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Best game on the amiga was Ralph Reed's BattleMech 8) If I try to upgrade that old box and it stops playing the game, it goes retro PDQ.

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No worse than when our local cable provider used one for scrolling program schedules, messages, etc. and it got hung for a whole weekend, with the red Guru box blinking.

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Ok, sounds good, but I've had an Amiga since they've first been available. With the departure of Michael Cowpland from Corel, I'm not sure how solid the ground is yet for Amiga Linux support from those quarters.

Could be I just got very cynical from all the commitements from vendors who never held up their end. Granted, some of that was probably due in large to Commodore's old marketing strategy: "Ready, Fire, Aim!"

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Neil Simon, maybe?

Aw, shucks, too bad Matthau is gone, he and Lemmon would have made a killer team for "Batman IV: Grumpier Old Ubermensches"

I could just hear Walter say, "Why do I still wear this cape? Because I'd look like hell in these tights without it, that's why!"

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I've known a number of people who would approach me at work with, "You'll think I'm stupid, but..." or "You'll think this is easy, but..." I never had a problem with anyone who asked for help before something became a crisis (which would require me to be working late on a Friday night.)

What blew me away was how quickly these people assumed they knew all there was about system migrations, what were reasonable expectations of highly accelerated project schedules and how utterly lazy those programmers were who drag themselves in at 9:30 am and why they couldn't show up when everyone else did at 8 am (of course, not everyone else had been in the shop until 2 am)

A useful new title could be: How to Tell When it's Time to Switch Jobs for Dummies

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Authors were NullSoft. Interesting only if AOL had a hand in saying, "You there! Tiny subsidiary of peons! Make this thing and publish it! We shall harm the RIAA with it! If we can get the music industry of CD's then there will be more for us to send out in junkmail!"

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MP3Board lawyers say, "Duam xnaht foobie bletch tharr." Translation: "Because they are big and huge and rich and we want money." I banged my head on the wall at the thought of Warner, which has an enormous music catalog of its own (and subsidiaries), merging with a company who (allegedly) helps water down their profits by assisting music pirates. Though I left a large red mark on the wall and a few small cracks, AOL nor Warner responded with any comments.

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Best Perl book I found was the O'Reilly one by Randal Shwartz, pretty good and kinda fun to read. I went from scratch to writing a small search cgi in 1.5 weeks. Seems like the book did the job, can't argue with that.

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Fine, you said it. It's true, too.

We're all dummies in our own ways. I could probably use House Cleaning for Dummies or something like that, since I'm a terrible slob. See my URL for an explanation.

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For time away from the keyboard: Homebrewing for Dummies ;-)

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Linux for Natalie Portman

Linux for Evil Geniuses

Linux for the Expecting Mother

Linux for Children

Linux for People Who Can't Read

Linux for Executives

Linux for Morons

Linux for Miscreants

Linux for Bloated Sacks of Proto Plasm

Linux for People So Stupid They Don't Deserve to Live

and lastly

Linux for Packs of Dobermans Clamped Onto Lawyers

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Cube: Monosyllabic, easy to say, easy to remember

N is for Nintendo, which is Japanese for box on the carpet into which you continually shovel money.

You'd prefer Duodecahedron? Yeah, cool name, but harder to stack.

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5) It's DVD based (but it won't play DVD-movies). Rather, it utilizes proprietary mini-DVDs that can be manufactured cheaply and efficiently

3) It's going to be cheap. Nintendo's next-generation console will retail between $150-200 -- $100 cheaper (minimum) than PlayStation

The ultimate democracy is dollar votes. Just like those used for elections they are held by the wise and unwise alike. Each dollar you spend on crappy tech is one less for good tech.

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It just seems like something that sounds cool, but may not be all that practical in the real world.

Boy, you sure are naive. Don't you realize they could replace bomb and drug sniffing dogs with these at airports and cause further delays?

Oh, wait, maybe you're a passenger.

Uh, nevermind. I deny everything!

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Yeah, this was yesterdays news. And you have to be registered and have a backround check by the usual parties. And its all such pitiful stuff you'd have to be an Iraqi tyrant with labs, engineers and the UN not breathing down your neck. Besides, no matter that the buyers identities are private, you can bet the Energy Department knows who is on the invoces.

I was in Prague, the Czech Republic, years ago when some character was busted with a trunk full of high grade uranium. You don't exactly read about this happening in Cleveland, but it's pretty alarming how much from former Soviet stores is still unaccounted for.

