Lets just hope we get to keep our purchases on Impulse... I've bought a ton of games from there, but haven't been able to download and archive them all - since bandwidth isn't on the cheap here in South Africa. And sometimes when you do create an Impulse archive from an install it doesn't do it's job properly. It's actually better to just compress the directory yourself and simply "Detect Application" from the Impulse client. I worry about buying stuff and then losing it forever. Long live physical mediums!
Impulse -- Bloaty client? It has an offline installer that ranges in around the 20MB download range... As someone living in South Africa where the broadband is expensive and I rarely connect to the Internet - using Impulse is a dream compared to something like Steam - which from what I gather:
A) doesn't have an offline installer (correct me if I'm wrong here - I scoured their site for hours on Friday at work)
B) the offline installers I have found seem to be hacked together, and in the range of 700-800MB... (now that is bloat...)
Coupled that there is certain functionality that can only be done from within the Steam client (gifting), I'm very unimpressed with Steam. Oh, and that I have to create a separate account for Steam, then one for their forums, and then another one for their support - Stardock at least has it right and when I log in to Impulse Driven, it logs me in across ALL their sites, giving me access to Sins of a Solar Empire / Elemental / any other forum...
I'm a very happy Stardock customer (see you are too) and I just wonder how it's going to affect myself here in RSA.
The US doesn't have anything to contend with (or worry about really) in terms of broadband...
In SA our monopoly-provider, Telkom, advertises "blazing fast Internet" at a lowely 384kbps... And anything after that comes at an exorbitant price (don't forget we're capped here - so their "cheapest offering" only really includes 1GB international and I think around 10GB local-only). While there's a new wave of competition in the access-to-bandwidth arena (Telkom still charges around R70 a GB while you can get it from most other places at around R10-R25/GB) you really can see just how badly we're affected by it. Oh yeah, and we have to pay for an analog line - even if we're not going to actually connect it to a phone.
Interestingly enough, I've looked at one of our mobile providers, Cell C - and their HSDPA is actually fairly good priced when you factor in things. Its about time - really wish ICASA would get onto Telkom's case and regulate them further...
Its rather upsetting listening to the local news radio stations on how they're often catching the poachers... far too late. Every week there's a new story about them. *sigh*.
Ung, I for one thing this is a complete waste of time. Coming from a low-bandwidth high-cost for services country (South Africa), I can just see the fun that will ensue when my MP3 collection want' to update itself. Its not bad enough the amount of bandwidth I have to use on running application updates, but now having to update my MP3 collection too...
No thanks. Guess it's time to convert everything to ogg!
Weirdly enough, the only advertising I've seen is from online sources - and none of them from RSA. I kept seeing things like District 9 on Twitter and a couple other places, but in terms of advertising in side of South Africa itself... I think it's been pretty poorly advertised. *sigh*. Oh well, at least now people won't think we have lions wandering the streets, and that we have electricity and running water and all those other things that the rest of the world rarely considers us having...
I for one, welcome faster Internet. Here in South Africa we're lagging so far behind the rest of the planet, its quite rediculous. I hear from my friends overseas that they're being upgraded to 50mb/s lines - usually for free as a part of their service provider upgrading their infrastructure - we're still struggling on under 1mb/s lines - and at a price that is so high (when you look at the cost of the service and the availability of income - the Internet isn't something that is cheap). Heck, even if you look at the price overseas and factor in the exchange rate, its still cheaper to access the Internet oversea's than it is here (and you get far more for your money's worth).
*sigh*. If only our Government wasn't so corrupt and inefficient, maybe we wouldn't be so far behind the rest of the world.
A while ago (when I won my EEE PC) I slipstreamed a cut down version of Windows XP onto it. The boot time, while not as impressive as indicated in the article was not bad at all...
Article (includes YouTube video taken from my mobile phone).
OK: so not so much article related... but anyways.
I'm surprised this is only hitting Slashdot now. It was on Lifehacker yesterday! What's happening with Slashdot these days - I've always relied on it to keep me informed of technology and interesting news before anywhere else...
