This would never work because of the myriad hardware/driver configurations necessary to support,
No problem. Linux drivers support lots of hardware. For older hardware, driver support is often better than for new editions of Windows. Also, not all types of hardware need to be supported. Instead, vendors could test their hardware to be compatible with a test boot disk.
and distribution rights for chipset, graphics, and sound drivers.
Also not a problem, because Linux drivers are mostly open source. For the few pieces of hardware where no Linux-compatible driver exists, such hardware would simply not be compatible with such a boot disk. Still no problem, as plenty of alternatives exist.
Even if they could produce the magic Linux boot CD that would work on every gaming PC made for the last 15 years, on Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI, Matrox, and any other graphics card known to man,
As I said, Linux works on a wide variety of configurations, and such a boot CD does not need to support legacy hardware.
Nvidia would still go after them for distributing Nvidia copyrighted software without the rights.
From the licensing agreement for Nvidia drivers:
"2. GRANT OF LICENSE
2.1.2 Linux Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section 2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux operating system may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of compressed files)."
... they could provide their games on bootable Linux discs. No install needed, no patches possible, full control over the player's experience, with the added bonus of being able run the games in Linux. Just a dream?
Also no need to update DirectX.
Does your game really require a server? Servers increase cost for open source projects, so I would run as much code as possible on the clients. Granted that you need the server to set up the games, but all actions could be refereed indepently by several clients. If they don't agree, this may mean that someone is using a hacked client, and a warning should be displayed. The more players participate in such a peer-to-peer game, the more clients would have to be hacked in order cheat, but of course a single vulnerability in your system may still be fatal for security.
I agree that wires can be dangerous to your health when you stumble over them, but are they really ready to run all systems from battery and recharge using induction?
Changing the resolution that the game uses for rendering beats upscaling. This is sometimes possible using some clever hex-editing and disassembling. There are several things to look for; for one thing, find any occurrence of the screen resolution. Also, you will need to know whether the game is based on VESA, DirectX or whatever. For VESA, the INT 10h calls are what you seek.
Yes, you need to know about hex-editing and disassembling, but this nerd business. And you may want to consult your lawyer on whether this is legal in your part of the world.
The Live CD approach works well enough, I guess(though it's seriously slow), but with the right technology(USB or flash/SDD port on most new motherboards comes to mind), it should be possible to load some version of *IX onto the device, plug it into the slot, and go. You would need some method of physical protection for the device you've plugged in.
There are USB sticks and flash media that have write protection switches built in. It is possible that booting an OS from flash media is faster than a CDROM, but haven't found the time to test it yet.
Another good practice to increase security is to run all untrusted code in a virtual machine.
This approach was common a couple of decades ago where you had the OS in ROM and there wasn't any way to do this sort of nonsense.
Good ole' C64 days. I remember the difficulties of getting graphics to a 160x200 pixel display with 16 colors by directly accessing RAM. Without checking, I think the VIC base address was 53248. Then came many other things, and yet things do not seem to slow down yet, speaking of CPU/GPU convergence...
If I were insane with security, I'd still prefer booting a live distro from CD to booting an OS from disk, as any infection would be removed when powering down. But I suppose that this rootkit protection might add to the security of such a CD...
I keep wondering what the gaming community would be like if we used a single, open source gaming engine, standardized much like a CD player, as a platform for most games. No matter the underlying hardware, it would just take your content and play it. As an open platform, games running inside it would be easy to mod and easy to maintain after the next DirectX or Windows release. The games wouldn't care if they run under Windows, Mac or Linux, they might even boot directly from CD as we had in the Amiga days (Knoppix+game engine...). Special features needed by the games would be integrated preferredly as scripts, or as pluggable modules if necessary. Pluggable modules would require an open interface specification to make ports to other or newer platforms possible. Development costs would drop as there really is only a single platform to support.
Doom (1993) was just a stripped-down version of hack-and-slay dungeon games. Examples of such games are Eye of the Beholder (1990), which had limited 3D rendering, but tile-based movement. Ultima Underworld (1992) had 3D graphics and you were able run around freely. Doom just replaced the swords with guns and left out the story, which didn't appeal to me, and wasn't new to me.
There are many different possibilities of creating parallel code, which also differ in terms of difficulty. It is often easy to parallelize tasks on a computer as different processes, if the amount of inter-process communication isn't too big. Otherwise, take a look at threads, mutexes and transactions to get startet on parallel programming. There isn't a best strategy yet for all cases, and perhaps a single best strategy for parallel programming doesn't exist.
