Personally, I think this shit is an awesome abuse of game mechanics, but I get off on abusing the system in games to my own advantage. I would love to try this setup myself, and even though I could, I'm not willing to put up the investment of money nor time to do the same thing as this guy.
He could probably make a fortune charging people (rich WoW players) for 1 hour at the helm of that beast. I know I'd pay at least $50 to give it a go.
XP can login extremely fast, but the thing that really kills login times can be old DOS style logon scripts. Totally serial drive mapping, etc. can hugely inflate logon times.
Worse, all those scripts could be written in VBScript or perhaps javascript and run asynchronously, giving the user their desktop while mapped drives are connected in the background.
Oh well... batch scripts are much easier to write.
That honestly depends on how good of an actor he is.
I had no idea that I would end up loving Leonardo DiCaprio as much as I do now when I saw him in Titanic. But after seeing movies like Catch Me if You Can and The Aviator, you'll understand how simply being a good actor can negate these kinds of labels.
the ability to use Wine to run WoW? Because that isn't considered WoW on Linux to my standards
If you're running Linux, and an application you happen to have requires Wine to work on your system, if installing Wine makes that application work 100% correctly, then that application works on Linux.
I don't personally see any difference between said theoretical application and any common Windows app that requires, for example, the.Net framework.
Dollars to doughnuts LAN play is disabled in order to force game revenue.
I've got friends who will play Warcraft 3 in a LAN setting only. Many of them have owned the game at some point or another, but god knows where their CD keys went.
If we want to get on battle.net, we use an application called Listchecker that puts a LAN game on to battle.net, but requires only 1 valid key. 8 people online, 1 authentic cd key.
If you apply the same technology to Starcraft 2 or Diablo 2, you can battle.net it up, with other local players, with a method very hazardous to Blizzard's pocketbooks.
Backups and/or file storage should never be done locally. IMHO, all user profile data should be on a local SAN or file server of some sort.
As an example, a friend of mine works for a company with a highly overpaid IT dept. The users have absolutely no shared drives to transfer large files. They have to email them, which confers a file size limit, not to mention incredible version conflicts and massive PST files. They force users to store critical files on their local hard drives, and the machines perform a ghost backup every night to a secondary internal drive, because the System Admins don't want to be responsible for network security. While I personally think those kinds of policies are really stupid, I will also admit that they do account for hardware failure and rogue network activity in a proven fashion.
However, I just had to ask her, "What happens if your computer is stolen?"
> ever since the "phonics" fad caught on in the UK spelling's gone to the dogs anyway
Ive allways atribyutid fonix to my suksess in spelling.
Yu just haff to lern the eksepshuns (of which there are many).
Seriously, I did find phonics to be an incredibly valuable source of my ability to spell things correctly, but I don't know if it actually helped the average person. Growing up, I had an amazing ability to spell words based on what I knew about sounding them out, but I have a feeling that I was able to pick up on latin roots or some such in order to determine things like, for example, "eu" or "yu" or "u" for getting the "U" sound at the beginning of a word I had never spelled before....
Then, on the same token, when someone would ask me how to spell a completely or mostly phonetic word and I'd challenge them to try themselves by giving them clues to sounding it out... would actually produce words that, when pronounced phonetically, wouldn't sound like their target word at all.
It seems to go both ways though, if you fail at reading phonetically, which the people who would ask me how to spell things frequently did, you'll fail at writing phonetically too.
What was that study again that proved letter order doesn't matter, because we don't actually take it into consideration?;-)
why is it better to have these bunched together into a single menu where you can't differentiate what's open and what isn't?
OS X Dock Layout:
Left side: Applications. Running applications are identified by a big silver dot under the icon.
Right side: Open, minimized application windows. These windows are identified by a preview of their content, and a scaled down application icon is superimposed over the window preview in its bottom corner. Folders, files, and the trash can also are or can be affixed to the right side of the dock. These items contain no application icons superimposed over their pictures. Should folders be affixed to the dock, applications will minimize to the dock in an animated fashion appearing between those folders and the trash can. Separators can be added by the user for convenience. ____
It scales a little better than Windows/Linux bars IMHO, clutters a little more easily (with multiple minimized windows from the same app, it gets hard to tell what's what) than Windows, but starts with much less clutter than KDE.
FWIW though, I prefer the Windows taskbar to both, because even when my open applications/windows start to reach the classification of beowulf-grade clusterfuck, it maintains a little more composure than KDE or OS X while still keeping me well informed of what's going on.
That is, rather, on very high resolutions with taskbar grouping turned off:P
Finally something explains the idiotic location of the quick launch folder.
