>Small point - did you know that running a DVD at >1600x1200 won't show any quality increase
Sure, but that's not the point of doing 1600x1200 - the point is that with the bottom quarter of the screen that's NOT movie, I can have a window open to talk to my friends or whatever.
I guess it depends on the movie - some movies I want just the movie, others I don't mind doing something else during.
>Personally, I would prefer to watch movies with >my wife in my living room on my TV with surround >sound and DVD component quality.
That's great if you've spent thousands of dollars on a big screen TV with a killer sound system, but what if the sound and picture on the computer I'm sitting in front of is VASTLY better than the TV (which is only marginally bigger than my monitor) across the room? My 21" TV has two-channel stereo coming out of tiny speakers in the cabinet, my computer has a 20" monitor and full surround with a subwoofer. Then there's the matter of NTSC vs. 1600x1200...
I'd still rather have the real original DVD, but I have a far better movie-watching experience on my computer than my TV.
Plus on a movie with proper screen formatting, it only needs to take up the top 3/4 of the screen, leaving the bottom open for a chat window or something.
Wow, either I'm totally spacing or we were isolated here (which I have a hard time believing, being Austin), but I don't recall GBBS... Can you recall any distinguishing features of the interface? (as an example, TBBS for the IBM folks was usually hot-key and was aware enough to poll input during the "room" descriptions (cause it used a "rooms" metaphor instead of a "department" or "section" thingie with the stuff)).
>I think there was another big BBS based in ACOS, >but I'm not 100% on that, called "Proving >Grounds" which was basically an RPG type of bbs >where your account could challenge other users >to battles and stuff.
I dunno if it was the same stuff or something he hacked together on his own, but a good friend of mine around that time (I'm thinking this woulda been '86ish, before I got my license) ran "Riverworld Proving Grounds", based loosely on the Phillip Jose Farmer books.
It was basically a regular board with a door game that allowed you to challenge either a monster or another user or a progressive "dungeon" mode (basically a sequence of monster fights increasing in difficulty, death resulting in immediate logoff). Basically after a day or maybe five tops, it resulted in the sysop and ONE user taking turns killing each other to the limits of the top user's maxcallsperday. That was one of the big problems with door games in those days. You'd end up with one user logging in over and over again up to his maxcallsperday setting to win some sort of thingie, tying up the line. Granted, depending on the board, it might not have mattered, since the number of people dialing into any given board at 2am on a Thursday night in 1985 was RELATIVELY low, but can you imagine a web page with, say, 500 daily users having maxconnections set to 1? and some sort of persistence, so that each user keeps a connection alive for 10 minutes between accesses? and has a file library? that's got peak bandwidth limited?
Something to remember when we talk about how slow our modems were in those days is that we had relatively small chunks of data to deal with... a complete side of a disk was 360K tops. Even at 1200 baud, that's not THAT bad, and until Ultima 2 or so came out, very few games or applications took more than one side of an SSDD floppy. Aside from the fact that you were usually tying up the entire system at the time, the size of various Stuff made it so that 1200 baud really wasn't unbearable.
It all depended, of course, on staying modem current, which wasn't THAT bad, unless you actually took the 4800 baud gamble. Ow. I remember seeing game crack t-files claiming "If you ain't 4800 your an asshole!!!!!" [sic]. Of course, then came the 9600 fiasco.
I'm sure plenty of others will do the USR history recap, so I'll wander off now and just disclaim...
Wow. Don't drink and Slashdot. I think the typing came out ok, but DAMN did I ramble. Now to aim for the buttons to actually preview and/or post... urp.
>What would freak out a farmer more than a >computer generated voice warning from the US >Agriculture Department that a biblical swarm of >locus are desending upon Southeast Texas?
Hey now, I was in central Texas at that time.. with regular trips to southWEST Texas each year for deer season.
That's... that's... that's not fu.. well, ok, it's kinda funny.
But couldn't you have said something about a goat plague? Those damn Sonoran goats ate everything in sight, it sucked to hunt a lease that had those goats on it.
>Now I wonder-- why do Macs of 2002 not have the >same telephony capability of a 4-voice modem >circa 1984?
