It's not a bad solution, and the clunkiness is not their fault - it's the fault of digital camara producers: I guess the digital cameras coming to us from "traditional" camera manufacturers have some sort of excuse for not thinking too radically about the "device" side of things (it's wearing thin though), but what is Sony's excuse, or any of the other consumer electronics companies now making cameras? Why don't digital cameras all talk bluetooth? Why can't high end cameras talk to bluetooth GPS devices? For that matter - why can so few of them do anything at all with bluetooth - even remote shutter release would be good. My Fuji 9500 uses a £2.50 *cable* as a remote shutter release - how last century is that?:/ Why can't I use my phone/PDA etc? WiFi and a built in web interface would be nice too.
Maybe much of this stuff is seen as trivial and not that important to professionals (although I bet GPS tagging would be) but as a buyer of various devices, it seems to me that cameras lag behind in terms of the level of connevtivity I now expect out of a chunk of electronics. Maybe I should wait for the first mobile phone with a standard lens mount and full size CCD:P
That global temperatures over the past two centuries exhibit and upwards trend is pretty much proven. That atmospheric CO2 levels are tightly correlated to global temperature is pretty much proven.
Aharrr!! (and Arrgh!) It's also proven that the number of pirates has declined rapidly over the same period! It's obvious that the lack of pirates is causing global warming!
(well that and the bloomin great fusion reaction we're orbiting:P)
Seriously though, I agree that increased greenhouse gases = warmer Earth is pretty much proven, but is it the biggest effect on global temps? What about the sun's output - is it constant? What about the distance from the sun - is this decreasing? The planet's core is cooling but does it spike ever?
Where do cars figure on the scale of greenhouse gas producers? How do we know how much CO2 was around 800,000 years ago?
They lost just about everything a few years back but this was down to general ineptitude on behalf of Sun's engineers.
However - I don't think they back anything up - and the contract absolves them of the need to do so. They lost the cotents of the web server (crofters.plusnet.co.uk) a few months ago too. Happily for me, the actual content of my web site was in their MySQL server on a seperate box (humbug.plusnet.net).
I wouldn't trust them (or any ISP) to store anything important for me - retrieve your email to a local server.
PlusNET are more geek friendly than most ISPs though - they were perhaps the first ISP in the UK to just let you telnet (now SSH) to the web server, upload binaries (it's a Linux server) and generally just "do it yourself". No support or fancy control panels - just "here's the server, and here's your bit of it - do your stuff". They do have the fancy control panel thingies now, but you can still just SSH to the box. This why I still use them - I can build all my stuff on my own LAMP environemnt and then replicate it to theirs.
Of course these days there's no shortage of hosting outfits that will rent you a server (or virtual server) but PlusNET do this for little more than the price of the connection. Just don't expect any backups!
I agree. The lego I see in the shops Today does not look like the stuff I played with for hours at a time as a child. I built all manner of things from the simple bricks, and later on from the Technic stuff - not all of which were that successful (like the time I built a chassis for a static steam engine, age 10 with predictable results and a valuable lesson in materials science:P I switched that project to Meccano...).
Today though I see lots of small kits, that oprerry much only build one thing. Take the Star Wars stuff for example: Lego could either use 1000's of generic blocks to build a model so vast that if you stood 20 feet away and squinted, your A-Wing didn't look like it was built by the ancient Egyptians, out of sandstone blocks; or they could just make a "wing" part, and sell a kit that made a small model. Trouble is, these models well, how can I put this? They suck. A Wings don't have little round bits all over them. As a kid, would I want a Lego kit that only makes one Star Wars model anyway, but looks like it was produced by someone who'd never seen the movie, or a proper model, that actually looks a bit like the things I saw on the big screen, and isn't covered in some sort of geometrically arranged skin disease?
The Mindstorms stuff on the other hand, isn't pretending to "be" anything - it's back to the core Lego values - "well sell parts - you make stuff with it."
Hehe I think Id have less of a problem believing Farrel as an American cop - after all, don't 30% of New York inhabitants think they're Irish (at least on St Paddy's day:P). I did have the misfortune to watch a real pile of old boots called "Alexander" the other night though. I thought "nothing much on, Sky Movies is showing this thing, loads of big names in it.. worth a punt". Oh dear. There's 3 hours of my life I'd rather have back. It should have been sub-titled "how the Irish took over the world". Very strange hearing ancient greeks and Macedonians saying things like "roight den, I tink we'll be off over dem ills and be invadin' the Hindu Kush - hows aboutcha?"