Need to edit your start menu? Just go to "Start Menu" under your profile directory! Need to edit your desktop? Same place! Documents? You betcha!
Want to edit the icons in your quick launch? Muahahahaha...
Your quest begins in the folder options dialog, where you'll need to expose a double hidden/system folder, buried in the depths of your Application Data.
After solving the Great Vendor Folder riddle, you must offer supplication to the mighty Internet Explorer, Guardian of the Quick Launch treasures. Icons may be created in the god's domain, and likewise they may be destroyed... but should you attempt to relocate his possessions to another folder of more logical choosing, the Compatibility gods will smite thee down.
they designed a Windows Registry as an interface to the database on Linux.
So wait, let me get this straight... these people know both Windows *and* Linux so well that they wrote a Windows Registry for Linux, rather than cutting the bullshit and using SQL?
Might there exist, in large black holes, ones with atomic numbers in the thousands?
(I am totally not a physicist).
I would say no. Neutron stars are some of (if not the) densest light emitting objects in the universe, and the principle behind their name is that the matter inside them is so compacted together by gravity that their individual atoms cannot exist with classical electron clouds. As such, their constituent particles break their atom bonds and the protons and electrons fuse into a very densely packed neutron soup.
I would imagine, then, that should conditions inside a black hole be favorable enough for classical particles to exist at all, they would be in a similar state.
Who knows though, maybe black holes are "Quark" stars.:P
It's just the distance, at which gravitation is stronger than everything else,
FWIW, best explanation I've ever read is that the event horizon is the point at which gravity is so strong, your escape velocity is greater than the speed of light.
I.E. Once past the event horizon, a rocket ship attempting to escape the gravitational field of a black hole would need to travel faster than light speed, which cannot be done.
Very interesting. It could be (and likely is) a result of poor programming that causes me to hate foxpro so much... which is something I can understand. I'm a staunch supporter of using AutoIt for various sysadmin tasks.... as long as the script is written well enough.
With Foxpro, we're using a system that keeps multiple MDB files and they're queried using Foxpro's SQL (i think it's SQL). We run telemarketing campaigns, and each campaign has its list of leads in these DB files, and depending on what campaigns are active, it'll scrub these DB files looking for more leads.
The problem is that the lead generation done by this Foxpro application is so slow, that if a certain number of campaigns is exceeded, each will run out of leads before its turn for generation comes up again. We all know it's very poorly implemented, but of course, we're not the vendor. We tried throwing the application on a 2U machine from the gods, and it was still just as slow. Add to that constant issues with file and table locks not getting cleared... the calls to the IT department between our site that still uses the Foxpro-based product, and the one that uses an MSSQL/IIS based product are absurdly disparate.
We're decommissioning the Foxpro based product next month (thank god) and upgrading that site. I'm sure you can understand why the word Foxpro makes me jokingly think of suicide, and if you say it really is that great, then I do believe you. It is much more likely for a really bad programmer to be the culprit of our woes than the underlying language that was used.
My desktop environment not only shows up faster, but I can start using it just about as fast as it renders itself
On the same token though, I've been able to do that with XP as well (I'd assume you can do it with Vista) by nLiteing the crap out of it... I had XP boot in 13 seconds to a fully usable desktop on a Dell GX50 with 128 ram... but it lacked a lot of features, like a print spooler, or the ability to be sysprepped.
And while it's fine and dandy that Linux can do that for me, switching to Linux defeats the purpose of my question;)
This is done by every operating system... ok, it's done by Windows and OS X. Not sure about the linux flavors.
What I'd be curious to know is if there's a way to prevent it from giving me a damn desktop if I can't use it yet... I wouldn't mind sitting at an hourglass or green spinning circle for 8 extra seconds if it means Windows won't taunt me with a GUI I cannot use:P
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A nerd can whistle a 300-baud connection handshake.
I think I've done that...
A geek will help you connect the modem.
Of course, I've done this too....
You're not excluded.
Personally, I think this shit is an awesome abuse of game mechanics, but I get off on abusing the system in games to my own advantage. I would love to try this setup myself, and even though I could, I'm not willing to put up the investment of money nor time to do the same thing as this guy.
He could probably make a fortune charging people (rich WoW players) for 1 hour at the helm of that beast. I know I'd pay at least $50 to give it a go.
He forgot the "dozen" before "thousand."
XP can login extremely fast, but the thing that really kills login times can be old DOS style logon scripts. Totally serial drive mapping, etc. can hugely inflate logon times.
Worse, all those scripts could be written in VBScript or perhaps javascript and run asynchronously, giving the user their desktop while mapped drives are connected in the background.
Oh well... batch scripts are much easier to write.
