If I wanted to have to wade through The Onion's rubbish disguised as news all the time, I'd be over at Digg. The Onion, while funny, should NEVER be front page news at Slashdot - BECAUSE IT AIN'T NEWS! Seriously, what's next? Lolcats? Come on...
And, conversely, IT staff can and do massively impede productive workers... the parts of the company that make money. Perverse security requirements, upgrades that remove functionality, ridiculous delays to get the simplest things done because users aren't permitted to do anything to their pc...
And will often be quite condescending about it as well; after all, they're the wizards. Users are just muggles.
I recently discovered the on-demand feature of Netflix. Yesterday, I watched half a season of The Office from a laptop plugged into the LCD TV in the living room, and it was great! No streaming interruptions, no ads in the player... thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, it's jumpstarting my plans to build a small PC for the living room; I'm building a small Shuttle box on NewEgg right now.
Re:What's with the militant terminology?
on
Network Warrior
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· Score: 1
As a former Marine and a current IT wearer-of-many-hats, I have a lot of responses to this running through my head right now, but I'll be succinct: Fuck you.
What you're saying MIGHT be true if somehow ex-infantrymen were being slotted into IT positions, but the people who leave the military to do IT come from MOSs that require fast and creative thinking and being able to rapidly problem solve - sometimes while getting shot at. I'd like to see you pull off a tenth of what the average E-5 comms guy in the Army or USMC has to these days in Afghanistan or Iraq.
I think that if you're seeing good results from what you're doing, then keep doing it. I'm not saying don't tweak/optimize/refine it, but putting a personal face on IT is sometimes a big deal in a small company where your job security depends as much on how well you are perceived as how well you perform. Get to know your customers, it'll help you in the end. If you think of them as anonymous lusers, even if you don't think you're letting them know you do, _you are_.
We had some ads running on www.mvgc.net (still do now, under a different account) and as soon as our account got over $50 they closed it for fradulent clicks. I appealed to no effect. I have no idea how they detect what's fradulent and what's not, but clearly my explanation that we often had 15-20 members on a LAN with NAT IPs meant nothing to them.
This time we've instructed ALL members not to click on Google Ads on our site, ever, no matter if they were interested in the link or not.
They never paid us for the first account (it was fradulent, after all *rolls eyes*) and we haven't yet been sent money for the second try either. But I bet they don't refund the money advertisers pay them when they close an account.
I'd like to know exactly what kind of fraud detection they use. Is it by IP addesses, or some kind of link layer MAC address logging, or do they just cancel your shit if you exceed statistically expected performance? In my eyes, the first two are valid, the third is a crock of crap.
He's building a gaming PC, not a fucking time machine to take him back to 2002. I think it's a reasonable assumption that someone who is building a gaming PC will expect it to play current games. Just because you're four generations behind in your gaming doesn't mean he is.
And just a heads up: everyone IS playing WoW. Those people DO need more than 1GB of RAM.
Please stop exaggerating in your posts. No one but you is talking about liquid cooling and 30" plasma screens. I'm talking about Joe Average with a 19" CRT. To get anything like maximum performance out of _current games_, he needs more RAM than 1GB.
Maybe it's time for some colleges to shitcan their CS/CIS programs. There's plenty of colleges with, shall we say, less-than-stellar programs, facilities and instructors. Maybe those schools should go back to what they're good at.
My understanding was that lawyers take the cases their firms' partners tell them to take, or they don't get paid for very long. Public Defenders, while admirable, don't make a lot of money.
Equating death penalty cases with a class action about faulty compression software is hardly apples and apples.
1. Make sure your KVM has USB ports. Lots of new machines (especially new Dells) don't have any PS2 ports for mouse/keyboard.
2. We have a couple external enclosures for HDDs, one for laptop drives and one for desktop drives, ATA and SATA. These are really handy for fast data recovery from corrupted or damaged drives.
3. USB keychain/thumb/jump/whateveryouwannacallthem drive. These are really handy for getting drivers from machine to machine.
4. A label maker. Or a Sharpie and tape. Something to label all the containers you're going to accumulate.
I'd argue that, while it's still too early to really be sure, Worlds of Warcraft looks to be the best RPG game I've seen, ever. Better than the original Baldur's Gate, better than Neverwinter Nights, FAR better than EQ, better than... hell, better than everything in that genre.
I point to quotes like this from Blizzard:
Those questions informed the entire World of Warcraft design process. One of the biggest issues with the current generation of MMOs isn't technological, it's philosophical. An MMO is a game, not a social experiment. Creating a huge arena and expecting the players to generate all your content means you've forgotten why people play games in the first place -- to have experiences, to challenge themselves. MMOs shouldn't be about a designer playing god and seeing what all his little ants do in his digital ant farm. To extend the metaphor, MMOs should be a theme park -- not a playground.
...there's plenty of companies that usually deliver what they promise. The one that comes to mind immediately is Blizzard. I mean, have they made a bad game?
What separates the good companies that deliver on their promises from the shitbad slackers that deliver a half-done product with missing features that you have to download 50 megs of patches to even play?
