well, there's that, but if you're like me and have 90% of your coworkers outsourced 12 1/2 hours away, you start disliking your 12:30AM to 7:30AM meeting times.
If I could work my own schedule, that would be great, but my employer also wants me in the office during "core" hours (9AM-3PM) so it's hard to not work 12-15 hour days (well, minus the 2 hours to read/post to slashdot makes it 10-13:)
tough question - technically, Apple has had hardware audio since about the G3, but it's fairly simple hardware and has some pre-processing done in software. The G3 iMacs had CD quality 5.1 surround sound, so I expect it's better now. Anything that ships with a CoreAudio driver like the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 will be fully hardware accelerated, so yes, you can get a PCI sound card provided a slot is available. I've also heard of a couple of USB interface sound "cards" but I can't name names or tell you performance.
hrm... it sounds like you have some control of their machines if you can strip admin privs - if so, and they're running X.4, I'd recommend setting a pwpolicy that forces strong passwords. I'm not sure what you can do about older OS releases, but there may be something.
You may want to look at some of these security whitepapers I had bookmarked - maybe useful, maybe not.
Somehow I erased part of my last sentence or maybe my thought train strayed - I do weekly backups of the/Users drive and monthly dd backups of the entire disk. It also cleans up the backups when disk space is low (I only keep one monthly around), so I hope I never get a long term infection;)
if anyone's interested, the crontab entry fragment I use looks like this (minus my bash shell script for cleanup): 00 3 * * 0 tar cvfj/Volumes/backup/Users`date +%d%m%y`/Users &>/var/log/backup`date +%d%m%y` 30 3 1 * * dd if=/dev/rdisk0 of=/Volumes/backup/complete`date +%d%m%y` bs=524288 count=3000 &>/var/log/complete`date +%d%m%y`
that is a simple text file created using any text editor. The numbers mean, in order, minute, hour, day of month, month of year, day of the week, with * being a wildcard (any match). It's also possible to do a range, like 1-5 if you want Monday-Friday on the day of the week parameter (0=Sunday, 6=Saturday). use man crontab for more info. You install it with sudo crontab yourtextfilename from a command line if you want it to record as root (otherwise it crons as your username and if your user files get wiped out, your backup will as well).
Note that I have a second hard disk called 'backup' and it is owned by root. Currently it does not compress the dd files but I suspect you can do this by adding something like this to the dd line: | xargs tar xvfj complete`date +%d%m%y`.tar.bz2 and probably also;rm -rf complete`date +%d%m%y` to remove the uncompressed file at the end. Maybe even an &>/dev/null I haven't tried the above yet, so I'm speculating.
also, I probably will get rid of the bash script and replace it with an entry that sorts and finds the oldest but I want to do this without a temp file, which is what I'm doing now (and using sort).
It's not just config options - UNIX design offers better protection against viruses because you don't run as an admin user all the time (or do you, you naughty person?). Apple's implementation makes the admin user a sudoer (a regular user with password admin priviledges), which is somewhat worse than complete restriction like requiring root to do stuff like installs, but better than 99.99% of Windows users who run as admin because it's too painful to log out and log back in as an admin. Double so at sites using NT network login which requires you to log off completely to switch users, making any installs painful. Windows Vista will use administration similar to macosx. I said somewhat intentionally above - a bad root password is as good as no security at all. Back before anybody cared about security I hacked a university root with a guessed password god123 - every admin liked god in the name back then, so it was kinda like hacking routers with admin/admin today.
So why would sudo priveledges (generally) be worse than root but better than running as admin? Let's say you open up an e-mail with an attached virus. On NT based systems as an admin user, that virus has the run of the system and can erase or corrupt anything it chooses. On UNIX systems it can only corrupt owned files, so the running user's own files are the only files that can be affected. This virus would not know the sudo user password and therefore cannot corrupt system files. It could probably social engineer the user to enter a password or attempt keylogging and hope the user types the sudo password or root user and password (and root isn't configured on mac by default). Another huge problem starting to appear on Windows is the installation of rootkits without any knowledge of the user. Rootkits on UNIX require root to install, so generally require some social engineering to get themselves in (heck, even make it legal(ish) like spyware - pr0nripperXXX requires admin priveleges to install essential software into your operating system. Without this technology, you will not have access to free pr0n. Click Agree if you want to install the software, Disagree if you do not. pr0nripperXXX is a product of SPAM network technology LTD [SPAM networks]. By clicking Agree you agree to allow SPAM networks to distribute promotional material and adult content through and to the host system).
Personally, I have scheduled dd backups of my user files done by a cron job just in case my admin user is compromised while my WinXP box gets them burned to DVD occasionally (tho I do a monthly dd copy using a linux partition, as well).
that was my point exactly, though I was pretty sarcastic about it.
it's in Microsoft's best interest to make tools that only benefit Microsoft, though I've heard that peer pressure is forcing them to add a PDF save file type to the next version of Office. I wouldn't hold my breath for an OpenOffice importer/exporter anytime soon (maybe externally, but not from MS), but it's a start.
