My choice of words was sarcastic. Trump's treatment of Christie was extremely humiliating, but in all fairness I can't think of anybody who deserves it more.
>So, are you saying Flynn talked to the Russians on orders from Trump? Let me be clear - I have no proof that this is the case, I just find the alternative quite unbelievable.
> But if the manner in which Flynn talked to the Russians wasn't illegal, then it wouldn't matter whether Trump ordered him to or not. Not to Flynn no, he would still be guilty. It would matter to the question of "are there other guilty parties as well". It would make Trump an accomplice in the crime.
>Also, I thought Trump was taking orders from Putin. Why would Flynn need to tell the ambassador what Trump was going to do about sanctions? What ? You never had to report to your bosses about your job ?
>Sorry, I'm getting all my conspiracy theories mixed up for who Trump is a puppet of this week. Perhaps a different metaphor would help then. Think of Trump as an escort. At any given moment he is doing whatever he is doing to please whoever is currently paying him. He doesn't have just one client, he doesn't even have just one regular.
I dont think those are mutually exclusive. That is certainly a true narative. Just ask poor Chris Christie. I just do not think its the only narative. There is no way Flynn acted only. He has implied as much himself. He's just the fall guy. Trump's Oliver North
She did win in a landslide in the only thing polls measure: number of voters. That popular vote win WAS in fact a landslide. No, landslide is not strong enough a word - it was a fucking avalanche.
That she lost the college is also true - she won a massive amount of votes - she just won them in the wrong places, but polls don't really measure THAT.
There were a large number of reasons why Clinton didn't win the presidency. She wasn't a very inspiring candidate, a lot of democrats felt she didn't deserve the nomination over Sanders, her campaign made a number of very serious tactical gaffes (often after ignoring pleas from their on-the-ground operatives who were telling them what they needed), despite being orders of magnitude more honest than her opponent she was perceieved as untrustworthy and he as "one of us" and she couldn't alter that perception, Russian interference, Comey's incredible violation of professional ethics. All these things were played a role. No single one was THE reason - they were all "reasons". The one thing that was NOT a factor was how good a choice her opponent was -he was the worst choice to ever RUN let alone WIN a presidency in the USA. By a long margin. He wasn't even a very good campaigner, hell his campaign was in shambles for most of the race. It was broke. It was plagued by scandals. It had no ground-game to speak off. Ultimately - it is what it is, there's no point in crying that Clinton didn't win - and contrary to what Trumpians are saying very few people are. We tried to stop the driverless train full of dinamite from leaving the station, we failed - now it's rushing down the track. All we care about now is trying to derail it before it crashes into the next town and kills everybody.
In Trump's defense he did turn down one truly horrible appointee. The GOP's wish for deputy chief of staff. He did the right thing because although the party loves this dude - he was a centerpiece of the Iran/Contra scandal, the major operative in charge of the cover-up of the El Salvador massacre and twice convicted of withholding testimony under oath.
Of course the one time Trump did the right thing he did it for the wrong reasons - he rejected the guy because during the campaign the dude had said some critical things about him.
The selection pool is actually limited to "very rich people" but Trump makes exceptions for people who have publicly said things he likes to hear. Trouble is he only TRUSTS rich people. Like many rich people, he assumes everybody who isn't rich is trying to rob him - and regardless of how he blew smoke up their asses on the campaign trail it's becoming extremely clear that he distrusts anybody who isn't very wealthy. You can see the fracture lines all over the white house and the ones struggling are constantly those who aren't rich. Bannon has caused some serious fuck-ups, up to getting himself on the national security commission (and leaks suggest Trump didn't like that and hadn't known what he was signing)... but his position is secure, Trump trusts him because Bannon is rich. Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer on the other hand are getting constant flack from their boss - those two have actually done a halfway decent job, to the extent that it's possible in this administration. Spicer's sheer exasperation is visible every time he has to stand before the American people and say something flagrantly ridiculous because that's what the boss wants. Yet he had done it, even if he had to resort to prefacing it with "the president really does believe that..."
Which is what you normally preface a statement with when you have difficulty accepting that the person under discussion can really belief something that stupid...
