With the company I am presently with, for 2 years. They constantly dangle the "full time" carrot, but never deliver. I've found this with every place I have contracted, they talk the talk, but make excuses when its time to pay up on promises.
Lucky you. I was contracting for a well known outsourcing firm (yes, should have known better) who subsequently made me permanent. I saw a completely different side to everything. The co-workers became backstabbing bastards, my manager was an imbecile who spoke in some sort of secret company code language, the bureaucracy increased ten-fold and most importantly the interesting work dried up.
After I'd had my incredibly depressing induction course (you're all replacable!) and was shown the promotion hoop jumping process on paper, I resigned - after just 6 weeks. I then had a long stretch of unemployment - the best (and most costly) decision I ever made. I still have nightmares about that place.
What do you expect? It's a FPS. That's basically what I play FPSs for - I don't want the story to get in the way of the carnage. To paraphrase Carmack (I think) 'a FPS is like a porn film, you do need a plot but it's not very important.'
Even DeusEx had a linear story line (albeit very cleverly done).
Wicked! Soon the US will be able to get a missile to any point in the world in a few minutes. That'll help make the world a happier place.
They already can.
You know, constant harping at our ally in this stupid conflict isn't going to stop those fucking jihadist nutcases from kidnapping and executing innocent aid workers. Targeted ordnance, while messy and unpalatable, does have a solid track record of changing the minds of those on the receiving end.
SunOS (later known as Solaris 1) was BSD. SunOS 5+ is Solaris 2 and up, which is SVR4. Much of what exists in the modern BSDs and Linux was invented by Sun - The VFS and RPC (hence NFS), shared objects and mmaping, etc.
Well, I went there to find out who Heather Graham is. I'm not planning to play the game, so I suppose it doesn't really matter. I assume she is some sort of actress or model, because it's clear from the article that she's a bit of a dizzy bint.
They should reintroduce this policy on the London Underground:).
I agree, decimate is misused a lot. It even has an entry in the OED supporting the modern usage (albeit with a note saying that it's a questionable practice). It's particularly irritating because the latin root makes it so bloody obvious. I mean, it's not like we have a shortage of synonyms for 'annihilate'.
Re:What is all the fuss about
on
Halo 2 Reviews
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Same here. I played halo 2 on the PC and thought: this is a console game ported to the PC, and it feels like you're using an emulator - not just the speed, the controls too. Maybe it was my hardware (a lot better than an Xbox, thanks). I found that the framerate was crap (I didn't run it at 640x480 though, I ran it at my LCDs native resolution). The textures were, well Xboxy, the gameplay nothing special (I didn't think the vehicles were as much fun as everyone else seemed to). The controls were what did it for me, though. I've played a lot of FPS games on the PC (ever since wolf3d). I pretty much expect to able to configure my controls to suit my keyboard and habits. Halo seemed to basically provide the facility to remap Xbox controller buttons to keyboard keys and no more. I found that to be the real showstopper.
I've tried playing FPSs or games with FPS elements on various consoles before (Hitman, that old James Bond game, Metal Gear Solid), I can't get to grips with 'mouse look' using buttons or a thumb joystick. It's just not going to happen.
I had much the same reaction when I played GTA3 on the PC (without having played it on the PS2). I thought that the controls were too 'basic', but having played it on the PS2, it is a completely different game, and enormous fun. It's also great fun to watch someone else play - which is a first for me.
Remember that before ATI began releasing any drivers at all for Linux they released the specifications of their chipsets and even gave cards to developers who wrote open source drivers.
Look in your kernel config under Direct Rendering Infrastructure.
Well, I got it working (3D acceleration, I mean). Eventually. I have a Thinkpad A21p with a rage mobility m3. The DRI drivers work, but you need to download daily snapshots (there doesn't appear to be a 'stable'), cross your fingers and hope that it works. If it doesn't (it locks up hard - there's a kernel module involved) then you try yesterdays build. Even now, if there's an OpenGL screensaver that kicks in, Xv breaks, but that's pretty good as far as I'm concerned.
