It's a sad day in America now that opposing one black man's confirmation gets you branded as a racist for life.
So therefore the 48 senators who voted against Clarence Thomas in 1991 were all racists? I'm shocked that the GOP didn't try to use those tactics in 1992, considering the propensity of the Bush family to low-blow opponents on the issue of race during a campaign (Willie Horton in 1988, the whole South Carolina smear job on John McCain in 2000).
The reason that those senators weren't declared racist was their voting record on civil rights issues (tell me Ted Kennedy is a racist, and I'll laugh in your face). Ashcroft, on the other hand, has such a poor record on the issue of civil rights that it's a logical jump to make. The death penalty excuse vis-a-vis Ronnie White was a smokescreen.
So how much entertainment industry pocket lint covered Ashcroft when he was a senator? Didn't someone check out his past campaign contributions and see a flood of money from Disney and the other usual suspects? His attempt to quash the Felton suit is the quid pro quo for those.
As for attempting to get rid of the DMCA via Dmitry, I have hopes, but they're not good. I was thinking about the results of the Amateur Action prosecution, where the sysops, residents of California, were hauled into court in Tennessee on obscenity charges for violating their local standards and were found guilty. It's a bit of a stretch, but it might be considered a precedent considering that one of the main defenses is going to be that Dmitry wasn't violating the law in Russia, but was in the US. And there are judges out there dumb enough to not know the difference between pr0n and legitimate use of reverse-engineering and crypto-breaking.
(FADE IN on an office corridor at the Paramount lot. The shot resolves on a door; a sign on the door says Rick Berman, Trek God And You Know It. The camera enters the office, and we see Rick Berman and Brannon Braga seated at a table, hard at work...)
RB: I like the meta-plot, Brannon. Time-traveling aliens trying to change history and all that. Really reminds me of what Gene used to do.
BB: Gene never did anything like that, Rick.
RB: Well, it reminds me of what me and Mike Piller used to do, and that's perfectly fine for today's Trek!
(Braga begins to wander around the room a bit. Berman is in tight concentration.)
RB: Hmmm, Brannon, my sweet little Peter Principled Co-Creator...
BB: Yes, my lord and master?
RB: That time-travel stuff. Kinda reminds me of that one song by Cher.
BB: "Believe"?
RB: No, the one with the video that you love because of all the sailors in it.
BB: Oh, "If I Could Turn Back Time". I can see why it would remind you of what we're doing. That ship, and those sailors in those tight-fitting uniforms...
RB: No, Brannon, the time-travel stuff.
BB: How do you keep track of all the time things, anyway?
RB: I don't. No, I think I might have had an inspiration.
BB: Gene would be so proud.
RB: Who wrote that song, Brannon?
(Braga goes over to his computer, opens up his browser, and does a Google search.)
BB: It was someone named Diane Warren. Thank goodness that Okuda told me about Google, huh?
RB: Tell Okuda to get out another tech book pronto. We need something to sell at Christmas.
BB: Will do. So why did you want to know that?
RB: What else did she write?
BB: Why do you want to know?
RB: Well, we still need a theme song.
BB: I thought we'd just get Dennis McCarthy to knock off something at the last moment, like he did for Voyager.
RB: No. Since we have a time-travel plot, I want to pay tribute to the genius who wrote "If I Could Turn Back Time"
(Braga goes back to his Google search and starts scribbling down titles of songs.)
BB: Okay, I've got some titles here. I'm going to give them to Jeri Taylor to see if she can download these. She's not doing anything right now.
RB: Good idea. She's been a little depressed ever since Voyager wrapped. This'll keep her mind off that. (He grabs the list from Braga's hand) "Shape Of The Heart". Didn't Rod Stewart sing that?
BB: I know he sang "Hot Legs". And speaking of that, I'm going to go down to the set to make sure that yummy Texan doesn't shave his when we do the decontamination scene!
This is like laws that permit gun shops to be sued for selling weapons later used in crimes. Silly. Damn silly. Thank you, DMCA. You've opened up the Bottle of Stupidity and let the genie loose. It's now becoming quite apparent that the only way around this is to scrap every copyright law and develop a new set for today's methods of content distribution.
>>A shame. Be was *good* and had a hell of a lot of potential. Sort of like an Amiga for the 1990s.
