The big reason why I want to move to full Flash display ASAP.
DON'T DO THAT! You can't really print Flash presentations. You can't copy text from Flash. You don't really want to use Flash. I'd suggest that Flash is slower to download, but I'm not actually sure about that. In some scenarios, it would probably download faster (image intensive pages that can now be done with line art as opposed to gifs), but for just presenting text, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
Seriously, do not do that! You'd also be cutting out all the people too paranoid to run ActiveX, all those who use a browser without a Flash plugin, and anyone who needed to access the page from a console-based browser. If you want to know why not to do an all flash site, visit this site and cower in fear. (Only works in IE because their MIME types are messed up.)
Usually, when IE goes down, a dialog boxes appears informing you that your system is unstable and needs to be rebooted. Usually, IE won't crash. IE is very stable, just like Netscape (4) actually is. (Mozilla is unstable as hell, it crashes after running an hour. Guess that's what I get for running nightlies though...) To make the browser unstable, start running plugins/ActiveX/Java. These without fail kill my browser after a while. Which is why I disable the horrendous Java support in Netscape.
I have actually seen IE reboot a system without warning on a Windows 98 (not SE) system. (Involving Java.) On my Win98SE when it crashes, I usually get a dialog box along the lines of "Windows is unstable, it is recommended you save all work and reboot." That isn't an exact quote, because it actually doesn't happen too often, but it does happen.
The one really cool thing about MITRE though is that they offer jobs through AFCEA which means I got to work there out of highschool as an intern. Although so far both projects I worked on went literally nowhere, it still was fun to work there. But it doesn't pay enough to keep the best and the brightest - I've seen at least three people leave my section in the last year.
I have to wonder if MITRE's problems really are pay related - it's possible that all the stuff coming out of there is crap simply because the best people work for jobs with decent pay. I've already, as a sophomore, been asked to stay with MITRE after I graduate - and honestly, I'm not planning on doing it.
Have you actually looked at the specs for the PS2? The main problem that developers are having is that they're used to writing for only one CPU at a time. The PS2 can do parallel processing in it's 3D Vector processor, and if a developer wants to take full advantage of the hardware, they need to take that into consideration. Doing that right is hard.
Hah, you old geezer, I'm not even out of college, and if last term's (yeah, terms) grades are any indication, I have a good five to six years before I do! Hahah, I'm still a sophomore, learning all this cool CS stuff. Wait, six years? Crap.
Seriously though, the problem isn't a new IDE, it's the hardware. Consoles generally speaking don't rely on APIs as much as accessing the hardware directly - most game companies actually write their own core code, which is of course highly proprietary, designed to get the most out of the hardware. The radical hardware design makes this more difficult than the PlayStation, and most other consoles.
In a way, though, this ensures that the PS2 games won't be taking full advantage of the console early on - may have been a good move. Bottom line is, there are extremely competent programmers out there who are still trying to figure out exactly how to best handle the PS2's hardware. It'll take them time to figure out, but you have to expect that.
It should also be noted that the original PlayStation IDE was based around Linux for whatever reason. Just because this is Slashdot, and most people like it when Linux is mentioned. Others rather hear about BSD or BeOS, but most like Linux.
I have no clue what the hell I just wrote. Damn sleep deprivation.
Ever wonder why you never seem to wake up in exactly the same position that you fell asleep in? People move while sleeping. They'll turn around while sleeping - you do actually move while asleep. It's generally not enough to fall out of bed (although sometimes it is!) and you generally don't start moving far enough to annoy anyone you're sleeping next to, but you do actually move while asleep.
What did you mean here? I'm not sure how PS2 games are radically different in the way they run....
The hardware is extremely different - screwing the way most people write games, and with the way that the game is actually ran at runtime. (The twin vector-processor whatevers are the biggest problem, since it either takes a assembly genius to get it to work write, or some really good compilers that don't exist yet.)
For example, Final Fantasy. wow, thay are on 9 in a few days and NONE of them have anything to do with one another, except maybe chocobos.
Actually, they're all very similar in design and layout. All of Square's Final Fantasy games really do look and "feel" like a Final Fantasy game, while most of their other RPGs have a noticable trend away. The story line is almost always different, but in a way, that's a good thing. It would get strained to have the same characters over and over again - it would even begin to get boring if it was the same world over and over again. By having different backdrops, Square allows themselves to play with the gameplay in ways they couldn't otherwise. (V's job system, XI's Espers, XII's Materia, XIII's draw system...)
The other thing that ties all the games together are the basic weapon/item/spells/summons, which almost always carry over. (Masamune is in every game, Tonic, Potion, Tincture, etc., Fire, Fira, Firaga (or Fire, Fire 2, Fire 3 in the US up until VIII), Ifrit, Shiva, Cait Sith (a character in VII, "Stray" in US's VI (or III)), etc.). The basic game play is really quite similar among all the Final Fantasy games, and that's what gets people coming back to it.
