So software developers are taking advantage of faster CPUs and the dirt cheap price of RAM. How is this bad? I want my computer to do more over time, not to minimize featuresets just so hobbyists can screw around with full installs of the latest distros on an old Sparc 10 taken from an office trash heap.
People who want to Linux on crappy old hardware need to use crappy old distros or run BlackBox. That's life. Obsolesence is just the way of computing, and that isn't going to change just because a few morons refuse to give up on that old Pentium 233 and buy an Athlon.
I was referring to the force fields in the Darth Maul/Qui-Gon fight at the end of Episode I. There was a nonsensical series of force fields that activated, and later deactivated, for no reason. All it did was make that awful movie last even longer.
My thoughts exactly. This could have been one of the most incredible, pivotal sword battles in movie history, right up there with the end of Empire. Instead it gets turned into "Back to the Future II" with lightsabers.
And for all those of you who actually *like* the idea, keep in mind that if history has taught us anything, it is that Lucas will screw up his epic light-saber battles with something stupid like a corny kung-fu sendup, breaking to lame battle sequences, or throwing in a bunch of nonsensically placed force fields.
I'm not going to see that movie. This is it. The last two were bad enough, but surfboards on lava is just too stupid for me to handle.
Royalties on technology are most certainly NOT bad. Many great technical innovations have come from small companies, indvidual inventors, or universities that have no manufacturing capability. So companies that do have the manufacturing capability, but did not have the R&D capability, pay royalties to use those neat innovations in products. The system is great, works quite well overall, and encourages innovation by people who would otherwise have no incentive to invest their time and resources into making new ideas a reality.
The real problem with the system is that it does not punish abusers. Once our governments finally start cracking down on the tiny minority of companies that file patents to which they have no legitimate claims, things will get a lot better.
Re:This reminds me of an old convo I had ...
on
Tuning Linux VM swapping
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In the last two years I have had a lot of conversations about this with people, mostly because I often run Sun boxes with > 4GB of RAM. I have heard a lot of varying opinions ranging from 1.5x RAM to just don't bother with swap if you have a lot of RAM. I usually just deal with it by dedicating an entire 36 gig disk to swap in servers and use a much smaller swap partition on workstations.
Re:Stupid new combat rules...
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but good luck finding groups where there aren't always powergames abusing it with Combat reflexes and a high Dex. I realize that plenty of real role-players who will not do so exist, but they rarely want to play D&D.
Because many Sun/Apple investors care about revenue growth. Many of them are large funds that made huge investments when these companies were on top of the world and had great growth potential. Said companies blew their leads, and now some of those investors would rather just see the company fold, collect their tends-of-thousands of shares worth of post-liquidation assets, and re-invest it in companies that have serious growth potential. They can't just dump all of their shares at once, because that causes the price to immediately plummet and they get screwed on the selling price.
Niche markets aren't a bad thing, and they have plenty of investors-people who invest in high-end luxury item manufacturers aren't expecting big growth. But those are not the investors who put their money into tech stocks.
On what planet does the most stable OS out there require a babysitter? Solaris boxes are practically set-it-and-forget it. Let a script send out a daily status update to be sure nothing is broken and move on to building more boxes.
"Smartly Sun now also sells Linux based servers - but their servers do not have the assumed Windows/Linux flexability of the commodity hardware servers sold by the competition."
IMHO this could be the thing that saves Sun, because one reason many people stick with Sun is the quality of Sun support, which has always been some of the best technical support available. Now you can buy your Windows/Linux/UNIX hardware from one vendor, and know that you will get great support with a fast turn-around, and not end up on the phone talking to Apu in Bangalore.
Of course, given that some companies are opting to just make all of the x86 hardware disposable due to low per-unit costs, this might be a moot point. But then again, when a strange problem pops up in every machine in your 1,000 system cluster, you probably don't want to be dealing with a vendor who has cruddy support services.
Capcom released an arcade-perfect port of Street Fighter Zero (Alpha) 3 in Japan. Back before boot discs, I used swap tricks to play the game for hours on end. I even bought Ascii's Saturn-style controller to play the game with. The Dreamcast was a fighting gamer's dream, with Soul Calibur, Street Fighter, Rival Schools 2, and all of those SNK games. It's a shame that Sega mucked the whole thing up...
