A similar thing happened a few months ago when a T-Mobile Sidekick was stolen. Apparently, T-Mobile stores a copy of all of your data and photos on their servers so that if you switch phones you have access to all of your data and photos. The "thief" apparently wasn't aware of this and was soon identified because of the photos that she took of herself and her neighborhood. It's a long story, but an interesting read.
[CROCHETY_OLD_MAN]
Why, sonny, I remember back in my days when deciding on a college was a balance between how much it cost and how good the college was for the field of study you wanted. You went to college with a priority on learning. We didn't have none of these newfangled college decision making thingys that were all about partying and maybe getting a token diploma after spending four years and thousands of dollars, dagnabbit!
What's that? You're joining Delta Tau Chi? Well, that makes a bit more sense.
[/CROCHETY_OLD_MAN]
t's a crappy, slow and expensive medium. Why anyone at all, home users or enterprises still use it is beyond me.
Your cluelessness knows absolutely no bounds. LTO2 for the enterprise is unbelievably fast when used with the right software. Our LTO2 drives at work using Veritas Netbackup and an increased transfer buffer size can EASILY reach 650Mb/sec for a single stream depending on the types of files that are being backed up. Two simultaneous streams easily floods those servers with only a single, gigabit pipe.
"Crappy and slow"? Not modern drives. "Expensive"? That's completely relative. To people who have lost data from never having a backup at all, there are some files, like photos or other such files, that are completely irreplaceable and invaluable. And we've successfully restored data from years back without problems, so reliability isn't necessarily lacking. (Auditors' requiring old data, of course.)
The recent slashdot article about Capricorn selling you a 120TB rack of spinning disks with aggregate throughput of 40Gbps for $200K should put the final nail in tapes coffin.
And as several replies in that thread pointed out, a large number of 4-IDE-drive boxes is completely inadequate for a reliable, enterprise storage solution, particularly for mission-critical data.
Okay, my suggestion is probably dead because you want the data to be to be readable on other systems. I read that initially, but it just didn't click. (It's getting late here.) You should still consider this to be an option as well, even if you get an external hard drive. I've actually had Windows screw up (oh, there's a shock) and wipe an external hard drive on me because it thought that it was unformatted.
Take my advice on this -- NEVER format an external drive as "dynamic". ALWAYS make it "basic", otherwise it's the equivalent of a Veritas Volume Manager drive and is therefore NOT friendly to being moved from system to system.
I don't understand why so many home users are against using a good, old fashioned tape backup. Look, you can get a DDS-4 tape drive from eBay for less than $100. In fact, I'm about to sell my Sun external DDS-4 drive there soon. You can then get a compatible SCSI card for about $20 if not less. Then you just have to get the tapes. A new box of ten DDS-4 tapes -- equivalent to about 480GB compressed -- can be found for around $50 on eBay.
Because Windows Backup recognizes most tape drives, you can always use that to do you full and incremental backups. It's certainly not going to be anywhere close to something like Veritas NetBackup, but it still allows media management, is compatible from system to system (as long as it's the same version of Windows or newer), and you don't really need to do anything.
Mark what you want to backup, make sure the tape is in the drive and ready to go, then back the stuff up. If you have a completelsystem crash, Backup can read the contents of the tape and rebuild the index.
I know, I know, the Slashdot crowd doesn't seem to like tapes. Whatever. They work fine for me. I use a three month rotation with a full backup at the beginning of every month and incrementals every Sunday. For the infrequently-changed directories (almost called them file systems... whoops), I use a six-month rotation.
And don't complain about the slow speed of tape drives because that's what overnight backups are for. Let the system back up your files while you're asleep. Besides, DDS-4 goes at about 15-20GB/hour. Even if you just need to go out and run some errands, you can set it to backup as you're about to walk out the door.
While there have been shows like that here in the States for a while, this was a particular disaster for Dell not just because of the potential hazard but because -- what is Dell? A tech company. Most of the people who surf the Internet and read the tech blogs are tech-oriented people who are going to zoom in on tech-related issues and pass them on to other tech-oriented individuals.
The GP might have been a bit over-generalizing, the tech companies in particular need to be very careful about the quality of their products. News of problems with their products in particular are going to get roasted over the Internet faster than you can say, "The Internet is a series of tubes." He was, however, very accurate with the statement that problems and complaints are reported in much greater amounts than compliments, which can only be detrimental to tech companies that don't make good products.
But as you said, they're low-end. I can't imagine anyone actually going to their head of IT and putting "low end" and "mission critical data" in the same sentence.
