I'm not buying consoles because their games tend to be vapid and very weak. They're simplistic, lowest-common-denominator games that don't last me more than a day for the best of them. They're not moddable. They aren't strategically deep, 99% of them. And I was reared on AppleII games which, while they were simple, tried to be thought-provoking and challenging on a deeper level than twitch reflexes.
I just don't like the console format.
And I'm buying fewer PC games now than ever. I can't remember what the last one I bought was. It might have been the first Dawn of War, which was... OK.
The next one I'm going to buy will likely be Supreme Commander, which I trust will be excellent.
Games magazines are not trustworthy. Almost all of them are either on the take or infected with hype fanboyism.
Game companies are not trustworthy. They lie incessantly about hardware requirements, features and everything else, while releasing the same warmedover shit again and again.
Software stores are not trustworthy, and collude with the above two groups. Their pig-in-a-poke sales scheme-- overpriced games and no return policy-- has burned me more times than I care to mention.
Like so many others, the entire games industry from previews through production through reviews all the way to the bargain bin, is driven increasingly by marketing. Rather than release good product, companies use unethical marketing tactics to sell their shit, in the name of short-term profits.
The only good large house is EA. At least they give the appearance of giving a damn.
In many ways, all this is similar to the business model of the MPAA and the RIAA. After this latest crash, expect the game companies to blame their shortfalls on piracy, and go after high school kids who decide to pirate Duke Nukem MCXXVIII rather than spend $50 on entertainment that won't last them a day.
Game Industry: I know you guys read this kind of thing. You people need to listen to us, your decades-loyal supporters, before you lose us to other forms of entertainment.
I'd like to see an RTS AI based on military command structure.
The AI would be shaped like a tree.
At the top, there would be a strategic AI controlling resource management and making high-level strategic decisions like whether to rush, guns/butter, etc.
It would have a certain number of sub-generals, each of which might have a different sector of the map or some other division method.
Each general would control a certain number of companies. Now, these generals might be just AI objects, or they might be connected to command-vehicle objects within their areas of operations. The generals would make decisions within their AOO, keeping track of chokepoints, the large-scale enemy shape, etc.
Each company would be run by a lieutenant, which would control a certain number of platoons, and would conduct recon and other operatonal-level tasks.
You get the idea. Basically, AI would percolate down through a tree, from the general all the way down to the troops in the field who would have little more than basic insect intelligence (much like the American military.)
I think this type of AI could be made absolutely brutal.
Furthermore, if the command units did indeed map to troops and vehicles in the field, then command structure breakdown and operational paralysis would occur in a very realistic way...
This is absolutely correct. I've never seen Haatsumi but I've seen students of his students and they're pretty darn good.
I've also seen Dan Inosanto, who is on Haatsumi's level, and that guy is the quickest person I've ever seen anywhere. Flat out amazing.
Something nobody talks about with regards to these guys is how durable they are. For you to do martial arts for that long, if there was anything wrong with your body physically-- in fact if you weren't a near-perfect physical specimen-- you would have washed out long ago.
Bujinkan and ninjutsu are unfairly discredited. I do think that a lot of ninjutsu students in the US buy into the mystique quite a bit too much and it's rather annoying. There's something very cultlike about bujinkan schools and I just don't see the damn point of that. But props to them for "keepin it real" after all these years, unlike so many other arts, and through duress and great pressure to sell out.
How about I just won't watch their stupid-ass shows, their packaged, manipulative, commercialized news, their inane formulaic product placements masquerading as edgy dramas? 99.999% of this crap isn't even worth pirating, for free, without commercials, to watch in half a window during long compiles. So why in god's name would ANYBODY sit in a chair and watch it, even if they're not hijacking your set?
How about I won't pay for cable channels which are, themselves, becoming more and more infested with ads?
How about the entire media establishment go fuck themselves?
Last time I watched TV was for about 3 days in September, 01. I don't intend to ever do it again.
Although Hannity handing it to the Westboro Baptist Church lady was hilarious, I'll give it that: http://empiresfall.blogspot.com/
Don't bother, this guy's an authoritarian, one of the kind who loves his country like a 4 year old girl loves Mommy.
