Basilisk Games makes a wonderful turn-based RPG in the vein of Might & Magic and Ultima that has a Linux version and ran fine on my 3 year old Intel embedded graphics hardware. It's fun, addicting and has great replay value.
http://www.basiliskgames.com/book1.html
I know that the discussion is based around the "official" app stores, but because of the Pre's open nature there's a huge homebrew app scene. And while it may not be able to support a great gaming framework (yet), I've heard of really cool projects like a Doom emulator and others. The app store for the Pre may be limited now, but already the homebrew scene is looking healthy and has a lot of great offerings.
*Hundreds* of 300ft wind farms to power a data center? Holy sustainability problems Batman!
You said it! A good friend of mine is an engineer for Vestas, and I hear constantly about their nightmares in dealing with turbine uptime. Those wind farms are producing at 20% most of the time. Those guys better take that into account in their power capacity planning!
Possibly because business doesn't normally give a shit if a blind monkey with three fingers wrote the code as long as it just fucking works and they can see some cost savings or business benefit to implementing it. Us in the real business world are less concerned about "lock in" or what license something was written under and just want our shit to run and run well. MOSS enterprise search does a really kick ass job of indexing file shares and making them available in a really to use, easy to manage central location.
Software is a tool to acheive a business objective. If I've got the best tool to do the job, I don't care what political/social dynamic the license of the code falls into.
I know that I'll probably get verbally lynched for saying this here, but MOSS 2007 enterpise search is a REALLY nice way of dealing with this . Since MOSS can index your file shares, then all of your users can search for documents contextually using a simple web portal across multiple sites...
I better leave before I'm hanging from the Slashdot tree.
After doing this type of work for a while, I've found that the best way to keep my sanity while keeping users happy was to implement rigorous policy regarding how and when users ask for help. It sounds like your outfit may be too small to have a dedicated "helpdesk" or front line support, but I would suggest at least setting up a helpdesk system or Sharepoint portal that is self service to allow users to send in issues.
This allows you to maintain visiblity into your workload, so you can show why something isn't getting done after the fifth time Joe User asks the status, plus is an easy sell to your management with the argument that it allows you to effectively prioritize without users in your face all day asking why such and such isn't done or that this or that is the most important thing in the world at the moment.
The best thing about a policy like this is that you can easily deflect to people that are rude or in your face. "Did you put in a ticket?" "Sorry, I'm super busy and I can't effectively prioritize this request until you submit it." "Oh, your an asshole and want to know the status every five minutes? Check the portal." Getting enforcment on this is your biggest battle. If you can't win that, then take your experience, dedication and hard work and start shopping around. There's no reason to be burnt out because of the user population if you can help it.
If you need those drivers to run Vista on your PC, then Vista has a problem.
Just to play Devil's advocate here, I've had plenty of lockups, kernel panics, etc. due to faulty Linux modules with no "esoteric" or obscure hardware. To a normal user that would appear to be a "Linux" problem as well. Your statement appears to be contradicting itself.
Unfortunately, his only probable recourse is a lengthy and costly lawsuit. I can't imagine how much money Core IP and their customers are losing right now. All for what appears to be guesswork on the behalf of the law enforcement agency.
Laissez faire only works when you have sound money. If you have a currency that holds no real value (our Dollar and other debt-based fiat currencies) and is subject to at-whim inflation and deflation, then you NEED high levels of regulation for the system to work.
See, this is exactly the position the people in power want the American people, and eventually all of the World's population. If you're worried about how you are going to eat, then you are less interested in participating in local, federal or global democracy or resistance.
The people in control (and it's not the Presidents or political leaders that have the real power in the world) are using tools like the Federal Reserve and the IMF/World Bank to enact monetary policy that ends up bankrupting the working class of the world. Greenspan took the blame but his masters are the architects. It was all by design and it is only meant to enslave our population.
I don't know about you but I feel like I'm working more just to survive than ever.
You're obviously ill informed of the FED's previous bailout history. Companies that get aid loan packages from the FED rarely can ever pay them back. What happens? Nothing. More bailout loan packages, more inflation, more debt. Guess who gets to pay it all back in the end? That's right, the American Taxpayer through taxes AND inflation.
