I can see how Xbox would be chosen, since it's an American-made system, and the military prefers American-made whenever possible, to be patriotic.
But what of region coding?
I wonder what will happen if a soldier buys a game off base while stationed in Europe, and brings it into the Xbox gameroom on base, and discovers it won't play.
Will all games have to be imported from the USA?
I would imagine Microsoft would make a special deal with the military, and give them regionfree consoles that would play anything, regardless of region.
I played the game 3 times through to reach the end of Hell mode, not being rushed. It is more fun that way. I didn't do every quest, but I later went back and mopped up the remaining quests after getting to Hell. A lot of other players just get rushed, that's true. One day I saw a Level 1 character on Hell!
Adding another difficulty level beyond Hell probably wouldn't improve the current situation, unless rushing is nerfed. There's lots of ideas to make it so that high level characters can't bodyguard low level characters as easily, which I won't go into here. At least Blizzard was wise enough to put minimum level requirements on their items, so the problem of twinking (high level items on low level characters) isn't as bad as it is on Everquest.
As for Hardcore, no thanks. To me, it seems like just a competition to see which player has the better Internet connection. One burst of netlag, slowing down the response time of your character, and you are permanently dead. This is especially bad, when combined with the problem of grief players declaring hostility. Hitting Alt-F4 at the first sign of trouble helps, but still isn't enough to save you if you're in a hard area and the lag catches you by surprise.
I still think it would be fun to see a fourth difficulty level beyond Hell, "Inferno", geared for characters who are very high level. Currently, at high level, there is nothing to do except repeat the cow run over and over, because nothing else in the game is worthwhile. The enhancements Blizzard is proposing in Act 5 of Hell might be better served by applying them to *all* acts, thus creating an entirely new difficulty level with not much new programming required!
I'm disappointed that they didn't do more in the 1.10 patch. A fourth difficulty level, "Inferno", beyond hell, would have been great to have and it would reduce the boredom at high level. The changes they're doing to Act 5 could have been applied to all acts at this new difficulty level.
There's other nitpicks that make the game still feel incomplete. Act 4 still only has very few waypoints, compared to all other levels. Adding some more waypoints, or even a new area or two, to Act 4 would have been great.
A much-needed "No Hostile Players" checkbox, to prevent players from going hostile, should have been added to the game creation options. Grief players have ruined many a good game by unexpectedly going PvP.
This wishlist was made 2 years ago, when rumours of 1.10 first began: http://www.krellan.com/rant/diablo.html
On the BitPass site, they sell prepaid "cards" that are just account numbers. Unfortunately, they map to credit cards, or PayPal (which maps to credit cards or bank accounts). So, there's no way to simply place money into their system, without using a credit card or a bank account.
I can walk a block to the local convenience store on the street corner, and have my choice of over a dozen brands of prepaid phone cards! I give the store clerk some cash, and get a prepaid phone card. It is completely anonymous, and nobody has to pay the high fees of credit cards. I don't need to be a certain age, or have a clean credit history, or live in a certain country, to qualify. Anybody can walk in and pay cash for these cards! This is a huge market.
I have often wished I could buy a prepaid "webcard" in the same way. I would buy a card, and it would have a fixed value that would be depleted as I spend it online. It could also function as a normal prepaid phone card, to be used as a wedge to get into stores that only are willing to sell phone cards.
When I can walk into a convenience store and see a stack of prepaid BitPass cards for sale, I will know they have a chance to be successful. People that can't get a credit card will be able to still buy things online. This could be huge for the large number of teenagers that play online games and such! I really hope that BitPass can get their cards into stores, so that they can be bought with cash.
I also have PlayStation-to-USB converters. They work great, and require *no* drivers at all (they appear as generic USB HID devices).
I originally bought them for DDR, but have found I like them for other games as well. The Microsoft Sidewinder joysticks are just too big and clunky! While other controllers get smaller and more efficient, Microsoft just gets clunkier. Somewhat like American cars vs. Japanese cars, a few decades ago....
Microsoft's last few joysticks, with force feedback, were just ghastly huge! When a joystick starts to require its own power supply, that's a sign that things have gotten out of hand. I love my PlayStation controllers. And 2 of them fit in less desk space than 1 Microsoft joystick:)
This PS1 game is a music game, known for these very distinctive things:
It comes with 6 songs done in a very strange and indescribeable way, by a Japanese group "Laugh & Peace". Very good and catchy music.
All graphics in the game are black and white, simulated vector graphics! No filled-in shapes here. Would be great if the game could output a format that could be understood by a laser projector....
You can put in your own audio CD's, and the game will create its own steps for you to follow, based on the beat and the rhythm of the music! So the game has an essentially limitless number of songs you can play.
On the old Fresh Games forum site, in fact, it was the very first game requested.
The game is completely in Japanese, but the characters are mostly katakana so it is easy to work through and translate. Here's the original Japanese site for the game's developers:
I like this very much. The concept of graylisting/tempfailing is so simple that one wonders why it wasn't thought of and widely implemented earlier!
It would work very well when combined with Bayesian and tarpitting techniques.
Most email servers have a few well-known addresses that would have graylisting turned off, so that their mail could be received immediately: abuse@, support@, sales@, and so on. These addresses typically are read by better software that splits the inbox load up among multiple people on a team, so that no one person has to bear the burden of reading and dealing with it all.
Because these addresses have no graylisting, they would receive all messages, including spam. Bayesian filters could then be applied. Whenever someone reads incoming mail, they could decide whether or not it is spam. Eventually, the software will be able to make good Bayesian guesses. The person will be free to concentrate first on the messages that are determined not to be spam.
