"Troll" shouldn't even always be a negative
on
Moderation Ideas
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· Score: 1
The misuse of "troll" on slashdot has been bothering me too. I'd even go so far as to say that a really good troll ought to get a positive score. Maybe we need "troll (funny)" and "troll (lame)" ratings, the former being a positive. Of course, marking a good troll as a troll defeats the purpose.
It really started to bother me when I moderated a particularly insulting post (no trolling discernible, just name calling) as flamebait, and it came back as a troll since someone else moderated it that way. If a non-troll that I do still think deserves a negative score were to come up in meta-moderation, I would have to think hard about whether to rate it unfair or not.
Maybe I'll just head on back over to alt.religion.kibology one of these days and see how they're doing. That's where you'll find the true trollers, the master baiters as it were.
While I really prefer not having any fluorescent light at all (and am lucky enough to not have any now, but haven't always been) they are much more bearable if you have the kind that point upwards at the ceiling with an opaque bottom cover, rather than the typical translucent plastic cover that lets them shine directly down. It's still ugly compared to sunlight, halogen, or good old fashioned incandescent bulbs, but you do avoid the strobing effect.
That probably doesn't help, unless you happen to be designing the lighting for your building. But it's something to look for if you do have a choice in the matter.
The government will buy $2 billion worth of software in 2000
Imagine how far that money would go if they spent even 1/10 of it on open source software development instead of purchasing ready made software. That's $200 million. What do you suppose the Gnome project could do with $10 million? Maybe give Linus a big fat check just for being a nice guy. Send the samba folks a couple million. No sweat.
Everyone working on open source/free software should be thinking about how to get their hands on some of that money. If the government is serious about using open source software, it could be a virtual gold mine for all those projects struggling for people and resources.
That little matchhead sized web server, iPic that's been featured on slashdot several times, was for a while connected to the net through a Digital Unix box running SLiRP. Looks like it has a normal SLIP connection now, but there's another modern use for you.
I first used it years ago, with a shell account on a certain national provider. I still have that shell account, every once in a while I find a use for it, just enough that I haven't dumped it yet. Mostly telnetting in and doing traceroutes and the like. But when I went on vacation to Hawaii earlier this year and decided I wanted to stay in touch via email, I realized I could do it, with my PalmPilot, Palm modem, said shell account, 800 number to said shell account ($8/hr from Hawaii), and SLiRP! I even still had SLiRP all set up to go. It was great, worked flawlessly. Granted, if I had to get a new account to do it, I would have just gotten a PPP account, but having the shell account anyway, SLiRP was a perfect solution.
SLiRP was the last in a string of programs of that sort that I used regularly. The first was DNet on the Amiga. Man was that ever a hack! But it worked really well within it's limits. After I started running NetBSD on that Amiga, and when I first moved to Linux, it was Term for a short time until SLiRP appeared.
witten seems to be making the assumption that the primary purpose of moderation is to remove trolls from view. Maybe that is what some people find most important about moderation, but I personally feel moderation has been a huge win, not because of how well it does or doesn't deal with trolls, but because people who don't have time to read every reply to an article can still get the stuff a few moderators thought was worthwhile. Back when 100 comments on a story was a rarity, it wasn't such a big deal, but there are several stories every day that top 200 comments now. Without moderation, I'd never even bother reading the comments at all on those stories. And I do take my moderation points seriously when I get them, it's only fair to all the moderators that helped me wade through 400 comments about Microsoft Bob: The Next Generation or what have you.
So do I think meta moderation is overkill? Probably. But moderation as a whole has been great. And if some people see a need for meta moderation, that's fine with me too. I probably won't be using it in it's current form, but to each their own.
This is scheduled for release "by the end of 2000". C&C: Tiberian Sun is out now. While you will probably still be able to find copies of TS on the shelves a year from now, it is NOT going to be competition for WC3 that far down the line. Games just don't work that way. The vast majority of sales come in the first couple of months, with a spike at the following christmas if you're lucky (and if it wasn't released at christmas in the first place). Two similar games released within a couple of months of each other can definitely affect each others' sales. Two similar games released more than a year apart won't.
