It is at times like this that I am glad I have enough specializations in my major that I would hopefully be able to avoid this in the future. While digital design is by far my largest specialization, I have taken enough courses in other specialities that I don't get stuck working in one sector.
I do think these types of clauses are not good for the individuals but to some degree are necessary to keep business fair otherwise you would see a lot of "dirty" tricks by companies to pull away top design engineers from each other. Two years in the computer industry though is a bit ridiculous. I mean almost everything in my PC was obsolete within 2 minutes of coming out of the packaging, the tech grows so fast that anything over a year is harsh.
----
"The same thing we do every night Pinky; Try to take over the world."
This just isn't fair. The reason they are trying to do this is because people on XBox are already having to pay for XB Live and EA figures they should get into the act as well.
The reason I bought a PS2 is because I could play the games I liked, including EA games online for free. I guess I will just go back to the PC versions of the games which typically play faster, load faster and look better then they do on my PS2.
If those hours are actually true then I hope these people have no high buildings for jumping off of near them. Seriously I am lucky to be sane after a 15 or 18 hour quarter (yes quarter, thank you Ohio State). But a 20+ hr quarter you would be in class way too much. Not to mention the possible out of class work loads. Did I also mention that it is a two year program which a lot of employers just laugh at? While they are getting those 30k and 40k jobs we'll be getting those 50k and 60k jobs.
I am God the creator almight and I claim all patents on ever gene in every living creature.
How did we get to the point where we can do this? You didn't really do anything but make a discovery of something already existing in nature. You created nothing; so how do you patent what you didn't create?
Why do so many users and occassional admins fear the "new" thing? Think about the operating systems you are comparing, the thing that really matters in any operating system is the core of it, or the kernel for the geeks.
The fact is the last two desktop operating systems are definitely on a very similar if not identical kernel. I mean XP is a butt kicking version of Windows 2000 with all the functionality and more, at least for those actually using professional. It was the huge success of 2K outside of the business world that helped result in the death of 9x (ME was BAD) and the complete usual of the NT-esque kernel that 2K used.
A similar thing can be said with 2003. It is server 2000 with a few extra things here and there and is as such more stable, cleaner, and offers a load more features then 2000 did, or ever will. There is no point in waiting for tons of Service Packs, cause otherwise you will be using 2003 when the server post-longhorn comes out. The fact is Windows isn't quick with Service Packs not so much because they are lazy as they aren't as needed as they were in Win 2K in prior. Use 2003 and keep up with the rest of the pack, if you fall behind now your company will be playing catch up for years.
Why do we keep trying to bridge this "gap" between Linux and windows? I mean really there is a gap there for a reason. I do not expect nor do I want every modern home user using the operating system that since its inception has been FGBG (For Geeks By Geeks).
There are other more geek-ish OSes, yes. However, linux is the mainstream one with the most support. There are a few reasons that the gap should stay the huge gap that it currently is.
If it became a mainstream operating system, maybe not even necessarily on the scale of M$ Windows, it would become even more prone to virus, trojan horse and other horrible attacks. I am not saying these things do not happen now. On the contrary there are vulnerabilities exploited all the time. However, most geeks know how to fix the holes pretty quickly and there are not enough linux machines to make a hardcore evil-doer write a virus for it. After all when was the last time you heard a nifty name on the news for a linux worm. I can name at least two dozen Windows worms/viruses.
For home users tech support is already enough of a pain in the butt. Dell and HP/Compaq must get millions of inane questions a day, and most those chimps they have working for them read from a book and probably could barely turn a PC on themselves. So I can see a conversation between tech support involving the install of a program. My mom has a hard enough time double clicking setup.exe.
Backwards compatibility is also a hold-back. I mean who wants to give up their present machine and lose with it all the other games and software which they came to love oh so much. WINE is good for a lot but there are still a lot of games that cannot keep up when in WINE. While there may be a lot of replacement programs available for users that isn't what they always want.