Absolute train wreck of a movie that droned on in no particular direction for 3 feckin' hours. I swear, 2 or 3 times I thought it was over and went to make coffee, only to find they were invading some other place when I got back, our hero was still eyeing up his best mate (but, following the advice of his adopted father, and unlike many of his ancestors, hadn't shagged his mother).
There's absolutely no excuse for Hollywood "running out of ideas" and making all these half-arsed re-makes: my bookshelves are crammed with excellent plots, many of which would make a hal;f decent screenplay. Let's face it, if Peter Jackson, could make a series of nicely paced action packed movies from the Lord Of The Rings, surely something could be done with say - half of the PK Dick stories still unfilmed, Magician, The Stainless Steel Rat series, Tad Williams epic, not to mention all the "classic" fantasy fare from Ursula Le Guin (I'm not counting that tripe someone knocked up a couple of years ago), Michael Moorcock (about the only thing Elric hasn't been in is a movie...), EE Smith, Asimov etc.
Put down the red underpants and Step away from the Superman plot. FFS. And Batman - that's been done to death now surely. Makes me laugh when I see the actors in these remakes being interviewed, and explaining their character, his background and his motivation - like we didn't already know.
Seeing as we now live in a world of virtual machines (z/VM, VMware, et al) and a world manipulated by raising tickets, maybe we should go the whole hog and just run our companies via a MMORPG - with a live link to the stock price!
Certainly my job feels like a computer game sometimes...:P
Thanks for the tip Ford. It's set to 128MB by default on this Windows binary distribution. Increasing to 500MB does improve the performance to about 1 second for colourising/messing with the histogram etc. Still not instant (ie adjusts in near real time as you move the sliders) but a big improvement.
The near 5MB jpegs from my Fuji 9500 expand in memory to about 95MB and Gimp uses a total of 210MB
Who moderates this stuff? In what way is that trolling? Granted it's a bit weak - but it's not trolling! Presumably the mod never read the Dragons Of Autummn Twiglets, or Dragons of a Damp Mattress ?
Besides - didn't they already make this into a movie - it had Devito and Schwarzenegger - "Shirt of the Twins" or something...
Make a proper movie or not at all. Where's Peter Jackson when you need him?
I actually prefer GIMP's interface to Photoshop (which maybe because I used it first but hey). I used GIMP exclusively for photo editing. Until that is, I bought a better camera which takes 5MB jpegs (or 40MB raw images) and I have to agree - GIMP is hopeless with these larger files.
I run it on a P4 prescott at 3.2GHz, with 1GB of dual channel RAM and messing with anything like the light levels or colour mixer is just unworkable on a 5MB jpeg - you can watch it apply the effcts of the change, in blocks over a period of minutes, whereas Photoshop Elements, which came free with the camera, does this more or less instantly, just like GIMP did with the smaller images from my old camera.
I can't claim to have looked into this problem too much - I'm just using the pre-cooked binary on Windows, so maybe there is a solution (perhaps better compilation options, or maybe the code is optimized for Linux) I hope so.
In general- the downsides are the memory and CPU overhead, plus you're adding another layer of "stuff", that may have it's own problems. Everytime you are trying to trace a fault, you will often have to eliminate the VM layer.
Plus - to turn the question on its head: just think about what you are doing and why? Shouldn't you just be able to run multiple things on one real machine? Why do we need to spin up entire operating system instances?
Great for development and simulation - but I've yet to hear a convincing argument for doing this in production that doesn't amount to "ease of admin and installation" - ie convenience. These factors are relevant to any system design of course, but I value performance and reliability more.
Sadly, and in a large part due to the way commercial IT is funded, this can actually look good on paper - to the technology accountant: "as many servers as we like, that can be created and destroyed at will? Yes please". We also need virtual finance teams, virtual staff, virtual customers - hell don't bother running a real business at all - just model the entire thing, and play it like a RTS sim - with your score linked directly to the corporate stock price!