33? youngster. I remember video gaming (on a magnavox odyssey) around the time you were born, though I admit, I was awfully young and it's pretty hazy back there.
I still get "boys night" for beer (quality, rarely quantity - no rice or corn for us), but the only possibly active pr0n star I can name is Marey Carey because I saw that bimbo interviewed for the California elections on Fox news (or whatever the lunchroom TV is set to).
Turn based gaming has mostly gone underground. You may want the try the indies - off the top of my head, I can only think of Spiderweb software's Avernum, a game I didn't like much personally, but I'm sure there are others (and they have a bunch of sequels I never played). You may also want to try Wizardy 8 (realtime movement with phased combat - see their FAQ or try the demo). I have motion sickness problems with the realtime in that one (rare for me with RPGs, usually only a problem with about 50% of shooters), but most of my friends loved it.
Apple wanted $1 per port to use the name FireWire, not for the technology itself, and the extra cost was to recoup co-marketing expenses - the actual technology was licensed as IEEE1394 for the standard rate most people including Intel charge for technologies, something like 25 cents per port. Sony called it iLink because they didn't want to pay Apple's marketing cost, which was perfectly fine with Apple. Incidentally, Intel let manufacturers avoid co-marketing costs if they agreed to exclusively put "Intel Inside" stickers on their machines (outside the computer's brand name), otherwise they were charging rates similar to Apple.
Intel invented USB as a low power small periphrials bus that could be chained together and would eliminating device specific periphrial drivers by including drivers in the device itself. I believe it ultimately targets PS/2 mice and keyboards, which is a licensed IBM technology (Intel has "not invented here" problems as bad as Apple, IMO). USB was originally intended for low power devices only, and therefore items like USB disk drives also need power adapters. USB 2.0 was a quick ploy to steal market share for high speed devices, but it still is underpowered (500mA/5V max), if a slower device is plugged into the bus (a USB 1.0 or 1.1 device) the entire bus runs at the slower speed, and requires a special controller (e.g. a PC). USB 2.0 has a 127 device limit, while firewire is 63, and USB 2.0 has a 5m cable limit, while firewire is 4.5m.
IEEE1394 (firewire) is meant to be a powered bus (up to 1.5A/12V), like ATA or SCSI and can run independently between devices without a specialized controller (e.g. without a PC). A 400Mbps device plugged into an 800Mbps chain will not slow devices earlier in the chain (unlike USB, which slows everything to the slowest device), so it is advantageous to chain firewire devices by speed.
more importantly, MICROSOFT would prefer that you don't know anything about partitioning, as that might let some moron (er, user) install a dual boot with some other OS than Windows, and who would EVER do that? For that matter, Microsoft has made no effort to allow multiple boots off the same hard disk(s), intentionally overwriting the MBR with their single boot loader and never creating a multiboot loader like GRUB or LILO (read this article).
Microsoft uses the KISS BOW IBM method - Keep It Simple, Stupid But Only When It Benefits Microsoft.
and deservedly so - Apple still owns the trademark to OpenDoc and apparently people haven't caught on yet, 'cause they're still using that name for OpenDocument. Should Apple ever revive OpenDoc, there's legal ramifications due to product confusion, and they'd probably win because they owned the name first. I doubt this will ever happen because OpenDoc was essentially a type of OLE and Apple now uses something close to Microsoft's model for this, not their own, but better to stop any chance of this now.
I don't know how those numbers are derived for some review sites - Gamespy actually gave it 2 out of 5 stars, a system they've been using for a couple of years. It's possible this game was rated using both the new and old system due to the release date (2003). The new system has a minimum of.5 stars and a maximum of 5 stars, meaning 10 possible values and a 2 is 4/10 (.5, 1, 1.5, 2) or 40%.
The latest reviews of PC games right now go from 2 stars to 3.5 stars, averaging about 3 stars, so that's slightly above average.
Diplomacy got the dreaded.5 stars recently Civilization IV, Call of Duty 2, and Age of Empires 3 all got 5 stars.
This is A list season (Christmas), so I expect a higher tilt, but Diplomacy is an established board game like Civ was, and yet still only got.5 stars...
Sounds like you got a few bad support people. I've had both at Speakeasy, usually fixed by making a new support call and trying to get a different person (which it looks like you did, sorry it didn't work out). Having worked support, I've seen both good and bad and the turnaround is often very heavy so you get a lot of noobs. Worse than noobs are the people that think they know what they're talking about, but really are complete fscking morons, like one guy I talked to 4 times taking several hours at Speakeasy and he never understood my problem, much less fixed it (the next guy fixed it in 15 seconds and even recouped my bill for that period).
Most support sites have a database of issues that can be quickly looked up, so if you don't get a quick response, the guy or girl handling your call is probably needing to check a database. Really slow responses or holds mean that they're probably consulting with a floor expert that wanders the cubicles. I never had a problem a floor expert couldn't answer, so I have utmost respect for them. At Bell Atlantic (circa 1993), they were forbidden from talking on the phone, so you probably can't ask to speak to them, but if the person doesn't know the answer, there usually is good help nearby. The problem is when the answer doesn't fit in the database but the support guy thinks he understands the problem but doesn't and tries to answer it without going through the expert (or a bad expert, but I've never met a bad expert, though I'm sure some exist).
