Too many people in IT are clueless, unmotivated timeservers waiting for the next paycheck to show up.
They're luckier than the clueful, geek without a degree, who knows quite a bit and is self taught, but is forced to work in a factory to pay the bills, can only take classes part time (which is taking FOREVER!), and feels even more life-force and geek-soul being drained from him every day because of the crappy job they must endure.
The only thing worse than a clueless dork doing geek's work is a geek doing clueless dork work.
My experience with getting Cell-Phones to connect to anything is that if you don't live in an area that just happens to support some lame specific type of cell phone you're not getting connected to crap.
Years ago, there were very broad application cell phones with RJ-11 connectors to allow you to hook up any old modem to them, but as with all conspiracies, those types of cell phones have vanished entirely and of been replaced by things that now require special (probably costly) services.
It's all a plot by them to make sure we can't do any 'netting without a million people listening in.
I hate spam. No. I DISPISE Spam. It makes me want to kill people. Chop them into little bits, even.
But everytime I catch myself thinking that spam should be made illegal, I start to wonder where we would draw the line at?
If we let them outlaw spam, pretty soon we won't be able to e-mail people we don't know on some formal basis, or at least, not without fear of being turned in and penalized.
Rather than allowing them to use our hatred for spam against us, I think we should find some way to fight spammers. Perhaps if we were to create some organization that profiled and listed the personal information of people caught spamming, we could all collectively violate their privacy in the same way they have violated ours (by writing them millions of personal hate letters and flooding their paper mailbox to the point of uselessness... or other perfectly legal forms of retaliation.)
I hate spam. I just wish we didn't have to resort to creating more laws just to get rid of it.
For inside the balloon is another ballon, and inside that one another. It is like an Onion, with all these different shells expanding outwards from the central fire of Creation.
I knew it. The Onion is the center of the universe!
I can think of another Software company that wouldn't be in a world of hurt today if they didn't have that bloody hardware company soaking up resources up until recently.
But I won't mention Sega's name, lest I offend other Dreamcast fans.
I think it would be in Apple's absolute best interest to open up the Apple design spec, sell off their hardware business, and go into the OS Market.
80% of those people are still farmers, will remain farmers, will never have a higher quality of life, and will never care because of ignorance.
You really love your fellow man, don't you?
Nothing is good about Communism.
Nothing is good about the Democrats or Replubicans, either...
The world won't ever be free until we're all Libertarian and can truely care about peace and goodwill without having to fall back on pitiful excuses such as God, Country, or Self-Interest.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Re:Didn't fail in the market place.
on
Indrema No More
·
· Score: 2
So what you are saying is, that basically what they should have done is marketed it as a computer?
Heh. Here's a concept...
Install a user friendly VCR-Like interface on top of Linux... simple funcitons... load game... play CD/DVD, etc... the stuff we see in most consoles with a few extras.
Then, mount a DVD-CD-R drive in it. Give it four controller ports. Include a Keyboard, Joypad, and Mouse. Then include a disc with a very basic self booting mini-linux distro that comes with a web-browser and some other basic applications. Add an option for an internal IDE Hard Disc.
It would be the C64/Amiga 500 all over again.
If Microsoft had any brains what-so ever, the X-Box would be doing this, too.
Consoles are getting so advanced that soon it will be reasonable expectation for them to do more than just boot games.
With DVD-CD-R combo drives popping out of the woodwork, there's no reason to go with a static ROM disc when a standard FileSystem for re-writable media could be built into a console or OS.
The creature will eat the Beachball, Rocks, and if you manage to get to the forth world you may notice that the Skeleton Village is populated with living dead.
My creature cleaned house. I hope I didn't need them skeletons for anything. YES! HE ATE THEM ALL DISPITE PUKING EACH ONE UP IMMEDIATELY AFTER EATING IT!
I paid $5000 several months ago. It doesn't bother me, but it might bother some people.
Dell now offers the 8000, which is some degree cheaper. It's not nearly as light as the 5000e, but in most respects it is a superior system minus the extreme compact nature of the 5000e.
It's easy to say that if I were buying the system today I would rather have the 8000, for $2000 less.
Incidently, you are very wrong. I have a Pentium III based desktop system graced with 256 megabytes of ram and a GeForce 2 GTS and I can honestly say from personal experience that my desktop doesn't game THAT MUCH better than my laptop.
Yes, there is a performance difference. And in some things you can REALLY tell. But no, it's not "half as fast" as you put it. I can EASILY say without a doubt that my Laptop was outperforming many desktops I saw present at Lanwar.
I speak as an owner of both. If my 5000e gets to the point where the latest, greatest game isn't going to play well, I'll buy a new laptop.