If anybody wants a real explination about how exactly our economy has functioned (or not functioned more accurately) read Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve. Every American and actually every world citizen needs to know how this bank and it's subsidiaries the IMF and World Bank are destroying sound economic policy all over the world.
VMWare's real-world SMP and Multi-CPU support is actually pretty shoddy. Although it is "supported" and two virtual processors will show up on the guest, the performance is not anywhere near bare metal multi-cpu performance.
I have a client running MSSQL and Exchange as virtual servers (both multithreaded apps that make good use of multiple processors/cores) and the performance was actually better with single virtual proc than assigning multiple cores to each VM.
VMWare supports processor "pinning" however and allows you to dedicate a specific proc/core to a VM which can really boost performance.
I couldn't get the networking to work in NAT mode, and bridging mode on a laptop ain't always the best idea.
I think you have it backwards. I use VirtualBox on my Linux laptop because its easily supported on my distibution (Arch Linux) but VMware is a nightmare to get working in anything but deb and redhat based distros in my experience.
The only downside for me is the lack of bridging. NAT works out of the box for networking but in order to bridge you have to create an openvpn connection back to your host and I already use an openvpn to connect to one of my clients, which complicates things when it wants to use the tun/tap interface... anway it was more pain than I was willing to go through to do any sort of virtual server testing.
It's a perpetual myth that energy costs are rising because of lack of energy, when in fact energy costs are rising because the Dollar is being massively devalued on domestic and international markets.
This is what happens when you have a fiat currency that's backed by nothing, and created out of debt. Every time the market "corrects" it leads to runaway inflation and rising costs because the dollar loses value as more and more worthless money gets pumped into the market to bail out near insolvent corporations and banks after the recent sub-prime scandal.
Don't blame lack of abundant energy, blame this fiasco of an economy run by a sadistic elitist banking cartel (the Federal Reserve) that has placed the American people and much of the world into a neo-serfdom.
I personally love ASSP (anti spam server proxy) for my clients.
It has a great deal of flexibility and since the highest false positives are flagged by the bayesian engine, you can set that specific filter to use "testing" mode which flags those messages with a subject line like [SPAM]. Couple that with a client side rule to deposit messages with that subject line into the junk mail folder, you then can allow employees to go through their own messages to look for their missing mail.
ASSP also has a feature to allow for users to contribute to the filtering rules, so the filter gets more accurate over time. They can send messages that get marked false positive to an internal address that modifies the bayesian database so that messages of that type make it through next time. That feature also white-lists the sender's address along with simply sending that recipient a message.
By far, it is the most flexible and powerful spam filter I've ever encountered and would highly recommend it for any small to medium sized business.
...and in many cases outlast the computers they are installed in. They also perform a useful function better and more economically than any other alternative at present.
That hasn't been my experience after 8 years in the industry. HDD's are a very common upgrade due to ever increasing drive sizes and generally also have a higher failure rate than all of the other parts in a PC.
If you want to talk about wasteful consumer electronics, crap like remote controls for car stereos, USB-powered electric pencil sharpeners, or LED-studded kid's shoes seem to beat hard drives hands down.
I would love to and also agree, but I was commenting in relation to the parent article which was about a billion hard drives being manufactured.
This makes me wonder how many of those drives are leeching heavy metals into the ground water tables while they rot in landfills or metal scrappers in China.
Computer HDDs have to be one of THE most wasteful consumer electronic devices ever created.
First thing within a minute of inauguration, in this order:
1. Abolish the illegal and corrupt institution that is the Federal Reserve.
2. Abolish the illegal and corrupt institution that is the IRS and the Federal Income Tax that pays the illegal interest on the illegal money borrowed from the illegal Federal Reserve.
3. Get assassinated.
...hey, at least I accomplished the two things that would completely re-invigorate the American Socio-Economic System.
Of course, I could just vote for Ron Paul and let him get assassinated in my place. There's a reason for the smear, people. He wants to destroy those two opressive institutions and there's no wonder that some very powerful people are against him.
