Ok, click the link in the story, and look at the big yellowish-green image titled "Diviniation Nation", or click here. Now, does that drawing at the right hand side of it look kind of like the goatse.cx image? a flat area with fingers on the edge of a big hole... Odd...
Yeah, you're right. I forgot Carmack's explanation about doing a GOOD co-op play into the game would complicate the scripting of events and stuff. You risk trapping some players here while the other is over ther etripping a trap, etc. Thanks.
Anymore exclusive doesn't eman what it used to. Nowadays exclusivity lasts only for a limited time. Does anyone knowif the co-op feature will ever come to the PC, aside froma community released mod? Stalking through the bases in Doom with a buddy, trying nt to kill him when stumbling upon a horde of imps.
You magnificent bastard. You have no idea how happy this makes, me. Sadly, this is the highpoint of my day.:)
It works pretty damn well. Some tweaks and it'll be perfect. thanks!
Games like Doom, old Sierra adventures, Maniac Mansion and othe rSCUMM games, they can all run on todays PC, albeit with help. DOOM/Quake/Hexen have lots of open source engines based on the open code, and support many newer features making the games look even better. Sierra games, like the Space Quest games, Leisure Suit Larry, and other Sierra SCI-based games also have new engines for modern PCs, although they've been reverse engineered, since they're closed source.
I have found the FreeSCI being the best for Sierra games, and it's available for Win32, Macs, Linux, DEC Alpha, etc. Same with Maniac Manson, Beneath a Steel Sky, and other SCUMM based games (lots of lucas Arts games). ScummVM is a fantastic, widely compatible engine for LucasArts and other SCUMM based games, and is also available for a host of formats. To boot, two different games are freely available for it, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Flight of the Amazon Queen (both are in the floppy version, and the full CD ROM version with voice audio! Beneath A Steel Sky will NOT disappoint, play it!).
The Z-Machine engine for Zork has been ported to everything known to man, and some things not known to man, so that's widely playable.
Lastly, for those niche games that you love (Epic Pinball, Jill of the Jungle!) try a virtual machine system, like VMware (the best, IMHO), Microsoft's newly aquired and freshly released Virtual PC 2004 (not as good, IMHO, and not available on Linux, obviously), or some other open source projects might work.
The last gasp is to install a copy of DOS or Win9x on a spare small partition (Mine's a half gig bootable partition on my second drive), and boot from it for really cranky stuff. This only works, mind you, if your sound card has some form of DOS based drivers/emulation drivers available. I have a Creative branded Ensoniq Audio PCI, and while I have the DOS drivers, they're a bitch to find now, and I keep them very safe. I've found that Demos and Intros are most likely to fail. I can't get Future Crew's Second Reality running with sound under anything but real DOS.
This is also another good reason to kep an old Sound Blaster 16 lying around. God knows they're plentiful enough and cheap, so no true old school hard core gamer/geek shouldn't have one.:)
Right, it's really about the VFAT overlay, but there's still prior art in the form of 4DOS, and there was even a Win3.1 specific utility called LongfileNames or something. I rememebr seeing it on CompUSA in a long thin box (kinda like square/triangular poster tube). So there's plenty of prior art for the concept.
Their specific implementation however might not be challengable, seeing as how they DID invent it. There's a chance however since IIRC patent law gives you only 1 year after public introduction to patent said invention or you lose the right to patent it. The problem then becomes a game of dates and when it was "public" (do wide spread betas count? It WAS indevelopment for 4 years), and when did they submit the patent.
While PCMag has made their old utilities available by online subscription only, theere are a few folks on the net who have copies up of some of them. One utility that's FANTASTIC for tracking file/registry/ini-file changes/creations/removals is called In Control 5, or InCtrl5. Super simple to use, with multiple report formats (TXT, HTML, CSV, etc.) and I love it. Works on all Windows versions because it's totally non-invasive. If you can't find it, email me and I'll make a copy available. They're all free, and were freely available, they just restrict the downloads now to squeeze more money from the now discontinues Utility section (one of the last really useful parts of the magazine).
Wow. This looks like it rocks. A small floating dock in the river (after getting the permits, yay PA beauracracy), make a trap door in the middle, drop a few of these down in, and it's a totally covert method. Drop a little conduit in the lawn to run lines back the the house...:)
If you're paying the 38% tax rate, that means you're in the highest income bracket. That means you can afford it a hell of a lot better than someone in the lowest income bracket. If you REALLY want a burden, try supporting a family of 4 or 5 on an income of $25 a year.
I'm not even an Apple fan, and I think this article is nuts.