(It also should be noted that Crash Bandicoot officially ended with Crash Bandicoot 3: WARPED, although they've decided that it's too lucrative and are instead coming out with Crash Bandicoot character games, like a Mario Cart and Mario Party clone.)
However, I do agree completely that Sony is the king of marketting, and that they've successfully used that to quell other platforms. Bascially, they try and win the developers over to the PS, and with PS2s weird hardware, games are that much harder to port from the PlayStation2. Unfortunately for Sony, that works two ways: It's also harder to port to the PS2.
Lack of modem/ethernet? All the new online games coming out for DC this holiday season are impressive. PS2 owners won't get that anytime soon.
Yeah, but will Dreamcast users? From what I've heard, Sega's online service had some troubles on launch (enough to get a Penny Arcade cartoon). Besides, most on-line games over dialup are laggy and just seem to play poorly (mostly depending on the latency between server/players). Plus, I have to wonder how servers work - do you start up a server on your DC, or do you play off the official Sega.net servers?
It's possible that Sony is actually wise in waiting. As most people have pointed out, this is the initial release of a system. Wait for it to become stable. It's not the launch titles I'm interested in, it's MGS2 and FFX. Some time next year, I might actually find myself getting a PS2. But right now, it's not worth it. It takes time for good games - you have to be patient with new consoles. Especially with the PS2, since it is a very radical change in the way most games run. Whether this helps or hurts it in the long run remains to be seen.
(And, with Sony, you have to wait three or four "versions" before they create one that doesn't break just after the warranty period...)
In a way, though, it does bring the various "classes" together. Don't forget, I know nothing about you and you know nothing about me. There is really no way to tell who anyone on Slashdot is, unless they feel the need to share it. Assuming you don't know who I am, you know very little about me. What is my income? Where do I live? What color is my skin? You cannot tell unless you A) meet me personally and I say "hi, I'm _xeno_" or B) figure out who I am IRL. Unless you happen to be going to the same college I am, your chances of meeting me and figuring out who I am are slim.
So, yeah, it does divide people by those who can get on and those who cannot, but it does help with all who do make it on. There are people who can express themselves better online than IRL because they don't start with the stereotypes. It's a lot harder to be prejudiced about someone when you cannot see or hear them - most of hour prejudices come from the input clues a person gives us. Here, people are prejudged mainly based on their post structures. (In other words, people who post with no caps and no punctuation are generally considered to be trolls/losers. Look through the posts at -1 and you'll notice your dispostion based on the "look" of the post.)
As newsgroups such as the various alt.supports show, there are plenty of people who can actually express themselves "in Cyberspace" where they can't In Real Life.
It should be noted that I have no gift for "public expression" IRL. I hate speaking in front of even 10 people. Yet here I am, posting a long post to Slashdot. Why? Because the fact that I can "Preview" what I just said makes it easier for me to be coherent.
The Internet does serve as a way to merge the classes, for those who are priviledged enough to get on it. While as always, the conclusions that Jon Katz draws seem to be a little out of proportion, don't discount the Internet yet. It really does serve as a means to eliminate class boundaries, and even geographic boundaries and political boundaries. Yes, the Internet leaves a vast majority of people out - but those who can get in, find that the social barriers to entry are far less than those in real life.
There is never, ever any need to try and push your framerate above the verticle refresh rate of your monitor. Since my monitor peaks out around 120 Hz (or 120 frames per second) someone running a game at 200 FPS (or 200 Hz) would be dropping frames, since the monitor can't keep up.
Most games use this to their advantage, so that when I play Half-Life, my frame rates never go above 72 FPS since my refresh rate is around 72 Hz - this is used to prevent "tearing" when one frame is rendered during the first half of the sweep to refresh the screen and another is rendered later. Going above your refresh rate will actually make your game look worse.
Even if the card is capable of 200fps, it should never actually do that - unless you have a rediculously fast refreshing monitor, you're just drawing frames that you won't see or that will simply tear. Plus, I believe that it's been stated that the human eye cannot discern framerates above about 60FPS anyway. Although it is quite nice to be able to play Half-Life at 1280x960 at a constant 72fps (again, locked to 72fps since anything higher would tear on my display).
Hemos has said in the past (and in the Slashdot IRC chat) that about the only control they will exercise (and not nec. may) is to prevent Java applets/Flash shows from being served. Other than that, any GIF that's standard-size is fair game ad-wise.
Lack of apps for Alpha NT actually has nothing to do with MS just not porting them. It has much more to do with the target audience - and the target market isn't using Alphas for desktop tasks. Simply put, there is no market for Office on WinNT Alpha. In fact, the only market for WinNT/Alpha machines is as servers (mainly due to cost). As it turned out, there really wasn't a market for WinNT on Alpha either - in fact Win on Alpha support has been completely dropped. Not by Microsoft, but by Compaq.
Conspiracy theorists might decide that WinNT for Alpha was dropped because Compaq wanted to force the people buying Alphas to use Tru64. However, this really isn't the case, because apparently the market for WinNT Alpha machines was less than 10% the market for Tru64 Alpha machines. WinNT on Alpha simply isn't commerically viable.
