Sorry, but I can't stand people who buy the very, very latest game on the market right when it hits the shelves and then complain that it won't run on their four year old computer and/or that it requires numerous bugfixes.
This has happened with numerous great games -- two recent examples are Ultima 9 and Black and White. These are great games but there are always that group of people who were hoping to get something (the newest gaming experience available) for nothing (no investment in matching hardware). If Myst III: Exile is intending to push the limits on realism using 3D hardware (which is what it's been advertised as from the beginning), why would you assume that your old i740 card will run it? You already know exactly what your hardware can do. Don't expect miracles.
This review is just whining. I'm sorry, but I want games that push the envelope. Period. And if it doesn't work out of the box for me, I'll at least give them a month or two to come up with some bug fixes. If you want "safe" games (i.e. that will support all of your old hardware, will be very stable out of the box, etc...) then run old games, just like using the 2.2 kernel instead of the newer 2.4 kernel. Yes the 2.4 kernel is still a little unstable in some cases, but some of us want the features. It would be nonsense to say "2.4 kernel: I give it 0/10 as a piece of software. It's unstable crap."
In my opinion, it's the same with brand-spanking-new (i.e. less than a month old!) games which are as complex as today's games are and are trying to do new things. It would be much easier to chuck out yet-another-FPS based on this-or-that Quake engine and make it stable, but I wouldn't be nearly as interested in it.
If you don't like it, play King's Quest. That's still fun and it'll run on your 386.
In terms of culture, the computer gaming industry is moving more and more toward pure, plotless sex and violence. Hardcore gamers actively make fun of bestselling games which don't involve blood and skin such as Riven or The Sims, even though they appear to appeal to a wider audience.
At least in this sense, I think that the "hardcore gamer" community is largely a collection of adolescent boys and underdeveloped men who live out their aggressive fantasies alone or online in games because they're unable to relate properly to "normal" humans (i.e. outside the tech industry). The tech industry and especially the gaming community seems to be a race of people unto itself, apart from the rest of humanity.
Of course, I say this as someone who owns $2,500 worth of PC and Linux games and was just looking at those butt-floss pictures on the gaming sites yesterday...
But seriously, I do get frustrated with some other gamers and their extreme views and behavior. Some of these guys make me feel downright normal and human by comparison.
I think the single biggest problem for the Palm devices is that their display resolution is horrible right now. 160x160 just doesn't cut it anymore -- it's too big a sacrifice when people are wanting mobile Web browsing, mobile multimedia...
Consider this: some of the color Palm-OS units claim to support 16-bit color depth -- 65,535 colors. But a 160x160 display only has 25,600 pixels -- barely enough to display one third of these colors at any one time!
There's not enough room on a 160x160 display to be able to -- show recognizable photos, run a mini-spreadsheet, read a book with AA or "cleartype" text, watch multimedia clips, browse the Web, see an entire day's schedule at once, and so on and so forth -- with any real degree of sincerity. The 320x240 displays of the PocketPC devices still aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but at 76,800 pixels, they have more than 300% of the screen area that Palm devices do! With the right scaling software, PocketPC devices can even browse most Web sites fairly well.
For me at least, this is the single largest reason for Palm loosing market share to the new PocketPC devices -- the PocketPC devices are now so much more functional than Palm for most tasks that any size benefits or battery benefits are completely outweighed.
I have all the Ultima games from beginning to end.
I know I'm going to get beat senseless for this, but Ultima IX may be the single best game of any kind I've every played (yes, I played it through to the end) except for maybe Nethack, and Ultima Online is great as well.
I think the recent Ultima games have been given a bum rap.
And it will gradually fill up with spray paint and permanent marker and pretty soon sane people will just walk by without responding in any way. Eventually, it will be declared an eyesore cesspit of racial slurs and four-letter words and will be torn down.
Let's face it: we all have free speech, but when do Americans ever speak publicly? Usually only when they're upset about something. Moving free speech to the street like this will just give people on the street who aren't in a hurry (i.e. those that basically live there) a place to vent all of their anger at institutional capitalism and perceived systemic wrongs.
Not that I'm against free speech. I just don't think this'll last, because people don't like to help ugly free speech along if they can avoid it.
As others have pointed out, these are different standards. One (MJPEG) basically compresses individual frames and the other (MPEG) compresses across a flexible series of frames. What hasn't been pointed out, however, is that they are sadly incompatible.
Both are lossy high-compression standards that introduce their own different artifacts into the video stream, meaning that to re-encode MPEG as MJPEG (rare) or to re-encode MJPEG as low-bitrate MPEG for a DVD player (common), you'll get a multiplying effect as all of the artifacts that were nearly invisible to the naked eye in the source stream are suddenly enhanced and magnified as the video stream is re-compressed, especially in high-detail or high-motion segments.
Even worse, because of all the extra "detail" the second encoder sees in the artifacts generated by the first encode, the second compression pass isn't nearly as efficient, using more space for frames that are individually worse in appearance.
Try this. Start with a low-resolution (720x480) photo of high detail and save it as a JPEG at 20% quality. The.JPG version of the original photo has some detectible artifacts, but is likely passable. Now, re-save the.JPG version as a JPEG file again using 20% quality. The second JPEG looks much worse while there has been no compression gain. In fact, the second save will likely use up more space than the first. The effect when encoding MJPEG->MPEG or MPEG->MJPEG is similar, but occurs across multiple frames.