A much better outcome than on my desktop machine. ATI's radeon drivers - they suck.
God, I hate you ATI, you've wasted literally weeks of my time with your crap software. Linux certified, yeah right. This Radeon 9800SE card came with a linux logo on the box. Ha!
Firstly it's known as imperial not 'English' and secondly we stopped using imperial units for engineering and science many, many years ago.
You'll still find me using feet and inches when I'm doing a spot of carpentry in the garden shed at the weekend and I'll follow that up with a crafty pint in the local, to wash the sawdust away.
Interestingly most timber sizes in the UK are just the imperial size expressed in millimetres, so if you ask for 90mmx90mm instead of 4-by-4 prepared, you receive blank stares, but thanks to the bloody EU, it's illegal to advertise it in imperial measurments.
I think the real problem was with Colin Pillinger himself, he was out of his depth. Lots of people were saying at the time, that the project would never have left the drawing board if it weren't for his enthusiasm and leadership. That wouldn't have been a bad outcome all things considered.
When complex projects fail, it's almost always caused by bad project management.
One used to be able to LEARN new tech related things from/.
Bollocks. I've been here (in one form or other) since the beginning. Slashdot has always been complete chaos. Here you'll find opinion, hearsay and groupthink at +5 and worse below, it's entertainment and nothing more - not serious journalism. There are always links to other sites in the article for those that can be bothered.
In the meantime IDE drives have begun to be used in RAID arrays, but usually where capacity matters and not performance. Admittedly the lines have blurred, especially for network-connected storage arrays where ethernet pipes are the limit and you cannot really tell the difference between a good IDE array and a regular SCSI array.
But NetApp told me Ethernet was just as good as fibre channel!
Under certain circumstances (nuisance calls, hoax calls, fraud etc.) you can call a free operator number and ask them to give you the number of a call made at a particular time, even if the caller ID was suppressed.
I use this to complain to the Telephone Preference Service, when I get unsolicited commercial telephone calls.
For 1471 users: If you get "the caller withheld their number" when you dial 1471, then you can usually get the number out of BT. If you get "we do not have the callers number", you can't - it was probably an international call.
I did actually read the article, not that it said what drives there were. I saw mention of a SCSI controller, but I also saw dual SATA controller and dual PATA controllers. The acticle never actaully *specifically* mentions which drives are used. In does imply SCSI though, I agree.
But since you ask, here's the systems handbook for the machine:
Yes, indeed, They're 68 pin SCSI drives, connected via a ribbon cable to the HBA. Not 80 pin SCA2 drives - or FC drives, which I would expect in a machine of this price and indeed what we had on the U1, U2, U60 (with FC on the 1000. 1500, 2000).
I finally escaped from 7 years on a Sun workstation to a Linux box. Solaris had its advantages, but X11 wasn't one of them and CDE wasn't another.
CDE might look like Windows 3.11 and be a heap of steaming clag - that's because it was designed by committee: Novell, IBM, Sun and some others. The best thing you can say about it is: it works, and it has done for years. Reliably.
I moved from OpenLook to CDE to WindowMaker and haven't really looked back. There's not much wrong with the X server itself. It's got a few things missing, but Xinerama and XRENDER were added in Solaris 8/9. The Sun OpenGL implementation is textbook and GNOME and KDE are both available, Star/OpenOffice and firefox are there. What's the problem?
It's not as responsive as it is on a Linux PC, but that's because the scheduling is tuned differently. I persoanlly prefer it done the Solaris way myself, but I mainly only run xterms, with the occaisonal firefox, thunderbird and OpenOffice session and some other services running smoothly in the background. Each to their own, I suppose.
Anyone who's looked after a SunRay server can testify to how solid and reliable the Solaris X server is these days.
Dude, have a look at Sun's older hardware, SS20 or even the Ultra1 for example, and you'll see what rock solid hardware is about.