If you lead a steampipe through it, it might... you might power a turbine and get hot water for your house. Here is where "suck and blow" might be good a deal for humankind...
Online chat may expose may be exposed to all kinds of thoughts,
I like the way you phrased that.
Typical case of being blind to my own writing...should read "Online chat may expose kids to all kinds of thoughts".
The only thing more dangerous than making an appointment to do something evil is the deed itself. In-game chat may be all that is needed for it, and as a parent I would like to be warned about that possibility.
a world without religion
Even science is a belief system (the belief in reproducibility of observation and extrapolation), so I doubt there can be a human world without religion. Even if that belief system works a lot better for me than texts written from the views of people who lived centuries ago, far far away.
Online chat may expose may be exposed to all kinds of thoughts, and many of those thoughts may be beyond a kid's limited grasp of reality. As such, any online game is dangerous as the players playing it, and a warning like that should be printed on every box sold for parents who think "I want my kid to know everything about computas".
Adaptive content does not necessarily mean that difficulty changes. There is a reason why many games allow the player to change difficulty, and some players might welcome a hint that they wouldn't die as often on lower difficulty, but that may be as far as it should go.
On the other hand, what I miss in many games are several options to solve problems. Fallout does this in some cases, but the game still leaves me wondering how I should communicate my ideas to the game in other cases. And the answer is: probably even more complex scripts. Creating games as an open environment where problems can be solved by talking, thinking and shooting is difficult. And even if many might think that shooting is all that most people want anyway, and that it is easiest to program, people beyond 30 years might pay for that kind of entertainment.
Non-linear gameplay gets more difficult the more flexible the user's and AI's options are. I believe that many players would welcome new ideas here.
If it was 7 or 8 years from now and Obama was coming out of office having accomplished some of the many things he has promised to do
By that time, Obama will be out of office, and the price will no longer make any difference. As Nobel intended it, the peace Nobel price is to be awarded for achievements dating back no longer than a year. As such, the price is intended to be a vote on current political matters. However controversial decisions turn out under that condition, it is Nobel's will.
Slashdot Mirror
Use electricity from overhead lines instead. Hauling energy around costs energy and slows your vehicle.
This would never work because of the myriad hardware/driver configurations necessary to support,
No problem. Linux drivers support lots of hardware. For older hardware, driver support is often better than for new editions of Windows. Also, not all types of hardware need to be supported. Instead, vendors could test their hardware to be compatible with a test boot disk.
and distribution rights for chipset, graphics, and sound drivers.
Also not a problem, because Linux drivers are mostly open source. For the few pieces of hardware where no Linux-compatible driver exists, such hardware would simply not be compatible with such a boot disk. Still no problem, as plenty of alternatives exist.
Even if they could produce the magic Linux boot CD that would work on every gaming PC made for the last 15 years, on Intel, AMD, Nvidia, ATI, Matrox, and any other graphics card known to man,
As I said, Linux works on a wide variety of configurations, and such a boot CD does not need to support legacy hardware.
Nvidia would still go after them for distributing Nvidia copyrighted software without the rights.
From the licensing agreement for Nvidia drivers: "2. GRANT OF LICENSE 2.1.2 Linux Exception. Notwithstanding the foregoing terms of Section 2.1.1, SOFTWARE designed exclusively for use on the Linux operating system may be copied and redistributed, provided that the binary files thereof are not modified in any way (except for unzipping of compressed files)."
"We want an open, standard platform which is much easier than having five which are not compatible,"
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7052420.stm
... they could provide their games on bootable Linux discs. No install needed, no patches possible, full control over the player's experience, with the added bonus of being able run the games in Linux. Just a dream? Also no need to update DirectX.
Does your game really require a server? Servers increase cost for open source projects, so I would run as much code as possible on the clients. Granted that you need the server to set up the games, but all actions could be refereed indepently by several clients. If they don't agree, this may mean that someone is using a hacked client, and a warning should be displayed. The more players participate in such a peer-to-peer game, the more clients would have to be hacked in order cheat, but of course a single vulnerability in your system may still be fatal for security.
I agree that wires can be dangerous to your health when you stumble over them, but are they really ready to run all systems from battery and recharge using induction?
Sorry, couldn't refuse...
