We all like purty graphics for aesthetic reasons, but many of us play games for other purposes. To lots of people, online gaming is enjoyable because it's competitive, like football or chess.
I'd be interested to see how much both lack of detail (lower resolutions, turning off dynamic lighting, and the like) and bad framerate influence players' performance. My guess is: not much, and quite a bit once you go under 25-30 fps or so.
Indeed it was the 5312. My only complaint is that the wireless card doesn't have a way to attach an antenna.
This apparently isn't the same eMachines that made those Compaq knockoffs I always had to fix for people my freshman year--it is indeed a great little machine.
I don't think that it'd be more expensive to make them without Windows, though. All major laptop vendors have those little "configure your computer" pages, where you can tell them that you want to swap your cdrw for a Plextor Foobulator 52x for $40. They've also got a drop-down box for operating system, typically allowing you to buy XP Pro for anadditional $lots.
All it would take would be a (No Operating System: -$60.00) option*, and a disclaimer later on the page: "We won't support you trying to install OS/2 on this machine--don't choose this option unless you know what an operating system is and have some scheme for getting one on this machine."
You don't have to market it, or even design it specifically. Anyone who wants a box without Windows is likely to find the option in the configurator.
*Or even a Mandrake Linux 10.0 (disks only, install it yourself!): -$40.00 option.
Worse, from a purely selfish perspective, there's no choice in the matter for anyone (not just Joe Sixpack) when it comes to laptops. Sure, there are a few Windows-less brands out there, but even with Windows they're cheaper (presumably due to economies of scale) than the alternative.
I recently bought a laptop with a a 60 gig disk, 512 MB ram, Athlon 2400+, 54g wireless, and other goodies... but also WinXP... for $1k. Could I have gotten a comparable machine without Windows for, say, ~$950, or even $1k? Not that I could find.
The US did not enter WWII until the Japanese forced us to. We stayed out as long as we could.
The UN wasn't considered a mistake until recent American presidents decided they didn't want to play nice with the rest of the world. Nobody else seems to have a problem with the UN, really, other than countries that abuse their own people (Zimbabwe, etc.)
I certainly don't mind "guidance" from the UN, as you put it, in light of the "guidance" we get from the US administration. They've brought us the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, bans on medically-useful research because it might piss off some fundamentalists, etc.
It's getting near sixty years since Lord of the Rings was written, and it's not on its way to becoming a footnote in history......Political history, maybe. But history's not just about who won elections and wars.
"We're about creating awareness and strategic communication about what the Army is about."... this may be true in a limited sense, in terms of tactics and teamwork and combat situations.
But, ultimately, the Army--any army--is about one thing: the application of force to make another party do what you want them to. In many cases this is justified; in many more it is not.
There is nothing wrong with simulating, to whatever degree of accuracy, military tactics and situations in FPS games... but claiming that that in any way captures the essence of what the Army is about is ludicrous. The Army is about killing people.
This is exactly how Natural Selection's commander works. NS is played between two teams with differing (but mutually exclusive) objectives: Marines and Aliens. The marines have a commander with an overhead view, who can order his troops around and build structures using a Starcraft-like system. Of course, they're not always that responsive--generally guys in combat are more concerned with the alien chomping on them than the flashing waypoint on their screen.
Aliens, on the other hand, don't have a commander. Rather, they have something of a hive-mind: each alien knows where all his buddies are, whether they're under attack, etc. Buildings are built by aliens "on the ground", which gives an aura of ad-hockery to alien bases--some friendly Gorge thought it'd be a good idea to plop a defense tower in that corner.
The asymmetry between the two sides makes Natural Selection a great game.
Not legally, but what's "legal" has become so apeshit nowadays that the moral relevance of that question is greatly diminished.
Whether they can do so ethically is another matter, which alas must still be answered in the negative: Darl and Co. have done nothing yet that permits ESR to use deadly force... but to look to the legal system for justice in this day and age is becoming more and more futile.
First, the FBI does not have the right to demand that new systems go out of their way to support snooping--maybe they do legally, but they shouldn't morally.
Second, there are already encrypted real-time internet communications protocols: Secure AIM comes to mind. If this technology gets blocked because it "can't be wiretapped", then something's fishy: it won't let The Terr'ists do anything They couldn't already do.
