But if you read the article, this isn't just limited to video cards. Do you have any unusual or older cards you want to use? A video capture card, maybe? How about an MPEG-2 decoder board (no software decoder, even on a GHz CPU, produces as perfect a picture as a good hardware decoder)? I'm willing to bet that some of these devices, and others, qualify to be affected by this bug. Certainly, I have enough interesting cards in my PCI bus that I'm not about to buy a P4--including an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 for analog video capture, a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI (because I wanted a real 3dfx Glide card for playing N64 games--glide wrappers produce unacceptably inconsistent results--but wanted to save my AGP slot for an NV20), and a hardware DVD decoder. But hey, I'm not upgrading soon anyway. Santa left a little gift under my tree, an Abit KT7-RAID and a GHz AMD monster. With the price of PC-133 falling, I'm happy because I'll finally get to have a box with tons of RAM--768 MB, baby! It'll let me have a big ass RAMdisk for temp files, which speeds things up immeasurably if you do high-res graphics editing with programs that make temp files for undo functions. But, I digress...
At any rate, the problem *does* affect many people. That being said, the next rev of the chipset will probably fix it. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't point out that AMD has had similar problems, too, it's not just Intel's fault--anyone remember the bugs in the AMD 750, which was the only chipset available for months after the K7 came out?
Well, two years isn't long. It certainly isn't the ten years that the parent post ascribed to the "DC area" in general. And 703 just got it two months ago. I don't think 540 has it yet, but it's been a while since I've been there. I'm just not sure how long 202 has had it, though.
I think you're making the mistake of assuming that things will always be done the way they are now. Take Internet access. You mention all the timeout and hostunreach problems--forget about that. If there's a big move to telephony over IP--not just the current, problematic use of Voice-over-IP that's been emerging fairly recently--we'll see telephony providers with big pipes, eliminating those problems. Emergency use will be as assured as it is now. Just my opinion, though.:-)
As the gentleman who replied to you just before I did pointed out, dialing the area code for a number within the same area code was optional here until a couple months ago, when suddenly it just stopped working that way. Most people didn't realize that it was coming, and many people started complaining about it.
Since you moved here recently, I can understand how you may not have realized this--you might have moved from someplace where ten-digit dialing was mandatory. But to people who have lived here for many years, ten-digit dialing is new. The only time we ever had to use an area code was when we were calling into an area code different from our own.
I'm not sure about what other area codes around the D.C. area had this, too, but I'm willing to bet that very few have had 10-digit dialing for local calls for very long. I've spent time in a few, and local dialing has usually been a 7-digit affair.
I live in the D.C. area, in Northern Virginia, a ten minute drive into the city. We only started even having to use area codes for local numbers about two months ago. Ten-digit dialing hasn't been standard here for three years, not by a long shot. Even when we started having to use area codes for local calls, two months ago, people started complaining. Now, I wasn't one of those people, and I understand the need for modernized phone number systems. However, I can understand how people, especially older people and the less educated, can see such changes as an added burden.
That being said, it's a necessary step for future expandability. For now, at least. But, I bet that eventually, within the next 20 years at the accelarating pace of technology, telephone numbers and most telephone lines themselves will be passe. Cable and fiber and wireless are the future--telephone lines are just such puny creatures with such small bandwidth--and I honestly think that most calls will be routed through cyberspace in the future. Why have to remember a 10 digit phone number, when you can pick up a receiver and say: "John Laws, hampden-Sydney, Virginia," the first time, and then just pick up the receiver and say "John Laws" any time after the first? It's coming within the next two decades, three at the most.
The ascii girl #3 in his pr0n directory at gopher://gopher.heatdeath.org/00/pr0n/pr0n003.txt% 09%09%2B looks underage! Damn ascii kiddie pr0n! Damn ascii child pr0nographers, exploiting our underage letters and numbers like that...
[Note: joke, not troll. Now, put the moderation point *on the floor* and back up, slowly...]
Plenty of people do this, but most just use old, stripped arcade cabinets purchased from local arcades or servicing companies. It's just cheaper, and less time-consuming, to use an old cab and then fill it with what you want.
If you're willing to spend more money for something new, try a cabinet from http://www.hanaho.com/ --they make new cabs, complete with your choice of different arcade monitors.
For the most info on this stuff, try http://www.arcadecontrols.speedhost.com/arcade.htm --the most comprehensive site by far. As it will point out, there are many options when building an arcade cab, one of the more popular being to wire up a PC to the arcade cabinet and use it to run MAME, so that any one of over 2000 supported games can be played. Plenty of special hardware is available to map arcade controls to keyboard codes for use by the PC in such a cabinet. This also makes playing a game designed for the PC, like Q3 or UT, quite playable on such a cabinet if you include all the right controls, like a trackball for the mouse and buttons coded to each key used in the game. There are also MAME front ends which make it easy to use MAME in arcade cabs, like Arcade@Home.
You mentioned Pole Position--if you want to give it a truly authentic feel, you'll need arcade foot pedals. http://www.happcontrols.com/amusement/amusement.ht m has them. Happ is one of the big suppliers for *real* arcade parts. so a lot of people who build arcade cabinets for home use use their products. They *are* expensive, but you're getting real arcade controls, designed to withstand thousands of hours of abuse by random arcade patrons. There are cheaper alternatives for the PC which can be adapted for use with a MAME cabinet easily, but they're not as authentic.
I haven't built a MAME cabinet yet, because I'm poor [insert sound of tiny violins], but I will eventually. I've already been squirreling away components bought on eBay. For example, one of the hardest to find arcade controls is the unusual and quite nonstandard flight yoke used by some 1983-1985 Atari games like Star Wars, Return of the the Jedi, and Firefox. I bought one on eBay for $90, which is worth it because they're just so impossible to find and because Star Wars was the game I remember most fondly from childhood. We used to have a sit-down cockpit version of Star Wars at the local arcade, and I wanted the unique controller so that I could play it fairly faithfully. Someone has even given instructions on how to interface it to a PC, at http://www.arcadecontrols.speedhost.com/arcade_jud e.shtml . I plan to build it to work quite authentically--I'm even going to put in coin mechs, and use those bronze arcade tokens we used when I was a kid--which Happ also happens to sell. It's also going to be as big as most four-player cabs, because I'm designing it with all the controls necessary for two people to play almost any two-person arcade game together using the original controller types, like trackballs for Marble Madness, dual joysticks for Sarge, etc., and it'll take up a lot of control panel space. In the middle will of course be the Atari flight yoke for use with one-player flight and driving games, and at the bottom of the cab near the floor I'm putting a set of pedals for racing games. Instead of using an arcade monitor, though, I want to get a large PC monitor so that playing games designed with PC resolutions in mind is easier. MAME can output authentic-looking arcade scanlines to a PC monitor anyway, so it's no loss of authenticity in the way the games look. With all the NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, PSX, etc., emulators available, it makes building an arcade cabinet driven by a PC even more interesting and fun. It should be a massive project when I get the chance to put design into practice..
Anyway, those links should be enough to get anyone started. I look forward to whenever I do get the time and money to complete my project, but meanwhile I'm picking up some useful controls and parts.
>> What's there to be excited about?
>
> Oh, I dunno, crystal clear quality?
>
> You still listen to records, don't you?
But you're missing the point that you're actually getting much less quality. Yes, digital instead of film means that there won't be the occasional specks of dust on the print. But there'll be less picture resolution.
It's like this: Imagine you're given the choice between two images to work with. One of them is taken with a digital camera and gives you a 1024x768 16bpp picture with no dust or other analogue issues. The other was taken with a film camera, and gives you something like 4000x3000 with better-than-32bpp, but there may be small dust specks. I'd want to work with the film image, because there's more to work with and a few dust imperfections can be fixed--if they're even noticeable.
As for your remark about records versus CDs, that's not fair because CDs give sound quality almost equal to that of vinyl, but with the advantages of being digital and easier to take care of. But, resolution of digital video cameras isn't nearly the equal of 35mm film cameras. The right analogy would be comparing a record to a low-quality mp3 recorded at only 112kbps. Sure, it's digital. Sure, most people won't notice the sound difference. But a lot of people *will* notice the sound difference, and it's a huge step down.
Roger Ebert is one of the most consistent critics of digital film and digital projection. He says they're wonderful for independent projects and for films that big studios won't agree to produce. And he's right--they're great for that. But if it's a major film with an actual budget, it should be shot on film. I think he's right. Film has a much better, less harsh look than video, too. Video is often sharper, but not as true with its treatment of colors and contrast. But the killer is that video resolution can't touch film. What happens 50 years from now, when we're moving to HDTV-2? It will surely outstrip the limits of video resolution. Lucas's new pet all-video Star Wars saga will look pathetically scaled-up. Yet, anything shot on film will probably still need to be scaled *down* to fit the new standard.
Technology progresses, and one day probably soon there will be a digital video camera that can rival the quality of film's resolution and color. But that time is not now. Shooting on digital video is pathetically shortsighted, unless you think resolution will never, ever get better than current HDTV formats. Where a budget demands, fine, go for digital video. But, film is better. And yes, sitting at a theater, you *can* tell the difference between a real film and one that's being shown digitally.
What far too few people seem to know is that Americans not only have the right to bail--we have the right to *reasonable* as opposed to *excessive* bail. This right is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, and most State Constitutions have provisions as well.
Fact is, if he could afford a very decent attorney, he could probably win a lawsuit against the city for violation of his Constitutional rights through imposition of excessive bail. If he had to stay in jail for some time due to this, there's also an argument for wrongful/false imprisonment that could be made. Any way you slice it, such high bail is excessive for a few minor misdemeanor charges. After all, I've known people to get $2000 bail for felonious assault, and $10,000 bail for production of child pornography.
So, how does the system get away with abusing us? We never, or at least quite seldom, fight back. Most of us lack the resources to sue over violations of our Constitutional rights, and so it becomes easy for the system to impose high bail for bogus charges just to get us off the street so that we can't exercise our Constitutional right to peacably assemble to petition the government for redress. So, of course they walk all over us.
What we really need is an organization with teeth and funding to protect our rights by vigorously suing police, prosecutors, cities, counties, and states whenever rights violations occur. There is no such organization. The ACLU is pathetically underfunded and unwilling to stand up except in very extreme cases, which means that the system has carte blanche to harass us and deprive us of our rights as long as it does so in small doses at a time.
It amazes me that, with all the wealth in America, especially with all the Internet billions that were made recently by many young libertarians and liberals, no enormously wealthy patron of rights has stepped to the plate and started a legal organization to vigorously defend us from abuses like this. It's pathetic that your rights can be ignored in this country unless and until the cops beat the shit out of you, and even then it'll probably take five years and tens of thousands in legal fees for you to get them back.
Maybe Bill Gates should stop founding charities to give computers to schools--c'mon, kindergarteners need to be focusing on things more basic than using a PC--and create a charity to protect our eroded Constitutional rights. If I had 1/10000 what he did, I'd give every last penny to such a cause. And what's with all these wealthy liberal Hollywood types, who talk the talk when it comes to rights but never get involved beyond flashing their ACLU card to interviewers, to make themselves feel good? Or how about the Oprah types, who come out in support of every right and cause, but still keep *obscene* amounts of money for themselves while donating a relative pittance? When I give $100 to a cause, it's a *real* contribution since I'm fairly poor. Oprah giving a cause $50,000 would be like me giving them my pocket lint, relatively speaking. These types are perfectly willing to make movies that take a stand, thinking that that means something. A movie never stopped a cop from beating someone, or a magistrate from imposing high bail. The only way to do that is to fight them in the Courts, and that takes $$$, which people with $$$ are seldom willing to donate to the cause since cops and magistrates and prosecutors usually abuse people who have no $$$.
It also amazes me how fashionable and trendy other causes are, even though they're far less important than out basic rights. Big bucks go to environmental causes and AIDS research, and to little else by comparison. Nevermind that unless we start defending people who have had their rights abused, there'll be no more environmental protests. Nevermind that without the right to protest, AIDS never would have gotten beyond its early/mid-80's lack of address due to the Reagan-Meese characterization of it as a disease for fags and pervs.
Even if our rights had financial backing, thanks to the fact that cops are willing to lie to protect one another behind the "blue wall of silence," your piggie perpetrators will seldom be found. Two police lost a civil case for using excessive force recently in my area, and they insisted that they didn't know the other four police who joined in terrorizing an innocent citizen. To make it worse, the two policemen who were found liable by a jury are still working for the same PD. Why aren't they fired? It makes no sense whatsoever that we tolerate this.
The more I reflect upon such issues, the less respect I have for this country. Jefferson and Washington would not be proud: they'd revolt.
This rather proves my point, actually. Modern chess, as I pointed out, took about a thousand years to develop into the highly evolved game it is. Moves were altered over time, and unnecessary pieces whittled out of the game. The board itself has been changed and rechanged time and again.
The end result of a thousand years of the game's "natural evolution" is a game that's practically perfect in its beauty. It's so deceptively simple--there aren't many different kinds of pieces; there's a board with a simple layout; the rules are very straight-forward. Yet, despite the appearance of simplicity, it's an extremely hard game to master. This I think makes it much more charming and beautiful than certain other games which come from the East, which have too many pieces and too-complex rules to be the international sport which chess is.
As I said, there are many variations of chess--but almost all of which which are still being played have been invented in this century. None of the variations which have emerged since chess was codified into its modern form between two and four centuries ago (depending on who you read) have lasted long.The variations you mentioned, like Bughouse, were invented for entertainment value and a change of pace, not at all as real games in and of themselves. Some of the other variations you mentioned were invented as teaching aids, to help new players learn chess in an interesting way. In fact, a standard practice among many of the best chess coaches is to start players out with nothing but the king and a few pawns, so that they can learn the endgame--the part where most players lose their hold on the game--first, and then work backwards to learning the opening moves, which are somewhat less important.
We played Bughouse occasionally between matches; it's common to see people playing it in the break room. Same goes for lightning chess, with just a minute on the clock to make as many moves as possible and try to have the most points on the board when the clock goes off. But these things are just distractions, played for fun during the breaks in real tournament chess. Like masturbation, they're fun, but just not as fulfilling as mastering the real thing.;-)
I got it for Christmas many years ago, when I was still into tournament chess. Not that I was a great tournament player--I could never break a 1600 rating, which if you know about tournament chess isn't a very good rating at all--but I enjoyed it a lot. Of course, I was about 13 at the time, and unless you're a prodigy you're not going to be great at chess that young; so that might be a good excuse to use for my poor rating.:-)
Anyway, the set I got for Christmas and still have was, I think, made by The Franklin Mint as an authorized *Star Trek* item. It was very attractive, made from clear and blue glass, with gold-plated pieces. It came with some detailed and cumbersome rules. We played it a few times, but it proved rather uninteresting compared to real chess.
See, the reality is that chess doesn't need to be "improved." It can't be "improved," and more variety would be a detriment instead of an improvement. As it stands, chess is complicated enough that you'll probably never play the same game twice in your life, even if you play in tournaments every week. I've known plenty of people with Master and International Grand Master ratings who've been playing chess their whole lives and are never bored with it. It's just not repetitious; there's practically infinite variety.
There are so many practical and useful variations just of the opening moves, that chess is incredibly interesting and never truly mastered. Tournament players usually have two or three openings that they use most of the time and study extensively, but they'll try new things whenever they feel like it or when an opponent's unusual strategies force them into something different.
Chess also has such a rich history and wonderful traditions that it could never be replaced by anything new. There have been many, many, many variations on chess created in the last century; the reason you've never heard of them is that chess players view them as a curiosity and distraction, but not as anything useful. After all, regular chess is complicated enough for people to devote their whole lives learning about it and still not master it; things like four-player chess, three-dimensional chess, etc., just distract from those studies.
One of my favorite things about chess is its history--dating back a thousand years in the Middle East for early variations, modern chess was codified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the nineteenth century it became the first real international sport. Most people today don't consider it a sport, but before the modern Olymics, before baseball and basketball and football and soccer were even invented, there was a structure in place for the best international players to compete with one another.
One of my favorite bits of chess lore is of one of the greatest players of all time, a very rough-and-tumble English gentleman. In the 19th century the world chess championship was set distinctly apart from the rest of the chess world; the title holder could see fit to accept or decline any challengers to his title, as he saw fit, and if the challenge was accepted the champion could decide the time and place. Unlike the timed matches common today, championship matches in the 19th century could last for days or weeks, with the players working for ten to eighteen hours straight before breaking for the night, even having their meals at the board. It's been a long time since I heard this story, so some of the details may be lacking, but on the whole it's a fairly accurate account...So anyway, this particular Englishman decided that the championship match would be held...in his favorite pub, during the busiest time of the evening when people would be laughing and singing and getting ever more drunk around them. The challenger arrives, and takes his seat across from the vaunted champion, a man who he's been warned is very, very intimidating, with an intensely jovial Falstaffian presence. They make some small talk, and the challenger notices the empty glasses in front of the champ. The champ calls the serving girl over and orders another, and the challenger orders a drink as well. They get the board and pieces set up, and they're settling in for a long night when the serving girl brings their drinks. The champion, seizing the opportunity to further intimidate this challenger who's awed in the presence of the storied world champ, grabs both drinks from the serving girl's tray and drinks them both voraciously, slams the glasses down, and proclaims in chess-speak: "You left your drink *en pris*, so I took it *en passant*!" The challenger was so intimidated that he resigned immediately.
Now, who would want to mess with a sport so ancient, noble, and complex, as chess?
Let's face it: that book needed to be published. The message of *Voices from the Hellmouth* is one we at/. don't need to learn--we've lived it, we understand it; we are the Net-saavy Quake-playing geeks and geekettes who are now being persecuted in high schools across this great country, to a greater extent than ever before. That book needed to be published so that people who don't read/.--the administrators, teachers, parents, cool kids, Pinkertons, and FBI flunkies who are responsible for the persecutions--can learn that the Internet doesn't "turn people's hearts dark" and that playing video games filled with "fantasy violence" and board-game classics like Dungeons & Dragons is a positive outlet for people who are beaten up or verbally beaten down by bullies, shunned by girls, and cast a suspicious eye by clueless school admins and the police officers who are now placed in schools "for our own protection."