WOW! But is it ready for the enterprise?
on
3 Terabytes, 80 Watts
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
And, no, I'm not talking about the starship Enterprise, so can it with the "Star Trek" comments.
Obviously, this is the kind of product that companies and perhaps even data centers will possibly take a very long and desiring look at. No doubt that's exactly what Capricorn is hoping for. 3.2Kw/hr is nothing compared to the power that's eaten up by a rack that's loaded with arrays and SCSI drives.
My concern is with reliability. For the most part, the general attitiude is that SCSI, while much more expensive than IDE or SATA, is also more reliable with a larger MTBF. Whether that's really true or not is up for debate, but that's the general opinion that out there. Of course, there's also the general attitude that more spindles means more throughput and more reliability if in a proper RAID configuration. From what I've seen with other solutions, we can probably assume with a wide margin of safety that 120TB for this Capricorn system is RAID 0. If a 1U system only contains four drives and they're all independent RAID configurations, then say goodbye to 30 TB just to add a modicum of redundancy with RAID 5, whereas if there were more spindles, the amount of lost space would be greatly decreased even though there would be the increased chance of a failed drive.
Looking at this system, my gut feel is that a more-spindle configuration might be a wiser move, unless the money saved in electricity goes to a better-than-average backup system. Maybe it's my bias towards SCSI/fibre channel, but I don't know that I can yet trust a low-spindle, IDE configuration to do the same thing in an enterprise environment.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone out there in Slashdotland had good luck with enterprise IDE solutions? Who knows. Perhaps some success stories might change my pro-SCSI/fibre view.
First off, you're an idiot. The company is what people consider to be evil, not the CPU. I suppose that I shouldn't expect much logic in a guerilla-like flame from a testicular-free AC.
Secondly, just because Intel might have gotten this one right doesn't mean that they're not evil. Show me proof that the major PC vendors are voluntarily making available equal quantities of AMD and Intel-based PCs (with no sneaky, inside deals with Intel to lock out AMD) so that their customers can have the choice of which one to purchase. Then, I'll reconsider my current stance that Intel is evil.
Regardless, this just ups the ante for AMD. I'm very interested to see what they're going to do to try to top this.
At least he's not as unnecessarily vulgar as "Penny Arcade", unless the vulgarity is the humor. We seem to have been indoctrinated into a culture where a joke could be funny at its nature, but add a few swear swords and suddenly it's hysterically funny. I never understood that one, which I guess explains why I don't think PA is funny. Besides, "funny" and "vulgar" are completey subjective concepts, aren't they? Different strokes, I suppose. I agree with your sentiment, however. Apparently, people with mod points seem to disagree.
Oh, and you obviously have never worked in Tech Support if you can't associate with UF.
Even though I'm behind a firewall, I use ZoneAlarm on all of my PCs so that I can catch what's communicating with the Internet and what's not. So far, it's done superbly well as far as I can tell.
For example, every time I play a media file in Windows Media Player, it tries to connect to the Internet not once but twice - once when Media Player fires up and once again after it's fnished! Excuse me? Exactly what is Media Player trying to figure out? Well, whatever it is, it's none of their damned business. Check "Remember this setting", click "Deny", and done.
Every time a process tries to act like a server, ZA also notifies me of that as well. It's a bit of a pain when I fire up a game server for the first time and the pop-up balloon interferes with the screen (whoops), but again it just shows that it's at least doing what it's supposed to do.
ZoneAlarm has its share of issues, but it clearly goes with the attitude of "better safe than sorry". There have been some rare times where the program itself doesn't start, for whatever reason, but its service gets started. On those rare occasions I've noticed that the service, if it can't communicate with the control daemon, or whatever you want to call it, it just blocks all network access. It could have just allowed everything instead and there'd be no way of knowing if it's working or not. Personally, I'd rather have it block all access. Not only does that let me know that there's a problem, but it's certainly keeping the PC's network connection secure.
Using a hardware firewall for inbound and ZA for outbound connections makes perfect sense as far as I'm concerned. It's not trouble-free, but they've been getting better at its stability over the past several revisions from what I can tell.
...that for whatever reason, PCs don't count anymore. Forget that games like WoW are making gobs ot money, regardless of whether it's from sales or from subscription. These idiotic lists of things related to gaming almost always ignore PC gaming sales. Just look at the latest "games list" for whatever topic on Slashdot recently, and rarely are consoles and PCs listed together.