Agreed. Nothing beats the SparcStations and the U1, U2, and the U60 for build quality. There's an internal picture in TFA which shows an IDE hard drive with a dangling ribbon cable for heavens sake! Even my SS5 has an SCA SCSI disk.
Still, can't be as bad as an U5 or a U10, those boxes made my crappy homebrew athlon machine look like a triumph of design engineering. They really cheapend the Sun workstation brand, but then Sun didn't actually make them...
Sun and Red Hat had a decent enough relationship 2 years ago - RHES was being certified and supported on some of Sun's intel based rackmount servers, but Red Hat just kept knifing them in the back on big deals. Now Sun *hate* their guts.
Sun are now looking fairly enthusiastically at Linux on low-end boxes, if that's what the customer wants. Of course Sun prefer Solaris, because they *know* how Solaris performs/scales/breaks *really* well. Deploying any large IT project is inherently less risky when you use stuff you've used before. For example, if it's a SunPS led project and serious uptime guarentees ($$$) are at stake, you know it'll be a big name app running on clustered, big-iron SPARC/Solaris. Linux might feature in particular areas in the infrastructure - DNS, webserving etc. - but it probably won't be in any of the crucial parts of the system.
For many of Sun's big customers - especially those who have bought nothing but Sun since the early 90's, Linux won't fit well into their organisation, without significant extra work (all the tedious stuff - build creation, testing, systems management, backup). Sun wouldn't be taken seriously if they they did push it.
The markets differ, of course. Linux is likely to feature much more in the edu sector, for example. Whereas many financial applications still *only* run on Sybase/Solaris, though the trend is definately going in the Java direction.
Slashdot Mirror
With the company I am presently with, for 2 years. They constantly dangle the "full time" carrot, but never deliver. I've found this with every place I have contracted, they talk the talk, but make excuses when its time to pay up on promises.
Lucky you. I was contracting for a well known outsourcing firm (yes, should have known better) who subsequently made me permanent. I saw a completely different side to everything. The co-workers became backstabbing bastards, my manager was an imbecile who spoke in some sort of secret company code language, the bureaucracy increased ten-fold and most importantly the interesting work dried up.
After I'd had my incredibly depressing induction course (you're all replacable!) and was shown the promotion hoop jumping process on paper, I resigned - after just 6 weeks. I then had a long stretch of unemployment - the best (and most costly) decision I ever made. I still have nightmares about that place.
Other complaints? The game is totally linear.
What do you expect? It's a FPS. That's basically what I play FPSs for - I don't want the story to get in the way of the carnage. To paraphrase Carmack (I think) 'a FPS is like a porn film, you do need a plot but it's not very important.'
Even DeusEx had a linear story line (albeit very cleverly done).
Wicked! Soon the US will be able to get a missile to any point in the world in a few minutes. That'll help make the world a happier place.
They already can.
You know, constant harping at our ally in this stupid conflict isn't going to stop those fucking jihadist nutcases from kidnapping and executing innocent aid workers. Targeted ordnance, while messy and unpalatable, does have a solid track record of changing the minds of those on the receiving end.
SunOS (later known as Solaris 1) was BSD. SunOS 5+ is Solaris 2 and up, which is SVR4. Much of what exists in the modern BSDs and Linux was invented by Sun - The VFS and RPC (hence NFS), shared objects and mmaping, etc.
SunSwitch NOW!
That still makes me feel sick.
Plant a tree, then you're carbon neutral.
Well, I went there to find out who Heather Graham is. I'm not planning to play the game, so I suppose it doesn't really matter. I assume she is some sort of actress or model, because it's clear from the article that she's a bit of a dizzy bint.
They should reintroduce this policy on the London Underground :).
I agree, decimate is misused a lot. It even has an entry in the OED supporting the modern usage (albeit with a note saying that it's a questionable practice). It's particularly irritating because the latin root makes it so bloody obvious. I mean, it's not like we have a shortage of synonyms for 'annihilate'.
