Here, let me post this at 2 so you can waste more mod points modding me down.
Go ahead and deny the lack of objective discussion on Slashdot, doesn't bother me, it'll take a while for your guys to mod me down below the karma cap.;-)
The federal government clearly can't give all of its support to Caltech and MIT. But I lean toward making the best even better. We don't want to build the infrastructure necessary to give away $100 million in $20,000 grants. We would be much more likely to look at the needs of an entire school, rather than trying to do individual projects.
I have no problem with them giving all of their support to Caltech and MIT. Split it proportional to the size of the school, MIT will get $80 million, us over here at Caltech will get $20 million, I say we just distribute it evenly among the student body. There's only about 1,000 of us, so everyone will get about 20,000:-).
This was posted on PlanetBaldursGate on Monday, April 17 of last year.
Dave's background: There are many more fields in building a computer game than programming alone, Bandit. I would suspect that over three-quarters of the people who work here wouldn't know what to do with a line of code if they were handed one.
Aside from the programmers, we've got artists (besides the computer artists, I know that some of them have backgrounds as comic book artists and graphic design... although it helps to know how to use the graphic editors, it's not always necessary to get hired if the talent is there), animators (most of the animators here have specific animation education backgrounds, I believe) and designers (which includes game designers, writers and scripters... with most of us being a blend of the three).
I, myself, am on the design team as a designer/writer (although I now do some scripting, as well... a bit different from programming as the programmers build the game editors that scripters use to put the game pieces together). I got involved in the business in a strange way, I guess. I used to manage a hotel before I came here... I just had a hobby where I ran a PBM (play-by-mail) RPG that I had designed. Bioware was looking for designers who had designed their own game (and finished it... an important distinction), and a friend of mine who was playing my game happened to work here. He offered my game to Greg and Ray to look at and they asked me to give some writing samples for a job. I had no intention of applying (it was nice, but I had a career in the hotel industry at the time) until the next day (this is where it gets weird) a company came in and bought my hotel and I was given three months severance (they always let the GMs go on a takeover). So I thought, "Well, why not?" and gave Ray and Greg some samples of writing I had done as well as the first few chapters of a book I was writing on the side. They liked it and voila, here I am.
It's true that some companies only promote people to game designers from within, but Bioware works on games that require a lot of design and writing (hey, a million words doesn't come from nowhere) so they have hired people just for these jobs alone. They tend to require people to have scripting skills as well as creative writing skills (instead of learning the scripting as I have), but having talent doesn't hurt. There are a lot of other designers here who write great and learned their scripting skills along the way beside myself.
So there are a lot of different ways to get into the business, I suppose.
The "one million words" may refer to Planescape: Torment, which supposedly had over a million words of dialogue in it.
The produce for Icewind Dale, J.E. Sawyer, used to be a webmaster for Interplay or Black Isle.
Oh, and the two people who founded Bioware (the company that made BG2) are both doctors in Canada who just decided to start a game company.
I'm seen this question asked many times, and more often than not someone at a game company (like Bioware) simply says, "Send us a resume, we do hire people in the normal way."
Colleges and Universities also have a time honored tradition of bending over for anyone who is or might be a contributor. If Princeton's development office has them on file as a donor, you'll be disappointed how quickly they'll act to shut up their own students and faculty.
Well...I don't know how true that is in general. But specifically regarding this case, from the FAQ (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/faq.html) on their webpage, they state that:
Fortunately, the DMCA did not apply to this challenge, since SDMI granted explicit permission to study their technologies. We are not sure whether it would have been legal to study these technologies outside the context of this challenge. We think the DMCA, by criminalizing some kinds of study of important technologies, represents an "ignorance is bliss" approach to technological copyright enforcement, which will not work in the long run. We lobbied against certain aspects of the DMCA while it was before Congress, and we still consider it to be a seriously flawed law. (my emphasis)
Above, we mentioned the important role of analysis in the design of security systems. The main problem with the DMCA is that it hinders this analysis, restricting it in order to provide an extra layer of legal protection for existing copyright systems. But this causes the scientific process to stagnate. Imagine a federal law making it illegal for anyone (including Consumer Reports) to purposefully cause an automobile collision. While this may be a well-intentioned attempt to stop road-rage, it also bans automobile crash-testing, ultimately leading to unsafe vehicles and the inability to learn how to make vehicles safe in general. The situation with the DMCA is analogous.