The PS2 is getting a little long in the tooth, and it shows in the visual quality of the games and some of the system's "limits." Four megabytes of dedicated video RAM was never enough, people with a Dreamcast know that those old Dreamcast games look better than anything on the PS2 because it was able to display gorgeous textures that the PS2 cannot. Xbox and Gamecube blow away the PS2 when it comes to visuals. Lack of a built in hard disk and ethernet adapter put it at a serious disadvantage against the Xbox, where players can buy three more games for the cost of the PS2 hard disk an ethernet adapter.
Sony really needs to think a little harder about the PS3 feature set. To really compete with Microsoft's next loss leader, it will need four controller ports, a lot of video RAM (anyone who really believes those stories about Xbox 2 having only 10 megs of video RAM is a moron.), a hard disk, and a built-in network adapter. Dump the useless firewire port and USB ports-K.I.S.S.
Stupid new combat rules...
on
D&D Is 30
·
· Score: 1
"...flanking & attacks of opportunity in 3/3.5 Edition still irritate me."
Those rules took so much fun out of the game by making combat drag on. There's nothing worse than constantly having combat interrupted by yet another attack-of-opportunity until it gets to the point that D&D rounds take as long as Warhammer 40k rounds to wrap up.
This sort of thing is going to really hurt America's tech industry in the long run. There is a huge job boom coming in the next few years as the baby-boomers retire, the economy recovers, and more businesses integrate computing into their infrastructures. Computer-science undergraduate numbers are dropping due to a perception that computer jobs are unstable (a perception that most tech workers support can attest to.). Now we have the government exempting essentially all IT workers from any mandatory overtime pay. This sort of idiocy is not going to encourage people to enter the field, and more work will have to be outsourced internationally, which will continue to increase the US trade deficit.
On the upside, at least IT workers can look forward to higher pay overall, although they will not have time to appreciate it.
I spent some time looking at this found found a few flaws in using standard rackmount systems at home. First, the damned things are long; often extending to the full 36" deep that a standard IT rack holds. Rackmount systems are also very noisy, because they incorporate small high-speed fans.
For home systems, you would be much better off just using mini-itx. For some ideas, take a look at http://www.mini-itx.com.
Another option to consider is XBoxes, especially if you're handy with a soldering iron and can install mod chips yourself. Buy it for $150, add some extra RAM if you need it.
This is how the security industry works. Host mailing lists for security "researchers," post proof-of-concept code, release automated tools, etc., making it easy for any moron with time to kill to become an uber-script kiddie. Then they turn around and sell solutions to help companies protect their networks. Following that, new expliots, scanning tools, etc. get released, and the cycle continues.
Sure it can all be justified with some explanation about ethical research and such, but in the long run, the IT security industry engages in clever extortion.
I just wish that I had thought of it first, and patented automated scanning software!
When I was in high-school I slept for about two hours a night, four on a good night. Mountain Dew, Barq's, and loads of coffee kept me going through weeks of AD&D, Warhammer, M:TG, and exams. One morning, before an Algebra II final that I had to pass to graduate (I have math-related learning disabilities), I chugged two liters of Dew to stay awake after three caffiene-fueled, all-night gaming sessions. During the course of the exam I chugged another two liters two keep going. I could feel my heart rate getting erratic and sweat was dripping off of me but I was able to get through the exam and rush to the loo to unload all that Dew.
I don't know if I ever hit the equivalent of 100 cups in 24/hours in those days, but I'm sure that I came close, and I know people who have definately pushed past that limit. Aside from acting very much like Tweak, nobody ever really suffered anything other than the usual withdrawl symptoms.
While the answers to all of those questions is open to debate, it is obvious that Verisign knows that offering a one-hundred year service is a great way to get free publicity.
Just think what this means for the future of fighting games! No longer will I be held back by my left thumb's poor dexterity! I'll just think of the moves and bring on the ass-whoopings! SHWEEEEET!