When this is done, the Bayesian score of each incoming message can then be calculated. Combined with tarpitting, this would be a very good thing to apply to incoming mailboxes. After the DATA command is received by SMTP, the Bayesian score of the message could be calculated, based on its contents. If a message has a high probability of being spam, an intentional delay could be inserted before the SMTP server returns a success code to the sender! If the client software disconnects earlier, the mail would be treated as not sent, because the SMTP transaction was not yet complete. This would force senders of what looks like spam to wait a while before sending each message, perhaps with timeouts up to 30 seconds. This would greatly cut down on their ability to quickly send many messages.
So, there's 3 layers here:
1) Graylisting/tempfailing of all email boxes that are read by an ISP's end users. The actual email contents are never read by people at the ISP. 2) Bayesian sorting of all incoming mail that is read by the ISP (abuse@, support@, and so on). This builds up a good Bayesian database of incoming email. 3) Tarpitting incoming SMTP connections when incoming mail is determined to most likely be spam, by using the Bayesian score. This would be applied to all email boxes.
Note that nowhere in any of these layers, incoming email is refused! These systems are great, because there wouldn't be the worry of accidentally refusing an important email because it was misclassified as spam.
I'd like to be a customer of an ISP that applies these three layers to incoming email....
These videos look promising. Are there any similar instructions for the basic UT, not UT2003?
I go to a LAN party with a group of friends pretty much every weekend, and play UT, because not all the computers are strong enough to run UT2003. I'd like to try to make a mod/mutator. I'm not sure where to start, when learning about the UT API.
Anyone have suggestions on a good site I can go to for basic UT modding information? Many UT sites I have seen assume a lot of prior knowledge, or have now became UT2003-only.
It is vestigial, useful only for signatures. This is the only time in my life, since elementary school, that I have used cursive writing.
There are lots of good reasons that have already been posted. It is very difficult to read. It is not very faster than printing. It serves no use.
My grandmother used to be a shorthand expert (worked decades as a secretary, in the age before dictation machines). Shorthand is now dead. It has been made obsolete. Cursive will soon follow.
In elementary school, in the early 1980's, there was a fad that swept through, with yet another writing system: Denelian! This was some kind of hybrid between printing and cursive. It was supposed to be easier to learn than cursive, used as a stepping stone after children learned printing. Instead, it combined the disadvantages of both! Fortunately this fad died out after a few years.
Standard printing is easy to read and easy to write. It is easy to learn. It is just as effective at communicating information as cursive, if not more so. Isn't that what writing is supposed to do?
I use DJ binders. They are large binders that hold around 200 CD's at a time, originally intended for use by DJ's at clubs and such.
Here's an example: http://www.targus.com/cases_media_104_208.asp
CD's are stored 4 to a page, and pages are double-sided. CD's are stored in plastic sleeves, and the plastic is flexible enough to allow the liner notes to be placed behind the CD when stored. Putting liner notes behind the CD also marks the proper location to put back the CD when you are done using it.
When filled, each binder is around 3" thick. It fits in a standard shelf, and its height is roughly that of standard paper in the US (11"). The only disadvantage is that the binder is rather wide, and can require a deep shelf to store without risk of toppling out.
The plastic cases for CD's are then thrown away. I keep interesting ones that would be hard to replace if ever needed (imports, etc.) and use them as generic cases for CD's I frequently use, keeping them outside of the binder.
The result? Around 40GB of music on the hard drive, and all CD's safely tucked away in binders!
College radio stations!
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TiVo For Radio?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
This would be wonderfully good for college radio stations.
I have an old standalone FM receiver (non-amplifier) hooked up to the line-in of a computer. I tune it to a station and leave it there most of the time, then use a program to schedule a recording at a certain time of the day. Convert that to MP3, burn a CD once enough are collected, and life is good. I'd like to do this with multiple stations, though, not just a single station.
College radio is great because they play music that has escaped the Clear Channel suppression. They play a ton of different music. However, each DJ has their own format, and they change every few hours or so, so if you find a style of music that you like, you have to listen at an oddball time (such as Thursdays 1AM-3AM or something like that). A RadioTiVo would solve this problem!
Also, college radio hardly ever repeats a song, since there are so many minor bands striving to be heard. There's more music to play than there is airtime. So, if you hear a song that you like, that's probably your only chance to get it! A RadioTiVo would let you go back and selectively save the songs you like, even if you weren't recording in advance.
Radio is also much lower bandwidth than TV. It might be possible to record several stations at once! Imagine recording the entire dial, and then using some kind of matching algorithm to pick out individual songs. You could have a self-service "request" system this way: you just flag the songs you want, and then the service listens to all radio stations until the song eventually comes across. Then it saves it. That would be great.
I would imagine the RIAA will slap this thing down as soon as it is built, however....
I was one of the few people who really *liked* the earlier VtM game, Redemption, by Nihilistic Software. The thought of another VtM game fills me with joy! I hope Troika can learn from Nihilistic's game, keeping what was good, and reworking what was bad.
The graphics and sound of the first game were just excellent. I even made steps for a dance simulation game, using Redemption's main theme song! I hope they bring back Kevin Manthei as composer. For graphics, a lot of the game's best graphics were missed by many players, due to the poor choice of camera angles. I hope very much that the next game doesn't have the camera always looking down at the dull ground. Using the freelook mode in Redemption (for observation only, sadly not playable), and looking up, you can see a lot of incredibly detailed artwork and layouts.
