...that ranted about how it was unfair for M$ to tighten up their kernel/ OS?...that introduced certificate encryption for internal comms between Symantec Corp. AV servers and clients, a system so shaky that one server could bring them all down with no fallback?...that brought out a home AV product so top heavy they had to rewrite it from scratch once even the non-tech users cottoned on?...that is now on its' 11th version of corporate AV, and still hasn't got it right?
Like I *don't* have to run IE AND FF already due to different engines.....it's really strange hearing the boss of Mozilla criticise Google Chrome for creating similar issues to what FF has against IE.
Oh, wait, we're all going to have to adapt to multiple engines/ browsers/ plugins etc.........when I started pointing this out (over a year ago), I got marked down for trolling, simply because I was listing the technical problems that we were all about to face (what I think of browser war 2.0).- this isn't a techincal 'my browser is better thasn yours' issue, it's dealing with the real world ramifications. IE isn't compliant by a long shot, but by being the most dominant browser, it has to be regarded as the standard to adhere to and the *real* standards applied second - you can shout all you want about how IE should be rendering correctly in the first place (and I'd agree) but it's *too late* - and pretendfing the market leader doesn't exist does not lead to desktop triumphs - just ask .
Oh, you can go force all sites to become compliant by developing for FF first, but by doing that you're ignoring backwards/ sideways compatibility - a situation Mozilla have cheerfully helped create, and suddenly Google are the new nasties for doing the same?
Games have come such a long way since Elite...
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
...after all, it's been 25 years. That's 25 years in which to come up with new ideas.
So where are we now?
I recently paid Steam £30 to play X3: Terran Conflict - a 3D space sim where you start with a basic ship, and have to trade/ fight/ pirate your way up the food chain..........oh.....
Re:The BBC Micro version was first and best
on
Elite Turns 25
·
· Score: 1
The C64 version was better, I'm afraid - the extra memory meant there were special missions and more ships:-)
I was illustrating that this is a new technology that will fix a lot of the issues that have grown around RAID, not trying to sell new s/w.
Do let me know where in my article I was giving the impression that this was a sales pitch......although now you've pointed that out, I've realised that Firefox is less that two years old, and I've now hit the 100+ user mark for unprotected password lists. So I guess until they fix that for default installs, I'd better not use FF for at least 18 months:-)
Well I got it up and running (I do like FreeNAS, it allows me to set things up without having to delve too deeply into Unix/ Linux - however once I tried to copy a large (>5Tb) amount of data to it, not only did it crash and burn, but it wouldn't boot while the drives were still in place. Removing the sata cables to the drives allowed it to boot, but as a result any chance of recovery was gone - even rebuilding FreeNAS and recreating the drive pool didn't change anything.
This left me much more wary of using FreeNAS for ZFS/ ISCSI stuff - but I can't complain, as Freenas.7 is still in beta, so I guess that's the price for being bleeding edge:-)
I did consider using a heaver-duty unix OS, but I'm a windows engineer (the home setup is a 2003 domain) and spend more than enough time already fixing those, so I'm not mad keen on learning a new OS just for one purpose. Plus, I found that the alternative file systems to NTFS (UFS, etc.) are all very well, but I quickly ran into trouble in all sorts of ways - one silly example is the new Win7 libraries - unless the required drive/ dir is indexed, you can't add them (and the libraries, while just another implementation of the same thing, are very handy)...add to that FreeNAS keeping my domain account's password in a plain txt file (eeek), and it's sort of convinced me to wait until there's a decent offering for 2008 R2....
I've managed to get this going, using the excellent FreeNAS - although proceed with caution, as only the beta build supports it, and I've already had serious (all data lost) crashes twice.
However the principle is sound, and I'm sure this will become standard before long - the only trouble being that HP, Dell and the like can't simply offer upgrades for existing RAID cards - due to the nature of ZFS, it needs a 'proper' CPU and a gig or two or RAM. Even so, it does protect against many of the problems now besetting RAID (which was never meant to handle modern, gargantuan disk sizes).