So this group of researchers lobbied against the DMCA. This would be the perfect opportunity for them to fight it. Seeing as how they've said that they disagree with the DMCA, it seems that it would be more likely for them NOT to fold under the RIAA's pressure.
Professor Edward Felton
Department of Computer Science
Princeton University
Princeton, NY 08544
Dear Professor Felten,
(etc.)
Well, it's a good thing that they got the Zip code right. Last time I checked, Princeton University wasn't in NY. The RIAA can't even send threatening letters correctly.
If the researchers went ahead and published the paper anyways. Large universities have fairly competent legal teams, they should be able to defend themselves.
Besides, this is Princeton. I can't see how any litigation pursued against researchers from Princeton would be anything other than a black eye for SDMI. It's not like they'd be suing some little private university with no grad school that no one's ever heard of. This is barely a step down from threatening Harvard (and seriously, who in their right mind would threaten Harvard?).
It would be a shame if Princeton's legal dept tells the researchers to back down because they don't have a legal leg to stand on here. Hell, even if they didn't have a legal leg to stand on it would still be fun to watch SDMI go after several professors at Princeton. High visibility and bad publicity for SDMI. I'd pay to watch those court proceedings.
Who was working at Bell labs as they were researching and developing video phones. The class was having a discussion on technologies that were more advanced, more useful, or just "better" than existing technologies but didn't take off.
He said that in the studies they conducted (usability studies), it took people an average of 20 rings to answer the video phone, as compared to the 2 rings to pick up a normal phone.
I was thinking that the only way to crack it would be to decompile the program, search for the part of the program that generates the keys and reverse engineer the algorithm.
What would video conferencing replace? The telephone. Does the telephone need to be replaced? No.
Think about it, what percentage of the masses wants to have to look presentable when speaking on the telephone? A video phone completely destroys the anonymity of your appearance. The person you're talking to can see what you look like, what you're wearing, your facial expression, it adds a whole new dimension to communication that people don't want.
A study was done on how long it takes people to pick up the phone vs how long it takes them to pick up the video phone. The average number of rings before someone answered the phone was 2 rings. The average number of rings before someone answered the video phone was 20 rings. Think about it, 20 rings. Where do you think all that extra time comes from? The person running around, smoothing their hair, straightening their clothes, checking their make up in the mirror...
Video phones add unnecessary overhead to the communication process. There's simply no need for them.
I'm not sure, but I believe that the serial key for the mathematica program is not on the cd you receive when you buy it. I've been told that Wolfram actually has a central authentication server that generates and verifies all the keys, and when you register a copy of mathematica the program calls up the central server to check the key.
So the only way to reverse engineer the key generation routine would be to somehow break into the auth server. I've also heard rumors that the auth server isn't even connected to anything, and that to register you have to wait for a response from wolfram with a correct code to unlock the program, since they are so paranoid.
More rumors:-)
Wolfram is so paranoid about Mathematica because of what happened when he was creating it. He did most of the work on it when he was a grad student or something at Caltech, and when he finished, Caltech tried to say "Hey, you made that while you were here, it's ours." Wolfram was like, "I don't think so," a long legal battle ensued, Wolfram won (surprisingly, Caltech's army of lawyers normally crushes people in situations like this), but ended up very, very paranoid.
Hm, I'm not sure I can verify anything I just said. Oh well:-)
The folks over at Linux Tribes have managed to get Tribes running on WINE.
I'm not entirely sure how much hacking it takes to get it to work, but they say the stability is about the same as running Tribes under Windows (as in, Tribes will crash about the same amount whether being run in Windows or WINE).
