ICQ assigns people by number, not name. (trying to do names in something like the Internet is stupid anyway, I don't want to be known as Bob1027)
So its quite easy to have multiple people on your list with the exact same name, in fact I have two of them right now. Its not really a problem because when they message you, its usually pretty easy to tell which one is which by their email addy and what they're actually saying.
It might get more difficult if you have like six of them that way, but you can rename people in ICQ on your list to whatever you want, so its a non issue. Besides, its easier to keep track of that then of Bob_1, Bob102, Bob5, 2343Bob, and the other assorted myriad of idiotic names the AOL system conjures up.
Skins are just an execuse that lazy developers created to avoid making a decent interface to any of their programs. So they can say "if you don't like the interface, your welcome to make your own." And of course, the interface is so lousy in most skinnable programs that someone is bound to.
Really I think the worst thing about Mozilla is the non standard, well, everything! The interface is nothing short of confusing to newbie computer users who expect everything to work the way it does in just about every other Windows program.
Interface consistancy across an OS is good. Mozilla doesn't even come close.
Blizzard has said they will have the game ported to Linux as soon as there are sales figures to support it. Considering they're a small company and don't have free sources of income (ala Ion Storm), they probably can't afford to port the game if they won't make any money off the port.
How can you argue with that? Once there's enough Linux users who don't just go out and buy the Windows version but instead hold out for a Linux version to make the port profitiable, there will be a port.
Asking a Corporation to deliberately loose money to support an Operating System is pretty silly, you certainly can't expect them to do that unless they think there is PR to be gained from it that will outweigh the cost.
here's the problem, see Blizzard is a small company. They make what, one game a year at most? (Granted Starcraft was on the top 10 list for over two years which goes to show you how good it was, but ok...)
They don't have the kind of money to make linux versions of the game if the sales aren't going to be there to support it. They've said several times "Show us the sales, and we'll port it." No one to date has been able to show them anything even remotely resembling strong sales of Linux games. The market just isn't there.
A tiny but growing market is still a tiny market. As soon as they think there is money to be made by porting to Linux, you can bet they'll do it.
So far as the "well they never innovate" nonsense, well if you really want to believe that, thats just fine. Personally, I always try to figure out how truly godawful games like anything made by Westwood manages to do so well when stacked up against a masterpiece like Starcraft in the sales department. Of course Tiberian Sun totally died off after a month, so I guess in the end things worked out.
Now that its gone gold, it shouldn't be a problem. Its getting games to go gold that usually takes Blizzard years and years, once they get this far they can print off cd's pretty darn fast. I'd expect it to start appearing in stores more or less when they say it will.
(after all, Broodwar appeared in stores a week after it went gold, in some places anyway)
They changed their FAQ, now it says Q1 next year, although thats still in the realm of "yeah right".
When they said it'd be out this year, I actually laughed when I heard it. That was before they changed the whole game from some kind of Roleplaying Hybrid back into a real RTS, so who knows how far that set them back.
Mid next year at the absolute earliest, I say Christmas next year.
Lets see... Oh yes, Linux now has ATA/100 support and Windows doesn't, woohoo! Lets all celebrate because we're faster then MS!
Wait a second... how long do you think for a Windows ATA/100 driver to be available really? I mean as soon as there is anything even remotely resembling demand for it, it will come into existance.
And just for the record, Windows has had USB support for well over two years now, whereas I try to plug a USB device into Linux, and...
Nothing!
So I guess MS has Linux beat by two years. Woohoo! Go MS!
Give me a break.
(ps - there is that whole ATA/100 being really pretty useless considering hard drive speed and the overall fact that IDE sucks compaired to SCSI anyway, but thats not really important to the whole "ra ra we support it first!" nonsense)
nVidia didn't beat 3dfx by using FUD against them, nVidia beat 3dfx because their products are flat out better.
3dfx's FUD didn't really help them much, but they did do it as you point out. I was just trying to say that nVidia beat them by simply making better hardware and drivers (which apparently includes the Linux ones as you point out).
Sorry for not being clear about that right off the bat.:-)
So far as 2k goes, wouldn't it being delayed six more months to fix some of the more glaring bugs have been a good thing? If anything, the need for marketing didn't do anybody much good except for MS' competition.
