It's worth noting that on most OSes, Windows included, a program that writes code to memory and then expects it to be executable without any further intervention is buggy. Windows has required a system call to make the memory executable for a long time, it's just that it wasn't actually necessary before. The programs that NX breaks were always buggy, it's just that the bug was never exposed.
Not to say that its not happening today. Half Life II is currently my happy place. But that's one title in a sea of 3D trash that no one will ever have any emotional attachment to at all.
Every single game that you remember fondly from your youth was just "one title in a sea of... trash". You simply don't remember the trash, for obvious reasons. For every Zork or Marathon, there were a thousand worthless games that nobody can remember today.
Looking back, I have fond memories of about as many games as there are years that I've been playing games. If you think that Half Life 2 is nostalgia-worthy, then you're good for 2004.
Yes, it would be wonderful if the government could step in and give everybody broadband. Then the US's internet infrastructure would be run with the same care and efficiency as Amtrak.
No thanks.
I don't know about other countries, but here in France, the speed and availability of broadband has gone way, way up since France Telecom's monopoly was broken and private companies were allowed to start doing things. Even just a couple of years ago, $50/month for a 512kbit connection was about as good as you could get. Now private companies are offering 8Mbit connections for about $20/month.
The problem isn't the government or the telecoms, the problem is that the United States is really damned big. If you look at the places that have really fast, cheap broadband, they're almost universally places that are very densely populated. Most of the US is not.
Anyone who blames the US for this is simply looking for excuses to blame the US for everything.
Events like this can make for good filters. If anybody actually seriously tries to put any blame on the US for any part of this disaster, you can safely ignore anything they say about almost anything.
All accounts of Myth 2 say they shipped together, but the Mac version was available first because a Virus was found in the PC Gold Master and the PC version recalled. In most Cases stores pulled all versions from the shelf Mac and PC. After that you would find it as a Hybrid Box sporting an orange sticker claiming to be Version 1.1 (and for all intents and purposes the same game, just Virus Free)
Do you have any cites for this? I recall both Myths being hybrid discs, but I could be wrong.
When Bungie announced they were selling to MS, both Oni and Halo were in production. In fact, so was Myth 3.
It turns out you're right about Oni. Do you have any cites about Myth 3? As far as I remember, it got started as a "milk the franchise for every last penny" project by the company that bought the series.
Halo was supposed to be released on Mac and PC from the start, but it was going to be on the Mac FIRST. I was at the MacWorld Keynote speech where Halo was first introduced (the same one we first saw the clamshell iBook). I believe it was Jason Jones on stage with Steve Jobs who narrated the trailer they were playing before the crowd as he explained what we were watching was played on a G4 with a ( then unavailable for the Mac) nVidia video card running hacked drivers.
He emphasized that the game would be for the Mac First with later release for the PC. The audience had been in quiet awe during the presentation when this caused the crowd to erupt into cheers.
I just downloaded and watched the keynote video. There's no mention that Halo will be Mac first, just that it will be on the Mac. After the realtime demo, Jason Jones just says that Halo is a work in progress and will be out in the first half of the next year.
If you're interested, the (very low-quality) keynote video can be had here. If I missed something there, please do tell. (It's worth downloading just for the first few minutes with Steve Jobs and Noah Wiley.)
And please, mods - If You Don't know if someone is right, don't mod them up Just because it sounds right !!
Good luck with that. 99% of slashdot moderators couldn't find their ass with two hands and a mirror. (Yes, I mean you, Mr. Mod.)
The hijackers won't make it as far as the cockpit next time. The door will be locked, and then they will all be tackled by their fellow passengers.
The only reason the 9/11 hijackers were as successful as they were was because all of the passengers "knew" that if they kept their heads down and waited, they would survive the day. As soon as people knew that this was no longer true, the hijackers lost. The only reason the plane crashed is because the hijackers had a long time to do what they wanted before the passengers got wise to what was going on.
If the hijackers are going to change their tactics, then why are we expending so much effort towards banning the things that they used the last time? This is particularly bizarre considering that these things are now useless.
