I REALLY wish they would port Homeworld, but I doubt it. They said they wanted to work simultaneously, and that'll be out in about a month. I really doubt Loki is anywhere close to finishing their next game. On a positive note, I read yesterday in an interview with the producer of Homeworld that he would like to release the source code to the game in a few years. Can't wait!
On another note, you are never to refer to Tradewars 2000 and a game I want to play in the same sentence ever.
Anti-trust comes in groups.
on
DOJ vs NSI
·
· Score: 3
This, as far as I can tell, is the second big wave of anti-trust action by the government. The first was when industrialization happened faster than the government could act. The result? An oil monopoly. A steel monopoly. A meat monopoly. Etc. When growth goes that fast, some lucky people will end up with monopolies. This is not fair.
Here we see again growth far too rapid for government regulation to prevent monopolies from forming. Again, we see the monopolies have formed (NSI with the help of the government, no less!) Anti-trust laws help the government because it can't have perfect foresight. Free market ecomonies work pretty well usually. But when monopolies come into the picture, someone has to clean it up.
I guess the other ripple of anti-trust stuff would be the breakup of CAB (airline deregulation) and AT&T, but that was much smaller.
The rate at which memory prices fall is going to be a LOT faster than the rate at which compression algorithms get better. MP4 will be at best twice as good at compressing music as MP3 (and you can only compress things so far before you have no information left), but portable storage prices are going to drop much more than that, especially with the portable MP3 players and digital cameras driving demand. AMD announced earlier that by next year they'll have Flash RAM at $1/MB and IBM has those itsy-bitsy hard-drives we all want. Adding more processing power isn't going to bring as much of an advantage as adding more storage.
I plan on buying CTP. Loki deserves that from me, and it should be a great game. But I, too, have played Sid Meir's Alpha Centauri (SMAC) on Windows and loved it. I have it on Windows, but I can't bear the hypocrisy of booting into it anymore. I've tried running SMAC on Wine and failed, but they have mentioned the possibility of a Linux port before, so it's not out of the question. So, if you care, go over to http://alpha.owo.com/cgi-bin/ubb/forumdisplay.cgi? action=topics&forum=The+Game&number=2&Da ysPrune= and register your support. (slashdot's going to insert a space somewhere in that. Make sure you remove it before you try it)
Neal Stephenson is my new hero. The only thing I've read of his is "Command Line" but I've already bought Snow Crash and I'm hitting it next week after finals are over.
I was shocked to read in Newsweek that he writes out his book with a writing utensil and then transfers them to his computer (which runs Linux). How retro! I can't read my handwriting if it's more than 2 days old, so I could never do that.
I also loved the part where it explains that because the book contains the source code to the solitaire cryptography algorithm, the book can't be exported (though can't low levels be exported?)
Well, Linus has said that he doesn't expect Linux to last forever or to keep expanding (at least kernel-wise) at an exponential rate. Soon or later, someone will say, "This isn't how things should be done." and they'll start a new OS that will be better. So who knows; maybe 10 years down the road we'll be doing a Plan-9 compliant system instead, and doing it right. History repeats.
A slight update for you people who are going to Linux expo:
The Raleigh Grand Cinema has said it's going to start selling tickets 3pm May 12th for the shows on the 19th. They are listed at moviefone, so I would try that a little before then.
Of course, you're competing with the IBMers and Redhaters in the Triangle, who are on their home turf and are more organized. Best of luck. I'll be home, in Mississippi, by then, for better or for worse.
No, there is a standard romanization. It is shiitake. Well, I'm not sure, but if they think it's shiitaki, then it must be spelled with the characters shi i ta ke. There are about 60 phonetical symbols (written with Hiragana or Katakana, the Japanese phonetical syllabaries). All 60 have quite clear romanizations. Every Japanese word can be made up of them; therefore every Japanese word can be romanized consistently.
