On a 486 I pulled the cpu, then I was very curious as to why the screen went blank. Then, somehow uncomprehending the situation, I realized I was holding the chip and thought "Well that's silly of me, I just pulled the CPU" and I just placed it back in the socket.
This is why drugs and hardware support do not mix.
The machine continued to work fine and works to this day.
I hear there's going to be a second version called Doom3 which is going to be eating exaflops of computing power and ungodly amounts of memory in under two weeks. Please, please, do something about the Texas virus company before it's too late.
They say you're going to need to have a dual Xeon to even run the virus. That's when you know the whole upgrading thing is way out of hand.
This happened in a year where a drunk-driving North Dakota politician who killed a person got off with a hundred days in jail. This is utter madness.
Perhaps car stereos should be illegal too, aren't they potentially just as dangerous? What if you hit someone while fiddling with the air conditioner, is that just as bad? If not, why not?
Aren't cars the real problem? I think maybe only politicians should be allowed to drive. They should be allowed to drunkenly swerve onto the sidewalks killing pedestrians, and for the rest of us, running a stop sign should be punished by having the accelerator foot chopped off.
So U2 are releasing yet another disk full of filler, and they're sorry that people are going to pirate it, hear that it's crap, and not buy it.
They're threatening us that they're going to release it on itunes? Why is this a threat?
U2 aren't quite horrid, but they've been in a slump since about 1986.
The only thing P2P endruns is the marketing machinery that takes pablum and shoves it down peoples' throats by brainwashing them that it's excellent music. The truth is, there's so much music out there that the fanbases have fragmented. Why should groups like U2 be able to make jackloads of cash when there are 9999999++ other bands hungrier, edgier and more original?
Get off your high horse, Bono, and make something good that can make a splash-- if you can. U2 are nothing without their marketing machine.
In a way this is good, it means a consolidation of companies to boycott. I think the time to boycott is going to be soon.
How much momentum could we get for boycotting RIAA labels? I think it could be a lot.
Encourage people not to buy music from RIAA labels. Spread the word. Perhaps we can have some effect; if we succeeded in a large-scale boycott of Sony, the advantage to labels and artists that did not support RIAA would be immense.
Some other comments are saying "But they will just want to ban it all the more!"
In fact, if we use P2P to broadcast all kinds of government dirty laundry, their attempts to ban p2p will look like an attempt to crack down on freedom of information.
It could very well be that free flow of information, anonymous and universally available, is a huge reason why world governments don't like p2p. Of course, the record industry's huge donations to Orrin Hatch don't hurt any either.
I say dump Cryptome onto p2p sites. Dump whatever you can. We have a loophole right now; better try and widen it while we can. We might even give pause to some of the criminals on capitol hill while we're at it.
well, i don't know if he's that bad. it could even be that he stirs up flamewars on purpose for a kind of twisted marketing. however, go read the newsgroups about him, there should be stuff going waaaay back.
Just so you know, Derek Smart has been famous (as a dickwad) since maybe 1993 or thereabouts. He has a long and checkered history of attempting to do all manner of things, failing miserably, and then attacking his detractors, in court or elsewhere.
People don't attack a random game developer this way for no reason and for that length of time unless there's a good deal of substance to the rumors. Check out BC3000AD and you'll see what I mean.
Compare the "legs," or longevity, of games like Angband and Nethack to those of Quake and the Diablo games. No contest.
This is because there are different production values: the roguelike games have a lasting cerebral appeal, while games that are built on eye candy concentrate elsewhere. This may have to do with the business models of modern game companies.
Take id software for instance. For gameplay internals, it doesn't get much simpler than id games. Doom was actually a playable game from the map screen if you turned on display of objects, and doing this shows how moronically simple Doom and Quake are. The appeal of the games, however, came from the presentation of the data, and the atmosphere produced by the amazing, moody artwork. Mid-end graphics are comparatively simple to do, and using OpenGL actually makes it simpler, once you get over a certain learning curve. The models are the sticking point: you're not going to be doing amazing mo-capped human character models, but there's quite a database of MDL format models already out there, and there are other types of games, such as modern military RTS, that don't really require extremely detailed models-- a good example is the amazing TA, a game that has excellent longevity despite rather dated graphics.
TA is a game where the graphics are just good enough. At the time, there had to be a lot of trickery to render that many units at once, and the trickery in the TA engine involved giving the graphics a stylization that is still quite capable of bringing its gritty, desolate image home. TA is a sterling example of turning flaws into advantages.