In the end Linux needs to just stay put. It isn't about catching the big evil M$. The fact is they will somehow manage to self-destruct themselves on their own. Leave Linux and any other "geek" OS alone. They should stay with the geeks and some of those lucky server admins.
I think Syllabus will prove to be another "fad", a fake "linux" of sorts that never quite made it. To be honest the OSes we have now are enough. If you want simple to use with a pretty powerful interface hidden away then use OS X. If you want a fairly stable, even if buggy, OS with lots of support and tons of software and ease of use (for the most part) use Windows XP (maybe 2K) all others are CRAP. If you want true power and don't mind the occasional frustration and want to seem cool around your geek buddies then use Linux, [fill in the blank]BSD, or maybe even that proprietary OS Solaris.
---
"The same thing we do every night Pinky; Try to take over the world!"
There is absolutely no expectation of privacy when using computer provided to you by your place of work. Anyone who seriously expects privacy might want to reconsider sending those e-mails about how much they hate their boss.
I have worked in an semi-administrative position in IT for quite some time and often see users get quite flustered by the information that we can gather on the users. I have even heard of instances where they have complained to their bosses only to be told that IT was well within their rights.
The simple fact is that this guys boss should not have been spending so much time with non-work related materials. I know that where I work now this would never fly but I suppose that is the difference between private industry and civil service.
But I do hope this guy gets off. There was no spying or spyware involved. He was performing his job which was monitoring company run resources and making sure that they were being used for work and not for pleasure. At one point we had and ISA server for the IT department that allowed us to avoid the proxy that blocked certain websites. Because of our boss's lack of productivity the server "broke" and never did get repaired.
In the world of IT the sysadmin truly has more control than just about anyone within a company or organization. I think sysadmins should do this more often because in the end the money wasted from lack of productivity is coming from someones pocket and I am sure they would love to know. In this case the man gets shafted because the money wasn't coming from the higher ups pockets but from the tax payers. Times like this I hate government.
Seriously stop this insanity now. If you want to make a homebrew webcam then you really should thing about how "homebrew" you really want to go. If you go out and buy a CCD and all the chips necessary then you really aren't doing anything more than some solder work and if you don't have some sort of specialized interface chip then you will probably be doing a lot of coding work. I mean you can't make a webcam without interfacing with a PC, and that requires drivers to handle actually getting the image from the CCD to a usable state on the PC.
If you wanted to be insane you could take all those crazy EE courses I took in digital design and create your own chips and interface tools and make more work for yourself, but this can get really expensive really quick. You could use microcontroller but they might not be fast enough which sends you to DSPs. Either way it might prove to be a lot more work then you would ever want to do. I mean companies have engineering teams for these things.
To be honest and comes down to how "homebrew" you really want this to be. If you think you like photography this will make you hate it and to be honest this has 0 to do with photography. This is an EE related thing and unless you like electronics a lot and want to do design I would avoid this like the plague. Otherwise, enjoy yourself, I am an EE and wouldn't do anything beyond soldering premade chips together, at least not alone.
--- What do you think happens if I cross this red wire with this black one? *ZAP!*
Many times when this occurs the employees in question are salaried employees. People who make a flat monthly rate are a bit harder to pay overtime for than your standard hourly employee. Also you will find that places will usually explain to those people that they may be required to work extra hours and perform overtime and this is usually seen in their pay.
Something I would really like to know is if any employers actually pay their salaried workers a bit more knowing they will have to work overtime or if they manage ways to pay overtime or give them extra time off for working the overtime. While quitting may not always be an option as finding a replacement job is not always easy, it is still available as a way to get out of these types of bad situations.