The full-motion video cutscenes were terrible, however, and gave the game a bad reputation early on. The main character (Christof) looked completely different, handsome in game but ugly in the cutscenes. The game engine was very good, and 99% of all plot sequences were already done in the game engine, so why not simply make it 100%? I hope the new game is completely in the engine, never going to a cutscene. The Half-Life 2 engine should be more than powerful enough for this.
The plotline of Redemption was just great. I would have loved to read it as a novel. It is true that it is extremely stereotypical in places, and the love interest of Christof is contrived and grating at times, but the overall story was very good. The game was completely driven by this heavy plotline, which unfortunately made it extremely linear. There were alternate choices that could be made in the game, but these only affected your character's statistics (making the wrong decision hurt), and there were no real plot branching points. The alternate choices had great dialog, though! I would have liked to go back and read the various possibilities in the script. It is a shame that the game didn't have a "walkthrough mode" where selected parts can be replayed after beating the game.
It is true that there were three possible endings, but they were selected by the final choice the player made after the game was already essentially beaten, so there were no real alternate plotlines. Perhaps a more lightweight plotline, with several possiblities and side quests, would have made a more engrossing game. I hope they add more exploration opportunities and side quests in the next game.
The first game attempted to simulate the overall mood of the White Wolf "World Of Darkness", and pretty much succeeded. It did not do so well at actually implementing the rules of the world, however. There are many obvious glaring errors. The massive slaughter of cannon fodder, like a vampiric Gauntlet Legends, is laughable. The game is mostly a series of dungeon crawls. It's as if they designed and completed another game, and then just slapped the White Wolf label on it afterwards. As it stands, the game is still fun, but nothing like the real VtM roleplaying game. The game is one of political subtleties, backstabbing, and maneuvering for power - things not really possible in a computer game. The things that are easy to program, like the mechanical system of the game, were needlessly changed (botched!). I would have liked to see the real dice rolls, ala Baldur's Gate. Attributes could have been made to better match the real game, perhaps going from 0.0-5.0 instead of 0-100. The breakdown of Discipline level-building into individual Discipline powers instead of entire Disciplines, however, was a good thing as it slowed down the rate of character advancement enough to allow smooth gradual character building thorought the entire game storyline. It also allowed characters to be built in many different ways, allowing players to choose which powers to specialize in. I didn't like how many of the powers overlapped and were redundant with each other, though. I hope they are able to inco
The website has a simple idea: one huge email list, filtered by location. People register their location (by ZIP code), and other optional information about themselves, when signing up. All email submissions go into a central database, then they are reflected only to those people who have chosen to receive them. It can also be filtered by age range and other categories, and multiple filters can be applied.
For instance, I have chosen to receive emails from everybody 10 or fewer miles away from me, and emails from people in my age range 20 or fewer miles away.
On the service, people swap recommendations all the time. The mailing list has helped me find a good veterinarian in the area!
Because of the publicity generated by the media coverage, this service is most popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it does have support for nationwide ZIP codes.
It could be better: I wish it had a browseable archive of postings that could be similarly filtered, instead of it being a simple email forwarder. That would make it easy to browse past answers to FAQ's. But, it is very good for what it does offer.
I think this would be great. I don't know how to read Asian languages but like to have support for them nonetheless, because I'm fascinated by various writing systems used all over the world.
Problems I see:
* What to do about the text console? Would the framebuffer console become mandatory, since VGA text can only support 512 unique characters (nowhere near enough for Asian languages)? One of the strengths of Linux is its extremely fast text console updating, and on many systems I've chosen to keep the standard VGA text instead of going to framebuffer mode for this very reason.
* What to do about fonts? Making full Unicode fonts is very expensive and time-consuming. There are some free fonts already but nowhere near the level of fonts available for standard ASCII.
* What about software that is hardcoded to use 8-bit characters? The tcsh shell comes to mind.
* What about IME's (input method editors)? Are they smoothly integrated with all X applications, or are they hardcoded to only work inside of one specific application? A global IME will be needed, if it does not exist already. Also, an equivalent IME will be needed for console mode, if that is supported.
I'm assuming UTF-8 will become the standard encoding format. That will be a good thing, as it provides a smooth upgrade path.
Translating error messages and the like should be easy. Accepting input from the user, and handling it properly, will be harder.
My guess is that full I18N will be possible only in graphical mode, and that text mode will still be assumed to be English. Many distributions are defaulting to graphical mode these days, leaving text mode solely for the advanced user who has manually customized their setup. I use text mode all the time, for speed and other issues, and would hate to see it deprecated due to the difficulty of getting it to work internationally.
Isn't this like what Marimba Castanet tried for Java?
It was a way to synchronize Java applications so that they could be used offline, and automatically updated whenever the user went back online. The idea was to have "channels" of available Java programs on a user's machine that could be accessed at any time and updated/synchronized with a central server periodically. It was intended for use by traveling salesmen and others with intermittent Internet connections.
It was a fun novelty at first, but overall it didn't go over so well. Marimba's web page is still up today, evidently the company has diversified into some overall "change management" strategy.
Macromedia Central strikes me as exactly the same thing, but for Flash instead of Java!
I have doubts, because this unit doesn't support all HDTV resolutions. Also, the specs page said it only has an NTSC tuner! Does it receive HDTV off the air? If it requires an external tuner to decode HDTV, then this box seems nearly worthless.
Does anyone have this box? Is it a true HDTV tuner, or is it a waste of money?
