor did support this! It made it very excellent to play). Warcraft 3 is great because I can hit F9 and see the quests (hell, any Blizzard game is good for quest tracking).
The play granularity thing is another issue. I may not have 2 or 4 hours to play a game in one stretch. I'm not a big fan of games where I can't just save and quite at any point, or games where if I do get in, it takes me a good 2 hours to get anywhere in it. Games with specific save points (Resident Evil) require premeditated play time. IE: I pick an afternoon to sit down and go ahead and get from one logical point to another. In a game like Warcraft 3, I can just save at any point, and resume later.
There are a lot of great games, but there are fewer great games that make themselves easy to enjoy. Lower penalties for platformers (which I've noticed tend to be geared towards the younger gamers, many of whom seem to have infinite patience which I no longer have; losing an hour of 'work' is painful -- replayed game segments are not fun, generally!), better quest tracking, easy save/resume, all contribute to something I can do in my work schedule.
"An alternative approach is to have "virtual" cores - have a stack of registers and pools of computational elements. This does require some extra element of sophistication, to share out resources, but if you have two programs with very different CPU needs, both programs should run faster. "
It's called hyperthreading. It sucks because multiple threads doing different things isn't the common case (unless you run BeOS). It also sucks because the L1 cache gets thrashed a lot, which is why it's actually bad to have it on for some activities.
"The other thing I have an issue with is how EB has a habit of opening a new copy of a game to be able to put it on the display shelf. If it's the last copy in stock, they want to sell it to you at the price of a new game, even though the goo from the 5 stickers that have been put on the case and the discs that have just been kept in a drawer somewhere can put the game in a condition that can be worse than many used games."
Demand the 10% shop-worn discount. Managers have been told forever that they're not supposed to use it, but they will if you ask for it politely enough.
While there is a disturbing trend to making large, fuel inefficient cars coming over North Amercia (modern Honda Civics are the size of the 1980s Honda Accord; modern Accords are the size of some NA cars from the 80s), there is still some innovation. Have you driven a Honda Insight? That car doesn't get 70mpg because it's traditional.
Maybe with the fact that launching things which are promoted seems to be the key to sales, not just being released around Q4, we'll start to see fewer pump-and-dump games coming out just in time for gift shoppers to buy...
Won't compile with 2.6.11? Check. Compiles with BIG, LARGE warnings about depreciated features being used in 2.6.10? Check. Won't work under x64_64? Check. 2D part of drivers buggy? Check. Infrequent releases that don't correct problems? Check. No support for X RandR? Check.
Sorry, the ATI drivers don't pass muster. Perhaps I should've realized sooner with the constant weird 2D bugs I had with the ATI driver. Or the fact it wouldn't compile on 2.6.11. Or the fact it just plain won't work as advertised on 64-bit Linux.
I took out my Radeon 8500, put in a Geforce 2MX I had, and installed the nVidia driver. It was actually wrapped in an installer, rather than me having to manually untar and run scripts ala ATI. It asked if I wanted 32-bit compatibility OpenGL libraries. It told me that the 2.6.11 kernel fixed some AGP issues and was reccomended (which was good since I already had it, and only used the 2.6.10 because of ATI). X RandR started to work with the nVidia driver. 64-bit and 32-bit apps work flawlessly with each other.
ATI is shit. Their card hardware may be good, but without a driver, it might as well be an ISA SB16 for all the use I get out of it.
When you have an archive of spam stretching back to 1998 like I do, it's trivial. Just feed it to the DSpam when you set it up, and be ready for 5-6 9s of accuracy in spam detection. That, and some fairly zealous Postfix correctness (IE: we don't accept not RFC822 messages + RBL checks) dropped my system from a few hundred spams a day to a few hundred spams every couple of weeks, with a rate of them actually reaching my inbox of around 1-2 per month peak.
Spending 50$ on old, used games which the cost to EB on is roughly 10-20$ is exactly what they want! Buying a new release title that has about 10$ of markup sucks compared to used stuff that they make up to 4x as much on!