Surprising you brought that up. As a former Amigoid, I remember the period between Commodore's bankrupty and the purchase by Escom (which was followed by Escom's bankruptcy and the purchase by Gateway, and the fire sale by the Cow to Amiga, Inc.). Rumors started floating around at that time that the newly-incorporated Be was highly interested in buying Commodore from Irving Gould, and that the announced-but-not-yet-in-development BeOS would be AmigaOS 4.0. All of the talking points that Jean-Louis Gassbag had for BeOS up until the end were originated at that time, and a LOT of Amiga owners bought into it. There was still talk about Be even AFTER the Escom purchase. I suspect that former Amigoids make up a high percentage of BeOS evangelists.
And now we've got AmigaOS 4 actually coming out later this year (supposedly). Cross-platform multimedia solution, etc. Jesus, sounds like Gassbag does have a new job: head of PR at Amiga, Inc.
I work in quality control in the meat industry in the US. Considering that everything's tested for E. coli these days, the amount of false positives generated by letting your clothes contact the meat would drive the entire industry bonkers. So more power to them; they DESERVE to be driven bonkers.
What would also be fun is taking water samples that are tested for general coliform contamination and, whoops, accidentally letting your shirt sleeve contact the sample as it's being analyzed.
There's a great deal of potential for abuse for these clothes...
Apparently you haven't trolled Usenet lately. There's distros of betas on there that have automatically-installing patches that disable the activation and 180-day expiry on each reboot.
Also, there's stuff in place now to disable various M$ shenanigans in older OSes. X-Setup, the open-source tweaking program for various flavors of Win, has an option to already "register" copies of Win for Windows Update use. Of course, it's at http://www.xteq.com
That's true. Under the 75-year rule, Disney would have seen Mickey Mouse go public domain in 2002. They're also scared that some judge may rule the 20-year extension unconstitutional, which is why they've been trying to revive Mickey with a vengeance, for one final cash-in just in case (House of Mouse, the Mickey (in part) Marathon that's broadcasting on Toon Disney right now, etc.).
Disney's not alone in the cartoon world in trying to evade the 75-year rule. Warner Brothers would have seen its cartoons and characters start to go PD in 2005 (Porky Pig in 2010, Daffy Duck in 2012, Bugs Bunny no later than 2015). WB got out of this bind starting about five years ago, before the extension was passed, by creating what they called "dubbed" cartoons, cleaning up the old audio track and formatting it into stereo, for the ones they wanted to keep out of PD. They then reapplied for copyrights for the 'dubbed' versions. All in all, a very creative way around the copyright problem, but a bastardization of classic cartoons.
Hmmmm, this could offer up a whole new realm of high-tech office snooping. Imagine what you could do with...
...no, not that, so get your finger off that moderating button...
Imagine what some paranoid PHB could do with a mirror-and-prism setup, intercepting the signals from the optical LAN. I don't trust copper and PHBs in combination; I certainly won't trust light and PHBs. The only good thing is that most PHBs aren't intelligent enough to 1) set this up or 2) read/.
Wonderfully...illuminating headline, isn't it? (Sorry, it had to be said)
This is Microsoft we're talking about. How many different meanings are going to be read into this little foo of theirs? The only reality is that the only time M$ will release an IPv6 server to the public will be when they 1) can no longer deny that IPv6 is needed and popular and 2) can make a mint off of it. Thus, the chances of them releasing anything valuable to the community now and under the GPL are about the same as Taco finally admitting his preference for Thai boys.
Games are the major and virtually only reason I have right now not to abandon M$ (that and the fact that I have to use Word once in a while). An implementation of DirectX that works seamlessly with Linux may seem to be an impossible dream (IANAC (I Am Not A Coder), but just from the surface it seems that they can't get it done without running into proprietary code somewhere), but if someone can pull it off...oh, man, I'd love it.
I finally was able to break the shackles of Intel by finally going AMD/VIA. Now I'd like to have a Wintel box without the Win or Tel parts in it. Yeah, I can set up a dual boot, but, heck, I'm lazy. I'd rather not have to worry about what to boot into today. The fact is that most people out there are like me in this aspect rather than most of the serious gearheads that populate/., people who aren't able or just don't want to make the effort.
Linux is a niche OS in good part due to games. The majority of games out are for Win (and unlike most people, I haven't had bad performance on ME with games, for some reason). It's a good shortcut into the market. Any project that can do this has my support, and should have the support of every Linux user or wanna-use-but-what-about types.
