The old adventure games aren't dead, they're just getting old. Recently, I played through Day of the Tentacle and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and started playing Sam & Max. These games are still great fun (although I cheat a lot when I'm stuck, being more impatient now in the future than I was back in the present), and the best thing is you can play them in Linux, FreeBSD or on your old SGI through ScummVM.
I actually portupgraded my laptop (a 133 MHz/40 MB antique) from FreeBSD 4.7 to 4.8 just to get speech in Sam & Max. Those games are such a waste of time!
The world was taken into production, and God made Adam and Eve:
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man:
$ man woman
UNDOCUMENTED(7) Linux Programmer's Manual UNDOCUMENTED(7)
NAME
undocumented - No manpage for this program, utility or function.
DESCRIPTION
This program, utility or function does not have a useful manpage. Before opening a bug to report this, please check with the Debian Bug Tracking System (BTS) at <http://bugs.debian.org/> if a bug has already been reported. If not, you can submit a wishlist bug if you want.
Later on, Adam had two sons, and both submitted wishlist bugs for Woman.
The story in itself was just as stupid as the story of Doom: "There's a portal to some hellish place, and now monsters are swarming around you. You have a crowbar. Can you save the world?"
That's actually quite unimportant for an action game. I think what people perceive as "intelligent" in the story of Half-Life is the way it's told. It makes you wonder what is happening, what happens next, who are those people and why do they want to kill you?
Doom and Unreal were just card games with shooting in them: find the key card, find the door, shoot some monsters. I think the story Doom was based on was about the same as Half-Life, but it never made me curious of what was happening. That's the difference of intelligence levels in the "stories". Half-Life had a more intelligent way to tell you what was going on, and that's all you can expect from a story in a game. It's not high literature.
After all, you don't expect an FPS to be The Brothers Karamasov or Orlando, do you?
But then, so has Bush. "We will export death and violence to the four corners of the earth in defense of this great nation.", quoth he. This, from a man who considers himself a devout Christian.
This, from a man most of the rest of the world considers a religious fundamentalist.
I would suggest that people who are against the RIAA and music copyrights work to get the laws changed.
Yes, you could do that if you lived in a democratic country, but you don't. Those laws are demanded by the WTO, which, in turn, is owned by the corporate states of America. This is true for most of the civilized world. Before you can change the laws, you have to change the system, but I'm sure the system is held up by the laws it produces.
You see, as long as nobody can get elected without insane amounts of money for campaigning, nobody will be elected without support from Big Industry, and this includes RIAA, since the record industry is owned by the same people that own everything else. Many apologies for sounding like a Communist Troll, but I think there's a grain of truth in this.
I use 13 rounds of ROT1 (my own secret algorithm which I'm not giving away to the public yet). It has the advantage of being compatible with ROT13, while being 13 times harder to brute-force attack.
It takes a whole loaf of bread just to crack a four letter word on my toaster.
A Congress spokesperson said, commenting on the new extension:
All causes shall give way: We are in copyright Step't in so far that, should we wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er: Strange things we have in head, that will to hand; Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
Lawyers are currently debating whether it's feasible to build a time machine to sue those who infringe copyright even before the works have been scanned.
Konqueror can filter pop-up ads just like Mozilla, at least in 3.1 - I didn't care much for earlier versions of Konq, but it's become quite a capable browser lately. Anyway, the problems with Hotmail were in Options --> something (Personal Profile, I think: you'd actually get a message that Hotmail didn't support old browsers like Netscape, and a link to download MSIE), but when I tried it now with Mozilla, I hade no problems, and without changing the user agent string. Good.
BTW, I don't want to start a Moz vs Konq discussion here. Both are good. And Opera is good too. I just happen to use Konqueror as my main browser at the moment, as it's very stable in Debian Sid (crashed only once on me). You just happen to notice better the nice features of the software you use most.
That's partly true, but Opera (the only "major" browser to lie about itself) does identify itself as being IE on Linux when it's configured to report as IE. Its user agent string is something like:
"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Linux 2.4.20-ck4 i686) Opera 7.00 [en]"
It doesn't even hide the fact that it's Opera. Konqueror can be configured to report as IE on Windows (Or Mozilla 8.0 on VIC-20 or whatever), but it doesn't do it as default. (A nifty feature is to have IE 5.5/Windows as user agent string for difficult sites like Hotmail only.)
