Castle Wolfenstein for Apple II
on
64kbps @ 40,000 ft.
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· Score: 2, Informative
not if your latency still sucks:)
The blurb didn't state which Wolfenstein or which 64 kbps. For all we know, it could be referring to "Castle Wolfenstein" for the Apple II family. The Apple II's disk drive operated at a maximum sustained speed of (you guessed it) 64 kbps (with any OS more recent than Apple DOS 3.3 such as Diversi-DOS, ProntoDOS, or ProDOS).
No, Linux versions of games from commercial developers will be nearly exclusively x86. Non-x86 Linux is too small a niche, niche of a niche actually, to consider.
Non-x86 Linux may be, but if you have a good SDK, and the SDK is ported to the major PDA operating systems (Palm OS and Pocket PC), you can recompile for free.
PDAs will also lack the horsepower/memory/etc for nearly all commercial games.
Commercial games != commercial first-person shooters. Not all commercial games are 3D. Tetris, in particular, continues to sell well, even though it's been cloned on a 1.2 MHz machine with 128 bytes of RAM. If 16.8 MHz and 384 KB of RAM is powerful enough for the Game Boy Advance, then games should have no problem running on PDAs. (Or by "memory" do you mean "storage"?)
Your brand name may be your one biggest asset
on
WineX 2.0
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· Score: 2
Most Linux gamers buy the Windows version of the game and dual boot or emulate.
transferring one sale from the Windows column to the Linux column doesn't do a developer any good, they need additional sales
If you port your game to Linux, your customers will be able to run it on PDAs that run Linux, giving them something to do during downtime (such as on a train or bus or something).
DirectX has an "unfair" advantage coming from the OS vendor
If SDL is bundled with Mandrake, then it "com[es] from the OS vendor" too.
Even Id once stated publicly (Game Developer Magazine) that it doesn't make business sense to support Linux, that they only do it because it is cool.
In other words, id Software ports its products to the GNU/Linux system not because it'll provide any additional sales in the short run but because a cross-platform policy builds the id Software brand in the long term. Many analysts have claimed that a company's trademarked brand name is its biggest asset, as it represents the goodwill of the company.
Three cross-platform game programming libraries
on
WineX 2.0
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· Score: 3, Informative
SDL seems like it makes it pretty easy to support Linux and Windows
Not only SDL, but also ClanLib and the very widely used Allegro library. Apparently, ClanLib and Allegro have a richer set of features than SDL (such as graphics primitives), but all three SDKs can talk to the various platforms' OpenGL implementations. With tools like these, publisher-developers have little excuse not to write cross-platform code (other than bribes from Microsoft).
I find it strange that everyone wants tivo to give away their service without a monthy/annual fee.
We're not cheapskates; we know we're not going to get something for nothing from TiVo. We just want to know how the box works so that we can hack it to use guide data sources other than TiVo's, such as Gemstar Guide Plus (from the makers of TV Guide).
I paid for my phone, why do I have a monthly fee?
More like "I paid for my Lucent phone, why do I have to subscribe to AT&T long distance instead of another company's service?"
Internet connectivity to the kiosks has been provided using various methods including leased lines, ISDN lines and Dial-up connections. Internet access in India is at a nascent stage due to inadequate telecommunications infrastructure.
The following was more interesting:
Some kiosk installations have been at places that don't even have phone lines. In such cases, the computers use cached web content to simulate web access.
That must be a pretty d*ng big cache. How many clicks is it from the average US site to WinMX.com or Kazaa.com? (WinMX and Kazaa are two popular P2P file-sharing apps for Windows.)
The children were sorely disappointed when the machine wouldn't acknowledge their parent-induced handicaps such as missing limbs and blindness.
When it comes to the Internet, blindness is a handicap (now that much of the web is moving to Flash and that Flash MX's accessibility features have not come into wide use), but not having legs isn't nearly as much of a handicap, especially when you can prop yourself up and use the computer that way.
Perhaps this will encourage the semi-tech crowd (the casual gamer type mostly) to use Ogg, and it may filter down in to the main populous who mainly uses mp3 right now.
People still use MP3 because there are pocket-sized MP3 players, and there are pocket-sized MP3 players because efficient MP3 decoder software that uses fixed-point (integer) arithmetic is widely available. The reference Vorbis decoder still uses floating-point arithmetic, which common ARM microprocessors cannot do in real time.
I like what they did w/ the first unreal. It was kind of like midi, except it had samples of the sounds used right there in the file.
