This is assuming your motherboard even has ISA slots. I tell ya, kids these days, err, where was I?;)
Anyway, in the few short years I've been using Linux, all the distributions have come very far in detecting and using newer hardware. However, the general rule of thumb, especially for things like dial-up modems, is still the older the hardware is, the more likely it will be compatible.
I'm stuck on dialup myself, and I use an old Creative Modem Blaster 56K. Purchased around... 98 or 99 I think.
Before that it was my lovely US Robotics 28.8 DSVD (Digital Simultaneous Voice and Data! OHHH, AHHH!) modem. Heh. That sounded like a cool feature at the time, but it never really took off. And MAN that modem was HUGE. I'm talking over a foot. Really hard to cram it into my case. This modem also worked fine in various Linuxes.
So yeah... To answer your question: Your modems are too new. Find older ones.
Thief, the first one? That's actually the only game I played in the series. I am interested in the third but I'm afraid it might not agree with my hardware. Though it does run on an xbox, and my computer is slightly better on a purely hardware basis, heh.
Thief was very entertaining, and I found myself heading for the shadows in dark hallways in the real world without thinking about it. But I was never once tempted to turn out my lights with a water arrow, so I think I'm still clutching the last vestiges of my sanity. Thief got hard, though, when they throw all those zombies at you and big monsters and what-not. It seemed like the developers were afraid there wasn't enough action simply breaking into mansions and stealing stuff, but I'd have been happy if that were the whole game.
And yes, the games are also why I dual boot this machine, however Mandrake has come leaps and bounds even in the short time I've been using it. Mandrake 10 has a media player installed that supports pretty much every codec I've got, and I recall just three or four years ago it was a pain to get anything in divx to play. It supports my TV card, though it doesn't look as good as it does with DScaler, a nice bit of open source Windows software.
By the way, I'm going to be on my bike in (most likely) the rain in a couple hours. Not only that, but I'll be going through one of those much maligned "bike trails" that run through a marsh, and with the heavy rainfall recently the trails are at least partially flooded. Also, my front tire appears to have a slow leak. But I've got an eBay item that I need to ship today, and that's my favorite route, though obviously not the wisest. It should be an interesting journey...
Well, this post is even longer and more OT than my last, so I think I'll wrap it up now.
Yes that is interesting. Tell me, did you mean the original AoE or the second one? I know for AoE II they went to extreme measures to prevent cheating in online games, though it still proved rather futile...
Totally OT now, I think it's funny how one of the selling points in AoE II was the larger scale buildings, and yet a single unit still dwarfed the buildings. However, I suppose that's one of the inherent limits of the isometric RTS genre... It'd be hard to scroll around with buildings that were precisely to scale with the units, or the units would be so small as to be unclickable.
Then I welcome to the KFG stalking club! I've been reading his posts for over a year. I often have a tab open with his user page and find myself hitting reload quite often.
From what I've gathered, not only is KFG older than the "average slashdotter" he's also apparently not in the best of health due to some sort of fatal disease (two at last count?)... anyway, he likes to vanish from slashdot to do various things, such as study paleoanthropology or play Grand Prix Legends, and whenever he does I'm like "I hope he didn't kick the bucket this time!"
As you can see I have tendency to ramble (perhaps the direct opposite of KFG himself as his posts are normally short and to the point, example: in a reply to a question about why someone would do something he posted "Her." which I thought was rather amusing and yet insightful. And I just broke the record he set for longest parenthetical a while back).
Still with me? Scary! Alright then since, as I've stated, I tend to ramble, I'll shut up now and go back to stalking, something I'm much better at!
Ah, the 486... Who needs PCI slots anyway? Not us! AGP? Hah! Give me a VLB card and I'll be fine!
Actually, when it comes to computers, I often joke with my friends when I talk of eras past by saying "Those were the good old days... Wait a minute... those days sucked, nevermind."
My first computer (this is going to make me look like even more of a youngun to you) was an Acer with an AMD 486 at 66 MHz. Ohhh, ahhh! heh. 8 whole MB of ram, too. Quake made it hurt, but it actually ran the original Diablo pretty well.
Bicycling at -20F is doable, but I don't call it fun.
