Linux gaming is not far-fetched...when Unreal Tournament 2003 came out last year, it included an installer for Linux right on the disk set. Doom III will similarly have a Linux installer as part of the disk set. The UT2K3 demo disk was a special Knoppix disk with a cut-down copy of UT2K3 on it.
John Carmack, for one, is very supportive of Linux gaming...it helps to have a stable platform to run something so computationally intense as games. Between some of the best game companies waking up to Linux, the successes of WineX, and the upcoming OpenGL updates, there is indeed a bright future for Linux as a gaming platform.
I've not yet installed Windows on my gaming PC. I may never do it. Most of the games I like are already Linux native. Feels good not to give Redmond any money and do it with a clear conscience and no laws broken...
If some company is stupid enough to make an international telemarketing call, have at it. That business model will soon drive them bankrupt.
Four letters: VoIP.
I'm pretty sure that using Voice over Internet Protocol, even international calls could get sufficiently low to facilitate international telemarketing.
Just you wait. We'll be hearing Pakistanis and Indians calling us about toner and fax paper a few months after this list goes into effect.
OK, Mickey D's has a grilled chicken sandwich, salads with or without chicken in them, and in Los Angeles, chicken Fajita rollups. They also have a yogurt and fruit parfait concoction for dessert. All of these are halfway decent choices for those stuck at Mickey D's and wanting something that won't cause their aorta to pop.
Oh yeah...you can also buy a bottle of Dannon's bottled water at some McDonalds' too.
Fearless prediction: SCO's lawsuit isn't going to get a chance to happen. IBM buys SCO. End of lawsuit, end of story. I think this is the outcome the tattered remnants of SCO wanted in the first place.
The golden age of copy prevention remains the mid-to-late 1980s. I remember very well the fact that the best selling program in 1987 for PCs was "Copy II PC" which was a software unprotect program. Wanna scare a person who was a Commodore 64 owner? Make "Kachunk! Kachunk!" noises at them. Why is that scary? Because there was a copy prevention scheme that caused the heads in a C64 floppy drive to bang around violently. Remember media with deliberately introduced physical flaws? Remember questions like "what is the word which is on page 1, line 5, word 17 of your software manual?" and you would have to answer them before you could get into your software?
No, there was a reason why aggressive copy prevention died out around the end of the '80s. People didn't want it, and embraced alternative software without the copy prevention.
It might take a while, but they'll learn their lesson. But wait for another 15 years or so, and someone will try it again. Such seems to be the cyclical nature of software companies and "piracy" paranoia.
Oh yeah, another blast from the past for those other old farts who remember it: "Home Taping Is Killing Music!" "C30, C60, C90, Go!" Ha ha ha ha...
I have no doubt that if nVidia, ATi, Matrox or whoever released a card that stank the place right up then these guys would write about it - what do you think they'd do, michael, fake benchmark results?
It seems like most of these hardware sites are pretty honest. Matrox threw all its eggs into its Parhelia basket, and probably threw around lots of swag in hopes the card would get Super Bitchen press from the Super Bitchen gaming hardware sites.
Guess what? You can't put lipstick on a pig and say it's J-Lo. Parhelia stank on ice, and the hardware sites were more than happy to point it out. Now Matrox is in danger of going bust thanks to the Parhelia's failure.
However, don't put much stock in Benchmarks. The video card companies seem to be able to game the benchmarks...can you say Quack Quack?
WWF Attitude on Dreamcast. I have had random reboots and other delightful events playing it. Dreamcast was arguably the best console ever built, but even Dreamcast could be flummoxed by poorly-written (or poorly ported from PSX in this case) games.
BTW someone mentioned Typing Of The Dead. Kickass game. I know the typing game is a big genre in Japan but it hasn't taken off here. I understand there was a Neon Genesis Evangelion typing game that was a Japan-only release for DC, and others have been put ouf for other systems. I would think such a game would be ideal for PC gaming, in that the keyboard is ubiquitous and not just a peripheral that is "sold separately" from the rest of the system.
