I don't even know how people can stand using Fileplanet... it's been awful for years, and forces you to click through enless pages of mirros to finally get a download. There's been many times I just gave up and decided it wasn't worth the effort... perhaps this is how they save on bandwidth?
I don't get what people had against it... it fit in my hands well, and had lots of buttons to spare. People made fun of the keypad on it, but why? The buttons came in very handy in games like Doom for switching weapons. Besides, it not like you were constantly using it.
I guess my hands are larger than most peoples though, I don't imagine the controller fits into smaller hands as well (Meanwhile I'm getting carpal tunnel from trying to play my GBA...)
Some mention of the companies "Mystique" or "Playaround" must be in the top 5... these are the companies responsible for the X-rated Atari 2600 games, including Custer's Revenge, a game where you control Custer and rape an indian woman tied to a cactus. Why they even thought a game like this could work is beyond me... How can something even be erotic with such a low resolution?
Although it's not as well known, Atari also made a video game called "I, Robot". In fact, it was the first game to use 3D filled polygons I believe. Unfortunately, the game wasn't accepted very well, and people couldn't figure it out I guess. So, out of the 1,000 machines they made, only 500 even sold. The rest were sitting in a warehouse. In order to get rid of them, Atari sent them to Japan... but none of the machines ever got there, as the crew of the ship were given orders to push the machines overboard on the way! I believe the point was to make sure that stockholders didn't see warehouses of unsold machines. In any case, this deserves at least a part in this list.
And I didn't think the US Saturn pads were that bad... in fact, I like them better than Japanese ones. But then, my favorite controller ever was the enormous Jaguar controller, so what do I know?
Instead of preventing Europeans from circumventing Nintendo of Europe, why not make NOE a better choice? If people are buying from America, then why not listen to what they want and provide it?
Instead of staggered releases, just release the game at the same time in Europe, and people won't have to import it... AND they'll be buying from European stores. And why not look and see what's being imported most, and bring it over to Europe if it isn't there already?
Isn't this just common sense? (But then, I guess "instead of making proper copy protection, just creating a law making it illegal in the first place" has been the method of choice here in NA...)
I stopped playing pinball games once they went up to $0.50 per play, and many arcade games are $1 to play... that's just way too much, considering that you're usually killed off after a few minutes once you miss a checkpoint or get to the third character who uses every cheap tactic the AI can muster. I used to love arcades back in the day where I could play Moon Patrol for a good half hour on a quarter, but I simply can't afford to spend enough to learn all the moves in a fighting game, or where to sit to avoid the bosses bullets in the latest shoot 'em up... especially when I can play games that are just as good at home.
No offense to the Japanese or anything, but is it that hard to translate the name of the damn game? Words like "Boktai" have no meaning to us english-only people. If it's the name of the main character, I can let it slide, but still...
Oh well, I guess it's better than giving it a really bad name like "Corpse Killer" or "Revengers of Vengeance". Not sure if those were the results of bad translations or what.
The problem, as far as I know, has to do with memory. I don't have any numbers to quote, and I don't know how much RAM is in the e-reader itself, but the cards themselves hold very little... something like 6K. For a game as big as Legend of Zelda (128K), that's over 20 cards!
Instead, I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo put out a "Zelda All-Stars" cartridge that had both NES Zelda games on it (Similar to what Sega did with Phantasy Star). Like all the Super Mario Advance games, it would be easy to program (since it's already done), and I'm sure tons of people would buy it. Anyone at Nintendo listening?
As for Super Mario Bros, there's a perfectly good version of it for the Gameboy Color, and it'll play fine on the GBA. If you really want SMB1 for the GBA, you'd be better off getting SMB DX and saving the money by not buying a card reader... either that, or wait until Nintendo remakes it as one of the Super Mario Advance games...
What I'd like to see is a Mario game for the e-Reader that you can buy expansion packs for. For example, you'd buy Super Mario-e (or whatever they'd call it), and it would come with a bunch of levels on cards. Then you could buy a set of extra cards that would add 2 or 3 worlds to play, and the game would just ask you to swipe a card to play the level on that card. Nintendo could easily crank out new levels and charge $5 a pack and make a killing!
The problem here is that not enough people realize the way these things work, and how they're generally getting ripped off... Otherwise, companies wouldn't bother doing this.
So instead of thinking that there should be laws, or accountability, or respect for the customer (I don't think any company is genuinely respectful. The ones that are are probably only faking it), keep in mind that it's our own fault for being idiots.
Stop buying things on rebate, stop your friends from doing, and make sure they know why.
Doesn't it get boring after a while?
on
AOL Sues Spammers
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Okay, so Slashdot seems to get duplicate stories very often... some of their stuff may not always be newsworthy to everyone and so on... but doesn't it get old to repeatedly criticize them for it?
