Am I the only one who saw that and thought to themselves "I know about watercooling, but how in the world will fuel injection help people's computer performance?"
That aside, that's pretty cool. I wouldn't be willing to put one in my car, but it's still cool. Plus you could hack up the monitor circuit so you could connect it to your incar Linux PC with a little LCD panel to watch your engine in real time, or maybe use you're engine's performance (rpms, mix, etc) to somehow controll the music being played. The pointless add-on possibilities are endless.
Looking at the graph, expansion packs don't seem to do much of anything to the number of players (execpt for the Acheron's Call, which quickly went back to normal). It would seem that while expansion packs are good at keeping gamers from quitting (things are usually flat after an expansion pack is released) they don't do anything to add to the numbers (what do you expect). That said, here are some things I find interesting about different games:
EverQuest - What can I say? It shot up fast and while it seems to be slowing down (might start DROPPING soon) it's WAY above everyone else.
Ultima Online - Can someone explain to me the big upswing before the last expansion pack? The upswing started at about Nov '02. Is this some kind of pre-expansion pack rejoining?
FFXI - Seems to be growing fast. What do you expect from a FF game?
Anarchy Online - Why did this suddenly drop/plunge after March '02?
Sims Online - Went up quick, leveled off quick, what comes next (falls off quick????)?
WWII Online - Do they have a hard limit on the number of subscribers? It's like a straight line. Would be good if there were more than a handfull of subscribers.
This chart will be cool to watch if he keeps updating it. It will be interesting to see what the new EverQuest game does to the old, etc.
Also, it would be cool to see the same graph, only relative to the previous sample instead (so up/down trends could be seen easier).
I don't have access to a Mac (let alone two) but couldn't you use a VPN if you wanted to stream from home to work or vice versa? You know, tunnel the traffic so it looks like one local network even though it isn't?
I remember hearing recently that about 470k votes didn't get counted for American Idol because if you dialed a number wrong your phone would ring up some poor little church. Watch those phone numbers people.
I think the fuss was because a demo of the GCN (I think it was shown at Spaceworld) showed Link fighting Gannon before the system came out. The demo looked amazing, it used the version of Link that is now in Soul Calaber (spelling?). I think that game would have looked awesome, and I think many others thought the same way. So when the look was changed, you have to be disapointed in a way.
I wasn't worried about Zelda when I heard about the change, but I wasn't sure it would work too well. As more and more screenshots and videos came out, I became more sure. Once I played the game though, I have to say that they did an AMAZING job with it. The game still doesn't look like a cartoon (no cell shading game has gotten that good. They might have moments, but...), but it does have great style. I can't wait to play/see the sequel.
Also, remember that there weren't that many cel shaded games when the change was announced. You had Jet Set Radio (which was good) and Klona 2 was out then too (I think), but other than that the few games that were celshaded were pretty bad (like that one wacky-races-twisted-metal hybrid that was supposed to be pretty bad). There just weren't many games that did it successfuly. But people should really learn to trust Nintendo more, it turned out great, didn't it?
PS: OT: I just got my Technician License last Sat and yesterday the FCC gave me my callsign. Yeah!
This is a bit off topic, but does the term "next-gen" consoles bug anyone else in the way it's used above.
It seems to me, that the term "next-gen consoles" should refer to the next generation of consoles. So you would use it to refer to X-Box 2, Playstaion 3, and the Gopher (Nintendo's next console, yes I made that code name up). You'd use it now to refer to those consoles. You'd use it after they had come out but it was still quite common for new games to come out on current consoles because they are still so common and big. You don't use the term "next-gen" to refer to the CURRENT generation of consoles when the "true" next-gen consoles are at least a year or two away.
Why? It's confusing. If you read what was submited, it sounds like the sequel to Splinter Cell will be comming out for the PS3, XBox2, and Weasle (maybe that's a better name;). But they are comming out for the CURRENT consoles
Would it have been that hard to write "...released on all major consoles in early 2004."? No.