I don't think that the freedom to copy other people's software without restrictions is a fundamental freedom at all, any more than the freedom to be free from annoying people who talk on cell phones on public transportation.
Copyright has been around almost as long as the printing press, and would seem to be a useful thing. I think that the current state of affairs is excessive, but I think that a world without copyright is also excessive, merely in the opposite direction. As usual, moderation is the most useful position.
I'm not selling out or rationalizing, I simply don't share your ideals. I don't believe that this freedom is less important than others, I believe that it is not a fundamental freedom at all.
I personally think that adding proprietary software to the world increases, not decreases, freedom. The existence of my software in the world gives people more choice. The fact that my software is non-free doesn't change that fact, it just changes the nature of the choice.
By that logic it's OK to support totalitarian, repressive and/or undemocratic states / regiemes, because you're increasing he choice of political systems under which people can choose to live. OK, you can say people have no choice about the country they live in,.. substitute local state police organisations for states, or really ugly authoritarian private enterprises - as a hypothetical example - if you don't want to work 18 hour days for $10 per day with no rights regarding health & safety, you don't have to, so allowing / co-operating with companies that pursue such policies isn't hurting freedom.
This is a nonsensical argument. My proprietary software doesn't harm its users, unlike abusive governments and companies.
All manner of harmless items have been banned on airliners, such as nail clippers and children's scissors.
Box cutters too maybe? In any case this isn't an outright ban. This really is no different than not allowing trucks with explosives in public roadway tunnels. If you don't think you can't harm/kill someone with saftey scissors you're dead wrong.
I don't care if you can hurt or kill people with it. The question is whether you can successfully destroy or hijack an airliner with a given item. The answer is "yes" for bombs and guns, and "no" for box cutters and scissors. It worked once with box cutters, and it will never work again with anything short of a firearm. Even the gun will probably need to be semiautomatic to succeed against a bunch of angry passengers with nothing to lose. Confiscating scissors and nail clippers is not doing anything to enhance my safety.
All manner of harmless items have been banned on airliners, such as nail clippers and children's scissors.
The current administration is already seriously discussing jamming cell phones and GPS in the event of a terrorist attack. While it's not a ban, it's in the same ball park as far as the kind of thinking goes.
Are you sure? If the original poster is correct and the impact energy is half a gigaton, then it will be comparable to the energy released in the earthquake, which was about 1.8 gigatons, also according to slashdot. Of course, slashdot is not exactly a reliable source for these kinds of things.
Ocean would probably be worse. If it landed in the ocean, it would probably be like yesterday's unpleasantness with a great many people killed by tsunami. Landing on land, it would just make a big boom and put a lot of dirt into the air, unless it happened to land in a populated area. Worst case is a city, of course, but that's not likely.
I personally think that adding proprietary software to the world increases, not decreases, freedom. The existence of my software in the world gives people more choice. The fact that my software is non-free doesn't change that fact, it just changes the nature of the choice.
No they weren't. You need a Bungie history lesson.
Turn off the flame-thrower, it's just a company, let's not get emotional about it.
I'm sorry if you took offense, as none was intended.
Bungie's first PC game was Marathon 2. It mostly fell flat on the PC side, but that was their first foray into the Windows world.
You're correct on the first count, but completely wrong on the second. Here's what Bungie has to say about the "flop" of the PC version of Marathon 2:
Marathon 2, released in November 1995, was also the first Bungie game to be ported to PC (Windows 95, in September 1996), marking Bungie's transition from Mac specialist to multiplatform publisher. It coincided with tremendous growth - the company's revenues shot up an astonishing 500%. This was now a company with a marketing staff, programmers, artists, desks, Post-It notes - the whole deal!
Well, as they say, correlation does not equal causation. That period saw several Bungie releases, Marathon 2 Mac, Marathon Infinity, Abuse, and Marathon 2 PC. Also, the fact that the PC market is many times bigger than the Mac market means that it could still be a flop on the PC side while being a relative hit for Bungie.
But Oni was intended to be a Mac-only game. It wasn't until 1999 (Oni dates back to the creation of the west-coast office in 1997), that it was announced to be a Mac/PC/PS2 title. It was also to be Bungie's first real console game (Marathon was ported to Pippin, but we all know what happend to that, uhh, wildly succesful platform...)