Personally, I'm tired of seeing jokes about how fast servers went down after a slashdotting, and how often dupes are posted, and I don't see why people keep modding them up. They're getting almost as old as the stupid Yakov Smirnov jokes.
Mod me down if you will, but please stop modding these up.
If I were to take a guess at something having a probability of zero, I'd say it would be something like a statement that was both 100% true and 100% false.
The two of you are talking apples and oranges. wackybrit is talking about the probability of an event occuring, while you are talking about statements.
Saying something like "I always lie" creates an interesting logical paradox, but it's much different than the possibility of the existence of another mark-t who owns a Lambourghini.
...one of the other me's will build a means to cross this space and enter mine. I could assume that I am in one of the universes where my double did not go. But why hasn't any other doubles been visiting us and telling us this?
Well, there would exist the possibility that we exist in a universe that wasn't visited by any such doubles. There would be an infinite amount of universes that received no such visitors at all (Although it would seem logical that there would be less such universes than ones that did receive a visitor... I guess some infinities are larger than others).
There's also the more likely scenario that any visitor of this sort would be considered a raving lunatic, and be entirely dismissed. Anyone seen K-Pax?
This is so what we need. Starting over. Nobody wants to do it and hides behind the excuse of a veil of "volunteer work" that somehow implies nobody can criticize even if what you put out is inadequate.
Don't forget that it's a freakin' buttload of work to do! X has been around for decades now... working to replace it isn't going to happen overnight, or probably even over the course of a year. Just look at Berlin (or whatever it's called now, I forget). It's been in the works for as long as I can remember, and as far as I know, the user base isn't exactly noteworthy.
Replacing X is like abandoning the Earth to terraform Mars just because cleaning up the Earth is too much work....
I just went through this ceremony about a month ago, and it's formal name was "The Ritual Of The Calling Of An Engineer" at the U of M.... although no one actually calls it that... we all just say "The Iron Ring Ceremony".
There's not really any pranking done on the day though... at least, no more than any other day.
If GNOME is planning to go that way then they should have better helped on QNX or OpenBeOS.... and since both the Gnome and KDE teams planned on making GUI's, then they should have helped out on MS Windows, right?
PkgConfig: Do you see who the author is ? The same person who works and dictates GNOME these days. It's not dependant on GNOME right, but it's written FOR GNOME
So what? Just because the program was originally written for use with Gnome doesn't mean that it's intrinsically tied to Gnome. No piece of pkgconfig requires Gnome to run. Try compiling it without having Gnome installed, and it won't complain at all! Look through the code if you want, if you can find anything in there that even implies that it needs Gnome, I'll eat my words. LibXML is the same story. It was originally written because Gnome needed XML support. Nowadays XML support is a big thing for whatever reason, and since the library has already been in use for quite a while, there's no reason to invent something new.
Your whole arguement seems to be that since the people who made these applications also worked on Gnome, that their other software will inherently be tied to it in some parasitic way. That's just completely ludicrous. If you look through the list of people who have contributed to Gnome, you'll also see Alan Cox in there. Are we to immediately boycott any contribution he makes to the Linux kernel, since it MIGHT be done with Gnome in mind? Grow up.
Now said this, please think that there are a lot of users who DO NOT use GNOME or KDE
Since Gnome and KDE are a part of any modern distribution, I think the number of people who don't use them is probably a small minority. For all you people who are stubbornly sticking with Afterstep or Window Maker and no desktop environment, you're missing out on a decent amount... join the 21st century.
a new Xfree86 which contains full of GNOME crap inside and requires the user to install a lot of crappy GNOME dependencies before getting Xfree86 installed ?
*sigh*... I really don't think you understand the things that are in there. Stuff like fontconfig, xcursor, pkgconfig, and xft2 are NOT dependant on Gnome (In fact, it's the other way around, Gnome requires them, just like it requires Xlib). Also, they are NOT only for Gnome. They just happen to be good ideas that haven't been completely adopted yet. Even though they came from developers that you seem to have a personal grudge against, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're "wrong". fontconfig and xft2 deal with fonts (obviously), and are used by both Gnome and KDE. xcursor is all about changing the cursor, which MS-Win has been able to do for over 10 years now. pkgconfig is a simple way to keep track of whats on your system independant of rpms or debs or source (which really should have been done a long time ago).
Just because XTerm doesn't use xft2 yet doesn't mean that xft2 is there just for Gnome.
1) GNOME got screwed up by Havoc Pennington
That's all a matter of perspective. Many people think that Gnome is a lot better now, since a lot of the useless cruft has been removed for the sake of a clean, simple desktop.