I think you'd be suprised how often a mom or dad buys a game at wal-mart for their kid. Hopefully the sales person will know what's going on, but you can't always count on that. Personally, like I said in my origional comment, I think the naming is just something to live with. It's not like it's a real problem.
This was mentioned on X-Play (on TechTV) the other day. The fact is they CAN'T rename the titles. I don't know how it started, but there are two reasons they can't change it.
First, if they change it, then what do they call the first title with the new naming scheme? The old one was "Madden 2k3", and the new one will be... "Madden 2k3"? That won't work. Will they call it "Madden 2k3 2.0"? I don' think that will work either. They can't call it "Madden", because most people would probably assume "Madden 2k3" (the older title) would be newer than the one named "Madden".
But more to the point, if one company changes things and names it correctly (so the game that comes out in 2k3 is called 2k3, not 2k4) then they are at a LOSS compared to the competition. If Joe Schmoe goes to buy a football game for his PS2/XBox/GCN and sees the following three things, which one is he least likely to buy:
Football '04 (wrong)
Madden 2k3 (correct)
NFL 2004 (wrong)
I say he will be least likely to buy Madden (all else being equal to him) because it seems "older" than the other titles. So unless EVERYONE in the industry switches at once, it seems like it's not in the best intreset of any of the publishers to correct the naming problem. I think this is just something that we'll all just learn to accept like the naming of cars model years.
PS: Sorry to pick on Madden, it's just the name of the first football game to come to my mind, so I used it as an example. I haven't played ANY football games in years (not my thing) so don't go fanboy on me and take it as some kind of judgement.
We have found quite a lot of evidence of WMD in Iraq. Even if we hadn't, freeing the people was worth it. That said, they're just taking picutes so the normal limitations of "can't see through things" are still there. If you think I'm wrong them post a picture of the inside of NORAD taken from a satalite to prove me wrong.
I'd think you'd have to roll your own. That said, it shouldn't be too hard to do. Just take a laptop drive, interface it to a microcontroller (search Google and you can find code and such to interface PICs, Amtels, HC11s, and others to HDs). Add ethernet (either a ethernet chip, you can find info on interfacing those with the same microcontrollers) or just use a reliable ISA card (3c509s are very well documented) and connect that to the microcontroller (also easy to do).
Lyrics from a Moxy Fruvous song called "Guinea Pig". I'm not against geneticaly enginered food, but it just seemed apropriate.
dont ya tell me what youre putting in my lunch box dont
tell me what your feeding me today,
dont fill my head with trouble while im scarfin' down a cheese soufle
I wanna be a new, original creation
a cross between a moose a monkey and a
fig
I'm ready Monsanto let me be your guina pig
cuz the seed we sew aint good enough
the earth we plow it aint good enough
the food we grow well its never been up to scratch,
the geezer with the beard and all the angels
made a few mistakes I dont know why
we dont need him anymore if geneticly modefy
so dont ya tell me what youre puttin in my lunch box
I got a crazy pioneering additude
dont bother me with labels gotta get a belly full of franken-food
Since Gentoo is a source based distro and x86-64 PCs can boot/run 32bit code, Gentoo can already do this unofficially. You should be able to boot off a regular x86 disk and install gentoo if you just set the compiler right and such. I'm pretty sure it's been done before, but it will be great to see it be official. That said, I'm glad to see one of my two favorite distros (Debian is the other) supporting the Opteron. Yeah Gentoo!
The Toshiba Box: RD-X2
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Near as I can tell, here is the Toshiba box that the story talks about. The URL is also below:
http://www.toshiba.com/tacp/dvd/current/RDX2.htm l
I got in the late beta and signed up in November, so I'd assume that's when you start to see renewals. That means they'd need to have any new pricing structures (I doubt they'd do this) inplace before that (Oct?).
I don't want to buy a DVORAK keyboar just to have to learn to use it. Yes I know you can remap keyboards but...
I use many computers off and on and I don't want to switch between the two on a daily (or even hourly) basis. Yes I know you can remap keyboards but...