Firefox 3 runs terribly across two of my Windows XP machines - I've had it consume more than 500MB of RAM with one tab open (course I had just closed some tabs that were open) - apparently it doesn't release memory so well after you close a tab?
Anyways, I've moved away from using FF and back to Internet Explorer...
A little late on the comment band-wagon, but I completely agree. One of my friends is a super-programmer that has had no formal qualification in programming, and has no books in his house on programming either. But he's pretty much proficient in C++ / Delphi / Java / ASM and has helped me a couple of times when I was a newbie to programming and teaching myself PHP.
Looking back on my own experiences, it was only through trial and error that I became a better, if not good programmer. Now that I'm actually lecturing programming to various levels, am I becoming even more aware of the "better" ways of programming - and the more advanced technologies at our disposal to make use of. As a developer, I used to always worry that my code wasn't "up to scratch", because while it worked, I was just scared that it didn't work in the right way. Now that I'm more familiar with a variety of languages, I feel more confident with my ability to program, and am prepared to use more advanced techniques in my programming because I better understand what's going on at a low level.
Going through 4 years of varsity was a bore: I bunked lectures and spent a fair portion of my life in an alcoholic haze. The subjects, even the advanced ones, where easy to do, even when drunk. While the degree wasn't necessarily a waste of time, I find that lecturers have to slow down and hold back on the advancement of the whole class when people don't understand a topic or an idea related to programming.
Here in South Africa I find it especially bad - I've lectured a couple of classes where third year students don't understand the basic principles of an array or object - things that are meant to be (and I'm currently teaching) to first year students... So obviously there is some lack of effort (and a lot of cheating) that goes on...
I simply love the way that the titles of some articles on/. are so vague and misleading from when you read the actual summary or article. I still love IE 7 compared to Firefox (although I do use FF portable sometimes). And with IE 8 on the way (they have a blog somewhere, Google it) looks like Microsoft is going to be heating up the competition (the way it should be. Competition drives innovation)
The roleplaying game Trinity [formerly Aeon Trinity] had different agents that could perform all kinds of actions for you. Intelligent Agents that are basically mobile agents - moving from one computing system to the next gathering the information you required. It wasn't an instantaneous way to get information (depending on how you played the game of course).
Having said that, I think this kind of technology could be really cool. Especially in terms of Research - Imagine where you could simply tell your intelligent agent "I want information on [insert subject field here]" and after a couple of hours of searching online, it comes back with the results. It need not require an advanced AI (although it would surely need some form of intelligence), but the options are limitless. Especially when you start looking at technologies like XML and the semantic-web.
When thinking of potential domain names, I usually use the inurl: function in Google. I generally only use part of the name too - that way you're able to see all the potential variations of the domain name you're thinking of working with (and possibly giving you some inspiration too)...
I think a lot of you have lost the plot - the cause of this imbalance doesn't appear to be from "natural" influence in the world - it primarily appears to be because of human interference that the world (not just in the oceans) is dying. So many of you are so content to say, "well it's evolution / de-evolution", but it's us that have caused these actions to occur. Us polluting water supplies, killing off wildlife, destroying the forests, I'm not surprised the world retaliates against us the way it does (earth quakes, tsunami's, hurricanes). Shifting the blame or the cause or the problems to "survival of the fittest" isn't a solution. It's an escape goat, meant to make us feel "better" about all the harm we're causing to the world. We're all so narrow minded and think we rule the world, when in reality we don't. Think to H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds", what was the minor oversight of the aliens? And while some people have compassion in the world, which I've seen firsthand, but others want nothing more than the capitalistic / economic gain they can achieve by destroying lesser species that aren't as developed as us. At one point we were as weak and vulnerable as they were, we didn't always have the technology we had today. Surely these species require some assistance rather than hindrance? Are we not stunting their own evolution by constantly interfering in their daily lives? Eventually something is going to develop to the point where there is an advanced form of intelligence, and I don't think they're going to be very happy with us...
Slashdot Mirror
For the comments - they are usually far more insightful and interesting than the actual stories...