There are certain neurological disorders that lead extremely intelligent people to have a very weak attention to self. This leads to all sorts of poor social skills as the afflicted individual is too busy focusing on things other than him or herself. In the case of ADD medications and training can be a huge help, but Asberger's cases are somewhat hopeless, leading to individuals like Bill Gates, who has billions of dollars, a crappy hairdo, and a suit that looks like it should be on a shoe salesman.
Software designers need to realize that the clueless users aren't the only ones who have trouble with the software; plenty of intelligent programmers and sysadmins are just as screwed when it comes to configuring complicated stuff like printing, sendmail, and Apache. The problem is that there are just too many options. Sure we can read the documentation, when we have the time, but there is rarely time to read the hundreds of pages of documentation that go along with a lot of really complicated software packages. It's not that I don't appreciate the flexibility that all the nifty features provided by large software packages, it's just that I rarely use most of them, and don't have time to sift through the documentation.
If you want to add cool features to the software, go for it. We'll love you for it. But if you want us to actually use the software, stop every time you add a feature, and make sure that you are providing simple, straightforward, easy-to-find documentation, or create a nice GUI. Otherwise I'm left with the options of sifting through my book collection and google results or just using Windows software with a nice automatic setup wizard.
If you're going to bring up anything, be prepared to back it up with a PowerPoint briefing and detailed documentation in the future-in short, if you can't use this to make a star out of yourself, just keep quiet.
How do the guys who sell this junk even manage to get the product to market without dying from laughter as they bilk stupid investors out of millions of dollars? And why is it that investors still haven't caught on that specialty video game controllers without mainstream game support-lightgun games, ddr, steering wheels-don't make money?
Funk dat!
And people wonder why I refuse to invest in stocks...
By the time Lucas gets around to making sequels, he won't need any actors. He can just license the rights to the appearances of Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill, and have ILM just do the whole damned movie with CG, eliminating all of those costly bluescreen shots. No more paying union wages for gaffers, lighting techs, etc.. Just a bunch of nerds with a rendering farm and voice-synthesizers.
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So software developers are taking advantage of faster CPUs and the dirt cheap price of RAM. How is this bad? I want my computer to do more over time, not to minimize featuresets just so hobbyists can screw around with full installs of the latest distros on an old Sparc 10 taken from an office trash heap.
People who want to Linux on crappy old hardware need to use crappy old distros or run BlackBox. That's life. Obsolesence is just the way of computing, and that isn't going to change just because a few morons refuse to give up on that old Pentium 233 and buy an Athlon.
I was referring to the force fields in the Darth Maul/Qui-Gon fight at the end of Episode I. There was a nonsensical series of force fields that activated, and later deactivated, for no reason. All it did was make that awful movie last even longer.
My thoughts exactly. This could have been one of the most incredible, pivotal sword battles in movie history, right up there with the end of Empire. Instead it gets turned into "Back to the Future II" with lightsabers.
And for all those of you who actually *like* the idea, keep in mind that if history has taught us anything, it is that Lucas will screw up his epic light-saber battles with something stupid like a corny kung-fu sendup, breaking to lame battle sequences, or throwing in a bunch of nonsensically placed force fields.
I'm not going to see that movie. This is it. The last two were bad enough, but surfboards on lava is just too stupid for me to handle.
"And that royalties on technology is bad, m'kay?"
Royalties on technology are most certainly NOT bad. Many great technical innovations have come from small companies, indvidual inventors, or universities that have no manufacturing capability. So companies that do have the manufacturing capability, but did not have the R&D capability, pay royalties to use those neat innovations in products. The system is great, works quite well overall, and encourages innovation by people who would otherwise have no incentive to invest their time and resources into making new ideas a reality.
The real problem with the system is that it does not punish abusers. Once our governments finally start cracking down on the tiny minority of companies that file patents to which they have no legitimate claims, things will get a lot better.
In the last two years I have had a lot of conversations about this with people, mostly because I often run Sun boxes with > 4GB of RAM. I have heard a lot of varying opinions ranging from 1.5x RAM to just don't bother with swap if you have a lot of RAM. I usually just deal with it by dedicating an entire 36 gig disk to swap in servers and use a much smaller swap partition on workstations.
