Wow, cool. Works as well in AfterStep as I could really imagine it working. Just one thing... how do you turn it off? Replacing 'true' with 'false' in that javascript call doesn't seem to do it for me.
From the GPL: The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
While this obsfucated form of the source is indeed machine-readable, you're going to have a hard time passing it off as the preferred form for making modifications. Seems fairly open and shut to me.
I really like what Maxis did with Sim City Classic - they ported it to Shockwave and you can play it right on their website! (and you stare at a few ads, oh well)
Wow, that is really cool idea. Unfortunately, Maxis (now EA)'s website is a bitch and a half to navigate. They JS redirect you to a "sorry, you can't come in page" if you don't accept cookies, and if you turn off JS, the site won't work. For those of you who don't feel like digging through it yourself, check the appropriate page out at http://simcity.ea.com/us/guide/classic/index.phtml .
It really does work, and seems like a great move for everyone involved. Granted, Simcity is a fairly simple game by modern standards, so I'm not sure how many other (even abandonware) games could be converted easily to Shockwave. Man would I love to see a Shockwave version of Civ 1, though.
Re:The real reason for FreeDOS...
on
FreeDOS
·
· Score: 1
Hell yeah. These new kids with their Unreal and their Counterstrike. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who misses the good old days and thinks Quake has better graphics than necessary.
Don't tell me Bush is thinking of bringing back Project Orion. It's almost a good idea, except for the bad PR and the possible nuclear contamination. Not that I'd object to Bush getting some bad PR, of course.
Apparently, there were plans to build a high-atmosphere sky base above the USSR during the cold war using this technology. Makes you wonder just what our government is capable of.
Not true. Attempting to download a file directly from port 1214 of a machine which already has maximum downloads results in a 503 Service Unavailable error. Using direct HTTP seems to produce almost identical results to using the FastTrack clients.
Well, my university supports Redhat. We bought something like 100 copies of 7.2 deluxe (or whatever they call it). We just chose not to pay for RHN because it doesn't fit our needs.
As far as personal use goes, people who are cheap wouldn't buy RHN anyway and would just do their own updates. At least this way their machines can be secure.
Should people not use the GIMP because they could buy Photoshop? Certainly the free software movement owes Adobe a debt for their ideas, if not for their code.
To have the machine update itself with a click of the mouse, even if I am away from the box out of town is a nice benefit as well.
There's really no need to pay for this sort of thing. Searching for "redhat update" on Freshmeat reveals 5 GPLed update tools. I even wrote one myself to meet my university's specific needs. Download it, run it with -writeconfig, edit the config file to point to your favorite mirror, copy the script to/etc/cron.daily, and you're set for automatic update retrieval.
Beyond basic "rpm -Fvh" functionality, it can be configured to send mail to a specific address when updates arrive, ignore certain packages (with regexp support), and write a script which performs the updates when run.
It's called HURL (Hurl Updates Redhat Linux), and you can get a copy here. Drop me some mail if you like it or have suggestions.
I really don't see why everyone compares computers to TV in articles like this. Just because both have a lighted screen doesn't mean the experience is at all similar.
For the sake of argument, say the top three computer activities are web surfing, chatting, and playing games. Web surfing is essentially reading, which the article mentions early on as an acceptable alternative to TV. Chatting, while clearly not as good as actual face to face interaction, does at least involve some mental involvement, as well as a social element. Game playing probably gets the worst rap of these activities, but even it consists of some sort of intellectual stimulation.
TV's real problem is that it is a passive medium; the only choice a viewer makes is which channel to watch. Computers, by contrast, are almost completely interactive. Nearly anything a person uses a computer for requires some amount of thought, and for that reason it's really misleading to declare computer use analagous to TV viewing. Even the verb is different - people don't "use TVs" or "watch computers."
Holly: I was in love once - a Sinclair ZX-81. People said, "No, Holly, she's not for you." She was cheap, she was stupid and she wouldn't load - well, not for me, anyway.
