The thing that made DOOM, and no other game since has managed to recreate (apart from the Alien DOOM mod, which was basically DOOM again) was the atmosphere.
DOOM was a favorite on damp winter afternoons. I would play it wearing headphones so as to not disturb others in the house. It felt _creepy_. You felt a bit of anxiety as you could hear another Imp shuffling around the place, but couldn't tell exactly where he was. You'd jump when you went around a corner and suddenly heard one of those half-man-half-goat things shout "Wwooooooooooooooo!!!" and start hurling fireballs at you.
I've not found an FPS since that does that for me. ID got the atmosphere absolutely right on that, and I hope they can recreate this in DOOM 3 - to a bigger extent with the graphics capabilities they should have.
One afternoon, I was playing DOOM and got the fright of my life. I was playing along, headphones on, volume up, creeping around one of the levels when my housemate sneaked up behind me and threw one of those beanbag frogs that were used to prop open doors. The frog landed on my shoulder JUST as a room erupted with Imps. I almost died of fright!
The significance about the Wright's first flight is not that it was a first powered heavier than air flight (the Wrights got airborne but stalled and crashed before the actual celebrated 'First Flight'). It was because their flight was the first heavier than air controllable and sustainable flight (that didn't end in a crash). The Kiwi guy may have had a powered plane up before the Wright's date, but he didn't have all the significant attributes of the Wright's flight (particularly the not-crashing bit)
There were plenty of other powered heavier than air flights before the Wright's 1903 flight, but none of them were either sustainable AND controlled AND piloted.
I entered my own name into Google to see what it'd turn up. Well, it seems like there is a Hollywood actor with the same name as me. I hope he doesn't get particularly famous - I have a domain in my own name and I can just see the domain-dispute-lawsuit heading my way if he does:-/
I used to have a RaQ2. One of the nice things about it was the oddness of having the Mips R4000 - most of the remote root exploits that the skript kiddies used were Intel-only. I still kept it patched though!
My only real gripes with it was that it was awfully hard to get a lot of stuff to compile (there was only ever one version of OpenSSH which would build cleanly, and getting a new version of gcc going was a real pain) and although it was perfectly adequate for PHP and MySQL and the usual Apache stuff (oh, and PHP didn't work out of the box either, it died with a floating point exception without patching) it was HORRIBLY slow for Perl and Perl cgi scripts. If you had a single "use" Perl statement in your perl script, the Perl script would take 3 to 4 seconds to start using 100% CPU. I never did find a fix for that problem.
I only disallowed ia_archiver from the cgi-scripts - it wasn't impacting on the rest of the site (and since I thought at first it was another program like Teleport Pro, I didn't want to disallow it for the whole site). My robots.txt also instructs crawlers not to go into my cgi-bin directory.
A while back (when I was still using a CobaltRaQ2 - adequate for the job, but not particularly speedy with cgi scripts) I got DoSSed by ia_archiver (yes, cgi-bin is in robots.txt, no I'm not associated with Amazon, but someone else who links to the cgi-script in question probably was). I thought ia_archiver was another Teleport Pro, and just modified the acutal script to display a rejection page if it saw ia_archiver in the HTTP_USER_AGENT.
Finally, I know what it is...
It was trying to crawl *every* available url for the CGI script - and it appeared to be buggy because it got itself into an endless loop changing from one mode to the other.
SPARC is supposedly open?
on
Sun vs. OpenBSD?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I thought the SPARC processor was supposed to be an open architecture? It is according to Sparc International - surely if the Sun SPARC processors don't meet the SPARC specification, they aren't SPARC processors any more?
Or is it not the actual processor - but support hardware/boot rom issues that they are having a hard time getting information about?
The rating of your PC's PSU is *not* the wattage that the PC will normally draw. Even with a CRT monitor, I doubt a normal PC+monitor will draw 333 watts under normal workloads.
It takes a sysadmin every bit as competent as a good Unix sysadmin to PROPERLY administer a Win2K server and its associated workstations. It's a fallacy that you can hire cheap newbies to run a Windows network. Instead of having the problems fixed, scripts written to have certain things get fixed automatically, you get reboot monkeys.
