yes, and with newer GPUs, the program size has increased dramatically, which makes them much more versatile. 3 years ago I was cramming a vertex program into 256 lines - now I've got 65535. Fragment programs increased similarly (though I just finally got a card that supports them in the last 3 months to play Oblivion, so I'm still learning the ropes).
Take a look at the GPU based samples (unfortunately, most require Windows) - many are incorporating physics (water, cloth, etc). Another good source is http://www.gpgpu.org/
Unfortunately, I don't know of any open source GPU based physics engines, which sucks, and IIRC, a bunch of patents have been filed on some of the software based solutions.
Airplane! is a spoof of several plane based disaster movies. It used Zero Hour as base material, kinda like Kentucky Fried Movie used Enter the Dragon as base material for A Fistful of Yen and blaxploitation movies like Cleopatra Jones as base material for the Cleopatra Schwartz segment. Both segments spoof other movies of the genre (and other genres), as well, but have one particular movie as the basis. I imagine the producers of Airplane! bought the rights to Zero Hour to use character names and some dialogs. I vaguely recall seeing Zero Hour a long time ago (I think on TV), but don't remember it being intentionally funny. I also vaguely recall the Airport movies (75, 77, the concorde one [80?] - haven't seen them since they were on TV).
3dfx's technology and core assets were absorbed into nVidia and the company was dissolved. Even if they were reformed, they would have to start from scratch. The purchase was done primarily to settle a number of nasty patent lawsuits between the two companies and save them both a lot of money, otherwise both probably would have ridden each other into the ground.
When the merger was announced, it was basically the #1 and #2 performance graphics card makers and looked like we were destined for high priced performance cards. A number of low end companies existed then, S3, ATI, Matrox, Creative, etc., but none seemed like they wanted to compete on the high end. Shortly after the merger, ATI stepped up and decided to compete on the high end against the juggernaut, the others decided to stick to the low end and it mostly killed them, primarily due to the memory price fallout that made performance cards affordable.
Incidentally, the winner in that battle went the opposite of the PC tradition - the closed provider (nVidia) beat the open provider (3dfx). What I mean by that is 3dfx licensed their technology to 3rd parties to manufacture cards, where nVidia did not (they considered it brand dissolution - an argument often made by Apple). After the purchase, nVidia indicated they would bring all card manufacturing internal to themselves. They now license cards as well as manufacture their own, or maybe they never went through with the internalizing - I don't know.
The article thinks the password of 'Joshua' was silly, but I don't think the writer was hacking in 1981-1982 (when the movie was written/made, since it was released in 1983) - passwords were unbelievably insecure on most networks back then and nearly always were just common words. The pirate BBS's I hung out on usually published the ones they cracked (occasionally I'd trade new ones for what is now called 'warez') and many were really, really easy - stuff like god, admin - even password (incidentally, a published paper I read back in the mid-1980s even identified 'god' as the most common password). In addition, most 'secure' networks would give you 3-5 attempts, then kick you out... then you just call back and try again. We would script an autodialer with common usernames (root, admin, smith, etc) and passwords like above and run it overnight when our parents were sleeping (yeah, 1 phone line) and often have a crack within a couple of days.
In 1997 I went to a Java symposium hosted by Sun, Netscape, and Oracle. Scott McNealy gave the keynote and touted the whole "Network is the Computer" thing. Scott envisioned Networked (semi-dumb) terminals that had a browser in place of a desktop and embedded java to run applications. Oracle and Sun backends would provide data and application hosting, respectively. From a question asked, he explained his idea differed from, say, an XTERM because the application would be hosted entirely on the terminal (and a small disk or SRAM cache) and would disappear after any actions were complete and that memory was needed for other tasks (basically terminals were memory and a network card, no data storage required). These applications would be bought on a per-use scenario - if you needed Word, you'd pay 10 cents and use Word.
The model he envisioned in 1997 never appeared in reality, as far as computer software goes - the idea was to "rent" applications, not buy them (the closest success I can think of is MMORPGs and ATM machines [i.e. realtime bank account checking], but both are quite different in implementation). The over-the-web purchase (non-rental) model he didn't mention, however, has taken off very successfully (e.g. iTunes). He also touted java based smart cards at that conference, another technology that was pretty much stillborn in the US, but is fairly successful overseas.
Neither of these were necessarily bad ideas - in the rental case, everyone is always using the latest update and if you don't like or use an app much, it doesn't kill you financially. In the smart card case, you can do stuff like bring your medical history with you in case of an emergency or require a PIN before making transactions. I also think Scott failed to anticipate computer hardware prices taking a massive nosedive in late 1997 (memory dropped several hundred dollars, disk got cheaper, etc).
As far as AJAX goes, I'm mixed - Scott did propose something like that in his rental model, but it was using Java and Oracle, not Javascript and XML.
incidentally, both Mortal Kombat and Tomb Raider had sequels that stunk so bad they degraded the originals, but I agree, those two really weren't that bad.
I think the real problem is the material as much as anything - picking a plotless game like Doom to make a movie on is absurd - the now in pre-production Halo movie has more potential in just the environment alone. Wing Commander had potential (the games had plot!) but had horrible implementation and too much absurdity to be taken seriously (ugh - those Kilrathi were AWFUL).
The key, I think, would be to find more character based games. Oblivion has a rich world, but the characters are extremely bland - I'd much more prefer Fallout (even played for laughs but with characters that are completely serious, like the games - think Evil Dead). Gothic might work, as it had as much to do with the core characters as fighting, though some elements would need to be redone (IMO). Adventure games like The Longest Journey could be adapted to make an excellent tweener movie (think MirrorMask) - strip out the puzzle elements and emphasize the already rich plot and characters. OTOH, I seriously doubt something like Syberia would work, as the environments and puzzles are more important than the characters and I personally didn't empathize with any characters in that game (maybe slightly with the bot and Kate, but not much). In a movie you need to empathize with a character (in other words, understand their motives and feel either good or bad towards them) much quicker than a book or video game. Many video games don't really have characters you can empathize with at all, and others could, but did it wrong (Bloodrayne is a prime example - I saw it back-to-back with a MUCH better old Hammer film called Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter on "bad movie night" - it was Casablanca to Bloodrayne for God's sake, but neither was a "Trolls 2" in my mind). Mortal Kombat probably worked as well as it did for that exact reason - people emphasized with certain "favorite" characters, and those characters were given personality, unlike the sequel which decided to cram in as many characters as possible and traded any character development to do it.
