There really is no reason for AOL to develop Winamp anymore. Every Wintel PC out there comes with Windows media player, which isn't perfect, but many people seem to prefer it to Winamp. Now that iTunes is picking up steam on PCs, and with AOL using iTunes for its own online music sales, Winamp is just a competing project that isn't really competing. Delayed releases, poor performance, and a bad randomization algorithm that doesn't cut it for today's trend of listening to music with shuffle on aren't pushing the envelope.
I remember when Winamp was cool, interesting, and mattered, but those days ended after AOL picked up Nullsoft. It's about time for AOL to just euthanize the poor thing and move on.
This is just another reason that world leaders need to stop being petty, flip a coin, and start work on the international fusion reactor! Spend those billions already!
"Most upgrades are incremental as it usually only takes 1 or 2 components to remain current."
Well said. I usually just swap out the video card and CPU every now and then, and add some RAM if needed. My real problem now is that "high-end" video cards have moved up in price from $350-$400 to $500-$600, so I'm not touching most of the new 3D games that have landed in the past six months.
Yeah, but keep in mind that Apple users generally don't play games on their machines. Chop out the video/graphics/sound professionals from those folks and you find a lot of Apple users who use their machines for writing, paying bills, and websufing, none of which require upgrading more than every four or five years.
But the six years he quotes is still a hell of a stretch...
Re:I've never understood the obsession with Halo
on
Halo 2 Reviews
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· Score: -1, Troll
Console-only gamers don't have a clue about what makes an FPS good, because they have a totally different experience playing FPS games than PC gamers. A good console FPS is one where the control scheme sort of makes up for the fact that only an idiot would want to play an FPS with a console gamepad as opposed to a keyboard/mouse combo. A good console FPS makes up for consoles having miniscule amounts of RAM, forcing limited texture sets, a limited number of enemy types in each level, and small levels.
Metroid Prime is another great example of this. It took all the fun out of FPS gaming by slowing the game down, crippled the AI and added in auto-aim, and replaced big levels with levels that require endless backtracking across jumping puzzles to keys and switches. In short, it was just a typical platform jumping game from a first-person perspective.
But as long as there are clueless numbskulls out there willing to spend $50 on a shitty FPS because they want to play the cool games that PC gamers get to play, there will be companies like Bungie excreting these pitiful examples of the genre and milking the cash cow for years.
You've obviously never worked for the US Government as a contractor or employee. The government loves to request huge piles of documentation about all sorts of crazy things from contractors, who regularly just copy & paste from old documents, swap some names around, and replace the logos on the first page with logos of the relevant contractors and agencies. The thing is, much of this paperwork is huge, and these agencies have piles of the stuff printed and bound, on CD, on DVD, and on various government intranets -- so much of it that, in fact, nobody ever looks over it. So when silly nerds working on documentation get bored, they tend to stick some really stupid stuff in there, knowing damned well that nobody notices. It's just like the silly names that go into network protocols and such. Bored geeks looking for cheap thrills try to see what they can get away with.
On a related note, I was once working on a very serious project where I named all of the client systems after food - chicken, pizza, and taco, and named the server Megadoomer after an Invader Zim episode. I just about died trying not to fall over laughing when my coworkers would turn red with embarassment when discussing the network during meetings because they thought the names were terribly silly. But it was government work, so nobody cared enough to make me change anything.
Well, aside from time wasted reading/. rants, the Patriot Act has has had zero affect on me. And seeing as how I am neither an enemy of the USA or engaged in anything likely to convince anyone that I am, nor am I a paranoid privacy weirdo, I don't really expect that it ever will.
Maybe he's just sick of having a massive CRT on his desk. I bought a 19" LCD because I got sick of having a monitor so big that I had to move my desk in front of a recessed window and hang the ass-end of the CRT into the window well. Add in the massive amount of heat generated by a large, professional grade CRT and moving on to an LCD just made sense.
In my experience IT managers usually end up that way via a field promotion; the boss quits, and his bosses don't have time or money to spend replacing him, so they just promote whoever's been around the longest. In IT that usually means promoting some lazy, easy to placate schmuck who's only been around that long because, unlike most IT workers, he's too lazy to post a resume on Monster.com.
