Cooperative play rules! Yeah! Capture the flag and slaughter the players on the other team! Yes, nothing like good ole cooperative play!!! W00t!
Seriously...I find that CTF and its variants are way more fun to play than plain vanilla deathmatches. Strategy, tactics, offense and defense, etc. A lot more fun.
And hey, isn't Counter Strike the most popular game even to this day? That's a game you can't play without coming up with a cooperative strategy. If you don't have the strategy, you get slaughtered. Period.
Check out the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, for example...Gates' tendency to blow off showers is mentioned more than once. Although I do suspect that Melinda is probably reminding him to take his showers lately...wives are like that, y'know.:)
Let's face it folks: Paul Allen is a GEEK, pure and simple. It is a hallmark of geekiness to have personal hygiene "issues." People keep their distance from RMS for a reason. Even Bill Gates, with far more money than his former MS partner, is known to have hygiene problems.
...was released in 1999. The Unreal Warfare engine is hardly an improvement over the perfection that is the original version. Sure, it's a bit prettier, but take a look at the original version on a machine with cojones. On an Athlon XP 1800+ with a GeForce Ti4200 with 128MB RAM, you can crank the anti-aliasing up to 4X and still be running at 70FPS and just be totally awestruck.
Between the graphics not improving by much, and the really bad choices made in "improving" the weaponry and gameplay, Epic Games really didn't give us much over UT1999 with UT2003. I look forward to seeing what others will do with the UW engine, though. It does have potential.
Daddy...I was on this site called Slashdot and I clicked on a link to Disneyland, and I didn't go to the Disneyland site...instead, there was a picture of this naked guy with a huge hole in his butt...eew...
Trust me, you DON'T want Adelphia cable modem. Unless your town has fiber to the curb, the only crappy cable modem system you will EVER see is the Terayon TeraPro system. Adelphia rolled it out in the East San Fernando Valley and Hawaiian Gardens, CA, and it is SHIT. When it's good, you get almost but not quite DOCSIS performance. When it's bad, you get sub-modem speeds and having to reset the modem (unplug then replug) many times per day. Ant can back me up on this.
I understand that Adelphia's DOCSIS performance isn't very much better. The gripe board on DSLReports.Com for Adelphia Powerlink users is pretty busy. Lots of gloating when the Rigas family got busted. Enjoy pound-me-in-the-@$$ prison, John et fils.
Take a look at Buttercup. It's getting a GeForce 4MX 440SE 64MB with 64MB DDR. It has 512MB RAM, the highest an i815 motherboard can go up to. And it will probably do much, much more than anything a modded XBox can do. And even though the case is a bit bigger than an XBox, it isn't much bigger than a VCR or an audio receiver. Put a TV tuner card in there with MythTV and you have a TIVO.
This strikes me being one of those consolidations like what was going on during the Dot-Com bubble. To give but one example, Time Warner snarfing up AOL basically weakened both companies. I suppose if there was a company I would like to see get weakened, it would be Microsoft. However, even if the Uni deal went totally sour Microsoft would survive. Apple could go right down the tubes if this happened.
When I first heard about this, I thought that Apple was angling to buy Universal PICTURES on Pixar's behalf. That would make total sense, considering that Disney has not been an especially fair partner in their deal with Pixar, and Pixar has been one of the few bright spots on Disney's otherwise lackluster balance sheet. Even a threat of Jobs leveraging Apple to give Pixar its own friendly distribution path would be enough to scare Michael Eisner into giving Jobs whatever he wanted.
In any event, this deal makes zero business sense, and seems to be turning into a pissing match between Ballmer and Jobs. Jobs should know better...Ballmer is the one who drinks the most beer. He'll win. ~_^ (grinning, ducking and running)
For myself...I would GLADLY buy a legit copy of LinDVD. I have even emailed InterVideo with my intentions. I would spend REAL MONEY to get the DVD drives in my Linux boxes to work like my Mac G3 DVD drive does. I have run Windows on one of these boxes, and have a license for WinDVD...I don't want to run Windows on this box anymore. I don't think I am alone in this.
