I no longer run Linux. I ran it for years but now I'm totally blown away by the stability of BSD. People told me and I didn't believe them, I still remembered it from 5-6 years ago. But now it's miles beyond Debian, Redhat or anything else in terms of stability and usability.
Also there's/usr/ports.
Wasn't aware that the package manager handled packages compiled from source. So let me guess, it's the worst of both worlds.
No danger of me pirating TV shows when they all seem to suck so badly with a few very limited exceptions (The Hitlery Channel, etc.)
When I turn on the television-- very rarely for the last 18 years-- I'm astonished by how horrible the shows are. Every time it seems to have gone downhill, from bad to worse to worse yet. That goes for cable, normal TV, everything.
Wouldn't mind pirating some really bad crime dramas from the 1980s, such as "It Takes a Thief" and other drivel of that nature.
If they want me to consume modern television in any form, they've got to make it better.
An aside: it blows my mind that they've got people paying for programming with commercials now, on cable.
When cable first came out, I remember the big selling point for it was that there were no commercials. They did that of course to build the brand, and now that they've got 90% of american households hooked up, why shouldn't they turn the screws by making you watch commercials too?
Time for a cryptography architecture to become default in chat apps. "Flying dutchman" data arrangements would be very easy to do in chat rooms, because everyone has to receive the commonly-viewable chatter anyway. P2P chats like Waste seem to be getting more popular as well.
Of course, nobody who has anything to hide knows anything about botnets.
I find that nausea seems to be increased by hopping and jumping around a lot. I theorize that this is why it happened so badly with Halflife, because of all the climb and jump puzzles. (example of this in HL2 is the room that you have to flood after climbing around on pipes...)
The swaying and jumping of close-by textures seems to be what does it. So I take lots of "look around" breaks when I'm playing that kind of area.
Now I'm back to Morrowind. Holy crap, that's a great game... The next one, Oblivion, looks to be awesome too. They're using Havoc and Speedtree.
I didn't like the first one very much. I wanted to like it, but it gave me severe nausea, worst ever in a shooter except for Kingpin.
But in halflife2, the engine nausea is gone, and I was very surprised to find that the game pulled me in to an extent I haven't seen since maybe Doom2.
In Halflife2, it's the storyline that does it. Very dark take on a police-state future, reminding me a bit of science fiction stories like "The Sheep Look Up."
And the use of the physics engine is nothing short of phenomenal.
One serious criticism I have of the game is how bloody linear it is. It's almost like a rail shooter at times. Even out in the open, you're limited to a thin strip of land that you can drive on, and there's only one way to go-- tunnels collapse behind you, and the way forward is usually so obvious that it might as well have neon arrows pointing in that direction.
The climb-and-jump puzzles are back, too, and in my view that's not a good thing. Don't like 'em. I'd much rather have open-ended gameplay and maps that allow you to go anywhere and take any of several routes to the finish rather than extremely linear chutes that funnel you toward the finish.
Of course, with more open-ended maps, you'd miss out on all kinds of really interesting storyline, like Father Grigory.
Oh, and like they said, the engine is totally insane-crazy. At times it's almost like you're in a movie. And like the first one, there are numerous ways to skin a cat in many of the tactical puzzles. Once you realize that, the game gets a lot easier.
I don't see a lot of replay value with this one due to the extreme linearity. I understand people replayed the first one again and again, but that doesn't float my boat, personally.
Expect the mods on this one to be awesome, though.
You know, I'm not a fuddyduddy-- really I'm not-- but I have to wonder whether it's a good thing with the world the way it is to give greater access to biological tools to the Wide World out there.
For every disenfranchised third world junta dictator, there are a hundred veterinary medicine scientists trying to keep undernourished flocks alive in countries like Uganda.
But I just have to think that in the current climate it may not be the greatest of ideas to make available this kind of tool. Same way I felt when the "mouse superflu" paper was released on the net two years back.
Believe it or not, not everyone in this world has the best interests of the West at heart. Biology is an extremely powerful tool that can be used as a devastating weapon, and I don't think it's all that smart to make top of the line software tools available to anyone for the asking. Kind of like how we don't sell bioreactors on the uncontrolled market: if anything, software tools of this nature are more powerful and more difficult to design unassisted.