Oh, and did you see the quality of writing in the article? Wow. So. Bad.
Lets just hope we get to keep our purchases on Impulse... I've bought a ton of games from there, but haven't been able to download and archive them all - since bandwidth isn't on the cheap here in South Africa. And sometimes when you do create an Impulse archive from an install it doesn't do it's job properly. It's actually better to just compress the directory yourself and simply "Detect Application" from the Impulse client. I worry about buying stuff and then losing it forever. Long live physical mediums!
Impulse -- Bloaty client? It has an offline installer that ranges in around the 20MB download range... As someone living in South Africa where the broadband is expensive and I rarely connect to the Internet - using Impulse is a dream compared to something like Steam - which from what I gather: A) doesn't have an offline installer (correct me if I'm wrong here - I scoured their site for hours on Friday at work) B) the offline installers I have found seem to be hacked together, and in the range of 700-800MB... (now that is bloat...) Coupled that there is certain functionality that can only be done from within the Steam client (gifting), I'm very unimpressed with Steam. Oh, and that I have to create a separate account for Steam, then one for their forums, and then another one for their support - Stardock at least has it right and when I log in to Impulse Driven, it logs me in across ALL their sites, giving me access to Sins of a Solar Empire / Elemental / any other forum... I'm a very happy Stardock customer (see you are too) and I just wonder how it's going to affect myself here in RSA.
The US doesn't have anything to contend with (or worry about really) in terms of broadband... In SA our monopoly-provider, Telkom, advertises "blazing fast Internet" at a lowely 384kbps... And anything after that comes at an exorbitant price (don't forget we're capped here - so their "cheapest offering" only really includes 1GB international and I think around 10GB local-only). While there's a new wave of competition in the access-to-bandwidth arena (Telkom still charges around R70 a GB while you can get it from most other places at around R10-R25 /GB) you really can see just how badly we're affected by it. Oh yeah, and we have to pay for an analog line - even if we're not going to actually connect it to a phone.
Interestingly enough, I've looked at one of our mobile providers, Cell C - and their HSDPA is actually fairly good priced when you factor in things. Its about time - really wish ICASA would get onto Telkom's case and regulate them further...
Its rather upsetting listening to the local news radio stations on how they're often catching the poachers... far too late. Every week there's a new story about them. *sigh*.
Ung, I for one thing this is a complete waste of time. Coming from a low-bandwidth high-cost for services country (South Africa), I can just see the fun that will ensue when my MP3 collection want' to update itself. Its not bad enough the amount of bandwidth I have to use on running application updates, but now having to update my MP3 collection too... No thanks. Guess it's time to convert everything to ogg!
Surely the firewalls and censorship that happens in China kind of defeats the purpose of faster connections between the Far East and the USA?
Weirdly enough, the only advertising I've seen is from online sources - and none of them from RSA. I kept seeing things like District 9 on Twitter and a couple other places, but in terms of advertising in side of South Africa itself... I think it's been pretty poorly advertised. *sigh*. Oh well, at least now people won't think we have lions wandering the streets, and that we have electricity and running water and all those other things that the rest of the world rarely considers us having...
I for one, welcome faster Internet. Here in South Africa we're lagging so far behind the rest of the planet, its quite rediculous. I hear from my friends overseas that they're being upgraded to 50mb/s lines - usually for free as a part of their service provider upgrading their infrastructure - we're still struggling on under 1mb/s lines - and at a price that is so high (when you look at the cost of the service and the availability of income - the Internet isn't something that is cheap). Heck, even if you look at the price overseas and factor in the exchange rate, its still cheaper to access the Internet oversea's than it is here (and you get far more for your money's worth). *sigh*. If only our Government wasn't so corrupt and inefficient, maybe we wouldn't be so far behind the rest of the world.
is that a name of the new Duke Nukem game?
Article (includes YouTube video taken from my mobile phone).
OK: so not so much article related... but anyways.
I'm surprised this is only hitting Slashdot now. It was on Lifehacker yesterday! What's happening with Slashdot these days - I've always relied on it to keep me informed of technology and interesting news before anywhere else...