Do you have any cites for that? It doesn't agree with my memory at all, and I have a hard time believing that they would do another Mac-only game after two hugely successful cross-platform games. However, I can't find any actual information on this.
Even worse, it took forever for the crappy ports to come out. Bite me, Microsoft!
Indeed. Halo went from the Next Big Thing to just another FPS with better-than-average AI and cookie-cutter level design. Sigh.
The best resource is people. Find some computer enthusiasts and talk to them in the language you're trying to learn. (Resist English!) You'll pick up the terminology just by being around it and being corrected when you use the wrong one.
Remember, Halo and Oni were originally going to be Mac-only before Microsoft bought them out.
No they weren't. You need a Bungie history lesson.
Bungie's first PC game was Marathon 2. It mostly fell flat on the PC side, but that was their first foray into the Windows world.
Next up was Myth, which was a simultaneous Mac/PC release. Myth 2 followed the same tradition. Oni was simultaneous or nearly so for the Mac and PC, and also came out for the PS2. All of this was before the Microsoft Unpleasantness.
Halo was originally developed on Macs and intended for the same simultaneous Mac/PC release as all of their other stuff until Microsoft bought them out. Bungie hadn't been Mac-only for a long time at that point, and Microsoft's big change was making it an Xbox exclusive, and then finally allowing crappy ports to the PC and Mac worlds.
I personally think that Halo is way better gameplay-wise. The AI makes it much more interesting to play, but Marathon was still kick-ass for its time. However, Halo's story really is weak and flat by comparison. Halo seems to throw in reversals and betrayals more out of boredom than anything else. Marathon's betrayals are all precisely timed to have the maximum impact when they kick you in the nuts. Its story still blows my mind today, and IMO it can stand next to the best SF books that I've read.
Given that Tiger is not available to the public yet, I would say that the quoted text is perfectly accurate, although it is destined for irrelevancy pretty soon.
It's too bad Amtrak sucks harder than I believed physically possible, and can't even keep their trains on time in clear weather during the quietest periods of the year.
These days, "we hate the customer" seems to be the motto of all of the big airlines.
This summer, I was flying from Paris to Ft. Lauderdale via Philadelphia on USAir. The Paris->Philadelphia leg was handled by the same plane that does USAir's Philadelphia->Paris flight that same day. The incoming flight was about four hours late, so of course our outgoing flight was also four hours late. Sucks, but what can you do.
So we get into Philadelphia at about 9PM instead of 4:30PM and everybody rushes to get any last-minute connections they can. I was already stuffed and had to wait for the next day's flight, but a lot of people had chances to make late flights to their destination. We all get off the plane, go through customs, get to USAir's rebooking desk.
Two people are working this desk.
An airplane with three hundred people comes in four hours late. USAir knew that this flight would be late almost a full day in advance, since it was a cascade effect from the other flight's delay. And yet, none of USAir's genius managers had the presence of mind to call in a few extra employees that night to speed things along.
A lot of people missed connections they otherwise could have made, because they had to wait in line for an hour to get new tickets.
Since USAir obviously hates their customers exceptionally strongly, I won't be flying with them again.
This isn't really an isolated incident, either, just the most recent bad one. The entire industry has a serious problem with this, and I have a feeling it's going to take a couple of high-profile bankruptcies before they get a grip on it.
I'll take a simplistic approach and model the collision without gravity. This is not really correct, but it will probably be within an order of magnitude. The situation is not really chaotic even with gravity, at least in the short term, so the size of the change in the result is likely to be close to the size in the change at the beginning.
Assume the asteroid is a year away from collision when it's found, and it's on course directly for the center of Earth. Our error needs to be less than the amount of speed that would make the asteroid be more than one Earth radius away from where we think it will be, one year into the future. Take the radius of the Earth, divide by a year, and you get 20cm/s. This is pretty low, and I honestly don't know if we can determine an asteroid's velocity that accurately or not. We seem to come very close to this sort of accuracy with space probes, but they have onboard star trackers and guidance computers, and they also have course correction thrusters. Anybody have more concrete numbers?