Don't just think this is a video game problem - let's take RPGs with wide open plots - the D&D movies (yes, plural - look it up yourself) were GODAWFUL but that doesn't mean all movies of the genre were bad - sequels aside, Conan was OK, Ladyhawke was quite good (albeit the music was... odd), Krull and the Beastmaster weren't horrible, Hobbit + Lord of the Rings (old) was OK, LotR (new) was very good. I mean, honestly, how different were the first D&D movie and the LotR plot-wise? Both are essentially bad guy wants powerful item held by good guys. Maybe games don't make good movies in general? Well, many games have books, and some of them have very popular book series including D&D. Books serve as primary source material for many movies, so I have to conclude that the problem is crappy scripts and poor casting and directing.
Comic books is another mixed genre - some even have less of a plot than video games. The same character can be HORRIBLE and Fantastic depending on script - compare "Batman and Robin" and "Batman Begins." Both had great actors, but were much different in implementation and execution.
Technically in music, only the lyrics can be copyrighted. Fighting copy infringement on the music itself is MUCH harder, though there are a few notable wins (e.g. I Want a New Drug/Ghostbusters). The hard part is you need to prove a particular hook or sound is uniquely identifiable to a particular song and even that doesn't always work - samplers have taken hooks without permission and won several court cases by saying sampling itself is an art form (they've also lost a few).
Basically, it's already nearly impossible to go after a parodier in the US, even if parody wasn't protected by law, because recorded and performed works of music are not copyrightable and thus very difficult to prosecute. Published music, OTOH, is copyrightable and the publisher is free to add any royalties into the sheet music for the published work. This is one reason why the original jazz "real book" is illegal but performing and recording songs out of it is not... well, make that as long as original lyrics aren't involved.
I have an intense dislike of D20, and it's not because of the system itself - it's just that after the 90th time you play a game with the same system they all seem like cookie-cutter knockoffs of each other. I had the same problem with GURPs - all characters in that system had a fairly predictable set of talents and flaws and after a while it lost its novelty.
On Palladium, however and strangely enough, my biggest dislike was how their systems interacted together, followed by the perpetual inclusion of misbalancing archetypes. Questions like why would superheros use SDC and Rifts characters use MDC (where in superheros, 100SDC = 1MDC). I know later a conversion system was released, but why would he do that in the first place? The naming conventions were wacked as well - SDC is something like standard damage capacity and MDC mega damage capacity, but I naturally associate mega with 1000, not 100. In the beginning, the systems were fairly compatible - a ninjas and superspies character could work in TMNT or even the superheros system for instance (though a ninja being able to beat a superhero was a bit odd to me).
Misbalanced archetypes was the killing factor for me playing Palladium games - you always had one completely misbalancing archtype and somebody always got it. It got so bad in games I played that I started calling it the munchkin class. Then people started writing entire adventures that depended on you having one or more munchkin class character in your party. In RIFTs, the misbalancing character was the Glitter Boy. The player that played one was rarely entertained unless they were gunning down super powered demons with his rail gun that were always far too powerful for anyone else to even scratch. The Glitter Boy, OTOH, could take 2 or 3 on at once and barely come out hurt. My only character to "survive" one of these encounters in a published module was a Juicer, and the Juicer died horribly not long after (well, not technically - the GM forced my next character to be a cyborg with the juicer's brain). Keep in mind that these are published adventures, which all play like Tomb of Horrors - they expect your party to be munchkin-ized killing machines and if they aren't, you're dead before the second encounter (of MANY).
Well... that's not the most intuitive program to use, is it?
To use GUI RunAs: press and hold Shift, then right click the executable and choose RunAs... and then select the user. I would have found that without being told in, oh, say never.
I have to ask, how the *FUCK* can Microsoft hire and maintain hundreds of usability people and yet have such a horribly unintuitive feature that really should be used by ALL users? If it were under the basic right click menu I could understand, but SHIFT-RIGHT CLICK? Sounds like a developer crammed it in at the last second without a usability review, as I can't imagine a usability person woulda let that get thru. I guarantee that wouldn't pass a no-help "try to do this action" test with no instruction. I bet they get less than 5% success in a random study of users with varying degrees of skill.
That, however, doesn't mean that there aren't errors in interpretation. Take the 7 day creation story - taken literally, that's 7 revolutions of the sun. Taken figuratively, that could mean any amount of time, as God had to create the sun and the earth to have any period of measurable time in the first place and he/she/it had not done so at the start of creation. Some groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses even interpret the (approximately, since it was supposed to end already) exact age of the earth based on the interpretation that a human generation is about 20 years.
Then there's words that no longer mean the same thing - if I said "you're gay" in the 1940s, I would mean you're happy. Today, I'd mean you're a homosexual. Even if the language is essentially dead (e.g. Latin), who's to say that the meaning didn't change between the time the text was written and the language dying?
No mistakes are allowed? I think not - I can't think of a great example from the Torah offhand, but a great example of interpretation problems is the tiny piece of Islamic Qu'ran that refers to jihad - viewed from a radical standpoint, it means dying killing your enemies by any means will bring you to heaven (which is justification for suicide attacks). Taken from context (and a more moderate view), it means if you die in battle against invaders to protect your families and home you will go to heaven. Depending on interpretation, you've got two radically different meanings for the same passage.
I didn't know Windows always creates copies of DLLs for stability reasons... that kind of defeats the purpose of dlls, but I can see if the library itself was unstable there may be some advantages to that. There is actually another legacy reason for DLLs - the code can be loaded or unloaded as needed, so a large app could use a much smaller memory footprint (and load much faster) since all functions of the app don't have to be loaded when the program starts up. This became more of a non-issue much earlier in the life of dlls, but some of the structure that supported it is still lying around (because it's useful for plug-ins).
The traditional way a dynamic shared library works (specifically, a dynamic library means dynamic link library [dll] on Windows, shared object [so] or shared library [sl] on UNIX or UNIX-likes, and dynamic library [dylib] or framework on mac) is the application starts and checks its symbol table to see if all the symbols it needs are in memory. If it can't find the function for the symbol (and it's marked in a way that identifies it as dynamic), the program searches the library path for the first instance of the symbol it finds. The program then starts (loads) the library and updates the internal symbols to point to that library's address space. If the library is already loaded, the program dynamically links to the addresses in the library (but doesn't start it).
It is also possible to indirectly load and unload libraries, which is how plug-ins work (normally the symbols the app needs for dynamic libraries are set at link time, so no special processing is required). On UNIX (and mac as of X.3, though there is another way to do it that worked on older OS's) this is through the dlfcn (dlfcn.h header - stands for dynamic library function) commands dlopen, dlclose, and dlsym (also some others like dlerr). I forget what Windows uses, but the idea and functionality is similar. The idea is you can load or unload and look up symbols as needed. A long time ago, this was for performance and memory reasons, as noted above, but is now pretty much exclusively used for plug-ins.