Current iBooks have a choice between GeForce4GO and Radeon Mobility 7500. Maybe you can't play Counter-Strike (no Mac version if memory serves) but yes! you can play Unreal Tournament! You'll have to haunt eBay or Amazon Auctions or Yahoo Auctions to find it (stupid MacSoft let it lapse from print, the fsckers!) but once you get it it runs like gangbusters on a modern iBook. And UT2003 is on the way for MacOS X...certainly a new iBook would be able to run that.
Let's see, what else is available for Mac? Quake III Arena? Check. Castle Wolfenstein? Check. Master of Orion 3? Check. Tony Hawk? Check. Jedi Outcast? Check. Max Paine? Check. Deus Ex? Check. Warcraft III? Check. And the list goes on and on and on.
Actually the Celeron 300a (the one with cache) and the rest of the PIII-based Celerons were actually quite good. The Mendocino Celerons were very, very overclockable. The Coppermine Celerons and the Tualatin Celerons were not overclockable, but were still solid CPUs and a great choice for bang/buck ratio.
However the Celeron = Crap equation does hold true for the P4 Celerons. They stink on ice. And they don't even yield much of a price difference over the regular P4.
Even if MandrakeSoft goes under, Linux-Mandrake will not. The stuff that distinguishes Mandrake from other distros is all Free Software so a community effort could take the distro over.
Lindows is garbage, but you make a good point...it could very easily be a quick shortcut to an e-z Debian. However, I don't want to give Michael Robertson any of my money...he's an obnoxious prick. Ask anyone from any one of the rest of the desktop-oriented distros he alienated away from his "Desktop Linux Summit." Bleah.
Intel is not the only chip manufacturer making chips with potential Palladium hooks. AMD, Transmeta and even VIA (Surprise! I thought they'd hold out, but no, they're on board too) will be incorporating Palladium-friendly crypto co-processors and other hooks into future versions of their chips.
However, it requires chipset support to get Palladium working. I suspect that even after LaGrande/Palladium gets going, there will be chipsets that ignore the "features" that we Stuckists are so worked up about.
And without the chipset support, that "evil circuitry" could actually do some cool stuff, like offload crypto overhead to the crypto co-processor. Imagine effortless SSH and SSH tunneling! That's a possibility.
However, don't think that using chips from someone other than Intel will save you from the advance of Palladium. Or "All your trusted base are belong to us" or whatever it's called now. All the chip manufacturers have signed off on it. Soylent Green is People. Resistance is futile. That pod next to your bed...never mind that...
Gandalf is unmistakeably a Christ-figure. Gandalf The Grey sacrifices himself for the rest of the Fellowship in his battle with the Balrog, supposedly perishes, yet returns, transfigured, as Gandalf The White. No spoilers here...I figure most of you all have watched "LOTR: The Two Towers" and those who haven't have read the books.
LOTR was indeed allegory. Methinks Tolkien didst protest too much. It was written during WWII and has the period's fingerprints all over it. It also was written by a devout Christian, and where there isn't reference made to WWII there is reference to Christian concepts of the End Times.
Don't get me started on the Dune Chronicles and its parallels to Western and Near Eastern culture clashes throughout the millenia. The Oil...er, The Spice must flow, y'know...;-)
MacOS X is NOT UNIX. It is FreeBSD with a Mach microkernel replacing the monolithic FreeBSD kernel.
However, it is a *BSD, and its marketshare is expanding, so this means all those *BSD is dying trolls should crawl back under the bridges they emerged from.
Proprietary UNIXes, however, are dying. Big time. Why pay for it when you can getinfree?
...you must understand his belief system. LotR is very black-and-white in its view because JRR Tolkien was a very devout Christian. The scenario of the book of Revelation is cast in values of 100% black and 100% white. The Holy Trinity vs. the unholy trinity of Satan, the Antichrist and the False Prophet. How could LotR be anything else? It's the same with CS Lewis' fiction, too. Narnia, the Mars Trilogy...it's all very good vs. evil because it's very Christian in its world view.
Unfortunately, this is the very same world view of the fundamentalists who run the US, and the fundamentalists of Al'Qaeda that we are fighting against. Both see themselves as absolute good fighting absolute evil. And that's why we are in such a big mess.
There is something distinctly Nazi about Saruman and his operations. Him and his "master race" of humanised Orcs...you caught a distinct whiff of Adolf from Saruman.