West Wing jumped the shark long ago. With cardboard cutout characters like "George W. Bush" and "Donald Rumsfeld", I can't believe anybody ever took it seriously. The whole mess in "Iraq" (wherever that's supposed to be) has just been ridiculously long and drawn out, and is obviously just a lame recurring plot device to make up for the fact that their writers have no original ideas. They constantly introduce new major adversaries and then forget about them (anybody remember "Osama bin Laden" from the 2001 season, or "Saddam Hussein" from last year?) and in general it's just a gigantic farce. I'm surprised anybody pays any attention to it these days.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth noting that on most OSes, Windows included, a program that writes code to memory and then expects it to be executable without any further intervention is buggy. Windows has required a system call to make the memory executable for a long time, it's just that it wasn't actually necessary before. The programs that NX breaks were always buggy, it's just that the bug was never exposed.
Not to say that its not happening today. Half Life II is currently my happy place. But that's one title in a sea of 3D trash that no one will ever have any emotional attachment to at all.
Every single game that you remember fondly from your youth was just "one title in a sea of... trash". You simply don't remember the trash, for obvious reasons. For every Zork or Marathon, there were a thousand worthless games that nobody can remember today.
Looking back, I have fond memories of about as many games as there are years that I've been playing games. If you think that Half Life 2 is nostalgia-worthy, then you're good for 2004.
Yes, it would be wonderful if the government could step in and give everybody broadband. Then the US's internet infrastructure would be run with the same care and efficiency as Amtrak.
No thanks.
I don't know about other countries, but here in France, the speed and availability of broadband has gone way, way up since France Telecom's monopoly was broken and private companies were allowed to start doing things. Even just a couple of years ago, $50/month for a 512kbit connection was about as good as you could get. Now private companies are offering 8Mbit connections for about $20/month.
The problem isn't the government or the telecoms, the problem is that the United States is really damned big. If you look at the places that have really fast, cheap broadband, they're almost universally places that are very densely populated. Most of the US is not.
Yeah, MySQL certainly handles high-traffic web sites well. I would have replied sooner, but slashdot kept giving me those HTTP 500 errors....
Anyone who blames the US for this is simply looking for excuses to blame the US for everything.
Events like this can make for good filters. If anybody actually seriously tries to put any blame on the US for any part of this disaster, you can safely ignore anything they say about almost anything.
All accounts of Myth 2 say they shipped together, but the Mac version was available first because a Virus was found in the PC Gold Master and the PC version recalled. In most Cases stores pulled all versions from the shelf Mac and PC. After that you would find it as a Hybrid Box sporting an orange sticker claiming to be Version 1.1 (and for all intents and purposes the same game, just Virus Free)
Do you have any cites for this? I recall both Myths being hybrid discs, but I could be wrong.
When Bungie announced they were selling to MS, both Oni and Halo were in production. In fact, so was Myth 3.
It turns out you're right about Oni. Do you have any cites about Myth 3? As far as I remember, it got started as a "milk the franchise for every last penny" project by the company that bought the series.
Halo was supposed to be released on Mac and PC from the start, but it was going to be on the Mac FIRST. I was at the MacWorld Keynote speech where Halo was first introduced (the same one we first saw the clamshell iBook). I believe it was Jason Jones on stage with Steve Jobs who narrated the trailer they were playing before the crowd as he explained what we were watching was played on a G4 with a ( then unavailable for the Mac) nVidia video card running hacked drivers.
He emphasized that the game would be for the Mac First with later release for the PC. The audience had been in quiet awe during the presentation when this caused the crowd to erupt into cheers.
I just downloaded and watched the keynote video. There's no mention that Halo will be Mac first, just that it will be on the Mac. After the realtime demo, Jason Jones just says that Halo is a work in progress and will be out in the first half of the next year.
If you're interested, the (very low-quality) keynote video can be had here. If I missed something there, please do tell. (It's worth downloading just for the first few minutes with Steve Jobs and Noah Wiley.)
And please, mods - If You Don't know if someone is right, don't mod them up Just because it sounds right !!