"Even when you factor in Apple's $13 a share in cash and almost no debt, the company's stock, at a recent $23, trades at 20 times estimated 2004 earnings. Dell's shares, on the other hand, go for 26 times projected 2004 earnings -- but its business is three times as profitable as Apple's."
First they state that the shares are $13 per, then comment thta when it was $23 shares it was trading at a high P/E ratio, as though it's bad, but then shows how Dell has a higher ratio. And to boot, he compares earning on a fiscal year that's not even closed yet. And on top of it, Dell isn't debt free. In fact, FEW companies are debt free, but apple is. that alone makes it a great stock buy.
"Tom Santos, one of the plaintiffs, estimates that Apple's stores would have lost as much as $80 million in 2003 had they been paying the same prices for inventory as the resellers paid."
Ok sir, tell you what, we'll have Apple charge you HIGHER prices so you don't have to complain about not going out of business.
"And Apple's earnings would have been worse had it not been for $4.8 billion the company has in cash and short-term securities. In fact, the cash hoard made more money last year than Apple's operations -- which lost $1 million while the computer maker booked a $69 million gain on interest income."
Which is far more than any Microsoft division made last year, excluding Office and Operating Systems.
"Out of the hundreds of people who were waiting outside Apple's SoHo store in the cold to buy an iPod, I could find only one whose positive experience with the music player led him to buy an Apple computer."
Ok, so they polled people for their experiences of devices they haven't bought yet. That's a great poll. I'd like to see a poll of people who bought Sony CD or MP3 players, to ask them if it made them buy a Sony Vaio. Or if HP's new iPod clone will make them buy an HP. That's a bogus comparison.
"While Apple's sales of $6.2 billion last fiscal year were nearly unchanged from 1999, profits plummeted 90 percent to $69 million, from $601 million four years ago...Jobs' mass-appeal strategy has crimped the company's historically high profit margins. Apple's net profit margin is just 1 percent. That's down from 10 percent four years ago."
The margins for PC makers has been razor thin for years, it just finally caught up with Apple. I got out of selling boxes years ago due to shrinking margins. The fact that you can get multi-GHz PCs for $500 while a 1Ghz apple is more than grand doesn't help either. So let's not blame Jobs for the shrinking margins, let's blame market factors. As for shrinking profits, that's due to hardware that's overpriced.
"Apple sold just over 3 million computers in its last fiscal year, which ended in September -- 900,000 less than it sold in fiscal 1996, the year before Jobs returned...Meanwhile, Apple's share of the worldwide personal-computer market has shrunk to 2 percent from 3.2 percent five years ago."
Ok, let's not compare this last year's performance to the year before, or any other year Jobs wa there, let's comapre it to before he arrived. Well, fine then, let's compare the other years since 1996 when Steve managed to maneuver Apple into selling far more PCs than in 1996. Let's compare how this year's sales are disappointing to last year's, to be fair. And let's factor in the lack of new product development in that part of the company's line up. They've been focusing on the consumer device market, like with the iPod mini (a smash seller). Gateway has been pushing plasma TVs and digital cameras FAR harder than PCs. Companies can only do so much at a time. Even Microsoft, arguably the world's biggest software company, can only manage an OS upgrade every 3-4 years now, and their project dates always slip every further.
I'm not Apple fanboy. I can't stand the Mac OS UI, I don't like the hand holding, I don't like the over priced hardware, I don't like the platform lock in, etc. But, let's at LEAST be fair about an examination of the company.
Make sure you have something set up before hand. Even then, scout around where you'll be first. I came to a small town in '99 for contract work (Big mistake), a 3 year contract which wound up being cancelled 18 months in. I was caught flatfooted, and wasn't financially prepared to move back to the larger city I wa from. So I did Service and custom programming for a year, right until September 10, 2001. It seems there was a little event on 9/11/2001 that caused the economy to go a bit soft, and when that happens in a small town, holy hell does it go "soft". I had 3 client go bankrupt by the end of the year, and I don't mean like KMart, I mean like fire the employees, close the doors, sell the building and equipment. Small towns can turn IT careers into a small graveyard on your resume.
Regular incandescents are a little "yellow" to me. I don't like it much. I'm a very light oriented person, despite being a night owl. I like my light sources to be a little on the blue side. I love those new headlights in better cars, although most folks hate them.
Ten years ago or so, GE came out with some pastel tinted bulbs, pink, yellow, blue pastel tints to the powercoating inside the bulb. I found the blue tint gave a much "whiter" light than regular incandescent bulbs, and I like a nice white light source. When they were discontinued, I went back to shitty bulbs. Now they market almost the exact same product as the blue pastel ights as the new Reveal bulb. Speaking from experience, I love them. They're worth the extra buck. Whites are whiter, colors are brighter, and things DO Seem a bit crisper and clearer. So while I do agree with SOME parts of this study, I disagree with the weight they give to the psychological aspects.
