I related to my WinXP Pro installation the same way. After 2 reinstalls - trying to make my DVD burner working and having Quake 4 installed simultaneously - I stopped treating my Windows as temporary movie player for Linux. Wasted week-end is way too much. Installing Windows is not entertaining.
If only recovering Windows was as easy as Linux, I might have also considered DRM on a great game a minor nuisance. Yet, most protected games I have played were not worth the trouble. There are no "great enough" protected games which are worth reinstalling Windows.
Many of us define DRM more accurately as "digital restrictions management".
The (proper) definition comes from RMS.
I'm kind of sad too - I wanted to try the game, but SecuROM simply doesn't work on my PC. I have experienced all that in full with Quake 4 which used it too. Cracked version confirmed the rule that most protected games are not worth the trouble.
BTW, forgot to mention another big variable affecting size of TCP implementation.
Do you need to support BSD socket API or not?
The BSD sockets provide quite number of services, supporting which is quite elaborate. e.g. accepting connection with system call vs. notifying application asynchronously that it has a new connection. or the same applied to received packets. or synchronous sending.
TCP in 10k without BSD sockets interface is doable and not complicated.
From my experience, biggest challenges in TCP are the all other smaller RFCs written after TCP became STD.
If you look at other projects e.g. LWIP, you will notice that core TCP code isn't that large. Many parts deal with compatibility issues, with security issues and of course with memory management. (Many disregard memory management, yet TCP for effective work has to have quite an amount of memory: otherwise bandwidth would be quite limited.)
From my personal experience, TCP is nothing more than ring buffer, four counters and FSM to track the counters. Rest is optional and can be easily simulated, remaining within RFC requirements. (Yes, I was implementing TCP long time ago for traffic shaping module.)
In our company IT is engaged in three major activities: spilling coffee on servers, checking cables and answering "NO" to all questions. None of that requires any "knowledge".
My friend to demo his diploma work implemented trivial TCP/IP & HTTP for micro-controller with only 2K flash memory and 2K of RAM. Main work was specialized signal processing - monitoring over HTTP in HTML (with some bits of JavaScript) was pure bonus.
TCP/IP itself when implemented for only particular tasks is not that complicated. Modern OSs has to accommodate all possible applications and scenarios (including security stuff) and TCP/IP ends-up being quite bloated.
Google doesn't support S2S (server to server) part of XMPP protocol. With Google Talk you are limited to talk only to other Google Talk users.
Description implies that Yandex simply made its clone of existing XMPP client which supports S2S out of box.
P.S.
Here's hoping that its affair with XMPP will help eliminate ICQ's enormous foothold in Russia.
Knowing conservatism of Russians, I wouldn't hold my breath. ICQ is popular because there are lots of different clients for it with tons of features. XMPP would take some time to catch up.
Also, due to age of ICQ protocols, many firewalls support it natively allowing admins to control precisely what and how their users do. That plays great role in corporate adoption of ICQ in Russia. And since private internet in Russia is still relatively expensive, most people use Net (and ICQ) in office, not at home.
The RIAA and McCain's campaign must use the same people for their due-diligence vetting...
Not from US. But as a bystander I had an impression that in fact that was Democrats who introduce all possible kinds of dangerous laws: DMCA was introduced during democratic president.
Obama now also has the backing of the industry and one can only wonder what pro-big-business laws they would come up with. With Republicans it is much easier: they normally go for low hanging fruits like tax breaks and gov't benefits.
Found recently an article about piracy, mostly in context of games but also touching **AA claims. This is pretty much my opinion on piracy in well written form.
It is hard to swallow to many, but I still stand on the position that many people will not engage in what now called "piracy" if only business was better and quicker in responding to changing customer needs. Nobody wants to be criminal, nor states want to criminalize its populace. But **AA actions... This is pretty much worst what have happened in creative business in ages.
ZFS is targeted at large scale installations with RAID/etc. Hardly FS for MythTV or normal home PC.
I were using for some time JFS with Ext3 and can hardly complain.
Though the bit:
[...] where 25% of the filesystem ended up in lost+found with numbers for filenames.
tells me that the problem might not be in the file system itself. I would suggest replacing hard drive and/or just in case adding sync somewhere in shutdown sequence of your box. XFS was and is running on many boxes around the world. If you have seen something like that, my first thought would be faulty hard drive or bad cooling (so HDD did overheat).
Another browser? Again wasting time finding all the options to turn off all the new "exciting" "bells and whistles"??