I know this treads perilously close to treading on the toes of the "information wants to be free" ethic, but it's something that makes me nervous literally every day.
I mean, yes, with the widespread use of DVDs and CDs, this could become a problem, but aren't there many things that could be made biodegradable where it would be more desirable than data?
I'll buy a Macintosh when it costs relatively the same as a PC of equivalent power.
I don't like the idea of paying money for cool glowy apple logos. Substance wins over false style in my book and always has.
My current computer is a PC that looks like it has a family of hyenas living in it, and it runs BSD faster and more smoothly than the high-end macs at school. It's great that Macs finally got a shell (after what, 20 years?) but I don't really need to be babied by my OS or my hardware manufacturer.
The whole "cute animal" thing has got to go
on
NetBSD Chooses New Logo
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
When I see cute cartoon Tuxes and BSD devils, whether they're doing their imitation of the Iwo Jima flaglifting or not, I think "my god, and we're trying to get onto the corporate desktop here."
I've actually had an experience where I was recommending Linux in a corporate environment, and someone said "Is that the one with the cartoon penguin? How can we take that seriously?"
And it's no joke. You have to remember, appearance is everything to those people. Appearance matters more than reality. And if you have a cartoon demon as your "mascot--" or Eddie from the Iron Maiden albums, or WHATEVER-- nobody but hackers are going to take the thing seriously.
Nvidia are extremely open-OS friendly. Their driver itself may not be opensource but they have excellent driver and developer support under Linux and BSD, and the graphics card market is so cutthroat that if they were to divulge driver secrets, it would be suicide. Keep in mind that one of Nvidia's huge strengths has always been their driver technology, which is miles beyond ATI.
I have always been extremely happy with Nvidia and at this point I see no reason to buy any other make of card.
Yes, it would be nice if they could opensource more of their technology but I can't see that happening. I think they've bent over backwards to provide support to Linux, more than any other competitive graphics card company.
Re "(NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.)"
Yeah, we know that. But what's the matter with plugging free software? If you had to pay for it it might be different but you're not getting anything out of it. That's why I always get a chuckle out of the super-punctilious disclaimers that always appear for some kind of journalistic integrity.
Slashdot and Newsforge are also part of the Open Source movement, and there's not a disclaimer whenever someone says something in favor of open source. Same difference. Don't worry about it.
In Other News, the Horse Trough Industry Association moved today to criminalize the use of the automobile.
"Automobiles are infernal machines that stink, make noise and are cutting into our bottom line," Christopher Fisk, barrister for HTIA, said earlier this afternoon.
HTIA is pressing legislation to impose tough penalties on non-horsetrough users.
I'm really happy when I read things like this. They make me think that maybe, when the oil crunch really hits and the government starts pouring some serious money at the energy problem, maybe we'll have some alternatives besides starving to death.
Have you ever thought about what would happen if oil production ceased today? There would be mass famines. As in "not enough to eat" famines. There's simply not enough "bandwidth" on the roads of cities to support horse-and-buggy food transport that would feed the number of people living there.
Slashdot Mirror
It's good for a short coffee shop read.
Much more interesting books on the subject are "Complexity" by Waldrop and "Swarm Intelligence," by I forget whom.
It's a great thing we have such a fearless, balls-to-the wall Strong Leader in the White House, someone who's not afraid to make the tough decisions.
Who do we start bombing? Maybe we can bomb hurricanes?
A storm comes up. You go out of control, spinning wildly above orchards, ponds, villages.
Picket fences. Busy highways. Powerlines.
You wonder "Was I really that stupid?" You fall.
I no longer run Linux. I ran it for years but now I'm totally blown away by the stability of BSD. People told me and I didn't believe them, I still remembered it from 5-6 years ago. But now it's miles beyond Debian, Redhat or anything else in terms of stability and usability.
/usr/ports.
Also there's
Wasn't aware that the package manager handled packages compiled from source. So let me guess, it's the worst of both worlds.
It's sooo awesome cuz it lets U compile your stuff from source!!!!!