Completely off-topic, one of the guys who runs LinuxTribes, Bad_CRC, is also one of the guys who helped make one of the "All your base" videos floating around.
Computer Science: Computer Science deals with the theory of computer programming. If you have been reading Slashdot long enough, you will have seen discussions regarding algorithms, O(n) or O(1) problems, NP complete and so on. That's computer science. The coursework will generally deal a lot with writing programs in Lisp and Scheme (and other interpretive languages). There will be a good deal of mathematical proofs (number theory, set theory). You will be asked to "prove" that the algorithm you are using can solve the problem in polynomial time, for example. A computer science major learns "how" to program.
Software Engineer: A software engineer is very different from a computer programmer. A SE will learn how to set up large software projects (normally with a team), and carry out these projects. Emphasis is on writing real programs, as opposed to proving that you *can* write the program (which a CS major would do). Software Engineers are drilled in good code structure and the correct way to set up very large programs.
Electrical Engineer: Pure Hardware, analog and digital. This covers a huge range, from RF circuits, microwave antenna, radio, microprocessor, microcontroller and asic design. Very low-level, usually the only programming (if any) a EE will do is in Assembly or C.
Computer Engineer: A computer engineer combines the digital aspect of an Electrical Engineer with some of the Softare work of a Software Engineer.
The three "Engineer" majors really have very little to do with what the CS majors do. A software engineer could get by never using scheme and lisp, whereas a CS major would use those quite a bit.
Also, for none of these should you expect to take a course in C, or C++, or something designed to teach you a specific language (except maybe an advanced C++ course for Software Engineers.)
they've been developing the linux, mac and PC versions simultaneously.
They are also concurrently working on a BeOS version, but that's going a little slower. They do hope to have all 4 versions ready to go at launch time.
I've installed NT 4.0 3 or 4 times on my machine. I'm using the same ethernet card as you, the 3C905B. Never had a problem.
Actually, the install went painlessly each time. A couple of times I f*cked my system over doing some stupid thing or another, and the repair disk always brought me back to exactly the same state I had been in when I made the repair disk, no hassle.
The only problems I ever had were when I tried to install SP 4 without reading the instructions. The driver for my SoundBlaster Live card were incompatible with SP4, and I had to update the drivers *before* installing SP4, or the computer wouldn't finish booting anymore. (Silly me, I did that twice). First time I fixed it by reinstalling (which was easy), second time I fixed it with a repair disk (also easy).
I've also installed NT 4.0 on 4 or 5 other computers, all with different hardware, although most of them had that same ethernet card. Each install went flawlessly.
Oh, and each of those computers was assembled from parts I ordered and assembled myself, so I didn't have Dell or Gateway or Compaq causing problems for me.
I have never been able to get 98 SE to install on my machine. It gets a "divide by zero" error trying to read my harddrive, and after 3 or 4 tries I gave up on it. NT 4.0 with SP6a can do *almost* everything 98SE can do (read: games).
I do agree installing NT on a machine that already has an OS on it is rought, I've watched NT try to wipe out the "virus" it sees on the harddrive. It was amusing, at least:-).
I didn't say that the stereotype was entirely false. The point I was making was that, because of the stereotype that is applied to wrestlers, incorrect information is assumed about who I am. That is never permissible (and that is just an opinion, so don't bother trying to convince me otherwise), so I feel that stereotyping is wrong.
Simply because a stereotype fits MOST of the time doesn't mean it fits ALL of the time, and for that reason I feel that you should not use stereotypes. I don't think I contradicted myself.
That's from the very first "response" listed in the article. I would just like to thank a fellow geek for doing what they hate, labeling and stereotyping. I wrestled for 6 years. I was pretty damn good at it too. I suppose that I shouldn't complain TOO much, I admit, as I was the only person on the wrestling team taking AP classes. When the county tournament rolled around senior year, we had to leave school early so we could get to the tournament when it started (this was on a friday). My last class was AP Economics, I told him I was leaving early, and he didn't understand why. He had gotten a note saying that all the wrestlers need to leave early, but he disregarded it because, "Well, in all my years of teaching here I have never had a wrestler in AP Economics."