There's also the small matter of Pixar's battle with Disney over renegotiating terms of their distribution deal. With "Finding Nemo" Pixar has satisfied their contractual agreement with Disney.
Perhaps this deal is Steve's upraised middle finger in the face of Michael Eisner..."We don't need the Mouse anymore! Kiss my shiny Vegan ass!"
Re:"Caste"-ing not just exclusive to MS
on
Microsoft Caste System
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Before we go too far into the MS bashing, or Other-Big-Like-Evil-Company(TM) bashing for caste mentality division in the workforce, remember that we have a similar problem in the OSS world.
Anti-noob and RTFM mentality is a serious obstacle for the heavily geek-driven projects in the OSS world. Both on the side of new developers and new users. These are important people and a valuable resource for renewing project growth, ideas, and direction.
We need to seriously look at how Apple has cultivated their Mac User Groups to see how we need to start behaving towards new users. One of the reasons why Apple still survives, rather than be a fond memory like Commodore and Atari, is because they have thousands and thousands of zealots who would never even think of going elsewhere.
How did these zealots come to be? When they were brand new, wet-behind-the-ears newbies, they got tons of help from more experienced Mac users. Help given, not grudgingly, through clenched teeth, but given willingly and cheerfully. This is an example F/OSS people need to follow.
BTW, that Toyota or Nissan is a great car in its own right. Not fancy but it will run forever if kept up well. Actually even the Korean cars are doing pretty well, although there isn't as much of a database on their longevity as there is with the Japanese makes. Similarly, the VIA EPIA is a relatively new platform, without much of a history. My comment was not meant as a dig at all. Hell, my car is a 1986 Nova, which is Chevy badged but is in all but name a Toyota Corolla.
There are just a lot more luxurious fripperies on a Mercedes than on a Toyota or a Nissan. (Note: I am not talking about Lexus or Infiniti) A flat-panel iMac looks a lot sexier and has a more luxurious feel to it than a generic beige box. And for those who want the Lexus/Infiniti equivalents, there's always Voodoo Computer, Alienware and their like.
The Tualatin (and to some extent, Coppermine) PIIIs and Celerons were incredibly good...clock for clock better than PIV. The "dirty little secret" about Banias/Centrino is that it is not based on the PIV core, but the PIII. This is why they talk about Centrino and Pentium-M, not about where in the Intel continuum the Pentium-M actually belongs.
I want to see the Centrino platform on the desktop. But we never will see it, because it would embarrass Intel and point up how failed the PIV architecture is.
Oh yeah, one more thing. VIA has been selling the CIII as part of the EPIA Mini-ITX platform, not really as a separate chip, and I suspect the tight connection between CIII and EPIA will be even tighter by the time this injunction takes effect three years from now.
I don't think that projects like this need separate PR people...I think people in the community need an attitude adjustment. Every n00b you blow off with "man man", "RTFM," "STFI," or any of those other lovely turns of phrase will be a n00b running back into the waiting arms of Microsoft. Because Microsoft understands that not only gurus use their software. Actually I'd prefer that the n00bs go running to Apple, because that's truly an example of a Real OS with a (mas o menos) n00b friendly interface. But hardware that's built like a Mercedes costs Mercedes prices. Most people are tooling around in Intel Toyotas and Athlon Nissans...some even are in VIA Kias.
We need to spend a little time studying how the Mac community treats newbies. Visit your local Mac User Group sometime. There are no snarls of "RTFM" there. You would find it instructive.
Re:As usual an interesting post MsGeek... kudos.
on
Legacy-Free PCs
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· Score: 1
Aww...I'm blushing... #^_^#
Anyway, you might want to investigate DebianPPC. It might obviate the need for a MacOS partition. However, if 7.5.5 will kick over the machines you are talking about, it's free as in beer and there is no restriction on how many machines you run it on.