Technology finance will cretae some bizarre technical solutions, if sombody in the organisation doesn't put the brakes on - another good example is "hmm terminal server runs all the same apps that native desltops do for the remote workers - let's just issue everyone a Windows TS "device" and host everyone's sessions inside a big servers in the data centre - it's cheaper, and there's no difference right? This is where someone gets to try and explain latency, and how it's different from "bandwidth", to an accountant:D "yeah but we just paid for a 1 Ooodlegig/s line - it'll be super quick!"
It's not new either - mainframes have operated like this for years. IBM would have you create your entire data centre inside z/VM - including the routers, switches and firewalls. It's great for development and testing - need more Linux/Apache/WAS/Oracle servers? sure just wish 3 more into existence, re-test your fancy shmancy clustering and treacle bending widget, and then bin them off again with another wave of the virtual wand.
We have clusters of Websphere AS inside one LPAR - not for speed I hasten to add - that would be silly, but to create resilience, seperate the Java VMs and add flexibitlty for software releases.
Then again, as the Samsung Blue Ray player seems likely to cost about the same: $900 or about £400, it doesn't look so bad - play HD discs, and play games.
I spent £150 on a Sony DVD player years ago, and then the Ps/2 arrived a couple of months later and cost a little bit less, and you could do other things with it...
Think I'll just wait for the bare drives to arrive and upgrade my HTPC:) (ok it might be around 2008 by then but I feel there's a lot of dust that needs to settle on the whole HDMI/Large cap optical disc thing)
I have an older Razer Viper and it looks identical.
The Viper was sold as an FPS mouse - but while it has the aforementioned high-res optics, it falls down as an FPS mouse on some very basic stuff:-
You cannot turn off the acceleration completely! This is a must for old-skool FPS gamers like me - I need a linear relationship between mouse and game movement - it's no good if it speeds up unexpectedly - how'm I supposed to do my snap-rails now?? It's just about usable if you ditch the drivers and use the standard XP ones.
It has a wheel!! Arrgh. These are no bloomin use at all in fast-paced FPS's. Much too easy to move the wheel either not enough or too many times, or click it by accident while moving it. Probably OK in more recent slow FPS games or RTS though I should imagine. I'd rather have a proper 3rd button myself. No self respecting Q2/3 player selects weapons by using a scroll wheel to cycle through them - you need to go straight to the weapon you need at the time.
It does random things on almost all mouse mats. The only surface I have that it doesn't throw a wobbly on every couple of minutes is my desk - and it's wearing thin...
It's shape is pretty good for gaming, but the old Logitech Wingman or 3 button cheapo Pilot has it beat (even if you did have to buy 3 Pilots to make one good one). It's not a bad mouse by any means, but it isn't worth the asking price, especially, as you can now get cheap mice with the same high-res opticals.
'Genesis 15:5 He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars...'...but not too closely, or ye may see-ith the little strings that holdeth them up"
As some other posters have said - why is this a problem for the religious types? If Hawking discovers (in their view) just how God did his works? He'd write a paper entitled "How the universe was made: X happened" or some such, and the Christians, as they can just make any old stuff up because it all works on faith, can just say "yeah - God did X". Everyone's happy, job's a good'un.
If the Pope doesn't want anyone studying God's works, then as he no doubt beleives the entire universe was made by God, shouldn't he be walking about with his eyes shut, in case he notices anything a bit dodgy, or revealing in the divine creation?
I was brought up a Catholic, but brother! Sometimes it sure is amusing listening to some of them try to make sense of the ancient scribblings.
Bah - the whole game is flawed anyway - just choose rock every time! Rock smashes scissors and scissors cut paper. Nothing beats rock!
Yeah yeah I know - some people say paper beats rock "becuase it covers it" or some such. What's their point? It's still a rock, and totally unscathed by it's encounter with the paper.:P
Yes - "round robin" is the crudest way of doing it, and is fine if the load on each server is more or less the same. You can also change the order based on other factors such as source IP address, or the load of each server.
Agreed - and that was my point - there are a 1001 ways to do this, and 1001 other ways apart from editing the hosts file to stop the OS from doing it.
It's the fact they didn't document it that smells. What else haven't they documented?
As I said, you probably agree in some way in the EULA - and I agree you don't have to install these products - although I do use XP. Why? because the pile bad points doesn't outweigh the good ones yet. I play games on my PC. When some other OS allows me to play these games, the pile of good points for XP will be reduced.