That honestly depends on how good of an actor he is.
I had no idea that I would end up loving Leonardo DiCaprio as much as I do now when I saw him in Titanic. But after seeing movies like Catch Me if You Can and The Aviator, you'll understand how simply being a good actor can negate these kinds of labels.
the ability to use Wine to run WoW? Because that isn't considered WoW on Linux to my standards
If you're running Linux, and an application you happen to have requires Wine to work on your system, if installing Wine makes that application work 100% correctly, then that application works on Linux.
.Net framework.
I don't personally see any difference between said theoretical application and any common Windows app that requires, for example, the
[ducks]
Dollars to doughnuts LAN play is disabled in order to force game revenue.
I've got friends who will play Warcraft 3 in a LAN setting only. Many of them have owned the game at some point or another, but god knows where their CD keys went.
If we want to get on battle.net, we use an application called Listchecker that puts a LAN game on to battle.net, but requires only 1 valid key. 8 people online, 1 authentic cd key.
If you apply the same technology to Starcraft 2 or Diablo 2, you can battle.net it up, with other local players, with a method very hazardous to Blizzard's pocketbooks.
Seven hundred?!?!
I'm not sure that the GP actually meant "thin clients."
He mentioned diskless clients which can be accomplished very reliably on that sort of scale using Citrix Provisioning Server (formerly Ardence).
This video is a favorite of mine.
Overrated on accident.
Backups and/or file storage should never be done locally. IMHO, all user profile data should be on a local SAN or file server of some sort.
As an example, a friend of mine works for a company with a highly overpaid IT dept. The users have absolutely no shared drives to transfer large files. They have to email them, which confers a file size limit, not to mention incredible version conflicts and massive PST files. They force users to store critical files on their local hard drives, and the machines perform a ghost backup every night to a secondary internal drive, because the System Admins don't want to be responsible for network security. While I personally think those kinds of policies are really stupid, I will also admit that they do account for hardware failure and rogue network activity in a proven fashion.
However, I just had to ask her, "What happens if your computer is stolen?"
> ever since the "phonics" fad caught on in the UK spelling's gone to the dogs anyway
;-)
Ive allways atribyutid fonix to my suksess in spelling.
Yu just haff to lern the eksepshuns (of which there are many).
Seriously, I did find phonics to be an incredibly valuable source of my ability to spell things correctly, but I don't know if it actually helped the average person. Growing up, I had an amazing ability to spell words based on what I knew about sounding them out, but I have a feeling that I was able to pick up on latin roots or some such in order to determine things like, for example, "eu" or "yu" or "u" for getting the "U" sound at the beginning of a word I had never spelled before....
Then, on the same token, when someone would ask me how to spell a completely or mostly phonetic word and I'd challenge them to try themselves by giving them clues to sounding it out... would actually produce words that, when pronounced phonetically, wouldn't sound like their target word at all.
It seems to go both ways though, if you fail at reading phonetically, which the people who would ask me how to spell things frequently did, you'll fail at writing phonetically too.
What was that study again that proved letter order doesn't matter, because we don't actually take it into consideration?
> How will you coutersue if you're bankrupted before you can?
Find a lawyer who is confident enough that he will win the suit, and have that lawyer will charge a percentage. Seek damages in excess of fee.
Yes yes.... I was attempting to make light of how incongruous its location is when compared to other portions of the user profile.
right click the quick launch area
Very difficult to do when navigating admin shares, which is the reason the folder location has driven me so far up the wall in the past.
:P
Nonetheless, good tip
why is it better to have these bunched together into a single menu where you can't differentiate what's open and what isn't?
OS X Dock Layout:
:P
Left side: Applications. Running applications are identified by a big silver dot under the icon.
Right side: Open, minimized application windows. These windows are identified by a preview of their content, and a scaled down application icon is superimposed over the window preview in its bottom corner. Folders, files, and the trash can also are or can be affixed to the right side of the dock. These items contain no application icons superimposed over their pictures. Should folders be affixed to the dock, applications will minimize to the dock in an animated fashion appearing between those folders and the trash can. Separators can be added by the user for convenience.
____
It scales a little better than Windows/Linux bars IMHO, clutters a little more easily (with multiple minimized windows from the same app, it gets hard to tell what's what) than Windows, but starts with much less clutter than KDE.
FWIW though, I prefer the Windows taskbar to both, because even when my open applications/windows start to reach the classification of beowulf-grade clusterfuck, it maintains a little more composure than KDE or OS X while still keeping me well informed of what's going on.
That is, rather, on very high resolutions with taskbar grouping turned off
Internet Explorer 4.0's Quick Launch Toolbar
Finally something explains the idiotic location of the quick launch folder.