It's not size. Companies as big as Sony Online Entertainment (most recently Star Wars Galaxies) and as small as Reakktor Media GMBH (Neocron 2) have all failed miserably to deliver on their promises and hype. You could assume that a huge company like Sony could hire competent managers, but that's obviously not true. But conversely, some smaller companies don't do any better either.
This is something that merits more study. As the gaming industry grows, more and more non-gamers are involved with production of games -- especially in areas like marketing.
These people probably don't understand fully how the "gamer" demographic thinks. They often don't understand that with the ubiquity of internet communications, people are gonna discover that a game is a lump of crap often the day it's released, or even before that if there's an open beta. Just google the title and read a few reviews . And if a game is asstastic, well, gamers have no brand loyalty. They'll happily tell a company to roll up their game, stick it in their ass, and set it on fire. And they'll do it publicly and vociferously.
"It's a major issue that's holding (Linux) back as a desktop OS."
If that's what you meant to say, then I agree. I firmly believe that games are what drives the state of the art in a lot of areas - graphics being a big one, but gamers are usally worried about performance issues as well, and it's nice that you can eliminate a lot of bloat with Linux. I mean, seriously, who buys matched 1GB pairs of DDR3200 or $400 video cards to use office apps?
No one, I hope.
There's a lot of gamers who would use Linux as their primary desktop, if they could only know that the new games coming out would be able to be run with their OS. I know I would use Linux in a heartbeat as my main OS, but I'd be stuck playing nothing but ID Games and Neverwinter Nights. Good games, but variety is the spice of life.
Get games released for Linux, or make a foolproof emulator, and I bet you'll see the number of people using Linux as their primary desktop go through the roof.
Planetside is having a hard time for two reasons:
1. Most new FPS games coming out support up to 64 players on a single server, and the netcode is good enough that you don't need a T3 to run a server. It's hard to pitch the idea of $13 a month to a gamer who can buy Battlefield Vietnam once and play on packed servers for free.
2. The Planetside dev team cut out pretty much everything that had anything to do with an RPG during the beta testing, so there's no long term goals, no "loot", no personalization of player stats... It's purely an MMOFPS. There's no role-playing aspect whatsoever, so you're not gonna appeal to the usual MMO crowd.
I mean, the people who wanna shoot stuff buy a (free play) FPS. The people who wanna roleplay buy an RPG. And the people who wanna be elf mangina play EQ or Lineage II.:)
Slashdot Mirror
"Apple requires you to be 17 years or older to purchase a censored dictionary that omits half the words Steve Jobs uses every day."
If I wanted to have to wade through The Onion's rubbish disguised as news all the time, I'd be over at Digg. The Onion, while funny, should NEVER be front page news at Slashdot - BECAUSE IT AIN'T NEWS! Seriously, what's next? Lolcats? Come on...
And, conversely, IT staff can and do massively impede productive workers... the parts of the company that make money. Perverse security requirements, upgrades that remove functionality, ridiculous delays to get the simplest things done because users aren't permitted to do anything to their pc... And will often be quite condescending about it as well; after all, they're the wizards. Users are just muggles.
Who let the MBA in here?
I recently discovered the on-demand feature of Netflix. Yesterday, I watched half a season of The Office from a laptop plugged into the LCD TV in the living room, and it was great! No streaming interruptions, no ads in the player... thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, it's jumpstarting my plans to build a small PC for the living room; I'm building a small Shuttle box on NewEgg right now.
What you're saying MIGHT be true if somehow ex-infantrymen were being slotted into IT positions, but the people who leave the military to do IT come from MOSs that require fast and creative thinking and being able to rapidly problem solve - sometimes while getting shot at. I'd like to see you pull off a tenth of what the average E-5 comms guy in the Army or USMC has to these days in Afghanistan or Iraq.
That comment makes the game seem more attractive to me than anything else I've ever read about EVE...
I think that if you're seeing good results from what you're doing, then keep doing it. I'm not saying don't tweak/optimize/refine it, but putting a personal face on IT is sometimes a big deal in a small company where your job security depends as much on how well you are perceived as how well you perform. Get to know your customers, it'll help you in the end. If you think of them as anonymous lusers, even if you don't think you're letting them know you do, _you are_.
This time we've instructed ALL members not to click on Google Ads on our site, ever, no matter if they were interested in the link or not.
They never paid us for the first account (it was fradulent, after all *rolls eyes*) and we haven't yet been sent money for the second try either. But I bet they don't refund the money advertisers pay them when they close an account.
I'd like to know exactly what kind of fraud detection they use. Is it by IP addesses, or some kind of link layer MAC address logging, or do they just cancel your shit if you exceed statistically expected performance? In my eyes, the first two are valid, the third is a crock of crap.
And just a heads up: everyone IS playing WoW. Those people DO need more than 1GB of RAM.
Please stop exaggerating in your posts. No one but you is talking about liquid cooling and 30" plasma screens. I'm talking about Joe Average with a 19" CRT. To get anything like maximum performance out of _current games_, he needs more RAM than 1GB.