It would be nice if MPEG-2 encoders would drop in price to the point that they could be directly included in camcorders. Footage captured this way could then be directly dumped to media for playback on MPEG-2 players like DVD players without any loss in quality.
But here we are drawing lines of determinism... One could argue that a computer always does exactly what it intends to do, since it makes no mistakes. What exactly defines "intent" in your view?
If we create an artifically intelligent machine that does "expand" its programming, one could just as easily use the same argument -- since it is artifically intelligent, it is programmed to evolve, and thus, anything it does is still ultimately the result of the programmer's work.
I suppose this the same argument used by those who say that Michaelangelo isn't the artist -- God is the artist and Michaelangelo is just the tool. Perhaps a computer is just a tool as well. So what?
What I am saying is that it doesn't matter unless you are putting on airs, trying to be highbrow -- interested in art for academic reasons alone. If what an artist paints moves me, regardless of whether or how the artist formed intent or who created it, I personally am willing to allow just a little bit of wonder to "cloud" my vision so that I can say:
"That computer has just produced a work of art that made me cry..."
I am not going to draw lines in the sand and refuse to appreciate beauty simply because it was produced outside an arbitrary definition of "artist" and without the lingering romance of humanism. Yes, it is thanks in part to the programmer in such a case, but one cannot deny that the programmer never concieved of precisely the work the computer has painted -- the painting remains the computer's work alone, the programmer merely a teacher.
I have no problem being grateful to a computer for beautiful work, whether or not its own "intent" is similar to our own "intent" -- programmed by God, programmed by Evolution, programmed by a programmer, "programmed" by experience -- what is the difference?
The work is the end and the means; the artist is merely serving it.
You can't know the artist's intent -- you are not him/her, and it is impossible that such intent is unambiguously contained within the visual work itself. Ergo, the only thing that provides meaning is your own context as the viewer. Any sense you feel you have of the artist's intent is merely an illusion [unless you're one of the people that believes that objects can be imbued with "psychic waves" of whoever has handled them]. Thus, creative art is whatever touches you as the viewer.
Imagine it this way. You see a painting hanging in an office, unmarked and unsigned -- there is no signature from the artist, no indication of title or origin. Yet you still form an impression of the painting. It moves you -- you like it. You could argue that it is because that was the author's intent, but you don't even know who the author was -- for all you know, the painting was done by a mass murderer [or a computer?]... In fact, what you are reacting to is the relationship between the representation and your own personal existence and experiences.
Or, put it this way: if you are a Duchamp-hater, then you can argue that no computer can ever make art, nor could a urinal ever be artistic because, after all, it was made in a factory for men to urinate in. But I am a Duchamp-lover...
They're called peltier devices, and they're still around. They're not popular because they require water cooling to work well with the current batch of CPUs.
See, an AMD Thunderbird will dissipate as much heat as a sizable incandescent light bulb and do it in a very, very small space. Peltier devices aren't magic -- they still have to obey the laws of physics. Yes, one side gets cool, but the heat has to go somewhere. It goes to the other side.
The catch is that the peltier device draws a lot of current, so it has to dissipate a lot of heat of its own. So, collect all of the heat coming off your CPU, plus all of the added power dissipation (a huge amount) generated by the peltier device. All of this heat will turn up on the "warm side" of the peltier, which really ought to be called the "hot as freaking lava" side.
If you hook a 100 watt peltier up to your Athlon (which you'll need because an athlon may be dissipating 60-80 watts) and you don't water cool your peltier, you'll quite literally melt it to pieces and it will stop working within a matter of minutes or even seconds. Of course, once the peltier has more or less dissolved into little chunks, there will be no "cool side" to keep your CPU cool and your CPU will fry as well.
Even if you do get a peltier+water rig working, it's never quite safe because the cool side gets so much cooler than room temperature that condensation starts to form all over the place and you end up shorting your CPU out anyway.
In short, it's safer to just cool things to room temperature using a water rig without the peltier element, which is just too risky and will still need water to cool it with any recent CPU.
I don't want to start a flamewar, but I think you're right... KDE is probably going to "win" -- if it was ever about winning at all [and I don't think it was].
Disclaimer: I have both GNOME 1.2 and KDE 2.1 installed. I switch between them and WindowMaker.
(Yes, I know that GNOME 1.4 is out, but Ximian no longer supports my distro with binary packages.)
I think that it's not quite a done deal yet that KDE will become the de-facto desktop for Linux, but it's getting close. Why? Guts. KDE has them, GNOME seems to have far less.
KDE is undeniably uglier than GNOME and just not as viscerally exciting somehow. But KDE works, and that's what it's all about. KDE has a very nice IDE, a truly remarkable [given the development time] file manager and browser in Konqueror, and things like DCOP are just icing on an already very together functionality cake. I guess KDE is like the Microsoft of the Linux world. People hate the KDE people. They've done things to alienate the open-source guys. They make visually ugly products that are very highly integrated. But KDE and KDE applications are everywhere, and KDE is easy to install, use, and use in very powerful ways. In short, it's "nearly fully cooked" today, as things stand, with KDE 2.1.
GNOME on the other hand is much more attractive and somehow much more "Linux" but also is lacking a lot of core functionality by comparison. When using the two, KDE honestly feels like the "next step" in Linux desktops, technology-wise -- it just kind of stands alone. It's like GNOME is several years behind and not even gaining any ground because KDE seems to be moving faster.