As for the question of my Laptop getting stolen, I've known of few items* turn up missing at Lanwars in general. Maybe it's the mentality of gamers that the only thing it's okay to steal is copyrighted material. Besides, at Lanwar 9, I think I was the only person out of 380+ that showed up with a Laptop. I looked for others, but didn't see any.
*(As I recall, someone's stuffed animal turned up missing at Lanwar 9. It was announced over the PA, but this doesn't mean it was stolen, it could have just been misplaced.)
That's my only concern with the GeForce2Go. If it supports RatioMetric, I'm sooooooooo there with my next laptop. If it does not, forget it.
BTW - The ATI doesn't seem to take a performance hit as the scaling appears to be done in hardware somewhere between the Video Chipset and the LCD, or perhaps in the LCD display it's self. If that's the case, I think there is probably no reason that NVidia based Laptops can't have this feature.
128 megabytes of ram (ready for the other 128 megs any day now...) 30 gig HD, 850mhz Pentium III, Rage Mobility 128, 1600x1200 15+ inch display with RatioMetric Scaling, a DVD, and a 3Com CardBus 10/100+56k double height dongle-free Nic/Modem.
I've found that for almost any game I want to play, this groovy little gig is light, powerful, and a whole lot less trouble than "dragging along my big leather suitcase and my garment bag and my tenor saxophone and my twelve-pound bowling ball and my lucky, lucky autographed glow-in-the-dark snorkel" (well, hey, at least THAT'S what it feels like to drag your whole computer to LANWAR.
Anyway, I normally get a lot of ooohs and aaahs from the people sitting next to me. Their first reactions are "You aren't seriously going to play on a Laptop are you?"
But by the time they see me pulling off acceptable frame-rates in Quake 3 they soon realize maybe it's not so bad for games after all. (Just bring along a good mouse, touch-pads blow for games.)
Incidently, it even plays Black And White fairly well, and of course it plays Diablo II like a dream.
One thing to note about portables that anybody looking to buy one should keep in mine is the RatioMetric Displays.
Some LCDs only look good in their native resolution, requiring lower screen sizes to be scaled up into a blocky mess or to be reduced down and not viewed fullscreen.
ATI's later offerings have used a method where somewhere between the video output and the LCD, any display that isn't full screen is blown up to fill the full LCD with a natural Anti-Aliasing effect. This form of "Mode Promotion" works really well for almost any display mode, though anything less than 640x480 does seem to suffer from a slight blurr, but who uses anything lower than that for games?
Anyway, the point of this message is that you shouldn't discount very high end Laptops as Lanparty material. Just get over the $5000 price tag of one with good performance and you'll be fine.
"It sure looked like it could have been something tho."
The only reason some Linux people wanted to see Indrema survive was because Linux is still not even remotely close to being accepted as a gaming platform and Linux geeks want so badly for that to change.
Loki can't do everything, though I'm sure someone was going to reply to me screaming their name. It takes more than a Quake 3 port.
The fact is, that Linux still isn't really ready to be a major gaming platform, and even had the Indrema taken off, this still wouldn't have given proof that the Linux OS is ready for main-stream gaming, it would've just proven that a console running on Linux can be a viable gaming platform. There is a major difference between running Linux on a console for games, and using a Linux powered PC for games.
This is one of the reasons I'm planning on switching to a regional ISP...
I've been using USIT.NET, which got bought by ONEMAIN and then became part of EARTHLINK.
For this reason I plan on switching to a different ISP, one that is based here in Tennessee and doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. (I know people who work for them and the company seems very solid, even if relatively small.)
My logic behind switching to these guys (ISDN.NET) is that by getting DSL through them (along with web hosting services and a few other things) I'm supporting a competitor of Bellsouth.Net.
Even though Bellsouth is just reselling their lines to ISDN.NET, I like knowing that I didn't choose Bellsouth.NET directly. It's almost the only way I can stick my middle finger up to them.
I would've already dropped USIT/EARTHLINK if it weren't for the fact that I won't be able to get the DSL line until JUNE!
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, use it.
It wasn't meant to be funny, unfortunately.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Too many people in IT are clueless, unmotivated timeservers waiting for the next paycheck to show up.
They're luckier than the clueful, geek without a degree, who knows quite a bit and is self taught, but is forced to work in a factory to pay the bills, can only take classes part time (which is taking FOREVER!), and feels even more life-force and geek-soul being drained from him every day because of the crappy job they must endure.
The only thing worse than a clueless dork doing geek's work is a geek doing clueless dork work.
:-(
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
My experience with getting Cell-Phones to connect to anything is that if you don't live in an area that just happens to support some lame specific type of cell phone you're not getting connected to crap.
Years ago, there were very broad application cell phones with RJ-11 connectors to allow you to hook up any old modem to them, but as with all conspiracies, those types of cell phones have vanished entirely and of been replaced by things that now require special (probably costly) services.