But either way - he's done exactly the job Trump wanted him to do. The guy hitched his wagon to a star (even if it was a red dwarf) to jump the capitol-hill line to the front but he's been loyally toeing the boss's line ever since, and yet his loyalty isn't being rewarded, he's just getting crapped on because we won't believe the bullshit Trump sends him to relay. What's the real difference between Steve "I wasn't happy with how much power you gave me so I tricked you into giving me more because I'm just using you" Bannon and Sean "Yes sir, I'll tell them exactly what you want me to tell them" Spicer ? Spicer isn't rich.
Fact remains though - when the call was made he was 1) Not in any way part of the executive branch 2) Not in any way authorized to speak on behalf of the executive branch
And therefore: flagrantly undermining the foreign policy objectives of the sitting president of the united states. Which is a crime and this application of the Logan act would almost certainly pass constitutional muster. The problem isn't that he spoke to Russia - it's what he spoke about, things that the constitution CLEARLY reserves for the executive branch and which he had no authority to intervene in.
The fact that, if he had waited a few weeks, he would have been perfectly within the law should not make a difference. If a cop finds a 17 year old working in a strip club they won't fail to prosecute the owner because her birthday is really, really close. They won't fail to prosecute even if her birthday is tomorrow ! She's there before it's legal and that's the end of the matter. Hell in the red states they'd probably prosecute HER as well and come up with some reason to make her register as a sex offender. I mean if they do it for sexting teens they sure as hell won't let a stripper get away with it. Even if she's a totally empowered young women doing it because it makes her, personally, feel good and pays well. Actually - that would probably make them MORE eager to punish her, punishing a drug-addicted girl from extreme poverty for doing what she had to, to survive doesn't play that well with the public (even the religious right), but punishing a proud slut sure does !
Well none if the revealed trolls I have seen were wikipedia editors, twitter trolls mostly. Its entirely possible that wiki attracts a different subspecies. Cave trolls versus bridge trolls anybody ?
Geez, you're right, I had completely forgotten about EGA... wow.
And now you mention it, I remember how incredibly proud and happy I was when I got my first EGA screen and could go beyond 4 colors. Space Quest 2 looked soooo gorgeous to my eyes then.
And when VGA appeared with 256 it was all over again, and then 16/24/36-bit SVGA... after that it got weird.
My only actual C# experience was hacking some KSP mods, but what I saw did not impress me much. I've been a python programmer too long now, kept forgetting semicolons lol.
Actually the few that have ended up revealed were all fourty-something massively overweight living-in-mother's-basement types.
Something about a complete and utter lack of success or achievement leads some people to resent success and achievement in others, especially women, and thus hound them online with a great deal of trolling. For some reason, making successful people feel bad makes them feel less bad.
>Irony - it's not something you flatten wrinkled clothes with. No it is a pronoun meaning "having the nature of iron". Compare with "coppery". Example: "She faced her foes with irony resolve".:P
I assume by "poking" you are referencing the BASIC peek/poke direct-memory access commands ? I never had used them much, I learned BASIC from a C64 manual long after my family had moved onto a 286 - so that was the point where the manual stopped working since the PC had a completely different addressing scheme to the commodore.
I moved on to TurboPascal within about 2 years and most of my efforts would be focused there for the next several years, my graphics and demoscene experiences all happened in TP, first with BGI and later with embedded ASM. The worst thing about BGI was having a fantastic sprite capture/blit/animation approach (which couldn't possibly work today because XORblit is only animated on a monochrome display)... and absolutely no way to save the results to a file. I actually tried to come up with a way to do so in order to write a sprite editor. That effort led to my first genuine Schroedenbug. See the sprite editor work, I could make sprites, save them, and run another program that used them... and then they would a few hours later, running the same program it would instead blit random gibberish. It turns out, it should never have worked at all - what I was saving to disk was not the data for the bitmap - but the actual pointer to where that data was stored in memory. The only reason it temporarily worked was because DOS had no memory-management to speak off and nothing like a garbage collector. A program which wrote something to memory, and ended, would leave the data sitting there in RAM until something else wrote over it. So until that happened, another program with the same pointer address could get access to the same data. But once something use that memory, what that file-read value was sending the xorblit command was the gibberish it was blitting. It took me days to figure out what was actually happening, once I did - I was so disheartened I gave up on ever figuring out a solution. To this day I consider the single worst shortcoming TP ever had to have been the complete inability to serialize data from a pointer into something you could store.