It doesn't help that good techies rarely make good managers. Programming/sysadmin/dba skills rarely translate into people skills. In the best IT teams I worked on, the team really managed itself and the boss was there as what we called a human shit filter -- someone to communicate between customers and IT staff and make sure that the two sides didn't flip out and kill each other.
Agreed. I have a Mac for websurfing, writing, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.. But when it comes to 3D games, even games from 2002 still run slowly at the native resolution of the LCD, so I switch to the PC, Gamecube, or Xbox. Hell, I don't even run 3D modeling software on my Mac because my almost-two-year-old PC still runs circles around my year-old Mac in any 3D app.
Of course, these days I've all but given up on PC gaming as well. Dealing with 3D driver issues, Direct X versions, and the fact that different games often have issues running properly on the same system configuration isn't worth the hassle compared to the console where I just stick the game in and it works. Add in the additional trouble of most PC game companies refusing to give up the "release a beta, patch later if it sells well" product release paradigm, and PC gaming just sucks. Too make matters even worse, now that the 3D chipset market is down to just Nvidia and AMD, prices for cards that run games that came out six months ago well are twice what they used to be. It's no wonder that the PC game industry is in a slump, being a PC gamer takes too damned much time and money, especially now that MSFT is luring PC companies like Bioware and Lionhead to release XBox exclusives.
Anyway, this is a common rant, so I'll stop now and check "No Karma Bonus" on the way out...
This doesn't just apply to security, it applies to IT in general. The sysadmin is always the guy who has to implement all of the stupid shit managers promise to people, and rarely has any input on how it will be done. I finally knew that my IT career was about to end the when, on a Friday morning, I was asked to work at least 12 hours on Saturday AND Sunday because the director of a federal agency I was working for (as a contractor) has promised that we would have a certain system working by a certain date which just happened to be Monday morning. This was the first time that ANYONE on the team responsible for the implementation had heard about it.
I refused -- not that it mattered, because the coders needed time to adapt beta code from a different project to this one--, and dropped by for a few hours on Sunday just to check on the status of things. Two weeks later we had a semi-functional prototype. Three months later it was still a lame cycle of the same crap.
Now I'm going to art school and painting full-time. The money sucks, but I never have to come in at three AM to cleanup after someone else's dumbshit idea.
Will all of you losers who live too far out in the middle of nowhere to have DSL or cable PLEASE stop trying to see if you qualify? Because I'll guarantee that you don't, and you're killing the server so that those of us who live in civilized places can't check!
A weak bladder is usually the result of poor housetraining, or in the case of many bitches, being spayed too young. One thing a vet will never tell you about getting a bitch spayed is that if you do it before they're a year old, it causes hormonal imbalances that lead to severe bladder control problems. The bladder control problems can be controlled with medication, but the best solution is to wait until the dog is a year old to spay.
Disclaimer - I do not oppose spaying and neutering pets, just doing it when they're too damned young!
Agreed -- this is another one of those tech companies snowing clueless investors out of millions of dollars by describing ways technology can make life even more inconvenient. What's even more amazing is that they're pushing this idea in the UK, a country where the weather is not conducive to standing around loading files onto a music player. Whoever is investing in this scam must have no clue of what an mp3 is, or how much easier it is to just do this in a nice warm house as opposed to a cold, wet London streetcorner.
In twelve month the only web site talking about this one will be Pud's.
Does anyone know anything about John Carmack being banned from some Vegas casinos because he is a very talented card-counter as well as being able to figure out all of the odds? I've heard stories, but never seen anything to substantiate.
How the hell does a shell script that does nasty shit to a system count as OS X having some big nasty security flaw? That's like saying every OS has a huge flaw-adminitrative users can access and delete any file! Holy shit, we're all doomed!
Whichever of the/. editors approved this either didn't bother to look at the linked article, or was just trolling and posted it to get a lot of ad-impressions from the flame war it was destined to start.
Agreed. I might have cared about TF2 before the online gaming world had moved to CS, but at this point it would just be another weird mod that pisses me off...