Lister: What are you trying to say, Hol?
Holly: What I'm saying, Dave, is that it's better to have loved and to have lost than to listen to an album by Olivia Newton-John.
Cat: Why's that?
Holly: Anything's better than listening to an album by Olivia Newton-John.
Here's a link to their actual disclaimer page. By posting this, I'm violating both their "no linking without permission" policy and their "no links that bypass the homepage" policy.
If they really cared, couldn't they just block all pages but their index for all browsers who don't send a referer header indicating they came from another page on their site? If you're going to make up stupid rules, you might as well enforce them when it's that easy to do.
I only work for the campus network admin, so I don't have a complete understanding of what we do and how it works, but I'll give it a shot.
As I understand it, Morpheus does not heed the various TCP/IP limitations concerning speed of connection attempts, numbers of concurrent connections/connection attempts, etc. Therefore, trying to limit its access to bandwidth through TCP/IP traffic shaping doesn't work the same way it does for say, Napster or Gnutella. With those applications, we were simply able to assign them a low priority, such that they would only get bandwidth which wasn't being used by more critical applications. With Morpheus, we've had to impose a router-level traffic cap on the port, which is an imperfect fix because a lot of the time, it would be perfectly alright for Morpheus to be using say 60% of the campus bandwidth when nobody else is interested in doing much. Instead, it always has to be confined to 15% or so.
Ironically, the cheats that Morpheus uses to get more bandwidth actually resulted in it getting less in this situation.
Too bad that in order to do provide such great filesharing service, they wreck everyone else's network experience. The client pulls all sorts of nasty against-RFC tricks in order to increase its avalible bandwidth, which result in Morpheus/Kaaza/MusicCity users getting more than their fair share of the network.
At the university I attend, things got so bad at times that although 50 or so people would be downloading movies at a given time at perfectly reasonable speeds, no one else could so much as surf the web without unacceptable lag. Worse, standard application-priority procedures didn't work because of the applications' non-standards compliant behavior. We ended up having to impose a hard limit on the amount of bandwidth allowed on that port, severely limiting the resources allowed to the programs, even when the network is mostly idle.
The bottom line is that there's more than ethical problems with these new services. By resorting to breaking network protocol rules in order to increase bandwidth, they're setting a very bad precendent. If more programs begin to follow their example of treating the host network as something to be selfishly exploited, network admins will be forced to impose draconian restrictions on network use. This would be a very Bad Thing (TM), and it's my biggest problem with these new services.
Seriously. The best feature of AfterStep, my WM of choice, is a damn lot of workspaces with definable key bindings to switch between them. I usually keep 4 groups of 8 desktops each open: one group for terminals, one for web browsers, one for TIK and XMMS, and one for miscellaneous stuff. Getting around is as easy as glancing at the pager, then CTRL-arrow key and/or CTRL-SHIFT-arrow key
.
If you are really mouse-phobic, you can also define keys to move your cursor around. Combine this with auto-focus and you'll be surprised how little you'll use your mouse.
While I will agree that an FPS can be pretty frightening with the right setup, the game that frightened me the most of all the games I've played was X-COM 2. You'd be leading your team around an underwater alien crash site at night with almost no visibility and creepy music in the background, when suddenly a bolt of energy would shoot out from the darkness and get one of your soldiers in the back. If you play in the dark, in a quiet room, you will seriously jump a mile when that happens.
Anyone who's played the game will agree with me that turn-based strategy can be just as scary as real-time games.
Nice troll! I give it about an 8 out of 10. I like the transition from almost reasonable claims to outright lies that nobody would ever believe especially. The troll seems to peak most of the way through the big central paragraph, though, and the rest just distracts from the point. You either ought to quit while you're ahead or continue to make even more outrageous claims. Remember, a short, concise troll is usually better than a long-winded and well-developed one.
