When I was a kid, we had a cat that actually figured out how to open doors. He'd jump up at the knob and grab it on the way down, which would turn the knob and knock the door open just enough that he could open it the rest of the way with his paw. My parents eventually had to start locking doors they didn't want him to get out of.
What do you call the original Battlezone? The only difference was, there wasn't any specialised add-on card to do this task on the market back then.
FWIW, many Atari vector games included extra coprocessors called "mathboxes" for calculating 3D projections. BattleZone was one of the first. Admittedly, it had much more in common with modern FPUs than modern 3D accelerators, but even back then people were dedicating silicon to 3D graphics.
I actually didn't see that sentence when I posted. So you're right, I should be modded down as redundant! Dunno why people were modding me up. (At least one of the mods did get it right, though.)
So if anybody with mod points to burn wants to -1 my original comment to hell, have at it.
If Acclaim was able to put their adds on gravestones they wouldnt get much benefit out of it.
You kidding? They're already getting press coverage for their game!
Talk about one hell of a publicity stunt (no pun intended). Even if they don't ever get a single ad actually placed on a tombstone, they're already ahead.
I didn't say Mozilla isn't better than Netscape -- I personally use Mozilla and think it's much superior -- but I wouldn't install it on somebody else's computer unless they were relatively tech-savvy. The main advantage Netscape 6 has over Mozilla is that plugins seek out the Netscape 6 plugin directory during installation, but usually skip over Mozilla. No big deal for me, since Mozilla usually picks up the.DLLs that get dumped in my Netscape 4.7 (for compatibility reasons only, really!) plugin directory, and I can copy over the troublesome ones. But other people don't look so kindly upon this. Getting the Java plugin working under Mozilla can be a (minor) hassle too -- Netscape 6 has the advantage that it's bundled with it, and the automated installer apparently works fine if you add it later.
MAPI support's another one -- it made it into Netscape 6.2, but it didn't make it into Mozilla until relatively recently. Same goes for spell-checking (still AWOL in Mozilla). I can live without them, but some people wouldn't. And on a college campus, having AOL mail and IM support built-in is a huge plus, although I personally would never use them.
Really, Mozilla's much superior to Netscape 6.2, but anything that doesn't work 100% out-of-the-box isn't much good for many people; keep in mind how many people use IE/OE because "that's what the computer came with." (Hell, just getting people to use a program named Mozilla Seamonkey would be a big enough hurdle.)
I'm on a college campus. Since people set up floor and campus mailing lists which inevitably get added to address books, we get a ton of E-mail worms being spread around. (Fortunately for me, the different schools have different mail servers, and it looks like the engineering school's mail server has some kind of server-side scanning on it.) It eventually got so bad that the entire arts & sciences school lost E-mail for two days thanks to one of the recent worms (I don't remember which) which practically made their server go up in flames. The only problem that's worse around here is spyware (*cough* New.net *cough*) killing peoples' Internet connections, and that's relatively recent, since people pick it up from recent versions of P2P apps.
So yeah, when people come up to me and ask "How can I stop all these E-mail viruses," I give them an honest answer: don't open E-mail attachments you're not expecting, update your virus scanner manually when you hear about a new worm (fortunately the copies of NAV our school gives out is pre-configured to automatically update itself every couple of weeks), and stop using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Their options are basically Netscape and Opera -- and most college students (myself included) are reluctant to cough up the registration fee for Opera, so that leaves one option.
I'm not going to go into the debate of whether the IE/OE combination is so dangerous because of Microsoft being incompetent or simply because 80something percent of the world uses it (it's been argued way too many times). But either way, switching to Netscape works, and so far nobody's complained. I've even gotten a couple of "ooh, pretty" comments once people saw Netscape's Modern theme.
That's a good idea for most/. readers, but Mozilla isn't really an end-user product; it lacks some of the polish of commerical browsers. Also Netscape 6.x has the advantage that, after branching, the Netscape team beats some of the bugs out of it. I personally use Mozilla, but when I "evangelize" a Windows browser, it's Netscape 6.2.1.
That said, the "spyware" here is really annoying, but it's disabled easily enough. Open prefs.js and change pref("browser.tracking.enabled", true);
to false, and you're done.