In reality it may come down to forcing states to once again rework labor laws. Since in almost every state salaried workers are exempt from overtime pay they can become slave labor and while some companies may seemingly be able to get away with this, it isn't good for the people they have working for them. While removing the exemption may cost some companies more money, the smart ones will simple hire more workers to lower the overtime load since that would be cheaper than paying someone to work 60+ hours a week every week.
i haven't seen it yet (must be to bed too early to see a midnight showing) and i probably won't get to see it until at least the weekend. but let me say this, i have heard way too much hype for this movie. seriously everyone keeps saying how great the movie is and even go as far as to call it the best superhero movie ever. the problem is they are pushing it way too much. seriously if the movie has even a slight flaw some people are going to absolutely hate it because of the fact it was so overhyped. so long as it can live up to the hype i won't be one of these people. either way this should be the largest grossing film this summer.
The Do-Not-Call list was almost a waste of time and money. With the growth in online usage and that insidious spam growing everywhere companies are not using the phone for solicitations anymore. It is by far much cheaper to send out mass emails and probably more effective then trying to call individuals. No telemarketers to pay (or at least fewer) and fewer phone bills for 800 numbers and other lines.
Before the do-not-call list it wasn't exactly hard to get rid of a telemarketer. Before they would even make their pitch you would have the phone hung up because they would mispronounce your name.
It may have been a nice idea to do the do not call list what we all really want and need is the do not email list. The spam is ten times worse then the telemarketers ever were.
we see it. That does sound might impressive but then again the xbox 2 or next or whatever you wanna call it, is how far away? Seriously these specs if even from M$ are probably still speculation to some degree. While next gen consoles (we need a new name for them) will need more power they also need to maintain reasonable prices. Giving it power and making the system cost $600 isn't exactly going to make them sell.
Granted the companies are already losing money on the consoles but you cannot expect it to all be made up for on games. Especially when you are M$ and you have a hard time selling your console outside the US. If they cannot win over console gamers in another country then they will always be playing 2nd or 3rd fiddle behind those boys at Sony and Nintendo.
---
"Friends don't let Friends play FPS's on consoles"
WOE IS ME. i mean what is our society coming to if we cannot trust the anonymous people we meet in mmorpgs to be trustworthy enough to buy virtual items away from us.
i think it is time you people stop wasting SO much time and/or money on these games and go out and meet some REAL people. Anyone who is taking the time to collect and sell items on mmorpgs obviously has enough spare time to go and spend it with people who do not hide from each other behind their avatars and fake personae.
Well it seems like it is about time a bill would come along to solve the horrific problems created by that vile devil known as the DMCA. Now what we all need to do is write your senators and representatives. Let them know how much we want this bill to get through and how important it is to us.
If your elected officials are up for election this year iterate how important this issue is and a vote on this issue could sway your voting. The politicians are supposed to listen to their voters and we as voters need to let them know what we want. This bill and an election year may help give us more leverage when writing to our reps and senators.
The answer to this question is obviously yes. I mean I cannot count the number of times I have installed and updated Windows from virus recoveries and from clean builds and never get a virus before securing the PC is complete. It sounds to me like you may be missing a critical step. I mean please tell me you are reformatting on the install to. Otherwise why both to install the second time. The virus would still be sitting around there somewhere waiting.
There is really no excuse for you to have a virus/worm that quick unless you are an incompetent windows user. Of course you could be failing to mention the virus filled email you opened, or the pr0n site you were visiting during your updates. Seriously man, unless you blatantly go look for a virus/worm then you should not get one before you get patched and updated. BTW, windows firewall a la SP1 is crap and so is Symantec/Norton's. Seriously get yourself a Hardware firewall and then throw in Zone Alarm for good measure. Any good firewall should still let you successfully patch windows without having to turn it off.
I love linux and all, but dude it sounds like you should come and take a breath. Windows may be the devil, but Linux (at this point) can only take the geeks so far.
The dreamcast not only seems to be one of the easiest hacked consoles ever created, making it one of the coolest consoles to own, but it is also one of the most revolutionary devices ever.
Before the console wars became the new hip thing there was the Dreamcast. No XBox or Gamecube just the DC and PS2. Both had their supporters but only one really changed the industry for the better, while the other is an on going money grab by an over-zealous (and too large) company.
