Well...he does have a point for some cards..take r500 series for example (such as x1550). Proprietary drivers dropped support for drivers >9.3, radeon opensource drivers get an average of 10fps in older games such as UT2004 or less powerfull games like Touhou 8. radeonhd drivers work, but aren't much faster and are still fairly unstable (15-20fps average, crashing every 10 minutes or so, driver has a long way to go still as the game is still more or less unplayable). Note that this is on a card roughly equivalent to a geforce 7600, and rarely dips below 60fps with the proprietary drivers.
I applaud their efforts and overall my experience with ATI on linux has been great but there IS still a huge problem with them dropping support for some cards. For ones like mine there's only a few options.
1. Stop playing 3d games.
2. work on the radeonhd driver to help support my card. (a LOT is still not implemented, or incompatible with my specific card, I'd love to help but this would be very time consuming)
3. get a new video card. (I'm actually happy with my hardware though..just the drivers lately are the issue)
4. (what I actually do) Patch the proprietary driver for new kernel/xorg-server versions, the changes between a few versions are relatively minor, and easy to debug and track down. It only takes a few hours to get it working on an unsupported kernel version or xorg version, though tbh i haven't tried to get it working >=1.7 yet, I'm running the proprietary driver 9.3 currently on 2.6.31.6-rt19 with xorg-server-1.6.5-r1
I use ATI myself and won't bash them for doing a good thing, but he does have a point, ATI DOES still drop cards from driver support very quickly, and well before many of the cards are adequately supported by the OS driver (which means your system effectively can't update X, mesa, etc, and that latest ubuntu ISO has no option for 3d acceleration for his card without painful downgrades or modifying the driver himself).
heh, funny WOW related story. I bought the game after being told it had "role playing" shards. After being a long time ultima online and neverwinter nights player, i thought it would be cool to get into another MMO with role playing. (NWN realy was, if you found a good server). I spent HOURS upon HOURS coming up with a backstory for my character, being careful with the creation and look so it fit, and reading up on the history of Azeroth. (it was a role playing, pvp server). Excited, i joined in on the horde side...it turns out trying to role play on the specificly labeled role playing servers in WOW gets you laughed out of the game O_x. I tried playing it for a month but found the game mechanics dry and repetitive, it's nothing more than an endless grind, there's no getting together by a campfire at night telling stories of your adventures, really none of the interesting things you would find in other online rpg's.
anyways, you sound like you're looking for exactly what i'm looking for...an actual online ROLE PLAYING game. you probably would have liked the origional ultima online (before the year 2000, when the Renaissance expansion came out, but even after that there was still a lot of guilds that never broke character in game). The expansions have pretty much turned it into a crappy version of WOW though, its now all about the l00t grind:/ You probably also would have enjoyed Neverwinter Nights during the time a lot of the better servers were still up (the singleplayer epicly sucked), most were FORCED role playing (you break character, you get banned, you get a few warnings of course). Never played online games besides those where you could go hours/days without fighting and still be completely into it:)
no kidding, same thing i was thinking, his radio's are shit, he just has enough of them to get the EQUIVILANT of a decent radio unit for a hell of a lot more money. (kinda a stupid way of doing it)
besides, if i had 25k to put (more) radios in my car (i already have 2m+cb in my 03 mr2), i'd get a nice yaesu unit for normal use, and one of these hooked up to my carputer. http://gnuradio.org/
As someone else with a similar front projection system, if yours is fast enough try out a 3d system that uses electronically controlled glasses. Works with pretty much any 3d game already and looks awesome, you just have to tune what the offset is. I was never much of a fan of world of warcraft...but at 96 inches in full 3d i have to say it was pretty badass for a while:). When tuned properly it's like you're looking through a window out into the world. (text and chats float at the "pane" of the window, everything else drops behind)
well...why not make a minimal OS for it? assuming you use a pic32 it has a network stack built in already anyways, toss on a 802.11b chipset and an anteanna trace, add a SD card slot you can bitbang to/from, and buy a replacement nintendo DS screen for it, and you could build yourself a portable, wifi enabled, pic based, touchscreen terminal for under $200 that can run all year.
go dig up a old sharp mobilon, they're run off a pair of AA batteries from here till doomsday and are ARM based. (you can dump linux on a memory card and install it) AND they have a cardbus slot for expansions. (they're the size of a jornada). I picked one up for $5 at a ham radio swapmeet, makes an awesome mobile web browser/terminal/orinoco based wardriving machine.
