Please smack yourself in the head with a ballpeen hammer. Winmodems?! You speak of the good hardware of winmodems - like M$ created this great new competitive hardware arena? I gag at the thought.
Winmodems are CRAP! They aren't even modems. They are a ripoff dongle that makes your cpu waste cycles doing what a REAL modem is supposed to do, and restricts the use of said crappy device to WINDOZE. There are no universal drivers for them.
When someone actually pays for one of those things they are literally throwing their money in the toilet, trading cash for nothing.
As for Linus and linux, M$ had nothing to do with his creating it. Hell, at the time of its birth, M$ wasn't the rockhard, full-blown, hard-case monopoly that it now is. M$ had jack-diddle to do with the creation of linux.
The hell you wont and the hell you don't. Are you saying you NEVER pay for drugs? You NEVER get sick and receive a prescription from your doctor?
Public monies pay for BASIC research, not specific, targeted, medical research. Even when it does, it only does proof of concept, and it is usually aided by drug company funding.
Pharmaceuticals need for public funding to handle basic research. They have the job of using the results of basic research to develop specific drugs - and it costs shitloads to do it. Damn straight they deserve to get a return on their huge investment. I say that you must now forgoe EVER buying any other drug if you don't want to pay drug companies. You must forgoe EVER going into a hospital for surgery because you would end up receiving drugs and anesthetics produced by pharmaceutical companies (none by public-funded university research except indirectly via basic research).
Public money would never have produced the drugs we now have to treat AIDS or any other life-saving drug.
To clarify, birds and insects do make use of stalls, yes, but they never crash as a result of stalling. They do not unintentionally stall. When they do stall they are capable of recovering virtually immediately because their lifting surfaces are fully reconfigurable.
I was simply making a point that it is foolish to assume that engineers are going to do "better" than nature, almost inspite of nature. Nay. They would do better to learn from nature which does most things pretty damn well, and in many cases FAR better than an engineer can dream of doing. There is intense research on housefly flight because they can do what is simply, and seemingly, impossible as a matter of course. No problem for the housefly but a MASSIVE problem for an engineer.
Eh? Planes are inferior to birds. Planes stall, birds NEVER do. Planes are limited in maneuverability relative to birds. Moreso when compared to insects.
It is impractical to make an ornithopter based on a bird or insect model - it doesn't scale well, so engineers had to compromise and accept an inferior-performing model as a means of transport.
Not true. Confirmation of life on another distant planet would derive from a planet having an oxygen-rich atmosphere. There is NO way for the earth's atmosphere to exist as it does by accident - only life produces such a highly oxidizing atmosphere rich in oxygen.
If you have a sensitive detector and spectrophotometer and you are able to point it at a distant planet (we're talking future tech here) and you detect an oxygen-rich atmosphere, you have just confirmed that life exists on that planet. It may not be technological life and could well be algae/plant/bacterial, but it is life.
For Hell's sake. Chapter 11 is not going out of business, that is what Chapter 7 is. They may yet go out of business if they don't handle the restructuring of debt, etc, properly but right now they are NOT going out of frickin' business. Got it?
Next. There are some problems with the Loki game model. I own 3 of their games and about to purchase a 4th so I am supporting them and I actually really wanted the games too. The problem, however, is that the games they port do come out so much later than the Windoze release. This wouldn't be so bad, in that I am not terribly impatient, if I knew ahead of time that they were going to port something. I bought Alpha Centauri for doze and then well after the fact find that Loki was going to port it.
If I had known, I wouldn't have bought the doze version.
It would be nice if Loki, whenever possible, give early and immediate announcements that they will be porting this or that game to linux - as early as possible, like right after getting the go ahead from the originating game company. Then, if I knew that in a few months or even half a year (or so) that a linux version for Halo was going to become available, I would wait without complaint. I have a stack of games I have yet to play so I can wait for the port on lots of games (except "Doom III" and "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" - but fortunately, id software is good about releasing officially non-supported linux binaries to work with their games).
Loki should try to jump on the train for a likely game as soon as it is announced (Halo should have been such a one but there is NO WAY there will EVER be a linux port of that game since M$ owns Bungie - Macs will get it only because M$ has to toss the usual bone out to try to avoid monopoly talk). Get the OK and immediately announce the agreement. Then, the more adult-like of us will be patient enough to wait for the linux port. The silly children will be incapable of waiting for more than a day or so and will just have to buy the doze version because we all know that a game magically sucks if it is more than a week past the release date and you buy it.
Loki also should also try to get agreements from game makers to let them work with them to produce a linux binary that can be burned into the same CD that the doze version is - and agree to handle the support issues for it. Then, we could just buy the CD and install our doze version, or Mac version, or loki-supplied linux version without having to wait for a fully and independently packaged linux version to appear. For a small percentage of each sale loki provides the linux binary and support for it.
Re:So, what's a good Linux 3D card then?
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ATi Radeon 8500
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· Score: 1
I have a Radeon 32MB DDR basic. Works like a charm. Supported out of the box with XFree86-4.1.0 and latest kernels - though you can get updated kernel drivers from the DRI website.
I occassionally get graphic lockups in games or, more often, though still rare, plain old X crashes. For the most part it is pain-free.
Re:Great device. It's a shame it won't sell...
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ATi Radeon 8500
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· Score: 1
For all practical purposes Matrox is already out of it. They are dropping 3D accel stuff. The competition is too hot and costly so they are dropping out of the performance 3D market.