But DRM will eventually be forced. What happens when all players will ONLY play content protected by DRM? You won't even have the option of making non-DRM content (and I suspect producers will have to go via $BIG_MULTINATIONAL and pay lots of money to be able to produce DRM content).
DRM (as far as the RIAA etc. are concerned) isn't about stopping piracy - what the RIAA et al. are really terrified of is small companies being able to inexpensively publish content. If all players will only play DRM content, and the RIAA et al. are the keymasters...they've just preserved their old business model.
BeebEm is a fine BBC Micro emulator (pretty faithful as far as I can tell - the only game it seems to have problems with is Revs). Elite certainly works fine on BeebEm.
If you want Elite on Windows/Linux/Solaris etc. get Elite: The New Kind by Christian Pinder at http://www.newkind.co.uk. He basically recoded original Elite in C from the BBC sources.
What I don't understand is why spammers try and defeat the filters - it seems like a waste of time to me. Those who filter their email don't want the spam and won't buy anything from a spammer - so why bother?
I've got so frustrated with the vast quantities of spam I receive that I installed SpamAssassin. It works surprisingly well.
The Moller Skycar has been "six months away from being flown" for as long as I've been alive. I don't know how Moller manages to con investors, but he does it.
Statistically, general aviation has 7 times the fatal accident rate per mile travelled than driving a car. GA has about the same safety record as riding motorcycles on the public roads.
However, unlike motorcycling (where the hapless biker is usually taken out by someone else), the pilot can do a lot more to manage the risk. Mid-air collisions or accidents caused by something OTHER than the pilot are very rare - so you're right - it CAN be very safe if you've got the right pilot behind the yoke. Even our ancient GA planes very rarely suffer mechanical failure.
Ultralights are _fun_ - I don't think the pilots ARE crazy fools. Sure, there's an element of risk involved.
The crazy fools are the ones who try and kid themselves that GA flying is safer than driving and blunder on regardless instead of knowing the risk and managing the risk.
And you don't know how to burn money until you start flying multiengine:-)
And there was still a lot of second-guessing this pilot's action in rec.aviation.piloting. Some said if it were controllable enough to fly to an unpopulated place, surely he should have tried landing it?
It's a very tough call. None of us were there either, so it's probably a call we can't make. It's still worth discussing the possibilities though.
From his description of the events, I can't disagree with his subsequent actions.
At work, I've implemented an automatic nightly backup. It uses rsync to back the fileserver's files to another machine in the office, and it also rsyncs these files over SSH to one of our remote branches - so we've actually got two backups. The amount of data we have is only a couple of hundred megs (which is a good thing because whilst we have ADSL at the main office, the remote branch only has a 64K ISDN link - and this is why I also keep a local backup as well as a remote. The remote is a disaster recovery backup, the local is so we can recover from 'oh shit I shouldn't have deleted that file' moments without having to retrieve the file over the 64K link). This is all done by a cron job when everyone's gone home. No need to mess with physical media and having to remember to do the backups. The cron job makes tarfiles of everything in/home and all the machine's configuration files (smb.conf, squid.conf, everything in/var/named,/etc/passwd and all the usual files). Basically, in the event of our swerver biting the dust, I just want to be able to re-install the OS then untar the backups and go. I've tested it, too - when I put in a new machine for our server, I used the backups to create the new server after installing the OS.
I do the same thing for home, too (except it backs up over ADSL to my webserver which is a continent away).
I think the situation may have changed. I only recently got a cellphone (a Nokia handset). It cost about 90 quid with 20 quid's worth of pay-as-you go from O2. I also have another SIM card for Pronto pay as you go (since I live in the Isle of Man, and it's cheaper whilst I'm home to use the Pronto sim card, and switch to the O2 sim card when away in the UK).
I never had to unlock my phone - it just works fine whatever SIM card I put in.
GSM in Europe I think has more free marketability than the mish-mash of conflicting standards and provider lock-in in the States. I can switch providers merely by changing the SIM card in my phone. No need to buy a new handset. Most customers coulnd't care less if the phone uses CDMA, TDMA, GSM etc. so long as it works.