Need to edit your start menu? Just go to "Start Menu" under your profile directory! Need to edit your desktop? Same place! Documents? You betcha!
Want to edit the icons in your quick launch? Muahahahaha...
Your quest begins in the folder options dialog, where you'll need to expose a double hidden/system folder, buried in the depths of your Application Data.
After solving the Great Vendor Folder riddle, you must offer supplication to the mighty Internet Explorer, Guardian of the Quick Launch treasures. Icons may be created in the god's domain, and likewise they may be destroyed... but should you attempt to relocate his possessions to another folder of more logical choosing, the Compatibility gods will smite thee down.
they designed a Windows Registry as an interface to the database on Linux.
So wait, let me get this straight... these people know both Windows *and* Linux so well that they wrote a Windows Registry for Linux, rather than cutting the bullshit and using SQL?
That sounds very... irresponsible.
Remember that the reason Nintendo abandoned cartridges was because a 8.5 gigabyte DVD was cheaper than the equivalent ROM.
Two things:
First, those were probably EPROM's, not flash, but don't quote me on it.
Second, supply+demand+moore's law = totally different situation today.
...I wouldn't be suprirsed if a 1GB EPROM costs more than used car....
Might there exist, in large black holes, ones with atomic numbers in the thousands?
(I am totally not a physicist).
:P
I would say no. Neutron stars are some of (if not the) densest light emitting objects in the universe, and the principle behind their name is that the matter inside them is so compacted together by gravity that their individual atoms cannot exist with classical electron clouds. As such, their constituent particles break their atom bonds and the protons and electrons fuse into a very densely packed neutron soup.
I would imagine, then, that should conditions inside a black hole be favorable enough for classical particles to exist at all, they would be in a similar state.
Who knows though, maybe black holes are "Quark" stars.
It's just the distance, at which gravitation is stronger than everything else,
FWIW, best explanation I've ever read is that the event horizon is the point at which gravity is so strong, your escape velocity is greater than the speed of light.
I.E. Once past the event horizon, a rocket ship attempting to escape the gravitational field of a black hole would need to travel faster than light speed, which cannot be done.
Cheers.
It's not really like many (if any) of us is doing anything to change that outcome :-/
Haha.
Very interesting. It could be (and likely is) a result of poor programming that causes me to hate foxpro so much... which is something I can understand. I'm a staunch supporter of using AutoIt for various sysadmin tasks.... as long as the script is written well enough.
With Foxpro, we're using a system that keeps multiple MDB files and they're queried using Foxpro's SQL (i think it's SQL). We run telemarketing campaigns, and each campaign has its list of leads in these DB files, and depending on what campaigns are active, it'll scrub these DB files looking for more leads.
The problem is that the lead generation done by this Foxpro application is so slow, that if a certain number of campaigns is exceeded, each will run out of leads before its turn for generation comes up again. We all know it's very poorly implemented, but of course, we're not the vendor. We tried throwing the application on a 2U machine from the gods, and it was still just as slow. Add to that constant issues with file and table locks not getting cleared... the calls to the IT department between our site that still uses the Foxpro-based product, and the one that uses an MSSQL/IIS based product are absurdly disparate.
We're decommissioning the Foxpro based product next month (thank god) and upgrading that site. I'm sure you can understand why the word Foxpro makes me jokingly think of suicide, and if you say it really is that great, then I do believe you. It is much more likely for a really bad programmer to be the culprit of our woes than the underlying language that was used.
i think MapleStory and Second Life both came out before WoW, so WoW certainly wasn't the first game to create a market for virtual goods.
Diablo 2, anyone?
I had a very profitable revelation when I realized that, not only could I frequently dupe items, I could sell them quite easily on EBay.
My desktop environment not only shows up faster, but I can start using it just about as fast as it renders itself
On the same token though, I've been able to do that with XP as well (I'd assume you can do it with Vista) by nLiteing the crap out of it... I had XP boot in 13 seconds to a fully usable desktop on a Dell GX50 with 128 ram... but it lacked a lot of features, like a print spooler, or the ability to be sysprepped.
;)
And while it's fine and dandy that Linux can do that for me, switching to Linux defeats the purpose of my question
didn't have any problem at all with Foxpro
Foxpro makes me want to shoot myself on a daily basis. And I don't even code with it.
This is done by every operating system... ok, it's done by Windows and OS X. Not sure about the linux flavors.
:P
What I'd be curious to know is if there's a way to prevent it from giving me a damn desktop if I can't use it yet... I wouldn't mind sitting at an hourglass or green spinning circle for 8 extra seconds if it means Windows won't taunt me with a GUI I cannot use