Things that the Dreamcast changed:
Online Gaming
The FIRST console to have online gaming. It came with a 56k modem for those horrid dial-up speeds and eventually had the ability to be expanded to broadband with an adapter. Phantasy Star was one of the first (if not the first) game to be online for a console and many games for the Dreamcast joined it. Including sports games and shooters.
Keyboard and Mouse
This was pretty big. I mean web browsing with a controller is a pain (I would know). And first person shooters with support for the keyboard and mouse make it capable of rivalling some of the PC games in this respect
VGA Adapter
Unless I am mistaked this is the only console to date to have a VGA Adapter that had a purpose. It made the Dreamcast capable of using a PC monitor and games that were "VGA" Enable had better resolutions and looked way better than on even the best TV. These graphics can still rival PS2 and some occassion XBox graphics to this day.
The only thing some people complained about seriously was lack of a DVD player. But at the time PS2 was still ~$200 and the DC was already ~$99. For that you could have gotten another DVD player that actually would play movies and not just act like it could.
So not only is it a good thing that the homebrew site is back it is an excellent thing. We can finally have more games for the Dreamcast even it they are not officially sponsored by Sega anymore. It is good to see that this is one "dead" console that is not truly dead and may have a big enough fan base to keep it alive for some time to come.
Two computers? One Linux, One Windows. Don't start me on WINE and all this stuff. I KNOW. I was using Linux only for about a year but there is one simple point that cannot be ignored, if you still play games you still need windows. It is better to have two machines, less rebooting back and forth and you can always remote X into the linux one or KVM or whatever you choice would be. I recommend two computers for all homes...especially when you play enough games to make it matter.
I am going to get yelled at for this, but have you considered ghost programs? You know make an image and then when the machine dies you rebuild from the image. Seriously it takes less time to do then rebuilding the data from the raid array probably would be and you can use the extra space you saved for more fun stuff.
Why do all the companies think that everyone using DVDXCopy and GameXCopy are performing an illegal act. Did there not used to be something in the copyright laws allowing end users to make Personal Backups? I mean a CD and/or DVD will not last forever, of course if they did new media would never sell write?
Alright one thing I need to throw in my habitual gripe about is to the idiot weblogger who apparently is Dave's love buddy. We do own stuff on the internet. It is called are intellectual property. Anything you write online as "original art" is considered copyrighted material. I would hope a person who posts his own thoughts and ideas in a weblog would appreciate something of this magnitude to some degree but obviously not.
I do appreciate the importance of IP. I have written as a columnist for a student paper and would have been irate (and still would be) if I ever found someone using my original material as my own. So IP is sacred to anyone who writes, draws, or writes original code (which rarely happens).
Dave apparently fails to see that allowing users to request their material isn't enough. You may have cut many of them off from the only copy of their IP and have prevented users from seeing it. If any large company or government body did this is would be called censorship, in this case it is just outright stupidity.
Let me explain something, though it may have already been done for many of you. You joke about more cores, but both groups are surely already in the process of adding more cores to their architectures. Granted I heard my news through a third party but apparently they know a person at Intel who said there was development of upwards of 16 cores on a single chip. The reason this works out as more is better is simply because we can. Think about how small the processes have gotten. Most will be over to.09 soon and there is technology to get that down even smaller. Before the limitations on the expansion of the speed of a chip were often affected by Cache size. Look at the crazy performance given by doubling cache sizes on a CPU. The problem is Cache is expensive to place on a chip, cores are not. Expect the new war in the CPU world to be more along the lines of more cores and not so much on clock speeds. This is part of the reason the companies are trying to break the traditional numbering schemes for processors and inventing convoluted messes of numbers that literally mean nothing. My only concern so far has been on the usefulness of dual cores. I am sure they have made some sort of hardware method to allow current software to continue treating the chip as a single CPU, because otherwise it would be pretty useless to have what amounts to really having twice the CPU on the same chip space since most software isn't multithreaded to handle multiple chips. But I am sure they have taken care of this. Better stop before I look like I am rambling....