I'm not happy that either one "wins" or doesn't. I'm not even sure it's a good thing that one will become the de-facto standard and the other merely the alternative... But it seems inevitable, and right now, especially with Eazel and Ximian appearing to be in serious financial trouble, KDE seems to be nearly running away with it. In the final analysis, most people will use what gets the job done.
That's why so many of us are still dual-booting into Windows for so many things...
I don't know what happens to all of the older CPUs, but I have a friend at intel who says he has drawer fulls of leftover/recycled PII chips in that speed range that he can't do anything with.
Apparently, they're just kind of "sequestered" there...
I originally bought a Voodoo5 card and played everything at 1024x768 at 2x FSAA. Beautiful!
Eventually I sold it and went GeForce2 because Linux didn't support the Voodoo5 well. Unfortunately, the FSAA quality isn't as good -- I have to play 4x FSAA on the GF2 to get the same visual effect most of the time (and 4x is only available in Windows... *sigh*) so I have to play at 800x600 most of the time.
But it's worth it.
I couldn't imagine going back to playing non-FSAA, even at 1600x1200. People who still haven't seen FSAA... It's worth the cost of a hardware upgrade, IMO.
Now I'm dying to get my hands on a GF3 to try the new HRAA (is that the right abbreviation?) alongside the nifty lighting improvements.
I have an extensive library of recorded TV episodes on VHS, for one thing. One blank CD-R is enough to hold a 1-hour episode or two 30-minute episodes that I can then play in my DVD player.
So... I use them for Dr. Who, M*A*S*H, Homicide, Northern Exposure...
Plus, all my home movies have now been copied to CD-R for play on the selfsame DVD player.
I've gone through about 2 100-CD spindles this year... enough to fill one large-size CD wallet with my favorite viewing.
I'm seeing a lot of messages about how we may as well run Windows games under Wine because ports suck cucumber anyway. I've decided to post a message to the root thread of this discussion just to say:
Try the Loki and Hyperion ports! They're as nice, if not nicer, than the Windows versions. I own 13 of them, and for a number of these, I own the Windows version as well, so I can compare side-by-side.
Please don't assume that just because it's a port, and just because it's a small company, the Windows version will be better. Loki especially has done a nice job -- they're still releasing updated 3D support and patches for games more than a year or two old! How many Windows gaming companies will do this? None! I can't tell you how many Windows native games I have with that bug that just drives-you-nuts but the game is too old already to be supported any longer by its manufacturer. Meanwhile, Loki is still supporting its first Linux port.
I'd venture to say that overall, quality and support have been much better for the Linux ports, and they all run beautifully. I'd say for the 3D games that you'll want to be running XFree86 4.0 or better for the [basically first real] 3D support for Linux, but other than that, there's nothing special needed.
The ports are NICE and they're NATIVE. Try them! You'll like them!
You're the second person to swear that Linux game ports are total crap... Have you tried them?
I have both versions of a number of games and I own a total of 13 "ported" games for Linux that I've purchased, not pirated because I felt that they were worth my hard-earned money. And I don't buy crap.
These ports are smooth. They are identical to their windows versions and they play nice and fast on my GF2. These games have my LAN party droogs saying "damn, I didn't know Linux could do that!"
Have you tried any of the Loki or Hyperion ports? Or are you just FUDing Linux gaming?
I have a whole pile of Loki and Hyperion games for Linux and they do not suck. At worst, they are identical to the Windows version (Heretic II, Quake I/II/III, Heavy Gear II, Descent 3).
At best, they better than the Windows versions because they're much faster and they don't BSOD or crash on me and I can run them in a window if I choose to do so (Civ:CTP, Heroes III, RT2).
Because too many people will "economize" -- if a Windows version and a Linux version of a $50.00 game exist, and the Windows version will run under both Windows and Linux, but the Linux version will run only under Linux, guess what a lot of tightwads will buy in an effort to maximize their purchase?
And thus, the Linux porting company (Loki, Hyperion, Tribsoft) goes belly-up because the windows version has outsold the Linux version, even among Linux users.
I personally don't believe that Linux will ever run a Windows game as well as it would have run the same Linux game, no matter how good emulation gets. People play games for the experience, not out of the kind of necessity that causes them to run Office under Wine. If you can have a better gaming experience in Windows [i.e. framerate, stability, speed...] then you probably find yourself rebooting and running it under Windows, even if it works under Linux emulation.
Not to mention that I also firmly believe that there will always be a few [dare I say many?] Windows games that don't run under Linux, period, including some major titles. Why? Because Windows is Windows and Linux is Linux and the former is closed, complex and obscure and the latter depends on smaller teams of programmers with fewer corporate resources and fewer lawyers.
I personally have both versions (Windows and Linux) of all of the following games:
Quake: The Offering
Quake II: Colossus
Quake III Arena
Heretic II
Heavy Gear II
Descent 3
Soldier of Fortune
In each case, I bought the Linux version after the Windows version (after because the Linux versions came later). Why buy two copies of the same game? It's called putting your money where your mouth is. I want games under Linux. The best way to ensure that this will happen is to help existing Linux games to turn a tidy profit for the people working on them.
Hey, you chose Linux knowing that it didn't run Windows software well. Why hang around waiting for it to run Windows software now that your comfortable enough with Linux to be playing games? Support Linux gaming, not Windows gaming on Linux.