I quit working support at Bell Atlantic when I had to do case-by-case billing depending on whether we were contractually obligated to do free support or not. Telling someone that you can't help them unless they pay you $35 for a 2 second fix just went against my morals and when they started pushing performance and I got on the "poor performers" list because the best performers were hanging up on callers to keep their call times down, I decided it was time to go (and calming down irate hangup victims that had spent 2 hours on hold was making my call times even worse).
I didn't go with VoIP at home because I needed to share multiple base stations with the same phone line and Speakeasy didn't support that (though they did point out unsupported ways to do it). I'm not sure if that's an issue for most businesses, but it might be and is a worthwhile question to ask if you need it.
I've seen C code that uses tons and tons of goto statements to implement exception handling, so just because they're out of fashion doesn't necessarily mean they're completely bad. My C teacher, like most of 'em, taught me never to use goto, and I think I've used them once in my personal code (mainly to see how they work), but seeing tons of goto statements isn't a sign that it's bad code.
exotic perl calls have their uses, too, but don't expect anyone to maintain them. I use them for maintenance work on my directories and some cgi handling, but I don't share this stuff with others.
job security is fleeting - they'll just hire 5 coders in India to decode or rewrite your bad code and fire you anyway.
Interesting that you mention arrays - ages ago I had to switch my school taught coding style from creating C arrays to using malloc calls because traditional C arrays are defined in the stack and I'd end up with stack overflow errors. I don't do much C coding these days (and have no idea if that is still true), but when I do code C I always use malloc for that reason.
Anyhow, my point is that even though the malloc'd blob is still an array for all intents and purposes, a stack allocated array can be bad - especially if you're allocating a large amount of space, so it's possible (though not likely) that your IT manager wasn't a complete moron.
Incidentally, the coding style I was taught in school was bad in many, many ways. Monolithic at a time when Modular should have been taught and I was never taught good header format for C (e.g. #ifndef __HEADER__ #define __HEADER__ #endif) to name a couple of things, though I'm sure I could think of more. They did dock me points any time I didn't follow format conventions, comment my code, or indent properly, so at least I did learn something (like how to use formatting tools;).
Oblivion is delayed until Q1 of 2006 for both the XBox 360 and PC. Q1 is Take-Two interactive's (the publisher's) financial quarter, which goes from Feb to April, so worst case scenario, barring another delay, we don't see it until after the tax man comes.
How to learn how to learn about UNIX in 10 seconds!
from an xterm terminal (command line), type ls/usr/bin//usr/local/bin | xargs man
administrators - repeat with/usr/sbin
most newer systems support 'info' as well as man - replace man with info above to try this
warning: on Linux or UNIX systems be sure to install the man and/or info pages first.
yes, I skipped pages (e.g. man 5 ), but do you REALLY think I was serious;) anyhow, I coulda done a really nasty command string to do all that, but it isn't worth my time.
Right - it completely depends on what you want - you can get the same junk that goes into most machines at Best Buy or CompUSA, or you can pay more for some good stuff.
I've torn apart several store bought PCs that were just out of warranty to fix hardware problems for friends and relatives and nearly all of them had crappy ECS motherboards and shoddy power supplies, with the exceptions of one box that had an Intel motherboard and shoddy power supply (I think that was a Gateway) and an IBM with a good power supply and working (but crappy) motherboard and a bad hard disk. As a rough guess, it was about 20 machines total in the last 6-7 years.
To be fair, most of the power supplies you get with cases off of New Egg are junk, which is why I usually end up tossing them and buying a $70+ one from a local store (Best Buy, CompUSA, etc). It costs more, but it's easier to return if it doesn't meet its printed specs, which happens all too often. Also, I've heard I was lucky and the boards were at least ECS - Microstar had a horrible reputation for a long time before turning themselves around (they now go by MSI, not Microstar).
Incidentally, my first mac died from a bad power supply that fried the motherboard, and an authorized mac dealer wanted $350 for the motherboard and $300 for the power supply PLUS $95/hour service fees with expected time at 3 hours. My first time working on a computer back in 1995 was when I took that mac home and then picked up a $99 new motherboard and $15 used power supply online and spent an hour replacing both. My first experience with building a PC (about 3 months later) was a bit more painful, as I had some incompatible component issues and some BIOS problems with my graphics card (meaning I spent a lot of time with web and phone support).
The only hardware problems I had with Linux were in the early days of USB, but I don't even remember them much anymore (my joystick and gamepad weren't recognized, I think, but I only used those on Windows, anyway).
ah - spoken like someone who hasn't had a very long conversation with a Jehovah's Witness!
Here are some actual facts I pulled from the Jehovahs:
The world was created in 7 earth days! Also, the world is going to end in 2001 (or something like that), so you need to convert now! Incidentally, they've now recanted that date, but it still will end soon.