You may be thinking of Chinese, which is tonal (making things more difficult) and has 2 "standard" romanizations. One, for instance, would write Qing, while the other would write Ching. They would both be pronounced the same.
I can't imagine that the international FTP sites are going to be that bad anyway. How quickly can anyone, even at a university, download a VCD of the thing from over the ocean? There's no way any ISP is going to blacklist certain international routes, and that's not what the lawyers should go after. Just trying to connect to those site.fr web sites makes me want to hit the computer, it's so slow. And I'm sure the lawyers can get most of the industrialized nations to respect their copyrights by scaring those ISPs. The countries which don't respect our copyright law are the ones with pathetic Internet connections, so it's not going to matter that much anyway.
On another note, several other people and I are in the planning stages of a port of Star Control 2 (otherwise known as the greatest game to have ever existed). We plan on just redoing the engine and using the data that you get when you buy the game (I'd say about 40% of the data formatting has been reverse-engineered). It's being discussed at http://www.cam.org/~lafranc/sc4board/ and a preliminary web page is at http://info3.tech.klte.hu/~mudry/fscp/ (which is often down) and mirrored at http://www.duke.edu/~ahc4
I was at first concerned that it was "only as much as a flight" because that's actually a lot more than most people think, but it's only about 5% of what you get in a 3-hour flight, so it's not that bad at all.
I figure this will just make plastic/ceramic guns that much more popular.
Sort of that, but the main thing was not that they couldn't put out the chips fast enough. They made money on the processors anyway, though they could have made more if they had better production. It was the fallout in the prices of RAM (AMD makes RAM too) and the Asian crisis (they like AMD stuff, aparently) which made them actually lose money.
Well, x86 performance has always been measured in Mhz (of course, everything has been measured like that; it's just with x86 that's about all people care about). I remember seeing on a gaming page one of the maintainers saying something to the effect of, "SGI came out with a new processor today. But it's only 300mhz! Hah! I'll keep my Celeron!" Gamers and business people don't understand the more arcane measures of performance. At best they know that a K6 has worse FP performance than a comparable Intel. But I doubt they could quantify that. So, don't blame just AMD. It's the whole x86 market. Why else would Cyrix and IDT (I think the two of them) be puting out PR-200mhz for something that actually runs at 180mhz (just an example; I don't remember the numbers) but performs like 200mhz (but not really, after all)? Because mhz are all people undrestand. I still cringe at hearing a salesman try to sell my friend a computer and after he said mhz (which he said a whole lot) he would say "millions of cycles per second" really fast, to make him look extra smart.
One thing that it seems "visitors" may be taking away from all this on Slashdot is the idea that the connection works both ways: Just because people can understand what might drive those kids to commit mass murder and might even admit to having those feelings themselves does not mean that they're defending what was done or saying that murder is ok.
Just like I could say I respect Hitler's leadership abilities without being a Nazi or that I can understand why immigrant Irish workers and sharecroppers hated blacks without being a racist, I can say that I understand what might drive those kids to kill without having a trace of the urge myself. These were not normal people. As many people have pointed out, they were in many ways like us, but they were not us.
Many people here may spend countless hours looking at the pentagrams id shows us, but the vast majority of these people don't worship the devil. These kids, however, had the racist feelings to stand behind their swastikas and the guns to back up those feelings.
As one of the emails to Katz showed, some people think we're defending what was done or saying that it's understandable. It's not. It's the emotion behind the actions that's understandable. I would hate for visitors to Slashdot to think that we all think what was done was somehow justified.
Re:Now they can sell to goverment without telling
on
Ikonos 1 lost in space
·
· Score: 1
Well, considering US missile/satellite tracking systems and the fact that the US military has the ability to shoot down satellites from the ground I don' think that they couldn't get away with that.
That Katz article hit a nerve. It got linked to from other sites. My girlfriend had been depressed about the shootings, so I thought I'd email her a link to the Katz story (not that it would lift her spirits or anything), but she had already read it! My girlfriend, the English major, had read an article on Slashdot without me pointing it out (which, if I recall, I've never done before anyway).