Indeed, and back then parallel was significantly faster than serial (hence it being used for printers). It was a favorite tool for copying files between PC's as well as it could do in 20minutes what would take an hour over serial (after a previous hour trying to get both PC's serial ports configured to matching configurations).
Among the hacker crowd it had another major use too - you had 8 circuits that could be individually switched on/off by sending a different byte over the port, It was extremely low voltage (you could just about light-up an indicator LED with it - but you could use it to flip a switch, whether that was an electronic transistor based on or a cheap relay-based one depended on your budget) and that meant you could turn non-computer devices on and off with software. The early days of home-automation relied on the parallel port because a single CPU in the box could control 8 different devices and switch on any particular combination of them at any given time. It didn't become possible to do that over a serial port until the other side of the connection was smart and could actually execute instruction code. In my case - I had a complicated circuit that replaced the controller of a scalectric car with 4 voltage boosters allowing step-up speed control (all off would stop it), and the other 4 bits on the other track. So sending 10001000 would have both cars drive at minimum speed, 11001000 would have the first car at twice the speed of the other. Then I started the process of trying to program a time based sequence to give me perfect (fully automated) scalectric laps with no cars ever flipping but doing the track at the highest speed possible. It would have been so glorious...
Would have been...
See I was about 12, my electronics skills were not that advanced and frankly I hadn't considered the huge amount of RF noise that scalectric brushes produce - let alone that slowing down caused the motor to act as a generator creating voltage the other way (the same effect now used for regenerative braking in Tesla's)... a mere few hours after I got the whole thing to work... I fried my motherboard. And that, ladies and gentleman, is the story of how I learned the value of surge protection. That too is something every hacker (at least those in lightning territory) used to know - modems on phone lines had a nasty habit of sending lightning surges through your PC. You soon learned that surge protectors had limited power against the kind of voltages lightning strikes put on a line... you always unplugged everything at the first sign of a cumulonimbus cloud.
LQ is one of the oldest forums - and have always been a bit of a goto place for slackware users, it may be the only place on the net where slackers outnumber other distros. This would also partly explain why vim would handily beat emacs. Emacs was never all that popular among slackware users, a mere text editor that took up an entire software category by itself (the (E) series) - and which, if installed, could easily double the size of your setup all by itself was not going to go down well with those who clung to slackware for it's extremely flexibility and tiny footprint after the big rise-of-redhat and domination-of-debian in the late 1990s. These days, of course, that's hardly true anymore - the (X) and (xapps) series alone could match (e) and that's without installing KDE (which is the only desktop slackware ships anymore and has been for quite some time). I remember it was big news on/. when slackware stopped including Gnome in the base distro - when was that ? Could be 10 years already...
(Yes, they existed - especially in the mid-1980s) all knew: - Interrupt 18 to force a reboot - The memory range which was set aside for the display, and which you had to write to in order to do graphics (non-hackers used libraries but hackers mostly went for embedded assembler to try and squeeze a little more speed out for graphics work) - The hex number for every one of the 16 colors a CGA display could show (Sierra Online took it a step further in the AGI engine and invented an early precursor of the scene-bumpmap which allowed their pseudo-3D adventure games to work by using a map-image where depth was indicated by color allowing characters to walk in front or behind objects). Unlike a true bumpmap it didn't specify height for lighting, it specified distance from the screen for movement. It allowed the Y axis to double as a Z axis - How to read/write from the parallel port - How to write to the PC-speaker's memory address to play sounds - How to access extended memory
All things that went by the wayside when Unix and Win32 became available on the PC platform, acting like you are root all the time became frowned upon, libraries became the normal way of doing things, memory wasn't artificially limited to 640K. Some of the legacies of this era lived on rather longer than you'd think. As late as the early 2000's the best way to run most games on Linux was still using SVGALib - which wrote directly to video memory and didn't require resources for X, but in an age before the DRM driver in the kernel SVALib meant you had to run your game as root. I still played Quake2 that way ! The way SVGALib worked was simply a slightly larger memory region using the exact same techniques that we had used in the 1980s.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you're your right. That guy is crazy dangerous.
My choice of words was sarcastic. Trump's treatment of Christie was extremely humiliating, but in all fairness I can't think of anybody who deserves it more.
>So, are you saying Flynn talked to the Russians on orders from Trump?
Let me be clear - I have no proof that this is the case, I just find the alternative quite unbelievable.