Gateway owns Amiga. Gateway was in South Dakota. They've since moved most (all?) of their company to San Diego, but in '97 when this was filed, that would have been Gateway's HQ.
Intersting that you'd say Starcraft and Alpha Centauri are impossible on a console. Warcraft, Command and Conquer, and Civilization II all exist in Playstation versions. I haven't even seen Warcraft or C&C in action, I can't imagine how they did the controls. Civ2 I've seen but not played, it looks like it works pretty well. I don't see any reason SMAC couldn't be done in a console format too. I wouldn't want to do it on today's PSX though, 2MB of memory is a LITTLE cramped.
Sega's Dreamcast is due for release in the US next month. It's been out in Japan since early this year (or even late last year?) It's lot's more powerful than the current playstation, but about the same as a high end pc/3d accelerator (costing 1/10 as much of course). It runs a version of Windows CE of all things. Not a bad system otherwise, if you really need a new console to tide you over until PS2 comes out.
Nintendo has announced a system named "Dolphin" but hadn't given any dates the last I heard. 2001 seems likely. They say it will use a PowerPC. I don't remember any other details. And of course the N64 has been around for a couple of years.
Color gameboys are kind of fun too, but not exactly the same thing.
I've played both Myth and Myth II from a masqed box, no problem. I don't know about more than one. Running a client on a masqed box doesn't require any special setup. Running a server just needs one port forwarded.
The page does say the server is connected to the net through SLiRP on a Digital Unix machine, so yes, "he's doing some sort of trick with portforwarding".
There was another posted to slashdot only a few weeks ago called iPic. It's smaller than any of the ones mentioned here, I think. The URL is http://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/~shri/iPic. html. The page has even been updated (new picture, more info) since it was first posted.
Re:"Just about all the public servers?"
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Linux Q3Test 1.07
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· Score: 1
Something to keep in mind with Quake II patches is that the Quake II engine has been used over and over again in games from other companies (Half-Life, Kingpin, etc.) So when they patch Q2, they're not only patching the game you bought, they're patching the code for several games that have yet to be released.
The same holds true for Unreal (Klingon Honor Guard, the next Duke Nukem), and will for Quake 3 as well.
I have a Logitech cordless desktop, and I haven't had any of those sorts of problems. I've had it for about 4 months now, and I just replaced the batteries on the mouse for the first time yesterday. I haven't had to replace the keyboard batteries at all. I use it under both windows and Linux, and I actually never even noticed that there WAS a battery meter under windows until yesterday when I went to the mouse control panel to see why it stopped working. Interestingly, I never saw any degradation in performace. The pointer was working fine one second, and then all of a sudden wouldn't move at all. (Being under windows at the time, my first thought was that it was probably a software failure;-)
When I first got it, the wheel on the mouse would stick a little. I mean it was physically harder to turn it past one point. Turned out the mouse was just screwed together too tight, loosening the front screw fixed that problem. The other thing I've noticed is that if I place the mouse on a metal surface, (with or without a pad) it works very poorly. If I put a book between the surface and the mouse however, it's raised far enough that it doesn't interfere with the signal. My desk is wood, but I have an empty metal computer case as a mouse stand next to an easy chair where I sit sometimes.
I play quake and other games with it all the time. I can't feel any difference from playing with a cordful keyboard and mouse, and not having a cord on the mouse just rocks for games.
I don't actually have a real solution, but this is exactly the situation bison is in. Since bison includes part of itself in its output, the programs it outputs have to be GPLed as well. This is why most distributions include both yacc and bison, which have very close to the same functionality. Yacc has a BSD license and can thus be used for projects where bison cannot.
Re:Clues .... please take one
on
DVD-RAM Support
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· Score: 1
Perhaps you didn't actually read what I wrote. Random access removable media SCSI devices have existed since long before DVD was invented. I gave the examples of ZIP drives and floptical drives. Neither of which requires any special software to make them work, you just plug them into your SCSI chain, the kernel recognizes them (by asking them, SCSI is good at that) as readable and writable with removable media and you're off and running. A DVD-RAM drive shouldn't be any different from those devices.