Nor is every dominant company a bad thing. nVidia got to be where it is now because they simply worked their asses off to make the best stuff on the market, why shouldn't they be rewarded with dominance? They have done nothing wrong thus far, indeed they are still cranking out higher quality stuff then everybody else and improving their products at a torrid pace. Granted they may not have the best Linux drivers in the world (so I hear), but no company is perfect.
There is pleanty of reason to be happy about 3dfx having problems, they dug themselves into this hole by releasing several crap cards in a row. They are not there because of FUD or unfair monopolies or lawyers or anything, they are there because they have been beaten on a technological level consistantly. Isn't that exactly what we want to happen, the company who makes the best technology wins? Instead of the company with the best marketing wins?
This is a Good Thing(TM). The market is such that if 3dfx goes out and makes a better board then nVidia again, they can reclaim their marketshare. Its not being run by marketing, and that is extremely good.
And I disagree that competition is always a good thing. Look at Domain Name registrations. What have we got with competition? Confusion, Names getting lost between registrars, registrars pulling all kinds of crap like saying they own your name, etc. You notice how these problems didn't exist when NSI had a government enforced monopoly.
You notice how they still don't exist in systems like CA*Net, which has a monopoly on the *.ca domain? Funny how things didn't get messed until competition started. But hey, prices did come down.
(of course I'd rather pay the extra money for a decent service, which hasn't existed in the domain name space since this competition crap started.)
The moral of the story? Competition in the 3d market is good, because its actually resulting in better stuff. But in competition, someone has to loose. At least they're losing for the right reasons.
First of all, 3dfx should be *commended* for delaying a product if they don't think its ready. This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. This is exactly what we want from other companies.
Praise them, they are doing the right thing.
Unfortunately, the Voodoo 5 sucks badly. The GeForce 2 rips it up in the power consumption, heat, feature, and sheer power fields.
I don't really think its 3dfx's fault entirely, maybe they lost some good talent or something. I mean they haven't done *anything* that was top of the line since the Voodoo2. They ruled back in those days. Then there was the Banshee. Then the Voodoo3. Both of which were lame.
Now we have the V4 (which is a joke), and the V5 (which is a bigger more expensive joke).
So, lets applaud them for their policy, and slam them for their technology. At least then we are doing it right.
It draws more power, generates more heat, and does 32 bit color. Of course everybody else has been doing that for years, but its a brand new feature from 3dfx!
Matrox really makes the best stuff for normal everyday use. You should be able to pick up a G200 for fairly cheap now, and it'll do everything you want from it pretty happily.
It may never be released at all. If it has been released already, its simply a single cpu card (the V5 5500 is 2 of the cpus on the V4), and the card compares favorably to cards released a year ago, maybe. Compare it to something like the GeForce 2, and to say it gets crushed by the foot of god is an understatement.
They just use that as an execuse and a reason to tell the masses. Remember, if the media tells the public its true, then for all intents and purposes its true, even if its not.
Speed matters. When you have a server doing thousands of SSL transactions per second, the extra time it takes to generate a 512bit key vs a 128bit key becomes very very real and very expensive. It may not matter if it takes 17 seconds on your P133, but the server can't dedicate itself to doing your encryption for more then a split second.
Besides, in terms of non Public Key Cryptography, 128bit is reasonably secure for current applications. Just look at Distributed.net trying to crack 64bit encryption. 128bit is 2^64 stronger then that. Thats reasonably secure from brute force attacks.
If its a cryptoanalyitic attack your worried about (such as someone knowing how to quickly decrypt the messages), what you need is better algorithms, not longer keys. Longer keys don't stop a cryptoanalyitic attack.
I've never heard of it before, what with BrowserWatch Chat being down and all.
Good that you mentioned it, any browser that is out now that does things properly deserves a mention in this thread to show Mr. Zeldman that IE5/Mac is not the only browser in the world capable of doing things properly.
Well, unless you want to do basic text all the time, which I wouldn't really mind.
If you want any flash to your site at all though, it gets tremendously difficult to design it for every browser, because of how bad most browsers are. What can you do?
I mean really, if you can't design stuff according to the standards, then where do we stand?
Slashdot Mirror
ICQ assigns people by number, not name. (trying to do names in something like the Internet is stupid anyway, I don't want to be known as Bob1027)
So its quite easy to have multiple people on your list with the exact same name, in fact I have two of them right now. Its not really a problem because when they message you, its usually pretty easy to tell which one is which by their email addy and what they're actually saying.