"... I don't expect the DEVELOPERS to INSULT ME with RACIAL or SEXIST SLURS."
Morons like you are the nerds who screw these games up for the rest of us. See, the whole point of role-playing games is to play a role within the context of the game. When the developers insult people using racist/sexist language within the context of the game, they are doing so to give the players a chance to role-play their parts in the situation appropriately. The players shouldn't be taking the slurs personally, for feel insulted, because the insults are not directed at the players-they are merely intended to stimulate the appropriate dialouge within the world in which players have paid to interact.
But unfortunately online games are full of stupid people like you, who, unable to separate themselves from the game, take everything personally, bitch and whine a lot, and ruin the experience for people with a clue.
What do these guys want developers to do? Tell us the truth? That would make every video game press release look like this:
"xyz Software announced , a knockoff of that adds two new features, five hundred new bugs, and a graphics slightly prettier than in the game just like it that you bought LAST year!"
Video game hype is like pr0n models: you know that the body parts are (mostly) fake, and that they'll probably OD or commit suicide within five years, but hey, it's fun to get off on until the real thing comes along.
Agreed. The opensource community, especially the GPL world, is full of huge hypocrites. I'll just point at the/. editors, who regularly make asses out of themselves by shouting good and bad about Blizzard, Sun, and Microsoft from opposite sides of their mouths year after year.
"Why is it that the software support for these things is so immature even when compared to crap like video cards that are bleeding-edge marvels of technology?"
Because most people don't notice bad sound. Most computer users, even Linux nerds, are still just using two crappy speakers, so getting cutting-edge drivers for a nice card doesn't come up. A monitor, however, is quite literally in your face, so programmers get inspired to do something nice with that image they're staring at.
It may be technically feasible, but what about financially? The interesting thing about open-source consumers is that they're mostly talk, but when it comes down to actually buying all of they stuff that they claim to want for Linux, they don't vote with their dollars. Just look at the failure of Lokigames to make a profit, not to mention id's big profile attempt to push Linux by doing a simultaneous Linux/Mac/Windows release of Quake III - sales of Linux Quake III were abysmal.
Expecting geeks to pony up a few hundred bucks for an open-source video card that has little if any chance of competing with ATI/Nvidia on speed seems pretty unlikely.
"I am not trying to flame but I just don't see the point - OS X is BSD. You've got X11. you can run all sorts of apps from the OS X command line (from apache to fink to vi) so what's the appeal of running linux?"
Nerd cred. See, for a while it was cool to dual-boot Linux and Windows, but then all the nerds got out of college and bought a second PC. So then it became cool to run Linux and just run Windows on an old PC for running Quicken, MS Money, or updating the all important resume in MS-Word format. But after a while everyone realized that Linux doesn't need any real processing power because the only games that run on Linux come out long after the Windows versions, so everyone switched to Windows on the fast machine and Linux on the old one.
At that point all of the nerds with cool tech jobs decided to show off by running Linux on on Sun/Dec/IBM RISC machines they bought on ebay for stupid sums of money because at that time there were no sub-1000 Sun desktops. Then the dotcoms crashed, and over the past few years ebay has been flooded with cheap RISC machines from failed dotcoms, so people wanting to show off had to buy some other overpriced RISC machine to run Linux on. Where can you turn to get an overpriced RISC machine that runs Linux but still costs less than a Hyundai? Apple computers!
See, it's all about people trying (and failing) to look cool. It's just like guys who buy a $1000 1984 Corolla, slap on a "spoiler" made from scrap metal and old screws, and finish it off with $9.95 Wal-Mart hubcaps that are supposed to look like spinner rims. Of course, they're still dorks, they still get no pussy, but it impresses fourteen-year-olds who like to post to web forums about how cool they are and how they hate their parents who make them use AOL and won't let them dual-boot the family machine to a install of Mandrake 7.0.
Ok, ok, I stand corrected on this one... The last time I looked into dual-CPU Macs the only well-optimized programs were Photoshop and some of the OS functions. If I hadn't just lost my job this morning I'd be changing my plans to get a single-CPU G5 to a dual...
