"Ronfar" is an excellent name for nearly any genre
Ronfar is a rather lame name - something one of my D&D characters in 6th grade might have had.
The GMs would get a much better reception with this name-changing business if they just realized one thing: any name becomes a valid fantasy name if you add an apostrophe or two at strategic locations: M'adbi'zatch, Slas'hdot, Nata'lie, B'ritney, etc. etc. This also works for generating Star Trek names.
I'm not familiar enough with EQ to know how stringent the GMs are being about this, but it generally strikes me as a bad idea. These players are paying customers -- if they want to call themselves Salt Shaker or Biilbo, so what? While neither of those are award-winning names, I think they are both preferable to the uninspired "Ronfar" (yawn).
I've been playing pencil & paper RPG for going on 20 years now (yikes!) and have always had a penchant for absurd names. I once had a character - a pompous, headstrong baby dragon in the game "Rifts" - by the name of Therion Quasathorne Vengohopfdengodongo, and I roll-played the HELL out of that character, constantly having him get in arguments with people who refused to address him by his full name.
I guess the bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, is to hell with pay-for-play RPG. It's only a matter of time before tools and bandwidth get good enough that people can start running their own homebrew realtime persistent-world games -- an evolution of the MUD/MUSH ethic.
Lynda: I have never created a Web site other than our own.
Who needs real-world experience when you can just sit on the sidelines and pontificate?
The design of lynda.com is, umm, not the worst web design I've ever seen, but it certainly isn't the best. Some of the color schemes are questionable, but no worry -- just go to another page on the site and you're sure to be treated to another color scheme entirely. Consistency is every bit as boring as all those rectangular objects that plague the web. And the site looks pretty bad in Lynx. And I can't help but raise my eyebrow at anyone who consistently capitalizes the word "Web" in the year 2000.
Oh, and thanks to whoever pointed out the poll on lynda.com about "what resolution do you design web pages for?" I can only shake my head and sigh...
Here's something intersting about Napster. Lets say I want to use it _legally_ to download music that has ben freely released as mp3s. Wow, gee, look at that. I can't! Napster scanned my hard drive I found the mp3's I legally made from my CD's (so I dont have to carry them around everywhere). Now its sharing them on the net so others can download. Wait, thats not legal! I don't want this. Napster does not make these easy to change.
Then just don't export the directories you don't want to share... (i.e. create/mp3public and/mp3private -- export only/mp3public to Napster, and keep the rips of your own CD collection in/mp3private).
Artists *should* get paid for their work -- they should receive compensation for every song they write, and every hour they spend in the studio or touring. It used to be that artists were seen as respected craftspeople; folks like Bach and Michelangelo were more likely to be seen as tradesmen than fussy primadonnas.
I have a problem with this whole "royalties" model. I code for a living, and get paid a fair wage for every program I write and every hour I spend at a client's site. I do it because I enjoy it, and don't need or expect the extra incentive of receiving a future kickback just because a piece of code I wrote helps make somebody lots of money.
Likewise, I'm a musician, and I make music because I REALLY REALLY enjoy doing so -- I'd still do it eagerly even if I was certain I'd never make another cent from doing so. I don't mind charging a small amount for selling a tape or CD, because that helps me recover the cost of equipment and media. But I'm more than happy to share MP3s of my music and to invite people to make as many copies of my recordings as they want; none of which requires a bit of time, money, or effort on my part. It's a win/win situation -- people get new music to listen to and I get more exposure, all for free. Woo woo!
I've been known to use Napster, but I'm not one of these people who gets on there and downloads entire albums. This is for several reasons; one is that I *do* want to support acts that I like, and I enjoy having a nice CD with cover art and liner notes to stick on my shelf (even if I *do* feel raped every time I spend $18 on something that cost less than a buck to produce). But Napster can also be annoyingly inconsistent -- I end up deleting a lot of songs after the first listen, either because its a crappy recording, or the end of the song is cut off, or someone has added a stupid voiceover. Clearly, Napster is NOT a good way for a serious music fan to build a collection. I'd rather go out and buy an album rather than spend the time downloading six different copies of a single song trying to find one that's listenable and complete.
Regarding the Salon article, I find it hard to take seriously anything portrayed in such unrealistic, dualistic terms. Like the artist claiming "If we can't sell more CDs, we'll have to go back to working at McDonalds". Umm, are those REALLY the only two options? If the band fails, couldn't one form another band, or get work as a session musician, or play in smaller clubs? Maybe that's not as satisfying to the ego, but there's still plenty of oppurtunities for a talented musician to earn a comfortable living. If the person cares about their music, they'll keep doing it anyway. If the only options are superstar or fry chef, that leads me to believe that perhaps there wasn't much talent there to begin with.