A better way to go if you do this a lot is to use the Netscape CCK to make your own CD without all the AOL crap included. The CCK won't let you edit this pref directly, but unzip browser.xpi and look for this line in all-ns.js. You can also make some interesting changes in the.js files in bin/defaults/pref -- like turning off all those AOL "partner" buttons by default and disabling the activation procedure.
Porting the games to a modern OS, like other people have mentioned, would not be feasible. Besides being complicated, in many situations, the publishers don't actually have the code (they didn't develop the game) so they can't port it; but they do have the IP rights to the game "universe" and exclusive publishing rights, so the developers can't legally port it either. (This is why there was never a true sequel to Wasteland after Interplay started self-publishing -- the programmers all worked at Interplay, but EA, who published Wasteland, had the rights to the Wasteland universe. It's also why we didn't see System Shock 2 until VIE sunk and Looking Glass jumped ship back to EA.)
One thing that might be interesting though is for some game companies to fund or license a PC emulator, like VMware or Bochs, and throw a package of a PC emulator, FreeDOS, and the game together. Lock out access to the BIOS, make pre-scripted CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that automatically run the game, and -- presto! -- you've got an old game that runs under modern OSes, with no tech support mess. The development budget on this would be reasonably high to start off with (to get the PC emulator) but for each individual title the development cost would be practically 0. Now you've just got the marketing issue of getting people to buy old games; throw enough together in a bundle, especially if you give them a few classics like one of the Ultima or Star Control games, and people'll bite.
(And yes, I know VMware would probably be prohibitively expensive, unless the publisher could get one hell of a bulk license discount combined with a discount for shipping a crippled version that wouldn't interfere with their regular business. I'm just using that as an example.)
When my parents signed up for SWBell DSL, they asked about sharing the connection, since I had set up a home network for them. They were told they'd be given just one IP address; if they felt like doing NAT it wasn't technically forbidden, but it wouldn't be supported, and they wouldn't help set it up.
Then the installation guy comes, and he tells them they ran out of their normal DSL modems, so they were giving people free upgrades to a better one. They had me take it look at it; turns out the "modem" was a nice hardware firewall/router combo that retails for around $300 or so.
Needless to say, the router's NAT function has come in really handy. Thanks, SWBell!
Do newer ATX boards even support 5.25" floppy drives??
Yes. It all depends on the floppy cable; you need one with a large connector, and most PCs/motherboards ship with cables that only have the smaller connectors for 3.5" drives. But if you can dig up a cable with the right connectors (or get one at Radio Shack) then it should work.
The biggest problem you might have is that a lot of 5.25" drives either are fixed as the first floppy drive, or have jumper settings that are long-lost. So you hook up your 5.25" as the first floppy and 3.5" as the second, and then swap them in the BIOS.
Incidentally, I recently built a 1.2 GHz Athlon box with a 5.25" drive by special request of the customer. It does work, and yes, even Windows 98 and 2000 support it. (Dunno about XP, but I'd presume so since it works with Windows 2000.)
(This is a little OT, since the orignal poster asked about external drives, but he can always do this and just sit the drive outside of the case somewhere, assuming this isn't supposed to be a permanent solution. Or he could just buy a bigger case.)
Good grief! Can somebody link to the tens of thousands of "designed for IE" webpages that are currently incompatible as a result of this patch?
Well, there would be a problem, but it's not something awful IE-specific HTML brought about. Since IE half-ignores MIME types, servers that don't have proper MIME types set up could suddenly have file associations break on their Web page. I was recently asked by someone about a problem they were having with.M3U files getting downloaded as text or being asked to be save them to disk in anything but IE. Turns out the Web server didn't have a MIME type set up for M3U files, and the guy who ran the server just argued "it works fine in IE."
So yeah, it would be a kinda big problem, and it's Microsoft's fault (if they wouldn't have set up a brain-dead policy of not handling MIME types properly then the servers would have been set up right to begin with). But it's not a "Designed for IE" page thing, and I doubt it's in the thousands of pages. Most pages that don't get the kind of traffic where somebody would notice bad HTML (e.g. homepages) are hosted on GeoCities/Angelfire/whatever which already have MIME types set up right.
That's not a time bomb, that's copy protection. If you tried to dump the ROMs to pirate the game, then you'd nuke the encryption tables and end up with a dump of encrypted data and an unusable board. Capcom was infamous for using this in their CPS-2 system; but if the board commits suicide from a dead battery then you can send it back to Capcom to get a new battery and a reprogrammed encryption key (for a fee, of course).