It's people like you who, with your whining and complaining, stopped that message from getting out when it was needed most. That book would have been printed and available by now, and more people--like the newspaper sensationalists who are making things worse--could have a better chance to understand that they need to cut teenagers more slack, not less, if they want to create healthy adults. Raising impressionable young people in an environment filled with cops and admins who'll search your backpacks and lockers because of how you look, who act like busybodies seizing bottles of water and packs of cigarettes as if they were crack cocaine, just fills them with justified rage instead of with the knowledge they should be gleaning in schools. Picking on a kid because he dresses differently is exactly like picking on a kid for being Black or Latino. It just isn't right and it needs to be stopped.
This book would have helped the situation, and I'm aghast the the/. community actively worked against it. Katz wasn't going to make money off it. Taco and Hemos weren't going to line their pockets with green (at least, not *THAT* kind of green, hehe...). Andover wasn't going to line its coffers with profits from this book. It probably would have been a loss-leader, almost an act of charity and giving back to the community by doing something to help young geeks and geekettes everywhere who are in trouble thanks to the current repression and hysteria.
In fact, if any of the/. admins or anyone with their ears is listening right now, I have a humble but useful suggestion for you. It's doubtless been made before, but it needs to be made again and again until it happens. It won't fix the present problems with the *Hellmouth* book, but it would fix all such future issues. Here it is:
You should put a big, bold disclaimer at the top of each page, just under the banner, that all comments submitted to/. are done so under an Open Content License or something similar, giving rights to reprint them in any non-commercial manner. After all,/. is a bunch of Open Source and Free Software supporters, right? If this is true, then we should have no problems agreeing to this. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to not post here. So, do we support Open Source and Free Software or not? Let's do more than pay this philosophy lip service. Let's support it with each and every post we make here. Let's make sure that no chance like the *Hellmouth* book is ever passed up again, thanks to a few fucking posers who don't care about helping their fellow geeks. Fuck the posers. Slashdot should be a place for people who are really supporters of the FSF and Open Source philosophies. If you don't want your posting under an Open Content Licence, then go post it in a Windows forum. There would be a few whiners, but almost all of us would support the change. After all, are we hypocrites or real men who stand behind our philosophy when it comes to us, rather than just the work of others?
This book could have helped a lot of people. In my own state, a boy was suspended for having blue hair. The school knew it would lose the appeal, but it did what it wanted to do: it kept the boy out of school for the rest of his senior year, then gave him the diploma once they lost the case and the kid was no longer their problem. Should blue hair be a reason to keep a kid out of school? How about kinky black hair, so we can discriminate against Blacks? Why don't we expell jocks when they abuse geeks instead? A sixth grader was expelled because he was found with a list of classmates' names--no word on what the list actually was for, mind you, and the kid insists he found it in his desk and was just reading it when the teacher took it, but here it is: a kid expelled for having a piece of paper with names, just names. Maybe they were names of classmates he thought were cute. Maybe they were names of kids who picked on him. Maybe it was a list of his friends. Maybe it really was someone else's list. Who knows, but there it stands. How about the kid who had a Web site, not on the school servers, that he made on his own time not in school, who called some of his teachers ignorant fools who "deserve to be shunned." The teachers in question took "shunned" as a threat, though clearly it's not, and had the boy suspended while they filed a lawsuit against him and his parents. The parents settled out of court for $7000 because our "justice" system is SO FUCKED UP that it costs more than that just to defent yourself against a nuisance, groundless lawsuit. So much for freedom of speech and the First Amendment I loved so much.
Let me tell you about that First Amendment. It applies, partially at least, even to minors in schools. I had to research it a lot to defend myself against school administrators once. I especially like the Tinker decision, which has been interpreted from its original application (the right to wear armbands or other symbolic and expressive clothing to public schools) to be the basis of most of the rights which high school students have.
As a sophomore in high school in 1993, I wrote an article for the school newspaper defending a female friend of mine who had been slandered as a "racist" for writing, in the preceding issue, an article about how race-based scholarships and quotas are wrong. I wrote an impassioned and well-reasoned piece, not unlike what George Bush Sr. or Ronald Reagan would have said on the issue. It was especially contentious because in my school, we had a "Minority Parents' Association" whose sole goal was getting scholarships for Black students. I thought this was wrong, because white students didn't have anyone at our school helping them to get scholarships. Just a personal political opinion. But it sparked a huge controversy; I had to leave school early the day it came out in print, and had to have a security detail take me to classes for the rest of the week. A certain well-known national newspaper printed an article about the controversy my little, rather centrist-conservative article caused in a predominantly minority school. I learned a lot about how people--especially high school kids and the administrators who deal with them--can act irrational and treat you like an outcast for one little difference you might have. Most of the Black students assumed I was a racist without even reading the very moderate article. Liberal teachers were actively disagreeing to the point of trying to push their own opinions onto their students. A Black vice-principal even came to one of my classes to lead a discussion about the article, and called my position "ignorant." It only made her hate me more when I destroyed all her flimsy arguments in the ensuing debate, and had most of the class agreeing with me.
I created a few enemies, including that vice-principal. I could handle my fellow students, but it's hard to handle a few administrators who are out to get you. I wrote another article for the school newspaper the following year, about how it was a shame that the school was cutting history and philosophy and literature classes, while they were leaving cosmetology classes intact. After all, I reasoned, anyone who wants to do hair and nails for a living can just pay a couple hundred dollars for a two-week course and job placement, but high school was the only chance a lot of people would have to be introduced to literature and history and philosophy. The article was published, but with heavy editing done by the admins who disliked my first piece. They didn't even tell me they were editing it. They were even ignorant enough to change the phrase "liberal education," a rather common one, to the nonsensical phrase "conservative education" reasoning that I should have said that since I was conservative, not liberal. It really pissed me off, especially when people were asking me what the Hell I meant by "conservative education."
So, I did the ultimate in pissing any administration off: I got together with half a dozen friends and we put together a newspaper of our own. We wrote articles with a conservative slant, since we had a liberal administration. The homecoming queen was the daughter of a military man, and wrote a piece about why women and men shouldn't be stationed in combat together. I was pro-choice myself, but a friend wrote an opinion piece that was pro-life. We even put political satire and poetry in it, and endorsed a Republican senatorial candidate. It was designed, from beginning to end, to teach the administration a lesson: that if the students weren't permitted to run the school newspaper how we saw fit, we'd just publish our own alternative newspaper. A friend with a Mac and ClarisWorks formatted it, and I scrounged together $175 for a press run of 1000 copies of the six-page newspaper. We called it *The Federalist*.
I got suspended for a week for handing copies of it out to the people who wrote articles for it before it was officially approved for distribution. According to precedent, they had to approve it since it was done by and would be distributed by students, but they got me on a technicality for giving out less than a dozen copies to the people who had written it with me. Of course, I appealed and won. It really pissed the admins off, but it worked: they never tried to censor the school newspaper again, under the threat that we'd publish something far more annoying to them ourselves. Oh, BTW, the conservative paper pissed off one student so much that when I was standing in a classroom talking to someone, a this guy saw me and came into the class and asked me if I'd published the alternative paper. I said yes, and he picked up one of those desk/chair combos and hurled it at my chest. It was kind of gratifying, in a weird way...
Of course, when we did that we were exercising our Constitutional rights. Most adults seem to forget that even teenagers have Constitutional rights, even in schools. But today, we'd have been expelled, all of us involved. And it would have taken thousands of dollars--something my poor family didn't have--to get us reinstated. I feel very sorry for high schoolers today.
I left HS in 1995, the year my school got its first police officer stationed there. We all laughed about it, because aside from the odd fist fight out front nothing ever happened at my school. No one ever got shot. No one brought a gun. But we got a police officer anyway. We laughed at him--a cop whose job was to confiscate glass bottles and cigarettes. We called Officer Buck "Officer Fucknut" and sneered "Do I smell...bacon?" when he passed by. But we all secretly resented his very presence. We laughed and sneered to mask our own unease. We hated him, and his intrusion where he most certainly didn't belong. And yet today I'd wager there are half a dozen Officer Fucknuts patrolling our old school grounds, making students who should be enjoying themselves uneasy, putting yet another black stain on the high school experiences of the 2500 young people there. It's like a prison, with them the guards and the principal the warden. That's not what school is supposed to be like. It's so intrusive. Today, there's even a police station in the local Mall. There's something deeply wrong with contemporary America; thanks to unfounded hysteria and politicians who pass feel-good, right-restricting legislation, we're closer to an Orwellian prison than we realize. Each day, I see more and greater injustices in "the land of the free," and it's beginning to feel like we're all trapped in a Kafka story, or in a gulag, or at the very least in a civilization in decline. If you've ever read *The Decline of the West*, you know what I mean...
P.S.--This and all my past, present, and future postings will be made under an Open Content License, allowing for any non-commercial use, abuse, reprinting, or extracting in whole or in part. You are also free to make derivative works with or without attribution--after all, it's only a quich posting on a public forum; it ain't my fuckin' life's work. I'm amending my user info page to reflect this licensing of all my postings, and I suggest that everyone here who *really* supports the philosophies behind Free Software or Open Source to do the same. And I still hope Rob and Jeff decide to put an Open Content License discaimer at the top of every page, to prevent important work like a paper printing of Hellmouth from being stopped by a few bad apples with bad faith and selfish arrogance.
> Many websites send notices of their original content to each other
That's fine, but/. is not Anandtech. This is not a site on which every little review and rant is meant to be posted. Hannibal's article belonged here because, well, Hannibal is an expert on the technology behind microprocessors. This article didn't tell us anything we couldn't have gotten from the standard press releases. It was, IMNSHO, fluff masquerading as a technical piece. It was full of unfounded opinion, not detailed and insightful analysis.
> This is false. I am a hell of a lot more knowledgeable in matters
> of MPU architecture than you, and I learned quite a bit
Then you obviously aren't as knowledgeable as you claim, if you learned anything from that piece of fluff masquerading as a technical piece. And, how would you know how much I do or don't understand about processor cores? As I said, there was nothing in that article that anyone who follows processor technology wouldn't already know from previous, and more insightful, articles. You can call me a "troll" if you want, it just proves your immaturity and the FACT that you have no solid way to refute what I said, you just want to resort to ad hominem uselessness. And, just FYI, I have read every single article on microproccessor design that has passed by the/. pages for two years, plus linkage from several other sites, and a few print articles (though I no longer like to touch paper. How primitive...). I could easily look up links, hell, just by using the search features on/. and Anand. But that wouldn't prove a bloody thing, and I won't waste my time. If any one here is the troll, it's a bear-baiter like you.
> The author's name is Johan De Gelas. He lives in the Netherlands. ENGLISH
> IS NOT HIS NATIVE LANGUAGE. I'd like to see you post a single sentence in Danish
I don't care where he lives or what is his native language. Unless he is fourteen years old as well, thee's no excuse for writing like that. I wasn't nitpicking grammar or syntax, I was talking about the very narrow, simplistic style--style is the same, whether in English or Latin or anything else. And this is written like a high school term paper, not a serious treatise on microprocessor design. My point was that it's a lot closer to a high school report than a serious article. To go even further, it has NO insights of its own. It quotes others, and says nothing unique. Therefore, it isn't a real analysis of anything. The author didn't analyze, he wrote a book report. Furthermore, you sound like an apologist who objects to what I said based on your personal biases, not based on the merits of my analysis of the article and the situation in general regarding the Athlon vs. Pentium 4 debate.
Skipping the boring quoting, I'll state this: preproduction benchmarks are NOT "always wrong." You're an idiot if you think that anything is "always wrong." Even a blunt intellect such as yourself, who prefers lashing out based on general statements and a few chosen "wrong" benchmarks of pre-production systems (when there are plenty of on'par looks at performance, too), gets a few things right. But this isn't one of them--you think Tom was wrong when he said that when the PII came out if offered little over the PPro. Well, its advantage was more horsepower, but its disadvantage is no on-die high-speed L2 cache. Therefore, if you multitask instead of running one app at a time, the PPro was usually considerably faster for you than the slower-cache PII--when it was first released, that is. As its clockspeed eclipsed that of the PPro significantly, of course its performance eclipsed the PPro's. But, I'd take a 200MHz PPro with one of the larger L2 sizes available on it over a PII300 any day, if I were using it for serious business-type uses rather than gaming. Especially if it were a server, the PPro would kick the PII's ass because of the cache. We can conclude this by saying that you believe the P4 becnhmarks so far have been "sandbagged," and are inaccurate. I believe they're accurate. There's no way to settle this until the retail product ships, period. But when it does, I expect a full apology.;-) BTW, the previews have mostly been done by Intel-friendly websites, not by AMD campers like Tom. Me? I dislike Intel, for some of their MS-like tactics, but I buy the best performance I can get for the money. If I bought a system today, it would have to be Intel because AMD has no multiprocessor solution on the market yet--but I fully expect the 760MP to change my mind. Intel's GTL based SMP isn't even in the same league with what the EV6 can do.
Again skipping the quoting, your analysis of Athlon vs. P!!! performance is pretty useless since I was bemoaning the fact that people have been comparing a 7th gen core designed to scale to high clock speeds with an old core which is optimized for lower clockspeeds. But, I'll debunk the FUD anyway. The Athlon core performs better all-around, not just on FPU-intensive apps. The reason the Intel chips score better on many apps, like games which, yes, are optimized for 3DNow! too, are two-fold. First of all, the Intel chips have MORE SIMD instrustions, so that optimized apps have more to work from. Secondly, and most importantly, Intel gives out much better compilers which optimize the code more tightly than it can be optimized for AMD processors. AMD doesn't do all this compiler work; they consentrate on making better processors, not on tieing in specialized compilers to their processors. "You can deny the facts, or you can try to understand them." And your "analysis" of the supposed advantages of the Coppermine's cache over the Thunderbird's are positively laughable. You see, in the REAL WORLD people don't run benchmarks on their boxes all day. They run apps and processes, usually several at a time. That's why the Athlon's cache is superior--you can keep more in it instead of swapping to system RAM, which is a MUCH BIGGER HIT than having a small amount of cache latency. In the REAL WORLD, the Athlon's cache architecture makes sense, not in your fantasy where we all run CPUmark all day.
> "The Athlon is truly a seventh-generation core.' What does that mean???
You really should pay more attention in class, boy, because I'm schooling you right now. I explained what I meant right after that comment in the original post: The Athlon is a new core designed to scale well to very high clockspeeds. Just like the Willammette. That's why the Willamette performs slower clock-for-clock than a theoreticl P!!! at the same clockspeed: it has to make trade-offs to achieve that speed, namely deeper pipelines, more of a hit for failed branch predictions, etc. And yet, people were wrongly downing the Athlon for not reaching the P!!!'s clock-for-clock performance, and that was a mistake since the Athlon, like Willammette, must make some sacrifices to reach high clockspeeds. Again, this is why you can buy a 1.2GHz Athlon today, but the 1GHz P!!! is the best Intel can do. Their 1.13 GHz part, which had to be recalled, was malfunctioning so badly that people couldn't even get the Linux kernel to compile on it. Blech.
> "If you think it means the K7 core has one single architectural innovation
> which does not exist on an MPU available before it, then I challenge you to
> list it now"
It's a huge innovation in the x86 world, something Intel hasn't done since the PPro days. First of all, the EV6 bus is new to x86 and a huge innovation, it is superior in every way to the old Intel GTL+. Not only does is run at an effective 200MHz--and did so back when P!!!s were still at 100MHz FSB, and the Celerons still are crippled at 66MHz while the Durons are at full 200MHz like the Athlons--but it is superior technology. It's not a shared bus architecture like the P!!!s, each processor gets its own interface and its own dedicated bandwidth--a huge boon for multiprocessing, with the 760MP coming to retail very soon according to Anand. It's revolutionary for an x86 processor. Plus, you wouldn't consider Athlon's monstrous brute of an FPU an innovation? Poor FPU performance was always the bane of the x86 architecture--a primary reason x86 wasn't used in most supercomputers and scientific applications. Now, the countryside is littered with Athlon clusters crunching numbers for the scientific community in places where they'd never have considered using a P!!!. That's an innovation, too. You claim that the K7 is merely a revamp of the old P6 core, but that only proves your total ignorance about its design. It's a whole new core, with very little similarity to a P6 core beyond the x86 instruction set. If you don't know that, you're out of your depth here. Go back and play on the porch at HardwareCentral, where they're as biased against AMD as Tom's is against Intel.
> all appearances are that, once the P4 moves into heavy volume production
> (note: not until Q3 next year at the earliest)
God, you are a shameless, and dim-witted, Intel apologist, just as I suspected. Q3 2001? And then you go on to say that the K8 will just be a derivative of the K7. You really aren't paying attention at all. The K8 Hammer architecture is completely new, not only extending x86 to true 64-bit while retaining backwards-compatibility with 32-bit and 16-bit code, but adding huge and significant architectural innovations. Go read about it, dimwit, before you guess at what it is. Lots of documentation has been released--even just a quick scan of some Slashdot search results will make you a lot more knowledgeable about it than you are now. Geez...
I've been looking at Freedom for a long time. In fact, I was a beta tester for all of three minutes, until the beta software somehow managed to complately hose my ability to connect to the Net--I have no idea how it managed to do it, but it was probably because I had some funky firewalls installed at the time. Anyway, what I want to know is this: How can it possibly be anonymous, in a country like the U.S.? Don't you guys get calls from law enforcement agencies all the time, and it it's really anonymous aren't those law enforcement types very, very angry? Why isn't the Web or USENET flooded with copyright violations, harrassments, and child pornography coming from Freedom, if it's really that anonymous? Or has there been a problem with that, and I just haven't heard?
