Slashdot Mirror

Head trauma

If you haven't I would recommend the game that the Marines use. Operating Flashpoint and Armed Assault are more simulator than FPS.

IMO, America's Army, though enjoyable as a game wasn't much more realistic than Counter Strike.

Hunter Kressel has been warning people about this for years now.

I'm married, and I managed to get my pvr350 working in FreeBSD using the pvrxxx driver port. I wrote a shell script that turns the TV on and off and changes the channels.

But I also have a Windows Media Center PC. Maybe that balances things out?

Wow, that lists sure takes me back, espcieally bladeenc and 8hz. Kinda makes me feel old :)

"If Frauhoff (sp?) had enforced their patent from day one, you would not be seeing mp3's in existence now, or at any time until after the patent ran out."

First of all, you ovbiously didn't RTFA. This has nothing to do with Fraunhofer.

Second of all, Fraunhofer has always enforced their patent from day one. Back in ~1997, when mp3's first started to gain popularity with digital audio enthusiats, several third party encoders popped up, which were based on Fraunhofer's reference source code. Shortly after their release, Fraunhofer would contact the makers of these encoders, inform them of their patent, and ask for royalties. As a result, the encoders would suddenly disappear from the makers' websites with a message stating "Sorry, I can't distibute my encoder any more, because Fraunhofer wants royalties."

mp3 took off because it filled a need, it was the best thing available at filling that need at the time - not because of a submarine patent. Early commercial encoders, like music match jukebox and mp3pro paid royalties to Fraunhofer from day one.

If you're curious, I have a 'boneyard' of retro mp3 encoders on my site with a few of these extinct encoders.*

http://www.toadlife.net/stuff/retro_mp3_encoders/

*Please don't sue me Fraunhofer.

Some days ago I was reading the replies to a Slashdot article (I don't remember which one) and one poster had this link as his signature:

http://winsudo.toadlife.net/

I haven't tried this tool, so I don't know how it behaves, but you can give it a try if you wish. :) If you do, please post a reply saying whether it works or not. Maybe I'll start using it too.

It is what I currently use on my laptop and I haven't had any problems since I implemented it over two months ago. Also, if you want to install stuff, there's a sudo program for windows http://home.toadlife.net/winsudo/ that you might want to check out.

AthlonXP chips had no built in throttling in the chip. As a result, motherboard makers built in a crude protection system that would shit down the entire system if the chip got too hot. Without that protection, the chips would burn themselves up if the fan failed.

New AMD (Sempron 64/Athlon 64/Athlon X2 64, Turion) all have "Cool N' Quiet" built in which throttles the chip down to speeds as low as 1Ghz (even lower on Turions I think) when idle. I have a dual core athlon system now, and my chip sits at 1Ghz/1.1 volts and mt CPU fan runs at 1000RPM when my computer is idle. When you launch an app that demands processing power, the chip instant throttles up to it's full speed/voltage and the fan kicks up to 3000RPM.

Pictures:

http://www.toadlife.net/stuff/forum_pics/idle.PNG

http://www.toadlife.net/stuff/forum_pics/inuse.PNG

AthlonXP chips had no built in throttling in the chip. As a result, motherboard makers built in a crude protection system that would shit down the entire system if the chip got too hot. Without that protection, the chips would burn themselves up if the fan failed.

New AMD (Sempron 64/Athlon 64/Athlon X2 64, Turion) all have "Cool N' Quiet" built in which throttles the chip down to speeds as low as 1Ghz (even lower on Turions I think) when idle. I have a dual core athlon system now, and my chip sits at 1Ghz/1.1 volts and mt CPU fan runs at 1000RPM when my computer is idle. When you launch an app that demands processing power, the chip instant throttles up to it's full speed/voltage and the fan kicks up to 3000RPM.

Pictures:

http://www.toadlife.net/stuff/forum_pics/idle.PNG

http://www.toadlife.net/stuff/forum_pics/inuse.PNG

It all started with the GeForce 6800 GPU a couple of years back. My patented process provides a "double-whammy" argument for the wife - A lower heating bill + a lower electricity bill!

You can check out one of the diagrams I provided in my patent application here.

Apparently, there is no need for one! :)

"You idiot! You own a Macintosh! The file is fucking gone!"

It sounds like the last Windows you ran was Win9x series. To base all your arguments against windows based on a 7 year old version which didn't even *have* security is silly. That's like me saying desktop linux sucks because when I tried slackware 96 it took me an hour just to get my serial mouse to work, and even longer just to get the vesa driver to work with XFree86.

"Kinda made me mad that I had paid quite a bit of money for something that crashed more. The only thing I missed was the games."

Well now there are a few games that run on Linux. ;) Not exactly a huge selection, but they do exist.

"And if software can't protect you from viruses, then why do Windows users run antivirus suites? Surely securely-designed software must be useful for some level of protection."