Yikes! And I thought biking in the rain here in Wisconsin was rough. Obviously if I'm biking the rain one can assume it's most likely above 32F, heh. The coldest I can ever recall it being here was something like -30F one winter. I remember schools were canceled due to cold. I was used to having "snow days" where school closed, but that was the first and only "can't let the kids get frostbite" days off I had.
But biking at -20F? I really hope that's a typo, unless you did it to experiment with self cryogenic preservation or something.
Great! I was just thinking about that, too. I had a 12mb Voodoo2 card once, but I have no idea what happened to it. I think it got tossed out in the last move. But yeah, GPL doesn't like my GeForce I guess. At first I was thinking it was an issue with XP since it doesn't even get past the starting screen. I'll try out that updated demo though. With nVidia having bought 3dfx and everything I thought that they'd make some Glide drivers for the nVidia cards by now... but I'm sure all of a dozen people worldwide would care, heh. Well, thanks for the OT posting, it wouldn't be slashdot without it!
Stupid AC. If you read KFG's posts a while you'll notice that he's so very right, so very often, that you can basically just assume everything he says is true. Go read his comments from, say, The End of the Oil Age so that you might notice the genius you're attempting to insult here.
And a little bit of my own advice here... This is obvious to most people, but apparently you don't seem to know... When talking about people, phrases like "All muslims..." are never going to be accurate. You can't lump billions of people into the same category. What if I say, all Catholic priests are pedeophiles? The actions of a few, or even a majority, don't speak for the actions of an entire group. It just doesn't work that way.
Also I think you should relax and take comfort in the fact that everything happening on this planet is, in persepective, quite trivial.
This story begins about four years ago when cable giant Charter came to La Crosse, Wisconsin and gobbled up the local cable company. One good thing to come out of this was, finally, relatively affordable broadband in the area. So, a friend of mine signs up for it. After about a year he moves out and his parents go back to dialup. Recently, his mom has become a bit more tech savvy and desires broadband. He stops by to help her out the day the Charter guy comes to install it, and much to his surprise, the Charter guy asks if they want his old email account back. He says yes, logs in and finds some three year old emails in his inbox. So at least around here, Charter keeps your email account (and who knows what else). What, or if, they do anything with it besides let it sit there is unknown. Still, it kinda makes you go "Hmm..."
You slashdotters have some really depressing thoughts, and you mods love to mod up really depressing thoughts. What am I talking about? Look, despite what you may think, making money off your hobby does not automatically mean you will hate your hobby!
Do you all have such pessimistic views on life? Do you all hate your day jobs, and simply refuse to believe that life can be any better?
Look. I used to work as a janitor. I also survived for about a year and a half off of NOTHING but the sale of Diablo II items on eBay, back in 00-01 when the game was still hot.
Which one of these "jobs" do you think I enjoyed more? Come on geniuses, figure it out. Is pointing and clicking at my computer, or mopping up feces and cleaning urinals a better job? Now granted, I did have to play D2 a minimum of about 12 hours a day back then, and there were a few days when I felt like not playing at all. But when I was a janitor, I never, ever, EVER felt like cleaning urinals. Where as with the D2 "job" I found myself enjoying it 99% of the time.
The D2 funds did eventually dry up, but basically what I'm trying to tell you is this: For about 1.5 years, I made money playing a video game, and I fucking enjoyed it. So don't think it's impossible, you depressed pessimistic dorks.
"There are no stupid questions, but there are a lot of inquisitive idiots!"
Yeah, I have a question here that I'm probably going to get flamed for, but I really want to understand exactly how this works. As far as I know, TV signals are one-way communication... So how do I get WiFi over television? I mean, say I'm browsing Slashdot and I click on something, how is that click uploaded? This part just doesn't make sense to me, so if anyone can help clue me in, thanks!
This is easily one of the best posts I've ever read on Slashdot. Not only did you manage to site examples in which Microsoft has abused its monopoly position, you never once actually called them a monopoly, allowing the reader to come to that conclusion by reading the examples.
Also, you didn't use the term "M$" and refrained from calling their employees "cockmasters" which, I must say, is somewhat of a rarity on Slashdot when discussing Microsoft. So bravo, AC. Excellent job. A lot of my Microsoft-loving acquaintances will find the URL to this post in their inbox very soon.