Carbon dating is the devil trying to trick us - there's no such thing as dinosaurs or anything like that - those bones were just placed there to tempt us away from faith.
Their version of the bible is infallible - there are no errors in translation, because God wouldn't let that happen. Yes, I argued that the bible was, at best, a third generation translation once it got to English and in most cases 6-7th generation, but that didn't seem to matter. I also argued that there was a section on personal hygene in the Hebrew scrolls that had stuff like women should wear veils and men be clean shaven (sorry, Jesus), but that is suspiciously cut from their version of the bible.
Anyhow, your definition is wrong - Yom means 1 24 hour day, at least by the Jehovah's I've talked to (but what the heck is a day if there is no sun and earth to start with...)?
sigh - I know some good people that are Jehovah's witnesses, but I can't say I agree with them.
Quite honestly, if it's a noob and they're serious but still ignorant, I usually suggest they read the faq and/or documentation first before asking simple questions that can be answered there. The problem is, there's a constant barrage of 12 year old non-programmers that want to, say, jump right in and create the next version of Quake without any programming knowledge, any knowledge of graphics, and then the inability to comprehend what they're reading because it's way above their skill level. When I suggest something easier, they refuse - what would you do?
I usually just put them on my ignore list, but many others aren't so nice.
speak for yourself - I find IRC immensely helpful, but you do bring up a valid point - use other mediums first.
I usually try google and if that fails, I'll move on to IRC (though I tend to use freenode over efnet). #opengl, #macdev, #winprog, and #linux have all helped with questions I've had (yeah, I'm a jack-of-all trades developer, and true to form, master of none - though I can port quite well). The key I've found is asking a sensible question and not one that can be found by a simple search. Something not found in the manual or faq helps give you some credibility, though I've gotten some brownie points for finding errors in Apple and Microsoft manuals.
Honestly, someone that pops into #winprog and asks "how do I create a window" is asking to be shot down. Another aggrivation is when someone asks you something straight out of the faq or manual for a project (usually resulting in rtfm posts). If we, as developers, spent the entire day answering simple questions, we'd get no development done, so it's not an action taken out of malice, it's just practical.
OpenDoc® was Apple's answer to Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE, which migrated to COM, DCOM, then strayed into being ActiveX) in Documents. It's a registered trademark of Apple Computers, Inc. It died many years ago (you can probably get the history in those Wikipedia articles - I didn't really read them), but I'm sure Apple still owns the trademark.
OpenDocument is an unrelated document format that came out of OpenOffice and OASIS, though again, read the Wikipedia entry for more, 'cause paragraph 1 is about as far as I got in it.
hmm probably shoulda tm'd Microsoft and Apple, as well as all those component models MS used, too... nah - too much effort
Dvorak needs to pull his head out of his ass and see the sun once in a while. The guy made a career on bashing Apple because he has nothing better to do and he likes the notoriety his grandstanding gives him. There - it felt good to vent that.
Anyhow, I completely disagree - the XBox 360 has been getting huge amounts of press, just not in mainstream media (yet). Then again, is the XBox 360 really targeted towards the masses like the iPod, or a target market of teenagers or young adults? Lets see, big announcement party on MTV, prominent location on Microsoft's web page, oodles of gaming press articles...
Quite honestly, I've heard a hell of a lot more about Longhorn/Vista than Leopard/MacOS X.5 (due out around the same time as Vista). Let's check Google - Leopard Mac search - 808,000 results. Windows Vista search - 34,100,000 results. Even if you use the old codename for Vista (Longhorn) you still get 7 million results.
Even his main argument, that the video iPod was late to market is silly - the iPod itself was late to market and still owns the market. It's not like being late to market hasn't happened before, even with an inferior product - the VCR, for instance. iPods never were the best sounding or most feature rich player (IMO), but people seem to like their looks and their higher price makes them more upscale (do you buy your clothes at Macys, or K-Mart?).
I'm guessing no, because I don't think it's possible to do it with any performance. Think of it like this - you have a texture in graphics memory and you want to pixel shade it - you have to copy the texture to main memory, do the pixel shading in software, then recopy the texture back into graphics memory. If you're thinking pixel shade in software and then copy to memory, how do you know you can do that operation first? Bump mapping, for example, shifts the pixels of the texture and if you pixel shade first, you probably will have the wrong pixels shaded.
The graphics card-memory bandwidth would be constantly in use, which may be a bottleneck (especially on older systems, since you'd be limited to 2-8MB of textures to maintain 30FPS). In addition, the graphics card wouldn't have the texture to work with while it's offloaded, so it would need to either do something else (if anything is available) or idle. You also wouldn't be able to render your scene unless all the textures were back on card, so that's another potential bottleneck (though that may be possible with changes to the hardware drivers).
Slashdot Mirror
well, there's that, but if you're like me and have 90% of your coworkers outsourced 12 1/2 hours away, you start disliking your 12:30AM to 7:30AM meeting times.