The Sims and its 16 million sales; Myst's 11 million; Half-Life's 8 million... nah, PCs just can't be counted as gaming systems. No, no, forget that consoles are trying their best to be more like PCs with things like Internet connectivity and the ability to play music and movie files. Hell, some even allow keyboards! But, no, PCs and consoles are separate. No oneEVER uses a PC for any kind of serious gaming. Really! That whole WoW thing was fabricated on the same sound stage as that completely fabricated moon landing.
I'm using this dual-core Athlon 64 for OpenOffice and Notepad, not gaming. Nope. And, no, those are not Battlefield 2, Battlefront II, or Ghost Recon CDs for the PC on my desk. Nope. Just your imagination. Now, bugger off while I not use my PC for not gaming. I still not need to get my not "Veteran Knife" badge on my not Battlefield 2 character.
...but I'm not playing a game not against players who are not from around the world. Nope. I'll get a console if I want to do things like that.
So... that actually makes it more of a shareware model. You're free to distribute the less-featured version, but you have to pay up to get the rest. Expand that further, that means that it has something in common with the king of the shareware model, "Doom". Considering that Linspire is by no means the most beloved distro and it's apparently following a shareware model, should anyone be surprised that it (sort of) bears a relationship with a product called "Doom"?
I understand why Linspire is doing what they're doing, but I still don't see how this is going to help them. Linux with no DVD or WMV is representative of just about every Linux distro out there. This alone will not differentiate Linspire from the others. But then add onto that the need to pay for extra features, a concept that for the most part goes against the Linux mindset... are those vultures I see circling overhead?
I'm curious as to how this is going to help Linspire. I reviewed one of their books recently, and they said that the primary reason why they've had to charge for the software is to pay for the codec licensing. Okay, I understand that completely. But what the (insanely light) article doesn't go into is how the free version with codecs is comparable to the "commercial" version.
Because this free version is DVD and WMV compliant at installation, that right there means that those are two technologies that supposedly have to be licensed. Linspire is now giving them away. So, wouldn't that mean that they're actively losing money on those licensing fees with every download? How is that going to benefit a Linux distro that already is not very popular?
Is there some "between the lines" information that I'm just not seeing here?
My recommendation: find someplace that sells (and services) used printers. There is no need to go with a new printer unless you really want to or are lulled into a false sense of security because of having a sealed box.
I have a friend who deals in government surplus and he can just about repair laser printers with his eyes closed. I got a used LaserJet 5 with duplex unit and additional paper tray from him, and it's never given me a problem even though I've printed thousands upon thousands of pages on it. The LaserJet 5 printers are the pre-Carly printers, when HP actually made quality products. The damn things can take just about any beating you can throw at it.
That and my HP DeskJet 970cxi are on my home network via a Microplex print server (LPR/LPD-based) that can support two parallel and two serial printers. By installing the LPR software that comes with Windows XP (but has to be installed manually) and the drivers from HP's site (because the built-in Windows drivers lack a lot of good features), I have all of the PCs in my house printing to both of these printers. Because the server unit is LPR/LPD based (and uses a lot of UNIX sommands like lpstat), I can print to it from my Sun workstations if I install a PostScript cartridge in my LaserJet, and SimplyMEPIS Linux prints to both of them without any problems.
The only thing that I question is your requirement that it prints "decent graphics". Anything with 600dpi or above can print decent graphics. But since I can't determine what you mean by that or why you have such a requirement, I can't say for certain that something like an LJ5 would be good. Just don't go lower. The LJ4 was good, but everything below was 300dpi. MAJOR difference in graphics quality!
If you want to buy a new printer because of a warranty, that's fine, but I have to recommend that you find a good-condition HP from the days when HP stood for "quality printers", unlike today where it seems to stand for "ink and toner supplier". Linksys and other companies sell network server boxes, too. Hell, even an old PC can do that if you want. You don't have to have a network-ready printer in order to print on a network.
He estimates a top quality adventure would cost around $2million today, even including personnel. $2 million is nothing in game budget terms today.
Maybe not for behemoths like EA, Ubi, or Eidos, but for a small start-up like Telltale, I'm sure that two million is nothing to shoo away like it's no big deal!
Actually, most of the costs would be for the first episode - 3D modeling, bitmapping, fine-tuning the graphics, developing the game engine, and so forth. After that, the rest if just using what tools have already been made available plus additional characters and graphics, possibly some engine tweaks as well. Plus is gives the company a bit of capital to work with to produce additional episodes.