And if Saruman was a Hitler figure, where does that leave his boss, Sauron? Considering that JRR Tolkien was a very devout Christian, Sauron was none other than Satan. The Fallen Angel. The Great Deceiver. A giver of gifts with definite strings attached. Hitler as a minion of Satan? Not really a stretch if you accept a Christian worldview. I'm sure many Christians believed that Hitler was the Antichrist and that WWII was Armageddon.
You cannot read LOTR and NOT get a sense that it was an allegory of what was going on in the background, namely World War II.
ASUS would definitely be more like it. At least they make quality products. Best motherboard you can buy. That's probably a nice laptop that probably also would be a decent Linux laptop. They have a few new ones on their site: http://usa.asus.com/. However, I'd wait until their Centrino/Banias model comes out...Centrino is going to kick ass nine ways to Sunday. All the advantages of both the PIII and the P4 wrapped up in one chip. Smokes the P4 clock rate for clock rate.
The whole point of GTA is to run around doing stuff you could never get away with in Real Life (tm). Some of the misogynistic stuff in it raises hackles, but hey, considering the age/sex of most gamers, I understand completely why that's in there.
The fun of the game is just to drive around and create as much havoc as possible. Mission? What mission? Bloodshed, mayhem...and nobody...NOBODY...gets hurt for real.
In Huxley's Brave New World there was a hormonal/psychotropic treatment given on occasion called "violent passion surrogate." You had to get it done at least once. In a world without anything resembling pain or violence, where survival was assured and the happiness of their subjects the prime duty of the World State, apparently people needed the occasional safe release of adrenaline to maintain health.
Perhaps GTA3 and other violent games are this civilization's answer to this adrenaline safety valve. I know I feel REAL GOOD after blowing bots away in UT. I know that back when I was building websites for people who couldn't make up their fsckn minds what they wanted, a nice round of Doom 2 was just the ticket. "You want me to change the counter? Good! I'll make the death count go up, beeyatch! BLAM!!!"
Slashdot Mirror
Linux gaming is not far-fetched...when Unreal Tournament 2003 came out last year, it included an installer for Linux right on the disk set. Doom III will similarly have a Linux installer as part of the disk set. The UT2K3 demo disk was a special Knoppix disk with a cut-down copy of UT2K3 on it.
John Carmack, for one, is very supportive of Linux gaming...it helps to have a stable platform to run something so computationally intense as games. Between some of the best game companies waking up to Linux, the successes of WineX, and the upcoming OpenGL updates, there is indeed a bright future for Linux as a gaming platform.
I've not yet installed Windows on my gaming PC. I may never do it. Most of the games I like are already Linux native. Feels good not to give Redmond any money and do it with a clear conscience and no laws broken...
Oh man, have you ever opened a can of worms! :)
Four letters: VoIP.
I'm pretty sure that using Voice over Internet Protocol, even international calls could get sufficiently low to facilitate international telemarketing.
Just you wait. We'll be hearing Pakistanis and Indians calling us about toner and fax paper a few months after this list goes into effect.
OK, Mickey D's has a grilled chicken sandwich, salads with or without chicken in them, and in Los Angeles, chicken Fajita rollups. They also have a yogurt and fruit parfait concoction for dessert. All of these are halfway decent choices for those stuck at Mickey D's and wanting something that won't cause their aorta to pop.
Oh yeah...you can also buy a bottle of Dannon's bottled water at some McDonalds' too.
Fearless prediction: SCO's lawsuit isn't going to get a chance to happen. IBM buys SCO. End of lawsuit, end of story. I think this is the outcome the tattered remnants of SCO wanted in the first place.
I call BS.
The golden age of copy prevention remains the mid-to-late 1980s. I remember very well the fact that the best selling program in 1987 for PCs was "Copy II PC" which was a software unprotect program. Wanna scare a person who was a Commodore 64 owner? Make "Kachunk! Kachunk!" noises at them. Why is that scary? Because there was a copy prevention scheme that caused the heads in a C64 floppy drive to bang around violently. Remember media with deliberately introduced physical flaws? Remember questions like "what is the word which is on page 1, line 5, word 17 of your software manual?" and you would have to answer them before you could get into your software?