I'd say rather "NO." FireFox 3 is already dumb down enough and mimics IE in many aspects. Third "user-friendly" browser, which brings about ZERO value to browsing, is bit too much for me to swallow.
Well, you know, Diablo never was praised for being great RPG.
Restarting after death was very easy in original Diablo 1/2 - do not think that Diablo 3 would make that worse.
In world of RPG, Diablo is essentially senseless shooter. Shoot whatever moves. Multi-player also played not last role in its success. If you ever tried to play co-op in NWN1, you would understand that dumb-down Diablo has its niche: simpler game play allows to add more features elsewhere (e.g. multi-player), which are way too complicated in full fledged RPGs. Great advantage: you do not need DM in Diablo. In NWN1 any decent MP module requires to have DM.
all in all this is one game i am not going to waste $60 bucks on.
As much as I'm disgruntled too that we are not getting real Fallout, still as post-apocalyptic "Oblivion with guns" the game might stand.
I do not like RPG mechanics (nor first person mode) of Oblivion, the thingy might just be something I would take a look at.
I would definitely take a look at it if they would at least change name to not to spoil the great franchise which Fallout was.
At the moment there are really few good RPGs are coming out. I'm replaying at the moment Sacred awaiting for Diablo3 and Sacred2. NWN2 was the biggest disappointment of RPG I ever had. Morrowind/Oblivion - I simply didn't liked. That might make the game at least worth checking.
Ha-ha-ha! If I had mod points, I would have modded you up "Funny"!
True: what kind of idiot would trade true gaming - PC gaming - for a gimmicky controller and games which generally belong to genre "button mashing TV show. sit tight and watch." Ha-ha!!!
In original Fallout you could have solved quests without ever shooting at anybody. Fallout 3 is plain shooter in that aspect, quests do not really matter: shoot first, ask questions later. And you have to shoot because you get shoot at first too.
I think they have demoed (as usually) the best what game has to offer.
Consequently, whatever was left out of the demo will be half-arsed experience: strategic play, quests w/o killing and well actually playing game without killing anyone.
Greatest feature of original Fallout people are clamoring about that you could have played thru the whole game with only one single battle.
They demoed urban shooter flick with story. I have to conclude that the game has nothing else (interesting) in it.
Original Fallout was original game, one of a kind. Fallout 3 is one of a genre, which already has wast library of games. Do not get me wrong, I like urban shooters. But I was expecting more - I wanted to play something what at least remotely resembles original Fallout game, hard core RPG game with multitude of gameplays, with one of the best RPG mechanics ever developed outside of WotC.
I do not understand all that stuff surrounding Perl 6.
Perl 5 is near perfect: it does many things very efficiently, especially in coding effort department.
Perl 6 is different beast. Perl 6 is a standard. Whatever implements standard can be called Perl 6. There are several implementations underway (mostly complete by now) but they are pretty much unknown to masses due to huge popularity of Perl 5.
All this talks about Perl death remind me the talks about assembler programming death. My groupmate told me that in University about decade ago. Since then, like a curse, I have to deal with assembler regularly. Not that I have anything against it. But it bothers me that some people when see something new, fancy and shiny and quickly declare everything else old, uncool and boring.
P.S. And, btw, ask the.Net crowd about scripting languages. M$ already brainwashed them. Will you see, C# is not scripting, CLR is not interpreter. Scripts sucks because they sucks and C# is better. Scripting languages are dead. End of topic. Move on.
I wouldn't say it MS fault per se. In my experience, most of the time this is unskilled developers who make such bad press for MS. As embedded programmer, I can tell you that most of such problems come from hardware. Windows BSODs, Linux oopses - there is not much difference. If the developers were not morons: (1) watchdog timer would have being configured properly rebooting system within seconds after OS crash; (2) in particular Windows can reboot instead of flashing the BSOD.
Yes, Windows quality sucks, but in such applications most of the crashes happen due to H/W problems. You do not see much of Linux flops because the developers on average know better how to build system which should run 24/7. Windows developers on other side, often deliver literally snapshot of development system with all bells and whistles activated. That's why we are seeing such BSODs.
Though, to the topic, most embarrassing flop I have seen was a row of new laptops on demo stand behind glass. They should have been running some fancy demo, but instead all like one had the WGA pop up on screen telling that "the XP might be not genuine." Demo was still running in the background, but not full screen, so you didn't see it at first. And this was in retail shop with literally "just unboxed" hardware all having proper OEM licenses.