It seems that the new firewalling technique of 2.4 (iptables) does not play well with Ethernet bridges.
I have a DSL connection to a small subnet of static IP addresses (/29). The problem is that the DSL uplink, out of my control and unfirewalled, is on one of the addresses in my subnet! It's as if there is a fox in the henhouse.
There is no proper routing subnet, as there should be. This is no doubt because of the IP address shortage. The DSL uplink must exist on the same subnet as my machines, giving me only 5 usable addresses for my machines. Broadcasts must be passed correctly, or the machines won't be able to ARP each other. Proxy ARP is not an option, because of the need to keep the DSL uplink on the same subnet.
So, I run Ethernet bridging with firewalling. I bridge two Ethernet cards together, passing broadcast packets between them (filtering out externally generated "smurf" broadcast packets, of course). I also implement my firewall at this point. The network is one logical LAN, but partitioned into two physical LAN's, with the firewall machine in between them. The firewall makes sure that unwanted packets from the DSL uplink never reach my machines.
It's not perfect (there is no stateful connection filtering), but it has worked well for me. Probes come in at least every hour, and no successful breakins to my knowledge.
And another reason not to upgrade? The machine's uptime is now at 326 days, I'm going for the year:)
Do not forget that the Silly Valley's native paper, the San Jose Mercury News, also published a report on how bad things are here. This report was a 4-part series!
Wow, great news! I guess when you sell over 8 million copies of your new game, you can afford to let an older one go!
I've never played any game in the GTA series, but have been intrigued by it and have wanted to try it out. When the site recovers from being slashdotted, I will download GTA1 and give it a try. I love games where you get to play the role of a bad guy! Rockstar might just have gained another customer here.
I wish more companies would release their older games for free. There are only two others I know of: Id Software (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom) open-sourced their older game engines (but without levels/content), and Bill Budge completely released his Apple ][ games (Pinball Construction Set, etc.) to the public domain!
Will Rockstar Games allow peer-to-peer networks to legally carry their GTA1 download, now that they have released it for free? If so, it would ease a huge burden on their site.
Also, will abandonware sites be allowed to carry the game without fear of legal hassle? That would be great if abandonware sites could set up a special collection of "freed" games that would be legally free to download and share.
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus Where the three-body problem is solved, Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K, And the cold virus never evolved.
(chorus)
We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high, Our ball bearings are perfectly round. Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed, And a kilogram weighs half a pound.
(chorus)
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart, If we just find a big enough wrench.
(chorus)
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space, And living up here is a bore. Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye 'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!
(chorus)
CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange, Where the space debris always collects, We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams: Solar power and zero-gee sex.
Even without having 4GB of memory installed, it is still very useful to have a 64-bit address space. Imagine being able to mmap() your entire hard drive at once! The filesystem would just simply treat the entire disk as a big data structure in virtual memory, copying when needed, instead of having to issue read and write calls to the disk. This will provide a huge performance increase.
AGP and PCI cards, especially newer video cards, are also getting big. These need to have address space allocated to them. Even with a 64-bit PCI card, Linux still surprisingly allocates address space in 32-bit memory (the lower 4GB). If 4GB of RAM is installed, Linux must create a "hole" for PCI cards and such, as there isn't enough address space for all the RAM plus the PCI cards. This reminds me of the bad old days of ISA, where the expansion cards had to sit between 640K and 1M, creating a hole between the first 1M and all later memory. This hole still exists!
And finally, there's lots of good reasons to have a huge address space that provides room enough for everything on the system at once. No need to decode multiple memory maps and translate between them. It would be a boon to things involving virtual memory, multiple programs, data transfer between programs, and so on.
BTW, I use a machine at work with 4GB of memory installed. It's running Linux 2.4. Even with HIGHMEM enabled, it is still a mess, because we need that memory to be available to the kernel and PCI devices, and not just in user space. Linux is very good at doing page table tricks with PAE (Physical Address Extensions) for user programs, but this isn't true in kernel space. I'm looking forward to real 64-bit machines!
Re:Am I the only that thought this sounde wierd?
on
Building the A380
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· Score: 1
Thanks!
I was sure there had to be a good reason to construct those rest stops for the convoy. I hope they can use them for something useful, perhaps convert them into traditional rest stops after the convoy is complete.
Re:Am I the only that thought this sounde wierd?
on
Building the A380
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I also find it bizarre that they would construct special rest stops along the French highway so that the convoy could rest overnight on their 3-day journey.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and more efficient just to pay some overtime and have the drivers drive in shifts, 24/7, until the trip is complete? They'd just stop the convoy for a few minutes while changing drivers. No need for the expense, and the security issues, of building a dedicated rest stop.
But European rest stops are cool. Maybe it would be a good idea to waste the money to build more of them!
UCITA is bad news for anyone remotely connected to the software industry, if you haven't already heard.
California is great but it has high taxes and its legal climate is anti-business, not to mention the huge cost of living. I currently live in San Jose, and if worse comes to worst, I will move to probably Nevada, Arizona, or New Mexico. I'd prefer Vermont, for many things including getting to vote for Senator Leahy, but my partner hates the snow:)
Slashdot Mirror
I can see how Xbox would be chosen, since it's an American-made system, and the military prefers American-made whenever possible, to be patriotic.
But what of region coding?
I wonder what will happen if a soldier buys a game off base while stationed in Europe, and brings it into the Xbox gameroom on base, and discovers it won't play.
Will all games have to be imported from the USA?
I would imagine Microsoft would make a special deal with the military, and give them regionfree consoles that would play anything, regardless of region.