TCP/IP may not be the best protocol in the world, but imagine if there were three or four incompatible standards used by the major ISPs, and you had to buy an operating system locked into that ISP's infrastructure to use the net...that's what the cellphone situation is like in the US. Everyone singing GSM is like everyone talking TCP/IP. You know your handset will work regardless of the provider you choose.
Your message doesn't really suggest that X is the problem.
Buggy applications would still crash whether they were running on X or something else. Throwing out X because of buggy applications will not stop the buggy applications from crashing! Those buggy apps will still crash on Windows, Mac OSX or BeOS. X doesn't make them any less or more likely to crash. I've found X itself to be very stable.
I've not found the performance of X compared to the performance of Windows noticably different since the days of the 486 for normal desktop apps.
Funnily enough, my experience has been pretty much the opposite (at least recently). A few years ago - yes, X was a bear to set up.
But the recent installs I've done?
RedHat 7.x seems to have BETTER graphics card support than Win2K, and the devices on all the machines I've installed recently have just *worked* with no fiddling at all - this goes from a Dell PII-266 to a new whitebox cheap component Athlon 1600+ box. We got some new machines recently - the ones I put RedHat on were in 1024x768 on the install. The Win2K installs required additional drivers. RedHat also supported the network card out of the box - Win2K needed 3rd party drivers.
This is a mistake many people (particularly HR) make.
You don't necessarily need a Linux admin, just like most people who advertise for software engineers who know VB don't actually need people who know VB - just a good software engineer since learning VB is trivial. What you need is a good sysadmin who has a capibility to learn. You need that whether you're running Windows or Linux. A good sysadmin will be able to learn virtually all he needs to know in a very short period of time. To a good sysadmin, learning Linux is reasonably trivial.
Now if you just want cheap reboot monkeys instead of sysadmins, I'd agree with you.
Since the pole reversals/absence of magnetic field has occurred many times before without the atmosphere being stripped off by the solar wind, why would the solar wind strip it off this time?
With kernel modules you don't need to have the stuff loaded *in* the kernel all the time. All the distros I've used recently only have the stuff essential to run in the kernel image in/boot - the rest is all modules.
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The thing that made DOOM, and no other game since has managed to recreate (apart from the Alien DOOM mod, which was basically DOOM again) was the atmosphere.
DOOM was a favorite on damp winter afternoons. I would play it wearing headphones so as to not disturb others in the house. It felt _creepy_. You felt a bit of anxiety as you could hear another Imp shuffling around the place, but couldn't tell exactly where he was. You'd jump when you went around a corner and suddenly heard one of those half-man-half-goat things shout "Wwooooooooooooooo!!!" and start hurling fireballs at you.
I've not found an FPS since that does that for me. ID got the atmosphere absolutely right on that, and I hope they can recreate this in DOOM 3 - to a bigger extent with the graphics capabilities they should have.
One afternoon, I was playing DOOM and got the fright of my life. I was playing along, headphones on, volume up, creeping around one of the levels when my housemate sneaked up behind me and threw one of those beanbag frogs that were used to prop open doors. The frog landed on my shoulder JUST as a room erupted with Imps. I almost died of fright!
The significance about the Wright's first flight is not that it was a first powered heavier than air flight (the Wrights got airborne but stalled and crashed before the actual celebrated 'First Flight'). It was because their flight was the first heavier than air controllable and sustainable flight (that didn't end in a crash). The Kiwi guy may have had a powered plane up before the Wright's date, but he didn't have all the significant attributes of the Wright's flight (particularly the not-crashing bit)
There were plenty of other powered heavier than air flights before the Wright's 1903 flight, but none of them were either sustainable AND controlled AND piloted.
I entered my own name into Google to see what it'd turn up. Well, it seems like there is a Hollywood actor with the same name as me. I hope he doesn't get particularly famous - I have a domain in my own name and I can just see the domain-dispute-lawsuit heading my way if he does :-/
I used to have a RaQ2. One of the nice things about it was the oddness of having the Mips R4000 - most of the remote root exploits that the skript kiddies used were Intel-only. I still kept it patched though!