:)
If I could work my own schedule, that would be great, but my employer also wants me in the office during "core" hours (9AM-3PM) so it's hard to not work 12-15 hour days (well, minus the 2 hours to read/post to slashdot makes it 10-13
tough question - technically, Apple has had hardware audio since about the G3, but it's fairly simple hardware and has some pre-processing done in software. The G3 iMacs had CD quality 5.1 surround sound, so I expect it's better now. Anything that ships with a CoreAudio driver like the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 will be fully hardware accelerated, so yes, you can get a PCI sound card provided a slot is available. I've also heard of a couple of USB interface sound "cards" but I can't name names or tell you performance.
hrm... it sounds like you have some control of their machines if you can strip admin privs - if so, and they're running X.4, I'd recommend setting a pwpolicy that forces strong passwords. I'm not sure what you can do about older OS releases, but there may be something.
You may want to look at some of these security whitepapers I had bookmarked - maybe useful, maybe not.
make that | xargs tar cvfj complete`date +%d%m%y`.tar.bz2
ever have one of those days?
Somehow I erased part of my last sentence or maybe my thought train strayed - I do weekly backups of the /Users drive and monthly dd backups of the entire disk. It also cleans up the backups when disk space is low (I only keep one monthly around), so I hope I never get a long term infection ;)
/Volumes/backup/Users`date +%d%m%y` /Users &>/var/log/backup`date +%d%m%y`
;rm -rf complete`date +%d%m%y` to remove the uncompressed file at the end. Maybe even an &>/dev/null
if anyone's interested, the crontab entry fragment I use looks like this (minus my bash shell script for cleanup):
00 3 * * 0 tar cvfj
30 3 1 * * dd if=/dev/rdisk0 of=/Volumes/backup/complete`date +%d%m%y` bs=524288 count=3000 &>/var/log/complete`date +%d%m%y`
that is a simple text file created using any text editor. The numbers mean, in order, minute, hour, day of month, month of year, day of the week, with * being a wildcard (any match). It's also possible to do a range, like 1-5 if you want Monday-Friday on the day of the week parameter (0=Sunday, 6=Saturday). use man crontab for more info. You install it with sudo crontab yourtextfilename from a command line if you want it to record as root (otherwise it crons as your username and if your user files get wiped out, your backup will as well).
Note that I have a second hard disk called 'backup' and it is owned by root. Currently it does not compress the dd files but I suspect you can do this by adding something like this to the dd line:
| xargs tar xvfj complete`date +%d%m%y`.tar.bz2
and probably also
I haven't tried the above yet, so I'm speculating.
also, I probably will get rid of the bash script and replace it with an entry that sorts and finds the oldest but I want to do this without a temp file, which is what I'm doing now (and using sort).
It's not just config options - UNIX design offers better protection against viruses because you don't run as an admin user all the time (or do you, you naughty person?). Apple's implementation makes the admin user a sudoer (a regular user with password admin priviledges), which is somewhat worse than complete restriction like requiring root to do stuff like installs, but better than 99.99% of Windows users who run as admin because it's too painful to log out and log back in as an admin. Double so at sites using NT network login which requires you to log off completely to switch users, making any installs painful. Windows Vista will use administration similar to macosx. I said somewhat intentionally above - a bad root password is as good as no security at all. Back before anybody cared about security I hacked a university root with a guessed password god123 - every admin liked god in the name back then, so it was kinda like hacking routers with admin/admin today.
So why would sudo priveledges (generally) be worse than root but better than running as admin? Let's say you open up an e-mail with an attached virus. On NT based systems as an admin user, that virus has the run of the system and can erase or corrupt anything it chooses. On UNIX systems it can only corrupt owned files, so the running user's own files are the only files that can be affected. This virus would not know the sudo user password and therefore cannot corrupt system files. It could probably social engineer the user to enter a password or attempt keylogging and hope the user types the sudo password or root user and password (and root isn't configured on mac by default). Another huge problem starting to appear on Windows is the installation of rootkits without any knowledge of the user. Rootkits on UNIX require root to install, so generally require some social engineering to get themselves in (heck, even make it legal(ish) like spyware - pr0nripperXXX requires admin priveleges to install essential software into your operating system. Without this technology, you will not have access to free pr0n. Click Agree if you want to install the software, Disagree if you do not. pr0nripperXXX is a product of SPAM network technology LTD [SPAM networks]. By clicking Agree you agree to allow SPAM networks to distribute promotional material and adult content through and to the host system).
Personally, I have scheduled dd backups of my user files done by a cron job just in case my admin user is compromised while my WinXP box gets them burned to DVD occasionally (tho I do a monthly dd copy using a linux partition, as well).
that was my point exactly, though I was pretty sarcastic about it.
it's in Microsoft's best interest to make tools that only benefit Microsoft, though I've heard that peer pressure is forcing them to add a PDF save file type to the next version of Office. I wouldn't hold my breath for an OpenOffice importer/exporter anytime soon (maybe externally, but not from MS), but it's a start.
33? youngster. I remember video gaming (on a magnavox odyssey) around the time you were born, though I admit, I was awfully young and it's pretty hazy back there.