Yeah, but good luck finding groups where there aren't always powergames abusing it with Combat reflexes and a high Dex. I realize that plenty of real role-players who will not do so exist, but they rarely want to play D&D.
Because many Sun/Apple investors care about revenue growth. Many of them are large funds that made huge investments when these companies were on top of the world and had great growth potential. Said companies blew their leads, and now some of those investors would rather just see the company fold, collect their tends-of-thousands of shares worth of post-liquidation assets, and re-invest it in companies that have serious growth potential. They can't just dump all of their shares at once, because that causes the price to immediately plummet and they get screwed on the selling price.
Niche markets aren't a bad thing, and they have plenty of investors-people who invest in high-end luxury item manufacturers aren't expecting big growth. But those are not the investors who put their money into tech stocks.
On what planet does the most stable OS out there require a babysitter? Solaris boxes are practically set-it-and-forget it. Let a script send out a daily status update to be sure nothing is broken and move on to building more boxes.
"Smartly Sun now also sells Linux based servers - but their servers do not have the assumed Windows/Linux flexability of the commodity hardware servers sold by the competition."
Actually, they do. Sun just certified one of their x86 servers with Windows
, and announced plans to certify ALL of their x86/Opteron hardware to work with Windows.
IMHO this could be the thing that saves Sun, because one reason many people stick with Sun is the quality of Sun support, which has always been some of the best technical support available. Now you can buy your Windows/Linux/UNIX hardware from one vendor, and know that you will get great support with a fast turn-around, and not end up on the phone talking to Apu in Bangalore.
Of course, given that some companies are opting to just make all of the x86 hardware disposable due to low per-unit costs, this might be a moot point. But then again, when a strange problem pops up in every machine in your 1,000 system cluster, you probably don't want to be dealing with a vendor who has cruddy support services.
Capcom released an arcade-perfect port of Street Fighter Zero (Alpha) 3 in Japan. Back before boot discs, I used swap tricks to play the game for hours on end. I even bought Ascii's Saturn-style controller to play the game with. The Dreamcast was a fighting gamer's dream, with Soul Calibur, Street Fighter, Rival Schools 2, and all of those SNK games. It's a shame that Sega mucked the whole thing up...
The PS2 is getting a little long in the tooth, and it shows in the visual quality of the games and some of the system's "limits." Four megabytes of dedicated video RAM was never enough, people with a Dreamcast know that those old Dreamcast games look better than anything on the PS2 because it was able to display gorgeous textures that the PS2 cannot. Xbox and Gamecube blow away the PS2 when it comes to visuals. Lack of a built in hard disk and ethernet adapter put it at a serious disadvantage against the Xbox, where players can buy three more games for the cost of the PS2 hard disk an ethernet adapter.
Sony really needs to think a little harder about the PS3 feature set. To really compete with Microsoft's next loss leader, it will need four controller ports, a lot of video RAM (anyone who really believes those stories about Xbox 2 having only 10 megs of video RAM is a moron.), a hard disk, and a built-in network adapter. Dump the useless firewire port and USB ports-K.I.S.S.
"...flanking & attacks of opportunity in 3/3.5 Edition still irritate me."
Those rules took so much fun out of the game by making combat drag on. There's nothing worse than constantly having combat interrupted by yet another attack-of-opportunity until it gets to the point that D&D rounds take as long as Warhammer 40k rounds to wrap up.
This sort of thing is going to really hurt America's tech industry in the long run. There is a huge job boom coming in the next few years as the baby-boomers retire, the economy recovers, and more businesses integrate computing into their infrastructures. Computer-science undergraduate numbers are dropping due to a perception that computer jobs are unstable (a perception that most tech workers support can attest to.). Now we have the government exempting essentially all IT workers from any mandatory overtime pay. This sort of idiocy is not going to encourage people to enter the field, and more work will have to be outsourced internationally, which will continue to increase the US trade deficit.
On the upside, at least IT workers can look forward to higher pay overall, although they will not have time to appreciate it.
I spent some time looking at this found found a few flaws in using standard rackmount systems at home. First, the damned things are long; often extending to the full 36" deep that a standard IT rack holds. Rackmount systems are also very noisy, because they incorporate small high-speed fans.