Kohan looks good. I played the demo the other day and liked it. If you like/liked games like Warcraft I & II, Starcraft, etc - realtime strategy games, then Kohan is a game for you. The nice thing is it eliminates some of the annoying micromanagement that was necessary in the above-cited games. You aren't spending time sending peons/workers out to mine this, chop trees, etc. You spend time on the larger picture.
I just ordered it, though it isn't in stock right now, but I want it. They were out of stock of Myth II when I ordered that one too. The demand is there, vs their supply, at least for some of the games.
Because the coders who are capable of doing it in the open source world see no point to making a pointless game. Ask IRC client/server coders to learn 3D graphics programming so they can give you a pathetic IRC 3D avatar/fakey/flakey world to do IRC chat with since that is what a goal-less game would be - nothing more than a glorified IRC chattoom. Gag.
Don't know about marathon other than playing, for a few minutes, some of the available derivatives from it on linux - not too impressed, but then, I'm not impressed with doom NOW, though I was extremely impressed and wowed by it when it was new.
Me, my father, brother, all were wowed by Doom and Doom II. Nowadays, it just doesn't pass muster. Half-Life had a similar effect (OK, so did Quake at its release) to Doom, though once FPS became common, the wow factor become somewhat less compared to when it was new.
Halo doesn't count for squat yet because it isn't here. No one is or can play it. How/why should it have ANY place in a game discussion. You seek to place the cart before the horse. Wait until it is out and the disappointment hits before you discuss how great it is (M$ buying/wrecking Bungie pretty much assures disappointment. That puppy is dead now).
Huh? What's wrong with having your virtual ass on the line, blowing shit up (or being blown up)? I don't need to go to a virtual, goal-free world to mow a virtual lawn, hump a virtual chick, drive a virtual car to the store and chat with other virtuals. I can do that now FOR REAL and it is better/worse than any computer game crap would ever be.
What you CAN'T do in the real world is raise and army and conquer a continent or world, or run around like a super-action hero saving the world from monsters, hostile aliens, gangsters, etc - at least not without suffering FOR REAL and/or hurting yourself or other REAL people. At least in the game, it is safe. Go wild, get fragged, shut it down, go to bed with the wifey or girlfriend or alone, whatever, do your real life, then escape for a few hours later saving the world from alien invasion. THAT is fun. Goal-less, virtual world sounds about as much fun as a dentist appointment or viewing a webcam of a generic city street corner. Who-hoo! Hold me back!
Nonsense. First, and unlike communications and scientific satellites, spy satellites are highly mobile. They can maneuver quite easily. Second, the orbits of ALL the other satellites is known to us. Space Command tracks EVERYTHING greater in size, roughly, than a pencil eraser.
The orbits of all these objects is known and entirely predictable. It is known where all these civilian satellites will be at any time throughout their lifetimes. Orbits are extremely predictable. Since that's the case, there is no problem. For one thing, spy satellites tend to operate in orbits that are quite different than any civilian satellites. For those few civilian satellites (few as they are) that operate in roughly the same orbital regime as the spy satellites, again, they are not very maneuverable and their orbits are known COLD. Spy satellites can move freely within this HUGE area that is left to them. They are NOT willy-nilly sent this way and that way without taking into account any other objects greater than the size of a pencil eraser that might pose a risk to it. Space is not crowded in any sense that you would consider meaningful in your day-to-day, prosaic, limited life sphere and the engineers and technicians that operate the satellites REALLY know what they are doing. It is not bumper cars out there. Not even close.
Finally, very few countries are capable of doing what we (the US) can do with satellites and spacecraft. Most certainly are unable to touch our satellites even if they knew when one they didn't want to have spying on them was directly overhead. All they can do is shake a powerless fist and stuff their naughty biological weapons and tanks into hideaways. But then, that's only if they KNOW when they are being looked at.
We have a G3 Powermac and two iMacs. The powermac is slow and moderately stable. The iMacs are a mix. The iMac in my lab bay crashes often - and has had the system fully reinstalled multiple times to no avail. The other iMac is more stable but it still crashes, certainly more often than any NT box I've used in the building - which is most of the computers, and MUCH more often than my linux laptop.
I am all but certain that there is a factory hardware problem with the iMac in my part of the lab but then, it is also the old-fashioned non-preemptive multitasking/memory model that is used. I wish they had MacOSX on them.
I HATE frickin MacOS up to and including 9. We have macs and imacs in our lab, while I have my own laptop running linux. Mine never crashes and runs umpteen scientific apps that I need while the macs crash regularly.
Now then, MacOS X...THAT interests me. I could even see myself getting a G4 with MacOS X on it (and then loading Yellow Dog as well) but not until I can go to a software store or software outlet on the net and buy the games I like to run under MacOS X.
All things being equal, I would have no problems going to MacOS X but they are not, in the end, equal, until vendors start selling/producing the same cool games for the Mac as they do in droves for the PC. That day may well be coming, and I hope it is, but until then, that is the little weight that still casts the scale in favor of a PC.
"Plump" doesn't mean frickin' lardass. You don't fuck the personality, you fuck the body and if the body isn't a turn-on...you go for a body that IS a turn-on.
"Natural woman" sounds like codespeak for "let your ass grow HUGe, eat all the bon-bons you want, be a FAT-ass lazy, disgusting cottage-cheese bag - it's natural. Except it is extremely rare to find a fat-ass aborigine type. Most tribal or primative (in this case, closer to nature and thus more "natural" than ANY western girl) peoples are nice and svelt, muscular, well-toned. Fat is detrimental, unnecessary, and UGLY. Muscle is beautiful.