2) Havoc Pennington want's HIG unified, 3) Havoc Pennington want's unification of bottom framework of KDE and GNOME,
So? What's wrong with that? If your insinuation is that he's going to mess those up, I think you're overestimating Havoc's power. If the KDE team doesn't like something, he's not going to be able to force them to use the HIG's or framework or whatnot. KDE and Gnome unification is something that really would be good for the Linux community.
Besides, even if parts of Gnome and KDE are merged into XFree86, what's so bad about that? Since probably 90% of the X11 users are running this stuff anyways, I don't see any major reason to keep a huge wall between them. If a small change in X can make the Gnome/KDE teams jobs much easier, then I'm all for it. Not to mention that all this new-fangled stuff can help out other projects like XFce, so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel.
If you're really afraid of all this change, then feel free to continue running X11R5 or something that will keep you back in the dark ages where fonts are jagged and your modelines are fixed.
Just because you don't understand how to build XFree86, and think it takes a long time, you claim that XFree itself is flawed?
It would be nice to see a nice autoconf setup so you could just "./configure && make"... I compile pretty much all my software except for Mozilla and XFree86... since I invariably get some obscure error that I can't figure out. If you factor in the time it takes to compile 45 megs of source code (or whatever it is by now), it's just easier to get the binaries.
For God's sake people, you're NOT going to go sterile from the electromagnetic fields your computer emits... you're also not going to mutate or develop cancer either, it's simply not powerful enough (Fields from enormous power transmission lines are another matter).
The main reason there are regulations is not for health concerns, but to make sure that stuff will work in proximity to other stuff (Except of course hospitals or airplanes, where health concerns and electrical systems are closely related). If your computer were to interfere with your monitor, that wouldn't be too good, would it?
Some other myths I've seen around here is that if you block the electric field, then you block the magnetic field too... this is NOT always the case, since often the coupling mechanism will be much more sensitive to one form (electric or magnetic) than the other. I'm taking a class on electromagnetic compatibility this term, and we actually did an experiment to show the effect of grounded shielding on a coaxial cable. Basically, there were two cables kept very close together, and one was shielded. You'd apply a voltage to the unshielded one, and measure what was induced on the other one. There were clips to ground each side of the shield. The main point was so that we could see that if you grounded the shield at BOTH ends, it provided significantly more protection against noise. In fact, depending on the frequency, grounding it on one end had almost no effect whatsoever (maybe a 5% difference, and it depended on what end you grounded it on). This was because if the cable was only grounded at one end, it couldn't dissipate magnetic fields, since there was no loop for current to flow through.
Effects also depend highly on the frequency. If I remember correctly, at lower frequencies, the electric field was more significant, and grounding the shield at one end had a fairly noticeable effect... whereas at high frequencies, the magnetic coupling was much more important.
It's also worth pointing out that digital circuits are much worse for EM emissions, since the square waves used for clock signals generate enormous amounts of harmonics far exceeding the clock frequency. Even a 1 MHz clock can have frequency components past 15 MHz (This is very dependang on the "rise time" of the signal.. a "more perfect" square wave has more harmonics), so one can only imagine what's coming out of your 2 GHz machine!
You will also NEVER eliminate ALL the noise from a circuit. I don't care if you encase the thing in a meter of iron, there is still some amount of emissions. The point is to get them to such a small level that they're negligible. Even if you have your case all together, there's still the possibility of it causing interference. Thicker shielding usually will lead to more effective protection, but it's still impossible to reduce the fields to absolutely zero.
It's impressive that computers can compete with humans on the grand master level... but frankly, why haven't we gotten to the level where computers can *destroy* human players every single time? Is it simply a matter of computers not being fast enough, or not being able to search enough moves? Eventually, computers will get to the point where they can anticipate EVERY outcome. After all, there's a limited number of moves possible in a chess game (albeit a VERY high number), so what happens when we reach that point? I'm starting to think that chess itself just isn't a hard enough problems to pit human intellect against computer intellect, since people like Kasparov are just so damn good at it (Anyone else remember that Star Trek episode where Data plays Stratagema (sp?) against some alien, and can't beat him... so forces him into a stalemate instead?). As always, people have already pointed out Go as a better solution to strategy competitions, and eventually, I think that might be the only answer. Obviously, computer Go programs are rather primitive... but it stands to reason that human Go players aren't at the top of their league either, since the game receives much less attention than chess does I'm sure. By the way, why is it that when people talk about Go programs, it always comes up against a wall of "too many possibilities" for the computer to calculate? Obviously, humans can't calculate all these possibilities, so shouldn't it be possible for a computer program to think differently instead of brute forcing things? Perhaps things like pattern matching would be more effective (I don't know how to play Go at all though, so maybe I'm just talking out my ass).