When I migrated over from Amiga to the Wintel world, I slapped OS/2 on my first few boxen. Loved that damn thing. Bitch to configure, especially for a relative novice, but once it was, it seriously beat Windows all to hell. I only got rid of it when everything started to be made for Win95. There have been a few posts wondering if a game layer for Linux would set up an OS/2 situation. I don't particularly think so. We're only dealing with emulating DirectX, not emulating the entire operating system like OS/2 did. A project like this is less dangerous to Linux than the emulation layer in Mac OSX will be to the production of future Mac apps.
The only things that I've seen out there that might be easily available are old arcade machines. A lot of game distributors, especially small ones, still keep them on hand, and are often willing to sell you older ones that they'll never bring to a bar or wherever for a song.
For various cartridges, consoles, etc., there should be some large liquidators who have purchased those in the past and might have some on hand. Maybe you could contact the companies (if they still exist) to see if their sales records of old inventory are public.
Wish I could help more than that, but I think that you've got an incredible idea, and I'd be the first in line with a checkbook to invest.
The only things that I've seen out there that might be easily available are old arcade machines. A lot of game distributors, especially small ones, still keep them on hand, and are often willing to sell you older ones that they'll never bring to a bar or wherever for a song.
For various cartridges, consoles, etc., there should be some large liquidators who have purchased those in the past and might have some on hand. Maybe you could contact the companies (if they still exist) to see if their sales records of old inventory are public.
Wish I could help more than that, but I think that you've got an incredible idea, and I'd be the first in line with a checkbook to invest.
I'm an expert in standards and labeling guidelines from my time as a meat and poultry inspector, and what the FBI is doing by changing the name of Carnivore is perfectly legal by those guidelines. It qualifies under the heading of "fanciful trade name", and truth-in-labeling guidelines state that it has to be accompanied by a more basic description of the product directly under the name.
In order to be true to the law, there are certain mandatory features that have to be maintained, like the correct ingredients in order of predominance (greatest amount of something first) and the name and address of a responsible party (either who made it or who it was made for).
So, this is how I'd submit the label so that it applies to guidelines:
DCS1000
(A Software Tool To Infringe First Amendment Rights)
Ingredients: Bureaucratic paranoia, technophobia, blind ignorance of modern communications, general desire to pry into people's personal affairs.
Manufactured For The Federal Bureau Of Investigation, Technical Snoop Division, Quantico, VA
KEEP THE PUBLIC FROZEN OUT OF THE LOOP
And What's Single-Player REALLY Going To Be Like?
on
New Doom Details
·
· Score: 5
Gee, an id game promising a great single-player experience. Excuse my skepticism when I read that. "Great single-player experience" to me now is defined by having a great story being told during my travails through the plot.
This will be id's seventh basic iteration of a first-person shooter. In the previous six, none have had a story more substantive than "You're stranded on an alien planet (or the equivalent thereof). Shoot things." They've always relied on flash and graphics for user immersion. All well and good back in the days of Doom, when the rules were less clear-cut (and a masterpiece like System Shock could get buried by the dual factors of shareware distribution and a commercial distributor who just didn't give a rat's ass about it because they couldn't pigeonhole it).
Now look at what's happened since Quake II. Half-Life redefined the rules of the genre thanks to that terrific storyline. System Shock II, Thief and its sequel, Soldier of Fortune, Deus Ex...a strong storyline has become the rule rather than the exception, something to set you apart from the crowd in a single-player FPS. FPSes even get dinged by reviewers for not having a strong storyline. Gabe Newell buried a landmine in John Carmack's sandbox, and Carmack and his team have proven in the past that they haven't got the inclination to deal with this kind of threat.
(This is why I wondered about the ex-id players and their particular solo efforts. Daikatana's storyline always seemed to be a joke to me, and it turned out to be as shallow as expected. And even having Lewis Carroll as source material, I have very little hope that Alice will have some meat on her bones.)
I'm not big on multiplayer gaming due to my inherent asocial tendencies, so I look for strong single-player elements in my FPSes. However, I purchased both Quake III and Unreal Tournament. Why? Because I know what side my bread is buttered on. The greatest storyline in the world won't save a game that's behind the tech curve. My money voted for id's and Epic's development efforts in engine creation and other basic tech. I trust each company to give us magnificent efforts in technical achievement; I just don't trust them to do stories.
