The heatsink fan stickers are different. The connectors are in a different order. The COPYRIGHT string has a different date (2001 vs. 2002 -- no jpg artifacting suggesting a blur and redo).
The board layouts are very similar, and it's likely that someone did take a stock Radeon picture and mod it a bit, but those are still different boards entirely.
Guess what else lowers attention spans, alters thought patterns, and makes it harder to do such things as interact and study: music!
Ever tried to study to music? Unless the music is raw noise that you just tune out, chances are that you partly listen to it -- wasting precious mind cycles. If you are listening to particularly good music, which you stop to enjoy (or even jump up and dance to, depending on the situation, etc), you're clearly not focusing on the task at hand.
Humans don't multitask at a fundamental level (not well, anyways). This is why study guides say you shouldn't study to music, and that you should study in blocks of time greater than half an hour for full effect (your mind does take time to switch gears).
"- First, most people do not but Microsofware, they buy computers with Microsoftware preinstalled. Even for geeks it's getting harder to buy a PC without all that junk."
Until OEMs sign contracts that require bare HDs to be sold with software bundles, getting a naked PC is as easy as buying parts and putting them together. This is the way 99.999 percent of all computer inclined poeple go -- unless they just go to a local computer retailer and buy a bunch of whiteboxes which they'll make & test for a small fee.
In other words, this only affects people who buy brand-name computers. Such people are unlikely to care if there is no software anyways.
A P2 300 was not low-end when Starcraft came out:p It plays nicely on 166 Mhz P1s (although non-MMX ones aren't really up to it).
If you want to play games at the office, why not just have people bring in computers? I mean, you can't sit down and have a big network game on a short 30 minute lunch break. Not the ones I play, anyways.
I like the story element and RPG-ishness introduced in War3. It's great for the single player game. I'm less likely to create thousands of units and rushrushrust, as I am to create a small fighting force which I train and nurture to the highest level. It's not quite Myth2 in terms of battle tactics and the like, but it's a nice change from the usual "build everything, throw them at each other" Blizzard RTS:)
"1) It won't play smoothly on a P3 500 laptop (with 384 meg of RAM and an ATI Rage Mobility). Blizzard usually tries to get the low-end of the market. Not any longer"
On my A750s with TNT1s, which are "super-duper" for 3 years ago, the play is acceptable like Starcraft on a P120. It's slower than top-of-the-line, but very playable. If you want to play a game released in 2002, don't have a machine from pre-1999. Is that hard to accept? If so, try console gaming. They can have much larger windows of games (release + n years) than an arbitrary computer configuration.
Also, a Rage mobility isn't exactly a great 3D card to be using in a 3D game.
"Screw it. If this game had come out 5 years ago, maybe. But Starcraft is better, and so is Age of Empires 2."
If it had come out 5 years ago, it wouldn't be Warcraft 3. The Voodoo2s of the time (very high-end for 1997) can't do it acceptably. Starcraft and AOE2 are better for you because you have an old 2D-capable system. Essentially what you're saying (in your own words) is that you wanted something that worked on your old computer, and you're disapointed when it doesn't work like a game released 4 years ago (Starcraft). Again, I have to say, if you want to play games for computers released this year, own a computer with hardware from a maximum of 3 years ago. Try a desktop P3 with a GeForce 2 MX 400, I'm sure it'll do it more than acceptably.
Or move to console gaming. You sound like you'd enjoy that a lot more.
"OpenBSD had the best TCP/IP random number generation (recently re-written)."
Didn't you question anything when they said 2.2.1x, or OpenBSD 2.8 was "recent"? No? OpenBSD 3.1 is the most recently released one. They've had this for quite a few releases now (didn't you also notice that OpenSSH's default root problem affected OpenBSD 2.9-3.1?). They also had *no* data for Linux 2.4, or Windows XP.
Don't believe me? Scroll down to the bottom of the page where it mentions it was last updated in April 2001.