However the Mac is an entirely different beast. The biggest difference is simply the target market - while Alpha machines are sold as high-end servers, Mac machines are sold as desktop boxes. That means that there is a market for applications on MacOS that there simply isn't for WinNT on Alpha.
Since there is a definite market for desktop applications on MacOS that WinNT for Alpha lacked, then it stands to reason that if people aren't porting applications to it there issome other reason... Unfortunately for Apple, this isn't entirely true - there is a much larger market for Wintel applications than any other type. That's why there are almost always Win32/x86 versions even when there aren't for other platforms.
A rather good example is the fact that Java for Win32(x86) is usually more advanced than Java for UNIX. (Keep in mind that Java for Linux is almost identical as Java for Solaris and Java for (Free)BSD. The differences are mostly in the JIT, along with thread support and other things that the OSes disagree on.) Sun may own Solaris, but Java developers are mostly interested in the applications running under Windows. As a result, Java for Windows gets the most attention and is usually released sooner than Java for any other platform - including Solaris.
It's really a market thing. If Apple can create a market for MacOS apps, then companies will port. The market only has to be commerically viable - the cost of supporting the market cannot be prohibitive. From the few Mac developers I've talked with, this hasn't always been the case.
In the case of WinNT for Alpha, though, it was too costly a market to support. There simply wasn't any demand. Outside the world of open source, the market determines what succeeds and what fails - not technology. Not stability. And, again, it's the market that will cause OSX to either succeed or fail.
I told them that the only difference between this and a more old-fashioned situation was that Mom had to look in the Internet history
If you install the Windows PowerToys, giving you TweakUI, there as option in the TweakUI panel that allows you to automatically delete all IE browser history. It's under the Paranoia tab.
Trust me - if I want to look at things my parents don't want me to, I know enough to remove all traces. If the kid knew enough to jumper the BIOS, they know enough to make plenty sure that the parent can't use the browser history. (Anywhere from brute force by deleting, which would arouse suspision, to copying previous history/cache to a temp folder and them moving it back, to, under Netscape/Windows, creating a new "user" and deleting it when done.) If you can't trust the kid, then don't let them on the Internet. Seriously though, most kids I know don't use the Internet for pr0n, they use it to look for stuff their more insterested in, be that Slashdot, SNES emulation, Pokémon, whatever.
Best way to protect your kid is to make sure you know why they're on the 'net. If they say that they wish to look for something you're willing to allow them to look for, chances are they really are. And by staying nearby, you can make sure they really do.
I think you should have told the parents just to watch the child while she was browsing the Internet - there's no need to attempt to prevent her from even using the computer! There are very easy ways to keep children off the Internet when you don't want them on - if you're on DSL, disabling the modem works wonders, on a phone line, keeping track of when you were on and comparing that to the invoice is another great method.
Unless, of course, there was material on the computer that children shouldn't know about...
Annoyingly enough, plain old text means that it removes all the tags, even those that Slashdot "supports." You want to use Extrans and CmdrTaco should consider why Plain Old Text is even there - it doesn't seem to actually DO anything useful. Extrans seems to provide the proper support. I have no idea why that's even there.
Re:One last defense of my gender on /.
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Deja For Sale
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Go ahead - defend it. It still goes against what most people think of as "common sense." Want a comparison?
I play (too much) Counter-Strike over the college LAN. Almost all Counter-Strike players are male. There are apparently as many as four women who actually play on the LAN, although most don't play frequently. (Actually, I think we chat-flamed one away... Same problem you're running into.) However, there have been players known to pretend to be women for whatever reason. (I know one who claims he's still trying to fool people, so everyone who claims to be a women on the local Counter-Strike servers finds that I immediately assume that she is he.) Same basic thing applies to Slashdot - almost everyone posting to Slashdot is male. Therefore, I doubt anyone who claims that they are not part of that majority, simply because probabilty states that a given user is most likely male. (I have no statistics to decide whether someone claiming to be female is female, though. I expect that most people who say they are female on Slashdot actually are (assuming that it can be decided they are not trolls).)
Basically, yeah, people will doubt you. So you really have two choices - live with it, or ignore it. I, personally, will believe you until I have reason not to - as you said, it really doesn't matter at all.
I'd love to see your sig "-- "If PRO is the opposite of CON what is the opposite of PROGRESS?" ~Paul Harvey" make it to the canidates...
Re:The W3C has their fundamental assumptions wrong
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CSS for Mobile Devices
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Um, will you at least put the "cellphone section" first, then... with an automatic cutoff that keeps the rest from flooding my bandwidth?;^/
As it turns out, that's not a problem: most cellphone browsers wind up first sending a request to a special WAP server, which is connected to the internet, and from there on out everything is normal HTTP. Presumably, one would have this server pick up some of the parsing.