Your argument assumes a one to one relationship between hostname and IP address. There just aren't enough addresses in a 4 byte address range (actually a lot less in practice) for every server, and every client to have it's own address. Many web servers host multiple web sites under different hostnames, in different domains, on the same IP address. You need to to use the hostname for these sites as that's how the server determines which of the many sites it hosts to give you.
Take my site - http://www.muttsnutts.com/ It's hosted on my ISP's web server along with hundreds of others. Lookup the address:-
ANSWER SECTION: www.muttsnutts.com. 14400 IN A 84.92.1.5
Second, the reverse may be true - try doing a dig or nslookup of www.google.com - you'll get different addresses every time (or the same ones in a different order):-
ANSWER SECTION: www.google.com. 278479 IN CNAME www.l.google.com. www.l.google.com. 30 IN A 216.239.59.147 www.l.google.com. 30 IN A 216.239.59.99 www.l.google.com. 30 IN A 216.239.59.103 www.l.google.com. 30 IN A 216.239.59.104
ANSWER SECTION: www.google.com. 278492 IN CNAME www.l.google.com. www.l.google.com. 43 IN A 216.239.59.99 www.l.google.com. 43 IN A 216.239.59.103 www.l.google.com. 43 IN A 216.239.59.104 www.l.google.com. 43 IN A 216.239.59.147
Granted, Microsoft could engineer their sites so that the IP address would work, but this places some severe restrictions on their web server farm's scale. As a couple of other posters mentioned - you could block the traffic in the routing table anyway, or just buy an external firewall and block the traffic there.
I don't like the smell of this - especially as they didn't document it. It may seem harmless enough, or even beneficial, but is the first step onto a slippery slope. You probably agree to it in the EULA when you install though.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not a bad solution, and the clunkiness is not their fault - it's the fault of digital camara producers: I guess the digital cameras coming to us from "traditional" camera manufacturers have some sort of excuse for not thinking too radically about the "device" side of things (it's wearing thin though), but what is Sony's excuse, or any of the other consumer electronics companies now making cameras? Why don't digital cameras all talk bluetooth? Why can't high end cameras talk to bluetooth GPS devices? For that matter - why can so few of them do anything at all with bluetooth - even remote shutter release would be good. My Fuji 9500 uses a £2.50 *cable* as a remote shutter release - how last century is that? :/ Why can't I use my phone/PDA etc? WiFi and a built in web interface would be nice too.
:P
Maybe much of this stuff is seen as trivial and not that important to professionals (although I bet GPS tagging would be) but as a buyer of various devices, it seems to me that cameras lag behind in terms of the level of connevtivity I now expect out of a chunk of electronics. Maybe I should wait for the first mobile phone with a standard lens mount and full size CCD
Aharrr!! (and Arrgh!) It's also proven that the number of pirates has declined rapidly over the same period! It's obvious that the lack of pirates is causing global warming!
(well that and the bloomin great fusion reaction we're orbiting
Seriously though, I agree that increased greenhouse gases = warmer Earth is pretty much proven, but is it the biggest effect on global temps? What about the sun's output - is it constant? What about the distance from the sun - is this decreasing? The planet's core is cooling but does it spike ever?
Where do cars figure on the scale of greenhouse gas producers? How do we know how much CO2 was around 800,000 years ago?
Cheers,
Scoot.
Hey he's not cheating - he's just chnaging the rules of the game so it's possible to rescu^H^H^H^H^H hit everything he aims at!
He probably used protomatter in his code too!
"No...no...no. Quicker, easier, more seductive. But, limited by those daft controllers they are."
:D
"Control! You must learn Control!"
"But how can I control it with this food mixer that came with my PS/2?!?"
"Use the MOUSE Luke!!"
They lost just about everything a few years back but this was down to general ineptitude on behalf of Sun's engineers.
However - I don't think they back anything up - and the contract absolves them of the need to do so. They lost the cotents of the web server (crofters.plusnet.co.uk) a few months ago too. Happily for me, the actual content of my web site was in their MySQL server on a seperate box (humbug.plusnet.net).
I wouldn't trust them (or any ISP) to store anything important for me - retrieve your email to a local server.
PlusNET are more geek friendly than most ISPs though - they were perhaps the first ISP in the UK to just let you telnet (now SSH) to the web server, upload binaries (it's a Linux server) and generally just "do it yourself". No support or fancy control panels - just "here's the server, and here's your bit of it - do your stuff". They do have the fancy control panel thingies now, but you can still just SSH to the box. This why I still use them - I can build all my stuff on my own LAMP environemnt and then replicate it to theirs.