Knowing the legal and political systems surrounding intellectual property as you do, what do you think the chances are that money (specifically, lobbying from organizations like Microsoft or the RIAA) will overpower Open Source by creating more and more insidious forms of copyright protection and law, possibly even to the point that Open Source becomes illegal because it "threatens" the closed-source business model?
This seems to be one of the current trends in intellectual property law. Do you think it will continue?
Actually, you're wrong. A freelance writer is not the same as an unemployed writer. In fact, I have a number long-term of contracts to produce X in return for advance Y.
The difference between "freelance" writer and "staff" writer is that as a freelancer, my contract can be dismissed at any time, for any reason, and I don't get health insurance, retirement plans, etc. -- all that stuff I have to pay for on my own. My income gets reported on form 1099 (misc income, royalty, advance) and not on form W2 (wages) and no taxes are withheld; I have to pay taxes myself.
But please don't make the same accusation I just asked people not to make by assuming that just because I put "self employed" on my IRS forms I'm some kind of sociopath or vagrant. Really, you've just made my point for me again. Anyway, have you seen how much IRS "self employment" tax is? It's not pretty.
I think you're absolutely right; working long hours and spending money on useless consumer items is probably the most clear expression of Americanism that I can think of. It's a value system I personally hate, mainly because I feel the compelling need to exist outside of any possesions I own or job I perform.
But (and here's the point of my post) it's going to take a lot to change this. I know first hand that people aren't at all tolerant of those who have succeeded in not working a 40-hour week. I am a freelance writer. I make enough to live. I became a freelance writer specifically because I was tired of working long hours at a job that I felt was taking over -- that was becoming somehow enmeshed with my identity. I didn't want that.
But even though I make enough to live, I have become a social problem for many people. I have had a number of relationships end almost entirely because I wasn't "trying hard enough to be successful" and members of my family continually call to badger me about when I'm going to "do something with my life" and why I'm not "working harder to make something of" myself.
Credit agencies and businesses of all kinds -- sometimes even for little things -- don't want to sign contracts with me because as far as they're concerned, not working 40 hours PLUS is synonymous with "irresponsible" and therefore dangerous in any financial sense.
Put simply, there is no tolerance right now in American culture, not just in the technology industry, for anyone who feels satisfied to live outside of consumerism. Only lazy bums feed the ducks in the park... the responsible people would never be caught doing anything so worthless.
So please -- before you mod this down as trolling or flamebait, at least stop a moment and consider putting a little less pressure on yourself and (especially) on your family members and loved ones to buy things, earn money, get advancements, etc. After all, this is not a real-time strategy simulation! This is LIFE and it's the only one you've got!
Apple used the code in a way that fully complies with the licenses involved. If the developers didn't want this, why would they have chosen the licenses they chose?
BSD and Mach were not developed by the Free Software Foundation or the "open source" (read: Linux) community. They share some things with Linux, but I don't see how the Linux/FSF folks really have any standing to complain about how BSD or Mach get used.
Apple has given back. First example that comes to mind: Darwin. Seems like a pretty big contribution to me.
What is everybody complaining about? Or does the free software community now claim ownership of all code under the "all information wants to be free" act and now simply attack any company that doesn't GPL every last thing?
I couldn't agree more. When I take my Palm Vx with me, it is not because I feel like kernel hacking or writing
device drivers. Sometimes, I just want addresses, phone numbers, and appointments! I know that it is probably
hard for Taco to grasp, but one should use the proper tool for the job. If it is a notebook, Palm, Newton, or
whatever, if it suits the purpose that you need it for, fine.
Yes, but for some of us "the job" isn't addresses, names and appointments. I've struggled with a Windows CE-based HPC Pro for several years now, but I'm a writer and what I really need is a device that:
Can hold all of the plain text files n levels deep from my home directory on my Linux box.
Can work as a dedicated journal/note-taker, not just for the odd memo, but for heavy writing, day to day.
Lets me use all of the basic commands like cat, grep, sort, sed and will run most of the huge stack of shell scripts that I've come up with over the years to manage my life.
Basically, I do want a full-fledged Linux machine that I can stick into a backpack that doesn't weigh as much as a notebook. I've been waiting with baited breath for LinuxCE and playing with the ported kernels to try and get a usable full-fledged Linux system running on my CE device with xscribbler, but it hasn't happened yet.
Yes, I need it to be portable, too, so that I can carry it around, but not pocket-sized, because then the display is too small to work with large amounts of text. More like 480x340 or even a small 640x480 display. Something under 2 lbs. About half the size of a sheet of letter paper -- say 4'x8' or something in that range and an inch or less thick.
I'm not trolling or trying to start an argument here; I just want to point out that there are different needs out there -- different strokes for different folks, you know? No need to bash a device if you think it's too bulky or complex or a person's use habits if you think they're counterproductive; just don't buy it and don't hire that person or work their way.
I for one would be willing to spend hundreds to replace my CE device with a finished Agenda device if only it had a larger display.
Wow... Just pause a moment and take it all in.
on
Happy Birthday Hubble
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· Score: 2
Thank you Hubble.
And thank you, Slashdot for posting the link to the image archive. It has made my day. It's when I see things like this that I realize how much I miss the "space race" and everything it brought with it.