Good luck with that. 99% of slashdot moderators couldn't find their ass with two hands and a mirror. (Yes, I mean you, Mr. Mod.)
The hijackers won't make it as far as the cockpit next time. The door will be locked, and then they will all be tackled by their fellow passengers.
The only reason the 9/11 hijackers were as successful as they were was because all of the passengers "knew" that if they kept their heads down and waited, they would survive the day. As soon as people knew that this was no longer true, the hijackers lost. The only reason the plane crashed is because the hijackers had a long time to do what they wanted before the passengers got wise to what was going on.
If the hijackers are going to change their tactics, then why are we expending so much effort towards banning the things that they used the last time? This is particularly bizarre considering that these things are now useless.
I don't think that the freedom to copy other people's software without restrictions is a fundamental freedom at all, any more than the freedom to be free from annoying people who talk on cell phones on public transportation.
Copyright has been around almost as long as the printing press, and would seem to be a useful thing. I think that the current state of affairs is excessive, but I think that a world without copyright is also excessive, merely in the opposite direction. As usual, moderation is the most useful position.
I'm not selling out or rationalizing, I simply don't share your ideals. I don't believe that this freedom is less important than others, I believe that it is not a fundamental freedom at all.
This is a nonsensical argument. My proprietary software doesn't harm its users, unlike abusive governments and companies.
I don't care if you can hurt or kill people with it. The question is whether you can successfully destroy or hijack an airliner with a given item. The answer is "yes" for bombs and guns, and "no" for box cutters and scissors. It worked once with box cutters, and it will never work again with anything short of a firearm. Even the gun will probably need to be semiautomatic to succeed against a bunch of angry passengers with nothing to lose. Confiscating scissors and nail clippers is not doing anything to enhance my safety.
All manner of harmless items have been banned on airliners, such as nail clippers and children's scissors.
The current administration is already seriously discussing jamming cell phones and GPS in the event of a terrorist attack. While it's not a ban, it's in the same ball park as far as the kind of thinking goes.
Are you sure? If the original poster is correct and the impact energy is half a gigaton, then it will be comparable to the energy released in the earthquake, which was about 1.8 gigatons, also according to slashdot. Of course, slashdot is not exactly a reliable source for these kinds of things.
Ocean would probably be worse. If it landed in the ocean, it would probably be like yesterday's unpleasantness with a great many people killed by tsunami. Landing on land, it would just make a big boom and put a lot of dirt into the air, unless it happened to land in a populated area. Worst case is a city, of course, but that's not likely.
I personally think that adding proprietary software to the world increases, not decreases, freedom. The existence of my software in the world gives people more choice. The fact that my software is non-free doesn't change that fact, it just changes the nature of the choice.
My guess would be that it's more effective to simply use a second parachute as your backup.
I'm sorry if you took offense, as none was intended.
You're correct on the first count, but completely wrong on the second. Here's what Bungie has to say about the "flop" of the PC version of Marathon 2: Well, as they say, correlation does not equal causation. That period saw several Bungie releases, Marathon 2 Mac, Marathon Infinity, Abuse, and Marathon 2 PC. Also, the fact that the PC market is many times bigger than the Mac market means that it could still be a flop on the PC side while being a relative hit for Bungie.
But Oni was intended to be a Mac-only game. It wasn't until 1999 (Oni dates back to the creation of the west-coast office in 1997), that it was announced to be a Mac/PC/PS2 title. It was also to be Bungie's first real console game (Marathon was ported to Pippin, but we all know what happend to that, uhh, wildly succesful platform...)
Do you have any cites for that? It doesn't agree with my memory at all, and I have a hard time believing that they would do another Mac-only game after two hugely successful cross-platform games. However, I can't find any actual information on this.
Even worse, it took forever for the crappy ports to come out. Bite me, Microsoft!
Indeed. Halo went from the Next Big Thing to just another FPS with better-than-average AI and cookie-cutter level design. Sigh.
The best resource is people. Find some computer enthusiasts and talk to them in the language you're trying to learn. (Resist English!) You'll pick up the terminology just by being around it and being corrected when you use the wrong one.
Remember, Halo and Oni were originally going to be Mac-only before Microsoft bought them out.