That's called mod. It's commonly used on Game Boy Advance games too. The UMX files are actually renamed XM, S3M, and IT files, and you too can make those with Modplug Tracker.
From first hand experience, my old 486DX2/66 could play S3M's and IT's up to 32-channels without any problems.
Probably using zeroth order (nearest neighbor) resampling, which introduces ugly aliasing artifacts. Most modern s3m players (such as Modplug Player) use cubic spline interpolation to resample the instruments, which requires many more multiply operations than resampling does but produces a much cleaner sound.
I'm just waiting for a mod format that uses Vorbis to encode its samples.
If you want a connection with all the bandwith and where you can run all services, yo pay the full price. Usually those accounts are named Business-something.
Very few people have $1000 per month to spend on full service Internet connection.
So why's everybody whining, when a telco or ISP starts to enforce those limitations?
Because if the telco or ISP has a government-granted monopoly, there is no alternative.
First LiveScript, then JavaScript, then ECMAScript
on
Don't Hit That Back Button
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· Score: 3, Informative
I think you're referring to ECMAScript formerly called JavaScript
First it was LiveScript, then when "Java" became a buzzword, Netscape changed its syntax to resemble that of a brace language (C, Perl, or the Java programming language) and changed its name to JavaScript. "ECMAScript" is the generic name, created when the underlying language (without any specific DOM) was submitted to the European standards body ECMA; "JavaScript" is Sun's trademark licensed to Netscape, reflected in the media type for ECMAScript source code (text/javascript).
Change the hand cursor-shape in 9x's Control Panel
on
Don't Hit That Back Button
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· Score: 2, Informative
I want Mozilla to give me the netscape finger.
Mozilla gives you the system finger cursor-shape when you:hover over a link. If you want Mozilla to give you the Netscape finger, or even the middle finger, you can select any.cur file in Start > Settings > Control Panel > Mouse > Pointers.
I would think that a legitimate service would provide high-quality encodings (perhaps using the Fraunhofer codec),
For 192 kbps class MP3 encoding lame --r3mix produces the best results. It even beats Fraunhofer's own encoder. Go to r3mix.net and click "quality" and "analysis" for the lowdown.
The only correlary is that some people will pay more for convenience.
Legitimate music download services such as eMusic and the one that this article mentions provide more convenience than Gnutella, KaZaA, and WinMX in two big ways:
The downloads work over HTTP and thus work better over connections that severely throttle non-RFC-defined services, such as the router on Rose-Hulman's T1s.
Three nines availability. There is negligible risk of "Connection reset by peer"... Resume... "User offline".
Whenever I use the term "M$" to refer to Microsoft in a Slashdot comment, I put 10 LET M$ = "Microsoft" at the top of the comment. It's a line of Basic code meaning "assing the string 'Microsoft' to a string called M". In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Microsoft was primarily a vendor of Basic interpreters. Consider my use of M$ analogous to the common use on this board of Perl's $var interpolation (even though Basic itself doesn't do such interpolation).
And with Qt... only the X11 version is released under both the QPL and the GPL
Qt Free Edition for X11 runs on *ntel PCs (through FreeBSD, Linux, Cygwin, or WeirdX) and Macs (through rootless X on Aqua). And if you want to, the GPL lets you port it so that it will run natively on any other windowing system. Precisely what more could you ask for?
I don't believe there are no legal grounds, historical or otherwise, for licensing text materials with provisions on what you can or cannot do with the knowledge within.
Ever heard of a non-disclosure agreement? Trade secret law?
If I buy a copy of a M$ technical reference from my local bookstore
Then trade secret law doesn't apply because the information is readily available to the general public.
The same applies to software itself assuming that code is considered free speech.
Code is speech, but there are some exceptions to the First Amendment, such as the "clear and present danger" rule.
The First Amendment only applies when the GOVERNMENT is attempting to prevent you from doing what you stated above.
In the case of a GOVERNMENT-granted monopoly such as a copyright or patent, the GOVERNMENT passes laws that prevent you from saying some things.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is a private company who does not fall under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment.
A private company that takes advantage of powers granted by the GOVERNMENT to suppress speech. If the GOVERNMENT gives a private company the right to deny something to the people, then the GOVERNMENT is (through the private company) denying it to the people, possibly in violation of the First Amendment. This is part of why copyrights and trademarks have "fair use" provisions, and patents restrict making, using, and selling inventions but not discussing them.