I'm very curious. Please let us know. Maybe an interview with ZKS would be a good/. Interview topic some time...
Rather, it is a piece of self-promotion by Ace's Hardware, who sent this story in themselves. The article itself doesn't say anything the knowledgeable don't already know. In fact, it reads like a high-school report, and not even a very well-written one. E.g., "First we will try to analyze the most important shortcomings, next we will search for possible solutions." Sounds just like the simplistic expositions of a high school term paper.
I repeat: the article is not a technical piece at all. Hannibal at ArsTechnica writes technical pieces about CPU design. This article at Ace's Hardware says nothing insightful.
In fact, it misses the point. It dares to call the P4 "innovative" and wonder whether future designs in the x86 world will copy it. Well, of course not! How many times must it be said that the P4 barely keeps up with the Athlon and performs less well than a P!!!? Because, that is a fact. Numerous production samples have leaked, with the test results uniformly and without exception pointing to the fact that even if the platform's performance is improved by release time--which it should, since these are samples not a retail product--it won't outperform a P!!! with equal clockspeed. That's why the P4 is being released at 1.4 and 1.5GHz initially, because if they were released at 1.2GHz they'd be outperformed by the 1GHz P!!! and that wouldn't be good.
Now, the P4 barely keeps up with the current-generation Athlon Thunderbirds. This is important to note because people always *blamed* AMD for a processor which still, with the advantages of the P!!! SIMD intruction optimizations used in much software, didn't quite keep pace with Intel's offering in the most common benchmarks. Now, the technically knowledgeable know that the Athlon whomps the P!!! in anything that isn't SIMDified, and that its floating point unit is head-and-shoulders above. But people still moaned about the performance gap in certain common SIMDified benchmarks.
Well, here's what they didn't realize: the Athlon is a truly seventh-generation core--which beat Intel to the punch by, what, almost a year and a half? As such, it has made trade-offs to be able to scale to higher clockspeeds better--one reason why Intel had to recall, and still hasn't re-issued, the 1.13GHz P!!! yet AMD are easily churning out 1.2GHz Athlon Thunderbirds. The P!!! only scales well up to 1GHz--even then, it needed a microcode update to be stable--while the Athlon Mustang has hit 1.2 GHZ with no problems. Heck, Duron 600's usually overclock to at least 900MHz.
In other words, you can't reasonably compare a core optimized to scale to low clockspeeds and take advantage of them, to a core designed to scale up to extreme speeds. You have to compare the Athlon Thunderbird core to Intel's own belated seventh-generation x86, the P4. And, the Athlon Thunderbird compares very favorably. It hasn't been released at 1.4GHz, and probably won't be since AMD will undoubtedly release the newer core before then, but an extrapolated 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird, in line with how performance scales for the that core, beats the 1.4GHz P4 samples that have been tested. THE ATHLON BEATS IT. So, how can you call such a low-performing core innovative? It isn't. I'd wager that the next core AMD have up their sleeves will be the real innovator here. Plus, to get the performance it does, Intel's P4 even has to use a 400MHz-effective FSB and double-pumped ALU. This makes the P4 core iteself look rather weak in comparison with the Athlon, which gets by with similar performance with merely a 200MHz (soon, 233) FSB and a non-double-pumped ALU. So, the core of the Athlon is clearly, in itself, much stronger than that of the P4. AMD will doubtless be using similar tricks in its future revisions, but it cannot be doubted that the P4 is not the "innovation" that this BS article claims it is. The article even belittles Athlon's branch prediction--which is weak, because the core was rushed--not noting the fact that even with such a poor branch prediction mechanism the Athlon core outperforms the P4 on a theoreticl clock-for-clock basis.
I note the "theoretical" because I'd like to again point out that the Athlon core is soon to be released in a new revision which will scale to higher clockspeeds, have larger cache, and have improvements to the core itself which AMD has not yet specified. I think that this article at Ace's Hardware is so utterly biased against AMD and for Intel that it makes me sick. He talks of everything negative about the Athlon as being a "compromise" or a decision made in a rush, yet he plays down the negative aspects of the P4 core--for example, he plays down the 19-cycle branch misprediction penalty in the P4 by hyping the P4's escellent branch prediction algorithms, but doesn't give the Athlon slack about its lackluster branch prediction mechanism based on the fact that it has a reduced misprediction penalty. Ace's Hardware has always been biased for Intel and against AMD, and it shows here. The P5 core is hyped as a big "innovation," but not once is that word used in reference to the Athlon, which performs at least as well (probably better clock-for-clock, as I pointed out) and got there to the seventh generation almost A YEAR AND A HALF before Intel. The one place where he FINALLY gives AMD credit is in the conclusion, and even then it's marred by renewed complaints. This is funny, since this article was allegedly a follow-up to Ace's earlier look at the P4 core by looking at the Athlon core in that light. For all the nice things finally said about the Athlon in the last paragraph, he never once used "innovative" regarding it, despite giving the moniker to the P4 at least twice.
And, as a final note, what I've just said doesn't really matter all that much, because the above poster was RIGHT: all that matters is who can deliver the most PERFORMANCE at the least PRICE. And that is, clearly, AMD. That comment *is* insightful, as far as it goes, because that's all that really matters. Why don't we all use Alphas or PowerPCs, which are much more beautiful architecturally? Because they can't give us the price/performance of an Athlon or dual P!!! system. In the final analysis, that's all that's important.
If you go to ARDI's pages, you'll see that they've been very infrequently updated. Some of them are dated 1997... They say that one of the reasons for this is that they've been concentrating on marketing and making custom implementations of their emulation engine, the core that emulates a 68k Motorola processor on an x86 machine, for companies which want to have apps available on x86 without rewriting their old code.
This makes sense since I'm sure there are many companies with legacy apps written for 68k machines--not just Macs exclusively--which they don't want to discard just yet, but which are sorely wanting for decent hardware. They'd run much faster on a modern x86 emulating the old processor, than on an old 68k machine.
But if you really like using Executor for Mac apps, I have a much better and more complete and satisfying solution for you. Use Basilisk II, the open-source Mac emulator, with a free copy of the Mac System 7.5.5 downloadable from Apple's own FTP servers. It's much more satisfying to have a real Macintosh OS being emulated, instead of ARDI's reverse-engineered runtime environment which, while efficient, lacks all the charm and nostalgia of running the *REAL* MacOS.
Coincidentally, I wrote a post about Basilisk II the last time emulation was mentioned here on/. Read all about it, how to use it, and where to get the latest stable or dev release, here:
Umm, I'm not one of those people who's going to vote Nader. In fact, I used to be a huge Republican. I changed my mind when I realized that both Republicans AND Democrats absolutely suck.
This gentleman who wrote the above letter claims that it's a trite platitude to believe that Republicans and Democrats are the same. Well, how are they not the same? They both adhere to the same fundamental assumptions about government, and those fundamental assumptions all revolve around our current monstrous system. No one is interested in a small government which does what Thomas Jefferson and George Washington would have wanted it to do, but otherwise leaves us the fuck alone. Republicans want to censor sex, and Democrats want to censor violence. They're BOTH for censorship, for doing what they think is good for us instead of letting us choose.
I mean, did you actually listen to the debate last night? They said practically the same thing about trying to get the entertainment industry to change its ways. Well, most Americans don't want the Federal government to tell the studios what kind of films they can give us, what kind of music we can have, etc. If you are a parent and don't want your kid to listen to Eminem, that's your business. It isn't, however, the government's business to try to get record companies to "self-censor" music. It's still censorship. One of the things most often forgotten is that freedom of speech is worthless if all the outlets for speech are closed to you--and that's what the Federal government wants to do, by telling the industry it needs to police itself better. Screw censorship in all its forms. When this country was founded, broadsides with the most obscene possible content were easily available in any big city, yet never once did Washington whine like Gore does about it.
The system today is monstrous, and neither party wants to restore small government. The gentleman who wrote this article talked about bureaucrats as essentially harmless. Sure, they're harmless if you forget that it's your own money paying them, money which is stolen from our pockets by an income tax which was unconstitutional until circa 1900. None of the people who founded this country and forged its laws believed in income tax. In fact, the very notion of taking money so directly and blanketly from the common people was abhorrent to them. Let's also not forget that not only have bureaucrats wasted TRILLIONS of our tax dollars over the years, but they've also created terrible things in so doing. Does anyone remember what a piece of horse-shit the Meese Commission Report, done primarily by bureaucrats, was? They wanted to take away our right to express ourselves in any sexually explicit materials. They considered Playboy magazine a gateway drug to the evils of pornography. Bureaucrats are not harmless. They're a big threat to every right we have, because they spin the facts to fit into politicians' preconceived plans. How is it that Gore has one set of figures for everything, and Bush has another? They each have their own set of bureaucrats, of course...
As more and more laws and regulations are passed, it becomes more difficult for a man to do anything without the government's permission or denials. Do you know what the country with the greatest social mobility is? Hong Kong. Do you know why? Very little bureaucracy and very little government intervention. Fifty years ago Hong Kong was a useless, poor rock in the ocean. It was literally a rock--people couldn't even farm there. There were no big industries. But the British controlled it and instituted a government of benign, salutary neglect. If someone harmed you, the police and justice system would take care of it. But otherwise, the government didn't do a damned thing. And today, fifty years later, Hong Kong is an economic giant. All that in five decades, from a pre-industrial-revolution level of existence, practically, to the average median income being only $2000 less than that in the US. And economic mobility here is NOTHING compared to Hong Kong. There, you fill out one sheet of paper, one-sided, and you're registered as a business. Anyone, literally, can start a small business. Here, people need to file so many papers that many give up--a stack of tax papers, a stack of forms to submit to the health department even if you're not serving food, a stack of forms over and over again. It's hard just to open your doors in the US because of the bureaucratic red tape. And then there are the thirty-page forms a business sometimes needs to fill out just to pay a few bucks in taxes...
The economic mobility of the present in the US is largely an illusion of the tech sector. Nowhere else is there upper mobility, unless you want to become an MBA business drone. And even then, I know a girl with an MBA who's working at Red Lobster.
Take me, for example. I have no upward mobility. I have no mobility at all. I am one of many lost in the cracks, lost to the complexities of new laws which an increasingly intrusive government saddles us with. Republicans and Democrats both--and, Democrats controlled the legislature, BTW, this wasn't a partisan thing--decided it would be a good idea to keep teenagers from having sex by making a new law, one very few in my state know about, which makes it a crime for anyone 18 or over to have consensual sex with someone who is *above the "age of consent"* but below 18. Well, when I was in high school I knew the age of consent in my state was 15, so when I was a high school senior and started dating a high school junior who was a year and a half younger than I was, I thought I was fine. After all, lots of high school seniors date even freshmen and sophomores, so dating a junior put me squarely on firm ground. Well, I wasn't on firm ground when her dad had me arrested for having consensual sex with her, even though she was above the age of consent, even though I was still in high school, even though she was only a year and a half younger. Even my teachers were shocked that I was being prosecuted. But thanks to those primarily Democratic lawmakers, I was in big trouble.
Here's where the story gets interesting: the judge was a smart and reasonable guy, and he dismissed the case. After all, the law was meant to keep old perverts from taking advantage of vulnerable teenagers, not to prosecute teenagers for dating people who are well within their own peer group. Nevermind that I'd been a virgin and she'd had more experience back then than most 25 year olds, so if anyone was seduced it was me.;-)
Well, thank god for all that bureaucratic recordkeeping, because I can't get a job thanks to that arrest on a charge I wasn't even convicted for. Thanks to the fact that the Federal government does more than the Constitution says it should, I have an FBI record which prevents me from getting a job anywhere in the academic world. Since I was in 10th grade I knew I was meant to be a poorly paid, but happy with my career, teacher. That dream, that vocation, that entire life has disappeared. Thanks all to a few politicians who didn't think to write a law which couldn't be abused by being applied to an innocent high school kid like I used to be once. And then, thanks to the FBI which keeps records of arrests even if THE JUDGE DISMISSED THE CASE.
Now, if the Federal government were as small as it's supposed to be, if it only did what Jefferson and Madison designed it to do, I could have a new life. I could have moved a few states over, and forgotten about that horrible period in my life when I was being prosecuted for doing something many, many, many, many teenagers do and is considered a normal part of adolescence, and taught middle or high school English or history. But instead I have a number, given to me by the Federal government, which follows me wherever I go and keeps me from ever having a life, a career, anything worthwhile since I have to give that number to my prospective employers and with it they find out from that same Federal government that a long time ago I was once arrested for something so minor and normal and such a misapplication of the law that the judge dismissed the case. And then they don't hire me, despite my degree from a prestigious private liberal arts college, completed in only three years of Dean's List hard work, with two full majors.
You see, people like me are forgotten in this Information Age. People like me are invisible. People like me have no future. People like me hate bureaucrats and unnecessary or poorly written laws, for good reason. And people like me have good reason to dislike both Republicans and Democrats for creating a country so Orwellian as this one out of a country as wonderful as the one Jefferson and Madison and Washington made.
And I'm not the only one. A fifteen year old kid in Michigan is on the sex offender registry because he had consensual sex with his girlfriend, who was a year younger than he was. He'll never have a future, either. I could list a dozen more cases just from the top of my head, since I'm acutely aware of such things. But they're invisible to most of you. We are invisible to most of you, the victims of the Information Society where one small step can stay with you for the rest of your life, thanks to laws which change yearly and a number which doesn't.
Anyone want to hire a very good, very educated, very dedicated English and history teacher who was never actually convicted of anything? Didn't think so. So tell me why I should vote Democrat, when they did this just as much as Republicans did? They are the same.
Well, you're right--but we're on the same page here, really. I was just pointing out that the graphics are ancient, but we love those old games. Why? Well, they're fun. Old games were about fun game play, not flashy graphics. That's why Quake3 was a hit, and Daikatana sucks ass--sure, the graphics in Q3 are great, but people play because it's fun. Daikatana, though--they concentrated on the flashy graphics, and created a game no one wants to play because it's just not fun.
I mean, my favorite 3D shooter is still...Duke Nukem 3D. Yeah, the sprites are all 2D and look weird when moving through 3D space. Yeah, the resolution is very low--at its highest setting it still doesn't look all that detailed, because it was meant to be played at a max of 640x480. But it's FUN!
It's like the Atari--the old Frogger cart is fun, while that new 3D frogger thingie they created for the PC bites. They have 3D versions of BattleZone for the PC, with fancy graphics, but...give me the old arcade version, with black and white vector graphics, running under MAME instead.
My favorite arcade game would have to be...Star Wars, the ancient 3-color vector graphics game which has you trying to destroy the Death Star from the perspective of Luke's X-Wing fighter. It kicks ass, with its, what, 4-bit sound samples? It's just fun to play.
That's why I love my old Mac environment so much. It has awesomely simple, fun games that you can't get for the modern PC. Barrack has decent graphics, but you don't play for that--it's addictively simple and fun and I've never seen a PC game like it. Risk II for the Mac is just a colorized version of a game that had been floating around since the 80s, no other changes, and it's also sddictively simple and fun, with no PC equal. Even the OS is fun--no drag-and-drop, not a whole lot of "advanced" features found in Win98/NT/2K or Gnome or KDE or newer Mac OS versions, but it's very, very ergonomic and simple and I'd love it if Linux or Windows could have a GUI so simple but elegant where the apps mesh like in Mac OS.
Game play is what's most important in a game--how fun it is. People have lost sight of that today. Something similar is true of OSes, I think--the user experience is being thrown away for bells and whistles. Look at those horrid, HORRID, betas of Windoze Whistler. Yuck! In 2001, Micro$oft will release an OS whose GUI is still no match for what the MacOS had five or six years ago--a lifetime in the computer world. I have a lot of hope for Nautilus--I think it'll produce something truly superior for Linux; but, KDE and Gnome still don't have a seamless user experience in their near future. Maybe in a couple of years they'll produce something as nice as the user experience with that old MacOS, but uniquely their own. I hope so.;-)
Exactly--I think emulation has become so big precisely because of the nostalgia associated with those quirky old games we all used to play, or just the quirky old OSes we made do with. After all, some of the first emulators were for things like the Atari 2600, ancient technology with horrid graphics and pitiful resolution by today's standards--but we remember fondly those old games.
No one has mentioned this one yet, so I thought I'd post it right toward the top since I LOVE it so much. It is bar none my favorite piece of software--I use it every day. It's Basilisk II, the open-source project that emulates a 68k-based Macintosh.
And it emulates a 68k Mac perfectly, only faster than the originals on my old K6-2 400. I can't wait to see it speed along when I finally upgrade--AMD, VIA, please hurry up and get dual Athlon solutions out the door, okay? The proggie is even optimized for dual processor machines; you can run it on one particular CPU, and use the other for other tasks.
This brings me to the one drawback: it tries to eat 100% of CPU time, from what I understand even on fast machines--but not a problem if you stay inside the emulated Mac while it's running, like I do, or have a dual-processor machine.
But Basilisk II is superior in most respects to the closed-source, commercial Mac emulators, SoftMac 2000 and Fusion--it's much more stable, crashing less frequently than a real 68k Mac, whereas Fusion and SoftMac crash more often.
I highly recommend that anyone who's ever used an old Mac and liked it or some of its software, check out Basilisk II at its homepage. If you run it under a Windoze platform, the homepage for the Windows port is here.
The great part is that Mac OS versions through 7.5.3 and its update to 7.5.5 are free for download from Apple's own website, so that you can run a real MacOS unlike with the runtime environment Executor some here may have tried. Links to Apple's FTP to get the OS are on each Basilisk II homepage, but the directions for installing MacOS on a HFS partition image file seem a bit more detailed at the Windoze version's homepage.