Linux games should focus on extensibility, replay value, using randomness (cf. Roguelikes), and multiplayer, which gives games far more gameplay depth than the engine would seem to warrant (cf. Quake, Diablo II).
We could have a hundred original, interesting games on Linux. Instead we have 45,000 versions of Freecell and Tetris. In fact, Linux is the indisputed king of these types of games, because of the minimal thought required in their creation.
One idea for curing this might be to leverage the existing codebases of games like Angband and grafting semi-modern rendering engines onto them. Even turnbased play is wonderful with these games, and I think realtime play a la Diablo might not be very difficult to achieve.
One thing we DON'T need is more Tetris and Tuxracer clones.
I think things are very slowly lining up against Microsoft. The one place they still have near-total dominance is in PC gaming. And I'm referring to totally extreme dominance without even any viable alternatives.
Their market model is already beginning to crumble. One HUGE reason for this is free software. I can't think of any Microsoft software that doesn't have superior, free alternatives. They have absolutely nothing going for them other than kuretsu, the Japanese for (loosely) market momentum.
Once people realize that there are alternatives to Microsoft, alternatives that aren't shitty and don't crash, etc, they're going to start checking out what we have to offer. And hey... Microsoft is quite pricey these days! Right now, XP Professional costs roughly $99 (or more if you don't shop around). That's for a totally bare-bones OS that has numerous security vulnerabilities and is an incredible headache to patch and maintain. Hey, at least it has an uptime greater than a few hours. Until the spyware gets to it. And the Office home edition is FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS.
It really looks as if Microsoft's in the process of trying to reinvent themselves, in some ways the way IBM did in the late 90s. I understand that there have been some pretty stringent cutbacks at Microsoft, and the fact that they're now going to be interoperating with UNIX software in the Longhorn core, supposedly in 2008, means that they've acknowledged that if they don't do this they're screwed.
Who are they kidding? I think they're screwed either way... once people see what's out there for free Linux software they won't be going to the store to plonk down a house payment to upgrade their OS. Microsoft's not going to die, but their moment in the sun is nearing its end.
I understand that there have been some recent belt-tightenings at Microsoft, as astonishing as it may sound. Apparently they got rid of the free soda, et cetera.
Also interesting about their attempted attack on Unix from Longhorn-- the much ballyhooed Unix support on the Longhorn core.
I think they're headed for hard times. They must work with OSS, and yet the more they do so the more they're going to be competing in an uneven playing field. Free software that works is far preferable to massively marketed, grossly expensive software that's full of bugs.
Only thing that Windows has now that Linux doesn't (don't split hairs with me, I mean mostly) is game support. And even that advantage is shrinking visibly. Currently I boot into a stripped XP for gaming, and that's it-- half the time in the XP installation, I'm running Cygwin to catch X apps from my other box for such things as browsing and sundries, thereby endrunning the execrable memory management in Windows.
If they don't accept OSS, their island is going to slowly erode under their feet. If they do accept OSS, they're screwed once again, because if they receive the Mark of the Penguin, their users will get used to free open source software and they'll start wondering why they should pay $178 for a similar but shittier, more bloated word processor. And then they'll start thinking about the OS that's full of security holes every week and vulnerable to all kinds of malware...
I just don't see how any kind of UNIX integration is good for the Windows business model.
Yes. And one thing you might note for your simian friend here is the fact that nobody's forcing you to install everything on the CDs. Did this guy install Fedora at all? Ever?
Personally, I love having a full-figured (Don't call it fat!) install. I miss the 6-8 CD SuSe distros. But everything works so nice on Fedora...
Let them sue. We want them to sue. It looks real bad when the entertainment industry, billionaire fat cats, are suing 78 year old grannies whose nieces downloaded some Backstreet Boys clips.
Everything they do in this regard strengthens the many small outlets. More and more people are becoming aware that the huge conglomerates-- Hollywood, Sony etc-- do not have their best interests at heart in any way, and are in fact not releasing intellectually stimulating, well written material but are instead drive their pablum down our throats with advertising.
I'm sick of entertainment designed by committee for the lowest common denominator.
My answer to this is, and has always been, "Screw 'em."
I will not pay money to companies that behave in this manner. Many Slashdot readers are vociferous opponents of Microsoft, but they continue to pay money to the media establishment for such things as Spiderman II and cable television.