Bought this when it came out - and within two days sent Lucasfilm a rant in which I questioned how exciting it was supposed to be running across the Tattoine desert for hours at a time. In fact, I took the game back to the shop and got a refund (yes, this was back in the days when games were physically bought from shops).
As I recall, I also ranted about why Lucasfilm had replaced 'fun' with 'profit', and why they thought that would be attractive to players. Funnily enough, they ignored my email - but it seems that they finally figured it out for themselves, and closed the thing down rather that making something people actually wanted to use.
Are Lucasarts and Apple actually the same company? I'm seeing too many parallels for it to just be a coincidence:-)
Up until Vista, XP could *do no right* - the world and his wife slagged it off.
Then, suddenly, Vista comes out and XP transforms into the best OS since...well, anything. The same happened with NT, 2000 and XP - many 'experts' bleated about how the new OS/ AD/ etc. was pointless ('you can do it all with LDAP!' I remember a Linux 'expert' saying) and they'd be sticking with 98, thank you very much - seemingly assuming that MS and the rest of the world would follow their decision.
I'm also not just considering the huge corporates - many smaller sites will be rubbing their hands at the option of getting rid of the likes of PointSEC (encryption s/w) due to 7 having it built in.
XP was nice. But then, so was DOS. Drive-by viruses are not going to start avoiding XP out of nostalgia...and we haven't dealt with the whole 64-bit side of things yet (another reason to jump up to XP x64/ 7 x64).
And lurking behind all this is 2008 R2 - which will make going to Win7 a no-brainer. Unless, of course, MS suddenly bring out Direct Connect for 2003/ XP - but somehow, I doubt it:-)
But hey, I'm not working in the real world, right Slashdot? Mark me down as a troll again, I'm sure the whole world will be running Linux by next Tuesday.
In July, an article was posted claiming that no businesses are going to be moving to Windows 7.
I posted a comment pointing out that businesses have said this about the next version of Windows since 95 (excluding ME and Vista), complained that this wasn't really news and that Slashdot should stop recycling tabloid fodder. I got marked down for being a troll (my guess is that they're still trying to make Linux look like a desktop contender - good luck with that).
Oh, but look - here's an article point out that users *are* going to be moving to Windows 7. Just fancy that. Never saw that one coming.
No doubt Slashdot will moderate me down as a troll again - which is why I'm going to point out that I was trollified for saying so on every article they post about Windows 7 selling well - just so people are aware that on this site 'Troll' appears to mean 'non-Linux user' or 'someone that doesn't agree with us'.
And to think some claim that it's *microsoft* that are facists....
However, considering that selling anything for more than it's actually worth (company costs included) is perfectly legal (even though it's basically a form of fraud), I'm not sure why they continually act so surprised that no-one else sees things the way they do:-)
But regardless, I will treat this as a UK MP would - if caught, I will then buy the product, not pay any fines, and insist that I have 'done nothing wrong':-)
....despite knowing that there were bugs in the game that made it impossible to complete.
Which may sound daft, but I wasn't alone.....which raises the question - in today's modern gaming world, when did *you* last like a game so much that you did the same?
...that this brings the demise of the dirty digger.
He is, after all, the proprietor of a rag that convinced a not-very-bright woman to try having eight babies at once in exchange for a million pounds. Every doctor in the world said don't do it, just have one or two or you'll lose all of them....but they (and the Sun) went ahead - even printing scans on the front page with headlines saying 'DOING FINE', as if the doctors were all idiots. And what about Piers Moron - so popular over here, he had to go to the U.S. (where no one knew him) to get any interviews - after all, there are only so many blackmail-based 'favours' you can pull in the U.K....
Well, guess what happened to the eight babies - she lost them all. So that's at least one child killed so that Murdoch could sell more newspapers. And that's just ONE story - there are many, many more (Private Eye - the ONLY news mag you need in the UK, is full of this stuff) - most recently, Amy Winehouses' junkie ex-husband - the Sun wanted him strung up for years....until last weeks' exclusive multi-day interview.