And hey, I think XML is pretty cool - last year, my summer job was all about XML. Although the idea was to take an XML document you knew nothing about and allow people to do intelligent searches on the thing. Head on over to xfront.org for more information about this.
Actually, XML has one cool use - suppose that Slashdot generated the comments and all the pages in XML. So there would be a <comment> tag and so-on. Then, using XSLT you transform the XML document into HTML. That way, if you ever wanted to change the look, you just edit the XSLT, and everything changes to the new look. Unfortunately, that requires XML and XSLT parsers to be on the client-side. (Or you can do it server-side and watch Slashdot be crushed under the load.)
When you get right down to it, XML is really just the SGML spec reimplemented with certain pieces removed. The pieces they removed actually makes it easier to parse - but there's no way to understand what an XML document actually means. (Which was what I was supposed to solve.) XML Schemas are supposed to help this in some way. The thing XML is really useful for, though, is simply having a standardized way of formatting data, so any parser can read it in. Then an application needs to know enough about the document to determine what it means. In that way, XML is really just a flat-file database, which happens to look like SGML.
It is an extension of CSS2. CSS2 has this concept of media types, with different rules. (For example, there is a vocal media type, which has very little use for line-height and rendering things... The one thing I remember about the voice media type is that you can specify types of voices to say (render) content in.)
All CSSMP does is say that there is now a mobil-phone media type, and that these rules are used for it. In a way, it's a completely different spec, but you'd need it to be separate. Lumping voice browsers, TV browsers, and console-browsers into one standard would get... messy. CSSMP just gives another set of rules for rendering HTML content.
BTW, how do you expect ISP's to rewrite Amazon.com's main page to work on a cellphone? It's kinda graphically intensive... How about Slashdot? For simple pages, it'd be easy, but for complex pages like Slashdot it would be all but impossible. (Especially pages that are designed to look a certain way, which cellphones, and lynx, usually choke on. Try nVidia's webpage under Lynx some time - it's all graphics without ALT tags.)
Actually, as it turns out, CSSMP might be exactly what you want - since a page designed with a CSS2 style sheet can have multiple media types, the cellphone section would describe how to render the page on a cellphone, while the browser sections would identify how to display it under a browser. A properly designed page would work both under a CSS2 compliant browser (there aren't any!) and under a CSS2 compliant cellphone (and... there aren't any of those, either). But it would be the same HTML document, just different styling rules for different ways of displaying the same content.
And while you're giving the W3C credit for being forward looking, realize that there is no (finished, I think Mozilla trys to) browser that currently implements CSS2 - and the W3C is currently working on CSS3.
Given that the only browser that I'm aware of this date that even attempts to implement CSS2 (which is not the same as standard CSS which IE for Mac does right) is Mozilla. (Or, rather, Gecko, I guess. The Mozilla renderer/parser combo, which I think is Gecko - but I might be wrong... Bottom line is that all Mozilla based browsers (eg, Galeon) should pick up the ability.)
There is currently one production browser in existance that actually implements CSS1 - Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh. Only the Mac version of IE does CSS1 correctly. No other browsers do. This spec is designed to supplement CSS2. The W3C is actively working on CSS3 for some strange reason...
As to why they did this, that's simple: HTML was never designed to specify the style of the document, just the structure. That's why the tags have names like Paragraph, Emphasis, and Strong. HTML was designed to structure content - it never was intended to be used to create the complex web pages we see today.
CSS was designed to solve that problem - it would move style away from the structure. CSS2 has the idea of multiple media types - all this mobile phone implementation really does is add another media type. The idea behind media types is so that HTML+CSS2 can be used in both a browser, and then have a special set of rules for when it's printed. There's a "vocal" set of rules for blind people who use text-to-speech browsers. Now there's a WAP "media" type so that phones that support it can view content.
Most simply, the idea behind CSS2 is to allow someone to create a webpage based on content and not on style - and to allow the CSS backend to be changed, so that the look and feel of a website isn't done in HTML as much as it's done in CSS. The mobile phone CSS spec is simply an extension of this ideal - to separate content from style. By extension, that means you don't need to rewrite the page in HDML - all you need to do is use the special cellphone CSS section, and the page is "converted." This was the basic goal behind CSS2. It's too bad no one ever really got around to using it.
I'm using right now about 5% of my CPU cycles. I am currently running Apache, the Cyclone IRC daemon, identd, atd, OpenSSH server, lpd, crond, XFree86 4.0.1, XFS, six virtual terms, all the various Gnome programs, Netscape, GAIM, and X-Chat.
And I'm using about 5% of the CPU. Right now, I could be doing something actually useful - but I'm not. If I start the distrubted.net client, I then start using ALL my CPU.
The bottom line is, since my computer is basically being used as a development platform (httpd is for some web dev stuff, the ircd is just me playing around with stuff), I'm not actually using too much CPU time. If it were a desktop, I'd probably being using less CPU time (well, not really - most of the processes right now are sleeping, waiting for I/O.) I'm not using too much processing power. Any modern OS is capable of multiprocessing - some better than others. Because of this, I can happily type away this message while the dnet client runs happily in the background.