Apple prefers using a special type of dylib called a framework. Essentially, a framework is a lot like an application on mac - a directory with a regular structure that looks like a file in the GUI.
One of the problems with dynamic libraries is they can break if, say, some legacy code is removed from a newer version that is required by a certain app. This spawned app specific dynamic libs like the ones that often litter Windows directories. Apple people do something of the same with embedded frameworks. I've never really found an advantage to doing this over static linking (which copies the library into the app) outside of maybe patching, however, so it's probably not the most useful thing. I might be forgetting some good reason, but I can't come up with it at the moment - even third party code can be statically linked (but perhaps that's the reason - to be able to patch third party code).
Yeah, but even people that know about the "normal" user accounts quickly discover that almost all software written for windows doesn't handle non-admin accounts well. Ever try to install a program just in user space on Windows? If it works at all, you're lucky, and that isn't even scratching the surface of the problems. Got a network password? You can't just switch users to admin (like Linux) or use a sudo password (like Mac) - no, you need to log completely off of your user, then log on as the admin user, install the program, and log off as admin, then log back in as your regular user. Do you have any idea what a MASSIVE pain in the ass that is, especially when I have 20-30 windows open (many are Exceed based X sessions) and am trying to get work done? After 2 months of that and multiple programs that plain wouldn't work if they weren't running as an admin user, I switched back to running exclusively as an admin on Windows.
since I don't plan to spend any time on this one, I thought I'd start a thread on ways to attack OS specific issues for people that do want to try (the hard version - non hardware dependent - architecture is easy - endian-ness, pipeline, unaligned memory copies, etc).
since you can't rely on architecture, and can't attack stuff like endian-ness, you need to hit the nuances of the OS. One way I can think of is exploit size differences of stuff like wchar_t, since it's 4 bytes on most newer flavors of BSD (e.g. MacOSX) and 2 bytes on Linux, Windows, AIX, and perhaps others. Forcing a call to get sizeof(size_t) repeatedly if the size is not 2 would be another.
For Windows to look good, you might be able to do something with line endings, but that may not be enough (since Linux or whatever could add them in their data, too) - try threads. Most OS's use pthreads, but Windows does its own - use that to your advantage. Also use the built-in thread pool functionality of Windows but always destroy and recreate the threads in pthreads. I'd say to use expensive calls like fork() on UNIX boxes, but if I were a judge, I'd call you on that. You could also do mean tricks like forcing locks on critical sections when geared towards the OS you don't like (or force a long delay like 500ms if another thread has the "token" to chose a line then make the code never hit that condition for the preferred thread type).
how would you do it (if you don't want to bother trying, that is)?
Heh, I think of one good joke and it's already taken (or close enough)
Oh, and thanks for poking fun at Unisys - those bastards poked fun at me for working at CDC (years ago) - yes, that's Control Data Corporation, not the Center for Disease Control.
I knew a guy that had this exact problem, but it had escalated a bit further. He failed out of college, lost his job, and after dealing drugs for two years to make ends meet, he realized there was something severely wrong and decided to seek medical treatment. He was diagnosed with severe ADHD and moderate depression, and with treatment he was able to regain control of his life.
I was the fuckaround type and there is a huge difference between myself and him - he would play for 30 hours straight, skip all classes for days at a time, and never turned in homework. I would play a couple of hours in-between classes and in the evening instead of studying and then have to cram for midterms and finals instead of learning the material gradually.
If you think ADHD people can't get addicted to games, I think you're very, very wrong. They may not be able to focus on individual tasks in the game (just like real life), but the addicting factor isn't just in the tasks - it's in the rewards (levels, money, power, etc).
someone let BILL GATES reproduce - I find that much more scary, but I guess having countless billions will get you everywhere in life (except on the moral scale).
funny - that is exactly the period I stopped playing games for a while (15-17) and that was a long time ago.
Those last 3 years of high school were probably too busy for me to have any time, and I suspect a lot of kids hit that - for me, I was in clubs 2 nights a week, played in a youth orchestra, played in a rock band, worked part time... You get the picture. I also had a bunch of friends (yes, including girls) that would do stuff together like go to movies or hang out at the mall (more because many of us worked there, not so much for shopping).
and I was just thinking about how shallow some recent games are
after 6 hours of playing Oblivion (Elder Scrolls 4) I a) think my character feels like a cardboard cutout b) think the NPCs in the game world would be as much fun as drinking pee c) still wonder where all the children are (ok, I know - laws against killing kids screw that up for some countries)
but read this reference from one of the TES Oblivion developers - this guy subjectively refers to characters people care about, yet I feel the game failed to deliver that, at least at this point. Another great effect is games that set a mood - the fairly recent games F.E.A.R. and the haunted house in Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, for example, are good horror effects.
I didn't really realize how much characters mattered until I thought about the games I liked most, including those I played as a kid. Not that this is required - I loved Wizardry for all the stuff you could find. I loved Ultima for the quests (they seem a bit shallow now, but at the time they were cutting edge). I loved Civilization and Medieval: Total War for the strategies - for that matter, I loved Escape Velocity (and its distant predecessor Elite) for that reason, too. I loved Doom for the variety in the creatures you'd encounter. Still, the games I want to revisit years later almost always have strong characters.
Some of my favorite (and some are weird choices):
Below the Root: Apple 2 - a mostly non-combat game that was almost unplayed because it was edu-ware based on a book nobody read. Probably the most interesting part of this game to me was how the weaker characters could tell the disposition of NPCs (via empathy). NPCs exhibited everything from racism and hatred to caring and love for your character. Also, it's the first game I remember with pre-generated characters (side scroller) where two of the three characters you could play were female.
Wing Commander: did you care about the characters as much as have fun playing the game? If you tell me you didn't want to send a missile down Maniac's tailpipe more than once, I'd say you were lying. Compare that to Freelancer - did I care about anybody in this game? No. Heck I didn't even care about Edison Trent (the main character). Do I have any interest in replaying it? No - I'd much rather play the extremely dated Elite.
Gothic (I): this game isn't that old, but was referenced in the link above - Diego and the Old Camp. Diego saves you early in the game and helps you throughout the game. The combat interface was clunky, but the best parts of the game were the characters and storyline.