I also recommend a little stronger technological background in the introduction. Just mentioning kernel 2.4.9 isn't going to cut it. Try throwing in mentions of Redhat 6.2 for additional stability, Tux webserver for speed, and maybe some impressive hardware specs. The more it sounds like you know what you're talking about in the introduction, the better the ultimate troll effect.
Please drop a reply if you have any questions or want any more advice.
Brandeis owns brandeis.edu and brandeis.org. Brandeis.com is an add/portal redirector, however, so it's hard to argue that Brandeis has no reason to have taken the.org rather than have it suffer a similar fate.
I liked this game better...
on
Pirates!
·
· Score: 3, Informative
when it was by Sid Meier and ran on a 68k Mac (monochrome or color!).
I know some old school gamers will back me up on this.
Re:Not such a great open source example.
on
FreeCiv 1.12.0 Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Actually, FreeCiv is a great example of what open source can accomplish. Sure, Civilization is a few years old, but its follow-ups in the same style (Colonization, Civ II and Alpha Centauri) were all very good and sold well. That Civilization is a classic and among the best computer games ever made is a fact nearly undisputed among experienced gamers. In any case, your point is moot because, for example, nobody complains about the GNU Chess people wasting their time on a centuries-old game rather than writing exciting 3d engines.
Besides, it's not so much just the fact that you can play Civilization for free that makes FreeCiv a triumph of the open source community. What really makes it great is that people who wouldn't normally have access to game source code can see inside the guts of the game, learn how it works, and make changes. The alterations could be as sweeping as an entire new ruleset which could be distributed over the net or as simple as altering a few #DEFINEs just to see what happens, but in any case, the ability to work with the source of a project like this is invaluable.
Hacking this sort of project is a big part of what the open source movement is all about: having a good time, growing intellectually, and inviting others to do the same.
In my opinion, the best sci-fi show still in production is Red Dwarf. It's easily one of the funniest shows I've ever seen, and while the recent seasons (7-8) haven't been nearly as good as the show was at its peak (seasons 1-4), it's still very much worth watching.
Those of you in the UK can look forward to a new season soon, and most of us in the US can catch reruns of the first 8 seasons on our local PBS station.
Granted, LORD was an amazing game, but once you delve into the realm of BBS games, you simply can't do better than the MBBS version of Tradewars 2002. God, I wasted a lot of my life playing that...
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, cool. Works as well in AfterStep as I could really imagine it working. Just one thing... how do you turn it off? Replacing 'true' with 'false' in that javascript call doesn't seem to do it for me.
From the GPL:
The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it.
While this obsfucated form of the source is indeed machine-readable, you're going to have a hard time passing it off as the preferred form for making modifications. Seems fairly open and shut to me.
Wow, that is really cool idea. Unfortunately, Maxis (now EA)'s website is a bitch and a half to navigate. They JS redirect you to a "sorry, you can't come in page" if you don't accept cookies, and if you turn off JS, the site won't work. For those of you who don't feel like digging through it yourself, check the appropriate page out at http://simcity.ea.com/us/guide/classic/index.phtml .
It really does work, and seems like a great move for everyone involved. Granted, Simcity is a fairly simple game by modern standards, so I'm not sure how many other (even abandonware) games could be converted easily to Shockwave. Man would I love to see a Shockwave version of Civ 1, though.
Hell yeah. These new kids with their Unreal and their Counterstrike. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who misses the good old days and thinks Quake has better graphics than necessary.
Don't tell me Bush is thinking of bringing back Project Orion. It's almost a good idea, except for the bad PR and the possible nuclear contamination. Not that I'd object to Bush getting some bad PR, of course.
Apparently, there were plans to build a high-atmosphere sky base above the USSR during the cold war using this technology. Makes you wonder just what our government is capable of.
Not true. Attempting to download a file directly from port 1214 of a machine which already has maximum downloads results in a 503 Service Unavailable error. Using direct HTTP seems to produce almost identical results to using the FastTrack clients.