The only thing you need is a Mac 68k ROM, which you can download from a real Mac you own (instructions are given for how to copy this to a file), or you could pirate it from the Net. A ROM from a Quadra works best, since it's a 32-bit clean ROM unlike some of the older 16-bit "dirty" ROMs. Not that I condone piracy, but...you can easily find quadra.rom with some creative guesswork at Google.
It's been great to have that old Mac I used to use at the college computer lab in '95 back, and better than ever. I've been playing Barrack, one of my favorite games of all time. I've been playing that quaint old classic Risk, simple but addictive as it was in the early 90s. And Basilisk II even allows your virtual Mac to use your PC's internet connection, so grab Netscape 3.04 from the Netscape archives and have deja vu all over again (I still think the rounded look of the old versions of Netscape for the Mac are better than most of today's browsers look).
Sorry for running on so long, but I love it. The only problem has been tracking down older versions of Mac apps and games--I decided I wanted to make my virtual Mac an authentic 1995 beast, not only was it my first year of college, it's the year the Net really exploded into the mainstream. I've been collecting these old apps that were common back then, and eventually, even though it's a copyright violation, I'm going to release a 150MB HFS partition file on the Net containing a snapshot of 1995, with all the common software that's now difficult to find. Much of it I had to find by poring through old FTP mirrors, like this and from here. The olf NCSA Telnet and NCSA Mosaic ftp archives are still there, and have period versions of common utilities.
Anyway, I just thought I'd share something about my favourite emulator. Ciao.
Ho-hum, a flame based on one misplaced word in a 659-line USENET post. I'm absolutely crushed. Clearly, in my haste in trying to complete such a lengthy discourse in time to participate in my *life*, something a troll such as yourself clearly lacks, I said "incredulous" instead of "incredible." If you look closely, you'll also discover such horrible secrets as my numerous typos.
Oh, and I wasn't bragging about my linguistic abilities--although my girlfriend *does* say I give great French lessons--I was pointing out the irony that someone as articulate as he was, was articulating a viewpoint based on a false definition of "anonymous."
Now, I'll go back to giving my girlfriend those French lessons, my friend. You--and your hand--can go slither back under whatever trollish rock you call home.;-)
Did anyone else have 790 pop in mind when reading this post? He's a character in the great sci-fi series *LEXX*, who happens to have a piece of human brain tissue at the core of his circuitry. Which explains how he, a robot head, could fall in love with the love slave Xev.
Sci fi and science have always played off one another. I wonder how many scientists were inspired growing up by the fantastic creations of the 1950s comic books, like aeroplanes that could fly into space, or by Asimov and others.
But, I digress. I just have to point out that it may be difficult to overclock human brain tissue, but...
I'd post a lengthy explanation of why it's more important to protect basic freedoms than to protect idiots who should learn about the Net before they run out into traffic and get run over on the information superhighway, but I said it well enough in a discussion on alt.privacy.anon-server. It was in response to a man who blamed anonymous remailers as responsible for threats made by an anonymous person to some woman he knows.
I won't repost it here because it's a good 659 lines, but here's some linkage to it on DejaNews (I still can't bring myself to call them Deja...sigh...):
If that link expires, go to the main Power Search page at http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml and type "carbonymous" into the author field, and that will show it and a few others.
The implications for abuse are far, FAR to huge to make a genetic database a good idea. Umm, can anyone say genetic screening for "the possibility of undesirable traits"? Can anyone say inability to get insurance because of a pre-existing genetic condition? Can anyone say FBI database of "potentially violent" people--like, say, most of history's greatest individuals? Can anyone recall that you leave DNA roughly EVERYWHERE you go, and that unscrupulous agencies could use this to monitor people they don't like even if they do nothing illegal?
Soryy, but you misunderstand where I'm coming from. For starters, I'm well into my 20s, not under 18. This is important, becaue I'm old enough and well-educated enough, having graduated from one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the nation in a mere three years--a feat no one at my college pulled off in any professor's memory, the requirements are so thick--to come from a mature and thoughtful perspective, rather than one tinged by being too young to do something. Just as importantly, I'm not so old that I can't remember my high school years clearly, along with the culture, behaviours, and attitudes which were commonplace a mere five years ago. The older one gets, the more divorced one is from the state of today's youth, in most cases. This taints viewpoints, because what was inappropriate teenage behaviour in 1962 is very, very far removed from what is appropriate teenage behavior today. Having children oneself also often makes one entirely unqualified to make a rational and impartial judgement about what is appropriate for young people, because parental emotions make one lose objectivity much of the time. Objectivity is important, because we're talking about the development into adulthood of another human being, not our own selfish wants and desires which sometimes conflict with what is most healthy.
That being said, the important misunderstanding lies not with my age/youth, but with your characterizations of this particular law. You see, the very same people have made this law, who have tried to censor Mapplethorpe's artwork from being displayed in public museums in their city, and who attempted to get adult magazines such as HUSTLER banned for being "patently obscene." This is the same city, and these are the same public officials. Given their history, it is more than reasonable to infer that their motives are not regulation, but eradication--in fact, it's not just "more than reasonable to infer," it's bloody obvious.
I have no objection to regulations, per se. I have numerous objections to this one, as well as others which have come along in recent years.
Regarding your example about movie ratings, I'm sorry, but it's not at all on-point. In fact, the entire movie ratings system as it stands today is successful precisely because teenagers can easily circumvent it. If you're 18 and your friend or girlfriend is 16, well, just buy her ticket while she waits out of sight. I have only once in my entire life run across a movie theater that wouldn't sell two, three, or half a dozen tickets to anyone who is old enough for the movie's rating, and then have no questions for the under-17s when they roll into the theater. The only other exceptions I've seen to this are regarding films which are unrated, or which are garnering direct protest right in the area.
This is what makes the MPAA ratings system fairly successful: it gives conservative parents warm fuzzies in their ignorant bliss that their 15 year old darling can't see some nasty sex-and-violence romp, while simultaneously giving teens the ability to see whatever films they want behind their parents' backs. This isn't of course applicable to very very young children, but is 100% true for teens.
Now, this arcade system on the other hand is an abomination, not because it actually works unlike the movie ratings system which is usually easily circumvented, but because it's clearly designed to kill all violent arcade games/arcades as we know them within its jurisdiction. The "violent" games must be segregated in a separate physical area from the rest of the games, with means to prevent unauthorized minors from accessing them. In other words, they have to be put into a "back room" as if they were hardcore pornography. There is no mechanism for giving teens a clear and easy way to have access to these games--as I said, much of arcade playing is done on impulse, to kill time, or otherwise by teens who are at the damned mall to get away from their parents and be independant in the first place. How is a parent who gives his teens enough independence to, well, be a healthy young adult, supposed to give this permission? It's unconscionable to expect a teenager to have to hold Daddy's hand every time he wants to play a HARMLESS VIDEO GAME. If you don't think they're harmless, I refer you to the statistics given by Jamie's/. story day before yesterday.
This is part of an alarming trend in the U.S. to artificially and unhealthily extend childhood. For example, if an 18 year old is an adult, why can't he drink alcoholic beverages? Well, the sole reason is that Elizabeth Dole and her conservative groups complained that 18 year olds being able to legally purchase liquor caused it to get into the hands of other, younger high school students. Even Ronald Reagan was initially against raising the drinking age--after all, it was lowered in the first place based on the premise that someone who is an adult, who has the right to vote in our Republic, and who has the responsibility to fight and die for it in time of war, should naturally be extended every right including the one to drink alcohol. That makes a lot of sense--either you're an adult, or you're not. Either you have rights, or you don't. But, raising the spectre of younger high schoolers drinking caused rights to be rescinded and taken away from supposed adults. Well, the result is that use of alcohol by high school students has increased many times over since the rise in drinking age--it simply didn't work. Rights were taken away, for nothing. And in the end, it probably contributed to the rise of underage drinking, because teenagers will very often do things just because they;re told not to.
Even more important and damaging, how is it that an 18 year old is an adult, when in certain locales purchase of sexual videos and magazines is restricted to those at least 21? Where I happen to live, the age is 18--but in many places it is 21. Now, no 18 year old can be prevented from making sexually explicit materials and being the subject of them, because he's an adult and has 1st Amendment rights to participate if he wants to in the adult materials industry. Any law restricting the age to 21 and over would be immediately called unconstitutional by the Court. And yet, if I am an 18 year old or 20 year old in such a jurisdiction, I could not legally purchase the sex videos I myself have starred in. This makes NO SENSE whatsoever. "Adult" and "age of majority" thus have little real meaning, and rights are rendered arbitrary in such examples.
But laws have been getting ever more restrictive on young people, especially 14-17 year olds. First a smoking age is set at 16, and then it's raised to 18--it hasn't stopped teen smoking, in fact after a brief decline it's on the rise once more. It just succeeds in making older teens, who are not children but really young adults, feel more boxed in, feel like they have fewer and fewer rights, feel like they're being treated with no respect and have no rights. And they're correct. And this comes from someone who HATES cigarettes and has NEVER smoked any.
Curfews are being set in more cities and towns all over the country, curfews which affect older teens and not just young children. Talk about the State interfering with the development of a 16 year old into a healthy adult, well, it may make the old people feel safe not to have a few young hooligans running about after dark, but it makes every teen under such tyranny feel like he or she has no rights and no worth as a person, no free will and no respect. Talk to young people about such issues. It demeans them, and the parents who should have a say instead of the State mandating curfews.
Even a basic teenage right of passage like learning to drive is under fire. Thanks to a media which plays up any incidence of teenage car accidents, especially if they involve alcohol, moves are underway in many states to raise the driving age to 17 or even 18 for an instruction permit. Of course, the DOT's own aggregate statistics show that 21-25 year olds are more likely to drive drunk than 16-20 year olds, but facts don't count when people go by gut emotion fed by an irresponsible press. Of course, 16-20 year olds DO have more accidents overall than 21-25 year olds--it makes perfect sense, because you're ALWAYS going to have more accidents on average in people's first few years of driving than after they've already had a few years of practice. Well, duh, but no one THINKS any more.
Even the most fundamental part of oneself, one's body, is a subject of much legislation and loss of rights in the last few years. Ages of consent have gone up, even though ages of sexual maturity (physically) and of first sexual contacts have been going down. Before the health and nutrition advances of the 19th century, average age of first menses hovered between 14 and 16. Today, it is listed as 12 in most textbooks, but the most recent studies have suggested it has been dropping swiftly, as low as 9 for African American girls in certain cities, and 10-11 for Caucasian American girls in some cities. A majority of middle school children now engage in oral sex, according to an article which recently appeared in the Washington Post Magazine. And yet, ages of consent are being raised and prosecutions are on the rise--not prosecutions of older perverts who deserve to be prosecuted for inappropriate contact, but rather prosecutions of young people for having consensual sex with members of their own peer group. One would hardly say that a boy who just turned 15 was out of the peer group of a girl who's almost 14, and yet such a boy was prosecuted, in Michigan if memory serves, for consensual sex with the girlfriend. Prosecutors called it "statutory rape" since the age of consent was 15 and he'd reached it but she hadn't, but most of us would call it a "normal teenage relationship." Now, even five years ago, much less 10, no prosecutor in the country would have prosecuted. But these days, no one uses common sense, and no one thinks of the real emotional health of our young people. Not just the boy--who is now, thanks to Megan's Law, a registered sex offender--but the girl will probably never develop into a normal adult with normal sexual behaviours. I can recount many similar cases, and even find URLs if you want. In my own state, the age of consent is still technically 15, but a new law makes it a serious crime for someone 18 or older to have consensual sex with someone above the "age of consent" but under 18. Not only is it confusing, it's been used to convict 18 year old high school seniors for having consensual sex with 16 year old high school juniors. Teenagers who are really young adults, now have not even basic rights over their own sexual development with members of their peer group.
We make our young people, kids as young as 12 and 13, responsible for upholding the responsibilities of adults. If they harm someone, they can be tried as an adult for assault or murder. Yet, we give them none of the rights of adults. How is it that we treat them like adults when they do evil, and like children when they do good? How can they have all the bad and none of the good that comes with being an adult? Why is it, at the exact moment we're treating teenagers more and more like children, taking away more of their rights, that we can simultaneously start punishing them as the justice system has only punished adults before now? I think it's because our society is selfish, and doesn't care about our teenagers. We want them to do as we say, and if they don't they get punished, but if they do they get no reward. We have lost sight of our teenagers. We treat them as objects, not human beings.
Not to mention the fact that we drug our young people like no other ntion does. We put them on Ritalin for just about everything--it's scary, the percentages of kids and teens on this stuff. And we put them on Welbutrin and Zoloft for depression--which is merely a usually harmless symptom of being a teenager. Most teenagers are naturally depressed from time to time--it's part of growing up. And we drug them for it. Do you know how many prescription drugs the Columbine shooters were on?
Everything for teenagers has been growing progressively worse. They've been given fewer and fewer rights--had more and more taken away. Is it any wonder, then, that some of them have felt so trapped, so put upon by external pressures, that some of them have snapped like at Columbine? Columbine was a wake-up call, not that teens are more violent than they've ever been--which stats show is untrue--not that we need to censor their films and video games, but that we're censoring them to death. We give them so little freedom that they don't value their own lives, or those of their classmates. We put them under so much presure to succeed, to get good grades, to get into college, to have cool friends and be in the right cliques--many also need to have jobs, too--and we have taken away their only freedoms and rewards. We have taken away all their fundamental rights.
And this is just another piece in that big puzzle. It's just another brick in the wall. And it's a very wicked thing to do to our teenagers, our supposed young adults. They get all the responsibilities and none of the rights. This is a small part of a much, much larger wrong. But it should be stopped. It all needs to be stopped, and thought about rationally.
The key point here is that it's the ARCADE business which is suing to stop this law. This is about ARCADE games, not about BUYING games RETAIL.
Let me repeat, since 99% of the people below, who are moderated up to 4 and 5 for pointing out that requiring a parent to buy a game for a child is not a ban, don't seem to have READ THE BLOODY POST and associated material. Here it it: THIS IS ABOUT ARCADES!!! NOT retail.
I hope we've cleared the confusion now, and I hope the people who misunderstood what this was all about get appropriately moderated down again. People shouldn't moderate something up if it completely misses the subject, whether or not it's an OPINION the moderator agrees with.
You see, this *is* a ban on arcades. It is not a *de jure* ban, it is a *de facto* ban. That is, the law itself does not ban arcades; the law does, however, made the business of running an arcade completely untenable, thus causing, in effect, a ban on arcades.
Here's why: The majority of those who frequent arcades are minors--mostly high school students, though this varies by location and type of arcade. As such, minors are an important, the most important, customer demographic in the arcade business. Without minors, arcades would go the way of the drive-in movie theater.
This law effectively prevents most minors from going to arcades. Let's face it: high school students, and most junior high students, are not going to arcades to play the latest mind-numbing soul-killing consumer-drone-creating Pokemon franchise. They play the good stuff, the Area 51s and the Mortal Kombats and the House of the Deads and the VR Gunfights. Keep them from those by this law, and arcades shrivel and die--and that's what these freaks want--the same freaks, BTW, who were with Charles Keating and the Moral Majority, who had no TRUE morals whatsoever (umm, can anyone say S&L scam?), when they tried to prosecute a certain respected art gallery for obscenity for exhibiting the photographs of a a certain controversial but respected artist. Brownie points for anyone who can name the artist AND the gallery (hint: Showtime recently made a film about it). Oh, and these were the same people who tried to ban the sale of HUSTLER which, while not always the most tasteful magazine, is protected speech. Anyone who thinks that Thomas Jefferson wouldn't defend HUSTLER in this day and age, should immediately read some of his writings, or preferably leave this country altogether for someplace more to your morally censorious liking, such as Iraq or Libya.
But, I digress. Back to the main line of reasoning, this is a *de facto* ban because there is no effective way to implement a system whereby under-18s are prevented from accessing such machines without parental consent, while still allowing parentally-consented (yes, I know, but I'm too tired to think of a better term) minors to freely access them. What, is a parent supposed to accompany Little Johnny and Jake to the arcade every time they want to play Mortal Kombat? Let's say a parent does; she goes up to the attendant and says "Let my kids in to the back room" while she shops. Johnny and Jake go get a drink 'cause they're thirsty, or go anywhere for a change of scenery--kids don't like staying in one place for long periods--come back to the arcade, and they can't get in. Different attendant, or attendant doesn't remember them, or maybe the policy is a parent is needed *every occasion*. Oops, sorry. Better yet, most teens drop by the arcade while doing something else. My friends and I would stop by after movies or while hanging out in the mall or after dining somewhere. Oops, sorry, no parents with you, can't get in, you'll go hang out somewhere else. Needing parental consent all the time adds up to a lot of lost revenue, most of which is from kids whose parents would have let them play any game. Fact is, most 16 year olds, a lot of 15 and 14 year olds, and almost all 17 year olds, are very mobile, but without their parents. They're teenagers, YOUNG ADULTS, with lives of their own. Mommy and Daddy don't accompany them everywhere, and don't need to because they're trusted, independant. What a great way it is to teach teenagers to grow into responsible, independant adults, to make them bring Mommy and Daddy with them everywhere they go.