[andrew@fizgig andrew]$ rpmfind --help rpmfind 1.0 : RPM packages search engine usage : rpmfind [flags] packagename [packagename...] Homepage: http://rufus.w3.org/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html Maintainer: Daniel Veillard Mailing-list: rpm2html@rufus.w3.org flags meaning -q or -v decrease or increase verbosity -p prefix prefix for the local RPM database -s server URL of the server to contact --lookup simple lookup (standard mode) --latest suggest upgrades for the package[s] --upgrade suggest upgrades for all dependencies --sources fetch the source RPM for the package --apropos do a lookup in the database for the keyword --[no]auto do [not] run in automatic mode
So, not quite like apt, but at least it's an option.
I suppose this means that I'll have to buy the $80 version or something, but still. Now, we can say, sort-of, that our OS comes with Voice Recognition and Windows doesn't! I thought you were lying at first. I checked the article.
3dfx has the best Linux support? How about that Banshee X-server?
Matrox has the best Linux support, because they're the only ones to have released their specs. Hopefully they'll do the same with the G400, or it'll be similar enough not to matter.
1. An driver written by regular Linux hackers who have full access to specs. (what Crow's doing)
2. An open driver written by the company.
3. A closed driver written by the company.
4. A closed driver written by someone for free for the company. (3dfx)
Nvidia might be 2 or 3. Let's hope 2. Like they did with their X server code, maybe they'll come around and give out the source. But I doubt it, since they probably consider their 3d parts to have much more information that needs to be kept proprietary.
Why do I think 1 is better than 2? I've been lurking on the mailing list for the G200 glx driver development, and I've learned so much from it! I had no idea about most of this stuff before. I could never have learned this, even if Matrox developed their own in-house open-source driver. So, it will be a very good thing if Nvidia releases the source to the drivers. I don't particularly like the preceden 3dfx has set. I like the one Matrox has set. Unfortunately, I have a bad feeling about which one Nvidia will follow.
I agree with your point, but the TNT2 is an AGP-only card. Only x86 chipsets have the AGP slot. Plus, no one would ever use it on something slower than a P2, so one would assume Nvidia would compile the driver with PGCC or at least heavily optimized egcs
He has the quote: "The Internet was working swell on traditional Unix, Macintosh and Windows NT before Linux was much more than a glimmer in Linus' eye". But he fails to realize that the internet was running on Unix before NT was a glimmer in Bill Gate's eye. And it's using the same software that Linux is using. He doesn't realize that a lot of the GNU software is older than Linux itself, and older than NT.
Also, how are we supposed to be "making nice with da dragon" if the dragon doesn't let us? What are supposed to channel our efforts into, poking at Word with a dissassembler? We're not allowed to make Windows any less abominable. It's not wasted effort. It's effort that would otherwise not have bene made towards much of anything.
I get the feeling he wrote it to get Slashdotted, as he realizes that everyone will hate him and sent him nasty emails. I'm not going to satisfy him. All he wants is for a few hundred of us to send threatening emails so he can confirm his belief that we're all ultra-liberal hippies.
First of all, "yay, I got a link posted!". Ok, now. Everyone keeps saying, "Oh, it'll get cracked." But, despite the fact that LOTS of people who you'd think would be able to crack Divx absolutely loath it, but it still hasn't been cracked. Granted, it's in a proprietary system, so it wouldn't be as easy as cracking something already on the computer. I'm just thinking that maybe the IP-protecting people actually are on to something this time, at least until we have mass-produced quantum computers *drool*. Divx uses 128-bit private-key encryption, IIRC. It hasn't been cracked yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I REALLY wish they would port Homeworld, but I doubt it. They said they wanted to work simultaneously, and that'll be out in about a month. I really doubt Loki is anywhere close to finishing their next game. On a positive note, I read yesterday in an interview with the producer of Homeworld that he would like to release the source code to the game in a few years. Can't wait!