Improves color perception
Improves visual clarity
They acknowledge that these lamps can help in these areas.
Improves mood
Improves productivity
Improves mental awareness
They dither about this, but I can say the GE bulbs do help my mood, and through that my productivity and awareness. Try to do ten dimentional math when you're in a bad mood and foggy. It's hard. But in a good mood, you can do it more easily (although it's still hard;).
Improves results of light therapy in treating seasonal affective disorder (SAD)
I anecdotally disagree. However on the other factors, I can agree that these bulbs do nothing to further retail sales, vitamin D production or tooth health (chewing light bulbs is NOT good for the teeth). For plant growth, I can't speak because I'm not a plant.
Bastard! You're supposed to tell us how to get in! The tech sector in some states SUCKS, so a near-infinite-market that's accessible without moving is perfect!:)
Ok guys, we're going to sue Bank of America^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Daimler/Chrysler, we're going to do it in California^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Michigan, and during February^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H March. Did we get this month's Microsoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H welfare^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "licensee" checks yet?
A LOT of people have called this a vivisection. It wasn't. The iPod was put under (on Hold) first, and the death of the unit wasn't the goal, information leading to a greater understanding of the unit's pieces for future cosmetic enhancement was. So it was exploratory surgery that the patient didn't survive. THEN it turned into a necropsy.:)
Frequently in my life I've somehow bubbled to the top of whatever group I'm stuck in for various reasons. I think the most important things are to project a feeling to your teammates that you're competent, a through thinker, and open to ideas while still having spine enough to choose between ideas and make decisions and take charge. You have to be approachable yet still set aside enough to be respected when a decision is made, and not constantly argued with.
It also helps to be smart.
There are other good posts in this article, but these are a couple things I'd recommend also.
True, I get lots of bounces when I've never sent mail there (nor been wormed), but for folks who are infected, and do get bounces, a bounce with info saying "This bounced due to a worm you are infected with" would be more helpful to the clueless newbies with "Lookout!" Express...
Why not strip the virus from the bounce, like some (too few) servers do? Even better, why not have the AV scanner integrate with the mail server, so that the bounce doesn't just bounce, but also SAYS "Hey, douchebag, you're infected!" Make the bounce message USEFUL.
You got my point exactly. Glad to see my original comment sparked a healthy conversation instead of a flamewar. Maybe/. doesn't suck as much as some people say.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, click the link in the story, and look at the big yellowish-green image titled "Diviniation Nation", or click here. Now, does that drawing at the right hand side of it look kind of like the goatse.cx image? a flat area with fingers on the edge of a big hole... Odd...
Apparently they WEREN'T charitable enough to actually cut the checks they promied with their sponsorship, hence the problem.
Yeah, you're right. I forgot Carmack's explanation about doing a GOOD co-op play into the game would complicate the scripting of events and stuff. You risk trapping some players here while the other is over ther etripping a trap, etc. Thanks.
Er, lemme try that again, "...stumbling upon a horde of imps was half the fun."
Anymore exclusive doesn't eman what it used to. Nowadays exclusivity lasts only for a limited time. Does anyone knowif the co-op feature will ever come to the PC, aside froma community released mod? Stalking through the bases in Doom with a buddy, trying nt to kill him when stumbling upon a horde of imps.
Yeah, that's MY job!
You magnificent bastard. You have no idea how happy this makes, me. Sadly, this is the highpoint of my day. :)
It works pretty damn well. Some tweaks and it'll be perfect. thanks!
I have found the FreeSCI being the best for Sierra games, and it's available for Win32, Macs, Linux, DEC Alpha, etc. Same with Maniac Manson, Beneath a Steel Sky, and other SCUMM based games (lots of lucas Arts games). ScummVM is a fantastic, widely compatible engine for LucasArts and other SCUMM based games, and is also available for a host of formats. To boot, two different games are freely available for it, Beneath a Steel Sky, and Flight of the Amazon Queen (both are in the floppy version, and the full CD ROM version with voice audio! Beneath A Steel Sky will NOT disappoint, play it!).
The Z-Machine engine for Zork has been ported to everything known to man, and some things not known to man, so that's widely playable.
Lastly, for those niche games that you love (Epic Pinball, Jill of the Jungle!) try a virtual machine system, like VMware (the best, IMHO), Microsoft's newly aquired and freshly released Virtual PC 2004 (not as good, IMHO, and not available on Linux, obviously), or some other open source projects might work.