> But if the manner in which Flynn talked to the Russians wasn't illegal, then it wouldn't matter whether Trump ordered him to or not.
Not to Flynn no, he would still be guilty. It would matter to the question of "are there other guilty parties as well". It would make Trump an accomplice in the crime.
>Also, I thought Trump was taking orders from Putin. Why would Flynn need to tell the ambassador what Trump was going to do about sanctions?
What ? You never had to report to your bosses about your job ?
>Sorry, I'm getting all my conspiracy theories mixed up for who Trump is a puppet of this week.
Perhaps a different metaphor would help then. Think of Trump as an escort. At any given moment he is doing whatever he is doing to please whoever is currently paying him. He doesn't have just one client, he doesn't even have just one regular.
I dont think those are mutually exclusive. That is certainly a true narative. Just ask poor Chris Christie. I just do not think its the only narative. There is no way Flynn acted only. He has implied as much himself. He's just the fall guy. Trump's Oliver North
Good point. Generally the rich measure personal worth by wealth - and assumes everybody else does too.
Chick is derived from the Spanish "Chiquita" meaning "young girl".
Nothing about looks in there.
She did win in a landslide in the only thing polls measure: number of voters. That popular vote win WAS in fact a landslide. No, landslide is not strong enough a word - it was a fucking avalanche.
That she lost the college is also true - she won a massive amount of votes - she just won them in the wrong places, but polls don't really measure THAT.
There were a large number of reasons why Clinton didn't win the presidency. She wasn't a very inspiring candidate, a lot of democrats felt she didn't deserve the nomination over Sanders, her campaign made a number of very serious tactical gaffes (often after ignoring pleas from their on-the-ground operatives who were telling them what they needed), despite being orders of magnitude more honest than her opponent she was perceieved as untrustworthy and he as "one of us" and she couldn't alter that perception, Russian interference, Comey's incredible violation of professional ethics. All these things were played a role. No single one was THE reason - they were all "reasons".
The one thing that was NOT a factor was how good a choice her opponent was -he was the worst choice to ever RUN let alone WIN a presidency in the USA. By a long margin. He wasn't even a very good campaigner, hell his campaign was in shambles for most of the race. It was broke. It was plagued by scandals. It had no ground-game to speak off.
Ultimately - it is what it is, there's no point in crying that Clinton didn't win - and contrary to what Trumpians are saying very few people are. We tried to stop the driverless train full of dinamite from leaving the station, we failed - now it's rushing down the track. All we care about now is trying to derail it before it crashes into the next town and kills everybody.
In Trump's defense he did turn down one truly horrible appointee. The GOP's wish for deputy chief of staff. He did the right thing because although the party loves this dude - he was a centerpiece of the Iran/Contra scandal, the major operative in charge of the cover-up of the El Salvador massacre and twice convicted of withholding testimony under oath.
Of course the one time Trump did the right thing he did it for the wrong reasons - he rejected the guy because during the campaign the dude had said some critical things about him.
The selection pool is actually limited to "very rich people" but Trump makes exceptions for people who have publicly said things he likes to hear. Trouble is he only TRUSTS rich people. Like many rich people, he assumes everybody who isn't rich is trying to rob him - and regardless of how he blew smoke up their asses on the campaign trail it's becoming extremely clear that he distrusts anybody who isn't very wealthy. ... but his position is secure, Trump trusts him because Bannon is rich. Reince Priebus and Sean Spicer on the other hand are getting constant flack from their boss - those two have actually done a halfway decent job, to the extent that it's possible in this administration. Spicer's sheer exasperation is visible every time he has to stand before the American people and say something flagrantly ridiculous because that's what the boss wants. Yet he had done it, even if he had to resort to prefacing it with "the president really does believe that..."
You can see the fracture lines all over the white house and the ones struggling are constantly those who aren't rich. Bannon has caused some serious fuck-ups, up to getting himself on the national security commission (and leaks suggest Trump didn't like that and hadn't known what he was signing)
Which is what you normally preface a statement with when you have difficulty accepting that the person under discussion can really belief something that stupid...
But either way - he's done exactly the job Trump wanted him to do. The guy hitched his wagon to a star (even if it was a red dwarf) to jump the capitol-hill line to the front but he's been loyally toeing the boss's line ever since, and yet his loyalty isn't being rewarded, he's just getting crapped on because we won't believe the bullshit Trump sends him to relay.