I know that it's important to save the trees and everything else here on Earth, but I'll be damned if space isn't just a whole hell of a lot prettier anyway, and spaceships and aliens a whole hell of a lot more fun.;^)
NASA is willing to spend billions on these high tech toys, and nothing at all on discovery of ancient relics.
Yeah, I'd much rather have a shattered old clay pot with some leftover "Jesus" dandruff in it than all of these images of the vastness of creation in all its glory.
What are they thinking, dabbling in all this stuff, so clearly shallow and frivolously pretty?
(I can't figure out whether you're joking or serious, but I hope to god you're not serious...)
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but I can't stand people who buy the very, very latest game on the market right when it hits the shelves and then complain that it won't run on their four year old computer and/or that it requires numerous bugfixes.
This has happened with numerous great games -- two recent examples are Ultima 9 and Black and White. These are great games but there are always that group of people who were hoping to get something (the newest gaming experience available) for nothing (no investment in matching hardware). If Myst III: Exile is intending to push the limits on realism using 3D hardware (which is what it's been advertised as from the beginning), why would you assume that your old i740 card will run it? You already know exactly what your hardware can do. Don't expect miracles.
This review is just whining. I'm sorry, but I want games that push the envelope. Period. And if it doesn't work out of the box for me, I'll at least give them a month or two to come up with some bug fixes. If you want "safe" games (i.e. that will support all of your old hardware, will be very stable out of the box, etc...) then run old games, just like using the 2.2 kernel instead of the newer 2.4 kernel. Yes the 2.4 kernel is still a little unstable in some cases, but some of us want the features. It would be nonsense to say "2.4 kernel: I give it 0/10 as a piece of software. It's unstable crap."
In my opinion, it's the same with brand-spanking-new (i.e. less than a month old!) games which are as complex as today's games are and are trying to do new things. It would be much easier to chuck out yet-another-FPS based on this-or-that Quake engine and make it stable, but I wouldn't be nearly as interested in it.
If you don't like it, play King's Quest. That's still fun and it'll run on your 386.
In terms of culture, the computer gaming industry is moving more and more toward pure, plotless sex and violence. Hardcore gamers actively make fun of bestselling games which don't involve blood and skin such as Riven or The Sims, even though they appear to appeal to a wider audience.
At least in this sense, I think that the "hardcore gamer" community is largely a collection of adolescent boys and underdeveloped men who live out their aggressive fantasies alone or online in games because they're unable to relate properly to "normal" humans (i.e. outside the tech industry). The tech industry and especially the gaming community seems to be a race of people unto itself, apart from the rest of humanity.
Of course, I say this as someone who owns $2,500 worth of PC and Linux games and was just looking at those butt-floss pictures on the gaming sites yesterday...
But seriously, I do get frustrated with some other gamers and their extreme views and behavior. Some of these guys make me feel downright normal and human by comparison.
I think the single biggest problem for the Palm devices is that their display resolution is horrible right now. 160x160 just doesn't cut it anymore -- it's too big a sacrifice when people are wanting mobile Web browsing, mobile multimedia...
Consider this: some of the color Palm-OS units claim to support 16-bit color depth -- 65,535 colors. But a 160x160 display only has 25,600 pixels -- barely enough to display one third of these colors at any one time!
There's not enough room on a 160x160 display to be able to -- show recognizable photos, run a mini-spreadsheet, read a book with AA or "cleartype" text, watch multimedia clips, browse the Web, see an entire day's schedule at once, and so on and so forth -- with any real degree of sincerity. The 320x240 displays of the PocketPC devices still aren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but at 76,800 pixels, they have more than 300% of the screen area that Palm devices do! With the right scaling software, PocketPC devices can even browse most Web sites fairly well.
For me at least, this is the single largest reason for Palm loosing market share to the new PocketPC devices -- the PocketPC devices are now so much more functional than Palm for most tasks that any size benefits or battery benefits are completely outweighed.
I have all the Ultima games from beginning to end.
I know I'm going to get beat senseless for this, but Ultima IX may be the single best game of any kind I've every played (yes, I played it through to the end) except for maybe Nethack, and Ultima Online is great as well.
I think the recent Ultima games have been given a bum rap.
$0.02 + $0.01 for the pennies dish.
I think this will just be the largest toilet stall in North America. Soon the blackboard will just be full of:
@#( &#%& #$(*(& jews! @#(&%@# &%* nigga sh#@( &#*^
And it will gradually fill up with spray paint and permanent marker and pretty soon sane people will just walk by without responding in any way. Eventually, it will be declared an eyesore cesspit of racial slurs and four-letter words and will be torn down.
Let's face it: we all have free speech, but when do Americans ever speak publicly? Usually only when they're upset about something. Moving free speech to the street like this will just give people on the street who aren't in a hurry (i.e. those that basically live there) a place to vent all of their anger at institutional capitalism and perceived systemic wrongs.
Not that I'm against free speech. I just don't think this'll last, because people don't like to help ugly free speech along if they can avoid it.
As others have pointed out, these are different standards. One (MJPEG) basically compresses individual frames and the other (MPEG) compresses across a flexible series of frames. What hasn't been pointed out, however, is that they are sadly incompatible.
.JPG version of the original photo has some detectible artifacts, but is likely passable. Now, re-save the .JPG version as a JPEG file again using 20% quality. The second JPEG looks much worse while there has been no compression gain. In fact, the second save will likely use up more space than the first. The effect when encoding MJPEG->MPEG or MPEG->MJPEG is similar, but occurs across multiple frames.