Ok, I'm going to complain anyways. It's hypocritical to complain about being stereotyped as something that you feel you are not if you are just doing it right back. Don't be so close-minded as to just look at what someone does, or what sport they play, or what music they listen to, or what clothes they wear and instantly assume things about them. It's so easy to become like those you hate/those that "oppressed" you. Don't do it. Open your mind and look at someone for who they are, not what they are.
but must we always accept articles submitted by people who work at the site?
Yea, all the guys at gamespy are cool, but it still bugs me a bit when Slashdot posts a story on (insert site here) and the person who submitted the story is from (insert same site here).
www.pricewatch.com (I'm too lazy to do a link, shoot me).
It was said above, and the price for a GeForce2 was given.
Pricewatch shows prices for a GeForce with 32 MB for ~$100. That's value. Oh, and it's made by Elsa, who have a 6 year manufacturer's warranty on the entire card, and they include diagnostic software with the drives so you can measure card temp and overclock it easily (and hopefully safely).
Off topic, on pricewatch and AMD Athlon 750 is the same price as a PIII 500.
that's why other employees also watch out for unauthorized personnel. You're right, crowds do go in. And I can tell you that I have gone in with crowds where people have had their badges in their pockets. And I watched another employee ask them where their badge was and hold them until they took it out and showed it.
I've also watched security guards stop individuals in a group that didn't have their badge visible. And our security guards are not minimum wage rent-a-cops.
The corporate culture in this company is such that these methods have proven effective. I agree that it isn't foolproof and will not work for every company, but it has for ours.
All I have to do is swipe a card when I enter the building and always have my badge visible. All I do is write code (and I'm only an intern, I'm not going to work for this company because I can't stand the corporate bureacracy, but that's another story) and lock my workstation when I leave. It doesn't impact on conditions at all, truthfully.
Our security policy is just one of many policies. There is also a major safety policy in place that include ergonomics. That basically means that if you want/need an ergonomic mouse/keyboard/chair/anything the company will provide it for you.
I've sat in the lobby and watched people go through the locked door. Each one of them has to flash a badge to the security guard before they enter. That's not one out of ten people, it's every single person. In other buildings there is no security guard, but you can't enter unless you have a key card. Some buildings have a security officer AND a door that requires a keycard.
It seems to work. There have not been any reported problems regarding theft.
that's the question you should be asking. I work for a major corporation, and our building is locked down, and I mean tight. Naturally, you have to have your badge displayed at all times, and you need a key card to enter the building. Security is always walking around, and most employees are good about asking someone who is not displaying a badge who they are looking for.
At other buildings in this company I work for every door has a security officer. That's right, every...single...door. And the only way to enter that door is to have a key card or to have the security guard buzz you in. And the security guard will only buzz you in if someone with a valid company ID can vouch for you.
There are security personnel in our buildings 24/7. Even with this there is a clean desk policy in place, and all employees are required to lock everything up if they are away from their desk for more than 2 hours. All employees are also required to have two passwords on their machines, boot-level and system level. You may scoff at these 'rules' and say that no one follows them, but the majority of people do. It's the double edged sword of a bureacracy, you have to follow the process if you want to do anything, but if you want to do something there is a set process for you to follow.
Slashdot Mirror
Here, let me post this at 2 so you can waste more mod points modding me down.
;-)
Go ahead and deny the lack of objective discussion on Slashdot, doesn't bother me, it'll take a while for your guys to mod me down below the karma cap.
~Moller
The federal government clearly can't give all of its support to Caltech and MIT. But I lean toward making the best even better. We don't want to build the infrastructure necessary to give away $100 million in $20,000 grants. We would be much more likely to look at the needs of an entire school, rather than trying to do individual projects.
:-).
I have no problem with them giving all of their support to Caltech and MIT. Split it proportional to the size of the school, MIT will get $80 million, us over here at Caltech will get $20 million, I say we just distribute it evenly among the student body. There's only about 1,000 of us, so everyone will get about 20,000
Works for me.