And this sometimes happens with Slashdot, of all places! Anyone know why? Ideas for a fix? (Junkbuster is out, only 64MB RAM here:-(
64MB is *PLENTY* of RAM for Junkbuster. I run it on my work machine, a PII-266 Linux box with only 32MB. I just checked with top, and Junkbuster is only using a little over a meg of RAM (1332K). And that overhead is more than made up for by the bandwidth, memory, and disk space that was formerly being used to load and display banner ads. I can't recommend Junkbuster highly enough.
I'd guess that universities and such have a lot of people in the USA. So, why not Napsterize MP3s locally, ie. inside the campus LAN, only to and from machines connected to it?
That's not how Napster works. When you start a Napster client, it goes out and automatically connects you to the least loaded server available. There's no way to point it at a specific server, and since Napster has not released any of their server code, there is no way to set up your own server.
Ok, could you put your expertise where your mouth is? Could you tell me how to rip CDs or point me to resources for doing so? I have RedHat 6.1 installed on a Pentium 75 with 48 MB RAM and a 8GB Scsi harddrive. My CDRom is scsi as well and not very fast. Will this set up work?
This should work fine. I recommend the program Cdparanoia, which is a free command-line tool that runs under Linux (prolly other Unices too, but I've only used it with Linux). It'll let you turn each track on a CD into a.WAV file, which you then can feed into an MP3 Encoder. Cdparanoia is a *great* program that does its own error-correction, and has worked on every CD-ROM drive I've tried (both SCSI and IDE).
As far as MP3 encoders go, the most popular free one is probably Bladeenc, also for Linux. To be honest, though, the commercial encoders (which use the Frauenhauffer(sp?) algorhytms) *do* sound better than any of the free encoders. I also haven't seen any good commercial MP3 Encoders for Linux, so that part may require a reboot into Windows.
Be aware that encoding MP3 can be a very time-consuming process, espescially if you're only rocking a P75. But this shouldn't be prohibitive - it just means you'll want to fire off a batch job before you go to bed.
Naw, they had the 32XE, 64XE, and the 130XE, i had the old 32XE and recently found an 130XE at salvation army, i love it:)
I've never heard of a 32XE, and have been using Ataris since the early 80s (though this was in the US -- I think that Atari may have released one or two different models in Europe. Where did you get yours?). The progression of 8-bit Ataris (roughly chronologically) that I'm aware of is: 400, 800, 1200XL, 600XL, 800XL, 130XE, 65XE... The XEs are pretty much the same as the XLs only they were pale grey instead of black & silver. The 130XE had 128K RAM, and the 65XE had 64K (so it was functionally identical to an 800XL).
At one point I had an 800XL with 256K RAM - that was ELITE at the time (circa 1984), even though you could hardly do anything with the extra memory, since the 6502 processor could only address 48K of main memory and the rest had to be bank-switched in 16K blocks... So basically it was just like any other Atari except you had like a dozen virtual RAMdisk devices that were only 16K each... After that machine died we bought a 65XE which is still at my parent's house... My dad still plays "MULE" and "River Raid" all the time on it.
Source code isn't a valid form of speech that needs to be protected, sure some of us can read it (although the code I've seen to DeCSS sucked ass, have those people ever heard of indentation?). But others cannot.
So free speech should only apply to material which is of universal interest and accessible to everyone?
It's always been framed as an 'us vs. them' situation
I think it goes both ways -- that the corporations have adopted at least as much of an confrontational "us vs. them" attitude as anyone. I think that point got hammered home pretty dramatically when police raided Jon Johanson's home.
The judge in this ruling may well be correct in maintaining that DeCSS is in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. To me, though, there's a larger issue; that the industry is becoming dangerously greedy and irresponsible in its actions. Just because they have been successful in convincing the US (and other) governments to do their dirty work does not make their actions moral or correct.
hostile reception my previous postings have received from the long-haired 15 year old "open source" Linux zealot brigade
If you're going to draw such generalities, I should start out by establishing that I am 29, short haired, and have been a full-time paid programmer and/or admin for the past 5-6 years.
This is like calling Linux a program. or X11 a gui. They are both ways of life, just like being a marketeer is, and are equally valid.
No. Linux is not "a way of life". It is an OS kernel. Neither is X11 "a way of life". If you consider marketing a way of life, you definitely need to get out more.
This IS the most significant transaction in Linux's long and chequered history (which I have been following since the very beginning over 2 years ago), and to laugh at it is to trivialise the extreme importance.
First off, I will join everyone else in laughing at you over the statement "over 2 years ago". I first became exposed to Linux in 1994 and it was already a very active community at that time.
By laughing at the marketers, you demean yourselves, and make yourselves look stupid to the average joe consumer, when it is your JOB to try and impress him with innovative great software
As a Linux advocate, it is my "job" to want the best for the evolution of Linux, and public perception of same. In my eyes, that means supporting the efforts of people like Linus, Richard Stallman, and Bruce Perens. It also means pointing out snake oil when I see it -- and laughing at the perpetrators of same as often and as loudly as possible.
As a highly respected prectitioner of the science of marketing, I will not be argued with when I say, Without marketing, Linux is nothing.