The last gasp is to install a copy of DOS or Win9x on a spare small partition (Mine's a half gig bootable partition on my second drive), and boot from it for really cranky stuff. This only works, mind you, if your sound card has some form of DOS based drivers/emulation drivers available. I have a Creative branded Ensoniq Audio PCI, and while I have the DOS drivers, they're a bitch to find now, and I keep them very safe. I've found that Demos and Intros are most likely to fail. I can't get Future Crew's Second Reality running with sound under anything but real DOS.
This is also another good reason to kep an old Sound Blaster 16 lying around. God knows they're plentiful enough and cheap, so no true old school hard core gamer/geek shouldn't have one. :)
Their specific implementation however might not be challengable, seeing as how they DID invent it. There's a chance however since IIRC patent law gives you only 1 year after public introduction to patent said invention or you lose the right to patent it. The problem then becomes a game of dates and when it was "public" (do wide spread betas count? It WAS indevelopment for 4 years), and when did they submit the patent.
While PCMag has made their old utilities available by online subscription only, theere are a few folks on the net who have copies up of some of them. One utility that's FANTASTIC for tracking file/registry/ini-file changes/creations/removals is called In Control 5, or InCtrl5. Super simple to use, with multiple report formats (TXT, HTML, CSV, etc.) and I love it. Works on all Windows versions because it's totally non-invasive. If you can't find it, email me and I'll make a copy available. They're all free, and were freely available, they just restrict the downloads now to squeeze more money from the now discontinues Utility section (one of the last really useful parts of the magazine).
Wow. This looks like it rocks. A small floating dock in the river (after getting the permits, yay PA beauracracy), make a trap door in the middle, drop a few of these down in, and it's a totally covert method. Drop a little conduit in the lawn to run lines back the the house... :)
Oy. I meant $25k a year. It's all me stupid K key's fault! I swear! :)
If you're paying the 38% tax rate, that means you're in the highest income bracket. That means you can afford it a hell of a lot better than someone in the lowest income bracket. If you REALLY want a burden, try supporting a family of 4 or 5 on an income of $25 a year.
It was a joke, you insensitive clod. I was commenting on the idiots who call +5 posts from Anonymous Cowards karma whore posts.
So, how long will it take for someone to call this anonymou spost a karma whore? I've got a pool running...
- "Even when you factor in Apple's $13 a share in cash and almost no debt, the company's stock, at a recent $23, trades at 20 times estimated 2004 earnings. Dell's shares, on the other hand, go for 26 times projected 2004 earnings -- but its business is three times as profitable as Apple's."
First they state that the shares are $13 per, then comment thta when it was $23 shares it was trading at a high P/E ratio, as though it's bad, but then shows how Dell has a higher ratio. And to boot, he compares earning on a fiscal year that's not even closed yet. And on top of it, Dell isn't debt free. In fact, FEW companies are debt free, but apple is. that alone makes it a great stock buy.- "Tom Santos, one of the plaintiffs, estimates that Apple's stores would have lost as much as $80 million in 2003 had they been paying the same prices for inventory as the resellers paid."
Ok sir, tell you what, we'll have Apple charge you HIGHER prices so you don't have to complain about not going out of business.- "And Apple's earnings would have been worse had it not been for $4.8 billion the company has in cash and short-term securities. In fact, the cash hoard made more money last year than Apple's operations -- which lost $1 million while the computer maker booked a $69 million gain on interest income."
Which is far more than any Microsoft division made last year, excluding Office and Operating Systems.- "Out of the hundreds of people who were waiting outside Apple's SoHo store in the cold to buy an iPod, I could find only one whose positive experience with the music player led him to buy an Apple computer."
Ok, so they polled people for their experiences of devices they haven't bought yet. That's a great poll. I'd like to see a poll of people who bought Sony CD or MP3 players, to ask them if it made them buy a Sony Vaio. Or if HP's new iPod clone will make them buy an HP. That's a bogus comparison.- "While Apple's sales of $6.2 billion last fiscal year were nearly unchanged from 1999, profits plummeted 90 percent to $69 million, from $601 million four years ago...Jobs' mass-appeal strategy has crimped the company's historically high profit margins. Apple's net profit margin is just 1 percent. That's down from 10 percent four years ago."