"MNG (pronounced ``ming''), is short for Multiple-image Network Graphics, as one might gather from the title of this page. Designed with the same modular philosophy as PNG and by many of the same people, MNG is intended to provide a home for all of the multi-image capabilities that have no place in PNG. "
Actually, they're not going for 10 games+ a console. They're going for 2-4 games, with network support (10$ a month or so). This is why the ethernet port is standard (it makes it much easier to sell 3rd party people on this feature). This is why such things as the HD for streaming updates (required for MMORPGs -- remember the Phantasty Star Online v1 and v2 releases for the DC?), and such features as the "nickname" that the Xbox remembers (in such games as DOA3) for use in multiplayer?
Their model isn't stupid. They saw Sony, and the UO people making money hand over fist. They saw the console arena, where people want trouble-free gaming, and also want to try MMORPGs -- money + commitment to gaminf = PROFIT!
It's a fine position. I just don't agree with their other tactics of trying to lock down the box to stop people from using its online features for other things (media boxes, cheap set-top computers).
"I think Sega killed their consoles more or less just because they couldn't design a PS2 level system with the moeny they had left, and in the time needed."
No, they killed it because the DC was expensive to manufacture, and it didn't command the premium that the PS2 would command later on (Sony knows all about selling things with big margins).
They had taken a loss with the 32X, Sega CD, and Saturn. The losses were because the Sega CD had few titles, the 32X had no 3rd party support (but all the costs associated with developing the hardware, producing it, and trying to sell it), and the Saturn -- when your console is an SMP system which uses a quad-based 3D accel chip, you know you need people who are only the best of the best. Difficult development meant that it went by the wayside like the 32X.
Given that they'd lost all that money, and that they had to sell the DC at a loss to keep at an acceptable point on their economics curve, is it any wonder that when the numbers started to show doom, they just abandoned their baby and went 3rd party? It makes complete economic sense.
The Dreamcast is a "PS2 level" system. I call them 5th gen systems (with gen 1 being NES/TG16/SMS). 5th gen systems all used non-CD media, had support for very complex scene rendering (Shenmue), and could do some crazy things if well done. Unfortunately the PS2 is hard to develop for, doesn't have enough RAM, and has the VR0 VR1 problem (IE: their video card is hard to program for, and requires constant texture streaming to keep scenes looking complex). Plus the anti-aliasing that's common on the Dreamcast (due to the Kyro chipset-based rendering culling hidden polygons, it has lots of extra room for smoothing), is not common on the PS2. Thus PS2 games generally have jaggies and look like ass.
" I doubt they killed the DC because they were too costly, if so, why did they let the price drop to $100 or so?"
Because they had produced a lot of units. These units were no longer selling at 150$. If you have 100,000 units, and you will sell maybe 10,000 at 150$, maybe it's a good idea to sell 20,000 at 100$ because the area under the curve (total revenue) is much larger. Stepping down all the prices so that Sega could sell off as much as possible at each level (milking the profit margins as best they can) was a good way of ending the run. When they figured they'd reached saturation, they did the last (50$ US) cut so they could clear out the rest, claim a tax write off, and stop having to pay for expensive wharehouse space for their Dreamcast units that remained unsold.
Are you familiar with economics and business realities at all?
Sites like kuro5hin.org which, through careful donation drives, make 6 months of operating money in 3 days. Non-profits who are there for the people, who are lean and run well mainly out of the pockets of the people who're there?
Maybe a big business media site like Salon can't stay in business, but I'm sure that a leaner site could've. The Internet is all about the little guy, as Dan's Data's "Minnows 1, whales 0" argues. Until more people are online supporting a services model, you can't just base your entire revenue on a needing "just a few more" subscribers to break even.
Salon should've restructured about 74.5 million ago. They've lost a stupid amount of money.
I agree that dumbing down is bad, but I don't agree with your WM point. Why should every GUI program writer write the same support code? You might as well say that they have to make all their apps stateful by hand. It's much simpler to provide one provably correct code path in the WM, than potentially thousands in all the applications in a system.
For those apps which are "special," they could simply send a "NON_STATEFUL" token to the WM when dealing with that window.
Ever driven a CAR? Ever noticed how signs don't come in uniform shapes and colours, only differentiated by the WORDS on them?
No, you haven't noticed that -- because colours are the most intuitive and fastest way of humans differentiating between several distinct objects. Ever tried to say what colour something spelt when the words were in another colour? You probably didn't do 100% because of that same fact.