But let's ignore the fact that the Sun is staffed and edited by the utter scum-of-the-earth (or 'journalists' as they like to pretend) - the point of all this is that, even sinking to these depths, the circulation of the Sun, Times, et al has been going down for *decades* (hence they get more and more desperate in trying to scare you into buying tomorrows edition) - however, there's so much FREE information that buying a newspaper to read what happened 24 hours ago is laughable.
So I *dearly* hope that Murdope starts charging, I really really do - anything that hastens the death of News International (or anything Murdoch-owned, really) can't come fast enough.
As I recall, no sites had any plans to introduce 2000, as NT4 was 'quite adequate'.
Then it was XP, as 'no-one wants to buy new machines'.
The two hiccups - Windows ME (unsurprisingly), and Vista. And now here we are, with XP about to go (and more than showing it's age) - and somehow, managers not wanting to frighten chairmen with next years' costs has become a slashdot news article.
Which it would be, if I'd only been in the game for five years....please guys, you're supposed to be impressive, not tabloid-recyclers.
Wasn't that the one where it was really designed for multiplayer (even though we were all on dial-up), but didn't actually tell you as much so that you'd buy the game anyways?
Or am I thinking of X-Wing? Or X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter?
Lucasarts would no doubt deny that this sort of behaviour did not, in any way, contribute to the modern piracy culture:-)
....or the Matrix, or Star Wars, etc. if they didn't have amazing visuals?
There will always be similar games and films that don't have the amazing effects, and still be entertaining - the point is, these are usually outnumbered by those that do - and by a large margin....
Slashdot Mirror
....in a 3D directors extended widescreen THX-2 version with more hours of extras than the viewer has left to live
...that ranted about how it was unfair for M$ to tighten up their kernel/ OS? ...that introduced certificate encryption for internal comms between Symantec Corp. AV servers and clients, a system so shaky that one server could bring them all down with no fallback? ...that brought out a home AV product so top heavy they had to rewrite it from scratch once even the non-tech users cottoned on? ...that is now on its' 11th version of corporate AV, and still hasn't got it right?
Why yes, it could!
Like I *don't* have to run IE AND FF already due to different engines.....it's really strange hearing the boss of Mozilla criticise Google Chrome for creating similar issues to what FF has against IE.
Oh, wait, we're all going to have to adapt to multiple engines/ browsers/ plugins etc..... ....when I started pointing this out (over a year ago), I got marked down for trolling, simply because I was listing the technical problems that we were all about to face (what I think of browser war 2.0).- this isn't a techincal 'my browser is better thasn yours' issue, it's dealing with the real world ramifications. IE isn't compliant by a long shot, but by being the most dominant browser, it has to be regarded as the standard to adhere to and the *real* standards applied second - you can shout all you want about how IE should be rendering correctly in the first place (and I'd agree) but it's *too late* - and pretendfing the market leader doesn't exist does not lead to desktop triumphs - just ask .
Oh, you can go force all sites to become compliant by developing for FF first, but by doing that you're ignoring backwards/ sideways compatibility - a situation Mozilla have cheerfully helped create, and suddenly Google are the new nasties for doing the same?
...after all, it's been 25 years. That's 25 years in which to come up with new ideas.
So where are we now?
I recently paid Steam £30 to play X3: Terran Conflict - a 3D space sim where you start with a basic ship, and have to trade/ fight/ pirate your way up the food chain..... .....oh.....
The C64 version was better, I'm afraid - the extra memory meant there were special missions and more ships :-)
I like the sound of that - you've convinced me, I'll give it a whirl!
Get real?
I was illustrating that this is a new technology that will fix a lot of the issues that have grown around RAID, not trying to sell new s/w.