Full Throttle and The Longest Journey (and I never played Sam and Max or Curse of Monkey isle, but have heard they're also great) - two of my favorite adventure games because I like this sort of game for plot and story, not for puzzles. Quite honestly, I can't say I like Myst-like games all that much - 12 hours (at most) of puzzles. Syberia took me a bit longer, but I felt nothing for the main character - nice attempt through the phone calls, but the game felt stark and lonely. If you want to play a godawful adventure, try Midnight Nowhere (from some Russian developer) - it's not the game that bugs me, it's the main character - I feel more for the ball in pong than I do for him. Honorable mention goes to Maniac Mansion, which I thought was a boring game (humor just didn't hit home for me), but had interesting characters.
some of the later Infocom text games - Hitchhiker's Guide (chars from the book) and Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Trent or Tiffany) pop into my head.
Fallout series - as funny as it may sound, I actually liked this game most for the pop culture references and jokes. The unique characters were ok, but I would have preferred characters that interact a bit more, though the episode with Vic and Val was pretty good. Of all the D&D games (going back to the ones on Intellivision), I liked Planes
I know plenty of people in the US that work evenings, weekends, and read technical manuals outside of work (heck, my latest "for fun" reading is the OpenGL Orange book). As for education, don't delude yourself - I work for an established company and it's almost impossible to get a job here without a master's degree now. When I started, it was Bachelor's degree, and before that (the startup two years) many of the people had no degree.
My job at a mid-sized company has been fairly stable, but we've gone from 12 people at a peak in my direct group to 8 through attrition and hired only 2 replacements in the past 5 years (we've basically lost half, but some were the same position via short timers). Our outsourced equivalent in India have hired over 30. In addition, we've eliminated US based contractors (50% of our workforce, pre-crash) and replaced them with contractors in India. Overall, I think product quality has suffered, but as the workers over there ramp up and start to understand the expectations of Americans, I think quality is slowly getting better. There still are a lot of issues (I can't tell you how many times I've fixed grammar and spelling errors), but our product as a whole is also much bigger. Overall, I've seen a gradual drop in US workforce and a significant increase in Indian workforce.
Still, I don't think the US has a lack of IT jobs - the problem is it has a lack of established IT jobs. Most people that leave my company join startups and end up working long hours, but they get better pay and generally have some job stability as long as that company stays intact. The trend in the US has been when an IT company gets to a certain size and establishment, they stop hiring in the US and outsource the work to establishing countries. I've stuck with one company 9 years now, even though I could get better pay elsewhere. Why? One big reason is more vacation and generally shorter days than startups (8-10 hours). When I started and the company was still a startup (though starting to pick up steam), I was working long hours and weekends. In reality, I still really work 12 hour days, but dedicate much of that extra time to open source dev. I can't imagine going back to 2 weeks vacation given to most newhires (and that seems to be a sticking point in several companies I've interviewed with - they don't seem to want to negotiate vacation), especially when my wife gets 6 already (and I get 4 next year).
people have already mentioned that sudo requires a password, which is the default (look in/etc/sudoers - also notice that you can turn it off), but there is another advantage to using "sudo" as opposed to root:
Say you're running IM - the process is run as your user not root. If that process is exploited, the hacker is in as your user, but still doesn't know your password. Yes, they could set up a key logger and other hacker tricks, but at that point it's watch and wait for them, not a direct exploit. There are even other issues - most hackers compile the programs on the target machine once they get in and that isn't possible unless the mac had the dev disk installed.
Some users, like www (the default apache user - the root process spawns www user processes to handle web actions) have limited permissions. If you want to go extreme, you could even restrict global write access by that user through ACLs (though I'm not sure if ACLs pre-empt directories like/tmp that have the sticky bit set)
Some people argue that you should have a root user with a root password, but I think it's more important to make sure all administrators use a good password, and better to have one hard to remember password than two easy ones. If you feel that's not enough, it's also possible to restrict what exactly the sudoer can do - try man sudoers or info sudoers from a command prompt.
Yeah, and I know a LOT of people that vote Republican only because of their stance on abortion - especially in this past election when religious ads in newspapers stated abortion is murder, then telling voters to "vote with your conscience" (implying to vote for anyone that supports pro-life) in the election. I know that message influenced voters - it came up in conversation when I was in the voting line - a guy told me "God is against the Democrats because they're murderers." Maybe he was right - the Dems lost.
Anyhow, there's nothing stopping you from "throwing your vote away" on a third party - I've done it for years - maybe if enough people get pissed off at the major parties and throw their votes away instead of skipping the elections altogether, new parties would emerge. Then again, I know enough pot smoking hippy-wannabes that would vote for the Greens just because of their stance on pot, though I admit, most of these people would also benefit from the social welfare programs they endorse (and no, these people could care less about legalizing hemp - they want BC bud in every living room).
I'm not sure if mono and WINE are compatible, but mono does provide some.NET functionality on Linux. I have no experience with using it myself, however.
Where the heck is their support from, anyhow? It looks like 2 Indians and a Russian responded to your e-mails, at least giving a casual glance at the names. It's entirely possible that you're getting outsourced support and they may not be able to do anything directly for you.
Sorry, but I think you're way off base - I don't think many people would have seen BM at all if it weren't for the controversial subject matter - probably dwarfing the number lost because of the subject matter. The real problem with Indie films is the distribution chain.
While I admit the story and acting were good (except Jake bugs me, but that's a different matter), the beginning was insanely boring. On par with Last Days and 2001: A Space Odyssey boring - I really need to know to skip the first half of movies like those unless I take up smoking hashish. I even left and took a tinkle and came back and the movie still didn't get going for at least another 10 minutes. As far as Oscars go, it was better than the cookie cutter movie Crash that won, but had I seen any of the other nominated movies, I'd probably have voted for one of them as I didn't find either of these "special."
I seriously doubt two hot lesbians would be a best seller, either - it would also be too controversial for mainstream, but may make heavy rotation on Skinimax after dark or in the foreign markets.
that in itself is a touchy subject - the common designations nVidia gives are Ultra and GT - better than the standard card LE, GS - low end/discount version (GS is sometimes better, depending on age of the original card) of the original card.
x extension (gtx, fx) was for a while PCI-X, but they've since dropped it.
you may also see TC, which stands for Turbo Cache. You'll find that on low end cards.
You will sometimes see GS cards that are more expensive than GT cards, but I've never seen a GS card that is better than a GT card, so I suspect that's a volume issue (pricewatch has some 7800GTs that are cheaper than GS's). It may be onboard memory, but I doubt it. The GTs are usually the same card as the GS, however (so you may be able to unlock the features nVidia shuts off).