Perhaps you are confused by the "RAM" part of "DVD-RAM". This is not a CD burner where you can only write once, which I can fully believe requires special drivers. This is a full fledged read/write device, exactly the sort of thing SCSI is supposed to let you plug in without worrying about finding the proper drivers.
Can someone explain why a SCSI DVD drive would need special drivers? Shouldn't a SCSI device generally work right out of the box? I've plugged in removeable media SCSI devices before without needing any special drivers (ZIP drive, an old Floptical drive). Is this actually code to deal with whatever file system DVDs use, and not something truly specific to DVDs, or is there really something special about DVDs as opposed to regular SCSI devices?
If we were talking about an IDE DVD instead, how much different would things be? I've never run across IDE devices other than hard drives and CD-ROM, so I don't know from personal experience if it is as easy to deal with random devices as it is with SCSI (or so I thought).
Computers increase our productivity by exactly the amount of time it takes to produce studies saying they don't.
I find my PalmPilot very useful for taking notes. It's not that it's more efficient than paper, but if I put something on paper, it will get lost. But a PalmPilot is too expensive to lose, so I never lose my notes any more.
I've had a MediaOne cable modem for the past year and a half. Never in that time have I noticed a loss of bandwidth that appeared to be MediaOne's fault (I.E. other sites are often slow, but my connection to the net is always fast). There's always been a 300k upstream limit, but that's plenty for a low traffic website.
Last week I got a flyer in the mail from a company offering DSL, it was $150/mo for 256k both ways. I pay $40 for 1.5M down/300k up. Don't think I'll be switching any time soon.
One of the programmers on Civilization: Call to Power (Windows version, not Linux) had a degree from DigiPen. He was on the project essentially from beginning to end and was one of our better programmers. I don't know how much of that was due to DigiPen and how much was due to natural talent or other experience (he had worked on console titles before coming to CTP), but it certainly worked out fine for him. I don't know what percentage of DigiPen graduates are actually working in the industry, but if this person was a typical example, then it should be pretty high.
Slashdot Mirror
The misuse of "troll" on slashdot has been bothering me too. I'd even go so far as to say that a really good troll ought to get a positive score. Maybe we need "troll (funny)" and "troll (lame)" ratings, the former being a positive. Of course, marking a good troll as a troll defeats the purpose.
It really started to bother me when I moderated a particularly insulting post (no trolling discernible, just name calling) as flamebait, and it came back as a troll since someone else moderated it that way. If a non-troll that I do still think deserves a negative score were to come up in meta-moderation, I would have to think hard about whether to rate it unfair or not.
Maybe I'll just head on back over to alt.religion.kibology one of these days and see how they're doing. That's where you'll find the true trollers, the master baiters as it were.
While I really prefer not having any fluorescent light at all (and am lucky enough to not have any now, but haven't always been) they are much more bearable if you have the kind that point upwards at the ceiling with an opaque bottom cover, rather than the typical translucent plastic cover that lets them shine directly down. It's still ugly compared to sunlight, halogen, or good old fashioned incandescent bulbs, but you do avoid the strobing effect.
That probably doesn't help, unless you happen to be designing the lighting for your building. But it's something to look for if you do have a choice in the matter.
Imagine how far that money would go if they spent even 1/10 of it on open source software development instead of purchasing ready made software. That's $200 million. What do you suppose the Gnome project could do with $10 million? Maybe give Linus a big fat check just for being a nice guy. Send the samba folks a couple million. No sweat.
Everyone working on open source/free software should be thinking about how to get their hands on some of that money. If the government is serious about using open source software, it could be a virtual gold mine for all those projects struggling for people and resources.
That little matchhead sized web server, iPic that's been featured on slashdot several times, was for a while connected to the net through a Digital Unix box running SLiRP. Looks like it has a normal SLIP connection now, but there's another modern use for you.