The upshot is, it would kill the entire arcade business in the area except for 1 or 2 locations. Thus, it would be a *DE FACTO BAN* on arcades. If the authors of the legislation had mere reasonable regulation of arcades on their minds, they would have implemented a one-time system whereby a parent could give Little Johnny permanent permission to play whetever games he wants, with say a registration card. Of course, doing that would smack of America as a show-me-your-papers totalitarian sort of place--not that it isn't already...:-(
Slashdot Mirror
But if you read the article, this isn't just limited to video cards. Do you have any unusual or older cards you want to use? A video capture card, maybe? How about an MPEG-2 decoder board (no software decoder, even on a GHz CPU, produces as perfect a picture as a good hardware decoder)? I'm willing to bet that some of these devices, and others, qualify to be affected by this bug. Certainly, I have enough interesting cards in my PCI bus that I'm not about to buy a P4--including an ATI All-in-Wonder 128 for analog video capture, a Voodoo 5 5500 PCI (because I wanted a real 3dfx Glide card for playing N64 games--glide wrappers produce unacceptably inconsistent results--but wanted to save my AGP slot for an NV20), and a hardware DVD decoder. But hey, I'm not upgrading soon anyway. Santa left a little gift under my tree, an Abit KT7-RAID and a GHz AMD monster. With the price of PC-133 falling, I'm happy because I'll finally get to have a box with tons of RAM--768 MB, baby! It'll let me have a big ass RAMdisk for temp files, which speeds things up immeasurably if you do high-res graphics editing with programs that make temp files for undo functions. But, I digress...
At any rate, the problem *does* affect many people. That being said, the next rev of the chipset will probably fix it. I'd be a hypocrite if I didn't point out that AMD has had similar problems, too, it's not just Intel's fault--anyone remember the bugs in the AMD 750, which was the only chipset available for months after the K7 came out?
Well, two years isn't long. It certainly isn't the ten years that the parent post ascribed to the "DC area" in general. And 703 just got it two months ago. I don't think 540 has it yet, but it's been a while since I've been there. I'm just not sure how long 202 has had it, though.
I think you're making the mistake of assuming that things will always be done the way they are now. Take Internet access. You mention all the timeout and hostunreach problems--forget about that. If there's a big move to telephony over IP--not just the current, problematic use of Voice-over-IP that's been emerging fairly recently--we'll see telephony providers with big pipes, eliminating those problems. Emergency use will be as assured as it is now. Just my opinion, though. :-)
As the gentleman who replied to you just before I did pointed out, dialing the area code for a number within the same area code was optional here until a couple months ago, when suddenly it just stopped working that way. Most people didn't realize that it was coming, and many people started complaining about it.
Since you moved here recently, I can understand how you may not have realized this--you might have moved from someplace where ten-digit dialing was mandatory. But to people who have lived here for many years, ten-digit dialing is new. The only time we ever had to use an area code was when we were calling into an area code different from our own.
I'm not sure about what other area codes around the D.C. area had this, too, but I'm willing to bet that very few have had 10-digit dialing for local calls for very long. I've spent time in a few, and local dialing has usually been a 7-digit affair.
I live in the D.C. area, in Northern Virginia, a ten minute drive into the city. We only started even having to use area codes for local numbers about two months ago. Ten-digit dialing hasn't been standard here for three years, not by a long shot. Even when we started having to use area codes for local calls, two months ago, people started complaining. Now, I wasn't one of those people, and I understand the need for modernized phone number systems. However, I can understand how people, especially older people and the less educated, can see such changes as an added burden.
That being said, it's a necessary step for future expandability. For now, at least. But, I bet that eventually, within the next 20 years at the accelarating pace of technology, telephone numbers and most telephone lines themselves will be passe. Cable and fiber and wireless are the future--telephone lines are just such puny creatures with such small bandwidth--and I honestly think that most calls will be routed through cyberspace in the future. Why have to remember a 10 digit phone number, when you can pick up a receiver and say: "John Laws, hampden-Sydney, Virginia," the first time, and then just pick up the receiver and say "John Laws" any time after the first? It's coming within the next two decades, three at the most.
The ascii girl #3 in his pr0n directory at gopher://gopher.heatdeath.org/00/pr0n/pr0n003.txt% 09%09%2B looks underage! Damn ascii kiddie pr0n! Damn ascii child pr0nographers, exploiting our underage letters and numbers like that...
[Note: joke, not troll. Now, put the moderation point *on the floor* and back up, slowly...]
Plenty of people do this, but most just use old, stripped arcade cabinets purchased from local arcades or servicing companies. It's just cheaper, and less time-consuming, to use an old cab and then fill it with what you want.
m --the most comprehensive site by far. As it will point out, there are many options when building an arcade cab, one of the more popular being to wire up a PC to the arcade cabinet and use it to run MAME, so that any one of over 2000 supported games can be played. Plenty of special hardware is available to map arcade controls to keyboard codes for use by the PC in such a cabinet. This also makes playing a game designed for the PC, like Q3 or UT, quite playable on such a cabinet if you include all the right controls, like a trackball for the mouse and buttons coded to each key used in the game. There are also MAME front ends which make it easy to use MAME in arcade cabs, like Arcade@Home.
t m has them. Happ is one of the big suppliers for *real* arcade parts. so a lot of people who build arcade cabinets for home use use their products. They *are* expensive, but you're getting real arcade controls, designed to withstand thousands of hours of abuse by random arcade patrons. There are cheaper alternatives for the PC which can be adapted for use with a MAME cabinet easily, but they're not as authentic.
d e.shtml . I plan to build it to work quite authentically--I'm even going to put in coin mechs, and use those bronze arcade tokens we used when I was a kid--which Happ also happens to sell. It's also going to be as big as most four-player cabs, because I'm designing it with all the controls necessary for two people to play almost any two-person arcade game together using the original controller types, like trackballs for Marble Madness, dual joysticks for Sarge, etc., and it'll take up a lot of control panel space. In the middle will of course be the Atari flight yoke for use with one-player flight and driving games, and at the bottom of the cab near the floor I'm putting a set of pedals for racing games. Instead of using an arcade monitor, though, I want to get a large PC monitor so that playing games designed with PC resolutions in mind is easier. MAME can output authentic-looking arcade scanlines to a PC monitor anyway, so it's no loss of authenticity in the way the games look. With all the NES, SNES, Genesis, N64, PSX, etc., emulators available, it makes building an arcade cabinet driven by a PC even more interesting and fun. It should be a massive project when I get the chance to put design into practice..
If you're willing to spend more money for something new, try a cabinet from http://www.hanaho.com/ --they make new cabs, complete with your choice of different arcade monitors.
For the most info on this stuff, try http://www.arcadecontrols.speedhost.com/arcade.ht
You mentioned Pole Position--if you want to give it a truly authentic feel, you'll need arcade foot pedals. http://www.happcontrols.com/amusement/amusement.h
I haven't built a MAME cabinet yet, because I'm poor [insert sound of tiny violins], but I will eventually. I've already been squirreling away components bought on eBay. For example, one of the hardest to find arcade controls is the unusual and quite nonstandard flight yoke used by some 1983-1985 Atari games like Star Wars, Return of the the Jedi, and Firefox. I bought one on eBay for $90, which is worth it because they're just so impossible to find and because Star Wars was the game I remember most fondly from childhood. We used to have a sit-down cockpit version of Star Wars at the local arcade, and I wanted the unique controller so that I could play it fairly faithfully. Someone has even given instructions on how to interface it to a PC, at http://www.arcadecontrols.speedhost.com/arcade_ju
Anyway, those links should be enough to get anyone started. I look forward to whenever I do get the time and money to complete my project, but meanwhile I'm picking up some useful controls and parts.
>> What's there to be excited about?
>
> Oh, I dunno, crystal clear quality?
>
> You still listen to records, don't you?
But you're missing the point that you're actually getting much less quality. Yes, digital instead of film means that there won't be the occasional specks of dust on the print. But there'll be less picture resolution.
It's like this: Imagine you're given the choice between two images to work with. One of them is taken with a digital camera and gives you a 1024x768 16bpp picture with no dust or other analogue issues. The other was taken with a film camera, and gives you something like 4000x3000 with better-than-32bpp, but there may be small dust specks. I'd want to work with the film image, because there's more to work with and a few dust imperfections can be fixed--if they're even noticeable.
As for your remark about records versus CDs, that's not fair because CDs give sound quality almost equal to that of vinyl, but with the advantages of being digital and easier to take care of. But, resolution of digital video cameras isn't nearly the equal of 35mm film cameras. The right analogy would be comparing a record to a low-quality mp3 recorded at only 112kbps. Sure, it's digital. Sure, most people won't notice the sound difference. But a lot of people *will* notice the sound difference, and it's a huge step down.
Roger Ebert is one of the most consistent critics of digital film and digital projection. He says they're wonderful for independent projects and for films that big studios won't agree to produce. And he's right--they're great for that. But if it's a major film with an actual budget, it should be shot on film. I think he's right. Film has a much better, less harsh look than video, too. Video is often sharper, but not as true with its treatment of colors and contrast. But the killer is that video resolution can't touch film. What happens 50 years from now, when we're moving to HDTV-2? It will surely outstrip the limits of video resolution. Lucas's new pet all-video Star Wars saga will look pathetically scaled-up. Yet, anything shot on film will probably still need to be scaled *down* to fit the new standard.
Technology progresses, and one day probably soon there will be a digital video camera that can rival the quality of film's resolution and color. But that time is not now. Shooting on digital video is pathetically shortsighted, unless you think resolution will never, ever get better than current HDTV formats. Where a budget demands, fine, go for digital video. But, film is better. And yes, sitting at a theater, you *can* tell the difference between a real film and one that's being shown digitally.
What far too few people seem to know is that Americans not only have the right to bail--we have the right to *reasonable* as opposed to *excessive* bail. This right is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, and most State Constitutions have provisions as well.
Fact is, if he could afford a very decent attorney, he could probably win a lawsuit against the city for violation of his Constitutional rights through imposition of excessive bail. If he had to stay in jail for some time due to this, there's also an argument for wrongful/false imprisonment that could be made. Any way you slice it, such high bail is excessive for a few minor misdemeanor charges. After all, I've known people to get $2000 bail for felonious assault, and $10,000 bail for production of child pornography.
So, how does the system get away with abusing us? We never, or at least quite seldom, fight back. Most of us lack the resources to sue over violations of our Constitutional rights, and so it becomes easy for the system to impose high bail for bogus charges just to get us off the street so that we can't exercise our Constitutional right to peacably assemble to petition the government for redress. So, of course they walk all over us.
What we really need is an organization with teeth and funding to protect our rights by vigorously suing police, prosecutors, cities, counties, and states whenever rights violations occur. There is no such organization. The ACLU is pathetically underfunded and unwilling to stand up except in very extreme cases, which means that the system has carte blanche to harass us and deprive us of our rights as long as it does so in small doses at a time.
It amazes me that, with all the wealth in America, especially with all the Internet billions that were made recently by many young libertarians and liberals, no enormously wealthy patron of rights has stepped to the plate and started a legal organization to vigorously defend us from abuses like this. It's pathetic that your rights can be ignored in this country unless and until the cops beat the shit out of you, and even then it'll probably take five years and tens of thousands in legal fees for you to get them back.
Maybe Bill Gates should stop founding charities to give computers to schools--c'mon, kindergarteners need to be focusing on things more basic than using a PC--and create a charity to protect our eroded Constitutional rights. If I had 1/10000 what he did, I'd give every last penny to such a cause. And what's with all these wealthy liberal Hollywood types, who talk the talk when it comes to rights but never get involved beyond flashing their ACLU card to interviewers, to make themselves feel good? Or how about the Oprah types, who come out in support of every right and cause, but still keep *obscene* amounts of money for themselves while donating a relative pittance? When I give $100 to a cause, it's a *real* contribution since I'm fairly poor. Oprah giving a cause $50,000 would be like me giving them my pocket lint, relatively speaking. These types are perfectly willing to make movies that take a stand, thinking that that means something. A movie never stopped a cop from beating someone, or a magistrate from imposing high bail. The only way to do that is to fight them in the Courts, and that takes $$$, which people with $$$ are seldom willing to donate to the cause since cops and magistrates and prosecutors usually abuse people who have no $$$.
It also amazes me how fashionable and trendy other causes are, even though they're far less important than out basic rights. Big bucks go to environmental causes and AIDS research, and to little else by comparison. Nevermind that unless we start defending people who have had their rights abused, there'll be no more environmental protests. Nevermind that without the right to protest, AIDS never would have gotten beyond its early/mid-80's lack of address due to the Reagan-Meese characterization of it as a disease for fags and pervs.
Even if our rights had financial backing, thanks to the fact that cops are willing to lie to protect one another behind the "blue wall of silence," your piggie perpetrators will seldom be found. Two police lost a civil case for using excessive force recently in my area, and they insisted that they didn't know the other four police who joined in terrorizing an innocent citizen. To make it worse, the two policemen who were found liable by a jury are still working for the same PD. Why aren't they fired? It makes no sense whatsoever that we tolerate this.
The more I reflect upon such issues, the less respect I have for this country. Jefferson and Washington would not be proud: they'd revolt.
This rather proves my point, actually. Modern chess, as I pointed out, took about a thousand years to develop into the highly evolved game it is. Moves were altered over time, and unnecessary pieces whittled out of the game. The board itself has been changed and rechanged time and again.
;-)
The end result of a thousand years of the game's "natural evolution" is a game that's practically perfect in its beauty. It's so deceptively simple--there aren't many different kinds of pieces; there's a board with a simple layout; the rules are very straight-forward. Yet, despite the appearance of simplicity, it's an extremely hard game to master. This I think makes it much more charming and beautiful than certain other games which come from the East, which have too many pieces and too-complex rules to be the international sport which chess is.
As I said, there are many variations of chess--but almost all of which which are still being played have been invented in this century. None of the variations which have emerged since chess was codified into its modern form between two and four centuries ago (depending on who you read) have lasted long.The variations you mentioned, like Bughouse, were invented for entertainment value and a change of pace, not at all as real games in and of themselves. Some of the other variations you mentioned were invented as teaching aids, to help new players learn chess in an interesting way. In fact, a standard practice among many of the best chess coaches is to start players out with nothing but the king and a few pawns, so that they can learn the endgame--the part where most players lose their hold on the game--first, and then work backwards to learning the opening moves, which are somewhat less important.
We played Bughouse occasionally between matches; it's common to see people playing it in the break room. Same goes for lightning chess, with just a minute on the clock to make as many moves as possible and try to have the most points on the board when the clock goes off. But these things are just distractions, played for fun during the breaks in real tournament chess. Like masturbation, they're fun, but just not as fulfilling as mastering the real thing.
I got it for Christmas many years ago, when I was still into tournament chess. Not that I was a great tournament player--I could never break a 1600 rating, which if you know about tournament chess isn't a very good rating at all--but I enjoyed it a lot. Of course, I was about 13 at the time, and unless you're a prodigy you're not going to be great at chess that young; so that might be a good excuse to use for my poor rating. :-)
Anyway, the set I got for Christmas and still have was, I think, made by The Franklin Mint as an authorized *Star Trek* item. It was very attractive, made from clear and blue glass, with gold-plated pieces. It came with some detailed and cumbersome rules. We played it a few times, but it proved rather uninteresting compared to real chess.
See, the reality is that chess doesn't need to be "improved." It can't be "improved," and more variety would be a detriment instead of an improvement. As it stands, chess is complicated enough that you'll probably never play the same game twice in your life, even if you play in tournaments every week. I've known plenty of people with Master and International Grand Master ratings who've been playing chess their whole lives and are never bored with it. It's just not repetitious; there's practically infinite variety.
There are so many practical and useful variations just of the opening moves, that chess is incredibly interesting and never truly mastered. Tournament players usually have two or three openings that they use most of the time and study extensively, but they'll try new things whenever they feel like it or when an opponent's unusual strategies force them into something different.
Chess also has such a rich history and wonderful traditions that it could never be replaced by anything new. There have been many, many, many variations on chess created in the last century; the reason you've never heard of them is that chess players view them as a curiosity and distraction, but not as anything useful. After all, regular chess is complicated enough for people to devote their whole lives learning about it and still not master it; things like four-player chess, three-dimensional chess, etc., just distract from those studies.
One of my favorite things about chess is its history--dating back a thousand years in the Middle East for early variations, modern chess was codified in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and in the nineteenth century it became the first real international sport. Most people today don't consider it a sport, but before the modern Olymics, before baseball and basketball and football and soccer were even invented, there was a structure in place for the best international players to compete with one another.
One of my favorite bits of chess lore is of one of the greatest players of all time, a very rough-and-tumble English gentleman. In the 19th century the world chess championship was set distinctly apart from the rest of the chess world; the title holder could see fit to accept or decline any challengers to his title, as he saw fit, and if the challenge was accepted the champion could decide the time and place. Unlike the timed matches common today, championship matches in the 19th century could last for days or weeks, with the players working for ten to eighteen hours straight before breaking for the night, even having their meals at the board. It's been a long time since I heard this story, so some of the details may be lacking, but on the whole it's a fairly accurate account...So anyway, this particular Englishman decided that the championship match would be held...in his favorite pub, during the busiest time of the evening when people would be laughing and singing and getting ever more drunk around them. The challenger arrives, and takes his seat across from the vaunted champion, a man who he's been warned is very, very intimidating, with an intensely jovial Falstaffian presence. They make some small talk, and the challenger notices the empty glasses in front of the champ. The champ calls the serving girl over and orders another, and the challenger orders a drink as well. They get the board and pieces set up, and they're settling in for a long night when the serving girl brings their drinks. The champion, seizing the opportunity to further intimidate this challenger who's awed in the presence of the storied world champ, grabs both drinks from the serving girl's tray and drinks them both voraciously, slams the glasses down, and proclaims in chess-speak: "You left your drink *en pris*, so I took it *en passant*!" The challenger was so intimidated that he resigned immediately.
Now, who would want to mess with a sport so ancient, noble, and complex, as chess?
Let's face it: that book needed to be published. The message of *Voices from the Hellmouth* is one we at /. don't need to learn--we've lived it, we understand it; we are the Net-saavy Quake-playing geeks and geekettes who are now being persecuted in high schools across this great country, to a greater extent than ever before. That book needed to be published so that people who don't read /.--the administrators, teachers, parents, cool kids, Pinkertons, and FBI flunkies who are responsible for the persecutions--can learn that the Internet doesn't "turn people's hearts dark" and that playing video games filled with "fantasy violence" and board-game classics like Dungeons & Dragons is a positive outlet for people who are beaten up or verbally beaten down by bullies, shunned by girls, and cast a suspicious eye by clueless school admins and the police officers who are now placed in schools "for our own protection."