Of course these days there's no shortage of hosting outfits that will rent you a server (or virtual server) but PlusNET do this for little more than the price of the connection. Just don't expect any backups!
I agree. The lego I see in the shops Today does not look like the stuff I played with for hours at a time as a child. I built all manner of things from the simple bricks, and later on from the Technic stuff - not all of which were that successful (like the time I built a chassis for a static steam engine, age 10 with predictable results and a valuable lesson in materials science :P I switched that project to Meccano...).
Today though I see lots of small kits, that oprerry much only build one thing. Take the Star Wars stuff for example: Lego could either use 1000's of generic blocks to build a model so vast that if you stood 20 feet away and squinted, your A-Wing didn't look like it was built by the ancient Egyptians, out of sandstone blocks; or they could just make a "wing" part, and sell a kit that made a small model. Trouble is, these models well, how can I put this? They suck. A Wings don't have little round bits all over them. As a kid, would I want a Lego kit that only makes one Star Wars model anyway, but looks like it was produced by someone who'd never seen the movie, or a proper model, that actually looks a bit like the things I saw on the big screen, and isn't covered in some sort of geometrically arranged skin disease?
The Mindstorms stuff on the other hand, isn't pretending to "be" anything - it's back to the core Lego values - "well sell parts - you make stuff with it."
Hehe I think Id have less of a problem believing Farrel as an American cop - after all, don't 30% of New York inhabitants think they're Irish (at least on St Paddy's day :P). I did have the misfortune to watch a real pile of old boots called "Alexander" the other night though. I thought "nothing much on, Sky Movies is showing this thing, loads of big names in it.. worth a punt". Oh dear. There's 3 hours of my life I'd rather have back. It should have been sub-titled "how the Irish took over the world". Very strange hearing ancient greeks and Macedonians saying things like "roight den, I tink we'll be off over dem ills and be invadin' the Hindu Kush - hows aboutcha?"
Absolute train wreck of a movie that droned on in no particular direction for 3 feckin' hours. I swear, 2 or 3 times I thought it was over and went to make coffee, only to find they were invading some other place when I got back, our hero was still eyeing up his best mate (but, following the advice of his adopted father, and unlike many of his ancestors, hadn't shagged his mother).
There's absolutely no excuse for Hollywood "running out of ideas" and making all these half-arsed re-makes: my bookshelves are crammed with excellent plots, many of which would make a hal;f decent screenplay. Let's face it, if Peter Jackson, could make a series of nicely paced action packed movies from the Lord Of The Rings, surely something could be done with say - half of the PK Dick stories still unfilmed, Magician, The Stainless Steel Rat series, Tad Williams epic, not to mention all the "classic" fantasy fare from Ursula Le Guin (I'm not counting that tripe someone knocked up a couple of years ago), Michael Moorcock (about the only thing Elric hasn't been in is a movie...), EE Smith, Asimov etc.
Put down the red underpants and Step away from the Superman plot. FFS. And Batman - that's been done to death now surely. Makes me laugh when I see the actors in these remakes being interviewed, and explaining their character, his background and his motivation - like we didn't already know.
Yeah - fear my +5 M Sword!
:P
Seeing as we now live in a world of virtual machines (z/VM, VMware, et al) and a world manipulated by raising tickets, maybe we should go the whole hog and just run our companies via a MMORPG - with a live link to the stock price!
Certainly my job feels like a computer game sometimes...
Thanks for the tip Ford. It's set to 128MB by default on this Windows binary distribution. Increasing to 500MB does improve the performance to about 1 second for colourising/messing with the histogram etc. Still not instant (ie adjusts in near real time as you move the sliders) but a big improvement.
The near 5MB jpegs from my Fuji 9500 expand in memory to about 95MB and Gimp uses a total of 210MB
Cheers,
Scoot.
Who moderates this stuff? In what way is that trolling? Granted it's a bit weak - but it's not trolling! Presumably the mod never read the Dragons Of Autummn Twiglets, or Dragons of a Damp Mattress ?
Besides - didn't they already make this into a movie - it had Devito and Schwarzenegger - "Shirt of the Twins" or something...