I'll bet you'd be even more respected if you spelled "practitioner" correctly. Quite seriously, for someone who has worked so hard to enter the hallowed halls of a qualified marketing, your spelling, grammar, punctuation, and command of the English language all leave something to be desired.
In conclusion, I have to wonder whether your post is in fact a troll - if so, it is a brilliantly funny, clever one. If, on the other hand, you are completely sincere in everything you've written, then I will leave you with one thought: if your job is to market Linux effectively, that means marketing it not just to "joe average consumer", but also to the kind of people who read Slashdot and use Linux already - in other words, the kind of people who think that marketers and PR people are by and large, jackasses.
Keep in mind that musicians pay a terrible faustian price whenever they join a record label: they lose the rights to their own recordings. Even a bigshot like Bruce Dickinson can't afford to buy back some of his own albums from his old record company.
A similar thing happened with Buckner & Garcia, who you may remember as having recorded the album "Pac Man Fever" back in the 80s. Recently, B&G decided they wanted to reissue the album on CD, but couldn't afford to buy the rights back (from Sony, if I recall). Instead, they ended up re-recording the entire album from scratch, trying to make it sound as much like the original as possible.
Support independent musicians! Create your own content and keep it free!
How can these money hungry lawyers and people sue?? The user is INCONVENIENCED by the software, and on rare occasion has to reinstall, usually the result of an bug in 98 or an untechnical user
Strange as it may seem, there are more than a few businesses using AOL for net access. I personally think this is a bad idea, but I have seen AOL used in the workplace by everything from a small magazine publisher to trade associations to a law firm. Amazingly enough, there are still plenty of businesses without a dedicated net connection, and AOL seems to be a popular choice among people who use it at home and just need to do basic email and web access.
Such businesses generally don't have a full-time tech staff on hand, so if something goes wrong, it can seriously interfere with their ability to get work done. Similarly, there are lots of (not espescially computer-savvy) people who work at home who rely on AOL for business-critical purposes. In any of these cases, lost connectivity == lost time == lost money. If I lost several days work because of a piece of software that didn't work as advertised, I think taking legal action would be perfectly reasonable.
It would be interesting to see a single valid entry that could be submitted to more than one Obfuscated Foo Code Contest
There was an entry in the Obfuscated C contest a few years ago that was a Hello World program that ran in C, Bourne Shell, and Pascal (i.e. the same block of code could be parsed successfully in all three environments). It made creative use of comment characters so that each language would ignore those statements meant for the other two.
Or, if I made an independent film I couldn't distribute it on DVD without licensing an encryption key? Is that for real? Please tell me I'm mistaken.
As far as I know, that's exactly the case.
A similar situation exists with DAT. When DAT first hit the market, the industry (which in this case means mostly Sony) decided it didn't want consumers to have access to that good a recording standard, so they implemented a versioning system whereby you can only make a single copy of a given DAT. This applies even with original content; if I recorded a performance of my own music onto DAT, I would only be able to make a single digital copy of it. Those of us with home studios don't like this a bit.
I believe that it is now possible to get DAT decks without the versioning hardware, but that restriction did a lot to keep the DAT format from being a much bigger success than it was. All I know is I'm grateful for affordable hard disk recording and CD burners.
The entertainment industry has tried many, many tactics to "protect itself" from "pirates". These tactics have ranged from trying to stamp out video rental and used CD stores to lobbying for taxes on blank recording media. Historically, they've usually been unsuccessful, but that doesn't mean that consumers shouldn't be vigilant and educated about these tactics.
Personally, if the industry would behave itself in a reasonable manner, I would be more than happy to pay a fair price for a movie or CD (though I do not think $20 for a music CD is an espescially fair price...) I may not agree with every detail of copyright law, but I can understand that the industry wants to protect their copyrights. It's when the industry wants to control MY content and MY copyrights that I take serious issue.
...i had no idea that certain words were reserved for exclusive use by certain races
There are many cases where a group attempts to reclaim a perjorative term - such as "nigger", "queer", "dyke", "pagan", or even "geek" - as a badge of pride or camaraderie. This does not mean it will be well-received if that same term is used by people outside the group in question.
a) Sometimes a nigger is not black or white. It's a state of mind.
There was a recent usenet post on rec.music.hip-hop in which someone (non-black) tried to justify the use of the term "nigga" as an acceptable term, as distinct from the term "nigger" which was a racist epithet.
The response was brilliant: "Is that anything like the distinction between 'master' and 'massa'?"
In my own humble opinion, anyone non-black who tries to justify the use of words like "nigger" is, at best, an ignorant buffoon.
In the past I've mentioned the ".xxx plan" for porn. I've always found the idea intriguing (the idea being that porn sites would have to register under that domain). It still allows porn sites to exist, but in a manner such that someone who doesn't want to see those sites can avoid them very easily.