My thought on Doom III is that it's going to be a terrific glorified tech demo. However, I'll be incredibly and pleasantly surprised if Carmack and company pull a rabbit out of their hats and give us a story. I'll be waiting for this, but wary.
This brings up a good point - why not just try to build on OS that runs DOS/Win* games?
Well, I'm one of those people in that group, so I'm really interested in that area. But then we have to go back to the same old stumbling block that we've seen before: the Temple of Redmond locking down their APIs. The stumbling block here not only has to include all of the usual suspects (msvcrt.dll, mfc42.dll, etc.), but we now have to throw in DirectX. Let's face it, DirectX dominates the market for game-programming APIs. It's a piece of crap, yes, but it's still there, it still has to be dealt with, and with every new version, it integrates itself more and more into Windows under the guise of increasing functionality (DirectX 8 is going to include a whole bunch of new goodies, but I've got to give M$ credit in one thing: the DirectX 8 beta I'm running is not only the first stable beta they've ever released (of ANYTHING), but it's more stable than 7.0a). We've run into this syndrome before with MSIE, and as M$ has shown, there's no turning that clock back.
The good news is that there are some game programmers who are rebelling against M$ domination. As an example, Diablo II loads instantly when you're using Glide, as opposed to the "order a pizza for delivery and see what arrives first, the pizza or your game on the screen" phenomenon you experience in Direct3D. It might be a path for implementation, though; encourage the development of Glide wrappers inside of this "mini-OS" for gaming so that non-3DFX users (like myself) can benefit. But then there's a problem in getting Glide wrappers to work with every card (I'm still experimenting to see if one works with my GeForce 2).
Can someone create an open-source version of DirectX that doesn't include any proprietary M$ code? I dunno; I'm not a programmer, and I don't pretend to be one. But any "mini-OS" designed for gaming has to include it in order to be free and clear from M$ Legal. I don't see that happening, even given the talented bunch who frequent/..
I just find it strange that companies like Asus, ABit, and Soyo are all putting out motherboards that can overclock everything up to and including the Hubble constant while Intel and AMD are spending their time finding new ways to prevent overclocking the CPU. That being said, anyone know any voltage combos I can use on my Apollo Pro 133/PII 400 box to get the sucker stable at about 500Mhz without having to install cryogenic equipment?
My personal view: I'm sticking with Intel for a while until after my next CPU upgrade (PII 400 is going to a CuMine 700+, hopefully by the end of the weekend). I'm just easing myself away slowly from the Beast That Grove Built.
Switching to the Apollo Pro 133 (from an old 440BX that was past its shelflife viz. BIOS upgrades) was a no-brainer due to the i820 fiasco (yeah, it's not that great of a chipset, but it was still US$50 cheaper than another 440BX, even though I have to jump through hoops every time driver upgrades are released to get Windog to respond to their existence; BTW: there's been some complaints about its hacked UDMA66 implementation, but it works fine once drivers are installed). And thanks to the fine people here at/., I'm sure as hell not going to touch a Willamette. So the next iteration of AMD past T-Bird will certainly end up being my next CPU.
(NOTE: I'm a hardcore gamer that stupid bought an inexpensive generic Vortex2 soundcard that, like those asinine Winmodems, uses some proprietary hardware-based calls to Windog for various purposes. Until the sound card's upgraded and WINE will do games properly, Linux is not an option.)
The Spie, who curses Wintel's implementation of P&P...I WANT MY JUMPERS BACK!
You know, if Katz didn't have this rep for integrity, I would swear that he was making it up, because this seems utterly cliched to me.
The French always seem to bitch about agricultural things if it even remotely has something to do with poor France versus the rest of civilization. It was the lobbying of French farmers that caused the now-EU to force through the CAP, which successfully turned the clock back fifty years on Euroagriculture. They were the ones to complain about antibiotics and steroids in American beef (even when testing proved that levels in the finished product were negligible to non-existent). And their running war with Britain over anything that can be grown or raised is a joke in agribusiness around the world (as a quality supervisor in the meat and poultry industry, I watch this kind of stuff carefully).
And what's their target when it's the Americans who offend? McDonalds. Every single time, it's McDonalds. This guy's initial complaint was about US duties on Roquefort cheese. Funny, but last time I walked into Mickey D's and ordered a Quarter Pounder with Cheese (or would that be a Hamburger Royale?), I wasn't asked if I wanted the cheese to be Swiss, Gruyere, or Roquefort. I got good old pasteurized, processed American cheese food product on it. So what is McDonalds' sin? It's not part of the French "culture", and France has a tradition of denigrating other cultures. In fact, from the French people I've known, xenophobia is a point of pride among them.