You can search the Apple site for how to get the.SMI files for 7.5.3 and the 7.5.5 updater.
Oh yeah! Delpart is invaluable. Don't groan, but a Windows98 Rescue Disk plus Delpart.EXE is one of the most important tools in your quiver if you have to deal with Windozers.
The Knoppix CD is a goodie, particularly the new ones with the newest KDE which is perhaps the tightest, least hoggish KDE yet.
BTW, don't leave Delpart.Exe on your hard drive. It WILL nuke your HD in situ. The result is a spectacular BSOD/Stop Error that will make your hair curl. We did it once at the tech school I attended, just for grins. Great BOFH tool. >:)
Actually the Mac has been "Legacy Free" since the iMac. The Mac has Open Firmware instead of a ROM BIOS, and was designed for MacOS X which discarded the old Mac Classic codebase for a *BSD/Mach hybrid. The iMac didn't have a floppy drive, ADB bus or serial ports. The Blue-and-white G3 minitower had an ADB port but the rest applies, and it also was the first with Firewire. Once again, it's Apple that led the way in a direction others eventually followed.
Re:But who watches the watchers?
on
NARA Goes Online
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Considering the choices they have made from the National Archives so far, they are pretty much showing our history warts and all. The Dred Scott decision is there, as is the Censure of Joe McCarthy and Pres. Teddy Roosevelt's Corrolary to the Monroe Doctrine. I didn't peruse the site at length, but those certainly don't fall into the "rah rah look at how great we are" category.
I look forward to seeing transcripts from the Nixon tapes there in the future. And transcripts from the Iran-Contra hearings. And so on. And so on.
This is a good start. At long last I can say that the Feds got something right here.
Tux Racer is hardly the only game you can play natively under Linux. I am not talking WineX here, I am talking native Linux binaries. I would even venture to say that UT (original) runs even better under Linux with the nvdriver than it does on Windows with the Detonator driver. No, it's not free as in speech (it is free as in beer, however) but NVidia wrote an incredibly good driver that works under Linux and FreeBSD. Now if they would only support Linux PPC that would be really nice...
This already happened last year at The Tech museum in San Jose. A LAN party where the most interesting battles were projected on the museum's IMAX screen.
What happened to you? I've bought some cheap stuff from OWC, and I didn't have any problems. I always thought they were a good company, but if they've screwed you, I won't buy from them any more.
OK, fool me once, shame on you: I bought a 128MB CAS=2 PC100 DIMM from OWC because they had the best price. Turned out, they sent me a 64MB DIMM by mistake. Tried it in several PCs and my G3, all saw it as 64. Got an RMA, sent it back, and got an email from them later saying, to the effect of, "It is TOO a 128MB DIMM!!!" They dinged me for a restocking fee. Fuckers.
Fool me twice, shame on me: I ordered a DVD-ROM from OWC thinking it was a combo drive. I realized my mistake and within an hour of making the order emailed them with the message "Please cancel order...made a mistake, sorry about that." I confirmed the next morning that yes indeed, the order had been cancelled. Fast forward to the Monday after that Friday. The order was put through a second time, my credit card was charged, and the DVD-ROM was sent winging my way via FedEx. Imagine my surprise when a DVD-ROM arrived at my apartment two days later. I had no idea they put the order through again.
I hit the roof, and called OWC and bitched. "You ordered this." "No, I cancelled the order. I want an RMA." I then quoted them chapter and verse on who I talked to that last Friday confirming that the order had been cancelled. Finally I got my RMA and I sent the damn drive back.
See, this is an old Telemarketing trick. If someone balks on an order, send it anyway and charge the mark's card anyway. 9 times out of 10 the mark will just say "screw it," keep the order, and you will have made yourself a sale.
They finally reimbursed my account (two weeks later!) and I found that they had deducted a restocking fee from the amount they owed me for the fraudulent sale. I went ballistic and sent in a dispute of the restocking fee with VISA. Why should I be charged a restocking fee for something sent to me fraudulently? If anything, by rights I should have been refunded for the cost of shipping the damn drive back.