The problem with such an approach is that not everyone will be able to agree on a working definition of what constitutes porn. I think most of us can agree that some sites certainly qualify ("STEAMING HOT BARELY LEGAL TEENS"), but what about an artist who uses nude models? Or an educational site with a frank discussion of safe sex practices? Or a site which discussed the history of gay culture? According to many, many of our conservative neighbors, all of these fit quite easily into the definition of porn -- just look at the kinds of things which get blocked by the average "censorware" filter. And if there's one thing we've learned about porn sites, it's that they will go out of their way to disguise the fact that they are porn sites, in hopes they can trick people into hitting their site (i.e. "whitehouse.com") Many of the sites with the most explicit content would be the last to voluntarily adopt a.xxx domain.
The same argument holds even more strongly for so-called "hate speech". NOBODY is going to willingly label themselves as a source of "hate speech". My personal opinion is that neo-nazis and racial purists are sadly backwards and ignorant in their thinking, but that's just my opinion - I strongly believe that silencing free speech which happens to be impolite or unpopular is a much worse offense.
The most dangerous thing about this form of censorship is that even if I did believe in silencing "hate speech", there is no one who I would trust to have the intelligence and sense to decide what is and isn't "hate speech" - I can see someone censoring Pink Floyd's "The Wall" on those grounds, for instance.
Yes. There are Medusas in HOMM3 which have a petrification attack. It is a temporary effect which lasts for several rounds of combat.
Is it possible for any attractive women to be turned to stone in the game?
I think so. I'm pretty sure that one of the troop types is female elven archers, and that said female elves are susceptible to being turned to stone. There are also harpies and probably other female creatures, though it has been a while since I've played the game, so I don't remember the complete creature roster.
1.) Under Windows, SMAC runs in a 640x480 256c window. Period.
Umm, no. I've played it happily at 1152x864x16-bit color with no problems whatsoever (Win95 OSR2). Make sure you've got the latest video drivers for your system and that you've got the latest Alpha Centauri patch.
Overall, I think that SMAC is a good game, but not an earth-shatteringly amazing one. Gameplay is very similar to Civ II. The SF backstory is a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it gives the game a steeper learning curve, since the tech tree is entirely invented, and it will take a few games to learn what the different tech advances really mean in game terms. On the other hand, players have much greater latitude to design units, so once you know what's what, you can do a lot of cool fine tuning of your forces.
My biggest single complaint - and the thing that ultimately made me lose interest in the game - is that the AI is really pretty unimpressive. It's no worse than Civ or Civ II, but I guess I was a little disappointed because SMAC offers a lot more potential for diplomacy than the early games, and it's a shame to see that nuance go entirely unused by the computer.
I went through several weeks of playing this game, and pretty much haven't touched it since. I really, really like the game engine, and it's a shame the AI just can't live up to it. On the other hand, I know there are lots of people who have had lots of fun playing SMAC multiplayer, either in "live" net games or play-by-email -- I just never had the time to explore these options, since games of SMAC can take a while.
I remember when I first heard the name Pentium, I though fuck, why not just call it 586.
It got called "Pentium" because Intel wanted to trademark the name of their chip, and you can't trademark a number -- 3rd party competitiors could have made chips called "Ultra 586" or something (which is just what happened anyway with Cyrix). By picking an actual name for the chip, Intel was able to have brand-name protection.
Personally, I cannot fscking wait until some of these Thai-stick Bogarting full-of-BS tool-dependant Shockwave-inflicting pretentious "artist" wannabes that make web front ends to business site such a holy terror to implement for those of us with actual skills (like perl and DB2) start being forced on pain of no work and subsequent drug withdrawl to fscking write fscking proper fscking HT-fscking-ML to the fscking spec the client fscking asked for. Without the little moving GIFs. Grrrrrr...
Okay, you have by a large a good rant going here, but I have to take exception with this point, on the grounds that 98% of the rampant pot smokers I have encountered in the IT community are very competent coders, Unix admins, and network guys. In other words, the kinds of people who suffer most from dealing from the multimedia web-gadget lightweights who, from my experience, are mostly white-wine drinking thirtysomethings with a marketing or PR background.
And to be fair, I have to raise an eyebrow after seeing your post lambast the incompetence of consultants who use "perl. Just perl", and then later offer a definition of "actual skills" as Perl and DB2. Hmm.
But don't get me wrong, we are definitely in agreement that all those Shockwave-fetishing Front-Page using (cough cough) "developers" ought to have their fingers smashed with hammers.
Slashdot Mirror
"Ronfar" is an excellent name for nearly any genre
Ronfar is a rather lame name - something one of my D&D characters in 6th grade might have had.
The GMs would get a much better reception with this name-changing business if they just realized one thing: any name becomes a valid fantasy name if you add an apostrophe or two at strategic locations: M'adbi'zatch, Slas'hdot, Nata'lie, B'ritney, etc. etc. This also works for generating Star Trek names.
I'm not familiar enough with EQ to know how stringent the GMs are being about this, but it generally strikes me as a bad idea. These players are paying customers -- if they want to call themselves Salt Shaker or Biilbo, so what? While neither of those are award-winning names, I think they are both preferable to the uninspired "Ronfar" (yawn).