I still get "boys night" for beer (quality, rarely quantity - no rice or corn for us), but the only possibly active pr0n star I can name is Marey Carey because I saw that bimbo interviewed for the California elections on Fox news (or whatever the lunchroom TV is set to).
Turn based gaming has mostly gone underground. You may want the try the indies - off the top of my head, I can only think of Spiderweb software's Avernum, a game I didn't like much personally, but I'm sure there are others (and they have a bunch of sequels I never played). You may also want to try Wizardy 8 (realtime movement with phased combat - see their FAQ or try the demo). I have motion sickness problems with the realtime in that one (rare for me with RPGs, usually only a problem with about 50% of shooters), but most of my friends loved it.
Apple wanted $1 per port to use the name FireWire, not for the technology itself, and the extra cost was to recoup co-marketing expenses - the actual technology was licensed as IEEE1394 for the standard rate most people including Intel charge for technologies, something like 25 cents per port. Sony called it iLink because they didn't want to pay Apple's marketing cost, which was perfectly fine with Apple. Incidentally, Intel let manufacturers avoid co-marketing costs if they agreed to exclusively put "Intel Inside" stickers on their machines (outside the computer's brand name), otherwise they were charging rates similar to Apple.
Intel invented USB as a low power small periphrials bus that could be chained together and would eliminating device specific periphrial drivers by including drivers in the device itself. I believe it ultimately targets PS/2 mice and keyboards, which is a licensed IBM technology (Intel has "not invented here" problems as bad as Apple, IMO). USB was originally intended for low power devices only, and therefore items like USB disk drives also need power adapters. USB 2.0 was a quick ploy to steal market share for high speed devices, but it still is underpowered (500mA/5V max), if a slower device is plugged into the bus (a USB 1.0 or 1.1 device) the entire bus runs at the slower speed, and requires a special controller (e.g. a PC). USB 2.0 has a 127 device limit, while firewire is 63, and USB 2.0 has a 5m cable limit, while firewire is 4.5m.
IEEE1394 (firewire) is meant to be a powered bus (up to 1.5A/12V), like ATA or SCSI and can run independently between devices without a specialized controller (e.g. without a PC). A 400Mbps device plugged into an 800Mbps chain will not slow devices earlier in the chain (unlike USB, which slows everything to the slowest device), so it is advantageous to chain firewire devices by speed.
more importantly, MICROSOFT would prefer that you don't know anything about partitioning, as that might let some moron (er, user) install a dual boot with some other OS than Windows, and who would EVER do that? For that matter, Microsoft has made no effort to allow multiple boots off the same hard disk(s), intentionally overwriting the MBR with their single boot loader and never creating a multiboot loader like GRUB or LILO (read this article).
Microsoft uses the KISS BOW IBM method - Keep It Simple, Stupid But Only When It Benefits Microsoft.
and deservedly so - Apple still owns the trademark to OpenDoc and apparently people haven't caught on yet, 'cause they're still using that name for OpenDocument. Should Apple ever revive OpenDoc, there's legal ramifications due to product confusion, and they'd probably win because they owned the name first. I doubt this will ever happen because OpenDoc was essentially a type of OLE and Apple now uses something close to Microsoft's model for this, not their own, but better to stop any chance of this now.
I don't know how those numbers are derived for some review sites - Gamespy actually gave it 2 out of 5 stars, a system they've been using for a couple of years. It's possible this game was rated using both the new and old system due to the release date (2003). The new system has a minimum of .5 stars and a maximum of 5 stars, meaning 10 possible values and a 2 is 4/10 (.5, 1, 1.5, 2) or 40%.
.5 stars recently
.5 stars...
The latest reviews of PC games right now go from 2 stars to 3.5 stars, averaging about 3 stars, so that's slightly above average.
Diplomacy got the dreaded
Civilization IV, Call of Duty 2, and Age of Empires 3 all got 5 stars.
This is A list season (Christmas), so I expect a higher tilt, but Diplomacy is an established board game like Civ was, and yet still only got
Sounds like you got a few bad support people. I've had both at Speakeasy, usually fixed by making a new support call and trying to get a different person (which it looks like you did, sorry it didn't work out). Having worked support, I've seen both good and bad and the turnaround is often very heavy so you get a lot of noobs. Worse than noobs are the people that think they know what they're talking about, but really are complete fscking morons, like one guy I talked to 4 times taking several hours at Speakeasy and he never understood my problem, much less fixed it (the next guy fixed it in 15 seconds and even recouped my bill for that period).
Most support sites have a database of issues that can be quickly looked up, so if you don't get a quick response, the guy or girl handling your call is probably needing to check a database. Really slow responses or holds mean that they're probably consulting with a floor expert that wanders the cubicles. I never had a problem a floor expert couldn't answer, so I have utmost respect for them. At Bell Atlantic (circa 1993), they were forbidden from talking on the phone, so you probably can't ask to speak to them, but if the person doesn't know the answer, there usually is good help nearby. The problem is when the answer doesn't fit in the database but the support guy thinks he understands the problem but doesn't and tries to answer it without going through the expert (or a bad expert, but I've never met a bad expert, though I'm sure some exist).