On another note, you are never to refer to Tradewars 2000 and a game I want to play in the same sentence ever.
This, as far as I can tell, is the second big wave of anti-trust action by the government. The first was when industrialization happened faster than the government could act. The result? An oil monopoly. A steel monopoly. A meat monopoly. Etc. When growth goes that fast, some lucky people will end up with monopolies. This is not fair.
Here we see again growth far too rapid for government regulation to prevent monopolies from forming. Again, we see the monopolies have formed (NSI with the help of the government, no less!) Anti-trust laws help the government because it can't have perfect foresight. Free market ecomonies work pretty well usually. But when monopolies come into the picture, someone has to clean it up.
I guess the other ripple of anti-trust stuff would be the breakup of CAB (airline deregulation) and AT&T, but that was much smaller.
Well, I meant actual MPGE-1 Layer 4, not the stupid MP4. But the same goes for it, ACC, Microsoft's audio code, RealAudio, etc.
The rate at which memory prices fall is going to be a LOT faster than the rate at which compression algorithms get better. MP4 will be at best twice as good at compressing music as MP3 (and you can only compress things so far before you have no information left), but portable storage prices are going to drop much more than that, especially with the portable MP3 players and digital cameras driving demand. AMD announced earlier that by next year they'll have Flash RAM at $1/MB and IBM has those itsy-bitsy hard-drives we all want. Adding more processing power isn't going to bring as much of an advantage as adding more storage.
I plan on buying CTP. Loki deserves that from me, and it should be a great game. But I, too, have played Sid Meir's Alpha Centauri (SMAC) on Windows and loved it. I have it on Windows, but I can't bear the hypocrisy of booting into it anymore. I've tried running SMAC on Wine and failed, but they have mentioned the possibility of a Linux port before, so it's not out of the question. So, if you care, go over to http://alpha.owo.com/cgi-bin/ubb/forumdisplay.cgi? action=topics&forum=The+Game&number=2&Da ysPrune= and register your support. (slashdot's going to insert a space somewhere in that. Make sure you remove it before you try it)
Neal Stephenson is my new hero. The only thing I've read of his is "Command Line" but I've already bought Snow Crash and I'm hitting it next week after finals are over.
I was shocked to read in Newsweek that he writes out his book with a writing utensil and then transfers them to his computer (which runs Linux). How retro! I can't read my handwriting if it's more than 2 days old, so I could never do that.
I also loved the part where it explains that because the book contains the source code to the solitaire cryptography algorithm, the book can't be exported (though can't low levels be exported?)
Well, Linus has said that he doesn't expect Linux to last forever or to keep expanding (at least kernel-wise) at an exponential rate. Soon or later, someone will say, "This isn't how things should be done." and they'll start a new OS that will be better. So who knows; maybe 10 years down the road we'll be doing a Plan-9 compliant system instead, and doing it right. History repeats.
A slight update for you people who are going to Linux expo:
The Raleigh Grand Cinema has said it's going to start selling tickets 3pm May 12th for the shows on the 19th. They are listed at moviefone, so I would try that a little before then.
Of course, you're competing with the IBMers and Redhaters in the Triangle, who are on their home turf and are more organized. Best of luck. I'll be home, in Mississippi, by then, for better or for worse.
No, there is a standard romanization. It is shiitake. Well, I'm not sure, but if they think it's shiitaki, then it must be spelled with the characters shi i ta ke. There are about 60 phonetical symbols (written with Hiragana or Katakana, the Japanese phonetical syllabaries). All 60 have quite clear romanizations. Every Japanese word can be made up of them; therefore every Japanese word can be romanized consistently.
You may be thinking of Chinese, which is tonal (making things more difficult) and has 2 "standard" romanizations. One, for instance, would write Qing, while the other would write Ching. They would both be pronounced the same.