Then also demand that they give you a REAL version of windoze rather than some crippled pervert recovery-only monstrosity. If you have to have winders, then at least have the option of giving out burned copies to your friends.
Re:An iBook (or iPurse, iClam, take your pick)
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Which Laptop To Buy?
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· Score: 1
Err...I hate to tell you this but they are NOT masculine in the least. They are not in touch with their feminine side, they ARE girlie through and through.
You, sir, are a girlie-man. Oooo look at the girlie-man with this candy-colored purse! It really sets off the color of your sundress.
You should be ashamed of yerself, boyo. Dump it. Dump it NOW and buy a manly laptop, purse-boy.
Re:Therein lies the dilemna
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Mac Rants
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· Score: 1
I would think that if one really wants to do a comparison between different systems, be it P4 vs Athlon, P4 vs G4, Athlon vs G4, etc, then benchmarking suites should be bundled by type. For instance, you come up with a suite of benchmarking apps that are specifically targetted to a specific type of use: If you wish to compare systems for use as a graphics development setup use Photoshop, various renderers. Include in this not just the time for the machine to complete a task once it is initiated, but also include timings on how long it takes a user to get initiate the final transforms/rendering. Here you would measure speed to complete the task for the machine as well as how long it takes an individual using it to do the deed. You could, in theory, have a Mac that does the graphics transforms, etc, faster than the PC but see that it takes more keystrokes (or mouse clicks) to get to the point of actually initiating the render/transform.
Next, have a suite of apps/tasks specific for a server: fileserver, webserver, printserver, etc. Then have a suite specific for office and research-related tasks: wordprocessing, database, spreadsheet, presentation type apps.
I think we can ignore actions like email and web browsing since this can be done effectively on ANY system and is not a problem/bottleneck for any system.
Games are a problem: there are way more games for the PC than the Mac. There are some games that you can find for both but they are still rare so I am not sure if this is really a relevant test at this point. Perhaps once MacOS X is more ubiquitous on Macs and Mac software is standardized on it, you will find more cross-platform games and be able to do some game benchmarking. Until then you would need to take each benchmark as provisional and not all that useful. Right now, if you really like to play computer games the Mac is not the platform to go with (yet, at least).
It is nonsensical to mix and match this stuff the way it seems to be done right now. The Mac creams the PC with photoshop filter transforms! Oh yeah? The PC creams the Mac on database access speed and updating! Apples and oranges and not generally something that is heavily mixed on a machine. You usually have a server that does just that - acts as a server. It doesn't get used for graphics design and games. You have a Mac, you can't avoid doing some productivity crap with wordprocessors and the like but you are likely mostly using it for some specific task like web design, graphic design, and the like. Benchmarks should be so focused so that people can see how each system stacks up for specific tasks - then they can decide which system does what they will be doing better and more cost-effectively.
It would also provide some nice clean measures of weakness that each system designer can use as goalposts to reach.
But then, those that go through "singularity" and thus give up expansion are true idiots. No matter how you slice it, all the computer toys, genetic engineering, whatever, cannot stop the parent sun from burning out and dooming them to death.
Going thru a "singularity" event shouldn't/wouldn't eliminate the fundamental fact that their planet and all life on it are ultimately doomed unless they DO expand.
To ignore this fact is self destructive and even insane.
In any case, even with below lightspeed tech that we could conceivably make use of now or in the reasonable future, it would be an IMMENSE undertaking to even send one group of people into interstellar space to the nearest star system. Even then, there is no guarantee that those that went would not go bonkers during the LONG trip and self-destruct.
I would argue that it would require a HIGH level of technology far beyond what we can envision to actually pull it off. It is also not unreasonable to expect that any terrestrially evolved species would have similar difficulties with the time, boredom, close-quarters, etc, of an interstellar trip.
My point with this is that it is unlikely that technologically advanced (in our sense) civilizations occur with much frequency - if not for a chance encounter with a large meteor 65 million years ago there would not be any technological civilization on earth today. Those that do arise must get to a very advanced stage to be able to traverse stellar distances. Those that pull that off are not certain of infinite survival in a technological state. They could expand a bit and experience setbacks. They could enjoy a long, illustrious history and then go extinct (at least technologically) long before or after we came into being.
Just because it is mathematically conceivable that a sublight-speed technological civilization COULD expand throughout a galaxy in a million years doesn't mean they are psychologically, economically, or emotionally capable of the deed. It may require a level of technology that and EXTREME few manage to reach. Some might crap out on a "singularity" event, on war, on stupid ecological destruction of the homeworld, or simply be stable at a low-tech level indefinitely. There is certainly no rule that our western technological civilization HAD to occur. MOST of humanity throughout our 150,000 year history have managed to obtain a relatively static level of tech and remained quite happy with it.
I do not believe that the Fermi paradox can be used as a means of discounting advanced aliens (advanced is a relative term). It doens't take into account real factors like I mentioned above - the theoretical capability if you through your entire civilization into it of sending a ship or two into another solar system which likely doesn't have a suitable planet in it, waiting for that colony to mature to the point of being able to afford, economically and in mere physical effort, to send on their own ships, etc, it could well be PRACTICALLY impossible or MUCH more difficult than Fermi's paradox envisions.
MOST stars are binaries. Most of the planetary systems we have detected (or can detect at this stage) are dicked up - massive gas giants in super-close orbit around their primary, with the accompanying result that any reasonable earthlike planets were tossed out of their orbits by the giant's migration inward, probable inability for binaries and triple stars to support habitable-zone planets, and the number of bases from which to launch further colonists gets drastically reduced.