Do let me know where in my article I was giving the impression that this was a sales pitch... ...although now you've pointed that out, I've realised that Firefox is less that two years old, and I've now hit the 100+ user mark for unprotected password lists. So I guess until they fix that for default installs, I'd better not use FF for at least 18 months :-)
Well I got it up and running (I do like FreeNAS, it allows me to set things up without having to delve too deeply into Unix/ Linux - however once I tried to copy a large (>5Tb) amount of data to it, not only did it crash and burn, but it wouldn't boot while the drives were still in place. Removing the sata cables to the drives allowed it to boot, but as a result any chance of recovery was gone - even rebuilding FreeNAS and recreating the drive pool didn't change anything.
This left me much more wary of using FreeNAS for ZFS/ ISCSI stuff - but I can't complain, as Freenas .7 is still in beta, so I guess that's the price for being bleeding edge :-)
I did consider using a heaver-duty unix OS, but I'm a windows engineer (the home setup is a 2003 domain) and spend more than enough time already fixing those, so I'm not mad keen on learning a new OS just for one purpose. Plus, I found that the alternative file systems to NTFS (UFS, etc.) are all very well, but I quickly ran into trouble in all sorts of ways - one silly example is the new Win7 libraries - unless the required drive/ dir is indexed, you can't add them (and the libraries, while just another implementation of the same thing, are very handy)...add to that FreeNAS keeping my domain account's password in a plain txt file (eeek), and it's sort of convinced me to wait until there's a decent offering for 2008 R2....
Yes, yes, I know it will be in time for 2020 :-)
I've managed to get this going, using the excellent FreeNAS - although proceed with caution, as only the beta build supports it, and I've already had serious (all data lost) crashes twice.
However the principle is sound, and I'm sure this will become standard before long - the only trouble being that HP, Dell and the like can't simply offer upgrades for existing RAID cards - due to the nature of ZFS, it needs a 'proper' CPU and a gig or two or RAM. Even so, it does protect against many of the problems now besetting RAID (which was never meant to handle modern, gargantuan disk sizes).
Bought this when it came out - and within two days sent Lucasfilm a rant in which I questioned how exciting it was supposed to be running across the Tattoine desert for hours at a time. In fact, I took the game back to the shop and got a refund (yes, this was back in the days when games were physically bought from shops).
As I recall, I also ranted about why Lucasfilm had replaced 'fun' with 'profit', and why they thought that would be attractive to players. Funnily enough, they ignored my email - but it seems that they finally figured it out for themselves, and closed the thing down rather that making something people actually wanted to use.
Are Lucasarts and Apple actually the same company? I'm seeing too many parallels for it to just be a coincidence :-)
I know when Slashdot is wrong - they mark me down as a troll for pointing it out :-)
It *was* a flop.
Apple managed to keep millions brain-dead about mp3's, VBR, lossless...all in the name of style.
Like they did with their computers, in fact.
And there you have it.
I put up a humourous comment, and get a score of 1: at least two others put up similarly humourous comments, and they all get 2.
Slashdot = desperatley pretending Linux/ FF aren't 10 years too late :-)
....or have slashdot never been wrong?
This is what I find strange -
Up until Vista, XP could *do no right* - the world and his wife slagged it off.
Then, suddenly, Vista comes out and XP transforms into the best OS since...well, anything. The same happened with NT, 2000 and XP - many 'experts' bleated about how the new OS/ AD/ etc. was pointless ('you can do it all with LDAP!' I remember a Linux 'expert' saying) and they'd be sticking with 98, thank you very much - seemingly assuming that MS and the rest of the world would follow their decision.
I'm also not just considering the huge corporates - many smaller sites will be rubbing their hands at the option of getting rid of the likes of PointSEC (encryption s/w) due to 7 having it built in.
XP was nice. But then, so was DOS. Drive-by viruses are not going to start avoiding XP out of nostalgia...and we haven't dealt with the whole 64-bit side of things yet (another reason to jump up to XP x64/ 7 x64).
And lurking behind all this is 2008 R2 - which will make going to Win7 a no-brainer. Unless, of course, MS suddenly bring out Direct Connect for 2003/ XP - but somehow, I doubt it :-)
But hey, I'm not working in the real world, right Slashdot? Mark me down as a troll again, I'm sure the whole world will be running Linux by next Tuesday.