It also gives the gamers the ability to say, "Hey, this is where we think you got it wrong" and let the company make the changes for the next game, if they feel that the changes are apporpriate, of course. And since episodes are almost always cheaper than a full-blown game, more people would be willing to plunk own the dollars to see if they're interested enough to continue the series.
The only problem that I see with episodic games is the length of the game. It's a very delicate balance between providing enough material that the customer feels that he got his money's worth and not so much material that the release is not cost effective. It's a bit of a gamble, but the feedback for Bone and Half-Life 2: Episode One would seem to sugest that episodic gaming is being accepted as a viable alternative.
Good interview. I think that Telltale is doing it right - don't try to make this massive game that everyone will enjoy but cost a bazillion dollars to make, and instead focus on those who pretty much guarantee a purchase. Actually, I think they might be underestimating their audience. A lot of PC gamers out there recognize lines from the various LucasArts games that the Telltale team have worked on. If Telltale is successful at retaining the pure entertainment value that their Lucasarts games had, they'll get a larger die-hard fanbase than they think with "Sam & Max".
Don't get me wrong. I love my first-person shooters like Battlefield 2 and Battlefront II; but sometimes I'm in the mood to go back and just laugh at the fun times with Guybrush (and of course Murray), the Tentacle, and Sam & Max. As long as Telltale can keep their focus and not try to make their games all things to all people, I think they'll do well and hopefully gain a larger fan base as a result.
Uh... how exactly can you copyright numbers that have no direct bearing on your entity and that you did not plan for before they became those numbers? If I write "he had a.245 batting average last year" I'm violating a copyright? o_0
Where's my duck/duct tape? My head's about to explode thinking about that one.
Bundling a game with an operating system is a totally different thing. This list is based on sales. With respect to games, there's a direct 1:1 correlation. People bought the game for the game. People did not buy Windows for Solitaire.
In fact, that makes the inclusion of PC games into this list even more critical. It shows that games like World of Warcraft could easily be the most popular games of all. Why? Because people keep paying the monthly subscription fees!! After all, if people suddenly don't play the game, why would they continue to pay subscription fees? Yes, I know, some people think "We'll I might get back into it." But then if the person doesn't get back into it and keeps paying, that's his fault, not Blizzard's.
Subscription fees are definitely relevant because they show that a particular game is popular enough that people want to keep paying for it. That makes the inclusion of subscription-based gaming that much more important when it comes to lists like this.
I fully agree with you. The PC is no less a gaming "console" for a lot of people than are the "real" consoles. In fact, one could easily argue that the consoles are all trying to become PCs with media play and Internet capabilities. I won't be surprised if you can have an e-mail address specifically for the console of your choice in the near future. (After all, keyboards are supported on some consoles.)
I would guess that games like Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft would rank very highly in term of dollars produced, and last time I checked -- they're games. PC games deserve full recognition in this category as well. The fact that they're not included makes the article meaningless.
And does it really make sense to offer a Top 100 of ANYTHING where we're only five years into the 21st centry?
Whoa, wait a minute! So, does that mean that anyone with a peach or apple tree in their yard is running a cyanide lab? Does that make you guilty of sale of a lethal item by selling your peaches at the farmer's market?
You probably think I'm being facetious or sarcastic; but if you have a peach orchard and you sell your product at a farmers market, do your customers show ID to buy your produce?
This is getting absolutely out of hand. I thought that the original question was completely ludicrous. But now I'm not so sure.
Ah, yes, there's no reason to perhaps save money by buying a few boxes if a local pharmacy or grocery store happens to have them on sale.
If other people make meth labs, fine. I wish the police or appropriate enforcement agencies the best in their mission to find the bastards; however, I don't appreciate the guilt by association (because of a fraction of a percent of the population) that's directed at me and millions of others who happen to have a medical condition that we really don't want and didn't ask for in the first place.
I would use the phrase, "It's the principle of the matter", but apparently that concept goes beyond you and instead leaps straight to overzealous sarcasm.
I particularly enjoy how I can't shop for good deals on my doctor-recommended loratidine with decongestant that I take every day for my allergies. Apparently, if I purchase more than 15 pills of 240 mg pseudoephedrine each in one day I am obviously running a meth lab.
I never knew. I guess the government knows me better than I know myself. Thank you, government, for stopping me from creating a narcotics lab that I never knew I wanted!
The peach situation baffles the hell out of me though.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick/
A similar thing happened a few months ago when a T-Mobile Sidekick was stolen. Apparently, T-Mobile stores a copy of all of your data and photos on their servers so that if you switch phones you have access to all of your data and photos. The "thief" apparently wasn't aware of this and was soon identified because of the photos that she took of herself and her neighborhood. It's a long story, but an interesting read.
