Yeah. Old players die off, new blood either doesn't know about 'good old games' or is too enthralled with new shiny, playership dwindles or company loses interest, stuff dies. While what makes even old games fun for players may vary, one of the abiding reasons seems to be good story-telling; for other games, the challenge of a good dungeon or skill (Star Raiders, for instance - steady hand, good reflexes, and a bit of planning).
Another peeve of mine is the suprising number of classic games that while apparently making no money for anyone are still locked up, rather than being released into public domain. Not only might it be interesting to see some of the code (how they packed so much game goodness into a small ROM or onto a floppy) but 'the community' could have a blast with tweaking, modding, classic-game tournaments.
I enjoyed the remakes of the King's Quest series, for instance; there was a lot of love poured into them. Not only are they fun to play, and not just for nostalgia's sake, but they're great for introducing young'uns to a whole style of gaming they might otherwise never see.
Oh! Gotcha, hadn't thought of it, never played any games online yet. I think you're right. Unless the game's company turned over any server-side proprietary stuff and let a game's community take over.
It's not that I don't get what you're saying; different strokes, and all that. And I have no great liking for extra parts, either; just enough to get the job done as I prefer.
Yes, I run psensors; right now it's displaying CPU temp in the icon in Unity launcher - I could change that to GPU. What I have set are some values in BIOS for "if all hell breaks loose", and psensors is set to notify me if certain temps are reached by either CPU or GPU. But since the machine is always on that wouldn't matter if I'm not here to see them; I don't have any program to shut down the machine but I bet a smart fellow could write a script for doing so. I don't know how accurate the reported temps are, not having an appropriate thermometer, and not knowing how accurate the onboard chip is. From what I can gather from what I've read on AMD's site and from data from Tom's Hardware, CPU temp seems to be close to projected actual for my load, ditto for video card under heavy load. Reported fan speeds seem to be close, given specs from their manufacturers and, in the case of the CPU cooler, from frostytech also.
So far as I can tell I have no problems with update notifications (all updates are done at once when there are any, whether for kernel, OS elements, browsers, drivers, applications, or utility programs - a few times a week perhaps; a few clicks and entering a password is not what I'd consider onerous), resource load, software conflicts, and I haven't gotten a pain in the ass from installing and briefly setting my preferences in one utility and several times in BIOS, once for each CPU and GPU that's been in the machine.
But that wasn't my point. If one of three fans died, I could reduce the settings for card and programs to let me limp along until either the fan or the card could be replaced. (I had no notion of hot swapping a bloody fan, btw.) This is when a monitoring app might come in handy, because I'd have historical readings to compare against. That would help me, for instance, did I have one of these cards, because I haven't a spare card on hand and the onboard video died along with the NIC two years ago. (I was saving up for parts - which could have been spares as they were gotten - for a new build but that went away about as quickly as the several pounds of calf muscle and blood clot. Gotta love that DVT.)
Oh, yeah, I had an 8800GT die last year. As hot as that card ran normally.... Don't really know why, though, and my hardware guy hasn't gotten around yet to tearing it down to find out. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to have a fuse or something, aina?
Uh, I think JMS was on GEnie circa '84 before the Web existed, late Summer and Fall of '91. I seem to recall some of his posts in the sci-fi and writers roundtables, but I was spending most of my time in the Atari ST RT and over at Pournelle's RT.
Netflix on Ubuntu desktop works fine for me. CPU is a 1090T. I have it set to run a project on BOINC using all six cores full time; when I do something that needs graphics or CPU it usually gives way gracefully. If the crunching causes a problem with what I want to run I can suspend the project.
There are many things I _want_. Meanwhile, can I afford it, there are some things I just want to _do_.
If one of three fans die, you have time to save, shut down, replace. If one of one fans die, you hope the card will automagically shut itself down before permanent damage is done, that you have a replacement fan or card on hand, or that your mobo has a working vid out.