I've been playing pencil & paper RPG for going on 20 years now (yikes!) and have always had a penchant for absurd names. I once had a character - a pompous, headstrong baby dragon in the game "Rifts" - by the name of Therion Quasathorne Vengohopfdengodongo, and I roll-played the HELL out of that character, constantly having him get in arguments with people who refused to address him by his full name.
I guess the bottom line, as far as I'm concerned, is to hell with pay-for-play RPG. It's only a matter of time before tools and bandwidth get good enough that people can start running their own homebrew realtime persistent-world games -- an evolution of the MUD/MUSH ethic.
Lynda: I have never created a Web site other than our own.
Who needs real-world experience when you can just sit on the sidelines and pontificate?
The design of lynda.com is, umm, not the worst web design I've ever seen, but it certainly isn't the best. Some of the color schemes are questionable, but no worry -- just go to another page on the site and you're sure to be treated to another color scheme entirely. Consistency is every bit as boring as all those rectangular objects that plague the web. And the site looks pretty bad in Lynx. And I can't help but raise my eyebrow at anyone who consistently capitalizes the word "Web" in the year 2000.
Oh, and thanks to whoever pointed out the poll on lynda.com about "what resolution do you design web pages for?" I can only shake my head and sigh...
Here's something intersting about Napster. Lets say I want to use it _legally_ to download music that has ben freely released as mp3s. Wow, gee, look at that. I can't! Napster scanned my hard drive I found the mp3's I legally made from my CD's (so I dont have to carry them around everywhere). Now its sharing them on the net so others can download. Wait, thats not legal! I don't want this. Napster does not make these easy to change.
Then just don't export the directories you don't want to share... (i.e. create /mp3public and /mp3private -- export only /mp3public to Napster, and keep the rips of your own CD collection in /mp3private).
Artists *should* get paid for their work -- they should receive compensation for every song they write, and every hour they spend in the studio or touring. It used to be that artists were seen as respected craftspeople; folks like Bach and Michelangelo were more likely to be seen as tradesmen than fussy primadonnas.
I have a problem with this whole "royalties" model. I code for a living, and get paid a fair wage for every program I write and every hour I spend at a client's site. I do it because I enjoy it, and don't need or expect the extra incentive of receiving a future kickback just because a piece of code I wrote helps make somebody lots of money.
Likewise, I'm a musician, and I make music because I REALLY REALLY enjoy doing so -- I'd still do it eagerly even if I was certain I'd never make another cent from doing so. I don't mind charging a small amount for selling a tape or CD, because that helps me recover the cost of equipment and media. But I'm more than happy to share MP3s of my music and to invite people to make as many copies of my recordings as they want; none of which requires a bit of time, money, or effort on my part. It's a win/win situation -- people get new music to listen to and I get more exposure, all for free. Woo woo!
I've been known to use Napster, but I'm not one of these people who gets on there and downloads entire albums. This is for several reasons; one is that I *do* want to support acts that I like, and I enjoy having a nice CD with cover art and liner notes to stick on my shelf (even if I *do* feel raped every time I spend $18 on something that cost less than a buck to produce). But Napster can also be annoyingly inconsistent -- I end up deleting a lot of songs after the first listen, either because its a crappy recording, or the end of the song is cut off, or someone has added a stupid voiceover. Clearly, Napster is NOT a good way for a serious music fan to build a collection. I'd rather go out and buy an album rather than spend the time downloading six different copies of a single song trying to find one that's listenable and complete.
Regarding the Salon article, I find it hard to take seriously anything portrayed in such unrealistic, dualistic terms. Like the artist claiming "If we can't sell more CDs, we'll have to go back to working at McDonalds". Umm, are those REALLY the only two options? If the band fails, couldn't one form another band, or get work as a session musician, or play in smaller clubs? Maybe that's not as satisfying to the ego, but there's still plenty of oppurtunities for a talented musician to earn a comfortable living. If the person cares about their music, they'll keep doing it anyway. If the only options are superstar or fry chef, that leads me to believe that perhaps there wasn't much talent there to begin with.
And this sometimes happens with Slashdot, of all places! Anyone know why? Ideas for a fix? (Junkbuster is out, only 64MB RAM here :-(
64MB is *PLENTY* of RAM for Junkbuster. I run it on my work machine, a PII-266 Linux box with only 32MB. I just checked with top, and Junkbuster is only using a little over a meg of RAM (1332K). And that overhead is more than made up for by the bandwidth, memory, and disk space that was formerly being used to load and display banner ads. I can't recommend Junkbuster highly enough.
I'd guess that universities and such have a lot of people in the USA. So, why not Napsterize MP3s locally, ie. inside the campus LAN, only to and from machines connected to it?
That's not how Napster works. When you start a Napster client, it goes out and automatically connects you to the least loaded server available. There's no way to point it at a specific server, and since Napster has not released any of their server code, there is no way to set up your own server.