About Hell and Hardcore:
I played the game 3 times through to reach the end of Hell mode, not being rushed. It is more fun that way. I didn't do every quest, but I later went back and mopped up the remaining quests after getting to Hell. A lot of other players just get rushed, that's true. One day I saw a Level 1 character on Hell!
Adding another difficulty level beyond Hell probably wouldn't improve the current situation, unless rushing is nerfed. There's lots of ideas to make it so that high level characters can't bodyguard low level characters as easily, which I won't go into here. At least Blizzard was wise enough to put minimum level requirements on their items, so the problem of twinking (high level items on low level characters) isn't as bad as it is on Everquest.
As for Hardcore, no thanks. To me, it seems like just a competition to see which player has the better Internet connection. One burst of netlag, slowing down the response time of your character, and you are permanently dead. This is especially bad, when combined with the problem of grief players declaring hostility. Hitting Alt-F4 at the first sign of trouble helps, but still isn't enough to save you if you're in a hard area and the lag catches you by surprise.
I still think it would be fun to see a fourth difficulty level beyond Hell, "Inferno", geared for characters who are very high level. Currently, at high level, there is nothing to do except repeat the cow run over and over, because nothing else in the game is worthwhile. The enhancements Blizzard is proposing in Act 5 of Hell might be better served by applying them to *all* acts, thus creating an entirely new difficulty level with not much new programming required!
I'm disappointed that they didn't do more in the 1.10 patch. A fourth difficulty level, "Inferno", beyond hell, would have been great to have and it would reduce the boredom at high level. The changes they're doing to Act 5 could have been applied to all acts at this new difficulty level.
There's other nitpicks that make the game still feel incomplete. Act 4 still only has very few waypoints, compared to all other levels. Adding some more waypoints, or even a new area or two, to Act 4 would have been great.
A much-needed "No Hostile Players" checkbox, to prevent players from going hostile, should have been added to the game creation options. Grief players have ruined many a good game by unexpectedly going PvP.
This wishlist was made 2 years ago, when rumours of 1.10 first began:
http://www.krellan.com/rant/diablo.html
A shame that so little has been done in so long.
On the BitPass site, they sell prepaid "cards" that are just account numbers. Unfortunately, they map to credit cards, or PayPal (which maps to credit cards or bank accounts). So, there's no way to simply place money into their system, without using a credit card or a bank account.
I can walk a block to the local convenience store on the street corner, and have my choice of over a dozen brands of prepaid phone cards! I give the store clerk some cash, and get a prepaid phone card. It is completely anonymous, and nobody has to pay the high fees of credit cards. I don't need to be a certain age, or have a clean credit history, or live in a certain country, to qualify. Anybody can walk in and pay cash for these cards! This is a huge market.
I have often wished I could buy a prepaid "webcard" in the same way. I would buy a card, and it would have a fixed value that would be depleted as I spend it online. It could also function as a normal prepaid phone card, to be used as a wedge to get into stores that only are willing to sell phone cards.
When I can walk into a convenience store and see a stack of prepaid BitPass cards for sale, I will know they have a chance to be successful. People that can't get a credit card will be able to still buy things online. This could be huge for the large number of teenagers that play online games and such! I really hope that BitPass can get their cards into stores, so that they can be bought with cash.
I also have PlayStation-to-USB converters. They work great, and require *no* drivers at all (they appear as generic USB HID devices).
:)
I originally bought them for DDR, but have found I like them for other games as well. The Microsoft Sidewinder joysticks are just too big and clunky! While other controllers get smaller and more efficient, Microsoft just gets clunkier. Somewhat like American cars vs. Japanese cars, a few decades ago....
Microsoft's last few joysticks, with force feedback, were just ghastly huge! When a joystick starts to require its own power supply, that's a sign that things have gotten out of hand. I love my PlayStation controllers. And 2 of them fit in less desk space than 1 Microsoft joystick
One of the most requested games has been Vib Ribbon!
http://cyan.askee.net/vib%20ribbon/
This PS1 game is a music game, known for these very distinctive things:
On the old Fresh Games forum site, in fact, it was the very first game requested.
http://forums.playfresh.com/
The game is completely in Japanese, but the characters are mostly katakana so it is easy to work through and translate. Here's the original Japanese site for the game's developers:
http://www.nanaon-sha.com/products/vib-ribbon.html
A complete English localization already exists, as Sony released the game in Europe:
http://www.vibribbon.com/
Once again, USA gamers get the shaft, because all we buy are monster trucks and extreme-sport athletes, right? Right. *sigh*
"There's no time, hurry up, everything is so fantastic...."
I like this very much. The concept of graylisting/tempfailing is so simple that one wonders why it wasn't thought of and widely implemented earlier!
It would work very well when combined with Bayesian and tarpitting techniques.
Most email servers have a few well-known addresses that would have graylisting turned off, so that their mail could be received immediately: abuse@, support@, sales@, and so on. These addresses typically are read by better software that splits the inbox load up among multiple people on a team, so that no one person has to bear the burden of reading and dealing with it all.
Because these addresses have no graylisting, they would receive all messages, including spam. Bayesian filters could then be applied. Whenever someone reads incoming mail, they could decide whether or not it is spam. Eventually, the software will be able to make good Bayesian guesses. The person will be free to concentrate first on the messages that are determined not to be spam.