Like u don't need to mess with any packages or RPM database r stuff like that.
Answer me this-- wat other linux distro actually let u compile stuff from source?
News?
News might be construed as support for a terrorist organization.
No danger of me pirating TV shows when they all seem to suck so badly with a few very limited exceptions (The Hitlery Channel, etc.)
When I turn on the television-- very rarely for the last 18 years-- I'm astonished by how horrible the shows are. Every time it seems to have gone downhill, from bad to worse to worse yet. That goes for cable, normal TV, everything.
Wouldn't mind pirating some really bad crime dramas from the 1980s, such as "It Takes a Thief" and other drivel of that nature.
If they want me to consume modern television in any form, they've got to make it better.
An aside: it blows my mind that they've got people paying for programming with commercials now, on cable.
When cable first came out, I remember the big selling point for it was that there were no commercials. They did that of course to build the brand, and now that they've got 90% of american households hooked up, why shouldn't they turn the screws by making you watch commercials too?
Time for a cryptography architecture to become default in chat apps. "Flying dutchman" data arrangements would be very easy to do in chat rooms, because everyone has to receive the commonly-viewable chatter anyway. P2P chats like Waste seem to be getting more popular as well.
Of course, nobody who has anything to hide knows anything about botnets.
I find that nausea seems to be increased by hopping and jumping around a lot. I theorize that this is why it happened so badly with Halflife, because of all the climb and jump puzzles. (example of this in HL2 is the room that you have to flood after climbing around on pipes...)
The swaying and jumping of close-by textures seems to be what does it. So I take lots of "look around" breaks when I'm playing that kind of area.
Now I'm back to Morrowind. Holy crap, that's a great game... The next one, Oblivion, looks to be awesome too. They're using Havoc and Speedtree.
I have to say, I was floored by HL2.
I didn't like the first one very much. I wanted to like it, but it gave me severe nausea, worst ever in a shooter except for Kingpin.
But in halflife2, the engine nausea is gone, and I was very surprised to find that the game pulled me in to an extent I haven't seen since maybe Doom2.
In Halflife2, it's the storyline that does it. Very dark take on a police-state future, reminding me a bit of science fiction stories like "The Sheep Look Up."
And the use of the physics engine is nothing short of phenomenal.
One serious criticism I have of the game is how bloody linear it is. It's almost like a rail shooter at times. Even out in the open, you're limited to a thin strip of land that you can drive on, and there's only one way to go-- tunnels collapse behind you, and the way forward is usually so obvious that it might as well have neon arrows pointing in that direction.
The climb-and-jump puzzles are back, too, and in my view that's not a good thing. Don't like 'em. I'd much rather have open-ended gameplay and maps that allow you to go anywhere and take any of several routes to the finish rather than extremely linear chutes that funnel you toward the finish.
Of course, with more open-ended maps, you'd miss out on all kinds of really interesting storyline, like Father Grigory.
Oh, and like they said, the engine is totally insane-crazy. At times it's almost like you're in a movie. And like the first one, there are numerous ways to skin a cat in many of the tactical puzzles. Once you realize that, the game gets a lot easier.
I don't see a lot of replay value with this one due to the extreme linearity. I understand people replayed the first one again and again, but that doesn't float my boat, personally.
Expect the mods on this one to be awesome, though.
You know, I'm not a fuddyduddy-- really I'm not-- but I have to wonder whether it's a good thing with the world the way it is to give greater access to biological tools to the Wide World out there.
For every disenfranchised third world junta dictator, there are a hundred veterinary medicine scientists trying to keep undernourished flocks alive in countries like Uganda.
But I just have to think that in the current climate it may not be the greatest of ideas to make available this kind of tool. Same way I felt when the "mouse superflu" paper was released on the net two years back.
Believe it or not, not everyone in this world has the best interests of the West at heart. Biology is an extremely powerful tool that can be used as a devastating weapon, and I don't think it's all that smart to make top of the line software tools available to anyone for the asking. Kind of like how we don't sell bioreactors on the uncontrolled market: if anything, software tools of this nature are more powerful and more difficult to design unassisted.
I know this treads perilously close to treading on the toes of the "information wants to be free" ethic, but it's something that makes me nervous literally every day.