If I give a family a PC, and say "here - you get a free PC, a free Internet connection, and all you have to do is keep it on all the time" who wouldn't like the deal? They're paying for electricity - depending on how the networking's done, they aren't paying for anything else. And since the PC is doing actual work, they needn't be bothered by ads. Sounds like a nice setup to me.
As long as the distributed client didn't eat too many CPU cylces, they wouldn't notice - and probably, wouldn't care. The only time I ever find the need to go and kill all unneeded processes is when I want to play CPU intensive games. For someone who wants to do word processing and surf the web, that'd be a very nice deal.
Actually, their errata page DID have a mistake in it - they referred to some directory called/sinb. I don't have a/sinb on my machine, but I do have a/sbin.
A service pack is a bunch of updates. An update is a fix to usually one program. Windows NT service packs fixed many, many bugs. I guess what Slashdot is saying is that the people at RedHat can only fix this one problem, and haven't gotten around to fixing all "2500" others.
Honestly, I think that the pro-Debian main editors on this site just like poking fun of the most popular/most widespread Linux distribution - kinda like how all Linux users poke fun at Microsoft.
I dunno - my RedHat 7.0 box hasn't even had uptime of over a day yet. Although I've traced the problem to "playing too many Windows-only games that WINE cannot run."
It is true - it's also directly copied off their errata page (which, seeing as I installed RedHat 7.0, foolish me, I really should be heading towards more frequently.)
Apparently they are waiting also, this story just disappeared off the front page!
It's also one of those "installed by default" things that I should have shut off anyway because I hate running daemons on my machine that I have no clue what they're doing.
Yes, I have patented making and smoking crack. That's what some of these executives must be doing to apply for these patents.
I respectfully disagree...
That's what the patent office has been doing to grant the patents. It's a no-brainer to attempt to patent something, given the economical advantage you might get. That'd be like saying that anyone who responded must be smoking crack, because they might get a $50 ThinkGeek gift certificate. Applying's smart, fooling the patent office is annoying, but the patent office being fooled - that's where the crack comes in.
Slashdot Mirror
DON'T DO THAT! You can't really print Flash presentations. You can't copy text from Flash. You don't really want to use Flash. I'd suggest that Flash is slower to download, but I'm not actually sure about that. In some scenarios, it would probably download faster (image intensive pages that can now be done with line art as opposed to gifs), but for just presenting text, you'd be shooting yourself in the foot.
Seriously, do not do that! You'd also be cutting out all the people too paranoid to run ActiveX, all those who use a browser without a Flash plugin, and anyone who needed to access the page from a console-based browser. If you want to know why not to do an all flash site, visit this site and cower in fear. (Only works in IE because their MIME types are messed up.)
I have actually seen IE reboot a system without warning on a Windows 98 (not SE) system. (Involving Java.) On my Win98SE when it crashes, I usually get a dialog box along the lines of "Windows is unstable, it is recommended you save all work and reboot." That isn't an exact quote, because it actually doesn't happen too often, but it does happen.
I have to wonder if MITRE's problems really are pay related - it's possible that all the stuff coming out of there is crap simply because the best people work for jobs with decent pay. I've already, as a sophomore, been asked to stay with MITRE after I graduate - and honestly, I'm not planning on doing it.
Hah, you old geezer, I'm not even out of college, and if last term's (yeah, terms) grades are any indication, I have a good five to six years before I do! Hahah, I'm still a sophomore, learning all this cool CS stuff. Wait, six years? Crap.
Seriously though, the problem isn't a new IDE, it's the hardware. Consoles generally speaking don't rely on APIs as much as accessing the hardware directly - most game companies actually write their own core code, which is of course highly proprietary, designed to get the most out of the hardware. The radical hardware design makes this more difficult than the PlayStation, and most other consoles.
In a way, though, this ensures that the PS2 games won't be taking full advantage of the console early on - may have been a good move. Bottom line is, there are extremely competent programmers out there who are still trying to figure out exactly how to best handle the PS2's hardware. It'll take them time to figure out, but you have to expect that.
It should also be noted that the original PlayStation IDE was based around Linux for whatever reason. Just because this is Slashdot, and most people like it when Linux is mentioned. Others rather hear about BSD or BeOS, but most like Linux.
I have no clue what the hell I just wrote. Damn sleep deprivation.
Ever wonder why you never seem to wake up in exactly the same position that you fell asleep in? People move while sleeping. They'll turn around while sleeping - you do actually move while asleep. It's generally not enough to fall out of bed (although sometimes it is!) and you generally don't start moving far enough to annoy anyone you're sleeping next to, but you do actually move while asleep.
The hardware is extremely different - screwing the way most people write games, and with the way that the game is actually ran at runtime. (The twin vector-processor whatevers are the biggest problem, since it either takes a assembly genius to get it to work write, or some really good compilers that don't exist yet.)