Rather reminds me of a question from Chris Crawford's Balance of Power, after you've inadvertently started World War III: "What will you do now, smart person?"
The writer's native language appears to be French and the result of the effort to put it into English I considered pretty good. I had no trouble understanding the article.
If you knew it would arrive, might even be better to send it to various vid sites starting maybe with YouTube and the like, or to public page of one or more of the social sites where you might have membership.
Because you might find yourself in a jurisdiction that can jail you for not either handing over the decryption key or, perhaps, being allowed to decrypt it yourself.
No doubt; I agree the schmeer oughta be on it's own somewhere. A simple post with link would then suffice, no?
But I was thinking of those links that led me to some places where I did more reading of a few things that I found useful or informative. Separating wheat from chaff was non-trivial, of course. "Time well spent" may've been an over-reach, but learn stuff I did. I think. Time stamp shows 0817; for me it was more oh-dark-thirty at the end of a very long day. And I did preface all by admitting 'simple-minded'. [grin]
Don't know if the hosts file has helped, cuz I forgot to turn off AdBlock, and had already selected most of what I intended to read before crashing at around 0600 local.
No, but they show we're getting better at incrementally and usefully augmenting our ability to discern and watch changes in, for example different flora and how they fare - useful data indeed relating to their overall health, water management, degree of susceptibility to wildfire, blight and other microbial and insect predations, and a raft of stuff I don't know about or have forgotten. That's just the plants part. I'm old enough to remember when the first Landsats were put up; data returned was eye-opening; we started learning of things that few had even thought of, because we'd never had the ability to see them before.
To you, no, nothing special. To people who give a shit about some of the complexity involved in looking at what's going on with our planet, yeah, it means a bit. And if real rocket science done by real rocket scientists doesn't match with the ostensible mission of/. what does? In your expert opinion, that is.
Ok, I'm a simple-minded soul, as some here may have noticed. While I can't claim to have read all of this latest 'oh no, another hosts file screed' because I skimmed portions, I got some seemingly solid info out of it (ditto for some of the earlier ones I've read in whole or part.)
Funny thing is, for all the excruciating length of it (yet not much compared to all the reading that I end up doing most days) I came away today thinking it may have been time well spent - it's prompted me to finally get around to 'installing' a hosts file list, not sure which one, likely the one from someonewhocares.org. If it works as well as what I used for a while about ten years ago, I'll be happy. And grateful to APK for the lesson and the reminder.
YMMV
Oh, and for on-topic, and what I stopped here for: the vids are freaking amazing - the mine cart blew me away: all that in such a small space, and in many ways superior to much of what was done in 16/32 bit days as well. My hat is off (and yes, I wear one) to the skilled, talented, and imaginative programmers, true geeks all. Thanks.
Am I the only one wondering how they installed the lights in the caves?
"Know ye the truth, and the truth shall set you free."
Right. Thanks, anyway. [grin]
I have to guess that it's good to know the state of play, but too often lately I almost think I'd prefer not to know just how bad it is. A bit of bliss about now would go a long way.
Yeah, odd, that. Many dismissively use "ah, that's just semantics" yet, beyond grunt, gesture, posture, facial expression, semantics is all we have left with which attempt communication with another.
So I think you make a useful distinction, to help increase clarity of thought by using correct word.
I think Patrick Henry chose his words carefully: "Give me liberty...."
Apart from some inherent curiosity (same as lead me to trying out, for grins, Fortran and COBOL on my Atari ST), the practical allure of an alternative to Windows that was also free had definite appeal. And, were I smart enough, the capability to examine source code and change it to my liking was beyond intriguing.
So, in early Oughts, started trying out various distros to see what was going on. Finally went Linux-only a few years ago. (Yeah, I'm slow, stupid, and lazy, so what? That's part of the 'freedom' I really like.)
Linux mostly does, and reasonably well, most of what I want, and generally with less overall hassle than the alternatives I've tried or leased (Windows). Pragmatic wins.