It would seem that the tone generation capabilities of a Mac would be able to replicate the functionality of an AppleCat. All the AppleCat really was was a sophisticated tone generator - there were programs to allow you to use the AppleCat as a sound card. It was no Mockingboard, but it worked pretty well if you didn't mind getting your sound effects through the receiver on your phone...
I loved that we had DTMF generators that would do A/B/C/D as early as '84. Built-in silver box, just add software...
Remember the DTMF *de*coder add-on you could get? You could actually do a reasonably good phone menu system with the Apple.
>(as an aside, you don't remember ProTALK BBS, do you?)
Can't say that I do. Was this a software package or an actual BBS system somewhere?
I find it funny reading these replies from folks talking about "back in the day" being mid to early 90's, with their 2400 baud modems...
Go back another decade, kids.
I used to practically LIVE on a Ddial here in Austin from '85 until it went away in '88 or '89.
Lurking around the pirate boards, running wardialers all night so I could call up some of the bigger AE's like Metal Shop.
I loved my AppleCat. Being able to do Bell 202A (1200 baud half duplex). Using Cat-Fur to dial in, chatting with the person on the other end YEARS before things like BiModem.
Hacking cut and paste with ProTerm by telling it I had a serial printer running on the same port as my modem.
>Yeah.. the Sims is the best selling PC game of all time because it totally sucks
Another person already mentioned Myst. How about other top-sellers like Deer Hunter?
Windows (of various flavors) is the best selling operating system of all time. Does this mean it doesn't suck?
Should we mention the music examples of NSync and Britney Spears? They sell an assload of records. Do they suck?
I'll even push a few folks' buttons: The Phantom Menace made a TON of money. It's #20 on the top 100 grossing American films list, adjusted for inflation. (Full list here: http://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice.html ). Was it a great movie?
If a clueless MS sales rep giving a presentation to your company is allowed to represent MS to the rest of us, can I use your typically clueless l33t h4x0r IRC Linux zealot to represent Linux?
>It's been my experience in my many travels to >the USA that the majority of its citizens most >certainly do care how they are perceived abroad - >by Europeans, Asians, etc.
Well, it may be a matter of caring how individual Americans are perceived while travelling vs. caring what Europe as a whole thinks of America and American culture as a whole.
>Is it possible you were judging your own people >by the actions of a few who make the >headlines?:-)
>But still it is silly that 1 head butt changes >the rating.
In a way, I'd rather it be a clearly defined list or limit that makes the rating, rather than it being arbitrary and completely at the whim of the ratings board.
If they can go down a list and say "Ok, you're two points over the line for a 12. You can take out x laser blasts, x seconds of sabre duel, x punches, or this head-butt to get under the line again", I'm ok with that.
I'd MUCH rather it be a specific set of rules than some completely subjective opinion, like we seem to have here in the US... hm.
>Let's keep producing more violent movies and >glorifying war, like Platoon, Saving Private >Ryan
Uh... You honestly think Platoon or Saving Private Ryan "glorif[y] war"?
Have you SEEN Saving Private Ryan? Have you actually WATCHED Platoon? There's nothing in either of those movies that glorifies war. They both attempt to portray war as the horrible nasty hellish nightmare that it is.
After the release of SPR, military recruiters all over America reported a drop in inquiries. This from a nation that was ALREADY largely apathetic about military service. This was almost exclusively in response to the opening D-Day scenes.
If you're looking for a movie that glorifies war, go find a copy of The Longest Day (B&W, please, none of that Turnerized colorized crap). Watch the Omaha Beach landing sequence. Compared to SPR's, it's about as violent as an episode of Seinfeld.
For a more modern movie (yet set in an older war...), go get Mel Gibson's "The Patriot".
Neither SPR nor Platoon try to be "feel good" movies. Neither is a chest-thumping rah rah "we kicked their sorry asses" movie.
Oh, and I can't let this one go...
>Look at crime rates in Europe, where guns are >near impossible to get hold of
That kid in Germany sure seemed to have his share. I won't mention terrorist groups like the IRA, Red Brigade, ETA, 17 November, or any of a hundred splinter groups...
-l
Re:I dont like the french either ...
on
The Plague of Frogs
·
· Score: 1, Troll
>Shut up, or we'll recall all the Jerry Lewis >reels.