Well, my university supports Redhat. We bought something like 100 copies of 7.2 deluxe (or whatever they call it). We just chose not to pay for RHN because it doesn't fit our needs.
As far as personal use goes, people who are cheap wouldn't buy RHN anyway and would just do their own updates. At least this way their machines can be secure.
Should people not use the GIMP because they could buy Photoshop? Certainly the free software movement owes Adobe a debt for their ideas, if not for their code.
There's really no need to pay for this sort of thing. Searching for "redhat update" on Freshmeat reveals 5 GPLed update tools. I even wrote one myself to meet my university's specific needs. Download it, run it with -writeconfig, edit the config file to point to your favorite mirror, copy the script to /etc/cron.daily, and you're set for automatic update retrieval.
Beyond basic "rpm -Fvh" functionality, it can be configured to send mail to a specific address when updates arrive, ignore certain packages (with regexp support), and write a script which performs the updates when run.
It's called HURL (Hurl Updates Redhat Linux), and you can get a copy here. Drop me some mail if you like it or have suggestions.
For the sake of argument, say the top three computer activities are web surfing, chatting, and playing games. Web surfing is essentially reading, which the article mentions early on as an acceptable alternative to TV. Chatting, while clearly not as good as actual face to face interaction, does at least involve some mental involvement, as well as a social element. Game playing probably gets the worst rap of these activities, but even it consists of some sort of intellectual stimulation.
TV's real problem is that it is a passive medium; the only choice a viewer makes is which channel to watch. Computers, by contrast, are almost completely interactive. Nearly anything a person uses a computer for requires some amount of thought, and for that reason it's really misleading to declare computer use analagous to TV viewing. Even the verb is different - people don't "use TVs" or "watch computers."
An FP is a terrible thing to waste.
Holly: I was in love once - a Sinclair ZX-81. People said, "No, Holly, she's not for you." She was cheap, she was stupid and she wouldn't load - well, not for me, anyway.
Lister: What are you trying to say, Hol?
Holly: What I'm saying, Dave, is that it's better to have loved and to have lost than to listen to an album by Olivia Newton-John.
Cat: Why's that?
Holly: Anything's better than listening to an album by Olivia Newton-John.
If they really cared, couldn't they just block all pages but their index for all browsers who don't send a referer header indicating they came from another page on their site? If you're going to make up stupid rules, you might as well enforce them when it's that easy to do.
Its fails to consider the possibility that God might punish people for their belief in Him.
"Why on earth did you believe in me? You had no evidence!"
From the story:
Bruce has a website for you to check it. It's got a FAQ and bio for you to examine.
From said FAQ:
Q: CONCERNING "ARMY OF DARKNESS," WHICH ENDING DID YOU PREFER? THE "S-MART" ENDING OR THE "I'VE-SLEPT-TOO-LONG" ENDING?
A: The "I've-slept-too-long" one. It's more appropriate for the idiot, Ash.
I only work for the campus network admin, so I don't have a complete understanding of what we do and how it works, but I'll give it a shot.
As I understand it, Morpheus does not heed the various TCP/IP limitations concerning speed of connection attempts, numbers of concurrent connections/connection attempts, etc. Therefore, trying to limit its access to bandwidth through TCP/IP traffic shaping doesn't work the same way it does for say, Napster or Gnutella. With those applications, we were simply able to assign them a low priority, such that they would only get bandwidth which wasn't being used by more critical applications. With Morpheus, we've had to impose a router-level traffic cap on the port, which is an imperfect fix because a lot of the time, it would be perfectly alright for Morpheus to be using say 60% of the campus bandwidth when nobody else is interested in doing much. Instead, it always has to be confined to 15% or so.
Ironically, the cheats that Morpheus uses to get more bandwidth actually resulted in it getting less in this situation.