Slashdot Mirror
It is at times like this that I am glad I have enough specializations in my major that I would hopefully be able to avoid this in the future. While digital design is by far my largest specialization, I have taken enough courses in other specialities that I don't get stuck working in one sector.
I do think these types of clauses are not good for the individuals but to some degree are necessary to keep business fair otherwise you would see a lot of "dirty" tricks by companies to pull away top design engineers from each other. Two years in the computer industry though is a bit ridiculous. I mean almost everything in my PC was obsolete within 2 minutes of coming out of the packaging, the tech grows so fast that anything over a year is harsh.
----
"The same thing we do every night Pinky; Try to take over the world."
This just isn't fair. The reason they are trying to do this is because people on XBox are already having to pay for XB Live and EA figures they should get into the act as well.
The reason I bought a PS2 is because I could play the games I liked, including EA games online for free. I guess I will just go back to the PC versions of the games which typically play faster, load faster and look better then they do on my PS2.
If those hours are actually true then I hope these people have no high buildings for jumping off of near them. Seriously I am lucky to be sane after a 15 or 18 hour quarter (yes quarter, thank you Ohio State). But a 20+ hr quarter you would be in class way too much. Not to mention the possible out of class work loads. Did I also mention that it is a two year program which a lot of employers just laugh at? While they are getting those 30k and 40k jobs we'll be getting those 50k and 60k jobs.
I am God the creator almight and I claim all patents on ever gene in every living creature.
How did we get to the point where we can do this? You didn't really do anything but make a discovery of something already existing in nature. You created nothing; so how do you patent what you didn't create?
Why do so many users and occassional admins fear the "new" thing? Think about the operating systems you are comparing, the thing that really matters in any operating system is the core of it, or the kernel for the geeks.
The fact is the last two desktop operating systems are definitely on a very similar if not identical kernel. I mean XP is a butt kicking version of Windows 2000 with all the functionality and more, at least for those actually using professional. It was the huge success of 2K outside of the business world that helped result in the death of 9x (ME was BAD) and the complete usual of the NT-esque kernel that 2K used.
A similar thing can be said with 2003. It is server 2000 with a few extra things here and there and is as such more stable, cleaner, and offers a load more features then 2000 did, or ever will. There is no point in waiting for tons of Service Packs, cause otherwise you will be using 2003 when the server post-longhorn comes out. The fact is Windows isn't quick with Service Packs not so much because they are lazy as they aren't as needed as they were in Win 2K in prior. Use 2003 and keep up with the rest of the pack, if you fall behind now your company will be playing catch up for years.
Why do we keep trying to bridge this "gap" between Linux and windows? I mean really there is a gap there for a reason. I do not expect nor do I want every modern home user using the operating system that since its inception has been FGBG (For Geeks By Geeks).
There are other more geek-ish OSes, yes. However, linux is the mainstream one with the most support. There are a few reasons that the gap should stay the huge gap that it currently is.
If it became a mainstream operating system, maybe not even necessarily on the scale of M$ Windows, it would become even more prone to virus, trojan horse and other horrible attacks. I am not saying these things do not happen now. On the contrary there are vulnerabilities exploited all the time. However, most geeks know how to fix the holes pretty quickly and there are not enough linux machines to make a hardcore evil-doer write a virus for it. After all when was the last time you heard a nifty name on the news for a linux worm. I can name at least two dozen Windows worms/viruses.
For home users tech support is already enough of a pain in the butt. Dell and HP/Compaq must get millions of inane questions a day, and most those chimps they have working for them read from a book and probably could barely turn a PC on themselves. So I can see a conversation between tech support involving the install of a program. My mom has a hard enough time double clicking setup.exe.
Backwards compatibility is also a hold-back. I mean who wants to give up their present machine and lose with it all the other games and software which they came to love oh so much. WINE is good for a lot but there are still a lot of games that cannot keep up when in WINE. While there may be a lot of replacement programs available for users that isn't what they always want.