No, there was a reason why aggressive copy prevention died out around the end of the '80s. People didn't want it, and embraced alternative software without the copy prevention.
It might take a while, but they'll learn their lesson. But wait for another 15 years or so, and someone will try it again. Such seems to be the cyclical nature of software companies and "piracy" paranoia.
Oh yeah, another blast from the past for those other old farts who remember it: "Home Taping Is Killing Music!" "C30, C60, C90, Go!" Ha ha ha ha...
...snailmail is not a good idea. Faxes, phone calls and email are the only things that are getting through to congresspersons/senators now.
Too bad my congresscritter is Howard Berman. [sigh]
It seems like most of these hardware sites are pretty honest. Matrox threw all its eggs into its Parhelia basket, and probably threw around lots of swag in hopes the card would get Super Bitchen press from the Super Bitchen gaming hardware sites.
Guess what? You can't put lipstick on a pig and say it's J-Lo. Parhelia stank on ice, and the hardware sites were more than happy to point it out. Now Matrox is in danger of going bust thanks to the Parhelia's failure.
However, don't put much stock in Benchmarks. The video card companies seem to be able to game the benchmarks...can you say Quack Quack?
WWF Attitude on Dreamcast. I have had random reboots and other delightful events playing it. Dreamcast was arguably the best console ever built, but even Dreamcast could be flummoxed by poorly-written (or poorly ported from PSX in this case) games.
BTW someone mentioned Typing Of The Dead. Kickass game. I know the typing game is a big genre in Japan but it hasn't taken off here. I understand there was a Neon Genesis Evangelion typing game that was a Japan-only release for DC, and others have been put ouf for other systems. I would think such a game would be ideal for PC gaming, in that the keyboard is ubiquitous and not just a peripheral that is "sold separately" from the rest of the system.
Let's see, what else is available for Mac? Quake III Arena? Check. Castle Wolfenstein? Check. Master of Orion 3? Check. Tony Hawk? Check. Jedi Outcast? Check. Max Paine? Check. Deus Ex? Check. Warcraft III? Check. And the list goes on and on and on.
There are glaring omissions. You mentioned one. But right now is the best it's ever been for Mac gaming. Here's a good place to start looking.
I'd rather see a live-action Cowboy Bebop.
Actually the Celeron 300a (the one with cache) and the rest of the PIII-based Celerons were actually quite good. The Mendocino Celerons were very, very overclockable. The Coppermine Celerons and the Tualatin Celerons were not overclockable, but were still solid CPUs and a great choice for bang/buck ratio.
However the Celeron = Crap equation does hold true for the P4 Celerons. They stink on ice. And they don't even yield much of a price difference over the regular P4.
Even if MandrakeSoft goes under, Linux-Mandrake will not. The stuff that distinguishes Mandrake from other distros is all Free Software so a community effort could take the distro over.
Lindows is garbage, but you make a good point...it could very easily be a quick shortcut to an e-z Debian. However, I don't want to give Michael Robertson any of my money...he's an obnoxious prick. Ask anyone from any one of the rest of the desktop-oriented distros he alienated away from his "Desktop Linux Summit." Bleah.
Intel is not the only chip manufacturer making chips with potential Palladium hooks. AMD, Transmeta and even VIA (Surprise! I thought they'd hold out, but no, they're on board too) will be incorporating Palladium-friendly crypto co-processors and other hooks into future versions of their chips.
However, it requires chipset support to get Palladium working. I suspect that even after LaGrande/Palladium gets going, there will be chipsets that ignore the "features" that we Stuckists are so worked up about.
And without the chipset support, that "evil circuitry" could actually do some cool stuff, like offload crypto overhead to the crypto co-processor. Imagine effortless SSH and SSH tunneling! That's a possibility.
However, don't think that using chips from someone other than Intel will save you from the advance of Palladium. Or "All your trusted base are belong to us" or whatever it's called now. All the chip manufacturers have signed off on it. Soylent Green is People. Resistance is futile. That pod next to your bed...never mind that...
Gandalf is unmistakeably a Christ-figure. Gandalf The Grey sacrifices himself for the rest of the Fellowship in his battle with the Balrog, supposedly perishes, yet returns, transfigured, as Gandalf The White. No spoilers here...I figure most of you all have watched "LOTR: The Two Towers" and those who haven't have read the books.