Too bad that in order to do provide such great filesharing service, they wreck everyone else's network experience. The client pulls all sorts of nasty against-RFC tricks in order to increase its avalible bandwidth, which result in Morpheus/Kaaza/MusicCity users getting more than their fair share of the network.
At the university I attend, things got so bad at times that although 50 or so people would be downloading movies at a given time at perfectly reasonable speeds, no one else could so much as surf the web without unacceptable lag. Worse, standard application-priority procedures didn't work because of the applications' non-standards compliant behavior. We ended up having to impose a hard limit on the amount of bandwidth allowed on that port, severely limiting the resources allowed to the programs, even when the network is mostly idle.
The bottom line is that there's more than ethical problems with these new services. By resorting to breaking network protocol rules in order to increase bandwidth, they're setting a very bad precendent. If more programs begin to follow their example of treating the host network as something to be selfishly exploited, network admins will be forced to impose draconian restrictions on network use. This would be a very Bad Thing (TM), and it's my biggest problem with these new services.
Seriously. The best feature of AfterStep, my WM of choice, is a damn lot of workspaces with definable key bindings to switch between them. I usually keep 4 groups of 8 desktops each open: one group for terminals, one for web browsers, one for TIK and XMMS, and one for miscellaneous stuff. Getting around is as easy as glancing at the pager, then CTRL-arrow key and/or CTRL-SHIFT-arrow key
.
If you are really mouse-phobic, you can also define keys to move your cursor around. Combine this with auto-focus and you'll be surprised how little you'll use your mouse.
AfterStep is just amazing.
While I will agree that an FPS can be pretty frightening with the right setup, the game that frightened me the most of all the games I've played was X-COM 2. You'd be leading your team around an underwater alien crash site at night with almost no visibility and creepy music in the background, when suddenly a bolt of energy would shoot out from the darkness and get one of your soldiers in the back. If you play in the dark, in a quiet room, you will seriously jump a mile when that happens.
Anyone who's played the game will agree with me that turn-based strategy can be just as scary as real-time games.
Nice troll! I give it about an 8 out of 10. I like the transition from almost reasonable claims to outright lies that nobody would ever believe especially. The troll seems to peak most of the way through the big central paragraph, though, and the rest just distracts from the point. You either ought to quit while you're ahead or continue to make even more outrageous claims. Remember, a short, concise troll is usually better than a long-winded and well-developed one.
I also recommend a little stronger technological background in the introduction. Just mentioning kernel 2.4.9 isn't going to cut it. Try throwing in mentions of Redhat 6.2 for additional stability, Tux webserver for speed, and maybe some impressive hardware specs. The more it sounds like you know what you're talking about in the introduction, the better the ultimate troll effect.
Please drop a reply if you have any questions or want any more advice.
Brandeis owns brandeis.edu and brandeis.org. Brandeis.com is an add/portal redirector, however, so it's hard to argue that Brandeis has no reason to have taken the .org rather than have it suffer a similar fate.
I know some old school gamers will back me up on this.
Besides, it's not so much just the fact that you can play Civilization for free that makes FreeCiv a triumph of the open source community. What really makes it great is that people who wouldn't normally have access to game source code can see inside the guts of the game, learn how it works, and make changes. The alterations could be as sweeping as an entire new ruleset which could be distributed over the net or as simple as altering a few #DEFINEs just to see what happens, but in any case, the ability to work with the source of a project like this is invaluable.
Hacking this sort of project is a big part of what the open source movement is all about: having a good time, growing intellectually, and inviting others to do the same.
Those of you in the UK can look forward to a new season soon, and most of us in the US can catch reruns of the first 8 seasons on our local PBS station.
I agree, and I still can't believe they didn't even mention Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri or Pirates!
Granted, LORD was an amazing game, but once you delve into the realm of BBS games, you simply can't do better than the MBBS version of Tradewars 2002. God, I wasted a lot of my life playing that...