"The only company to survive the 90s bloodbath turned into a consumer electronics vendor." Obvious, but only after you mention it, and finely insightful. Thanks for the perspective I didn't have before; I'd never stopped to think about it.
Nope, you're doing exactly right and fine. Welcome to the bafflement zone.
I'm guessing that the question got modded up for the excellent sarcasm - else the innocent unintended sarcasm or for the backhanded nasty sarcasm - a win no matter what. And, while there are indeed quite a few games that can be played natively on Linux, many are at least historically not quite ready for prime time or in various beta- and alpha-stages; for years when finding a listing of Linux games, Tux Racer was at or near top of list, being an earlier fairly well-polished effort, so it got bragged on.
Since they're closing up getting more visits wouldn't do anything useful, so poor assumption on your part. Moreover the reason given for closing the site is 'lack both the time and the ambition to do what is necessary to keep the site afloat', so props to your reading comprehension.
So you've used Linux for all that time and never heard of the site. Yippee. Had you ever done a search for "Linux games" you'd most likely have stumbled across it in the first ten results; it shows up as happypenguin.org.
But since you've never heard of it, you can somehow be certain that there's nothing of value being lost. Bravo. Interesting way to live a life: "If I haven't heard of it it's worthless." Of all the arrogance I've met in life yours strikes me as the worst yet. Congrats, and all that. Sorry, I'm fresh out of prizes. But since you likely never heard of me ere now, I have no worries, being worthless. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes sense. A backup is little good if one can't restore from it.
Yeah. Old players die off, new blood either doesn't know about 'good old games' or is too enthralled with new shiny, playership dwindles or company loses interest, stuff dies. While what makes even old games fun for players may vary, one of the abiding reasons seems to be good story-telling; for other games, the challenge of a good dungeon or skill (Star Raiders, for instance - steady hand, good reflexes, and a bit of planning).
Another peeve of mine is the suprising number of classic games that while apparently making no money for anyone are still locked up, rather than being released into public domain. Not only might it be interesting to see some of the code (how they packed so much game goodness into a small ROM or onto a floppy) but 'the community' could have a blast with tweaking, modding, classic-game tournaments.
I enjoyed the remakes of the King's Quest series, for instance; there was a lot of love poured into them. Not only are they fun to play, and not just for nostalgia's sake, but they're great for introducing young'uns to a whole style of gaming they might otherwise never see.
It's a system but increasingly not ours and not one of justice. It is too often a fig leaf for might makes right.
Oh! Gotcha, hadn't thought of it, never played any games online yet. I think you're right. Unless the game's company turned over any server-side proprietary stuff and let a game's community take over.
It's not that I don't get what you're saying; different strokes, and all that. And I have no great liking for extra parts, either; just enough to get the job done as I prefer.
Yes, I run psensors; right now it's displaying CPU temp in the icon in Unity launcher - I could change that to GPU. What I have set are some values in BIOS for "if all hell breaks loose", and psensors is set to notify me if certain temps are reached by either CPU or GPU. But since the machine is always on that wouldn't matter if I'm not here to see them; I don't have any program to shut down the machine but I bet a smart fellow could write a script for doing so. I don't know how accurate the reported temps are, not having an appropriate thermometer, and not knowing how accurate the onboard chip is. From what I can gather from what I've read on AMD's site and from data from Tom's Hardware, CPU temp seems to be close to projected actual for my load, ditto for video card under heavy load. Reported fan speeds seem to be close, given specs from their manufacturers and, in the case of the CPU cooler, from frostytech also.
So far as I can tell I have no problems with update notifications (all updates are done at once when there are any, whether for kernel, OS elements, browsers, drivers, applications, or utility programs - a few times a week perhaps; a few clicks and entering a password is not what I'd consider onerous), resource load, software conflicts, and I haven't gotten a pain in the ass from installing and briefly setting my preferences in one utility and several times in BIOS, once for each CPU and GPU that's been in the machine.