~Moller
This was posted on PlanetBaldursGate on Monday, April 17 of last year.
Dave's background: There are many more fields in building a computer game than programming alone, Bandit. I would suspect that over three-quarters of the people who work here wouldn't know what to do with a line of code if they were handed one.
Aside from the programmers, we've got artists (besides the computer artists, I know that some of them have backgrounds as comic book artists and graphic design... although it helps to know how to use the graphic editors, it's not always necessary to get hired if the talent is there), animators (most of the animators here have specific animation education backgrounds, I believe) and designers (which includes game designers, writers and scripters... with most of us being a blend of the three).
I, myself, am on the design team as a designer/writer (although I now do some scripting, as well... a bit different from programming as the programmers build the game editors that scripters use to put the game pieces together). I got involved in the business in a strange way, I guess. I used to manage a hotel before I came here... I just had a hobby where I ran a PBM (play-by-mail) RPG that I had designed. Bioware was looking for designers who had designed their own game (and finished it... an important distinction), and a friend of mine who was playing my game happened to work here. He offered my game to Greg and Ray to look at and they asked me to give some writing samples for a job. I had no intention of applying (it was nice, but I had a career in the hotel industry at the time) until the next day (this is where it gets weird) a company came in and bought my hotel and I was given three months severance (they always let the GMs go on a takeover). So I thought, "Well, why not?" and gave Ray and Greg some samples of writing I had done as well as the first few chapters of a book I was writing on the side. They liked it and voila, here I am.
It's true that some companies only promote people to game designers from within, but Bioware works on games that require a lot of design and writing (hey, a million words doesn't come from nowhere) so they have hired people just for these jobs alone. They tend to require people to have scripting skills as well as creative writing skills (instead of learning the scripting as I have), but having talent doesn't hurt. There are a lot of other designers here who write great and learned their scripting skills along the way beside myself.
So there are a lot of different ways to get into the business, I suppose.
The "one million words" may refer to Planescape: Torment, which supposedly had over a million words of dialogue in it.
The produce for Icewind Dale, J.E. Sawyer, used to be a webmaster for Interplay or Black Isle.
Oh, and the two people who founded Bioware (the company that made BG2) are both doctors in Canada who just decided to start a game company.
I'm seen this question asked many times, and more often than not someone at a game company (like Bioware) simply says, "Send us a resume, we do hire people in the normal way."
~Moller
Colleges and Universities also have a time honored tradition of bending over for anyone who is or might be a contributor. If Princeton's development office has them on file as a donor, you'll be disappointed how quickly they'll act to shut up their own students and faculty.
Well...I don't know how true that is in general. But specifically regarding this case, from the FAQ (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/sip/sdmi/faq.html) on their webpage, they state that:
Fortunately, the DMCA did not apply to this challenge, since SDMI granted explicit permission to study their technologies. We are not sure whether it would have been legal to study these technologies outside the context of this challenge. We think the DMCA, by criminalizing some kinds of study of important technologies, represents an "ignorance is bliss" approach to technological copyright enforcement, which will not work in the long run. We lobbied against certain aspects of the DMCA while it was before Congress, and we still consider it to be a seriously flawed law. (my emphasis)
Above, we mentioned the important role of analysis in the design of security systems. The main problem with the DMCA is that it hinders this analysis, restricting it in order to provide an extra layer of legal protection for existing copyright systems. But this causes the scientific process to stagnate. Imagine a federal law making it illegal for anyone (including Consumer Reports) to purposefully cause an automobile collision. While this may be a well-intentioned attempt to stop road-rage, it also bans automobile crash-testing, ultimately leading to unsafe vehicles and the inability to learn how to make vehicles safe in general. The situation with the DMCA is analogous.
So this group of researchers lobbied against the DMCA. This would be the perfect opportunity for them to fight it. Seeing as how they've said that they disagree with the DMCA, it seems that it would be more likely for them NOT to fold under the RIAA's pressure.
