Living room ? I've got 4 boxen in the living room, one of em's a low profile P200 serving as a tv-enhancer (allows me to open up a FFX fanpage while playing the game, all overlaid on the tv screen).
Web appliances were 'neat' 7 years ago when the web itself was novel. Nowadays it's just regurgitated crippled crap.
Well actually you can read CD-R discs just fine in the PS2, else there wouldn't be a modchip business. DVD-R's are cool but the hardware is still too expensive and no proper modchip exists to easily boot DVD-R backups, for now it's an annoying 30-second thumb-numbing hack everytime you boot a game.
That said, I'm pretty confident someone will figure out how to read CD-R discs from PS2Linux, mostly likely with a kernel modification or something of the sort.
The thing they probably didn't take into proper account is the fact that loads of projects on SF are dead or even stillborn. Lots of pages with "Hi, this is my great idea" that have never released anything and haven't been updated in months.
Amen to that! Make a game YOU love to play, not what you think the rest of the world will like.
Proof: I write stupid puzzle action games, like Tetris/Columns/whatever. I like these simple nerve fryers and I've probably played them all, so when I code my own game, I know the pros and cons of each title and thus have an idea what it's like from the player's perspective, so I can tweak the gameplay intelligently. Ask your typical consultant to write a Tetris clone, he'll make a flashy noisy thing, but it'll be the blandest, most un-fun game you've ever played (besides Daikatana). Why ? Because he has no idea what games 'feel' like. To be a writer, you have to love books. To be a musician, you have to love music. To be a game developer, you have to love games. True game programming is art.
I used to be interested in this kind of uber-laptop, but once I tried one I realized it's just a big fat waste of moolah. If you want a nice LanParty box, just get a low-profile case and mobo, pop in a fast athlon and Geforce2/3/4. Many boards nowadays have AGP retaining clips that hold your video card in place during transport.
The only big part left is the monitor. If you were going to blow 4000$ on a gaming laptop, you probably have a bit of leeway in your budget for a nice 17" LCD screen. You could possibly even attach it to the case somehow and have a desktop-based humongous laptop-type-thing. Why not ?
Don't even bother. If you want to _start_ in game development, do it for fun. It's not something you can pick up from a 21-day book and sell your skills immediately. Making a game takes TIME, as you'll be doing graphics, audio and pure design work, which are each much more demanding than the code itself.
This isn't to say you can't capitalize on a novel idea, but those are hard to come by and most likely you'll get over-excited about your own project and release pure crap. Yes it happens to every one of us; you fall in love with your pet project so damned much that you fail to see how ugly and unfinished it really is. Then you expect everyone to wet their boxers the instant they witness your creation, and then you fall in a deep depression and start doing heroin when it's 2 years later and you haven't seen a dime from it.
Like anything in computers, if you want to do it right, do it for the hell of it. People who jump in "for the money" usually don't get very far, just think of all your former co-workers who had lame CS degrees from "ICS Remote learning" and you'll quickly remember the difference between a 'hacker' and a 'consultant'. Now which generalized term would you attibute to a game developer ? Ah-ha!
It's the actual data you're storing that's confidential (sometimes). File formats should be public from their inception, if only to aid in the creation of conversion tools / import filters and whatnot. Of course this isn't what M$ wants, but for the rest of the world it could be very good.
Of course there is some degree of lock-in that pertains to using proprietary file formats, and some companies hold on to that lock-in very dearly, but should they be confronted with the threat of a competitor's product being file-compatible, then the battle comes down to whose app is truly superior, not just who has the largest installed user base.
In RL, if you're using Product X and find a Product Y that does the same thing at a lesser price, you just might switch. Now if they're both the same price, but Product Y smells like citrus while Product X smells like bleach, then you might also switch. The point of it is that you are free to choose whatever product you want to do the job, and you can always switch back if you are so inclined. Software should be no different, Lock-in is evil, lock-in is terrorism, blah!