My friend owns an ARM9 based netbook (Sorry but I don't remember the model, it's probably around 3-4 years old now, I think it was just called "netbook" actually) and I own a MIPS based netbook (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skytone_Alpha-400). The newer skytone netbooks are already ARM based, and have been out for quite a while. My only two beefs with them are the default OS absolutely blows (it's easy to use, hard to modify or install ANYTHING, luckily you pretty much just need copy a tarball of the OS image you want to load onto it on a SD card to get a normal distro.) and the keyboard sucks. (though I've yet to see a netbook with a keyboard that didn't suck). I've seen a couple ARM based netbooks hanging around frys electronics the past few years as well, they're around just not pushed and advertised as hard as the x86 ones, and tend to only appear for a few months out of the year.
I recommend buying one as they become more common, the difference in battery life alone is worth it.
I'll second this, at home I keep an install of chromium just for slashdot because the new interface doesn't work with the security settings I have in firefox, and even with exceptions in place it's maddeningly slow. C'mon slashdot...you didn't have this problem a year or two ago..
Adding on to further throw this thread off topic, if you're working with audio you really should be using the real-time preemption model, most distros don't have it turned on by default so you either need to compile your own kernel or find one that does. (i think the pro-audio build for ubuntu has it by default)
Most of the doujin games based off touhou are NOT free, they're sold. Check out himeya shop online, they have a pretty good listing of them and are one of the few companies that buy them up and resell them to US customers.
MythTV back end, MythTV front end for me, the front end is made a world better by disabling the internal player and using custom player scripts set up through the admin interface.
The "Items bought with real money will not provide a combat advantage" is the same thing they said when they first allowed buying items in Ultima Online, and they started selling collectibles and items to lock down in your home. That lasted about 6 months before they started selling ($10-$15 a piece) armor and weapons that are pretty much top tier, equal to items people spent 7+ years getting. Result will probably be the same too, everyone who actually enjoys the game for what it is, and likes competitive gameplay will leave for a different game. Thankfully the game was already completely ruined by EA already at that time thanks to the "new expansion pack is pretty much required to stay competitive" game they'd already played a few times, so no huge loss.
I hate to reply to myself, but good god I left a lot of extra commas in the top paragraph...sorry. It was re-edited many times and broken up and re-structured. Just read it in William Shatner's voice and it'll sound fine.
Hmm, I'd say that's more of a recent phenomena though. While it's true the working life of my recent computers is 4-5 years at most. (lower if it ever had HP, Compaq, or Sony, written on it), my Commodore, one of my friend's mac classics, and other older machines never died, just stopped being used as much. (mostly brought out just to mess with now), hell, as a more recent example, my Thinkpad was built in 2000 and is still my primary laptop today, and gets used more than any other computer I own. Works as well as the day it was built. (though thinkpads were a long standing exception, most everything was cheap throwaway junk by around 1995). This is irrelevant to my main point however:)
Junk or not though, whether it works is generally irrelevant for a collector of such things. Your points about a typewriter are just as valid to a well built computer, and the durability issue pointed out just as relevant to a cheap typewriter. (I'm old enough to have written school papers on typewriters, and yes, a lot of them were junk that broke after 3-4 years). The only real value is who owned it previously, it doesn't matter if it's a $0.02 BIC pen used to write a popular book, it still gains that perceived value.
I have to respectfully disagree with that, mplayer is an amazing player for anime/fansubs (which probably accounts for 99% of the video on my system). Most current shows are in HD as well and current versions of mplayer have no issue with them. VLC, in my experience, is fairly sub-par on linux, try out mplayer using smplayer as a front end, you'll love it:)
For blu-ray, it's considered unstable at the moment so you won't see it in a mainline distro, but check out the doom9 guys and the posts over on the gentoo forums, I've had working blu-ray playback for nearly a year now using my sony blu-ray drive. I've had no issues with it but yrmv, it is still unstable:/
I also play tons of visual novels and danmaku shooters/other doujin games (I own Touhou 6-8 as well), they play perfectly under wine, BUT you first need to install the Japanese font set's from windows. (i forget it's name, there's a Free version of it that replaces it you can just copy in, you don't need to rip it from windows). My biggest issue of late has been the text in Touhou 12 is partly transparent, makes it hard to read. Working on a patch for that now so when i buy the game I'll be able to play it fully:)
In the case of not having cup holders, it's not terribly hard either. In the case of US cars....use your left hand to hold the cup.
I know, most people would never think to do something so radical...
I'm glad it's extended too, this hit the gentoo forums about a week ago and i forgot about it.
$20 to me was asking too much for it, heck, for $20 i can pick up 2-3 playstation store games. $5-$10 is a more acceptable price, and by allowing the price to drop, they just made one more sale they otherwise wouldn't have had.
Slashdot Mirror
Well...he does have a point for some cards..take r500 series for example (such as x1550). Proprietary drivers dropped support for drivers >9.3, radeon opensource drivers get an average of 10fps in older games such as UT2004 or less powerfull games like Touhou 8. radeonhd drivers work, but aren't much faster and are still fairly unstable (15-20fps average, crashing every 10 minutes or so, driver has a long way to go still as the game is still more or less unplayable). Note that this is on a card roughly equivalent to a geforce 7600, and rarely dips below 60fps with the proprietary drivers.