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yes, and with newer GPUs, the program size has increased dramatically, which makes them much more versatile. 3 years ago I was cramming a vertex program into 256 lines - now I've got 65535. Fragment programs increased similarly (though I just finally got a card that supports them in the last 3 months to play Oblivion, so I'm still learning the ropes).
Take a look at the GPU based samples (unfortunately, most require Windows) - many are incorporating physics (water, cloth, etc). Another good source is http://www.gpgpu.org/
Unfortunately, I don't know of any open source GPU based physics engines, which sucks, and IIRC, a bunch of patents have been filed on some of the software based solutions.
Airplane! is a spoof of several plane based disaster movies. It used Zero Hour as base material, kinda like Kentucky Fried Movie used Enter the Dragon as base material for A Fistful of Yen and blaxploitation movies like Cleopatra Jones as base material for the Cleopatra Schwartz segment. Both segments spoof other movies of the genre (and other genres), as well, but have one particular movie as the basis. I imagine the producers of Airplane! bought the rights to Zero Hour to use character names and some dialogs. I vaguely recall seeing Zero Hour a long time ago (I think on TV), but don't remember it being intentionally funny. I also vaguely recall the Airport movies (75, 77, the concorde one [80?] - haven't seen them since they were on TV).
3dfx's technology and core assets were absorbed into nVidia and the company was dissolved. Even if they were reformed, they would have to start from scratch. The purchase was done primarily to settle a number of nasty patent lawsuits between the two companies and save them both a lot of money, otherwise both probably would have ridden each other into the ground.
When the merger was announced, it was basically the #1 and #2 performance graphics card makers and looked like we were destined for high priced performance cards. A number of low end companies existed then, S3, ATI, Matrox, Creative, etc., but none seemed like they wanted to compete on the high end. Shortly after the merger, ATI stepped up and decided to compete on the high end against the juggernaut, the others decided to stick to the low end and it mostly killed them, primarily due to the memory price fallout that made performance cards affordable.
Incidentally, the winner in that battle went the opposite of the PC tradition - the closed provider (nVidia) beat the open provider (3dfx). What I mean by that is 3dfx licensed their technology to 3rd parties to manufacture cards, where nVidia did not (they considered it brand dissolution - an argument often made by Apple). After the purchase, nVidia indicated they would bring all card manufacturing internal to themselves. They now license cards as well as manufacture their own, or maybe they never went through with the internalizing - I don't know.
yes, Wargames used a modem to connect.
The article thinks the password of 'Joshua' was silly, but I don't think the writer was hacking in 1981-1982 (when the movie was written/made, since it was released in 1983) - passwords were unbelievably insecure on most networks back then and nearly always were just common words. The pirate BBS's I hung out on usually published the ones they cracked (occasionally I'd trade new ones for what is now called 'warez') and many were really, really easy - stuff like god, admin - even password (incidentally, a published paper I read back in the mid-1980s even identified 'god' as the most common password). In addition, most 'secure' networks would give you 3-5 attempts, then kick you out... then you just call back and try again. We would script an autodialer with common usernames (root, admin, smith, etc) and passwords like above and run it overnight when our parents were sleeping (yeah, 1 phone line) and often have a crack within a couple of days.
In 1997 I went to a Java symposium hosted by Sun, Netscape, and Oracle. Scott McNealy gave the keynote and touted the whole "Network is the Computer" thing. Scott envisioned
Networked (semi-dumb) terminals that had a browser in place of a desktop and embedded java to run applications. Oracle and Sun backends would provide data and application hosting, respectively. From a question asked, he explained his idea differed from, say, an XTERM because the application would be hosted entirely on the terminal (and a small disk or SRAM cache) and would disappear after any actions were complete and that memory was needed for other tasks (basically terminals were memory and a network card, no data storage required). These applications would be bought on a per-use scenario - if you needed Word, you'd pay 10 cents and use Word.
The model he envisioned in 1997 never appeared in reality, as far as computer software goes - the idea was to "rent" applications, not buy them (the closest success I can think of is MMORPGs and ATM machines [i.e. realtime bank account checking], but both are quite different in implementation). The over-the-web purchase (non-rental) model he didn't mention, however, has taken off very successfully (e.g. iTunes). He also touted java based smart cards at that conference, another technology that was pretty much stillborn in the US, but is fairly successful overseas.
Neither of these were necessarily bad ideas - in the rental case, everyone is always using the latest update and if you don't like or use an app much, it doesn't kill you financially. In the smart card case, you can do stuff like bring your medical history with you in case of an emergency or require a PIN before making transactions. I also think Scott failed to anticipate computer hardware prices taking a massive nosedive in late 1997 (memory dropped several hundred dollars, disk got cheaper, etc).
As far as AJAX goes, I'm mixed - Scott did propose something like that in his rental model, but it was using Java and Oracle, not Javascript and XML.
incidentally, both Mortal Kombat and Tomb Raider had sequels that stunk so bad they degraded the originals, but I agree, those two really weren't that bad.
I think the real problem is the material as much as anything - picking a plotless game like Doom to make a movie on is absurd - the now in pre-production Halo movie has more potential in just the environment alone. Wing Commander had potential (the games had plot!) but had horrible implementation and too much absurdity to be taken seriously (ugh - those Kilrathi were AWFUL).
The key, I think, would be to find more character based games. Oblivion has a rich world, but the characters are extremely bland - I'd much more prefer Fallout (even played for laughs but with characters that are completely serious, like the games - think Evil Dead). Gothic might work, as it had as much to do with the core characters as fighting, though some elements would need to be redone (IMO). Adventure games like The Longest Journey could be adapted to make an excellent tweener movie (think MirrorMask) - strip out the puzzle elements and emphasize the already rich plot and characters. OTOH, I seriously doubt something like Syberia would work, as the environments and puzzles are more important than the characters and I personally didn't empathize with any characters in that game (maybe slightly with the bot and Kate, but not much). In a movie you need to empathize with a character (in other words, understand their motives and feel either good or bad towards them) much quicker than a book or video game. Many video games don't really have characters you can empathize with at all, and others could, but did it wrong (Bloodrayne is a prime example - I saw it back-to-back with a MUCH better old Hammer film called Captain Kronos Vampire Hunter on "bad movie night" - it was Casablanca to Bloodrayne for God's sake, but neither was a "Trolls 2" in my mind). Mortal Kombat probably worked as well as it did for that exact reason - people emphasized with certain "favorite" characters, and those characters were given personality, unlike the sequel which decided to cram in as many characters as possible and traded any character development to do it.