That's why Canadians, Britons, Austrialians, etc, etc, etc, etc,.. basically everyone except the US (which, I note, also rejects the metric system) has been holding on to its quant "old" money while other countries have made their bills easy to differentiate, and harder to counterfeit.
"What will the other 90% do for a living? And how do we pick which 10% it's going to be?"
The other 90% will just time-share work. Think about it. If you're paid more, you can work less. Assuming owners would cut their margins a bit (every owner), then every worker would have more consumer surplus to re-invest. This would accelerate the economy nicely.
The picking would be those willing to work. Do you assume everyone doesn't want to work? I want to work. Maybe not 60-80 hours a week like some crazies, but I enjoy spending 3-5 days of a week away from home, working with a team of trained people to solve problems.
Sounds like a client side problem. I don't have popups in my browser. I can only wonder what messed up program would put popups in video files. Mplayer sure doesn't have that problem:-D
If your page looks like crap, but people can still read the content, it's ok. My changelog uses CSS for everything. If you look at it on NS4, it will look "like crap" as you puh it -- but people can still scroll down and read everything just as it was intended.
First, that's my signature. I really was hoping you'd reply to the content of my message, where I did state that NS4.x sucked. Although it's not directly stated, there was a void between 3 and Mozilla where there weren't any useful browsers from Netscape.
Second, any "feature" (where a feature is defined as additional utility not essential to the core) which cannot be turned off must either be essential to the application it is a part of (save is core, save as is a feature), or be a bug (like Word 97 not being able to copy certain sub and super script combinations, as I found out years and years ago before I started writting all my labs in XHTML).
Internet Explorer, by not being essential to your OS (core libs, device drivers, shell), and by being unable to be "turned off" and not intalled (like MS Office import filters) is (Q.E.D.) a bug.
" I am reminded of what J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, said about the sounds of explosions in space in B5. He said to think of it as music. In the real world, there's no music in the blackness of space, playing dramatically as ships go by, but even physicists don't get upset when they hear music in space in the movies."
The little physicist in me was happy to observe that whenever we see an explosion from a cockpit or other "real" point of view in the B5 universe, the explosions and such are silent. Only when we are 3rd person omniscient do we hear the explosions in the music (JMS' reason reminds me of the 1812 overture; it also has timed explosions:)).
No, after version 3.x. Version 4 was much, much slower on any computer at the time. It felt as slow then as something like M13 feels now if you compare it to "real" browsers. Version 4 would often have to "reread" IMAP spools, reindex things, lose settings, try to support CSS and fail, had a broken proprietary DHTML model, loved to crash, had memory leaks... need I go on?
The big 4.x push in Netscape is something that was mainly a product of the marktetting department, not properly designed code. To say that it went to shit after the worst went by is just insanity. The Netscape 6.x stuff, while not super-duper polished like a complete browser (remember: it branched from around M18), at least functioned better than Netscape 4. It did CSS, CSS2, it didn't leak memory as much, and it certainly never crashed as often as NS4 (8 times in 4 hours is my record).
"Note: A download is NOT FREE. It costs time, and in many places of the world bandwidth is not flat-rate, so its not even "free" in that sense."
Take a gander at your EULAs. For IE, you're only allowed to make a backup copy of the download. For Mozilla, it's do as you please. This means in countries or places where it's not flat rate, they can make as many images from one download and spread it everywhere for a low, low cost!
Praise digital, praise free software, and boo towards trolls. Thank you, have a nice day.
AFAK, Andover was profitable, then VA ("The #1 losing money Linux PC maker") stepped in. A year later the joint company shed as much of the VA heritage as possible. How many VA employees were sent away in the end?
VA as a company was only able to buy a GOOD, profitable company and leech its revenue stream because of the ludicrous valuation of its stock by idiots on the futures market. That websites that were owned and operated by Andover in 1999 are still around today is a miracle of their financial controllers, thanks to Larry Augustin and his money-losing grew.
Slashdot Mirror
"Linux" is not. Do you mean just Linus Torvalds? Some kernel developers? Mandrake, SuSE, Red Hat employees? Patrick Volkerding?
Lalala -- it's all madness, that's why LSB exists, and why United Linux is trying to exist. It gives a nice, corporate friendly coherent entity.
The heatsink fan stickers are different. The connectors are in a different order. The COPYRIGHT string has a different date (2001 vs. 2002 -- no jpg artifacting suggesting a blur and redo).