I quit working support at Bell Atlantic when I had to do case-by-case billing depending on whether we were contractually obligated to do free support or not. Telling someone that you can't help them unless they pay you $35 for a 2 second fix just went against my morals and when they started pushing performance and I got on the "poor performers" list because the best performers were hanging up on callers to keep their call times down, I decided it was time to go (and calming down irate hangup victims that had spent 2 hours on hold was making my call times even worse).
I didn't go with VoIP at home because I needed to share multiple base stations with the same phone line and Speakeasy didn't support that (though they did point out unsupported ways to do it). I'm not sure if that's an issue for most businesses, but it might be and is a worthwhile question to ask if you need it.
sneak up on them and turn their hearing aids waaay up, then start scratching a chalkboard.
Grandma hates it when I do that.
heh - mostly true - but not always
I've seen C code that uses tons and tons of goto statements to implement exception handling, so just because they're out of fashion doesn't necessarily mean they're completely bad. My C teacher, like most of 'em, taught me never to use goto, and I think I've used them once in my personal code (mainly to see how they work), but seeing tons of goto statements isn't a sign that it's bad code.
exotic perl calls have their uses, too, but don't expect anyone to maintain them. I use them for maintenance work on my directories and some cgi handling, but I don't share this stuff with others.
job security is fleeting - they'll just hire 5 coders in India to decode or rewrite your bad code and fire you anyway.
Interesting that you mention arrays - ages ago I had to switch my school taught coding style from creating C arrays to using malloc calls because traditional C arrays are defined in the stack and I'd end up with stack overflow errors. I don't do much C coding these days (and have no idea if that is still true), but when I do code C I always use malloc for that reason.
;).
Anyhow, my point is that even though the malloc'd blob is still an array for all intents and purposes, a stack allocated array can be bad - especially if you're allocating a large amount of space, so it's possible (though not likely) that your IT manager wasn't a complete moron.
Incidentally, the coding style I was taught in school was bad in many, many ways. Monolithic at a time when Modular should have been taught and I was never taught good header format for C (e.g. #ifndef __HEADER__ #define __HEADER__ #endif) to name a couple of things, though I'm sure I could think of more. They did dock me points any time I didn't follow format conventions, comment my code, or indent properly, so at least I did learn something (like how to use formatting tools
Oblivion is delayed until Q1 of 2006 for both the XBox 360 and PC. Q1 is Take-Two interactive's (the publisher's) financial quarter, which goes from Feb to April, so worst case scenario, barring another delay, we don't see it until after the tax man comes.
here's a reference:
http://pc.ign.com/articles/663/663060p1.html
How to learn how to learn about UNIX in 10 seconds!
/usr/bin/ /usr/local/bin | xargs man
/usr/sbin
;)
from an xterm terminal (command line), type
ls
administrators - repeat with
most newer systems support 'info' as well as man - replace man with info above to try this
warning: on Linux or UNIX systems be sure to install the man and/or info pages first.
yes, I skipped pages (e.g. man 5 ), but do you REALLY think I was serious
anyhow, I coulda done a really nasty command string to do all that, but it isn't worth my time.
Right - it completely depends on what you want - you can get the same junk that goes into most machines at Best Buy or CompUSA, or you can pay more for some good stuff.
I've torn apart several store bought PCs that were just out of warranty to fix hardware problems for friends and relatives and nearly all of them had crappy ECS motherboards and shoddy power supplies, with the exceptions of one box that had an Intel motherboard and shoddy power supply (I think that was a Gateway) and an IBM with a good power supply and working (but crappy) motherboard and a bad hard disk. As a rough guess, it was about 20 machines total in the last 6-7 years.
To be fair, most of the power supplies you get with cases off of New Egg are junk, which is why I usually end up tossing them and buying a $70+ one from a local store (Best Buy, CompUSA, etc). It costs more, but it's easier to return if it doesn't meet its printed specs, which happens all too often. Also, I've heard I was lucky and the boards were at least ECS - Microstar had a horrible reputation for a long time before turning themselves around (they now go by MSI, not Microstar).
Incidentally, my first mac died from a bad power supply that fried the motherboard, and an authorized mac dealer wanted $350 for the motherboard and $300 for the power supply PLUS $95/hour service fees with expected time at 3 hours. My first time working on a computer back in 1995 was when I took that mac home and then picked up a $99 new motherboard and $15 used power supply online and spent an hour replacing both. My first experience with building a PC (about 3 months later) was a bit more painful, as I had some incompatible component issues and some BIOS problems with my graphics card (meaning I spent a lot of time with web and phone support).
The only hardware problems I had with Linux were in the early days of USB, but I don't even remember them much anymore (my joystick and gamepad weren't recognized, I think, but I only used those on Windows, anyway).
ah - spoken like someone who hasn't had a very long conversation with a Jehovah's Witness!