Don't just think this is a video game problem - let's take RPGs with wide open plots - the D&D movies (yes, plural - look it up yourself) were GODAWFUL but that doesn't mean all movies of the genre were bad - sequels aside, Conan was OK, Ladyhawke was quite good (albeit the music was... odd), Krull and the Beastmaster weren't horrible, Hobbit + Lord of the Rings (old) was OK, LotR (new) was very good. I mean, honestly, how different were the first D&D movie and the LotR plot-wise? Both are essentially bad guy wants powerful item held by good guys. Maybe games don't make good movies in general? Well, many games have books, and some of them have very popular book series including D&D. Books serve as primary source material for many movies, so I have to conclude that the problem is crappy scripts and poor casting and directing.
Comic books is another mixed genre - some even have less of a plot than video games. The same character can be HORRIBLE and Fantastic depending on script - compare "Batman and Robin" and "Batman Begins." Both had great actors, but were much different in implementation and execution.
Technically in music, only the lyrics can be copyrighted. Fighting copy infringement on the music itself is MUCH harder, though there are a few notable wins (e.g. I Want a New Drug/Ghostbusters). The hard part is you need to prove a particular hook or sound is uniquely identifiable to a particular song and even that doesn't always work - samplers have taken hooks without permission and won several court cases by saying sampling itself is an art form (they've also lost a few).
Basically, it's already nearly impossible to go after a parodier in the US, even if parody wasn't protected by law, because recorded and performed works of music are not copyrightable and thus very difficult to prosecute. Published music, OTOH, is copyrightable and the publisher is free to add any royalties into the sheet music for the published work. This is one reason why the original jazz "real book" is illegal but performing and recording songs out of it is not... well, make that as long as original lyrics aren't involved.
I have an intense dislike of D20, and it's not because of the system itself - it's just that after the 90th time you play a game with the same system they all seem like cookie-cutter knockoffs of each other. I had the same problem with GURPs - all characters in that system had a fairly predictable set of talents and flaws and after a while it lost its novelty.
On Palladium, however and strangely enough, my biggest dislike was how their systems interacted together, followed by the perpetual inclusion of misbalancing archetypes. Questions like why would superheros use SDC and Rifts characters use MDC (where in superheros, 100SDC = 1MDC). I know later a conversion system was released, but why would he do that in the first place? The naming conventions were wacked as well - SDC is something like standard damage capacity and MDC mega damage capacity, but I naturally associate mega with 1000, not 100. In the beginning, the systems were fairly compatible - a ninjas and superspies character could work in TMNT or even the superheros system for instance (though a ninja being able to beat a superhero was a bit odd to me).
Misbalanced archetypes was the killing factor for me playing Palladium games - you always had one completely misbalancing archtype and somebody always got it. It got so bad in games I played that I started calling it the munchkin class. Then people started writing entire adventures that depended on you having one or more munchkin class character in your party. In RIFTs, the misbalancing character was the Glitter Boy. The player that played one was rarely entertained unless they were gunning down super powered demons with his rail gun that were always far too powerful for anyone else to even scratch. The Glitter Boy, OTOH, could take 2 or 3 on at once and barely come out hurt. My only character to "survive" one of these encounters in a published module was a Juicer, and the Juicer died horribly not long after (well, not technically - the GM forced my next character to be a cyborg with the juicer's brain). Keep in mind that these are published adventures, which all play like Tomb of Horrors - they expect your party to be munchkin-ized killing machines and if they aren't, you're dead before the second encounter (of MANY).
Well... that's not the most intuitive program to use, is it?
To use GUI RunAs:
press and hold Shift, then right click the executable and choose RunAs... and then select the user. I would have found that without being told in, oh, say never.
I have to ask, how the *FUCK* can Microsoft hire and maintain hundreds of usability people and yet have such a horribly unintuitive feature that really should be used by ALL users? If it were under the basic right click menu I could understand, but SHIFT-RIGHT CLICK? Sounds like a developer crammed it in at the last second without a usability review, as I can't imagine a usability person woulda let that get thru. I guarantee that wouldn't pass a no-help "try to do this action" test with no instruction. I bet they get less than 5% success in a random study of users with varying degrees of skill.
That, however, doesn't mean that there aren't errors in interpretation. Take the 7 day creation story - taken literally, that's 7 revolutions of the sun. Taken figuratively, that could mean any amount of time, as God had to create the sun and the earth to have any period of measurable time in the first place and he/she/it had not done so at the start of creation. Some groups like the Jehovah's Witnesses even interpret the (approximately, since it was supposed to end already) exact age of the earth based on the interpretation that a human generation is about 20 years.
Then there's words that no longer mean the same thing - if I said "you're gay" in the 1940s, I would mean you're happy. Today, I'd mean you're a homosexual. Even if the language is essentially dead (e.g. Latin), who's to say that the meaning didn't change between the time the text was written and the language dying?
No mistakes are allowed? I think not - I can't think of a great example from the Torah offhand, but a great example of interpretation problems is the tiny piece of Islamic Qu'ran that refers to jihad - viewed from a radical standpoint, it means dying killing your enemies by any means will bring you to heaven (which is justification for suicide attacks). Taken from context (and a more moderate view), it means if you die in battle against invaders to protect your families and home you will go to heaven. Depending on interpretation, you've got two radically different meanings for the same passage.
really?
I didn't know Windows always creates copies of DLLs for stability reasons... that kind of defeats the purpose of dlls, but I can see if the library itself was unstable there may be some advantages to that. There is actually another legacy reason for DLLs - the code can be loaded or unloaded as needed, so a large app could use a much smaller memory footprint (and load much faster) since all functions of the app don't have to be loaded when the program starts up. This became more of a non-issue much earlier in the life of dlls, but some of the structure that supported it is still lying around (because it's useful for plug-ins).
The traditional way a dynamic shared library works (specifically, a dynamic library means dynamic link library [dll] on Windows, shared object [so] or shared library [sl] on UNIX or UNIX-likes, and dynamic library [dylib] or framework on mac) is the application starts and checks its symbol table to see if all the symbols it needs are in memory. If it can't find the function for the symbol (and it's marked in a way that identifies it as dynamic), the program searches the library path for the first instance of the symbol it finds. The program then starts (loads) the library and updates the internal symbols to point to that library's address space. If the library is already loaded, the program dynamically links to the addresses in the library (but doesn't start it).
It is also possible to indirectly load and unload libraries, which is how plug-ins work (normally the symbols the app needs for dynamic libraries are set at link time, so no special processing is required). On UNIX (and mac as of X.3, though there is another way to do it that worked on older OS's) this is through the dlfcn (dlfcn.h header - stands for dynamic library function) commands dlopen, dlclose, and dlsym (also some others like dlerr). I forget what Windows uses, but the idea and functionality is similar. The idea is you can load or unload and look up symbols as needed. A long time ago, this was for performance and memory reasons, as noted above, but is now pretty much exclusively used for plug-ins.