Ahh.. well then that's the golden difference : up here, I wouldn't trust the cable tech with a screwdriver, I'd much less believe whatever he tries to tell me. That scepticism of mine started wayyy back in 1998 when I recognized the cable installation guy : he was a former Bell ISP tech support agent, back when I was working there too. Nevermind the fact that he was an IDIOT agent, who would just waste the client's time and let the next guy fix it. Anyways, up here in Canada we have a serious shortage of expert people in all fields, so most 'experts' are just college students with a fancy nametag.
"- I've been IP-less for the last two hours. What gives ?
- Please reboot Windows and try again.
- This is a linux system, and I've already checked my end. Is the DHCP server down again ?
- We don't support linux. Please install Windows and call us back. "
Needless to say, I called a few marketroids and weaseled out a free month of service:) Still it goes to show that big cable providers suck because they hire minimum-wage clowns that still wear velcro sneakers.
Nah.. you see, when RMS explains his point, it is actually based on facts and logic, so anyone with a brain can understand and argue over it. When the pope explains anything, it's really just a bunch of elliptic hogwash that amounts to nothing. "Love thy neighbor, hate thy gay son, because some dead guy with really bad hair supposedly loves ya."
Cut the crap. Religion is last century's big thing, this century it's all about pr0n.
Yes there is an important OS difference. The OS needs to reserve an extra 12kb of stack to hold CPU state information. I remember reading in an assembly language book that "stack memory is expensive". So there you have it:)
Well, I'm seeing Netware from a user's point of view. That's what they use at my workplace, and although I'm sure they've got it horribly misconfigured, it's just a big pain in the ass. Now perhaps Netware itself is ok, I honestly don't know a thing about it, but all the Novell apps that run on it seem like pure crap that just exists as a political statement. Especially Groupwise.. unstable, inflexible, won't even talk to our NT servers.. we're just stuck supporting multiple standards that don't want to coexist. Windows talks to linux, linux talks to windows, Novell talks to its shadow while giving everyone else the finger. We're lucky to have a GroupwiseSMTP gateway, otherwise our entire network would be a big black box.
Why does distance have anything to do with it ? If you can receive data one way, then why can't you send data the other way ? The physical link is there, it might be a little laggy compared to a downtown setup but should still work, no ? Especially since cable uploads are always capped at a fraction of the downstream, things should work just fine, but without hogging a phone line.
Cable bound to a 56k really defeats the purpose, since a big selling point of cable is that it's "always on", just fire up a browser and let it rip. If you have to go back to the dark ages of phone dialing, then it ain't worth squat. Get ISDN instead.
If they can circumvent the per-player fee by not displaying a DVD logo on the box, why don't they just stick to that and forego the whole EVD/AVD bullshit ?
Why not just call it a VCD player with unofficial DVD support ? The way I see it, if it can play DVDs it's going to be stuck to the licensing fees no matter what. If they're not bound by law, then the Powers That Be (tm) will buy new laws that will make it happen.
Dude, just buy a friggin' TV set and cheapo DVD player. If you've got zillions of PC's networked together into a decent sound system, but are watching DVDs on a squinty laptop lcd, you're just missing the whole point of "Home Entertainment"
Somehow deep down inside I wish this didn't exist. Netware is old and cruddy and should be left to die, it is a serious ball-and-chain in anything bigger than a small 30-pc network, and is generally better served by Linux or even NT.
But to get back to the point : wouldn't it be simpler and more efficient to just slap linux + apache + php on a box and just setup the Netware firewall (BorderManager) to forward port 80 ?
Isn't it just striking that a jail warden is actually pulling this off ? How many suits have been futzed because of jurisdiction issues ? Now all it took is for this guy to call a few contacts to pull some strings in the system. What if the offended person was I, Billco, joe average office worker ? I'd be flat on my ass, still pissed as hell at the online agencies, but with no recourse because I don't have friends in the legal 'business'.