Both are lossy high-compression standards that introduce their own different artifacts into the video stream, meaning that to re-encode MPEG as MJPEG (rare) or to re-encode MJPEG as low-bitrate MPEG for a DVD player (common), you'll get a multiplying effect as all of the artifacts that were nearly invisible to the naked eye in the source stream are suddenly enhanced and magnified as the video stream is re-compressed, especially in high-detail or high-motion segments.
Even worse, because of all the extra "detail" the second encoder sees in the artifacts generated by the first encode, the second compression pass isn't nearly as efficient, using more space for frames that are individually worse in appearance.
Try this. Start with a low-resolution (720x480) photo of high detail and save it as a JPEG at 20% quality. The
It would be nice if MPEG-2 encoders would drop in price to the point that they could be directly included in camcorders. Footage captured this way could then be directly dumped to media for playback on MPEG-2 players like DVD players without any loss in quality.
But here we are drawing lines of determinism... One could argue that a computer always does exactly what it intends to do, since it makes no mistakes. What exactly defines "intent" in your view?
If we create an artifically intelligent machine that does "expand" its programming, one could just as easily use the same argument -- since it is artifically intelligent, it is programmed to evolve, and thus, anything it does is still ultimately the result of the programmer's work.
I suppose this the same argument used by those who say that Michaelangelo isn't the artist -- God is the artist and Michaelangelo is just the tool. Perhaps a computer is just a tool as well. So what?
What I am saying is that it doesn't matter unless you are putting on airs, trying to be highbrow -- interested in art for academic reasons alone. If what an artist paints moves me, regardless of whether or how the artist formed intent or who created it, I personally am willing to allow just a little bit of wonder to "cloud" my vision so that I can say:
"That computer has just produced a work of art that made me cry..."
I am not going to draw lines in the sand and refuse to appreciate beauty simply because it was produced outside an arbitrary definition of "artist" and without the lingering romance of humanism. Yes, it is thanks in part to the programmer in such a case, but one cannot deny that the programmer never concieved of precisely the work the computer has painted -- the painting remains the computer's work alone, the programmer merely a teacher.
I have no problem being grateful to a computer for beautiful work, whether or not its own "intent" is similar to our own "intent" -- programmed by God, programmed by Evolution, programmed by a programmer, "programmed" by experience -- what is the difference?
The work is the end and the means; the artist is merely serving it.
You are operating under the fallacy of intent.
You can't know the artist's intent -- you are not him/her, and it is impossible that such intent is unambiguously contained within the visual work itself. Ergo, the only thing that provides meaning is your own context as the viewer. Any sense you feel you have of the artist's intent is merely an illusion [unless you're one of the people that believes that objects can be imbued with "psychic waves" of whoever has handled them]. Thus, creative art is whatever touches you as the viewer.
Imagine it this way. You see a painting hanging in an office, unmarked and unsigned -- there is no signature from the artist, no indication of title or origin. Yet you still form an impression of the painting. It moves you -- you like it. You could argue that it is because that was the author's intent, but you don't even know who the author was -- for all you know, the painting was done by a mass murderer [or a computer?]... In fact, what you are reacting to is the relationship between the representation and your own personal existence and experiences.
Or, put it this way: if you are a Duchamp-hater, then you can argue that no computer can ever make art, nor could a urinal ever be artistic because, after all, it was made in a factory for men to urinate in. But I am a Duchamp-lover...
They're called peltier devices, and they're still around. They're not popular because they require water cooling to work well with the current batch of CPUs.
See, an AMD Thunderbird will dissipate as much heat as a sizable incandescent light bulb and do it in a very, very small space. Peltier devices aren't magic -- they still have to obey the laws of physics. Yes, one side gets cool, but the heat has to go somewhere. It goes to the other side.
The catch is that the peltier device draws a lot of current, so it has to dissipate a lot of heat of its own. So, collect all of the heat coming off your CPU, plus all of the added power dissipation (a huge amount) generated by the peltier device. All of this heat will turn up on the "warm side" of the peltier, which really ought to be called the "hot as freaking lava" side.
If you hook a 100 watt peltier up to your Athlon (which you'll need because an athlon may be dissipating 60-80 watts) and you don't water cool your peltier, you'll quite literally melt it to pieces and it will stop working within a matter of minutes or even seconds. Of course, once the peltier has more or less dissolved into little chunks, there will be no "cool side" to keep your CPU cool and your CPU will fry as well.
Even if you do get a peltier+water rig working, it's never quite safe because the cool side gets so much cooler than room temperature that condensation starts to form all over the place and you end up shorting your CPU out anyway.
In short, it's safer to just cool things to room temperature using a water rig without the peltier element, which is just too risky and will still need water to cool it with any recent CPU.
I don't want to start a flamewar, but I think you're right... KDE is probably going to "win" -- if it was ever about winning at all [and I don't think it was].
Disclaimer: I have both GNOME 1.2 and KDE 2.1 installed. I switch between them and WindowMaker.
(Yes, I know that GNOME 1.4 is out, but Ximian no longer supports my distro with binary packages.)
I think that it's not quite a done deal yet that KDE will become the de-facto desktop for Linux, but it's getting close. Why? Guts. KDE has them, GNOME seems to have far less.