In July, an article was posted claiming that no businesses are going to be moving to Windows 7.
I posted a comment pointing out that businesses have said this about the next version of Windows since 95 (excluding ME and Vista), complained that this wasn't really news and that Slashdot should stop recycling tabloid fodder. I got marked down for being a troll (my guess is that they're still trying to make Linux look like a desktop contender - good luck with that).
Oh, but look - here's an article point out that users *are* going to be moving to Windows 7. Just fancy that. Never saw that one coming.
No doubt Slashdot will moderate me down as a troll again - which is why I'm going to point out that I was trollified for saying so on every article they post about Windows 7 selling well - just so people are aware that on this site 'Troll' appears to mean 'non-Linux user' or 'someone that doesn't agree with us'.
And to think some claim that it's *microsoft* that are facists....
Heheheh he's absolutely correct.
However, considering that selling anything for more than it's actually worth (company costs included) is perfectly legal (even though it's basically a form of fraud), I'm not sure why they continually act so surprised that no-one else sees things the way they do :-)
But regardless, I will treat this as a UK MP would - if caught, I will then buy the product, not pay any fines, and insist that I have 'done nothing wrong' :-)
...for games and music that we *wouldn't have bought anyway*.
Remember folks, home taping is killing music.
....defrag, anyone?
....despite knowing that there were bugs in the game that made it impossible to complete.
Which may sound daft, but I wasn't alone.....which raises the question - in today's modern gaming world, when did *you* last like a game so much that you did the same?
...that this brings the demise of the dirty digger.
He is, after all, the proprietor of a rag that convinced a not-very-bright woman to try having eight babies at once in exchange for a million pounds. Every doctor in the world said don't do it, just have one or two or you'll lose all of them....but they (and the Sun) went ahead - even printing scans on the front page with headlines saying 'DOING FINE', as if the doctors were all idiots. And what about Piers Moron - so popular over here, he had to go to the U.S. (where no one knew him) to get any interviews - after all, there are only so many blackmail-based 'favours' you can pull in the U.K....
Well, guess what happened to the eight babies - she lost them all. So that's at least one child killed so that Murdoch could sell more newspapers. And that's just ONE story - there are many, many more (Private Eye - the ONLY news mag you need in the UK, is full of this stuff) - most recently, Amy Winehouses' junkie ex-husband - the Sun wanted him strung up for years....until last weeks' exclusive multi-day interview.
But let's ignore the fact that the Sun is staffed and edited by the utter scum-of-the-earth (or 'journalists' as they like to pretend) - the point of all this is that, even sinking to these depths, the circulation of the Sun, Times, et al has been going down for *decades* (hence they get more and more desperate in trying to scare you into buying tomorrows edition) - however, there's so much FREE information that buying a newspaper to read what happened 24 hours ago is laughable.
So I *dearly* hope that Murdope starts charging, I really really do - anything that hastens the death of News International (or anything Murdoch-owned, really) can't come fast enough.
As I recall, no sites had any plans to introduce 2000, as NT4 was 'quite adequate'.
Then it was XP, as 'no-one wants to buy new machines'.
The two hiccups - Windows ME (unsurprisingly), and Vista. And now here we are, with XP about to go (and more than showing it's age) - and somehow, managers not wanting to frighten chairmen with next years' costs has become a slashdot news article.
Which it would be, if I'd only been in the game for five years....please guys, you're supposed to be impressive, not tabloid-recyclers.
I thought Slashdot was a *news* site ;-)
Just remember folks - home taping is killing music. Honest.
Wasn't that the one where it was really designed for multiplayer (even though we were all on dial-up), but didn't actually tell you as much so that you'd buy the game anyways?
Or am I thinking of X-Wing? Or X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter?
Lucasarts would no doubt deny that this sort of behaviour did not, in any way, contribute to the modern piracy culture :-)
....or the Matrix, or Star Wars, etc. if they didn't have amazing visuals?
There will always be similar games and films that don't have the amazing effects, and still be entertaining - the point is, these are usually outnumbered by those that do - and by a large margin....