When this is done, the Bayesian score of each incoming message can then be calculated. Combined with tarpitting, this would be a very good thing to apply to incoming mailboxes. After the DATA command is received by SMTP, the Bayesian score of the message could be calculated, based on its contents. If a message has a high probability of being spam, an intentional delay could be inserted before the SMTP server returns a success code to the sender! If the client software disconnects earlier, the mail would be treated as not sent, because the SMTP transaction was not yet complete. This would force senders of what looks like spam to wait a while before sending each message, perhaps with timeouts up to 30 seconds. This would greatly cut down on their ability to quickly send many messages.
So, there's 3 layers here:
1) Graylisting/tempfailing of all email boxes that are read by an ISP's end users. The actual email contents are never read by people at the ISP.
2) Bayesian sorting of all incoming mail that is read by the ISP (abuse@, support@, and so on). This builds up a good Bayesian database of incoming email.
3) Tarpitting incoming SMTP connections when incoming mail is determined to most likely be spam, by using the Bayesian score. This would be applied to all email boxes.
Note that nowhere in any of these layers, incoming email is refused! These systems are great, because there wouldn't be the worry of accidentally refusing an important email because it was misclassified as spam.
I'd like to be a customer of an ISP that applies these three layers to incoming email....
These videos look promising. Are there any similar instructions for the basic UT, not UT2003?
I go to a LAN party with a group of friends pretty much every weekend, and play UT, because not all the computers are strong enough to run UT2003. I'd like to try to make a mod/mutator. I'm not sure where to start, when learning about the UT API.
Anyone have suggestions on a good site I can go to for basic UT modding information? Many UT sites I have seen assume a lot of prior knowledge, or have now became UT2003-only.
Thanks!
I'm glad cursive is dying.
It is vestigial, useful only for signatures. This is the only time in my life, since elementary school, that I have used cursive writing.
There are lots of good reasons that have already been posted. It is very difficult to read. It is not very faster than printing. It serves no use.
My grandmother used to be a shorthand expert (worked decades as a secretary, in the age before dictation machines). Shorthand is now dead. It has been made obsolete. Cursive will soon follow.
In elementary school, in the early 1980's, there was a fad that swept through, with yet another writing system: Denelian! This was some kind of hybrid between printing and cursive. It was supposed to be easier to learn than cursive, used as a stepping stone after children learned printing. Instead, it combined the disadvantages of both! Fortunately this fad died out after a few years.
Standard printing is easy to read and easy to write. It is easy to learn. It is just as effective at communicating information as cursive, if not more so. Isn't that what writing is supposed to do?
I dance on the grave of cursive!
I use DJ binders. They are large binders that hold around 200 CD's at a time, originally intended for use by DJ's at clubs and such.
Here's an example:
http://www.targus.com/cases_media_104_208.asp
CD's are stored 4 to a page, and pages are double-sided. CD's are stored in plastic sleeves, and the plastic is flexible enough to allow the liner notes to be placed behind the CD when stored. Putting liner notes behind the CD also marks the proper location to put back the CD when you are done using it.
When filled, each binder is around 3" thick. It fits in a standard shelf, and its height is roughly that of standard paper in the US (11"). The only disadvantage is that the binder is rather wide, and can require a deep shelf to store without risk of toppling out.
The plastic cases for CD's are then thrown away. I keep interesting ones that would be hard to replace if ever needed (imports, etc.) and use them as generic cases for CD's I frequently use, keeping them outside of the binder.
The result? Around 40GB of music on the hard drive, and all CD's safely tucked away in binders!
This would be wonderfully good for college radio stations.
I have an old standalone FM receiver (non-amplifier) hooked up to the line-in of a computer. I tune it to a station and leave it there most of the time, then use a program to schedule a recording at a certain time of the day. Convert that to MP3, burn a CD once enough are collected, and life is good. I'd like to do this with multiple stations, though, not just a single station.
College radio is great because they play music that has escaped the Clear Channel suppression. They play a ton of different music. However, each DJ has their own format, and they change every few hours or so, so if you find a style of music that you like, you have to listen at an oddball time (such as Thursdays 1AM-3AM or something like that). A RadioTiVo would solve this problem!
Also, college radio hardly ever repeats a song, since there are so many minor bands striving to be heard. There's more music to play than there is airtime. So, if you hear a song that you like, that's probably your only chance to get it! A RadioTiVo would let you go back and selectively save the songs you like, even if you weren't recording in advance.
Radio is also much lower bandwidth than TV. It might be possible to record several stations at once! Imagine recording the entire dial, and then using some kind of matching algorithm to pick out individual songs. You could have a self-service "request" system this way: you just flag the songs you want, and then the service listens to all radio stations until the song eventually comes across. Then it saves it. That would be great.
I would imagine the RIAA will slap this thing down as soon as it is built, however....
Yes...!
I was one of the few people who really *liked* the earlier VtM game, Redemption, by Nihilistic Software. The thought of another VtM game fills me with joy! I hope Troika can learn from Nihilistic's game, keeping what was good, and reworking what was bad.
The graphics and sound of the first game were just excellent. I even made steps for a dance simulation game, using Redemption's main theme song! I hope they bring back Kevin Manthei as composer. For graphics, a lot of the game's best graphics were missed by many players, due to the poor choice of camera angles. I hope very much that the next game doesn't have the camera always looking down at the dull ground. Using the freelook mode in Redemption (for observation only, sadly not playable), and looking up, you can see a lot of incredibly detailed artwork and layouts.
The full-motion video cutscenes were terrible, however, and gave the game a bad reputation early on. The main character (Christof) looked completely different, handsome in game but ugly in the cutscenes. The game engine was very good, and 99% of all plot sequences were already done in the game engine, so why not simply make it 100%? I hope the new game is completely in the engine, never going to a cutscene. The Half-Life 2 engine should be more than powerful enough for this.