In the end Linux needs to just stay put. It isn't about catching the big evil M$. The fact is they will somehow manage to self-destruct themselves on their own. Leave Linux and any other "geek" OS alone. They should stay with the geeks and some of those lucky server admins.
I think Syllabus will prove to be another "fad", a fake "linux" of sorts that never quite made it. To be honest the OSes we have now are enough. If you want simple to use with a pretty powerful interface hidden away then use OS X. If you want a fairly stable, even if buggy, OS with lots of support and tons of software and ease of use (for the most part) use Windows XP (maybe 2K) all others are CRAP. If you want true power and don't mind the occasional frustration and want to seem cool around your geek buddies then use Linux, [fill in the blank]BSD, or maybe even that proprietary OS Solaris.
---
"The same thing we do every night Pinky; Try to take over the world!"
There is absolutely no expectation of privacy when using computer provided to you by your place of work. Anyone who seriously expects privacy might want to reconsider sending those e-mails about how much they hate their boss.
I have worked in an semi-administrative position in IT for quite some time and often see users get quite flustered by the information that we can gather on the users. I have even heard of instances where they have complained to their bosses only to be told that IT was well within their rights.
The simple fact is that this guys boss should not have been spending so much time with non-work related materials. I know that where I work now this would never fly but I suppose that is the difference between private industry and civil service.
But I do hope this guy gets off. There was no spying or spyware involved. He was performing his job which was monitoring company run resources and making sure that they were being used for work and not for pleasure. At one point we had and ISA server for the IT department that allowed us to avoid the proxy that blocked certain websites. Because of our boss's lack of productivity the server "broke" and never did get repaired.
In the world of IT the sysadmin truly has more control than just about anyone within a company or organization. I think sysadmins should do this more often because in the end the money wasted from lack of productivity is coming from someones pocket and I am sure they would love to know. In this case the man gets shafted because the money wasn't coming from the higher ups pockets but from the tax payers. Times like this I hate government.
diamond is not a stone. i believe it is technically considered a mineral
Seriously stop this insanity now. If you want to make a homebrew webcam then you really should thing about how "homebrew" you really want to go. If you go out and buy a CCD and all the chips necessary then you really aren't doing anything more than some solder work and if you don't have some sort of specialized interface chip then you will probably be doing a lot of coding work. I mean you can't make a webcam without interfacing with a PC, and that requires drivers to handle actually getting the image from the CCD to a usable state on the PC.
If you wanted to be insane you could take all those crazy EE courses I took in digital design and create your own chips and interface tools and make more work for yourself, but this can get really expensive really quick. You could use microcontroller but they might not be fast enough which sends you to DSPs. Either way it might prove to be a lot more work then you would ever want to do. I mean companies have engineering teams for these things.
To be honest and comes down to how "homebrew" you really want this to be. If you think you like photography this will make you hate it and to be honest this has 0 to do with photography. This is an EE related thing and unless you like electronics a lot and want to do design I would avoid this like the plague. Otherwise, enjoy yourself, I am an EE and wouldn't do anything beyond soldering premade chips together, at least not alone.
---
What do you think happens if I cross this red wire with this black one? *ZAP!*
Many times when this occurs the employees in question are salaried employees. People who make a flat monthly rate are a bit harder to pay overtime for than your standard hourly employee. Also you will find that places will usually explain to those people that they may be required to work extra hours and perform overtime and this is usually seen in their pay.
Something I would really like to know is if any employers actually pay their salaried workers a bit more knowing they will have to work overtime or if they manage ways to pay overtime or give them extra time off for working the overtime. While quitting may not always be an option as finding a replacement job is not always easy, it is still available as a way to get out of these types of bad situations.