I applaud their efforts and overall my experience with ATI on linux has been great but there IS still a huge problem with them dropping support for some cards. For ones like mine there's only a few options.
1. Stop playing 3d games.
2. work on the radeonhd driver to help support my card. (a LOT is still not implemented, or incompatible with my specific card, I'd love to help but this would be very time consuming)
3. get a new video card. (I'm actually happy with my hardware though..just the drivers lately are the issue)
4. (what I actually do) Patch the proprietary driver for new kernel/xorg-server versions, the changes between a few versions are relatively minor, and easy to debug and track down. It only takes a few hours to get it working on an unsupported kernel version or xorg version, though tbh i haven't tried to get it working >=1.7 yet, I'm running the proprietary driver 9.3 currently on 2.6.31.6-rt19 with xorg-server-1.6.5-r1
I use ATI myself and won't bash them for doing a good thing, but he does have a point, ATI DOES still drop cards from driver support very quickly, and well before many of the cards are adequately supported by the OS driver (which means your system effectively can't update X, mesa, etc, and that latest ubuntu ISO has no option for 3d acceleration for his card without painful downgrades or modifying the driver himself).
I was thinking the same thing, it does sound similar.
heh, funny WOW related story. I bought the game after being told it had "role playing" shards. After being a long time ultima online and neverwinter nights player, i thought it would be cool to get into another MMO with role playing. (NWN realy was, if you found a good server). I spent HOURS upon HOURS coming up with a backstory for my character, being careful with the creation and look so it fit, and reading up on the history of Azeroth. (it was a role playing, pvp server). Excited, i joined in on the horde side...it turns out trying to role play on the specificly labeled role playing servers in WOW gets you laughed out of the game O_x. I tried playing it for a month but found the game mechanics dry and repetitive, it's nothing more than an endless grind, there's no getting together by a campfire at night telling stories of your adventures, really none of the interesting things you would find in other online rpg's.
:/ You probably also would have enjoyed Neverwinter Nights during the time a lot of the better servers were still up (the singleplayer epicly sucked), most were FORCED role playing (you break character, you get banned, you get a few warnings of course). Never played online games besides those where you could go hours/days without fighting and still be completely into it :)
anyways, you sound like you're looking for exactly what i'm looking for...an actual online ROLE PLAYING game. you probably would have liked the origional ultima online (before the year 2000, when the Renaissance expansion came out, but even after that there was still a lot of guilds that never broke character in game). The expansions have pretty much turned it into a crappy version of WOW though, its now all about the l00t grind
no kidding, same thing i was thinking, his radio's are shit, he just has enough of them to get the EQUIVILANT of a decent radio unit for a hell of a lot more money. (kinda a stupid way of doing it) besides, if i had 25k to put (more) radios in my car (i already have 2m+cb in my 03 mr2), i'd get a nice yaesu unit for normal use, and one of these hooked up to my carputer. http://gnuradio.org/
As someone else with a similar front projection system, if yours is fast enough try out a 3d system that uses electronically controlled glasses. Works with pretty much any 3d game already and looks awesome, you just have to tune what the offset is. I was never much of a fan of world of warcraft...but at 96 inches in full 3d i have to say it was pretty badass for a while :). When tuned properly it's like you're looking through a window out into the world. (text and chats float at the "pane" of the window, everything else drops behind)
well...why not make a minimal OS for it? assuming you use a pic32 it has a network stack built in already anyways, toss on a 802.11b chipset and an anteanna trace, add a SD card slot you can bitbang to/from, and buy a replacement nintendo DS screen for it, and you could build yourself a portable, wifi enabled, pic based, touchscreen terminal for under $200 that can run all year.
oop, sorry, i mean MIPS based, i had jornada on the brain....
go dig up a old sharp mobilon, they're run off a pair of AA batteries from here till doomsday and are ARM based. (you can dump linux on a memory card and install it) AND they have a cardbus slot for expansions. (they're the size of a jornada). I picked one up for $5 at a ham radio swapmeet, makes an awesome mobile web browser/terminal/orinoco based wardriving machine.
My friend owns an ARM9 based netbook (Sorry but I don't remember the model, it's probably around 3-4 years old now, I think it was just called "netbook" actually) and I own a MIPS based netbook (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skytone_Alpha-400). The newer skytone netbooks are already ARM based, and have been out for quite a while. My only two beefs with them are the default OS absolutely blows (it's easy to use, hard to modify or install ANYTHING, luckily you pretty much just need copy a tarball of the OS image you want to load onto it on a SD card to get a normal distro.) and the keyboard sucks. (though I've yet to see a netbook with a keyboard that didn't suck). I've seen a couple ARM based netbooks hanging around frys electronics the past few years as well, they're around just not pushed and advertised as hard as the x86 ones, and tend to only appear for a few months out of the year.