/. community actively worked against it. Katz wasn't going to make money off it. Taco and Hemos weren't going to line their pockets with green (at least, not *THAT* kind of green, hehe...). Andover wasn't going to line its coffers with profits from this book. It probably would have been a loss-leader, almost an act of charity and giving back to the community by doing something to help young geeks and geekettes everywhere who are in trouble thanks to the current repression and hysteria.
/. admins or anyone with their ears is listening right now, I have a humble but useful suggestion for you. It's doubtless been made before, but it needs to be made again and again until it happens. It won't fix the present problems with the *Hellmouth* book, but it would fix all such future issues. Here it is:
/. are done so under an Open Content License or something similar, giving rights to reprint them in any non-commercial manner. After all, /. is a bunch of Open Source and Free Software supporters, right? If this is true, then we should have no problems agreeing to this. Anyone who disagrees is welcome to not post here. So, do we support Open Source and Free Software or not? Let's do more than pay this philosophy lip service. Let's support it with each and every post we make here. Let's make sure that no chance like the *Hellmouth* book is ever passed up again, thanks to a few fucking posers who don't care about helping their fellow geeks. Fuck the posers. Slashdot should be a place for people who are really supporters of the FSF and Open Source philosophies. If you don't want your posting under an Open Content Licence, then go post it in a Windows forum. There would be a few whiners, but almost all of us would support the change. After all, are we hypocrites or real men who stand behind our philosophy when it comes to us, rather than just the work of others?
It's people like you who, with your whining and complaining, stopped that message from getting out when it was needed most. That book would have been printed and available by now, and more people--like the newspaper sensationalists who are making things worse--could have a better chance to understand that they need to cut teenagers more slack, not less, if they want to create healthy adults. Raising impressionable young people in an environment filled with cops and admins who'll search your backpacks and lockers because of how you look, who act like busybodies seizing bottles of water and packs of cigarettes as if they were crack cocaine, just fills them with justified rage instead of with the knowledge they should be gleaning in schools. Picking on a kid because he dresses differently is exactly like picking on a kid for being Black or Latino. It just isn't right and it needs to be stopped.
This book would have helped the situation, and I'm aghast the the
In fact, if any of the
You should put a big, bold disclaimer at the top of each page, just under the banner, that all comments submitted to
This book could have helped a lot of people. In my own state, a boy was suspended for having blue hair. The school knew it would lose the appeal, but it did what it wanted to do: it kept the boy out of school for the rest of his senior year, then gave him the diploma once they lost the case and the kid was no longer their problem. Should blue hair be a reason to keep a kid out of school? How about kinky black hair, so we can discriminate against Blacks? Why don't we expell jocks when they abuse geeks instead? A sixth grader was expelled because he was found with a list of classmates' names--no word on what the list actually was for, mind you, and the kid insists he found it in his desk and was just reading it when the teacher took it, but here it is: a kid expelled for having a piece of paper with names, just names. Maybe they were names of classmates he thought were cute. Maybe they were names of kids who picked on him. Maybe it was a list of his friends. Maybe it really was someone else's list. Who knows, but there it stands. How about the kid who had a Web site, not on the school servers, that he made on his own time not in school, who called some of his teachers ignorant fools who "deserve to be shunned." The teachers in question took "shunned" as a threat, though clearly it's not, and had the boy suspended while they filed a lawsuit against him and his parents. The parents settled out of court for $7000 because our "justice" system is SO FUCKED UP that it costs more than that just to defent yourself against a nuisance, groundless lawsuit. So much for freedom of speech and the First Amendment I loved so much.
Let me tell you about that First Amendment. It applies, partially at least, even to minors in schools. I had to research it a lot to defend myself against school administrators once. I especially like the Tinker decision, which has been interpreted from its original application (the right to wear armbands or other symbolic and expressive clothing to public schools) to be the basis of most of the rights which high school students have.
As a sophomore in high school in 1993, I wrote an article for the school newspaper defending a female friend of mine who had been slandered as a "racist" for writing, in the preceding issue, an article about how race-based scholarships and quotas are wrong. I wrote an impassioned and well-reasoned piece, not unlike what George Bush Sr. or Ronald Reagan would have said on the issue. It was especially contentious because in my school, we had a "Minority Parents' Association" whose sole goal was getting scholarships for Black students. I thought this was wrong, because white students didn't have anyone at our school helping them to get scholarships. Just a personal political opinion. But it sparked a huge controversy; I had to leave school early the day it came out in print, and had to have a security detail take me to classes for the rest of the week. A certain well-known national newspaper printed an article about the controversy my little, rather centrist-conservative article caused in a predominantly minority school. I learned a lot about how people--especially high school kids and the administrators who deal with them--can act irrational and treat you like an outcast for one little difference you might have. Most of the Black students assumed I was a racist without even reading the very moderate article. Liberal teachers were actively disagreeing to the point of trying to push their own opinions onto their students. A Black vice-principal even came to one of my classes to lead a discussion about the article, and called my position "ignorant." It only made her hate me more when I destroyed all her flimsy arguments in the ensuing debate, and had most of the class agreeing with me.
I created a few enemies, including that vice-principal. I could handle my fellow students, but it's hard to handle a few administrators who are out to get you. I wrote another article for the school newspaper the following year, about how it was a shame that the school was cutting history and philosophy and literature classes, while they were leaving cosmetology classes intact. After all, I reasoned, anyone who wants to do hair and nails for a living can just pay a couple hundred dollars for a two-week course and job placement, but high school was the only chance a lot of people would have to be introduced to literature and history and philosophy. The article was published, but with heavy editing done by the admins who disliked my first piece. They didn't even tell me they were editing it. They were even ignorant enough to change the phrase "liberal education," a rather common one, to the nonsensical phrase "conservative education" reasoning that I should have said that since I was conservative, not liberal. It really pissed me off, especially when people were asking me what the Hell I meant by "conservative education."
So, I did the ultimate in pissing any administration off: I got together with half a dozen friends and we put together a newspaper of our own. We wrote articles with a conservative slant, since we had a liberal administration. The homecoming queen was the daughter of a military man, and wrote a piece about why women and men shouldn't be stationed in combat together. I was pro-choice myself, but a friend wrote an opinion piece that was pro-life. We even put political satire and poetry in it, and endorsed a Republican senatorial candidate. It was designed, from beginning to end, to teach the administration a lesson: that if the students weren't permitted to run the school newspaper how we saw fit, we'd just publish our own alternative newspaper. A friend with a Mac and ClarisWorks formatted it, and I scrounged together $175 for a press run of 1000 copies of the six-page newspaper. We called it *The Federalist*.
I got suspended for a week for handing copies of it out to the people who wrote articles for it before it was officially approved for distribution. According to precedent, they had to approve it since it was done by and would be distributed by students, but they got me on a technicality for giving out less than a dozen copies to the people who had written it with me. Of course, I appealed and won. It really pissed the admins off, but it worked: they never tried to censor the school newspaper again, under the threat that we'd publish something far more annoying to them ourselves. Oh, BTW, the conservative paper pissed off one student so much that when I was standing in a classroom talking to someone, a this guy saw me and came into the class and asked me if I'd published the alternative paper. I said yes, and he picked up one of those desk/chair combos and hurled it at my chest. It was kind of gratifying, in a weird way...
Of course, when we did that we were exercising our Constitutional rights. Most adults seem to forget that even teenagers have Constitutional rights, even in schools. But today, we'd have been expelled, all of us involved. And it would have taken thousands of dollars--something my poor family didn't have--to get us reinstated. I feel very sorry for high schoolers today.
I left HS in 1995, the year my school got its first police officer stationed there. We all laughed about it, because aside from the odd fist fight out front nothing ever happened at my school. No one ever got shot. No one brought a gun. But we got a police officer anyway. We laughed at him--a cop whose job was to confiscate glass bottles and cigarettes. We called Officer Buck "Officer Fucknut" and sneered "Do I smell...bacon?" when he passed by. But we all secretly resented his very presence. We laughed and sneered to mask our own unease. We hated him, and his intrusion where he most certainly didn't belong. And yet today I'd wager there are half a dozen Officer Fucknuts patrolling our old school grounds, making students who should be enjoying themselves uneasy, putting yet another black stain on the high school experiences of the 2500 young people there. It's like a prison, with them the guards and the principal the warden. That's not what school is supposed to be like. It's so intrusive. Today, there's even a police station in the local Mall. There's something deeply wrong with contemporary America; thanks to unfounded hysteria and politicians who pass feel-good, right-restricting legislation, we're closer to an Orwellian prison than we realize. Each day, I see more and greater injustices in "the land of the free," and it's beginning to feel like we're all trapped in a Kafka story, or in a gulag, or at the very least in a civilization in decline. If you've ever read *The Decline of the West*, you know what I mean...
P.S.--This and all my past, present, and future postings will be made under an Open Content License, allowing for any non-commercial use, abuse, reprinting, or extracting in whole or in part. You are also free to make derivative works with or without attribution--after all, it's only a quich posting on a public forum; it ain't my fuckin' life's work. I'm amending my user info page to reflect this licensing of all my postings, and I suggest that everyone here who *really* supports the philosophies behind Free Software or Open Source to do the same. And I still hope Rob and Jeff decide to put an Open Content License discaimer at the top of every page, to prevent important work like a paper printing of Hellmouth from being stopped by a few bad apples with bad faith and selfish arrogance.
> Many websites send notices of their original content to each other
/. is not Anandtech. This is not a site on which every little review and rant is meant to be posted. Hannibal's article belonged here because, well, Hannibal is an expert on the technology behind microprocessors. This article didn't tell us anything we couldn't have gotten from the standard press releases. It was, IMNSHO, fluff masquerading as a technical piece. It was full of unfounded opinion, not detailed and insightful analysis.
/. pages for two years, plus linkage from several other sites, and a few print articles (though I no longer like to touch paper. How primitive...). I could easily look up links, hell, just by using the search features on /. and Anand. But that wouldn't prove a bloody thing, and I won't waste my time. If any one here is the troll, it's a bear-baiter like you.
;-) BTW, the previews have mostly been done by Intel-friendly websites, not by AMD campers like Tom. Me? I dislike Intel, for some of their MS-like tactics, but I buy the best performance I can get for the money. If I bought a system today, it would have to be Intel because AMD has no multiprocessor solution on the market yet--but I fully expect the 760MP to change my mind. Intel's GTL based SMP isn't even in the same league with what the EV6 can do.
That's fine, but
> This is false. I am a hell of a lot more knowledgeable in matters
> of MPU architecture than you, and I learned quite a bit
Then you obviously aren't as knowledgeable as you claim, if you learned anything from that piece of fluff masquerading as a technical piece. And, how would you know how much I do or don't understand about processor cores? As I said, there was nothing in that article that anyone who follows processor technology wouldn't already know from previous, and more insightful, articles. You can call me a "troll" if you want, it just proves your immaturity and the FACT that you have no solid way to refute what I said, you just want to resort to ad hominem uselessness. And, just FYI, I have read every single article on microproccessor design that has passed by the
> The author's name is Johan De Gelas. He lives in the Netherlands. ENGLISH
> IS NOT HIS NATIVE LANGUAGE. I'd like to see you post a single sentence in Danish
I don't care where he lives or what is his native language. Unless he is fourteen years old as well, thee's no excuse for writing like that. I wasn't nitpicking grammar or syntax, I was talking about the very narrow, simplistic style--style is the same, whether in English or Latin or anything else. And this is written like a high school term paper, not a serious treatise on microprocessor design. My point was that it's a lot closer to a high school report than a serious article. To go even further, it has NO insights of its own. It quotes others, and says nothing unique. Therefore, it isn't a real analysis of anything. The author didn't analyze, he wrote a book report. Furthermore, you sound like an apologist who objects to what I said based on your personal biases, not based on the merits of my analysis of the article and the situation in general regarding the Athlon vs. Pentium 4 debate.
Skipping the boring quoting, I'll state this: preproduction benchmarks are NOT "always wrong." You're an idiot if you think that anything is "always wrong." Even a blunt intellect such as yourself, who prefers lashing out based on general statements and a few chosen "wrong" benchmarks of pre-production systems (when there are plenty of on'par looks at performance, too), gets a few things right. But this isn't one of them--you think Tom was wrong when he said that when the PII came out if offered little over the PPro. Well, its advantage was more horsepower, but its disadvantage is no on-die high-speed L2 cache. Therefore, if you multitask instead of running one app at a time, the PPro was usually considerably faster for you than the slower-cache PII--when it was first released, that is. As its clockspeed eclipsed that of the PPro significantly, of course its performance eclipsed the PPro's. But, I'd take a 200MHz PPro with one of the larger L2 sizes available on it over a PII300 any day, if I were using it for serious business-type uses rather than gaming. Especially if it were a server, the PPro would kick the PII's ass because of the cache. We can conclude this by saying that you believe the P4 becnhmarks so far have been "sandbagged," and are inaccurate. I believe they're accurate. There's no way to settle this until the retail product ships, period. But when it does, I expect a full apology.
Again skipping the quoting, your analysis of Athlon vs. P!!! performance is pretty useless since I was bemoaning the fact that people have been comparing a 7th gen core designed to scale to high clock speeds with an old core which is optimized for lower clockspeeds. But, I'll debunk the FUD anyway. The Athlon core performs better all-around, not just on FPU-intensive apps. The reason the Intel chips score better on many apps, like games which, yes, are optimized for 3DNow! too, are two-fold. First of all, the Intel chips have MORE SIMD instrustions, so that optimized apps have more to work from. Secondly, and most importantly, Intel gives out much better compilers which optimize the code more tightly than it can be optimized for AMD processors. AMD doesn't do all this compiler work; they consentrate on making better processors, not on tieing in specialized compilers to their processors. "You can deny the facts, or you can try to understand them." And your "analysis" of the supposed advantages of the Coppermine's cache over the Thunderbird's are positively laughable. You see, in the REAL WORLD people don't run benchmarks on their boxes all day. They run apps and processes, usually several at a time. That's why the Athlon's cache is superior--you can keep more in it instead of swapping to system RAM, which is a MUCH BIGGER HIT than having a small amount of cache latency. In the REAL WORLD, the Athlon's cache architecture makes sense, not in your fantasy where we all run CPUmark all day.
> "The Athlon is truly a seventh-generation core.' What does that mean???
You really should pay more attention in class, boy, because I'm schooling you right now. I explained what I meant right after that comment in the original post: The Athlon is a new core designed to scale well to very high clockspeeds. Just like the Willammette. That's why the Willamette performs slower clock-for-clock than a theoreticl P!!! at the same clockspeed: it has to make trade-offs to achieve that speed, namely deeper pipelines, more of a hit for failed branch predictions, etc. And yet, people were wrongly downing the Athlon for not reaching the P!!!'s clock-for-clock performance, and that was a mistake since the Athlon, like Willammette, must make some sacrifices to reach high clockspeeds. Again, this is why you can buy a 1.2GHz Athlon today, but the 1GHz P!!! is the best Intel can do. Their 1.13 GHz part, which had to be recalled, was malfunctioning so badly that people couldn't even get the Linux kernel to compile on it. Blech.
> "If you think it means the K7 core has one single architectural innovation
> which does not exist on an MPU available before it, then I challenge you to
> list it now"
It's a huge innovation in the x86 world, something Intel hasn't done since the PPro days. First of all, the EV6 bus is new to x86 and a huge innovation, it is superior in every way to the old Intel GTL+. Not only does is run at an effective 200MHz--and did so back when P!!!s were still at 100MHz FSB, and the Celerons still are crippled at 66MHz while the Durons are at full 200MHz like the Athlons--but it is superior technology. It's not a shared bus architecture like the P!!!s, each processor gets its own interface and its own dedicated bandwidth--a huge boon for multiprocessing, with the 760MP coming to retail very soon according to Anand. It's revolutionary for an x86 processor. Plus, you wouldn't consider Athlon's monstrous brute of an FPU an innovation? Poor FPU performance was always the bane of the x86 architecture--a primary reason x86 wasn't used in most supercomputers and scientific applications. Now, the countryside is littered with Athlon clusters crunching numbers for the scientific community in places where they'd never have considered using a P!!!. That's an innovation, too. You claim that the K7 is merely a revamp of the old P6 core, but that only proves your total ignorance about its design. It's a whole new core, with very little similarity to a P6 core beyond the x86 instruction set. If you don't know that, you're out of your depth here. Go back and play on the porch at HardwareCentral, where they're as biased against AMD as Tom's is against Intel.
> all appearances are that, once the P4 moves into heavy volume production
> (note: not until Q3 next year at the earliest)
God, you are a shameless, and dim-witted, Intel apologist, just as I suspected. Q3 2001? And then you go on to say that the K8 will just be a derivative of the K7. You really aren't paying attention at all. The K8 Hammer architecture is completely new, not only extending x86 to true 64-bit while retaining backwards-compatibility with 32-bit and 16-bit code, but adding huge and significant architectural innovations. Go read about it, dimwit, before you guess at what it is. Lots of documentation has been released--even just a quick scan of some Slashdot search results will make you a lot more knowledgeable about it than you are now. Geez...
I've been looking at Freedom for a long time. In fact, I was a beta tester for all of three minutes, until the beta software somehow managed to complately hose my ability to connect to the Net--I have no idea how it managed to do it, but it was probably because I had some funky firewalls installed at the time. Anyway, what I want to know is this: How can it possibly be anonymous, in a country like the U.S.? Don't you guys get calls from law enforcement agencies all the time, and it it's really anonymous aren't those law enforcement types very, very angry? Why isn't the Web or USENET flooded with copyright violations, harrassments, and child pornography coming from Freedom, if it's really that anonymous? Or has there been a problem with that, and I just haven't heard?