My only real gripes with it was that it was awfully hard to get a lot of stuff to compile (there was only ever one version of OpenSSH which would build cleanly, and getting a new version of gcc going was a real pain) and although it was perfectly adequate for PHP and MySQL and the usual Apache stuff (oh, and PHP didn't work out of the box either, it died with a floating point exception without patching) it was HORRIBLY slow for Perl and Perl cgi scripts. If you had a single "use" Perl statement in your perl script, the Perl script would take 3 to 4 seconds to start using 100% CPU. I never did find a fix for that problem.
I only disallowed ia_archiver from the cgi-scripts - it wasn't impacting on the rest of the site (and since I thought at first it was another program like Teleport Pro, I didn't want to disallow it for the whole site). My robots.txt also instructs crawlers not to go into my cgi-bin directory.
A while back (when I was still using a CobaltRaQ2 - adequate for the job, but not particularly speedy with cgi scripts) I got DoSSed by ia_archiver (yes, cgi-bin is in robots.txt, no I'm not associated with Amazon, but someone else who links to the cgi-script in question probably was). I thought ia_archiver was another Teleport Pro, and just modified the acutal script to display a rejection page if it saw ia_archiver in the HTTP_USER_AGENT.
Finally, I know what it is...
It was trying to crawl *every* available url for the CGI script - and it appeared to be buggy because it got itself into an endless loop changing from one mode to the other.
Or is it not the actual processor - but support hardware/boot rom issues that they are having a hard time getting information about?
The rating of your PC's PSU is *not* the wattage that the PC will normally draw. Even with a CRT monitor, I doubt a normal PC+monitor will draw 333 watts under normal workloads.
Additionally, the dope used on the Hindenburg's fabric was highly flammable. Hydrogen or helium - it'd have still burned fiercely.
It takes a sysadmin every bit as competent as a good Unix sysadmin to PROPERLY administer a Win2K server and its associated workstations. It's a fallacy that you can hire cheap newbies to run a Windows network. Instead of having the problems fixed, scripts written to have certain things get fixed automatically, you get reboot monkeys.
But DRM will eventually be forced. What happens when all players will ONLY play content protected by DRM? You won't even have the option of making non-DRM content (and I suspect producers will have to go via $BIG_MULTINATIONAL and pay lots of money to be able to produce DRM content).
DRM (as far as the RIAA etc. are concerned) isn't about stopping piracy - what the RIAA et al. are really terrified of is small companies being able to inexpensively publish content. If all players will only play DRM content, and the RIAA et al. are the keymasters...they've just preserved their old business model.
BeebEm is a fine BBC Micro emulator (pretty faithful as far as I can tell - the only game it seems to have problems with is Revs). Elite certainly works fine on BeebEm.
If you want Elite on Windows/Linux/Solaris etc. get Elite: The New Kind by Christian Pinder at http://www.newkind.co.uk. He basically recoded original Elite in C from the BBC sources.
What I don't understand is why spammers try and defeat the filters - it seems like a waste of time to me. Those who filter their email don't want the spam and won't buy anything from a spammer - so why bother?
I've got so frustrated with the vast quantities of spam I receive that I installed SpamAssassin. It works surprisingly well.
The Moller Skycar has been "six months away from being flown" for as long as I've been alive. I don't know how Moller manages to con investors, but he does it.
Statistically, general aviation has 7 times the fatal accident rate per mile travelled than driving a car. GA has about the same safety record as riding motorcycles on the public roads.
However, unlike motorcycling (where the hapless biker is usually taken out by someone else), the pilot can do a lot more to manage the risk. Mid-air collisions or accidents caused by something OTHER than the pilot are very rare - so you're right - it CAN be very safe if you've got the right pilot behind the yoke. Even our ancient GA planes very rarely suffer mechanical failure.
Ultralights are _fun_ - I don't think the pilots ARE crazy fools. Sure, there's an element of risk involved.
:-)
The crazy fools are the ones who try and kid themselves that GA flying is safer than driving and blunder on regardless instead of knowing the risk and managing the risk.
And you don't know how to burn money until you start flying multiengine
And there was still a lot of second-guessing this pilot's action in rec.aviation.piloting. Some said if it were controllable enough to fly to an unpopulated place, surely he should have tried landing it?