The board layouts are very similar, and it's likely that someone did take a stock Radeon picture and mod it a bit, but those are still different boards entirely.
Guess what else lowers attention spans, alters thought patterns, and makes it harder to do such things as interact and study: music!
Ever tried to study to music? Unless the music is raw noise that you just tune out, chances are that you partly listen to it -- wasting precious mind cycles. If you are listening to particularly good music, which you stop to enjoy (or even jump up and dance to, depending on the situation, etc), you're clearly not focusing on the task at hand.
Humans don't multitask at a fundamental level (not well, anyways). This is why study guides say you shouldn't study to music, and that you should study in blocks of time greater than half an hour for full effect (your mind does take time to switch gears).
That these Xboxes are fun to play video games on.
Imagine that!
"- First, most people do not but Microsofware, they buy computers with Microsoftware preinstalled. Even for geeks it's getting harder to buy a PC without all that junk."
Until OEMs sign contracts that require bare HDs to be sold with software bundles, getting a naked PC is as easy as buying parts and putting them together. This is the way 99.999 percent of all computer inclined poeple go -- unless they just go to a local computer retailer and buy a bunch of whiteboxes which they'll make & test for a small fee.
In other words, this only affects people who buy brand-name computers. Such people are unlikely to care if there is no software anyways.
They're not "super super" like some of the Starcraft ones, but I'm still not all the way through (I've played through Stracraft + expansion twice :)).
A P2 300 was not low-end when Starcraft came out :p It plays nicely on 166 Mhz P1s (although non-MMX ones aren't really up to it).
:)
If you want to play games at the office, why not just have people bring in computers? I mean, you can't sit down and have a big network game on a short 30 minute lunch break. Not the ones I play, anyways.
I like the story element and RPG-ishness introduced in War3. It's great for the single player game. I'm less likely to create thousands of units and rushrushrust, as I am to create a small fighting force which I train and nurture to the highest level. It's not quite Myth2 in terms of battle tactics and the like, but it's a nice change from the usual "build everything, throw them at each other" Blizzard RTS
"1) It won't play smoothly on a P3 500 laptop (with 384 meg of RAM and an ATI Rage Mobility). Blizzard usually tries to get the low-end of the market. Not any longer"
On my A750s with TNT1s, which are "super-duper" for 3 years ago, the play is acceptable like Starcraft on a P120. It's slower than top-of-the-line, but very playable. If you want to play a game released in 2002, don't have a machine from pre-1999. Is that hard to accept? If so, try console gaming. They can have much larger windows of games (release + n years) than an arbitrary computer configuration.
Also, a Rage mobility isn't exactly a great 3D card to be using in a 3D game.
"Screw it. If this game had come out 5 years ago, maybe. But Starcraft is better, and so is Age of Empires 2."
If it had come out 5 years ago, it wouldn't be Warcraft 3. The Voodoo2s of the time (very high-end for 1997) can't do it acceptably. Starcraft and AOE2 are better for you because you have an old 2D-capable system. Essentially what you're saying (in your own words) is that you wanted something that worked on your old computer, and you're disapointed when it doesn't work like a game released 4 years ago (Starcraft). Again, I have to say, if you want to play games for computers released this year, own a computer with hardware from a maximum of 3 years ago. Try a desktop P3 with a GeForce 2 MX 400, I'm sure it'll do it more than acceptably.
Or move to console gaming. You sound like you'd enjoy that a lot more.
"OpenBSD had the best TCP/IP random number generation (recently re-written)."
Didn't you question anything when they said 2.2.1x, or OpenBSD 2.8 was "recent"? No? OpenBSD 3.1 is the most recently released one. They've had this for quite a few releases now (didn't you also notice that OpenSSH's default root problem affected OpenBSD 2.9-3.1?). They also had *no* data for Linux 2.4, or Windows XP.
Don't believe me? Scroll down to the bottom of the page where it mentions it was last updated in April 2001.
"MNG (pronounced ``ming''), is short for Multiple-image Network Graphics, as one might gather from the title of this page. Designed with the same modular philosophy as PNG and by many of the same people, MNG is intended to provide a home for all of the multi-image capabilities that have no place in PNG. "
Care to read more?