Hawking makes a lot of weird bets. He infamously bet Kip Thorne that Cygnus X-1 did not contain a black hole, even though Hawking himself believed it did, because he figured if he turned out to be wrong he might as well get something out of it. (Incidentally, the wager was a porno magazine subscription.)
Supposedly one of our school's quantum physics classes uses a book with a reproduction of one of his written bets in it.
Unless you combine it with the fact that IE is set up to automatically execute certain MIME types (like audio/x-wav). Send a message with an attached.EXE file, but hack up the message so the MIME type reads something else, and -- presto! -- instantly executing attachments. That's one of the attacks Nimda used.
Nimda already did this, to some degree. Both the Web page and E-mail worm version of it (Nimda attacked on so many different fronts -- IIS, IE, SMB, and OE -- it was insane) passed.EXE files to the user using standard HTML redirects. (Or something similar. I don't know the exact tech details since our university's POP3 was kind enough to filter Nimda, so I didn't get a live specimen to look at.)
No problem for most E-mail programs or browsers, since they'll just prompt to save the.EXE file to disk. Not so with IE or OE -- the message/page was hacked up to give the.EXE file an audio/x-wav MIME type, so it got executed right away instead.
Incidentally, I've seen a variant of Nimda/BadTrans/OE-worm-of-the-week over the past couple of days that's been using the BadTrans "Re: " subject but tries to automatically launch an attached file ala Nimda instead of relying on social engineering. I've just been dumping it in the trash, but next time I get one I'll look at the source to see if it's using MIME types.
Except the whole demo page, content included, is a large Flash file. (You can't interact with any of the text or links -- try it.) I assume to get it to work on a real page they'd have to float a Flash ad over the page using layers, which probably won't convert over so well between IE and any standards-compliant browser like Mozilla, Konqueror, or Opera.
I'm sure all 3 of my chords would sound... well, just as bad, but digital.
In entertainment news today, it was revealed that CmdrTaco is in fact the new lead guitarist for Limp Bizkit. Widespread rumors suggest that Jon Katz may be Fred Durst in disguise.
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When I was a kid, we had a cat that actually figured out how to open doors. He'd jump up at the knob and grab it on the way down, which would turn the knob and knock the door open just enough that he could open it the rest of the way with his paw. My parents eventually had to start locking doors they didn't want him to get out of.
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I finished reading it, I just somehow missed the last line. My brain probably filtered it out thinking it was a signature. That, and it was late.
So if anybody with mod points to burn wants to -1 my original comment to hell, have at it.
Talk about one hell of a publicity stunt (no pun intended). Even if they don't ever get a single ad actually placed on a tombstone, they're already ahead.
VoiceStream and Cingular both use GSM, if you are in their service area. I'm told AT&T is planning on switching eventually.
Isn't it obvious? Call them all Bruce. *dodges hurled tomatoes*
MAPI support's another one -- it made it into Netscape 6.2, but it didn't make it into Mozilla until relatively recently. Same goes for spell-checking (still AWOL in Mozilla). I can live without them, but some people wouldn't. And on a college campus, having AOL mail and IM support built-in is a huge plus, although I personally would never use them.
Really, Mozilla's much superior to Netscape 6.2, but anything that doesn't work 100% out-of-the-box isn't much good for many people; keep in mind how many people use IE/OE because "that's what the computer came with." (Hell, just getting people to use a program named Mozilla Seamonkey would be a big enough hurdle.)
So yeah, when people come up to me and ask "How can I stop all these E-mail viruses," I give them an honest answer: don't open E-mail attachments you're not expecting, update your virus scanner manually when you hear about a new worm (fortunately the copies of NAV our school gives out is pre-configured to automatically update itself every couple of weeks), and stop using Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. Their options are basically Netscape and Opera -- and most college students (myself included) are reluctant to cough up the registration fee for Opera, so that leaves one option.
I'm not going to go into the debate of whether the IE/OE combination is so dangerous because of Microsoft being incompetent or simply because 80something percent of the world uses it (it's been argued way too many times). But either way, switching to Netscape works, and so far nobody's complained. I've even gotten a couple of "ooh, pretty" comments once people saw Netscape's Modern theme.