Firefox 3 runs terribly across two of my Windows XP machines - I've had it consume more than 500MB of RAM with one tab open (course I had just closed some tabs that were open) - apparently it doesn't release memory so well after you close a tab? Anyways, I've moved away from using FF and back to Internet Explorer...
A little late on the comment band-wagon, but I completely agree. One of my friends is a super-programmer that has had no formal qualification in programming, and has no books in his house on programming either. But he's pretty much proficient in C++ / Delphi / Java / ASM and has helped me a couple of times when I was a newbie to programming and teaching myself PHP. Looking back on my own experiences, it was only through trial and error that I became a better, if not good programmer. Now that I'm actually lecturing programming to various levels, am I becoming even more aware of the "better" ways of programming - and the more advanced technologies at our disposal to make use of. As a developer, I used to always worry that my code wasn't "up to scratch", because while it worked, I was just scared that it didn't work in the right way. Now that I'm more familiar with a variety of languages, I feel more confident with my ability to program, and am prepared to use more advanced techniques in my programming because I better understand what's going on at a low level. Going through 4 years of varsity was a bore: I bunked lectures and spent a fair portion of my life in an alcoholic haze. The subjects, even the advanced ones, where easy to do, even when drunk. While the degree wasn't necessarily a waste of time, I find that lecturers have to slow down and hold back on the advancement of the whole class when people don't understand a topic or an idea related to programming. Here in South Africa I find it especially bad - I've lectured a couple of classes where third year students don't understand the basic principles of an array or object - things that are meant to be (and I'm currently teaching) to first year students... So obviously there is some lack of effort (and a lot of cheating) that goes on...
I simply love the way that the titles of some articles on /. are so vague and misleading from when you read the actual summary or article. I still love IE 7 compared to Firefox (although I do use FF portable sometimes). And with IE 8 on the way (they have a blog somewhere, Google it) looks like Microsoft is going to be heating up the competition (the way it should be. Competition drives innovation)
I'm sorry to say, but really, who cares?
The roleplaying game Trinity [formerly Aeon Trinity] had different agents that could perform all kinds of actions for you. Intelligent Agents that are basically mobile agents - moving from one computing system to the next gathering the information you required. It wasn't an instantaneous way to get information (depending on how you played the game of course). Having said that, I think this kind of technology could be really cool. Especially in terms of Research - Imagine where you could simply tell your intelligent agent "I want information on [insert subject field here]" and after a couple of hours of searching online, it comes back with the results. It need not require an advanced AI (although it would surely need some form of intelligence), but the options are limitless. Especially when you start looking at technologies like XML and the semantic-web.
When thinking of potential domain names, I usually use the inurl: function in Google. I generally only use part of the name too - that way you're able to see all the potential variations of the domain name you're thinking of working with (and possibly giving you some inspiration too)...
You forgot step seven... PROFIT!!!
I think a lot of you have lost the plot - the cause of this imbalance doesn't appear to be from "natural" influence in the world - it primarily appears to be because of human interference that the world (not just in the oceans) is dying. So many of you are so content to say, "well it's evolution / de-evolution", but it's us that have caused these actions to occur. Us polluting water supplies, killing off wildlife, destroying the forests, I'm not surprised the world retaliates against us the way it does (earth quakes, tsunami's, hurricanes). Shifting the blame or the cause or the problems to "survival of the fittest" isn't a solution. It's an escape goat, meant to make us feel "better" about all the harm we're causing to the world. We're all so narrow minded and think we rule the world, when in reality we don't. Think to H. G. Wells' "War of the Worlds", what was the minor oversight of the aliens? And while some people have compassion in the world, which I've seen firsthand, but others want nothing more than the capitalistic / economic gain they can achieve by destroying lesser species that aren't as developed as us. At one point we were as weak and vulnerable as they were, we didn't always have the technology we had today. Surely these species require some assistance rather than hindrance? Are we not stunting their own evolution by constantly interfering in their daily lives? Eventually something is going to develop to the point where there is an advanced form of intelligence, and I don't think they're going to be very happy with us...