Moller
They addressed the letter wrong:
April 9, 2001
Professor Edward Felton
Department of Computer Science
Princeton University
Princeton, NY 08544
Dear Professor Felten,
(etc.)
Well, it's a good thing that they got the Zip code right. Last time I checked, Princeton University wasn't in NY. The RIAA can't even send threatening letters correctly.
If the researchers went ahead and published the paper anyways. Large universities have fairly competent legal teams, they should be able to defend themselves.
Besides, this is Princeton. I can't see how any litigation pursued against researchers from Princeton would be anything other than a black eye for SDMI. It's not like they'd be suing some little private university with no grad school that no one's ever heard of. This is barely a step down from threatening Harvard (and seriously, who in their right mind would threaten Harvard?).
It would be a shame if Princeton's legal dept tells the researchers to back down because they don't have a legal leg to stand on here. Hell, even if they didn't have a legal leg to stand on it would still be fun to watch SDMI go after several professors at Princeton. High visibility and bad publicity for SDMI. I'd pay to watch those court proceedings.
Moller
Who was working at Bell labs as they were researching and developing video phones. The class was having a discussion on technologies that were more advanced, more useful, or just "better" than existing technologies but didn't take off.
He said that in the studies they conducted (usability studies), it took people an average of 20 rings to answer the video phone, as compared to the 2 rings to pick up a normal phone.
Moller
I was thinking that the only way to crack it would be to decompile the program, search for the part of the program that generates the keys and reverse engineer the algorithm.
:-)
Other methods hadn't occurred to me
Moller
What would video conferencing replace? The telephone. Does the telephone need to be replaced? No.
Think about it, what percentage of the masses wants to have to look presentable when speaking on the telephone? A video phone completely destroys the anonymity of your appearance. The person you're talking to can see what you look like, what you're wearing, your facial expression, it adds a whole new dimension to communication that people don't want.
A study was done on how long it takes people to pick up the phone vs how long it takes them to pick up the video phone. The average number of rings before someone answered the phone was 2 rings. The average number of rings before someone answered the video phone was 20 rings. Think about it, 20 rings. Where do you think all that extra time comes from? The person running around, smoothing their hair, straightening their clothes, checking their make up in the mirror...
Video phones add unnecessary overhead to the communication process. There's simply no need for them.
Moller
I'm not sure, but I believe that the serial key for the mathematica program is not on the cd you receive when you buy it. I've been told that Wolfram actually has a central authentication server that generates and verifies all the keys, and when you register a copy of mathematica the program calls up the central server to check the key.
:-)
:-)
So the only way to reverse engineer the key generation routine would be to somehow break into the auth server. I've also heard rumors that the auth server isn't even connected to anything, and that to register you have to wait for a response from wolfram with a correct code to unlock the program, since they are so paranoid.
More rumors
Wolfram is so paranoid about Mathematica because of what happened when he was creating it. He did most of the work on it when he was a grad student or something at Caltech, and when he finished, Caltech tried to say "Hey, you made that while you were here, it's ours." Wolfram was like, "I don't think so," a long legal battle ensued, Wolfram won (surprisingly, Caltech's army of lawyers normally crushes people in situations like this), but ended up very, very paranoid.
Hm, I'm not sure I can verify anything I just said. Oh well
The folks over at Linux Tribes have managed to get Tribes running on WINE.
I'm not entirely sure how much hacking it takes to get it to work, but they say the stability is about the same as running Tribes under Windows (as in, Tribes will crash about the same amount whether being run in Windows or WINE).
Completely off-topic, one of the guys who runs LinuxTribes, Bad_CRC, is also one of the guys who helped make one of the "All your base" videos floating around.
Moller
I use a Viper V550.
And I still get 30 fps, so ha!
Computer Science: Computer Science deals with the theory of computer programming. If you have been reading Slashdot long enough, you will have seen discussions regarding algorithms, O(n) or O(1) problems, NP complete and so on. That's computer science. The coursework will generally deal a lot with writing programs in Lisp and Scheme (and other interpretive languages). There will be a good deal of mathematical proofs (number theory, set theory). You will be asked to "prove" that the algorithm you are using can solve the problem in polynomial time, for example. A computer science major learns "how" to program.