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There really is no reason for AOL to develop Winamp anymore. Every Wintel PC out there comes with Windows media player, which isn't perfect, but many people seem to prefer it to Winamp. Now that iTunes is picking up steam on PCs, and with AOL using iTunes for its own online music sales, Winamp is just a competing project that isn't really competing. Delayed releases, poor performance, and a bad randomization algorithm that doesn't cut it for today's trend of listening to music with shuffle on aren't pushing the envelope.
I remember when Winamp was cool, interesting, and mattered, but those days ended after AOL picked up Nullsoft. It's about time for AOL to just euthanize the poor thing and move on.
This is just another reason that world leaders need to stop being petty, flip a coin, and start work on the international fusion reactor! Spend those billions already!
"Most upgrades are incremental as it usually only takes 1 or 2 components to remain current."
Well said. I usually just swap out the video card and CPU every now and then, and add some RAM if needed. My real problem now is that "high-end" video cards have moved up in price from $350-$400 to $500-$600, so I'm not touching most of the new 3D games that have landed in the past six months.
Yeah, but keep in mind that Apple users generally don't play games on their machines. Chop out the video/graphics/sound professionals from those folks and you find a lot of Apple users who use their machines for writing, paying bills, and websufing, none of which require upgrading more than every four or five years.
But the six years he quotes is still a hell of a stretch...
Console-only gamers don't have a clue about what makes an FPS good, because they have a totally different experience playing FPS games than PC gamers. A good console FPS is one where the control scheme sort of makes up for the fact that only an idiot would want to play an FPS with a console gamepad as opposed to a keyboard/mouse combo. A good console FPS makes up for consoles having miniscule amounts of RAM, forcing limited texture sets, a limited number of enemy types in each level, and small levels.
Metroid Prime is another great example of this. It took all the fun out of FPS gaming by slowing the game down, crippled the AI and added in auto-aim, and replaced big levels with levels that require endless backtracking across jumping puzzles to keys and switches. In short, it was just a typical platform jumping game from a first-person perspective.
But as long as there are clueless numbskulls out there willing to spend $50 on a shitty FPS because they want to play the cool games that PC gamers get to play, there will be companies like Bungie excreting these pitiful examples of the genre and milking the cash cow for years.
You've obviously never worked for the US Government as a contractor or employee. The government loves to request huge piles of documentation about all sorts of crazy things from contractors, who regularly just copy & paste from old documents, swap some names around, and replace the logos on the first page with logos of the relevant contractors and agencies. The thing is, much of this paperwork is huge, and these agencies have piles of the stuff printed and bound, on CD, on DVD, and on various government intranets -- so much of it that, in fact, nobody ever looks over it. So when silly nerds working on documentation get bored, they tend to stick some really stupid stuff in there, knowing damned well that nobody notices. It's just like the silly names that go into network protocols and such. Bored geeks looking for cheap thrills try to see what they can get away with.
On a related note, I was once working on a very serious project where I named all of the client systems after food - chicken, pizza, and taco, and named the server Megadoomer after an Invader Zim episode. I just about died trying not to fall over laughing when my coworkers would turn red with embarassment when discussing the network during meetings because they thought the names were terribly silly. But it was government work, so nobody cared enough to make me change anything.
Well, aside from time wasted reading /. rants, the Patriot Act has has had zero affect on me. And seeing as how I am neither an enemy of the USA or engaged in anything likely to convince anyone that I am, nor am I a paranoid privacy weirdo, I don't really expect that it ever will.
Maybe he's just sick of having a massive CRT on his desk. I bought a 19" LCD because I got sick of having a monitor so big that I had to move my desk in front of a recessed window and hang the ass-end of the CRT into the window well. Add in the massive amount of heat generated by a large, professional grade CRT and moving on to an LCD just made sense.
In my experience IT managers usually end up that way via a field promotion; the boss quits, and his bosses don't have time or money to spend replacing him, so they just promote whoever's been around the longest. In IT that usually means promoting some lazy, easy to placate schmuck who's only been around that long because, unlike most IT workers, he's too lazy to post a resume on Monster.com.