Slashdot Mirror
not if your latency still sucks :)
The blurb didn't state which Wolfenstein or which 64 kbps. For all we know, it could be referring to "Castle Wolfenstein" for the Apple II family. The Apple II's disk drive operated at a maximum sustained speed of (you guessed it) 64 kbps (with any OS more recent than Apple DOS 3.3 such as Diversi-DOS, ProntoDOS, or ProDOS).
Why all these stupid names for 80x86-compatible processors.
Because a chip vendor can trademark a name but can't trademark a number. Thus the move from "386", "486", etc. to the "Pentium®" line.
Did you know? Intel applied for trademark registration for "Sexium", but the CDA forced the company to sell 686 processors as "Pentium II" instead.
No, Linux versions of games from commercial developers will be nearly exclusively x86. Non-x86 Linux is too small a niche, niche of a niche actually, to consider.
Non-x86 Linux may be, but if you have a good SDK, and the SDK is ported to the major PDA operating systems (Palm OS and Pocket PC), you can recompile for free.
PDAs will also lack the horsepower/memory/etc for nearly all commercial games.
Commercial games != commercial first-person shooters. Not all commercial games are 3D. Tetris, in particular, continues to sell well, even though it's been cloned on a 1.2 MHz machine with 128 bytes of RAM. If 16.8 MHz and 384 KB of RAM is powerful enough for the Game Boy Advance, then games should have no problem running on PDAs. (Or by "memory" do you mean "storage"?)
Most Linux gamers buy the Windows version of the game and dual boot or emulate.
Wine is not an emulator. VisualBoyAdvance is.
transferring one sale from the Windows column to the Linux column doesn't do a developer any good, they need additional sales
If you port your game to Linux, your customers will be able to run it on PDAs that run Linux, giving them something to do during downtime (such as on a train or bus or something).
DirectX has an "unfair" advantage coming from the OS vendor
If SDL is bundled with Mandrake, then it "com[es] from the OS vendor" too.
Even Id once stated publicly (Game Developer Magazine) that it doesn't make business sense to support Linux, that they only do it because it is cool.
In other words, id Software ports its products to the GNU/Linux system not because it'll provide any additional sales in the short run but because a cross-platform policy builds the id Software brand in the long term. Many analysts have claimed that a company's trademarked brand name is its biggest asset, as it represents the goodwill of the company.
SDL seems like it makes it pretty easy to support Linux and Windows
Not only SDL, but also ClanLib and the very widely used Allegro library. Apparently, ClanLib and Allegro have a richer set of features than SDL (such as graphics primitives), but all three SDKs can talk to the various platforms' OpenGL implementations. With tools like these, publisher-developers have little excuse not to write cross-platform code (other than bribes from Microsoft).
I find it strange that everyone wants tivo to give away their service without a monthy/annual fee.
We're not cheapskates; we know we're not going to get something for nothing from TiVo. We just want to know how the box works so that we can hack it to use guide data sources other than TiVo's, such as Gemstar Guide Plus (from the makers of TV Guide).
I paid for my phone, why do I have a monthly fee?
More like "I paid for my Lucent phone, why do I have to subscribe to AT&T long distance instead of another company's service?"
So what's their connection at? I bet its the good old fashiond 65 baud tin can and string.
Hardly an acoustic coupler. From the article:
The following was more interesting:
That must be a pretty d*ng big cache. How many clicks is it from the average US site to WinMX.com or Kazaa.com? (WinMX and Kazaa are two popular P2P file-sharing apps for Windows.)
Like with photoshop? Or with a can of spray paint?
Closer to the former. Read the article: "And they would use [Microsoft] Paint. It's very, very popular with all of them."
The children were sorely disappointed when the machine wouldn't acknowledge their parent-induced handicaps such as missing limbs and blindness.
When it comes to the Internet, blindness is a handicap (now that much of the web is moving to Flash and that Flash MX's accessibility features have not come into wide use), but not having legs isn't nearly as much of a handicap, especially when you can prop yourself up and use the computer that way.
Perhaps this will encourage the semi-tech crowd (the casual gamer type mostly) to use Ogg, and it may filter down in to the main populous who mainly uses mp3 right now.
People still use MP3 because there are pocket-sized MP3 players, and there are pocket-sized MP3 players because efficient MP3 decoder software that uses fixed-point (integer) arithmetic is widely available. The reference Vorbis decoder still uses floating-point arithmetic, which common ARM microprocessors cannot do in real time.
I like what they did w/ the first unreal. It was kind of like midi, except it had samples of the sounds used right there in the file.