Wow, you're the message-board equivalent of a spaz. Kevin, does it really make sense to tell someone a post is bullshit because they made a typo? It certainly didn't (as you mentioned) take away from the truth of the post.
Perhaps if you read and understand this post you won't be such an asshole in the future. I know if I were a potential employer, I'd look into how you acted in addition to your technical qualifications.
In Saskatoon, which is southern Saskatchewan, the sun rises at around 09:50 in December towards the longest day of the year. It sets around 16:20.
With ~6 hours of daylight, there's nothing you're saving. Saskatchewan, thankfully, is one of the few places in North America which does not follow DST. Of course, in the summer, the shortest night is roughly 4 hours.
I'm not even going to mention how stupid it is to have DST north of 60 degrees.:p
Yes, you sometimes kill mobs, you sometimes find things, you sometimes do a lot of things. Up to that level, most of the quests tend to be simpler. My character, a Warlock, has gained new summons every 10 levels (Voidwalker at 10 and Sucubus at level 20, via related quests).
Really, World of Wacraft is Warcraft 3 in a really important sense -- you play as a hero from Warcraft 3. You are directly involved in the game at the lowest level. You don't worry about managing towns or groups, you worry about managing your inventory and your health. The quests serve to bolster your character and advance your character's personal storyline. Each race has specific quests, each character type, etc.
I really like the exploration aspect. While I may be able to stomp the crap out of level 13 critters, I'm still only the mid 20s, and I keep finding new areas I can get into. However, some of these areas house critters that are in the 40s and 50s, so I carefully creep around and get the discovery xp, as well as completing my map. That's also fun. I've played for just a month now, and I still haven't completed more than a fraction of the world map.
Seriously, this game has lots in it. If you don't get it, you don't get it.
You should test software longer than you write it. You should verify building layouts longer than you take to make them. You should...
Verification of correctness is very important, otherwise you get a poor reputation quickly and won't be purchased by people anymore. Unless you're a monopoly.
Grab a 64-bit Linux distribution. Yet another benefit of opensource is that people can freely recompile to 64-bit. I'm running 64-bit KDE 3.4.0 on my 64-bit Linux 2.6.11 on my Opteron 3000+. It runs WoW under 32-bit Cedega nicely as well (in addition to Starcraft/Diablo, etc). No need to chain yourself to a legacy OS for a few applications you can easily run in Linux:)
"Every time there's a patch to one piece of the kernel, you have to download the entire kernel package again. "
Last time I looked at ftp.kernel.org, there were lots of nice patches in the/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6 directory. It's how I've been updating my 2.6 since I first downloaded it at 2.6.4. cat../patch-2.6.N | patch -p1 -E && make oldconfig does wonders.
Some of the deltas are large (a couple mb), but nothing like the size of a full kernel download.
Slashdot Mirror
"Game playing through NAT is nearly impossible. Scratch that... if there is more than one person trying to play the same MMORPG from the same IP, it IS impossible for many games."
WoW works great. You can have lots of people on different machines behind 1 IP, assuming you have separate WoW accounts (no MMO lets you have multiple characters from the *same* account logged in for obvious reasons).
"Did George Lucas provide a scene (in "Revenge of the Sith") where Darth Vader's own right hand was sliced off? If the answer is "yes", then Lucas has remained true to the original trilogy."
His hand was sliced off in episode 2 by Dooku, and this fact was used by Palpatine/Sidious to goad Anakin into killing Dooku for purposes of revenge when he had him as an unarmed prisoner!
Perhaps if you actually watched the movies, you could be considered a score above 2 commentor; as is, you trolled some ignorant mods. Good day to you!
I realize OpenBSD has songs every release, but what does DMX/50 Cent have to do with their licence?
In Canada, I don't think we have any outdated copyright laws, just the odd ham-handed enforcement of laws by people who know nothing about technology. Those are two different things.
In Canadian law, it's OK for two private people to share (not for profit) things they own which are copyright (IE: music, games), because -- honestly -- how the hell could that ever be enforced, and what kind of negative impact would it have on word of mouth?