Hopefully, some of this will change now that people are developing some of their own free, open-source Napster tools.
Ok, could you put your expertise where your mouth is? Could you tell me how to rip CDs or point me to resources for doing so? I have RedHat 6.1 installed on a Pentium 75 with 48 MB RAM and a 8GB Scsi harddrive. My CDRom is scsi as well and not very fast. Will this set up work?
This should work fine. I recommend the program Cdparanoia, which is a free command-line tool that runs under Linux (prolly other Unices too, but I've only used it with Linux). It'll let you turn each track on a CD into a .WAV file, which you then can feed into an MP3 Encoder. Cdparanoia is a *great* program that does its own error-correction, and has worked on every CD-ROM drive I've tried (both SCSI and IDE).
As far as MP3 encoders go, the most popular free one is probably Bladeenc, also for Linux. To be honest, though, the commercial encoders (which use the Frauenhauffer(sp?) algorhytms) *do* sound better than any of the free encoders. I also haven't seen any good commercial MP3 Encoders for Linux, so that part may require a reboot into Windows.
Be aware that encoding MP3 can be a very time-consuming process, espescially if you're only rocking a P75. But this shouldn't be prohibitive - it just means you'll want to fire off a batch job before you go to bed.
Naw, they had the 32XE, 64XE, and the 130XE, i had the old 32XE and recently found an 130XE at salvation army, i love it :)
I've never heard of a 32XE, and have been using Ataris since the early 80s (though this was in the US -- I think that Atari may have released one or two different models in Europe. Where did you get yours?). The progression of 8-bit Ataris (roughly chronologically) that I'm aware of is: 400, 800, 1200XL, 600XL, 800XL, 130XE, 65XE... The XEs are pretty much the same as the XLs only they were pale grey instead of black & silver. The 130XE had 128K RAM, and the 65XE had 64K (so it was functionally identical to an 800XL).
At one point I had an 800XL with 256K RAM - that was ELITE at the time (circa 1984), even though you could hardly do anything with the extra memory, since the 6502 processor could only address 48K of main memory and the rest had to be bank-switched in 16K blocks... So basically it was just like any other Atari except you had like a dozen virtual RAMdisk devices that were only 16K each... After that machine died we bought a 65XE which is still at my parent's house... My dad still plays "MULE" and "River Raid" all the time on it.
Source code isn't a valid form of speech that needs to be protected, sure some of us can read it (although the code I've seen to DeCSS sucked ass, have those people ever heard of indentation?). But others cannot.
So free speech should only apply to material which is of universal interest and accessible to everyone?
It's always been framed as an 'us vs. them' situation
I think it goes both ways -- that the corporations have adopted at least as much of an confrontational "us vs. them" attitude as anyone. I think that point got hammered home pretty dramatically when police raided Jon Johanson's home.
The judge in this ruling may well be correct in maintaining that DeCSS is in violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. To me, though, there's a larger issue; that the industry is becoming dangerously greedy and irresponsible in its actions. Just because they have been successful in convincing the US (and other) governments to do their dirty work does not make their actions moral or correct.
hostile reception my previous postings have received from the long-haired 15 year old "open source" Linux zealot brigade
If you're going to draw such generalities, I should start out by establishing that I am 29, short haired, and have been a full-time paid programmer and/or admin for the past 5-6 years.
This is like calling Linux a program. or X11 a gui. They are both ways of life, just like being a marketeer is, and are equally valid.
No. Linux is not "a way of life". It is an OS kernel. Neither is X11 "a way of life". If you consider marketing a way of life, you definitely need to get out more.
This IS the most significant transaction in Linux's long and chequered history (which I have been following since the very beginning over 2 years ago), and to laugh at it is to trivialise the extreme importance.
First off, I will join everyone else in laughing at you over the statement "over 2 years ago". I first became exposed to Linux in 1994 and it was already a very active community at that time.
By laughing at the marketers, you demean yourselves, and make yourselves look stupid to the average joe consumer, when it is your JOB to try and impress him with innovative great software
As a Linux advocate, it is my "job" to want the best for the evolution of Linux, and public perception of same. In my eyes, that means supporting the efforts of people like Linus, Richard Stallman, and Bruce Perens. It also means pointing out snake oil when I see it -- and laughing at the perpetrators of same as often and as loudly as possible.
As a highly respected prectitioner of the science of marketing, I will not be argued with when I say, Without marketing, Linux is nothing.
I'll bet you'd be even more respected if you spelled "practitioner" correctly. Quite seriously, for someone who has worked so hard to enter the hallowed halls of a qualified marketing, your spelling, grammar, punctuation, and command of the English language all leave something to be desired.
In conclusion, I have to wonder whether your post is in fact a troll - if so, it is a brilliantly funny, clever one. If, on the other hand, you are completely sincere in everything you've written, then I will leave you with one thought: if your job is to market Linux effectively, that means marketing it not just to "joe average consumer", but also to the kind of people who read Slashdot and use Linux already - in other words, the kind of people who think that marketers and PR people are by and large, jackasses.