Smallpox wants to be free too.
Do we really want data to be biodegradable?
I mean, yes, with the widespread use of DVDs and CDs, this could become a problem, but aren't there many things that could be made biodegradable where it would be more desirable than data?
I'll buy a Macintosh when it costs relatively the same as a PC of equivalent power.
I don't like the idea of paying money for cool glowy apple logos. Substance wins over false style in my book and always has.
My current computer is a PC that looks like it has a family of hyenas living in it, and it runs BSD faster and more smoothly than the high-end macs at school. It's great that Macs finally got a shell (after what, 20 years?) but I don't really need to be babied by my OS or my hardware manufacturer.
When I see cute cartoon Tuxes and BSD devils, whether they're doing their imitation of the Iwo Jima flaglifting or not, I think "my god, and we're trying to get onto the corporate desktop here."
I've actually had an experience where I was recommending Linux in a corporate environment, and someone said "Is that the one with the cartoon penguin? How can we take that seriously?"
And it's no joke. You have to remember, appearance is everything to those people. Appearance matters more than reality. And if you have a cartoon demon as your "mascot--" or Eddie from the Iron Maiden albums, or WHATEVER-- nobody but hackers are going to take the thing seriously.
Are they giving away Microsoft Bob along with those "Hot new holiday visualizations for Media Player?"
I have a better idea.
How about I don't run Windows at all. Ever.
Yeah, FUCK nvidia. They don't support my Amiga. They don't support the scanvector display in my PDP-1.
Why, those money hungry bastards think they have the right to hold onto the intellectual property that makes them #1 in the graphics card market.
HOW DARE THEY!
Nvidia are extremely open-OS friendly. Their driver itself may not be opensource but they have excellent driver and developer support under Linux and BSD, and the graphics card market is so cutthroat that if they were to divulge driver secrets, it would be suicide. Keep in mind that one of Nvidia's huge strengths has always been their driver technology, which is miles beyond ATI.
I have always been extremely happy with Nvidia and at this point I see no reason to buy any other make of card.
Yes, it would be nice if they could opensource more of their technology but I can't see that happening. I think they've bent over backwards to provide support to Linux, more than any other competitive graphics card company.
How hard is it, really, to run X?
I was running X on a Pentium 90. Then on an AMD 233. Both of those boxes are basically worthless now.
They might not like Fedora Core 2, but I'm sure they would run nice with Fluxbox and xmms which is basically all you need.
Re "(NewsForge and Slashdot are both part of OSTG.)"
Yeah, we know that. But what's the matter with plugging free software? If you had to pay for it it might be different but you're not getting anything out of it. That's why I always get a chuckle out of the super-punctilious disclaimers that always appear for some kind of journalistic integrity.
Slashdot and Newsforge are also part of the Open Source movement, and there's not a disclaimer whenever someone says something in favor of open source. Same difference. Don't worry about it.
Isn't there already a New York plunger company named something like this?
In Other News, the Horse Trough Industry Association moved today to criminalize the use of the automobile.
"Automobiles are infernal machines that stink, make noise and are cutting into our bottom line," Christopher Fisk, barrister for HTIA, said earlier this afternoon.
HTIA is pressing legislation to impose tough penalties on non-horsetrough users.
I'm really happy when I read things like this. They make me think that maybe, when the oil crunch really hits and the government starts pouring some serious money at the energy problem, maybe we'll have some alternatives besides starving to death.
Have you ever thought about what would happen if oil production ceased today? There would be mass famines. As in "not enough to eat" famines. There's simply not enough "bandwidth" on the roads of cities to support horse-and-buggy food transport that would feed the number of people living there.
I think we need to do something about oil PRONTO.
Gee, imagine that... PC Gamer reviews a blockbuster title in an overwhelmingly positive way!
Wow, I do hope it's as good as they say though. Would be nice for a game to come out that doesn't suck dog balls. Or maybe I'm getting old.
You stole the source code for UNIX from SCO, didn't cha?
Options to using IE? Should be "Alternatives To..."
And besides, IE is not even an option for anyone serious about, well, serious about anything.