Actually, they're not going for 10 games+ a console. They're going for 2-4 games, with network support (10$ a month or so). This is why the ethernet port is standard (it makes it much easier to sell 3rd party people on this feature). This is why such things as the HD for streaming updates (required for MMORPGs -- remember the Phantasty Star Online v1 and v2 releases for the DC?), and such features as the "nickname" that the Xbox remembers (in such games as DOA3) for use in multiplayer?
Their model isn't stupid. They saw Sony, and the UO people making money hand over fist. They saw the console arena, where people want trouble-free gaming, and also want to try MMORPGs -- money + commitment to gaminf = PROFIT!
It's a fine position. I just don't agree with their other tactics of trying to lock down the box to stop people from using its online features for other things (media boxes, cheap set-top computers).
"I think Sega killed their consoles more or less just because they couldn't design a PS2 level system with the moeny they had left, and in the time needed."
No, they killed it because the DC was expensive to manufacture, and it didn't command the premium that the PS2 would command later on (Sony knows all about selling things with big margins).
They had taken a loss with the 32X, Sega CD, and Saturn. The losses were because the Sega CD had few titles, the 32X had no 3rd party support (but all the costs associated with developing the hardware, producing it, and trying to sell it), and the Saturn -- when your console is an SMP system which uses a quad-based 3D accel chip, you know you need people who are only the best of the best. Difficult development meant that it went by the wayside like the 32X.
Given that they'd lost all that money, and that they had to sell the DC at a loss to keep at an acceptable point on their economics curve, is it any wonder that when the numbers started to show doom, they just abandoned their baby and went 3rd party? It makes complete economic sense.
The Dreamcast is a "PS2 level" system. I call them 5th gen systems (with gen 1 being NES/TG16/SMS). 5th gen systems all used non-CD media, had support for very complex scene rendering (Shenmue), and could do some crazy things if well done. Unfortunately the PS2 is hard to develop for, doesn't have enough RAM, and has the VR0 VR1 problem (IE: their video card is hard to program for, and requires constant texture streaming to keep scenes looking complex). Plus the anti-aliasing that's common on the Dreamcast (due to the Kyro chipset-based rendering culling hidden polygons, it has lots of extra room for smoothing), is not common on the PS2. Thus PS2 games generally have jaggies and look like ass.
" I doubt they killed the DC because they were too costly, if so, why did they let the price drop to $100 or so?"
Because they had produced a lot of units. These units were no longer selling at 150$. If you have 100,000 units, and you will sell maybe 10,000 at 150$, maybe it's a good idea to sell 20,000 at 100$ because the area under the curve (total revenue) is much larger. Stepping down all the prices so that Sega could sell off as much as possible at each level (milking the profit margins as best they can) was a good way of ending the run. When they figured they'd reached saturation, they did the last (50$ US) cut so they could clear out the rest, claim a tax write off, and stop having to pay for expensive wharehouse space for their Dreamcast units that remained unsold.
Are you familiar with economics and business realities at all?
Sites like kuro5hin.org which, through careful donation drives, make 6 months of operating money in 3 days. Non-profits who are there for the people, who are lean and run well mainly out of the pockets of the people who're there?
Maybe a big business media site like Salon can't stay in business, but I'm sure that a leaner site could've. The Internet is all about the little guy, as Dan's Data's "Minnows 1, whales 0" argues. Until more people are online supporting a services model, you can't just base your entire revenue on a needing "just a few more" subscribers to break even.
Salon should've restructured about 74.5 million ago. They've lost a stupid amount of money.
When this comment was written by Karora.
Moderators of the above comment (+1 style): YHBT. YHL. HTH. HAND.
I agree that dumbing down is bad, but I don't agree with your WM point. Why should every GUI program writer write the same support code? You might as well say that they have to make all their apps stateful by hand. It's much simpler to provide one provably correct code path in the WM, than potentially thousands in all the applications in a system.
For those apps which are "special," they could simply send a "NON_STATEFUL" token to the WM when dealing with that window.
Ever driven a CAR? Ever noticed how signs don't come in uniform shapes and colours, only differentiated by the WORDS on them?
.. basically everyone except the US (which, I note, also rejects the metric system) has been holding on to its quant "old" money while other countries have made their bills easy to differentiate, and harder to counterfeit.