It's all a plot by them to make sure we can't do any 'netting without a million people listening in.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Actually, there is signifigant proof in the order that children who play video games are more creative and less violent.
And I quite frankly happen to like American "Tits on a Stick" thank you.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
I think the gaming community should countersue, on the grounds that we the gaming community may have to suffer any censorship that may come of us!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
I hate spam. No. I DISPISE Spam. It makes me want to kill people. Chop them into little bits, even.
But everytime I catch myself thinking that spam should be made illegal, I start to wonder where we would draw the line at?
If we let them outlaw spam, pretty soon we won't be able to e-mail people we don't know on some formal basis, or at least, not without fear of being turned in and penalized.
Rather than allowing them to use our hatred for spam against us, I think we should find some way to fight spammers. Perhaps if we were to create some organization that profiled and listed the personal information of people caught spamming, we could all collectively violate their privacy in the same way they have violated ours (by writing them millions of personal hate letters and flooding their paper mailbox to the point of uselessness... or other perfectly legal forms of retaliation.)
I hate spam. I just wish we didn't have to resort to creating more laws just to get rid of it.
Spam is Bad. Laws are worse.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
For inside the balloon is another ballon, and inside that one another. It is like an Onion, with all these different shells expanding outwards from the central fire of Creation.
I knew it. The Onion is the center of the universe!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
This is a post to other newbies explaining that the moderation system isn't perfect.
It'll get moderated down as off-topic.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
infinitely more flexible than typical WIMP operations.
For those who haven't been using computers for 20 years ---
WIMP - Windows Icons Mouse & Pointer.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Too bad no one's heard of it.
My ICQ# is in the 200,000's.
When I started using ICQ, nobody else had heard of it either.
Amazing what's happened the past few years, eh?
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
I can think of another Software company that wouldn't be in a world of hurt today if they didn't have that bloody hardware company soaking up resources up until recently.
But I won't mention Sega's name, lest I offend other Dreamcast fans.
I think it would be in Apple's absolute best interest to open up the Apple design spec, sell off their hardware business, and go into the OS Market.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
I can't think of a more annoying (fitting) voice personally.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
80% of those people are still farmers, will remain farmers, will never have a higher quality of life, and will never care because of ignorance.
You really love your fellow man, don't you?
Nothing is good about Communism.
Nothing is good about the Democrats or Replubicans, either...
The world won't ever be free until we're all Libertarian and can truely care about peace and goodwill without having to fall back on pitiful excuses such as God, Country, or Self-Interest.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
So what you are saying is, that basically what they should have done is marketed it as a computer?
Heh. Here's a concept...
Install a user friendly VCR-Like interface on top of Linux... simple funcitons... load game... play CD/DVD, etc... the stuff we see in most consoles with a few extras.
Then, mount a DVD-CD-R drive in it. Give it four controller ports. Include a Keyboard, Joypad, and Mouse. Then include a disc with a very basic self booting mini-linux distro that comes with a web-browser and some other basic applications. Add an option for an internal IDE Hard Disc.
It would be the C64/Amiga 500 all over again.
If Microsoft had any brains what-so ever, the X-Box would be doing this, too.
Consoles are getting so advanced that soon it will be reasonable expectation for them to do more than just boot games.
With DVD-CD-R combo drives popping out of the woodwork, there's no reason to go with a static ROM disc when a standard FileSystem for re-writable media could be built into a console or OS.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Interesting=2, Informative=1, Funny=1, Total=4
What that means is that only 1/4th of the people who moderated this post realized it was meant to be a joke.
Either that or 3 of the 4 moderators are Chinese, which sort of does figure in with world population numbers.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
The creature will eat the Beachball, Rocks, and if you manage to get to the forth world you may notice that the Skeleton Village is populated with living dead.
My creature cleaned house. I hope I didn't need them skeletons for anything. YES! HE ATE THEM ALL DISPITE PUKING EACH ONE UP IMMEDIATELY AFTER EATING IT!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
...just increase public ludity?
There are a lot of people into Voyeurism, you know.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
I paid $5000 several months ago. It doesn't bother me, but it might bother some people.
Dell now offers the 8000, which is some degree cheaper. It's not nearly as light as the 5000e, but in most respects it is a superior system minus the extreme compact nature of the 5000e.
It's easy to say that if I were buying the system today I would rather have the 8000, for $2000 less.
Incidently, you are very wrong. I have a Pentium III based desktop system graced with 256 megabytes of ram and a GeForce 2 GTS and I can honestly say from personal experience that my desktop doesn't game THAT MUCH better than my laptop.
Yes, there is a performance difference. And in some things you can REALLY tell. But no, it's not "half as fast" as you put it. I can EASILY say without a doubt that my Laptop was outperforming many desktops I saw present at Lanwar.
I speak as an owner of both. If my 5000e gets to the point where the latest, greatest game isn't going to play well, I'll buy a new laptop.