The game looks interesting. Amazingly, 3dgamers.com has an 18 MB demo that I'm downloading right now. I usually have difficulty getting demos from farther back than 2001, which is frustrating when you have rather humble hardware. So a game from 1998 is great, since it's a year a lot of my hardware belongs in. Come to think of it, 98 was a good year for gaming. StarCraft, Half-Life... I do recall having difficulty with homework thanks to those titles. Yes I was in high school then, heh... Either I'm a little kid or you're an old man, which do you prefer?;)
I wish they'd add an option to export mail into some other formats (like a.csv file or something). Also I read that it uses the "mbox" format that is supposedly understood by other clients, and I should be able to import thunderbird mail by choosing "Import from Eudora" however, that does not work with Outlook Express.
I'd really like to have my mail in both clients... anyone out there manage to export from thunderbird to Outlook Express?
Heh... Gotta mention it. A few episodes back, Stan needed help for a dance competition and they go to an arcade to inlist the help of an asian DDR player.
*Stan and a goth watch as the asian kid dances frantically.*
Stan: Oh my god... he's really good.
Goth: He should be, he's spent like $6,000 on that thing.
*Asian kid stops playing, Stan approaches him.*
Stan: You're really good, kid... would you help me in my dance competition? Asian kid: You mean dancing without a machine telling you what to do?
And as long as I'm trying to be funny, why not look at QDB on the subject of DDR, too.
If it's any consolation to you, I got your joke. In fact I was surprised none of the moderators did. It is fun to see the nice little thread you've started from that post, though... An actual, intentional troll couldn't have done better!
Ragnarok Online is an MMORPG with ~$12 monthly fee. However, they don't make you buy a disc. Not only can you download the client for free, but you can play free for 15 days. And that's free, as in, they don't ask you for a credit card number or anything until your 15 days are up. I wish more games followed this model! Seems to be working great for them, but maybe the rules are different when you're based in Korea?;)
Please keep in mind that your average Slashdotter couldn't bike more than a few miles without being close to a heart attack. You've got us all beat there, KFG.
Actually, the fact that you're much more athletic than the average computer nerd reminds me of something Michael Crichton mentioned in The Lost World. One of the characters said it was once common for geniuses to be very athletic as well, and he cited some example I can't recall of some smart person who also had Olympic physical skills. Now, the "computer nerd" is the big trend, where doing exercise is almost shunned.
But then, this correlation of athletic ability to intellect doesn't exactly apply to the guy in my sig, heh.
"Four Wings and A Prayer." Nice little popular work on Monarch butterfly migration.
Silly KFG, there'd be like, what, ten people here that care? Heh... Actually, I did get away from the computer yesterday, on a bicycle even! However I only biked a paltry five miles or so, through a marsh trail here in Wisconsin. Some interesting creatures in that marsh, but mostly humans and humans with dogs on the trail. I saw no butterflies... still too cold? There were a few ducks. Quack, quack. I really should bike more often, but hey, isn't Wisconsin the fattest state in the US? So compared to my brethren here, I'm doing great! And compared to KFG, I didn't bike at all. Oh well...
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, in the few short years I've been using Linux, all the distributions have come very far in detecting and using newer hardware. However, the general rule of thumb, especially for things like dial-up modems, is still the older the hardware is, the more likely it will be compatible.
I'm stuck on dialup myself, and I use an old Creative Modem Blaster 56K. Purchased around... 98 or 99 I think.
Before that it was my lovely US Robotics 28.8 DSVD (Digital Simultaneous Voice and Data! OHHH, AHHH!) modem. Heh. That sounded like a cool feature at the time, but it never really took off. And MAN that modem was HUGE. I'm talking over a foot. Really hard to cram it into my case. This modem also worked fine in various Linuxes.
So yeah... To answer your question: Your modems are too new. Find older ones.
Thief was very entertaining, and I found myself heading for the shadows in dark hallways in the real world without thinking about it. But I was never once tempted to turn out my lights with a water arrow, so I think I'm still clutching the last vestiges of my sanity. Thief got hard, though, when they throw all those zombies at you and big monsters and what-not. It seemed like the developers were afraid there wasn't enough action simply breaking into mansions and stealing stuff, but I'd have been happy if that were the whole game.