Speaking as an American, we don't have a native culture and cuisine that go back a thousand years. We have to create our own. McDonalds is an aspect of our culture. As for its supposed culinary sins, the protests are coming from a country that:
1) Considers snails to be a delicacy.
2) Considers fungus rooted up by hogs to be a delicacy (and grinds it up with goose liver to produce a paste that's pound for pound more expensive than heroin and tastes worse).
3) Attempted to foist roast pigeon on the world.
4) Invented the concept of microscopic portions at macroscopic prices and called it "nouvelle cuisine" in order to sucker in the pretentious rich people.
In other words, to all the French out there, thanks for that nice statue, and glad that we could save your collective ass twice in the Twentieth Century, but don't throw bricks in glass houses when it comes to culinary culture.
Slashdot Mirror
So therefore the 48 senators who voted against Clarence Thomas in 1991 were all racists? I'm shocked that the GOP didn't try to use those tactics in 1992, considering the propensity of the Bush family to low-blow opponents on the issue of race during a campaign (Willie Horton in 1988, the whole South Carolina smear job on John McCain in 2000). The reason that those senators weren't declared racist was their voting record on civil rights issues (tell me Ted Kennedy is a racist, and I'll laugh in your face). Ashcroft, on the other hand, has such a poor record on the issue of civil rights that it's a logical jump to make. The death penalty excuse vis-a-vis Ronnie White was a smokescreen.
So how much entertainment industry pocket lint covered Ashcroft when he was a senator? Didn't someone check out his past campaign contributions and see a flood of money from Disney and the other usual suspects? His attempt to quash the Felton suit is the quid pro quo for those.
As for attempting to get rid of the DMCA via Dmitry, I have hopes, but they're not good. I was thinking about the results of the Amateur Action prosecution, where the sysops, residents of California, were hauled into court in Tennessee on obscenity charges for violating their local standards and were found guilty. It's a bit of a stretch, but it might be considered a precedent considering that one of the main defenses is going to be that Dmitry wasn't violating the law in Russia, but was in the US. And there are judges out there dumb enough to not know the difference between pr0n and legitimate use of reverse-engineering and crypto-breaking.
The Spie
(FADE IN on an office corridor at the Paramount lot. The shot resolves on a door; a sign on the door says Rick Berman, Trek God And You Know It. The camera enters the office, and we see Rick Berman and Brannon Braga seated at a table, hard at work...)
RB: I like the meta-plot, Brannon. Time-traveling aliens trying to change history and all that. Really reminds me of what Gene used to do.
BB: Gene never did anything like that, Rick.
RB: Well, it reminds me of what me and Mike Piller used to do, and that's perfectly fine for today's Trek!
(Braga begins to wander around the room a bit. Berman is in tight concentration.)
RB: Hmmm, Brannon, my sweet little Peter Principled Co-Creator...
BB: Yes, my lord and master?
RB: That time-travel stuff. Kinda reminds me of that one song by Cher.
BB: "Believe"?
RB: No, the one with the video that you love because of all the sailors in it.
BB: Oh, "If I Could Turn Back Time". I can see why it would remind you of what we're doing. That ship, and those sailors in those tight-fitting uniforms...
RB: No, Brannon, the time-travel stuff.
BB: How do you keep track of all the time things, anyway?
RB: I don't. No, I think I might have had an inspiration.
BB: Gene would be so proud.
RB: Who wrote that song, Brannon?
(Braga goes over to his computer, opens up his browser, and does a Google search.)
BB: It was someone named Diane Warren. Thank goodness that Okuda told me about Google, huh?
RB: Tell Okuda to get out another tech book pronto. We need something to sell at Christmas.
BB: Will do. So why did you want to know that?
RB: What else did she write?
BB: Why do you want to know?
RB: Well, we still need a theme song.
BB: I thought we'd just get Dennis McCarthy to knock off something at the last moment, like he did for Voyager.
RB: No. Since we have a time-travel plot, I want to pay tribute to the genius who wrote "If I Could Turn Back Time"
(Braga goes back to his Google search and starts scribbling down titles of songs.)
BB: Okay, I've got some titles here. I'm going to give them to Jeri Taylor to see if she can download these. She's not doing anything right now.