Keep in mind that musicians pay a terrible faustian price whenever they join a record label: they lose the rights to their own recordings. Even a bigshot like Bruce Dickinson can't afford to buy back some of his own albums from his old record company.
A similar thing happened with Buckner & Garcia, who you may remember as having recorded the album "Pac Man Fever" back in the 80s. Recently, B&G decided they wanted to reissue the album on CD, but couldn't afford to buy the rights back (from Sony, if I recall). Instead, they ended up re-recording the entire album from scratch, trying to make it sound as much like the original as possible.
Support independent musicians! Create your own content and keep it free!
How can these money hungry lawyers and people sue?? The user is INCONVENIENCED by the software, and on rare occasion has to reinstall, usually the result of an bug in 98 or an untechnical user
Strange as it may seem, there are more than a few businesses using AOL for net access. I personally think this is a bad idea, but I have seen AOL used in the workplace by everything from a small magazine publisher to trade associations to a law firm. Amazingly enough, there are still plenty of businesses without a dedicated net connection, and AOL seems to be a popular choice among people who use it at home and just need to do basic email and web access.
Such businesses generally don't have a full-time tech staff on hand, so if something goes wrong, it can seriously interfere with their ability to get work done. Similarly, there are lots of (not espescially computer-savvy) people who work at home who rely on AOL for business-critical purposes. In any of these cases, lost connectivity == lost time == lost money. If I lost several days work because of a piece of software that didn't work as advertised, I think taking legal action would be perfectly reasonable.
It would be interesting to see a single valid entry that could be submitted to more than one Obfuscated Foo Code Contest
There was an entry in the Obfuscated C contest a few years ago that was a Hello World program that ran in C, Bourne Shell, and Pascal (i.e. the same block of code could be parsed successfully in all three environments). It made creative use of comment characters so that each language would ignore those statements meant for the other two.
Or, if I made an independent film I couldn't distribute it on DVD without licensing an encryption key? Is that for real? Please tell me I'm mistaken.
As far as I know, that's exactly the case.
A similar situation exists with DAT. When DAT first hit the market, the industry (which in this case means mostly Sony) decided it didn't want consumers to have access to that good a recording standard, so they implemented a versioning system whereby you can only make a single copy of a given DAT. This applies even with original content; if I recorded a performance of my own music onto DAT, I would only be able to make a single digital copy of it. Those of us with home studios don't like this a bit.
I believe that it is now possible to get DAT decks without the versioning hardware, but that restriction did a lot to keep the DAT format from being a much bigger success than it was. All I know is I'm grateful for affordable hard disk recording and CD burners.
The entertainment industry has tried many, many tactics to "protect itself" from "pirates". These tactics have ranged from trying to stamp out video rental and used CD stores to lobbying for taxes on blank recording media. Historically, they've usually been unsuccessful, but that doesn't mean that consumers shouldn't be vigilant and educated about these tactics.
Personally, if the industry would behave itself in a reasonable manner, I would be more than happy to pay a fair price for a movie or CD (though I do not think $20 for a music CD is an espescially fair price...) I may not agree with every detail of copyright law, but I can understand that the industry wants to protect their copyrights. It's when the industry wants to control MY content and MY copyrights that I take serious issue.
Think: When is the last time you heard of a law changed cause everyone broke it?
Segregation in the southern U.S.? Prohibition? British occupation of India?
Take a trip to your local library and look up "civil disobedience" while you're at it.
There are many cases where a group attempts to reclaim a perjorative term - such as "nigger", "queer", "dyke", "pagan", or even "geek" - as a badge of pride or camaraderie. This does not mean it will be well-received if that same term is used by people outside the group in question.
a) Sometimes a nigger is not black or white. It's a state of mind.
There was a recent usenet post on rec.music.hip-hop in which someone (non-black) tried to justify the use of the term "nigga" as an acceptable term, as distinct from the term "nigger" which was a racist epithet.
The response was brilliant: "Is that anything like the distinction between 'master' and 'massa'?"
In my own humble opinion, anyone non-black who tries to justify the use of words like "nigger" is, at best, an ignorant buffoon.
In the past I've mentioned the ".xxx plan" for porn. I've always found the idea intriguing (the idea being that porn sites would have to register under that domain). It still allows porn sites to exist, but in a manner such that someone who doesn't want to see those sites can avoid them very easily.
The problem with such an approach is that not everyone will be able to agree on a working definition of what constitutes porn. I think most of us can agree that some sites certainly qualify ("STEAMING HOT BARELY LEGAL TEENS"), but what about an artist who uses nude models? Or an educational site with a frank discussion of safe sex practices? Or a site which discussed the history of gay culture? According to many, many of our conservative neighbors, all of these fit quite easily into the definition of porn -- just look at the kinds of things which get blocked by the average "censorware" filter. And if there's one thing we've learned about porn sites, it's that they will go out of their way to disguise the fact that they are porn sites, in hopes they can trick people into hitting their site (i.e. "whitehouse.com") Many of the sites with the most explicit content would be the last to voluntarily adopt a .xxx domain.