Because no /. college story is complete without some snide remark about the greek system.
Wow. Total cluelessness reigns supreme. You need to start watching some classic, frat house comedies.
It's a reference to the Delta House in the movie Animal House. Looks like my statement about "how long ago it seems" was more accurate than I thought.
Sheesh. { roll eyes }
[CROCHETY_OLD_MAN]
Why, sonny, I remember back in my days when deciding on a college was a balance between how much it cost and how good the college was for the field of study you wanted. You went to college with a priority on learning. We didn't have none of these newfangled college decision making thingys that were all about partying and maybe getting a token diploma after spending four years and thousands of dollars, dagnabbit!
What's that? You're joining Delta Tau Chi? Well, that makes a bit more sense.
[/CROCHETY_OLD_MAN]
t's a crappy, slow and expensive medium. Why anyone at all, home users or enterprises still use it is beyond me.
Your cluelessness knows absolutely no bounds. LTO2 for the enterprise is unbelievably fast when used with the right software. Our LTO2 drives at work using Veritas Netbackup and an increased transfer buffer size can EASILY reach 650Mb/sec for a single stream depending on the types of files that are being backed up. Two simultaneous streams easily floods those servers with only a single, gigabit pipe.
"Crappy and slow"? Not modern drives. "Expensive"? That's completely relative. To people who have lost data from never having a backup at all, there are some files, like photos or other such files, that are completely irreplaceable and invaluable. And we've successfully restored data from years back without problems, so reliability isn't necessarily lacking. (Auditors' requiring old data, of course.)
The recent slashdot article about Capricorn selling you a 120TB rack of spinning disks with aggregate throughput of 40Gbps for $200K should put the final nail in tapes coffin.
And as several replies in that thread pointed out, a large number of 4-IDE-drive boxes is completely inadequate for a reliable, enterprise storage solution, particularly for mission-critical data.
Okay, my suggestion is probably dead because you want the data to be to be readable on other systems. I read that initially, but it just didn't click. (It's getting late here.) You should still consider this to be an option as well, even if you get an external hard drive. I've actually had Windows screw up (oh, there's a shock) and wipe an external hard drive on me because it thought that it was unformatted.
Take my advice on this -- NEVER format an external drive as "dynamic". ALWAYS make it "basic", otherwise it's the equivalent of a Veritas Volume Manager drive and is therefore NOT friendly to being moved from system to system.
I don't understand why so many home users are against using a good, old fashioned tape backup. Look, you can get a DDS-4 tape drive from eBay for less than $100. In fact, I'm about to sell my Sun external DDS-4 drive there soon. You can then get a compatible SCSI card for about $20 if not less. Then you just have to get the tapes. A new box of ten DDS-4 tapes -- equivalent to about 480GB compressed -- can be found for around $50 on eBay.
... whoops), I use a six-month rotation.
Because Windows Backup recognizes most tape drives, you can always use that to do you full and incremental backups. It's certainly not going to be anywhere close to something like Veritas NetBackup, but it still allows media management, is compatible from system to system (as long as it's the same version of Windows or newer), and you don't really need to do anything. Mark what you want to backup, make sure the tape is in the drive and ready to go, then back the stuff up. If you have a completelsystem crash, Backup can read the contents of the tape and rebuild the index.
I know, I know, the Slashdot crowd doesn't seem to like tapes. Whatever. They work fine for me. I use a three month rotation with a full backup at the beginning of every month and incrementals every Sunday. For the infrequently-changed directories (almost called them file systems
And don't complain about the slow speed of tape drives because that's what overnight backups are for. Let the system back up your files while you're asleep. Besides, DDS-4 goes at about 15-20GB/hour. Even if you just need to go out and run some errands, you can set it to backup as you're about to walk out the door.
While there have been shows like that here in the States for a while, this was a particular disaster for Dell not just because of the potential hazard but because -- what is Dell? A tech company. Most of the people who surf the Internet and read the tech blogs are tech-oriented people who are going to zoom in on tech-related issues and pass them on to other tech-oriented individuals.
The GP might have been a bit over-generalizing, the tech companies in particular need to be very careful about the quality of their products. News of problems with their products in particular are going to get roasted over the Internet faster than you can say, "The Internet is a series of tubes." He was, however, very accurate with the statement that problems and complaints are reported in much greater amounts than compliments, which can only be detrimental to tech companies that don't make good products.