Hmm... maybe they left it behind the photo copier...

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The bad side of IBM's new and fast IDE hard drives is their comparably high price. While the 15, 30 and 45 GByte models are still reasonably priced, the models with 60 and 75 GBytes cost $300 and 540$.

The Smoking Banana

Whether Intel engineers took the high road or the low road when it comes to branch prediction and related technology remains to be seen, but Digital made creative use of a previously published account of Intel's approach to technology. Mr. Palmer quoted a passage from the Corporate Focus feature in the August 26, 1996 Wall Street Journal. In the article, entitled "Intel Shifts Its Focus To Long-Term Original Research," Intel COO Craig Barrett is quoted as saying, "Now that we're at the head of the class and there's nothing left to copy." Said CEO Andy Grove, "We're a big banana now... we can't rely on others to do our research and development for us."

Yeah, I'll believe it when I try it out and not just for 5 minutes while the Salesman-From-Hell belches out all it's virtues instead of being swept away by an extremely localized hurricane.

A couple years ago I had the pleasure of using a Gyromouse and it absolutely rocked. I'll get another one as soon as I ditch my laptop for a desktop system. The true beauty wasn't just the wireless operation, but that I could click with my thumb. Thumb is much stronger and reaction time seems shorter, probably due to shorter arc length of rotation (i.e. pressing button on 2" digit instead of 3") Fatigue from clicking usually never set in, even after hours of surfing or game play.

Maybe Gyration and Logitech could get together and make a true gyro with resistance, etc.

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I gained a large degree of respect for German programmers, back when I downloaded demos for my Amiga. Certainly a few figured out how everything worked and then did some pretty amazing things. Assuming the same level of enthusiasms graduated to Operating Systems, I'd not be surprised.

Another factor may simply be price. Buy Windows for a premium (prices are considerably higher for pretty much everything in Europe) or dl Linux for free and dig in.

Necessity can be quite a mother...

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Perhaps those extremely clever chaps stumbled onto the old hack which played music on the disc drive. I'm sure that's part of it:

SetKey Am
SetKey G
etc..

Then again it could be these are for flashing subliminal messages. I'm not sure if this is possible. Strange how every time I come to work and stare at this Trinitron monitor I have the greatest urge to buy another Walkman, to go with the other 587...

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Whose tech sharing with DEC resulted in Intel employing such Alpha features as Branch Prediction without license and a 12 count complaint filed against Intel. All very interesting stuff.

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As I line up my next system, with a 19" monitor, I ponder not only why someone would port these games to a tiny screen, but why? How long can one play something like this before serious eyestrain sets in?

Next hazard to driving: People who can barely focus on the road after bugging their eyes out, playing Doom for 2 hours.

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With this in the news, soon on its heals should be a class action complaint agains Pacific Bell. They continue to advertise, but delays are commonly 2 months before it's up and running. Often they can't deliver the speed (because they don't tell you up front you have to be close to a switch or something.) And often screw up peoples computers.

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User testing drops off

Code reviews stop

Customer service & marketing start blaming the IS dept for bugs

Someone in one or both of these areas start to say this, inadvertently, or (worse) consciously, to customers.

Company loses business as customers lose faith in ability to deliver.

Although the blame ends up on the IS dept. the whole company suffers, especially since word of mouth is the key to success and distress. It's that old quality thing, its the first thing to go.


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An effective illustration of how deadly kinetic energy weapons can be in space is in the film Outland (w/Sean Connery) Nope, not that impressed by lasers after seeing that.

Lasers better for blasting something a long way off, as the velocity of a bullet would take some time to get there.

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Yeah, I'll rise up, I'll rise up and get me a multiprocessor mobo and then I'll get that 2.4 kernel with SMP and I'll rule with world with the great taste of fish...

"CUT!"

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Yeah, it's friday, cut em some slack.

I guess some of us have more time than we know what to do with. This is on top of programming 12 hours a day, browsing the web for 6 hours and drinking coffee for 3 hours each day :)

Other 3 hours are for taking a pee and sleeping, but hopefully not both at the same time!

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Look at the amazingly detailed model of the Space Needle they made.

Yeah, impressive...

Now how about some real competition we all can get in on, building stuff out of AOL CD's.

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Oh, yeah! Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

Sorry...

I'd rather have a play house made of these, but always thought the structural integrity was somewhat lacking in these larger builds. Do they get to file or make any adjustments?

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An excellent and thoughtful post, Vulgrin. Thanks.