Never again, man, never again. The fucked thing is that OWC has practically got a monopoly on bargain-basement Mac parts. Yeah, there's MacResQ and Small Dog, but they are small potatoes next to OWC. [sigh]
Slashdot Mirror
Cooperative play rules! Yeah! Capture the flag and slaughter the players on the other team! Yes, nothing like good ole cooperative play!!! W00t!
Seriously...I find that CTF and its variants are way more fun to play than plain vanilla deathmatches. Strategy, tactics, offense and defense, etc. A lot more fun.
And hey, isn't Counter Strike the most popular game even to this day? That's a game you can't play without coming up with a cooperative strategy. If you don't have the strategy, you get slaughtered. Period.
Well, when I play UT as a woman, the person behind the keyboard and mouse really is a woman. So there.
Check out the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, for example...Gates' tendency to blow off showers is mentioned more than once. Although I do suspect that Melinda is probably reminding him to take his showers lately...wives are like that, y'know. :)
Let's face it folks: Paul Allen is a GEEK, pure and simple. It is a hallmark of geekiness to have personal hygiene "issues." People keep their distance from RMS for a reason. Even Bill Gates, with far more money than his former MS partner, is known to have hygiene problems.
Paypal is NOT your friend. It's owned by eBay and they are well-known for their Extremely flexible policy towards allowing those representing themselves as law enforcement to see their records.
...was released in 1999. The Unreal Warfare engine is hardly an improvement over the perfection that is the original version. Sure, it's a bit prettier, but take a look at the original version on a machine with cojones. On an Athlon XP 1800+ with a GeForce Ti4200 with 128MB RAM, you can crank the anti-aliasing up to 4X and still be running at 70FPS and just be totally awestruck.
Between the graphics not improving by much, and the really bad choices made in "improving" the weaponry and gameplay, Epic Games really didn't give us much over UT1999 with UT2003. I look forward to seeing what others will do with the UW engine, though. It does have potential.
Daddy...I was on this site called Slashdot and I clicked on a link to Disneyland, and I didn't go to the Disneyland site...instead, there was a picture of this naked guy with a huge hole in his butt...eew...
I understand that Adelphia's DOCSIS performance isn't very much better. The gripe board on DSLReports.Com for Adelphia Powerlink users is pretty busy. Lots of gloating when the Rigas family got busted. Enjoy pound-me-in-the-@$$ prison, John et fils.
Take a look at Buttercup. It's getting a GeForce 4MX 440SE 64MB with 64MB DDR. It has 512MB RAM, the highest an i815 motherboard can go up to. And it will probably do much, much more than anything a modded XBox can do. And even though the case is a bit bigger than an XBox, it isn't much bigger than a VCR or an audio receiver. Put a TV tuner card in there with MythTV and you have a TIVO.
Actually that is very true...well then, this makes the deal even more absurd, doesn't it? (shudder)
This strikes me being one of those consolidations like what was going on during the Dot-Com bubble. To give but one example, Time Warner snarfing up AOL basically weakened both companies. I suppose if there was a company I would like to see get weakened, it would be Microsoft. However, even if the Uni deal went totally sour Microsoft would survive. Apple could go right down the tubes if this happened.
When I first heard about this, I thought that Apple was angling to buy Universal PICTURES on Pixar's behalf. That would make total sense, considering that Disney has not been an especially fair partner in their deal with Pixar, and Pixar has been one of the few bright spots on Disney's otherwise lackluster balance sheet. Even a threat of Jobs leveraging Apple to give Pixar its own friendly distribution path would be enough to scare Michael Eisner into giving Jobs whatever he wanted.
