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Problems With OEM ATI Cards And ATI's Linux Driver
Doug Bostrom writes "Over at FlightGear.org, Andy Ross describes how ATI's new Linux drivers only seem to work with "official" ATI cards (made by ATI), why that does not make sense, and a possible fix that unfortunately would mean booting Windows, if only for a few minutes."
Question: Eating Poop & housetraining Woes
We have a female cairn terrier, 3 months old and she has a terrible habit for eating poop. I have tried adding MSG to her food-pineapple and other items that I have pulled off the net. So far nothing has worked. We are having a terrible time housetraining her and when we take her outside she hunts for poop to eat and comes in to do her stuff and not always on paper my carpet need help desperately.
What We Think:
Eating poop, unfortunately, is a common problem in some dogs. There are a few products on the market under different names that when mixed with the dog's food it is supposed to make the poop taste bad (as if it doesn't already). One product is named "For-bid" but there are also others that you can try. Ask at your local pet supply store. Also, make sure your puppy is eating a balanced diet. A dog's feces, along with waste, can contain food as well. Your puppy may be seeking out poop as a nutritional source or simply a snack. Be sure you are feeding her a vet-recommended brand of puppy food; if you already are, consider trying another brand as every dog is different.
Also, be sure to pick up ALL the poop outside that you can (including her own) to give her little opportunity to eat it. And start teaching your puppy the "Leave It" command so when she leaves the poop alone, or you pull her away, you can praise her for doing the command correctly. As far as housetraining goes, if you haven't already, be sure to read the Puppy Poop article. As it explains in the article, your puppy must receive consistent praise for peeing and pooping outside, only then will she begin to understand what behavior you want from her. Having newspapers in the house usually confuses things even more, although she has a preference for carpet; she is smart as carpet is much more porous than newspaper! Follow the steps in the Puppy Poop article and after a few months of consistency and praise, she should be getting the hang of things.
Although I felt Questron II did not apply a successful enough wrinkle to Questron, I feel Legacy of the Ancients, a one-player RPG which uses the same engine and contains many similar monster and town names, really did. The new name makes an excellent first impression; as Questron III I can assure you that people would be less intrigued by it, but the game is richer in many ways. The purpose of LoA is to destroy or neutralize the Compendium, a lethal magic weapon which can be used to destroy the entire world of Tarmalon. You start out waking up in a museum created by the Ancients where you are wearing a gold bracelet, which you must twist to get out, and over the course of the game you will need to visit all the exhibits. This requires discovering coins, from jade, the least valuable, to topaz, amethyst, sapphire, ruby and eventually diamond. Many exhibits give you items or gold and can be visited again; others give you quests or challenge you and improve your attributes if you're successful. There is also a caretaker who contacts you about your compendium and bracelet before he continually gives you advice. He also promotes you through the levels after you've proven yourself more worthy by finishing quests and is a lot more believable than the living guys in Questron who helped you when everyone else in the land you tried to save was against you. Here, the land is lawless, and it's only the impenetrable museum where you can get help, not the castle where there's a wizard hanging out and you kill a bunch of guards and get saluted for bravery later. Although there are still some annoying dungeons, they are much shorter in length(Armaz, the second, only requires you to start at the bottom and go up, as opposed to descending, getting items, and returning alive) and you can really see the increase in difficulty for the final dungeon as more than just facing monsters with more hit points.
The biggest improvement from Questron II to LoA is that you must revisit many locations several times; there will be a door you can't unlock in a castle or an exhibit you can't view in the museum. Then, later on, you will be able to go somewhere you could only see before, where you'll meet another obstacle. As there are a few successions of this, LoA gains a certain complexity. Even with getting to the castle(which, with two levels, REALLY feels like a castle,) it leads you on; the castle is in the middle of a small lake, one water square apart from a town. Towns, although some are still largely useless, also play a more active role as more than just suppliers of spells, armor and weapons so you can beat up monsters, and each has a design that almost gives it a unique personality. As for the spells: the seek spell, returning you to the museum, is a new addition and a great time-saver.
The museum is very nice, despite the code-wheel copy protection when you try to get back in(although the names on the wheel are pretty cool,) and it's a bit of a shock when you have to go out into the world, which is detailed enough but my first impression was that it was ugly compared to Questron II--however, you will get used to the detail. There's not just graphical detail--you use more food if you crossed a desert or climbed a mountain. This sort of touch so absent in early games happens a lot in LotA. Even if you might not like a change initially, you'll see that the programmers made things more convenient or real--the guards may overwhelm instead of kill you, for instance. The towns are really quite nice, as although the view is overhead, you can't see the inside of a building until you're in it. Seeing the roof pop off when you enter is quaint. Another augmentation is that banks pay interest, so if you die, and you left your money in the bank, you'll get a nice surprise. Also, in the towns, there are the usual folks who give you advice and guards that will come after you if you do anything wrong, as well as the time- and level-dependent better weapons and armor(they are also sorted by condition, i.e. superb studded hide or shoddy ring mail or fair club) that you may buy. There's also a game called ''flip-flop'' where you can win a lot of money, but another gambling opportunity will allow you to make money without having the guards attack you. Funny how blackjack persists in the Questron series but other games come and go. There are also two shockingly similar mini video games where you can increase endurance(only negatively useful in dungeons, as monsters rob you of it) and dexterity. These are weaker than Questron, and the only thing I liked about them was that I could slow down action with an emulator and do rather well. To their credit I have seen Apple file-based games like the games that sold in the early eighties, but the games-within-a-game just weren't exciting. The only logic puzzle, Stones of Wisdom, is a part of the museum exhibits and requires you to bid on the composition of dice--''four fours'' might say you think there are four fours between your opponent, who must raise the stakes or call you. The bids increase by value and then number, so two ones is a higher bid than one two. Players start with four dice each, and whoever gets caught lying or ''calls'' when his opponent tells the truth loses a die, and when he's out, game over. It's not quite as inspired as Questron's Mind game, but given that it raises the anti-negative intelligence virtue and once again is a puzzle that raises intelligence, it's passable, especially since it has the added fairness of giving better returns when your intelligence is lower.