Basically it would cost me time, money, and make my life harder. You only want to switch to things if it saves you time, money, or makes your life easier.
I've been running various versions of 2.5 for a while now. You need to make sure you have the new module utils installed, but otherwise just use it! I haven't had any problems with it (other than it can be a bit of a pain to get the nVidia binary drivers working, but it's not that bad). I think the performance is better. But if you can (IE you don't need hardware that doesn't currently work) then I'd suggest you use it.
All I'll say is that I sure hope that Half-Life 2 has a better ending that the origional. Half-Life was one of the best games I've ever played, but it had one of the worst endings I've ever seen.
I would think that a form of electrostatic air filtration would do the best job. Sharper Image has two or three (here, or here) would be the kind of thing your after. There are different sizes, etc, but this is probably the best thing you can get. On top of this, you might want to invest in some of those fan filter covers for computer fans that are made of fabric or whatever to keep dust out. There are some here, here, and here. I would think that the combination of these things would keep you pretty low on dust. That said, make sure to clean the air purifier and check the fan filters every once in a while to make sure they're clear or else thing might end up worse than before. Once the room is clean (after the first week or whatever) and you've cleaned everything out, I'd imagine that you'd wouldn't have to check the fan filters much at all (maybe only when working on that specific PC) as long as you keep the electrostatic air filter going on clean.
Also, see if you can talk to whoever in incharge of the heating/AC system in the building to see if there is anything they can do. Maybe Allergy Free has a filter that would work with the system or maybe you could get together the with the other groups of people in the building and buy an electrostatic air filtration system for the whole building. They work great on both dust and allergies. These are just wild ideas from brainstorming, they really aren't that realistic I guess. The first paragraph though will probably work well.
PS: We have electrostatic air filters installed in our house. We also had them installed in the house we had before this one. Our family has allergy problems and when we clean them, you'd be amazed the colors the water turns from what comes off them. They really do catch alot.
PPS: Or you could just watercool everything and run it all through one massive radiator. But this would be a bit more than $500. More pipedreaming.
Yeah, I thought of requiring a license a long time ago too. You can see at http://www.foobarsoft.com/opinions/internetproblem sandsolutions.shtml. Of course, the real problem with this is that you'd have to get every country to agree to do this and make sure no one cheats and such. It would have been nice long ago, but it's way too late in the game to do it today.
My e-mail address is plastered all over the internet, and I don't feel like changing it. I have been getting more and more spam, but I've got it pretty much under controll. For the record I get 20-30 e-mails a day, only 0-2 of which is ham. Here is my little anti-spam journey.
First I ignored it. This worked for a while, but my paitence didn't grow nearly as fast as the spam volume (I've been on the net for years, so I remember when spam was a rare occurace). These are only the major things. I've tried others here and there.
Next I started using MS Outlook's built in spam catcher. This is basically a blacklist that you maintain that you can easily add things too. This actually worked somewhat well, but as the use of forged addresses (and just plain random ones) grew, this became less effective.
Next I started to use SpamNet. I used this up untill about last week. This used to be somewhat effective, and in the last month or so has been almost completely effective. This is the most wonderfull anti-spam device I've used. It was great near the end of the beta. But now it's out of beta and I'm not going to pay $5 a month to stop something I shouldn't get in the first place. Sorry Cloudmark.
When Spamnet started, it was pretty effective, but still left a decent amount to be desired. So I searched around and found SAProxy. This program let's you run Spamassassin on Windows, and the combination of this and Spamnet worked wonders. As Spamnet got better, this became more or less useless.
Unfortunatly, I had to get rid of Spamnet, due to the afformentioned monthly fee. So now all I have is SAProxy. It does work great, and it does get better with each new release. Now only about 3 messages a day get through, which is quite fantastic. Only 5% or so of the spam I get gets though. I could set the limit lower (to catch more spam) but right now I don't have to worry about it catching ham (it never has for me) and I don't want to have to start wading through my spam folder to check for ham. I thought I was using this stuff to not have to do that in the first place?