A bit of a different topic, but are there any high-level chess programs that *don't* use opening books and endgame books? Maybe it's just me, but it seems like cheating for a computer to just memorize what people have already done. It would be much more impressive if the computer was able to improvise it's own strategies, even if they ended up being the same. I'm sure it's a lot more difficult to program well though...
The Simpsons have been going downhill for the last few years. I've been a devout fan watching even the reruns every day for the last X years... but recently I've decided to stop. You can only see that damn "elf jockey" episode so long before you realize they've mostly run out of good ideas. Granted, the show still manages to make me laugh once in a while, but it's definitely lost it's magic in recent years. To be honest, if they're having trouble making 30 minutes (or 23 minutes or whatever) funny, I simply can't see them keeping the show funny for a complete 90 minutes. I'd love to be proved wrong of course...
It's really too bad that Futurama and Family Guy were cancelled. They were great shows with a great style of comedy behind them. I really hope someone realizes that all these so-called "reality" shows are retarded, and gives Futurama another chance. It has/had almost limitless potential.
It's worth noting that there are other systems with more dubious claims of bitness than the Jaguar. For example:
The Lynx - This system (also made by Atari) was advertised as a 16-bit handheld system. However, the only reason to call it a 16-bit system was because of the graphics engine, which was actually fairly sophisticated (I've actually programmed for it before), and had some (limited) 3D capabilities. However, the Lynx uses a 65C02 as it's CPU, which most of you probably know is 8-bit (the C-64 and Apple II used almost the same chip).
The TurboGrafx-16 - Similar to the Lynx, the only thing 16-bit about this system was it's graphics engine. The main processor is an HuC6280, which is 8-bit. From what I've played of TG16 games (which hasn't been all that much), they're only about as sophisticated as Master System games, but with much better graphics.
The NeoGeo - This is the worst offender in my opinion. SNK billed the NeoGeo as a 24-bit game system, but there is absolutely nothing 24-bit about it at all! It uses a 68000 (16-bit) as it's main processor, and a Z-80 (8-bit) as a sound chip. SNK was able to get away with this because the games they made were so big, and had SO much animation that people never questioned it's power. In reality, the only advantage it had over the Genesis (which was also based on a 68K + Z-80) was an obscenely large addressing space (The cartridges had TWO seperate edge connectors, were about the size of a VHS tape, and some held over 80 megabytes [not bits]). I'm not saying the NeoGeo wasn't an impressive piece of technology... after all, they're still in arcades across the continent... but it's not 24-bit.
Some may say that the Jaguar isn't "really" 64-bit, but it all depends on what you consider to be a measure of bitness. In the end, you get only a vague idea of anything whatsoever. Even if the Jaguar is 64-bit, it's obviously less powerful than the 32-bit Playstation, so who really cares about this arbitrary number? After all, there's a reason that the video game industry (mostly) stopped using this absurdity.
It's also worth pointing out that the Jaguar is 64-bit where it needs to be, and not 64-bit where it doesn't have to be. The sound chips are 32-bit, but would there really be any advantage to having 64-bit sound chips? I doubt it. The graphics chips are 64-bit, and would probably suffer if they were anything less. Instead of Atari charging us more money for unnecessary power, they decided to cut costs... and with good reason in my opinion.
I should point out that I actually have a Jaguar (As well as the JagCD), and I still play it. I do consider it to be 64-bit, but I wouldn't compare it's power to the Playstation or the N64...
No, the Saturn never claimed to be anything other than a 32-bit system. The Saturn uses dual SH-2 chips at it's core, which are both 32-bit I believe. There's also about half a dozen other processors in there to do extra stuff like 3D and 2D (Yes, these were done in seperate chips in the Saturn)... this apparently made it very hard to program.
The 68000 in the Jaguar is (in my opinion) only really included in the design so that programmers can work with something they already know, and to assist in porting efforts. Supposedly, the Jaguar's custom chips were difficult to program, and had some annoying bugs that had to be worked around (I can't provide any proof of this though). Someone already mentioned that most designers (and I think Atari themselves) actually only recommended using the 68000 to read the joystick ports. A game that is properly written can completely bypass the 68000 and run entirely on the Tom chip. Of course, it's not all that useful to shut the chip down... even though it's not as powerful as the rest of the system, it can still be used for something...
I don't understand people's complaints about the Jaguar controller.. I've had a Jaguar since it was new, and I still think it has one of the best controllers around. The number pad is especially useful with games like Doom where you can switch weapons with a single button.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't even know how people can stand using Fileplanet... it's been awful for years, and forces you to click through enless pages of mirros to finally get a download. There's been many times I just gave up and decided it wasn't worth the effort... perhaps this is how they save on bandwidth?