Make a proper movie or not at all. Where's Peter Jackson when you need him?
I'd just be expecting him to say "I don't *think* so!" every five minutes :p In fact, didn't he have Rasitlin's hairdo in Mortal Kombat as well?
I actually prefer GIMP's interface to Photoshop (which maybe because I used it first but hey). I used GIMP exclusively for photo editing. Until that is, I bought a better camera which takes 5MB jpegs (or 40MB raw images) and I have to agree - GIMP is hopeless with these larger files.
I run it on a P4 prescott at 3.2GHz, with 1GB of dual channel RAM and messing with anything like the light levels or colour mixer is just unworkable on a 5MB jpeg - you can watch it apply the effcts of the change, in blocks over a period of minutes, whereas Photoshop Elements, which came free with the camera, does this more or less instantly, just like GIMP did with the smaller images from my old camera.
I can't claim to have looked into this problem too much - I'm just using the pre-cooked binary on Windows, so maybe there is a solution (perhaps better compilation options, or maybe the code is optimized for Linux) I hope so.
LOL - thanks for your anti-scam blog Labrat - a bit more subtle than most on 419eater - and all the funnier for it..
:P
oh, and Love & Kisses to you and your family
In general- the downsides are the memory and CPU overhead, plus you're adding another layer of "stuff", that may have it's own problems. Everytime you are trying to trace a fault, you will often have to eliminate the VM layer.
Plus - to turn the question on its head: just think about what you are doing and why? Shouldn't you just be able to run multiple things on one real machine? Why do we need to spin up entire operating system instances?
Great for development and simulation - but I've yet to hear a convincing argument for doing this in production that doesn't amount to "ease of admin and installation" - ie convenience. These factors are relevant to any system design of course, but I value performance and reliability more.
Sadly, and in a large part due to the way commercial IT is funded, this can actually look good on paper - to the technology accountant: "as many servers as we like, that can be created and destroyed at will? Yes please". We also need virtual finance teams, virtual staff, virtual customers - hell don't bother running a real business at all - just model the entire thing, and play it like a RTS sim - with your score linked directly to the corporate stock price!
:D "yeah but we just paid for a 1 Ooodlegig/s line - it'll be super quick!"
Technology finance will cretae some bizarre technical solutions, if sombody in the organisation doesn't put the brakes on - another good example is "hmm terminal server runs all the same apps that native desltops do for the remote workers - let's just issue everyone a Windows TS "device" and host everyone's sessions inside a big servers in the data centre - it's cheaper, and there's no difference right? This is where someone gets to try and explain latency, and how it's different from "bandwidth", to an accountant
It's not new either - mainframes have operated like this for years. IBM would have you create your entire data centre inside z/VM - including the routers, switches and firewalls. It's great for development and testing - need more Linux/Apache/WAS/Oracle servers? sure just wish 3 more into existence, re-test your fancy shmancy clustering and treacle bending widget, and then bin them off again with another wave of the virtual wand.
We have clusters of Websphere AS inside one LPAR - not for speed I hasten to add - that would be silly, but to create resilience, seperate the Java VMs and add flexibitlty for software releases.
Then again, as the Samsung Blue Ray player seems likely to cost about the same: $900 or about £400, it doesn't look so bad - play HD discs, and play games.
:) (ok it might be around 2008 by then but I feel there's a lot of dust that needs to settle on the whole HDMI/Large cap optical disc thing)
I spent £150 on a Sony DVD player years ago, and then the Ps/2 arrived a couple of months later and cost a little bit less, and you could do other things with it...
Think I'll just wait for the bare drives to arrive and upgrade my HTPC
I have an older Razer Viper and it looks identical.
The Viper was sold as an FPS mouse - but while it has the aforementioned high-res optics, it falls down as an FPS mouse on some very basic stuff:-
You cannot turn off the acceleration completely! This is a must for old-skool FPS gamers like me - I need a linear relationship between mouse and game movement - it's no good if it speeds up unexpectedly - how'm I supposed to do my snap-rails now?? It's just about usable if you ditch the drivers and use the standard XP ones.
It has a wheel!! Arrgh. These are no bloomin use at all in fast-paced FPS's. Much too easy to move the wheel either not enough or too many times, or click it by accident while moving it. Probably OK in more recent slow FPS games or RTS though I should imagine. I'd rather have a proper 3rd button myself. No self respecting Q2/3 player selects weapons by using a scroll wheel to cycle through them - you need to go straight to the weapon you need at the time.