I first used it years ago, with a shell account on a certain national provider. I still have that shell account, every once in a while I find a use for it, just enough that I haven't dumped it yet. Mostly telnetting in and doing traceroutes and the like. But when I went on vacation to Hawaii earlier this year and decided I wanted to stay in touch via email, I realized I could do it, with my PalmPilot, Palm modem, said shell account, 800 number to said shell account ($8/hr from Hawaii), and SLiRP! I even still had SLiRP all set up to go. It was great, worked flawlessly. Granted, if I had to get a new account to do it, I would have just gotten a PPP account, but having the shell account anyway, SLiRP was a perfect solution.
SLiRP was the last in a string of programs of that sort that I used regularly. The first was DNet on the Amiga. Man was that ever a hack! But it worked really well within it's limits. After I started running NetBSD on that Amiga, and when I first moved to Linux, it was Term for a short time until SLiRP appeared.
witten seems to be making the assumption that the primary purpose of moderation is to remove trolls from view. Maybe that is what some people find most important about moderation, but I personally feel moderation has been a huge win, not because of how well it does or doesn't deal with trolls, but because people who don't have time to read every reply to an article can still get the stuff a few moderators thought was worthwhile. Back when 100 comments on a story was a rarity, it wasn't such a big deal, but there are several stories every day that top 200 comments now. Without moderation, I'd never even bother reading the comments at all on those stories. And I do take my moderation points seriously when I get them, it's only fair to all the moderators that helped me wade through 400 comments about Microsoft Bob: The Next Generation or what have you.
So do I think meta moderation is overkill? Probably. But moderation as a whole has been great. And if some people see a need for meta moderation, that's fine with me too. I probably won't be using it in it's current form, but to each their own.
This is scheduled for release "by the end of 2000". C&C: Tiberian Sun is out now. While you will probably still be able to find copies of TS on the shelves a year from now, it is NOT going to be competition for WC3 that far down the line. Games just don't work that way. The vast majority of sales come in the first couple of months, with a spike at the following christmas if you're lucky (and if it wasn't released at christmas in the first place). Two similar games released within a couple of months of each other can definitely affect each others' sales. Two similar games released more than a year apart won't.
Gateway owns Amiga. Gateway was in South Dakota. They've since moved most (all?) of their company to San Diego, but in '97 when this was filed, that would have been Gateway's HQ.
Intersting that you'd say Starcraft and Alpha Centauri are impossible on a console. Warcraft, Command and Conquer, and Civilization II all exist in Playstation versions. I haven't even seen Warcraft or C&C in action, I can't imagine how they did the controls. Civ2 I've seen but not played, it looks like it works pretty well. I don't see any reason SMAC couldn't be done in a console format too. I wouldn't want to do it on today's PSX though, 2MB of memory is a LITTLE cramped.
It won't be free.
Sega's Dreamcast is due for release in the US next month. It's been out in Japan since early this year (or even late last year?) It's lot's more powerful than the current playstation, but about the same as a high end pc/3d accelerator (costing 1/10 as much of course). It runs a version of Windows CE of all things. Not a bad system otherwise, if you really need a new console to tide you over until PS2 comes out.
Nintendo has announced a system named "Dolphin" but hadn't given any dates the last I heard. 2001 seems likely. They say it will use a PowerPC. I don't remember any other details. And of course the N64 has been around for a couple of years.
Color gameboys are kind of fun too, but not exactly the same thing.
I've played both Myth and Myth II from a masqed box, no problem. I don't know about more than one. Running a client on a masqed box doesn't require any special setup. Running a server just needs one port forwarded.
The page does say the server is connected to the net through SLiRP on a Digital Unix machine, so yes, "he's doing some sort of trick with portforwarding".
There was another posted to slashdot only a few weeks ago called iPic. It's smaller than any of the ones mentioned here, I think. The URL is http://www-ccs.cs.umass.edu/~shri/iPic. html. The page has even been updated (new picture, more info) since it was first posted.
Something to keep in mind with Quake II patches is that the Quake II engine has been used over and over again in games from other companies (Half-Life, Kingpin, etc.) So when they patch Q2, they're not only patching the game you bought, they're patching the code for several games that have yet to be released.