Nothing the State does could possibly be wrong in his eyes. He has no idea what liberty really is; he's never read any of the writing of the thinkers who framed our constitution and who informed the views of the Founding Fathers, and if it were up to him, he'd throw all those people in Gitmo.
I'm hearing more and more about the idea of a national strike.
We technicians bitch and complain about this kind of flagrant privacy violation. It would be much more difficult for these people, I'd think, if there were some sort of technician union that had technical rights as well as civil rights as part of its platform.
It's real simple: 1) Don't help these fucks in any way. 2) Harm them in any way you can get away with. Small needling, over and over again. Refusal to cooperate. Take their money and do nothing.
That's true, and at the same time the size of drive technology is increasing by a thousand times every 10 years. I think, though, that we're going to have exabyte drives within 10 years. Maybe I'm on crack, but the petabyte discovery makes me think I'm right. What's after that, yottabyte? With an exabyte, do you think any private citizen is going to have the need for as much data as the entire human race produces in a year?
I don't.
Nice obligatory windows bash there. I just wish they'd hurry up and die already.
There comes a point when there's too much storage...
I know, I know: 640k and all that. Hear me out...
What would be the sum total of petabytes taken up by: * every music performance ever * every movie * every television show * For that matter, recordings of every word ever spoken by every human to have ever lived on earth? (5 exabytes)
The human race supposedly produces 1-2 exabytes a year of information and that number is increasing.
Yes, yes, I know it's huge. Point is, sometime soon we're going to reach that sort of storage capacity. How soon is it going to be that someone announces that exabytes are available? If petabyte drives are around, exabyte arrays will be following shortly.
In my lifetime, we've gone from K to megs to gigs, and now terabytes. Not so long ago, I remember marvelling at the 1gig drives that were out (about 12 years ago now.)
If you take the subset of those items that includes "good" or desirable data for any given person, you have a much, much smaller sum of data.
I had this conversation with a friend who was asking if storage technology will be in demand forever. I told him I don't think it will, I think it will become a situation where you will have more than you could possibly ever need and wouldn't have any need for more. There's just a limit to the kind of data that people, especially normal consumers, are going to want to store.
'Course, one possible use for technology is computation caching, and the need for that is infinite.
Other than political reasons-- for which this should be exploited to the hilt in order to frighten the credulous even more about the policies of the dictatorial and illegitimate Bush administration--
Other than those reasons, being afraid of the NSA because of cookies is like being afraid of thermonuclear war because it might muss your hair.
They eavesdrop all electronic communications. They can crack cryptography in realtime. If they want to, they can have you disappeared to some torture prison in a foreign country where you will divulge anything in order to get the agony to stop.
And these fuckwits are worried about a persistent cookie.
One thing I perceive as a problem with both Gnome and KDE is that they are trying to be like Windows. It may be that the Windows interface has become the QWERTY of GUIs, and is so familiar to users that they are unable to learn anything new, but there have been numerous advances on various UNIX WMs that have never made it onto the Windows platform.
For example: Nextstep/Windowmaker tearoff menus. These are extremely handy because you can literally build gui applications from just these menus and collections of scripts. Also, these menus scroll if they are outside the screen. I can place menus at the bottom of the screen in a row with just their titles peeking out into the bottom of the screen. Then, when I slide my mouse down past the title, the menu scrolls up onto the screen. So depending on what I'm doing, I can build my own adhoc UI out of menus and come up with something quite functional.
Fluxbox tabbable applications are another great example of flexible functionality. I can group applications how I want them and all it takes to navigate from one to the other is to slide the mouse into the region of the desired tab at the top of an application window. This is excellent because it is a very efficient and intuitive use of screen real estate.
One reason for the huge popularity of Firefox over IE is the tabs. Tabs are so easy to use that people pick up on them right away. And the fact that they're rearrangeable in Fluxbox means that they offer adhoc functionality for the power user.
An application that I've had a great deal of success with is called 3ddesk. This is a drop-in enhancement for mousewheel workspace navigation: when switching between workspaces, the mousewheel spins an OpenGL cylinder tiled with realtime-updated views of each workspace. Seeing the workspaces laid out in this manner allows much better spacial orientation than offered by any pager, and it becomes very quick and simple to flip back and forth between desktops.
