Comment Re:Here's a thought... (Score 1) 332
RIght -- San Jose didn't have cable modems for
I suffered on dial-up, ISDN and Metricom wireless modems while my friends had megabit plus.
Comment Hell yes (Score 1) 279
A big, sarcastic "Thank you, Mr. Helms," is what I said when I walked out on the worst teacher I ever had. I ditched his useless 7th grade math class in the middle of a quiz, went to the school library and started reading about real math, at my own pace.
I know you're not out there, Mr. Helms, but thank you for being enough of a loser and a jerk and a world-class bore that I finally got fed up and started learning math on my own, without teachers to hold me back.
(That school eventually threw me out; another really good thing. Honestly, being a reject of the US "cookie cutter" school system is not necessarily bad).
Comment Turn into a parody (Score 1) 268
Turn the new one into a parody; the lemmings are now Lawyers, Protected speech. Done.
Can You Fight DRM With Patience? 309
As modern DRM schemes get more annoying and invasive, the common wisdom is to vote with your wallet and avoid supporting developers and publishers who include such schemes with their games. Or, if you simply must play it, wait a while until outcry and complaints have caused the DRM restrictions to be loosened. But will any of that make game creators rethink their stance? An article at CNet argues that gamers are, in general, an impatient bunch, and that trait combined with the nature of the games industry means that progress fighting DRM will be slow or nonexistent. Quoting:
"Increasingly so, the joke seems to be on the customers who end up buying this software when it first comes out. A simple look back at some controversial titles has shown us that after the initial sales come, the publisher later removes the vast majority of the DRM, leaving gamers to enjoy the software with fewer restrictions. ... Still, [waiting until later to purchase the game] isn't a good long-term solution. Early sales are often one of the big quantifiers in whether a studio will start working on a sequel, and if everyone were to wait to buy games once they hit the bargain price, publishers would simply stop making PC versions. There's also no promise that the really heavy bits of DRM will be stripped out at a later date, except for the fact that most publishers are unlikely to want to maintain the cost of running the activation, and/or online verification servers for older software."
Comment Re:Hmm.. (Score 2, Funny) 155
"Markedly unstable" =
That'd be fantastic.
Comment Gosh... (Score 1) 295
Gosh, I would have thought that the Baby Roasting and Bayonetting business would have shown up more clearly.
Whatever Happened To Second Life? 209
Barence writes "It's desolate, dirty, and sex is outcast to a separate island. In this article, PC Pro's Barry Collins returns to Second Life to find out what went wrong, and why it's raking in more cash than ever before. It's a follow-up to a feature written three years ago, in which Collins spent a week living inside Second Life to see what the huge fuss at the time was all about. The difference three years can make is eye-opening."
An Inside Look At Warhammer Online's Server Setup 71
An article at Gamasutra provides some details on the hardware Mythic uses to power Warhammer Online, courtesy of Chief Technical Officer Matt Shaw and Online Technical Director Andrew Mann. Quoting:
"At any given time, approximately 2,000 servers are in operation, supporting the gameplay in WAR. Matt Shaw commented, 'What we call a server to the user, that main server is actually a cluster of a number of machines. Our Server Farm in Virginia, for example,' Mann said, 'has about 60 Dell Blade chassis running Warhammer Online — each hosting up to 16 servers. All in all, we have about 700 servers in operation at this location.' ... 'We use blade architecture heavily for Warhammer Online,' Mann noted. 'Almost every server that we deploy is a blade system. We don't use virtualization; our software is somewhat virtualized itself. We've always had the technology to run our game world across several pieces of hardware. It's application-layer clustering at a process level. Virtualization wouldn't gain us much because we already run very close to peak CPU usage on these systems.' ... The normalized server configuration — in use across all of the Mythic-managed facilities — features dual Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors running at 3 GHz with 8 GB of RAM."
Comment Could be taken too far (Score 1) 837
The red shirts, okay. The fake nose and clown shoes, no way.
Mozilla Thunderbird 3 Released 272
supersloshy writes Today Mozilla released Thunderbird 3.
Many new features are available, including Tabs and enhanced search features, a message archive for emails you don't want to delete but still want to keep, Firefox 3's improved Add-ons Manager, Personas support, and many other improvements. Download here."
Herschel Spectroscopy of Future Supernova 21
davecl writes "ESA's Herschel Space Telescope has released its first spectroscopic results. These include observations of VYCMa, a star 50 times as massive as the sun and soon to become a supernova, as well as a nearby galaxy, more distant colliding starburst galaxies and a comet in our own solar system. The spectra show more lines than have ever been seen in these objects in the far-infrared and will allow astronomers to work out the detailed chemistry and physics behind star and planet formation as well as the last stages of stellar evolution before VYCMa's eventual collapse into a supernova. More coverage is available at the Herschel Mission Blog, which I run."
Comment Re:Different Audiences? (Score 1) 399
> That in itself would be the main reason I would never own a console these days.
Let's see: Locked down ecosystem = no viruses or malware to worry about, pretty effective banning system for people who do manage to hack their consoles and do Bad Stuff to other people, decent quality bar for games, hardware that I basically don't have to worry about (short of sending it back to the manufacturer if it breaks -- yeah, I had a RROD; the world didn't end, a week later I had a better console).
I'm happy to pay for that.
And hey, it's not like someone said "You can have a PC, or a console, but not both." Sheesh, get some perspective.
Comment WHS (Score 1) 611
Not popular on Slashdot, but I'm very happy with Windows Home Server. We've got a bunch of Windows machines around, and it images everything automatically. I do manual backups of important stuff (e.g., vacation pictures, mail archives) on DVD and thumb drives, and do a total clone of the WHS backup directory every two months (it's less than a terabyte, and fits comfortably on a cheap HD).
The Linux boxes just have source code, so a git push to a Windows box suffices there.
Backups are stored both off-site and in a local fire safe.
Comment I'd like to see nicknames (Score 4, Funny) 671
I'd like to see nicknames, like:
Bellicose Bill
or
Ballistic Ballmer
or
Screamin' Steven
rather than boorrrrring build numbers.
Just sayin'.
Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 598
About seven years ago I went from full-time Java programming to full-time
And after a month or so of being uncomfortable, there came a day when I thought to myself, "Oh thank God, the nightmare is over."
Real async I/O (not faking it by handwaving and mumbling "Well, do that with threads."). A wonderful native code interop story. An IDE that just worked. The ability to do user interfaces that didn't utterly suck and didn't look like they were designed by a misanthropic X-Windows hacker. Oh, it wasn't perfect, but I was spending most of my time writing code and actaully having fun, instead of wading through screwed-up configuration files and figuring out WTF was wrong with the JIT -vs- non-JIT environment.
Say what you want, but the day I left Java behind, I was quite happy.