I can give one (simplified) example of something what had been happening right before my eyes.
Tender was for school software. Three companies offered deals. Then in sudden turn of events clarification of requirements came with following disqualification of two companies from the tender. Time for tender was three month and to finish legalese required to qualify for the new clarified requirements was about 8 months. Pretty much everybody knew that the larger company which won the tender paid off (indirectly, through deal with other ministry) to make tender conditions impossible for its competitors. (Accusing anybody doesn't work: "Software market is evolving fast so requirements has to follow its development" is the universal excuse.)
Find some sale guys and talk with them - this is happening everywhere. My example actually from my homeland Belarus (and same thing happened in Russia twice to the company too). Though the countries are underdeveloped by all means, many politicians there are already trying hard to make sure that their career would look clean. And this is how it'd done.
Is it only me who think that real target are the pirates in 3rd world (China, India) and real goal is to push them to adopt Vista?
Economy of piracy has its mechanics and M$ exploited it many times. Many developers get first taste of programming on pirated Windows using pirated development software. M$ had rather them pirating Vista.
All this WGA thing is really nothing, because there are bunch of packs floating on net with XP and Vista stripped of all unnecessary stuff (like license checks). Most active pirates will not be affected by M$' change of WGA by a bit.
Ok, I'm not Canadian, but this applies to everyone when their local government is pissing away money for no good reason.
WTF?! Do you even following politics?
Business is greatest influence force in politics.
This is classical form of corruption: business makes a undertable deal with local politicians so that they buy their products. The statue that all procurement deals have to be public and open to competition - is the most often ignored statue. (Also popular (in 3rd world) are preferential investments, but they are quite hard to hide and rarely happen in developed countries.)
This is essentially how politicians make money. Or you thought that they simply do their thing out of pure altruism and patriotism? [Sarcasm intended.]
Slashdot Mirror
The skillset required to tweak a PC for gaming and really enjoy PC games overlaps significantly with the skillset required to play pirated games.
Your comment is mostly moot. For one simple reason.
The money "required to tweak a PC for gaming" also indicates that the people are the potential buyer.
All business need is not to turn them off - because they are purchasing power, target audience and consumers.
Steam and StarDock both work well and earned a praise in gaming community. Yet, EA consistently (and insistently) cannot do it.
I related to my WinXP Pro installation the same way. After 2 reinstalls - trying to make my DVD burner working and having Quake 4 installed simultaneously - I stopped treating my Windows as temporary movie player for Linux. Wasted week-end is way too much. Installing Windows is not entertaining.
If only recovering Windows was as easy as Linux, I might have also considered DRM on a great game a minor nuisance. Yet, most protected games I have played were not worth the trouble. There are no "great enough" protected games which are worth reinstalling Windows.
Many of us define DRM more accurately as "digital restrictions management".
The (proper) definition comes from RMS.
I'm kind of sad too - I wanted to try the game, but SecuROM simply doesn't work on my PC. I have experienced all that in full with Quake 4 which used it too. Cracked version confirmed the rule that most protected games are not worth the trouble.
BTW, forgot to mention another big variable affecting size of TCP implementation.
Do you need to support BSD socket API or not?
The BSD sockets provide quite number of services, supporting which is quite elaborate. e.g. accepting connection with system call vs. notifying application asynchronously that it has a new connection. or the same applied to received packets. or synchronous sending.
TCP in 10k without BSD sockets interface is doable and not complicated.
From my experience, biggest challenges in TCP are the all other smaller RFCs written after TCP became STD.
If you look at other projects e.g. LWIP, you will notice that core TCP code isn't that large. Many parts deal with compatibility issues, with security issues and of course with memory management. (Many disregard memory management, yet TCP for effective work has to have quite an amount of memory: otherwise bandwidth would be quite limited.)
From my personal experience, TCP is nothing more than ring buffer, four counters and FSM to track the counters. Rest is optional and can be easily simulated, remaining within RFC requirements. (Yes, I was implementing TCP long time ago for traffic shaping module.)
Since when IT became "knowledge based work"???
In our company IT is engaged in three major activities: spilling coffee on servers, checking cables and answering "NO" to all questions. None of that requires any "knowledge".
My friend to demo his diploma work implemented trivial TCP/IP & HTTP for micro-controller with only 2K flash memory and 2K of RAM. Main work was specialized signal processing - monitoring over HTTP in HTML (with some bits of JavaScript) was pure bonus.