LOTR was indeed allegory. Methinks Tolkien didst protest too much. It was written during WWII and has the period's fingerprints all over it. It also was written by a devout Christian, and where there isn't reference made to WWII there is reference to Christian concepts of the End Times.
Don't get me started on the Dune Chronicles and its parallels to Western and Near Eastern culture clashes throughout the millenia. The Oil...er, The Spice must flow, y'know...;-)
However, it is a *BSD, and its marketshare is expanding, so this means all those *BSD is dying trolls should crawl back under the bridges they emerged from.
Proprietary UNIXes, however, are dying. Big time. Why pay for it when you can get in free?
...you must understand his belief system. LotR is very black-and-white in its view because JRR Tolkien was a very devout Christian. The scenario of the book of Revelation is cast in values of 100% black and 100% white. The Holy Trinity vs. the unholy trinity of Satan, the Antichrist and the False Prophet. How could LotR be anything else? It's the same with CS Lewis' fiction, too. Narnia, the Mars Trilogy...it's all very good vs. evil because it's very Christian in its world view.
Unfortunately, this is the very same world view of the fundamentalists who run the US, and the fundamentalists of Al'Qaeda that we are fighting against. Both see themselves as absolute good fighting absolute evil. And that's why we are in such a big mess.
There is something distinctly Nazi about Saruman and his operations. Him and his "master race" of humanised Orcs...you caught a distinct whiff of Adolf from Saruman.
And if Saruman was a Hitler figure, where does that leave his boss, Sauron? Considering that JRR Tolkien was a very devout Christian, Sauron was none other than Satan. The Fallen Angel. The Great Deceiver. A giver of gifts with definite strings attached. Hitler as a minion of Satan? Not really a stretch if you accept a Christian worldview. I'm sure many Christians believed that Hitler was the Antichrist and that WWII was Armageddon.
You cannot read LOTR and NOT get a sense that it was an allegory of what was going on in the background, namely World War II.
"My god. It smelled like a skunk crawled up another skunk's urethra, set itself on fire and gave birth to another skunk."
Thanks. I needed that.
Not true. I'm female and I've been to a few small LAN parties. Yeah, testosterone-to-estrogen ratio is a bit high, but yes, grrl gamers do exist.
What they need is a cameo appearance by Ein The Data Dog.
ASUS would definitely be more like it. At least they make quality products. Best motherboard you can buy. That's probably a nice laptop that probably also would be a decent Linux laptop. They have a few new ones on their site: http://usa.asus.com/. However, I'd wait until their Centrino/Banias model comes out...Centrino is going to kick ass nine ways to Sunday. All the advantages of both the PIII and the P4 wrapped up in one chip. Smokes the P4 clock rate for clock rate.
Latte.
Another couple of caveats: hella expensive, video is crappy onboard SIS Vampire Video with no way of swapping it out.
The whole point of GTA is to run around doing stuff you could never get away with in Real Life (tm). Some of the misogynistic stuff in it raises hackles, but hey, considering the age/sex of most gamers, I understand completely why that's in there.
The fun of the game is just to drive around and create as much havoc as possible. Mission? What mission? Bloodshed, mayhem...and nobody...NOBODY...gets hurt for real.
In Huxley's Brave New World there was a hormonal/psychotropic treatment given on occasion called "violent passion surrogate." You had to get it done at least once. In a world without anything resembling pain or violence, where survival was assured and the happiness of their subjects the prime duty of the World State, apparently people needed the occasional safe release of adrenaline to maintain health.
Perhaps GTA3 and other violent games are this civilization's answer to this adrenaline safety valve. I know I feel REAL GOOD after blowing bots away in UT. I know that back when I was building websites for people who couldn't make up their fsckn minds what they wanted, a nice round of Doom 2 was just the ticket. "You want me to change the counter? Good! I'll make the death count go up, beeyatch! BLAM!!!"
Just as long as you don't go over the edge and start acting things out IRL, like those lamers in Oaktown did.
The Windows iPod is FAT32. This is also the version suggested for running under Linux.