But as you said, they're low-end. I can't imagine anyone actually going to their head of IT and putting "low end" and "mission critical data" in the same sentence.
And, no, I'm not talking about the starship Enterprise, so can it with the "Star Trek" comments.
Obviously, this is the kind of product that companies and perhaps even data centers will possibly take a very long and desiring look at. No doubt that's exactly what Capricorn is hoping for. 3.2Kw/hr is nothing compared to the power that's eaten up by a rack that's loaded with arrays and SCSI drives.
My concern is with reliability. For the most part, the general attitiude is that SCSI, while much more expensive than IDE or SATA, is also more reliable with a larger MTBF. Whether that's really true or not is up for debate, but that's the general opinion that out there. Of course, there's also the general attitude that more spindles means more throughput and more reliability if in a proper RAID configuration. From what I've seen with other solutions, we can probably assume with a wide margin of safety that 120TB for this Capricorn system is RAID 0. If a 1U system only contains four drives and they're all independent RAID configurations, then say goodbye to 30 TB just to add a modicum of redundancy with RAID 5, whereas if there were more spindles, the amount of lost space would be greatly decreased even though there would be the increased chance of a failed drive.
Looking at this system, my gut feel is that a more-spindle configuration might be a wiser move, unless the money saved in electricity goes to a better-than-average backup system. Maybe it's my bias towards SCSI/fibre channel, but I don't know that I can yet trust a low-spindle, IDE configuration to do the same thing in an enterprise environment.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone out there in Slashdotland had good luck with enterprise IDE solutions? Who knows. Perhaps some success stories might change my pro-SCSI/fibre view.
First off, you're an idiot. The company is what people consider to be evil, not the CPU. I suppose that I shouldn't expect much logic in a guerilla-like flame from a testicular-free AC.
Secondly, just because Intel might have gotten this one right doesn't mean that they're not evil. Show me proof that the major PC vendors are voluntarily making available equal quantities of AMD and Intel-based PCs (with no sneaky, inside deals with Intel to lock out AMD) so that their customers can have the choice of which one to purchase. Then, I'll reconsider my current stance that Intel is evil.
Regardless, this just ups the ante for AMD. I'm very interested to see what they're going to do to try to top this.
At least he's not as unnecessarily vulgar as "Penny Arcade", unless the vulgarity is the humor. We seem to have been indoctrinated into a culture where a joke could be funny at its nature, but add a few swear swords and suddenly it's hysterically funny. I never understood that one, which I guess explains why I don't think PA is funny. Besides, "funny" and "vulgar" are completey subjective concepts, aren't they? Different strokes, I suppose. I agree with your sentiment, however. Apparently, people with mod points seem to disagree.
Oh, and you obviously have never worked in Tech Support if you can't associate with UF.
Even though I'm behind a firewall, I use ZoneAlarm on all of my PCs so that I can catch what's communicating with the Internet and what's not. So far, it's done superbly well as far as I can tell.
For example, every time I play a media file in Windows Media Player, it tries to connect to the Internet not once but twice - once when Media Player fires up and once again after it's fnished! Excuse me? Exactly what is Media Player trying to figure out? Well, whatever it is, it's none of their damned business. Check "Remember this setting", click "Deny", and done.
Every time a process tries to act like a server, ZA also notifies me of that as well. It's a bit of a pain when I fire up a game server for the first time and the pop-up balloon interferes with the screen (whoops), but again it just shows that it's at least doing what it's supposed to do.
ZoneAlarm has its share of issues, but it clearly goes with the attitude of "better safe than sorry". There have been some rare times where the program itself doesn't start, for whatever reason, but its service gets started. On those rare occasions I've noticed that the service, if it can't communicate with the control daemon, or whatever you want to call it, it just blocks all network access. It could have just allowed everything instead and there'd be no way of knowing if it's working or not. Personally, I'd rather have it block all access. Not only does that let me know that there's a problem, but it's certainly keeping the PC's network connection secure.
Using a hardware firewall for inbound and ZA for outbound connections makes perfect sense as far as I'm concerned. It's not trouble-free, but they've been getting better at its stability over the past several revisions from what I can tell.
...that for whatever reason, PCs don't count anymore. Forget that games like WoW are making gobs ot money, regardless of whether it's from sales or from subscription. These idiotic lists of things related to gaming almost always ignore PC gaming sales. Just look at the latest "games list" for whatever topic on Slashdot recently, and rarely are consoles and PCs listed together.