In any event, this deal makes zero business sense, and seems to be turning into a pissing match between Ballmer and Jobs. Jobs should know better...Ballmer is the one who drinks the most beer. He'll win. ~_^ (grinning, ducking and running)
For myself...I would GLADLY buy a legit copy of LinDVD. I have even emailed InterVideo with my intentions. I would spend REAL MONEY to get the DVD drives in my Linux boxes to work like my Mac G3 DVD drive does. I have run Windows on one of these boxes, and have a license for WinDVD...I don't want to run Windows on this box anymore. I don't think I am alone in this.
There's also the small matter of Pixar's battle with Disney over renegotiating terms of their distribution deal. With "Finding Nemo" Pixar has satisfied their contractual agreement with Disney.
Perhaps this deal is Steve's upraised middle finger in the face of Michael Eisner..."We don't need the Mouse anymore! Kiss my shiny Vegan ass!"
Anti-noob and RTFM mentality is a serious obstacle for the heavily geek-driven projects in the OSS world. Both on the side of new developers and new users. These are important people and a valuable resource for renewing project growth, ideas, and direction.
Exactly.
We need to seriously look at how Apple has cultivated their Mac User Groups to see how we need to start behaving towards new users. One of the reasons why Apple still survives, rather than be a fond memory like Commodore and Atari, is because they have thousands and thousands of zealots who would never even think of going elsewhere.
How did these zealots come to be? When they were brand new, wet-behind-the-ears newbies, they got tons of help from more experienced Mac users. Help given, not grudgingly, through clenched teeth, but given willingly and cheerfully. This is an example F/OSS people need to follow.
BTW, that Toyota or Nissan is a great car in its own right. Not fancy but it will run forever if kept up well. Actually even the Korean cars are doing pretty well, although there isn't as much of a database on their longevity as there is with the Japanese makes. Similarly, the VIA EPIA is a relatively new platform, without much of a history. My comment was not meant as a dig at all. Hell, my car is a 1986 Nova, which is Chevy badged but is in all but name a Toyota Corolla.
There are just a lot more luxurious fripperies on a Mercedes than on a Toyota or a Nissan. (Note: I am not talking about Lexus or Infiniti) A flat-panel iMac looks a lot sexier and has a more luxurious feel to it than a generic beige box. And for those who want the Lexus/Infiniti equivalents, there's always Voodoo Computer, Alienware and their like.
The Tualatin (and to some extent, Coppermine) PIIIs and Celerons were incredibly good...clock for clock better than PIV. The "dirty little secret" about Banias/Centrino is that it is not based on the PIV core, but the PIII. This is why they talk about Centrino and Pentium-M, not about where in the Intel continuum the Pentium-M actually belongs.
I want to see the Centrino platform on the desktop. But we never will see it, because it would embarrass Intel and point up how failed the PIV architecture is.
Oh yeah, one more thing. VIA has been selling the CIII as part of the EPIA Mini-ITX platform, not really as a separate chip, and I suspect the tight connection between CIII and EPIA will be even tighter by the time this injunction takes effect three years from now.
I don't think that projects like this need separate PR people...I think people in the community need an attitude adjustment. Every n00b you blow off with "man man", "RTFM," "STFI," or any of those other lovely turns of phrase will be a n00b running back into the waiting arms of Microsoft. Because Microsoft understands that not only gurus use their software. Actually I'd prefer that the n00bs go running to Apple, because that's truly an example of a Real OS with a (mas o menos) n00b friendly interface. But hardware that's built like a Mercedes costs Mercedes prices. Most people are tooling around in Intel Toyotas and Athlon Nissans...some even are in VIA Kias.
We need to spend a little time studying how the Mac community treats newbies. Visit your local Mac User Group sometime. There are no snarls of "RTFM" there. You would find it instructive.
Aww...I'm blushing... #^_^#
.SMI files for 7.5.3 and the 7.5.5 updater.
Anyway, you might want to investigate DebianPPC. It might obviate the need for a MacOS partition. However, if 7.5.5 will kick over the machines you are talking about, it's free as in beer and there is no restriction on how many machines you run it on.