It doesn't help that good techies rarely make good managers. Programming/sysadmin/dba skills rarely translate into people skills. In the best IT teams I worked on, the team really managed itself and the boss was there as what we called a human shit filter -- someone to communicate between customers and IT staff and make sure that the two sides didn't flip out and kill each other.
Agreed. I have a Mac for websurfing, writing, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.. But when it comes to 3D games, even games from 2002 still run slowly at the native resolution of the LCD, so I switch to the PC, Gamecube, or Xbox. Hell, I don't even run 3D modeling software on my Mac because my almost-two-year-old PC still runs circles around my year-old Mac in any 3D app.
Of course, these days I've all but given up on PC gaming as well. Dealing with 3D driver issues, Direct X versions, and the fact that different games often have issues running properly on the same system configuration isn't worth the hassle compared to the console where I just stick the game in and it works. Add in the additional trouble of most PC game companies refusing to give up the "release a beta, patch later if it sells well" product release paradigm, and PC gaming just sucks. Too make matters even worse, now that the 3D chipset market is down to just Nvidia and AMD, prices for cards that run games that came out six months ago well are twice what they used to be. It's no wonder that the PC game industry is in a slump, being a PC gamer takes too damned much time and money, especially now that MSFT is luring PC companies like Bioware and Lionhead to release XBox exclusives.
Anyway, this is a common rant, so I'll stop now and check "No Karma Bonus" on the way out...
This doesn't just apply to security, it applies to IT in general. The sysadmin is always the guy who has to implement all of the stupid shit managers promise to people, and rarely has any input on how it will be done. I finally knew that my IT career was about to end the when, on a Friday morning, I was asked to work at least 12 hours on Saturday AND Sunday because the director of a federal agency I was working for (as a contractor) has promised that we would have a certain system working by a certain date which just happened to be Monday morning. This was the first time that ANYONE on the team responsible for the implementation had heard about it.
I refused -- not that it mattered, because the coders needed time to adapt beta code from a different project to this one--, and dropped by for a few hours on Sunday just to check on the status of things. Two weeks later we had a semi-functional prototype. Three months later it was still a lame cycle of the same crap.
Now I'm going to art school and painting full-time. The money sucks, but I never have to come in at three AM to cleanup after someone else's dumbshit idea.
And just how the hell does one deliver a cat? I would think that Fedex and UPS ground are out...
Will all of you losers who live too far out in the middle of nowhere to have DSL or cable PLEASE stop trying to see if you qualify? Because I'll guarantee that you don't, and you're killing the server so that those of us who live in civilized places can't check!
A weak bladder is usually the result of poor housetraining, or in the case of many bitches, being spayed too young. One thing a vet will never tell you about getting a bitch spayed is that if you do it before they're a year old, it causes hormonal imbalances that lead to severe bladder control problems. The bladder control problems can be controlled with medication, but the best solution is to wait until the dog is a year old to spay.
Disclaimer - I do not oppose spaying and neutering pets, just doing it when they're too damned young!
Agreed -- this is another one of those tech companies snowing clueless investors out of millions of dollars by describing ways technology can make life even more inconvenient. What's even more amazing is that they're pushing this idea in the UK, a country where the weather is not conducive to standing around loading files onto a music player. Whoever is investing in this scam must have no clue of what an mp3 is, or how much easier it is to just do this in a nice warm house as opposed to a cold, wet London streetcorner.
In twelve month the only web site talking about this one will be Pud's.
Does anyone know anything about John Carmack being banned from some Vegas casinos because he is a very talented card-counter as well as being able to figure out all of the odds? I've heard stories, but never seen anything to substantiate.
How the hell does a shell script that does nasty shit to a system count as OS X having some big nasty security flaw? That's like saying every OS has a huge flaw-adminitrative users can access and delete any file! Holy shit, we're all doomed!
/. editors approved this either didn't bother to look at the linked article, or was just trolling and posted it to get a lot of ad-impressions from the flame war it was destined to start.
Whichever of the
Agreed. I might have cared about TF2 before the online gaming world had moved to CS, but at this point it would just be another weird mod that pisses me off...