There are a number of reasons why I dislike both of the dominant windowmanagers. Gnome is simply too dumbed down. Sure, it offers things like gnome-swallow, and drawers which allow me to swallow up things like transparent xterms running "top" and "tail -f/var/log/syslog" so that these can be unfurled at a moment's notice-- but the gui is simply too restrictive and unwieldy in configuration.
KDE isn't quite so bad, but lacks many of the things that Gnome features. KDE does not even have drawers that I'm aware of. The separate kicker panels make up for this failing to some extent but not entirely. In both Gnome and KDE, the functionality for editing menus is not nearly as available or intuitive as it is in Fluxbox or Windowmaker. When moving over to the other light windowmanagers like XFCE, Icewm, Waimea, et cetera, there's simply not enough functionality there at all. We have a pinboard and a cute panel with cute little icons, all mostly static and without configurable function beyond a click on an icon. In Fluxbox and Blackbox, the differences between the "slit" (dock) and the panel are obscure to inexperienced users, and the lack of configurability of the panels makes these next to unusable. Yes, there's a task bar, but this isn't Windows 95, and I'm usually running up to 30 separate windows or groups of applications.
So, I use Windowmaker.
Windowmaker is small and light enough that I can export entire login sessions, and the gui is snappy and quick. If I want a taskbar, I middleclick on the desktop and drag the menu that comes up so that it becomes a tearoff; then I stash this at the bottom of the screen as I mentioned above so that it becomes a slide-up menu.
The applet dock is extensible, intuitive and powerful. Can't say the same for the clip but it's pretty good.
It's a hell of a note that I'm using a gui from 1989 and it beats the pants off of anything out there for extensibility, speed and functionality. I understand that NextStep is going to be the gui of the next A
alias su="xterm -fg white -bg darkred -e su" so when you su, you get a new xterm in colors to remind you that that xterm is root.
Use fluxbox. The tabs mean that you can stack up things like xterms.
If you run gnome panel, you can put drawers on it. The drawers can contain swallowed apps, such as xterms running top, tail syslog, watch processes, etc. So you can pop open a monitor drawer and xterms running text monitors emerge.
Check into 3ddesk. It's an applet that maps your desktops onto a 3d cylinder that can be rotated with the mousewheel for desktop switching. Much more useful than it sounds. The visual preview and positional awareness that it gives make it possible to use many more desktops than you ordinarily could without them becoming useless clutter like they can with traditional pagers.
I don't know why you're concerned about maximizing real estate with a dual-head display. I get by just fine with a 19 inch display.
That said, there are some technologies emerging that will allow you to use x11 functionality to use a laptop or additional workstation as a second (or third) screen controlled by the same desktop. Check into x2vnc.
Shipping containers are similar in shape to the modularized boxes the US has developed for use on the Littoral Combat Ship as well as other naval systems. These devices can be easily loaded and unloaded on ceiling- or floor-mounted rail systems, and can contain munition packages, targetting systems, crewspace or drone support facilities. Why they would need gigantic amounts of processing power onsite as well, I don't know. Possibly DNA sequencing or realtime cryptanalysis.
I remember the very first time I visited Google. It was around the time of the Kikwit ebola outbreak as I remember, in around 95. That was the last time I ever used any other search engine. Guess they just stumbled on a golden algorithm.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not buying consoles because their games tend to be vapid and very weak. They're simplistic, lowest-common-denominator games that don't last me more than a day for the best of them. They're not moddable. They aren't strategically deep, 99% of them. And I was reared on AppleII games which, while they were simple, tried to be thought-provoking and challenging on a deeper level than twitch reflexes.
I just don't like the console format.
And I'm buying fewer PC games now than ever. I can't remember what the last one I bought was. It might have been the first Dawn of War, which was... OK.
The next one I'm going to buy will likely be Supreme Commander, which I trust will be excellent.
Games magazines are not trustworthy. Almost all of them are either on the take or infected with hype fanboyism.
Game companies are not trustworthy. They lie incessantly about hardware requirements, features and everything else, while releasing the same warmedover shit again and again.
Software stores are not trustworthy, and collude with the above two groups. Their pig-in-a-poke sales scheme-- overpriced games and no return policy-- has burned me more times than I care to mention.