What's the real difference between Steve "I wasn't happy with how much power you gave me so I tricked you into giving me more because I'm just using you" Bannon and Sean "Yes sir, I'll tell them exactly what you want me to tell them" Spicer ? Spicer isn't rich.
Fact remains though - when the call was made he was
1) Not in any way part of the executive branch
2) Not in any way authorized to speak on behalf of the executive branch
And therefore: flagrantly undermining the foreign policy objectives of the sitting president of the united states. Which is a crime and this application of the Logan act would almost certainly pass constitutional muster. The problem isn't that he spoke to Russia - it's what he spoke about, things that the constitution CLEARLY reserves for the executive branch and which he had no authority to intervene in.
The fact that, if he had waited a few weeks, he would have been perfectly within the law should not make a difference. If a cop finds a 17 year old working in a strip club they won't fail to prosecute the owner because her birthday is really, really close. They won't fail to prosecute even if her birthday is tomorrow ! She's there before it's legal and that's the end of the matter. Hell in the red states they'd probably prosecute HER as well and come up with some reason to make her register as a sex offender. I mean if they do it for sexting teens they sure as hell won't let a stripper get away with it. Even if she's a totally empowered young women doing it because it makes her, personally, feel good and pays well. Actually - that would probably make them MORE eager to punish her, punishing a drug-addicted girl from extreme poverty for doing what she had to, to survive doesn't play that well with the public (even the religious right), but punishing a proud slut sure does !
Well none if the revealed trolls I have seen were wikipedia editors, twitter trolls mostly. Its entirely possible that wiki attracts a different subspecies. Cave trolls versus bridge trolls anybody ?
Today I Learned.
Geez, you're right, I had completely forgotten about EGA... wow.
And now you mention it, I remember how incredibly proud and happy I was when I got my first EGA screen and could go beyond 4 colors. Space Quest 2 looked soooo gorgeous to my eyes then.
And when VGA appeared with 256 it was all over again, and then 16/24/36-bit SVGA ... after that it got weird.
My only actual C# experience was hacking some KSP mods, but what I saw did not impress me much.
I've been a python programmer too long now, kept forgetting semicolons lol.
Actually the few that have ended up revealed were all fourty-something massively overweight living-in-mother's-basement types.
Something about a complete and utter lack of success or achievement leads some people to resent success and achievement in others, especially women, and thus hound them online with a great deal of trolling. For some reason, making successful people feel bad makes them feel less bad.
99% of trolling is extreme insecurity.
>Irony - it's not something you flatten wrinkled clothes with. :P
No it is a pronoun meaning "having the nature of iron". Compare with "coppery".
Example: "She faced her foes with irony resolve".
Poe's law in action folks.
You're probably right - we're talking about 20-odd years ago, it's more than likely I've forgotten a detail :P
Considering the POTUS's past NASA comments and ethno-nationalist views on border security - I fear NASA would lose.
I assume by "poking" you are referencing the BASIC peek/poke direct-memory access commands ?
I never had used them much, I learned BASIC from a C64 manual long after my family had moved onto a 286 - so that was the point where the manual stopped working since the PC had a completely different addressing scheme to the commodore.
I moved on to TurboPascal within about 2 years and most of my efforts would be focused there for the next several years, my graphics and demoscene experiences all happened in TP, first with BGI and later with embedded ASM. The worst thing about BGI was having a fantastic sprite capture/blit/animation approach (which couldn't possibly work today because XORblit is only animated on a monochrome display) ... and absolutely no way to save the results to a file. I actually tried to come up with a way to do so in order to write a sprite editor.
That effort led to my first genuine Schroedenbug. See the sprite editor work, I could make sprites, save them, and run another program that used them... and then they would a few hours later, running the same program it would instead blit random gibberish.
It turns out, it should never have worked at all - what I was saving to disk was not the data for the bitmap - but the actual pointer to where that data was stored in memory. The only reason it temporarily worked was because DOS had no memory-management to speak off and nothing like a garbage collector. A program which wrote something to memory, and ended, would leave the data sitting there in RAM until something else wrote over it. So until that happened, another program with the same pointer address could get access to the same data. But once something use that memory, what that file-read value was sending the xorblit command was the gibberish it was blitting.