Software Engineer: A software engineer is very different from a computer programmer. A SE will learn how to set up large software projects (normally with a team), and carry out these projects. Emphasis is on writing real programs, as opposed to proving that you *can* write the program (which a CS major would do). Software Engineers are drilled in good code structure and the correct way to set up very large programs.
Electrical Engineer: Pure Hardware, analog and digital. This covers a huge range, from RF circuits, microwave antenna, radio, microprocessor, microcontroller and asic design. Very low-level, usually the only programming (if any) a EE will do is in Assembly or C.
Computer Engineer: A computer engineer combines the digital aspect of an Electrical Engineer with some of the Softare work of a Software Engineer.
The three "Engineer" majors really have very little to do with what the CS majors do. A software engineer could get by never using scheme and lisp, whereas a CS major would use those quite a bit.
Also, for none of these should you expect to take a course in C, or C++, or something designed to teach you a specific language (except maybe an advanced C++ course for Software Engineers.)
Moller
Yea, it's all nice and good to have a playstation or whatever (I hear some dreamcast games are nice), but the N64 has the group games down cold.
Starfox 64, Bomberman 64, Goldeneye, MarioKart 64, Super Smash Bros...
Any one of those games (Starfox being the weakest of the 5) can easily waste hours, days, weeks.
I've always found Nintendo would blow away the other systems when it came down to simply how "fun" the games were.
Of course, I wasn't very fond of FF7 or FF8 (showy CG, wahoo), and Mega Man hasn't been fresh for ages.
Then again, all I play are PC games now. I can't find something on a console that's as fun as Tribes or Baldur's Gate.
Moller
they've been developing the linux, mac and PC versions simultaneously.
They are also concurrently working on a BeOS version, but that's going a little slower. They do hope to have all 4 versions ready to go at launch time.
The word "port" doesn't really apply here.
I've installed NT 4.0 3 or 4 times on my machine. I'm using the same ethernet card as you, the 3C905B. Never had a problem.
:-).
Actually, the install went painlessly each time. A couple of times I f*cked my system over doing some stupid thing or another, and the repair disk always brought me back to exactly the same state I had been in when I made the repair disk, no hassle.
The only problems I ever had were when I tried to install SP 4 without reading the instructions. The driver for my SoundBlaster Live card were incompatible with SP4, and I had to update the drivers *before* installing SP4, or the computer wouldn't finish booting anymore. (Silly me, I did that twice). First time I fixed it by reinstalling (which was easy), second time I fixed it with a repair disk (also easy).
I've also installed NT 4.0 on 4 or 5 other computers, all with different hardware, although most of them had that same ethernet card. Each install went flawlessly.
Oh, and each of those computers was assembled from parts I ordered and assembled myself, so I didn't have Dell or Gateway or Compaq causing problems for me.
I have never been able to get 98 SE to install on my machine. It gets a "divide by zero" error trying to read my harddrive, and after 3 or 4 tries I gave up on it. NT 4.0 with SP6a can do *almost* everything 98SE can do (read: games).
I do agree installing NT on a machine that already has an OS on it is rought, I've watched NT try to wipe out the "virus" it sees on the harddrive. It was amusing, at least
Moller
I didn't say that the stereotype was entirely false. The point I was making was that, because of the stereotype that is applied to wrestlers, incorrect information is assumed about who I am. That is never permissible (and that is just an opinion, so don't bother trying to convince me otherwise), so I feel that stereotyping is wrong.
Simply because a stereotype fits MOST of the time doesn't mean it fits ALL of the time, and for that reason I feel that you should not use stereotypes. I don't think I contradicted myself.