Like so many others, the entire games industry from previews through production through reviews all the way to the bargain bin, is driven increasingly by marketing. Rather than release good product, companies use unethical marketing tactics to sell their shit, in the name of short-term profits.
The only good large house is EA. At least they give the appearance of giving a damn.
In many ways, all this is similar to the business model of the MPAA and the RIAA. After this latest crash, expect the game companies to blame their shortfalls on piracy, and go after high school kids who decide to pirate Duke Nukem MCXXVIII rather than spend $50 on entertainment that won't last them a day.
Game Industry: I know you guys read this kind of thing. You people need to listen to us, your decades-loyal supporters, before you lose us to other forms of entertainment.
I'd like to see an RTS AI based on military command structure.
The AI would be shaped like a tree.
At the top, there would be a strategic AI controlling resource management and making high-level strategic decisions like whether to rush, guns/butter, etc.
It would have a certain number of sub-generals, each of which might have a different sector of the map or some other division method.
Each general would control a certain number of companies. Now, these generals might be just AI objects, or they might be connected to command-vehicle objects within their areas of operations. The generals would make decisions within their AOO, keeping track of chokepoints, the large-scale enemy shape, etc.
Each company would be run by a lieutenant, which would control a certain number of platoons, and would conduct recon and other operatonal-level tasks.
You get the idea. Basically, AI would percolate down through a tree, from the general all the way down to the troops in the field who would have little more than basic insect intelligence (much like the American military.)
I think this type of AI could be made absolutely brutal.
Furthermore, if the command units did indeed map to troops and vehicles in the field, then command structure breakdown and operational paralysis would occur in a very realistic way...
This is absolutely correct. I've never seen Haatsumi but I've seen students of his students and they're pretty darn good.
I've also seen Dan Inosanto, who is on Haatsumi's level, and that guy is the quickest person I've ever seen anywhere. Flat out amazing.
Something nobody talks about with regards to these guys is how durable they are. For you to do martial arts for that long, if there was anything wrong with your body physically-- in fact if you weren't a near-perfect physical specimen-- you would have washed out long ago.
Bujinkan and ninjutsu are unfairly discredited. I do think that a lot of ninjutsu students in the US buy into the mystique quite a bit too much and it's rather annoying. There's something very cultlike about bujinkan schools and I just don't see the damn point of that. But props to them for "keepin it real" after all these years, unlike so many other arts, and through duress and great pressure to sell out.
How about this:
How about I just won't watch their stupid-ass shows, their packaged, manipulative, commercialized news, their inane formulaic product placements masquerading as edgy dramas? 99.999% of this crap isn't even worth pirating, for free, without commercials, to watch in half a window during long compiles. So why in god's name would ANYBODY sit in a chair and watch it, even if they're not hijacking your set?
How about I won't pay for cable channels which are, themselves, becoming more and more infested with ads?
How about the entire media establishment go fuck themselves?
Last time I watched TV was for about 3 days in September, 01. I don't intend to ever do it again.
Although Hannity handing it to the Westboro Baptist Church lady was hilarious, I'll give it that:
http://empiresfall.blogspot.com/
I'm afraid.
I couldn't even get B&W to work. It crashed on every machine I tried it on, so much that it was unplayable. Tech support was 100% unresponsive.
I'm never going to buy another game by this guy. That game was the most over-hyped piece of crap ever.
Don't bother, this guy's an authoritarian, one of the kind who loves his country like a 4 year old girl loves Mommy.
Nothing the State does could possibly be wrong in his eyes. He has no idea what liberty really is; he's never read any of the writing of the thinkers who framed our constitution and who informed the views of the Founding Fathers, and if it were up to him, he'd throw all those people in Gitmo.
They are evil and it's time those of us who have a conscience started doing whatever we can to fuck them.
America is in the process of devolving into a police state. With every passing week their grip on the government grows.
Oh, and I'm dead serious.
It's getting time we put a stop to these people.
I'm hearing more and more about the idea of a national strike.
We technicians bitch and complain about this kind of flagrant privacy violation.
It would be much more difficult for these people, I'd think, if there were some sort of technician union that had technical rights as well as civil rights as part of its platform.