As for the question of my Laptop getting stolen, I've known of few items* turn up missing at Lanwars in general. Maybe it's the mentality of gamers that the only thing it's okay to steal is copyrighted material. Besides, at Lanwar 9, I think I was the only person out of 380+ that showed up with a Laptop. I looked for others, but didn't see any.
*(As I recall, someone's stuffed animal turned up missing at Lanwar 9. It was announced over the PA, but this doesn't mean it was stolen, it could have just been misplaced.)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
That's my only concern with the GeForce2Go. If it supports RatioMetric, I'm sooooooooo there with my next laptop. If it does not, forget it.
BTW - The ATI doesn't seem to take a performance hit as the scaling appears to be done in hardware somewhere between the Video Chipset and the LCD, or perhaps in the LCD display it's self. If that's the case, I think there is probably no reason that NVidia based Laptops can't have this feature.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
I do rather well with my Laptop, thank you very much. Maybe the one you've been playing on just isn't powerful enough.
Yes, the hard drives tend to be slow. A big enough laptop hard drive helps defeat some of this, and lots of memory always helps.
I'd rather SPEND more than CARRY more. Call me spoiled.
I can't wait to get ahold of a GeForce2Go based laptop.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Yup. A Notbook. A fully loaded Dell 5000e.
128 megabytes of ram (ready for the other 128 megs any day now...) 30 gig HD, 850mhz Pentium III, Rage Mobility 128, 1600x1200 15+ inch display with RatioMetric Scaling, a DVD, and a 3Com CardBus 10/100+56k double height dongle-free Nic/Modem.
I've found that for almost any game I want to play, this groovy little gig is light, powerful, and a whole lot less trouble than "dragging along my big leather suitcase and my garment bag and my tenor saxophone and my twelve-pound bowling ball and my lucky, lucky autographed glow-in-the-dark snorkel" (well, hey, at least THAT'S what it feels like to drag your whole computer to LANWAR.
Anyway, I normally get a lot of ooohs and aaahs from the people sitting next to me. Their first reactions are "You aren't seriously going to play on a Laptop are you?"
But by the time they see me pulling off acceptable frame-rates in Quake 3 they soon realize maybe it's not so bad for games after all. (Just bring along a good mouse, touch-pads blow for games.)
Incidently, it even plays Black And White fairly well, and of course it plays Diablo II like a dream.
One thing to note about portables that anybody looking to buy one should keep in mine is the RatioMetric Displays.
Some LCDs only look good in their native resolution, requiring lower screen sizes to be scaled up into a blocky mess or to be reduced down and not viewed fullscreen.
ATI's later offerings have used a method where somewhere between the video output and the LCD, any display that isn't full screen is blown up to fill the full LCD with a natural Anti-Aliasing effect. This form of "Mode Promotion" works really well for almost any display mode, though anything less than 640x480 does seem to suffer from a slight blurr, but who uses anything lower than that for games?
Anyway, the point of this message is that you shouldn't discount very high end Laptops as Lanparty material. Just get over the $5000 price tag of one with good performance and you'll be fine.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"It sure looked like it could have been something tho."
The only reason some Linux people wanted to see Indrema survive was because Linux is still not even remotely close to being accepted as a gaming platform and Linux geeks want so badly for that to change.
Loki can't do everything, though I'm sure someone was going to reply to me screaming their name. It takes more than a Quake 3 port.
The fact is, that Linux still isn't really ready to be a major gaming platform, and even had the Indrema taken off, this still wouldn't have given proof that the Linux OS is ready for main-stream gaming, it would've just proven that a console running on Linux can be a viable gaming platform. There is a major difference between running Linux on a console for games, and using a Linux powered PC for games.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
...Now all we need is a little Endurium and we'll be ready to start looking for inhabitable planets to colonize.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
This is one of the reasons I'm planning on switching to a regional ISP...
I've been using USIT.NET, which got bought by ONEMAIN and then became part of EARTHLINK.
For this reason I plan on switching to a different ISP, one that is based here in Tennessee and doesn't appear to be going anywhere anytime soon. (I know people who work for them and the company seems very solid, even if relatively small.)
My logic behind switching to these guys (ISDN.NET) is that by getting DSL through them (along with web hosting services and a few other things) I'm supporting a competitor of Bellsouth.Net.
Even though Bellsouth is just reselling their lines to ISDN.NET, I like knowing that I didn't choose Bellsouth.NET directly. It's almost the only way I can stick my middle finger up to them.
I would've already dropped USIT/EARTHLINK if it weren't for the fact that I won't be able to get the DSL line until JUNE!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
I don't deny the appeal of watching robots fight each other, but why hasn't the genre progressed beyond that?
Because it's not legal to film PEOPLE killing each other!
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"