TCP/IP itself when implemented for only particular tasks is not that complicated. Modern OSs has to accommodate all possible applications and scenarios (including security stuff) and TCP/IP ends-up being quite bloated.
Google doesn't support S2S (server to server) part of XMPP protocol. With Google Talk you are limited to talk only to other Google Talk users.
Description implies that Yandex simply made its clone of existing XMPP client which supports S2S out of box.
P.S.
Here's hoping that its affair with XMPP will help eliminate ICQ's enormous foothold in Russia.
Knowing conservatism of Russians, I wouldn't hold my breath. ICQ is popular because there are lots of different clients for it with tons of features. XMPP would take some time to catch up.
Also, due to age of ICQ protocols, many firewalls support it natively allowing admins to control precisely what and how their users do. That plays great role in corporate adoption of ICQ in Russia. And since private internet in Russia is still relatively expensive, most people use Net (and ICQ) in office, not at home.
The RIAA and McCain's campaign must use the same people for their due-diligence vetting...
Not from US. But as a bystander I had an impression that in fact that was Democrats who introduce all possible kinds of dangerous laws: DMCA was introduced during democratic president.
Obama now also has the backing of the industry and one can only wonder what pro-big-business laws they would come up with. With Republicans it is much easier: they normally go for low hanging fruits like tax breaks and gov't benefits.
Found recently an article about piracy, mostly in context of games but also touching **AA claims. This is pretty much my opinion on piracy in well written form.
It is hard to swallow to many, but I still stand on the position that many people will not engage in what now called "piracy" if only business was better and quicker in responding to changing customer needs. Nobody wants to be criminal, nor states want to criminalize its populace. But **AA actions... This is pretty much worst what have happened in creative business in ages.
ZFS is targeted at large scale installations with RAID/etc. Hardly FS for MythTV or normal home PC.
I were using for some time JFS with Ext3 and can hardly complain.
Though the bit:
[...] where 25% of the filesystem ended up in lost+found with numbers for filenames.
tells me that the problem might not be in the file system itself. I would suggest replacing hard drive and/or just in case adding sync somewhere in shutdown sequence of your box. XFS was and is running on many boxes around the world. If you have seen something like that, my first thought would be faulty hard drive or bad cooling (so HDD did overheat).
Another browser? Again wasting time finding all the options to turn off all the new "exciting" "bells and whistles"??
I'd say rather "NO." FireFox 3 is already dumb down enough and mimics IE in many aspects. Third "user-friendly" browser, which brings about ZERO value to browsing, is bit too much for me to swallow.
Well, you know, Diablo never was praised for being great RPG.
Restarting after death was very easy in original Diablo 1/2 - do not think that Diablo 3 would make that worse.
In world of RPG, Diablo is essentially senseless shooter. Shoot whatever moves. Multi-player also played not last role in its success. If you ever tried to play co-op in NWN1, you would understand that dumb-down Diablo has its niche: simpler game play allows to add more features elsewhere (e.g. multi-player), which are way too complicated in full fledged RPGs. Great advantage: you do not need DM in Diablo. In NWN1 any decent MP module requires to have DM.
all in all this is one game i am not going to waste $60 bucks on.
As much as I'm disgruntled too that we are not getting real Fallout, still as post-apocalyptic "Oblivion with guns" the game might stand.
I do not like RPG mechanics (nor first person mode) of Oblivion, the thingy might just be something I would take a look at.
I would definitely take a look at it if they would at least change name to not to spoil the great franchise which Fallout was.
At the moment there are really few good RPGs are coming out. I'm replaying at the moment Sacred awaiting for Diablo3 and Sacred2. NWN2 was the biggest disappointment of RPG I ever had. Morrowind/Oblivion - I simply didn't liked. That might make the game at least worth checking.
Uhm... I'm confused. Where is the button to mod up the post itself???
Ha-ha-ha! If I had mod points, I would have modded you up "Funny"!
True: what kind of idiot would trade true gaming - PC gaming - for a gimmicky controller and games which generally belong to genre "button mashing TV show. sit tight and watch." Ha-ha!!!
[/sarcasm]
In original Fallout you could have solved quests without ever shooting at anybody. Fallout 3 is plain shooter in that aspect, quests do not really matter: shoot first, ask questions later. And you have to shoot because you get shoot at first too.
I think they have demoed (as usually) the best what game has to offer.
Consequently, whatever was left out of the demo will be half-arsed experience: strategic play, quests w/o killing and well actually playing game without killing anyone.