It's real simple:
1) Don't help these fucks in any way.
2) Harm them in any way you can get away with. Small needling, over and over again. Refusal to cooperate. Take their money and do nothing.
That's true, and at the same time the size of drive technology is increasing by a thousand times every 10 years. I think, though, that we're going to have exabyte drives within 10 years. Maybe I'm on crack, but the petabyte discovery makes me think I'm right. What's after that, yottabyte? With an exabyte, do you think any private citizen is going to have the need for as much data as the entire human race produces in a year?
I don't.
Nice obligatory windows bash there. I just wish they'd hurry up and die already.
There comes a point when there's too much storage...
I know, I know: 640k and all that. Hear me out...
What would be the sum total of petabytes taken up by:
* every music performance ever
* every movie
* every television show
* For that matter, recordings of every word ever spoken by every human to have ever lived on earth?
(5 exabytes)
The human race supposedly produces 1-2 exabytes a year of information and that number is increasing.
Yes, yes, I know it's huge. Point is, sometime soon we're going to reach that sort of storage capacity. How soon is it going to be that someone announces that exabytes are available? If petabyte drives are around, exabyte arrays will be following shortly.
In my lifetime, we've gone from K to megs to gigs, and now terabytes. Not so long ago, I remember marvelling at the 1gig drives that were out (about 12 years ago now.)
If you take the subset of those items that includes "good" or desirable data for any given person, you have a much, much smaller sum of data.
I had this conversation with a friend who was asking if storage technology will be in demand forever. I told him I don't think it will, I think it will become a situation where you will have more than you could possibly ever need and wouldn't have any need for more. There's just a limit to the kind of data that people, especially normal consumers, are going to want to store.
'Course, one possible use for technology is computation caching, and the need for that is infinite.
It would be wonderful if corporations would promote democracy here in the United States.
Or, hell, if they would just stop supporting the current illegitimate fascist junta in power here right now.
End is a relative of Alice, Bob, Charlie and Doug.
I agree.
Fuck 'em, they can eat a dick, and have fun when it's time for streetfighting which may be soon.
Bush sorely needs intelligence too.
Other than political reasons-- for which this should be exploited to the hilt in order to frighten the credulous even more about the policies of the dictatorial and illegitimate Bush administration--
Other than those reasons, being afraid of the NSA because of cookies is like being afraid of thermonuclear war because it might muss your hair.
They eavesdrop all electronic communications. They can crack cryptography in realtime. If they want to, they can have you disappeared to some torture prison in a foreign country where you will divulge anything in order to get the agony to stop.
And these fuckwits are worried about a persistent cookie.
Crime is the art of knowing when to quit.
-Me
Wireless looks to me like a good way to endrun this newest malfeasance.
Are they actually looking into ways of stopping community wireless efforts? Not the city-funded ones that is but large adhoc clouds?
Does anyone know who is behind wikipediaclassaction.org?
They have some kind of axe to grind and I'd really like to know what it is. Apparently they have some sort of organizational affiliation.
One thing I perceive as a problem with both Gnome and KDE is that they are trying to be like Windows. It may be that the Windows interface has become the QWERTY of GUIs, and is so familiar to users that they are unable to learn anything new, but there have been numerous advances on various UNIX WMs that have never made it onto the Windows platform.
/var/log/syslog" so that these can be unfurled at a moment's notice-- but the gui is simply too restrictive and unwieldy in configuration.
For example:
Nextstep/Windowmaker tearoff menus. These are extremely handy because you can literally build gui applications from just these menus and collections of scripts. Also, these menus scroll if they are outside the screen. I can place menus at the bottom of the screen in a row with just their titles peeking out into the bottom of the screen. Then, when I slide my mouse down past the title, the menu scrolls up onto the screen. So depending on what I'm doing, I can build my own adhoc UI out of menus and come up with something quite functional.
Fluxbox tabbable applications are another great example of flexible functionality. I can group applications how I want them and all it takes to navigate from one to the other is to slide the mouse into the region of the desired tab at the top of an application window. This is excellent because it is a very efficient and intuitive use of screen real estate.
One reason for the huge popularity of Firefox over IE is the tabs. Tabs are so easy to use that people pick up on them right away. And the fact that they're rearrangeable in Fluxbox means that they offer adhoc functionality for the power user.