In reality it may come down to forcing states to once again rework labor laws. Since in almost every state salaried workers are exempt from overtime pay they can become slave labor and while some companies may seemingly be able to get away with this, it isn't good for the people they have working for them. While removing the exemption may cost some companies more money, the smart ones will simple hire more workers to lower the overtime load since that would be cheaper than paying someone to work 60+ hours a week every week.
i haven't seen it yet (must be to bed too early to see a midnight showing) and i probably won't get to see it until at least the weekend. but let me say this, i have heard way too much hype for this movie. seriously everyone keeps saying how great the movie is and even go as far as to call it the best superhero movie ever. the problem is they are pushing it way too much. seriously if the movie has even a slight flaw some people are going to absolutely hate it because of the fact it was so overhyped. so long as it can live up to the hype i won't be one of these people. either way this should be the largest grossing film this summer.
The Do-Not-Call list was almost a waste of time and money. With the growth in online usage and that insidious spam growing everywhere companies are not using the phone for solicitations anymore. It is by far much cheaper to send out mass emails and probably more effective then trying to call individuals. No telemarketers to pay (or at least fewer) and fewer phone bills for 800 numbers and other lines.
Before the do-not-call list it wasn't exactly hard to get rid of a telemarketer. Before they would even make their pitch you would have the phone hung up because they would mispronounce your name.
It may have been a nice idea to do the do not call list what we all really want and need is the do not email list. The spam is ten times worse then the telemarketers ever were.
so the french are getting back for that WW2 thing huh?
It will invade France.
we see it. That does sound might impressive but then again the xbox 2 or next or whatever you wanna call it, is how far away? Seriously these specs if even from M$ are probably still speculation to some degree. While next gen consoles (we need a new name for them) will need more power they also need to maintain reasonable prices. Giving it power and making the system cost $600 isn't exactly going to make them sell.
Granted the companies are already losing money on the consoles but you cannot expect it to all be made up for on games. Especially when you are M$ and you have a hard time selling your console outside the US. If they cannot win over console gamers in another country then they will always be playing 2nd or 3rd fiddle behind those boys at Sony and Nintendo.
---
"Friends don't let Friends play FPS's on consoles"
WOE IS ME. i mean what is our society coming to if we cannot trust the anonymous people we meet in mmorpgs to be trustworthy enough to buy virtual items away from us.
i think it is time you people stop wasting SO much time and/or money on these games and go out and meet some REAL people. Anyone who is taking the time to collect and sell items on mmorpgs obviously has enough spare time to go and spend it with people who do not hide from each other behind their avatars and fake personae.
Well it seems like it is about time a bill would come along to solve the horrific problems created by that vile devil known as the DMCA. Now what we all need to do is write your senators and representatives. Let them know how much we want this bill to get through and how important it is to us.
If your elected officials are up for election this year iterate how important this issue is and a vote on this issue could sway your voting. The politicians are supposed to listen to their voters and we as voters need to let them know what we want. This bill and an election year may help give us more leverage when writing to our reps and senators.
The answer to this question is obviously yes. I mean I cannot count the number of times I have installed and updated Windows from virus recoveries and from clean builds and never get a virus before securing the PC is complete. It sounds to me like you may be missing a critical step. I mean please tell me you are reformatting on the install to. Otherwise why both to install the second time. The virus would still be sitting around there somewhere waiting.
There is really no excuse for you to have a virus/worm that quick unless you are an incompetent windows user. Of course you could be failing to mention the virus filled email you opened, or the pr0n site you were visiting during your updates. Seriously man, unless you blatantly go look for a virus/worm then you should not get one before you get patched and updated. BTW, windows firewall a la SP1 is crap and so is Symantec/Norton's. Seriously get yourself a Hardware firewall and then throw in Zone Alarm for good measure. Any good firewall should still let you successfully patch windows without having to turn it off.
I love linux and all, but dude it sounds like you should come and take a breath. Windows may be the devil, but Linux (at this point) can only take the geeks so far.
Before the console wars became the new hip thing there was the Dreamcast. No XBox or Gamecube just the DC and PS2. Both had their supporters but only one really changed the industry for the better, while the other is an on going money grab by an over-zealous (and too large) company.