The US laws are pretty decent, they just overspecify in a few areas, and try to enforce unenforceable things (the US war on drugs is another great example where throwing money at a minority problem does not solve it).
A GeForce 5200 is 60$ for a reason. That POS may support DX9 features in hardware, but the GeForce ti4400 will outperform it even when emulating those features via cool drivers. I want to get a GeForce 5900XT, because those guys should be roughly 150$ CDN right now. I'd love to buy a GeForce 4 Ti4800 or 4400, on the premise they'd be about 100$ CDN or 80$ CDN. The lowest priced card I can find that will perform better than a GeForce 5900XT or Ti4800 is a GeForce 6600GT. They are 300$ CDN for the AGP versions.
Everything lower than that, well, they don't perform as well. Yes, they have a checkbox that indicates they have the features, but when you benchmark them, you see that they don't push as many pixels, etc.
PC gaming, thanks to CPU pricing and performance ratios, is entirely about the video card. At this point, a GeForce 5900XT will do you for every game. You can run Doom 3 with decent quality settings on any PC, pretty much, that you can afford. For less that 1,000$ CDN, you can have an entire system that does this, plus more.
But you can't buy affordable cards that perform decently. The bare minimum you can buy is something like the 6600GT. There is nothing between 60$ and 300$ that will perform AT ALL.
(Yes, I'm discounting ATI; ATI does not have functioning drivers under Linux 64-bit, nor under the latest rev of the kernel 32-bit, nor do they work correctly on Windows! Don't make the mistake I did in buying a Radeon 8500 a few years back, get nVidia...)
I've never understood why the US view on higher education is that the moment you get into university, your main goal in life becomes the consumption of fermented vegetables and goldfish.
Seriously, this is not the view in Canada, or other countries. There is no inferiority complex for going to a tech school vs. a principles school (IE: University). If you go to a tech school, they teach you how. If you got to a University, they teach you why (you're expected to be able to learn how on your own).
Perhaps if the US legal drinking age were lowered, University wouldn't be seen as such a booze zone (although, frankly, I'm guessing as much underage drinking occurs in the US as in Canada, despite the large legal drinking age gap). Perhaps if the US gov't made public education a priority, we'd also see generally accesible schools for people whose marks qualify them for it. I'd like to see what you could've done in University, instead of resenting people who went.
Of course, you could still go to Canada and pay 1/4th to 1/8th what you'd pay in the US (even after the usual 2-3x doubling of fees that citizens pay!). And you wouldn't have to deal with beer swilling!
I've had my Gmail account open continously throughout this, and Google.ca resolved constantly. Why? I use intelligent caching DNS, and my browsers won't try to magically autocomplete if there is a problem (DNS is handled by Privoxy).
...
Yet still yesterday I kept seeing people panic about, "google being hacked".
Obviously these people need to learn a little about computers, and run their own caching DNS servers. Hopefully ones like djbdns, so they aren't vulnerable to cache poisoning attacks.
You can get a motherboard with SATA, ATA, RAID, onboard audio, NIC, etc, for like 60$ CDN. Maybe back in the days when motherboards were 180$ CDN for a barebones, and 250$ for the one with terrible AC'97, was this an issue. Nowadays you buy based on what features you want, and disable the rest.
I use Intel EEPros in all my machines because they are well supported and in every OS I can load. I just disable the onboard NICs. I've noticed, though, that recently onboard audio has become high enough quality that I can move the mouse and not "hear" it on my speakers.
Suck it up!
Let's review what they have:
* Spider-Man 2 (Activision)
* Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay (Vivendi Universal Games)
* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (EA)
* Van Helsing (Vivendi Universal Games)
* Incredibles (THQ)
Now, Spider-Man 2 was apparently OK because the core gameplay (not related to the movie stuff) was acceptable. It wasn't super awesome, though. Riddick was good (it was done by a house focused on gaming, and whose deadlines were not tethered to a release date), and then the rest of the games were crap.