KDE is undeniably uglier than GNOME and just not as viscerally exciting somehow. But KDE works, and that's what it's all about. KDE has a very nice IDE, a truly remarkable [given the development time] file manager and browser in Konqueror, and things like DCOP are just icing on an already very together functionality cake. I guess KDE is like the Microsoft of the Linux world. People hate the KDE people. They've done things to alienate the open-source guys. They make visually ugly products that are very highly integrated. But KDE and KDE applications are everywhere, and KDE is easy to install, use, and use in very powerful ways. In short, it's "nearly fully cooked" today, as things stand, with KDE 2.1.
GNOME on the other hand is much more attractive and somehow much more "Linux" but also is lacking a lot of core functionality by comparison. When using the two, KDE honestly feels like the "next step" in Linux desktops, technology-wise -- it just kind of stands alone. It's like GNOME is several years behind and not even gaining any ground because KDE seems to be moving faster.
I'm not happy that either one "wins" or doesn't. I'm not even sure it's a good thing that one will become the de-facto standard and the other merely the alternative... But it seems inevitable, and right now, especially with Eazel and Ximian appearing to be in serious financial trouble, KDE seems to be nearly running away with it. In the final analysis, most people will use what gets the job done.
That's why so many of us are still dual-booting into Windows for so many things...
I don't know what happens to all of the older CPUs, but I have a friend at intel who says he has drawer fulls of leftover/recycled PII chips in that speed range that he can't do anything with.
Apparently, they're just kind of "sequestered" there...
No doubt!
I originally bought a Voodoo5 card and played everything at 1024x768 at 2x FSAA. Beautiful!
Eventually I sold it and went GeForce2 because Linux didn't support the Voodoo5 well. Unfortunately, the FSAA quality isn't as good -- I have to play 4x FSAA on the GF2 to get the same visual effect most of the time (and 4x is only available in Windows... *sigh*) so I have to play at 800x600 most of the time.
But it's worth it.
I couldn't imagine going back to playing non-FSAA, even at 1600x1200. People who still haven't seen FSAA... It's worth the cost of a hardware upgrade, IMO.
Now I'm dying to get my hands on a GF3 to try the new HRAA (is that the right abbreviation?) alongside the nifty lighting improvements.
Here's to Doom 3 on GF3 with AA.
I have an extensive library of recorded TV episodes on VHS, for one thing. One blank CD-R is enough to hold a 1-hour episode or two 30-minute episodes that I can then play in my DVD player.
So... I use them for Dr. Who, M*A*S*H, Homicide, Northern Exposure...
Plus, all my home movies have now been copied to CD-R for play on the selfsame DVD player.
I've gone through about 2 100-CD spindles this year... enough to fill one large-size CD wallet with my favorite viewing.
I paid less for my GF2 card ($140) new than I did for my Voodoo3 card years ago ($199). GF2-MX cards are now under $100 and use the same drivers.
How much cheaper do you want a 3D accelerator to be?
I'm seeing a lot of messages about how we may as well run Windows games under Wine because ports suck cucumber anyway. I've decided to post a message to the root thread of this discussion just to say:
Try the Loki and Hyperion ports! They're as nice, if not nicer, than the Windows versions. I own 13 of them, and for a number of these, I own the Windows version as well, so I can compare side-by-side.
Please don't assume that just because it's a port, and just because it's a small company, the Windows version will be better. Loki especially has done a nice job -- they're still releasing updated 3D support and patches for games more than a year or two old! How many Windows gaming companies will do this? None! I can't tell you how many Windows native games I have with that bug that just drives-you-nuts but the game is too old already to be supported any longer by its manufacturer. Meanwhile, Loki is still supporting its first Linux port.
I'd venture to say that overall, quality and support have been much better for the Linux ports, and they all run beautifully. I'd say for the 3D games that you'll want to be running XFree86 4.0 or better for the [basically first real] 3D support for Linux, but other than that, there's nothing special needed.
The ports are NICE and they're NATIVE. Try them! You'll like them!
You're the second person to swear that Linux game ports are total crap... Have you tried them?
I have both versions of a number of games and I own a total of 13 "ported" games for Linux that I've purchased, not pirated because I felt that they were worth my hard-earned money. And I don't buy crap.
These ports are smooth. They are identical to their windows versions and they play nice and fast on my GF2. These games have my LAN party droogs saying "damn, I didn't know Linux could do that!"
Have you tried any of the Loki or Hyperion ports? Or are you just FUDing Linux gaming?
I have a whole pile of Loki and Hyperion games for Linux and they do not suck. At worst, they are identical to the Windows version (Heretic II, Quake I/II/III, Heavy Gear II, Descent 3).
At best, they better than the Windows versions because they're much faster and they don't BSOD or crash on me and I can run them in a window if I choose to do so (Civ:CTP, Heroes III, RT2).
Have you tried any of the ports?
And thus, the Linux porting company (Loki, Hyperion, Tribsoft) goes belly-up because the windows version has outsold the Linux version, even among Linux users.
I personally don't believe that Linux will ever run a Windows game as well as it would have run the same Linux game, no matter how good emulation gets. People play games for the experience, not out of the kind of necessity that causes them to run Office under Wine. If you can have a better gaming experience in Windows [i.e. framerate, stability, speed...] then you probably find yourself rebooting and running it under Windows, even if it works under Linux emulation.