How long would a human group of 100 manage to stay sane and useful and alive if they spent 50 years getting to a star system only to find it is enhabited by dead, uninhabitable rocks that will NOT support a nice lively colony from which to build more colony ships (and grow colonists)? Now they must kill themselves or go insane or try to keep going to the next system for another 50 or 60 years only to find that it's a crap system too. Only rarely would one of dozens (VERY expensive endeavor, this, requiring a world-wide focus unlike ANYTHING in our history) of colony ships find something useful and liveable.
They land and start a colony. A fraction of these colonies actually thrive and survive. It takes a century or so, without any technological tumble to put them into a dark age (or stone age) for the colony to have developed to the point of being able to continue colonizing the present star system - with the few pathetic rocks that remain besides the one good primary. It takes another century before they have the people and materiel to build another colony ship - managing to keep a worldwide focus on the endeavor. That colony ship with its colonists now go through the whole thing again.
I think Fermi was overly optimistic and basing his assumptions on the purity of mathematical equations, not taking into account the reality - biological beings, economical costs, time, effort, psychology - needed to expand and overtake a galaxy.
I also don't think that "singularity", therefore, is the answer either. We are simply VERY rare to begin with, those that could pull off the task are even rarer among the rare. It requires a string of good fortune, perfect and impeccable behavior of individuals and civilizations to the point that the reality has a vanishingly small chance of actually occuring in any given galaxy. Some galaxies might have a full-spread lucky and spectacularly perfect civilization that managed to take over the entire galaxy, but they could be in a galaxy far, far away.
Are YOU clueless? Redhat doesn't create/make all the stuff that comes with Redhat anymore than Mandrake does. They do create some of it and add it but the bulk is from "out there".
This situation would be similar with the windoze situation ONLY if windoze came with not only the doze media player, notepad, etc, but ALSO realplayer, quicktime player, nedit, etc, etc.
Redhat, Suse, Debian, Mandrake, etc, etc, ALL give you a separate kernel (the os) plus a bunch of DIFFERENT apps and tools that they do not themselves create. They may work on some of the tools along with a bunch of others but the overall situation is TOTALLY different than with M$ and windoze.
There is NO valid reason that applications and the core OS should be pasted together. Apps are apps and the kernel/os is the kernel os. Multimedia, web browsing/file browsing, etc, do not an OS make. They are APPS that an OS mediates with for the hardware. Simply require that M$ make their offering modular - do NOT intertwine/commingle applications with your kernel, period. Make them so they can be removed, not just erasing the icon but REMOVED and/or replaced by a third party's equivalent and competing app.
There is no reason why any of the crap that M$ sticks in their so-called OS should be there. It is ONLY for the sake of forcing out competitors. There really is no other reason for doing things this way.
They should sell everything in modular fashion and be required to FULLY open up their APIs (NO secret APIs, period). Anyone who wants should be able to make use of the core OS functionality without hindrance or without disadvantage to the equivalent M$ app. A computer distributor should be able to install the windows kernel, if they wish, and then add on distributor-specific apps (realplayer instead of windoze media, for instance, or mozilla instead of IE if they wish). The core functionality between distributor x and y would be equivalent since the core OS would be the same but the user experience and user options would be wider and based PURELY on freedom of choice rather than lowest-common-denominator and path-of-least-resistance as it is now.
I disagree. Humans and other animals may be poor (relatively) at doing paper-and-pencil mathematics, but they are quite good and fast with innate math. Huh? Well, tossing a basketball through a hoop requires unconscious calculation to make the muscle add the correct energy to the throw, it must be pused in the correct direction to make up for player movement relative to the hoop, etc. A lion, alternatively, must do the calculation on efficient pursuit trajectory of prey when they bolt. A lion doesn't run to the prey, it predicts and compensates for the movement/running of the prey to form an intercept course.
This happens all the time and unconsciously with ALL creatures with a brain. It does involve math and it is automatic. Not too bad.
Then there is the difference between a machine calculating a formula that HAD to derive from a human No machine creates new formulas or mathematics. They ONLY calculate that which humans in their creativity, slow as it may be, are able to devise. Quantum math, relativity, calculus...humans are slow to calculate the answers but very good at coming up with the formulations and rules.
Naw. Assuming (wont happen) that a machine intelligence takes over from biological intelligence on some alien planet, all that would mean is that instead of the ET biological creatures showing up all over, personally or via radio, you would run across the machine creations of this biological ET race. The absense, thus far, of any recognizable ET signals doesn't rule out ET in favor of the so-called "singularity", it just indicates that no one is broadcasting in a way that our paltry antenna are able to detect.
WE aren't broadcasting in a way that our own detection methods could detect beyond a few lightyears - our signals are too weak, non-directional and our detectors are, well, right now an OLD Arecibo antenna that can ONLY detect a signal SPECIFICALLY sent our direction by a powerful transmitter. Why would we think this is what an alien race would do when we ourselves aren't doing this and have no plans to do this on any continuous basis? Hell, it would require decades of dedicated, directional, powerful transmission by an alien race in order for our attempts to detect them to bear fruit.
Who's to say that some alien race didn't do this for a thousand years...but the signals passed us by during the reign of the dinosaurs?
In any case, if the "singularity" happens as a rule, then my question is where are the ET machines? THEY should be ubiquitous now...yet they are not. That's your answer. Singularity doesn't happen.