Perhaps it's time to find ways of entertaining ourselves other than media worship which enriches these gigantic conglomerates.
Is television all that good anyway? I personally have not watched broadcast or cable television with any regularity for 15 years. From 93-01 I did not even own a TV set-- I grudgingly got one to pacify friends who called me deprived because I did not have one, and for a while I actually tried to force myself to sit down and watch the thing, but I couldn't stomach it-- nothing on cable that appealed to me even remotely.
So, if they're going to behave this way, let them behave this way, and leverage all the technology we have at our disposal to support independent media groups. If you have to have Star Trek Voyager, there's always BT.
Re:What are we reviewing here? Book or license?
on
Lysergically Yours
·
· Score: 1
I see your point, but it's hairsplitting... an example of geekily excessive literalism.
"A pretty good apple pie. Even better, it's free!"
Maybe this is to get people ready for omnipresent cops with night vision devices... they go to the theatres and get used to friendly ushers with NV gear, so it's not such a surprise when park police are rousting pot smokers in pitch darkness.
Not only does XP come with no useful applications, but hardly any useful applications are available for it.
I have been thinking lately that Microsoft is in trouble. It's strange because in one way they seem to be on top of the heap but in other ways they're starting to look surrounded... the only place they really are kicking Linux is in the arena of game availability, and even there they're losing ground... I predict that they're going to be reinventing themselves soon.
Theatres are public space. If you're wearing copyrighted material such as a shirt with a logo you yourself have copyrighted, do the corporations get jail time for filming you and thereby infringing your copyright?
No, of course not, because we're entering David Brin's worst case scenario of "no government openness, no citizen privacy."
This would be totally fatuous were it not for the plans he mentioned of hooking the computer up to the bike's engine control CPU. I don't know enough about that sort of thing to know if there's any point to it. Possibly overclocking your engine to a dangerous degree when you need to go very fast, but why...?
Pretty neat nonetheless. Computer controlled neon lights, et cetera...?
Slashdot Mirror
On a 486 I pulled the cpu, then I was very curious as to why the screen went blank. Then, somehow uncomprehending the situation, I realized I was holding the chip and thought "Well that's silly of me, I just pulled the CPU" and I just placed it back in the socket.
This is why drugs and hardware support do not mix.
The machine continued to work fine and works to this day.
I hear there's going to be a second version called Doom3 which is going to be eating exaflops of computing power and ungodly amounts of memory in under two weeks. Please, please, do something about the Texas virus company before it's too late.
They say you're going to need to have a dual Xeon to even run the virus. That's when you know the whole upgrading thing is way out of hand.
This happened in a year where a drunk-driving North Dakota politician who killed a person got off with a hundred days in jail. This is utter madness.
Perhaps car stereos should be illegal too, aren't they potentially just as dangerous? What if you hit someone while fiddling with the air conditioner, is that just as bad? If not, why not?
Aren't cars the real problem? I think maybe only politicians should be allowed to drive. They should be allowed to drunkenly swerve onto the sidewalks killing pedestrians, and for the rest of us, running a stop sign should be punished by having the accelerator foot chopped off.
Our knowledge is so powerful that it can now make food of urine.
The pride is too much for me, I fear my chest shall burst.
So U2 are releasing yet another disk full of filler, and they're sorry that people are going to pirate it, hear that it's crap, and not buy it.
They're threatening us that they're going to release it on itunes? Why is this a threat?
U2 aren't quite horrid, but they've been in a slump since about 1986.
The only thing P2P endruns is the marketing machinery that takes pablum and shoves it down peoples' throats by brainwashing them that it's excellent music. The truth is, there's so much music out there that the fanbases have fragmented. Why should groups like U2 be able to make jackloads of cash when there are 9999999++ other bands hungrier, edgier and more original?
Get off your high horse, Bono, and make something good that can make a splash-- if you can. U2 are nothing without their marketing machine.
In a way this is good, it means a consolidation of companies to boycott. I think the time to boycott is going to be soon.
How much momentum could we get for boycotting RIAA labels? I think it could be a lot.
Encourage people not to buy music from RIAA labels. Spread the word. Perhaps we can have some effect; if we succeeded in a large-scale boycott of Sony, the advantage to labels and artists that did not support RIAA would be immense.
Boycott Sony. Boycott Clearchannel.
Why is it that sites linked from slashdot almost never work?
Some other comments are saying "But they will just want to ban it all the more!"