The way Sourceforge does it is so much nicer.
I don't get what people had against it... it fit in my hands well, and had lots of buttons to spare. People made fun of the keypad on it, but why? The buttons came in very handy in games like Doom for switching weapons. Besides, it not like you were constantly using it.
I guess my hands are larger than most peoples though, I don't imagine the controller fits into smaller hands as well (Meanwhile I'm getting carpal tunnel from trying to play my GBA...)
Some mention of the companies "Mystique" or "Playaround" must be in the top 5... these are the companies responsible for the X-rated Atari 2600 games, including Custer's Revenge, a game where you control Custer and rape an indian woman tied to a cactus. Why they even thought a game like this could work is beyond me... How can something even be erotic with such a low resolution?
Although it's not as well known, Atari also made a video game called "I, Robot". In fact, it was the first game to use 3D filled polygons I believe. Unfortunately, the game wasn't accepted very well, and people couldn't figure it out I guess. So, out of the 1,000 machines they made, only 500 even sold. The rest were sitting in a warehouse. In order to get rid of them, Atari sent them to Japan... but none of the machines ever got there, as the crew of the ship were given orders to push the machines overboard on the way! I believe the point was to make sure that stockholders didn't see warehouses of unsold machines. In any case, this deserves at least a part in this list.
And I didn't think the US Saturn pads were that bad... in fact, I like them better than Japanese ones. But then, my favorite controller ever was the enormous Jaguar controller, so what do I know?
"Microsoft makes a significant loss - thought to be over $150 - on each Xbox console it sells..."
Hmm... maybe I should buy one after all >:)
Instead of preventing Europeans from circumventing Nintendo of Europe, why not make NOE a better choice? If people are buying from America, then why not listen to what they want and provide it?
Instead of staggered releases, just release the game at the same time in Europe, and people won't have to import it... AND they'll be buying from European stores. And why not look and see what's being imported most, and bring it over to Europe if it isn't there already?
Isn't this just common sense? (But then, I guess "instead of making proper copy protection, just creating a law making it illegal in the first place" has been the method of choice here in NA...)
I stopped playing pinball games once they went up to $0.50 per play, and many arcade games are $1 to play... that's just way too much, considering that you're usually killed off after a few minutes once you miss a checkpoint or get to the third character who uses every cheap tactic the AI can muster. I used to love arcades back in the day where I could play Moon Patrol for a good half hour on a quarter, but I simply can't afford to spend enough to learn all the moves in a fighting game, or where to sit to avoid the bosses bullets in the latest shoot 'em up... especially when I can play games that are just as good at home.
Personally, I think the fact that he was able to roll the score on Defender more impressive... damn that game is hard!
Even more impressive is that he did it on an actual arcade machine with the nasty controls.
No offense to the Japanese or anything, but is it that hard to translate the name of the damn game? Words like "Boktai" have no meaning to us english-only people. If it's the name of the main character, I can let it slide, but still...
Oh well, I guess it's better than giving it a really bad name like "Corpse Killer" or "Revengers of Vengeance". Not sure if those were the results of bad translations or what.
Where's Super Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus?
The problem, as far as I know, has to do with memory. I don't have any numbers to quote, and I don't know how much RAM is in the e-reader itself, but the cards themselves hold very little... something like 6K. For a game as big as Legend of Zelda (128K), that's over 20 cards!
Instead, I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo put out a "Zelda All-Stars" cartridge that had both NES Zelda games on it (Similar to what Sega did with Phantasy Star). Like all the Super Mario Advance games, it would be easy to program (since it's already done), and I'm sure tons of people would buy it. Anyone at Nintendo listening?
As for Super Mario Bros, there's a perfectly good version of it for the Gameboy Color, and it'll play fine on the GBA. If you really want SMB1 for the GBA, you'd be better off getting SMB DX and saving the money by not buying a card reader... either that, or wait until Nintendo remakes it as one of the Super Mario Advance games...
What I'd like to see is a Mario game for the e-Reader that you can buy expansion packs for. For example, you'd buy Super Mario-e (or whatever they'd call it), and it would come with a bunch of levels on cards. Then you could buy a set of extra cards that would add 2 or 3 worlds to play, and the game would just ask you to swipe a card to play the level on that card. Nintendo could easily crank out new levels and charge $5 a pack and make a killing!
The problem here is that not enough people realize the way these things work, and how they're generally getting ripped off... Otherwise, companies wouldn't bother doing this.
So instead of thinking that there should be laws, or accountability, or respect for the customer (I don't think any company is genuinely respectful. The ones that are are probably only faking it), keep in mind that it's our own fault for being idiots.