If you are going to give awards based on mediocre licence-fodder games, at least name the category that way. Real gaming awards should be about innovative gameplay, new ideas presented, technical achievements, and I'd like to see some for bucking trends (IE: movie games which don't suck, new games, etc).
I also realize that too much of the gaming industry is bought and paid for. Games like Beyond Good and Evil, well, the reason mags kept mentioning it as they dropped the price to 20$ US was because the Ubisoft president came up with the story, and paid off all the gaming press to keep a buzz going on it. This isn't really a rare occurance, either!
I don't mind games that take a while to complete (after all, I can still play it decently, just over a longer period, right?). What I hate are games which do the following:
* No easy quest tracking or other goal tracking
coupled with
* A play granularity which is around 2 hours.
Most of the games that are above the 10 hour completion time rating are like this; once you put them down, when you get back to them you realize you don't remember what you were doing. Few games do have a notes on what happened, and a list of what's happening next (Kotor did support this! It made it very excellent to play). Warcraft 3 is great because I can hit F9 and see the quests (hell, any Blizzard game is good for quest tracking).
The play granularity thing is another issue. I may not have 2 or 4 hours to play a game in one stretch. I'm not a big fan of games where I can't just save and quite at any point, or games where if I do get in, it takes me a good 2 hours to get anywhere in it. Games with specific save points (Resident Evil) require premeditated play time. IE: I pick an afternoon to sit down and go ahead and get from one logical point to another. In a game like Warcraft 3, I can just save at any point, and resume later.
There are a lot of great games, but there are fewer great games that make themselves easy to enjoy. Lower penalties for platformers (which I've noticed tend to be geared towards the younger gamers, many of whom seem to have infinite patience which I no longer have; losing an hour of 'work' is painful -- replayed game segments are not fun, generally!), better quest tracking, easy save/resume, all contribute to something I can do in my work schedule.
"An alternative approach is to have "virtual" cores - have a stack of registers and pools of computational elements. This does require some extra element of sophistication, to share out resources, but if you have two programs with very different CPU needs, both programs should run faster. "
It's called hyperthreading. It sucks because multiple threads doing different things isn't the common case (unless you run BeOS). It also sucks because the L1 cache gets thrashed a lot, which is why it's actually bad to have it on for some activities.
"The other thing I have an issue with is how EB has a habit of opening a new copy of a game to be able to put it on the display shelf. If it's the last copy in stock, they want to sell it to you at the price of a new game, even though the goo from the 5 stickers that have been put on the case and the discs that have just been kept in a drawer somewhere can put the game in a condition that can be worse than many used games."
Demand the 10% shop-worn discount. Managers have been told forever that they're not supposed to use it, but they will if you ask for it politely enough.
While there is a disturbing trend to making large, fuel inefficient cars coming over North Amercia (modern Honda Civics are the size of the 1980s Honda Accord; modern Accords are the size of some NA cars from the 80s), there is still some innovation. Have you driven a Honda Insight? That car doesn't get 70mpg because it's traditional.
Maybe with the fact that launching things which are promoted seems to be the key to sales, not just being released around Q4, we'll start to see fewer pump-and-dump games coming out just in time for gift shoppers to buy...
:/
One can hope
I didn't see any evidence that the 3D worked at all, especially with GLgears getting such terrible frame rates.
ATI's driver was the only one that allowed 3D accel, and it was the shits for everything.
Won't compile with 2.6.11? Check.
Compiles with BIG, LARGE warnings about depreciated features being used in 2.6.10? Check.
Won't work under x64_64? Check.
2D part of drivers buggy? Check.
Infrequent releases that don't correct problems? Check.
No support for X RandR? Check.
Sorry, the ATI drivers don't pass muster. Perhaps I should've realized sooner with the constant weird 2D bugs I had with the ATI driver. Or the fact it wouldn't compile on 2.6.11. Or the fact it just plain won't work as advertised on 64-bit Linux.