This may be true for BeOS, but QNX definately supports sub-pentium machines. The current version of Neutrino (6.2.0) supports 386, 486, ARM, MIPS32, and several other CPUs commonly used in embedded systems.
Thanks for clearing that up then. Sorry for misinforming people. I knew older versions of QNX supported even 8086, but I read somewhere that newer versions (those available for free download) needed faster HW. Having checked http://www.qnx.ca I now see that I was wrong.
Sorry. Did you said that you recommend Doom I for a _6_year_ old boy ?
Doom isn't so bad for a six year old. You're probably confusing it with Quake, which is a bit too difficult. In Doom, you don't have to aim precisely like in modern first person shooters, you just have to shoot in the general direction of the creature you want to kill. If it's too difficult for him, just show him how to get to the shotgun, from then on it's really child's play.
Doom is probably as good an introduction to FPS's as you can get. The kid learns a bit of important computing history, and he's eased into a genre he surely will be inspired by, both in front of the computer, and when playing with other children.
I've never seen it, but QNX might be an alternative. Does BeOS support pre-Pentium systems?
No, neither QNX nor BeOS support pre-Pentium computers. I think QNX actually needs a quite fast computer. BeOS runs very well on a Pentium Classic with 32 MB RAM though.
I think FreeBSD would be fine if you run a smaller implementation of X11 on it. Anyone tried the Tiny-X server on FreeBSD?
I'd tell the 12-year old me the same thing that the 30-year old me told me when I was 12.
"OK, I can't, uh, stay long, so listen carefully: when you want discover time travel in the future, remember what I'm saying now, because without it, you'll never learn how. The important thing is:... where the hell did I leave my notes?!" [Future self fades away]
Oh, so it's SUVs! I thought it was just annoyances - but then an SUV is an annoyance, so I wasn't that far off. We'd have more choice if we could choose names from this broader category. My suggestions would be:
Rash Gates Windows (might be a trademark on that, though) Uriah Rennie Bush Chinese Water Torture JOZYXQE (there's almost definately not a trademark on that one)
You can password protect GRUB, and not every distro out there lets you boot into single mode without having to type a password. Personally, I've locked the options for booting single and booting from floppy in GRUB, and the GRUB command line is of course protected as well. And the BIOS. Of course, removing the BIOS password is as easy as opening the computer case and removing the battery for a while, so an ordinary PC will never be all that safe. But GRUB, protected with a password, will at least slow down an attacker.
The best plays ever written were written when copywriting did not exist.(Shakespear)
No, the laws didn't exist, but Shakespeare was a professional playwright/actor, and he did make money from his work. The audience had to pay to get entrance to The Globe (the theatre building), and the most of the company earned a fair bit of their income from this. Piracy wasn't much of an issue for the actors and producers of the performance, since video cameras weren't invented yet.
However, piracy flourished in the publishing business, and many of Shakespeare's plays were first published as bad pirate versions. This might have prompted Shakespeare to publish the proper versions of some of his scripts himself. Publishing wasn't very popular among writers though, since it would make the plays available for other actors -- and the playwright could eventually lose money if other companies performed his plays, since that would draw some of the audience away. After all, performances were more profitable.
What all this leads to is: Shakespeare didn't have much incentive to publish his works, because he lost the rights to his work as soon as it was made public. But he did it anyway, since it already was stolen. Some form of copyright protection can be a good thing, both for the artist and the audience. It's the American entertainment industry that has caused the delusion that it leads to slavery and loss of rights.
When it comes to classical music and other arts from before the democratic revolutions, those were largely sponsored by various aristocrats. That time has passed.
And people think Linux is unpopular because it's too hard. The C64 was popular, and it grew more hair on your chest than in your palms with obscure commands like `LOAD"$",8` just to get what we *nixers get with a simple `ls`. To get it to do anything usefull, you had to learn asm programming (which was simple, I've heard, but I only did useless stuff). I don't remember what you had to do to delete a file, but I remember it was so hard you normally just formatted the disk instead. It's no mystery the machine was mostly used for games.
I don't use Konqueror much myself (I agree it's too slow, so I use Opera most of the time in Linux (Debian)), but after having fooled around with a highly optimized Gentoo with KDE 3.1_RCx, I found it to be acceptably fast and rendering correctly most of the time. So it's getting better, and it probably likes GCC 3.2 and glibc 2.3 as well. If it gets half the amount of developer support Mozilla has, I think it will turn into a very good browser (at least if they simplify the GUI a bit). And we all agree that is good, don't we?