Not to mention that I also firmly believe that there will always be a few [dare I say many?] Windows games that don't run under Linux, period, including some major titles. Why? Because Windows is Windows and Linux is Linux and the former is closed, complex and obscure and the latter depends on smaller teams of programmers with fewer corporate resources and fewer lawyers.
I personally have both versions (Windows and Linux) of all of the following games:
In each case, I bought the Linux version after the Windows version (after because the Linux versions came later). Why buy two copies of the same game? It's called putting your money where your mouth is. I want games under Linux. The best way to ensure that this will happen is to help existing Linux games to turn a tidy profit for the people working on them.
Hey, you chose Linux knowing that it didn't run Windows software well. Why hang around waiting for it to run Windows software now that your comfortable enough with Linux to be playing games? Support Linux gaming, not Windows gaming on Linux.
Knowing the legal and political systems surrounding intellectual property as you do, what do you think the chances are that money (specifically, lobbying from organizations like Microsoft or the RIAA) will overpower Open Source by creating more and more insidious forms of copyright protection and law, possibly even to the point that Open Source becomes illegal because it "threatens" the closed-source business model?
This seems to be one of the current trends in intellectual property law. Do you think it will continue?
Actually, you're wrong. A freelance writer is not the same as an unemployed writer. In fact, I have a number long-term of contracts to produce X in return for advance Y.
The difference between "freelance" writer and "staff" writer is that as a freelancer, my contract can be dismissed at any time, for any reason, and I don't get health insurance, retirement plans, etc. -- all that stuff I have to pay for on my own. My income gets reported on form 1099 (misc income, royalty, advance) and not on form W2 (wages) and no taxes are withheld; I have to pay taxes myself.
But please don't make the same accusation I just asked people not to make by assuming that just because I put "self employed" on my IRS forms I'm some kind of sociopath or vagrant. Really, you've just made my point for me again. Anyway, have you seen how much IRS "self employment" tax is? It's not pretty.
I think you're absolutely right; working long hours and spending money on useless consumer items is probably the most clear expression of Americanism that I can think of. It's a value system I personally hate, mainly because I feel the compelling need to exist outside of any possesions I own or job I perform.
But (and here's the point of my post) it's going to take a lot to change this. I know first hand that people aren't at all tolerant of those who have succeeded in not working a 40-hour week. I am a freelance writer. I make enough to live. I became a freelance writer specifically because I was tired of working long hours at a job that I felt was taking over -- that was becoming somehow enmeshed with my identity. I didn't want that.
But even though I make enough to live, I have become a social problem for many people. I have had a number of relationships end almost entirely because I wasn't "trying hard enough to be successful" and members of my family continually call to badger me about when I'm going to "do something with my life" and why I'm not "working harder to make something of" myself.
Credit agencies and businesses of all kinds -- sometimes even for little things -- don't want to sign contracts with me because as far as they're concerned, not working 40 hours PLUS is synonymous with "irresponsible" and therefore dangerous in any financial sense.
Put simply, there is no tolerance right now in American culture, not just in the technology industry, for anyone who feels satisfied to live outside of consumerism. Only lazy bums feed the ducks in the park... the responsible people would never be caught doing anything so worthless.
So please -- before you mod this down as trolling or flamebait, at least stop a moment and consider putting a little less pressure on yourself and (especially) on your family members and loved ones to buy things, earn money, get advancements, etc. After all, this is not a real-time strategy simulation! This is LIFE and it's the only one you've got!
What is everybody complaining about? Or does the free software community now claim ownership of all code under the "all information wants to be free" act and now simply attack any company that doesn't GPL every last thing?
Yes, but for some of us "the job" isn't addresses, names and appointments. I've struggled with a Windows CE-based HPC Pro for several years now, but I'm a writer and what I really need is a device that:
Basically, I do want a full-fledged Linux machine that I can stick into a backpack that doesn't weigh as much as a notebook. I've been waiting with baited breath for LinuxCE and playing with the ported kernels to try and get a usable full-fledged Linux system running on my CE device with xscribbler, but it hasn't happened yet.
Yes, I need it to be portable, too, so that I can carry it around, but not pocket-sized, because then the display is too small to work with large amounts of text. More like 480x340 or even a small 640x480 display. Something under 2 lbs. About half the size of a sheet of letter paper -- say 4'x8' or something in that range and an inch or less thick.
I'm not trolling or trying to start an argument here; I just want to point out that there are different needs out there -- different strokes for different folks, you know? No need to bash a device if you think it's too bulky or complex or a person's use habits if you think they're counterproductive; just don't buy it and don't hire that person or work their way.
I for one would be willing to spend hundreds to replace my CE device with a finished Agenda device if only it had a larger display.
Thank you Hubble.
;^)
And thank you, Slashdot for posting the link to the image archive. It has made my day. It's when I see things like this that I realize how much I miss the "space race" and everything it brought with it.
I know that it's important to save the trees and everything else here on Earth, but I'll be damned if space isn't just a whole hell of a lot prettier anyway, and spaceships and aliens a whole hell of a lot more fun.
NASA is willing to spend billions on these high tech toys, and nothing at all on discovery of ancient relics.
Yeah, I'd much rather have a shattered old clay pot with some leftover "Jesus" dandruff in it than all of these images of the vastness of creation in all its glory.
What are they thinking, dabbling in all this stuff, so clearly shallow and frivolously pretty?
(I can't figure out whether you're joking or serious, but I hope to god you're not serious...)