That said, the "spyware" here is really annoying, but it's disabled easily enough. Open prefs.js and change pref("browser.tracking.enabled", true); to false, and you're done.
A better way to go if you do this a lot is to use the Netscape CCK to make your own CD without all the AOL crap included. The CCK won't let you edit this pref directly, but unzip browser.xpi and look for this line in all-ns.js. You can also make some interesting changes in the .js files in bin/defaults/pref -- like turning off all those AOL "partner" buttons by default and disabling the activation procedure.
One thing that might be interesting though is for some game companies to fund or license a PC emulator, like VMware or Bochs, and throw a package of a PC emulator, FreeDOS, and the game together. Lock out access to the BIOS, make pre-scripted CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files that automatically run the game, and -- presto! -- you've got an old game that runs under modern OSes, with no tech support mess. The development budget on this would be reasonably high to start off with (to get the PC emulator) but for each individual title the development cost would be practically 0. Now you've just got the marketing issue of getting people to buy old games; throw enough together in a bundle, especially if you give them a few classics like one of the Ultima or Star Control games, and people'll bite.
(And yes, I know VMware would probably be prohibitively expensive, unless the publisher could get one hell of a bulk license discount combined with a discount for shipping a crippled version that wouldn't interfere with their regular business. I'm just using that as an example.)
<form METHOD="post" ACTION="mailto:vx2org@hotmail.com? subject=delete page" ENCTYPE="text/plain">
Somehow sending all these requests through a Hotmail account, of all places, isn't very reassuring.
Then the installation guy comes, and he tells them they ran out of their normal DSL modems, so they were giving people free upgrades to a better one. They had me take it look at it; turns out the "modem" was a nice hardware firewall/router combo that retails for around $300 or so.
Needless to say, the router's NAT function has come in really handy. Thanks, SWBell!
Stay tuned for a preview of tomorrow on Ask Slashdot:
The biggest problem you might have is that a lot of 5.25" drives either are fixed as the first floppy drive, or have jumper settings that are long-lost. So you hook up your 5.25" as the first floppy and 3.5" as the second, and then swap them in the BIOS.
Incidentally, I recently built a 1.2 GHz Athlon box with a 5.25" drive by special request of the customer. It does work, and yes, even Windows 98 and 2000 support it. (Dunno about XP, but I'd presume so since it works with Windows 2000.)
(This is a little OT, since the orignal poster asked about external drives, but he can always do this and just sit the drive outside of the case somewhere, assuming this isn't supposed to be a permanent solution. Or he could just buy a bigger case.)
So yeah, it would be a kinda big problem, and it's Microsoft's fault (if they wouldn't have set up a brain-dead policy of not handling MIME types properly then the servers would have been set up right to begin with). But it's not a "Designed for IE" page thing, and I doubt it's in the thousands of pages. Most pages that don't get the kind of traffic where somebody would notice bad HTML (e.g. homepages) are hosted on GeoCities/Angelfire/whatever which already have MIME types set up right.
Of course, that doesn't stop anybody from getting the machines to run 68K code they wrote to decrypt the ROMs and pass the decrypted data to a computer. It just means you have to be far, far more determined than most pirates were.
Supposedly one of our school's quantum physics classes uses a book with a reproduction of one of his written bets in it.
Unless you combine it with the fact that IE is set up to automatically execute certain MIME types (like audio/x-wav). Send a message with an attached .EXE file, but hack up the message so the MIME type reads something else, and -- presto! -- instantly executing attachments. That's one of the attacks Nimda used.
No problem for most E-mail programs or browsers, since they'll just prompt to save the .EXE file to disk. Not so with IE or OE -- the message/page was hacked up to give the .EXE file an audio/x-wav MIME type, so it got executed right away instead.
Incidentally, I've seen a variant of Nimda/BadTrans/OE-worm-of-the-week over the past couple of days that's been using the BadTrans "Re: " subject but tries to automatically launch an attached file ala Nimda instead of relying on social engineering. I've just been dumping it in the trash, but next time I get one I'll look at the source to see if it's using MIME types.
If only dealing with Rambus were this easy.
Except the whole demo page, content included, is a large Flash file. (You can't interact with any of the text or links -- try it.) I assume to get it to work on a real page they'd have to float a Flash ad over the page using layers, which probably won't convert over so well between IE and any standards-compliant browser like Mozilla, Konqueror, or Opera.