Try "Builders of Infinity". This book, can't recall the author, contains the good and bad of nanotech. The gray goo problem pops up as does a nifty way to colonize a new solar system.
Slashdot Mirror
Please smack yourself in the head with a ballpeen hammer. Winmodems?! You speak of the good hardware of winmodems - like M$ created this great new competitive hardware arena? I gag at the thought.
Winmodems are CRAP! They aren't even modems. They are a ripoff dongle that makes your cpu waste cycles doing what a REAL modem is supposed to do, and restricts the use of said crappy device to WINDOZE. There are no universal drivers for them.
When someone actually pays for one of those things they are literally throwing their money in the toilet, trading cash for nothing.
As for Linus and linux, M$ had nothing to do with his creating it. Hell, at the time of its birth, M$ wasn't the rockhard, full-blown, hard-case monopoly that it now is. M$ had jack-diddle to do with the creation of linux.
The hell you wont and the hell you don't. Are you saying you NEVER pay for drugs? You NEVER get sick and receive a prescription from your doctor?
Public monies pay for BASIC research, not specific, targeted, medical research. Even when it does, it only does proof of concept, and it is usually aided by drug company funding.
Pharmaceuticals need for public funding to handle basic research. They have the job of using the results of basic research to develop specific drugs - and it costs shitloads to do it. Damn straight they deserve to get a return on their huge investment. I say that you must now forgoe EVER buying any other drug if you don't want to pay drug companies. You must forgoe EVER going into a hospital for surgery because you would end up receiving drugs and anesthetics produced by pharmaceutical companies (none by public-funded university research except indirectly via basic research).
Public money would never have produced the drugs we now have to treat AIDS or any other life-saving drug.
To clarify, birds and insects do make use of stalls, yes, but they never crash as a result of stalling. They do not unintentionally stall. When they do stall they are capable of recovering virtually immediately because their lifting surfaces are fully reconfigurable.
I was simply making a point that it is foolish to assume that engineers are going to do "better" than nature, almost inspite of nature. Nay. They would do better to learn from nature which does most things pretty damn well, and in many cases FAR better than an engineer can dream of doing. There is intense research on housefly flight because they can do what is simply, and seemingly, impossible as a matter of course. No problem for the housefly but a MASSIVE problem for an engineer.
Eh? Planes are inferior to birds. Planes stall, birds NEVER do. Planes are limited in maneuverability relative to birds. Moreso when compared to insects.
It is impractical to make an ornithopter based on a bird or insect model - it doesn't scale well, so engineers had to compromise and accept an inferior-performing model as a means of transport.
Not true. Confirmation of life on another distant planet would derive from a planet having an oxygen-rich atmosphere. There is NO way for the earth's atmosphere to exist as it does by accident - only life produces such a highly oxidizing atmosphere rich in oxygen.
If you have a sensitive detector and spectrophotometer and you are able to point it at a distant planet (we're talking future tech here) and you detect an oxygen-rich atmosphere, you have just confirmed that life exists on that planet. It may not be technological life and could well be algae/plant/bacterial, but it is life.
For Hell's sake. Chapter 11 is not going out of business, that is what Chapter 7 is. They may yet go out of business if they don't handle the restructuring of debt, etc, properly but right now they are NOT going out of frickin' business. Got it?
Next. There are some problems with the Loki game model. I own 3 of their games and about to purchase a 4th so I am supporting them and I actually really wanted the games too. The problem, however, is that the games they port do come out so much later than the Windoze release. This wouldn't be so bad, in that I am not terribly impatient, if I knew ahead of time that they were going to port something. I bought Alpha Centauri for doze and then well after the fact find that Loki was going to port it.
If I had known, I wouldn't have bought the doze version.
It would be nice if Loki, whenever possible, give early and immediate announcements that they will be porting this or that game to linux - as early as possible, like right after getting the go ahead from the originating game company. Then, if I knew that in a few months or even half a year (or so) that a linux version for Halo was going to become available, I would wait without complaint. I have a stack of games I have yet to play so I can wait for the port on lots of games (except "Doom III" and "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" - but fortunately, id software is good about releasing officially non-supported linux binaries to work with their games).
Loki should try to jump on the train for a likely game as soon as it is announced (Halo should have been such a one but there is NO WAY there will EVER be a linux port of that game since M$ owns Bungie - Macs will get it only because M$ has to toss the usual bone out to try to avoid monopoly talk). Get the OK and immediately announce the agreement. Then, the more adult-like of us will be patient enough to wait for the linux port. The silly children will be incapable of waiting for more than a day or so and will just have to buy the doze version because we all know that a game magically sucks if it is more than a week past the release date and you buy it.
Loki also should also try to get agreements from game makers to let them work with them to produce a linux binary that can be burned into the same CD that the doze version is - and agree to handle the support issues for it. Then, we could just buy the CD and install our doze version, or Mac version, or loki-supplied linux version without having to wait for a fully and independently packaged linux version to appear. For a small percentage of each sale loki provides the linux binary and support for it.
I have a Radeon 32MB DDR basic. Works like a charm. Supported out of the box with XFree86-4.1.0 and latest kernels - though you can get updated kernel drivers from the DRI website.
I occassionally get graphic lockups in games or, more often, though still rare, plain old X crashes. For the most part it is pain-free.
For all practical purposes Matrox is already out of it. They are dropping 3D accel stuff. The competition is too hot and costly so they are dropping out of the performance 3D market.
You are now down to ATI and nVIDIA.