It might get more difficult if you have like six of them that way, but you can rename people in ICQ on your list to whatever you want, so its a non issue. Besides, its easier to keep track of that then of Bob_1, Bob102, Bob5, 2343Bob, and the other assorted myriad of idiotic names the AOL system conjures up.
Skins are just an execuse that lazy developers created to avoid making a decent interface to any of their programs. So they can say "if you don't like the interface, your welcome to make your own." And of course, the interface is so lousy in most skinnable programs that someone is bound to.
Really I think the worst thing about Mozilla is the non standard, well, everything! The interface is nothing short of confusing to newbie computer users who expect everything to work the way it does in just about every other Windows program.
Interface consistancy across an OS is good. Mozilla doesn't even come close.
Well, I think so anyway. :)
Its supposed to hit the shelves sometime around then, so *maybe* you can get it in time. I don't honestly know, these things aren't overly reliable.
Blizzard has said they will have the game ported to Linux as soon as there are sales figures to support it. Considering they're a small company and don't have free sources of income (ala Ion Storm), they probably can't afford to port the game if they won't make any money off the port.
How can you argue with that? Once there's enough Linux users who don't just go out and buy the Windows version but instead hold out for a Linux version to make the port profitiable, there will be a port.
Asking a Corporation to deliberately loose money to support an Operating System is pretty silly, you certainly can't expect them to do that unless they think there is PR to be gained from it that will outweigh the cost.
Oh boy, one of these again..
here's the problem, see Blizzard is a small company. They make what, one game a year at most? (Granted Starcraft was on the top 10 list for over two years which goes to show you how good it was, but ok...)
They don't have the kind of money to make linux versions of the game if the sales aren't going to be there to support it. They've said several times "Show us the sales, and we'll port it." No one to date has been able to show them anything even remotely resembling strong sales of Linux games. The market just isn't there.
A tiny but growing market is still a tiny market. As soon as they think there is money to be made by porting to Linux, you can bet they'll do it.
So far as the "well they never innovate" nonsense, well if you really want to believe that, thats just fine. Personally, I always try to figure out how truly godawful games like anything made by Westwood manages to do so well when stacked up against a masterpiece like Starcraft in the sales department. Of course Tiberian Sun totally died off after a month, so I guess in the end things worked out.
Now that its gone gold, it shouldn't be a problem. Its getting games to go gold that usually takes Blizzard years and years, once they get this far they can print off cd's pretty darn fast. I'd expect it to start appearing in stores more or less when they say it will.
(after all, Broodwar appeared in stores a week after it went gold, in some places anyway)
They changed their FAQ, now it says Q1 next year, although thats still in the realm of "yeah right".
When they said it'd be out this year, I actually laughed when I heard it. That was before they changed the whole game from some kind of Roleplaying Hybrid back into a real RTS, so who knows how far that set them back.
Mid next year at the absolute earliest, I say Christmas next year.
Well, do you know which kernel release it was brought in on?
thanks.
Lets see... Oh yes, Linux now has ATA/100 support and Windows doesn't, woohoo! Lets all celebrate because we're faster then MS!
Wait a second... how long do you think for a Windows ATA/100 driver to be available really? I mean as soon as there is anything even remotely resembling demand for it, it will come into existance.
And just for the record, Windows has had USB support for well over two years now, whereas I try to plug a USB device into Linux, and...
Nothing!
So I guess MS has Linux beat by two years. Woohoo! Go MS!
Give me a break.
(ps - there is that whole ATA/100 being really pretty useless considering hard drive speed and the overall fact that IDE sucks compaired to SCSI anyway, but thats not really important to the whole "ra ra we support it first!" nonsense)
This is a good thing! Just think about it, now you can claim trademark infringement as an execuse to not cut your lawn!
Woohoo!
(ps - if anybody takes this seriously, then yikes!)
nVidia didn't beat 3dfx by using FUD against them, nVidia beat 3dfx because their products are flat out better.
:-)
3dfx's FUD didn't really help them much, but they did do it as you point out. I was just trying to say that nVidia beat them by simply making better hardware and drivers (which apparently includes the Linux ones as you point out).
Sorry for not being clear about that right off the bat.
re: 3dfx. Fair enough
So far as 2k goes, wouldn't it being delayed six more months to fix some of the more glaring bugs have been a good thing? If anything, the need for marketing didn't do anybody much good except for MS' competition.