And yes, the games are also why I dual boot this machine, however Mandrake has come leaps and bounds even in the short time I've been using it. Mandrake 10 has a media player installed that supports pretty much every codec I've got, and I recall just three or four years ago it was a pain to get anything in divx to play. It supports my TV card, though it doesn't look as good as it does with DScaler, a nice bit of open source Windows software.
By the way, I'm going to be on my bike in (most likely) the rain in a couple hours. Not only that, but I'll be going through one of those much maligned "bike trails" that run through a marsh, and with the heavy rainfall recently the trails are at least partially flooded. Also, my front tire appears to have a slow leak. But I've got an eBay item that I need to ship today, and that's my favorite route, though obviously not the wisest. It should be an interesting journey...
Well, this post is even longer and more OT than my last, so I think I'll wrap it up now.
Totally OT now, I think it's funny how one of the selling points in AoE II was the larger scale buildings, and yet a single unit still dwarfed the buildings. However, I suppose that's one of the inherent limits of the isometric RTS genre... It'd be hard to scroll around with buildings that were precisely to scale with the units, or the units would be so small as to be unclickable.
From what I've gathered, not only is KFG older than the "average slashdotter" he's also apparently not in the best of health due to some sort of fatal disease (two at last count?)... anyway, he likes to vanish from slashdot to do various things, such as study paleoanthropology or play Grand Prix Legends, and whenever he does I'm like "I hope he didn't kick the bucket this time!"
As you can see I have tendency to ramble (perhaps the direct opposite of KFG himself as his posts are normally short and to the point, example: in a reply to a question about why someone would do something he posted "Her." which I thought was rather amusing and yet insightful. And I just broke the record he set for longest parenthetical a while back).
Still with me? Scary! Alright then since, as I've stated, I tend to ramble, I'll shut up now and go back to stalking, something I'm much better at!
But don't try to tell me you had one with an AGP slot... ;)
Actually, when it comes to computers, I often joke with my friends when I talk of eras past by saying "Those were the good old days... Wait a minute... those days sucked, nevermind."
My first computer (this is going to make me look like even more of a youngun to you) was an Acer with an AMD 486 at 66 MHz. Ohhh, ahhh! heh. 8 whole MB of ram, too. Quake made it hurt, but it actually ran the original Diablo pretty well.
Just for shits, here's a picture of the machine that started it all.
Yikes! And I thought biking in the rain here in Wisconsin was rough. Obviously if I'm biking the rain one can assume it's most likely above 32F, heh. The coldest I can ever recall it being here was something like -30F one winter. I remember schools were canceled due to cold. I was used to having "snow days" where school closed, but that was the first and only "can't let the kids get frostbite" days off I had.
But biking at -20F? I really hope that's a typo, unless you did it to experiment with self cryogenic preservation or something.
Great! I was just thinking about that, too. I had a 12mb Voodoo2 card once, but I have no idea what happened to it. I think it got tossed out in the last move. But yeah, GPL doesn't like my GeForce I guess. At first I was thinking it was an issue with XP since it doesn't even get past the starting screen. I'll try out that updated demo though. With nVidia having bought 3dfx and everything I thought that they'd make some Glide drivers for the nVidia cards by now... but I'm sure all of a dozen people worldwide would care, heh. Well, thanks for the OT posting, it wouldn't be slashdot without it!
And a little bit of my own advice here... This is obvious to most people, but apparently you don't seem to know... When talking about people, phrases like "All muslims..." are never going to be accurate. You can't lump billions of people into the same category. What if I say, all Catholic priests are pedeophiles? The actions of a few, or even a majority, don't speak for the actions of an entire group. It just doesn't work that way.
Also I think you should relax and take comfort in the fact that everything happening on this planet is, in persepective, quite trivial.
This story begins about four years ago when cable giant Charter came to La Crosse, Wisconsin and gobbled up the local cable company. One good thing to come out of this was, finally, relatively affordable broadband in the area. So, a friend of mine signs up for it. After about a year he moves out and his parents go back to dialup. Recently, his mom has become a bit more tech savvy and desires broadband. He stops by to help her out the day the Charter guy comes to install it, and much to his surprise, the Charter guy asks if they want his old email account back. He says yes, logs in and finds some three year old emails in his inbox. So at least around here, Charter keeps your email account (and who knows what else). What, or if, they do anything with it besides let it sit there is unknown. Still, it kinda makes you go "Hmm..."