That's called mod. It's commonly used on Game Boy Advance games too. The UMX files are actually renamed XM, S3M, and IT files, and you too can make those with Modplug Tracker.
From first hand experience, my old 486DX2/66 could play S3M's and IT's up to 32-channels without any problems.
Probably using zeroth order (nearest neighbor) resampling, which introduces ugly aliasing artifacts. Most modern s3m players (such as Modplug Player) use cubic spline interpolation to resample the instruments, which requires many more multiply operations than resampling does but produces a much cleaner sound.
I'm just waiting for a mod format that uses Vorbis to encode its samples.
but if your just looking at music, it just seems a good deal simpler to have that run off the CD.
Which limits you to sixty minutes of music if you devote 3/4 of the disc to Red Book. Big games will want more than an hour of music.
But then how does virtual domain hosting work?
It uses the host header:
If you want a connection with all the bandwith and where you can run all services, yo pay the full price. Usually those accounts are named Business-something.
Very few people have $1000 per month to spend on full service Internet connection.
So why's everybody whining, when a telco or ISP starts to enforce those limitations?
Because if the telco or ISP has a government-granted monopoly, there is no alternative.
I think you're referring to ECMAScript formerly called JavaScript
First it was LiveScript, then when "Java" became a buzzword, Netscape changed its syntax to resemble that of a brace language (C, Perl, or the Java programming language) and changed its name to JavaScript. "ECMAScript" is the generic name, created when the underlying language (without any specific DOM) was submitted to the European standards body ECMA; "JavaScript" is Sun's trademark licensed to Netscape, reflected in the media type for ECMAScript source code (text/javascript).
I want Mozilla to give me the netscape finger.
Mozilla gives you the system finger cursor-shape when you :hover over a link. If you want Mozilla to give you the Netscape finger, or even the middle finger, you can select any .cur file in Start > Settings > Control Panel > Mouse > Pointers.
Now they're disguising ads as articles!
It's a new Slashdot feature. Read the original announcement.
I would think that a legitimate service would provide high-quality encodings (perhaps using the Fraunhofer codec),
For 192 kbps class MP3 encoding lame --r3mix produces the best results. It even beats Fraunhofer's own encoder. Go to r3mix.net and click "quality" and "analysis" for the lowdown.
[Win2k/XP Pro's IIS] can simultaneously service 10 different IP addresses
In that case, it can be trivially circumvented with a cheap proxy.
The only correlary is that some people will pay more for convenience.
Legitimate music download services such as eMusic and the one that this article mentions provide more convenience than Gnutella, KaZaA, and WinMX in two big ways:
don't write M$!!
Whenever I use the term "M$" to refer to Microsoft in a Slashdot comment, I put 10 LET M$ = "Microsoft" at the top of the comment. It's a line of Basic code meaning "assing the string 'Microsoft' to a string called M". In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Microsoft was primarily a vendor of Basic interpreters. Consider my use of M$ analogous to the common use on this board of Perl's $var interpolation (even though Basic itself doesn't do such interpolation).
Here's a sample of Basic code:
Result:
And with Qt ... only the X11 version is released under both the QPL and the GPL
Qt Free Edition for X11 runs on *ntel PCs (through FreeBSD, Linux, Cygwin, or WeirdX) and Macs (through rootless X on Aqua). And if you want to, the GPL lets you port it so that it will run natively on any other windowing system. Precisely what more could you ask for?
I don't believe there are no legal grounds, historical or otherwise, for licensing text materials with provisions on what you can or cannot do with the knowledge within.
Ever heard of a non-disclosure agreement? Trade secret law?
If I buy a copy of a M$ technical reference from my local bookstore
Then trade secret law doesn't apply because the information is readily available to the general public.
The same applies to software itself assuming that code is considered free speech.
Code is speech, but there are some exceptions to the First Amendment, such as the "clear and present danger" rule.
The First Amendment only applies when the GOVERNMENT is attempting to prevent you from doing what you stated above.
In the case of a GOVERNMENT-granted monopoly such as a copyright or patent, the GOVERNMENT passes laws that prevent you from saying some things.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is a private company who does not fall under the jurisdiction of the First Amendment.
A private company that takes advantage of powers granted by the GOVERNMENT to suppress speech. If the GOVERNMENT gives a private company the right to deny something to the people, then the GOVERNMENT is (through the private company) denying it to the people, possibly in violation of the First Amendment. This is part of why copyrights and trademarks have "fair use" provisions, and patents restrict making, using, and selling inventions but not discussing them.