Something I'd like to add, is the cyclical nature of the appeal of games.

The first real game platform was the Apple ][, which saw meteoric rise in popularity to play color games. After a glut the popularity waned and pundits were declaring computer gaming dead. Then came the Atari 2600, an inferior piece of hardware, but much cheaper than the $1,500 price tag of an Apple or CGI equiped PC. Another meteoric rise and decline, culminating in 9 million ET cartridges in a southern California landfill. Again, games were declared dead.

Enter the NES. Wildly popular it brought quality arcade games into the home and demonstrated, probably for the first time effectively, that people would shell out up to $60 for a game cartridge.

Since then the game market has been fairly strong, as Sony, Sega, Nintendo and PC's have rapidly evolved to present bigger and better games, finally achieving networked games (until then you played NSnipes at work ;-).

Card games and Harry Potter have siezed the imaginations where games are now failing, but there's always another generation. Probably ushered in by the likes of GarageGames and people, like me, who get bored and decide to finally put an old idea to code.

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I grew up with Apple ][ games (I still have miniposters for a few!), so have followed game genres from character based (nethack, larn), text based (Dungeon, Adventure), puzzle solving, simulation, arcade, action, and so on for pretty much the gammet of hardware between the 70's and present.

Something which should be obvious is the excessive number of variations on StreetFighter-like, sports, racing and 3D shoot-em-ups. Ultimately these things have pretty much been beaten to death, which probably explains the rise in popularity of card games.

I'm so bored of these things, I'm going back and digging up old games and playing them again, because ... they were actually fun and still are. I can think of a few games I'd really love to see (and would certainly pay good money for) come out for my PC or Linux workstation or PDA, etc. Sadly, when game companies did bring a few great games over to PC's, years back, they utterly ruined them by putting too much extra crap in them for some II, III, etc.

IMHO it's certainly time for game companies to take a deep breath, sit back with a brew and think about what really is fun and how to put it into a game. Perhaps some inspiration could come from old Atari 2600, C64, Apple ][ games. Until then I'll have to resort to emulators and abandoneware and keep coaxing my tired old Quantum drive to spin up one more time on my old Amiga.

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Hear! Hear!

I've played, off and on, the same MUD for 10 years. Don't anyone ever try to tell you that text muds can't be addicting. There are a number of other players and immortals who have been around for almost as long.

I've contributed quite a bit of code, the one thing which keeps a MUD fresh and exciting. I don't think I'd care much for 3D MUDS, as I've played a few 3D games and can say that they're not everyone's cup of tea. Imagination fills in the gap between text and visual.

Possibly one decline in MUDS is fewer servers available to run them on. I recall one actually running on the back DNS of a large bank. I bet the directors would have dumped core if they ever found that out.

MUDS are highly appealing to international players, as well, we have a number of russian, german and spanish players, among others. Just because commercial games don't make it is no reason to assume something free is dying as well. Administration is the key. Many MUDS have had corrupt or uncaring admins, which drive players away. In the case of Ultima Online, my nephew gave up because people kept killing his character and he couldn't get anywhere. Another problem, seriously, is balance. What goes around needs to come around.


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Yeah, I can just see this...

Someone hacks the server and the guard guns people down.

Plausable deniability, anyone?

Even without such a gaff, consider more than one person having access. Traceable? Hmm, lots of potential problems here.

Best leave it to the game warden ... and his ... Robo Carp.

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Hah, good try, better get over to www.natalieportman.com before you make that mistake again.

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Well, that's an informative article. Basically, their kinda planning, sorta smelling some money, but really-really busy, so don't expect them to even start hammering something out until Matt and the writers get a break, like late winter.

The Simpsons CD kinda sucked, the best track being Do The Bartman was funny about 3 times then got old. I hope they can line up some decent music for the film, as Matt seems prone to tossing a tune here and there. Songs from the TV show are usually much better, so there's hope.

It's got a ways to go to outdo SP:BLU

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"Sweet Jar Jar, I shall avenge your death!"

:)

(Slightly on topic)

Well, why they heck not, Mel Brooks did a pretty decent send up with "Spaceballs", why not combine Python and E1...

Megapode 1: The Python Menace

nah, yer right, it's too obscure...

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Something I left out, but intended to include in there was the incident with a paint chip cutting into the window of the space shuttle was a few months after the conversation. The point being these things, depending upon altitude and mass are moving at various, and no doubt very high, velocities. Ergo that coconut in the pacific actually covers a lot of ground, is a short amount of time. Not to overlook any extraterrestrial debris, which may be accelerating toward earth.