... nah, PCs just can't be counted as gaming systems. No, no, forget that consoles are trying their best to be more like PCs with things like Internet connectivity and the ability to play music and movie files. Hell, some even allow keyboards! But, no, PCs and consoles are separate. No one EVER uses a PC for any kind of serious gaming. Really! That whole WoW thing was fabricated on the same sound stage as that completely fabricated moon landing.
...but I'm not playing a game not against players who are not from around the world. Nope. I'll get a console if I want to do things like that.
The Sims and its 16 million sales; Myst's 11 million; Half-Life's 8 million
I'm using this dual-core Athlon 64 for OpenOffice and Notepad, not gaming. Nope. And, no, those are not Battlefield 2, Battlefront II, or Ghost Recon CDs for the PC on my desk. Nope. Just your imagination. Now, bugger off while I not use my PC for not gaming. I still not need to get my not "Veteran Knife" badge on my not Battlefield 2 character.
So ... that actually makes it more of a shareware model. You're free to distribute the less-featured version, but you have to pay up to get the rest. Expand that further, that means that it has something in common with the king of the shareware model, "Doom". Considering that Linspire is by no means the most beloved distro and it's apparently following a shareware model, should anyone be surprised that it (sort of) bears a relationship with a product called "Doom"?
... are those vultures I see circling overhead?
I understand why Linspire is doing what they're doing, but I still don't see how this is going to help them. Linux with no DVD or WMV is representative of just about every Linux distro out there. This alone will not differentiate Linspire from the others. But then add onto that the need to pay for extra features, a concept that for the most part goes against the Linux mindset
I'm curious as to how this is going to help Linspire. I reviewed one of their books recently, and they said that the primary reason why they've had to charge for the software is to pay for the codec licensing. Okay, I understand that completely. But what the (insanely light) article doesn't go into is how the free version with codecs is comparable to the "commercial" version.
Because this free version is DVD and WMV compliant at installation, that right there means that those are two technologies that supposedly have to be licensed. Linspire is now giving them away. So, wouldn't that mean that they're actively losing money on those licensing fees with every download? How is that going to benefit a Linux distro that already is not very popular?
Is there some "between the lines" information that I'm just not seeing here?
Ah, yes. The ol' "I've never seen it personally, so it's can't possibly be true!" attitude.
Welcome to Slashdot indeed.
My recommendation: find someplace that sells (and services) used printers. There is no need to go with a new printer unless you really want to or are lulled into a false sense of security because of having a sealed box.
I have a friend who deals in government surplus and he can just about repair laser printers with his eyes closed. I got a used LaserJet 5 with duplex unit and additional paper tray from him, and it's never given me a problem even though I've printed thousands upon thousands of pages on it. The LaserJet 5 printers are the pre-Carly printers, when HP actually made quality products. The damn things can take just about any beating you can throw at it.
That and my HP DeskJet 970cxi are on my home network via a Microplex print server (LPR/LPD-based) that can support two parallel and two serial printers. By installing the LPR software that comes with Windows XP (but has to be installed manually) and the drivers from HP's site (because the built-in Windows drivers lack a lot of good features), I have all of the PCs in my house printing to both of these printers. Because the server unit is LPR/LPD based (and uses a lot of UNIX sommands like lpstat), I can print to it from my Sun workstations if I install a PostScript cartridge in my LaserJet, and SimplyMEPIS Linux prints to both of them without any problems.
The only thing that I question is your requirement that it prints "decent graphics". Anything with 600dpi or above can print decent graphics. But since I can't determine what you mean by that or why you have such a requirement, I can't say for certain that something like an LJ5 would be good. Just don't go lower. The LJ4 was good, but everything below was 300dpi. MAJOR difference in graphics quality!
If you want to buy a new printer because of a warranty, that's fine, but I have to recommend that you find a good-condition HP from the days when HP stood for "quality printers", unlike today where it seems to stand for "ink and toner supplier". Linksys and other companies sell network server boxes, too. Hell, even an old PC can do that if you want. You don't have to have a network-ready printer in order to print on a network.
He estimates a top quality adventure would cost around $2million today, even including personnel. $2 million is nothing in game budget terms today.
Maybe not for behemoths like EA, Ubi, or Eidos, but for a small start-up like Telltale, I'm sure that two million is nothing to shoo away like it's no big deal!
Actually, most of the costs would be for the first episode - 3D modeling, bitmapping, fine-tuning the graphics, developing the game engine, and so forth. After that, the rest if just using what tools have already been made available plus additional characters and graphics, possibly some engine tweaks as well. Plus is gives the company a bit of capital to work with to produce additional episodes.