Personally I use different browsers for different OS's: Opera for Debian, Mozilla for Windows (I detest IE). I can't afford a Mac at the moment, and probably never will. I'm a poor bastard *sob*.
I think I forgot my point.:-( Maybe it was something like: all the browsers are under developement, and what's good and what's not is likely to change. I remember back in the day when I switched from Netscape to IE, because Netscape sucked more than IE. And back, and forth, and to Linux, and to Opera, and to Moz, and blah blah.
Re:Do not pass go, do not collect $200
on
Dow vs. Parody
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There is a line between parody and fraud. It's obvious that the group in question went out of their way to make their site look as much like an official Dow site as possible in order to defame Dow Chemical. That's not parody. That's intentional misrepresentation.
It might be argued that Dow are misrepresenting themselves, and that The Yes-Men are helping Dow to express more truthfully what they stand for.
Not that this matters at all. All these pranks are meant to last for some time, then get a lot of attention as the corporation sends their army of lawyers, then closed down. But some still work, like gatt.org, a parody of wto.org. They are so alike that I almost don't see the difference myself. This one's been up for more than a year.
What? Doom III isn't delayed, is it? It's supposed to be out "when it's done". I'd vote, as always, for Daikatana. No, just kidding. That'd be Duke Nukem Forever.
Yes, you're right: Jon Johansen never was a saint. No one in their right mind asked him to be one. He was a 15 year old script kiddie when DeCSS was written. He preferred FreeBSD to Linux (maybe without any rational reason), but that's not the case, and it never was. He might have violated the GPL, and then - he might not (search for "special licence"). That's also beside the point in this case.
Whether the defendant is a good guy or a bad guy should be irrelevant in any legal case in a civilized state. It shouldn't matter. It's just not relevant. Bring him to trial for infringement of the GPL instead, or for not being a good poster boy. It's still irrelevant to this case. You're not a good poster boy yourself for free software, and neither am I, Stalin, Hitler, GWB, Saddam Hussein or Mother Theresa. It's hardly illegal.
Of course, if his motives were to pirate films (which I doubt - why would he post to the LiVid mailing lists then?), he could be judged for contributing to copyright infringement. But he has contributed to developement of free DVD players for Linux, QNX, Windows, *BSD, BeOS, etc., just by releasing the source. Breaking the CSS algorithm was the most important thing about DeCSS. Today it's just an old-fashioned prototype to libdvdcss, used in most free DVD players. And by the way, Jon Johansen has contributed to such players. (Just search for his last name on that page.)
The point is: the priciple of DeCSS is important to the developement of free DVD software. Without DeCSS, no libdvdcss: no xine, no MPlayer, no Ogle, no VideoLAN. We need to break the encryption to read DVD's. And we need the right to do so.
I agree that one should try both xine and MPlayer. However, I disagree that the latter is buggy. This is, of course, my personal opinion, based on how it works on my computer. The correct answer is: try both, see what you like best (actually xine works better on a few files here too). YMMV and all that.
The good news is that both xine and MPlayer are far better than any player I've tried on that other platform I boot into for games, although none of them have GUIs worth using. After getting used to using the arrow keys for skipping back and forth, F for full screen, etc., I must say: what the fuck do you need a GUI for in a media player anyway.
Being able to reconstruct the index of incomplete.avi's is nice too. No longer do I have to wait for the complete porn movie to download before I can skip to the juicy parts.
Slashdot Mirror
The old adventure games aren't dead, they're just getting old. Recently, I played through Day of the Tentacle and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and started playing Sam & Max. These games are still great fun (although I cheat a lot when I'm stuck, being more impatient now in the future than I was back in the present), and the best thing is you can play them in Linux, FreeBSD or on your old SGI through ScummVM.
I actually portupgraded my laptop (a 133 MHz/40 MB antique) from FreeBSD 4.7 to 4.8 just to get speech in Sam & Max. Those games are such a waste of time!
And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man:Later on, Adam had two sons, and both submitted wishlist bugs for Woman.
The story in itself was just as stupid as the story of Doom: "There's a portal to some hellish place, and now monsters are swarming around you. You have a crowbar. Can you save the world?"
That's actually quite unimportant for an action game. I think what people perceive as "intelligent" in the story of Half-Life is the way it's told. It makes you wonder what is happening, what happens next, who are those people and why do they want to kill you?