Stop buying things on rebate, stop your friends from doing, and make sure they know why.
Okay, so Slashdot seems to get duplicate stories very often... some of their stuff may not always be newsworthy to everyone and so on... but doesn't it get old to repeatedly criticize them for it?
Personally, I'm tired of seeing jokes about how fast servers went down after a slashdotting, and how often dupes are posted, and I don't see why people keep modding them up. They're getting almost as old as the stupid Yakov Smirnov jokes.
Mod me down if you will, but please stop modding these up.
If I were to take a guess at something having a probability of zero, I'd say it would be something like a statement that was both 100% true and 100% false.
The two of you are talking apples and oranges. wackybrit is talking about the probability of an event occuring, while you are talking about statements.
Saying something like "I always lie" creates an interesting logical paradox, but it's much different than the possibility of the existence of another mark-t who owns a Lambourghini.
--Zero
...one of the other me's will build a means to cross this space and enter mine. I could assume that I am in one of the universes where my double did not go. But why hasn't any other doubles been visiting us and telling us this?
Well, there would exist the possibility that we exist in a universe that wasn't visited by any such doubles. There would be an infinite amount of universes that received no such visitors at all (Although it would seem logical that there would be less such universes than ones that did receive a visitor... I guess some infinities are larger than others).
There's also the more likely scenario that any visitor of this sort would be considered a raving lunatic, and be entirely dismissed. Anyone seen K-Pax?
This is so what we need. Starting over. Nobody wants to do it and hides behind the excuse of a veil of "volunteer work" that somehow implies nobody can criticize even if what you put out is inadequate.
Don't forget that it's a freakin' buttload of work to do! X has been around for decades now... working to replace it isn't going to happen overnight, or probably even over the course of a year. Just look at Berlin (or whatever it's called now, I forget). It's been in the works for as long as I can remember, and as far as I know, the user base isn't exactly noteworthy.
Replacing X is like abandoning the Earth to terraform Mars just because cleaning up the Earth is too much work....
I just went through this ceremony about a month ago, and it's formal name was "The Ritual Of The Calling Of An Engineer" at the U of M.... although no one actually calls it that... we all just say "The Iron Ring Ceremony".
There's not really any pranking done on the day though... at least, no more than any other day.
If GNOME is planning to go that way then they should have better helped on QNX or OpenBeOS. ... and since both the Gnome and KDE teams planned on making GUI's, then they should have helped out on MS Windows, right?
PkgConfig: Do you see who the author is ? The same person who works and dictates GNOME these days. It's not dependant on GNOME right, but it's written FOR GNOME
So what? Just because the program was originally written for use with Gnome doesn't mean that it's intrinsically tied to Gnome. No piece of pkgconfig requires Gnome to run. Try compiling it without having Gnome installed, and it won't complain at all! Look through the code if you want, if you can find anything in there that even implies that it needs Gnome, I'll eat my words. LibXML is the same story. It was originally written because Gnome needed XML support. Nowadays XML support is a big thing for whatever reason, and since the library has already been in use for quite a while, there's no reason to invent something new.
Your whole arguement seems to be that since the people who made these applications also worked on Gnome, that their other software will inherently be tied to it in some parasitic way. That's just completely ludicrous. If you look through the list of people who have contributed to Gnome, you'll also see Alan Cox in there. Are we to immediately boycott any contribution he makes to the Linux kernel, since it MIGHT be done with Gnome in mind? Grow up.
Now said this, please think that there are a lot of users who DO NOT use GNOME or KDE
Since Gnome and KDE are a part of any modern distribution, I think the number of people who don't use them is probably a small minority. For all you people who are stubbornly sticking with Afterstep or Window Maker and no desktop environment, you're missing out on a decent amount... join the 21st century.
a new Xfree86 which contains full of GNOME crap inside and requires the user to install a lot of crappy GNOME dependencies before getting Xfree86 installed ?
*sigh*... I really don't think you understand the things that are in there. Stuff like fontconfig, xcursor, pkgconfig, and xft2 are NOT dependant on Gnome (In fact, it's the other way around, Gnome requires them, just like it requires Xlib). Also, they are NOT only for Gnome. They just happen to be good ideas that haven't been completely adopted yet. Even though they came from developers that you seem to have a personal grudge against, that doesn't necessarily mean that they're "wrong". fontconfig and xft2 deal with fonts (obviously), and are used by both Gnome and KDE. xcursor is all about changing the cursor, which MS-Win has been able to do for over 10 years now. pkgconfig is a simple way to keep track of whats on your system independant of rpms or debs or source (which really should have been done a long time ago).
Just because XTerm doesn't use xft2 yet doesn't mean that xft2 is there just for Gnome.