No they weren't. You need a Bungie history lesson.
Bungie's first PC game was Marathon 2. It mostly fell flat on the PC side, but that was their first foray into the Windows world.
Next up was Myth, which was a simultaneous Mac/PC release. Myth 2 followed the same tradition. Oni was simultaneous or nearly so for the Mac and PC, and also came out for the PS2. All of this was before the Microsoft Unpleasantness.
Halo was originally developed on Macs and intended for the same simultaneous Mac/PC release as all of their other stuff until Microsoft bought them out. Bungie hadn't been Mac-only for a long time at that point, and Microsoft's big change was making it an Xbox exclusive, and then finally allowing crappy ports to the PC and Mac worlds.
I personally think that Halo is way better gameplay-wise. The AI makes it much more interesting to play, but Marathon was still kick-ass for its time. However, Halo's story really is weak and flat by comparison. Halo seems to throw in reversals and betrayals more out of boredom than anything else. Marathon's betrayals are all precisely timed to have the maximum impact when they kick you in the nuts. Its story still blows my mind today, and IMO it can stand next to the best SF books that I've read.
Given that Tiger is not available to the public yet, I would say that the quoted text is perfectly accurate, although it is destined for irrelevancy pretty soon.
It's too bad Amtrak sucks harder than I believed physically possible, and can't even keep their trains on time in clear weather during the quietest periods of the year.
These days, "we hate the customer" seems to be the motto of all of the big airlines.
This summer, I was flying from Paris to Ft. Lauderdale via Philadelphia on USAir. The Paris->Philadelphia leg was handled by the same plane that does USAir's Philadelphia->Paris flight that same day. The incoming flight was about four hours late, so of course our outgoing flight was also four hours late. Sucks, but what can you do.
So we get into Philadelphia at about 9PM instead of 4:30PM and everybody rushes to get any last-minute connections they can. I was already stuffed and had to wait for the next day's flight, but a lot of people had chances to make late flights to their destination. We all get off the plane, go through customs, get to USAir's rebooking desk.
Two people are working this desk.
An airplane with three hundred people comes in four hours late. USAir knew that this flight would be late almost a full day in advance, since it was a cascade effect from the other flight's delay. And yet, none of USAir's genius managers had the presence of mind to call in a few extra employees that night to speed things along.
A lot of people missed connections they otherwise could have made, because they had to wait in line for an hour to get new tickets.
Since USAir obviously hates their customers exceptionally strongly, I won't be flying with them again.
This isn't really an isolated incident, either, just the most recent bad one. The entire industry has a serious problem with this, and I have a feeling it's going to take a couple of high-profile bankruptcies before they get a grip on it.
I'll take a simplistic approach and model the collision without gravity. This is not really correct, but it will probably be within an order of magnitude. The situation is not really chaotic even with gravity, at least in the short term, so the size of the change in the result is likely to be close to the size in the change at the beginning.
Assume the asteroid is a year away from collision when it's found, and it's on course directly for the center of Earth. Our error needs to be less than the amount of speed that would make the asteroid be more than one Earth radius away from where we think it will be, one year into the future. Take the radius of the Earth, divide by a year, and you get 20cm/s. This is pretty low, and I honestly don't know if we can determine an asteroid's velocity that accurately or not. We seem to come very close to this sort of accuracy with space probes, but they have onboard star trackers and guidance computers, and they also have course correction thrusters. Anybody have more concrete numbers?
West Wing jumped the shark long ago. With cardboard cutout characters like "George W. Bush" and "Donald Rumsfeld", I can't believe anybody ever took it seriously. The whole mess in "Iraq" (wherever that's supposed to be) has just been ridiculously long and drawn out, and is obviously just a lame recurring plot device to make up for the fact that their writers have no original ideas. They constantly introduce new major adversaries and then forget about them (anybody remember "Osama bin Laden" from the 2001 season, or "Saddam Hussein" from last year?) and in general it's just a gigantic farce. I'm surprised anybody pays any attention to it these days.
Approximately one billion Chinese people eat nothing but Chinese food all the time, and they seem to be doing fine.