Greatest feature of original Fallout people are clamoring about that you could have played thru the whole game with only one single battle.
They demoed urban shooter flick with story. I have to conclude that the game has nothing else (interesting) in it.
Original Fallout was original game, one of a kind. Fallout 3 is one of a genre, which already has wast library of games. Do not get me wrong, I like urban shooters. But I was expecting more - I wanted to play something what at least remotely resembles original Fallout game, hard core RPG game with multitude of gameplays, with one of the best RPG mechanics ever developed outside of WotC.
+10.
I watched videos and second: this is not Fallout. There is ZERO ZILCH NADA of what made Fallout such great, long lasting experience.
I do not understand all that stuff surrounding Perl 6.
Perl 5 is near perfect: it does many things very efficiently, especially in coding effort department.
Perl 6 is different beast. Perl 6 is a standard. Whatever implements standard can be called Perl 6. There are several implementations underway (mostly complete by now) but they are pretty much unknown to masses due to huge popularity of Perl 5.
All this talks about Perl death remind me the talks about assembler programming death. My groupmate told me that in University about decade ago. Since then, like a curse, I have to deal with assembler regularly. Not that I have anything against it. But it bothers me that some people when see something new, fancy and shiny and quickly declare everything else old, uncool and boring.
P.S. And, btw, ask the .Net crowd about scripting languages. M$ already brainwashed them. Will you see, C# is not scripting, CLR is not interpreter. Scripts sucks because they sucks and C# is better. Scripting languages are dead. End of topic. Move on.
I wouldn't say it MS fault per se. In my experience, most of the time this is unskilled developers who make such bad press for MS. As embedded programmer, I can tell you that most of such problems come from hardware. Windows BSODs, Linux oopses - there is not much difference. If the developers were not morons: (1) watchdog timer would have being configured properly rebooting system within seconds after OS crash; (2) in particular Windows can reboot instead of flashing the BSOD.
Yes, Windows quality sucks, but in such applications most of the crashes happen due to H/W problems. You do not see much of Linux flops because the developers on average know better how to build system which should run 24/7. Windows developers on other side, often deliver literally snapshot of development system with all bells and whistles activated. That's why we are seeing such BSODs.
Though, to the topic, most embarrassing flop I have seen was a row of new laptops on demo stand behind glass. They should have been running some fancy demo, but instead all like one had the WGA pop up on screen telling that "the XP might be not genuine." Demo was still running in the background, but not full screen, so you didn't see it at first. And this was in retail shop with literally "just unboxed" hardware all having proper OEM licenses.
I can give one (simplified) example of something what had been happening right before my eyes.
Tender was for school software. Three companies offered deals. Then in sudden turn of events clarification of requirements came with following disqualification of two companies from the tender. Time for tender was three month and to finish legalese required to qualify for the new clarified requirements was about 8 months. Pretty much everybody knew that the larger company which won the tender paid off (indirectly, through deal with other ministry) to make tender conditions impossible for its competitors. (Accusing anybody doesn't work: "Software market is evolving fast so requirements has to follow its development" is the universal excuse.)
Find some sale guys and talk with them - this is happening everywhere. My example actually from my homeland Belarus (and same thing happened in Russia twice to the company too). Though the countries are underdeveloped by all means, many politicians there are already trying hard to make sure that their career would look clean. And this is how it'd done.
Is it only me who think that real target are the pirates in 3rd world (China, India) and real goal is to push them to adopt Vista?
Economy of piracy has its mechanics and M$ exploited it many times. Many developers get first taste of programming on pirated Windows using pirated development software. M$ had rather them pirating Vista.
All this WGA thing is really nothing, because there are bunch of packs floating on net with XP and Vista stripped of all unnecessary stuff (like license checks). Most active pirates will not be affected by M$' change of WGA by a bit.
Ok, I'm not Canadian, but this applies to everyone when their local government is pissing away money for no good reason.
WTF?! Do you even following politics?
Business is greatest influence force in politics.
This is classical form of corruption: business makes a undertable deal with local politicians so that they buy their products. The statue that all procurement deals have to be public and open to competition - is the most often ignored statue. (Also popular (in 3rd world) are preferential investments, but they are quite hard to hide and rarely happen in developed countries.)
This is essentially how politicians make money. Or you thought that they simply do their thing out of pure altruism and patriotism? [Sarcasm intended.]
As soon as I have read that article still recommends DDR2, I felt that something is wrong.
And I was right: the article is dated November 2006...
Move on, nothing (new) to see here.