Kohan looks good. I played the demo the other day and liked it. If you like/liked games like Warcraft I & II, Starcraft, etc - realtime strategy games, then Kohan is a game for you. The nice thing is it eliminates some of the annoying micromanagement that was necessary in the above-cited games. You aren't spending time sending peons/workers out to mine this, chop trees, etc. You spend time on the larger picture.
I just ordered it, though it isn't in stock right now, but I want it. They were out of stock of Myth II when I ordered that one too. The demand is there, vs their supply, at least for some of the games.
Because the coders who are capable of doing it in the open source world see no point to making a pointless game. Ask IRC client/server coders to learn 3D graphics programming so they can give you a pathetic IRC 3D avatar/fakey/flakey world to do IRC chat with since that is what a goal-less game would be - nothing more than a glorified IRC chattoom. Gag.
Don't know about marathon other than playing, for a few minutes, some of the available derivatives from it on linux - not too impressed, but then, I'm not impressed with doom NOW, though I was extremely impressed and wowed by it when it was new.
Me, my father, brother, all were wowed by Doom and Doom II. Nowadays, it just doesn't pass muster. Half-Life had a similar effect (OK, so did Quake at its release) to Doom, though once FPS became common, the wow factor become somewhat less compared to when it was new.
Halo doesn't count for squat yet because it isn't here. No one is or can play it. How/why should it have ANY place in a game discussion. You seek to place the cart before the horse. Wait until it is out and the disappointment hits before you discuss how great it is (M$ buying/wrecking Bungie pretty much assures disappointment. That puppy is dead now).
Huh? What's wrong with having your virtual ass on the line, blowing shit up (or being blown up)? I don't need to go to a virtual, goal-free world to mow a virtual lawn, hump a virtual chick, drive a virtual car to the store and chat with other virtuals. I can do that now FOR REAL and it is better/worse than any computer game crap would ever be.
What you CAN'T do in the real world is raise and army and conquer a continent or world, or run around like a super-action hero saving the world from monsters, hostile aliens, gangsters, etc - at least not without suffering FOR REAL and/or hurting yourself or other REAL people. At least in the game, it is safe. Go wild, get fragged, shut it down, go to bed with the wifey or girlfriend or alone, whatever, do your real life, then escape for a few hours later saving the world from alien invasion. THAT is fun. Goal-less, virtual world sounds about as much fun as a dentist appointment or viewing a webcam of a generic city street corner. Who-hoo! Hold me back!
Nonsense. First, and unlike communications and scientific satellites, spy satellites are highly mobile. They can maneuver quite easily. Second, the orbits of ALL the other satellites is known to us. Space Command tracks EVERYTHING greater in size, roughly, than a pencil eraser.
The orbits of all these objects is known and entirely predictable. It is known where all these civilian satellites will be at any time throughout their lifetimes. Orbits are extremely predictable. Since that's the case, there is no problem. For one thing, spy satellites tend to operate in orbits that are quite different than any civilian satellites. For those few civilian satellites (few as they are) that operate in roughly the same orbital regime as the spy satellites, again, they are not very maneuverable and their orbits are known COLD. Spy satellites can move freely within this HUGE area that is left to them. They are NOT willy-nilly sent this way and that way without taking into account any other objects greater than the size of a pencil eraser that might pose a risk to it. Space is not crowded in any sense that you would consider meaningful in your day-to-day, prosaic, limited life sphere and the engineers and technicians that operate the satellites REALLY know what they are doing. It is not bumper cars out there. Not even close.
Finally, very few countries are capable of doing what we (the US) can do with satellites and spacecraft. Most certainly are unable to touch our satellites even if they knew when one they didn't want to have spying on them was directly overhead. All they can do is shake a powerless fist and stuff their naughty biological weapons and tanks into hideaways. But then, that's only if they KNOW when they are being looked at.
We have a G3 Powermac and two iMacs. The powermac is slow and moderately stable. The iMacs are a mix. The iMac in my lab bay crashes often - and has had the system fully reinstalled multiple times to no avail. The other iMac is more stable but it still crashes, certainly more often than any NT box I've used in the building - which is most of the computers, and MUCH more often than my linux laptop.
I am all but certain that there is a factory hardware problem with the iMac in my part of the lab but then, it is also the old-fashioned non-preemptive multitasking/memory model that is used. I wish they had MacOSX on them.
I HATE frickin MacOS up to and including 9. We have macs and imacs in our lab, while I have my own laptop running linux. Mine never crashes and runs umpteen scientific apps that I need while the macs crash regularly.
Now then, MacOS X...THAT interests me. I could even see myself getting a G4 with MacOS X on it (and then loading Yellow Dog as well) but not until I can go to a software store or software outlet on the net and buy the games I like to run under MacOS X.
All things being equal, I would have no problems going to MacOS X but they are not, in the end, equal, until vendors start selling/producing the same cool games for the Mac as they do in droves for the PC. That day may well be coming, and I hope it is, but until then, that is the little weight that still casts the scale in favor of a PC.
"Plump" doesn't mean frickin' lardass. You don't fuck the personality, you fuck the body and if the body isn't a turn-on...you go for a body that IS a turn-on.
"Natural woman" sounds like codespeak for "let your ass grow HUGe, eat all the bon-bons you want, be a FAT-ass lazy, disgusting cottage-cheese bag - it's natural. Except it is extremely rare to find a fat-ass aborigine type. Most tribal or primative (in this case, closer to nature and thus more "natural" than ANY western girl) peoples are nice and svelt, muscular, well-toned. Fat is detrimental, unnecessary, and UGLY. Muscle is beautiful.