Actually, they're all very similar in design and layout. All of Square's Final Fantasy games really do look and "feel" like a Final Fantasy game, while most of their other RPGs have a noticable trend away. The story line is almost always different, but in a way, that's a good thing. It would get strained to have the same characters over and over again - it would even begin to get boring if it was the same world over and over again. By having different backdrops, Square allows themselves to play with the gameplay in ways they couldn't otherwise. (V's job system, XI's Espers, XII's Materia, XIII's draw system...)
The other thing that ties all the games together are the basic weapon/item/spells/summons, which almost always carry over. (Masamune is in every game, Tonic, Potion, Tincture, etc., Fire, Fira, Firaga (or Fire, Fire 2, Fire 3 in the US up until VIII), Ifrit, Shiva, Cait Sith (a character in VII, "Stray" in US's VI (or III)), etc.). The basic game play is really quite similar among all the Final Fantasy games, and that's what gets people coming back to it.
(It also should be noted that Crash Bandicoot officially ended with Crash Bandicoot 3: WARPED, although they've decided that it's too lucrative and are instead coming out with Crash Bandicoot character games, like a Mario Cart and Mario Party clone.)
However, I do agree completely that Sony is the king of marketting, and that they've successfully used that to quell other platforms. Bascially, they try and win the developers over to the PS, and with PS2s weird hardware, games are that much harder to port from the PlayStation2. Unfortunately for Sony, that works two ways: It's also harder to port to the PS2.
Yeah, but will Dreamcast users? From what I've heard, Sega's online service had some troubles on launch (enough to get a Penny Arcade cartoon). Besides, most on-line games over dialup are laggy and just seem to play poorly (mostly depending on the latency between server/players). Plus, I have to wonder how servers work - do you start up a server on your DC, or do you play off the official Sega.net servers?
It's possible that Sony is actually wise in waiting. As most people have pointed out, this is the initial release of a system. Wait for it to become stable. It's not the launch titles I'm interested in, it's MGS2 and FFX. Some time next year, I might actually find myself getting a PS2. But right now, it's not worth it. It takes time for good games - you have to be patient with new consoles. Especially with the PS2, since it is a very radical change in the way most games run. Whether this helps or hurts it in the long run remains to be seen.
(And, with Sony, you have to wait three or four "versions" before they create one that doesn't break just after the warranty period...)
So, yeah, it does divide people by those who can get on and those who cannot, but it does help with all who do make it on. There are people who can express themselves better online than IRL because they don't start with the stereotypes. It's a lot harder to be prejudiced about someone when you cannot see or hear them - most of hour prejudices come from the input clues a person gives us. Here, people are prejudged mainly based on their post structures. (In other words, people who post with no caps and no punctuation are generally considered to be trolls/losers. Look through the posts at -1 and you'll notice your dispostion based on the "look" of the post.)
As newsgroups such as the various alt.supports show, there are plenty of people who can actually express themselves "in Cyberspace" where they can't In Real Life.
It should be noted that I have no gift for "public expression" IRL. I hate speaking in front of even 10 people. Yet here I am, posting a long post to Slashdot. Why? Because the fact that I can "Preview" what I just said makes it easier for me to be coherent.
The Internet does serve as a way to merge the classes, for those who are priviledged enough to get on it. While as always, the conclusions that Jon Katz draws seem to be a little out of proportion, don't discount the Internet yet. It really does serve as a means to eliminate class boundaries, and even geographic boundaries and political boundaries. Yes, the Internet leaves a vast majority of people out - but those who can get in, find that the social barriers to entry are far less than those in real life.
Most games use this to their advantage, so that when I play Half-Life, my frame rates never go above 72 FPS since my refresh rate is around 72 Hz - this is used to prevent "tearing" when one frame is rendered during the first half of the sweep to refresh the screen and another is rendered later. Going above your refresh rate will actually make your game look worse.
Even if the card is capable of 200fps, it should never actually do that - unless you have a rediculously fast refreshing monitor, you're just drawing frames that you won't see or that will simply tear. Plus, I believe that it's been stated that the human eye cannot discern framerates above about 60FPS anyway. Although it is quite nice to be able to play Half-Life at 1280x960 at a constant 72fps (again, locked to 72fps since anything higher would tear on my display).
Hemos has said in the past (and in the Slashdot IRC chat) that about the only control they will exercise (and not nec. may) is to prevent Java applets/Flash shows from being served. Other than that, any GIF that's standard-size is fair game ad-wise.
Conspiracy theorists might decide that WinNT for Alpha was dropped because Compaq wanted to force the people buying Alphas to use Tru64. However, this really isn't the case, because apparently the market for WinNT Alpha machines was less than 10% the market for Tru64 Alpha machines. WinNT on Alpha simply isn't commerically viable.
However the Mac is an entirely different beast. The biggest difference is simply the target market - while Alpha machines are sold as high-end servers, Mac machines are sold as desktop boxes. That means that there is a market for applications on MacOS that there simply isn't for WinNT on Alpha.