Apple prefers using a special type of dylib called a framework. Essentially, a framework is a lot like an application on mac - a directory with a regular structure that looks like a file in the GUI.
One of the problems with dynamic libraries is they can break if, say, some legacy code is removed from a newer version that is required by a certain app. This spawned app specific dynamic libs like the ones that often litter Windows directories. Apple people do something of the same with embedded frameworks. I've never really found an advantage to doing this over static linking (which copies the library into the app) outside of maybe patching, however, so it's probably not the most useful thing. I might be forgetting some good reason, but I can't come up with it at the moment - even third party code can be statically linked (but perhaps that's the reason - to be able to patch third party code).
Yeah, but even people that know about the "normal" user accounts quickly discover that almost all software written for windows doesn't handle non-admin accounts well. Ever try to install a program just in user space on Windows? If it works at all, you're lucky, and that isn't even scratching the surface of the problems. Got a network password? You can't just switch users to admin (like Linux) or use a sudo password (like Mac) - no, you need to log completely off of your user, then log on as the admin user, install the program, and log off as admin, then log back in as your regular user. Do you have any idea what a MASSIVE pain in the ass that is, especially when I have 20-30 windows open (many are Exceed based X sessions) and am trying to get work done? After 2 months of that and multiple programs that plain wouldn't work if they weren't running as an admin user, I switched back to running exclusively as an admin on Windows.
since I don't plan to spend any time on this one, I thought I'd start a thread on ways to attack OS specific issues for people that do want to try (the hard version - non hardware dependent - architecture is easy - endian-ness, pipeline, unaligned memory copies, etc).
since you can't rely on architecture, and can't attack stuff like endian-ness, you need to hit the nuances of the OS. One way I can think of is exploit size differences of stuff like wchar_t, since it's 4 bytes on most newer flavors of BSD (e.g. MacOSX) and 2 bytes on Linux, Windows, AIX, and perhaps others. Forcing a call to get sizeof(size_t) repeatedly if the size is not 2 would be another.
For Windows to look good, you might be able to do something with line endings, but that may not be enough (since Linux or whatever could add them in their data, too) - try threads. Most OS's use pthreads, but Windows does its own - use that to your advantage. Also use the built-in thread pool functionality of Windows but always destroy and recreate the threads in pthreads. I'd say to use expensive calls like fork() on UNIX boxes, but if I were a judge, I'd call you on that. You could also do mean tricks like forcing locks on critical sections when geared towards the OS you don't like (or force a long delay like 500ms if another thread has the "token" to chose a line then make the code never hit that condition for the preferred thread type).
how would you do it (if you don't want to bother trying, that is)?
Heh, I think of one good joke and it's already taken (or close enough)
Oh, and thanks for poking fun at Unisys - those bastards poked fun at me for working at CDC (years ago) - yes, that's Control Data Corporation, not the Center for Disease Control.
I knew a guy that had this exact problem, but it had escalated a bit further. He failed out of college, lost his job, and after dealing drugs for two years to make ends meet, he realized there was something severely wrong and decided to seek medical treatment. He was diagnosed with severe ADHD and moderate depression, and with treatment he was able to regain control of his life.
I was the fuckaround type and there is a huge difference between myself and him - he would play for 30 hours straight, skip all classes for days at a time, and never turned in homework. I would play a couple of hours in-between classes and in the evening instead of studying and then have to cram for midterms and finals instead of learning the material gradually.
If you think ADHD people can't get addicted to games, I think you're very, very wrong. They may not be able to focus on individual tasks in the game (just like real life), but the addicting factor isn't just in the tasks - it's in the rewards (levels, money, power, etc).
someone let BILL GATES reproduce - I find that much more scary, but I guess having countless billions will get you everywhere in life (except on the moral scale).
funny - that is exactly the period I stopped playing games for a while (15-17) and that was a long time ago.
Those last 3 years of high school were probably too busy for me to have any time, and I suspect a lot of kids hit that - for me, I was in clubs 2 nights a week, played in a youth orchestra, played in a rock band, worked part time... You get the picture. I also had a bunch of friends (yes, including girls) that would do stuff together like go to movies or hang out at the mall (more because many of us worked there, not so much for shopping).
and I was just thinking about how shallow some recent games are
after 6 hours of playing Oblivion (Elder Scrolls 4) I
a) think my character feels like a cardboard cutout
b) think the NPCs in the game world would be as much fun as drinking pee
c) still wonder where all the children are (ok, I know - laws against killing kids screw that up for some countries)
but read this reference from one of the TES Oblivion developers - this guy subjectively refers to characters people care about, yet I feel the game failed to deliver that, at least at this point. Another great effect is games that set a mood - the fairly recent games F.E.A.R. and the haunted house in Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, for example, are good horror effects.
I didn't really realize how much characters mattered until I thought about the games I liked most, including those I played as a kid. Not that this is required - I loved Wizardry for all the stuff you could find. I loved Ultima for the quests (they seem a bit shallow now, but at the time they were cutting edge). I loved Civilization and Medieval: Total War for the strategies - for that matter, I loved Escape Velocity (and its distant predecessor Elite) for that reason, too. I loved Doom for the variety in the creatures you'd encounter. Still, the games I want to revisit years later almost always have strong characters.
Some of my favorite (and some are weird choices):
Below the Root: Apple 2 - a mostly non-combat game that was almost unplayed because it was edu-ware based on a book nobody read. Probably the most interesting part of this game to me was how the weaker characters could tell the disposition of NPCs (via empathy). NPCs exhibited everything from racism and hatred to caring and love for your character. Also, it's the first game I remember with pre-generated characters (side scroller) where two of the three characters you could play were female.
Wing Commander: did you care about the characters as much as have fun playing the game? If you tell me you didn't want to send a missile down Maniac's tailpipe more than once, I'd say you were lying. Compare that to Freelancer - did I care about anybody in this game? No. Heck I didn't even care about Edison Trent (the main character). Do I have any interest in replaying it? No - I'd much rather play the extremely dated Elite.
Gothic (I): this game isn't that old, but was referenced in the link above - Diego and the Old Camp. Diego saves you early in the game and helps you throughout the game. The combat interface was clunky, but the best parts of the game were the characters and storyline.