The plotline of Redemption was just great. I would have loved to read it as a novel. It is true that it is extremely stereotypical in places, and the love interest of Christof is contrived and grating at times, but the overall story was very good. The game was completely driven by this heavy plotline, which unfortunately made it extremely linear. There were alternate choices that could be made in the game, but these only affected your character's statistics (making the wrong decision hurt), and there were no real plot branching points. The alternate choices had great dialog, though! I would have liked to go back and read the various possibilities in the script. It is a shame that the game didn't have a "walkthrough mode" where selected parts can be replayed after beating the game.
It is true that there were three possible endings, but they were selected by the final choice the player made after the game was already essentially beaten, so there were no real alternate plotlines. Perhaps a more lightweight plotline, with several possiblities and side quests, would have made a more engrossing game. I hope they add more exploration opportunities and side quests in the next game.
The first game attempted to simulate the overall mood of the White Wolf "World Of Darkness", and pretty much succeeded. It did not do so well at actually implementing the rules of the world, however. There are many obvious glaring errors. The massive slaughter of cannon fodder, like a vampiric Gauntlet Legends, is laughable. The game is mostly a series of dungeon crawls. It's as if they designed and completed another game, and then just slapped the White Wolf label on it afterwards. As it stands, the game is still fun, but nothing like the real VtM roleplaying game. The game is one of political subtleties, backstabbing, and maneuvering for power - things not really possible in a computer game. The things that are easy to program, like the mechanical system of the game, were needlessly changed (botched!). I would have liked to see the real dice rolls, ala Baldur's Gate. Attributes could have been made to better match the real game, perhaps going from 0.0-5.0 instead of 0-100. The breakdown of Discipline level-building into individual Discipline powers instead of entire Disciplines, however, was a good thing as it slowed down the rate of character advancement enough to allow smooth gradual character building thorought the entire game storyline. It also allowed characters to be built in many different ways, allowing players to choose which powers to specialize in. I didn't like how many of the powers overlapped and were redundant with each other, though. I hope they are able to inco
In the San Francisco Bay Area, a website received newspaper coverage, but its idea is applicable anywhere.
s iness/columnists/david_plotnikoff/2759439.htm
http://www.local2me.com/
Here's the newspaper article:
http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/bu
The website has a simple idea: one huge email list, filtered by location. People register their location (by ZIP code), and other optional information about themselves, when signing up. All email submissions go into a central database, then they are reflected only to those people who have chosen to receive them. It can also be filtered by age range and other categories, and multiple filters can be applied.
For instance, I have chosen to receive emails from everybody 10 or fewer miles away from me, and emails from people in my age range 20 or fewer miles away.
On the service, people swap recommendations all the time. The mailing list has helped me find a good veterinarian in the area!
Because of the publicity generated by the media coverage, this service is most popular in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it does have support for nationwide ZIP codes.
It could be better: I wish it had a browseable archive of postings that could be similarly filtered, instead of it being a simple email forwarder. That would make it easy to browse past answers to FAQ's. But, it is very good for what it does offer.
I think this would be great. I don't know how to read Asian languages but like to have support for them nonetheless, because I'm fascinated by various writing systems used all over the world.
Problems I see:
* What to do about the text console? Would the framebuffer console become mandatory, since VGA text can only support 512 unique characters (nowhere near enough for Asian languages)? One of the strengths of Linux is its extremely fast text console updating, and on many systems I've chosen to keep the standard VGA text instead of going to framebuffer mode for this very reason.
* What to do about fonts? Making full Unicode fonts is very expensive and time-consuming. There are some free fonts already but nowhere near the level of fonts available for standard ASCII.
* What about software that is hardcoded to use 8-bit characters? The tcsh shell comes to mind.
* What about IME's (input method editors)? Are they smoothly integrated with all X applications, or are they hardcoded to only work inside of one specific application? A global IME will be needed, if it does not exist already. Also, an equivalent IME will be needed for console mode, if that is supported.
I'm assuming UTF-8 will become the standard encoding format. That will be a good thing, as it provides a smooth upgrade path.
Translating error messages and the like should be easy. Accepting input from the user, and handling it properly, will be harder.
My guess is that full I18N will be possible only in graphical mode, and that text mode will still be assumed to be English. Many distributions are defaulting to graphical mode these days, leaving text mode solely for the advanced user who has manually customized their setup. I use text mode all the time, for speed and other issues, and would hate to see it deprecated due to the difficulty of getting it to work internationally.
That would be great. In the meantime, I'd be happy to see tech jobs return to their former level, let alone double.
Isn't this like what Marimba Castanet tried for Java?
It was a way to synchronize Java applications so that they could be used offline, and automatically updated whenever the user went back online. The idea was to have "channels" of available Java programs on a user's machine that could be accessed at any time and updated/synchronized with a central server periodically. It was intended for use by traveling salesmen and others with intermittent Internet connections.
It was a fun novelty at first, but overall it didn't go over so well. Marimba's web page is still up today, evidently the company has diversified into some overall "change management" strategy.
Macromedia Central strikes me as exactly the same thing, but for Flash instead of Java!
I posted a while ago about looking for a HDTV VGA box. Is this the box I'm looking for?
6 735
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=49939&cid=503
I have doubts, because this unit doesn't support all HDTV resolutions. Also, the specs page said it only has an NTSC tuner! Does it receive HDTV off the air? If it requires an external tuner to decode HDTV, then this box seems nearly worthless.