Since there is a definite market for desktop applications on MacOS that WinNT for Alpha lacked, then it stands to reason that if people aren't porting applications to it there issome other reason... Unfortunately for Apple, this isn't entirely true - there is a much larger market for Wintel applications than any other type. That's why there are almost always Win32/x86 versions even when there aren't for other platforms.
A rather good example is the fact that Java for Win32(x86) is usually more advanced than Java for UNIX. (Keep in mind that Java for Linux is almost identical as Java for Solaris and Java for (Free)BSD. The differences are mostly in the JIT, along with thread support and other things that the OSes disagree on.) Sun may own Solaris, but Java developers are mostly interested in the applications running under Windows. As a result, Java for Windows gets the most attention and is usually released sooner than Java for any other platform - including Solaris.
It's really a market thing. If Apple can create a market for MacOS apps, then companies will port. The market only has to be commerically viable - the cost of supporting the market cannot be prohibitive. From the few Mac developers I've talked with, this hasn't always been the case.
In the case of WinNT for Alpha, though, it was too costly a market to support. There simply wasn't any demand. Outside the world of open source, the market determines what succeeds and what fails - not technology. Not stability. And, again, it's the market that will cause OSX to either succeed or fail.
The response is still available, though.
Also, Win98lite is the tool that actually removes IE.
If you install the Windows PowerToys, giving you TweakUI, there as option in the TweakUI panel that allows you to automatically delete all IE browser history. It's under the Paranoia tab.
Trust me - if I want to look at things my parents don't want me to, I know enough to remove all traces. If the kid knew enough to jumper the BIOS, they know enough to make plenty sure that the parent can't use the browser history. (Anywhere from brute force by deleting, which would arouse suspision, to copying previous history/cache to a temp folder and them moving it back, to, under Netscape/Windows, creating a new "user" and deleting it when done.) If you can't trust the kid, then don't let them on the Internet. Seriously though, most kids I know don't use the Internet for pr0n, they use it to look for stuff their more insterested in, be that Slashdot, SNES emulation, Pokémon, whatever.
Best way to protect your kid is to make sure you know why they're on the 'net. If they say that they wish to look for something you're willing to allow them to look for, chances are they really are. And by staying nearby, you can make sure they really do.
I think you should have told the parents just to watch the child while she was browsing the Internet - there's no need to attempt to prevent her from even using the computer! There are very easy ways to keep children off the Internet when you don't want them on - if you're on DSL, disabling the modem works wonders, on a phone line, keeping track of when you were on and comparing that to the invoice is another great method.
Unless, of course, there was material on the computer that children shouldn't know about...
Annoyingly enough, plain old text means that it removes all the tags, even those that Slashdot "supports." You want to use Extrans and CmdrTaco should consider why Plain Old Text is even there - it doesn't seem to actually DO anything useful. Extrans seems to provide the proper support. I have no idea why that's even there.
I play (too much) Counter-Strike over the college LAN. Almost all Counter-Strike players are male. There are apparently as many as four women who actually play on the LAN, although most don't play frequently. (Actually, I think we chat-flamed one away... Same problem you're running into.) However, there have been players known to pretend to be women for whatever reason. (I know one who claims he's still trying to fool people, so everyone who claims to be a women on the local Counter-Strike servers finds that I immediately assume that she is he.) Same basic thing applies to Slashdot - almost everyone posting to Slashdot is male. Therefore, I doubt anyone who claims that they are not part of that majority, simply because probabilty states that a given user is most likely male. (I have no statistics to decide whether someone claiming to be female is female, though. I expect that most people who say they are female on Slashdot actually are (assuming that it can be decided they are not trolls).)
Basically, yeah, people will doubt you. So you really have two choices - live with it, or ignore it. I, personally, will believe you until I have reason not to - as you said, it really doesn't matter at all.
I'd love to see your sig "-- "If PRO is the opposite of CON what is the opposite of PROGRESS?" ~Paul Harvey" make it to the canidates...
As it turns out, that's not a problem: most cellphone browsers wind up first sending a request to a special WAP server, which is connected to the internet, and from there on out everything is normal HTTP. Presumably, one would have this server pick up some of the parsing.
And hey, I think XML is pretty cool - last year, my summer job was all about XML. Although the idea was to take an XML document you knew nothing about and allow people to do intelligent searches on the thing. Head on over to xfront.org for more information about this.
Actually, XML has one cool use - suppose that Slashdot generated the comments and all the pages in XML. So there would be a <comment> tag and so-on. Then, using XSLT you transform the XML document into HTML. That way, if you ever wanted to change the look, you just edit the XSLT, and everything changes to the new look. Unfortunately, that requires XML and XSLT parsers to be on the client-side. (Or you can do it server-side and watch Slashdot be crushed under the load.)
When you get right down to it, XML is really just the SGML spec reimplemented with certain pieces removed. The pieces they removed actually makes it easier to parse - but there's no way to understand what an XML document actually means. (Which was what I was supposed to solve.) XML Schemas are supposed to help this in some way. The thing XML is really useful for, though, is simply having a standardized way of formatting data, so any parser can read it in. Then an application needs to know enough about the document to determine what it means. In that way, XML is really just a flat-file database, which happens to look like SGML.