On the other hand, a nicer new feature is that you can even deliver mail between food sellers in the towns for a nice fee, which counts for style points even if there are better rackets out there. Once you feel you're ready(it's important to buy the few spells there are) you can go to the castle. Some things don't change from the old Questron games; you have to loot the place. However, as I mentioned, you can't loot the place all at once and be done--there is a bottom level behind a river, and you need something outside the castle to get across it as well and a different item to unlock another castle door. The castle also has several surprises that were not a part of the game in Questron, the main one being a lethal trap. One pleasant surprise for Questron fans is that the combat is a lot fairer. If there are two spaces between you and a guard and you each move toward the other, he won't attack you! You also are not attacked as you flee. So overall there is a good deal more skill in hand-to-hand combat, and you don't have to use spells, which ultimately cost money. Speaking of money, LoA is a bit better regulated; you could bet your entire wad in Q1 or 10000 gold in Q2, and you could get rich quick. With LoA there are still ways to cheat but they are not so efficient. As you can get a comfortable amount of gold in reasonable time, it's nice to see that the game is not so arbitrary.
Once you get through the castle, there is a land beyond the main continent. Unlike Q1&2, you can't just go sailing in any direction to find the pirates' dungeon(yes, there are still a few 3-d perspective dungeons, but they're smaller and less maddening, and there seem to be fewer monsters--the main problem is that you must constantly push the key to look for traps.) This reveals more of the museum's secrets, leading you to more dungeons, more secrets, and so forth. Eventually you will get to pay a visit to the root of the troubles. Here you seem to cross an electronic walkway before you get captured in the warlord's chambers, and the action gets very fast-paced. I almost didn't make it out, and I'd almost used up all my healing herbs in the process. I'd heard other people rave about how exciting the ending was, and I'd have to agree, especially with the two castles being so different(the warlord's looks so much rougher,) as opposed to Q2. I've never seen a pre-1990 game where you have to cut it so thin at the end.
My initial gripes with the overland aside(after hours of play, the swamps still look too fuzzy,) I enjoyed the graphics; not seeing the town buildings until you've looked in was a good addition, and the monsters in the dungeon actually looked shapely, as did the black-and-white overland monsters. The contrast in the castles is nice, as you have blue and purple floors, gardens, and even animal heads for trophies(some floors are animated--I don't know why, but I like it,) and having the 3-d perspective for the museum was the right thing. You'll often see well-animated exhibits in monitors on the wall as your character goes to put a coin in. Pity the final fortress looks like a pile of white vines; although it has a bunch of gates crashing down in front of you to block an exit, the visual part doesn't make a great net contribution to the excitement.
In the miscellaneous department, I didn't think much of the background sound or the option to use a joystick, and having two exits from the museum was unnecessary considering that you seemed to enter back at a random one. The leave command was useful when I got stuck in Isle City(you don't start out anywhere near the entrance,) though, and the emulated Apple version with its five possible gameplay speeds happily goes quicker than the PC conversion, which makes you shamble in unneeded animative detail all over the place. The towns, like Thornberry and Grand Ledge, have the neat names Questron players have come to expect. You even have to find out what direction the ''next continent'' is in, or you will get lost at sea. Previously, boating in any direction would get you to the other place. And most importantly, there is a clue that you need to reason through; it's not a crushing puzzle, but would makes LotA more than a blurry looting and buying and killing adventure even without the museum. What's that word? The stuff that makes you pause between killing monsters because you feel there's something more to the game? Plot? Even if part of it is forced; your compendium gets stolen at a random time by brigands. But when merchants start disappearing in various towns, and you unlock a critical part of the museum, you'll be intrigued.
So the Questrons have acquired a new and clever name(I mean, what's the corporate equivalent of Questron? GeneriCo?) and added clout with Legacy of the Ancients. Although the terrain, where you cannot always tell if a square is water or land, may leave a bad first impression with some, the different icons fit together to give a very real world where you can walk across rivers, etc. There are other ways I can nit-pick: there's a useless option to use a joystick, transitions in the game surely ran too slow on the Apple, too much emphasis is on getting the coins(which requires a random and repeatable action) and there is a nasty hook that may prevent people trying to replay the game quickly from achieving level three. Yet the game is more complex and surely more fair than the first two, and the museum is a memorable stroke of creativity which allows a believable man-from-another-world scenario to replace the oft-used ''peasant rising up.'' Also, this game is very replayable, as the suicide-squeeze ending alone(sack the fortress and leave before it blows up) is worth playing out again. LoA shows commendable improvement on an already solid series.
release kde 3.1 already
Here ya go