If there's one thing we should learn from statistics it's that if it can happen, no matter how small the probability, eventually it will.

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Probably one of those nosy 00x agents told them.

Then again, it's probably not as exciting to the US press as say, a nice car wreck.

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10+ years ago, I was in a chat room on GeNIE (remember them?:) with a Q/A session with Byte columnist/SciFi author Jerry Pournelle. Over the years Jerry has hobnobbed with people at NASA and been an advisor of sorts in Washington on things scienterrifical.

The Q/A session revolved around the viability of putting up a large space station, like the one in Moonraker. I had read some artical about NASA having a catalog of 8,000+ items (including an electric screwdriver) floating in orbit. When my turn came I asked Jerry if he didn't consider it hazardous to plop something in the way of all these missiles.

Jerry dismissed my concern with an analogy of the danger presented to a rowboat in the Pacific by a coconut. He didn't seem to consider that that coconut would be moving fast enough to reduce the rowboat to splinters, should they meet. I voiced my concern that he was an idiot to another conference attendee, she turned out to be Mrs. Pournelle.

At the expense of a few billion bucks by NASA I feel somewhat vindicated now.

Now all I want to know is, can this thing pop a HUGE Jiffy Pop if I put it in someone's living room...

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You seem not to grasp the purpose of going public. Perhaps they have already tapped about all the private capital they can and now need to go public to raise more which would allow them to continue to function, distribute, etc. It's much trickier now than it was last year (before tech investors opened their eyes), but Transmeta does have one thing going, a viable product with OEMs lining up. A good sign.

Pre IPO doesn't hold the romantic vision of instant wealth it once did, now filings for IPO meet a critical eye. Which can be a good thing, as smarter investors are less likely to turn tail and run when the rest of the market hiccups.

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Most likely, they'd be held up to Open Source developement, which would reveal who really innovates.


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Two things:

Episode 2: Duh, of course. You were expecting Episode 1.01 Rev A?

The Rise of the Empire Duh, again.

You were maybe expecting:

The Empire That Sank Into The Swamp. So, They Built A Second One. That Sank Into The Swamp. So They Built A Third One. That Burned Down, Fell Over, Then Sank Into The Swamp. But The Fourth One Stayed Up. An' That's What Your Gonna Get, Palpatine -- The Strongest Empire In The Universe.

I dunno.. I kinda think it's been done before. Also, it'll be a bitch to get on the marquee.

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Our hero clicks on the DRI Project page and breaks into a sweat.

Just what I've been looking for! Oh, yeah! Thanks for posting!

Good-bye free time, hello carpal tunnel.

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I see the auction on ebay is now purged.

I'd sell my vote, but then I'd have to kill the buyer.

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Geez, so many posters here seem to be overlooking Word for Mac. Not like Apple is any threat to M$, this just strengthens their hand.

The ultimate question is: Would they toss it into OPEN SOURCE? Probably not, but that's what stands between it, as it is now, and a truly great product.

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most annoying commercials

Um.. don't know if I've seen them, I watch so little TV. Someone had some awful tech-vest commercials a while, back, no networking or anything fun like that. Just the kinds of vests the rural kids wore (probably because their fathers hunted in similar), remember blue jeans, before being fashionable were the clothing of laborers.

I guess this would make sense along that last thought, the Levis Techno-Jackets look like Airport Groundcrew outfits, how better to impress your friends than to look like a baggage handler?

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Pentium boxes were available

We could dl RH6.2

Programmers could perform administration

Our NT admins were already overwhelmed with NT problems

Here's a question to put to anyone with extensive background in both: What's the learning curve for each? IMHO Linux is faster on the uptake.

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What? You don't want to take 17 in the evening? Note: Delete would be a nice feature

What's wrong with you?

I live in Capitola, but work up near Milpitas, so I'm doing 17 all week. Problem is getting time away from work. I'll be there next year tho, count on it.

CES can't possibly be as eye popping, although I did get to see Evil Bill threaten half the audience with a keynote on technology, summed up in these words, "We will replace all your standards with our own, all your products with those of our partners and bury you."

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What? You don't want to take 17 in the evening? What's wrong with you?

I live in Capitola, but work up near Milpitas, so I'm doing 17 all week. Problem is getting time away from work. I'll be there next year tho, count on it.

CES can't possibly be as eye popping.

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