All CSSMP does is say that there is now a mobil-phone media type, and that these rules are used for it. In a way, it's a completely different spec, but you'd need it to be separate. Lumping voice browsers, TV browsers, and console-browsers into one standard would get... messy. CSSMP just gives another set of rules for rendering HTML content.
BTW, how do you expect ISP's to rewrite Amazon.com's main page to work on a cellphone? It's kinda graphically intensive... How about Slashdot? For simple pages, it'd be easy, but for complex pages like Slashdot it would be all but impossible. (Especially pages that are designed to look a certain way, which cellphones, and lynx, usually choke on. Try nVidia's webpage under Lynx some time - it's all graphics without ALT tags.)
Actually, as it turns out, CSSMP might be exactly what you want - since a page designed with a CSS2 style sheet can have multiple media types, the cellphone section would describe how to render the page on a cellphone, while the browser sections would identify how to display it under a browser. A properly designed page would work both under a CSS2 compliant browser (there aren't any!) and under a CSS2 compliant cellphone (and... there aren't any of those, either). But it would be the same HTML document, just different styling rules for different ways of displaying the same content.
And while you're giving the W3C credit for being forward looking, realize that there is no (finished, I think Mozilla trys to) browser that currently implements CSS2 - and the W3C is currently working on CSS3 .
There is currently one production browser in existance that actually implements CSS1 - Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh. Only the Mac version of IE does CSS1 correctly. No other browsers do. This spec is designed to supplement CSS2. The W3C is actively working on CSS3 for some strange reason...
As to why they did this, that's simple: HTML was never designed to specify the style of the document, just the structure. That's why the tags have names like Paragraph, Emphasis, and Strong. HTML was designed to structure content - it never was intended to be used to create the complex web pages we see today.
CSS was designed to solve that problem - it would move style away from the structure. CSS2 has the idea of multiple media types - all this mobile phone implementation really does is add another media type. The idea behind media types is so that HTML+CSS2 can be used in both a browser, and then have a special set of rules for when it's printed. There's a "vocal" set of rules for blind people who use text-to-speech browsers. Now there's a WAP "media" type so that phones that support it can view content.
Most simply, the idea behind CSS2 is to allow someone to create a webpage based on content and not on style - and to allow the CSS backend to be changed, so that the look and feel of a website isn't done in HTML as much as it's done in CSS. The mobile phone CSS spec is simply an extension of this ideal - to separate content from style. By extension, that means you don't need to rewrite the page in HDML - all you need to do is use the special cellphone CSS section, and the page is "converted." This was the basic goal behind CSS2. It's too bad no one ever really got around to using it.
And I'm using about 5% of the CPU. Right now, I could be doing something actually useful - but I'm not. If I start the distrubted.net client, I then start using ALL my CPU.
The bottom line is, since my computer is basically being used as a development platform (httpd is for some web dev stuff, the ircd is just me playing around with stuff), I'm not actually using too much CPU time. If it were a desktop, I'd probably being using less CPU time (well, not really - most of the processes right now are sleeping, waiting for I/O.) I'm not using too much processing power. Any modern OS is capable of multiprocessing - some better than others. Because of this, I can happily type away this message while the dnet client runs happily in the background.
If I give a family a PC, and say "here - you get a free PC, a free Internet connection, and all you have to do is keep it on all the time" who wouldn't like the deal? They're paying for electricity - depending on how the networking's done, they aren't paying for anything else. And since the PC is doing actual work, they needn't be bothered by ads. Sounds like a nice setup to me.
As long as the distributed client didn't eat too many CPU cylces, they wouldn't notice - and probably, wouldn't care. The only time I ever find the need to go and kill all unneeded processes is when I want to play CPU intensive games. For someone who wants to do word processing and surf the web, that'd be a very nice deal.
Actually, their errata page DID have a mistake in it - they referred to some directory called /sinb. I don't have a /sinb on my machine, but I do have a /sbin.
Honestly, I think that the pro-Debian main editors on this site just like poking fun of the most popular/most widespread Linux distribution - kinda like how all Linux users poke fun at Microsoft.
I dunno - my RedHat 7.0 box hasn't even had uptime of over a day yet. Although I've traced the problem to "playing too many Windows-only games that WINE cannot run."
Apparently they are waiting also, this story just disappeared off the front page!
It's also one of those "installed by default" things that I should have shut off anyway because I hate running daemons on my machine that I have no clue what they're doing.
I respectfully disagree...
That's what the patent office has been doing to grant the patents. It's a no-brainer to attempt to patent something, given the economical advantage you might get. That'd be like saying that anyone who responded must be smoking crack, because they might get a $50 ThinkGeek gift certificate. Applying's smart, fooling the patent office is annoying, but the patent office being fooled - that's where the crack comes in.