You can search the Apple site for how to get the
Oh yeah! Delpart is invaluable. Don't groan, but a Windows98 Rescue Disk plus Delpart.EXE is one of the most important tools in your quiver if you have to deal with Windozers.
The Knoppix CD is a goodie, particularly the new ones with the newest KDE which is perhaps the tightest, least hoggish KDE yet.
BTW, don't leave Delpart.Exe on your hard drive. It WILL nuke your HD in situ. The result is a spectacular BSOD/Stop Error that will make your hair curl. We did it once at the tech school I attended, just for grins. Great BOFH tool. >:)
Actually the Mac has been "Legacy Free" since the iMac. The Mac has Open Firmware instead of a ROM BIOS, and was designed for MacOS X which discarded the old Mac Classic codebase for a *BSD/Mach hybrid. The iMac didn't have a floppy drive, ADB bus or serial ports. The Blue-and-white G3 minitower had an ADB port but the rest applies, and it also was the first with Firewire. Once again, it's Apple that led the way in a direction others eventually followed.
Considering the choices they have made from the National Archives so far, they are pretty much showing our history warts and all. The Dred Scott decision is there, as is the Censure of Joe McCarthy and Pres. Teddy Roosevelt's Corrolary to the Monroe Doctrine. I didn't peruse the site at length, but those certainly don't fall into the "rah rah look at how great we are" category.
I look forward to seeing transcripts from the Nixon tapes there in the future. And transcripts from the Iran-Contra hearings. And so on. And so on.
This is a good start. At long last I can say that the Feds got something right here.
Maguro, Uni, Kohada, Tako, Sake...man, this story is making me hungry! ^_^
Tux Racer is hardly the only game you can play natively under Linux. I am not talking WineX here, I am talking native Linux binaries. I would even venture to say that UT (original) runs even better under Linux with the nvdriver than it does on Windows with the Detonator driver. No, it's not free as in speech (it is free as in beer, however) but NVidia wrote an incredibly good driver that works under Linux and FreeBSD. Now if they would only support Linux PPC that would be really nice...
Don't believe me? Here's the link to the event's page on their site: http://www.thetech.org/events/maxgames/
OK, fool me once, shame on you: I bought a 128MB CAS=2 PC100 DIMM from OWC because they had the best price. Turned out, they sent me a 64MB DIMM by mistake. Tried it in several PCs and my G3, all saw it as 64. Got an RMA, sent it back, and got an email from them later saying, to the effect of, "It is TOO a 128MB DIMM!!!" They dinged me for a restocking fee. Fuckers.
Fool me twice, shame on me: I ordered a DVD-ROM from OWC thinking it was a combo drive. I realized my mistake and within an hour of making the order emailed them with the message "Please cancel order...made a mistake, sorry about that." I confirmed the next morning that yes indeed, the order had been cancelled. Fast forward to the Monday after that Friday. The order was put through a second time, my credit card was charged, and the DVD-ROM was sent winging my way via FedEx. Imagine my surprise when a DVD-ROM arrived at my apartment two days later. I had no idea they put the order through again.
I hit the roof, and called OWC and bitched. "You ordered this." "No, I cancelled the order. I want an RMA." I then quoted them chapter and verse on who I talked to that last Friday confirming that the order had been cancelled. Finally I got my RMA and I sent the damn drive back.
See, this is an old Telemarketing trick. If someone balks on an order, send it anyway and charge the mark's card anyway. 9 times out of 10 the mark will just say "screw it," keep the order, and you will have made yourself a sale.
They finally reimbursed my account (two weeks later!) and I found that they had deducted a restocking fee from the amount they owed me for the fraudulent sale. I went ballistic and sent in a dispute of the restocking fee with VISA. Why should I be charged a restocking fee for something sent to me fraudulently? If anything, by rights I should have been refunded for the cost of shipping the damn drive back.
Never again, man, never again. The fucked thing is that OWC has practically got a monopoly on bargain-basement Mac parts. Yeah, there's MacResQ and Small Dog, but they are small potatoes next to OWC. [sigh]