Nor is every dominant company a bad thing. nVidia got to be where it is now because they simply worked their asses off to make the best stuff on the market, why shouldn't they be rewarded with dominance? They have done nothing wrong thus far, indeed they are still cranking out higher quality stuff then everybody else and improving their products at a torrid pace. Granted they may not have the best Linux drivers in the world (so I hear), but no company is perfect.
There is pleanty of reason to be happy about 3dfx having problems, they dug themselves into this hole by releasing several crap cards in a row. They are not there because of FUD or unfair monopolies or lawyers or anything, they are there because they have been beaten on a technological level consistantly. Isn't that exactly what we want to happen, the company who makes the best technology wins? Instead of the company with the best marketing wins?
This is a Good Thing(TM). The market is such that if 3dfx goes out and makes a better board then nVidia again, they can reclaim their marketshare. Its not being run by marketing, and that is extremely good.
And I disagree that competition is always a good thing. Look at Domain Name registrations. What have we got with competition? Confusion, Names getting lost between registrars, registrars pulling all kinds of crap like saying they own your name, etc. You notice how these problems didn't exist when NSI had a government enforced monopoly.
You notice how they still don't exist in systems like CA*Net, which has a monopoly on the *.ca domain? Funny how things didn't get messed until competition started. But hey, prices did come down.
(of course I'd rather pay the extra money for a decent service, which hasn't existed in the domain name space since this competition crap started.)
The moral of the story? Competition in the 3d market is good, because its actually resulting in better stuff. But in competition, someone has to loose. At least they're losing for the right reasons.
First of all, 3dfx should be *commended* for delaying a product if they don't think its ready. This is not a bad thing. This is a good thing. This is exactly what we want from other companies.
Praise them, they are doing the right thing.
Unfortunately, the Voodoo 5 sucks badly. The GeForce 2 rips it up in the power consumption, heat, feature, and sheer power fields.
I don't really think its 3dfx's fault entirely, maybe they lost some good talent or something. I mean they haven't done *anything* that was top of the line since the Voodoo2. They ruled back in those days. Then there was the Banshee. Then the Voodoo3. Both of which were lame.
Now we have the V4 (which is a joke), and the V5 (which is a bigger more expensive joke).
So, lets applaud them for their policy, and slam them for their technology. At least then we are doing it right.
It draws more power, generates more heat, and does 32 bit color. Of course everybody else has been doing that for years, but its a brand new feature from 3dfx!
The v5 is crap, take a look at it head on vs a real card like the GeForce 2. Its a total joke.
So they get the Ion Storm award, not the Blizzard award.
I guess your ignoring the fact that the 6000 generates heat like a pig and draws power in the same realm as my entire laptop?
Matrox really makes the best stuff for normal everyday use. You should be able to pick up a G200 for fairly cheap now, and it'll do everything you want from it pretty happily.
It may never be released at all. If it has been released already, its simply a single cpu card (the V5 5500 is 2 of the cpus on the V4), and the card compares favorably to cards released a year ago, maybe. Compare it to something like the GeForce 2, and to say it gets crushed by the foot of god is an understatement.
nothing here
They just use that as an execuse and a reason to tell the masses. Remember, if the media tells the public its true, then for all intents and purposes its true, even if its not.
Speed matters. When you have a server doing thousands of SSL transactions per second, the extra time it takes to generate a 512bit key vs a 128bit key becomes very very real and very expensive. It may not matter if it takes 17 seconds on your P133, but the server can't dedicate itself to doing your encryption for more then a split second.
Besides, in terms of non Public Key Cryptography, 128bit is reasonably secure for current applications. Just look at Distributed.net trying to crack 64bit encryption. 128bit is 2^64 stronger then that. Thats reasonably secure from brute force attacks.
If its a cryptoanalyitic attack your worried about (such as someone knowing how to quickly decrypt the messages), what you need is better algorithms, not longer keys. Longer keys don't stop a cryptoanalyitic attack.
I've never heard of it before, what with BrowserWatch Chat being down and all.
Good that you mentioned it, any browser that is out now that does things properly deserves a mention in this thread to show Mr. Zeldman that IE5/Mac is not the only browser in the world capable of doing things properly.
Well, unless you want to do basic text all the time, which I wouldn't really mind.
If you want any flash to your site at all though, it gets tremendously difficult to design it for every browser, because of how bad most browsers are. What can you do?
I mean really, if you can't design stuff according to the standards, then where do we stand?