2GB is the absolute minimum for anyone who calls themselves a gamer.
Why dick around with all that when Deep Freeze is $14 per license?
Tool.
Maybe it's time for some colleges to shitcan their CS/CIS programs. There's plenty of colleges with, shall we say, less-than-stellar programs, facilities and instructors. Maybe those schools should go back to what they're good at.
Like, say... philosophy.
Equating death penalty cases with a class action about faulty compression software is hardly apples and apples.
Microsoft pays well.
I fail to see any relevance to this story, beyond the usual anti-Microsoft rabble rousing.
2. We have a couple external enclosures for HDDs, one for laptop drives and one for desktop drives, ATA and SATA. These are really handy for fast data recovery from corrupted or damaged drives.
3. USB keychain/thumb/jump/whateveryouwannacallthem drive. These are really handy for getting drivers from machine to machine.
4. A label maker. Or a Sharpie and tape. Something to label all the containers you're going to accumulate.
I refuse to make it a link. If you really want to see it, you'll have to copy -> paste it yourself and cut your own throat.
Otherwise, I'd be good.
I point to quotes like this from Blizzard:
Those questions informed the entire World of Warcraft design process. One of the biggest issues with the current generation of MMOs isn't technological, it's philosophical. An MMO is a game, not a social experiment. Creating a huge arena and expecting the players to generate all your content means you've forgotten why people play games in the first place -- to have experiences, to challenge themselves. MMOs shouldn't be about a designer playing god and seeing what all his little ants do in his digital ant farm. To extend the metaphor, MMOs should be a theme park -- not a playground.
http://pc.gamespy.com/pc/world-of-warcraft/493681p 1.html?fromint=1
Whatever's happened with their staff, they still haven't lost sight of the brass ring as a company.
Dev #1: Here's an idea! What if we make it work with a special controller that has electrodes attached to the pleasure centers of your BRAIN!
(marketing drone scribbles furiously)
Dev #2: Shit Mike, that's a great idea! Isn't Bob an EE? He should be able to hook that up no problem!
(marketing drone dashes from room, notepad in hand)
Bob: Dude, there's no way I can do that. It would require, like, surgery, or something...
Dev #1: Oh yeah. Nevermind.
Meanwhile in Marketing...
Marketing Drone: You guys wouldn't believe what the next game they're making is gonna do!
Marketing Manager: Really? What?
Marketing Drone: They're developing a new controller that GIVES YOU AN ORGASM!!!1
Marketing Manager: HOLY SHIT! Is it too late for a two page spread in this month's PC Gamer?!?
What separates the good companies that deliver on their promises from the shitbad slackers that deliver a half-done product with missing features that you have to download 50 megs of patches to even play?
It's not size. Companies as big as Sony Online Entertainment (most recently Star Wars Galaxies) and as small as Reakktor Media GMBH (Neocron 2) have all failed miserably to deliver on their promises and hype. You could assume that a huge company like Sony could hire competent managers, but that's obviously not true. But conversely, some smaller companies don't do any better either.
This is something that merits more study. As the gaming industry grows, more and more non-gamers are involved with production of games -- especially in areas like marketing.
These people probably don't understand fully how the "gamer" demographic thinks. They often don't understand that with the ubiquity of internet communications, people are gonna discover that a game is a lump of crap often the day it's released, or even before that if there's an open beta. Just google the title and read a few reviews . And if a game is asstastic, well, gamers have no brand loyalty. They'll happily tell a company to roll up their game, stick it in their ass, and set it on fire. And they'll do it publicly and vociferously.
If that's what you meant to say, then I agree. I firmly believe that games are what drives the state of the art in a lot of areas - graphics being a big one, but gamers are usally worried about performance issues as well, and it's nice that you can eliminate a lot of bloat with Linux. I mean, seriously, who buys matched 1GB pairs of DDR3200 or $400 video cards to use office apps?
No one, I hope.
There's a lot of gamers who would use Linux as their primary desktop, if they could only know that the new games coming out would be able to be run with their OS. I know I would use Linux in a heartbeat as my main OS, but I'd be stuck playing nothing but ID Games and Neverwinter Nights. Good games, but variety is the spice of life.
Get games released for Linux, or make a foolproof emulator, and I bet you'll see the number of people using Linux as their primary desktop go through the roof.
Planetside is having a hard time for two reasons: 1. Most new FPS games coming out support up to 64 players on a single server, and the netcode is good enough that you don't need a T3 to run a server. It's hard to pitch the idea of $13 a month to a gamer who can buy Battlefield Vietnam once and play on packed servers for free. 2. The Planetside dev team cut out pretty much everything that had anything to do with an RPG during the beta testing, so there's no long term goals, no "loot", no personalization of player stats... It's purely an MMOFPS. There's no role-playing aspect whatsoever, so you're not gonna appeal to the usual MMO crowd. I mean, the people who wanna shoot stuff buy a (free play) FPS. The people who wanna roleplay buy an RPG. And the people who wanna be elf mangina play EQ or Lineage II. :)