1) GNOME got screwed up by Havoc Pennington
That's all a matter of perspective. Many people think that Gnome is a lot better now, since a lot of the useless cruft has been removed for the sake of a clean, simple desktop.
2) Havoc Pennington want's HIG unified,
3) Havoc Pennington want's unification of bottom framework of KDE and GNOME,
So? What's wrong with that? If your insinuation is that he's going to mess those up, I think you're overestimating Havoc's power. If the KDE team doesn't like something, he's not going to be able to force them to use the HIG's or framework or whatnot. KDE and Gnome unification is something that really would be good for the Linux community.
Besides, even if parts of Gnome and KDE are merged into XFree86, what's so bad about that? Since probably 90% of the X11 users are running this stuff anyways, I don't see any major reason to keep a huge wall between them. If a small change in X can make the Gnome/KDE teams jobs much easier, then I'm all for it. Not to mention that all this new-fangled stuff can help out other projects like XFce, so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel.
If you're really afraid of all this change, then feel free to continue running X11R5 or something that will keep you back in the dark ages where fonts are jagged and your modelines are fixed.
Just because you don't understand how to build XFree86, and think it takes a long time, you claim that XFree itself is flawed?
It would be nice to see a nice autoconf setup so you could just "./configure && make"... I compile pretty much all my software except for Mozilla and XFree86... since I invariably get some obscure error that I can't figure out. If you factor in the time it takes to compile 45 megs of source code (or whatever it is by now), it's just easier to get the binaries.
For God's sake people, you're NOT going to go sterile from the electromagnetic fields your computer emits... you're also not going to mutate or develop cancer either, it's simply not powerful enough (Fields from enormous power transmission lines are another matter).
The main reason there are regulations is not for health concerns, but to make sure that stuff will work in proximity to other stuff (Except of course hospitals or airplanes, where health concerns and electrical systems are closely related). If your computer were to interfere with your monitor, that wouldn't be too good, would it?
Some other myths I've seen around here is that if you block the electric field, then you block the magnetic field too... this is NOT always the case, since often the coupling mechanism will be much more sensitive to one form (electric or magnetic) than the other. I'm taking a class on electromagnetic compatibility this term, and we actually did an experiment to show the effect of grounded shielding on a coaxial cable. Basically, there were two cables kept very close together, and one was shielded. You'd apply a voltage to the unshielded one, and measure what was induced on the other one. There were clips to ground each side of the shield. The main point was so that we could see that if you grounded the shield at BOTH ends, it provided significantly more protection against noise. In fact, depending on the frequency, grounding it on one end had almost no effect whatsoever (maybe a 5% difference, and it depended on what end you grounded it on). This was because if the cable was only grounded at one end, it couldn't dissipate magnetic fields, since there was no loop for current to flow through.
Effects also depend highly on the frequency. If I remember correctly, at lower frequencies, the electric field was more significant, and grounding the shield at one end had a fairly noticeable effect... whereas at high frequencies, the magnetic coupling was much more important.
It's also worth pointing out that digital circuits are much worse for EM emissions, since the square waves used for clock signals generate enormous amounts of harmonics far exceeding the clock frequency. Even a 1 MHz clock can have frequency components past 15 MHz (This is very dependang on the "rise time" of the signal.. a "more perfect" square wave has more harmonics), so one can only imagine what's coming out of your 2 GHz machine!
You will also NEVER eliminate ALL the noise from a circuit. I don't care if you encase the thing in a meter of iron, there is still some amount of emissions. The point is to get them to such a small level that they're negligible. Even if you have your case all together, there's still the possibility of it causing interference. Thicker shielding usually will lead to more effective protection, but it's still impossible to reduce the fields to absolutely zero.
It's impressive that computers can compete with humans on the grand master level... but frankly, why haven't we gotten to the level where computers can *destroy* human players every single time? Is it simply a matter of computers not being fast enough, or not being able to search enough moves? Eventually, computers will get to the point where they can anticipate EVERY outcome. After all, there's a limited number of moves possible in a chess game (albeit a VERY high number), so what happens when we reach that point? I'm starting to think that chess itself just isn't a hard enough problems to pit human intellect against computer intellect, since people like Kasparov are just so damn good at it (Anyone else remember that Star Trek episode where Data plays Stratagema (sp?) against some alien, and can't beat him... so forces him into a stalemate instead?). As always, people have already pointed out Go as a better solution to strategy competitions, and eventually, I think that might be the only answer. Obviously, computer Go programs are rather primitive... but it stands to reason that human Go players aren't at the top of their league either, since the game receives much less attention than chess does I'm sure. By the way, why is it that when people talk about Go programs, it always comes up against a wall of "too many possibilities" for the computer to calculate? Obviously, humans can't calculate all these possibilities, so shouldn't it be possible for a computer program to think differently instead of brute forcing things? Perhaps things like pattern matching would be more effective (I don't know how to play Go at all though, so maybe I'm just talking out my ass).