An application that I've had a great deal of success with is called 3ddesk. This is a drop-in enhancement for mousewheel workspace navigation: when switching between workspaces, the mousewheel spins an OpenGL cylinder tiled with realtime-updated views of each workspace. Seeing the workspaces laid out in this manner allows much better spacial orientation than offered by any pager, and it becomes very quick and simple to flip back and forth between desktops.
There are a number of reasons why I dislike both of the dominant windowmanagers. Gnome is simply too dumbed down. Sure, it offers things like gnome-swallow, and drawers which allow me to swallow up things like transparent xterms running "top" and "tail -f
KDE isn't quite so bad, but lacks many of the things that Gnome features. KDE does not even have drawers that I'm aware of. The separate kicker panels make up for this failing to some extent but not entirely. In both Gnome and KDE, the functionality for editing menus is not nearly as available or intuitive as it is in Fluxbox or Windowmaker. When moving over to the other light windowmanagers like XFCE, Icewm, Waimea, et cetera, there's simply not enough functionality there at all. We have a pinboard and a cute panel with cute little icons, all mostly static and without configurable function beyond a click on an icon. In Fluxbox and Blackbox, the differences between the "slit" (dock) and the panel are obscure to inexperienced users, and the lack of configurability of the panels makes these next to unusable. Yes, there's a task bar, but this isn't Windows 95, and I'm usually running up to 30 separate windows or groups of applications.
So, I use Windowmaker.
Windowmaker is small and light enough that I can export entire login sessions, and the gui is snappy and quick. If I want a taskbar, I middleclick on the desktop and drag the menu that comes up so that it becomes a tearoff; then I stash this at the bottom of the screen as I mentioned above so that it becomes a slide-up menu.
The applet dock is extensible, intuitive and powerful. Can't say the same for the clip but it's pretty good.
It's a hell of a note that I'm using a gui from 1989 and it beats the pants off of anything out there for extensibility, speed and functionality. I understand that NextStep is going to be the gui of the next A
Damn Small Linux would probably run just fine on it. I was running Linux on a 233 AMD, back in 99 or so, and it ran much nicer than my Celly 450.
If you need a windowing system, try fluxbox. Its use of tabs make it much more powerful than other equivalent WMs.
I don't see why this is such a big question. Hasn't it already been done to death here and elsewhere?
If nothing else, you could use it as an X terminal to a much more powerful machine. I have a 700mhz Vaio that I'm using for that purpose.
alias su="xterm -fg white -bg darkred -e su" so when you su, you get a new xterm in colors to remind you that that xterm is root.
Use fluxbox. The tabs mean that you can stack up things like xterms.
If you run gnome panel, you can put drawers on it. The drawers can contain swallowed apps, such as xterms running top, tail syslog, watch processes, etc. So you can pop open a monitor drawer and xterms running text monitors emerge.
Check into 3ddesk. It's an applet that maps your desktops onto a 3d cylinder that can be rotated with the mousewheel for desktop switching. Much more useful than it sounds. The visual preview and positional awareness that it gives make it possible to use many more desktops than you ordinarily could without them becoming useless clutter like they can with traditional pagers.
I don't know why you're concerned about maximizing real estate with a dual-head display. I get by just fine with a 19 inch display.
That said, there are some technologies emerging that will allow you to use x11 functionality to use a laptop or additional workstation as a second (or third) screen controlled by the same desktop. Check into x2vnc.
Shipping containers are similar in shape to the modularized boxes the US has developed for use on the Littoral Combat Ship as well as other naval systems. These devices can be easily loaded and unloaded on ceiling- or floor-mounted rail systems, and can contain munition packages, targetting systems, crewspace or drone support facilities. Why they would need gigantic amounts of processing power onsite as well, I don't know. Possibly DNA sequencing or realtime cryptanalysis.
I think I must be confused. The thing is I can remember it clear as day. ???
Altavista used to be my favorite search engine.
I remember the very first time I visited Google. It was around the time of the Kikwit ebola outbreak as I remember, in around 95. That was the last time I ever used any other search engine. Guess they just stumbled on a golden algorithm.