In fact, if we use P2P to broadcast all kinds of government dirty laundry, their attempts to ban p2p will look like an attempt to crack down on freedom of information.
It could very well be that free flow of information, anonymous and universally available, is a huge reason why world governments don't like p2p. Of course, the record industry's huge donations to Orrin Hatch don't hurt any either.
I say dump Cryptome onto p2p sites. Dump whatever you can. We have a loophole right now; better try and widen it while we can. We might even give pause to some of the criminals on capitol hill while we're at it.
well, i don't know if he's that bad. it could even be that he stirs up flamewars on purpose for a kind of twisted marketing. however, go read the newsgroups about him, there should be stuff going waaaay back.
Wow, it's good that the Federal Government is watching the Democratic Convention.
I'm sure bush+co will be very careful not to let any turbaned, kaffiyeh'd nutcases get through.
Just so you know, Derek Smart has been famous (as a dickwad) since maybe 1993 or thereabouts. He has a long and checkered history of attempting to do all manner of things, failing miserably, and then attacking his detractors, in court or elsewhere.
People don't attack a random game developer this way for no reason and for that length of time unless there's a good deal of substance to the rumors. Check out BC3000AD and you'll see what I mean.
Parent article is definitely true.
Compare the "legs," or longevity, of games like Angband and Nethack to those of Quake and the Diablo games. No contest.
This is because there are different production values: the roguelike games have a lasting cerebral appeal, while games that are built on eye candy concentrate elsewhere. This may have to do with the business models of modern game companies.
Take id software for instance. For gameplay internals, it doesn't get much simpler than id games. Doom was actually a playable game from the map screen if you turned on display of objects, and doing this shows how moronically simple Doom and Quake are. The appeal of the games, however, came from the presentation of the data, and the atmosphere produced by the amazing, moody artwork.
Mid-end graphics are comparatively simple to do, and using OpenGL actually makes it simpler, once you get over a certain learning curve. The models are the sticking point: you're not going to be doing amazing mo-capped human character models, but there's quite a database of MDL format models already out there, and there are other types of games, such as modern military RTS, that don't really require extremely detailed models-- a good example is the amazing TA, a game that has excellent longevity despite rather dated graphics.
TA is a game where the graphics are just good enough. At the time, there had to be a lot of trickery to render that many units at once, and the trickery in the TA engine involved giving the graphics a stylization that is still quite capable of bringing its gritty, desolate image home. TA is a sterling example of turning flaws into advantages.
Linux games should focus on extensibility, replay value, using randomness (cf. Roguelikes), and multiplayer, which gives games far more gameplay depth than the engine would seem to warrant (cf. Quake, Diablo II).
We could have a hundred original, interesting games on Linux. Instead we have 45,000 versions of Freecell and Tetris. In fact, Linux is the indisputed king of these types of games, because of the minimal thought required in their creation.
One idea for curing this might be to leverage the existing codebases of games like Angband and grafting semi-modern rendering engines onto them. Even turnbased play is wonderful with these games, and I think realtime play a la Diablo might not be very difficult to achieve.
One thing we DON'T need is more Tetris and Tuxracer clones.
I think things are very slowly lining up against Microsoft. The one place they still have near-total dominance is in PC gaming. And I'm referring to totally extreme dominance without even any viable alternatives. Their market model is already beginning to crumble. One HUGE reason for this is free software. I can't think of any Microsoft software that doesn't have superior, free alternatives. They have absolutely nothing going for them other than kuretsu, the Japanese for (loosely) market momentum. Once people realize that there are alternatives to Microsoft, alternatives that aren't shitty and don't crash, etc, they're going to start checking out what we have to offer. And hey... Microsoft is quite pricey these days! Right now, XP Professional costs roughly $99 (or more if you don't shop around). That's for a totally bare-bones OS that has numerous security vulnerabilities and is an incredible headache to patch and maintain. Hey, at least it has an uptime greater than a few hours. Until the spyware gets to it. And the Office home edition is FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS. It really looks as if Microsoft's in the process of trying to reinvent themselves, in some ways the way IBM did in the late 90s. I understand that there have been some pretty stringent cutbacks at Microsoft, and the fact that they're now going to be interoperating with UNIX software in the Longhorn core, supposedly in 2008, means that they've acknowledged that if they don't do this they're screwed. Who are they kidding? I think they're screwed either way... once people see what's out there for free Linux software they won't be going to the store to plonk down a house payment to upgrade their OS. Microsoft's not going to die, but their moment in the sun is nearing its end.