Doom and Unreal were just card games with shooting in them: find the key card, find the door, shoot some monsters. I think the story Doom was based on was about the same as Half-Life, but it never made me curious of what was happening. That's the difference of intelligence levels in the "stories". Half-Life had a more intelligent way to tell you what was going on, and that's all you can expect from a story in a game. It's not high literature.
After all, you don't expect an FPS to be The Brothers Karamasov or Orlando, do you?
This, from a man most of the rest of the world considers a religious fundamentalist.
Yes, you could do that if you lived in a democratic country, but you don't. Those laws are demanded by the WTO, which, in turn, is owned by the corporate states of America. This is true for most of the civilized world. Before you can change the laws, you have to change the system, but I'm sure the system is held up by the laws it produces.
You see, as long as nobody can get elected without insane amounts of money for campaigning, nobody will be elected without support from Big Industry, and this includes RIAA, since the record industry is owned by the same people that own everything else. Many apologies for sounding like a Communist Troll, but I think there's a grain of truth in this.
I use 13 rounds of ROT1 (my own secret algorithm which I'm not giving away to the public yet). It has the advantage of being compatible with ROT13, while being 13 times harder to brute-force attack.
It takes a whole loaf of bread just to crack a four letter word on my toaster.
Lawyers are currently debating whether it's feasible to build a time machine to sue those who infringe copyright even before the works have been scanned.
Konqueror can filter pop-up ads just like Mozilla, at least in 3.1 - I didn't care much for earlier versions of Konq, but it's become quite a capable browser lately. Anyway, the problems with Hotmail were in Options --> something (Personal Profile, I think: you'd actually get a message that Hotmail didn't support old browsers like Netscape, and a link to download MSIE), but when I tried it now with Mozilla, I hade no problems, and without changing the user agent string. Good.
BTW, I don't want to start a Moz vs Konq discussion here. Both are good. And Opera is good too. I just happen to use Konqueror as my main browser at the moment, as it's very stable in Debian Sid (crashed only once on me). You just happen to notice better the nice features of the software you use most.
Thanks for clearing that up then. Sorry for misinforming people. I knew older versions of QNX supported even 8086, but I read somewhere that newer versions (those available for free download) needed faster HW. Having checked http://www.qnx.ca I now see that I was wrong.
Doom isn't so bad for a six year old. You're probably confusing it with Quake, which is a bit too difficult. In Doom, you don't have to aim precisely like in modern first person shooters, you just have to shoot in the general direction of the creature you want to kill. If it's too difficult for him, just show him how to get to the shotgun, from then on it's really child's play.
Doom is probably as good an introduction to FPS's as you can get. The kid learns a bit of important computing history, and he's eased into a genre he surely will be inspired by, both in front of the computer, and when playing with other children.
No, neither QNX nor BeOS support pre-Pentium computers. I think QNX actually needs a quite fast computer. BeOS runs very well on a Pentium Classic with 32 MB RAM though.
I think FreeBSD would be fine if you run a smaller implementation of X11 on it. Anyone tried the Tiny-X server on FreeBSD?
Yes, why not? You could probably make your own slimmed-down disc based on it, and it's got all you need. It doesn't get any easier.
Get it here
Or you may take a look at Longhorn itself (it's free to download! Thanks Microsoft!). I think it looks a bit old-fashioned.
"OK, I can't, uh, stay long, so listen carefully: when you want discover time travel in the future, remember what I'm saying now, because without it, you'll never learn how. The important thing is:
Rash
Gates
Windows (might be a trademark on that, though)
Uriah Rennie
Bush
Chinese Water Torture
JOZYXQE (there's almost definately not a trademark on that one)
You can password protect GRUB, and not every distro out there lets you boot into single mode without having to type a password. Personally, I've locked the options for booting single and booting from floppy in GRUB, and the GRUB command line is of course protected as well. And the BIOS. Of course, removing the BIOS password is as easy as opening the computer case and removing the battery for a while, so an ordinary PC will never be all that safe. But GRUB, protected with a password, will at least slow down an attacker.
No, the laws didn't exist, but Shakespeare was a professional playwright/actor, and he did make money from his work. The audience had to pay to get entrance to The Globe (the theatre building), and the most of the company earned a fair bit of their income from this. Piracy wasn't much of an issue for the actors and producers of the performance, since video cameras weren't invented yet.