"Natural woman" = Fat-ass lazy pig.
Then also demand that they give you a REAL version of windoze rather than some crippled pervert recovery-only monstrosity. If you have to have winders, then at least have the option of giving out burned copies to your friends.
Err...I hate to tell you this but they are NOT masculine in the least. They are not in touch with their feminine side, they ARE girlie through and through.
You, sir, are a girlie-man. Oooo look at the girlie-man with this candy-colored purse! It really sets off the color of your sundress.
You should be ashamed of yerself, boyo. Dump it. Dump it NOW and buy a manly laptop, purse-boy.
I would think that if one really wants to do a comparison between different systems, be it P4 vs Athlon, P4 vs G4, Athlon vs G4, etc, then benchmarking suites should be bundled by type. For instance, you come up with a suite of benchmarking apps that are specifically targetted to a specific type of use: If you wish to compare systems for use as a graphics development setup use Photoshop, various renderers. Include in this not just the time for the machine to complete a task once it is initiated, but also include timings on how long it takes a user to get initiate the final transforms/rendering. Here you would measure speed to complete the task for the machine as well as how long it takes an individual using it to do the deed. You could, in theory, have a Mac that does the graphics transforms, etc, faster than the PC but see that it takes more keystrokes (or mouse clicks) to get to the point of actually initiating the render/transform.
Next, have a suite of apps/tasks specific for a server: fileserver, webserver, printserver, etc. Then have a suite specific for office and research-related tasks: wordprocessing, database, spreadsheet, presentation type apps.
I think we can ignore actions like email and web browsing since this can be done effectively on ANY system and is not a problem/bottleneck for any system.
Games are a problem: there are way more games for the PC than the Mac. There are some games that you can find for both but they are still rare so I am not sure if this is really a relevant test at this point. Perhaps once MacOS X is more ubiquitous on Macs and Mac software is standardized on it, you will find more cross-platform games and be able to do some game benchmarking. Until then you would need to take each benchmark as provisional and not all that useful. Right now, if you really like to play computer games the Mac is not the platform to go with (yet, at least).
It is nonsensical to mix and match this stuff the way it seems to be done right now. The Mac creams the PC with photoshop filter transforms! Oh yeah? The PC creams the Mac on database access speed and updating! Apples and oranges and not generally something that is heavily mixed on a machine. You usually have a server that does just that - acts as a server. It doesn't get used for graphics design and games. You have a Mac, you can't avoid doing some productivity crap with wordprocessors and the like but you are likely mostly using it for some specific task like web design, graphic design, and the like. Benchmarks should be so focused so that people can see how each system stacks up for specific tasks - then they can decide which system does what they will be doing better and more cost-effectively.
It would also provide some nice clean measures of weakness that each system designer can use as goalposts to reach.
But then, those that go through "singularity" and thus give up expansion are true idiots. No matter how you slice it, all the computer toys, genetic engineering, whatever, cannot stop the parent sun from burning out and dooming them to death.
Going thru a "singularity" event shouldn't/wouldn't eliminate the fundamental fact that their planet and all life on it are ultimately doomed unless they DO expand.
To ignore this fact is self destructive and even insane.
In any case, even with below lightspeed tech that we could conceivably make use of now or in the reasonable future, it would be an IMMENSE undertaking to even send one group of people into interstellar space to the nearest star system. Even then, there is no guarantee that those that went would not go bonkers during the LONG trip and self-destruct.
I would argue that it would require a HIGH level of technology far beyond what we can envision to actually pull it off. It is also not unreasonable to expect that any terrestrially evolved species would have similar difficulties with the time, boredom, close-quarters, etc, of an interstellar trip.
My point with this is that it is unlikely that technologically advanced (in our sense) civilizations occur with much frequency - if not for a chance encounter with a large meteor 65 million years ago there would not be any technological civilization on earth today. Those that do arise must get to a very advanced stage to be able to traverse stellar distances. Those that pull that off are not certain of infinite survival in a technological state. They could expand a bit and experience setbacks. They could enjoy a long, illustrious history and then go extinct (at least technologically) long before or after we came into being.
Just because it is mathematically conceivable that a sublight-speed technological civilization COULD expand throughout a galaxy in a million years doesn't mean they are psychologically, economically, or emotionally capable of the deed. It may require a level of technology that and EXTREME few manage to reach. Some might crap out on a "singularity" event, on war, on stupid ecological destruction of the homeworld, or simply be stable at a low-tech level indefinitely. There is certainly no rule that our western technological civilization HAD to occur. MOST of humanity throughout our 150,000 year history have managed to obtain a relatively static level of tech and remained quite happy with it.
I do not believe that the Fermi paradox can be used as a means of discounting advanced aliens (advanced is a relative term). It doens't take into account real factors like I mentioned above - the theoretical capability if you through your entire civilization into it of sending a ship or two into another solar system which likely doesn't have a suitable planet in it, waiting for that colony to mature to the point of being able to afford, economically and in mere physical effort, to send on their own ships, etc, it could well be PRACTICALLY impossible or MUCH more difficult than Fermi's paradox envisions.
MOST stars are binaries. Most of the planetary systems we have detected (or can detect at this stage) are dicked up - massive gas giants in super-close orbit around their primary, with the accompanying result that any reasonable earthlike planets were tossed out of their orbits by the giant's migration inward, probable inability for binaries and triple stars to support habitable-zone planets, and the number of bases from which to launch further colonists gets drastically reduced.