I understand that there have been some recent belt-tightenings at Microsoft, as astonishing as it may sound. Apparently they got rid of the free soda, et cetera.
Also interesting about their attempted attack on Unix from Longhorn-- the much ballyhooed Unix support on the Longhorn core.
I think they're headed for hard times. They must work with OSS, and yet the more they do so the more they're going to be competing in an uneven playing field. Free software that works is far preferable to massively marketed, grossly expensive software that's full of bugs.
Only thing that Windows has now that Linux doesn't (don't split hairs with me, I mean mostly) is game support. And even that advantage is shrinking visibly. Currently I boot into a stripped XP for gaming, and that's it-- half the time in the XP installation, I'm running Cygwin to catch X apps from my other box for such things as browsing and sundries, thereby endrunning the execrable memory management in Windows.
If they don't accept OSS, their island is going to slowly erode under their feet. If they do accept OSS, they're screwed once again, because if they receive the Mark of the Penguin, their users will get used to free open source software and they'll start wondering why they should pay $178 for a similar but shittier, more bloated word processor. And then they'll start thinking about the OS that's full of security holes every week and vulnerable to all kinds of malware...
I just don't see how any kind of UNIX integration is good for the Windows business model.
Yes. And one thing you might note for your simian friend here is the fact that nobody's forcing you to install everything on the CDs. Did this guy install Fedora at all? Ever?
Personally, I love having a full-figured (Don't call it fat!) install. I miss the 6-8 CD SuSe distros. But everything works so nice on Fedora...
someone needs a hug
Let them sue. We want them to sue. It looks real bad when the entertainment industry, billionaire fat cats, are suing 78 year old grannies whose nieces downloaded some Backstreet Boys clips.
Everything they do in this regard strengthens the many small outlets. More and more people are becoming aware that the huge conglomerates-- Hollywood, Sony etc-- do not have their best interests at heart in any way, and are in fact not releasing intellectually stimulating, well written material but are instead drive their pablum down our throats with advertising.
I'm sick of entertainment designed by committee for the lowest common denominator.
My answer to this is, and has always been, "Screw 'em."
I will not pay money to companies that behave in this manner. Many Slashdot readers are vociferous opponents of Microsoft, but they continue to pay money to the media establishment for such things as Spiderman II and cable television.
Perhaps it's time to find ways of entertaining ourselves other than media worship which enriches these gigantic conglomerates.
Is television all that good anyway? I personally have not watched broadcast or cable television with any regularity for 15 years. From 93-01 I did not even own a TV set-- I grudgingly got one to pacify friends who called me deprived because I did not have one, and for a while I actually tried to force myself to sit down and watch the thing, but I couldn't stomach it-- nothing on cable that appealed to me even remotely.
So, if they're going to behave this way, let them behave this way, and leverage all the technology we have at our disposal to support independent media groups. If you have to have Star Trek Voyager, there's always BT.
I see your point, but it's hairsplitting... an example of geekily excessive literalism.
"A pretty good apple pie. Even better, it's free!"
Maybe this is to get people ready for omnipresent cops with night vision devices... they go to the theatres and get used to friendly ushers with NV gear, so it's not such a surprise when park police are rousting pot smokers in pitch darkness.
Damn you, I had forgotten cup upselling.
Concessions is hell.
Parent is not true.
Not only does XP come with no useful applications, but hardly any useful applications are available for it.
I have been thinking lately that Microsoft is in trouble. It's strange because in one way they seem to be on top of the heap but in other ways they're starting to look surrounded... the only place they really are kicking Linux is in the arena of game availability, and even there they're losing ground... I predict that they're going to be reinventing themselves soon.
Yeah right but it's an interesting thought.
Theatres are public space. If you're wearing copyrighted material such as a shirt with a logo you yourself have copyrighted, do the corporations get jail time for filming you and thereby infringing your copyright?
No, of course not, because we're entering David Brin's worst case scenario of "no government openness, no citizen privacy."
This would be totally fatuous were it not for the plans he mentioned of hooking the computer up to the bike's engine control CPU. I don't know enough about that sort of thing to know if there's any point to it. Possibly overclocking your engine to a dangerous degree when you need to go very fast, but why...?
Pretty neat nonetheless. Computer controlled neon lights, et cetera...?
That's an improvement. The way it is now, most of us have appliances instead of friends, and that looks like a growing trend.