So in short, I'm now using SAProxy and quite happy. If there was a free version of Spamnet, I'd use it, but there isn't. If you're on Windows and have a supported e-mail client, get SAProxy, and save yourself a huge headache.
So what will I use next? I've been thinking of setting up a perl script to automatically find the home address of people who spam me and sending them a few ICBMs with notes attached like "HOW TO WIN AT EBAY WITH FREE CHEAP ICBMS THAT INCREASE YOUR SEXLIFE AND GROW HAIR."
This is why we need to be able to use spectral evidence. I'll say right now last night a spectare came to my house and put spam in my e-mail box. I'll say that at any trial for anyone. It will only cost you $5.
"A Linux PC in most countries is a PC in which somebody is being encouraged to pirate Windows."
I think this sums up what MS is thinking. It seems very clear to me from reading the interview that they don't see Linux as that big a threat, or at least anything serious. We know that they are running scared in some areas, but untill they can admit to themselves what Linux really is and what it's going to do to them if they don't change, they are in trouble. Good thing they have a few billion in cash to burn while they try to figure out which way is up.
That's a good question. I'd like to know the answer too. That said, it obviously depends on how the game was programed.
If everything is seperate, so that you could just drop in some new files to completely change the sound or graphics subsystem, then it shouldn't take too long.
If, on the other hand, everything is woven into the game tightly, it could take a VERY long time. By this I mean things like having a function like:
void doCPUPlayerLogic(HWND parrent...);
If the logic is like that, you're going to have to rewrite large parts of the game. "Proper" programming suggests that you should program like the first option, but we all know that doesn't happen. Depending on if they origionally thought they would port it (they would have been thinking Mac or console I'd bet), just how hurried they were (often the second solution can be easier to do), etc.
That said, can anyone answer the question well? How long does it take to port the average game to Linux? Does it vary by genre (obviously a FPS that uses OGL would be easier to port than one that uses DirectX)?
Slashdot Mirror
That aside, that's pretty cool. I wouldn't be willing to put one in my car, but it's still cool. Plus you could hack up the monitor circuit so you could connect it to your incar Linux PC with a little LCD panel to watch your engine in real time, or maybe use you're engine's performance (rpms, mix, etc) to somehow controll the music being played. The pointless add-on possibilities are endless.
This chart will be cool to watch if he keeps updating it. It will be interesting to see what the new EverQuest game does to the old, etc.
Also, it would be cool to see the same graph, only relative to the previous sample instead (so up/down trends could be seen easier).
I don't have access to a Mac (let alone two) but couldn't you use a VPN if you wanted to stream from home to work or vice versa? You know, tunnel the traffic so it looks like one local network even though it isn't?
I remember hearing recently that about 470k votes didn't get counted for American Idol because if you dialed a number wrong your phone would ring up some poor little church. Watch those phone numbers people.
I wasn't worried about Zelda when I heard about the change, but I wasn't sure it would work too well. As more and more screenshots and videos came out, I became more sure. Once I played the game though, I have to say that they did an AMAZING job with it. The game still doesn't look like a cartoon (no cell shading game has gotten that good. They might have moments, but...), but it does have great style. I can't wait to play/see the sequel.
Also, remember that there weren't that many cel shaded games when the change was announced. You had Jet Set Radio (which was good) and Klona 2 was out then too (I think), but other than that the few games that were celshaded were pretty bad (like that one wacky-races-twisted-metal hybrid that was supposed to be pretty bad). There just weren't many games that did it successfuly. But people should really learn to trust Nintendo more, it turned out great, didn't it?
PS: OT: I just got my Technician License last Sat and yesterday the FCC gave me my callsign. Yeah!
It seems to me, that the term "next-gen consoles" should refer to the next generation of consoles. So you would use it to refer to X-Box 2, Playstaion 3, and the Gopher (Nintendo's next console, yes I made that code name up). You'd use it now to refer to those consoles. You'd use it after they had come out but it was still quite common for new games to come out on current consoles because they are still so common and big. You don't use the term "next-gen" to refer to the CURRENT generation of consoles when the "true" next-gen consoles are at least a year or two away.