How long would a human group of 100 manage to stay sane and useful and alive if they spent 50 years getting to a star system only to find it is enhabited by dead, uninhabitable rocks that will NOT support a nice lively colony from which to build more colony ships (and grow colonists)? Now they must kill themselves or go insane or try to keep going to the next system for another 50 or 60 years only to find that it's a crap system too. Only rarely would one of dozens (VERY expensive endeavor, this, requiring a world-wide focus unlike ANYTHING in our history) of colony ships find something useful and liveable.
They land and start a colony. A fraction of these colonies actually thrive and survive. It takes a century or so, without any technological tumble to put them into a dark age (or stone age) for the colony to have developed to the point of being able to continue colonizing the present star system - with the few pathetic rocks that remain besides the one good primary. It takes another century before they have the people and materiel to build another colony ship - managing to keep a worldwide focus on the endeavor. That colony ship with its colonists now go through the whole thing again.
I think Fermi was overly optimistic and basing his assumptions on the purity of mathematical equations, not taking into account the reality - biological beings, economical costs, time, effort, psychology - needed to expand and overtake a galaxy.
I also don't think that "singularity", therefore, is the answer either. We are simply VERY rare to begin with, those that could pull off the task are even rarer among the rare. It requires a string of good fortune, perfect and impeccable behavior of individuals and civilizations to the point that the reality has a vanishingly small chance of actually occuring in any given galaxy. Some galaxies might have a full-spread lucky and spectacularly perfect civilization that managed to take over the entire galaxy, but they could be in a galaxy far, far away.
Are YOU clueless? Redhat doesn't create/make all the stuff that comes with Redhat anymore than Mandrake does. They do create some of it and add it but the bulk is from "out there".
This situation would be similar with the windoze situation ONLY if windoze came with not only the doze media player, notepad, etc, but ALSO realplayer, quicktime player, nedit, etc, etc.
Redhat, Suse, Debian, Mandrake, etc, etc, ALL give you a separate kernel (the os) plus a bunch of DIFFERENT apps and tools that they do not themselves create. They may work on some of the tools along with a bunch of others but the overall situation is TOTALLY different than with M$ and windoze.
There is NO valid reason that applications and the core OS should be pasted together. Apps are apps and the kernel/os is the kernel os. Multimedia, web browsing/file browsing, etc, do not an OS make. They are APPS that an OS mediates with for the hardware. Simply require that M$ make their offering modular - do NOT intertwine/commingle applications with your kernel, period. Make them so they can be removed, not just erasing the icon but REMOVED and/or replaced by a third party's equivalent and competing app.
There is no reason why any of the crap that M$ sticks in their so-called OS should be there. It is ONLY for the sake of forcing out competitors. There really is no other reason for doing things this way.
They should sell everything in modular fashion and be required to FULLY open up their APIs (NO secret APIs, period). Anyone who wants should be able to make use of the core OS functionality without hindrance or without disadvantage to the equivalent M$ app. A computer distributor should be able to install the windows kernel, if they wish, and then add on distributor-specific apps (realplayer instead of windoze media, for instance, or mozilla instead of IE if they wish). The core functionality between distributor x and y would be equivalent since the core OS would be the same but the user experience and user options would be wider and based PURELY on freedom of choice rather than lowest-common-denominator and path-of-least-resistance as it is now.
I disagree. Humans and other animals may be poor (relatively) at doing paper-and-pencil mathematics, but they are quite good and fast with innate math. Huh? Well, tossing a basketball through a hoop requires unconscious calculation to make the muscle add the correct energy to the throw, it must be pused in the correct direction to make up for player movement relative to the hoop, etc. A lion, alternatively, must do the calculation on efficient pursuit trajectory of prey when they bolt. A lion doesn't run to the prey, it predicts and compensates for the movement/running of the prey to form an intercept course.
This happens all the time and unconsciously with ALL creatures with a brain. It does involve math and it is automatic. Not too bad.
Then there is the difference between a machine calculating a formula that HAD to derive from a human No machine creates new formulas or mathematics. They ONLY calculate that which humans in their creativity, slow as it may be, are able to devise. Quantum math, relativity, calculus...humans are slow to calculate the answers but very good at coming up with the formulations and rules.
Naw. Assuming (wont happen) that a machine intelligence takes over from biological intelligence on some alien planet, all that would mean is that instead of the ET biological creatures showing up all over, personally or via radio, you would run across the machine creations of this biological ET race. The absense, thus far, of any recognizable ET signals doesn't rule out ET in favor of the so-called "singularity", it just indicates that no one is broadcasting in a way that our paltry antenna are able to detect.
WE aren't broadcasting in a way that our own detection methods could detect beyond a few lightyears - our signals are too weak, non-directional and our detectors are, well, right now an OLD Arecibo antenna that can ONLY detect a signal SPECIFICALLY sent our direction by a powerful transmitter. Why would we think this is what an alien race would do when we ourselves aren't doing this and have no plans to do this on any continuous basis? Hell, it would require decades of dedicated, directional, powerful transmission by an alien race in order for our attempts to detect them to bear fruit.
Who's to say that some alien race didn't do this for a thousand years...but the signals passed us by during the reign of the dinosaurs?
In any case, if the "singularity" happens as a rule, then my question is where are the ET machines? THEY should be ubiquitous now...yet they are not. That's your answer. Singularity doesn't happen.
Try "Builders of Infinity". This book, can't recall the author, contains the good and bad of nanotech. The gray goo problem pops up as does a nifty way to colonize a new solar system.