The same argument holds even more strongly for so-called "hate speech". NOBODY is going to willingly label themselves as a source of "hate speech". My personal opinion is that neo-nazis and racial purists are sadly backwards and ignorant in their thinking, but that's just my opinion - I strongly believe that silencing free speech which happens to be impolite or unpopular is a much worse offense.
The most dangerous thing about this form of censorship is that even if I did believe in silencing "hate speech", there is no one who I would trust to have the intelligence and sense to decide what is and isn't "hate speech" - I can see someone censoring Pink Floyd's "The Wall" on those grounds, for instance.
Do any people get turned to stone in this game?
Yes. There are Medusas in HOMM3 which have a petrification attack. It is a temporary effect which lasts for several rounds of combat.
Is it possible for any attractive women to be turned to stone in the game?
I think so. I'm pretty sure that one of the troop types is female elven archers, and that said female elves are susceptible to being turned to stone. There are also harpies and probably other female creatures, though it has been a while since I've played the game, so I don't remember the complete creature roster.
It's not his fault, it's mine. I forgot to check that url as it's addition was an after thought.
While you're at it, the "it's" in "it's addition" should not have an apostrophe, and "afterthought" should be one word instead of two.
Thus concludes another episode of "Its EZ too Learn English, the Slash Dot Way...".
1.) Under Windows, SMAC runs in a 640x480 256c window. Period.
Umm, no. I've played it happily at 1152x864x16-bit color with no problems whatsoever (Win95 OSR2). Make sure you've got the latest video drivers for your system and that you've got the latest Alpha Centauri patch.
Overall, I think that SMAC is a good game, but not an earth-shatteringly amazing one. Gameplay is very similar to Civ II. The SF backstory is a bit of a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it gives the game a steeper learning curve, since the tech tree is entirely invented, and it will take a few games to learn what the different tech advances really mean in game terms. On the other hand, players have much greater latitude to design units, so once you know what's what, you can do a lot of cool fine tuning of your forces.
My biggest single complaint - and the thing that ultimately made me lose interest in the game - is that the AI is really pretty unimpressive. It's no worse than Civ or Civ II, but I guess I was a little disappointed because SMAC offers a lot more potential for diplomacy than the early games, and it's a shame to see that nuance go entirely unused by the computer.
I went through several weeks of playing this game, and pretty much haven't touched it since. I really, really like the game engine, and it's a shame the AI just can't live up to it. On the other hand, I know there are lots of people who have had lots of fun playing SMAC multiplayer, either in "live" net games or play-by-email -- I just never had the time to explore these options, since games of SMAC can take a while.
Mastering Perl Device Drivers? :-) Check out http://www.assurdo.com/PerlFS/ for a system which allows you to write filesystems in Perl. Perl is a great language, that I use all the time, but I still question whether or not it fits the definition of a "real" language -- nobody has yet written a really solid Perl compiler in Perl.
I remember when I first heard the name Pentium, I though fuck, why not just call it 586.
It got called "Pentium" because Intel wanted to trademark the name of their chip, and you can't trademark a number -- 3rd party competitiors could have made chips called "Ultra 586" or something (which is just what happened anyway with Cyrix). By picking an actual name for the chip, Intel was able to have brand-name protection.
(ob-hypothetical company name suggestions:)
Here is some more good reading for folks to explore while waiting for the xenu.net matter to get straightened out:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/
http://www.rickross.com/groups/scientolo gy.html
http://wpxx02.toxi.un i-wuerzburg.de/~cowen/essays/essays.html
http://www.xenutv.com
(I'll bet that this story will probably get Slashdot placed on the ScienoScitter block list, if it isn't already...)
Personally, I cannot fscking wait until some of these Thai-stick Bogarting full-of-BS tool-dependant Shockwave-inflicting pretentious "artist" wannabes that make web front ends to business site such a holy terror to implement for those of us with actual skills (like perl and DB2) start being forced on pain of no work and subsequent drug withdrawl to fscking write fscking proper fscking HT-fscking-ML to the fscking spec the client fscking asked for. Without the little moving GIFs. Grrrrrr...
Okay, you have by a large a good rant going here, but I have to take exception with this point, on the grounds that 98% of the rampant pot smokers I have encountered in the IT community are very competent coders, Unix admins, and network guys. In other words, the kinds of people who suffer most from dealing from the multimedia web-gadget lightweights who, from my experience, are mostly white-wine drinking thirtysomethings with a marketing or PR background.
And to be fair, I have to raise an eyebrow after seeing your post lambast the incompetence of consultants who use "perl. Just perl", and then later offer a definition of "actual skills" as Perl and DB2. Hmm.
But don't get me wrong, we are definitely in agreement that all those Shockwave-fetishing Front-Page using (cough cough) "developers" ought to have their fingers smashed with hammers.