A bigger threat would be to send them all back to the US.
Please. Anything but that. Please, keep the Jerry Lewis movies in France where you seem to enjoy them so much.
>Killing babies in order to use their cells >is "coming around"?
No, but using the remains of legally and safely aborted fetuses *IS* coming around.
Would you prefer the fetal tissue just be disposed of WITHOUT offering any possible benefit to society?
I realize you'd prefer to dictate a woman's bodily choices with no real investment in it yourself, but given the choices you DO have, how about making the morally superior of the two?
Slashdot Mirror
>Small point - did you know that running a DVD at
>1600x1200 won't show any quality increase
Sure, but that's not the point of doing 1600x1200 - the point is that with the bottom quarter of the screen that's NOT movie, I can have a window open to talk to my friends or whatever.
I guess it depends on the movie - some movies I want just the movie, others I don't mind doing something else during.
-l
>Personally, I would prefer to watch movies with
>my wife in my living room on my TV with surround
>sound and DVD component quality.
That's great if you've spent thousands of dollars on a big screen TV with a killer sound system, but what if the sound and picture on the computer I'm sitting in front of is VASTLY better than the TV (which is only marginally bigger than my monitor) across the room? My 21" TV has two-channel stereo coming out of tiny speakers in the cabinet, my computer has a 20" monitor and full surround with a subwoofer. Then there's the matter of NTSC vs. 1600x1200...
I'd still rather have the real original DVD, but I have a far better movie-watching experience on my computer than my TV.
Plus on a movie with proper screen formatting, it only needs to take up the top 3/4 of the screen, leaving the bottom open for a chat window or something.
-l
>Americans think it's perfect already
Huh. Nice sweeping generalization there.
I don't know anyone that thinks America is "perfect".
Then again, at least here we have a system in place where we can try to fix the things that AREN'T perfect.
In China, trying to fix the broken things results in the army being called out to drive their tanks into student rallies.
-l
>can't use the GPS for anything important. (like
>i.e. steering the trains with it)
You wacky Euros. Here in the US, the TRACKS tell our trains where they can and can't go.
-l
>The Beijing evening news is a for-profit publication
Isn't the Beijing paper in question a state-run publication, hence NOT a money-making venture?
>It was a total rewrite of GBBS
Wow, either I'm totally spacing or we were isolated here (which I have a hard time believing, being Austin), but I don't recall GBBS... Can you recall any distinguishing features of the interface? (as an example, TBBS for the IBM folks was usually hot-key and was aware enough to poll input during the "room" descriptions (cause it used a "rooms" metaphor instead of a "department" or "section" thingie with the stuff)).
>I think there was another big BBS based in ACOS,
>but I'm not 100% on that, called "Proving
>Grounds" which was basically an RPG type of bbs
>where your account could challenge other users
>to battles and stuff.
I dunno if it was the same stuff or something he hacked together on his own, but a good friend of mine around that time (I'm thinking this woulda been '86ish, before I got my license) ran "Riverworld Proving Grounds", based loosely on the Phillip Jose Farmer books.
It was basically a regular board with a door game that allowed you to challenge either a monster or another user or a progressive "dungeon" mode (basically a sequence of monster fights increasing in difficulty, death resulting in immediate logoff). Basically after a day or maybe five tops, it resulted in the sysop and ONE user taking turns killing each other to the limits of the top user's maxcallsperday. That was one of the big problems with door games in those days. You'd end up with one user logging in over and over again up to his maxcallsperday setting to win some sort of thingie, tying up the line. Granted, depending on the board, it might not have mattered, since the number of people dialing into any given board at 2am on a Thursday night in 1985 was RELATIVELY low, but can you imagine a web page with, say, 500 daily users having maxconnections set to 1? and some sort of persistence, so that each user keeps a connection alive for 10 minutes between accesses? and has a file library? that's got peak bandwidth limited?
Something to remember when we talk about how slow our modems were in those days is that we had relatively small chunks of data to deal with... a complete side of a disk was 360K tops. Even at 1200 baud, that's not THAT bad, and until Ultima 2 or so came out, very few games or applications took more than one side of an SSDD floppy. Aside from the fact that you were usually tying up the entire system at the time, the size of various Stuff made it so that 1200 baud really wasn't unbearable.