I have a similar situation in a two man shop where our largest client has gone from 2 to 300 users in the past two years. The only way that we have been able to keep up with the management overhead is by implementing thin computing. We have six clients, and a total of about 25 servers (including our Citrix Farm), but I am able to only work four days a week and my partner only three.
This may be flaimbait here, but we also are almost exclusively Windows on the Server and Desktop (even our thin clients). God knows I love Linux and put it everywhere it's feasible (which has only been edge of network so far), but Active Directory and Citrix allow me to have my business and my life.
I have been a Linux user for about a year now, and everybody I know that ever switched or attempted to switch from Windows to Linux was due to seeing the sweet desktop and eye-candy achievable from using OSS desktop software. With a combo of Fluxbox and Gdesklets, I was able to entice at least three of my friends into installing some type of FOSS destkop OS. If that software had been available on Windows, who's to say that they ever would have even wanted to learn anything about Linux or the OSS movement?
I have always been a big PC gamer, but after switching exclusively to Linux, the availability of games has diminished, although I am finding ways to cope. America's Army and Enemy Territory are awesome Linux implementations of FPS which are also completely free. Scorched3D is another great implementation of an OpenGL game based on an old DOS game that I once enjoyed. Hey, and there's always the old Loki releases...
It's the fight that Microsoft and every game publisher is fighting against along with the RIAA and MPAA... Intellectual Property Rights.
The problem with PC gaming is simple. Lack of effective copy protection. PC games are being developed for a platform that provides a means to crack, and distribute the owner's intellectual property in a short time period. Often times these titles are available via warez sites and newsgroups before they are even released in stores.
The fact simply is that developing on the PC platform is a losing battle for most game developers and regardless of how much muscle Microsoft has in pushing them towards developing on Xbox, the simple fact is that Xbox copy infringement is not even close to being as rampant as PC game pirating is.
If you guys want to bitch about how the PC is dying as a gaming platform, then do your part to breath life into it and support the developers who take the time to release a game on a platform that it can be experienced fully. Tell your friends too.
Slashdot Mirror
Basilisk Games makes a wonderful turn-based RPG in the vein of Might & Magic and Ultima that has a Linux version and ran fine on my 3 year old Intel embedded graphics hardware. It's fun, addicting and has great replay value. http://www.basiliskgames.com/book1.html
I know that the discussion is based around the "official" app stores, but because of the Pre's open nature there's a huge homebrew app scene. And while it may not be able to support a great gaming framework (yet), I've heard of really cool projects like a Doom emulator and others. The app store for the Pre may be limited now, but already the homebrew scene is looking healthy and has a lot of great offerings.
*Hundreds* of 300ft wind farms to power a data center? Holy sustainability problems Batman!
You said it! A good friend of mine is an engineer for Vestas, and I hear constantly about their nightmares in dealing with turbine uptime. Those wind farms are producing at 20% most of the time. Those guys better take that into account in their power capacity planning!
Shhh! Don't say it too loudly! Everybody on the block is homomorphobic!
Possibly because business doesn't normally give a shit if a blind monkey with three fingers wrote the code as long as it just fucking works and they can see some cost savings or business benefit to implementing it. Us in the real business world are less concerned about "lock in" or what license something was written under and just want our shit to run and run well. MOSS enterprise search does a really kick ass job of indexing file shares and making them available in a really to use, easy to manage central location.
Software is a tool to acheive a business objective. If I've got the best tool to do the job, I don't care what political/social dynamic the license of the code falls into.
I know that I'll probably get verbally lynched for saying this here, but MOSS 2007 enterpise search is a REALLY nice way of dealing with this . Since MOSS can index your file shares, then all of your users can search for documents contextually using a simple web portal across multiple sites... I better leave before I'm hanging from the Slashdot tree.
After doing this type of work for a while, I've found that the best way to keep my sanity while keeping users happy was to implement rigorous policy regarding how and when users ask for help. It sounds like your outfit may be too small to have a dedicated "helpdesk" or front line support, but I would suggest at least setting up a helpdesk system or Sharepoint portal that is self service to allow users to send in issues.
This allows you to maintain visiblity into your workload, so you can show why something isn't getting done after the fifth time Joe User asks the status, plus is an easy sell to your management with the argument that it allows you to effectively prioritize without users in your face all day asking why such and such isn't done or that this or that is the most important thing in the world at the moment.