Here are some actual facts I pulled from the Jehovahs:
The world was created in 7 earth days! Also, the world is going to end in 2001 (or something like that), so you need to convert now! Incidentally, they've now recanted that date, but it still will end soon.
Carbon dating is the devil trying to trick us - there's no such thing as dinosaurs or anything like that - those bones were just placed there to tempt us away from faith.
Their version of the bible is infallible - there are no errors in translation, because God wouldn't let that happen. Yes, I argued that the bible was, at best, a third generation translation once it got to English and in most cases 6-7th generation, but that didn't seem to matter. I also argued that there was a section on personal hygene in the Hebrew scrolls that had stuff like women should wear veils and men be clean shaven (sorry, Jesus), but that is suspiciously cut from their version of the bible.
Anyhow, your definition is wrong - Yom means 1 24 hour day, at least by the Jehovah's I've talked to (but what the heck is a day if there is no sun and earth to start with...)?
sigh - I know some good people that are Jehovah's witnesses, but I can't say I agree with them.
Quite honestly, if it's a noob and they're serious but still ignorant, I usually suggest they read the faq and/or documentation first before asking simple questions that can be answered there. The problem is, there's a constant barrage of 12 year old non-programmers that want to, say, jump right in and create the next version of Quake without any programming knowledge, any knowledge of graphics, and then the inability to comprehend what they're reading because it's way above their skill level. When I suggest something easier, they refuse - what would you do?
I usually just put them on my ignore list, but many others aren't so nice.
speak for yourself - I find IRC immensely helpful, but you do bring up a valid point - use other mediums first.
I usually try google and if that fails, I'll move on to IRC (though I tend to use freenode over efnet). #opengl, #macdev, #winprog, and #linux have all helped with questions I've had (yeah, I'm a jack-of-all trades developer, and true to form, master of none - though I can port quite well). The key I've found is asking a sensible question and not one that can be found by a simple search. Something not found in the manual or faq helps give you some credibility, though I've gotten some brownie points for finding errors in Apple and Microsoft manuals.
Honestly, someone that pops into #winprog and asks "how do I create a window" is asking to be shot down. Another aggrivation is when someone asks you something straight out of the faq or manual for a project (usually resulting in rtfm posts). If we, as developers, spent the entire day answering simple questions, we'd get no development done, so it's not an action taken out of malice, it's just practical.
Please don't interchange OpenDoc® and OpenDocument -
OpenDoc® was Apple's answer to Microsoft's Object Linking and Embedding (OLE, which migrated to COM, DCOM, then strayed into being ActiveX) in Documents. It's a registered trademark of Apple Computers, Inc. It died many years ago (you can probably get the history in those Wikipedia articles - I didn't really read them), but I'm sure Apple still owns the trademark.
OpenDocument is an unrelated document format that came out of OpenOffice and OASIS, though again, read the Wikipedia entry for more, 'cause paragraph 1 is about as far as I got in it.
hmm probably shoulda tm'd Microsoft and Apple, as well as all those component models MS used, too... nah - too much effort
Dvorak needs to pull his head out of his ass and see the sun once in a while. The guy made a career on bashing Apple because he has nothing better to do and he likes the notoriety his grandstanding gives him. There - it felt good to vent that.
Anyhow, I completely disagree - the XBox 360 has been getting huge amounts of press, just not in mainstream media (yet). Then again, is the XBox 360 really targeted towards the masses like the iPod, or a target market of teenagers or young adults? Lets see, big announcement party on MTV, prominent location on Microsoft's web page, oodles of gaming press articles...
Quite honestly, I've heard a hell of a lot more about Longhorn/Vista than Leopard/MacOS X.5 (due out around the same time as Vista). Let's check Google - Leopard Mac search - 808,000 results. Windows Vista search - 34,100,000 results. Even if you use the old codename for Vista (Longhorn) you still get 7 million results.
Even his main argument, that the video iPod was late to market is silly - the iPod itself was late to market and still owns the market. It's not like being late to market hasn't happened before, even with an inferior product - the VCR, for instance. iPods never were the best sounding or most feature rich player (IMO), but people seem to like their looks and their higher price makes them more upscale (do you buy your clothes at Macys, or K-Mart?).
I'm guessing no, because I don't think it's possible to do it with any performance. Think of it like this - you have a texture in graphics memory and you want to pixel shade it - you have to copy the texture to main memory, do the pixel shading in software, then recopy the texture back into graphics memory. If you're thinking pixel shade in software and then copy to memory, how do you know you can do that operation first? Bump mapping, for example, shifts the pixels of the texture and if you pixel shade first, you probably will have the wrong pixels shaded.
The graphics card-memory bandwidth would be constantly in use, which may be a bottleneck (especially on older systems, since you'd be limited to 2-8MB of textures to maintain 30FPS). In addition, the graphics card wouldn't have the texture to work with while it's offloaded, so it would need to either do something else (if anything is available) or idle. You also wouldn't be able to render your scene unless all the textures were back on card, so that's another potential bottleneck (though that may be possible with changes to the hardware drivers).