It also gives the gamers the ability to say, "Hey, this is where we think you got it wrong" and let the company make the changes for the next game, if they feel that the changes are apporpriate, of course. And since episodes are almost always cheaper than a full-blown game, more people would be willing to plunk own the dollars to see if they're interested enough to continue the series.
The only problem that I see with episodic games is the length of the game. It's a very delicate balance between providing enough material that the customer feels that he got his money's worth and not so much material that the release is not cost effective. It's a bit of a gamble, but the feedback for Bone and Half-Life 2: Episode One would seem to sugest that episodic gaming is being accepted as a viable alternative.
Good interview. I think that Telltale is doing it right - don't try to make this massive game that everyone will enjoy but cost a bazillion dollars to make, and instead focus on those who pretty much guarantee a purchase. Actually, I think they might be underestimating their audience. A lot of PC gamers out there recognize lines from the various LucasArts games that the Telltale team have worked on. If Telltale is successful at retaining the pure entertainment value that their Lucasarts games had, they'll get a larger die-hard fanbase than they think with "Sam & Max".
Don't get me wrong. I love my first-person shooters like Battlefield 2 and Battlefront II; but sometimes I'm in the mood to go back and just laugh at the fun times with Guybrush (and of course Murray), the Tentacle, and Sam & Max. As long as Telltale can keep their focus and not try to make their games all things to all people, I think they'll do well and hopefully gain a larger fan base as a result.
Uh ... how exactly can you copyright numbers that have no direct bearing on your entity and that you did not plan for before they became those numbers? If I write "he had a .245 batting average last year" I'm violating a copyright? o_0
Where's my duck/duct tape? My head's about to explode thinking about that one.
Bundling a game with an operating system is a totally different thing. This list is based on sales. With respect to games, there's a direct 1:1 correlation. People bought the game for the game. People did not buy Windows for Solitaire.
In fact, that makes the inclusion of PC games into this list even more critical. It shows that games like World of Warcraft could easily be the most popular games of all. Why? Because people keep paying the monthly subscription fees!! After all, if people suddenly don't play the game, why would they continue to pay subscription fees? Yes, I know, some people think "We'll I might get back into it." But then if the person doesn't get back into it and keeps paying, that's his fault, not Blizzard's.
Subscription fees are definitely relevant because they show that a particular game is popular enough that people want to keep paying for it. That makes the inclusion of subscription-based gaming that much more important when it comes to lists like this.
I fully agree with you. The PC is no less a gaming "console" for a lot of people than are the "real" consoles. In fact, one could easily argue that the consoles are all trying to become PCs with media play and Internet capabilities. I won't be surprised if you can have an e-mail address specifically for the console of your choice in the near future. (After all, keyboards are supported on some consoles.)
I would guess that games like Half-Life 2 and World of Warcraft would rank very highly in term of dollars produced, and last time I checked -- they're games. PC games deserve full recognition in this category as well. The fact that they're not included makes the article meaningless.
And does it really make sense to offer a Top 100 of ANYTHING where we're only five years into the 21st centry?
Whoa, wait a minute! So, does that mean that anyone with a peach or apple tree in their yard is running a cyanide lab? Does that make you guilty of sale of a lethal item by selling your peaches at the farmer's market?
You probably think I'm being facetious or sarcastic; but if you have a peach orchard and you sell your product at a farmers market, do your customers show ID to buy your produce?
This is getting absolutely out of hand. I thought that the original question was completely ludicrous. But now I'm not so sure.
Ah, yes, there's no reason to perhaps save money by buying a few boxes if a local pharmacy or grocery store happens to have them on sale.
If other people make meth labs, fine. I wish the police or appropriate enforcement agencies the best in their mission to find the bastards; however, I don't appreciate the guilt by association (because of a fraction of a percent of the population) that's directed at me and millions of others who happen to have a medical condition that we really don't want and didn't ask for in the first place.
I would use the phrase, "It's the principle of the matter", but apparently that concept goes beyond you and instead leaps straight to overzealous sarcasm.
I particularly enjoy how I can't shop for good deals on my doctor-recommended loratidine with decongestant that I take every day for my allergies. Apparently, if I purchase more than 15 pills of 240 mg pseudoephedrine each in one day I am obviously running a meth lab.
I never knew. I guess the government knows me better than I know myself. Thank you, government, for stopping me from creating a narcotics lab that I never knew I wanted!
The peach situation baffles the hell out of me though.