The margins for PC makers has been razor thin for years, it just finally caught up with Apple. I got out of selling boxes years ago due to shrinking margins. The fact that you can get multi-GHz PCs for $500 while a 1Ghz apple is more than grand doesn't help either. So let's not blame Jobs for the shrinking margins, let's blame market factors. As for shrinking profits, that's due to hardware that's overpriced.Ok, let's not compare this last year's performance to the year before, or any other year Jobs wa there, let's comapre it to before he arrived. Well, fine then, let's compare the other years since 1996 when Steve managed to maneuver Apple into selling far more PCs than in 1996. Let's compare how this year's sales are disappointing to last year's, to be fair. And let's factor in the lack of new product development in that part of the company's line up. They've been focusing on the consumer device market, like with the iPod mini (a smash seller). Gateway has been pushing plasma TVs and digital cameras FAR harder than PCs. Companies can only do so much at a time. Even Microsoft, arguably the world's biggest software company, can only manage an OS upgrade every 3-4 years now, and their project dates always slip every further.
I'm not Apple fanboy. I can't stand the Mac OS UI, I don't like the hand holding, I don't like the over priced hardware, I don't like the platform lock in, etc. But, let's at LEAST be fair about an examination of the company.
Make sure you have something set up before hand. Even then, scout around where you'll be first. I came to a small town in '99 for contract work (Big mistake), a 3 year contract which wound up being cancelled 18 months in. I was caught flatfooted, and wasn't financially prepared to move back to the larger city I wa from. So I did Service and custom programming for a year, right until September 10, 2001. It seems there was a little event on 9/11/2001 that caused the economy to go a bit soft, and when that happens in a small town, holy hell does it go "soft". I had 3 client go bankrupt by the end of the year, and I don't mean like KMart, I mean like fire the employees, close the doors, sell the building and equipment. Small towns can turn IT careers into a small graveyard on your resume.
Ten years ago or so, GE came out with some pastel tinted bulbs, pink, yellow, blue pastel tints to the powercoating inside the bulb. I found the blue tint gave a much "whiter" light than regular incandescent bulbs, and I like a nice white light source. When they were discontinued, I went back to shitty bulbs. Now they market almost the exact same product as the blue pastel ights as the new Reveal bulb. Speaking from experience, I love them. They're worth the extra buck. Whites are whiter, colors are brighter, and things DO Seem a bit crisper and clearer. So while I do agree with SOME parts of this study, I disagree with the weight they give to the psychological aspects.
- Improves color perception
- Improves visual clarity
They acknowledge that these lamps can help in these areas.- Improves mood
- Improves productivity
- Improves mental awareness
They dither about this, but I can say the GE bulbs do help my mood, and through that my productivity and awareness. Try to do ten dimentional math when you're in a bad mood and foggy. It's hard. But in a good mood, you can do it more easily (although it's still hard- Improves results of light therapy in treating seasonal affective disorder (SAD)
I anecdotally disagree. However on the other factors, I can agree that these bulbs do nothing to further retail sales, vitamin D production or tooth health (chewing light bulbs is NOT good for the teeth). For plant growth, I can't speak because I'm not a plant.Bastard! You're supposed to tell us how to get in! The tech sector in some states SUCKS, so a near-infinite-market that's accessible without moving is perfect! :)
Ok guys, we're going to sue Bank of America^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Daimler/Chrysler, we're going to do it in California^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Michigan, and during February^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H March. Did we get this month's Microsoft^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H welfare^H^H^H^H^H^H^H "licensee" checks yet?
A LOT of people have called this a vivisection. It wasn't. The iPod was put under (on Hold) first, and the death of the unit wasn't the goal, information leading to a greater understanding of the unit's pieces for future cosmetic enhancement was. So it was exploratory surgery that the patient didn't survive. THEN it turned into a necropsy. :)
Frequently in my life I've somehow bubbled to the top of whatever group I'm stuck in for various reasons. I think the most important things are to project a feeling to your teammates that you're competent, a through thinker, and open to ideas while still having spine enough to choose between ideas and make decisions and take charge. You have to be approachable yet still set aside enough to be respected when a decision is made, and not constantly argued with. It also helps to be smart. There are other good posts in this article, but these are a couple things I'd recommend also.
True, I get lots of bounces when I've never sent mail there (nor been wormed), but for folks who are infected, and do get bounces, a bounce with info saying "This bounced due to a worm you are infected with" would be more helpful to the clueless newbies with "Lookout!" Express...
Why not strip the virus from the bounce, like some (too few) servers do? Even better, why not have the AV scanner integrate with the mail server, so that the bounce doesn't just bounce, but also SAYS "Hey, douchebag, you're infected!" Make the bounce message USEFUL.
You got my point exactly. Glad to see my original comment sparked a healthy conversation instead of a flamewar. Maybe /. doesn't suck as much as some people say. ;)