I recommend buying one as they become more common, the difference in battery life alone is worth it.
however...nobody here would even notice a 3.4
I'll second this, at home I keep an install of chromium just for slashdot because the new interface doesn't work with the security settings I have in firefox, and even with exceptions in place it's maddeningly slow. C'mon slashdot...you didn't have this problem a year or two ago..
...so long as their manager gets training on how to deal with their quirks, and they're kept far away from customers.
Easy, just find a manager that previously worked over programmers.
Adding on to further throw this thread off topic, if you're working with audio you really should be using the real-time preemption model, most distros don't have it turned on by default so you either need to compile your own kernel or find one that does. (i think the pro-audio build for ubuntu has it by default)
Most of the doujin games based off touhou are NOT free, they're sold. Check out himeya shop online, they have a pretty good listing of them and are one of the few companies that buy them up and resell them to US customers.
MythTV back end, MythTV front end for me, the front end is made a world better by disabling the internal player and using custom player scripts set up through the admin interface.
The "Items bought with real money will not provide a combat advantage" is the same thing they said when they first allowed buying items in Ultima Online, and they started selling collectibles and items to lock down in your home. That lasted about 6 months before they started selling ($10-$15 a piece) armor and weapons that are pretty much top tier, equal to items people spent 7+ years getting. Result will probably be the same too, everyone who actually enjoys the game for what it is, and likes competitive gameplay will leave for a different game. Thankfully the game was already completely ruined by EA already at that time thanks to the "new expansion pack is pretty much required to stay competitive" game they'd already played a few times, so no huge loss.
I hate to reply to myself, but good god I left a lot of extra commas in the top paragraph...sorry. It was re-edited many times and broken up and re-structured. Just read it in William Shatner's voice and it'll sound fine.
Hmm, I'd say that's more of a recent phenomena though. While it's true the working life of my recent computers is 4-5 years at most. (lower if it ever had HP, Compaq, or Sony, written on it), my Commodore, one of my friend's mac classics, and other older machines never died, just stopped being used as much. (mostly brought out just to mess with now), hell, as a more recent example, my Thinkpad was built in 2000 and is still my primary laptop today, and gets used more than any other computer I own. Works as well as the day it was built. (though thinkpads were a long standing exception, most everything was cheap throwaway junk by around 1995). This is irrelevant to my main point however :)
Junk or not though, whether it works is generally irrelevant for a collector of such things. Your points about a typewriter are just as valid to a well built computer, and the durability issue pointed out just as relevant to a cheap typewriter. (I'm old enough to have written school papers on typewriters, and yes, a lot of them were junk that broke after 3-4 years). The only real value is who owned it previously, it doesn't matter if it's a $0.02 BIC pen used to write a popular book, it still gains that perceived value.
just my 0.02 cents
change the settings to disable directinput, on some systems it causes this. (not just wine, it happens in windows too!)
I have to respectfully disagree with that, mplayer is an amazing player for anime/fansubs (which probably accounts for 99% of the video on my system). Most current shows are in HD as well and current versions of mplayer have no issue with them. VLC, in my experience, is fairly sub-par on linux, try out mplayer using smplayer as a front end, you'll love it :)
:/
:)
For blu-ray, it's considered unstable at the moment so you won't see it in a mainline distro, but check out the doom9 guys and the posts over on the gentoo forums, I've had working blu-ray playback for nearly a year now using my sony blu-ray drive. I've had no issues with it but yrmv, it is still unstable
I also play tons of visual novels and danmaku shooters/other doujin games (I own Touhou 6-8 as well), they play perfectly under wine, BUT you first need to install the Japanese font set's from windows. (i forget it's name, there's a Free version of it that replaces it you can just copy in, you don't need to rip it from windows). My biggest issue of late has been the text in Touhou 12 is partly transparent, makes it hard to read. Working on a patch for that now so when i buy the game I'll be able to play it fully
In the case of not having cup holders, it's not terribly hard either. In the case of US cars....use your left hand to hold the cup. I know, most people would never think to do something so radical...
For those of us behind work firewalls that allow slashdot but not gaming websites, could someone post up a summary of the data in the charts?
I'm glad it's extended too, this hit the gentoo forums about a week ago and i forgot about it. $20 to me was asking too much for it, heck, for $20 i can pick up 2-3 playstation store games. $5-$10 is a more acceptable price, and by allowing the price to drop, they just made one more sale they otherwise wouldn't have had.
Doom (1993) and Duke Nukem 3D (1996) both had excellent co-op gameplay. And duke was definitely not bald :)
"on the original arcade machine." AFAIK (can't get to the article from work) the arcade records are always on original hardware.