Same here. I played halo 2 on the PC and thought: this is a console game ported to the PC, and it feels like you're using an emulator - not just the speed, the controls too. Maybe it was my hardware (a lot better than an Xbox, thanks). I found that the framerate was crap (I didn't run it at 640x480 though, I ran it at my LCDs native resolution). The textures were, well Xboxy, the gameplay nothing special (I didn't think the vehicles were as much fun as everyone else seemed to). The controls were what did it for me, though. I've played a lot of FPS games on the PC (ever since wolf3d). I pretty much expect to able to configure my controls to suit my keyboard and habits. Halo seemed to basically provide the facility to remap Xbox controller buttons to keyboard keys and no more. I found that to be the real showstopper.
I've tried playing FPSs or games with FPS elements on various consoles before (Hitman, that old James Bond game, Metal Gear Solid), I can't get to grips with 'mouse look' using buttons or a thumb joystick. It's just not going to happen.
I had much the same reaction when I played GTA3 on the PC (without having played it on the PS2). I thought that the controls were too 'basic', but having played it on the PS2, it is a completely different game, and enormous fun. It's also great fun to watch someone else play - which is a first for me.
Slashdot Journals might meet the criteria to be blogs, but the main site certainly isn't one.
Remember that before ATI began releasing any drivers at all for Linux they released the specifications of their chipsets and even gave cards to developers who wrote open source drivers.
Look in your kernel config under Direct Rendering Infrastructure.
Well, I got it working (3D acceleration, I mean). Eventually. I have a Thinkpad A21p with a rage mobility m3. The DRI drivers work, but you need to download daily snapshots (there doesn't appear to be a 'stable'), cross your fingers and hope that it works. If it doesn't (it locks up hard - there's a kernel module involved) then you try yesterdays build. Even now, if there's an OpenGL screensaver that kicks in, Xv breaks, but that's pretty good as far as I'm concerned.
A much better outcome than on my desktop machine. ATI's radeon drivers - they suck.
God, I hate you ATI, you've wasted literally weeks of my time with your crap software. Linux certified, yeah right. This Radeon 9800SE card came with a linux logo on the box. Ha!
He's from Bistol, I believe.
Oo-aaah, my lovely.
And leave it to a progressive society to overlook the obvious identication and privacy implications of overloading functions into one device.
"Citizen, where is your phone?"
Firstly it's known as imperial not 'English' and secondly we stopped using imperial units for engineering and science many, many years ago.
You'll still find me using feet and inches when I'm doing a spot of carpentry in the garden shed at the weekend and I'll follow that up with a crafty pint in the local, to wash the sawdust away.
Interestingly most timber sizes in the UK are just the imperial size expressed in millimetres, so if you ask for 90mmx90mm instead of 4-by-4 prepared, you receive blank stares, but thanks to the bloody EU, it's illegal to advertise it in imperial measurments.
What? It got there in one piece didn't it?
I think the real problem was with Colin Pillinger himself, he was out of his depth. Lots of people were saying at the time, that the project would never have left the drawing board if it weren't for his enthusiasm and leadership. That wouldn't have been a bad outcome all things considered.
When complex projects fail, it's almost always caused by bad project management.
One used to be able to LEARN new tech related things from /.
Bollocks. I've been here (in one form or other) since the beginning. Slashdot has always been complete chaos. Here you'll find opinion, hearsay and groupthink at +5 and worse below, it's entertainment and nothing more - not serious journalism. There are always links to other sites in the article for those that can be bothered.
In the meantime IDE drives have begun to be used in RAID arrays, but usually where capacity matters and not performance. Admittedly the lines have blurred, especially for network-connected storage arrays where ethernet pipes are the limit and you cannot really tell the difference between a good IDE array and a regular SCSI array.
But NetApp told me Ethernet was just as good as fibre channel!
The new slashdot? What changed? Did I miss it?
You can do that in the UK too.
Under certain circumstances (nuisance calls, hoax calls, fraud etc.) you can call a free operator number and ask them to give you the number of a call made at a particular time, even if the caller ID was suppressed.