Do you all have such pessimistic views on life? Do you all hate your day jobs, and simply refuse to believe that life can be any better?
Look. I used to work as a janitor. I also survived for about a year and a half off of NOTHING but the sale of Diablo II items on eBay, back in 00-01 when the game was still hot.
Which one of these "jobs" do you think I enjoyed more? Come on geniuses, figure it out. Is pointing and clicking at my computer, or mopping up feces and cleaning urinals a better job? Now granted, I did have to play D2 a minimum of about 12 hours a day back then, and there were a few days when I felt like not playing at all. But when I was a janitor, I never, ever, EVER felt like cleaning urinals. Where as with the D2 "job" I found myself enjoying it 99% of the time.
The D2 funds did eventually dry up, but basically what I'm trying to tell you is this: For about 1.5 years, I made money playing a video game, and I fucking enjoyed it. So don't think it's impossible, you depressed pessimistic dorks.
Heh, okay, done with the rant, sorry.
Yeah, I have a question here that I'm probably going to get flamed for, but I really want to understand exactly how this works. As far as I know, TV signals are one-way communication... So how do I get WiFi over television? I mean, say I'm browsing Slashdot and I click on something, how is that click uploaded? This part just doesn't make sense to me, so if anyone can help clue me in, thanks!
Also, you didn't use the term "M$" and refrained from calling their employees "cockmasters" which, I must say, is somewhat of a rarity on Slashdot when discussing Microsoft. So bravo, AC. Excellent job. A lot of my Microsoft-loving acquaintances will find the URL to this post in their inbox very soon.
And where have you been for the past five days? The paleoanthropology thing again? Inquiring stalkers want to know! ;)
This might be a good time to read up on why Wil Wheaton quit hosting "Arena" on G4, the same G4 that is now merging with TechTV.
Over at the Guild Wars website you'll be able to download a pre-alpha build of the game on Wednesday, May 12! E3 for everyone, yay!
I'd really like to have my mail in both clients... anyone out there manage to export from thunderbird to Outlook Express?
*Stan and a goth watch as the asian kid dances frantically.*
Stan: Oh my god... he's really good.
Goth: He should be, he's spent like $6,000 on that thing.
*Asian kid stops playing, Stan approaches him.*
Stan: You're really good, kid... would you help me in my dance competition?
Asian kid: You mean dancing without a machine telling you what to do?
And as long as I'm trying to be funny, why not look at QDB on the subject of DDR, too.
Okay. How's this?
If it's any consolation to you, I got your joke. In fact I was surprised none of the moderators did. It is fun to see the nice little thread you've started from that post, though... An actual, intentional troll couldn't have done better!
Nope... I played it back when it was in beta and there were no fees of any kind then. Once the beta ended they started the monthly fee.
Ragnarok Online is an MMORPG with ~$12 monthly fee. However, they don't make you buy a disc. Not only can you download the client for free, but you can play free for 15 days. And that's free, as in, they don't ask you for a credit card number or anything until your 15 days are up. I wish more games followed this model! Seems to be working great for them, but maybe the rules are different when you're based in Korea? ;)
Actually, the fact that you're much more athletic than the average computer nerd reminds me of something Michael Crichton mentioned in The Lost World. One of the characters said it was once common for geniuses to be very athletic as well, and he cited some example I can't recall of some smart person who also had Olympic physical skills. Now, the "computer nerd" is the big trend, where doing exercise is almost shunned.
But then, this correlation of athletic ability to intellect doesn't exactly apply to the guy in my sig, heh.
Silly KFG, there'd be like, what, ten people here that care? Heh... Actually, I did get away from the computer yesterday, on a bicycle even! However I only biked a paltry five miles or so, through a marsh trail here in Wisconsin. Some interesting creatures in that marsh, but mostly humans and humans with dogs on the trail. I saw no butterflies... still too cold? There were a few ducks. Quack, quack. I really should bike more often, but hey, isn't Wisconsin the fattest state in the US? So compared to my brethren here, I'm doing great! And compared to KFG, I didn't bike at all. Oh well...