Ok, true. Marketing in itself is practically an art form. Marketing as it is understood and applied by most corporations is a joke. Their thought process starts with "which cow haven't we milked in a good while" and ends with "consumers are our analog to Pavlov's dog. Time to bombard the senses with crap!". Good market-think starts with "What does the customer want" and ends with "What can we offer to satisfy that desire ?"
Demographic studies, product tweaking and price selection are the responsibilities of a good marketer. Very few corporations have good marketers anymore, because it has become too easy to screw the customer and fuck with his head.
There is also a reason people become programmers, without necessarily working in a software shop. The problem is that alot of competent programmers are sitting in some over-lit cubicle doing lame office work while some VB idiot 100 feet away is earning twice as much. Then he makes us all look bad and managers dump in-house coders because they think we all stink.
I hope I'm not the only guy on this planet who sometimes believes the US gov't orchestrated the whole 9.11 thing just to control everything and everyone with fear ?
I don't know squat about clustering, but wouldn't such a thing introduce a fair bit of latency into the system ? You'd basically be tossing pixels left and right, with a bit of state information every few milliseconds. FPS trigger-twitch deathmatches usually rely on low-low latency, where even adding as little as 10ms into the bag would result in a misfire.
For networking we don't notice, but turn it into a real-time pixel-precise moving target, and you're jumping into a big tub of clustered trouble.
Bah.. even worse is when the bullshit data comes from your ISP's routers. Up here on Videotron we're getting a few megs of router ARP packets daily, all counting up to the 6 gig limit. Granted these don't amount to much in a month, but it's still arrogant that their misconfigured equipment shows up on my bill.
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Living room ? I've got 4 boxen in the living room, one of em's a low profile P200 serving as a tv-enhancer (allows me to open up a FFX fanpage while playing the game, all overlaid on the tv screen).
Web appliances were 'neat' 7 years ago when the web itself was novel. Nowadays it's just regurgitated crippled crap.
Well actually you can read CD-R discs just fine in the PS2, else there wouldn't be a modchip business. DVD-R's are cool but the hardware is still too expensive and no proper modchip exists to easily boot DVD-R backups, for now it's an annoying 30-second thumb-numbing hack everytime you boot a game.
That said, I'm pretty confident someone will figure out how to read CD-R discs from PS2Linux, mostly likely with a kernel modification or something of the sort.
The thing they probably didn't take into proper account is the fact that loads of projects on SF are dead or even stillborn. Lots of pages with "Hi, this is my great idea" that have never released anything and haven't been updated in months.
Amen to that! Make a game YOU love to play, not what you think the rest of the world will like.
Proof: I write stupid puzzle action games, like Tetris/Columns/whatever. I like these simple nerve fryers and I've probably played them all, so when I code my own game, I know the pros and cons of each title and thus have an idea what it's like from the player's perspective, so I can tweak the gameplay intelligently. Ask your typical consultant to write a Tetris clone, he'll make a flashy noisy thing, but it'll be the blandest, most un-fun game you've ever played (besides Daikatana). Why ? Because he has no idea what games 'feel' like. To be a writer, you have to love books. To be a musician, you have to love music. To be a game developer, you have to love games. True game programming is art.
I used to be interested in this kind of uber-laptop, but once I tried one I realized it's just a big fat waste of moolah. If you want a nice LanParty box, just get a low-profile case and mobo, pop in a fast athlon and Geforce2/3/4. Many boards nowadays have AGP retaining clips that hold your video card in place during transport.
The only big part left is the monitor. If you were going to blow 4000$ on a gaming laptop, you probably have a bit of leeway in your budget for a nice 17" LCD screen. You could possibly even attach it to the case somehow and have a desktop-based humongous laptop-type-thing. Why not ?