"... I don't expect the DEVELOPERS to INSULT ME with RACIAL or SEXIST SLURS."
Morons like you are the nerds who screw these games up for the rest of us. See, the whole point of role-playing games is to play a role within the context of the game. When the developers insult people using racist/sexist language within the context of the game, they are doing so to give the players a chance to role-play their parts in the situation appropriately. The players shouldn't be taking the slurs personally, for feel insulted, because the insults are not directed at the players-they are merely intended to stimulate the appropriate dialouge within the world in which players have paid to interact.
But unfortunately online games are full of stupid people like you, who, unable to separate themselves from the game, take everything personally, bitch and whine a lot, and ruin the experience for people with a clue.
What do these guys want developers to do? Tell us the truth? That would make every video game press release look like this:
"xyz Software announced , a knockoff of that adds two new features, five hundred new bugs, and a graphics slightly prettier than in the game just like it that you bought LAST year!"
Video game hype is like pr0n models: you know that the body parts are (mostly) fake, and that they'll probably OD or commit suicide within five years, but hey, it's fun to get off on until the real thing comes along.
Agreed. The opensource community, especially the GPL world, is full of huge hypocrites. I'll just point at the /. editors, who regularly make asses out of themselves by shouting good and bad about Blizzard, Sun, and Microsoft from opposite sides of their mouths year after year.
"Why is it that the software support for these things is so immature even when compared to crap like video cards that are bleeding-edge marvels of technology?"
Because most people don't notice bad sound. Most computer users, even Linux nerds, are still just using two crappy speakers, so getting cutting-edge drivers for a nice card doesn't come up. A monitor, however, is quite literally in your face, so programmers get inspired to do something nice with that image they're staring at.
It may be technically feasible, but what about financially? The interesting thing about open-source consumers is that they're mostly talk, but when it comes down to actually buying all of they stuff that they claim to want for Linux, they don't vote with their dollars. Just look at the failure of Lokigames to make a profit, not to mention id's big profile attempt to push Linux by doing a simultaneous Linux/Mac/Windows release of Quake III - sales of Linux Quake III were abysmal.
Expecting geeks to pony up a few hundred bucks for an open-source video card that has little if any chance of competing with ATI/Nvidia on speed seems pretty unlikely.
"I am not trying to flame but I just don't see the point - OS X is BSD. You've got X11. you can run all sorts of apps from the OS X command line (from apache to fink to vi) so what's the appeal of running linux?"
Nerd cred. See, for a while it was cool to dual-boot Linux and Windows, but then all the nerds got out of college and bought a second PC. So then it became cool to run Linux and just run Windows on an old PC for running Quicken, MS Money, or updating the all important resume in MS-Word format. But after a while everyone realized that Linux doesn't need any real processing power because the only games that run on Linux come out long after the Windows versions, so everyone switched to Windows on the fast machine and Linux on the old one.
At that point all of the nerds with cool tech jobs decided to show off by running Linux on on Sun/Dec/IBM RISC machines they bought on ebay for stupid sums of money because at that time there were no sub-1000 Sun desktops. Then the dotcoms crashed, and over the past few years ebay has been flooded with cheap RISC machines from failed dotcoms, so people wanting to show off had to buy some other overpriced RISC machine to run Linux on. Where can you turn to get an overpriced RISC machine that runs Linux but still costs less than a Hyundai? Apple computers!
See, it's all about people trying (and failing) to look cool. It's just like guys who buy a $1000 1984 Corolla, slap on a "spoiler" made from scrap metal and old screws, and finish it off with $9.95 Wal-Mart hubcaps that are supposed to look like spinner rims. Of course, they're still dorks, they still get no pussy, but it impresses fourteen-year-olds who like to post to web forums about how cool they are and how they hate their parents who make them use AOL and won't let them dual-boot the family machine to a install of Mandrake 7.0.
Ok, ok, I stand corrected on this one... The last time I looked into dual-CPU Macs the only well-optimized programs were Photoshop and some of the OS functions. If I hadn't just lost my job this morning I'd be changing my plans to get a single-CPU G5 to a dual...