It all depended, of course, on staying modem current, which wasn't THAT bad, unless you actually took the 4800 baud gamble. Ow. I remember seeing game crack t-files claiming "If you ain't 4800 your an asshole!!!!!" [sic]. Of course, then came the 9600 fiasco.
I'm sure plenty of others will do the USR history recap, so I'll wander off now and just disclaim...
Wow. Don't drink and Slashdot. I think the typing came out ok, but DAMN did I ramble. Now to aim for the buttons to actually preview and/or post... urp.
-l
>What would freak out a farmer more than a
>computer generated voice warning from the US
>Agriculture Department that a biblical swarm of
>locus are desending upon Southeast Texas?
Hey now, I was in central Texas at that time.. with regular trips to southWEST Texas each year for deer season.
That's... that's... that's not fu.. well, ok, it's kinda funny.
But couldn't you have said something about a goat plague? Those damn Sonoran goats ate everything in sight, it sucked to hunt a lease that had those goats on it.
-l
>Now I wonder-- why do Macs of 2002 not have the
>same telephony capability of a 4-voice modem
>circa 1984?
It would seem that the tone generation capabilities of a Mac would be able to replicate the functionality of an AppleCat. All the AppleCat really was was a sophisticated tone generator - there were programs to allow you to use the AppleCat as a sound card. It was no Mockingboard, but it worked pretty well if you didn't mind getting your sound effects through the receiver on your phone...
I loved that we had DTMF generators that would do A/B/C/D as early as '84. Built-in silver box, just add software...
Remember the DTMF *de*coder add-on you could get? You could actually do a reasonably good phone menu system with the Apple.
>(as an aside, you don't remember ProTALK BBS, do you?)
Can't say that I do. Was this a software package or an actual BBS system somewhere?
-l
I find it funny reading these replies from folks talking about "back in the day" being mid to early 90's, with their 2400 baud modems...
Go back another decade, kids.
I used to practically LIVE on a Ddial here in Austin from '85 until it went away in '88 or '89.
Lurking around the pirate boards, running wardialers all night so I could call up some of the bigger AE's like Metal Shop.
I loved my AppleCat. Being able to do Bell 202A (1200 baud half duplex). Using Cat-Fur to dial in, chatting with the person on the other end YEARS before things like BiModem.
Hacking cut and paste with ProTerm by telling it I had a serial printer running on the same port as my modem.
Sigh.
Life was so much simpler when I was 14...
-l
>I've had to buy a new motherboard as well. Hence
>the OS re-install.
What OS are you running that can't handle a motherboard change?
Even my last Win98 system survived three motherboard without a reinstall... along with four CPU any number of video/sound/network card changes.
What x86 OS *can't* handle that?
-l
>I just wonder how many /.ers use Windows?
An awful lot more than you seem to think.
I don't recall the story or the exact numbers, but a slashdot log showed something like over half the hits coming from Windows boxes.
This was a while back, of course, and it doesn't allow for browser ID spoofing, but it's still significant enough to mention.
-l
>Yeah.. the Sims is the best selling PC game of all time because it totally sucks
Another person already mentioned Myst. How about other top-sellers like Deer Hunter?
Windows (of various flavors) is the best selling operating system of all time. Does this mean it doesn't suck?
Should we mention the music examples of NSync and Britney Spears? They sell an assload of records. Do they suck?
I'll even push a few folks' buttons: The Phantom Menace made a TON of money. It's #20 on the top 100 grossing American films list, adjusted for inflation. (Full list here: http://www.filmsite.org/boxoffice.html ). Was it a great movie?
Being popular doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
-l
If a clueless MS sales rep giving a presentation to your company is allowed to represent MS to the rest of us, can I use your typically clueless l33t h4x0r IRC Linux zealot to represent Linux?
-l
>Using the standard 138,000 miles per second
>approximation, we get about 496,800,000 mph.
D'oh!
186,000 miles per second, approximately 669,600,000 mph.
My bad.
-l
>Apparently, these things move at 900000mph, or a
>few times the speed of light.
900,000mph is nowhere NEAR the speed of light.