But that wasn't my point. If one of three fans died, I could reduce the settings for card and programs to let me limp along until either the fan or the card could be replaced. (I had no notion of hot swapping a bloody fan, btw.) This is when a monitoring app might come in handy, because I'd have historical readings to compare against. That would help me, for instance, did I have one of these cards, because I haven't a spare card on hand and the onboard video died along with the NIC two years ago. (I was saving up for parts - which could have been spares as they were gotten - for a new build but that went away about as quickly as the several pounds of calf muscle and blood clot. Gotta love that DVT.)
Oh, yeah, I had an 8800GT die last year. As hot as that card ran normally.... Don't really know why, though, and my hardware guy hasn't gotten around yet to tearing it down to find out. You'd think it wouldn't be that hard to have a fuse or something, aina?
Uh, I think JMS was on GEnie circa '84 before the Web existed, late Summer and Fall of '91. I seem to recall some of his posts in the sci-fi and writers roundtables, but I was spending most of my time in the Atari ST RT and over at Pournelle's RT.
Why on earth would you want to watch it on your computer?
Because it's what I have.
Don't know about that complicated stuff, but Netflix ran fine in an XP Home Premium vm in VirtualBox on my desktop machine.
Netflix on Ubuntu desktop works fine for me. CPU is a 1090T. I have it set to run a project on BOINC using all six cores full time; when I do something that needs graphics or CPU it usually gives way gracefully. If the crunching causes a problem with what I want to run I can suspend the project.
There are many things I _want_. Meanwhile, can I afford it, there are some things I just want to _do_.
http://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/hagarthehorrible/s-1297130 from yesterday
I might guess your sig is to aggravate the grammar nazis but it still gives me the fingernails-on-blackboard reaction.
"For all intents and purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That raises the question, "who cares?"
Maybe they ran out of Juche?
If one of three fans die, you have time to save, shut down, replace.
If one of one fans die, you hope the card will automagically shut itself down before permanent damage is done, that you have a replacement fan or card on hand, or that your mobo has a working vid out.
Rather reminds me of a question from Chris Crawford's Balance of Power, after you've inadvertently started World War III: "What will you do now, smart person?"
The writer's native language appears to be French and the result of the effort to put it into English I considered pretty good. I had no trouble understanding the article.
You mean, on LInux, the emulators will stop working? Ditto DOSBox? The ROM images will evaporate?
If you knew it would arrive, might even be better to send it to various vid sites starting maybe with YouTube and the like, or to public page of one or more of the social sites where you might have membership.
Because you might find yourself in a jurisdiction that can jail you for not either handing over the decryption key or, perhaps, being allowed to decrypt it yourself.
No doubt; I agree the schmeer oughta be on it's own somewhere. A simple post with link would then suffice, no?
But I was thinking of those links that led me to some places where I did more reading of a few things that I found useful or informative. Separating wheat from chaff was non-trivial, of course. "Time well spent" may've been an over-reach, but learn stuff I did. I think. Time stamp shows 0817; for me it was more oh-dark-thirty at the end of a very long day. And I did preface all by admitting 'simple-minded'. [grin]
Don't know if the hosts file has helped, cuz I forgot to turn off AdBlock, and had already selected most of what I intended to read before crashing at around 0600 local.
And for you to recognize that makes you a gentleman and on your way to scholar.
"I think it's unlikely anyone would say "lets start locking up or watching people who haven't committed any crimes based solely on brain scans.""
Not yet.
No, but they show we're getting better at incrementally and usefully augmenting our ability to discern and watch changes in, for example different flora and how they fare - useful data indeed relating to their overall health, water management, degree of susceptibility to wildfire, blight and other microbial and insect predations, and a raft of stuff I don't know about or have forgotten. That's just the plants part. I'm old enough to remember when the first Landsats were put up; data returned was eye-opening; we started learning of things that few had even thought of, because we'd never had the ability to see them before.