RB: Good idea. She's been a little depressed ever since Voyager wrapped. This'll keep her mind off that. (He grabs the list from Braga's hand) "Shape Of The Heart". Didn't Rod Stewart sing that?
BB: I know he sang "Hot Legs". And speaking of that, I'm going to go down to the set to make sure that yummy Texan doesn't shave his when we do the decontamination scene!
RB: You do that, Brannon...
(FADE OUT)
This is like laws that permit gun shops to be sued for selling weapons later used in crimes. Silly. Damn silly. Thank you, DMCA. You've opened up the Bottle of Stupidity and let the genie loose. It's now becoming quite apparent that the only way around this is to scrap every copyright law and develop a new set for today's methods of content distribution.
Surprising you brought that up. As a former Amigoid, I remember the period between Commodore's bankrupty and the purchase by Escom (which was followed by Escom's bankruptcy and the purchase by Gateway, and the fire sale by the Cow to Amiga, Inc.). Rumors started floating around at that time that the newly-incorporated Be was highly interested in buying Commodore from Irving Gould, and that the announced-but-not-yet-in-development BeOS would be AmigaOS 4.0. All of the talking points that Jean-Louis Gassbag had for BeOS up until the end were originated at that time, and a LOT of Amiga owners bought into it. There was still talk about Be even AFTER the Escom purchase. I suspect that former Amigoids make up a high percentage of BeOS evangelists.
And now we've got AmigaOS 4 actually coming out later this year (supposedly). Cross-platform multimedia solution, etc. Jesus, sounds like Gassbag does have a new job: head of PR at Amiga, Inc.
What would also be fun is taking water samples that are tested for general coliform contamination and, whoops, accidentally letting your shirt sleeve contact the sample as it's being analyzed.
There's a great deal of potential for abuse for these clothes...
Also, there's stuff in place now to disable various M$ shenanigans in older OSes. X-Setup, the open-source tweaking program for various flavors of Win, has an option to already "register" copies of Win for Windows Update use. Of course, it's at http://www.xteq.com
Disney's not alone in the cartoon world in trying to evade the 75-year rule. Warner Brothers would have seen its cartoons and characters start to go PD in 2005 (Porky Pig in 2010, Daffy Duck in 2012, Bugs Bunny no later than 2015). WB got out of this bind starting about five years ago, before the extension was passed, by creating what they called "dubbed" cartoons, cleaning up the old audio track and formatting it into stereo, for the ones they wanted to keep out of PD. They then reapplied for copyrights for the 'dubbed' versions. All in all, a very creative way around the copyright problem, but a bastardization of classic cartoons.
...no, not that, so get your finger off that moderating button...
Imagine what some paranoid PHB could do with a mirror-and-prism setup, intercepting the signals from the optical LAN. I don't trust copper and PHBs in combination; I certainly won't trust light and PHBs. The only good thing is that most PHBs aren't intelligent enough to 1) set this up or 2) read /.
This is Microsoft we're talking about. How many different meanings are going to be read into this little foo of theirs? The only reality is that the only time M$ will release an IPv6 server to the public will be when they 1) can no longer deny that IPv6 is needed and popular and 2) can make a mint off of it. Thus, the chances of them releasing anything valuable to the community now and under the GPL are about the same as Taco finally admitting his preference for Thai boys.
I finally was able to break the shackles of Intel by finally going AMD/VIA. Now I'd like to have a Wintel box without the Win or Tel parts in it. Yeah, I can set up a dual boot, but, heck, I'm lazy. I'd rather not have to worry about what to boot into today. The fact is that most people out there are like me in this aspect rather than most of the serious gearheads that populate /., people who aren't able or just don't want to make the effort.
Linux is a niche OS in good part due to games. The majority of games out are for Win (and unlike most people, I haven't had bad performance on ME with games, for some reason). It's a good shortcut into the market. Any project that can do this has my support, and should have the support of every Linux user or wanna-use-but-what-about types.
When I migrated over from Amiga to the Wintel world, I slapped OS/2 on my first few boxen. Loved that damn thing. Bitch to configure, especially for a relative novice, but once it was, it seriously beat Windows all to hell. I only got rid of it when everything started to be made for Win95. There have been a few posts wondering if a game layer for Linux would set up an OS/2 situation. I don't particularly think so. We're only dealing with emulating DirectX, not emulating the entire operating system like OS/2 did. A project like this is less dangerous to Linux than the emulation layer in Mac OSX will be to the production of future Mac apps.