Why? It's confusing. If you read what was submited, it sounds like the sequel to Splinter Cell will be comming out for the PS3, XBox2, and Weasle (maybe that's a better name ;). But they are comming out for the CURRENT consoles
Would it have been that hard to write "...released on all major consoles in early 2004."? No.
I think you'd be suprised how often a mom or dad buys a game at wal-mart for their kid. Hopefully the sales person will know what's going on, but you can't always count on that. Personally, like I said in my origional comment, I think the naming is just something to live with. It's not like it's a real problem.
First, if they change it, then what do they call the first title with the new naming scheme? The old one was "Madden 2k3", and the new one will be... "Madden 2k3"? That won't work. Will they call it "Madden 2k3 2.0"? I don' think that will work either. They can't call it "Madden", because most people would probably assume "Madden 2k3" (the older title) would be newer than the one named "Madden".
But more to the point, if one company changes things and names it correctly (so the game that comes out in 2k3 is called 2k3, not 2k4) then they are at a LOSS compared to the competition. If Joe Schmoe goes to buy a football game for his PS2/XBox/GCN and sees the following three things, which one is he least likely to buy:
I say he will be least likely to buy Madden (all else being equal to him) because it seems "older" than the other titles. So unless EVERYONE in the industry switches at once, it seems like it's not in the best intreset of any of the publishers to correct the naming problem. I think this is just something that we'll all just learn to accept like the naming of cars model years.
PS: Sorry to pick on Madden, it's just the name of the first football game to come to my mind, so I used it as an example. I haven't played ANY football games in years (not my thing) so don't go fanboy on me and take it as some kind of judgement.
That must be a pretty low flying satalite. Let's try from a satalite in ORBIT this time ;)
We have found quite a lot of evidence of WMD in Iraq. Even if we hadn't, freeing the people was worth it. That said, they're just taking picutes so the normal limitations of "can't see through things" are still there. If you think I'm wrong them post a picture of the inside of NORAD taken from a satalite to prove me wrong.
I'd think you'd have to roll your own. That said, it shouldn't be too hard to do. Just take a laptop drive, interface it to a microcontroller (search Google and you can find code and such to interface PICs, Amtels, HC11s, and others to HDs). Add ethernet (either a ethernet chip, you can find info on interfacing those with the same microcontrollers) or just use a reliable ISA card (3c509s are very well documented) and connect that to the microcontroller (also easy to do).
Does this mean Windows doesn't crash?
Wow... My eyes have been k#dK%SDJ3(&s*x@M NO CARRIER
Since Gentoo is a source based distro and x86-64 PCs can boot/run 32bit code, Gentoo can already do this unofficially. You should be able to boot off a regular x86 disk and install gentoo if you just set the compiler right and such. I'm pretty sure it's been done before, but it will be great to see it be official. That said, I'm glad to see one of my two favorite distros (Debian is the other) supporting the Opteron. Yeah Gentoo!
http://www.toshiba.com/tacp/dvd/current/RDX2.htm l
I got in the late beta and signed up in November, so I'd assume that's when you start to see renewals. That means they'd need to have any new pricing structures (I doubt they'd do this) inplace before that (Oct?).
Game, set, match... QWERTY.
I've been running various versions of 2.5 for a while now. You need to make sure you have the new module utils installed, but otherwise just use it! I haven't had any problems with it (other than it can be a bit of a pain to get the nVidia binary drivers working, but it's not that bad). I think the performance is better. But if you can (IE you don't need hardware that doesn't currently work) then I'd suggest you use it.
All I'll say is that I sure hope that Half-Life 2 has a better ending that the origional. Half-Life was one of the best games I've ever played, but it had one of the worst endings I've ever seen.