No, you haven't noticed that -- because colours are the most intuitive and fastest way of humans differentiating between several distinct objects. Ever tried to say what colour something spelt when the words were in another colour? You probably didn't do 100% because of that same fact.
That's why Canadians, Britons, Austrialians, etc, etc, etc, etc,
"What will the other 90% do for a living? And how do we pick which 10% it's going to be?"
The other 90% will just time-share work. Think about it. If you're paid more, you can work less. Assuming owners would cut their margins a bit (every owner), then every worker would have more consumer surplus to re-invest. This would accelerate the economy nicely.
The picking would be those willing to work. Do you assume everyone doesn't want to work? I want to work. Maybe not 60-80 hours a week like some crazies, but I enjoy spending 3-5 days of a week away from home, working with a team of trained people to solve problems.
Sounds like a client side problem. I don't have popups in my browser. I can only wonder what messed up program would put popups in video files. Mplayer sure doesn't have that problem :-D
If your page looks like crap, but people can still read the content, it's ok. My changelog uses CSS for everything. If you look at it on NS4, it will look "like crap" as you puh it -- but people can still scroll down and read everything just as it was intended.
First, that's my signature. I really was hoping you'd reply to the content of my message, where I did state that NS4.x sucked. Although it's not directly stated, there was a void between 3 and Mozilla where there weren't any useful browsers from Netscape.
Second, any "feature" (where a feature is defined as additional utility not essential to the core) which cannot be turned off must either be essential to the application it is a part of (save is core, save as is a feature), or be a bug (like Word 97 not being able to copy certain sub and super script combinations, as I found out years and years ago before I started writting all my labs in XHTML).
Internet Explorer, by not being essential to your OS (core libs, device drivers, shell), and by being unable to be "turned off" and not intalled (like MS Office import filters) is (Q.E.D.) a bug.
" I am reminded of what J. Michael Straczynski, creator of Babylon 5, said about the sounds of explosions in space in B5. He said to think of it as music. In the real world, there's no music in the blackness of space, playing dramatically as ships go by, but even physicists don't get upset when they hear music in space in the movies."
:)).
The little physicist in me was happy to observe that whenever we see an explosion from a cockpit or other "real" point of view in the B5 universe, the explosions and such are silent. Only when we are 3rd person omniscient do we hear the explosions in the music (JMS' reason reminds me of the 1812 overture; it also has timed explosions
No, after version 3.x. Version 4 was much, much slower on any computer at the time. It felt as slow then as something like M13 feels now if you compare it to "real" browsers. Version 4 would often have to "reread" IMAP spools, reindex things, lose settings, try to support CSS and fail, had a broken proprietary DHTML model, loved to crash, had memory leaks... need I go on?
The big 4.x push in Netscape is something that was mainly a product of the marktetting department, not properly designed code. To say that it went to shit after the worst went by is just insanity. The Netscape 6.x stuff, while not super-duper polished like a complete browser (remember: it branched from around M18), at least functioned better than Netscape 4. It did CSS, CSS2, it didn't leak memory as much, and it certainly never crashed as often as NS4 (8 times in 4 hours is my record).
"Note: A download is NOT FREE. It costs time, and in many places of the world bandwidth is not flat-rate, so its not even "free" in that sense."
Take a gander at your EULAs. For IE, you're only allowed to make a backup copy of the download. For Mozilla, it's do as you please. This means in countries or places where it's not flat rate, they can make as many images from one download and spread it everywhere for a low, low cost!
Praise digital, praise free software, and boo towards trolls. Thank you, have a nice day.
Could we see one for the VA/Andover one?
AFAK, Andover was profitable, then VA ("The #1 losing money Linux PC maker") stepped in. A year later the joint company shed as much of the VA heritage as possible. How many VA employees were sent away in the end?
VA as a company was only able to buy a GOOD, profitable company and leech its revenue stream because of the ludicrous valuation of its stock by idiots on the futures market. That websites that were owned and operated by Andover in 1999 are still around today is a miracle of their financial controllers, thanks to Larry Augustin and his money-losing grew.
Is someone to change his cronjob so the city scape flashes "CRASH N BURN" across a few adjacent buildings ;)
(Obreference)