The same holds true for Unreal (Klingon Honor Guard, the next Duke Nukem), and will for Quake 3 as well.
I have a Logitech cordless desktop, and I haven't had any of those sorts of problems. I've had it for about 4 months now, and I just replaced the batteries on the mouse for the first time yesterday. I haven't had to replace the keyboard batteries at all. I use it under both windows and Linux, and I actually never even noticed that there WAS a battery meter under windows until yesterday when I went to the mouse control panel to see why it stopped working. Interestingly, I never saw any degradation in performace. The pointer was working fine one second, and then all of a sudden wouldn't move at all. (Being under windows at the time, my first thought was that it was probably a software failure ;-)
When I first got it, the wheel on the mouse would stick a little. I mean it was physically harder to turn it past one point. Turned out the mouse was just screwed together too tight, loosening the front screw fixed that problem. The other thing I've noticed is that if I place the mouse on a metal surface, (with or without a pad) it works very poorly. If I put a book between the surface and the mouse however, it's raised far enough that it doesn't interfere with the signal. My desk is wood, but I have an empty metal computer case as a mouse stand next to an easy chair where I sit sometimes.
I play quake and other games with it all the time. I can't feel any difference from playing with a cordful keyboard and mouse, and not having a cord on the mouse just rocks for games.
I don't actually have a real solution, but this is exactly the situation bison is in. Since bison includes part of itself in its output, the programs it outputs have to be GPLed as well. This is why most distributions include both yacc and bison, which have very close to the same functionality. Yacc has a BSD license and can thus be used for projects where bison cannot.
Perhaps you didn't actually read what I wrote. Random access removable media SCSI devices have existed since long before DVD was invented. I gave the examples of ZIP drives and floptical drives. Neither of which requires any special software to make them work, you just plug them into your SCSI chain, the kernel recognizes them (by asking them, SCSI is good at that) as readable and writable with removable media and you're off and running. A DVD-RAM drive shouldn't be any different from those devices.
Perhaps you are confused by the "RAM" part of "DVD-RAM". This is not a CD burner where you can only write once, which I can fully believe requires special drivers. This is a full fledged read/write device, exactly the sort of thing SCSI is supposed to let you plug in without worrying about finding the proper drivers.
Can someone explain why a SCSI DVD drive would need special drivers? Shouldn't a SCSI device generally work right out of the box? I've plugged in removeable media SCSI devices before without needing any special drivers (ZIP drive, an old Floptical drive). Is this actually code to deal with whatever file system DVDs use, and not something truly specific to DVDs, or is there really something special about DVDs as opposed to regular SCSI devices?
If we were talking about an IDE DVD instead, how much different would things be? I've never run across IDE devices other than hard drives and CD-ROM, so I don't know from personal experience if it is as easy to deal with random devices as it is with SCSI (or so I thought).
Computers increase our productivity by exactly the amount of time it takes to produce studies saying they don't.
I find my PalmPilot very useful for taking notes. It's not that it's more efficient than paper, but if I put something on paper, it will get lost. But a PalmPilot is too expensive to lose, so I never lose my notes any more.
I've had a MediaOne cable modem for the past year and a half. Never in that time have I noticed a loss of bandwidth that appeared to be MediaOne's fault (I.E. other sites are often slow, but my connection to the net is always fast). There's always been a 300k upstream limit, but that's plenty for a low traffic website.
Last week I got a flyer in the mail from a company offering DSL, it was $150/mo for 256k both ways. I pay $40 for 1.5M down/300k up. Don't think I'll be switching any time soon.
One of the programmers on Civilization: Call to Power (Windows version, not Linux) had a degree from DigiPen. He was on the project essentially from beginning to end and was one of our better programmers. I don't know how much of that was due to DigiPen and how much was due to natural talent or other experience (he had worked on console titles before coming to CTP), but it certainly worked out fine for him. I don't know what percentage of DigiPen graduates are actually working in the industry, but if this person was a typical example, then it should be pretty high.