Does anyone have this box? Is it a true HDTV tuner, or is it a waste of money?
I run a 2.2 kernel, with the patch for Ethernet bridging and firewalling.
i dge
:)
http://bridge.sourceforge.net/
http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/mailman/listinfo/br
It seems that the new firewalling technique of 2.4 (iptables) does not play well with Ethernet bridges.
I have a DSL connection to a small subnet of static IP addresses (/29). The problem is that the DSL uplink, out of my control and unfirewalled, is on one of the addresses in my subnet! It's as if there is a fox in the henhouse.
There is no proper routing subnet, as there should be. This is no doubt because of the IP address shortage. The DSL uplink must exist on the same subnet as my machines, giving me only 5 usable addresses for my machines. Broadcasts must be passed correctly, or the machines won't be able to ARP each other. Proxy ARP is not an option, because of the need to keep the DSL uplink on the same subnet.
So, I run Ethernet bridging with firewalling. I bridge two Ethernet cards together, passing broadcast packets between them (filtering out externally generated "smurf" broadcast packets, of course). I also implement my firewall at this point. The network is one logical LAN, but partitioned into two physical LAN's, with the firewall machine in between them. The firewall makes sure that unwanted packets from the DSL uplink never reach my machines.
It's not perfect (there is no stateful connection filtering), but it has worked well for me. Probes come in at least every hour, and no successful breakins to my knowledge.
And another reason not to upgrade? The machine's uptime is now at 326 days, I'm going for the year
Do not forget that the Silly Valley's native paper, the San Jose Mercury News, also published a report on how bad things are here. This report was a 4-part series!
0 77356.htm
http://www.bayarea.com/mld/mercurynews/business/5
This was published on 2/9/2003.
It is interesting, as each part showed a different point of view from a person of a different age.
Wow, great news! I guess when you sell over 8 million copies of your new game, you can afford to let an older one go!
I've never played any game in the GTA series, but have been intrigued by it and have wanted to try it out. When the site recovers from being slashdotted, I will download GTA1 and give it a try. I love games where you get to play the role of a bad guy! Rockstar might just have gained another customer here.
I wish more companies would release their older games for free. There are only two others I know of: Id Software (Wolfenstein 3D, Doom) open-sourced their older game engines (but without levels/content), and Bill Budge completely released his Apple ][ games (Pinball Construction Set, etc.) to the public domain!
Will Rockstar Games allow peer-to-peer networks to legally carry their GTA1 download, now that they have released it for free? If so, it would ease a huge burden on their site.
Also, will abandonware sites be allowed to carry the game without fear of legal hassle? That would be great if abandonware sites could set up a special collection of "freed" games that would be legally free to download and share.
Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved.
(chorus)
We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound.
(chorus)
If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench.
(chorus)
I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!
(chorus)
CHORUS:
Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.
--Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song)
© 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm
http://www.jamesoberg.com/humor.html
(from very bottom of page)
Even without having 4GB of memory installed, it is still very useful to have a 64-bit address space. Imagine being able to mmap() your entire hard drive at once! The filesystem would just simply treat the entire disk as a big data structure in virtual memory, copying when needed, instead of having to issue read and write calls to the disk. This will provide a huge performance increase.
AGP and PCI cards, especially newer video cards, are also getting big. These need to have address space allocated to them. Even with a 64-bit PCI card, Linux still surprisingly allocates address space in 32-bit memory (the lower 4GB). If 4GB of RAM is installed, Linux must create a "hole" for PCI cards and such, as there isn't enough address space for all the RAM plus the PCI cards. This reminds me of the bad old days of ISA, where the expansion cards had to sit between 640K and 1M, creating a hole between the first 1M and all later memory. This hole still exists!
And finally, there's lots of good reasons to have a huge address space that provides room enough for everything on the system at once. No need to decode multiple memory maps and translate between them. It would be a boon to things involving virtual memory, multiple programs, data transfer between programs, and so on.
BTW, I use a machine at work with 4GB of memory installed. It's running Linux 2.4. Even with HIGHMEM enabled, it is still a mess, because we need that memory to be available to the kernel and PCI devices, and not just in user space. Linux is very good at doing page table tricks with PAE (Physical Address Extensions) for user programs, but this isn't true in kernel space. I'm looking forward to real 64-bit machines!
Thanks!
I was sure there had to be a good reason to construct those rest stops for the convoy. I hope they can use them for something useful, perhaps convert them into traditional rest stops after the convoy is complete.
I also find it bizarre that they would construct special rest stops along the French highway so that the convoy could rest overnight on their 3-day journey.
Wouldn't it be cheaper and more efficient just to pay some overtime and have the drivers drive in shifts, 24/7, until the trip is complete? They'd just stop the convoy for a few minutes while changing drivers. No need for the expense, and the security issues, of building a dedicated rest stop.
But European rest stops are cool. Maybe it would be a good idea to waste the money to build more of them!
Avoid Maryland! It is a UCITA state!
:)
http://www.acm.org/usacm/IP/ucita.states.htm
Virginia is also a UCITA state.
UCITA is bad news for anyone remotely connected to the software industry, if you haven't already heard.
California is great but it has high taxes and its legal climate is anti-business, not to mention the huge cost of living. I currently live in San Jose, and if worse comes to worst, I will move to probably Nevada, Arizona, or New Mexico. I'd prefer Vermont, for many things including getting to vote for Senator Leahy, but my partner hates the snow