It does random things on almost all mouse mats. The only surface I have that it doesn't throw a wobbly on every couple of minutes is my desk - and it's wearing thin...
It's shape is pretty good for gaming, but the old Logitech Wingman or 3 button cheapo Pilot has it beat (even if you did have to buy 3 Pilots to make one good one). It's not a bad mouse by any means, but it isn't worth the asking price, especially, as you can now get cheap mice with the same high-res opticals.
'Genesis 15:5 He took him outside and said, "Look up at the heavens and count the stars...' ...but not too closely, or ye may see-ith the little strings that holdeth them up"
As some other posters have said - why is this a problem for the religious types? If Hawking discovers (in their view) just how God did his works? He'd write a paper entitled "How the universe was made: X happened" or some such, and the Christians, as they can just make any old stuff up because it all works on faith, can just say "yeah - God did X". Everyone's happy, job's a good'un.
If the Pope doesn't want anyone studying God's works, then as he no doubt beleives the entire universe was made by God, shouldn't he be walking about with his eyes shut, in case he notices anything a bit dodgy, or revealing in the divine creation?
I was brought up a Catholic, but brother! Sometimes it sure is amusing listening to some of them try to make sense of the ancient scribblings.
Bah - the whole game is flawed anyway - just choose rock every time! Rock smashes scissors and scissors cut paper. Nothing beats rock!
:P
Yeah yeah I know - some people say paper beats rock "becuase it covers it" or some such. What's their point? It's still a rock, and totally unscathed by it's encounter with the paper.
Hey who troll-modded the parent redundant? I thought that was quite funny !
Yeah he did, but unfortunately, Alderaan also shot first which kind of ruined the plot of all 3 movies... :P
Yes - "round robin" is the crudest way of doing it, and is fine if the load on each server is more or less the same. You can also change the order based on other factors such as source IP address, or the load of each server.
Fair enough - but I still like to marvel at the accuracy and speed of reflex!
Agreed - and that was my point - there are a 1001 ways to do this, and 1001 other ways apart from editing the hosts file to stop the OS from doing it.
It's the fact they didn't document it that smells. What else haven't they documented?
As I said, you probably agree in some way in the EULA - and I agree you don't have to install these products - although I do use XP. Why? because the pile bad points doesn't outweigh the good ones yet. I play games on my PC. When some other OS allows me to play these games, the pile of good points for XP will be reduced.
Couple of reasons:-
Your argument assumes a one to one relationship between hostname and IP address. There just aren't enough addresses in a 4 byte address range (actually a lot less in practice) for every server, and every client to have it's own address. Many web servers host multiple web sites under different hostnames, in different domains, on the same IP address. You need to to use the hostname for these sites as that's how the server determines which of the many sites it hosts to give you.
Take my site - http://www.muttsnutts.com/ It's hosted on my ISP's web server along with hundreds of others. Lookup the address:-
ANSWER SECTION:
www.muttsnutts.com. 14400 IN A 84.92.1.5
Then try http://84.92.1.5/ - you get the default site.
Second, the reverse may be true - try doing a dig or nslookup of www.google.com - you'll get different addresses every time (or the same ones in a different order):-
ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com. 278479 IN CNAME www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com. 30 IN A 216.239.59.147
www.l.google.com. 30 IN A 216.239.59.99
www.l.google.com. 30 IN A 216.239.59.103
www.l.google.com. 30 IN A 216.239.59.104
ANSWER SECTION:
www.google.com. 278492 IN CNAME www.l.google.com.
www.l.google.com. 43 IN A 216.239.59.99
www.l.google.com. 43 IN A 216.239.59.103
www.l.google.com. 43 IN A 216.239.59.104
www.l.google.com. 43 IN A 216.239.59.147
Granted, Microsoft could engineer their sites so that the IP address would work, but this places some severe restrictions on their web server farm's scale. As a couple of other posters mentioned - you could block the traffic in the routing table anyway, or just buy an external firewall and block the traffic there.
I don't like the smell of this - especially as they didn't document it. It may seem harmless enough, or even beneficial, but is the first step onto a slippery slope. You probably agree to it in the EULA when you install though.