Bogomips would be highly relevant to Windows performance. See, most Windows boxes spend most of their time doing nothing, and Bogomips tells how many million times per second a computer can do absolutely nothing...
If they're just targetting people who share......it'd surely be possible to write a worm that would turn computers into Kazaa clients, which would run around leeching files at random from people. With enough of these out there, 1) the original sharers wouldn't have to, except to put new files on the network, 2) the RIAA lawyers would wind up spending resources tracking down people/IP addresses that aren't guilty, and 3) "The worm did it" would become a legitimate defense.
I'm not saying this is a good thing. Hell, such a worm would cause massive bandwidth loads everywhere, and probably cause network admins to block 1214 (until the Kazaa folks get smart and support port-hopping).
But part of me would do a little happy-dance if this happened.
...DVD movies, and to a lesser extent CD's, still make sense. It's cheaper to transfer eight gigabytes of data on a little plastic disk than to send it through the 'net, and only a fundamental shift in the way data is carried over the internet will change this.
There are economic factors other than the actual cost of getting the DVD's to retail outlets--things like marketing, which tends to be more expensive and obnoxious when they're selling something physical--that make wired distribution look more attractive, but looking purely at the cost and convenience of shoving bits around in different ways, sneaker-net wins.
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You can fatally overdose on marijuana, too.
Don't believe me? Well, I've got this wheelbarrow of plants for you to eat...
We all like purty graphics for aesthetic reasons, but many of us play games for other purposes. To lots of people, online gaming is enjoyable because it's competitive, like football or chess.
I'd be interested to see how much both lack of detail (lower resolutions, turning off dynamic lighting, and the like) and bad framerate influence players' performance. My guess is: not much, and quite a bit once you go under 25-30 fps or so.
It's certainly widespread, though. So many pages around the web look like they were generated by a horde of hyperactive chipmunks...
Indeed it was the 5312. My only complaint is that the wireless card doesn't have a way to attach an antenna.
This apparently isn't the same eMachines that made those Compaq knockoffs I always had to fix for people my freshman year--it is indeed a great little machine.
I don't think that it'd be more expensive to make them without Windows, though. All major laptop vendors have those little "configure your computer" pages, where you can tell them that you want to swap your cdrw for a Plextor Foobulator 52x for $40. They've also got a drop-down box for operating system, typically allowing you to buy XP Pro for anadditional $lots.
All it would take would be a (No Operating System: -$60.00) option*, and a disclaimer later on the page: "We won't support you trying to install OS/2 on this machine--don't choose this option unless you know what an operating system is and have some scheme for getting one on this machine."
You don't have to market it, or even design it specifically. Anyone who wants a box without Windows is likely to find the option in the configurator.
*Or even a Mandrake Linux 10.0 (disks only, install it yourself!): -$40.00 option.
Worse, from a purely selfish perspective, there's no choice in the matter for anyone (not just Joe Sixpack) when it comes to laptops. Sure, there are a few Windows-less brands out there, but even with Windows they're cheaper (presumably due to economies of scale) than the alternative.
I recently bought a laptop with a a 60 gig disk, 512 MB ram, Athlon 2400+, 54g wireless, and other goodies... but also WinXP... for $1k. Could I have gotten a comparable machine without Windows for, say, ~$950, or even $1k? Not that I could find.
The US did not enter WWII until the Japanese forced us to. We stayed out as long as we could.
The UN wasn't considered a mistake until recent American presidents decided they didn't want to play nice with the rest of the world. Nobody else seems to have a problem with the UN, really, other than countries that abuse their own people (Zimbabwe, etc.)
I certainly don't mind "guidance" from the UN, as you put it, in light of the "guidance" we get from the US administration. They've brought us the Patriot Act, John Ashcroft, bans on medically-useful research because it might piss off some fundamentalists, etc.
...but it looks like rot-13 text to me!
Isn't the atmosphere of Mars only a few percent as dense as Earth's atmosphere?
Doesn't seem like the swooshing of the diffuse Martian atmosphere would provide enough force to shove even a highly-engineered tumbleweed around...
It's getting near sixty years since Lord of the Rings was written, and it's not on its way to becoming a footnote in history... ...Political history, maybe. But history's not just about who won elections and wars.