It took me days to figure out what was actually happening, once I did - I was so disheartened I gave up on ever figuring out a solution. To this day I consider the single worst shortcoming TP ever had to have been the complete inability to serialize data from a pointer into something you could store.
Indeed, and back then parallel was significantly faster than serial (hence it being used for printers). It was a favorite tool for copying files between PC's as well as it could do in 20minutes what would take an hour over serial (after a previous hour trying to get both PC's serial ports configured to matching configurations).
Among the hacker crowd it had another major use too - you had 8 circuits that could be individually switched on/off by sending a different byte over the port, It was extremely low voltage (you could just about light-up an indicator LED with it - but you could use it to flip a switch, whether that was an electronic transistor based on or a cheap relay-based one depended on your budget) and that meant you could turn non-computer devices on and off with software.
The early days of home-automation relied on the parallel port because a single CPU in the box could control 8 different devices and switch on any particular combination of them at any given time. It didn't become possible to do that over a serial port until the other side of the connection was smart and could actually execute instruction code.
In my case - I had a complicated circuit that replaced the controller of a scalectric car with 4 voltage boosters allowing step-up speed control (all off would stop it), and the other 4 bits on the other track. So sending 10001000 would have both cars drive at minimum speed, 11001000 would have the first car at twice the speed of the other.
Then I started the process of trying to program a time based sequence to give me perfect (fully automated) scalectric laps with no cars ever flipping but doing the track at the highest speed possible. It would have been so glorious...
Would have been...
See I was about 12, my electronics skills were not that advanced and frankly I hadn't considered the huge amount of RF noise that scalectric brushes produce - let alone that slowing down caused the motor to act as a generator creating voltage the other way (the same effect now used for regenerative braking in Tesla's)... a mere few hours after I got the whole thing to work... I fried my motherboard. And that, ladies and gentleman, is the story of how I learned the value of surge protection. That too is something every hacker (at least those in lightning territory) used to know - modems on phone lines had a nasty habit of sending lightning surges through your PC.
You soon learned that surge protectors had limited power against the kind of voltages lightning strikes put on a line... you always unplugged everything at the first sign of a cumulonimbus cloud.
There wasn't one then.
LQ is one of the oldest forums - and have always been a bit of a goto place for slackware users, it may be the only place on the net where slackers outnumber other distros. This would also partly explain why vim would handily beat emacs. Emacs was never all that popular among slackware users, a mere text editor that took up an entire software category by itself (the (E) series) - and which, if installed, could easily double the size of your setup all by itself was not going to go down well with those who clung to slackware for it's extremely flexibility and tiny footprint after the big rise-of-redhat and domination-of-debian in the late 1990s. These days, of course, that's hardly true anymore - the (X) and (xapps) series alone could match (e) and that's without installing KDE (which is the only desktop slackware ships anymore and has been for quite some time). I remember it was big news on /. when slackware stopped including Gnome in the base distro - when was that ? Could be 10 years already...
(Yes, they existed - especially in the mid-1980s) all knew:
- Interrupt 18 to force a reboot
- The memory range which was set aside for the display, and which you had to write to in order to do graphics (non-hackers used libraries but hackers mostly went for embedded assembler to try and squeeze a little more speed out for graphics work)
- The hex number for every one of the 16 colors a CGA display could show (Sierra Online took it a step further in the AGI engine and invented an early precursor of the scene-bumpmap which allowed their pseudo-3D adventure games to work by using a map-image where depth was indicated by color allowing characters to walk in front or behind objects). Unlike a true bumpmap it didn't specify height for lighting, it specified distance from the screen for movement. It allowed the Y axis to double as a Z axis
- How to read/write from the parallel port
- How to write to the PC-speaker's memory address to play sounds
- How to access extended memory
All things that went by the wayside when Unix and Win32 became available on the PC platform, acting like you are root all the time became frowned upon, libraries became the normal way of doing things, memory wasn't artificially limited to 640K. Some of the legacies of this era lived on rather longer than you'd think. As late as the early 2000's the best way to run most games on Linux was still using SVGALib - which wrote directly to video memory and didn't require resources for X, but in an age before the DRM driver in the kernel SVALib meant you had to run your game as root. I still played Quake2 that way ! The way SVGALib worked was simply a slightly larger memory region using the exact same techniques that we had used in the 1980s.
You need to buy diesel. Study after study confirms the lowest TCO car that currently exist is BMW 3-series between 8 an 14 years old.