Because all of the computer viruses target Windows. In a good security plan, anti-virus is a last line of defense. If you practice other more important security practices (good ole' common sense goes a long way) then your AV should never detect anything. Mine hasn't in years. If some other OS had the marketshare that windows did, all of the computer viruses would be written for that OS, and everyone would still be running AV. Back when Macs has a 15% marketshare their were viruses for Mac and lots of Mac users ran antivirus. That's the only real comparison I can give you because in the history of home computing, those are the only two platforms that have ever had a sizeable amount of marketshare.

"Because Windows is meant so that even an idiot could use it, Therefore MS must expect that idiots WILL use it. Idiots don't know how to set up auto updates or that they should often check up on the latest security alerts. Microsoft should have it do their patches automagically."

There is catch-22 here. I agree 100% that Windows should come automatically update itself out of the box, but if it did, millions of people would bitch and moan about it. People want to have their cake and eat it too. They want their computer to be secure, but they want total control over their computer too. That means being able to choose weather or not they update it, and being able to run any untrusted code they want. Microsoft has found a middle ground by adding the 'security center' in XP that bugs you constantly if your auto updates is turned off, but you'll find that people even complain about *that*. You can't please EVERYBODY, but that's the thing Microsoft is forced to TRY to do...because EVERYBODY uses their operating system.

"But if it doesn't play without the rootkit, then how do you listen to it without installing the rootkit?"

I would return the CD to the store, and if they wouldn't give my money back I would sue Sony. If you read around I'm sure you've noticed that there are multiple lawsuits against Sony regarding this matter. The fact is tons of people run as admin in windows because that how Microsoft made it by default. Sony is evil for doing what they did and the blame lies on them, not the operating system that their "DRM" installs on. Lets say that Microsoft shipped XP back in 2001 and it created limited users account by default instead of admin accounts. Sony's CD would simply say "You must enter your administrator password to view the special feature on this CD", and you can bet that most people would blindly do it, not realizing (or caring about) the potential consequences.

"No vulnerabilities were exploited the day they were found out. Whoop de doo. Great. So they attacked an unfixed vulnerability from earlier. That's what you're saying. So what if they're attacked after the hole has been known a while? If that means no patch was released all this time, who cares?

Also, a simple Google search begs to differ. Right on the first page, what do I see? "Zero-day Microsoft Excel flaw for sale on eBay", "Zero-Day Exploit Targets IE", "Microsoft Promises to Quickly Solve a Zero-Day Vulnerability". . .

I can't provide you a hard scientific study that shows what resources an idle GUI takes up in Windows, but based on tests I've done, it makes sense to me that if it's not being used, pretty much ALL modern OSs are smart enough to page it out and it will not take up many resources.

The tests I'm referring to are some gaming benchmarks I did that compared gaming performance of FreeBSD 5.4 vs Windows XP Pro.

You can see the benchmarks here.

After posting them to a messageboard, someone said the test was unfair because FreeBSD didn't have to load a bloated desktop manager and Windows did. Based I what I had read about modern OS's, I thought this was wrong. To prove my point, I redid all of the tests with different setups.

In the original FreeBSD benchmarks, I created separate accounts for the games. When starting X from these accounts their xinitrc file would load the game instead of a desktop/window manager. This would supposedly help the games run as fast as possible. In the Windows benchmarks, I loaded the games from the regular Windows desktop, but took care to disable all other running programs.

In the second set of FreeBSD benchmarks, I loaded the games directly from my gloriously bloated KDE 3.4 desktop. The results were exactly the same as the first set of benchmarks. In the second set of Windows benchmarks, I installed a light 3rd-party explorer replacement (lightstep I think), and disabled about 10-15 windows services. This reduced the default memory usage in Windows from about 110MB to around 80MB. Again, the results were exactly the same as the first set of benchmarks.

Now, it may be that my system has too much memory to properly tell how well BSD or Windows were able to page out unused programs, but another piece of evidence I could give you would be what I see when I load up process Explorer and take a look at CPU usage on the windows machine I'm typing at right now. For the most part it says 0%. Sometimes it jumps up to 3-5%, but when I look at the list of processes, it's firefox that is taking up those cycles.

So, if no one is logged onto a windows machine, I hardly see how it's GUI is going to degrade performance. Perhaps on a super low memory machine (like 64MB) there might be somewhat of a performance hit, but if you're using a machine like that for a server, then you're probably (hopefully) using it as a router or other network device, in which case, Windows is the wrong choice anyway.

I think the author gets that.

From TFA:
"Most games bear no relation to military simulators at all. In fact, what games mostly choose to simulate bears no relation to reality at all. Most of these games can't be called a simulation except in the very broadest sense."

But nevertheless, I do agree with you.

Flashpoint was and still is the premier battlefield simulator. There are a few other games which, in some specific areas, compare to Flashpoint, but as a whole, no other games touches Flashpoint.

Ironically, I just reinstalled OFP last night. I'm thinking about writing some more missions for the game.

Obligatory link