The only things that I've seen out there that might be easily available are old arcade machines. A lot of game distributors, especially small ones, still keep them on hand, and are often willing to sell you older ones that they'll never bring to a bar or wherever for a song.
For various cartridges, consoles, etc., there should be some large liquidators who have purchased those in the past and might have some on hand. Maybe you could contact the companies (if they still exist) to see if their sales records of old inventory are public.
Wish I could help more than that, but I think that you've got an incredible idea, and I'd be the first in line with a checkbook to invest.
The only things that I've seen out there that might be easily available are old arcade machines. A lot of game distributors, especially small ones, still keep them on hand, and are often willing to sell you older ones that they'll never bring to a bar or wherever for a song.
For various cartridges, consoles, etc., there should be some large liquidators who have purchased those in the past and might have some on hand. Maybe you could contact the companies (if they still exist) to see if their sales records of old inventory are public.
Wish I could help more than that, but I think that you've got an incredible idea, and I'd be the first in line with a checkbook to invest.
In order to be true to the law, there are certain mandatory features that have to be maintained, like the correct ingredients in order of predominance (greatest amount of something first) and the name and address of a responsible party (either who made it or who it was made for).
So, this is how I'd submit the label so that it applies to guidelines:
DCS1000
(A Software Tool To Infringe First Amendment Rights)
Ingredients: Bureaucratic paranoia, technophobia, blind ignorance of modern communications, general desire to pry into people's personal affairs.
Manufactured For The Federal Bureau Of Investigation, Technical Snoop Division, Quantico, VA
KEEP THE PUBLIC FROZEN OUT OF THE LOOP
This will be id's seventh basic iteration of a first-person shooter. In the previous six, none have had a story more substantive than "You're stranded on an alien planet (or the equivalent thereof). Shoot things." They've always relied on flash and graphics for user immersion. All well and good back in the days of Doom, when the rules were less clear-cut (and a masterpiece like System Shock could get buried by the dual factors of shareware distribution and a commercial distributor who just didn't give a rat's ass about it because they couldn't pigeonhole it).
Now look at what's happened since Quake II. Half-Life redefined the rules of the genre thanks to that terrific storyline. System Shock II, Thief and its sequel, Soldier of Fortune, Deus Ex...a strong storyline has become the rule rather than the exception, something to set you apart from the crowd in a single-player FPS. FPSes even get dinged by reviewers for not having a strong storyline. Gabe Newell buried a landmine in John Carmack's sandbox, and Carmack and his team have proven in the past that they haven't got the inclination to deal with this kind of threat.
(This is why I wondered about the ex-id players and their particular solo efforts. Daikatana's storyline always seemed to be a joke to me, and it turned out to be as shallow as expected. And even having Lewis Carroll as source material, I have very little hope that Alice will have some meat on her bones.)
I'm not big on multiplayer gaming due to my inherent asocial tendencies, so I look for strong single-player elements in my FPSes. However, I purchased both Quake III and Unreal Tournament. Why? Because I know what side my bread is buttered on. The greatest storyline in the world won't save a game that's behind the tech curve. My money voted for id's and Epic's development efforts in engine creation and other basic tech. I trust each company to give us magnificent efforts in technical achievement; I just don't trust them to do stories.
My thought on Doom III is that it's going to be a terrific glorified tech demo. However, I'll be incredibly and pleasantly surprised if Carmack and company pull a rabbit out of their hats and give us a story. I'll be waiting for this, but wary.
Well, I'm one of those people in that group, so I'm really interested in that area. But then we have to go back to the same old stumbling block that we've seen before: the Temple of Redmond locking down their APIs. The stumbling block here not only has to include all of the usual suspects (msvcrt.dll, mfc42.dll, etc.), but we now have to throw in DirectX. Let's face it, DirectX dominates the market for game-programming APIs. It's a piece of crap, yes, but it's still there, it still has to be dealt with, and with every new version, it integrates itself more and more into Windows under the guise of increasing functionality (DirectX 8 is going to include a whole bunch of new goodies, but I've got to give M$ credit in one thing: the DirectX 8 beta I'm running is not only the first stable beta they've ever released (of ANYTHING), but it's more stable than 7.0a). We've run into this syndrome before with MSIE, and as M$ has shown, there's no turning that clock back.