"We're about creating awareness and strategic communication about what the Army is about." ... this may be true in a limited sense, in terms of tactics and teamwork and combat situations.
But, ultimately, the Army--any army--is about one thing: the application of force to make another party do what you want them to. In many cases this is justified; in many more it is not.
There is nothing wrong with simulating, to whatever degree of accuracy, military tactics and situations in FPS games... but claiming that that in any way captures the essence of what the Army is about is ludicrous. The Army is about killing people.
Except they don't permit people to go play somewhere else--see the bnetd mess.
Griefers should be tagged rather than banned.
We all know that China, North Korea, and the rest of the "people's democratic socialist whatevers" are far from it.
But civil liberties are doing much better, overall, in some of the European representative republics than they are in the USA.
Most people do live in one. Unfortunately, SCO is not under the jurisdiction of one--last I checked, they were based in the USA.
Lolly?
"If you stay at that node for 10 seconds I'll drop you a shotty..."
They did that. It's called NS Combat--basically Natural Selection with the RTS elements removed, and just lots of things to shoot/chew on.
Natural Selection--even the full version--really isn't that complex.
This is exactly how Natural Selection's commander works. NS is played between two teams with differing (but mutually exclusive) objectives: Marines and Aliens. The marines have a commander with an overhead view, who can order his troops around and build structures using a Starcraft-like system. Of course, they're not always that responsive--generally guys in combat are more concerned with the alien chomping on them than the flashing waypoint on their screen.
Aliens, on the other hand, don't have a commander. Rather, they have something of a hive-mind: each alien knows where all his buddies are, whether they're under attack, etc. Buildings are built by aliens "on the ground", which gives an aura of ad-hockery to alien bases--some friendly Gorge thought it'd be a good idea to plop a defense tower in that corner.
The asymmetry between the two sides makes Natural Selection a great game.
While it doesn't mean the Silmarillion is a "rewrite of the bible" (it's not), Earendil is about as clear a Christ figure as can be found anywhere...
...with a painting titled "The Isle of the Dead."
Turned out pretty good.
Not legally, but what's "legal" has become so apeshit nowadays that the moral relevance of that question is greatly diminished.
Whether they can do so ethically is another matter, which alas must still be answered in the negative: Darl and Co. have done nothing yet that permits ESR to use deadly force... but to look to the legal system for justice in this day and age is becoming more and more futile.
First, the FBI does not have the right to demand that new systems go out of their way to support snooping--maybe they do legally, but they shouldn't morally.
Second, there are already encrypted real-time internet communications protocols: Secure AIM comes to mind. If this technology gets blocked because it "can't be wiretapped", then something's fishy: it won't let The Terr'ists do anything They couldn't already do.
Wow, sometimes I wonder about this country.
If all you've got is a hammer, and you're being attacked by flies, then don't start looking for nails: get a flyswatter.
I would, but BT's banned by my university--they see it as one of those Evil Piracy Programs That Waste Our Bandwidth, despite efforts to educate them.
Why we only have 7 Mbits/s of bandwidth for a university with 10k students is another mystery...
Bogomips would be highly relevant to Windows performance. See, most Windows boxes spend most of their time doing nothing, and Bogomips tells how many million times per second a computer can do absolutely nothing...
If they're just targetting people who share... ...it'd surely be possible to write a worm that would turn computers into Kazaa clients, which would run around leeching files at random from people. With enough of these out there, 1) the original sharers wouldn't have to, except to put new files on the network, 2) the RIAA lawyers would wind up spending resources tracking down people/IP addresses that aren't guilty, and 3) "The worm did it" would become a legitimate defense.
I'm not saying this is a good thing. Hell, such a worm would cause massive bandwidth loads everywhere, and probably cause network admins to block 1214 (until the Kazaa folks get smart and support port-hopping).
But part of me would do a little happy-dance if this happened.
...DVD movies, and to a lesser extent CD's, still make sense. It's cheaper to transfer eight gigabytes of data on a little plastic disk than to send it through the 'net, and only a fundamental shift in the way data is carried over the internet will change this.
There are economic factors other than the actual cost of getting the DVD's to retail outlets--things like marketing, which tends to be more expensive and obnoxious when they're selling something physical--that make wired distribution look more attractive, but looking purely at the cost and convenience of shoving bits around in different ways, sneaker-net wins.