I can't imagine that the international FTP sites are going to be that bad anyway. How quickly can anyone, even at a university, download a VCD of the thing from over the ocean? There's no way any ISP is going to blacklist certain international routes, and that's not what the lawyers should go after. Just trying to connect to those site .fr web sites makes me want to hit the computer, it's so slow. And I'm sure the lawyers can get most of the industrialized nations to respect their copyrights by scaring those ISPs. The countries which don't respect our copyright law are the ones with pathetic Internet connections, so it's not going to matter that much anyway.
More apropriately, go to
g i?action=topics&forum=The+Game&number=2&Da ysPrune=5&LastLogin=
http://alpha.owo.com/cgi-bin/ubb/forumdisplay.c
On another note, several other people and I are in the planning stages of a port of Star Control 2 (otherwise known as the greatest game to have ever existed). We plan on just redoing the engine and using the data that you get when you buy the game (I'd say about 40% of the data formatting has been reverse-engineered). It's being discussed at http://www.cam.org/~lafranc/sc4board/ and a preliminary web page is at http://info3.tech.klte.hu/~mudry/fscp/ (which is often down) and mirrored at http://www.duke.edu/~ahc4
I was at first concerned that it was "only as much as a flight" because that's actually a lot more than most people think, but it's only about 5% of what you get in a 3-hour flight, so it's not that bad at all.
I figure this will just make plastic/ceramic guns that much more popular.
Sort of that, but the main thing was not that they couldn't put out the chips fast enough. They made money on the processors anyway, though they could have made more if they had better production. It was the fallout in the prices of RAM (AMD makes RAM too) and the Asian crisis (they like AMD stuff, aparently) which made them actually lose money.
Well, x86 performance has always been measured in Mhz (of course, everything has been measured like that; it's just with x86 that's about all people care about). I remember seeing on a gaming page one of the maintainers saying something to the effect of, "SGI came out with a new processor today. But it's only 300mhz! Hah! I'll keep my Celeron!" Gamers and business people don't understand the more arcane measures of performance. At best they know that a K6 has worse FP performance than a comparable Intel. But I doubt they could quantify that. So, don't blame just AMD. It's the whole x86 market. Why else would Cyrix and IDT (I think the two of them) be puting out PR-200mhz for something that actually runs at 180mhz (just an example; I don't remember the numbers) but performs like 200mhz (but not really, after all)? Because mhz are all people undrestand. I still cringe at hearing a salesman try to sell my friend a computer and after he said mhz (which he said a whole lot) he would say "millions of cycles per second" really fast, to make him look extra smart.
One thing that it seems "visitors" may be taking away from all this on Slashdot is the idea that the connection works both ways: Just because people can understand what might drive those kids to commit mass murder and might even admit to having those feelings themselves does not mean that they're defending what was done or saying that murder is ok.
Just like I could say I respect Hitler's leadership abilities without being a Nazi or that I can understand why immigrant Irish workers and sharecroppers hated blacks without being a racist, I can say that I understand what might drive those kids to kill without having a trace of the urge myself. These were not normal people. As many people have pointed out, they were in many ways like us, but they were not us.
Many people here may spend countless hours looking at the pentagrams id shows us, but the vast majority of these people don't worship the devil. These kids, however, had the racist feelings to stand behind their swastikas and the guns to back up those feelings.
As one of the emails to Katz showed, some people think we're defending what was done or saying that it's understandable. It's not. It's the emotion behind the actions that's understandable. I would hate for visitors to Slashdot to think that we all think what was done was somehow justified.
Well, considering US missile/satellite tracking systems and the fact that the US military has the ability to shoot down satellites from the ground I don' think that they couldn't get away with that.
That Katz article hit a nerve. It got linked to from other sites. My girlfriend had been depressed about the shootings, so I thought I'd email her a link to the Katz story (not that it would lift her spirits or anything), but she had already read it! My girlfriend, the English major, had read an article on Slashdot without me pointing it out (which, if I recall, I've never done before anyway).