Don't even bother. If you want to _start_ in game development, do it for fun. It's not something you can pick up from a 21-day book and sell your skills immediately. Making a game takes TIME, as you'll be doing graphics, audio and pure design work, which are each much more demanding than the code itself.
This isn't to say you can't capitalize on a novel idea, but those are hard to come by and most likely you'll get over-excited about your own project and release pure crap. Yes it happens to every one of us; you fall in love with your pet project so damned much that you fail to see how ugly and unfinished it really is. Then you expect everyone to wet their boxers the instant they witness your creation, and then you fall in a deep depression and start doing heroin when it's 2 years later and you haven't seen a dime from it.
Like anything in computers, if you want to do it right, do it for the hell of it. People who jump in "for the money" usually don't get very far, just think of all your former co-workers who had lame CS degrees from "ICS Remote learning" and you'll quickly remember the difference between a 'hacker' and a 'consultant'. Now which generalized term would you attibute to a game developer ? Ah-ha!
It's the actual data you're storing that's confidential (sometimes). File formats should be public from their inception, if only to aid in the creation of conversion tools / import filters and whatnot. Of course this isn't what M$ wants, but for the rest of the world it could be very good.
Of course there is some degree of lock-in that pertains to using proprietary file formats, and some companies hold on to that lock-in very dearly, but should they be confronted with the threat of a competitor's product being file-compatible, then the battle comes down to whose app is truly superior, not just who has the largest installed user base.
In RL, if you're using Product X and find a Product Y that does the same thing at a lesser price, you just might switch. Now if they're both the same price, but Product Y smells like citrus while Product X smells like bleach, then you might also switch. The point of it is that you are free to choose whatever product you want to do the job, and you can always switch back if you are so inclined. Software should be no different, Lock-in is evil, lock-in is terrorism, blah!
2B or not 2B, that is the question.
Ahh.. well then that's the golden difference : up here, I wouldn't trust the cable tech with a screwdriver, I'd much less believe whatever he tries to tell me. That scepticism of mine started wayyy back in 1998 when I recognized the cable installation guy : he was a former Bell ISP tech support agent, back when I was working there too. Nevermind the fact that he was an IDIOT agent, who would just waste the client's time and let the next guy fix it. Anyways, up here in Canada we have a serious shortage of expert people in all fields, so most 'experts' are just college students with a fancy nametag.
:) Still it goes to show that big cable providers suck because they hire minimum-wage clowns that still wear velcro sneakers.
"- I've been IP-less for the last two hours. What gives ?
- Please reboot Windows and try again.
- This is a linux system, and I've already checked my end. Is the DHCP server down again ?
- We don't support linux. Please install Windows and call us back. "
Needless to say, I called a few marketroids and weaseled out a free month of service
Nah.. you see, when RMS explains his point, it is actually based on facts and logic, so anyone with a brain can understand and argue over it. When the pope explains anything, it's really just a bunch of elliptic hogwash that amounts to nothing. "Love thy neighbor, hate thy gay son, because some dead guy with really bad hair supposedly loves ya."
Cut the crap. Religion is last century's big thing, this century it's all about pr0n.
Yes there is an important OS difference. The OS needs to reserve an extra 12kb of stack to hold CPU state information. I remember reading in an assembly language book that "stack memory is expensive". So there you have it :)
Well geez, if it's so fast on Sun hardware, why is it so slow on native x86 ?
What kinds of things did you wish you had, but couldn't get, in college?
Laid.
Well, I'm seeing Netware from a user's point of view. That's what they use at my workplace, and although I'm sure they've got it horribly misconfigured, it's just a big pain in the ass. Now perhaps Netware itself is ok, I honestly don't know a thing about it, but all the Novell apps that run on it seem like pure crap that just exists as a political statement. Especially Groupwise.. unstable, inflexible, won't even talk to our NT servers.. we're just stuck supporting multiple standards that don't want to coexist. Windows talks to linux, linux talks to windows, Novell talks to its shadow while giving everyone else the finger. We're lucky to have a GroupwiseSMTP gateway, otherwise our entire network would be a big black box.