I use this to complain to the Telephone Preference Service, when I get unsolicited commercial telephone calls.
For 1471 users: If you get "the caller withheld their number" when you dial 1471, then you can usually get the number out of BT. If you get "we do not have the callers number", you can't - it was probably an international call.
I did actually read the article, not that it said what drives there were. I saw mention of a SCSI controller, but I also saw dual SATA controller and dual PATA controllers. The acticle never actaully *specifically* mentions which drives are used. In does imply SCSI though, I agree.
1 00 z/W2100z.html
1 00 z/component.left.html
But since you ask, here's the systems handbook for the machine:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/W2
Yes, indeed, They're 68 pin SCSI drives, connected via a ribbon cable to the HBA. Not 80 pin SCA2 drives - or FC drives, which I would expect in a machine of this price and indeed what we had on the U1, U2, U60 (with FC on the 1000. 1500, 2000).
I criticise because:
http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/W2
This is what you'd find in a PC, look at all those untidy loose cables. Sun workstations used to be beautifully put together.
I finally escaped from 7 years on a Sun workstation to a Linux box. Solaris had its advantages, but X11 wasn't one of them and CDE wasn't another.
CDE might look like Windows 3.11 and be a heap of steaming clag - that's because it was designed by committee: Novell, IBM, Sun and some others. The best thing you can say about it is: it works, and it has done for years. Reliably.
I moved from OpenLook to CDE to WindowMaker and haven't really looked back. There's not much wrong with the X server itself. It's got a few things missing, but Xinerama and XRENDER were added in Solaris 8/9. The Sun OpenGL implementation is textbook and GNOME and KDE are both available, Star/OpenOffice and firefox are there. What's the problem?
It's not as responsive as it is on a Linux PC, but that's because the scheduling is tuned differently. I persoanlly prefer it done the Solaris way myself, but I mainly only run xterms, with the occaisonal firefox, thunderbird and OpenOffice session and some other services running smoothly in the background. Each to their own, I suppose.
Anyone who's looked after a SunRay server can testify to how solid and reliable the Solaris X server is these days.
Dude, have a look at Sun's older hardware, SS20 or even the Ultra1 for example, and you'll see what rock solid hardware is about.
Agreed. Nothing beats the SparcStations and the U1, U2, and the U60 for build quality. There's an internal picture in TFA which shows an IDE hard drive with a dangling ribbon cable for heavens sake! Even my SS5 has an SCA SCSI disk.
Still, can't be as bad as an U5 or a U10, those boxes made my crappy homebrew athlon machine look like a triumph of design engineering. They really cheapend the Sun workstation brand, but then Sun didn't actually make them...
Sun and Red Hat had a decent enough relationship 2 years ago - RHES was being certified and supported on some of Sun's intel based rackmount servers, but Red Hat just kept knifing them in the back on big deals. Now Sun *hate* their guts.
Sun are now looking fairly enthusiastically at Linux on low-end boxes, if that's what the customer wants. Of course Sun prefer Solaris, because they *know* how Solaris performs/scales/breaks *really* well. Deploying any large IT project is inherently less risky when you use stuff you've used before. For example, if it's a SunPS led project and serious uptime guarentees ($$$) are at stake, you know it'll be a big name app running on clustered, big-iron SPARC/Solaris. Linux might feature in particular areas in the infrastructure - DNS, webserving etc. - but it probably won't be in any of the crucial parts of the system.
For many of Sun's big customers - especially those who have bought nothing but Sun since the early 90's, Linux won't fit well into their organisation, without significant extra work (all the tedious stuff - build creation, testing, systems management, backup). Sun wouldn't be taken seriously if they they did push it.
The markets differ, of course. Linux is likely to feature much more in the edu sector, for example. Whereas many financial applications still *only* run on Sybase/Solaris, though the trend is definately going in the Java direction.
Your 'one distro at a time' theory is just wrong.