A bit of a different topic, but are there any high-level chess programs that *don't* use opening books and endgame books? Maybe it's just me, but it seems like cheating for a computer to just memorize what people have already done. It would be much more impressive if the computer was able to improvise it's own strategies, even if they ended up being the same. I'm sure it's a lot more difficult to program well though...
The Simpsons have been going downhill for the last few years. I've been a devout fan watching even the reruns every day for the last X years... but recently I've decided to stop. You can only see that damn "elf jockey" episode so long before you realize they've mostly run out of good ideas. Granted, the show still manages to make me laugh once in a while, but it's definitely lost it's magic in recent years. To be honest, if they're having trouble making 30 minutes (or 23 minutes or whatever) funny, I simply can't see them keeping the show funny for a complete 90 minutes. I'd love to be proved wrong of course...
It's really too bad that Futurama and Family Guy were cancelled. They were great shows with a great style of comedy behind them. I really hope someone realizes that all these so-called "reality" shows are retarded, and gives Futurama another chance. It has/had almost limitless potential.
It's worth noting that there are other systems with more dubious claims of bitness than the Jaguar. For example:
The Lynx - This system (also made by Atari) was advertised as a 16-bit handheld system. However, the only reason to call it a 16-bit system was because of the graphics engine, which was actually fairly sophisticated (I've actually programmed for it before), and had some (limited) 3D capabilities. However, the Lynx uses a 65C02 as it's CPU, which most of you probably know is 8-bit (the C-64 and Apple II used almost the same chip).
The TurboGrafx-16 - Similar to the Lynx, the only thing 16-bit about this system was it's graphics engine. The main processor is an HuC6280, which is 8-bit. From what I've played of TG16 games (which hasn't been all that much), they're only about as sophisticated as Master System games, but with much better graphics.
The NeoGeo - This is the worst offender in my opinion. SNK billed the NeoGeo as a 24-bit game system, but there is absolutely nothing 24-bit about it at all! It uses a 68000 (16-bit) as it's main processor, and a Z-80 (8-bit) as a sound chip. SNK was able to get away with this because the games they made were so big, and had SO much animation that people never questioned it's power. In reality, the only advantage it had over the Genesis (which was also based on a 68K + Z-80) was an obscenely large addressing space (The cartridges had TWO seperate edge connectors, were about the size of a VHS tape, and some held over 80 megabytes [not bits]). I'm not saying the NeoGeo wasn't an impressive piece of technology... after all, they're still in arcades across the continent... but it's not 24-bit.
Some may say that the Jaguar isn't "really" 64-bit, but it all depends on what you consider to be a measure of bitness. In the end, you get only a vague idea of anything whatsoever. Even if the Jaguar is 64-bit, it's obviously less powerful than the 32-bit Playstation, so who really cares about this arbitrary number? After all, there's a reason that the video game industry (mostly) stopped using this absurdity.
It's also worth pointing out that the Jaguar is 64-bit where it needs to be, and not 64-bit where it doesn't have to be. The sound chips are 32-bit, but would there really be any advantage to having 64-bit sound chips? I doubt it. The graphics chips are 64-bit, and would probably suffer if they were anything less. Instead of Atari charging us more money for unnecessary power, they decided to cut costs... and with good reason in my opinion.
I should point out that I actually have a Jaguar (As well as the JagCD), and I still play it. I do consider it to be 64-bit, but I wouldn't compare it's power to the Playstation or the N64...
No, the Saturn never claimed to be anything other than a 32-bit system. The Saturn uses dual SH-2 chips at it's core, which are both 32-bit I believe. There's also about half a dozen other processors in there to do extra stuff like 3D and 2D (Yes, these were done in seperate chips in the Saturn)... this apparently made it very hard to program.
The 68000 in the Jaguar is (in my opinion) only really included in the design so that programmers can work with something they already know, and to assist in porting efforts. Supposedly, the Jaguar's custom chips were difficult to program, and had some annoying bugs that had to be worked around (I can't provide any proof of this though). Someone already mentioned that most designers (and I think Atari themselves) actually only recommended using the 68000 to read the joystick ports. A game that is properly written can completely bypass the 68000 and run entirely on the Tom chip. Of course, it's not all that useful to shut the chip down... even though it's not as powerful as the rest of the system, it can still be used for something...
I don't understand people's complaints about the Jaguar controller.. I've had a Jaguar since it was new, and I still think it has one of the best controllers around. The number pad is especially useful with games like Doom where you can switch weapons with a single button.