I took out my Radeon 8500, put in a Geforce 2MX I had, and installed the nVidia driver. It was actually wrapped in an installer, rather than me having to manually untar and run scripts ala ATI. It asked if I wanted 32-bit compatibility OpenGL libraries. It told me that the 2.6.11 kernel fixed some AGP issues and was reccomended (which was good since I already had it, and only used the 2.6.10 because of ATI). X RandR started to work with the nVidia driver. 64-bit and 32-bit apps work flawlessly with each other.
ATI is shit. Their card hardware may be good, but without a driver, it might as well be an ISA SB16 for all the use I get out of it.
When you have an archive of spam stretching back to 1998 like I do, it's trivial. Just feed it to the DSpam when you set it up, and be ready for 5-6 9s of accuracy in spam detection. That, and some fairly zealous Postfix correctness (IE: we don't accept not RFC822 messages + RBL checks) dropped my system from a few hundred spams a day to a few hundred spams every couple of weeks, with a rate of them actually reaching my inbox of around 1-2 per month peak.
Spending 50$ on old, used games which the cost to EB on is roughly 10-20$ is exactly what they want! Buying a new release title that has about 10$ of markup sucks compared to used stuff that they make up to 4x as much on!
"I'm sorry, but that's complete bullshit. "
Wow, you're the message-board equivalent of a spaz. Kevin, does it really make sense to tell someone a post is bullshit because they made a typo? It certainly didn't (as you mentioned) take away from the truth of the post.
Perhaps if you read and understand this post you won't be such an asshole in the future. I know if I were a potential employer, I'd look into how you acted in addition to your technical qualifications.
In Saskatoon, which is southern Saskatchewan, the sun rises at around 09:50 in December towards the longest day of the year. It sets around 16:20.
:p
With ~6 hours of daylight, there's nothing you're saving. Saskatchewan, thankfully, is one of the few places in North America which does not follow DST. Of course, in the summer, the shortest night is roughly 4 hours.
I'm not even going to mention how stupid it is to have DST north of 60 degrees.
Yes, you sometimes kill mobs, you sometimes find things, you sometimes do a lot of things. Up to that level, most of the quests tend to be simpler. My character, a Warlock, has gained new summons every 10 levels (Voidwalker at 10 and Sucubus at level 20, via related quests).
Really, World of Wacraft is Warcraft 3 in a really important sense -- you play as a hero from Warcraft 3. You are directly involved in the game at the lowest level. You don't worry about managing towns or groups, you worry about managing your inventory and your health. The quests serve to bolster your character and advance your character's personal storyline. Each race has specific quests, each character type, etc.
I really like the exploration aspect. While I may be able to stomp the crap out of level 13 critters, I'm still only the mid 20s, and I keep finding new areas I can get into. However, some of these areas house critters that are in the 40s and 50s, so I carefully creep around and get the discovery xp, as well as completing my map. That's also fun. I've played for just a month now, and I still haven't completed more than a fraction of the world map.
Seriously, this game has lots in it. If you don't get it, you don't get it.
Well, first:
0 /index.x?pg=1
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/
Then:
http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q1/athlon64-300
HTH. HAND.
You should test software longer than you write it. You should verify building layouts longer than you take to make them. You should ...
Verification of correctness is very important, otherwise you get a poor reputation quickly and won't be purchased by people anymore. Unless you're a monopoly.
Grab a 64-bit Linux distribution. Yet another benefit of opensource is that people can freely recompile to 64-bit. I'm running 64-bit KDE 3.4.0 on my 64-bit Linux 2.6.11 on my Opteron 3000+. It runs WoW under 32-bit Cedega nicely as well (in addition to Starcraft/Diablo, etc). No need to chain yourself to a legacy OS for a few applications you can easily run in Linux :)
I run Slamd64, the x86-64 Slackware.
"Every time there's a patch to one piece of the kernel, you have to download the entire kernel package again. "
/pub/linux/kernel/v2.6 directory. It's how I've been updating my 2.6 since I first downloaded it at 2.6.4. cat ../patch-2.6.N | patch -p1 -E && make oldconfig does wonders.
Last time I looked at ftp.kernel.org, there were lots of nice patches in the
Some of the deltas are large (a couple mb), but nothing like the size of a full kernel download.