However, piracy flourished in the publishing business, and many of Shakespeare's plays were first published as bad pirate versions. This might have prompted Shakespeare to publish the proper versions of some of his scripts himself. Publishing wasn't very popular among writers though, since it would make the plays available for other actors -- and the playwright could eventually lose money if other companies performed his plays, since that would draw some of the audience away. After all, performances were more profitable.
What all this leads to is: Shakespeare didn't have much incentive to publish his works, because he lost the rights to his work as soon as it was made public. But he did it anyway, since it already was stolen. Some form of copyright protection can be a good thing, both for the artist and the audience. It's the American entertainment industry that has caused the delusion that it leads to slavery and loss of rights.
When it comes to classical music and other arts from before the democratic revolutions, those were largely sponsored by various aristocrats. That time has passed.
And people think Linux is unpopular because it's too hard. The C64 was popular, and it grew more hair on your chest than in your palms with obscure commands like `LOAD"$",8` just to get what we *nixers get with a simple `ls`. To get it to do anything usefull, you had to learn asm programming (which was simple, I've heard, but I only did useless stuff). I don't remember what you had to do to delete a file, but I remember it was so hard you normally just formatted the disk instead. It's no mystery the machine was mostly used for games.
I don't use Konqueror much myself (I agree it's too slow, so I use Opera most of the time in Linux (Debian)), but after having fooled around with a highly optimized Gentoo with KDE 3.1_RCx, I found it to be acceptably fast and rendering correctly most of the time. So it's getting better, and it probably likes GCC 3.2 and glibc 2.3 as well. If it gets half the amount of developer support Mozilla has, I think it will turn into a very good browser (at least if they simplify the GUI a bit). And we all agree that is good, don't we?
:-( Maybe it was something like: all the browsers are under developement, and what's good and what's not is likely to change. I remember back in the day when I switched from Netscape to IE, because Netscape sucked more than IE. And back, and forth, and to Linux, and to Opera, and to Moz, and blah blah.
:-)
Personally I use different browsers for different OS's: Opera for Debian, Mozilla for Windows (I detest IE). I can't afford a Mac at the moment, and probably never will. I'm a poor bastard *sob*.
I think I forgot my point.
Ah, goth babe lesbo porn finished downloading - gotta go.
What? Doom III isn't delayed, is it? It's supposed to be out "when it's done". I'd vote, as always, for Daikatana. No, just kidding. That'd be Duke Nukem Forever.
Yes, you're right: Jon Johansen never was a saint. No one in their right mind asked him to be one. He was a 15 year old script kiddie when DeCSS was written. He preferred FreeBSD to Linux (maybe without any rational reason), but that's not the case, and it never was. He might have violated the GPL, and then - he might not (search for "special licence"). That's also beside the point in this case.
Whether the defendant is a good guy or a bad guy should be irrelevant in any legal case in a civilized state. It shouldn't matter. It's just not relevant. Bring him to trial for infringement of the GPL instead, or for not being a good poster boy. It's still irrelevant to this case. You're not a good poster boy yourself for free software, and neither am I, Stalin, Hitler, GWB, Saddam Hussein or Mother Theresa. It's hardly illegal.
Of course, if his motives were to pirate films (which I doubt - why would he post to the LiVid mailing lists then?), he could be judged for contributing to copyright infringement. But he has contributed to developement of free DVD players for Linux, QNX, Windows, *BSD, BeOS, etc., just by releasing the source. Breaking the CSS algorithm was the most important thing about DeCSS. Today it's just an old-fashioned prototype to libdvdcss, used in most free DVD players. And by the way, Jon Johansen has contributed to such players. (Just search for his last name on that page.)
The point is: the priciple of DeCSS is important to the developement of free DVD software. Without DeCSS, no libdvdcss: no xine, no MPlayer, no Ogle, no VideoLAN. We need to break the encryption to read DVD's. And we need the right to do so.
I agree that one should try both xine and MPlayer. However, I disagree that the latter is buggy. This is, of course, my personal opinion, based on how it works on my computer. The correct answer is: try both, see what you like best (actually xine works better on a few files here too). YMMV and all that.
.avi's is nice too. No longer do I have to wait for the complete porn movie to download before I can skip to the juicy parts.
The good news is that both xine and MPlayer are far better than any player I've tried on that other platform I boot into for games, although none of them have GUIs worth using. After getting used to using the arrow keys for skipping back and forth, F for full screen, etc., I must say: what the fuck do you need a GUI for in a media player anyway.
Being able to reconstruct the index of incomplete