It's a very tough call. None of us were there either, so it's probably a call we can't make. It's still worth discussing the possibilities though.
From his description of the events, I can't disagree with his subsequent actions.
At work, I've implemented an automatic nightly backup. It uses rsync to back the fileserver's files to another machine in the office, and it also rsyncs these files over SSH to one of our remote branches - so we've actually got two backups. The amount of data we have is only a couple of hundred megs (which is a good thing because whilst we have ADSL at the main office, the remote branch only has a 64K ISDN link - and this is why I also keep a local backup as well as a remote. The remote is a disaster recovery backup, the local is so we can recover from 'oh shit I shouldn't have deleted that file' moments without having to retrieve the file over the 64K link). /home and all the machine's configuration files (smb.conf, squid.conf, everything in /var/named, /etc/passwd and all the usual files). Basically, in the event of our swerver biting the dust, I just want to be able to re-install the OS then untar the backups and go. I've tested it, too - when I put in a new machine for our server, I used the backups to create the new server after installing the OS.
This is all done by a cron job when everyone's gone home. No need to mess with physical media and having to remember to do the backups. The cron job makes tarfiles of everything in
I do the same thing for home, too (except it backs up over ADSL to my webserver which is a continent away).
I think the situation may have changed. I only recently got a cellphone (a Nokia handset). It cost about 90 quid with 20 quid's worth of pay-as-you go from O2. I also have another SIM card for Pronto pay as you go (since I live in the Isle of Man, and it's cheaper whilst I'm home to use the Pronto sim card, and switch to the O2 sim card when away in the UK).
I never had to unlock my phone - it just works fine whatever SIM card I put in.
GSM in Europe I think has more free marketability than the mish-mash of conflicting standards and provider lock-in in the States. I can switch providers merely by changing the SIM card in my phone. No need to buy a new handset. Most customers coulnd't care less if the phone uses CDMA, TDMA, GSM etc. so long as it works.
TCP/IP may not be the best protocol in the world, but imagine if there were three or four incompatible standards used by the major ISPs, and you had to buy an operating system locked into that ISP's infrastructure to use the net...that's what the cellphone situation is like in the US. Everyone singing GSM is like everyone talking TCP/IP. You know your handset will work regardless of the provider you choose.
Your message doesn't really suggest that X is the problem.
Buggy applications would still crash whether they were running on X or something else. Throwing out X because of buggy applications will not stop the buggy applications from crashing! Those buggy apps will still crash on Windows, Mac OSX or BeOS. X doesn't make them any less or more likely to crash. I've found X itself to be very stable.
I've not found the performance of X compared to the performance of Windows noticably different since the days of the 486 for normal desktop apps.
Funnily enough, my experience has been pretty much the opposite (at least recently). A few years ago - yes, X was a bear to set up.
But the recent installs I've done?
RedHat 7.x seems to have BETTER graphics card support than Win2K, and the devices on all the machines I've installed recently have just *worked* with no fiddling at all - this goes from a Dell PII-266 to a new whitebox cheap component Athlon 1600+ box. We got some new machines recently - the ones I put RedHat on were in 1024x768 on the install. The Win2K installs required additional drivers. RedHat also supported the network card out of the box - Win2K needed 3rd party drivers.
This is a mistake many people (particularly HR) make.
You don't necessarily need a Linux admin, just like most people who advertise for software engineers who know VB don't actually need people who know VB - just a good software engineer since learning VB is trivial.
What you need is a good sysadmin who has a capibility to learn. You need that whether you're running Windows or Linux. A good sysadmin will be able to learn virtually all he needs to know in a very short period of time. To a good sysadmin, learning Linux is reasonably trivial.
Now if you just want cheap reboot monkeys instead of sysadmins, I'd agree with you.
Since the pole reversals/absence of magnetic field has occurred many times before without the atmosphere being stripped off by the solar wind, why would the solar wind strip it off this time?
With kernel modules you don't need to have the stuff loaded *in* the kernel all the time. All the distros I've used recently only have the stuff essential to run in the kernel image in /boot - the rest is all modules.