You can use MechVM to set up MW2 and find out:
http://www.mechvm.org/
More info and discussions:
http://www.mech2.org/forum/viewforum.php?f=24&sid=e01242e30227541e3a1fa45f9fc5d72a
Further down the list: linux: 1410, windows: 226
According to my count, the following words appear more than 2000 times:
alpha: 299534, skytel: 237233, arch: 122616, metroca: 73973, num: 72115, tone: 63352, com: 43040, call: 36191, from: 33065, this: 18987, has: 17926, all: 15899, sep: 15773, down: 15761, weblink: 14934, will: 14215, new: 13903, frm: 13723, test: 13269, txt: 13082, page: 13077, sub: 11974, have: 11060, been: 10876, center: 10687, number: 10512, your: 10444, update: 10292, york: 9740, home: 9562, alert: 9338, critica: 9334, server: 8994, trade: 8846, connect: 8807, informi: 8465, error: 8330, machine: 8208, cnn: 8013, world: 7967, message: 7947, news: 7901, that: 7894, time: 7815, edt: 7743, reboot: 7515, due: 7484, cabinet: 7339, cmp: 7339, status: 7332, mail: 7320, gblnetn: 7307, periodi: 7256, sequent: 7199, tkt: 7176, can: 6971, sev: 6833, service: 6514, ibm: 6409, now: 6206, today: 6054, evacuat: 5838, site: 5670, problem: 5289, network: 5111, system: 5102, ncc: 5101, www: 5057, everyon: 5031, sent: 5018, office: 4914, need: 4815, abs: 4745, socket: 4719, terrori: 4701, check: 4605, breakin: 4573, element: 4549, mpfetch: 4503, tue: 4412, line: 4409, get: 4394, asap: 4387, greater: 4325, contact: 4284, outage: 4224, any: 4218, phone: 4196, pls: 4183, custome: 4180, http: 4159, msg: 4139, unable: 4081, meeting: 4076, unch: 4027, subject: 4015, sendq: 3995, monitor: 3967, process: 3946, know: 3773, city: 3681, code: 3650, fyi: 3641, calls: 3616, plane: 3602, availab: 3553, yahoo: 3553, just: 3538, current: 3492, report: 3485, back: 3467, open: 3411, closed: 3407, team: 3406, being: 3399, bridge: 3375, timed: 3362, when: 3356, data: 3343, per: 3339, att: 3324, work: 3308, support: 3268, inc: 3266, updates: 3213, complet: 3205, job: 3198, reports: 3079, info: 3052, minutes: 3049, until: 3034, net: 3019, file: 2989, root: 2953, noc: 2952, issue: 2944, msn: 2933, failed: 2910, they: 2889, working: 2852, email: 2804, tomorro: 2795, case: 2723, access: 2678, operati: 2654, switch: 2652, ticket: 2630, sybase: 2611, still: 2599, alerts: 2503, emmc: 2484, our: 2484, informa: 2477, cdt: 2472, see: 2458, day: 2435, follow: 2406, script: 2405, their: 2397, investi: 2391, buildin: 2365, cell: 2338, pentago: 2318, fire: 2316, room: 2284, emergen: 2282, confirm: 2280, about: 2275, tuesday: 2272, name: 2266, event: 2260, opencon: 2258, sock: 2255, creditd: 2251, come: 2250, crdtdrv: 2250, alarm: 2245, chunk: 2245, possibl: 2240, web: 2229, sales: 2221, loock: 2217, attack: 2216, hudson: 2212, high: 2198, prob: 2187, says: 2173, only: 2136, west: 2134, request: 2133, followi: 2107, user: 2099, applica: 2076, let: 2076, account: 2061, nationa: 2050, going: 2046, device: 2014, morning: 2011, immedia: 2002
"there's a world market for about 6 computers".
I'd like to have one of those.
Changing the resolution that the game uses for rendering beats upscaling. This is sometimes possible using some clever hex-editing and disassembling. There are several things to look for; for one thing, find any occurrence of the screen resolution. Also, you will need to know whether the game is based on VESA, DirectX or whatever. For VESA, the INT 10h calls are what you seek.
Here are some notes of how I did it for MechWarrior 2:
http://www.mech2.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=213
The Wikipedia article on VESA BIOS has links to the various VESA APIs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VESA_BIOS_Extensions
Yes, you need to know about hex-editing and disassembling, but this nerd business. And you may want to consult your lawyer on whether this is legal in your part of the world.
The Live CD approach works well enough, I guess(though it's seriously slow), but with the right technology(USB or flash/SDD port on most new motherboards comes to mind), it should be possible to load some version of *IX onto the device, plug it into the slot, and go. You would need some method of physical protection for the device you've plugged in.