Moller
(wrestlers, so I don't give them much credit)
That's from the very first "response" listed in the article. I would just like to thank a fellow geek for doing what they hate, labeling and stereotyping. I wrestled for 6 years. I was pretty damn good at it too. I suppose that I shouldn't complain TOO much, I admit, as I was the only person on the wrestling team taking AP classes. When the county tournament rolled around senior year, we had to leave school early so we could get to the tournament when it started (this was on a friday). My last class was AP Economics, I told him I was leaving early, and he didn't understand why. He had gotten a note saying that all the wrestlers need to leave early, but he disregarded it because, "Well, in all my years of teaching here I have never had a wrestler in AP Economics."
Ok, I'm going to complain anyways. It's hypocritical to complain about being stereotyped as something that you feel you are not if you are just doing it right back. Don't be so close-minded as to just look at what someone does, or what sport they play, or what music they listen to, or what clothes they wear and instantly assume things about them. It's so easy to become like those you hate/those that "oppressed" you. Don't do it. Open your mind and look at someone for who they are, not what they are.
Bah. No one's going to listen to me anyways.
but must we always accept articles submitted by people who work at the site?
Yea, all the guys at gamespy are cool, but it still bugs me a bit when Slashdot posts a story on (insert site here) and the person who submitted the story is from (insert same site here).
Moller
www.pricewatch.com (I'm too lazy to do a link, shoot me).
It was said above, and the price for a GeForce2 was given.
Pricewatch shows prices for a GeForce with 32 MB for ~$100. That's value. Oh, and it's made by Elsa, who have a 6 year manufacturer's warranty on the entire card, and they include diagnostic software with the drives so you can measure card temp and overclock it easily (and hopefully safely).
Off topic, on pricewatch and AMD Athlon 750 is the same price as a PIII 500.
Moller
people will use them. As long as you can't drink until you're 21, people will do it.
Oh, and it's enjoyable. In general, people will do something that's very enjoyable even if there are consequences. We just work like that.
Moller
that's why other employees also watch out for unauthorized personnel. You're right, crowds do go in. And I can tell you that I have gone in with crowds where people have had their badges in their pockets. And I watched another employee ask them where their badge was and hold them until they took it out and showed it.
I've also watched security guards stop individuals in a group that didn't have their badge visible. And our security guards are not minimum wage rent-a-cops.
The corporate culture in this company is such that these methods have proven effective. I agree that it isn't foolproof and will not work for every company, but it has for ours.
Moller
All I have to do is swipe a card when I enter the building and always have my badge visible. All I do is write code (and I'm only an intern, I'm not going to work for this company because I can't stand the corporate bureacracy, but that's another story) and lock my workstation when I leave. It doesn't impact on conditions at all, truthfully.
Our security policy is just one of many policies. There is also a major safety policy in place that include ergonomics. That basically means that if you want/need an ergonomic mouse/keyboard/chair/anything the company will provide it for you.
Moller
I've sat in the lobby and watched people go through the locked door. Each one of them has to flash a badge to the security guard before they enter. That's not one out of ten people, it's every single person. In other buildings there is no security guard, but you can't enter unless you have a key card. Some buildings have a security officer AND a door that requires a keycard.
It seems to work. There have not been any reported problems regarding theft.
Moller
that's the question you should be asking. I work for a major corporation, and our building is locked down, and I mean tight. Naturally, you have to have your badge displayed at all times, and you need a key card to enter the building. Security is always walking around, and most employees are good about asking someone who is not displaying a badge who they are looking for.
At other buildings in this company I work for every door has a security officer. That's right, every...single...door. And the only way to enter that door is to have a key card or to have the security guard buzz you in. And the security guard will only buzz you in if someone with a valid company ID can vouch for you.
There are security personnel in our buildings 24/7. Even with this there is a clean desk policy in place, and all employees are required to lock everything up if they are away from their desk for more than 2 hours. All employees are also required to have two passwords on their machines, boot-level and system level. You may scoff at these 'rules' and say that no one follows them, but the majority of people do. It's the double edged sword of a bureacracy, you have to follow the process if you want to do anything, but if you want to do something there is a set process for you to follow.
Moller