The best thing about a policy like this is that you can easily deflect to people that are rude or in your face. "Did you put in a ticket?" "Sorry, I'm super busy and I can't effectively prioritize this request until you submit it." "Oh, your an asshole and want to know the status every five minutes? Check the portal." Getting enforcment on this is your biggest battle. If you can't win that, then take your experience, dedication and hard work and start shopping around. There's no reason to be burnt out because of the user population if you can help it.
If you need those drivers to run Vista on your PC, then Vista has a problem.
Just to play Devil's advocate here, I've had plenty of lockups, kernel panics, etc. due to faulty Linux modules with no "esoteric" or obscure hardware. To a normal user that would appear to be a "Linux" problem as well. Your statement appears to be contradicting itself.
Unfortunately, his only probable recourse is a lengthy and costly lawsuit. I can't imagine how much money Core IP and their customers are losing right now. All for what appears to be guesswork on the behalf of the law enforcement agency.
Laissez faire only works when you have sound money. If you have a currency that holds no real value (our Dollar and other debt-based fiat currencies) and is subject to at-whim inflation and deflation, then you NEED high levels of regulation for the system to work.
See, this is exactly the position the people in power want the American people, and eventually all of the World's population. If you're worried about how you are going to eat, then you are less interested in participating in local, federal or global democracy or resistance.
The people in control (and it's not the Presidents or political leaders that have the real power in the world) are using tools like the Federal Reserve and the IMF/World Bank to enact monetary policy that ends up bankrupting the working class of the world. Greenspan took the blame but his masters are the architects. It was all by design and it is only meant to enslave our population.
I don't know about you but I feel like I'm working more just to survive than ever.
You're obviously ill informed of the FED's previous bailout history. Companies that get aid loan packages from the FED rarely can ever pay them back. What happens? Nothing. More bailout loan packages, more inflation, more debt. Guess who gets to pay it all back in the end? That's right, the American Taxpayer through taxes AND inflation.
If anybody wants a real explination about how exactly our economy has functioned (or not functioned more accurately) read Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve. Every American and actually every world citizen needs to know how this bank and it's subsidiaries the IMF and World Bank are destroying sound economic policy all over the world.
VMWare's real-world SMP and Multi-CPU support is actually pretty shoddy. Although it is "supported" and two virtual processors will show up on the guest, the performance is not anywhere near bare metal multi-cpu performance.
I have a client running MSSQL and Exchange as virtual servers (both multithreaded apps that make good use of multiple processors/cores) and the performance was actually better with single virtual proc than assigning multiple cores to each VM.
VMWare supports processor "pinning" however and allows you to dedicate a specific proc/core to a VM which can really boost performance.
I couldn't get the networking to work in NAT mode, and bridging mode on a laptop ain't always the best idea.
I think you have it backwards. I use VirtualBox on my Linux laptop because its easily supported on my distibution (Arch Linux) but VMware is a nightmare to get working in anything but deb and redhat based distros in my experience.
The only downside for me is the lack of bridging. NAT works out of the box for networking but in order to bridge you have to create an openvpn connection back to your host and I already use an openvpn to connect to one of my clients, which complicates things when it wants to use the tun/tap interface... anway it was more pain than I was willing to go through to do any sort of virtual server testing.
It's a perpetual myth that energy costs are rising because of lack of energy, when in fact energy costs are rising because the Dollar is being massively devalued on domestic and international markets.
This is what happens when you have a fiat currency that's backed by nothing, and created out of debt. Every time the market "corrects" it leads to runaway inflation and rising costs because the dollar loses value as more and more worthless money gets pumped into the market to bail out near insolvent corporations and banks after the recent sub-prime scandal.
Don't blame lack of abundant energy, blame this fiasco of an economy run by a sadistic elitist banking cartel (the Federal Reserve) that has placed the American people and much of the world into a neo-serfdom.
I personally love ASSP (anti spam server proxy) for my clients.