There are USB sticks and flash media that have write protection switches built in. It is possible that booting an OS from flash media is faster than a CDROM, but haven't found the time to test it yet. Another good practice to increase security is to run all untrusted code in a virtual machine.
This approach was common a couple of decades ago where you had the OS in ROM and there wasn't any way to do this sort of nonsense.
Good ole' C64 days. I remember the difficulties of getting graphics to a 160x200 pixel display with 16 colors by directly accessing RAM. Without checking, I think the VIC base address was 53248. Then came many other things, and yet things do not seem to slow down yet, speaking of CPU/GPU convergence ...
If I were insane with security, I'd still prefer booting a live distro from CD to booting an OS from disk, as any infection would be removed when powering down. But I suppose that this rootkit protection might add to the security of such a CD ...
Carry your own bomb onto the plane. After all, what are the chances that there would be two bombs on the plane?
Added bonus: ability to threaten terrorists: "We'll denote our bomb before you activate yours"? No power to terrorists!
I keep wondering what the gaming community would be like if we used a single, open source gaming engine, standardized much like a CD player, as a platform for most games. No matter the underlying hardware, it would just take your content and play it. As an open platform, games running inside it would be easy to mod and easy to maintain after the next DirectX or Windows release. The games wouldn't care if they run under Windows, Mac or Linux, they might even boot directly from CD as we had in the Amiga days (Knoppix+game engine...). Special features needed by the games would be integrated preferredly as scripts, or as pluggable modules if necessary. Pluggable modules would require an open interface specification to make ports to other or newer platforms possible. Development costs would drop as there really is only a single platform to support.
Of course, Microsoft or Sony might be in trouble if it happened, so we may never see it. But even EA has spoken up for such a solution, as slashdotted here: http://games.slashdot.org/games/07/10/19/1410234.shtml
Doom (1993) was just a stripped-down version of hack-and-slay dungeon games. Examples of such games are Eye of the Beholder (1990), which had limited 3D rendering, but tile-based movement. Ultima Underworld (1992) had 3D graphics and you were able run around freely. Doom just replaced the swords with guns and left out the story, which didn't appeal to me, and wasn't new to me.
There are many different possibilities of creating parallel code, which also differ in terms of difficulty. It is often easy to parallelize tasks on a computer as different processes, if the amount of inter-process communication isn't too big. Otherwise, take a look at threads, mutexes and transactions to get startet on parallel programming. There isn't a best strategy yet for all cases, and perhaps a single best strategy for parallel programming doesn't exist.
If you lead a steampipe through it, it might ... you might power a turbine and get hot water for your house. Here is where "suck and blow" might be good a deal for humankind ...
That sucks ...
I like the way you phrased that.
Typical case of being blind to my own writing...should read "Online chat may expose kids to all kinds of thoughts". The only thing more dangerous than making an appointment to do something evil is the deed itself. In-game chat may be all that is needed for it, and as a parent I would like to be warned about that possibility.
a world without religion
Even science is a belief system (the belief in reproducibility of observation and extrapolation), so I doubt there can be a human world without religion. Even if that belief system works a lot better for me than texts written from the views of people who lived centuries ago, far far away.
Online chat may expose may be exposed to all kinds of thoughts, and many of those thoughts may be beyond a kid's limited grasp of reality. As such, any online game is dangerous as the players playing it, and a warning like that should be printed on every box sold for parents who think "I want my kid to know everything about computas".
Adaptive content does not necessarily mean that difficulty changes. There is a reason why many games allow the player to change difficulty, and some players might welcome a hint that they wouldn't die as often on lower difficulty, but that may be as far as it should go.
On the other hand, what I miss in many games are several options to solve problems. Fallout does this in some cases, but the game still leaves me wondering how I should communicate my ideas to the game in other cases. And the answer is: probably even more complex scripts. Creating games as an open environment where problems can be solved by talking, thinking and shooting is difficult. And even if many might think that shooting is all that most people want anyway, and that it is easiest to program, people beyond 30 years might pay for that kind of entertainment.
Non-linear gameplay gets more difficult the more flexible the user's and AI's options are. I believe that many players would welcome new ideas here.
If it was 7 or 8 years from now and Obama was coming out of office having accomplished some of the many things he has promised to do
By that time, Obama will be out of office, and the price will no longer make any difference. As Nobel intended it, the peace Nobel price is to be awarded for achievements dating back no longer than a year. As such, the price is intended to be a vote on current political matters. However controversial decisions turn out under that condition, it is Nobel's will.