/. Interview topic some time...
I'm very curious. Please let us know. Maybe an interview with ZKS would be a good
Rather, it is a piece of self-promotion by Ace's Hardware, who sent this story in themselves. The article itself doesn't say anything the knowledgeable don't already know. In fact, it reads like a high-school report, and not even a very well-written one. E.g., "First we will try to analyze the most important shortcomings, next we will search for possible solutions." Sounds just like the simplistic expositions of a high school term paper.
I repeat: the article is not a technical piece at all. Hannibal at ArsTechnica writes technical pieces about CPU design. This article at Ace's Hardware says nothing insightful.
In fact, it misses the point. It dares to call the P4 "innovative" and wonder whether future designs in the x86 world will copy it. Well, of course not! How many times must it be said that the P4 barely keeps up with the Athlon and performs less well than a P!!!? Because, that is a fact. Numerous production samples have leaked, with the test results uniformly and without exception pointing to the fact that even if the platform's performance is improved by release time--which it should, since these are samples not a retail product--it won't outperform a P!!! with equal clockspeed. That's why the P4 is being released at 1.4 and 1.5GHz initially, because if they were released at 1.2GHz they'd be outperformed by the 1GHz P!!! and that wouldn't be good.
Now, the P4 barely keeps up with the current-generation Athlon Thunderbirds. This is important to note because people always *blamed* AMD for a processor which still, with the advantages of the P!!! SIMD intruction optimizations used in much software, didn't quite keep pace with Intel's offering in the most common benchmarks. Now, the technically knowledgeable know that the Athlon whomps the P!!! in anything that isn't SIMDified, and that its floating point unit is head-and-shoulders above. But people still moaned about the performance gap in certain common SIMDified benchmarks.
Well, here's what they didn't realize: the Athlon is a truly seventh-generation core--which beat Intel to the punch by, what, almost a year and a half? As such, it has made trade-offs to be able to scale to higher clockspeeds better--one reason why Intel had to recall, and still hasn't re-issued, the 1.13GHz P!!! yet AMD are easily churning out 1.2GHz Athlon Thunderbirds. The P!!! only scales well up to 1GHz--even then, it needed a microcode update to be stable--while the Athlon Mustang has hit 1.2 GHZ with no problems. Heck, Duron 600's usually overclock to at least 900MHz.
In other words, you can't reasonably compare a core optimized to scale to low clockspeeds and take advantage of them, to a core designed to scale up to extreme speeds. You have to compare the Athlon Thunderbird core to Intel's own belated seventh-generation x86, the P4. And, the Athlon Thunderbird compares very favorably. It hasn't been released at 1.4GHz, and probably won't be since AMD will undoubtedly release the newer core before then, but an extrapolated 1.4GHz Athlon Thunderbird, in line with how performance scales for the that core, beats the 1.4GHz P4 samples that have been tested. THE ATHLON BEATS IT. So, how can you call such a low-performing core innovative? It isn't. I'd wager that the next core AMD have up their sleeves will be the real innovator here. Plus, to get the performance it does, Intel's P4 even has to use a 400MHz-effective FSB and double-pumped ALU. This makes the P4 core iteself look rather weak in comparison with the Athlon, which gets by with similar performance with merely a 200MHz (soon, 233) FSB and a non-double-pumped ALU. So, the core of the Athlon is clearly, in itself, much stronger than that of the P4. AMD will doubtless be using similar tricks in its future revisions, but it cannot be doubted that the P4 is not the "innovation" that this BS article claims it is. The article even belittles Athlon's branch prediction--which is weak, because the core was rushed--not noting the fact that even with such a poor branch prediction mechanism the Athlon core outperforms the P4 on a theoreticl clock-for-clock basis.
I note the "theoretical" because I'd like to again point out that the Athlon core is soon to be released in a new revision which will scale to higher clockspeeds, have larger cache, and have improvements to the core itself which AMD has not yet specified. I think that this article at Ace's Hardware is so utterly biased against AMD and for Intel that it makes me sick. He talks of everything negative about the Athlon as being a "compromise" or a decision made in a rush, yet he plays down the negative aspects of the P4 core--for example, he plays down the 19-cycle branch misprediction penalty in the P4 by hyping the P4's escellent branch prediction algorithms, but doesn't give the Athlon slack about its lackluster branch prediction mechanism based on the fact that it has a reduced misprediction penalty. Ace's Hardware has always been biased for Intel and against AMD, and it shows here. The P5 core is hyped as a big "innovation," but not once is that word used in reference to the Athlon, which performs at least as well (probably better clock-for-clock, as I pointed out) and got there to the seventh generation almost A YEAR AND A HALF before Intel. The one place where he FINALLY gives AMD credit is in the conclusion, and even then it's marred by renewed complaints. This is funny, since this article was allegedly a follow-up to Ace's earlier look at the P4 core by looking at the Athlon core in that light. For all the nice things finally said about the Athlon in the last paragraph, he never once used "innovative" regarding it, despite giving the moniker to the P4 at least twice.
And, as a final note, what I've just said doesn't really matter all that much, because the above poster was RIGHT: all that matters is who can deliver the most PERFORMANCE at the least PRICE. And that is, clearly, AMD. That comment *is* insightful, as far as it goes, because that's all that really matters. Why don't we all use Alphas or PowerPCs, which are much more beautiful architecturally? Because they can't give us the price/performance of an Athlon or dual P!!! system. In the final analysis, that's all that's important.
If you go to ARDI's pages, you'll see that they've been very infrequently updated. Some of them are dated 1997... They say that one of the reasons for this is that they've been concentrating on marketing and making custom implementations of their emulation engine, the core that emulates a 68k Motorola processor on an x86 machine, for companies which want to have apps available on x86 without rewriting their old code.
/. Read all about it, how to use it, and where to get the latest stable or dev release, here:
.org/co mments.pl?sid=00/10/17/1442251&cid=127
This makes sense since I'm sure there are many companies with legacy apps written for 68k machines--not just Macs exclusively--which they don't want to discard just yet, but which are sorely wanting for decent hardware. They'd run much faster on a modern x86 emulating the old processor, than on an old 68k machine.
But if you really like using Executor for Mac apps, I have a much better and more complete and satisfying solution for you. Use Basilisk II, the open-source Mac emulator, with a free copy of the Mac System 7.5.5 downloadable from Apple's own FTP servers. It's much more satisfying to have a real Macintosh OS being emulated, instead of ARDI's reverse-engineered runtime environment which, while efficient, lacks all the charm and nostalgia of running the *REAL* MacOS.
Coincidentally, I wrote a post about Basilisk II the last time emulation was mentioned here on
http://slashdot
Umm, I'm not one of those people who's going to vote Nader. In fact, I used to be a huge Republican. I changed my mind when I realized that both Republicans AND Democrats absolutely suck.
;-)
This gentleman who wrote the above letter claims that it's a trite platitude to believe that Republicans and Democrats are the same. Well, how are they not the same? They both adhere to the same fundamental assumptions about government, and those fundamental assumptions all revolve around our current monstrous system. No one is interested in a small government which does what Thomas Jefferson and George Washington would have wanted it to do, but otherwise leaves us the fuck alone. Republicans want to censor sex, and Democrats want to censor violence. They're BOTH for censorship, for doing what they think is good for us instead of letting us choose.
I mean, did you actually listen to the debate last night? They said practically the same thing about trying to get the entertainment industry to change its ways. Well, most Americans don't want the Federal government to tell the studios what kind of films they can give us, what kind of music we can have, etc. If you are a parent and don't want your kid to listen to Eminem, that's your business. It isn't, however, the government's business to try to get record companies to "self-censor" music. It's still censorship. One of the things most often forgotten is that freedom of speech is worthless if all the outlets for speech are closed to you--and that's what the Federal government wants to do, by telling the industry it needs to police itself better. Screw censorship in all its forms. When this country was founded, broadsides with the most obscene possible content were easily available in any big city, yet never once did Washington whine like Gore does about it.
The system today is monstrous, and neither party wants to restore small government. The gentleman who wrote this article talked about bureaucrats as essentially harmless. Sure, they're harmless if you forget that it's your own money paying them, money which is stolen from our pockets by an income tax which was unconstitutional until circa 1900. None of the people who founded this country and forged its laws believed in income tax. In fact, the very notion of taking money so directly and blanketly from the common people was abhorrent to them. Let's also not forget that not only have bureaucrats wasted TRILLIONS of our tax dollars over the years, but they've also created terrible things in so doing. Does anyone remember what a piece of horse-shit the Meese Commission Report, done primarily by bureaucrats, was? They wanted to take away our right to express ourselves in any sexually explicit materials. They considered Playboy magazine a gateway drug to the evils of pornography. Bureaucrats are not harmless. They're a big threat to every right we have, because they spin the facts to fit into politicians' preconceived plans. How is it that Gore has one set of figures for everything, and Bush has another? They each have their own set of bureaucrats, of course...
As more and more laws and regulations are passed, it becomes more difficult for a man to do anything without the government's permission or denials. Do you know what the country with the greatest social mobility is? Hong Kong. Do you know why? Very little bureaucracy and very little government intervention. Fifty years ago Hong Kong was a useless, poor rock in the ocean. It was literally a rock--people couldn't even farm there. There were no big industries. But the British controlled it and instituted a government of benign, salutary neglect. If someone harmed you, the police and justice system would take care of it. But otherwise, the government didn't do a damned thing. And today, fifty years later, Hong Kong is an economic giant. All that in five decades, from a pre-industrial-revolution level of existence, practically, to the average median income being only $2000 less than that in the US. And economic mobility here is NOTHING compared to Hong Kong. There, you fill out one sheet of paper, one-sided, and you're registered as a business. Anyone, literally, can start a small business. Here, people need to file so many papers that many give up--a stack of tax papers, a stack of forms to submit to the health department even if you're not serving food, a stack of forms over and over again. It's hard just to open your doors in the US because of the bureaucratic red tape. And then there are the thirty-page forms a business sometimes needs to fill out just to pay a few bucks in taxes...
The economic mobility of the present in the US is largely an illusion of the tech sector. Nowhere else is there upper mobility, unless you want to become an MBA business drone. And even then, I know a girl with an MBA who's working at Red Lobster.
Take me, for example. I have no upward mobility. I have no mobility at all. I am one of many lost in the cracks, lost to the complexities of new laws which an increasingly intrusive government saddles us with. Republicans and Democrats both--and, Democrats controlled the legislature, BTW, this wasn't a partisan thing--decided it would be a good idea to keep teenagers from having sex by making a new law, one very few in my state know about, which makes it a crime for anyone 18 or over to have consensual sex with someone who is *above the "age of consent"* but below 18. Well, when I was in high school I knew the age of consent in my state was 15, so when I was a high school senior and started dating a high school junior who was a year and a half younger than I was, I thought I was fine. After all, lots of high school seniors date even freshmen and sophomores, so dating a junior put me squarely on firm ground. Well, I wasn't on firm ground when her dad had me arrested for having consensual sex with her, even though she was above the age of consent, even though I was still in high school, even though she was only a year and a half younger. Even my teachers were shocked that I was being prosecuted. But thanks to those primarily Democratic lawmakers, I was in big trouble.
Here's where the story gets interesting: the judge was a smart and reasonable guy, and he dismissed the case. After all, the law was meant to keep old perverts from taking advantage of vulnerable teenagers, not to prosecute teenagers for dating people who are well within their own peer group. Nevermind that I'd been a virgin and she'd had more experience back then than most 25 year olds, so if anyone was seduced it was me.
Well, thank god for all that bureaucratic recordkeeping, because I can't get a job thanks to that arrest on a charge I wasn't even convicted for. Thanks to the fact that the Federal government does more than the Constitution says it should, I have an FBI record which prevents me from getting a job anywhere in the academic world. Since I was in 10th grade I knew I was meant to be a poorly paid, but happy with my career, teacher. That dream, that vocation, that entire life has disappeared. Thanks all to a few politicians who didn't think to write a law which couldn't be abused by being applied to an innocent high school kid like I used to be once. And then, thanks to the FBI which keeps records of arrests even if THE JUDGE DISMISSED THE CASE.
Now, if the Federal government were as small as it's supposed to be, if it only did what Jefferson and Madison designed it to do, I could have a new life. I could have moved a few states over, and forgotten about that horrible period in my life when I was being prosecuted for doing something many, many, many, many teenagers do and is considered a normal part of adolescence, and taught middle or high school English or history. But instead I have a number, given to me by the Federal government, which follows me wherever I go and keeps me from ever having a life, a career, anything worthwhile since I have to give that number to my prospective employers and with it they find out from that same Federal government that a long time ago I was once arrested for something so minor and normal and such a misapplication of the law that the judge dismissed the case. And then they don't hire me, despite my degree from a prestigious private liberal arts college, completed in only three years of Dean's List hard work, with two full majors.
You see, people like me are forgotten in this Information Age. People like me are invisible. People like me have no future. People like me hate bureaucrats and unnecessary or poorly written laws, for good reason. And people like me have good reason to dislike both Republicans and Democrats for creating a country so Orwellian as this one out of a country as wonderful as the one Jefferson and Madison and Washington made.
And I'm not the only one. A fifteen year old kid in Michigan is on the sex offender registry because he had consensual sex with his girlfriend, who was a year younger than he was. He'll never have a future, either. I could list a dozen more cases just from the top of my head, since I'm acutely aware of such things. But they're invisible to most of you. We are invisible to most of you, the victims of the Information Society where one small step can stay with you for the rest of your life, thanks to laws which change yearly and a number which doesn't.
Anyone want to hire a very good, very educated, very dedicated English and history teacher who was never actually convicted of anything? Didn't think so. So tell me why I should vote Democrat, when they did this just as much as Republicans did? They are the same.
Well, you're right--but we're on the same page here, really. I was just pointing out that the graphics are ancient, but we love those old games. Why? Well, they're fun. Old games were about fun game play, not flashy graphics. That's why Quake3 was a hit, and Daikatana sucks ass--sure, the graphics in Q3 are great, but people play because it's fun. Daikatana, though--they concentrated on the flashy graphics, and created a game no one wants to play because it's just not fun.
;-)
I mean, my favorite 3D shooter is still...Duke Nukem 3D. Yeah, the sprites are all 2D and look weird when moving through 3D space. Yeah, the resolution is very low--at its highest setting it still doesn't look all that detailed, because it was meant to be played at a max of 640x480. But it's FUN!
It's like the Atari--the old Frogger cart is fun, while that new 3D frogger thingie they created for the PC bites. They have 3D versions of BattleZone for the PC, with fancy graphics, but...give me the old arcade version, with black and white vector graphics, running under MAME instead.
My favorite arcade game would have to be...Star Wars, the ancient 3-color vector graphics game which has you trying to destroy the Death Star from the perspective of Luke's X-Wing fighter. It kicks ass, with its, what, 4-bit sound samples? It's just fun to play.
That's why I love my old Mac environment so much. It has awesomely simple, fun games that you can't get for the modern PC. Barrack has decent graphics, but you don't play for that--it's addictively simple and fun and I've never seen a PC game like it. Risk II for the Mac is just a colorized version of a game that had been floating around since the 80s, no other changes, and it's also sddictively simple and fun, with no PC equal. Even the OS is fun--no drag-and-drop, not a whole lot of "advanced" features found in Win98/NT/2K or Gnome or KDE or newer Mac OS versions, but it's very, very ergonomic and simple and I'd love it if Linux or Windows could have a GUI so simple but elegant where the apps mesh like in Mac OS.
Game play is what's most important in a game--how fun it is. People have lost sight of that today. Something similar is true of OSes, I think--the user experience is being thrown away for bells and whistles. Look at those horrid, HORRID, betas of Windoze Whistler. Yuck! In 2001, Micro$oft will release an OS whose GUI is still no match for what the MacOS had five or six years ago--a lifetime in the computer world. I have a lot of hope for Nautilus--I think it'll produce something truly superior for Linux; but, KDE and Gnome still don't have a seamless user experience in their near future. Maybe in a couple of years they'll produce something as nice as the user experience with that old MacOS, but uniquely their own. I hope so.
Exactly--I think emulation has become so big precisely because of the nostalgia associated with those quirky old games we all used to play, or just the quirky old OSes we made do with. After all, some of the first emulators were for things like the Atari 2600, ancient technology with horrid graphics and pitiful resolution by today's standards--but we remember fondly those old games.
No one has mentioned this one yet, so I thought I'd post it right toward the top since I LOVE it so much. It is bar none my favorite piece of software--I use it every day. It's Basilisk II, the open-source project that emulates a 68k-based Macintosh.
And it emulates a 68k Mac perfectly, only faster than the originals on my old K6-2 400. I can't wait to see it speed along when I finally upgrade--AMD, VIA, please hurry up and get dual Athlon solutions out the door, okay? The proggie is even optimized for dual processor machines; you can run it on one particular CPU, and use the other for other tasks.
This brings me to the one drawback: it tries to eat 100% of CPU time, from what I understand even on fast machines--but not a problem if you stay inside the emulated Mac while it's running, like I do, or have a dual-processor machine.
But Basilisk II is superior in most respects to the closed-source, commercial Mac emulators, SoftMac 2000 and Fusion--it's much more stable, crashing less frequently than a real 68k Mac, whereas Fusion and SoftMac crash more often.
I highly recommend that anyone who's ever used an old Mac and liked it or some of its software, check out Basilisk II at its homepage. If you run it under a Windoze platform, the homepage for the Windows port is here.
The great part is that Mac OS versions through 7.5.3 and its update to 7.5.5 are free for download from Apple's own website, so that you can run a real MacOS unlike with the runtime environment Executor some here may have tried. Links to Apple's FTP to get the OS are on each Basilisk II homepage, but the directions for installing MacOS on a HFS partition image file seem a bit more detailed at the Windoze version's homepage.