It has a great deal of flexibility and since the highest false positives are flagged by the bayesian engine, you can set that specific filter to use "testing" mode which flags those messages with a subject line like [SPAM]. Couple that with a client side rule to deposit messages with that subject line into the junk mail folder, you then can allow employees to go through their own messages to look for their missing mail.
ASSP also has a feature to allow for users to contribute to the filtering rules, so the filter gets more accurate over time. They can send messages that get marked false positive to an internal address that modifies the bayesian database so that messages of that type make it through next time. That feature also white-lists the sender's address along with simply sending that recipient a message.
By far, it is the most flexible and powerful spam filter I've ever encountered and would highly recommend it for any small to medium sized business.
...and in many cases outlast the computers they are installed in. They also perform a useful function better and more economically than any other alternative at present.That hasn't been my experience after 8 years in the industry. HDD's are a very common upgrade due to ever increasing drive sizes and generally also have a higher failure rate than all of the other parts in a PC.
If you want to talk about wasteful consumer electronics, crap like remote controls for car stereos, USB-powered electric pencil sharpeners, or LED-studded kid's shoes seem to beat hard drives hands down.
I would love to and also agree, but I was commenting in relation to the parent article which was about a billion hard drives being manufactured.
This makes me wonder how many of those drives are leeching heavy metals into the ground water tables while they rot in landfills or metal scrappers in China. Computer HDDs have to be one of THE most wasteful consumer electronic devices ever created.
First thing within a minute of inauguration, in this order:
...hey, at least I accomplished the two things that would completely re-invigorate the American Socio-Economic System.
1. Abolish the illegal and corrupt institution that is the Federal Reserve.
2. Abolish the illegal and corrupt institution that is the IRS and the Federal Income Tax that pays the illegal interest on the illegal money borrowed from the illegal Federal Reserve.
3. Get assassinated.
Of course, I could just vote for Ron Paul and let him get assassinated in my place. There's a reason for the smear, people. He wants to destroy those two opressive institutions and there's no wonder that some very powerful people are against him.
Centralized Computing.
I have a similar situation in a two man shop where our largest client has gone from 2 to 300 users in the past two years. The only way that we have been able to keep up with the management overhead is by implementing thin computing. We have six clients, and a total of about 25 servers (including our Citrix Farm), but I am able to only work four days a week and my partner only three.
This may be flaimbait here, but we also are almost exclusively Windows on the Server and Desktop (even our thin clients). God knows I love Linux and put it everywhere it's feasible (which has only been edge of network so far), but Active Directory and Citrix allow me to have my business and my life.
I have been a Linux user for about a year now, and everybody I know that ever switched or attempted to switch from Windows to Linux was due to seeing the sweet desktop and eye-candy achievable from using OSS desktop software. With a combo of Fluxbox and Gdesklets, I was able to entice at least three of my friends into installing some type of FOSS destkop OS. If that software had been available on Windows, who's to say that they ever would have even wanted to learn anything about Linux or the OSS movement?
Syphon Filter.
Had to be the most revolutionary game of it's time, not only graphically, but the gameplay as well.
I probably replayed that game 10 times, which is always the ultimate compliment.
Amen brotha.
I have always been a big PC gamer, but after switching exclusively to Linux, the availability of games has diminished, although I am finding ways to cope. America's Army and Enemy Territory are awesome Linux implementations of FPS which are also completely free. Scorched3D is another great implementation of an OpenGL game based on an old DOS game that I once enjoyed. Hey, and there's always the old Loki releases...
It's the fight that Microsoft and every game publisher is fighting against along with the RIAA and MPAA... Intellectual Property Rights.
The problem with PC gaming is simple. Lack of effective copy protection. PC games are being developed for a platform that provides a means to crack, and distribute the owner's intellectual property in a short time period. Often times these titles are available via warez sites and newsgroups before they are even released in stores.
The fact simply is that developing on the PC platform is a losing battle for most game developers and regardless of how much muscle Microsoft has in pushing them towards developing on Xbox, the simple fact is that Xbox copy infringement is not even close to being as rampant as PC game pirating is.
If you guys want to bitch about how the PC is dying as a gaming platform, then do your part to breath life into it and support the developers who take the time to release a game on a platform that it can be experienced fully. Tell your friends too.