For home systems, you would be much better off just using mini-itx. For some ideas, take a look at http://www.mini-itx.com.
Another option to consider is XBoxes, especially if you're handy with a soldering iron and can install mod chips yourself. Buy it for $150, add some extra RAM if you need it.
This is how the security industry works. Host mailing lists for security "researchers," post proof-of-concept code, release automated tools, etc., making it easy for any moron with time to kill to become an uber-script kiddie. Then they turn around and sell solutions to help companies protect their networks. Following that, new expliots, scanning tools, etc. get released, and the cycle continues.
Sure it can all be justified with some explanation about ethical research and such, but in the long run, the IT security industry engages in clever extortion.
I just wish that I had thought of it first, and patented automated scanning software!
When I was in high-school I slept for about two hours a night, four on a good night. Mountain Dew, Barq's, and loads of coffee kept me going through weeks of AD&D, Warhammer, M:TG, and exams. One morning, before an Algebra II final that I had to pass to graduate (I have math-related learning disabilities), I chugged two liters of Dew to stay awake after three caffiene-fueled, all-night gaming sessions. During the course of the exam I chugged another two liters two keep going. I could feel my heart rate getting erratic and sweat was dripping off of me but I was able to get through the exam and rush to the loo to unload all that Dew.
I don't know if I ever hit the equivalent of 100 cups in 24/hours in those days, but I'm sure that I came close, and I know people who have definately pushed past that limit. Aside from acting very much like Tweak, nobody ever really suffered anything other than the usual withdrawl symptoms.
Actually, that's sort of off-topic because distcc negates the need to set up a beowulf cluster.
While the answers to all of those questions is open to debate, it is obvious that Verisign knows that offering a one-hundred year service is a great way to get free publicity.
Just think what this means for the future of fighting games! No longer will I be held back by my left thumb's poor dexterity! I'll just think of the moves and bring on the ass-whoopings! SHWEEEEET!
There are certain neurological disorders that lead extremely intelligent people to have a very weak attention to self. This leads to all sorts of poor social skills as the afflicted individual is too busy focusing on things other than him or herself. In the case of ADD medications and training can be a huge help, but Asberger's cases are somewhat hopeless, leading to individuals like Bill Gates, who has billions of dollars, a crappy hairdo, and a suit that looks like it should be on a shoe salesman.
Software designers need to realize that the clueless users aren't the only ones who have trouble with the software; plenty of intelligent programmers and sysadmins are just as screwed when it comes to configuring complicated stuff like printing, sendmail, and Apache. The problem is that there are just too many options. Sure we can read the documentation, when we have the time, but there is rarely time to read the hundreds of pages of documentation that go along with a lot of really complicated software packages. It's not that I don't appreciate the flexibility that all the nifty features provided by large software packages, it's just that I rarely use most of them, and don't have time to sift through the documentation.
If you want to add cool features to the software, go for it. We'll love you for it. But if you want us to actually use the software, stop every time you add a feature, and make sure that you are providing simple, straightforward, easy-to-find documentation, or create a nice GUI. Otherwise I'm left with the options of sifting through my book collection and google results or just using Windows software with a nice automatic setup wizard.
If you're going to bring up anything, be prepared to back it up with a PowerPoint briefing and detailed documentation in the future-in short, if you can't use this to make a star out of yourself, just keep quiet.
You must be female, guys never have trouble with that sort of thing...
How do the guys who sell this junk even manage to get the product to market without dying from laughter as they bilk stupid investors out of millions of dollars? And why is it that investors still haven't caught on that specialty video game controllers without mainstream game support-lightgun games, ddr, steering wheels-don't make money?
Funk dat!
And people wonder why I refuse to invest in stocks...
By the time Lucas gets around to making sequels, he won't need any actors. He can just license the rights to the appearances of Carrie Fisher, Harrison Ford, and Mark Hamill, and have ILM just do the whole damned movie with CG, eliminating all of those costly bluescreen shots. No more paying union wages for gaffers, lighting techs, etc.. Just a bunch of nerds with a rendering farm and voice-synthesizers.