The only thing you need is a Mac 68k ROM, which you can download from a real Mac you own (instructions are given for how to copy this to a file), or you could pirate it from the Net. A ROM from a Quadra works best, since it's a 32-bit clean ROM unlike some of the older 16-bit "dirty" ROMs. Not that I condone piracy, but...you can easily find quadra.rom with some creative guesswork at Google.
It's been great to have that old Mac I used to use at the college computer lab in '95 back, and better than ever. I've been playing Barrack, one of my favorite games of all time. I've been playing that quaint old classic Risk, simple but addictive as it was in the early 90s. And Basilisk II even allows your virtual Mac to use your PC's internet connection, so grab Netscape 3.04 from the Netscape archives and have deja vu all over again (I still think the rounded look of the old versions of Netscape for the Mac are better than most of today's browsers look).
Sorry for running on so long, but I love it. The only problem has been tracking down older versions of Mac apps and games--I decided I wanted to make my virtual Mac an authentic 1995 beast, not only was it my first year of college, it's the year the Net really exploded into the mainstream. I've been collecting these old apps that were common back then, and eventually, even though it's a copyright violation, I'm going to release a 150MB HFS partition file on the Net containing a snapshot of 1995, with all the common software that's now difficult to find. Much of it I had to find by poring through old FTP mirrors, like this and from here. The olf NCSA Telnet and NCSA Mosaic ftp archives are still there, and have period versions of common utilities.
Anyway, I just thought I'd share something about my favourite emulator. Ciao.
Ho-hum, a flame based on one misplaced word in a 659-line USENET post. I'm absolutely crushed. Clearly, in my haste in trying to complete such a lengthy discourse in time to participate in my *life*, something a troll such as yourself clearly lacks, I said "incredulous" instead of "incredible." If you look closely, you'll also discover such horrible secrets as my numerous typos.
;-)
Oh, and I wasn't bragging about my linguistic abilities--although my girlfriend *does* say I give great French lessons--I was pointing out the irony that someone as articulate as he was, was articulating a viewpoint based on a false definition of "anonymous."
Now, I'll go back to giving my girlfriend those French lessons, my friend. You--and your hand--can go slither back under whatever trollish rock you call home.
Did anyone else have 790 pop in mind when reading this post? He's a character in the great sci-fi series *LEXX*, who happens to have a piece of human brain tissue at the core of his circuitry. Which explains how he, a robot head, could fall in love with the love slave Xev.
Sci fi and science have always played off one another. I wonder how many scientists were inspired growing up by the fantastic creations of the 1950s comic books, like aeroplanes that could fly into space, or by Asimov and others.
But, I digress. I just have to point out that it may be difficult to overclock human brain tissue, but...
I'd post a lengthy explanation of why it's more important to protect basic freedoms than to protect idiots who should learn about the Net before they run out into traffic and get run over on the information superhighway, but I said it well enough in a discussion on alt.privacy.anon-server. It was in response to a man who blamed anonymous remailers as responsible for threats made by an anonymous person to some woman he knows.
= 661727467&CONTEXT=971767337. 1064960 22
I won't repost it here because it's a good 659 lines, but here's some linkage to it on DejaNews (I still can't bring myself to call them Deja...sigh...):
http://x70.deja.com/[ST_rn=ps]/threadmsg_ct.xp?AN
If that link expires, go to the main Power Search page at http://www.deja.com/home_ps.shtml and type "carbonymous" into the author field, and that will show it and a few others.
The implications for abuse are far, FAR to huge to make a genetic database a good idea. Umm, can anyone say genetic screening for "the possibility of undesirable traits"? Can anyone say inability to get insurance because of a pre-existing genetic condition? Can anyone say FBI database of "potentially violent" people--like, say, most of history's greatest individuals? Can anyone recall that you leave DNA roughly EVERYWHERE you go, and that unscrupulous agencies could use this to monitor people they don't like even if they do nothing illegal?
Bad idea, period.
Soryy, but you misunderstand where I'm coming from. For starters, I'm well into my 20s, not under 18. This is important, becaue I'm old enough and well-educated enough, having graduated from one of the oldest liberal arts colleges in the nation in a mere three years--a feat no one at my college pulled off in any professor's memory, the requirements are so thick--to come from a mature and thoughtful perspective, rather than one tinged by being too young to do something. Just as importantly, I'm not so old that I can't remember my high school years clearly, along with the culture, behaviours, and attitudes which were commonplace a mere five years ago. The older one gets, the more divorced one is from the state of today's youth, in most cases. This taints viewpoints, because what was inappropriate teenage behaviour in 1962 is very, very far removed from what is appropriate teenage behavior today. Having children oneself also often makes one entirely unqualified to make a rational and impartial judgement about what is appropriate for young people, because parental emotions make one lose objectivity much of the time. Objectivity is important, because we're talking about the development into adulthood of another human being, not our own selfish wants and desires which sometimes conflict with what is most healthy.
/. story day before yesterday.
That being said, the important misunderstanding lies not with my age/youth, but with your characterizations of this particular law. You see, the very same people have made this law, who have tried to censor Mapplethorpe's artwork from being displayed in public museums in their city, and who attempted to get adult magazines such as HUSTLER banned for being "patently obscene." This is the same city, and these are the same public officials. Given their history, it is more than reasonable to infer that their motives are not regulation, but eradication--in fact, it's not just "more than reasonable to infer," it's bloody obvious.
I have no objection to regulations, per se. I have numerous objections to this one, as well as others which have come along in recent years.
Regarding your example about movie ratings, I'm sorry, but it's not at all on-point. In fact, the entire movie ratings system as it stands today is successful precisely because teenagers can easily circumvent it. If you're 18 and your friend or girlfriend is 16, well, just buy her ticket while she waits out of sight. I have only once in my entire life run across a movie theater that wouldn't sell two, three, or half a dozen tickets to anyone who is old enough for the movie's rating, and then have no questions for the under-17s when they roll into the theater. The only other exceptions I've seen to this are regarding films which are unrated, or which are garnering direct protest right in the area.
This is what makes the MPAA ratings system fairly successful: it gives conservative parents warm fuzzies in their ignorant bliss that their 15 year old darling can't see some nasty sex-and-violence romp, while simultaneously giving teens the ability to see whatever films they want behind their parents' backs. This isn't of course applicable to very very young children, but is 100% true for teens.
Now, this arcade system on the other hand is an abomination, not because it actually works unlike the movie ratings system which is usually easily circumvented, but because it's clearly designed to kill all violent arcade games/arcades as we know them within its jurisdiction. The "violent" games must be segregated in a separate physical area from the rest of the games, with means to prevent unauthorized minors from accessing them. In other words, they have to be put into a "back room" as if they were hardcore pornography. There is no mechanism for giving teens a clear and easy way to have access to these games--as I said, much of arcade playing is done on impulse, to kill time, or otherwise by teens who are at the damned mall to get away from their parents and be independant in the first place. How is a parent who gives his teens enough independence to, well, be a healthy young adult, supposed to give this permission? It's unconscionable to expect a teenager to have to hold Daddy's hand every time he wants to play a HARMLESS VIDEO GAME. If you don't think they're harmless, I refer you to the statistics given by Jamie's
This is part of an alarming trend in the U.S. to artificially and unhealthily extend childhood. For example, if an 18 year old is an adult, why can't he drink alcoholic beverages? Well, the sole reason is that Elizabeth Dole and her conservative groups complained that 18 year olds being able to legally purchase liquor caused it to get into the hands of other, younger high school students. Even Ronald Reagan was initially against raising the drinking age--after all, it was lowered in the first place based on the premise that someone who is an adult, who has the right to vote in our Republic, and who has the responsibility to fight and die for it in time of war, should naturally be extended every right including the one to drink alcohol. That makes a lot of sense--either you're an adult, or you're not. Either you have rights, or you don't. But, raising the spectre of younger high schoolers drinking caused rights to be rescinded and taken away from supposed adults. Well, the result is that use of alcohol by high school students has increased many times over since the rise in drinking age--it simply didn't work. Rights were taken away, for nothing. And in the end, it probably contributed to the rise of underage drinking, because teenagers will very often do things just because they;re told not to.
Even more important and damaging, how is it that an 18 year old is an adult, when in certain locales purchase of sexual videos and magazines is restricted to those at least 21? Where I happen to live, the age is 18--but in many places it is 21. Now, no 18 year old can be prevented from making sexually explicit materials and being the subject of them, because he's an adult and has 1st Amendment rights to participate if he wants to in the adult materials industry. Any law restricting the age to 21 and over would be immediately called unconstitutional by the Court. And yet, if I am an 18 year old or 20 year old in such a jurisdiction, I could not legally purchase the sex videos I myself have starred in. This makes NO SENSE whatsoever. "Adult" and "age of majority" thus have little real meaning, and rights are rendered arbitrary in such examples.
But laws have been getting ever more restrictive on young people, especially 14-17 year olds. First a smoking age is set at 16, and then it's raised to 18--it hasn't stopped teen smoking, in fact after a brief decline it's on the rise once more. It just succeeds in making older teens, who are not children but really young adults, feel more boxed in, feel like they have fewer and fewer rights, feel like they're being treated with no respect and have no rights. And they're correct. And this comes from someone who HATES cigarettes and has NEVER smoked any.
Curfews are being set in more cities and towns all over the country, curfews which affect older teens and not just young children. Talk about the State interfering with the development of a 16 year old into a healthy adult, well, it may make the old people feel safe not to have a few young hooligans running about after dark, but it makes every teen under such tyranny feel like he or she has no rights and no worth as a person, no free will and no respect. Talk to young people about such issues. It demeans them, and the parents who should have a say instead of the State mandating curfews.
Even a basic teenage right of passage like learning to drive is under fire. Thanks to a media which plays up any incidence of teenage car accidents, especially if they involve alcohol, moves are underway in many states to raise the driving age to 17 or even 18 for an instruction permit. Of course, the DOT's own aggregate statistics show that 21-25 year olds are more likely to drive drunk than 16-20 year olds, but facts don't count when people go by gut emotion fed by an irresponsible press. Of course, 16-20 year olds DO have more accidents overall than 21-25 year olds--it makes perfect sense, because you're ALWAYS going to have more accidents on average in people's first few years of driving than after they've already had a few years of practice. Well, duh, but no one THINKS any more.
Even the most fundamental part of oneself, one's body, is a subject of much legislation and loss of rights in the last few years. Ages of consent have gone up, even though ages of sexual maturity (physically) and of first sexual contacts have been going down. Before the health and nutrition advances of the 19th century, average age of first menses hovered between 14 and 16. Today, it is listed as 12 in most textbooks, but the most recent studies have suggested it has been dropping swiftly, as low as 9 for African American girls in certain cities, and 10-11 for Caucasian American girls in some cities. A majority of middle school children now engage in oral sex, according to an article which recently appeared in the Washington Post Magazine. And yet, ages of consent are being raised and prosecutions are on the rise--not prosecutions of older perverts who deserve to be prosecuted for inappropriate contact, but rather prosecutions of young people for having consensual sex with members of their own peer group. One would hardly say that a boy who just turned 15 was out of the peer group of a girl who's almost 14, and yet such a boy was prosecuted, in Michigan if memory serves, for consensual sex with the girlfriend. Prosecutors called it "statutory rape" since the age of consent was 15 and he'd reached it but she hadn't, but most of us would call it a "normal teenage relationship." Now, even five years ago, much less 10, no prosecutor in the country would have prosecuted. But these days, no one uses common sense, and no one thinks of the real emotional health of our young people. Not just the boy--who is now, thanks to Megan's Law, a registered sex offender--but the girl will probably never develop into a normal adult with normal sexual behaviours. I can recount many similar cases, and even find URLs if you want. In my own state, the age of consent is still technically 15, but a new law makes it a serious crime for someone 18 or older to have consensual sex with someone above the "age of consent" but under 18. Not only is it confusing, it's been used to convict 18 year old high school seniors for having consensual sex with 16 year old high school juniors. Teenagers who are really young adults, now have not even basic rights over their own sexual development with members of their peer group.
We make our young people, kids as young as 12 and 13, responsible for upholding the responsibilities of adults. If they harm someone, they can be tried as an adult for assault or murder. Yet, we give them none of the rights of adults. How is it that we treat them like adults when they do evil, and like children when they do good? How can they have all the bad and none of the good that comes with being an adult? Why is it, at the exact moment we're treating teenagers more and more like children, taking away more of their rights, that we can simultaneously start punishing them as the justice system has only punished adults before now? I think it's because our society is selfish, and doesn't care about our teenagers. We want them to do as we say, and if they don't they get punished, but if they do they get no reward. We have lost sight of our teenagers. We treat them as objects, not human beings.
Not to mention the fact that we drug our young people like no other ntion does. We put them on Ritalin for just about everything--it's scary, the percentages of kids and teens on this stuff. And we put them on Welbutrin and Zoloft for depression--which is merely a usually harmless symptom of being a teenager. Most teenagers are naturally depressed from time to time--it's part of growing up. And we drug them for it. Do you know how many prescription drugs the Columbine shooters were on?
Everything for teenagers has been growing progressively worse. They've been given fewer and fewer rights--had more and more taken away. Is it any wonder, then, that some of them have felt so trapped, so put upon by external pressures, that some of them have snapped like at Columbine? Columbine was a wake-up call, not that teens are more violent than they've ever been--which stats show is untrue--not that we need to censor their films and video games, but that we're censoring them to death. We give them so little freedom that they don't value their own lives, or those of their classmates. We put them under so much presure to succeed, to get good grades, to get into college, to have cool friends and be in the right cliques--many also need to have jobs, too--and we have taken away their only freedoms and rewards. We have taken away all their fundamental rights.
And this is just another piece in that big puzzle. It's just another brick in the wall. And it's a very wicked thing to do to our teenagers, our supposed young adults. They get all the responsibilities and none of the rights. This is a small part of a much, much larger wrong. But it should be stopped. It all needs to be stopped, and thought about rationally.
The key point here is that it's the ARCADE business which is suing to stop this law. This is about ARCADE games, not about BUYING games RETAIL.
:-(
Let me repeat, since 99% of the people below, who are moderated up to 4 and 5 for pointing out that requiring a parent to buy a game for a child is not a ban, don't seem to have READ THE BLOODY POST and associated material. Here it it: THIS IS ABOUT ARCADES!!! NOT retail.
I hope we've cleared the confusion now, and I hope the people who misunderstood what this was all about get appropriately moderated down again. People shouldn't moderate something up if it completely misses the subject, whether or not it's an OPINION the moderator agrees with.
You see, this *is* a ban on arcades. It is not a *de jure* ban, it is a *de facto* ban. That is, the law itself does not ban arcades; the law does, however, made the business of running an arcade completely untenable, thus causing, in effect, a ban on arcades.
Here's why: The majority of those who frequent arcades are minors--mostly high school students, though this varies by location and type of arcade. As such, minors are an important, the most important, customer demographic in the arcade business. Without minors, arcades would go the way of the drive-in movie theater.
This law effectively prevents most minors from going to arcades. Let's face it: high school students, and most junior high students, are not going to arcades to play the latest mind-numbing soul-killing consumer-drone-creating Pokemon franchise. They play the good stuff, the Area 51s and the Mortal Kombats and the House of the Deads and the VR Gunfights. Keep them from those by this law, and arcades shrivel and die--and that's what these freaks want--the same freaks, BTW, who were with Charles Keating and the Moral Majority, who had no TRUE morals whatsoever (umm, can anyone say S&L scam?), when they tried to prosecute a certain respected art gallery for obscenity for exhibiting the photographs of a a certain controversial but respected artist. Brownie points for anyone who can name the artist AND the gallery (hint: Showtime recently made a film about it). Oh, and these were the same people who tried to ban the sale of HUSTLER which, while not always the most tasteful magazine, is protected speech. Anyone who thinks that Thomas Jefferson wouldn't defend HUSTLER in this day and age, should immediately read some of his writings, or preferably leave this country altogether for someplace more to your morally censorious liking, such as Iraq or Libya.
But, I digress. Back to the main line of reasoning, this is a *de facto* ban because there is no effective way to implement a system whereby under-18s are prevented from accessing such machines without parental consent, while still allowing parentally-consented (yes, I know, but I'm too tired to think of a better term) minors to freely access them. What, is a parent supposed to accompany Little Johnny and Jake to the arcade every time they want to play Mortal Kombat? Let's say a parent does; she goes up to the attendant and says "Let my kids in to the back room" while she shops. Johnny and Jake go get a drink 'cause they're thirsty, or go anywhere for a change of scenery--kids don't like staying in one place for long periods--come back to the arcade, and they can't get in. Different attendant, or attendant doesn't remember them, or maybe the policy is a parent is needed *every occasion*. Oops, sorry. Better yet, most teens drop by the arcade while doing something else. My friends and I would stop by after movies or while hanging out in the mall or after dining somewhere. Oops, sorry, no parents with you, can't get in, you'll go hang out somewhere else. Needing parental consent all the time adds up to a lot of lost revenue, most of which is from kids whose parents would have let them play any game. Fact is, most 16 year olds, a lot of 15 and 14 year olds, and almost all 17 year olds, are very mobile, but without their parents. They're teenagers, YOUNG ADULTS, with lives of their own. Mommy and Daddy don't accompany them everywhere, and don't need to because they're trusted, independant. What a great way it is to teach teenagers to grow into responsible, independant adults, to make them bring Mommy and Daddy with them everywhere they go.
The upshot is, it would kill the entire arcade business in the area except for 1 or 2 locations. Thus, it would be a *DE FACTO BAN* on arcades. If the authors of the legislation had mere reasonable regulation of arcades on their minds, they would have implemented a one-time system whereby a parent could give Little Johnny permanent permission to play whetever games he wants, with say a registration card. Of course, doing that would smack of America as a show-me-your-papers totalitarian sort of place--not that it isn't already...