[andrew@fizgig andrew]$ rpmfind --help ...]
rpmfind 1.0 : RPM packages search engine
usage : rpmfind [flags] packagename [packagename
Homepage: http://rufus.w3.org/linux/rpm2html/rpmfind.html
Maintainer: Daniel Veillard
Mailing-list: rpm2html@rufus.w3.org
flags meaning
-q or -v decrease or increase verbosity
-p prefix prefix for the local RPM database
-s server URL of the server to contact
--lookup simple lookup (standard mode)
--latest suggest upgrades for the package[s]
--upgrade suggest upgrades for all dependencies
--sources fetch the source RPM for the package
--apropos do a lookup in the database for the keyword
--[no]auto do [not] run in automatic mode
So, not quite like apt, but at least it's an option.
I suppose this means that I'll have to buy the $80 version or something, but still. Now, we can say, sort-of, that our OS comes with Voice Recognition and Windows doesn't! I thought you were lying at first. I checked the article.
3dfx has the best Linux support? How about that Banshee X-server?
Matrox has the best Linux support, because they're the only ones to have released their specs. Hopefully they'll do the same with the G400, or it'll be similar enough not to matter.
My order of preference:
1. An driver written by regular Linux hackers who have full access to specs. (what Crow's doing)
2. An open driver written by the company.
3. A closed driver written by the company.
4. A closed driver written by someone for free for the company. (3dfx)
Nvidia might be 2 or 3. Let's hope 2. Like they did with their X server code, maybe they'll come around and give out the source. But I doubt it, since they probably consider their 3d parts to have much more information that needs to be kept proprietary.
Why do I think 1 is better than 2? I've been lurking on the mailing list for the G200 glx driver development, and I've learned so much from it! I had no idea about most of this stuff before. I could never have learned this, even if Matrox developed their own in-house open-source driver. So, it will be a very good thing if Nvidia releases the source to the drivers. I don't particularly like the preceden 3dfx has set. I like the one Matrox has set. Unfortunately, I have a bad feeling about which one Nvidia will follow.
I agree with your point, but the TNT2 is an AGP-only card. Only x86 chipsets have the AGP slot. Plus, no one would ever use it on something slower than a P2, so one would assume Nvidia would compile the driver with PGCC or at least heavily optimized egcs
The plot for that Star Wars short seems a whole lot like Dune. Banished to a planet that produces a telepathy-inducing 'spice'?
He has the quote: "The Internet was working swell on traditional Unix, Macintosh and Windows NT before Linux was much more than a glimmer in Linus' eye". But he fails to realize that the internet was running on Unix before NT was a glimmer in Bill Gate's eye. And it's using the same software that Linux is using. He doesn't realize that a lot of the GNU software is older than Linux itself, and older than NT.
Also, how are we supposed to be "making nice with da dragon" if the dragon doesn't let us? What are supposed to channel our efforts into, poking at Word with a dissassembler? We're not allowed to make Windows any less abominable. It's not wasted effort. It's effort that would otherwise not have bene made towards much of anything.
I get the feeling he wrote it to get Slashdotted, as he realizes that everyone will hate him and sent him nasty emails. I'm not going to satisfy him. All he wants is for a few hundred of us to send threatening emails so he can confirm his belief that we're all ultra-liberal hippies.
First of all, "yay, I got a link posted!".
Ok, now. Everyone keeps saying, "Oh, it'll get cracked." But, despite the fact that LOTS of people who you'd think would be able to crack Divx absolutely loath it, but it still hasn't been cracked. Granted, it's in a proprietary system, so it wouldn't be as easy as cracking something already on the computer. I'm just thinking that maybe the IP-protecting people actually are on to something this time, at least until we have mass-produced quantum computers *drool*. Divx uses 128-bit private-key encryption, IIRC. It hasn't been cracked yet.