Why does distance have anything to do with it ? If you can receive data one way, then why can't you send data the other way ? The physical link is there, it might be a little laggy compared to a downtown setup but should still work, no ? Especially since cable uploads are always capped at a fraction of the downstream, things should work just fine, but without hogging a phone line.
Cable bound to a 56k really defeats the purpose, since a big selling point of cable is that it's "always on", just fire up a browser and let it rip. If you have to go back to the dark ages of phone dialing, then it ain't worth squat. Get ISDN instead.
If they can circumvent the per-player fee by not displaying a DVD logo on the box, why don't they just stick to that and forego the whole EVD/AVD bullshit ?
Why not just call it a VCD player with unofficial DVD support ? The way I see it, if it can play DVDs it's going to be stuck to the licensing fees no matter what. If they're not bound by law, then the Powers That Be (tm) will buy new laws that will make it happen.
Sneak peek of the new footage dialogue :
/. every day."
"[*boink*boink*boink*]
Luke: Sis, why is mom having sex with an 8 year old ?
Leia: Because he has a fast pod and a big lightsaber. And he reads
-cut to original movie-
Luke: Ahhh.. so that's why you're wearing danish pastries.
Dude, just buy a friggin' TV set and cheapo DVD player. If you've got zillions of PC's networked together into a decent sound system, but are watching DVDs on a squinty laptop lcd, you're just missing the whole point of "Home Entertainment"
Somehow deep down inside I wish this didn't exist. Netware is old and cruddy and should be left to die, it is a serious ball-and-chain in anything bigger than a small 30-pc network, and is generally better served by Linux or even NT.
But to get back to the point : wouldn't it be simpler and more efficient to just slap linux + apache + php on a box and just setup the Netware firewall (BorderManager) to forward port 80 ?
Isn't it just striking that a jail warden is actually pulling this off ? How many suits have been futzed because of jurisdiction issues ? Now all it took is for this guy to call a few contacts to pull some strings in the system. What if the offended person was I, Billco, joe average office worker ? I'd be flat on my ass, still pissed as hell at the online agencies, but with no recourse because I don't have friends in the legal 'business'.
Ok, true. Marketing in itself is practically an art form. Marketing as it is understood and applied by most corporations is a joke. Their thought process starts with "which cow haven't we milked in a good while" and ends with "consumers are our analog to Pavlov's dog. Time to bombard the senses with crap!". Good market-think starts with "What does the customer want" and ends with "What can we offer to satisfy that desire ?"
Demographic studies, product tweaking and price selection are the responsibilities of a good marketer. Very few corporations have good marketers anymore, because it has become too easy to screw the customer and fuck with his head.
There is also a reason people become programmers, without necessarily working in a software shop. The problem is that alot of competent programmers are sitting in some over-lit cubicle doing lame office work while some VB idiot 100 feet away is earning twice as much. Then he makes us all look bad and managers dump in-house coders because they think we all stink.
I hope I'm not the only guy on this planet who sometimes believes the US gov't orchestrated the whole 9.11 thing just to control everything and everyone with fear ?
I don't know squat about clustering, but wouldn't such a thing introduce a fair bit of latency into the system ? You'd basically be tossing pixels left and right, with a bit of state information every few milliseconds. FPS trigger-twitch deathmatches usually rely on low-low latency, where even adding as little as 10ms into the bag would result in a misfire.
For networking we don't notice, but turn it into a real-time pixel-precise moving target, and you're jumping into a big tub of clustered trouble.
Bah.. even worse is when the bullshit data comes from your ISP's routers. Up here on Videotron we're getting a few megs of router ARP packets daily, all counting up to the 6 gig limit. Granted these don't amount to much in a month, but it's still arrogant that their misconfigured equipment shows up on my bill.