The good news is that there are some game programmers who are rebelling against M$ domination. As an example, Diablo II loads instantly when you're using Glide, as opposed to the "order a pizza for delivery and see what arrives first, the pizza or your game on the screen" phenomenon you experience in Direct3D. It might be a path for implementation, though; encourage the development of Glide wrappers inside of this "mini-OS" for gaming so that non-3DFX users (like myself) can benefit. But then there's a problem in getting Glide wrappers to work with every card (I'm still experimenting to see if one works with my GeForce 2).
Can someone create an open-source version of DirectX that doesn't include any proprietary M$ code? I dunno; I'm not a programmer, and I don't pretend to be one. But any "mini-OS" designed for gaming has to include it in order to be free and clear from M$ Legal. I don't see that happening, even given the talented bunch who frequent /..
My personal view: I'm sticking with Intel for a while until after my next CPU upgrade (PII 400 is going to a CuMine 700+, hopefully by the end of the weekend). I'm just easing myself away slowly from the Beast That Grove Built.
Switching to the Apollo Pro 133 (from an old 440BX that was past its shelflife viz. BIOS upgrades) was a no-brainer due to the i820 fiasco (yeah, it's not that great of a chipset, but it was still US$50 cheaper than another 440BX, even though I have to jump through hoops every time driver upgrades are released to get Windog to respond to their existence; BTW: there's been some complaints about its hacked UDMA66 implementation, but it works fine once drivers are installed). And thanks to the fine people here at /., I'm sure as hell not going to touch a Willamette. So the next iteration of AMD past T-Bird will certainly end up being my next CPU.
(NOTE: I'm a hardcore gamer that stupid bought an inexpensive generic Vortex2 soundcard that, like those asinine Winmodems, uses some proprietary hardware-based calls to Windog for various purposes. Until the sound card's upgraded and WINE will do games properly, Linux is not an option.)
The Spie, who curses Wintel's implementation of P&P...I WANT MY JUMPERS BACK!
Would living for two and a half years in Germany count?
The French always seem to bitch about agricultural things if it even remotely has something to do with poor France versus the rest of civilization. It was the lobbying of French farmers that caused the now-EU to force through the CAP, which successfully turned the clock back fifty years on Euroagriculture. They were the ones to complain about antibiotics and steroids in American beef (even when testing proved that levels in the finished product were negligible to non-existent). And their running war with Britain over anything that can be grown or raised is a joke in agribusiness around the world (as a quality supervisor in the meat and poultry industry, I watch this kind of stuff carefully).
And what's their target when it's the Americans who offend? McDonalds. Every single time, it's McDonalds. This guy's initial complaint was about US duties on Roquefort cheese. Funny, but last time I walked into Mickey D's and ordered a Quarter Pounder with Cheese (or would that be a Hamburger Royale?), I wasn't asked if I wanted the cheese to be Swiss, Gruyere, or Roquefort. I got good old pasteurized, processed American cheese food product on it. So what is McDonalds' sin? It's not part of the French "culture", and France has a tradition of denigrating other cultures. In fact, from the French people I've known, xenophobia is a point of pride among them.
Speaking as an American, we don't have a native culture and cuisine that go back a thousand years. We have to create our own. McDonalds is an aspect of our culture. As for its supposed culinary sins, the protests are coming from a country that:
1) Considers snails to be a delicacy.
2) Considers fungus rooted up by hogs to be a delicacy (and grinds it up with goose liver to produce a paste that's pound for pound more expensive than heroin and tastes worse).
3) Attempted to foist roast pigeon on the world.
4) Invented the concept of microscopic portions at macroscopic prices and called it "nouvelle cuisine" in order to sucker in the pretentious rich people.
In other words, to all the French out there, thanks for that nice statue, and glad that we could save your collective ass twice in the Twentieth Century, but don't throw bricks in glass houses when it comes to culinary culture.
1) Copies of Windows 2000 and Windows Millennium.
/. containing the words "Portman", "grits", or "Beowulf".
2) Recordings of calls to tech support.
3) A thread containing Blizzard's excuses for the poor performance of Diablo II.
4) The Starr Report.
5) Any thread on
6) pr0n. Lots of it.
We are the first generation capable of demonstrating to our distant descendants exactly how thoroughly stupid we were. So let's do it.
Actually, Buena Vista is the G-rated arm of the Mouse. Miramax was purchased from the Weinstein Brothers to be the R-rated arm of Disney.