Using the standard 138,000 miles per second approximation, we get about 496,800,000 mph.
-l
>It's been my experience in my many travels to
:-)
>the USA that the majority of its citizens most
>certainly do care how they are perceived abroad -
>by Europeans, Asians, etc.
Well, it may be a matter of caring how individual Americans are perceived while travelling vs. caring what Europe as a whole thinks of America and American culture as a whole.
>Is it possible you were judging your own people
>by the actions of a few who make the
>headlines?
Touche... heh.
-l
>>Please, don't judge us poor Europeans by the
>>behaviour of those of us who make the headlines
>>across the pond.
>And we Americans would appreciate the same
>courtesy.
On second thought, lemme rephrase that:
SOME Americans would appreciate the same courtesy. The vast majority don't give a rat's ass what Europe thinks.
HOWEVER, the easiest way to get us to quit judging you based on the actions of a tiny minority is to extend us the same courtesy.
Hope that's clear enough.
-l
>Please, don't judge us poor Europeans by the
>behaviour of those of us who make the headlines
>across the pond.
And we Americans would appreciate the same courtesy.
-l
>But still it is silly that 1 head butt changes
>the rating.
In a way, I'd rather it be a clearly defined list or limit that makes the rating, rather than it being arbitrary and completely at the whim of the ratings board.
If they can go down a list and say "Ok, you're two points over the line for a 12. You can take out x laser blasts, x seconds of sabre duel, x punches, or this head-butt to get under the line again", I'm ok with that.
I'd MUCH rather it be a specific set of rules than some completely subjective opinion, like we seem to have here in the US... hm.
-l
>Let's keep producing more violent movies and
>glorifying war, like Platoon, Saving Private
>Ryan
Uh... You honestly think Platoon or Saving Private Ryan "glorif[y] war"?
Have you SEEN Saving Private Ryan? Have you actually WATCHED Platoon? There's nothing in either of those movies that glorifies war. They both attempt to portray war as the horrible nasty hellish nightmare that it is.
After the release of SPR, military recruiters all over America reported a drop in inquiries. This from a nation that was ALREADY largely apathetic about military service. This was almost exclusively in response to the opening D-Day scenes.
If you're looking for a movie that glorifies war, go find a copy of The Longest Day (B&W, please, none of that Turnerized colorized crap). Watch the Omaha Beach landing sequence. Compared to SPR's, it's about as violent as an episode of Seinfeld.
For a more modern movie (yet set in an older war...), go get Mel Gibson's "The Patriot".
Neither SPR nor Platoon try to be "feel good" movies. Neither is a chest-thumping rah rah "we kicked their sorry asses" movie.
Oh, and I can't let this one go...
>Look at crime rates in Europe, where guns are
>near impossible to get hold of
That kid in Germany sure seemed to have his share. I won't mention terrorist groups like the IRA, Red Brigade, ETA, 17 November, or any of a hundred splinter groups...
-l
>Shut up, or we'll recall all the Jerry Lewis
>reels.
A bigger threat would be to send them all back to the US.
Please. Anything but that. Please, keep the Jerry Lewis movies in France where you seem to enjoy them so much.
*shudder*
-l
>>electronic arts expo
>That would be Electronic Entertainment Expo
Woah. Geek meme alert. I've seen that before.
EA's big, but they're not a xerox of band-aid or anything.
-l
>Maya, Lightwave 3D, 3D Studio MAX.....
But are these programs limited by the power of the card, or the ability of the CPU to feed it information?
Aside from simply supporting the features of OpenGL, are the GeForce 4Ti's slowing down the 1.9 gig Athlons, or the other way around?
-l
>in the past 200 years the US has managed to earn
>itself more enemies than many other countries
>which have had a headstart of centuries
Powerful countries tend to have lots of enemies.
How many enemies do you think England had at the peak of the British Empire?
-l
>Killing babies in order to use their cells
>is "coming around"?
No, but using the remains of legally and safely aborted fetuses *IS* coming around.
Would you prefer the fetal tissue just be disposed of WITHOUT offering any possible benefit to society?
I realize you'd prefer to dictate a woman's bodily choices with no real investment in it yourself, but given the choices you DO have, how about making the morally superior of the two?
-l