Things that the Dreamcast changed:
The FIRST console to have online gaming. It came with a 56k modem for those horrid dial-up speeds and eventually had the ability to be expanded to broadband with an adapter. Phantasy Star was one of the first (if not the first) game to be online for a console and many games for the Dreamcast joined it. Including sports games and shooters.
This was pretty big. I mean web browsing with a controller is a pain (I would know). And first person shooters with support for the keyboard and mouse make it capable of rivalling some of the PC games in this respect
Unless I am mistaked this is the only console to date to have a VGA Adapter that had a purpose. It made the Dreamcast capable of using a PC monitor and games that were "VGA" Enable had better resolutions and looked way better than on even the best TV. These graphics can still rival PS2 and some occassion XBox graphics to this day.
The only thing some people complained about seriously was lack of a DVD player. But at the time PS2 was still ~$200 and the DC was already ~$99. For that you could have gotten another DVD player that actually would play movies and not just act like it could.
So not only is it a good thing that the homebrew site is back it is an excellent thing. We can finally have more games for the Dreamcast even it they are not officially sponsored by Sega anymore. It is good to see that this is one "dead" console that is not truly dead and may have a big enough fan base to keep it alive for some time to come.
Two computers? One Linux, One Windows. Don't start me on WINE and all this stuff. I KNOW. I was using Linux only for about a year but there is one simple point that cannot be ignored, if you still play games you still need windows. It is better to have two machines, less rebooting back and forth and you can always remote X into the linux one or KVM or whatever you choice would be. I recommend two computers for all homes...especially when you play enough games to make it matter.
I am going to get yelled at for this, but have you considered ghost programs? You know make an image and then when the machine dies you rebuild from the image. Seriously it takes less time to do then rebuilding the data from the raid array probably would be and you can use the extra space you saved for more fun stuff.
Thats why I said in this case it isn't censorship. Geeze Us. Read you dope before you randomly start posting nothing.
Why do all the companies think that everyone using DVDXCopy and GameXCopy are performing an illegal act. Did there not used to be something in the copyright laws allowing end users to make Personal Backups? I mean a CD and/or DVD will not last forever, of course if they did new media would never sell write?
Alright one thing I need to throw in my habitual gripe about is to the idiot weblogger who apparently is Dave's love buddy. We do own stuff on the internet. It is called are intellectual property. Anything you write online as "original art" is considered copyrighted material. I would hope a person who posts his own thoughts and ideas in a weblog would appreciate something of this magnitude to some degree but obviously not.
I do appreciate the importance of IP. I have written as a columnist for a student paper and would have been irate (and still would be) if I ever found someone using my original material as my own. So IP is sacred to anyone who writes, draws, or writes original code (which rarely happens).
Dave apparently fails to see that allowing users to request their material isn't enough. You may have cut many of them off from the only copy of their IP and have prevented users from seeing it. If any large company or government body did this is would be called censorship, in this case it is just outright stupidity.
Let me explain something, though it may have already been done for many of you. You joke about more cores, but both groups are surely already in the process of adding more cores to their architectures. Granted I heard my news through a third party but apparently they know a person at Intel who said there was development of upwards of 16 cores on a single chip. .09 soon and there is technology to get that down even smaller. Before the limitations on the expansion of the speed of a chip were often affected by Cache size. Look at the crazy performance given by doubling cache sizes on a CPU. The problem is Cache is expensive to place on a chip, cores are not. Expect the new war in the CPU world to be more along the lines of more cores and not so much on clock speeds. This is part of the reason the companies are trying to break the traditional numbering schemes for processors and inventing convoluted messes of numbers that literally mean nothing.
The reason this works out as more is better is simply because we can. Think about how small the processes have gotten. Most will be over to
My only concern so far has been on the usefulness of dual cores. I am sure they have made some sort of hardware method to allow current software to continue treating the chip as a single CPU, because otherwise it would be pretty useless to have what amounts to really having twice the CPU on the same chip space since most software isn't multithreaded to handle multiple chips. But I am sure they have taken care of this. Better stop before I look like I am rambling....