To you, no, nothing special. To people who give a shit about some of the complexity involved in looking at what's going on with our planet, yeah, it means a bit. And if real rocket science done by real rocket scientists doesn't match with the ostensible mission of /. what does? In your expert opinion, that is.
Ok, I'm a simple-minded soul, as some here may have noticed. While I can't claim to have read all of this latest 'oh no, another hosts file screed' because I skimmed portions, I got some seemingly solid info out of it (ditto for some of the earlier ones I've read in whole or part.)
Funny thing is, for all the excruciating length of it (yet not much compared to all the reading that I end up doing most days) I came away today thinking it may have been time well spent - it's prompted me to finally get around to 'installing' a hosts file list, not sure which one, likely the one from someonewhocares.org. If it works as well as what I used for a while about ten years ago, I'll be happy. And grateful to APK for the lesson and the reminder.
YMMV
Oh, and for on-topic, and what I stopped here for: the vids are freaking amazing - the mine cart blew me away: all that in such a small space, and in many ways superior to much of what was done in 16/32 bit days as well. My hat is off (and yes, I wear one) to the skilled, talented, and imaginative programmers, true geeks all. Thanks.
Am I the only one wondering how they installed the lights in the caves?
"Know ye the truth, and the truth shall set you free."
Right. Thanks, anyway. [grin]
I have to guess that it's good to know the state of play, but too often lately I almost think I'd prefer not to know just how bad it is. A bit of bliss about now would go a long way.
Yeah, odd, that. Many dismissively use "ah, that's just semantics" yet, beyond grunt, gesture, posture, facial expression, semantics is all we have left with which attempt communication with another.
So I think you make a useful distinction, to help increase clarity of thought by using correct word.
I think Patrick Henry chose his words carefully: "Give me liberty...."
Apart from some inherent curiosity (same as lead me to trying out, for grins, Fortran and COBOL on my Atari ST), the practical allure of an alternative to Windows that was also free had definite appeal. And, were I smart enough, the capability to examine source code and change it to my liking was beyond intriguing.
So, in early Oughts, started trying out various distros to see what was going on. Finally went Linux-only a few years ago. (Yeah, I'm slow, stupid, and lazy, so what? That's part of the 'freedom' I really like.)
Linux mostly does, and reasonably well, most of what I want, and generally with less overall hassle than the alternatives I've tried or leased (Windows). Pragmatic wins.
"The only company to survive the 90s bloodbath turned into a consumer electronics vendor." Obvious, but only after you mention it, and finely insightful. Thanks for the perspective I didn't have before; I'd never stopped to think about it.
Nope, you're doing exactly right and fine. Welcome to the bafflement zone.
I'm guessing that the question got modded up for the excellent sarcasm - else the innocent unintended sarcasm or for the backhanded nasty sarcasm - a win no matter what. And, while there are indeed quite a few games that can be played natively on Linux, many are at least historically not quite ready for prime time or in various beta- and alpha-stages; for years when finding a listing of Linux games, Tux Racer was at or near top of list, being an earlier fairly well-polished effort, so it got bragged on.
Since they're closing up getting more visits wouldn't do anything useful, so poor assumption on your part. Moreover the reason given for closing the site is 'lack both the time and the ambition to do what is necessary to keep the site afloat', so props to your reading comprehension.
So you've used Linux for all that time and never heard of the site. Yippee. Had you ever done a search for "Linux games" you'd most likely have stumbled across it in the first ten results; it shows up as happypenguin.org.
But since you've never heard of it, you can somehow be certain that there's nothing of value being lost. Bravo. Interesting way to live a life: "If I haven't heard of it it's worthless." Of all the arrogance I've met in life yours strikes me as the worst yet. Congrats, and all that. Sorry, I'm fresh out of prizes. But since you likely never heard of me ere now, I have no worries, being worthless. Thanks.