Also, see if you can talk to whoever in incharge of the heating/AC system in the building to see if there is anything they can do. Maybe Allergy Free has a filter that would work with the system or maybe you could get together the with the other groups of people in the building and buy an electrostatic air filtration system for the whole building. They work great on both dust and allergies. These are just wild ideas from brainstorming, they really aren't that realistic I guess. The first paragraph though will probably work well.
PS: We have electrostatic air filters installed in our house. We also had them installed in the house we had before this one. Our family has allergy problems and when we clean them, you'd be amazed the colors the water turns from what comes off them. They really do catch alot.
PPS: Or you could just watercool everything and run it all through one massive radiator. But this would be a bit more than $500. More pipedreaming.
Yeah, I thought of requiring a license a long time ago too. You can see at http://www.foobarsoft.com/opinions/internetproblem sandsolutions.shtml. Of course, the real problem with this is that you'd have to get every country to agree to do this and make sure no one cheats and such. It would have been nice long ago, but it's way too late in the game to do it today.
First I ignored it. This worked for a while, but my paitence didn't grow nearly as fast as the spam volume (I've been on the net for years, so I remember when spam was a rare occurace). These are only the major things. I've tried others here and there.
Next I started using MS Outlook's built in spam catcher. This is basically a blacklist that you maintain that you can easily add things too. This actually worked somewhat well, but as the use of forged addresses (and just plain random ones) grew, this became less effective.
Next I started to use SpamNet. I used this up untill about last week. This used to be somewhat effective, and in the last month or so has been almost completely effective. This is the most wonderfull anti-spam device I've used. It was great near the end of the beta. But now it's out of beta and I'm not going to pay $5 a month to stop something I shouldn't get in the first place. Sorry Cloudmark.
When Spamnet started, it was pretty effective, but still left a decent amount to be desired. So I searched around and found SAProxy. This program let's you run Spamassassin on Windows, and the combination of this and Spamnet worked wonders. As Spamnet got better, this became more or less useless.
Unfortunatly, I had to get rid of Spamnet, due to the afformentioned monthly fee. So now all I have is SAProxy. It does work great, and it does get better with each new release. Now only about 3 messages a day get through, which is quite fantastic. Only 5% or so of the spam I get gets though. I could set the limit lower (to catch more spam) but right now I don't have to worry about it catching ham (it never has for me) and I don't want to have to start wading through my spam folder to check for ham. I thought I was using this stuff to not have to do that in the first place?
So in short, I'm now using SAProxy and quite happy. If there was a free version of Spamnet, I'd use it, but there isn't. If you're on Windows and have a supported e-mail client, get SAProxy, and save yourself a huge headache.
So what will I use next? I've been thinking of setting up a perl script to automatically find the home address of people who spam me and sending them a few ICBMs with notes attached like "HOW TO WIN AT EBAY WITH FREE CHEAP ICBMS THAT INCREASE YOUR SEXLIFE AND GROW HAIR."
This is why we need to be able to use spectral evidence. I'll say right now last night a spectare came to my house and put spam in my e-mail box. I'll say that at any trial for anyone. It will only cost you $5.
I think this sums up what MS is thinking. It seems very clear to me from reading the interview that they don't see Linux as that big a threat, or at least anything serious. We know that they are running scared in some areas, but untill they can admit to themselves what Linux really is and what it's going to do to them if they don't change, they are in trouble. Good thing they have a few billion in cash to burn while they try to figure out which way is up.
If everything is seperate, so that you could just drop in some new files to completely change the sound or graphics subsystem, then it shouldn't take too long.
If, on the other hand, everything is woven into the game tightly, it could take a VERY long time. By this I mean things like having a function like:
void doCPUPlayerLogic(HWND parrent...);
If the logic is like that, you're going to have to rewrite large parts of the game. "Proper" programming suggests that you should program like the first option, but we all know that doesn't happen. Depending on if they origionally thought they would port it (they would have been thinking Mac or console I'd bet), just how hurried they were (often the second solution can be easier to do), etc.
That said, can anyone answer the question well? How long does it take to port the average game to Linux? Does it vary by genre (obviously a FPS that uses OGL would be easier to port than one that uses DirectX)?