Full Throttle and The Longest Journey (and I never played Sam and Max or Curse of Monkey isle, but have heard they're also great) - two of my favorite adventure games because I like this sort of game for plot and story, not for puzzles. Quite honestly, I can't say I like Myst-like games all that much - 12 hours (at most) of puzzles. Syberia took me a bit longer, but I felt nothing for the main character - nice attempt through the phone calls, but the game felt stark and lonely. If you want to play a godawful adventure, try Midnight Nowhere (from some Russian developer) - it's not the game that bugs me, it's the main character - I feel more for the ball in pong than I do for him. Honorable mention goes to Maniac Mansion, which I thought was a boring game (humor just didn't hit home for me), but had interesting characters.
some of the later Infocom text games - Hitchhiker's Guide (chars from the book) and Leather Goddesses of Phobos (Trent or Tiffany) pop into my head.
Fallout series - as funny as it may sound, I actually liked this game most for the pop culture references and jokes. The unique characters were ok, but I would have preferred characters that interact a bit more, though the episode with Vic and Val was pretty good. Of all the D&D games (going back to the ones on Intellivision), I liked Planes
I know plenty of people in the US that work evenings, weekends, and read technical manuals outside of work (heck, my latest "for fun" reading is the OpenGL Orange book). As for education, don't delude yourself - I work for an established company and it's almost impossible to get a job here without a master's degree now. When I started, it was Bachelor's degree, and before that (the startup two years) many of the people had no degree.
My job at a mid-sized company has been fairly stable, but we've gone from 12 people at a peak in my direct group to 8 through attrition and hired only 2 replacements in the past 5 years (we've basically lost half, but some were the same position via short timers). Our outsourced equivalent in India have hired over 30. In addition, we've eliminated US based contractors (50% of our workforce, pre-crash) and replaced them with contractors in India. Overall, I think product quality has suffered, but as the workers over there ramp up and start to understand the expectations of Americans, I think quality is slowly getting better. There still are a lot of issues (I can't tell you how many times I've fixed grammar and spelling errors), but our product as a whole is also much bigger. Overall, I've seen a gradual drop in US workforce and a significant increase in Indian workforce.
Still, I don't think the US has a lack of IT jobs - the problem is it has a lack of established IT jobs. Most people that leave my company join startups and end up working long hours, but they get better pay and generally have some job stability as long as that company stays intact. The trend in the US has been when an IT company gets to a certain size and establishment, they stop hiring in the US and outsource the work to establishing countries. I've stuck with one company 9 years now, even though I could get better pay elsewhere. Why? One big reason is more vacation and generally shorter days than startups (8-10 hours). When I started and the company was still a startup (though starting to pick up steam), I was working long hours and weekends. In reality, I still really work 12 hour days, but dedicate much of that extra time to open source dev. I can't imagine going back to 2 weeks vacation given to most newhires (and that seems to be a sticking point in several companies I've interviewed with - they don't seem to want to negotiate vacation), especially when my wife gets 6 already (and I get 4 next year).
people have already mentioned that sudo requires a password, which is the default (look in /etc/sudoers - also notice that you can turn it off), but there is another advantage to using "sudo" as opposed to root:
/tmp that have the sticky bit set)
Say you're running IM - the process is run as your user not root. If that process is exploited, the hacker is in as your user, but still doesn't know your password. Yes, they could set up a key logger and other hacker tricks, but at that point it's watch and wait for them, not a direct exploit. There are even other issues - most hackers compile the programs on the target machine once they get in and that isn't possible unless the mac had the dev disk installed.
Some users, like www (the default apache user - the root process spawns www user processes to handle web actions) have limited permissions. If you want to go extreme, you could even restrict global write access by that user through ACLs (though I'm not sure if ACLs pre-empt directories like
Some people argue that you should have a root user with a root password, but I think it's more important to make sure all administrators use a good password, and better to have one hard to remember password than two easy ones. If you feel that's not enough, it's also possible to restrict what exactly the sudoer can do - try man sudoers or info sudoers from a command prompt.
Yeah, and I know a LOT of people that vote Republican only because of their stance on abortion - especially in this past election when religious ads in newspapers stated abortion is murder, then telling voters to "vote with your conscience" (implying to vote for anyone that supports pro-life) in the election. I know that message influenced voters - it came up in conversation when I was in the voting line - a guy told me "God is against the Democrats because they're murderers." Maybe he was right - the Dems lost.
Anyhow, there's nothing stopping you from "throwing your vote away" on a third party - I've done it for years - maybe if enough people get pissed off at the major parties and throw their votes away instead of skipping the elections altogether, new parties would emerge. Then again, I know enough pot smoking hippy-wannabes that would vote for the Greens just because of their stance on pot, though I admit, most of these people would also benefit from the social welfare programs they endorse (and no, these people could care less about legalizing hemp - they want BC bud in every living room).
I'm not sure if mono and WINE are compatible, but mono does provide some .NET functionality on Linux. I have no experience with using it myself, however.
Where the heck is their support from, anyhow? It looks like 2 Indians and a Russian responded to your e-mails, at least giving a casual glance at the names. It's entirely possible that you're getting outsourced support and they may not be able to do anything directly for you.
heh - it's a plant to keep the meta-mods on their toes. Weeds out the incompetent meta moderators that don't check the context.
Sorry, but I think you're way off base - I don't think many people would have seen BM at all if it weren't for the controversial subject matter - probably dwarfing the number lost because of the subject matter. The real problem with Indie films is the distribution chain.
While I admit the story and acting were good (except Jake bugs me, but that's a different matter), the beginning was insanely boring. On par with Last Days and 2001: A Space Odyssey boring - I really need to know to skip the first half of movies like those unless I take up smoking hashish. I even left and took a tinkle and came back and the movie still didn't get going for at least another 10 minutes. As far as Oscars go, it was better than the cookie cutter movie Crash that won, but had I seen any of the other nominated movies, I'd probably have voted for one of them as I didn't find either of these "special."
I seriously doubt two hot lesbians would be a best seller, either - it would also be too controversial for mainstream, but may make heavy rotation on Skinimax after dark or in the foreign markets.
that in itself is a touchy subject - the common designations nVidia gives are
Ultra and GT - better than the standard card
LE, GS - low end/discount version (GS is sometimes better, depending on age of the original card) of the original card.
x extension (gtx, fx) was for a while PCI-X, but they've since dropped it.
you may also see TC, which stands for Turbo Cache. You'll find that on low end cards.
You will sometimes see GS cards that are more expensive than GT cards, but I've never seen a GS card that is better than a GT card, so I suspect that's a volume issue (pricewatch has some 7800GTs that are cheaper than GS's). It may be onboard memory, but I doubt it. The GTs are usually the same card as the GS, however (so you may be able to unlock the features nVidia shuts off).